This article presents a critical discussion of Inertia Theory (Longobardi 2001; 2003), according to which syntactic change never originates in syntax itself. We argue that syntactic change originates in language usage, which includes the possibility that it may be triggered by genuinely syntactic factors. In order to substantiate this claim, two syntactic changes are studied in detail, namely the rise of French est-ce que as an interrogative particle and the reanalysis of presentational hay + noun “there is + noun” in Spanish. We show that the reanalysis of est-ce que as a marker of ‘strong’ interrogation is pragmatically motivated and brought about by frequent usage. By contrast, the reanalysis of impersonal presentative hay + noun in certain varieties of Spanish is shown to be triggered by conflicting linking strategies, and must therefore be considered an instance of syntactically motivated syntactic change.
In Contemporary French, c’est-clefts are claimed to occur with significantly higher frequency than their counterparts in other Romance languages and in older stages of French. Starting out from the assumption that c’est-clefts exist in order to mark focus on the clefted constituent, historical linguists commonly seek to explain the observed increase from Old to Modern French as resulting from the decline of alternative focusing strategies. In particular, the loss of flexible focus accents and the severe restrictions on non-canonical constituent orders are generally held responsible for the rise of clefting. This contribution puts standard explanations to the test of corpora and argues that they fail to account for a number of observations. Finally, it proposes that a more comprehensive account of the evolution of c’est-clefts needs to take into account not only phonological and syntactic change, but also an independent pragmatic innovation, viz. the emergence of the informative-presupposition cleft type as defined by Prince (1978).
This paper presents a diachronic formal morphosyntactic analysis of the role of the functional projection Pl/Pl* in Romance indefinite nominals, responsible for number and the countability distinction. Reinterpreting the complex system of indefinite nominal determination in two central Romance languages, viz. French and Italian, which both feature an indefinite article and a ‘partitive article’ as a device of ‘nominal classification’ in a broad sense in contrast to Romance languages without such an element, viz. Spanish, it argues that this ‘classification system’ arose when nominal declension in Latin was partially or completely lost. The application of the latest minimalist assumptions on agreement processes in the syntax both to modern Romance languages and to (Late) Latin allows us to describe and explain the obvious differences between French, Italian and Spanish and to relate them to the interaction of gender and number marking in Romance indefinite nominals.
This article is concerned with the role of the morphological paradigm in syntactic change. The discussion focuses on syntactic change in infinitival complements and the distribution of these complements in the context of infinitive embedding verb phrases. I argue that the syntactic structure of the infinitival complements is closely related to the co-occurrence of inflectional exponents on the infinite verb forms. The presence of inflectional exponents on infinitive verb forms determines the quality of the functional syntactic category Infl in the infinitival complements. Syntactic changes in the structure and/or in the distribution of infinitival complements originate from paradigm alterations concerning the inflectional exponents of the infinite verb forms.
This paper will argue that grammaticalisation within the IP domain is responsible for the change in word order from Old to Modern Romance. Stylistic fronting, postverbal clitics, and other verb-third orders do not seem to be related at first sight. However, on closer investigation it seems as if all these phenomena can be brought together by the availability of an additional functional category in the IP domain that was involved in information structure. This paper will argue that stylistically fronted elements and the verb in postverbal clitic constructions target this additional functional category and thus change the meaning of the sentence. In the course of time, grammaticalisation (in the view of Roberts & Roussou 2003) reduced the availability of this functional category and therefore stylistic fronting and postverbal clitics are not an option in Modern Romance anymore.
Syntactic change consists of (a series of) small, local changes which are the result of chance or are brought about by the possible imperfections of the linguistic system — the impression of globality of the change is due to the sum of the individual changes which, eventually eliminating single imperfections, contribute to the formation of a more coherent system. In Modern Italian, one can identify two independent reflexive (“si”) constructions which syntactically demote the lexical subject: a passive one and an impersonal one, with quite distinct properties. Old Italian only had passive si — the impersonal construction is the result of many small changes in the rules and the domain of application of the passive construction: these changes began in the Old Italian period and lasted for at least five centuries. But this new construction, not being the result of a unitary project, continues to show signs of being imperfectly put together.
