Volume 57, Issue s44-s1 - Historica

Work on Construction Grammar and Diachronic Construction Grammar has foregrounded the idea that constructions are organized as a network of interconnected form-meaning pairs. This article explores the history of the construction exemplified in the title, henceforth referred to as the Expeditionary Go construction, and its relation both to other members of the small family of English go- constructions and to the prepositional be- progressive (e.g., 1700, They were a hunting ). The analysis traces the development of expeditionary go since Old English times and argues that it was a device conveying the Subject’s remoteness from the speaker-oriented deictic centre. This function has remained basically unchanged over the course of the history of English, but the form of expeditionary clauses has been adjusted as a result of profound language-internal and language-external developments; these developments have brought expeditionary clauses and other members of the network of go -constructions, most especially admonitive clauses ( Don’t go peeping like that! ), closer together.

The morpheme dāk 得 has a broad range of functions in modern Cantonese, including being used as a particle introducing an adverbial construction, as a particle introducing the so-called ‘potential complement’ (we refer to this as the ‘long potential’) and as a verbal (quasi-)suffix (the ‘short potential’), which indicates that the state of affairs denoted by the verb may happen. In this paper, we first offer a general introduction on dāk 得 in modern Cantonese, which we then compare with Mandarin de 得 and parallel acquisitive modals in Lao, Vietnamese, and Zhuang, also with a focus on their modal meanings. We will then provide a diachronic overview of Cantonese dāk 得 based on a sample of texts from the 19th and early 20th century written in Cantonese by Western scholars, missionaries, and officers. The historical Cantonese data will be analyzed and compared to the development of the cognate morpheme de 得 in mainstream Chinese written sources: because of the limited diachronic depth of Cantonese data, this is necessary to delve further into the history of this item and of the related constructions. We will argue that: a. all the contemporary Cantonese (and Mandarin) uses seem to derive from the attainment sense of postverbal de / dāk 得; b. the vast majority of possible word order configurations were attested at some point in the recorded history of Chinese, but there appear to be also some patterns which could be specific to Cantonese; c. there seems to be a (partial) structural and semantic split between the ‘short’ potential and the ‘long’ potential; d. the adverbial construction probably had a more straightforward development.

To complement existing synchronic typological studies of the marking strategies of (past) habituality, this paper details the diachronic paths leading to and from past habitual constructions. The rich corpus evidence from the diachrony of Ancient Greek demonstrates at least four source constructions: (1) past counterfactual mood (in optative and indicative), (2) futures in the past, (3) iteratives (with - sk ) and (4) lexical sources with semantic affinity to habituality (volition, habit, love). It is argued that the former two acquire habitual meaning through an invited inference of epistemic certainty of the statement by the speaker: what certainly would have happened in the knowable past is implied to be characteristic of the past. The past forms with the so-called iterative - sk (3) suffix follow the cross-linguistically frequent evolution of pluractional constructions through a form of semantic bleaching: past iterative > frequentative > habitual > habitual imperfective. Lexical sources (4) first acquire habitual meaning in the present after which only the more heavily grammaticalized ones receive past habitual usage through semantic bleaching and generalization of usage (as reflected by host class expansions). The paper is concluded with a diachronic map of these paths into habituality and the paths leading from past habituality into other domains such as genericity.

This article studies the diachronic behaviour of the non-finite verbal (participial, gerundial) absolute construction (AC) in (pre)classical and modern Spanish translations from Latin, written between the 15th and the 18th centuries. It focuses on the convergence of and divergence between the ACs of the Spanish target texts and those of the Latin source texts, drawing on three types of translations: (i) Latin absolute constructions translated as Spanish absolutes (translated ACs), (ii) Latin absolute constructions translated as Spanish constructions other than absolutes (non-translated ACs) and (iii) Spanish absolute constructions that do not stem from Latin absolutes (ex-novo ACs). The article traces a diachronic evolution of the AC in terms of formal and functional equivalence, or creativity, and links the results to the cultural-historical context. The analysis shows that the nearly extinct, (pre)classical participial AC developed from a ‘marked’ Latin calque situated at the far end of the Communicative Distance pole to a less formal, gerundial AC, moving in the direction of Communicative Immediacy. This process of syntactic elaboration concurred with the AC’s increased frequency and was caused by language-internal mechanisms such as structural priming and form/function overlap with gerundial free adjuncts (FAs). From the 15th century onwards, a growing tendency towards unbounded construals enabled the gerundial AC to become fully entrenched in early modern Spanish, which guaranteed the survival of this construction.

The Turkic varieties of the Balkans use two main diametrically opposed subordination strategies: (i) the Turkic model, where typical subordinate clauses are prepositive, nonfinite, contain clause-final subordinators, etc. and (ii) the Indo-European model, where typical subordinate clauses are postpositive, finite, contain clause-initial subordinators, etc. The paper observes that Balkan Turkic additionally uses several kinds of subordinate clause that allow for problematic mixtures of these two models (‘X-clauses’). Spread over a spectrum between the Turkic and Indo-European extremes, X-clauses can, for instance, be prepositive but contain clause-initial subordinators. The paper, then, hypothesizes that X-clauses emerge due to uncertainties in the structural parameters of the Balkan Turkic subordination system. Such uncertainties are typical of complex systems undergoing change and arise in the present case due to the shift in Balkan Turkic away from Turkic towards Indo-European subordination.

When applied to Tai varieties beyond Southwestern Tai, Gedney’s tone box framework and its revised versions have several shortcomings, the most notable of which is the lack of consideration of diachronic issues that give rise to more complicated tonal correspondences. This paper proposes a more widely applicable Tai tone box chart with one additional tier based on the more probable tone-conditioning phonetic nature of onsets found in non-Southwestern Tai varieties. This Tai tone box chart has been designed to be paired with an ancillary chart to explain the essential diachronic processes of different Tai varieties. It thus provides insights into the revision of Proto-Tai phonological reconstructions based on tonology and support for the early-stage Southern-Northern Tai division and the Southwestern-Central Tai versus Yongnan Zhuang-Saek-Northern Zhuang divisions.

This paper looks at the vowel harmony system of Ronghong Rma (Qiang). This system has previously been described in terms of synchronic vowel alternations. This paper takes a different approach to explore the diachronic element of vowel harmony. The finding is that ‘harmonization’ is epiphenomenal and that the vowel alternations are the results of regular sound changes from an earlier stage in the language. This diachronic perspective brings into focus a chain shift in the vowel system and clarifies the etymologies of forms that have undergone these changes. It also reveals the importance of uvular consonants as conditioning environments for vowel changes in Ronghong Rma.

This paper investigates the phonological tendency of Ancient Greek to anticipate word-internal aspiration to a word-initial segment (vowel, voiceless stop, or /w/). Special attention is paid to the relationship of this tendency with hiatus resolution. A close look at the philological data shows that several processes of h- anticipation should be distinguished: in particular, various kinds of perceptually-driven leftward migration of aspiration (sporadically lexicalized) must be kept apart from a later synchronic rule that moved h to the new onset when two syllabic nuclei coalesced. The hypothesis that the latter phenomenon could accompany not only vowel coalescence but other types of hiatus resolution as well, including elision and glide-formation, may provide explanation for some hitherto obscure cases. The results of this study also have implications for the theoretical discussion of sporadicity in sound change, as they could provide further evidence for the controversial category of phonetically-conditioned sound change with probabilistic conditioning.