PAPERS FROM THE 7th ICHL

AMSTERDAM STUDIES IN THE THEORY AND

HISTORY OF LINGUISTIC SCIENCE

General Editor
E.F. KONRAD KOERNER
(University of Ottawa)

Series IV - CURRENT ISSUES IN LINGUISTIC THEORY

Advisory Editorial Board

Henning Andersen (Copenhagen); Raimo Anttila (Los Angeles)

Thomas V.Gamkrelidze (Tbilisi); Hans-Heinrich Lieb (Berlin)
J.Peter Maher (Chicago); Ernst Pulgram (Ann Arbor, Mich.)
E.Wyn Roberts (Vancouver, B.C.); Danny Steinberg (Tokyo)

Volume 48

Anna Giacalone Ramat

Onofrio Carruba and Giuliano Bernini (eds.)

Papers from the 7th International Conference on Historical Linguistics

 PAPERS
from the
7th INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE
on
HISTORICAL LINGUISTICS

Edited by

ANNA GIACALONE RAMAT

ONOFRIO CARRUBA and GIULIANO BERNINI

JOHN BENJAMINS PUBLISHING COMPANY

AMSTERDAM/PHILADELPHIA

1987
 This book was published with the financial support
of the Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche.

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

International Conference on Historical Linguistics (7th: 1985: Pavia, Italy)
Papers from the 7th International Conference on Historical Linguistics.
(Amsterdam studies in the theory and history of linguistic science. Series IV, Current
issues in linguistic theory, ISSN 0304-0763; v. 48)
Conference held in Pavia, Italy, Sept. 9-13, 1985.
Bibliography: p.
Includes index.
1. Historical linguistics -- Congresses. I. Giacalone Ramat, Anna, 1937- . II. Carruba,
Onofrio. III. Bernini, Giuliano. IV. Title. V. Title: Papers from the Seventh International
Conference on Historical Linguistics. VI. Series.
P140.I5 1985 410 87-8100
ISBN 90 272 3542 2 (alk. paper)
© Copyright 1987 - John Benjamins B.V.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or
any other means, without written permission from the publisher.
 TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preface page ix
General Programme of the Conference » xi
John Anderson, Gothic obstruents: The limits of reconstruction » 1
Françoise Bader, Structure de l'énoncé indo-européen » 13
Joëlle Bailard, Il s'en va où le français, et pourquoi? » 35
Giuliano Bernini, Attempting the reconstruction of negation pat­
terns in PIE » 57
Pier Marco Bertinetto, Structure and origin of the «narrative»
imperfect » 71
Bernard H. Bichakjian, The evolution of word order: 
paedomorphic explanation » 87
Joan L. Bybee and William Pagliuca, The evolution of future
meaning » 109
Theodora Bynon, Syntactic change and the lexicon » 123
Gualtiero Calboli, Die Syntax der ältesten lateinischen Prosa » 137
Andrew Carstairs, Diachronic evidence and the affix-clitic
distinction » 151
Thomas D. Cravens, The syllable and phonological strength: Gra­
dient loss of gemination in Corsican » 163
William Croft, Hava Bat-Zeev Shyldkrot, and Suzanne Kemmer,
Diachronic semantic processes in the middle voice » 179
Gerrit J. Dimmendaal, Drift and selective mechanisms in mor­
phological change: The Eastern Nilotic case » 193
Dorothy Disterheft, The diachronic relationship of morphology
and syntax » 211
Nils E. Enkvist and Brita Wårvik, Old English þa, temporal
chains, and narrative structure » 221
Thomas Fraser, The establishment of «by» to denote agency in
English passive constructions » 239
vi TABLE OF CONTENS

Herbert Galton, From Indo-European perfect to Slavic perfect

to Slavic preterite » 251
John Harris, On doing comparative reconstruction with genetical­
ly unrelated languages » 267
Henry M. Hoenigswald, A and the prehistory of Greek noun
accentuation » 283
Cor Hoppenbrouwers, The instability of peripheral /./, / ø . / ,
and /  . / in Dutch lects » 285
Paul J. Hopper and Janice Martin, Structuralism and diachrony:
The development of the indefinite article in English » 295
Robert J. Jeffers, On methodology in syntactic reconstruction:
Reconstructing inter-clause syntax in prehistoric Indo-European » 305
Romano Lazzeroni, Considerazioni sulla cronologia relativa dei
mutamenti fonetici » 325
Winfred P. Lehmann, Time » 339
Helmut Liidtke, Auxiliary verbs in the universal theory of
language change » 349
Silvia Luraghi, Patterns of case syncretism in Indo-European
languages » 355
Yakov Malkiel, Integration of phonosymbolism with other
categories of language change » 373
Derry L. Maisch, The grammaticalization of social relationship:
The origin of number to encode deference » 407
Maria Manoliu-Manea, From conversational to conventional
implicature: The Romanian pronouns of identity and their
substitutes » 419
Celestina Milani, Note su / s / interconsonantica nei dialetti greci
antichi » 429
Donka Minkova, The prosodic character of early schwa deletion
in English » 445
William Pagliuca and Richard Mowrey, Articulatory evolution » 459
Rebecca Posner, Creolization and syntactic change in Romance » 473
Aldo Luigi Prosdocimi, Syllabicity as a genus, Sievers' law as
a species » 483
Norbert Reiter, Die Entwicklung von komplexen zu einfachen
semantischen Inhalten » 507
 TABLE OF CONTENS vii

Elke Ronneberger-Sibold, A performance model for a natural

theory of linguistic change » 517
Haiim B. Rosén, On «normal» full root structure and its
historical development » 535
Thomas F. Shannon, The rise and fall of final devoicing » 545
Elizabeth Closs Traugott and Richard Dasher, On the historical
relation between mental and speech act verbs in English and
Japanese » 561
Dieter Wanner, On the persistence of imperfect grammars: clitic
movement from Late Latin to Romance » 575
Otmar Werner, The aim of morphological change is a good
mixture - not a uniform language type » 591
Margaret E. Winters, Syntactic and semantic space: The develop­
ment of the French subjunctive » 607
Roger Wright, The study of semantic change in early Romance
(Late Latin) , » 619
Wolfgang U. Wurzel, Paradigmenstrukturbedingungen: Aufbau
und Veränderung von Flexionsparadigmen » 629
Index of Names » 645
Index of Languages » 657
Index of Subject Matter » 665

m
 PREFACE

The VII International Conference on Historical Linguistics was held

in Pavia, Italy, from September 9th to 13th, 1985, in the pleasant setting
of the old University with its courtyards and towers lit up by the late sum­
mer sun.
It was organized by Anna Giacalone Ramat, President of the Interna­
tional Society for Historical Linguistics for the period 1983-85, assisted by
the following Local Committee members: G. Bernini, O. Carruba, M.-E.
Conte, G. Graffi, G. Manzelli, M.V. Molinari, P. Ramat, C. Segre.
The International Committee, whose members at the time of the Con­
ference were J. Fisiak (Vice-President), H. Andersen (Secretary), T. Fraser,
M. Gerritsen, M. Harris and P. Hopper, gave advice before, during and
after the Conference and their help was invaluable in the task of assessing
which abstracts should be included in the programme and which ought to
appear in this volume. I wish to thank all my colleagues for their hard work
and sound advice and particularly the co-editors of this book O. Carruba
and G. Bernini.
There were over two hundred participants attending the Conference,
coming from all the corners of the world: Eastern and Western Europe, Iran,
Japan, New Zealand and the U.S. More than 65 papers were read which
created great interest, stimulated much debate and provided an excellent over­
view of the current state of the art in historical linguistics and related topics.
The papers collected in this book clearly show that new issues are emerging
in the theory of linguistic change which tend to incorporate non-autonomous
principles like naturalness in phonetic processes, the influence of socio-
cultural settings and discourse pragmatics, This wide range of issues is design­
ed to contribute to an explanatory theory of language change.
On the last day of the Conference, Friday, September 13th, two
workshops were held on Historical Development of Auxiliaries (the co­
ordinators were Martin Harris and Paolo Ramat) and on Reconstructions
of the Indo-European Sound Systems and Their Consequences (co-ordinator
Theo Vennemann). The papers from these workshops will appear in the near
x PREFACE

future, in two volumes published by Mouton-De Gruyter.

It was possible to hold the VII International Conference on Historical
Linguistics in Pavia thanks to the generous co-operation of several institu­
tions which gave substantial subsidies. We must thank the following: the
University of Pavia, the Amministrazione Provinciale di Pavia, the Regione
Lombardia, the Camera di Commercio di Pavia, the Banca del Monte di
Pavia e Bergamo, the Banca Popolare di Lodi. The Consiglio Nazionale
delle Ricerche gave a generous contribution towards the publication of this
volume.
Special thanks are due to all our colleagues and young researchers who
worked enthusiastically and efficiently and who made the conference
organization so smooth. I wish to mention, in particular, C. Pagani and
M. Mazzoleni, for their invaluable collaboration in running the secretariat
for about two years and in helping in the task of preparing the indices.
Anna Giacalone Ramat
Pavia, November 1986
 GENERAL PROGRAMME OF THE CONFERENCE

Monday, September 9th

9.00 Registration
9.30 Official opening of the Conference (Aula Magna dell'Università)
10.00 Malkiel, Y.: integration of phonosymbolism with other categories of lan­
guage change
10.40 Lazzeroni, R.: Considerazioni sulla cronologia relativa dei mutamenti fo­
netici
11.20 Lüdtke, H.: Auxiliary verbs in the universal theory of language change
12.15 Cocktail given by the Rector in the Rector's reception rooms

SECTION I
Chair: Martin Harris
15.00 Hock, H.H.: Yes, Virginia, syn­
tactic reconstruction is possible
15.35 Calboli, G.: Die Syntax der älte­
sten lateinischen Prosa
16.10 Hopper, P.J.: Syntactic meaning
and syntactic change: Some obser­
vations
SECTION II
Chair: Elisabeth Traugott
15.00 Neroznak, V.P.: Problems of lin­
guistic reconstruction: New per­
spectives
15.35 Dezsö, L.: Historical typology of
morphosyntax: Past, present and
future
16.10 Bader, F.: Structure de l'énoncé
indo-européen

Break
17.00 Bichakjian, .: Typology and evo­
lution of word order
17.35 Bailard, J.: Il s'en va où le fran­
çais, et pourquoi?: The explana­
tory value of pragmatic and syn­
tactic functions in word order
change
Break
17.00 Bynon, Th.: Historical syntax and
the substance-structure dichoto­
my
17.35 Lehmann, W.P.: Time in histori­
cal linguistics
XII GENERAL PROGRAMME
Tuesday, September 10th
SECTION I
Chair: Georges Lüdi
9.00 Cravens, Th.D.: The syllable and
phonological strength: Gradient
loss of gemination in Corsican
9.35 Wanner, D.: On the persistence
of 'imperfect grammars': Clitic
movement from Late Latin to Ro­
mance
10.10 Stehl, Th.: Sostrato, variazione
linguistica e diacronia
Break
11.00 Skytte, G.: Categoria e funzione
nella linguistica diacronica, con
particolare riguardo all'introdut­
tore dell'infinito nelle lingue ro­
manze
11.35 Bertinetto, P.M.: Structure and o-
rigin of the «narrative» imperfect
12.10 Parry, M.M: «Conditional para­
digms» in Piedmontese and Ligu-
rian dialects
Break
SECTION I
Chair: Alberto Mioni
15.00 Luraghi, S.: Patterns of case syn­
cretism
15.35 Posner, R.: Creolization and lin­
guistic change
16.10 Campbell, L.: Pipil language
change
Break
17.00 Dolde, K., Eichinger, L.: Syntak­
tischer Wandel und Textverständ­
nis am Beispiel von Grimmelshau-
sens Simplicius Simplicissimus
SECTION II
Chair: Robert Jeffers
9.00 Dietz, K.: Lehnwortphonologie
und englische Sprachgeschichte
9.35 Pagliuca, W. - Mowrey, R.: Arti-
culatory evolution
10.10 Shannon, Th. F.: The rise and fall
of final devoicing
Break
11.00 Dörum, H.: Disorder and regula­
rity in linguistic change
11.35 Lubbe, H J . : Onset 5p-, st- and
sk- in Germanic languages
12.10 Minkova, D.: The prosodic cha­
racter of schwa loss in Old English
and schwa preservation in Early
Modern English
Break
SECTION II
Chair: Robert Stockwell
15.00 Dimmendaal, G.J.: Allomorphism
in Eastern Nilotic languages: So­
me dynamic historical processes
15.35 Disterheft, D. : On the relationship
of syntactic and morphological
change
16.10 Carstairs, A.: Diachronic eviden­
ce and the affix-clitic distinction
Break
17.00 Werner, O.: Neither uniform lan­
guage type nor agglutination are
the aims of morphological change
 GENERAL PROGRAMME
17.35 Price, G.: Substrata, superstrata,
adstrata and the early history of
French
18.10 Harris, J.: On doing comparati­
ve reconstruction with genetical­
ly unrelated languages
Wednesday, September 11th
SECTION I
Chair: Nils Erik Enkvist
9.00 Ronneberger-Sibold, E.: A per­
formance model for a natural
theory of linguistic change
9.35 Lüdi, G.: Reflets de la variation
du français à l'époque de la revo­
lution dans un pastiche anti-
revolutionnaire
10.10 Winters, M.E.: Syntactic and se­
mantic space: The development of
French subjunctive
Break
11.00 Weigand, E.: Historical dialogue
grammar exemplified by poetic
dialogues of «Kudrun»
11.35 Croft, W. - Shyldkrot, H.B. -
Kemmer, S.: Diachronic seman­
tic processes in the middle voice
12.10 Baron, N.S.: The role of compu­
ter in language change
Afternoon
Excursion to the Certosa di Pavia
Thursday, September 12th
SECTION I
Chair: Simon Dik
9.00 Maisch, D.L.: The grammaticali-
zation of social relationship: The
origin of number to encode defe­
rence
XIII
17.35 Bybee, J.L. - Pagliuca, W.: The
evolution of future meaning
18.10 Fleischman, S.: Aspectual featu­
res of tense oppositions in narra­
tive discourse: A reversal of pre­
dictable diachronic patterns?
SECTION II
Chair: Konrad Koerner
9.00 Wurzel, W.U.: Paradigmenstruk-
turbedingungen: Aufbau und Ver­
änderung von Flexionsparadigmen.
9.35 Krisch, Th.: The role of presup­
positions in Old Norse compara­
tive constructions
10.10 Traugott, E. - Dasher, R.: On the
historical relation between mental
and speech act verbs in English.
Break
11.00 Manzelli, G.: The Nostratic back­
ground of Hungarian nyár «sum­
mer»
11.35 Splett, J.: Bedeutung und Bedeu-
tungsindizierung im Rahmen der
Wortfamilien des Althochdeut­
schen
12.10 Panagi, O.: Bahuvrīhi, Ellipse,
Synekdoche
SECTION II
Chair: Winfred Lehmann
9.00 Galton, H.: From Indoeuropean
perfect to Slavic perfect to Slavic
preterite
XIV GENERAL PROGRAMME

9.35 Manoliu, M.: Pragmatic strategies
and linguistic change
10.10 Reiter, N.: Beobachtungen zur se­
mantischen Entwicklung von Be­
ziehungsadjektiven im Russischen
Break
11.00 Fraser, Th.: The establishment of
by to denote agency in English
passive constructions
11.35 Conradie, J.: Semantic change in
modal auxiliaries as a result of
speech act embedment
12.10 Enkvist, N.E. - Wårvik, .: Old
English þā: A study in diachronic
text linguistics
Break
9.35 Prosdocimi, A.L.: La legge di Sie­
vers come species del genus silla-
bicità
10.10 Hoenigswald, H.M.: A and
the prehistory of Greek noun in­
flection
Break
11.00 Rosén, H.B.: On «normal» full
root structure and its historical de­
velopment
11.35 Jeffers, R.J.: Subordination in
Indo-European: The emergence of
grammatically signalled incorpo­
ration
12.10 Bernini, G.: Attempting the re­
construction of negation patterns
in PIE
Break

SECTION I SECTION II
Chair: Theodora Bynon Chair: Thomas Fraser
15.00 Hoppenbrouwers,  : The insta­ 15.00 Wright, R.: The study of seman­
bility of peripheral /./, / ø . / and tic change in Early Romance (La­
/  . / in Dutch lects te Latin)
15.35 Longobardi, G.: Teoria dei para­ 15.35 Milani,  : Note su / s / intercon­
metri sintattici e linguistica stori­ sonantica nei dialetti greci antichi
ca: alcune asimmetrie tra il goti­
co di Wulfila e l'originale greco
e la loro spiegazione
Break
16.30 Business Meeting of the Internat
19.30 Dinner at Collegio Nuovo

Friday, September 13th

WORKSHOP: HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT OF AUXILIARIES

(a) General Problems: Discussant: Paolo Ramat (Pavia)

Henning Andersen (Copenhagen)
Simon Dik (Amsterdam)
Eloise Jelinek (Arizona)
From auxiliary to desinence
Copula and auxiliary: synchronic and
diachronic aspects
Auxiliaries and ergative splits: a typolo­
gical parameter
 GENERAL PROGRAMME xv

(b) Exotic Languages: Discussant: Anna Rita Puglielli (Roma)

Ronald Emmerick (Hamburg)
Thomas Stolz (Bochum)
Auxiliaries in Khotanese
The development of the AUX-category
in pidgins and creoles: the case of the re-
sultative-perfective aspect and its relation
to anteriority in creoles

(c) Germanic Languages: Discussant: Martin Harris (Salford)

Louis Goossens (Antwerp) The auxiliarization of the English mo­
dals: a functional grammar view
Merja Kytö (Helsinki) On the use of modal auxiliaries indica­
ting possibility in early American English

(d) Romance Languages: Discussant: John Green (Bradford)

Harm Pinkster (Amsterdam)
Giampaolo Salvi (Budapest)
Ed Tuttle (UCLA)
Nigel Vincent (Cambridge)
The use of motion verbs as auxiliaries in
Latin
The Romance auxiliaries: a case of syn­
tactic reconstruction
The spread of ESSE as a universal auxi­
liary in Italo-Romance
«Venire» and «andare» as auxiliaries in
Italian

WORKSHOP: RECONSTRUCTIONS OF THE PROTO-INDO-EUROPEAN

SOUND SYSTEM AND THEIR CONSEQUENCES
Chief Discussants: Claude Boisson, Paul Hopper, Winfred Lehmann
1st Session. Chair: L.A. Prosdocimi
Konrad Koerner (Ottawa), Comments on reconstruction
V. Shevoroshkin (Ann Arbor), On Indo-European laryngeals and vowels
[Alfred Bammesberger] (Eichstätt)*, The laryngeal theory and the problems of mor­
phological reconstruction in Indo-European
Leo A. Connolly (Memphis), Laryngeal metathesis: An Aryan peculiarity?

2nd Session. Chair: Y. Malkiel

R.S.P. Beekes (Leiden), The nature of the PIE laryngeals
[William R. Schmalstieg] (Penn State University), The structural status of Indo-
European monophthongizations
Alexander Lubotsky (Leiden), Against the PIE phoneme *a
Discussion (Sessions 1 and 2). Chair: Y. Malkiel

3rd Session. Chair: O. Panagi

Thomas V. Gamkrelidze (Tbilisi), Language typology and Indo-European recon­
struction
Philip Baldi (Penn State University), The new look of Latin historical phonology
XVI GENERAL PROGRAMME

Theo Vennemann (München), Phonological and morphological consequences of the

«glottalic theory»
Erich P. Hamp (Chicago), The IE obstruent features and phonotactic constraints
[Frederik H.H. Kortlandt] (Chicago), On Lachmann's Law

4th Session. Chair: H.M. Hoenigswald

Jens Elmegard Rasmussen (København), Possibilities and limitations of sound
change typology
Michael Job (Bochum), Possibilities and limitations of sound change typology
W. Merlingen (Wien), Über die Grundlagen der Indogermanistik
Pierre Swiggers (Leuven), Towards a characterization of the PIE phoneme-system
Richard Schrodt (Wien), Neue Forschungen zur germanischen Lautverschiebung
Discussion (Sessions 3 and 4). Chair: Prof. H.M. Hoenigswald

Closing remarks

*[ ] around names mean that the paper was presented by a colleague and/or di­
scussed.
 GOTHIC OBSTRUENTS: THE LIMITS OF RECONSTRUCTION

JOHN ANDERSON
University of Edinburgh

I am concerned here with one instance of a problem in the legitimation

of what we reconstruct on the basis of texts of a language no longer
spoken*. I have increased the acuteness of the problem by looking at a
language with no extant descendants. However, I do not pursue the acuteness
further: we do have sister (or cousin) languages with descendants. But, I
am going to suggest, this shouldn't make us too confident.
Without later evidence, particularly of phonemicisation, attempts to
legitimate allophonic variation are usually dependent on general or com­
parative considerations; the texts typically do not provide evidence. In this
case, we need to recognise reduced legitimacy, unless it can be shown that
the postulated variation throws light on other, independently attested aspects
of the system. But we often have the same problem (though not so com­
monly recognised) in deciding on the general realisational type of a con­
trastive unit. It can happen that the orthography, as well as the comparative
evidence, is rather unhelpful.
We find an example in Wulfila's Gothic of a contrastive unit which
on comparative and graphogenetic grounds is plausibly a voiced obstruent,
but for which it is difficult to legitimate any allophony and even to be
more specific about its major realisation, or the type of the unit — in
particular, whether it is continuant or not. The unit contrasts with two
voiceless obstruents, stop and continuant respectively, as exemplified
in (1):

* This paper grew out of joint work on Gothic with Fran Colman. I am grateful to be
able to use here ideas that may have originated with her; she is, of course, not responsible
for any naughty bits.
2 JOHN ANDERSON

1 a. / k / b. / x / . / 3 /
kuni 'race' hawi 'hay' gawi 'region'
(ge-)lauk 'I-woke' þlauh 'I-fled' baug 'I-bent'
(us-)waikjan 'to-wake' hlahjan t-laugh' wagjan 'to-shake'
stiks 'point' slahs 'stroke' wigs 'journey'
These units are consistently separated in the orthography 1 . We have com­
parative and graphogenetic evidence for the voiceless velar plosive in (1.a),
whose orthographic representation is based on the Greek uncial kappa. The
character of the fricative in (b) is perhaps a little less certain: the symbol is
used to transliterate the Greek «spiritus asper» (though also occasionally kappa
— Penzl 1950: 221) and is sometimes inserted in Greek loans medially bet­
ween vowels in hiatus. This perhaps indicates that at least non-finally the unit
is not velar but already an aspirate, as in other Germanic languages, and as
is compatible with the use of the apparently Latin-based symbol <h>. But
the real problem is usually identified with (l.c).
Its etymological source turns up as voiced stop or continuant in other
Germanic languages. In some positions, at least, the stop value develops from
an earlier fricative, as in initial position in Old English, for instance (Hogg
1979, Anderson 1985). But that isn't very helpful in evaluating the state of
Gothic in this respect: even if all instances represented by <g> go back to
a fricative in some pre-Gothic stage, this does not, in the absence of a voiced
fricative/plosive contrast, determine the character of the Gothic unit; nor,
a fortiori, can we, in the absence of further evidence, reconstruct allophonies
for this unit. On this, see particularly Penzl 1950: 222. The use of a symbol
for the unit based on gamma is likewise unhelpful, given the lack of a
plosive/continuant contrast among voiced velars in both Gothic and Greek.
This is why I have used the eccentric phonemic symbol at the head of (l.c),
as neutral between / g / and / γ / . It seems to me that we have no way of
legitimating a choice between stop and continuant here. Thus, Voyles
(1981:10), for instance, is rather apologetic in opting for one phonemicisa-
tion rather than the other: «In instances of this type where two possible
analyses are so similar, we see no principled way of deciding between them».
1
I adopt here one of the usual romanisations of the Gothic alphabet (exemplified in
Wright 1910), but I include no editorial diacritics. The bulk of the Gothic we have is the substantial
remains of a fourth century translation (allegedly by Bishop Wulfila) of the Bible which is preserved
in a sixth century manuscript (Streitberg 1908). The alphabet is unique but clearly takes the Greek
uncial and to some extent the Roman and Runic alphabets as its model(s): see e.g. Wimmer 1887:
259-74.
 GOTHIC OBSTRUENTS 3

What we can reconstruct is a voiced obstruent. This is both a problem and

not a problem.
What I'm saying is two things: firstly, the contrastive system of Gothic
does not show a voiced velar plosive/continuant opposition, and our nota­
tion should reflect this (i.e. a neutralisation); secondly, the evidence does not
permit us to reconstruct allophonies or even principal realisation for this
«archi-unit», and our notation should not disguise this (i.e. the limits of
reconstruction). Utilisation of the notation of dependency phonology 2
enables us to satisfy both these (rather differently based) requirements: we
can provide an appropriate representation at both the contrastive and the
realisational levels. I now want to look at this.
We can broadly divide the properties or features that characterise a seg­
ment into two groups: articulatory, whose function is principally locational;
and categorial, properties to do with the nature of the sound source. We can
call these systematic groupings within the segment gestures (Lass 1976: ch.
6; Anderson and Jones 1977), to emphasise their relative autonomy. Different
segment-types within the categorial gesture are characterised by the presence
or absence or combination of two unary features or components, represented
V and C, V being the unary equivalent of Jakobson's vocalic and  of con­
sonantal. Some segment types are so distinguished in (2):
(2) |V| V;C.V |V;C| C.V;V |C.V| |C;V| |C|
vowels liquids nasals voiced voiceless voiced voiceless
fricatives fricatives plosives plosives
The simplest representations are those for vowels and voiceless plosives, each
characterised by the absence of one of the components  and V. Other
segment-types involve combinations of  and V. Nasals and voiced plosives
show both  and V, but the semi-colon indicates that one component
predominates or governs, that to the left. With nasals, V predominates, 
is dependent; with voiced plosives, the reverse. Nasals are more vowel-like
than voiced plosives. In between are voiceless fricatives, where neither com­
ponent predominates, indicated by the period. Liquids and voiced fricatives
show the presence of a second V, rendering liquids more vowel-like than nasals
and voiced fricatives more vowel-like than voiceless. The verticals in (2) in-

2
On dependency phonology see e.g. Anderson and Jones 1977; Anderson 1980; Ewen
1977; Anderson and Ewen 1980, forthcoming; Durand forthcoming; Lass 1984: ch.ll; as well
as works referred to in the following.
4 JOHN ANDERSON

dicate that no further categorial components may be present in the

characterisation of the segment-type concerned. Thus, whereas |C| indicates
voiceless plosives,  without verticals allows for any segment with  in its
categorial representation — i.e. all consonants. In a system where there are
no more complex segment-types than those in (2), the representations for li­
quids and voiced fricatives need not bear verticals.
These representations define various phonological domains: the sonori­
ty hierarchy, which involves increasing preponderance of V; markedness rela­
tionships, which involve the inherent complexity of the representation; as we
have seen and shall see, appropriate natural classes. Space forbids the ex­
ploration of other domains, including the first two mentioned (see further
the works alluded to in note two above and references therein).
We can characterise the segments in (1) as to their categorial gestures
as in (3):
(3) a. / k / = |C| b. / x / = |C.V|  / 3 / = C;V
The verticals in (a) and (b) again require that only the components indicated
are present in the categorial gesture for the segment-type concerned. (3.c) is
the representation for a voiced obstruent: it neutralises the representations
for voiced plosives and voiced fricatives given in (2) in that it leaves it open
whether there is another V. The notation gives us a transparent way of
representing neutralisation, without recourse to a dubious third value in a
binary system and without a need for the additional apparatus of
underspecification theory (cf. e.g. Ewen and van der Hulst 1985).
In languages with a spoken form we can formulate how such a neutralised
segment is realised, as stop or fricative or both: we can fill in an extra V or the
verticals. But this is not the case in Gothic: we cannot legitimate such realisa-
tional statements. (3.c) is thus all we can reconstruct about the categorial type
of the voiced velar. And our notation should not force us to do more. (3.c)
is accordingly also our reconstruction of the realisation of this contrastive unit.
We can reconstruct perhaps a little more about the realisations of the
voiced obstruents whose spellings are transliterated as <b> and <d> — though
not as much as has sometimes been suggested. This depends on the inter­
pretation of alternations involving these units. First, however, let us look at
the sibilants: their distribution provides some of the evidence for reconstruc­
ting realisations for these other voiced obstruents.
I am assuming the articulatory pattern in (4) for the Gothic obstruents
at a contrastive level:
 GOTHIC OBSTRUENTS 5

(4) ARTICULATORY GESTURE



T
E
|u| d - Lu G

R
I
C;V / ß / <b> / 8 / <d> /z/ / 3 / <g> A
L
G
|C.V| /f/ /9/ /s/ /x/ E
S
T
|C| /p/ /t/ /k/ U
R
E
u, d and 1 are articulatory components: u = gravity, d = dentality, 1 =
linguality. /8, / 9 / and / t / are grouped as dental (redundantly lingual), which
is appropriate given their behaviour in various processes in Germanic; / 3 / ,
/ x / and / k / are velar (1.u); and / ß / , /f/ and / p / labial. The unmarked
obstruents, the sibilants, are also redundantly lingual. Linguality on its own
denotes alveolar. Again, I've chosen bizarre symbols to indicate that with
the labials and dentals also the voiced variant in the top row in (4) does not
show a stop/continuant contrast. / z / is redundantly C.V;V, a voiced fricative.
Comparative and graphogenetic evidence does not suggest the possibility of
a stop realisation.
The redundancy for dental and unmarked obstruents is given as (5):
(5) |(d)| ⇒ 1
and that for / z / as (6):
(6) {|1|}

{C;V} ⇒{C.V;V}
where { ] enclose gestures and the discontinuous lines represent association
(here between gestures).
6 JOHN ANDERSON

Notice now, however, that the unmarked obstruents / s / and / z / do not

show a stop/continuant contrast; and they are both realised as fricatives. So
the representations in (7) are appropriate, rather than those in (4):
(7) { }

| = /z/
|
{C;V}
{ }
|
| = /s/

{|C|}
and the redundancy in (8), rather than that in (6):
(8) {|l|}
|
|
{ C} ⇒ {V}
Thus, (8) as well as (5) applies to both / z / and / s / .
As the least marked obstruent, / s / is able to initiate clusters like those
in (9), apparently in defiance of the sonority hierarchy:
(9) speiwan «to-spit», steigan «to-ascend», skaidan «to-divide»
Such clusters also, as is well-known, behave as a unit under reduplication;
cf. (10.a) and (l0.b) with (l0.c):
(10) a. haitan «to-call» ⇒ haihait «I-called»
b. fraisan «to-tempt» ⇒ faifrais «I-tempted»
c. skaidan «to-divide» ⇒ skaiskaid «I-divided»
Whereas in (10.b) only the first consonant is reduplicated (as in (10.a)), in
(l0.c) the whole cluster is involved. This would make sense if the cluster in
examples like (lO.c) has the initial structure in (11):
(11) { J {|u|/d/l.u}

{|c|}
such that / s / gains a separate categorial gesture only by virtue of application
of (5) and (8). Thus, there is no infringement of the sonority hierarchy in
such clusters; and reduplication involves replication of the first consonant
 GOTHIC OBSTRUENTS 7

in all instances: s +  etc. are categorially simplex, such that a single  gesture
is associated with two distinct articulatory gestures.
The / s / ≠ / z / contrast is also very generally neutralised. There is a con­
trast only between sonorants:
(12) hazjan «to-praise», (ga-)marzjan «to-offend», maiza «greater» vs.
nasjan «to-save», lausjan «to-loose», galisa «silk»
Elsewhere we find a neutralised unit representable as in (13):
(13) { }

|
{C}
i.e. the minimal consonant, to which will apply the redundancies in (5) and
(8) to give (14):
(14) {|{C.V}
1|}
Mostly, the realisation of this is spelled with an <s>:
(15) sokjan «to-seek», smals «small», haihs «half-blind», andalaus «endless»
However, we do find <z> before a tautomorphemic voiced obstruent:
(16) huzd «treasure», azgo «ash» vs.
dis-dailjan «to-divide», us-bairan «to-carry-out»
The reahsational statement in (17) therefore seems appropriate for the unit
of (13/14):
(17) a. {C.V} ⇒ {C.V;V}/ {C;V}
b. ⇒{|C.V|}
if we take the spelling as our guide.
However, there is also evidence that in some cases the neutralisation is
derivative rather than initial/lexical. Consider alternations like that in the
strong neuters in (18):
(18) riqis «darkness» nom. sg. vs. riqizis gen. sg.
dius «wild beast» nom. sg. vs. diuzis gen. sg.
Between sonorants / z / and / s / are in contrast; compare (19) with (18):
(19) gras «grass» nom. sg. vs. grasis gen. sg.
agis «fear» nom. sg. vs. agisis gen. sg.
8 JOHN ANDERSON

Thus, initially the stem-final consonant in (19) is / s / while that in (18) is / z / ,

and the latter is neutralised by a fricativisation rule of the form of (20):
(20) {C;V} ⇒ {C.V} / }
which applies at word level (see below).
This finally takes us back to the labial and dental obstruents, for we find
the same kind of alternation in their case:
(21) a. hlaif «bread» acc. sg. vs. hlaibis gen. sg.
gaf «I-gave» vs. giban «to-give»
b. goþ «good» nom.sg.neut. vs. godis gen. sg.
baiþ) «I-waited» vs. beidan «to-wait»
Compare again the invariant (22):
(22) a. hlaf «I-stole» vs. hlifan «to-steal»
b. iþ «oath» acc. sg. vs. aiþis gen. sg.
Again, the stems in (21) terminate initially in / ß / , / § / ; and the voiceless
variants can once more be allowed for by (17.b) provided that they too have
undergone the neutralisation in (20) (which, indeed, will apply to them unless
restricted), i.e. they are fricative word-finally.
However, this doesn't give us any evidence for the normal non-neutralised
realisations of / ß / and //. Specifically we don't have evidence from this that
they are fricative elsewhere, even in the forms in (21). The formulation of
the appropriate generalisation does not require this; nor (despite e.g. van
Hamel 1931: § 78; Moulton 1948) can the evidence be pressed to support such
a suggestion, except with reduced legitimacy, on the basis of the comparative
evidence and the naturalness of intervocalic weakening. The evidence other­
wise is as indecisive as in the case of <g>. Notice, for instance, that Gothic
<b> is found in Latin loanwords as an equivalent for both Latin <b> and
Latin <v> (Braune-Ebbinghaus 1961: § 54).
In order to allow for the forms in (23):
(23) a. hlaifs «bread» nom. sg., gaft «you-(sg.)-gave»
b. goþs «good» nom. sg. masc.
(20) should be extended as in (24):
(24) {C;V} ⇒ {C.V}/ (~V;)]
(given that / s / and / t / are the only obstruents to appear in this position),
which will apply to (23), with following obstruent (~ V;) as well as the
appropriate forms in (21), and vacuously in the case of the /s/'s in (25):
 GOTHIC OBSTRUENTS 9

(25) ga-qiss «consenting», dis-wiss «dissolution», us-qiss «accusation»

(20) applies at word level, even after the formation of compounds, as il­
lustrated in (26):
(26) a. twalib-wintrus «twelve-years-old» vs. twalif «twelve»
b. gud-hus «temple» vs. guþ «god»
Cf. too the «cliticised» forms in (27):
(27) az-uh «each» vs. as «who, anyone», arjiz-uh «each» vs. arjis
«who»
Gothic spelling does not provide the same evidence of the application
of (20/24) to velars, as illustrated in (28):
(28) dag «day» acc. sg., dags nom. sg.; og «I-fear», ogs «fear!» sg.
We find alternation between <h> and <g> only in a few paradigms, and then
not in the same contexts as (20/24) requires:
(29) aih/aig «I-have», aigum/aihum «we have»
Here we have variation in the same contexts, deriving from the vestiges of
Verner's Law, and difficult to interpret (is the alternation phonological or
orthographic only?). Apparently, then, the articulatorily most complex
obstruent (1.u) must be excluded from (20/24). It may be that the velar did
fricativise and devoice in Gothic, and that this fails to be represented in the
spelling because, say, <h> represents an aspirate and so is inappropriate as
a spelling for the (non-contrastive) voiceless velar fricative3. But I see no
way to legitimate such a suggestion.
However, we perhaps do get from this complex of phenomena some
evidence concerning one further realisation of / ß / and / 8 / . For the forms
in (30) do not show the results of (24) and so a voiceless realisation:
(30) a. swarb «I-wiped» cf. swairban «to-wipe»; band «I-bound» cf. bindan
«to-bind»; kald «cold» nom. sg. neut., cf. kaldis gen.sg.
b. gards «house» nom.sg., cf. gardis gen.sg.; dumb «dumb» nom.sg.
neut., dumbs nom.sg.masc., cf. dumbis gen.sg.

 That <h> represented an aspirate even in final position is perhaps suggested by its fre­
quent assimilation to following consonants: iþ-þ rather than nih-þan, for instance. But this
phenomenon is limited to closed-class items. On the weakness of the traditional argument for
supposing that / 3 / devoices see Voyles 1981: 70, though / x / and / 3 / are even more generally
contrastive than he suggests. We find <z, b, d> retained in a minority of instances (Streitberg
1905-6: § 1) where by (20/24) we would expect <s, f, þ>. It is, I think, indeterminable whether
this represents (spelling or phonological) analogy or variable application of (20/24) (cf. Voyles
1981: 71).
10 JOHN ANDERSON

even though here / ß / and / 8 / are word-final or pre-word-final-/s/. After

sonorants / ß / and / 8 / are not eligible for (24). We can therefore plausibly
suggest that they are prevented from undergoing (24) by virtue of having
already been designated stops, by a plosivisation rule such as (31):
(31) {C;V} ⇒ {|C;V|} / {V;C}
However, (24) is also blocked after / z / , which is [C.V;V] (cf. (17.a)):
(32) gazds «sting» nom.sg.; huzd «treasure» nom. sg.
The environment for (31) should thus also include voiced obstruents. However,
since / ß / and / 8 / are not preceded by voiceless obstruents, we can generalise
(31) as in (33):
(33) {C;V} ⇒ {|C;V|} / {C}
i.e. / ß / and / 8 / (and, unless we restrict the rule, /3/) are plosive after another
consonant (cf. Moulton 1948: § 1.4).
I have tried to be explicit about what we can legitimate concerning the
realisation of Gothic obstruents, particularly the voiced ones. And I have sug­
gested a notation, independently developed, which (apart from permitting a
perspicuous representation of neutralisations — cf. again Anderson 1985)
allows in a natural way for the varying specificity that characterises what we
can reconstruct. In the case of the Gothic voiced non-sibilant obstruents
realisational specification beyond (3.c) is of doubtful legitimacy except with
the forms in (30) and (32) and the neutralisations due to (24). Notice finally
that the notation has permitted all the suggested formulations to be non-
structure-changing, except for (minimally) the word level rule (20/24); they
add more detail, fill blanks. But that's another story (cf. e.g. Anderson forth­
coming)!

REFERENCES

Anderson, John M. 1980. On the internal structure of phonological segments:

evidence from English and its history. FLH 1. 165-91.
—-. 1985. The status of voiced fricatives in Old English. FLH 6.
. forthcoming. Old English ablaut again: the essentially concrete character
of dependency phonology. Rethorica, Phonologica, Syntactica: Festschrift
for Robert P. Stockwell.
—--. and Colin J. Ewen (eds.). Studies in dependency phonology. Lud­
wigsburg Studies in Language and Linguistics, 4.
 GOTHIC OBSTRUENTS 11

—-. and Colin J. Ewen. Forthcoming. Principles of dependency phonology.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
. and Charles Jones 1977. Phonological structure and the history of
English. Amsterdam: North-Holland.
Braune, Wilhelm. 1961. Gotische Grammatik (revised Ernst A. Ebbinghaus).
Tübingen: Max Niemeyer.
Durand, Jacques (ed.). Forthcoming. Dependency and non-linear phonology.
London: Croom Helm.
Ewen, Colin J. 1977. Aitken's Law and the phonatory gesture in dependency
phonology. Lingua 41. 307-29.
and Harry van der Hulst. 1985. Single valued features and the nonlinear
analysis of vowel harmony. In H. Bennis and F.H. Beukema (eds.).
Linguistics in the Netherlands 1985, 39-48. Dordrecht: Foris.
van Hamel, G.A. 1931. Gotisch Handboek. Haarlem: H.D. Tjeenk Willink
& Zoon.
Hogg, Richard M. 1979. Old English palatalization. Transactions of the
Philological Society, 89-113.
Lass, Roger. 1976. English phonology and phonological theory: synchronic
and diachronic studies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
. 1984. Phonology: an introduction to basic concepts. Cambridge: Cam­
bridge University Press.
Moulton, William G. 1948. The phonemes of Gothic. Lg. 24. 76-86.
Penzl, Herbert. 1950. Orthography and phonemes in Wulfila's Gothic. JEGPh
49. 217-30.
Streitberg, Wilhelm. 1905-6. Gotica. IF 18. 383-407.
-—. 1908. Die Gotische Bibel. Reprinted 1950, Heidelberg: Carl Winter.
Voyles, Joseph B. 1981. Gothic, Germanic, and Northwest Germanic.
Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner.
Wimmer, L.F.A. 1887. Die Runenschrift (translated from Danish by F.
Holthausen). Berlin: Weidmannsche Buchhandlung.
Wright, Joseph. 1910. Grammar of the Gothic language. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.

ANDER
 STRUCTURE DE L'ÉNONCÉ INDO-EUROPÉEN

FRANÇOISE BADER
E.P.H.E. IVème Section, Paris

1. Il ne manque pas d'études sur la structure de la phrase i.e. l . J'es­

saierai, pour ma part, de mettre en relation la structure syntaxique de l'é­
noncé en parataxe, et la structure mélodique de l'énoncé simple et comple­
xe, en laissant de côté le problème de la subordination, d'une part, et, de
l'autre, tous les problèmes typologiques 2 .
1.2 Soit l'énoncé louvite suivant, qui comprend deux phrases, a) et
b), dont chacune comprend trois segments:
a) a-ta imrassa-dlM-unti \ pari tarauitta
b) a-ta piyatta immarassa(n)-dlM-ti
1 2 3:
«et pour le dieu de la steppe, il les a écrasées (?) les semences; et il les a
données au dieu de la steppe» 3 .
D'une part, ce texte offre les trois classes de signes que possèdent, à

1
De Brugmann, 1925, à Panhuis, 1983, en passant, essentiellement, par Watkins, 1963
et 1964, et Dressier, 1969. De nombreuses études portent sur l'ordre des mots, pour lequel
voir Schwentner, 1923, 1926, 1938, 1952, 1967 (lui ajouter Zimmer, 1976, avec la discussion
de Bader, 1978); des travaux particulièrement nombreux ont porté sur la phrase germanique,
ainsi Behaghel, 1932; Delbrück, 1911; Fourquet, 1938; Bacquet, 1962. Les recherches qui ont
porté sur la question de savoir si PIE. présentait l'ordre SOV, SVO, ou VSO dans le cadre
typologique des universaux linguistiques de Greenberg, 1963, sont d'origine américaine (Leh­
mann, 1974; P. Friedrich, 1975; Miller, 1975), comme les critiques, justifiées, qui leur ont été
faites par Watkins, 1976; Strunk, 1977, discute de la valeur de la comparaison typologique.
Ma conclusion sera que les trois ordres ont chacun une fonction, que permet d'atteindre la
seule reconstruction i.e. interne.
2
Cet article n'est qu'un résumé; je n'y ai pas traité le problème de l'ordre de la princi­
pale et de la subordonnée; ni le cas de tous les verbes initiaux; pour le problème des traduc­
tions, voir note 13.
3
Laroche, 1959, 154.
14 FRANÇOISE BADER

l'exclusion de toute autre (onomatopées mises à part), les langues i.e., et

qui sont interdépendantes pour la fonction syntaxique, la présence ou l'ab­
sence de sémantisme, l'accent, auquel est liée leur place dans la phrase et
l'énoncé:
1) pronoms: particules, non fléchies (ici a- «et») et référents, à statut
casuel (ici -ta «les», anaphorique atone enclitique);
2) noms (ici adjectif im(ma)rassa- «de la steppe», et nom propre de
dieu);
3) verbes, simples (piyatta), ou composés (pari tarauitta).
1.3 D'autre part, les éléments appartenants à ces trois classes de si­
gnes sont groupés entre eux dans la phrase, et s'y succèdent en un ordre
qui diffère dans les deux phrases, en raison de la structure de l'énoncé, et
de la place consécutive du verbe. Ce texte est en effet un énoncé complexe
(paratactique). Or la structure de ce dernier est fonction de facteurs accen-
tuels. Les uns sont indépendants du fait qu'il est complexe: ils concernent
I les classes de signes;
II le déroulement de la phrase simple; d'autres, au contraire, sont pro­
pres à sa nature d'énoncé complexe, puisqu'ils ont trait à:
III l'articulation des phrases.

2. I Chaque classe de signes a des caractéristiques propres:

2.1 du point de vue des fonctions:
a) le verbe est seulement prédicat;
b) les noms peuvent avoir accessoirement une fonction prédicative; mais
ce sont spécifiquement les actants de la phrase;
c) les pronoms qui accessoirement peuvent être aussi prédicats (qu'ils
soient particules ou referents) 4 , et actants (dans le seul cas des référents),
sont spécifiquement des indices de relations: relations articulaires dans la
phrase et l'énoncé; relations au monde, définies par I' espace-temps, et par
les rapports du soi et de l'autre, relations objectivement imposées du de­
hors à la personne, que complètent les données subjectives comportant une
part plus ou moins grande d'incertitude: indéfinitude; interrogation 5 ; éven-

4
Bader, 1975 ; 1981 a.
5
Voir Klein, 1985, 116-118, pour les rapports de *kwe indéfini, généralisant, inter-
rogatif.
 ENONCE INDO-EUROPEEN 15

tualité, avec ce qu'elle implique de souhait, possibilité, volonté; phraséolo­

gie du discours («peut-être»; «assurément»...); appréciations qualitatives ou
quantitatives (quālis, tālis) etc., d'où deux types de fonctions 6 : les unes,
syntaxiques, d'articulation; les autres, sémiologiques, qui sont aptes et à
se grammaticaliser (fournissant aux pronoms leurs catégories) et à se lexi-
caliser7.

2.2 du point de vue sémantique (et, corrélativement, de la structure

radicale), une ligne de clivage passe entre pronoms, d'une part, et, de l'au­
tre, verbes et noms: les racines (biconsonantiques) sur lesquelles sont bâtis
verbes et noms (autres que les lexicalisations pronominales) ont un séman­
tisme plein dans un cadre saussurien; mais les pronoms (à structure radicale
monoconsonantique) sont asémantiques 8 . De cette opposition découle une
vaste supplétion entre les classes de signes situées de part et d'autre de la
ligne: les pronoms, à qui leurs fonctions catégorielles (d'espace-temps, de
personne-altérité, de subjectivité) tiennent lieu de sémantisme, vont doter
de ces dernières les verbes et les noms, dont les catégories sont autres (gen­
re; diathèse; etc.), et qui ont à chaque fois un sémantisme plein, unique,
et indépendant de leurs catégories spécifiques. Dans ce système supplétif,
les formes pronominales, à morphosyntaxe de caractère agglutinant - par
opposition à la morphologie flexionnelle des verbes et des noms - s'aggluti­
nent à ces derniers, en des emplois qui sont tous des manifestations de leur
fonction d'indices de relations.
Certains n'affectent pas la structure de l'énoncé: formes qui jouent le
rôle de pré- ou de post-positions (casuelles ou non) en syntagmes nominaux;
formes soudées aux verbes, en préposition (augment), ou postposition (par­
ticules à valeur temporelle, comme *-i, modale, comme le *-ni fixé à la 1ère
sg. du subjonctif skr.-ni, ou déictique, comme les particules d'impératif,
*-töd, etc.). Et je les laisserai de côté, au contraire d'autres: pré-et post-
verbes; particules modales; négations.

2.3 Du point de vue de l'accent, d'importance primordiale dans la

structure de l'énoncé, la ligne de démarcation passe, cette fois, entre noms,
d'un côté, verbes et pronoms, de l'autre, du fait que:

6
Bader, 1983 a, b, c.
7
Bader, 1979; 1982.
8
Bader 1982, 88-95; 1983 a et b.
16 FRANÇOISE BADER

1) les noms sont toujours accentués, sauf, initialement, au vocatif9;

2) les verbes et pronoms peuvent être toniques ou atones. Mais, à l'é­
gard de cette double possibilité accentuelle, les uns et les autres diffèrent;
a) le verbe est tonique en subordonné, atone en principale 10 ; mais,
même atone, il n'est pas proclitique, et n'est donc pas un clitique;
b) des pronoms, clitiques susceptibles d'être proclitiques et encliti­
ques 11 , on pourrait presque dire, au contraire, qu'ils n'ont pas d'accent
propre (hors du nominatif, toujours emphatique, puisque la personne est
incluse dans la désinence verbale; des démonstratifs; des lexicalisations): leur
atonie vs. tonicité est uniquement fonction de la place que particules et ré-
ferents occupent d'une part dans les groupments supplétifs qu'ils forment
avec les verbes et noms, d'autre part dans les divers segments de phrase que
je décrirai à partir des propriétés accentuelles que je viens d'indiquer.
Celles-ci nous sont connues directement et indirectement; directement
en védique; en grec, directement pour les noms (sauf au vocatif) et les pro­
noms; indirectement par la remontée de l'accent (dans la plupart des for­
mes verbales, et au vocatif), si on l'explique par une atonie ancienne12; in­
directement, enfin, les propriétés accentuelles des trois classes de signes nous
sont connues, dans toutes les langues, par la place qu'ils occupent dans l'é­
noncé. Par les langues qui notent l'accent, nous savons, en effet, que place
et accent des éléments de la phrase sont liés; parce que la comparaison montre
que les mêmes éléments occupent des places identiques dans les autres lan­
gues, on peut déduire qu'ils ont été aussi comparables quant à l'accent; l'u­
nion de la place et de l'accent des pronoms, noms, verbes permet de propo­
ser une reconstruction approximative de la structure mélodique de la phra­
se i.e. 13

9
Pour l'accentuation védique du vocatif, Macdonell, 1955, 564-66; pour l'accent du ver­
be i.e. comme marque de dépendance, Meillet, 1933.
10
Pour l'atonie et la position enclitique du verbe, ainsi que sa tonicité subordonnante,
Delbrück, 1888, 35; 1911; Wackernagel, 1892, 93-102; 1877; 1893. Behaghel, 1929; Hirt, 1929,
293-369; Kurytowicz, 1958, 98; Minard, 1956, § 101 b; Renou, 1965, 230, entre autres.
11
Jucquois, 1970.
12
Wackernagel, 1877; Vendryes, 1958, 112-115.
13
Je me suis servie essentiellement des deux états de langue archaïques qui notent l'ac­
cent, védique et grec, ainsi que du hittite, en raison de son archaïsme, et du germanique, parce
qu'il a été particulièrement bien étudié; j'ai laissé de côté le tokharien, malgré les bonnes don­
nées fournies par Zimmer, parce que je les ai déjà discutées (Bader, 1978); sauf exception,
j'ai pris mes exemples védiques dans Macdonell, 1956, et hittites dans Friedrich, 1960, aux­
quels je renvoie pour les traductions.
 ÉNONCÉ INDO-EUROPÉEN 17

3.1 La phrase se déroule, en effet, en trois segments dans l'articula­

tion non marquée:
1) un segment initial, qui comprend deux portions: un premier mot to­
nique, suivi d'enclitique(s), seul, ou en chaîne;
2) un secteur médian accentué, secteur privilégié des noms, éventuelle­
ment précédés de formes pronominales accentué;
3) un secteur final indifférent à l'accent (comme la fin de vers est in­
différente à la quantité).

3.2 Ces vues seront d'abord illustrées par quelques exemples compa­
rables à la phrase a) du louvite

1 2 3
louv. a-ta imrassa-dIM-unti pari tarauitta
R.V.2,12,13 a:
b:
R.V.1,85,12 a:
II. I 100
104
106
Ensuite, j'étudierai en détail: A. le segment initial; B. le segment final;
C. les variations de place des thèmes pronominaux qu'on peut trouver dans
l'un ou dans l'autre, en «tmèse» ou en «univerbation» avec le verbe.

A. Segment initial
4.1 Le problème spécifique de ce segment, en articulation neutre, ré­
side dans l'ordre des éléments de la chaîne pronominale (et se retrouvera,
identique, dans l'articulation marquée, mais postposé au verbe). Il est fixe
pour une langue donnée, avec des constantes d'une langue à l'autre, mais
aussi des variations. Je partirai de l'anatolien, étudié magistralement par
E. Laroche 14, et je distinguerai trois groupes dans la chaîne hittite, du type

nu-war- as-si-za- san

a b 

14
Laroche, 1957-58, 145.
18 FRANÇOISE BADER

avec a = ligateurs (nu- ligateur de phrase «et»; -war-, articulant le disours

au récit); b = référents, dans l'ordre: cas direct (-as «il») - indirect (si «à
lui») - particule reflexive (-za);  = particule d'emploi catégoriel supplétif
(san est, entre autres, tantôt particule locale, tantôt postposition d'altéri-
té) 15 ; mêmes groupements fonctionnels en louvite, type

a-wa- ti-du-as- tar

a b 
avec des variations dans l'agencement interne de b (particule réfléchie -ti;
référents direct puis indirect -du-as).

4.2 La comparaison du hittite et du louvite invite à poser trois pro­

blèmes: ordre interne des particules; ordre relatif des particules et référents;
ordre interne des referents. Une étude détaillée du grec montrerait que:
a) l'ordre des particules est constant: ligateurs - modalités diverses, ad­
verbes pronominaux temporels - particule modale (cf,II.I1100, § 3.2); comme
ces modalités disjoignent les ligateurs des referents, l'ordre est différent de
celui qu'a l'anatolien, où -san, -tar, etc., viennent après les référents;
b) l'ordre relatif de la chaîne est: particules - referents, comme en ana-
tolien {e.g. II.I 521... );
c) les référents posent deux problèmes de succession: I o ) l'un, qui leur
est propre, concerne l'ordre des formes casuelles atones, qui est tantôt celui
du hittite (Od. 23, 125-26; tantôt celui
du louvite (Eur., Andr. 256, all'oud' soi)16; 2°) l'autre,
qui se rencontre aussi pour les préverbes, a trait à l'ordre des formes prono­
minales atones et toniques: les référents peuvent être tous atones, ainsi dans
les exemples ci-dessus, mais aussi se succéder en ordre atone - tonique, le
pronom ouvrant le secteur médian accentué:
IL I 298 khersì
R.V. 8,48,9 c:
hitt. (apologie de Hattusili) nu-wa-ra-an am-mu-uk pa-ra-a pa-a-i 17
II. I 40 (avec préverbe).

15
Sur -san, -kan, -tar, etc., difficiles à cerner, voir Götze, 1933; Lee, 1966; Josephson,
1972.
16
C'est aussi, p.ex., l'ordre du v. slave, et du v. anglais: Vaillant, 1979, § 1487; Bac-
quet, 1962, p. 96.
17
«Now, give him to me»: Sturtevant, 1935, 65.
 ÉNONCÉ INDO-EUROPÉEN 19

4.3 Dans une langue donnée, l'ordre de la chaîne peut présenter des
flottements: ainsi, outre les faits grecs, l'on voit le slave avoir une chaîne
de particules ze (gr. «de») li (particule interrogative) bo (gr. «gár»), ou li
ze bo, suivies, dans les deux cas, des référents dans l'ordre datif (enclitique)
- accusatif (semi-enclitique)18; et le hittite, avec préverbe ser-, ser-wa-ssi,
et ser-sit-wa 19: dans le premier cas, la particule de discours rapporté est à
la place usuelle des ligateurs; le second offre un ordre qui, en termes de gram­
maire celtique, serait celui d'une «préposition conjuguée» 20 .

4.4 Le problème principal que soulève le segment initial d'une phrase

d'articulation neutre est donc celui de l'ordre interne de la chaîne pronomi­
nale qui en constitue la seconde portion atone, et se poursuit parfois jus­
qu'au début du second secteur accentué. Je laisserai de côté le segment mé­
dian qui, dans la phrase simple, devrait être étudié essentiellement du point
de vue des facteurs qui ont convergé pour y amener le verbe. Et je confron­
terai au segment initial le segment final, dont la caractéristique principale
est l'indifférence à l'accent.

. Segment final

5. L'indifférence de ce dernier à l'accent ressort du fait qu'on y trou­

ve des noms, pronoms, verbes, e.g..
Il I. 269
270
271
272
les uns et les autres pouvant aussi figurer à l'initiale (cf. IL, I 304-307). Voi­
ci quelques détails sur l'accent et/ou la place de ces éléments.

5.1 Les noms se trouvent à la finale:

a) dans l'articulation marquée, qu'il s'agisse de l'objet, ou du sujet ex­
primé, inversé obligatoirement dans la variante de l'articulation marquée

18
Vaillant, 1979, § 1487.
19
Friedrich, 1960, § 288.
20 Thurneysen, 1946, p . 272-276.
20 FRANÇOISE BADER

où le verbe suit la chaîne enclitique (e.g. II. I 215 pro-

), obligatoirement dans la variante de cette articulation
où le verbe est le premier mot de la phrase (II. I 46 )
b) dans l'articulation neutre, quand ils sont des mentions circonstan­
cielles (II. I 270, ci-dessus), ou quand ils constituent le prédicat d'une phra­
se nominale (IL I 335 ). Quant au vocatif atone,
il peut, se trouver à la finale, ou dans la portion atone du segment initial:
R.V. 4, 51, 10 a:
b:

5.2 Le verbe peut être final, et alors atone ou tonique (cf. namete et
santi - accentué, parce qu'il est dans une relative -, § 3.2). Mais il peut se
trouver aussi dans le segment final ailleurs qu'à la finale absolue; il est:
a) antépénultième (et atone), en R.V. 4, 51, 10 b (§ 5.1), où l'impéra­
tif de YAM- est suivi du locatif du pronom tonique de 1ère p.plur., et d'un
vocatif atone;
b) pénultième, tonique, ou atone, selon que le pronom final est lui-
même, inversement, l'un ou l'autre: R.V. 4,50, 11
a:
b:
Ces chaînes finales où s'accolent verbe et pronom, dont l'un est atone,
l'autre tonique, doivent être semi-enclitiques: vraisemblablement, dans une
langue à accent de hauteur, la voix tombait en fin de phrase, mais moins
que dans la portion atone de l'initiale.

5.3 Les pronoms peuvent aussi être à la finale, atones ou toniques,

comme le montre R.V. 4,50, 11 a-b, ci-dessus, mais aussi, comme le verbe,
être pénultièmes, toniques (R.V. 10,34, 2 b: máhyam
, ou atones (R.V. 7,71,1 c: huvema): de mê­
me en grec:
II. I 274
II. III 368
II. XX 42
En termes de grammaire celtique ou tokharienne, postposés au verbe, ces
pronoms sont suffixés; préposés, ils sont infixés.
L'indifférence à l'accent de la finale, où l'on trouve les mêmes éléments
qu'à l'initiale, restreint, ou étend, comme on voudra, le champ d'applica-
 ENONCE INDO-EUROPEEN 21

tion de la «loi de Wackernagel». Cela amène, en tout cas, à examiner les

variations de place, initiale, ou finale, des thèmes pronominaux.

C. Variation de place des thèmes pronominaux

6.1 Les référents peuvent être, comme à la finale, toniques ou atones
à l'initiale: II. II 485 _ este; XI 8 8 t h u -
món; dans XI 763-64 ê té min óiō /pollà metaklaúsesthai, le référent est
à sa place dans la chaîne enclitique, et non dans l'infinitive dont il est le
sujet, comme en X 551
La place initiale de ces referents ne vaudrait pas la peine d'être notée
si, entre celle-ci et la position finale, ne se manifestait la variation connue
pour les préverbes sous forme de «tmèse» et «univerbation». Je rappelle
ce qu'il en est, afin de mettre en relief les deux variantes de l'univerbation,
pré- et post-position, d'une part, et, de l'autre, de montrer que les mêmes
variations de place jouent pour les thèmes pronominaux autres que les réf­­
rents et les préverbes, que sont les particules modales, négations, articula-
teurs du discours au récit, ou autres.

6.2 Pour les préverbes21, la tmèse est le fait d'une articulation non
marquée (e.g. R.V. 2, 33, 7 d: ), l'uni­
verbation, d'une articulation marquée, soit en parataxe (ainsi, louv. pari
tarauitta, § 1.2), soit en hypotaxe: en védique, la soudure du préverbe et
du verbe est normale en subordination 22 ; elle n'est pas encore accomplie
chez Homère, où on trouve à la fois II. IV 319 ka-
, La soudure de préver­
be et verbe tient à l'inversion des rapports accentüels de l'un et de l'autre
en articulations neutre et marquée: dans la première, le verbe est atone, et
le préverbe porte l'accent à des endroits de la phrase qui appellent celui-ci;
dans la seconde, parce que le verbe est tonique, le préverbe, dans le système
supplétif qu'il forme avec lui, devient proclitique (comme les post- et pré­
positions dans les syntagmes nominaux) 23 .

21
Kurylowicz, 1964, ch. VII; Watkins, 1963, 31-41; Lehmann, 1974, 232-35; Friedrich,
1975, 34-39.
22
R e n o u , 1952, 316.
23
Je laisse de côté les cas ambigus, pour lesquels on ne sait pas si on a affaire à un pré­
verbe, ou une postposition nominale: Götze, 1963 (pour le hittite).
22 FRANÇOISE BADER

6.3 Et, de même qu'il y a des postpositions nominales

sitions, de même se trouvent, des préverbes, des «postverbes» (su­
jets, en grec, à une anastrophe, dont les grammairiens discutaient la légiti­
mité), e.g.. en II. V 307-308

(avec un sujet inversé, indice d'articulation marquée); etc 24 .

Il y a donc deux variantes d'univerbation en parataxe: préverbe, avec
verbe («composé») en finale; postverbe, avec verbe qui remonte en articu­
lation marquée.

6.4 Dans les exemples grecs ci-dessus, verbe et postverbe sont acco­
lés, ou séparés seulement par un enclitique (V 308); il peut en être de même
en v. angl. (wulfas atugan a stacan up) 25 , ou en sanskrit (R.V. 1, 85, 10
b: cid bibhidur ví parvatam), où, cependant, l'un et l'autre peu­
vent être séparés par un mot (nom) tonique (R.V. 10,14,12 b:
26
. Et le postverbe en parataxe peut être sujet à une
tmèse inverse de la tmèse habituelle, avec verbe en tête et préverbe final:
hitt. KUB XXVIII 4 II 15 austa-ma-kan dKamrusipas nepisaz katta; la mê­
me structure survit, mais vigoureusement, en hypotaxe, dans la principale
d'un système subordonné allemand (§ 12.2).

7. On peut procéder à la même opération pour d'autres particules d'o­

rigine pronominale, et, d'abord, pour les particules modales.
7.1 La particule ke, à laquelle je me bornerai pour le grec27, apparaît
a) en «tmèse», e.g. II. I 137 ei dé ke
lōmai;
b) en «univerbation», pré- ou post-verbée, ainsi (côte à côte), II. XXI
253
7.2 En hittite 28 , la particule d'irréel man est 'préverbée au verbe d'a-
podose akten, et en tmèse dans la protase à conjonction mān «si» à verbe
huisweten dans Madd. I 12: man-kan mān ANA IAttarsiya huiswetenn-a

24
Vendryes, 1938, 239-49.
25
Bacquet, 1962, p . 8 1 .
26
Voir Macdonell, 1956, p . 285 p o u r la postposition des préverbes.
27
Je laisse donc de côté án; p o u r l'intéressante analyse d ' a r c , apseudēō-nan, Dubois,
1984, 161-62.
28 Friedrich, 1960, §§ 280; 330.
 ÉNONCÉ INDO-EUROPÉEN 23

katita-man akten; et, en position enclitique, BoTU 8 III 65 sq: lē-man-se

LUGAL-us kissan tezzi; la particule n'est pas postverbée à ma connais­
sance.
7.3 Lat. utinam (qui avec nē est l'équivalent de hitt. lē-man) se trou­
ve au contraire à la fois en tmèse, à l'initiale tonique (Tér., . 463 utinam
aut hic surdus aut haec muta facta sit), ou en seconde position (Cic, Fam.
14.4,2, huic utinam aliquando gratiam referre possimus); en préverbation
(Cic, V. 1, 61, deportasse te negare non potes, atque utinam neges), et po-
stverbation (Vg., En. 2, 110, cupiere... fessi discedere bello; fecissentque
utinam).

8. La négation, dont la place a suscité une enorme bibliographie 29 ,

à la différence des particules modales, pose exactement le même genre de
problèmes.
8.1 En voici des exemples en grec 30 (où l'ordre de la chaîne, et l'ap­
titude de ou à se trouver comme premier et comme second mot, font que
la négation précède la chaîne de toutes les particules, dont ke est la derniè­
re, avant les referents, quand elle est en tmèse):
a) en tmèse, comme premier mot: II. VIII 404-405 oudé ken es deká-
tous ... eniautoùs / ; I 106 ou
eîpes; I 32 mē m'eréthize; comme second mot: I 153
eisin; exceptionnellement, comme dernier mot devant le secteur nominal:
V 278 ;
b) en univerbation:
I o préposée (I 29 I, notamment quand le verbe précè­
de une complétive à l'infinitif (I 111-112
sthai; VII 392-93:
la négation porte sur l'infinitif «il déclare qu'il ne la rendra pas»);
2° postposée, dans l'articulation marquée, comme les postverbes et par­
ticules modales, avec verbe dans le segment initial (Od., 18, 409
tin' ge; Eur., Med. 83 óloito mèn . Mêmes phénomènes dans d'au­
tres langues.

29
Delbrück, 1897, 521-24; Wackernagel, 1957, 348-313; L e h m a n n , 1974, 153-54; Sei­
ler, 1952.
30
Dover, 1960, 14.
24 FRANÇOISE BADER

8.2 En hittite 31 :
a) en tmèse: KUB VIII 48 I 12 UL -war-an-kan tuētaza memiyanaz
kuennir;
b) en univerbation:
I o préverbée (en fin de phrase):   III 4 III 17 sq. nu namma INA
ÍD
seha UL päun;
2 o postverbée: Madd. I 35 nu-war-an sannatti-ya le murināsi -ya-war-
an lē (articulation marquée où se rapprochent les verbes de première et se­
conde phrases); le verbe est séparé de la négation par une chaîne, BoTU
23 A II 44 (qui a, de plus, un pronom final): parkunusi-ma-za UL kuit.
8.3 En sanskrit 32 :
a) tmèse: na vai nünam bhagavantas ta etad avedisuh; ou, en second
mot: tebhyo na sarvam iva pratipatsye;
b) en univerbation:
1 ° préverbée, p.ex. avec verbe composé, kim svāminam api na jānāsi,
et ;
2° postverbée: pathi yad ajāyata tad ahar jānāmi no.
8.4 En latin:
a) en tmèse: Cic., Phil. 8,12 non, si tibi antea profuit, semper proderit;
b) en préverbation (Cic, Mur. 84 sine gemitu hoc dici non potes).
8.5 La préposition de la négation est la place préférée de la négation,
en sanskrit, hittite, ou latin, par une tendance très largement suivie, qui se
manifeste ailleurs33: en tokharien (A ); en arménien,
Fon a des exemples de tmèse (Ezn. 187 ew «et non les cieux
ne tournent pas»); mais la préverbation est plus fréquente (duk' oč' mta-
nêkr «vous, vous n'entrez pas»); de même en vieux slave, tmèse (L. 6, 39
ne oba li se), mais plus souvent préverbation (Mat. 8, 10
ni I, comme en lituanien (tmèse: kur es biju
negājusi; mais préverbation normale: es tur neęsmu bijis). En gotique, la

31
Friedrich, 1960, § 279-283.
32 G o n d a , 1951; M i n a r d , 1936, § 20-35.
33 Tokharien: Krause, in Lehmann, 1974, 124; arménien: Jensen, 1959, § 500 (et lettre
du 28-3-1984 de Ch. de Lamberteire, que je remercie ici); slave: Meillet, 1928; lituanien: End-
zelin, 1923, § 836; germanique: Jespersen, 1917; Mossé, 1956, § 252; Fourquet, 1938, 249-51;
Bacquet, 1962, 178-182; 629-46; v.irlandais: Thurneysen, 1946, § 860.
 ÉNONCÉ INDO-EUROPÉEN 25

négation de phrase est toujours préverbée (Mt. 6, 26 pei ni saiand nih snei-
pand); en vieil irlandais, elle n'est séparée du verbe que par une particule
conjointe (ni-dénat firtu úili), ou un réfèrent enclitique infixé (ni-n-fortéit),
comme p.ex. dans II. I 32 (§ 8.1).

9. On pourrait étendre cette investigation à d'autres particules, com­

me les disjoncteurs, les articulateurs de discours au récit, les particules de
comparaison, ou les particules interrogatives. Je me bornerai à l'interroga-
tif gr. ê 34 , qu'on trouve en général en tmèse, comme premier mot de la
phrase, le plus souvent (IL III 46 ),
mais aussi après vocatif, devant la chaîne enclitique (II. V 421 ,
), et qui peut se préverber (Plat., Lg. 935 d
parade-
khómetha?). L'enquête pourrait s'étendre jusqu'aux ligateurs d'une extrê­
me banalité comme dé, dont voici des exemples de postverbation, préver-
bation, tmèse (après un préverbe qui en est lui-même affecté) dans II. I 46
/47

10.1 «Préverbation» et «postverbation» ne sont, en dernière analyse,

que des manifestations d'un phénomène connu pour les referents sous les
noms d'«infixation» et «suffixation», en grammaire celtique35 ou tokha-
rienne36, phénomène qui existe aussi dans les autres langues, non seulement
pour les diverses sortes de particules que nous venons de voir, mais pour
les référents eux-mêmes: on en a vu des exemples védiques (vām huvema;
vardhatam nah, § 5.2; 3) et grecs (min
§ 5.3; il y en a latin sub uōs placō; en hittite, Lois I § 47 A tasse pāi (suffi­
xation), variante nan-si-pāi (infixation, avec l'objet exprimé)37; et il en est
de même, de manière vivante, dans les langues qui 'ont substitué au moyen
un actif accompagné du réfléchi, infixé en lituanien (su-si-eĩti)38, suffixe en
général en gotique 39 (ushaihah sik, M. 27, 5); etc.

34
Denniston, 1970, 282-85.
35
Pour les pronoms infixés du v. irlandais, Thurneysen, 1946, 255-70.
36
K r a u s e - T h o m a s , 1960, 162-63.
37
Friedrich, 1960, §§ 237; 2 3 9 .
38
Meillet-Vaillant, 1965, 292.
39 F o u r q u e t , 1938, 271-76.
26 FRANÇOISE BADER

10.2 Les thèmes pronominaux, référents et particules, apparaissent

donc en tmèse, ou en univerbation, dans ses deux variantes: postverbation
(«suffixation»); préverbation, qui a elle-même deux variantes: en position
enclitique («infixation»), ou à l'initiale absolue. La cause de ces variations
de place réside dans la structure mélodique de la phrase et les particularités
accentuelles de ses constituants, telles que les éléments toniques et atones
viennent se placer dans l'un de ses deux segments aptes à les recevoir, et
cela en fonction de l'articulation. En effet, la tmèse semble caractéristique
de l'articulation neutre, et l'univerbation de l'articulation marquée. Mais
les pronoms ne sont pas les seuls à changer de place dans la phrase en fonc­
tion de l'articulation; dans des conditions accentuelles différentes, le verbe
en fait autant. Et j'en viens, pour finir, aux variations de la place du verbe
qui caractérisent l'articulation marquée 40 .

III Les articulations de l'énoncé complexe

11.1 Soit l'énoncé mycénien à trois phrases, PY Ep 704.5-6:

a) evita ijereja eke b) euketoqe ekee ) damo-de-mi pasi kotonao ke-
kemenao onato ekee... «la prêtresse E. détient; et elle proteste qu'elle dé­
tient titre de e (...) pour le compte du dieu; mais le dāmos affirme qu'elle
détient en usufruit une part des communaux» 41 .
Si l'on combine ce texte et le texte louvite donné au départ, on a les
trois cas de figure possibles de l'articulation d'un énoncé complexe en para-
taxe, soit neutre, soit marquée. Dans l'énoncé complexe, en effet, la liaison
entre phrases a été obtenue par deux procédés: l'emploi de thèmes prono­
minaux; la place du verbe.

11.2 Dans la parataxe, l'emploi de thèmes pronominaux avec verbe

final (donc tmèse) caractérise l'articulation neutre (celle de la première phrase
de mon énoncé louvite, que j'ai artificiellement extraite d'un texte où elle
figure, d'où l'emploi du ligateur); l'articulation marquée a pour instrument
la remontée du verbe dans le segment initial de la phrase, dans ses deux por-

40
J ' a i a b o r d é les problèmes q u e je reprends rapidement ici à plusieurs reprises; 1973
a, 43-48; 1973 b,93-109; 1974 a, 173-180; 1974 b,861-869; 1975 a; 1975 d; 1976,43-44; 1977; 1978.
41
Traduction de Perpillou, 1972, 180.
 ÉNONCÉ INDO-EUROPÉEN 27

tions, tonique et atone, ce qu'illustrent les phrases b) et ) de l'énoncé my­

cénien.
Ces deux variantes sont bient connues ailleurs; mais je me contenterai
d'indiquer des faits qui les caractérisent. Avec verbe initial, le sujet expri­
mé est toujours inversé (ainsi, A.S. 7,42
anyá)42; avec verbe suivant la chaîne enclitique, il peut l'être (II. I 357 toû
), ou non, ainsi dans la phrase c) du mycénien; mais
ce qui importe, c'est que, dans tous les cas, l'inversion du sujet43 est indi­
ce d'articulation marquée. Par ailleurs, la chaîne pronominale conserve et
son ordre interne fixe, et sa place dans le segment atone du segment initial;
mais c'est par rapport au verbe qu'elle change: tout entière en tmèse dans
l'articulation neutre, elle est sujette à l'univerbation en articulation mar­
quée, postposée au verbe initial, préposée au verbe qui remonte à ses côtés,
et dont le statut accentuel est intéressant du point de vue de la subordi­
nation.
11.3 Les deux articulations marquées n'offrent pas le même degré de
subordination: dans l'une, le verbe est le dernier enclitique élément de la
chaîne (R. V. 2, 33, 9 d: ná va u yosad Rudrad asuryàm): il est atone, comme
en principale; dans l'autre, étant à l'initiale absolue, le verbe a nécessaire­
ment une tonicité qui doit être interprétée comme indice de subordination
devant le secteur nominal accentué (ainsi dhatté, A.S. 7, 42, ci-dessus).

12.1 Le cheminement de la parataxe est jalonné d'étapes diverses. Des

deux procédés d'articulation marquée, remontée du verbe et outils prono­
minaux, l'hypotaxe met en oeuvre le second. Il peut subsister des traces de
parataxe dans les places respectives du verbe et du pronom: c'est l'ordre
de la phrase mycénienne b) (verbe initial - élément pronominal) que conser­
ve la relative de R. V. 1, 70, 5:
avec, par conséquent, univerbation par suffixation du pro­
nom; et c'est l'autre type d'articulation marquée (avec pronom - verbe en
seconde position - sujet inversé) qu'offre p.ex. R. V. 2, 35, 11 c;
te yuvatáyah. Mais, avec le développement de la subordination relative, la
place marquée du verbe devient fonctionnellement redondante; et le ver-

42
R e n o u , 1952, § 393.
43
P o u r l'inversion du sujet en védique, Jacobi, 1895; en germanique, Mogk, 1894; Ries,
1880.
28 FRANÇOISE BADER

be reste à la finale; le relatif, alors en tmèse, peut occuper une des deux
portions de l'initiale: atone (hitt. daliya-
44
nun nu-smas -us tehhun ); ou, plus souvent, tonique (R.V.
2,12,2 a: ) 45 .

12.2 Place du verbe et outil subordonnant se distribuent en fonction

de la proposition où ils figurent dans la phrase complexe du germanique:
en allemand, le verbe se trouve au début de la principale, et à la fin de la
subordonnée (type er zog gestern in das neue Haus ein / als er gestern in
das neue Haus einzog46) où I'on trouve un exemple d'opposition post-/pré-
verbe, et d'une disjonction verbe... postverbe parallèle à l'exemple hittite
donné §6.4. Quant à la place du verbe en début de principale, elle tient en
tout état de cause à ce que l'articulation marquée est statistiquement bien
plus fréquente que l'articulation neutre; elle a joué un rôle des plus impor­
tants dans la remontée du verbe, qui se manifeste déjà en celtique ancien47
(sous réserve de la «loi de Bergin»), par exemple48.

12.3 La remontée du verbe en articulation marquée dans la parataxe

entraîne un bouleversement des structures en ce qui concerne non seulement
l'ordre SOV, qui devient SVO et VSO, avec inversion du sujet, mais aussi,
corollairement, la répartition des secteurs de la phrase: dans les deux arti­
culations marquées, il y a agglutination de la chaîne enclitique et du verbe
(vs. du verbe et de la chaîne) en un segment identique, du seul point de vue
de l'accent, au segment initial de la phrase simple; il est suivi d'un seul se­
cond segment, formé par le secteur nominal, segment médian de la phrase
simple.

12.4 Je fais figurer les données de cet exposé dans le tableau suivant
(a. = articulations; s. = segment)

44
Friedrich, 1960, § 334.
45
Pour la place du verbe dans les relatives grecques, voir Giseke, 1846.
46
F o u r q u e t , 1938, 28; p o u r la place du verbe en germanique, voir n o t a m m e n t Beha-
ghel, 1929; Delbrück, 1911; Hirt, 1929, 258-63.
47
Lewis-Pedersen, 1961, § 433; Thurneysen, 1946, § 513; bibliographie sur la loi de Ber­
gin chez Dressler, 1969, 19 n o t e 109.
48
J'ai laissé de côté le problème du verbe médian, qui reste à étudier.
 ÉNONCÉ INDO-EUROPÉEN 29

a. neutre s. initial s. médian s. final

1er mot portion

tonique: atone: accentué: indifférent à l'accent:
nom, chaîne noms noms; pronoms infixés ou
pronom pronominale suffixes; verbe final
ou pénultième

a. marquées s. atone s. accentué

D 1er mot portion

tonique: atone:
nom, chaîne
+ verbe
pronom pronominale noms (avec éventuelle­
ment inversion du sujet)
2) 1er mot portion
tonique: atone:
verbe chaîne noms (avec inversion con­
pronominale stante du sujet exprimé)

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BADI
 IL S'EN VA OU LE FRANÇAIS, ET POURQUOI?*

JOËLLE BAILARD
University of California Los Angeles

There have been a number of studies during the last ten years suggesting
that French is undergoing a typological shift. Harris (1976a, 1978), for in­
stance, argued that French is moving toward verb-first sentential word-order,
VSO or VOS, more probably VSO. In Bailard (1982), I suggested that the
basic sentence word order which is competing with the canonical SVO order
is not VSO but rather VOS. In both Harris' analysis and mine, though, it
was assumed that the emerging word order, just like the one it shows signs
of replacing, is a syntactically determined order, conform, that is, to the
word order typology described by Greenberg (1963). As a result in part of
the recent interest in discourse analysis, this prima facie hypothesis about
French basic word order has been brought into question. Lambrecht, in par­
ticular, has suggested that there is in spoken French a «preferred clause pat­
tern», to which we shall return, which is pragmatically, not syntactically
determined, and he has ventured that the next preferred word order in French
will also be a pragmatically determined one (Lambrecht, to appear). In that
view, then, French could be said to be more similar to Mandarin Chinese
than to English.
The purpose of this paper will be to discuss the relevance of proposi­
tions with initial topic-phrases, as in (1) below, and of propositions with
final topics, as in (2), in relation to canonical sentences like (3) for the
characterization of the basic word order in contemporary French:

* This paper is for Harold Cohn. I wish to thank the LSA and the NSF for the travel
grant which made my participation in the ICHL-7 Conference possible. I also wish to thank
Sandra Thompson and George Bedell for their comments. Space limitations only prevented
me from dealing more adequately with some of these. A separate paper will be necessary to
do them justice.
36 JOËLLE BAILARD

(1) Ces illusionsi, eilesi ne vont pas durer longtemps.

«These illusions, they are not going to last long.»
(2) Ellesį ne vont pas durer longtemps, ces illusionsi.
They are not going to last long, these illusions.
These illusions are not going to last long.
(3) Ces illusions ne vont pas durer longtemps.
«These illusions are not going to last long.»
Mandarin Chinese, according to Li and Thompson (1981), is a language
which exhibits some traits both of SVO and of SOV types, but in which
the overriding regularity is a pragmatic one, specifically topic-comment. Ac­
cording to Huang (1982), on the other hand, Mandarin Chinese may be view­
ed as having two types of basic sentences, SVO and topic-comment. Super­
ficially, then, Lambrecht's proposal would appear more similar in spirit to
Li and Thompson (1981) than to Huang (1982). Harris (1984b, 1985),
though, observes that the great frequency of topic-initial sentences in to­
day's French raises the possibility that both the topic-comment and the V-
initial structure are likely candidates to replace SVO, and that French now
has two favoured sentence-types. Harris' position, then, would seem to be
parallel to that of Huang's for Mandarin Chinese.
The first issue which needs to be addressed is the relationship between
frequency of occurrence and unmarkedness or basicness. Our position here
is that the number of tokens of any type, while being a potential factor in
change, is itself a statistical fact which needs to be explained, not an ex­
planation of or evidence for basicness. So, «basic sentence» here should not
be equated with the notion of preferred clause pattern or favoured sentence
type, nor with Huang's basic sentence, which is a sentence that cannot be
derived transformationally given the constraints on movement transforma­
tions. Rather, it will be assumed that the basic or unmarked sentence type
universally is, as discussed in Greenberg (1963), a declarative affirmative
sentence where the arguments are represented by full NPs. As Greenberg
noted, the notion upon which his syntactic typology of languages is built
is a semantic notion, and the underlying assumption behind his classifica­
tion was that the sentences which make up his data base are cross-linguistic
representations of the same semantic entity, which we may characterize loose­
ly as the propposition associated with the least amount of presupposition.
One may, of course, disagree with Greenberg's assumption. What is im­
portant here methodologically is that if one rejects his primary working
 IL S'EN VA OÙ LE FRANÇAIS 37

hypothesis, one must be cautious then not to relate any claim about word
order change to his description of universals, which, while proposed for syn­
chrony, is also assumed, sometimes implicitly, often explicitly, to have predic­
tive value for diachrony as well, since, like any syntactic theory, it constitutes
in effect a prediction as to what may constitute a possible human language
and hence a possible linguistic change.
One prerequisite, as long as we retain Greenberg's notion of basicness,
before we try, to establish what specific typological shift, if any, is taking
place in French is to ascertain that the syntactic data selected may all be
taken to constitute equally valid evidence of the same phenomenon. It is
for this reason that a sentence like (4), while perfectly grammatical and as
frequent, if not more, as its counterpart in (3) with full NP's, will be ex­
cluded from our primary data here. Similarly, sentences such as the ones
in (5)-(6), though very frequent also, will not be considered in this paper1 :
(4) Elles ne vont pas durer longtemps.
«They are not going to last long.»
(5) IIj Ij'a compris lui i .
«(As for him), he understood it.»
(6) Lui i , ili lj'a compris.
«HE / (As for) him, he understood it.»
Given only what we know at the moment, sentences like (5)-(6) cannot
be evaluated as evidence of syntactic change, because they contain pronouns,
and the accepted standard of comparison is a sentence where all the
arguments are nouns. These sentences can no more be used in comparison
to (l)-(3) than could a sentence containing another extraneous semantic
variable such as interrogation, as in (7):
(7) Combien de temps vont-ellesi durer ces illusionsi? (Butor)
How long are they going to last, these illusions?
How long are these illusions going to last?
'
It is taken for granted that questioning is a causal factor in word order
variation in many languages and, in the absence of evidence to the contrary,
considering the complications which fall out from the distribution of pro­
nouns for the synchronic description of any state of the language (cf.

1
The previous examples, like much of the contemporary French data discussed here,
are from Larsson (1979), whose sources are primarily 20th century novelists and magazines.
38 JOËLLE BAILARD

e.g. Foulet 1968), we must assume that including pronominalized sentences

in this investigation of diachronic change would lead to a skewed data base,
and that contemporary French sentences with pronouns must be viewed here
as secondary data, itself to be explained in relation to sentences containing
only full NPs. Larsson (1969), for instance, noted with respect to the
noun/pronoun opposition that dislocation in fact appears to have a different
interpretative value when the arguments are pronouns 2 .
One other factor, aside from the added interpretative complexity
brought in by pronouns which was mentioned by Larsson as pertinent to
word order in topicalized sentences was prosody, the importance of which
was already discussed by Wackernagel (1892) and Behaghel (1930). Thus
in sentences like (8)-(9), the relative ordering of the two post-verbal nominals
might be evidence of nothing more than the universal tendency to place heavy
constituents to the right of the sentence:
(8) C'est dommage, dit enfin Ludi, que çai ne vousj plaise pas
à vousj cet endroit i . (Duras)
«It's too bad, said Ludi finally, that you don't like it, you, this place.»
(9) IIi avait l'air de le j dominer luii le climat j . (Céline)
«He looked as if he controlled it the climate.»
As was mentioned, one of the languages French is being compared to
is Mandarin Chinese. The structure to which some French sentences are be­
ing assimilated is shown in (10)-(11), from Li and Thompson (1981):
(10) Zhangsan wo yijing jian -guo -le.
Zhangsan I already see EXP CRS
«Zhangsan, I have already seen (him).»
(11) zhei -ke shu yezi hen da
this CL tree leaf very big
«This tree, (its) leaves are very big.»
For Li and Thompson, sentences like (10)-(11) represent the unmarked

2
These remarks should not be taken as a suggestion that the study of sentences with
pronouns is not necessary for an accurate picture of syntactic change. To the contrary. One
should keep in mind though, that by including them in the data consistently, we might have,
among other considerations, if their past and present frequency is similar, to reanalyze Classical
and 19th century French as SOV, in which case any attempt at analysis of current word order
change based on a previous SVO basic order would be pointless.
 IL S'EN VA OÙ LE FRANÇAIS 39

structure in Mandarin Chinese. The SV(X) structure also occurs, as in (12)-

(13), but they regard such sentences as less basic:
(12) Zhangsan zuotian zai xuexiao kanjian -le Lisi
Zhangsan yesterday at school see -ASP Lisi
«Zhangsan saw Lisi at school yesterday.»
(13) ta zai xuexiao hen goaxing zheijian shi
he at school very happy this matter
«He was very happy about this matter at school.»
Huang (1982), though, as was noted, differs with Li and Thompson
about the status of topic-comment sentences. While they give the topic-
comment structure as the unmarked structure semantically in Mandarin
Chinese, he suggests that topic-comment is only one of the two basic senten­
tial structures in the language, but his characterization of basicness should
not be confused with Li and Thompson's, since basicness is for him a syn­
tactic notion.
One other reason, beside the frequency of topic-initial propositions in
French, for comparing it to Mandarin Chinese is the occurrence in both
languages of multiple left-side topics, as is shown below in (14)-(15) for
French and (16) for Chinese:
(14) Dix mètres de falaise droite i , des diables de leur calibrej, çai ne lesj
effraie pas. (Leblanc)
«Ten meters of sheer cliff, devils of their caliber, it does not scare
them.»
(15) Mes parents i , la liberté sexuelle et tout ça;, ilsi en; ont horreur. (Elle)
«My parents, sexual freedom and all that, they can't stand it.»
(16) Zhangsan, neixie ren, lian yige ta dou bu renshi.
Zhangsan those men even one he all not know
«(As for) Zhangsan, of those men, not a single one he knows.»
The existence of multiple topics in French and in Chinese raises in­
teresting questions as to how the propositions in question should be ana­
lyzed syntactically. One of these questions is whether the structure should
be referred to as S'or S". The issue is especially pertinent here for French
because of a suggestion made by Lambrecht as to the form of a «preferred
clause pattern» in spoken French, which he describes as (COMP) [clitic +
V(X)]. This could be taken to imply that Topic is to be found under COMP.
As Huang mentioned, though, in Mandarin Chinese, topics are found
40 JOËLLE BAILARD

not only at the beginning of a proposition, as in (16), but also to the right
of COMP, as in (17):
(17) ta ku de [neixie shu, mei yiben wo dou kan bu xia-que le].
he cry COMP those book every one I all read not down ASP
«He cried so much that, those books, I couldn't continue to read any
of them.»
An accurate syntactic and semantic description of topicalization in
French will have to take into account the fact that, as in Mandarin Chinese,
embedded topics do occur, as in (18):
(18) Mariéi dit que Jean;, il; ne 1¡' écoute jamais.
«Marie says that Jean, he never listens to her.»
To return to our main concern, it is of interest that, while Li and Thomp­
son's objective is the same as Greenberg's in the sense that they are con­
cerned with characterizing the unmarked sentence type in the language, they,
unlike Lambrecht (1984), do not extend the characterization they propose
for Mandarin Chinese to French. They suggest that French is different from
Chinese and, like English, a language with syntactic word order (Li and
Thompson, 1981: 19).
Yet, discourse-based studies such as the ones by Barnes (1983, 1984),
Larsson (1979), Harris (1985), suggest that, at the same time that we ought
to be able to give of contemporary French a description which distinguishes
it from Chinese, we also must try to make explicit how contemporary French
differs from a «pure» SVO type like English, or from what is taken to have
been the previous, equally pure, status of French, based, unfortunately on­
ly on (selected) written records.
One of the several facts which we need to take into account for this
is that, in French propositions, there is often one constituent before the
sentence or after it, and in some cases both at once. Larsson (1979) gives
sentences (19)-(20) below as examples of multiple right-dislocations, and (21)-
(22) as examples involving both left-and right-dislocation silmultaneously:
(19) Ili les; sent passer ses dîners; Philippe i . (Rochefort)
«Philippe (he) gets to notice (them) his dinners.»
(20) Ellei leur; cache tout la viei aux hommes;. (Céline)
«Life (it) hides everything from (them) men.»
(21) Son enfant i , elle; l i 'adore, cette mère;. (Régula)
«Her child, this mother (she) adores him.»
 IL S'EN VA OÙ LE FRANÇAIS 41

(22) Les miliciensi, ilsi leuri faisaient des agaceries, les Russes j .
«The militiamen, the Russians (they) were teasing them.»
With respect to (20), Larsson notes that the relative ordering of the last
two nominals may be determined in part by rhythm.
I have used the term «topic» so far indiscriminately to refer to some
proposition-final and to some proposition-initial constituents. But, as was
shown by Larsson, the two types of dislocation, when used to topicalize,
do not have exactly the same meaning. Some of the pragmatic differences
between left-side topics and right-side topics can be seen from her examples
in (23) through (26) below:
(23) C'est vrai qu'il y a des endroits aux Etats-Unis où les Noirs ont pas
le droit d'entrer? - Et les Indiens i , m'dame, pourquoi yi sont dans
des sortes de camps? (Delanoe)
«It's true that there are places in the United States where Blacks do
not have the right to go in? - And the Indians, Ma'am, why are they
in some kinds of camps?»
(24) *... - Et m'dame, pourquoi yi sont dans des sortes de camps, les In-
diensi?
(25) Ce briquet, justement, j'ai allumé tes cigarettes avec quand tu es venue
chez moi pour la première fois. (Beauvoir)
«This_lighter, precisely, I lit your cigarettes with (it) when you came
to my place for the first time.»
(26) *(Je lui ai montré un briquet en argent). J'ai souvent allumé ses cigaret­
tes avec (çai) ce briquet i .
«(I showed her a silver lighter). I often lit her cigarettes with (it), this
lighter.»
Whether the nominal constituents are to the right or to the left of the
sentence, and despite their interpretive differences, these phrases all may
be said to be topics in the sense that they are «what the sentence is about»,
and the theme/topic distinction discussed by Dik (1978,1980) is not obviously
involved here.
With respect to right-side topics, there is no data at present on whether
Mandarin Chinese makes significant use of the construction, or whether what
follows a sentence in that language should best be analyzed as afterthought.
For French, though, as Larsson mentions, afterthought is not an appropriate
label for those right-side constituents, since they are frequently indispen­
sable to the desired interpretation of the sentence. This is true, for instance,
42 JOËLLE BAILARD

of example (24), where, in the absence of les Indiens, y would be interpreted

as referring to les Noirs, contrary to Delanoe's intention, who, in the original
context, uses left-dislocation to signal topic-switching, a purpose for which
right-dislocation, on the other hand, appears inappropriate 3 .
Afterthought, then, might be an accurate description of the rightmost
constituent in the title of this paper, but not generally for all NPs (or PPs)
which occur to the right of the sentence, and our main question, if consti­
tuents such as le français are not topics 4 , remains how these phrases should
be analyzed synchronically and how this situation could be explained
diachronically, when we assume that typology is one of several aspects of
language pertinent to linguistic change, as suggested in e.g. Harris (1985),
and emphasized here again by Andersen (1985). Andersen reminds us that,
in order to explain linguistic change, we must take into account the distinc­
tion between changes in uses as opposed to changes in norms, as well as
the system underlying these norms and the type of the language.
In the case of Mandarin Chinese and French, for instance, there is one
non-trivial difference which must be considered on the syntactic level. While
there are reasons to argue that Mandarin Chinese lacks an overt subject/ob­
ject distinction, such a position would be untenable for French. This is clear
when we expand on the study of some of the sentence-types discussed by
Lambrecht (1984).
Lambrecht's position, essentially, was that the typological shift which
he finds in progress in French is the result, in effect, of some conspiracy
in which various unrelated, but pragmatically motivated, constructions take
part, and that the syntactic regularity which emerges from this is simply an
accidental by-product. The main pragmatically motivated constructions he
identifies as responsible for this syntactic shift are referred to as the topic
construction, as seen in (1), the «antitopic construction», as in (2) here, and
the «presentational» and «identificational constructions», illustrated below
in (27)-(28), respectively:
(27) Ya (= canonical Fr. il y a) mon frère qui vient dans trois semaines.
«There is my brother who is coming in three weeks.»

3
Duranti and Ochs (1979) suggest a link between left-dislocation and turn-taking in
Italian. Such a discourse feature might also be relevant to the distribution of dislocation in
French.
4
For discussions of the grammaticalization of afterthought instead of topic as a
mechanism of word order change, see e.g. Hyman (1975) and Givón (1979).
 IL S'EN VA OÙ LE FRANÇAIS 43

(28) Tous ceux qu'ya dans le quartier, c'est moi qui leur a donné des bouts.
(François, 1974).
«All the ones that there are in the neighborhood, it is I who gave them
cuttings.»
Compare (27)-(28) with the following:
(29) Ya quelque chose que je ne comprends pas là-dedans.
«There is something that I don't understand in there.»
(30) Tous les géraniums mauves qu(i)ya dans le quartier, c'est des boutures
que je leur ai données.
«All the mauve geraniums that there are in the neighborhood, it's cut­
tings that I gave them.»
Sentences (27) through (30) are all example of constructions of what
Lambrecht gives as two of the important representations of his preferred
clause pattern, and which he suggests are the basis for the typological
classification of spoken French. Note that, while in (27)-(28) the relative
pronoun qui can only be interpreted as the subject of the embedded verb,
in the next two sentences, the relative pronoun form que shows that the
antecedent must be interpreted as the object of the lower verb. Assuming
here, only for the sake of the argument, that for a language to have as its
unmarked sentence-structure the topic-comment articulation (or, for that
matter the comment-topic one) should ever be considered a reason to posit
that, in that language, grammatical functions would have no reality, or at
best play a trivial role, it is not clear how such sentences might be construed
as evidence that French is moving from a syntactically determined word order
to a pragmatically determined one. In fact, whatever one's view of the
relevance of grammatical relations for French at all, it is not clear what,
if anything, might be concluded from the frequent occurrence of such
sentences with respect to word order typology, contrary to Lambrecht's sug­
gestion, except that grammatical relations are necessary constructs, as has
been assumed in traditional analyses of word order change (cf e.g. Ven-
nemann 1975; Li and Thompson 1975).
For French, it would appear, study of the topic-initial and of the topic-
final constructions, as well as of the presentational and identificational con­
structions, only seems to provide additional evidence, if need be, that gram­
matical functions are necessary constructs for an exhaustive description of
such various unrelated structures as are found in contemporary French, just
as they have been for canonical French.
44 JOËLLE BAILARD

In contemporary French, just as in the previous stages of the language,

the S/O distinction may be marked by any or all of the following: verb agree­
ment, pronoun case marking, word order and, in the case of indirect object
full NPs, a preposition. Thus, in sentence (14) above, with its two left-side
topics, ça, which has as its antecedent dix mètres de falaise, must be inter­
preted as subject because it is preverbal there, and the accusative case marking
in les, in opposition to dative leur, which occurs in e.g. (22), makes clear
that les is a direct object. In (8), on the other hand, the clitic form vous
in isolation could be taken as subject, direct or indirect object, but the 3sg
verb agreement shows that the verb is agreeing with ça, and vous is further
disambiguated as indirect object by the resumptive postverbal à vous.
The DO/IO opposition is equally obvious in presentational and iden-
tificational sentences, as is the S/DO one. Consider the following sentences:
(31) (a) Ya mon pote que je (lui) dois toujours cent balles.
(b) Ya mon pote à qui je dois toujours cent balles.
«There is my buddy that I still owe one hundred francs.»
(32) (a) C'était le type d'en face que je (lui) ai dit qu'y devrait revenir plus
tard.
(b) C'était le type d'en face à qui j'ai dit qu'y devrait revenir plus
tard.
«That was the guy next door that I told he would have to come
back later.»
In the (a) sentences, which are considered to belong to the popular
register, and which have been discussed by Frei (1929), instead of the nor­
mative à qui, we find que, which alone could be interpreted as direct ob­
ject. The resumptive clitic lui, though, may be used to identify the antece­
dent as indirect object instead.
In short, it should not need saying that, whatever changes are taking
place in French syntax, French is still far removed from a language like Man­
darin Chinese which lacks both case marking and verb agreement. In fact,
the word order change in progress might perhaps best be interpreted as an
attempt by the language users to provide a new clear encoding of grammatical
relations.
Before we are in a position to offer any definitive generalization about
the syntactic representation of the basic sentence, in any event, to the ex­
tent that we are concerned with accounting for topicalized sentences, fur­
ther investigation of multiple-topic sentences will be necessary, as also of
 IL S'EN VA OÙ LE FRANÇAIS 45

embedded topics. Lack of space prevents us from attempting this here but,
in order to give an explicit description of the form of French topicalized
sentences, we shall have at some point to determinate the hierarchical rela­
tion between the Topic node(s) and COMP and also between the Topic and
S' and S" 5 .
With respect to interpretation, also, one question which still needs a
definitive answer is whether the ordering of topical constituents among
themselves must be taken for French as an indication of some distinction
in meaning, of scope or otherwise. We saw earlier that French right-side
topics are not exactly equivalent to their left-side counterpart, but with respect
to left-side topics alone, it does not appear warranted to assume cross-
linguistically that the leftmost topic is necessarily of a different kind, for
instance, generic, or has different scope automatically from its immediate
neighbor.
Thus, for Japanese, Kuroda (1965) suggested that there is no difference
in meaning between sentences like (33) and (34):
(33) John -wa nicyoo -ni -wa New York Times -o yomu
-TOP Sunday-on-TOP -ACC read
«As for John, on Sunday (he) reads the New York Times.»
(34) Nicyoo -ni -wa John-wa New York Times-o yomu.
Sunday -on-TOP -TOP -ACC read
For French, similarly, Larsson found no obvious hierarchical distinc­
tion necessarily between left-side topics, and noted that it is not clear that
there is any difference in meaning between, for instance, sentences (11) and
(35):
(35) La liberté sexuelle et tout ça;, mes parents i , ilsi enj ont horreur.
«Sexual freedom and all that, my parents, they can't stand it.»
Whether the two positions convey a different meaning could be determined
only by comparing the freedom of occurrence of such sentences in context.
A distinct and more fundamental issue yet for us is whether such topical
constituents should be considered constituents within the sentence, and more
directly to the point here, as was suggested by the reference to predicative

5
On this topic, compare, for instance, Chomsky (1977, 1981), Banfield (1982) and
Reinhart (1983).
46 JOËLLE BAILARD

sentences in opposition to topicalized sentences, whether it would be desirable

to postulate that in French every sentence must include a topic.
The position implicit in this discussion has been that, universally, a
sentence need not have a topic, and Japanese, where the distinction between
topicalized and non-topicalized sentences is morphologized, is a case in point.
Compare (33)-(34) with (36), where the only particles serve to mark gram­
matical functions:
(36) John -ga nicyoo -ni New York Times-o yomu
-NOM Sunday-on -ACC read
«John reads the New York Times on Sunday.»
In French, it is not clear that any single constituent ought to be
characterized as what the sentence is about in a headline-type sentence such
as:
(37) Reagan a le cancer.
«Reagan has cancer.»
Although the name in (37) is a readily identifiable one, and its referent
might be considered part of the extra-linguistic context shared by the writer
and the readers, sentence (38) would not be interchangeable with (37) to
report Reagan's illness to the unsuspecting public:
(38) Reagan, il a le cancer.
«(As for) Reagan, he has cancer.»
Sentence (38) is still acceptable only in a discourse context which sug­
gests that Reagan is, by some association of ideas, present in the mind of
all discourse participants at the time the sentence is being used. The pro­
positions in (37)-(38), in other words, have the same truth value, but dif­
ferent presuppositions. While sentence (37) is a simple predication, with no
presupposition as to the pragmatic status of either NP, in (38), Reagan is
not part of the assertion. Sentence (38), for this reason, in contemporary
French, should not be considered a basic sentence in the sense of Greenberg.
This is not to say that this sentence type is of no interest for historical
syntax. Studies such as Ashby (1982), to the contrary, suggest that, to the
degree that occurrences of tokens must be taken into account, topic-initial
sentences must indeed be considered as one of the potential factors in deter­
mining if the ongoing typological shift will come to completion. As was noted
in Harris (1984b), some change which is predictable on the basis of general
observations about the cyclicity of typological change and of implicational
 IL S'EN VA OÙ LE FRANÇAIS 47

universals may fail to become actualized due to the action of conflicting

factors present in an earlier stage.
As for frequency per se, though, note that even if we were willing in
principle to use relative frequency as an explanation of linguistic change,
in the particular case at hand, the notion could not be of any use for ap­
praising whether French has suddenly, or early in the century, embarked
on a typological shift, since we have no standard of comparison for fre­
quency. We simply do not know, nor is there any way to find out, to what
extent the topic-initial construction was used back in the late nineteenth or
early twentieth century 6 . All we know about this is that the construction
was used as far back as the nineteenth century, and was considered of no
importance by most grammarians, who, for the majority, continued to
describe French as a proper SVO language, consistent with the Port-Royal
evaluation of what a «logical» language should be 7 .
With respect to the hypothesis that French might be becoming a topic-
initial language, then, at this stage, the burden of proof would still lie with
the proponents of the hypothesis. The same applies, of course, to the slightly
different proposal from Lambrecht, according to which French is moving
for pragmatic reasons to a (Comp) [Clitic + V (X)] preferred clause pat­
tern, common to sentences such as the ones shown here in (27)-(28) in addi­
tion to (l)-(2).
Independently of the distinction between «preferred» or «most frequent»
and «basic» or «unmarked», in order to show that we are indeed faced with
a syntactic/pragmatic pattern such as the one Lambrecht discusses, to be
able to claim any level of explanatory adequacy, it would seem that we would
need, first, to show that the occurrences of the syntactic pattern are associated
systematically with some common feature, or cluster of features, at the in­
terpretative level and, secondly, that the sentences used as the primary data
for the hypothesis are all conform to the syntactic schema suggested.

6
Harris (1984b), on the issue of statistics and linguistic change, mentions the observa­
tion by Smith (1981) that typology «provides data which needs explanations... It provides no
explanation itself», related to the view of Lass (1980) that the distribution noted in the form
of a statistical law is the «primary explanandum», having «no explanatory force per se». Here,
on the other hand, we are assuming that, while it is, of course, true that statistics need to be
explained, typology is itself, as argued in Harris (1982, 1984a-b) one of the causal factors in
change, because of the tendency to analyze data based on analogy.
7
Among the notable exceptions to this prescriptive approach are Bauche (1929) and Frei
(1929).
48 JOËLLE BAILARD

It is not obvious what syntactic arguments one might give to support

the view that the structures (il) y a NP qui/que - S, c'est NP qui/que - S,
Topic - S and S - Topic are all instantiations of this hypothetical syntactic
schema.
With respect to the distinctive pragmatic feature(s) which sentences such
as the ones in (l)-(2), (27)-(28) might be said all to have in common, and
in opposition to sentences having a different syntactic representation, to my
knowledge, no explicit proposal has yet been made. In Lambrecht's own
characterization of the sentence types he considers crucial, it appears that,
in some cases, the postverbal constituents would represent the focus or new
information, as in (27)-(28), while, in other cases, what would follow the
verb would be the topic, as in (2) above.
The problem of evaluating the status of topic-initial sentences in rela­
tion to markedness is a common one in Romance languages. Thus, while
Spanish is widely assumed to be SVO, Green (1976) has argued that there
is a basic VSO order, with SVO as a topicalized alternative. For Occitan,
similarly, the basic order is often taken to be SVO also, but Belasco (1984)
gives instance of the topic-initial construction, such as are reproduced here
in (39)-(40), as an indication of the difference between Occitan and French:
(39) (a) L'estieu lo trabalh i fa susar.
(b) En été, le travail fait suer.
«In the summer, work makes (one) sweat.» (Transl. my own.)
(40) (a) Mon jardin i es plen d'aucèls.
(b) C'est plein d'oiseaux dans mon jardin.
«My garden (it) is full of birds.»
Other sources, yet, suggest that Occitan possesses another construction
in addition to SVO, namely VOS, as shown in (41)-(43) (Anne Cummings,
p.c.). Note that VSO is not acceptable instead of VOS:
(41) (a) A agut un accident ieri Paul.
(b) Paul a agut un accident ieri.
(c) *A agut Paul un accident ieri.
«Paul had an accident yesterday.»
(42) (a) Es anat al cinema Paul.
(b) Paul es anat al cinema ieri.
(e) Es anat Paul al cinema ieri.
«Paul went to the movies yesterday.»
(43) (a) A telefonai a Marie Paul.
 IL S'EN VA OÙ LE FRANÇAIS 49

(b) Paul a telefonai a Marie.

(c) *A telefonat Paul a Marie.
«Paul telephoned Marie.»
As with Modem French, one would need to determine whether in Oc­
citan topic-initial is a basic sentence-structure, and whether all instances of
VOS there should be analyzed as containing a right-side topic or the con­
struction has undergone restructuring, so that some sentence-final subjects
might not have the topic function, as can be argued for French.
Another interesting point in Lambrecht (to appear) is his suggestion
that the motivations for the next step in the evolution of French syntax will
also be pragmatic, and not syntactic, ones. Such a prediction as to the form
of sentences in the next century and beyond might be taken as an indication
that Lambrecht views word order grammaticalization as a highly marked
phenomenon, in contradiction with the view held by many that one impor­
tant factor in linguistic change is the bleaching out of the pragmatic value
of some construction, and in opposition also with the underlying assump­
tion which is common, despite differences in their formulations, to the
theories of linguistic change developed by Andersen (1973), Lightfoot (1979),
Harris (1982, 1984a-b). As pointed out by Andersen (1973), the input to
linguistic change is not a grammar but language data, and the changes which
occur are generally local ones, that is, changes which affect only a subpart
of the grammar, and therapeutic ones, in that the part of the grammar af­
fected becomes clearer or simpler, more transparent, though a specific change
may result in overall greater complexity of the entire grammar. In this view,
variation is the norm, but change is not predetermined. No prediction is
made that a certain change, or any change, will or must take place.
One analysis of syntactic French compatible with Andersen's theory
of linguistic change is that proposed by Harris (1976a, 1978), who suggested
that French is shifting from SVO as the unmarked order to V-initial as a
result of the reinterpretation of the right-dislocation construction which was
originally used as a topicalizing device. A plausible reason as to why the
construction became reanalyzed as it did would be that its frequent occur­
rence in a variety of discourse contexts made it unclear for the language
learner that right-dislocation was being used for the purpose of setting off
the topic as opposed to, possibly, indicating the grammatical function of
the constituent.
The fact that a language learner might be led to analyze a proposition-
50 JOËLLE BAILARD

final noun as subject itself could be due to a variety of factors, which joint­
ly had the effect of making the structure of the French sentence opaque.
One of these factors was phonetic erosion. The verbal inflectional system
has become reduced, from a six-way opposition in Old French, to at best
a three-way opposition in the first (and most productive) conjugation. This
has been a result in part of the tendency in non-careful French not to pro­
nounce the liaison consonant. Also, as noted by Harris (1978), the indefinite
pronoun on, which triggers 3sg agreement, is in the process of replacing
lpl nous, as in on aime ça (nous) «we like that», so that, in some dialects
at least, the conjugation suffixes for the first conjugation are in effect reduced
to two, zero in the non-2pl and /-e/ in the 2pl. As a consequence, as observed
by Sauvageot (1962), the subject clitics have now taken over the function
of verb agreement markers.
In such circumstances, for the rightmost constituent in the proposition
to become reinterpreted as the subject or as the object is therapeutic, since
it has the effect of making it possible again, as it was in canonical French,
to use linear order to mark grammatical functions, reducing syntactic opacity
within the sentence. This reanalysis of the syntactic data is consistent also
with the existence in V-initial propositions of two intonational contours,
one of which is associated with the right-topicalized sentence and the other,
the «integrated contour», with a simple predication. That French is an
oxytonic language itself may have been a contributing factor in the predilec­
tion for right-dislocation as a topicalizing device earlier.
This earlier topicalizing function of right-dislocation would explain in
its turn why the spreading sentence structure was first noted with definite
NPs, since topics are by nature assumed to have an agreed-upon referent.
In Occitan, apparently, right-dislocation is still limited to definite NPs, sug­
gesting that perhaps the same reanalysis which was first proposed by Harris
for French has not yet taken place in that language. In French, by contrast,
the scope of the V-initial strategy has been broadened to include also
sentences with a non-definite subject, by making use of ce/ça as the agree­
ment marker, as in:
(44) Ça ne me déplairait pas une Porsche.
«A Porsche (that) would not make me unhappy.»
(45) (a) Ça fait toujours plaisir des fleurs.
(b) *Ça fait toujours des fleurs plaisir.
«Flowers are always pleasing.»
 IL S'EN VA OÙ LE FRANÇAIS 51

In Bailard (1982), it was suggested that the order which is competing

with SVO for unmarked status is not VSO, as proposed in Harris (1976a,
1978), but VOS, though both types of sentences occur, and sentences such
as the ones in (44)-(45) would appear to support this interpretation, since
VSO is unacceptable there. VOS is also more likely than VSO, everything
else being the same, when ça is occurring with a definite subject, thus:
(46) (a) Ça ne surprendra personne cette conclusion.
(b) *Ça ne surprendra cette conclusion personne.
«This conclusion will surprise no one.»
(47) (a) C'est vachement bizarre cette histoire.
(b) *C'est cette histoire vachement bizarre.
«This story is really weird.» 8
Harris (to appear) has suggested that, in cases where VOS order is
preferable to VSO, there are in general specifiable syntactic grounds for this,
and that, when the two NPs in a sentence are, in the surface structure, a
subject and a direct object respectively, and their relations with the relevant
verb are on a par with one another. There seems to be no syntactic reason
for postulating a preference for VSO or VOS in French at the present time.
It is not clear, though, how this point could apply to sentences like (46).
Unlike avoir, for instance, in some cases, surprendre cannot be said to be
lexically empty and to need its direct object to give it its meaning, and even
if it were the case that we are indeed faced with an already well-established
VSO pattern, there would be no reason a priori why idioms like faire plaisir
should be impermeable to this pattern, or sentences like (48)-(49) either:
(48) (a) Il a eu un accident Jean.
(b) *I1 a eu Jean un accident.
«Jean had an accident.»
(49) (a) Il est allé au cinéma Jean.
(b) *I1 est allé Jean au cinema.
«Jean went to the movies.»
With respect to valency, aller in (49) does not seem to me to require
a complement any more or less than does surprendre in (46), and changing
the object there to a definite NP would not make VSO obviously more ac­
ceptable with the same intonation pattern:

8
For an analysis of the shift of ce from demonstrative to article, see Harris (1980).
52 JOËLLE BAILARD

(50) (a) Ça surprendra Jean-Marie cette conclusion.

(b) *Ça surprendra cette conclusion Jean-Marie.
«This conclusion will surprise Jean-Marie.»
What we seem to have instead in the type of sentences we have discussed
here with pleonastic subject pronouns is a stronger tendency toward VOS
than toward VSO. As Harris (to appear) notes, though, this generalization
can be made at best only for those sentences where only the subject is cliticiz­
ed. The situation is more complex when all NPs show one of these agree­
ment markers, thus:
(51) (a) Ili Ij' a eu son accident j Jean i .
(b) Ili Ij' a eu Jean i son accidentj.
«Jean has had his accident.»
(52) (a) Ili em a eu un d'accident; Jeanį.
(b) Ili em a eu un Jeanį d'accident;.
«Jean has had an accident.»
(53) (a) Ili luij enk a raconté des histoiresk à Mariej Paul i .
(b) Ili luij enk a raconté à Mariej des histoiresk Paul i .
(c) Ili luij enk a raconté des histoiresk Paul i à Marie j .
(d) Ili luij enk a raconté Paul i des histoiresk à Marie j .
(e) Ili luij enk a raconté à Marie; Paul i des histoires k .
(f) ?Ili luij enk a raconté Paul i à Mariej des histoires k .
«Paul has told Marie some tales.»
The use of clitics with objects or adverbial complements is not so com­
mon yet as with subjects, but it is also very frequent and, it would appear,
spreading. If the pronominalization strategy were to generalize, V-initial
might as a consequence surface as the dominant order at some point in the
future. For now, in any event, if it is the case that VOS is the word order
type which is competing with SVO for unmarked status at the sentential
level, whether the newer type can eventually succeed in replacing the older
one, in the end, will be determined by a variery of factors, extra-linguistic
as well as language-internal.
While prosody may have facilitated the spread of right-dislocation and
hence, ultimately, its reanalysis, new developments in the intonational con­
tour of the French sentence might in their turn be more compatible with
a VSO than with a VOS order. Also, universally the VOS type has been
found to be almost non-existent, and if the reasons for this are cognitive,
 IL S'EN VA OÙ LE FRANÇAIS 53

as opposed to, say, socio-historical, then, the same cognitive reasons behind
the general preference cross-linguistically for the subject before object order
might in French now work likewise against the generalization of VOS, again
possibly in favor of the universally less marked VSO.
In conclusion, there seems to be little doubt that French is a mixed-
type language at the moment, with two predominant orders competing in
basic sentences, SVO and VOS. While the interaction of pragmatics and
syntax in typological change is not a new discovery, a wealth of new material
has recently been brought to our attention, and the main task confronting
us now will be to try to integrate the results of this research in functional
syntax into the overall study of linguistic change, much as was done earlier
in relation to the effects of sound change on typological change.

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Historical Linguistics. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
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on the Historical Development of Auxiliaries, 7th International Con­
ference on Historical Linguistics. To appear in the Proceedings.
Ashby, W.J. 1982. The drift of French syntax. Lingua 57.29-46.
Bailard, J. 1982. Le français de demain: VSO ou VOS? In Ahlqvist (1982).
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Banfield, A. 1982. Unspeakable sentences: narration and representation in
the language of fiction. Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Barnes, . 1983. Moi, c'est pareil n'est pas pareil: Chinese-style topics in
French. Presented at the LSA Annual Meeting, Minneapolis, Minnesota.
. 1984. An empirical study of the syntax and pragmatics of left-
dislocations in spoken French. University of Minnesota, Minneapolis.
Bauche, H. 1929. Le langage populaire, 4th edition. Paris: Mayot.
Behaghel, O. 1923-32. Deutsche Syntax: eine geschichtliche Darstellung. 4
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Belasco, S. 1984. L'Occitan, qu'es aquò? French Review 8.1.7-18.
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Chomsky, N. 1977. On Wh-Movement. In Formai Syntax, P. Culicover et

al., eds., 71-132. New York: Academic Press.
. 1981. Lectures on government and binding. Dordrecht: Foris.
Dik, S.C. 1978. Functional grammar. Amsterdam: North-Holland.
. 1980. Studies in functional syntax. London and New-York: Academic
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tax and semantics 12, Discourse and syntax, ed. T. Givón, 377-417. New
York: Academic Press.
Foulet, L. 1968. Petite syntaxe de l'ancien français. Paris: Champion.
Frei, H. 1929. La grammaire des fautes. Paris: Paul Geuthner.
Givón, T. 1979. On understanding grammar. New York: Academic Press.
Green, J. 1976. How free is word order in Spanish? In Harris (1976b), 7-32.
Greenberg, J. 1963. Some universals of grammar with particular reference
to the order of meaningful elements. In Universals of language, ed. J.
Greenberg. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Harris, M. 1976a. A typological approach to word order change in French.
In Harris (1976b) 33-53.
. 1976b. (ed.) Romance syntax: Synchronic and diachronic perspectives.
Salford: Salford University.
. 1978. The evolution of French syntax: a comparative approach. Lon­
don: Longman.
. 1980. The marking of definiteness: a diachronic perspective. In Papers
from the 4th International Conference on Historical Linguistics, ed. E.
Traugott et al., 75-86. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
. 1982. On explaining language change. In Ahlqvist (1982), 1-14.
. 1984a. On the strengths and weaknesses of a typological approach to
historical syntax. In Historical syntax, ed. J. Fisiak, 183-197. The Hague:
Mouton.
1984b. On the causes of word order change. Lingua 63.175-204.
. 1985. Word order in contemporary French: a functional view. To
appear in Working Papers in Functional Grammar.
Huang, C.T.J. 1982. Logical relations in Chinese and the theory of grammar.
Ph.D. dissertation, MIT.
Hyman, L. 1975. On the change from SOV to SVO: evidence from Niger-
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 IL S'EN VA OÙ LE FRANÇAIS 55

Kuroda, S.-Y. 1965. Generative grammatical studies in the Japanese

language. Ph.D. dissertation, MIT.
Lambrecht, K. 1984. On the status of SVO sentences in French discourse.
To appear in R. Tomlin, ed.: Coherence and grounding in discourse.
Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Larsson, E. 1979. La dislocation en français: étude de syntaxe française.
Lund. OWK Gleerup.
Lass, R. 1980. On explaining language change. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Li, C.N. 1975. (ed.) Word order and word order change. Austin: Universi­
ty of Texas Press.
Li, C.N. and S.A. Thompson. 1975. Subject and topic: a new typology of
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. 1981. A functional reference grammar of Mandarin Chinese. Berkeley
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Lightfoot, D. 1979. Principles of diachronic syntax. Cambridge: Universi­
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Reinhart, T. 1983. Anaphora and semantic interpretation. Chicago: Chicago
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Smith, N.V. 1981. Consistency, markedness and language change: on the
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Wackernagel, J. 1926-8. Vorlesungen über Syntax, I-II, 2 Auff. Basel:
Birkhäuser.

BAILARD
ATTEMPTING THE RECONSTRUCTION OF NEGATION PATTERNS
IN PIE.

GIULIANO BERNINI
Istituto Universitario di Bergamo

1. Old Indo-European grammars as well as grammars of single Indo-

European languages describe pretty thoroughly the morphological and syn­
tactic encoding of negation at both sentence and word level, allowing the
firmly established reconstruction of the particles *n, *ē for sentence nega­
tion and *n for nominal negation in the proto-language l .
On the other hand, among the major scholars who have worked on
the reconstruction of Proto-Indo-European in a typological frame derived
from Greenberg's universals of word order (mainly W.P. Lehmann (1974)
with his strong theoretical assumptions, Friedrich (1975) with his cautious
adherence to the somewhat contradictory facts of the historical languages,
and very recently Hawkins (1983: 215-224, 266-274) with the unorthodox
proposal of VSO/SVO order (1983: 271)) only W.P. Lehmann has taken
into account the expression of negation, which, as is well known, is con­
sidered to have been harmonic with the claimed SOV order and hence
postverbal, despite the historical attestations but in accordance with its be­
ing a sentence qualifier (1974:153).
Negation appears in fact to be a field worth of investigation in the larger
framework of typology, since it is a pragmatic universal (we know of vir­
tually no language lacking such meaning) with a range of different encoding
possibilities at morphological or syntactical level (no language expressing

1
The first essay on Indo-European negatives is Fowler 1896. For detailed treatment of
negative patterns in the proto-language see Brugmann-Delbriick 1897:519-540 of vol. 4,
Brugmann 1916:974-979, Hirt 1937: 69-80, and for the history of negative particles in the an­
cient languages, mostly Greek and Latin, cp. Wackernagel 1928:248-313. For the three
reconstructed particles and their correspondences see Pokorny 1959: 756 f., 703, 757 f. respec­
tively.
58 GIULIANO BERNINI

negation on the level of intonation 2 ), which interact with the grammatical

and/or the pragmatical topic-focus structure of utterances and with the rise
of negative non-referential indefinites. In this respect, the study of the
developments in the syntax of negation shown by the variety of patterns
found in modern as well as early Indo-European languages can turn out
to be of valuable help in the reconstruction of early Indo-European syntax.
In this contribution I will concentrate on the Indo-European particle
*ne (or its counterparts in Greek, Armenian and Tocharian, partly also in
Albanian), which can be found under quite different shapes in most modern
and ancient languages, e.g. Skt. ná vs. Hindi < naGoth, ni vs.
Eng. not < OE na-wiht, and also Anc. Gk. où vs. Mod. Gk. < Anc. Gk.
I will also touch the expression of non-referentiality through the various
words for «nobody» and «nothing», leaving aside the questions concerning
the prohibitive particle *mē and the proclitic *n.
2. From recent work on the typology of negation 3 two major
parameters for cross-linguistic comparison emerge: (a) the position of
sentence negation morphemes, and (b) the presence of a separate set of non-
referential pronouns or adverbs.
In the case of sentence negation morthemes, Dahl's (1979) empirical
work has shown a close correlation between, on the one hand, the two main
types of negative constructions (syntactic, employing particles such as the
Indo-European ones, or morphological, such as the negative auxiliary in
the Uralic languages) and, on the other hand, the position occupied by the
negative morpheme and the basic word order of a language. Morphological
constructions obey general regularities of word and morpheme order as ex-

2
This seems to be true for verbal human languages, notwithstanding the possibility of
expressing negation by means of prosodic modifications in the form of change of distinctive
tones in some Niger-Congo languages as Ga and Mano (Dahl 1979: 82 with further references),
since this device must be rather regarded as morphological. Among human sign languages,
at least American Sign Language allows, beside lexicalization of various negative meanings
such as «not», «not yet» etc., the simple expression of sentence negation through a so-called
non-manual sign, actually a particular facial expression, accompanying the normal signing of
positive sentences (Liddell 1980:39). This device corresponds, mutatis mutandis, to a particular
intonational contour for negative sentences without overt negative morpheme in verbal languages.
3
In this respect the most important investigation on the typology of sentence negation
was carried out by Dahl (1979). For a preliminary overview of cross-linguistic data see Payne
1985 and for a functional approach Givón 1984:321-351. For ongoing investigation of negative
indefinites by the team of Professor Ramat in Pavia see Ramat-Bernini-Molinelli 1986.
 PIE. NEGATION PATTERNS 59

emplified by Greenberg's universal number 16 concerning position of aux­

iliary and verb in VSO and SOV languages; negative particles in syntactic
constructions show a clear tendency to a fixed preverbal position, this be­
ing in the great majority of the cases the one preceding the finite element
of the verbal group irrespective of basic word order.
The second parameter involves conditions of non-referential interpreta­
tion of otherwise referential indefinites in negative sentences (e.g. Eng.
anybody, anything) and the development of separate sets of non-referential
pronouns or adverbs either through incorporation of negation (as in Eng.
nobody, nothing) or from common words with original positive meaning
as exemplified by Fr. personne «nobody» (originally «a person», cp. Lat.
persona(m)), rien «nothing» (originally «a thing», cp. Lat. rem).

