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Affix Not Clitic-Based Vowel Shortening in Modern Arabic Varieties Transactions of the Philological Society Pub Date : 2024-02-21 Emily Lindsay-Smith
Word formation in most languages is inextricably linked to a distinction between clitics and affixes. Although famous for its templatic morphological structure, Arabic also contains concatenative formatives some of whose status as clitics or affixes is controversial. It is well known that Arabic varieties exhibit a range of interacting shortening and lengthening processes. Some of the shortening processes
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A Semantically Rich ‘Do’-Support Verb in the Camuno Dialect of Northern Italy Transactions of the Philological Society Pub Date : 2024-02-21 Nicola Swinburne
In the Camuno dialect of northern Italy, ‘do’-support may be used to form the interrogative. In some varieties, this is optional, and it co-exists with the alternative interrogative method of using the main verb alone. Through an elicitation experiment, participants produced their preferred version of a question based on a certain main verb with given context. The likelihood that ‘do’-support was used
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From People's King to King of a Country: The Development of the Place Element Modifying the Title Paired in Apposition with a Personal Name Traced in the Peterborough Chronicle Transactions of the Philological Society Pub Date : 2023-12-20 Seiji Shinkawa
A king was typically referred to as people's king in the early period of Old English, whereas today, king of a country is the most commonly used. This study attempts to trace the development of the place element modifying the title paired in apposition with a personal name in the tradition of vernacular English historiography as represented by the Peterborough Chronicle. There existed a strong tendency
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Sound Change and Analogy, Again: Brugmann's Law and the Hunt For O-Grades in Indo-Iranian* Transactions of the Philological Society Pub Date : 2023-11-27 Laura Grestenberger
This article revisits the interaction between regular ‘Neogrammarian’ sound change (defined as a purely phonological process) and subsequent morphological change (especially changes subsumed under the term ‘analogy’) in the development of the outcomes of Brugmann's Law (BL) in Indo-Iranian. The traditional formulation of BL states that Proto-Indo-European *o became Indo-Iranian /ā/ in open syllables
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Central Siberian Yupik Influence on Sirenikski Verbal Inflection Transactions of the Philological Society Pub Date : 2023-11-21 Anna Berge
Language contact is pervasive in the history of all Eskaleut languages of the Pacific Rim, and the languages show contact effect regardless of typological similarity or degree of relatedness. Moreover, the degree of contact has allowed for the borrowing of features that are generally thought of as relatively impervious to borrowing, including verb inflection. In particular, Sirenikski has been in close
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The Origin of Differential Object Marking and Tripartite Alignment in Udi (East Caucasian) Transactions of the Philological Society Pub Date : 2023-11-20 Gilles Authier
Thanks to the discovery in Mount Sinai Monastery of the Albanian palimpsest, which contains fragments of the Bible in an ancient form of Udi, this language has become the earliest attested member of the East Caucasian family. However, due to its long evolution in contact with unrelated languages, both old and modern Udi show many characteristics unknown to their closest relatives, including Differential
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The Ancient Greek Datives in -essi: Contact or Independent Innovations?1 Transactions of the Philological Society Pub Date : 2023-11-20 Marta Capano, Michele Bianconi
The Ancient Greek datives in -essi have posed a longstanding challenge in Greek linguistics, with their traditional categorisation as ‘Aeolic’ but their widespread presence across Aeolic and non-Aeolic regions. This article investigates the origin and diffusion of this trait, examining both the early Greek evidence (in particular the Lesbian poets, Homer, and Mycenaean Greek) and that from specific
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Contact-Induced Changes in Morphosyntax: An Introduction Transactions of the Philological Society Pub Date : 2023-11-20 Michele Bianconi, Robin Meyer
The study of language contact and contact-induced change has seen a rise in scholarly attention since Weinreich's Languages in Contact (1953), and especially after Thomason & Kaufman's (1988) Language Contact, Creolization, and Genetic Linguistics. Since then, numerous textbooks and handbooks (Heine & Kuteva 2005; Matras 2007, 2020; Hickey 2010, 2017), edited volumes (Aikhenvald & Dixon 2001, 2007;
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Support-Verb Constructions with Objects: Greek-Coptic Interference in the Documentary Papyri?1 Transactions of the Philological Society Pub Date : 2023-11-16 Victoria Beatrix Fendel
