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Booklet ICHL abstracts 2014

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  • Elbieta Adamczyk, Adam Mickiewicz University, Pozna Arjen Versloot, University of Amsterdam

    A MULTIVARIATE ANALYSIS OF MORPHOLOGICAL VARIATION IN PLURAL INFLECTION IN

    NORTH SEA GERMANIC LANGUAGES

    The focus of the present study is on the diachronic development of irregular plural formations

    in two representatives of the North Sea Germanic branch, i.e. English and Frisian.Old

    Germanic languages exhibit a wide range of plural formation patterns, inherited from Indo-

    European and subsequently reshaped in Proto-Germanic, e.g., Old English:dg dagas days, cealf cealfru calves, ft ftfeet.A salient feature of the declensional system of Old Germanic languages was an increasing syncretism of the inflectional classes, resulting

    from an interplay of phonological and morphological developments (phonological reduction

    and analogical levelling). These tendenciesinduced a reduction in the diversity of the inherited

    inflectional exponents, including those marking specifically the plural. In effect, the

    distribution of the plural markers, which remained largely lexical,was partly reordered by

    phonological andsemantic criteria (cf. Dammel, Krschner & Nbling 2010).

    The mechanism of the remodelling of the Germanic plural paradigms entailed a

    number of interacting factors which contributed to the shape of the nominal inflection as it is

    known in Modern English and Frisian.The aim of the present study is to identify and weigh

    the significance of the factors which contributed to the preservation of irregular plural patterns

    in these languages. Theinvestigationinvolved two steps: (a) identifying the persistence of

    individual irregular plural forms and (b) applying a multivariate analysis to define the weight

    of the different factors contributing to the preservation of irregular plurals.The North Sea

    Germanic languages were chosen as the testingground for the analysis, since they depart from

    a relatively late common starting point, being nearly identical forthe reconstructed Proto-

    English and Proto-Frisian.

    The factors which will be considered in order to account for the attested plurality

    patterns include the following:

    (a) frequency of occurrence (b) morphological salience of plural marking (c) interaction with default plural endings (d) prosody (e) morpho-phonological complexity of the plural marking (f) semantics (g) language contact

    The interplay of factors can potentially lead to three outcomes for the development of

    irregular plural forms, namelya word may (1) preserve the historically developed plural form,

    (2) become regular or (3) develop a new irregular form.The present study presents the

    outcome of a multivariateanalysis, wherethe factors are quantified and their correlation with

    the dependent variable of (type of) irregularity is computed (cf. Sutter 2009).

    References

    Dammel, Antje, Sebastian Krschner & Damaris Nbling. 2010. Pluralallomorphie in zehn germanischen

    Sprachen; Konvergenzen und Divergenzen in Ausdrucksverfahren und Konditionierung. Kontrastive

    germanistische Linguistik, vol. 2, 587-642. (Germanistische Linguistik 206-209). Hildesheim [etc.]:

    Olms.

    Sutter, Gert. 2009. Towards a multivariate model of grammar: The case of word order variation in Dutch clause

    final verb clusters. In Andreas Dufter, Jrg Fleischer & Guido Seiler (eds.), Describing and Modeling

    Variation in Grammar, vol. 204, 225-254. Berlin, New York: Mouton de Gruyter.

  • Old English Possessed Body Parts in Contact Cynthia L. Allen Australian National University

    A striking syntactic change which took place in Middle English is the loss of the Dative External Possessor (DEP) found in Old English examples like scearpa him a scancan (Balds Leechbook) scarify his legs, literally, scarify him the legs. In Early Middle English, the Internal Possessor (IP, used in the translation of this example) increasing became dominant, and the External Possessor is limited to a few fixed expressions such as look x in the eye and look x in the mouth in Modern English. Ahlgren (1946) suggested that the loss of the accusative/dative case marking distinction is the key to the loss of this construction. This explanation does not fare well under close scrutiny and explanations in terms of contact with other languages have been proposed as more promising in accounting for why although most Scandinavian languages have had similar losses of case distinctions and have lost the DEP, they have developed another External Possessor (EP) construction using a locative expression for the possessor. McWhorter (2002) argued that contact with Scandinavian precipitated this change, which must then be seen as an instance of simplification caused by language contact rather than transfer of a construction from one language to another, but others (e.g. Vennemann 2002, Filppula et al. 2008, Hickey 2012) point to the lack of EPs in the Brythonic languages as a similarity with English which is documented as unusual situation in Europe (Haspelmath 1999) and thus unlikely to be a coincidence. By this view, the fact that the DEP only disappeared from texts in the Middle English period is treated as stemming from a discrepancy between spoken language, where the IP is assumed to have been preponderant because of Celtic influence, and the more Germanic written language.

    This paper furnishes new data which must be taken into account when evaluating the role of contact in the loss of the DEP in English. A corpus study into the syntax of body parts in Old English which shows variation between DEPs; both the IP and the DEP are possible in some similar situations even in the same text. However, when we make a distinction between DEPs involving direct argument (subject or object) body parts as opposed to prepositional objects, we see that were already becoming more restricted in their range at an early stage in OE direct argument body parts, being found almost exclusively with adversely affected possessors. Both case marking loss and contact with Scandinavian are therefore excluded as triggering the decline of the DEP, whatever role they may have played in its eventual complete loss. Contact with Celtic cannot be ruled out at least as a contributing factor, in this initial decline. However, if we assume that the early favouring of the IP over the DEP in early OE writings is due to Celtic contact, we must abandon the notion that Celiticised English was not considered suitable English for writing in OE. I argue furthermore that in focusing on the loss of the DEP in English, we should not lose sight of the fact that the DEP has also changed in languages like German from the situation documented by Havers (19011) for the early Indo-European languages generally. At an early stage, the IP and DEP were in variation to describe essentially the same event but the DEP made the speakers explicit focus on the fact that the whole possessor and not just the body part was affected. In the European languages generally, the semantic distinction between the IP and the DEP became sharpened to the point where optionality in the choice of construction has disappeared in German, for example. In English, on the periphery of the European Sprachbund and possibly influenced by contact with Celtic, the DEP became an increasingly marked construction which was used to emphasise the effect on the whole possessor, leading to its lowered frequency and eventual loss.

  • Slavic and the birth of Standard Average European

    Henning Andersen, UVLA

    The changes in Slavic verbal categories that occurred from deep prehistory until the Early Middle Ages, encourage examination in a spatial perspective. The parallel developments in contiguous language areas suggest widespread bilingualism and multilingualism. This is particularly so with respect to the most recent developments, which coincide with the demographic mobility in the period of the Great Migrations.

    1. In the earliest phase, developments differ in Slavic, Baltic and Germanic, but the outcome of these developments is the same in all three dialect groups: [i] Inherited aspect distinctions (PIE Stative, Aorist) are lost, and what remains is a Preterite/Present distinction. During this phase, [ii] analytic expressions of Telic aspect (terminativity, Russ. predelnost, Streitbergs perfectiv) are innovated (Maslov, J. S. 1959). As they are grammatized, the adverbial Telicity markers develop from words to clitics to prefixes (Pinault 1995). Typologically the developments in Baltic, Slavic, and Germanic are parallel.

    2. In the second phase, [iii] Progressive (durative, iterative) verbs are formed from simplex and prefixed Telic verbs to express Atelicity. Eventually [iv] Telic action verbs and their Atelic counterparts are reanalysed as Perfective vs. Imperfective verbs. Other Telic verbs become Perfective procedurals, and Atelic verbs, Imperfective procedurals (Maslov 1959/2004). This is a Slavic development, but the categories of proceduals in East Baltic, though exprressed with different morphology, are typologically similar.

    3. In the third phase, the other aspects known from Old Slavic texts are grammatized. [v] The CS Imperfect (vs. Aorist) has a parallel in the Lithuanian progressive Preterite. [vi] The CS auxiliated Retrospective (Pluperfect vs. Perfect) has parallels in Balkan, Romance and Germanic languages (Drinka 2003, 2007). [vii] The Slavic auxiliated Prospective has regional variants (Futures) whose auxiliaries translate into the neighboring languages, Greek (will, have), Romance (have), Hungarian (begin, take), and Germanic (shall, will; become) (Andersen 2006, 2009).

    In this presentation I will discuss to what extent the development of the most recent of these typological affinities [vvii] corresponds to known geographical contiguities and the textual record of the languages in question.

  • Variationist Analysis of Phonetic Reduction in the Grammaticalized Motion Verb in Japanese

    Fumihito Arai

    Kobe Shoin Womens University

    This study addresses the phonetic reduction in the Japanese -te-iku -Con.-go construction as in (1)

    which has been grammaticalized from the full-verb iku go. Using the variationist framework, we

    argue that this is a typical case of change from below, that is of language change in which the

    innovative reduced form (-te-ku) is more likely to appear in informal, spontaneous speech and in male

    utterances.

    (1) Ensoku-ni-wa, takusan okasi-o mot-te-[iku/ku] tumori desu.

    excursion-to-Top. many snack-Acc. have-Con.-go will be

    I am going to bring a lot of snacks on the school excursion. While the semantics of -te-iku has been much studied so far (Imani 1991 and others), the phonetic

    reduction concomitant with the grammaticalization of -te-iku has been largely ignored, except for

    Matsumura (1998) and Shibatani (2007). Matsumura (1998) uses a bibliographic survey to show that

    the form with the reduced vowel was already present in Edo Japanese, the older form of modern Tokyo

    Japanese. Shibatani (2007) argues that the reduced form is more likely when the link between the -te

    conjunctive form and its preceding verb is semantically less congruous.

