Assessing phonological correlates of syntactic change

This chapter analyzes the puzzling word order behavior of be-auxiliaries in the history of Latin. Corpus data show that in Late Latin, periphrastic verb forms consisting of a past participle and a form of esse ‘be’ strongly prefer the head-final order ‘PaPa - be’, which – as is well known – does not survive in Romance. This generalization does not however hold in all syntactic environments: most notably, negated be-periphrases with a monosyllabic form of esse actually prefer the order ‘be - PaPa’. An account is developed which evaluates the status of Late Latin be-auxiliaries at the syntax-prosody interface. The core proposal is that Late Latin has two distinct lexical items esse, viz. ‘strong be’ and ‘weak be’. The lexical entry of the latter variant (which is the one most commonly used in verbal periphrases) specifies that weak be is phonologically deficient, in the sense that it can fail to project a prosodic word, in which case it has to occur in an extrametrical position at the right edge of a phonological phrase. The effect of negation on word order is explained in prosodic terms too: being proclitic, the Late Latin negator non forms a complex head together with weak be, and this whole complex is automatically mapped onto an independent prosodic word. At a general level, the chapter argues that at least in some cases, it is necessary to take into account prosodic considerations to correctly understand word order change.

An Information Structure scenario for V2 loss in Medieval French

This paper discusses word order change in Medieval French. Verb-second (V2) configurations are generally understood as having an initial XP and the verb in the left periphery. How has this configuration been lost in French? Under an Information Structure scenario, the XP is in initial position because of its characterized (discourse-old) informational value, which motivates the left-peripheral position of the verb. The decline of the characterized informational value of the XP thus accounts for the gradual loss of V2. The informational behaviour of XPs was examined in unambiguous V2 configurations with an overt post-verbal subject in Medieval French. This detailed quantitative study of a calibrated corpus shows that XPs with a characterized informational value were predominant with productive V2 configurations, that they gradually declined as productive V2 was lost, and that they increasingly failed to attract the verb to the left periphery. These observations can be accounted for if V2 in Medieval French was driven by informational values and if it disappeared along with the informational cues provided by the XPs.

The word order of negation in the history of Basque

This article investigates word order changes in negated periphrastic constructions in the history of Basque. A number of linguistic variables are argued to correlate with these changes: the negative particle ez is increasingly focalized in main clauses, the innovative pattern negative particle – auxiliary verb – main verb allows for more syntactic flexibility than the conservative one, and the word order changes do not progress at equal rates in all clause subtypes. Genre issues are also considered, including the hypothesis that the loss of the conservative order main verb – negative particle – auxiliary verb of main clauses occurs first in texts close to oral language. Moreover, it is argued that eastern dialects are more innovative than western dialects and that efforts towards standardization of the language have slowed down this case of word order change.

WORD ORDER IN THE LOWER CHULYM DIALECT OF CHULYM-TURKIC: A DIACHRONIC ASPECT

В статье анализируется динамика изменения порядка слов в ныне исчезнувшем малочисленном бесписьменном нижнечулымском диалекте чулымско-тюркского языка. Рассматриваются тексты, собранные в XIX–XXI вв., в т. ч. из полевых записей автора. Для обеспечения принципа репрезентативности отобранного материала и в условиях скудости собранных на разных этапах нижнечулымских текстов, анализ был проведен на выборке в 20 предложений с глагольным сказуемым для каждого временного отрезка (всего 80 предложений). В ходе исследования делается вывод, что тенденция к сохранению типичного тюркского базового порядка слов в простом предложении с глагольным скзазуемым (SOV) характерна для текстов, собранных в XIX и XXI вв. (в т. ч. в переводных текстах раннего периода). Наметившаяся с середины XX в. тенденция к изменению базового порядка слов в сторону характерного для русского языка (SVO) несколько сохраняется в XXI в., однако подавляющее большинство моделей простого предложения текстов этого периода являются разновидностями типичного тюркского базового порядка слов SOV. Это иллюстрирует тезис о том, что даже в условиях языковых контактов, активного двуязычия и сильного влияния языка большинства миноритарный язык (в данном случае — нижнечулымский диалект) вполне может сохранять свою синтаксическую структуру. The article analyzes the dynamics of word order change in the now extinct moribund non-written Lower Chulym dialect of the Chulym-Turkic language. The article deals with texts collected in the 19–21 centuries, including those recorded by the author. To ensure the representativeness principle for the selected material and in terms of the Lower Chulym text scarcity at different stages, the analysis was carried out on a sample of 20 sentences with a verb predicate for each time period (80 sentences in total). The study concludes that the tendency to preserve the typical Turkic basic word order in a simple sentence with a verb predicate (SOV) is characteristic of texts collected in the 19th and 21st centuries (including translated texts of the early period). The tendency from the middle of the 20th century to change the basic word order towards the one characteristic for Russian (SVO) persisted in the 21st century to a certain extent, however, the overwhelming majority of the simple sentence models in the texts of this period are varieties of the typical Turkic basic word order, SOV. This illustrates the point that even in the conditions of linguistic contacts, active bilingualism and strong influence of the major language, the minority language (in this case, the Lower Chulym dialect) may well retain its syntactic structure.

Gur

Within Niger-Congo, Gur is one of the families with the most highly developed agglutination systems in both the nominal and the verbal phrase. At the same time, the morphology of the Gur languages is characterized by a high rate of reduction and restructuring processes which can be best studied in the context of the nominal class systems, which reveal almost all evolutionary stages. Besides some lexical items, the reconstruction of a relatively high number of nominal class markers confirms the family’s strong relationship with Adamawa and Benue-Congo languages. The modern verbal systems are characterized by different aspect systems (marked by different verbal stems or suffixes) and by preverbal tense markers; post-verbal clitics denote assertion. Serial verb constructions are found in all languages, but more or less complementary to verbal derivations. Diathesis is expressed by moving patients to the subject position. Word order change is another prominent evolutionary phenomenon within the family.

On cause and correlation in language change

Studies of language change frequently wrestle with the problem of cause and correlation. It is comparatively simple to observe a correlation between historical trends. However, it is much more difficult to demonstrate that the changes in the frequency of a construction A were indeed the cause of the changes in the frequency of a construction B. We present a statistical method that can help to assess whether two historical changes are not only correlated, but also causally related. In particular, we use Granger Causality to determine whether the gradual replacement of ex-situ wh-interrogatives with clefted wh-interrogatives in 18th to 20th century Brazilian Portuguese resulted from word order change, and particularly the rise in the frequency of SV word order. Our results indeed suggest that SV word order Granger-causes the use of clefted wh-interrogatives, as well as declarative ‘that’-clefts, but not the other way around.

Word order change at the left periphery of the Hungarian noun phrase

This chapter studies the determination and the distribution of possessive constructions from Old to Modern Hungarian. The grammaticalization of the definite article in well-defined contexts had structural consequences, the most salient of which is the emergence of a new strategy for demonstrative modification, which is called determiner doubling throughout the paper. Word order variation arises due to the determiners’ interference with the possessor expressions at the left periphery of the noun phrase. The newly added demonstratives first adjoined to the noun phrase in a somewhat looser fashion: their combination with the dative-marked possessors resulted in a word order specific only to the Middle Hungarian period (Demonstrative-Possessor). At a later stage, demonstratives got incorporated into the specifier of the DP, giving rise to the fixed word order Possessor-Demonstrative, with the Possessor undergoing noun phrase internal topicalization, thus landing in a phrase-initial specifier position.