Journal of Historical Linguistics - Online First

This study investigates demonstratives as the diachronic source of first/second person pronouns and shows that though several languages use them to designate the speaker/addressee, most usage does not conventionalize as first/second person pronouns despite the claim in previous studies. It then presents functional reasons that demonstratives rarely give rise to first/second person pronouns. This study additionally examines nouns and reflexives as the source of first/second person pronouns and shows that while it is relatively common for nouns to develop into first/second person pronouns, the same conclusion as demonstratives can be drawn for reflexives. I argue that the historical development of first/second person pronouns differs from that of third person pronouns due to speech-functional and discourse-pragmatic reasons. The development of the former concerns the speaker-addressee axis, thus more strongly affected than the latter by the tug of war between efficiency in linguistic communication and social success in interpersonal communication.

This paper explores a rare sound correspondence pattern found in Gyalrongic languages, focusing on two etyma: ‘musk deer’ and ‘valley’. The reflexes in daughter languages exhibit different onsets, including palatals, alveolars, and laterals, which renders their genetic relationship non-obvious. Despite its significance, this correspondence pattern has been largely overlooked and insufficiently reconstructed. In this study, I propose a novel reconstruction of the onset, namely *t.ɬj-, elucidating the distinct reflexes observed in different sub-branches. Through this analysis, I demonstrate that both etyma have Sino-Tibetan origins. Additionally, the paper emphasises the importance of studying correspondences with limited examples and discusses the broader implications of such research for other domains.

Kassian et al. (2023) propose a method to detect ancient linguistic relationships by means of a weighted permutation test applied to word lists. The method provides evidence for an ancient historical connection between Chukotko-Kamchatkan languages and Nivkh languages, and between Samoyedic languages and Yukaghir. In this paper, I argue that while the word lists collected by the authors represent a valid dataset for language comparison and are supported by extensive etymological work, their statistical tests constitute a departure from the significance testing framework that has propelled contemporary literature on long-range comparison. I then advance some proposals on how their tests can be integrated and compared with those traditionally accepted in the literature.

The development of the Persian definitive object marker -rā from Old Persian rādī through Middle Persian benefactive rāy has been established as a model grammaticalization process by Bossong (1985). His explanations on other modern Iranian languages, and their interplay in the historical development, have received far less research attention. This article offers a novel and comprehensive account of the historical development of -rā in West Iranian, from Old Persian up to approximately 20 New Iranian languages. Based on the semantic map model, it demonstrates that concerning -rā, most West Iranian languages can be subdivided into three typological groups, two of which represent more or less clearly defined genetic subgroups within the continuum of West Iranian. The interplay of genetic and typological/functional factors is complex, and open questions remain. The present study aims to provide empirical data, and to raise relevant questions, for future in-depth studies.

This paper investigates the diachronically changing syntactic and semantic status of the Spanish Absolute Construction (AC) on the Communicative Continuum (Koch & Oesterreicher 1990 [2011]) in a corpus of 15th- to 18th-century translations from Latin. Previous research has already demonstrated that the 15th-century preclassical Spanish AC evolved from a highly formal past participial Latin calque in the realm of Communicative Distance to an entrenched gerundial absolute in the 18th century, positioned slightly further from the Communicative Distance pole (Del Rey Quesada 2018, 2021, Molenaers 2023). This study highlights that, besides the altering predicate, other characteristics enhanced the AC’s progression along the Continuum, including one syntactic (non-augmentation) and two semantic (non-adverbial, coreferential) factors. By means of clause linkage (Raible 1992, 2001), a development is traced to a syntactically less dense and semantically less complex gerundial AC, which displays a high frequency of the three outlined features. Complementary analyses grounded in a functional-pragmatic theory of subordination (Cristofaro 2003) have revealed a moderate widening of the innovative AC’s clausal status beyond strict subordination. Two language-internal evolutions, the case switch from ablative to nominative in the transition from Latin to Spanish and priming with the gerundial unaugmented free adjunct (FA), are identified as the driving forces behind the Spanish AC’s syntactic and semantic promenade beyond the extremes of Communicative Distance.

