Archives

• Les relatives dans les vers saturniens latins

  Vol. 9 No. 17 (2025)

  Antoine Viredaz. Part of the Special Collection "Latin and Sabellic relative clauses". The metre in which the first two Latin epic poems and certain Latin verse inscriptions dating mainly from the 3rd-2nd centuries BC were composed is called Saturnian. Both the exact boundaries of the Saturnian corpus and the primary principle of versification of this metre are debated. We can now be certain, however, that a set of eight Latin funerary or dedicatory inscriptions and around 80 epic fragments by Andronicus and Naevius are definitely Saturnian. Studying the linguistic variation within this limited corpus allows us to identify certain indications of metrical constraints. The aim of this paper is to examine whether the variations observed in relative constructions can be exploited for this purpose. I will therefore study the relative clauses attested in Saturnian texts from the epigraphic and literary traditions. It is my aim to highlight the variation in these texts with regard to the position of the relativiser and that of the relative clause. I will attempt to determine what conditions the appearance of different structural types of relative clauses. Two avenues will be explored: that of semantic differences (e.g. restrictive or non-restrictive relative clauses), and that of constraints related to literary genre or metre.

• Latin and the comparative reconstruction of QU-exclamatives

  Vol. 9 No. 16 (2025)

  Michiel de Vaan. Part of the Special Collection "Latin and Sabellic relative clauses". While there are many synchronic studies on exclamatives, diachronic studies into the origin and development of exclamatives are rare. In this paper, I study the Latin evidence in order to arrive at a method for investigating the historical development of a subset of exclamatives, viz. exclamatives headed by interrogatives (QU-). I propose a classification of these exclamatives which takes into account their syntactic behaviour and their semantics. The specific distributional patterns found in Latin support existing etymological insights and allow for a few typological generalizations.

• Basque V2 effects in diachrony

  Vol. 9 No. 15 (2025)

  Maia Duguine & Georg Kaiser. This paper explores the evolution of verb-second (V2) patterns in Basque wh-interrogatives from the Archaic period (14-16th c.) to later periods. While in Modern Basque a systematic “residual” V2 system in wh-interrogatives is observed, in Archaic Basque the patterns appear to be mixed: synthetic verbs display systematic V2 order, whereas analytic verbs allow intervening material between the wh-phrase and the verbal complex. We put forth a multifactorial analysis of Archaic Basque interrogatives, assuming that in analytic constructions independent syntactic and morphophonological properties of auxiliaries interact with the syntax of V2 in such a way that they ‘hide’ its effects on word order. The change from Archaic to Modern Basque involves a simple change in the properties of T, independently of the syntax of V2.

• Moods in relative clauses in Plautus and Terence

  Vol. 9 No. 14 (2025)

  Wolfgang de Melo. Part of the Special Collection "Latin and Sabellic relative clauses". This contribution discusses relative clauses in four comedies by Plautus and one by Terence, as a representative sample of early Latin comedy. The main questions are, firstly, to what extent modal usages are the same as in classical Latin, and, secondly, how any differences can be explained. In defining and non-defining relative clauses alike, subjunctives make up 25% of the total, but they are used for somewhat different reasons in the two types of relative clauses. In defining relative clauses, the subjunctive can be the result of indirect speech, modal attraction, or the desire to express purpose. In classical Latin, the subjunctive is also employed if the head noun is indefinite and non-specific; this type is still spreading in early Latin, being almost obligatory in presentative constructions, but not yet elsewhere. In non-defining relative clauses, subjunctives can be used to express wishes or doubts, or they can be the result of indirect speech or modal attraction. In classical Latin, the subjunctive is also common if the relative clauses have causal or concessive nuances; in early Latin, on the other hand, the subjunctive is more restricted in such contexts. In 'causal' relative clauses, it mostly occurs if the superordinate clause contains a negative evaluation, and I argue that we are dealing with a reanalysis of relative clauses expressing purpose here. The subjunctive has barely begun to spread to concessive relative clauses, and the further spread to cum-clauses only really happens after Plautus and Terence.

