Phonaesthemic alternations in Flemish dialects: a matter of language contact in the emergence of phonaesthesia?

In this article, we present and analyse phonaesthemic alternations as they appear in Flemish dialects of Dutch, that is when a root-initial consonant or consonant cluster is replaced by a post-alveolar affricate /ʧ/ or /ʤ/ in order to create a phonaesthemically marked variant of a neutral base word. Although no longer productive in Flemish dialects, we show that such phonaesthemic alternations exhibit strong functional similarities to those found in other languages, in particular the evaluative notions of diminutivity and augmentativity. We also show that, formally speaking, Flemish phonaesthemic alternations differ from those attested in other languages in only targeting a single consonant or consonant cluster. We then put forward the hypothesis that Flemish speakers may have copied this mechanism to produce phonaesthemic alternations from Picard speakers, corroborating the notion that phonaesthemic alternations may emerge from language contact.

Establishing a Sprachbund in the Western Lingnan region: conceptual and methodological issues

It is well-known that Tai-Kadai languages have affected the typological profiles of Southern Sinitic varieties. For example, compared with their northern sisters, Southern Sinitic varieties display a stronger tendency towards head-initial structures, as in the N–N compounds for expressing the sex of animals and in post-verbal temporal adverbs. Given that the Tai-Kadai languages in China have been in contact with Sinitic for over two millennia, it is quite natural to find signs of Sinitic influence therein. Most remarkably, pre-verbal adjunct phrases and pre-nominal relative clauses, which are extremely atypical of VO languages but distinctive of Sinitic, are attested in some Tai-Kadai languages in Southern China. The prevalence of such typologically unusual traits among different linguistic groups in the Lingnan region of Southern China provides strong support for its status as a linguistic area. Devising and adopting a ‘mutualist’ approach, we analyse the typological data of over 280 language varieties, which we believe illustrates and strongly supports the idea that Western Lingnan qualifies as a linguistic area in its own right according to criteria widely recognized by areal linguists. The approach proposed in this study can be applied to other putative linguistic areas around the world to study the mechanisms and outcomes of contact-induced change under a specific set of ecological conditions.

On the impact of clause order on pronoun resolution: evidence from Spanish

In research on intra-sentential pronominal anaphora resolution in null subject languages, it has been argued that null pronouns tend to be biased towards subject antecedents, whereas overt pronouns tend to prefer object antecedents, as predicted by Carminati’s ‘Position of the Antecedent Hypothesis’. However, these studies have mainly focused on only one of the two possible clause orders (main-subordinate or subordinate-main), which have not been overtly contrasted. This paper investigates the effects of clause order on the interpretation of third-person subject pronouns in globally ambiguous intra-sentential contexts by 49 native speakers of Spanish. The results of an acceptability judgment task explicitly comparing both clause orders indicate that relative clause order is a key factor affecting the interpretation of pronouns: while a preference of overt pronouns for object antecedents holds across clause orders, null pronouns show a bias towards subject antecedents only in subordinate-main sequences. These findings refine the Position of the Antecedent Hypothesis predictions by restricting them to subordinate-main complex sentences.

Cyclic changes to the negative coordinating conjunction from Latin to Modern French

The evolution of the negative coordinating conjunction (‘neither’/‘nor’) from Latin to Modern French instantiates a type of cyclic development that is previously undocumented as such at the level of morphosyntax, viz. a ‘semasiological’ cycle. In effect, the conjunction appears to have taken an almost perfectly circular path. Thus, in Classical Latin, as is consonant with the typological status of that language as a Double Negation language, neque/nec was exclusively used in negative contexts. Medieval French being a Negative Concord language, on the other hand, its negative coordinating conjunction, ne, a direct descendant of neque/nec, was able to develop a full range of weak negative polarity uses. In a range of contexts, ne was thus semantically equivalent to either the additive conjunction et (‘and’) or the disjunction ou (‘or’). By the end of the Classical French period, however, the conjunction (which by then takes the form ny/ni) has lost all of its weak negative polarity uses again, and it is used only in strong negatively polar environments in Modern Standard French. Based on data from the electronic corpora Frantext and Base de Français Médiéval, I analyze the three stages of this evolution. I show that, together with other developments in the French negative system, it falsifies predictions made in the literature and has consequences for the reconstruction of negative systems in less well-documented languages.

