Token frequency as a determinant of morphological change

This paper demonstrates that morphological change tends to involve the replacement of low frequency forms in inflectional paradigms by innovative forms based on high frequency forms, using Greek data involving the diachronic reorganisation of verbal inflection classes. A computational procedure is outlined for generating a possibility space of morphological changes which can be represented as analogical proportions, on the basis of synchronic paradigms in ancient Greek. I then show how supplementing analogical proportions with token frequency information can help to predict whether a hypothetical change actually took place in the language’s subsequent development. Because of the crucial role of inflected surface forms serving as analogical bases in this model, I argue that the results support theories in which inflected forms can be stored whole in the lexicon.

How Brasidas Was Honoured at Skione (Thucydides 4.121.1)

The crux at Thucydides 4.121.1 has recently come under renewed scrutiny from scholars, but decisive conclusions were not reached. This article argues that commentators have not yet taken into account all relevant considerations, and that as a result the passage still remains incompletely understood. The verb προσήρχοντο is derived from προσέρχομαι, not προσάρχομαι. The unusual imperfect form προσήρχοντο (instead of expected Attic προσῇσαν) can perhaps be regarded as an instance of poetic verbal inflection (compare Pi. O. 9.93 διήρχετο), a type of diction suitable in the context of Thucydides’ heroic-poetic depiction of Brasidas. Modern scholars’ focus on the textual criticism of this one word has in general caused them to neglect matters of verbal interpretation. As a consequence, some important aspects of Thucydides’ language and the cultural context of the scene remain underappreciated.

Stress and stem allomorphy in the Romance perfectum: emergence, typology, and motivations of a symbiotic relation

Perfective stem allomorphy and stress are morphological traits which interact in complex ways in Romance verbal inflection. This article surveys the whole range of variation of these traits across Romance varieties, typologizes the observed interactions between the two, and examines attested and unattested possibilities. A comparison between the modern-day and the original Latin systems suggests that there is a strong pan-Romance bias against having verbs with a concrete combination of properties: perfective root-stress and no perfective stem alternation. This is a combination of traits that would have frequently resulted in diagonal syncretisms between past and present given the phonological changes attested in the daughter languages. Homophony avoidance (and the adaptive-discriminative role of morphology more generally) are therefore argued to motivate the observed bias.

Obligatory features of Lithuanian verbal inflection classes

Lithuanian verbal inflection classes are defined by tense suffixes, stem‑forming affixes, vowel and consonant alternations, and accentuation patterns. I make a distinction between obligatory features that are relevant for every verb and non‑obligatory features that characterize only part of the verbs. I argue that the obligatory features are the present and the past tense suffixes combined with mobile and immobile accentuation patterns, while the rest of the features are optional. When only the obligatory features are taken into account, three types of the present tense (‑a‑, ‑i‑, ‑o‑) and two types of the past tense (‑ė‑, ‑o‑) suffixes are found in five combinations (‑a‑/‑ė‑, ‑a‑/‑o‑, ‑i‑/‑o‑, ‑o‑/‑ė‑, ‑o‑/‑o‑) with further variants defined by two types of mobile and one type of immobile accentuation, resulting in eighteen suffixal‑accentual combinations in standard Lithuanian. The combinations of features characterizing the present and the past stems support the view of inflection classes as classes of stems rather than of lexemes (Stump 2016).

Interrogating the Egypto-Sudanic Arabic Connection

The Arabic dialectology literature repeatedly asserts the existence of a macro-level classificatory relationship binding the Arabic speech varieties of the combined Egypto-Sudanic area. This proposal, though oft-encountered, has not previously been formulated in reference to extensive linguistic criteria, but is instead framed primarily on the nonlinguistic premise of historical demographic and genealogical relationships joining the Arabic-speaking communities of the region. The present contribution provides a linguistically based evaluation of this proposed dialectal grouping, to assess whether the postulated dialectal unity is meaningfully borne out by available language data. Isoglosses from the domains of segmental phonology, phonological processes, pronominal morphology, verbal inflection, and syntax are analyzed across six dialects representing Arabic speech in the region. These are shown to offer minimal support for a unified Egypto-Sudanic dialect classification, but instead to indicate a significant north–south differentiation within the sample—a finding further qualified via application of the novel method of Historical Glottometry developed by François and Kalyan. The investigation concludes with reflection on the implications of these results on the understandings of the correspondence between linguistic and human genealogical relationships in the history of Arabic and in dialectological practice more broadly.

Topic drop in German: Empirical support for an information-theoretic account to a long-known omission phenomenon

German allows for topic drop (Fries1988), the omission of a preverbal constituent from a V2 sentence. I address the underexplored question of why speakers use topic drop with a corpus study and two acceptability rating studies. I propose an information-theoretic explanation based on the Uniform Information Density hypothesis (Levy and Jaeger2007) that accounts for the full picture of data. The information-theoretic approach predicts that topic drop is more felicitous when the omitted constituent is predictable in context and easy to recover. This leads to a more optimal use of the hearer’s processing capacities. The corpus study on the FraC corpus (Horch and Reich2017) shows that grammatical person, verb probability and verbal inflection impact the frequency of topic drop. The two rating experiments indicate that these differences in frequency are also reflected in acceptability and additionally evidence an impact of topicality on topic drop. Taken together my studies constitute the first systematic empirical investigation of previously only sparsely researched observations from the literature. My information-theoretic account provides a unifying explanation of these isolated observations and is also able to account for the effect of verb probability that I find in my corpus study.

Genus-Zuweisung bei der Pronominalisierung von Personen in den Südwalser Dialekten

The Alemannic dialects in linguistic islands in Northern Italy have been undergoing strong changes since the second half of the 20th century. One of these changes concerns the assignment of gender with persons. Generalized neuter abolishes the coupling of gender with male/female and transfers both female and male persons into neuter. This in turn has its effect on verbal inflection. The post-verbal subject clitics mutate in the 3rd person singular to verb endings void of male/female connotations. This change, as it is now spreading, is not in itself a recent phenomenon. In early written dialectal records it already occurs in single documents even at the beginning of the 19th century.

Betrayal through obedience: on the history of the unusual inflectional chain in Siyuewu Khroskyabs

This paper focuses on the verbal inflection chain of Siyuewu Khroskyabs, a Gyalrongic language (Trans-Himalayan). Siyuewu Khroskyabs goes against two general typological tendencies: first, as an SOV language, it shows an overwhelming preference for prefixes, which is rarely reported typologically; second, the inflectional prefixes in the outer slots are older than those in the inner slots, which is the reverse case of most languages. In this paper, I will first identify distinct historical layers within the inflectional prefixes, and then focus on two of the prefixes, də- ‘even’ and ɕə- ‘q’ whose evolutionary pathways are relatively clear. The essential part of the hypotheses is that the prefixes originate from enclitics which could be attached to the end of a preverbal chain, originally loosely attached to the verb stem. The preverbal chain later became tightly attached to the verbal stem and eventually became a part of it as a chain of prefixes. As a result, the original enclitics are reanalysed as prefixes. The integration of preverbal morphemes is responsible for the prefixing preference in Modern Siyuewu Khroskyabs. However, despite this superficial prefixing preference, Siyuewu Khroskyabs underlyingly favours postposed morphemes. By following the general suffixing tendency, this language finally managed to create a typologically rare, overwhelmingly prefixing verbal template.