Cover not available
Part of
Perspectives on Historical Syntax
Edited by Carlotta Viti
[Studies in Language Companion Series 169] 2015
► pp. 61–92

Time for change

| University of Constance

In order to get an angle on deep-time historical relationships between languages, beyond what can be fathomed by the Comparative Method, and in order to model and thereby understand the evolution of typological diversity, attention is increasingly being paid to the question of time-stability of lexical as well as of grammatical traits. Proceeding by inference rather than through longitudinal study, crosslinguistic distributions have been interpreted as revealing how stable or unstable particular traits are. Despite all methodological sophistication, the conclusions that have been reached about time-stability in this indirect way are alarmingly contradictory. As a corrective, I suggest that this research programme be reoriented and that time-stability be studied directly, namely diachronically. Within this general context, the particular issue addressed here is the tempo of change: traits will appear relatively time-stable, not only if they are wholly resistant to change, but also if the tempo of changes affecting them is slow. When this matter is addressed at all, the literature again is remarkably contradictory: uniformitarians would assert that the tempo of change is uniform and diversitarians that it can randomly be rapid or slow. A particular development, the grammaticalisation of a local adposition ‘at’ from a noun ‘dwelling, home’, will be examined in detail here with the aim of determining the length of time this kind of change takes and of comparing its tempo across several languages where it has occurred. Relevant instances are French chez ‘at’ from Late Latin casa/chiés; Swedish, Danish, Norwegian hos ‘at’ from Old Norse hus; Icelandic and Faroese hjá ‘at, next to, by, with; of’ from Old Norse hión ‘family, household’; and late Pāli gē ‘at; of’ from Prakritic Indo-Aryan geha (with the postposition subsequently turned into a suffix in Sinhalese and Maldivian). All four occurrences have indeed taken about the same length of time to reach completion: approximately 400 years, or some 16 generations, 16 cycles of acquisition. I conclude that grammaticalisation of this kind is very slow, and ceteris paribus proceeds at a uniform tempo. I suggest that the most significant factors that can prolong change are that a change is a whole cascade of individual reanalyses rather than elementary and that it diffuses through speech communities slowly rather than rapidly.

Keywords: absolute dating, adpositions, diachrony, grammaticalization, pertinacity, relative dating, social diffusion, syntax, tempo of change, time-stability
Published online: 29 April 2015
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.169.03pla
References
Atkinson, Quentin D
2011 Phonemic diversity supports a serial founder effect model of language expansion from Africa. Science 332: 346-349. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Biberauer, Theresa & Roberts, Ian
2008 Cascading parameter changes: Internally-driven change in Middle and Early Modern English. In Grammatical Change and Linguistic Theory [Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 113], Thórhallur Eythórsson (ed.), 79-113. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Blust, Robert
2007 Òma Lóngh historical phonology. Oceanic Linguistics 46. 1-53. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Breu, Walter
2011 Language contact of minority languages in Central and Southern Europe: A comparative approach. In The Languages and Linguistics of Europe: A Comprehensive Guide, Vol. 1, Bernd Kortmann & Johan van der Auwera (eds), 429-451. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Brown, Cecil H., Holman, Eric W., Wichmann, Søren & Vilupillai, Viveka
2008 Automated classification of the world’s languages: A description of the method and preliminary results. STUF – Language Typology and Universals 61: 285-308. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Butt, Miriam & Lahiri, Aditi
2013 Diachronic pertinacity of light verbs. Lingua 135: 7-29. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bybee, Joan, et al.
2011 The vanishing phonemes debate, apropos of Atkinson 2011. Linguistic Typology 15: 147-332. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Clark, Eve V
1978 From gesture to word: On the natural history of deixis in language acquisition. In Human Growth and Development: Wolfson College Lectures, 1976, Jerome S. Brunner & Alison Garton (eds), 85-120. Oxford: OUP.Google Scholar
Claudi, Ulrike & Heine, Bernd
1989 On the nominal morphology of ‘alienability’ in some African languages. In Current Approaches to African Linguistics, Vol. 5, Paul Newman & Robert Dale Botne (eds), 3-19. Dordrecht: Foris.Google Scholar
Cuny, Albert
1930 La catégorie du duel dans les langues indo-européennes et chamito-sémitiques. Bruxelles: Lamertin.Google Scholar
Dahl, Östen
2004 The Growth and Maintenance of Linguistic Complexity[Studies in Language Companion Series 71]. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
De Gorog, Ralph Paul
1972 The medieval French prepositions and the question of synonymy. Philological Quarterly 51: 345-364.Google Scholar
De Silva, M.W. Sugathapala
1970 Some observations on the history of Maldivian. Transactions of the Philological Society 69: 137-162. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Dresher, B. Elan & Lahiri, Aditi
2005 Main stress left in early Middle English. In Historical Linguistics 2013: Selected Papers from the 16th ICHL [Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 257], Michael D. Fortescue, Eva Skafte Jensen, Jens Erik Mogensen & Lene Schøsler (eds), 75-85. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Fikkert, Paula, Dresher, B. Elan & Lahiri, Aditi
2009 Prosodic preferences: From Old English to Early Modern English. In The Handbook of the History of English, Ans van Kemenade & Bettelou Los (eds), 125-150. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.Google Scholar
Friedländer, Marianna
1974 Lehrbuch des Susu. Leipzig: Enzyklopädie.Google Scholar
Fritz, Sonja
2002 The Dhivehi Language: A Descriptive and Historical Grammar of Maldivian and its Dialects. Heidelberg: Ergon.Google Scholar
Geiger, Wilhelm
1938 A Grammar of the Sinhalese Language. Colombo: Royal Asiatic Society, Ceylon Branch.Google Scholar
Greenberg, Joseph H
1978 How does a language acquire gender markers? In Universals of Human Language, Vol. 3: Word Structure, Joseph H. Greenberg, Charles Ferguson & Edith Moravcsik (eds), 47-82. Stanford CA: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Greenberg, Joseph. H
1993. Review of Johanna Nichols, Linguistic Diversity in Space and Time (1992). Current Anthropology 34: 503-505. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Greenhill, Simon J., Atkinson, Quentin D., Meade, Andrew & Gray, Russell D
2010 The shape and tempo of language evolution. Proceedings of the Royal Society, B: Biological Sciences 277: 2443-2450. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Guðmundsson, Helgi
1972 The Pronominal Dual in Icelandic[University of Iceland Publications in Linguistics 2]. Reykjavik: University of Iceland.Google Scholar
Hall, Robert A
1953  Haitian Creole: Grammar, Texts, Vocabulary . The American Anthropologist, Vol. 55, No. 2, Part 2, Memoir No. 74.Google Scholar
Hansen, Björn
2004 The life cycle of a definite marker: The development of the short and long form of the adjective in Russian, Old Church Slavonic and Serbian/Croatian. Zbornik za lingvistiku i filologiju 47(1-2): 51-73.Google Scholar
Harrison, Annette & Ashby, William J
2003 Remodelling the house: The grammaticalisation of Latin casa to French chez . Forum for Modern Language Studies 39: 386-399. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Haspelmath, Martin, Dryer, Matthew S., Gil, David, & Comrie, Bernard
(eds) 2008 The World Atlas of Language Structures. München: Max Planck Digital Library. [URL]Google Scholar
Heine, Bernd & Kuteva, Tania
2002 World Lexicon of Grammaticalization. Cambridge: CUP. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Heusler, Andreas
1932 Altisländisches Elementarbuch, 3rd edn. Heidelberg: Carl Winter.Google Scholar
Hodge, Carleton T
1970 The linguistic cycle. Language Sciences 13: 1-7.Google Scholar
Hombert, Jean-Marie
2010 Language isolates and linguistic diversity. Paper given at BLS 36. [URL] [URL]
Hombert, Jean-Marie & Lenclud, Gérard
2014 Comment le langage est venue à l’homme. Paris: Fayard.Google Scholar
Horn, Laurence R
1989 A Natural History of Negation. Stanford CA: CSLI.Google Scholar
Hurford, James R
2009 Universals and the diachronic life cycle of languages. In Language Universals, Morten Christiansen, Christopher Collins & Shimon Edelman (eds), 40-54. Oxford: OUP. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hutcheson, James
1973 A Natural History of Complete Consonantal Assimilations. PhD dissertation, Ohio State University, Columbus. [URL]
Hyman, Larry M
2009 The natural history of verb-stem reduplication in Bantu. Morphology 19: 177-206. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Jespersen, Otto
1917 Negation in English and Other Languages. København: Host.Google Scholar
Johnson, Marion R
1979 The natural history of Meinhof’s law in Bantu. Studies in African Linguistics 10: 261-271.Google Scholar
Kroch, Anthony
1989 Reflexes of grammar in patterns of language change. Language Variation and Change 1: 199-244. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kutsch Lojenga, Constance
1994 Ngiti: A Central Sudanic Language of Zaire. Köln: Rüdiger Köppe.Google Scholar
Lagerqvist, Hans
1993 La préposition chiés en ancien français: Étude diachronique et synchronique basée sur un corpus des textes littéraires datant des Xe, XIe, XIIe et XIIIe siècles [Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis, Studia Romanica Upsaliensia 51]. Uppsala: Almqvist & Wiksell.Google Scholar
Lahiri, Aditi
2014 Change in stress patterns and higher level prosodic domains. In Oxford Handbook of Historical Phonology, Patrick Honeybone & Joseph Salmons (eds). Oxford: OUP.Google Scholar
Lahiri, Aditi & Fikkert, Paula
1999 Trisyllabic shortening: Past and present. English Language and Linguistics 3: 229-267. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lahiri, Aditi & Kraehenmann, Astrid
2004 On maintaining and extending contrasts: Notker’s Anlautgesetz. Transactions of the Philological Society 102: 1-55. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Longobardi, Giuseppe
2001 Formal syntax, diachronic minimalism and etymology: The history of French ‘chez’. Linguistic Inquiry 32: 275-302. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Magnússon, Ásgeir Blöndal
1989 Íslensk orðsifjabók. Reykjavík: Orðabók Háskólans.Google Scholar
Martin, Andrew Thomas
2007 The Evolving Lexicon. PhD dissertation, UCLA.
Meir, Irit, Sandler, Wendy, Padden, Carol & Aronoff, Mark
2010 Emerging sign languages. In The Oxford Handbook of Deaf Studies, Language, and Education, Vol. 2, Marc Marschark & Patricia Elizabeth Spencer (eds), 267-280. Oxford: OUP.Google Scholar
Nettle, Daniel
1999a Is the rate of linguistic change constant? Lingua 108: 119-136. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
1999b Linguistic Diversity. Oxford: OUP.Google Scholar
Nichols, Johanna
2003 Diversity and stability in languages. In The Handbook of Historical Linguistics, Brian D. Joseph & Richard D. Janda (eds), 283-210. Oxford: Blackwell. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2012 Monogenesis or polygenesis: A single ancestral language for all humanity? In The Oxford Handbook of Language Evolution, Maggie Tallerman & Kathleen R. Gibson (eds), 558-572. Oxford: OUP.Google Scholar
Noreen, Adolf
1892 Altnordische grammatik, I: Altisländische und altnorwegische grammatik, unter berücksichtigung des urnordischen. Halle: Niemeyer.Google Scholar
Plank, Frans
1984 The modals story retold. Studies in Language 8: 305-364. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
1992 Language and earth as recycling machines. In Language and Earth: Elective Affinities between the Emerging Sciences of Linguistics and Geology [Studies in the History of the Language Sciences 66], Bernd Naumann, Frans Plank, & Gottfried Hofbauer (eds), 221-269. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
1995 Syntactic change: Ergativity. In Syntax: An International Handbook of Contemporary Research, Vol. 2, Joachim Jacobs, Arnim von Stechow, Wolfgang Sternefeld & Theo Vennemann (eds), 1184-1199. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.Google Scholar
2009  WALS values evaluated. Linguistic Typology 13: 41-75. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2010 Time-stability in historical linguistics. In Temporal Dynamics of Language: Transience and Pertinacity, Frans Plank et al., 14-22. Konstanz: Universität Konstanz. [URL]Google Scholar
2012 Why *-ling-in? The pertinacity of a wrong gender. Morphology 22: 277-292. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Plank, Frans & Lahiri, Aditi
2009 Microscopic and macroscopic typology: Basic Valence Orientation without affixes, more pertinacious than meets the naked eye. Paper given at ALT 8, Berkeley CA.
Plank, Frans, Mayer, Thomas & Poudel, Tikaram
2009 Phonological fusion is not the only, and probably not even the main, source of morphological cumulation. Paper given at the 7th Mediterranean Morphology Meeting, Lefkosia, Cyprus. [URL]
Spitzer, Leo
1942 Chez Vandamme sont venus. Modern Language Notes 57: 103-108. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Stampe, David
1972 On the natural history of diphthongs. CLS 8: 578-590.Google Scholar
Stolz, Thomas
1991 Von der Grammatikalisierbarkeit des Körpers, 1: Vorbereitung. Essen: ProPrins, Universität GHS Essen.Google Scholar
Traugott, Elizabeth Closs & Trousdale, Graeme
2010 Gradience, gradualness and grammaticalization: How do they intersect? In Gradience, Gradualness and Grammaticalization [Typological Studies in Language 90], Elizabeth Closs Traugott & Graeme Trousdale (eds), 19-44. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Trudgill, Peter
2011 Sociolinguistic Typology: Social Determinants of Linguistic Complexity. Oxford: OUP.Google Scholar
Wijayaratne, D.J
1956 History of the Sinhalese Noun: A Morphological Study Based on Inscriptions. Colombo: University of Ceylon Press Board.Google Scholar
Yu, Alan C.L
2007 A Natural History of Infixation. Oxford: OUP. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cited by

Cited by 1 other publications

Bowern, Claire, David Goldstein, George Walkden, Anne Breitbarth, Chelsea Sanker, Freek Van de Velde, Ranjan Sen & Aditi Lahiri
2023. Diachrony and Diachronica . Diachronica 40:5 ► pp. 666 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 20 april 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.