The History of Negation in the Languages of Europe and the Mediterranean, 2020
Looking at the changes in the expression of sentential negation in various languages of Europe an... more Looking at the changes in the expression of sentential negation in various languages of Europe and the Mediterranean, this chapter presents empirical generalizations about Jespersen’s cycle. The focus lies on incipient Jespersen’s cycle—that is, the factors contributing to the emergence and generalization of new items that have the potential to successfully become new standard expressions of negation. The chapter rejects a teleological view of Jespersen’s cycle and therefore broadens the empirical base by also looking at languages in which there are linguistic elements that seem to fulfil at least some criteria of successful new negative markers, but which nevertheless never reach the next expected step in the development. It furthermore highlights two topics rarely discussed in the literature on Jespersen’s cycle: the comparative speed of the development in different languages and the fate of the original negators after the end of cycle.
The History of Negation in the Languages of Europe and the Mediterranean, 2020
This chapter argues that, while the creation of indefinites from generic nouns is grammaticalizat... more This chapter argues that, while the creation of indefinites from generic nouns is grammaticalization in the form of upwards reanalysis from N to R, the quantifier and free-choice cycles do not in fact constitute instances of grammaticalization. Indefinites restricted to stronger negative-polarity contexts are not more functional than indefinites licensed in weaker negative-polarity contexts. Rather, it is argued that implicational semantic features requiring roofing by different types of operators situated in the Q head of indefinites, and in particular the way they are acquired in first language acquisition, are responsible for the diachronic developments. Negative concord items arise through an acquisitional mechanism maximizing the number of agreement relations in the acquired grammar consistent with the primary linguistic data.
The History of Negation in the Languages of Europe and the Mediterranean, 2020
This chapter turns to external motivations for changes in the licensing conditions of indefinites... more This chapter turns to external motivations for changes in the licensing conditions of indefinites and in their series formation. It is shown by means of selected examples that language contact is not so much responsible for triggering the quantifier or free-choice cycles, but rather that the distribution of individual indefinites as well as of entire series may be influenced by patterns in contact languages. This may lead for instance to the imposition of negative concord, or the restructuring of an entire indefinite system after the model of a contact language. The chapter furthermore addresses the role of variation within the diasystem of one language for the advancement of changes affecting indefinites in the scope of negation.
This chapter compares the syntax of the three best attested medieval Brittonic languages across a... more This chapter compares the syntax of the three best attested medieval Brittonic languages across a range of areas, including word order, verbal syntax and agreement, verbnouns, subordinate clauses and noun phrases. In many cases, innovations due to grammaticalization or language contact can be peeled away to provide a sense of the ancestral syntactic structure. In other cases, close similarity between the languages suggests little change since Brittonic. A number of more difficult cases, for instance, marking of embedded negation, the syntax of the verbnoun and that of the copula, raise more challenging issues that are discussed in this chapter.
Data gathered from social media have been used extensively to examine lexical dialect variation i... more Data gathered from social media have been used extensively to examine lexical dialect variation in widely used languages such as English and Spanish, but their use to date in morphosyntax and for lesser-used languages has been more limited. This paper tests the usefulness of using data derived from Twitter to address traditional questions in dialect syntax and sociolinguistics. It uses two cases studies from Welsh – the form of the second-person singular pronoun in various syntactic contexts, and the availability of auxiliary deletion – to assess whether datasets based on Twitter data can successfully replicate and enhance results derived by traditional means. The results of the case studies coincide to a large extent with distributions established in existing studies, even ones using entirely different methods, such as dialect questionnaires or acceptability judgment tests. Twitter data also show considerable success in establishing implicational hierarchies and conditioning factor...
Diachronica. International Journal for Historical Linguistics, 2018
This article investigates the pragmatic function of new negative markers during incipient renewal... more This article investigates the pragmatic function of new negative markers during incipient renewal of negation in ‘Jespersen’s cycle’. We outline a typology of these markers, suggesting a pathway by which they begin as specialized for use with discourse-old propositions and later expand to inferred propositions before finally becoming possible with discourse-new propositions. This framework is applied to an overlooked case of Jespersen’s cycle in North Germanic: replacement of early Norwegian ei(gi) “not” by ekki (originally “nothing”) from 1250 to 1550. We document a sharp rise in frequency of ekki around 1425, suggesting that, until then, ekki had been restricted to negating discourse-old propositions. Once this constraint was lifted, ei(gi) and ekki competed directly, resulting in rapid replacement of ei(gi) by ekki. This typologically unusual direct replacement of a negator with no intervening doubling stage can be attributed to the new negator’s origin as a negative indefinite a...
