From tony at benjamins.com Thu Jul 3 15:56:31 1997 From: tony at benjamins.com (Tony Schiavo) Date: Thu, 3 Jul 1997 11:56:31 EDT Subject: New Book: Historical Linguistics Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- John Benjamins Publishing would like to call your attention to the following new title in the field of Historical Linguistics: TENSE AND ASPECT IN INDO-EUROPEAN LANGUAGES THEORY, TYPOLOGY AND DIACHRONY John Hewson & Vit Bubenik 1997 xii, 403 pp. Current Issues in Linguistic Theory, 145 US/Canada: Cloth: 1 55619 860 4 Price: $89.00 Rest of the world: Cloth: 90 272 3649 6 Price: Hfl. 150,-- John Benjamins Publishing web site: http://www.benjamins.com For further information via e-mail: service at benjamins.com This monograph presents a general picture of the evolution of IE verbal systems within a coherent cognitive framework. The work encompasses all the language families of the IE phylum, from prehistory to present day languages. Inspired by the ideas of Roman Jakobson and Gustave Guillaume the authors relate tense and aspect to underlying cognitive processes, and show that verbal systems have a staged development of time representations (chronogenesis). They view linguistic change as systemic and trace the evolution of the earliest tense systems by (a) aspectual split and (b) aspectual merger from the original aspectual contrasts of PIE, the evidence for such systemic change showing clearly in the paradigmatic morphology of the daughter languages. The nineteen chapters cover first the ancient documentation, then those families whose historical data are from a more recent date. The last chapters deal with the systemic evolution of languages that are descended from ancient forbearers such as Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin, and are completed by a chapter on the practical and theoretical conclusions of the work. For further information please e-mail Bernadette Keck: service at benjamins.com From eeyore at leland.Stanford.EDU Mon Jul 14 20:55:55 1997 From: eeyore at leland.Stanford.EDU (Michael Getty) Date: Mon, 14 Jul 1997 16:55:55 EDT Subject: HISTLING posting Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Dear HISTLINGers, Here are the results (below) from my inquiry from 6/23 on the notion of grammar competition as an approach to the problem of gradiency in historical change. Sincere thanks to everyone who took the time to respond to my questions, some at considerable length: Henning Andersen, Alice Harris, Paul Hopper, Anthony Kroch, David Lightfoot, Niki Ritt, Eric Schiller, and Barbara Vance. The tenor of the responses I received was by and large sympathetic to the ideas advanced by Kroch/Fontana/Pintzuk/Santorini/Taylor. A number of people also responded by pointing out congruent points from their own work: see the references below for Harris and Campbell (1995), Lightfoot (1991), Andersen (1973), and Need and Schiller (1994) My summary has grown rather long, so I’ve arranged it under subheadings, which you’ll find below along with complete references; I haven’t tried to provide an exhaustive bibliography on the problem of periphrastic _do_ discussed below, merely the titles I’ve managed to get at thus far -- apologies for anything I’ve overlooked. Many thanks again for all the engaging responses. Michael Getty ------------------------------------------------------------------------ A. Precursors of the Phrase-Structures-in-Competition (PSC) approach. B. Critical responses to PSC C. Indeterminacy: Support for PSC? A. Precursors of PSC I was not terribly surprised to find out that the idea of accounting for variation and change through co-existing, discrete grammars was around before Kroch (1989). What did surprise me was the explicitness with which the idea of conflict or competition between such grammars is spelled out in earlier work -- at least in the study of phonemic systems -- with scattered references to Bloomfield and various Prague School theoreticians, including Jakobson. Within the post-WWII era, the first important study in this area seems to have been Fries and Pike’s study of Spanish loan phonology in Mazatec ([1949]; I was alerted to this paper by Weinreich et al. [1968], who are cited by Fontana [1994] along with Hankamer [1977]). Isolating some apparent phonemic contrasts in Mazatec, which they found only in Spanish loan words, Fries and Pike argued that the best way of describing this situation was to posit that Mazatec in fact had two phonemic systems: one native, one borrowed. They went on to extend this idea to cases of change in phonemic systems brought about by dialect contact, at one point coming to a very prescient formulation “In the process of change from one phonemic system to a different phonemic system of the same language, there may be a time during which parts of the two systems exist simultaneously and in conflict within the speech of two individuals.” As Weinreich et al. (p. 161) pointed out, however, the impact of this idea seems to have been deflected onto the study of bilingualism and dialect contact, whereby “it does not seem to have occurred to anyone that the theory could serve as a socially realistic basis for the investigation of language change.” The more recent formulations of the idea of grammar competition differ from these precursors in making no crucial reference to dialect contact (though Kroch and Taylor [in press] is an important exception). Rather, the source for the introduction of innovative grammatical options is thought to come from UG (‘endogenous optimization’ as suggested in Kiparsky [1996]), as a consequence of independent changes (Kroch 1989, Fontana 1994) or is reserved for separate investigation. A different sort of