Grammatical Change Research Articles

The development of the encoding of deictic motion in the Bantu language Rangi: grammaticalisation and change

AbstractThe close cross-linguistic relation between the domains of space and time has been well described. The frequent emergence of Tense-Aspect-Mood (TAM) markers from deictic motion verbs in particular, has also been extensively detailed in the literature. This paper focusses on the less well-known link between associated motion, a category of functional morphemes expressing (deictic) motion events, and TAM, in a language contact situation. Specifically, it provides a synchronic and diachronic description of three associated motion prefixes,joo-,tóó-andkoo-, found in the Tanzanian Bantu language Rangi, spoken in an area of high linguistic diversity. It proposes that the prefixjoo-encodes movement towards a deictic centre,tóó-encodes movement towards a goal which is not the deictic centre, andkoo-encodes movement away from a deictic centre. It further contends that whiletóó-andkoo-have maintained a purely deictic function,joo-has grammaticalised to assume an additional function whereby it encodes future tense, possibly aided by the absence of a dedicated future tense marker in the language. This three-way morphological encoding of spatial relations on the verb form is not a common characteristic of East African Bantu languages. However, this paper proposes that the system in Rangi can be accounted for on the basis of cross-linguistically widely attested pathways of grammatical change.

Διερευνώντας τη διαχρονική εξέλιξη των συνδετικών της Ελληνικής: η περίπτωση του AΝ ΚΑΙ

The study examines the diachrony of the concessive connective ‘ αν και ’ in Medieval and Early Modern Greek. It is illustrated that the concessive conditional ‘ αν και ’, albeit present in the language since Ancient Greek, met with a clear decline in usage during the Medieval Greek period. From the 16 th century on ‘ αν και ’ starts being attested abundantly again and, apart from expressing the concessive conditional meaning, it has also moved towards becoming a purely concessive marker. In the explanation provided here, it is demonstrated that the odd diachronic distribution can be well-understood by appealing to constructional networks and formal factors as motives for grammatical change.

КОГНИТИВНИЯТ ФАКТОР ЗА ГРАМАТИЧЕСКИТЕ ИЗМЕНЕНИЯ / THE COGNITIVE FACTOR IN GRAMMATICAL CHANGE

Changes in the conceptualization of objects, phenomena, and processes are a major cognitive factor in grammatical change. Grammatical categorization, which has to do with changes in conceptualization, triggers semantic and formal changes in grammatical classes and categories. Changes can be enhanced by the influence of an external factor – foreign language influence and bilingualism, or an internal factor – insufficient fixation of the grammatical norm, formality of the norm or artificiality of the norm. Changes can also be spontaneous as they follow the logic of intralingual evolution. Keywords: grammatical change, conceptualization, categorization, exceptions to norms, errors in usage, Bulgarian language

Contact-induced grammatical change?

AbstractThe paper discusses how language contact and borrowing can be established as a critical factor of quantitative and/or qualitative changes of abstract grammatical patterns, in particular if languages are genetically and areally closely related and thus structurally similar. More specifically, it deals with the question of whether the word-formation pattern of proper name compounding in German and Dutch is an instance of grammatical borrowing from English, as is often claimed in the literature. To this end, we conduct a structural analysis of the pattern in the three languages based on original and translation corpus data. We show that the pattern which, at first glance, seems to be identical in all three languages has in fact different properties in each language. Although this does not necessarily preclude transfer from English, we conclude that there is no evidence in favour of such an influence.

On conceptualizing grammatical change in a Darwinian framework

Abstract Approaching language change within a Darwinian framework constitutes a long-standing tradition within the literature of diachronic linguistics. However, many publications remain vague, omitting conceptual details or missing necessary terminology. For example, phylogenetic trees of language families are regularly compared to biological speciation, but definitions on mechanisms of inheritance, i.e. how linguistic information is transferred between individuals and cohorts, or on the linguistic correlates to genotype and phenotype are often missing or lacking. In light of this, Haider’s attempts to develop this approach into a theoretically more precise position, closely mirroring principles of Darwinian natural selection in the dimension of diachronic grammatical change, but contrasting this with non-Darwinian lexical change. He draws a comparison to viral replication, essentially positing that grammar variants act as mental viruses, competing for replication in new hosts, i.e. children during critical periods of language acquisition. Haider proposes that in light of this competition for replication, the unconscious fixation of an individual’s grammar leads to diachronic grammatical change largely mirroring Darwinian natural selection. Despite the intuitive appeal this mode of reasoning may feature, the following response paper identifies and discusses a suit of shortcomings to this conceptualization. Some problems arise from underspecified theoretical notions, others due to the incomplete or inaccurate adoption of biological principles, and yet more through a partial incompatibility with empirical data. These criticisms do not amount to a dismissal of the Darwinian framework Haider is following, but to a rejection of Haider’s current position. Albeit it remains unclear if a truly Darwinian approach to language change can be reached, suggestions on how Haider’s theoretical notions could be further developed are made and pertinent efforts may ultimately lead to a productive theory.