Support-verb constructions are combinations of a verb and a noun that fill the predicate slot, for example, to make a suggestion in I made the suggestion yesterday. The article examines direct-object structures with support-verb constructions in Greek documentary papyri from fourth- to mid-seventh-century Egypt. By the fourth century, Greek and Egyptian (at this stage called Coptic) had co-existed
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Towards a Typology of Contact-Induced Change: Questions, Problems and the Path Ahead Transactions of the Philological Society Pub Date : 2023-11-15 Robin Meyer
The fields of linguistic typology, contact linguistics and historical linguistics frequently interact with one another and each draws on the insights gained in the others. To date, however, there is no effective and systematic cooperation between these subdisciplines, no database comparing the typological distribution of features with common outcomes or mechanisms of internal change and the results
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From Latin QUO(D) VELLES to Romagnol Cvël: A Case of Degrammaticalisation from a Free-choice Indefinite to the Noun ‘Thing’1 Transactions of the Philological Society Pub Date : 2023-11-15 Nicola D’Antuono
Degrammaticalisation is an oft-dismissed category of language change. In this paper evidence is provided for its existence, its triggers, and its conditions. This case study details the development of an understudied Old Italo-Romance indefinite, covelle, a polarity-sensitive item roughly translating as ‘anything’ which originated from a Latin free relative with Free-Choice interpretation. It is shown
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The Contribution of Germanic to the Expansion of Partitive-Related Phenomena in the Prehistoric Circum-Baltic Area1 Transactions of the Philological Society Pub Date : 2023-11-15 Giacomo Bucci
The primary objective of this article is to expand the discussion on partitive-related phenomena diffusion in the prehistoric Circum-Baltic area by considering the role of early Germanic languages. The central message is that early Germanic languages have been historically overlooked in the study of partitive phenomena in the Circum-Baltic area, and this paper aims to address this oversight. After
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Morphosyntactic Contact in Translation: Greek ídios and Latin proprius in the Bible Transactions of the Philological Society Pub Date : 2023-11-14 Marina Benedetti, Chiara Gianollo
We investigate the possibility that contact with Greek through the translation of biblical texts may have played a role in the development of Latin proprius ‘personal’, ‘peculiar’ into a reflexive possessive adjective. A few centuries earlier, post-Classical Greek witnesses a similar development with the adjective ídios ‘private’, ‘personal’: we determine that in the New Testament this adjective has
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Testing Inferences about Language Contact on Morphosyntax: A Typological Case Study on Alorese–Adang Contact Transactions of the Philological Society Pub Date : 2023-11-08 Kaius Sinnemäki, Noora Ahola
When linguists make inferences about language contact, control data is required for reliable analysis. Historical data or reconstructions are typically used for that purpose. However, historical data is globally mostly unavailable, and reconstructions are laborious if comparing outcomes of language contact in a typological way. We assess a recent typological proposal (Di Garbo & Napoleão de Souza 2023)
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Negation in Contact: French and Occitan Transactions of the Philological Society Pub Date : 2023-11-08 Xavier C. A. Bach
Development of negative markers along the lines of the well-known Jespersen's Cycle occurred in a wide number of languages. This article investigates the possibility of contact playing a role in such developments in Lengadocian Occitan. The evolution of negation in Lengadocian Occitan followed two main lines. It first developed a postverbal negative marker ges, until increased contact with French from
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Sociolinguistic Typology Meets Historical Corpus Linguistics Transactions of the Philological Society Pub Date : 2023-11-03 George Walkden, Gemma Hunter McCarley, Raquel Montero, Molly Rolf, Sarah Einhaus, Henri Kauhanen
This paper makes the case for using historical corpora to assess questions of sociolinguistic typology. A full account of any contact-induced change will need to establish what the linguistic innovation in question was, who was in contact, where and when the contact took place and how the change happened, both at the individual level and at the population level. The historical corpus approach complements
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Tracing Eastern Mayan Perfect -maχ: Outcomes of Direct Affix Borrowing in the Sacapulas Corridor Transactions of the Philological Society Pub Date : 2023-11-02 James Tandy
