Historical change of word classes

Diachronica ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 162-200 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthias Gerner

This paper isolates four parameters that guide the historical change of word classes: the quantificational parameter, the directional parameter, the preservative parameter and the temporal parameter. These parameters are involved in the organization of seven case studies in East Asian languages. Based on these case studies I define four diachronic tendencies that apply to East Asian languages and perhaps beyond: (1) the greater the size of the target word class, the lower the number of new acquired meanings; (2) if a word class engages on a path of change, then the greater its size, the more likely it is that the process of change in which it engages will be lexicalization; (3) in a typical process of grammaticalization relatively more meanings are generated than in a typical process of lexicalization; (4) processes of grammaticalization represent temporally short processes more often than processes of lexicalization.

2001 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 438-438
Author(s):  
Cristina Schmitt

The papers in this book were presented at the Symposium on Grammaticalization held in Leiden 1995, with the exception of the paper by Tabor and Traugott. This collection of 11 papers deals with a variety of cases of language change that do not fit perfectly into the models of grammaticalization as a unidirectional process by which open-class elements are weakened and become part of the closed-class set. Briefly described case studies in a variety of languages—from Romance, Germanic, and South East Asian languages to Ancient Greek, Hittite, Basque, and others—allow the reader to peer through the overwhelming number of factors and interactions among factors involved in language change. At the same time, one can also examine the struggle to define and determine which facts do and do not belong to the realm of grammaticalization. To illustrate some of the issues addressed in this book, I will briefly describe some of the papers.


Author(s):  
Stefania Tutino

The last three chapters of this book present specific case studies showing concrete examples of the issues to which probabilism was applied. These chapters bring the theoretical and theological discussions on probabilism into the daily life of early modern men and women, and they demonstrate the fundamental role probabilism assumed in early modern Western culture. This chapter focuses on the question of the validity of East Asian marriages, which were institutionally, legally, and culturally very different from the European West. As Catholic missionaries and theologians confronted these differences, they found probabilism immensely useful for rethinking, updating, and adapting to this new context traditional notions concerning the nature of marriage both as a sacrament and as a legal contract.


2020 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Geraldine Cáceres Sepúlveda ◽  
Silvia Ochoa ◽  
Jules Thibault

AbstractDue to the highly competitive market and increasingly stringent environmental regulations, it is paramount to operate chemical processes at their optimal point. In a typical process, there are usually many process variables (decision variables) that need to be selected in order to achieve a set of optimal objectives for which the process will be considered to operate optimally. Because some of the objectives are often contradictory, Multi-objective optimization (MOO) can be used to find a suitable trade-off among all objectives that will satisfy the decision maker. The first step is to circumscribe a well-defined Pareto domain, corresponding to the portion of the solution domain comprised of a large number of non-dominated solutions. The second step is to rank all Pareto-optimal solutions based on some preferences of an expert of the process, this step being performed using visualization tools and/or a ranking algorithm. The last step is to implement the best solution to operate the process optimally. In this paper, after reviewing the main methods to solve MOO problems and to select the best Pareto-optimal solution, four simple MOO problems will be solved to clearly demonstrate the wealth of information on a given process that can be obtained from the MOO instead of a single aggregate objective. The four optimization case studies are the design of a PI controller, an SO2 to SO3 reactor, a distillation column and an acrolein reactor. Results of these optimization case studies show the benefit of generating and using the Pareto domain to gain a deeper understanding of the underlying relationships between the various process variables and performance objectives.


2012 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 33-58 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erez Levon

AbstractBeliefs about a language rarely correspond to how it is used. This is especially true for Hebrew, a language that has been subject to continued ideological “preservation” efforts ever since its (re)vernacularization in the early 20th century. Recently, attention has turned to the maintenance of Hebrew gender morphology, which is perceived in both scholarly and popular opinion as threatened by a process of leveling to gender syncretized forms across a range of word classes and inflectional paradigms. In this article, I investigate the extent to which sociolinguistic evidence supports this perception in cases of animate reference. I argue that while the claim of widespread gender neutralization of these forms is descriptively valid, its characterization as a change-in-progress is inaccurate. Rather, I suggest that Hebrew is already fully syncretized for gender in certain relevant morphological contexts and that the perception of an ongoing process of change reflects a prescriptive belief about how Hebrew should be, not how it actually is.


IFLA Journal ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 44 (3) ◽  
pp. 223-228 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yasuyo Inoue

This essay introduces the concept of privacy from the perspective of the East Asian nation of Japan. Firstly, it provides background context to how privacy is viewed in the country; then it discusses relevant legislative approaches to the protection of privacy in Japan. It goes on to discuss privacy in relation to its relevance to libraries, illustrated with two case studies, before concluding with some suggestions as to the way forward in Japan.


2017 ◽  
Vol 41 (2) ◽  
pp. 445-495 ◽  
Author(s):  
Svenja Völkel

Abstract Tongan is an Oceanic language belonging to the Polynesian subgroup. Based on previous work (Churchward 1953, Tchekhoff 1981, Broschart 1997), Tongan has been classified as a 'flexible' language by various typological approaches on word classes (Hengeveld 1992, Rijkhoff 1998, Croft 2001). This means that lexical items are per se not categorised in terms of major word classes, but they can function as noun, verb, adjective and manner adverb without morphosyntactic derivation. However, not all lexemes are entirely flexible occurring within all these constructions. So the crucial issue of how flexible Tongan really is remains. This question will be addressed by a survey based on a combination of syntactic and semantic word class criteria – basically following Croft's prototype approach (2000, 2001) but also considering Hengeveld & Rijkhoff's work (Hengeveld 1992, Hengeveld, Rijkhoff & Siewierska 2004, Hengeveld 2013) Evans & Osada's work (2005). It reveals the scope of lexical flexibility for various lexemes and semantic groups.


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