Volume 44, Issue Historica-vol-31

Throughout the thirteenth century in the dialect of Florence the order of clitic pronouns in double-object clusters in which the dat ( ive ) was first- or secondperson singular or plural was acc ( usative )– dat . During the fourteenth century variation in the order arose so that both the acc – dat and the dat – acc order were possible. By the fifteenth century, however, the variation was resolved in favor of dat – acc , the pattern found today in Standard Italian, derived essentially from late Medieval Florentine. Expanding upon Aski (forthcoming), this article offers a pragmatic-driven account of the order of double-object proclitic clusters found in fourteenth-century Florentine texts of a variety of genres, which were collected from the Opera del Vocabolario Italiano (OVI) on-line database. The results of our analysis confirm Aski's (forthcoming) observation that the primary factor governing the order alternation is topicality of the referent of the first clitic, but additional structural and semantic factors were found to be operative as well. Although this is an exhaustive textual examination of a medieval morphosyntactic phenomenon, the conclusions remain tentative, since pragmatic properties are always co-determined by contextual and situational factors that are difficult if not impossible to reconstruct.

In this contribution we discuss diachronic and variationist aspects of morphonotactics, a new research field that we have tried to establish over the last years (cf. Dressler & Dziubalska-Kołaczyk, Rivista di Linguistica, 18: 249–266, 2006). Morphonotactics is the area of interaction between morphotactics and phonotactics and represents a subfield of morphonology, which in turn is the area of interaction between morphology and phonology (cf. Dressler, Morphonology, Karoma Press, 1985, A functionalist semiotic model of morphonology, Benjamins, 1996). We claim that in this interaction morphotactics typically creates phonotactically marked structures which occur never or only exceptionally in monomorphemic words. In our contribution we deal with typical diachronic changes. Our claim about the markedness of morphonotactic sequences is tested mainly against data from Polish, Lithuanian and other Balto-Slavic languages. Our theoretical basis draws on models of Natural Phonology (cf. Hurch & Rhodes, Natural Phonology: The state of the art, Mouton de Gruyter, 1996, Dziubalska-Kołaczyk & Weckwerth, Future challenges for natural linguistics, Lincom, 2002) and Natural Morphology (cf. Dressler et al., Leitmotifs in natural morphology, Benjamins, 1987, Kilani-Schoch & Dressler, Morphologie naturelle et flexion du verbe françis, Narr, 2005), and especially on the subtheories of universal markedness (or universal preferences) and of typological adequacy.

The distribution of French voiced and voiceless reflexes of L. /k/ in intervocalic position before /a/ is an interesting problem of Romance historical phonology that has received little attention so far. This paper analyzes previous attempts to explain that distribution, demonstrates that they are ultimately inadequate, and shows that in order to account for the phenomenon adequately data from other Western Romance languages and particularly the diachronic stability of the vowels preceding /ka/ need to be taken into consideration. A (set of) sound law(s) is proposed, which describes the chronological unfolding of vowel elision, and the geographical distribution of its effects is analyzed. It is demonstrated how the distribution of voiced and voiceless reflexes of L. /k/ before /a/ may be used as a criterion for classifying Western Romance languages.

This article casts new light on the well-known loss of the masculine genitive plural in Medieval Cypriot Greek and its apparent replacement by the accusative plural. Based on the examination of extensive material from the period, it argues that the phenomenon emerged earlier than so far assumed, i.e. prior to medieval times. Language contact involving mainly Cypriot Greek and Old/Middle French speakers is investigated both from a sociolinguistic and a textual perspective. The findings suggest that language contact with French is likely to have facilitated the diffusion of the construction, but could not have been the initial reason for its emergence. New evidence links the Cypriot phenomenon to earlier occurrences of the same construction found in inscriptions from a wide area, including Egypt, the Middle East and South Russia. Finally, regarding the morphosyntactic origin of the construction, a new explanation is put forward involving functional interplay between the dative, the accusative and the genitive in the late Roman/early Byzantine period, facilitated by phonological overlap in the nominal paradigm.