Journal of Historical Linguistics - Volume 7, Issue 3, 2017

Using quantitative corpus evidence from different periods, the present article analyzes the emergence and diachronic development of the Spanish time constructions (clausal and adverbial) involving contemporary hacer ‘make’ and earlier haber ‘have’. The obtained data, as well as cross-linguistic evidence, suggest that the clausal construction must have been the source of the adverbial one. A proposal is presented that could explain that development. The data show, in addition, that the grammatical properties and usage patterns of the clausal and adverbial constructions were very similar until the 16th century but have been diverging ever since. This divergence coincides with an exponential increase in the textual raw frequency of the adverbial construction, where word order fixation, erosion of the inflectional morphology and a change in the possibilities for time adjunction among others are found to occur at around the same time. This points towards a desentencialization, loss of inner structure and grammaticalization of the adverbial construction in those periods.

Since the 19th century linguists have expected to find conditioned sound changes in environments that make phonetic sense: consonants palatalize adjacent to front vowels, back vowels front if a front vowel occurs in the next syllable, stops voice between voiced segments, and so forth. Most conditioned sound changes conform to this expectation, but a surprising number do not. Some of these are well known, as the palatalization of *s before most word-initial consonants in High German. Since there is no obvious explanation for them, such changes are generally ignored in discussions of historical phonology. The result of this practice has been to give the false impression that what appear to be phonetically unmotivated sound changes are rare abnormalities that probably would conform to expectation if we had more information about them. This paper draws attention to examples of conditioning in Austronesian languages in which the phonetic properties of the context appear unrelated to those of the change, and it questions why such changes should occur. Although finding a completely satisfactory explanation has proven difficult, one general conclusion suggested by the data is that native speakers have an intuitive recognition of natural classes that is independent of phonetic motivation.

In Italian, grazie ‘thanks’ and ringraziare ‘to thank’ historically introduce an object by means of the preposition di ‘of’ ( Renzi, Salvi & Cardinaletti 1991 : 545–548); when grazie and ringraziare introduce a subordinate infinite clause, they may all the same be followed by either di or per ‘for’, the latter being the habitual preposition introducing an implicit causal subordinate (ibid.). In light of these considerations, a general lower frequency of occurrence of collocations with per would be expected. This article argues that, in contemporary Italian, there has been an increase in the use of constructions with per and that such an increase is due to an influence from the English thanks/to thank for. Through diachronic lexicographic, quantitative and qualitative analyses carried out over a range of dictionaries and corpora, this article will show that the frequency of use of forms with per has indeed more than octupled in writing from 1200 to 2011 and more than doubled in speech from 1965 to 2003. Moreover, by analyzing the distribution of the studied constructions in a corpus of dubbed Italian from (American) English, the article will also explore the possibility that language contact with English, mainly via dubbing translations, may have played a concurrent fundamental role motivating such changes.

Borrowing affixes may be rare compared to lexical borrowing, but it is not random. The current study describes regular patterns of affix borrowing in a database containing 649 borrowed affixes, challenging a number of previous claims about relative borrowability, in particular regarding inflectional categories. It is shown that borrowing affixes of all major nominal and verbal inflectional categories, including case markers and argument indexes, is well attested. Borrowing case markers, for instance, appears to be just as common as borrowing plural markers. By factoring in the “availability” for borrowing (i.e. whether a potential donor language has a relevant affix), it can be shown that nominal categories are far more frequently borrowed than verbal categories. Additionally, it is shown that sets of borrowed affixes often consist of interrelated sets of forms, e.g. forming paradigms, rather than being isolated forms from different morphosyntactic systems, in particular for the more tightly integrated inflectional subsystems. The frequency and systematicity by which inflectional affixes are borrowed calls for a reconsideration of the role of inflection in models of language contact.