Diachronic features of Romanian in a broader comparative setting

2019 ◽  
pp. 217-222
Author(s):  
Alexandru Nicolae
Keyword(s):  
Structural Properties ◽  
Word Order ◽  
Language Contact ◽  
Romance Languages ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Romance Language ◽  
Syntactic Theory ◽  
Syntactic Change ◽  
History Of ◽  
Diachronic Development

Chapter 6 highlights the novel theoretical and empirical facts brought about by the word order changes that occurring in the passage from old to modern Romanian, showing how the diachrony of Romanian may contribute to a better understanding of the history of the Romance languages and of the Balkan Sprachbund, as well as to syntactic theory and syntactic change in general. One important dimension of diachronic variation and change is the height of nouns and verbs along their extended projections (lower vs higher V- and N-movement). The two perspectives from which language contact proves relevant in the diachronic development of word order in Romanian, language contact by means of translation and areal language contact, are discussed. The chapter also addresses the issue of surface analogy vs deep structural properties; once again, Romanian emerges as a Romance language in a Balkan suit, as Romance deep structural properties are instantiated by means of Balkan word order patterns.

Negation and Nonveridicality in the History of Greek

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katerina Chatzopoulou
Keyword(s):  
Quantitative Data ◽  
Qualitative Data ◽  
Inertial Forces ◽  
Greek Language ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Polarity Item ◽  
Syntactic Change ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Asymmetry ◽  
Diachronic Development

This study is an investigation of the expression of negation in the history of Greek, through quantitative data from representative texts from three major stages of vernacular Greek (Attic Greek, Koine, Late Medieval Greek), and qualitative data from Homeric Greek until Standard Modern. The contrast between two complementary negators, NEG1 and NEG2, is explained in terms of sensitivity of NEG2 μη‎ to nonveridicality: NEG2 is a polarity item in all stages of the Greek language, an item licensed by nonveridicality. The asymmetry in the diachronic development of the Greek negator system (the replacement of NEG1 and the preservation of NEG2) is explained with reference to the particulars of the uses of NEG2, specifically the inertial forces drawn by the nonnegative uses of NEG2, which being nonnegative did not experience the renewal pressures predicted by the Jespersen’s Cycle. These are its complementizer uses: (i) as a question particle, and (ii) in introducing verbs of fear complements. A viewpoint for Jespersen’s Cycle is proposed that abstracts away from the morphosyntactic and phonological particulars of the phenomenon and explicitly places its regularities in the semantics, accommodating not only for Greek, but for numerous other languages that deviate in different ways from the traditional description of Jespersen’s Cycle. The developments observed in the history of the Greek negator system agree with current generative theories of syntactic change, regarding the notions of up-the-tree movement.

History of the Portuguese Lexicon

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bernhard Pöll
Keyword(s):  
Iberian Peninsula ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Language Contact ◽  
Western World ◽  
Romance Language ◽  
European Languages ◽  
Colonial Expansion ◽  
Lower Extent ◽  
History Of ◽  
Basic Vocabulary

The basic vocabulary of Portuguese—the second largest Romance language in terms of speakers (about 210 million as of 2017)—comes from (vulgar) Latin, which itself incorporated a certain amount of so-called substratum and superstratum words. Whereas the former were adopted in a situation of language contact between Latin and the languages of the conquered peoples inhabiting the Iberian Peninsula, the latter are Germanic loans brought mainly by the Visigoths. From 711 onward, until the end of the Middle Ages, Arabic played a major role in the Peninsula, contributing about 1,000 words that are common in Modern Portuguese. (Classical) Latin and Greek were other sources for lexical enrichment especially in the 15th and 16th centuries as well as in the 18th and 19th centuries. Contact with other European languages—Romance and Germanic (especially English, and to a lower extent German)—led to borrowings in several thematic fields reflecting the economic, cultural, and scientific radiance that emanated from the respective language communities. In the course of colonial expansion, Portuguese came into contact with several African, Asian, and Amerindian languages from which it borrowed words for concepts and realia unknown to the Western world.