Several Eastern Mayan languages of central highland Guatemala have an innovative perfect participle suffix -maχ, whose distribution suggests that it diffused areally. This article describes the innovation of -maχ in Poqom and argues that it spread to other Mayan languages in a newly proposed contact area called the ‘Sacapulas Corridor’. I explore three case studies where the distribution of the perfect
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Short vs Long Stem Alternations in Romance Verbal Inflection: The S-Morphome Transactions of the Philological Society Pub Date : 2023-10-03 Borja Herce, Chundra A. Cathcart
Some verbs in Romance (e.g. the reflexes of faciō ‘do’, dīcō ‘say’, habeō ‘have’, sapiō ‘know’, possum ‘be able’, and volō ‘want’) display alternations between a short (e.g. It. f-are, f-a, d-ire) and a long (e.g. It. fac-evo, dic-e, dic-evo) stem. This paper contains an exploration of the lexical and paradigmatic distribution of these stem alternations across Romance varieties to trace when they emerged
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Colloquial Persian: Towards a New Rise of Simple Verbs?1 Transactions of the Philological Society Pub Date : 2023-07-19 Dorian Pastor, Agnes Korn, Christian Rammer
For the formation of new verbs, Persian very productively employs complex predicates, while the derivation of simple verbs has been held to be marginal or even inexistent. We use data from internet fora, blogs, and messaging services to argue that the derivation of simple verbs from nominals is a productive process at least among speakers of colloquial Persian who actively use online media. Two acceptability
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A Partial Decipherment of the Unknown Kushan Script* Transactions of the Philological Society Pub Date : 2023-07-12 Svenja Bonmann, Jakob Halfmann, Natalie Korobzow, Bobomullo Bobomulloev
Several dozen inscriptions in an unknown writing system have been discovered in an area stretching geographically from Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan to southern Afghanistan. Most inscriptions can be dated to the period from the 2nd century BCE to the 3rd century CE, yet all attempts at decipherment have so far been unsuccessful. The recent discovery of previously unknown inscriptions near the
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Towards a New Generalisation of the Tri-Axial Orientation System in Situ Rgyalrong Transactions of the Philological Society Pub Date : 2023-07-05 Shuya Zhang
This paper revisits the orientation systems in Situ Rgyalrong (Burmo-Qiangic, Sino-Tibetan). These systems reflect heliocentric (e.g., east/west) or topographic (e.g., upriver/downriver) orientation, typically within a frame of absolute reference. While scholars agree that the orientation systems of different Situ dialects are generalisable to a tri-axial model, the precise semantic values reflected
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Grammaticalization as Conventionalization of Discursively Secondary Status: Deconstructing the Lexical–Grammatical Continuum Transactions of the Philological Society Pub Date : 2023-07-03 Kasper Boye
Despite intense research on grammaticalization, no satisfactory definition has so far been proposed. Some would argue that it is indeed impossible to come up with a precise definition as grammaticalization is an epiphenomenon. After pointing out problems in existing definitions, this article proposes a new definition of grammaticalization as a distinct kind of change. The definition is based not only
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Periphrases with Motion Verbs in Vedic Sanskrit: (between) Textual Analysis and Grammaticalization Patterns Transactions of the Philological Society Pub Date : 2023-07-02 Beatrice Grieco
The Sanskrit language knows the use of iterative-continuative periphrases which are so far mostly unexplored. The aim of this paper is to investigate the grammaticalization of the motion verbs i- ‘go’ and car- ‘move’ plus participle into auxiliary verbs, collecting data from the earliest attestations (c. 2nd millennium BC) to Late Vedic (c. 900–600 BC). I argue that in the earliest attestations there
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Loss of MID in English: Free Peasantry and Their Linguistic Advantage Transactions of the Philological Society Pub Date : 2023-06-21 Rongkun Liu
The paper deals with the mysterious loss of a common preposition MID in the historical development of English. The issue is examined using a quantitative method combined with a historical sociolinguistic focus on the free peasantry in the East Midlands and Kent. Statistical results show East Midlands to be the leading region of the change, with Kent being the most conservative region. Given the special
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Voice Markers in Septuagint Greek in the Light of Hebrew Interference: A Corpus-Based Study on the Aorist System of the Book of Genesis* Transactions of the Philological Society Pub Date : 2023-06-20 Eystein Dahl, Liana Tronci
In this paper, we examine the behaviour of so-called passive and middle aorist forms in the Greek reflected in the Genesis of the Septuagint. The Septuagint, and Biblical Greek more generally, displays a considerable aberration with respect to other varieties of Ancient Greek regarding the relative frequency of passive vis-à-vis middle aorist forms. Here, we explore this feature of Septuagint Greek
