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Grammaticalization And The Rise Of Configurationality In Indo Aryan
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Book Synopsis Grammaticalization and the Rise of Configurationality in Indo-Aryan by : Uta Reinöhl
Download or read book Grammaticalization and the Rise of Configurationality in Indo-Aryan written by Uta Reinöhl and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017-04-14 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines historical changes in the grammar of the Indo-Aryan languages from the period of their earliest attestations in Vedic Sanskrit (around 1000 bc) to contemporary Hindi. Uta Reinöhl focuses specifically on the rise of configurational structure as a by-product of the grammaticalization of postpositions: while Vedic Sanskrit lacks function words that constrain nominal expressions into phrasal units - one of the characteristics of a non-configurational language - New Indo-Aryan languages have postpositions which organize nominal expressions into postpositional phrases. The grammaticalization of postpositions and the concomitant syntactic changes are traced through the three millennia of Indo-Aryan attested history with a focus on Vedic Sanskrit, Middle Indic Pali and Apabhramsha, Early New Indic Old Awadhi, and finally Hindi. Among the topics discussed are the constructions in which the postpositions grammaticalize, the origins of the postpositional template, and the paradigmatization of the various elements involved into a single functional class of postpositions. The book outlines how it is semantic and pragmatic changes that induce changes on the expression side, ultimately resulting in the establishment of phrasal, and thus low-level configurational, syntax.
Book Synopsis Grammaticalization from a Typological Perspective by : Heiko Narrog
Download or read book Grammaticalization from a Typological Perspective written by Heiko Narrog and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-10-18 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume explores the way in which grammaticalization processes - whereby lexical words eventually become markers of grammatical categories - converge and differ across various types of language. While grammaticalization at its core is a unidirectional phenomenon, in which the same pathways of change are replicated across languages, certain language types and language areas have distinct preferences with respect to what they grammaticalize and how. Previous work has principally addressed this question with specific reference to languages of Southeast and East Asia that do not seem to grammaticalize paradigms of categories in the same manner as Indo-European languages, or form extensive grammaticalization chains. This volume takes a broader approach and proceeds systematically area by area: specialists in the field address the processes of grammaticalization in languages of Africa, Europe, Asia and the Pacific, and the Americas, and in creole languages. The studies reveal a number of unique pathways of grammaticalization in each language area, as well as identifying the universal shared features of the phenomenon.
Book Synopsis Multiple Preverbs in Ancient Indo-European Languages by : Chiara Zanchi
Download or read book Multiple Preverbs in Ancient Indo-European Languages written by Chiara Zanchi and published by Narr Francke Attempto Verlag. This book was released on 2019-08-26 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book investigates multiple preverbs (PVs) in some ancient IE languages (Vedic, Homeric Greek, Old Church Slavic, and Old Irish). After an introduction, it opens with the theoretical framework and a typologically-oriented overview of PVs. It then gives quantitative data about multiple PV composites and carries out philological, formal, semantic, and syntactic analyses on them. The comparison among these languages suggests that a process of accumulation lies behind multiple PV composites. Also, PV ordering is explained by different factors: semantic solidarity between PVs and verbs PVs tendency to be specified by event participants, PVs etymologies, influence from other languages. The book also contributes to casting light on the reasons for PVs grammaticalization and lexicalization. These are two distinct reanalyses triggered by the same factor, i.e. the mentioned semantic solidarity, which makes PVs be felt as redundant. They are thus reassigned salient pieces of information as actional markers (grammaticalization) or reinterpreted as part of the verb (lexicalization).
Book Synopsis Transitive Nouns and Adjectives by : John J. Lowe
Download or read book Transitive Nouns and Adjectives written by John J. Lowe and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017-06-16 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the wealth of evidence from early Indo-Aryan for the existence of transitive nouns and adjectives, a rare linguistic phenomenon which, according to some categorizations of word classes, should not occur. John Lowe shows that most transitive nouns and adjectives attested in early Indo-Aryan cannot be analysed as a type of non-finite verb category, but must be acknowledged as a distinct constructional type. The volume provides a detailed introduction to transitivity (verbal and adpositional), the categories of agent and action noun, and to early Indo-Aryan. Four periods of early Indo-Aryan are selected for study: Rigvedic Sanskrit, the earliest Indo-Aryan; Vedic Prose, a slightly later form of Sanskrit; Epic Sanskrit, a form of Sanskrit close to the standardized 'Classical' Sanskrit; and Pali, the early Middle Indo-Aryan language of the Buddhist scriptures. John Lowe shows that while each linguistic stage is different, there are shared features of transitive nouns and adjectives which apply throughout the history of early Indo-Aryan. The data is set in the wider historical context, from Proto-Indo-European to Modern Indo-Aryan, and a formal linguistic analysis of transitive nouns and adjectives is provided in the framework of Lexical-Functional Grammar.