Syntactic variation in the history of Norwegian and the decline of XV word order

Diachronica ◽  
2006 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 105-141 ◽  
Author(s):  
John D. Sundquist
Keyword(s):  
Word Order ◽  
Information Structure ◽  
Language Contact ◽  
Underlying Structure ◽  
Syntactic Variation ◽  
15Th Century ◽  
Case Morphology ◽  
History Of ◽  
Exogenous Factors ◽  
Subsequent Loss

This essay examines syntactic variation between Complement–Verb (XV) and Verb–Complement (VX) order in a corpus of Middle Norwegian texts written between 1250 and 1525. In comparison to traditional studies which relate word order variation and the subsequent loss of XV word order to overt case morphology, this analysis proposes that information structure and variation in the underlying structure of the VP play a significant role. Empirical data point to the interaction of endogenous and exogenous factors, including language contact between Norwegian and Danish, which ultimately brings about the decline of XV word order in 15th-century Norwegian.

Language Contact and the Lexicon of Romance Languages

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
André Thibault ◽  
Nicholas LoVecchio
Keyword(s):  
Language Contact ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Linguistic Community ◽  
Romance Languages ◽  
Rigorous Approach ◽  
Historical Factors ◽  
Physical Presence ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Theoretical Issues

The Romance languages have been involved in many situations of language contact. While language contact is evident at all levels, the most visible effects on the system of the recipient language concern the lexicon. The relationship between language contact and the lexicon raises some theoretical issues that are not always adequately addressed, including in etymological lexicography. First is the very notion of what constitutes “language contact.” Contrary to a somewhat dated view, language contact does not necessarily imply physical presence, contemporaneity, and orality: as far as the lexicon is concerned, contact can happen over time and space, particularly through written media. Depending on the kind of extralinguistic circumstances at stake, language contact can be induced by diverse factors, leading to different forms of borrowing. The misleading terms borrowings or loans mask the reality that these are actually adapted imitations—whether formal, semantic, or both—of a foreign model. Likewise, the common Latin or Greek origins of a huge proportion of the Romance lexicon often obscure the real history of words. As these classical languages have contributed numerous technical and scientific terms, as well as a series of “roots,” words coined in one Romance language can easily be reproduced in any other. However, simply reducing a word’s etymology to the origin of its components (classic or otherwise), ignoring intermediate stages and possibly intermediating languages in the borrowing process, is a distortion of word history. To the extent that it is useful to refer to “internationalisms,” related words in different Romance languages merit careful, often arduous research in the process of identifying the actual origin of a given coining. From a methodological point of view, it is crucial to distinguish between the immediate lending language and the oldest stage that can be identified, with the former being more relevant in a rigorous approach to comparative historical lexicology. Concrete examples from Ibero-Romania, Gallo-Romania, Italo-Romania, and Balkan-Romania highlight the variety of different Romance loans and reflect the diverse historical factors particular to each linguistic community in which borrowing occurred.

Micro-change and macro-change in diachronic syntax

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Éric Mathieu ◽  
Robert Truswell
Keyword(s):  
Word Order ◽  
Language Contact ◽  
Diachronic Syntax ◽  
Current Trends ◽  
Syntactic Change ◽  
Complementizer Agreement ◽  
Viewpoint Aspect ◽  
And Control

This introduction discusses current trends in diachronic linguistics with a focus on syntactic change and reviews the fifteen other chapters included in the volume. In the spirit of modern diachronic syntax, the selected articles show that very general patterns of change, emergent, multigenerational diachronic phenomena, interact with small, discrete, local, intergenerational changes in the lexical specification of grammatical features. General topics include acquisition biases, cross-categorial word order generalizations, typological particularities and universals, language contact, and transitional changes, while specific linguistic topics include tense and viewpoint aspect, directional/aspectual affixes, V2, V3, Stylistic Fronting, directional/aspectual prefixes, negation, accusative and dative marking, analytic passives, complementizer agreement, and control and raising verbs.

