Volume 47, Issue Historica-vol-34

The article seeks to demonstrate that the diachrony and synchrony of Romance languages are marked by the coexistence of two major types of adverb with attributive (modifying) function. Both are based on adjectives: Type A takes the unmarked adjective (e.g. Sp. trabajar duro ‘to work hard’), whereas Type B is derived (Sp. trabajar duramente ‘to work hard’). In contrast to studies which focus on - ment ( e ), the article highlights the neglected synchrony and diachrony of Type A adverbs. Moreover, the diachrony and synchrony of both Type A and Type B are considered as related phenomena that have to be placed at the interface of the oral and the written traditions. A combination of written diachronic data with written and spoken variationist data from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries provides evidence for the reconstruction of the oral and written tradition in Romance.

The sound change * s > n in initial position in Arapaho is unparalleled in the world’s languages, and previous attempts at explaining it have failed to produce a convincing account of its intermediate stages. This article presents two hypotheses to account for the correspondence between PA * s - and Arapaho n -, taking into account not only the individual steps of this particular proto-phoneme, but the evolution of the whole consonant system. It shows that the change * s > n in initial position only appears to reflect an unnatural development: it can in fact be explained in terms of a sequence of natural changes and mergers.

There are certain discrepancies between the forms and constructions prescribed by Pāṇinian grammarians and the forms and constructions that are actually attested in the Vedic corpus (a part of which is traditionally believed to underlie Pāṇinian grammar). Concentrating on one particular aspect of the Old Indian verbal system, viz. the morphology and syntax of present formations with the suffix ‑ya- , I will provide a few examples of such discrepancy. I will argue that the most plausible explanation of this mismatch can be found in the peculiar sociolinguistic situation in Ancient India: a number of linguistic phenomena described by grammarians did not appear in Vedic texts but existed within the semi-colloquial scholarly discourse of the learned community of Sanskrit scholars (comparable to Latin scholarly discourse in Medieval Europe). Some of these phenomena may result from the influence of Middle Indic dialects spoken by Ancient Indian scholars, thus representing syntactic and morphological calques from their native dialects onto the Sanskrit grammatical system.

The phonological shape of the PDE first-person nominative singular pronoun ‘I’ is assumed to have a simple history. The final consonant of WGmc *ik ‘palatalises’ (i.e. fronts and assibilates), and later drops, yielding [i-], which develops through the Great Vowel Shift into something like [ai]. However, the late Old English and early Middle English evidence indicates that such a simple narrative does not match the attested data. Rather, there are significant temporal, geographical and variational aspects, including complex lexical diffusion. The Linguistic Atlas of Early Middle English, Corpus of Tagged of Texts contains 145 texts that include one or more variants of the pronoun ‘I’. Between them, they exemplify an intricate history. In this article we unpack the changes that have brought about the attested complexity. As a basis we use the etymology of this item created for the recently published Corpus of Narrative Etymologies ( CoNE ), which itself interfaces with its accompanying Corpus of Changes ( CC ). The history of this small grammatical word ultimately needs to be considered against the wider background of velar palatalisation in general and in relation to the reflexes of other commonly occurring items of a similar structure. But the changes visible in ‘I’ seem not to be fully replicated in any of them, and here we confine ourselves to its particular and apparently unique history.

Copular verbs most often originate from bleached intransitive verbs that have incorporated in their valency originally optional predicative adjuncts. The originally optional element is then reanalyzed as the central predicate and gradually extends its scope through the lexicon along the following path: A>N(P). Although at first sight, the case of the (reflexive) evidential copulas s’avérer and se révéler - both meaning ‘turn out to be’ - may look like instances of this general diachronic schema, we argue that the present state is the result, on the one hand, of the complex interaction of the indirect (with comme ‘as’) and the direct copular construction (constructional intertwining), and, on the other, of lexical attraction between se révéler and s’avérer . The case of se révéler and s’avérer suggests that copularisation processes are far more diverse and complex than generally assumed.

The article focuses on the operation of the Northern Subject Rule in the first-person singular in early Scots. It establishes that the first-person singular was under the scope of the NSR in the fourteenth and the fifteenth centuries, with a near-categorical operation of the Proximity-to-Subject Constraint. In addition, it reveals the strength of this constraint, which in recent literature has generally been assumed to be less robust than the Type-of-Subject Constraint. A comparison with Northern Middle English suggests that Scots was more advanced in the operation of the NSR.

The article presents a study of early progressive passives in English. It is based on a collection of data from large databases, and extends the data set of pre-1820 examples of the progressive passive very significantly. There is some indication in the data that the progressive passive may initially have been regional, as has been suggested in earlier work on early progressive passives, although if so, it was probably slightly further north than thought, but the data also indicate that the construction took root in London at quite an early stage. Contrary to previous claims, the evidence which we have at the moment does not appear to provide any particular reason for thinking that early use was mostly found in informal contexts such as private letters and was generally avoided in print. In addition, the new data cast doubt on the idea that the Southey-Coleridge circle played a major role in spreading the construction.

The system of participant reference allows narrators not only to keep track of who is who, but it also serves to reveal the structure of the text and the ranking of the participants in the text. As narratives are typically built around storylines, participant reference systems interact and participate in signalling text structure and storylines in narrative texts. The aim of this article is to study the interaction of þa ‘then’ and participant continuity in structuring Old English narratives. In Old English narratives the adverb þa serves several discourse functions, which are related to the core function of foregrounding, or signalling the main line of narrative. However, it has been argued that þa is a signal of discontinuity, whose main function is to mark discourse-unit boundaries. On the basis of co-occurrence patterns of þa and signals of participant continuity in a sample of Alfrician sermons, I wish to argue that, at the intersection of participant continuity and foregrounding, þa has the function of reintroducing major participants into the story, simultaneously signalling text structure and continuity and cohesion in the text, and that the discontinuity associated with þa arises from its interaction with other structuring signals.