Some varieties of Camuno, an Eastern Lombard variety spoken in Valcamonica, Italy, show clear evidence of what appears to be an unconditioned sound change of S > h, where S had [s] and [θ] variants (Bonfadini 1995a; Cresci 2014). However, neighboring varieties in the upper parts of the valley retain inherited S and, in at least one village, Cerveno, debuccalization is limited to intervocalic position. In this study, we attempt to explain dialect variation in Camuno in terms of s-debuccalization as a lenition process within the general framework of Evolutionary Phonology (Blevins 2004a, 2006, 2015) building on the typology established by Ferguson (1990). The probability of articulatory undershoot is greatest in the V_V environment, and all dialects with S > h show the sound change in this context. In medial clusters like rS, lS, nS, where there is articulatory overlap and longer sustained constriction, articulatory undershoot is less likely, and S is most likely to be maintained, as it is in Cerveno. A treatment of S > h as lenition implies that [s] and [θ] were produced with spread vocal folds in languages where this sound change has been observed. Here we offer additional evidence for aspiration as an active feature in Camuno phonology and suggest possible origins of this feature during the long period of contact with Longobardic. Another central issue explored in this study are phonetic factors that might differentiate intervocalic s > h from s > h that originates in the syllable coda, as in many varieties of Spanish.

This study aims at describing the verbs of the visual sensory domain in Old Anatolian Turkish (oat), including basic and compound verb forms. We shall specifically focus on intra-field and trans-field meaning extensions of visual perception verbs such as baḳ-, naẓar et-, gör-, and görin-/gözük-. Our findings are based on a corpus consisting of 11 texts both in prose and poetry from the 13th to 15th centuries. There are mainly two types of verbs that conceptualise mental and emotive states through visual perception: one pertains to idiomatic expressions with göz ‘eye’, such as göz-(ün) aç- (eye-poss.acc open), göz-den düş- (eye-abl fall), and göz dut- (eye hold). The second form includes basic verbs including baḳ- (to look at), gör- (to see), naẓar et- (to look at) and gör-in-/göz-ük- (to appear). We shall show that visual perception constitutes a rich source for expressing emotive states, and the use of vision verbs for the expression of emotions is as productive as it is for mental states. Similar to Sweetser’s body is mind metaphor, we suggest that vision is emotion. The domain of visual perception in oat texts displays a strong connection to intellection; however, there is no evidence in our data indicating that the verbs gör- and baḳ- have meaning extension to ‘to know’. The phenomenon-based verbs görin- and gözük- have mainly two meaning extensions: one is related to physical existence, as in ‘occur’ and ‘appear’ in English. When these verbs co-occur with nouns and adjectives, they reflect the speakers’ judgements and beliefs by means of a metaphor.

This paper deals with lexico-semantic stability, specifically in the anatomical domain. The main goal is to develop a method for measuring semantic polysemy and shift, in order to address: (1) the validity of standardized vocabulary lists (e.g., Swadesh 1950 , 1952 , 1955 ; Holman et al. 2008 ; Haspelmath & Tadmor 2009a , 2009b ) for investigating cross-linguistic stability; and (2) the difference between basic and stable vocabulary ( Ratliff 2006 ; Matisoff 2009 ), and its implications for studying remote relationships between language families, on the one hand, and subgroup differentiation within language families, on the other. To study these problems, a total of 50 etyma from the anatomical domain were selected from the Preliminary Etymological Mayan Database ( Kaufman with Justeson 2003 ), and these were then classified employing the novel metric, and further analyzed by means of statistical methods. The results point to: (1) no specific correlation with the stability rankings of the Swadesh and Leipzig-Jakarta lists; (2) support for the “basicness” of etyma from the anatomical domain; (3) several significant relationships between stability and polysemy scores and independent variables relevant to the anatomical domain; (4) evidence of lexico-semantic stability score affinities between Mayan subgroups; and (5) evidence supporting the utility of polysemies to investigate subgrouping and language contact. The paper also offers conclusions and areas for further research.