The rise of ‘subordination features’ in the history of Greek and their decline

2013 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 28-48 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ioannis Fykias ◽  
Christina Katsikadeli
Keyword(s):  
High Frequency ◽  
Indirect Speech ◽  
Syntactic Theory ◽  
Subordinate Clauses ◽  
History Of ◽  
Diachronic Development ◽  
Recurrent Patterns ◽  
Field Of Inquiry

This study is a contribution based on Greek material to a field of inquiry that deals with the diachronic development of formal syntactic devices and their interrelationship with the dichotomy between main and subordinate clauses in Indo-European (Kiparsky 1995, Lühr 2008). First, we focus on some devices signaling indirect speech that emerged in Pre-Classical and Classical Greek, such as the development of a system of complementizers (hóti ‘that.COMP’, hōs ‘that.COMP’) and some characteristic usages of moods (the optative of indirect speech). In Post-Classical Greek, this system of traits that had been employed to code indirect speech collapsed, as evidenced by the disappearance of hōs ‘that.COMP’ and the optative of indirect speech as well as the high frequency of pleonastic hóti ‘that.COMP’. Later in the history of Greek a new subordination system arises. We interpret these developments in the light of contemporary syntactic theory (Emonds 2004, 2012), and try to formulate a hypothesis regarding the cycle-like regularities and recurrent patterns that are followed by (clusters of) traits, that is, the “Indirect Speech Traits Cycle”.

scholarly journals ORDEN DE PALABRAS Y POSICIÓN DE LOS CLÍTICOS PRONOMINALES EN LAS CONSTRUCCIONES IMPERATIVAS DE LAS LENGUAS ROMÁNICAS MEDIEVALES | WORD ORDER AND PRONOMINAL CLITIC POSITION IN THE IMPERATIVE CONSTRUCTIONS OF OLD ROMANCE LANGUAGES

2017 ◽  
pp. 155
Author(s):  
Montserrat Batllori ◽  
Assumpció Rost
Keyword(s):  
Word Order ◽  
Language Contact ◽  
Necessary Conditions ◽  
Romance Languages ◽  
Verbal Morphology ◽  
Linguistic Change ◽  
Old Spanish ◽  
American Spanish ◽  
The One ◽  
Shed Light

<p>Esta investigación aporta evidencias acerca del hecho de que el español medieval y también otras lenguas románicas antiguas (portugués e italiano, por ejemplo) son claros exponentes de la clase II de Rivero y Terzi (1995: 301, e.g. 1) en que el imperativo no presenta una sintaxis diferenciada de la de las oraciones matrices, mientras que, como mínimo, el español actual formaría parte de las lenguas de la clase I, cuyos imperativos tienen una sintaxis propia. Se muestra, asimismo, que los cambios correspondientes al orden de palabras de las construcciones imperativas corresponden a un proceso de sintactización que ha desvinculado las estructuras de imperativo de la morfología verbal (y, por consiguiente, de la sintaxis de las oraciones matrices) y ha comportado un cambio hacia un tipo de estructura con requisitos sintácticos específicos.  Además, por otra parte, nuestros datos permiten profundizar en la teoría del contacto lingüístico y en las condiciones necesarias para que se dé la transferencia de estructuras arcaicas del español medieval al español atlántico. De acuerdo con ellos, podemos afirmar que el mantenimiento de estructuras medievales en Hispanoamérica se debe supeditar al hecho de que las lenguas indígenas de adstrato posean construcciones que faciliten la transferencia lingüística y, por tanto, revitalicen un patrón que ya se encontraba en retroceso en el español peninsular. </p><p>Abstract<em>: This research provides evidence in favour of the fact that Old Spanish, as well as other Old Romance languages (Portuguese and Italian, for example) accommodate to Rivero and Terzi’s (1995: 301, e.g. 1) pattern II in which imperative structures of the languages do not display a different syntax from the one exhibited by main clauses, whereas Modern Spanish should be classified as belonging to pattern I, the imperative constructions of which present their own specific syntax. We put forward that the changes undergone by the word order of imperative sentences through time should be attributed to a syntactization process that tended to detach imperatives from a specific verbal morphology (and also from the syntax of main clauses) and brought about new specific syntactic requirements for them to be licensed. Furthermore, our data allow us to shed light on the theory of linguistic change and the necessary conditions to have transference phenomena from Old Spanish to Hispano-American Spanish. Our data show that, so as to posit that Old Spanish constructions of any sort have been transferred to Hispano-American Spanish, there should be similar configurations in the indigenous languages that enable this transference through language contact and can bring about an increasing use of the structures that already were receding in Peninsular Medieval Spanish.</em></p>

