Nigel Vincent | The University of Manchester (original) (raw)
Papers by Nigel Vincent
Tense, Aspect, Modality, and Evidentiality, 2018
The relatedness of non-finite constructions and evidentiality has been observed in various Europe... more The relatedness of non-finite constructions and evidentiality has been observed in various European languages. Passive matrix verbs plus infinitive in English, the corresponding though less productive pattern in Dutch, reportive passives in Danish, and evidential participial constructions in Lithuanian have all received attention in the literature. We continue this line of investigation, focussing on the Accusativus cum Participio, found in contemporary Lithuanian only with verbs of communication, cognition and perception. Our quantitative and qualitative corpus-based analysis investigates its distribution in different types of discourse and provides evidence to support the claim that the use of the non-agreeing ‘be’-participle is obligatory because it marks a proposition. We compare our account with similar uses of non-finite verb in other languages
The Italianist, 2010
I am very flattered and honoured to be invited to give this lecture, but very sad that there is a... more I am very flattered and honoured to be invited to give this lecture, but very sad that there is an occasion for it. I came to know Clara Cooper when I was appointed to my first permanent academic post in 1974 as one of two lecturers in the newly established Sub-Department of Italian within the Department of French at the University of Lancaster. Her husband Richard Cooper had been one of the moving forces in getting that new unit established and Clara and Richard were generous and enthusiastic hosts to me and my fellow appointee, Paolo Rossi, on many occasions. Another of the instigators of the Italian section was the Machiavelli scholar Russell Price, who was marrried to Francesca, a Calabrian. Paolo and I had the pleasure and the duty of being entertained reciprocally in the two houses and studiously never coming to a conclusion as to whether it was better to eat Calabrian food in Francesca's house or Torinese food in Clara's house! After those years in Lancaster our paths diverged: Richard and Clara moved to Oxford, and I moved to other posts before settling in Manchester. In addition to being an excellent cook and host, Clara was a dedicated and much appreciated teacher of the Italian language, as we have heard, and she was always interested in new ideas and keen to keep up with latest developments. In fact, the last time she and I met was in November 2003 at a workshop for teachers of Italian organised by Anna Laura Lepschy and Anna Rita Tamponi at University College London. On that occasion I spoke on the theme of teaching Old Italian within the modern curriculum and it seems appropriate therefore that I should take up again the topic of the early stages of the language, but this time in a historical and geographical context rather than a pedagogical one. One of the received ideas that teachers passed on to their pupils and students in the days when Clara and I in our different countries began to study was that Italian has changed very little in the course of the seven centuries since Dante composed the Divine Comedy and hence that this
The Modern Language Review, 1989
International Journal of American Linguistics, 1978
... We present both his orthography and his pronunciation: (39) ozoup [os6uB] iguana (see 8). (40... more ... We present both his orthography and his pronunciation: (39) ozoup [os6uB] iguana (see 8). (40) zohol [so?61]fish (see 6). (41) tom [tom] fish poison (camote, veneno para pescado) (see 2). (42 ... 7 Ibid. 8 P. Ladefoged, Preliminaries to Linguistic Phonetics (Chicago, 1971), p. 111. ...
This paper considers and compares the status of the concept of head within different grammatical ... more This paper considers and compares the status of the concept of head within different grammatical frameworks (Minimalism, LFG and HPSG) and its relevance to our understanding of the mechanisms of change involved in grammaticalization. Our data is drawn from the developments of lexical prepositions into grammatical prepositions and complementisers in Romance and Germanic. We argue in favour of a non-derivational approach and in particular against accounts in which all developments are mediated through a chain of functional heads of the kind deployed in cartography and nanosyntax.
Nine Romance languages are discussed, first in context of their common Latin origins, and then as... more Nine Romance languages are discussed, first in context of their common Latin origins, and then as individual studies. The final chapter is devoted to Romance-based Creole languages. This book should be of interest to students and lecturers in linguistics, language study and Romance linguistics.
Typological Studies in Language, 2010
... 292 Nigel Vincent and Kersti Borjars go'and'come', we can postulate itive (or ... more ... 292 Nigel Vincent and Kersti Borjars go'and'come', we can postulate itive (or andative) and ventive aspect (cf. ... Stage 3: this effect, which is in origin pragmatic, is grammaticalized through a shift from D to T Of this last stage in the change they observe: Dand Tare both heads ...
