Historical Linguistics

This book examines the life, language and grammar of Robert Lowth (1710–1787), founder of prescriptivism. Drawing on private documents, it maps his social networks and compares his own language to the grammar's model of correctness. By analysing his role in the establishment of the prescriptive canon, it portrays Lowth as a precursor to usage guides like Fowler's Modern English Usage.

This book investigates the case system and the marking of grammatical roles and relations in Semitic languages. It further attempts to provide an explanation for “unusual” usages of cases, especially the accusative, that seem to violate the traditional interpretation of Semitic as exhibiting nominative/accusative alignment from a diachronic perspective. The basic methodologies applied for the diachronic reconstruction are those of historical and comparative linguistics. These methodologies, however, face severe limitations based on the lack of sufficient data for the earliest historically attested periods of Semitic (~ 2500–1800 BC). It is argued that these limitations can be mitigated by employing linguistic typology, which is a linguistic discipline that has not found wide reception among scholars working on Semitic languages so far. Based on both the comparative method and typological principles, the book investigates the alignment and marking of grammatical roles, basic word order patterns connected to the marking of roles, head- and dependent-marking patterns, and the function of the individual cases across Semitic. It concludes that although the alignment of historically attested Semitic languages is nominative/accusative, both morphologically and syntactically, they exhibit vestiges of a more archaic system that reflects a marked-nominative system. In this archaic system, the accusative functioned as the unmarked and default form of the noun that was used as citation form, for nominal predicates, the vocative, and for direct objects of transitive verbs. The nominative on the other hand, was the morphologically and syntactically marked form that solely functioned to mark nominal subjects.

This is a book about language as a species-typical trait of humans. Linguists customarily describe it as an extremely exceptional capacity, even when compared with the biological endowment of closely related species, and this is the source of the many quarrels that exist around the aim of explaining its evolutionary origins. This book argues that language is not so exceptional after all, as according to the text it is just the human version of a rather common and conservative organic system that they refer to as the Central Computational Complex. The book argues that inter-specific variation of this organ is restricted to (i) accessible memory resources, and (ii) patterns of external connectivity, both being the result of perturbations in the system underlying its development. The book thus offers a fresh perspective on language as a naturally evolved phenomenon.

This is a book about degrammaticalization, a rare type of linguistic change whereby grams become ‘less grammatical’, typical examples being shifts from affix to clitic, or from function word to lexical item. It discusses the alleged unidirectionality of semantic and morphosyntactic change, showing that change is in fact reversible on all levels. It also aims to classify degrammaticalization by examining primitive changes on several levels: semantics, pragmatics, morphology, syntax, and phonology. It is argued that there exist three separate types of degrammaticalization: degrammation, whereby a function word develops into a lexical item; deinflectionalization, whereby an inflectional affix becomes either derivational or enclitic, while gaining additional functions; and debonding, whereby a bound morpheme becomes a free morpheme, often without change on the semantic-functional level.

This book charts the English invasion of Europe since 1945. Sixteen contributors report on the English words and phrases that have become integral parts of their languages. Each describes the effect of English on the host language, and shows how the process of incorporation often modifies pronunciation and spelling and frequently transforms meaning and use. The languages surveyed are Icelandic, Dutch, French, Spanish, Norwegian, German, Italian, Romanian, Polish, Croatian, Finnish, Albanian, Russian, Bulgarian, Hungarian, and Greek. This book provides a systematic survey of a phenomenon that is fascinating, alarming, and apparently unstoppable.

This book suggests that many linguistic, literary, and historical considerations of medieval statements on language have significantly failed to take into account the social and linguistic contexts of their production. The book explores not only medieval ideas about language but also the discursive traditions which generated them. The book draws upon a wide range of documentary evidence, including most notably the royal letters issued in 1258 prior to the Barons' War. The book also analyses the language spoken by Chaucer's pilgrims, the conversations in ‘Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’, and many other chronicles, poems, and commentaries. The book concludes with a consideration of the post-medieval history of the status of English in law, literature, and education.

From its Germanic roots on the Continent, English has had many influences from other languages. This work documents the main influences on the lexicon and the structure. The earliest contacts were with the Romans, when many words were borrowed by the Germanic tribes from Vulgar Latin. In the British Isles, Roman influence continued but the primary influence, though largely substratal, was from Brythonic Celtic. In the later period the Latin influence became largely literary. Meanwhile, Danes settled northeast England, and the contact situation there was complicated but the major result was a high degree of koineization, reflected in major structural innovations shared with East Norse, primarily Old Jutland Danish. Subsequently, the French dominated southeast England and created a superstrate that resulted in Anglo-French on the one hand and the transfer of thousands of words to English on the other. As these words assimilated to the English lexicon, their affixes became an important part of English word formation, productivity beginning as early as the thirteenth century. The result of all this contact was that English preserved little of its Germanic heritage. Later influences were largely restricted to the lexicon and consisted mainly of learned Greek and latinate roots, many of which became standard English, though frequently of a higher register than native roots of similar import, and facilitated scientific word formation.

This book essentially argues for the importance of word frequency as a factor in the analysis and explanation of language structure. In other words, the roles of words and other linguistic phenomena such as morphology, phonology, and syntax are highly influenced by low, medium, or high frequency with which they occur. The book includes three decades of influential research in one thematic source. It provides an introductory overview that traces the development of thinking on this important subject. The discussion covers word frequency in lexical diffusion, morphophonemics, lexical and morphological conditioning of alternations using Spanish verbs as example, rules and schemas in the development and use of the English past tense, morphological classes as natural categories, regular morphology and lexicon, sequentiality as the basis of constituent structure, and mechanisms of change in grammaticization.

This book investigates the development of three future‐referring constructions in Greek, namely “μέλλω / œχω / θέλω + Infinitive / complement clause” in the classical (5th–4th c. BC), the Hellenistic–Roman (3rd c. BC–4th c. AD), the Early Medieval (5th–10th c. AD), and the Late Medieval period (11th–15th c. AD). Despite their co‐occurrence in all these periods, it is shown for the first time that these constructions were increasingly differentiated in terms of their semantic, syntactic, and sociolinguistic properties. The analysis sheds new light on these developments, since large parts are based on hitherto unknown material, drawn especially from papyri and non‐literary documents. The investigation is based on the functional–typological perspective of grammaticalization, and it pays particular attention to a variety of—often neglected—factors, such as language contact. The typological predictions concerning future‐referring forms are found lacking in some respects, and various modifications are proposed accordingly.

This book examines the history of adnominal genitive phrases from Old to Early Modern English, focusing on the evidence provided by a systematic corpus study and the role of linguistic typology in diachronic syntax. It is argued that arguments based on typology should not outweigh the evidence presented by the texts. Particular attention is paid to the nature of the possessive marker in Middle English, since previous studies, which have concluded that the marker was a clitic at an early stage, suffer from an inadequate empirical base. Two chapters are devoted to establishing that the ‘his genitive’ found in many early texts is not to be equated with the possessor doubling construction found in many Germanic languages. The relationship between possessives and determiners in earlier English is also examined.