Some languages use a special form of the noun, a “numerative”, after some or all numerals. In suc... more Some languages use a special form of the noun, a “numerative”, after some or all numerals. In such languages, a distinct numerative is typically not available for all nouns, but rather only for a small subset, forming a morphological “minor category” (Corbett 2000). We examine how such a system emerges and disintegrates diachronically, looking in detail at Welsh, a language in which a distinct numerative emerged as the result of the phonological attrition of plural suffixes and analogical extension of new plural suffixes to all relevant syntactic environments except after numerals. Nouns with distinct numeratives tend to be animate and to denote units frequently counted, an association previously noted also for minor duals (Plank 1996). We suggest that this association arose in Welsh via differential analogical extension in two directions: animates resisted analogical extension of the pattern numeral + singular noun; and animates were most receptive to extension of the pattern numer...
Morphosyntactic dialect variation, once a neglected area of dialect research, has recently witnes... more Morphosyntactic dialect variation, once a neglected area of dialect research, has recently witnessed a large growth in interest. Various methods from geospatial data analysis have been applied to morphosyntactic data. To date, the focus has largely been on analyzing the distribution of stable patterns of variation. This article extends this work to examine patterns of ongoing change. It uses a body of data from the Syntactic Atlas of Welsh Dialects and the Siarad Corpus of spoken Welsh to examine the innovation and diffusion of a new second-person singular pronoun, chdi, testing the usefulness of Geographically Weighted Regression (GWR) as a method for identifying and modeling patterns of ongoing syntactic change. It is shown that GWR provides plausible models of the diachronic development of changes that are still in progress. Furthermore, it allows us to test whether rates of change are constant across geographical space, allowing us to test whether the Constant Rate Hypothesis (t...
Historical linguists seeking explanations for syntactic innovation (actuation) in the process of ... more Historical linguists seeking explanations for syntactic innovation (actuation) in the process of transmission of syntactic systems from one generation to the next encounter the paradox that whatever grammatical property is undergoing change must have been acquired successfully by children in the not too distant past (the logical problem of language acquisition). If conditions for successful acquisition were present then and if children are swift and efficient acquirers of language, as much research in language acquisition suggests, then it is puzzling why faithful transmission of such a system should have failed to occur. This chapter considers endogenous and exogenous solutions to this core question which locate the motivation for change variously in: (i) spontaneous innovation; (ii) alteration in conditions of acquisition by language use; (iii) alteration in conditions of acquisition by other linguistic changes (including typological accounts); (iv) imperfect acquisition due to delayed onset or limited access; (v) alteration in conditions of acquisition due to coexistence of more than one grammatical system (including speech of non-native speakers). It considers which of these could be considered endogenous or exogenous on various different understandings of the term, arguing ultimately that endogenous change does not exist and all change is exogenous, but only because truly endogenous transmission (language acquisition) does not exist in practice.
Lightfoot (2002) argues that syntactic reconstruction is rendered impossible by the lack of any a... more Lightfoot (2002) argues that syntactic reconstruction is rendered impossible by the lack of any analogue in syntax to the traditional notion of the phonological ‘correspondence set’ of the Comparative Method and by the radical discontinuity caused by reanalysis between successive grammars. Alice Harris and Lyle Campbell, in various works, have defended the notion of ‘syntactic pattern’ as the analogue of the correspondence set, arguing that patterns can be compared across languages, with innovations being stripped away to reveal aspects of the protolanguage. In this article, I argue that syntactic reconstruction can be carried out while maintaining and indeed utilizing core notions in generative approaches to syntactic change such as the central role of reanalysis and child language acquisition and the distinction between the abstract grammatical system and the surface output of that system. Reanalysis itself is constrained by the fact that both pre- and post-reanalysis grammars mus...
The History of Negation in the Languages of Europe and the Mediterranean, 2020
This chapter turns to external motivations for Jespersen’s cycle. Given the apparent diffusion pa... more This chapter turns to external motivations for Jespersen’s cycle. Given the apparent diffusion pattern of the development in northwestern Europe observed in chapter 2, the current chapter considers the question of whether Jespersen’s cycle was a single innovation that spread through language contact, or whether there were several separate instances of Jespersen’s cycle in the languages of Europe and the Mediterranean. The timing of the changes in the different languages are mapped to the socio-historical situations, leading to the conclusion that in northwestern Europe at least, the trigger of Jespersen’s cycle was much less frequently contact-induced than previously thought. An in-depth case study of three Afro-Asiatic languages in North Africa, however, shows that language contact can lead to the diffusion of Jespersen’s cycle across a wide area. Furthermore, the stability of the transitional stage II may be related to the type of contact situation.
