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Grammaticalization in Latin
... We will show, based on cross-linguistic and historical evidence, that expletive negation arises from Latin prohibitive negation. While this is not a new claim (Ageno 1955, Lakoff 1968, Fruyt 2011, Parry 2013, Lakey 2015, the literature has left unexplained how the transition takes place. Our article fills this gap. ...
... Finally, under negative priority attitudes, the attitude holder also prefers not-p to p (e.g., in (15) the 1st person attitude holder prefers not being prevented from doing it to being prevented). With negative priority attitudes, for the whole construction to convey a prohibition or an apprehension towards a negative event, the propositional (or 'verbal') negation non is required, in addition to ne, as in (16a) and (16b) (as mentioned in the synthetic works on Latin by Orlandini 2001;Bodelot 2003;Fruyt 2011;Pinkster 2015Pinkster , 2021. Note that a literal translation for such constructions would involve a double negation. ...
... In Lakoff's analysis and, by extension, in Mari and Tahar (2020)'s, it is argued that ne in embedded position is a complementizer (a hypothesis shared by Vincent 1988, Orlandini 2001, Roussou and Robert 2003, Fruyt 2011, Lakey 2015, which is selected by the embedding verb and has the capacity of selecting a subjunctive clause. In both cases, however, we have to stipulate hidden mechanisms or operators, which, for methodological reasons, we prefer to abstain from. ...
This article focuses on a non-canonical use of negation in historical and modern French, characterized by an apparent absence of meaning: expletive negation. In search of the lost meaning of expletive negation, via a diachronic investigation from Latin to French, we establish that expletive negation originates from prohibitive negation. We put forward an analysis of prohibitive negation within Krifka (2014)'s model of embedded speech-act and propose that expletive negation is the continuation of prohibitive negation, and that it is what remains of a long-gone embedded negative imperative in French. Along this line of analysis, the article brings historical evidence in favour of the hypothesis that languages can develop from speech-act embedding to proposition embedding. Our analysis of prohibitive negation as a clause-typing negation marker in Latin and as a verbal mood negation marker brings new evidence to the claim that sentential and verbal mood marking are two intimately related phenomena.
... The morpheme nōn is a complex element deriving from nē ('not') + oinom (lat.ūnus, 'one') (Ernout and Meillet 1959, p. 444;de Vaan 2008;Fruyt 2011), still recognizable in the ancient form noenum (Plaut. Aul. ...
... However, addressing a full discussion is beyond the goal of this paper. For a detailed discussion on the effect of Jespersen's Cycle in Latin see, among many others, Ernout and Thomas (1953), de Vaan (2008), Fruyt (2011), Orlandini and Poccetti (2012, and Gianollo (2016). 7 Some (rare) uses of nōn with the subjunctive mode are attested; for example, Rhet. ...
This article aims at investigating some diachronic aspects of the Italian negative system, considering a time span ranging from Old Latin to Modern Italian. Most of the negative polarity phenomena populating the Modern Italian system are consequences of a crucial change that occurred in Old Latin: The Latin negative morpheme nōn (“not”), which initially displayed a maximal projection status, and became a syntactic (negative) head. This change caused the shift from a double negation system to a negative concord one, which affects many Romance languages (and their dialects). It also determines the availability of the expletive reading of negation in Italian, as well as in other Romance languages (ex. French), calling for a new generalization: only languages (and structures) displaying a negative head allow the expletive interpretation of negation, languages displaying a maximal projection status do not.
... Un processo svoltosi tramite sostituzione diretta è stato studiato da Garzonio & Poletto (2014) per il dialetto di Rionero in Vulture, che utilizza manco, originariamente negazione enfatica col significato di 'neppure' che ha perso il valore scalare diventando la negazione standard di questa varietà. Un processo simile si può ricostruire per il latino, dove la forma rafforzata noenum < *ne 'non' + *oinom 'uno' ha dato origine alla negazione standard non; in latino, sia noenum che nihil 'niente' usato con valore avverbiale come rafforzatore della negazione si sostituiscono alla negazione di frase, non formano con essa una negazione composta (Fruyt 2011;Gianollo 2018: 176-180). ...
