Journal of Historical Linguistics - Current Issue

Based on a corpus of private correspondence written by twelve influential political and cultural figures in eighteenth-century Spain, this article discusses several hypotheses about the role of individual variation in language change. The study analyses five variables undergoing change in early modern Spanish and examines the idiolectal use of the traditional variants. Several conclusions are drawn from the results. The first is that idiolectal patterns vary considerably from one variable to another. Those variants that were clearly in the majority at the time or have undergone slower change processes are more consistent with in-between profiles.

On the other hand, those variants that are more clearly declining or undergoing abrupt changes are represented by more refractory patterns. Still, these profiles are not uniform, so a specific type of variation in one variant does not exclude others. The results concerning the most decisive period in the configuration of the idiolectal distributions are less conclusive, mainly due to the imbalances in the representativeness of the samples. However, among the variables better represented in the corpus, the end of adolescence – set at 18 in this study – seems to be the most significant, in line with some well-known hypotheses in the literature. Nevertheless, we have also detected a few cases of changes in adulthood. Finally, the data support the dominance of stability in syntactic variation, suggesting that speakers change little once their idiolectal distributions have been established. Even so, some longitudinal changes are found, albeit in a recurrent direction: the replacement of traditional forms by alternative, more prestigious variants.

This article gathers a motivated inventory of Old English self-manipulative verbs, including Abstain verbs and Refrain verbs, analyses their semantics and syntax and offers diachronic perspectives on the replacement of that-clause complementation with the from + -ing construction. Such perspectives go in two directions. Firstly, the semantics of the that-clause remains intact throughout the change to the from + -ing construction. Secondly, deverbal nominalisations contribute to the semantics and syntax required by the gerund. The main conclusion is that Refrain verbs are exceptional because the competition leading to the Complement Shift does not hold between finite and non-finite clauses, but between finite clauses and deverbal nominalisations. This has two important consequences: the status of derived nominal linked predications must be acknowledged, and deverbal nominalisations must occupy the top of the syntactic ranking of clause linkage.

Wanderwords are a very common phenomenon among the languages of the world, but they are rarely discussed in detail. Their paths of spreading are often considered hardly reconstructible and their origins beyond reach, and being non-inherited, they are often ignored by the linguists working on the history of the languages involved. The present article questions both these tendencies, as it aims at exploring, as far as possible, the origins and interconnections of a series of related words referring to “apples”, “plums”, and other fruits attested in various languages and language families of the Near East. The article has two goals. First, to try to reconstruct the borrowing chains and general spread of these terms, thus going as close as possible to their putative origin. Second, to provide a test case and an illustration of a general methodological framework that can be used to study the history of such wanderwords.

This paper investigates the relationship between social and phonetic motivations for language change in Fang (Bantoid). While previous research has proposed that innovations in Fang arose due to social need and lack phonetic motivation (Mve et al. 2019; Good, Di Carlo & Tschonghongei 2020), I propose that there is a phonetic motivation and the social situation, at best, was a pathway for the innovation to gain wider adoption in the population. I provide comparative and language-internal evidence that the Fang innovations are driven by two interconnected processes, palatalization and spirantization, triggered by high vowels. These processes have been obscured synchronically in part due to the phonemic merger of *i > ə in some parts of the paradigm, thus making the alternations look phonetically unmotivated.