This corpus-based study examines the different historical stages the Latin synthetic pluperfect underwent in Spanish and Portuguese. It tries to explain parallel and divergent developments of the morpheme -ara leading to opposite results: the strengthening of the form as an exclusively temporal category in Portuguese and its transformation into a fully-fledged past subjunctive in Spanish. In our analysis we will focus on three main aspects: first, the relevance of the underlying logical-conceptual structures as the enabling condition for the expansion of the category into new domains; second, the role of reanalysis as a listener-based strategy in discourse as the decisive mechanism for functional change; and third, the validity of the prototype concept as a device to explain the organisation of grammatical categories from a diachronic perspective. With our case study we address key questions of this book, namely the locus, the motivation and the nature of linguistic change.
This article deals with the ways in which non-lexical core arguments can be expressed in various languages. It tries to devise a typological hierarchy for the different types and endeavours to place Romance within this hierarchy. An analysis of Basque verbal markers as cross-reference morphemes introduces the subject with a language radically different from central IE. Using Nichols’ (1986 & 1992) typological differentiation between head-marking and dependent-marking languages as its basis, a typological sub-parameter of “clausal head-marking vs. clausal dependent-marking” is suggested which is shown to correspond to two radically different types of clausal co-reference: (1) agreement (concord) and (2) cross-reference. This terminology is then used to describe and explain an ongoing syntactic change in which Spanish object clitics have evolved into obligatory verbal markers closely resembling those of Basque. Their conventional analysis as “agreement markers” is questioned and Spanish is shown to be moving towards a clausal head-marking language in which all core-arguments of the sentence have to be expressed by verbal affixes, while nominal and pronominal argument realisations become mere appositions outside the sentence core. The traditional concept of an emerging new paradigm of “object conjugation” is rejected.
This article investigates whether evolutionary accounts can offer new insights into the paradox of language change. Specifically, I will examine three recent influential accounts (Haspelmath 1999, Keller 1994, and Croft 2000). As they contain a broad spectrum of positions on the relations between language and biology, they can be divided into metaphorical, biologistic and generalized views. Cross-cutting these, two types of evolutionary accounts are distinguished, which I call adaptive and two-level views, respectively. I critically evaluate their potential to provide satisfactory explanations for various types of change, drawing on examples from Romance and Germanic. Finally, I propose a revised explanation scheme which brings together the two-level approaches with theoretical distinctions and explanatory factors that have been suggested in earlier non-evolutionary frameworks, so that a more comprehensive view of language change can be obtained.
This article presents a critical discussion of Inertia Theory (Longobardi 2001; 2003), according to which syntactic change never originates in syntax itself. We argue that syntactic change originates in language usage, which includes the possibility that it may be triggered by genuinely syntactic factors. In order to substantiate this claim, two syntactic changes are studied in detail, namely the rise of French est-ce que as an interrogative particle and the reanalysis of presentational hay + noun “there is + noun” in Spanish. We show that the reanalysis of est-ce que as a marker of ‘strong’ interrogation is pragmatically motivated and brought about by frequent usage. By contrast, the reanalysis of impersonal presentative hay + noun in certain varieties of Spanish is shown to be triggered by conflicting linking strategies, and must therefore be considered an instance of syntactically motivated syntactic change.
In Contemporary French, c’est-clefts are claimed to occur with significantly higher frequency than their counterparts in other Romance languages and in older stages of French. Starting out from the assumption that c’est-clefts exist in order to mark focus on the clefted constituent, historical linguists commonly seek to explain the observed increase from Old to Modern French as resulting from the decline of alternative focusing strategies. In particular, the loss of flexible focus accents and the severe restrictions on non-canonical constituent orders are generally held responsible for the rise of clefting. This contribution puts standard explanations to the test of corpora and argues that they fail to account for a number of observations. Finally, it proposes that a more comprehensive account of the evolution of c’est-clefts needs to take into account not only phonological and syntactic change, but also an independent pragmatic innovation, viz. the emergence of the informative-presupposition cleft type as defined by Prince (1978).
This paper presents a diachronic formal morphosyntactic analysis of the role of the functional projection Pl/Pl* in Romance indefinite nominals, responsible for number and the countability distinction. Reinterpreting the complex system of indefinite nominal determination in two central Romance languages, viz. French and Italian, which both feature an indefinite article and a ‘partitive article’ as a device of ‘nominal classification’ in a broad sense in contrast to Romance languages without such an element, viz. Spanish, it argues that this ‘classification system’ arose when nominal declension in Latin was partially or completely lost. The application of the latest minimalist assumptions on agreement processes in the syntax both to modern Romance languages and to (Late) Latin allows us to describe and explain the obvious differences between French, Italian and Spanish and to relate them to the interaction of gender and number marking in Romance indefinite nominals.