L’articolo intende riassumere le premesse teoriche, le metodologie e i risultati più rilevanti ottenuti dall’analisi del parlato in italiano di quattro parlanti italo-australiani di origine veneta. Lo studio, parte del più ampio progetto IRIAS (Italian Roots in Australian Soil), condotto da Università di Bologna, University of Western Sydney, ISTC-CNR e Filef, si concentra su soggetti residenti nell’area metropolitana di Sydney (Greater Sydney) e insediatisi in Australia da più di un cinquantennio, caratterizzati da un repertorio linguistico trilingue del tipo dialetto L1, italiano L2 e inglese L3. L’analisi, condotta sulla classe delle consonanti coronali e articolata in due fasi (uno studio distribuzionale delle produzioni fonetiche e una più sottile indagine delle caratteristiche spettrali dei suoni fricativi), rivela la presenza di tendenze non sistematiche, che verranno discusse in chiave sociolinguistica. Prima della fase sperimentale vera e propria, verranno brevemente discusse le specificità storiche, culturali e linguistiche dell’emigrazione italiana in Australia.
... pour les langues ibéro-romanes et M.Fruyt (2010Fruyt ( , 2011 pour le latin, il y a en réalité deux systèmes fonctionnant en parallèle : un système binaire, où le locuteur inclut l'allocutaire dans sa sphère pour opposer celle-ci à la sphère hors interlocution, et un système ternaire, où le locuteur distingue sa sphère propre par rapport à celle de l'allocutaire et par rapport à la sphère hors interlocution. Ces deux configurations ainsi que les formes qui y correspondent sont représentées respectivement dans les figures 2 et 3. ...
Alors que le latin distingue entre les démonstratifs hic , iste et ille associés respectivement à la 1 re , la 2 e et la 3 e personnes, l’ancien français oppose deux démonstratifs : le proximal ( cist < iste ) et le distal ( cil < ille ). Pourquoi le démonstratif médian iste , peu fréquent en latin classique et tardif, évince-t-il en ancien français le démonstratif proximal latin hic ? Cette étude analyse comment cette restructuration du système ternaire en un système binaire se prépare dès le latin tardif, à partir d’un corpus de textes proches de l’oral. Hic et iste étant des déictiques forts, contrairement au distal ille (Kirsner 1979), il est montré comment, au moment où iste empiète sur le contexte d’emploi de hic , une nouvelle répartition se crée : hic se maintient comme marqueur référentiel , alors que iste s’impose comme marqueur pragmatique de saillance. Cette nouvelle fonction pragmatique de iste enclenche en latin tardif une restructuration du système des démonstratifs qui aboutira en ancien français. C’est ainsi que l’oralité peut être source du changement linguistique.
... The different means used for introducing direct speech have been analysed in many languages (see Güldemann 2008, Vandelanotte 2012, Golato 2000, Deutscher 2011), most recently also in Latin (e.g. Fruyt 2011, Gayno 2015, Sznajder 2015. Within Latin linguistics, scholars often focus on Late Latin since the number of instances of direct speech is higher in that period than in Classical Latin (see Fruyt 2011: p. 693), and the introducer dicens 'saying' increases in frequency and importance. ...
The present paper examines the marking of the end of direct speech in five selected Late Latin texts. It shows that a range of strategies are employed in the texts, among which it analyses the use of particles, pronouns and participle constructions in greater detail. Although the end of direct speech tended to be signalled, none of the means can be viewed as a routinized marker of the end of direct speech in Late Latin - the particle et 'and' was found 19 % of instances in the examined texts. When an expression was used in a seemingly routine fashion, its higher occurrence was limited to one or two texts and attributed in the present analysis to the author's style. The most frequent expressions identified (the particles et and -que 'and', demonstrative and relative pronouns) do not carry any specific meaning with respect to direct speech but rather fulfil the function of cohesive device. The end of direct speech thus seems to be treated as a mere boundary in the discourse, lacking any specific marking in Late Latin.