prelude to the PSC model can be found in Andersen (1973). His theory of deductive and abductive changes in phonology -- if I’ve understood it correctly -- seems to hold that speakers within a community in which a change has been actuated can hold two ‘grammars’ inside their heads, at least to the extent that they are thought to have phonemic inventories which diverge from the evidence provided by the speech community, a divergence which is masked over by the effects of separate, ‘adaptive’ rules. These adaptive rules are diacritic to individual lexical items; underlying changes manifest themselves more freely and more often, in turn, as the adaptive rules are lost in a process of lexical attrition. If extended onto syntax, this would put Andersen’s theory squarely on the side of lexical diffusion as a mechanism of syntactic change, which is the next point I’ll address. B. Critical responses to PSC In the citations I found as a result of replies to my posting, there were only two sources, viz. Ogura (1993) and Hudson (1997), which directly addressed the PSC approach, both of them taking issue with Kroch (1989), and specifically with his Constant Rate Hypothesis. Both papers, I believe, argue for approaches to the rise of auxiliary _do_ in English which would fall under the rubric of ‘lexical diffusion,’ namely to the extent that the gradient nature of the change involved is thought to result from the change being shunted through the lexicon, proceeding item by item (Harris and Campbell [1995: 106-115] have a good overview). Ogura’s article seems most in line with other recent work making the case for lexical diffusion as accounting for both the gradual nature of the rise of periphrastic _do_ and even its persistent s-shaped curve over time, e.g. Denison (1985), Tottie (1991), Stein (1990). At present, the idea of lexical diffusion seems to be the most prevalent approach to syntactic changes of this type. In the two papers addressing Kroch (1989), in particular, the advance of _do_ periphrasis is thought to be constrained by word frequency -- as an emergent property of individual lexical entries (Ogura) -- or by independent developments towards a well-defined class of syntactic auxiliaries (Hudson; cf. Kroch’s reply in the same volume). I’ll make no attempt to adjudicate on this point, though it should be pointed out that the PSC approach has been applied -- successfully, it would appear, especially with regard to the Constant Rate Hypothesis -- to a number of other historical changes, viz. the rise of INFL-medial and VO syntax in Old/Middle English, Yiddish, Greek (see my original posting for full citations), as well as to the evolution of the clitic systems of Modern Spanish (Fontana [1994]) and Bulgarian (Izvorsky, In press.) In addition, it seems to me -- at the moment -- that the actual point of contention between the PSC approach and lexical diffusion (henceforth: LD) might be difficult to formulate. As far as I’ve been able to tell, the PSC approach makes no crucial claims on the way in which competing grammatical options are deployed. In other words, there is nothing to rule out the kinds of phenomena talked about under the rubric of LD, i.e. certain words or classes of words preferentially exhibiting an innovation or systematically resisting it. Rather, in the strict sense outlined in Kroch (1994), the PSC approach seems only to hold that the divergent syntactic options evident in a given point of variation, like morphological doublets, cannot peacefully coexist. Eventually, so the theory goes, one must displace the other or they must channeled into separate functional/stylistic domains. How this happens would seem to be open to the kinds of favoring/disfavoring factors which LD theorists have been positing all along -- right down to individual lexemes -- and which Kroch (1989: 238) sees as expressing themselves in the initial frequencies of _do_ periphrasis in various contexts. C. Indeterminacy: Support for PSC? As a final point, I’m going to go out on a bit of a limb. It strikes me that one of the resolute properties of a language in which a change is in progress (e.g. during the rise of modal auxiliaries in English, the development of epistemic modals, or -- perhaps -- the ongoing change to prefixal morphology in Colloquial French), is that an appreciable portion of the utterances one comes across are of indeterminate nature. In other words, before we find the first iron-clad examples of a new structure, we see many examples which suggest this new structure but can’t be unambiguously analyzed as evincing it. Thus, there are lots of instances of modal verbs in OE and early ME which might as well be analyzed as auxiliaries but don’t have to be, or which invite epistemic readings but don’t demand them. I’m thinking of examples like OE _thonne maeg hine scamigan thaere braedinge his hlisan_ ‘Then he may be ashamed of the extent of his fame.’ (Bo 46.5, quoted from Denison in Traugott [1992: 195]), where it seems to me that nothing forces either a strictly root or epistemic reading of _maeg_. To the point, then, I think this kind of indeterminacy (which is put forward programmatically in Hankamer [1977]) would be somewhat bothersome in a LD account: if change proceeds item-by-item through the lexicon, then it seems that each item would have to be either-or with respect to the change in progress. In other words, _mugan_ in the example just given would have to have a feature within its lexical entry either licensing epistemic readings or not, regardless of the ambiguity. In the PSC approach, on the other hand, (putting aside the possibility of LD-type effects as mentioned above) indeterminacy would seem to be a natural property: if no contextual or structural factors in a given utterance force a particular analysis, indeterminacy would follow from the availability of two grammatical options applying to the same string (cf. Harris and Campbell [1995: 82-88], who accept the idea of multiple analyses without the notion of distinct grammars; their point regarding ‘blending’ structures is particularly relevant). I would particularly welcome responses on this point: the notion of discrete, co-existing syntaxes is intriguing, but strikes me as being open only to the kind of indirect confirmation the problem of indeterminacy suggests. In addition, there might be a question as to how well the PSC approach can be extended onto other phenomena: in the case of the development of epistemic modals in English, the innovating system does not seem to be in competition with *anything* (cf. Frisch [1997] for a similar issue in the development of ME sentence negation). REFERENCES: Andersen, Henning. 1973. Abductive and deductive change. Language. 49(4): 765-793 Denison, David. 1985. Why Old English had no prepositional passive. English Studies. 66: 189-204 Fontana, Josep. 19XX. A Variationist account of the development of the Spanish clitic system. . K. Beals et al. (eds.), Papers from the 30th Regional Meeting of the Chicago Linguistics Society. Vol. 2: Parasession on the Variation and Linguistic Theory. 87-100 Fries, C.C. and Kenneth Pike. 1949. Co-existent phonemic systems. Language. 25: 29-50. Frisch, Stefan. 1997. The change in negation in Middle English: A NEGP licensing account. Lingua. 101: 21-64. Hankamer, Jorge. 1997. Multiple Analyses. Charles Li (ed), Mechanisms of Syntactic Change. Austin: UT Press. 583-607. Harris, Alice C., and Lyle Campbell. 1995. Historical syntax in cross-linguistic perspective. New York: Cambridge. Especially pp. 41, 116-117, 83-88. Hudson, Richard. 1997. The rise of auxiliary _do_: Verb-non-raising or category strengthening? Transactions of the Philological Society. 95(1): 41-72. Reply by Kroch in same volume, pp. 140-144. Izvorski, Roumyana. In press. The Syntax of Clitics in the History of Bulgarian. To appear in the Proceedings of Diachronic Generative Syntax 4, Universite de Quebec a Montreal, 31 October 1995. Available at http://babel.lling.upenn.edu/~izvorski/papers.html Kiparsky, Paul. 1996. The shift to head-initial VP in Germanic. H. s, S.D. Epstein, and S. Peters (eds.), Studies in Comparative Germanic Syntax II. Amsterdam: Kluwer. 140-179. Kroch, Anthony. 1994. Morphosyntactic Variation. K. Beals et al. (eds.), Papers from the 30th Regional Meeting of the Chicago Linguistics Society. Vol. 2: Parasession on the Variation and Linguistic Theory. 180-201. Also available at http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~kroch/online-papers.html Kroch, Anthony, and Ann Taylor. In press. Verb movement in Old and Middle English: Dialect variation and language contact. To appear in Ans van Kemenade and Nigel Vincent (eds), Inflection and syntax in language change. Cambridge University Press. (due out this year). Also available at http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~kroch/online-papers.html or in Penn Working Papers in Linguistics. 1: 45-68 (earlier version). Lightfoot, David. 1991. How to set parameters. Cambridge: MIT Press. Ch. 6. Lightfoot, David. 1997. Catastrophic change and learning theory. Lingua. 100: 171-192. The references contain a number of interesting citations of work on the nature of s-shaped curves in language change. Lightfoot, David. In press. Shifting triggers and diachronic reanalyses. To appear in Ans van Kemenade and Nigel Vincent (eds), Inflection and syntax in language change. Cambridge University Press. (due out this year) Need and Schiller. 1994. An autolexical account of variation. K. Beals et al. (eds.), Papers from the 30th Regional Meeting of the Chicago Linguistics Society. Vol. 2: Parasession on the Variation and Linguistic Theory. 218-231. Ogura, Mieko. 1993. The development of periphrastic _do_ in English: A case of lexical diffusion in syntax. Diachronica. 10(1): 51-85. Stein, Dieter. 1990. The semantics of syntactic change: Aspects of the evolution of ‘do’ in English. Berlin: de Gruyter Tottie, Gunnel. 1991. Lexical diffusion in syntactic change: frequency as a determinant of linguistic conservatism in the development of negation in English. Dieter Kastovsky (ed), Historical English Syntax. Berlin: de Gruyter. 439-468. Traugott, Elizabeth C. 1992. Syntax. Cambridge History of the English Language I: The beginnings to 1066. pp. 168-289. Weinrich, Uriel, Willam Labov, and Marvin Herzog. 1968. Empirical foundations for a theory of language change. In Winfred P. Lehmann and Yakov Malkiel (eds.), Directions for historical linguistics. Austin: UT Press. 95-188. From hens.1 at osu.edu Mon Jul 14 17:11:45 1997 From: hens.1 at osu.edu (Gregor Hens) Date: Mon, 14 Jul 1997 13:11:45 EDT Subject: Germanic Linguistics & Philology Message-ID: The web site of the SOCIETY FOR GERMANIC PHILOLOGY (SGP) has moved to the following address: www.germanic.ohio-state.edu/sgp/ The SGP embraces all areas of and approaches to Germanic linguistics and philology, from formal syntax and phonology through historical linguistics to textual editing and includes scholars interested in the Germanic languages from Modern German, Netherlandic and Yiddish to Old English, Scandinavian and Gothic. The web site features information about the SGP, its membership, its goals and administration. In addition, the full text of the biannual Newsletter of the Society is available, and visitors to the site will find editorial information about the Society's journal, the American Journal of Germanic Linguistics and Literature (AJGLL). A first call for papers has been posted for the Fourth Annual Germanic Linguistics Conference, to be held at Ohio State in April 1998. Gregor Hens Department of Germanic Languages & Literatures The Ohio State University www.germanic.ohio-state.edu/faculty/gh/ From martinez at em.uni-frankfurt.de Tue Jul 15 18:02:04 1997 From: martinez at em.uni-frankfurt.de (martinez) Date: Tue, 15 Jul 1997 14:02:04 EDT Subject: Confs: Internat. Symposium - 125 Jahre Indogermanistik in Graz Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- This message has been sent to Linguist List, Indoeuropean, Indology and HISTLING. Apologies for cross-postings! -- See. http://titus.uni-frankfurt.de/curric/graz98.html -- Die Abteilung "Vergleichende Sprachwissenschaft" des Instituts f|r Sprachwissenschaft an der Karl-Franzens-Universitdt Graz veranstaltet vom 30. Juni - 2. Juli 1998 ein Internationales Symposium 125 Jahre Indogermanistik in Graz (1873 - 1998) Die Referate sollen die Forschungsschwerpunkte der indogermanistischen Tradition in Graz dokumentieren und sind deshalb besonders aus folgenden Gebieten erw|nscht: Indo-Iranisch Italisch Griechisch Anatolisch Indogermanische Tr|mmersprachen Onomastik Nat|rlich sind Referate aus allen Bereichen der indogermanischen, der historisch-vergleichenden und der allgemeinen Sprachwissenschaft willkommen. n die Abteilung "Vergleichende Sprachwissenschaft" Institut f|r Sprachwissenschaft z.Hd. Dr. Michaela Ofitsch Merangasse 70/II A-8010 Graz Austria A n m e l d u n g Ich nehme am Symposium "125 Jahre Indogermanistik in Graz" vom 30.6. - 2.7.1998 in Graz teil. Name: ............................................................................... .......................... Adresse: ............................................................................... .......................... Tel.: ............................................................ Fax: ............................................................ e-mail: ............................................................ Ich nehme teil: mit Referat m ohne Referat m Referatsthema: ............................................................................... ......................................... ............................................................................... ......................................... Datum: ..................... Unterschrift:.......................................... From jonathan2 at mdx.ac.uk Tue Jul 22 21:54:45 1997 From: jonathan2 at mdx.ac.uk (Jonathan Hope) Date: Tue, 22 Jul 1997 17:54:45 EDT Subject: request for histling: recent work on Early Modern English Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- I've recently been asked to do a couple of things which give me the chance to spread recent work on Early Modern English to a wider, non-linguistic audience, and I'd be very grateful for any off-prints, suggestions, and references people think are relevant: 1 The first is a chapter (7000 words) on Shakespeare's language for a student companion to Shakespeare studies. The editor is keen for me to put Early Modern English, and Shakespeare, in a proper linguistic context. In particular, this seems to me to be a good opportunity to spread the word about variationist studies of Early Modern English (eg. much of the work coming out of Helsinki), but there may be other things that I'm not so well up on that I should know about. 2 The second is that I've been asked to address a meeting of the editors of Shakespeare's plays for the Arden Shakespeare series (one of the scholarly, one play per volume editions). This stems from a realisation on their part that they don't know much about what is going on in historical linguistics, and a genuine desire to find out, and if possible use the kind of things we're working on in their editing. This seems to me to be (a) very laudable in itself and (b) an opportunity for us as a community of historical linguists to reach a much wider audience (Arden texts are used in schools and universities all over the world). I'd be very grateful for any suggestions anyone has, which I'll summarise to the list if it seems worthwhile. Jonathan Hope Middlesex University j.hope at mdx.ac.uk From MRATLIF at CMS.CC.WAYNE.EDU Tue Jul 22 22:11:51 1997 From: MRATLIF at CMS.CC.WAYNE.EDU (Martha Ratliff) Date: Tue, 22 Jul 1997 18:11:51 EDT Subject: Paul Benedict Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Dear colleagues, It is with a heavy heart that I make the following announcement -- Paul Benedict was killed in a car accident in Florida yesterday. I talked with his wife today, and she told me that he died quickly, without suffering. I had just seen him at a meeting of Southeast Asianists in May, where he was as active and happy as always, and full of ideas for new projects. If any of you knew Paul and care to write to his wife, the address is as follows: Marilyn Benedict 104 River Lane Ormond Beach, Florida 32176 In memory of good times now past, Martha Ratliff From martinez at em.uni-frankfurt.de Thu Jul 31 20:41:21 1997 From: martinez at em.uni-frankfurt.de (Javier Mart nez Garc a) Date: Thu, 31 Jul 1997 16:41:21 EDT Subject: [Fwd: SOS: Help Acta Orientalia] Message-ID: (Forwarded from Indology by JMG) -- Dr. Fco. Javier Martmnez Garcma ~ Vergleichende Sprachwissenschaft Universitdt Frankfurt ~ Postfach 11 19 32 ~ D-60054 Frankfurt tel. +49- 69- 7982-2847; (sekr.) -3139 ~ fax. +49- 69- 7982-2873 -------------- next part -------------- An embedded message was scrubbed... From: unknown sender Subject: no subject Date: no date Size: 1372 URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: vcard.vcf Type: text/x-vcard Size: 101 bytes Desc: Card for Fco. Javier Martmnez Garcma URL: From tony at benjamins.com Thu Jul 3 15:56:31 1997 From: tony at benjamins.com (Tony Schiavo) Date: Thu, 3 Jul 1997 11:56:31 EDT Subject: New Book: Historical Linguistics Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- John Benjamins Publishing would like to call your attention to the following new title in the field of Historical Linguistics: TENSE AND ASPECT IN INDO-EUROPEAN LANGUAGES THEORY, TYPOLOGY AND DIACHRONY John Hewson & Vit Bubenik 1997 xii, 403 pp. Current Issues in Linguistic Theory, 145 US/Canada: Cloth: 1 55619 860 4 Price: $89.00 Rest of the world: Cloth: 90 272 3649 6 Price: Hfl. 150,-- John Benjamins Publishing web site: http://www.benjamins.com For further information via e-mail: service at benjamins.com This monograph presents a general picture of the evolution of IE verbal systems within a coherent cognitive framework. The work encompasses all the language families of the IE phylum, from prehistory to present day languages. Inspired by the ideas of Roman Jakobson and Gustave Guillaume the authors relate tense and aspect to underlying cognitive processes, and show that verbal systems have a staged development of time representations (chronogenesis). They view linguistic change as systemic and trace the evolution of the earliest tense systems by (a) aspectual split and (b) aspectual merger from the original aspectual contrasts of PIE, the evidence for such systemic change showing clearly in the paradigmatic morphology of the daughter languages. The nineteen chapters cover first the ancient documentation, then those families whose historical data are from a more recent date. The last chapters deal with the systemic evolution of languages that are descended from ancient forbearers such as Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin, and are completed by a chapter on the practical and theoretical conclusions of the work. For further information please e-mail Bernadette Keck: service at benjamins.com From eeyore at leland.Stanford.EDU Mon Jul 14 20:55:55 1997 From: eeyore at leland.Stanford.EDU (Michael Getty) Date: Mon, 14 Jul 1997 16:55:55 EDT Subject: HISTLING posting Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Dear HISTLINGers, Here are the results (below) from my inquiry from 6/23 on the notion of grammar competition as an approach to the problem of gradiency in historical change. Sincere thanks to everyone who took the time to respond to my questions, some at considerable length: Henning Andersen, Alice Harris, Paul Hopper, Anthony Kroch, David Lightfoot, Niki Ritt, Eric Schiller, and Barbara Vance. The tenor of the responses I received was by and large sympathetic to the ideas advanced by Kroch/Fontana/Pintzuk/Santorini/Taylor. A number of people also responded by pointing out congruent points from their own work: see the references below for Harris and Campbell (1995), Lightfoot (1991), Andersen (1973), and Need and Schiller (1994) My summary has grown rather long, so I?ve arranged it under subheadings, which you?ll find below along with complete references; I haven?t tried to provide an exhaustive bibliography on the problem of periphrastic _do_ discussed below, merely the titles I?ve managed to get at thus far -- apologies for anything I?ve overlooked. Many thanks again for all the engaging responses. Michael Getty ------------------------------------------------------------------------ A. Precursors of the Phrase-Structures-in-Competition (PSC) approach. B. Critical responses to PSC C. Indeterminacy: Support for PSC? A. Precursors of PSC I was not terribly surprised to find out that the idea of accounting for variation and change through co-existing, discrete grammars was around before Kroch (1989). What did surprise me was the explicitness with which the idea of conflict or competition between such grammars is spelled out in earlier work -- at least in the study of phonemic systems -- with scattered references to Bloomfield and various Prague School theoreticians, including Jakobson. Within the post-WWII era, the first important study in this area seems to have been Fries and Pike?s study of Spanish loan phonology in Mazatec ([1949]; I was alerted to this paper by Weinreich et al. [1968], who are cited by Fontana [1994] along with Hankamer [1977]). Isolating some apparent phonemic contrasts in Mazatec, which they found only in Spanish loan words, Fries and Pike argued that the best way of describing this situation was to posit that Mazatec in fact had two phonemic systems: one native, one borrowed. They went on to extend this idea to cases of change in phonemic systems brought about by dialect contact, at one point coming to a very prescient formulation ?In the process of change from one phonemic system to a different phonemic system of the same language, there may be a time during which parts of the two systems exist simultaneously and in conflict within the speech of two individuals.? As Weinreich et al. (p. 161) pointed out, however, the impact of this idea seems to have been deflected onto the study of bilingualism and dialect contact, whereby ?it does not seem to have occurred to anyone that the theory could serve as a socially realistic basis for the investigation of language change.? The more recent formulations of the idea of grammar competition differ from these precursors in making no crucial reference to dialect contact (though Kroch and Taylor [in press] is an important exception). Rather, the source for the introduction of innovative grammatical options is thought to come from UG (?endogenous optimization? as suggested in Kiparsky [1996]), as a consequence of independent changes (Kroch 1989, Fontana 1994) or is reserved for separate investigation. A different sort of