Roots of V-to-C Movement in Romance

The paper investigates the syntactic structure of wh-clauses in late Latin. The results show that, in sentences with a wh-phrase as direct object, the interrogative operator reaches FocP in the left periphery, with the finite verb raising to the Foc head. This spec-head relation accounts for why subjects and dislocated XPs (like topics or focus elements) can not be intervening constituents between the object wh-phrase and the verb. For wh-clauses in which the interrogative operator is an adjunct, the hypothesis is that the wh-phrase occupies [Spec,IntP]. Here, the verb does not move to the CP-field, thus explaining the possibility of intervening subjects and interpolated XPs between the adjunct wh-element and the verb. These results show that the verb second (V2) property of V-to-C movement, as seen in several old Romance languages, can be derived from late Latin, and not exclusively from a supposed influence of Germanic languages, as is assumed in the literature.

The Unidirectionality of Grammaticalization in Modern Linguistics

The present article contains the results of study on unidirectionality of grammaticalization which is understood as a shift from lexical to grammatical signs. The research aims to find out and describe present approaches to the unidirectionality idea and identify the current tendency in attitudes towards this property of grammaticalization. The research methodology includes a content analysis of approaches to the unidirectionality issue, their generalization and analysis of some units questioning the unidirectionality of grammaticalization. The relevance of grammaticalization studies is due to a growing interest of Russian and foreign linguists in grammatical changes, current differences in identifying the main properties of such change as grammaticalization and terminological variation. The theoretical framework of this study is based on the research by T. Givn, Ch. Lehmann, T. Lindstrm, E. Traugott, B. Heine and other famous linguists working in the field of grammaticalization. It is noted that the issue of unidirectionality of grammaticalization is almost ignored in Russian linguistics where unidirectionality is often seen as an integral property of this process. The study results have shown the tendency to accepting the unidirectionality idea and a controversial nature of some examples used to overturn this idea. Such examples include English infinitival to , the verb to dare and the suffix -ish . It has been established that the terms degrammaticalization and lexicalization used to refer to processes opposite to grammaticalization can be considered reasonable depending on their understanding and the meaning of the term grammaticalization. This study is a part of a more extensive research aimed to describe and analyze the mechanisms of grammaticalization in Germanic languages.

Latin in the System of Philological education

The article deals with the integrative and differentiated nature of the discipline Latin in the paradigm of education of philologists – specialists in Romance and Germanic languages. It is proved that Latin, integrating with a number of disciplines of professional training of philologists in the context of philological education, contributes to the theoretical training of linguists. At the same time, it is determined that the course of Latin should clearly meet the needs of future professionals, and thus take into account their professional orientation. Therefore, there is a need to differentiate the content of education depending on the specialty of philology students.

Multi-word term variation

Complex nominals (CNs) are frequently found in specialized discourse in all languages, since they are a productive method of creating terms by combining existing lexical units. In Spanish, a conceptual combination may often be rendered with a prepositional CN (PCN) or an equivalent adjectival CN (ACN), e.g., demanda de electricidad vs. demanda eléctrica [electricity demand]. Adjectives in ACNs – usually derived from nouns – are known as ‘relational adjectives’ because they encode semantic relations with other concepts. With recent exceptions, research has focused on the underlying semantic relations in CNs. In natural language processing, several works have dealt with the automatic detection of relation adjectives in Romance and Germanic languages. However, there is no discourse studies of these CNs, to our knowledge, for the goal of establishing writer recommendations. This study analyzed the co-text of equivalent PCNs and ACNs to identify factors governing the use of a certain form. EcoLexicon ES, a corpus of Spanish environmental specialized texts, was used to extract 6 relational adjectives and, subsequently, a set of 12 pairs of equivalent CNs. Their behavior in co-text was analyzed by querying EcoLexicon ES and a general language corpus with 20 expressions in CQP-syntax. Our results showed that immediate linguistic co-text determined the preference for a particular structure. Based on these findings, we provide writing guidelines to assist in the production of CNs.

Using Historical Glottometry to Subgroup the Early Germanic Languages

Historical Glottometry, introduced by Kalyan & François (2018), is a wave-based quantitative approach to language subgrouping used to calculate the overall strength of a linguistic subgroup using metrics that capture the contributions of linguistic innovations of various scopes to language diversification, in consideration of the reality of their distributions. This approach primarily achieves this by acknowledging the contribution of postsplit areal diffusion to language diversification, which has traditionally been overlooked in cladistic (tree-based) models. In this paper, the development of the Germanic language family, from the breakup of Proto-Germanic to the latest period of the early attested daughter languages (namely, Old English, Old Frisian, Gothic, Old High German, Old Low Franconian, Old Norse, and Old Saxon) is accounted for using Historical Glottometry. It is shown that this approach succeeds in accounting for several smaller, nontraditional subgroups of Germanic by accommodating the linguistic evidence unproblematically where a cladistic approach would fail.

Hochfrequenz und Irregularität – zur Stammallomorphie bei (a)frz. al(l)er/(a)it. andare, (a)frz. venir/(a)it. venire und afrz. ester/(a)it. stare

Normally, verbs showing allomorphy due to phonological changes become more regular over time through intraparadigmatic analogy. There are verbs, though, such as auxiliaries, modals or basic verbs of movement which stay irregular, obviously due to their extremely high token frequency. Especially studies with reference to Germanic languages show that irregularity often relates to a development leading to a clear(er) distinction of single forms within a paradigm. The article examines the applicability of the concept of relevance developped by Bybee (1985), the significance of token frequency and other factors discussed in studies anchored in the usage based approach with regard to the French and Italian verbs aller/andare, venir/venire and – for Old French – ester (cf. the suppletive paradigm of être) and Italian stare, considering the development from Latin to modern French and Italian.

Derivational Potential of Pronouns in German and Russian languages

The question of the use of pronouns as an element in the process of word formation of lexical units of the German and Russian languages is considered. The material was texts related to different genres: journalistic, popular science, scientific, artistic. The novelty of the research is seen in the comparison of the word-formation potential of pronouns in two languages, the word-formation system of which has some differences. The result of a comparative analysis of vocabulary related to different parts of speech is presented. Particular attention is paid to the possibility of using personal pronouns that are involved in nominal word formation. It is shown that lexical units with components — personal pronouns in the Russian language are less typical, however, they are used in texts of a certain subject and in some cases are tracing copies from the corresponding foreign words. Attention is paid to the emergence of neologisms and occasionalisms, the use of borrowings. The question is raised about the role of context in the interpretation of words with pronominal components. It is concluded that the derivational potential of pronouns is higher in German, but the lexical units of the Russian language can also be formed using similar elements. An increase in the number of words of this type in the Russian language is noted due to the translated terminology from the Germanic languages.