Volume 46, Issue Historica-vol-33

English, a prototypical example of a Satellite-framed language (Talmy 1985, 2000), characteristically encodes manner of motion in the main verb and path in a satellite ( John ran into the house ). In this article I examine developments in the encoding of motion events from Old English to Late Modern English, in the light of Slobin’s (2004a) diachronic model for the emergence of manner salience; also discussed is the extent to which the shape and size of the English motion verb lexicon is a result of the specific properties of its morpholexical and morphosyntactic resources.

The article examines a change in passive constructions in the diachrony of Greek: the use of the nonactive suffix as a specialized marker of passive constructions is a later development in Greek, starting from Late Hellenistic/ Early Byzantine. Evidence is provided mainly by examples of active passives and nonactive transitives in Ancient Greek but not in later periods. The historical data provide arguments in favor of an analysis that postulates the presence of the external argument in passive constructions in the same position as in transitive constructions, and blocking by the nonactive suffix either of ( a ) one of the internal arguments (Ancient Greek) or ( b ) the internal argument in the accusative case (Late Hellenistic/Early Byzantine).

The article discusses words referring to grain legumes in languages from the Turkic, Mongolic, Tungusic, Japonic and Korean families. Some linguists assume these languages to represent a single macro-family, usually referred to as Altaic. Taking into account that the homeland of Altaic speakers may have been an area for which there is early archaeobotanical evidence of the mentioned grain legume species, the article reports on the attestation of words for these crops in the hypothetically related languages as well as on attempts to reconstruct their ancestral forms in hypothetical Proto-Altaic. Being written from the perspective of a plant biologist, the article remains agnostic with regard to the plausibility of the Altaic hypothesis itself. Instead, it attempts to demonstrate how linguistic evidence bears witness to the uninterrupted presence of grain legumes among the speakers of the investigated languages from the sixth millennium BC to the present day.

Studies of the development of compound tense auxiliary selection in Spanish frequently analyse ser (‘to be’) + past participle (PtP) as an anterior construction, and its disappearance as a slow replacement process starting in Old Spanish, in which the new anterior auxiliary aver (‘to have’) replaced it. This article investigates and rejects the empirical basis for this claim on the basis of a comparative analysis of Old Spanish bible translations. It is argued that the majority of tokens of ser + PtP has a resultative function, as indicated by typical patterns of verbal mood, coordination and temporal-aspectual morphology. Old Spanish translators of the bible appear to have regarded aver + PtP as being more similar to simple imperfective preterit forms like cantaba (‘s/he sang’) than to ser + PtP. Comparing the types and rates of use of aver + PtP and ser + PtP in earlier and later bible versions with the help of generalised linear mixed-effects regression models shows that ser + PtP was more stable in Old Spanish than hitherto assumed. Rather than replacing ser + PtP in Old Spanish, aver + PtP expanded at the expense of simple preterit forms. In summary, this article provides empirical evidence against the replacement hypothesis for Old Spanish, while at the same time assessing ways to quantitatively identify replacement processes in diachronic linguistics.

The article attempts to shed new light on the question if a definite article existed in Old English. First, it tries to determine what it actually means to be an article, discusses several criteria of ‘articlehood’ that have been proposed in the literature, and demonstrates that only some of them are useful for identifying the category in Old English. Next, a distinction between ‘primary’ and ‘secondary’ characteristics of articles is proposed, and the primary ones are employed in a corpus study of occurrences of the OE form se in various prose texts from the York-Toronto-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Old English Prose (YCOE). The results of that study highlight the necessity to reconceptualize the emergence of the article within a construction-grammar model, and to take notions like gradience and gradualness into account. It will be argued that the emergence of the definite article in English reflects the prior establishment of a determination slot in the prehead of the NP. Being lexically underspecified, such a grammatically established slot has the potential of recruiting default fillers, and in the case of OE definite NPs that filler happened to be se . Evidence will be provided to show that a determination slot had indeed already emerged in Old English. It was a characteristic feature of most definite NP constructions and triggered the gradual grammaticalization of the demonstrative se .