prelude to the PSC model can be found in Andersen (1973). His theory of deductive and abductive changes in phonology -- if I?ve understood it correctly -- seems to hold that speakers within a community in which a change has been actuated can hold two ?grammars? inside their heads, at least to the extent that they are thought to have phonemic inventories which diverge from the evidence provided by the speech community, a divergence which is masked over by the effects of separate, ?adaptive? rules. These adaptive rules are diacritic to individual lexical items; underlying changes manifest themselves more freely and more often, in turn, as the adaptive rules are lost in a process of lexical attrition. If extended onto syntax, this would put Andersen?s theory squarely on the side of lexical diffusion as a mechanism of syntactic change, which is the next point I?ll address. B. Critical responses to PSC In the citations I found as a result of replies to my posting, there were only two sources, viz. Ogura (1993) and Hudson (1997), which directly addressed the PSC approach, both of them taking issue with Kroch (1989), and specifically with his Constant Rate Hypothesis. Both papers, I believe, argue for approaches to the rise of auxiliary _do_ in English which would fall under the rubric of ?lexical diffusion,? namely to the extent that the gradient nature of the change involved is thought to result from the change being shunted through the lexicon, proceeding item by item (Harris and Campbell [1995: 106-115] have a good overview). Ogura?s article seems most in line with other recent work making the case for lexical diffusion as accounting for both the gradual nature of the rise of periphrastic _do_ and even its persistent s-shaped curve over time, e.g. Denison (1985), Tottie (1991), Stein (1990). At present, the idea of lexical diffusion seems to be the most prevalent approach to syntactic changes of this type. In the two papers addressing Kroch (1989), in particular, the advance of _do_ periphrasis is thought to be constrained by word frequency -- as an emergent property of individual lexical entries (Ogura) -- or by independent developments towards a well-defined class of syntactic auxiliaries (Hudson; cf. Kroch?s reply in the same volume). I?ll make no attempt to adjudicate on this point, though it should be pointed out that the PSC approach has been applied -- successfully, it would appear, especially with regard to the Constant Rate Hypothesis -- to a number of other historical changes, viz. the rise of INFL-medial and VO syntax in Old/Middle English, Yiddish, Greek (see my original posting for full citations), as well as to the evolution of the clitic systems of Modern Spanish (Fontana [1994]) and Bulgarian (Izvorsky, In press.) In addition, it seems to me -- at the moment -- that the actual point of contention between the PSC approach and lexical diffusion (henceforth: LD) might be difficult to formulate. As far as I?ve been able to tell, the PSC approach makes no crucial claims on the way in which competing grammatical options are deployed. In other words, there is nothing to rule out the kinds of phenomena talked about under the rubric of LD, i.e. certain words or classes of words preferentially exhibiting an innovation or systematically resisting it. Rather, in the strict sense outlined in Kroch (1994), the PSC approach seems only to hold that the divergent syntactic options evident in a given point of variation, like morphological doublets, cannot peacefully coexist. Eventually, so the theory goes, one must displace the other or they must channeled into separate functional/stylistic domains. How this happens would seem to be open to the kinds of favoring/disfavoring factors which LD theorists have been positing all along -- right down to individual lexemes -- and which Kroch (1989: 238) sees as expressing themselves in the initial frequencies of _do_ periphrasis in various contexts. C. Indeterminacy: Support for PSC? As a final point, I?m going to go out on a bit of a limb. It strikes me that one of the resolute properties of a language in which a change is in progress (e.g. during the rise of modal auxiliaries in English, the development of epistemic modals, or -- perhaps -- the ongoing change to prefixal morphology in Colloquial French), is that an appreciable portion of the utterances one comes across are of indeterminate nature. In other words, before we find the first iron-clad examples of a new structure, we see many examples which suggest this new structure but can?t be unambiguously analyzed as evincing it. Thus, there are lots of instances of modal verbs in OE and early ME which might as well be analyzed as auxiliaries but don?t have to be, or which invite epistemic readings but don?t demand them. I?m thinking of examples like OE _thonne maeg hine scamigan thaere braedinge his hlisan_ ?Then he may be ashamed of the extent of his fame.? (Bo 46.5, quoted from Denison in Traugott [1992: 195]), where it seems to me that nothing forces either a strictly root or epistemic reading of _maeg_. To the point, then, I think this kind of indeterminacy (which is put forward programmatically in Hankamer [1977]) would be somewhat bothersome in a LD account: if change proceeds item-by-item through the lexicon, then it seems that each item would have to be either-or with respect to the change in progress. In other words, _mugan_ in the example just given would have to have a feature within its lexical entry either licensing epistemic readings or not, regardless of the ambiguity. In the PSC approach, on the other hand, (putting aside the possibility of LD-type effects as mentioned above) indeterminacy would seem to be a natural property: if no