Journal of Historical Linguistics - Volume 8, Issue 3, 2018

This study is a corpus-based investigation of the development of English clause-initial quotative inversion, i.e. the construction in which a reporting clause with SV inversion is placed before the quoted message. The analysis makes use of various corpora of historical and contemporary English in order to document quantity and quality changes in the investigated construction in all stages of English. The study shows that the construction observed in Present Day English has developed in a continuous way since the period of Old English, although it has been a low-frequency pattern in each historical period. Moreover, the construction has developed differently in British and American English. In the former variety, the clause-initial quotative inversion is still quite rare and limited to newspapers, mostly tabloids; in the latter, it is quite widespread in magazines, where it shows an exceptionally high frequency and a growing collocational range.

This article offers an analysis and systematization of the relationship between directionality and grammaticalization and develops an innovative proposal regarding a new type of directionality. The article proposes four types of directionality in grammaticalization: A. down, B. up, C. neither down nor up, and D. up and down. The first three types are very well studied, but the last has been overlooked in the theoretical literature. The article analyzes directionality D in depth. It is a directionality that is very similar to a round trip: an up in the cline is followed by a down in the cline. First, the form or construction leaves sentence grammar and enters into periphery grammar, acquiring a new category and a discourse meaning, generally a subjective one; later, the form comes back into sentence grammar, but always re-enters as a different category from the etymological source. This process appears to be round trip directionality. This round trip process constitutes a fourth type of directionality in grammaticalization. Directionality D requires its own status, distinct from the sum of directionalities A and B, due to its specific source and due to the fact that the reinsertion into the sentence grammar is in a specific category. It has its own individual distribution and a characteristic and innovative circular path. The evidence of this directionality presented in this article comes from Spanish, but this path very likely also generalizes to other languages.

It has repeatedly been observed that there is a worldwide preference for suffixes over prefixes. In this article, we argue that universally dispreferred – or rare – structures can and do arise as the result of regular processes of language change, given the right background structures. Specifically, we show that Ancient Egyptian-Coptic undergoes a long-term diachronic macro-change from exhibiting mixed suffixing-prefixing to showing an overwhelming preference for prefixing. The empirical basis for this study is a comparison of ten typologically significant parameters in which prefixing or affixing is potentially at stake, based on Dryer’s (2013a) 969-language sample. With its extremely high prefixing preference, Coptic belongs to the rare 6% or so of languages that are predominantly prefixing. We argue that each of the micro-changes implicated in this macro-change are better understood in terms of changes at the level of individual constructions, rather than in terms of a broad structural “drift.” Crucially, there is nothing unusual about the actual processes of change themselves.