... In Latin linguistics, it is mainly indirect speech that has been so far examined (oratio obliqua in general, shift of tenses, pronominal and adverbial shift, etc. 3 ), whereas direct speech has been a rather marginal topic of research and has been often examined in relation to indirect speech (see, e.g., Sznajder, 2002or Baños Baños, 2009). Thus, detailed comprehensive studies of Latin direct speech are still lacking, although some articles concerned with the topic were published, among them, for example, an article about the verb inquit (Kieckers, 1919) and a study of grammaticalization in Latin (Fruyt, 2009), in which the participle dicens introducing direct speech is mentioned as an example of grammaticalization (Fruyt, 2009: p. 693). Most recently, an article about means introducing direct speech in biblical 1 In the literature also other subcategories of reported speech are distinguished and studied, for example distancing indirect speech (Vandelanotte, 2004), hybrid speech (Vries, 2008: p. 58), etc. 2 The term "quotative marker" is used as the term referring to all types of means used for introducing direct speech (verbs, nouns, particles, etc.). ...
This paper examines means for introducing direct speech in selected Late Latin texts with a focus on verbal ones. The most frequently used verbs are dicere in finite forms, ait and the present participle dicens. The introducers inquit, ait and dicens show signs of at least incipient stages of grammaticalization. Ait is almost completely reserved for introducing direct speech, inquit was already specialized in introducing direct speech in Classical Latin. Dicens often follows another finite verb of speech in the introductory clause, which results in more or less redundant introducing construction. It seems that ait and dicens are progressive at the expense of inquit, which decreases in frequency of use in comparison to Classical Latin. The examined texts show a tendency to place introducing verbs before direct speech, which is manifested by inquit inserted into direct speech, often combined with another verb of speech placed before the direct speech. Individual texts differ in various aspects, but the correlation with the choice of introducing verbs cannot be proved unambiguously.
In European Portuguese, nunca ‘never’ is traditionally classified as a temporal adverb and it can convey sentential negation on its own, therefore behaving as a strong negative polarity item (NPI). Nevertheless, in early stages of the language we find nunca with a non-negative interpretation, in contexts that are considered ungrammatical in contemporary Portuguese. Unlike negative indefinites that started as weak NPIs and became inherently negative, nunca was already a strong negative polarity item in 13th century Portuguese. In this article I will show that, apart from the strong NPI nunca , there was also an ambiguous item nunca that corresponded to a modal polarity item. In the Romance context, items originating from Latin numquam also unfold into ambiguous items with different polarity. In Portuguese, however, ambiguity was not preserved. The evolution of nunca reinforces the idea that Portuguese is the most innovative of Romance languages regarding the outcomes of polarity items.
This paper provides an analysis of the variables that determine the syntactic distribution of ecce , a presentative adverb in Latin. Traditionally, grammarians have simply regarded ecce as an adverb (similar to here ) or an interjection (similar to hey! ) but this lexicographic view misses important syntactic phenomena. For example, adverbs in Latin can follow subjects, but ecce cannot. Interjections can be used as single words to express surprise, but ecce , as a presentative, is never used in the absence of a following determiner phrase (DP). Two corpora of almost seven million Latin words ranging from ∼200 BCE to 1800 CE were analyzed for instances of ecce . Adopting a cartographic approach, results suggest that ecce , as a presentative, is base-generated in the head of a Focus phrase (FocP) projection in the matrix clause. This is confirmed through its consistent precedence of subjects, scope over left-dislocated constituents in [Spec, FocP], and its ungrammaticality in the embedded domain. This study brings to light several theoretical implications for the under-studied category of presentatives by showing how discourse and hierarchical properties license the use of ecce and restrict its contexts of use.