    However, since the two forms (unreduced/reduced) are still in competition in present-day Japanese,

    this case should be treated as linguistic variation governed by multiple factors in accordance with

    Weinreich, Labov & Herzogs (1968) principle of language change and not by just a single factor as

    presumed by Shibatani (2007). Thus, the present study aims to elucidate how the phonetic reduction in

    -te-iku can be explained from the variationist viewpoint.

    We examined 4,029 tokens (2,972 of -te-iku and 1,057 of -te-ku) amassed from the Corpus of

    Spontaneous Japanese (NIJL 2004), and set three linguistic factors (verb length, affirmative/negative

    context, verb frequency) and eight social factors (birth year, gender, geography, education, speech

    spontaneity, speech style, speech skillfulness, speech experience) as possible predictors of the vowel

    reduction in question. The result of a multivariate analysis shows that the innovative -te-ku form

    appears at a higher probability in informal and more spontaneous speech, and it is preferred by men.

    This indicates that the -te-iku/-te-ku variation is a typical case of change from below.

    Language-internally, -te-ku is preferred in affirmative contexts, which supports the hypothesis that

    language change behaves conservatively in negative contexts (Givn 1979). The rate of the incoming

    variant in relation to verb length apparently shows the effect of this linguistic factor, where the vowel

    reduction is most compatible with a bimoraic verb. However, looking closely, it behaves as such

    because the bimoraic verbs appear most frequently in the data. The pattern of relative frequency of

    -te-ku in terms of verb length is consistent across speaker age groups. It follows that this vowel

    reduction is in conformity with the principle of lexical diffusion which states that high-frequency words

    are more susceptible to sound change (Hopper 1976).

    References

    Givn, Talmy. (1979). On understanding grammar. Orland: Academic Press.

    Hopper, Joan. (1976). Word frequency in lexical diffusion and the source of morphophonological change. In Christie, W.

    (ed.), Current Progress in Historical Linguistics, 96-105. Amsterdam: North Holland.

    Imani, Ikumi. (1991). V-tekuru to V-teiku ni tuite. Nihongogaku 9, 5: 54-66.

    Matsumura, Akira. (1998). Zho edogo tkygo no kenky. Tokyo: Tokyodo Shuppan.

    NIJL. (2004). Corpus of Spontaneous Japanese. Tokyo: The National Institute for Japanese Language.

    Shibatani, Masayoshi. (2007). Grammaticalization of converb constructions: The case of Japanese -te conjunctive

    constructions. In J. Rehbein, C. Hohenstein & L. Pietsch (eds.), Connectivity in Grammar and Discourse, 21-49.

    Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

    Weinreich, Uriel, Labov, William & Herzog, Marvin I. (1968). Empirical Foundations for a Theory of Language Change. In

    W. Lehmann & Y. Malkiel (eds.), Directions for Historical Linguistics, 95-195. Austin: University of Texas Press.

  • Xavier Bach & Louise Esher Research Centre for Romance Linguistics, University of Oxford

    On the paradigmatic status of infinitives in French and Occitan

    Infinitival forms are typically presented as forming part of the inflectional paradigm of the verb, yet

    the reasons for this choice rarely receive explicit consideration, much less justification. Our study

    examines the relationship between the infinitive and the inflectional paradigm in French and Occitan

    (Gallo-Romance), showing that the infinitive is best considered peripheral to the paradigm.

    In Romance, the infinitive is certainly felt to be representative of the verb paradigm, witness its use

    as the citation form. One may further note the presence of infinitives in periphrases expressing tense,

    voice and aspect (categories prototypically associated with the verb), whether interchangeably with

    finite forms, as in the compound perfectives (jai fait; avoir fait), or alongside finite forms, as in the periphrastic future (je vais chanter). However, as Maiden (2011:208-9) observes, the morphological

    properties of the infinitive in Romance differ substantially from those of finite wordforms: the

    infinitive bears chiefly lexical information, and does not itself carry marking for tense, person,

    number or mood. Maiden suggests that speakers are hence unlikely to analyse the infinitive as

    composed of a lexical stem and inflectional endings, but rather as a single, atomic unit. This item is,

    unlike other forms of the verb, readily converted into a verbal noun (le savoir, le manger).

    If the infinitive retains any significant link with another area of the paradigm, it should be with the

    synthetic future (SF) and synthetic conditional (SC), as these forms derive historically from parallel

    periphrastic constructions infinitive + HABEO, etc. and infinitive + HABEBAM, etc. respectively. Yet

    examination of regional variation in Occitan and of native speakers spontaneous errors in French indicates that there is no longer any link between the infinitive and the SF/SC.

    In Occitan, the infinitive never serves as a template for analogical remodelling of other parts of the

    paradigm, including the SF/SC; where the SF/SC stem appears remodelled on the stem found in the

    infinitive, this stem is never unique to the infinitive but always found elsewhere in the paradigm;

    indeed, there are no cases where the SF/SC stem is uniquely spread to the infinitive, or vice versa.

    The infinitive typically resists changes general to the paradigm (levelling, shift of conjugational

    class) and may undergo idiosyncratic changes distinct from those affecting the rest of the paradigm.

    In French, investigation of erroneous SF/SC forms attested on the Internet reveals that errors

    replacing the SF/SC stem by the infinitive (je savoirai) are confined to L2 learners1 and deliberate

    playfulness.2 Native speakers spontaneous errors typically involve the stem of the 1pl/2pl.prs.ind

    (je voulerai), confirming Freis (1929:168-9) finding of a general tendency to remodel verb forms on the stem of the 1pl/2pl.prs.ind; by contrast, the infinitive serves as a template only for erroneous

    infinitive forms (avoirer). Although Frei cites infinitives remodelled on the 1pl/2pl.prs.ind stem, we

    have not found any such examples.

    The French and Occitan data support a view of the infinitive as peripheral to the paradigm lexically and syntactically linked to the paradigm, but morphologically distinct from it.

    References

    Frei, Henri. 1929. La grammaire des fautes. Genve: Slatkine.

    Maiden, Martin. 2011. Morphological Persistence. In M. Maiden, J.C. Smith & A. Ledgeway (eds.), The Cambridge History of the Romance Languages. Cambridge: CUP. 155-215.

    1 Typically on language-learning websites and discussion forums.

    2 Eg. the dialogue of the MMORPG persona Halumgalom the Gnome exclusively uses forms remodelled on the

    infinitive: Ca pouvoira se vendre qui savoire. Ou sinon a faira un trophe ! (, 20 January 2013).

  • The Story of Woe

    Jhanna Bardal (University of Bergen), Valgerur Bjarnadttir (Stockholm University), Eystein Dahl (University of Bergen), Tonya Kim Dewey (University of Bergen), Thrhallur Eythrsson (University of Iceland), Chiara Fedriani (University of Bergamo), Thomas Smitherman (University of Bergen)

    In contrast to the consensus in the field that historical-comparative syntactic reconstruction is a futile and unavailing enterprise, we aim to show how syntactic reconstruction may be fruitfully carried out with the aid of Construction Grammar where complex syntactic structures are regarded as formfunction pairings (cf. Bardal & Eythrsson 2012), here specifically using the formalism of Sign-Based-Construction Grammar (Sag 2012).

    As an exercise in syntactic reconstruction, with the goal to illustrate in detail how such reconstruction may be carried out, we compare the syntactic environments found for an Indo-European interjection, traditionally reconstructed as PIE *wai woe. We investigate the syntactic environments that woe instantiates in a subset of the daughter languages, i.e. Early Germanic, Latin, Old Slavonic, Baltic, and Old Indo-Iranian. In addition to its bare extra-sentential use, woe also occurs systematically with a dative subject-like argument, a construction which we refer to as the DAT-(is)-woe construction. Our investigation into these five Indo-European language branches reveals that the DAT-(is)-woe construction is found in all these early daughters. The construction was generally used when something bad happened to people, expressing the speakers dismay. In addition to the systematic occurrences of the DAT-(is)-woe construction, we present sporadic examples of woe with an accusative in Latin and a genitive in Old Lithuanian.

    An issue in need of explanation is related to the word order variation generally found for this construction. It is manifested as a systematic variation in the order of the dative subject-like argument and woe, i.e. as DAT-(is)-woe and woe-(is)-DAT. We show that when woe is in first position it represents new information, not mentioned earlier in the context. As such, woe in first position functions as fronted focused material, or predicate focus in the terms of Lambrecht (1994).

    Our examination suggests that the DAT-(is)-woe construction is inherited, hence we reconstruct three constructions for Proto-Indo-European to account for the behavior of DAT-(is)-woe: a) an argument structure construction consisting of only one argument in the dative case, and a specific pragmatic value associated with the construction, namely speakers dismay, b) a subjectverb construction which specifies that the default word order in Proto-Indo-European was with the subject in initial position, while the verb came later in the sentence (cf. Delbrck 1900), and c) a predicate-focus construction, which places the predicate in first position, preceding the subject, if the predicate was in focus in the discourse. These three constructions are sufficient to capture the behavior of the DAT-(is)-woe construction across the five Indo-European daughter languages discussed here, and hence to reconstruct the behavior of the construction in Proto-Indo-European.

    We thus show how syntactic units may be reconstructed for an earlier proto-stage, in this case a concrete lexically-specific argument structure construction, a more schematic neutral word order construction and a schematic discourse-motivated predicate-focus construction, illustrating at the same time that non-canonical subject marking is likely to have existed in Proto-Indo-European.

