Competing reinforcements
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Theresa Biberauer
Abstract
Drawing on recent developments in Afrikaans and Brazilian Portuguese, this paper proposes a syntactic constraint, alongside previously identified phonological and pragmatic ones, on progression in Jespersen’s (1917) Cycle/ JC. In particular, it argues that languages which draw on structurally high negative reinforcers and subsequently grammaticalise these as concord-elements will not replace the original sentential negator with this element, as would otherwise be expected in the context of JC. Languages of this type may, however, employ alternative reinforcement strategies, which in many cases draw on the same lexical stock as JC. A language may thus appear to have undergone a JC-related development without actually having done so.
Abstract
Drawing on recent developments in Afrikaans and Brazilian Portuguese, this paper proposes a syntactic constraint, alongside previously identified phonological and pragmatic ones, on progression in Jespersen’s (1917) Cycle/ JC. In particular, it argues that languages which draw on structurally high negative reinforcers and subsequently grammaticalise these as concord-elements will not replace the original sentential negator with this element, as would otherwise be expected in the context of JC. Languages of this type may, however, employ alternative reinforcement strategies, which in many cases draw on the same lexical stock as JC. A language may thus appear to have undergone a JC-related development without actually having done so.
Chapters in this book
- Prelim pages i
- Table of contents v
- Foreword & Acknowledgements vii
- Editors’ introduction ix
-
Part I. General and specific issues of language change
- Competing reinforcements 3
- On the reconstruction of experiential constructions in (Late) Proto-Indo-European 31
- Criteria for differentiating inherent and contact-induced changes in language reconstruction 49
- Misparsing and syntactic reanalysis 69
- How different is prototype change? 89
- The syntactic reconstruction of alignment and word order 107
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Part II. Linguistic variation and change in Germanic
- The Dutch-Afrikaans participial prefix ge- 131
- Diachronic changes in long-distance dependencies 155
- Changes in the use of the Frisian quantifiers ea/oait “ever” between 1250 and 1800 171
- On the development of the perfect (participle) 191
- OV and V-to-I in the history of Swedish 211
- Ethnicity as an independent factor of language variation across space 231
- The sociolinguistics of spelling 253
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Part III. Linguistic variation and change in Greek
- Dative loss and its replacement in the history of Greek 277
- Word order variation in New Testament Greek wh-questions 293
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Part IV. Linguistic change in Romance
- The morphological evolution of infinitive, future and conditional forms in Occitan 317
- The evolution of the encoding of direction in the history of French 333
- Velle -type prohibitions in Latin 355
- The use and development of habere + infinitive in Latin 373
- Index 399
Chapters in this book
- Prelim pages i
- Table of contents v
- Foreword & Acknowledgements vii
- Editors’ introduction ix
-
Part I. General and specific issues of language change
- Competing reinforcements 3
- On the reconstruction of experiential constructions in (Late) Proto-Indo-European 31
- Criteria for differentiating inherent and contact-induced changes in language reconstruction 49
- Misparsing and syntactic reanalysis 69
- How different is prototype change? 89
- The syntactic reconstruction of alignment and word order 107
-
Part II. Linguistic variation and change in Germanic
- The Dutch-Afrikaans participial prefix ge- 131
- Diachronic changes in long-distance dependencies 155
- Changes in the use of the Frisian quantifiers ea/oait “ever” between 1250 and 1800 171
- On the development of the perfect (participle) 191
- OV and V-to-I in the history of Swedish 211
- Ethnicity as an independent factor of language variation across space 231
- The sociolinguistics of spelling 253
-
Part III. Linguistic variation and change in Greek
- Dative loss and its replacement in the history of Greek 277
- Word order variation in New Testament Greek wh-questions 293
-
Part IV. Linguistic change in Romance
- The morphological evolution of infinitive, future and conditional forms in Occitan 317
- The evolution of the encoding of direction in the history of French 333
- Velle -type prohibitions in Latin 355
- The use and development of habere + infinitive in Latin 373
- Index 399