Book Synopsis The Diachrony of Differential Object Marking in Romanian by : Virginia Hill
Download or read book The Diachrony of Differential Object Marking in Romanian written by Virginia Hill and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021-06-15 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides a comprehensive investigation of the origins, development, and stabilization of differential object marking (DOM) in Romanian. DOM, a means by which a grammar distinguishes between objects based on semantic features such as animacy or definiteness, has been a fruitful area of research in syntax, historical linguistics, and typology. In this volume, Virginia Hill and Alexandru Mardale demonstrate that Romanian DOM reflects a typological mix of Balkan and Romance patterns, and is in fact composed of three distinct mechanisms. Their analysis of these mechanisms reveals that DOM triggers in Romanian are located in the nominal domain, in contrast to languages such as Spanish, where they are located in the verbal domain. The cross-linguistic perspective adopted in the volume sheds light on existing typologies of DOM, particularly in relation to the variation observed in the merging location of the DOM particle and of the doubling pronominal clitic.
Book Synopsis Gender from Latin to Romance by : Michele Loporcaro
Download or read book Gender from Latin to Romance written by Michele Loporcaro and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018 with total page 415 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores grammatical gender in the Romance languages and dialects and its evolution from Latin. Michele Loporcaro investigates the significant diversity found in the Romance varieties in this regard; he draws on data from the Middle Ages to the present from all the Romance languages and dialects, discussing examples from Romanian to Portuguese and crucially also focusing on less widely-studied varieties such as Sursilvan, Neapolitan, and Asturian. The investigation first reveals that several varieties display more complex systems than the binary masculine/feminine contrast familiar from modern French or Italian. Moreover, it emerges that traditional accounts, whereby neuter gender was lost in the spoken Latin of the late Empire, cannot be correct: instead, the neuter gender underwent a range of different transformations from Late Latin onwards, which are responsible for the different systems that can be observed today across the Romance languages. The volume provides a detailed description of many of these systems, which in turns reveals a wealth of fascinating data, such as varieties where 'husbands' are feminine and others where 'wives' are masculine; dialects in which nouns overtly mark gender, but only in certain syntactic contexts; and one Romance variety (Asturian) in which it appears that grammatical gender has split into two concurrent systems. The volume will appeal to linguists from a range of backgrounds, including Romance linguistics, historical linguistics, typology, and morphosyntax, and is also of relevance to those working in sociology, gender studies, and psychology.
Book Synopsis Cycles in Language Change by : Miriam Bouzouita
Download or read book Cycles in Language Change written by Miriam Bouzouita and published by Oxford Studies in Diachronic a. This book was released on 2019-09-15 with total page 331 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume explores the multiple aspects of cyclical syntactic change from a wide range of empirical perspectives. The notion of 'linguistic cycle' has long been recognized as being relevant to the description of many processes of language change. In grammaticalization, a given linguistic form loses its lexical meaning - and sometimes some of its phonological content - and then gradually weakens until it ultimately vanishes. This change becomes cyclical when the grammaticalized form is replaced by an innovative item, which can then develop along exactly the same pathway. But cyclical changes have also been observed in language change outside of grammaticalization proper. The chapters in this book reflect the growing interest in the phenomenon of grammaticalization and cyclicity in generative syntax, with topics including the diachrony of negation, the syntax of determiners and pronominal clitics, the internal structure of wh-words and logical operators, cyclical changes in argument structure, and the relationship between morphology and syntax. The contributions draw on data from multiple language families, such as Indo-European, Semitic, Japonic, and Athabascan. The volume combines empirical descriptions of novel comparative data with detailed theoretical analysis, and will appeal to historical linguists working in formal and usage-based frameworks, as well as to typologists and scholars interested in language variation and change more broadly.
Book Synopsis The Development of Latin Clause Structure by : Lieven Danckaert
Download or read book The Development of Latin Clause Structure written by Lieven Danckaert and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017-06-09 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines Latin word order, and in particular the relative ordering of i) lexical verbs and direct objects (OV vs VO) and ii) auxiliaries and non-finite verbs (VAux vs AuxV). In Latin these elements can freely be ordered with respect to each other, whereas the present-day Romance languages only allow for the head-initial orders VO and AuxV. Lieven Danckaert offers a detailed, corpus-based description of these two word order alternations, focusing on their diachronic development in the period from c. 200 BC until 600 AD. The corpus data reveal that some received wisdom needs to be reconsidered: there is in fact no evidence for any major increase in productivity of the order VO during the eight centuries under investigation, and the order AuxV only becomes more frequent in clauses with a modal verb and an infinitive, not in clauses with a BE-auxiliary and a past participle. The book also explores a more fundamental question about Latin syntax, namely whether or not the language is configurational, in the sense that a phrase structure grammar (with 'higher-order constituents' such as verb phrases) is needed to describe and analyse Latin word order patterns. Four pieces of evidence are presented that suggest that Latin is indeed a fully configurational language, despite its high degree of word order flexibility. Specifically, it is shown that there is ample evidence for the existence of a verb phrase constituent. The book thus contributes to the ongoing debate regarding the status of configurationality as a language universal.
