Diachronic Morphology

Chapter 6 (by Santazilia) is a study of the Basque noun morphology, which sets out the noun paradigm of historical Basque and the structure of its NP, and then goes on to list the explanations proposed so far for every aspect concerning the formation of that paradigm: first the number/definiteness axis, and then the individual cases, classifying these into primary cases (grammatical and local), secondary cases (those built upon the allative and the genitive), and pseudo-flectional morphemes or non-cases.

This volume is a collection of papers dealing with various aspects of language change. The collection is a good illustration of the place occupied by historical linguistics in modern linguistics as aptly captured by Joseph (2001) ‘while not in the center of the field of linguistics, historical linguistics nonetheless draws on virtually all aspects of the field in ways that other subfields do not’. This wide array of different aspects of modern linguistics that historical studies embrace can be seen in the papers included in the present volume. There are papers by Bloch-Rozmej, Jaskuła, Wójcik and Zdziebko, which deal with phonology and phonological theory. Syntactic analysis forms a major part of the contributions by Bondaruk and Bartczak Meszyńska, Charzyńska-Wójcik, Malicka-Kleparska, Mokrosz and Zhang. Papers by Charzyńska-Wójcik and Charzyński and a contribution by Lis deal with the historical evolution of the lexicon, while Szymanek deals with historical morphology. Finally, a contribution by Klimkowski is an interesting and inspiring inquiry into the nature of change in general.

This paper deals with one of the oldest and most controversial problems in the historical morphology of the Germanic branch of Indo-European: the origin and historical development of the so-called ‘weak preterite’. In Germanic, the weak preterite is the only means of forming the preterite tense of a derived verb. In spite of two hundred years of research into the weak preterite and a large number of hypotheses concerning its origin, it is not even securely established how the inflectional endings of this formation should be reconstructed for the common prehistory of the attested Germanic languages. Traditionally the inflectional endings of the weak preterite are conceived of as reflecting free inflectional forms of the verb “do”, only recently having been grammaticalized as inflectional morphology for derived verbs. But it has never been possible to identify the inflectional forms in question satisfactorily within the paradigm of “do”. This paper reconsiders the evidence of the Germanic daughter languages by taking into account West Germanic irregularities previously neglected or viewed as irrelevant. It is shown that the West Germanic evidence provides a key to understanding the origin and the later developments of the weak preterite inflectional endings.

While grammaticalisation represents an extremely common and productive pathway of change, a significant and growing number of examples of historical changes appear to proceed in precisely the opposite direction; that is, formerly functional items unexpectedly acquire lexical status and bound items unexpectedly gain greater freedom. This paper examines the properties of degrammaticalisations, the conditions on and reasons for its occurrence, and considers the challenges it poses for claims about the nature of grammaticalisation, especially unidirectionality and its claim to be a fundamental mechanism of language change.

Chapter overview: preliminaries; Middle as a cluster of deagentivized (Intransitivized) syntactic patterns; Middle types/patterns; Middle voice in Indo-European and beyond: The range of variation; Middle and reflexive in a diachronic perspective
Concluding terminological remarks: Reflexive sensu stricto vs.
"reflexive" as a cover term

Cappadocian Greek is reported to display agglutinative inflection in its nominal system, namely, mono-exponential formatives for the marking of case and number, and nom.sg-looking forms as the morphemic units to which inflection applies. Previous scholarship has interpreted these developments as indicating a shift in morphological type from fusion to agglutination, brought about by contact with Turkish. This study takes issue with these conclusions. By casting a wider net over the inflectional system of the language, it shows that, of the two types of agglutinative formations identified, only one evidences a radical departure from the inherited structural properties of Cappadocian noun inflection. The other, on the contrary, represents a typologically more conservative innovation. The study presents evidence that a combination of system-internal and-external motivations triggered the development of both types, it describes the mechanisms through which the innovation was implemented, and discusses the factors that favoured change.

The paper tries to account for several instances of emerging suppletion by establishing a cross-linguistic tendency of suppletion replication in grammaticalization. It can be shown that words which acquire new grammatical functions and therefore enter a different class of lexemes tend to copy suppletion patterns already present in other members of this class. This development can be triggered by factors of different nature, either internal to the language in question or rooted in contact between different languages or dialects of the same language. The suppletion replication tendency is demonstrated on several cases of grammaticalization of demonstrative or relative pronouns into 3rd person pronouns. This typologically common development is known to have led to the creation of new suppletion in several languages of Europe. In the present paper, three particularly telling cases from Slavonic, dialects of Lithuanian and early West Germanic dialects spoken on the continent are discussed in detail.

