Reviewing the history and development of aspiration in Eastern Balochi

This paper examines the history of aspiration in Eastern Balochi and aims to posit the course of its development and the extent to which it can be said to be contrastive. It uses primary data obtained by the author directly from various locales and compares sets of these data with the secondary data available on Balochi from 19th and early 20th century material. I maintain that, historically, voiceless aspiration arose word-initially in Eastern Balochi, in the sounds /p t č k/, and spread from there to other positions. In the discussion of aspiration, literature on Balochi has seen the question of influence from the neighbouring Indo-Aryan languages as an important problem. In this paper it is argued that equally relevant to the issue are two other important historical phenomena: post-vocalic lenition of stops and affricates, and gemination, a widely found but less well explored feature of Balochi. Also observed in Eastern Balochi, but less frequently remarked upon, is the breathiness found in voiced stops and affricate, a feature hitherto understood to be restricted to a small lexicon borrowed from Indo-Aryan. Focusing on a large number of Eastern Balochi varieties rather than seeing it as a unified whole, I attempt to show that contrastive status of aspiration appears to be gradually developing in these varieties. Many processes are leading in this direction, such as degemination and fortition of fricatives; among these one important diagnostic for the ultimate status of aspiration, I propose, is the transposition of glottal fricative.

Old Basque had */χ/, not /h/

The sound change from Latin /f/ to Old Spanish and Gascon /h/ has often been attributed to stratal influence from Basque. The motivation would be that Old Basque lacked /f/, and instead had a phoneme /h/, with which bilingual speakers replaced it when speaking in Romance. However, this hypothesis presents several difficulties. Most importantly, Navarrese Romance preserves Latin /f/, and in Basque itself, /f/ is adapted as /b/ in loanwords from Latin and Romance, not as /h/. Here we will argue that Old Basque had neither /f/ nor /h/. Instead, modern Basque /h/ derives from older */χ/. Medieval data will play an important role in establishing this. This hypothesis explains a number of morphophonological alternations, as well as some puzzling aspects in the treatment of aspiration in Romance borrowings, and it also makes it more difficult to hold to the stratal hypothesis for the Romance change /f/ > /h/.

Lexical diachronic semantic maps

This paper extends the scope of application of the semantic map model to diachronic lexical semantics. Combining a quantitative approach to large-scale synchronic polysemy data with a qualitative evaluation of the diachronic material in two text languages, ancient Egyptian and ancient Greek, it shows that weighted diachronic semantic maps can capture informative generalizations about the organization of the lexicon and its reshaping over time. The general methodology developed in the paper is illustrated with a case study of the semantic extension of time-related lexemes. This case study shows that the blend of tools well established in linguistic typology with proven methods of historical linguistics enables a principled approach to long-standing questions in the fields of diachronic semasiology and onomasiology.

Pathways of initial consonant loss

This paper investigates the historical loss of root-initial consonants, using a case study of Middle Paman languages of Cape York Peninsula, in northeastern Australia. Systematic loss of initial consonants is a typologically unusual phenomenon, mainly found in Australia, that has often been regarded as a starting point for far-reaching changes in root structure, phonotactics and even phoneme inventory. So far, the literature has focused mainly on identifying phonetic causes of initial loss. This study focuses on the actual processes and pathways of initial loss, which is an equally important part of the historical puzzle. Specifically, it shows that there are multiple pathways for initial loss: it can be the result of a gradual phonetic process involving intermediate steps like lenition, as is assumed in part of the literature, but it can also be due to more abrupt processes involving borrowing and even morphosyntactic alternations. This adds to a more diversified model of how initial loss actually proceeds, which together with earlier work on the diversity of phonetic causes of initial loss produces a more comprehensive understanding of this typologically and diachronically unusual phenomenon.

Old English intensifiers

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.

Indexicality, semanticity and contact along the now < this time pathway

This study presents data from modern Arabic innovations now < this time to investigate the cross-linguistic developmental pathway temporal deictic < [demonstrative [time noun]]. Products of this path (e.g., German heute, Spanish ahora) feature consistently in contrastive approaches to grammaticalization and lexicalization and have been advanced as exclusive examples of both phenomena, without clear resolution. In this investigation, I establish the derivation of now forms in dialectal Arabic from ten distinct [demonstrative [time noun]] source constructions and identify patterns of fusion and coalescence relevant to both grammaticalization and lexicalization analyses. I then demonstrate a correlated progression of indexicalization and desemanticization in these items’ semanto-pragmatic structure that firmly positions them as examples of grammaticalizing, rather than lexicalizing, change, and proceed to develop this account via examination of the cross-dialectal diffusion of now < this time as an abstract, schematized structure. This approach provides additional support for a grammaticalization account of temporal deictic < [demonstrative [time noun]] developments cross-linguistically and elaborates a novel evidentiary stream with implications for the integration of contact linguistics and grammaticalization/lexicalization studies more broadly.

Pre- and postnominal onymic genitives in (Early) New High German

This empirical study focuses on the diachrony of adnominal genitives of proper names in (Early) New High German (17th to 19th centuries), e.g., Carls Haus vs. das Haus Carls ‘Carl’s house’. Starting from the observation that word order variation exists within the whole period investigated, the study identifies determining factors for this variation and weights them in a multifactorial model of word order variation and change, the first time this has been done for German. The focus is on formal factors such as syntactic complexity, a factor that increases in importance over the observed time span. The historical data allow not only the investigation of established formal parameters but also the identification of new factors such as the type of inflectional marker (due to genitive allomorphy in older stages of German). In addition to these formal factors, genitive semantics, pragmatic information status and genre are also taken into account. Explanations for the trend towards the postnominal position of complex adnominal genitives as well as the stability of bare name possessors in the prenominal position are discussed.