Diachronic Change Research Articles

The chop suey letterform in historical Los Angeles Chinatowns

ABSTRACT This study investigates the sociosemiotic practices of the chop suey letterform in three historical Chinatowns of Los Angeles. Created to index Chineseness in the 1880s America, the chop suey letterform has been controversial in use yet remains highly visible in today’s global linguistic landscape. This study examines visual data to capture the diachronic changes and synchronic variations in typographic ideologies over temporal space. It analyzes the dynamic meaning-making processes involved to construct ethnocultural identities, sustain power relations, and negotiate social re-positionings. In doing so, it proposes a new constitutive frame analytical approach to reveal the changeability and interconnectedness of discursive frames in political-economic transformations. On one hand, it critiques the chop suey letterform as symbolic capital utilized to create and sustain hegemonic regimes of racialization, domestication, and commodification. On the other hand, it highlights the progressive role the letterform plays through semiotic negotiation in social re-positionings and identity transformations.

A discourse dynamics analysis of academic voice construction: Disciplinary variation, trajectories, and dynamic interaction patterns

The discourse dynamics approach is a novel approach proposed within Complex Dynamic Systems Theory to explore the developmental and interactional characteristics of a complex system as manifested in discourse over time. This approach has been attested to be advantageous for identifying the evolutionary dynamics of language practices and social events. The current study adopts this approach to investigate the diachronic changes and dynamic interaction patterns of different categories of voice markers across four disciplines in 1970–2020. Using published research articles sampled with two-year intervals, the analysis revealed non-linear trajectories and dynamically changing interaction patterns of different categories of voice markers, as well as disciplinary variation in the use, trajectories, and interaction patterns of such expressions. Our findings demonstrate the value of understanding academic voice construction from a diachronic perspective through the discourse dynamics approach and can be useful for informing academic writing pedagogy aimed at helping novice academic writers understand discipline-specific practices of academic voice construction.

Phonetic Tonal Manifestations and Trends in Tone Change: A Case Study of the Yong-Deng Dialect in Northwest China

This study takes the Yong-deng dialect as a case study to investigate the phenomenon of tonal merging observed in Northwest Chinese dialects. It begins by examining the various monosyllabic tone patterns of the Yong-deng dialect, then supplements this with a review of the relevant literature, comparisons with the tone patterns of the neighbouring dialects, and an analysis of its tone sandhi in disyllabic and trisyllabic combinations. Each step of the dialect’s tonal variation is scrutinised, allowing for the identification of pertinent phonetic biases and the derivation of associated phonological rules. The central argument advanced here is that both synchronic tonal variation and diachronic tone change are governed by specific phonological rules. Despite the ostensibly variable phonetic manifestations, these rules can enable the prediction of the trajectory of tone change. The paper contributes to the understanding of tone merger and highlights its systemic and rule-bound nature.

Entropology: an Information-Theoretic Approach to Understanding Archaeological Data

The main objective of this paper is to develop quantitative measures for describing the diversity, homogeneity, and similarity of archaeological data. It presents new approaches to characterize the relationship between archaeological assemblages by utilizing entropy and its related attributes, primarily diversity, and by drawing inspiration from ecology. Our starting premise is that diachronic changes in our data provide a distorted reflection of social processes and that spatial differences in data indicate cultural distancing. To investigate this premise, we adopt a parsimonious approach for comparing assemblage profiles employing and comparing a range of (Hill) diversities, which enable us to exploit different aspects of the data. The modelling is tested on two seemingly large datasets: a Late Bronze Age Cretan dataset with circa 13,700 entries (compiled by PG); and a 4th millennium Western Tripolye dataset with circa 25,000 entries (compiled by AD). The contrast between the strongly geographically and culturally heterogeneous Bronze Age Crete and the strongly homogeneous Western Tripolye culture in the Southern Bug and Dnieper interfluve show the successes and limitations of our approach. Despite the seemingly large size of our datasets, these data highlight limitations that confine their utility to non-semantic analysis. This requires us to consider different ways of treating and aggregating assemblages, either as censuses or samples, contingent upon the degree of representativeness of the data. While our premise, that changes in data reflect societal changes, is supported, it is not definitively confirmed. Consequently, this paper also exemplifies the limitations of large archaeological datasets for such analyses.

Tracking diachronic sentiment change of economic terms in times of crisis: Connotative fluctuations of 'inflation' in the news discourse.