3. As regards positioning of sentence negation particles, the bulk of

the modern and ancient languages of the Indo-European family obeys the
tendency stated above (fixed preverbal position) irrespective of word order,
as illustrated by: Celtic with the only partial exception of Modern Welsh
and Breton (cp. Mn. Ir. níor bhuail sé «he did not strike», with níor < ní
«not» + past tense particle ro (Dillon - Ó Cróinín, 1961:47); O. Ir. ar-nach-
n-aurchoissed (Würzb. Gl. 8a4, reported in Lewis-Pedersen 1961: § 401) «that
it should not detain him», liter. «that-not-him-it should detain» where nach
(*ne-kwe is the special negative form to be used before clitic personal pro­
nouns); Romance with the only partial exception of Old and Modern French
(e.g. Sp. Juán no come pescado «Juan does not eat fish», also Port. não,
It. non, Rom. nu, Fr. ne); Gothic among the Germanic languages (e.g. ni
nimiþ) arbi (G 4, 30) «he does not inherit», ni gaaiwiskoþs warþ (k 7, 14)
«I was not confused») 4 ; Baltic (e.g. Lith. «there is
nothing to reap, nothing to do», Fraenkel 1950:78); Slavonic (e.g. Russ.
Ivan ne edit ryby «Ivan does not eat fish», Czech Jan nejí rybu «id.», .

4
. Streitberg 1910:217, who speaks of position before the verbal predicate without
further remarks. Behaghel (1924:68 f.) differentiates between verbal negation on the one hand
and quantitative negation of the verb and of non-verbal constituents on the other; in this se­
cond case, ni must be posited only before the constituent to be negated if this precedes the
verb. (e.g. ni waihtai botida (Mk 5,26) «it profited him nothing»). This is clearly a special
case, pointing to an incipient process of negative incorporation, since it occurs mainly with
the two indefinite nouns manna «(a) man» and waiht(s) «(a) thing», and does not challenge
the main pattern of pre-verbal position of negation. For the early situation in Germanic see
Hopper 1975:39f., Ramat 1981:132f.
60 GIULIANO BERNINI

Ch. SI. ašte ne bi otu boga bylǔ sĭ, ne moglǔ bi «If he was not from god,
he could not (do it)», also ne prěžde poučati sę «not training oneself» with
ne before the verbal predicate, cp. Vaillant 1977:193); Albanian (cp.Skënder
nuk do ta turpëronte Brahimin «Skënder would not bring dishonor to him,
Brahim», see Lambertz 1959:835); Tocharian, where *mē substituted *ne
(cp. A. natsey-ac mä kumnäs «he won't fall into distress», puk wramäm
säpn-ä nåpak ā mäskanträ «everything is not as in the dreams», Krause
1955:38); Iranian with the only exception of Avestan (cp. Mn. Pers. soma
šâm na-xordîd «you did not eat supper» with strong stressed na (Mace
1971:50), Tadzhik ki on parda -buda «that it was not a curtain» (Comrie
1981:191 f.), O.Pers. yapā Gaumāta haya magus viþam tayām amāham naiy
parābara «for Gaumāta the Wizard did not dethrone our royal descent»
(DB I, 70-71 cp. Brandenstein-Mayrhofer 1964:85); some Indic languages,
notably Hindi (cp. uskā na jānā acchā hε «it is good for him not to go»,
liter. «to him not go good is», vo nani jāegā «he won't go», Bhatia 1978:16)
and Punjabi (cp. o kār naī giā «he did not go home», Bhatia 1978:16), but
also partly Nepali (cp. ma naja «should I not go» vs. ma khan-ñu «I don't
eat», Bhatia 1978:17); Hittite among the Anatolian subgroup (cp. šer-a-ššan
GADan pešiemi šu-uš LÚaš natta aušzi «I throw a cloth over it and no one
will see them», liter. «... and man not see» with natta «not», reported in
Lehmann 1974:54; see Friedrich 1960:147).
As one can easily see, this bulk comprises languages with clear word
order patterns (VSO as in Celtic; SVO as in modern Romance, Slavonic,
Albanian and partly Baltic; SOV both weak as in the Iranian group or more
rigid as in Indic), although languages with conflicting word order types as
Tocharian (classified as SVO with overlay of SOV features by Friedrich,
1975:9) are present too.
To this bulk we can also add the languages that do not continue the
Indo-European particle *ne as the one listed above do, but which behave
in the same way, i.e. Armenian, both Modern with SOV order (cp. vor gluxə
č-i uzum gərki vrajie bardzraenel «that she did not want to raise her head
from the book», liter. «that head-her not-was wanting book from-on to
raise» with či = (vo)č «not» + i «was», Comrie 1981:192 f.) and Old with
SVO order (cp. zi oc' goyr noc'a tełí yijavanin «for there was no place for

5
nuk( *ne-kwod with  owing to conflation with Lat. numquam «never» (Hamp
1984:178).
 PIE. NEGATION PATTERNS 61

them in the hostel», Schmitt 1981:176); SVO Greek, both Modern (. 
«Ulysses does not eat fish»6) and Ancient (cp.
«he did not take any account (of it)» (Aesch, Prom. 232));
partly Albanian with SVO order (cp. s'kam pa kurr kësi nieri «I never saw
such a man», liter. «not I-have seen ever...», Lambertz 1959:157)7.
Among the languages not mentioned till now and which deserve par­
ticular comments are Latin (e.g. si adgnatus nec escit, gentiles familiam
habento «if there is no close relative, distant ones shall take over the house»
(XII Tables), nee mi aurum posco nee mi pretium dederitis nec... «I don't
ask for gold, do not pay me any price, not...» (Annales, 186), non ego te
flocci facio «I don't care a bean for you» (Plaut., Curc. 713), Homeric Greek
(e.g. «for lowly men surely wouldn't beget
such (sons)» (Od. 4,64), :<but
your heart doesn't notice, Zeus!» (Od. 1,59) both reported in Lehmann
1974:126, 55 respectively; «Thetis did not forget her
tasks» (II. 1,495) ), Avestan (e.g.
«the karapans do not want to submit to orders and laws» (Gath. 51,14),
«I was not able to get hold of x v .» (Yt. 19,57)
both reported in Gonda 1951:69), Sanskrit (e.g.
táskarah «they perish not; no thief shall (can) harm them» (RV vi 28 3),
«no god,
no mortal could surpass what the mighty bull has done» (RV viii 96 2), tarn
«If you cannot explain this
(riddle) to me, your head will burst» (SB); all reported in Macdonell
1971:354, 362, 362 respectively).
Free ordering of negative particles is claimed for the four languages,
with two positions being actually and equally preferred: sentence initial and
before the verbal group (see Brugmann-Delbrück 1897:521 of vol. 4,
Brugmann 1916: 976 for all the languages at issue; Wackernagel 1928:259
ff. for Latin and Greek in particular; Bartholomae 1904:1071 for Avestan;

6
For cp. Schwyzer-Debrunner 1966:593,597.
7
Alb. s should be better regarded as another instance of reshaped IE *ne according to
the very interesting proposal of Hamp (1984: 179-181) who reconstructs an original emphatic
form *ne-kwid (parallel to *ne-kwod > nuk(ë)) which lost the negative element owing to the
morphonemic reassignments brought about by the intertwining of different cliticization
possibilities of *kwid and old optional contextual forms of topicalised personal pronouns with
suffixed -në as u(në) «I», ti(në) «thou» etc.
62 GIULIANO BERNINI

Delbrück 1888:542, Macdonell 1971:286, Speijer 1886:315 for Sanskrit in

general and for Vedic in particular). The second of these two possibilities
becomes almost compulsory with some semantic classes (notably «know­
ing», «wanting», «being able») as Latin univerbations nescio «I do not
know», nolo «I do not want», nequeo «I cannot» (cp. Leumann-Hofmann-
Szantyr 1977:447, Wackernagel 1928: 253) and comparable formations in
other groups (e.g. Slavonic, cp. Vaillant 1977:194 ff.; Germanic, . Ramat
1981:133) illustrate.
Vedic often has a negative particle at the beginning of the sentence,
but the widespread assumption of Vedic as the language reflecting the original
ordering (see Brugmann-Delbrück 1897:521 of vol. 4, Brugmann 1916:976,
Hirt 1937:72, Wackernagel 1928:259) must be faced rather critically, since
sentence initial position of negative particles in non-VSO languages is at­
tested only for two isolated SOV languages over almost 250 in Dahl's sam­
ple (Zuñi and Takelma, 1979:93) and runs counter the overall development
of the other languages. Moreover deeper insight is needed into some crucial
questions pertaining negative order: (a) the expression of correlation of
negative sentences and the preference for negative conjunctions of the Eng.
neither... nor type. Sentence initial negative conjunctions are shown also
by rigid SOV languages as Hindi, cp. na meẽ bāzār gayā, na gha «I went
neither to the market nor home» (Bhatia 1978:25). As regards Latin, for
instance, a great many old examples with nec seem to fit this preference (cp.
Leumann-Hofmann-Szantyr 1977:448-452). This could provide an alternative
interpretation of, e.g., the Latin example taken from Annales 186 and the
Sanskrit sentence RV viii 96 2 cited above; (b) the distinction of sentence
vs. constituent negation, with possibility of preposing the same negative par­
ticle to the verb or to any other phrase, this being notoriously the case for
Latin and Greek, for later Sanskrit (Speijer 1886:315) but not for Vedic ac­
cording to Macdonell (1971:236) and to Delbrück (1888:543); () the
pragmatical patterns of word order in Vedic and in Avestan, with identifica­
tion of contextual conditions of the so called assertion vs. verbal or better
predicate negation (as illustred by sa yadri na jayeta yadi ciram jāyēta «if
it (scil. the fire) does not arise or if it arises too slowly» (AB 1,16,9) vs.
ná duscarmä bhavati «he does not get a skin disease» (TS 2,1,4,3) reported
in Brugmann-Delbrück 1897: 521-522 of vol. 4). With regard to this pro­
blem, Gonda argues on the base of a thorough empirical investigation that
immediate preverbal position is found in the case of simple expression of
 PIE. NEGATION PATTERNS 63

negative facts and sentence initial position is reserved for strong «affective»
reactions to previous statements. In this case ná means rather «it is not so
that...» (Gonda 1951:51-52).
Stress may also have a role in this regard, with proclisis correlating with
position immediately before the verb (cp. e.g. Skt. ná, Lat. nequeo vs. Pali
n'atthi «is not» (Gonda 1951:55), Goth. nist, MHG ih enmac with e = [ə]).
Typological considerations help in this case limiting the range of
hypothetical reconstruction and making at least plausible the further search
for single language (or language group) developments. Evidence from in­
side as well as outside the Indo-European family makes unplausible the
equating of Vedic negative structures with Proto-Indo-European ones, but
this same evidence helps us also in the evaluation of tentative reconstruc­
tions of Proto-Indo-European word order patterns, particularly of the claim­
ed consistent SOV order with the almost automatic assumption of a sentence
final negative qualifier (notably Lehmann 1974).
In Dahl's sample of almost 250 languages (cp. his statistical tables, 1979:
103-104), verb final languages appear to share almost equally preverbal and
postverbal negative constructions with a slight preference for these latter
ones, found in 51 over 91 languages (56%) (cp. also Payne 1985: 225 for
similar statements, although not substantiated by explicit statistical coun­
tings), but in the group of verb final languages with syntactic constructions,
only 2 over 23 (i.e. 8,69%) put the particle after the verb, while in the group
of verb final languages with morphological constructions postverbal negative
auxiliaries or negative suffixes are the great majority, ranging about 69%
the former (11 languages over 16) and 72% the latter (36 languages over
50). Furthermore, assuming a postverbal negative qualifier in a SOV Proto-
Indo-European involves reconstructing the ways of and the reasons for the
shift in position and in category of the old negative morpheme or the genesis
of a new negative morpheme, accounting for the preverbal particle(s) of the
historical languages.

4. We can now leave aside the case of new negative particles originating
from emphatic adverbial expressions deriving mostly from neuter Accusatives
with negative incorporation, as shown chiefly by Lat. nōn (if derivation from
*ne-oinom is correct, see Leumann-Hofmann-Szantyr 1977:452 and Wacker­
nagel 1928:253), and also by Av. naēčīm, younger Av. naēčis (Bartholomae
1904:1034), Ved. nákim (and mákim), both with only two occurrences (Mac-
donell 1971:236,240) together with makis, all composed of th.e indefinite
64 GIULIANO BERNINI

pronominal stem *kwi-. This case, found also in languages which do not
continue IE *ne, cp. Anc. Gk. Mn. Gk. , is of minor typological
and diachronical significance since it is a simple matter of lexical substitu­
tion which does not affect the position of the negative particles involved.
Of major significance are the factors enabling the genesis of new
negative morphemes (or words) or their shift around the verb which can
be sketched by considering some of the languages not yet subject to scrutiny
as regards positioning of negative particles and which show exceptional
behaviors running counter the overall trend to preverbal constructions.
Among these are all modern Germanic languages, which posit the negative
particle either after the finite element of the verbal group as SVO English
or Nordic languages in main TVX sentences (e.g. Norw. jeg har ikke sett
ham «I have not seen him» vs. Det er folk som ikke vil arbeide «There are
people who do not want to work», Sommerfelt-Marm 1981:53), or accor­
ding to the distribution of topic and focus as German and Dutch (with its
offspring Afrikaans), which have TVX order in main sentences and SOV
in subordinate ones (e.g. Germ. Ich sehe das Haus (TOP) nicht (FOC) «I
do not see the house»). This type of negative constructions notoriously is
the result of discontinuous constructions with two particles, one before the
verb being lost, and a second one after the verb being originally an emphatic
expression, as one can find in ancient Germanic languages (e.g. OHG ni
zawêta imo es niawiht «he did not succeed» (Otfr. II, 5.12), see also Behaghel
1924:71-76, Ramat 1981:132 ff.) and today in Fr. ne V pas (e.g. il ne le dira
pas «he won't tell it») and in Welsh ni(d) V ddim (cp. nid wiLf i ddim yn
hoffi coffi «I do not like coffe», Bowen-Rhys Jones 1960:23) or Breton ne
V ket (. ne lavaro ket kement-se «he won't tell it», Pedersen 1913:213).
In colloquial usage both French (see Ashby 1981) and Welsh (see Bowen-
Rhys Jones 1960:23) often drop the first particle.
This development typically creates new negative words, either with or
without incorporation of negation, starting from words with originally
positive meanings (e.g. Germ. nicht < ni eo wiht, liter. «not ever (a) thing»,
Nord. ekke < *eint-gi(n) «one» with generalizing suffix, cp. Ramat 1981:112;
Fr. pas < lat. passum (Accusative) «(foot) step» as is well known; Welsh
dim, base of mutated form ddim, corresponding to Ir. dim glossed «quip-
piam, quicquam», cp. Lewis-Pedersen 1961 :§385). This evolution, which
incidentally goes along with the rise of new sets of non-referential pronouns
both with or without negative incorporation (e.g. Eng. no(ne), liter. «not
 PIE. NEGATION PATTERNS 65

one», Fr. personne «nobody» < Lat. persona(m) «person»), is the result of
the non-referentiality acquired by indefinite noun phrases with focus func­
tion in the scope of negation. Pragmatic factors are therefore at work in this
case, where the resulting postverbal construction becomes a kind of Adver­
bial Operator in the sense of Bartsch-Vennemann (1972:133) harmonic with
the VO structure of the language and thus looses some of the markedness
character one would attribute to it on the sole basis of statistical regularities.
The fully character of negative morpheme acquired by these new par­
ticles is proved by their usage as constituent negation, preposed to the word
or phrase they are intended to negate, as illustrated by known Germanic
and French examples and by Welsh dim/nid Blodwen ddaeth (on Gareth)
«it wasn't Blodwen who came (but Gareth)» (reported in Payne 1985:232).
Leaving aside the question of possible areal diffusion of such construc­
tions, relevant only for Breton and for some Romance dialects on the
linguistic boundary to German (see Molinelli-Bernini-Ramat, forthcoming),
but otherwise chronologically and sociolinguistically unplausible, the dif­
ferent diffusion of this construction shows the different effect of pragmatic
factors on different word orders, whereby strongly TVX languages as Ger­
man show the most aberrant construction with negation on focus, while among
SVO languages only those which have known TVX order show fully gram-
maticalized discontinuous or postverbal constructions (notably French), the
other ones allowing them only as highly marked choices (notably Italian, cp.
mica). In VSO languages, the preverbal position does not appear to be serious­
ly challenged by the pragmatic factors of topic-focus ordering, permitting only
the rise of weak discontinuous/postverbal constructions as in Welsh.

5. A case for the shift of the negative particle around the verb is
represented by some modern Indic languages, which compose the second
group of Indo-European languages with departure from the statistically
regular immediate preverbal position of our negative particle. Indic languages
have acquired almost all of the characteristics of rigid SOV languages ow­
ing to their being since long time in contact with Dravidian languages. Among
the major Indic languages, Hindi and Punjabi maintain preverbal negation
(as examples reported above on p. 60 show) but Marathi and Sinhala,
among others, have postverbal constructions (e.g. Mar. gharāt konī āla nahī
«no one came home», liter. «home someone come NEG: was», Bhatia 1978:
17; Sinh. miniha gamətə yanne nææ «the man does not go to the village»,
liter. «man to-village go not», De Abrew 1981:12). Nepali (see above p. 60)
66 GIULIANO BERNINI

and Kashmiri (e.g. agar su vanihē ni me, bi mā vanihə: tas «if he had not
told me, I would not have told him», liter. «if he would-have-said not me,
I not would-have-said him» with partial overlapping of IE *ne, *mē, Bhatia
1978:26) come in between, showing the former postverbal negation in
declarative sentences and preverbal negation in conditional and imperative
ones, the latter just the reversed situation. In this case, the shift in the posi­
tion of the inherited negative particle seems to be brought about by the overall
trend towards SOV due to contact, without appealing direct Dravidian in­
fluence, since one should check the actual possibilities of cross-linguistic iden­
tifications between negative morphemes of Dravidian and Indo-European
languages of the area. Interplay of affixation of negative particles to aux­
iliary forms and positioning of these in relation to the main verb are more
likely to be at work, with the result of regular V-Aux order of SOV patterns.
6. The interpretation of the Indo-European data presented above has
shown that: (a) new negative morphemes arise through grammaticalization
of stylistic variants of emphasis expressions under the felicitous conditions
of a combined effect of grammatical and pragmatical order, this being most
easy in VX languages; (b) shift of negative particles around the verb can
take place inside a more general trend towards consistency of word order,
with verb forms with attached negative particles being actually moved.
This background, enriched by evidence from outside Indo-European
which points to a strong reduction of main verb forms in negative sentences
when auxiliaries become particles (cp. Estonian loen «I read», loed «you read»
etc. vs. ei loe «I, you, etc. do not read» (liter. «NEG read»); Finnish en lue
«I do not read» (liter. «NEG: 1SG read»), et lue «you do not read» (liter.
«NEG: 2SG read»), ei lue «he/she does not read» (liter. «NEG:3SG read»)
etc. vs. luen «I read», luet «you read», lukee «he/she reads», Comrie
1981:133,132) provides a number of checkpoints for possible reconstructions
not only of Proto-Indo-European sentence negation (with likely exclusion of
V-Neg ordering), but also of Proto-Indo-European negative morphemes, either
debatable and debated as Lat. nōn whose derivation from *ne-oinom presents
difficulties of phonetic development and of ordering and for which origin
from a reinforced particle *nō-ne has been recently proposed in Dunkel
1982-83:194, or of yet unknown origin as Arm. oč', Gk. où or *ne itself.
Evident should also be the feed-back action on reconstruction of general
Proto-Indo-European word order patterns, which receive a constraint on
likelihood of verb position.
 PIE. NEGATION PATTERNS 67

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Friedrich, Johannes. 1960. Hethitisches Elementarbuch. 2nd edn. Heidel­

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Payne, John R. 1985. Negation, in Language typology and syntactic descrip­

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STRUCTURE AND ORIGIN OF THE «NARRATIVE» IMPERFECT

PIER MARCO BERTINETTO

Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa

0. Introduction
The term «narrative» Imperfect (henceforth, NIPF, where IPF stands
for «Imperfect») refers to a peculiar usage of this tense, which is believed
to have emerged in relatively recent times (French grammarians also make
use of the term «IPF pittoresque»). The specific characteristics of this usage
lie, as is well known, in its aspectual features: in contrast to the imperfec-
tive value of the IPF in its normal usages, the NIPF is used in contexts where
we should expect to find a perfective tense, such as the Simple Preterite ( =
«Passato Remoto») or the Compound Preterite (= «Passato Prossimo»).
The purpose of this paper is twofold. First, I shall try to characterize
the aspectual value of the NIPF, showing that there is in fact a gradual shift
from the truly imperfective meaning of the normal IPF to the truly perfec­
tive meaning of the extreme cases of NIPF. Second, I shall attempt to
demonstrate that the NIPF, although classified by grammarians only in
relatively recent times, has a more distant origin, and is deeply rooted in
the subtle and rich aspectual system of old Italian.
Finally, I should like to observe that although my analysis is likely to
hold also for other Romance languages, the examples will be drawn only
from Italian: my conclusions will therefore be prudently limited to this
linguistic domain.

1. Basic aspectual characterization of the IPF.

In order to grasp the actual aspectual value of the NIPF, it is necessary
to start with a characterization of the basic usage of the IPF. By basic usages
I refer, in particular, to the «progressive» and «habitual» meanings of this
tense, as they may be observed in the following examples (later on in this
paper I shall claim that the basic usages of the IPF include also a third variety,
72 PIER MARCO BERTINETTO

which I call «continuous» IPF: for the moment, however, I refer exclusive­
ly to the two aforementioned types which are standard in any textbook):
(1) Mentre andava a scuola, si accorse all'improvviso di non aver studiato
la lezione.
(As he was going to school, he suddenly realized that he had not done
his homework).
(2) L'estate scorsa mi veniva a trovare spesso.
(Last summer he used to visit me quite often).
Minor details aside, the «progressive» meaning conveyed by the IPF in (1)
can be described as follows: (a) the given process (going to school) was tak­
ing place at a certain point in time tf (standing for «focalization point»);
(b) most importantly, the continuation of the process after tf is absolutely
u n d e t e r m i n e d . In other words, by the mere uttering of the
IPF in (1), the speaker does not commit him/herself to the belief that the
process of going to school was continued or (alternatively) was interrupted
after tf; in fact, he/she treats as barely irrelevant any question concerning
the temporal boundaries of the action (and this is true even if the speaker
happens to know how the given state of affairs in fact developed). As for
the «habitual» meaning conveyed by the IPF in (2), suffice it to say that
this usage of the IPF is defined by its allusion to a numerically unspecified
iteration of the event (in our case, the process of visiting).
In both cases we may say that the element crucial to the understanding
of the imperfective aspect carried by both the «progressive» and the
«habitual» IPF, is the notion of i n d e t e r m i n a c y , although
this notion has to be interpreted in two quite different ways; i.e., «indeter­
minate continuation» (or, equivalently, «indeterminate duration») with the
«progressive» aspect, and «numerical indeterminacy» with the «habitual»
aspect. As a matter of fact, whenever such a characterization is violated
in the given context, the sentence is either ungrammatical or else deviates
in aspectual interpretation from the original imperfective value. Thus
sentence (3), corresponding to (1), is ungrammatical inasmuch as the Sim­
ple Preterite (andò) is incompatible, because of its perfective meaning, with
the «indeterminate continuation» of the event after tf sentence (4), on the
other hand, corresponding to (2), is felt as «deviant» by any native speaker
inasmuch as it contains a numerical determination:
(3) * Mentre andò a scuola, si accorse all'improvviso di non aver studiato
la lezione.
 NARRATIVE IMPERFECT 73

(As he went to school, he suddenly realized that he had not done his
homework).
(4) (?) L'estate scorsa mi veniva a trovare tre volte.
(Last summer he would visit me three times).
As it happens, sentence (4) is, as we shall see in a moment, a possible
manifestation of the NIPF. Notice, in this connection, that numerical deter­
mination is quite compatible with perfective tenses, as is shown by (5). This
proves, therefore, that numerical specifications are the crucial element that
runs against the salient aspectual value of the «habitual» IPF:
(5) L'estate scorsa mi venne a trovare tre volte.
(Last summer he visited me three times).
The contrast between the IPF and the Simple Preterite may be observ­
ed in a number of other instances, all of which yield similar results on
analysis. Thus, in (6) the IPF (in its «progressive» meaning) is interpreted
as temporally overlapping with the event expressed by the Compound
Preterite, whereas the Simple Preterite is interpreted as posterior. This is
another consequence of the aspectual difference between the two given tenses:
(6) (a) Quando arrivai, Luca preparava la cena.
(When I came, Luca was preparing dinner).
(b) Quando arrivai, Luca preparò la cena.
(When I arrived, Luca prepared dinner).
In (7) on the other hand we observe a fact which is relevant to the distinc­
tion between the «progressive» and «habitual» aspects. The introduction
of an indication of «determinate duration», which is of course quite com­
patible with the Simple Preterite and with perfective tenses in general (cf.
(7a)), bars the «progressive» interpretation of the IPF but not the «habitual»
one, as can be seen in (7b):
(7) (a) I due mangiarono in silenzio dall'inizio alla fine.
(Both people ate silently from the beginning to the end).
(b) I due mangiavano in silenzio dall'inizio alla fine.
(Both people used to eat silently...).
Indeed, the presence of an indication of «determinate duration», although
strictly incompatible with the definition of the «progressive» aspect as
described above, is not rejected by the «habitual» aspect, provided that the
number of iterations of the process remains indeterminate. In such cases,
therefore, each iteration has a determinate duration, whereas the total
74 PIER MARCO BERTINETTO

number of iterations is not specified. This confirms that the notion of «in­
determinacy», which characterizes the imperfective aspect, must be inter­
preted in quite different ways in the two cases, as noted above.
Of course, the IPF can be used in a number of ways other than those
considered so far. Without aiming at exhausting the inventory, I would like
to recall at least the following usages, which are among the most typical:
«oniric», «imminential», «ludic», «hypothetical», «prospective». Sentences
(8a-e) illustrate in turn each of these possibilities:
(8) (a) Gianni si mise a sognare ad occhi aperti: tutti lo consideravano
un genio, ed ascoltavano volentieri il suo parere...
(Gianni started to day-dream: everybody regarded him as a genius,
everybody respected his opinion...).
(b) Ancora un poco e il treno deragliava
(Another moment, and the train would have derailed)
(c) Giochiamo che tu eri la guardia ed io il ladro.
(Let's pretend that you are the policeman and I am the thief)
(d) Se veniva, mi faceva piacere.
(If he had come, I would have been happy).
(e) Mi ha detto che veniva il giorno dopo.
(He told me that he would come the following day).
Each usage could be analysed separately from the point of view of its tem­
poral and aspectual properties. However this analysis would be far beyond
the scope of the present paper. I therefore limit myself to the observation
that although these usages do not all share the imperfective value (cf. the
«hypothetical» IPF, which is aspectually neutral), it can be shown that their
aspectual values derive from the basic imperfective character of this tense.
Further details are provived in Bertinetto (in press).

2. Basic structure of the NIPF.

Let us now examine the basic semantic structure of the NIPF.
First of all, it must be observed that the NIPF belongs almost exclusively
to the written language. Its usage in spoken language is very rare and often
carries parodic connotations, unless it belongs to the style of radio and televi­
sion commentators of sport events, where it is marginally admitted. The
following examples provide an illustration of three typical discourse domains
(newspaper, literary texts and sport-commentary):
 NARRATIVE IMPERFECT 75

(9) L'illustre ospite si recava ieri in visita ufficiale presso il capo dello
stato. Più tardi si intratteneva in lungo e cordiale colloquio con il
presidente del consiglio, e a sera partecipava ad una cena di gala of­
ferta in suo onore.
(The distinguished guest made an official visit yesterday to the presi­
dent of the republic. Later on he had a long and friendly talk with
the prime minister, and in the evening took part in a dinner of state
given in his honour).
(10) «Quella sera stessa, alle dieci in punto, l'ingegnere Ribera batteva due
colpi discreti alla porta del signor Giacomo Puttini in Albogasio
Superiore. Poco dopo si apriva una finestra sopra il suo capo e vi com­
pariva il visetto imberbe del sior Zacomo» (A. Fogazzaro).
(The same evening, at 10 o'clock precisely, the engineer Ribera knock­
ed discreetely at the door of Mr. Giacomo Puttini in Albogasio
Superiore. Shortly afterwards, a window above his head opened and
the beardless face of sior Zacomo appeared).
(11) Al 30° Dossena scendeva sulla sinistra, stringeva al centro e mancava
di un soffio la conclusione.
(At the 30th minute, Dossena ran down the left side of the pitch, veered
to the middle and only missed scoring by a hair's breadth).
It should be emphasized that the usage of the NIPF is not as widespread
as the warnings of a few worried purists may have suggested. Its presence
in literary texts is quite limited (with the provisos I shall give later on), and
its usage in newspapers is nowadays minimal. The NIPF may be found
somewhat more regularly in some very special types of discourse, such as
speeches justifying awards for valour, and biographies:
(12) Incurante del pericolo, il nostro si gettava nelle acque turbolente dei
fiume, e dopo aspra lotta contro gli elementi riusciva a trarre in salvo
l'incauto giovane.
(Ignoring the danger, our hero dived into the river's turbulent waters,
and after a hard battle with the elements managed to save the careless
youth).
(13) Due secoli fa, nasceva a Bonn L. van Beethoven.
(Two centuries ago, L. v. B. was born in Bonn).
Now, the question is: On what grounds are we entitled to say that
sentences (9-13) illustrate the use of the NIPF? The obvious test for ascer­
taining the presence of the NIPF consists, as is well known, in replacing
76 PIER MARCO BERTINETTO

the IPF by the Simple Preterite. Whenever this can be done without introduc­
ing striking differences in meaning, we have good reason to believe that the
IPF has indeed been used in a perfective context (the reader can easily check
whether this is so in (9-13)).
A more principled answer may be derived from the analysis developed
in the preceding section. In fact, the NIPF shows up whenever the condi­
tion of «indeterminacy», which is typical of the imperfective aspect, is not
fulfilled in the given context. Now, as we have seen, this condition may be
violated with the IPF in at least two ways: when the context provides an
indication of «determinate duration», and when it specifies the number of
iterations. The latter situation is illustrated in ex. (4) above, which exhibits
the type of NIPF deriving from violation of the conditions ensuring the ex­
istence of the «habitual» IPF. The former situation, on the other hand, can
be illustrated by the following sentence, which shows that the second major
source of the NIPF lies (quite predictably) in the infringement of the condi­
tion characterizing the «progressive» IPF:
(14) Il drappello marciava per due ore.
(The platoon marched for two hours).
Needless to say, this sentence would be perfectly acceptable, according to
our discussion of ex. (7b) above, even in the case of an «habitual» reading
of the IPF. However, if the context suggests a semelfactive reading, we
necessarily have an instance of NIPF.
Examples (4) and (14) are among the most striking illustrations of the
NIPF. In most cases, however, violation of the conditions for indeterminacy
is less explicit, and must be inferred through a careful examination of the
linguistic context. Thus, in (9), (11) and (12) the «narrative» reading of the
IPF is suggested by the presence of a series of events, each of which pro­
vides a temporal boundary to the preceding one, thus preventing any kind
of «indeterminate continuation» of the process. As for (10) and (13), the
NIPF is the result of the combined action of a punctual adverbial and a
non-durative verb linked to it, which again precludes (at least in the given
contexts) the imperfective reading.

3. Aspectual characterization of the NIPF.

The essential character of the NIPF lies, as we have seen, in the use
of a basically imperfective tense in a perfective context. This situation is
clearly reminiscent of the condition for metaphor, which has been defined
 NARRATIVE IMPERFECT 77

as a word used in a «counterdetermining» context. It is not surprising,

therefore, that Berrettoni (1972) suggested that the NIPF may be viewed
as a kind of «aspectual metaphor».
If this is the case, we may expect there to be «dead» as well as «live»
aspectual metaphors. The latter case would hold when the imperfective value
of the IPF, in its basic meanings, is perceived by the language user despite
the counterdetermination of the context; whereas the former circumstance
would hold when the basic aspectual value of this tense is somehow totally
overridden by the perfective character of the sentence. The most typical ex­
amples of NIPF, such as those considered above, are thus instances of
«dead» aspectual metaphors; and the probability of finding them is of course
highest in the most conventionalized types of discourse, such as those il-
lustrated in (9-13).
As for «live» aspectual metaphors, they are typically found in literary
discourse (where, in fact, they form the majority of cases of NIPF). As was
said above, the distinctive feature of this weaker type of NIPF lies in the
fact that the context has a partially «counterdetermining» value only. The
aspectual characterization of such NIPFs is thus somewhat ambiguous, in­
asmuch as they retain part of their original value: and it is no wonder that
they are found most typically in literary texts, where writers consciously ex­
ploit all the metaphorical possibilities of the language. The following
sentences illustrate this situation:
(15) «Si spogliarono, si coricarono; e dopo aver chiacchierato un po', si
addormentarono: Bouvard supino, la bocca aperta; Pécuchet sui fianco
destro, le ginocchia raccolte sotto il mento, un berretto di cotone
calcato in capo; e tutti e due ronfavano nel chiaro di luna che entrava
dalle finestre». (G. Flaubert; It. translation by . Sbarbaro).
(They undressed and went to bed; and after chatting a while, they fell
asleep (...): and they both lay snoring in the moonlight which came
through the window).
(16) «... ma il frate, facendogli di nuovo sentir fortemente la mano con
cui lo teneva, lo tirò appiè del covile, e, stesavi sopra l'altra mano,
accennava col dito l'uomo che vi giaceva» (A. Manzoni).
(... but the monk, making him feel again the pressure of his hand,
pulled him over to that miserable bed and, extending his other hand
over it, pointed with his finger to the man who was lying there).
(17) «Rogas avvertì il collega della sezione politica, che subito dispose
78 PIER MARCO BERTINETTO

sorveglianza e controllo telefonico. Due ore dopo bussava alla villet­

ta di periferia in cui Nocio usava ritirarsi nell'estate». (L. Sciascia).
(Rogas warned his colleague in the political section who immediately
ordered surveillance of the house and monitoring of telephones. Two
hours later he knocked at the door of the cottage where Nocio used
to spend the summer).
Sentence (17) illustrates a possible merging of NIPF and «progressive» IPF:
indeed, bussava might be replaced here by the «progressive» periphrasis stava
bussando, without dramatic modifications of meaning; on the other hand,
the Simple Preterite could also be used. As for (15-16), they illustrate a possi­
ble merging of NIPF and that particular variety of IPF which I suggest to
call «continuous» IPF, which belongs (together with the «progressive» and
the «habitual» IPF) to the set of the basic imperfective varieties of this tense.
Since a thorough discussion of this matter would lead us too far from our
topic, suffice it to say that in (15-16) the IPF could be replaced by the «con­
tinuous» periphrasis «andare + GERUNDIO» (andava Tonfando, andava
accennando). It should be stressed that this kind of diagnostic is inadequate
for a real understanding of the «continuous» IPF: nevertheless, it suffices
for our present purposes (for further details, cf. Bertinetto (in press)). An
example of pure «continuous» IPF is provided, for the sake of comparison,
in (18):
(18) «Ancora mezzo affannato, e tutto sottosopra, ringraziava intanto alla
meglio in cuor suo la provvidenza, d'esser uscito d'un tal frangente,
senza ricever male né farne; la pregava che l'aiutasse a liberarsi anche
da' suoi liberatori; e dal canto suo, stava all'erta, guardava quelli,
guardava la strada, per cogliere il tempo di sdrucciolar giù quatto quat­
to...» (A. Manzoni).
(Still panting and thoroughly disoriented, he thanked God as best he
could for having escaped such a danger, without receiving or doing
any harm; now he prayed God to help him get rid of his liberators;
and meanwhile he was on the lookout, looking now at his liberators,
now at the road, waiting for the right moment to escape).
Consider for instance the form ringraziava (but the same holds for the re­
maining IPFs). It may not be considered a NIPF, for its replacement by
the Simple Preterite ringraziò would produce a considerable semantic
modification. On the other hand, it is quite evident that this form may not
be taken as an example of «progressive» or «habitual» IPF. The latter
 NARRATIVE IMPERFECT 79

hypothesis is excluded in principle because the situation is clearly semelfac-

tive. As to the former hypothesis, it is likewise excluded by the impossibili­
ty of replacing the form ringraziava by the progressive periphrasis stava
ringraziando. In contrast, the continuous periphrasis andava ringraziando
would be perfectly appropriate in this context. Thus, as was said before,
the IPFs of (18) do instantiate the particular kind of IPF which I have call­
ed the «continuous» IPF. (Notice, by the way, that the continuous periphrasis
would be altogether out of place in all the examples of NIPF presented in
(9-13), with the possible exception of (10), which however (and significant­
ly enough) is taken from a literary text).
This suggests that sentences (15-16), where such a substitution is not
ruled out, retain part of the imperfective (namely, the «continuous») value
of the IPF, just as (17) ambiguously retains, as seen above, part of its «pro­
gressive» meaning. On the other hand, the IPFs in (15-17) could equally
well be replaced by a Simple Preterite, without any significant change of
meaning. We must therefore conclude that these sentences, as was stated
above, illustrate a sort of merging of divergent aspectual values. They are,
in other words, «live» aspectual metaphors.
Before closing this section, let us summarize our findings. We have seen
that there exist three varieties of IPF in its basic imperfective value: «pro­
gressive», «habitual», «continuous». The NIPF is produced by the inser­
tion of an IPF into a (counterdetermining) perfective context. Finally we
have seen that literary texts provide many examples of a «weak» sort of
NIPF, which exhibits ambiguous aspectual characterizations.
It is now time to address the second topic announced in the introduc­
tion: How recent is the NIPF as a grammatical tool? The remaining part
of this paper will be devoted to this matter.

4. Origin of the NIPF.

Among the most prominent features of the aspectual system of old
Italian, I would like to point out its great flexibility. One feature of this
flexibility consists of a free, but far from arbitrary, alternation of IPF and
Simple Preterite. This may perhaps be observed best with «permanent»
stative verbs which, in modern Italian (and to an even greater extent in
French), almost necessarily require the IPF. Adopting Dauses's (1981) ter­
minology, I name «absolute» IPF this special usage of the IPF, in which
the particular Aktionsart of the verb («permanent» stative) determines an
80 PIER MARCO BERTINETTO

almost complete aspectual neutralization (converging in fact towards the im­

perfective member of the opposition).
The following sentences, all taken from 13th and 14th century texts,
come from Aigotti (1974). To begin with, let us consider examples contain­
ing the verb essere («to be»):
(19) «Buonanno di ser Benizo fu uno fiorentino mercantante di spezieria.
Era un uomo basso e largo e grosso». (Trecentonovelle)
(Buonanno of ser Benizo was a Florentine spice merchant. He was
a short, broad, fat man).
(20) «... fu in Siena uno piacevole uomo e semplice, (...). Era costui balbo
della lingua... (ibid).
(... there once was in Siena a pleasant and simple man... He was a
stutterer...).
Examples (19-20) exhibit the Simple Preterite in its copulative and existen­
tial functions, respectively. In both cases, this tense is accompanied by an
IPF of, so to say, attributive character, which designates some distinctive
property of a given individual. Thus, even with the verb essere, old Italian
distinguished between a «global» consideration of the event, perfectively
viewed by means of the Simple Preterite, and an imperfective consideration
of the event, viewed in its existence within a certain temporal frame. Notice,
in fact, that in (19-20) the Simple Preterite carries a markedly «presentative»
function, i.e. is used to introduce a new element into the universe of discourse
and to suggest its temporal distance from the point of speech by marking
the situation as past. The IPF, on the other hand, conveys an idea of
simultaneous presence, i.e. of existence within a temporal frame already
defined (or to be defined shortly).
It must be noted that this aspectual distinction was quite consistently
respected in old Italian. This can be observed in the case not only of essere
(and of the «absolute» IPF in general), as illustrated in (19-20), but of any
sort of verb. Consider for instance:
(21) «E mise in dimenticanza Dio e il suo nome, e non si confessava e diceva
che molto erano pazzi chi dicea i peccati sui ai preti...».
(Conti morali senesi).
(And he forgot all about God and his name, did not confess his sins
and used to say that those who did so were quite mad).
(22) «Poi che Giason e ssua ccompagnia furono arrivati, si uscirono dalla
nave nobilmente vestiti e parati, e prendeano aria ed agio si'ccome
 NARRATIVE IMPERFECT 81

gente affannata del tormento del mare». (Istorietta troiana).

(After Jason and his company had arrived they came out of their ship
wearing their best clothes, pretending still to be suffering from the
travail at sea).
The relevant fact is provided here by the very strict coordination of the Simple
Preterite and the IPF; indeed, this aspectual alternation covers events which
are temporally very close to each other. As before, the event expressed by
the Simple Preterite carries a sort of «presentative» function, inasmuch as
it globally characterizes a new state of affairs; the events expressed by the
IPF, on the other hand, provide some additional qualification of the same
situational frame.
Not surprisingly, such a rich and subtle aspectual system was deemed
to go astray. A quite revealing example is provided by the oscillation bet­
ween the IPF and the Simple Preterite of the verb aver nome. At the begin­
ning, this alternation had exactly the same aspectual character as described
above in sentences (19-22):
(23) «Il secondo fu uno che avea nome Giovanni da Pirano...» (Trecen­
tonovelle).
(The second was a man whose name was G. da P.).
(24) «Uno cavaliere di corte ch'ebbe nome messere Beriuolo era in
Genova...» (Novellino).
(A gentleman of the court whose name was Berioulo, was in G.).
Later on, however, this aspectual distinction was gradually eliminated in
favour of a sort of lexical distinction between the stative meaning of «to
have the name x», expressed by the IPF, and the non-stative meaning of
«to receive the name x», expressed by the Simple Preterite. Thus, the choice
between IPF and Simple Preterite ceased to be an option, and the IPF of
aver nome became one of the many instances of «absolute» IPF.
Even more striking are the alternations between IPF and Simple Preterite
which can be observed in the different manuscripts of one and the same
text. The following example is quoted from Dauses (1981):
(25) «Ed era molto fedele alli soi amici (...). Ma { fo/ era} pigro ad ac­
quistare amici». (Storie de Troia e de Roma).
(And he was very faithful to his friends... But he was lazy in acquir­
ing new ones).
There is reason to believe that this conflict between two versions of the same
82 PIER MARCO BERTINETTO

text reflects the beginning of the crisis which would soon affect the entire
aspectual system. There is no doubt, in fact, that the aspectual flexibility
of old Italian was lost rather soon. According to Wilmet (1973), the «ab­
solute» IPF had been almost completely generalized in French by the 14th
century. I am not able to specify when the same process occurred in Italian,
but it is likely that it was not much later. Considerations such as this have
led several scholars (e.g. Tekavčič (1972:512)) to state that the NIPF is only
the final stage (up to now) of this crisis.
If this were so, however, it would be very difficult to justify examples
such as the following, which exhibit something very close to the NIPF. What
we observe here, indeed, is something quite similar to the «weak» type of
NIPF analysed above in (15-17); the examples come however from old texts:
(26) «Lo marito correndo al romore per aiutare la moglie, e '1 lume si
spense, si trovò nella detta acqua; ed essendo nell'acqua cominciò a
gridare: - Accurr'uomo -. Li vicini, udendo il romore, scendeano le
scale per sapere che fosse...» (Trecentonovelle).
(The husband, hearing the noise, ran to help his wife, but the light
went off, and he found himself in the water; he then started to shout:
- Help! -. The neighbours, hearing the noise, came downstairs to see
what was happening).
(27) «Mallio quando si vidde così assalito prese una lancia a due mani et
uccidea et abatteva cavalieri e cavalli...» (Fatti di Cesare).
(Mallio, when he realized that he was being attacked, took a spear
in his hands and started to kill and knock down knights and horses).
Furthermore, if this usage were really contrary to the aspectual system of
old Italian, we would presumably not find it in writers such as the Abbot
Cesari (first half of the 19th cent.), renowned as one of the most enthusiastic
purists of Italian literary history (notice, by the way, the use of the «Passé
Antérieur» si furono trovati in the main clause, an unmistakably archaic
choice):
(28) «I tre, allo scocco appunto dell'ora si furono trovati a casa il sig.
Giuseppe: sicché tutti e tre montavano insieme le scale, ridendo in­
sieme di questa loro accuratezza; ed entrarono nella camera del
Torelli...» (Abbot Césari).
(The three men, at exactly one o'clock, met in front of the house of
Mr. G.; so that all three went up the stairs together, laughing at their
punctuality, and entered Torelli's room).
 NARRATIVE IMPERFECT 83

We are clearly not faced here with a surrender to modern linguistic

usage, as we should have to say if indeed the NIPF were a modern inven­
tion, but rather with a text shaped according to older models. In the final
section I shall suggest an explanation for the rise of the NIPF.

5. Concluding remarks.
The view that I like to propose here is significantly different from the
one usually accepted. I do not consider the NIPF as a kind of extreme cor­
ruption of the Italian (and Romance) aspectual system: rather, I view it as
a partial revitalization of the original flexibility of the language. Indeed,
the great majority of instances of NIPF which can be observed in literary
texts belongs, as noted in section 3, to the «weak» type of NIPF, i.e. the
NIPF which actualizes the sort of ambiguous merging of perfective and im-
perfective features illustrated in (15-17). Following Berrettoni (1972), I have
defined these examples as «live» aspectual metaphors, inasmuch as the basic
imperfective characterization of the NIPF is not completely lost.
Of course, the specific ratio of perfective /imperfective meaning injected
into each manifestation of NIPF varies from one case to another, and may
be calculated only through a careful examination of the context. However,
it is important to realize that the most genuine NIPFs are only the extreme
version of a kind of metaphorical usage which, as such, already existed in
old Italian, and was deeply rooted in the aspectual flexibility of the language.
If it is ever proved, by further research, that this kind of metaphorical
usage ceased to be exploited during an intermediate stage in the develop­
ment of the language, this would only mean that Italian went through a
period of rigidification of its aspectual properties. I am nevertheless per­
suaded that this development is not likely to have happened. Among the
cues that lead me to this belief, I would like particularly to cite the behaviour
of «verba dicendi», which traditionally enjoyed considerable aspectual
freedom, as was noted also by Dauses (1981):
(29) «Colui minacciava Carmignano e diceva: - Tu mi fai perdere questo
gioco; al corpo e al sangue che io te ne pagherò -. Carmignano allora
disse...» (Trecentonovelle).
(He threatened . and said: - You are making me lose; you will pay
for this in blood -. Carmignano then said...).
Furthermore, the received hypothesis that the NIPF is the most recent
84 PIER MARCO BERTINETTO

product of the crisis of the aspectual system cannot be maintained even on

purely theoretical grounds. If the NIPF is indeed to be regarded as a kind
of aspectual metaphor, its very existence presupposes the fundamental stabili­
ty of the two aspectual values (perfective/imperfective) involved in this
metaphorical process. If it were not so, its peculiar semantic effects could
not be perceived by speakers. The only serious argument supporting the view
that the aspectual opposition between the IPF and its perfective counter­
parts is in the process of being neutralized, would consist in the generaliza­
tion of phenomena such as the «absolute» IPF: however, apart from this
marginal area, the distinction between IPF on the one hand and Simple
Preterite on the other is still very solid in Italian (or, for that matter, in
Romance languages in general).
The only point on which I in some ways agree with the received opi­
nion that the NIPF is a linguistic tool of relatively recent origin, has to do
with the uses of NIPF that can be observed in highly conventionalized types
of discourse, such as those exemplified in (9-13); i.e. with what I have call­
ed «dead» aspectual metaphors. These are the only instances where the aspec­
tual nature of the NIPF can be characterized to all intents and purposes
as perfective, i.e. where the replacement of the NIPF by means of the Sim­
ple Preterite leaves virtually no semantic residue. The generalization of these
uses may indeed be a relatively recent phenomenon. It is essential to unders­
tand, though, that these uses of the IPF are statistically far less prominent
than has been suggested, and are above all nothing else but an extreme
development of the possibilities inherent in the aspectual flexibility originally
possessed by Italian, and which has been partly revitalized, as was said above,
in modern times.

REFERENCES

Aigotti, D. 1974. Tempo e aspetto nell'italiano antico, dissertation. Univ.

of Torino.
Berrettoni, P. 1972. La metafora aspettuale. Studi e Saggi Linguistici,
12.250-9.
Bertinetto, P.M. in press. Tempo, Aspetto e Azione nel verbo italiano. Il
sistema dell'indicativo. Firenze: Accademia della Crusca.
 NARRATIVE IMPERFECT 85

Dauses, A. 1981. Das Imperfekt in den romanischen Sprachen. Seine

Bedeutung im Verhältnis zum Perfekt. Wiesbaden.
Tekavcic, P. 1972. Grammatica storica dell'italiano. Vol. II: Morfosintassi,
Bologna. New edition, 1980.
Wilmet, M. 1973. Antériorité et postériorité: réflexions sur le passé antérieur.
Revue de Linguistique Romane 147-8. 274-91.
 THE EVOLUTION OF WORD ORDER:
A PAEDOMORPHIC EXPLANATION

BERNARD H. BICHAKJIAN
University of Nijmegen, The Netherlands

1. From typology to diachrony

Word order has been a matter of considerable discussion. Twenty years
ago, Greenberg observed that SOV and SVO are the most common types
and listed some of their concomitant features. While his typological investiga­
tions yielded data that may serve as a valuable touchstone for the reconstruc­
tion of unattested languages (cf. Jacobson 1958, commenting on earlier
typological results), Greenberg did not suggest diachronic solutions. But his
cross-linguistic findings incited others to do so.
A number of explanations were enthusiastically proposed, with each
author or set of authors believing that he (or they) had discovered the very
mechanism that triggers a word-order change. Those explanations, however,
enjoyed merely a brief life-span. More broadly-researched empirical data or
better-honed interpretations either belied them or failed to provide conclusive
support, ushering in a period when linguists have been seeking a safe heaven
in formal (Hawkins, 1979), stochastic (Lightfoot, 1981), or multicausal (Sasse,
1977) approaches, but thereby leaving word-order change in fact unexplained.
The task ahead is clear. Mindful of the past difficulties, but convinced
nevertheless that it can be done, I shall attempt an explanation of word-order
change by integrating it in the overall evolution of syntax. After a brief review
of the existing and largely-insufficient explanations, I shall try to show the
scope of the phenomenon in the Indo-European languages, and argue that the
theory of linguistic paedomorphosis I have outlined in Bichakjian (1984, 1986
and forthcoming a) and developed in Bichakjian (forthcoming b) can provide
a coherent explanation of word-order change and of the connected processes.

2. Existing explanations.
As Hawkins has pointed out, «there is no shortage of proposals in the
88 BERNARD H. BICHAKJIAN

literature explaining why individual word orders may change» (1979:644).

I shall not try to make up a complete inventory, but rather discuss the three
which have attracted the most attention: the morphological-decay, the after­
thought, and the grammaticalization hypotheses. It is true that all of them
have been rejected as universal triggering mechanisms, but the debate has
been useful, not so much because it suggested an alternative solution, but
because it provided a better understanding of the problem. That is also the
motive of the following discussion.

2.1 The morphological erosion hypothesis.

According to the traditional view phonological decay and the attendant
morphological erosion brings about the fixation of word order. This view
was restated in a somewhat modified form by Vennemann, who claimed
that SOV languages become SVO when morphological decay sets in, because
an SOV word order without distinct case markers would create intolerably
ambiguous situations, and then the entire structure of the language is reversed
(1975:289 et sq.).
The morphological-erosion hypothesis raises unfortunately more ques­
tions than it answers. The reader is left to wonder what causes the phonological
decay to occur in the first place, and, second, how it can explain the massive
shift from left to right branching, especially since in a predominantly left-
branching language the morphology can renew itself without changing the
nature of the structures. Armenian has remained a mostly left-branching
language while changing many of its declensional suffixes. In Latin regular
intensitives such as canto cantavi «I sing, I sang» replaced cano cecini, which
displayed the ancestral ablaut that was no longer active. Also the left-branching
Proto-Romance future legere + habeo «I shall read» replaced the mor­
phologically ill-suited legam and the substandard legebo.
The case of the Proto-Romance future clearly shows, I believe, that
as long as the language was predominantly left-branching, the problems of
an allomorphic and quasi-ambiguous future were given left-branching solu­
tions. But today the right-branching Romance languages are replacing these
structurally incongruous forms with a right-branching alternative although
the supplanted items are perfectly functional from a purely morphological
point of view (cf. e.g. Il va lire for il lira «he will read»). The lexical renewal
taking place in English (I gonna instead of I shall/will) does not weaken
the present argument. The motivation of the English change should be sought
 THE EVOLUTION OF WORD ORDER 89

primarily in a quest for greater semantic transparency, but it should also

be kept in mind that it is once again a right-branching alternative in line
with the right-branching language in which it is introduced.
The structural shift that the Fr. il va lire is bringing about in yet another
part of the French morphology does not stand alone. Several languages
within and without the Indo-European family (e.g. the Slavic languages
among the former and Finnish among the latter) have developed an SVO
order while having quite clear case markers. The evidence seems even over­
whelming. According to Sasse, Koch (1974) and Miller (1975) have shown
independently of each other «dass in den meisten indogermanischen Sprachen
der Übergang von SOV in SVO zeitlich vor dem Verlust der Kasusendungen
liegt» (1977: 90).
Moreover, the ambiguity that would result from the loss of case markers
in an SOV language seems debatable. After a detailed discussion, Sasse
reaches a negative conclusion: «die Hypothese, dass eine konsistente SOV-
Sprache ihren Typ deshalb und nur deshalb ándert, weil durch fehlende KM
[Kasusmarkierung] Ambiguitäten entstehen, kann sich auf so wenig Substanz
berufen, dass ihr Universalitätsanspruch in ganz brisanter Weise gefährdet
erscheint» (1977:104).
Since structural changes can and often do occur without morphological
erosion (cf. the French future) and since the ambiguity that would result
from the latter plays a marginal role, the causes of the reversal of consti­
tuent order must be sought elsewhere.

2.2 The grammatical hypothesis.

One of the alternative explanations of word-order change has been based
on the evolution of verb serialization. If, instead of saying he sang a song
for her, a given language said originally he song sang her give, serializing
thereby the verbs sing and give, the subsequent recategorization of give in­
to a pre- or postposition meaning «for», called «grammaticalization», would
yield an SOV-PP structure which in turn would open the door for an SVO
order.
Sasse, who quoted the above example from Hyman (1975:118), went
on to say: «Grammatikalisierung braucht nicht notwendigerweise von SVO
zu SOV zu führen. Im Chinesischen führt sie von SVO zu SOV» (1977:112).
He was relying for this on Li and Thompson, the original authors of the
grammaticalization hypothesis, who had claimed that Mandarin Chinese
90 BERNARD H. BICHAKJIAN

is changing its word order from SVO to SOV through such a process
(1974:209). Recently, however, Li and Thompson's already-contested in­
terpretation has been convincingly refuted by Sun and Givón, whose data
from oral and written «texts» and from language acquisition provide a «pro­
file [that] is not consistent with a drift from SVO to SOV; if anything it
is consistent with continued and vigorous preservation of Mandarin as a
rigid SVO language» (1985:348). With the invalidation of what was thought
to be the Chinese evidence, the alleged change from SVO to SOV through
grammaticalization loses all empirical support. The African languages also
fail to provide an example of an SVO language becoming SOV through such
a process.
An SVO language may develop an SOV structure to express certain
grammatical notions (cf. also the VSO order used in certain cases by the
Germanic languages to express optativity), but the evidence seems to indicate
that in such cases, SOV is used for marked structures (cf. Sun and Givón,
1985: 348 for Mandarin Chinese and Sasse, 1977:113-4 for an African ex­
ample).
There is also very little support for Sasse's presumption: certain incon­
sistent SOV languages of Africa «waren vermutlich früher SVO-Sprachen»
(1977:109). There is no guarantee that the incongruous elements are ancient
relics; they could very well be innovations. The features that he mentions
(1977:108-9) are indeed those that Latin had introduced on its way from
Indo-European SOV to Romance SVO.
The evidence for the alleged changes from SVO to SOV in unmarked
situations being found wanting both as a result of grammaticalization or
of any other natural process (borrowing being, therefore, excluded), let us
return to the change from SOV to SVO. Sasse believes that grammaticaliza­
tion may serve as one of the possible factors (1977:115). This may indeed
be so, but it should be noted that while this process introduces a right branch­
ing phrase, the verb is recategorized as a postposition, a grammatical item
that is consistent with the SOV character of the language. From that point
on in the evolution, two subsequent changes may take place: either, as
Hyman points out, the postpositional phrase is moved to the left of the verb
and the consistency of the SOV pattern is maintained (1975:119), or the
postposition is moved to the left of its noun, becoming thereby a preposi­
tion and introducing thereby a true SVO pattern. Since these two alternatives
are equally possible, it is obvious that grammaticalization cannot auto-
 THE EVOLUTION OF WORD ORDER 91

matically explain the second. There must be another factor at work, but
which one?
Moreover, since, to my knowledge, the Indo-European languages have
never changed their word order through such a process, grammaticaliza-
tion cannot be considered to have a universal explanatory power (cf. also
Sasse, 1977:119). Rather, it seems to belong to the class of accidental changes,
whose occurence and explanation remain ad hoc.

2.3 The afterthought hypothesis.

With the morphological-decay and grammaticalization hypotheses
yielding less-than-satisfactory results, the quest for an explanation of word-
order change led to an investigation of «afterthought syntax».
Hyman, the advocate of the afterthought hypothesis, argued that when
the speaker of an SOV language suddenly realizes that the sentence he just
uttered should have included another element of information, and thus a
phrase carrying the complementary message is added after a slight pause
and given a modified prosodic contour. For pragmatic reasons, SOV may
therefore become SOV-Pause-O, and, as such split-constructions become
more frequent, the pause will tend to be omitted, and the resulting SOVO
will eventually usher in a SVO pattern.
The problem with this hypothesis is that it is difficult to prove it, and
ipso facto to falsify it. Hyman argued that the existence in some African
languages of SOVO word orders (without a break in the intonational curve)
and with the preverbal O being more «prominent» than the postverbal one
«provides evidence for my [i.e. Hyman's] hypothesis» (1975:127). This un­
fortunately is not so. The attested SOVO word order shows perhaps that
when SOV becomes SVO the less prominent objects are shifted before the
more prominent ones (e.g. the direct object) or that the switch from SOV
to SVO is a gradual change, but it does not provide evidence that afterthought
is the driving force behind this process.
It is interesting to note that Dutch uses the SOVO order quite frequently
in subordinate clauses. The SOVO structure is compulsory with an infinitive
phrase, as in (1).
(1) [De bonden] hebben... laten weten dat er loons-
The [trade] unions have informed that wage
verhogingen zullen worden geëist wanneer de werkgevers
increases will be demanded if the employers
92 BERNARD H. BICHAKJIAN

niet bereid zijn om in te gaan op hun eisen voor ...

not ready are to meet their demands for
arbeidstijdverkorting.
working time reduction.
(NRC Handelsblad, 14 Nov. 1985:7)
It is also common with a prepositional phrase dominated by VP.
(2) ... wanneer de werkgevers niet bereid zijn tot
if the employers not ready are for
vergaande onderhandelingen.
far-reaching negotiations.
But, unless it is stressed, the prepositional phrase dominated by S cannot
be placed after the verb.
(3) . . . *wanneer de werkgevers niet klaar zijn volgende
if the employers not ready are next
maand.
month.
Since (3), the only sentence that could qualify as an after-thought construc­
tion, is not acceptable in unmarked situations while (2) and (1) are, the Dutch
shift from SOV to SVO in subordinate clauses (cf. also the order of zullen
worden geëist) does not seem to be prompted by the afterthought
phenomenon. Conversely, the unacceptability of (4).
(4) *wanneer de werkgevers niet om in te gaan op hun
if the employers not to meet their
eisen voor ... arbeidstijdverkorting bereid zijn
demands for working time reduction ready are
seems to indicate that the pressure to switch to an SVO pattern probably
comes from the increased demands made upon the human memory by the
postponement of the verb.
Since a cause-and-effect relationship has not been established between
afterthought and the switch from SOV to SVO, analogical reasoning based
on this hypothesis becomes equally inconclusive. This is the case of he PAST
yams eat units two, which, according to Hyman, «looks very much like an
apposition, «he has eaten yams... two of them», something which would
be likely to function as an afterthought» (1975:135). That this language uses
the SOVO word order for an emphatic construction and SOV for the un­
marked one is not surprising and the existing duality of structures may be
 THE EVOLUTION OF WORD ORDER 93

taken as an indication of an ongoing switch from SOV to SVO, but we do

not know why the reordering of the constituents is taking place.
In spite of Hyman's appealing idea and his large amount of data from
African languages, the change from SOV to SVO remains unexplained.

2.4 Explanations of word-order change only.

The hypotheses reviewed above were indeed aimed at explaining the
change in the place of the verbal objects. Their authors were of course aware
of Greenberg's implicational universais, but they focused their attention on
this particular change, assuming more or less implicitly that, when SOV
becomes SVO, everything else will fall into its newly assigned place. This
view was strongly challenged by Hawkins on purely formal grounds
(1979:641-2). His conclusion seems right, but since his formal reasoning led
him also to «argue... that the chances that P[roto]I[ndo]E[uropean] was an
SOV language are less than 1 in 10» (1979:643), a word of caution seems
warranted. Hyman had the merit of having argued that afterthought —
assuming it did work — could also account for the reversal of noun phrases,
but in general the reordering of items in other structures was not examined.
This, I believe, was a serious omission.
On the positive side of the balance sheet, the discussion around the Li
and Thompson hypothesis along with the careful investigation of word-order
change in African languages has helped dispel the fallacious myth which
alleges that word order swings back and forth between SOV and SVO. Under
normal evolutionary circumstances, therefore when linguistic interference
plays no role, SOV becomes or may become SVO — occasionally VSO —
but not vice versa. Givón rightly observed that «the lexical-semantic re-
analysis of verbs into prepositions in a serial-verb construction is likely...
to introduce some SOV syntax into an erstwhile SVO-serializing language.
But it is not likely to introduce a complete SOV syntax into the language»
(1975:89). Indeed no natural process turns a dominantly SVO language in­
to an SOV one.
Aware of the directionality of this change and also of the need to ex­
amine the evolution of all syntactic structures, let us turn to Indo-European
and see how its syntax evolved. The course of this evolution will subsequently
suggest an explanation that is valid for the reversal of all the syntactic struc­
tures.
94 BERNARD H. BICHAKJIAN

3. The evolution of Indo-European syntax.

In the (pre)history of the Indo-European languages, no less than three
major evolutionary changes have taken place: the development of a
nominative sentence structure, the rise of subordination via correlation, and
the change of constituent order. The first change does not concern us here
(cf. for a state of the art Schmidt 1979 and for an original hypothesis Klimov
1977). The second change is complex. The development of correlation is
also not pertinent to the present study, but the nature of this construction
is consistent with the pattern of the original syntax, and its change into subor­
dination, and the expanding role of the latter, are part of the reversal that
the structure of the protolanguage underwent in the course of its evolution.

3.1 The structure of the protolanguage.

Not long before its loss of unity, Indo-European must have been a
nominative language, with incipient subordination, or perhaps only correla­
tion, and a left-branching set of structures. Left branching meant that
whenever a constituent, be it a word, a particle or an affix, governed another,
the governee preceded the governor. The syntax of the protolanguage must
have had the following phrase-structure rules, which I shall represent with
a notation based on the rewriting rules used in Transformational Grammar,
but allowing myself a margin of liberty that is necessary for the discussion
of certain historical developments.
l.a VP → NP + V
b → S + V
2. PP → NP + PostP/Adv
3.a NP → Gen + N
b → Adj + N
c → S + N
4. V → Root + Aux + Pers
5. N → Root + Case + Number
6. Adj → Root + Degree + Case + Pers
7. Comparison → Standard + Adj
8. Coordination → N + N + Conj
9. Disjunction → N + N + Conj
10.a Numbers (11-19) → units + tens
b(?) (21-99) → units + tens
 THE EVOLUTION OF WORD ORDER 95

I shall, for the convenience of the reader, illustrate the above rules with Latin
examples, although it should not be concluded that Latin was still consistently
applying all the phrase-structure rules of the protolanguage.
11.a Galli ... obsidionem relinquunt (Caes. B.G. V, 49i).
[The] Gauls [the] siege raised.
ll.b haec me vedisse certo scio (PL Mil. 299).
them me to-have-seen for sure I-know
I know for sure that I saw them.
12. mecum
me-with i.e. with me
13.a deorum sanguis
gods' blood
13.b magna verba
arrogant words
13.C Quod habuit id perdidit (PL Pers. 644)
what he-had that he-lost
he lost what he had
14. amaverat (am + a + v + era + t)
loved-had-he i.e. he had loved
15. rosas (= ros + a + m + s)
roses (Acc.)
16. dulciores (dulc + ior + es)
sweeter (Nom./Acc. PL).
17. melle dulcior
honey (Abl.) sweeter
sweeter than honey
18. senatus populusque romanus
senate people-and Roman
the senate and people of Rome
19. unus pluresve
one several-or
one or several
20. a undecim
one-ten i.e. eleven
20.b quinque et viginti
five and twenty i.e. twenty-five
96 BERNARD H. BICHAKJIAN

From the above rules and examples, it should be clear that the SOV
sequence is not an isolated order of constituents, but indeed one of the many
manifestations of a left-branching grammar. The study of word-order change
must therefore focus not solely on the switching around of verb and object,
but on the shift from left to right branching.
Had he decided to take the nature of the branching pattern into con­
sideration, Martin Harris would not have asserted «that change in the do­
main of word order ... is cyclical» (1984:183-4), nor would Gary Miller have
been led to argue in an otherwise interesting article that the Indo-European
proto- and derived languages have gone from VSO to SOV and thence to
SVO (1975). Such a sequence would imply that a once right-branching
language would have become left-branching and again right branching. Not
only does the bulk of the linguistic evidence point to Indo-European's be­
ing a left-branching language (cf. structures 1-10 above), but, from an evolu­
tionary point of view, Miller's hypothesis is tantamount to positing that
man's biological evolution went from a manlike primate (hominid) to an
apelike one (pongid) and then to modern man (homo sapiens). While the
zigzagging of minor (i.e. adaptive) features can certainly occur, major evolu­
tionary processes (i.e. hierarchical changes) are not cyclical — in biology
and under normal circumstances mutatis mutandis in linguistics.

3.2 Shifting to the right.

From the time of the initial division of the protolanguage into dialects
up to the present, the Indo-European languages have been busy revising the
ancestral order of constituents. They have become stricto sensu more or less
right branching.
One set of changes is connected with the development of subordina­
tion. Correlation turned from left to right branching and subsequently chang­
ed into subordination, which began increasingly to replace left-branching
infinitival and participial constructions. See under 21-23 and 24-26, respec­
tively, the ancestral constructions and their modern alternatives.
21. Quod habuit id perdidit (Quoted and glossed above)
22. Haec me vedisse certo scio. (Quoted and glossed above)
23. Hinc ex hisce aedibus ... vidi exeuntem
Here out of this house I-saw [a] going out
mulierem (PL Cist. 547)
woman.
 THE EVOLUTION OF WORD ORDER 97

24. Libenter homines id quod volunt credunt (Caes. B.G. 3, 18,6).

Readily men that what they-want believe
25. scis... quod epulum dedi (Petronius, Sat. 71,9).
you-know ... that [a] dinner party I gave
26. mulier quae se suamque aetatem spernit (PL Most. 250)
[a] woman who herself her-and age disregards

Among the other changes, some consisted of using preposed conjunc­

tions instead of disjunctive or conjunctive postclitic particles, moving the
standard of a comparison to the right of the adjective and replacing the
degree suffix and the ablative case with two correlated function words: an
adverb preceding the adjective, and a prepositon- or conjunction-like item
introducing the word or sentence that serve as the basis of comparison. In
most languages, the postnominal adverbs became prepositions (Brugmann,
1905:483-9, especially, 488), which were used first in combination with the
particular case they governed, and later alone.
Furthermore, prenominai determinants indicating gender, number and
degree of determinancy came into existence and replaced postnominal
markers. In a parallel development preposed personal pronouns and tem­
poral or modal auxiliaries took upon themselves the role once played by
verbal affixes. Adjectives and the reflexes of genitives moved to the right
of nouns, and in a change that is probably related five-and-twenty became
twenty-five.
At one point in the long span of time during which the above changes
have been taking place, O, and in at least one branch SO, moved to the
right of V.
Together, these changes make up the massive shift from left to right
branching, which can be observed at least partially in all Indo-European
languages. Some have admittedly reversed one pattern while others have
changed the order elsewhere. French, for instance, has moved all nominal
and many adjectival modifiers after the noun (la fille du roi and un garçon
intelligent), while English often prefers preposed animate genitives and places
all true attributive adjectives invariably before the noun (the King's daughter
and an intelligent boy). Compounds are also often VO in French and Object-
Agent in English (cf. lave-vaisselle and its English equivalent dish-washer).
Conversely, English has developed a preverbal modal auxiliary, while French
98 BERNARD H. BICHAKJIAN

uses conditional or subjunctive postverbal affixes (cf. I would tell it to you

if... but je vous le dirais, si ... and his parents wish he would finish school
but ses parents souhaitent qu'il finisse...).
The shift from left to right branching may also have proceeded at a
faster rate in one language than in the next. Iranian has an SOV word order,
a number of postnominal clitics, including the object marker -râ, and ver­
bals with preceding objects (džavânha-je farang rafte 'young men and women
who have gone to Europe' lit. 'young [men and women] to Europe having
gone' [Lazard, 1957:160]), while English uses an SVO order and often right-
branching relatives instead of present participles (cf. the spinach-eating giant,
but not *The at-the-clock-looking man). Nevertheless, even an SOV language
such as Iranian has introduced an appreciable number of right-branching
structures. «The object can be postposed to the right of the verb... when
it is marked with the... [object] marker -rã, which is used when the object
is definite» (Kuno, 1974:131), and «le complément circonstanciel est sou­
vent placé après le verbe dans la langue familière» (Lazard, 1975:203).
Moreover, Iranian postposes attributive adjectives and features postnominal
relatives and postverbal complement clauses, which, except for their inter­
nal SOV order and the use of a subordinator (ke) in combination with a
personal pronoun instead of a relative pronoun, resemble their French and
English counterparts.
Each language may be evolving at its own rate, and the structures that
have been turned around may not be the same everywhere, but in general
all the Indo-European languages have been switching to right-branching
structures. Behind the diversity of the particular changes and their differential
rates, the unity and the directionality of the process is now clear, and we
have reached the burning question: Why have the Indo-European languages
shifted from left to right branching?

4. Towards an explanation of the shift from left to right branching.

Given its occurence in all the Indo-European languages, and its steady
progression, the shift from left to right-branching structures cannot be con­
sidered an ad hoc change. The shift to right-branching structures is an evolu­
tionary change and, as such, should be explained with a theory that can ac­
count for the evolution of languages.
In a series of publications, (Bichakjian 1984, 1986, forthcoming a and
especially forthcoming b), I have stressed the need to distinguish the inherent
 THE EVOLUTION OF WORD ORDER 99

from the contingent changes, shown that the former proceed in the direc­
tion of earlier-acquired features and strategies, and argued that this ongo­
ing evolutionary process, which closely resembles man's biological evolu­
tion should probably be traced back to the action of regulatory genes on
the cellular correlates of speech. I have called this the theory of linguistic
paedomorphosis.
In the present study, I shall not attempt to show that every single one
of the structures 1-10 given above is acquired earlier in its right- rather than
left-branching forms. I have no data showing, for instance, that children
could produce magis dulcis quam mel before melle dulcior or panem et
circenses «bread and games» before panem circensesque. I also know of
no comparative studies on the acquisitions of Germ. fiinf und zwanzig and
the corresponding Engl. twenty-five or the Engl. intelligent boy and the Fr.
garçon intelligent. I shall limit the discussion to two sets of crucially impor­
tant structures: on the one hand left-branching nominal and verbal inflec­
tion and their right-branching reflexes and on the other left-branching ver­
bals and right-branching subordinates.

4.1 Preposed function words vs declensional and conjugational systems.

Since the evolution of the nominal and verbal forms in the Indo-
European languages shows a regression of inflection and the concomitant
use of preposed function words, the paedomorphic character of the shift
from left to right branching can be shown by comparing the acquisitions
of (1) prepositions and articles vs case markers, and (2) personal pronouns
and auxiliaries vs verbal inflection.

4.1.1 The acquisition of prepositions and articles vs case markers.

The acquisition of case markers has been repeatedly observed and
discussed. There is no doubt that some very regular cases or at least
predominantly used markers (cf. e.g. -om, the singular instrumental marker
of Russian masculine and neutral nouns used by Gvozdev's son for all
genders) are acquired rather early, and children learn to tag such suffixes
to content words before they start using prepositions. But the situation promp­
tly reverses itself. By the age of three or soon thereafter children have ac­
quired all common prepositions, but the mastery of the nominal morphology
will not be achieved until the child's eighth year (cf. Rüke-Dravina, 1973 for
Latvian, Slobin, 1971 for Russian and C. and W. Stern, 1922 for German).
100 BERNARD H. BICHAKJIAN

The function of articles is manifold. When declined, as in German, ar­

ticles can convey syntactic distinctions and, by so doing, take over the task
of nominal inflection, making it possible for the child to learn a very limited
number of regular forms instead of the full system of nominal declensions,
whose acquistion is invariably delayed by the mastery of unproductive
phonological rules.
If they are used to convey grammatical number, articles are likely to
be acquired before inflectional markers. It is commonly observed that
children create plural particles of their own before mastering the proper in­
flectional marker. Brown reported that the «numeral two was used by the
children to refer to more than one instance though not always just to two.
... [Moreover b]y the time the noun inflected for plurality attained criterion
the children also almost always used pronouns with singular or plural number
correct according to the reference situation or to the NP antecendent». Con­
versely children failed to perform correctly on tests where the plural was
indicated by the inflectional marker alone (1973:331).
Finally, if articles serve only to express determinancy, the comparison
is difficult, since the ancestral alternative was based on stylistic devices or
implicit knowledge. Such articles, at any rate, have very few forms, and,
as overt markers and independent items, they are presumably acquired long
before the mastery of the otherwise necessary stylistic devices.
When the comparison is directed at the mastery, and not at the first
appearance of items, it is clear that prepositions and articles are acquired
before complete declensional systems of nouns and adjectives, with the at­
tendant concord of the latter. Since the Fr. plus doux lit. «more sweet» and
que le miel «that (the) honey» are in the same relationship to dulcior and
melle, respectively, as à la mère «to the mother» is to matri, the earlier ac­
quisition of prepositions could perhaps be extended to analytical com­
paratives. We could then conclude that, while additional research would be
desirable, the existing evidence, limited but nevertheless crucial, does show
that the evolution of nominal and adjectival structures has gone in the direc­
tion of earlier-acquired items.

4.1.2 The acquisitions of personal pronouns and auxiliaries vs verbal

endings.
The acquisitions of personal pronouns and verbal endings occur initially
together, but this is true only of the regular verbs when conjugated in the
 THE EVOLUTION OF W O R D ORDER 101

present indicative. However, when one takes into consideration the rest of
the conjugation with its gamut of tenses and its abundance of irregular forms
(cf. e.g. the third-pers.-sing. markers in the Sp. canta, cantó, digo, fue «sings,
sang, said, went») the situation changes: personal pronouns are acquired
halfway through the child's third year, whereas the mastery of the full con­
jugation will go into the seventh or eighth year (cf. Ruke-Dravina, 1973 and
Slobin 1971).
The comparison between the acquisition of auxiliated and inflected ver­
bal forms is vitiated by the aspectual value carried by one of them. The Fr.
j'ai fait «I did» is definitely acquired before je faisais «I was doing», because
the latter is marked while the former is not. Conversely, the ablauted Engl.
I did is acquired before the auxiliated I have done for the same reason (cf.
Cromer, 1974:221-4). Nevertheless, when the aspectual distinction is negligi­
ble or nonexistent as between the Fr. futures je ferai «I shall do» and je
vais faire «I am going to do» the auxiliated form seems to be, if not ac­
quired earlier, at least generalized sooner (cf. Grégoire, 1947:128).

4.1.3 The new nominal and verbal structures.

I have tried to show that the use of function words instead of nominal
and verbal endings constitutes an evolution in the direction of early-acquired
features. Since languages on the whole evolve towards earlier-acquired items
or strategies — presumably because the new alternatives are more advan­
tageous — the development of function words and the attendant regression
of nominal and verbal endings is consistent with the overall process and ispo
facto partially explained. What I have not shown, however, is that preposi­
tions and preposed articles, personal pronouns and auxiliaries are acquired
before post-positions and the corresponding postposed function words. I
shall return to this question later, after discussing the development of right-
branching subordination.

4.2 The acquisition of right-branching subordination.

As mentioned above (3.2) and discussed in Bichakjian (1982 and for­
thcoming b), subordination arose, in part at least, out of correlation after
the latter had changed from a left- to a right-branching structure. Later
subordination came to replace left-branching participial and infinitival
phrases. For the comparison of the acquisitions of the ancestral and modern
102 BERNARD H. BICHAKJIAN

structures, two complementary sets of data are available.

Participles are the last verbal forms to be acquired (Rüke Dravina,
1973:264), while relative clauses appear quite early (for a review of the
literature cf. Sheldon, 1972:5-28). And for the infinitives, Carol Chomsky
showed, on the basis of comphrehension tests, that «structure 3 [i.e. John
asked Bill to go] is still imperfectly learned by some children even at age
10, and structure 4 [i.e. He knew that John was going to win the race] is
acquired fairly uniformly at about 5;6» (1969:120).
The second set of evidence comes from the comparison of two types
of relatives: the one modifying the subject of the matrix sentence, and the
one that has the object of the main clause for antecedent. Although technical­
ly both are right-branching structures, the center-embedded relatives are the
closest approximation that English can provide for left-branching clauses.
In English, therefore, where such experiments have been conducted, it has
consistently been observed that children have great difficulty with center-
embedded clauses. The following reaction observed by Slobin and Welch
seems characteristic: «the child either omits the relative, changes the com­
plex sentence into a compound sentence or restructures the main and subor­
dinate clauses so that the relative occurs at the end of the sentence» (Sheldon
1972:9; see also the results of Sheldon's own repetition experiment 1972:55-6
and Bowerman's 1979 assessment of the state of the art).
Although part of the data has had to be extrapolated — such a modus
operandi is common and indeed often unavoidable in an evolutionary science
— it seems clear that right-branching subordination is acquired before left-
branching clauses (24 before 21), and also before left-branching participial
and infinitival phrases (26 and 25 before 23 and 22, respectively). At the
clausal level, the evidence leaves no doubt: right-branching structures are
acquired earlier than their left-branching equivalents.

4.3 A graduated explanation of the shift to right branching.

The historical data and the evidence from the typology of Indo-
European languages show that the shift from left to right branching pro­
ceeded in the following steps. The consistently left-branching protolanguage,
with its participial and infinitival phrases and left-branching correlation,
gradually developed right-branching subordination. This being partly the
situation in standard Iranian. With the original consistency broken, the new
pattern was eventually extended to nonsentential objects, whereby SOV
 THE EVOLUTION OF WORD ORDER 103

became SVO, and in a few cases VSO. With postverbal râ-suffixed ac­
cusatives and circumstantial complements, Standard or «Advanced» Ira­
nian seems to be also entering into this second phase. In another step, which
may partially overlap the preceding, when they came to replace the late-
acquired inflectional markers, the earlier-acquired function words were given
a pattern consistent with the right-branching structures which at the clausal
level at least are acquired earlier than their left-branching counterparts. This,
for instance, was the case of the Romance languages.
It should be borne in mind that, while a steady shift from left- to right
- branching structures has been in progress, languages have always contain­
ed some left-branching structures — this feature is indeed inherent — and,
at one time or another, these structures may have enjoyed the predilection
of archaizing writers or antiquity-loving grammarians, who have encourag­
ed, or served to broaden their use. This was the case of German, which under
the impulse of humanistic grammarians received an iron-clad SOV order
in subordinate clauses (Behaghel, 1932:19-22), and where «a small set of
High German particles has come into use as postpositions» (Lehmann,
1971:21). I discussed in Bichakjian (1986) the French humanistic gram­
marians' attemps to introduce vowel quantity into the French language and
the reasons of their failure. In an insightful article, Halle had pointed out
that, while the child always attempts to build the optimal grammar of the
language he is exposed to, adults introduce changes that may go against the
child's efforts (1962:64-5). The paedomorphic conception of language evolu­
tion is somewhat different from Halle's, but in both approaches adults play
a similar role. Whereas languages proceed naturally towards ever-earlier-
acquired features, adults may seek to (re)introduce archaic features, which
are normally acquired late, containing thereby an added degree of difficul­
ty, which will «enhance» the style. The obsession with manliness can take
many forms! Whatever the psychological needs of adult speakers, languages
naturally proceed towards early-acquired features, and for that reason gram­
mars shift from left- to right-branching structures, non obstant the detours
or brakes imposed by conservative grammarians (cf. also mutatis mutandis
Givón's remark quoted in 2.4).

5. The nature of word order.

The preceding study has tried to show that word-order change is best
understood when seen in the framework of the shift from left- to right-
104 BERNARD H. BICHAKJIAN

branching structures. This shift is a major evolutionary process, which

belongs to the steady progression of languages towards ever-earlier-acquired
features. Word-order change is not therefore the result of morphological
decay, the byproduct of an accidental change or a concession to distracted
speakers, but one of the many manifestations of the steady replacement of
late-acquired models by earlier-acquired alternatives. This is the essence of
language evolution, and this is the nature of word-order change.
The arguments presented in this study have rested admittedly on Indo-
European data only. They and the issuing conclusion will have to be check­
ed against data from other language families before the present explana­
tion can acquire universal validity. Evidence that non-Indo-European
languages are also evolving toward earlier-acquired models (Solberg, 1977),
and of the apparent universality of the change from SOV to SVO (or in
some cases VSO) in normal circumstances, seem to be encouraging signs
that the conclusion of this study will eventually be found to be valid for
all human languages.

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and P.E.R. Verhuyck. Leiden, pp. 5-20.
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-----. Forthcoming a. Neoteny and Language Evolution. Proceedings of the
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 THE EVOLUTION OF W O R D ORDER 105

. Forthcoming b. Paedomorphosis and Language Evolution.

Bowerman, Melissa. 1979. The Acquisition of Complex Sentences. In
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 THE EVOLUTION OF FUTURE MEANING

JOAN L. BYBEE AND WILLIAM PAGLIUCA

State University of New York at Buffalo

0. Introduction
In many languages, the morpheme or morphemes used to indicate future
time have other uses that are not strictly temporal*. In recent work by
Ultan 1978, comparing approximately 50 languages, and by Fleischman 1982,
referring mainly to Romance and English, we find future morphemes describ­
ed as indicating, along with their future meaning, one or more of the follow­
ing: desire, intention, obligation, necessity, imminence, habitual, general
truth, characteristic behavior, command, polite request, supposition. If we
view this mad array in historical perspective, we would hope to find that
some of these uses line up in historical sequence, with one leading to another,
or that some of them represent retentions from earlier meanings. However,
as Fries 1927 pointed out, it is often difficult to know which of the many
uses of futures are retentions, or older meanings «glimmering through», and
which are later derivatives that might be common to all future morphemes.
We propose to present a solution to this problem based on cross-linguistic
study of the development of future morphemes. We will argue that the lex­
ical sources of futures are limited — verbs indicating desire, obligation and
movement are the most common — and that futures having these flavors
have retained them from their lexical sources, and that other uses are com­
mon extensions of future and can be found with future morphemes from
any source.

The morphemes that will be treated here are those that have as one of
their uses the expression of PREDICTION, i.e. the assertion by the speaker

* Work on this paper was carried out under a grant from the National Science Founda­
tion (BNS 8318262).
110 J.L. BYBEE and W. PAGLIUCA

that a proposition will be true in time subsequent to the moment of speech.

Examples (1), (2) and (3) illustrate this use with the three future morphemes
of British English, will, shall and be going to1.
will
(1) I think the bulk of this year's students will go into industry.
(Coates 1983:170)
shall
(2) We shall no doubt live to see stranger things. (Wekker 1976:44)
going to
(3) Within a few years at the present rate of development,
Paris is going to look like London, and London like New York. (Wek­
ker 1976:125).
Our choice of prediction as the identifying use of future morphemes
fits well with general practice, and moreover, is theoretically significant. The
development of the prediction use is a crucial stage in the diachronic se­
quence, since some of the other uses that futures have in common are
derivable from prediction.

1. The lexical sources of future morphemes.

Ultan identified the etymological sources of future markers in many
of the languages of his study. We have done the same with 50 languages
of a stratified probability sample (Perkins 1980)2, and in about twenty-five
languages chosen for convenience. In the overwhelming majority of cases
we find that future morphemes derive from main verbs having the same or
very similar meanings.
The two most common sources for future markers are verbs indicating
DESIRE and verbs of MOVEMENT. The languages in which we found a future
marker deriving from a morpheme indicating the subject's desire are listed
in (4):

1
We choose British rather than American English because shall is rare or non-existent
in most American dialects, and because of the availability of extensive corpus-based studies
on British English.
2
The languages of Perkins' sample were randomly chosen, controlling for genetic and
areal bias. If one wants to arrive at valid statements concerning the relative frequency of a
given linguistic phenomenon in the languages of the world, then only samples so constructed
may be used; convenience samples, because they lack the controls, are inappropriate.
 THE EVOLUTION OF FUTURE MEANING 111

(4) DESIRE:
Perkins' sample: Central Sierra Miwok, Serbo-Croatian,
Karankawa.
other languages consulted: English, Mandarin, Chukchi.
listed by Ultan 1978: Danish, Norwegian, Rumanian, Gallo-Ro­
mance, Angevin French, Italian (occasionally),
Old Church Slavic, Modern Greek, Arabic,
Somali, Tagalog.
Heine and Reh 1982: Swahili.
Verbs of movement used for futures include both motion toward the
speaker (come) and motion away from the speaker (go), although the latter
appears to be more common. Languages with movement-derived futures are
listed in (5).
(5) MOVEMENT:
Perkins' sample: Southern Sierra Miwok (andative), Sonay
(come), Haitian, Logbara (go and come)
other languages consulted: Abipon, Arabic, English, French, Hausa, Kru
languages, Spanish, Tojolabal, Quechua.
listed by Ultan 1978: Cuna, Kwara ? ae, Bassa.
Heine and Reh 1982: Ewe (come), Acholi (come), Lango (come),
Lotuko (go and come), Duala (go and come).
The other verbal sources for futures are possession (have), existence
(be) or come into existence (become), and verbs indicating obligation (such
as shall). We believe that these sources are closely related. When predicates
such as have, be or become are used to indicate future they must be accom­
panied by a form of the verb that contributes to the future sense: it is the
infinitive in many cases, which represents the action of the verb in the
abstract, as neither completed (as a past participle) nor in progress (as a
present participle). In Korean, the verb has a suffix that means «in order
to», which supplies part of the future sense. The role of the copula or marker
of possession is to attribute the infinitival predicate to the agent. This yields
the sense of OBLIGATION, SO that forms derived in this way follow a path
similar to verbs that originally meant «be obligated» or «owe».
Germanic languages are the only ones we have found that have a future
developed from a verb with the meaning «obligation», but a number of
languages have developed a future that originated in an obligation construc­
tion, as shown in (6):
112 J.L. BYBEE and W. PAGLIUCA

(6) POSSESSION:
Perkins' sample: none
other languages consulted: Eastern Kru languages, Western Romance
languages (e.g. French and Spanish), Ukrai­
nian.
COPULA: Ecuadorian Quechua, Korean
BECOME: German, Gothic, Cuna.
A general pattern is observable in the way that morphemes expressing
these three semantic notions gradually develop a sense of prediction. Both
DESIRE and OBLIGATION require a willful and animate agent, for they predicate
certain conditions on such an agent: DESIRE describes internal conditions
and OBLIGATION external, social conditions, MOVEMENT verbs require a sub­
ject capable of movement. These original senses gradually weaken, and the
marker comes to signal prediction, and to be applicable in propositions with
any sort of subject. However, we would argue that the original sense of these
verbs is not lost entirely, but is rather retained in certain contexts, and hence
futures from different sources will have different shades or flavors of mean­
ing. Thus a future derived from a verb meaning desire may have a sense
of will or willingness in certain contexts, a future derived from obligation
may give an obligation sense occasionally, and a future derived from move­
ment may give the sense of being headed along a certain path, which gives
a meaning often labelled, erroneously we believe, as INTENTION.

We claim that when a future morpheme has any one of these senses,
it is a retention from the original lexical meaning of the verb from which
the future developed, and not a secondary development from the future
meaning. To argue for this hypothesis, we will examine the development
of futures from each of the three sources in English to demonstrate how
differences in their meanings are traceable to the sources from which they
arose.

2. Evolution of future meaning.

Will in English.
As an example of a future developed from a verb originally meaning
«want» or «desire» we take the history of English will. Examples (7) through
(10) are from Beowulf. Example (7) shows will used to express VOLITION with
an infinitival complement.
 THE EVOLUTION OF FUTURE MEANING 113

(7) Beowulf is min nama, wille ic asecgan suna Healfdenes, mærum

peodne, min ærende... (line 343).
Beowulf is my name. I wish to tell my errand to Healfdene's son, the
great lord.
In (8) the sense is more of WILLINGNESS, which is slightly weaker than desire
or volition:
(8) gif he us geunnan wile þaet we hine swa godne
gretan moton. (line 346)
If he will grant that we may greet him who is so gracious.
(9) is an example in which volition or intention is present in the meaning,
but a sense of prediction is discernible as well:
(9) Wen ic þæt he wille... Geotena leode etan unforhte (line 442)
I think that he wants to /will devour fearlessly the people of the Geats.
Also in Beowulf, there are examples such as (10) in which a prediction con­
cerning a person is made on the basis of what is known about him:
(10) Ic minne can glaedne Hroðulf þaet he þa geogoðe wile arum healdan.
(line 1181).
I know my gracious Hrothulf that he will treat the young men
honorably.
The most common use in later texts such as Sir Gawain, especially in
the first person, is to make promises or state intentions, as in (11):
(11) I wyl nauþer grete ne grone...' (line 2157)
I will neither cry nor groan.
In (12) we see the shift to pure prediction devoid of any shades of voli­
tion. Such uses occur at first only when will is used with subjects that are
inanimate objects, incapable of volition.
(12) For þer hit onez is tachched twynne wil hit never, (line 2512)
For once it is attached, it will never come off.
The subject here is the lace Gawain took from the lady — figuratively, the
symbol of his temporary fall from grace.

This sort of example is crucial to the development of future meaning,

for it is in such cases that will is first used in a prediction sense without modal
flavor. Of course, the use of will with human agents to indicate willingness
and intention continues to the present day, but as examples such as (12) grow
114 J.L. BYBEE and W. PAGLIUCA

more common, the prediction sense of will becomes more and more the cen­
tral or dominant sense, and eventually this sense is possible even with human
agents (see example [1]).

2.2 Shall in English.

The original main verb meaning of shall was «owe». When used with
an infinitive (without to) as in (13) from Old English, it could indicate what
is right or becoming, or as in the Middle English example (14), it could ex­
press necessity and what is appointed or settled to take place. These senses
are related to obligation (cf. Bybee and Pagliuca 1985), as is the use of shall
in commands or general decrees, also attested from Old English, and a 17th
century example of which is (15).
(13) Swa sceal geong guma gode gewyrcean... (Beowulf, line 20)
So a young warrior must do good deeds...
(14) Arte thou he that shall come...? ((1526) Tindale, Luke 7.19)
(15) Scandalous persons shall be kept from the Sacrament.
(Ordinances of Lords, and Commons, with rules and directions, con­
cerning suspention from the sacrament of the Lord's Supper in cases
of ignorance and scandali, October 20, 1645).
A statement of obligation by a first person subject amounts to a pro­
mise to carry out the act, and, by implication, a statement of intention, as
in (16), from Beowulf.
(16) Ic þæm godan sceal, for his mod-þræce, madmas beodan. (line 384)
I shall offer the good [man] treasures for his daring.
By the Middle English period, shall in first person expressions of in­
tention such as (17) has become common, and approaches the sense of predic­
tion:
(17) And I schal ware alle my wyt to wynne me þeder. (Gawain, line 402)
And I shall use all my wit to find my way there.
Shall is eventually restricted to first person, and the prediction sense
gradually becomes central. For obligation-derived future markers general­
ly, it is only when prediction has become prominent that the use of the marker
with inanimate, non-agent subjects becomes common. But the modal flavor
is not also extended — in fact, it is not extendable: Intent to carry out an
obligation to perform an action cannot be attributed to inanimate objects,
except in figurative language.
 THE EVOLUTION OF FUTURE MEANING 115

2.3 Will and shall compared.

Wekker 1976 and Coates 1983 have both argued that one of the more
frequent uses of shall and will in contemporary British English is to express
what Wekker calls «simple futurity» and Coates calls «prediction», often
without attendant modal flavors. Both authors have also identified in the
extensive corpora they have examined other uses in which shall and will ex­
press modal notions in addition to prediction. We claim that the contem­
porary modal nuances of shall and will are direct continuations of their
original lexical meanings — those of shall are all related to obligation and
those of will are related to desire. Coates' analysis shows this clearly. She
cites will in examples such as (18) and (19) in which «willingness» and «in­
tention» are expressed:
WILLINGNESS:
(18) Give them the name of someone who will sign for it and take it in if
you are not at home. (p. 171).
INTENTION:
(19) I'll put them in the post today. (p. 170).
Wekker points out that in some contexts, the modal coloring of will
is very frequent, if not obligatory. Consider (20), in which, in the temporal
clause introduced by if, will has the sense of willingness, and (21), a negative
sentence, in which won't has the sense of «refuses to» or «is not willing»:
(20) If he will meet us there, it will save a lot of time.
(21) The trouble is... the key won't go in the lock. (Coates 1983:173).
According to Coates, shall has the modal readings of «obligation», «ad­
dressee's volition» and «intention». The first is used only in the written lan­
guage, and there primarily for the formal function of stating laws and decrees
(example [22]). This is a direct continuation of the original meaning of shall:
OBLIGATION:
(22) A line of rails or tramway constructed under the powers of this Order
shall not be used for the public conveyance of passengers unless it has
been certified by the Minister to be fit for that purpose. (p. 191).
«Addressee's volition» as in (23) refers to cases where the interrogative shall
I occurs with an active verb:
ADDRESSEE'S VOLITION:
(23) Shall I ring at 11 p.m. one night (English time) in the week after you
get back?
116 J.L. BYBEE and W. PAGLIUCA

The speaker is consulting with the wishes of the addressee, and, as Coates
points out, substituting will in this case is not appropriate, since it would
give the sense of questioning the speaker's own wishes. This use is also a
derivative of the original obligation sense of shall — obligation has a source
external to the agent (in this case the speaker) and the speaker here is check­
ing this obligation with the person who is imposing it.

We noted above that an obligation verb was used to state the inten­
tions of the speaker in earlier English, so the presence of many examples
such as (24) in Coates' sample supports our hypothesis:
INTENTION:
(24) and I shall get to London as soon as I can. (p. 186)

2.4 Be going to in English.

The development of the meaning of the be going to construction and
its range of uses differs from shall and will because its original meaning had
to do with motion in space rather than the internal and external conditions
of desire and obligation specific to humans. The going to construction in
English is much younger than shall and will and has not undergone as much
semantic change and development. Its range of use in Modern English, we
will claim, is directly traceable to its original lexical meaning.

As Marchese points out in her discussion of go-futures in Kru languages,

the construction almost always involves go in an imperfective aspect, the
present progressive or continuous. Whatever sense of movement in time or
space is conveyed by the construction must be viewed as already in progress.
In addition, it is a common feature of such constructions in many languages
to include an indicator of movement toward a goal, either inherent in the
verb, or expressed by an adposition, such as the English to or Spanish a
(of the ir a future). Thus, part of the original meaning of the construction
involves movement towards a goal. Scheffer 1975 notes that the earliest uses
of be going to in English involve actual movement, as in example (25) from
The Merry Wives of Windsor (IV, 3.3):
(25) Sir, the Germans desire to have three of your horses; the Duke himself
will be to-morrow at court, and they are going to meet him.
In the seventeenth century, the construction loses the notion of change of
location and is used to express movement toward a goal of a more figurative
 THE EVOLUTION OF FUTURE MEANING 117

sort. The sense of prediction develops out of this meaning, and the modal
flavors described as being part of this construction, we will claim, are all
due to the original meaning «the subject is on a path moving toward a goal
(which may be an event, state or activity)».

Contemporary descriptions of the be going to construction recognize

that it is used in making predictions, but Wekker 1976 argues that be going
to differs from shall and will in that it has a «present orientation» or that
there are «indications in the present that something will happen» (p. 126)
(Cf. also Fleischman's «present relevance» (Fleischman 1983)). Thus
(26) There's going to be a storm.
implies that clouds are building up in a way that
(27) There will be a storm.
does not. Similarly
(28) She's going to have a baby.
implies that she is already pregnant, while
(29) She will have a baby.
does not. The oft-cited «imminence» or near future sense of be going to,
as in (30), is clearly subsumed under this description.
(30) That glass is going to fall.
This sense of be going to is also accurately covered by the more literal
reading of «the subject is on a path moving toward a goal», as long as move­
ment is not confined to spatial movement. Moreover, we would argue that
this historically-motivated description also explains the salient sense of in­
tention that be going to has with human subjects, as in example (31), since
the mere decision to perform an act puts one on the path toward that act.
(31) I haven't yet decided what I'm going to do when I get to be a grown-
up. (Wekker 1976:133).
In (31), the progressive aspect provides the present orientation sense: the
subject is currently on the path, either by decision or by other situational
factors.

2.5 We have argued in our discussion of will, shall and be going to,
that the differences in the uses of these future markers can be understood
as continuations of their original lexical meanings. Since obligation, desire
and movement are commonly occurring sources for future morphemes in
the languages of the world, we expect similar sequences of development to
118 J.L. BYBEE and W. PAGLIUCA

be repeated across languages. Assuming this is so, we can apply the following
reasoning to the reconstruction of the source of future morphemes whose history
is not known: if the future marker has a sense of obligation in some context,
then its lexical source was a verb that meant «to owe» or a marker of obligation
constructed with the copula or a marker of possession. If the future has a sense
of volition or desire, then its source is a verb of that meaning. The ability of a
marker to express intention or prediction is not helpful in reconstruction, since
these uses are shared by markers designated as futures whose origins differ.

Perhaps the most cogent illustration of the fact that these modal flavors
do not develop from the future meaning, but rather, when present, must
be interpreted as retentions, comes from Quechua. The inflectional future
paradigm in Quechua is heterogeneous — the first person singular and plural
exclusive inflections are based on an old movement morpheme (i.e. «going
to»); the second person is identical to the present, and the third person suf­
fix appears to have evolved from an obligation marker. The evidence for
this is that in most dialects its reading is prediction, but in the dialect of
Cajamarca, it is used for obligation («must»), probability and future (Felix
Quesada, personal communication). The crucial point is that the movement-
derived first singular and plural exclusive can have readings with prediction
and intention but not readings with obligation or necessity. Only in the third
person — that is, the form derived from an obligation source — can obliga­
tion or necessity be present as modal flavors.

3. Other uses of future markers.

In the preceding sections, we have discussed senses of future morphemes
that may be divided into the two categories shown in (32):
(32) 1. Senses which are original to the construction, or which are weaken­
ed versions of the original source meaning: desire (and derivative will­
ingness), obligation (and necessity), and movement on a path.
2. Senses or uses that develop along the way, but that are not source-
specific: intention (for first person agents) and of course prediction,
which we are using as the defining sense of futures.
One more use, which is restricted to obligation-derived futures, belongs in
the first category.
Some futures are described as being used to state suppositions or imply
probability or likelihood. Consider the French and Spanish examples (33)
and (34)
 THE EVOLUTION OF FUTURE MEANING 119

(33) George n'est pas venu ce matin. Il aura oublié notre rendez-vous.
George didn't come this morning. He probably forgot our appoint­
ment. (Fleischman 1982:132)
(34) ¿Serán las cinco, no?
It must be five o'clock, don't you think?
Similarly, the Dutch zullen (Kirsner 1969), the Korean be-future and the
Quechua third person future may all express probability. All of these futures
are derived from obligation constructions, as are the English modais in (35)
and (36) that can be used in this way:
(35) It must be five o'clock.
(36) He should be in Rome by now.
Notice that a substitution of will in these sentences introduces a stronger
sense of prediction and certainty. For this reason we suggest that the pro­
bability reading of futures is specific to obligation-derived futures.
The other uses of futures that remain to be discussed constitute a third
category as shown in (37):
(37) 3. Senses that develop out of prediction and are consequently not
source-specific.
In this category fall the uses of futures as imperatives. Obligation-derived
futures may develop directly into imperatives since informing a second per­
son agent that he or she has a certain obligation is functionally equivalent
in many cases to imposing that obligation, or issuing a command (as in the
Biblical thou shalt not). But other types of futures may also develop im­
perative uses. Because commands necessarily refer to future acts and because
commanding is imposing a prediction on a second person, the marker used
for future prediction is semantically and pragmatically compatible with mak­
ing commands.
The second group of uses in the third category are uses of the future
to express what are called «general truths» by Ultan, «predictability» by
Coates and «eternal truths» by Fleischman, as in examples (38) and (39):
(38) the antibodies are naturally occurring and over 95 percent of all reci­
pients will have anti-A and/or anti-B in their serum. (Coates 1983:178)
(39) A l'égard des voleurs on ne sera jamais assez prudent.
When it comes to thieves, one can never be too careful. (Fleischman
1982:132).
These statements amount to predictions, though not necessarily predictions
120 J.L. BYBEE and W. PAGLIUCA

about future time. They are predictions based on past experiences and thus
apply to states of affairs that exist in the past, present and future. Coates
relates these predictions to statements of characteristic behavior, also bas­
ed on past experience, as in (40):
(40) It is a fairly safe bet that one of the guests will want to take the empty
flask home; they make delightful lamp bases. (Coates 1983:178).
It is certainly a small step from prediction about future time to generalized
prediction, but often the «timelessness» of such statements may derive more
from the context than from the future marker. Note that the French sentence
in (39) contains the adverb jamais, and that all of the sentences cited have
indefinite subjects.
Occasionally, futures are cited as being used as indicators of habitual
action. To the extent that we have been able to document such usage, we
find that the future never constitutes the only, or even usual, means of in­
dicating habitualness, and that the cases cited actually express predictabili­
ty much as examples (38) and (40) do.

4. Conclusion.
What we have tried to show is that much of the meaning of grammatical
markers — particularly that which appears to be idiosyncratic and difficult
to analyze — may be attributable to the lexical sources from which they
derive. Since we find strong cross-linguistic tendencies to use the same small
set of lexical items to derive futures, and since the modal flavors of future
morphemes are also similar across languages, we hypothesize that the seman­
tic changes leading to grammaticization and the changes during gram-
maticization are similar across languages. If this is so, it means that we can
specify common or frequently travelled paths of semantic change in much
the same way that we recognize common paths of phonological change, and
that these can be used to reconstruct the sources of grammatical markers.

LANGUAGE REFERENCES

ABIPON
Najlis, Elena Lidia. 1966. Lengua Abipona. Archivo de Lenguas Precolom­
binas, Volumen 1. Buenos Aires: Centro de Estudios Linguísticos, Uni­
versidad de Buenos Aires.
 THE EVOLUTION OF FUTURE MEANING 121

ARABIC
Elbiad, Mohamed. Personal communication.
DAKOTA
Buechel, Eugene. S.J. 1939. A grammar of Lakota: The language of the
Teton Sioux Indians. Saint Francis, SD: Rosebud Educational Society.
HAITIAN
Hall, Robert A., Jr. et al. 1970. Haitian Creole: Grammar, texts and voca­
bulary. Memoirs of the American Folklore Society, v. 43. Mamaroneck,
NY: Kraus Reprint Corp.
KARANKAWA
Gatschet, Albert S. 1891. The Karankawa Indians. Peabody Museum of
American Ethnology: Archaeological and Ethnological Papers, vol. 1,
no. 2. Harvard University.
KOREAN
Martin, Samuel E. 1960. Korean reference grammar. Research and Studies in
Uralic and Altaic Languages, Project no. 19. Cleveland: Bell and Howell.
Ramstedt, G.J. 1939. A Korean grammar. Helsinki: Suomalais-Ugrilainen
Seura.
Choi, Soonja. Personal communication.
KRU languages
Marchese, Lynell. 1979. Tense/aspect and the development of auxiliaries
in the Kru language family. Dissertation, UCLA.
LOGBARA
Crazzolara, J.P. 1960. A study of the Logbara (Ma'di) language. London:
Oxford University Press.
MANDARIN
Li, Charles N. and Sandra A. Thompson. 1982. A reference grammar of
Mandarin. Los Angeles: University of California Press.
MIWOK
Freeland, L.S. 1951. Language of the Sierra Miwok. Memoirs of UAL or
Indiana University Publications in Anthropology and Linguistics VI.
QUECHUA
Quesada, Felix. Personal communication.
SERBO-CROATIAN
Partridge, Monica. 1972. Serbo-Croatian practical grammar and reader.
Belgrade.
122 J.L. BYBEE and W. PAGLIUCA

SONAY
Prost, André. 1956. La langue Sonay et ses dialectes. Mémoires, no. 47.
Dakar, Senegal: Institut Documental D'Afrique Noire.
TOJOLABAL
Furbee-Losee, Louanna. 1976. The correct language: Tojolabal: a gram­
mar with ethnographic notes. New York: Garland Press.

GENERAL REFERENCES
Bybee, Joan L. and William Pagliuca. 1985. Cross-linguistic comparison
and the development of grammatical meaning. Proceedings of the Con­
ference on Historical Semantics and Word-Formation, Błazejewko,
Poland, March 1984, ed. by J. Fisiak. Berlin: De Gruyter.
Coates, Jennifer. 1983. The semantics of the modal auxiliaries. London:
Croom Helm.
Fleischman, Suzanne. 1982. The future in thought and language: Diachronic
evidence from Romance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Fleischman, Suzanne. 1983. From pragmatics to grammar: Diachronic reflec­
tions on complex pasts and futures in Romance. Lingua 60.183-214.
Fries, Charles C. 1927. The expression of the future. Language 3.87-95.
Heine, Bernd and Mechthild Reh. 1982. Patterns of grammaticalization in
African languages. AKUP 47.
Kirsner, Robert S. 1969. The role of zullen in the grammar of Modern Stan­
dard Dutch. Lingua 24.101-55.
Marchese, Lynell. 1979. Tense/aspect and the development of auxiliaries
in Kru dialects. Dissertation, UCLA.
Perkins, Revere D. 1980. The evolution of culture and grammar. Disserta­
tion, SUNY Buffalo.
Scheffer, Johannes. 1975. The progressive in English. Amsterdam: North-
Holland.
Ultan, Russell. 1978. The nature of future tenses. In Universais of human
language, Volume 3: Word structure, ed. by Joseph H. Greenberg,
83-123. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Wekker, H. Chr. 1976. The expression of future time in contemporary British
English: An investigation into the syntax and semantics of five verbal
constructions expressing futurity. Amsterdam: North-Holland.
 SYNTACTIC CHANGE AND THE LEXICON

THEODORA BYNON
University of London

It is I think generally agreed that both syntax and lexicon are involved
in determining the form of a sentence and that, as regards the lexical aspect,
the decisive factor is the valency of the predicate, normally the verb. The
syntactic structure of the sentence and the valency of its verb may thus be
considered as being in a relationship of «mutual expectancy». There is less
agreement when it comes to specifying the respective domains of syntax and
lexicon and to describing the precise nature of the relationship between them.
In Generative Grammar the syntactic rules specify constituent structure and
linear order, the lexicon specifies the arguments of the verb together with
the semantic roles of these, and the link between the two is made via the
so-called lexical insertion rules. In traditional grammar on the other hand,
the separation of syntax and lexicon seems to be less sharp, and syntactic
structures tend to be described in conjunction with the classes of lexical items
with which they occur.
While therefore the synchronic aspect of this relationship has received
some attention, the question of how syntax and lexicon interact in the time
dimension has not so far been systematically explored. Any such investiga­
tion will obviously have to take account of differences between theoretical
models. For clearly an analysis carried out within the framework of
Generative Grammar is likely to classify certain changes as «lexical» which,
in a more traditional framework, might be treated as «syntactic». Despite
these discrepancies, however, the interplay of lexical substance and syntac­
tic form seems worth exploring, and might begin with a closer look at the
literature on what is loosely termed «syntactic change». It is true that some
diachronic developments can be, and in fact have been, described entirely
in syntactic terms without any reference to the lexicon. Word-order change
would appear to be a case in point. Another example of a change which
124 THEODORA BYNON

has been stated in strictly syntactic terms is the reanalysis of the phrase struc­
ture rule S → NP + VP to S → NP + AUX + VP in the history of English.
This was put forward by Lightfoot as a prime example of «autonomous»
syntactic change «independent of considerations of meaning and use» (1979:
81-115; 153). But, as he himself showed, the new auxiliary constituent in­
serted into the rule was the result of the grammaticalisation of the ancestors
of the modal verbs and we know that this process went hand in hand with
changes in the syntactic and semantic properties of these verbs in the lex­
icon. Such an interplay between syntactic form and lexical substance would,
in fact, appear to be rather typical of what is traditionally termed «syntac­
tic change» and, the issue being an empirical one, this should be open to
verification.
A cursory examination of the literature on syntactic change would seem
to confirm that change in the syntactic encoding of semantically like sets
of verbs constitutes a major — perhaps even the major — mechanism
of syntactic change (cf. Lakoff 1968, Ard 1977, Bynon 1983, Joseph 1983).
This would suggest that it is precisely at the intersection of syntax and lex­
icon that a syntactic change takes root. The demise of the subjectless con­
struction in English may serve to illustrate this type of change. It is a par­
ticularly suitable example for this purpose because it is well documented
and has, even since Lightfoot's analysis of 1979 (229-39), given rise to two
book-length treatments (Elmer 1981; Seefranz-Montag 1983) and a number
of articles (Lightfoot 1981; Fischer and van der Leek 1983; Seefranz-Montag
1984). The change in question concerns the loss from the grammar of
English of structures of the type Me seems that...., Me rues of..., which
are associated with a specific lexical class of verb, and represents a discrete
episode in the syntactic change from SOV (or later TVX) to SVO word-order.
The term «subjectless construction» is generally used to refer to sentences
which lack a referential subject, the verb typically being impersonal as is
the case with weather verbs in many Indo-European languages (Latin pluit
«it rains», Old English hit snīwþ «it snows»). In Germanic other verb classes
were also construed impersonally, all apparently referring in a similar way
to events outside the control of the individual. These comprised verbs ex­
pressing such physical sensations as hunger and cold (OE hine hyngreþ «he
is hungry»), mental experiences such as anger, shame, regret and desire, and
certain related concepts expressed through verbs like «to seem», «to hap­
pen», «to behove» (see Elmer 1981: 29-44). One particular aspect of the
syntax of the above verbs has long been the topic of diachronic investiga-
 SYNTACTIC CHANGE AND THE LEXICON 125

tion, namely the reanalysis of subjectless constructions of the type Me

(DATIVE/ACCUSATIVE) rues my sins (GENITIVE) as the personal tran­
sitive type I (NOMINATIVE) rue my sins (ACCUSATIVE). In these a
preverbal noun phrase with object marking has received nominative mark­
ing and subject status (and a genitive has been reinterpreted as an accusative),
whereas similar object noun phrases with for instance verbs like to give,
to ask, to forbid, etc. have not changed to nominative marking and subject
status. Since this change affects syntactic structure only in relation to a
specific lexical set it is particularly relevant to the present discussion.
The only study of the subjectless construction to be based on an ex­
amination of an extensive corpus of Old and Middle English texts is that
carried out by Elmer (1981). This yields the interesting observation that even
in Old English not a single one of the verbs of psychological experience was
exclusively construed with the subjectless construction — see Table 1, which
illustrates the syntactic potential of the «rue» and «desire» classes of verb.
It will be seen that in the subjectless constructions (indicated in italics in
the Table) the impersonai verb is preceded by a noun phrase, generally
human, case-marked for dative or accusative (the choice being lexically deter­
mined) and having the semantic role of experiencer; it is followed either by
a sentential complement, or by a nominal complement in the genitive case,
representing the cause or object of the psychological state. Even in Old
English, however, the canonical subjectless type with impersonal verb has
variants in which either the experiencer or the complement noun phrase is
the syntactic subject and governs verb agreement 1 .
Within the syntax of Old English as a whole, the subjectless construc­
tion is marked in that it shows a certain discrepancy between case-marking,
linear order and semantic interpretation 2 , the experiencer noun phrase
behaving syntactically (despite its non-nominative form) in certain respects

1
Jespersen's construed example sentence illustrating the historical development of the
subjectless construction ([1927] 1974:209) is precisely one in which the complement noun phrase
is in fact the subject and controls verb agreement (that is to say, the verb is not «impersonal»:
þam cynge (OBJECT) likodon peran (SUBJECT)
the king (OBJECT) likeden peres (SUBJECT)
the king liked pears (AMBIGUOUS)
he (SUBJECT) liked pears (OBJECT).
2
The preverbal noun phrase looks like the topicalised object of a transitive sentence
the normal unmarked order of which is SVO. But in the present case preverbal position of
the object-marked noun phrase is the unmarked order.
126 THEODORA BYNON

like a subject. It can for instance govern the deletion of a co-referential sub­
ject in a conjoined clause (Elmer 1981:49):
Gode ofhreow þa and hraþe (Ø) cwaeþ to þam engle...
«God (DATIVE) rued then and quickly (he) said to the angel...»
Its historical development would also seem to single out the subjectless
construction as being isolated in the syntax as a whole. For it had its own
way of conforming to the new SVO target, either by developing a dummy
subject it, with shift of the experiencer noun phrase to postverbal position,
or by making the experiencer noun phrase into a full subject both in regard
to case-marking and verb agreement. The latter reanalysis resulted from the
fact that in Middle English the erosion of case distinctions had, where pro­
per nouns and lexical noun phrases were concerned, led to structurally am­
biguous sentences (see Table 1). Given the generalisation of SVO order in
the language as a whole, initial position and animateness would have
favoured reanalysis of the experiencer noun phrase as the subject, manifesting
itself in pronominal noun phrases acquiring nominative marking (I rue, etc.).

Table 1
SYNTACTIC PARADIGM OF rue AND ITS LEXICAL CLASS (after
Elmer 1981)
Canonical structure of the «subjectless construction»:
NP-dat/acc V-3sg Complement

OE: hreowan «to rue, make sorry, grieve»; sceamian «to feel/cause
shame»; ofþyncan «to cause regret», etc.

SENTENTIAL: me hreoweþ þaet... («it grieves me that...»)

NP GENITIVE: me hreoweþ þaere daede
ih hreowe þaere d a e d e ( « I regret the deed»)
NOMINATIVE: me hreoweþ) seo daed
seo daed hreoweþ þaem cyninge («the king regrets the deed»)
ABSOLUTE: ih scamode («I felt shame»)

ME: rewen «to affect with regret, to grieve, repent»; greven

«to injure, harass, oppress; to cause grief»; forthinken
«to regret, repent; to be grieved, displeased; to grieve», etc.
 SYNTACTIC CHANGE AND THE LEXICON 127

SENTENTIAL: me rewep pat...

I rewe þat... («It grieves me that...»)
It reweþ me þat ...
NP GENITIVE: me reweþ of NP
I rewe of NP
NOMINATIVE: me rewe}) NP
TRANSITIVE: I rewe NP
AMBIGUOUS: Armheorted is þe man þe swiþere reweþ his sinne
þe king greueþ alle wordes
alle wordes greueþ þe king
þe king greueþ þe knight
})e knight greue}) })e king

17th century: I rue that...

It rues me that...
I rue (of) my sins

The alternative means of achieving the canonical SVO pattern was by

inserting the dummy subject it before the verb, as did the weather verbs.
While, however, the it-variant was already a frequent and early alternative
in Old English with weather verbs, with the present class of verbs of mental
experience it is hardly met with and becomes general only in the 13th/14th
century (Elmer 1981: 135). This chronological difference may be related to
the valency structure of the respective verb sets. Weather verbs have zero
valency and thus possess no argument which, in the absence of a sentence-
initial adverb, could satisfy the verb-second constraint of Old English. In
the case of one-place verbs like to thirst, however, the experiencer noun
phrase is the natural filler of the preverbal slot while in the case of the two-
place verbs of mental experience this slot could be filled either by the ex­
periencer or by the complement noun phrase. With these latter verbs, then,
the it-construction came into use only much later to indicate that the com­
plement (and not experiencer) is the syntactic subject.
As regards the nominal complement, neutralisation of the genitive-
accusative distinction would, as a result of the growing predominance of
SVO order, have invited the reanalysis of synthetically marked genitive ob­
jects as normal accusative objects. This, taken in conjunction with the
development of nominative marking of the experiencer, would result in many
128 THEODORA BYNON

sentences being simply reanalysed as transitive, with appropriate syntactic

recoding in the lexicon and, where necessary, a recasting of semantic roles
and change in verb meaning (for example OE Brian, which underwent a
semantic shift from «to please» to «to like»; see note 1). This is a classic
instance of a syntactic reanalysis remaining at first covert in that it is ac­
companied by no overt change in surface form. Only when the reanalysis
has «surfaced» by pronominal noun phrases changing their case-marking
from dative/accusative to nominative do we have direct evidence of the new
interpretation. Timberlake terms this second phase «actualization»:
«Reanalysis is made possible by the potentially ambiguous character of sur­
face output, while actualization occurs as the consequence of reanalysis»
(1977: 168). It should be remarked, however, that alongside these personal
and transitive reanalyses, the impersonal construction survived into the 16th
century and beyond in such expressions as Me thinks that..., Me seems that...
(see Elmer 1981: 159, 160).
Unlike previous accounts which tended to confine themselves to the tran­
sitive reanalysis, Elmer's careful textually based study shows that the verbs
under consideration are characterised as a class by having available to them
at all times a certain range of possible syntactic encodings (what he terms
their syntactic paradigm). Its diachronic interpretation, however, caused
Elmer some trouble, for how should the various competing structures be
related to each other in the time dimension? For instance, in view of the
fact that in structurally ambiguous sentences synthetically marked genitives
were reanalysed as accusatives and datives as nominatives, are we to inter­
pret the resulting transitive structure as the descendant, or a descendant,
of the earlier impersonal construction in the syntactic part of the grammari
And is the analytic genitive type with of to be treated as another such descen­
dant? Should one, in other words, postulate a syntactic split? Elmer rejects
this possibility, surmising that the transitive reanalysis would rather have
come about by analogy with semantically similar personal verbs such as «to
lament», «to regret». Rue would, in other words, have been reclassified as
optionally transitive in the lexicon.
In Table 1 the labels attached to the various constructional types of
the syntactic paradigm are based on Elmer's system. It will be seen from
these that he implicity equates as diachronic sames isomorphic constructions
in successive grammars and treats the transitive construction, which lacks
an isomorphic counterpart in the earlier paradigm, as «new». In adop-
 SYNTACTIC CHANGE AND THE LEXICON 129

ting this position he is in line with tradition, which speaks of the demise
of «the subjectless construction», treating it is a continuing entity in the
time dimension. Elmer's unwillingness to postulate a syntactic split seems
to me to be correct, and by invoking analogical influence from semantical-
ly similar verbs he has, I think, pointed us in the right direction also with
respect to the rest of the syntactic paradigm (which he does not analyse).
For, looked at from the point of view of the grammar as a whole, it would
appear that all the variant constructions in the syntactic paradigm are, at
any given point in time, already «in the grammar» in the sense that they
are demanded by other normal personal verbs. If this is so, it implies that
we are not dealing with change in syntactic structure as such but rather with
the redistribution of lexemes between existing constructions. Elmer, however,
does not discuss these relationships except in broad statistic terms, stating
that in Old English the sentential complement type was the most frequent
and that with the nominative type preverbal experiencer constituted the un­
marked order.
It would therefore appear that the diachronic developments under
examination did not in any way result in the creation of new syntax. What
did change syntactically, as an indirect result of the above developments,
was that from Late Middle English onwards every sentence must invariably
have an overt subject constituent in the nominative case and with which
the verb agrees. What is undoubtedly syntactic in this whole process is
the motivation of the change and the ensuing generalisation of SVO struc­
ture.
In constrast to Elmer, whose theoretical position is fairly uncommit­
ted, Fischer and van der Leek (1983) use for their analysis a recent variant
of Generative Grammar which, as already noted above, offers a fairly ex­
plicit account of the intersection of syntax and lexicon. The solution they
propose is exemplary at least in that it seeks to account for both the syntac­
tic variation at any one time and for the diachronic developments. They
interpret the syntactic variants as instances of parametric variation controlled
by the universal rule «move a», and the diachronic developments as chan­
ge in the case-assignment rules. We shall consider these two aspects in
turn.
As shown in Table 2, the authors divide the syntactic paradigm (omit­
ting, however, the it-variant) into three construction types and suggest that
each verb has all three types and that, furthermore, each type is associated
130 THEODORA BYNON

with a specific semantic reading 3 . Thus the verb is taken to be semantical-

ly neutral in the subjectless construction (Type i), semantically «causative»
when the cause noun phrase is the syntactic subject (Type ii), and seman­
tically «receptive» when the experiencer is the subject (Type iii). The semantic
differences between readings (i) to (iii) may then be interpreted as progressive
increase in transitivity (in the sense of Hopper and Thompson 1980). Ap­
plied to the verb lician V like, (i) would be read as «It is pleasing to the
king that...», (ii) as «X pleases the king», and (iii) as «The king likes X».
The authors account for these syntactic-cum-semantic relationships by having
the grammar optionally assign to impersonal verbs either two case-governed
noun phrases (dative or accusative to the experiencer noun phrase and
genitive or preposition to the cause noun phrase) or a single case-governed
noun phrase (dative/accusative to the experiencer noun phrase or genitive
/ preposition to the cause noun phrase). The former covers type (i), the lat­
ter types (ii) and (iii) by moving the noun phrase which lacks lexical case
into subject position (which results in it automatically receiving nominative
case in surface structure). The device of NP-movement is, then, a formal
way of capturing the fact that in addition to being construed subjectless,
impersonal verbs have the option of conforming to the pattern of «ordinary»
verbs by making either of their two noun phrase objects into the subject.