The History of Negation in the Languages of Europe and the Mediterranean, 2020
Looking at the changes in the expression of sentential negation in various languages of Europe an... more Looking at the changes in the expression of sentential negation in various languages of Europe and the Mediterranean, this chapter presents empirical generalizations about Jespersen’s cycle. The focus lies on incipient Jespersen’s cycle—that is, the factors contributing to the emergence and generalization of new items that have the potential to successfully become new standard expressions of negation. The chapter rejects a teleological view of Jespersen’s cycle and therefore broadens the empirical base by also looking at languages in which there are linguistic elements that seem to fulfil at least some criteria of successful new negative markers, but which nevertheless never reach the next expected step in the development. It furthermore highlights two topics rarely discussed in the literature on Jespersen’s cycle: the comparative speed of the development in different languages and the fate of the original negators after the end of cycle.
The History of Negation in the Languages of Europe and the Mediterranean, 2020
This chapter argues that, while the creation of indefinites from generic nouns is grammaticalizat... more This chapter argues that, while the creation of indefinites from generic nouns is grammaticalization in the form of upwards reanalysis from N to R, the quantifier and free-choice cycles do not in fact constitute instances of grammaticalization. Indefinites restricted to stronger negative-polarity contexts are not more functional than indefinites licensed in weaker negative-polarity contexts. Rather, it is argued that implicational semantic features requiring roofing by different types of operators situated in the Q head of indefinites, and in particular the way they are acquired in first language acquisition, are responsible for the diachronic developments. Negative concord items arise through an acquisitional mechanism maximizing the number of agreement relations in the acquired grammar consistent with the primary linguistic data.
The History of Negation in the Languages of Europe and the Mediterranean, 2020
This chapter turns to external motivations for changes in the licensing conditions of indefinites... more This chapter turns to external motivations for changes in the licensing conditions of indefinites and in their series formation. It is shown by means of selected examples that language contact is not so much responsible for triggering the quantifier or free-choice cycles, but rather that the distribution of individual indefinites as well as of entire series may be influenced by patterns in contact languages. This may lead for instance to the imposition of negative concord, or the restructuring of an entire indefinite system after the model of a contact language. The chapter furthermore addresses the role of variation within the diasystem of one language for the advancement of changes affecting indefinites in the scope of negation.
This chapter compares the syntax of the three best attested medieval Brittonic languages across a... more This chapter compares the syntax of the three best attested medieval Brittonic languages across a range of areas, including word order, verbal syntax and agreement, verbnouns, subordinate clauses and noun phrases. In many cases, innovations due to grammaticalization or language contact can be peeled away to provide a sense of the ancestral syntactic structure. In other cases, close similarity between the languages suggests little change since Brittonic. A number of more difficult cases, for instance, marking of embedded negation, the syntax of the verbnoun and that of the copula, raise more challenging issues that are discussed in this chapter.
Data gathered from social media have been used extensively to examine lexical dialect variation i... more Data gathered from social media have been used extensively to examine lexical dialect variation in widely used languages such as English and Spanish, but their use to date in morphosyntax and for lesser-used languages has been more limited. This paper tests the usefulness of using data derived from Twitter to address traditional questions in dialect syntax and sociolinguistics. It uses two cases studies from Welsh – the form of the second-person singular pronoun in various syntactic contexts, and the availability of auxiliary deletion – to assess whether datasets based on Twitter data can successfully replicate and enhance results derived by traditional means. The results of the case studies coincide to a large extent with distributions established in existing studies, even ones using entirely different methods, such as dialect questionnaires or acceptability judgment tests. Twitter data also show considerable success in establishing implicational hierarchies and conditioning factor...