Bengali exhibits a puzzle for standard views on inflection, tense/aspect, and negation. Although Bengali negation is marked by na ‘not’, finite verbs marked for perfect aspect cannot take na or any other negative. To negate perfects, the verbs must drop tense/aspect marking and take a special marker, ni, not used elsewhere in the language.  Previous research (e.g. Ferguson 1972:91) noticed this puzzle, but only one account, Ramchand (2004), attempts a solution.  Working within tense and event logics (cf. Parsons 1990), Ramchand treats ni and na as distinct negative quantifiers, na quantifying events and ni quantifying times. The account defines perfects as ‘resultant states’ entailing prior events, and claims that na negates the resultant state but not the prior event, creating semantic clash. This correctly predicts scopal, interpretive differences between negations of the past and ni negations. However, the account incorrectly predicts that temporal negative polarity items disallow na, though allowed in other past declaratives. Also, Ramchand’s analysis, leaving out discussion of futures, incorrectly predicts that na cannot range over all future times.’

Previous work does not recognize the semantic link between ni and the negative existential nai ‘there is not,’ used for ni dialectally. I therefore propose a unified semantics for ni/nai as the negation of states (existential, locative, and ‘resultant’ states). The apparent present-past alternations, I argue, stem from coercion of events to resultant states when embedded in ni/nai. My explanation for ni captures the scopal effects without limiting the semantics of na, thus avoiding incorrect predictions.

I advocate a diachronic explanation of the morphological gap. Ni originates from nai and nahi ‘there is not’ and I show how its development arises from polysemy of negative markers during medieval Bengali and from analogy to the affirmative perfects, which contain positive auxiliary ach- corresponding to nai. Medieval textual data, previously undiscussed, converge to illuminate the grammaticalization of aspect and negation. My main contribution is showing how the forces of grammaticalization, analogy, and lexical semantics interact to create the paradigm. The facts in my argument affect theoretical concerns outside defective paradigms. The evolution of Bengali perfects is fueled by the semantics of its original constituents, supporting Bybee et al’s (1994) approach to grammaticalization. Bengali also confirms the cross-linguistic tendency of diachronic “perfect to perfective” shift (cf. Dahl 1985, Bybee et al 1994, Deo 2006).

Euskal artikuluaren bilakaeraren analisi diakroniko bat egin dut. Horren barrenean, deklinabide mugatuaren berreraiketa morfologikoa egin dut, batetik, eta artikuluaren erabileraren deskripzio historiko bat, bestetik.Artikuluak D-elementu gisa sailkatu ditut, erakusleen gramatikalizazioaren azalpen estandarren barrenean; -a artikulu prototipikoaz landa, erakusleetatik datozen beste artikulu batzuk identifikatu ditut horrela. Analisi modu honek azalbide bakarraren pean ezarri ditu deklinabide mugatuaren berreraiketan zeuden hainbat arazo.Berreraiketa morfologiko horretarako, Erdi Aroko datuen arakatze sistematikoa egin dut. Datu horiek osatu dute berreraiketa proposamenaren oinarri enpirikoa; bertan aurkitu ditut D-elementuen aldaerarik arkaikoenak.Artikuluaren erabileraren deskripzio historikorako, XVI. mendeko testuetako datuak erauzi ditut. Testuinguru sintaktikoen arabera analizatu dut artikuluaren erabilera: bokatiboak, perpaus existentzialak, perpaus predikatiboak eta subjektua...

The main aim of this paper is to examine the word formation of denominal parasynthetic verbs with prefix a- in Old Spanish. The analysis relies on the lexical semantics viewpoint of the Generative Lexicon. I argue that the polysemy in denominal parasynthetic verbs can essentially be attributed to the semantic features of the nominal stem. Regarding the data under study, the paper focuses on the verbs contained in Nebrija’s Vocabulario (1495). This information is compared with the one provided by the Spanish textual corpora CORDE, CE and CDH.

This article looks at variation in the distribution of /j/ in post-tonic syllables in Middle Welsh. It extends previous studies by looking at variation at the level of the individual lexical item, using data from a stylistically and lexically relatively homogeneous group of law manuscripts from both north and south Wales. Many items show no variation, appearing either with /j/ or without /j/ in all texts. Variable items show different patterns of distribution: for some items, /j/-full forms are restricted to northern texts, and even there compete with /j/-less forms; for other items, the /j/-full forms dominant in the northern texts are found alongside /j/-less forms even in the south. With frequent items, it seems clear that the overall patterns closely resemble those found with cases of lexical diffusion of linguistic innovations. In addition to documenting the patterns of variation, this article makes some proposals as to how they may have arisen. It is suggested that, in the items investigated closely here (plural suffixes and synchronically monomorphemic items), two processes play the major role: a sound change deleting /j/ in the onset of post-tonic syllables, which diffuses south-to-north; and analogical extension of /j/ into the -eu and -oed plural suffixes, restricted to northern varieties.

