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Abstract
As a type of irregularity and anomaly, suppletion has been widely investigated in Indo-European languages. It is generally thought that Turkic languages, as they are very agglutinating, do not tolerate such irregularities. Though this is true to a certain extent, suppletion may be observed in any natural language as a universal linguistic phenomenon. Turkic languages contain a considerable number of radical and affixal suppletive pairs. In this article I deal with those suppletive pairs in historical and contemporary Turkic languages and comment on their rise and degradation through phonological and semantic shifts, language contact or analogy. I will revisit and reorganize certain pairs which have been falsely classified as suppletive. Since it is important to distinguish suppletive pairs from separate lexical and grammatical morphemes, I will also clarify some theoretical points regarding apophony, uniqueness, the productiveness of single paradigms, lexicalization, synonymy and antonymy.
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This study uses typological surveys of predicative possessive constructions across languages and illustrates how a typological study may contribute to a historical discussion. More specifically it provides an account of such constructions in the history of Akkadian. The typological surveys reveal that various constructions in Akkadian not only connote possession accidently, but rather are tokens of predicative possessive constructions. Thus, this article provides a synchronic survey of different marginal predicative possessive constructions in Akkadian, of different dialects and from different periods, most of them unnoticed in the literature. Second, once these constructions are identified, assuming their existence in the history of a language may contribute to explaining other related phenomena, either as motivations for certain diachronic developments or as historical syntactic/semantic explanations for other phenomena. In the context of Akkadian, it will be first and foremost used to explain the origin of the Akkadian verb išûm , the equivalent of the English verb ‘to have’, as Akkadian is unique among the Semitic languages in having a finite verb for this function.
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Abstract
One of the most salient features of northern English and Scots is the Northern Subject Rule (NSR), a grammatical constraint that governs present-tense verbal morphology according to the type and position of the subject. Although most accounts of the NSR refer only to the plural, there is evidence that the constraint also affected the first-person singular, giving rise to a system in which all plural persons and the first-person singular have verbal - s unless adjacent to a personal-pronoun subject, in which case the present indicative marker is zero or the - e suffix. We aim to demonstrate that the NSR in first-person-singular contexts was operative in the North in early Modern English and is documented until the eighteenth century in northern English and Scots. As regards the origin of the NSR in this context, analysis of the LAEME data for the North shows that there were signs of the adjacency constraint in all persons of the present indicative, including the first-person singular, during this period. However, the adjacency constraint appears to have been less robust than the type of subject constraint. As the effect of subject type is relevant only in third-person plural contexts, this might explain the strength of the constraint in this context and the attention that third-person plural contexts and the NSR have received in the literature at the expense of other environments, such as the first-person singular.
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The degree modifier to death is generally left out of the paradigm of English intensifiers. The article analyses this modifier within the framework of grammaticalisation and subjectification. This corpus-driven study suggests an unusual grammaticalisation path. In contrast to numerous intensifiers grammaticalising from adverbs, to death developed its booster function (i.e. high degree) from various constructions np 1 verb np 2 to death / np be adjective to death , often occurring in bridging contexts. The multiplicity of source constructions is what makes this case study of special interest. It is also shown that the semantic change from a ( potential or actual ) result sense to a high degree meaning results from the interplay of metaphor, hyperbole and metonymic inferencing.
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Abstract
The primary means for expressing polar questions in Estonian are particles positioned at the beginning or the end of a sentence. We trace the development of these question particles from the seventeenth century until to the present day. In the course of time new particles emerged and older ones changed their function. Such functional shifts included, among others, the loss of negative or affirmative polarity, the loss of interrogativity, or the adoption of a focus-marking function. The oldest question particles based on negative particles are interesting because of the functional shifts which they underwent and which can be found in Old Written Estonian texts. The older Written South Estonian particle es , for example, is often cited as an example of decliticisation, and claimed to have developed in the opposite direction of usual grammaticalisation paths. As our analysis reveals, however, it has in fact followed a normal path of development after all: deriving from a compound, and changing from a sentence-initial marker of polar questions to a scope marker following the question word or phrase in content questions, the simple particle was sometimes cliticised by merging with preceding words.
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In a series of articles published between 1934 and 1962, Franklin Edgerton proposed several revisions to Sievers's Law. Edgerton's revisions were in fact so far-reaching that the relevant sound law became known as ‘Sievers–Edgerton,’ or as ‘Edgerton's Law.’ Edgerton's Law rapidly gained acceptance among linguists, was standard dogma for several decades, and is still defended sometimes today, even though a number of scholars have argued that it cannot be sustained. This article examines Edgerton's Law from a historiographical perspective, focusing on the following question: if Edgerton's Law is not supported by the data, why has it survived for so long? This article presents four main arguments for the resilience of Edgerton's Law: Edgerton's scholarly prestige and the law's appeal to structuralist sensibilities led to its rapid acceptance, and the higher level of regularity it imposed on Sievers's Law and the elegance of the solution have allowed it to survive the various attacks on it – although it remains to be seen if Edgerton's Law can survive the latest attack, that of Sihler (Edgerton's Law: The phantom evidence, Winter, 2006).
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The grammaticalization path reflexive > middle > anticausative > passive (> impersonal) has long been recognized as a well-attested pattern in grammar evolution (Kemmer, The middle voice, John Benjamins, 1993, Cennamo, The reanalysis of reflexives: A diachronic perspective, Liguori, 1993, Wehr, SE-Diathese im Italienischen, Günter Narr, 1995, Parry, Transactions of the Philological Society 96: 63–116, 1998, among many others). Yet, the history of individual constructions of reflexive origin in various Romance languages reveals a number of unexpected facts that call the directionality of this path into question. The article traces the history of Italian passive constructions in which a reflexive marker is used (the so-called si -constructions), and shows that the range of uses of si -constructions has contracted considerably from the first vernacular documents to present-day Italian. In particular, reflexive passives in which the agent is coded overtly were much more frequent in Old Italian than in later stages of the language, and have eventually disappeared in present-day Italian. While grammaticalization models are, strictly speaking, unable to account for this contraction (or, perhaps, are not concerned with it), the dynamics of the process are straightforwardly accounted for by diachronic models in which the notions of prototype and prototype effects play a role. The historical data discussed in the article reflect a process of polarization consisting in the functionalization of an (embryonic) formal and semantic contrast between the si -construction and another passive construction, the so-called periphrastic passive (formed with essere , ‘be’ + past participle). These two constructions are preferentially associated with two distinct constellations of semantic traits in present-day Italian, but not (or at least not so sharply) in Old Italian.
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