Volume 51, Issue s38-s1 - Historica

The goal of this paper is to contribute to the understanding of the diachronic development of the Lokono-Wayuunaiki subgroup of the Arawak language family by focusing on a structured set of lexemes of recurrent interest for historical linguists. In this paper, I reconstruct the cardinal numerals from ‘one’ to ‘four’ in Proto-Lokono-Wayuunaiki (PLW). For each reconstructed etymon, I will discuss how regular sound change and attested morphological patterns support the reconstructed forms and the implied diachronic developments in the two daughter languages, Lokono and Wayuunaiki. On the basis of these reconstructions, I argue that the form for ‘three’ and the construction involved in the derivation of the form for ‘four’ constitute innovations shared only by Lokono and Wayuunaiki among Arawak languages, thus supporting the recognition of Lokono-Wayuunaiki as a legitimate subgroup of the Arawak family.

This article examines the history, from Old English times to the first quarter of the twentieth century, of the Intransitive Motion Construction. It compares the development of its result subschema ( The trolley rumbled through the tunnel ), where the verb is one of sound emission, with the development of other subschemas of the construction, in particular the manner subschema ( The man walked in ), where the verb denotes manner of motion. As shown by earlier research, the manner subschema and the manner of motion lexicon have greatly expanded since the Old English period, especially in Modern English. The result subschema, by contrast, although attested as far back as Old English, remains marginal until the nineteenth century, when it finally gains in importance, thus making the Intransitive Motion Construction more versatile. This expansion in the conceptual range of the construction, from predominantly coding manner of motion to describing other highly specific details of motion, such as the sound resulting from it, is linked to the addition to the English lexicon, in relatively recent times, of a great number of new sound verbs whose frequency of use has been constantly on the increase. Furthermore, the paper argues that these changes in the English sound verb inventory are also responsible for some of the developments undergone by the so-called Way -construction ( The steamer plashed its way forward ) in the Late Modern English period.

The most significant Latin-Portuguese medieval grammatical treatise, due mainly to its complexity and the great number of folios, remains unpublished. It originates from the Cistercian Monastery of Alcobaça and belongs to the Portuguese National Library, codex Alc. 79. The manuscript presents the (unfinished) incipit Hic incipiunt notabilia que fecit cunctis and is commonly known by the Latin noun Notabilia [noteworthy things]. The Alcobacensis manuscript is a quite elaborate volume, copied perhaps by two hands and it is divided into 31 chapters. The text identifies several main sources, such as Donatus (mid-4th century), Priscian (late 5th to early 6th century), Alexander of Villa Dei (c.1170–c.1250), Giovanni Balbi de Genova (fl.1286–1298), and two pre-modist or speculative grammarians, Petrus Helias (c.1100–post-1166) and Robert Kilwardby (c.1215–1279), but it might have other unnamed references, such as, hypothetically, the Catalan-Aragonese grammaticae proverbiandi (fifteenth century) and the Italian Notabilia by Giovanni da Soncino (? –c.1363).

This paper studies the linguistic change whereby Spanish dar prevailed as the default verb to express causation when taking a state noun as its object, displacing alternatives such as hacer vergüenza ‘to cause embarrassment’ or poner miedo ‘to frighten’. In spite of the seeming regularity of the dar- plus-state-noun pattern, it is argued that this collocational pattern has an idiosyncratic character, since not all combinations of lexical units conveying an equivalent meaning are acceptable in present day Spanish, whilst some alternatives that are currently possible in related languages and were commonly found in previous stages of this language’s history ( hacer miedo lit. ‘to make fear’) are no longer available. The study tries to show that the idiosyncratic character of these combinations in present-day Spanish can be explained in diachronic terms and that they are the result of two frequency effects that have been observed in other instances of linguistic change: on the one hand, the prevalence as productive patterns of linguistic structures with a high type frequency and, on the other, the resilience of structures with a high token frequency.

The origin of the Germanic suffixes forming occupational titles and agent nouns – masculine *- ārijaz (the ancestor of Modern English - er ) and its feminine counterpart reflected in Old English as - estre and in Modern as - ster – is an old problem in Germanic historical morphology. The masculine “agentive” suffix, which occurs in all the subgroups of Germanic, is generally presumed to be of Latin origin, though it occurs mostly with native derivational bases even in the earliest attested Germanic languages; the latter is believed to be native, but has no accepted etymology, and its limited range of occurrence in Germanic remains unexplained. It will be argued that the two suffixes are etymologically connected in a hitherto unsuspected way, that the traditional opinion about the origin of *- ārijaz should be revised, and that both suffixes have interesting Indo-European cognates outside Germanic.

