According to influential work on grammaticalization, the route grammaticalizing changes take is from lexical to functional categories (Lehmann 1985, van Gelderen 1993). It will be demonstrated on two grammatical relations that this is a too specific assumption. First, modal particles in German and Dutch emerge from adverbials and conjunctions — obviously, semantically more complete elements -, but, on their route to non-adverbial particles, they do not arrive at any functional status in any minimal sense. Second, as regards the infinitival preposition (IPrep), IPrep in German as well as other Germanic languages, bleaches out semantically from an original adverbial without, however, ever reaching the functional syntactic domain (in terms of Minimalism). The third relevant characteristic to be mentioned in this context is the fact that, despite heavy semantic bleaching and arriving at new syntactic functions, the original lexical semantics remains ‘shining through’ in the case of modal particles (MPs) in German and Dutch. This allows us to reconstruct an LF-status of modal particles as a triple COMP mapping. The decision which of the three COMPs is instantiated by an individual MP depends on its original categorial status as diachronic pre-MP.
The present paper is an attempt to give an integrated account of certain developments in North Germanic syntax: (1) Modern Icelandic and Faroese have so-called oblique subjects, i.e. dative, accusative or even genitive NPs with essentially the same distribution and syntactic rule properties as modern Mainland Scandinavian subjects. (2) Both Old and Modern Icelandic have a rather intricate system of lexical case assignment which differs from, e.g., the predominantly structural case assignment of Modern German.
(3) Old Icelandic has DO-IO as well as IO-DO order, whereas Modern Icelandic, like non-case-marking Modern Mainland Scandinavian, to a greater extent has IO-DO. — On the basis of these data it is argued that after the North Germanic shift to SVO, the development has been in the direction of a modern topologically, not morphologically oriented syntax both in the non-case-marking and the case-marking languages. Among other things, this explains why case assignment has remained lexical and idiosyncratic in Icelandic instead of shifting to a simpler system of structural case assignment.
The term ‘oblique subject’ is used in recent descriptions of Icelandic about NPs that behave syntactically like subjects without having nominative case. Data in support of such an analysis can easily be found in Modern Icelandic. Various linguists have assumed that also Old Icelandic has oblique subjects. In this paper I first discuss the notion of oblique subject on a metatheoretical basis. My claim is that oblique subject is not an empirical entity, it is a result of a decision to use it as a descriptive device because it may yield a more economical or elegant description of certain facts about the language. The main body of the paper is a thorough examination of the kinds of data that have been used in support of an oblique subject analysis for Old Icelandic, supplemented by some of my own additional data. It turns out that the set of subject properties of Old Icelandic is different (smaller) than that of Modern Icelandic, and the result of this examination is that Old Icelandic does not exhibit data that call for an oblique subject analysis. The final section of the paper offers an account of the diachronic process that may have led to the kind of structure that justifies an oblique subject analysis of Modern Icelandic. This process is a reanalysis leading to a change in the possible content of the Specifier position of IP, whereby it has become an exclusive subject position. Non-nominative NPs in that position may have kept their oblique case, and become oblique subjects.
The paper examines the well-known change from impersonal to personal subject from the point of view of a slight person split in Old and Early Middle English: third person pronouns remain impersonal longer than first or second person. This split is shown to be linked to the different rates of disappearance of morphological Case in the first, second, and third person paradigm by arguing that the change from impersonal to personal involves the loss of inherent/lexical/semantic Case and the introduction of structural Case. Both changes are indicative of a larger typological change from synthetic to analytic, which can be seen as a change from Interpretable to Uninterpretable features.
Harris and Campbell (1995: Chapter 7) propose specific universals governing processes that simplify biclausal structures, including the simplification of focus clefts to monoclausal focus constructions. In particular, it is claimed there that after a biclausal construction is reanalyzed as monoclausal, the main verb governs the syntax of the single-clause structure, even though conservative coding rules (e.g. case marking, agreement, word order) at first make it appear that the derived auxiliary governs those constituents that originated in its clause.