Book Synopsis Quantitative Historical Linguistics by : Gard B. Jenset
Download or read book Quantitative Historical Linguistics written by Gard B. Jenset and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work outlines a new framework for quantitatively assessing models and hypotheses in historical linguistics. It offers an in-depth explanation and discussion of the benefits of working with quantitative methods, corpus data, and corpus annotation, and the advantages of open and reproducible research
Book Synopsis Variation and Change in Gallo-Romance Grammar by : Sam Wolfe
Download or read book Variation and Change in Gallo-Romance Grammar written by Sam Wolfe and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2020-05-13 with total page 485 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume offers a wide-range of case studies on variation and change in the sub-family of the Romance languages that includes French and Occitan: Gallo-Romance. Both standard and non-standard Gallo-Romance data can be of enormous value to studies of morphosyntactic variation and change, yet, as the volume demonstrates, non-standard and comparative Gallo-Romance data have often been lacking in both synchronic and diachronic studies. Following an introduction that sets out the conceptual background, the volume is divided into three parts whose chapters explore a variety of topics in the domains of sentence structure, the verb complex, and word structure. The empirical foundation of the volume is exceptionally rich, drawing on standard and non-standard data from French, Occitan, Francoproven�al, Picard, Wallon, and Norman. This diversity is also reflected in the theoretical and conceptual approaches adopted, which span traditional philology, sociolinguistics, formal morphological and syntactic theory, semantics, and discourse-pragmatics. The volume will thus be an indispensable tool for researchers and students in French and (Gallo-) Romance linguistics as well as for readers interested in grammatical theory, sociolinguistics, and historical linguistics.
Book Synopsis Germanic Phylogeny by : Frederik Hartmann
Download or read book Germanic Phylogeny written by Frederik Hartmann and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2023-03-30 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides a computational re-evaluation of the genealogical relations between the early Germanic families and of their diversification from their most recent common ancestor, Proto-Germanic. It also proposes a novel computational approach to the problem of linguistic diversification more broadly, using agent-based simulation of speech communities over time. This new method is presented alongside more traditional phylogenetic inference, and the respectiveresults are compared and evaluated. Frederik Hartmann demonstrates that the traditional and novel methods each capture different aspects of this highly complex real-world process; crucially, the new computational approach proposed here offers a new way of investigating the wave-like properties oflanguage relatedness that were previously less accessible. As well as validating the findings of earlier research, the results of this study also generate new insights and shed light on much-debated issues in the field. The conclusion is that the break-up of Germanic should be understood as a gradual disintegration process in which tree-like branching effects are rare.
Book Synopsis Romance Object Clitics by : Diego Pescarini
Download or read book Romance Object Clitics written by Diego Pescarini and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021-03-25 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers an empirical and theoretical exploration of the development of object clitic pronouns in the Romance languages, drawing on data from Latin, medieval vernaculars, modern Romance languages, and lesser-known dialects. Diego Pescarini examines phonological, morphological, and especially syntactic aspects of Romance object clitics, using the findings to reconstruct their evolution from Latin to Romance and to model clitic placement in modern Romance languages. On the theoretical side, the volume engages with previous accounts of clitics, particularly in generative theory. It challenges the received idea that cliticization resulted from a form of syntactic deficiency; instead, it proposes that clitics resulted from the feature endowment of discourse features, which initially caused freezing of certain pronominal forms and then - through reanalysis - their successive incorporation to verbal hosts. This approach leads to a revision of earlier analyses of well-known phenomena such as interpolation, climbing, and enclisis/proclisis alternations, and to new approaches to issues including V2 syntax, scrambling, and stylistic fronting, among many others.