contextual or structural factors in a given utterance force a particular analysis, indeterminacy would follow from the availability of two grammatical options applying to the same string (cf. Harris and Campbell [1995: 82-88], who accept the idea of multiple analyses without the notion of distinct grammars; their point regarding ?blending? structures is particularly relevant). I would particularly welcome responses on this point: the notion of discrete, co-existing syntaxes is intriguing, but strikes me as being open only to the kind of indirect confirmation the problem of indeterminacy suggests. In addition, there might be a question as to how well the PSC approach can be extended onto other phenomena: in the case of the development of epistemic modals in English, the innovating system does not seem to be in competition with *anything* (cf. Frisch [1997] for a similar issue in the development of ME sentence negation). REFERENCES: Andersen, Henning. 1973. Abductive and deductive change. Language. 49(4): 765-793 Denison, David. 1985. Why Old English had no prepositional passive. English Studies. 66: 189-204 Fontana, Josep. 19XX. A Variationist account of the development of the Spanish clitic system. . K. Beals et al. (eds.), Papers from the 30th Regional Meeting of the Chicago Linguistics Society. Vol. 2: Parasession on the Variation and Linguistic Theory. 87-100 Fries, C.C. and Kenneth Pike. 1949. Co-existent phonemic systems. Language. 25: 29-50. Frisch, Stefan. 1997. The change in negation in Middle English: A NEGP licensing account. Lingua. 101: 21-64. Hankamer, Jorge. 1997. Multiple Analyses. Charles Li (ed), Mechanisms of Syntactic Change. Austin: UT Press. 583-607. Harris, Alice C., and Lyle Campbell. 1995. Historical syntax in cross-linguistic perspective. New York: Cambridge. Especially pp. 41, 116-117, 83-88. Hudson, Richard. 1997. The rise of auxiliary _do_: Verb-non-raising or category strengthening? Transactions of the Philological Society. 95(1): 41-72. Reply by Kroch in same volume, pp. 140-144. Izvorski, Roumyana. In press. The Syntax of Clitics in the History of Bulgarian. To appear in the Proceedings of Diachronic Generative Syntax 4, Universite de Quebec a Montreal, 31 October 1995. Available at http://babel.lling.upenn.edu/~izvorski/papers.html Kiparsky, Paul. 1996. The shift to head-initial VP in Germanic. H. s, S.D. Epstein, and S. Peters (eds.), Studies in Comparative Germanic Syntax II. Amsterdam: Kluwer. 140-179. Kroch, Anthony. 1994. Morphosyntactic Variation. K. Beals et al. (eds.), Papers from the 30th Regional Meeting of the Chicago Linguistics Society. Vol. 2: Parasession on the Variation and Linguistic Theory. 180-201. Also available at http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~kroch/online-papers.html Kroch, Anthony, and Ann Taylor. In press. Verb movement in Old and Middle English: Dialect variation and language contact. To appear in Ans van Kemenade and Nigel Vincent (eds), Inflection and syntax in language change. Cambridge University Press. (due out this year). Also available at http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~kroch/online-papers.html or in Penn Working Papers in Linguistics. 1: 45-68 (earlier version). Lightfoot, David. 1991. How to set parameters. Cambridge: MIT Press. Ch. 6. Lightfoot, David. 1997. Catastrophic change and learning theory. Lingua. 100: 171-192. The references contain a number of interesting citations of work on the nature of s-shaped curves in language change. Lightfoot, David. In press. Shifting triggers and diachronic reanalyses. To appear in Ans van Kemenade and Nigel Vincent (eds), Inflection and syntax in language change. Cambridge University Press. (due out this year) Need and Schiller. 1994. An autolexical account of variation. K. Beals et al. (eds.), Papers from the 30th Regional Meeting of the Chicago Linguistics Society. Vol. 2: Parasession on the Variation and Linguistic Theory. 218-231. Ogura, Mieko. 1993. The development of periphrastic _do_ in English: A case of lexical diffusion in syntax. Diachronica. 10(1): 51-85. Stein, Dieter. 1990. The semantics of syntactic change: Aspects of the evolution of ?do? in English. Berlin: de Gruyter Tottie, Gunnel. 1991. Lexical diffusion in syntactic change: frequency as a determinant of linguistic conservatism in the development of negation in English. Dieter Kastovsky (ed), Historical English Syntax. Berlin: de Gruyter. 439-468. Traugott, Elizabeth C. 1992. Syntax. Cambridge History of the English Language I: The beginnings to 1066. pp. 168-289. Weinrich, Uriel, Willam Labov, and Marvin Herzog. 1968. Empirical foundations for a theory of language change. In Winfred P. Lehmann and Yakov Malkiel (eds.), Directions for historical linguistics. Austin: UT Press. 95-188. From hens.1 at osu.edu Mon Jul 14 17:11:45 1997 From: hens.1 at osu.edu (Gregor Hens) Date: Mon, 14 Jul 1997 13:11:45 EDT Subject: Germanic Linguistics & Philology Message-ID: The web site of the SOCIETY FOR GERMANIC PHILOLOGY (SGP) has moved to the following address: www.germanic.ohio-state.edu/sgp/ The SGP embraces all areas of and approaches to Germanic linguistics and philology, from formal syntax and phonology through historical linguistics to textual editing and includes scholars interested in the Germanic languages from Modern German, Netherlandic and Yiddish to Old English, Scandinavian and Gothic. The web site features information about the SGP, its membership, its goals and administration. In addition, the full text of the biannual Newsletter of the Society is available, and visitors to the site will find editorial information about the Society's journal, the American Journal of Germanic Linguistics and Literature (AJGLL). A first call for papers has been posted for the Fourth Annual Germanic Linguistics Conference, to be held at Ohio State in April 1998. Gregor Hens Department of Germanic Languages & Literatures The Ohio State University www.germanic.ohio-state.edu/faculty/gh/ From martinez at em.uni-frankfurt.de Tue Jul 15 18:02:04 1997 From: martinez at em.uni-frankfurt.de (martinez) Date: Tue, 15 Jul 1997 14:02:04 EDT Subject: Confs: Internat. Symposium - 125 Jahre Indogermanistik in Graz Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- This message has been sent to Linguist List, Indoeuropean, Indology and HISTLING. Apologies for cross-postings! -- See. http://titus.uni-frankfurt.de/curric/graz98.html -- Die Abteilung "Vergleichende Sprachwissenschaft" des Instituts f|r Sprachwissenschaft an der Karl-Franzens-Universitdt Graz veranstaltet vom 30. Juni - 2. Juli 1998 ein Internationales Symposium 125 Jahre Indogermanistik in Graz (1873 - 1998) Die Referate sollen die Forschungsschwerpunkte der indogermanistischen Tradition in Graz dokumentieren und sind deshalb besonders aus folgenden Gebieten erw|nscht: Indo-Iranisch Italisch Griechisch Anatolisch Indogermanische Tr|mmersprachen Onomastik Nat|rlich sind Referate aus allen Bereichen der indogermanischen, der historisch-vergleichenden und der allgemeinen Sprachwissenschaft willkommen. n die Abteilung "Vergleichende Sprachwissenschaft" Institut f|r Sprachwissenschaft z.Hd. Dr. Michaela Ofitsch Merangasse 70/II A-8010 Graz Austria A n m e l d u n g Ich nehme am Symposium "125 Jahre Indogermanistik in Graz" vom 30.6. - 2.7.1998 in Graz teil. Name: ............................................................................... .......................... Adresse: ............................................................................... .......................... Tel.: ............................................................ Fax: ............................................................ e-mail: ............................................................ Ich nehme teil: mit Referat m ohne Referat m Referatsthema: ............................................................................... ......................................... ............................................................................... ......................................... Datum: ..................... Unterschrift:.......................................... From jonathan2 at mdx.ac.uk Tue Jul 22 21:54:45 1997 From: jonathan2 at mdx.ac.uk (Jonathan Hope) Date: Tue, 22 Jul 1997 17:54:45 EDT Subject: request for histling: recent work on Early Modern English Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- I've recently been asked to do a couple of things which give me the chance to spread recent work on Early Modern English to a wider, non-linguistic audience, and I'd be very grateful for any off-prints, suggestions, and references people think are relevant: 1 The first is a chapter (7000 words) on Shakespeare's language for a student companion to Shakespeare studies. The editor is keen for me to put Early Modern English, and Shakespeare, in a proper linguistic context. In particular, this seems to me to be a good opportunity to spread the word about variationist studies of Early Modern English (eg. much of the work coming out of Helsinki), but there may be other things that I'm not so well up on that I should know about. 2 The second is that I've been asked to address a meeting of the editors of Shakespeare's plays for the Arden Shakespeare series (one of the scholarly, one play per volume editions). This stems from a realisation on their part that they don't know much about what is going on in historical linguistics, and a genuine desire to find out, and if possible use the kind of things we're working on in their editing. This seems to me to be (a) very laudable in itself and (b) an opportunity for us as a community of historical linguists to reach a much wider audience (Arden texts are used in schools and universities all over the world). I'd be very grateful for any suggestions anyone has, which I'll summarise to the list if it seems worthwhile. Jonathan Hope Middlesex University j.hope at mdx.ac.uk From MRATLIF at CMS.CC.WAYNE.EDU Tue Jul 22 22:11:51 1997 From: MRATLIF at CMS.CC.WAYNE.EDU (Martha Ratliff) Date: Tue, 22 Jul 1997 18:11:51 EDT Subject: Paul Benedict Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Dear colleagues, It is with a heavy heart that I make the following announcement -- Paul Benedict was killed in a car accident in Florida yesterday. I talked with his wife today, and she told me that he died quickly, without suffering. I had just seen him at a meeting of Southeast Asianists in May, where he was as active and happy as always, and full of ideas for new projects. If any of you knew Paul and care to write to his wife, the address is as follows: Marilyn Benedict 104 River Lane Ormond Beach, Florida 32176 In memory of good times now past, Martha Ratliff From martinez at em.uni-frankfurt.de Thu Jul 31 20:41:21 1997 From: martinez at em.uni-frankfurt.de (Javier Mart nez Garc a) Date: Thu, 31 Jul 1997 16:41:21 EDT Subject: [Fwd: SOS: Help Acta Orientalia] Message-ID: (Forwarded from Indology by JMG) -- Dr. Fco. Javier Martmnez Garcma ~ Vergleichende Sprachwissenschaft Universitdt Frankfurt ~ Postfach 11 19 32 ~ D-60054 Frankfurt tel. +49- 69- 7982-2847; (sekr.) -3139 ~ fax. +49- 69- 7982-2873 -------------- next part -------------- An embedded message was scrubbed... From: unknown sender Subject: no subject Date: no date Size: 1372 URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: vcard.vcf Type: text/x-vcard Size: 101 bytes Desc: Card for Fco. Javier Martmnez Garcma URL: