Volume 19, Issue 3

The Constant Rate Hypothesis (CRH) predicts that a linguistic innovation should spread at identical rates of change in all grammatical contexts in which it is used (Kroch 1989. Reflexes of grammar in patterns of language change. Language Variation and Change 1(3). 199–244). Weaknesses in previous tests of the CRH are identified. A new study is conducted that improves upon them. It utilizes a syntactic change in late Modern American English possessive have , which altered its realization in the grammar-theoretically related contexts negation, inversion, VP-adjunction and VP-ellipsis. Data sets are collected from the Corpus of Historical American English (Davies 2010. The corpus of historical American English: 400 million words, 1810-2009. http://corpus.byu.edu/coha/ (accessed 10 September 2016)) and analyzed with mixed-effects logistic regression models. The statistical analysis reveals that it is indeed plausible to assume that each of the contexts innovates the use of possessive have at the same speed. Implications of the findings for the CRH are discussed.

This paper analyzes the semantics of the French and Spanish prepositions en from the point of view of diachrony. We focus on the spatial variation of their usage in both languages. Our methodological approach is based on a corpus analysis. We draw on comparable ancient texts and analyze some semantic categories that are fundamental for the spatial description. Our results reveal a fairly active evolution of prepositions with increases and decreases of usage where we did not expect them.

The boundary permeability hypothesis views language as a system of categories which are more or less rigidly separated from one another. In previous work on grammatical categories, English was characterized as a soft boundary and German as a strict boundary language. This project presents a test of the prediction that English to be has a wider functional range than its German counterpart sein . The range of these verbs is determined on the basis of a bidirectional translation study. English to be is translated by a larger variety of lexical verbs in German while sein is translated by a smaller number of lexical verbs in English. In fact, the translation equivalents of sein form a subset of those of to be . Moreover, to be plays a much larger role in constructions such as there is and it is than sein does. The boundary permeability hypothesis views this structural difference and the wider semantic range of to be as two sides of the same coin. It is suggested that English is a more speaker-friendly language than German.

This paper measures the stability of cross-linguistic register variation. A  register is a variety of a language that is associated with extra-linguistic context. The relationship between a register and its context is functional: the linguistic features that make up a register are motivated by the needs and constraints of the communicative situation. This view hypothesizes that register should be universal, so that we expect a stable relationship between the extra-linguistic context that defines a register and the sets of linguistic features which the register contains. In this paper, the universality and robustness of register variation is tested by comparing variation within versus between register-specific corpora in 60 languages using corpora produced in comparable communicative situations: tweets and Wikipedia articles. Our findings confirm the prediction that register variation is, in fact, universal.

This study investigates how foreign language proficiency, which previous corpus-based research on alternation phenomena has largely ignored, influences the choice of genitive variant ( the tail of the dog/the dog’s tail ) in learners of English as a Foreign Language. The data stems from the Trinity Lancaster Corpus, a three-million-word corpus featuring spoken language from low-intermediate to advanced learners of English from several L1 backgrounds. The collected genitive observations were annotated for various constraints such as the length, animacy, definiteness and discourse status of the constituents and then analyzed via mixed-effects logistic regression. The results show that although native speakers and learners are remarkably similar, low-proficiency learners are less sensitive to possessor definiteness and possessor animacy, the latter of which is otherwise the strongest constraint of the genitive alternation.

The term negative emotive word refers to those words that, on their own, i.e. without context, have a semantic content that may be associated with negative emotion, but sometimes they lose it partly or wholly. In the literature negative emotive words are mainly discussed within the group of intensifiers, e.g. awfully good. In the present paper, we call this phenomenon polarity loss . At the same time, there is another use of negative emotive words that is rarely discussed in the literature, namely the case where the examined word, despite its negative semantic content, expresses a positive evaluation of the speaker, e.g. brutális alaplap (lit. ‘brutal motherboard’ – ‘high quality motherboard’). We call this phenomenon polarity shift . The aim here is to thoroughly examine the two different phenomena on the basis of the data of a Hungarian speech corpus HuTongue. After an in-depth analysis of the qualitative and quantitative features of negative emotive words, we propose corresponding ways of their meaning representations, using a lexical pragmatic approach and the concept of enantiosemy.

This study applies a corpus-based quantitative approach to the word order typology and linguistic theories about word order in several genetically unrelated language varieties in northwestern Iran, such as Mukri Kurdish, Northeastern Kurdish and Armenian (Indo-European), Jewish Neo-Aramaic (Semitic), and Azeri Turkic (Turkish). Despite the difference in the default position of the direct object, the existing corpora of published and personal field data of narrative free speech demonstrate that these languages share the clause-final position of Targets predominantly (e.g., physical and metaphorical goals, recipients, addressees, and resultant-states) in their word order. Yet, Targets are more flexible in Mukri Kurdish, Northeastern Neo-Aramaic, and Azeri Turkic, whereas they are less flexible in Armenian and Northeastern Kurdish. Among various factors relevant to the placement of Targets, morphosyntactic features such as parts of speech exhibit constraints and clear preferences in the pre- and postverbal placement of Targets.