Languages show variations according to the social class of speakers and Latin was no exception, as readers of Petronius are aware. The Romance languages have traditionally been regarded as developing out of a 'language of the common people' (Vulgar Latin), but studies of modern languages demonstrate that linguistic change does not merely come, in the social sense, 'from below'. There is change from above, as prestige usages work their way down the social scale, and change may also occur across the social classes. This book is a history of many of the developments undergone by the Latin language as it changed into Romance, demonstrating the varying social levels at which change was initiated. About thirty topics are dealt with, many of them more systematically than ever before. Discussions often start in the early Republic with Plautus, and the book is as much about the literary language as about informal varieties.

Social Variation and the Latin Language

Recently, linguists have discovered (or, more accurately, rediscovered) the role that historical linguistics can legitimately play in providing explanations for the facts of synchronic language types. Greater awareness of synchronic variability and its source in historical changes in progress has focused attention on the concept of a language as a system not of static structures, but of interacting processes which the individual speaker becomes involved in as he/she acquires the language and enters the language community (Weinreich, Labov & Herzog, 1968). These processes are hypothesized to be universal, in that they may occur in any language family at any time period (though the initial actuation of a change is still a riddle, ibid. 102).

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/S0022226700012391

The Evolution of Negation.

Parts and wholes: Implicative patterns in inflectional paradigms

This article contributes to the understanding of the origin and function of verbal -s marking in the Black English grammar by systematically examining the behaviour of this affix in two corpora on early Black English. To ascertain whether the variation observed in (early and modern Black English) -s usage has a precedent in the history of the language, or is rather an intrusion from another system, we focus particularly on the linguistic and social contexts of its occurrence, within a historical and comparative perspective. Our results show that both third person singular and nonconcord -s are subject to regular, parallel environmental conditioning. The finding that both insertion and deletion are conditioned by the same factors suggests that verbal -s marking is a unitary process, involving both concord and nonconcord contexts. Moreover, the (few) variable constraints on verbal -s usage reported throughout the history of the English language remain operative in early Black English. These results, taken in conjunction with indications that -s marking across the verbal paradigm was a prestige marker in the dialect at some earlier point in time, lead us to hypothesize that the contemporary pattern might be a synchronic reflex of the constraint ranking on -s usage in the varieties of English that provided the linguistic model for the slaves. Many of the conditioning effects we report would have been subsequently overridden by the grammaticalization of -s as the Standard English agreement marker. We conclude that present-tense marking via verbal -s formed an integral part of the early Black English grammar.

/pdf/there-s-no-tense-like-the-present-verbal-s-inflection-in-4mv4zcwl4p.pdf

There's No Tense Like the Present: Verbal -s Inflection in Early Black English.

case features are assigned configurationally to the Th-roles in a predicate’s Semantic Form. They cannot be idiosyncratic lexical properties of specific Th-roles, and their assignment cannot be specific to particular predicates. This means that the abstract Case feature [+HR] always defines the highest syntactically visible Th-role of a predicate, its “subject”. Given the previously introduced assumption that Th-hierarchy reflects semantic depth, it follows that Th-role reversals, such as a verb “kill” with victim as subject and killer as object, are excluded in principle from any language.8 Another corollary is that “quirky case” cannot be a lexical association of abstract case, but the idiosyncrasy must rather be accounted for at the level of morphosyntactic case. In section ?? provide empirical evidence in favor of this idea. At the level of abstract Case, the proposed decomposition into features has two principal advantages. The first advantage of the feature decomposition is that it makes it possible to individuate exactly the class of grammatical relations which play a role in syntactic constraints, such as binding, control, and parallelism in coordination. For example, the feature [+HR] picks out “A” and “S” in any language, irrespective of its case system, and thus universally defines the relation of grammatical subject, or “external argument”. (51) Def: An argument/Th-role pair bearing the feature [+HR] is a grammatical subject. Note that Uniqueness excludes the possibility that a single predicate might have multiple subjects.9 Categories requiring negative features are syntactically accessible in so far as those features are assigned by the appropriate licensers. For example, transitive subjects acquire the feature specification [–LR] by unifying with a bearer of morphosyntactic ergative case. Consequently, transitive subjects (“A” as opposed to “S” and “O”) can be singled out by the feature bundle [+HR,–LR] in ergative languages, and only in them. This point will be developed in section ??. Secondly, the features provide the appropriate representation on which valency-changing operations are defined. I assume that these operations are triggered by verb morphology in the lexicon. In particular: (52) a. Passive: demotes [+HR]. b. Antipassive: demotes [–HR]. c. Causative: adds/promotes [+HR]. d. Applicative: adds/promotes [–HR]. ditransitive transitive intransitive Th-roles: λx λy λz λx λy λx Abstract Case: [+HR] [ ] [+LR] [+HR] [+LR] [ +HR +LR ] ERG/NOM [–LR] [(–LR)] [(+HR)] [–LR] [ ] [ ] (Ngiyambaa) (ERG) (NOM) (NOM) (ERG) (NOM) (NOM) ERG/ACC/NOM [–LR] [–LR] [(+LR)] [–LR] [ ] [ ] (Wangkumara) (ERG) (ACC) (NOM) (ERG) (NOM) (NOM) The system generalizes correctly to four-place predicates (Donohue 2004). 8This means, for example, that inverse constructions are not passives (contra Perlmutter and Rhodes’ 1988 treatment of Ojibwa but in agreement with Dahlstrom 1985/1991). Some published treatments of psych-verbs are also inconsistent with this assumption. See section ?? below for further discussion. 9Again there are partly unresolved empirical issues at stake. There are at least two types of cases where linguists have been tempted to speak of multiple subjects. One is probably to be analyzed as a multiple topic construction, e.g. Korean (refs.); another consists of derived predicates such as causatives, where the embedded subject (the “causee”) sometimes has “subject properties”. These are cases of multiple predicates, for which we provide layered representations, which permit reference to the abstract Case features of basic verbs to be visible in their derivatives, as discussed in section ??.

Universals Constrain Change; Change Results in Typological Generalizations

Tendances generales des changements analogiques II

Polska fonetyka i morfologia historyczna

Tendances générales du développement morphologique

Survivance du nominatif singulier dans les langues romanes

/pdf/la-langue-romane-commune-latin-vulgaire-ou-latin-classique-12o8xtl2lh.pdf

La langue romane commune: latin vulgaire ou latin classique?

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