En este artículo se ofrece un análisis de un tipo de construcción compuesta por dos oraciones: Trae el paraguas, no sea que llueva esta tarde y Trae el paraguas, no sea que se mojen los libros.La segunda oración, encabezada por una negación y un verbo de suceso, era una desiderativa negativa que se construccionalizó como subordinada. En la nueva construcción la subordinada desempeña la función pragmática Motivación, es decir, el hablante justifica con ella el acto de habla anterior. El hablante no desea el cumplimiento del evento introducido por la oración subordinada y por ello busca un remedio o, si no tiene remedio, una forma de resistirse a ello. Así, la función pragmática Motivación se codifica morfosintácticamente, bien mediante una oración de interpretación final negativa, o bien mediante una oración de interpretación causal.
This paper aims to contribute to the clarification of the linguistic and extra-linguistic circumstances that accompany the emergence and behavior of mediante in the first centuries of Spanish. To this end, the origin of the Latin participle medians, mediantis is examined and the evidence of its ablative form mediante in various contexts is also analysed and discussed. We conclude from our study that (1) the appearance of mediante in Latin takes place at a relatively late stage of Latin, it having entered the language as a grammatical calque from Greek; (2) in Latin, prepositional values of mediante, which do not necessarily originate from Latin absolute ablative clauses, are already detected; and finally, (3) discursive traditions and historical-cultural factors, in particular those developed in Patristic and Scholastic Literature, are fundamental for the understanding, not only of the evolution of mediante in Latin, but also of its introduccion into Spanish.
This book is a collection of thirteen detailed studies on word order change within the framework of diachronic generative syntax. An initial chapter contextualizes them and introduces the theme in order to make clear from the onset its relevance and appeal. The sample of languages investigated is diverse and displays significant historical depth. Different branches of the Indo-European family are represented both through classical and living languages, namely: a wide range of Early Indo-European languages (Sanskrit, Greek, Indic, Avestan, Hittite, Tocharian, among others), Romance languages (Latin, Italian, European Portuguese, Brazilian Portuguese), Germanic languages (Dutch, English), and a Celtic language (Irish). Besides, three chapters are dedicated to Hungarian and one chapter deals with Coptic Egyptian. The essays in the book use the tools provided by the generative theory of grammar to investigate the constrained ways in which older linguistic variants give rise to new ones in the course of time, with the aim of contributing insights into the properties of natural language. Two ingredients of the generative framework make it especially appropriate to deal with word order phenomena, namely movement as a syntactic operation (embedded in the theory of grammar) and a richly articulated clausal architecture composed with lexical but also abstract functional categories. This collective volume is unique in the way it provides through in-depth language-internal or comparative studies new perspectives on the relation between word order change and syntactic movement, under the constraints imposed by particular instantiations of clausal architecture. © editorial matter and organization Ana Maria Martins and Adriana Cardoso 2018. the chapters their several authors 2018. All rights reserved.
This work follows the syntactic and semantic development of some indefinite pronouns and determiners between Latin and Romance. The history of elements of the functional lexicon such as Latin quidam ‘a certain’, aliquis ‘some’, nullus ‘no’, nemo ‘no one’, nihil ‘nothing’ allows us to detect which aspects of their meaning and of their form are responsible for the diachronic success of some of them, and for the disappearance of others, and how they are reanalyzed or replaced in the Romance languages. The system of indefinite pronouns and determiners changes profoundly from Latin to Romance, but Romance languages maintain a certain degree of similarity in the way their various systems evolve. We can account for this similarity of outcomes if we consider the changes happening at the intermediate stage of Late Latin. At this stage, the grammar of indefinites already shows a number of changes, which are homogeneously transmitted to the daughter languages, explaining in this way the parallelism among the various emerging Romance systems. The conclusions of this study confirm the fruitfulness of applying methods and models developed within synchronic theoretical linguistics to the study of diachronic phenomena. In turn, they bear witness to the importance of diachronic research for understanding the nature of crosslinguistic variation, and the systematic nature of language change.