This article is concerned with the role of the morphological paradigm in syntactic change. The discussion focuses on syntactic change in infinitival complements and the distribution of these complements in the context of infinitive embedding verb phrases. I argue that the syntactic structure of the infinitival complements is closely related to the co-occurrence of inflectional exponents on the infinite verb forms. The presence of inflectional exponents on infinitive verb forms determines the quality of the functional syntactic category Infl in the infinitival complements. Syntactic changes in the structure and/or in the distribution of infinitival complements originate from paradigm alterations concerning the inflectional exponents of the infinite verb forms.
This paper will argue that grammaticalisation within the IP domain is responsible for the change in word order from Old to Modern Romance. Stylistic fronting, postverbal clitics, and other verb-third orders do not seem to be related at first sight. However, on closer investigation it seems as if all these phenomena can be brought together by the availability of an additional functional category in the IP domain that was involved in information structure. This paper will argue that stylistically fronted elements and the verb in postverbal clitic constructions target this additional functional category and thus change the meaning of the sentence. In the course of time, grammaticalisation (in the view of Roberts & Roussou 2003) reduced the availability of this functional category and therefore stylistic fronting and postverbal clitics are not an option in Modern Romance anymore.
Syntactic change consists of (a series of) small, local changes which are the result of chance or are brought about by the possible imperfections of the linguistic system — the impression of globality of the change is due to the sum of the individual changes which, eventually eliminating single imperfections, contribute to the formation of a more coherent system. In Modern Italian, one can identify two independent reflexive (“si”) constructions which syntactically demote the lexical subject: a passive one and an impersonal one, with quite distinct properties. Old Italian only had passive si — the impersonal construction is the result of many small changes in the rules and the domain of application of the passive construction: these changes began in the Old Italian period and lasted for at least five centuries. But this new construction, not being the result of a unitary project, continues to show signs of being imperfectly put together.
This corpus-based study examines the different historical stages the Latin synthetic pluperfect underwent in Spanish and Portuguese. It tries to explain parallel and divergent developments of the morpheme -ara leading to opposite results: the strengthening of the form as an exclusively temporal category in Portuguese and its transformation into a fully-fledged past subjunctive in Spanish. In our analysis we will focus on three main aspects: first, the relevance of the underlying logical-conceptual structures as the enabling condition for the expansion of the category into new domains; second, the role of reanalysis as a listener-based strategy in discourse as the decisive mechanism for functional change; and third, the validity of the prototype concept as a device to explain the organisation of grammatical categories from a diachronic perspective. With our case study we address key questions of this book, namely the locus, the motivation and the nature of linguistic change.
This article deals with the ways in which non-lexical core arguments can be expressed in various languages. It tries to devise a typological hierarchy for the different types and endeavours to place Romance within this hierarchy. An analysis of Basque verbal markers as cross-reference morphemes introduces the subject with a language radically different from central IE. Using Nichols’ (1986 & 1992) typological differentiation between head-marking and dependent-marking languages as its basis, a typological sub-parameter of “clausal head-marking vs. clausal dependent-marking” is suggested which is shown to correspond to two radically different types of clausal co-reference: (1) agreement (concord) and (2) cross-reference. This terminology is then used to describe and explain an ongoing syntactic change in which Spanish object clitics have evolved into obligatory verbal markers closely resembling those of Basque. Their conventional analysis as “agreement markers” is questioned and Spanish is shown to be moving towards a clausal head-marking language in which all core-arguments of the sentence have to be expressed by verbal affixes, while nominal and pronominal argument realisations become mere appositions outside the sentence core. The traditional concept of an emerging new paradigm of “object conjugation” is rejected.
This article investigates whether evolutionary accounts can offer new insights into the paradox of language change. Specifically, I will examine three recent influential accounts (Haspelmath 1999, Keller 1994, and Croft 2000). As they contain a broad spectrum of positions on the relations between language and biology, they can be divided into metaphorical, biologistic and generalized views. Cross-cutting these, two types of evolutionary accounts are distinguished, which I call adaptive and two-level views, respectively. I critically evaluate their potential to provide satisfactory explanations for various types of change, drawing on examples from Romance and Germanic. Finally, I propose a revised explanation scheme which brings together the two-level approaches with theoretical distinctions and explanatory factors that have been suggested in earlier non-evolutionary frameworks, so that a more comprehensive view of language change can be obtained.