• The emergence of the hoi epêlthe ptareîn impersonal construction in Ancient Greek

  Vol. 9 No. 13 (2025)

  Diego Luinetti. This paper focuses on the spread of a particular impersonal construction featuring an argument structure with a dative or accusative coded argument and a noun clause in Ancient Greek. It aims to demonstrate that the construction under analysis expands in its functional domain considerably over time, both in terms of productivity and frequency. Furthermore, it argues that the spread of this impersonal construction was facilitated by a bridging context involving neutral alignment, where some subject properties are lost both on a semantic (agentivity, referentiality) and on a morphosyntactic level (dedicated encoding, verb agreement), such as when a neuter pronoun takes the subject function.

• Relative clauses in Oscan and Latin: the development of new syntactic structures through language contact

  Vol. 9 No. 12 (2025)

  James Clackson. Part of the Special Collection "Latin and Sabellic relative clauses".  This paper takes as its starting point an Oscan inscription which shows several remarkable syntactic features: a relative–correlative order; repetition of the antecedent in the relative and the main clause; and fronting of two constituents out of the relative clause. This inscription been cited by some scholars as an example of archaic Indo-European syntactic patterns but others view these features as the result of language contact with Latin. Through comparison of material both in Oscan and other languages in the Sabellic family, as well as consideration of the evolution and use of relative–correlative syntax in Latin, I show that the language contact explanation is to be preferred. I further argue that inherited Oscan syntax can help explain the repetition of the antecedent.

• Types of relativization and relative heads in the Sabellic languages

  Vol. 9 No. 11 (2025)

  Jasmim Drigo & Yexin Qu. Part of the Special Collection "Latin and Sabellic relative clauses". This paper offers a novel analysis of the formal morphological and syntactic features of the Sabellic languages. We show that Sabellic correlatives align syntactically with other Indo-European branches in terms of headedness and the use of relative pronouns. Our main contribution is that Sabellic correlatives are base generated in the left periphery. Additionally, we compare the semantics of the relative pronouns in the Sabellic languages and Latin. Unlike Latin, where pronouns derived from *kwó- can refer to both animate and inanimate referents, the Sabellic languages restrict their use to animate referents in free relative clauses. Finally, we find that Sabellic languages counterexemplify a proposed universal of relative clauses, which claims that languages with relative pronouns do not have internally-headed relative clauses. This demonstrates a broader diversity in Sabellic relative clause formation than previously assumed.

• Proceedings of the 23rd Diachronic Generative Syntax (DiGS) Conference

  Vol. 9 No. 2-10 (2025)

  Selected papers from the 23rd Diachronic Generative Syntax (DiGS) Conference, which was held at New York University in June 2022. Guest editors Ailís Cournane and Gary Thoms.

• V2 to V1 in Welsh: The role of preverbal particles and fronted adverbials

  Vol. 9 No. 1 (2025)

  Oliver Currie. A peculiarity of V2 in Middle Welsh is the morphosyntactic marking of fronted constituents in positive declarative main clauses (PDMCs) using preverbal particles: 'a' for subjects or direct objects and 'y(d)' for adverbial or prepositional phrases. Unlike other medieval V2 languages which subsequently lost V2 and developed SVO, such as English and French, Welsh became VSO. In a formal analysis of the loss of V2 in Welsh, Willis (1998) argues that a widespread loss of both preverbal particles in the 16th century through phonological erosion was a key factor in the change, though does not provide corroborative quantitative data. Based on a corpus study of Early Modern Welsh (c.1550-c.1750), the present article shows that there is no evidence of a widespread loss of the preverbal particles 'a' and 'y(d)' by the end of the 16th century, only a partial and gradual decline in their use over a longer, more than two century period. There does seem, however, to be a link between the change in use and partial omission of 'y(d)' after fronted adverbial or prepositional phrases and the increase in use in Early Modern Welsh of a specific V1 construction, Absolute V1, where a finite verb comes in absolute-initial position in a PDMC.

• Introduction: Towards a comparative historical dialectology

  Vol. 8 No. 7 (2024)

  Ann-Marie Moser, Lea Schäfer & Sophie Ellsäßer. Part of the Special Collection "Towards a comparative historical dialectology". In this article, we highlight the challenges facing research in the field of comparative historical dialectology, with a focus on morphological and syntactic phenomena. We define the term “historical comparative dialectology” and use four different studies from different varieties to illustrate how the aims of historical comparative dialectology can be approached. The studies consider different varieties and language stages (different dialects of Old and Modern Catalan, the dialectal continuum of Yucatec Maya, historical dialects of High German, different Occitan dialects) and discuss various phenomena from a historical comparative perspective: differential object marking, numeral classifiers, number distinctions of nouns, and inflectional patterns.

