Journal of Historical Linguistics - Volume 4, Issue 2, 2014

Although it has been widely assumed in historical linguistics that semantics plays a crucial role in analogical change, it is difficult to pinpoint the contribution of the semantic factor, since meaning and form work closely together in bringing about language change. The purpose of the present article is to shed light on the issue by means of two case studies from Russian, which enable us to isolate the role of semantics. The hypothesis we test is that analogical change is restricted to semantically homogeneous domains. We call this the Semantic Homogeneity Constraint. Two phenomena from Russian conjugation are explored: suffix shift and NU-drop. Although they seem parallel, analogical change occurs in the former, but not in the latter. It is argued that this is because the verbs involved in suffix shift constitute a semantically homogeneous domain, within which analogical change can take place. By contrast, NU-verbs are semantically diverse, and these semantic differences create boundaries which block analogical change. The findings have implications both for Russian and general linguistics. While suffix shift and NU-drop are well-known phenomena in Russian conjugation, they have not been juxtaposed and compared before. Our comparison provides new insights about the differences and similarities of the two phenomena. From the perspective of historical linguistics, the present article contributes to the theory of analogy, insofar as we provide empirical evidence for the Semantic Homogeneity Constraint, which places restrictions on semantic domains where analogical change can take place.

This study investigates the role of analogy in the changes in inflectional classes of Swedish verbs from the Old Swedish to Modern Swedish period. Verbs in the Germanic languages are generally classed as either weak or strong according to their type of inflection, but closer examination reveals interesting subtleties and exceptions to this general picture. Furthermore, changes in inflectional class go in different directions: not only from strong to weak, but also the other way around, and between strong classes and weak classes. Two analogical computer models — Analogical Modeling (Skousen 1989) and Minimal Generalization (Albright & Hayes 2002) — are used to model a selection of 80 such changes in the history of Swedish verbs. Taking only phonological descriptions of present tense verb stems paired with their original past tense stems as input, the models attempt to predict the most likely past tense forms based on analogy. In the cases where the new outcome matches the actual changes in Swedish, the predictions are considered correct. In this way, both models predicted roughly half of all changes correctly, but 83% of the changes where a weak verb became strong. I conclude that analogy modeled in this way may play a moderate to strong role in inflection class change in general, but a particularly strong role in the case of new strong verbs. Based on these results, analogy is deserving of a revaluation as an explanatory force in diachronic linguistics.

In New Persian, the aspecto-modal suffix -ē is a marker of counterfactuality and past habitual. It was frequently used in texts between the 10th and 16th centuries and did not disappear until the 18th century (earlier in some regions, depending on the dialect). However, in texts of the 15th century, -ē began to be replaced by the prefix mē-, which marks the concomitance, the present habitual, the frequentative-distributive and the continuative perfective. This article demonstrates that this replacement is not only morphological but that it also has a consequence for the reorganization of the aspectual and modal markings in New Persian: the replacement of -ē by mē- in all occurrences progressively leads to a loss of the marker’s first value of concomitance; it expresses all presents, concomitant and non-concomitant. The old unmarked present is marginalized and ends up expressing the subjunctive. This evolution is compared to the development described by different scholars about several unrelated languages.

We present a constructionalization framework for thinking about the development of contentful (“lexical”) constructions over time. This framework incorporates and goes beyond earlier work on lexicalization, which largely focuses on reduction in the form of specific lexical items. A constructionalist perspective draws attention to meaning as well as form, and to schemas as well as specific micro-constructions. Contentful constructionalization involves expansion as well as reduction, as evidenced by the rise of schemas and the specific constructions they license, for example word-formation schemas such as nominals ending in -hood (e.g. brotherhood) and snowclone schemas (e.g. X BE the new Y). We partially confirm and also extend earlier arguments that, although they have different outputs, lexicalization and grammaticalization result from similar processes of change. However, there are differences. For example, only minimal local, rather than extensive syntactic, expansion is typically involved. Once a contentful schema has come into being the new expressions it sanctions are coined instantaneously rather than gradually.