This paper has two goals: First it offers some theoretical reflections on the relations between grammaticalization and constructionalization. Secondly, the paper discusses a case study as an instance of constructionalization, arguing in favor of the passive interpretation of the Italian construction formed by the verb vedersi ‘to see oneself’ followed by the past participle. The synchronic description of the syntactic, semantic and pragmatic features of this construction in Modern Italian is accompanied by a diachronic investigation based on a corpus of texts from the thirteenth century on. Results show the gradual emergence of the passive interpretation through reanalysis of a reflexive construction and the development of idiosyncratic semantic and pragmatic features distinguishing the vedersi -construction from the standard essere ‘be’-passive.

In Kiranti languages, rich alternations in verbal paradigms make internal reconstruction possible, and allow a better understanding of the vowels and codas of the proto-language than is possible for other parts of speech. This paper, using data from four representative languages (Wambule, Khaling, Bantawa, Limbu), proposes a new approach to Proto- Kiranti historical linguistics combining the comparative method and internal reconstruction, and taking morphological alternations and analogy into account. It presents a comprehensive account of the sound correspondences between the four target languages and reconstructs more than 280 proto-Kiranti verb roots.

This paper deals with the problem of linguistic homoplasy (parallel or backward development), how it can be detected, what kinds of linguistic homoplasy can be distinguished and which varieties of the phenomenon are the most deleterious for the reconstruction of language phylogeny. It is proposed that language phylogeny reconstruction should consist of two main stages. Firstly, a strict consensus tree should be built on the basis of high-quality input data elaborated with the help of the main phylogenetic methods (such as Neighbor-joining, Bayesian MCMC, and Maximum parsimony), and ancestral character states, allowing us to reveal a certain number of homoplastic characters. Secondly, after the detected instances of homoplasy are eliminated from the input matrix, the consensus tree is to be compiled again. It is expected that after homoplastic optimization it will be possible to better resolve individual “problem clades”, and generally the homoplasy-optimized phylogeny should be more robust than the tree constructed initially. The proposed procedure is tested on the 110-item Swadesh wordlists of the Lezgian and Tsezic groups. The Lezgian and Tsezic results generally support theoretical expectations. The MLN (minimal lateral network) method, currently implemented in the LingPy software, is a helpful tool for the detection of linguistic homoplasy.

This paper applies quantitative methods in palaeography. It develops tree-structured regression models of the palaeographical variation found in a synchronic corpus of texts written in orthographically less standardised late Middle English and establishes their accuracy. There are sixteen models, each one relating to a letter-shape known to distinguish the Gothic cursive scripts Anglicana and Secretary. The models predict the presence of the individual letter-shape from one or more of the following variables, in no particular order: (1) localisation of texts’ orthographic variation; (2) text-type; and (3) in-word position. The discussion asks why several Secretary letter-shapes cluster in documents localisable to County Durham and the area further north, given the script’s association with (a) institutions of national administration in the London-Westminster area and (b) orthographic standardisation. It concludes that the linguistics and the palaeography do not co-vary during this period in the history of the English language and suggests that it may illuminate studies of the gradient between Anglicana and Secretary to pay attention to provincial centres, not least Durham.

Proto-Germanic (PGmc.) ai in stressed syllables shows varied outcomes in Germanic languages ( ā, ē, ei ), with many of these developments being conditioned by different phonological contexts. This article presents a reconstruction that unifies this variation by assuming that the monophthongisation spread over ‘Germania’ in two waves with different scopes and directions. The first wave expanded from north to south and was primarily limited to the contexts before - h and - r . A second wave, affecting the remaining instances of PGmc. ai , did not reach Old High German and Old West Nordic. The whole process covered the time between 400 and 900. The monophthongisation of PGmc. ai does not reflect any structural contrast among the Germanic languages, but the results had a differentiating impact on their vowel systems. The presented reconstruction is consistent with the information from runic inscriptions. It supposes a geographical configuration of tribes in a post-Migration setting.

The Spanish word frente (O.Sp. fruente <Lat. frōns ), meaning ‘forehead’, has changed gradually over time to be incorporated into a wide variety of modern forms that convey locative meanings and spatial relations as well as personal qualities. The purpose of the current study is to determine approximately when these new forms incorporating frente developed, the mechanisms for these various changes, and the cognitive ramifications of such developments. A total of 725 tokens of frente from works of fiction spanning three time periods (1200–1450; 1451–1750; 1751–2000) are analyzed quantitatively and qualitatively according to collocation, meaning, and syntactic phrase. Each of these analyses, when viewed holistically, shows that the original source lexeme has largely decategorialized as a noun and has been abstracted of its locative/spatial characteristics to be gradually incorporated into prepositional and adverbial forms. It is shown that, conceptually, prepositions profile spatial relations between a trajector and a landmark whereas adverbs profile the location of a trajector alone. These grammatical uses of frente as well as other even more abstract uses denoting personal qualities have developed over time due to cognitive processes such as abstraction, synecdoche, metaphor, and inference. Cases such as the evolution of frente from concrete noun to uses in locative/spatial forms as well as forms with even more abstract meanings give further justification for the need of a linguistic model that is cognitive-based.