• Numeral classifiers in Yucatec Maya: Microvariation and syntactic change

  Vol. 8 No. 6 (2024)

  Barbara Blaha Pfeiler & Stavros Skopeteas. Part of the Special Collection "Towards a comparative historical dialectology". Numeral classifiers in Yucatec Maya are subject to two processes of language change that create variation in the contemporary language. The first process is the use of a general classifier instead of specific sortal classifiers. The second process is the use of the general classifier along with mensural classifiers. Our study examines the microvariation of the contemporary language in space and time, based on data from the Atlas of Yucatec Maya and draws inferences about the entity of change in diachronic perspective. Our findings show that these processes are partially interconnected, reflecting the emergence of a general marker of Cardinality (Krifka 1995, Bale & Coon 2014, Bale, Coon & Arcos 2019). The dispersion of these phenomena in geographical space shows that they only partially overlap, suggesting that the underlying processes may apply independently from each other. Furthermore, the use of the general classifier in expressions of measure does not apply equally to all mensural classifiers. Hence, a further source of variation comes from mensural classifiers: some of them lose their function as classifiers and are only used as measure nouns. Contemporary variation can thus be understood as the cumulative effect of these processes.

• A conspiracy theory for the loss of V2 in Romance

  Vol. 8 No. 5 (2024)

  Sam Wolfe. This article presents corpus data from Middle French and Later Old Venetan to argue that a conspiracy of factors is necessary to destabilise the V2 property. Specifically, we suggest that late-stage V2 grammars can be rendered unstable through specialisation of the prefield, specialisation of the information-structural values of subjects occurring in inversion structures, an overall preference for left-peripheral base-generation over movement, and certain types of V3. Importantly, we conclude – in contrast to much previous work on V2 loss, but in line with recent analysis by Poletto (2019) – that no single factor alone will trigger the loss of V2.

• Dialectal dimensions of the strengthening of number distinctions in the history of German

  Vol. 8 No. 4 (2024)

  Nathalie Fromm. Part of the Special Collection "Towards a comparative historical dialectology". This paper investigates the diachronic and dialectal development of number marking in German nouns, focusing on the spread of overt plural morphology among neuter members of the historical a-stems. Using data from the historical reference corpora, the study examines the transition from unmarked to marked plural forms during the Middle High German and Early New High German periods. The analysis shows that while marked plurals began to appear as early as the 11th century, the spread of overt plural markers such as -er and -e varied considerably across dialects. Overall, the results of the corpus study suggest that the spread of marked plural forms is less pronounced than the current situation in standard German would suggest.

• The impact of text type, information structure, and discourse relations on the use of verb second in Middle English: A case study of Chaucer's prose works

  Vol. 8 No. 3 (2024)

  There have been many contributions to the understanding of how and why the non-subject-initial verb second (V2) phenomenon (i.e. subject-verb inversion) declined in Middle English, yet there are few perspectives that explore the factors driving the considerable amount of intra-writer variation in V2. In particular, there is limited research on the type of text, and whether authors’ syntax mirrors the weakened link between syntax and information structure that drove V2 usage in late medieval English (e.g. Bech 2001, 2014; Los 2009, 2012; van Kemenade 2012; van Kemenade & Westergaard 2012; Hinterhölzl & van Kemenade 2012). Appealing to the status of information structure in late medieval English, and briefly, the discourse relations present within the text, I argue that Chaucer’s use of V2 reflects a verb movement pattern that no longer made a verbal position available based on the information-structural status of the sentence. I show that this change in non-subject-initial V2 is evidenced in three of Chaucer’s prose works, and that its frequency is closely tied to the information status of the beginning of the sentence and the subject in driving inverted and non-inverted structures. I suggest that it is the nuances of text type and their rhetoric, and their interaction with the (non)-existence of information structural pressures, that accurately explains the occurrence of XVS and XSV structures. This Chaucerian V2 analysis serves as an exemplar study for understanding how texts might represent the collective impact of a range of factors on syntactic change, and the forces behind the instability of V2 in the history of English.