Table 2

OE CONSTRUCTION TYPES (after Fischer and van der Leek 1983):

(i) «neutral»: DAT/ACC GEN/ACC/PP/SENT lician
EXPERIENCER CAUSE 'please'
(ii) «causative»: NOM/SENT DAT/ACC
CAUSE EXPERIENCER 'please'
(iii) «receptive»: NOM GEN/PP
EXPERIENCER CAUSE 'like'

3
Note that type (ii) is given with the less common word-order, presumably because the
more common order with the subject following the experiencer noun phrase poses problems
for configurationally defined subject and object categories. To get round this problem the authors
offer a highly technical solution in the form of a chain-government hypothesis (see pp. 358-60).
 SYNTACTIC CHANGE AND THE LEXICON 131

LEXICAL ENTRY FOR OE hreowan:

NP NP (S)
NP: D a t i v e ; ө - r o l e : Experiencer
NP: G e n i t i v e ; ө - r o l e : Cause
S

LEXICAL ENTRY FOR ME rewen

NP: D a t i v e , 9 - r o l e : Experiencer
NP: of-Accusative;O-role: Cause
S

As regards the diachronic aspect, Fischer and van der Leek assume that
when in Late Middle English the morphological case-system broke down,
this means that the language was losing the ability to assign lexical case in
the base. Construction type (i) could now no longer be generated, since a
verb could now case-govern only one noun-phrase, its object, the other noun
phrase receiving case from tense. In the absence of overt case-marking, the
co-existence of type (ii) and type (iii) variants for the same verb would now
be detrimental to communication, especially in the case of verbs such as
to like which may select two animate noun phrases. The solution adopted
by the language lay in generalising just one construction type per verb 4 .
The continued survival of Me thinks that... and similar expressions well
beyond the 16th century is accounted for by their being analysed by the
authors as a type (ii) construction, with the cause as the subject.
In Fischer and van der Leek's analysis, then, the restructuring is seen
as being essentially lexical in nature, English having changed from being
a language with lexical case (in the base) to one with syntactic case (in sur­
face structure), a division which appears to correlate with the presence ver­
sus the absence of a morphological case-system. There are a number of pro­
blems which still require clarification, such as the possible absence of a sub­
ject constituent in the lexical case stage compared with its systematic presence
in the syntactic case stage, and the assumption that despite the presence of

4
In the case of like we have the survival of type (iii) while Chaucer still had both
possibilities: It likes her «It pleases her» and She likes it «She likes it» (1983: 342). With please
on the other hand type (ii) has been generalised, except in such archaisms as If you please,
which now tend to be interpreted as type (iii).
132 THEODORA BYNON

lexical case the basic syntactic functions are configurationally defined at all
times - to the extent that the underlying structure in Old English of the cause-
subject type (him rued his sins) is given as His sins rued him (which, accor­
ding to Elmer, is decidedly the rarer, marked order). But what matters for
our present purposes is the general principle rather than the technical detail.
The important element in their analysis is their claim that the loss of the
subjectless construction resulted from the loss of lexical case.
This latter statement would seem to capture in a generative framework
the same facts as does the frequently made observation in traditional terms
that, in the earlier stages of English, word-order and a viable case-system
together permitted a more direct mapping between semantic roles and mor-
phosyntactic form than is the case in present-day English. Old English was
thus closer to the ancient Indo-European languages which, it can be argued,
achieved a fairly direct matching of semantic structure and grammatical
form. Over the course of time this relatively direct and transparent rela­
tionship would have become progressively obscured so that in Modern
English case is determined not by function but by position. Seefranz-Montag
(1984: 572) speaks rather appropriately of a grammaticalisation process
whereby argument types become grammatical relations.
The twofold role of case, both as a property of individual lexical items
and as a marker of syntactic relations, has long been a part of traditional
grammar also, although it appears to have received little systematic atten­
tion. Thus for instance, of the two verbs meaning «to command» in Latin,
iubeo is said to govern the accusative and impero to govern the dative. At
the same time, in the syntax, the accusative is said to be the marker of the
direct object and the dative the marker of the indirect object. Now the
diachronic developments which affected the verbs of mental experience
discussed above would certainly suggest that we are dealing with a change
in case assignment in the lexicon, in view of the fact that the subsequent
fate of the object noun phrase (a label applied to the case which resulted
from the merger of dative and accusative in Late Middle English) in the con­
text of verbs of mental experience appears to be quite distinct from the fate
of formally parallel object noun phrases elsewhere with verbs like to give,
to ask, to persuade. With these too, the comparable object noun phrase is
usually human and the choice of dative or accusative was originally lexical­
ly determined, but here we never find a change to nominative marking. The
historical development would not therefore appear to depend on the case-
 SYNTACTIC CHANGE AND THE LEXICON 133

marking as such. It is based rather, it would seem, on the correlation in

the lexicon of morphosyntactic form and semantic role. For it is obvious
that dative/accusative case-marking fulfils a number of quite different
semantic functions according to the class of verb involved: that of experiencer
in the context of verbs of physical and mental experience, a benefactive role
in the context of verbs like to give, and presumably also with to show and
to persuade. It can then be argued that nowhere was dative/accusative case
replaced by nominative except in the experiencer role, which is exclusive to
the class of experience verbs.
There is, however, one other instance of a shift in case-marking from
dative/accusative to nominative with accompanying reanalysis of the sentence
as a whole. This is found with passives of the type He (SUBJECT) was given
a book (OBJECT) from earlier Him (OBJECT) was given a book (SUB­
JECT). It might seem then that the common factor between the subjectless
construction and this type of passive construction is not the lexically governed
association of case-form and semantic role, but rather the quite superficial
syntactic fact that the object-marked noun phrase in both cases occupies
the preverbal slot. The crucial question is thus whether both these
developments go together as two manifestations of one and the same syn­
tactic change, or whether they are to be considered as independent of one
another. According to Elmer (1981: 88, 104; cf. Seefranz-Montag 1983: 125),
nominative case-marking of the experiencer noun phrase belongs to the Old
English period when there is an analytic genitive complement, to the
13th/14th century when there is an accusative complement, and to the 14th
century when there is a clausal complement. Furthermore it appears to have
affected all members of the lexical class in question at roughly the same time,
with no evidence of lexical diffusion. As regards the reanalysis of the passive
construction, this also began in Old English but seems to have affected on­
ly a limited number of verbs before 1500 (Visser 1963-73: 2142ff., lists some
twenty-five), with each subsequent century adding further verbs, the con­
struction even today still not having achieved generality. In this latter case,
then, we have a clear instance of lexical diffusion whose earliest records coin­
cide with the parallel process affecting the «rue» and «desire» verbs. Visser
in fact considers that it was these latter which provided the model for the
new passive type. According to Sapir (1949: ch. 7) on the other hand, the
development from Him... to He was given a book would simply form part
of a general drift in English which increasingly identified preverbal posi-
134 THEODORA BYNON

tion with subject function and absence of case-marking. According to this

interpretation, then, the common factor would have been the vulnerability
of a case-marked human noun phrase in subject position. Its being given
nominative marking would be the easiest way of conforming to the SVO
target. This is the same as saying that lexical case has been replaced by syn­
tactic case.
There is, however, at least one argument which speaks against the
hypothesis that the indirect object as subject of the passive is part of the
same change as the subject-marking of the experiencer noun phrase. This
is the well attested fact that the passive type in question is restricted to
languages which have neutralised the dative/accusative distinction (Seefranz-
Montag 1983:200; cf. Bynon 1983:247). The transitive reanalysis of ex­
perience verbs with the experiencer noun phrase in the nominative is however
also found in languages such as Modern German which have preserved the
dative/accusative opposition. This would seem to suggest that there is no
direct historical connection between the developments affecting experience
verbs and those leading to the passive type in question 5 . The only common
factor is that they remove obstacles to the generalisation of SVO structure.
With the removal of this potential counter-example, the present case-
study would appear to endorse the proposal that change in the syntactic en­
coding of semantically like sets of verbs constitutes a basic mechanism of
syntactic change, and that «pure» syntactic change is the indirect cumulative
result of a series of limited changes affecting the syntactic encoding of verbs
which share one or more semantic roles. If this conclusion is confirmed by
further work, syntactic change will first have to be abstracted from the
systematic comparison of the lexical entries of cognate verbs, both in related
languages and in successive language states. For communication obviously
depends on lexical items being handed down together with the rules which
determine their use in sentences. Couched in the simplistic terms of the
parent-child model, the child must learn not only the phonological form
and the meaning of a lexical item but also how it is to be used. In the case
of verbs this involves its case frame/syntactic encoding and the semantic
roles of its arguments.

5 It has been suggested (Wynn Chao, personal communcation) that the passive in ques­
tion presupposes the construction type Give the dog the bone (as opposed to Give the bone
to the dog) in which order is the only overt marker of function.
 SYNTACTIC CHANGE AND THE LEXICON 135

Winter has recently advanced the claim that we can reconstruct only
what is learnt, not what is generated (1984: 622 ff.). And since, for him,
syntax is generated it cannot be reconstructed. But if it is accepted that the
syntactic encodings and semantic role frames of verbs must be learnt in ad­
dition to their phonological form and lexical meaning, there is then not much
left for «pure» syntax to cover other than the general conventions which
determine the relative order of constituents within phrases and the range
of the possible word-order variants together with their communicative func­
tions. In fact the approach that I am here advocating is rather similar to
the neogrammarian position regarding syntactic change and reconstruction,
which was based on a comparison of the uses of the morphological cases
of related languages and successive language states. The difference is that
they saw case primarily in terms of syntactic functions (subject, direct ob­
ject, etc.), and did not make systematic reference to the lexicon as the place
where case-frames/syntactic positions are assigned semantic roles. It would
appear, however, that it is these encodings rather than the syntactic func­
tions directly which are vulnerable to reanalysis.

REFERENCES

Ard, W.J. 1977. Raising and word order in diachronic syntax. Indiana
Linguistics Club.
Bynon, Th. 1983. Syntactic reconstruction: a case study. Proceedings of the
XIIIth International Congress of Linguists, ed. by Shîro Hattori et al.
Tokyo. 244-58.
Elmer, W., 1981. Diachronic grammar: the history of Old and Middle
English subjectless constructions. Tübingen: Niemeyer.
Fischer, O.C.M. & van der Leek, F.C. 1983. The demise of the Old English
impersonal construction. Journal of Linguistics 19. 337-68.
Hopper, P.J. & S.A. Thompson. 1980. Transitivity in grammar and
discourse. Language 56, 251-99.
Jespersen, O. [1927], 1974. A Modern English grammar on historical prin­
ciples. vol. iii. London: Allen & Unwin.
Joseph, B.D. 1983. The synchrony and diachrony of the Balkan infinitive.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
136 THEODORA BYNON

Lakoff, R. 1968. Abstract syntax and Latin complementation. Cambridge,

Mass.: MIT Press.
Lightfoot, D.W. 1979. Principles of diachronic syntax. Cambridge: Cam­
bridge University Press.
. 1981. The history of noun phrase movement. The logical problem of
language acquisition, ed. by C.L. Baker & J.J. McCarthy. Cambridge,
Mass.: MIT Press. 86-119.
Sapir, E. [1921], 1949. Language. New York: Harcourt Brace
Seefranz-Montag, A. von. 1983. Syntaktische Funktionen und Wortstellungs-
veränderung. Munich: Fink.
- — . 1984. Subjectless constructions and syntactic change. Historical syn­
tax, ed. by J. Fisiak, Berlin etc.: Mouton.
Timberlake, A. 1977. Reanalysis and actualization in syntactic change.
Mechanisms of syntactic change, ed. by C.N.Li. Austin: University of
Texas Press. 141-77.
Visser, F. Th. 1963-73. An historical syntax of the English language. Leiden:
Brill.
Winter, W. 1984. Reconstructional comparative linguistics and the
reconstruction of the syntax of undocumented stages in the development
of languages and language families. Historical syntax, ed. by J. Fisiak.
Berlin etc.: Mouton. 613-25.

Postscript:
The following have only just come to my notice:
Moessner, L. 1984. Impersonal constructions in Early Middle English. Studia
Anglica Posnaniensia 17. 29-38.
Krzyszpien, J. 1984. On the impersonal-to-personal transition in English.
Studia Anglica Posnaniensia 17. 63-69.

THEOD
 DIE SYNTAX DER ÀLTESTEN LATEINISCHEN PROSA

GUALTIERO CALBOLI
Dipartimento di Filologia Classica e Medievale, Università di Bologna

Es ist kaum möglich, das ganze Material der Gesetze und der privaten
und staatlichen Kultus der Römer jetzt in Betracht zu ziehen 1 . Also werde
ich mich darauf beschränken, einige Bemerkungen aus einem Teil dieses Ma­
terials, nämlich aus den Leges Regiae und Zwölftafelgesetzen und aus we-
nigen sakralen Schriften, den sogenannten carmina, zu behandeln 2 . Zuerst
scheint es mir, daß wenigstens von einem praktischen Gesichtspunkte aus
der Unterschied anwendbar ist, den Bruno Luiselli (1969: 123) erkannt hat,
nàmlich daB es in der ältesten lateinischen Prosa zwei verschiedene Stufen
des Ausdrucks gibt, eine niedrige und ärmliche der Gesetze und eine andere
hohe und erhabene, die in den sakralen Texten vorkommt. Dem metrischen
oder rhythmischen Wesen der carmina, die der zweiten, hõheren Stufe an-
gehören, sind schon eingehende Untersuchungen von berühmten Kennern,
wie Westphal, Peter, Norden, Thulin, Pasquali, Pighi gewidmet worden,
abgesehen von den Gelehrten der alteren Generation wie Friedrich Ritschl
und Otto Ribbeck, aber es ist den genannten Forschern nicht gelungen, jeden
Zweifel und Bedenken hinsichtlich des metrischen oder rhythmischen Cha-
rakters dieser carmina aus der Welt zu schaffen 3 . Nur eine Besonderheit
wurde von alien, wenn auch in verschiedenem Grad, angenommen, d.h. die

1
Dies würde alies betreffen, was «die Regelung des Verhältnisses vom Menschen zu den
hõheren Mächten und vom Menschen zum Menschen» umfaßt, wie E. Norden (1909 = 1958:156)
schreibt.
2
Zur Überlieferung und Authentizität der Zwòlftafeln, auch hinsichtlich der sprachli-
chen Besonderheiten und des griechischen Anteils, vgl. besonders F. Wieacker (1966: 294-353);
A. Watson (1975: 3-8; 177-186); zum Stil und Sprache der Zwòlftafeln vgl. G. Devoto (1944
= 1983: 95-97); F. Sbordone (1964); F. Wieacker (1966: 320-330).
3
Vgl. B. Luiselli (1969: 54-120), der die vorherige, diesbezügliche Literatur ausführlich
darstellt.
138 GUALTIERO CALBOLI

Erkenntnis, daß in diesen Texten ein deutlicher Parallelismus der cola und
commata vorhanden ist: selbst Luiselli (1969), der m.E. richtiggehend
alle Versuche einer metrischen Lõsung der Frage ablehnt, und besonders
die Auffassung ablehnt, wonach in diesen Texten ein metrischer Präzedenz-
fall zum Saturnier vorkomme, erkennt und betoni sogar bezüglich dersel-
ben Texte den oben erwähnten Parallelismus und hebt dieses stilistische
Merkmal in vielen carmina besonders hervor. In der Tat handelt es sich um
sehr alte carmina, wie die Begrenzung des templum in arce (Varro, ling. 7,8)
(deren Altertiimlichkeit neben modernisierten Teilen schon von Eduard
Norden (1939) aufgezeigt wurde) 4 , die lustratio agri (Cato, agr. 141, 2-3),
den ritus belli indicendi (Liv. 1,32, 5-14) und andere, von G.B. Pighi (1958)
gesammelte Texte 5 . Aber was bedeutet nun genau dieser Parallelismus?
Ich lasse natürlich das Problem der verschiedenen Schichten dieser Sprache
beiseite - die lexikalische Altertiimlichkeit der Zwòlftafelgesetze hoben
schon G. Devoto (1944 (= 1983): 73 ff.) und F. Wieacker (1966: 300
f.) hervor - und werde mich auf die syntaktischen Verbindungen be-
schranken.
Es ist das besondere Verdienst von Romano Lazzeroni (1959), erklärt
zu haben, daß dieser Parallelismus der Periodenglieder auf einer engen Ent-
sprechung der mehrgliedrigen Wortgruppen beruht, die statt einzelner Wörter
zum Ausdruck der betreffenden Dinge und Zwecke im Gebet benutzt wer-
den (vgl. Lazzeroni 1959: 26). Solch ein Verfahren, das analytisch die größ-
ten semantischen Einheiten in kleinere miteinander symmetrisch und paral­
lel verbundene Stiicke zergliedert, findet nicht nur in der lateinischen Spra­
che, sondern auch in sakralen Formeln des Umbrischen, Hethitischen, Lu-
wischen und Altindischen statt. Was das Umbrische angeht, zieht Lazzeroni
(1959) einige Stellen der iguvinischen Tafeln in Erwägung, nämlich das Ge­
bet an Iuppiter Grabovius (Ig. Taf. VIa 23 f.) und an Fisovius Sansius (Ig.
Taf. VIb 10 ff.) und den Fluch gegen die totam Tarsinatem (Ig. Taf. VIb 58

4
Vgl. besonders E. Norden (1939: 6-9; 58 f.). Norden bemerkt, daB neben sehr alter-
tümlichen Vocabula, wie tescum, ollaner-ollaber, quirquir, cortumio, auch junge Flexionsfor-
men und Schreibarten, wie lingua (abl.), sunto, dixisse, rectissime, vorkommen. Er verteidigt
also die Hypothese, diese Formel würde «nicht lange bevor die Formel in das varronische Werk
Aufnahme fand» umgearbeitet (E. Norden 1939: 58).
5
Diese unkritische Ausgabe bietet das ganze Material dar, aber dieses Material muß in
den kritischen Ausgaben der verschiedenen Autoren nachgeprüft werden. Deshalb gebe ich
immer auch die Autoren und die Stellen an.
 SYNTAX DER ÀLTESTEN LATEINISCHEN PROSA 139

ff.) 6 . Aus den altindischen Texten berücksichtigt er einige Beschwõrungs-

und Verwünschungsformeln, d.h. das yájus und die nivíd (z.B. Taittirīya
Sámhitã 13, 11d; aus dem Awesta vgl. z.B. Yasht 13,153) und jene Stellen
der Atharvaveda, in denen Gebete und Beschwörungen in einer mehr geo-
metrischen Form als der übrige Text vorkommen 7 . Hethitische und luwi-
sche Beispiele kommen aus den Keilschrifttexten aus Bogazköi (XV 34; I
43-46; II 69: Hethitisch; XXXV 39, 25-29; 43 III 28 ff.; 45 II 1 ff.; II 7
ff.: Luwisch) 8 . Das Wesen dieses Sprachtypus besteht also aus Synonymen
und Korrelativen. In dieser Hinsicht ist die Bedeutung der Synonyme auch
Luiselli nicht entgangen; denn er erkennt einen Einfluß des alten Satzbaus
auch in den Synonymenhäufungen, die wir in dem vorklassischen Latein
antreffen (vgl. Luiselli 1969: 52; 143; 151 f.). Dasselbe kann man auch vom
Parallelismus sagen, den Michael von Albrecht (1971: 19; 76; 95-97; 135)
bei Cato, Caesar, Sallust und sogar bei Cicero nachgewiesen hat, Innerhalb
dieses Parallelismus spielt manchmal auch das sogennante Prinzip der wach-
senden Glieder eine Rolle, z.B. im Gebet agri lustrandi bei Cato, agr. 141
Mars pater, te precor quaesoque, uti sies volens propitius mihi domo fami-
liaeque nostrae [...] uti tu morbos visos invisosque, viduertatem, vastitudi-
nemque, calamitates intemperiasque prohibessis defendas averruncesque9.

6
Vgl. z.B. Ig. Taf. VIa 23 f. teio subocau suboco / dei graboui ocriper fisiu totaper
iiouina erer nomneper erar nomneper fos sei pacer sei ocre fisei / tote iiouine erer nomne erar
nomne «Te inuocaui inuoco Iouem Graboumm pro monte Fisio, pro ciuitate Iguuina, pro eius
[montis] nomine, pro eius [ciuitatis] nomine; fauens sis, propitius sis monti Fisio, ciuitati Igu-
uinae, eius [montis] nomini, eius [ciuitatis] nomini» (Übersetzung von R. von Planta 1897 =
1973: 571).
7
TS I, 1, 11d dive tvã 'ntariksãya tvã prthivyai tvã dem Himmel dich, dem Luftraum
dich, der Erde dich! Yt. 13, 153 imōm co zōm yozomoôoi ovom co osmõnom yozomoôoi «die­
se Erde verehren wir, jenen Himmel verehren wir» (W. Krause 1922: 80 f.). vgl. auch H. 01-
denberg (1917): «In den eben erwähnten Beispielen tritt zugleich ein Zug auf, in dem sich wohl
eine álteste und zugleich häufigste Weise darstellt, aus den miteinander auftretenden Vorstel-
lungen eine charakteristische Figur zu formen: der P a r a l l e l i s m u s membro-
r u m» (S.5).
8
Vgl. z.B. KUB XV 34 II 6 ff. (ich gebe nur die Übertragung von Lazzeroni 1959: 131)
«E dentro nel paese di Hatti, preferito dagli dei, buono, florido, venite e porta[te] vita, salute,
lunghi anni, benessere (?) figli, [figlie nipoti] (e) pronipoti, l'amore degli dei, il [favore (?)]
degli dei».
9
Im ältesten Latein wird als kopulativische Konjunktion nur die enklitische Partikel
-que (niemals et) verwendet, und die Partikel -que bewahrt auch sptäter noch ihren archaischen
Charakter, vgl. dazu E. Norden (1939: 18-20); J.B. Hofmann-A. Szantyr (1965: 473 f.).
140 GUALTIERO CALBOLI

Viele andere Beispiele hat Elmo Lindholm (1931: 57-59) gesammelt, ein
Forscher, der in seinen «Stilistischen Studien» dem Gesetz der wachsenden
Glieder große wissenschaftliche Sorgfalt gewidmet hat, dessen Text ich wört-
lich zitieren möchte: «die sakrale Sprache ist in besonderem Grade durch
künstliche Klangmittel gekennzeichnet, wie Häufung von Synonymen, ge-
nau stilisierten Parallelismus, abwechselnd mit (bzw. verbunden mit) anwach-
senden Gliedern». Und weiter: «Die Àhnlichkeit der sakralen Prosa und der
[...] Gesetzessprache springt sogleich in die Augen, aber wir finden auch
eine große Verschiedenheit. Beide lieben Synonymenhäufung, um Deutlich-
keit und UnmiBverständlichkeit zu erlangen; Asyndeton, Alliteration, Iso-
kola und anschwellende Glieder sind in beiden gewähnlich. Aber in der
Rechtssprache beherrscht die Sachlichkeit die Wortstellung, der sakrale Ri-
tualstil dagegen wird von künstlich-stilisierten Rücksichten beherrscht; er
ist genau in Kola und Kommata gegliedert, Parallelismus und wachsende
Glieder werden zu einem Charakteristikum des Stils» (Lindholm 1931:
57-59)10. Lindholm und neuerdings Cesidio de Meo (1983: 143) vertreten
die Meinung, daB diese in der ältesten lateinischen Prosa vorhandenen Ten-
denzen später von der griechischen Rhetorik in Rom wiedererweckt und wei­
terentwickelt worden sind. In der Tat drückt sich später C. Gracchus auf
folgende Weise aus: frg. 61 ORF Malc. 4 S. 196 quo me miser conferam?
quo vortam? in Capitoliumne? at fratris sanguine madet11. an domum?

10
Das Gesetz der wachsenden Glieder wird jetzt eingehend von Th.N. Habinek (1985:
175-187) wieder untersucht. In der Tat ist unleugbar, daB, wie Habinek (1985: 189) richtig be-
merkt, das erste Glied des Saturniers normalerweise langer als das zweite ist (vgl. die Samm-
lung der Saturnier von G.B. Pighi 1968: 264-276, und B. Luiselli 1967: 270-281). Die Verkiir-
zung des zweiten Kolons im Saturnier ist ein bekanntes Phànomen, das einer Art Katalypsis
entspricht, vgl. B. Luiselli (1967: 276 f.), der schreibt: «I secondi cola [...] hanno tutta l'aria
di essere accomunati da un'identica struttura che sembra chiaramente essere quella del primo
colon metelliano dabunt malum Metelli decurtato di una sillaba». Das Gegenteil geschieht im
Hexameter. So wiirde Habineks Ansicht nach (s. besonders Habinek 1985: 187-200) die Prosa
Catos von der metrischen Struktur der hexametrischen Dichtung in der Benutzung der wach­
senden Glieder beeinfluBt. Ich mòchte lieber vorsichtig sein, aber teile im allgemeinen die ab-
schließende, etwas zurückhaltende, Bemerkung des amerikanischen Gelehrten (Habinek 1985:
200): «Sacrai language and Greek rhetoric contributed to the development of oratorical prose
(periodic and otherwise), but Roman poetry, too, deserves its place in any account of the de­
velopment of Latin prose».
11
Sanguine madet ist die Lesung von M, während L sanguinem (-ne P 2 ) redundat gibt.
Der letzte Editor Teubnerianus, Kazimierz F. Kumaniecki, liest redundat, aber ich ziehe es
vor, der Meinung von M. von Albrecht (1971: 69 Anm. 85) zu folgen und madet als lectionem
difficiliorem anzunehmen.
 SYNTAX DER ÀLTESTEN LATEINISCHEN PROSA 141

matremne ut miseram lamentantem videam et abiectam? Hierbei erkennen

wir nicht nur einen an die Medea des Ennius (scen. 276 f. Vahlen2) zurück-
gehenden Typus 12 und den Asianismus des Hegesias, der genau aus klei-
nen Gliedern bestand 13, sondern auch den alten Parallelismus. Denn, wenn
auch C. Gracchus, als Schüler des Menelaos von Marathus, mit dem Asia­
nismus bestens vertraut war 14, wiirde die von ihm erreichte, außergewöhn-
liche Billigung 15, abgesehen vom Stoff der Rede, stilistisch leichter ver-
stándlich sein, wenn man annimmt, daB sein Publikum an solch eine paral­
lele Struktur des Satzes schon irgendwie gewöhnt war 16. Ich habe persön-
lich (1964-1965) die Synonymie für eines der wichtigsten Kunstmittel der alten
lateinischen Prosa gehalten. Heute bin ich der Ansicht, man solite in der
Untersuchung dieser alten Denkmäler noch einen kleinen Schritt weiter ge-
hen. Auch das wesentliche Problem, ob diesen Texten eine metrische oder
rhythmische Struktur zugrunde liegt, kann m.E. nur nach einer eingehenden
Erklárung der sprachlichen Besonderheiten eine Lösung finden. In der ca-
tonischen lustrado agri (Cato, agr. 141) fällt besonders auf, daB nach der
einleitenden Anrufung auf Mars pater fast der ganze Text von einem Kom-
plex umfaßt wird, der aus einem Relativsatz quoius rei ergo usw. und sei-
nem Korrelativum harunce rerum ergo usw. besteht: Cato, agr. 141, 2-3 Mars
pater, te precor quaesoque, uti sies volens propitius mihi domo familiaeque
nostrae. Quoius rei ergo agrum terram fundumque meum suovitaurilia cir-
cumagi iussi, uti tu morbos visos invisosque, viduertatem vastitudinemque,

12
Enn. scen. 276 f. Vahlen2 Quo nunc me vortam? quod iter incipiam ingredi? / do-
mum paternamne? anne ad Peliae filias? Die zwei Stellen setzt schon Cicero in Beziehung,
indem er beide nebeneinander (die erste de orat. 3,214, die zweite de orat. 3,217) zitiert.
13
Vgl. Cic. Brut. 325 f.; Att. 12,6,1; Dion. Hal. comp. verb. 4, II S. 19,10 Usener-
Radermacher; E. Norden (1909 = 1958: 134-139).
14
Vgl. Cic. Brut. 100. Der Lehrer des C. Gracchus war Menelaus aus Marathus in Phoe-
nizien, ein Asiate also, wie der Lehrer seines Bruders, Diophanes von Mytilene (Cic. Brut. 104).
15
Vgl. Cic. de orat. 3,214 «[...] matremne ut miseram lamentantem videam et abiec­
taml» quae sic ab illo esse acta constabat oculis, voce, gestu, inimici ut lacrimas tenere non
possent.
16
Das römische Publikum war gegen die Klausel sehr empfindlich, wie Cicero selbst be-
stàtigt, s. Cic. orat. 214 «patris dictum (spricht C. Carbo) sapiens temeritas filii comprobavit»
- hoc dichorio tantus clamor contionis excitatus est, ut admirabile esset. Quaero nonne id nu-
merus effecerit? Verborum ordinem inmuta, fac sic: «comprobavit filii temeritas»: iam nihil
erit. W. Kroll (1913: 183) schreibt diesen clamorem mehr der noch frischen Erregung iiber die
Vorgänge des Jahres 91 zu, schließt jedoch einen Einfluß der Klausel nicht aus. Vgl. auch A.
Primmer (1968: 93-99).
142 GUALTIERO CALBOLI

calamitates intemperiasque prohibessis defendas averruncesque, utique tu

fruges, frumenta, vineta virgultaque grandire dueneque evenire siris [...],
harunce rerum ergo, fundi terrae agrique mei lustrandi lustrique faciendi
ergo, sicuti dixi, macte bisce suovitaurilibus lactentibus immolandis esto17.
Der Relativ- und Korrelativsatz zusammen mit der Wiederholung des ergo
bieten eine Art Umrahmung der untergeordneten, mit uti eingeleiteten
Konjunktiv- und Optativsätze dar. Dies ist nur deshalb möglich, weil die
zwei Teile des Komplexes Relativ- und Korrelativsatz noch eine Art Dipty-
chon bilden, oder besser von dem ursprünglichen Diptychon nicht weit ent-
fernt sind. Das Diptychon ist zwar der Kern der Hypothese, die Jean Haudry
(1973 und 1979) über die Herkunft des Relativsatzes dargestellt hat, und
es handelt sich um eine Hypothese, die im wesentlichen auch in der ausge-
zeichneten, umfangreichen Arbeit von Christian Lehmann iiber den Rela-
tivsatz (1984) angenommen worden ist. Jean Haudry meint, nämlich, daß
der Relativsatz aus einem Diptychon hervorgeht, dessen direkte bei wei-
tem überwiegende Form qui ....is, quam... tarn, umgekehrte is.. qui, tam...
quam sei. Im Lateinischen war ursprünglich ein vorangestelltes Indefinitum
vorhanden, in der Form: qui(s) hoc dicit, is errai «jemand sagt dies, irrt
er sich». Doch gab es schon in der ältesten Sprache auch nachgestellte Rela-
tivsätze (Haudry 1979: 108 f.). Christian Lehmann (1984: 368-389) hat die
verschiedenen Stufen, durch die der Relativsatz immer mehr grammatikali-
siert wurde, bis er sich zum Relativsatz des klassischen Lateins entwickelte,
eingehend untersucht 18 . Jetzt miissen wir einige wichtige Punkte in dieser
Entwicklung erwähnen. Zuerst den, wonach man im Lateinischen, sowie im
Oskischen und Umbrischen, im Anatolischen und im Tocharischen aus den
zwei in den indogermanischen Sprachen verwendeten Wurzeln, nämlich *kwi-
/ *kwo- und *yo-, die Wurzel *kwi-/*kwo- benutzte. «Keine Sprache -
schreibt Christian Lehmann (1984: 369) - verwendet beide Wurzeln des Re­
lativsatzes, d.h. *kwi-/*kwo- und *yo-, als Relativpronomen, aber alle ver-
wenden *kwi- als Interrogativum und, oft mit Erweiterungen [...], als Inde­
finitum». Im Lateinischen ist der vorangestellte Relativsatz seit den áltesten
Texten im Rückgang, während dieser Typus im 1000 Jahre alteren Hethiti-

17
Der Plural harunce rerum ergo beweist m.E. das Streben zur Vollständlichkeit und
Unmißverständlichkeit. Wenn wir die Skala der Anapher von Chr. Lehmann (1984: 225) in
Betracht ziehen, entspricht die Wiederholung derselben Worte, wie rei ergo - rerum ergo der
ersten, niedrigsten Stufe der Grammatikalisierung.
18
Zur Grammatikalisierung vgl. Chr. Lehmann (1984: 36; 223-227; 246-248; 401-405).
 SYNTAX DER ÀLTESTEN LATEINISCHEN PROSA 143

schen noch weit überwiegt. Ich mõchte hinzufügen, daB auch im oben er-
wáhnten Beispiel, d.h. in der von Cato (agr. 141) überlieferten lustrado agri,
der Relativsatz vorangeht. In den Leges Regiae und den Zwõlftafelgesetzen
finden sich insgesamt 18 Relativsätze oder Indefinita, die als Relativsätze
verwendet werden, und alle auBer einem Fall (s. Anm. 19) vorangestellt
sind 19. Nehmen wir jetzt die carmina in Betracht (die man alle in der
Sammlung von G.B. Pighi 1958 finden kann), so kann man feststellen, daB
die vorangestellten Relativsätze soweit überwiegen, daB auBer sehr wenigen
Beispielen im Gebet Scipios (Liv. 29, 27, 1 Divi divaeque, qui maria terras-
que colitis), in der evocatio deorum bei Macrobius (sat. 3,9,7-8; 10-11) und
in der devotio P. Deci Muris (Liv. 8, 9,4-8), alle Relativsätze vorangestellt
werden. Da es sich um die ältesten Texte der lateinischen Sprache han-
delt 20 , wird dadurch die Meinung von Christian Lehmann bestätigt, daB
«der indogermanische *kwi-/*kwo- Relativsatz ausschlieBlich oder primar
vorangestellt war» (Chr. Lehmann 1984: 369). Es geschieht auch nicht sel-
ten, daB ein im vorangestellten Relativsatz enthaltenes Wort wiederaufge-
nommen wird, z.B. Lat. quo die... eo die; Heth. kwēdani UDti... apēdani
UDti. Dieser Gebrauch ist Lehmanns Ansicht nach der indogermanischen
Rechts- und Sakralsprache zuzuschreiben. Ich stimme dieser Ansicht ganz
bei und mõchte zur Bestätigung aus der lateinischen Sakralsprache zwei ziem-
lich ähnliche Redewendungen anführen, die mit kleinen Veränderungen oft
vorkommen: quoius rei ergo... harunce rerum ergo (Cato, agr. 141, 2-3);
quod tibi fieri oportet... eius rei ergo (Cato, agr. 131-32). Sehr interessant
ist in dieser Hinsicht die im piaculum luci collucandi vorhandene Formel,
zumai wir hierbei, statt des vorangestellten Relativsatzes, einen in dersel-

19
(1-4) Leg. Reg. S. 8 Bruns (Fest. 189); (5) Tab. I 4 S.18 Bruns (Gell. 16, 10,5) Prole­
tario civi quis volet vindex esto / cui quis Fγ civi Marshall; (6) Tab. II 2 S. 20 Bruns (Fest.
374) quid horum fuit unum ludici arbitrove, eo dies diffensus esto / Si quid horum fuat War-
mington; (7) Tab. II 3 S. 20 Bruns (Fest. 233); (8) Tab. III 3. S. 21 Bruns (Gell. 20,1,45) quis
endo eo in iure vindicit, secum ducito; (9) Tab. III 4 S.21 Bruns (Gell. 20,1,45); (10) Tab. V
4 S.23 Bruns (Vlp. frg. 26,1); (11) Tab. VII 7 S.27 (Fest. 369); (12) Tab. VIII lb S. 28 Bruns
(Plin. nat. 28,18); (13) Tab. VIII 8a S. 30 Bruns (Plin. nat. 28,18); (14) Tab. VIII 16 S. 33
Bruns (Fest. 162); (15) Tab. VIII 22 S. 33 Bruns (Gell. 15,13,11); (16) Tab. X 5a S. 36 Bruns
(Cic. leg. 2,60) homini mortuo ne ossa legito quoi pos funus faciat / quoi Müller Büchner
quo BA1 cuos AH (hierbei haben wir den einzigen Fall, in dem der Relativsatz nicht vorange­
stellt wird); (17) Tab. X 7 S. 37 Bruns (Plin. nat. 21,7); (18) Tab. X 9 S. 37 Bruns (Cic. leg. 2,60).
20
M a n muß natürlich auch mit einer Modernisierung dieser Texte rechnen, aber die Hei-
ligkeit solite sie vor einer zu starken Veränderung bewahren (so schon G. Devoto 1944 = 1983:
73).
144 GUALTIERO CALBOLI

ben Weise vorangestellten Konditionalsatz antreffen, und sehr oft der mit
si oder ni eingeleitete Konditionalsatz in der alten Gesetzsprache begegnet:
Cato, agr. 139 (piaculum luci collucandi) Si deus, si dea est, quoium illud
sacrum est, uti tibi ius est porco piaculo facere illiusce sacri coercendi ergo
harumque rerum ergo, sive ego sive quis iussu meo fecerit, uti id recte fac­
tum siet. eius rei ergo te hoc porco piaculo inmolando bonas preces precor,
uti sies volens propitius domo familiaeque meae liberisque meis. harunce
rerum ergo macte hoc porco piaculo inmolando esto. Auch die Beziehung
zwischen Relativ- und Konditionalsatz wurde schon von Christian Lehmann
(1984: 330-341) behandelt. Diese Wendungen durften natürlich nicht ohne
Unterschied benutzt werden, aber sie besitzen auf jeden Fall eine Verwandt-
schaft, die besonders darin liegt, daß beide «keine konkrete semantische Be­
ziehung zum Hauptsatz oder einer seiner Konstituenten haben» (Chr. Leh­
mann 1984: 331). Solch eine Verwandtschaft wird durch die Sprache der
Leges Regiae21 und der Zwòlftafelgesetze nochmals deutlich bestätigt. In
diesem Gesetzkorpus gibt es 36 Konditionalsätze, während der Relativsatz
etwas seltener vorkommt: ich habe nur 15 Falle gefunden22. Aber man muß
3 Indefinita, die als Relativ benutzt werden, hinzufügen: Tab. I S. 18 Bruns
(Gell. 16,10,5) proletario iam civi quis volet vindex esto; Tab. II S.20 Bruns
(Fest. 372, 13) quid horum fuit unum /si quid horum fuat vitium Warming-
t o n / ludici arbitrove reove, eo dies diffisus esto; Tab. III S.21 Bruns (Gell.
20,1,45) M iudicatum facit aut quis endo eo in iure vindicit, secum ducito
(hier quis = ni quis). Außerdem findet man auch 3 Koniunktionen relativi-
scher Herkunft: Tab. I S. 19 Bruns (Rhet. Her. 2,20) Rem ubi pacunt, ora­
to; Tab. V S.23 Bruns (Vlp. frg. 11,14) Vti legassit super pecunia tutelave
suae rei, ita ius esto; Tab. VI S.25 Bruns (Fest. 180,9) Cum nexum faciei
mancipiumque, uti lingua nuncupassit, ita ius esto. Sehr selten, aber sehr
wichtig ist die Wendung si qui(s): Leges Regiae S.10 Bruns (Fest. P. 221)
Si qui hominem liberum dolo sciens morti duit, parricidas esto; Tab. VI
S.25 Bruns (Gell. 20,10,7) Si qui in iure manum conserunt eqs.

21
Zum Charakter und zur Datierung der sogenannten Leges Regiae vgl. E. Gabba (1966:
161) und besonders F. Wieacker (1966: 327 f.; 360 f.: zwischen den Leges Regiae und den Zwölf-
tafelgesetzen gibt es eine unleugbare Übereinstimmung; denn sie sind «mit dem formalen Auf-
bauschema des Zwölftafelsatzes völlig identisch» (Wieacker 1966: 327).
22
S. oben A n m . 19, wo ich alle Stellen angegeben habe, in denen sich entweder ein Re­
lativsatz oder ein Indefinitum befindet. Die drei mit einem Indefinitum eingeleiteten Sàtze sind
auch dort von mir wiedergegeben worden.
 SYNTAX DER ÀLTESTEN LATEINISCHEN PROSA 145

In diesen Texten befinden sich also drei Konstruktionen: (1) Konditio-

nalsàtze, die mit si und ni (niemals nisi)23 eingeleitet werden; (2) Relativ-
sätze und Verwandtes, d.h. Nebensätze, die mit einigen aus Wurzel *kwi-
/*kwo- abstammenden Partikeln, wie uti, ubi, quom, eingeleitet werden;
(3) einfache Nomina, wie z.B. Leges Regiae S.8 (Plin. nat. 14,12,88) Vino
rogum ne respargito (respar gito ist eine Altertümlichkeit, vgl. V. Pisani 1960:
40); ibid. Paeiex aram Iunonis ne tangito.
Es ist also m.E. nicht unmöglich, eine Beziehung zwischen dem Paral-
lelismus der cola und commata und besonders dem Satzparallelismus und
dem Komplex Relativ- Korrelativsatz zu sehen, zumai wenn wir an ein ur-
sprüngliches Diptychon denken. Aber diese Beziehung beruht auf der Vor-
anstellung des Relativsatzes oder auf jeden Fall auf der Vermeidung jener
Wendungen, in denen das bezügliche Nomen aus dem Relativsatz ausgezo-
gen wird, wie z.B. Divi divaeque qui maria terrasque colitis (Gebet Scipios,
Liv. 29,27,1). Jetzt miissen wir noch drei Punkte in der Syntax dieser Texte
berühren: (1) die infinitivische Unterordnung; (2) die Verwendung von Kon-
junktiven und Optativen, d.h. der Modi des opaken Ausdrucks; (3) die Mit-
tel, «control and binding» zu versichern.
Was den Punkt (1) anbelangt, nämlich den Gebrauch von infinitivischen
Nebensätzen und Gerundiven, ist es leicht, einige Beispiele darzustellen, um
zu beweisen, daB solche Konstruktionen in dieser Sprache schon fest ver-
wurzelt sind: Cato, agr. 131-32 (Gebet auf Iuppiter dapalis) quod tibi fieri
oportet und macte hac illace dape pollucenda esto; Tab. VIII S.33 Bruns
(Gell. 15,13,11) Qui se sierit testarier; Cato, agr. 141,2 (precatio agri lu-
strandi agrum terram fundumque meum suovitaurilia circumagi iussi; Le­
ges Regiae S.8 Bruns (Fest. 178) aeris CCC darier oporteat; Varro, ling.
7,8 (im alten Gebet auguri in arce, dem Norden den ersten Teil seines Bu­
ches 1939 gewidmet hat) quam me sentio dixisse. In diesen Fallen bilden
die Infinitivkonstruktionen und Gerundive kein selbständiges Kolon 24 . Die­
se Infinitive und Gerundive sind nur Bestandteile und zwar kleine Bestand-
teile des Satzes und haben keineswegs am Phänomen des Parallelismus teil.
AuBerdem werden fast alle infinitivischen Nebensätze in der passivischen

23
Vgl. J.B. Hofmann-A. Szantyr (1965 = 1972: 667).
24
Die Zergliederung der im Text angegebenen A . c . I . -Konstruktionen, in denen das re-
gierende Verbum zwischen den Akkusativ u n d den Infinitiv eingeschoben wird (se sierit testa-
rier, me sentio dixisse), ist eben ein Beweis, daB wenigstens in diesen Fallen der Infinitivsatz
kein Kolon bilden darf.
146 GUALTIERO CALBOLI

Form benutzt, deren Impersonalcharakter jüngst ganz richtig Françoise Lé-

toublon und Jean-Pierre Maurel (1985) hervorgehoben haben. Sie heben auch
hervor, daß im Lateinischen die Aufhebung des Objekts zum Subjekt nicht
ungewöhnlich ist (Typ: Gallos vicit → Galli victi sunt, z.B. Plaut. Pseud.
1176 f. viginti minas / dabin? Dabuntur; Stich. 550 f. immo duas dabo [...]
addentur duae), und daß man in diesem Prozeß «non seulement l'expres­
sion de l'agent, mais même sa représentation» vermeidet (Létoublon-Maurel
1985: 15 f.). Hier könnte man vielleicht den Rest einer ergativischen Kon-
struktion erkennen 25 , aber, was in diesen infinitivischen Nebensätzen recht
wichtig ist, scheint mir der Mangel an Agent, den wir auch in vielen alten
Gesetzen bemerken, z.B. Si in ius vocat ito. Ni it usw.; Vti legassit super
pecunia tutelave suae rei, ita ius esto26. DaB aber der Infinitiv mit dem re-
gierenden Verb eine Einheit bildet, geht aus folgender Besonderheit hervor:
der infinitivische Nebensatz wird so eng mit dem regierenden Verb verknüpft,
daB beide, wie schon Eduard Fraenkel (1928: 139-154) bewiesen hat, einen
TonzusammenschluB darbieten 27 (dasselbe geschieht auch mit den Gerun-
diven), z.B. Plaut. Amph. 53 dixí futuram hanc (im ersten FuB des Senars);
435 Per Iovem iuró med esse; Curc. 292 Quos semper videás bibentes essé
in thermipolio; 526 cras petí iubeto; Stich. 678 lectís sternendis studuimus
(Anfang eines iamb. Septenars); Ter. Haut. 80 tibi ut opús factost face. Was
Punkt (2) anbetrifft, haben wir schon einige Konjunktivformen, wie defen­
das, oporteat, averrunces, sierit gesehen; man müßte näher bestimmen, daB
viele Formen Überbleibsel des alten Optativs sind: legassit, prohibessis, sie­
rit, nuncupassit, incantassit, faxsit, duit (vgl. G. Calboli 1966: 208-221). Auf
jeden Fall ist diese Sprache auch in dieser Hinsicht gut ausgerüstet.

25
Vgl. G. Calboli 1983: 16 f.
26
T a b . I 1 S. 17 Bruns ( P o r p h . H o r . sat. 1,9,76); T a b . V 3 S. 23 Bruns (Vlp. frg. 11,
14). Subjektlose Sàtze treffen sich besonders in Bedingungssätzen, aber nicht nur dort (vgl.
dazu F. Wieacker 1966: 322 f.).
27
E . Fraenkel hat spàter dem P r o b l e m der Kola und der Gliederung des griechischen
und lateinischen Satzes groBe Aufmerksamkeit gewidmet (vgl. E . Fraenkel 1932; 1933; 1965)
und hervorgehoben, daB die abhängige Infinitivkonstruktion einmal «mit dem regierenden Ver-
b u m in syntaktischer Synaphie steht» (wie z.B. P l a u t . M e n . 538 dicam curarei; Ter. A n d r .
358 negat vidisse), ein anderes Mal «ein eigenes Kolon bildet» (wie z . B . : C. Papirius C a r b o
bei Cic. orat. 213 tu dicere solebas \ sacrarti esse rem publicam) (Fraenkel 1933: 326 f.; 1965:
50 f.). Aber Fraenkel berücksichtigt nicht in diesen Arbeiten die historische Entwicklung der
Sprache. Was unsere Frage anbelangt, möchte ich nur hervorheben, daß in den ältesten Zeiten
die erste Möglichkeit vorzuherrschen scheint, nämlich daB der Infinitiv mit dem regierenden
Verbum eine Einheit bildet.
 SYNTAX DER ÄLTESTEN LATEINISCHEN PROSA 147

So sind wir am Punkt (3). Die anaphorischen Sprachrnittel se und suus

fehlen in diesen Texten nicht: z.B. Tab. III S.21 Bruns (Gell. 20,1,45) secum
ducito; Tab. VIII S.31 Bruns (Cic. Tull. 50) nisi se telo defendit; S. 33 Bruns
(Gell. 15,13, 11) Qui se sierit testarier; Tab. V S.23 Bruns (Vlp. frg. 26,1) cui
suus heres nec escit. Die anaphorischen Ausdrucksmittel se und suus dürfen
nach «Government and Binding Theory» von Noam Chomsky in transpa-
renten Stellen benutzt werden, und das Subjekt der A.c.I.-Konstruktion fin-
det sich genau in einer transparenten Stelle (vgl. G. Calboli, im Druck). So
paßt sich die Tatsache, daB se in einem infinitivischen Nebensatz die Verbin-
dung mit dem iibergeordneten Subjekt ermöglicht (Qui se sierit testarier), der
chomskischen «Government and Binding Theory» gut an 28 . Einen Schritt
weiter geht man im Senatus Consultum de Bacchanalibus, wo man liest (S.
165 Bruns) sei ques esent, quei sibei deicerent necesus ese Bacanal habere.
Aber das Ausdrucksmittel steht schon in der Sprache der alten Gesetze, zwar
in einer Sprache, in der sich auBer dem Participium Praesens29 alle Sprach­
rnittel befinden, um den Bedürfnissen einer immer reicheren Kultur entge-
genzukommen. Aus den ältesten Zeiten bleibt nur die miniere Stellung des
Indefinitum quis, quid und der Parallelismus. Denn dies fällt besonders auf:
das Indefinitum quis, quid wird nach einem sehr alten Sprachgebrauch als
Eintrittswort verwendet und verbindet sich in anderen Fällen mit der Kon-
junktion si im Typ si quis; so wird es nicht mehr als «Complementizer» be­
nutzt, was m.E. davon abhángt, daB die alte «Complementation», die beson­
ders aus Parataxis und Satzparallelismus bestand, anfängt, sich zu verändern.
Zum Schluß noch ein paar Worte über den Parallelismus. Es ist viel-
leicht kein Zufall, daB wir in den ältesten lateinischen Texten anaphorische
Ausdrucksmittel wie se und suus und im Gegenteil keinen proleptischen Ak-
kusativ antreffen, der zuerst bei Plautus vorliegt, während er im Griechi-
schen schon im homerischen Epos vorhanden ist (vgl. Hofmann-Szantyr
1965: 471; G. Calboli 1980: 191 f.). Der Parallelismus, besonders der Satz­
parallelismus hat m.E. lange Zeit die lateinische Sprache gegen die Zerglie-
derung des Satzes geschützt, vergleichbar, etwa, in seiner unerschütterlichen
Standfestigkeit dem Säulengang eines dorischen Tempels.

28
In dem Sinne, daB in der «Government and Binding Theory» von Chomsky (1981 und
1982) das Problem der anaphorischen Verknüpfung der Sätze eingehend behandelt wird. Diese
Theorie verwenden A. Bertocchi und C. Casadio (1983), u m ähnliche P h a n o m e n e im Lateini­
schen zu erklären, aber s. auch A . Bertocchi (im Druck), die wichtige Einwände vorbringt.
29
DaB das Participium Praesens bis zum klassischen Latein wenig benutzt wurde, hob
schon J. Marouzeau (1910) hervor; dazu vgl. auch J . B . H o f m a n n - A . Szantyr (1965 = 1972:
384; 386-390).
148 GUALTIERO CALBOLI

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DIACHRONIC EVIDENCE AND THE AFFIX-CLITIC DISTINCTION

ANDREW CARSTAIRS
University of Canterbury, New Zealand

Most linguists today will probably agree that bound morphemes can
be of three kinds: stems, affixes and clitics. What I want to talk about here
is the distinction between affixes and clitics. I want to suggest that the
historical development of the construction that Jespersen (1942) called the
«group genitive» in English and in certain other Germanic languages may
shed light on this distinction 1.
The group genitive construction is illustrated in (1):
(1) a. NP [that man]'s daughter
b. NP [that man upstairs]'s daughter
c. NP [that man we met]'s daughter
d. NP [that man we bumped into yesterday]'s daughter
It is clear that the constituent to which the -'s- gets attached (its host, in
Zwicky's (1977) terminology) is the noun phrase (cf. Janda 1980). Sometimes
the element immediately to the left of the -'s is the head of the host noun
phrase, as in (la), but sometimes it is a nonhead element, as in (lb), (lc)
and (1d); and there is no requirement that this non-head element should
itself be a noun. So it is quite usual today to regard the possessive -'s of
modern English as not an affix, to be described under the heading of in­
flexional morphology, but rather a clitic, to be described (presumably) under
the heading of syntax. This is because inflexional morphology, like mor­
phology in general, is generally regarded as being concerned by definition
with the behaviour of elements within words. Consequently, if we find some

1
This paper is a revised version of part of Carstairs (1981). Work on it was supported
in part by University of Canterbury Research Grant No. 573346 and in part by a Senior Student­
ship from the Leverhulme Trust.
152 ANDREW CARSTAIRS

bound element (such as -'s) which enters into construction with constituents
larger than words, that element must be classified as a clitic.
What I have just said outlines one criterion for distinguishing between
clitics and affixes. We will call it criterion A. But clearly the importance
of the affix-clitic distinction will be more firmly established if we can find
further systematic differences between them. And in any case criterion A
alone will by no means always be adequate for determining whether a given
bound item is an affix or a clitic. Think of a language like Turkish or
Japanese in which modifiers consistently precede heads within the noun
phrase. In such a language, any bound element which always occurs at the
end of noun phrases can superficially at least be described equally well as
a clitic attached to the whole phrase or an affix attached to the head of the
phrase. Fortunately, further reasonably plausible criteria have indeed been
suggested; for example, Zwicky & Pullum (1982: 3) state:
Clitics exhibit a low degree of selection with respect to their hosts,
while affixes exhibit a high degree of selection with respect to their
stems.
The «high degree of selection» characteristic of affixes is really just the same
thing as grammatically or lexically conditioned allomorphy and, as such,
is too familiar to need much illustration; however, an Old English example
is provided in (2):
(2) Nom. Sg. Gen. Sg.
a. stãn stānes «stone»
b. tīd tīde «time»
c. sunu suna «son»
d. sweostor sweostor «sister»
Clearly, in any analysis of Old English one must recognise more than one
affix for the Genitive Singular; and stems and affixes select one another
in such a way that there is nearly always one and only one «correct» Genitive
Singular form for any noun. By contrast, the «low degree of selection»
characteristic of clitics can be illustrated by the modern English possessive
-'5. In Modern English prose and colloquial usage, the possessor noun phrase
must normally refer to a person, and there are further more or less vague
stylistic and register requirements: the possessor noun phrase must not be
too long and «heavy», and the group genitive construction is avoided
altogether in most forms of written English if the possessor NP is not «head-
final» (so that e.g. examples (lb-d) are unlikely ever to be written). But,
 AFFIX-CLITIC DISTINCTION 153

provided that these criteria are satisfied, the shape of the possessive marker
is fixed: it will always be orthographically -'s, with phonetic allomorphs
/ s ~ z ~ I z / predictable on purely phonological grounds, just like the
allomorphs of the clitic version of the 3rd Singular copula 2 . Taking our cue
from this phonological predictability, let us amend the Zwicky-Pullum
criterion slightly, so as to say more precisely what we mean by «a low degree
of selection»:
The degree of selection that clitics exhibit with respect to their hosts
is limited to allomorphy entirely predictable on phonological or
semantic grounds.
Let us call this criterion B (or the Insensitivity Criterion). Phonologically
predictable allomorphy we have already illustrated; the sort of thing I mean
by semantically predictable allomorphy will be illustrated shortly.
By our criteria A and B, then, the Old English Gen. -es of (2a) must
be analysed as an affix and the -'5 of (la) must be a clitic. There is nothing
very controversial about that. But this analysis does have interesting im­
plications if (as I suggest) the Old English -es is the historical ancestor of
the modern group genitive marker -'s. If we adhere to criterion B, then the
group genitive construction can arise only after the high degree of selection
between stem and affix found in Old English has disappeared through the
reduction of the range of Gen. Sg. alternants illustrated in (2) to a single
alternant (with or without phonologically predictable allomorphs); for it is
only after this high degree of selection has disappeared that the door will
be opened (as it were) for the Gen. -es to be reanalysed as a clitic rather
than an affix. Thus the history of English offers a chance to test the ap­
propriateness of combining criterion B with criterion A for distinguishing
between affixes and clitics. If we find that the group genitive construction
arose before the disappearance of selection in Genitive marking, then we will
have pretty clear diachronic evidence that criterion B is inappropriate. But if
the two developments took place the other way round, then we have an ele­
ment of support for our twofold criterion. So what are the historical facts?

The group genitive was not found in Old English at all; rather, where
in modern English one would say «King Malcolm of Scotland's daughter»
we find in Old English what Ekwall calls the «split genitive» construction:

2 This statement requires qualification in respect of the Plural: see the Appendix below.
154 ANDREW CARSTAIRS

Malcolmes cynges dohter of Scotlande. This construction remains common

through the Middle English period, and is found in Chaucer, e.g. heere
endeth the Wyves Tale of Bathe (Ch. CT D) (Mustanoja 1960: 78-9). But
in Chaucer, too, is recorded for the first time the modern construction, as
in the grete gode of loves name (Ch. HF 1489). So the question arises: how
far has the range of Genitive endings characteristic of Old English been reduc­
ed in Chaucer's time? The answer is: at least very substantially. For the
Genitive Singular, Mustanoja (1960: 71) says: «The ending -s is the rule in
the London English of Chaucer and Caxton; the old weak ending is found
only in more or less petrified expressions such as his lady grace...». This
zero Genitive seems commonest in nouns of relationship ending in -r (father,
mother, sister, brother); but from the point of view of criterion B, this can
be treated as an instance of predictability on a combination of phonological
and semantic grounds, and thus consistent with regarding Chaucer's -'s as
a clitic. As to the Genitive Plural, the -5 ending again predominates at an
early stage in the North and Chaucer's own East Midland dialect; there is
a rival ending -en(e) found at least once in Chaucer (CT D Sum. 2071 myn
eyen sight), but this is more characteristic of southern and western dialects.
So the two historical developments that we are interested in do indeed seem
to have happened in the right order from the point of view of maintaining
the Insensitivity Criterion: first the loss of the Genitive allomorphy, and
then the reanalysis of the overwhelmingly predominant remaining Genitive
marker as a clitic, so that it is freed to enter into construction with consti­
tuents larger than words 3 .
By themselves, these facts may not seem very significant. The fact that
the group genitive emerges after the loss of Genitive-marking allomorphy
could be just an accident. But this possibility recedes when we look at what
happens in other Germanic languages. German and English, within the West
Germanic sub-branch of Indo-European, are more closely related to each

3
In discussion at the ICHL it was suggested that, in southern Middle English dialects,
the developments may have occurred in the wrong order: a group genitive may have appeared
before the disappearance of Genitive Case-marking allomorphy. If so, Mustonoja and Jespersen
are wrong, and the implications for the explanation proposed here are serious. Unfortunately,
Visser's (1963) work on English historical syntax says nothing about the group genitive, so
to check the claim will require a fresh examination of all southern and Kentish Middle English
texts. Though this task is still to be done, it still seems worth putting forward here the pro­
posal which motivates it.
 AFFIX-CLITIC DISTINCTION 155

other than either is to Icelandic and Danish, within North Germanic; so,
other things being equal, we would not expect English and Danish to be
together on one side of an isogloss with Icelandic and German on the other
side. But this is precisely the situation with the group genitive construction.
German has no group genitive: it is out of the question to say, for example,
*des Königs von Englands Tochter or *der Kônig von Englands Tochter in
imitation of the English construction the King of England's daughter; rather,
one must say die Tochter vom König von England or die Tochter des Kônigs
von England. The same is true of Icelandic: Einarsson (1945: 110) confirms
that one can say afmselisdagur konungs islands og Danmerkur «the king
of Iceland and Denmark's birthday», but not e.g. *konung Islands og
Danmerkurs afmælisdagur. Danish, by contrast, does have a group genitive.
Jespersen (1934) reports that it has been frowned upon traditionally by
Danish normative grammarians, but it is nevertheless a lively feature of the
language. He quotes examples, overheard rather than elicited, cited in (3)
(where the Group Genitive marker -s is italicised):
(3) a. for dem der kommer-s skyld
for [those who come]'s sake
«for the sake of those who are coming»
b. et av de små børn som er her i
[one of the small children who are here for the
ferien-s fødselsdag
holiday]'s birthday
c. de som faldt på ærens mark-s efterladte
[those who fell on honour's field]'s descendants
Now it is not an accident, I suggest, that Danish resembles English also in
having only one remaining Genitive marker (which happens also to be -s).
What has happened, then, is that in Danish as in English the disappearance
of Case-marking allomorphy has opened the door to reanalysis of the one
remaining Genitive marker as a clitic rather than an affix, freeing it likewise
for attachment to whole noun phrases rather than to noun stems. This seems
consistent with the historical order of events too; a group genitive is reported
by 1500, at about the same time as -s had become the universal Genitive
marker in the Singular and had begun to be used in the Plural too, displac­
ing or superimposed on the old Genitive Plural ending -a (Haugen 1976:
293-4). In both German and Icelandic, however, any such development was
156 ANDREW CARSTAIRS

blocked by the maintenance of a considerable degree of allomorphy in the

realisation of the Genitive 4 .
The analysis that I have suggested for the development of the -'s con­
trasts somewhat with that suggested at ICHL IV by Janda (Janda 1980).
According to him, the modern clitic -'s does indeed derive from the Old
English affix -(e)s, but this unusual affix-to-clitic development is crucially
mediated by a reanalysis of the -(e)s as a reduced form of the possessive
adjective his. Certainly there is ample evidence of written forms with his
in lieu of a Genitive suffix on the preceding noun: Mustanoja (1960: 161)
comments: «The construction gains ground considerably in the 15th cen­
tury and remains a popular means of expression right down to the 17th'.
However, we must take seriously the possibility that this is not a genuinely
independent construction at all, but merely an orthographic rendering of
the Genitive ending - at best, therefore, a sort of learned reanalysis on the
part of the small literate minority, and, as such, not a genuinely indepen­
dent factor in the relevant morphological-cum-syntactic change. The
strongest argument for the bogusness of the possessive adjective construc­
tion is the fact that we very rarely find the construction with possessive ad­
jectives other than his — just the one which happens (in its reduced form)
to be homophonous with the Genitive marker. If what we are dealing with
were a genuinely independent construction, we would expect to find expres­
sions like that woman her house and those people their house just as often,
proportionately, as we find ones like that man his house. But in fact such
expressions are very rare, as Janda himself (1980: 249) points out, and are
also quite late, dating from after the practice of writing the possessive marker
as his had become well established (Wyld 1936: 316), they thus bear all the
marks of a «logical» extension of the learned reanalysis rather than a ge­
nuine spontaneous development.

Something that would support the genuineness of the possessive pro­

noun construction would be unequivocal evidence of its occurrence before
the arrival of the group genitive, that is before Chaucer. Some apparent
examples are to be found in the 13th-century second text of Lawman's The
Brut, alongside the ordinary affixai Genitive in -5. But Furnivall (1865)

4
Essentially the same causal link is proposed by Jespersen (1942: 297), though without
any explicit theory of the distinction between affixes and clitics.
 AFFIX-CLITIC DISTINCTION 157

argues, to my mind quite convincingly, that these examples are spurious.

The scribe of this particular text has an odd habit of writing h at the begin­
ning of many words where etymologically it does not belong; and, combin­
ing this with the common scribal habit of writing affixes such as the genitival
-es as separate words, he ends up writing something which looks like, but
is not, the ordinary possessive pronoun his.

A genuine possessive pronoun construction is to be found in Dutch;

and in this area it is interesting to compare the three languages English, Dutch
and Afrikaans. Table (4) illustrates the situation in Dutch: 5
(4) a. het huis van mijn vader «my father's house»
b. mijn vader z'n huis «my father's house»
c. mijn moeder d'r huis «my mother's house»
d. ?mijn ouders hun huis «my parents' house»
e. dit huis is van mijn vader «this house is my father's»
f. *dit huis is mijn vader z'n «this house is my father's»
mijn moeder d'r mother's»
g. *de man, die ik gisteren «the man I saw yesterday's
gezien heb, z'n huis house»
(acceptable only as anacoluthon, with a pause before z'n).
In (4a) we find the more usual possessive construction, involving the preposi­
tion van «of». But (4b-d) illustrate the pronominal construction that we are
interested in here. The first point to be made about it is that it is not restricted
to one possessive pronoun (even though my informants were not particularly
happy with (4d)). Secondly, it is quite impossible for the possessive pro­
noun to be stranded, as in (4f). Thirdly, a group-genitive-type construction,
as in (4g), is accepted reluctantly, if at all: it seems to involve anacoluthon.
So the Dutch pattern does not resemble that of English at any stage in history.
Contrast this with the pattern in Afrikaans: 6

5
These data are based on the speech of two informants in Christchurch, New Zealand.
The two were an immigrant from the Netherlands and his daughter, who had recently spent
some time in the Netherlands. Their intuitions were confirmed by some native Dutch speakers
in the ICHL audience.
6
(5) is derived from one native-speaker informant in Christchurch, and was confirmed
by a native speaker (Dr Jac Conradie) at the ICHL.
158 ANDREW CARSTAIRS

(5) a. die huis van my pa

b. my pa se huis
c. my ma se huis
d. my ouers se huis
e. hierdie huis is van my pa
f. hierdie huis is my pa s'n
my ma s'n
g. die man, wat ek gister gesien het, se huis
I am not competent to discuss the details of the historical development
leading up to the modern Afrikaans pattern. But it is striking how much
of the contrast between Dutch and Afrikaans is predictable once we ask the
following question: can the possessive markers in the constructions without
van (z'n, d'r, se etc.) be construed as enclitics with the preceding noun phrase
as host? For Dutch, our criteria for distinguishing clitics from affixes re­
quire us to answer no: the selectivity involved in the choice between z'n,
d'r and hun is incompatible with criterion B. Consequently, it is not sur­
prising to find that Dutch does not tolerate a construction such as in (4f),
where the stranding of z'n etc. would virtually force a clitic interpretation
on them. Likewise, it is not surprising that the group-genitive-type construc­
tion at (4g), if acceptable at all, has internal pause requirements that preclude
a clitic analysis for the element z'n. For Afrikaans, on the other hand, our
answer is yes: the element se or s'n can indeed be interpreted as a clitic.
(5b-d) all exhibit the same possessive marker se, so that selectivity with respect
to the host is non-existent. Consequently, our criteria do permit a clitic
analysis for se here; and the fact that Afrikaans has just the same freedom
as English in forming group genitives (as illustrated in (5g)) shows that the
clitic analysis is indeed correct. The only respect in which Afrikaans differs
from English is in having a distinct shape for the possessive marker when
it is phrase-final, as in (5f). But this sort of selectivity is quite consistent
with our criterion B, because it depends on the relation of the clitic to the
larger constituent of which if forms a part, and not on some characteristic
of the host to which it is attached.

I hope I have shown there is diachronic motivation from more than

one Germanic source in favour of the Insensitivity Criterion as part of the
definition of the term «clitic». Certainly this criterion needs to be refined;
for example, one might ask whether it applies only to «special clitics» (in
 AFFIX-CLITIC DISTINCTION 159

Zwicky's terminology) or also, in some form, to «simple clitics». One might

also ask how the criterion needs to be amended when we move from Zwicky's
straightforward notion of «host» to Klavans's (1985) framework, in which
the factors determining the position of a clitic are distinguished from those
which determine its phonological liaison. I have no ready answer to these
questions; but I hope that I have at least shown that they are worth asking.

Appendix: the Genitive Plural

I have claimed that, in modern English, the phonetic shape of -'s is
predictable on purely phonological grounds, so it satisfies the Insensivity
Criterion for clitichood. But, at first sight, the behaviour of phrase-final
Plural head nouns conflicts with this claim. Notice that after a / s / or / z /
which is not the Plural marker, -'s appears as / I z / :
(6) a. Professor Katz's /-sIz/ book
b. James's /-zIz/ bicycle
However, immediately after a Plural-marking / s / or / z / on the head of the
noun phrase, the possessive marker has no independent phonetic realisa­
tion at all (and we encounter the spelling -s'):
(7) a. the cats' / - s / tails
b. my friends' / - z / bicycles
Apparently, therefore, the possessive marker displays some grammatically-
conditioned as well as some phonologically-conditioned allomorphy, and
the Insensitivity Criterion is not satisfied.

These facts can be reconciled with the Criterion, however, if we analyse

the -'s of possessive Plurals such as cats' and friends' not as a sort of
coalescence of affixal Plural -s and the possessive clitic -'5, but rather as
a purely inflexional (i.e. affixal) realisation of the combination of mor-
phosyntactic properties Plural and Genitive. At first sight, this may seem
bizarre and ad hoc. It amounts to saying that, although Modern English
has lost all inflexional realisations of Genitive (and indeed Case as a rnor-
phosyntactic category) in the Singular of nouns, it has retained it in the Plural
of just those nouns with regular s-Plurals. Apart from anything else, this
analysis offends against Jakobsonian expectations on markedness, in terms
of which there should be more, not fewer, Case distinctions in the «unmark-
160 ANDREW CARSTAIRS

ed» Singular than in the «marked» Plural. Yet, bizarre as it may seem, this
analysis does shed light on some otherwise rather mysterious facts about
the acceptability of group genitives whose head noun is Plural.

Zwicky (1975: 165) quotes Kruisinga (1932) to the effect that «such
groups as the queens of England never take a genitive suffix, although the
groups father-in-law and queen of England do». However, we cannot simply
say that a non-phrase-final Plural head (such as queens, in Kruisinga's ex­
ample) blocks the addition of -'s. Consider the following:
(8) a. *my brothers-in-law's outrageous behaviour
b. those Portuguese men-of-war's dangling tentacles
(9) a. *the soldiers over there's uniforms
b. the children over there's uniforms
(10) a. *the priests of that parish's reaction to the problem
b. the women of that parish's reaction to the problem
The acceptability judgments are not as clear-cut as my distribution of
asterisks seems to imply. But, for me at least, there is a clear difference in
acceptability between the expressions in which the head of the group genitive
phrase has an s- Plural ((8a), (9a) and (10a)) and those in which it does not.
Where the head noun has an irregular Plural form, the fact that it is not
final in its noun phrase does not seem to matter. At first sight, phonological
factors may seem relevant: perhaps it is the proximity of sibilants (..5... 's)
in (8a), (9a) and (10a) which renders them unacceptable. But this cannot
be right, because similar proximity of sibilants is quite acceptable when the
first -s is not a Plural suffix: James Bond's girlfriends, Rose Macaulay's
novels, those people's uniforms.

The peculiar acceptability pattern falls into place, however, if we assume

that the possessive of regular nouns in the Plural involves inflexion, not clisis.
Under this analysis, (11) illustrates inflexional Genitives while (12) illustrates
clitic possessive marking:
(11) a. the cats' tails
b. my friends' bicycles
c. the soldiers' uniforms
(12) a. the cat's tail
b. my friend's bicycles
c. the children's uniforms
 AFFIX-CLITIC DISTINCTION 161

We are now in a position to say what is wrong with (8a), (9a) and (10a).
The fact that the head of the possessor noun phrase has a Plural in -s im­
poses a requirement that possession should be expressed inflexionally,
through the Genitive Plural affix -s'; but the fact that the head of the
possessor noun phrase is not phrase-final leads us to expect the phrase-final
clitic -'s as a possessive marker too. (8a), (9a) and (10a) therefore seem odd
because they contain double marking of possession, both on the head of
the noun phrase and at the end of it. (8b), (9b) and (10b) escape this oddity,
however, because the irregular Plurals men, children and women cannot be
inflected for Genitive Case, so the only marking of possession that these
phrase contain resides in the clitic -'5.

This analysis is admittedly novel, and the implication of residual mor­

phological Case-marking in modern English is likely to be controversial. But
it does have the merit of reconciling the clitic status of -'s with the Insen-
sitivity Criterion while at the same time suggesting some reason for an other­
wise perplexing discrepancy in behaviour between regular and irregular
Plurals.

REFERENCES

Carstairs, A.D. 1981. Notes on affixes, clitics and paradigms. Blooming-

ton: Indiana University Linguistics Club.
Einarsson, Stefán. 1945. Icelandic. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins.
Furnivall, F.J. 1865. Some fresh evidence from the second text of Laya-
mon on the possessives in es and his. TPhS 75-94.
Haugen, Einar. 1976. The Scandinavian languages. London: Faber.
Janda, Richard. 1980. On the decline of declensional systems: the overall
loss of OE nominal case inflections and the ME reanalysis of -es as his.
Papers from the 4th International Conference on Historical Linguistics,
ed. by Elizabeth C. Traugott et al., 243-52. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Jespersen, Otto. 1934. Gruppegenitiv pa dansk. Studier tilegnede Verner
Dahlerup, 1-7. Copenhagen: Aarhus University Press.
Jespersen, Otto. 1942. A modern English grammar on historical principles.
Part VI: Morphology. Copenhagen: Munksgaard.
162 ANDREW CARSTAIRS

Klavans, Judith L. 1985. Syntax and phonology in cliticization. Lg.

61.95-120.
Kruisinga, Etsko. 1932. A handbook of present-day English. 5th ed. Gron-
ingen: P. Noordhof.
Mustanoja, Tauno F. 1960. A Middle English syntax. Part I: Parts of speech.
Helsinki: Société Néophilologique.
Visser, F.T. 1963. An historical English syntax. 3 vols. Leiden: Brill.
Wyld, H.C. 1936. A history of modern colloquial English. 3rd ed. Oxford:
Blackwell.
Zwicky, Arnold. 1975. Settling on an underlying form: the English inflec­
tional endings. Testing linguistic hypotheses, ed. by D. Cohen and J.
Wirth, 129-85. Washington, D.C.: Hemisphere.
Zwicky, Arnold. 1977. On clitics. Bloomington: Indiana University
Linguistics Club.
Zwicky, Arnold & Geoffrey K. Pullum. 1982. Cliticization versus inflec­
tion: English n't. Bloomington: Indiana University Linguistics Club.
 THE SYLLABLE AND PHONOLOGICAL STRENGTH:
GRADIENT LOSS OF GEMINATION IN CORSICAN

THOMAS D. CRAVENS
Loyola College in Maryland1

0. Introduction.
Recent developments in multitiered phonology, and the efforts of a few
scholars to establish principles of relative phonological strength, present the
possibility for a coordinated approach which promises to contribute much
to the elaboration of a phonological framework suited to the study of sound
change. By offering a cogent description of the syllable and its constituents,
the multitiered approach provides the basis for analyzing common changes
such as assimilation, mora loss, and epenthesis in terms which emphasize
the fact that mutations are typically conditioned by prosodic context. Prin­
ciples of relative phonological strength open the way to a theoretical
understanding of the way in which changes occur selectively within a
language.
Stated more ambitiously, if multitiered analysis allows a clear statement
of how a given change occurs, incorporation of the theoretical concept of
phonological strength can add another dimension to understanding, by enabl­
ing a theoretical account of why the change occurs as it does. This will be
exemplified here in a cursory study of pandialectal gradient loss of conso­
nant length at the surface in the Italo-Romance dialects of Corsica. All Cor-
sican data are from Dalbera-Stefanaggi (1978).

1
This paper is derivative of one presented at the 15th Linguistic Symposium on Romance
Languages, held in Boston in March of 1985. I thank discussants there as well as at Pavia for
comments, in particular John Hajek, Aldo Prosdocimi, Mario Saltarelli, Tom Shannon, Nigel
Vincent, Dieter Wanner, and Roger Wright; all shortcomings are my responsibility alone. I
am also grateful to the Linguistic Society of America and the U.S. National Science Founda­
tion for making my attendance at ICHL 7 possible, and I especially thank Margaret Reynolds
of the LSA for kind assistance.
164 THOMAS D. CRAVENS

1. Corsican length loss.

The modern dialects of Corsica are mutually comprehensible with those

of the Italian region of Tuscany, and thus also with Tuscan-derived Stan­
dard Italian, and closely resemble both in lexicon, morphology, syntax, and
phonology. Focusing on the consonantism which will be treated here, both
types have distinctive length in the word, such as Standard Italian [fa:to]
«fate» vs. [fat:o] «done» (p.p. of fare), and, like all Italian speech types
with consonant length in the word, they also have the rule known as rad­
doppiamento or rafforzamento sintattico «syntactic doubling» or «reinforce­
ment» (hereafter RS), whereby following a word-final stressed vowel or a
lexically-defined list of particles — for the most part prepositions — a word-
initial consonant is realized as phonetically long: /la kasa/ → [lakasa] «the
house», but /tre*kase/ → [trek:ase] «three houses» (where * marks an RS
cue).
Corsican dialects are especially interesting in this respect in that in a
geographical progression from south to north on the island, there is gra­
dient loss of consonant length at the surface, both for phonemic length in
the word, and for realizations of RS. This differs from other cases of length
loss (LL) in the Romance languages in that degemination is not historically
lexicalized — as in the Spanish historical development Lat. /buk:a/ > Sp.
[boka], now representing /boka/ — but rather a surface manifestation of
an underlying representation which is still distinct from the single (or short)
consonants. This is clear in the case of, for example /fatto/ «done (p.p.
of fare)» vs. /prete/ «priest» in the dialects of Northeastern Corsica. The
surface form of the first is [fatu], while the second is [prede] (underlying
/ d / is spirantized, as in /pede/ → [peðe] «foot») (Dalbera-Stefanaggi
1978:56-57).

1.1 Vero.

In the village of Vero, slightly to the south and west of the center of
the island, voiced stops cannot lengthen at the surface, but voiceless stops
and the liquids and nasals have surface length of the Italian type. Table 1
illustrates with just / k / and / g / to represent the voiceless and voiced stops
(SI = Standard Italian, V = Vero; representations are phonetic unless other­
wise indicated, though details of vowel quality are not given).
 THE SYLLABLE AND PHONOLOGICAL STRENGTH 165

/k/ SI V
anlaut kasa kaza «house»
RS trek:ase trek:aze «3 houses»
V-V lakasa akaza «the house»
/g/
anlaut gola gola «throat»
RS treg:ole tregole «3 throats»
V-V lagola awola «the throat»
Table 1

The liquids and nasals at Vero differ from the stops in having length at the
surface not only phonemically in the word, and in RS, but also in absolute
anlaut 2 . Illustrating with the bilabial:
SI V
anlaut mam: a m:am:a «mother»
RS trem: am: e trem: am: e «3 mothers»
V-V lamam:a amam: a «the mother»

Table 2

2
One corroboration that [1:] in anlaut and RS is not underlyingly / l : / is the fact that
native speakers report that words such as [badi] «you dance» (Std. It. [bal:i]), [spada] «shoulder»
(Std. It. [spal:a]) contain «deux 1» — which Dalbera-Stefanaggi accepts as a native speaker
(Dalbera-Stefanaggi 1978:49) —, as opposed to the short [1] of [m:alu] «bad» (Std. It. [male]),
[m:eli] «honey» (Std. It. [mjele]), all with / l / . — It would appear that the same rule which
lengthens liquids and nasals in anlaut also affects in some way / p / , / t / , and / k / in that position.
The intervocalic consonants described as ambisyllabic and long in the present paper are transcrib­
ed by Dalbera-Stefanaggi with a macron, so [p:] here is given as [p]. In the word, it is clear
that this represents a geminate: «ce que nous notons par une consonne forte, par exemple t,
équivaut à la géminée tt» (113). This consonant is also characterized as «tendue», however,
and Dalbera-Stefanaggi gives this description to anlaut-conditioned / p / , / t / , and / k / in Vero,
along with liquids and nasals. While the confusion is not serious in the case of the liquids and
nasals, since they can, and no doubt do, appear as phonetically long in all environments where
transcribed with the macron, the stops described as tendues in anlaut are clearly not phonetically
identical to ambisyllabic geminates in the word (similar realizations in closely cognate Sardi­
nian are described as energiche by Loi Corvetto 1982:87). Whatever the actual distinction bet­
ween intraword geminates and these phrase-initial stops, it would seem that the latter should
be interpreted, along with anlaut-lengthened liquids and nasals, as phonetic variants of generaliz­
ed strengthening. This will remain undecided here, as it does not affect the analysis of RS.
It simply adds aniaut position as a strengthening environment (though it does raise interesting
problems for multitiered analysis, especially for that proposed by Chierchia 1982).
166 THOMAS D. CRAVENS

1.2 Casinca; Cervioni and Morosaglia.

In the northeast of the Corsican dialect continuum in the village of
Casinca, loss of surface length affects the voiced stops and the voiceless stops,
leaving only liquids and nasals with the possibility for surface length. As
in Vero, lengthening of liquids and nasals obtains phrase-initially as well
as in RS position, and again, the word-initial non-RS intervocalic realiza­
tion is not lengthened. Nearby in the villages of Cervioni and Morosaglia,
the consonantism is identical to that of Casinca, with the exception that the
nasals and / r / are subject to variable loss of the lengthening distinction,
leaving only [1:] as a regular lengthened surface form.
/l/ Casinca Cer-Mor
hume l:ume «light»
trel:umi trekumi «3 lights»
ulume ulume «the light»
/r/ r:ota r:ota-rota «wheel»
trer:ote trer:ote-trerote «3 wheels»
arota arota «the wheel»
/ m / m:am:a m:am:a - m a m a «mother»
trem: am: e trem: am: e «3 mothers»
amam: a amam:a - ¡-tremarne «the mother»
amama
(the same relationships hold for / n / as for / r / and / m / )
Table 3

The facts for these dialects can be schematized to give an overview of

the gradient effect of loss of surface lengthening. Assuming the same underly­
ing forms for all dialects, the grid in Table 4 shows that a clear pattern ob­
tains (+ signifies that surface lengthening is possible, - that it is not; C =
Casinca, C-M = Cervioni and Morosaglia).
SI V c C-M
/l/ + + + +
/r/ + + + + /-
/m/ + + + + /-
/n/ + + + + /-
/k/ + + -
/g/ + - - -
Table 4
 THE SYLLABLE AND PHONOLOGICAL STRENGTH 167

The voiced stops are most subject to loss of length at the surface, followed
by the voiceless stops, then nasals and / r / , and / l / is left as the most resis­
tant to LL.

2. Syllabic Analysis.
The synchronic state of any of these dialects can be described in a
number of ways. So far, the most interesting account proposed for RS, in
that it provides a clear theoretical motivation for interword lengthening of
the sort found in [trek:ase], is that of Standard Italian resyllabification within
the multitiered approach, exemplified by Saltarelli (1983)3.
In this analysis, the so-called geminates are manifestations of a rhyme
structure containing an empty syllabic coda which is filled by rule. To give
an example in the word, [fa:to] and [fat:o] are distinguished at the syllabic
level by their CV structures. As would be expected, fato has the structure
CVCV, and fatto is construed as CVCCV, with, however, an unassigned
empty coda branching from the first rhyme (1).

The segments which surface as geminates, or in Saltarelli's analysis, bimoraic

long consonants, are produced by instantiation of the Empty Node Con­
vention (ENC), a general process proposed by Ingria (1980).

3
Saltarelli's is not the first multitiered description of Italian geminates and RS. It is,
however, the clearest and most straightforward, and thus best suited for the purposes here.
See Vogel (1978, 1982), and Chierchia (1982) for alternative analyses of RS in the multitiered
approach, and Papa (1981) for an argument against the need for this account of RS. In fact,
the case of / l : / → [d] but RS and anlaut-Strengthened [1:] in Vero suggests that an analysis
which distinguishes underlying length from rule-derived length might be preferable to one which
posits a unique source for all long consonants. As the purpose of the present paper is to ex­
amine the utility of strength principles rather than to arrive at the ideal multitiered description
of Italian and Corsican RS, the competing proposals will not be evaluated here. Regardless
of which version would best describe syllabic restructuring in Corsican, the problem of ac­
counting for the differential effect of LL remains.
168 THOMAS D. CRAVENS

(2) ENC: Reassociate the empty node with the adjacent segment.
with the Italian reassociation specification:
(3) for Italian: Consonants reassociate to the right.
and finally the Italian surface phonetic rule:
(4) Bimoraic consonants are phonetically long.
This gives (5)
(5) R R

The same description applies to Italian RS. Lexical items such as tre which
cue lengthening in the phrase are interpreted as containing the empty node.
When juxtaposed to a following consonant in the breath group, the ENC
is actuated with its Italian specification, along with the Italian interpreta­
tion of bimoraic consonants, and the result is the surface form [trek:ase] (6).

The empty node analysis is applicable to the Corsican dialects as well, though
here dialect-specific restrictions on surface length, such as those in (7) are
necessary.

(7) Vero: Bimoraic consonants are long except for /bdg/.

Casinca: Bimoraic consonants are long except for / b d g p t k/.
Cervioni-Morosaglia: Bimoraic consonants are long except for
/ b d g p t k/; optionally for /r m n/.
 THE SYLLABLE AND PHONOLOGICAL STRENGTH 169

While Saltarelli's proposal is intended as synchronic, the empty node

analysis is perhaps more interesting as a diachronic description of the origin
of both intraword geminates and RS: the geminate of fatto does derive
historically from the internal consonant morae of FACTU, and most RS
triggers such as tre have through time lost a final consonant, giving a con­
crete source for the empty node (e.g. Lat. TRES CASAE > /tre*kase/). Trap­
ped in the word, the historically developed empty node of fatto has a con­
sistent surface realization; the prosodically free word-final empty node of
tre, however, has a surface realization only when juxtaposed to a single-
mora consonant or a non-clustered consonant in the breath group 4 . The
surface constraints of (7) can easily be restated for historical description of
Corsican by simply substituting «have developed as» for «are»: for Vero,
bimoraic consonants have developed as long except for /bdg/, etc. For
Cervioni and Morosaglia it is tempting to speculate that /r m n/ are in the
process of losing the possibility of surface lengthening, so that intraword
/r: m: n:/ would soon merge with /r m n/.
Ignoring a few details, this is a theoretically motivated description of
both the synchrony and the diachrony of this phase of Corsican consonan-
tism, with, in a certain sense, diachrony prominent in that actual historical
developments are masked in the synchronic version of the derivation.
Yet even if both the synchronic and diachronic descriptions are accep­
table as impeccable in detail, neither is truly satisfactory. The grid given
in Table 4 suggests that historical loss of surface length (or synchronic
blockage of length) is not haphazard, but that it follows a coherent order.
More precisely, it would appear that while lengthening can be blocked for
just /b d.g/, if / p t k/ cannot lengthen, then neither can /b d g/, and fur­
ther, as in Cervioni and Morosaglia, if /r m n/ are subject to loss of length,
variable though it is, then both the voiceless and the voiced stops are sub­
ject to LL as well. A full description must account for this gradient block­
ing of surface length.

3. Relative Phonological Strength.

A number of linguists have explored the possible interest of treating
diachronic phonological change or synchronic alternation in terms of hierar-

4
The concept of breath group remains ill defined; see Napoli and Nespor (1979),
however, for a description of the minimal syntactic conditions for obtaining RS.
170 THOMAS D. CRAVENS

chical relationships. Martinet's push and drag chains come quickly to mind,
and more recently a number of others, including Zwicky (1972), Lass and
Anderson (1975), Hooper (1976), now Lass (1984) and Harris (1985), have
examined to some extent the promise of the concept of relative phonological
strength.
The most ambitious attempt to come to grips with implicational strength
is Foley (1977), a book which at best has been heavily criticized, at worst
misunderstood or simply ignored. At the heart of Foley's strength analysis
is the notion that underlying the phonological system of any language is
a universal network of strength relationships, held in tension by reciprocal
forces of phonological weakening and strengthening, manifested locally in
any language by the various degrees of mutation to which phonological units
are subject, Implicit is the assumption that sound change, whether allophonic
or phonemicized, affects at its incipience not an entire class, say, all voiceless
stops, or all velars, but rather that it begins typically with just one member
of the class. Flapping of American English / t / , but not of / p / and / k / is
a banal example of this.
A point to be emphasized, since nearly everyone who has commented
on Foley's theory has misunderstood it, is that the universal network of
strength units is abstract in the extreme. That is, the phonetic and phonemic
manifestations of universal strength relationships are language specific. In
the voiceless stop series, for example, one language might have / p / stronger
than / t / and / k / , while another might have / k / stronger than / p / and / t / ,
and so on. The universal is that relative strength relationships obtain in any
language, not that, say, bilabials will always be stronger than dentals and
velars, or any other permutation of this series.
A good amount of the criticism which Foley (1977) has received is well
taken: the presentation is often unclear, data are at times questionable, and
their interpretation is not always totally consistent. More fundamentally,
Foley's insistence that phonetics is irrelevant to phonological theory —
though he hedges on this considerably — leaves the theory with no empirical
base. 5 With no phonetic principles, there can be no a priori determination
that voiceless stops are expected to be stronger than voiced stops, geminates

5
«Phonology is not the study of sounds, but the study of rules. Phonological elements
are thus properly defined not in terms of their acoustic or articulatory properties, but in terms
of the rules they participate in» (Foley 1977: 5-6).
 THE SYLLABLE AND PHONOLOGICAL STRENGTH 171

stronger than single stops, and so forth. That some strength relationships
are language-specific is evident from consideration of just a few languages;
the contention that all strength relationships are language-specific, however,
carries the theory to a level of abstraction that denies the articulatory and
acoustic reality of the speech chain. In their most straightforward manifesta­
tions, at least, changes such as assimilations and intervocalic voicing and
spirantization are typically conditioned by articulatory factors.
If the theory is modified at its core, however, by assuming that phonetic
information should be central both as a heuristic tool in discovering strength
relationships, and as a motivating force for the existence of at least some
hierarchies, the concept of phonological strength becomes more attractive.
Within orders, for example, if phonetic information is admitted as a
heuristic and descriptive tool, and weakening is characteristically a movement
toward those qualities typical of vocality, i.e. aperture and/or voicing,
phonetic principles would assume that unless an overriding principle in­
tervenes, geminates would be stronger than single stops, voiceless stops would
be stronger than voiced stops, and these would be stronger than spirants.
There are other principles which have been developed elsewhere, but
which are not relevant to the present discussion (Cravens 1984). The main
point here is the assumption that implicational strength hierarchies are poten­
tially a useful theoretical tool, and that to a certain extent, hierarchies are
phonetically motivated. In the case at hand, the basic tenets of strength
phonology provide a theoretical means for understanding the ordered ar­
rangement of resistance to LL in Corsican. If it is acceptable to view reduc­
tion in consonant length (degemination) as a weakening, or conversely,
lengthening in RS as a strengthening, a first approximation of the relevant
strength relationships in the Corsican dialects can be expressed. Strength
values on the parameter of consonant lengthening can be assigned as in Table
5, enabling the panchronic generalization of (8), where S reads «relative
strength value».

/l/ /r/ /p/ /b/

/m/ /t/ /d/
/n/ /k/ /g/
4 3 2 1
(there is no apparent order within /r m n/, /p t k/, /b d g/)

Table 5
172 THOMAS D. CRAVENS

(8) Bimoraic consonants are phonetically long if: Italian: S ≥ 1

Vero: S ≥ 2
Casinca: S ≥ 3
Cer-Mor: S ≥ 3(4)

Unfortunately, though this hierarchy is successful in describing relative

resistance to LL in Corsican, it is in conflict with the characterization of
the strength scale as an ordered ranking in terms of relative vicinity to the
vocalic qualities of full voicing and complete aperture. Surely any language's
realizations of / l / and / r / are more vowel-like than the full occlusives —
Chomsky and Halle go so far as to grant English / r / and / l / the feature
[+ vocalic] (Chomsky and Halle 1968:177) — and therefore liquids should
behave as phonologically weaker than full stops. Yet Corsican /l/, in being
the last unit to retain surface length in response to the strengthening rule
of RS, appears to behave as stronger than / p t k/ or /bdg/. Two refinements
are necessary in order to understand what is at work here.
The first consideration is that in these dialects, it appears that LL is
enacted selectively not simply by segment, but first by category. Vero has
LL only for /b d g/; in Casinca there is LL for /b d g/ and / p t k/; in
the most progressive dialects, it affects /r m n/ as well as the stops. Rather
than a direct progression /b d g/, / p t k/, /r m n/, LL appears to apply
exhaustively first to the occlusives as a category, in the order voiced stops,
then voiceless stops, and only afterwards extends to liquids and nasals. The
hierarchy in detail is not simply /l/ ! / r m n / ! / p t k / ! / b d g / ( ! = «stronger
than»), but rather a bilevel arrangement in which stops are affected first
in the expected order (/p t k/ ! /b d g/), and then liquids and nasals, which
from the evidence here show only /l/ ! /r m n/. This can be described in
a branching diagram (9).

Second, the phonetic characteristics of sonorants and occlusives must

be considered in light of the process in which they are involved. If strength
relationships are essentially determined phonetically, it can be expected that
they will differ according to the phonetic effect of the rule and the environ-
 THE SYLLABLE AND PHONOLOGICAL STRENGTH 173

ment in which it applies. In the case of consonant length, there is a clear

distinction between the character of long stops and long liquids and nasals:
while the former are complete blockages of the vocal tract with length
manifested as increased duration of closure before release, the latter are long
in the different sense of being continuous resonant flows unaccompanied
by complete blockage. This is the basis for the groupings established above.
Just as the resonant (or continuant) character of liquids and nasals allows
length in anlaut position where it is blocked for the stops (cf. Vero as describ­
ed in note 2; Castilian word-initial [r:]), so it also can be seen as providing
for their greater resistance to loss of length. This is difficult to describe in
coherent terms, but appears not to be an unreasonable interpretation in light
of similar developments in related Spanish: original / l : / , /r:/, and / n : / are
the only consonants not to have simply lost length (in fact, palatalization
of / l : / and / n : / can be interpreted as strengthenings, as can [d] resulting
from / l : / in Vero, mentioned in note 2).
At least with reference to lengthening phenomena, liquids and nasals
appear to form one strength category, while stops appear to form another.
These can be labeled here as II and I, with units indexed for each category
as in (10). Together these form the strength parameter relevant to lengthen­
ing (L) in these dialects.

(10) Parameter L

This requires that the specification of the domain of the rule be modified
to reflect selective application. The generalization of (8) can be restated as
in (11) — (or in an improved version of (11)).
174 THOMAS D. CRAVENS

(11) Bimoraic consonants are phonetically long if: Italian: S≥LI,1

Vero: S≥LI,2
Casinca: S≥LII,1
Cer-Mor: S≥LII,1(2)

In this interpretation, conditions for lengthening are given in terms of

the relevant phonological parameter and its internal categories. It is made
explicit that LL does not simply apply in the order voiced stops, voiceless
stops, /r m n/, / l / , but rather that the rule is ordered with regard to prin­
cipled categories. With this refinement, Corsican lengthening can be seen
as a case of selective application of a phonological rule in terms of relative
phonological strength.
With the incorporation of strength principles, instead of listing for each
dialect which segments or classes are (or are not) subject to surface lengthen­
ing, it is possible to establish one derivation which at the level of phonetic
interpretation blocks surface length in each dialect at the relevant point on
the strength scale (these constraints can be indexed in various ways in the
rule, depending upon the notation adopted). This gives a more elegant state­
ment of the restrictions on reassociative lengthening by demonstrating that
the process of RS is phonologically the same for these dialects, and that
the gradient differentiation of the phonetic results as long or short is not
haphazard, but controlled by ordered relationships which can be establish­
ed by application of theoretical principles.
Though the strength interpretation is of interest in synchronic de­
scription, it is perhaps most useful in diachronic analysis. It provides a co­
gent and controlled basis for viewing the cross-dialectal gradience in loss
of surface length in Corsican as a reflection in apparent time of the real
time development of LL in the more advanced dialects. Without strength
principles, it would be tempting, but only speculative, to posit that the
dialects of Cervioni and Morosaglia once passed through a stage of non-
lengthening of /b d g/, followed in time by non-lengthening of /p t k/,
and only last, variable lengthening of /r m n/, and further, that these
dialects may well be in the process of losing surface length altogether. With
their incorporation, however, there is theoretical motivation for po­
siting ordered, chronologically gradual development of non-lengthen­
ing.
 THE SYLLABLE AND PHONOLOGICAL STRENGTH 175

4. Conclusion.
This type of strength analysis is in many ways superficially similar to
Selkirk's (1984) proposal for indexing segments by relative sonority. But
there are some crucial differences. Whereas sonority relations apparently
are assumed to be constant across languages, i.e. phonetically universal
(Selkirk 1984: 112), the strength approach presented here is based on the
recognition that there exists not one universal hierarchy, but several net­
works of hierarchical parameters, each consisting of a general categorial level
(say, all obstruents), this in turn branching into more closely defined
categories (all occlusives, all fricatives, etc.), and branching again until ex­
haustive (e.g. all voiceless stops, all voiced stops). These are held in tension
in any language by both language-specific and universal relationships, which
in both cases are particular to the phonological process or rule in question.
Universally, voiceless geminates are stronger than voiceless simple stops with
regard to intervocalic voicing, for example. But in the same rule domain,
one language may voice / p / preferentially to / t / and / k / , while another
may, for example, voice / t / and / k / preferentially to / p / 6 .
Relative sonority is essentially a phonetic observation rather than a set
of theoretical principles. Inasmuch as it correlates well with a characteriza­
tion of vicinity to vocality, the concept of relative sonority is of central in­
terest in a principled determination of relative phonological strength, but
the notion of relative sonority is at most a component of strength analysis,
not an alternative to it. Without ancillary principles, relative sonority can­
not be used to account for facts such as weakening of / k / preferentially
to / t / and / p / in peripheral Tuscany, or English flapping of / t / but not

6
Much of this interpretation is basically Irene Vogel's. She suggests (1982: 99-100) that
the strength hierarchy is composed of different levels, a universal level of broad categories,
which corresponds well to the sonority hierarchy used by Selkirk and others, and which may
well be definable in terms of relative sonority, and a language-specific level in which the relative
positions of members of each class can be expected to differ from language to language. In
this view, any language should show glides weaker than liquids, these weaker than nasals, these
in turn weaker than obstruents; within these categories, relative strength relationships are not
predictable, but discoverable in each language. This is an important step forward, but as has
been shown here, even this characterization is too powerful. There may well be universal hierar­
chies corresponding to Vogel's for some rule types — intervocalic monomoraic weakening would
seem typically to follow the parameter obstruents ! spirants ! glides, for example — but am-
bisyllabic LL in Corsican demonstrates that liquids and nasals are not weaker than obstruents
in all rule applications.
176 THOMAS D. CRAVENS

/ p / and / k / . As a set of theoretical principles, though, the concept of relative

phonological strength provides the means for describing mutations which
differ by language 7 .
To repeat, the universal proposed here is that there exists in any language
a network of strength relationships, in part phonetically predictable univer­
sally, in part describable language-specifically, which controls the direction
and domain, and thus to a certain measure also the extent and velocity of
phonological weakening and strengthening. This is not the usual sort of
universal. Nevertheless, the theoretical concept of relative strength as used
here appears to be a helpful contribution to phonological theory in that it
provides a coherent means of accounting for the uneven application of rules
of sound change. The prime effect of incorporation of a theoretical con­
cept of relative phonological strength is bifurcated.
At one level, consideration of phonological strength is useful as a
heuristic tool: by elaborating the core regularities in diachronic change or
synchronic alternation in terms of strength, it is possible to identify the in­
teresting cases which, at least at first glance, appear to violate expected
developments, and therefore require further examination. These are often
phenomena which would be curious, but not identifiable as problem cases
in cogent terms, without strength principles (an example is Rumanian con­
sonant degemination, and loss of intervocalic / b / , unaccompanied by related
weakening of /p t k/).
More ambitiously, principles of relative phonological strength provide
a sort of explanatory tool: strength interpretations go beyond discovering
how a change came about, to enable a theoretical answer to the question
of why it came about the way it did within the relevant phonological system.
Whereas traditional theoretical approaches give a view of phonological

7
If, as is claimed here, phonological weakening and strengthening are determined by-
phonetic conditions, the fact that no two languages have exactly identical surface phonetic
realizations may well account for diversity in arrangement of the language-specific level of
the strength scale. The Artikulationsbasis of American English, for example, is so different
from that of Italian (which itself differs by regional variety) that constant cross-linguistic con­
gruence in relative strength within categories (/p t k/, /b d g/, /m n/, /r 1/) should not be
expected. This helps to understand the difficulty in establishing a language-universal ranking
of individual segments according to phonetic qualities such as sonority, and demonstrates the
utility of the theoretical concept of abstract strength units with phonemic and phonetic assign­
ment determined, at least in part, language-specifically.
 THE SYLLABLE AND PHONOLOGICAL STRENGTH 177

history as a succession of states, the strength approach allows a glimpse of

the coherence of phonological development as a continuous evolution,
systematically constrained by identifiable principles.

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Zwicky, Arnold. 1972. A note on a phonological hierarchy in English. In
Linguistic change and generative theory, ed. by R.P. Stockwell and R.S.K.
Macaulay, pp. 275-301. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

CRAV
DIACHRONIC SEMANTIC PROCESSES IN THE MIDDLE VOICE

WILLIAM CROFT, HAVA BAT-ZEEV SHYLDKROT*,

AND SUZANNE KEMMER
Stanford University

The middle voice is one of the most complex phenomena in the gram­
mar of natural languages. Its intractability is reflected in the confusion over
terminology in the literature. On the one hand, the term «middle voice»
has been applied to a wide range of grammatical phenomena. On the other
hand, a large number of terms have been used for some of the same
phenomena by different people: e.g. mediopassive, pseudo-reflexive, quasi-
reflexive, agentless passive, deponent and neuter. In this paper, we will at­
tempt to clarify the status of the middle voice and develop a diachronic
analysis of it, illustrating in the process a general model of grammatical
change.
We begin by calling MIDDLE VOICE or MIDDLE VOICE FORM the
morphosyntactic form in an individual language which expresses part or all
of a cluster of concepts which will be elucidated by the end of this paper,
but which roughly center around the simple or direct reflexive (i.e. coreferen-
tial agent and patient). We will call a MIDDLE USE any one of those con­
cepts expressed by a middle voice form.
We make two observations concerning the nature of the middle voice,
both of which we believe apply to grammatical phenomena in general. First,
the middle voice phenomenon is both syntactic and lexical in character both
cross-linguistically and (often) in a single language. The middle voice is us­
ed to express certain configurations of grammatical relations — compare
the standard transitive form in 1 to the middle form of the reflexive/
reciprocal in 2 and the (specialized) passive in 3 1 :

* Permanent address: Ben-Gurion University of the Negev.

1
In these and all following examples, middle morphosyntax is italicized.
180 W. CROFT, H. SHYLDKROT, S. KEMMER

(1) Me felicitaron.
They congratulated me'.
(2) Se felicitaron.
'They congratulated themselves/each other'.
(3) Se organizaron los juegos.
T h e games were organized'.
One also finds the middle voice used for more unusual grammatical
constructions, such as the «presentative of an action» use of the middle form
in Spanish:
(4) Se habla mucho aquí.
There's lots of talking here'.
In addition to these syntactic uses, the middle voice form also appears
on certain lexical semantic classes of verbs, such as the class of verbs of
speech actions, particularly emotive actions, in Spanish:
(5) arrepentirse 'repent'
gloriarse 'glorify'
jactarse 'boast, brag'
quejarse 'complain, lament, moan'
decidirse 'decide'
negarse 'refuse'
Like other lexical processes, the use of the middle voice to indicate
semantic class is idiosyncratic: one finds a few semantically similar verbs
which do not take the middle form, for no apparent reason, such as ex­
clamar 'exclaim'.
One also finds the middle voice used for lexical derivation, such as the
derivation of the term for 'borrow' from that for 'lend' in a number of
languages:
'borrow' 'lend'
Classical Greek
Somali (Cushitic) amahho amahh-di ('loan'; n.)
Amharic täbäddärä bäddärä
täbäwasä bäwasä
Fula (West Atlantic) wu'yake wu'yii
fe'y'yo fe'y'ya

Table 1. Derived middle voice forms for 'borrow'.

 DIACHRONIC SEMANTIC PROCESSES 181

It would be highly desirable to provide a unified analysis of both the

syntactic and lexical uses of the middle voice; we will provide one here.
The second general observation we may make about the middle voice
is that it is a semantic phenomenon. 2 The argument for this fact is that we
have found the same uses of the middle voice in language after language,
moreover, in languages with historically independent middle voice forms.
Such coincidences cannot be accidental; they must have to do with the nature
of the USES, that is, they must be semantic. To quote John Haiman:
If a word exhibits polysemy in one language, one may be inclined,
or forced, to dismiss its various meanings as coincidental; if a cor­
responding word in another language exhibits the same, or closely
parallel polysemy, it becomes an extremely interesting coincidence;
if it displays the same polysemy in four, five, or seven genetically
unrelated languages, by statistical law it ceases to be a coincidence
at all (Haiman 1974:341).
We find this striking similarity of form-use correspondences in both
the syntactic and lexical realms. The use of a single middle voice form for
reflexive, reciprocal and passive is found in French, Russian, Old Icelan­
dic, Amharic, Classical Hebrew and Kanuri (Nilo-Saharan). The use of a.
single form for both reflexive and passive is found in Somali and Fula. Final­
ly, a single form is used for the reflexive and the reciprocal in Klamath,
Quiché, Kiowa and Yokuts (all Amerind).
The most striking similarities of function, however, are found in the
lexicon. The middle voice is used over and over again to indicate the same
semantic classes of verbs. One of the most common of these is the use of
the middle voice form to label intransitive verbs of grooming, in particular
the verbs 'wash' and 'dress':

'wash' 'dress'
Modern French se laver s'habiller
Latin lavor induor
Russian myt's'a od'et's'a

2
There are important pragmatic aspects to the middle voice phenomenon pertaining to
its syntactic uses outside the realm of grammatical relations, but these will not be discussed
in this paper (see Croft, Shyldkrot and Kemmer (in prep.)).
182 W. CROFT, H. SHYLDKROT, S. KEMMER

Old Icelandic
Classical Greek
Turkish
Dyola (West Atlantic)
Masai (Nilotic)
Amharic
Somali
Sidamo (Cushitic)
Malay (Indonesian)
Papago (Uto-Aztecan)
Yokuts (Macro-Penutian)

Table 2. Middle voice forms for 'wash' and 'dress'.

The semantics of these verb forms are closely related to the reflexive;
in most of these languages, there are also related active transitive verb forms
meaning 'wash [someone else]' and 'dress [someone else]'. However, there
are other verb classes whose relationship to the reflexive meaning is more
distant and obscure but nevertheless take middle voice forms in many
languages. Two of the more unusual classes are verbs of requesting,
particularly 'beg' or 'pray' (Table 3), and verbs of attacking and plunder­
ing (Table 4), found only in languages with a broad-ranging middle voice
form:

Old Icelandic 'ask for'

Modern French "inquire, ask'
Latin 'ask, interrogate'
Classical Greek 'pray for'
'beg, pray,
beseech'
Fula 'beg for'
Tunen (NW Bantu) 'beg, pray,
beseech'
Pangwa (CE Bantu) 'pray'

Table 3. Middle voice forms for verbs of requesting.

 DIACHRONIC SEMANTIC PROCESSES 183

Classical Greek 'plunder, ravage'

'hurt greatly,
destroy'
Latin 'ravage, plunder,
rob'
'attack'
Fula 'attack'
'rob'
'rush at and
seize'

Table 4. Middle voice forms for verbs of attacking and plundering.

Finally, one finds striking similarities in derivational patterns. In addi­

tion to the derivation of 'borrow' from 'lend' by means of the middle voice
marker shown in Table 1, we may cite the middle voice derivation of the
term for 'show oneself, appear' from different lexical sources:

Old Icelandic ('show'

Guugu Yimidhirr
(Australian) ('show'
Classical Greek ('show'
[deponent]
Turkish ('see'
Ayacucho Quechua
(Andean) ('see'

Table 5. Derived middle voice forms for 'appear'.

We must select among the possible candidates for the relevant seman­
tic parameter for the middle voice form. We considered two candidates:
valency and causality, and determined that causality was the relevant con­
cept. Our analysis of causal structure as it pertains to grammatical and lex­
ical semantics is based on Talmy (1972, 1976) and Croft (1985a). Causal
structure consists of fitting the participants of an action — that is, the
arguments in a clause — into a causally-linked chain of events so that their
184 W. CROFT, H. SHYLDKROT, S. KEMMER

causal relations to each other and to the event(s) can be defined. The easiest
way to visualize the causal chain is by representing participants in an event
as linked by arrows representing events in the causal chain, as in Figure 1 :

Initiator Endpoint

Action

Figure 1. Basic components of the causal structure of events.

Here we must introduce some terminology. We use the term IN­

ITIATOR to describe the entity which is the causal source of the action;
this term is deliberately neutral as to the volitionality of the causer. The term
ENDPOINT describes the entity which is altered or affected in some way
by the action's taking place.
Our analysis of voice is a revival of the analysis of voice in traditional
grammar (cf. Barber 1975 and Klaiman 1982a,b), extended by the use of
our more sophisticated model of causal structure and by a general theory
of semantic change to be outlined below. In our terms, the active voice is
the voice in which the subject of the utterance is the initiator but not the
endpoint of the action. The passive voice is that in which the subject is end-
point but not the initiator of the action. The middle voice, on the other hand,
is that in which the subject is both the initiator and the endpoint of the ac­
tion. We will now illustrate and use these definitions in arguing against us­
ing valency for defining the middle voice.
The middle voice is frequently thought of as a valency-reducing or
detransitivizing phenomenon, and it frequently is. However, there are a cer­
tain number of uses which are valency-increasing rather than valency-
decreasing. The Russian utterance in Ivan brejets'a can mean not only 'John
shaves himself but 'John has someone else shave him' (Nedjalkov 1980:
222), in which the indirect causative creates a third argument position. A
similar situation holds for the Latin deponent form trahor T was dragged,
I let myself be dragged' (Gildersleeve and Lodge 1895:153), contrasting with
traho T drag [something]', and the Classical Greek middle in
T had you taught' (Goodwin 1892:267), contrasting with T taught
you'. This type of middle we will call the CAUSATIVE REFLEXIVE, after
Arnott (1970).
 DIACHRONIC SEMANTIC PROCESSES 185

Another type of valency-increasing use of the middle voice is the addi­

tion of a benefactive argument-place to a verb, although like the causative
reflexive, two of the three argument places are held by the same referent.
The Classical Greek middle voice has this use: contrast the active form in
τίθησι νόμους 'He makes laws [for others]' and the middle form in ó δήμος
τίθεται νόμους 'the people make laws for themselves' (Goodwin 1892:267).
This use we call the INDIRECT REFLEXIVE, again after Arnott.
Both of these anomalous cases can easily be accounted for by their causal
structure. The causative reflexive represents a causal chain in which the causer
(subject) indirectly causes another person to perform the action denoted by
the verb so that that action affects him (the causer); thus the subject is both
initiator and affected entity, as in Figure 2:

Figure 2. Causal structure of the causative reflexive.

In the indirect reflexive, the subject performs the action in such a way
that the outcome of the action indirectly affects himself. Thus, in a slightly
different manner, the subject is both the initiator and the endpoint, as in
Figure 3:

Figure 3. Causal structure of the indirect reflexive.

186 W. CROFT, H. SHYLDKROT, S. KEMMER

We do NOT wish to argue that the middle voice uses we have found
should all be subsumed under a general definition of situations in which
a subject is both the initiator and the endpoint of an action. That would
be contrary to both the historical and the typological evidence. First, not
every language with a middle voice form has all of the uses we describe as
middle uses. Second, in the one best attested case of the evolution of the
middle voice, that of the reflexive forms from Latin to Romance, the mid­
dle voice uses were acquired gradually by the reflexive pronoun form. Third,
the middle voice in Romance and elsewhere has come to cover technically
non-middle uses, in particular the passive. Finally, it appears that the passive
form has sometimes spread to middle uses: the Latin -r form probably has
a passive source (Greenberg 1986), and the Sanskrit -ya passive gradually
gained some characteristically middle uses (Gonda 1951:1, quoting J.S.
Speyer).
Instead, it is essential to distinguish each of the middle uses from all
of the others as precisely as possible and to define the semantic relation­
ships among all middle uses, as well as between middle and non-middle (i.e.
active and passive) uses. In this way we may then analyze the historical and
typological patterns that fall out from these uses. Although there is no space
here to outline the definitions of the middle uses and their semantic rela­
tionships (see Croft, Shyldkrot and Kemmer (in prep.)), we will give a
diagram which roughly indicates the structure of the semantic domain, and
discuss the historical aspect of our analysis of voice.
The diagram in Figure 4 (ignoring the shading for the moment) sets
out the middle uses, and some related active and passive uses, in terms of
their semantic relatedness. For example, the indirect and causative reflex­
ive are closely related to the simple or direct reflexive in that all three alter
the semantics of a normal transitive verb so that the subject is both initiator
and endpoint. However, all three differ in the directness of the subject's
involvement in the action: in the direct reflexive, the subject is the direct
initiatior and the direct endpoint; in the causative reflexive, the subject is
an indirect initiator but a direct endpoint; while in the indirect reflexive,
the subject is the direct initiator but an indirect endpoint (see Figures 2 and 3).
A theory of grammatical change based on the semantic analysis underly­
ing Figure 4 consists of two parts: a theory of origins and a theory of spread.
Our theory of origins is based on direct historical evidence and indirect
typological evidence. The indirect typological evidence indicates that the mid­
dle (and active and passive) voice forms cluster around certain «core uses».
 DIACHRONIC SEMANTIC PROCESSES 187

[Comitative]

Figure 4. Semantic relations among middle voice uses

188 W. CROFT, H. SHYLDKROT, S. KEMMER

The core use for the middle voice is normally the direct reflexive. These core
uses are usually called «prototypes» by synchronic linguists. However, given
the direct historical evidence provided by Romance, in which the direct reflex­
ive USE is the source of the middle voice FORM, it is more accurate to
describe the direct reflexive as a SOURCE USE. Our theory of origins is
that certain uses are source uses for morphosyntactic forms that later spread
to other uses which never serve as source uses. Presumably there is a fun­
damental cognitive reason for the privileged status of source uses, but we
will not pursue that possibility here.
Our theory of the spread of a morphosyntactic structure to other uses
is that this spread is INCREMENTAL and SEMANTIC (see Croft 1985b).
New uses are gradually acquired by a form over time, and the order of ac­
quisition of new uses is governed by the degree of semantic relatedness
of those uses. Direct semantic relations are indicated in Figure 4 by solid
lines directly linking two uses. The semantic constraint on the spread of a
form restricts the possible paths of change considerably: out of 300 pos­
sible paths directly linking two uses, only 38 are semantically justifiable
and thus predicted to be possible historical changes. In addition, not all of
these paths are likely to be bidirectional, and further research may reveal
even more constraints on possible grammatical changes in the domain of
voice.
We may illustrate our hypothesis of grammatical change as incremen­
tal semantic change with the evolution of the Latin reflexive to the Modern
French middle in Figure 5 (Kemmer 1985, based on data from Hatcher 1973
[1942]). The shading indicates the number of uses covered by the s- form
in Latin, Old French and Modern French. 3 The evolution of the Latin
reflexive fits our hypothesis: beginning with a direct reflexive form, it spread
gradually in different directions, but the spread was governed by the semantic
relations holding between the middle uses. It is important to note that the
active, middle and passive domains are not autonomous: all three are related
to each other, however distantly, through semantically intermediate uses.
The spread of the Latin reflexive has to be seen in terms of the concomitant
retreat of the active (unmarked) form and the passive(-r) forms from uses
such as verbs denoting cognition or change in body posture. This retreat

3 It should be noted that the use of the s- form for a lexical class, e.g. verbs of cogni­
tion in Old French, does not imply that EVERY verb of cognition was in a middle voice form,
only that some number of them were.
 DIACHRONIC SEMANTIC PROCESSES 189

Figure 5. The evolution of the Middle voice in French

190 W. CROFT, H. SHYLDKROT, S. KEMMER

has not occurred in English, where most of the lexical classes of verbs on
the diagram are in the active (unmarked) voice; this presumably reflects the
historical retreat and loss of the Indo-European mediopassive.
We have also included in Figure 5 a line indicating the range of the
Latin deponent form. It resembles the range of the Modern French se quite
closely. However, in Latin one must subtract the uses covered by the Latin
reflexive, so that the shape of the area covered by the deponent is more like
a doughnut. This state of affairs is also found in Russian, Turkish, Malay,
Fula and Acoma (Keresan), and reflects the simple process of renewal: the
source use of an older middle voice form is obscured by the reflexive serv­
ing as the source of a newer middle voice form which then displaces the
older form at the core. (Of course, in the Latin case, it is probable that the
source of the deponent was the passive, not the reflexive; our comments
apply more appropriately to e.g. Fula).
We may conclude with some general observations about the structure
of the domain of voice which suggest more general hypotheses about seman­
tic change. The uses in the domain of voice may be classified into three types,
indicated by the shading in Figure 4. The unshaded areas indicate source
uses: middle, passive and active. 4 The dark shaded area indicates MARK­
ED MIDDLE uses. These are uses of the middle voice form for grammatical
constructions which have simple transitive counterparts, and which indicate
some marked alteration of the causal structure of the described event, e.g.
the causative reflexive. These uses are almost always marked in surface struc­
ture in some way, often by a middle form, or by a separate form such as
the English 'each other' for reciprocals, or by a combination of a middle
form and another form such as the Latin inter + se for reciprocals or the
Modern French se faire construction for causative reflexives.
The lightly shaded area contains UNMARKED MIDDLE uses. These
are semantic classes of lexical items which are inherently «middle» in some
way or other. For example, in verbs of obtaining, the subject is inherently
an indirect benefactor by virtue of coming into possession of the thing ob­
tained. As another example, certain intransitive actions such as nontransla-
tional motion ('twist', 'rotate') and change in body posture ('sit down', 'lie
down') could also be conceptualized as inherently reflexive transitive actions.

4 The reciprocal sometimes functions as a secondary source use in its own right,
spreading to naturally reciprocal actions such as 'fight [intr.]' or 'meet [intr.]'.
 DIACHRONIC SEMANTIC PROCESSES 191

The unmarked middle uses are typologically sometimes active — that is,
unmarked — in form and sometimes marked as middle voice.
The status of unmarked middles reflects competition between what John
Haiman has called iconic and economic motivation (Haiman 1980, 1983).
Economic motivation, which can be roughly described as «don't mention
it if you don't have to», dictates that the middle causal structure of unmarked
middles need not be reflected in (marked) middle morphology, since it is
inherent in the event. Iconic motivation, roughly «if you mean it, say it»,
on the other hand, dictates that unmarked middle uses require marked middle
morphology since their semantics includes middle causal structure and the
marked middle morphology denotes that structure. This conflict in motiva­
tion causes typological and historical variation in the expression of these
uses. In conclusion, we would expect to find that in a given semantic area,
a middle voice form will acquire the marked middle uses before it will ac­
quire the unmarked middle ones, since the marked middle uses contrast with
normal active transitive uses while the unmarked middle uses do not generally
have such a contrast.

REFERENCES

Arnott, D. W. 1970. The Nominal and Verbal Systems of Fula. Oxford:

Oxford University Press.
Barber, E.J.W. 1975. Voice — beyond the passive. Proceedings of the First
Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society, ed. by . Cogen et
al., 16-24.
Croft, William, 1985a. Oblique grammatical relations and the causal struc­
ture of events. Presented in the Ferguson/Greenberg Lecture Series on
Language Universais and Sociolinguistics, Stanford University.
. 1985b. Grammatical change as incremental semantic change. MS, Stan­
ford University.
H. Shyldkrot and S. Kemmer. In preparation. Typology and gram-
maticalization of the middle voice.
Gildersleeve, B.L. and Gonzalez Lodge. 1895. Latin Grammar. London:
Macmillan.
Gonda, Jan. 1951. Remarks on the Sanskrit Passive. (Orientalia Pheno-
Traiectina, Vol. 4) Leiden: E.J. Brill.
192 W. CROFT, H. SHYLDKROT, S. KEMMER

Goodwin, William W. 1892. A Greek Grammar. Boston: Ginn.

Greenberg, Joseph. 1986. Some Problems of Indo-European in Comparative
Perspective. Proceedings of the Conference on Genetic Classification of
Language. Rice University.
Haiman, John. 1974. Concessives, conditionals and verbs of volition. Foun­
dations of Language 11.341-359.
. 1980. The iconicity of grammar: isomorphism and motivation.
Language 56.515-540.
. 1983. Iconic and economic motivation. Language 59.781-819.
Hatcher, Anna Granville. 1973 [1942]. Reflexive Verbs: Latin, Old French,
Modern French. (Reprint of the Johns Hopkins studies in Romance
literatures and languages, vol. 43) London: Johnson Reprint Corporation.
Kemmer, Suzanne. 1985. The reflexive origins of middle morphology: A
case study from the history of French. MS, Stanford University.
Klaiman, Miriam. 1982a. Affectiveness and the voice system of Japanese:
satisfaction guaranteed or your money back. Proceedings of the Eighth
Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society, ed. by Monica
Macauley et al., 398-413.
. 1982b. Defining 'voice': evidence from Tamil. Papers from the Eigh­
teenth Regional Meeting, Chicago Linguistic Society, ed. by Kevin Tuite,
Robinson Schneider, and Robert Chametzky, 267-281.
Nedjalkov, Vladimir P. 1980. Reflexive constructions: a functional typology.
Wege zur Universalien-Forschung (Sprachwissenschaftliche Beiträge zum
60. Geburtstag von Hansjakob Seiler), ed. by Gunter Brettschneider and
Christian Lehmann, 222-228. Tübingen: Gunter Narr.
Talmy, Leonard. 1972. Semantic structures in English and Atsugewi. Un­
published Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Berkeley.
. 1976. Semantic causative types. The Syntax of Causative Construc­
tions (Syntax and Semantics, vol. 6), ed. by Masayoshi Shibatani, 43-116.
New York: Academic Press.


 DRIFT AND SELECTIVE MECHANISMS
IN MORPHOLOGICAL CHANGES: THE EASTERN NILOTIC CASE *

GERRIT J. DIMMENDAAL
Rijksuniversiteit Leiden

1. Introduction
Languages differ widely in terms of morphological complexity. It is
often assumed that, with regard to changes in morphological systems, there
is a tendency towards isomorphism, resulting in a minimization of allomor-
phy, without, however, causing homophony (Kiparsky's «levelling condi­
tions»; Kiparsky 1972). This paradigmatic pressure may be counteracted by
syntagmatic modifications of a phonological or syntactic nature, which cause
the morphological component to become more complex.
This paper discusses morphologically defined allomorphs in Eastern
Nilotic languages from an historical point of view. Most languages belong­
ing to this group have rich and complex morphological systems. Simplifica­
tions in their respective morphologies can be accounted for on the basis of
traditional notions like analogical re-alignment. A common cause of mor­
phological complications in these languages is paradigmatic displacement,
itself the result of phonetic attrition in most cases.
In one sub-group of Eastern Nilotic, the Teso-Turkana cluster, a cross-
categorial reinterpretation of allomorphic distribution has taken place, as
a result of which the form of morphological allomorphs has now become
predictable to a large extent, mainly on the basis of an innovated principle

* I would like to express thanks to Joan Bybee, Andrew Carstairs, Simon Dik, George
van Driem, Jaap van Marie and Robert Stockwell for their stimulating comments and sugges­
tions.
ABBREVIATIONS:
A = aspect
 = consonant PASS = passive (impersonal active)
3 = third person present or future PEN = Proto-Eastern Nilotic
3PA = third person past tense V = vowel
194 GERRIT J. DIMMENDAAL

of mora counting. Accordingly, these languages provide an alternative case

to the more commonly observed type of morphological change referred to
above. These languages have maintained (or re-obtained) system adequacy
as a reaction to an increase in the degree of morphological alternation, not
by abandoning particular affixes, but by reinterpreting their distribution.

