This paper gives a quantative analyisis of the dynamics of the passive auxiliary weorðan favouring passive BE in the history of English. Weorðan displays a rise-and-fall pattern rather than a decline pattern: it forms a peak, which is interpreted as a 'failed change'. This failed change turns out… read more
Abstract
Fake indexicals are 1/2 person pronouns that do not have a fixed referent but vary over a set. It has been shown that fake indexicals are subject to morphological restrictions imposed by the verbal morphology. In this paper, we show that fake indexicals in the nominal… read more
The 2nd person singular pronoun du ‘you’ has been replaced by new pronouns gij/jij/jii in many Dutch dialects. The standard explanation attributes du’s decline to the emerging honorific plural pronouns such as gij ‘you’ in singular use. In this study we trace a purely syntactic trigger for this… read more
We study linguistic changes that failed, and their relation to successful changes. The inclusion of failed changes into Kroch’s logistic model of linguistic change is possible and, in fact, necessary. The logistic functions are solutions of a differential equation that also describes how failed… read more
After reviewing some earlier analyses of negative imperatives, we argue that there is a correlation between the (non-)availability of negative imperatives in a language and the merger of the anaphoric negator ( no ) and sentence negator ( not ). This shows up not only as lexical identity of these… read more
Apart from bare imperatives and infinitival imperatives, Dutch features a third type, the participial imperative, with a syntax quite different from the other types. First we present an inventory of the properties of the participial imperative. It will turn out that (the core set of) these… read more