Quelques observations sur ce qu’est la grammatialisation et ce qu’elle n’est pas

The notion of ‘grammaticalization’ — the embedding of once non- (or less-) grammatical phenomena into the grammar of a language — has enjoyed broad acceptance over the past 30 years as a new paradigm for describing and accounting for linguistic change. Despite its appeal, my contention is that there are some issues with ‘grammaticalization’ as it is conventionally described and discussed in the literature. My goal here is to explore what some of those problems are and to focus on what grammaticalization has to offer as a methodology for studying language change. Drawing on case studies from the history of English and the history of Greek, I reach a characterization of how much of grammatical change can legitimately be called “grammaticalization” and how much is something else. In this way, I work to achieve a sense of what grammaticalization is and what it is not.

Recent advances in the corpus-based study of ongoing grammatical change in English

Abstract Comparing early and current corpus-based work on ongoing grammatical change in English, the present study argues that progress tends to manifest itself in the more comprehensive and systematic coverage of changes known to be under way rather than in the discovery of genuinely new diachronic processes. As will be shown in two case studies on modal/semi-modal verbs and the progressive, there are three reasons for this. First, corpus research on ongoing change has been helped by increases in the size of available corpora and even more so by better coverage of spoken English. Secondly, researchers have a much wider range of statistical methods to choose from. Thirdly, conceptual advances have been made in theoretical models of change, particularly with regard to the impact of language ideologies and prescriptivism. In the study of ongoing changes, the corpus-based approach remains indispensable because it remedies the errors of impressionistic observation and helps shift attention from a small number of shibboleths important to prescriptivists to the groundswell of grammatical change that generally proceeds below the level of speakers’ conscious awareness.

New Empirical Approaches to Grammatical Variation and Change

Research on grammatical variation and change has traditionally been based on diachronic and synchronic corpus analysis, but the growing importance of experimental approaches to the study of language has led many researchers to combine corpus study with experimentation to systematically examine linguistic variability and stability [...]

Evolución gramatical de las construcciones progresivas del inglés: una discusión diacrónica

In this paper we bring forward a comprehensive discussion on the grammatical development of the English progressive construction. From a set of progressive prototypes drawn from the family of corpora York-Toronto-Helsinki-Penn, we exemplify how the lexical and grammatical configuration of the construction which is characteristic of Present-Day English appears since Old English. Furthermore, we explain how the syntactic evolution of English enables the establishment of the obligatory grammatical nature of the verbal periphrastic construction. Finally, we explain how the grammatical patterns and the semantic and pragmatic features that describe the English progressive construction in the course of its evolution are manifested apparently through a functional-morphosyntactic and grammatical change gradient.

동사 기원의 제외 표지어에 관하여: 문법화의 관점으로

The main purpose of this paper is to describe the grammatical change of exception-marking prepositions, focusing on exception markers derived from verbs and functioning as preposition: except, excepting, bar, barring, save, saving, and excluding. This paper describes the grammaticalization process qualitatively and quantitatively. That is, the syntactic and semantic changes of the respective prepositions are qualitatively expounded in terms of grammaticalization principles and mechanisms and their common characteristics identified. Quantitatively, the frequencies of those items under discussion are identified with the help of the two corpora, the British National Corpus and Corpus of Contemporary American English.

Past passive participles of intransitive verbs in the language of the Bulgarian minority in Romania: A closer look at contact-induced grammatical change. Našite bălgari să dojdeni or dušleli

This article discusses an innovative grammatical structure with past passive participles of intransitive verbs оbserved in the language of a Bulgarian minority in Brăneşti, Romania. The aim of this article is to reveal the mechanism of contact-induced grammatical change which seems to have occurred in the Bulgariandialect of Brăneşti under the influence of the Romanian language. The results of the analysis, based on materials from the author’s fieldwork, indicate that a grammatical structure involving the past passive participles of intransitive verbs hasarisen in the Brăneşti dialect as a result of grammatical replication of Romanianpast participles.