The present study focuses on the fluctuation of sentiment in economic terminology to observe semantic changes in restricted diachrony. Our study examines the evolution of the target term 'inflation' in the business section of quality news and the impact of the Great Recession. This is carried out through the application of quantitative and qualitative methods: Sentiment Analysis, Usage Fluctuation Analysis, Corpus Linguistics, and Discourse Analysis. From the diachronic Great Recession News Corpus that covers the 2007-2015 period, we extracted sentences containing the term 'inflation'. Several facts are evidenced: (i) terms become event words given the increase in their frequency of use due to the unfolding of relevant crisis events, and (ii) there are statistically significant culturally motivated changes in the form of emergent collocations with sentiment-laden words with a lower level of domain-specificity.

Breaking Free from Field Layers: The Interest of Post-excavation Stratigraphies (PES) for Producing Reliable Archaeological Interpretations and Increasing Chronological Resolution

In order to track diachronic changes in archaeological sequences, researchers typically partition time into stratigraphic layers defined during fieldwork, which serve as the framework for ensuing analyses. These analytical units have a significant impact on archaeological inference, defining its resolution, and influencing both the study of cultural assemblages and the reconstruction of past environments. However, field layers are seldom re-evaluated after excavation despite the fact that archaeological deposits are now commonly recognised as often containing material ‘mixed’ together by site formation processes, excavation techniques, or analytical practices. Although the analysis of intra-site spatial data clearly offers a means to overcome these issues, our literature review of 192 journal articles revealed the potential of this data (notably vertical projections of piece-plotted artefacts) to be under-exploited in prehistoric archaeology. Here, we advocate for the development of a more spatially informed framework for interpretation that we refer to as post-excavation stratigraphy or PES. After proposing a definition for PES, we attempt to develop a framework for theoretical considerations underlying their implication, importance, and potential. Three main benefits of PES are highlighted: ensuring assemblage reliability, increased chronological and spatial resolution, and more reliable interpretations based on a multi-stratigraphic approach. We contend that the stratigraphy defined during fieldwork is insufficient and potentially misleading. By providing a different “stratigraphic view” of the same sequence, each specialist can contribute data that, when combined, produces a better understanding of interactions between changes in, for example, technological or cultural traditions, subsistence strategies, or paleoenvironments.

Free Relative Clauses in Croatian Glagolitic Folk Medicine Books

Summary The paper examines semantic features and functions of free relative clauses with pronominal relativizers, represented in the Croatian Glagolitic folk medicine books from the 14th, 15th and 18th centuries. Prediction, projection and topicality are singled out as central conceptual and functional features of the expressions studied. The examples are interpreted from the aspect of construction grammar and the pragmatic aspect, and therefore a schematic representation of mental spaces forming the basis for the selected relative clauses has been constructed using the methodology presented in Dancygier and Sweetser (2005). The expressions studied are also viewed in the context of the titling function, as well as in the context of all relative clauses in the studied corpus and have therefore also been linked to the specific features of the text type and certain diachronic changes in their use have been observed.

Have media texts become more humorous?

As a research topic, humour has drawn much attention from multiple disciplines including linguistics. Based on Engelthaler & Hills’ (2018) humour scale, this study developed a measure named Humour Index (HMI) to quantify the degree of humour of texts. This measure was applied to examine the diachronic changes in the degree of humour of American newspapers and magazines across a time span of 118 years (1900-2017) with the use of texts from Corpus of Historical American English (COHA). Besides, the study also discussed the contributions of different types of words to the degree of humour in the two genres. The results show significant uptrends in the degree of humour of both newspapers and magazines in the examined period. Moreover, derogatory and offensive words are found to be less frequently used than other categories of words in both genres. This study provides both theoretical and methodological implications for humour studies and claims or hypotheses of previous research, such as infotainment and linguistic positivity bias.

A feast: Indigenous production and interregional exchange reflected by the bronze vessels unearthed from Shuangyuan Village Cemetery in southwestern China

AbstractSurprising combinations of bronze vessels with multiple cultural elements have been unearthed in Shu tombs in southwestern China, indicating a significant connection with the middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze River. However, there is currently no comprehensive evidence for the provenance of these foreign style vessels, and little emphasis has been given to the diachronic changes in the interaction between Shu culture and its surroundings. This article investigates the bronze vessels unearthed from the Shuangyuan Village Cemetery in Chengdu during the Eastern Zhou Dynasty and aims to deeply reveal the production and exchange of bronze vessels unearthed from Shuangyuan Village Cemetery from the perspective of lead sources through typological analysis and scientific analysis. The study clarified the ages of the local style Shu culture vessels and foreign style vessels, and the latter exhibited a strong influence of the Chu and Yue cultures. Lead isotope analysis shows that the lead source characteristics of foreign style vessels are consistent with those of vessels from Chu‐Yue culture at the same time, and they may be imported from Chu directly. The specific interaction modes of Shu and Chu underwent a clear transformation during the middle Warring States period.