Periphrasis and Inflexion in Diachrony
This chapter offers a brief overview of how Martin Maiden’s theoretical interests and empirical f... more This chapter offers a brief overview of how Martin Maiden’s theoretical interests and empirical foci have developed over the course of his career, starting with his early work on metaphony and moving through to his central engagement with the concept of the morphome. We consider the way his explorations of the structure and history of Romance inflexional systems provide essential diachronic confirmation of the need to recognize such a concept and of the way it relates not only to individual items but to the overall organization of the paradigm. We move on from there to consider the place of the morphome and morphome-based thinking within recent developments in morphological theory and in particular the way different approaches define—and in some cases erase!—the boundary between morphology and syntax. The chapter concludes with a brief overview of the individual chapters contained in this volume and the light they shed on the relations between periphrasis and inflexion both with res...
Periphrasis and Inflexion in Diachrony
Evidence from the Romance languages has played a central role in linguistic debates regarding the... more Evidence from the Romance languages has played a central role in linguistic debates regarding the relation between structure and change. One of the issues that has attracted most attention has been the connection between periphrasis and inflexion: Latin had rich systems of verbal and nominal inflexion that interacted in various ways with existing periphrastic patterns and structures that incorporated the ingredients of incipient Romance periphrases. These structures are of interest not only to those whose principal focus lies in exploring and explaining the development of the Romance languages, but also to those whose concern is with the broader theoretical implications for our understanding of language structure, variation, and change. This chapter sets out the issues, both theoretical—what models are most appropriate to describe and explain the Romance data?—and empirical—what sources of data are available and what issues arise in exploiting them? We begin with the criteria that s...
Transactions of the Philological Society, 2019
Introducing a collection of papers on suppletion looked at from a diachronic angle, this paper su... more Introducing a collection of papers on suppletion looked at from a diachronic angle, this paper surveys questions that have been asked (or should be) and answers that have been considered, in this issue and elsewhere, about how, why, where, and when suppletion originates, with particular lexical items and morphological categories; what happens to suppletion once and as long as it is there; how, why, where, and when suppletion disappears again; and how suppletion fits with particular approaches to morphology and general theories of language.
1. Similarity and diversity in the evolution of Italo-Romance PART I: VERBAL STRUCTURES 2. The de... more 1. Similarity and diversity in the evolution of Italo-Romance PART I: VERBAL STRUCTURES 2. The development of the southern subjunctive: Morphological loss and syntactic gain 3. Perfective auxiliation in Italo-Romance: The complementarity of historical and modern cross-dialectal evidence 4. Passive and impersonal reflexives in the Italian dialects: Synchronic and diachronic aspects 5. On the personal infinitive in Sicilian 6. Glimpsing the future: Some rare anomalies in the history of the Italo-Romance and Gallo-Romance future and conditional stem, and what they suggest about paradigm structure 7. Person endings in the old Italian verb system PART 2: (PRO)NOMINAL STRUCTURES 8. Prosodic restructuring and morphological opacity: The evolution of Italo-Romance clitic clusters 9. Subject clitics and macroparameters 10. Sicilian 1st and 2nd person oblique tonic pronouns: A historical and comparative examination 11. Patterns of variation and diachronic change in Piedmontese object clitic syntax 12. Gender assignment and pluralization in Italian and the Veneto 13. Kind-defining relative clauses in the diachrony of Italian 14. Synchronic and diachronic clues on the internal structure of 'where' in Italo-Romance
Oxford Handbooks Online, 2011
Continuity and Variation in Germanic and Romance
In the literature on semantic and categorial change French chez and Mainland Scandinavian hos are... more In the literature on semantic and categorial change French chez and Mainland Scandinavian hos are often cited together as parallel examples of locative prepositions deriving from nouns referring to the concept ‘house’. In this paper we compare in detail the philological records and the more recent development of the two items as well as that of the cognate Insular Scandinavian hjá. We show that while there are similarities in the development of Latin CASA / French chez and hos, as frequently suggested in the literature, there are also significant divergences. We argue in favour of a reevaluation of the origin of hos aligning it with hjá rather than casa as suggested in Noreen (1892), and show that if so revised, the differences can be shown to arise from the different meanings of the source terms: Latin casa ‘hut, house’ and later ‘place’ as opposed to Old Swedish hos and Old Icelandic hjá ‘group of people, company’. We then go on to explore the consequences of these different diach...
In some theoretical approaches, grammatical relations are assumed to be defined structurally, so ... more In some theoretical approaches, grammatical relations are assumed to be defined structurally, so that the crucial clue to the grammatical relation of an element is its position in the tree. Lexical Functional Grammar, in contrast, does not assume a universal ...
Yearbook of Morphology, 1997
Paradigms, periphrases and pronominal inflection: a feature-based account* KERSTIBORJARS, NIGEL V... more Paradigms, periphrases and pronominal inflection: a feature-based account* KERSTIBORJARS, NIGEL VINCENT AND CAROL CHAPMAN 1. INTRODUCTION How to model the relation between inflection and syntax has been a perennial topic of debate. Broadly ...
