A keyword on the footer: the Furtadian and the (re)current meaning of structural reforms

ABSTRACT A semantic change has occurred in the scope of structural reforms’ term. This article reviews Celso Furtado’s work, in particular, the ones related to this specific topic, and compares it with the current literature. It appears that structural reforms in the Furtadian conception connoted base transformations and were guided by the developmentalism school of thought. Nowadays, it is of general knowledge that, under the new-institutionalist influence, “structural reforms” are associated with liberal policies for monitoring fiscal consolidations, without consensus as to the power of effectiveness. The effort to rescue and understand the original conceptions of certain keywords in the economic development literature, as well as the way in which their interpretations and practices modify over time, is shown to be of paramount importance as the capitalist system struggle to find ways of adapting itself to the current situation of developing economies.

ἀφθόνητος αἶνος Su tre lemmi pindarici dell’Antiatticista

Among other peculiarities, the 2nd-century CE Atticist lexicon that goes under the name of Antiatticista contains seven entries exemplified with references to Pindar (not an Attic author), a fact that sets it apart from other Atticist lexica of the same period. This paper tackles the verbal adjective ἀφθόνητος and the irregular comparatives ἀφθονέστερος and ἀρχαιέστερος in order to show that two criteria guided the inclusion of these Pindaric words into the lexicon. The first, and more superficial, criterion concerns the word-formation of verbal adjectives and comparatives, and their relation with other (often more regular or more frequent) forms. The second criterion concerns semantic change, and especially the use of certain words in post-Classical and Byzantine Greek vis-à-vis the Classical models. The consideration of both criteria allows a more fine-grained interpretation of the Antiatticista’s methodology and its recourse to a wide range of Classical authors to illustrate, and defend, developments of post-Classical Greek.

Pidgin and Creole: Concept, Origin, and Evolution

Every language has a history, and, as in the rest of human culture, changes are constantly taking place in the course of the learned transmission of a language from one generation to another. Human culture and animal behavior contain differences. Language changes in all their aspects, in their pronunciation, word forms, syntax, and word meaning (semantic change). These changes are mostly very gradual in their operation becoming noticeable only cumulatively over the course of several generations. Pidgins and creoles (p & c) are not different- They are also undergoing different types of changes. This paper tries to investigate the concepts of p & c by analyzing different linguistic views and tracing back the origin of these contact languages with the help of different theories. This study throws some light on the evolution of p & c and aims at attaching proper value to them.

Of travels and travails: The role of semantic typology, argument structure constructions, and language contact in semantic change

This paper is an investigation into the role of argument structure constructions as catalysts or blockers of lexical semantic change. It presents a case study of the divergent semantic development of French travailler ‘work’ and English travel ‘journey’ from their shared earlier meaning ‘labour, toil’. This divergence is shown to not be random: It can be explained as a product of the different intransitive motion constructions (IMCs) and different communicative habits in these two languages. Consequently, the development of travailler ‘journey’ in the Anglo-Norman dialect of French can be understood as the result of contact influence of Middle English. By pointing to similar instances in which verbs meaning ‘labour, toil’ have acquired a polysemous ‘motion’ sense in languages with an IMC that can coerce non-motion verbs into contextual motion readings, the paper argues that this is most probably a regular semantic trajectory in satellite-framing, manner-conflating languages.

Adjectival Suffixes: From Latin to Romance

All languages seem to have nouns and verbs, while the dimension of the class of adjectives varies considerably cross-linguistically. In some languages, verbs or, to a lesser extent, nouns take over the functions that adjectives fulfill in Indo-European languages. Like other such languages, Latin and the Romance languages have a rich category of adjectives, with a well-developed inventory of patterns of word formation that can be used to enrich it. There are about 100 patterns in Romance standard languages. The semantic categories expressed by adjectival derivation in Latin have remained remarkably stable in Romance, despite important changes at the level of single patterns. To some extent, this stability is certainly due to the profound process of relatinization that especially the Romance standard languages have undergone over the last 1,000 years; however, we may assume that it also reflects the cognitive importance of the semantic categories involved. Losses were mainly due to phonological attrition (Latin unstressed suffixes were generally doomed) and to the fact that many derived adjectives became nouns via ellipsis, thereby often reducing the stock of adjectives. At the same time, new adjectival patterns arose as a consequence of language contact and through semantic change, processes of noun–adjective conversion, and the transformation of evaluative suffixes into ethnic suffixes. Overall, the inventory of adjectival patterns of word formation is richer in present-day Romance languages than it was in Latin.

Decategorialization and Chinese nouns

This chapter explores the interaction between semantic change and morphosyntactic decategorialization in the light of the development of classifiers and measure words in Chinese. The vast majority of both classifiers and measure words ultimately derive from independent nouns. Börjars and Payne argue that the decategorialization which measure words have undergone is strikingly unusual in that they have lost the full modificational properties of independent nouns without any accompanying semantic reduction: a measure word maintains its nominal meaning. On the other hand, classifiers lose both the independent semantics and morphosyntax of independent nouns, but because their development proceeds by analogy with that of measure words, they reacquire the same very limited potential for modification. Modelling these diachronic developments from an LFG perspective, they show that, while each individual stage has its own motivation, the end result is an interesting decoupling of the semantic and syntactic aspects of change.