Estudio cualitativo de los procesos de gramaticalización, cambio construccional y construccionalización en las construcciones progresivas del inglés

En este artículo se analizan cualitativamente determinados procesos de cambio gramatical que experimentan las construcciones progresivas del inglés a lo largo de su desarrollo diacrónico. Más concretamente, se estudian los procesos de gramaticalización, tanto de carácter primario como secundario, en que devienen las formas progresivas, así como los fenómenos de cambio construccional y construccionalización que parecen tener lugar en la evolución de estas estructuras. Se lleva a cabo un análisis cualitativo estandarizado, a partir de una muestra del conjunto de corpus York-Toronto-Helsinki-Penn, mediante el cual se prueba la existencia de una relación entre los procesos de gramaticalización primaria y los cambios construccionales, así como entre los fenómenos de gramaticalización secundaria y la construccionalización. Finalmente, el concepto de gradiente lingüístico, aplicado a estos procesos de cambio gramatical, explica tentativamente la forma en la que estos fenómenos de cambio podrían encontrarse latentes en las formas progresivas en todos los períodos de la lengua

The spread zones and contacts of medieval Finnic in the Northeastern Baltic Sea area: Implications for the rate of language change

AbstractIn the contemporary northern Baltic Sea area, there are two states, Finland and Estonia, in which a western Uralic language has an official status. Several Finnic minority languages are or used to be spoken in the adjacent areas in the contact zone of Baltic, Germanic and Slavic languages. Historically, the north-eastern surroundings of the Gulf of Finland reflect a gradual spread of the language area during the past millennium and especially the late Middle Ages, while more southern areas in contemporary Estonia, and its eastern neighbourhood in Russia show longer continuity of language borders. The Finnic languages were used predominantly orally until very recently, whereas written language began to affect non-standard varieties more strongly only in the 19th and 20th centuries. The diversification of the Finnic languages in the Northeastern Baltic Sea area involves both integration and disintegration of mutually closely related varieties. This article focuses on i) the variability of changes and their correlation with emerging divergence between Finnic languages, ii) local language contacts during the late Middle Ages and the Early Modern age, and iii) the rate of linguistic change. The external powers affecting the diversity between the Finnic languages include the settling of early Swedish, German and Slavic centres among or in the vicinity of Finnic communities, the policies of medieval Catholic and Orthodox church, the extension of the trading networks of the Hanseatic League, wars and conflicts between dominant political powers in the east and west, as well as the gradual establishment of political borders. I will suggest that all these factors have played a role in the rate of both lexical and grammatical change.

Where do demonstratives come from?

AbstractStudies in grammaticalization have established that processes of grammatical change frequently have lexical items as their source, and more specifically nouns and verbs. But there is at least one potential exception: As argued by Holger Diessel in a number of publications, demonstratives cannot be historically derived from other entities, such as lexical items. Based on a survey of languages from different parts of the world and belonging to different language families, the present paper argues that this generalization is in need of reconsideration.

Usage, media, and grammaticalization

Abstract This report presents a case study on a current grammatical change in a rhetorical question 不是…吗 (isn’t it the case…?) and its spreading from spoken Beijing Mandarin to Mandarin Chinese in general. The study addresses three interrelated issues that concern the development and spreading of this new pattern: (1) usage-based language variation and change in spoken Beijing Mandarin; (2) Socio-cultural factors that may have promoted the adaptation of the new pattern in Mandarin Chinese; and (3) the impact of media, which may enhance the rapid spreading of the pattern in China. The report offers another instance of usage as the main driving force leading to language variation and grammaticalization.

Disentangling modal meanings with distributional semantics

AbstractThis article investigates the collocational behavior of English modal auxiliaries such as may and might with the aim of finding corpus-based measures that distinguish between different modal expressions and that allow insights into why speakers may choose one over another in a given context. The analysis uses token-based semantic vector space modeling (Heylen et al., 2015, Monitoring polysemy. Word space models as a tool for large-scale lexical semantic analysis. Lingua, 157: 153–72; Hilpert and Correia Saavedra, 2017, Using token-based semantic vector spaces for corpus-linguistic analyses: From practical applications to tests of theoretical claims. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory) in order to determine whether different modal auxiliaries can be distinguished in terms of their collocational profiles. The analysis further examines whether different senses of the same auxiliary exhibit divergent collocational preferences. The results indicate that near-synonymous pairs of modal expressions, such as may and might or must and have to, differ in their distributional characteristics. Also, different senses of the same modal expression, such as deontic and epistemic uses of may, can be distinguished on the basis of distributional information. We discuss these results against the background of previous empirical findings (Hilpert, 2016, Construction Grammar and its Application to English, 2nd edn. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, Flach, in press, Beyond modal idioms and modal harmony: a corpus-based analysis of gradient idiomaticity in modal-adverb collocations. English Language and Linguistics) and theoretical issues such as degrees of grammaticalization (Correia Saavedra, 2019, Measurements of Grammaticalization: Developing a Quantitative Index for the Study of Grammatical Change. PhD Dissertation, Université de Neuchâtel) and the avoidance of synonymy (Bolinger, 1968, Entailment and the meaning of structures. Glossa, 2(2): 119–27).

Gender diversity and morphosyntax: An account of singular <i>they</i>

As one of the primary means of constructing gendered identities, language is a matter of central concern to transgender people (Zimman 2018). In this paper, we present an analysis of non-binary singular they; that is, they as used to refer to individuals whose gender identity is not, or is not exclusively, masculine or feminine. Despite singular they’s widespread usage and long history in English, not all speakers judge this most recent innovation to be grammatical, even if they do not object to singular they in quantified, generic, or otherwise gender non-specific contexts, and even if they produce the latter sort of examples natively. We argue that resistance to this new use of they can, at least in part, be attributed to speakers’ level of participation in a grammatical change in progress. Further, we propose that this change can be categorized into three distinct stages, with they’s most recent broadening – that is, as a non-binary singular pronoun of reference – dovetailing with wider socio-cultural changes (as well as featural changes beyond the pronominal system) that underscore the difficulty in separating grammatical and social judgements. As we aim to show, linguists from all subdisciplines – both theoretical and applied – are especially well suited to leverage theoretical insights to advocate for trans-affirming language practice.

Empirical perspectives on English as a lingua franca (ELF) grammar

AbstractThis article focuses on grammatical variation in English as a lingua franca (ELF). Calling for more systematic corpus studies, it presents three empirical perspectives that broaden and deepen the study of grammatical variability in ELF. These approaches focus on tracing how ongoing grammatical change in core and emergent modal auxiliaries is adopted in ELF. The empirical evidence is drawn from various ELF corpora that cover multiple genres. Utilizing the quantitative paradigm and building on corpus‐based variationist methods, the three perspectives highlight and call for more studies (1) in which the object of study consists of broad grammatical categories and which compare quantitative patterns between ELF and other types of Englishes, (2) that combine quantitative methods with close‐up qualitative analyses, and (3) that investigate probabilistic constraints in ELF grammar. The results show that ELF is shaped by the same natural evolutionary processes that affect the established varieties.

Grammatical change in South African Englishes

AbstractThis article investigates whether grammatical change in South African English (SAfE) leads to convergence or divergence in the different varieties within SAfE. Contact between speakers of English and other languages potentially leads to divergence from varieties beyond SAfE, and to convergence within SAfE. Modal auxiliaries show convergence between White SAfE (WSAfE) and Afrikaans, but not between WSAfE and Black SAfE (BSAfE). No convergence is observed between the innovative use of the progressive in BSAfE and WSAfE, except for similar long‐term frequency increases. The omission of the complementiser that shows similar long‐term frequency changes between WSAfE, Afrikaans and BSAfE. The findings indicate that higher degrees of contact between speakers result in closer convergence, especially as far as constructional semantics are concerned, but convergent frequency changes seem to be possible without the same closeness of contact.

Grammaticalisation paths in the rise and development of aside

In this paper we analyse the grammaticalisation processes involved in the rise and development of the ‘a-adverbial’ aside from the original combination of the preposition on and the substantive side in Old English. Different aspects of this grammatical change will be discussed in the paper, from morphosyntactic and phonological (coalescence-univerbation) to semantic ones (development of abstract senses, extension of semantic range), taking very much into account the diachronic axis that underpins them. Special attention has been paid in the analysis to the variation patterns of aside that existed in the Late Middle English period (when the actual process of grammaticalisation was about to be completed) and to the correlation of these variants with the geographic provenance of the texts, trying to determine if the processes of word formation that gave rise to this new word class travelled homogeneously across Britain.