Diachronica. International Journal for Historical Linguistics, 2018
This article investigates the pragmatic function of new negative markers during incipient renewal... more This article investigates the pragmatic function of new negative markers during incipient renewal of negation in ‘Jespersen’s cycle’. We outline a typology of these markers, suggesting a pathway by which they begin as specialized for use with discourse-old propositions and later expand to inferred propositions before finally becoming possible with discourse-new propositions. This framework is applied to an overlooked case of Jespersen’s cycle in North Germanic: replacement of early Norwegian ei(gi) “not” by ekki (originally “nothing”) from 1250 to 1550. We document a sharp rise in frequency of ekki around 1425, suggesting that, until then, ekki had been restricted to negating discourse-old propositions. Once this constraint was lifted, ei(gi) and ekki competed directly, resulting in rapid replacement of ei(gi) by ekki. This typologically unusual direct replacement of a negator with no intervening doubling stage can be attributed to the new negator’s origin as a negative indefinite a...
Some languages use a special form of the noun, a “numerative”, after some or all numerals. In suc... more Some languages use a special form of the noun, a “numerative”, after some or all numerals. In such languages, a distinct numerative is typically not available for all nouns, but rather only for a small subset, forming a morphological “minor category” (Corbett 2000). We examine how such a system emerges and disintegrates diachronically, looking in detail at Welsh, a language in which a distinct numerative emerged as the result of the phonological attrition of plural suffixes and analogical extension of new plural suffixes to all relevant syntactic environments except after numerals. Nouns with distinct numeratives tend to be animate and to denote units frequently counted, an association previously noted also for minor duals (Plank 1996). We suggest that this association arose in Welsh via differential analogical extension in two directions: animates resisted analogical extension of the pattern numeral + singular noun; and animates were most receptive to extension of the pattern numer...
Morphosyntactic dialect variation, once a neglected area of dialect research, has recently witnes... more Morphosyntactic dialect variation, once a neglected area of dialect research, has recently witnessed a large growth in interest. Various methods from geospatial data analysis have been applied to morphosyntactic data. To date, the focus has largely been on analyzing the distribution of stable patterns of variation. This article extends this work to examine patterns of ongoing change. It uses a body of data from the Syntactic Atlas of Welsh Dialects and the Siarad Corpus of spoken Welsh to examine the innovation and diffusion of a new second-person singular pronoun, chdi, testing the usefulness of Geographically Weighted Regression (GWR) as a method for identifying and modeling patterns of ongoing syntactic change. It is shown that GWR provides plausible models of the diachronic development of changes that are still in progress. Furthermore, it allows us to test whether rates of change are constant across geographical space, allowing us to test whether the Constant Rate Hypothesis (t...
Historical linguists seeking explanations for syntactic innovation (actuation) in the process of ... more Historical linguists seeking explanations for syntactic innovation (actuation) in the process of transmission of syntactic systems from one generation to the next encounter the paradox that whatever grammatical property is undergoing change must have been acquired successfully by children in the not too distant past (the logical problem of language acquisition). If conditions for successful acquisition were present then and if children are swift and efficient acquirers of language, as much research in language acquisition suggests, then it is puzzling why faithful transmission of such a system should have failed to occur. This chapter considers endogenous and exogenous solutions to this core question which locate the motivation for change variously in: (i) spontaneous innovation; (ii) alteration in conditions of acquisition by language use; (iii) alteration in conditions of acquisition by other linguistic changes (including typological accounts); (iv) imperfect acquisition due to delayed onset or limited access; (v) alteration in conditions of acquisition due to coexistence of more than one grammatical system (including speech of non-native speakers). It considers which of these could be considered endogenous or exogenous on various different understandings of the term, arguing ultimately that endogenous change does not exist and all change is exogenous, but only because truly endogenous transmission (language acquisition) does not exist in practice.
Lightfoot (2002) argues that syntactic reconstruction is rendered impossible by the lack of any a... more Lightfoot (2002) argues that syntactic reconstruction is rendered impossible by the lack of any analogue in syntax to the traditional notion of the phonological ‘correspondence set’ of the Comparative Method and by the radical discontinuity caused by reanalysis between successive grammars. Alice Harris and Lyle Campbell, in various works, have defended the notion of ‘syntactic pattern’ as the analogue of the correspondence set, arguing that patterns can be compared across languages, with innovations being stripped away to reveal aspects of the protolanguage. In this article, I argue that syntactic reconstruction can be carried out while maintaining and indeed utilizing core notions in generative approaches to syntactic change such as the central role of reanalysis and child language acquisition and the distinction between the abstract grammatical system and the surface output of that system. Reanalysis itself is constrained by the fact that both pre- and post-reanalysis grammars mus...
