Volume 49, Issue Historica-vol-36 -

This paper reconsiders the history of two little-known third-person pronouns – 3pl. acc. his and 3sg. fem. acc. his – attested only during Middle English. Competing theories of their origins are evaluated and a novel account is proposed. The paper highlights an important gap in our understanding of the history of English oblique pronouns and supplies the most comprehensive description yet published of the distribution of these innovative forms.

This paper presents a comparative analysis of the verb system of the three known Zamucoan languages, namely Old Zamuco, described by the Jesuit father Ignace Chomé in the first half of the eighteenth century, plus Ayoreo and Chamacoco, still actively spoken in the Chaco area between Bolivia and Paraguay. The analysis has confirmed the internal consistency of this language family, allowing us to build a plausible reconstruction of the Proto-Zamucoan verb system. The analysis has unsurprisingly pointed out Old Zamuco as the most conservative language among the three; Chamacoco, by contrast, appears to be the most innovative. This notwithstanding, Chamacoco also has conservative features that turn out to be particularly relevant for the purpose of linguistic reconstruction.

In Latin, a short vowel followed by a voiced plosive undergoes lengthening in the past participle (Lachmann’s law). Many of these ppp. show a nasal segment inherited from the present or perfect stem. In a few ppp. moving from a dental stem, such as pēnsus , spōnsus etc., such a spreading provides the condition for the formation of the cluster - ns - (<*- nd -+- to ). By observing the supposed omission of - n - in some of these verbal forms (e.g.: frēsus vs. frĕndo ), regardless of the effective status of the process, as opposed to its retention in other ones (e.g.: pēnsus vs. pĕndeo / pĕndo ), Latin speakers could have hypothesized that all ppp. forms of this group were originally provided with -n -, see e.g. frēsus <* frĕnsus , with loss of - n - and compensatory lengthening of the preceding vowel. The ‘NS-lengthening’ rule might represent an early trigger of the vowel lengthening described by Lachmann. Such a lengthening analogically spread to other ppp., according to a connectionist lexical process.

Across Bantu, several polysemic markers expressing progressive aspect and so-called predication focus have been reported (Güldemann 2003; Hyman and Watters 1984). In this article, we examine two such markers in Kikongo (Bantu, H16), i.e. the fronted-infinitive and the locative-infinitive constructions. We provide an in-depth synchronic description of the pragmatic and syntactic behaviour of both verbal constructions and suggest a historical evolution for each of them. We evoke the term ‘event-centrality’ to cover the different uses of both constructions and suggest that the fronted-infinitive construction’s progressive meaning evolved from its use as predication focus marker, and vice versa, that the locative-infinitive construction’s predication focus meaning evolved from its use as a progressive marker.

In this paper, the first detailed description of the two causative derivations in Japhug Rgyalrong is presented, based on a corpus of spontaneous speech. Two new pathways of grammaticalization are proposed. First, it is shown that the causative derives from a special type of denominal derivation. Second, a previously undocumented development from the causative to the abilitative derivation is described. Lastly, the implications of these grammaticalization hypotheses for the reconstruction of Sino-Tibetan morphology as a whole are evaluated.

Looking at the fate of the concept of exaptation in historical linguistics, this article attempts an extension of exaptation from morphosyntactic change to phonological change. It argues that explicit recognition of the links between language change and other manifestations of Darwinian evolution can provide a context in which the use of this concept might be justified. First, an overview of the applications of exaptation in linguistics is provided (Section 2). Next, the historical data, that is the raisings of the close–mid long vowels as part of the Great Vowel Shift, as well as the lowerings of the short vowels as part of the Short Vowel Shift, adduced in this paper to verify the usefulness of exaptation in studying sound change are presented (Section 3). Consequently, two ways in which exaptation can be applied in the analysis of these data are presented: first (Section 4.1), a superficially evolutionary approach, which treats exaptation as a biologically inspired metaphorical label, and second (Section 4.2), a strictly evolutionary approach, which goes beyond metaphorical extensions of biological terms to linguistics, and which instead treats languages as truly evolutionary systems.

There are three types of Russian verbless clauses, which emerged through the ellipsis of the copula and other (full) verbs. This paper provides arguments against the hypothesis that they owe their existence to contact with Uralic languages. It argues that Finnic verbless clauses developed in parallel or even later than their Russian counterparts, and that the verbless clauses in Samoyedic languages, which preserve ancient Proto-Uralic features and use predicate nominal suffixes, differ structurally too much from those in Russian to represent likely models. It is argued that verbless clauses can naturally emerge when the meaning expressed by a frequent and semantically bleached verb is also included in the meaning of the phrase dependent on it. Other factors (contact-induced change, pragmatic and contextual factors) can support the emergence of – usually highly idiomatic – verbless clause constructions.

This study aims at contributing to a more elaborate understanding of the historical phonology of Mawé (Tupí family, Brazil). The paper discusses two patterns of diachronic correspondence involving j and w , arguing, first, that the diachronic correspondence involving j is more insightfully viewed as stemming from the blocking of a regular process of change and, second, that the process of change underlying the correspondence of the glide w is better conceptualized as a dissimilatory process. A unified, conspirational account of these changes is proposed by invoking a constraint banning homorganic glide-vowel sequences that acted in two seemingly contradictory ways: blocking a change that targeted t in the proto-language and triggering a change that dissolved wu sequences. Finally, I discuss the singular character of the correspondence w > h and propose a hypothesis accounting for this reflex. Wider implications of these accounts are also considered, and the hypotheses and analyses advanced here are evaluated and compared to alternative accounts.