    References:

    Bardal, Jhanna & Thrhallur Eythrsson. 2012. Reconstructing Syntax: Construction Grammar and

    the Comparative Method. In Sign-Based Construction Grammar, 257308. Eds. Hans C. Boas &

    Ivan A. Sag. Stanford: CSLI Publications.

    Delbrck, Berthold. 1900. Vergleichende Syntax der indogermanischen Sprachen 5(3). Strassburg:

    Trbner.

    Lambrecht, Knud. 1994. Information Structure and Sentence Form. Cambridge: Cambridge University

    Press.

    Sag, Ivan A. 2012. Sign-Based Construction Grammar: An Informal Synopsis. In Sign-Based

    Construction Grammar, 69202. Eds. Hans C. Boas & Ivan A. Sag. Stanford: CSLI Publications.

  • Syntactic and phonological evidence in favour of the grammaticalization of Northern Catalan negative poc/poca. Montserrat Batllori & Assumpci Rost

    Universitat de Girona - Universitat de les Illes Balears [email protected] - [email protected]

    This paper focuses on the analysis of Catalan poc/poca 'no'. Syntactically, it provides evidence in favour of the current

    process of grammaticalization undergone by poc/poca and argues for its development into a head (equivalent to the negative

    marker no) on the lines of van Gelderen (2004, 2008a, 2008b, 2009 and 2011). Crucially, our hypothesis is supported by the

    results of a phonetic test on intonation that points out to a clear intonational difference between other Catalan emphatic

    polarity particles, such as pla 'NOT', and poc.

    As shown in Batllori & Hernanz (2013), in the northern region of Catalonia, poc/poca (< PAUCU, Latin quantitative adverb)

    is used by some speakers as a negative emphatic polarity particle, see (1a). It coexists with poc, which still displays a

    quantitative value, see (1b), but they can be easily set apart by their syntactic behaviour.

    (1) a. En Pere poc ho ha fet, destudiar per a lexamen. [NEGATIVE EMPHATIC POLARITY PARTICLE] b. En Pere ho ha fet poc, destudiar per a lexamen. [QUANTITATIVE ADVERB]

    However, there is microvariation with respect to the values expressed by non-quantitative poc. Some speakers use poc, in

    (1a), as a counterpressupositional emphatic polarity particle (for example, in Pla de lEstany; see Rigau 2004). Others,

    though, use it as a plain negative marker without pressupositional value, especially in Girona and Figueres, see (2):

    (2) a. On s en Joan? Poca ho s [= No ho s] b. Ja ha arribat en Pere? No, poca ha arribat [= No, no ha arribat] c. Avui poca hi anir al teatre; estic molt cansada [= Avui no hi anir al teatre; estic molt cansada]

    We attribute the fact that poc/poca is used as a negative head in Girona and Figueres to a specifier to head

    grammaticalization, in terms of van Gelderen (2004, 2008a, 2008b, 2009 and 2011). It is, in fact, another instance of the

    negative cycle explained and widely illustrated by this author.

    Our hypothesis gains further support from the fact that the negative emphatic polarity particle, pla 'NOT', despite showing a

    similar behaviour concerning the licensing of negative polarity particles, see (3), still conveys a pressupositional value, is

    emphatic in nature and, accordingly, not equivalent to the negative marker no, see (4).

    (3) a. La Maria poc ha dit mai aix. b. La Maria pla ha dit mai aix.

    (4) Tinc por que en Joan li ho digui tot. En Joan pla dir res. En Joan no dir res

    From a phonological standpoint, we also show that poc/poca behaves as a conventional negative marker, such as no. As

    known, negation sequences are comparable to declarative intonation patterns. In Catalan, the structure of the typical

    declarative melodic pattern displays a descending body and final inflexion (vid. Martnez Celdrn 1994, Prieto 1999, Juli-

    Mun 2005, Font Rotchs 2007). Accordingly, a non-emphatic negative statement would accommodate to (5):

    (5)

    If poc/poca were emphatic, (2c), for example, it would exhibit a different pattern from that in (5). As illustrated in (6), the

    body and the final inflexion of the curve would be ascending, instead of being a descending, and the final toneme would

    show an abrupt descending shape (cf. Font Rotchs 2007: 118).

    (6)

    To carry out the phonetic test on intonation we recorded 2 speakers who were asked to produce 5 utterances containing

    negative sequences with poc/poca in non-emphatic contexts and 5 more with the negative particle no. Besides, they were

    asked to produce utterances with the emphatic negative particle pla. Hence, we could contrast their intonational features with

    those of the statements with poc/poca. The melodic curves obtained provide us with evidence to pose that poc/poca is a

    polarity head.

    Bibliographical references Batllori, Montserrat and Maria-Llusa Hernanz (2013) Emphatic polarity particles in Spanish and Catalan, Lingua.128 (May 2013): 9-30. Font Rotchs, Dolors (2007) Lentonaci del catal, Publicacions de lAbadia de Montserrat, Barcelona.

    Rigau, Gemma (2004) El quantificador focal pla: un estudi de sintaxi dialectal. Caplletra, 36: 25-54.

    Van Gelderen Elly (2009) Feature economy in the Linguistic Cycle.In Crisma, P. & G. Longobardi (Eds.) Historical Syntax and Linguistic Theory, Oxford, OUP: 93-109. Van Gelderen, Elly (2004) Gramaticalization as Economy, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, John Benjamins.

    Van Gelderen, Elly (2008a) Negative cycles, Linguistic Typology. 12:. 195-243.

    Van Gelderen, Elly (2008b) Where did late merge go? Grammaticalization as feature economy, Studia Linguistica. 62: 287-300. Van Gelderen, Elly (2011) The Linguistic Cycle. Language Change and the Language Faculty, Oxford/New York, OUP.

    final inflexion/toneme

    body

    final inflexion/toneme

    body

  • Brace Constructions in Late Latin and Old French

    Brigitte L.M. Bauer

    University of Texas at Austin

    In the shift from Latin to French we observe a slow but steady change in word order, which is

    often referred to as a shift from OV to VO structures. It is manifest, for example, in the spread

    of Verb Object sequences in both main and subordinate clauses. In addition, there is another

    related change that affects verb phrases, but that is less well known: the emergence of brace

    constructions, in which the (direct) object is located between the auxiliary and the perfective

    participle or infinitive, as in:

    (a) [AUXILIARY + (DIRECT) OBJECT + PERFECTIVE PARTICIPLE] habeo epistulam scriptam

    have-1sg. letter-Acc. write-Pf.Part.-Acc.sg.-F. I have written a letter (b) [AUXILIARY + (DIRECT) OBJECT + INFINITIVE]

    coepit epistulam scribere

    start-Pf-3sg. letter-Acc. write-Inf. he started to write a letter

    This talk will compare constructions including habeo and perfective participles (cf. [a]) and

    constructions including auxiliaries other than habeo and infinitives (cf. [b]).

    Analysis of [HABEO + PERFECTIVE PARTICIPLE] constructions shows that once habeo had

    emerged as an auxiliary in the later stages of Latin, the construction underwent a consistent

    change in word order in Old and Middle French that can be summarized as follows: EPISTULAM SCRIPTAM HABEO > HABEO EPISTULAM SCRIPTAM > HABEO SCRIPTAM

    EPISTULAM. The brace construction therefore is part of a gradual development.

    In contrast to [HABEO + PERFECTIVE PARTICIPLE] structures, [AUXILIARY +

    INFINITIVE] constructions underwent a much longer andin the absence of nominal forms of the verbpotentially less complex evolution. Yet their development in all likelihood is similar because brace constructions are indeed attested in Latin, as in: incipiunt hymnos dicere (Peregr.) they start to recite hymns .

    Since this development has been a neglected topic in Latin and Romance linguistics,

    we will focus in this presentation on these constructions, examining whether their history as

    well shows a shift from [OBJECT + INFINITIVE + AUXILIARY] to [AUXILIARY + OBJECT +

    INFINITIVE] to [AUXILIARY + INFINITIVE + OBJECT]. My own preliminary research indicates

    that several of these structures indeed were well attested in the shift from Latin to Romance.

    On the basis of data from Vulgar and Late Latin as well as Old French texts I will analyse

    whether these varieties indeed reflect different chronological layers, relating where possible

    my findings to the patterns observed for perfective habeo constructions and the overall spread

    of VO.

  • When uniform stress placement collapsed: the history of English word stress told by Evolutionary Game Theory

    Andreas Baumann, University of Vienna

    In this paper we propose an evolutionary approach to stress assignment in languages such as English, in which stress is lexically fixed, and use it to explain the diachronic development of word stress in the history of English. In this approach lexical stress patterns are seen as adaptations to utterance rhythm. Since rhythmic structures normally involve sequences of two or more words, our approach differs radically from most extant theories (such as Chomsky and Halle 1968, Halle 1973, Hammond 1999, Hayes 1981, or Schane 2006), which derive lexical stress by means of rules operating on isolated lexical items, and which typically fail to handle variability (as in English [re.search]N vs. [re.search]N) satisfactorily.

    From the perspective of cultural evolution, the memorized phonological structures of words including their stress patterns represent replicating competence constituents whose evolutionary stability depends on their faithful expression and transmission. Since rhythmically motivated repair processes (such as stress shifting or vowel lengthening) would clearly impede their faithful expression and transmission, it makes sense to assume that words should be structurally adapted to the rhythmic structures in which they come to be uttered. At the same time, utterance rhythm does not only represent the environment to which words must adapt but is itself constituted through the combination of words.