The History of Negation in the Languages of Europe and the Mediterranean, 2020
This chapter turns to external motivations for Jespersen’s cycle. Given the apparent diffusion pa... more This chapter turns to external motivations for Jespersen’s cycle. Given the apparent diffusion pattern of the development in northwestern Europe observed in chapter 2, the current chapter considers the question of whether Jespersen’s cycle was a single innovation that spread through language contact, or whether there were several separate instances of Jespersen’s cycle in the languages of Europe and the Mediterranean. The timing of the changes in the different languages are mapped to the socio-historical situations, leading to the conclusion that in northwestern Europe at least, the trigger of Jespersen’s cycle was much less frequently contact-induced than previously thought. An in-depth case study of three Afro-Asiatic languages in North Africa, however, shows that language contact can lead to the diffusion of Jespersen’s cycle across a wide area. Furthermore, the stability of the transitional stage II may be related to the type of contact situation.
This poster presents a newly developed procedure for annotating a historical corpus of Welsh. It ... more This poster presents a newly developed procedure for annotating a historical corpus of Welsh. It builds on previous work on a chunk-parsed corpus of Middle Welsh (Meelen 2016). We aim to standardise decisions that have to be made at each stage of building a new treebank: preprocessing (including tokenisation and normalisation), part-of-speech tagging, chunk-parsing and, finally, creating a fully parsed corpus. These decisions will be extensively documented so that future texts can be easily added to the corpus by any linguists interested in working with historical Welsh texts. This first fully parse treebank of Welsh forms an important contribution to the fields of Welsh linguistics and historical syntax.
One of the principal challenges of historical linguistics is to explain the causes of language ch... more One of the principal challenges of historical linguistics is to explain the causes of language change. Any such explanation, however, must also address the ‘actuation problem’: why is it that changes occurring in a given language at a certain time cannot be reliably predicted to recur in other languages, under apparently similar conditions? The sixteen contributions to the present volume each aim to elucidate various aspects of this problem, including: What processes can be identified as the drivers of change? How central are syntax-external (phonological, lexical or contact-based) factors in triggering syntactic change? And how can all of these factors be reconciled with the actuation problem? Exploring data from a wide range of languages from both a formal and a functional perspective, this book promises to be of interest to advanced students and researchers in historical linguistics, syntax and their intersection.
This is the second book in a two-volume comparative history of negation in the languages of Europ... more This is the second book in a two-volume comparative history of negation in the languages of Europe and the Mediterranean. The work integrates typological, general, and theoretical research, documents patterns and directions of change in negation across languages, and examines the linguistic and social factors that lie behind such changes. The aim of both volumes is to set out an integrated framework for understanding the syntax of negation and how it changes.
While the first volume (OUP, 2013) presented linked case studies of particular languages and language groups, this second volume constructs a holistic approach to explaining the patterns of historical change found in the languages of Europe and the Mediterranean over the last millennium. It identifies typical developments found repeatedly in the histories of different languages and explores their origins, as well as investigating the factors that determine whether change proceeds rapidly, slowly, or not at all. Language-internal factors such as the interaction of syntax, semantics, and pragmatics, and the biases inherent in child language acquisition, are investigated alongside language-external factors such as imposition, convergence, and borrowing. The book proposes an explicit formal account of language-internal and contact-induced change for both the expression of sentential negation ('not') and negative indefinites ('anyone', 'nothing'). It sheds light on the major ways in which negative systems develop, on the nature of syntactic change, and indeed on linguistic change more generally, demonstrating the insights that large-scale comparison of linguistic histories can offer.
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While the first volume (OUP, 2013) presented linked case studies of particular languages and language groups, this second volume constructs a holistic approach to explaining the patterns of historical change found in the languages of Europe and the Mediterranean over the last millennium. It identifies typical developments found repeatedly in the histories of different languages and explores their origins, as well as investigating the factors that determine whether change proceeds rapidly, slowly, or not at all. Language-internal factors such as the interaction of syntax, semantics, and pragmatics, and the biases inherent in child language acquisition, are investigated alongside language-external factors such as imposition, convergence, and borrowing. The book proposes an explicit formal account of language-internal and contact-induced change for both the expression of sentential negation ('not') and negative indefinites ('anyone', 'nothing'). It sheds light on the major ways in which negative systems develop, on the nature of syntactic change, and indeed on linguistic change more generally, demonstrating the insights that large-scale comparison of linguistic histories can offer.