The History of Negation in the Languages of Europe and the Mediterranean

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anne Breitbarth ◽  
Christopher Lucas ◽  
David Willis
Keyword(s):  
Language Contact ◽  
Language Change ◽  
Theoretical Perspective ◽  
Theoretical Perspectives ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Child Language Acquisition ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Mediterranean ◽  
Patterns And Processes ◽  
Diachronic Development

The book constitutes the second volume of the two-volume work The history of negation in the languages of Europe and the Mediterranean. While the first volume united a rich collection of ten case studies, the current second volume turns to the patterns and processes in the historical development of the expression of negation and its interaction with indefinites from a more general theoretical perspective. The volume is subdivided into two parts, one dealing with Jespersen’s cycle and one dealing with developments affecting indefinites in the scope of negation (the quantifier and free-choice cycles), including the diachronic development of negative concord. In each case, there are relevant empirical observations across the languages of Europe and the Mediterranean. The book considers both language-internal and language-contact motivations for the changes observed, developing a generative account of the developments in terms of semantic change, reanalysis, and child-language acquisition, integrating insights from functionalist approaches that invoke language use as a motivation behind these cycles. Language contact is shown to have played a significant role in the spread of negation systems. The result is a holistic account of language change in the domain of negation, developed from comparing the diachronies of languages across Europe and incorporating insights from a wide range of theoretical perspectives.

Syntactic Change in Contact: Romance

2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Roberta D'Alessandro
Keyword(s):  
Language Contact ◽  
Language Change ◽  
Romance Languages ◽  
Annual Review ◽  
Publication Date ◽  
Differential Object Marking ◽  
Languages In Contact ◽  
Syntactic Change ◽  
Object Marking ◽  
Selection Of

Language change as a result of language contact is studied in many different ways using a number of different methodologies. This article provides an overview of the main approaches to syntactic change in contact (CIC), focusing on the Romance language group. Romance languages are widely documented both synchronically and diachronically. They have been in extensive contact with other language families both in bilingual contexts and in creolization contexts. Furthermore, they present great microvariation. They are therefore ideal to tackle language change in contact. Given the breadth of studies targeting Romance languages in contact, only a selection of facts is considered here, namely pro-drop, differential object marking (DOM), and deixis. The article shows that microcontact, i.e., contact between minimally different grammars, is a necessary dimension to be considered within contact studies, as it provides insights that are often radically different from those provided by the observation of contact between maximally different languages. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Linguistics, Volume 7 is January 14, 2021. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.

Old English intensifiers

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
James M. Stratton
Keyword(s):  
Old English ◽  
Language Contact ◽  
English Language ◽  
Driving Forces ◽  
English System ◽  
History Of ◽  
Internal And External Factors ◽  
Diachronic Development ◽  
Insight Into ◽  
Attributive Adjectives

Abstract While many studies have employed variationist methods to examine longitudinal changes in the English intensifier system, to date, no variationist studies have tackled the intensifier system of Old English. By providing a critical view of this system at an earlier stage in the history of the English language, the present study adds to the long tradition of scholarship on intensifiers while providing new insight into their diachronic development. Despite its antiquity, several parallels can be drawn with the intensifier system at later stages in the language. Both internal and external factors are found to constrain this system, with predicative adjectives favoring intensification over attributive adjectives, prose texts having higher intensification rates than verse texts, Latin-based texts having higher intensification rates than vernacular texts, and the rate of intensification increasing over time. The quantitative analysis of the Old English system also increases the time depth necessary for a more detailed reflection on the diachronic recycling, replacement, and renewal of intensifiers. Language contact and borrowing are also postulated as driving forces of innovation and replacement in earlier stages of the English language.

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