Volume 58, Issue s45-s1 - Historica

This diachronic, corpus-based study examines Spanish constructions formed with the verb tomar ‘take’ and nouns of ‘emotion’, including endogenous nouns with a target participant (e.g. cariño ‘affection’), exogenous nouns with a source or cause participant (e.g. tristeza ‘sadness’), and hybrid nouns allowing both options (e.g. miedo ‘fear’). Such constructions involve three different inchoative (‘begin to feel’) subschemas. The first one, the Prepositional-Stimulus subschema (e.g. tomar tristeza de algo ‘grow sad over something’), included exogenous and hybrid nouns and predominated in the Middle Ages, but disappeared by the 1800s. The other two subschemas, formed with endogenous and hybrid nouns, have survived until today. They include the Prepositional-Goal subschema (e.g. tomar cariño por alguien ‘grow fond of someone’), the most frequent of the two in the Middle Ages, and the Dative-Goal subschema (e.g. tomarle cariño a alguien ‘grow fond of someone’, lit. ‘take fondness to someone’), which presumably arose through analogy in the 1400s and subsequently marginalized its prepositional counterpart, becoming the default realization in present-day Spanish. Using the framework of Diachronic Construction Grammar, these changes are analyzed as involving the reconfiguration of a broader network of inchoative light verb constructions with nouns of emotion in Spanish.

This paper examines the development of the periphrastic passive voice construction in Swedish between 1300 and 1750, from the point of view of constructional change. The development involves the rise of a new auxiliary, bliva ‘remain’, originally a lexical loan from Middle Low German, which after a period of variation replaces the older auxiliary varda ‘become’. The findings reveal that the origins of the periphrastic passive construction may be found in mutative constructions with varda and adjectival complements, and the same development is then found with the loanword bliva , delayed by some hundred years. The results of quantitative analysis place the turning point in the development between 1450 and 1550. The paper relates the variation and change in passive auxiliaries to Diachronic Construction Grammar.

This paper explores the diachrony of Latin P-labile verbs (verbs that can be used transitively and intransitively with the preservation of the Patient and without a formal change), availing itself from evidence in medical and veterinary texts from the first to seventh century AD. The first part of the analysis discusses the influence of verbal semantics on the domain of lability in these texts and how lability developed as a diathetic strategy for the anticausative, the causative and the passive in Latin. Special attention is paid to the increase of P-lability as an anticausative strategy and its relation to the mediopassive and reflexive anticausative strategies in Late Latin. The second part of the analysis proposes a new explanation for the increase of P-lability in Latin and discusses the consequences of the development of a semantic-based alignment in Late Latin (the extended accusative) on the syntax and development of P-labile verbs.

The Ossetic future is generally believed to originate in compounds with Proto-Iranian * čana(h)- ‘desiring’, but the morphological and phonological details have never been explored. Examination of the Indo-Iranian evidence confirms that since the root * kanH- ‘take pleasure in’ occurs almost exclusively as a stative perfect, the only plausible source is possessive (bahuvrīhi) compounds with the derived noun * čanah- ‘desire’, which were restricted to this usage already in Old Iranian (cf. Avestan šaētō.cinah- ‘whose desire is possessions’). From denominative bases and thematic verbal nouns, *X- čanāh ‘whose desire is X N , desiring X N ’ was reinterpreted as deverbal ‘(be) wanting to X V ’ > ‘X V - fut ’ and generalized to all verbal stems. The phonological evolution to Ossetic -ʒæn- is regular; the distribution of the allomorphs -ʒæn- and -ʒin- in the Digor dialect provides indirect evidence for the placement of stress in Proto-Ossetic, which in turn permits the resolution of an old problem, the double reflex of Proto-Iranian * pati- in compounds.

In this paper, I revisit the continued debate surrounding manner of grammatical innovation, i.e. whether it is abrupt or gradual . I show that the debate is complicated by different diagnostics for manner and argue that it is best understood in terms of degree of similarity ( how similar the innovative use is to existing uses of a construction). However, even when adopting degree of similarity as a diagnostic, approaches differ with regards to how similar they find innovative and existing uses. The gradualness account argues that innovative uses are similar but distinct from existing uses, as they imply a new form-meaning pairing. A seamlessness account instead argues that innovative and existing uses are so similar that no new form-meaning pairing is required. I develop seamlessness into a theoretical position for semantic innovation in grammaticalization, which holds that grammatical innovations are maximally similar to existing uses i.e. they exhibit considerable conceptual overlap and the existing use is semantically underspecified. Seamlessness is empirically tested using semantic innovations in be going to as a case study.

Andi (East Caucasian) features a verb form that marks an event that is (still) not happening, contrary to the speaker’s expectation (i.e. ‘Still Not’ Present). This form is unusual for several reasons. First, forms of this kind are not typical for the language family. Second, while it conveys negative semantics, the form does not contain negation marking, even though segmentally it is rather heavy in comparison to other synthetic tenses. Third, to our knowledge grammatical ‘still not’ expressions are typologically uncommon. The paper describes the semantics and morphosyntactic properties of the ‘Still Not’ Present and suggests a plausible grammaticalization source by comparing dialects and closely related languages. We also try to match the data to typological categories like phasal polarity.

Despite the vast body of literature on the historical development of the theme-recipient alternation (also known as the “dative” alternation) in Chinese, most studies that have been conducted so far are limited to philological recounts of the binary choice between the prepositional dative and the ditransitive dative across dynasties, which usually spanned centuries. Against this backdrop, we conduct a state-of-the-art variationist analysis of the four variants, utilizing a large and richly annotated diachronic dataset based on a corpus of Chinese texts (1300s–1900s). Using conditional inference trees and conditional random forest analysis, we demonstrate that end-weight effects are the most stable linguistic constraint on variation, while definiteness and animacy of the theme constituent tend to be more fluid. Supplementary distinctive collexeme analysis reveals a strong collostructional interplay between verbs and the variants, including changes involving the prototypical verb of GIVING 给 gĕi .

The aim of this paper is to elaborate on the typology of affix changes due to reanalysis. By discussing the Polish nominal suffix /-ix-/ as resulting from morphological reduction, viz. the false subtraction of /-k-/ from /-isk-/, the supposed unidirectionality of affix changes, i.e., the irreversibility of affix growth, is questioned. Furthermore, the article points to the possible gradual nature of morphological reanalysis, in line with recent studies in syntactic reanalysis. Other types of affix changes, which were previously unidentified or deemed impossible, are also commented on and the supposed parallelism between affix reanalysis and grammaticalization as well as degrammaticalization is considered, including the role of analogy.