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Translation-Induced Interrogative Relativizers and Stability in Icelandic Transactions of the Philological Society Pub Date : 2023-05-23 Christian D. Brendel
Throughout the history of Icelandic, invariant particles, which do not inflect for semantic or syntactic features of the antecedent, are the typical markers of relative clauses (Þráinsson 2007). Another, putatively foreign strategy—relativization with interrogative–relative pronouns—is archaic in Modern Icelandic, but is frequent between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, a period featuring a
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Saying Yes without Yes: The Positive Response System in Latin Transactions of the Philological Society Pub Date : 2023-03-28 Tomaž Potočnik
The article studies a set of three positive response strategies in Latin: the echo response and the positive response particles ita and sic. It aims to determine their functions and division of labour and to establish what kind of agreement strategy existed in Latin, based on the typology of positive response systems by Sadock and Zwicky (1985). The main data for the study are drawn from the comedies
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Rethinking the Metre of Parzival: Iambic Verse for a Trochaic Language Transactions of the Philological Society Pub Date : 2023-03-24 Joshua J. Booth
The Middle High German (MHG) prosodic foot is uncontroversially considered to be trochaic, a fact which has traditionally led scholars to assume a preference for trochaic metre in poetry of the MHG Classical Period. However, given the trend elsewhere in mediaeval Europe (even in trochaic languages) to emulate French lyrics and compose verse in iambic metre, the uncritical assumption of a trochaic metre
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Evolution and Spread of Politeness Systems in Indo-European Transactions of the Philological Society Pub Date : 2023-03-21 Michael Dunn, Kate Bellamy
In this paper, we investigate the phenomenon of pronominal politeness in the Indo-European languages and demonstrate that the processes of change of pronominal systems related to politeness follow two evolutionary regimes, one inside the ‘Standard Average European’ (SAE) linguistic area and another outside of it. Historical processes of language change differ at different levels of linguistic structure
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Is This Verb a Word? A philological Study of the Distribution of Phonological and Morphological Domains in the Middle Welsh Verb Transactions of the Philological Society Pub Date : 2023-02-22 Stefan Dedio
The—for European languages—large amount of bound elements in the older Insular Celtic languages and the array of phonological interactions within morphological and phrasal structures have lead several researchers to conclude that individual words play a lesser role in the grammars of those languages. Based on current typological research on wordhood and a thorough discussion of the problems and limitations
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The Missing Dative Alternation in Romance: Explaining Stability and Change in the Argument Structure of Latin Ditransitives Transactions of the Philological Society Pub Date : 2023-02-16 Chiara Fedriani, Maria Napoli
This study explores the correlation between synchronic constructional variation shown by ditransitive verbs in Late Latin and (possible) diachronic developments, investigating the reasons why such developments did or did not occur throughout the history of this language. Starting from a comparison with the rise of the so-called ‘dative alternation’ in English, which emerged from a scenario that, apparently
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Introduction: ‘Digital Methods for Studying Meaning in Historical English’ Transactions of the Philological Society Pub Date : 2022-11-22 Susan Fitzmaurice, Seth Mehl
This special issue of the Transactions of the Philological Society presents new computationally assisted research into linguistic meaning in historical English texts. The issue is based upon the talks given at a workshop of the International Conference for English Historical Linguistics (2018, University of Edinburgh). The workshop was conceived in the context of the Linguistic DNA research project
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Cognitive Sociolinguistic Variation in the Old Bailey Voices Corpus: The Case for a New Concept-Led Framework Transactions of the Philological Society Pub Date : 2022-11-22 Justyna A. Robinson, Julie Weeds
The current paper contributes to a greater understanding of concepts in the context of cognitive sociolinguistic variation. We show how concepts, which we root in thesauri-based units, co-occur with other concepts and how they vary between and within groups of speakers as represented in historical transcripts from the Old Bailey court. In order to carry out distributional sociosemantic analysis at
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Semantic Shift in Middle English: Farming and Trade As Test Cases Transactions of the Philological Society Pub Date : 2022-11-22 Louise Sylvester, Megan Tiddeman, Richard Ingham