Since the writing of that book, another example has come to light. Synchronic data on the typology of focus in North East Caucasian (NEC) languages by Konstantine Kazenin (1994, 1995, 1996) provide the basis for the present study of diachronic development of biclausal and monoclausal focus structures in these languages and make it possible to test the claims referred to above. It is argued in the present paper that some NEC languages have a focus cleft and/or a monoclausal focus construction, historically derived from (1). It is shown that the derived monoclausal structures in various NEC languages have the range of properties predicted in Harris and Campbell (1995). Additional data show a different development of biclausal focus in Udi, a NEC language not treated by Kazenin.
The present article is an attempt to construct a scenario for the typological change of the subject in the Scandinavian languages, Danish, Norwegian and Swedish, from nominative subjects to categorical subjects. This change must and will be seen in the context of the rise of the so-called subordinate clause word order. Most of the material will be taken from three stages of Danish. In addition to Modern Danish, the 13th century is represented by the language of the Scanic Law and the mid 15th century by the Danish Lucidarius.
The background is the Copenhagen version of functional grammar, as presented by the papers in Engberg-Pedersen et al. (1996), and the topological theory of Paul Diderichsen (1941, 1943). No specific knowledge of these traditions is presupposed.
This paper examines the case of different dialects of Inuktitut which appear to vary in their distribution and function of the antipassive construction. It is hypothesized that a difference in grammatical restrictions on this construction will coincide with a quantitative difference in occurrence, i.e. some dialects have moved further along the continuum toward a nominative-accusative typology. However, it is shown that counting the number of tokens of the case marker in question does not show any statistical significance, due to the fact that this case marker has functions independent of object marking and that these functions appear to vary in inverse proportion to the degree to which it is used as an accusative marker.
The history of deontic expressions in several languages reveals some naturalness in (a) constructions involving BE plus infinitive/gerundial, (b) thematic object initially surfacing in the nom, (c) reanalysis via case accommodation in neuters to a structure in which the thematic object surfaces in the acc, and (d) animates being first to adopt the change obligatorily. Neuters permitted two analyses of the theme argument: (i) nom subject; (ii) acc object. BE and non-neuters of most word-classes favor the nom subject analysis. In Latin, impersonals in -um favored an object analysis. In Latin and OE the possibility of analyzing the agentive dative as a quirky subject in the (OE) type us is to ponder the word/what is us to ponder shifted the cues in favor of an analysis of the theme as structural object, whence overt acc objects.
One of the most fundamental changes in the history of the Germanic languages was the loss of inflectional case marking. This paper will discuss the mechanisms involved in the decline of inflectional case systems with special reference to the loss of lexical case in Swedish. It will be seen that the decline of lexical case was by no means a straightforward affair. The tendency towards loss was powerfully counteracted by tendencies of maintenance, which managed to slow down the eventual collapse of the case system. Ultimately, these opposed tendencies can be identified as the conflicting interests of the speaker and the hearer, or ease of production vs. ease of perception. This will be illustrated by a case study in changes in prepositional case assignment.
In order to understand and decode the message of a sentence, it is necessary to understand its basic argument structure. This implies e.g. that one must be able to identify the subject and distinguish this from the other elements of the sentence, in particular from the direct object. As linguistic patterns provide the speakers or writers with different types of construction with more or less transparency, it should be possible to identify the linguistic clues ensuring communication; e.g. the clues helping to distinguish the subject and the object. This distinction is in fact one of the crucial distinctions in syntax, and I will focus only on that distinction. I want to consider the following three factors, belonging to different grammatical levels, which may help to identify the elements of the sentence: the organising power of verbal valency: the nominal and verbal inflection and the word order. It will be shown that these factors cooperate in order to facilitate the identification of the subject and the direct object.
The Popolocan languages (Otomanguean, Mexico) have historically a VSO basic word order. The subject is encoded in the verb, in some verbs subject and human object. For pragmatic reasons a subject or object may be moved into the preverbal prosition. The preverbal argument, often marked by a focus marker, is repeated after the predicate by a nominal or pronominal form — one may say to restore the basic word order. The four Popolocan languages are affected by a change from a VSO into a SVO word order. However, each language shows a different stage of this development by using or omitting the coreferential terms and the focus marker.
Comparable observations are made with reference to the instrumental and comitative categories. The encoding in the verb of these arguments is gradually replaced by the use of prepositions, in some languages together with word order changes, each language showing a different degree of development.
As the vast majority of Popolocan speakers are bilingual, these developments are likely to be influenced by the Spanish SVO order.