Dynamics of Language Changes, 2020
Current Issues in Linguistic Theory, 1995
Tense, Aspect, Modality, and Evidentiality, 2018
The relatedness of non-finite constructions and evidentiality has been observed in various Europe... more The relatedness of non-finite constructions and evidentiality has been observed in various European languages. Passive matrix verbs plus infinitive in English, the corresponding though less productive pattern in Dutch, reportive passives in Danish, and evidential participial constructions in Lithuanian have all received attention in the literature. We continue this line of investigation, focussing on the Accusativus cum Participio, found in contemporary Lithuanian only with verbs of communication, cognition and perception. Our quantitative and qualitative corpus-based analysis investigates its distribution in different types of discourse and provides evidence to support the claim that the use of the non-agreeing ‘be’-participle is obligatory because it marks a proposition. We compare our account with similar uses of non-finite verb in other languages
The Italianist, 2010
I am very flattered and honoured to be invited to give this lecture, but very sad that there is a... more I am very flattered and honoured to be invited to give this lecture, but very sad that there is an occasion for it. I came to know Clara Cooper when I was appointed to my first permanent academic post in 1974 as one of two lecturers in the newly established Sub-Department of Italian within the Department of French at the University of Lancaster. Her husband Richard Cooper had been one of the moving forces in getting that new unit established and Clara and Richard were generous and enthusiastic hosts to me and my fellow appointee, Paolo Rossi, on many occasions. Another of the instigators of the Italian section was the Machiavelli scholar Russell Price, who was marrried to Francesca, a Calabrian. Paolo and I had the pleasure and the duty of being entertained reciprocally in the two houses and studiously never coming to a conclusion as to whether it was better to eat Calabrian food in Francesca's house or Torinese food in Clara's house! After those years in Lancaster our paths diverged: Richard and Clara moved to Oxford, and I moved to other posts before settling in Manchester. In addition to being an excellent cook and host, Clara was a dedicated and much appreciated teacher of the Italian language, as we have heard, and she was always interested in new ideas and keen to keep up with latest developments. In fact, the last time she and I met was in November 2003 at a workshop for teachers of Italian organised by Anna Laura Lepschy and Anna Rita Tamponi at University College London. On that occasion I spoke on the theme of teaching Old Italian within the modern curriculum and it seems appropriate therefore that I should take up again the topic of the early stages of the language, but this time in a historical and geographical context rather than a pedagogical one. One of the received ideas that teachers passed on to their pupils and students in the days when Clara and I in our different countries began to study was that Italian has changed very little in the course of the seven centuries since Dante composed the Divine Comedy and hence that this
The Modern Language Review, 1989
International Journal of American Linguistics, 1978
... We present both his orthography and his pronunciation: (39) ozoup [os6uB] iguana (see 8). (40... more ... We present both his orthography and his pronunciation: (39) ozoup [os6uB] iguana (see 8). (40) zohol [so?61]fish (see 6). (41) tom [tom] fish poison (camote, veneno para pescado) (see 2). (42 ... 7 Ibid. 8 P. Ladefoged, Preliminaries to Linguistic Phonetics (Chicago, 1971), p. 111. ...
This paper considers and compares the status of the concept of head within different grammatical ... more This paper considers and compares the status of the concept of head within different grammatical frameworks (Minimalism, LFG and HPSG) and its relevance to our understanding of the mechanisms of change involved in grammaticalization. Our data is drawn from the developments of lexical prepositions into grammatical prepositions and complementisers in Romance and Germanic. We argue in favour of a non-derivational approach and in particular against accounts in which all developments are mediated through a chain of functional heads of the kind deployed in cartography and nanosyntax.
Nine Romance languages are discussed, first in context of their common Latin origins, and then as... more Nine Romance languages are discussed, first in context of their common Latin origins, and then as individual studies. The final chapter is devoted to Romance-based Creole languages. This book should be of interest to students and lecturers in linguistics, language study and Romance linguistics.
Typological Studies in Language, 2010
... 292 Nigel Vincent and Kersti Borjars go'and'come', we can postulate itive (or ... more ... 292 Nigel Vincent and Kersti Borjars go'and'come', we can postulate itive (or andative) and ventive aspect (cf. ... Stage 3: this effect, which is in origin pragmatic, is grammaticalized through a shift from D to T Of this last stage in the change they observe: Dand Tare both heads ...
Periphrasis and Inflexion in Diachrony
This chapter offers a brief overview of how Martin Maiden’s theoretical interests and empirical f... more This chapter offers a brief overview of how Martin Maiden’s theoretical interests and empirical foci have developed over the course of his career, starting with his early work on metaphony and moving through to his central engagement with the concept of the morphome. We consider the way his explorations of the structure and history of Romance inflexional systems provide essential diachronic confirmation of the need to recognize such a concept and of the way it relates not only to individual items but to the overall organization of the paradigm. We move on from there to consider the place of the morphome and morphome-based thinking within recent developments in morphological theory and in particular the way different approaches define—and in some cases erase!—the boundary between morphology and syntax. The chapter concludes with a brief overview of the individual chapters contained in this volume and the light they shed on the relations between periphrasis and inflexion both with res...