This paper presents a study undertaken as part of the Technical Language and Semantic Shift in Middle English project. Our dataset (totalling 4,628 words and 2,215 senses) is drawn from an expanded corpus of the Bilingual Thesaurus of Everyday Life in Medieval England. This lexis has been arranged into a semantic hierarchy, based on the categories devised for the Historical Thesaurus of English, in
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Systematically Detecting Patterns of Social, Historical and Linguistic Change: The Framing of Poverty in Times of Poverty Transactions of the Philological Society Pub Date : 2022-11-22 Gerold Schneider
The linguistic DNA project seeks to understand the evolution of philosophy, society and language during the Modern English period. Corpora like Early English Books Online (EEBO), Corpus of Late Modern English Texts (CLMET) and Corpus of Historical American English (COHA) allow us to apply statistical data-driven models extracting patterns to confirm our expectations. As systems biology has revolutionised
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Discursive Quads: New Kinds of Lexical Co-occurrence Data With Linguistic Concept Modelling Transactions of the Philological Society Pub Date : 2022-11-22 Seth Mehl
This paper introduces linguistic concept modelling, a new computational approach to humanities-driven analysis of meaning in large text collections, and presents illustrative examples of the approach applied to over one billion words of printed Early Modern English contained in Early English Books Online (Text Creation Partnership edition). Linguistic concept modelling methods and innovations are described
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Evangelization and Language Change: A Transition from the Progressive Aspect to the Future Tense in Two Mayan Languages Transactions of the Philological Society Pub Date : 2022-09-16 Igor Vinogradov
This paper revisits the role that evangelization may have played in the diachronic development of Amerindian languages, with a focus on grammatical changes. Based on an analysis of written materials dating back to the colonial period and first-hand fieldwork data, it discusses the semantic transition from the progressive aspect to the future tense that occurred similarly in the verbal systems of Q’eqchi’
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The Early Jutish Bracteate Texts From Skonager And Darum Transactions of the Philological Society Pub Date : 2022-07-08 Bernard Mees
Several of the bracteates recovered in the nineteenth century from hoards discovered at Skonager and Darum in Jutland feature runic inscriptions that appear to record West Germanic linguistic developments. Most of the inscriptions from Iron Age Denmark seem to record language that is directly ancestral to Danish, but two of the bracteates from Skonager and Darum feature inscriptions that have long
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Grammatical Coding and the Discursive Construction of Participants: Spanish Passives in Written Press News Discourse Transactions of the Philological Society Pub Date : 2022-07-01 Miguel A. Aijón Oliva
This paper presents a comparative analysis of two Spanish constructions that are usually characterised as passive, namely the periphrastic or attributive passive – formed with the verb ser ‘be’ plus a participle – and the reflexive passive – formed with third-person reflexive clitic se. An isomorphic functional approach is adopted whereby the inherent syntactic-semantic features of each construction
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Climatic Conditions and Lexis: Some Diachronic Notes on Weather-Related Words in English and Other European Languages Transactions of the Philological Society Pub Date : 2022-06-22 Joachim Grzega
Focusing on metalinguistic sources and passages with words from the conceptual field of weather in cooccurrence (and including language contrasts), the study analyses whether changes in weather-related lexemes in English language history, particularly words for “weather, condition of the air,” “cloud,” and “mist,” may be related to climatic conditions. This is supported for the following cases: (1)
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Structural persistence as an explanatory factor in synchrony and diachrony* Transactions of the Philological Society Pub Date : 2022-05-25 Kersti Börjars, Tine Breban
In this paper, we look at examples of linguistic change in which the structure associated with the original element can help us understand aspects of both the diachronic process and the synchronic outcome of change. We first consider a range of phenomena that have resisted formal analysis because they show mixed-category behaviour. We argue that these elements have undergone changes that we would expect
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Verb Classes in the Resultative Construction in Germanic and Romance Languages Transactions of the Philological Society Pub Date : 2022-05-01 Justine Métairy