This paper aims to account for diachronic changes in word-formation constraints affecting German nominalization in the suffix -ung (e.g. Landung ‘landing’, Versicherung ‘insurance') from a Cognitive-Linguistic and usage-based point of view. I argue that these changes are best accounted for in a constructionist framework. More specifically, it is shown that the emergence of word-formation constraints cannot be explained by only taking one factor (say, semantic properties of the base verb) into account. Instead, semantic, syntactic, and pragmatic factors conspire in the diachronic development of word-formation patterns such as ung-nominalization.

Freek Van de Velde's article "Wayward categorial shift: so odd an article" deals with an intriguing construction, whereby the degree adverb 'so' and an adjective precede an indefinite article, which is found in several (older) Germanic languages. Such Big Mess Constructions (hence BMCs) differ from canonical NPs because the adjective usually follows an article, instead of preceding it. This observation, as well as the fact that BMCs are found in several Germanic languages at some stage of their history, begs for an explanation. Van de Velde claims the rise of the BMC is "merely the result of an historical accident", a categorial shift through reanalysis that was triggered by the phonological similarity of an adjectival suffix and the indefinite article following the adjective. The purpose of the present paper is to examine if Van de Velde's reanalysis hypothesis holds for Danish as well. As we will see, Danish is particularly interesting for this purpose, firstly, because the Big Mess Construction is still fully productive and secondly, because the historical circumstances for the kind of reanalysis assumed for Dutch and English appeared to be less favourable.

En general, a la hora de abordar nuevos estudios lingüísticos, es fundamental revisar y contrastar la información que se halla en las gramáticas y en los diccionarios. En el caso que nos ocupa, la morfología histórica del español, este ejercicio resulta particularmente relevante debido a las lagunas que se encuentran en las gramáticas y, en contraste, a la riqueza de información que esconde el Diccionario Crítico Etimológico Castellano e Hispánico de J. Corominas y J. A. Pascual (DCECH). A nuestro entender, la información morfológica en el DCECH tiene dos funciones básicas. En primer lugar, por lo que se refiere a cuestiones formales, en la mayoría de artículos, la información morfológica estructura toda una serie de contenidos bajo los epígrafes de derivados (DERIV.) y compuestos (CPT.). Y en segundo lugar, por lo que se refiere al establecimiento de las etimologías, la información morfológica es un elemento recurrente y básico para explicar las etimologías ciertas —vid. por ejemplo abadecero, abadejo, abeja, abismo, etc.—, como para formular o desechar hipótesis en los casos de etimologías desconocidas e inciertas —vid. por ejemplo ademán, adiano, galocha, etc.—. No obstante, como comenta Corominas en el prefacio del diccionario, los conceptos de derivado y compuesto se utilizan en el DCECH de una forma amplia, de manera que estos apartados agrupan información sobre elementos léxicos pertenecientes a la misma familia etimológica del lema. Así se aprecia en el artículo de simón ⎯abreviatura de coche de don Simón, denominación que hace referencia a un alquilador de coches madrileño, y cuya primera documentación, según el DCECH, se halla en Terreros⎯, el cual incluye simonía ⎯término ya documentado en el s. XIVs22 procedente del bajo latín simonia⎯ entre los derivados. Según algunos autores ⎯vid. Clavería (1993), entre otros⎯, este uso amplio de las etiquetas de derivado y compuesto es una de las causas que provoca dificultades a la hora de interpretar algunas de las informaciones del diccionario. Por lo tanto, el objetivo de este trabajo es doble. Por un lado, se presentará el uso y la función de la información morfológica en los artículos del DCECH. Por otro lado, gracias a la explotación de las bases de datos que se han elaborado a partir del DCECH en el Seminari de Filología i Informática de la Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona, y como botón de muestra, se analizarán los factores que intervienen en la formación de palabras con a- inicial a lo largo de la historia del español: cambio de prefijo (ej.: acudir) , cambio de régimen verbal (ej.: acordar), conexiones léxicas (ej.: abés), aglutinación del artículo árabe (ej.: adarga), etc.⎯. A su vez, esta información se verá complementada con la documentación que arroja el corpus textual de la Academia CORDE.

With a critical assessment of morphomic morphology (Aronoff 1994; Maiden 2008) as point of departure, this paper presents an analysis of the structure of the Danish verb forstå ‘understand’ and its development from Early Middle Danish to Modern Danish. Based on a semiotic-functional framework (Andersen 1980, 2010; Harder 1996), the analysis examines the strong past tense form forstod ‘understood’ and its relation to the inflection of the simplex verb stå ‘stand’. The original isomorphism between expression plane and content plane has been lost, but indexical relations on the two planes ensure that structural meaningfulness is maintained. The structure and development of forstå is compared to that of the verb overvære ‘attend, witness’, and the paper offers an alternative strategy to Aronoff’s (1976, 1994) morphome analysis of English understand.