The lateralization of labio-dorsals in Hmongic

This paper provides support for Ratliff’s hypothesis of a highly unusual shift from labio-dorsal to lateral affricates in some Hmongic languages. It proposes that this shift, which results from a series of sound changes, constitutes evidence for positing a ‘Tlowic’ subgroup within Hmongic. In addition, it disproves attempts to use correspondences between Chinese labiovelars and Hmongic lateral affricates in borrowings as evidence to revise Chinese historical phonology.

Norse-derived vocabulary in La estorie del evangelie

While the study of Norse-derived terms in medieval English has benefitted from recent etymological advances (e.g. the Gersum project), the exploration of their process of integration lags behind. The latter requires the analysis of the dialectal and semantic distribution of the terms, as well as their interactions with other members of their lexico-semantic fields. This paper offers a case study of this approach by presenting the first comprehensive account of the Norse-derived terms included in La estorie del evangelie, an early Middle English poem from south Lincolnshire/north Norfolk. Besides identifying and classifying the Norse loans on the basis of the Gersum typology and the Historical thesaurus of English, the paper examines the different layers of scribal reworking in its seven fourteenth- and fifteenth-century manuscripts from various dialectal areas to separate the Norse-derived terms that can be attributed to the original composition from those that represent later lexical substitutions, thus tracing the terms’ fate into the late Middle English period. This work shows that this understudied text offers valuable information on the interaction between native, Norse and French terms both in the early Middle English period of the original Fenland author and the later period of the surviving copies. Given that the methodology showcased here should not be restricted only to the analysis of Norse-derived terms, the paper’s significance transcends its immediate focus, as it also contributes to our understanding of medieval English lexicology more broadly.

The passive voice in ancient Indo-European languages: inflection, derivation, periphrastic verb forms

The IE languages developed different strategies for the encoding of the passive function. In some language branches, the middle voice extended to the passive function to varying extents. In addition, dedicated derivational formations arose in a number of languages, such as the Greek -ē-/-thē- aorist and the Indo-Aryan -ya-presents. Periphrastic formations involving a verbal adjective or a participle are also widely attested, and played an important role in the building of the passive paradigm in e.g. Romance and Germanic languages. As the periphrastic passive is also attested in Hittite alongside passive use of the middle, both strategies seem to be equally ancient. Some minor strategies include lexical passives and the extensive lability of verbs. A survey of possible strategies provides evidence for the rise of a disparate number of morphemes and constructions, and for their ongoing incorporation into the inflectional paradigms (paradigmaticization) of given languages, thus adding to our knowledge about cross-linguistic sources of passive morphology and grammaticalization processes involved.

Dative experiencers with nominal predicates in Romanian: a synchronic and diachronic study

This article investigates the evolution of the Romanian pattern [dative clitic + ‘be’ + N] (cf. Mi-e foame, lit. me.dat=is hunger, ‘I’m hungry’) from the 16th century until present-day Romanian. This pattern traces back to the Latin mihi est construction (lit. me.dat is), but is semantically more restricted than its Latin ancestor in that it can only express a physiological or psychological state. The aim of our study is to examine to what extent the dative experiencer behaves like a subject and the noun denoting a state like a predicate. We argue that, although certain subject diagnostics raise problems in Romanian, due to the obligatoriness of clitics and the scarcity of controlled infinitives, this pattern is clearly an instance of non-canonical subject marking with quirky dative case. The tendency toward expansion of this construction in present-day Romanian contradicts the hypothesis proposed in language typology according to which non-canonical subject marking tends to recede in favor of canonical marking in European languages.

Loss of intersective gradience as the lifeboat of a dying construction. An analysis of the diachronic change of causative bring

This paper focusses on diachronic processes which lead to the disambiguation between different constructions involving the same verb. It follows the development of bring as a periphrastic causative over the course of the Early Modern and Late Modern English periods and compares it to the development of other bring constructions. In a corpus-based analysis, it utilizes measures of cue strength as well as collostructional analysis to determine whether reflexive objects, negation, modals or the passive are cues strongly associated with the dying periphrastic causative X bring cause Y to-inf. Results indicate that the construction indeed increasingly attracts reflexive objects in combination with a modal or negation. This finding is interpreted as an indication that non-prototypical verbal properties developing into strong cues for a construction may serve to make a rare construction more salient and thus easier to recognize and process. Furthermore, the construction’s restriction to reflexive patients vastly reduces variability in the object slot.