2. The Eastern Nilotic languages.

Eastern Nilotic languages are spoken in major parts of Kenya, Uganda
and the Southern Sudan, and furthermore in the southwestern corner of
Ethiopia, the northwestern corner of Zaire, as well as northern Tanzania.
The group consists of approximately twenty languages, which have been
subclassified as follows by Vossen (1982: 296):

Eastern Nilotic itself is one of the three primary branches of the Nilotic
language family, which belongs to the Nilo-Saharan phylum, one of the four
major language families of Africa (Greenberg 1963: 85-86).
The percentage of cognates in a Swadesh 200 wordlist between, for ex­
ample, languages of the Teso-Turkana cluster and the Bari group is about 30%.
Languages belonging to the Teso-Turkana cluster share about 75% of
their basic items in the same wordlist. The major comparative study of
Eastern Nilotic is again Vossen (1982), who reconstructs phonological and
morphological properties of the common ancestor, Proto-Eastern Nilotic,
hereafter PEN, as well as subsequent historical developments. Reconstructed
forms referred to hereafter are taken from Vossen.
 DRIFT AND SELECTIVE MECHANISMS IN MORPHOLOGICAL CHANGE 195

3. Allomorphism.

Many African languages, including those belonging to Eastern Nilotic,

have a system of vowel harmony, whereby vowels are divided into two sets,
one set produced with an advanced tongue root ( + ATR), the other set pro­
duced with a retracted tongue root ( — ATR). Languages of the Bari group
in Eastern Nilotic have a ten vowel system, whereas those belonging to the
Non-Bari group have a nine-vowel system (with the tenth vowel ö lacking,
due to a historical merger with *).

Ideally, all vowels within a word belong to one of the two harmony sets.
One of the consequences of this vowel harmony system is an (automatic)
alternation for many affixes and roots between a [-ATR] form and a
[ + ATR] form, as the following examples from Bari illustrate 1 :
singular plural
dak dak-an «pipe»
kurit kurit-ön «giraffe»

Thus, each vowel in the [ - ATR] set has a counterpart (in the vertical line)
in the [ + ATR] set. The actual systems are more complex; although in­
teresting in themselves, these phonologically determined allomorphs are not
further discussed in the present paper.
Next to forms whose automatic alternation is conditioned by adjoin­
ing sounds, there are variant forms of morphemes which are conditioned
by position (non-automatic alternation); these morphologically determined
allomorphs are the central issue of this paper. The form of the passive suf­
fix in these languages, for example, not only depends on neighbouring
sounds, but also on the tense or aspect expressed by the verb. The follow­
ing examples from Turkana illustrate this characteristic feature:

1 The transcription of examples is phonemic. Tones have not been indicated in these
examples. Several forms are subject to further (phonetic) modifications. Vowels before pause
in Turkana are de-voiced if only a single tone is associated with the vowel. They remain voiced
when the associated tone is complex (i.e. when the latter consists of a sequence of high plus
low, or low plus high tone).
196 GERRIT J. DIMMENDAAL

a-mas-i-o «it was being drunk»

3PA-drink-A-PASS
a-mas-it-ai «it has just been drunk»
3PA-drink-A-PASS
a-mas-i «it had/has been drunk»
3PA-drink-PASS

Each of these morphological allomorphs of the passive marker has its own
phonological allomorphs; however, the choice between, for example, -ai or
-o depends on which particular aspect marker precedes it. Similar complex­
ities occur with nominal inflection and derivation in these languages. Many
Nilotic languages, including those belonging to the Eastern Nilotic branch,
have a rich number marking system for nouns, whereby either the singular
is the basic (uninflected) form, or the plural. The following examples from
Bari illustrate this system:
singular plural
plurative: kupö kupö-jin «large basket»
singulative: kuru-töt kuru «worm»

Nouns taking a number marker in the singular (but not in the plural) often
refer to entities which usually occur in large numbers (members of ethnic
groups, «worms», «flies», «mosquitos») or in pairs («ears», «breasts»). This
system does have a parallel in Indo-European languages, although in the
latter this is not expressed morphologically. Tiersma (1982: 835) notes that
«when the referent of a noun naturally occurs in pairs or groups, and/or
when it is generally referred to collectively, such a noun is locally unmark­
ed in the plural». The local markedness (of singular forms in this case) in
Indo-European languages manifests itself in the sense that plurals are used
more frequently with such nouns; these nouns are also more resistent to
levelling2.
There is still a third type of number suffixation in Eastern Nilotic. In
languages of the Bari group there are certain nouns whose principal form
has a plural meaning, but these nouns take a singulative suffix in order to

2 Interestingly, the Proto-Indo-European dual form was retained in Proto-Germanie

nouns which referred to entities normally occurring in pairs like «breasts» and «nostrils» (Tiersma
1982).
 DRIFT AND SELECTIVE MECHANISMS IN MORPHOLOGICAL CHANGE 197

indicate one item from a collection, and a plural suffix to denote a plurality
of collections, as in the following Bari examples:
«seeds»
«one seed»
«many kinds of seeds»

This system (as well as the singulative and plurative marking mentioned
earlier) is also found outside Eastern Nilotic. In the Non-Bari group of
Eastern Nilotic the third type has only been retained in a few nouns (com­
pare the «special group» in Turkana as described in Dimmendaal 1983a:
240); elsewhere the unmarked (uninflected) form has disappeared, thereby
giving rise to a system of replacement, where both the singular and the plural
are marked, as in the following Turkana example:
e-cor-ot «ankle bell»
-coro-i «ankle bells»

The latter examples illustrate a further innovation of the Non-Bari group,

namely gender marking prefixes on the noun. The historical development
of these nominal prefixes occurred along lines proposed for gender mark­
ing in general by Greenberg (1978)3. The form of these prefixes in the Non­
Bari languages depends on whether the noun is masculine, feminine (or
neuter, which only occurs in the Teso-Turkana cluster), on whether the noun
is singular or plural, and also on the syntactic function of the noun (subject
and object versus locative). Because of this overt marking by way of gender
prefixes, the number suffixes are superfluous (or at least redundant). Never­
theless, the Non-Bari languages have retained the number marking system
as such. There are various nominal number suffixes in Eastern Nilotic
languages, many of which are reconstructable for their common ancestor
(PEN). The form of these cognate suffixes varies considerably between in­
dividual languages or groups. The following section tries to provide at least
a partial answer to the question of how and why this variation between the
respective morphological systems has come about.

3 The historical development of the stages through which these gender prefixes probably
have gone has been described in Dimmendaal (1983a: 222), and has been further analyzed in
Heine and Vossen (1983).
198 GERRIT J. DIMMENDAAL

4. Paradigmatic displacement.
There is considerable variation in morphological structure between
Nilotic languages in general, and between the three branches, Eastern,
Western and Southern Nilotic, in particular. In terms of Greenberg's quan­
titative typology of languages (Greenberg 1960) the degree of fusion in
nominal and verbal forms is the highest in Western Nilotic languages, and
the lowest in Southern Nilotic, with Eastern Nilotic occupying an in­
termediate position. The synthetic index is lowest in Western Nilotic and
highest in Southern Nilotic, again with Eastern Nilotic languages occurring
between the two extremes. Southern Nilotic languages are extremely ag­
glutinative, whereas internal modification (Ablaut) of roots and stems is com­
mon in Western Nilotic. Eastern Nilotic languages belong to the inflectional
type. This section discusses some of the historical processes that helped to
create, feed and disrupt the typological characteristics of Eastern Nilotic
languages.
An important historical process in Eastern Nilotic, and a frequent source
of new morphological allomorphs, is paradigmatic displacement, which has
been described as a dynamic historical process by Schuh (1980). The pro­
cess (whereby a particular functional distinction is shifted from one posi­
tion in the word to another position which precedes or follows) occurred
in verbal and nominal forms in various languages. The following paradigms
from Maasai and Turkana (contrasting active and passive paradigms) il­
lustrate the innovation of a new morphological allomorph of the passive
in Turkana:

Maasai Turkana
Active ε-nap-ita ε-nap-it «(s)he carries (it)»
3-carry-A 3-carry-A

Passive: ε-nap-ita-i ε-nap-it-ai «(s)he/it is carried»

3-carry-A-PASSIVE 3-carry-A-PASSIVE

The final vowel of the aspect marker (*-ita) has been lost in active paradigms
in Turkana (and the other languages of the Teso-Turkana cluster). However,
in passive paradigms the allomorph of the passive marker after the aspect
marker -it is -ai (or -oi after [ +ATR] vowels). A comparison with Maasai
shows that the vowel a (or  after [ + ATR] vowels) at one point was part
of the preceding aspect marker. The vowel is now an integral part of the
 DRIFT AND SELECTIVE MECHANISMS IN MORPHOLOGICAL CHANGE 199

following passive suffix; in active paradigms the vowel never shows up, not
even when a plural suffix follows the aspect marker. One reason for the
complete loss of the vowel in active paradigms may be the fact that in passive
paradigms there is always a suffix following the aspect marker, whereas in
active paradigms there is only a following suffix in the plural. A further
consequence of the paradigmatic displacement in the passive paradigm is
the emergence of a new morphological allomorph of the passive, which alter­
nates with, for example, the passive suffix -i (or -i) which is used immediately
after verb roots (as illustrated in section 3 above); the result is syncretism
because the form of the passive suffix also depends on the tense-aspect ex­
pressed by the verb, i.e. the suffix is also an exponent of the verb form as
a whole. The final vowel ι or i of the passive markers is de-voiced before
a pause (due to tonal configurations, as illustrated in Dimmendaal and
Breedveld 1986). This de-voicing may be seen as an initial step towards com­
plete loss (unless another suffix follows, to protect it from loss):

a-mas-i [amasi] «it has been drunk»

3PA-drink-A

a-mas-it-ai [amasitai] «it had just been drunk»

3PA-drink-A-PASS

A similar case of paradigmatic displacement in Turkana can be found in

imperative verb forms. As the following comparative sets show, the plural
suffix in Turkana goes back to a marker in early Eastern Nilotic (*-a), which
functioned as a marker of imperative mood:

singular plural
Lotuxo
T e s o « d i g ! »
Turkana

(The prefix in these examples marks the verb class to which the verb belongs
in these languages; for a description of morphological verb classes in Nilotic
see Dimmendaal 1983b).
The original imperative suffix (*-a) is still attested in Lotuxo, but it
has disappeared as such in the singular in Teso and Turkana. However, the
vowel has been retained (next to Lotuxo) in Teso in the plural form, where
it has become part of the plural suffix. The original plural suffix (*-ta) (re-
200 GERRIT J. DIMMENDAAL

tained unaltered in Lotuxo) has become -ata in Teso, due to the paradigmatic
displacement. The number suffix -ata has been shortened to -a in Turkana.
This shortening rule does not seem to be due to phonetic attrition, because
in cases where a vowel is lost word-finally, the preceding consonant tends
to be retained in these languages; instead, the shortening seems to be the
result of a rule of proportional analogy. As the majority of verbal number
suffixes in Turkana (and Teso) has a structure -(C)V, and not -VCV, the
suffix -ata may have been remodelled by analogy with the predominant pat­
tern, because of a general tendency towards paradigm coherence. The result
in Turkana is a displacement of the parameter of number suffixation from
the original suffix to a morpheme which functioned as an imperative marker
at a much earlier stage. The imperative marker (*-a) is also found outside
Eastern Nilotic, for example in the Southern Nilotic language Pokot:
kar-a shut (it)!»
-kar «shut (verbal root)»

Paradigmatic displacement in nominal forms is either due to phonetic attri­

tion (erosion and subsequent loss of word-final elements), or to a reinter­
pretation of inflected forms as basic forms (and vice versa). The following
comparative sets illustrate some of these innovations with regard to number
suffixation:
singular plural PEN root
Kuku ka-muka- ka-muka *-muka «sandal, shoe»
Turkana a-muk-at a-muk
Bari wuru-te «cow dung»
Turkana a-war-εt

(The presence of the word-final vowel ε in the plural form of «cow dung»
in Turkana depends on the dialect).
The PEN vowel *a in the root for «sandal, shoe» has been retained
as part of a number suffix in Turkana, whereas in the non-alternating form
(the plural in this case) it has been lost. In the case of «cow dung» the final
root vowel also became part of the following number suffix in Turkana,
but it subsequently changed from to between these alveolar consonants.
Several number suffixes can be reconstructed for PEN (Vossen 1982: 306).
However, due to processes of the type illustrated above (whereby a root final
vowel became part of a suffix whenever there was one in an alternating form),
 DRIFT AND SELECTIVE MECHANISMS IN MORPHOLOGICAL CHANGE 2 0 1

new number suffixes have arisen. Sometimes the process gave rise to new
morphological allomorphs, as in the case of -at in the Turkana form for
«shoe» above, or to new instances of a particular suffix, which was already
there in the proto-language, as with the suffix -et (in the word for «cow
dung»), which has been reconstructed by Vossen (1982: 307) as *-εt. Because
there is not (or no longer) any phonological conditioning for the suffix -at
in Turkana (since the original vowel *a disappeared from the non-alternating
form) this suffix is no longer a phonological allomorph of some other suf­
fix. Similar processes can be illustrated for other languages and sub-groups
of Eastern Nilotic. The result is the same: new number suffixes arise whose
form is no longer predictable on the basis of some adjacent segment because
the latter has disappeared in the non-alternating form.
Because of the number marking system in these languages, whereby
either the singular or the plural is marked with a number suffix, there is
a potential ambiguity with regard to each nominal ending, viz. whether it
ends in a number suffix or not. As there is a wide variety of morphological
and phonological allomorphs for number suffixation, this potential ambigui­
ty occurs quite frequently. This often leads to reinterpretations of nouns
which originally ended in a number suffix as basic forms, and vice versa.
The following examples illustrate such innovations in Bari and Turkana:
singular plural PEN root
Bari mayat-ti mayat *-mayat «locust»
Turkana ε-maase ŋi-maase-i
Bari kurit kurit-ön *-kori «giraffe»
Turkana e-kori ŋi-kori-o

In Turkana the singulative suffix (which is still attested in Bari) has become
part of the root (*-ti > se) in the case of «locust», whereas in Bari the same
process of petrification occurred in the word for «giraffe» (*-kori-t > korit).
These processes of paradigmatic displacement (together with various
other changes, such as fusion rules for adjacent morphemes) have resulted
in considerable internal morphological diversification between Eastern Nilotic
languages.

5. A cybernetic counterpoise.
The various processes described above have resulted in new sets of suf­
fixes in Teso-Turkana and elsewhere, some of which may still be called
202 GERRIT J. DIMMENDAAL

phonological allomorphs, whereas others have become morphological

allomorphs. These historical changes have been counterbalanced in Teso-
Turkana by the innovation of a principle which makes it possible to predict
the form of morphological allomorphs on the basis of the principle of mora
counting4. (Phonological allomorphs here and elsewhere in Eastern Nilotic
follow from general principles of vowel harmony, or some other phonological
principle). Because this system is found in all languages of the Teso-Turkana
cluster (Teso, Turkana, Toposa, Nyangatom, Jie, Dodos and Karimojong),
it is probably an innovation which took place before the individual languages
evolved, i.e. in Proto-Teso-Turkana. The individual languages, however,
have continued to generalize this initial innovation, which probably started
with number inflection in nouns, to other parts of their grammars. Accor­
dingly, it may be said that there is a drift in this cluster initiated by the mora
counting principle, which functions as the selective mechanism in the conti­
nuing process of grammatical restructuring 5 . The relevance of the mora
counting principle is observable in its purest form with number inflection
in nouns. The form of morphologically determined allomorphs of number
suffixes in Teso-Turkana can be predicted to a large extent, by counting
the number of vowels in a nominal root, and, furthermore, by checking
whether a particular noun ends in a consonant or vowel. Thus, roots with
a structure -CVCV in, for example, Turkana almost always take a suffix
-i (or its allomorph -i, the alternation being determined by general vowel
harmony principles of the language, not by morphological criteria). Roots
with a structure -CVCVC often take a suffix -a (or the phonological

4 A similar set of criteria is found in an entirely different (and genetically unrelated)

language, Hausa, which belongs to the Chadic branch of Afroasiatic, and which is mainly spoken
in Nigeria and Niger. Hausa also has various number suffixes marking plurals (as well as rules
of infixation). The distribution of these suffixes can be related to the form of the nominal
root to a large extent. Thus tri-syllabic roots tend to take a number suffix -ai, whereas di-syllabic
roots with a tone pattern low-high or high-low take a suffix -una; and those with a high-high
tonal pattern take a suffix -ye:
malami malamai «teacher»
«student»
«room, hut»
riga riguna «gown»
«mouse»
suna sunaye «name».
5 The author is aware of the various ways in which the term «drift», as initiated by Sapir
(1921) and as summarized by Malkiel (1981), has been used.
 DRIFT AND SELECTIVE MECHANISMS IN MORPHOLOGICAL CHANGE 2 0 3

allomorphs -ɔ or -o). Clearly, this patterning is an innovation of the Teso-

Turkana cluster as a whole. Cognate suffixes like -1 (-i) or -a (-0 or -o) are
found outside Teso-Turkana, but the distribution of these number suffixes
is random, or at least not determined by the root structure of the noun,
as the following Bari nouns help to illustrate:
singular plural
«buffalo»
«collar bone»
twan twan-a «sickness, death»

This random pattern, whereby it is virtually unpredictable which number

suffix a particular noun takes, is also common among Southern and Western
Nilotic languages. A comparison of cognate roots in, for example, Bari and
Turkana shows that the regular pattern in Turkana is due to a restructuring
of the system, whereby nouns were shifted from one inflectional (number
marking) class to another on the basis of their root pattern:
Bari Turkana PEN root
sg. «crocodile»
Pl.
sg·
Pl.
sg.
pl.

Roots with a -CVC structure in Turkana take a number suffix -in (or its
phonological allomorph -in). As with the examples from Bari above, such
roots correspond to random patterns in Bari (and other Eastern Nilotic
languages outside the Teso-Turkana cluster):
Bari Turkana PEN root
sg. ruk a-ruk *-rruk «hump»
pl. ruk-an ŋa-ruk-in
sg. kuŋu a-kuŋ *-kuŋ «knee»
pl. kuŋu-at ŋa-kuŋ-in
sg. munu a-muŋ *-munu «snake»
pl. muno-ö ŋa-mun-in
204 GERRIT J. DIMMENDAAL

Identical, or similar, criteria for number inflection are found in closely related
languages like Toposa. As the following Toposa examples show, criteria for
the selection of a particular number suffix marker may be the same for
singulatives and pluratives. Nouns with a root pattern -(C) VCVC take a
number suffix -a (or its phonological allomorph - or -o):
singular plural
«beard»
«crocodile»
«horn»
«Dreast»
(Note that the second consonant in the word for «horn» is followed by a
glide. The crucial feature here and elsewhere for mora counting is the
presence of vocalic nuclei and consonants in coda positions).
Several of the historical class shifts for nouns are shared by all languages
of the Teso-Turkana cluster, and therefore probably took place in Proto-
Teso-Turkana. The following set of -CVCV roots in Teso and Turkana takes
a number suffix -1 (or the phonological allomorph -i) according to the regular
(mora based) rules of these languages:
Teso Turkana
singular plural singular plural
 DRIFT AND SELECTIVE MECHANISMS IN MORPHOLOGICAL CHANGE 2 0 5

ther (language internal) indication that the basis for number inflection in
Pre-Teso-Turkana was not based on mora counting. Additional internal
evidence comes from the structure of adjectives in these languages, which
share particular features with nouns, in that they, for example, take
singulative or plurative markers (unlike nominalized verbs, which are in­
flected both in the singular and the plural (replacement)). Adjectives belong
to a closed lexical set: notions expressed by way of adjectives elsewhere in
Eastern Nilotic are often expressed by way of stative verbs in Teso-Turkana.
Adjectives do not have the regular patterning between root structure and
number suffix found in common nouns. Examples from Turkana:

singular plural
-ŋole -ŋole-ik «bald»
-kooki -kooki-ok «orphaned»
-ŋoror-i -ŋoror «last born»

Abstract nouns in Teso-Turkana take different number suffixes from nouns

referring to concrete entities. However, the principle remains the same, i.e.
it is the root structure which determines the choice of the suffix, as in the
following Turkana data:

singular plural
e-deke ŋi-deke-siney «disease»
a-pεga ŋa-pεga-siney «argument»
a-kipɔorɔ ŋa-kipɔro-sia «wet season»
a-kuan ŋa-kuari-sia «night»

Interestingly, more and more parts of the grammars of these languages are
affected by the mora counting principle. There is a clear drifts towards a
cross-categorial reinterpretation of morphological allomorphy, or in Sapir's
words, «there is unconscious selection on the part of the speakers of those
individual variations that are cumulative in some special direction» (Sapir
1921: 155). The mutations (historical changes) are not just random, they
have a direction. They are found in nominal, as well as in verbal morphology.
Languages like Turkana have at least four derivational suffixes which
are used productively with abstract nouns (compared to basically one suf­
fix in a language like Maasai). The distribution of the four suffixes is almost
entirely based on mora counting:
206 GERRIT J. DIMMEND AAL

-CVC roots: - 1 V 1 C 1 V 1 C 2 roots:

a-rεŋ-isi «redness» a-lilim-u «coldness»
a-jɔk-isi «goodness» a-babar-u «saltiness»
-CV1CV1C roots: Roots with a habitual suffix-aan:
a-sɔbɔb-ɔb «disorder» a-mugi-aan-ut «purpleness»
a-cukul-ul «depth» a-ŋaŋ-aan-ut «yellowness»

Other parts of their grammars affected include the formation of inchoative

verb forms, as described in Dimmendaal (1983a: 168-172). The system is still
far from perfect or all-pervasive - and the mora counting principle probably
will never reach a stage of perfection or optimalization - but a gradual drift
or slant towards generalization of the principle is nonetheless undeniable.
A certain degree of regularity based on the root structure can be observ­
ed with number inflection in the Lotuxo-Maa cluster of Eastern Nilotic, the
closest relatives historically of the Teso-Turkana cluster. In Maasai, for ex­
ample, there is a strong tendency for -CVCVC roots to take a number suf­
fix -a (or phonological allomorph -o), as in Teso-Turkana. No such regularity
is found in the languages of the Bari group, which nevertheless have
numerous suffixes marking number in nouns. One or two of these suffixes
are extremely productive and are used in borrowings. For other nouns the
number inflection is almost entirely «mechanical» and unpredictable; the
only conditioning factors are principles of vowel harmony and root-final
vowels as against consonants, which determine the shape of phonological
allomorphs. This pattern is also found outside Eastern Nilotic. At one point
speakers of a pre-Teso-Turkana language must have started reinterpreting
the wide variety of number suffixes and their distribution on the basis of
nominal root structures, as a consequence of which many nouns were
transponed from one inflectional class to another, thereby further feeding
the emerging pattern.

6. On explanations in historical linguistics: the biological model.

There is a certain degree of probability that the principle of mora coun­
ting in Teso-Turkana is going to be applied to other parts of their gram­
mars which have not been affected yet at present. The depth of this pro­
cess, i.e. the question of which parts of their grammars are going to be af­
fected, and in what sense, can only be deduced on a post hoc basis, i.e. after
the respective changes have taken place. One can identify an ongoing pro­
cess, which is cumulative in a certain direction, but the cause of this process
 DRIFT AND SELECTIVE MECHANISMS IN MORPHOLOGICAL CHANGE 2 0 7

is (yet) unknown, neither does one know its target, one reason being that
the process of change may interact with other parameters of grammar. To
give one example, again deduced post hoc, languages of the Non-Bari group
have a system of verbal agreement marking which is cognate to the one found
in Western and Southern Nilotic languages. The agreement marking system
disappeared almost entirely from the Bari group of Eastern Nilotic. One
potential reason for this may have been related to a shift in word order in
the Bari group from an original (Proto-Eastern Nilotic) VSO (alternating
with VOS) to a SVO type, and from a system of potentially empty subject
positions to one where subjects are now obligatory. (Evidence for such a
shift is presented in Dimmendaal 1985). Languages like Bari have retained
the original plural suffix with imperative verb forms where subjects are ab­
sent, as in most languages. Instead of adapting a wide range of verbal suf­
fixes marking number, as in Teso-Turkana, Bari has almost completely aban­
doned the suffixes (and person marking prefixes as well). Given the current
system of nominal number suffixation in Nilotic languages other than those
belonging to the Teso-Turkana cluster, there does not seem to be any deduc-
tive-nomological necessity (in the sense of Lass 1981) for a re-adaptation
of number marking in nominal forms, in other words, there is nothing
teleological about the changes in Teso-Turkana. Without denying the
relevance of functionalistic or pragmatic approaches towards language
change in general, it has to be concluded that they are not of any direct
relevance here. As an alternative attempt towards explaining the observed
restructuring in one sub-group of Eastern Nilotic, recourse might be taken
to the biological model in historical linguistics. This model has been pro­
pagated, among others, by Stevick (1963). It provides a non-causal and non-
teleological way of thinking about mutations in grammatical systems, analo­
gous to current ideas about evolution, as formulated by, for example. Mayr
(1968), who observes the following about mutations in biological systems:
«In view of the high number of multiple pathways available for most
biological processes and... the randomness of many of [them] ... causality
in biological systems is not predictive, or at best is only statistically predic­
tive» (Mayr 1968: 54).
Mutations in biological systems are extremely common and frequent.
Accidental mutations may provide certain advantages, and therefore they
may be retained. Along similar lines, it might be argued that linguistic com­
munities are not homogeneous, because of idiolectic and dialectic variation
between speakers. Mutations leading to class shifts for groups of nouns,
208 GERRIT J. DIMMENDAAL

as in (early) Teso-Turkana, probably set through whenever they resulted in

an increase in formal simplicity and transparency, which, presumably, pro­
vides certain advantages in terms of learnability. Although one might inter­
pret such changes as being «therapeutic» in one sense, or as a counterpoise
to a complex system of morphophonemic alternations, one would also have
to explain why other languages allow for a «maladaptation» or «dysfunc­
tion». Examples of the «maladaption» can be found in, for example, Stan­
dard Dutch, which distinguishes between neuter and non-neuter nouns. The
latter are the result of a historical merger between masculine and feminine
nouns. Whether a non-derived noun takes the neuter marker «het» or the
other marker «de» as a marker of definiteness is basically unpredictable.
There is no overt marking of gender on the noun or on any of the modify­
ing categories when they are definite. Such a system may be hard to learn
when Dutch is acquired as a foreign language, but not in the case of first
language acquisition. Despite the fact that the contrast is not functional (and
in related languages like English the distinction has disappeared), there is
no indication that the contrast is unstable and thus likely to be abandoned
soon in Dutch. In a similar way, one finds two morphological verb classes,
class 1 and class 2, in the Non-Bari languages of Eastern Nilotic, which are
formally distinct. Class 2 verbs have an initial high front vowel (historically
a transitivizing prefix, as shown in Dimmendaal 1983b). Synchronically this
high front vowel is an integral part of the verbal root. There is absolutely
no semantic distinction in the Non-Bari languages between class 1 and class
2 verbs, but the form of inflectional and derivational affixes used with verbs
often depends on whether a class 1 or class 2 verb is involved. Despite the
lack of functionality, these languages have retained the formal contrast for
several centuries. Presumably, the languages tolerate such a system, because
they are full of morphologically determined allomorphs, i.e. there is a
language-specific system-adequacy or «normality» (in the sense of Dressier
1985: 325). In other words, there are internal or immanent reasons why such
non-functional distinctions may be retained. As observed earlier, the number
marking system in the Non-Bari languages is superfluous from a morpho-
syntactic point of view, because of overt characterization of number (and
case) by way of gender prefixes6. However, the number marking system

6 Abandoning the system of gender marking in favour of a number marking system

would require alternative case assignment strategies.
 DRIFT AND SELECTIVE MECHANISMS IN MORPHOLOGICAL CHANGE 2 0 9

has persisted again over a period of hundreds of years, without any sign
of loss or break down, probably because of a language-external (configura-
tional) pressure. These languages are spoken in an area where such systems
are extremely common. Aside from internal reasons (such as the functional
notion of redundancy), there is at least one external reason, the areal norm.
Any theory of morphological change claiming typological adequacy and
universal validity, and aiming at a proper understanding of what is natural
in morphological systems, should not only take into account «minimalistic»
language properties, such as constraints on allomorphy and preservation of
relevant contrasts, or paradigm economy (as defined by Carstairs 1983); it
should also leave space for language specific system adequacy, and the per­
sistance of non-functional properties, in the same way as biological evolu­
tion has left a place for such phenomena.

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Bechhaus-Gerst, pp. 245-268.
Kiparsky, Paul. 1972. Explanation in phonology. In Goals in Linguistic
Theory, ed. by S. Peters, pp. 189-227. Englewood Cliffs, N.Y.: Prentice-
Hall Inc.
Lass, Roger. 1981. On Explaining Language Change. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Malkiel, Yakov. 1981. Drift, slope, and slant: background of, and varia­
tions upon, a Sapirian theme. Language 57: 535-570.
Mayr, E. 1968. Cause and effect in biology. In Towards a Theoretical
Biology I: Prolegomena. An IUVS Symposium, ed. by C.H. Waddington,
pp. 42-54. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Sapir, Edward. 1921. Language. An Introduction to the Study of Speech.
New York: Harcourt Brace.
Schuh, Russell G. 1980. Paradigmatic displacement. In Historical Mor­
phology, ed. by Jacek Fisiak, pp. 349-58. The Hague: Mouton.
Stevick, Robert D. 1963. The biological model and historical linguistics.
Language 39: 159-69.
Tiersma, Peter Meijes. 1982. Local and general markedness. Language 58:
832-849.
Vossen, Rainer. 1982. The Eastern Nilotes. Linguistic and Historical '
Reconstructions. Berlin: Dietrich Reimer Verlag.
and Marianne Bechhaus-Gerst (eds.) 1983. Nilotic Studies 2. Berlin:
Dietrich Reimer Verlag.
 THE DIACHRONIC RELATIONSHIP OF MORPHOLOGY
AND SYNTAX

DOROTHY DISTERHEFT
Department of English, University of South Carolina

1. Introduction
It has long been recognized that morphology preserves old syntax 1 .
Since the last century historical linguists have suggested that some of the
inflectional and derivational affixes of Proto-Indo-European had previously
been free lexical morphemes. However, the time depth at which such
reconstructions were made was so great that their status for the most part
remained speculative. More recently, however, interest concerning the
diachronic relationship of morphology and syntax has, quite appropriate­
ly, been renewed. Most investigation in this vein can be attributed to the
impetus of Givón's celebrated archaeological excavation (1971), which ended
by paraphrasing the Chinese philosopher Lao Tse, and observed that «To­
day's morphology is yesterday's syntax». Among other things, Givón argued
that earlier word order patterns determine the order of morphemes; that
agreement markers develop from pronouns and preserve earlier word orders;
that the placement of clitic object pronouns likewise preserves old word
orders, as in Romance; that inflectional and derivational morphology arises
from free lexical morphemes via an agglutinative stage. However, his handl­
ing of much of the data is either idiosyncratic or marred by the syntactic
theory which he followed at the time; some of his claims have also been
invalidated. However, because Givón's view of this relationship continues
to exert strong influence, I will examine some of the subsequent revisions
to his claims. I conclude that, while his proposals about specific mor-

1 I acknowledge with gratitude the interest shown in these remarks by the conference
participants, both during the session and after. Several of my colleagues were eager for me
to incorporate a discussion of cliticization, but I ignored their advice because, while such pro­
cesses are certainly relevant to the topic at hand, they are only a subset. They also involve
phonological effects and I wish to restrict my scope here.
212 DOROTHY DISTERHEFT

phological developments were incorrect, his view on the relationship of mor­

phology and syntax was correct, though misstated. I reformulate the state­
ment of the relationship to claim that syntactic change operates on a given
constituent before a morphological change does.
2. Although the implication of Givón's assertions was exciting, the
fact that many were unsupported invited empirical disprovai. Light foot
(1979:161) has argued that when there is a discrepancy between the order
of enclitic pronouns and full NPs, the former may preserve the old order,
as in French. But this is not necessarily so: in modern Greek, whereas there
is a conflict between the tv/o types, the pronouns are innovatory 2 . Even in
cases where enclitics have the same linear order as verifiably earlier patterns,
old syntactic rules are not responsible. For example, Old and Middle Irish
most commonly infix pronominal objects, yielding a (conservative) SOV
order — rather than the current VSO:
(1) do-m-beir
to-me-carries
«he carries me»
However, it is the synchronic rule of enclitic placement (Wackernagel's Law,
found throughout much of Indo-European) which determines their position
and not a petrified word order. Anderson (1980:53) makes an identical point
about Polynesian. On the other hand, compound nouns and other word for­
mations do preserve old orders, but it is, as Lightfoot observes (1979:160),
difficult to determine which of many stages a given pattern reflects. English
nominal compounds with OV are still productive (car-wash) whereas VO
formations date from at least as early as the fifteenth century. Morphology,
he emphasizes, «mirrors syntax only in a selective way [and]... is a most
unreliable way of reconstructing earlier syntax» (p. 161).
Anderson (1980) is likewise sceptical about the extent to which mor­
phology preserves fossilized syntactic patterns. He discusses a Chickasaw
possessive construction in which the agreement patterns are anomalous:
(2) Hattuk at ofi' at im-aya'sha
man subj dog subj him-it-be-there
«The man has a dog».

2 Timberlake (1977:153-8; 173n8) makes the case that pronouns in general do not
preserve old syntax. The loss of subject-to-object raising in Finnish was implemented with pro­
nouns before full NPs. He cites similar cases from Yuman and Russian.
 DIACHRONIC RELATIONSHIP OF MORPHOLOGY AND SYNTAX 213

at marks both NPs as subject, instead of only the sentence-initial one. The
prefix im is likewise difficult: it signals agreement with an oblique NP, of
which there are none in the sentence. The verb is an invariant form, agree­
ing with neither NP, indicating location. He proposes that the synchronically
odd agreement can be explained by its development from an impersonal in
which the possessed NP was the original subject and the possessor an obli­
que. When the latter was reinterpreted as subject, it was moved to initial
position and assumed subject marking, but the rest of the original construc­
tion remained intact. Chung (1976) had similarly shown that among Polyne­
sian languages, Tongan passives have been reanalyzed as active, but that
distribution of the earlier morphology is retained even though the basic syn­
tactic structure has changed to an ergative one. For Anderson such reanalysis
involved a «rationalization of the syntax at the expense of complicating the
morphology» and while still critical of the assumption that «today's mor­
phology can be taken reliably to be yesterday's syntax», he concluded that
there are definitely clear cases in which «today's syntax can be expected to
become tomorrow's morphology» (1980:67).
Anderson's revision of Givón's maxim was formalized by Cole et al.
(1980) in a study of the reanalysis of nonsubject NPs as subjects. They
concluded that the acquisition of behavioral properties (transformations)
precedes coding (morphosyntax). On the basis of diachronic developments
relating to passivized objects of verbs which control the dative case; dative
experiencers in Germanic and Georgian; and passive agents in Tongan,
they establish three stages in the transition to subjecthood: Stage A, no
subject properties are associated with the NP in question; Stage B, the
NPs develop behavioral properties of subjects, i.e. they participate in the
new transformations, but their morphology has not changed; Stage C,
the syntactic subject now has morphology consistent with its behavioral
properties. The principle which Cole at al. propose is certainly a valid
one and actually applies more generally than they argue, as I will show
presently. However, their argument is weakened by the fact that, with
two exceptions (Georgian and English), the languages they adduce as
evidence supporting this principle exhibit only one stage. Furthermore,
the analysis is circular: each language is assigned to a stage on the basis
of its morphological or syntactic properties, which are then used as witnesses
for the validity of the hypothesis. Most Germanic languages have one
stage: Proto-Germanic, Gothic, and Modern German are Stage A. Thus
in Modern German the dative experiencer (mir) of gefallen «please» lacks
214 DOROTHY DISTERHEFT

any properties whatsoever of subject (3) as does the dative object (uns)
of helfen «help» (4).
(3) Mir gefallen diese Damen
me(dat) they-please these ladies (nom)
«I like these ladies»
(4) Uns wird von der Polizei geholfen
us(dat) pass aux(3sg) by the police help(pptc)
«We are helped by the police».
Evidence from Gothic is complicated by interference from the Greek original.
It is clear, however, that dative experiencers do not control equi-NP dele­
tion or conjunction reduction (p. 721). Although passivized non-accusative
objects would appear to have some subject properties (they appear in the
nominative case, control agreement and reflexivization), these passages are
literal translations of the Greek and may thus be discounted as evidence (p.
723n9). The status of Proto-Germanic is only inferred from comparative
reconstruction. Old Icelandic is transitional between A and B, whereas
Modern Icelandic is more fully B. In the earlier stages of Icelandic, the dative
experiencer of one verb pia «seem») controls reflexivization (p. 722),
whereas in the modern language more properties have been acquired by a
number of verbs. Both dative experiencers and passivized non-accusative
objects can be moved by subject-to-object raising (p. 724) and both are
operated on by equi-NP deletion. Old Swedish preserves the same stage:
dative experiencers do not control agreement, but do reflexivization (p. 726).
Modern Swedish, along with Danish and Norwegian, has reached Stage 
because the experiencers now have nominative case. The same development
is seen in English. Old English accusative experiencers sometimes behave
like subjects (they may undergo subject-to-object raising, be equi-deleted
by under identity with a nominative subject) but retain accusative case (p.
729). The situation is similar in Polynesian where Samoan and Tongan have
reanalyzed passive agents as subjects in their shift to ergative morphology
(Chung 1978). In Tongan -e marks the subject, but the same marker is used
for the passive agent in Maori. Chung argued that the original function of
the -e was to mark oblique NPs as passive agent, as in Maori, whereas the
same morpheme is now attached to subjects in Tongan (and Samoan). Cole
et al. take this as evidence that the languages with -e marking the subject
are Stage  because they have subject syntax but not morphology. Old
Georgian is Stage  while the modern language has developed only minimal
subject coding (number agreement).
 DIACHRONIC RELATIONSHIP OF MORPHOLOGY AND SYNTAX 215

Cole and company provide a clearer principle for the relationship of

diachronic syntax and morphology, but unfortunately repeat Givón, that
«morphology... is the ossification of yesterday's syntax» (p. 742). However,
their case would have been stronger had they presented more convincing
diachronic data and applied their theory to other kinds of changes. They
then could have established what is obvious: this is a general principle gover­
ning the diachronic relationship of the two components. The rest of my
discussion will illustrate this.
3. Category reanalysis is one of the most common types of syntactic
change, and a number of languages have at least two stages of development
(using Cole et al.'s framework). Particularly popular nowadays is the case
of the English modal. We have attested stages in which it still exhibits full
verbal syntax; after reanalysis as a member of the auxiliary, it retains its
old morphology even in today's stage B; the Germanic strong preterite in
the present and the weak dental affix in the preterite render it anomalous.
Another is the case of the Indo-European infinitive, which developed from
nominalized verbs with various derivational suffixes; in several early Indo-
European languages they are still members of various nominal paradigms.
In Vedic Sanskrit, for instance, some of the verbal nominalizations are still
morphologically indistinguishable from nouns and have no syntactic pro­
perties of infinitives (Stage A). Others have developed some syntactic
behavior of infinitives, like deletion of subject under coreference and marking
object with the same case as finite verbs, while still retaining their member­
ship in nominal paradigms (Stage B). Even in the RigVeda3, the final stage
was reached when one of the many infinitive inflections has a clearly non-
nominal (-dhyai) ending 4 . Stage  is fully attained by Classical Sanskrit
when the morphological marker of infinitives is narrowed to one (-tum) and
when it is recognized as a separate, verbal category by native grammarians
(Disterheft 1981).
In languages that have reanalyzed lexical categories as grammatical ones,
old morphology is preserved alongside new syntax. This process is typical

3 It is possible for one synchronic stage of a language to preserve typologically different

ones because the RigVeda was an artificial literary dialect whose composition evolved over
several centuries with the result that various books of the RigVeda belong to different periods.
4 Unlike Cole et al. I do not assume a transformational approach to syntactic change
but a surface-oriented, abductive one whereby a category may be reassigned but in early stages
has no syntactic properties to indicate its new status.
216 DOROTHY DISTERHEFT

of serial and consecutive verb constructions in African languages which,

because of their recent attestation, preserve only one stage. Old verbs func­
tion as auxiliaries, tense markers, prepositions, adverbials, and conjunctions
(Hyman 1971; Lord 1973); the latter are often homophonous with verbs.
A parallel is found in Indo-European — in Hittite — where the verbs pai-/
uwa- «go, come» have developed a use as consecutive adverb.
(5) paizzi DUMU. MEŠ. LUGAL DUMU.SAL.MEŠ. LUGAL
he-goes princes princesses
peran tiezzi (KUB XXXIV 123 I 8)
he-approaches
«Then he approaches the princes (and) princesses»
They are completely homophonous with verbal use, retaining all original
morphology. Their deviant syntax (sentence-initial position) and semantics
(they occur in contexts which do not involve motion or in which it is redun­
dant) readily identify their new consecutive function (Disterheft 1984). Verbs
are not the only constituents to evolve into minor categories. Adverbs are
often petrified cases of nouns in Indo-European languages, for example acc.
sg. Gk. prôton «at first», polu «much»; Lat. prīmum «at first», vērum «tru­
ly»; acc. pi. Gk. pollá «often», alià «otherwise»; abl. sg. Lat. primō «at
first», tūtō «safely»; instr. sg. Gk. kruphê «secretly»; dat./loc. sg. Gk. láthra
«secretly» (Buck 1933:349-50). While such one-stage attestations are not op­
timal for proving the point in question, they at least illustrate the variety
of syntax that morphology conserves.
Having established that Cole et al.'s principle operates widely on con­
stituents other than subject NPs, we may reexamine Givón's paraphrase of
Lao Tse. Those familiar with the article will remember that the master's
original statement was «... today's syntax is tomorrow's morphology» and
was what Anderson also proposed. Cole et al. accepted the inverse paraphrase
rather than the original — unfortunate, because their principle and Givón's
are not synonymous. To claim that the source of morphology is syntax im­
plies that the latter is the sole source of the former. This is inaccurate because
phonological rules, as is well known, also feed morphology. A better for­
mulation of the relationship is produced when the original of Lao Tse com­
bines with the principle of acquisition of subjecthood, emphasizing that syn­
tactic change precedes morphological change: When two innovations, one
morphological and one syntactic, may operate on the same constituent, the
syntactic one takes precedence. This produces the same result as Cole et al.'s
 DIACHRONIC RELATIONSHIP OF MORPHOLOGY AND SYNTAX 217

principle of the acquisition of behavioral and coding properties and, although

not as elegant, reflects Lao Tse's own observation on the conservatism of
morphology.

What does the reformulation of the principle accomplish, aside from

paraphrasing my predecessors? First, it is more general than Cole et al.'s
principle which was formulated only in terms of subject NPs and covers
change involving all categories. Second, it formalizes what the Master knew
and gives it a predictive power, for we may apply it to complex developments
which have taken place during periods for which we have no texts to establish
relative chronologies. For instance, it has been debated whether certain mor­
phological changes have triggered syntactic ones. Until recently only few
doubted that they could (e.g. Watkins 1963:2). Even within the last decade
it has been argued that, for instance, loss of case endings triggered word
order change. Vennemann's claim that SOV shifts to SVO in order to avoid
ambiguity resulting from loss of noun inflections (1974:359-60) presupposes
such a diachronic relationship. However, this view was challenged immediate­
ly by Li and Thompson (1974:210-12), who argued that word order shifts
have no relationship to loss of case marking: SOV changes to SVO without
losing case endings (Russian) whereas uniflected SOV languages go to SVO
(Niger-Congo). Their explanation for such change in Chinese lies rather in
the introduction of new structures to the language.
More recently, Bean 1983 has for English renewed Vennemann's claim
that the breakdown of the Germanic case system caused the shift in word
order type. She cites the fact that the nominative and accusative in many
noun classes had become homophonous in West Germanic by the turn of
the era and that, by the ninth century A.D., SVO obtains in 49 percent of
the cases where subject and object are both nouns. Such a time lapse,
however, presupposes that there was almost a millennium during which the
communicative efficiency of the language was reduced, if not seriously im­
paired. Since no evidence of such a state has been adduced, the word order
change could not be a direct result of the case syncretism. Rather, Bean has
only demonstrated that loss of case distinctions preceded the word order
shift, and not that there was a causal relationship. As Harris (1984:195) has
pointed out, such losses only take place after another strategy had replaced
them, i.e., when case endings are no longer functional. Furthermore, there
are good counterexamples which show that case syncretism does not
necessarily affect the interpretation of adjacent constituents. It is well
218 DOROTHY DISTERHEFT

documented that Irish (VSO), which has adjacent subject and object NPs,
lost most distinction (except for the mutation of the initial consonant of
a postposed modifier by lenition or nasalization) by Early Middle Irish. A
fair amount of superficial ambiguity has resulted — at least in the texts —
but there is absolutely no indication that Irish is shifting to SVO. Thus in
principle case loss or syncretism is not responsible for changes in the order­
ing of constituents. If the two processes are related, it is the syntactic change
that would allow the morphological adjustment to take place.

Another example of the inability of morphological change to initiate

syntactic change is the case of infinitive loss in Greek. The replacement of
nonfinite by finite constructions has traditionally been ascribed to the fact
that the infinitive became morphologically identical to the third singular verb.
(This view is presented in Anttila 1972). Joseph, however, has shown that
such homophony did not exist early enough to have caused the loss of non-
finite subordination, but at most could only have speeded the process in
its later stages (1983:187-9).
Until now I have not made a distinction regarding stages of syntactic
change. It is necessary to recognize that there are some cases in which mor­
phological innovations may have an effect on syntax. These are syntactic
changes that can be identified as secondary, that is, a given change is already
under way when a new morphological feature interacts with it, resulting in
the expansion of the original domain of the syntactic rule. One example from
the history of Irish is the expansion of raising to subject. The subject of
non-tensed subordinate clauses is moved to main clause subject position when
the verb of the latter clause is be. Apparently this pattern had been in the
language for several centuries at the time of the earliest texts because it is
well established and is one of the most common nontensed clause types.
Less common are those in which direct object has been raised to subject.
I interpret these as a later type whose introduction to the developing set of
raising constructions was facilitated by the loss of final syllables (fourth cen­
tury). Since the moved NP did not trigger the usual morphophonemic pro­
cesses of lenition and nasalization on the initial segment of the following
word, the embedded object could just as easily be moved to subject slot with
no change in the marking of the surface sentence (Disterheft 1982:49-52).
However, the morphological ambiguity which extended the range of rais­
ing to subject was a secondary development and quite parallel to the effect
that the change in infinitive endings had on the loss of that category in Greek.
 DIACHRONIC RELATIONSHIP OF MORPHOLOGY AND SYNTAX 219

4. The historical relationship between the two components discussed

here should be viewed as a unidirectional one: syntactic rules feed mor­
phology, and not vice versa. This is parallel to what Hooper (1976)
demonstrated for phonology, namely, that rules originating in that compo­
nent become morphologized. It would appear, then, that the direction of syn­
tactic change is more predictable than Lighfoot thought, but is not to be
defined as Givón and others working in word order typologies have predicted.

REFERENCES

Ahlqvist, Anders, ed. 1982. Papers from the 5th International Conference
on Historical Linguistics (Current issues in linguistic theory, 21). Amster­
dam: Benjamins.
Andersen, Henning. 1973. Abductive and deductive change. Lg. 49.765-93.
Anderson, John M. and Charles Jones, eds. 1974. Historical Linguistics.
Proceedings of the First International Conference on Historical
Linguistics. Amsterdam: North Holland.
Anderson, Stephen R. 1980. On the development of morphology from syn­
tax. In Fisiak 1980.51-69.
Anttila, Raimo. 1972. An introduction to historical and comparative
linguistics. New York: Macmillan.
Bean, Marian C. 1983. The development of word order patterns in Old
English. London: Croom Helm.
Buck, Carl Darling. 1933. Comparative grammar of Greek and Latin.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Chung, Sandra. 1977. On the gradual nature of syntactic change. In Li
1977.3-55.
. 1978. Case marking and grammatical relations in Polynesian. Austin:
University of Texas Press.
Cole, Peter, Wayne Harbert, Gabriella Hermon, S.N. Sridhar. 1980. The
acquisition of subjecthood. Lg 56.719-43.
Disterheft, Dorothy. 1981. Remarks on the history of the Indo-European
infinitive. FoLH 2.3-34.
. 1982. Subject raising in Old Irish. In Ahlqvist 1982. 44-53.
...... 1984. Non-final verbs in Hittite. KZ 97.221-7.
220 DOROTHY DISTERHEFT

Fisiak, Jacek, ed. 1980. Historical morphology. The Hague: Mouton.

Givón, Talmy. 1971. Historical syntax and synchronic morphology: an af-
chaelogist's field trip. Papers from the 7th regional meeting of the Chicago
Linguistics Society, p. 394-415. Chicago: Chicago Linguistics Society.
Harris, Martin B. 1984. On the causes of word order change. Lingua
63.175-204.
Hooper, Joan B. 1976. An introduction to Natural Generative Phonology.
New York: Academic Press.
Hyman, Larry. 1971. Consecutivization in Fe?fe?. JALL 10.29-43.
Joseph, Brian D. 1983. The synchrony and diachrony of the Balkan in­
finitive. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Li, Charles N., ed. 1977. Mechanisms of syntactic change. Austin: Univer­
sity of Texas Press.
Li, Charles N. and Sandra A. Thompson. 1974. Historical change of word
order: a case study in Chinese and its implications. In Anderson and Jones
1974.199-217.
Lightfoot, David W. 1979. Principles of diachronic syntax (Cambridge
studies in linguistics, 23). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Lord, Carol. 1973. Serial verbs in transition. SAL 4.269-96.
Timberlake, Alan. 1977. Reanalysis and actualization in syntactic change.
In Li 1977.141-77.
Vennemann, Theo. 1974. Topics, subjects, and word order: from SXV to
SVX via TVX. In Anderson and Jones 1974.339-76.
Watkins, Calvert. 1963. Preliminaries to a historical and comparative analysis
of the syntax of the Old Irish verb. Celtica 6.1-49.

DORO
 OLD ENGLISH ÞA, TEMPORAL CHAINS,
AND NARRATIVE STRUCTURE

NILS ERIK ENKVIST AND BRITA WÅRVIK1

Åbo Akademi

1. Recent studies of text and discourse have disproved the classic view
that Old English pa is an innocuous particle, one we should not worry about
in translation for instance. Apart from dictionaries (such as Bosworth &
Toller 1898) whose aims called for analyses even of particles, and from com­
prehensive studies of various aspects of OE syntax (such as Andrew 1940,
Bacquet 1962 and Mitchell 1985), a succession of recent papers has thrown
new light more specifically on various important functions of pa.
Thus in a paper born out of fifteen years' teaching of Old English and
printed in the Mustanoja Festschrift, Nils Erik Enkvist pointed out that pa
should not be dismissed as meaningless. His hypothesis was that pa had tex­
tual functions in signalling action in narrative texts (Enkvist 1972). Three
years later Robert Foster added that pa marked narrative units and thus
signalled narrative structure (Foster 1975). Enkvist read another paper on
pa at the Societas Linguistica Europaea Congress in Athens in 1982, which
has now appeared in the Fisiak Festschrift (Enkvist 1986). Here he tried to
relate þa, not only to action but also to grounding, making use of the new
developments in grounding theory (e.g. Hopper 1979, Hopper & Thomp­
son 1980, Longacre 1981). His conclusions emphasized the multifunctionality
of þa: it is an action marker, but as actions tend to be foregrounded it also
becomes a grounding marker. When pa occurs with stative verbs or with
verbs with a low transitivity index in the sense of Hopper and Thompson
(1980), it dramatizes or highlights narratively important but stative condi­
tions. Simultaneously it also indicates sequencing of events on the main story
line and marks the division of the narrative into units. It may well have been

1 The starting-points, basic methods, and goals of this paper were suggested by N.E.E.
The texts were analysed by B.W., who also contributed many methodological improvements
and observations of her own. The text was written jointly by both co-authors.
222 NILS ERIK ENKVIST - BRITA WARVIK

particularly common in impromptu storytelling, where a clear marking of

foreground and background, sequencing, and narrative structure are im­
portant to ease the processing load under real-time conditions. Therefore
pa may be associated with a colloquial, lively, impromptu-speech-like nar­
rative style.
A new dimension was added to the discussion of þa by Ruth Waterhouse
(1984), who argues from elaborate counts of þa in Aelfric's homilies that
pa had a function in «sentence determination», in the marking of syntactic
units such as sentences and clauses. One of the seminal and relevant obser­
vations made by Waterhouse (and by Mitchell, e.g. 1985:2546) concerns the
fuzziness of the distinction between main and subordinate clauses in cer­
tain Old English texts.
A student not only of syntax but also of discourse will be tempted to
regard all these observations as intimately interrelated. In narrative, actions
naturally tend to be foregrounded; those features of setting that are import­
ant for the story ought to be marked for their special importance; events
and actions 2 on the main story line should be sequenced with sufficient
clarity; and the organization of the narrative into sub-units such as episodes,
subepisodes and moves should be made clear. The time now seems ripe for
moving on from looking at pa in relation to single actions, narrative units,
or grounding, to a more integrated and holistic view where all these func­
tions of þa are seen as exponents of one unified and co-ordinated narrative
strategy. If we adopt the kind of predication-based text model where a text
is seen as a textualization of underlying predications («text atoms») as steered
by a text strategy, we may even have a chance of integrating Waterhouse's
observations of the role of þa in sentence determination into this co-ordinated
overview. This becomes possible because it is the text strategy - here, the
narrative text strategy - that decides how underlying predications are grouped
into, and marked as, syntactic units such as phrases, clauses and sentences
on the textual surface.
All this shows the importance of discoursal views. A student of OE
pa must venture into a new area of study, namely historical text linguistics
or historical discourse analysis (cf. Fries 1983). Such a wide perspective opens
up new vistas in combining syntax with the study of discourse, text typology

2 We define event as a change from one state into another, and action as an event caus­
ed by an actor, often wilfully and consciously in pursuit of a specific goal.
 OLD ENGLISH þA 223

(for instance, narrative), and styles (for instance, from the simple oral to
the elaborate written). Methodologically, such perspectives also raise the
usual questions as to optimal relative roles of structure and process in the
descriptions of discourse and of language change.
The present paper - a partial report of wider researches in progress -
will, however, only add a few notes to the points mentioned above. It will
discuss þa as a marker of narrative units, of sequencing, and of a speech­
like narrative style. This time we shall be especially interested in chains of
statements linked by pa, by other adverbials of time, and by conjunctions,
notably and; and in their contributions to temporal text strategies.

2. Like so many other terms in the study of discourse, those related

to grounding have been used in different, and sometimes contradictory, ways.
A long article (such as Chvany, forthcoming) would be indicated to untangle
these conceptual and terminological complications. Here a brief note on the
use of terms in the present paper must suffice.
There seem to be different reasons for highlighting certain elements of
a text in relation to other elements. One reason has to do with human ways
- presumably universal ones - of experiencing the world. It seem to be part
of the human conditions to regard certain types of elements, events and ac­
tions as more important than others. There is a scale of such importance,
beginning from ourselves and running through other men and animate agents
to inanimate objects, first movable and finally immovable ones. Thus my
brother visited Australia begins with something close to the speaker and is
therefore less marked than Australia has been visited by my brother (which
might, however, be justified if the speaker takes a close personal interest
in Australia). And the slippers are on the floor seems to be a far more nor­
mal structure than the floor is under the slippers. Let us, with Osgood 1980,
call this type of highlighting salience. Higher values on the salience scale
often motivate subject and topic assignment; salience often operates within
the clause.
Another reason for the relative highlighting of elements, usually clauses,
is the marking of the main story line and its sequential actions. For max­
imal transparency we shall call this main-line sequentiality, elaborating a
term from Kalmar 1982; this perhaps most closely corresponds to the
«foregrounding» of Hopper and Thompson 1980 and of Tomlin 1985.
A third, more inclusive concept we shall label as foregrounding (the
opposite of backgrounding), again following Kalmar 1982 and perhaps also
224 NILS ERIK ENKVIST - BRITA WÅRVIK

Hopper 1979a; Tomlin 1985 uses the term «pivotal information». Whereas
salience was manifested largely in the ordering of elements within clauses
and sentences, and whereas main-line sequentiality marked those high-
transitivity actions that make up the main story line, foregrounding can be
a property not only of main-line actions but also of other elements, such
as low-transitivity actions or events, and features of setting, which are im­
portant for and relevant to the proper comprehension of the story.
Foregrounding can thus include both main-line sequentiality and other
elements (clauses) that the adopted strategy regards as necessary for the
discourse. The French structuralists' distinction between kernels and catalysts
(Chatman 1969) is most closely akin to foregrounding and backgrounding.
Another distinction is that salience, in the sense adopted here, is more in­
herent and less readily manipulable, whereas grounding is more accessible
to the text-producer's strategic choices.
In making up her mind as to what falls within main-line sequentiality
and what is outside it, and what is foreground and what background in a
specific text, and investigator can proceed in two ways. Either she will read
the text and base her classification on intuitive, introspective judgments.
Or she will try to analyse the text by certain explicit criteria (such as those
presented by Hopper 1979a and 1979b, Hopper and Thompson 1980, or
Tomlin 1985) and base her classification on pragmatic, semantic and syn­
tactic considerations. (Of course all such explicit criteria, too, ultimately
depend on somebody's linguistic intuitions: so does everything in linguistics.)
In any case there is now widespread agreement that grounding classifica­
tions are scalar rather than binary (cf. Hopper and Thompson 1980).
By chain we indicate a succession of narrative propositions which are
linked to each other temporally. A chain can be presented in iconic order,
first ρ then q, or in non-iconic order, q took place after p. In other words,
the order can be the same, or different, in fabula and sjužet. A chain
may be unmarked; or it may be marked with special temporal expressions
and conjunctions. The temporal expressions form an open class which varies
all the way from simple conjunctions (while, when) and adverbs (first,
next) through phrases (after an hour) to clauses, sentences and even sentence
sequences. The time expressions may be absolute (on January 3, 1986,
at 3 p.m.), text-related (three hours later, then); or speech-act related (ten
minutes from now; next week). As is well known, shifts between text-related
and speech-act related temporals may indicate shifts in point of view, for
 OLD ENGLISH þA 225

instance from character-external narrative to erlebte Rede (style indirect

libre).
By hierarchic organization we mean the organization of a story into
major divisions, subdivisions, groups of actions or events, and individual
actions or events, in whatever terminology we may wish to apply. Hierar­
chic depth is a measure of the number of hierarchic levels in a narrative.
Presumably the shortest and most explicit way of illustrating hierar­
chic organization and depth is with a crude and simplistic fabrication, such
as:
Text A. Now I shall tell you what a horrible week Susie had. On Sunday
in the morning she slipped on a piece of soap in the bathroom.
In the afternoon her mother-in-law came to call. Just after she
had left, Crispin the Cat was run over by the neighbour's Rolls
Royce. On Monday, Susie got the flu. On Tuesday, ...
(Fabricated).
The structure of this piece of narrative can be illustrated with a tree diagram
such as that in Figure 1:

Figure 1. A schematic illustration of hierarchic organization and depth of

narrative.

As stories usually follow a temporal strategy, the nodes in trees illustrating

narrative organization come to stand for expressions of temporal units (such
as Sunday or afternoon) or sequences (every Sunday in January). If the order
of events and actions matches that of their presentation in the story, as in
the texts we are concerned with here, no special devices are necessary to mark
226 NILS ERIK ENKVIST - BRITA WARVIK

discrepancies between event order and narrative organization.

The number of hierarchic levels in a narrative text depends on several
factors. Some texts are simple and have few hierarchic levels; others are more
complex and deeper in that they have several hierarchic levels. Some texts
may be temporally explicit and allow a precise counting of levels, whereas
others are temporally vague. Analyses are also coloured by the analyst's text
comprehension: different readers may have different views of the temporal
hierarchy and depth of a given narrative. For the purposes of the present
paper we have started out by recognizing a depth of four major levels, labell­
ing them, from the top down, as story, episode, subepisode, and move. If
a story consisted of separate, fairly independent parts, they were called
substories. If a subepisode consisted of further episodes, they were called
subsubepisodes. A move can be placed somewhere on the scale between max­
imal foregrounding and maximal backgrounding. In a schematic tree these
levels would appear as follows (simplifying the grounding scale into a binary
notation: bg = maximally backgrounded, fg = maximally foregrounded):

Figure 2. A schematic illustration of a story structure with a depth of four

levels.

The simplest kind of story would consist directly of moves, without episodes
and subepisodes. As the first move of a subepisode, episode or story usual­
ly explains the setting of the action, it is often backgrounded. We have avoid­
ed the term paragraph because of its associations with the marking of text
divisions in writing and typography.
3. After these conceptual and terminological preliminaries we can
finally go on to the role of OE pa in narrative structure as revealed in tem­
poral chains. The only way of illustrating text strategies, including temporal
 OLD ENGLISH þA 227

ones, is to quote long passages of text, which in turn compels us to limit

our examples to four. We have chosen to illustrate three different degrees
of temporal complexity: one simple temporal strategy where story consists
directly of moves; one more complex strategy with episodes; and one more
complex strategy still, with an interplay of episodic levels and grounding.
Our fourth example illustrates the use of a simple strategy within a complex
story structure.
The Ohthere interpolation from king Alfred's Orosius - generally con­
sidered to be a reproduction of an oral narrative - may serve as an example
of a simple narrative structure. It may be taken to reflect some of the text-
organizing strategies typical of narratives in the oral story-telling tradition.
In this narrative a distinction between background and foreground is ex­
plicitly made, but further elaboration into episodes is lacking. One could
of course claim that the story is structurally simple because it is so short.
In itself, however, the brevity of a story is not a sufficient cause of struc­
tural simplicity.
Text B. (1) He sæde (2)þaet he æt sumum cirre wolde fandian (3) hu longe
þæt land norþryhte læge, (4) þþ hwæðer ænig mon be norõan
þæm westenne bude. (5)þa for he norþryhte be þæm lande; (6)
let him ealne weg þæt weste land on ðæt steorbord 7 þa widsæ
on ðæt bæcbord þrie dagas. (7) þa wæs he swa feor norþ (8)
swa þa hwælhuntan firrest faraþ. (9) þa for he þa giet norþryhte
(10) swa feor swa he meahte on on þæm oþrum þrim dagum
gesiglan. (11) þa beag þaet land þær eastryhte, oþþe seo sæ in on
ðæt lond, (12) he nysse hwæðer, (13) buton he wisse (14) ðæt he
ðær bad westanwindes 7 hwon norpan (15) 7 siglde õa east be
lande (16) swa swa he meahte on feower dagum gesiglan. (17)pa
sceolde he ðær bidan ryhtnorpanwindes, (18) for ðæm pæt land
beag pær supryhte, oppe seo sæ in on ðæt land, (19) he nysse
hwæper. (20) pa siglde he ponan suðryhte be lande (21) swa swa
he mehte on fif dagum gesiglan. (22) Da læg pær an micel ea up
in on pæt land. (23) pa cirdon hie up in on ða ea, (24) for pæm
hie ne dorston forp bi pære ea siglan for unfripe, (25) for pæm
ðæt land wæs eall gebun on opre healfe pære eas. (26) Ne mette
he ær nan gebun land (27) sippari he from his agnum ham for,
(28) ac him wæs ealne weg weste land on paet steorbord, butan
fiscerum 7 fugelerum 7 huntum, (29) 7 pæt wæron eall Finnas,
(30) 7 him wæs a widsæ on ðæt bæcbord. (Orosius, p. 14.)
228 NILS ERIK ENKVIST - BRITA WARVIK

Figure 3 is a schematic representation of the structure of this narrative. Each

box represents a move, the numbers referring to the linear ordering of the
moves in the text. The vertical placement of the boxes reflects their degree
of grounding: the boxes on the horizontal line marked FG are predominantly
foregrounded, those below them predominantly backgrounded. The story
is introduced by an indirect quotation telling the reader the motives for
Ohthere's voyage. After this, the story itself is given in the foregrounded
clauses, all except 14 introduced by pa. The moves pa wæs..., pa beag...
and pa læg... have low transitivity in the sense of Hopper and Thompson
1980, and do not describe human actions on the main line of sequentiality:
they exemplify foregrounding because of narrative relevance or importance
(what was called «dramatization» in Enkvist 1986). When the story is over,
the text goes back to description and pa disappears.

Figure 3. The structure of Text B. (FG = Predominantly foregrounded;

BG = Predominantly backgrounded).

A slightly more complex and sophisticated type of structure is ex­

emplified by Text C, from Ælfric's Catholic Homilies, number X Depositio
Sancii Cuthberhti. The structure of this text is illustrated by figure 4. (TA
in the figure stands for a time adverbial other than pa).
Text C. (1) pes foresæda haiga wer wæs gewunod (2)p r æ the wolde gan
on niht to sæ. (3) and standan on ðam sealtan brymme oð his
swyran. (4) syngende his gebedu; (5) pa on sumere nihte hlósnode
sum oðer munuc his færeldes. (6) and mid sléaccre stalcunge his
fótswaðum filigde. (7) oõ pæt hi begen to sæ becomon; (δ) Da
 OLD ENGLISH þA 229

dyde cuþberhtus (9) swa his gewuna wæs. (10) sang his gebedu
on sælicere yðe. (11) standende oð þ swyran. (12) and syððan
his cneowa on õam ceosle gebigde. (13) astrehtum handbredum
to heofenlicum rodore; (14) Efne õa comon twegen seolas of
sælicum grunde. (15) and hi mid heora flyse his fét drygdon. (16)
and mid heora blæde his leoma beðedon. (17) and siððan mid
gebeacne his bletsunge bǽdon. (18) licgende æt his foton on
fealwum ceosle; (19) pa cuðberhtus ða sælican nytenu on sund
asende, mid soõre bletsunge. (20) and on merigenlicere tide
mynster gesohte; (21) Wearð pa se munuc micclum afyrht. (22)
and ádlig on ærnemerigen. hine geeadmette to ðæs halgan
cneowum. (23) biddende (24) pæt he his adl eallunge afligde. (25)
and his fyrwitnysse fæderlice miltsode; (26) Se halga òa sona and-
wyrde. (27) Ic ðinum gedwylde dearnunge miltsige. gif õu õa
gesihõe mid swigan bedíglast. oõ paet min sawul heonon siõige.
of andwerdum life gelaõod to heofonan; (28) Cuõberhtus õa mid
gebede his sceaweres seocnysse gehælde. (29) and his fyrwites gylt
forgeaf; (Ælfric's Catholic Homilies X, p. 83)

Figure 4. The structure of Text C. (FG = Predominantly foregrounded;

BG .= Predominantly backgrounded; Ta = time adverbial)
230 NILS ERIK ENKVIST - BRITA WARVIK

In this example, the beginning of the new substory is indicated by the

lack of markers of temporal continuity; the introduction presents St.
Cuthbert's custom of taking nightly walks to the sea which then leads on
to the incident. In some other substories the beginning is marked by a time
expression defining a new temporal starting-point for what follows; in others,
the introduction of a new character or set of characters starts a new substory.
In our example the narrative itself is introduced by pa and the time adver­
bial giving the temporal setting of the first episode: one night. The
subepisodes consist of coordinated chains of clauses headed by pa. The begin­
ning of the second episode is marked by a change of subject as well as by
a new temporal setting.
It should be borne in mind that Text  is from a sermon written to
be read aloud. This may impose special requirements of clarity and of ease
of comprehension on the structure of the text. Ælfric makes skilful use of
time adverbials, pa chains, coordination by and, shifts of subject, changes
of action, and thematic shifts to indicate grounding distinctions and
movements from one hierarchic depth level to another.
Our third extract, Text D, is an example of a «literary» prose text: the
Old English version of the story of Apollonius of Tyre. The example con­
sists of one chapter, XVI. Though it does not constitute a wholly indepen­
dent unit within the flow of events in the story, it nevertheless accounts for
a fairly complete chain of events and can therefore be regarded as a substory
within the story of Apollonius' life.

Text D. (1) Apollonius pa sopfice hyre arehte ealle his gelymp (2) and æt
pare spræcan ende him feollon tearas of ðam eagum. (3) Mid py
pe se cyngc pæt geseah, (4) he bewænde hine õa to ðare dohtor
(5) and cwæð. (6) «Leofe dohtor, pu gesingodest; mid py pe pu
woldest witan his naman and his gelimp, pu hafast nu geedniwod
his ealde sàr. Ac ic bidde pe pæt pu gife him swa hwæt swa ðu
wille». (7) Da ða pæt mæden gehirde (8) pæt hire wæs alyfed fram
hire fæder (9) pæt heo ær hyre silf gedon wolde, (10) ða cwæð
heo to Apollonio: (11) «Apolloni, soðlice pu eart ure. Forlæt į>ine
murcnunge and nu ic mines fæder leafe habbe, ic gedo ðe
weligne». (12) Apollonius hire pæs pancode, (13) and se cyngc
blissode on his dohtor welwillendnesse (14) and hyre to cwæð:
(15) «Leofe dohtor, hat feccan į>ine hearpan and gecig öe to į>ine
 OLD ENGLISH þA 231

frynd and afirsa fram þam iungan his sarnesse». (16) Da eode
heo ut (17) and het feccan hire hearpan, (18) and sona swa heo
hearpian ongan, (19) héo mid winsumum sange gemægnde pare
hearpan sweg. (20) Da ongunnon ealle fra men hi herían on hyre
swegcræft (21) and Apollonius ana swigode. (22) Da cwæð se cyn-
ingc: (23) «Apolloni, nu ðu dest yfele, forðam fre ealle men heriaõ
mine dohtor on hyre swegcræfte and fru ana hi swigende tælst».
(24) Apollonius cwæð: (25) «Eala ðu goda cynge, gif ðu me gelifst,
ic secge fræt ic ongite fræt soõlice frin dohtor gefeol on swegcræft,
 heo næfð hine na wel geleornod. Ac hat me nu sillan fra hear­
pan; ponne wast pu fræt pu nu git nast». (26) Arcestrates se -
ing cwæð: (27) «Apolloni, ic oncnawe soõlice fræt fru eart on
eallum fringum wel gelæred». (28) Da het se cyng sillan Apollonige
pa hearpan. (29) Apollonius fra ut eode (30) and hine scridde (31)
and sette ænne cynehelm uppon his heafod (32) and nam fra hear­
pan on his hand (33) and in eode (34) and swa stod, (35) fræt se
cyngc and ealle fra ymbsittendan wendon (36) fræt he nære
Apollonius (37)  fræt he wære Apollines õara hæðenra God.
(38) Da wearõ stilnes and swige geworden innon õare healle.
(39) And Apollonius his hearpenægl genam (40) and he pa
hearpestrengas mid cræfte astirian ongan (41) and frare hearpan
sweg mid winsumum sange gemægnde. (42) And se cyngc silf and
ealle fre frar andwearde wæron (43) micelre stæfne cliopodon (44)
and hine heredon. (45) Æfter pisum forlet Apollonius pa hear­
pan (46) and plegode (47) and fela fægera fringa frar forð teah,
(48) fre fram folce ungecnawen wæs and ungewunelic, (49) and
heom eallum pearie licode ælc frara fringa (50) õe he forð teah.
(Apollonius of Tyre, p. 24-26).

As Figure 5 shows, the hierarchic structure of text D has more depth

than that of Cuthbert's nightly prayers: we can distinguish the levels of
episode, subepisode, and subsubepisode. It is also worth noting that the
hierarchy is sometimes less explicitly, or, rather, more subtly, marked than
that of the Cuthbert text. Though pa remains a marker for important in­
formation and for the structure of the narrative, both foregrounding and
shifts in episodic levels can be indicated by other signals such as changes
of actor or shifts in action.
 232
NILS ERIK ENKVIST - BRITA WÅRVIK

Figure 5. The structure of text D. (FG = Predominantly foregrounded; BG = Predominantly backgrounded; Ta =

time adverbial).
 OLD ENGLISH þA 233

One of the privileges of long narratives is to profit from variation: dif­

ferent sections can make use of different strategies and styles. Such
heterogeneity in fact appears in Apollonius. Figure 5 illustrated a relatively
complex narrative structure, but there are simple ones, too: thus the begin­
ning of Chapter VIII (Text E), illustrated in Figure 6, has a simple structure
reminiscent of that of the Ohthere interpolation (cf. Figure 3 above). This
simple strategy and style has few hierarchic levels whose foregrounded moves
are predominantly marked by pa; the complex strategy and style has several
levels and makes use of a larger set of markers of levels and of grounding.

Text E. (1) Da het se cyngc scipa gegearcian and him æfter faran, (2) 
hit wæs lang (3) ær õam þe ða scipa gegearcode wæron, (4) and
Apollonius becom ær to Tharsum. (5) Da sume dæge eode he be
strande. (6) pa geseah hine sum his cuðra manna (7) se wæs
Hellanicus genemnod, (8) se pe ærest pider com. (9) pa eode he
to Apollonium (10) and cwæð: (11) «Wes gesund, hlaford
Apolloni». (12) Da forseah he Apollonius cyrlices mannes gretinge
æfter ricra manna gewunan. (13) Hellanicus hine eft sona gegrette
(14) and cwæð: (15)»... (Apollonius of Tyre, pp. 10-12).

The story of Apollonius of Tyre

Figure 6. The structure of Text E. (FG = Predominantly foregrounded;

BG = Predominantly backgrounded; Ta = time adverbial).

4. In this paper, then, our aim has been to present a more holistic
approach to narrative structure to illustrate the use of pa as one of a set
234 NILS ERIK ENKVIST - BRITA WARVIK

of devices marking narrative hierarchies and main-line sequencing and

foregrounding. To understand the functions of pa in text strategies we should
view it, not only within its own clause but as part of a set of markers of
narrative continuity, as well as of a set of discontinuities and shifts which
indicate that the story moves from one section or episode to another.
Finally, a caveat. To evaluate our analyses it should be borne in mind
that all of them, those of narrative structure as well as those of grounding,
were based on intuition. After having read the text to the best of our abili­
ty, we identified those elements that we thought forwarded the story and
were necessary for proper text comprehension, as being foregrounded. The
texts discussed here generally do not describe settings and characters at
length, so that extreme contrasts between vigorous foregrounded action and
long-winded background descriptio are not very well illustrated, as they
would be in, say, Lydgate. In dividing the stories into episodes and
subepisodes, the most obvious criteria were unity of action and unity of ac­
tor. Thus the elements within an episode or subepisode either all have the
same agent, or form one complete action or action sequence which does
not directly continue and flow into the next episode or subepisode.

APPENDIX

Text  (translation)
(1) He said (2) that at one occasion he wanted to find out (3) how far that land extended north­
wards, (4) or whether any man lived north of the wilderness. (5) Then he travelled northwards
along the coast; (6) keeping all the way the waste land on the starboard and the open sea on
the portside for three days. (7) Then he was as far north (8) as the whalehunters go furthest.
(9) Then he travelled still northwards (10) as far as he could sail in another three days. (11)
Then the land turned east, or the sea into the land, (12) he didn't know which, (13) but he
knew (14) that he there waited for a wind from the west and somewhat from the north (15)
and sailed then east along the coast (16) as far as he could sail in four days. (17) Then he had
to wait for a due north wind, (18) because that land turned there directly to south, or the sea
into the land, (19) he didn't know which. (20) Then he sailed from there southwards along
the coast (21) as far as he could sail in five days. (22) Then there was a large river reaching
up into the land. (23) Then they turned back from the river, (24) because they didn't dare to
sail along the river for fear of hostilities, (15) because the land was all inhabited on the other
side of the river. (26) He had not met any inhabited land (27) since he had left his home, (28)
but all the way on his starboard there had been the waste land except for fishermen and fowlers'
and hunters, (29) who were all Lapps, (30) and on the portside he had had the open sea. (Orosius,
p. 14).
 OLD ENGLISH þA 235

Text  (translation)
(1) The above mentioned saint was accustomed (2) to go at night to the sea. (3) and stand in
the salty water up to his neck. (4) singing his prayers; (5) Then one night another monk watch­
ed his going. (6) and with stealthy tread slowly followed his footsteps. (7) until they both
came to the sea; (8) Then Cuthbert did (9) as he was accustomed to. (10) he sang his prayers
on the waves of the sea. (11) standing up to his neck in the water. (12) and after that bended
his knees on the sand. (13) the palms of his hands stretched out towards heaven; (14) Indeed,
then there came two seals from the sea-bottom. (15) and they dried his feet with their fur.
(16) and bathed his limbs with their breath. (17) and after that by beckoning asked for his
blessing. (18) lying at his feet on the yellow sand; (19) Then Cuthbert sent the blessed creatures
back to the sea. with a true blessing. (20) and in the morning went back to the monastery;
(21) Then the monk was very much frightened. (22) and being ill. early in the morning, he
descended to the saint's knees (23) praying (24) that he would, drive his illness entirely away.
(25) and like a father forgive his curiosity; (26) The saint then soon answered. (27) I forgive
your error secretly, if you conceal the sight by your silence, until my soul departs from the
present life called to heaven; (28) Cuthbert then healed his spy's sickness with prayers. (29)
and forgave the sin of his curious step. {Ælfric's Catholic Homilies, p. 83).

Text D (translation)
(1) Apollonius then truly told them all his fortunes (2) and at the end of the speech tears were
falling from his eyes. (3) As the king saw that, (4) he then turned to his daughter (5) and said:
(6) «Dear daughter, you did wrong; as you wanted to know his name and his fortunes, you
have now renewed his old wound. But I ask you to give him whatever you want». (7) When
the daughter heard (8) that her father gave her permission to do (9) what she herself had wanted
to do, (10) then she said to Apollonius: (11) «Apollonius, truly you are one of us. Leave your
grief and now that I have my father's permission, I will make you rich». (12) Apollonius thanked
her for that, (13) and the king rejoiced in his daughter's kindness (14) and said to her: (15)
«Dear daughter, order the servants to bring your harp and call your friends to you and take
away the young man's grief». (16) Then she went out (17) and ordered the servants to bring
her harp, (18) and as soon as she began to play, (19) she mingled the harp's sound with a plea­
sant song. (20) Then all the men started to praise her art of playing music (21) and Apollonius
alone was silent. (22) Then the king said: (23) «Apollonius you behave badly, because all the
men praise my daughter's art of playing music and you alone blame her by your silence». (24)
Apollonius said: (25) «Oh you good king, if you allow me, I say that I know that your daughter
has truly attempted music, but she has not learnt well. But order now the servants to give me
the harp; then you will know what you don't know yet». (26) The king Arcestrates said: (27)
«Apollonius I know truly that you are well learned in all things». (28) Then the king gave orders
to give the harp to Apollonius. (29) Apollonius then went out (30) and dressed himself (31)
and put a garland on his head (32) and took the harp (33) and went in (34) and stood in such
a way (35) that the king and everybody sitting around him thought (36) that he was not Apollonius
(37) but that he was Apollo the heathen god. (38) Then it became silent and quiet in the hall.
(39) And Apollonius took his plectrum (40) and began to move the harp-strings with strength
(41) and mingled the harp's sound with a pleasant song. (42) And the king and all those that'
were present (43) called out in loud voice (44) and praised him. (45) After this Apollonius left
the harp (46) and entertained them (47) and presented many pleasant things (48) that were
236 NILS ERIK ENKVIST - BRITA WARVIK

unknown and unusual to that people, (49) and all of them were very pleased with each of the
things (50) that he presented. {Apollonius of Tyre, pp. 24-26).

Text E. (translation)
(1) Then the king gave orders to prepare the ships and go after him (2) but it took a long time
(3) before the ships were prepared, (4) and Apollonius came before to Tharsus. (5) Then one
day he went by the sea. (6) Then he was seen by one of his men (7) that was called Hellanicus
(8) that came there first. (9) Then he went to Apollonius (10) and said: (11) «Good health,
lord Apollonius». (12) Then Apollonius scorned the common man's greeting according to the
rich men's custom. (13) Hellanicus soon again greeted him (14) and said: (15)»... (Apollonius
of Tyre, pp. 10-12).

TEXTS

Bately, Janet (ed.). 1980. The Old English Orosius. (Early English Text Socie­
ty, S.S. 6) Oxford etc.: Oxford University Press.
Godden, Malcolm (ed.). 1979. Ælfric's Catholic Homilies. (Early English
Text Society, S.S.5.) Oxford etc.: Oxford University Press.
Gooiden, Peter (ed.). 1958. The Old English Apollonius of Tyre. (Oxford
English Monographs). Oxford etc.: Oxford University Press.

REFERENCES

Andrew, S.O. 1940. Syntax and style in Old English. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press. [Reissued New York: Russell & Russell 1966.]
Bacquet, Paul. 1962. La structure de la phrase verbale à l'époque Alfré-
dienne. (Publications de la Faculté des Lettres de l'Université de
Strasbourg, Fascicule 145.) Paris: Les Belles Lettres,
Bosworth, Joseph and T. Northcote Toller. 1898. An Anglo-Saxon dic­
tionary. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Chatman, Seymour. 1969. New ways of analyzing narrative structure, with
an example from Joyce's Dubliners. Language and Style 2.1.3-36.
Chvany, Catherine V. Forthcoming. Foregrounding, «transitivity», salien-
cy (in sequential and non-sequential prose). [To appear in Essays in
Poetics.]
Enkvist, Nils Erik. 1972. Old English Adverbial pa-an action marker?.
Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 73.90-93.
 OLD ENGLISH þA 237

. 1986. More about the textual functions of Old English adverbial

þa. Festschrift for Jacek Fisiak, ed. by Dieter Kastovsky & Alexander
Szwedek, vol 1, 301-310. Berlin: Mouton/De Gruyter.
Foster, Robert. 1975. The use of þa in Old and Middle English narratives.
Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 77.404-14.
Fries, Udo. 1983. Diachronic textlinguistics. Proceedings of the XIIIth In­
ternational Congress of Linguistics August 29 - September 4, 1982, ed.
by Shiro Hattori & Kazuko Inoue, 1013-1015. Tokyo.
Hopper, Paul J. 1979a. Some observations on the typology of focus and
aspect in narrative language, Studies in Language 3.1.37-64.
. 1979b. Aspect and foregrounding in discourse. Syntax and seman­
tics, vol. 12, Discourse and syntax, ed. by Talmy Givón, 213-41. New
York etc.: Academic Press.
. , and Sandra A. Thompson. 1980. Transitivity in grammar and
discourse, Language 56. 251-99.
Kalmar, Ivan. 1982. Transitivity in a Czech folk tale. Syntax and seman­
tics, vol. 15, Studies in transitivity, ed. by Paul. J. Hopper & Sandra
A. Thompson, 241-59 New York etc.: Academic Press.
Longacre, Robert E. 1981. A spectrum and profile approach to discourse.
Text 1:4. 337-59.
. 1983. The grammar of discourse. New York and London: Plenum
Press.
Mitchell, Bruce. 1985. Old English syntax. 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Osgood, Charles E. 1980. Lectures on language performance. (Springer
Series in Language and Communication, vol. 7.) New York, Heidelberg,
Berlin: Springer-Verlag.
Quirk, Randolph., and C.L. Wrenn. 1957. An Old English grammar.
(Methuen's Old English Library.) London: Methuen & Co. [1955. 2nd
Ed. 1957. Rpt. 1969.]
Tomlin, Russell S. 1985. Foreground-background information and the syntax
of subordination, Text. 5:1-2.85-122.
Waterhouse, Ruth. 1984. Sentence determination in Ælfric's Lives of Saints.
Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 85.257-72.
THE ESTABLISHMENT OF «BY» TO DENOTE AGENCY IN ENGLISH
PASSIVE CONSTRUCTIONS

THOMAS FRASER
Université de Lille III

I would like briefly in this paper to examine the choice of the preposi­
tion by to introduce the agent of the passive sentence in English. This ques­
tion is generally only alluded to in grammars of Old and Middle English,
if indeed it is mentioned. Only Jespersen (1914), Mustanoja (1960), Visser
(1973) and, more recently, Faiss (1977) go into the matter in any detail, with
Mustanoja and Visser especially giving numerous examples of the various
prepositions used in this function. The only study devoted specifically to
the question is Green's 1914 article. Most authors agree that, though ex­
amples of by are to be found in early Middle English, and even in Late Old
English (the Old English examples are disputed by Visser), it is only in the
early Modern English period that the preposition finally became establish­
ed in its present-day function. I will insist in this paper, however, more par­
ticularly on the Old English period, for it is here that English began its search
for the ideal sign to express the relationship between agent and passive verb.
Although other Germanic languages do offer a certain variety of
prepositions to express agency (Old High German fon, duruh, mit; Gothic
fram, af, us, paírh), only English presents such a wide diversity of signs
- a fact which has led Green (1914: 519) for example, to conclude that: «It
is a fascinating but intangible pursuit to observe how later Anglo-Saxon and
Middle English present simultaneously several prepositions of radically dif­
ferent basic connotation to render this one idea of agency». It is to be hoped
that a semantic analysis of the passive construction and of the various
prepositions involved will produce at least some tangible results.
I would like to deal first of all with the question of foreign influence,
since those authors who attempt an explanation of the problem generally
point to Old French par, which was used alongside de to introduce the agent.
While it is probable that certain Modern English prepositional phrases are
240 THOMAS FRASER

calques of their French equivalents (e.g. «by hundreds and thousands»; the
now obsolete distributive phrase «by year» = French «par an»; possibly
also the use of by with verbs expressing «beginning» and «ending» - «to
begin by doing», etc.), it is more likely that French and English, along with
other Romance and Germanic Languages, developed their prepositions in­
dependently as solutions to a specific problem, namely the expression of
a dynamic relationship after the breakdown of the respective Latin and Ger­
manic case systems. A more probable foreign influence is that of Old Norse,
insofar as the socio-linguistic situation in the Danelaw after the Scandina­
vian settlement was such that the O.N. preposition af may well have en­
couraged the use of the related O.E. preposition of as a rival to from in
the expression of agency. It is also probable that in O.E. versions of Latin
texts the translators used certain O.E. prepositions systematically as
equivalents of the Latin means of introducing the agent. Thus, for exam­
ple, in the West Saxon Gospels, the Vulgate use of the preposition a/ab is
translated by O.E. from, Latin per by O.E. þurh, and a Latin prepositionless
agent is rendered by O.E. of:
1) Da wæs se hæ lend gelæd fram gaste on westen þaet he wære
fram deofle costnod. Mt. IV, 1. (Lat. a Spiritu, a diabolo)
2) Wa þam men þurh þone þe byð mannes sunu belæ wed. Mt.
26,24. (Lat. per quem)
3) wæs pæt scyp of pam ypum totorfod. Mt. 14,24. (Lat. jac-
tabatur fluctibus).
My main contention, however, is that the English Language, in the Old
and early Middle periods, was experimenting diverse semiological means
for the expression of the relationship between the passive verb and the
agent 1 . Examples 4) to 11) illustrate the main O.E. prepositions to be
found in this function.
4) Hit gelamp... pæt pa halgan apostolas... wæron gemartyrode
æt pam manfullan nero. ALS 29,117.
5) He wearp peh swipor beswicen for Alexandres searewe ponne
for his gefeohte. Or. 68,14.

1 The period under discussion offers many instances of the same phenomenon of ex-'
perimentation - for example for the expression of genetival relationships or to introduce the
infinitive after the loss of the inflexional ending.
 «BY» IN ENGLISH PASSIVE CONSTRUCTIONS 241

6) ær hio hiere anwaldes benumen wurde and beswicen from Ar-

bate hiere agnum ealdormenn and Mepa cyninge. Or. 37,30.
7) Judas nu is cwylmed mid deoflum on pæm ecum witum. BI.H.
63,6.
8) Her wæs Plegemund gecoren of Gode & of eallen his halechen.
ASC 890A.
9) ... pæt he... on mislicum witum gemartrod wurde. ALS 35,
243.
10) ðis wæs eall ear gedon purh se bisceop of Seresbyrig & purh
se biscop of Lincolne. ASC 1123.
11) pæt... pæs bearnes weorpe ongyten wære be pyson eallum
oðrum mannum. Bl.H. 163,27.
This variety illustrates a basic principle in Gustave Guillaume's theory of
psycho-semiology, a theory which studies the relationship between signs and
significates2. The principle I am referring to is the law of expressive suffi­
ciency («loi de la suffisance expressive») which can be most clearly explain­
ed by quoting from Guillaume himself (1973: 128): «Du côté du système
sémiologique règne la liberté. Tout est bon, tout convient, qui réussit à
signifier suffisamment. La loi constructive est ici uniquement la juste suf­
fisance. Et pour le choix des moyens, du moment qu'ils sont suffisants, on
a la plus grande liberté», (...) and further, «Il faut donc s'attendre, dans
le domaine de la sémiologie, à des combinaisons de moyens significatifs et
inattendues. La sémiologie nous met partout en présence d'une extrême
richesse d'inventions combinatoires». What has to be asked in our case
therefore, given the variety of signs, is if the preposition itself, as a linguistic
category, is a suitable means of expression of agency, and this will entail an
examination of the meaning of the preposition and also of the passive verb.
The fact that one preposition in particular, by, finally gained precedence
over the others is not, as Green suggests, due to the fact that «the confu­
sion resulting from the co-existence of several auctorial phrases must of itself
have demanded a gradual clearing up» (1914: 551), but can rather be ex­
plained by a corollary to Guillaume's law of expressive sufficiency, namely
that a certain coherence may be set up in the semiological system to reflect
the coherence that exists in the underlying mental system of representation.

2 The sign is the outward manifestation of the word, the significate (French signifié) is
the underlying lexical or grammatical meaning.
242 THOMAS FRASER

As Guillaume (1973: 130) puts it: «[cela vient] de ce que la sémiologie, pour
être opérante, doit épouser, reproduire suffisamment le psychisme, et donc
tendre à répéter en elle, à un degré suffisant, la cohérence qui s'est instituée
là».
Before looking at the O.E. expression of agency, I would like therefore
to offer a succinct analysis of the linguistic components involved in the
underlying system of langue. This analysis is based on Moignet's study of
the French verb, itself a development of Guillaume's dynamic theory of
language.
Any verb expresses on operation involved in time, that is an operation
which brings about a result; in other words, the semantic content of any
verb moves from an initial position, which can be called a causation, to a
final position which Moignet calls an effection; this movement is an opera­
tion in the course of which the activity is transformed, by the development
of time, into a resultative passivity. In a figure:

causation | > effection

Fig. 1

The causation referred to here is not necessarily the true cause of the event,
but rather the mental position from which the event takes its source. The
initial causation may be either expressed within the verb itself, in a language
such as Latin, for example, in which case the causation is internal, or else,
as in the modern European languages, it is expressed externally through an
independent set of pronouns; in this case the verb is said to be incident to
its external support. Similarly, on the right hand side, the end result may
be either arrived at internally, in which case we have an intransitive verb 3 ,
or else the effection can be carried on to an object lying outside the verb's
own lexical meaning, in which case the verb's incidence is brought to bear
resultatively on the object, which is situated prospectively in relation to the
verb. This can be summed up in the following figure:

3 «John drank», for example, announces that the subject is in the initial position of an
activity which at any instant is made up of a result.
 «BY» IN ENGLISH PASSIVE CONSTRUCTIONS 243

Fig. 2

(The left-pointing arrow indicates the verb's active incidence to the external
support, i.e. the subject; the right-pointing arrow indicates the verb's passive
incidence to the object)4 In the case of the passive verb, things are slight­
ly different, for here the subject is seen as the support of the grammatical
operativity (of the verb «to be») of the resultativity of the main verb (in­
dicated by the past participle). In other words, the passive incidence of the
verb is seen as retrospective and is referred back to the support constitued
by the subject.
Turning now to the preposition, it can be seen that it too is the sign
of an operation which may link two parts of speech: an initial support, which
is optional, but which, if present, is modified by what follows, and an end
support, which is nominal in nature and compulsory, and which can be called
the modifier. This can be illustrated by the following figure:

4 For example in a sentence such as «John drank water», John is seen, from instant to
instant in the course of the action as «drinking», and the water is seen as «drunk».
244 THOMAS FRASER

The major difficulty in attempting an analysis of prepositions of this sort

lies of course in the definition of the lexical content which they convey, but
my point may be illustrated by a reasonably unambiguous case, that of the
preposition in, which we may take as expressing an operation of «interioriza-
tion» or «inclusion». In a phrase such as «the skeleton in the cupboard»
the initial support is therefore in a situation of passivity with regard to the
operation. The end support, on the other hand, can be viewed as the agent
of the operation expressed by the preposition - i.e. it is the cupboard which
is seen as «interiorizing» the skeleton, and the incidence of the preposition
to the end support is an active incidence. In a figure:

In other words, since the operativity of any preposition is retrospective (go­

ing from right to left) the preposition, as a grammatical category, is ideally
suited to the introduction of an agent in a verbal form (the passive) in which
the semantic content is seen only as a resultativity. It is not susprising
therefore that a great variety of prepositions are to be found fulfilling this
function in Old English.
If we look now at the semantic content of these various prepositions
we will see why some did not survive in this role much beyond the beginn­
ing of Middle English, æt, for example, and on, which expresş respectively
operations of «juxtaposition» and «superposition», tended to lose any
dynamic value they had. As for the preposition for, it tended to express an
operation of «causation» and was soon lost as a means of expressing in­
strumentality. A more serious contender was the preposition purh, whose
underlying operation may be said to be one of «mediation». This can be
observed in the following examples from Old and Middle English.
 «BY» IN ENGLISH PASSIVE CONSTRUCTIONS 245

12) peos lar me wæs seald næs na for mannum ac purh God sylfne
Bl.H. 185,31.
13) ac heo wearö gescild purh pone cristnan casere Arcaduisan &
purh pæt cristene folc. Or. 56,9
14) pæt -pr cweartern ... wearõ onliht sona wundorlice purh
god. ALS 35, 250.
15) pa wearö se haiga Thomas gewissod eft purh god. ALS 36, 255.
16) And wolde wip Alisaunder speke,
Forte ben rz hym awreke
Of a prince, Kyng Alisaunder (Bennet & Smithers) 5-7
17) po was pe castel of Gloucestre and pe toun also
poru Sir Roger of Clifford in pe Kinges hond ido. R. of Gl.
( & S.) 79-80.
In the two Middle English examples in particular, the agent can be viewed
not so much as the perpetrator of the action but rather as the in­
termediary 5 .
The main preposition of agency in O.E. was from, this role being
gradually taken over towards the 11th century by of. Both were suited to
the purpose in that their semantic content, which we may call an operation
of «origination», coincided with the retrospective operativity of the preposi­
tion itself as a category. There is, however, a difference in the focus of the
two prepositions, for whereas from focuses on the starting point from which
the verbal operation initiates, of underlines rather the conduction of the
operation itself. This may help to explain why of tended to supersede from
towards the end of the O.E. period. If we look at the use of the two preposi­
tions in Alfred's translation of Orosius we find that the author systematically
uses from in conjunction with the kinetic passive in which the auxiliary is
weorðan:
18) ... wearõ Romeburg getimbred from twam gebroðrum. Or.
39,1.
19) æfter pæm fleame Hasterbai wearõ of slagen from his agnum
folce. Or. 95,17.

5 It is interesting to note that in Aelfric's Lives of Saints, purh is used systematically

in this capacity when the intervening agent is God.
246 THOMAS FRASER

20) & hie ðær æfter hrædlice tide from pæm londleodum purh
seare ofsleane wurdon. Or. 29,17.
On the other hand, of tends to be used in the resultative or static passive
in conjunction with the auxiliary beon/wesan:
21) for pon pe Tarente seo burg wæs getimbred of Læcedemo-
nium. Or. 84,2
although there are exceptions in which from is found with wesen as in:
22) Seo ilce Bizantium wæs ærest getimbrad from Pausania Or.
64,4.
It would seem then that when the passive verb itself underlined the opera­
tion rather than the ensuing result, the preposition from, insisting on the
initial point of the originator, was sufficient, and the «activity» of the end
support of the verb could be reduced to the starting point of the verb's event.
On the other hand, the preposition of suppletes the lack of operativity to
be found in constructions where the past participle is associated with the
be auxiliary 6 .
It would be my contention, then, that the replacement of from by the
preposition of as the main preposition of agency in early Middle English
should be seen in conjunction with the gradual decline of weorõan and the
temporary loss of the distinction between kinetic and static passives. As early
as the Blickling Homilies, and in the 10th and 11th century entries for the
Chronicle, of comes into prominence in this function:
23) Æpelstan wæs of Myrcum gecoren to cinge. ASC 924 C,D.
24) her wæs Olaf cing of slagen ... of his agenum folce. ASC 1030
25) Weorpian we eac pa clapas his hades, of pæm wæs ure ge-
cynd geedneowod. BI.H. 11,9
26) hwilc abbot pe pær coren of pe munecan pæt he beo geblet-
sad of pan ærcebiscop of Cantwarbyrig. ASC 675 E
From, on the other hand, with its insistence on the initial point of the ac-

6 1 have only come across one example in Orosius of the preposition of being used in
conjunction with the auxiliary weorõan:
Hu II æpelingas wurdon afliemed of S c i l i u m . Or. 1,25
This example is to be found in the table of contents of Alfred's translation, and it may possibly'
be explained by an attempt to gain greater expressivity in announcing an event to be recounted:
the event is underlined as dynamic by the auxiliary, the preposition and also the preverb a.
 «BY» IN ENGLISH PASSIVE CONSTRUCTIONS 247

tion, tends to be reserved for verbs which themselves express movement,

as for example sendan:
27) Her Palladius se biscop wæs onsended to Scottum ... from
Caelestino pam papan. ASC 430 Α.
If this is the case, then in the following instance:
28) ac we witan pæt pyses menniscan cynnes fynd ablende eowre
heortan pset Crist ne wære sop God & ponne bist gehæled fram
him. BI.H. 151,33.
the passive verb should not be rendered, as in Morris's translation, by «then
you will be saved by him», but rather by «then you will be saved from him»,
in which the pronoun refers back to fynd7.
During the Middle English period the main prepositions to be found
in the expression of agency were with, of and by; with, expressing an opera­
tion of «association» was a serious contender for this function and indeed
is still to be found in some varieties of English. However, it is the decline
of the preposition of and the establishment of by which marks this period.
By the end of the 14th century of had come to lose its dynamic spatial mean­
ing of «movement away from a point of origin» which had made it an ideal
sign for the expression of agency in preference to from; it had taken on new
roles and can be characterized by the 15th century as expressing an opera­
tion of «determination»; thus, in phrases of the type «a reward of £ 100»
or «the city of London» the preposition of simply provides contours for
the notion that is determined, by taking as its starting point the determin­
ing notion to the right. In the cases where of was still used as the preposi­
tion of agency as, for example:
29) ... termes which coude not be understande of comyn peple.
Caxton (quoted Faiss)
the agent can be viewed as simply determining the resultative state express­
ed by the past participle.
The emergence of by as the principal preposition of agency can be seen
as a repetition of the replacement of from by of. By, expressing an opera­
tion of «translation» or «transference» could transfer the agent either to
the resultativity of the verb or to its underlying operativity. This was a role

7 This interpretation is reinforced by the change in construction which occurs at «and

ponne...».
248 THOMAS FRASER

which the historical antecedent of the preposition had already held: I am

referring here to the preverb be- one of the main functions of which in Old
English was to transitivize intransitive verbs, thus transferring the opera­
tion of the verb through to the following direct object and providing an ex­
ternal support for the verb's passive incidence. This is precisely the func­
tion that by has as a preposition of agency. It should be added moreover
that in the early Modern period the English language was in the process of
rediscovering a means of expression of the dynamic or kinetic passive 8 .
The preposition by, whose underlying meaning of «transference» made it
a suitable sign for linking the agent and the verb's operational phase, paved
the way for the emergence of a form which the English language had pro­
bably not lost in its underlying system of representation.

REFERENCES

Faiss, Klaus. 1977. Aspekte der englischen Sprachgeschichte. Tübingen:

Gunter Narr.
Green, Alexander. 1914. The Analytic Agent in Germanic. J.E.G.P., 13.
514-552.
Guillaume, Gustave. 1973. Principes de linguistique théorique. Paris: Klin-
cksieck.
Jespersen, Otto. 1914. A Modem English Grammar on Historical Principles,
Part III. London: Allen & Unwin.
Moignet, Gérard. 1974. Sur la «transitivité indirecte» en français. Travaux
de linguistique et de littérature, 12,1. 281-299.
Moignet, Gérard. 1981. Systématique de la langue française. Bibliothèque
française et romane A-43. Paris: Klincksieck.

8 The first recorded written example
the end of the 18th century:
... a fellow whose uttermost upper grinder
barber.
Robert Southey, Life and Correspondence
It is probable that the form existed in the
we have of the passive progressive dates back to
is being torn out by the roots by a mutton-fisted
(1795) (quoted Visser)
spoken language several decades earlier.
 «BY» IN ENGLISH PASSIVE CONSTRUCTIONS 249

Mustanoja, Tauno. 1960. A Middle English Syntax. Part I. Mémoires de

la Société Néophilologique de Helsinki XXIII, Helsinki.
Vassant, Annette. 1980. Lexique, sémantique et grammaire dans la voix ver­
bale en français. Tra. Li.Li, 18,1.143-163.
Visser, F.Th. 1973. An Historical Syntax of the English Language. Vol. III,
2. Leiden: E.J. Brill.
 FROM INDO-EUROPEAN PERFECT
TO SLAVIC PERFECT TO SLAVIC PRETERITE

HERBERT GALTON
The University of Kansas

It should be obvious that I cannot deal with the entire problem of the
I.-E. perfect tense here, but only in its relation to its counterpart in Slavic.
There is, as is generally assumed, a single inherited perfect form in Com­
mon Slavic: wädä, whose meaning is quite clearly that of a present «I know»,
and within Slavic there is no evidence to show that this was in any way felt
to denote the result of an antecedent event such as «I have seen (and therefore
I know)», which many have considered the proper function of the I.-E.
perfect to express. However, as has been very aptly observed by Warren
Cowgill (1974:563), every state - such as, for instance, the one with the
description of which we are dealing in the Slavic form - presupposes some
preceding process except for primeval chaos, and in such a broad sense, I
submit, resultativity is not a linguistic matter, but an ontological one.
The question has arisen as to what was the meaning of the category
Perfect in I.-E. Szemerényi (1980:274) opts for the original designation of
a state in the present (Zustand in der Gegenwart, his italics) resulting from
a past event, while subsequent developments could bear out the meaning
of a result characterizing the object of the verb all the way from the past
event affecting it right into the present.
This emphasis on the present can trace its pedigree all the way back
to Brugmann (1916: 768) and Delbrück (1897:3). Hirt (1928:270) likewise
stresses the original presential constituent in the meaning of the perfect,
possibly even going beyond his predecessors, to the point of seeing in the
(apparently facultative) reduplication a palpable expression of the intensity
of the action. We are not surprised at finding no trace of any such mor­
phological means in the sole Slavic form attested; a derivation of the mean­
ing «I have seen, I have seen -> I know» seems to us rather far-fetched.
We tend to agree here rather with Brugmann, who did not postulate the
252 HERBERT GALTON

reduplication of the root as an indispensable morphological device of the

perfect.
On the other hand, Hirt's suggestion that the so-called perfect partici­
ple in -us- (weak stem) may not originally have belonged specifically to the
perfect tense is valuable to us, because the form is perfectly alive in the Slavic
languages and has - without going into details - merely the meaning of
anteriority to the main event of its clause (this may supply a second reference
point in the past), and nothing of the specific meaning of the perfect.
Anteriority on the time axis is also conveyed by the finite form of the
pluperfect with its two reference points, where it exists, but here again we
can follow Hirt's suggestion that its formation represents a separate develop­
ment in the I.-E. languages, which does not prejudge the original nature
of the perfect. While a pluperfect may indicate relevance at some point in
past time, the -us- form referred to says nothing about the continued
relevance of the event at a subsequent stage in its usage in Slavic or anywhere
else, for that matter, and it can probably be disregarded in a study on the
meaning and genesis of the Slavic perfect.
Hirt's suggestion that the I.-E. perfect tense was in fact primarily a sort
of present tense, marked by its intensive meaning, has antecedents, if perhaps
not quite so explicit, in the history of I.-E. philology. Thus Wackernagel,
quoting previous opinion, thinks that the resultative element in the mean­
ing of the perfect only gradually asserted itself in the history of Greek
(1953:1003). Views entirely in agreement with this keep coming to the fore.
K.H. Schmidt (1964a:2, 1964b: 1) only refers to a statai meaning of the
perfect, without specially characterizing this as the result of some previous
process; the evolution along preterital lines should be ascribed to the in­
dividual descendent languages of the parent tongue.
Perhaps farthest along this line is the thinking of the Soviet scholar
Ilja Perel'muter (1977:5, 29, 203 etc.). He finds that Homeric usage very
often fails to exhibit the classical «resultative» meaning; originally, the
perfect is supposed to have constituted a separate category of verbal expres­
sions, not part of a complete verbal paradigm, designed to convey the inac­
tive, in fact inertial state of the subject. It is, perhaps, not surprising that
this most consistent, in fact polarized, view of the perfect tense should have
occurred to a speaker of Russian, a language with a separate class of
predicative words of divers origin, yet all agreeing in constituting the single
nucleus of a monomial sentence conveying some, mostly involuntary, state
of the subject like mne (bylo) žal'«I am (was) sorry» (here from an ancient
 FROM LE. PERFECT TO SLAVIC PRETERITE 253

noun, whose feminine gender was lost). In fact, the nominal origin of the
perfect had already been adumbrated by Szemerényi (1970: 306).
At a time when the I.-E. perfect led a much more untroubled existence
in comparative linguistics, the ending of wädä was universally attributed
to the medio-passive, I.-E. *-ai represented by Latin -i, Sanskrit -e (e.g.
tutudī, tutude, cf. Vaillant 1966: 76, Stang 1942: 22). However, since then
doubt has been cast on the existence of a medio-passive voice for the I.-E.
perfect, since this expressed a state of the subject and would not seem to
require the formation of such a voice. The Systemzwang now appears to
us to have had its seat in the mind of the explorer rather than in the in­
vestigated subject matter; where an I.-E. medium voice is reliably continued
in Slavic, this is done by means of the reflexive pronoun s as e.g. in bojitb
s «he is afraid» to Skt. Pf. bibhāya, Pres, bháyate, where such a secon­
dary formal development probably occurred in pre-Slavic, cf. also Lith. bi-
jóti(s). It is in fact more likely that the *ë (which appears in Slavic as j a f
= / ä / ) continues an I.-E. suffix likewise indicating a state, even if one does
not go all the way with Perel'muter placing the perfect tense and suffixes
with a long vowel on the same footing, both of them conveying an identical
stative verbal category (1977:201).
It would, accordingly, be altogether incorrect to say that the I.-E. perfect
was replaced by a more explicit formation consisting analytically of two parts
in Slavic, because the two do not mean the same thing at all; the I.-E. perfect
denoted a psychic or physical state of the subject, whereas the Slavic perfect
has a rather specific meaning, as we shall see. The statai meaning of the
I.-E. perfect was continued by a special verbal formation characterized
precisely by a stem in -ä'- < *-ē- such as we find in its pure form in wädä,
which on account of its entirely aberrant nature was replaced by wäirib still
in the history of O.C.S., with an athematic ending -, but surviving to
this day say in the Russian or Slovak particle ved' «after all». This Slavic
(or Balto-Slavic) development (replacement of Pf.), then, is not very specific,
but the solution of the problem of such a presential perfect by creating an
entire verbal class capable of functioning at any temporal level is very much
in accordance with the overall enrichment of the I.-E. verbal system in Slavic.
The stem of the present tense in -i- (e.g. bbditb «he wakes», έγρήγορε,
inf. bbdäti) is in fact a hang-over from the old perfect, as has been
demonstrated by Kurytowicz (1964:79-84) and does not contradict the statai
meaning, as Aitzetmüller thought (1962:244). Of course, -i- is not specializ­
ed as a statai index and the entire connection is purely historical. An ex-
254 HERBERT GALTON

planation that -ä'- is limited to the infinitive and preterite stem because of
its derivation from a perfect tense marker overrates the preterite value of
the latter, in view of recent (and not so recent) findings on the meaning of
the Í.-E. perfect. The protolanguage apparently did have a class of statai
verbs, even if it is impossible to ascribe to it a full gammut of conjugational
forms at several temporal levels. These levels only sorted themselves out in
Slavic and some other descendent languages, in their separate development.
That the Pf. was originally formed only of non-durative verbs, allegedly
because it refers specifically to the result of a previous event which must
be couched in a non-durative, i.e. punctual verb (representing the event as
a point on the time axis, followed by the result as the next point) is entirely
unproven, cf. the lists of Homeric Pf. tense forms given by Perel'muter and
others, like «I smell, am scented», «I seem» etc. A Slavic verb
like goritb «it burns». inf. goräti (Leskien's class IV B), continues in both
forms the I.-E. perfect, of which it still gives a typical semantic example:
«something is in a state of burning». The circular route assumed by Aitzet-
müller (1963:213), via a preterit in -ě- (= -ä'-) is perhaps not necessary, if
we do not attribute a preterital meaning to the I.-E. Pf.; there was thus no
«gap to be filled in», but an entirely creative approach on the part of Slavic.
This language needed a perfect tense within the framework of its rich
temporal system, to convey a very specific meaning: an event which took
place in the past, but is still relevant at the moment of utterance. It is really
this which matters, and not whether the event has left a palpable result
behind; in fact, the relevance may be merely contrastive. By the same token,
the temporal location of the past event itself recedes into the background,
i.e. it does not really matter between which points on the time axis it was
located. It did not just arise and was over with the next event, but stretched
in its consequences beyond this location all the way to the present - which
is something altogether different from a mere present state.
It can in fact be claimed that the beginning of the new form was not
markedly preterital; it very much stressed the present relevance and only
turned into a full-fledged preterite afterwards. This is in marked contrast
to the new perfect formations of some of the other descendent languages,
probably even clearer than in the Modern Greek perfect which Seiler (1952:
80,148) claims to have encountered only in «situation actualisée», i.e. link­
ing it to the speech situation, for both types contain
from the outset a past element; in «situation non-actualisée», the aorist
substitutes for it - as in those Slavic languages which distinguish the two
 FROM I.E. PERFECT TO SLAVIC PRETERITE 255

tenses. To render past events per se, Slavic had an aorist and an imperfect,
and the extraordinary care bestowed upon the last formation with its long
suffix to distinguish it from the former (and on whose explanation there
is still nothing like a consensus) sufficiently shows how concerned the Slavs
were with a precise representation of past events, for in addition, Common
Slavic, as reflected in O.C.S., also possessed a morphological future in the
past as well as a pluperfect, about which nothing more shall be said here.
The meaning of the perfect tense was quite specific and cannot be proved
to carry on any Indo-European category, for to do that we would have to
know much more about the state of the I.-E. verb in the very period when
Balto-Slavic cut its ties with the proto-language, possibly coming under some
foreign influence.
In the light of our definition of the Common Slavic perfect - referring
to an event in the past without precise location there, but remaining rele­
vant at the moment of utterance - very little need be said about the aux­
iliary part of the new formation, i.e. jesmb e.g. in jesmb kupovalb «I have
bought» (imperfective aspect, pv. il), for it is precisely this element
which contains, in addition to the index of the grammatical person, the signal
of the present relevance: «I am one who has done such and such». The shift
away from what many believe nowadays to have been the original meaning
of the I.-E. perfect - with due allowance for the reservation just made - is
considerable, also the new analytic compound was surely much clearer and
more transparent to the speakers. To capture its significance we must
dissociate it from the one which the subsequent preterite forms have acquired
in the better known Slavic languages, above all Russian, where precisely the
7-form is all that is left of it and has acquired a purely preterital (sometimes
resultative) meaning by itself, yet that is what the i-form at first does not
seem to have had at all. It could even be maintained that the inherited par­
ticipial form in -us- was replaced in Slavic verb phrases almost entirely
(Vaillant 1966:85; as distinct from Baltic!) because of the strong past associa­
tion of the former.
No suggestion has been made that the i-form which constitutes the se­
cond part of the analytic perfect implied by itself any reference to the past;
it originated apparently as an adjective derived from a verb (Vaillant 1966:83
«proche encore de l'origine adjectivale»; cf. Ivanov 1981: 222; Kurytowicz
1970-72:323 for some reason or other proceeds from an original medio­
passive formation). That the i-form originally had a specific resultative mean­
ing as has been assumed by Belić (1935:31) will be hard to prove; Greek
256 HERBERT GALTON

«taciturn», Latin figulus, credulus, etc., Old High German tregil

«slothful», etc., show nothing of the sort, nor does its association in Slavic
with the stem of the aorist and infinitive prove this; resultativity in Slavic,
as far as we can survey it backwards, is a matter of the (pv.) aspect, and
not of a certain tense. The exclusive use of the verb «to be» as an auxiliary
which Feuillet rightly stresses (1983:30) is indeed due to the meaning of con­
tinued actuality of an event, not its resultativity; originally, the Pf. meant
not «I have done something», but, at least in Slavic, «I am the kind of per­
son who has done something». A typical example, from a speech situation,
would be O.C.S. John IX, 34: a ty li ny učiši
«thou wast (in the Revised English version of the Bible) born altogether in
sin, and doest thou teach us?». Neither the temporal location of the birth
(= aorist) nor the actual process of being born (= imperfect) matter here,
only the past fact as such in relation to the present situation, a matter of
contrastive relevance, not of a result, which is in any case obvious. Since
the Greek text displays the aorist here, this example shows once
again how faithful Constantine-Cyrill was to the «spirit» of the Slavic
language in his rendering of the Greek Bible. He surely used it where its
employment was called for, and if the statistical incidence is low (Vaillant
1966: 86), this shows, apart from the occasional irrelevance of statistics and
the whole quantifying approach, that O.C.S. still adhered strictly to the
criterion of Pf. - some kind of relevance of the past event at the moment
of speech. It is eminently a «temps de discours» in Benveniste's formula­
tion (1959: 78).
I may be dispensed with trying to explain niceties of the Slavic aspec­
tual system, such as an ipv. aorist or a pv. imperfect, and rather proceed
to illustrate my aspectual theory with a few of Bunina's many telling ex­
amples of Pf. Thus, imperfective učilb jesi «thou hast taught» concentrates
on the activity of teaching as such, regardless of temporal location except
generally in the past, as contrasted with the present disavowal of the teacher.
Luke VI, 3: ni do sego jeste Davydb «have ye not read so
far what David did?» stands in the ipv. Pf. as against the Greek
(as in the previous example because what matters apparently to
the Slavic mind is the activity of reading itself, covering any amount of time
up to, but excluding the present, when the Pharisees still seem to have taken
no notice of what they are supposed to have read. Luke VII, 43: pravä
jesi «though hast judged rightly» (ipv.) dwells squarely on the judging itself,
not on its occurrence a mere while before Jesus' answer.
 FROM I.E. PERFECT TO SLAVIC PRETERITE 257

On the contrary, John IX, 34: vb gräsax «thou

wast altogether born in sins» in the pv. aspect, also merely relates, on the
temporal level, a past event to the situation of the speech, but on the aspec­
tual level the fact of the birth is given its place in its own temporal sequence
leading from the non-being of the man via his conception in sin to his subse­
quent existence, underlying his alleged present claim to superior wisdom.
Sometimes indeed the next point in time may contain a result, but this is
simply unavoidable especially with certain verbs, like terminative (telic) «to
come» in Mark VIII, 3: druzii bo jixb iz daleče prišbli «some of them
are come from far». There is no emphasis on the process of coming here,
which would require the ipv. aspect, but rather on the sequence between
coming from far off and arriving on the scene of action, when Jesus now
has to care for their needs. Luke XXIII, 35: iny
i sę «he saved others in the original), let him save himself». Others
were effectively saved, in the pv. aspect, i.e. the action took its normal (un­
marked) course from an unredeemed state to the subsequent stage of redemp­
tion (the ipv. aspect may have left this in suspence in its «conative» varie­
ty), and this repeated, albeit summarily present series of past events is starkly
contrasted with Jesus' present plight.
We shall conclude that while the pv. perfect may connote a result, the
ipv. perfect cannot, so that it would not be legitimate to say that the forma­
tion of the Slavic perfect tense involves the addition of another noetic ele­
ment - resultativity - to the semantic sphere of the I.-E. perfect. Consequent­
ly, it cannot have been the desire to find a morphological expression of
resultativity that gave rise to the Slavic perfect. Rather, it was the need to
refer to a past event regardless of its fixation in time or processual character
- these could be handled by the aspect and lexical means - merely in its
relevance to the speech situation. The aspect, which is strictly a morphological
category invested by each verbal form and not per se a syntactic one, has
nothing to do with this, but sets the event in its own temporal context (pv.)
or isolates it from it (ipv. aspect). An event thus isolated may nevertheless
be relevant to the speech situation (Pf. tense).
In view of this it is impossible to agree with Safarewicz (1964:13) that
the I.-E. verbal system did not rest on a temporal, but a sort of aspectual
basis. Present, aorist, and perfect constitute (cf. Cowgill 1974: 562) at least
from a Slavic point of view, which is consistently aspectual, not as many
aspects, but tempora, because of the missing aspectual division that would
have to bisect them. «Present» is not an aspect, nor is «aorist», and the
258 HERBERT GALTON

perfect would altogether upset the clear dialectic opposition between the two
aspects - tertium non datur. That the most natural way of viewing the pre­
sent is that of a relatively lasting state and that of a past event as something
setting in and then being over, possibly against the background of a conti­
nuing state, are ontological and not grammatical matters; cf. also the original
meaning of αόριστος: «unmarked».
Grammatically aspectual is the division of preferably every verbal for­
mation along the lines of this dichotomy. The Anatolian group, therefore,
never lost an aspect, because I.-E. did not have it (similarly already van Wijk
1929:240 ff.). I regret that I cannot fall in with the widespread belief that
the I.-E. present and aorist verbal stems mark an aspectual rather than tem­
poral opposition, and that Slavic has simply best preserved an I.-E. state
of affairs (Shimomiya 1974:219) - its rôle was very much more creative than
that. It has been suggested that Meillet was influenced by Durkheim's
sociological school in postulating a relatively late origin of temporal as against
aspectual categories (Serbat 1976:208).
It will have been noticed, of course, that the notorious «completion
of action» criterion does not figure at all in my definition of the pv. aspect;
in the view received more generally among Slavicists nowadays, it has been
replaced by «complexivity», which in my scheme is merely a corollary of
an event's being placed between the preceding and the following point on
the time axis, which is what really matters. The actual completion of an ac­
tion would not seem to call for a special morphological category, being the
normal course of events, also it is very easy to find in Slavic contrary ex­
amples of actions which surely were completed (like «who painted this pic­
ture?» or «shelled walnuts») being rendered in the ipv. aspect; for illustra­
tions I beg to refer to my book and other articles.
But whatever view one may take of the semantic content of the aspec­
tual opposition typified in Slavic, its existence beyond the purely noetic
sphere, as a formalized and grammatical opposition in I.-E. has also been
questioned by van Wijk (1929: 240 ff.), Stang (1943:12) and Adrados (1963:
224, 273, 327, 825). For instance, unlike Slavic, the addition of prefixes still
does not perfectivize a Greek verb (unlike Ossetic), a fact which surely in
one way or another continues an I.-E. tradition. This can at the same time
also serve as an example of how Slavic utilized I.-E. procedures creatively
to set up a morphological category of verbal aspect, it did not just continue
an L-Ε. state of affairs, only with greater consistency! From the beginning
of its written tradition we have a wealth of grammatical tenses denoting
 FROM I.E. PERFECT TO SLAVIC PRETERITE 259

various locations on the time axis (if we may be permitted to hypostatize

the mere dimension of time) as well as their mutual relationships, and,
alongside this, a grammatical category rendering the very essence of the time
axis itself, i.e., its constitution by a number of successive points, each «fill­
ed» with a different content that sets it off from the other points, in the
pv. aspect, contradictorily opposed to its dialectic counterpart, relatively
subsisting states in the ipv. aspect, as the necessary background to the eter­
nal flow of points.
It now remains for us to deal briefly with the further fate of the perfect
tense in Slavic other than Bulgarian and Macedonian, where it has simply
been preserved or even enriched with new functions (the new Mac. forma­
tions are resultative). In the oldest Russian, the value of Pf. still stands out
clearly against aorist and imperfect, which were, of course, perfectly ge­
nuine Old Russ. tenses and not learned South Slavic imports. Thus, the
Chronicle reports (Tschižewskij 1969:38) the well-known story of the Vik­
ing prince Oleg's ( = Helgi's) death in the year 912 from the bite of a snake
darting from his dead horse's skull, in the aorist, with an occasional im­
perfect tense form covering longer stretches, as well as pluperfect forms sket­
ching in anterior events not strictly localized in time, but which remained
relevant at the point reached in the narration: pomänu Oleg ń svoi,
iže bě postavil kormiti i ne vsedati n ń, bě bo vbprasal volbxvovb i
kudesnikb: ot čego mi jestb umreti? «Helgi remembered his horse, which
he had put out to feed and not to sit on it, for he had asked the sorcerers
and magicians: from what must I die?» When Oleg hears that the horse has
died, he scoffs in his infatuation at the sorcerers' claim: ń rl jestb
(Pf.), a ja živb «the horse has died, and I (am) alive». It does not matter
when the horse died, only that it is dead at the moment of his speech, when
it is also contrasted with «I am alive» in the present tense.
The so-called birch-bark writs, discovered in Novgorod excavations after
World War II, too, exhibit Pf. forms correctly used in their older layer,
in fact these occur up to texts dating from XV century with the auxiliary,
contrasting with the simple aorist tense, but this was no doubt the effect
of a certain literary tradition (Arcixovskij - Borkovskij 1963: 262). At first,
the usage was clearly delineated: jesmbsolb nĕmeckuju «I have bought
German salt» at some time in the past and now I presumably still have it
(or not), as against se kupixb «I bought so and so», as part of a past record
in official documents.
However, the simple past tenses went out of use in Russia say in XIII
260 HERBERT GALTON

century (Galton 1962:16), maybe under the influence of a Fennic substratum

(admitted by Lewy 1964:64, but not advised by Veenker 1967:160). The loss
of the copula is tentatively connected with Fennic influence by Kiparsky
(1970:28). In any case, the impoverishment of Russian conjugation at the
temporal level, which led to the loss of the simple past tenses and in Greater
Russian even to the complete loss of the pluperfect, eliminated the present
relevance from the semantic content of the ancient perfect tense, when it
became the one and only preterit. The loss of the auxiliary does not appear,
then, as merely a matter of economy or convenience (on the contrary, it
necessitated the introduction of a subject pronoun to denote the person,
as in ja delal(a) «I did», ty delal(a) «you did» etc.), but as primarily remov­
ing the signal of present relevance when this had ceased to set off the perfect
from other past tenses.
In any case, it is legitimate to view this development as an impoverish­
ment of the verbal system, because the aspect cannot, as has sometimes been
asserted, take care of all nuances concerning the arrangement of the event
in time by itself with the aid of a single past tense form. It is not impossible
that there is some sort of balance with the declensional system at work here
(Isačenko 1939: 63 f.); both inflectional systems apparently proved too much
in the long run to handle. For at the other pole of the Slavic languages we
find Bulg. and M a c , which have not only preserved the wealth of tenses
including the Pf. with very much the original meaning and therefore also
retaining the use of the auxiliary (not entering into details), but which have
entirely lost the declension of nouns.
In between these two extreme poles we find the chief remaining Slavic
languages occupying various intermediate positions. The most wide-spread
spoken varieties of Serbo-Croatian on the whole only know one past tense,
which continues the old Pf., in both aspects, while the aorist and imperfect
fully survive only in very few dialects and, rather importantly, in the literary
language very much like the passé simple of French. The auxiliary has sur­
vived as a separate word which even coalesces with the negation (nije došla
«she has not come»). It can be omitted mainly in newspaper headings and
emotionally marked passages (Grickat 1954, French summary p. 209-225).
The fact that the simple past tenses have also died out in Czech, Slovak,
and Polish (but not in Lusatian Sorb!) would seem to lend weight to the
assumption that we are dealing with an autochthonous Slavic evolution,
because these languages cannot be suspected of a Fennic substratum or in­
fluence. However, there is a real gradation between Russian at the one pole,
 FROM I.E. PERFECT TO SLAVIC PRETERITE 261

without an auxiliary, and Serbo-Croatian at the other, which as a rule keeps

it, though it may be enclitic (Stevanovic 1975:351). For West Slavic, on the
other hand, the question has arisen as to whether we are still dealing with
an auxiliary verb at all. The last authoritative linguist to consider the jsem
in Czech psal jsem «I wrote/have written» (ipv.) a separate word, i.e. an
auxiliary verb, was apparently Fr. Trávnícek (cf. 1951:598, 1958 passim).
Against this, it has been pointed out that the two parts do not exist in-
dependently in a comparable function, as well as the fact that unlike the
position in S.-Cr., the negation must be attached to the 7-form, in fact it
is written together with it, so that the forms of «to be» in this collocation
only have the status of morphemes (Kopecny 1965, passim). Although Tráv-
nícek, writing in 1951, was still able to marshal Stalin to his aid - because
the Czech analytic Pf. allegedly provided a consummate example of an old
form (the Slavic perfect) filled with a new content (the ordinary preterit)
- since his demise the forms of «to be» concerned in this tense form have
been generally recognized for what they are - mere morphemes, though still
written separately and capable of a certain freedom of movement within
the sentence.
This mobility is even more marked in Polish, where, however, there
does not ever seem to have been any doubt about the morphematic nature
of the erstwhile auxiliary in modern times. The forms concerned are almost
synthetic, whereas in Lusatian Sorb, which has an aorist as well as an im-
perfect and perfect tenses, the last mentioned is still properly analytic and
has, therefore, a proper auxiliary, like the surrounding German language,
indicating the tense. In any case, the Polish and Czech third person has even
lost this morpheme, which, accordingly, only serves as an index of the first
and second persons (Szober 1959:269). The free mobility, the last trace of
the former auxiliary character of the present tense of «to be» is increasingly
being restricted to the Polish dialects. The present state can be traced back
to XIV century (Klemensiewicz et al. 1955:371).
To sum up: the I.-E. parent tongue apparently had, at least in its non-
Hittite form, a separate so-called perfect tense, with the meaning primarily
of a present state, inertial or otherwise, indicating various predicaments of
mind or body. That the -us- participles were specially associated with this
«perfect» tense cannot be proved. In any case, the verbal category concern-
ed was replaced in Balto-Slavic by a productive class of verbs with stem
vowel*-e- conjugated at all temporal levels, while the participles mentioned
survived to indicate anteriority, as they had probably done before. The tran-
262 HERBERT GALTON

sition from the I.-E. perfect to the Slavic verbs of state is still visible in the
residuary form wädä «I know».
Instead, Slavic developed a new perfect tense unparalleled in Baltic,
to denote an event which took place at some unspecified period in the past,
but has remained in one way or another relevant at the moment of utterance.
This reference is expressed by the present tense of the verb «to be», fixing
the single reference point of this tense, whereas the i-form, serving as the
other part ot this analytic tense, apparently did not even involve the past
to begin with, but rather indicated an agent or at least subject. The mean­
ing of the whole collocation, however, gradually shifted in the direction of
a past, in whose domain the event still deemed to be relevant was located.
This new Pf. came to stand alongside the simple past tense forms of
Slavic, aorist and imperfect, denoting respectively more or less point-like
or in any case localized events in the past as against continuing stretches
on the time axis. Where the Slavic conjugational wealth (including the com­
plications of the verbal aspect) has at least been preserved, as in the Slavic
South-East, the perfect has nearly kept its original composition and func­
tion. Where this is not so much the case, the present tense forms of «to
be» at least still function as auxiliaries; this is the position of Serbo-Croatian.
In the North (including Slovene), the scope of Pf. has swallowed up
the aorist and imperfect and it has thereby lost its specific semantic func­
tion, becoming to all intents and purposes the sole past tense form of the
verb. The ancient auxiliary has therefore become a mere morpheme indicating
the person, and present relevance, if any, has to be marked in other ways.
This morphematic character is clearer as we move from Czech to Polish,
and in Russian the process has moved full circle, the ancient «participle»
in 1 having become the one and only expression of past tense without even
a morpheme to mark the person.

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Adrados, Francisco Rodriguez. 1963. Evolución y estructura del verbo in­

doeuropeo. Madrid: «Antonio de Nebrija».
Aitzetmüller, Rudolf. 1962. Slavisch imĕti und das idg. Perfekt. Die Sprache
8, 238-249.
Aitzetmüller, Rudolf. 1963. Aksl. vĕdĕ und die slavischen Zustandsverba.
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Opera slavica IV (= Slavistische Studien zum IV. internationalen

Slavistenkongreß in Sofia). Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht.
Arcixovskij, A.V. - Borkovskij, V.J. 1963. Novgorodskie gramoty na
bereste. Moscow: Izdatel'stvo Akademii Nauk.
Belić, Aleksandar. 1935. Postanak praslovenske glagolske sisteme. Glasnik
srpske kraljevske akademije CLXIV. 1-40.
Benveniste, Émile. 1959. Les relations de temps dans le verbe français. BSL
54. 69-82.
Brugmann, Karl. 1916. Grundriß der vergleichenden Grammatik der indoger­
manischen Sprachen, IL Band, 3. Teil, 2. Auflage. Straßburg: Trübner.
Bunina, Irina . 1959. Sistema vremën staroslavjanskogo glagola. Moscow:
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264 HERBERT GALTON

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 ON DOING COMPARATIVE RECONSTRUCTION
WITH GENETICALLY UNRELATED LANGUAGES

JOHN HARRIS
University College London

1. Historical continuity and the genetic hypothesis.

The genetic classification of language varieties, such as pidgins and
creóles, which have evolved in conditions of large-scale language contact
and shift has long been a matter of dispute (e.g. Taylor 1956 versus Hall
1958). At the heart of the debate lies the issue of whether the principle of
historical continuity is a necessary component of the genetic hypothesis. That
is, do we consider a pair of languages genetically related only as long as
it can be established, as required by the usual text-book definitions (e.g.
Meillet 1937: 20, Bynon 1977: 67), that they have developed from a com-
mon parent language via channels of unbroken transmission between suc-
cessive generations of speakers?.
The genetic hypothesis, incorporating the notion of continuous genera-
tion-to-generation transmission, is by no means universally accepted. Many
generativists, for example, have objected to it on the grounds that «grammars
are not objects floating smoothly through time and space, undergoing a con-
tinuous, steady metamorphosis» (Lightfoot 1979: 148). Rather they are discon-
tinuous entities which are constructed afresh by successive generations (see
also Andersen 1973). But of course there is an important qualitative difference
between transmission in «normal» conditions and that which occurs during
large-scale abrupt language shift. In the former case, grammar construction
is performed by children at a developmental stage when, according to cur-
rent thinking, they are biologically best equipped to acquire the pre-existing
linguistic norms of their parents. Abrupt creolisation, on the other hand, by
its very nature implies a catastrophic disruption of the chain of transmission.
It principally involves adults who, no longer endowed with the innate ac-
quisitional skills they brought to the learning of their native language(s),
participate in the essentially ad hoc creation of a new set of linguistic norms.
It is this point that has led many creolists to doubt whether creóles should
268 JOHN HARRIS

be considered genetically related to the metropolitan languages from which

their lexicons derive (e.g. Taylor 1956, Thomason & Kaufman 1975).
Systematic structural divergence between languages which can less con-
troversially be assigned to the same language family can usually be attributed
to the operation of internal linguistic change. The position with regard to
divergence between a creóle and its lexical donor is quite different. While
some structural differences may be due to «normal» internal changes which
have occurred since the initial period of contact and shift, others are likely
to result from contact-induced change, i.e. restructurings conditioned either
by the substrate system(s) or by universal constraints associated with
pidginisation and creolisation. At the phonological level, for example, this
means that at least some points of divergence will be due, not to internal
sound change, but to contact-conditioned sound substitutions.
Although few would go so far as to agree with Sylvain (1936) that a
creóle can unambiguously be classified genetically with the substrate
language(s) spoken in the initial contact situation, the majority opinion
among creolists these days appears to be that the family-tree model is simp-
ly not applicable to cases of linguistic divergence resulting from rapid
language shift (e.g. Alleyne 1980, Le Page & Tabouret-Keller 1985, Han-
cock 1986). Given the potential intervention of considerable contact-induced
restructuring, it may not be appropriate to speak of the syntactic and
phonological systems of emergent contact varieties as being directly inherited
from the superstrate language. In any case, there are other levels besides
the genetic at which the relationship between a contact variety and its lex-
ical donor may be more fruitfully explored. For example, if historical con-
ditions are right, the two varieties may be related functionally, i.e. in terms
of their use. In this sense, Guyanese Creole, for instance, is a dialectal variety
(Gumperz 1968) of English, just as say Yorkshire dialect is. The use of these
varieties as local-group vernaculars identifies them as dialectal in relation
to the superposed norm of standard English. But this equation has nothing
to say about the structural relatedness, or otherwise, of such varieties.
But at least there is one level at which we may speak quite uncontrover-
sially of a clear linguistic relationship between a contact variety and the
superstrate language, namely the lexical. And this has important conse-
quences for historical reconstruction. The point is that, genetic relation-
ship or none, the very fact that a creóle derives the bulk of its lexicon from
its metropolitan donor allows us to identify systematically matching
phonemes in the two varieties. This is because the phonological modifica-
 COMPARATIVE RECONSTRUCTION 269

tions which superstrate morphemes undergo as they are borrowed into an

emergent creóle are no less regular than the phonological processes that oc-
cur in the course of «normal» linguistic change. The substitution of a given
superstrate sound by a phonetically different sound in the creóle is likely
to operate throughout the lexicon in much the same way as if regular inter-
nal sound change had been at work. This means that it is possible to establish
regular equivalence classes for forms as they occur in a contact variety and
its lexical donor. The main difference between correspondence sets of this
sort and those that can be identified for languages less controversially con-
sidered genetically related thus lies not in the nature of the sets themselves
but in the nature of the changes that underlie them.
The value of doing comparative reconstruction in these circumstances
is twofold. Firstly, by isolating the modifications undergone by superstrate
loans, the exercise yields information about the system(s) which determin-
ed the modifications in the first place. Moreover, the exercise can shed light
on historical details of the superstrate language which comparative
reconstruction based only on sister dialects might fail to uncover. This is
because contact vernaculars such as creóles can often be shown to preserve
forms which were originally borrowed from the metropolitan language but
which have subsequently disappeared from the latter.
In this paper, I seek to illustrate the last point by examining a particular
issue in English historical phonology which over the years has been the sub-
ject of some controversy: what sort of vowel was Middle English / a / (as
in cat, bad, etc.)? Some of the evidence adduced in debates about the history
of this vowel has been based on comparative material drawn from present-
day British dialects (e.g. Lass 1976). Fresh light can be shed on the issue
by expanding our data-base to include comparative material from vernacular
Englishes which have grown up in conditions of large-scale language shift
and whose relationship to metropolitan dialects, in terms of the traditional
family-tree model, has consequently been the subject of dispute. As I hope
to show, the comparative exercise in this case allows us to refine our inter-
pretation of the historical documentary evidence.

2. Atlantic contact Englishes.

The contact vernaculars I wish to focus on here fall into two groups:
anglophone Caribbean creóles and the nonstandard varieties of English
spoken in Ireland (Hiberno-English). The external histories of these ver-
270 JOHN HARRIS

naculars are similar in that they all sprang up during the seventeenth cen-
tury as a result of British colonial and trading activity on both sides of the
Atlantic. As to matters of internal history, the main investigative task is
to disentangle the various strands that are interwoven in the origins and
development of contact varieties of this type. In particular, it is necessary
to ascertain the relative contributions of the following important com-
ponents: degree of substratum input (west African languages in the case of
the Caribbean creóles, Irish Gaelic in the case of Hiberno-English), the poten-
tial intervention of linguistic universals, the superimposition of internally-
generated changes, and the possible retention of archaic metropolitan
features. The view that the phonological systems of these contact vernaculars
are inherited directly from substratum sources rather than from metropolitan
English is reflected in statements such as the following:

Irish [Gaelic: JH] speakers learning the variety of English used in

Ireland interpreted and reproduced the sounds they heard in terms of
their own phonemic system, and the resulting pronunciation has been
handed down, more or less intact, to the present day (Bliss 1984: 135).
However, the significance of substratum input relative to the other con-
tributory elements just mentioned cannot be properly assessed in isolation
from the external historical context. The extent to which individual varieties
in both Ireland and the Caribbean are structurally similar to metropolitan
English hinges on an interlocking set of socioHnguistic factors, among which
the most important would seem to be the following: the rate of shift to the
target language, the proportion of metropolitan speakers to substrate
speakers in the initial contact situation, the extent to which the superstrate
remains the superposed norm within a community, and the extent to which
an emergent contact variety feeds back into the community as a socio-
linguistic norm in its own right (see Hancock 1986).
Factors such as these not only determine differences between individual
contact vernaculars but also produce variability within a single community.
For example, Bajan (Barbados) and Jamaican Creole have developed in com-
munities where more or less similar demographic components have been pre-
sent, but in significantly different proportions. The presence in Barbados
of a relatively large white population from the outset of colonisation has
produced a variety of English that is structurally much closer to the
metropolitan language than is Jamaican Creole (see Niles 1980). And within
individual Caribbean communities we find sociolectal continua involving
 COMPARATIVE RECONSTRUCTION 271

varieties that range from least to most metropolitan-like (e.g. Bickerton

1975). Likewise in Ireland. Those varieties of Hiberno-English which show
most clearly the effects of substratum transfer are associated with areas where
Irish Gaelic continues to be spoken as a native language or at least survived
until relatively recently. On the other hand, varieties more obviously related
to metropolitan English, which were originally restricted to areas with a high
concentration of British colonists, have subsequently diffused more widely
throughout Ireland. The important point is that, in both the Caribbean and
Ireland, proportions of the population have retained a link of continuous
transmission with metropolitan English. The numerical and social
significance of such groups within each community presumably determines
the extent to which individual metropolitan-like varieties can be said to be
direct descendants of the superstrate as opposed to the outcomes of con-
vergence towards it ('decreolisation').
Drawing contact vernaculars into the comparative exercise in fact sheds
light on another controversial historical issue. It is remarkable that Hiber-
nian and New World Black Englishes share a number of grammatical and
phonological characteristics which don't occur in the standard language.
These include special habitual aspect markers (discussed at length in Harris
1985a and Rickford 1986). Other researchers put the linguistic similarities
down to the coincidental effects of substratum transfer (see the references
cited below).
As a first step towards resolving the issue as it relates to Middle English
/ a / , we may establish equivalence classes for reflexes as they appear in con-
tact varieties and in non-contact metropolitan dialects. As I hope to show,
this allows us to reconstruct with a fair amount of detail aspects of Early
Modern English phonology which have until fairly recently remained only
dimly understood. The reconstruction suggests a fresh interpretation of some
well-known historical documentary evidence and points to the conclusion
that some of the phonological similarities among Atlantic contact Englishes
are likely to stem from a common Early Modern vernacular base.

3. Early Modern English / a / .

3.1 Historical background.
There has been a good deal of disagreement among English historical
phonologists about what sort of vowel historically short / a / was during the
late Middle/Early Modern period. Some authorities assume that it was open
272 JOHN HARRIS

back [a] (e.g. Jespersen 1909); others that it was open front [a] (e.g. Dob-
son 1968). (Throughout this paper, phonetic symbols have their IPA values).
Lass (1976: ch 4), besides providing a summary and discussion of the rele­
vant literature, adduces comparative evidence from present-day English
dialects in support of the second view. The object of this section is to show
how this position can be further strengthened and refined by incorporating
additional comparative evidence from Caribbean creoles and Hiberno-
English. I will focus on three illustrative varieties: Jamaican Creole (JC),
Hiberno-English (HE, here represented by Mid Ulster English) and, as a
familiar point of comparison, British «Received Pronunciation» (RP). (For
material on JC I've drawn on Cassidy & Le Page 1967 and Wells 1982.
A summary of HE phonology can be found in Harris 1985b).
In all three varieties, Middle English (ME) / a / shows evidence of a
split (phonemic in JC and RP, allophonic in HE) into short and long reflexes.
Ignoring for the moment certain special combinative developments, we may
sketch the outlines of this pattern as follows. The short nucleus appears
minimally before voiceless noncontinuants: RP [æ], JC [ä], HE [ä] in fat,
tap, etc. The long one appears minimally before voiceless fricatives: RP
[a:], JC [ä:], HE [a:] in pass, path, etc.
The evidence I wish to concentrate on here has to do with realisations
of ME / a / in the environment of historical velars. In this context, RP shows
the main developments just outlined. JC and HE, however, display the ef­
fects of two special developments, both of which involve the addition of
some element of palatality to the syllable. These can be summarised as (i)
palatalisation of historical velars and (ii) front-raising of ME / a / . Evidence
suggests that both of these had occurred in the metropolitan language some
time before the spread of English to Ireland and the Caribbean. The first
development is unambiguously reported by seventeenth-century orthoepists.
The second, however, has not generally been recognised by authorities on
the history of English, in spite of the fact that there is evidence of it in
Early Modern rhymes and spellings. Comparative material from present-
day contact vernaculars suggests how this evidence might be better exploited
than has hitherto been possible.

3.2. Palatalisation of historical velars.

Advanced allophones of historical velars in the context of front vowels
are quite usual in most types of English, a distribution pattern that has an
obvious phonetic motivation (articulatory assimilation to a front tongue posi-
 COMPARATIVE RECONSTRUCTION 273

tion). What is striking about most anglophoae Caribbean creoles and HE

is that palatalised realisations (advanced velar or fully palatal [c,
also occur in the environment of certain nonfront vowels, including
nonfront reflexes of ME / a / . Typically, in both groups of dialects, a palatal
glide appears between ME / a / and an adjacent nonanterior consonant. This
takes the form of an on-glide where the relevant consonant precedes, e.g.:
(1) JC HE
cat
gas
and an off-glide wherever the consonant follows, e.g.:
(2) JC HE
bag see below)
The off-glide also frequently appears before palato-alveolars (as in HE
[smäif] smash). The off-glide pattern is regular in HE but lexically selective
in JC where it is reportedly typical of archaic usage. Spellings in Cassidy
& Le Page 1967 which indicate this pronunciation in JC include: hige (<
hag); bullrige « . . . rag) and rygin « ragging).
The palatality illustrated in (1) has distinctive status in JC, since it is
the only feature which distinguishes historical / a / from / o / and / a u / after
velars. (JC otherwise shows merger of these nuclei: the isolative developments
of ME / a / and / o / are collapsed under JC / a / (so that for example pat
= pot); ME / a u / is merged with lengthened reflexes of ME / a / and / o /
under JC / a : / (so that for example sauce, pass, loss all rhyme).) In nor­
thern HE, the historical contrast is generally marked by both vowel and
consonant quality. Nevertheless, the similarities between the two varieties
here are clear, e.g.:
(3) ME / k a / ME / k o / ME /ga/ ME / g o /
cat cot garden Gordon
JC
HE
On the basis of this brief survey of palatalisation in the environment
of ME / a / , we may establish the following equivalence class for RP, JC
and HE:
( 4 ) M E / k , g / / _ /a/ Lexical sets
cat, cap,....
gap, gas,...
274 JOHN HARRIS

The similarities between Hibernian and New World Black Englishes

with respect to palatalisation can in all likelihood be traced to a common
seventeenth-century metropolitan source. However, at least two other possi­
ble origins have been suggested in the literature.
One proposal is that the feature stems from independent substratum
sources. In this connection, a number of writers have noted the existence
of palatalised /k J , gj/ in some West African languages such as Twi (e.g.
Cassidy & Le Page 1967: lviii, Alleyne 1980: 178). A substratum origin is
frequently also claimed for the same feature in HE (e.g. Adams 1966, Bliss
1972, Hughes 1966, Sullivan 1980). Palatalised allophones of /k, g/ in HE
are indeed phonetically identical to the homorganic «slender» consonants
of Irish Gaelic. However, whatever this hypothesis might have to say about
the obvious phonetic similarities between the contact Englishes in question
and the various substrate languages, it cannot explain the fact that the
distribution of palatalisation in the former faithfully mirrors historical con­
trasts in the superstrate. In the case of JC, for example, it cannot account
for the fact that palatals before / a / or / a : / occur precisely in those cases
where these phonemes correspond to ME / a / but, significantly, not where
they correspond to ME / o / or / a u / .
Another suggestion is that New World Black Englishes acquired the
palatalisation feature from HE (e.g. Bailey 1982). The problem with this
hypothesis is that, while it could conceivably account for the presence of
the feature in varieties spoken in areas where there was significant Irish
immigration (especially Barbados - see Niles 1980), it cannot explain its
presence in creoles spoken in areas where the possibility of Irish influence
is, to say the least, remote, e.g. Sranan and Saramaccan (Surinam).
The most likely source of palatalisation in Atlantic contact vernaculars
is, as already indicated, metropolitan English. As some creolists have
acknowledged (e.g. Cassidy & Le Page 1967: lviii), explicit reports of the
feature in British English go back at least as far as the early seventeenth
century. A palatal pronunciation of historical velars was current in stan­
dard speech during the eighteenth century but was apparently already
established in regional dialects well before this time. Wallis, writing in 1653,
describes it as a typically Midlands feature (cited in Dobson 1968: 952).
At least initially, palatalisation appears to have been general not only before
vowels whose historical frontness has never been in doubt but also before
reflexes of ME / a / . Wallis reports it in, for example, get, begin, can. Later
descriptions, however, concentrate on its occurrence with an accompany-
 COMPARATIVE RECONSTRUCTION 275

ing glide only before ME / a / . The latter pronunciation survived in stan­

dard usage into the nineteenth century, but by Sweet's time it was regarded
as decidedly old-fashioned (1908: 135). It continues to be reported in some
very conservative rural English dialects, particularly those spoken in the west
Midlands, one of the most important source areas as far as the develop­
ment of Atlantic contact Englishes is concerned (see for example Orton &
Barry 1969: III. 13.8, V.7.18), as well as in some southern areas of the USA
(Kurath & Mc David 1961: 175).
In the light of this historical documentary and modern dialect evidence,
it seems pretty clear that palatalisation of historical velars was well
represented in the speech of English colonists in both Ireland and the New
World. If the West African and Irish Gaelic substrata did make any con­
tribution to the establishment of the feature in the emergent contact ver­
naculars, this is likely to have been at best reinforcing or «preservative» in
Weinreich's 1966 sense.

3.3 Front-raising of Early Modern / a / .

The comparative material on palatalisation is obviously relevant to the
debate about the phonetic quality of historical / a / in the Early Modern
period. The present-day palatal reflexes of historical velars evidently bear
witness to an Early Modern sound change, the effects of which have subse­
quently been undone in standard pronunciation. It's reasonable to assume
that palatalisation initially took the form of a natural diachronic process
whereby back (velar) consonants assimilated the front (palatal) tongue posi­
tion of a neighbouring front vowel. Since ME / a / was included in the
palatalising environment, it's also reasonable to assume that, at least at the
time of the change, it belonged to the natural class of front vowels. Subse­
quent retraction of the vowel in certain environments (e.g. before historical
/ r / or voiceless fricatives) failed, at least initially, to undo the effects of
palatalisation. At this stage then, palatal allophones before retracted reflexes
of ME / a / represented the fossilised residue of a formerly phonetically-
motivated change. The perceptually salient glide which characterises such
sequences is presumably attributable to the degree of tongue excursion re­
quired for the transition from a front consonant to a nonfront vowel.
Questions posed in the literature about the historical quality of ME / a /
often presuppose that the answer must involve a unitary phonetic value (e.g.
Jespersen 1909, Dobson 1968, Chomsky & Halle 1968). As Milroy (1984)
276 JOHN HARRIS

points out, the possibility that the vowel's realisation was subject to variabili­
ty, whether phonologically or sociolinguistically constrained, tends not to
be acknowledged, except to the limited extent that this is necessary to ac­
count for conditioned sound changes which have left their mark on stan­
dard dialects (rounding after / w / (as in swan) in the ancestor dialect of RP
being a case in point). The evidence relating to palatalisation in both
metropolitan and contact varieties does indeed support the contention of
Dobson (1968), Lass (1976) and others that, at the beginning of the Early
Modern period, ME / a / was some kind of front vowel. However, com­
parative evidence based on studies of sound changes currently in progress,
particularly in northern United States cities (Labov et al 1972) and Belfast
(Milroy 1984, Harris 1985b: 177 ff), indicates that this is probably only part
of the story. There are good grounds for assuming that some of these changes
are extensions of patterns of variation which were already evident in Early
Modern English.
One such change, the results of which survive in a number of contact
Englishes but which has since been aborted in standard dialects, is the con­
ditioned raising to mid position of ME / a / , particularly in the environment
of nonanterior consonants. In the light of the preceding discussion, it seems
clear that many types of Early Modern English had palatal allophones of
/k, g, ŋ/ in the environment of historically front vowels. We may next con­
sider to what extent these consonants themselves exerted an influence on
the quality of neighbouring vowels. Given what we know about the
naturalness of certain sound changes, we might expect the high front tongue
position of palatals to have a front-raising effect on adjacent reflexes of
ME / a / . In fact, there's evidence to suggest that this is exactly what hap­
pened. The front-preserving property of historical / k , g , ŋ / is illustrated by
the fact that, in postvocalic position, they prevented the otherwise general
backing (and subsequent rounding) of ME / a / after / w / , a change which
has left its mark on southern English and derivative dialects. Thus RP has
back < ME / a / in, for example, swan, swab, what but front / æ / in,
for example, quack, wag, twang. The nonlow feature of palatals was ap­
parently responsible for encouraging, more so than other consonants, the
raising of neighbouring ME / a / . This influence is not often acknowledged
by authorities on the history of English (Dobson only mentions it in pass­
ing (1968: 551)), although it seems to be well supported by spelling evidence
from the Early Modern period. The evidence takes the form of e-spellings
for ME / a / , which scholars have attempted to explain piecemeal in a number
 COMPARATIVE RECONSTRUCTION 277

of quite diverse ways; for example, by claiming that they represent

misreadings, misspellings, unstressed forms, Old French variants, Middle
Dutch or Latin adoptions, or ME doublets. As Milroy (1984) points out,
it has not generally been noted that the majority of these e-spellings occur
in historically velar environments. Examples cited by Wyld (1936), Kökeritz
(1953) and Dobson (1968) include: back, pack, sack, act, axle, action, rack,
drag, thank, rank. The hypothesis that such spellings demonstrate the ef­
fects of a conditioned raising process is further supported by comparative
evidence drawn from present-day contact Englishes.
In our three illustrative varieties, the following reflexes of ME / a / are
attested in the context of historical velars and to a certain extent palato-
alveolars (ignoring details of lexical selectivity which we get to in a moment):

(5) ME / a / /[-ant] Lexical set

[RP æ; JC ε; HE ε (:)] rag, hang,...

The RP vowel displays the effects of a general raising which is independent

of the nonanterior consonantal context.
The JC pattern illustrated in (5) is lexically restricted. Many words con­
taining the relevant historical sequence occur categorically with the main
/ a / reflex. Some categorically appear with the / ε / reflex, and others alter­
nate between / a / and / ε / , the latter variant apparently being the more con­
servative one (Cassidy & Le Page 1967: xlviii). The following derivatives
of ME / a / items, recorded in Cassidy & Le Page 1967, illustrate the mid-
vowel pronunciation: teg-reg (< tag-rag) «rabble», tenki «thank you»,
(s)kelyan «scallion», renk (< rank) «impertinent», krenki (< cranky) «sick­
ly», heng «hang».
Most types of HE regularly show nonlow realisations of ME / a / in the
immediate environment of palatalised reflexes of historical velars. The ex­
act height of the reflexes as well as the relative ability of different palatal
contexts to condition their occurrence are subject to a good deal of sociol-
inguistic and regional variation. In conservative Ulster Scots, for instance,
the raised reflex [ε:], which is long in all stressed positions, shows up more
or less categorically in all palatal contexts. The raised realisations are poten­
tially merged with reflexes of ME / e / . Thus we find homophones such as
(Gregg 1964: 168):
(6) [nε:k] [bε:g] [kε:tl]
neck = knack beg = bag kettle = cattle
278 JOHN HARRIS

Quantitative studies of sound change in progress in Belfast Vernacular

indicate that the front-raised pattern is in the process of being undone by
a more recent tendency to back ME / a / in some environments. The upshot
of this is that some words containing the historical sequence / a / plus velar
now show alternation between a conservative mid front variant merged with
ME / e / and an innovative low nonfront pronunciation accompanied by the
palatal glide discussed in the last section, e.g.
The fact that the front-raised pattern is recessive in both JC and HE
indicates that whatever sound change produced the pattern in the first place
is of some antiquity. It seems highly unlikely that the similarities between
the two varieties with respect to this feature stem from independent but
parallel developments. Rather, it's reasonable to suppose that we are deal­
ing with the results of a change which had already left its mark on
metropolitan dialects by the time these came to be represented in Ireland
and the New World in the seventeenth century. We may conclude that this
change is the very one that is evidenced by the Early Modern e-spellings
discussed above.
It thus seems possible to reconstruct the following split in the Early
Modern English / a / category: a low front isolative reflex, and a mid front
combinative reflex (potentially merged with ME /e/) which was favoured
by historically velar environments. If we take the position that phonological
correspondences between creolised Englishes and the metropolitan language
are mediated not by processes of continuous transmission but by substratum-
conditioned sound substitutions, we might reconstruct the historical
background to the front-raised pattern in JC as follows. During the for­
mative period of the variety, «Proto-JC» / a / was adopted as the represen­
tative of the isolative reflex of ME / a / , which was probably a fully open
front vowel in the speech of most of the white colonists. «Proto-JC» / ε /
was taken to represent not only the isolative development of ME / e / but
also the combinative development of ME / a / which sporadically displayed
the effects of front-raising in historically velar contexts.
We are now in a position to offer an explanation of the similarities bet­
ween Hibernian and certain New World Black Englishes with respect to
palatal realisations of historical velars and front-raised realisations of
historical / a / . The evidence adduced here suggests that direct HE influence
on New World Black Englishes is unlikely. Instead, the widespread distribu­
tion of the pronunciation on both sides of the Atlantic points to a common
 COMPARATIVE RECONSTRUCTION 279

source in seventeenth-century standard and nonstandard metropolitan

dialects, possibly supplemented independently by transfer effects from dif­
ferent substrate languages.

4. Conclusion.
The decision to perform comparative reconstruction on a contact ver­
nacular and its lexical source language is independent of the position we
adopt with respect to the question of whether their relationship is ap­
propriately described in terms of the traditional family-tree model. The lex­
ical relationship alone is enough to supply the raw material necessary for
applying the comparative method, namely systematic sound correspondences
between the two varieties. On the other hand, our response to the genetic
affiliation question does have a bearing on the way we interpret the results
of the comparative endeavour, and in particular on our interpretation of
the changes which produced systematic divergence between the varieties in
the first place. That is, do we attribute individual points of divergence to
the operation of internal sound change or contact-induced restructuring?
If we take the view that the lexicon of a contact vernacular represents, not
inherited stock, but the outcome of wholesale borrowing from the superstrate,
then it should be clear that drawing the two varieties into the same comparative
exercise amounts to applying, on a lexicon-wide scale, principles usually
associated with loan-word phonology. Whether our comparison is restricted
to a small set of lexical borrowings or encompasses the entire lexicon, the
value of the enterprise is the same. By comparing forms in the donor language
on the one hand and the recipient or emergent language on the other, we
derive correspondences which shed light on structural details of the two
languages at the time of borrowing. In this way, we can learn a good deal
not only about the system(s) which conditioned the integration of loan-forms
into the recipient or emergent language but also, as the comparison under­
taken here demonstrates, about the history of the donor language itself.

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Andersen, Henning. 1973. Abductive and deductive change. Language 49.
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Harris, John. 1985a. Expanding the superstrate: habitual aspect markers
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A(í)εí AND THE PREHISTORY OF GREEK NOUN ACCENTUATION
(RÉSUMÉ)
H.M. HOENIGSWALD
University of Pennsylvania, U.S.A.

The accent of αίεί is compatible neither with the idea that it is an ar­
chaic (like Skt. dyávi) nor that it is a Greek columnar (like ηθει) locative
of the 5-stem: the former should be
*Αιρεσί > αίει could, however, represent the late IE stage, with oblique-case
oxytonesis extended to the locative, but previous to the limitation of that
accentuation to monosyllables in Greek. Klingenschmitt (MSS 33.78), to be
sure, suspects a true dative after the Indo-Iranian manner from the «thème
II» (*H2yew-; cp. Av. yavaē), not extant in the various Greek words for
«age», loc. «always» though perhaps surviving in
the completely isolated ου «not» (cp. French jamais, etc.; Cowgill Lg
36.347-50, with a reference to F.B.J. Kuiper). If this is so, the fact that
*H2oyu goes to rather than tends to confirm the impression that
intervocalic -y- behaves differently from -s- in this respect, as, perhaps, it
does in others. (Lejeune, Phon. hist. du mycénien, etc., 169).
[The complete version of this paper will appear in «Studies in Memory of
Warren Cowgill, 1929-1985», Berlin / New York: De Gruyter].
 THE INSTABILITY OF PERIPHERAL
/  . / , / ø . / , AND / o . / IN DUTCH LECTS

COR HOPPENBROUWERS
Rijksuniversiteit Groningen

The long vowels constitute a category of unsteady elements. The outstan­

ding examples of this instability are the tense or rather peripheral 1 /  . / ,
/ ø . / , and /  . / . In standard varieties, where normative pressure is usually
high, these vowels stand the best chance of being preserved, witness (1) with
instances from French (a) and standard Dutch (b).
(1) a [le. gro. bø.] «the fat oxen»
b [twe. ] «two tall giants»
In nonstandard systems, the peripheral /./, / ø . / , and /  . / seem to
be subject to natural changes resulting in diphthongs on the one hand and
nonperipheral, lax vowels on the other hand. In this paper the claim will
be made that investigations into sound change are most profitably directed
at the development of those vowels in nonstandard varieties.
The two paths that the peripherals can take are indicated in (2):

(2)

The front spread /  . / e.g. may become /ei/ and by ongoing diphthongi-
zation /ei/ and even / æ i / . Following the path of vowel laxing, the /  . /
may become / I : / and / ε : / by further lowering. for details about these shifts
see Andersen's (1972) study of diphthongization and Hoppenbrouwers
(1982).

1
Since the feature TENSE has often been subject to criticism, I prefer to use the term
PERIPHERAL to subdivide the primary class of long vowels. (See Ladefoged 1975: 245, and
Hoppenbrouwers 1982).
286 COR HOPPENBROUWERS

A provisional confirmation of the claim that these peripherals are highly

unstable will be found in certain instances taken from the Dutch-speaking
area. Further confirmation will be found in other linguistic communities.
The nonstandard varieties that I will refer to can be arranged under the three
types of lects mentioned in (3).
(3)

Just as the standard language, a dialect is an independent and therefore

discontinuous system. It has its own core of grammatical and lexical
elements. The size of the area of intersection forms a criterion for the degree
of relationship between the systems in question. At least in the Netherlands,
the use of the dialect as an independent system becomes more and more
restricted to the group of nonmobile older rural males or NORMS, to use
the acronym proposed in the textbook by Chambers and Trudgill (1980).
The drastic changes in social and economic life, and consequently the
growing influence of the (secondary) school have revolutionized linguistic
behaviour in the dialect areas. The descendants of the NOR S are involved
in a process of standardization which leads to the REGIOLECT, a range
of intermediate forms with the standard language as the target. The con­
tinuum of intermediate stages ranges from the dialect of the older speakers
to the standard forms used by the girls of the youngest generation. Collec­
tive, supracommunal features play an essential role in this process of stan­
dardization, which results in the gradual loss of the independent core of
the former dialect. For other aspects of the regiolect such as the implica-
tional ordering of intermediate stages, and details about the continuum see
Hoppenbrouwers (1983) and (1984).
The substandard or sociolect, which is used in modern urban areas, also
forms a continuum with the standard language. But unlike the regiolect, the so­
ciolect exhibits a natural tendency to shift away from the established standard.
 INSTABILITY OF PERIPHERAL VOWELS 287

In Dutch dialects many instances reflect the instability of the peripheral

vowels. The first example I would like to discuss is a shift that has resulted
in a three-diphthong system, one of the characteristics of the Groningen
dialects. The situation 2 is illustrated in area I on the map that will also
serve as a background to the discussion of the other cases. As can be seen
in (4), West Germanic long ô is represented by / a u / in the core of area I.
WGM GRONINGEN DIALECT
(4) ô «good», [staul] «chair», [bicorni] «flower»
(5) ô + uml «seek», «green», «taste»
(6) a eo [dæip] «deep», [vræizn] «freeze», [dæif] «thief»
b ai [stæin] «stone», [hæit] «hot», [klæit] «cloth, dress»
c e2 [bræif] «letter», «mirror», [bæit] «beet»
The long ô with umlaut corresponds with the front round diphthong / œ y /
as in (5). The items with the front spread / æ i / belong to three etymological
classes. In (6) a we find instances that correspond with West Germanic eo,
those in (b) and (c) correspond with respectively ai and e 2 .
Area I, displaying the three-diphthong system, includes most of the
Groningen dialects and some of the dialects spoken in an adjacent part of
the province of Drente. Below this shaded area the map shows the stages
that historically precede the wide diphthongs. The respective narrow
diphthongs are indicated by open dots, the peripheral /./, / ø . / , and /  . /
are represented by solid ones. Notice that one of the phonetic paths in (2)
corresponds with the geographic continuum on the dialect map.
A large dialect area with high monophthongs, respectively /u(:)/, /y(:)/,
and /i(:)/ adjoins the narrower areas with the intermediate diphthongal
stages. Apart from / y / , which in this area represents the umlaut of West
Germanic ô, the vowels in the items in question have the same quality as
in standard Dutch. With regard to the quantity of vowels it needs to be
said that in some of the Drente dialects they have remained long in all the
phonemic contexts, whereas in standard Dutch and in other Drente dialects
they have been shortened, except in the context of following / r / .

2 The data that have been used to draw area I are taken from Sassen (1953) and
(1967).
288 COR HOPPENBROUWERS

As we are dealing here with a rather disparate set of variants, it is hard

to say how exactly the changes took place, the more so as the correspon­
ding West Germanic forms mentioned in (4), (5), and (6) have been (re-)con­
structed. Loans that in the dialects in question have undergone the same
changes may give some insight here. The items in (7) have been borrowed
from French.

Peripheral Vowels in Dutch Lects

 INSTABILITY OF PERIPHERAL VOWELS 289

FRENCH STAND. DUTCH/ INTERMEDIATE GRONINGEN

DRENTE DIALECT STAGES DIALECT
(7) a plaisir [pbzi:r] [-ebr/-εiər] [pəlzæbr]
clavier [klavi:r] id. [kbvæbr]
manière [mani: r] [mənæiər]
b presenter [-I:rə/-I:rn] [-ebrn/-εiərn] [pre.zntæiərn]
commander id. id. [kumdæiərn]
répéter [repətæiərn]
 téléphoner id. [tebfonI:rn]
photographier [fotvr‫כּ‬fI :rn]
(7) a contains examples of early loans, dating back to the Middle Dutch
period 3. In the standard language, and in most of the Drente dialects, such
items have long [i:] in the context of following / r / 4 .
In the northern Drente dialects, marked with dots on the map, the long
high vowel has been lowered to / e i / in accordance with one of the natural
tendencies affecting long vowels, see e.g. Hoppenbrouwers (1982). The verbs
in /-ebrn/, in the examples of (7)b also form a group of early loans from
French. The intermediate forms occurring in the northern Drente dialects
show that the sound changes in this group have coalesced with the cases
of lowered /-i:r/ in (7)a. The Groningen dialects, which form the end point
of the geographic continuum, present a relatively stable stage in the develop­
ment with their wide diphthongs in /pəlzæiər/, / k b v æ b r / etc.
More recent loans, as in (7)c, on the other hand do not show any trace
of diphthongization. The development of forms as in (7)a and b must have
preceded the borrowing of those in (7)c. One of the early texts in the Gron­
ingen dialect that have come down to us shows that at the end of the 18th
century the city of Groningen, situated on the southern border of area I,
already used (probably narrow) diphthongs in cases such as (4), (5), (6), and
(7)a and b. Recent loans, as in (7)c, follow the alternative path of the lax
vowels in (2), as they have /-I:rn/ in all the northern dialects, just as in stan­
dard Dutch 5.

3 I am here leaving aside the question whether such loans occurring in dialects are taken
over directly from the original language or, more likely, from the (national) standard.
4 Notice that for standard Dutch this is the only context in which truly long vowels have
survived, and this only at the phonetic level.
5 Standard Dutch, which incidentally never has diphthongs in the context of following
/ r / , uses the form /-I:rə/ in all the cases.
290 COR HOPPENBROUWERS

II
The second example is taken from south-eastern Dutch dialects. In this
case the vowels in question are variants of West Germanic î, û, and cor­
responding loans. Outside the dialects that have preserved those high vowels
(the long û eventually becoming /y:/) we find in area II diphthongs and
lower monophthongs. Both the diphthongal and monophthongal paths in­
dicated in (2) are reflected here in certain dialect continua.
In this area the distribution of the variants is much more complex than
in the Groningen instance, and therefore the map is only concerned with
one of the vowels in question in only one of the phonological contexts. The
shaded part of area II includes the dialects with diphthongal variants of Wgm
î in the context of following / s / , the case characterized by the largest
geographical extension of the diphthongization.
Most of the dialects in this area use diphthongs with the same degree
of wideness as those of the corresponding standard Dutch forms. (8) lists
examples that in some of the dialects have the wide diphthong / æ i / , both
in this and other contexts.
(8)
To the east of, and even within the shaded area, there are once again some
dialects, marked with dots, that use the lowered peripheral /  . / as in the
first example. The two dialect communities inside of II that still use the
peripheral vowel, form a dialect island surrounded by dialects with
diphthongs. To the east there are also four dialects with the intermediate
narrow /ei/. But just as in the Groningen case, the use of the unstable vowel
is restricted here to a small number of dialects.
To the west of II there is a large area using open monophthongs. In the
case shown on the map we only find / ε : / . In other contexts the higher / I : /
also occurs. (9)a and b presents instances in the context of following /va/.
(9) a [bh:v3] «stay», [sxrI:və] «write», [vrI:və] «rub»
b ε: ε: ε:
Such examples, which occur in the geographic continua starting with / i : / ,
reflect the monophthongal path in (2), which is the alternative way to avoid
peripheral /./, / ø . / , and /  . / .
Broadly speaking, the variants of Wgm û, ui and corresponding loans
reflect a comparable development, thus underlining the phoneticity, the in­
ternal linguistic character, of those processes. For more details see Hop­
penbrouwers (1982).
 INSTABILITY OF PERIPHERAL VOWELS 291

In contrast to the homogeneous picture that arises from the

diphthongization in area I, the effects of the changes in area II are manifold.
One reason for this difference may be the fact that the Groningen diphthongi­
zation has not yet been investigated so thoroughly. The main reason,
however, is probably found in the different socio-economic backgrounds
of the regions in question. The province of Groningen is a fertile clay district,
in which a large proportion of the land has been concentrated in a small
number of hands from at least the 16th century. Under these conditions a
great number of agricultural labourers were needed. Apart from seasonal
workers, the landlord took several more regular labourers into his employ,
workers who, often with their whole family, entered into the service of the
landowner for a limited term, mostly a couple of years. In this situation
mobility was relatively high, so that the speakers within this region could
influence each other's dialects, making them more homogeneous by doing so.
In the south-eastern region the socio-economic situation was totally dif­
ferent. Small farmers, cultivating a poor sandy soil, lived here in close com­
munities. Their intercommunal contacts were rather restricted, so that their
local dialects were less influenced by each other and could develop much
more independently.

III

In order to show the instability of the peripheral vowels in a sociolect

I will briefly discuss an example taken from Jansen (1978). If refers to
(western) Holland substandard as spoken in area III on the map. In this
area, the Amsterdam, the Hague, Rotterdam conurbation, the standard
Dutch phonemes /./, / ø . / , and /  . / are realized as in (10):
(10) STANDARD DUTCH SOCIOLECT
 /./ → [ei.. εi.. æi]
b /ø./ → [øy.. œy.. ay]
 /./ → [ou.. ɔu.. au]
i.e. with more or less wide diphthongs. A word group such as (11), which
in the national standard is pronounced with peripheral vowels, is
diphthongized in the sociolect.
(11) a [sεivə lœykə mɔubntjəs] «seven nice little mills»
b [sæifə 1kə mauləntjəs]
292 COR HOPPENBROUWERS

It will be clear that the well-known sociolinguistic parameters play an im­

portant part in this process. The degree of diphthongization in (11)a, and
b depends on social class, age, sex, speech style and so on. In the meantime
deviation from the standard norm, i.e. the avoidance of peripheral vowels,
has become a sociolinguistic marker in the sense of Labov 6.

IV

The last example shows the unstable character of the peripheral /./,
/ ø . / , and /  . / in a regiolect. It is spoken in the eastern part of the
Netherlands, in area IV on the map.
The use of the traditional dialect as an independent system has become
more and more restricted to the group of nonmobile older rurais. It will
be clear, however, that in the gradual shift towards the standard language,
in which the descendants of those NORs are involved, many features recall
the former dialects. Some of the supracommunal regiolect features prove
to be particularly resistent to the process of standardization.
Rule (12) is a good example of such a regiolect feature that may be traced
back to the dialect of the ancestors.
(12) STANDARD DUTCH REGIOLECT
/__r all contexts
 /./ → [I:]
b /ø./ → [Λ:]
 /./ → [U:]
Whereas in standard Dutch the effect of this phonetic rule is restricted to
the position of following / r / , in the eastern regiolect it applies in every con­
text. To simplify matters, I will limit the discussion to certain aspects of
subrule (12)a, which in every respect is collapsible with (12)b, and  As
counterparts of standard Dutch /./, the dialects at the beginning of the
regiolect continuum use numerous variants. Thus the instances in (13), which
are taken from Bezoen (1938), belong to the dialect of Enschede, situated
in the eastern part of area IV.

6 Especially younger lower-middle-class women, when making efforts to speak correct­

ly, may use hypercorrect forms as [di brø.nə so.s was vre. flo] «(the taste of) that brown sauce
was rather flat», instead of standard Dutch [di brœnə sous was vrei flou], with regular
diphthongs. It will be clear that we here have a case of overcorrection caused by inversion
of the sociolectal rule that generates the stigmatized diphthongs.
 INSTABILITY OF PERIPHERAL VOWELS 293

(13)a [brē.t] «broad» b [bI:n] «leg»  [bek] «brook»

[dē.l] «part»
[lē.m] «loam»
[blē.f] «stayed»
d [lε:zn] «read»
[steils] «(you)steal»
[nε:ms] «(you)take»
[stI:n] «stone» [lεpəl] «spoon»
[hI:t] «hot» [brεkn] «break»
[sxI:f] «wry» [bεtər] «better»
e [spœln] «play»
[vœl] «many, much»
[zwœp] «whip»

According to Bezoen (1938), the items in (13)a are pronounced with a fairly
monophthongal [e:], i.e. differently from standard Dutch where this
phoneme has a slightly diphthongal pronunciation. The items in (13)b form
part of a large group, and are pronounced with the phone that is generated
by rule (12)a. The variants in c, d, and e may be passed over as it will be
evident that the frequently used dialect forms in a, and b constitute the basis
of regiolect rule (12).
Speakers hailing from this region who try to speak the standard language
are generally not aware of this deviation from the norm: thus the present
Minister for Social Affairs, who is a native of the eastern region, may be
heard to say in debates or interviews broadcast by radio or television, that
[xI:n lu:nsfərhu:vIŋ] «no wage increase» can be allowed by the government.
Even in such official statements he uses nonperipheral (lax) vowels instead
of the peripheral standard forms.
Another well-known speaker, who also hails from this region, is a
popular weatherman. In a special program for Dutch tourists, which can
be received in camp-sites all over Europe, he regularly forecasts [dI:prεsis]
«depressions», accompanied with [fI:l rI:vεn] «much rain» or sometimes
areas of [hU:və drΛk] «high pressure» 7 .
The instances taken from different Dutch lects have shown that the in­
vestigation into sound change may successfully be directed at the develop­
ment of peripheral /  . / , /  . / and / ø . / They are a group of vowels that,
often depending on the context formed by the following consonant, tend
to shift, taking one of the two available paths. In combination with
geographic and socio-economic factors, those shifts may contribute to our
understanding of language change.

7 Such persistent regiolectal variables, which often are used below the level of social
awareness (see Labov, 1972), may easily become part of a new substandard or sociolect as
indicated in (3).
294 COR HOPPENBROUWERS

REFERENCES.

Andersen, H. 1972. Diphthongization. Lg. 48.11-50.

Bezoen, H.L. 1938. Klank- en vormleer van het dialect der Gemeente
Enschede. Leiden: Brill.
Chambers J.K. & P . Trudgill. 1980. Dialectology. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Hoppenbrouwers, C.A.J. 1982. Language Change; a study of phonemic and
analogical change with particular reference to S.E. Dutch dialects.
Haren/Meppel.
Hoppenbrouwers, C.A.J. 1983. Het genus in een Brabants regiolect. Tabu
13.1-25.
Hoppenbrouwers, C.A.J. 1984. Changes in a Dutch regiolect. In: W.U.
Dressier e.a. (eds.) Discussion Papers for the Fifth International
Phonology Meeting. Wiener Linguistische Gazette, supplement 3, Vien­
na, 128-132.
Jansen, F. 1978. De sociolinguïstische benadering van taalverandering.
G.A.T. Koefoed & J. van Marle (eds.) Aspecten van taalverandering.
Groningen: Wolters-Noordhoff. 193-214.
Labov, W. 1972. Sociolinguistic Patterns. Philadelphia: University of Penn­
sylvania Press.
Ladefoged, P. 1975. A Course in Phonetics. New York: Harcourt Brace
Javanovich, Inc.
Sassen, A. 1953. Het Drents van Ruinen. Assen: Van Gorkum.
Sassen, Α. 1967. Dialekt-atlas van Groningen en Noord-Drente. Antwerp:
De Sikkel.
 STRUCTURALISM AND DIACHRONY:
THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE INDEFINITE ARTICLE IN ENGLISH

PAUL HOPPER / JANICE MARTIN

State University of New York at Binghamton

1. Introduction.
1.1 The paradox has often been noted that scientific accounts of
language change are rooted essentially in the antithesis of change, namely
synchronic description. Synchronic description provides us with points of
orientation comparable to a navigator's compass, linking different stages
of a language and allowing us to chart the course of change. Yet the pro­
cedures which we follow, ironically, do not lead us to an understanding of
change but only of results and, at best, inductive generalizations from those
results. Change is thus reduced to the subtractive difference between the
grammars of fixed stages in the historical existence of a language. The step­
wise, discontinuous conception of change implicit in the procedures of com­
parison is at variance with our human apperception of change as something
continuous, and gives us only a secondary, indirect grasp of change as a
process. Dilthey understood this clearly in his sardonic characterization of
Platonic realism:
«A true Plato, who first of all fixes in concepts things which become
and flow, and then supplements the fixed concept with a concept of flow­
ing». (Gesammelte Schriften V: 112. Stuttgart: Teubner, 1958).
Our procedure of comparison of fixed stages forces us to view change
as a residual and separate component grafted onto these stages and sensed
as something different from them. We would like to emphasize that we are
not saying that linguists have misunderstood change; what we are instead
saying is that Dilthey's observation is an apt characterization of the
philosophy underlying our procedures, and that in order to translate the
results of these procedures into a more natural continuous apperception of
change we are obliged to depart from the procedures themselves.
Generalizing upon these observations, we would suggest that what is
ultimately being recognized is the intrinsic limitations of structuralism when
296 PAUL HOPPER / JANICE MARTIN

structuralism is extended to the study of change. Yet a non-structuralist ap­

proach to change involves both new kinds of data (discourse as opposed
to sentences), and new methodologies. The present investigation is intend­
ed as both a substantive study of the history of one area of the referential
economy of English, namely the Indefinite Article, and as a contribution
to methodology.

1.2 Referentiality.
The notion of referentiality as it is understood by logicians is based
firmly in word or sentence level semantics. This restriction has resulted in
a great deal of attention being paid to mysteries such as:
(1) Alice wants to marry a millionaire,
with its well-known ambiguity. Does Alice have a particular millionaire in
mind or will any millionaire do?
A recent line of thought suggests that by starting with discourse rather
than with word or sentence level semantics we can by-pass this,question,
and turn our attention instead to the role which the NP in question plays
in the discourse. For example, is the indefinite NP in question subsequently
referred to as an individual, or never referred to again? If it is referred to
again, how many times does this occur? What is the typical distance bet­
ween its first introduction and its next mention? This pragmatic approach
to referentiality, introduced through the pioneering work of Givón 1 (see
also Levy (1982)2 and Givón (1983)3, has now been investigated in a
number of languages (see Givón, ed., 1983; Hopper 1985 [to appear] 4 ), but
rather little work has been done on its diachronic implications. This paper
is an investigation of the history of the Modern English indefinite article
 () from the point of view of its discourse referentiality. Its goal is to trace
quantitatively the development of the general indefinite article of Modern
English out of an Old English quantifier having a much more limited
discourse function.

1 «Logic vs. Pragmatics, with Human Language as the Referee». Journal of Pragmatics,
6.2:1981.
2 Levy, Elena, 1982. «Towards an Objective Definition of Discourse Topic». CLS 1982.
3 Givón, T., ed., 1983. Topic Continuity in Discourse. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
4 Hopper, Paul J. 1985. «A Discourse Function of Noun Classifiers in Malay». In C.
Craig, ed., Noun Classification. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
 STRUCTURALISM AND DIACHRONY 297

1.3 Diachrony of the English Indefinite Article.

Traugott notes in her important paper «From Propositional to Textual
and Expressive Meanings: Some Semantic-Pragmatic Aspects of Gram-
maticalization» (1982)5:
«The indefinite article a (n) derives in the EME period from the numeral
an " o n e " of Old English. While the prime function of the numeral is to
designate an object as single, that of the indefinite article is to introduce fresh
material to the hearer's consciousness». (250)
Its literal function, Traugott suggests, is «to indicate absence of
anaphora» (252), and it can go even further and assume an expressive mean­
ing («The river... A river flowing smooth and seeming calm» [253]).
For Traugott, then, the principal development manifested by a(n) is one
of propositional, i.e. ideational, meaning to textual meaning. Its earliest mean­
ing is the propositional one of singularity, and it evolves from this into one
where it serves a text-organizational function. Givón similarly assumes that
indefinite articles in general develop out of a singular marker, and is more
specific in identifying this marker with the numeral «one» (Givón 1981 6 ).
Our previous work suggests that no such «propositional» meaning is in fact
reconstructible for the ancestor of a(n). We will return to this point later in
the paper, and for the moment will treat OE an- ModE a(n) as a historical
continuum, and study the gradual shift in discourse functions which this form
has undergone from the 10th century to the 20th century. The data for this
study come from a selection of narrative texts at various periods of the
language. In order to eliminate so far as possible discrepancies due to genre
differences, we included only narrative, with an emphasis on prose if this
was available.

2. Non-anaphoric Devices in Old English.

We will begin with an informal characterization of the situation. At the
earliest period investigated, the Old English period, we find the following
array of non-anaphoric devices in NP's:

5 Traugott, E.C. 1982. in Lehmann & Malkiel, eds, Perspectives on Historical Linguistics.
Amsterdam: Benjamins, 245-271.
6 Givón, T., 1981. «On the development of the numeral " o n e " as an indefinite marker»
Folia Linguistica Historica 1,2.
298 PAUL HOPPER / JANICE MARTIN

2.1 The pragmatically strongest one is sum, which when used as an

article is a presentative marker. It typically introduces into the discourse
a thematic participant, that is, a protagonist (often human) who is singled
out for some important role in the subsequent discourse. NP's introduced
by sum typically have numerous subsequent mentions, as in the following
example:
Tha waes sum cyninges thegn, his freond se getreoweste [«fidelissimus
quidam amicus illius»], the thas thing gehyrde ond onget. Tha eode he to
his inne. thaer he inne restan wolde - waes foreweard niht - ond hine acegde
ut ond him saegde ond cuthde hu him mon emb don wolde. (etc).
«There was a certain companion of the king, his most loyal friend, who
heard about this matter and understood it. He went into his chamber, where
he was about to retire - for it was late at night - and summoned him out
and told him what they had in store for him». (King Eadwine, Bright, ed.,
Anglo-Saxon Reader, 113-4).
Quite commonly, an NP introduced by sum is a presented participant,
as in this example. Moreover, sum, in the oldest period of the language,
when directly quantifying an NP may be said to establish a paragraph or
episode level theme. Hence sum also appears in travelers' tales with nouns
denoting a place which is the setting for an important episode. As our Latin
gloss indicates, sum typically renders Latin quidam, while, as was pointed
out by Paolo Ramat in the discussion of our paper, an translated Latin
unus; Professor Ramat suggested that this was a translating convention of
the period, albeit one founded on a linguistic reality in both languages.
2.2 The next strongest is an. An is also presentative. NP's introduced
by an may be human or non-human, and they may have some local impor­
tance, but where a difference between an and sum exists, it shows an NP
introduced by an to be less salient for the discourse as a whole than an
NP introduced by sum. NP's with an may also support subsequent
references, but to a more limited degree, as in the next example:
Tha laeg thaer an mycel ea up in thaet land. tha cyrbon hie on tha
ea. Forthaem hy ne dorston forth be thaere ea seglian for unfrithe. for-
thaem thaet land waes eall gebun on othre healfe thaere ea. «There lay a
great river up in that land; they then turned up into that river, because
they did not dare sail past the river, because of hostility, for the country
on the other side of the river was inhabited». (Orosius, 248).
Here the river referred to, even though it is described at length, is still
 STRUCTURALISM AND DIACHRONY 299

only a background entity. It is neither a protagonist in an episode, nor the

stage setting for an episode.
Already at the oldest periods of English an NP with an may appear
in isolation in the discourse, that is without any further anaphoric men­
tions; such NP's nonetheless tend to be important participants or «props»
at the local level. An also differs from sum in its characteristic position
in the discourse. Whereas sum almost always occurs at the beginning of
an episode, an may occur at any point.

3. Quantitative Changes in Distribution of .

In order to quantify the changes in the function of an we took samples
of narrative texts from various stages between the earliest extended nar­
rative in Old English and the 20th century. The samples were selected so
as to give a regularly periodized set separated by 50 to 100 years. The follow­
ing data were counted:
(1) The raw frequency of the indefinite article;
(2) The frequency of «isolated» an, i.e., instances of NP's with an which
are not subsequently referred to in the text;
(3) The topicality of NP's with an, i.e., the average number of NP's
with an which are subjects of their clauses.
(4) The persistence of , i.e., the average number of times an NP with
an is subsequently referred to.
Considering the size of the sample which must be used in order to find
50 examples of an, the sharpest decline (i.e., the sharpest rise in text fre­
quency) is seen (Graph 1) to occur in the Middle English period, from 27,000
in the 10th century to 4,000 in the 14th century. After this there appears
to be a plateau for several more centuries, followed by another sharp drop
in the 18th century.

3.1. Functional Correlates of Increased Frequency,

The question now arises, what are the functional correlates of this in­
crease in text frequency? We have identified two:
(1) A slow but consistent increase in the ability of the NP with an to
stand alone, without subsequent mentions. This is indicative of a lessening
of the referential strength of the indefinite NP. The weakening of the in­
definite NP is illustrated in Graph 2. In the OE period, 56% of the indefinite
300 PAUL HOPPER / JANICE MARTIN

NP's with an in our sample supported subsequent mentions; by the 20th

century this proportion has fallen to 10%. The indefinite article thus spreads
into the functional domain previously occupied by zero.
(2) An increasing ability of the indefinite NP with an to occur as
topic/subject (Graph 3). In the OE period an had been rare or virtually
non-existent as a topic. Topics were normally definite, and indefinites were
practically limited to occurring in predicates. In ModE we estimate that
27% of NP's with a(n) are subject/topics, as in the following example from
a modern fairy-tale:
«An old, pointed blue hat that had belonged to some Munchkin was
perched on this head, and the rest of the figure was a blue suit of clothes,
worn and faded, which had also been stuffed with straw». Baum, The Wizard
of Oz, Octopus Books, p. 39.
The in-between period is marked by a steadily consistent rise in the
relative frequency of indefinite subject/topic NP's with a(n). This increas­
ing tendency for the indefinite article to occur in subject/topic NP's is of
course compatible with its declining role as a presentative marker. Indefinite
subjects such as the one in the passage cited are not typically presentative
in the sense of introducing significant new participants, but are more usual­
ly found when new topics are casually introduced and then dropped with
little or no subsequent mention.
3.2 The trend in the history of English has been for the an form to
spread and encroach in both directions onto the domain of the stronger
quantifier sum, on the one hand, and the weaker zero on the other. In the
10th century the role of sum as a presentative is becoming more specialized.
It continues to mark presentatives, but is more likely to occur with plurals
and generics, while the more typical singular, referential-indefinite marker
is an. Even at this early period, then, there is evidence that an is taking
over some of the referential territory of sum.
The last graph, Graph 4, gives us a hint as to the later trajectory of
an. This graph shows the average number of times an NP with the indefinite
article is subsequently referred to in the text from each of centuries men­
tioned. We have already seen that at each period studied, the ability of an
to stand alone, without subsequent references, is either stable or rises. Yet
a count of the average number of subsequent references shows a numerical
increase between the 10th and 13th centuries, reaching a peak in the 13th
century, after which it shows a steady decline. This pattern is consistent with
 STRUCTURALISM AND DIACHRONY 301

the hypothesis that when an edged out sum on the one side and zero on
the other, it did so at first mainly by encroaching on sum, with a relatively
slow encroachment on the domain of zero. Consequently the average referen-
tiality of an increased during this period. At the beginning of the modern
period, an moved increasingly into the domain of zero; this movement is
manifested as a decline in its average referentiality.
Our study suggests, then, that the English Indefinite Article began as
a referential presentative marker in competition and functional overlap with
sum. Through the centuries, Old English an passed through stages of decreas­
ing referentiality and weakening of the presentative function.

4. Conclusions.
We conclude by pointing out that some general forces are at work here.
As forms widen their functional domain, the more specialized functions
which they once served are no longer catered to. This is true of the English
indefinite article, which is no longer exclusively presentative; the presentative
function is executed by a variety of different strategies, as exemplified in
the following, for example:
(2) At the door stood a /one/ a certain/this Mr. Smith.
The use of «this» as a presentative has been discussed by Wald
(1983)7; its appearance seems to be a relatively recent phenomenon, and
cannot be shown to be earlier than the 20th century.
Earlier in this paper we referred to Traugott's thesis that, in accordance
with her general semantic-pragmatic typology of change, the trajectory of
English a(n) has been from a propositional to a textual and perhaps expressive
meaning. Another way of formulating this typology is to speak of a develop­
ment from «less personal» to «more personal» (Traugott's Hypothesis A
[253]). Insofar as this form of the hypothesis does not involve the acceptance
of the notion of «propositional meaning», or indeed of categorial differences
between «types» of meaning, we find it distinctly preferable, and completely
compatible with the results of our own study. The meanings of forms are all
to some degree negotiable, and all constitute a part of the set of resources
which speakers of a language have for constructing «texts» in the broadest
sense. Some of these resources are available with relatively little context, that

7 Wald, Benji. 1983. «Referents and Topic within and across Discourse Units». In Flora
Klein-Andreu, ed., Discourse Perspectives on Syntax. Academic Press.
302 PAUL HOPPER / JANICE MARTIN

is to say their meanings are relatively stable and fixed in advance of their use,
while others are very highly contextualized. The Modern English indefinite arti­
cle is highly contextualized, since its uses range from specific to simply non-
anaphoric, from singular («a bird in hand», «a stitch in time») to expressive.
Probably, then, one way in which grammaticalization is to be com­
prehended is as an evolution from lesser to greater contextualization, or from
relative textual autonomy to relative textual dependence. The more dependent
a form is, of course, the more «personal» it is, i.e. the more adaptable to the
speaker's goals, and the more negotiable its meanings. The more autonomous a
form is, the less flexibility and range of negotiability it makes available to users.
This brings us back to the difficulty stated at the beginning of the paper,
the problem of the relationship between synchrony and diachrony as a win­
dow on change. It has often struck us that truly diachronic statements about
languages seem incompatible with synchronic ones. This is not always a con­
tradictory kind of incompatibility, but rather more often one of salience. Facts
about languages which are important in studying change and reconstruction
are frequently trivial, or at best peripheral, when viewed synchronically.
Among them are minor paradigmatic irregularities; frozen idioms and pro­
verbs; facts of variation; categorially ambiguous forms like Adverbs/Preposi­
tions, Adjectives/Participles; and semantic-pragmatic subtleties of the kind
Traugott has shown to be so central in understanding change, such as the
deontic-epistemic distinction in modals, are not generally viewed as central
to the «rules» for generating «sentences». We may add to these quantitative
discourse data showing the distribution of some linguistic forms to be a mat­
ter of statistical preference rather than binary categorial implementation.
Facts of this kind are more likely to be seen as exceptional and idiosyn­
cratic, and to be described by special rules extra to the «core grammar».
In the case of discourse data they may even be relegated synchronically to
a special component outside the grammar as such. Structuralism biases its
adherents towards fixed categories, and forces them, if we may adapt
Dilthey's words, to «fix in categories things which change, and then sup­
plement the fixed category with a category of changing».
This is, of course, by no means a new lament of historical linguists.
But ironically at the very time when the social sciences are vigorously debating
such issues as post-structuralism, post-modernism, and de-construction
linguistics appears to be making a reactionary turn in the direction of for­
mal abstract models, and there is no better perspective than that of the study
of change from which to challenge this turn.
 STRUCTURALISM AND DIACHRONY 303

GRAPH 1: Frequency of NP's with a(n) measured in terms of average no.

of words needed to obtain 50 examples.

GRAPH 2: %-age of Isolated Indef. NP's with a(n).

304 PAUL HOPPER / JANICE MARTIN

GRAPH 3: %-age of Indef. NP's with a(n) in Topic Position

GRAPH 4: Average Persistence of NP's with a(n).

 ON METHODOLOGY IN SYNTACTIC RECONSTRUCTION:
RECONSTRUCTING INTER-CLAUSE SYNTAX IN PREHISTORIC
INDO-EUROPEAN.
ROBERT J. JEFFERS
Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey

0. In this paper I have two principal goals, one particular and a se­
cond more general. In the particular, I propose to review selected facts about
inter-clause syntax (INTCL) in the ancient Indo-European (IE) text
languages; my purpose is to demonstrate how an analysis of those facts,
undertaken without certain preconceptions, might inform our hypotheses
about the nature of INTCL in the parent language, especially if pursued
in the context of our more general knowledge about devices available to
languages to mark structural and semantic relationships between clauses.
More generally, I will be using these necessarily selected comments on INTCL
in Indo-European to highlight what seems to me, at least, to be certain fun­
damental misdirections in traditional and more contemporary scholarship
on syntactic reconstruction (SR).
1.1 Before proceeding, I should define certain terms that I will be us­
ing here. INTCL refers to those structural devices of grammar that mark
an intimate semantic relationship between/among clauses (actually, proposi­
tions), such that the underlying propositions so linked function in surface
structure as constituents of a syntactic construction larger than the clause,
and such that the correct semantic interpretation of each constituent pro­
position is incomplete or unrecoverable without reference to the other(s).
In cases of INTCL, one or all of the constituent propositions may not be
manifested as full clauses in surface structure.
I have found it advantageous to work with the relatively neutral no­
tion INTCL in other contexts 1 , and I use the term advisedly in the present
discussion. It is my intention here - to the degree possible - to avoid evoking

1 See Jeffers 1986a which reports on one component of a comprehensive typological

study of INTCL in the languages of the world.
306 ROBERT J. JEFFERS

for early Indo-European, and especially for prehistoric Indo-European (pIE),

the preconceived notions generated by more familiar and traditional descrip­
tive labels, like «subordinate clause» and «subordination».
I agree with the conclusion reached in Haiman and Thompson (H&T)
1984, that «subordination», as a notion to be identified with some well-
defined, universal category of grammar (the subordinate clause), is at once
overly general and too narrow. After surveying its various uses and defini­
tions in the literature, H & T conclude that «subordination» is a somewhat
ill-defined, intuitive notion which 'seems to be at best a negative term which
lumps together all deviations from some «main clause» norm' (510).
However, though often treated as a primitive of syntactic structure, the
criteria used to identify particular subordinate clause types are frequently
language specific - an inconsistency presenting obvious problems for any
attempt to reconstruct subordinate clauses for a prehistoric language.
1.2 A second term that I will be using in this discussion is «incorpo­
ration», more specifically «grammatically signalled incorporation» (GSI).
In the same 1984 paper, H & T define this surface structure phenomenon
as «a relationship between a pair of adjacent clauses such that one can be
shown to be a part of the other by grammatical criteria» (513), and they
offer two typical criteria for GSI: «1) one clause can be contained within
the other, that is, surrounded by material from the other, and 2) one clause
can bear grammatical morphology which marks it as being a constituent
of the other».
2.0 I stated at the outset that I would review certain facts about INTCL
in the ancient IE text languages in the context of a critique of certain
methodological assumptions commonly seen in work on SR (in Indo-
European). Three issues concern me here, and sections 2.1-2.3 comprise a
brief discussion of each.
2.1.1 There has long been a tendency among investigators of early
IE syntax to pose questions, the substance of which is anchored to the par­
ticular surface structures that are typical of the extant IE languages. Such
questions are typically framed as follows:
a) If some construct/construction (say, «x») occurs in the extant
languages, the question is posed - «Did x exist in the parent language?» For
example, «Did pIE have a relative pronoun?» or;
b) If more than one alternative contruct/construction (say, «x» and
«y») have the same or similar functions in sets of related languages, the ques-
 METHODOLOGY IN SYNTACTIC RECONSTRUCTION 307

tion is posed - «Which of the alternatives, χ or y, is to be reconstructed for

the parent language?» For example, «Which of the most likely candidates,
*yo- or *kuo-, is to be reconstructed as a relative marker for pIE?» or;
c) If the meaning/function of an apparently reconstructible entity is
opaque, the debate over its semantic value in the parent language is often
limited to a choice among categories typical of the extant languages. For
example, the century-long investigation into the original function/meaning
of the IE morpheme *yo has produced a substantial literature comprised
largely of attempts to adduce evidence for hypotheses about the origin of
*yo as either a relative, demonstrative or anaphoric pronoun; (but, see Gonda
1954a).
It should be noted here that the tendency to bring predispositions of
this sort to investigations of linguistic prehistory, especially in IE studies,
is not restricted to work in historical syntax. The practice of «choosing from
among the alternatives» has been institutionalized as an actual step in the
comparative method in a number of historical linguistic texts, where students
are frequently taught to posit a phonetic representation for some phoneme
of the parent language using criteria that restrict them to a selection from
among the reflexes of that phoneme. Although such a procedure may have
pedagogical value for reinforcing notions of directionality in sound change,
as a methodological principle, it is certainly oversimplistic. In fact, recent
developments in IE phonology are particularly instructive on this point, as
some of the most encouraging work of the last decade in the area has been
generated by hypotheses that attribute to prehistoric Indo-European an
obstruent system that, though natural and well represented among the
world's languages, is nowhere attested in the IE language family, (i.e., «the
glottalic theory» associated with T. Gamkrelidze, P. Hopper, and V. Ivanov).
2.1.2 More to the point of the present discussion, however, is the
fact that the traditional approach to the study of early IE syntactic struc­
ture in general, and of INTCL in particular, has been characterized (with
the notable exceptions)2 by a search for answers to questions of the sort

2 Gonda 1954a is a striking exception. Unfortunately, he concentrated primarily on situa­

tions in which yo occurs as the stem in a relative word, and he assumed that yo must represent
some sort of pronominal stem. However, his broad acquaintance with non-IE languages and
an open-minded attitude toward the possible meaning of «syntactic forms» made it possible
for him to entertain possible functional interpretations for yo which are not otherwise en­
countered in the literature. It is surprising that Gonda's work on yo (together with a compa­
nion piece on *kui/kuo-, Gonda 1954b) has not exerted greater influence on work on IE INTCL.
308 ROBERT J. JEFFERS

exemplified in 2.1.1. In fact, it would be only a slight exaggeration to describe

the history of the study of pIE INTCL as a series of attempts to answer
the famous question «Gab es im Indogermanischen Nebensätze?».
That question, posed originally by Hermann Paul, is the title of a 1895
article by Edward Hermann (H) which was to serve as the starting point
for discussions of INTCL in early Indo-European for decades. There is much
to comment on in H's monograph, but the feature of his work most rele­
vant to this discussion is his methodology for reconstruction. H draws up
a list of the various types of markers of subordination, «Kennzeichen der
Nebensätze» (485), that occur in IE languages, and attempts to determine
for each whether there is comparative evidence to support its reconstruc­
tion for prehistoric Indo-European. H concludes that the facts offer no
grounds for the reconstruction of morphological or lexical markers of subor­
dination 3 , a conclusion supported in large part by many of the most
distinguished Indo-Europeanists of the mid-20th century 4 .
It is important to recognize that a profoundly important corollary was
assumed to follow from the conclusion that morpho-syntactic markers of
subordination are not reconstructible for the parent language - that corollary
being that early IE syntactic structure was characterized by an almost ab­
solute version of parataxis. If the grammar of pre-historic Indo-European
cannot be shown to include subordinate constructions of the sort that oc­
cur typically in extant IE languages, then - the argument goes - pIE gram­
mar must have been destitute of formal devices that mark syntactico-semantic
relationships between clauses.
Delbrück, in fact, asserts in a frequently quoted statement in his
Vergleichende Syntax (1900: 412) that «there was once a time in which only
principal clauses (Hauptsätze) existed». However, the very notion «prin­
cipal/main clause», has meaning only with reference to some correspon-

3 Hermann admits the possibility that subordinate clause marking by means of accent
is reconstructible for pIE.
4 Lehmann 1980 calls particular attention to Bonfante 1930 and Meillet 1937. Meillet
and others have, however, consistently pointed out that there is substantial evidence for the
reconstruction of a class of verbal-nouns (? infinitives) and verbal-adjectives (participles); the
reconstruction of such forms in prehistoric Indo-European would of course demand the positing
of reduced incorporated clauses (GSI, Type 2). For the purposes of the present discussion,
I will be concerned only with underlying propositions which maintain their integrity as full
clauses in surface structure. For discussions of IE non-finite verbals, see Jeffers 1975, 1976c,
1979, 1984.
 METHODOLOGY IN SYNTACTIC RECONSTRUCTION 309

ding and particular notion of «non-principal clause»; though treated as

universally applicable categories by Delbrück and his successors, references
to these complementary notions clearly reflect an acquaintance with par­
ticular grammars (the grammars of the IE text languages) that were seen
to manifest, though sometimes incorrectly (see section 3 and 4, below), a
particular structural dichotomy between so-called Haupt- and Nebensätze5.
We know now, however, as a consequence of much broader experience
with the languages of the world, that inter-clausal relationships are of many
types; moreover, we know that languages call on a great variety of devices
to mark those relationships, some of which are quite distinct from those
to which we've become accustomed if our paradigm is the IE language family
(see, e.g., Downing 1978; Hale 1976).
2.1.3 A new approach to SR, frequently referred to as the typological
method (TM), has received a great deal of attention in the last decade,
especially among Indo-Europeanists. Some proponents of this method (e.g.
Lehmann 1974, 1980; Justus 1980), are consciously open to positing, for
prehistoric Indo-European, syntactic structures which are substantially dif­
ferent from those typically found in the extant languages. But despite the
sense of open-mindedness about the character of early IE syntactic struc­
tures in typologically based work on reconstruction, certain fundamental
predispositions of the last century remain.
Consider, for example, the following remarks from Lehmann (L) 1980.
«We cannot agree (i.e. with Delbrück 1900) that there was a primitive stage
in the development of language when humans knew only simple clauses,
that is, no subordination». (There's that ill-defined word again). «Such a
view lacks credibility, certainly in a period as late as the Proto-Indo-European
community (116)». For L, it follows that, if early IE cannot be shown to
have had a system of subordination of a sort present in the IE languages,
it must have had an alternative system for subordinating clauses. At the
outset, he ensures that his hyphotheses about the character of early IE INTCL
will be constrained by certain particular notions of principal versus subor­
dinate clause that he brings to his investigations.

5 Indeed, the particular parameters which might be selected to define subordina­

tion/dependency in syntax would determine, albeit arbitrarily, where parataxis ends and
hypotaxis begins. However, I doubt that these are in fact proper notions of grammar at all.
See, on the other hand, the references in section 4 to the cross-linguistic embedding-adjoining
continuum.
310 ROBERT J. JEFFERS

This constraint is further compounded by other (but related) artificial

constraints imposed by TM, and it is the intrusion of such constraints into
the process of SR that is the second methodological issue that I want to raise
here 6 .
2.2.1 In typologically based discussions of early IE multi-clause con­
structions, researchers have directed most of their attention to «the relative
clause» (REL). This is apparently a consequence of the fact that there ex­
ists, at least ideally, a correlation between «Object/Verb» (O/V) order and
«REL Modifier/Head Noun» (REL/N) order. If it can be demonstrated,
the argument goes, that early IE grammar had REL + N constructions of
the type typical of rigid OV languages, like Japanese (see i., below), this
would support the hypothesis that prehistoric Indo-European was a OV
language.
i. Kore wa John ga kaita hon da.
This (the) John-wrote-book is (lit.)
This is the book that John wrote.
(after Kuno 1973: 254 via Lehmann 1980: 124)
2.2.2 Unfortunately, the use of TM as a framework for the reconstruc­
tion of prehistoric syntax introduces into the process a new set of typological­
ly based predispositions, as questions about the parent language come to
be framed in terms of typologically based implicational relationships, which
may or may not be relevant in the particular case. For the proponents of
TM, questions like the following serve as a guide to work in SR: «Is there
evidence in the extant languages for REL + N, as opposed to N + REL?»
As a consequence of the preoccupation with constructing a typological argu­
ment, the options for early IE grammar are reduced to one of these two
possibilities. This clearly represents a misguided approach to SR, reflecting
an apparent disregard for 1) the fact that (incorporated) adnominal relative
clauses are, by no means, absolute universais of language for the marking
of coreference in related clauses, and 2) the textual record (to which I shall
refer in section 3), which evidences the fact that neither adnominal relatives,
in particular, nor Type 1 GSI (1.1), in general, are structural properties of
the oldest varieties of the ancient IE text languages.

6 There is ample literature, both critical and supportive on other aspects of the
typological method in syntactic reconstruction, and there is no need to rehearse that discus­
sion here; see, however, Jeffers 1976a, 1976b; Lightfoot 1979, 3.3.
 METHODOLOGY IN SYNTACTIC RECONSTRUCTION 311

2.3.1 The third problematic feature of work on SR to which I want

to call attention here is the common failure of historical linguists working
on the subject to make clear the goals of the enterprise. This failing has
occasionally led thoughtful scholars (e.g., Lightfoot 1980; Winter 1985) to
summary (but, I believe, misguided) dismissals of SR as a useful endeavor.
I think that conclusions of this sort result, at least in part, because work
in historical syntax often leaves the mistaken impression that the actual/only
goal of SR is the construction of a complete grammar of some sort for a
parent language - either in the form of a set of fully specified rules or a
set of fully elaborated surface structures (sentence types). To set such a goal
for SR would be misguided, as its achievement is obviously impossible.
Unfortunately, historical linguists often fail to attend to and to call at­
tention to the fact that - if I may paraphrase Watkins (1969: Prolegomena)
- reconstructing back to proximate forms is not the only technique of
reconstruction, nor of historical linguistic analysis... solutions lie not only
in simple lineal reconstruction, but in discovering the workings of prehistoric
structural transformations which have reshaped the formal and functional
alignment of categories.
2.3.2 In this vein, I would claim, for example, that it is an appropriate
initial goal for scholars interested in early IE INTCL to adduce evidence
to support a hypothesis about its general structural features, i.e., about the
particular type of INTCL system - from among those we know to occur
in the world's languages - which is most likely represented in pIE grammar.
Such a «reconstruction» could then serve as a framework from which to
proceed to a recovery of the sorts of morpho-syntactic and syntactico-
semantic reanalyses and restructurings which might make comprehensible
- from an etymological point of view - the various and varied INTCL systems
which are manifested in the extant IE languages.
In order to avoid some of the methodological pitfalls that I have detailed
in the previous sections, it seems advisable to pose questions which are
«structure-neutral» to serve as guides in our investigations of prehistoric
syntactic structure. Instead of seeking cross-linguistic evidence for the
presence in the parent language of some particular, preconceived construct
or construction type, as a first step, we must undertake unconstrained surveys
of relevant structural facts to achieve insights about the overall
nature/character of a prehistoric syntactic system (or of some component
of that system). In the remaining sections of this paper, I will briefly ad-
312 ROBERT J. JEFFERS

dress one such question (in an admittedly abbreviated fashion) 7 , as an ex­

ercise suggesting the sort of program for SR that I am recommending here.
3.0 The question I propose to address is the following: «What can
we learn about the general character of INTCL in early Indo-European from
a careful, unbiased analysis of the syntax and semantics of the ubiquitous
morpheme *yo in its multiple manifestations in the various IE text
languages?» I am, of course, not suggesting that this morpheme and the
forms for which it serves as a stem/base have escaped the serious attention
of IE scholarship. On the contrary, the literature relating to this form is
voluminous. My point is, rather, that certain conclusions reached in these
studies may be less than solid, because the investigations which led to the
conclusions suffer from constraints imposed by flaws in methodology of
the types described in section 1.
3.1.1 If we first consider Anatolian, we find a probable reflex of the
IE morpheme *yo in the Hittite clitic particle -ia. The particle -ia (which
has secondarily come to alternate under phonetic conditions with
etymologically distinct -a < *e-/-e) 8 has been termed, among other things,
a coordinating conjunction and a sentence connective. The clitic -ia has been
identified as cognate with the pre-Celtic relative particle 9 , and it has been
claimed (Watkins 1963:16) that -ia is «related to» the IE relative stem *yo-
«in exactly the same way» as the IE clitic -kue is related to the relative/in­
definite stem, kuo-.

3.1.2 Hittite offers four categories of forms which mark a relation­

ship between or among clauses: lexicalized conjuntions; relative words; ge-

7 A more comprehensive discussion of INTCL in early Indo-European, including struc­

tures characterized by the ku-forms and by non-finite verbals, will appear in Jeffers 1986b.
8 Watkins (1963:16) claims that the Hitt. alternant -a (in -ia/-a) is to be identified with
the clitic variant of the Luwian sentence connective a-/-a (< *e-/-e). It has been pointed out
to me by . Carruba, however, that there is a flaw in this proposed correspondence, because
Hitt. a generally reflects IE *a or *o, not *e. The argument presented here, however, concern­
ing Hitt. -ia is not dependent on the correctness of any particular hypothesis concerning the
etymology of the alternant -a. For additional discussion of the Hitt. sentence connective -(i)a,
see J. Puhvel, Hittite Etymological Dictionary, Amsterdam, Mouton 1984, 7-10.
9 Clause intial, leniting relative verbs of Old Irish, such as 3pl. pres. bertae «which they
carry» are derived from *bheronti-yo; also, the lenition in prefixed relative verbs reflects the
etymological presence of *yo, i.e., no-chanaim «Which I sing» < *no-yo-kanami. (See Wat­
kins 1963).
 METHODOLOGY IN SYNTACTIC RECONSTRUCTION 313

nuine sentence connectives10; and clitic particles, principally -(i)a and -ma
«or». I have discussed the functions of the lexicalized conjunctions elsewhere
(Jeffers 1976c). Let it suffice to say here, that these forms announce aspec­
tual and adverbial relationships between their own and subsequent clauses
according to principles which have no obvious correspondence in general
IE 11 . Hittite relative words are based on the IE ku-stem, which I am ex­
cluding for the sake of simplicity from the present exemplary discussion (see,
however, Jeffers 1986b). Most important to this brief survey of the reflexes
of IE *yo, however, are the sentence connectives and clitics.
3.1.3 Some scholars, notably Watkins (1963), assume that -ia is
originally a member of the same category of forms that produced Anatolian
sentence connectives; I have argued elsewhere however (Jeffers and Pepicello
1979), that -ia is to be distinguished from the class of pIE sentence connec­
tives. An analysis of Hittite discourse features demonstrates that synchronic
-ia/a is functionally distinct from Anatolian (and by inference early IE)
sentence connectives like Hittite nu-12.
A genuine sentence connective, like nu-, serves to move the discourse
forward, and is appropriately translated «and then»; consider ii. and iii.
A sequence of three or more «nu-clauses» is commonplace.
ii. tak-ku ÌR URU Ha-at-ti IŠ-TU KUR URU Lu-ú-i-ya-az LÚ
URU
Ha-at-ti ku-iš-ki da-a-i-iz-zi na-an A.NA KUR
URU
Ha-at-ti ú-wa-te-iz-zi ...
If any Hittite man steals a Hittite slave from the country of Luwiyas, and
then brings him to the country of Hatti... (Laws I § 20)
iii. ták-ku DUMU.SAL-aš LÚ-ni ha-me-in-kán-za nu-uš-ši ku-u-ša-ta
píd-da-iz-zi ap-pí-iz-zi-na-at at-ta-aš an-na-aš hu-ul-la-
an-zi na-an-kán LÚ-ni tuh-ša-an-zi ku-u-ša-ta-ma 2-ŠU
šar-ni-in-kán-zi.
If a girl is betrothed to a man, and he pays the bride-price for her, and after-

10 The genuine sentence connectives include *no-, *so-, *to-, and *e-, reflected in Hitt.
nu-, šu-, ta-, and Luv. a, respectively.
11 takku (later, man) marks a conditional relationship; mán (later, mahhan), perfective;
kuitman, simultaneous/durative; kuit, causal; kuwappi, simple temporal (whenever).
12 In terms of distribution, sequences of sentence connective plus clitic are not uncom­
mon, a pattern that would be inexplicably redundant if the forms did not serve different func­
tions.
314 ROBERT J. JEFFERS

wards (her) father (and) mother violate it (i.e., the marriage contract), and
then take her away from the man, they return the bride-price in double the
amount. (Laws I § 29)

On the other hand, Hittite -ia (and its alternant -a) generally connects two
clauses in which the described actions or states are intimately connected in
time and space (i.e., where the two clauses describe two components of a
single situation), or where the connected clauses refer to parallel notions.
Consider iv. and v. (See also Friedrich 1959: 116).
iv. ták-ku LÚ DAM.GÀR URU Ha-at-ti ku-iš-ki ku-en-zi I ME
MA.NA KÙ.BABBAR pa-a-i pár-na-aš-še-e-a šu-wa-a-iz-zi.
If anyone kills a Hittite merchant, he pays one and a half pounds of silver
and gives his farm buildings in security. (Laws I § 5)
v. ma-a-na-aš SIG-at-ta-ri-ma nu-uš-ši 6 GÍN KU.BABBAR
pa-a-i LÚ A.ZU-ia ku-uš-ša-an a-pa-a-aš-pat pa-a-i.
When he 1 gets well, he 2 pays him six shekels of silver, and then he 2 pays
the physician his fee (Laws I § 10)

According to this analysis, then, Hitt. -ia marks a relationship between two
clauses which must be interpreted, structurally and semantically, as consti­
tuents of a single syntactic construction.
In the context of this interpretation of Hitt. -ia, let us turn to a review
of some of the syntactic and semantic properties of the more well-established
reflexes of *yo to determine if there exists evidence of any structural and/or
functional correlation between these reflexes and their alleged Hittite cognate.
The form yo occurs most commonly as the stem/base for relative adjec­
tives and pronouns, and for the so-called «relative conjunctions» of Indo-
Iranian and Greek 13. The «relative conjunctions» are complex, lexicalized
forms comprising yo plus one or more additional (probably adverbial) par­
ticles, e.g., Skt. yathā (ya- < *yo-); Gk. ophra (o- < ho- < *yo-).
3.2.1 A review of a representative sample of situations in which a yo
form plays some role in marking a relationship between two clauses

13 Even when the actual term «relative conjuction» is not used, the assumption that these
lexicalized forms reflect an extension in the use of the relative stem/theme is standard. See,
e.g., Monteil 1963: 76-79, et infra.
 METHODOLOGY IN SYNTACTIC RECONSTRUCTION 315

demonstrates that each of the clauses maintains its internal structural in­
tegrity and its surface structure autonomy, (i.e., neither of the clauses «is
surrounded by material from the other»). (The examples given in vi.-xiii.
comprise such a sample. The particular sentences given in these items were
also chosen to exemplify other points that I will be making in the remainder
of this paper, and I will refer to them throughout).

vi. a. sόma yã ś te mayobhúva ūtáyah sānti dāśúse/

Soma, which of you delightful aids are for worshipper

tā ́bhir no 'vita bhava (RV 1.91.9)

with these to us helper be

b. phulakàs d' has eíreai hē ́ ros/ oú tis

guards which you ask, hero/ not one

kekriménē rhúetai stratòn oudè phulássei (I1.10.416-7)

being chosen protects camp nor guards

Compare

 Naucratem quem invenire volui, in navi non 0 erat

N. which to meet I wanted, on ship not he was
(Plautus. Amph 1009)

d. nu = mu kuiš DINGIR-YA inan pais, nu = mu gienzu [daú]

me which god-my illness gave (on)me pity take
(KUB XXX 10 rev. 3)
(vi.a.-d. collected from Holland 1984)

vii. a. yárn bhadréna savasã codáyāsi prajā ́vata rādhasā/

whom w/blessed w/might you quicken w/children w/wealth

té syāma (RV 1.94.15)

they may we be

b. yó no dvésty/ ádharah sas padîsta/ yám u dvismás/

who us hates downward he fall whom we hate
316 ROBERT J. JEFFERS

tám u pranó jahatu (RV 3. 53.21)

him breath abandon
(for Greek, see Minard 1963).

viii. a. tat savitúr várenyam bhárgo devásya dhīmahi/

that of S. desirable glory of god we attain

dhíyo yó nah pracodáyāt (RV 3. 62.10)

thoughts our stimulate
«May we attain that desirable glory of the god S.,
which (so that it) may stimulate our thoughts».

b. prati tvá duhitar diva úśo jīrā abhutsmahi/

you daughter of heaven invoke we awoke

yā váhasi ... (RV 7.81.3)

who bring ...
«We awoke to invoke you, who (so that you) bring ...».

Compare Latin

. Verum certum est confidenter hominem contra conloqui,

I am resolved to speak up to the man boldly,

qui possim videri huic fortis, a me ut abstineat manum

who (so that) I'm able to seem strong to him,
and so that he'll leave his hands off me.
(Plautus. Amph 339)

ix. a. sadyás cid yáh sahásrāni śatā dádan

someone who thousand 100 gives

nákir dítsantam ā minat

noone the-one wanting-to-give (would) restrain

b. yá udŕcīndra devágopāh/
if brilliant-I. poss. the gods as guardian (we are)

sákhāyas te sivátamā ásāma (RV. 1.53.11)

 METHODOLOGY IN SYNTACTIC RECONSTRUCTION 317

friends your most prosperous we be

x. a. indrägni yuvam S11 nal). sahantä dasatho rayiml
I.&A. you surely us mighty will give wealth

yena ................ sähislmal).i (RV 8.40.1)

so thatlwhereby we may overcome

b. indram naro nemadhitä havantel

Indra men in contest call on

yat paryä yunajate dhiyas tal). (RV 7.27,1)

so that decisive he may yoke prayers these

xi. a. sa yad vartamänal). samabhavatl tasmäd vl,"tral). (SB 1.6.3.9)

because twisting he was born from that V. (he is called)

b. acitn yat tava dharma yuyopimal

unknowing because your law we have disturbed

ma nas tasmad enaso deva rlri~al). (RV 7.89.5)

not us from that from sin god you harm
«00 not harm us because of that sin, because unknowing(ly)
we disturbed your law».

c. yad agne divija asy apsuja vä sahaskl,"täl

if A. heaven-born you are water-born or strength-made

tarn tva giribhir havamahe (RV 8.43.28)

that-you w/songs we invoke

XlI. a. gl,"hän gachal gl,"hapatnl yatha asal). (RV 10.85.26)

house go mistress so that you may be

b. Trösin eph' hippodamois ithynomen ophra kai Hektör

eisetai ... (11. 8.11 0)
«We shall drive them against the Trojans so that H knows ... ».

X111. a. gl,"ne tad indra te sava upamam devatätayel

I praise this Indra your prowess highest for gods
318 ROBERT J. JEFFERS

yád dhámsi vrtrám ojasā (RV 8.62.8)

that you strike V. w/might

b. leússete gàr tò pántes, hó moi géras érkhetai allei

you see this all that my prize goes elsewhere (I1.1.120)

It seems reasonable to assume, then, on the basis of evidence from the

oldest attested IE text languages, that Typel GSI (1.1) is not à feature of
early IE INTCL - at least in cases where a reflex of *yo serves to mark some
inter-clausal relationship. Sentences like xiii.a. and b., which presage the
development of predicate complements, are particularly instructive with
respect to this phenomenon. Note that the object demonstratives in the first
clause of each sentence (Skt. tad; Gk. to) refer explicitly to the unincor­
porated complement clauses that follow. It is perhaps significant and wor­
thy of note at this point that this characteristic of *yo (i.e., that it marks
a linkage between two intimately related, but structurally unincorporated
clauses) corresponds to facts about Hitt. -ia discussed in 3.1.3.
The examples given in vi. and vii. also deserve special attention here.
Although the two clauses in each sentence share a coreferential noun, unlike
the adnominal relatives of modern European languages, or of Japanese for
that matter (recalli.), a relative (modifier) clause is not «incorporated» in­
to a main clause containing its head. The related clauses are, in fact, in­
terdependent, and it is probably inaccurate to characterize one clause as main
and the other as subordinate. As Gary Holland (1984) has correctly pointed
out in a recent discussion of IE relative constructions, the inflected *yo forms
in these very typical sentences of the ancient IE text languages function as
topicalizers, announcing that a particular noun will be a predicate in the
next clause 14.
3.2.2 There is another grammatical context in which inflected forms
of *yo are found to occur. Indo-Iranian and Greek offer examples of so-
called relative clauses of purpose, result and condition. In these clearly ar­
chaic constructions, adverbial clauses show inflected (i.e., pronominal/ad­
jectival) forms of *yo, where adverbial conjunctions (the «relative conjunc-

14 The character of this syntactic pattern has, of course, been noted by earlier scholars,
but it has been attributed, for example, to the style and purpose of the texts that have come
down to us; see, e.g., Minard 1953: 2-3.
 METHODOLOGY IN SYNTACTIC RECONSTRUCTION 319

tions») are typical and, at least in the later classical versions of those dialects,
standard (see xii.). Examples of relative clauses of purpose and condition
are given in viii. and ix., respectively. (Compare the corresponding
and similarly archaic Latin relative clause of purpose with pronominal qui,
viii. c).
I have suggested elsewhere (Jeffers & Pepicello 1979), - a claim reiterated
in Holland 1984 in a slightly different context - that the contemporary oc­
currence of these two types of adverbial clause - those characterized by *yo-
based conjunctions and others with inflected *yo-forms - is probably best
understood as a consequence of the fact that a coreferential noun may or
may not be present in pairs of connected clauses whose relationship is one
of purpose, result or condition.
It is significant that whenever an adverbial clause is marked by a
stereotyped case form like Skt. yad (xi.) or yena (x.a.), or by a complex,
lexicalized *yo-based conjunction like Skt. yathā (xii.a.), the constituent *yo
simply marks the presence of some close, but undifferentiated interclausal
relationship (again cf. Hitt. -ia). If a complex *yo-based conjunction is the
marker of INTCL, the morphological entity attached to *yo- serves to refine
the semantic character of the particular relationship; the INTCL relation­
ship may also be specified by means of a case marking (e.g., yena; x.a.);
but in the very common situation where *yod (Skt. yad) indicates a rela­
tionship between two clauses, the nature of that relationship is determined
solely by context and, to some degree, by the relative order of the clauses
involved (see ..1., below)15. On the other hand, the occurrence in adver­
bial clauses of an inflected form of *yo makes possible the marking of focus
in situations where a corefential noun is, in fact, involved in the bi-clausal
construction. (See also Pepicello 1978).
3.2.3 The facts discussed in 3.2.2 highlight certain problems with
attributing the notion «relative» to the full range of *yo-based forms
associated with INTCL in the ancient IE text languages. If the term «relative»
refers to corefentiality, its use with reference to complex, *yo-based lexical
conjunctions is clearly inappropriate, as the forms comprising this category
typically serve as markers of INTCL in constructions where no coreferen-

15 Sentences like x.a. are probably transformations of topicalizing constructions (yenā

rayinã ... tenā, «and by (which) wealth ... by that») of the sort in vi., developed on the pattern
of yad result clauses.
320 ROBERT J. JEFFERS

tial noun is involved. It is surely the case that the term has come to be used
with reference to such forms because of the presence in them of the consti­
tuent *yo. The early texts, however, offer little evidence to support an
etymological interpretation (relative) for the form *yo. It is only in cases
where an inflected form of *yo occurs that coreference is a factor in the
inter-clausal relationship; moreover, the semantic information relevant to
coreference in those situations is carried by the case affixes whose «attach­
ment» to *yo may well reflect some secondary reanalysis/restructuring, the
details of which remain obscure 16. The one property common to all oc­
currences of *yo considered here is that it marks the relationship between
clauses which must be interpreted as constituents of a larger syntactic con­
struction.
3.3.1 I have already briefly mentioned the role of relative clause order
with reference to the interpretation of certain adverbial clauses (3.2.2). It
is in fact the case that the order of any two linked clauses, in which a yo-
form serves as the marker of INTCL, is always determined by semantic con­
siderations which are transparently pragmatic/iconic. yo-clauses which refer
to topics, conditions or causes come first (see vi., vii., ix. and xi.); those
which express purpose or consequence not surprisingly come second (viii.,
x., xii.). This is the case whether *yo appears as an inflected form, as the
base constituent in a complex, lexicalized conjunction, or in the stereotyped
*yod.
4.1 In light of these facts about the syntax and semantics of *yo, let
us return to the «structure-neutral» question I posed in section 3.0, and see
if some tentative response might be constructed at this point. We might begin
by considering the facts detailed in sections 3.1 -3.3 in terms of the embedding-
adjoining continuum for INTCL in the world's languages 17.
On the basis of the restricted situations reviewed here, we might sug­
gest tentatively that constructs/morphemes, including at least the form *yo,
served as generalized markers of a close semantic relationship between clauses
comprising some larger syntactic construction in prehistoric Indo-European;
pairs of clauses linked by *yo, however, always retain structural autonomy
even when they share a coreferential noun phrase. The term «adjoining»,

16 The claim in Jeffers and Pepicello 1979 concerning the origin of IE relative pronouns
was premature.
17 I owe the term/notion «embedding-adjoining continuum» to Suzanne Romaine (1985).
 METHODOLOGY IN SYNTACTIC RECONSTRUCTION 321

is increasingly used to refer to inter-clausal relationships of this sort 18 . It

is important to emphasize that it is not to be interpreted as an argument
supporting the parataxis analysis for pIE syntax to suggest that the incor­
poration of surface structure clauses (marked by *yo) is not a property of
pIE grammar. Adjoined clauses are not independent clauses; INTCL in ad­
joining languages/structures is manifested by the occurrence of specific
markers (such as pIE *yo, according to this analysis) operating in conjunc­
tion with the general anaphoric properties of the language 19.
4.2 Moreover, the evidence (at least that of the *yo-constructions con­
sidered here) also supports a claim that the order of clauses in multi-clause
constructions in early Indo-European typically reflects purely iconic/pragma­
tic factors. Clause order is hence unlikely to correlate with other word-order
properties which might be used to argue for a particular word-order type
for pIE syntax.
4.3 If a hypothesis which attributes to prehistoric Indo-European
features of INTCL of the types just outlined is on the right track, it seems
clear that certain controversial issues of the last decade and last century con­
cerning pIE INTCL might simply not be relevant.
5. Finally, I cannot conclude without reference to the fact that many
sociolinguists now claim that oral-code linguistic systems tend to favor
systems of INTCL at the adjoining end of the embedding-adjoining con­
tinuum. If such claims prove to be valid, students of prehistoric (read,
«preliterate») syntax will surely have to take heed, and hypotheses of the
sort suggested here will demand attention on grounds more general than
those concerned with formal accounts of the comparative facts.

18 The similarities to Australian are striking. Consider these examples from Walbiri (Hale
1976) in which the form kutja- (prefixed to AUX) marks the interclausal relationship. Con­
struction 14a includes a coreferential noun phrase; 14b does not.
a. yankiri-Įi kutja-lpa ŋapa ŋa-nu ŋatjulu-lu ø-na pantu-nu.
emu-ERG COMP-AUX water drink-Past I-ERG AUX spear-Past
«The emu which was drinking water, (and) I speared it».
«While the emu was drinking water I speared it».
b. rjatjulu-lu lpa-na kali tjantu-nu, kutja-0-npa ya-nu-nu njuntu.
I-ERG AUX boomerang trim-Past COMP-AUX walk-P-hither you
«I was trimming a boomerang when you came up».
19 This hypothesis is not inconsistent with facts relating to the occurrence of yo in its
function as a genitive case marker; see Gonda 1954a.
322 ROBERT J. JEFFERS

REFERENCES

Delbrück, Berthold. 1900. Vergleichende Syntax der indogermanischen

Sprachen III. Strassburg: Trübner.
Downing, Bruce T. 1978. Some universais of relative clause structure. Univer­
sals of human language, 4: Syntax, ed. by Joseph Greenberg, 375-419.
Stanford: University of Stanford Press.
Friedrich, Johannes. 1959. Die hethitischen Gesetze. Leiden: E.J. Brill.
Gonda, Jan. 1954a. The original character of the Indo-European pronoun
io-. Lingua 4.1-41.
- — . 1954b. Notes on the I-Ε kui- & kuo- pronouns. Lingua 4.241-75.
Haiman, John A. and Sandra A. Thompson. 1984. «Subordination» in
Universal Grammar. Proceedings of the Tenth Annual Meeting of the
Berkeley Linguistic Society, ed. by Claudia Brugman et al., 510-23.
Berkeley Linguistic Society: Berkeley.
Hale, Kenneth. 1976. The adjoined relative clause in Australia. Grammatical
categories in Australian languages, ed. by R.M.W. Dixon 78-105.
Linguistic series 22, Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies.
Hermann, Eduard. 1985. Gab es im Indogermanischen Nebensätze? KZ
33.481-534.
Holland, Gary. 1984. Subordination and relativization in early Indo-
European. Proceedings of the Tenth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley
Linguistic Society, ibid., 609-622.
Jeffers, Robert J. 1975. Remarks on Indo-European infinitives. Lg.
51.133-48.
——. 1976a. Review of Proto-Indo-European Syntax, by Winfred P.
Lehmann. Lg. 52.982-88.
. 1976b. Syntactic change and syntactic reconstruction. Current Pro­
gress in Historical Linguistics, ed. by W.J. Christie, 1-10. Amsterdam:
North Holland.
-----. 1976c. Hittite Conjunctions. KZ 90. 152-65.
. and William J. Pepicello. 1979. The expression of purpose in Indo-
European. IF 84. 1-16.
. and Robert Kantor. 1984. A history of the Sanskrit gerund. IF 89.
89-103.
. 1986a. The morphology of complement clause verbs in verb-peripheral
languages. To appear.
 METHODOLOGY IN SYNTACTIC RECONSTRUCTION 323

. 1986b. Inter-clause syntax in prehistoric Indo-European. In prepara­

tion.
Justus, Carol F. 1980. Typological symmetries and assymetries in Hittite
and IE complementation. Linguistic Reconstruction and Indo-European
Syntax ( = Amsterdam Studies in the Theory and History of Linguistic
Science IV, Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 19), ed. by Paolo Ramat,
183-206. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Lehmann, Winfred P. 1974. Proto-Indo-European Syntax. Austin and Lon­
don: University of Texas Press
. 1980. The reconstruction of non-simple sentences in Proto-Indo-
European. Linguistic Reconstruction and Indo-European Syntax, ibid.,
113-44.
Lightfoot, David L. 1979. Principles of Diachronic Syntax. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
. 1980. On reconstructing a proto-syntax. Linguistic Reconstruction and
Indo-European Syntax, ibid., 27-46.
Meillet, Antoine. 1937. Introduction à l'étude comparative des langues indo­
européennes. 8th ed. Paris: Hachette.
Minard, Armand. 1953. La subordination dans la prose védique. Annales
de l'Université de Lyon III, 3.
Monteil, Pierre. 1963. La phrase relative en grec ancien. Etudes et Com­
mentaires 47. Paris: Klincksieck.
Romaine, Suzanne. 1985. Towards a typology of relative clause formation
strategies in Germanic. Historical Syntax (= Trends in Linguistics, Studies
and Monographs 23), ed. by Jacek Fisiak, 437-70. Berlin-New York-Am­
sterdam: Mouton.
Watkins, Calvert. 1963. Preliminaries to a historical and comparative analysis
of the Old Irish verb. Celtica 6.1-49.
. 1969. Geschichte der indogermanischen Verbalñexion. (Indoger­
manische Grammatik, 3:1) Heidelberg: Winter.
Winter, Werner. 1985. Reconstructing comparative linguistics and the
reconstruction of the syntax of undocumented stages in the development
of languages and language families. Historical Syntax, ibid., 613-26.

F
 CONSIDERAZIONI SULLA CRONOLOGIA RELATIVA DEI
MUTAMENTI FONETICI

ROMANO LAZZERONI
Università di Pisa

«Mentre per una determinazione temporale assoluta delle trasforma­

zioni fonetiche che si sono compiute nel periodo storico per adesso manca­
no ancora quasi tutti i punti di appoggio consistenti, per quella relativa ot­
teniamo fin d'ora molti risultati abbastanza sicuri».
Con queste parole, su cui ha richiamato l'attenzione A. Varvaro 1, si
apre l'ultimo capitolo della Historische Grammatik der französischen Spra­
che2 di W. Meyer-Lübke.
Nello stesso capitolo - che contiene una rapida sintesi di 19 tappe del
processo fonetico che porta dal latino al francese - si legge, tuttavia, l'av­
vertenza che l'ordine cronologico ricostruito non è sempre sicuro.
In altre parti del volume alcune contraddizioni sono sottolineate anco­
ra più chiaramente: la sincope delle vocali atone, per es., ora precede la so­
norizzazione delle occlusive sorde intervocaliche ed ora la segue 3 .
Nonostante queste contraddizioni - che sono più spesso constatate che
risolte - il principio della cronologia relativa viene, di solito, applicato sen­
za riserve 4 ; esempi illustri sono, in campo romanzo, i Beiträge zur Ge­
schichte der Romanismen di E. Richter 5 e, in campo indoeuropeo, la Pho­
nétique historique du Mycénien et du Grec ancien di M. Lejeune 6 .

1 Storia, problemi e metodi della linguistica romanza, Napoli, 1968, p. 290.

2 I, Heidelberg, 1908, p. 161.
3 Op. cit., p. 101.
4 «Lo scopo della ricostruzione linguistica» ha scritto J. Kurytowicz (Proceedings of the
IX Intern. Congress of Linguists, L'Aja, 1964, p. 9 ss.) «è di stabilire la cronologia relativa
delle fasi preistoriche e i mutamenti immediatamente anteriori ai dati più arcaici.»
5 Halle/Saale, 1934 (= Beih. zur ZRPh, LXXXII); cfr. anche G. Strąka, RLaR, LXXI,
1953, p. 247 ss.; Id., RLiR, XX, 1956, p. 249 ss.
6 Parigi, 1972.
326 ROMANO LAZZERONI

Tuttavia il greco mostra, non meno del francese, delle contraddizioni:

per es. non si riesce a stabilire in maniera univoca l'ordine dell'aspirazione
di -5- rispetto a  >ρα.
M. Doria 7 ha, recentemente, cercato di risolverle, ammettendo che i
mutamenti correlati abbiano avuto ciascuno una certa durata e siano stati
parzialmente contemporanei. Il problema era già stato avvertito dalla Rich­
ter. È chiaro che la nozione di durata implica un modello interpretativo del
mutamento che deve essere reso esplicito.

Le ipotesi formulate dalla grammatica generativa sull'ordine sincroni­

co delle regole che governano il mutamento - alludiamo al «riordinamento
di regola» - e al più controverso «inserimento di regola» non alterano il qua­
dro consegnatoci dalla tradizione.
Il riordinamento di regola è l'inversione sincronica dell'ordine diacro­
nico delle regole di mutamento 8 .
Il modello proposto è una reinterpretazione dell'analogia, che la gram­
matica generativa riconduce ai meccanismi di riordinamento, semplificazione
e perdita di regola; e il riordinamento può rappresentarsi, con P. Kiparsky,
come il passaggio da un ordine marcato, che opera su meno forme, a un
ordine non marcato che opera su più forme 9 .
Quale che sia la validità di questo modello, è chiaro che l'ordine sin­
cronico delle regole in un momento dato è ben distinto dall'ordine diacro­
nico in cui queste medesime regole hanno agito nella storia.
Per ciò che riguarda quest'ultimo, le acquisizioni della linguistica tra­
dizionale non vengono messe in discussione.
Conseguenze più rilevanti avrebbe l'interpretazione di una serie di fe­
nomeni in base al cosiddetto «inserimento di regola».

7 Studia mediterranea Piero Meriggi dicata, I, Pavia, 1979, p. 121 ss.

8 Cfr., per tutti gli aspetti della questione e per la bibliografia, R. King, Linguistica sto­
rica e grammatica generativa, trad. it., Bologna, 1973, p. 71 ss.
9 Cfr. P. Kiparsky, Explanation in Phonology, Dordrecht, 1982, p. 37 ss.; T. Bynon,
Historical Linguistics, Cambridge, 1977, p. 126 ss.; R. King, op. cit., p. 258 ss. È chiaro che
un ordine sincronico non marcato può essere indizio (non prova!) di un precedente ordine mar­
cato così come, nella linguistica tradizionale, l'estensione analogica di un mutamento implica
la preesistenza del mutamento in un campo di applicazione più ristretto. La questione riguar­
da problemi diversi da quelli che si trattano qui. Sull'interpretazione generativa dell'analogia
cfr. R. King, op. cit., p. 178 ss.
 CRONOLOGIA RELATIVA DEI MUTAMENTI FONETICI 327

Qui l'esempio canonico è la legge di Lachmann: in latino la vocale bre­

ve radicale di un verbo si allunga nel participio passato davanti a -kt- < -gt-,
ma resta inalterata davanti a -kt- primario: āctus, ma factus: dunque, l'al­
lungamento della vocale è anteriore alla desonorizzazione del nesso -gt-; ma
d'altra parte, l'assimilazione regressiva dei nessi consonantici, in seguito alla
quale -gt- > -kt, è antichissima, indoeuropea 10 .
Alla contraddizione - che potrebbe risolversi distinguendo ciò che è av­
venuto in data indoeuropea da ciò che è avvenuto,  si è ripetuto, con esiti
identici, in tutte le lingue indoeuropee - si è cercato di ovviare in varî modi:
 supponendo, appunto, che il nesso -gt- sia stato ricostituito in latino se­
condo la proporzione dico: dictus = ago: *agtus,  attribuendo l'allunga­
mento a cause morfologiche,  col modello generativo dell'«inserimento di
regola»: la regola dell'allungamento vocalico davanti a occlusiva sonora non
sarebbe stata aggiunta alla fine della sequenza delle regole esistenti (sequenza
che comprende gt- › -kt-), bensì prima. E avrebbe agito sulla forma soggia­
cente *agtos sebbene tale forma non sia mai stata realizzata a livello super­
ficiale 11.
Se si potesse dimostrare che il mutamento fonetico può operare sulla
rappresentazione mentale di una sequenza fonica anche in mancanza di una
realizzazione superficiale corrispondente, diverse conclusioni fondate su ar­
gomentazioni di cronologia relativa entrerebbero in crisi, specialmente nei
casi in cui le alternanze morfonologiche rivelano forme soggiacenti tali da
legittimare l'ipotesi.
Ma il modello dell'«inserimento di regola» è ben lungi dall'essere veri­
ficato, ed anzi è rifiutato da alcuni degli stessi studiosi che l'avevano, in
un primo tempo, proposto 12.

In questa rassegna non si può tacere di una comunicazione di H.M.

Hoenigswald all'XI Congresso internazionale dei linguisti13. Fissare una
cronologia relativa, argomenta Hoenigswald, equivale a costruire degli sta­
di intermedi.

10 Cfr., per lo stato della questione e per la bibliografia, R. Caldarelli, Sulle più recenti
interpretazioni della cosiddetta Legge di Lachmann, Macerata, 1982 (= Quaderni Linguistici
e Filologici - Ricerche svolte presso l'Università degli Studi di Macerata, II).
11 Cfr. R. King, op. cit., p. 58 ss.; T. Bynon, op. cit., p. 118 ss.
12 Significative le parole di R. King, Lg, XLIX, 1973, p. 577.
13 Proceedings of the 11th International Congress of Linguists, Bologna, 1974, p. 369 ss.
328 ROMANO LAZZERONI

Dire che nella rotazione consonantica germanica le occlusive sorde si

sono spirantizzate (t ) þ) prima dell'assordimento delle occlusive sonore per­
ché altrimenti si sarebbero spirantizzate anche le sorde derivate da sonore
equivale a postulare uno stadio intermedio in cui le occlusive sonore siano
conservate e le sorde spirantizzate.
Altre rappresentazioni sarebbero possibili (per es. si potrebbe suppor­
re che le due serie consonantiche si siano mosse simultaneamente, in un pro­
cesso di trasformazione graduale che avrebbe mantenuta inalterata la di­
stanza fra loro), ma l'ipotesi di uno stadio intermedio è preferibile per ra­
gioni di semplicità e di economia.
Costruzioni di questo tipo e altre simili14 hanno inevitabilmente carat­
tere astratto e, in qualche misura, pregiudiziale. Che il mutamento fonetico
risponda a criteri di economia e di semplicità può essere vero in alcuni casi
e non esserlo in altri.
Di ciò Hoenigswald è ben consapevole. Le sue caute conclusioni suo­
nano come un invito ad approfondire un tema a cui la linguistica storica
non ha dedicato tutta l'attenzione che merita 15 .

Dalla comunicazione di Hoenigswald B. Rosén16 trasse spunto per una

domanda: «sarebbe accettabile dire che, quando non ci sono prove positive
di processi ordinati cronologicamente, non si dovrebbe ritenere che essi sia­
no tali?»
La domanda è, mi pare, un invito a osservare i fatti, a cercare, appun­
to, le «prove positive».
Questa comunicazione muove dalla medesima domanda e si propone
due obiettivi:
1) valutare se le argomentazioni su cui si fondano le ipotesi di cronologia
relativa sono conformi a un modello della diffusione del mutamento lingui­
stico adeguato ed empiricamente verificabile.

14 V. sopra, n. 9.
15 Spesso, per es., non si tiene conto di mutamenti, per così dire, pancronici, o, me­
glio, condizionati dalla struttura di una lingua. Non si può affermare - l'osservazione è di H.M.
Hoenigswald, op. cit., p. 373 - che nelle lingue slave k ́ > s è anteriore a sr > str perché l'epen­
tesi della dentale avviene anche con s < k. Per lungo tempo, infatti, il nesso sr non è esistito
nelle 11. slave, sicché st è semplicemente un allofono di s davanti a r; cfr. Id., Ancient Indo-
European Dialects, ed. H. Birnbaum - J. Puhvel, Berkeley - Los Angeles, 1966, p. 12.
16 Proceedings, cit., alla n. 13, p. 373.
 CRONOLOGIA RELATIVA DEI MUTAMENTI FONETICI 329

2) valutare l'attendibilità delle conclusioni extralinguistiche di carattere

storico-culturale inferibili da considerazioni di cronologia relativa.

P. Kiparsky 17 ha mostrato che, se due mutamenti linguistici si impli­

cano, essi stanno in ordine di depauperamento (bleeding order)  di incre­
mento (feeding order). Nel primo caso l'uno riduce le rappresentazioni su
cui agisce l'altro, nel secondo, invece, le crea.
Non si è osservato, che io sappia, che tutte le argomentazioni di crono­
logia relativa applicano il medesimo principio.
Esse seguono il seguente schema: dati due mutamenti A e B, A sta ri­
spetto a  in ordine di depauperamento  in ordine di incremento, riducen­
do  creando le rappresentazioni a cui si applica B.
Se A ha avuto effetto su B, allora A è più antico di B; se A non ha
avuto effetto su B, allora  è più antico di A.
Gli schemi argomentativi sono, dunque, quattro: due causali (A è sta­
to causa dell'avverarsi  del non avverarsi di B) e due concessivi (B è avve­
nuto  non è avvenuto nonostante sia avvenuto A). Eccoli per esteso:
1) A ha ridotto le rappresentazioni a cui si applica B e B non si è appli­
cato alle rappresentazioni su cui ha agito A. Dunque A è più antico
di B. È il caso della delabializzazione delle labiovelari in prossimità
di  nel greco antico (A), che precede ku > π/τ (Β); dell'assordimento
delle consonanti finali in tedesco (A), che precede l'allungamento della
vocale davanti a sonora (B); della palatalizzazione iranica di -s- dopo
i, u (A), che precede l'aspirazione di -s- (B) 18 .
2) A ha allargato  istituito le rappresentazioni a cui si applica  e 
si è applicato a queste medesime rappresentazioni. Dunque A è più
antico di B. È il caso della sincope della vocale interna in umbro anti­
co (A), che precede il passaggio a -it- di -kt- secondario (B): ag(e)tod
> aitu, deik(e)tod > teitu 19. Invece -kt- primario > -ht-: rehte, uhtur,
ahtu. Si noterà che la sincope vocalica non allarga, ma istituisce il cam­
po di applicazione di -kt- > -it-. Vedremo che la distinzione è impor­
tante.

17 Cfr. R. King, op. cit., p. 244.

18 Cfr. SSL, VIII, 1968, p. 131 ss.
19 Cfr. R. von Planta, Grammatik der Oskisch-Umbrischen Dialekte, I, Strasburgo,
1892, p. 350 ss. (per -kt- primario) e p. 354 ss. (per -kt- secondario).
330 ROMANO LAZZERONI

3) A ha ridotto le rappresentazioni a cui si applica B, ma  si è applicato

anche a quelle rappresentazioni. Dunque  è più antico di A. È il ca­
so di nel greco attico (B) in che precede la caduta
del F nel nesso pF (A). È anche il caso della palatalizzazione della ve­
lare nel nesso ka in francese (B), che si applica anche davanti a  <
au (A): lat. causa > fr. chose.
4) A ha allargato le rappresentazioni a cui si applica B, ma  non si è
applicato a quelle rappresentazioni. Dunque  è più antico di A. È
il caso di -nd- > -nn- nei dialetti dell'Italia meridionale (B) che non
si applica a -nd- < -nt- (A): monno < lat. mundu, quanno < lat. quan­
do, ma quando < lat. quantu. È anche il caso della spirantizzazione
delle sorde nella mutazione consonantica germanica (B), che non si
applica alle sorde derivate dalle sonore (A).

Tutte queste argomentazioni presuppongono il modello interpretativo

del mutamento linguistico codificato alla fine del XIX secolo. L'evoluzione
linguistica è rappresentata come unidimensionale e lineare: «le leggi foneti­
che» scrisse M. Grammont 20 «non valgono che per un luogo e un'epoca
determinati. Quando una legge ha esercitato la sua azione i fonemi su cui
essa operava non esistono più nella lingua; se essi un giorno riappaiono per
composizione, per derivazione, per prestito, possono allora restare tali e quali
 subire un'evoluzione nuova, che non sarà necessariamente la stessa della
prima volta». Nella sostanza il Grammont non si distacca dall'affermazio­
ne di K. Brugmann 21 : «ogni tendenza fonetica che sorge in una lingua ope­
ra ciecamente [...]. Ci si ha da aspettare che ogni volta l'intero materiale
linguistico che viene sottoposto dal parlante agli organi fonatori e pertanto
giunge ad essere pronunciato, sia afferrato da questa tendenza in modo af­
fatto meccanico». In un modello lineare due mutamenti interrelati non pos­
sono disporsi altrimenti che in successione.
Nulla cambia col modello bidimensionale - temporale e spaziale - in­
trodotto dalla geografia linguistica: una volta isolato, nel continuum di un'a­
rea, il punto oggetto di osservazione, l'asse dello spazio diventa irrilevante
per l'ordine dei mutamenti presenti in quel punto; e, infatti, uno dei massi-

20 Traité de p h o n é t i q u e , Parigi, 1933, p . 166.

21 KZ, XXIV, 1879, p. 4. La citazione italiana è da V. Pisani, Paideia, IV, 1949 (citato
secondo la ristampa in Saggi di Linguistica Storica, Torino, 1959), p. 9.
 CRONOLOGIA RELATIVA DEI MUTAMENTI FONETICI 331

mi esponenti del metodo geolinguistico, G. Rohlfs, affronta i problemi di

cronologia relativa con strumenti rigorosamente tradizionali 22 .
La geografia linguistica introduce, però, una prospettiva di grande im­
portanza per la ricostruzione culturale. Se il mutamento linguistico si pro­
paga non meccanicamente, ma in seguito a contatti interlinguistici e inter­
dialettali - contatti, dunque, lato sensu, culturali - allora l'ordine cronolo­
gico dei mutamenti corrisponde all'ordine di successione dei rapporti cultu­
rali che ne sono stati il veicolo. In un modello a due dimensioni i due ordini
sono simmetrici.