Support verb constructions are documented throughout the history of Latin as well as other (typologically also irrelated) languages. As shown in several studies, such constructions are characterized by the presence of a support verb exhibiting a more or less reduced semantic force, and a predicative (abstract or verbal) noun that often constitutes its direct object. The present contribution deals, specifically, with the use of facio as support verb (as in bellum facere, iter facere, insidias facere , etc.), focussing on the post-classical and late period. In particular, three questions shall be investigated: (i) whether, and if yes, how facio increases its popularity in later centuries both in non-Christian and Christian sources; (ii) how is the spread of use of facio -support verb constructions in the Mulomedicina Chironis and in the Itinerarium Egeriae to be accounted for; (iii) what type of semantic evolution does the verb undergo in later Latin and whether, in this respect, continuity or rupture should be assumed with regard to the archaic and classical periods. This last point will enable us to suggest a more convincing explanation for an often-quoted passage of Cicero ( Phil . 3,22), in which the construction contumeliam facere occurs.
Whereas Latin has three demonstratives, hic, iste and ille associated respectively with the 1st, 2nd and 3rd person, Old French opposes two demonstratives, proximal (cist < iste) and distal (cil < ille). Why the median demonstrative iste, infrequent in Classical and Late Latin, becomes the proximal demonstrative in Old French and eliminates the Latin proximal demonstrative hic? This paper analyzes the ongoing restructuring of the ternary system into a binary system in Late Latin on the basis of a corpus of texts close to the spoken register. According to Kirsner (1979), hic and iste are strong deictics, contrary to the distal demonstrative ille. It is shown that, as iste encroaches on the preserve of hic in Late Latin, a new division of labor emerges: hic continues to be used as a referential device, whereas iste becomes a pragmatic marker of salience. This new pragmatic function of iste initiates in Late Latin a restructuring of the system of demonstratives, which reaches its endpoint in Old French. Hence, orality can be a source of linguistic change.
Il presente lavoro, di approccio soprattutto tipologico e funzionale, riprende e segue le teorie sulla grammaticalizzazione, cercando di esporre un quadro (seppur minimo) delle sue varie definizioni. La parte empirica, che si concentra essenzialmente nel terzo capitolo, vuole apportare nuovo materiale allo studio del processo di grammaticalizzazione dei costrutti binominali del tipo SN1 di SN2 (‘un boccone di’, ‘un pezzo di’) presenti in alcune varietà dialettali italiane, soprattutto dell’Italia mediana e meridionale: cica/zica, boccone, cria, morso, picca, tozzo. Quasi tutti i lessemi seguono un percorso di grammaticalizzazione del tipo: stadio 1: uso partitivo limitato; stadio 2: uso partitivo esteso; stadio 3: quantificatore; stadio 4: avverbio scalare/modificatore; stadio 5: complemento/avverbio libero. Un altro fenomeno rilevante è la formazione di particelle a polarità negativa (NPI), come cica e cria, che si presentano come “marca” della negazione ricorrendo in contesti negativi, processo rientra dunque nel cosiddetto ciclo di Jespersen (1917) ed è paragonabile allo sviluppo che è avvenuto in francese per pas < lat. PASSUM e per molti altri lessemi in alcune varietà italo - romanze. Un approccio diverso è quello di analizzare i lessemi riprendendo il concetto di ‘costruzione’ e le parti coinvolte (sintassi, morfologia, fonologia, semantica), rifacendoci alla (Radical) Construction Grammar di Croft (2001) e allo schema proposto dalla Traugott per i partitivi inglesi NP of NP (a bit of).
In this paper I investigate the interplay between sentential negation and indefinites in some Late Latin texts (since the 3rd century AD), with the aim of tracing back to this stage later developments affecting the early Romance languages. I argue that the persistence of Object-Verb order with negative indefinites in Late Latin is a sign of an early restructuring in the system of sentential negation, preluding to the early Romance systems. I propose a parsimonious interpretation of this diachronic process in terms of one crucial change in the formal features of the negative marker nōn, with a number of significant consequences for its relationship with the indefinite pronouns.
This paper provides an analysis of all the occurrences of a construction of habeo plus a perfect participle in Cicero where the participle is not unquestionably predicative. The evidence suggests the hypothesis that the structure habeo (specifically, in the present tense) plus perfect participle shows the potential for reanalysis in argumentative-commentative text units.