• Areal continuities and discontinuities emerge from parallel studies of inflection in diachrony

  Vol. 8 No. 2 (2024)

  Louise Esher. Part of the Special Collection "Towards a comparative historical dialectology".  Longitudinal study of specific inflectional characteristics can reveal stable, long-standing contrasts between the linguistic systems of different areas within a dialect continuum. This paper reports on a series of studies which use historical textual attestations to date analogical innovations in preterite forms for different varieties of Occitan (southern Gallo-Romance), providing a firm empirical foundation for theoretical enquiry about inflectional analogy, its directionality, nature and motivations. Because the studies are strictly parallel, they also facilitate comparisons from a dialectological perspective, conferring the additional benefit of elucidating historical diatopic (dis)continuities.  Based on the substance, sequence and chronology of observed changes, at least four distinct groups of speech varieties can be identified, each showing strong internal consistency as well as stability over several centuries. One suite of unique developments occurs in Gascon varieties. Another, entirely separate, trajectory is found in a small cluster of Lengadocian varieties around Toulouse. Across a large group of varieties from the Lengadocian, Provençau and Aupenc areas, a third set of changes is shown to occur not only in the same sequence but at the same or similar historical periods, indicating that this is a development undergone near-simultaneously across much of the Occitan-speaking area. In northern Occitan varieties (Lemosin, Auvergnat), the same set of changes occurs in the same sequence, but at a later period, indicating either diffusion of changes from southern varieties, or independent parallel development. While some areas correspond to one or more of the traditional dialect divisions, others split existing dialect groups or span multiple dialect groups and subgroups.  These findings illustrate how investigation of genuinely morphological characteristics complements existing study of more familiar lexical and phonological characteristics, and also how long-standing dialect realities can emerge from the study of historical change.

• Deriving the Old Irish clause

  Vol. 8 No. 1 (2024)

  Danny L. Bate. Old Irish, a historical Celtic and Indo-European language, displays many distinct features in the composition of its clauses. These include a typical Verb-Subject-Object word order, shifting stress placement in compound verbs, relativity marked by verbal endings and mutations, and object pronouns rigidly infixed within the clause-initial ‘verbal complex’. The goal of this paper is to propose a common underlying syntactic structure, in the framework of generative grammar, which can generate the attested data across different types of clause, namely: declarative, interrogative, imperative, relative and other subordinate finite clauses. The paper begins by introducing relevant features of Old Irish grammar, before moving on to a fresh ‘syntacto-prosodic’ analysis of declarative main clauses. This it then applies to the other clause types, before concluding with a final synchronic structure common to all the clauses considered. Through a combination of syntactic theory and philological scholarship, the functional category of ‘C’ and its different lexical expressions are identified as the main source of the various distinctive features of the Old Irish clause.

• Intra- and inter-author variation in negation in the 17th century Dutch Letters as Loot

  Vol. 7 No. 26 (2023)

  Levi Remijnse & Marjo van Koppen. This article provides a qualitative study of variation in negation in 17th century letters from people of different regions and social classes of the Dutch speaking area. This intermediate language stage between negative concord in Middle Dutch and single negation in Modern Dutch is affected by both bottom-up change (the negative clitic started to erode due to functional redundancy) and top-down change (some elite writers, like P. C. Hooft and Joost van den Vondel, started to omit the negative clitic completely). The letters display different surface varieties: optional deletion of the negative clitic, conservative negative concord and progressive single negation. However, in the underlying syntactic structure, the syntactic features of the negative clitic – polarity features projecting PolP – discriminate four different derivational systems: (i) a high PolP as part of an extended CP; (ii) a low PolP that attracts the finite verb to T; (iii) both high PolP and low PolP; and (iv) no PolP. We will argue that the letters with (incidental) negative concord represent a stage in which one or two PolPs are present. In particular, the letters with optional deletion of the negative clitic show that the clitic extends its function from true negation to emphasis on negation of a presupposition (as found in West Flemish) to general contrast on the polarity of the clause. This less specific function is indicative of semantic bleaching and a motive for eventual loss of the clitic. The letters without negative concord show completion of this process and hence loss of the PolP. However, we also show that at least it is feasible that a subset of letters with single negation still has a PolP underlyingly, which means that although the negative clitic is absent from the surface, its polarity features are present at the underlying syntactic structure. The negative features are present during the syntactic derivation in a PolP, however, we infer, they are not spelled-out at the surface, possibly as an effect of upper-class prescriptions. Sociolinguistically, we find that whereas the clitic is present across writers in Zeeland (a southern province of the Netherlands), the single negation systems with the clitic’s features in deep structure are present in Noord-Holland (‘North-Holland’, a northern province of the Netherlands), displaying a more conservative spread of single negation. Writers showing the most progressive variant containing single negation (and no PolP) only appear in Noord-Holland, where this grammar is top-down initiated.

