Volume 59, Issue s46-s1 - Historica

This paper traces the diachronic development of prepositional phrases (PPs) with bare institutional/location nouns (e.g. go to church , stay in bed, die in prison ) from Middle English to Late Modern English. Based on a dataset of 2,249 instances extracted from the Penn Parsed Corpora of Historical English (PPCME2, PPCEME, PPCMBE2), we investigate changes in the usage of these constructions (i.e. formal and functional features). One question addressed is why a definite determiner is apparently ‘missing’ in these constructions ( died in prison rather than  died in the prison ) and what kind of semantic interpretation this lack of overt definiteness marking triggers. Moreover, we assess whether there is evidence of these PPs becoming increasingly integrated into the extended verb phrase, by zooming in on the patterns’ semantic functions and formal features. By using collostructional analyses as well as by fitting a conditional random forest model, we show that different constructional types can be identified, which differ regarding the association strength between the elements involved as well as regarding their preferred semantic function, among other things. These results are then discussed from a usage-based, cognitive constructional perspective, indicating that the constructions at hand force us to revisit traditional assumptions about phrase structure boundaries and compositionality.

This article discusses a distinct function of the third person singular pronominal clitic =eš in Persian: to denote definiteness. In certain possessive constructions, =eš does not refer to an external possessor but serves to make its host identifiable – whether through association with another item in the linguistic or situational context or as an anaphoric definite marker without any association. The use of possessive markers for definiteness has been observed in Uralic, Trans-Eurasian, Austronesian, Semitic, and Mayan language families; this study presents evidence of a similar development in Persian, an Indo-European language of the southwestern Iranian branch. The present article examines various definite uses of =eš through colloquial examples from social media and historical examples from a New Persian corpus. The findings trace the development of =eš , illustrating how its associative link to external entities weakens over time until it functions as an anaphoric definite marker. A tentative grammaticalization path is proposed in which the abstraction of the possessive meanings leads to the eventual loss of possessive semantics in =eš , resulting in the loss of person and number features in anaphoric uses. Additionally, the article discusses how increasing frequency of =eš has contributed to its development across stages of New Persian.

Contemporary Kurdish variety groups exhibit considerable variation with respect to the lenition of voiced stops. This paper presents a first systematic overview of lenition across major varieties of Kurdish, drawing on published data and a recent questionnaire developed for studying phonological variation within Kurdish. Following recent studies on lenition, a distinction is made between lenition as a process related to earlier stages of language and lenition as a synchronically active process. Analysing diachronic sound changes in Kurdish as well as the synchronic lenition phenomena in its dialects, we conclude that while at earlier stages, Kurdish varieties favoured the lenition of voiced stops across different phonological environments, synchronically, lenition of voiced stops tends to be phonologically active only in the southernmost dialects of Central Kurdish and neighbouring Southern Kurdish and Gorani dialects, and with a limited extent, in the westernmost outliers of Northern Kurdish. It is argued that the synchronic lenition in the Gorani contact zone arose through innovation in Gorani and spread to Kurdish through substratum interference or originated in diffusion from Southern Kurdish.

The present study analyses the morphological variation of the third-person singular present tense inflection in English scientific texts from the Late Middle English to the Early Modern English period. This study delves into the historical development of this inflectional variation, focusing first on the rivalry between the interdental fricative -(e)th and the alveolar fricative -(e)s , by examining how these inflections competed and evolved in scientific prose, particularly medical recipes and treatises. Data retrieved from The Málaga Corpus of Late Middle English Scientific Prose and The Málaga Corpus of Early Modern English Scientific Prose allows the analysis of the use, distribution and frequency of these inflections from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century. The results shed light on the importance of period development and text-type in the process of morphological standardisation.

This study examines the development of stand-alone independent conditional clauses from the Old Hungarian period to the present. The analysis covers insubordinate conditional clauses with and without interjections, aiming to answer the question of what role interjections may have played in the emergence of these clauses. The results indicate that versions with interjections in the data appeared earlier (during the Old Hungarian period) and in greater quantities than those without, suggesting that interjections may have played a crucial role in the formation of indirect wishes and exclamatives/evaluations. Therefore, the independent clauses containing interjections are not merely occasional variants. This can be explained by the fact that interjections anticipate and emphasize the main characteristic of insubordinate clauses: their strong emotional charge. Since main clauses conveying emotional consequences with a more general meaning cannot be identified from the data, we consider hypoanalysis to be likely in the case of stand-alone conditional clauses.

This article addresses the use of the auxiliary do in affirmative declarative clauses (so-called periphrastic do ) during the early stages of the shift from Irish, the Celtic language spoken in Ireland, to English as the more common vernacular language there. A corpus compiled from the digital edition of the 1641 Depositions, a collection of witness testimonies recorded after a rebellion in Ireland, is used to examine the functions of periphrastic do . The focus is on possible habitual uses, since contemporary Irish English allows for the marking of habitual aspect in ways which differ significantly from the marking of habituality in other varieties of English. The data show that a periphrasis consisting of do plus the infinitive of a lexical verb (V) is often used in the 1641 Depositions in combination with markers of duration, yielding a habitual interpretation. It is argued that such uses, whose existence in the superstratal variety, Early Modern British English, has not been established, provided the conditions for the exaptation of do as a dedicated marker of habitual aspect, on the model of the habitual categories found in the verbal system of Irish.

This study reconstructs the constructionalization process of the inchoative construction in Spanish, both from a formal and semantic viewpoint, operating within the framework of (Diachronic) Construction Grammar. The statistical method of VNC (Variability-based Neighbor Clustering) is implemented in order to obtain a bottom-up periodization of the evolution of the schema. Formally, the study maps the variation between a , de and en in the preposition slot of the construction. First, the paper uncovers that the formal fixation took place before the end of the 18th century, and prepared the integration of new members in the construction. Semantically, the extension of the auxiliary slot is scrutinized, unveiling when each micro-construction emerged and how each subschema became more productive. Second, the study shows that some inchoatives are coerced into the construction by metaphorical extensions, while others are recruited by analogical extension, based on an earlier incorporated (and to some extend conventionalized) member within the same subschema. Third, it is argued that these various developments reflect different needs of creativity and expressivity in the course of the history of the construction. Finally, based on the VNC-output and the empirical data, the analysis leads to the conclusion that the constructionalization was finalized around the 18th century, when both the preposition slot fixated with the preposition a and when the auxiliary slot extended significantly to other domains, resulting in the activation of all current subschemas in contemporary Spanish.

This paper presents an analysis of the emergence, evolution and variability of negative correlative coordination ( ncc ) constructions in Indo-European, such as Armenian očʻ A ( ew ) očʻ B and Hindi nə A nə B. A new definition of ncc is put forward that takes into account the construction’s semantic and pragmatic properties, and this clause linkage strategy is analyzed in a sample of 240 historical and present-day doculects. It is argued that ncc constructions emerged in the proto-language by analogy with positive correlative conjunctions like Latin A- que B- que . The relationship between positive and negative correlative conjunctions is argued to be due to the fact that both constitute a system of question and response. Furthermore, a cyclic change is identified by which ncc markers bleach through frequent use and are regularly reinforced and renovated. A number of paths of renewal are identified, which are used to explain the variation of ncc constructions observed across the Indo-European family.