Un modello bidimensionale del mutamento presuppone l'unitarietà del

punto linguistico. Se il presupposto è fallace, anche il modello è fallace.
Ricerche iniziate quasi un secolo fa da P.J. Rousselot e da L. Gau­
chat 23 hanno mostrato che il mutamento linguistico si dispiega su tre di­
mensioni: del tempo, dello spazio e della profondità diastratica di una co­
munità di parlanti. Nell'ultimo ventennio la sociolinguística ha sviluppato
la stessa intuizione, aggiungendo le variabili socioculturali e stilistiche a quella
dell'età, su cui si era concentrata l'attenzione dei primi studiosi. Dunque,
il punto linguistico non è unitario: in ogni comunità coesistono più registri
in parte sovrapposti e in parte differenziati.
Nella comunità anglofona di New York, come ha mostrato W. La-
bov 24 , ciascun individuo dispone di più sottocodici individuati dalla diffe­
rente frequenza di alcuni stereotipi sociolinguistici: il gruppo sociale di gra­
do più elevato usa il più alto grado di forme di prestigio e il più basso grado
di forme stigmatizzate. Parallelamente lo stile più formale comporta il più
alto incremento di forme di prestigio.
Certo, il modello di Labov, elaborato su un grande agglomerato urba­
no del XX secolo, non sarà automaticamente applicabile a tutte le società
e, in particolar modo, a quelle preindustriali, organizzate in modo del tutto
diverso 25 . Ma in qualsiasi comunità l'uniformità linguistica, se mai è esi-

22 Cfr., per es., Historische G r a m m a t i k der Italienischen Sprache, I, Berna, 1949, p .

426 a proposito di -nt- > -nd- rispetto a -nd- > -nn- nei dialetti dell'Italia meridionale.
23 L'articolo di L. Gauchat, L'unité phonétique dans le patois d'une commune, è con­
tenuto nella Festschrift H. Morf, Halle, 1905, p. 175 ss.; il lavoro di Rousselot mi è noto dalla
citazione in I. Iordan - J. Orr, Introduzione alla linguistica romanza, trad. it., Torino, 1973,
p. 45 ss.
24 Cfr., ora , Il continuo e il discreto nel linguaggio, t r a d . it., Bologna, 1977, passim.
25 Così A . V a r v a r o , La parola nel t e m p o , Bologna, 1984, p . 113.
332 ROMANO LAZZERONI

stita, è eccezionale: la conoscenza, magari soltanto passiva, di più di un co­

dice è la condizione che rende possibile la comunicazione fra le classi e le
persone.
La lingua, ogni lingua, è un diasistema: un complesso di sottosistemi
ordinati.
La carenza dei documenti e la circostanza che nella norma scritta male
e raramente traspaiono le variabili del parlato ci impedisce, di solito, di co­
noscere il comportamento sociolinguístico delle comunità antiche.
Ma quando e dove è possibile intravvedere e misurare questo compor­
tamento - lo ha fatto, per es. V. Kohlheim per l'onomastica medioevale di
Regensburgo26 - si ottengono modelli identici a quelli di Labov: identici an­
che nello scavalcamento della classe media sulla più alta, nella esasperazio­
ne dei simboli di prestigio.
Se dunque, la situazione linguistica di un punto è rappresentabile con
un diasistema in cui i subsistemi costituenti oppongono le rispettive diffe­
renze, uno dei principali fattori del mutamento, se non addirittura il princi­
pale, è da scorgere nella dinamica delle varianti e nell'instabile, mutevole
equilibrio fra forme egemoni e forme subordinate 27 . Un mutamento in un
punto si conclude quando una variante diastratica e stilistica si generalizza
diventando variante diatopica.
Il modello appena illustrato rivela i limiti delle argomentazioni su cui
tradizionalmente si fonda la cronologia relativa.

Ogni mutamento - non importa se endogeno  importato - può propa­

garsi da un qualsiasi strato di una comunità.
Esso può scendere dall'alto, muovendo dai ceti e dagli stili più elevati:
il modello è quello della Rezeptiontheorie elaborato da J. Meier e H. Neu­
mann in campo folclorico28. Così, per es., W. von Wartburg immagina che
sia avvenuto l'allungamento e la dittongazione delle vocali toniche in silla­
ba libera in area galloromanza che avrebbe avuto inizio nel latino parlato
dai capi franchi29; certamente così - traggo ancora spunto da H. Kohlheim
- si è diffusa l'onomastica cristiana nella comunità medioevale di Regen-

26 O n o m a , X X I , 1977, p . 523 ss.

27 Cfr. A . V a r v a r o , o p . cit., p . 123 ss.
28 Cfr. A. Varvaro, op. cit., p. 112.
29 Die Ausgliederung der romanischen S p r a c h r ä u m e , Berna, 1950.
 CRONOLOGIA RELATIVA DEI MUTAMENTI FONETICI 333

sburgo; probabilmente così è avvenuta la toscanizzazione del dialetto ro­

manesco, se essa si deve alla corte dei papi medicei.
Ma talvolta il mutamento parte dagli strati intermedi  bassi di una
popolazione: P.J. Trudgill30 ha mostrato che nell'inglese di Norwich alcune
innovazioni fonetiche raggiungono la punta più elevata e la massima diva­
ricazione stilistica nella classe operaia, la punta più bassa e la minima diva­
ricazione stilistica nell'alta borghesia e manifestano un incremento gradua­
le attraverso le classi di età, raggiungendo le frequenze più alte nelle gene­
razioni più giovani. È l'immagine di un cambiamento in atto. Risultati non
diversi sono stati raggiunti da H. Cedergren per lo spagnolo di Panama 31 .
È chiaro, perciò, che, come in un'area geografica le innovazioni, se ir­
radiano da più centri, possono presentarsi nell'uno e nell'altro in ordine va­
riato, così in una comunità di parlanti i mutamenti, se non partono tutti
dallo stesso livello, seguono una irradiazione diastratica multidirezionale che
può far variare l'ordine della loro intersezione nei vari registri.
Tanto nella dimensione orizzontale dello spazio quanto nella dimen­
sione verticale di una comunità, due innovazioni A e B, se irradiate da epi­
centri diversi, possono raggiungere due punti  due strati in ordine inverso:
nell'uno essendo stato accolto A prima di B, nell'altro  prima di A.
Vi è anche un altro tipo di stratificazione - diremo lessicale - non meno
importante della stratificazione sociale e stilistica con cui si interseca.
Y. Malkiel ha sostenuto che un mutamento può nascere in determinate
sezioni del lessico in cui ricorrono condizioni morfonologiche particolari;
e da queste diffondersi a tutto il lessico, senza più riguardo alle condizioni
d'origine 32 .
Se così è - la cautela è d'obbligo di fronte a indagini appena iniziate

30 The Social Differentiation of English in Norwich, a me noto da W. Labov, Il conti­

nuo, cit., p. 130.
31 Patterns of Free Variation: The Language Variable, relazione presentata al Canadian
Sociology and Anthropology Meeting, a me nota da W. Labov, Il continuo, cit..
32 N u o v e tendenze della linguistica storica, a cura di W . P . L e h m a n n e Y. Malkiel, Bo­
logna, 1977, p . 33 ss. I m p o r t a n t i i Poscritti a p . 73 e 7 5 . Si deve inoltre considerare anche
la possibilità che il m u t a m e n t o inizi presso determinate sezioni del lessico, senza collegamento
con particolari condizioni morfonologiche: F . Fanciullo, in T r e millenni di storia linguistica
della Sicilia, Atti del Convegno della Società Italiana di Glottologia, Pisa, 1984, p . 139 ss.
h a sostenuto che il vocalismo «siciliano» h a avuto inizio, in situazioni di bilinguismo, nel lessi­
co c o m u n e (costituito da prestiti nelle due direzioni) r o m a n z o e greco-bizantino. Su tutta la
questione cfr. R. Lass, P h o n o l o g y . A n I n t r o d u c t i o n to Basic Concepts, C a m b r i d g e , 1984, p .
322 ss.
334 ROMANO LAZZERONI

- avremmo un altro caso in cui i mutamenti possono diffondersi in più dire­

zioni e, se sorti in categorie lessicali diverse, intersecarsi, estendendosi, in
ordine rovesciato.

Torniamo ai quattro schemi con cui abbiamo rappresentato le argo­

mentazioni di cronologia relativa.
Gli schemi 1 e 3 considerano l'ipotesi che, dati due mutamenti A e B,
A stia rispetto a  in ordine di depauperamento, riducendo le rappresenta­
zioni a cui si applica B, ma che in un caso A abbia effetto su  e nell'altro
non l'abbia.
E concludono per la maggior antichità di A nel primo caso e di  nel­
l'altro.
Ma se il mutamento si diffonde su tre dimensioni tali conclusioni val­
gono soltanto per l'ordine in cui i mutamenti interrelati si sono assestati
nel registro osservato - in genere, poiché si opera su documenti scritti, nel
registro elevato, letterario - o, eventualmente, per l'ordine della loro gene­
ralizzazione in un diasistema, non per l'ordine in cui i mutamenti sono pe­
netrati  sono sorti nel diasistema medesimo.
Riprendiamo un esempio illustrato: è certo che nel greco attico la ca­
duta del F è posteriore a altrimenti avremmo
poiché α rimane inalterata se è preceduta da p.
Ma ciò vale per l'attico scritto, in qualche misura letterario. Non è cer­
to, invece, che quando ancora esisteva non sia esistito anche
col F già scomparso, in qualche registro del greco attico di cui si è persa
ogni traccia.
Nello stesso modo potrebbero spiegarsi le contraddizioni riscontrate in
francese nella cronologia della sincope vocalica rispetto alla sonorizzazione
delle occlusive intervocaliche33: esse potrebbero rivelare varianti diastrati-
che diversamente assestate e generalizzate.

Lo schema n. 4 considera l'ipotesi che, dati due mutamenti A e , 

stia rispetto a  in ordine di incremento, allargando le rappresentazioni a
cui si applica B, ma che A non abbia effetto su B, non applicandosi  alle
rappresentazioni create da A. E conclude per l'anteriorità di B. La conclu-

33 Cfr. M. Regula, Historische Grammatik des Französischen, I, Heidelberg, 1955, p.

150 ss.; W. Belardi, Dal latino alle lingue romanze, I, Roma, 1979, p. 78.
 CRONOLOGIA RELATIVA DEI MUTAMENTI FONETICI 335

sione si fonda sul presupposto che le opposizioni neutralizzate siano sem­

pre irreversibili. Il presupposto è parzialmente fallace34. Una opposizione
neutralizzata non è reversibile se la neutralizzazione è generalizzata in tutti
i livelli del diasistema, se, cioè, il parlante non è più in grado di individuare
i suoi segmenti. Ma è reversibile se i segmenti sono individuabili nell'oppo­
sizione dei subsistemi.
Il principio teorico - che si compendia nella nozione di «segmento di
estensione» - è stato sviluppato da C. Grassi 35 : il segmento di estensione
di un fonema (o di una qualsiasi manifestazione di fonemi) è la porzione
di un subsistema selezionata dalla corrispondenza, in serie lessicali biunivo­
che, con altri fonemi presenti in un altro subsistema.
Per es., nel diasistema dell'italiano meridionale, -nn- del subsistema re­
gionale è suddiviso in due segmenti di estensione a seconda che, nell'italia­
no standard, vi corrisponda -nd-  -nn-: quanno ~ quando, ma canna ~
canna. È chiaro che il parlante meridionale è perfettamente in grado di di­
stinguere l'uno dall'altro.
Quando un fonema è suddiviso in più segmenti, ciascun segmento è
sottoposto alle pressioni del sistema egemone in modo differenziato.
Nella valle d'Andorno - traggo gli esempi, semplificandoli, da G. Berru-
to 36 - sotto la pressione del torinese è entrato un fonema ö che sta sostituen­
do ę solo nei casi in cui ciò è etimologicamente possibile: quando e deriva
da ŏ,  da ŏ, ŭ + l, nei casi, cioè, in cui il torinese ha ö (and. /e « fŏcu)
> fö; and. nęv (< nŏvu) > and. « oc(u)lu) > öč). Negli altri casi
ę resta invariato. Se non avessimo la documentazione del processo in corso,
ma conoscessimo soltanto la base di partenza latina e lo stadio terminale e,
degli stadi intermedi, potessimo inferire soltanto che and. ö è derivato da ę;
se la parlata di Andorno ci fossa nota, insomma, nello stesso modo incom­
pleto in cui ci sono note le lingue indoeuropee antiche, non ammetteremmo
la possibilità che un fonema unico ę in condizioni sincronicamente uguali si
sia segmentato in entità diverse e magari postuleremmo processo per stadi
(prima e > ö in un gruppo di etimi e poi e si riforma da altri etimi), una cro­
nologia relativa, insomma, ognun vede con quanta aderenza alla realtà.

34 Il caso più noto è quello della neutralizzazione di ā ed eā nella storia dell'inglese; cfr.
W. Labov, Il continuo, cit., p. 121 ss.
35 Linguistica e Filologia, Omaggio a B. Terracini, Milano, 1968, p. 151 ss.
36 Dialetto e società industriale nella valle di A n d o r n o (Supplementi al B A L I , I), Tori­
n o , 1970.
336 ROMANO LAZZERONI

Si aggiunga che la reazione del sistema dominato alla pressione del si­
stema egemone talvolta non è di semplice adeguamento, ma comporta lo
sviluppo di forme autonome 37 ; e allora, se i documenti non ci soccorrono,
l'interpretazione è ancora più difficile.
Si dirà che questi non sono mutamenti fonetici, ma sostituzioni di suo­
ni trasportati da serie lessicali? A parte la dubbia legittimità della distinzio­
ne - su ciò, in polemica con Ch. F. Hockett 38 ha scritto una splendida pa­
gina U. Weinreich39 - resta il fatto che essa non può cogliersi quando il
processo è compiuto ed osserviamo soltanto i risultati finali.

Resta lo schema n. 2. Esso afferma che, date due innovazioni A e B,

se A sta rispetto a  in ordine di incremento, istituendo  allargando le ma­
nifestazioni a cui si applica B e B si applica a queste manifestazioni, A è
più antico di B.
Nella premessa sono contenute due sottoipotesi:
1) A istituisce il campo di applicazione di  creando tutte le manifesta­
zioni a cui si applica B. È il caso - già citato - della sincope vocalica
dell'umbro antico che crea tutte le manifestazioni a cui si applica -kt- >
-it-.
In questo caso, quale che sia stata la dinamica dei mutamenti, A è
sicuramente più antico di  perché è condizione unica e necessaria di B.
2) A allarga il campo di applicazione di  che perciò si applica alle rap­
presentazioni create da A, ma non solo a quelle.
È il caso della vocalizzazione di 1 latina preconsonantica in francese,
che si applica ai gruppi creati dalla sincope vocalica (chaud < cal(i)du),
ma anche ai gruppi primari (haut < altu).
In questo caso si può affermare che A è più antico di  nelle manife­
stazioni create da A, ma non si può inferire che A preceda  in asso­
luto. Infatti  può essersi ripetuto a distanza, sia in modo indipen­
dente, sia come generalizzazione ed estensione di una variante subsi­
stematica già presente nel diasistema quando si produceva A.

37 Cfr. C. Grassi, art. cit., p. 153 ss.; G.B. Pellegrini, Protimesis, Scritti in onore di
Vittore Pisani (= Studi Linguistici Salentini, II), Lecce, 1969, p. 99 ss.; Id., ID, XLV (n.s.
XXII), 1982, p. 25 ss.
38 A Course in M o d e r n Linguistics, New York, 1958, p . 439 ss.
39 R o m P h , X I I I , 1960, p . 331 ss.
 CRONOLOGIA RELATIVA DEI MUTAMENTI FONETICI 337

Concludiamo. Dei quattro schemi argomentativi su cui si fondano le

conclusioni di cronologia relativa, uno soltanto - lo schema n. 2 nella sot­
toipotesi 1 - è adeguato a una rappresentazione tridimensionale del muta­
mento linguistico.
Dagli altri schemi (ma non dal n. 4) si può inferire l'ordine cronologi­
co in cui i mutamenti si sono succeduti nei registri linguistici corrispondenti
ai documenti osservati, ma non I'ordine in cui sono penetrati  sono sorti
nel diasistema di una comunità linguistica.
Perciò, dall'ordine documentato dei mutamenti non si può dedurre un
simmetrico ordine dei fatti culturali che ne sono stati il veicolo.
Inoltre, due mutamenti possono presentarsi in ordine opposto in due
lessemi distinti.
Prima di escogitare nuove leggi fonetiche, occorre considerare la pos­
sibilità che tali lessemi provengano da registri  da sezioni lessicali diversi
e che i mutamenti si siano incrociati in successione invertita.
Dallo schema n. 4 si può inferire che la generalizzazione - se vi è stata
- in tutti i livelli diasistematici di un mutamento che ha neutralizzato un'op­
posizione (condizione necessaria perché i segmenti cessino di essere indivi­
duati nell'opposizione delle varianti) è posteriore a un mutamento che l'ha
segmentata, ma non si può inferire che i due mutamenti si siano presentati
nel diasistema nel medesimo ordine.
Il presupposto su cui l'argomentazione tradizionale si fonda, che le op­
posizioni neutralizzate non siano in nessun caso risegmentabili, è smentito
dall'esperienza.

LAZZE
 TIME

WINFRED P. LEHMANN
The University of Texas

Our discipline took its start in the 19th century when the learned world
was developing methods and theory to account for its physical surroundings.
Geologists were sorting out the configuration of the earth; chemists were
examining the inner structure of objects. Among other scientists anatomists
were scrutinizing, describing and analyzing the human body, including the
vocal tract, to determine its functioning in accordance with strict scientific
principles. Their successes deriving from application of their rigorous
methodology provided them with prestige among other investigators, who
sought similar successes in dealing with their topics of research, such as
language. To achieve such successes these further scientists (earlier referred
to as moral or historical, more recently as social, behavioral, or human)
adopted methodological principles developed and refined by the physical
scientists of their day.
The 19th century scientists were also concerned with combatting
previous explanations of their physical surroundings through catastrophes,
a concept differing from that of René Thorn, who might with some cir­
cumspection better have chosen a different term. The previous explanations
are evident in the work of the early linguists, like Sir William Jones. As
one of his major priorities he sought out Indian and Chinese accounts of
a great flood, looking in this way to corroboration of a catastrophic event
that was held to have radically modified the course of the earth.
That catastrophe also affected man's relationship to time. Before the
flood man could enjoy virtually a millennium of existence, in contrast with
the 70 or 80 years which the psalmist allots his contemporaries and which
we expect for ourselves. By contrast, the new scientists assumed a steady
and comparable course through time for themselves and their physical sur­
roundings, with states being maintained and changes taking place in the same
way through past ages as at present. Glaciers formed and receded, rivers
340 WINFRED P. LEHMANN

produced deltas, substances oxidized over specific periods in the past exact­
ly as in the present. Greater or lesser quantities of water, debris or oxidizable
matter might be involved, but time elapsed then as it does now. To under­
stand their surroundings scientists had to be concerned with the dimensions
of quantities and their components in variation but could confidently assume
that the earth proceeded on its course at the same pace two millennia, two
hundred, two thousand millennia ago as today. Substances are maintained
or changed at the same pace in Asia, Africa or the Americas, even on other
planets and on stars, as in Europe.
The principle so applied is known as uniformitarianism. In accordance
with uniformitarianism the physical world is everywhere homogeneous;
hydrogen in Britain is homogeneous with hydrogen in Australia, on the planet
Venus, and elsewhere. When changes involving hydrogen or other substances
take place, they occur everywhere in accordance with homogeneous prin­
ciples (Christy 1983).
In carrying out scientific study involving time, the variables were sought
in substances. A scientist would identify an entity, whether a hydrogen
molecule, a crystal, or a human organ and determine possible modifications,
knowing that entities are open to change, or in the magic word of the day
to evolution, which might affect their form, their quantity, their relation
to their surroundings. Such changes were stated with reference to time, which
was regarded as an independent dimension.
Biologists also regarded time in this way. Organisms might be subject
to different processes than are lifeless substances, but in biological study
as well time was measured apart from the substances at hand. Biological
clocks tick on inexorably and steadily, whether the organisms existed in
paleolithic, pre-Cambrian or more recent periods.
When the less substantial attributes of organisms, such as language,
came to be examined scientifically, they were treated in accordance with the
same principles. Language was regarded as an organism. It could be examin­
ed at a specific stage, as it was by Adelung, Humboldt, Becker and other
descriptivists of the past who are currently neglected. Or, language could
be examined in change, as by the preponderant number of linguists in the
19th century. Under either approach the established view of time establish­
ed by the physical scientists was maintained. One examined linguistic material
for its elements, or substances — the sounds, forms, lexical elements, syn­
tactic strings, stylistic sequences. All of these were held to observe similar
procedures, whether in the second millennium before our era or merely a
 TIME 341

century ago. One identified the substances concerned, whether Hebrew,

Greek, German, assuming that each was to be treated under a similar con­
ception of time.
This confident — and primitive — view of time has now been aban­
doned by the most advanced sciences but not by ours. I here propose that
linguistics too abandon the obsolete view of time which pervades its
theoretical procedures from the days of Jacob Grimm and Franz Bopp
through the days of August Schleicher, Karl Brugmann, Ferdinand de
Saussure to those of Otto Jespersen, Leonard Bloomfield, Noam Chomsky
and many others. For an accurate understanding of the aim of our inquiry
— language — we must incorporate the improved conception of time achiev­
ed by Albert Einstein, Werner Heisenberg and their successors.
Time must be regarded by us as by them as a dimension inextricably
associated with the spatial dimensions. It is not a thing apart, a dimension
we can exclude from the system of language, as did Saussure, or from the
competence of the speaker, as did Chomsky. The stuff of language, whether
relationships, values, entities like S NP VP, whether processes like assimila­
tion, raising and so on, must be examined in close relationship with time.
The stuff of language must be treated with the insights achieved by Einstein
in the theory of special relativity. The makeshift devices proposed by Saussure
and Chomsky yield a faulty view of language which must now be abandoned.
Yet we must do far more than incorporate time in our consideration
of language. When we treat languages realistically rather than with reduc­
tionist procedures we must embrace an accurate view of them as individual
systems. As in special relativity separate systems have different time dimen­
sions, so must linguistic systems. The statement applies to separate systems
given labels like Japanese, English, Icelandic. It also applies to separate
systems given labels like urban middle-class dialects, rural dialects, pastoral
dialects. My discussion concerns overall systems like Japanese, English,
Icelandic.
If time is inextricably associated with given linguistic systems, linguistics
must examine any language in its social situation with reference to the passage
of time. It goes without saying that we must abandon the misguided efforts of
historical linguists who like Lightfoot propose to deal with a Saussurian dicho­
tomy of language in accordance with a Chomskyan approach (Lightfoot 1979).
An accurate approach to time in linguistic study will make its results
far richer as well as more interesting than are those produced under the
342 WINFRED P. LEHMANN

superseded view. As we develop such an approach to language we can build

on the contributions of informed specialists, such as Antoine Meillet. His
views of language may be expressed most clearly in his lectures to the Oslo
Institute for the Comparative Study of Civilizations in 1924. In these he
dealt at some length with the necessity of recognizing different systems in
language, differences in accordance with social relationships and other
criteria. Among his infinite «variety of situations», are the two following,
with further sub-groups:
A. «the dialect of a rural village where everybody is approximately at
the same level, where everybody has approximately the same culture»;
B. «the dialect of a city where there are people of different conditions,
of different education, and of different cultures» (Meillet 1967: 133).
In each of these there may be «differences according to circumstance,
where women may use a different form of language from that of men».
Such potential differences lead to four situations, which become eight when
we consider another difference cited by Meillet: the method by which
«linguistic habits are transmitted from generation to generation» (ibid 131ff).
Each of these further situations could be multiplied by additional differences,
but aiming here at simplicity I stop with the eight situations noted so far.
In accordance with the view that time is intimately associated with social
situations, we must be prepared to deal with different effect of time in situa­
tions differing by 1) internal social relationships, 2) external social relation­
ships, and 3) attitudes to language. In other words, we cannot confine
ourselves to syntactics, one of Peirce's three types of study, but must also
include semantics and pragmatics.
Recalling the procedures of historical linguistics, we may note that
Brugmann and the other neogrammarians indicated their purpose to «step
into the clear air of tangible reality», but also that much subsequent historical
study reeks of the musty air of the linguist's study. Little attention is paid
to the conditions of language use in areas where our texts originated. San­
skrit, Greek and Latin are treated in much the same way for their sounds,
forms, and syntax, even though the social conditions in the Punjab, in At­
tica and in Latium differed remarkably. Among the Brahmans who provid­
ed most of our Sanskrit texts language plays a far different role from that
of the Greek bards, orators and historians, who similarly lived and spoke
in social relationships different from those of either Republican Rome or
Imperial Rome. Meillet's observations remain to be applied to the tradi­
tional core area of Indo-European studies as well as to the Germanic, Celtic
 TIME 343

and Slavic habitations of northern Europe, to the Hittite hill-forts, and to

Indo-European pastoral society, as well as to language situations elsewhere.
To achieve the «clear air of tangible reality» we must take into account
the conditions of time as well as place in the various social arrangements.
By the current view of time noted above, linguistic events evolve at different
rates in different social situations. When we account for changes, whether
in phonology, syntax, or the lexicon, we cannot expect those changes to
be carried out at the same rate in every language area. It is now an impor­
tant task to examine languages in their social situations as those situa­
tions differ in ways sketched by Meillet and in still other ways, with con­
stant attention to differences in time as related to the social situation in
question.
Historical linguists have indeed provided characterizations of language
in change with reference to time, if vague, referring to some languages as
conservative, to others as innovative. Stated differently, the languages have
undergone change at different rates over similar periods of time. Icelandic
may well be conservative in lexicon and syntax, possibly also in phonology;
similarly Japanese and the Slavic languages. English on the other hand, as
Meillet puts it, is «less resistant to change than French» (1967: 136). In other
words, time as related to the social situations for English elapses more rapidly
than it does in French. In contrast with French, with the Slavic languages,
and with Icelandic, English has been highly innovative in all segments of
language, phonology, morphology, syntax, and lexicon. We must now set
out to determine with greater precision the rate of linguistic change in rela­
tion to the social situation in which these languages and many others are used.
It is also well-established that individual languages undergo rapid
changes in one period of time, remain stable at others. Old High German
underwent a considerable consonant change around the 5th century A.D.,
a considerable vowel change nearly a millennium later. And English,
undergoing only minor consonant changes in the early period, underwent
massive vowel changes at roughly the same time as High German, while re­
maining stable since in phonology.
If we hope to account for these variations in language change, we must
be more specific about the parameters affecting change. Considerable at­
tention has been given to external influences, that is, to influence from non-
native speakers. Influences from substratum, superstratum, adstratum have
been widely discussed, with too little precision, as the resulting disputes in­
dicate. For example, Japanese adopted lexicon from Chinese as comprehen-
344 WINFRED P. LEHMANN

sively as did English from French and Latin, but the basic structure of
Japanese remained unmodified. Phonological and syntactic change clearly
took place at different rates of time in Japanese from those in English.
Internal social relationships have specific effects. Pastoral societies en­
courage frequent meetings among speakers of a specific culture, leading to
uniformity of language in spite of sparse populations spread over broad
areas. Change takes place more slowly in such groups than in sedentary
cultures with self-contained groups having little intercommunication. Proto-
Indo-European in its pastoral society apparently changed more slowly than
did the language of feudal Europe. The pastoral nomadic situation in which
Arabic was maintained through three millennia may have led to similar
maintenance of the language with little change.
There has been much speculation about the situation in modern societies
who have developed means of rapid intercommunication by such means as
radio, moving pictures, and television (Labov 1965). The extensive society
so interrelated contrasts greatly with the small, self-contained groups in
medieval Europe, when multiple dialects flourished. Changes are apparent­
ly carried out rapidly in such self-contained social groups, as the multiple
dialects of Chinese, the many languages of Papua and pre-Columbian
America attest, as well as the numerous dialects of German, French and
other European languages which developed during little more than a millen­
nium.
Time then cannot be disregarded in relation to its surroundings, on the
assumption that change takes place at a comparable pace, whatever the type
of social organization or social relationships. In a short period Akkadian
underwent more changes than did the Semitic dialects of Arabia over millen­
nia. And Japanese remained relatively unchanged during a period in which
English was thoroughly modified. Previous work in historical linguistics pro­
vides a good number of accounts which we can examine in sketching various
models of language change. We need now to determine the scenarios and
the likely changes in each.
Through such an effort we will be able to suggest more credible causes
of language change than those proposed in the past. These were based on
selected conditions which make up only a part of the elements to be taken
into consideration. As examples we may recall the explanations for the Ger­
manic consonant shifts cited by Prokosch (1939: 55-57).
1) «an expression of the impetuous character of the Germanic tribes
during their early history;...
 TIME 345

2) «increase in the force of expiration, brought about by life in moun­

tainous districts;...

3) «the 'ethnological theory'... according to [which], the Germanic as

well as the High German Shifts are due to language mixture...» For Pro-
kosch himself, the «Germanic Migration [developed] leaders whose per­
sonalities influenced the «behavior» of their followers... In personalities of
this type will and contents predominated over reflection and form... Not
only the consonant shift, but also the accent shift, the vowel shift, the Ger­
manic verb system, all reflected a predominance of elements of contents over
elements of form» (1939: 57). Each of these proposed explanations iden­
tifies one cause. None takes time into consideration, whether the long period
in which Proto-Germanic and its dialects developed from Proto-Indo-
European with relatively little phonological change, or the brief periods dur­
ing which comprehensive shifts occurred. It is scarcely surprising that the
structuralists rejected not only such specific attempts to explain changes,
but also the very attempt itself. And recent attention to the Germanic con­
sonant shifts have been directed at their procedures, not at suggesting causes.
If we are to account for such shifts, we need to take into account language
in its specific type of society and to note the effects through time. To ex­
plain language as a system of totally interrelated parts we need to examine
it in a context determined by spatial, social, personal and temporal features.
Each examination must begin with attention to the structure of the
language concerned. If a language is consistent in structure, whether OV,
VSO or SVO, presumably it will be less open to change than if it is inconsis­
tent. The remarkably consistent OV structure of Japanese and the Turkic
languages may be one element in their stability. By contrast, English and
the other Germanic languages show inconsistent SVO structures when they
are first attested. The inconsistent structure may have made them open to
relatively rapid change. Problems in change of structural features are now
undergoing broad debate (Andersen 1983, Hawkins 1983, Ramat 1984, each
with bibliography).
Among parameters of internal social relationship I have mentioned the
type of overall organization, whether pastoral, feudal, or urban with strong
centralization. Among other internal factors, language acquisition may be
significant for change, whether in a bilingual context, as in India of our
era, or in a society like that of Classical Greek, where other languages were
rejected as the speech of barbarians. Further, sharp distinctions between
346 WINFRED P. LEHMANN

male and female language may have an effect on change. The relatively great
differences between male and female Japanese may well bring about strict
attention to usage, which may lead to greater language stability.
External social relationships may have been most widely explored among
causes for change, and also noted for important conditions: the size of dif­
fering communities and the prestige of their speakers. Early English, in its
contacts with Celtic, Scandinavian and Norman French, provides instruc­
tive examples. The intimate contacts with Norman French speakers of higher
prestige may help account for the greater impact of French and Latin on
English than we find for Japanese, where the Chinese lexicon was transmit­
ted by native Japanese speakers educated in China rather than by a domi­
nant foreign social class in the country.
The attitudes of speakers to language must also have its effects. Do
they respect a standard? Do they maintain a traditional, religious language
and is this language related to their own, as is Latin to the Romance in con­
trast with the Germanic languages? A contrastive study taking into account
the development and maintenance of a common Slavic religious language
in eastern Europe as opposed to the absence of a common Germanic religious
language in central Europe might illuminate some of the bases of stability
in the Slavic as opposed to the Germanic languages. Openness to other
languages, and social stratification may also affect language change. The
self-segregation of the Brahmans in India must have assisted in time stand­
ing still for Sanskrit while the religious language of Europe developed into
Kitchen Latin and the somewhat more conservative Latin of medieval learned
discussion. Social stratification may also lead to change, possibly sporadic
change, as in the introduction of the third person plural as form of address
in parts of the area dominated by Latin culture.
To account for language change as we find it under these varied condi­
tions with reference also to geographical alignments requires scrutiny of the
patterns of language use in society and the relationship of these with the
lapse of time. Through such scrutiny we will have the possibility of learning
how and why language changes. We will also contribute to other students
of culture in change, who like us have operated with a simplistic view of time.
«Time itself», as Hazan states in a study with a specific focus, «has
rarely been the principal object of anthropological consideration» (1984:
567). Like anthropologists, linguists have maintained «the conception of the
flow of time as irreversible», with little attention to it in relation to other
effects on linguistic communities. Nor have we dealt adequately with those
 TIME 347

effects. Ingold's criticisms of (in his words) «Khazanov's magisterial Nomads

and the Outside World» (1985: 385) illustrates the detailed investigations of
social groups necessary for understanding language and other cultural
change. It would be important to examine the conservativism of language
among pastoral nomadic societies in relation to Khazanov's conclusion that
«pastoral societies cannot undergo cumulative progressive development» (In-
gold 1985: 385). If accurate, Khazanov may-have provided an insight into the
basis for linguistic conservativism among pastoral societies. Our field, which
has traditionally prided itself on its role as a leader in theoretical procedures
and their application may be able to provide additional insights into rela­
tionships between time and other parameters related to language change.
For as one of the human sciences, we need to participate in the current
attempts to understand cultural change. The present-day direction of
linguistics was determined somewhat over a century ago when Darwin's ideas
of biological evolution influenced linguists directly, even without influence
from Herbert Spencer and others who applied Darwin's conclusions on
biological evolution to cultural evolution. A recent essay by Rindos with
the comments on it illustrates the complex issues (1985: 65-88). It is difficult
to disagree with his statement on human culture, which applied to our field
states that language «has some meaning; it is not merely the result of total­
ly random processes» (65). Following that conclusion, we must adopt cur­
rent conceptions of time to account for language as we find it, that is,
language in change. Language, like the physical world, exists in the four-
dimensional sphere of space-time. Linguistics must move out of its reduc­
tionist phase of disregarding time; it must determine the «multiplicity of
times» that exists in that four-dimensional sphere, and resume its fundamen­
tal role of providing an accurate understanding of language.

REFERENCES

Andersen, Paul Kent. 1983. Word Order Typology and Comparative Con­
structions. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Hawkins, John A. 1979. Grammatical Universais as Predictors of Word
Order Change. Language 55:618-48.
. 1983 Word Order Universais. New.York: Academic.
Hazan, Haim. 1984. Continuity and Transformation among the Aged: A
Study in the Anthropology of Time. Current Anthropology 25:567-78.
348 WINFRED P. LEHMANN

Ingold, Tim. 1985. Khazanov on Nomads. Current Anthropology 1985:

384-87.
Jakobson, Roman. 1958. Typological Studies and their Contribution to
Historical Comparative Linguistics. Proceedings of the International Con­
gress of Linguists 8:17-35.
Lehmann, Winfred P. 1973. A Structural Principle of Language and its Im­
plications. Language 49: 47-66.
. 1974. Proto-Indo-European Syntax. Austin: University of Texas Press.
. 1976. A Preface to Diachronic Syntactic investigation. In: Papers from
the Parasession on Diachronic Syntax, pp. 169-78, S.B. Steever et al eds.
Chicago: Chicago Linguistic Society.
Li, Charles and Sandra A. Thompson. 1974. An Explanation of Word Order
Change: SVO  SOV. Foundations of Language 12:201-14.
Lightfoot, David W. 1979. Principles of Diachronie Syntax. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Meillet, Antoine. 1967. The Comparative Method in Historical Linguistics,
trans. by Gordon B. Ford, Jr. Paris: Champion.
Prokosch, Eduard. 1939. A Comparative Germanic Grammar. Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania.
Ramat, Paolo. 1984. Linguistica Tipologica. Bologna: Il Mulino.
Vennemann, Theo. 1974. Topics, Subjects and Word Order: From SXV to
SVX via TVX. In: Historical Linguistics I, 339-76. John Andersen and
Charles Jones, eds. Amsterdam: North-Holland.
Watkins, Calvert. 1964. Preliminaries to the Reconstruction of Indo-
European Sentence Structure. Proceedings of the International Congress
of Linguists 9: 1035-42.
. 1976. Towards Proto-Indo-European Syntax: Problems and Pseudo-
Problems. In: Papers from the Parassession on Diachronie Syntax,
305-26. S.B. Steever et al. eds. Chicago: Chicago Linguistic Society.
 AUXILIARY VERBS IN THE UNIVERSAL THEORY
OF LANGUAGE CHANGE

HELMUT LÜDTKE
Romanisches Seminar - Universität Kiel, BRD

1. Preliminaries

Language (in the sense of Fr. langage) should not be viewed as an in­
strument of communication; we should rather say that language is (human
vocal) communication; in other words, it does not exist but it takes place.
Viewed as an object, language is a platonic idea, or a construct, to use more
recent terminology.
As far as its structure and functioning is concerned, language is cer­
tainly neither a machine nor a living organism. Nevertheless, being a pro­
duct of the human brain, it is organised along biological rather than on
mechanical principles; excepting, perhaps, the speech wave considered as
an extracorporeal phenomenon.
When a machine - or some parts of it - breaks down it will be repaired.
The history of a machine may be described as a cyclic sequence of two alter­
nating states, i.e. functioning and repair. According to the followers of De
Saussure (and many other linguists who never explicitly confessed their struc­
turalist orientation), the same would hold for any linguistic subsystem. It
eventually becomes dysfunctional and then gets either reconstructed or
replaced. In keeping with this mechanistic philosophy of mainstream struc­
turalism, language change is viewed as an unending sequence of destruc­
tion and subsequent re-generation.
I think the first linguist who questioned the validity of this view was
Walther von Wartburg in his 1931 booklet intitled «Das Ineinandergreifen
von deskriptiver und historischer Sprachwissenschaft» (Berichte der
Sächsischen Akademie der Wissenschaften 83/1). «Ineinandergreifen» is a
metaphor taken from the notion of cog-wheels. It implies that the two pro­
cesses involved are not in chronological succession; which means that neither
one can be the cause of the motivation for the other one.
350 HELMUT LÜDTKE

What W. von Wartburg had in mind was Gilliéron's therapeutic con­

ception: according to him languages will acquire defects, and defects will
be remedied after they have occurred. What matters in any case is the prin­
ciple of subsequence (event plus subsequent reaction) present both in
Gilliéron and in structuralism, versus a Heraclitean view of language as a
homeorethic structure which μεταβάλλον αναπαύεται (i.e. changing keeps at
rest); this latter conception would imply that the remedy is already operating
when the defect becomes noticeable.
Upon careful observation of what speaker/hearers actually and naturally
do, and not because of what grammarians prescribe, we may arrive at the
conclusion that it is the principle of simultaneity that underlies language
change.

2. The universal law of language change.

Conscious innovations aside, because their overall effect on language
structures is weak anyway, the bulk of what will happen in a language over
a considerable stretch of time, i.e. at least 1000 years, may be described as
a continuous interplay of three processes which are in operation all the time,
namely, phonic shrinkage, semantactic accretion, and merger of meaningful
items adjacent in the syntactic chain. Cf. the following graph:

item(s) time item(s) process

SHRINKAGE

ACCRETION

MERGER

This triad should be understood as a cybernetic cycle where each output

of a process is the input to the next one; so there is no starting point, no
single initial cause. However, each process is explained as a result of any
speaker's/hearer's natural linguistic behaviour. There is no longer any
mystery about these processes. Nor is there any problem of «actuation».
 AUXILIARY VERBS AND THEORY OF CHANGE 351

Language change is in no other way actuated than the earth's rotation or

revolution: it is always there, it needs no push.

3. Corollaries.
One of the immediate consequences that derive from the above scheme
is that the organisation of naming through items by a giving language can­
not be stable. Since the wheel of the triad always keeps turning, every item
is, in the long run, doomed to loose its identity either by elimination from
the repertoire through disuse or by merger with some syntactically adjacent
item.
Another consequence ensuing from the above assumption is that
presumably every item of every language stems from a former syntactic com­
bination.
Up to now we have taken it for granted that items exist, cease to exist,
or come into existence. We must also look at the other side of the coin (cf.
chapter 1.): items exist, i.e. they have their individual identity, insofar as
they are identified by the hearer in actual communication, and stored in
his/her brain in order to be re-used when (s)he acts as a speaker.
Being or not being identified as an individual item — versus constituting
part and parcel of the phonic representation (or exponence) of a longer item
— is a matter of probability. The score will be highest for the bulkiest items,
i.e. those having greatest phonic size.
Size, however, is not the only factor that determines identification. The
others are frequency of use, distributional constraints, i.e. occurrence at a
certain place in the syntactic chain where a given item, or member of a given
class of items, may be expected to occur, and, in the latter instance, size
of the class to which the item in question belongs. Obviously, potential for
identification, i.e. the probability of being identified, is positively correlated
with phonic size, frequency, and distributional constraints; negatively, with
the number of commutable items.
The foregoing argumentation helps to account for some phenomena
of semantic change (e.g. such as go along with an increase of frequency)
and for a bundle of processes described under the heading of «gram-
maticalisation», i.e. a gradual shift transforming lexemes into grammatical
morphemes. The rise and decay of morphological (sub)systems is partly ex­
plainable as a complex process by which some lexemes gain a temporary
respite from loss of identity. This is brought about by compensating phonic
352 HELMUT LÜDTKE

shrinkage by an increase in the frequency of occurrence and distributional

constraints, plus forming closed sets of commutable elements. The other
part of the explanation of why there is such a device as morphology in
languages has to do with people's ability to process information by time­
sharing. While the identification of lexemes requires the hearer's full con­
sciousness, grammatical items accompanying them may be processed
alongside with them through subconscious cortical activity.

4. Auxiliarity.
With respect to accretion in the diachronics of naming we may set up
the following distinctions:
— juxtaposition vs. subordination;
— enrichment: lexicon vs. accidence;
— accretion occurring in: verb phrase vs. noun phrase or between noun
phrases;
— anteposition vs. postposition of auxiliary to lexeme;
— replacement vs. reinforcement of decaying morphological subsystems by
auxiliaries;
— semantic ranges covered by auxiliarity (or, more specifically, by auxiliary
verbs) in different languages.

5. Auxiliary verbs.
The notion «auxiliary verb» may be given two different, though com­
plementary, definitions, one of them being synchronic, the other diachronic;
viz.:
— items that occur in the same positions as verb lexemes do, while their
potential for combining with lexemes, including themselves, is like that of
grammatical morphemes;
— a cross-linguistic device of accretion by which certain verb lexemes are
substituted for decaying subsystems of verb accidence.
Auxiliary verbs are likely to occur wherever two prerequisites, a syn­
tactical and a morphological one, are met, viz.:
— verb serialisation as a regular pattern;
— existence of uninflected (or only partially inflected) verb forms, e.g. in­
finitive, participle.
True auxiliary verbs are fully integrated into the pattern of verb ac­
cidence, which means that, on principle, they combine with any non-
 AUXILIARY VERBS AND THEORY OF CHANGE 353

obsolescent verb lexeme in the language. Thus, they are factors in the Carte­
sian product constituted by verb accidence. They are to be distinguished from
serially occurring verbs that express all sorts of modalities but whose distribu­
tion is limited on semantic grounds.

6. The life cycle of auxiliary verbs (Werner's funnel).

Incipient auxiliarity is characterised by the following peculiarities:
— full paradigm / free combinability;
— moderate frequency of auxiliary forms as against higher frequency of
simple forms;
— few distributional constraints. This implies — relatively — free order
(cf. Lat. HABEO DICTUM - DICTUM HABEO), including the possibility
of intercalation (HABEO X DICTUM);
— moderate phonic size of auxiliary items
(cf. HABET : 5 phonemes / 2 syllables
HABEAT: 6 phonemes / 3 syllables).
In the course of centuries — or rather: millennia — these properties
will irreversibly change in a universal direction, namely:
— restriction of the paradigm;
— rise in frequency of at least some of the auxiliary forms;
— increasing number of distributional constraints resulting in agglutination;
— shrinkage of phonic size (cf. 2.), sometimes below the output of phonetic
laws (cf. Manczak's law of irregular shrinking due to high frequency).
When this process, which can be symbolised by Otmar Werner's fun­
nel, goes on, the results may be opacity, phonic zeros, and dysfunctionali-
ty, either of single items or of whole subsystems.
Both rise and decay of auxiliary verbs are due to one and the same per­
vasive force, namely natural speech activity.

7. Semantic range of auxiliary verbs.

Cross-linguistically, it is the most frequent verbs that are candidates

for turning into auxiliaries, i.e. such as carry quite unspecific meanings, as
e.g. [be, have, do, become, go, come, will, shall] etc.
Correspondingly, notions expressed by auxiliary verbs show a very wide
range, such as, e.g.:
— actualisation marked as affirmative, negative, or dubitative: E. do;
354 HELMUT LÜDTKE

— verb topicalisation: colloquial German tun (singen tut er nicht; können

tut er das nicht);
— topicalisation of indirect objects: Fr. se voir (Jean se voit donner un livre
«John is given a book»);
— negativity: Finn. puhun / en puhu
puhut / et puhu
puhuu / ei puhu
— exclusion. Fr. (ne) faire que (→ immediate past, e.g. in Haiti Creole
French: m fèk rive «I have just arrived»);
— diathesis (passive voice): Lat.-Rom. ESSE, E. be, Germ. werden, It.
venire, Sw. bliva, etc.
— various tense/aspect functions, such as:
— continuance: Pg. ter, Sic. aviri, E. have;
— future: E. -'ll, Germ. werden, Romance descendants of Lat. HABERE,
VELLE, DEBERE, VENIRE; Fr. aller, Pg. ir, Slav. BỌD -, etc.
— past or completion: verbs originally or still denoting «possession» in a
great number of languages, e.g. Germanic, Romance, Modern Greek, Alba­
nian, Macedonian, etc.
— non-completion: Chinese méi yŏu; e.g.:
Wang qù lė Běi jïng
Wang go (compi.) Pe- -King
«Wang went (to) Peking» as against:
Wang mei yŏu qù Bei jïng
Wang not have go Pe- -king
«Wang did not go (to) Peking»
— consecutio temporum: It. avere / essere;
cf. «Peter says he would come if...»
Pietro dice che verrebbe se... as against:
«Peter said he would come if...»
Pietro disse che sarebbe venuto se...;
— honorific attitude: Jap. desu, imasu, arimasu;
— vicariousness: Welsh mae / ydy «is» conjugated for person and number,
occurs as a dummy verb lexeme forming the present and present perfect tenses
of any verb. This device also shifts the normal VSO order to V'SVO; example:
Rydw i'n hoffi coffi
Am I in like coffee
«I like coffee».
 PATTERNS OF CASE SYNCRETISM
IN INDO-EUROPEAN LANGUAGES

SILVIA LURAGHI
Università di Torino

0.* The Proto-Indo-European case system is generally reconstructed as

consisting of eight cases1. In Indo-European languages, however, one mostly
finds simplified case systems, in which functions formerly marked by different
cases have been taken over by one single case. This kind of simplification was
achieved through a diachronic process usually referred to as case syncretism.
In the present paper, case syncretism is understood as functional merging
of different morphemes, based on previous functional overlap 2 . In what
follows, I will show how functional syncretism has developed among former­
ly distinct functional elements, arguing that ancient Indo-European languages
display two basic patterns of simplification, clearly distinct from each other.
My work is divided into three parts. In section 1. I define functional syn­
cretism and other concepts related to it which I make use of in the course
of the paper; besides, I describe the conditions under which syncretism may
obtain among cases. Section 2. is devoted to the discussion of some pro­
blems related to the reconstruction and the evolution of the Proto-Indo-

* I thank Michael Job and Harm Pinkster for their comments on earlier versions of this
paper.
1 I refer here to the reconstruction given in Szemerényi (1985: 191-195). On possible alter­
native reconstructions, see below, section 2.2.
2 Functional syncretism should be kept apart from morphological syncretism. The lat­
ter has its immediate cause in phonetic erosion; its result is the phonological identity of one
or more morphemes. The development leads to homophony; real merging of the morphemes
involved may also occur, if functional syncretism goes hand in hand with morphological syn­
cretism. Coleman (1976) mentions three patterns of case syncretism in Latin. The first two
concern instances of mere homophony. I have doubts, whether one should really use the term
«syncretism» for such phenomena; see the discussion in Mignot (1978). The third pattern describ­
ed by Coleman concerns instances of functional syncretism in conjunction with morphological
syncretism. It must still be noticed that, although functional syncretism often shows up together
with morphological syncretism, morphemes involved in functional syncretism need not be
phonologically identical, i.e. functional syncretism may result in allomorphic variation.
356 SILVIA LURAGHI

European case system. Finally, in section 3., I examine case syncretism in

a number of Indo-European languages, using them as examples of the general
principles discussed in section 1.

1.
1.1 Conditions on syncretism.
Functional elements such as cases are seldom used completely unam­
biguously, for one function only. More often, they can be used with a cer­
tain degree of freedom, which enables speakers to choose among different
formal means in order to convey the same meaning 3 . The formal means
(e.g. cases) involved can then be regarded as being characterized by partial
synonymy 4 ; i.e. they are felt as synonyms in those contexts in which they
can overlap freely. Free overlap of cases clearly constitutes a basis for their
merging (syncretism). The latter can take place under two general condi­
tions: a) the degree of partial synonymy must be high enough to call for
a reduction of redundancy; b) functional merging and possible formal merg­
ing of morphemes must not engender unacceptable ambiguity 5 .

1.2 Value of cases.

As a condition for overlap I have set partial synonymy among cases.
Synonymy must be regarded as affecting the functional value of different
case endings. I will now clarify what I hold to be the value of a case.
Case endings may be defined as relational markers which convey seman­
tic and/or syntactic information in a sentence, with respect to the relation­
ship between nominal constituents and predicates or nominal constituents
between each other. I do not wish to enter here into a discussion of whether
one should speak of the meaning of a case. Nevertheless, there are a number
of regularities which characterize the use of each case, with regard to the
semantic as well as to the syntactic levels6. Therefore, cases may be regard-

3 Cf. Pinkster (1985: 166).

4 On the notion of synonymy as a condition for case syncretism, see Serbat (1985).
5 On acceptable and unacceptable ambiguity, see Plank (1978).
6 For example, the accusative case most often covers the semantic relation of a Patient;
on the syntactic level, it usually takes the position of the second argument of two- or three-
place predicates. Consequently, it can be regarded as having a semantic value of Patient (i.e. the
actant most directly affected by the action expressed by the verb) and a syntactic value of se­
cond argument (i.e. belonging to the central arguments of the predicate). See also Pinkster (1985).
 CASE SYNCRETISM IN INDO-EUROPEAN 357

ed as having a semantic and a syntactic value. The semantic value of a case

morpheme is understood as information about the semantic relation borne
by a noun phrase, whatever its function in the sentence may be 7 . The syn­
tactic value is understood as information about the syntactic function of
a nominal constituent, for example, whether it is an argument or a satellite
with respect to the predicate, whether it is the first or the second argument,
etc 8 . Clearly, as in most languages there is no one-to-one correspondence
among case morphemes and semantic relations or syntactic functions, what
I have defined as the value of cases is a matter of relative frequency.

1.3 Two patterns of case syncretism.

From the discussion in section 1.2 above, it follows that partial
synonymy among case morphemes can be accounted for either by their
semantic or by their syntactic value. Therefore, case syncretism may be
brought about by either components and consequently develop along two
lines: a) semantic syncretism: cases which mark different semantic relations
may merge, regardless of the syntactic function they refer to; b) syntactic
syncretism: cases which differ in their semantic value but mark constituents
in identical syntactic positions may merge as well.
Case systems in which semantic syncretism has operated convey through
case morphemes semantic rather than syntactic information, leaving the latter
to lexical features of the verb. Conversely, in case systems based on syntac­
tic syncretism, cases stress rather the syntactic position of a noun phrase,
while lexical features contribute to understanding the underlying semantic
relations. Apparently similar case systems, as e.g. the Ancient Greek and
the Germanic ones, function in quite different ways, depending on the
specific pattern of syncretism which they have followed9.

7 For example, the locative forms of Sanskrit dame, Latin domi, Greek oikoi, with the
meaning «at home».
8 I follow here the terminology of Dik (1978). A typical example for this correspondence
in Indo-European languages may be the nominative case, taking almost exclusively the syntac­
tic role of subject, i.e. the first argument of a predicate.
9 There is evidence for semantic syncretism even in languages relying on syntactic syn­
cretism and viceversa. For example, in Latin (see below, section 3.2.1), syntactic syncretism
of the ablative, the locative and the instrumental can possibly be reduced to previous semantic
syncretism. The merging of the ablative and the instrumental must have happened at an earlier
stage than the merging of the two cases mentioned with the locative. In fact, formal merging
of the locative with the ablative / instrumental was not yet fully accomplished for the -ā- stems
358 SILVIA LURAGHI

1.4 Lexical features.

When the same marker comes to be used for functions that should in
principle be left distinct, there must be some other means for dealing with
the ambiguity brought about by lack of formal distinction. This is general­
ly achieved by means of lexical features borne either by nouns or by verbs.
The disambiguating function of lexical features plays a prominent role, with
regard to semantic relations as well as to syntactic functions 10 .
Let us first turn to the function of lexical features for the assignment
of semantic relations. As certain lexical items are more likely than others
to bear certain semantic relations (e.g. toponyms are more likely than per­
sonal names to bear the semantic relation of locatives)11 it follows that
specific cases are more often associated with specific classes of lexical items,
or, more precisely, with specific lexical features. This fact in its turn allows
for a reduction in case systems, whenever the occurrence of a lexical feature
can by itself suffice to marking a noun phrase as carrying a specific seman­
tic relation.
As for the syntactic level, it may be observed that, much in the same
way, there are lexical items which are more likely than others to take cer­
tain syntactic functions. Thus, toponyms, being more likely to represent
locatives, usually take the position of satellites rather than that of arguments
with respect to the predicate 12 .

in Classical Latin. See Brugmann-Delbriick (1911: 487). Syncretism of ablative, locative and
instrumental is also attested in Homeric Greek by the adverbial ending -phi-. This instance
of syncretism was contrary to the basic pattern operating in Greek, in that it engendered semantic
opacity. Consequently, the ending -phi- was increasingly emarginated, until it finally disap­
peared. On the use of -phi- in homeric Greek, see Chantraine (1958: 234-241). There is no
agreement among scholars on the status of Mycenean -pi. Recently, Hettrich (1985) has pro­
pounded that Mycenean -pi only marked the relations of ablative and instrumental. The func­
tion of the locative would then have been taken over at a later stage, parallel to the develop­
ment of the Latin ablative.
10 The bearing of lexical features in determining case marking has been emphasized by
many scholars; see, among others, Croft (1984), Deane-Wheeler (1984), Bybee (1985) and
Pinkster (1985).
11 Cf. Pinkster (1985: 178). A good example for this phenomenon is given by the follow­
ing sentence: hėn. Phlégrāi Gigantes éstësan theoîs, «(the war) that Giants fought in Phlegra
against Gods» (Eur. Ion 988). Lexical features also explain the existence of 0 locatives, such
as Hittite takan «on the earth», Greek êmar, «by day»; see Neu (1980), Benveniste (1962).
12 See above, fn. 8. Dik (1978: 27) stressed that the instrumental case seldom takes the
position of an argument, as most predicates do not require instruments within their predicate
frame.
 CASE SYNCRETISM IN INDO-EUROPEAN 359

For the purpose of the present paper, animacy appears to have par­
ticular relevance among lexical features of the noun, in that it turns out to
be crucial in determining overlap among cases. In fact, as it will become
clear in the discussion in section 3. below, animacy plays a major role in
establishing the degree of acceptable ambiguity. In Indo-European languages,
animacy affects in particular the position of the dative case. This had already
been stressed by Brugmann-Delbrück, in a passage which is worth quoting,
because it also emphasizes, as a syntactic property of the dative, that of in­
dicating the third argument of a three-place predicate, as opposed to its se­
cond argument: «Ueberwiegend erscheinen Personalbegriffe im Dativ, wobei
die Person den Vorgang irgendwie aufnimmt, besonders wenn daneben noch
ein Akkusativ oder Genitiv vom Verbum abhängt, der dann das nähere Ob­
jekt bildet» (1911: 548)13.
Moreover, lexical features of the verb also contribute to disambiguating
the semantic relation borne by a noun phrase, as well as its syntactic role.
This largely depends on the fact that predicates bear inherent information
about their predicate frame, concerning the number of arguments and the
semantic relations that these arguments must be assigned14.
To sum up, lexical features are crucial in determining the structure of
any given case system. This applies to our understanding of both the syn­
chronic functioning of a case system, and its development in time.

2.
2.1 The Proto-Indo European case system.
Recent contributions to the reconstruction of the Proto-Indo-European
case system have increasingly made it clear that the classical reconstruction,
which one still finds in Szemerényi (1985), cannot constitute the basis for
an explanation of each specific case system attested in the daughter languages.
On the one hand, one finds limited morphemic distinction for some
cases in all Indo-European languages (e.g. ablative singular) or morphemes
which are etymologically connected but have a different status in different
languages (e.g. Ancient Greek suffix -phi as compared to Sanskrit endings

13 For exemplification from different Indo-European languages see, for instance, Jakob-
son (1936), Starke (1977), Luraghi (1986a) and Pinkster (1985).
14 Cf. Dik (1978: 25-32) and Pinkster (1985).
360 SILVIA LURAGHI

in -bhi-), so that one could easily conclude that the really innovative pat­
tern was the Sanskrit one, in that it was built up by widening and regulariz­
ing inflectional paradigms.
On the other hand, doubts on the correctness of the traditional
reconstruction also come from the discovery of a directive case in Old Hit­
tite, indicating goal with verbs of motion, which was marked by the ending
-a, also attested in adverbs in other Indo-European languages15. The ques­
tion could be raised, whether Proto-Indo-European should then be regard­
ed as having had a bigger number of cases than was thought so far.
One wonders whether it makes any sense at all to talk about case syn­
cretism, or whether one should better think to a process contrary to it, as
I mentioned above for Sanskrit, which one could propound for Hittite as
well, with regard to the directive case. However, one still must reckon with
well attested instances of morphological syncretism, as it is the case for the
Greek dative 16 .
The question of case syncretism can be reformulated as follows: Indo-
European languages must have inherited from the proto-language a set of
relational markers, partly definable as more or less independent particles,
partly integrated within an inflectional paradigm. These particles, whatever
their morphological status might have been, at least in late Proto-Indo-
European fulfilled the various functions that one singles out for each
reconstructed «case endings» on the basis of a comparison of the case systems
of the daughter languages. Moreover, the proto-language must already have
possessed a certain degree of semantic or syntactic overlap among those mor­
phemes that the daughter languages have exploited in building up their own
inflectional paradigms.
For the purpose of the present paper, I will consider the eight cases
traditionally reconstructed for the proto-language, with the proviso that they
constitute a purely hypothetic system, a function, in the mathematical sense,
of the case systems of the historical languages 17 .

15 I refer here to the etymology put forward in Laroche (1970). Alternative proposals
have been made by other scholars: see for instance Shields (1982).
16 Chantraine (1973) has discussed throughly the morphological constitution of Greek
nominal paradigms. On morphological syncretism in Germanic, see Prokosch (1939: 231-241).
17 Of course, in a diachronic perspective, the evolution which resulted in the case
systems of the historical languages must be regarded as having started with an already
heterogeneous situation. As Serbat (1981a: 87) puts it, «l'histoire n'a pas pour premier chapitre
une 'Genèse'».
 CASE SYNCRETISM IN INDO-EUROPEAN 361

2.2 Other diachronic phenomena.

If on the one hand case syncretism has the effect of diminishing a
system's degree of redundancy, it is also true that it creates an increasing
degree of opacity within that system, which in turn is avoided through
respecifying the categories previously expressed by cases, using relational
markers of a different kind. With respect to cases, this phenomenon is to
be seen in the increasing use of prepositions.
Moreover, in Indo-European languages case syncretism has been con­
comitant with typological change in word order, from OV to VO, and from
a synthetic toward an analytic type. As changes of this type are generally
incompatible with rich case systems, it must be borne in mind that not every
reduction found in the case systems of the Indo-European languages is at­
tributable to case syncretism18.
Typological change has had its most relevant effects in the Germanic
languages, but its effects are to be found also elsewhere, e.g. with respect
to the Ancient Greek locative 19 .

2.3 Possible merging of the accusative and the directive«

Before analysing case syncretism within the specific branches of the
Indo-European family, I want to briefly examine the position of the Old
Hittite directive, with respect to the rest of the Indo-European languages20.
It is well known that the accusative case could be used in ancient Indo-
European languages with verbs of motion, for indicating goal. On a purely
theoretical level, without implying either that Hittite had lost the goal ac­
cusative, or that the remaining Indo-European languages had lost the direc­
tive case, I would like to explain the possible functional syncretism of a
specific directive case with the accusative case of the direct object as an in­
stance of syntactic syncretism.
When used with two-place predicates, the two cases take similar syn­
tactic positions, in that both have the function of the second argument. The
fundamental difference between the two cases lies in the semantic class of

18 See Greenberg (1963). On the typological evolution of Germanic, see Ramat (1981).
19 Plank (1978: 290) has stressed the importance of considering the interaction of alter­
native and simultaneous use of coding devices as a prius to a study of case syncretism. On
the Greek locative, see below, fn. 26.
20 I discuss this possible instance of syncretism here instead t h a n in section 3 . , because
it is in fact unattested in historical languages.
362 SILVIA LURAGHI

two-place predicates taking the directive case as marker of their second argu­
ment, i.e. verbs of motion. Syntactic syncretism between the directive and
the accusative could be achieved because the lexical features of the verb alone
may suffice in indicating the semantic relation underlying the noun phrase
which stands in the position of the second argument.
3. In order to exemplify semantic and syntactic syncretism I am now
going to take into account the case systems of Ancient Greek, Hittite, Latin
and Old Germanic. The instances of syncretism that I am going to survey
are the following21:
Ancient Greek: genitive, ablative → genitive;
dative, locative, instrumental → dative;
Hittite: dative, locative → dative/locative;
dative/locative, directive → dative/locative;
ablative, instrumental → allomorphs with the same function;
Latin: ablative, instrumental, locative → ablative;
Old Germanic: ablative, instrumental, locative, dative → dative.

3.1 Semantic syncretism.

As examples for semantic syncretism I have chosen here Ancient Greek
and Hittite 22 . The semantic overlap allowing functional and (partly) mor­
phological syncretism will be explained in the following subparagraphs.

3.1.1 Genitive and ablative23.

The main function of the genitive case consists in marking (nominal)

21 Ch. Lehmann (1982: 107-112) has examined possible instances of interrelations among
cases, that may lead from «concrete» to «grammatical» cases, in a grammaticalization pro­
cess. This can be interpreted as a source for case syncretism, mainly on semantic basis, An
analogous interpretation of the evolution from concrete to grammatical cases is given by
Kurytowicz (1949: 149).
22 O n case syncretism in Indo-European languages, and in particular on semantic sources
for syncretism, see Wackernagel (1926: 300-305) a n d Kurytowicz (1964: 189-197).
23 Morphological syncretism of the ablative and the genitive case also occurred in Balto-
Slavic. However, functionally speaking, things are not exactly the same as in Ancient Greek.
In Slavic, the function of the ablative has been taken over mostly by the prepositional genitive,
whereas the plain genitive can function as an ablative under much stronger lexical constraints
than it does in Ancient Greek. This is possibly due to the wide use of the partitive genitive,
as well as to the use of the genitive case ending as a marker of the animate accusative. See
Vaillant (1977: 37-80).
 CASE SYNCRETISM IN INDO-EUROPEAN 363

dependency. If one considers instances of the so-called subjective/objective

genitive, as Greekphóbos ton polemiön, both possible interpretations (i.e.
«the enemies fear somebody» / «somebody fears the enemies») imply that
the action or process implied by the verbal noun is conceived as having the
rectum as its source, either as the experiencer/agent, or as the object/cause
of a particular situation.
The notion of source of an action or a process often corresponds to
that of source of motion, which in turn corresponds, in a metaphorical sense,
to that of cause. The latter two semantic relations are precisely those mark-
ed by the ablative24. Therefore, in certain environments, the genitive mark-
ed semantic relations which were elsewhere marked by the ablative.

3.1.2 Dative and locative.

The Indo-European dative indicates, in the words of Brugmann-
Delbrück, the «Nominalbegriff... mit Hinblick oder Rücksicht auf den die
Handlung geschiet» (1911: 547). More specifically, this definition can be
applied to instances in which the dative case indicates proximity to somebody,
either in a concrete or in a translated sense. An example of a locatival dative
can be found in the so-called dative of possession, best exemplified in
languages that continued the morphological distinction between the dative
and the locative, see, e.g.: índra túbhayam ánnuttá viriyám, «your power,
Indra, (is) overwhelming», RV I 80.7. The semantic affinity of the dati-
ve case with the locative follows clearly from examples of this kind, the
locative being used more often for toponyms or, more in general, for noun
phrases having inanimate referents. Therefore, the two cases display com-
plementary distribution, with animacy playing the role of a discriminating
feature.
Notice, however, that this does not hold true for all uses of the dative,

24 I will be speaking of functions of cases in a rather loose way, referring to what one
can most likely reconstruct for Proto-Indo-European. The development of an ablative of
cause deriving from an ablative of origin or separation can best be observed in languages in
which the ablative and the instrumental were still being kept apart, i.e. Sanskrit (see Haudry,
1977: 141-142) and Old Hittite (see Melchert, 1977: 160 and 190). Partial syncretism of the
genitive and the ablative can be observed, in Ancient Greek, also with the adverbial ending
-then, limited to pronouns. The fact that with nominal stems -then only functioned as an ablative,
may be interpreted as an archaism, referring back to a stage at which genitive and ablative
were still being kept separated. See Chantraine (1958: 241-243) on the use of -then in Homeric
Greek.
364 SILVIA LURAGHI

which can be emploied with any kind of verbs, including those expressing
motion, while the distribution of the locative is in general more restricted25.
I will return to this peculiarity of the dative in section 3.1.3 below.
The complementary distribution of the dative and the locative in cer-
tain environments engenders a high degree of redundancy within the system,
in that the dative can be conceived as the animate counterpart to the locative.
Thus, merging of the two cases does not bring about ambiguity.
Syncretism of dative and locative is well attested in Hittite; in Ancient
Greek, although morphologically attested, it was functionally restricted 26 .
For the true locative, all Greek varieties, including Homeric Greek, resorted
rather to the prepositional dative. This made the dative case ending again
unexploited for inanimates.

3.1.3 Dative/locative and directive.

As stressed above, section 3.1.2, the Indo-European dative could be
used with verbs both expressing or not expressing motion, while the locative
case was seldom used with the former. The Old Hittite dative, which had
previously merged with the locative, conveyed the meaning of location and
goal with animate referents. However, it only marked static locatives with
inanimates, the goal being marked by the directive case 27 . Starting from
Middle Hittite, one can observe functional syncretism of the dative/locative
with the directive, the latter case ending having become increasingly marginal,
until it ended up by being used as an archaism. Merging of the dative/locative
with the directive levelled the situation for both animates and inanimates28.

25 On the use of the dative case with verbs in Indo-European languages, see Brugmann-
Delbriick (1911: 549-554); on possible use of the locative case with verbs of motion, see ib.:
514-516.
26 T h e use of the dative case without prepositions for indicating the locative was mostly
limited t o t o p o n y m s in Classical Greek. In H o m e r i c Greek, although m o r e widespread,
it already was constrained by a n u m b e r of lexical restrictions, see C h a n t r a i n e (1953:
78-81).
27 Notice, however, t h a t , for a particular set of verbs clearly indicating t h e end of m o -
tion (such as « t o sit d o w n » , « t o lay d o w n » ) , t h e locative was used instead of the directive in
Old Hittite, see Starke (1977: 47-66) a n d Luraghi (1986a: 33 a n d fn. 2). This must have held
already for P r o t o - I n d o - E u r o p e a n , see Brugmann-Delbriick (1911: 514-515).
28 I have analysed this instance of syncretism in terms of system internal economy in
Luraghi (1985).
 CASE SYNCRETISM IN INDO-EUROPEAN 365

3.1.4 Locative and instrumental29.

There is cross-linguistic evidence for actants covering locative and in­
strumental relations as being interchangeable in certain contexts. In a large
number of languages, a location can be conceived as a means and, similar­
ly, a means or manner can be viewed as a location. Compare for instance
the following pairs of expressions: to travel by car / to travel in a car; en
hóplois mákhesthai /sýn hóplois mákhesthai, «to fight in / with weapons»;
priexaV na poezde/priexat' poezdom, «to arrive in / by train». Inter-
changeability derives from the fact that both locatival and instrumental rela­
tions are taken by actants which are concomitant to the development of the
action or the process expressed by a predicate 30 .

3.1.5 Dative/locative and instrumental.

Functional merging of the dative/locative with the instrumental was
allowed, in Ancient Greek, by the further differentiation of the dative and
the locative through the use of prepositions. On the one hand, as I have argued
above, an instrumental could be semantically close to a locative. On the other
hand, as instruments are mostly inanimate, the Proto-Indo-European in­
strumental must have been essentially limited to inanimates 31 . Thus, even
with respect to the dative case, the instrumental could take the place of a
locative, with the feature of animacy again serving for avoiding ambiguity32.

3.1.6 Ablative and instrumental.

Both cases cover the relation of a conditioning factor with regard to
the action or process expressed by the predicate33. Such factor may be con-

29 By using this particular ordering in m y exposition I am by no means implying that

the syncretism of dative, locative a n d instrumental in Greek chronologically corresponded to
it. I rather think that we are dealing with convergin p h e n o m e n a .
30 F o r a definition of concomitance, with regard t o the locative a n d the instrumental,
see Luraghi (in print a); on the instrumental see also Seiler (1974). O n possible similarities bet­
ween these two semantic relations, see already Wackernagel (1926: 304-305). For further discus­
sion a n d exemplifications see Luraghi (1986c: 141).
31 The instrumental of agent must not have been an originary construction of Proto-
Indo-European, see Luraghi (1986b) and, on Sanskrit, Haudry (1977: 414). On the semantic
value of the instrumental, as well as for further reference on this topic, see Luraghi (in print a).
32 Notice that syncretism of the dative/locative with the directive in Hittite a n d syn­
cretism of dative, locative a n d instrumental in Ancient Greek have followed the same p a t t e r n
of system internal economy with regard t o the feature of animacy.
366 SILVIA LURAGHI

ceived either as a cause, as is the case with the ablative, or as a means, as

is the case with the instrumental.
Starting from Middle Hittite, the ablative increasingly took over the
function of the instrumental; the two cases were still being used as allomorphs
of the latter until the latest written documents. Notice, however, that enclitic
possessives only had one form (morphologically an instrumental) for both
cases, starting with the oldest texts 34 .

3.2 Syntactic syncretism.

Latin 35 and Germanic36 provide us with two instances of syntactic syn­
cretism. The cases which had fallen together in these languages had previously
been the markers of different semantic relations; merging occurred on the
basis of the syntactic position that the cases took with regard to the predicate.
The kind of synonymy involved had been brought about by syntactic overlap:
all cases usually taking the function of satellites in concrete utterances merged
together.
The consequences of syntactic syncretism on the constitution and the
evolution of case systems relying on it have a much wider bearing than those
brought about by semantic syncretism. In fact, syntactic syncretism has the
effect of engendering semantic opacity within case systems. Semantic opacity,
in turn, affects the relation of prepositions to cases. In general, it seems
appropriate to state that opacity results in idiosyncratic use of cases with
prepositions, which ultimately leads one particular case to become the un­
marked one within prepositional phrases 37 .
Latin and Germanic display two variants of syntactic syncretism, which
differ from each other with regard to the destiny of the dative.

3.2.1 Latin,
The Latin ablative is the output of the locative, the ablative and the
instrumental. It can still be observed covering these three functions without

33 See below, fn. 38.

34 O n the use of the ablative a n d the instrumental in Hittite, see Melchert (1977).
35 For a syntactic and semantic analysis of the Latin ablative, see Serbai (1981b); on
syncretism in Latin, see Serbai (1985).
36 T h e wider study devoted to case syncretism in Germanic is Delbrück (1907). I have
analysed the same problem in Luraghi (1986c).
37 O n the notion of opacity, with specific reference to the Latin ablative a n d to the rela­
tionship between prepositions a n d cases in Latin, see Luraghi (in print b ) .
 CASE SYNCRETISM IN INDO-EUROPEAN 367

prepositions, limited to a number of occurrences in which semantic opacity

is either contextually or lexically dealt with. Elsewhere, one finds either a
prepositionless ablative functioning as an instrumental38, or a prepositional
phrase.
The functional load still carried by the ablative case, also without
prepositions, prevented it from becoming the unmarked case within preposi­
tional phrases: this was rather a task of the accusative case 39 .

3.2.2 Germanic.
In the Germanic languages, the dative case as well merged with the
locative, the ablative and the instrumental.
The difference between the Latin and the Germanic patterns derives
from the syntactic twofold nature of the dative case. Syntactically, the dative
case can be conceived either as the third argument of a three-place predicate,
as opposed to the cases of satellites (ablative, locative and instrumental) as
was the case in Latin, or as the case of the non-closest complement of a
verb, as opposed to the accusative, as was the case in the Germanic languages.
In other words, whereas Latin made a distinction between arguments and
satellites, Germanic rather discriminated between central arguments (i.e. first
and second argument) and all other possible actants.
Having chosen the latter perspective, Germanic increasingly made use
of the prepositional dative for marking satellites. Without prepositions, the
dative case mostly functioned as a true, argumentai dative40. Therefore, the
Germanic dative took a different way from that of the Latin ablative, in

38 The ablative case, without prepositions, could also convey the meaning of manner
and cause in Latin. The semantic relations of cause, instrument and manner can be distinguished
as follows: a) cause: source of the action, with no implications about the existence of an agent;
b) instrument: the means through which an action is accomplished, with explicit reference to
the existence of an agent; c) manner: the way in which an action develops/is accomplished,
with specific reference to the action itself and to its participants. Manner is rather close to
instrument, in that the way in which an action is accomplished can be conceived as a means
for accomplishing it. Functional merging of markers of instrument/manner with markers of
cause can be explained through the general notion of conditioning factor, which I have discussed
above, section 3.1.6. See also Vester (1983: 46) on the difference between cause, instrument
and manner with regard to controlled or uncontrolled states of affairs in Latin.
39 See Luraghi (in print b).
40 A prepositionless dative functioning as a locative or an instrumental is seldom to be
found in early Germanic languages, see Ramat (1981: 143-144).
368 SILVIA LURAGHI

that, when used without prepositions, it was restored in its originary func­
tion. The function of satellites was transferred to prepositional phrases,
within which the dative became the unmarked case 41 .
As a last remark, let me stress that, as I mentioned earlier, the Ger­
manic branch of the Indo-European family is the one in which the tendency
to the shift from a synthetic toward an analytic type had the greatest
relevance, at least among the languages surveyed in the present paper.
Therefore, it might not constitute the best item for a study of case syncretism.

4. Conclusions.
In the course of this paper, I have examined functional case syncretism
in four branches of the Indo-European family. I have been arguing that:
a) functional syncretism derives from partial synonymy among cases;
b) synonymy can take its origin either from the semantic or from the syn­
tactic overlap of cases;
c) instances of semantic syncretism are brought about by similarities in the
semantic relations underlying noun phrases marked by specific case endings;
d) syntactic syncretism is brought about by similarity in the syntactic posi­
tion that noun phrases marked by specific case endings usually take with
respect to the predicate;
e) lexical features, and animacy in particular, play a major role in case syn­
cretism, in that they contribute to determining the degree of acceptable am­
biguity;
f) syntactic syncretism engenders semantic opacity within case systems and
results in an increasing use of prepositions.

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Linguistics, ed. by G. Calboli. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Melchert, H.C. 1977. Ablative and instrumental in Hittite. Unpublished PhD
Dissertation, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University.
Mignot, X. 1978. Homonymie entre les desinences casuelles du latin.
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Neu, E. 1980. Studien zum endungslosen «Lokativ» des Hethitischen. Inns­
bruck: Institut für Sprachwissenschaft der Universität Innsbruck.
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taxe et Latin, ed. by Ch. Touratier, 163-186. Aix-en-Provence: Univer­
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 INTEGRATION OF PHONOSYMBOLISM
WITH OTHER CATEGORIES OF LANGUAGE CHANGE

YAKOV MALKIEL
University of California, Berkeley

The awareness of the existence of phonosymbolic effects at their crudest,

usually known as onomatopoeia (i.e., imitation in speech of actual sounds
and noises, as they can be observed in nature and in social contexts), cer­
tainly represents nothing conspicuously new, let alone designedly modern­
ist: The phenomenon was perfectly well known in Antiquity, to grammarians,
rhetoricians, and practicing writers, especially poets, of the highest order.
Throughout the ages, any person endowed with a modicum of sensitivity
to such matters and, in general, apt to be persuaded to talk about (respond
to) language, however naively, could probably convey, through voice,
gesture, facial expression, or in some other fashion, his or her realization
of the phonic appropriateness of certain words, such as It. schiaffo «smack,
slap in the face, box on the ears» or G. Pfiff «whistling», fig. «nip» or
«trick», or as the Russian verbs žurčat' «to purl, murmur» and vizžať «to
scream». There will, foreseeably, be certain variations in one's receptivity
to such acoustic effects, whether real or merely latent, i.e., anticipated; but
few observers will have any ideological quarrel with the narrowly circumscrib­
ed phenomenon as such, as long as it is viewed on the plane of synchrony.
Things began to change radically with the advent to influence of
historicism in linguistics, and especially with the attempts, characteristic of
the last third of the past century, to give, almost at any cost, a truly scien­
tific twist to evolutionary linguistics, with the natural and exact sciences be­
ing chosen as a model worthy of emulation, and, within the spectrum of
those sciences, Newtonian physics, known both for its rigor and its rigidity,
beginning to function as the pattern recommended for adoption by linguists.
With classificatory neatness selected as the immediate goal by Neogram-
marians, a new hierarchy of values started to emerge: The so-called regular
sound, which held forth the promise of predictability, became the thing that
really mattered (e.g., in deciding to which family of languages a tongue of
374 YAKOV MALKIEL

controversial parentage actually belonged); a lower rung on the ladder was

assigned to all sorts of analogical and associative interferences, sometimes
hastily lumped together even though, say, individual lexical blends and
paradigmatic pressure hardly involve closely related processes. In that climate
of opinion, onomatopoeia and such fragments of children's language as lent
themselves to eventual transfer to the language of adults, the celebrated
Lallwörter, came last, sometimes relegated to apologetic footnotes, by way
of marginal afterthought. Not surprisingly, Hermann Paul, the most talented
ideologue of that generation, was distinctly more generous in this respect
than the «small fry» among his uninspired imitators; witness the substan­
tial Chap. 19, on «Urschöpfung», in the successive editions of his Prinzi­
pien der Sprachgeschichte.
Toward the end of the century, tone-setting linguists began to realize
that certain near-universally recurrent, potentially ever-present sound changes
had to be sharply distinguished from unique sets of shifts; that the implica­
tions of K. Verner's Law, e.g., namely the influence of word stress on the
outcomes of certain consonants, could not with impunity be transferred from
Indo-European, where the assumption made excellent sense, to Romance,
where it unnecessarily complicated matters — unlike A. Horning (1883) and
W. Meyer-Lübke (1890) had overoptimistically surmised. For these general
tendencies, wide in scope but slightly inaccurate in predictability, which stood
outside the language-specific edifice of so-called regular changes, G.I. Ascoli,
with characteristic verve, coined the colorful term: accidenti generali.
Another major discovery falling into this exciting period was that of the
tremendous range of lexical diffusion or migration, due not only to the ac­
tual displacements of speakers (as merchants, invaders, tutors, servants, or
brides), but also to the still ill-defined spread 'of loose particles of speech
elements. I scarcely need to remind you here of the remarkable convergence
between the experiences, and theoretical inferences later drawn from them,
of European dialect geographers, on the one hand, and, on the other, of
the ethnographic Boasian school of thought, for a while highly influential
in the New World.
At the same time, it became crystal-clear to impartial chroniclers of
events that each new approach, with its peculiar theory, methodology, and
technique as indispensable attachments, so to speak, suited best a particular
type of scholarly personality (or temperament), quite apart from the widely
divergent appeals of phonology, morphosyntax, and lexis to certain intellec­
tual categories of explorers. Thus, M. Grammont was by far at his best in
 PHONOSYMBOLISM AND CATEGORIES OF CHANGE 375

grappling with processes of general phonology — not mere accidents, in this

context, but a bundle of important processes, if measured by his private
scale of values. Vittorio Bertoldi, an enthusiastic and, on the whole, entire­
ly persuasive student of migratory words (Wanderwörter, parole girovaghe),
endowed with a strong side-interest in phonosymbolism in the Crocean key
(La parola come mezzo d'espressione), fell flat, judging from the «dispense»
to his courses, as a student of the more tightly organized historical gram­
mar. This is, of course, presumably unavoidable, except that major scholars
are occasionally known to have gone astray not only through relative neglect
of obligatory matters entrusted to their care in case these matters failed to
set their brains ablaze, but also through overconfidence in domains that hap­
pened to be very close to their hearts. Phonosymbolism, e.g., greatly ap­
pealed to Hugo Schuchardt, and cherishing it certainly was one of his in­
alienable privileges; but, unfortunately, the use he made of playful appeal
to «Urschöpfung» all too frequently degenerated into abuse and adversely
colored part of his own etymological research and of studies conducted by
his admirers (including Leo Spitzer and Joan Corominas), with bad results
for the reputation of phonosymbolism.
The transmission of sounds and other isolable ingredients of speech thus
turned out to be less rectilinear than the founding fathers of the Neogram-
marian movement had overconfidently foreseen; critics, including an
iconoclast of the caliber and temperament of J. Gilliéron, went so far, em­
boldened by Schuchardt's almost sarcastic skepticism, as to conjure up the
image of «mirages phonétiques» (1912).
Where did these gradual refinements of insights and accretions of
knowledge, despite zigzags and sporadic defeats, leave phonosymbolism in
the Age of Diachrony? The contingent of highly qualified scholars — without
any special commitment to etymology — became before long sharply split
on the advisability of allowing for a measurable increase of the scope allot­
ted to it. The principal spokesman for the minority group favoring such
liberalization was Otto Jespersen; what added to the impact of his interven­
tion in the debate was his indisputable status, attained long before the early
'twenties, as a thoroughly competent phonetician (1889, 1897-99, 1904a,
1904b, 1912, etc.) plus, of course, particularly in the English-speaking coun­
tries on both sides of the Atlantic, the unchallenged esteem in which Scan­
dinavian scholarship, in general, was being held. Under these flattering cir­
cumstances, Jespersen's cross-linguistic remarks on the mutual affinity of
certain words presided over by the vowels i and  with the respective semantic
376 YAKOV MALKIEL

concepts of «smallness» and «roundness» could not be contemptuously

brushed aside as mere rêveries of an unbridled romantic. The majority group
of skeptics, obviously, comprised the bulk of the Establishmentarian
language historians and comparativists.
To turn briefly to the burning issue of the incipient dialogue between
Old World and New World scholarship, Edward Sapir, not long past the
start of his career, in his first broad-gauged paper ever (1911: 45-67), made
a point of minimizing the role that noise-imitation may have played in the
origin of speech, while granting high priority to (regular) sound shifts as
the controlling force behind subsequent language changes; his involvement
in discussing, and actually attempting to test, phonosymbolic challenges and
responses with the help of artificially made-up nonsense words to which par­
ticipants in such experiments were exposed and about which they were en­
couraged to voice their preferences, pertain to a distinctly later period of
his life 1. At that second stage Sapir was engaged in lively correspondence
with Jespersen (though the two were not destined to make each other's per­
sonal acquaintance). Bloomfield, conversely, though he was in many respects
a keen admirer of Jespersen's many-sidedness, objected in his famous, other­
wise entirely favorable, reviews (1922: 370-3; 1927: 444-6) of his Danish
counterpart's books: Language: Its Nature, Development, and Origin and
The Philosophy of Grammar, to nothing more passionately than to the
allowance the Copenhagen scholar tended to make for phonosyllabism's
suspected interference with regular sound change. Any acceptance of such
an approach apparently connoted, to Bloomfield's hypersensitive mind, the
imminent pollution or, worse, total collapse of a finely-chiseled edifice of
irreproachably neat scientific thinking.
The way last century's Junggrammatiker and this century's pre-
structuralist Jüngstgrammatiker operated, they proceeded to collect and aim­
ed next at classifying as cogently as they could all instances of the recurrent
sort of sound correspondences, arranging them paragraph by paragraph,
on the strength of certain well-known criteria (degree of stress, the given
sound's position within the word, etc.); examples can be cited by the hun­
dreds. Let us call, for the purpose of this paper, the gradually emerging ar-

1 For a rather detailed critical summary of this earliest synthesis of Sapir's thinking on
generalities consult Malkiel, 1985a. For bibliographic clues and other hints to Sapir's later con­
version to phonosymbolic experiments see an earlier piece from my pen (1977a: 511-29) as well
as R. Jakobson's endorsement (1979: 182).
 PHONOSYMBOLISM AND CATEGORIES OF CHANGE 377

ray Structure A. Then, in every second paragraph or so, they would list some
annoyingly disobedient, unruly words, which refused to be fitted into the
scheme; Bloomfield's celebrated «residues» (1933).
There is no need to imply that the discussion of these special cases
necessarily appeared in small print, was relegated to a footnote, or was com­
pressed into a single sentence of indefinite length. Some virtuoso performers,
e.g., Gottfried Baist, in the two successive editions of his sketch of a historical
grammar of Spanish, managed succinctly to state each regular cor­
respondence in a half-line, without at all bothering to illustrate each point,
then devoted the entire remainder of each relevant paragraph to a leisurely
analysis of recalcitrant etymologies (1889: 684-714; 1904-6: 878-915). Despite
this whimsical disproportion even Baist formally recognized the — to him,
dull — law and order.
At rare intervals, a scholar might succeed in recognizing, within such
a sizable residue, a modest amount of lexical equations that would embolden
him, in a moment of triumph, to formulate a new, narrow-scope Lautgesetz
capable of reducing the number of vexatious exceptions at the cost of com­
plicating the architecture of Structure A. But a typical scholar of that period
and persuasion would not in his wildest dreams have thought of erecting
rival structures (call them B, C, or D) for those members of the residue (bor­
rowed words, lexical blends, Lallwörter, and so on) that could not, by any
stretch of one's imagination, be smoothly squeezed into Structure A: These
«bad boys» were doomed to remain an amorphous pile, a mass of second-
rate material, and an embarrassing reminder of the vaguely-felt inherent
limitations of the method applied.
Antoine Meillet was not an average member of that generation of
scholars. Of course, he knew how to manipulate — imaginatively and with
assurance, at that — the, by then, classical sound correspondences where
needed. In other contexts he, independently, knew how to see and look
beyond. Take his searching review of the memorable monograph by the
Swedish Romanist Ernst G. Wahlgren, which revolved around the transmis­
sion, through semilearned conduits, of words like Lat. medicus «doctor,
physician», into Old French, as mire, illustrative of d > , as against (a) the
total loss of ancestral intervocalic -d- in vernacular words (uādit «he walks»
> [il] va) and (b) its faithful preservation in strictly learned lexical items:
mŏdu «manner» > mode. Without actually taking side in the issue, once
hotly debated (for details see Malkiel, 1977b: 69-85), Meillet, a relative out­
sider to Romance inquiries, wondered whether such originally semilearned
378 YAKOV MALKIEL

outcomes of sound development should not be assembled in a separate

phonological system (1931: 113f.) — to revert.to my own earlier phrasing,
in an autonomous Structure B 2 . Yet, if that much is granted, at least in
principle, exactly what is in the way of trying to organize a separate
phonology, however fragmentary, for observable patterns of phonosymbolic
and, if possible, also an autonomous morphology for deviant morphosym-
bolic behavior?
Let us see how far the acceptance, mutatis mutandis, of Meillet's idea
will take us along this hazardous road; I shall first cast about for Luso- and
Hispano-Romance illustrations, and center my attention about sibilants,
whether or not affricated. By way of introduction let me remark, first, that
Spanish at all times has had an / s / phoneme, realized differently, to be sure,
according to dialectal conditions and other sets of circumstances, and by
way of exception reduced to / h / or to zero, in the past, and not so excep­
tionally at present (e.g., in New World dialects bordering on the Atlantic,
in certain positions within the word and the clause). In addition, Old Spanish
and Old Galician-Portuguese had (b) an affricated unit phoneme As/ spell­
ed c, eventually reduced either to / s / , mostly overseas, or, chiefly in Europe,
to /Θ/, spelled under any circumstances, either  or z, depending on the
following vowel; plus, (c), an — equally affricated — / č / phoneme spelled
ch, preserved in Spanish, but simplified to / š / in modern Portuguese on
either side of the ocean, except for one small conservative pocket in nor­
thern Portugal. There was, (d) finally, in existence, from time immemorial,
a / š / sound, traditionally spelled x; it has been preserved in Portuguese,
but was given up, in Spanish, in favor of the «jota», i.e., of / x / , somewhere
around 16003.

2 Significantly, in Tuscan it is, conversely, parental / r j / which tends to yield / d j / in the

semilearned stratum of the lexicon. Thus, the widely-used suffix -āriu has here produced -aio,
against -ar(o), -aru in the North and in the South, with -iere figuring in old Gallicisms, and
with -ario representing the norm for the learnėd variant, as in binario', but, with some help
from the agency of consonant dissimilation, there have also developed armāriu «chest, cup­
board» > armadio, contrãriu «opposed, opposite» > contradio, Med. Lat. porphyr(i)u > OIt.
(Dante) porfido plus, in reference to simple / d / , Gr. - Lat. prōra «bow, prow» > proda and
rāru «thin, scattered» > (di) rado «seldom», to say nothing of a half-dozen pertinent verbs.
See Malkiel (1973a: 201-42, at 215 f.).
3 One finds the basic facts conveniently assembled in standard old-style historical gram­
mars of Spanish (e.g., R. Menéndez Pidal, 1941) and of Portuguese (e.g., E.B. Williams, 1938,
1962); in language histories, of which the one by R. Lapesa, in its revised versions, continues
 PHONOSYMBOLISM AND CATEGORIES OF CHANGE 379

With this modicum of factual knowledge firmly committed to memory,

the parade of examples can start. One of the words for «dirty», «messy»
in Latin — the one that literally meant «juicy, sappy» — was sūcidus
(extracted from the noun sūcus «sap»). Hispanophones ring it out clearly
in sucio, OSp. suzio; it also underlies It. sùdicio, likewise «dirty» (a word
somewhat distorted by metathesis), alongside sùcido «sappy», transmitted
through a more learnèd channel. Portuguese, at present, falls in with this
pattern in the first syllable of sujo4; but the older texts consistently ex­
hibited the spelling çujo, which invites interpretation as having stood for
/ t sužo/. There is no regular sound correspondence that could have presid­
ed over the shift of word-initial / s / to As/, at least not in the Latin layer
of Hispano-Romance, and any desperate appeal to the pressure, on the
primitive, of the correlated verb ençujar (= OSp. ensuziar) «to dirty,
besmear» in which an elusive t occlusion might have developed as a buffer
consonant carries no conviction, because in that eventuality scores of other,
resemblant word families would have been similarly affected.
For «darning» (used, e.g., in reference to socks and stockings) Por­
tuguese places at the disposal of its speakers the verb serzir, and the woman
engaged in this trade is called serzideira while the male practitioner of that
trade is known as serzidor. It is not difficult to connect serzir, via *sarzir5,
with well-documented sarciō, -īre «to patch, botch, mend, repair», and the
patcher, according to his sex, was called in Antiquity sarcinātor or sar-
cinātrīx. The extraction of Sp. zurcir, originally çurcir, in contrast, poses
serious problems. The leap from a front vowel, or a central vowel, to a high
back vowel cannot be explained away except through introduction of some
new, independent factor. One leans toward positing an early blend with Lat.
suō, -ěre «to sew»; I qualify the remark with «early», because before long
suěre was virtually overlaid by the compound cõns(u)ere, not unlike the reces­
sion of edere «to eat» before comedere in Hispano-Romance; hence Rum.

to be the best, having been thoroughly brought up to date (1980); in structuralist reinterpreta­
tions of earlier findings (e.g., by E. Alarcos Llorach [1961]); and in monographic investiga­
tions, of which those by Amado Alonso (1954: 93-95) happen to be the most circumstantial.
4 This observation does not hold for Arabic ingredients of Hispano-Romance, as was
demonstrated by, among others, A. Steiger (1932: 136-43).
5 To be sure, it is more common to see ancestral -er- transmuted into medieval and/or
modern -ar- (cf. mercåtu > Fr. marché «market»); but, given the transitional state of waver­
ing, an occasional move in the opposite direction causes little surprise.
380 YAKOV MALKIEL

coase, It. cucire, Fr. coudre beside couture, Sp. coser, etc. Contamination
with suere would adequately explain the rise of  in çurcir, especially if
one remembers that the paradigm of suere did not lack members marked
by ū, such as the p.ptc. sūtus. But what of the word-initial ç? To be sure,
one could charge it to the agency of consonant assimilation alone — i.e.,
to the anticipation, at the start of the word, of word-medial As/. But
the rapid generalization of ç in this word, in lieu of expected s-, clamors
for richer motivation. The social disfavor in which darning — the im­
pecunious person's escape from a minor predicament — has been held
might have produced the climate of contempt or disgust which favored ç-
over s-.
The words to be mentioned now have in common three features: an
involved biography, a controversial etymology, and a predominantly un­
complimentary meaning. Zafio «rough, coarse, crude, uncouth», orig. çafio
(. 1500), is an item of Moorish background and indeed may represent a
blend of two Arabic adjectives, even though safîh suffices to account for
it; the change in stress and the choice of the word-final -io segment are no
insuperable hindrances 6 . Çafio teaches us where to look for a plausible
source of word-initial As/, with Latin falling short of offering any suitable
model. The rendering of Ar. s- by ç was normal, and the association of Moors
with preminently negative features, in the few lexical units of that ilk that
involve value judgments, causes little surprise. Our second witness is sutano,
older çutano «so-and-so», typically used not in isolation, but as the last
member of a series: Fulano, Mengano y Zutano («X,Y, and Z»). The word
may be a straight Arabism, or a Romano-Oriental hybrid; noteworthy is
the fact that the older form, çutano, was used in keen rivalry with ci-tano,
-trano, -crano (and with sicrano, seclano in Portuguese), to say nothing of
Perengano7. The two outstanding features of zutano's eventual triumph
over its rivals are: the speakers' preference for As/ over / s / thus again
manifested, and their keener pleasure at having in this context pretonic 
rather than some front vowel.
Finally, zurdo, anciently çurdo «left (-handed)», an unflattering
characteristic according to the old scale of values, has been hazily associated

6 The Arabic intruder could easily have been sucked into the maelstrom of Hispanic -io
< -ǐdu formations, which among adjectives outnumbered those in -ίο.
7 The most noteworthy etymological conjectures, including those by A. Steiger and L.
Spitzer, have been summarized by Corominas (1957: 893), who gravitates toward the latter's view.
 PHONOSYMBOLISM AND CATEGORIES OF CHANGE 381

with ill-defined pre-Roman languages, and with Basque; the wavering be­
tween -rr- and -rd- will cause little surprise among those familiar with the
vicissitudes of the words for «left»: izquierdo ~ esquerro, and a certain
affinity to lerdo «slow, sluggish, dull», again a word of non-Latin ancestry,
makes itself felt. Even though competing forms such as Gal. xurdo, Ptg.
churdo, and even churro ~ churdo, all of them endowed with some such
vaguely negative meaning as «dirty, vile, base», plus Bearn, (i.e., Gascon)
sourrou «stingy», were available in abundance, Spanish speakers, significant­
ly, selected not / s / , nor / š / , nor indeed /tš/, but — once again — solely
As/, later /Θ/, followed by  ás their favorite device for carrying such a
thoroughly unpleasant meaning.
One more point can be appropriately made here before we take up the
next situation: Speakers visibly — and audibly — enjoy doubling and trebl­
ing phonosymbolic effects. For instance: repetition of a syllable-initial con­
sonant in consecutive syllables is, as is yet to be shown in detail, a powerful
phonosymbolic device almost amounting to a language universal and peculiar
also to children's talk. The vowel may but need not be repeated, as shown
by It. chiacchiera «gossip». With these bits of information, consider the
following triad of Spanish words: zozobra «worry, anxiety», lit. «capsiz­
ing, foundering, sinking»; zozobrar «to be in jeopardy, to worry, fret», lit.
«to capsize, founder, sink», used also as a transitive verb: «to wreck, sink»
(a business); finally, the adj. zozobroso means «worried, anxious, restless».
Etymologists apprise us of the Catalan origin of this Castilian word, a con­
jecture perfectly compatible with the maritime (or navigational) frame of
reference. The Catalan etymon is the compound sots «down» (from Lat.
subtus) plus sobre «up»; so the more widespread order of components in
the cross-linguistic binomial «up and down» (cf. R. vverx i vnix, G. herauf
und herunter, etc.) has here, for a change, been inverted. The Catalan verb,
sotsobrar, was and has remained a technical term; its bold semantic expan­
sion in Castilian remains unexplained. While the rendering of word - medial
Cat. -ts- by Sp. -ç- is understandable, the change of OSp. soçobra into
çoçobra (eventually spelled zozobra) on the assumption of consonant
assimilation may well be one factor, but need not represent the whole story.
It is advantageous to bracket (a) the echoing effect of consonant repetition,
(b) the generalization of the ç - in preference to the s-; (c) the presence of
a back-vowel (if not of u, then at least of o); and (d) the bold projection
of the meaning and, as a result, of the word's actual use far beyond the
382 YAKOV MALKIEL

original technical domain 8 , into the realm of anxiety.

Forearmed with this knowledge, we can now remind ourselves that a
nasal insert in numerous languages can have a comic, caricaturing effect;
e.g., Lat. strabus, undoubtedly a Hellenism, appears also as strambus, and
the meaning, coincidentally, moves from «squint-eyed» to such shades as
«envious, jealous, perverse». Certain languages use this device very generous­
ly, e.g., Spanish; others, including French, not at all — an aversion which
may or may not depend on the presence of nasalization in a given language.
If you now examine the record of discussions surrounding Sp. zambo
«knock-kneed», a word of uncertain provenience, you will before long
discover that practically all of the few etyma suggested over the years in­
volve word-initial 5-, in which case the shift from s- to ç- (and thence to
the spelling with z-) could be explained as an attempt, on the part of the
speakers, to increase the word's exhilarating effect. To this the intercala­
tion of the nasal was added by way of further entertainment, if the starting
point was indeed strabus «squint-eyed» 9 .
The departures of the formations here adduced from the locally valid
phonological norm have, of course, in most instances been observed by
scholars before, sometimes over the period of a century. How have such
deviations been previously accounted for, one may ask, if efforts have at
all been bent toward justifying them? The answer is: In most instances,
through the assumption of borrowing from a near-by dialect or from a
neighboring cognate language. To avoid monotony, I shall select an exam­
ple from a related, but slightly different category.
In word-medial position, between vowels, Late Latin / k j / and / t j / , after
coalescing, tended to yield either / č / or As/ in the Romance vernaculars,
with Castilian and Portuguese alike gravitating toward As/, de-affricated
in the end so as to have yielded, depending on the area under observation,
either /Θ/ or / s / in the modern era. (As if to complicate matters, Old Spanish
— but only vestigially Old Portuguese — favored / d z / over /ts/ in certain

8 I am adopting here the corpus established by Corominas, who is at his best in handl­
ing material of Catalan background (1957: 245a). Rodíguez-Marín (1923: 23-50) provides in­
sight into genuinely Castilian altibaxar and baxialto.
9 Conversely, if we adopt the var. strambus as our starting point (a hypothesis favored
by Meyer-Lübke and, later, endorsed by Corominas), we simply push back into Antiquity the
addition of the intercalary nasal; as also happens if we opt for scambus, in harmony with Diez's
preference. See Corominas (1957: 816b - 818b).
 PHONOSYMBOLISM AND CATEGORIES OF CHANGE 383

derivational suffixes 10.) Take Sp. aguaza «aqueous humor, sap», transpa­
rently from ancestral agua «water». One widely used derivative, aguazal,
is best rendered by «pool, puddle»; another, even more important, aguacero,
is tantamount to «(heavy) shower». There are further in existence one ad­
jective, aguazoso (alternating with aguanoso) «wet, watery, soaked»; plus
a triad of verbs, one basic: aguazar «to make marshy, to flood», refl. «to
become marshy», and two secondary: enaguazar «to flood» and desaguazar
«to drain, empty». Aside from the controversial side-issue of aguanoso,
which need not detain us today, the situation, as seen from a language
historian's vantage point, appears relatively simple: Either he agrees to
operate with well-documented Lat. aquātiō «fetching of water, water(ing),
rains, watering-place», a decision made easy by the independent existence
of Arag. aguazón, which audibly echoes the oblique case aquātiōne; or he
musters the courage to reconstruct a (plausible, but unrecorded) adjective,
to wit, *aquāceu(s); or else he assumes a blend of the two, not improbable,
since either was pronounced /akwatsju/ in most provinces of the Empire.
So far, so good; it now happens that Spanish also boasts a rival
derivative, namely aguacha «foul, stagnant water» (note the starkly
derogatory overtones, absent from the semantic gamut of «neutral» aguaza).
From the noun aguacha, there must have branched off the verb aguachar
«to flood», distinctly less common than enaguachar «to spill water over,
soak with water, flood», «to upset the stomach of»; refl, «to become upset»
(from excessive eating or drinking). A more messy tableau is hardly con­
ceivable. As a noun, aguachar, paralleling abovementioned aguazal, is tan­
tamount to «pool, puddle». One could go on and on; there is no dearth
of other lexical items, in part confined to dialect speech, like the self-
explanatory adj. aguachento, or the verbs aguachinar and enguachinar, of
which the latter presupposes an apheresized stem variant guach-, etc. But
how can the relation of aguaza to aguacha be described — not loosely, but
in a technically cogent manner?
On this point, the authorities are singularly evasive, whether they stage
their attacks on the elusive problem from the citadel of phonology or from

10 This confusing tangle of issues has become conventionally known under the tag of
«Old Spanish sibilants», ever since J.D.M. Ford's Harvard dissertation, submitted in the late
'nineties. For one provisional attempt to cut a swath through this jungle see Malkiel (1971:
1-52). A major consideration to be added to the earlier inquiry is the fact that, among the
erratically-developed suffixes, -eza straddled Castilian and Galician-Portuguese, whereas OPtg.
-açom, -aço, and -iço clashed with OSp. -azón, -azo, and -izo (plus analogues and variants).
384 YAKOV MALKIEL

the bulwark of suffixation. An otherwise well-informed Federico Hanssen,

e.g., remarks obliquely that it is practically impossible to draw any sharp
dividing line between borrowings from Italian in -acho, -acha and native
Spanish derivatives of this sort (1913: § 376). The obvious implication is
that, what in Spanish looks like an exception in need of some explanation,
was the rule in Tuscan, if not in Italian dialects, with faccia «face» ( facia,
a recorded Late Lat. variant of Class. faciēs, providing an illustration (in
dramatic contrast to Fr. face and to Ptg. face «cheek»). To revert to the
main thread of our argument: For V. Garcia de Diego as author of a handy
bidirectional etymological dictionary, aguacha and its numerous offshoots
are simply parts of an undifferentiated mass of Spanish words, of Latin
provenience ([1957]: s.w.); neither Corominas 11 nor the compilers of the
20th edn. (1984) of the Royal Academy's standard-setting dictionary have
strayed from that noncommittal attitude. R. Menéndez Pidal, after decades
of concentrated thinking, could not have been more discreet or more reserved
in his final pronouncements: In his deservedly admired Orígenes — whose
revised version is known for the share of attention it pays to Mozarabic,
i.e., to the medieval, long-extinct Romance speech of Christians living under
Muslim rule in the south of Spain — he uses the prerogative of selectivity
to skip any position-taking altogether, leaving the problem unmentioned
(1950: 264-84, 307-8). In the definitive revision of his grammar textbook,
he drops mere hints of the protracted coexistence of capacho «hamper,
basket» and older capaço, both allegedly traceable to a highly controversial
type *cappäceu — Meyer-Lübke in his dictionary toyed only with, or rather
wavered between, *cappāneu and *cavāneu «basket» (1930-35: §§ 1643,

11 Even though, in all too numerous instances, Corominas, over the years, has overin­
dulged the assumption of transmission of Latin lexical units through Mozarabic (cf. his remarks
on zambo, 1957: 816b), he controlled this temptation in his long article on agua (1954: 57-58b).
In analyzing (coll.) guachapear «to splash with the feet», «to botch, bungle», (fig.) «to clat­
ter, clank», he went to the opposite extreme of positing a blend of (a)guacha with chapotear
(vars. chapalear, chapullar) intr. «to splash», tr. «to moisten, sponge», which he traced to
an onomatopoeic root chap-. So presented, the explanation is misleading, because it leaves
out of our reckoning the essential -pear element traceable to pie «foot» and painstakingly in­
vestigated first by myself (1954:1-22, 65-95) and later by H. Bursch in his Bonn dissertation
directed by H. Meier (1978). Despite this qualification, Corominas' comment, if felicitous,
throws interesting light on word blends in phonosymbolism (or, strictly, morphosymbolism).
Take aguachirle «cheap wine; slosh, slipslop; trifle», a compound easily decomposable into
agua «water» and (coll.) chirle «tasteless, insipid» (also «sheep manure»); it is best understood
on the assumption of its overlap with aguacha.
 PHONOSYMBOLISM AND CATEGORIES OF CHANGE 385

1786). Menéndez Pidal, in addition, places hornacho «furnace» alongside

late-medieval hornazo and pits Sp. ricacho «vulgar rich person» (bereaved
of any Latin model) against Ptg. ricaço — all in all, a disappointingly meager
harvest scarcely improved upon by the dark hint of broad Mozarabic
preference for / č / where the northern dialects tended to opt for As/ — or,
in Castile, by way of exception, for / d z / . In the process, he forgets com­
pletely about the potentially most rewarding example, on account of the
semantic contrast it provides, namely aguaza vs. aguacha. I spare you the
inventory of other opportunities for critical reactions unaccountably miss­
ed. The salient point is that, in terms of realia, the Castilians needed neither
the Mozarabs in Andalusia, nor indeed the Tuscans across the Tyrrhenian
to acquire a fitting label for a «puddle of stagnant water».
I submit that the example aguaza / (a)guacha examined by us with full
attention to the scale of meanings and to derivational structure is
paradigmatic; in addition, it is etymologically as translucent and incontrover­
tible as one can hope for in the given context. Regardless of the ultimate
historical circumstances (which of course must be pieced together with a
degree of meticulousness unattainable here), we are free to argue that aguaza
typifies the phonological norm, while aguacha functions as a phonosym-
bolic by-form suggestive of a repugnant, malodorous type of stagnant water.
We can thus voice the suspicion, using a formulaic style of phrasing, that,
just as word-initial involved a phonosymbolic elaboration on
5-, so ch-, at least word-medially and perhaps in certain other positions as
well, could well represent a phonosymbolic orchestration of . These
shifts had best be deducted from the aggregate of those considered under
regular phonetic changes, although they may have had common roots. They
are characterized by a low degree of predictability, i.e., by a measure of
haphazardness, and by heavy dependence on meaning.
There is an off-chance that the voiced counterpart in Old Spanish of
namely , which occurred for the most part word-medially, was
likewise subject to phonosymbolic change into / c / . Take the Romance
designations of the «bedbug», an insect inspiring revulsion not only on ac­
count of its bloodsucking habit (which it shares with the gnat or mosquito),
but also — as a matter of fact, to an even higher degree — on account of
the stench it spreads, witness Fr. punaise, traceable to the provincial V. Lat.
compound *pūtināsia. The Classical Latin label for the bedbug was cïmex,
obl.. cīmice, and recorded OSp. çimze is exactly what one would have pre­
dicted its local outcome to be, from accurate knowledge of the interplay
386 YAKOV MALKIEL

of well-established sound correspondences. However, the present-day form

happens to be chinche /činče/. The word-initial change ch- neatly
parallels what we have just been observing word-medially; whether *chimze
eventually became chinche through an assimilatory, echoing process, or
through direct change of the / d z / , which was on its way to becoming /Θ/,
into / č / through some phonosymbolic leap, in deference to the speakers'
violent disapproval, remains a point that invites further investigation. —
The situation is discernibly different in Portuguese, where the former / d z / ,
to be sure, has been de-affricated, but not devoiced. The resulting / z / sound,
the outgrowth of older -s- and -z- (as in the notorious pair of homonyms
coser1 «to sew» vs. cozer2 «to cook», from cõns(u)ere and coquere, respec­
tively), happens to be very common word-medially between vowels, but rare
and confined to exotic words, e.g., Hellenisms, word-initially, not unlike
the situation in French and English (witness zèle, zéro — zeal, zero). The
rareness of / z / in this position, in turn, makes it eligible for all sorts of
phonosymbolic and comic effects. Ptg. zambro «knock-kneed», which —
for all we know — may have been arrived at, via a violent metathesis, from
aforecited stra(m)bus «squint-eyed», and dial. Ptg. zambaio, which has
preserved that same meaning, would be appropriate examples in point. Coll.
E. zillion «a large indeterminate number» (e.g., a zillion mosquitoes)
represents a comparably facetious distortion of the series million, billion,
trillion, etc.; and the French interjection zut! also teaches one a memorable
lesson. The comic effect of Ptg. zambro is enhanced by the extreme rarity
of the medial consonant cluster -mbr- in that language, a cluster entirely
trivial in near-by Spanish, where it is either primary, as in s-ombra «shade»,
from umbra, or secondary, as in hombro «shoulder», from (h)umeru, or
in hombre «man», from homine via older omne. Portuguese tolerates som­
bra', splits the responsibility for conveying the message «shoulder (-blade)»
between espádua, from spatula, and ombro;, and uses homem as its reflex
of homine 12.

12 The number of relevant examples can be easily increased; contrast Sp. hambre, orig.
fambre «hunger», from fame (via *famine), with Ptg. fome; or costumbre «habit», from
cōns(u)etūdine (on the assumption of a blend with the suffix -ūmen), with Ptg. costume. I
have elsewhere sought to show that the change in the paradigm of the inchoative verbs from
-esco to -eço could have been conditioned by the disinclination of Lusophones to avail themselves
of forms reminiscent of the (characteristically Castilian) velar insert.
 PHONOSYMBOLISM AND CATEGORIES OF CHANGE 387

One discovers a provocative interplay of practically all phonosymbolic

tendencies so far invoked in examining the record of the transmission of
the Latin prefix sub- «under, below» into Hispano-Romance. While a few
other ancestral prefixes show traces of an erratic development 13 , it is only
fair to state that sub- has surpassed them all in degree and frequency of
aberrancy. Surely, the coexistence, in Latin, of allomorphs, such as sus-
(witness sustinēre «to hold up, hold upright, sustain») beside sub- (as in
subiacēre «to lie under, belong to, be connected with») does not tell the whole
story, so far as the proliferation of variant forms is concerned. This strik­
ing degree of polymorphism, to be properly appreciated, requires, as a se­
cond driving force behind it, the suggestiveness of secrecy and subterfuge
that goes with the imagery of «under» and «from below». In this climate
of reaction, phonosymbolism had its field-day.
Over a century ago, an exceptionally talented, very young scholar,
Carolina Michaëlis, in one of her best-remembered juvenilia 14 , demon­
strated the wide range of reflexes of parental sub- in Hispano-Romance.
If one subtracts from her gropings what is now definitively known to have
been erroneous, there remains an extraordinary multiplicity of rival possi­
bilities:
(a) The normal development, free from interferences, was so- ( sub-,
as in: soasar «to roast lightly or medium», sofreír «to fry lightly», sofrenar
«to check (a horse) suddenly», sojuzgar «to subjugate, subdue», solevan­
tar «to raise up, upheave, rouse, stir up, incite», etc. 15;
(b) This phonologically regular evolution was apt to be complicated
when the radical was presided over by a back vowel, in which case the 
of the prefix was bound, at some juncture, to yield to a; the line led, e.g.,
from suffūmāre «to smoke, perfume with smoke of incense» via *sofúmar
to safumar and eventually sahumar, the only real difficulty being the un-

13
One is tempted to cite enx- from ex- contaminated with an anticipatory nasal; or tres-,
a merger of tras- and es- with some additional influence from tres- «three», «thrice» (echoing
bes-, biz-, «twice») for good measure.
14 C. Michalis', the future Sra. de Vasconcelos', etymological notes here appealed to
(1873: 86-91) served, along with C. Joret's 1874 monograph and with A. Darmesteter's lengthy
critical reaction to it, as the three starting points for the protracted discussion of the Paleo-
Romance sibilants.
15 In this tabulation so- and its variants echo Lat. sub- either actually documented or
apt to be projected onto the level of Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages.
388 YAKOV MALKIEL

predictable length of survival of the intermediate stage (Old Spanish texts,

e.g., waver between sofondar and safondar). Tendential vowel dissimila­
tion is neither a regular phonological change nor a phonosymbolic change.
It belongs with the sporadic or saltatory shifts, on the order of Ascoli's ac­
cidenti generali;
(c) A nasal intercalated between so and the radical may go back in a
few instances to the syllable-final b of sub-, but assumed before long the
character of the wedged-in nasal in stra(m)bus and can thus for the most
part be credited with primary or secondary phonosymbolic effects. Illustra­
tions include: so(m)pesar «to heft, try the weight of», so(n)sacar «to pilfer,
entice away, elicit, draw out», which still show the transition; and sonreír
«to smile» (but Ptg. sorrir), sonrodarse «to get stuck in the mud»,
sonros(e)arse «to rose-color, flush» (especially sonrosado «rosy»), with son-
solidly welded onto a radical-initial r-;
(d) The gambit so- zo-, purely phonosymbolic, is infrequent;
aforecited zozobra is an example in point;
(e) By combining vowel-dissimilation, i.e., (b), with affrication, i.e.,
/s/> As/, as exemplified under (d), speakers obtained the by-form ça-, spell­
ed za- at later stages. Here are a few instances: (naut.) zabordar «to run
aground», zabucar «to stir by shaking», zapuzar «to duck»;
(f) By going one step further and combining (c) with (e), speakers ar­
rived at çam-, eventually transmuted into zam- on the level of spelling; cf.
(coll.) zambucar «to hide away, slip away»;
(g) An alternative was to combine so- 5a-, i.e, (b), with the intercalated
nasal, i.e., (c), as in sancochar beside zancochar «to parboil»;
(h) Either sa- or, more likely, ça- could, through further elaboration,
yield ground to cha- /ča/, as in chapodar «to trim, clear of branches» beside
the simplex podar putāre 16.
Subsequent grammatical treatises and etymological explorations have
both added to, and subtracted from, Carolina Michaelis' pioneering pro-

16 There would be little point in delving here into C. Michalis' errors of which the most
serious was her attempt to bracket doublets due to borrowings from Old French (chanzón
beside canción, chanciller beside canciller) with the other instances of proliferation. Some of
her etymologies have also proved to be untenable, e.g., the derivation of zurdo from sǔrdus
«deaf».
 PHONOSYMBOLISM AND CATEGORIES OF CHANGE 389

posais 17 ; but progress, on the whole, has been distinctly slower than might
have been predicted — precisely as a consequence of certain scholars' reluc­
tance or refusal to systematize our grasp of phonosymboiically orchestrated
sound change. If anyone entertains doubts about the validity of the special
shift «word-initial s- ) ch-», because it is alien to normally-developed words,
on the order of sagīmen ) saín «grease, fat», sella > siella (later silla) «sad­
dle, stool», sex > seis «six», sĭccu )seco «dry», soc(e)ru ) suegro «father-
in-law», südat > Sp. suda alongside Ptg. sua «he sweats», let such a skeptic
focus his attention on a formation with downright onomatopoeic implica­
tions, whose phonosymbolic effectiveness no one would want to question.
Take Lat. sibilare «to hiss», with a by-form sīfiläre which can be, and often
has been, explained as a borrowing from some outside source, including
Italic, except that the unique raison d'être of such a borrowing, in the absence
of any cultural advantage, can indeed have been the aforecited factor of
effectiveness. From sībi-, sîfi-lāre Spanish has inherited three verbs: first,
silbar «to whistle»; second, chiflar «to hiss, gulp down», «to whistle, sing»
(said of birds), plus, reflexively and only in the familiar register, «to become
unbalanced», witness chifladura «craze»; and, third, chillar «to shriek,
screech, creak, squeak, hiss, scream» (figuratively said of colors); (in New
World dialects) «to squeal», i.e., «to turn informer»; among hunters, «to
utter a fox call». Observe that the second and the third products are given
away as phonosymboiically colored not only by the representation of
ancestral s-, before the high front vowel, via ch- / c / , but also by a bizarre
rendition of the ancestral word-medial -bil- or -fil- sequence through /fl/
or /λ/, counter to expectation; in contrast, the -lb- cluster of silbar involves
an entirely innocuous metathesis of syncopated parental -b'l-. Silbar is, prac­
tically, «lautgesetzlich»; nothing of the sort can be asserted of either chiflar
or chillar. But this is not all: The semantic development of silbar has been
slow and imperceptibly slight; conversely, those of chiflar and chillar have
been saltatory, to the point of wildness — in unfettered substandard and
dialect speech even more so than in relatively polished literary Spanish.
If now a critic unhappy about encountering this state of affairs wished
to extricate himself from any ideologically embarrassing commitment to the

17
Disappointing, despite a few valuable lexical data and bibliographic clues, is the treat­
ment of the issue by Menéndez Pidal (1941: § 37-2bc), who recognizes as causative factors
behind ç ~ ch, etc. solely consonant dissimilation and dialectal provenience of certain lexical
items, without being in a position to identify the dialect at fault.
390 YAKOV MALKIEL

assumption of common origin for silbar, chiflar, and chillar, the strongest
probabilistic rebuttal of any such denial is the astonishing degree of
parallelism between the derivational offshoots from the three verbs at issue:
silbato «whistle, whistling crack» is echoed by chiflato; silbido «whistling,
whistle, hiss» boasts even two counterparts, namely chiflido «whistle, whistl­
ing sound», and chillido «shriek, scream». Identity of suffix despite strong
differentiation of meaning can be demonstrated with silbón «name of a bird»
(«widgeon»), chiflón (in New World dialects) «cold blast of air», «rapids»,
«slide of loose stones» (in a mine). A masculine postverbal in -o is also shared
by the three verbs: silbo «whistle, hiss, whiz», chiflo «whistle» (beside more
widely used chifle, also more richly nuanced on the side of meaning), and
chillo (hunter's) «fox call» or «hare call». A parallel series of feminine
postverbals has a wider semantic range: silba «hiss(ing)», chifla «whistle,
whistling, hissing» (accompanied by the New World phrase estar de chifla
«to be in a bad humor»), and chilla «fox call, hare call»; etc. 18 .
Even this superficial inspection of the record of sibilare in Spanish suf­
fices to bring home to the beholder the involvement of phonosymbolism
in the intricate issue of channels of transmission. For almost exactly a cen­
tury and a quarter — ever since the appearance of Auguste Brachet's slim
book on the subject of French doublets and of the supplement to that pam­
phlet — Romance scholars have intermittently concerned themselves with
the study of doublets and triplets (or, to put it in Italian, of allòtropi), the
two peaks of this once highly promising line of curiosity being C. Michaelis'
mistitled 1876 book on Spanish doublets and, shortly thereafter, U.A.
Canello's monograph-length counterpart dealing with doublets in Italian 19.