Book Synopsis Dative External Possessors in Early English by : Cynthia L. Allen
Download or read book Dative External Possessors in Early English written by Cynthia L. Allen and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2019-09-26 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume is the first systematic, corpus-based examination of dative external possessors in Old and Early Middle English and their diachronic development. Modern English is unusual among European languages in not having a productive dative external possessor construction, whereby the possessor is in the dative case and behaves like an element of the sentence rather than part of the possessive phrase. This type of construction was found in Old English, however, especially in expressions of inalienable possession; it appeared in variation with the internal possessors in the genitive case, which then became the only productive possibility in Middle English. In this book, Cynthia Allen traces the use of dative external possessors in the texts of the Old and early Middle English periods and explores how the empirical data fit with the hypotheses put forward to date. She draws on recent developments in linguistic theory to evaluate both language-internal explanations for the loss of the dative construction and the possible role of language contact, especially with the Brythonic Celtic languages. The book will be of interest to students and researchers in the fields of historical syntax and morphology, language variation and change, and the comparative syntax of the Germanic languages.
Book Synopsis Arabic Historical Dialectology by : Clive Holes
Download or read book Arabic Historical Dialectology written by Clive Holes and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-08-30 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book, by a group of leading international scholars, outlines the history of the spoken dialects of Arabic from the Arab Conquests of the seventh century up to the present day. It specifically investigates the evolution of Arabic as a spoken language, in contrast to the many existing studies that focus on written Classical or Modern Standard Arabic. The volume begins with a discursive introduction that deals with important issues in the general scholarly context, including the indigenous myth and probable reality of the history of Arabic; Arabic dialect geography and typology; types of internally and externally motivated linguistic change; social indexicalisation; and pidginization and creolization in Arabic-speaking communities. Most chapters then focus on developments in a specific region - Mauritania, the Maghreb, Egypt, the Levant, the Northern Fertile Crescent, the Gulf, and South Arabia - with one exploring Judaeo-Arabic, a group of varieties historically spread over a wider area. The remaining two chapters in the volume examine individual linguistic features of particular historical interest and controversy, specifically the origin and evolution of the b- verbal prefix, and the adnominal linker -an/-in. The volume will be of interest to scholars and students of the linguistic and social history of Arabic as well as to comparative linguists interested in topics such as linguistic typology and language change.
Book Synopsis Portuguese Relative Clauses in Synchrony and Diachrony by : Adriana Cardoso
Download or read book Portuguese Relative Clauses in Synchrony and Diachrony written by Adriana Cardoso and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017-10-06 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores language variation and change from the perspective of generative syntax, based on a case study of relative clauses in contemporary European Portuguese and earlier stages of Portuguese. Adriana Cardoso offers a comparative account of three linguistic phenomena in the synchrony and diachrony of Portuguese-remnant-internal relativization, extraposition of restrictive relative clauses, and appositive relativization-and shows that the changes affecting these structures conspired to reduce the patterns of nominal discontinuity available in the language. Adopting a cross-linguistic perspective, she additionally shows that this series of changes transformed Portuguese from a 'Germanic-like' language, with a wide range of phrasal discontinuities, to a 'non-Germanic type', with more restricted patterns of discontinuity. The volume will be of particular interest to scholars working on Portuguese syntax, but also to Romance linguists and all those interested in historical and comparative syntax more widely.
Book Synopsis Word Order Change by : Ana Maria Martins
Download or read book Word Order Change written by Ana Maria Martins and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume explores word order change within the framework of diachronic generative syntax and offers new insights into word order, syntactic movement, and related phenomena. It draws on data from a wide range of languages including Sanskrit, Tocharian, Portuguese, Irish, Hungarian and Coptic Egyptian.
Book Synopsis Micro-change and Macro-change in Diachronic Syntax by : Eric Mathieu
Download or read book Micro-change and Macro-change in Diachronic Syntax written by Eric Mathieu and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017-06-20 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The chapters in this volume address the process of syntactic change at different granularities. The language-particular component of a grammar is now usually assumed to be nothing more than the specification of the grammatical properties of a set of lexical items. Accordingly, grammar change must reduce to lexical change. And yet these micro-changes can cumulatively alter the typological character of a language (a macro-change). A central puzzle in diachronic syntax is how to relate macro-changes to micro-changes. Several chapters in this volume describe specific micro-changes: changes in the syntactic properties of a particular lexical item or class of lexical items. Other chapters explore links between micro-change and macro-change, using devices such as grammar competition at the individual and population level, recurring diachronic pathways, and links between acquisition biases and diachronic processes. This book is therefore a great companion to the recent literature on the micro- versus macro-approaches to parameters in synchronic syntax. One of its important contributions is the demonstration of how much we can learn about synchronic linguistics through the way languages change: the case studies included provide diachronic insight into many syntactic constructions that have been the target of extensive recent synchronic research, including tense, aspect, relative clauses, stylistic fronting, verb second, demonstratives, and negation. Languages discussed include several archaic and contemporary Romance and Germanic varieties, as well as Greek, Hungarian, and Chinese, among many others.
