Disappearance of Old French juxtaposition Genitive and case: a corpus study (original) (raw)
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Disappearance of Old French juxtaposition genitive and case: a corpus study (2010)
This paper presents a quantitative corpus study of the disappearance of the prepositionless modification of a noun by a noun from Old to Middle French. I show that if quantified in terms of its proportion of all the cases of modification of a noun by either a prepositional phrase or another noun, the use of this con- struction declines gradually from the oldest French texts available and disappears by the mid-15th century.
English Language and Linguistics, 2003
This article looks at the role of deflexion in the development of the genitive in English and offers an empirical base for evaluating some claims which have been made about how this development proceeded. It focuses primarily on the claim that it was impossible for the genitive to remain as a morphological case once the other case distinctions were lost in the nominal system. This claim is based on a dubious typological argument and evidence is presented that the genitive retained some inflectional characteristics in Middle English. The article also looks at how the so-called 'his genitive' found in some earlier texts fits into the general picture of the development of English possessives. 1 Research on this paper was partially funded by Australian Research Council Discovery Grant DP0208153. My thanks to two anonymous English Language and Linguistics referees who commented on an earlier draft. 2 My use of the term 'group genitive' will not cover appositives such as 'King Henry the Eighth's wives', as these are syntactically different, as will be shown below.
The pace of grammaticalization and the evolution of prepositional systems: Data from Romance
Folia Linguistica, 2012
In this paper, we illustrate the uneven pace of grammaticalization in Romance by analysing a specific area of language, viz. simple and complex prepositions. Our goal is to establish a list of prepositions which are in actual use in five present-day Romance languages (to wit, French, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian and Spanish). In order to do so, we check the validity of existing lists against written and spoken corpora, and evaluate the degree of grammaticalization of each morpheme or construction, on the basis of (mainly) morpho-syntactic criteria. Additionally, and most importantly, a corpusbased approach makes it possible to observe these items' frequency (Bybee 2006). The result offers a clear picture of the degree of grammaticalization of prepositions in present-day Romance, showing that French seems indeed to be the most grammaticalized Romance language, followed by Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and Romanian.
We present a cross-constructional approach to the history of the dative alternation and the genitive alternation in Late Modern English (AD 1650 to AD 1990), drawing on richly annotated datasets and modern statistical modeling techniques. We follow sociolinguistic theory and the recent literature on gradient grammatical constraints in assuming that syntactic variation and change is probabilistic rather than categorical in nature. In this spirit, we show that historical dative and genitive variability exhibits some theoretically interesting common traits, such as the fact that the effect of more or less animate recipients in dative constructions and more or less animate possessors in genitive constructions appears to vary in parallel. This we interpret against the cultural backdrop of, for example, overall distributional changes in animacy categories, and we offer that distributional fluctuations such as these can trigger changes in probabilistic grammars in the long term.
(Definite) denotation and case in Romance: history and variation
Variation in Romance Languages
Recent minimalist approaches have reduced case to independent primitives (agreement, Tense)-but without any connection to its morphological expression. To solve this dichotomy, we consider the Latin-s case ending. Rejecting default treatments, we conclude that-s is associated with denotational, operator properties. These can be read as the set forming operator i.e. plural; as the inclusion operator, i.e. partitive, possessor, etc. (in a word 'oblique'); or as the quantificational closure of EPP contexts ('nominative'). These properties are preserved in the two-case declension of medieval Gallo-Romance, and in its residues in Romansh varieties. Thus so-called case is a denotational, 'determiner-like' element, with consequences for the classical historical correlation between loss of Latin case and development of the Romance determiner system. * We are very grateful to all our informants-among others, Mr. Rest Cundrau Demont for Vella (Grisons).
Journal of Germanic Linguistics, 2003
This book, which was written as a Habilitationsschrift, began as a study of the so-called Saxon genitive (prenominal genitive) in German, but has come to encompass all the diachronic changes that have occurred in the German nominal system, especially to the left of the noun. The study attempts to give a synchronic analysis of the relationships within the noun phrase from a diachronic perspective. Moreover, data from other Germanic languages are taken into account, especially from English and the Scandinavian languages. All the changes in the German NP are attributed by Demske to a single change in the relationship between articles and nouns, from semantic to a morphologically motivated relationship (320). After the introductory chapter 1, chapter 2 deals with agreement within the nominal system, chapter 3 with possessive pronouns, and chapter 4 with the attributive genitive. The book concludes with some general implications for diachronic syntax. Chapter 1, "Einleitung," gives an overview of previous analyses of the German nominal system, pointing out some of the problems with the NP analysis. Demske assumes the DP hypothesis, which claims that nominal phrases are not projections of nouns but rather of the functional category D(eterminer). The DP analysis overcomes the limitations of the NP analysis and is especially attractive for German, since case, number, and gender are primarily realized on the article rather than on the noun itself. Chapter 2, "Grammatische Merkmale und Relationen," deals with the marking of the features case, number, gender, and definiteness on nouns, adjectives, and articles. First, Demske outlines the inflectional and agreement properties of the noun phrase in New High German (NHG), especially the problems of adjective inflection. Then she discusses some previous approaches within both the generative and the HPSG (head-driven phrase structure grammar) frameworks. Demske brings historical data from Old High German (OHG) and Early New High German (ENHG) into this discussion.
Leipzig fourmille de typologues : Genitive objects in comparison
Typological Studies in Language, 2008
This paper examines genitive objects in a range of familiar European languages, in particular German, English, Latin, French and Italian. Three initial examples are given in (1)-(3) (in each case, the genitive object is in boldface). (1) French Claire fleurit le balcon de géraniums. 'Claire plants the balcony with geraniums.' (2) Latin (Lucilius 272) quarum et abundemus rerum et quarum indigeamus 'of which things we have too many and of which we have too few' (3) German Michael gedenkt der gemeinsamen Jahre. 'Michael thinks of the years spent together.' * An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Drittes Bamberger Romanistisches Arbeitsgespräch, 12 April 1997. We thank the participants for useful discussion, especially Annegret Bollée, Peter Koch, and Max Grosse.