• Word order change, architecture, and interfaces: evidence from the development of V to C movement in the history of English

  Vol. 7 No. 25 (2023)

  Ans van Kemenade, Roland Hinterhölzl, and Tara Struik. Part of the Special Collection "A Multifactorial Approach to Word Order Change".  We present a novel account of the development and loss of one type of V2 word order over the Middle and early Modern English periods, based on a fine-grained corpus study which shows that multiple factors are at play, in interaction between syntax, information structure and prosody. We focus on finite verb movement to the highest functional head in the C-domain (Force) of the main clause: subject-finite inversion with pronominal subjects following an initial adverb (þa, þonne) in Old English. Middle English first sees the extension of this V2-context to other initial short deictic adverbs: here, there, nu, yet and thus. The choice of verb is narrowed down to auxiliaries and monosyllabic lexical verbs. V2 following adverbs is subsequently lost over the early Modern period. We show that this loss coincides with the grammaticalization of modals and other auxiliaries, leading to the loss of primary stress on the auxiliary. This triggered metrical changes in the clause-initial prosodic word: as long as the unstressed initial adverb could co-occur with a stressed monosyllabic finite verb, and the post-verbal subject pronoun could be integrated into the prosodic word of the auxiliary, inversion flourished. The loss of primary stress on the auxiliary yielded an unheaded foot, violating prosodic requirements. Our multifactorial treatment of the development and loss of V2 implies that the process we find is best treated in terms of micro-variation.

• Testing cartographic proposals on locality effects in V2: a quantitative study

  Vol. 7 No. 24 (2023)

  Giuseppe Samo. Part of the Special Collection "A Multifactorial Approach to Word Order Change". In this paper, we explore quantitative and computational methods to compare two theories of locality effects in non-subject fronting in V2 environments. We test the predictions in locality effects in grammatical clauses of (i) a ”bottleneck effect” model and (ii) a ”standard” featural Relativized Minimality effect model. By using theory-driven frequencies, we aim to observe the generalisation ability of the two models. We explored ten morpho- syntactically annotated treebanks for seven Germanic languages and one treebank for Old French. Our results support the predictions of a model stipulating standard featural Relativized Minimality effects in non-subject fronting.

• A multifactorial approach to word order change: an introduction

  Vol. 7 No. 23 (2023)

  Pierre Larrivée and Cecilia Poletto. Introduction to the Special Collection "A Multifactorial Approach to Word Order Change". The purpose of  this piece is to articulate a multifactorical approach to syntactic change. Arguments are proposed against a monocausal view of word order variation and evolution, especially given the diversity of change pathways across languages. Change is best explained as the result of the dependence of a phenomenon on various micro-cues that help structure and acquire it. When these micro-cues change for independent reasons, so does the phenomenon concerned. Summarizing the main causalities identified in the papers from this Special Collection on the loss of V2 and of OV, we formulate the wish that such an approach be put to the test in future investigations.

• Clitics and the Left Periphery in the Sanskrit of the Rigveda

  Vol. 7 No. 22 (2023)

  Krishnan J. Ram-Prasad. This article presents a novel syntactic analysis of the Vedic left periphery and the position of clitics within it, taking the Rigveda as a corpus. I analyze Vedic within the cartographic model of the left periphery, arguing for distinct TopP and FocP projections. The model accounts for the position of conjunction clitics, pronoun clitics, adverbial clitics, interrogative pronouns,relative pronouns, local particles and the negator mā.́ Thismodel has implications for our understanding of Vedic syntax and ancient Indo-European languages more widely.

