How To Do Things Without Junk
-
John Charles Smith
Abstract
This paper examines the evolution of the accusative and dative forms of the Latin first- and second-person singular pronouns in the light of Lass’s claim that an opposition which has lost its original value and become vacuous ‘junk’ may assume a new linguistic function. In some Romance languages, the original opposition of case is lost, but the morphological opposition is refunctionalized to encode a distinction between a conjunctive and a disjunctive form. However, this phenomenon seems crucially not to involve ‘junk’, since it is always the original accusative which yields the conjunctive pronoun and the original dative which yields the disjunctive form. Instead, we are arguably dealing with ‘skeuomorphy’ – the state in which an opposition has been evacuated of its exponence, but retains some abstract identity which is not yet ‘junk’. If the opposition is refunctionalized, its refunctionalization will be guided by this residual dichotomy.
Abstract
This paper examines the evolution of the accusative and dative forms of the Latin first- and second-person singular pronouns in the light of Lass’s claim that an opposition which has lost its original value and become vacuous ‘junk’ may assume a new linguistic function. In some Romance languages, the original opposition of case is lost, but the morphological opposition is refunctionalized to encode a distinction between a conjunctive and a disjunctive form. However, this phenomenon seems crucially not to involve ‘junk’, since it is always the original accusative which yields the conjunctive pronoun and the original dative which yields the disjunctive form. Instead, we are arguably dealing with ‘skeuomorphy’ – the state in which an opposition has been evacuated of its exponence, but retains some abstract identity which is not yet ‘junk’. If the opposition is refunctionalized, its refunctionalization will be guided by this residual dichotomy.
Chapters in this book
- Prelim pages i
- Table of contents v
- Introduction vii
- An Acoustic Basis for Palatal Geminate Behavior in Spanish 1
- Mapping the Patterns of Maintenance versus Merger in Bilingual Phonology 15
- New Tendencies in Geographical Dialectology 31
- Output-to-output Correspondence and the Emergence of the Unmarked in Spanish Plural Formation 49
- Mapping French Pronunciation 65
- Phonological Variability in the Laboratory 83
- Constraint Re-ranking in Three Grammars 97
- Mid Vowels and Schwa in Eastern Catalan 113
- The Nominal Stress System of Romanian (re)revisited 127
- Proto-Romance Stress Shift Revisited 141
- Final -m in Yucatan Spanish 155
- Stressed Enclitics? 167
- How To Do Things Without Junk 183
- Subject Index 207
Chapters in this book
- Prelim pages i
- Table of contents v
- Introduction vii
- An Acoustic Basis for Palatal Geminate Behavior in Spanish 1
- Mapping the Patterns of Maintenance versus Merger in Bilingual Phonology 15
- New Tendencies in Geographical Dialectology 31
- Output-to-output Correspondence and the Emergence of the Unmarked in Spanish Plural Formation 49
- Mapping French Pronunciation 65
- Phonological Variability in the Laboratory 83
- Constraint Re-ranking in Three Grammars 97
- Mid Vowels and Schwa in Eastern Catalan 113
- The Nominal Stress System of Romanian (re)revisited 127
- Proto-Romance Stress Shift Revisited 141
- Final -m in Yucatan Spanish 155
- Stressed Enclitics? 167
- How To Do Things Without Junk 183
- Subject Index 207