The present paper consists of a contrastive corpus-based study of the (analytical) Resultative Construction (henceforth, RC) in culinary contexts (e.g. cut thin, whisk to a foam, roll into a ball). Four languages are investigated: two Germanic (i.e. Dutch and English) and two Romance languages (i.e. French and Spanish). Based on a sample of 1000 occurrences of the RC (by language) retrieved from our
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The morphosyntax and semantics of cardinal numerals in classical sanskrit Transactions of the Philological Society Pub Date : 2022-04-28 Alessandra Petrocchi
A complete study of numeral syntax in Classical Sanskrit has yet to be written. Grammars provide concise, decontextualised surveys which mainly focus on the morphology of cardinal numerals. Given their textual genre, reference grammars can neither devote much space to this very topic nor give exhaustive data; very little is said about Sanskrit numeral constructions outside of this kind of resources
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Loan Word Accommodation Biases: Markedness and Finiteness Transactions of the Philological Society Pub Date : 2022-04-04 Marlieke Shaw, Hendrik De Smet
One way or another, loan words have to be grammatically integrated in the grammar of their recipient language. For verbs, Wohlgemuth (2009) finds that direct insertion, where native inflections are added directly onto the borrowed stem, is cross-linguistically the most frequent accommodation strategy. He concludes from this that the borrowing of loan verbs is not constrained by inflection. Based on
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The historical development of imperfect indicative and conditional inflection in Pyrenean Romance* Transactions of the Philological Society Pub Date : 2022-03-22 Louise Esher
Even historical developments which appear opaque due to limited empirical data may prove tractable when sources of diverse types are combined. For systems of three-way inflectional contrast among imperfect indicative forms in a geographically coherent cluster of Catalan, Aragonese and Gascon varieties (e.g. first-conjugation [kanˈtaβam] ‘we sang’; third-conjugation [peɾˈðeβam] ‘we lost’; fourth-conjugation
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Adversative Conjunction and Neighboring Discourse Features in Old Church Slavic (Codex Marianus), with Comparative Notes on the Same Phenomena in Greek, Gothic and Classical Armenian* Transactions of the Philological Society Pub Date : 2022-03-19 Jared S. Klein
The system of adversative conjunction in the Old Church Slavic Gospels is characterized by two pure adversatives, nŭ and the much less frequent obače, together with two other forms, a and že, which are employed with equal or greater frequency in non-adversative conjunctive roles. The relationship between nŭ and a is complex. The role of the former is primarily corrective following a negated constituent
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DIALECTAL LAYERS IN WEST IRANIAN: A HIERARCHICAL DIRICHLET PROCESS APPROACH TO LINGUISTIC RELATIONSHIPS1 Transactions of the Philological Society Pub Date : 2022-03-19 Chundra A. Cathcart
This paper addresses a series of complex and unresolved issues in the historical phonology of West Iranian languages, (Persian, Kurdish, Balochi, and other languages), which display a high degree of irregular, non-Lautgesetzlich behaviour. Most of this irregularity is undoubtedly due to language contact; I argue, however, that an oversimplified view of the processes at work has prevailed in the literature
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Romance Genitives: Agreement, Definiteness, and Phases* Transactions of the Philological Society Pub Date : 2022-03-11 Angelapia Massaro
In this paper, which discusses data from Gargano Apulian Italo-Romance, I propose that prepositional and non-prepositional genitives are fundamentally two different types of phrases, and that the interpretation of a non-prepositional noun as the possessor is not due to a silent preposition or head-modifier inversion, but rather to an agreement mechanism taking place between the modifier and its head
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SUPERLATIVE MORPHOLOGY FROM SYNTAX: SLAVIC NAI-/NAJ- AND INTERNAL DEFINITENESS MARKING IN OLD LITHUANIAN Transactions of the Philological Society Pub Date : 2022-03-08 Florian Wandl
It has long been noticed that the Slavic superlative prefix nai-/naj- comprises two components: *na + *i. The former can be identified with the preposition Sl na ‘on(to)’ which developed an intensifying meaning when used as a prefix. The origin of the second component, on the other hand, has not been determined satisfactorily so far. This paper argues that it can be identified with the Slavic definiteness
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Mycenaean Adjectives in -te-ri-jo: A Reappraisal* Transactions of the Philological Society Pub Date : 2022-03-05 Juan Piquero
This paper offers a systematic study of the Mycenaean adjectives in -te-ri-jo / -tḗrios. Its purpose is twofold: first, to examine whether the suffix -tḗrios was already fossilized in the Mycenaean period (-tḗrios vs. -tḗr + ios); second, to define the semantic values associated with this suffix in the same period. Particular attention will be paid to the interpretation of the Mycenaean words pu-te-ri-ja