• A broader perspective on "basic" word order: ditransitives in Middle Low German

  Vol. 7 No. 21 (2023)

  Hannah Booth & Tianyi Zhao. The notion of “basic” word order, and in particular how to identify it, has been much discussed in the typological literature (e.g. Hawkins 1983, Dryer 1995, Croft 2003, Song 2010), but remains a contentious issue within and across syntactic theories. In this paper, we explore this tension via acase study of object order in ditransitive constructions in Middle Low German (c. 1200–1650). We show that the evidence on which previous claims of Accusative>Dative as the “basic” order have been made is in fact a product of crosslinguistically common mapping relations between case, thematic roles, animacy and definiteness, and as such should not be used as evidence for/against purely syntactic principles. We also show that standard typological criteria in fact point towards Dative>Accusative being more “basic”.Overall, our findings showcase the opportunities which a modular approach to grammar such as Lexical Functional Grammar (e.g. Bresnan, Asudeh, Toivonen & Wechsler 2016) can offer on matters of word order.

• An anchoring approach to the diachrony of negative concord in Spanish

  Vol. 7 No. 20 (2023)

  Aaron Yamada. In Old Spanish, Negative Concord Items (NCIs) (nada ’nothing’, ninguno ’none’, etc.) co-occurred preverbally with the sentential negative marker non ’no’. The exception to this pattern was the NCI nunca ’never’, which showed an almost categorical tendency to avoid co-occurrence with the sentential negative marker when placed preverbally. By the beginning of the 16th century, this pattern had mostly been lost, giving way to the Modern Spanish configuration, in which preverbal NCIs cannot co-occur with the sentential negative marker to express a single negation reading. This paper offers a novel explanation to this change, grounded in usage-based approaches to language diachrony, in arguing that nunca served as a cognitive anchor (Goldberg (2005)), or model of comparison for other NCIs in preverbal position. In other words, phrase structures with preverbally placed NCIs show analogical leveling towards the modern configuration, following the example set forth by the highly frequent exemplar [nunca + V]. The advantage of this approach is a causal, quantitatively defended explanation for the loss of Old Spanish preverbal NC that takes into account the unique behavior of nunca.

• Proceedings of the 22nd Diachronic Generative Syntax (DiGS) Conference

  Vol. 7 No. 6-19 (2023)

  Selected papers from the 22nd Diachronic Generative Syntax (DiGS) Conference, which was held at the University of Konstanz (online) in May 2021.

• Towards a historical dialectal approach to Differential Object Marking in Catalan

  Vol. 7 No. 5 (2023)

  Anna Pineda. Part of the Special Collection "Towards a comparative historical dialectology". This paper offers a description of the emergence and development of Differential Object Marking (DOM) in Old Catalan, focusing on the perspective of historical dialectology and thus paying special attention to the dialectal differences that emerge. It does so by means of a large corpus study comprising the period from the first written texts to the 18th century. Although, in present-day Catalan, DOM is widespread with human direct objects in most dialects, its use is generally rejected by prescriptive grammar, as the phenomenon has often been attributed to Spanish influence. However, diachronic findings point to an analysis of DOM in Catalan as a fruit of the internal evolution of the language: instances of the phenomenon with human direct objects are found in earlier Catalan texts. Spanish influence (related to a series of sociopolitical events) only comes into play later, causing an exponential increase of the frequency of DOM in Catalan. Interestingly, consistent geolectal differences can be observed when analysing Old Catalan texts, with Valencian texts offering the highest number of occurrences. In this context, one must take into consideration the influence of Aragonese in Valencia (people from Aragon repopulated the area) as well as Spanish, whose effects in the Catalan-speaking area became particularly prevalent especially from the 16th century onwards. The conclusions of this study aim to provide empirically and theoretically informed research not only to identify historical dialects within Romance languages – in this case Catalan – but also to pave the way for more studies on historical comparative dialectology. As a matter of fact, in this study, the status of DOM in Old Spanish and Old Aragonese has also been taken into account.