According to influential work on grammaticalization, the route grammaticalizing changes take is from lexical to functional categories (Lehmann 1985, van Gelderen 1993). It will be demonstrated on two grammatical relations that this is a too specific assumption. First, modal particles in German and Dutch emerge from adverbials and conjunctions — obviously, semantically more complete elements -, but, on their route to non-adverbial particles, they do not arrive at any functional status in any minimal sense. Second, as regards the infinitival preposition (IPrep), IPrep in German as well as other Germanic languages, bleaches out semantically from an original adverbial without, however, ever reaching the functional syntactic domain (in terms of Minimalism). The third relevant characteristic to be mentioned in this context is the fact that, despite heavy semantic bleaching and arriving at new syntactic functions, the original lexical semantics remains ‘shining through’ in the case of modal particles (MPs) in German and Dutch. This allows us to reconstruct an LF-status of modal particles as a triple COMP mapping. The decision which of the three COMPs is instantiated by an individual MP depends on its original categorial status as diachronic pre-MP.
The present paper is an attempt to give an integrated account of certain developments in North Germanic syntax: (1) Modern Icelandic and Faroese have so-called oblique subjects, i.e. dative, accusative or even genitive NPs with essentially the same distribution and syntactic rule properties as modern Mainland Scandinavian subjects. (2) Both Old and Modern Icelandic have a rather intricate system of lexical case assignment which differs from, e.g., the predominantly structural case assignment of Modern German.
(3) Old Icelandic has DO-IO as well as IO-DO order, whereas Modern Icelandic, like non-case-marking Modern Mainland Scandinavian, to a greater extent has IO-DO. — On the basis of these data it is argued that after the North Germanic shift to SVO, the development has been in the direction of a modern topologically, not morphologically oriented syntax both in the non-case-marking and the case-marking languages. Among other things, this explains why case assignment has remained lexical and idiosyncratic in Icelandic instead of shifting to a simpler system of structural case assignment.
The term ‘oblique subject’ is used in recent descriptions of Icelandic about NPs that behave syntactically like subjects without having nominative case. Data in support of such an analysis can easily be found in Modern Icelandic. Various linguists have assumed that also Old Icelandic has oblique subjects. In this paper I first discuss the notion of oblique subject on a metatheoretical basis. My claim is that oblique subject is not an empirical entity, it is a result of a decision to use it as a descriptive device because it may yield a more economical or elegant description of certain facts about the language. The main body of the paper is a thorough examination of the kinds of data that have been used in support of an oblique subject analysis for Old Icelandic, supplemented by some of my own additional data. It turns out that the set of subject properties of Old Icelandic is different (smaller) than that of Modern Icelandic, and the result of this examination is that Old Icelandic does not exhibit data that call for an oblique subject analysis. The final section of the paper offers an account of the diachronic process that may have led to the kind of structure that justifies an oblique subject analysis of Modern Icelandic. This process is a reanalysis leading to a change in the possible content of the Specifier position of IP, whereby it has become an exclusive subject position. Non-nominative NPs in that position may have kept their oblique case, and become oblique subjects.
The paper examines the well-known change from impersonal to personal subject from the point of view of a slight person split in Old and Early Middle English: third person pronouns remain impersonal longer than first or second person. This split is shown to be linked to the different rates of disappearance of morphological Case in the first, second, and third person paradigm by arguing that the change from impersonal to personal involves the loss of inherent/lexical/semantic Case and the introduction of structural Case. Both changes are indicative of a larger typological change from synthetic to analytic, which can be seen as a change from Interpretable to Uninterpretable features.
Harris and Campbell (1995: Chapter 7) propose specific universals governing processes that simplify biclausal structures, including the simplification of focus clefts to monoclausal focus constructions. In particular, it is claimed there that after a biclausal construction is reanalyzed as monoclausal, the main verb governs the syntax of the single-clause structure, even though conservative coding rules (e.g. case marking, agreement, word order) at first make it appear that the derived auxiliary governs those constituents that originated in its clause.
Since the writing of that book, another example has come to light. Synchronic data on the typology of focus in North East Caucasian (NEC) languages by Konstantine Kazenin (1994, 1995, 1996) provide the basis for the present study of diachronic development of biclausal and monoclausal focus structures in these languages and make it possible to test the claims referred to above. It is argued in the present paper that some NEC languages have a focus cleft and/or a monoclausal focus construction, historically derived from (1). It is shown that the derived monoclausal structures in various NEC languages have the range of properties predicted in Harris and Campbell (1995). Additional data show a different development of biclausal focus in Udi, a NEC language not treated by Kazenin.
The present article is an attempt to construct a scenario for the typological change of the subject in the Scandinavian languages, Danish, Norwegian and Swedish, from nominative subjects to categorical subjects. This change must and will be seen in the context of the rise of the so-called subordinate clause word order. Most of the material will be taken from three stages of Danish. In addition to Modern Danish, the 13th century is represented by the language of the Scanic Law and the mid 15th century by the Danish Lucidarius.
The background is the Copenhagen version of functional grammar, as presented by the papers in Engberg-Pedersen et al. (1996), and the topological theory of Paul Diderichsen (1941, 1943). No specific knowledge of these traditions is presupposed.
This paper examines the case of different dialects of Inuktitut which appear to vary in their distribution and function of the antipassive construction. It is hypothesized that a difference in grammatical restrictions on this construction will coincide with a quantitative difference in occurrence, i.e. some dialects have moved further along the continuum toward a nominative-accusative typology. However, it is shown that counting the number of tokens of the case marker in question does not show any statistical significance, due to the fact that this case marker has functions independent of object marking and that these functions appear to vary in inverse proportion to the degree to which it is used as an accusative marker.
The history of deontic expressions in several languages reveals some naturalness in (a) constructions involving BE plus infinitive/gerundial, (b) thematic object initially surfacing in the nom, (c) reanalysis via case accommodation in neuters to a structure in which the thematic object surfaces in the acc, and (d) animates being first to adopt the change obligatorily. Neuters permitted two analyses of the theme argument: (i) nom subject; (ii) acc object. BE and non-neuters of most word-classes favor the nom subject analysis. In Latin, impersonals in -um favored an object analysis. In Latin and OE the possibility of analyzing the agentive dative as a quirky subject in the (OE) type us is to ponder the word/what is us to ponder shifted the cues in favor of an analysis of the theme as structural object, whence overt acc objects.
One of the most fundamental changes in the history of the Germanic languages was the loss of inflectional case marking. This paper will discuss the mechanisms involved in the decline of inflectional case systems with special reference to the loss of lexical case in Swedish. It will be seen that the decline of lexical case was by no means a straightforward affair. The tendency towards loss was powerfully counteracted by tendencies of maintenance, which managed to slow down the eventual collapse of the case system. Ultimately, these opposed tendencies can be identified as the conflicting interests of the speaker and the hearer, or ease of production vs. ease of perception. This will be illustrated by a case study in changes in prepositional case assignment.
In order to understand and decode the message of a sentence, it is necessary to understand its basic argument structure. This implies e.g. that one must be able to identify the subject and distinguish this from the other elements of the sentence, in particular from the direct object. As linguistic patterns provide the speakers or writers with different types of construction with more or less transparency, it should be possible to identify the linguistic clues ensuring communication; e.g. the clues helping to distinguish the subject and the object. This distinction is in fact one of the crucial distinctions in syntax, and I will focus only on that distinction. I want to consider the following three factors, belonging to different grammatical levels, which may help to identify the elements of the sentence: the organising power of verbal valency: the nominal and verbal inflection and the word order. It will be shown that these factors cooperate in order to facilitate the identification of the subject and the direct object.
The Popolocan languages (Otomanguean, Mexico) have historically a VSO basic word order. The subject is encoded in the verb, in some verbs subject and human object. For pragmatic reasons a subject or object may be moved into the preverbal prosition. The preverbal argument, often marked by a focus marker, is repeated after the predicate by a nominal or pronominal form — one may say to restore the basic word order. The four Popolocan languages are affected by a change from a VSO into a SVO word order. However, each language shows a different stage of this development by using or omitting the coreferential terms and the focus marker.
Comparable observations are made with reference to the instrumental and comitative categories. The encoding in the verb of these arguments is gradually replaced by the use of prepositions, in some languages together with word order changes, each language showing a different degree of development.
As the vast majority of Popolocan speakers are bilingual, these developments are likely to be influenced by the Spanish SVO order.