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On the Relation between Finiteness and Clause Size: Evidence from Romanian and Southern Italo-Romance Irrealis Clauses* Transactions of the Philological Society Pub Date : 2022-02-03 Kim A. Groothuis
This paper investigates the relationship between finiteness and clause size, taking Romance varieties with an irrealis subordinator as a case study: che/chi in upper southern Italian dialects (USIDs), cu in Salentino, mi/mu/ma in southern Calabrian, and să in Romanian. The last three of these, but not the first, also replace many uses of the infinitive. On a view of finiteness as the result of anchoring
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Conditional clauses as polite modifiers in Latin: si placet between pragmaticalization and language contact Transactions of the Philological Society Pub Date : 2021-11-10 Chiara Fedriani
This article investigates the Latin conditional clause si placet ‘if (it) pleases (you)’, also considering other functional equivalents such as, among others, si non piget ‘if (you) don’t mind’ and si tibi molestum/grave non est ‘if (it) doesn’t bother/annoy (you)’, which all function as polite modifiers of requests and proposals. It first provides a theoretical assessment of si placet and examines
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The Phonetics and Phonology of Old Armenian , , and Prevocalic * Transactions of the Philological Society Pub Date : 2021-11-22 Ronald I. Kim
The Old Armenian letters and occur in nearly complementary distribution, but a century of scholarship has failed to resolve whether they denote separate phonemes, allophones, or allographs. The relation of these sounds to the vowel /u/ and interpretation of prevocalic spellings are also debated. It is argued that Old Armenian had a single phoneme /u/ realized as [u] in syllabic positions, i.e. between
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Diachronic dialectology: new methods and case studies Transactions of the Philological Society Pub Date : 2021-12-01 Tamsin Blaxter
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Lexical Differentiation between Human and Animal Genitalia in the Old English Medicina de Quadrupedibus Transactions of the Philological Society Pub Date : 2021-07-30 Bethany Christiansen
This paper examines the Old English words for sexual anatomy in the medical text Medicina de quadrupedibus (‘medicines made from quadrupeds’), a close translation of the Latin Liber medicinae ex animalibus. The Anglo-Saxon translator used different terms for human genitalia and animal genitalia, specifically, the word teors for a human penis and scytel for an animal penis; herþan (and possibly herþbylg)
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Early Alternatives to Dutch Descriptive Perception Verb Constructions: A Comparison of Two Bible Translations1 Transactions of the Philological Society Pub Date : 2021-07-11 Marjolein Poortvliet
Copular constructions (i.e. Subject-Verb-Predicative adjective) containing the Dutch descriptive perception verbs eruitzien ‘look’, klinken ‘sound’, voelen ‘feel’, ruiken ‘smell’ and smaken ‘taste’ (e.g. Zij klinkt blij) emerged throughout Middle Dutch and Early Modern Dutch. It is surprising, then, that no descriptive perception verb constructions are found in the Dutch Bible translation from 1637
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‘Alienable’ Possession in Biakic Transactions of the Philological Society Pub Date : 2021-08-24 Xavier Cédric Alain Bach
Alienable possessive constructions in Biakic stand out with respect to the South Halmahera-West New Guinea language family to which they belong. This article investigates the origins of the innovative alienable possessive forms in Biakic, which constitutes an example of grammaticalization from predicative to attributive possession. It describes the marking of alienable possession for each of the four
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On the diachronic origins of the accentual contrast in Terena (Arawakan) Transactions of the Philological Society Pub Date : 2021-08-07 Fernando Orphão de Carvalho
This paper presents internal and comparative evidence showing that the origin of the accentual contrast of modern Terena, an Arawakan language of southwestern Brazil, is related to a diachronic process of word-initial vowel loss. Alternations internal to the language involve a relation between vowel-initial trisyllabic allomorphs and consonant-initial disyllabic allomorphs, the latter bearing a tonal
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‘Dark’ and ‘Clear’ Y in Medieval Welsh Orthography: Caligula versus Teilo Transactions of the Philological Society Pub Date : 2021-06-04 Patrick Sims-Williams
A famous exception to the ‘phonetic spelling system’ of Welsh is the use of for both /ǝ/ and the retracted high vowel /ɨ(:)/. This double use of was almost universally adopted by c. 1330, when a grammarian labelled /ǝ/ and /ɨ/ as ‘dark y’ and ‘clear y’ and illustrated them with polysyllables such as ystyr /ˈǝstɨr/ ‘meaning’, in which the value of was predictable from the position of in the word. At