Volume 54, Issue 2 -

This paper compares the diachronic development of tornar ( e )+ a +infinitive (henceforth abbreviated RETURN+INF) constructions in Spanish, Catalan, and Italian, a topic that especially for Catalan and Italian has not received much attention. I develop and explore the hypothesis that due to their lexical origin, iterative constructions develop from a restitutive to a repetitive function. A diachronic analysis of a corpus of RETURN+INF tokens from the three languages suggests that the grammaticalization of RETURN+INF constructions can be measured in terms of (a) actionality and (b) restructuring as mirrored in the possibility of clitic climbing. A statistical analysis using generalized linear mixed-effects regression modeling demonstrates an interplay between restructuring and the actionality of the predicates in the development of RETURN+INF constructions: the grammaticalization process affects state, achievement, and accomplishment predicates before activity predicates because activity predicates exclude a restitutive meaning. The paper thus identifies a grammaticalization path for RETURN+INF constructions common to three Romance languages that suggests a link between typological and diachronic observations. At the same time, it identifies differences in the diachronic development of these periphrases between the Ibero-Romance languages and Italian. In addition, it proposes a statistical means of assessing quantitative differences in the degree to which a verbal periphrasis is grammaticalized across related languages.

Interfaces between grammatical domains have been considered from various perspectives in child language research and in general linguistics. The study aims to provide evidence for interfaces in acquisition of early clause-structure, based on longitudinal data from three Hebrew-acquiring toddlers. Two facets of their early speech output were examined: Usage productivity in verb-inflection, identified by a criterion of contextual appropriateness; and structural transparency/opacity of children’s speech output, with transparent forms being unambiguous in relation to their grammatical targets. These factors yielded two distinct developmental periods for the three children: I – from the onset of verb usage to productive verb inflection, and II – from productive verb inflection to disappearance of structural opacity. Period II displays a puzzling mixture of both transparent and opaque usages, not only in verb inflection, but also in use of prepositions marking objects and adverbs. These puzzles are resolved by the significant correlations that emerged between apparently unrelated linguistic systems: (1) opaque verb-forms occur mainly together with object/adverbs, and (2) transparent prepositions occur mainly in combination with transparent verbs. These unexpected convergences between different linguistic systems are discussed as underlining the role of structural transparency/opacity and as shedding new light on between-domain interfaces in language acquisition.

This paper investigates children’s interpretation of scopally ambiguous sentences containing negation and quantification, such as Donald didn’t find two guys , and Two horses didn’t jump over the fence . It has been argued, in previous literature, that children interpret such sentences only on their surface scope reading, i. e., on the interpretation ‘It’s not the case that Donald found two guys,’ instead of the adult-preferred inverse scope interpretation ‘There are two guys that Donald didn’t find,’ a phenomenon often called the Observation of Isomorphism . The present study shows, however, that this argument, even in its weakest interpretation, does not hold true, and that the apparent Isomorphism effect is an artifact of the experimental procedures used in previous studies. It also shows, based on Relevance Theory , and drawing from a series of novel experiments with 5-year-olds, that the reason why children seemed, in previous studies, to favor surface scope interpretations was because they made their decisions based on the set or information that they viewed as most “relevant” in a given context. It is concluded that children differ from adults not in scopal options their grammar allows, but in that they rank “salience” higher as a cue for general “relevance” than the Maxim of Charity , though for adults, the Maxim of Charity is at least equally relevant.

Morphemes that encode the semantic role of Beneficiary display complex patterns of polysemy. Such patterns have arisen through diachronic processes which are for the most part still unexplored. In the paper I discuss common assumptions about the directionality of semantic extension and about expected and unexpected polysemies. I show that, next to the often mentioned polysemy of Beneficiary, Recipient, Purpose and Direction, another frequent pattern includes Beneficiary, Purpose and Cause. Morphemes that exhibit such polysemy have original spatial meanings which include Location or Path, but not Direction. Notably, such original spatial meanings have been dropped in the course of semantic developments described in the paper. After discussing some well-attested diachronic developments, I show that, at least in the languages of Europe, markers of Beneficiary, Purpose, and Cause underwent an unpredicted semantic extension that led them to also indicate Direction. Such extension provides evidence for a rare development that has led a concrete spatial concept to be denoted by a morpheme that had an abstract meaning.

Language change is generally considered to originate in the spoken mode before spreading to the written mode, although the latter provides all our available data for language change until recent times. While written mode representations of speech, such as fictional dialogue, can be used, their authenticity is hard to verify. This study addresses these issues by comparing the language of the Year Books, texts which attest to oral pleading in medieval courts, and include very extensive dialogue, with legal register written-mode origin texts, in the Parliament Rolls of Medieval England. Both sets of texts were written in Anglo-Norman, arose within a fairly homogenous speech community, and cover the same time period – late thirteenth century until c. 1350. It is shown that changes known to have occurred in later medieval French are instantiated at this time in the dialogic texts, but to a lesser degree or not at all in the written register texts. Features of morphology, lexical semantic extension, and discourse syntax in these sources indicate in each case that the innovation arose and spread first in the spoken origin source. Support from diachronic change is thus offered for a continuity assumption for the primacy of the spoken mode in present and past states of language.

The quality of being proper is always presumed, for perfectly understandable reasons to do with its function in acts of reference, to be restricted to nouns or noun phrases. This article is an exploration of the idea that a defensible case can be made for the real, if often ephemeral, existence of proper verbs. Evidence is presented from four categories of usage, mainly in English, but also in French and Dutch.