The concept of ‘renewal’ is widely used in the literature on morphosyntactic change, but hardly ever theorized. Here we scrutinize the viability of this concept theoretically as well as empirically, revisiting in detail the most frequently cited case of renewal, namely the resemblance between the Latin and French synthetic futures. Phenomena accounted for in terms of renewal can also be accounted for in terms of grammaticalization theory.We argue that there is no need and no empirical support for renewal as its own type of change alongside grammaticalization. However, grammaticalization theory so far has neglected to properly account for influences of the existing system on ongoing grammaticalization processes. As an initial approximation of this vast field of study, we propose several domains where we believe that system influences on grammaticalization are operative. On the one hand, this involves making more precise the source determination hypothesis as developed in work by Joan Bybee and colleagues. On the other, it comprises interactions between constructions in paradigm formation.
This paper examines sequences of passive forms of the verb habere with the passive perfect participle in Late Latin texts from the 6th to 8th centuries. The passive verb haberi + participle can have various meanings ranging from resultativity and a focus on previous action, to a meaning equivalent to esse. Its use is marked by variability and ambiguity. Factors that could influence the interpretation of individual instances are also examined. Context seems to be of great importance. It is suggested that the use of haberi may have been influenced also by the spread of habere and the development of its meaning, the development of the impersonal habet and grammaticalization of habere + passive perfect participle that was under way at that time.
The Commentarium artis Donati by the African author Pompeius Maurus is the treatise that most accurately reflects Servius' doctrine on the matter of syntax, especially regarding nominal and verbal regency. His personal vision of metalinguistic terms, such as elocutio, conexio and regere, together with his treatment of octavus casus, are the most revealing examples of this legacy.
The paper examines the characteristics of habere transgressa, a case of habere + past participle, as found in Passio Desiderii. In comparison to other texts under examination, habere transgressa shows a high degree of grammaticalization, as a construction with an inanimate subject and participle of an intransitive verb. It is suggested that the use of the auxiliary habere may have been influenced by the development of the impersonal habet as well as the expanding meaning of habere. Habere + past participle occurred only twice in Passio Desiderii, while the auxiliary esse with past participle was found frequently in the text. Habere transgressa thus seems an important, although an isolated, example of habere + past participle, a study of which can contribute to a better understanding of the development of habere + past participle from Latin to Romance languages.
Morphosyntactic specialization and semantic change: the case of the French demonstrative
The complete reorganization of demonstrative system is a central and well known example of morphosyntactic specialization which characterizes the history of French. This article summarizes the main stages of this evolution, which lasted about six centuries and is now fairly well described. The main contribution of the paper is based on the relatively broad perspective in which morphosyntactic evolution is replaced, the evolution being addressed as part of a large scale diachrony (from classical Latin to modern French through medieval French), in a Romance perspective (focusing on the factors that distinguish French from other Romance languages) and through its relations with semantic changes parallel to morphosyntactic specialization.
Keywords: personal sphere, token-reflexivity, analogy, Latin demonstrative
Analyses of grammaticalization in Indo-European languages tend to focus on Germanic and Romance forms, for which we generally are able to identify the original autonomous composing elements. By contrast, in early Indo- European languages we find many inflected formations or other grammatical elements that are opaque. The question then is: Are these forms opaque (1) because of the length of their existence; or (2) because the composing elements in origin were not autonomous lexical forms, but rather of a different type? We may never be able to fully answer that question. Yet comparison of phenomena of grammaticalization in different stages of Latin will help clarify certain aspects of it. This article compares manifestations of grammaticalization in the transition from Latin to Romance with earlier formation processes in Latin and Indo-European. I will submit that the instances of grammaticalization that we find in the later stages of Latin and that resulted in a number of new grammatical forms in Romance, reflect a major linguistic innovation. While the new grammatical forms are created out of lexical or mildly grammatical autonomous elements, earlier processes seem to primarily involve particles with a certain semantic value, and freezing. This fundamental difference explains why the attempts of early Indo-Europeanists such as Franz Bopp at tracing the lexical origins of Indo-European inflected forms were unsuccessful and strongly criticized by the Neo-Grammarians.