18
Because chiflar and chillar were each allowed to develop a number of secondary,
idiosyncratic meanings, it stands to reason that each of the three verbs here under scrutiny
should, at least, have a few suffixal derivatives peculiar only to itself. If one can bracket, by
stretching one's imagination, silbador(a) «whistler, hisser», (b) «whistling, hissing» with chillador
«shrieking, squeaking, screaming», thorough isolation seems to prevail in each of the follow­
ing cases: silb-oso (adj.) «whistling»; chifi-adera and chifl-ete «whistle» (on chifladura see above);
and chill-ería «shrieks, screams, outcries»; «screaming and scolding». The situation is, actual­
ly,even more complicated, because speakers have isolated the opening syllable chi- as the one
most heavily endowed with phonosymbolic substance and experimented with its repetition:
chichear «to hiss», chicheo «hissing». Furthermore, the colloquialisms chufleta «joke, jest»,
chufletear «to joke», and chufletero «joker, jester» appear to involve vocalic variation (i/u)
on chiflar which, being a joke of sorts, revolves around the idea of «jest».
19 My own sketchy statements on this, now half-forgotten, frontier of knowledge (1973b:
749-51; 1977c: 191-6) are in urgent need of drastic revision and expansion.
 PHONOSYMBOLISM AND CATEGORIES OF CHANGE 391

These and similarly-slanted early groupings received high recognition from

authoritative judges including Hermann Paul in his oft-revised, long-
influential Prinzipien der Sprachgeschichte; unfortunately, the discussion,
past the abovementioned peak, lost its theoretical momentum. If it were
to be revived (and, in my own considered estimate, it deserves such an at­
tempt at resuscitation), then one important basic category should be reserv­
ed for splits of ancestral words into doublets or triplets on the strength of
standard (or neutral) transmission by word of mouth (type silbar) as against
phonosymbolically-colored transmission (types chiflar and chillar). The new
category here championed would then be comparable in scope and hierar­
chical status to such peers, better-remembered and more consistently ap­
pealed to, as (a) normal transmission vs. generalization of a rival allomorph;
(b) normal transmission vs. adoption of a regional dialect form or of a form
borrowed from a living cognate language (say, an Italianism in French); (c)
normal transmission, along with the mainstream of events, vs. acceptance
of the corresponding lexical item from a different social dialect, or from
a different social register of, essentially, the same dialect; (d) normal
transmission vs. insertion of a virtually unaltered, or partially altered, form
of the source word, directly and deliberately transplanted from the parent
language, i.e., a mot savant or cultismo. This outlet alone, if properly refur­
bished, has such tremendous potentialities as to forebode a bright future
for systematic inquiries into phonosymbolism.
Nothing in the preceding remarks should be interpreted as an attempt
to rule out well-established earlier approaches where such approaches hap­
pen to hold water. If Menéndez Pidal, after fifty years of concentrated think­
ing, declared that Sp. cedazo «sieve», from (crlbru) s(a)etäceu (glosses),
cecina «dried beef», from *siccïna, an elaboration on (carne) sicca, as well
as Hisp.-Lat. ceruitiune (A.D. 1079) beside OSp. çerviçio found in MSS
alongside servicio, all three involve instances of straight consonant assimila­
tion, there is no need for contradicting him; but when he, immediately
thereafter, with all due caution lists as mere extensions of such readily
understandable processes also cerrar «to bolt, lock, close» against the
background of Late Lat. serāre (preceded by ob-, re-serāre), or zueco
«wooden shoe, clog», as against soccu «light shoe» (typically worn by
Greeks), or (naut), zahorra «ballast», as against saburra, an old, Plautine
word probably borrowed, then the reader's response becomes measurably
less enthusiastic, since one fails to recognize the conditions under which the
assumed diffusion of consonant assimilation could defensibly have occur-
392 YAKOV MALKIEL

red. Again, where known cultural conditions demonstrably favor the

hypothesis of the migration of a word, or of a whole group of speakers,
from one dialect area to another, there is no need to hesitate to charge some
of the changes here surveyed to the infiltration of non-indigenous lexical
elements; but the absorption of such ingredients, if left otherwise un­
motivated, threatens to become a hazardous deus ex machina sort of device,
even in the hands of an accomplished master 20 . In many instances an ap­
peal to phonosymbolism simply turns out to be the less far-fetched exercise
in causal explanation, not unlike Ascoli's accidenti generali and old-fashioned
recourse to onomatopoeia supplemented the assumption of regular sound
change rather than eroding it.
In the overwhelming majority of cases open to inspection one cannot
safely set aside a category of words and blandly declare it «phonosymbolical-
ly developed», as against other lexical units subject to normal, or regular
development. What is most likely to have occurred is merely the addition
of a single phonosymbolic gambit to a series of otherwise perfectly normal
evolutionary moves or steps. Take zampoña «rustic flute, shepherd's pipe»;
«boy's flute made of green cane»; (coll.) «triviality, nonsense», this last
semantic prong strikingly reminiscent of Br. E. fiddlesticks! (and of coll.
R. dudki! «no!, nonsense!» as well). The etymon of zampoña is Gr. sym-
phõnía (συμφωνία) «unison of voices, instruments in concord, harmony» —
actually pronounced [s ǔ m p' o n ί a] by the Greeks and taken over by
the Romans at first contact with them as /s u m p o: n i a/. The stress
shift and the de-aspiration of the /pV were normal conditions of instan­
taneous adjustment to the new environment in Greek words transplanted
onto Roman soil. The reduction to three syllables and, coincidentally, the
change of the vowel / i / into a semiconsonant, as well as — probably —

20 I prefer not to overreach myself by stringing the many infelicities that, unfortunate­
ly, mar Menéndez Pidal's treatment of this elusive problem in four passages of his oft-revised
textbook of historical grammar (1941: §§37-2, 72-2, 126-2, and 128-4). His comments on the
plausibility of certain shrewd theories advanced by other scholars: A. Castro, A.M. Espinosa-
padre beside that scholar's son, V. García de Diego, J. Jud, Fr. Krüger, H. Schuchardt, A.
Thomas, M. de Unamuno, and others invariably deserve attention, even though none seems
to have thoroughly convinced him. The author complicated his task by interpreting too broad­
ly — after the fashion of the Madrid School — what it chose to call «acoustic equivalence»
and by dragging into the discussion the partial interchange of / s / and / š / , later / x / , which
may involve a separate phenomenon, of distinctly older vintage. Particularly unfortunate, in
my view, is the attribution of the nasal infix to the pressure of cum, in, nōn.
 PHONOSYMBOLISM AND CATEGORIES OF CHANGE 393

the shift  )  were the first regular sound changes undergone by the word
after its initial Latinization; the shape it then assumed must have been
*sompoña. The vowel dissimilation  - ó > a - ó it underwent next pertains
to the jurisdiction of «general accidents»; and only the last brush stroke,
namely the change of \*sa- to za-, requires the separate assumption of a
phonosymbolic process.
If, at the end of the road, one is asked whether any independent proof
of phonosymbolic action is available, the answer could well be that cir­
cumstantial evidence to that effect indeed exists. That evidence includes:
(a) the broad involvement of the realm of music and sound; (b) the inor­
dinately lively semantic development within colloquial Spanish; (c) the ex­
istence of independent phraseological parallels in languages only remotely
kindred, like English (fiddlesticks!) and Russian (dudki!), quite apart from
the fact that both the English compound and the Russian diminutive (from
dudit' «to sip through a straw»?) have certain constituents in their make-
up that also, once more independently, smack of phonosymbolism 21 .
In similar, though not strictly identical fashion, one could, step by step,
analyse the metamorphosis of ancestral sepelire «to bury», after its local
blend with subbulhre «to foam or bubble slightly» into reflexive za(m)bullir
«to dive, duck, plunge» — at present a popular term of competitive athletics,
but once used perhaps of crabs, or small fish, or ducks who, by diving, tem­
porarily bury themselves under water and, in so doing, emit or release some
bubbles at the surface. This time, the medieval midway form sobollir is,
fortunately, extant. Again, only a minority of intermediate steps can be writ­
ten off as phonosymbolic; specifically, the intercalation of the nasal, which
tends to add a semi-comic touch, plus the change of s- to ç-, later z-. The
remainder of the changes, though fairly heterogeneous this time, require
no such additional assumption.
Fresh insights into the working of phonosymbolism in a whole cluster
of interrelated languages are simultaneously provided by the Romance
chapter in the involved biography of ciccum — clearly, an old rustic word
whose original referential meaning hardly emerges with any degree of ac­
curacy from the mutually contradictory definitions furnished by ancient

21 For additional documentation and analysis of certain crucial points see, among my
own earlier papers, above ail, (1949: 183-232) and (1984: 27-46).
394 YAKOV MALKIEL

grammarians and lexicographers22. Conceivably, it denoted the thin mem­

brane surrounding the grains of the pomegranate; or else the — inedible
— core, or kernel of that fruit (cf. coccum), in short, something that is or­
dinarily cut off, thrown away, or spat out. In any event, it connoted (e.g.,
in Plautine comedies) something worthless, a trifle, a bagatelle, not unlike
coll E. straw in: I would not give a straw, or, for that matter, Fr. fétu,
also «straw», in such phrases as pas un fétu οr je m'en soucie or fiche com­
me d'un fétu «I don't care a rap about it». As a result, it was used
preminently in negative contexts, along with hilum, frit, naucum (whose
primary meaning has not been ascertained, either) and — slightly less hazy
— floccus <<(f)lock» (of wool). The lengthened medial consonant in ciccum
and floccus betrayed rusticity and pointed to comicality and expressivity,
enhancing the usefulness of those two items, in an ensemble of five words,
for emphatic denials; cf. fr. ne pas, ne brin, ne point. Additionally, ciccum
had a major advantage over the other candidates for a phonosymbolic career
in that its word-initial velar and the lengthened intervocalic velar, throughout
the years of Republic and Early Empire, involved basically the same
phoneme, resembling a type of word-formation highly characteristic of the
language of the nursery — witness. It babbo, mamma, nonno, and, if one
waives the condition of lengthening, also Fr. faire dodo «to go to sleep»,
Sp. nene «baby», R. njanja, Fr. nounou, and E. (n)anny «nurse», etc.; in
this context recall that baby-talk and phonosymbolic utterances have cer­
tain features in common. Both medial consonant lengthening and repeti­
tion of syllable-initial consonants, especially where it occurs in consecutive
syllables, have for many years been recognized as highly characteristic
manifestations of «expressivity», which is just an alternative label for
phonosymbolism 23 . Imagine the potentialities for phonosymbolic effects
where both phenomena come together! To put it differently, ciccu, whatever

22 I am here falling back on the information provided by Ernout and Meillet (1959-60:
119a) as well as Walde and Hofmann (1938: 211), in addition to standard dictionaries.
23 Françoise Skoda's recent monograph (1982) — cross-linguistic even though slanted
in the direction of Ancient Greek — and weighty critical reactions to it, on the order of Jean-
Louis Perpillou's constructive review (1984: 158-62) — are only the latest links in a long chain
of investigations, which included book-length studies from the pen of J. André (1978) and,
so far as consonant gemination rather than reduplication is concerned, from those of A. Graur
(1929) and A. Martinet (1937). For a bird's-eye view of my own thinking (until recently) see
Malkiel (1985b: 1-25).
 PHONOSYMBOLISM AND CATEGORIES OF CHANGE 395

its provenience 24 , was, from the start, literally cut out for phonosymbolic
effects.
To the Latinist, ciccu had a short nuclear i, much as floccus at the start
had, and later kept, its short o 25 . But, at least, some Romanists would be
happiest if allowed to assume a folkspeech change of ciccu into *cïccu, since
J, in contrast to ĕ, was a vowel exceptionally resistant (if not entirely im­
mune) to shifts, and since a measurable advantage accrued from the preser­
vation of the high front vowel in a word suggestive of «smallness» or «next-
to-nothingness», if we may here appeal to what can be facetiously called
«Jespersen's Law». Should critics tag our assumption as arbitrary, it can
be shown that alternative solutions invoked in certain concrete cases yet to
be mentioned border on the fantastic.
We are now almost off on our cruise aboard the boat of phonosym-
bolism — one more brief comment is needed before we can weigh anchor.
A disyllabic word in Latin with a lengthened consonant (not infrequently
a -cc- or a -tt-, but also an -ss-, rarely a -bb-) as its midpoint was very fre­
quently (although, to be sure, by no means exclusively) apt to be an adjec­
tive, fairly often one qualifying or ridiculing the physique of an individual.
Characteristic examples of a less than flattering description include: crassus
«thick, fat» and (late) grossus «thick» (which were doomed to merging on
a regional scale, witness Fr. gras «fat»), as well as their semantic opposite
flaccus «flabby», plus, to cite a near-opposite, *plattus «flat», a transparent
adaptation of Gr. platys , whose arrival had been prepared by preëx­
istent planus «level, even», as shown by Fr. plat, It. piatto, Sp. chato, against

24 A m o n g the a u t h o r s of etymological dictionaries, J . B . H o f m a n n and A . E r n o u t were

at loggerheads in interpreting the relation of ciccum to Gr. kikkos (κίκκος). In addition, the
former bracketed ciccum with coccum (and its Greek counterpart kókkos [κόκκος] as presumable
borrowings from outside, which could mean «Mediterranean s u b s t r a t u m » .
25 Similarly, the Latinist operates with quintāre «to shout, yell, shriek» (var. quirritãre
«to g r u n t » , in reference to the b o a r ) , while the Romanist recognizes behind Fr. crier (con­
ducive to E . cry), P r o v . - C a t . cridar, Sp.-Ptg. gritar, Friul. kridá, It. gridare, etc. the prototype
*quïrĭĭāre (Meyer-Lübke's bizarre spelling quintāre, which he has, to boot, left unstarred, may
be due to a misprint; see 1930-35: § 6967). Yet the phonosymbolic ingredients of the two words
are wholly different. Even though Class, quiritāre, from the outset, had phonosymbolic poten­
tialities acquired through o n o m a t o p o e i a (Ernout and Meillet, 1959-60: 559a), these were, step
by step, realized through transposition of the / r / , erratic voicing of word-initial / k / , lenghtening
of the nuclear vowel: / i / > / i : / , etc. In ciccu, the configuration of the word, from the start,
was highly conspicuous, and vowel-lenghtening was all that was needed to bring this built-in
suggestiveness to fruition.
396 YAKOV MALKIEL

the background of (obs.) plain, piano, llano. Still within the same sphere
one clearly recognizes gibber and gibbus «hunchbacked», with a solidly
reconstructed quasi-apophonic by-form *gubbus, known from It. gobbo,
sgobbare and from Sp. agobiar26. Neither It. brutto «ugly» nor (O)Fr.
brut, -e «brute, raw» can be smoothly traced to recorded brütus, as numerous
reputable scholars over the years have attempted to do, with or without ap­
peal to all sorts of «tricks»; only by positing the existence of the by-form
*brüttus does one, at one blow, remove all difficulties from his path 27 . The
list of other primary adjectives displaying this configuration includes: cassus
«empty, vain»; cossus «with a wrinkled skin»; mattus «drunk»; and siccus
«dry» 28 .
Under this set of circumstances it no longer seems too bold to argue that
cïccu, better still, *cïccu sounded so suggestive to speakers as to have easily
lent itself to all sorts of reinterpretations. OSp. chico was from the start
a far more intimate word than pequeño, designating the «tot», the «Knirps»,
the «maljutka» in the family, by virtue of the consensus of such potentially
phonosymbolic features as (a) word-initial ch- in lieu of ç-; (b) the high rather
than the mid-high nuclear vowel; (c) the intervocalic surd, echoing a lengthen­
ed intervocalic consonant in the parent language; and (d) disyllabicity. But
Fr. chiche «cheap» (i.e., essentially, «small») can also have descended from
*cicca, with subsequent generalization of the feminine form, if one allows
for the reduplicative effect of *ciche ) chiche, a process that would make
sense in this particular context. While these conjectures, by definition, are
hypothetical, I submit that they are less hazardous, in narrowly linguistic
and broadly cultural terms, than several previously advanced suppositions.
We have, somewhat haphazardly, touched upon the issue of lexical bor­
rowings here, actually a whole web of problems falling under the rubric of
cultural diffusion. Let me try to establish one important dichotomy at this

26 T h e process involved in the shift to *gubbus, clearly characteristic of Italo-Romance,

is a sort of facetious apophony, which — independently — underlies such playful English for­
mations as criss cross, chit chat, competing for attention with consonantal variation, as in razzle-
dazzle.
27 F o r details see below. It. bruto « b r u t a l , brutish», « b r u t e , animal», semantically
distinct from brutto, involves transmission through a learnèd channel.
28 T h e etymological connection between mattus a n d It. matto « m a d , insane, deranged,
crazy, foolish» (as against matto2 «dull, lustreless») has been affirmed by some scholars a n d
denied by others; the problem invites definitive investigation. T h e case of siccus, however, is
gratifyingly clear-cut.
 PHONOSYMBOLISM AND CATEGORIES OF CHANGE 397

juncture: So far as sound symbolism is concerned, a distinction must be

drawn between the absorption, into one major language, of lexical units
loaned by some other language of comparable rank, and the adoption of
mere dialectalisms. Suppose you follow, with Terlingen (1943), the influx
of Italianisms into Spanish or, under the even firmer guidance of Hope
(1971), the vicissitudes of Italianisms in French. With negligible exceptions,
these loans can be effortlessly broken down into semantic (or real-life-
conditions) groups, such as terms related to (a) literature and fine arts, (b)
military techniques and equipment, (c) navigation, (d) commerce and crafts,
(e) social life, (f) clothing and food, etc., for the obvious reason that the
Italians of the relevant period had developed, along those lines, something
original and previously all but unknown to their neighbors who, at a given
point, took cognizance of these novelties and, apparently, found them worthy
of their attention and possibly even of imitation, with the tag accompany­
ing the object: Wörter und Sachen. Seldom were Italian words adopted for
the sake of their sheer beauty and, yes, their expressivity, i.e., symbolic power
of evocation. In borrowings from dialects, the reverse ratio of motivations
has prevailed. To be sure, some lexical items of Asturian, Navarrese, An-
dalusian, etc. background have been incorporated into Castilian Spanish
because they referred to colorful regional designations of headgear, dresses,
dances, meals, songs, and the like; but a presumably higher percentage of
erstwhile regionalisms — not a few of them camouflaged beyond easy
recognition — which pervade the present-day lexicon of Standard Spanish
owe their adoption to certain phonosymbolic advantages. This is, admit­
tedly, very slippery ground, on which it is easy and tempting both to
overestimate and to underestimate the number of the debts thus incurred.
The same situation, one suspects, prevails grosso modo in other languages.
Take It. brutto, the basic word for the qualifier «ugly», whose path
we have already briefly crossed. No one would want to question its descent
from Lat. brütus, initially «heavy, unwieldly», then «dull, stupid», despite
the slight referential divergence of the two adjectives. As for the source of
the consonant gemination in the daughter language, opinions vary widely.
To limit myself to fairly recent pronouncements, Battisti and Alessio (1950:
619b), citing OLomb. bruteçar «to sully» and Med. Lat. (from Parma) brut-
turn, bruttura «dirt», thought that a northern word was here adapted to
Tuscan use through consonant lengthening: «La geminazione di t si spiega
come adattamento di v [oce] sett[entrionale]»; Giacomo Devoto was willing
to toe the same line (1966: 551b): ... «è stato sottoposto a toscanizzazione
398 YAKOV MALKIEL

eccessiva»; while Bruno Migliorini, toiling in tandem with Aldo Duro, was
distinctly more cautious in his wording: «Prob[abile] adattamento antico
del lat. brütus «bruto» (1964: 74b) 29 . I am willing to go off in an entirely
different direction, arguing that the by-form *brüttus, with phonosymbolic
lengthening of the word-medial consonant, should be traced all the way to
Antiquity, on the strength of OFr. brut, brute, in lieu of expected bru, *brue.
An advantage of this hypothesis is that it also enables us to grasp It. tutto,
-a, OFr. tot, -e (mod. tout, -e) «all, whole», forms which contrast dramatical­
ly with Sp. Ptg. todo, -a, a faithful echo of ancestral tōtu, -a. Since the
Latinity of Luso- and Hispano-Romance is notoriously more archaic than
that of Italy, the failure of the innovation *tõttus to have reached it causes
no surprise 30 . On the semantic front, the qualifications of brütus for suc­
cumbing to the influence of phonosymbolic gemination are too obvious to
invite comment. As regards the expression of «totality» 31 , it suffices to
observe the lively gesticulation normally accompanying the categorial state­
ment: Tutti! Tutte! among spontaneous speakers of Italian to realize what
emotions any exciting affirmation of totality can release. In this instance,
then, phonosymbolism has indeed been at work, but there is no point in
assuming any dialect borrowing as a triggering force.
The situation is wholly different in Central Europe. It is a truism that
word-initial d- in Low German, no less than in Flemish-Dutch and in English,

29 The idea of *brüttu here championed is not entirely new; it was pioneered, without
any attempt at justification, by C. Merlo (1941), then more carefully advanced by M. Regula
(1965:740), who, rather pointlessly, started out from *brütidu, allegedly patterned on hispidus,
horridus, etc. As if to complicate matters, P. Fiorelli (1967: 23) traced the adverbial phrase
di brutto «unexpectedly» to ex abruptō. Cortelazzo and Zolli (1979: 172a) list all three hypotheses
without taking side. Clearly, if one were to take Regula's proposal seriously, it might become
unavoidable to allow for *tõtidī as the starting point for tutti!
30 There exists a considerable body of literature on the innovative type / t o t : u / ; prac­
tically all of the conjectures played with by C . Nigra, E . Richter, V. García de Diego were
indignantly rejected by an impatient Meyer-Liibke (1930-35: §8815), w h o in the end turned
against his o w n earlier thinking a n d halfheartedly accepted only Georg Ebeling's identifica­
tion of nūllus as a possible model. Meyer-Lübke's private preference was for «eine A r t D o p ­
pelung», *tototus, for which he cited OIt. tututto a n d OSard. (Logudoro) totta(t)ta as witnesses,
sailing in the wake of G. G r ö b e r . F o r e a r m e d with the assumption of p h o n o s y m b o l i s m , one
posits, as the first step, plain consonant lenghtening and, as the second step, additional repeti­
tion of the key syllable, perhaps via reduplicative tutti, tutti.
31
It m a y in this context prove rewarding to collate in detail the findings of earlier
Romanists with the fresh insights that an inspired E d w a r d Sapir gained in his 1930 m o n o g r a p h
on totality.
 PHONOSYMBOLISM AND CATEGORIES OF CHANGE 399

as a matter of regular sound correspondence contrasts with High German,

and thereby with Standard German, t-; examples such as drive, drift vs.
treiben, Trieb,odeaf vs. taub, can be adduced by the dozens. When a rural
Plattdeutsch t- form tends to penetrate into colloquial urban and eventual­
ly into literary German, this sort of lexical transfer, as a rule, occurs in a
sector of lexis that is subject to phonosymbolic effects. Thus, Märkisch doof
/do:f/, a cognate of E. deaf, coexists in Berlin with taub, at the price of
remaining a racy word, confined to certain social milieux and age groups,
and of serving as a synonym of dumm, which previously meant not «stupid»,
but «dumb» and, at an even earlier point, «dark, unintelligible». Kluge and
Mitzka record this noteworthy case (1963: 138), and offer a good deal of
information on toll «crazy, stupidly bold» (78lab), whose counterpart in
OE was dol «foolish, naïve», from which mod. dull «stupid, lazy» in the
end branched off; but Mitzka neglects to add to the dossier of toll the fact
that the prevailing colloquial form in Berlin parlance, at least as early as
1920, was doll, especially as used in exclamations: Is(t) ja doll!, ne dolle
Sache! This increasing predilection for d- in a particular semantic sector
permeated by phonosymbolism has favored certain compounds, e.g., asso­
nant dummdreist over dummkühn, dummkeck, or tolldreist, tollkühn, which
lacked the sought-after side effect of assonance 32 .
The purpose of this paper has been amply fulfilled if I have managed
to set forth persuasive arguments in favor of two closely-related, indeed in­
tersecting, theses. First, in addition to crude imitation of speech-external
events (thunder, animal's roar or barking, etc.), there exists a special category
of sound changes — a class large or small or reduced to zero, depending
on the language placed under the observer's lens and on the particular stage

32 It is arguable that, once dumm and dunkel had been accepted and semantically ad­
justed, they paved the way for dumpf(ig, -icht) «damp, stifling, hollow, gloomy», not used
as an adjective before the New High German stage; it is in apophonic relationship to Dampf
«steam» (Kluge and Mitzka, 1963: 147b). If the prototype *dhumbos reconstructed with the
help of Goth, dumbs involved a variant of an ancient chromonym marked by a wedged-in
nasal, another manifestation of the phonosymbolic effect of such inserts may here have been
at issue. Without questioning the derivation of Dudelsack «bagpipes» from Turk, duduk «flute»,
one is tempted to single out the built-in phonosymbolic effectiveness of that word (and of G.
dudeln «to play the bagpipes», Dudelei «piping») as a factor that may have preconditioned
the borrowing process. Berlinese duft(e) «good, okay» has been traced to Yidd. tofl (from
H. tob); the leap from t- to d- may be credited to an allusion to Duft «smell, aroma» (Kluge
and Mitzka, 1963: 146a); however, that association — in itself, slightly far-fetched — might
not have jelled were it not for surrounding local cases, such as toll > doll.
400 YAKOV MALKIEL

of its growth focused upon — which lend themselves to neat segregation

from the bulk of normal, ideally regular sound changes; wherever warranted,
they may be subsumed under some such label as «phonosymbolically-colored
shifts». And second, these shifts, such as the transmutation of older Spanish
syllable-initial s into ç ch,have vigorously interacted with the mainstream
of events: The phonetic «laws» peculiar to the locus and the period; the
timelessly valid general phonetic «accidents»; the pressures of the paradigm
and the aggregate of lexical attractions and repulsions; the bundle of
phenomena conventionally bracketed as effects of diffusion; the social filter­
ing, through processes such as taboo, hypercorrection, excessive self-
assertion; the channeling of the material transmitted through various com­
peting conduits (vernacular, semilearned, and the like). Only this integrated
approach, unavailable as long as expressivity was indiscriminately being
equated with all sorts of Schall- and Lallwörter,  murky Ursehöpfungen,
promises to make this newly staked-out field truly promising.

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 THE GRAMMATICALIZATION OF SOCIAL RELATIONSHIP:
THE ORIGIN OF NUMBER TO ENCODE DEFERENCE

DERRY L. MALSCH
University of Oregon

Pronouns systems minimally encode person and number, and make

direct reference to participants of the speech event. This discourse redun­
dancy is ideal for encoding information regarding social relationship as well,
and in a large number of languages pronoun systems do in fact function
as social deictics. This is done, however, by utilizing a pronoun which is,
in a literal sense, inapplicable to the referent. Thus, for example, second
person plural pronouns are in many languages used to refer to a single ad­
dressee with the additional pragmatic value of respect, social distance, or
superior rank or status.
There are a number of interesting historical questions surrounding the
utilization of pronoun forms to encode social information, and a great deal
of research over the past three decades has been devoted to the social and
historical details surrounding the development of the pragmatic use of pro­
nouns in a number of individual languages. Seminal is the very influential
work of Brown and Gilman (1960) which characterizes the choice of singular
or plural pronoun for singular reference in terms of the social parameters
of power and solidarity, which are assumed to inform all social dyads. Ap­
plying their analysis to changes in pronoun choice that reflect changing social
realities, Brown and Gilman focus on historical developments in the
pragmatics of pronoun systems after the usage was initially established.
Subsequent work has taken the same approach: e.g. Lambert 1967, Wales
1983, Haugen 1975, Paulston 1976, Bates and Benigni 1975, and Kempf 1985
all have a sociolinguistic focus, and concentrate on modifications of an
earlier, given, pattern of usage in the face of social change.
But there are other diachronic questions to consider as well. Probably
the most interesting of these, as well as the most elusive, concerns the origin
of the usage itself. Brown and Gilman attempt to account for this essential-
408 DERRY L. MALSCH

ly by appeal to historical contingency. Specifically, they relate the onset of

the use of second person plural vos in Medieval Latin to show deference
to a singular referent to the fact that in fourth century Europe there were
two Emperors, sharing power within the single and unifed imperial office.
As they put it, «words addressed to one man, were, by implication, addressed
to both». This is immediately hedged, however, and Brown and Gilman pro­
ceed to suggest that the use of plural vos was possibly a direct metaphorical
response to the power of the Emperor(s), rather than a response to the literal
plurality of the officeholders. But there is circularity in such a claim: to say
that a plural pronoun comes to encode power because plurality is a natural
metaphor for power is actually to say very little. In any case, this direct
association of plurality with power is not unique with Brown and Gilman's
analysis, but is in fact the traditional philological account of the
phenomenon. There are, to be sure, variant scenarios: for example, some
scholars (e.g. Bourciez 1956) have suggested that the second person plural
usage developed by analogy with the first person plural pronoun as used
by the Emperor for self-reference. Of course, this only removes the pro­
blem from second to first person; the question of the leap from semantic
plural to pragmatic respect remains.
However, without denying either the areal aspects of the usage in Euro­
pean languages, or the possibility that political contingencies in Medieval
Europe may have stimulated its development, it is clear that any contingent
explanation is not sufficient. Any such explanation fails to take into con­
sideration the multitude of genetically and areally diverse languages in which
pronominal number is also utilized to mark the relational dynamics of social
dyads. Consequently, the impetus for such developments must lie in recur­
rent and universal aspects of social relationship, and not in the particularities
of external history. Head (1978), for example, in outlining the typological
consistencies in the pragmatic use of pronouns, lists some 87 languages, 49
of them non-Indoeuropean, which utilize a second person dual or plural
form in respectful address. And Head's data base is far from comprehen­
sive. Yet in spite of this growing mass of evidence that the correlation of
plurality with respect is fairly commonplace in language, Brown and
Gilman's linkage of the origin of pronouns of respect with specific cir­
cumstances of European history continues to have a great deal of currency.
Thus Trudgill 1974, Wales 1983, and most recently Kempf 1985 all assume
the validity of the Brown and Gilman scenario.
 THE GRAMMATICALIZATION OF SOCIAL RELATIONSHIP 409

The primary goal of this paper, then, is to offer an alternative, non-

contingent, description of the mechanism by which pronoun forms take on
the pragmatic function of marking social relationships holding within a given
dyad. In order to orient to the problem it will be useful to have a framework
within which this description can be located, and to provide in a general
way for the diachronic shift from semantic to pragmatic value before the
content of the particular shift within pronoun systems is discussed. Such
a framework has been articulated by Brown and Levinson (1978) in their
lengthy discussion of politeness phenomena. Since being polite involves utiliz­
ing particular linguistic forms which carry conventional implications distinct
from their literal interpretations, the critical element in their model, given
in table 1, is the identification of an implicature facilitating the shift from
semantic-based to pragmatic-based usage.

Table 1

Their model assumes three, possibly cyclic, stages that characterize three
different relationships that hold between form and use. In the first, purely
semantic, stage, form and meaning completly determine usage. Using pro­
noun systems as an example, this stage would characterize a system in which
singular number indicates only a singular referent, and where plural number
indicates only a plural referent. It would also characterize a system in which
first person refers only to speaker, second person only to addressee, and
third person only to bystander or non-participant in the speech event. In
the second stage an implicature develops relating structurally determined
usage to pragmatic usage. Again, exemplifying this scheme with reference
to pronoun systems, an implicature from usage 1 to usage 2 would allow
the use of a plural pronoun to refer to a singular addressee with respect.
Usage 2 could in turn have an effect on form. Just such a feedback loop
410 DERRY L. MALSCH

is described by Comrie (1975) for languages in which polite plural pronouns

take singular agreement morphology. The third stage of the model results,
in effect, from the subtraction of stage 1 from stage 2, leaving only the ex­
tended pragmatic usage and the relationship between it and the original form.
In pronoun systems this can occur when a new plural arises, replacing the
original plural in usage 1, and leaving it stranded with only a pragmatic in­
terpretation. The result is an honorific form, in which meaning is derived
solely from the pragmatics of the speech event. As an example of this
development, Brown and Levinson cite the history of second person pro­
nouns in Tamil, outlined in table 2.

I. IL III. IV.
Proto-T. Old T. Inter. T. Modern T.
Singular niin nii nii nii
Singular + nii + yir niir niir or niinkaL
Respect
Plural niim nii + yir niim + kaL niinkaL

Table 2

The plural form of Old Tamil is a realization of stage 2 from table 1 : nii + yir
indicates both semantic plurality (usage 1) and pragmatic respect (usage 2)
in singular reference. But in Intermediate Tamil the historical reflex of niiyir
is niir and has become an honorific. All sense of plurality is lost and plural
reference is now marked by a new form in the paradigm (actually the original
plural form niim with added plural suffix kaL). The present state of affairs
in Tamil shows a repetition of stage 2: the (new) semantic plural of In­
termediate Tamil has again been pragmatically extended to indicate social
relationship.
Given this framework, the question remains: what in fact is the nature
of the implicature that enables usage 1 to be extended to usage 2? One
possibility is the generalization of the notion of power as defined by Brown
and Gilman. If power were the relevant social variable defining the im­
plicature, then there should be a correlation between societies stratified by
a power differential and the use of plural pronouns to show respect to a
power superior. There are in fact a number of languages which have
developed pronouns of respect on the base of plural forms within the con-
 THE GRAMMATICALIZATION OF SOCIAL RELATIONSHIP 411

text of rigid social stratification. One such example is Ponapean, in which

stratification until recently was so extreme that no two individuals could
be said to share the same rank or status. This differentiation was marked
by an elaborate set of titles, which insured that in virtually any interaction
the dyad would be characterized by a power differential. Vocabulary was
also stratified, and keyed to relative power, so that the linguistic exchange
would mirror this power differential. Pronoun usage, as indicated in table
3, also reflected this situation.

Common Respect Royal

2nd 3rd 2nd 3rd 2nd 3rd
Singular kowe ih komwi — ihr ihr
Dual kumwa ira — --- — —
Plural kumwail ihr --- --- --- ---

Table 3

There are two dimensions to the extended usage of pronouns in Ponapean:

while the respect form is evidently derived from second person dual or plural,
the second persons royal form is quite obviously derived from third person
plural. Rehg (1981), in attempting to explain this distribution of pronoun
forms suggests a contingency very similar to Brown and Gilman's, i.e. that
the plural form is appropriate because when talking to a high chief one must
also address his spirit or eni. Unfortunately, this neither accounts for the
plural usage in all other power differentiated dyads nor for the third person
usage in the royal form.
In spite of the fact that languages like Ponapean seem to reinforce the
idea that power differences motivate the use of plural pronouns to show
respect, there are other languages which utilize plurality for singular reference
in dyads in which no element of power is present. One set of examples is
found in a number of Australian languages in which an avoidance relation­
ship holding between certain kin is linguistically marked. These avoidance
relationships typically involve a man and his mother-in-law, as in Dyirbal,
but may also extend to his brother-in-law or father-in-law, as in Guugu
Yimidirr, or even to a woman's son-in-law's sister, as in Djapu. As Haviland
(1979) points out, one aspect of brother-in-law language in Guugu Yimidirr
is, in addition to an extensive parallel vocabulary, the use of the second per-
412 DERRY L. MALSCH

son plural pronoun yurra for singular reference. Similarly, in Djapu,

avoidance relationships are signalled by the use of the second person plura
pronoun rhuma. On the other hand, in Gugadja the third person plural pro­
noun, dana, is used in addressing one's brother-in-law. But in none of these
languages is a plural pronoun used in singular reference to mark status or
rank difference. Thus, while it may be the case that plurality is often
pragmatically extended to encode power, power per se cannot be the
delimiting social relationship motivating the implicature.
The nature of the implicature must encompass the notion of power but
at the same time be distinct and of wider scope. There have been a number
of attempts to broaden, in one way or another, the basis for this pragmatic
extension. Like Brown and Gilman, Silverstein (1976:39) identifies pro-
nominal extensions to pragmatic usage as essentially metaphorical. These
pragmatic metaphors, involving either number or person or both, are taken
to be based on the discourse-referential value of the categories themselves.
In the case of a shift from third person meaning to second person usage,
as noted above for Ponapean, and which has occured as well in Italian and
German, among other languages, the effect according to Silverstein is to
make an addressee «larger than life» by removing his or her «individual
personhood». On the other hand, in the case of a shift from plural meaning
to singular usage, the effect is to make an addressee count for «more than
one social individual». This intepretation suggests that the metaphorical use
of plural forms is pragmatically distinct from that of third person forms.
Yet these two extensions seem to be realizations of the same social dimen­
sion, as is evidenced by the fact that they often co-occur in the same system
of pragmatic usage, and often co-occur within the same form as well. Given
this observation, it seems unlikely that there are, as Silverstein suggests, a
set of distinct implicatures, each encording different parameters of social
meaning.
Brown and Levinson (1978) take an approach similar to Silverstein's
in suggesting that the basis for the implicature may be the fact that in all
societies where a person's social status is linked to membership in a group
it is reasonable to mark that status by pragmatic reference to the group itself.
Plural form in singular reference would then encode a particularly salient
aspect of an individual's social persona. But again, while this explanation
addresses the pragmatic use of plurality, it fails to be relevant to other shifts,
e.g., from third person to second person, which are certainly alternate realiza­
tions of the same social dimension.
 THE GRAMMATICALIZATION OF SOCIAL RELATIONSHIP 413

Head (1978) also suggests that an explanation for the uniformity of

pragmatic extension within pronoun systems lies in a natural metaphorical
identification of grammatical category with social status. Noting the cor­
relation of physical proximity with social relationship, Head suggests that
this analogy can readily be represented through grammatical categories of
person and number: both third person and plural are taken to be notionally
more distant than their second person and singular counterparts. However,
it is interesting that in spite of the fact that many languages overtly gram-
maticalize proximity, any correlation with social distance is rare. The one
example that Head cites is, as Head himself points out, based on questionable
data. One relevant example may be Navaho, where the so-called fourth per­
son pronoun is used to refer to kin in an avoidance relationship. This mor­
pheme, the verbal prefix dz-, is in its literal use a directional prefix and can
be glossed as movement away into space. However, the primary means of
marking social distance in Navaho is with the familiar second person plural
form. And in other languages, for example Kannada, there is no exploita­
tion at all of a pronominally grammaticalized contrast in proximity. Never­
theless, Kannada has a highly elaborated set of deference markers, among
them, as indicated in table 4 (Bean 1978), a pair of third person pronouns
semantically differentiated as remote (R) and close (C):

Singular Plural Honorific

Honorific
2nd Person niinu niivu niivu
3rd Person ivaLu (FC) ivaru (C) ivaru (C)
avaLu (FR) avaru (R) avaru (R)
ivanu (MC)
avanu (MR)

Table 4

When these plural pronouns are pragmatically extended to mark deference,

they preserve their semantic values of special proximity, and there is no shift
from physical to social distance. Given data like this, it appears unlikely
that there is any direct analogy between physical and social distance func­
tioning as the basis of the implicature.
Instead of searching for an explanation of the implicature predicated
on a fairly direct correspondence between semantic value and a particular
414 DERRY L. MALSCH

external social parameter, it might be more productive to look for a solu­

tion within the dynamics of face-to-face interaction itself. Bean (1970) takes
a step in this direction by linking what she sees as the inherent social distance
in the use of plural number with its literal use in social triads. Basing her
analysis on the work of George Simmel, she claims that intimacy is possible
only within a dyad, since triads (as well as larger social groupings) inherent­
ly involve social distancing. Thus, number becomes a natural metaphor for
the social distance that differentially inheres in dyads and triads. In Bean's
analysis, third person usage also metaphorically transforms a dyad into a
triad, by making the referent both the addressee and the person spoken
about. One problem with this is that second person, as an instance of referen­
tial deixis, already incorporates these properties. More critically, however,
Bean's model assumes that intimacy is the motivating social dynamic, and
yet there are many languages, e.g., Ponapean, discussed above, in which
intimacy seems to play no role at all in the distribution of pronominal forms.
And even where it does, this seems to be a secondary historical develop­
ment that follows from an earlier distinction based on quite distinct social
parameters.
While Bean is on the right track, a more inclusive, and therefore more
adequate explanation for the implicature is possible by considering the model
of face-to-face interaction articulated in great detail by Brown and Levin-
son (1978). Briefly, they demonstrate that the defining dynamic informing
social interaction is a set of wants (termed face wants) that each participant
brings to every interaction. These face wants center on an individual's public
self-image, and are typically met only through the behavior of others with
whom the individual interacts. They are of two types: on the one hand an
individual wants the approbation of his or her associates, and on the other
wants the freedom from imposition. And whether these face wants are met
or not, an individual wants others to recognize the validity of the wants
themselves. As Brown and Levinson demonstrate, a great deal of linguistic
behavior makes sense only in terms of the desire or need of a speaker to
validate an addressee's face wants. To do so a speaker may ritually align
himself or herself with the values of the addressee, or may overtly state an
unwillingness to impose on the personal domain of the addressee. On the
one hand a speaker may «pay face» by choosing linguistic forms which in­
form the interaction with solidarity or intimacy, and on the other hand may
do so by choosing linguistic forms which increase social distance, e.g. by
ritually creating or projecting a power differential. Much polite behavior
 THE GRAMMATICALIZATION OF SOCIAL RELATIONSHIP 415

is thus deferential, and as such it is largely avoidance based. But avoiding

imposition may literally mean avoiding interaction. This presents a dilem­
ma, one which is resolved by engaging in redressive behavior. Such behavior
allows a speaker to ritually draw attention to the face wants of the addressee
and thereby validate them symbolically even in the process of violating them
in fact. In short, through mitigating, redressive linguistic behavior, the
speaker can make it clear to the addressee he or she is «paying face».
The use of plural form in singular reference then can be seen as one
means available to a speaker to indicate to the addressee that there is an
unwillingness to impose. This is achieved by symbolically diffusing the im­
mediacy of the addressee's presence in the face-to-face encounter. In effect,
the use of a plural form serves to mask the involvement of the addressee
in the interaction, and thus softens in some measure the obligation that would
otherwise obtain for the addressee to participate in the interaction. This is,
however, a ritualized gesture, which serves to pay face to the addressee in
the face of an ongoing interactional imposition. The same goal of paying
face is achieved, moreover, through the use of any linguistic gesture which
ritually places the addressee at some remove from the obligations of the in­
teraction. Thus the use of third person forms to indicate the addressee has
the same result.
There are in fact a wide ranging number of linguistic devices which allow
the addressee to be given some independence from the constraints of the
interaction, and this is strong evidence that any analysis of the origin of
the implicature which is based solely on a metaphor of plurality is inade­
quate. One of the most striking examples that supports the claim that the
implicature involves some notion of ritual dispensation of addressee's in­
volvement in the interaction can be found in Ponapean greeting rituals.
Greetings in general are typically laden with considerations of face: notice
the pro forma inquiry of an addresse's well-being in English. In Ponapean,
deferential greeting explicitly removes the addressee from the interaction by
stating his or her absence from the immediate context of the speech event.
Depending on the context such a greeting would be on the order of kaselehli
tehnpasen «greetings empty nest there» or kaselehlie tehnwaren «greetings
empty vehicle there». Additional evidence of the same sort can be found
in closer scrutiny of the literal meaning of the Navaho fourth person pro­
noun, mentioned above. The meaning is not merely one of non-proximity,
as originally suggested, but rather one of movement away from the speaker's
deictic center. A very similar situation is found in Nahuatl (Hill and Hill
416 DERRY L. MALSCH

1978) in which the verbal prefix on-, meaning physical motion away from
the speaker, is used to express deference.
In addition to plurality, third person forms, or the use of deictic
markers, many languages, including some familiar ones like German and
French, as well as others like Slovakian utilize an impersonal construction
to express deference. Thus in Slovakian one would say Kam sa ide? «where
is one going» rather than Kam idešl «where are you going» in respectful
questioning. And in Sinhalese, plurality is not used at all to express deference;
rather, the demonstrative pronoun mee is used as a prefix on the second
person singular pronoun. Like the other linguistic devices discussed above
this serves to remove the addressee from the usual role as participant in the
interaction and to reconstruct him or her as a part of its context.
Moreover, in a number of languages pragmatic extension to plurality
and/or third person pronominal reference is insufficient to express the re­
quired deference to an addressee. That is, the use of pronouns themselves
may be seen as tying the addressee too closely to the interaction. In such
circumstances, names are often substituted for pronouns, and where there
is a distinction between surname and given name it is the surname that takes
on the function of a social deictic. While names can be viewed as transfor­
ming the addressee into a non-participating referent, in a manner parallel
to the use of third person pronouns, the substitution of an individual's name
for second person forms can still undermine the addresse's right to nonin-
volvement by focusing on his or her individuality. It is because of this that
names themselves are often proscribed in deferential interaction. Thus in
languages like Djapu, cited above, personal names cannot be used either
in address or reference when an avoidance relationship obtains. And in
Bengali and Tamil, one of the ways in which a wife shows deference to her
husband is never to use his given name. As a result there is often further
symbolic displacement of an addressee by the use of titles and/or kin terms.
This serves to protect the autonomy of the addressee by placing him or her
within well-defined social roles that bring to the speech event well-defined
constraints on the behavior of the speaker.
Kin terms particularly are used in many languages as both vocatives
and substitutions for pronouns, particularly when age is a salient aspect of
one's social identity. Thus, deference may be shown by addressing any in­
dividual as old as or older than the speaker as either mother or father, as
in Yoruba and Hopi; as elder brother or elder sister, as in Turkish; or as
 THE GRAMMATICALIZATION OF SOCIAL RELATIONSHIP 417

grandfather or grandmother, as in Vietnamese.

Lastly, in a number of languages actual kin may show deference to other
kin by symbolically displacing them by the use of teknonymy, the use of
a kin term appropriate to a different kin relationship. Thus, in Korean a
married adult male will be addressed by his mother not by the kin term ap­
propriate to their relationship, but rather as his own child's father. If the
son is not yet a parent, then there is no form of address which is appropriate
for the mother to use, since the use of her son's given name is no longer
possible when he reaches adulthood. And in Vietnamese, a married person
will address the parents of the spouse as either grandfather of grandmother.
In the same mode, and elder brother will be addressed as elder uncle.
All of these linguistic extensions seem to encode the same pragmatic
implicature. They serve to mitigate the threat to a person's face inherent
in the interaction itself by symbolically placing the addressee outside of its
confines. They thus give face to the addressee by ritually stating the unwill­
ingness of the speaker to bind the addressee to the behavioral obligations
of the interaction.
The evidence given above indicates that Brown and Gilman's contingent
explanation linking plurality with the social variable of power is not only
insufficient but also unnecessary. Rather, in an interactional framework
which recognizes the face needs of the participants, not only pronominal
usage, but also other linguistic forms subject to pragmatic extension, find
a unified and natural explanation.

REFERENCES

Bates, E. and L. Benigni. 1975. Rules of address in Italy: a sociological

survey. Language in society 4. 271-88.
Bean, S. 1970. Two's company, three's a crowd. American Anthropologist
72. 562-4.
Bean, S. 1978. Symbolic and pragmatic semantics. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
Bourciez, E. 1956. Élements de linguistique romane. Paris: Klincksiek.
Brown, P. and S. Levinson. 1978. Universals in language usage: politeness
phenomena. Questions and politeness, ed. by E. Goody, 56-289. Cam­
bridge: University of Cambridge Press.
418 DERRY L. MALSCH

Brown, R. and A. Gilman. 1960. The pronouns of power and solidarity.

Style in language, ed. by T. Sebeok, 253-76. Cambridge: The MIT Press.
Comrie, B. 1975. Polite plurals and predicate agreement. Language
51.406-18.
Haugen, E. 1975. Pronominal address in Icelandic: from you-two to you-
all. Language in society 4.323-39.
Haviland, J.B. 1979. Guugu Yimidhirr Brother-in-law Language. Language
in society 8.365-93.
Head, B. 1978. Respect degrees in pronominal reference. Universais of
human language, volume 3, ed. by J. Greenberg, 151-211. Stanford: Stan­
ford University Press.
Hill, J.H. and K.C. Hill. 1978. Honorific usage in Modern Nahuatl.
Language 54.123-55.
Kempf, R. 1985. Pronouns and terms of address in Neues Deutschland.
Language in society 14.223-37.
Lambert, W. 1967. The use of tu and vous as forms of address in French
Canada: a pilot study. Journal of verbal learning and verbal behavior
6.614-17.
Paulston, C. 1976. Pronouns of address in Swedish: a social class seman­
tics and a changing system. Language in society 5.359-86.
Rehg, K. 1981. Ponapean reference grammar. Honolulu: The University of
Hawaii Press.
Silverstein, M. 1976. Shifters, linguistic categories, and cultural description.
Meaning in anthropology, ed. by K. Basso and H. Selby, 11-55. Albu­
querque: University of New Mexico Press.
Trudgill, P. 1974. Sociolinguistics. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.
Wales, K. 1983. Thou and you in Early Modern English: Brown and Gilman
reappraised. Studia linguistica 37.107-25.
FROM CONVERSATIONAL TO CONVENTIONAL IMPLICATURE: THE
ROMANIAN PRONOUNS OF IDENTITY AND THEIR SUBSTITUTES

MARIA MANOLIU-MANEA
University of California. Davis.

Recent developments in linguistic pragmatics have revealed the role of

conversational implicature in language change. The key-context in the
development of a new meaning of a grammatical (or lexical) construction,
which has been often evoked in traditional diachronic explanations,
represents in fact the pragmatic environment favoring the nonliteral inter­
pretation, i.e. the conversational meaning which will replace the previous
literal meaning (see Peter Cole, 1975: 273; Fleischman, 1983, et al.). Although
it might sound like a mere change of labels rather than a real theoretical
development, there is some evidence in favor of the appropriateness of the
concept of implicature when accounting for semantic changes, especially
within a category of words which are rather difficult to define and which
we have chosen to call «insinuating words», i.e. carriers of conventional
implicatures, such as «still», «even», «same», etc. In the present paper we
intend to reveal the way in which a conversational meaning may become
a conventional meaning, that is a meaning of an «insinuating word», by
analyzing an ongoing change in contemporary Romanian, namely the
replacement of the pronouns of identity by adverbial phrases1.

1
Roughly speaking, the difference between conversational and conventional implicatures
may be stated as follows:
Conversational implicatures are cancellable and nondetachable. Let us consider the ut­
terance (i) John has three books, which, by the Gricean's «cooperative principle» has
the implicature (ii) «John has only three books», (ii) is suspendable by mention in a
IF-clause, as shown by (iii) John has three books, if not more. Now, let us consider
the ironic interpretation of (iv) Peter is a genius, i.e. (v): «Peter is an idiot». Any
equivalent of (iv) performed in a context in which it is mutually known that (iv) is very
definitely false will share the ironic reading (5): see (vi) Peter is a great brain (or) (vii)
Peter is a mental prodigy, which means that the conversational implicature (v) is not
detachable.
420 MARIA MANOLIU-MANEA

Considered as «grammatical words» in Romance structural (psychome-

canical) descriptions (see for example, Martin, 1975), the pronouns of iden­
tity, such as «same» and «self», may be used as special means of denial.
Their function is not only to assert an identity, but also to «insinuate» that
a non-identity has been expected:
See, for example,
(1) Rom. Rǎspunde mereu acelaşi student (deşi aş dori sǎ rǎspundä studen­
ti diferiti) «the same student always answers (in spite of the fact that
I expect to have different students' answers»).
In symbolic logic terms, the meaning of (1) can be roughly represented as
follow:
(a) Ex (Answer n (x)). E y (Answer n + 1(y) ) . (χ = )
Expectation: χ is not identical with 
i.e. «there is a person x, who answers at time n, and there is a person y,
who answers at time n + 1, and it is not true that χ and  are not identical».
A similar expectation is carried by Rom. însu§i «self», the so-called «pro­
noun of reinforcement».
See, for example, (2) Rom. mi-a spus aceasta el însuşi (însuşi Petru)
(nu o ştiu din alta parte) «he (Peter) himself told me this (I haven't got it
from another source)».
The meaning of sentence (2) can be represented roughly in the follow­
ing terms:
(b) E x Ey E z (TELL ( x , y , z ) ) · (x: Petru), (: ME), (z: those things)
Expectation: «x ≠ Petru», i.e. «it was not Peter who told me that».

The difference between «same» and «self» can then be described in terms
of the variables linked by the «unexpected identity»: «same» carries an ex­
pectation concerning the relation between two variables, χ and y, while «self»

Conventional implicatures are attached by convention to particular items or expres­

sions, such as but, even, well... etc. They are not detachable and not cancellable, because
they do not rely on defeasible assumptions about the nature of the context. Let us con­
sider the utterance (viii) Joan is pregnant, but Peter is unhappy, with the conventional
implicature (ix) «Peter should be happy if Joan is pregnant», (ix) can be cancelled as
shown by (x) Joan is pregnant but Peter is unhappy, because he wants to split. A sentence
such as (xi) Joan is pregnant and Peter is unhappy, where but is replaced by and, has
the same truth-conditions as (viii), but lacks the conventional implicature expressed by
(ix), which proves that (ix) is detachable (see Grice, 1975, Levinson, 1983).
 ROMANIAN PRONOUNS OF IDENTITY 421

expresses «identity with oneself» (see Coseriu, 1955), i.e. a relation between
the values of the same variable; viz. the value taken by a certain variable
does not correspond to the expected value (for more details see Manoliu,
1983). In less cryptic terms, one may state the difference under discussion
as follows: «same» expresses «repetition», while «self» expresses «coin­
cidence». As means of denial, the pronouns of identity belong to a special
category of «insinuating morphemes» which cannot be defined semantical-
ly without considering their pragmatic value, i.e. the conventional implicature
they carry.

Acelaşi and tot

In contemporary spoken Romanian, one of the most frequent substitutes
for expressing an unexpected non-identity between two variables is the adver­
bial TOT followed by a NP inlcuding the demonstrative pronoun acela
«that». The key-context in which the replacement is accomplished without
any residual semantic difference, is represented by a prophrase having the
role of a predicative NP, as shown by sentences (3) and (4):
(3) E acela§i lucru! (standard Romanian)
(4) E tot aia!2 (colloquial Romanian)
«It is the same thing»
Originally a correlative of «equally» (see Lat. TOT... QUOT «as
much... as»), TOT developped into a VP modifier, expressing «per­
manence», «continuity of the process», such as in (5):
(5) tot  mai iubeşti?! «you still love her, don't you?!» (cf. Fr. tu l'aimes
toujours, hein?!)
or «the repetition of the event», as shown by (6):
(6) tot te mai duci pe acolo, -i aşa? «you still go there, don't you? 3 ».
In combination with nouns, the replacement of acelaşi by tot does not

2 AIA is the colloquial form for aceea «that» - feminine singular or «neutre», i.e. the
form having the function of a pro-phrase.
3 TOT may also be a sentence connective, expressing a special type of contextual
equivalence, i.e. it introduces the denial of an expected event as a reason for introducing another
event, as a normal consequence, if not as an alternate of the denied event, in a chain of conse­
quences, such as «if non Ρ (because of Q), then Z»:
see, for example, Hai sã ne uităm la telewizor, TOT nu mai putem pleca pe ploaia asta...
«let's watch TV, since we cannot go out any longer because of the rain».
422 MARIA MANOLIU-MANEA

always result in completely synonymous constructions. Compare, for ex­

ample, (7) and (8):
(7) Petru şi Ion stau în aceeşi cameră
«Peter and John live in the same room»
(8) Petru §i Ion stau tot în camera aceea
«Peter and John still live in that room».
Though various Romanian grammars refer to the synonymy between
TOT ... ACELA and ACELAŞI, no explanation has been yet advanced. As
we have suggested in a previous paper (see Manoliu, 1983), TOT... ACELA
meets ACELAŞI through a simple pragmatic device concerning the permanen­
ce of the entire event, as shown by sencentes (7) and (87, where it is still possible
to sense the difference between the two constructions under discussion.

In (7) the focus is on the identity between the room in which Peter lives
and the room occupied by John. In (8) TOT emphasizes the temporal con­
tinuity, denying the expectation (9) «Peter and John no longer live there».
In other words, (7) and (8) are different as to the scope of negation: in (7)
it is the relation between two arguments which falls into the scope of nega­
tion, while in (8) the predicate is in the scope of negation, i.e. «it is not true
that living in room z at time η-l is no longer true for time n». In short,
TOT... ACELA asserts the continuity of the process, by denying the con­
ventional implicature of an expected discontinuity, while ACELAŞI asserts
an identity of arguments, by denying an expected non-identity. Situational-
ly, the continuity of processes (or events) entails the permanence of the ob­
jects involved (in our case, Peter, John and the room where they live). In
other terms, contextually, the conventional implicature conveyed by TOT
entails the conventional implicature conveyed by ACELAŞI. This entailment
is thus a conversational implicature which has favored a change in the seman­
tic content of TOT in such a way that it may convey the same conventional
implicature as ACELAŞI. The conversational meaning of the adverbial TOT
in contexts such as (4), where the NP is a predicative noun, becomes a value
of its conventional meaning.
As a means asserting a «permanence», TOT has various advantages
over ACELAŞI:
(a) Unlike ACELAŞI, which can modify only nouns and behaves like an
adjective, TOT can focus on various constituents:
(i) personal pronouns: e.g. (10) vorbeşte tot el «it is again he who
speaks», and not (11) *vorbeşte acelaşi el, lit. «speaks the same he»;
 ROMANIAN PRONOUNS OF IDENTITY 423

(ii) adverbial phrases: e.g. (12) tot acolo «in the same place» and not
*acelasi acolo «the same there», (13) tot atunci «at the same moment»
and not *acelaşi atunci, lit. «the same then», etc.

(in) prepositional phrases: (14) vorbeşte tot cu Petru «it is again Peter
to whom he speaks» (where the repetition refers to an argument; comp.
(15) vorbeşte din nou cu Petru «he speaks again with Peter», where
the repetition refers to the predicate);

(iv) and adjectives: e.g. (16) Dunărea e tot albastră «the Danube is
still blue».

(b) TOT is invariable, while ACELAŞI agrees in gender and number with
its head-noun (it is therefore morphologically more complex):

see (17) tot rochia aceea - aceeaşi rochie «the same dress» (fem. ,sg.)
tot constumul acela - acelaşi costum «the same suit» (masc. sg.)
tot pantofii aceia - aceiaşi pantofi «the same shoes» (masc. pl.)
tot rochiile acelea - aceleaşi rochii «the same dresses» (fem. pl.).
The demonstrative following the noun behaves, of course, as an adjective.
The replacement under discussion is not yet a «fait accompli», since
there are various contexts where TOT and ACELAŞI do not carry exactly
the same conventional implicature: comp. (18) and (19):
Comp. (18) s-a imbrăcai cu aceeasi rochie
«she put on the same dress»
and (19) s-a imbracai tot cu rochia (nu cu pantalonii)
«she put on the dress again (and not the slacks)».

In (18) the denial concerns the relation between the members of the same
class, the class of «dresses»; in (19) the denial concerns the relation between
two classes, the dresses and the slacks.
Only with a NP followed by a demonstrative, TOT may convey a similar
implicature as acelaşi, i.e. the unexpected identity between two values of
the same variable:
Cf. (19) s-a imbracai cu aceeaşi rochie
«she put on the same dress»

TOT is compatible both with acela «that» and acesta «this», as shown by
(21) and (22):
424 MARIA MANOLIU-MANEA

(21) ieri te-ai imbracai tot cu rochia aceea «yesterday you put on that
dress again» (the dress is not on the hearer at the moment of speaking).
But, in combinations with pronouns, adjectives and adverbs, TOT is
now the only alternative for expressing an unexpected identity between two
variables, as sown by (10), (11), (12), (13) or (16) 4 .
Another phenomenon which may be considered as an indirect proof
for the lexicalization of the new conventional implicature of TOT (... acela)
is the fact that its homophone, the adjectival TOT (- TOATA-TOTI-TOATE)
«every» is no longer used with the value of a universal quantifier in com­
bination with nouns characterized by the feature - Uniformity, as its cognates
are used in other Romance languages.
see (23) Fr. tout enfant doit se coucher tôt «every child must go to bed
early»,
but (24) Rom. *?tot copilul trebuie sa se culce devreme, somewhat unac­
ceptable, with an archaic flavor,
rather (25) a. fiecare/ orice copil trebuie sa se culce devreme,
with more specific universal quantifiers, such as fiecare «every» and orice
«any», if not (25 b), with the plural form and the definite article -i.
(25) b. copiii trebuie să se culce devreme
«children have to go to bed early»

Chiar and însuşi

Let us now turn our attention to Rom. CHIAR, which is tending to
replace the emphatic pronoun însuşi in colloquial speech (see Iordan et al.,
1967: p. 131). CHIAR originates in the adverbial use of an adjective, namely
Lat. CLARUM, with the meaning of «(it is) clear (that P)», as shown by
its use in Old Romanian, where chiar has the value of «exactly», «precise­
ly» (see Densusianu, 1961, II: p. 165, where CHIAR is glossed as a synonym
of clar «clear(ly)», cu adevărat «truly», în realitate «in reality»), as well
as by some of its contemporary contextual values (see 26):
(26) Contemp. Rom. chiar cä-i prosti «It is clear that he is stupid!»
where chiar behaves like a sentence modifier and it is followed by the com­
plementizer că;

4 In old Romanian, the implicature under discussion was conveyed by the reflexive - Ş1
(Lat. SIBI): e.g. atunceşi «the same time», acoloşi «the same place», which is also a compo­
nent of the pronoun of identity acela şi.
 ROMANIAN PRONOUNS OF IDENTITY 425

and
(27) fetita chiar plînge, -i glumai «the little girl is weeping indeed,
seriously!»,
where chiar is a VP modifier.

As a sentence modifier, CHIAR has also an «argumentative value»,

referring to a complex anti-universe, cancelling not only the expectation of
the modified sentence, but also the expectation carried by a previous sentence:
(28) a. Desi Paul era furios si supărat pe noi, Ileana l-a calmat si l-a
convins sa ne ajute
«Although Paul was furious and angry at us, Helen pacified him
and even persuaded him to help us»
or
(28) b. ceaiul e fïerbinte, e chiar prea fïerbinte
«the tea is hot, even too hot»

As a pro-adverb modifier, chiar expresses an «unexpected coincidence» in

space (see (29)) or time (see (30)):
(29) poti să te asezi chiar aici, linga mine
«you can sit right here, besides me»
(30) chiar ieri 1-am văzut pe Yakov
«I saw Yakov just yesterday»

When modifying an adjectival attribute, chiar can also express an «unex­

pected attainability of the upper limit of a quality»:
See (31) daca a făcut asta e chiar prost...
«if he has done that, he is really stupid»

Finally, CHIAR has been extended in contexts where the focus is on

a NP and it then becomes a synonym of the pronoun of reinforcement în-
susi «self»:
comp. (32) s-a împåcat (a) cu însăşi regina (cu regina însasi)
(b) chiar cu regina
«he made peace with the queen herself»

In this case, chiar meets însusi by converting its conventional implicature

of an «unexpected coincidence» into a conversational implicature of an
«unexpected coincidence with oneself», by insinuating that the candidate
426 MARIA MANOLIU-MANEA

chosen by the realm of events does not coincide with the candidate favored
by our expectations (arising from our common beliefs).
Because of this conversationl meaning, when focussing a NP, the
argumentative chiar is accompanied by - ŞI, which brings in the meaning
of «aditional argument» 5 :
(33) chiar şi Petru a venit «even Peter came»
The adverbial ŞI originates in Lat. SIC «so» and has the meaning of «also»:
see (34) spune-i şi lui «tell him also»

In other Romance languages, especially in French, the pronoun of iden­

tity alone can take an argumentative value even when modifying a noun:
comp. (35) a. Fr. même I' enfant «even the child» - Rom. chiar §i copilul
b. Fr. I' enfant lui-même «the child himself» - Rom. însuşi copilul
/ chiar copilul
c. Fr. le même enfant «the same child» - Rom. acelaşi copil,
tot copilul acela.

In Romanian, chiar alone cannot play this triple role, since it always precedes
the entire modified constituent (see chiar cu regina in (32.b)) and the definite
article is always cliticized and follows the noun (see (36) copilUL lit. «child»
«the»).
The spread of CHIAR as a means of denying expectations concerning
the identity has been favored by various factors:
(a) CHIAR is invariable, while însuşi has a rather complex mor­
phology:
see the paradigm of însu§i in (37).
(37) însu§i «himself» - însaşi «herself» - înşişi «themselves» (masculine)
- inseşi (or însele) «themselves» - feminine»; însumi «myself -
masculine» - însami «myself - feminime»; însuti «yourself - masculine»
- msati «yourself - feminine»; inşine «ourselves»; înşiva «yourselves-
plural».

5 The same argumentative value can be expressed in this case by another phrase, name­
ly pîna si (see Lat. paena ad): e.g.pisi Petru a venit «even Peter came», where pina brings
in the idea of «the attainement of a limit with an accompanying perspective». See the meaning
of pîna when used alone in contexts such as umple sticla pîna la gura «fill the bottle to the
rim», or astept pîna la patru «I shall wait till four o'clock». For a similar evolution of a space-
time preposition to an «insinuating word» see Sp. hasta: e.g. hasta Pedro vino «even Peter came».
 ROMANIAN PRONOUNS OF IDENTITY 427

In the everyday speech (even in the speech of cultivated persons, and in the
written language of the press), confusions between these forms occur rather
frequently (see Iordan et al., 1967: p. 133: e.g. (38)însaşi(forînse§i) cuvintele
acestea formează o poezie, Flacãra, 16 (1957), p. 22 «these words form a
poem by themselves»).
( b ) Another factor favoring chiar is the fact that însuşi is governed by
more restrictive constraints:

(i) însuşi still preserves its «reflexivity» (given by the reflexive mor­
pheme -şi (see Lat. sibi):

comp. (39) s-a împăcat chiar cu el «he made peace precisely with him»
and (40) s-a împacat cu el însuşi (or s-a împăcat cu sine însuşi) «he made
peace with himself».
(ii) The choice of articles after însuşi is more restricted than after chiar:
comp. (41) a spus aceasta chiar (a) mamei (definite article)
(b) unei mane (indefinite article)
«he said that precisely to the/a mother»
and (42) a spus aceasta (a) însaşi mamei (definite article)
(b) *însaşi unei mane (indefinite article)
(c) Chiar is capable of modifying any class of constituents with a similar
pragmatic value, insinuating the fact that an expectation of non-identity or
non-coincidence has been cancelled (see 26-32).
(d) Since CHIAR precedes the entire NP (or PP), it spread is also in
line with the present tendency to prepose noun determiners, which
characterizes contemporary colloquial Romanian:
comp. (43) standard Romanian: i-a spus mamei,
«he told to (my/his) mother»
lit. «to her has said-he mother-dative-definite article-dative»
and
(44) Colloq Rom. i-a spus lu mama (same meaning as (43)) lit. «to her
has said-he TO (invariable LU) mother (zero case marker)».
The on-going changes presented in this paper are not at all exceptional
if one considers the entire history of Romance pronouns of identity, which
have known almost cyclic changes precisely because of the pragmatic im­
plications of their semantic area. The few changes under discussion are not
only meant to advocate the appropriateness of the Gricean model of im-
plicatures in accounting for semantic changes, but also, and mainly, to bring
428 MARIA MANOLIU-MANEA

some evidence in favor of the hypothesis according to which the causes of

language change reside within speaker's communicative necessities and, con­
sequently, they have to be considered more in terms of their finality (final
causes) and multiple choices, rather than in terms of a one-to-one determined
choice, which characterizes the world of natural objects and positive sciences6.

REFERENCES

Cole, P. 1975. The synchronic and diachronic status of conventional im-

plicatures. In Syntax and Semantics: Speech Acts. Ed. P. Cole and J.
L. Morgan. New York: Academic Press, Pp. 257-289.
Coseriu, Eugenio. 1955/56. Determinación y entorno. Romanistisches
Jahrbuch 7, 29-54.
Coseriu, Eugenio. Linguistic Change does not exist. (to appear in Miscellanea
in Onore di Vittore Pisani).
Densusianu, . 1961. Istoria limbii române, I-II, Bucharest: Editura Ştiin-
tifică.
Fleischman, Suzanne. 1983. From Pragmatics to Grammar. Diachronic
Reflections on Complex Pasts and Futures in Romance. Lingua 60,
183-214.
Grice, H.P. 1975. Logic and Conversation. Syntax and Semantics 3: Speech
Acts. Ed. P. Cole and J.L. Morgan. New York: Academic Press. Pp.
41-58.
Levinson, Stephen C. 1983. Pragmatics, Cambridge, London: Cambridge
University Press.
Manoliu-Manea, Maria. 1983. Pragmatics of Identity Pronouns. Rom.
ACELAŞI versus INSUŞI - Lat. IDEM versus IPSE. In Logos Seman­
tikos, Studia Linguistica in Honorem Eugenio Coseriu (1921-1981), 2,
Berlin - New York, Madrid: Walter de Gruyter and Editorial Gredos.
383-391.
Martin, Robert. 1975. Sur Futilité du mot même. Travaux de Linguistique
et de Littérature, 13.2. 227-43.
Martin, Robert. 1983. Pour une logique du sens, Paris: P.U.F.

6 For a synthesis on the «final causes and language change» see Coseriu, 1982.
 NOTE SU / S / INTERCONSONANTICA
NEI DIALETTI GRECI ANTICHI

CELESTINA MILANI
Università di Verona

1.1.1 Si rileva che /ksm/ mantiene il fonema / s / intatto nel miceneo

come si desume da a3-ka-sa-ma PY Jn 829.3 aikmáns (ac. plur.); l'iscri­
zione è del XIII secolo. Non è certo però che i nessi /ksn/, /rsm/, /rsn/
micenei siano intatti perché negli esempi che si hanno la sibilante non è resa
graficamente, fatto consueto alle regole grafiche micenee, che tuttavia po­
trebbe nascondere I' indebolimento di / s / in /h/. Nel miceneo si trovano
i seguenti esempi: a-wa-ra-ka-na ΡY Un 1314 (secolo XIII) awráksna
)arákhnã a-mo KN Sg 890 bis. 5 hársmo = hársma (oppure hanno!) «ruo­
ta», a-mo-ta KN So hársmota o hármota, a-mo-te KN So 4442. b. hársmo-
te o hármote (fine del XV secolo); pte-no KN Sd (fine del XV secolo) ptér-
snõ o ptérnõ «due predelllini (del carro)1», cfr. Chadwick-Baumbach 1963
e Baumbach 1971: s.w. Perciò si può concludere che esiste in miceneo un
solo caso sicuro di / s / interconsonantica; negli altri tre casi non si può di­
mostrare questo fatto, anche perché per le regole grafiche del miceneo / s /
interconsonantica potrebbe essere stata omessa.
1.2 Nel greco successivo al miceneo la sibilante interconsonantica si
indebolisce in h. Non è improbabile che tale h sia un' approssimante larin­
gale che, mediante un processo di risillabazione, si fonde con l'occlusiva
precedente, riducendosi a coarticolazione. Nei paragrafi 1.2 si considera quin­
di

1.2.1 Nei casi qui considerati /C1/ è un'occlusiva velare sorda men­
tre /C 2 / è una nasale labiale. Si considerano solo gli esempi certi (e qua­
si), rimandando per la problematica di ogni esempio ai dizionari etimologi­
ci di Boisacq, Frisk, Chantraine che si devono considerare sempre citati.

1
Del greco si dà la translitterazione non la trascrizione fonetica.
430 CELESTINA MILANI

Con Gk. si intende il greco antico da Omero in poi, con PGk. si designa
la forma greca originaria ricostruita, con PIE la forma indeuropea.
Esempi: Gk. aikhmé ( PGk. aiksma, Aeol. aíkhmã «punta della spada».
II. 6.320, «spada»//. 12.45, cfr. Lit. iëszmas «spilla», OPruss. aysmis «spil­
la», v. Hesych. aîkloi'hai gõníai toû bélous e (con altro vocalismo) iktéa a-
kóntion Hesych., cfr. Cypr. ikmaménos Lejeune 1972: 62, 66 n. 8, Adra­
dos 1973: 115.
Gk. amukhmós < PGk. *amuksmós «scalfittura» Theocr. 24.126, cfr. Gk.
amússõ, ámugma, Hesych. amukálai-hai akídes ton belôn para tò amús-
sein; però cfr. arnukhé: analogica a amukhmós (o viceversa?). Gk. īõkh-
mós < PGk. «tumulto della battaglia» Il. 8.89 cfr. Gk. iöké, To­
xis, Hom. Paliõxis, Corynth. wiókei.
Gk. lakhmós (PGk. *laksmós «battito» Antim. 54, cfr. Gk. laktismós «bat­
tito del piede», láx «con il tallone» Boisacq 1950: 555, ma Frisk 1970: 82
e Chantraine 1968-80: 619: non accennano a / -sm-/. Gk. lakhmós ( PGk.
*laksmós «lana» Od. 9. 445 (mss.) per lakhnós Eust. 1638. 39. Gk. mukh-
mós {*muksmós «gemito» Od. 24.416, cfr. mukáomai, mugmós, v. Chan­
traine 1968-80: 718s, s. 2 múzõ.
Gk. plókhmos < PGk. *plóksmos «ricciolo» Il. 17.52, cfr. Gk. plókamos,
plékõ, Skt. praçnah «lavoro a intreccio, turbante», OHG flahs «lino», OE
fl «lino», Lat. plectõ.
Si aggiunge a questo paragrafo Gk. rhõkhmós ( PGk. *rhõgsmós «fendi­
tura» Il. 23.420, cfr. rhegnumi, rhôgas (. plur.), rhõgmós Schwyzer 1959:
493; rhõkhmós presenta varie grafie cfr. Liddell-Scott 1940-68: 1579.

1.2.2 Nei casi seguenti /C1/ è un'occlusiva velare sorda e / C 2 / è una

nasale dentale. Cfr. . a-wa-ra-ka-na e Gk. arákhnē <PGk. *aráksnã in
rapporto al Lat. arānea Benveniste 1935:101, incerto il confronto col Gk.
árkus.
Altri esempi: Gk. ákhnē, Dor. ákhnã < PGk. «efflorescenza, balla
di grano» Il. 5.499, cfr. Got. ahana «balla», Got. ahs «spiga», Lat. acus,
aceris, però cfr. Gk. ákhuron «paglia» dove l'aspirazione può essere di ori­
gine enfatica Vendryes 1932:852: influsso di ákhné, Chantraine 1968-80: 151
dubita di /-snä/.
GK. kulíkhnë <PGk. *kulíksnā «piccola coppa» Alc. 41.2, cfr. Skt. kala-
çah «giara», Gk. kulix, Hesych. skállion- kulíkion mikrón Chantraine 1933:
195, Pokorny 1959: 550s.
Gk. lakhnē <PIE «lana» Od. 11.320, lákhnos < PIE «la-
 / S / INTERCONSONANTICA NEI DIALETTI GRECI ANTICHI 431

na» Od. 9.445, cfr. Avest. varəsa- «lana», OSI. vlasu «lana», OSI. vlakno
«cappello», Lat. lana Benveniste 1935: 101s.
- GK. lúkhnos <PGk. *lúksnos «fiaccola» Od. 19.34, cfr. Avest. raoxšna
«brillante», OSI. luna (le/ouksna), OPruss. (plur.) lauxnos «stelle», Lat.
lūna (louksna), Prenest. losna «luna» Risch 1981: 501. Gk. pákhnê < PGk.
*páksnã < PIE *pagsnā «brina» Od. 14.476, cfr. Gk. pégnumi, págos Chan-
traine 1933: 192, Schwyzer 1959: 327. - Gk. pelíkhnè < PGk. *peliksnā «taz­
za» Alcm. 19 cfr. . pe-ri-ke MY Ue 611 pelikes, Aeol. pelíka, Ion. Att.
pelike.
- Gk. tékhnë < PGk. *téksnã < PGk. *tektsnā < PIE *tekþna, cfr. Sk. táksan-
«carpentiere», Avest. tasan- «artigiano», Gk. téktõn «carpentiere, costrut­
tore», lat. texõ Thurneysen 1887: 157 n. 3, Saussure 1892: 90 ss, Chantrai-
ne 1968-80: 1117; cfr. Locr. tekna Buck 1955:60.
1.2.3 Ci sono poi i casi di Gk. mórphnos e ptérnè in cui / C 1 / non
è una velare e / C 2 / è una nasale dentale. Cfr. Gk. mórphnos «di colore
scuro» Il. 24.316, un tipo di aquila Arist. Hist. anim. 618b.25; da PIE
*morgwsnos Walde 1897:478, Hirt 1901: 221ss. cfr. ON myrkr «scuro», OE
mierce «scuro», OS mirki «scuro»; oppure da PIE *morqwsnos cfr. OSI.
mrakǔ «oscurità», etc.: Solmsen 1897:24ss. cfr. Gk. morphe, dubbio Pisa­
ni 1939-40: 497 ss. per cui vedi Belardi 1950: 214. - Gk. pternë Il. 22.397,
ptérnă Lycophr. 500 «tallone»; da PGk. *ptérsnā cfr. . pte-no KN Sd
«due predellini (del carro)»; cfr. PIE *pērsnā, Skt. parsnih «tallone», Avest.
pāšna-, Hitt. paršna-, paršina- «alto della coscia», Got. fairzna «tallone»;
OHG fersana «tallone», OE fiersn «tallone», lat. pērna «coscia» Benveni­
ste 1954:41ss.
1.2.4 Si considerano in questo paragrafo i casi in cui / C 1 / è un'oc­
clusiva velare sorda e / C 2 / è un liquida laterale  una vibrante: - Focese
mukhlós < PGk. *mukslós < PIE *mughslos; in focese significa «asino ri-
produttore», cfr. Hesych. mukhlós skoliós okheutes lagkēs, moikhós. Phō-
keîs dè kaì ónous toùs epì okheίan pempoménous, v. anche Hesych. muk-
loi. hai perì taskélēkai en toîs posi epì notou tôn ónõn mélainai grammaí... ;
cfr. Hesych. múskloi · hoi skolioí (múskloi ( PGk. *mukslo-); cfr. Lat. mülus
(*mukslos), Alban, musk «muletto» ((PIE * mughslos), etc.; cfr. Nieder­
mann 1902: 101 ss.
- Gk. ablēkhrós Il. 5. 337 (a- protetica Wackernagel 1910: lss.), blēkhrós
Alc. 16: da PGk. *mlāksros, cfr. Lat. flaccus (*mlākos), Lit. blaka «pun­
to smagliato della tela»; è da mettere in rapporto con Dor. bláx, blākós,
432 CELESTINA MILANI

Gk. malakós; secondo Chantraine 1933: 225 l'aspirazione potrebbe essere

espressiva; Leumann 1950: 55: ablēkhrós forma originaria, blēkhrós forma
secondaria.
- Gk. lékhrios Soph. Oed. Col. 195 «obliquo», lékhris Antim. 35 «obliqua­
mente»: da PGk. *leksrios, *lekhsris, cfr. Gk. likriphis < PGk. *lekhriphis
Il. 14.463 (Hirt 1901: 226); v. anche Hesych. likroi hoi ézoi tôn elapheíõn
kerátõn, cfr. Gk. loxós; v. Schwyzer 1959: 327, 551, 620.
1.2.6 Si presentano in questo paragrafo i casi incerti di /C1sC2s/
/C 1 hC 2 /; l'incertezza sta nella presenza di / s / interconsonantica che per al­
cuni studiosi non è dimostrabile mentre per altri è sicura. Si rimanda per
la problematica e la bibliografia ai dizionari etimologici di Boisacq, Frisk,
Chantraine, s. vv..
Si tratta dei seguenti lessemi, per ciascuno dei quali almeno uno stu­
dioso ha postulato la presenza di / s / interconsonantica: áphenos, dokhmós,
drakhmé; prókhnu, sukhnós; khnaúõ; aíphnës, Dor. órphnā, Ion. Att. órph-
nē; siphlós; stiphrós, téphrā; ophthalmós2.
1.2.7 I lessemi, nei quali si ha /s/> h sono del periodo più antico del­
la grecità; per la maggior parte sono infatti documentati in Omero, se si
escludono amukhmós testimoniato in Teocrito per quanto riguarda /ksm/,
kulíkhne e pelíkhnē rispettivamente documentati in Alcmane e Alceo per
quanto riguarda /ksn/.
Più incerta è la definizione del problema quando / C 2 / è una liquida;
anche in questo caso, comunque, si tratta di lessemi generalmente documen­
tati in epoca antica: ablēkhrós (Iliade), blēkhrós (Alceo), lékhrios (Sofo­
cle), lékhris (Antimaco); mukhlós, voce focese, è lessema documentato nel­
la lingua scritta solo da Esichio, ma è noto che il criterio cronologico della
lingua scritta non sempre è valido ai fini della datazione di un fenomeno.
1.3.1 Continuando l'analisi, si nota che / s / interconsonantica si in­
debolisce in h anche nei morfemi dei verbi medio-passivi /-sthe/, /-sthai/,
nonchè /-sthēn/, /-sthãn/, /-sthon/, /-sthõ/, /-sthõn/, /-sthōsan/. Quan­
do la radice del verbo termina in occlusiva sorda e sonora, la sibilante del

2 Più certo di questi casi è diphthéra, cfr. . di-pte-ra PY Un 1318, di-pte-ra3 PY
Sb 1315; Saussure 1892:91 richiama Gk. dépsō con chiusura di / e / in / i / come in histië cfr.
Schwyzer 1959: 351; la sibilante di depsō può spiegare l'aspirata / p h / ma la formazione resta
singolare; Pisani 1939-40: 513 pensa a diph- + tera; si è pensato a un neutro in /-tar/ come
néktar, hiktar, divenuto tema in / - ã / come hēméra/hêmar cfr. Chantraine 1968-80:80.
 / S / INTERCONSONANTICA NEI DIALETTI GRECI ANTICHI 433

morfema suffissale si indebolisce in / h / e, ridotta a coarticolazione, si fon­

de con l'occlusiva precedente. Qualche esempio: péplekhthe, peplékhthai
(plékō); péprakhthe, peprâkhthai (prássō); tétakhthe, tetákhthai (tassō); té-
traphthe, tetráphthai (trépõ); lélekhthe, lelékhthai (légō); tétriphthe, tetríph-
thai (tríbõ), etc. Nelle radici verbali terminanti in occlusiva sonora, si è ve­
rificato l'assordimento della sonora davanti al morfema suffissale iniziante
per sibilante la quale, poi, ridotta ad h, mediante un processo di risillaba­
zione, si è fusa con l'occlusiva precedente.
In verbi come tetárakhthe, tetarakhthai, gégraphthe, gegráphthai, etc.,
la sibilante di /-sthe/, /-sthai/, etc., indebolitasi in h si è fusa con la sorda
aspirata precedente, a meno che si tratti, in questi casi, dei morfemi origi­
nari del greco /-the/, /-thai/, il che è abbastanza improbabile per motivi
di analogia, cfr. Wackernagel 1895: 57ss., Pisani 1961:178 e 226. Anche nel
caso di radici verbali terminanti in nasale e liquida, si ha la scomparsa di
h esito di / s / nei morfemi /-sthe/, /-sthai/, etc., a meno che anche in que­
sti casi si tratti dei morfemi originari del greco /-the/, /-thai/, fatto piuttosto
dubbio per motivi di analogia, dinamica che è imperante nel sistema verbale.
Qualche esempio: péphanthe, pephánthai; éstalthe, estálthai, etc.
1.3.2 Si nota il seguente processo: /C1st'—/  /C 1 ht'—/  /C 1 hth'—/
in alcuni casi. Non è improbabile che l'estensione dell'aspirazione sia dovu­
ta anche all'accento che si trova sulla vocale successiva al nesso consonanti-
co. Esempi: Delph., Locr. Arg. ekhthós « PGk. *ekstós, Delph. Epid. ékh-
thō, cfr. Ion. Att. ex, ektós Buck 1955: 105. Da ekhthós sembrano deriva­
re: ekthodapós IGRom. 4.360.38 (Pergamo II secolo d.C.) probabilmente
adattamento di ekhthodopós «straniero» (cfr. Soph. Phil. 1137) a forme
come allodapós; ekhthósdikos díka IG5 (2). 357.26 (Stimfalo III secolo a.C.);
cfr. Chantraine 1968-80: 391; v. anche Čop 1956: 226 e Puhvel 1958: 288 ss.
Ancora aperto è il problema dell'etimo di ekhthrós <PGk. *ekstrós,
cfr. Il. 9.312, ricollegato al Lat. externs dal Walde 1897: 484 s. e per il suf­
fisso al Skt. anyatra e al Gk. allótrios dal Wackernagel 1895: 38 s. nonché
dallo Schwyzer 1959: 326; il problema è stato ripreso dal Čop, loc. cit. e
dal Puhvel, loc.cit.; comunque sia, tutti gli studiosi sono d'accordo nel ri­
costruire la sequenza ekstr-. V. anche Pisani 1939-40: 513 ss.
Analogo è il caso di hephthós «cotto» Herod. 2.77, hephthéntes Diosc.
Eup. 1.139 (ms. Laur. gr. 74.23, XIV sec.) < PGk. *hepst-, v. anche ápeph-
thos < PGk. *áphephthos Theogn. 449; cfr. hépsō, mic. e-we-pe-se-so-me-
na MY Oe 127.
434 CELESTINA MILANI

Rientrano in questa problematica: epiphthúsdō dorico Theocr. 7.127

«sputo sopra» (rispetto a ptúō), da PGk. *pstu- Walde 1897: 479, Schwy-
zer 1959:325s., Chantraine 1968-1980:951: aspirata enfatica (?); apophth-
ráxasthai glossato da Esichio tò toîs muktêrsin eis tò éxõ êkhonproésthai...
Krêtes kai Sámioi, da PIE *pstr-, v. Pokorny 1959: 846s: va considerato
in rapporto con ptárnumai, rapporto su cui ha dei dubbi Chantraine 1968-80:
946.

1.3.3 Interessante è il caso di .  /C 1 sC 2 /  /C1 C2 h/. Cioè

si tratta della metatesi di h. Cfr. Gk. érkhomai ( PGk. ér-skomai, se è vali­
do il vecchio etimo di Fick 1874:20, Walde 1897: 478, Hirt 1901:228 e
1912:210, accettato anche da Boisacq 1950:287 ma respinto da Schwyzer
1959:702 nota 6.

1.3.4 In alcuni lessemi inizianti per vocale si verifica la ritrazione del­

l'aspirazione che è esito di / s / interconsonantica; tale ritrazione potrebbe
essere originata dalla frontiera sillabica al di qua della quale doveva trovar­
si h esito di / s / . Formalizzando il processo si ha:  /VC 1 hC 2 /
> /hVC 1 C 2 /. Esempi: Gk. harme ( PGk. arsmā «connessione» Chrysipp.
Stoic. 2. 154, harmós «giunto» IG I.322, hárma «carro» Hom. (Cfr. .
a-mo, a-mo-ta, v. par. 1.1.1) vanno considerati in rapporto ad ararískõ;
varie spiegazioni sono state date di / h - / , per esempio Sommer 1905: 133
ritiene, senza fondamento, / h - / dovuta al nesso /-rm-/; per la problemati­
ca cfr. Chantraine 1968-80:111 e 102.
Gk. heirmós «sequenza, serie» Arist. Probi. 916 a. 31, cfr. eírõ, hér-
mata Il. 14.182 e kathérmata «pendenti» Anacr. 21.12; potrebbero apparte­
nere a questo gruppo lessicale Gk. hórmos «collana» Il.18.401, hormathós
«catena» Od. 24.8; l'ipotesi che / h - / sia dovuta a /-rm-/ è indimostrabile
secondo Chantraine 1968-80: 325, il quale pensa a un esito da PIE *ser-,
v. Pisani 1939-40:510; Boisacq 1950:229 ricollega il gruppo lessicale al Lat.
serō, series e giustifica la mancanza dell'aspirazione in eírõ col fatto che
eírõ si trova solo in composizione con preposizioni, affermazione inesatta
come appare da Liddell-Scott 1940-68:491; il Sommer 1905:134 pensa a una
radice PIE *wer- cfr. Lett, wer'u «allineo», etc. Allo stato attuale delle ri­
cerche sembra più fondato giustificare / h - / con la metatesi di -h- esito di
del nesso /rsm/.

2.1 In questa parte della presente ricerca si studiano i vari casi in cui
la sibilante interconsonantica, evidentemente ridottasi ad approssimante la-
 / S / INTERCONSONANTICA NEI DIALETTI GRECI ANTICHI 435

ringale h, sparisce senza lasciar traccia. Si ha cioè: /C 1 sC 2 /  /C 1 C 2 / con

/s/ > /h/ > / 0 / .
2.1.1 Si riscontrano questi casi:
Gk. tékmar > PGk. *téksmr < PGk. *qweksmr «segno, termine» Pind. Pith.
2.49, cfr. tékmõrll. 13.20, cfr. Avest. čašman- «occhio» < PIE *qweksmen,
Skt. cáksatë «essi vedono», Skt. casksus- «vedente» cfr. Chantraine 1968-80:
1099 s.; naturalmente ci si chiede perché solo in questo caso l'eventuale h
< / s / sia sparita senza lasciar traccia e, mediante un processo di risillaba­
zione, non si sia fusa con la velare precedente dando origine al fonema /kh/,
v. paragrafi 1.2.1ss. Forse la risposta a questo problema potrebbe essere
che / s / interconsonantica degli esempi studiati ai paragrafi 1.2.1, 1.2.2, 1.2.3,
1.2.4 appartenesse per esempio a un tema nominale PGk. del tipo /-(o)s/,
/-esos/ (cfr. Gk. génos), mentre in tékmar, tékmõr, tekmaírõ l'origine del­
la sibilante interconsonantica potrebbe essere diversa: si tratta di mere ipo­
tesi da verificare in un prossimo studio su /-s-m-/ in PIE. D'altra parte per­
ché non si potrebbe pensare che tékmar, tékmõr venissero da area eolica,
quindi psilotica? Il problema resta perciò aperto. Dubbio Bechtel 1914:311:
da PGk. *tekt-m. Più chiaro da spiegare è Gk. hékplethros «lungo sei plet­
tri» da PGk. *seks-plethros, documentato in Frinico Atticista 412, h < / s /
si è ridotta a / 0 / per la legge di Grassmann; infatti una sequenza di tre
aspirate è impronunciabile, cfr. Lightner 1973:128 ss.
2.1.2 Mentre nel paragrafo precedente si sono presi in considerazio­
ne i casi di  /C1 C 2 / in cui / C 1 / è un'occlusiva velare sorda, in
questo paragrafo si considerano i casi in cui / C 1 / è una vibrante. Cfr. .
pte-no KN Sd ptérsnõ o ptérnõ «due predellini» (cfr. par 1.1.1), Gk. ptér-
nē, ptérnā «tallone» da PGk. *ptérsnā, cfr. PIE (v. par. 1.2..).
Gk. arneiós < PGk. *arsneiós «montone» Il 2.550, cfr. Aeol. arnéades, Skt.
«montone» cfr. Meillet 1897: 328 ss., Chantraine 1968-80: 947.
2.2 Il nesso si riduce a/C 2 + geminata/; in /C1/
è occlusiva dentale nasale dentale.
Si tratta d'un processo di assimilazione, la dentale si assimila alla sibi­
lante successiva, e tutto il nesso si riduce a una nasale lunga: /tsn/ > /ssn/
) / s n / > / n n / > oppure /dsn/ > /tsn/> /ssn/ > / s n / > / n n / .
Esempi: Gk. blénna, blennos «fango» Arist. Hist. anim. 591a.28 da
PGk. *mlédsna/os cfr. Skt. vimradati «ammollisce», mrtsna- «polvere, ar­
gilla», ON mylsna «polvere, argilla» Schwyzer 1959: 322, Chantraine
1968-80: 179: geminata espressiva.
436 CELESTINA MILANI

Gk. dennos «rimprovero» Archil. 66 (plur.), da PGk. *détsnos Chantraine

1933: 192; PGk. *détsnos < PIE *gwedhsnos, cfr. Lit. gĕda «vergogna»,
MHG kwāt «lordura» cfr. Brugmann 1896: 103, Specht 1934:213 ss., Schwy-
zer 1959: 322; Chantraine 1968-80; 263 non propone nessuna etimologia,
nota che / n n / potrebbe essere dovuta a espressività.
Gk. pứnnos ho prόktos Hesych., da PGk. *pútsnos, cfr. Skt. pütāu duale
«natiche», MHG vut «vulva» cfr. Schwyzer 1959:322.
3. In un gran numero di lessemi si nota la conservazione della sibi­
lante con la scomparsa della prima consonante, cioè > /sC 2 /.
3.1 Molto spesso / C 1 / è una dentale che si assimila alla sibilante di
/-smós/, Asma/, morfema suffissale particolarmente importante nella for­
mazione nominale dei lessemi ionico-attici; tale rilevanza deve essere dovu­
ta all'influenza del sistema verbale (cfr. i morfemi / -smai/, /-sai/, /-stai/,
/-sthai/, /-sthon/, /-sthēn/, etc. il suffisso /-sm-/ si mantiene a lungo nel
periodo classico e nella koiné, periodo nel quale assumono notevole rilievo
i morfemi /-smós/, /-asmós/. Cfr. Chantraine 1968-80: 138 ss., Schwyzer
1959:493 s.
Molto rari sono i casi in cui / C 1 / è una dentale sorda, cfr. dasmós «di­
visione» Il. 1.166 (datéomai); più numerosi sono gli esempi nei quali / C 1 /
è una dentale sorda aspirata, cfr. epilésmōn «capace di dimenticare» Crat.
154 (lanthánō), klosma «trama» Paus. 6.26.7 (klothō), peîsma «cavo» Od.
9.136 da PGk. *phénthsma, v. Got. bindan, plásma «immagine» Aristoph.
Aves 686 (plássō  PGk. *pláthjõ), púsma «domanda» Phil. 1.126.6 (pun-
thánomai), rhusmós «movimento misurato, condizione» Archil. 67a.7
(rhuthmóõ, rhuthmós), ōsmós «attacco» Diod. Sic. 2.19 e ōsmeP. Bremen
1.4 (ōthismós, õthéõ), etc. Interessante il caso di husmínē «combattimen­
to» Il 5.84, dativo atematico husmîni Il. 2.862; lessemi formati su PGk.
*husmós < PIE *udhsmos cfr. Skt. yudhmah «combattimento», Lit. judéti
«muoversi», Lat. iubeõ Chantraine 1973:231.
Molto più frequenti sono gli esempi in cui / C 1 / è una occlusiva den­
tale sonora, cfr. áeisma «canto» Herod. 2.79 (aeídõ), hármosma «compa­
gine» Eur. El. 411 (harmózõ, harmóttõ), áthroisma Eur. Or. 874 e athroi-
smós Theophr. Caus. Plant. 1.10.7 «raccolta» (athroízõ), gnórisma «segno»
Xen. Cyr. 2.1.27 (plur.) e gnõrismós Arist. Anal. post. 90.16 (gnõrízō), em-
pódisma Plat. Pol. 295b (empodízõ), dáneisma Thuc. 1.121 e daneismós
Plat. Leg. 842d (plur.) «prestito» (daneízō), hísma «fondazione» Lycophr.
731 (hízõ), ktísma Call. Aet. II fragm. 43.75 e ktismós IGRom. 4.914 (Ci-
 / S / INTERCONSONANTICA NEI DIALETTI GRECI ANTICHI 437

bira) «fondazione» (ktízõ), nómisma «costume, tradizione» Aesch. Septem

269 (nomízõ), skhísma Arist. Hist, anim. 499a.27 (plur.), skhismós Aesch.
Ag. 1149 e skhismé LXX Is. 2.21 «divisione» (skhízō), etc.
È stato molto difficile trovare esempi in cui / C 1 / è un'occlusiva vela­
re, si è trovato klōsmós Xen. Eq.9.10 «battito di mani» cfr. klōgmós e kló-
zõ, è molto probabile che klõsmós sia dovuto ad analogia coi frequenti les­
semi in /-smós/.
3.2 Si esaminano in questo paragrafo i casi di /nsm/ > /sm/; poiché
sono piuttosto numerosi, si dà solo una esemplificazione. Cfr. báthusma
«luogo profondo» Theophr. Hist, plant. 4.11.8 (bathúnō), ékhtrasma ·
ékhthra Hesych. (ekhthraínō), hedusma «dolcezza» Aristoph. Eq. 678 (hë-
dúnō), lípasma «forma grassa di ulcerazione» Hipp. Mim. 16 (lipaínõ), mia­
sma «macchia» Aesch. Eum. 169 (miaínō), húphasma «tessuto» Od. 3.274
(huphaínõ), khásma «cavità» Hes. Theog. 740 (khaínõ). Rientrerebbe in que­
sto gruppo anche kosmos «ordine» Il. 10.472 da PGk. *kónsmos Fröhde
1877:311 etimo non accettato da Heubeck che pensa a PGk. *kodsmos (Heu-
beck 1957: 272), mentre Chantraine 1968-80: 571 dubita di ogni etimo.
La caduta della nasale nel nesso /nsm/ si verifica anche nel sistema
verbale; qualche esempio: exérasmai: xēraínõ, hedusmai: hēdúnō, memía-
smai: miaínõ, péphasmai: phaínõ, húphasmai: huphaínō, etc.
3.3 La nasale nel nesso /nsC 2 / cade anche se / C 2 / non è una nasale
labiale come si è visto nel paragrafo precedente. Infatti nei casi sopra elen­
cati la nasale dentale potrebbe essere scomparsa per dissimilazione, ma nei
casi di 3.3 questo discorso non vale. La motivazione più valida è che il nes­
so si semplifica perché il parlante lo realizza con difficoltà ed è risaputo che
il parlante attua la legge del minimo sforzo per cui i gruppi fonematici com­
plessi che vengono articolati con difficoltà tendono a semplificarsi  a scom­
parire, cfr. Zipf. 1949: passim. Si nota che /nsC 2 / > /sC 2 / nei numerali or­
dinali per esempio: Gk. triakostós < PGk. *triakonstós, etc.
Il fatto si verifica anche nei lessemi: Gk. dikaspólos < PGk. *dikanspólos
«uno che dà le leggi» Il. 1.238 (per -pólos cfr. pélomai < , il pri­
mo elemento del composto è un antico accusativo plurale Chantraine
1968-80:283; Gk. mogostókos < PGk. *mogonstókos, epiteto di Ilizia IL
11.270, il primo elemento del composto sarebbe un antico accusativo plu­
rale secondo Solmsen 1888: 333s., Bechtel 1914: s. v., interpretazione re­
spinta da Chantraine 1968-80: 707 che pensa a un adattamento metrico di
mogo- in mogos-.
438 CELESTINA MILANI

In taluni dialetti il nesso /nsth/ si è conservato, cfr. Arg. poigrapsán-

sthõ, khrónsthõ; talora nel nesso /nsth/ il fonema / n / cade con allunga­
mento di compenso della vocale precedente, cfr. Corc, eklogizoústhõ, Epid.
pherosthō, Lak. apelosthõ Buck 1928:68. /nsC 2 / > /SC 2 / si verifica nei
nessi consonantici nei quali la nasale dentale chiude una preposizione che
sia primo elemento di un composto, cfr. Gk. sustrophe  PGk. *xunstrophe
(v. . ku-su-to-ro-qa KN  817 e PY), Gk. suskeuázõ, suskepázõ, etc.
Cfr. anche Thess. ostropha ( onstropha, cfr. Att. anastrophé; per on- ( =
Gk. ana) del lesbico, tessalico, cipriota cfr. Pisani 1961:57. Dello stesso ti­
po è Epid. astás in rapporto all'attico anastás.
D'altra parte è noto che eis ed es da ens, rimasto in cretese ed argivo,
toứs (etc.) ed Ark., Thess., Cret. sett. tós da tóns risalgono a ens tons rima­
sti avanti vocale mentre si ha es tós avanti consonante, cfr. Cret. es tón -
ens orthón, Gort. tòs kãdestáns - tòns eleuthérons, etc. Pisani 1961:77,
Schmitt 1977:52.
3.4 Quanto a / msp/ > / s p / un esempio probabile, ma non certo, può
essere offerto da Gk. despotes < PGk. *demspótãs Benveniste 1935: 66s.;
secondo Frisk 1960:371 e Chantraine 1968-80: 266s. *dems- sarebbe un ge­
nitivo; cfr. Risch 1951:13 ss., Pisani 1961: 102 ss. Cfr. . do-po-ta ΡΥ
Τη 316.5.
3.5 Nei verbi è frequente /ksk/ > /sk/, cfr. Gk. eískõ < PGk.
*wewískõ «rendo simile, penso» (cfr. éoika), Gk. láskõ < PGk. *lákskō «par­
lo» (cfr. lakeîn), Gk. titúskomai < PGk. titúkskomai «cerco di attendere»
(cfr. tetukeîn), etc. Si tratta in sostanza di un fenomeno di dissimilazione.
Cfr. anche Gk. péskos < PGk. *pékskos «pelle» sorto dalla sovrappo­
sizione di lessemi come pékos e méskos secondo Güntert 1914:145 ss. cfr.
Hesych. péskon· pikrón e kódion e derma, v. anche Nic. Ther. 549péskos;
per Chantraine 1968-80:890 l'etimo è oscuro.
Analogo è il caso di Gk. diskos <PGk * dikskos Il. 2.114 «anello piat­
to di metallo» cfr. Chantraine 1968-80:282.

3.6 In alcuni lessemi si verifica la scomparsa di / C 1 / (= Ch) con la

trasposizione dell'aspirazione dopo / C 2 / , cioè /C1hsC2/  /sC 2 h/; si trat­
ta dei nessi /khsk/ e /thsk/ che si riducono a /skh/ per applicazione della
legge di Bartholomae, v. Pisani 1961: 39.
Esempi: Gk. eskhatos < PGk. *ékskatos, cfr. ekhthós < *exs-tós, ex,
in opposizione cfr. ég-kata di analoga struttura. Gk. glískhros < PGk.
 / S / INTERCONSONANTICA NEI DIALETTI GRECI ANTICHI 439

*glíkhskros «viscido» Hipp. VC 14, cfr. glíkhomai e Hesych. glikhós · phei-

dõlòs kai glískhros. Gk. léskhë < PGk. *lékhskã < PIE *leghskā «luogo del
villaggio dove si sta a riposare, portico» Od. 18.329, cfr. lékhos; secondo
Chantraine 1968-80: 632 *lékh-skā deriverebbe da *lekh-sk-etai cfr. lékho-
mai, v. Celt, lesc «parassita», OHG lesean «estendere».
Analogo è il caso di páskhõ < PGk *pathskõ Meillet 1930:37.
3.7 Si considerano in questi paragrafi i casi di /gsk/ > /sg/ cioè i casi
in cui cade / C 1 / (= occlusiva dentale sonora) col trasferimento della so­
norità in / C 2 / .
Esempi: sicuro è il caso di mísgõ < PGk. *migskõ, Chantraine 1947:258,
incerto è il caso di lisgárion «vanga» Sch. Theocr. 4.10 (mss.) derivato da
lísgos «vanga» cfr. Lat. ligō, õnis Prellwitz 1892: 184; da PGk. *ligskos,
Prellwitz 1905:271s.: anche da PGk. *lídskos cfr. Gk. lístron; Chantraine
1968-80: 643 nessun etimo certo.
3.8 È molto raro /rsk/ > /sk/. Cfr. Gk. agostos «parte piatta della
mano»Il. 11.425 da PGk. *agorstós cfr. ageirö Solmsen 1909: 1 ss.; Chan­
traine 1968-80: 14 etimo sconosciuto. Gk. ákastos < PGk. *ákarstos, cfr.
Lat. acer, aceris, OHG āhorn Osthoff 1901: 187 ss., etimo accettato da Frisk
1960:51 e Chantraine 1968-80: 46; per il suffisso cfr. platánistos Chantrai­
ne 1933:302; v. Hesych. ákastos- hē sphéndamnos; ákarna- dáphnē. La sem­
plificazione, di cui si parla, si verifica anche nel corso del greco storico, cfr.
pastás (in rapporto a parastás) «portico, colonnato» Herod. 2.148 (plur.),
v. anche Hesych. partádes - ámpeloi Solmsen 1909: 485 ss., Schwyzer 1959:
336 e 507.
3.9 Problematico è / k s q w /  / s p / perché sarebbe fondato su un uni­
co esempio perdipiù incerto; comunque lo si enuncia a livello di ipotesi di
lavoro, cfr. Gk. lisphos Aristoph. Ranae 826 da PGk. *líksqwos «affila­
to», cfr. Got. slaihts «liscio», ON slettr, OHG sieht « P I E *slikt-), Lat. li­
ma < PLat. *slïksmā, o *sleiksmã, cfr. Gk. lisphos < PGk. *slíksqw(h)os,
Gr. lissós < PGk. *slikjós Boisacq 1950: 584.
3.10 Molto comune ai dialetti greci è /ksC 2 / > /sC 2 / nel corso del
sandhi, cfr. Beot. ésgonos < eks, Thess. eskikrémen, es tan, esgónois, esdó-
men, Esprépeia (cfr. Att. ekprepes): es < eks, Phoc. es toû drómou, etc.
cfr. Hoffman 1893: 468 s., Bechtel 1923:111, Thumb-Kieckers 1932: pas­
sim, Thumb-Scherer 1959: passim.
3.11 /bsph/ > /sph/ non è fondato su esempi sicurissimi, cfr. bla-
440 CELESTINA MILANI

sphemeîn < PGk. *mlapsphameîn cfr. bláps, blábē Wackernagel 1895: 41

ss., 1905: 496 ss. L'etimo oggi è respinto dagli studiosi, cfr. Chantraine
1968-80: 178 s.
Concludendo, si rileva che / s / interconsonantica è conservata in un solo
esempio nel miceneo (a3-ka-sa-ma); negli altri esempi registrati nel miceneo
la sibilante non appare scritta, fatto che potrebbe indicare che in quei casi
/ s / si è già indebolita in h ma che potrebbe essere anche dovuto alle regole
gràfiche del miceneo. È comunque probabile che la riduzione di / s / inter­
consonantica ad aspirazione si sia verificata dopo la documentazione del
miceneo, cioè dopo il XIII secolo. Nei lessemi più antichi del greco succes­
sivo si nota la riduzione di / s / interconsonantica ad h, dopo occlusiva vela­
re sorda e davanti a nasale  a liquida. Il caso di mórphnos, come si è visto,
non è certissimo.
Il caso di tékmar, tékmōr, inserito in questo contesto, lascia dei pro­
blemi aperti per cui si rimanda al par. 2.1.1.
Interessanti i casi di trasposizione - estensione di h dopo / C 2 / (heph-
thós), ekhthós, etc.) nonchè i casi di trasposizione di h dopo / C 2 / (cfr. érk-
homai, ma v. par. 1.3.3; v. anche éskhatos, glískhros, páskhō, etc.).
Dipende dalla frontiera sillabica la trasposizione di / h / sulla vocale ini­
ziale (cfr. harmé, heirmós, etc.).
Normale la caduta di h nel nesso / r h n / < /rsn/, cfr. ptérnē, etc.
In qualche caso il nesso /dent.sn/ si riduce a / n n / forse per influsso
eolico /cfr. blénnos, dennos, etc.).
Si nota inoltre che / C 1 / si assimila ai morfemi suffissali Asma/, /-smós/,
Asme/, essendo / C 1 / un'occlusiva dentale; a livello di struttura superficiale
in questi casi C1 sparisce. È interessante notare che / s / interconsonantica
si riduce ad h anche quando fa parte dei morfemi suffissali verbali Asthe/,
Asthai/ etc., fondendosi con l'occlusiva precedente qualunque essa sia.
Si osserva anche che in certi lessemi, probabilmente non del greco più
antico, / C 1 / tende a sparire, cfr. par. 3.2 ss.

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 THE PROSODIC CHARACTER OF EARLY SCHWA DELETION
IN ENGLISH

DONKA MINKOVA
University of California, Los Angeles

Middle English loss of final schwa is a change which influences direct­

ly the evolution of the entire phonological and grammatical system of the
language. Compared to developments in stressed position, studies of this
change are fewer in number and less rigorous, due both to the nature of
the written evidence and to the instability of the phonetic manifestations
of unstressed vowels in Modern English. Nor has schwa loss attracted the
variety of theoretical interpretations characteristic of descriptions of other
central phonological changes in English.
Although there is no «definitive» statement on the chronology of the
change, the general view is that it occurred between 1200 and 1400. This
is only the central phase of the change, when it was generalized across the
vocabulary. Sufficient information has been collected on the direct written
omission of final -e and on its metrical insignificance as evidence of loss
in individual texts. The result is a very amorphous and inconsistent picture:
traditionalism in spelling, lax versification rules and, in a number of cases,
the dual character of schwa, a phoneme and a grammatical morpheme at
the same time, vitiate most judgments. The issue of motivation is still open,
in spite of ample speculation in print on whether it was functional insuffi­
ciency or lack of phonological distinctiveness that led to the change. The
usual compromise, looking at schwa loss as the result of a counterfeeding
process, involving both phonological and morphological factors, is circular
and unrevealing, especially in view of the preservation of -e in similar cir­
cumstances in other Germanic languages.
To unravel the causation problem of schwa loss would be more than
I can attempt to achieve, but what I suggest in this paper may help find
a more acceptable solution to it. It is commonly agreed that schwa began
to be omitted in certain environments long before 1200. Instances of this
446 DONKA MINKOVA

early change — Late Old English up to 1250 — are less numerous and fall
into several clearly defined groups. Such data is easily identified and isolated,
and is available in the standard literature. By restricting this study to un-
controversial early cases of loss, one avoids the overwhelming bulk and in-
conclusiveness of later evidence. I shall try to interpret the early data in terms
of a non-linear phonological framework, making the analytical approach
also «isolative» in a sense.
The earliest, and most frequently cited instances, of schwa loss follow
several familiar patterns 1 :
1. Elision in hiatus. «There can be no doubt that weak vowels were
often elided before another vowel [or -h DM] in ordinary OE speech» (Sweet
1922: § 374). A statement to the same effect comes from Luick (1921-40/64:
§ 452), according to whom after the 10th  elision became «more frequent
and general as a consequence of the acceleration of the speech tempo: already
before Orm's time each post-tonic -e disappears before a following vowel
or a -h in a weakly stressed word in the spoken language (emphasis DM).
And further: «this phenomenon is .... so regular, that it must have had a
purely linguistic foundation [eine rein sprachliche Grundlage]». So, for Late
Old English and Early Middle English the phenomenon is well documented;
some relevant early instances are 2 :
— sum sar(e) angeald; on þæm gold(e) ongitan; gyted(e) hine Beowulf (Sweet
1922) — all from Old English.
— mōstic, todeld it, mādim, mighti (Luick 1921/64: § 452). The same pat­
tern, loss of schwa in hiatus, accompanied by cliticization of a following
pronoun or preposition, is frequent in the Peterborough Chronicle: heng-

1
The paper will not cover OE/EME «functional» loss, e.g. tō dæg, æt hām, for *tõ
dæge, *æt hāme (Horn-Lehnert 1954: 306), nor co-occurrences of the type ... þa hwile fulwiht
sio ... and ... þa hwile fre fulwihte sio (9th c. Dahl 1939: 14). These are all instances of
purely morphological alternation confined to nouns, usually as part of prepositional phrases.
For a survey of the data and an evaluation of its importance cf. Minkova 1983: 62 ff and 1984
b: 452-3.
2
I have not included cases of «pre-accentual» loss in Old English (Luick § 451). This
group, as isolated by Luick, covers the loss of the vowel in prefixai be-, ge- and also in ne,
be, to, me, sche, e.g. binnan «within», gede { geeode «went», nis «is not», þoþre, «the other»,
toffren «to offer», malon «me alone», shaligte «she alighted», etc. Their treatment is essen­
tially the same as that of the instances discussed below; I am not taking them into considera­
tion because of the later (18th c , according to Luick, ibid.) reversal of the process, and the
ultimate reinstatement, and even strengthening, in the case of the definite article, of the «weak
schwa».
 SCHWA DELETION IN ENGLISH 447

ed up, smoked heom, makod he (wk. pret. sg.), pined heom, bebyred
him, læd him (pret. pl.) (Clark 1970: LXV).
— mid sac and mid socne (10th c, Dahl 1936: 15); chele 7 þrisst, sune 7
mone, hete 7 niþ, kare 7 serrge, depe 7 derne, lefe 7 dere, etc. — the
latter are examples from the Ormulum (c. 1200), where the consistent
metrical pattern makes elision of -e in the first word of the pairs
obligatory. (Burchfield 1956).

2. Schwa loss occurs also early (in the course of the 12th c.) in non-
major class words: pen/pan (OE þenne/þanne), when/whan (OE
hwenne/hwanne), sōn (OE sōne), ges (OE gese), as well as in the inflected
forms of pronouns: än, mm, hir, your, etc. (Luick 1921-40/64: § 454; Jor­
dan 1934/74: 152). Here belong also words of French origin which would
be unstressed in combination with a proper name, e.g. sir, dam, frēr (ibid.
§ 461).
—þon hast a moder fair and fre. (134)
She is yhote dame Candace:
Fair and brigth is hir face —
(Kyng Alisaunder)
or:
— (And leuen al his muchele kare) (152)
To dame Siriz pe hende.
— «God pe iblessi, dame Siriz! (161)
Ich am icom to speken þe wiz...
(Dame Sirith)3

3. Schwa loss in words of more than two syllables:

— Words of the type x x x: lafdi (OE hlafdige), almes(s) (OE ælmesse),
orrest (AN orresta), drinking (OE drincinge). According to Luick (op.
cit. § 456) this development belongs also to the 12th  and is simultaneous
with the suppression of the secondary stress in such words.
— Words of the type x x x x : kinrich(e) (OE cynerice), webster(e) (OE web-
bestere), minter (OE myntere), daisi(e) (OE daiesye). In such words syn­
copation of the medial syllable occurs first; this is followed by loss of

3 Quoted from Bennet & Smithers 1968: 33, 85.

448 DONKA MINKOVA

the secondary stress and simultaneous loss of final -e (Luick op. cit. §
459 4 .
This, in very broad outline, is the picture we get of the loss of final
schwa in Late Old English and Early Middle English, before the process
was generalized and began to affect all lexical items in the language 5 .
Unlike post-1250 data of across-the-board loss which is frequently in­
conclusive, there can be no doubt about the validity of the above evidence;
all three groups above include instances of graphically marked loss, i.e.,
no final <-e> appears in the sources. In the cases of graphic preservation
of <-e>, as in some of the instances of loss in hiatus or the examples from
kyng Alisaunder and Dame Sirith, there is a consensus among scholars con­
cerning the loss, based on unequivocal metrical evidence, as in the Ormulum.
(On this cf. also Burchfield 1956, Strang 1970: 244).
Once the dating problem and the problem of inconclusive evidence is
out of the way, we can turn to the issue of causality. The classroom wisdom
here is a noncommittal appeal to a balanced interaction between the lack
of phonetic distinctiveness of the final unstressed vowel and the functional
«overloading» of the grammatical morpheme which it represents. What has
been generally overlooked, however, is that all groups above share some
important characteristics beyond the now trivial phonological neutraliza­
tion of the final vowels and their weakened function as inflexional markers.
These are:
— The loss is not confined to any particular segmental environment 6 .

4
Instances of syncopation of the medial syllable in originally trisyllabic words (e.g. kin-
dom, OE cynedom, balfull, OE bealuful, hergong, OE heregang, etc.) are not quoted in this
list only because the focus in the paper is on the loss of final -e. It will become apparent, however,
that the rhythmic principle accounting for the syncopation and for the loss is the same in both
cases.
5
As mentioned above (cf. note 2), one set of examples of schwa loss I have not attemp­
ted to cover in this paper are the so-called «contracted» forms: ME poþre «the other», nis
«is not», malone «me alone». These are all instances of the Early Schwa Deletion Rule (below)
operating in its (b) form. The modern contractions hasn't, we've, I'll etc. are also instances
of the (b) form of the rule, after it was generalized to affect [-as] and [-əd] terminal nodes.
6
Koziol (1937:308) claims that «within each individual category — weakly stressed,
polysyllabic, disyllabic, native and borrowed words, loss occurs earlier after voiceless stops
and fricatives, as well as after liquids or nasals, than after voiced stops and fricatives». The
evidence adduced in support of this claim is very selective and fragmentary; my own textual
data (Minkova 1983:51-101) does not warrant this conclusion.
 SCHWA DELETION IN ENGLISH 449

— The length/weight of the stressed syllable has no bearing on the behavior

of the final schwa 7 .
— There is no clear correlation between morphological class and structure,
on the one hand, and schwa loss on the other 8 .
— All instances of early loss refer directly to rhythmic phrasing, either within
the boundaries of an individual word, or within a larger prosodic unit.
It is on this latter point, the reference to rhythmic phrasing, that the
rest of this paper will focus. I shall try to match these undisputed early in­
stances of loss against some general principles of the prosodic organization
of English, thus highlighting their similarity and their importance for the
later development of the vowel in this position. The former claim has not
been made at all, and the latter needs elaboration.
The analytical framework I shall use is the theory of the hierarchy of
prosodie domains in phonology, as developed in Selkirk 1980 and most
recently expounded in Hayes 1985. My initial justification for trying this
analysis is that the hierarchy has been found, independently, and among
other advantages that it may offer, to be an appropriate theoretical con­
struct for explaining the siting and operation of sandhi rules, of which ap­
parently, word final schwa loss is an example.
One possible way of parsing an utterance into its constituent prosodie
domains is the following (from Hayes 1985:7):

7
According to Jordan (1934/74:141) loss after long first syllables in trisyllabic words
precedes loss of schwa in unsyncopated trisyllabic words with a short first syllable. This state
of affairs is assumed also in Wright and Wright (1923 § 141, but cf. § 153). I have disregarded
this temporal sequence for two reasons: (a) it is only valid for the South; in the North the
situation «is simplified by the fact that here every final -e disappeared already in the 13th c.»
(Jordan, ibid.); and (2) «words of the form x x x always had a long first syllable» (Luick,
op. cit. § 509). This comes as a consequence of an earlier development, 11th c, whereby the
majority of the trisyllabic forms with a short stressed syllable undergo syncopation of the medial
syllable (Luick, op. cit. § 513).
8
For a statistical account of the distribution of loss in hiatus across the various word
classes, cf. Minkova 1978.
450 DONKA MINKOVA

I: Intonational Phrase
P: Phonological Phrase
: Clitic Group
W: Word
I have replaced theC1,C2,C 2 C 3 , and C 4 labelling in the original to avoid
confusion with the Clitic Group 9 . The branching is, of course, entirely ar­
bitrary, though not so the hierarchical arrangement.
Phonological rules refer to phrases of a particular size, regardless of
the syntactic category they represent. An important property of the hierar­
chy is that 'rules applying across a given «boundary» necessarily apply across
all weaker «boundaries», and rules applying before or after a given «boun­
dary» necessarily apply before or after all stronger «boundaries»' (Hayes
1985:6). Thus, in this set of data, the rule deleting / ə / in [w ælmesse] (where
-e > 0) applying at the right edge of the W(ord) domain, will apply at the
right edge of the higher domains, the Clitic Group, the Phonological Phrase,
etc. I am also assuming and applying the provisions spelled out in the
typology of domain-sensitive rules proposed by Selkirk 1980. According to
this typology, domaine juncture rules «must know whether the segments
[they] involve belong or not to distinct domains of the type Dj included
within the domain D i ... A rule of this type scans the terminal string includ­
ed within the Di domain and performs the structural change only if the
segments of the terminal string of the phonological representation can be
factored into smaller prosodic domains in the way specified in the struc­
tural description» (Selkirk 1980: 111-2).
Since the phrasal phonology rule defined above allows us, in fact re­
quires us, to scan the terminal string within the domain of application, we
can attempt a structural description of the terminal nodes as constituents
which enter into binary strength relations. If we specify the W S relations
on the constituent nodes of the examples in groups 1-3 before and after dele­
tion has applied we get:

9
The Clitic Group is defined as «a single content word together with all contiguous
grammatical words in the same syntactic constituent» (Hayes 1985:12). The Phonological Phrase
is formed from one or more Clitic Groups. It is not necessary for the purposes of this study
to examine the details of the syntactic diagnostics for phonological phrasing.
SCHWA DELETION IN ENGLISH 451
452 DONKA MINKOVA

(Boldface W nodes indicate the position and the relations of the deletable
syllable).
An examination of the deletable nodes in 1-6 allows us to formulate
the following rule:
The Early Schwa Deletion Rule:
If within the Clitic Group a W node is filled by a syllable of the follow­
ing configuration:

(i.e., crucially non-branching rhyme, with schwa in the peak position), and
either

10 I am assuming, with Luick (op. cit. § 456), that deletion follows upon the suppres­
sion of the secondary stress in words of this type.
π Same as 5. An account of the first stage of the rule is not intended here, but one cold
suggest that the OE loss of schwa in - is concomitant with the weakening of the second
element of the compound and the elimination of the word boundary within it.
 SCHWA DELETION IN ENGLISH 453

(a) is adjacent to one or more W nodes in the terminal string (as in 1,2,3,5
and 6), or
(b) is immediately dominated by a higher W node (as in 3,4,6),
then this node is deleted.
The (a) and (b) parts of this rule have two important properties in
common:
(1) They both make reference to the Clitic Group. This I regard as the
unifying principle behind the entire process of early schwa loss. The Clitic
Group is the only domain which would correctly predict the deletion in ex­
ample (2) above, by stipulating adjacency of W's on the terminal string where
disyllabic «heads» are involved.
(2) They both provide that the deletable W node must be attached to
other material to the left and must have a non-branching rhyme, and a peak
filled by [-3]. At first blush this may sound trivial. But if we bear in mind
that since Late Old English times this has been a sufficient specification for
the deletion to occur, it appears that schwa loss is not a consequence of a
segmental rule but of a general prosodic constraint in English which bans
syllables of the above configuration from appearing adjacent to another W
node of the same configuration or word finally.
It also appears, at least preliminarily, that any violations of the above
constraint fall easily into clear-cut groups:
— Proper names, native and foreign: Anna, Birma, China, Donka, Erica etc.
— Words borrowed into English after  1500 and /or retaining their foreign
flavor: gamma (1450), mesquita (1477), naphtha (1500), dilemma (1523),
saga (1709), ballerina (1892), tuna (1884), marijuana (1923), rumba (1937),
canasta (1948), etc. Only hosanna and mandragora are recorded from
before the 12th 
— British Southern Early Modern English [-r] vocalizations: number, er­
ror, potter, summer, etc.
— In casual speech [ou] can surface as [-ə]: fellow, pillow, window.
A discussion of these groups does not belong here, yet let me stress that
in spite of the apparent violation that they represent, they are still subject to
one of the constraints noted above: English disallows two adjacent W nodes
wherein both have the above configuration:
This observation has been made
about Modern English, but to the best of my knowledge it has not been
regarded as a more general historical constraint. It is a matter of relative
454 DONKA MINKOVA

prominence: two «absolute» W's cannot be adjacent. This is probably one

of the important advantages of the proposed prosodic interpretation of the
conditions for schwa loss in English.
By defining the Early Schwa Deletion Rule with reference to metrical
constituent structure within the Clitic Group, we have managed to avoid
reference to the — # V and — # h environments for the loss in cases l,
2, and 3.I find this gratifying: in my previous work I have found «avoidance
of hiatus» a very unenhghtening characterization of the causation of early
schwa loss. For one thing, there is no evidence in English, at any point in
its history, for any phonotactic constraint on hiatus, word internally or across
word boundaries 12 . Nor is there any universal, or even a tendency, for
languages to disallow hiatus; in fact languages with and without hiatus are
about evenly distributed 13 .
Another advantage of the proposed analysis is that by regarding schwa
loss as governed by a specific prosodic domain, the clitic group, we need
only a minimal amount of syntactic information in the structural descrip­
tion; every content word (lexical category) belongs to a separate clitic group.
This relieves us of the task of finding a syntactic motivation for the change
on the basis of very random and disparate data. As I have tried to show
elsewhere (Minkova 1984b), in the later history of the language syntactic
considerations override the prosodie ones as the rule of schwa loss spreads
across the vocabulary. But for Late Old English and Early Middle English
it seems possible, and desirable, to ignore syntactic behavior and concen­
trate on the prosodie phrasing.
As a corollary to the above arguments, one could in fact try to analyze
the idiosyncratic behavior of the class of adjectives in late Middle English
which has so far been attributed, puzzhngly, to the syntactic properties of
the adjectives. Whereas non-monosyllabic adjectives become invariable in
all positions at a very early date (which implies loss of [-ə] in structures of
the type:

12
The [-] vs. [-ən] selection does not have to be analyzed as «avoidance of hiatus».
It is that, of course, but it is also a constraint in English on the co-occurrence (word medially)
of two syllabic nuclei, the first of which is []. The same principle would be applicable to the
appearance of the «linking» and «intrusive» [-r-].
13
Bell and Hooper 1978:8 write: «Within the section [roughly the phonological word],
VV sequences («hiatus») are not permitted by about one-half of the world's languages...».
 SCHWA DELETION IN ENGLISH 455

e.g. heþene → hepen), monosyllabic adjectives of the type gōd, dëf, smal,
strong mark the syntactic distinction between attributive and predicative,
and the morphological distinction between singular and plural, much
longer (Mosse 1952/68: 64, Samuels 1972b)14. It can be suggested that in
the inflected forms of these adjectives (with, final -e) there would be no
pressure for deletion arising from W W adjacency15. I am not sure this is
the right explanation, but at least it opens a line of reasoning thus far
unavailable to us.

