On the interplay between forces of erosion and forces of repair in language change A case study

Abstract

This article investigates the origins and development of the ergative patterning in Hindi. Following traditional Indo-Aryan scholarship, two evolutions are discerned: (i) the reanalysis of a passive as an ergative construction, and (ii) the development of an ergative case marker ne. Three different hypotheses have been postulated in the literature to account for the latter change, two of which suggest a grammaticalization path: the first argues for a case marker as a possible source, the second points towards a lexical source. The third hypothesis maintains that language contact is involved in the change. We scrutinize all three hypotheses and conclude that the ne-clitic is borrowed from Old Rajasthani and introduced in analogy to other clitics, which were already in use as reinforcers of existing case functions. We argue furthermore that the rise of the ergative marker can only be adequately explained in relation to the constructional change in (i). Drawing on the traditional account which traces the origins of the ergative construction back to a former passive construction through reanalysis, we argue that it was actually this constructional reanalysis that allowed the introduction of an ergative marker in the language.

La construction causative en faire et le marquage différentiel de l’objet en français

“…Comme nous avons essayé de le montrer, le français n'est pas à proprement parler une langue à MDO, mais il en présente des traces. Celles-ci sont sans doute marginales dans la phrase simple (Fagard et Mardale 2012), mais on en trouve sporadiquement des exemples tels que (24) Voyez l'hypocrisie : on nous empêche à nous de produire des maïs OGM, par contre les commerciaux sont autorisés à vendre le maïs OGM (locuteur à la radio France Info, 22 février 2012, exemple emprunté à Fagard et Mardale) (Melis & Flores 2009). Ici on observe que si l'espagnol étend le MDO jusque dans la zone des SN lexicaux, le français le limite à la zone des clitiques seulement, à l'exclusion des SN lexicaux.…”

“…En fait la distribution de l'accusatif dit prépositionnel en espagnol est une question bien plus complexe qu'on ne le dit ici, et son extension a évolué au cours de l'histoire et varie selon la région (Melis et Flores 2009).…”

Dative Doubling in Non-Mandatory Contexts in European Spanish

“…In addition to its relationship with marking, doubling has been linked to leísmo, the use of dative clitic le/s for the accusative in different varieties of Spanish and in many parts of Latin America (Fernández-Ordóñez 1999; Gómez Seibane 2012). From a diachronic point of view, the relation is inverse; that is, the greater the presence of leísmo, the lesser the tendency to double (Melis and Flores 2009). In current colloquial speech, the relationship is indirect: the greater the number of features encoded by le/s, the more constraints underlie doubling (Navarro and Neuhaus 2016).…”

The Development, Preservation and Loss of Differential Case Marking in Inner Asia Minor Greek

“…Emergence It is not unheard of from a diachronic point of view for an originally nondifferential language to develop into a differential one language-internally, that is, without the influence of a contact language. A number of Romance languages that developed out of non-differential Vulgar Latin-most notably, Spanish, Catalan and Sardinian-are differential, as are most Slavonic languages and Hebrew, having evolved from non-differential Proto-Indo-European and Proto-Semitic, respectively (for the Romance languages and Hebrew, see Bossong, 1991;Guardiano, 2010;Melis and Flores, 2009; for the Slavonic languages, see Corbett 1991: 98-99;Igartua, 2005: 478-592;Klenin, 1983).…”