Periphrasis and Inflexion in Diachrony
Evidence from the Romance languages has played a central role in linguistic debates regarding the... more Evidence from the Romance languages has played a central role in linguistic debates regarding the relation between structure and change. One of the issues that has attracted most attention has been the connection between periphrasis and inflexion: Latin had rich systems of verbal and nominal inflexion that interacted in various ways with existing periphrastic patterns and structures that incorporated the ingredients of incipient Romance periphrases. These structures are of interest not only to those whose principal focus lies in exploring and explaining the development of the Romance languages, but also to those whose concern is with the broader theoretical implications for our understanding of language structure, variation, and change. This chapter sets out the issues, both theoretical—what models are most appropriate to describe and explain the Romance data?—and empirical—what sources of data are available and what issues arise in exploiting them? We begin with the criteria that s...
Transactions of the Philological Society, 2019
Introducing a collection of papers on suppletion looked at from a diachronic angle, this paper su... more Introducing a collection of papers on suppletion looked at from a diachronic angle, this paper surveys questions that have been asked (or should be) and answers that have been considered, in this issue and elsewhere, about how, why, where, and when suppletion originates, with particular lexical items and morphological categories; what happens to suppletion once and as long as it is there; how, why, where, and when suppletion disappears again; and how suppletion fits with particular approaches to morphology and general theories of language.
1. Similarity and diversity in the evolution of Italo-Romance PART I: VERBAL STRUCTURES 2. The de... more 1. Similarity and diversity in the evolution of Italo-Romance PART I: VERBAL STRUCTURES 2. The development of the southern subjunctive: Morphological loss and syntactic gain 3. Perfective auxiliation in Italo-Romance: The complementarity of historical and modern cross-dialectal evidence 4. Passive and impersonal reflexives in the Italian dialects: Synchronic and diachronic aspects 5. On the personal infinitive in Sicilian 6. Glimpsing the future: Some rare anomalies in the history of the Italo-Romance and Gallo-Romance future and conditional stem, and what they suggest about paradigm structure 7. Person endings in the old Italian verb system PART 2: (PRO)NOMINAL STRUCTURES 8. Prosodic restructuring and morphological opacity: The evolution of Italo-Romance clitic clusters 9. Subject clitics and macroparameters 10. Sicilian 1st and 2nd person oblique tonic pronouns: A historical and comparative examination 11. Patterns of variation and diachronic change in Piedmontese object clitic syntax 12. Gender assignment and pluralization in Italian and the Veneto 13. Kind-defining relative clauses in the diachrony of Italian 14. Synchronic and diachronic clues on the internal structure of 'where' in Italo-Romance
Oxford Handbooks Online, 2011
Continuity and Variation in Germanic and Romance
In the literature on semantic and categorial change French chez and Mainland Scandinavian hos are... more In the literature on semantic and categorial change French chez and Mainland Scandinavian hos are often cited together as parallel examples of locative prepositions deriving from nouns referring to the concept ‘house’. In this paper we compare in detail the philological records and the more recent development of the two items as well as that of the cognate Insular Scandinavian hjá. We show that while there are similarities in the development of Latin CASA / French chez and hos, as frequently suggested in the literature, there are also significant divergences. We argue in favour of a reevaluation of the origin of hos aligning it with hjá rather than casa as suggested in Noreen (1892), and show that if so revised, the differences can be shown to arise from the different meanings of the source terms: Latin casa ‘hut, house’ and later ‘place’ as opposed to Old Swedish hos and Old Icelandic hjá ‘group of people, company’. We then go on to explore the consequences of these different diach...
In some theoretical approaches, grammatical relations are assumed to be defined structurally, so ... more In some theoretical approaches, grammatical relations are assumed to be defined structurally, so that the crucial clue to the grammatical relation of an element is its position in the tree. Lexical Functional Grammar, in contrast, does not assume a universal ...
Yearbook of Morphology, 1997
Paradigms, periphrases and pronominal inflection: a feature-based account* KERSTIBORJARS, NIGEL V... more Paradigms, periphrases and pronominal inflection: a feature-based account* KERSTIBORJARS, NIGEL VINCENT AND CAROL CHAPMAN 1. INTRODUCTION How to model the relation between inflection and syntax has been a perennial topic of debate. Broadly ...
Dynamics of Language Changes, 2020
Current Issues in Linguistic Theory, 1995