    The verification of this approach is done in two steps: In the first step, we use the formal language of Evolutionary Game Theory (cf. e.g. Hofbauer and Sigmund 1998, Maynard-Smith 1982) to model interactions between phonological structures: in our game-theoretical model, which is an extension of Ritt and Baumann (2013), polysyllabic words figure as players, which can choose among different stress placement strategies (e.g. always stress the first syllable). They combine to form utterances together with (potentially unstressed) monosyllabic words, and receive rewards (so-called payoff) reflecting the rhythmic quality of the utterances they form. The key assumption of Evolutionary Game Theory is that the payoff a word receives that way reflects its fitness: thus, choosing a stress placement strategy incurring a higher payoff will promote the faithful transmission and utterance frequency of a word. As we shall demonstrate, the model allows us to derive interesting and testable predictions about probable distributions of stress patterns in the lexica of natural languages, and about the dynamics involved in their potential change. In particular, the model shows that the distribution of stress placement patterns among polysyllabic words should crucially depend on the frequency of monosyllabic words.

    In the second step, in order to test the predictions, we feed relevant parameter estimates drawn from a historical corpus ranging from Old English to Early Modern English into the model. The results are remarkable: the model predicts that along the measured trajectory characterizing the frequency development of monosyllabic words, the distribution of stress placement strategies among polysyllables changes from solely initial stress (i.e. Germanic word stress in OE) to mixed stressing strategies (as they arguably characterize EME). Hence, the diachronic development of English word stress can be explained as an epiphenomenon of a word-length reducing diachronic process, viz. phonetic erosion. References

    Burzio, Luigi. 1994. Principles of English Stress. Cambridge: University Press. Chomsky, Noam and Morris Halle. 1968. The sound pattern of English. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Halle, Morris. 1973. Stress Rules in English: A New Version. Linguistic Inquiry 4: 51-64. Hammond, Michael. 1999. The Phonology of English: A Prosodic Optimality-Theoretic Approach. Oxford: University

    Press. Hayes, Bruce. 1981. A Metrical Theory of Stress Rules. Bloomington: Indiana University Linguistic Club. Hofbauer, Josef and Karl Sigmund. 1998. Evolutionary games and population dynamics. Cambridge: University Press. Maynard Smith, John. 1982. Evolution and the theory of games. Cambridge: University Press. Ritt, Nikolaus and Andreas Baumann. 2013. Transferring mathematics to English studies. In: Markus, Manfred and

    Herbert Schendl (eds.). Transfer in English studies. Vienna: Braumller.

    Schane, Sanford. 2006. Understanding English word accentuation. Language Sciences 29: 372-384.

  • Kristin Bech and Christine Meklenborg Salvesen

    University of Oslo

    SUPERFICIAL TYPOLOGY: THE SO-CALLED VERB-SECOND CONSTRAINT IN OLD ENGLISH AND OLD FRENCH

    Old English (OE) and Old French (OF) are both referred to as verb-second (V2) languages,

    i.e. languages in which the verb typically occupies second position even after a non-subject-

    initial element, as exemplified in (1) and (2).

    (1) Mid twam wurscipum ge-glngde se lmihtiga scyppend s mannes sawle

    with two dignities adorned the almighty God the mans soul With two dignities Almighty God adorned mans soul (lfrics Lives of Saints)

    (2) Et por ce voudroit ele mieuz qu'ele fest Tristan morir en aucune maniere

    and for that would she better that'she did Tristan kill in some way

    And because of that she would rather have Tristan killed in some way (Tristan)

    Another similarity between the two languages is that they both feature numerous non-V2

    sentences in which several elements, including the subject, precede the verb. However, the

    syntactic and information-structural characteristics of such clauses are completely different in

    the two languages (Bech & Salvesen, forthcoming). Furthermore, OE is a much more

    heterogeneous language than OF with respect to word order in general; it has word ordering

    possibilities that do not exist in OF.

    In this paper, we focus on the postverbal field(s) of the two languages, and our paper is

    divided into three parts: 1) a presentation of empirical data on the postverbal position of

    elements in OE and OF, using a corpus of ca. 1,500 main clauses from OE and ca. 1,800 main

    clauses from OF; 2) a discussion of some syntactic implications of the empirical data, using a

    cartographic generative framework and 3) a discussion of possible information-structural

    factors that may have a bearing on element position in the two languages. We will show that

    categorizing the two languages simply as V2 languages is an oversimplification of a complex matter.

    Reference:

    Bech, Kristin & Christine M. Salvesen. Forthcoming. Preverbal word order in Old English

    and Old French. In Information Structure and Syntactic Change in Germanic and Romance

    Languages, ed. by K. Bech & K.G. Eide. John Benjamins.

  • The syncretism of genitive and dative in Old Iranian

    Maria Carmela Benvenuto & Flavia Pompeo

    Sapienza University of Rome [email protected]

    [email protected]

    As is well known, case syncretism is a phenomenon that has taken place in many Indo-

    European languages, and involves a reduction in the number of cases compared to the system

    usually reconstructed for Proto-Indo-European (Luraghi 2000). This paper will focus on the

    syncretism of the Indo-European dative and genitive in Old Iranian languages, devoting

    particular attention to the changes which occurred from Old Avestan to Young Avestan.

    Old Persian does not have separate forms for genitive and dative as these previously

    distinct grammatical categories merged into the genitive (Meillet & Benveniste 1931). Indeed,

    a detailed examination of Old Persian textual data reveals that the genitive expresses a variety

    of syntactic functions and semantic roles, cross-linguistically typical not only of the genitive,

    but also of the dative (Pompeo & Benvenuto 2011; Benvenuto & Pompeo 2012).

    As far as Avestan is concerned, the dative dies out in Young Avestan while the

    genitive spreads to an increasing number of fields beyond its original sphere of meaning,

    replacing the dative in many contexts. Regarding this, Reichelt (1909), in the section entitled

    Der dativische Genitiv, suggests that the high frequency of the adnominal genitive determined the progressive extension of this case at the expense of the original functions of

    the dative. In Young Avestan, this phenomenon evolved and eventually comprised the

    syntactic function of Indirect Object and the role of Recipient.

    The study of the Old Iranian material makes it possible to demonstrate that the decay

    of the dative is not due to phonological changes or to the progressive silencing of post-tonal

    syllables. On the contrary, it suggests that the main cause of this syncretic process is to be

    found in both the semantic and syntactic overlapping of genitive and dative cases. In

    particular, as far as the syntactic level is concerned, it is well-known that languages have a

    tendency to eliminate synonymous grammatical forms over time (Bardal & Kulikov 2009).

    In both Old Persian and Young Avestan, the result of the syncretism is a new genitive case, structured as a polysemic radial category, with the expression of the Possessor as its core

    function, while the other attested functions constitute metaphorical extensions of the

    Possessor. The direction of the syncretism in question is confirmed by the general drift in the

    evolution of both languages.

    Bardal, J. & Kulikov, L.I. (2009). Case in decline. In: Malchukov, A. & Spencer, A. 2009, eds.), The Oxford handbook of case. Oxford, pp. 470-478.

    Benvenuto, M.C. & Pompeo F. (2012). Il sincretismo di genitivo e dativo in persiano antico. In: Vicino Oriente 16, pp. 151-165.

    Luraghi, S. (2000). Synkretismus. In: Booij, G., Lehmann, C. & Mugdan, J. (2000, eds.), Morphologie. Ein internationales Handbuch zur Flexion und

    Wortbildung./Morphology. An international handbook on inflection and word-

    formation, Vol. 1. Berlin - New York, pp. 638-47.

    Meillet, A. & Benveniste, . (1931). Grammaire du vieux-perse. Paris.

    Pompeo, F. & Benvenuto, M.C. (2011). Il genitivo in persiano antico. Un caso esemplare di categoria polisemica. In: Studi e saggi linguistici 49, pp.75-123.

    Reichelt, H. (1909). Avestisches Elementarbuch. Heidelberg.

  • Ivar BergDepartment of Language and Literature, NTNU (Trondheim)[email protected]

    Stages in deflexion: The (case of) Norwegian dative (case)The usual story tells that the Old Norse four-case system disappeared in Norwegian during the Late Middle Ages. However, when one examines the process more thoroughly it becomes clear that this was by no means a straight-forward process. The present paper examines what happened in more detail, aiming to sort out discernible stages in the process of deflexion.

    Some Modern Norwegian (and Swedish) dialects still retain a dative case, which in itself shows that case inflection did not simply disappear all over. By comparing Old Norse and a Modern Norwegian dialect, Sandy (2012) demonstrates how the dative is actually more widely used now, having replaced the genitive (more rarely the accusative). Both in form and function there is no doubt the old dative, though, not a new nominativeoblique system. Two examples of changes will be discussed, with examples from 15th century written sources (found in the Diplomatarium Norvegicum):

    a) The former genitive-governing prepositions til to and millum between are increasingly found with dative complements, as still is the case in dialects retaining the dative. When genitive lost its function as a lexical case, dative was the only marked option left.

    b) In the inflection of the demonstrative essi this (the older form sj disappeared early) a new stem enn- (based on acc.sg.masc. ann) replaced ess- in nom.sg.masc. and nom./acc.sg.fem. This established a contrast between nominative enn- and dative ess- and indicates that marking the case distinction was decisive for the change of stem form.

    It thus seems that Norwegian at one stage, presumably much more widely than in present dialects, had a two-case system which was established and strong enough to reshape grammatical structure. This point is easily missed if one just compares the two well-known stages Old NorseModern Norwegian without properly considering the intermediate stages the linguistic development went through. It also means that nominative and accusative merged before dative merged with either, which seems contrary to the case hierarchies given e.g. in Blake (2001).

    ReferencesBlake, Barry J. 2001. Case. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Diplomatarium Norvegicum IXXIII. 18472011. Christiania/Oslo. Vols. IXXI online: http://www.dokpro.uio.no/dipl_norv/diplom_felt.html.

    Sandy, Helge. 2012. Syntaktisk og semantisk styrt dativ. In: Unn Ryneland and Hans-Olav Enger (eds.): Fra holtijaR til holting. Sprkhistoriske og sprksosiologiske artikler til Arne Torp p 70-rsdagen. Oslo: Novus, s. 319338.

  • Are there diachronic universals of agreement systems?Balthasar Bickel, Alena Witzlack-Makarevich, Taras Zakharko, and Giorgio Iemmolo

    University of Zurich

    Reconstruction often relies on assumptions about what constitutes natural, andtherefore universally preferred, pathways of change. One method for testing such as-sumptions is the Family Bias Method (Bickel 2011), which infers likely diachronic trendsfrom distributional biases within established language families and applies probabilisticreasoning to extrapolate trends in small families and isolates.

    In this presentation we apply this method to typological data from agreement systemin order to evaluate two hypotheses that are generally accepted even though the evidencefor them is restricted only to a handful of languages.

    The rst one, which we call Watkins Law, based on Watkins (1962), Benveniste(1946), and Jakobson (1932), maintains that zero forms in agreement paradigms are morelikely to develop and be preserved in the third rather than in the rst or second person,as has been documented, e.g. for the development of agreement morphology from Proto-Iranian to Persian (Watkins 1962: 83.). The second hypothesis to be tested, which wecall Silversteins Law (Silverstein 1976), predicts that ergative alignment is more likelyto develop and be maintained in the third person rather than in the rst and secondperson.

    Based on a detailed analysis of agreement paradigms in over 120 languages worldwide,we estimate diachronic trends on zero forms and alignment types. For alignment types,we nd no evidence of a universal trend in line with Silversteins Law, thus conrmingearlier ndings based on dierent methods. Likewise, for Watkins Law, we nd noevidence if the principle is taken in its original sense, as bearing on paradigm shapes.There is no universal trend in our data for languages to (re-)structure paradigms so asto have more zeros in the third than in the rst and second person. That is, we nd thatworldwide, there are about as many families showing such a trend as there are familieswith a trend towards an opposite or equi-proportional distribution of zeros.

    However, the principle receives (weak) statistical support if individual markers areconsidered regardless of the rest of the paradigm. There is a (borderline) signicanttrend for rst and second person categories to develop and maintain overt agreementmore often than third person. This trend is likely to reect grammaticalisation processesof independent pronouns developing into agreement markers (Givn 1976, Ariel 2000):since third person pronouns tend to be less frequent in discourse, they have an inherentlysmaller probability of developing into overt third person agreement markers than rstand second person pronouns.

  • Plural allomorphy in German dialects: the case of subtraction Magnus Breder Birkenes (University of Marburg)

    German exhibits a great deal of plural allomorphy, both diachronically and synchronically. The paper is concerned with the apparently subtractive plural forms in many German dialects, e.g., dg d day, days or knd kn child, children (cf. Wurzel 1984, Golston and Wiese 1996). Drawing on the fact that the occurrence of such forms in contemporary dialects is unpredictable, the hypothesis is raised that we are dealing with historically far-reaching phonological processes. This can be seen from the fact that similar subtractions appear in analogous phonological environments (cf. Holsinger & Houseman 1999). Historically, we find variation between the plural endings -er, and subtraction within one and the same lexeme, a diversity that has existed for hundreds of years. Subtraction and -e, however, never co-exist.

    This leads one to the assumption that all subtractive forms in German can be traced back to the historical presence of a schwa ending which was lost during apocope, a process common to most Low and High German dialects. Crucially, before the loss of the schwa, assimilations in consonant clusters and the general process of lenition in sonorous environments led to the elision of a stem-final consonant. It is a truly natural phonological, polygenetic development, in that it is found in diverse Low and High German dialects, and other Germanic languages like North Frisian. The genesis of subtractive forms can thus be thought of as a historical accident. For their synchronic existence, however, another explanation is demanded. The analysis to be presented here differs from older work on this topic (cf. Wurzel 1984 and Golston and Wiese 1996) in which an attempt is made to derive the subtractive forms using existing synchronic rules or principles of well-formedness. From a synchronic point of view, Natural Morphology views subtractive forms as counter-iconic: a marked form (plural) is symbolized with less phonological material than the unmarked form (singular). It therefore predicts subtractive forms to be replaced with modulatory or additive forms. While there is much truth in this, Natural Morphology cannot easily explain why these forms have existed for over 500 years, as examples from language enclaves of German and a reconstruction of the processes show.

    In this paper, which is founded on empirical data from over 300 dialect grammars from all over the German speaking area, I will argue that local markedness resulting from the higher frequency of a marked grammatical category (cf. Tiersma 1982) favours such subtractive forms in cases where the plurals are more frequent than the singulars, e.g. children, teeth and leaves. These plurals may, due to their high frequency, have been reanalysed as the base forms. An analysis where the singulars are derived from the plurals is also supported by productive uses of the pattern in modern Hessian dialects in cases where the singular can be said to be marked. In this way, I argue, subtraction could prevail against competing markers in many lexemes. Such an analysis poses a problem to traditional models of morphology because of the many affixes or rules needed, but is easily reconstructable in an associative model of morphology (cf. Bybee 1985).

    Bybee, Joan L. (1985): Morphology: A study of the relation between meaning and form. (Typological studies in language 9), Amsterdam: Benjamins.

    Golston, Chris / Wiese, Richard (1996): Zero morphology and constraint interaction: subtraction and epenthesis in German dialects. In: Booij, Geert / van Marle, Jaap (eds.) Yearbook of Morphology 1995, Dodrecht: Kluwer, 143159.

    Holsinger, David / Houseman, Paul (1999): Lenition in Hessian: cluster reduction and subtractive plurals. In: Booij, Geert / van Marle, Jaap (eds.) Yearbook of Morphology 1998, Dordrecht: Kluwer, 159174.

    Tiersma, Peter M. (1982): Local and General Markedness. Language 58, 832849. Wurzel, Wolfgang Ullrich: (1984): Flexionsmorphologie und Natrlichkeit: ein Beitrag zur morphologischen

    Theoriebildung. (Studia Grammatica 21), Berlin: Akademie-Verlag.

  • Decomposing the Old Spanish Left Periphery Using a Parallel Corpus

    Miriam Bouzouita

    Ghent University / University of Cambridge

    [email protected]

    The current study focusses on various Old Spanish phenomena in which one or more

    constituents appear fronted at the left-periphery, with or without a following resumptive element.

    More concretely, it examines so-called focalisations and left dislocations, such as Clitic Left

    Dislocations (CLLD) and Hanging Topic Left Dislocations (HTLD). The aim of this study

    consists in unveiling the syntactic and pragmatic differences that exist between these Old Spanish

    phenomena and their contemporary counterparts. The current research has been carried out on the

    basis of the parallel Biblia Medieval corpus in order to control more steadily certain variables that

    can potentially alter the outcomes of this study.

    Escobars (1995) study of various left-periphery phenomena in contemporary Spanish, while verifying the different properties of CLLD-HTLD identified by Cinque (1990) for modern

    Italian, concludes that for Spanish a-case-marking of the left-dislocated constituent is a

    characteristic of CLLDs that distinguishes it from HTLDs. Diachronically, this criterion proves to

    be untenable as the preposition a has not always been available as a grammatical marker of

    accusative case in the history of Spanish (e.g. Laca 2006). Even in the 20th c. the

    grammaticalisation of this preposition as an accusative case marker has not yet been completed

    since inanimates do not need to co-occur with it. Similarly, focalisations have been distinguished

    from CLLDs and HTLDs on the basis of lack of resumptive pronouns. However, contemporary

    Spanish strong pronouns can no longer occur without a co-referential clitic and will always appear

    doubled even when topicalised. Yet their Old Spanish counterparts had no such restriction.

    Similarly, although contemporary Spanish CLLDs are said to be sensitive to strong islands, this

    criterion does not appear to apply in Old Spanish (Bouzouita in press [2013]). In sum, this study

    will show that, given conventional criteria, there appears to be considerable overlap between the

    supposedly distinct structures of focalisation, HTLD and CLLD. Moreover, it will be shown that

    the aforementioned phenomena can be observed in the same syntactic and pragmatic contexts.

    References

    Bouzouita, M. (in press [2013]) Left Dislocation Phenomena in Old Spanish: An Examination of their Structural Properties In: Left Sentence Peripheries in Spanish. Dufter, A. & A. O. de Toledo y Huerta (eds). Philadelphia/Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

    Cinque, G. (1990) Types of A-Dependencies. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Escobar, Ma A. (1995) Lefthand Satellites in Spanish. Utrecht: OTS.

    Laca, B. (2006) El objeto directo, En: Sintaxis histrica de la lengua espaola, Company C. (ed.). vol. 1, Mexico: UNAM, p. 421-475.

  • Rates of Irregular Change: Phonological Reduction and Grammatical Convergence in IranianChundra A. Cathcart

    University of California, Berkeley

    Non-Persian Modern Iranian languages share many formally identical or similar functional morphemes with Mod-ern Persian (NP). This paper asks whether this similarity is due to patterns of drift shared by Iranian languages(cf. Sapir 1921, chs. 7-8), or contact with NP, either in the form of grammatical borrowing or accommodation. Icompare the sound changes, regular and irregular (viz., phonological reduction), that derive fifteen NP functionalitems against the historical phonology of their cognates in other Iranian languages. Some functional items showan EQUAL number of irregular changes across Iranian; when coupled with language-specific regular changes, suchcases are clearly due to drift. But some non-Persian items show a GREATER number of irregular reductions thantheir identical NP cognates. Often, the non-Persian language is otherwise more phonologically conservative thanNP. I argue that such asymmetrical cases point to sociolinguistic pressure from NP.

    Items that show an EQUAL number of reductions between NP and other Iranian languages often also showdistinctive regular changes which make it clear that the similarity is an effect of drift, e.g., Old Iranian *hacawith Mid/NP az, Parthian a, Baloc ac, Kurdish from. Here, OIr *h- has been irregularly lost by alllanguages, and the languages have undergone language-specific treatments of *-c-. But in other items, the numberof reductions in a non-Persian language is GREATER than that of an identical form in NP. For example, OIr *rad-sake (OP radiy) > MP ray (dat.-abl. marker) > NP ra (obj. marker) via regular change. Parth ra (dat.-abl.)shows a regular outcome, but Bal ra (obj. marker) does notas a rule, Bal preserves OIr *-d-. If we take Bal rato be an inherited form, it shows a greater degree of reduction than its NP cognate.

    This is contradictory. Impressionistically, Baloc is more conservative in its historical phonology than NP, andnot prone to lenitionits most noteworthy innovation is the fortition of OIr fricatives. This impression is con-firmed by comparing relative Levenshtein distances (Nerbonne et al. 1996) between OIr and Baloc (mean = .44)and OIr and NP (mean = .56) for 50 reliable cognate sets. A Welchs 2-sample t-test shows that the mean relativedistance between NP and OIr is greater than that of Baloc and OIr (t = 2.79, df = 96.8, p < .01), indicat-ing that Baloc shows significantly less regular change from OIr than NP. In items where Baloc shows greaterirregular change than NP, I argue that it shows either (a) grammatical borrowing from NP or (b) grammaticalaccommodation, a special type of convergence by which languages in contact adjust to make their...grammaticalelements more similar in form and function (Johanson and Robbeets 2012:11). In the absence of distinctive NPsound changes, it is difficult to determine whichstill, either way, it points to sociolinguistic pressure from NP.

    This study finds that across Iranian, grammatical items fall into three categories: (1) identical (cross-linguistica-lly), with an equal number of phonological reductions; (2) non-identical, with an equal number of reductions; and(3) identical, with fewer reductions in NP (I have not encountered identical items with a greater number of reduc-tions in NP, or non-identical items showing different numbers of reductions). (1) is an uninformative category;while many of these items have been borrowed (from NP into Indic or Turkic), the historical phonology does notclearly indicate whether it is an inherited form or an NP borrowing. (2) securely points to drift or independentinnovation, as language-specific changes have operated (the possibility of early loans notwithstanding). (3) pointsto sociolinguistic pressure from Persian, especially if a language which superficially shows more reduction, forinstance Baloc, is known to be more phonologically conservative than NP. Thus we see that parallelisms in the de-velopment of Iranian grammatical items come about due to both drift (ostensibly an effect of genetic relatedness)and sociolinguistic pressure.

    References

    Johanson, L. and M. Robbeets (2012). Bound morphology in common: Copy or cognate? In L. Johanson andM. Robbeets (Eds.), Copies Versus Cognates in Bound Morphology, pp. 322. Leiden: Brill.

    Nerbonne, J., W. Heeringa, E. van den Hout, P. van der Kooi, S. Otten, and W. van de Vis (1996). Phoneticdistance between Dutch dialects. In G. Durieux, W. Daelemans, and S. Gillis (Eds.), CLIN VI, Papers from theSixth CLIN Meeting, Antwerp, pp. 185202. University of Antwerp, Center for Dutch Language and Speech.

    Sapir, E. (1921). Language: an Introduction to the Study of Speech. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company.

  • Anticausativization between Late Latin and early Italo-Romance:

    the semantics of predicates and the syntax of voice

    (Michela Cennamo - University of Naples Federico II)

    This paper investigates the role played by the interplay of the aspectual template of verbs, the verbs inherent meaning (the 'root'), and the nature of the P subject (e.g., animacy and control) in determining the distribution of the different strategies available in the diachrony of Latin and in early Italo-Romance to mark

    anticausativization (the (medio-passive) -r form, the reflexive pattern and the active intransitive in Latin, the

    active intransitive and the reflexive in Old Italian).

    The different forms are usually described in the literature as interchangeable (Feltenius 1997 for Latin,

    Brambilla Ageno 1964 for Old Italian). We will argue, instead, that the structural and lexical aspects of the

    verb meaning (following Levin & Rappaport Hovav 2005, among others) as well as the inherent and

    relational properties of verbal arguments affect the use of the different patterns, interacting with the encoding

    of voice, both synchronically and diachronically.

    In particular, building on Cennamo, Eythrsson & Bardal 2011, we will show, through a corpus-based

    investigation, that the selection of the reflexive strategy in Latin was initially confined to inherently telic

    predicates (achievements and accomplishments) (e.g., frangere 'break', dum calor se frangat - till heat

    RFL breaks - 'Till the heat goes down', fervefacere 'heat up', se patinae fervefaciunt RFL - pans heat-up -

    'The pans heat up', Plaut. Pseud. 831-33), whilst the active intransitive mainly occurred with verbs of

    variable/reduced telicity (e.g., lenire 'soothe', irae leniunt - anger soothes - 'Anger soothes', Plaut. Mil. 583),

    with activities (e.g., volutare 'roll', saxa volutant - stones roll - 'Stones roll') and, marginally, with

    accomplishments lexicalizing a reversible state (e.g., aperire 'open', foris aperit - door opens - 'The door

    opens', Plaut. Persa 300) (see also Cennamo 1998: 88). Gradually, in the course of time, the reflexive

    spreads to non-inherently telic (e.g., minuere 'decrease', minuente se morbo - decreasing RFL illness - Plin.

    Nat. 23, 50) and atelic predicates (e.g., servare 'keep'- mala se servant - apples RFL keep - 'Apples keep'),

    and the active intransitive expands to inherently telic predicates (e.g., rumpere 'break'), until in late texts the

    three anticausative forms become truly interchangeable (rumpunt dentes/rumpuntur dentes/dentes se

    rumpunt - break teeth/break-R teeth/teeth RFL break - Its teeth break' (sc. equus 'horse') (Chiron 775)). The equivalence between the anticausative strategies obtaining in Late Latin is also found in some early

    Italian vernaculars, e.g., Old Florentine, where the active intransitive and the reflexive alternate with all verb

    classes (e.g., degree achievements, aumentare 'increase', le pene ... s'aumentano - the punishments RFL

    increase -'The punishments increase' (Boccaccio, Esposizioni, 47, 664.20) vs. le biade aumenteranno - the

    corn will-increase - 'Corn will increase' (Boccaccio, Filocolo, 5, 54, 624.2), with hints of the gradual gaining

    ground of aspectual notions such as telicity in determining the obligatory occurrence/preference of the

    reflexive form to mark anticausatives, interacting with the reconstitution of the voice system in the transition

    to Romance (Cennamo 2012)

    The Latin and Old Italian data, therefore, appear to offer an interesting contribution to the current debate

    on the role played by the verb's inherent meaning and its interaction and integration with the event structure

    template of predicates in determining argument realization, showing the relevance of these notions for the

    diachrony of anticausativization in Latin and the transition to Romance.

    References

    Brambilla Ageno, F. 1964. Il Verbo nell'Italiano Antico. Milan/Naples: Ricciardi.

    Cennamo, M. 1998. The loss of The loss of the voice dimension between Late Latin and Early Romance. In

    Historical Linguistics 1997, ed. by M. S. Schmidt, J.R. Austin & D. Stein, 77107. Amsterdam: Benjamins.

    Cennamo, M. 2012. Aspectual constraints on the (anti)causative alternation in Old Italian. Transactions of

    the Philological Society 110.3: 394-421. Thematic issue on Argument Realization and Change.

    Cennamo, Eythrsson & Bardal 2011. The rise and fall of anticausative forms and constructions in

    Indo-European: the context of Latin and Germanic, under revision for Linguistics.

    Feltenius, L. 1997. Intransitivizations in Latin. Upsala: Almquist & Wiksell.

    Levin B. & Rappaport Hovav, M. 2005. Argument Realization. Cambridge: Cambridge University

    Press.

  • Dating Proto-Indo-European: A revised computational phylogenetic

    analysis supports the steppe hypothesis

    William Chang, David Hall, Chundra Cathcart, and Andrew Garrett

    University of California, Berkeley

    Within Indo-European studies and historical linguistics more broadly, despite long study and

    dispute, it remains controversial when and where Proto-Indo-European (PIE) was spoken. According

    to the hypothesis of Renfrew (1987, 1999, 2000, 2001), PIE was spoken in Anatolia and was spread

    broadly with the diffusion of agriculture. Since the chronology of farming dispersal is understood, on

    this hypothesis PIE was spoken in the 7th millennium BCE. An alternative hypothesis (Mallory 1989,

    Anthony 2007, Parpola 2008) is that PIE was spoken in the steppe north of the Black and Caspian

    Seas between about 4500 and 3500 BCE. According to this steppe hypothesis, language spread in Asia and Europe was associated with horse domestication, wheeled transport, and other cultural

    innovations. The two analyses of PIE origins thus differ in chronology by some 3000 years. In the last

    decade this debate has been put on a new footing with research by Gray & Atkinson (2003), Bouckaert

    et al. (2012), and other associated work by the same authors and their colleagues.

    In this line of research, computational methods from biological phylogenetics are applied to

    linguistic data (e.g. basic vocabulary lists) in order to infer phylogeny and chronology. The latter in

    particular does not rely on the glottochronological assumption of a constant rate of change, but

    assumes only that rates of change are distributed in a statistically tractable way. Without exception,

    and using a variety of tools, datasets, and statistical and model assumptions, work along these lines has

    pointed to the Anatolian chronology for PIE. Most Indo-Europeanists do not accept this chronology,

    so the results have been controversial and widely reported.

    In this paper, we use basically the same methods and tools as a recent study by Bouckaert et

    al. (2012), which argued forcefully for the Anatolian hypothesis, to demonstrate that the data actually

    support the steppe hypothesis. When the data are coded correctly, the phylogenetic tools applied by

    earlier researchers in fact produce a quite different result, one that is consistent with the steppe

    hypothesis. Earlier work made several errors in data coding that produce a direct effect on the

    estimated chronology. We mention two such errors here.

    First, we encoded known descent relationships. For example, Irish and Scots Gaelic are

    descended from Old Irish, and English is descended from Old English. Such relationships are crucial

    because rates of change in known historical periods should inform inferences about unknown periods.

    But Bouckaert et al. (2012) left these relationships as a matter of inference to the software rather than

    stipulating them; they were then systematically inferred wrongly. For example, in their analysis, the

    latest common ancestor of Old and Modern Irish and Scots Gaelic was far earlier than Old Irish itself;

    in turn this led prehistoric ancestral dates to be estimated as too early. The error arises from patterns of

    borrowing, drift, and accidental convergence.

    Second, from the dossier of innovations we did not exclude lexical changes involving

    borrowed words. Crucially, borrowing can be recognized in medieval and modern languages, where

    we know the linguistic milieu, but not in ancient IE languages, where the borrowing may be from

    unattested substrate languages. Loans from unknown sources are analyzed as endogenous innovation.

    If modern borrowings are excluded, rates of change are estimated wrongly and the overall chronology

    extended.

    When these and other linguistically justified changes in data coding are made, and

    phylogenetic software run, the impact on chronology is significant and yields date inferences

    consistent with the steppe hypothesis. Our presentation will detail the linguistic rationale for all our

    coding changes. In addition, describing multiple software runs, we will show that our results are robust

    to varying assumptions about IE subgrouping and about the intervals at which linguistic splits happen.

  • Directional phrases in the history of Dutch

    Robert Cloutier

    Universiteit van Amsterdam

    Modern Dutch prepositional phrases can be ambiguous between a locational and a directional

    reading, as seen in (1).

    1. Hij loopt in het gebouw.

    a. He is walking in the building (i.e. he is inside the building walking around)

    b. He is walking into the building (i.e. he is moving from a location outside of the

    building to a location inside the building)

    However, if the prepositional element occurs after the noun phrase, only the directional reading is

    possible, as seen in (2).

    2. Hij loopt het gebouw in.

    a. *He is walking in the building

    b. He is walking into the building

    Numerous scholars have studied the construction exemplified in (2) (Los et al. 2012; Belin 2008;

    Blom 2005; Helmantel 2002 among others), yet the question about the constituency of such

    constructions remains unresolved: Are these best analyzed as postpositional phrases or as complex

    predicates? The various constituency tests used to argue for or against a particular analysis have

    proven inconclusive for a variety of reasons (Belin 2008). Examination of the historical

    development of these constructions may shed some light on this question.

    Many scholars have observed that Middle Dutch did not have these constructions

    (Hogenhout-Mulder 1983; Van der Sijs 2005; Cloutier 2006) and that these were rather expressed

    with prepositions in Middle Dutch (Gerritsen 1978; Hogenhout-Mulder 1983; Van der Wal and Van

    Bree 1992; Cloutier 2006). Cloutier (2006), focussing on the adposition in, does not find examples of

    this postpositional construction until the 19th century. However, two scholars discuss Middle Dutch

    examples with positional phrases: Blom (2005) found instances with the adposition door through,

    and Belin (2008) discusses instances of postpositions occurring in conjunction with the preposition

    te at. These data suggest a timeline of the rise of postpositional directional phrases, though a

    comprehensive study of the relevant adpositions over time is still lacking. I will examine the use over

    time of a number of adpositions that express direction in Modern Dutch in a corpus of Middle and

    Early Modern Dutch texts available on the CD-ROM Middelnederlands and the Digitale Bibliotheek

    voor de Nederlandse Letteren.

  • Eleanor Coghill, University of Konstanz

    The Development of Ergativity in Aramaic

    In eastern Aramaic, ergative alignment in the perfect (later the past perfective) developed as a result of the loss of the old Semitic verbal conjugations and their replacement with participle forms. The latest stage of the language (North-eastern Neo-Aramaic) has seen a shift back to fully accusative alignment in most dialects. Thus an entire cycle of alignment change can be seen in the documented history of Aramaic. In the dialects where ergativity still survives it is restricted to verbal agreement (there is no case marking). In these dialects ergativity is being further eroded, both by movement towards Split-S alignment and by the increasing use of separate markers for O. There has been much discussion of the pathways through which a shift to tense-conditioned ergative alignment may take place: for Iranian, Indo-Aryan and Aramaic, various possibilities have been suggested, including the reanalysis of passives or of possessive predicates (cf., e.g. Benveniste 1952, Cardona 1970, Kutscher 1969). More recently, a connection between dative (expressing roles such as experiencer) and ergative has been noted (e.g. Butt 2006, Haig 2008) and this appears to be supported by the Aramaic case. The lexical distribution of the ergative construction in earlier Eastern Aramaic (as established by a corpus search) suggests that the original construction may have been limited mostly to psychological verbs, such as see, hear and know, which could take a dative argument for the experiencer. These experiencers were then reanalysed as agents. There is also evidence suggesting that beneficiaries too were reanalysed as agents. Aramaic is ideal as a case-study for alignment change, due to the wealth of texts, dating from 3000 years ago to the present day. The paper will present evidence from both ancient texts and modern dialects, in order to understand the changes in alignment and their motivations.

    References

    Benveniste, mile. 1952 La construction passive du parfait transitif, Bulletin de la Socit de linguistique 48, 52-62.

    Butt, Miriam. 2006. The Dative-Ergative Connection. In Patricia Cabredo-Hofherr (ed.), Proceedings of the Colloque Syntax-Semantique Paris (CSSP) 2005.

    Cardona, G. 1970. The Indo-Iranian construction man (mam) ktam. Language 46, 1-12.

    Haig, Geoffrey L. J. 2008. Alignment Change in Iranian Languages: A Construction Grammar Approach. Berlin; New York: Mouton de Gruyter.

    Kutscher, Y.E., 1969, Two passive constructions in Aramaic in the light of Persian, Proceedings of the international conference on Semitic studies, Jerusalem, 132-151.

  • Change or contact? English vs Afrikaans

    Jac Conradie

    University of Johannesburg

    As the development of Afrikaans on the basis of 17th

    century Dutch is

    often ascribed to language contact rather than diachronic change, a

    series of similar developments in the history of English and that of

    Afrikaans - in instances where the influence of English on Afrikaans is

    excluded - offers an opportunity for identifying the role played by

    language contact in effecting change. In the verbal system, the

    following areas may be considered:

    Loss of concord in the finite verb - more advanced in English than in Dutch and complete in Afrikaans.

    Virtual disappearance of the distinction between finite verb and infinitive accompanied by a more rigid ordering of elements of the

    verbal string in both English and Afrikaans.

    Replacement of the BE perfect (Du. zijn, etc., Afr. is) by the HAVE perfect (Du. hebben, etc., Afr. het) in so-called mutative verbs (e.g.

    verbs expressing movement or change), a distinction still

    maintained in Dutch.

    The isolation of modal verbs as a separate verbal category in English and Afrikaans to a much larger extent than in Dutch, e.g.

    by their lacking present and past participles and by not allowing

    ellipsis of the main verb.

    The retention of relatively conservative forms of the past participle in attributive function and/or with semantic specialisation or in a

    figurative sense, e.g. Eng. drunken, beholden, ill-gotten, proven,

    new-mown, molten, misshapen, shrunken, stricken, etc. and Afr.

    gebonde (boek) vs gebind, gebroke (hart) vs gebreek, opgewonde

    (kind) vs opgewen, etc.

    In the nominal system, two salient developments are:

    The loss of grammatical gender in both English and Afrikaans, while Dutch retains a two-class distinction.

    The frequent and very similar usage of the prenominal possessive, as in Eng. the hunters shot, a years work, Afr. die jagter se skoot, n jaar se werk.

    -o0o-

  • Lexical expansion in the have and be perfect in Dutch

    A diachronic collostructional analysis

    Evie Couss

    University of Gothenburg

    The grammaticalization of the perfect is a well-studied topic within historical linguistics. It is widely

    known that the perfect auxiliary have in for instance English or French has grammaticalized from a

    possessive verb by losing its original lexical content and starting to function as an abstract grammatical

    marker. Bybee & Dahl (1989) were one of the first to point out that the grammaticalization of the perfect

    auxiliary is accompanied by changes in the surrounding grammatical context. This study will focus on

    the properties of the main verbs that are combined with the perfect auxiliary in a perfect construction.

    Bybee & Dahl (1989) and Bybee et al. (1994) hypothesize that the grammaticalization of perfect

    auxiliaries is accompanied with a lexical expansion from telic change of state predicates to other types

    of verbs.

    This study investigates whether such a lexical expansion actually has taken place in the have and be

    perfect in Dutch. Both perfect constructions combine the perfect auxiliary have or be with a past

    participle. The be perfect is largely restricted to intransitive past participles that involve some change of

    state (also known as unergatives or mutatives) whereas the have perfect combines with all other types of

    past participles. This contribution presents a diachronic study of the past participles used in both perfect

    constructions taken from a corpus of Dutch legal texts dating from 1250 till 1800. The sample under

    investigation contains 1344 past participles featuring in the have perfect and 499 past participles in the

    be perfect.

    The collected past participles are submitted to an innovative statistical analysis, known as the diachronic

    distinctive collexeme analysis. The analysis is developed by Hilpert (2006) as part of a larger family of

    statistical measures called collostructional analysis. Collostructional analysis in general measures the

    degree of attraction that lexical items exhibit to constructions. Diachronic distinctive collexeme analysis

    in particular compares the attraction of lexical items to one construction over sequential periods of time.

    The statistical method allows us to observe changes in the collocational preferences of a construction

    such as the expected lexical expansion in the perfect construction.

    The diachronic distinctive collexeme analysis of both perfect constructions indicates that they show

    evidence of lexical expansion in the observed time period. The have perfect expands from verbs of

    change of possession verbs of communication, possession and perception transitive activity verbs

    intransitive telic verbs in irrealis contexts. The be perfect shows lexical expansion from change of

    location verbs and change of state verbs verbs of occurence and verbs of continuation of pre-existing

    condition atelic existence of state verb zijn be. These changes in collocational preferences will be

    argued to reflect the ongoing grammaticalization of the have and be perfect in the observed time period

    in Dutch.

    References

    Bybee, J. & . Dahl (1989) The creation of tense and aspect systems in the languages of the world. In: Studies in Language

    13, 51-103.

    Bybee, J., R. Perkins & W. Pagliuca (1994) The evolution of grammar. Tense, aspect, and modality in the languages of the

    world. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

    Hilpert, M. (2006) Distinctive collexeme analysis and diachrony. In: Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory 2, 243-257.

  • Phonetic Factors in Camuno *n-loss and *m-maintenance in word-final syllables

    Michela Cresci

    CUNY Graduate Center

    Camuno, a variety of Eastern Lombard, is an endangered Romance language of northern Italy

    spoken in Valcamonica. Though a great deal of work has been done on the history of coda-nasals in

    Romance (e.g. Hajek 1997; Sampson 1999), the Camuno facts have yet to be integrated into this bigger

    picture.

    Fieldwork on Camuno has been on-going by this author for the past three years, and forms the basis

    of this study. Internal reconstruction as well as comparative evidence demonstrate that historical loss of coda

    nasals in Camuno has occurred, and involves four phonetic or phonological variables: stress; cluster vs.

    singleton coda; voicing of the following obstruent in NC clusters; and place of articulation of the nasal. That

    a singleton nasal is lost in a final stressed syllable, but not a final unstressed syllable is illustrated by pairs

    like b good, m. (cf. < *bun, cf. bna good, f.) vs. zn donkey (< Lat. asin-). That nasals can be

    maintained in word final codas of stressed syllables is illustrated by pairs like b good, m. (cf. < *bun, cf.

    bna good, f.) vs. tnt round m. ( < *tnd, cf. tnda round f.). That obstruent voicing played a role in

    coda nasal loss is clear from comparing forms like tnt round m. ( < *tnd, cf. tnda round f.), where a

    nasal is maintained before a historically voiced obstruent, to those like tt a lot (cf. tant very much),

    where the nasal is lost before a historically voiceless obstruent. This pattern is evident for both /n/ and /m/,

    so we find /m/- loss in kp field (cf. kamp t small field) before a historically voiceless obstruent, but /m/

    maintained in gmp stem (cf. gamb t small stem) where mp < *mb. While in clusters, the pattern of *n

    and *m-loss are parallel, this is not the case for single-member codas. Word-finally, *n has been lost, as in

    b good, m. (< *bun), but *m is maintained: fm smoke, d m dome, etc.

    While some of these patterns are evident in other Romance languages, the absence of evidence of

    vowel nasalization and the occurrence of historical word-final obstruent devoicing (Cresci 2012) make this

    historical development of special interest. In this study I suggest phonetic factors that may explain: (1)

    differential loss of *n vs. *m in word-final position of stressed syllables; (2) the role of obstruent voicing in

    nasal maintenance; and (3) why, unlike French, Portuguese and other Romance languages, there is no

    evidence of contrastive nasalized vowels in the history of Camuno (cf. Beddor 2009).

    References

    Beddor, P. S. (2009). A coarticulatory path to sound change. Language, 85.4, 785-821.

    Cresci, M. (2012). Camuno Final Obstruent Devoicing. Poster presented at 2nd Workshop on Sound

    Change, Institute of Phonetics and Speech Processing, Munich, Germany.

    Hajek, J. (1997). Universals of sound change in nasalization. Oxford: Blackwell.

    Sampson, R. (1999). Nasal vowel evolution in Romance. New York: OUP.

  • From Latin to Romance: discontinuities in passive BE-periphrases

    Lieven Danckaert (GIST, UGent)

    In this paper, I argue against the widespread view that the Romance analytic passive present tenses with a BE-auxiliary, like French il est aim 'he is loved', have developed from the analytic Latin passive perfect of the type amatus est 'he was loved' (see, among many others, Harris 1978: 188; Winters 1984: 451; Hewson & Bubenk 1997: 315). The usual explanation offered by proponents of this view is that Latin amatus est was ambiguous between a pure perfective past tense reading ('it was the case the was loved') and a resultative (adjectival), present tense reading ('it is now the case that he is loved, as the result of a past action'). However, in addition to there not being any independent evidence in favour of this putative meaning shift, the above explanation also fails to take into account a set of word order facts that until now have not been noticed in the literature. It is received wisdom that the evolution from Early to Late Latin witnessed a rise of head-initial syntax (see e.g. Bauer 1995). However, corpus data reveal that this is only partially correct. As shown in Graph 1, there is a significant rise of head-initial TP's in clauses with a modal auxiliary and an infinitival complement, but not in clauses with a BE-auxiliary and a (deponent) past participle, which display the opposite tendency:

    Average % of AuxV(P) BE + past participle modal + infinitive

    Classical Latin (Cicero, 85 BC - Gaius, 180 AD): 29,40% 37,50% Late Latin (Egeria, 380 AD - Iordanes, 550 AD): 8,10% 78,02%

    Table 1: Evolution of Aux-V(P) order in clauses with a modal and a BE- auxiliary

    In other words, the word order development of Latin BE-periphrases is such that it moves away from the 'Aux-V' order characteristic of (early) Romance languages (cf. amatus est vs. il est aim). In addition, it has been pointed out that the replacement of (classical) Latin passive paradigms happens in different stages: analytic passive perfects with a present tense BE-auxiliary (amatus est 'he was loved') are replaced by periphrases with a perfective auxiliary (fuit amatus) (cf. de Melo 2012) before the synthetic present passive (amatur 'he is (being) loved') is lost and (productively) replaced by the Romance periphrases of the il est aim type (Muller 1924; Herman 2002). In order to capture these two facts (viz. (i) the persistence of VAux word order and (ii) the relative chronology of the changes), I will suggest that the Latin amatus est perfects disappeared from the language, via a stage of verb incorporation (in the syntactic sense of Baker 1988). Only later, when the synthetic present passives (amatur) are being lost, a new present tense analytic paradigm (est amatus) replaces them. I will suggest this new paradigm is formed by analogy with the existing fuit amatus periphrases, which themselves pattern with modal auxiliaries in appearing predominantly in the order 'AuxVP' (as do the newly formed est amatus present tense passives). Despite appearances, these innovative forms are unrelated to the Latin passive 'VAux' perfects.

    References Baker, M. 1988. Incorporation. Chicago U.P. Bauer, B. 1995. The emergence and development of SVO patterning in Latin and French. O.U.P. de Melo, W. 2012. Kurylowicz's first 'law of analogy' and the development of passive periphrases in Latin. In: Laws and rules in Indo-European, 83-101 Harris, M. 1978. The evolution of French syntax. London Herman, J. 2002. La disparition du passif synthtique latin, ER 24, 31-46 Hewson, J. & V. Bubenik. 1997. Tense and aspect in Indo-European languages. Benjamins Muller, H. 1924. The passive voice in Vulgar Latin, The Romanic Review 15, 68-93 Winters, M. 1984. Steps toward the Romance passive inferrable from the Itinerarium Egeriae, RomPh 37, 445-54

  • Serena Danesi University of Bergen Between the historical languages and the reconstructed language:

    The verbal adjective + dative construction in Latin, Ancient Greek, Sanskrit and Avestan In existing historical linguistic research, syntactic reconstruction is generally regarded with skepticism because, unlike with the lexicon, syntax does not provide well-defined entities to compare. The Comparative Method presupposes a comparison only of items with similar form and meaning. Since syntactic structures, allegedly, lack a meaning component, identifying cognate entities appears to be an unattainable enterprise, and, consequently, syntactic structures have been excluded from a historical-comparative framework (Jeffers 1976, Winter 1984 among others). In this presentation, I aim to show, in the same vein as Bardal & Eythrsson 2012, that syntactic reconstruction may be successfully accomplished; I demonstrate this with an analysis of verbal adjectives across four different Indo-European languages, namely Sanskrit, Avestan, Ancient Greek and Latin, as exemplified in (1 4). (1) y stot bhyo hvyo sti y man Sanskrit REL.NOM singers:DAT to-be-invoked:NOM be:PRS3sg. sacrifice:LOC He who