In Preterit Expansion and Perfect Demise in Porteno Spanish and Beyond, Guro Nore Flogstad offers an original account of the way in which the Preterit category has expanded, at the expense of the Perfect, in Porteno Spanish - a variety spoken in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Through primary sources and a large cross-linguistic sample, Flogstad convincingly shows that the expansion of a Preterit is not rare in the languages of the world. This finding challenges the prevailing view in historical morphosyntax, and especially in usage-based grammaticalization theory, namely the alleged...

In Methods in Latin Computational Linguistics, Barbara McGillivray presents some of the most significant methodological foundations of the emerging field of Latin Computational Linguistics. The reader will find an overview of the computational resources and tools available for Latin and three corpus case studies covering morpho-syntactic and lexical-semantic aspects of Latin verb valency, as well as quantitative diachronic explorations of the argument realization of Latin prefixed verbs. The computational models and the multivariate data analysis techniques employed are explained with...

This volume is about the morphosyntactic encoding of feelings and emotions in Latin. It offers a corpus-based investigation of the Latin data, benefiting from insights of the functional and typological approach to language. Chiara Fedriani describes a patterned variation in Latin Experiential constructions, also revisiting the so-called impersonal constructions, and shows how and why such a variation is at the root of diachronic change. The data discussed in this book also show that Latin constitutes an interesting stage within a broader diachronic development, since it retains some ancient...

In Categorization and Constructional Change Damian Vergara Wilson uses the Spanish change-of-state construction quedar(se) + ADJ to analyze the impact of categorization on constructional change and productivity in data spanning eight centuries. In usage, the appearance of one adjective in the construction triggers the emergence of related ones through analogical extension propelling the expansion of semantic categories of adjectives. Categories develop in different ways reflecting the characteristics of their members in terms of semantics and conventionalization. Emergence tends to...

Formal approaches to DPs in Old Romanian offers the first collection of papers on this topic published in English. All the analyses adopt the conceptual tools of generative grammar to explain the syntactic peculiarities of Old Romanian nouns, synchronically and diachronically. Old Romanian noun syntax displays non-trivial peculiarities both in the internal structure of the DP (e.g., inflected possessive marker, polydefinite agreement, optional definite article on proper nouns) and in the way the DP is used in clause derivation (e.g., variable location of object pronouns, reanalysis of...

In The Evolution of Complex Spatial Expressions within the Romance Family, Thomas Hoelbeek offers a corpus-based historical study of a group of expressions in French and Italian. Applying a functional approach, he tackles adpositions containing the French noun travers or the Italian noun traverso, previously never analysed from a diachronic perspective. This study enriches our knowledge of the expressions analysed and their functioning in the past, but also in present-day French and Italian, providing diachronic observations regarding functional notions put to the test....

Reflexivity in Vedic offers a corpus-based synchronic and diachronic analysis of reflexivity in the language of the R̥gveda and Atharvaveda, two of the most ancient corpora ever composed in an Indo-European language. Applying a functional and cognitivist framework, Verónica Orqueda discusses the different possible strategies and proposes a distribution determined by the interaction between reflexivity, transitivity and valency. This study enriches typological approaches to the emergence of reflexives and therefore, on the basis of the Vedic data, it shows that nominal reflexive strategies...

This volume consists of revised versions of presentations given at a roundtable on “New Directions for Historical Linguistics: Impact and Synthesis, 50 Years Later” held at the 23rd International Conference on Historical Linguistics in San Antonio, Texas, in 2017, as well as an introduction by the editors. The roundtable discussed the evolution of historical linguistics since the 1966 symposium on “Directions for Historical Linguistics,” held in Austin, Texas. Six prominent scholars of historical linguistics and sociolinguistics contributed: William Labov (the only surviving author...

In Grammaticalising the Perfect and Explanations of Language Change: Have- and Be-Perfects in the History and Structure of English and Bulgarian, Bozhil Hristov investigates key aspects of the verbal systems of two distantly related Indo-European languages, highlighting similarities as well as crucial differences between them and seeking a unified approach. The book reassesses some long-held notions and functionalist assumptions and shines the spotlight on certain areas that have received less attention, such as the role of ambiguity in actual usage. The detailed analysis of rich,...

During several decades, syntactic reconstruction has been more or less regarded as a bootless and an unsuccessful venture, not least due to the heavy criticism in the 1970s from scholars like Watkins, Jeffers, Lightfoot, etc. This fallacious view culminated in Lightfoot’s (2002: 625) conclusion: “[i]f somebody thinks that they can reconstruct grammars more successfully and in more widespread fashion, let them tell us their methods and show us their results. Then we’ll eat the pudding.” This volume provides methods for the identification of i) cognates in syntax, and ii) the...