New insights into the use of Neolithic pottery in Guangxi of South China: organic residue analysis of experimental and archaeological pottery

As one of the world’s earliest pottery origins in Eurasia, the role of pottery during Neolithic period in South China remains unclear. Here, we present a new understanding on the utilization pattern of early pottery from the Neolithic sites of Dayan, Dingsishan and Zengpiyan in Guangxi province, China. Compound-specific stable isotope analysis of pottery and bone lipids show that a persistent use of terrestrial C3 and C4 resources throughout the pottery utilization history highlight the culinary practice and terrestrial exploitation during Neolithic period. Contrary to the traditional view that the primary use of these pottery was closely linked with aquatic resource processing, no aquatic biomarkers were found in the potsherds, yet these compounds were detected in the cooking experiments in this study, indicating that aquatic resources in these sites were probably processed or consumed in other ways. Moreover, a remarkable diachronic change from extensive use of C3 and C4 resources to the intensive use of certain kinds of C3 resources in different Neolithic stages, further indicating that an ecological tradition rooted in the subtropical and tropical environments as well as the Neolithic social evolution exerted great influence upon the initial production and the subsequent utilization of early pottery in prehistoric South China.

The Diachronic Change of Ren Rongrong’s Translation: A Corpus-based Research on Reduplication in His Chinese Translation of Children’s Literature

Based on a self-built corpus, a statistical and multidimensional comparative analysis is performed to determine the diachronic change in the application of reduplications in Ren’s five representative translated works for children literature (spanning 24 years) and relevant factors. The total number of reduplicated words in the five translated works showed a downward trend, as well as the frequency of AA and ANA. The frequency of ABB, ABAB, and AABB forms showed no obvious upward or downward trend but fluctuated significantly. The diversity and variation of the application of reduplication are not only related to the function of reduplicated words themselves but also influenced by the original text, translator, and readers.

Semantic changes in the diachronic perspective from the viewpoint of ethnic experience categorization in the English language

The article considers semantic changes in English words as certain movements in accordance with figurative schemes within the framework of the conceptual structure of the word and lexical categories. We believe this aspect to be relevant as the traditional approach to semantic changes of words in the diachronic perspective does not reveal the mechanism of transition from one meaning to another. In terms of cognitive linguistics, it is possible to more profoundly describe the phenomenon of recategorization in the English word semantics in the diachronic perspective and understand the essence of these changes. The scientific novelty of this study is the evaluation of semantic changes in the vocabulary of the English language from the standpoint of categorization, which is considered within the framework of diachronic changes influenced by a variety of external, extralinguistic factors, including the level of the development of civilization, culture and thinking of the English-speaking nation. We have provided rationale for the hypothesis that every shift of the meaning towards “improvement” or “deterioration” in the diachronic perspective will depend on the direction of the movement (to the core or periphery) of the word conceptual base: deterioration of the meaning is often associated with its movement towards the periphery, and improvement - with its movement to the core. The expansion and narrowing of the meanings of words is associated, respectively, with the movement from its part to its whole and from its whole to its part in the conceptual structure of words. In each specific case, the language selects the optimal way to change the value. This is the theoretical significance of our research. The possibility of using research materials in courses in the history of the English language, linguistic and cultural aspects of the English language, lexicology and stylistics of the English language determines the practical significance of the study.

