A linguistic model of earthquake frequencies applied to the seismic history of California

1987 ◽  
Author(s):  
H.R. Shaw
Keyword(s):  
Linguistic Model ◽  
History Of

There's no tense like the present: Verbal -s inflection in early Black English

1989 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 47-84 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shana Poplack ◽  
Sali Tagliamonte
Keyword(s):  
English Language ◽  
Social Contexts ◽  
Black English ◽  
Environmental Conditioning ◽  
English Grammar ◽  
Linguistic Model ◽  
Third Person ◽  
History Of ◽  
And Function ◽  
Time Lead

ABSTRACTThis article contributes to the understanding of the origin and function of verbal -s marking in the Black English grammar by systematically examining the behaviour of this affix in two corpora on early Black English. To ascertain whether the variation observed in (early and modern Black English) -s usage has a precedent in the history of the language, or is rather an intrusion from another system, we focus particularly on the linguistic and social contexts of its occurrence, within a historical and comparative perspective. Our results show that both third person singular and nonconcord -s are subject to regular, parallel environmental conditioning. The finding that both insertion and deletion are conditioned by the same factors suggests that verbal -s marking is a unitary process, involving both concord and nonconcord contexts. Moreover, the (few) variable constraints on verbal -s usage reported throughout the history of the English language remain operative in early Black English. These results, taken in conjunction with indications that -s marking across the verbal paradigm was a prestige marker in the dialect at some earlier point in time, lead us to hypothesize that the contemporary pattern might be a synchronic reflex of the constraint ranking on -s usage in the varieties of English that provided the linguistic model for the slaves. Many of the conditioning effects we report would have been subsequently overridden by the grammaticalization of -s as the Standard English agreement marker. We conclude that present-tense marking via verbal -s formed an integral part of the early Black English grammar.

scholarly journals Neues zur Entwicklung der Negation im Mittelhochdeutschen

2017 ◽  
Vol 139 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-46 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simon Pickl
Keyword(s):  
Geographical Distribution ◽  
Middle High German ◽  
Internal Factors ◽  
Parallel Development ◽  
Fine Grained ◽  
Linguistic Model ◽  
Sentential Negation ◽  
History Of ◽  
Diachronic Development

AbstractThis paper investigates the development of sentential negation in Middle High German using sermons from the Upper German dialect area. To this end, a heterogeneous yet fine-grained corpus of Alemannic and Bavarian sermons is analysed with respect to diachronic development, geographical distribution and language-internal factors. What becomes clear is that Jespersen’s Cycle, a cross-linguistic model of the development of negation that can be seen as part of the received history of German negation, fails to account for the mechanisms in the development of sentential negation in German. These mechanisms cannot be understood independently of the – in some respects parallel – development of n‑indefinites. It appears that the interplay of variation and the grammaticalisation of the n‑indefinite

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