In this paper, I discuss the use of habere + perfect participle in Latin. Four different types of lexical habere + pp constructions are identified, what I call the adnominal construction, the resultative construction, the affectee type and the ‘consider’ type. In addition, we find examples that can only be analysed as the periphrastic perfect already in archaic Latin. The periphrastic perfect, I argue, originated through reanalysis of the resultative construction, but perception/cognition verbs cannot have been essential for this reanalysis, contrary to common belief.
The paper discusses the phenomenon of Late Latin intransitivizations, where a morphologically active form of a transitive verb is used with a middle-passive function. Intransitivizations are present throughout the history of the language, but their number increases significantly in the 3rd–4th century CE. They are instances of patient-preserving lability and represent one of the possible means to express the anticausative alternation. The analysis casts intransitivizations into the broader context of voice fluctuations in Late Latin, by comparing them with competing constructions and by examining the possible causes for their increase in frequency during the Late Latin stage.
There are three-and only three-mechanisms of grammatical change: Reanalysis (including the different aspects of grammaticalization), Analogy, and External Borrowing. These three mechanisms, implying processes of de-categorization, or generalization, or language contact, are described in detail. Examples are taken in typologically different languages. The motivations of grammatical change that could trigger off the mechanisms are the following: (i) semantic-pragmatic change (processes of metaphorization, of pragmatic inferencing or metonymyzation, of subjectification), (ii) typological extension, (iii) structural requirement, (iv) phonological change. The semantic-pragmatic change, related to conceptual change and different cognitive processes, is crucial.
The aim of the paper is to compare the class of auxiliary verbs in three Romance languages, French, Spanish and Italian, in the framework of grammaticalization theory. Grammaticalization is defined as the process by which lexical items are gradually converted into grammatical markers, i.e. a dynamic operation by which elements can move over time from one linguistic component to another (from the lexicon to the grammar and eventually, to the morphological component). Auxiliaries are defined both on a syntactic and a semantic basis : formally, they are verbs followed by a non finite verb form (only infinitives are considered here) and semantically, they express one of three notional concepts : time, aspect or modality. The major claim of the paper is that French is the most grammaticalized of the three languages, and Spanish the least. The empirical evidence that supports this hypothesis relates to three kinds of data : the number of verbs that can be analyzed as members of the category AUX, the selectional properties concerning the subject NP (± human NP) and the possible alternation of the infinitival complement with NP complements.
Grammaticalization, the change by which lexical categories become func- tional categories, is overwhelmingly irreversible. Prototypical functional categories never become prototypical lexical categories, and less radical changes against the general directionality of grammaticalization are extremely rare. Although the pervasiveness of grammaticalization has long been known, the question of why this change is irreversible has not been asked until fairly recently. However, no satisfactory explanation has been proposed so far. Irreversibility cannot be attributed to the lack of predict- ability, to the interplay of the motivating factors of economy and clarity, or to a preference for simple structures in language acquisition. I propose an explanation that follows the general structure of Keller's (1994) invisible-hand theory: language change is shown to result from the cumulation of countless individual actions of speakers, which are not intended to change language, but whose side eVect is change in a particular direction. Grammaticalization is a side eVect of the maxim of extravagance, that is, speakers' use of unusually explicit formulations in order to attract attention. As these are adopted more widely in the speech community, they become more frequent and are reduced phonologically. I propose that degrammaticalization is by and large impossible because there is no counteracting maxim of ''anti-extravagance,'' and because speakers have no conscious access to grammaticalized expressions and thus cannot use them in place of less grammaticalized ones. This is thus a usage-based explanation, in which the notion of imperfect language acquisition as the locus of change plays no role.
The contributions in this volume cover a wide range of theoretical and methodological issues and raise a number of new questions that indicate the future direction of grammaticalization studies. The volume focuses on issues such as grammaticalization and lexicalization; the unidirectionality hypothesis; the issue of the relevance of contexts for grammaticalization; the description of grammaticalization paths. Much of the current work concentrates on such categories, as discourse markers, honorifics or classifiers, which have not previously been central to works on grammaticalization. Other studies take a new perspective on known grammaticalization paths by applying concepts adopted from other linguistic fields, such as prototype theory, morphocentricity, or by discussing their findings from a comparative or typological angle, presenting data from a large number of languages, often based on extensive empirical investigations of written and spoken text corpora.
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If from the etymological point of view the term category denotes a class of objects sharing a common feature, under linguistic category we generally understand a class of linguistic units (chiefly words) sharing a common meaning or syntactical function, expressed by a common external (phonetic) form. Thus the words room-s, table-s, pencil-s, match-es, glass-es… are representative of the category of the plural number; ( be ) describe-d, contrive-d, share-d, found-ed, assert-ed… represent the category of the past tense. Forms like men, children , etc., on the one hand, (he) rode, went , etc., on the other, are also members of the category of the plural or past, respectively, in spite of the lack of the characteristic feature -(e)s or -(e)d , since functionally (i.e. as regards meaning) they lean upon the pattern of the productive -s and -d forms, thus: the semantic difference between man and men ( child and children ) is the same as that between e.g. room and room-s , rendered by the sign -s versus zero;
the semantic difference between rides and rode ( goes and went ) is the same as that between describe-s and describe-d , rendered by the sign -d as against -s .
This paper deals with noun incorporation data from Northern Athapaskan languages, which have not hitherto been analyzed formally. Based on semantic characteristics of noun incorporation and on incorporation from oblique and subject positions, we claim that this phenomenon does not obey the syntactic rules posited by Baker (1988). A theory which seeks to constrain noun incorporation in terms of grammatical relations is not adequate for explaining it in Northern Athapaskan. A functional approach (Givón 1984, 1985), which is sensitive to the semantics and pragmatics of incorporation, is found to be more adequate. We argue that noun incorporation is a functionally motivated process at the interface of morphology and syntax that changes linguistic coding from independent and salient to dependent and nonsalient.
Recently, linguists have discovered (or, more accurately, rediscovered) the role that historical linguistics can legitimately play in providing explanations for the facts of synchronic language types. Greater awareness of synchronic variability and its source in historical changes in progress has focused attention on the concept of a language as a system not of static structures, but of interacting processes which the individual speaker becomes involved in as he/she acquires the language and enters the language community (Weinreich, Labov & Herzog, 1968). These processes are hypothesized to be universal, in that they may occur in any language family at any time period (though the initial actuation of a change is still a riddle, ibid. 102).
It is well known that the future indicative and conditional (or future-in-thepast) paradigms of most Central and West Romance languages reflect a Latin infinitival construction with habeo, e.g. Italian canterd <cantare habeo, cantaria < cantare habebam.Although the development was essentially a Vulgar Latin one and so belongs to the subliterate register of the language, it is reflected now and again in the written material from the classical and post-classical periods. It is, therefore, possible by a study of its occurrences in the written material to make inferences about its origins within the antecedent morpho-syntactic system and the structural pressures that gave rise to its development.
In his interesting paper on babeo and aueo published in CQ 66 (1972), 388–98, Dr. A.S. Gratwick raised a number of questions bearing on my own discussion of the origin and development of the babeo +infinitive construction in CQ 65 (1971), 215–31.
First the collapse of the earlier future-tense system. As I said, this was ‘the product of a number of different linguistic events’, phonetic, grammatical, and semantic, which were summarized and illustrated on pp. 220–1 of my paper. Even so Dr. Gratwick (p. 397) believes that I assigned too much weight to ‘phonetic attrition of the future simple’.
The History and Definition of the Term “Analogy”Tendencies in Analogical ChangeAnalogical and Morphological ChangeConclusions
Notes
The Grammaticization of ConstructionsThe Role of RepetitionType and Token FrequencyHow Does Frequency Increase? A Case Study of canPhonological ChangesAutonomyNew Pragmatic AssociationsEntrenchment: The Evolving Morphosyntactic Properties of English AuxiliariesThe Effects of RepetitionNotes