Greek history

I commence this review with a major contribution to the study of women in the ancient Greek world. The public invisibility of women in the poleis of the archaic and classical period is a well-known phenomenon; equally well-known is the fact that this starts to change from the Hellenistic period onwards, when developments in the culture of evergetism and in honorific practices created a niche for women to be publicly visible and honoured by their communities. Przemysław Sierkierka, Krystyna Stebnicka, and Aleksander Wolicki have published a two-volume collection of all public honorific inscriptions for Greek women from the classical to the Roman imperial period. The work excludes honorific inscriptions for Hellenistic queens and female members of the Roman imperial family, thus focusing on honours for Greek citizen women and foreign women. The first volume includes a book-size introduction to the history of public honours for Greek women, examining diachronic changes and offering an overview of the language of inscriptions and the repertory of honours provided. At the same time, the introduction offers an extensive discussion of the role of women in the public life of Greek cities in the long term. The first volume also includes the corpus of inscriptions from Aegean Greece, the Balkans, and Sicily and Italy in the West; the second volume largely focuses on Asia Minor, while also including the few relevant inscriptions from Cyprus, Syria, Egypt, and Cyrenaica. Each inscription is described in detail, while the Greek text is accompanied by an English translation and followed by a focused commentary. In line with the other major corpus under review here, this editorial choice to provide translation, bibliography, and commentary will make these volumes an impressive research tool for both specialists and non-specialists. I admit that I was really surprised by the quantity of the surviving material: the volume includes 1128 inscriptions from 238 communities. While many of these inscriptions are short, formulaic, and repetitive, the information provided on a substantial number is truly fascinating for Greek social history and the history of women.

러 불규칙 활용의 형성에 대하여

This paper aims to study ‘rʌ(러)’ irregular of Modern Korean, which has gotten less attention than other irregular classes. The ‘rʌ’ irregular is a conjugation in which ‘irɨda(이르다), purɨda(푸르다), nurɨda(누르다)’ are combined with the vowel ending, which ‘r(ㄹ)’ is added, resulting in the conjugated forms that ‘irɨrʌ(이르러), purɨrʌ(푸르러), nurɨrʌ(누르러)’. The ‘rʌ’ irregular of Modern Korean is the irregular with different characteristics from ‘p(ㅂ)’ irregular and ‘s(ㅅ)’ irregular. Because the ‘rʌ’ irregular isn’t the irregular conjugation formed by phonological motivations such as the changes of phonetic value and phonological phenomena. However, there is a limit that cannot be specifically discussed the motivations of forming the ‘rʌ’ irregular in previous studies. Thus, this study discussed how the ‘rʌ’ irregular of Modern Korean was formed by which motivations and gone through which processes of diachronic changes. According to the data of Middle Korean, it can be seen that the ‘rʌ’ irregular was composed of only color-adjectives such as ‘pɨrɨda(프르다), nurɨda(누 르다)’ in the 15th century, and was added ‘nirɨda(니르다)’ the 16th century, finally formed. In addition, it could analyze that the ‘rʌ’ irregular was formed by the non-phonological motivation of the convergence between paradigms. As a result, it comes to have the possibilities to solve various problems related to the formation of ‘rʌ’ irregular.

Languages in China link climate, voice quality, and tone in a causal chain

Are the sound systems of languages ecologically adaptive like other aspects of human behavior? In previous substantive explorations of the climate–language nexus, the hypothesis that desiccation affects the tone systems of languages was not well supported. The lack of analysis of voice quality data from natural speech undermines the credibility of the following two key premises: the compromised voice quality caused by desiccated ambient air and constrained use of phonemic tone due to a desiccated larynx. Here, the full chain of causation, humidity → voice quality → number of tones, is for the first time strongly supported by direct experimental tests based on a large speech database (China’s Language Resources Protection Project). Voice quality data is sampled from a recording set that includes 997 language varieties in China. Each language is represented by about 1200 sound files, amounting to a total of 1,174,686 recordings. Tonally rich languages are distributed throughout China and vary in their number of tones and in the climatic conditions of their speakers. The results show that, first, the effect of humidity is large enough to influence the voice quality of common speakers in a naturalistic environment; secondly, poorer voice quality is more likely to be observed in speakers of non-tonal languages and languages with fewer tones. Objective measures of phonatory capabilities help to disentangle the humidity effect from the contribution of phylogenetic and areal relatedness to the tone system. The prediction of ecological adaptation of speech is first verified through voice quality analysis. Humidity is observed to be related to synchronic variation in tonality. Concurrently, the findings offer a potential trigger for diachronic changes in tone systems.

Diachronic Developments of the Concessive Though-Fronting Construction in American English: A Corpus-Based Perspective

ABSTRACT This paper examines diachronic development patterns of the concessive though-fronting construction in American English, using corpus data. The findings of this study, on the one hand, show that the fronted expression has been dominantly an AdjP with a subject predicative complement function and a rather negative connotation, and that the major licensing verbs are linking verbs, which is in line with the previous observations in literature on its contemporary uses. However, the findings also show that the construction has undergone some interesting diachronic changes regarding the increasing dominance of AdjP as the syntactic category of the fronted expression, more diverse grammatical functions of the fronted expression than noted in previous literature, the change of the most preferred position of the concessive though-fronting clause, the strong preference for the singular countable bare NP without a/an, and the uses of the copula as the licensing verb. Furthermore, the attested data provide some examples that weaken the movement-based analysis. The findings, therefore, indicate that it is worth investigating its diachronic properties about expressions that occur in the pre-though position, the salient position of the concessive though-fronting clause, licensing verbs, and the relationship between the pre-though expression and its putative gap in detail.

Where didwergo? Lexical variation and change in third-person male adult noun referents in Old and Middle English

AbstractThe present study uses variationist quantitative methods to examine the evolution of the semantic field of third-person male adult noun referents from Old English to Middle English, covering a time depth of approximately six hundred years. Results show a shift from the favored variantwerin Old English tomanin Middle English, with the diachronic change in frequency following a prototypical s-shaped distribution. Although the replacement seems to take centuries to be complete, lexical frequency and written transmission are proposed as influential explanatory factors, and a homonymic clash is suggested to have accelerated the process of replacement in Middle English. Text type and text origin contribute to variation, with alliteration significantly influencing lexical choices in Old English verse texts. When combined with findings from recent synchronic work, this study highlights a heterogeneously structured semantic domain, which has undergone lexical replacement and change over time, providing some evidence for the applicability of s-shaped patterns for lexical change.

Local Utilitarian Pottery at Ancient Corinth: Differences in Materials and Diachronic Changes

ABSTRACT: This article explores the chemical-element composition of a wide range of local domestic wares (late 6th century b.c. to early 4th century a.d.). Using instrumental neutron activation analysis and two statistical approaches, we examine whether function or date explains variations in the chemical groups we found and if they match their archaeological labels. The initial choice of ceramic pastes (cooking fabric or buff ware) relates to function, but within those main categories, vessel function did not affect grouping. Fabrics did vary with time. Such changes do not occur at the same time in the cooking and buff wares, nor do they correlate well with the political history of the city.

Numeral Incorporation as Grammaticalization? A Corpus Study on German Sign Language (DGS)

Numeral incorporation describes the merging of a numeral sign with a lexical sign to create a single sign with a compositional meaning, e.g., “three weeks.” As a phenomenon of simultaneous morphology, numeral incorporation is unique to sign languages. While researchers disagree on the exact morphological structure of the construction, it has, thus far, mainly been described as a synchronic, phonological phenomenon. Using the DGS corpus, a language resource on German Sign Language, we explore the possibility of numeral incorporation resulting from a language change process, specifically a grammaticalization process. Our dataset comprises tokens belonging to nine different signs that may occur in numeral incorporations. We find a cline of three constructions in the corpus, which shows a progression from free morpheme to cliticized morpheme to bound morpheme (affix). A comparison of the usage frequency of the three constructions in different age groups reveals that signers use more incorporations the younger they are. Following the apparent time approach, these observations are taken as indicators of diachronic language change. We describe to what extent the properties of numeral incorporation fit with the grammaticalization hypothesis and conclude that while the emergence of numeral incorporation is an instance of language change and shows some aspects seen in grammaticalization, the gradual change fails to exhibit some crucial aspects of grammaticalization and, thus, should not be regarded as an example thereof.

Economy or ecology: metaphor use over time in China’s Government Work Reports

Abstract Government attention selectively distributed to various issues in policy-making processes is usually reflected in language, such as metaphors in political discourse. In addition, metaphor change may reveal how conceptualizations of major topics such as economy and ecology evolve over time. After self-building a corpus of China’s 45-year Government Work Reports, this study explores whether there is a difference in attention to topics of economy and ecology over time and investigates the diachronic change of metaphor use on them based on a modified framework for diachronic metaphor change analysis. Results show that attention to economy has been steadily decreasing while attention to ecology has been growing, and that there is an increasing tendency of using more economy and ecology metaphors. Metaphor change on the use of source domains is arranged on a continuum, ranging from constant use (war for economy and ecology, and journey and object for economy), incremental change (living organism and building for economy and ecology, and object for ecology) to fundamental change (building and living organism for ecology). This study may enrich the understanding of diachronic metaphor change by providing a Chinese perspective on the metaphor use in government discourse over time.