14
Also see Cable 1983:63, who writes: «Although adjectives of two syllables were
generally uninflected, adjectives of three syllables often took an inflectional -e.» This made
a fourth syllable that sustained the naturally alternating rhythms of English prose and the pat­
tern of the iambic pentameter: the sémelièste mán.
15
One issue of which I am aware, will not be addressed here, namely the subsequent
history of the schwa. The prosodic rule, as stated here, does not predict that deletion will later
generalize to all word-final positions. By deleting one of two adjacent W's the later rule will,
as a matter of fact, create undesirable stress clashes and thus run counter to our vague intui­
tions and expectations that an evenly spaced rhythmic alternation is an innate feature of the
language. On a theoretical account of this state of things, cf. Hayes (1985:84).
I cannot here defend the prosodic hierarchy approach as compared to the boundary ap­
proach to junctural phenomena. This is a theoretical issue to which my analysis cannot con­
tribute; both approaches would suit the data and the choice of one over the other perhaps
does not matter. What matters is that the rule should be formulated within the boundaries
of a prosodie domain. This is the only formulation under which the apparently random in­
stances acquire some coherence.
The Early Schwa Deletion Rule makes reference to the Clitic Group. It might be interesting
to investigate the possibility of confining the operation of the rule within the domain of the
metrical foot. I suspect the results will be similar to the ones obtained here.
I have not gone into the theoretical implications of «flattening» of metrical structure,
which appears to be what is going on here. For a discussion of this notion and its application
to the metrical treatment of German compounds, cf. Giegerich 1984: 189ff.
Finally, on the advantages and disadvantages of the Early Schwa Deletion Rule: it sug­
gests a reason why the whole thing started, namely the configuration of the W node undergo­
ing it. Also, it tells us something about fast or casual speech during the period. Being a diagnostic
456 DONKA MINKOVA

I am aware that the proposal made in this paper is falsifiable, above

all due to the nature of the written evidence. However, an attempt like this
may suggest a new way of analyzing the prosodic structure of the earlier
stages of English. It has been observed, again and again (Luick 1921-40/1964,
Arakin 1976, Samuels 1972a: 145) that schwa loss affected the rhythmic
organization of the language. Luick even goes so far as to assume (§ 452,
456) «an acceleration of the speech tempo» for Late Old English and Early
Middle English. To the best of my knowledge, no one has proposed a detailed
and explicit linguistic account of what such statements mean.

REFERENCES

Arakin, V.D. 1976. Otpadenye konečnogo [ə] i izmenenye tipologii

angliiskogo yazyka [Loss of final [ə] and the typological change of the
English Language]. Teoriya yazyka anglistika, keltologiya [Linguistic
theory, anglistic and celtic studies]. Moscow: Nauka.
Bell, Alan and Joan B. Hooper. 1978. Issues and evidence in syllabic
phonology. In Syllables and segments, ed. by Alan Bell and Joan B.
Hooper. 3-25. North-Holland linguistic series. 40. Amsterdam: North
Holland.
Bennett, J.A.W. and G.V. Smithers. 1968. Early Middle English verse and
prose, 2nd ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Burchfield, R.W. 1956. The language and orthography of the Ormulum MS.
TPS 56-87.
Cable, Thomas. 1974. The meter and melody of Beowulf. Urbana: Univer­
sity of Illinois Press.
Cable, Thomas. 1983. A Companion to Baugh & Cable's History of the
English language. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice Hall.
Clark, Cecily (ed). 1970. The Peterborough Chronicle 1070-1154. Oxford:
Clarendon Press.

for phrasing, the rule as formulated here supports an observation (Cable 1974:90) that the
absence of a x x pattern is «not especially surprising». It appears to be «a natural result
of the linguistic system». Thus the rule can be used in other areas of historical research, the
study of Old and Middle English meter.
 SCHWA DELETION IN ENGLISH 457

Dahl, Torsten. 1936. Form and function. Studies in Old and Middle English
Syntax. Acta Jutlandica, Aarsskrift for Aarhus Universitet. VIII. 1-258.
Giegerich, Heinz. 1985. Metrical phonology and phonological structure: Ger­
man and English. Cambridge: University Press.
Hayes, Bruce. 1985. The prosodic hierarchy in meter. MS. UCLA.
Horn, Wilhelm and Martin Lehnert. 1954. Laut und Leben. Englische
Lautgeschichte der neueren Zeit. Berlin: Verlag der Wissenschaften.
Jordan, Richard. 1934/74. Handbook of Middle English grammar: Phono­
logy. Translated and revised by Eugene J. Cook. The Hague: Mouton.
Koziol, Herbert. 1937. Der Abfall des nachtonigen -e- im Mittelenglischen.
Beiblatt zur Anglia. 48.306-309.
Luick, Karl. 1914-1940/1964. Historische Grammatik der englischen
Sprache. Stuttgart: Bernhard Tauchnitz.
Minkova, Donka. 1978. Unstressed final -e in the Ormulum. English studies.
Sofia University. 162-80.
Minkova, Donka. 1983. Phonological and morphological problems of the loss
of final -e in Middle English. Unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Sofia University.
Minkova, Donka. 1984a. Early Middle English metric elision and schwa dele­
tion. English historical linguistics: Studies in development. CECTAL confe­
rence papers series No. 3, ed. by N. Blake and Ch. Jones. Sheffield. 56-67.
Minkova, Donka. 1984b. On the hierarchy of factors causing schwa loss
in ME. Neuphilologische Mitteilungen. LXXX 4: 445-454.
Mosse, Fernand. 1952/68. Handbook of Middle English. Translated by
James A. Walker. 8th printing 1983. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins
University Press.
Samuels, M.L. 1972a. Linguistic evolution. Cambridge: University Press.
Samuels, M.L. 1972b. Chaucerian final -e. Notes & Queries. Dec. 1972.
445-8.
Selkirk, Elizabeth. 1980. Prosodic domains in phonology: Sanskrit revisited.
Juncture, ed. by Mark Aronoff and Mary-Louise Kean. 107-131. Anma
Libri. Stanford University.
Strang, Barbara. 1970. A history of English. London: Methuen.
Sweet, Henry. 1922. An Anglo-Saxon reader in prose and verse. 9th ed. Ox­
ford: Clarendon Press.
Wright, J. and E.M. Wright. 1923. An elementary Middle English gram­
mar. 2nd ed. Oxford: University Press.
 ARTICULATORY EVOLUTION

WILLIAM PAGLIUCA RICHARD MOWREY

SUNY at Buffalo Ottawa, Ontario

Despite the unevenness in quality and comprehensiveness of the various

sources of data, and the difficulty in extracting generalizations as broad in
scope as we might like, it has long been recognized that the data on change
of phonetic form over time are not at all what one would expect were changes
random or arbitrary. In fact, it is the regularity of correspondences, and
hence of change, which made diachronic theories of a meaningful sort possi­
ble: if «all» morphs formerly containing A's in a given environment now
contain C's, we are persuaded that change has a nonrandom basis. Moreover,
much of «what happens» seems to be «plausible» in the sense that the
phonetic distance traversed from A to  is often minimal. We may refer
to this as the Minimal Distance Working Principle. Thus, for example, we
find [p] > [f] and [p] > [b], but not [p] > or > [p]. Further, there is
a marked imbalance in the incidence of assimilations relative to dissimila­
tions, and of lenitions or weakenings relative to fortitions or strengthen­
ings. In each case, the former — assimilation and lenition — predominates,
i.e. much of change seems to be unidirectional. We suggest that the imbalance
becomes even more pronounced as the reliability, completeness, and recen­
cy of the data increase. Just as the oddest changes — those violating the
minimal distance principle — tend to be found in reconstructions of the
histories of the most poorly-attested and temporally-remote languages, so,
in general, the incidence of fortitions declines as the data become more com­
prehensive, and, with certain delimitable exceptions, such as changes in
language or dialect-contact milieux, becomes suspiciously low in the most
accessible data — that on changes observed in progress. In what may be
considered to be an additional source of data — the «changes» evident in
the relation of more casual to more formal styles of speech in individuals
— unconditioned fortitions do not seem to occur at all.
Given the predominance of lenition and assimilation, more remote
460 W. PAGLIUCA - R. MOWREY

changes which apparently violate this tendency need to be reexamined. That

is, our current observations must be allowed to trigger a reanalysis and in
some cases a substantial rejection of earlier reconstructions.
1. In order to lay the foundation for such a reanalysis, it will be
necessary to abandon the terms lenition and assimilation, for the following
reasons. First, these terms carry unwanted connotations peculiar to other
theories of change. Secondly, they are generally associated with a notion
of saltatory segmental mutation which belies microevolutionary gradualness.
Third and most importantly, processes typically identified as lenitions are
on the microphonetic level but instances of a phenomenon of a more general
sort, which we will characterize as Substantive Reduction. Likewise, assimila­
tion processes are properly seen as instances of the more general phenomenon
of Temporal Reduction. By this redefinition, we incorporate as instances
of substantive and temporal reduction not only traditionally-recognized leni­
tions and assimilations, but also apparently unrelated phenomena, some in
fact traditionally characterized as fortitions.

As a non-controversial and extremely common instance of substantive

reduction, we cite the fricativization of stops and the further erosion of these
supraglottal fricatives to the glottal fricative [h]. Cf. 1.
(1) Ρ > f > h
t >s >h
 >x >h
If we look for the moment at the beginning and endpoints of these reduc­
tion pathways, from full stop to glottal fricative, it is clear that for all three
stops supraglottal articulations have been lost, leaving only a residual glot­
tal state. Substantive reduction is clearest in the transition of fricative to
[h], but perhaps less clear in the transition of stop to fricative. It is reasonable
to assume however that less articulatory energy is involved in a fricative
relative to a stop and that complete closure of the articulators as for a stop
always involves more radical muscular movements.

The representation of the development of a stop to a glottal fricative

as three discrete steps is nevertheless overly simplified. Where some measure
of phonetic detail is available, as it is for synchronic variation within a single
dialect, we see an intermediate stage of affrication between the stop and
fricative stages, and similarly, a state of weakened frication between the full
 ARTICULATORY EVOLUTION 461

fricative and glottal fricative stages, as in Caribbean Spanish dialects in which

[s] reduces as in 2. A fuller representation of the reduction pathway is
therefore as in 3 1
s
(2) s > h > h > 0
(3) Ρ > Pf > f > fh > h
s s
t > t > s > h > h
 > kx > x > x h > h
() (b) (c) (d) (e)
Note that the affrication stage is generally regarded as a strengthen­
ing 2. This is due to a shift in perspective, whereby parametric reference is
acoustic rather than articulatory: the «addition» of stridency to a stop
represents an increase in acoustic energy. Since, at the same time, t > s is
generally interpreted as a lenition, adherents of the strengthening analysis
of affrication presumably reason as follows: «a stop «plus» strident offset
is obviously «stronger» than a stop without such offset, which is in turn
«stronger» than a simple strident fricative.» Bailey (1977), who analyzes the
High German Consonant Shift as consisting of a «fortition» syllable-initially
(t ) t s ; p > pf,  > x) and a lenition intervocalically and syllable-finally
( > χ; t > s; p > f) evidently accepts some such belief about the character

1
It is not particularly difficult to find evidence for the gradual erosion of fricatives.
Consider, for instance, the behavior of intervocalic / õ / in South American Spanish dialects
in which this fricative is in the process of eroding: native speakers report that remnants of
decaying / o / — elevation of the tongue in the attitude of the fricative, without contact —
persist even in those lexical items in which «deletion» would otherwise be assumed. Menéndez-
Pidal, in describing the same process in Iberian Spanish (1968: 99ff.) notes that this fricative
is generally very «weak», which may indicate how long a history an eroding fricative can have
on its way to 0. Nor is Spanish unique: in not a few grammars where the author attends to
phonetic detail, remarks on the weakness or strength of fricatives transcribed in IPA symbols
are common qualifiers on supposed universality. So, too, in careful records, we don't always
find the stops of a given language to be phonetically alike — differences in the extent of aspira­
tion, voicing, and affrication seem to be usual rather than exceptional. To some extent, the
regularity and discreteness assumed for segmental configurations across languages is a direct
result of phonemic analysis, in which phonetic differences are routinely regularized away. When
care is taken in recording phonetic detail in changes in progress, the existence of «stages» such
as those we indicate in 3b and 3d becomes obvious. Thus, in a meticulous cross-dialectal study
of sound changes in Quechua, Quesada (1985) provides evidence for intermediate «steps» in
the reduction of [s] and other obstruents, including the uvular stop [q] which, in «spirantiz-
ing» as opposed to «voicing» dialects, reduces first to an uvular affricate, and then to a fricative.
2
Lass (1984:178), who has long been concerned with issues related to our discussion
so far, is an exception.
462 W. PAGLIUCA - R. MOWREY

of affrication relative to frication. But affrication is more likely the erosion

of stop closure integrity, which has, as an aerodynamic consequence, an
increase in acoustic energy — that is, articulatorily, affrication is a reduc­
tion rather than a fortition. Further erosion of configurational integrity leaves
the fricatives in 3c. The shift in perspective to the acoustic domain thus
obscures both the nature of affrication and its relation to other reduction
phenomena. As a result, such series are conventionally interpretable only
as stops «strengthening» to affricates, which then «weaken» to simple
fricatives. If parametric reference were consistently articulatory, such dif­
ficulties would not arise.

We could, of course, introduce further diacritics into the reduction

pathways in 3 to show, for example, the average amount of supraglottal
frication remaining in a particular dialect at a particular time, but such a
profusion of symbols would only obscure the general tendency we are try­
ing to elucidate — gradual substantive reduction. At the same time, this
diacritically-augmented segmental representation continues to give the illu­
sion that we are dealing with discrete steps when in fact all we have is a
continuum or gradation of phonetic realizations. In this gradation there is
nothing to suggest a canonical segment type or canonical phone vs. a tran­
sitional phone. For example, just as there is no reason to assert that an af­
fricate is merely a transitional stage between stop and fricative, so too is
there no reason to assign transitional status to weakened fricatives and
canonical status to the glottal fricative [h].

As instances of processes generally identified as assimilatory, let us con­

sider regressive nasalization of vowels before nasal consonants — cf. 4 —
and regressive palatalization — of an apical [s] for example, as in 5.
(4) VN >
(5) si >
On a traditional phonetic analysis, 4 may be described as the result of
premature lowering of the velum during the production of the vowel in an­
ticipation of the nasal consonant. The subsequent history of such sequences,
however, often involves ultimate loss of the consonantal gestures (cf. 6).
(6) VN ) > .
(a) (b) (c)
 ARTICULATORY EVOLUTION 463

Given that the sequence in 6 represents a gradual progression, 6b

necessarily involves a partial reduction of the nasal consonant relative to
its immediate predecessor, 6a.

Turning now to palatalization, the description of 5 as an assimilation

invokes the anticipatory coarticulation of the domed high tongue [i] with
the front fricative, resulting in the latter's palatalization. As 7 suggests,
however, the partial coarticulation of the two configurations [s] and [i] is
effected by an increase in temporal coincidence over time.
(7) si > >
(a) (b) (c)

Thus, it is not as if, for (b), a transitional glide is introduced between the
still-full apical fricative and the palatal vowel, but rather that the transition
is the fricative and vowel in coproduction at that locus. Necessarily, then,
we cannot regard the alphabetic symbols in (b) as representing, either tem­
porally or substantively, the «same» configurations as in (a). That is, (b)
is a temporally-compressed descendant of (a), as (c) is of (b).

In the cases we have just discussed, it is difficult to isolate temporal

relative to substantive reduction. This suggests to us that a proper concep­
tion of evolutionary processes is one in which temporal and substantive
reduction are always copresent. That Some sort of equilibrium between tem­
poral and substantive reduction must exist may be made obvious by the
method of falsifying the negative: suppose that a consonant within a lexical
item reduces completely to , as is the case in consonant cluster simplifica­
tion or intervocalic consonant loss. In these cases, we never see a dead period
or articulatory lacuna in the place the consonant previously occupied. On
the contrary, articulations to the left and right of the lost consonant become
temporally closer to each other — that is, substantive reduction is accom­
panied by temporal reduction. Likewise, assimilation processes — i.e. tem­
poral reductions — seem to imply concomitant loss of most but not all of
the articulatory gestures of the assimilated phone. We do not see, for ex­
ample, a wholesale compression of all the articulatory gestures from both
phones into a single phone.
2. In the discussion above we employed a more or less traditional
segmental notation in combination with a non-traditional use of diacritics
in order to represent the fine phonetic gradations inherent in the evolutionary
464 W. PAGLIUCA - R. MOWREY

pathways under examination. Obviously, this type of alphabetic represen­

tation is inadequate to our needs. Neither substantive nor temporal reduc­
tion of component articulations is expressible in a system of representation
in which all elements (alphabetic symbols or features and the segmental
matrices they comprise) are, because temporally neutral, de facto temporally
equal. Yet it is clear that those stretches of articulation conventionally regard­
ed as segmental are not all temporally equivalent. The duration of the con­
figuration and its component articulations, as well as the energy and number
of individual gestures, may vary significantly.
To illustrate, let us examine the difficulties that the generative system
has in expressing substantive and temporal reduction. The reduction of [s]
to [h] is typically represented as a single event, rather than as the gradual
erosion of supraglottal gestures approximated in 2; cf. the feature-and-rule
notation of 8.
(8) Γ+ cons]
- syll Γ - cons]
+ cont - ant
+ ant - cor
+ cor - strid
+ strid + low J
L— low J

Neither [ + cons] → [ - cons] nor [ + strid] → [ - strid] expresses ero­

sion of articulation; they refer instead to consequences of the reduction of
lingual articulations. The first indicates a change in consonantal constric­
tion, but does not itself indicate the site of the constriction. The second
records one consequence of the loss of such constriction. Having more direct
reference to specific articulations are [anterior] and [coronal]. But nothing
about the changes [ + ant] → [ - ant] or [ + cor] → [ - cor] suggests that
the process described involves reduction of lingual articulations: velar con­
sonants are also specified as [ - ant, - cor] but velars are not decay pro­
ducts of apical consonants. «Loss» of anteriority and coronality thus can­
not be interpreted as reduction. The specifications [ - ant] and [ - cor] are
relevant for velars as classificatory elements; they are inappropriate, and
hence irrelevant, as elements in the description of the reduction of [s] to
[h]. Finally, by the definition of [low], [ - low] → [+ low] suggests the
addition of an active gesture depressing the tongue — a very doubtful con­
comitant of the erosion of [s] — or any other fricative — to [h].
 ARTICULATORY EVOLUTION 465

The expression of coarticulation phenomena — temporal reductions

— likewise suffers under alphabetic control. 4 for instance, is notationally
identifiable as an assimilation, but 9 is not, its formal expression requiring,
in classical feature-and-rule analysis, a rule which inserts a homorganic oral
stop. Now, the number of distinct formalisms for the description of
phonological processes provided by the theory is small: there are just four
classes of rules (insertion, deletion, feature-changing, and a transformational
device for operations on two (or more) segments simultaneously), suggesting
an elegant economy of phenomena types. We might, then, expect the types
to correspond to some basic phenomenological differences. This is, of course,
not the case. 9, which likely involves partial diminution of a single ar-
ticulatory gesture (as noted first by Jespersen 1909) and thus is reductive
in origin, is representable only as a phenomenon of a radically different sort.
And, though 10 and 11 each represent temporal compression of existing
gestures, 10 is written as a modification of one segment, but 11 requires
the intercalation of a third. The diphthongization in 12, analyzed as an «in­
sertion» of a short [i] between non-high vowels preceding palatals and velars
(cf. Lass 1984), is the result of the temporal coincidence of the doming tongue
for such consonants with the latter part of the vowel; no new articulations
are intruded. 13, which Lass cites as a fortition, is likewise a change involv­
ing no new articulations. In this case, reduction of lingual articulations for
the fricative [z] allows a slightly earlier realization of alveolar closure for
the nasal [n]. At this interface, a brief non-nasal tap is produced which com­
bines the alveolar" closure of [n] and the non-nasal, reducing [z] articula­
tions. Finally, the representation of 14 requires the use of the transforma­
tional device, which merely rewrites, under a mask of simultaneity, two rules
— one changing the features of one segment, the second deleting the other
— suggesting a non-existent phenomenological distinction between
monophthongization and other temporal compressions 3 .
(9) ml  mbl, nr  ndr, ns  nts, ms  mps
(10) Baule 1  r / pal or alv C_
(11) Eng. dial. Is  lts (else, pulse, false)

3
References for 9-14: For 9 and 11, Zwicky 1972 and Ohala 1974a, who provides ar-
ticulatory analyses. 10, adduced by Vago (1976) as an instance of an acoustically-based change,
is described in more detail in Pagliuca and Mowrey 1980, as is 11, for which cf. also the analysis
in Javkin 1978. For more discussion of the descriptive problem posed by monophthongiza-
tions like 14, cf. Pagliuca and Mowrey 1980.
466 W. PAGLIUCA - R. MOWREY

(12) Amer. Eng. dial, bag, cash, bush:

(13) Amer. Eng. dial, isn't, wasn't, doesn't business:

(14) ai > e
We must reject feature-and-rule notation as being inadequate to express
the relatively obvious temporal and substantive reduction processes we have
discussed. Because of the classificatory nature of their reference, such feature
specifications, like the alphabets they expand, are incapable of expressing
directly the phonetic content, and hence the phonetic nature, of a host of
diachronic phenomena.
3. The solution to the problem of representation does not lie in the
selection of new classificatory features which stack up in the familiar serial
segmental manner: such a system would remain incapable of expressing the
timing details inherent in the gradual coalescence of neighboring articulatory
gestures so common in historical change. In short, simply choosing new
features would maintain the notational myth of discrete segments which
mysteriously vanish when people open their mouths to speak.
Having rejected the segmental framework in favor of one which allows
us to express timing relationships in greater detail, we are left with the pro­
blem of choosing the events whose timing should be represented. Candidates
are in 15.
(15) a. Constriction points and degrees of constriction of the various ar­
ticulators.
b. Spatial configurations of articulators relative to a reference point.
 Acoustic events.
d. Neuromuscular events.
Of these four, only neuromuscular events are capable of directly reflec­
ting temporal and substantive reduction. For example, the reduction in 16.
(16) ρ > pf > f > h > 0
can be described as in 17.
(17) a. gradual loss of orbicularis oris superior activity { ρ > p f > f}
b. gradual loss of orbicularis oris inferior activity { f > h }
c. gradual loss of laryngeal opening (posterior crico-arytenoid activi­
ty) {h  }
or schematically as in 18.
 ARTICULATORY EVOLUTION 467

(18) ρ pf f h 0
OOS
OOI
PCA
This schema may be over simplified (that is, underspecified as to the
number of neuromuscular events occurring) but it is at least capable of show­
ing the series as reductive, which feature specifications cannot do.

Note that the schema in 18 imposes no artificial distinction between

laryngeal and supraglottal gestures which comprise the constellation of ar­
ticulations along this reduction pathway. We see no justification for an ad
hoc typology of neuromuscular events based on spatial position in the vocal
tract as in Halle 1983. Indeed, if posterior crico-arytenoid activity diminished
during any phase of the pathway in 16, that phase and all subsequent phases
would be voiced. Thus what has been considered to be a separate dimen­
sion of consonantal weakening — the sonority hierarchy of voicing — is
at least partially equivalent to other reductive processes in the theory we
are presenting, and here we are striving for a representation which more
directly reflects the gestural components of articulation. Moreover, the theory
presented here consciously attempts to incorporate a wider range of signal­
ling behavior, from facial gestures accompanying speech to the signed
language of the deaf. We believe these modalities will also reveal temporal
and substantive reduction to be the sole mediators of internal change.
4. The simple observation that no new articulatory gestures are in­
troduced through evolutionary phonetic processes, which we may call the
Principle of Differential Retention, has far-reaching consequences for
reconstruction. Our reasoning is as follows:

First, if no new articulatory gestures can be introduced in daughter

dialects which are direct descendants of a given parent, then any gestures
which exist in a daughter must also have existed in the parent, although in
a less temporally-and substantively-reduced form. As a corollary, only those
gestures which exist in daughters can be proposed to have existed in the
parent, even if this results in so-called «defective» consonant and vowel
distributions which practitioners have traditionally abhorred. Stated more
simply, our reconstructions are limited by the phonetic evidence at hand
and may not be augmented by the notational fiction of system symmetry.
468 W. PAGLIUCA - R. MOWREY

Second, if we examine the reflexes of a lexical item in a number of

daughter dialects and find only one daughter which has articulatory gestures
lacking in all others, we must reconstruct the parent lexeme as also having
that gesture and assume that it was lost in all daughters but one. The alter­
native — assuming that one daughter produced an epenthetic articulation
— cannot be defended on the basis of the number of daughters having the
articulation versus the number lacking it, because we can neither base our
reconstructions on the vagaries of dialect survival nor on chance migratory
patterns. Rather, our observation of shallow time depth diachronic change
shows that epenthesis is illusory, and we allow this observation to inform
and constrain reconstruction in general, even in the face of statistical
predominance of one reflex over another.

5. If the principle of Differential Retention holds, then «fortitions»

which are not products of temporal and substantive reduction must be in­
terpreted either as evidence of the adoption of the language under examina­
tion by an alien speech community (i.e. dialect contact) or as a signal to
reexamine its reconstruction. If, however, language-internal auditorily-
precipitated change occurs, then, since it results in the introduction of «new»
articulations into existing lexical material, the Retention principle would be
insufficient, if not thereby falsified.

Clearly, some fortitions and apparently unconditioned changes of place

of articulation are the result of language- and dialect-contact, and as such,
do not affect the integrity of the Retention principle. But there is a
considerable body of residue — interchanges of labials and velars seem
to be the most popular — which has for a long time enjoyed a secure
place in the store of what may be referred to as the working linguist's
folk knowledge. In earlier work (Pagliuca and Mowrey 1980; Pagliuca 1982)
we have examined the evidence for some of the presumed «clear cases»
illustrating the necessity of recognizing acoustic/auditory factors in phonetic
change. In cases where some degree of phonetic detail is available, the
evidence is in favor of reduction. Take, for example, the oft-cited change
of a velarized lateral to a labiovelar glide in Cockney (cf. e.g. Ohala 1974b),
which would involve the introduction of a new articulation — namely,
labialization. When the appropriate phonetic records are consulted (e.g.
Sivertsen 1960) the phonetic nature of the glide reflex of the velarized lateral
is seen to depend on the immediate vocalic environment — in particular,
 ARTICULATORY EVOLUTION 469

the reflex is labialized only if labialization is present in the preceding vowel.

Cf. 19. 4
(19) fill full bulb old

In one celebrated case of the change of velars to labials — the English

[x] > [f] change, exemplified by the spelling versus the modern pronuncia­
tion of such words as enough and rough — (cf. e.g. Ladefoged 1971) a purely
articulatory analysis is sufficient. In brief, [x] has [f] as a descendant only
if the preceding diphthongal offset was labial. This suggests to us that the
labiodental fricative arose by coarticulation of the labial activity of the
diphthongal offset with the residual glottal state of the original velar fricative.
That the loss of labiality on the vowel, and its monophthongal character,
are not subsequent but contemporaneous effects in items undergoing the
[x] > [f] change seems fairly certain. Dobson (1968), whose study is based
on the records of the English orthoepists of the time, notes that the diphthong
was reduced if the change to [f] occurred, but remained intact otherwise.
The latter obtains in dialects in which the change did not occur, and in words
in which the development of [x] was simple decay to [h], then [ø] (: 506
et passim). The contrast in the fate of the diphthong according to whether
the change to [f] occurred or not by itself suggests that an analysis which
invokes the acoustic similarity of labials and velars based on the feature
[grave] is deficient: substitution of one [grave] fricative for another should
have resulted in [oux] becoming [ouf] — that is, acoustically-based
misperception should result in a simple substitution of [f] for [x], and not
in concomitant weakening of the diphthong. Finally, a review of the ex­
perimental evidence on the confusability of acoustically similar consonants
(e.g. Miller and Nicely 1955; Fant et al. 1969; Winitz et al. 1972) suggests
that the presumed special confusability of labials and velars is difficult to
substantiate, and that the results of such experiments could be used equally
well to predict confusion of consonants we never see interchanging in
historical material 5 .

Any claim that the acoustic similarity of two sounds is the basis for a
language-internal change entails a number of predictions about their behavior

4
Rounding in the vowel of full is historical, i.e. is a retention in Cockney.
Sivertsen's conventions: indicates a non-syllabic (glide) segment; — = retracted.
5
For more discussion, cf. Pagliuca 1982.
470 W. PAGLIUCA - R. MOWREY

which do not seem to be borne out by historical and synchronic evidence.

As with the supposed difficulty of keeping labials and velars distinct, if it
were true, its consequences should be oscillation and relatively frequent in­
terchange of the two sounds, and the instability of systems in which they
contrast. If confusion were immanent in such systems, we should not have
to dig in the past for a handful of examples — like evidence for temporal
and substantive reduction, examples would abound in all data, including
that of contemporary speech.' Secondly, explaining changes by ascribing
unreliability of this order to the perceptual apparatus creates the problem
of having to explain how and why such systems arise and are maintainable.
Similar considerations bring us to unfavorable evaluations of «ease of percep­
tion» and «desire for maximum differentiation» arguments for specific
changes, or change in general.
Inspection of compendia of the world's languages reveals the remarkable
range of detail which an auditory perception system can be tuned to operate
with. If we invoke «acoustic similarity» for so relatively gross a difference
as that between velars and labials, then what are we to make of the
maintenance of contrasts between dental, alveolar, retroflex and palatal-
alveolar voiceless stops in Dravidian languages, between lamino-dental,
lamino-palatal, apico-alveolar, and retroflex voiceless stops in Australian
languages, between short and long unaspirated apicais, unaspirated retroflex,
and short and long aspirated retroflex voiceless stops in Gujarati, etc. Distinc­
tions such as these arise and remain — remain encodable — and are not
subject to conflation or collapse due to auditory overloading, but rather
only to gradual erosion over time or collapse in adoption in contact, in which
a differently-tuned perceptual system is implicated. In light of these con­
siderations, the notion that similarities of the order of labials vs. velars, or
velarized laterals vs. labiovelar glides are too great for them to be readily
distinguishable, that the differences are too fine for auditory-perception
and/or articulatory systems to maintain, loses whatever intuitive appeal it
may have had. The changes which seem to invite acoustic or perceptual
analyses must, if they are language-internal developments, have other ex­
planations. If we refine our focus to consider phonetics rather than
phonological contrasts, the case for perceptual debility as a potential cause
of internal change appears to be even weaker. Dialectal differences are both
finely-graded and consistent, and, in the absence of significant contact, are
maintained. The precision with which dialect-specific articulation is copied
in generational transmission renders untenable the postulation of any defi-
 ARTICULATORY EVOLUTION 471

ciencies inherent to the human perceptual system which would account for
changes of the magnitude [x] > [f], [k] > [p] or > [w]. The «jumps» in­
volved are — articulatorily and auditorily — too large. It is true that learners
do not have direct access to many of the details of articulation of the language
they are acquiring, and must rely heavily on auditory information. But rather
than concluding from this that the natural locus of diachronic phonetic
change is therefore auditory perception — i.e. in misperception or error —
the success with which fine dialectal detail is copied should suggest to us
that the link between perception and articulation is far more subtle and ef­
ficient than we tend to give it credit for being, and that we should be wary
of untenable conclusions about the lack of sophistication of the human
perceptual and motor systems.

6. We have proposed that internal phonetic change is neurophysical-

ly rather than psychologically based, and consists of two complementary
processes: substantive and temporal reduction of existing neuromuscular
gestures. Dialect divergence occurs when a communication barrier — either
physical or social — arises, and the now-separated dialects proceed on
separate reduction pathways. By using the principle that daughter dialects
differentially retain part of the parent configuration, reconstruction is possi­
ble by inclusion of all daughter dialect gestures in the proposed configura­
tion of the parent 6 .

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Bailey, C-J. N. 1977. Linguistic change, naturalness, mixture, and struc­

tural principles. Papiere zur Linguistik 16. 6-73.
Dobson, E.J. 1968. English pronunciation 1500-1700. Two volumes. Second
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Fant, Gunnar, . Lindblom, and A. de Serpa-Leitão. 1969. Consonant con­
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ly Progress and Status Report 4. Royal Institute of Technology,
Stockholm.

6
We thank Joan Bybee for reading and commenting on this paper, and the Linguistic
Society of America and the National Science Foundation for a travel grant to WP.
472 W. PAGLIUCA - R. MOWREY

Halle, Morris. 1983. On distinctive features and their articulatory implemen­

tation. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 1. 91-105.
Javkin, Hector. 1978. Phonetic and grammatical explanations for an epen­
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 CREOLIZATION AND SYNTACTIC CHANGE IN ROMANCE

REBECCA POSNER
Oxford

The purpose of this paper is to develop an idea I have floated elsewhere

- that Bickerton's (1981, 1984) Language Bioprogram Hypothesis (LBH) is
about catastrophic language change in general, rather than about creoliza-
tion in a narrower sense - and to examine its validity in this light.
I would prefer - unlike Bickerton - to reserve the term «creolization»
for the language development in certain black slave communities during the
17th and 18th centuries. But I suggest that similar radical changes have oc­
curred at other periods, sometimes without language contact playing a crucial
role.
In creolization the lexical stock of the language remains essentially
unaltered: creoles are members of the same family as their models but are
of utterly different morphosyntactic type. Such evidence as we have sug­
gest that creoles were, from the outset, recognized as quite different from
their models and that they have, in their basilectal forms, remained essen­
tially as they were at their formation. The initial transformation seems to
have been abrupt, though creoles have since undergone the sort of gradual
changes familiar to historical linguists.
Abrupt change of language usage, within a community at large, is
thought to be unusual, especially at the morphosyntactic levels, where
relatively long periods of co-occurrence are common. This may be why
creolization is often regarded less as a kind of change, affecting a previous­
ly existing language, than as the creation of a totally new language out of
lexical material culled from a simplified or debased version of its model.
Bickerton's hypothesis is that, with the aid of an innate language
bioprogram, children, exposed only to artificial and impoverished data of
this kind, elaborate a new, genuine, rich language, which draws from its
source only lexical items. In a «pure creole», if such a thing existed, the
grammar would be identical with the biogrammar: an approximation to this
474 REBECCA POSNER

«core grammar» can be extrapolated by comparison of different creoles

(Bickerton 1984).
The most cogent arguments for a common core for all creoles rely on
the evidence concerning pre-verbal tense-aspect markers: I have elsewhere
discussed (Posner 1985 b, forthcoming b) the French creole negative parti­
cle pa which has been incorporated into the array of such markers; this
radical reanalysis of French post-verbal negative pas can be associated with
typological change.
Use of serial verbs, with lexical verbs used where the models use preposi­
tions, conjunctions and the like, is seen as another creole feature. As the
core biogrammar makes no use of minor categories, Bickerton finds it natural
that verbs should be pressed into use for functions filled by prepositions
etc. in other languages. Disterheft (this volume) points out that reanalysis
of verb to preposition etc. is found in African languages and Mandarin
Chinese, with the syntactic change preceding morphological change. In some
creoles a similar reanalysis may reflect substrate influence.
Here I shall summarily discuss another feature of creole syntax -
specifically of French-based creole syntax - that is less readily linked to core
biogrammar (for more detail cf. Posner forthcoming c).
What is at issue is the creole treatment of the Romance universal com­
plementizer, which, Bickerton would predict, should have no equivalent in
a pure creole. In Rule 1 of his postulated core grammar, COMP is an emp­
ty slot in which no overt complementizer appears.
As is well known, modern Romance standards, unlike English, always
require use, with finite subordinate or completive clauses, of an overt WH,
or, better, QU, subordinator (especially que, che etc. traditionally derived
from QUOD or QUAM). In earlier texts the QU form is not always present
- especially if subordination is already modally marked (e.g. by the negative
or the subjunctive). This «omission» was frowned on by language arbiters
and is usually treated as emotive parataxis, characteristic of poetic discourse.
Modern non-standard Romance also optionally omits the QU form in some
contexts. In popular Canadian French completives, English influence is
sometimes invoked.
Complementizers are not normally used in New World French creole
completives: where a [kœ] or [ke] form appears it is stigmatized as Fren­
chified. Indian Ocean French creoles, on the other hand, optionally use the
QU form (as ki) in completives. There is nothing then to suggest that the
French creole developments are different from those of Romance in general,
 CREOLIZATION AND SYNTACTIC CHANGE 475

except in so far as optional omission of the QU form was blocked in the

standards by the weight of grammatical authority. As in other respects, the
New World creoles have carried further tendencies that were already percep­
tible in Old French and continued in modern non-standard varieties, while
Indian Ocean creoles have stayed closer to the model.
Creole usage in headed relative clauses appears to deviate more from
French. Here I take as read the view that in modern Romance the universal
QU complementizer has replaced earlier case marked relative pronouns
(Giacalone Ramat 1982, Hirschbühler & Rivero 1982). Where there appears
to be a nominative case-marked relative - in modern French and Engadine
Romantsch, both non-Pro-drop languages -I accept that Kayne's (1976) que
→ qui rule operates.
In Old French, however, qui was still a masculine nominative relative
pronoun, though it was occasionally replaced by caseless que. In Middle
French such replacement was more frequent, with inanimate heads (Jokinen
1978). In modern usage, especially in Canada, que in subject position is a
recognized feature of non-standard varieties (Sankoff et al. 1971).
Following the same track as completives, nonstandard French varieties
might be expected to omit que in relatives. Such omission is found mainly
in cleft sentences: in Canada it is sometimes seen as a phonological elision
(Lefebvre & Fournier 1978:283), perhaps influenced by English.
New World creoles regularly make no use of que in non-subject posi­
tion in relatives, but ki, or elided k, seems to be obligatory in subject posi­
tion. This differentiation is predicted by the Keenan and Comrie Accessibility
Hierarchy (cf. Giacalone Ramat 1982). Indian Ocean creoles, as anticipated,
have not gone so far as those of the New World, and only optionally omit
ki (identical with the complementizer) in non-subject position.
The evidence on relatives so far discussed suggests, once again, that
French creoles, especially those of the New World, have merely taken further
tendencies discernible in non-standard French. I have implied that changes
have been gradual, with optional deletion becoming regular in a fairly predic­
table way.
The contrast between creole and standard is, to be sure, greater, but
this is because of the standard's rejection of popular optional deletion, as
a consequence of emphasis on clarity, logical cohesion and explicitness.
More striking differences, however, emerge from New World relative
structures where a particle, derived from French là «there», demarcates
relative clauses. This suggests a parallel with similar use of Tok Pisin ia,
476 REBECCA POSNER

from English «here» (Sankoff & Brown 1976).

In Lousiana, and in the Indian Ocean, the use of LA as a relative marker
is unknown. It is optional in Martinique and Guadeloupe, but may be regular
in Haïti: Lefebvre 1982 claims that it is obligatory in restrictive relatives,
though evidence from Faine 1936, suggests that this may be a recent develop­
ment.
In all the French creoles, LA postposed to an NP acts as a deictic or
definite marker. Post-posed noun determiners are predicted by rule 3 of
Bickerton's Core Grammar. The French definite article, we recall, has no
reflex in the creoles, except as an agglutinated element of unitary lexical
items. Creole LA plays a different syntactic role from the definite article
in most Romance languages (with the possible exception of Rumanian): it
marks the end of the NP, and so can distinguish attributive from predicative
adjectives. In Haitian LA can be doubled after a noun (d'Ans 1968: 105)
— the first occurrence is semantically deictic and has only phonologically
determined allomorphic variation, while the second, a definite marker, has
a plural allomorph that is identical with the 3rd person plural pronoun and
possessive yo (from French eux). Noun plurality can be marked only in com­
bination with definiteness (by postposition of yo). A similar usage is attested
in 19th century texts from Louisiana, where ye is the equivalent of Haitian
yo (Neumann 1985:107).
The use of là as a definite noun-phrase marker, and hence a restrictive
relative marker, has no parallel in French. Là is however, frequently found
in non-standard varieties as a deictic or hesitation filler, and perhaps to mark
sense-groups (for Quebec cf. Villiard & Champ Roux 1981).
In Haiti the grammaticalization of relative marker LA is perhaps re­
cent, but the similarity with the Ewe noun phrase marker la, used also as
a relative marker, is striking - as pointed out by Baudet (1981). It is hard
to avoid the conclusion that West African newly imported slaves equated
the French là that may have punctuated emphatic non-standard speech, with
its Ewe homonym, even though only relatively few are likely to have been
Ewe mother-tongue speakers. The Haitian use of yo as a plural allomorph
of LA has, however, no exact parallel in Ewe (where the 3rd person plural
pronoun wo has no definite reference as a noun-pluralizer and is not a relative
clause marker - Westermann 1930). Grammaticalization in this precise form
seems to be unique to Haiti - if we assume that older Louisiana texts reflect
a usage borrowed from 19th century Haitian immigrants.
What appears to have happened is that the relative is treated in the same
 CREOLIZATION AND SYNTACTIC CHANGE 477

way as an attributive adjective and is incorporated into the NP, the boun­
dary of which is marked by LA. My contention is that non-use of a com­
plementizer in French creoles may simply be a generalization of earlier
Romance tendencies, in which the link between clauses need not be marked
overtly, but that the use of LA as a relative marker may reflect a more
unusual change, in which the relative clause is seen as an integral part of
its head NP.
In Bickerton's scenario, however, the two processes would not be so
different. For him «core» creole would have no overt complementizers: the
creoles I have been examining are assumed to have been influenced, at their
formation, by the superstrate language, to a greater or less degree, depen­
ding on the exposure of language learners to superstrate data, if only in the
form of a stable pidgin. One result might be that the superstrate complemen­
tizers would be used in some contexts and varieties: one can well imagine
that more salient French qui would resists erosion more than que.
Bickerton's (1984) table setting out the putative ranking of various
creoles, shows Haitian «nearer the bioprogram» than Mauritian, while Réu­
nionnais, which is much more like popular French than creoles proper, is
much further away from the bioprogram. Presumably the creoles of Mar­
tinique, Guadeloupe and Louisiana would lie between Haitian and Mauri­
tian. The proportion of slaves to masters at the time of creolization is of
crucial importance in this ranking so that the language of slaves (e.g.
maroons) left to their own devices would be closer to the bioprogram. One
would predict that creoles in societies where masters were more in evidence
would make more use of complementizers than those in which the bioprogram
had full rein. Developments like the use of LA as a relative marker could
be seen as a compensatory device in conditions in which the QU - relative
marker is regularly omitted in some structures.
A more traditional story than Bickerton's - and for me a less convinc­
ing one - is that abrupt creolization was followed by gradual decreolization.
This story envisages the insertion, by adult African speakers, of their masters'
lexical items into their native grammatical structures. The resultant unstable
jargon would provide the input to language learners of a new generation,
for whom the creole would be the mother tongue. Subsequent decreoliza­
tion would depend on the degree of contact with the superstrate language:
creoles on the right of Bickerton's table would have undergone extensive
decreolization. One result would be the adoption of the superstrate com­
plementizers.
478 REBECCA POSNER

I repeat that the evidence about creole complementizer use is most simply
explicable in terms of «normal» gradual linguistic change, and requires no
such appeal to a catastrophic creolization process.
However, the Haitian LA relative marker does point to a more radical
transformation, with French là interpreted as part of a quite different gram­
matical framework. That substrate had a hand in this reinterpretation is
eminently plausible, but «biogrammar» could also have a rôle to play.
What I am suggesting is that at the moment of creolization there was
a change of «type» - in the sense of «the idea speakers have about what
their language is like» (Coseriu 1968). Let me use the Coserian hierarchical
schema to illustrate, spatially, my contention.

Universais
«top-down» type / «bottom-up»
changes system changes
norm
N speech

Linguistic change is most usually «bottom-up» (in Andersen's (1973) ter­

minology «abductive») with speech innovations (like the deletion of a com­
plementizer) sometimes, often haphazardly, accepted into a social norm and
incorporated into the (rationalized) system associated with that norm.
«Bottom-up» change of type would he unlikely.
However there are also more orderly, «top-down» («deductive» or
«analogical») changes, when anomalies of usage may eventually be smoothed
out and tidied up to fit in better with the dictates of a prestigious norm and
the exigencies of the system associated with it.
More unusually, I suggest, «type-down» changes can follow on from
an abrupt change of language type - when new speakers have a quite dif­
ferent view from their predecessors of what the language is like. This would
be most likely when mature speakers switch from a language of one type
to one of another type and bring to their adopted language the attitudes
associated with their abandoned language.
The deductive effects of change of type would take time to work down
through the system and the norm to speech: the timelag before Haitian gram-
maticalization (in the system) of the LA relative marker was fully realized
in usage could be explained in this way.
Bickerton's LBH goes even futher, by suggesting that, in very special
 CREOLIZATION AND SYNTACTIC CHANGE 479

conditions, the «ideas» about language that a speaker may have, have been
acquired only from the innate bioprogram («universais») and not from any
tradition. Change comes right from the top, in other words.
Such a circumstance could, surely, result only from a catastrophic social
upheaval in which children acquiring language have access solely to the most
rudimentary speech data: such are the conditions which Bickerton envisages
for the formation of pure creole. It is to be doubted whether these condi­
tions, in their extreme form, could ever obtain. But it is worth pursuing the
question of whether what Bickerton (1984) calls a «weaker reflex» of the
«internal program» had a hand in, for instance, the emergence of Romance
from Latin, or the linguistic transformation that took place in the Middle
French period.
In this perspective it will be important to define what the possible
«typological» variations can be, and whether some features are always
«packaged» with others, as Chomsky's (1981) hypothesis about parametric
setting implies. I have suggested that one way modern Romance differs from
Latin is that relative clauses are seen as similar to subordinate and com­
pletive clauses, which are «hinged» to other elements of discourse by the
all-purpose QU complementiser. Incidentally, «free» relative clauses are
treated more like interrogatives than headed relatives (Posner 1985). Creole
tends on the other hand to omit overt complementiser «hinges» and to treat
relative clauses as integral parts of their NP head (making, it seems, no use
of «free» relatives). Whether these differences can be linked with, for in­
stance, morphological (e.g. part-of-speech marking or syntactic (e.g. word-
order) features), remains to be investigated.

REFERENCES

Ahlqvist, Anders, (ed.) 1982. Papers from the 5th ICHL. Amsterdam: Ben­
jamins.
Andersen, Henning. 1973. Abductive and deductive Change. Lg. 49. 567-593.
Baudet, Martha M. 1981. Identifying the African Grammatical Base of the
Caribbean Creoles: A Typological Approach. In Highfield & Valdman
1981. 104-117.
Bickerton, Derek. 1981. Roots of Language. Ann Arbor: Karoma.
-----. 1984. The language bioprogram hypothesis. The Behavioural and Brain
Sciences 7.2: 173-221.
480 REBECCA POSNER

Chomsky, Noam. 1981. Lectures on Government and Binding. Dordrecht:

Foris.
Coseriu, Eugenio. 1968. Sincronía, diacronía et tipología. In Actas del XI
Congreso Internacional de lingüística y filología románicas. Madrid:
CSIC. 1. 269-281.
D'Ans, André-Marcel. 1968. Le créole français d'Haïti. Etude des unités
d'articulation, d'expansion et de communication. The Hague and Paris:
Mouton.
Faine, Jules. 1936. Philologie créole: études historiques et étymologiques
sur la langue créole d'Haïti. Port-au-Prince: Imprimerie de l'Etat.
Giacalone Ramat, Anna. 1982. Explorations in Syntactic Change (Relative
Clause Formation Strategies). In Ahlqvist (ed.) 1982. 283-292.
Hirschbühler, Paul and Rivero, María-Luisa. 1982. Aspects of the Evolu­
tion of Relatives in Romance. In Ahlqvist (ed.) 1982. 123-132.
Jokinen, Ulla. 1978. Les relatifs en moyen français. Helsinki: Acad. S. Fenn.
Kayne, Richard. 1976. French relative que. In Current Studies in Romance
Linguistics (ed. by Marta Lujan, and Fritz Hensey). Georgetown: Univer­
sity Press.
Keenan, Edward and Comrie, Bernard. 1977. Noun Phrase accessibility and
universal grammar. Linguistic Inquiry 8: 63-99.
Lefebvre, Claire. 1982. L'expansion d'une catégorie grammaticale: le déter­
minant la. In Lefebvre et al. 1982. 21-63.
Lefebvre, Claire and Fournier, Robert. 1978. Les relatives en français de
Montréal. Syntaxe et sémantique du français, ed. by J. McA'Nulty.
Quebec. Presses de l'Université.
Lefebvre, Claire, Magloire-Holly, Hélène, and Piou, Nanie (eds.) 1982. Syn­
taxe de l'Haïtien. Ann Arbor: Karoma.
Neumann, Ingrid. 1985. Le créole de Breaux Bridge, Louisiane. Etude mor­
phosyntaxique, textes, vocabulaire. Hamburg: Buske.
Posner, Rebecca. 1985a. Diachronic syntax - free relatives in Romance. JL
21. 181-189.
-----. 1985b. Histoire de la négation et la typologie romane. In Actes du
XVIIème Congrès International de Linguistique et Philologie Romane
2. 265-269. Aix: Université de Provence.
-----. Forthcoming a. Creolization as Typological Change. To appear in
Diachronica.
 CREOLIZATION AND SYNTACTIC CHANGE 481

-----. Forthcoming b. Post-Verbal Negation in French: a comparative study.

To appear in Romance Philology.
Sankoff, Gillian and Brown, Penelope. 1976. The Origins of Syntax in
Discourse. Lg. 52. 631-666.
Sankoff, Gillian, Cedergren, Henrietta J. and Sarrasin, R. 1971. Quelques
considérations sur la distribution sociolinguistique de la variable QUE
dans le français de Montréal. Paper to the Annual meeting of the Associa­
tion canadienne-français pour l'Avancement des Sciences.
Villiard, Pierre and Champ Roux, Benoît. 1981. Le la Québécois: de
l'adverbe au complémenteur. Revue de l'Association Québécoise de
Linguistique 1: 167-176.
Westermann, Diedrich. 1930. A Study of the Ewe Language, Oxford: Univer­
sity Press.
 SYLLABICITY AS A GENUS, SIEVERS' LAW AS A SPECIES

ALDO LUIGI PROSDOCIMI

Department of Linguistics - Padova University

This paper summarises a version which will appear as a book in its own
right (Prosdocimi «Sillab.»), wherein there is a chapter on the (non)reality of
reconstruction and on the meaning of reconstruction units which are not pho­
nemes (or morphemes, lessemes, etc.) of natural languages, but comparative
segments as well as reconstruction units. They are units which have the syste­
matic configuration and aspects of natural language units, but which are not
so by nature. The distinction, irrelevant in certain cases, becomes essential
for others: vocalism, sonantism and laryngeals of the Indo-European Recon­
struction belong to these other cases. It is evident that as far as syllabicity
goes, vocalism which was and - despite the big shock of the «New Look»
of consonantism, is implicit and still at least in our eyes, the centre and punc­
tum dolens of Indo-European reconstruction problems (and for good reasons).
From certain evidence it would seem that in the presence of a vocalised
sonant, the apophonic vowel (e/o) can come out as zero, associating the
phenomenon to accentual covariation. Also the more general problem of
the nature of apophonic e/o is posed, i.e. of vocalism in a nutshell. In our
thesis what matters is that it is a vowel of vocalisation and not different
- if not for reasons of chronology and/or functionality - to the vocalisation
which gives a in Latin (etc.). The vocalism e/o is colourable by laryngeals,
with indifference towards e vs.  (cf. e/oH2 > -ã vs. e/os > -os).
With colourable vocalism, I have associated the Schwebeablaut (Pro­
sdocimi 1984 «Latino»). With non-colourable vocalism, I associate the so­
nant level expressed by symbols r etc.
We may therefore have:
1 pekwtos sprētus perk/prek-
2 cards gnātus prk
The type perk/prk justifies, amongst other things, verbal formations such
as prsko: perksk- of Italic-Latin, Celtic, etc. This takes back the vocalisa-
484 ALDO LUIGI PROSDOCIMI

tion e vs. a, reduced er vs. r (i.e. to the former r with vocalic support) to
an insertion factor in the vocalic system in as much as in morphological func­
tion, rather than, or besides, chronological or purely chronological. The dou­
ble level of vocalisation is connected to the question of the vowel a, which
I would suggest in terms different to Lubotsky's (at this congress): a, a
typologically probable but not necessary vowel, exists as a/å; when a/a)e/o,
there is space for new vocalisation.
The question is vast and here only aspects or fragments are dealt with.
There is, however, the practical question of notation. I will use e -  as com­
monly used where vocalisation may not be relevant. I will use (C)e/o where the
lack of distinction in timbre may be relevant. Where the possibility of non-
vocalisation may be relevant, I will use Ce/o in alternation with Co (the tet­
ter's greater neutrality to indicate a vocalisation position or vocalic potentia­
lity, which can be explained either as e/o (pok w -tos), or as a different vowel,
such as a of Latin canis). With > I mean «changes to» and/or production.

1. The Phenomenology of Sonantism According to «expanded» Sievers' Law.

1.1.1 Sievers' rule was stated (1878) for Vedic with regard to Germanic.
It concerns the syllabicity of j and w in relation to the following vowel (a
 ŏ), like VCCiya 1 ~ VCiya ~ VCya-: classic Sievers' or «Sievers» in
brief.
«Standen i und  vor Vokalen (in den 1.1.5. genannten Fällen und
auf Grund von Sievers und Lindeman), wurde der Hiat durch den
homorganen Glide getilgt (UV → UŲV). Für die übrigen Sonoranten
in dieser Stellung lässt sich die exakte phonetische Realisierung nicht
mehr bestimmen» (Schindler 1977).

1
Henceforth I shall use a few conventional forms of the «Classic Sievers» and «Sievers-
Edgerton» type, etc. Since the phenomenon is particularly clear in Vedic - where the case -i(y)a
is particularly evident-, I shall use the Indian form (easily identifiable for -y- and -a-) in alter­
native to -ijo- of the normal reconstruction without particular expedients, except where there
is the danger of causing ambiguity or confusion. For the same reason I will not worry about
putting forward a monster such as vrkiH-, and not wlk w jH-, where -iH- alone and nothing
else is under discussion. I will not use asterisks where it is obvious that I am dealing with
reconstructed forms, etc.
As far as apophonic vocalism is concerned, the matter is very delicate, because within
the analysis that I give below, at least in certain positions its very nature is put in question.
I will use e and  according to common use (-jos and -jeHi) reserving the use of a convention
e/o or V where relevant. In some cases I shall use  to signify a position with vocalization
or vocalic potentiality, which could be explained either as e/o (pokw-tos) or as a different
vowel, whether a in Latin or ï in Indian (on the difference, see §§ 3.12).
 SYLLABICITY AND SIEVERS' LAW 485

1.1.2 It was expanded later (esp. Edgerton) to cover the relationship

between sonants like ētîyut, -CRiwa-~ VCyu- etc. «Sievers-Edgerton».
1.1.3 Even later the general sonant syllabicity rule was formulated,
given in the following fashion (Schindler 1977):

An interactive right to left formulation, i.e. from the end of the word: cf.
çvabhih and not + çumbhih: «Expanded Sievers».
1.2.1 «Expanded Sievers» allows numerous exceptions, among which
is the same classical Sievers' Law (cf. Schindler 1977, reformulation accor­
ding to Prosdocimi «Sillab.»):
1. Word initially:

explanation under f).

c) Classical Sievers, Sievers-Edgerton (also phonosyntactically:

d(i)jeus, with the exception of Lindemann 1965: swopno- and never
+ suopno-; §1.5.).
2. Morphological syllabic boundaries:
d) Acc.sg. -im, -um, -rm
e) -CmnV- > -C(m)(n)V-
such as açman- > açmā, raçman- > raçmā
such as krn(w)wa, krn(w)ma and not +krnuwa, +krnuma
(+ such as grabhnïma

2 «Bei den -men- Stämmen wurde / m / in der folge /CmnV/ nicht silbisch sondern
schwand (Typus ved. ásman-: ásnah)» (Schindler 1977). As I note, this class was put forward
by Schmidt (Kritik der Sonantentheorie) as an anti-consonantal argument. The types raçman-,
dra(g)hman-, açman- in the weak forms ought to give -CmnV and therefore *-CmnV > -Cama,
while on the contrary they give (instrumental): raçmá, dra(g)hmã, ráçnã. It is possible that
the variation in -m-/-n/ is due to stress variation, but the oscillation here in the sense that
in this sequence two nasals are reduced to one - obviously for tautosyllabic reasons or for being
- at the point of juncture equivalent to one nasal only. This is the same rule as pet-(t)ro-,
se(d)-(t)la- (Saussure MSL 1889 = Recueil pp. 420-432) as applied to nasals: -VCM//NV- =
-VC(M)NV-; or -VC//MNV- = -VCM(N)V- from which Cn-/Cm-. The same goes for krn(w)-wa
and krn(w)-má. grabh-nï-ma (unless we have -iH- as morph) and not *grabhãna < -- < -nH-
exemplifies application of syllabicity rule in initial position: -Vbh//n0H//mé.
486 ALDO LUIGI PROSDOCIMI

f) (#)CRRV > CRRV (common if there is CRRC in the same

paradigm: Gk. τριών (but see b); -vi- → gen. -v(i)yas for ϯ-uyãs.
1.2.2 The rule as described, and not explained, from right to left and
the exceptions which upset matters do not offer a satisfactory picture. There
is a need for reformulation: dealing with syllabicity the conditions of
syllabicity intended as syllabic boundaries must be recognised, i.e. as syllabic
juncture (cf. the cases in absolute initial position).
Against the logic of the right to left description (which is a mirage, but
which can also be explained), the whole phenomenology depends on a fun­
damental phenomenon, already recognised by Saussure in an unpublished
work, w is consonantal at the beginning of the syllable 3, while it is vocalic
when it is not syllable initial. The point is to establish the conditions where
w is or is not syllable initial and related to this is not at the centre of the
syllable, so as to assume syllabicity = vocality.
1.2.3 Syllable-initial position indicates caesura in relation to what
precedes, i.e. with the final of the previous syllable. This is the case of the
phenomenology in syllable-initial position, an example of classic Sievers,
etc. The formulation from the right is a subspecies, with morphological
caesurae of this chain of syllabic caesurae.
The formulation from the end is certainly erroneous and çvabhih does
not balance the rest, amongst which classic Sievers. Yet çvabhih exists and
offers indications as to the morphonological conditions as a result of the
genetic history of the syllable in relation to the morphs.
1.3.1 The whole question can be reduced to the identification of
syllable-initial conditions and, here, to the recognition of the basic status
of the sonants, i.e. more consonantal or more vocalic?
The conditions for the position of the syllable are:
a) of the phonological type: -VCC- = VC//C-, -VC- = -V//C-
b) of the morphonological type: çvabhih and krnma.
Classic Sievers is decisive for the phonological syllable caesura in ab­
solute initial position: #CjV- > #CijV- (#CjV- = C//iV in reality for

3 I leave aside the second diphthongal element in syllable final position as possibly pos­
ing problems regarding the consonantalism (cf. krnwa-) of even greater diachronic complexity
- theoretically to the point of a structure with open syllables only. In syllable final position
then a diphthong for phonetic reasons results: Ceje > CejØ. Syllable initial position is the con­
ditioning force, for which reason from now on, unless indicated, «sonant» will be synonymous
with sonant in initial position and at the centre of the syllable.
 SYLLABICITY AND SIEVERS' LAW 487

phonosyntactic reasons, as appears even clearer in the Vedic: Seebold 1972;

Schindler 1977).
The whole sonant system, i.e. w and j included, behaves essentially con-
sonantically or, in other terms, it is derived in terms of diachronic mor-
phonology from full vocalism where the sonants are sillabically marginal,
i.e. consonantal. It is strange, but true (cf. unpublished Saussure in Pro-
sdocimi «Mémoire»). As previously mentioned, the explanation must exist
as a certainly not banal, but central implication. However, it is not for us
to pursue the matter here.
1.3.2 On sonantism itself and for the premises on sonantism as con­
sonantal, one must distinguish between:
a) sonants without apophonic vowel in the syllable;
b) sonants with apophonic vowel in the syllable.
By definition sonants ought to be vowels in the absense of and consonants
in the presence of an apophonic vowel. A correct formulation should in­
clude syllables with sonants in the presence of vowels in general and not
only in a limited manner in the classic Sievers case in as much as it is
anomalous in the presence both of an apophonic vowel and a vocalised so­
nant.
The sonants (syllable initially) with an apophonic vowel in the syllable
have given rise to classic Sievers: monstrum is the fact that in a condition­
ing situation there may be a syllabic sonant followed by an apophonic vowel.
Here the classic Sievers rule functions, which therefore is to be refor­
mulated (the use of -j- for example), in as much as there is no equivalence
between -ja and -ija according to the conditioning factors in play, but it
is -jo- which after -VCC- or VC- becomes -ijo-. This is Sievers as a true
law (= positive Sievers), in which, that is, in a certain conditioning situa­
tion something exceptional happens: et i et  and not aut i ø aut j o . In the
case of -jo- > -jo- nothing occurs, everything is normal, and thus there is
no law (negative Sievers).
-VC-/-VCC- give rise to a phonetic syllabic caesura V/VC//jV different
to the other morphological -VC//jV- caesura (or morphonological based
on previous morphological forms).
The syllabic caesura //Cj- involves the vocalisation of -j- in as much
as not syllable initial which, for a language of the syllabic type -(C)V(C)
// CV(C)//, becomes the centre of the syllable and therefore a vowel. In
this case //Cjo/e- leads to //Ci- with retention of the apophonic vowel,
488 ALDO LUIGI PROSDOCIMI

against the general rule of cooccurrence: Sievers is a rule following (as will
become clear, it is not categorical) the one which changes consonantal sonants
to vocalic sonants

1.3.3 If positive Sievers (//Cijo-) is caused by phonetic constriction,

the premise for negative Sievers (//Cjo-) ought to be morphological in
nature. The other side of the coin is the consonantal nature of -j-: whence
we have -VC//jo- instead of -V//Cjo-.
The confirmation of the explanation lies in the fact that positive Sievers,
in contrast to the negative one, has a very small number of exceptions in Vedic.
As for the case -ijo-/-jo- which for obvious morphological reasons, is
for the most part the most frequent example, we have, according to Edgren's
calculations (1878 -» 1885; cf. Seebold 1972 pp. 30-31):
absolute occurrences percentages
ia ya ia ya
VC/VCC 1552 91 17 : 1
VC 462 1747 5 : 19
(cases of VC/VCC are further reduceable in as much as due to a specific
morphological rule seen in the inflexion of devi, exceptionally dev//i by mor­
phology derivative of dev//a: 2.2. below).
The explanation and implications are evident: -VCjo-, next to the normal
division -VC//jo > -VCjo-, allows -V//Cjo- whence the percentage for -VCia-,
-VC/VCCjo- normally allows only the division V/VC//Cjo- from which
-V/VCCia- almost without exception.
Since -CCj- → -C//CJ- is obviously a phonetic restriction, -VC/jo- as
a morphological caesura should be suggested as well as -V//Cjo- → Cio-
as a phonetic alternative.

1.3.4 A first framework suggests:

a) the morphonological basis of the syllabic caesura conditions the voca­
lisation of the sonants (morphonology is «synchrony» of the genetic history);
b) phonetic limitations can make the caesura change: the phonetic
restriction is the limit of two consonants (or equivalent groups between two
short vowels, or of a single long consonant, i.e. also counting the absolute
initial of permitted syllables not beyond the consonantal load of CVC =
CV (with some clusters in certain positions equivalent to a single consonant).
Both the principles, applied here in one species, must be worth more
generically for the genus or for a hierarchy of genera.
 SYLLABICITY AND SIEVERS' LAW 489

1.4 From the syllabicity of the species (Sievers) to the syllabicity of

the genus.
I a) Sonantism with vocalisation in presence of an apophonic vowel not
considered by classical Sievers:

b) Sonantism with vocalisation without a vowel not considered by ex­

tended Sievers:
*krnwma → krnma
*grabhnHma > grabhnïma and not (see note 2).
II Vocality = Syllabicity without sonants = only consonants with
apophonic vowels:
-CCC- →?
I and II must be subdivided if  = H (H = any laryngeal) for two reasons:
(1) heuristic - the phenomena appear deformed or masked by the pro­
duction or non-production of H;
(2) intrinsic - H behaves in a special way, neither properly consonantal
nor properly sonantal, and this has been seen (cf. voiceless aspirates like
sthā, pantha-) but undervalued (3.2. and Prosdocimi 1984 «Latino»,
«Sillab.»).
1.5 Lindeman's rule and the nature of the post-sonant vowel. «Zu
Wortformen der Struktur = [ + syll] [ - syll] # , d.h. einsil­
bigen Wörtern mit einem (nach der Grundregel unsilbischen) Sonoranten
nach anlautendem Verschlußlaut oder Spiranten, finden sich auch zweisilbige
Nebenformen mit silbischem Sonorantem. Es sind das die bekannten Alter­
nationen des Typs : Himmel».
Die Ratio für die Verteilung der beiden Varianten im Idg. ist auf Grund
des rigvedischen Befundes noch erkennbar: Die Formen mit R standen nach
Pausa und im Satz nach schweren Silben (vgl. den Kontext von SIEVERS).
Die Beschränkung der Regel auf sonst einsilbige Wortformen - es gibt kein
fsuopnos neben *suopnos «Schlaf» - wurde von Lindeman (NTS 20, 1905,
38 ff) erkannt.» (Schindler 1977, ρ. 57).
Application to the type djeus/dieus does not only confirm its applica­
tion from the beginning, but the modalities underline the criteria of syllabicity
suggested above, especially in the pause # C j V > #CiV as equivalent to
-VCCj- -VCj-. Here the pause objectivizes the criterion for which -C'y >
-Ci- when -- ( #  - ! ) is tautosyllabic.
490 ALDO LUIGI PROSDOCIMI

The restriction of Lindeman's rule which takes us to the exclusion of

+ suopno- is not a curiosity but, put in the right perspective, it is the flag
of more general phenomenology with far-reaching consequences. In as much
as it depends on a determined concept of Sievers in the Lindeman-Schindler
formulation, the rule is only half the story, i.e. the deformation of reality
in as much as it seeks to explain an anomaly pertaining to Sievers (#swo-
for #suo-) where Sievers is already anomalous (-Cu(w)o- in stead of -CwoC-/
-CuC-). Lindeman's rule therefore stands as the elimination (in some cases)
of that anomaly in the general sonant system which is positive Sievers
(-Cio-). As a consequence, it must be reformulated: not only in specified
conditions is the sequence -io- excluded in favour of just -jo- but the ex­
pected correlation - according to the apriori of sonant syllabicity - is - i ø .
The prediction will come true: Skt. svapnas: Gk.
The consequences of this type of formulation are enormous for Sievers'
Law which is fitted in the much wider question of apophony (and stress)
and on its morphonological origins (in which the origins and nature of
sonants in relation to vowels and vice versa become important again).
Lindeman's rule is thus a residual of the expectation jo ~ i, with exclusion
of -io-. The problem is to establish the morphonological status of -jo- with
an alternative result i and not fio, in itself and in relation to the accent.
The link with stress is made evident by the paradigm *kuon/kwon ~ *kunós
correlated to the fact that as a monosyllable *kwon can have *ku(w)on ac­
cording to Sievers for phonosyntactic reasons, without giving *kun on the
basis of svopno/supno. The vowel following w cannot be reduced because
as a monosyllable it is necessary and preexistentially tonic (and, with that,
in a sort of morphonology which rendered this vowel different from the
others, for example as in > pHtfs > Skt. pitúh: see § 2.2.6; in the
question we must fit the Vedic monosyllables like dhih and not *dh(i)yãh).
wo/u recurs in apophony. Using «apophony» is not an explanation for
our case but, inversely, our case, with others, refills with content the «passe-
partout» label of «apophony». As the apophony of which it is a case is cor­
related to stress position (a recognisable fact, despite morphologisations and
regularisations which have modified the original physionomy), swopnos-
~ supnos is likewise linked.
Here we cannot qualify with certainty the status of svápna- with respect
to That is to say that if the accent:
1) has kept the vowel in as much as it has never been shifted
2) has blocked the reduction >  to a state of semireduction in as much
 SYLLABICITY AND SIEVERS' LAW 491

as baritonesis from previous oxytony

3) may have been shifted to the radical vowel after a >
*sw0pnó-phase.
The first case seems the simpler solution and obligatory for he who con­
ceives e/o vocalism in the traditional sense. The type kuon/kwon ~ kunós
with the exclusion of *kwonos (cf. Prosdocimi 1984 «Latino» 1.3.) seems
to confirm this (here I leave out the fact that Tkwonos seems balanced by
*wegh-to-). That would mean suggesting stress difference originating from
or preceding the phenomena induced by the «apophonic» accent while it
is reasonable to say that the apophonic accent was unitary in a phase previous
to the effects, independently of the fact that the oxytone type corresponds
to the more ancient type in as much as oxytony here is the supersegmental
nature of the more ancient derivational morphology, or rather, it is the same
as the «apophonic» accent. Therefore it is legitimate to suggest the
possibilities of the phase in the middle of «blocked» reduction or of the
already reduced phase with fixation in wV instead of u. The answer ought
to come from other cases where, in the same stress conditions, there may
be the same morphonological conditions. There are some immediately evident
cases such as -io-/-i- in the Venetic nominative (2.1.); others less obvious
like the distribution -ja /-ja etc.; the cases of mHtér which, according to
our theory (3.4.), vocalising in moM-tér, retracts the accent in Greek and
Lithuanian, but keeps it in Indian and German; and of pituh < pitfs < pitfos
vs. rnatróh Atróh vs. pitré/ϯ-tré, with gradualness in the relationship between
full vocalism and reduced vocalism in the fixing of the accent (§2.2.6). The
position of the accent is a consequence of vocalisation and not a cause.
Why would the reflex of such an important element be reflected only
in marginal phenomenology such as Lindeman's rule? Apart from the
methodological principle which, for our reconstructive purposes it does not
matter whence the data comes and, rather, as it is in the precepts of (especial­
ly, but not exclusively, internal) reconstruction, it is to be expected apriori
that those of the more ancient phases come from marginal, residual or
emarginated situations. In our case it is possible to establish the reason: star­
ting from that fact that the normal case is jV ~ ï, while -TV- is abnormal,
the phonosyntactic rule would have given -V, -VC. i.e. #supnos —V swo-,
which would have differentiated the paradigmatic class in favour of syn-
tagmatic stochasticity.
The need for paradigmatic unity selected like Sievers, one of the two,
supno-; in as much as -u-, without u/wo alternation. The recognisability
492 ALDO LUIGI PROSDOCIMI

exemplified by Sievers has therefore been removed, i.e.  is not considered

by positive Sievers because it no longer has, within the language, the classic
Sievers conditions -wV-/uV-. It can no longer reenter into (our) heuristic
perspective of Sievers' even as a diachronic potentiality. Sievers is, however,
recognisable in swop- which has the classic Sievers conditions only as its
restriction, i.e. that of negative Sievers (thus, in reality, in the non-application
of the positive rule -jV- > -iV-).
In conclusion: Lindeman's rule is the confirmation of the interpreta­
tion of classic Sievers as a species of vocalisation, and that is a supplemen­
tary rule for particular conditions of -jV- > TV- instead of jo/i, therefore
with three levels:
apophony
Lindeman
Sievers
-Io- placed as exceptional, however recurrent, must be postulated - even if
it is not characterised. This is an adequate reason for its existence with regard
to -10-: presumably a morphological reason, or many and varied such
reasons depending on the situation. We shall come back to this when refer­
ring to -i-/-io- in Venetic (2.1.)·

1.6 Cases of «classic» Sievers outside Vedic.

Classic Sievers has been identified in Vedic with attempts to spot it
elsewhere, like Lithuanian, Latin, etc. An exhaustive review is offered by
Seebold 1972 (p. 74 ff.), in a reductive perspective which, where it turns
to contest the antiquity of the phenomenon, seems incorrect - in facts and
method - even only to a limited degree with regard to «classic» Sievers. We
will not stop to discuss this because of that phenomenology, and an other
one left unconsidered by Seebold. The latter is reconsidered the more general
principle of syllabicity of which Sievers in an example. In this broader pic­
ture there is, as will be seen below in outline, a single explanation of many
phenomena formerly ascribed to Sievers in all their glory or as tangentials
and of others excluded by Sievers (like the feminines in -jH, -jHs).

2. Cases of sonants with vowels not considered in Sievers.

2.1.1. The evidence from Venetic: //Çjo- > -Cjo- (Sievers) and ■
/ /  jo- of the Venetic type are unacknowledged cases of Sievers.
Venetic systematically presents -(C)Cis < -Cjos vs. -Vjos. The loss
 SYLLABICITY AND SIEVERS' LAW 493

¡Support in Germanic with Sievers covariation:

non-compound finals compound finals 6
VCC/VC -ijas -Ï-
VC -jas -ja-
2.1.2 Summing up in terms of syllabic caesura, in Sievers the caesura
is per se morphological, and phonetic only in the case VC/VCC ) V/VC//C
while in the Venetic type it is phonetic even for VC- > -V//C-.
Hence, we discover that -10-/-TØ- is an allotrope of -jo- in conditions
of //Cjo-: either from (Germanic) Sievers morphonology, of from another
(Venetic) morphonology.
The explanation is obviously that of swopnos/supnos, independently
here of the accent. The condition differs only in its morphonological condi­
tioning: in Venetic the morphology -VC//jo- does not act, but there is the

4 The phenomenon was recognised by myself and ascribed to Sievers' Law as early as
1965 and 1967. The phenomenon was taken up by Prosdocimi 1977 «i.e. io/i» and 1983
«Venetico» pp. 176-178. The explanations here are to be modified and/or completed by the
explanation given in this article and in Prosdocimi «Sillab».
5 The orthographic rules are complicated by the syllabic punctuation wherefore -VjV-
is -V.i.i(i)V-, extremely rarely -ViV-. This spelling (Lejeune/Prosdocimi) was phonetically inter­
preted as -Vi//jo-. I maintain now that this spelling indicates strong syllabic caesura -V//j-,
which strengthens -j- to -jj- from which we have as the result -V1 jo-/-Vijo-. There is a confir­
mation in Messapian (Prosdocimi 1985, «Messapico» and «Sillab.»): Cjo- is always -Ce- (with
-e- which can be shown to be short) and -Vjõ- is always -Vja- where -j- is equally written in
an unmarked manner (-hi- or J'-) indicative of accentuated fricativeness = consonantism =
syllabic caesura -V//j-.
6 «Bei den Komposita mit ja-stammingen Vorgliedern steht in der Kompositionsfuge
nach schwerer Silbe und nach Nebensilbe -i, nach leichter und nach wechselnden Auslautgruppe
-ja (andi-laus, aglaiti-waurdei gegenüber wilja-halfrei)». (Seebold 1972 p. 76).
For Germanic (as for Baltic) the question remains of why a polysyllabic presents the same
syllabic behaviour as that of Sievers. This is not an objection to our thesis, but it is however
a problem. I retain that the explanation is found in the fact that polysyllabicity, whence «Neben­
silbe» is secondary with respect to a phonematic structure still without vocalisation in agree­
ment with its zero vocalism or vocalism reduced phonetically to zero in atomic position.
494 ALDO LUIGI PROSDOCIMI

phonetic caesura -V//Cjo-, with the only exception of - -jo- due to the
7
special nature of H in relation to the previous vowel . That shows that the
vowel after j , or in covariation after i, is not a vowel equivalent to an e/o
vowel. The use of the term apophony or samprasärana (Lejeune) is not an
explanation but a name or a label.
2.1.3 Baltic presents similar phenomenological behaviour: -is (-ys)
already referred to Sievers by Sommer (followed by Nagy 1970) through
an -ijas with contraction - for which there is no reason and which does not
take account of -is- - is explainable by linking it to the Venetic phenomenon,
with Sievers' restrictive phenomenon (cf. the supnos type) and not with
nonrestrictive Venetic.
-ys could correspond to Messapic phenomenology (see note 5), with dou­
ble vocalisation which is not, however, the -ijo- of Sievers but an intermediate
stage between -ijo- and i. so that ° in i° leaves a trace in lengthening. Even
if the precise thread is not determined, it is obvious that the Messapic 'e
and the Lithuanian -ys are something special, which allow vocality of -j-
> -i- with subsequent special vocalic status.
Summing up, the 3 way scheme given at 1.5. is confirmed and it must
be completed so that the relevant features in the syllabic caesura which unifies
-VCjo- from Venetic with Sievers' -VCCjo- may appear. It also renders as
recognisable -i- (or other substitutes like Lithuanian -y- and Messapic -'e-)
and -io- as outcomes of the same conditioning.
Simplifying:

7 The explanation regarding the nature of H in relationship to the preceding vowel is

not important here. What matters is the fact that there is a parallel in Hittite documents where
V + H is noted. According to the calculations (Tischler 1980 «Lautg. und Etym.» p. 506)
75% of the time we find a ø (VH2/H3) e ø in 78% of cases as opposed to ah and eh in 25%
and 22% of cases respectively.
 SYLLABICITY AND SIEVERS' LAW 495

The fundamental result is that I and To are realisations of the same basic
phonetic reality. The basic reality is conditioned by phonetics and syllabic
caesura. This in its turn is morphological (variously scaled in the applica­
tion of phonetic or morphological caesura), for which a single morph ap­
pears differently for reasons of syllabic phonetics conditioned by mor-
phonology. That has fundamental support in the feminine where the
phenomenon has been expanded in inverse proportion to the masculine.

2.2 Feminine ■ as a unitary morpheme.

2.2.1 In parallel to the masculine, the feminine ought to be in agree­
ment.
If:

The prediction pertaining to the masculine comes true and it allows the
explanation of the morphological unity of the stems in -I and -jā (Brugmann,
Grdr. II, 2, pp. 286-7) by means of the difference due to phonetics affected
by syllabic caesura. A crux of the (description of the) morphology of feminine
stems in -jã and -I is thus resolved in various languages and, hence, in the
reconstruction.
496 ALDO LUIGI PROSDOCIMI

The outcome //Cf explains the origin of the genitive, originally a form
derived from stems in -o- via -joH (thus semantically a possessive) which
then entered in the paradigm. The fixing of -ï in the genitive with respect
to -jā (and -jã) which ought to coexist statistically is easily explained. The
insertion in the paradigm in / / C o brings the caesura -VC//jeH to V//CJH
> V//CiH > V//Ci (an analogous reason of variations in the position of
the system is valid for the syllabic division of the vrki;"-Flexion 2.2.3.).
In the unity of the paradigm remains the Greek -jã, which, with respect
to -jā, appears preferentially after -CC- (cf. participles) with the following
distribution:

This shows that jã/jã is due to the syllabicity rule //jā

is due to the double divisibility: -V//Cj- (phonetic)
phological)).
The position of -jã is that of -Cis -//Cjos, thus -CiH -Cjã. There are
two open questions: why //CiH > *-Cia with outcome -cjá? The phase -i-
is required by the logic of the explanation. It might only have been virtual,
but a real phase has two elements of support in its favour: the type vrki-
with -Í- constantly accented in the inflexion, thus IH (with H which lengthens
or vocalises in ǐ, thus however -ǐC- or ïyV-: see below § 2.2.3.) and the
Messapic type 8 in -wH- corresponding with H > a to Skt. tanüh, in turn
parallel to vrkl-, which constantly has the spelling -Coa i.e. [] and never
ϯCva i.e. [Cwa].
On the parallel between //Cis ~ //Cjos one can set up covariation
in //CiH ~ //CjoH, but this, according to the theory, ought to give -Cjã.
Therefore one ought to suggest //CiH0 (on the convention 0H ) V ~ H0
> V see below and Prosdocimi 1984 «Latino» § 2.2.), with vocalic metathesis
for H0. Yet this would not be anything but a way of reaffirming //CiH0.
If desired, a convention which sums up the whole process with //Ci/jH0
could be proposed. There is -1 do not deny it - some difficulty in explaining
the process in the individual phases, but the terms of the process - where
the advantage of a unitary picture is a cogent argument - are sufficiently
clear and tested.

8 Examples in De Simone St. Etr. XLVI, 1978, especially pp. 237-4. Interpretation in
Prosdocimi 1985 «Messapico» and 1986 «Sillab».
 SYLLABICITY AND SIEVERS' LAW 497

The revival of  would not be a solution, in as much as it is the conven­

tion of a vocality (its own or as a vocalisation of H) which, in the best of
the hypotheses (using apophony as a «passe-partout») gives either í and ja,
or ja and jã, but not the three in coexistence (J, jã, ja) specifically in I ~
ja, because  cannot at the same time be more vocalic and more consonan­
tal. Independently of the theory - vocalic  or laryngeal H -  has at least
the same difficulties as H. Put together with H it offers a picture which is
altogether more coherent and explicative.
2.2.2 Whatever may be the status of that which brings //CjH to -jã,
its existence leads however to three outcomes for -jeH. That fits in precisely
with the three Lithuanian outcomes, -I, -ja, ė. By exclusion, -ė is the out­
come of -CiHo or of the vocalisation covariation -i/jH0 (Venetic) and jos
(other languages); particularly evident in Messapic -Ces (see note 5). One
covariation could explain Lithuanian , these
9
in opposition to //jas i.e. in symmetry
Lithuanian Others
-jo- -jeH -jo- -jeH
//Cis //Ci //Cis (Ven.) //Ci
//Cys //Ce //Cjos //Ci/jã
//jas //ja //jos //jã
Our theory explains not only -jã but, and this is decisive, the triparti-
tion of outcomes, -ja-s ( -jHs explains, as will be seen, old Norse ylgr by
means of a triple outcome also in Germanic.

2.2.3 vrkIh and devi.

Our theory could explain the vrklh -Flexion vs. the devi- Flexion of
Vedic, except for giving a reason for syllabicity when it comes up against
Sievers

9 On this see Sommer 1914 in «Abh. Leipz.» 30, 4, taken up again in Seebold 1972,
pp. 103 ff. - regarding Sievers, where, as in other cases, negative results are arrived at breaking
up the overall picture of things. Our thesis puts things back together again and explains the
three outcomes whether for the masculine or the feminine here. It also explains the three feminine
forms in Germanic where the first premise leading us to the third outcome -ja-, present at the
same time with -i- and -jā-, in ylgr (-kwjãs) can be reasonably put forward as explicable and
proven.
498 ALDO LUIGI PROSDOCIMI

I refer the reader to Prosdocimi «Syllab.», and I recall a single element:

devi implies -joH; vrklh implies -iH; -joH and -iH presuppose syllabicity of
the sort dev//joH- ~ vr//kiH-. That is to say that in the specific case, an
unexpected result, or rather an inversion of classic Sievers. The reason for
the division is morphological, and so strong here that it overcomes -CC-.
dev-ï is still considered to be a derivative of deva while vrkïh is (cf.
Kurytowicz) the shift of vrkah with substitution into -a < -eH2.

dev/Δ vr//klh
because morphological because phonetic
*deiw//jH wl//kjH
derived from deiw//o- because this derivative marker
(wlk(o)- + -jH-) turned into
a 'feminine' morpheme (wlko- : wlkjH)
(Kuryiowicz) therefore with
syllabicity according to the parallel:
wl-ko-s
wl-kjH-s (for *wl-keH-)

10 The stress structure different between the two categories (of the type devi, oxytone
and baritone and of the type vrkïh always oxytone in the nominative), noted by Panini and
by others, was assumed by Lanmann «discoverer» of the two inflexions (cf. Wackernagel Ai. Gr.
III p. 163) to be explanatory. It is not an explanation but an element that must fit in to the
picture of things and must be explained. It is not stress that establishes the segmental form.
The opposite is true in as much as the suffixes (instrum., and dat. etc.) which are normally
oxytonic are not here. Evidently this is because vocalisation of -j- created a special condition.
The proof is in the genitive pitúh < *pitros (§ 2.2.6.) which, having r-, bears the stress (udat-
ta) the rest of the inflexion which has stress on the final syllable. The types pitróh and not
*pitfoh (udatta) and not +pitròh (svarita) represent the normality of a paradigm conforming
to -trV- and not to -trV-: -tuh < -tfs < -tfoS vs. +-tre/os as exceptional is explicative.
 SYLLABICITY AND SIEVERS' LAW 499

Two confirmations follow:

1) -i- from vrkï in as much as it is parallel to vrkah and no longer derived,
brings us to the accretion of -s i.e.
deiw//jH0 wl-kiH-s
i.e. original Hø with -s because it is
because it is derived parallel to wl-ko-s
The secondary character of this -s besides being likely apriori, is also af­
firmed by the fact that here, differently to Skt. vartakas and Lat. vortex
(cf. Prosdocimi 1984 «Latin» 2.1.), -H2S does give -ks. The chronological
difference falls within a morphologic semantic difference: -VHs > -Vk(V)s
remains masculine or is polarised as such; -VHs > -Vs remains feminine or
is polarised as feminine. Naturally it is no objection that devi does not take
on -h and is unlike vrkï. That signifies a graduality of paradigmatic integra­
tion, of which vrkïh ~ devi is an element of proof.
2) Monosyllables of the type dhïh, where the absolute initial makes the
syllabification / /dh obligatory, all belong to the vrkïh -Flexion. (The fix­
edness of the caesura without phonosyntax which takes us to -Vdh/'/ as in
the Sievers of -k//won is the same reason as that which explains why here
we have //dhih, i.e. the type ϯkun, and not the type k(u)won: 1.5.).

2.2.4 Old Norse ylgr and Old Indian vrkih.

The vrkïh inflexion, with -s as parallel to the masculine, and the out­
come -ja- from //CjH, allows one to explain the otherwise inexplicable Old
Norse ylgr (on which Mayrhofer 1980 in «Homm. Leroy» pp. 131-2 and
note 12 with observations from H. Eichner and J. Schindler):
1) ylgr in place of OHG wulpa is in the structural position of vrkïh, with
the same use of -s parallel to the masculine.
2) The syllabification / / C - allows //CiH > //CI, or //CiH0 > / / Ç / ã .
Therefore, with -s a *wlkwjas whence -jas > -Ør like -jãs < -jos.
3) The phase -kwja- explains the delabialisation which normally appears only
in front of -j-,
With yl.gr < //kwjas we have, also in Germanic, arrived at the three out­
comes (cf. 2.2.2. and note 9)

2.2.5 Lithuanian feminine -ė between -I- and -ja; masculine ys between -is
and -jas.
Our hypothesis also explains the feminine forms of Lithuanian in a
500 ALDO LUIGI PROSDOCIMI

general picture in harmony with the masculine. The case of -ė between -I-
< TH and -jã < -joH, as a result of //Cj/iH0 as a result of a covariate status
between j/i with subsequent vocalisation - likely a stage such as -ïa- parallel
to -io- ) -I- in Lithuanian -ys (vs. Venetic -is § 2.1.). Lithuanian has, unlike
other languages, Venetic included, a short-list even for the masculine: -ys
< -īs, between -īs and -70s, can be explained as a result of //CioS being an
alternative to //CIØs (Lith. -is, Venetic -Cïs).
If, for Gothic and Lithuanian, the heuristic iter has separated the rele­
vant phenomology, the general picture agrees with and confirms the prin­
ciples if not all the details of our explanation.
On these premises, detached from Sievers in view of the rule of which
Sievers is a species, besides Germanic and Lithuanian, the other languages are
to be revised, such as Greek and Celtic (on these, see Lindemann 1982 in Et.
Celt, for a presumed genitive type vrkïh. On all this in Prosdocimi «Sillab.»).

2.2.6 A piece of general evidence: O. Ind. genit. pitúh < pitfs < pitfe/os.
e/o vocalism and stress.
The details, besides being known, are evident: why not *pitárs or
* pitras? How is it that (cfr. note 12) there is udatta on the reduced grade?
The explanation comes from application of the rules of syllabicity (//ter),
therefore for the genitive //tros, that is for Sievers //tre/os. This is the same
as wl-kiH-e/os (note also the stress) but with the vocalisation rule in Venetic
where //Cjos ) //CiØs, here //Cro/es > //Crs > -Cúh:

' ' '\

The syllabicity //tros reappears in Sievers, -VCCr-/-VCr- being normal, ex­

cept for pitá < pHo-tr. Rather than admitting to a phase pHtr- the caesura
is to be attributed to morphology and insertion in the //ter morpheme series,
whence //tr.

n The case of trisyllabic Indrah, i.e.; Indrah, is not an objection because we have -a-
of the paradigm. Rather it is a confirmation because it corresponds to the case of -i/jos which
has been generalized with respect to the only sporadic type -Cis (Venetic and other languages).
This gives us the ratio: Indrah: pituh = //Ci/jos: //Cis. For the attribution of stress, see § 3.3.
 SYLLABICITY AND SIEVERS' LAW 501

Whatever -trV- may be, it is not only found in pituh but also in other
cases where pitróh, matróh is counted as trisyllabic. Despite alternative or
anti-sonantal hypotheses, (e.g. J. Schmidt 1895 «Kritik» p. 159 ff.) joining
*pitfoS > *pitfs > pitúh with the trisyllabic count of the aforesaid cases con­
firms the old interpretation dependent on Böthlingk's Devanagari forms such
as pitróh, matróh. The fact that the type pitré may never be trisyllabic is
not an objection but a piece of a complex mosaic about which we detail
a few elements: pitfoS as vrkias implies the accent on the sonant and not
finally. In the case of -tfe/os the sonantization involves e/o > 0 in Venetic
Cïs. That related to swopnos/supnos vs. kwon/kuon and not *kun but rather
dhïh < *dhiHs and not *dhieH (and //tfoS > -trs ~ //kiH0s > -kías in
as much as between/and -e/os H is placed: §§ 1.5; 2.2.3.) - shows the par­
ticular nature of the apophonic vowel e/o or, at least, a particular kind of
behaviour involving covariation with a preceding sonant and, both, with
fixing of the stress (§ 3.4.).
We recognise an analogous explanation for pitúh < //tros in the third
plural of the perfect -
//Cròi of the middle, with parallel and the rule //Crós
of //kwon; //kuon but not ϯ kun.
The graduation -tr(0)s, never f-tre/os, -treus and -tréi and never ϯ-tréi,
indicates - with vrkias - the history of stress; the original opposition -tfV-
~ -trV- is fixed where vocalisation is constant in order to be fixed as a con­
ditioned phonetic transformation .The paradigmatic accentua­
tion follows where it is not fixed or paradigmatically fixed ( )
up to the point of preventing vocalisation (pitré). That means that the ac­
cent follows or is in covariation and does not precede vocalisation. That
is to say it is subsequent i.e. the nature changes (cf. Lehmann 1952 «PIE
Phon.»?) with respect to the accent that provoked the reduced grades. A
reciprocal confirm supporting the picture of things is pita, ~ mata
but , German bhr^h- (Verner): 3.4.
3.1 The rule -CC-, associated with vocalisation of H12, also func-

12 In a work in press (1984 «Latino» 2.2. and ff.) I have shown as fas as gnãtus, status,
gnotus, sprëtus are concerned, that in proximity to a sonant H selects vocalisation position
according to the rule of two consonants and that the quantity of the resulting vowel depends
on the position of vocality with respect to
In relation to consonantal behaviour, I have also included wH and jH (see above for
jHo > -ia) with the inborn peculiarity with respect to other sonants, of vocalising to i and w.
502 ALDO LUIGI PROSDOCIMI

tions when a consonant is H with one exception characteristic of H with

respect to the preceding consonant to which it may unite consequently coun­
ting as only a single unit. This is (Saussure's) rule, revisited, whereby t +
H becomes th in tisthati, pantha- etc. The premise allowing one to arrive
at one sole phoneme or an allophone thereof is that tH counts as a single
syllabic phoneme. If this is true in this case, evident because the trace of
aspiration is left in the voiceless stop, it may also be true in other cases where
the residual trace is not so evident or is not at all evident.
CH- with respect to vocalisation has 2 possible types of behaviour: as
a double consonant or as a single. This explains the Indian outcomes of the
types dhï and dha for reduced grades. The former is from monophonemic
dhH ( ι with subsequent vocalisation and the latter is from biphonemic
dhH with preceding vocalisation of the apoponic sort pekwtos, thus with
Skt. -ā and not *ī (see also note 12).
The following is a summary:
a)
b)

c)

3.2 A further step.

If p- of pibami is voiced by the laryngeal that has left only this trace,
we have the premise to a monophonematic situation of the foreseen

The alternation in Greek between ara — r, and ana ~ na, etc. fits in completely.
The following may also fit in perfectly: O.Ind. -ir in as much as conditioning
of the sort V ~ C predisposes matters towards a different syllabic caesura. Moreover, as for
a < nH, there are the specific problems relating to the outcome of the sonants in Indian (cf.
Schmidt 1895 'Kritik')·
Also fitting in - in fact proof of the matter in as much as it explains the unexplained
- is the alternative vocalisation as i/ī of H in Old Indian I > 0 H, ï < H0.
 SYLLABICITY AND SIEVERS' LAW 503

type. However, linked to the result th from tH, there is a further implica­
tion to be foreseen for all the laryngeals in themselves and in relation to
the nature of the consonant given its method of articulation: the
monophonemic laryngeal may modify it or if of the same nature 13, it may
disappear without leaving a trace.
The second may be illustrated by d (lat. dõ) in which  which
voices (glottalizes: cf. pibami) a voiceless step is voiced (or glottal) in nature
and in monophonemic contact with a voiced (or glottal) stop ought to be
absorbed without leaving a trace. The prediction comes true: the past par­
ticiple *dita (except for a doubtful result in Prakrit) does not exist, but we
do have -tta- in composed forms (including the exceptional participle dat-
ta 14 with preceding vowel, evidently because -VdHt- permitted syllabicity
Vtt-) to give the result -tt-. The example is of excep­
tional importance because H is absorbed to the point as not vocalize
into nothing as instead happens when it is absorbed in a different form

The cluster  + H can therefore have all the following possibilities

(exemplified by Indian):

paradigmatic stha: cf. panthas, rathas)

3.3. This explains the phenomenology of also

in Germanic according to Verner's Law)
Leaving aside for the moment dubita which has further complications,
which however can be explained by the rule gh (or -gH- →
-gh-), it is striking that a series which a priori ought to be homogeneous
in its segmental structure is not homogeneous suprasegmentally. It becomes
homogeneous at that level by the application of the rule of CH compatibili-

13 I have proposed (1984 «Latino») that the numbered or conventional forms Hi, H2,
H3 correspond to the three grades of articulation. Independently of this proposal, a fact of
this type is certain for H3 (cf. Gk. ) which voices (or glottalizes) pibami.The confirma­
tion, as one will find in the main text, is the fulfilled reduction as dH >
14 The question widens to take in the following dadmas, dadhmas vs. dadima dahima:
and infractions of Bartholomae's Law of the type dhattas and not *daddhas, etc. It appears
reasonable to attribute everything to the double possibility of d/dH, dh/dhH and to paradigmatic
restructuring {da- is not doubling of the present and dad- also functions as a CVC root. On
this see elsewhere).
504 ALDO LUIGI PROSDOCIMI

ty and as far as stress is concerned, either the rule of swopnos: supnos (stress
on the syllable with apophonic vowel, whatever its origin may be) or if it
is not the same, the rule *pitr0s, vrkias ( 2., 2.3., 2.2.4.)

The restored structure is unexceptionable. It corresponds to morphologi­

cal expectations (reduced + -tér) and puts back in high favour the «verbal»
etymologies of these forms and, with them, the lexical structure and a specific
semantic- institutional structure of this terminological nucleus (see elsewhere).
For our purposes stress in m-tér is important. If inserted within this
framework (meH- as pekw-tós - as required by Aryo-Germanic
agreement and by the morphological structure - it offers, together with pitúh
< (§ 2.2.5.), an essential piece of data relevant to the ques­
tion of swópnos ~ supnos. It is not the stress here that provokes vocalisa­
tion, but the process of vocalisation that may (re)provoke the stress in ques­
tion. It is reasonable to think that the nature of this stress is different to
that which led to the reduced grades, but it is possible to think of covaria­
tion as existing whereby the law of syllabicity causing vocalisation precedes
stress distribution. The problem remains - but the terms that pose it (at least
I hope so) also remain.

REFERENCES

An excellent bibliography and history of Sievers' Law is to be found in See-

bold 1972 «Halbv.» = Seebold, Elmar. Die indogermanischen Halbvo-
cale. Heidelberg 1972, followed by the excellent review-article by Schin-

15 Cf. G. Schmidt in 87, 1973, pp. 36-83. The question - Grassmann included -
merits reconsideration in light of possible or gH (the latter is less probable given the rules
of compatibility between dh and g).
 SYLLABICITY AND SIEVERS' LAW 505

dler 1977 «Sievers» = Schindler, Jochen. Notizen über die sieverschen

Gesetze. «Die Sprache» 23/1, 1977, 56-65 (as will become obvious, our
view of things is radically different). To be added:
Lindeman 1965 = Lindeman, Fredrik Otto. La loi de Sievers et le debut
du mot en indo-européen. «NTS» 20, 1965, 38-108 (expecially for
dieus/djeus, kuon/kwon vs. swopnos and not *suopnos).
Nagy 1970 = Nagy, Gregory. Greek dialects and the transformations of
an Indo-European process. Cambridge Mass..
From the treatment given the whole bibliography on problems relating to
the sonants (apophonic in type) and on conditioning phenomenon (of
the laryngeal and suprasegmental types). Even a selection is impossible
here for which reason, assuming the principal texts (Memoire, Kritik der
Sonantentheorie, Etudes indo-européennes, etc.) to be well-known, the
reader is referred to:
Prosdocimi «Sillab.» = conventional abbreviation for the volume (foreseen
for 1986-87) from which this communication is taken; provisional title:
Prosdocimi, Aldo Luigi. Sillabicità tra vocalismo e vocalizzazione nel­
l'indeuropeo ricostruito.
Prosdocimi 1984 «Latino» conventionally indicates a work in a miscella­
neous volume on phonology of Indo-European languages curated by E.
Polomé and W. Winter.
See also:
Prosdocimi 1977 = Prosdocimi, Aldo Luigi. Indoeuropeo io/i and iä/
nella flessione nominale. Casi di reintegrazione paradigmatica. «CFdS»
31, 1977, 205-214.
Prosdocimi 1978 «Diacronia» = Prosdocimi, Aldo Luigi. Diacronia: rico­
struzione. Genera próxima e differentia specifica, «Lingua e stile» XIII/3,
1978, 335-371.
Prosdocimi 1978 «Diachrony» = Prosdocimi, Aldo Luigi. Diachrony and
Reconstruction: «Genera proxima» and «differentia specifica». Procee­
dings of the Xllth Int. Congress of Linguists (Vienna 28th Aug. Sept.
1977), Innsbruck 1978, 84-98.
Prosdocimi 1985 «Mémoire» = Prosdocimi, Aldo Luigi. Saussure e il pro­
getto di riedizione del Mémoire: spunti biografici; la legge di Sievers co­
me legge di sillabicità (in press).
Prosdocimi 1985 «Messapico» = Prosdocimi, Aldo Luigi. Sulla morfolo­
gia nominale del messapico (in press).
 DIE ENTWICKLUNG VON KOMPLEXEN
ZU EINFACHEN SEMANTISCHEN INHALTEN

NORBERT REITER
Freie Universität, Berlin

In der sowjetischen Sprachwissenschaft gibt es den Begriff «okačestvl-

enie otnositel'nych prilagatel'nych», den man am besten mit «Vereigenschaf-
tung von Beziehungsadjektiven» übersetzen kann. Um was für einen Vor­
gang es sich dabei handelt, werde ich mit einigen Beispielen erläutern:

1. Von dolg «die Schuld» gibt es zwei Adjektive: dolgovój (17 J h . )

und das viel ältere dólźnyj (11. Jh.). Das jüngere wird als sog. Beziehungs-
adjektivum verwendet, wie z. B. in dolgovája tjurmá «Schuldgefängnis»,
das ältere als sog. Qualitätsadjektivum, also dólźnyj etwa «schuldigst» wie
in s dolžnym vnimaniem «mit schuldigster Aufmerksamkeit». Es kann auch
prädikativisch verwendet werden: je emu dolžen pjat' rublej «ich bin ihm
5 Rubel schuldig», ferner übersetzt es das dtsch. müssen, z. B. ty dolžen
prijti ešče segodnja «du mußt noch heute kommen».
Der Unterschied zwischen dolgovój und dólźnyj läßt sich wie folgt be­
schreiben: Zunächst das Grundwort dolg. Es meint die aus einem rechtli­
chen oder moralischen Verhältnis (:V) folgende Verbindlichkeit (:=>) einer
Person (:P), eine Sache (: S) zu tun bzw. nicht zu tun: (PS/P'S), so daß
sich formalisiert ergibt: VP => PS/P'S. Es handelt sich um eine Subjunktion.
Jedes der beiden Adjektive teilt die Beziehung eines Sachbestandes zu
dieser Subjunktion mit, insofern sind sie beide auch Beziehungsadjektive.
Darüber hinaus charakterisieren sie aber auch den attribuierten Sachbestand,
uzw. so:
dólźnyj sagt, daß dieser Sachbestand Komponente in der Subjunktion ist,
entweder als P oder als S, dolgovój aber sagt, daß er es nicht ist.
Ein Beispiel ganz anderer Art ist das Folgende:
2. Von lëd «Eis» gibt es ebenfalls zwei Adjektive: ledovój (Ende 18.
Jh.) und ledjanój (13./14. Jh.). Das sog. Beziehungsadjektivum ist ledovój
508 NORBERT REITER

wie z. . in ledovája doróga «Eisbahn», ledovája vodá «Eiswasser»; das

andere, ledjanój, wäre ein Qualitätsadjektivum. Es bedeutet «eiskalt, eisig»,
z. B. ledjanája noc" «eine eiskalte Nacht» oder auch ledjanája vodá «eis­
kaltes Wasser»
lëd «Eis» umfaßt eine gr ere Anzahl semantischer Komponenten, die aus
verschiedenen Sinnesbereichen stammen, dem visuellen, wenn man an Far­
be und Form denkt, dem taktilen, wo es um den Eindruck der Oberflächen­
beschaffenheit geht, und dem thermischen, dessen Sinnesempfindung einen
gewissen Bereich auf der Wärmeskala einnimmt.
ledovój signalisiert alle Komponenten des semantischen Inhaltes von lëd.
Dabei kann pragmatisch die eine oder die andere dominieren. Bei ledovája
doróga «Eisbahn» dominiert die Oberflächenbeschaffenheit, bei ledovája
vodá vermutlich die thermische Komponente. Obwohl also eine der seman­
tischen Komponenten dominieren kann, sind die anderen darum nicht aus­
geschaltet. Man sieht es an ledov _ . Eiswasser kann z. B. eines sein,
in dem noch Eisstückchen schwimmen oder das durch Auftauen von Eis
zustandegekommen ist. Was im einzelnen vorliegt, teilt das Syntagma nicht
mit, sondern ist der Interpretationsfähigkeit des Hörers überlassen. Ledja-
nój hingegen ist semantisch auf eine der Komponenten von lëd beschränkt,
nämlich auf die thermische, und nur diese signalisiert es. Daher der Unter­
schied zwischen ledovája und ledjanája vodá
3. Von krug «Kreis» gibt es krugovój (etwa 18. Jh.) und das sehr alte
krúglyj. Sog. Beziehungsadjektivum ist krugovój, z. . in Syntagmen wie
krugovóe dviženie «Kreisbewegung» krugovaja pljaska «Kreistanz», also:
«Reigen», krugovája oboróna, ein militärischer Ausdruck, bedeutet «Igel­
stellung». Krúglyj dagegen bedeutet «rund».
Auch hier enthält das eine Adjektivum, uzw. das jüngere krugovój, al­
le semantischen Komponenten des Grundwortes krug. Daß ein Kreis rund
ist, weiß jeder, doch braucht umgekehrt, was rund ist, nicht auch ein Kreis
zu sein, d.h. «Kreis» ist «rund» unter der Bedingung des Kontinuums, es
ist das «Unendlicheck» bei gleichbleibendem Radius. Mit «Kreis» impliziert
ist der Ausschluß der Unebenheit. Alles das signalisiert krugovój. Das an­
dere, krúglyj, ist auf den Ausschluß der Unebenheit festgelegt, daher kann
es auch in sog. übertragener Bedeutung verwendet werden. Man kennt v
krúglych cifrach «in runden Zahlen», krúglye sutki «runde 24 Stunden»,
za krúglym stolóni «am runden Tisch», selbstverständlich kann es auch vi­
suell verwendet werden, z. B. krugloe lico «rundes Gesicht» usw.
 ENTWICKLUNG SEMANTISCHER INHALTE 509

Der Inhalt von krug ist selbst schon reichlich allgemein. Wahrschein­
lich war er in sehr alter Zeit noch um einiges spezieller; denn krug = krçgz
wird mit anord. hringr «Ring» zusammengebracht.
Die Etwicklung im Slavischen hat eine Parallele im gallisch-germa­
nischen Bereich. Deutsch rund geht in letzter Instanz auf lateinisch rotun-
dus zurück, das sich zu rota «Rad» stellt. In beiden Fällen scheint die Ent­
wicklung ihren Ausgang von kreisrunden Gegenständen genommen zu ha­
ben, dem Rade bei den einen, dem Ring bei den anderen.
Man sieht, jedes dieser drei Beispiele hat seine individuelle Note, und
so ist es bei allen anderen Fällen. Das Russische hat von dieser Art etwa
80 Paare, gezählt allerdings nur solche, an denen ein Adjektivum auf -ovyj
beteiligt ist. Die Beteiligung der -ovyj-Adjektive spielt für die Aufklärung
des Vorganges insofern eine Rolle, als dieser Typ der jüngste in der russi­
schen Sprachgeschichte ist. Hierzu einige Erläuterungen:
Das Russische verfügt zur Bildung sog. Beziehungsadjektive über ein
knappes halbes Dutzend von Suffixen. Ich nenne die wichtigsten:
1. --, wie in dužnyj, allgemeinslavisch, mindestens seit tausend Jahren,
von allen einschlägigen Suffixen am häufigsten gebraucht. Das Russi­
sche verfügt über schätzungsweise 25.000 Adjektive mit --, Suffix
-- hat keine spezielle Semantik, es dient lediglich zur Bildung von Ad­
jektiven.
2. -'anyj, wie in ledjanój, ebenfalls allgemeinslavisch, außerhalb des Rus­
sischen vertreten als -en-, sehr alt, doch weitaus weniger gebraucht. Das
Russische hat Überschlagsweise 300 Wörter mit diesem Suffix. Es gilt
als seit langem schon unproduktiv. Es hat eine speziellere Bedeutung.
Sie wird gewöhnlich mit «gemacht aus...» angegeben.
3. -ovyj geht auf die u-Deklination zurück, ist nach dieser Herkunft das
jüngste der Suffixe. Es ist etwa im 12. Jh. aufgekommen und nur im
Ost- und Westslavischen vertreten. Es hat keine spezielle Semantik. Darin
ist es dem Suffix -- gleich. Das Russische verfügt bzw. verfügte über
insgesamt an die 3.200 Adjektive auf -ovyj. Durchgesetzt hat sich -ovyj
etwa im 15./16. Jh., stark gebraucht wurde es im 18. Jh. und später bis
in unsere Tage.
Die eben skizzierten historischen Umstände der drei wichtigsten Adjek­
tivsuffixe des Russischen sind für die Beurteilung der semantischen Ent­
wicklung der Adjektive im Russischen insofern von Belang, als im Falle
510 NORBERT REITER

von Adjektivdubletten diejenige auf -ovyj, und das ist gewöhnlich die
jüngere, sich semantisch mit dem Grundwort deckt, während die ande­
re auf -1- oder -'anyj, und das ist die ältere, semantisch vom Grund­
wort abgerückt ist. Bei den im Russ. bekannten etwa 80 Paaren ist das
zu ca. 70% so. Bei den verbleibenden 30% ist es umgekehrt, doch zeigt
sich, daß in diesen Fällen das -ονχ/-Adjektivum das ältere und das auf
-- das jüngere, hinzugebildete ist.
Für die Erklärung des Phänomens haben also die Dublettenpaare mit
verschiedenalten Suffixen hochrangige methodische Bedeutung. Dieses Phä­
nomen ist es, das in der sowjetischen Sprachwissenschaft «okačestvlenie ot-
nositel'nych prilagaternych» gennant wird, und damit wollen wir uns nun
näher befassen.
«Okačestvlenie» oder - wie ich es übersetzt habe - «Vereigenschaftung»
verrät durch sich selbst die theoretische Grundlage, auf der der Vorgang
sowjetischerseits erklärt wird. Sie besteht in der Annahme, daß die Haupt­
wortkategorien ontische Gegebenheiten mitteilen, Substantive also «Substan­
zen», Adjektive «Eigenschaften», Verben «Tätigkeiten». Demnach wird mit
«okačestvlenie» oder «Vereigenschaftung» gemeint, daß sich ein Adjekti-
vum semantisch zu einem wahren Eigenschaftswort entwickele und am En­
de seiner Entwicklung einen ontisch anderen Tatbestand signalisiere als zu
Anfang. Mit dieser Annahme gerät das Problem in eine Sackgasse. Mit «Ei­
genschaft» ist wissenschaftlich Endstation. Es bietet sich keine Möglichkeit
mehr, übergreifende Zusammenhänge aufzudecken. Das alles nur, weil man
sich bei der Einschätzung der Hauptwortkategorien von traditionellen Vor­
stellungen leiten läßt, aber die sind falsch.
Die Wort kategorien signalisieren keine ontischen Tatbestände, vielmehr
handelt es sich dabei aller Wahrscheinlichkeit nach um kommunikations-
steuernde Zeichen, anders gesagt: Um Informationen zur Informationsver­
arbeitung, die mit der durch ein Wort gegebenen Sachinformation grund­
sätzlich nichts zu tun haben und daher einer jeden entsprechend den kom­
munikativen Bedürfnissen beigegeben werden können. Daher ist es auch
möglich, daß ein Sachbestand auf verschiedene Weise angezeigt wird: sub­
stantivisch, adjektivisch oder auch verbal. Deutsch eisern gibt keine andere
Sachinformation als das Eisen, das Laufen keine andere als laufen. Übli­
cherweise treten die substantivische und die adjektivische, sodann die sub­
stantivische und die verbale Anzeige zusammen auf. Es gibt aber auch eini­
ge Fälle, wo alle drei üblich sind. Bei Farbbezeichnungen findet man das.
 ENTWICKLUNG SEMANTISCHER INHALTE 511

Vgl.: der grüne Baum, ein lichtes Grün; die Bäume grünen. Auch im Slavi-
schen gibt es eine ganze Reihe solcher Tripletten.
Da die Wortkategorien mit den mitgeteilten Sachbeständen nichts zu
tun haben, ist auch die in der Slavistik übliche Zweiteilung der Adjektive
in sog. «Beziehungs-» und «Qualitätsadjektive» nicht gerechtfertigt, und
das sogar schon dann, wann man sich an die traditionelle Auffassung hält;
denn wenn Adjektive «Eigenschaften» zu signalisieren hätten, dann dürfte
es nur Qualitätsadjektive geben und wäre für «Beziehungsadjektive» gar kein
Raum, aber dazu versteht man sich in der Slavistik nicht, weil eben doch
gewisse Unterschiede zu bemerken sind. Aufzudecken, worin dieser Unter­
schied in Wahrheit besteht, ist mein Anliegen hier.
Wörter wie ledovój, dolgovój, krugovój und unzählige andere i n d
Adjektive, und sie sind nicht adjektivisch verkleidete Substantive, wie oft
gemeint wird. Sie für verkappte Substantive zu halten, ist falsch, da sie den­
selben semantischen Inhalt signalisieren wie das dazugehörige Substantiv,
von dem sie per Suffigierung formal auch abgeleitet sind. Ledovój signali­
siert keinen anderen Sachbestand als lëd, nur geschieht es das eine Mal in
adjektivischer, das andere Mal in substantivischer Anzeige.
Obwohl an den drei genannten Beispielen festgestellt worden war, daß
jedes seine eigene Individualität hat, in e i n e r Hinsicht sind sie ein­
ander aber gleich: Das eine der beiden Adjektive gibt den Inhalt des Sub-
stantivums in allen seinen Komponenten wieder, das andere aber nur einen
davon. Wir können es auch so sagen: Das eine Mal ist der Inhalt komplex,
das andere Mal einfacher. «Einfach» und «komplex» sind Skalenbegriffe.
Sie beziehen sich auf die Minus- bzw. Plusrichtung auf einer Skala, die wir
die «Komplexitätsskala» nennen können. So können wir sagen: Der seman­
tische Inhalt von ledovój ist komplexer als der von ledjanój und dieser wie­
der einfacher als der von ledovój.
«Einfach» und «komplex» beschreiben semantische Beschaffenheiten;
unter pragmatischem Gesichtspunkt könnte man von «allgemein» und «spe­
ziell» sprechen. Das Speziellere hat einen geringeren Anwendungsradius als
das Allgemeinere. Das ist eine auch außerhalb des Sprachlichen geltende Re­
gel. Je mehr Bedingungen an etwas gestellt werden, desto schwieriger wird
es, ein Exemplar zu finden, das alle gestellten Bedingungen erfüllt.
Und nun verbinden wir die systematische Feststellung mit der histori­
schen Beobachtung:
512 NORBERT REITER

Von einem Dublettenpaar hat den einfacheren oder auch allgemeineren In­
halt gewöhnlich das ältere Adjektivum, während das jüngere den komple­
xeren, spezielleren signalisiert, der zugleich der des Grundwortes ist.
Demnach scheint die Entwicklung vom Speziellen zum Allgemeinen ei­
ne Funktion der Zeit zu sein. Da nun aber - gerade auch am Russischen -
zu beobachten ist, daß die Entwicklung mal schneller, mal zögerlicher vor
sich gehen kann, d.h. die schnellere Entwicklung zum allgemeinen Inhalt
auch bei den jüngeren -ονyj/-Adjektiven auftritt und vornehmlich im 18. Jh.
beginnt, kommen wir zu dem Ergebnis, daß die Entwicklung nicht eigent­
lich eine Funktion der Zeit, sondern der Anzahl der ein Adjektivum gebrau­
chenden Menschen ist. Also: Je mehr Leute ein Adjektivum gebrauchen,
umso schneller entwickelt es sich semantisch vom Speziellen zum Allgemei­
neren hin.
Auch das ist eine außerhalb des Sprachlichen beobachtbare Regel: Je
mehr Leute an einer Sache beteiligt sind, desto geringer wird die relative
Trefferquote. Die Treffer diffundieren, das arithmetische Mittel der Tref­
ferwerte sinkt ab. Das etwa ist die Situation, in der sich die Semantik des
länger gebrauchten Adjektivums befindet. Die Einfachheit seines Inhaltes
entspricht etwa dem Absinken des Mittels der Trefferwerte. Die Entwick­
lung hat zur Folge, daß die semantische Verbindung zwischen Adjektivum
und substantivischem Grundwort immer lockerer wird. Ledjanój hat mit
lëd, krúglyj mit krug nicht mehr viel zu tun. Sofern nun weiterhin Bedarf
danach besteht, den vollen Inhalt des Grundwortes auch adjektivisch zu sig­
nalisieren, wird er durch die Bildung eines neuen Adjektivums befriedigt,
was umso besser geht, je mehr Suffixe zur Derivation bereitstehen. Ein sol­
ches jüngeres Suffix ist im Russischen - ovyj, und so wird der Bedarf mit
Adjektiven dieses jüngeren Typs abgedeckt. Es entstehen ledovój, krugo-
vój, dolgovój usw.
Zurück zum «okačestvlenie». Dieser Begriff beruht nicht einfach nur
auf der traditionellen Auffassung von den Wortkategorien, sie wird dar­
über hinaus durch eine optische Täuschung begünstigt. Sie besteht in einer
statistisch eindeutigen Zuordnung zwischen den Extrembereichen der Kom­
plexitätsskala und den Wortkategorien. Das heißt: Hochkomplexe Inhalte
werden mehrheitlich substantivisch, die einfachen adjektivisch angezeigt. So
entsteht der Eindruck, als würden sich die Adjektive von der Dinghaftig-
keit weg zur wahren Eigenschaft hinentwickeln und erschiene somit «oka­
čestvlenie» auch aus dieser Sicht gerechtfertigt, was es freilich nicht ist.
 ENTWICKLUNG SEMANTISCHER INHALTE 513

Die statistische Verteilung der Wortkategorien auf die Extrembereiche

der Komplexitätsskala erweist sich auch an den hier besprochenen Adjekti­
ven selbst: es sind Derivate zumeist von Substantiven. Ausnahmslos ist das
nicht, es gibt auch Adjektive von Adjektiven.
Es fragt sich nun, wie diese merkwürdige Zuordnung der Wortkatego­
rien zu den beiden Extrembereichen der Komplexitätsskala zu erklären ist.
In der wünschenswerten Ausführlichkeit kann ich das hier nicht vortragen,
doch will ich immerhin einen Hinweis geben:
Es besteht ein Zusammenhang zwischen dem Komplexitätsgrad eines
semantischen Inhaltes und der Vielfalt der Relationen, die er eingehen kann,
je komplexer er ist, desto vielfältiger (nicht zahlreicher!) die Relationen. Da
nun die substantivische Anzeige aus kommunikationsstrategischen Gründen
dann erfolgt - aber nicht erfolgen muß! - wenn es spezielle Relationen zu
beachten gilt oder auf sie doch zumindest aufmerksam gemacht werden soll,
ist die Zuordnung des Substantivums zu den höheren Komplexitätsgraden
eine Folge kommunikationsstrategischen Verhaltens und keine ontisch be­
dingte Zwangsläufigkeit.
Lassen sich diese aus der Beobachtung russischen Materials gewonne­
nen Überlegungen allgemein für die Sprachwissenschaft, besonders vielleicht
die Indogermanistik verwerten? Ich glaube schon.
Die Entwicklung vom Speziellen zum Allgemeinen oder - um den rus­
sischen Fachterminus noch einmal zu verwenden - das «okačestvlenie» gilt
als irreversibel. Ausnahmslos ist auch das zwar wieder nicht, immerhin in
einer Unzahl von Fällen ist es tatsächlich so. Das legt den Gedanken nahe,
daß die uns heute bekannten Adjektive, gerade die mit den einfachsten, ja
primitivsten Inhalten, eine solche Entwicklung hinter sich gebracht und -
vereinfacht gesagt - irgendwann als Substantive begonnen haben.
Diese Annahme wäre die beste Erklärung für einen merkwürdigen Tat­
bestand. Zu den semantisch einfachsten Adjektiven gehören die sog. Polar­
adjektive wie KLEIN / GROSS, KURZ / LANG, SCHMAL / BREIT usw.
Sie sind zwar in allen indogermanischen Sprachen vorhanden, decken sich
aber etymologisch nur zum geringsten Teil; nicht einmal innerhalb des doch
noch sehr kohärenten Slavischen gibt es restlose Übereinstimmung. Merk­
würdig daran ist, daß hier glatt das Gegenteil von dem vorliegt, was man
eingentlich erwarten müßte; denn allgemeine Inhalte sind ja schließlich
etwas, das viele Menschen verbindet, während man sich eher vorstellen kann,
514 NORBERT REITER

daß die speziellen von Region zu Region, Gesellschaft zu Gesellschaft dif­

ferieren. Man müßte also erwarten, daß gerade die Wörter mit den allge­
meinsten Inhalten derselben ursprachlichen Entstehung sind und ihre ety­
mologische Verwandtschaft am besten bewahrt haben. Aber das ist nicht so.
Da die Entwicklung vom Speziellen zum Allgemeinen kontinuierlich und
im großen und ganzen in nur e i n e r Richtung erfolgt, erhalten die
Wörter allgemeinen Inhaltes ständig Nachschub. Da aber nun weiter die
Differenzierungs- und Verwendungsmöglichkeiten umso geringer werden,
je allgemeiner der Inhalt ist, würde sich im allgemeinen Bereich der Kom­
plexitätsskala eine Akkumulation von Synonymen ergeben, die im Laufe
der Zeit ständig größer würde und zu einer Belastung des Zeicheninventars
führen müßte. Dem scheint man durch Beibehaltung der jeweils jüngeren
und modernen und durch Ausscheidung der älteren Form zu begegnen. Wir
hätten es hier also mit einer Erscheinung der Sprachökonomie zu tun. Was
ich hier vortrage, ist eine - allerdigns nicht unfundierte - Mutmaßung, zur
Rechtfertigung sage ich aber, es gehört zur Aufgabe eines Sprachwissen­
schaftlers, auch die Konsequenzen aus seinen Beobachtungen in die Rech­
nung mit einzubeziehen und es nicht bei der simplen Tatsachenfeststellung
zu belassen.

LITERATURVERZEICHNIS

Archangel'skaja, T.A., Stepeni sravnenija otnositeI'nyh prilagateI'nych,

priobretajuščich kačestvennye značenija. Učennye zapiski MGPI 1971,
Nr. 2. 167-178.
Archangel'skaja, Τ.Α., Razvitie novych sintaksičeskich svojstv otnositeI'nych
prilagatel'nych v processe ich okačestvlenija, in: Voprosy grammatičes-
kogo stroją sovremmennogo russkogo jazyka. Sbornik statej. Moskva
(MGPI) 1972, 30-37.
Archangel'skaja, T.Α., Razvitie leksiko-grammatičeskich svojstv kačestven-
nosti u otnositeI'nych prilagatePnych v sovremennon russkom jazyke.
AKD. Moskva 1972.
Archangel'skaja, Τ.Α., Obrazovanie kratkich form u otnositePnych prila­
gatePnych v processe ich okačestvlenija, in: Lingvističeskie discipliny na
fakul'tete russkogo jazyka i literatury. Materiały seminara prepodavate-
 ENTWICKLUNG SEMANTISCHER INHALTE 515

lej russ. jaz.ped. institutov Moskv. zony 25-26, okt. 1971. Moskva
(MGPI) 1973. 46-52.
Landsman, I.M., Process okačestvlenija ot substantivnych otnositePnych
prilagatePnych v russkom jazyke. AKD Taškent.
Potemkina, A.I., O perechode otnositePnych prilagatePnych v kačestven-
nye, in: Učennye zapiski Moskovskogo gos. ped. inst. inostrannych ja-
zykov im. M. Toreza. Moskva 1968, 4, I, 149-167.
Reiter, N., Die ovyi-Adjektive in Russland. In: Osteuropa-Institut an der
Freien Universität Berlin, Slavistische Veröffentlichungen, Bd. 61. Ber­
lin 1986.
Werner, O., Zum Problem der Wortarten, in: Sprachgebrauch und Sprach­
system. Festschrift für Hugo Moser. Düsseldorf 1975. Teil 2, 432-471.

REIT
 A PERFORMANCE MODEL FOR A NATURAL THEORY
OF LINGUISTIC CHANGE

ELKE RONNEBERGER-SIBOLD
University of Freiburg, Fed. Rep. of Germany

0. Introduction
The basic idea of any natural theory of linguistic change is that languages
do not change randomly or due to certain entirely system-inherent evalua­
tion criteria, but that languages are changed by their users in order to
facilitate communication. This means that the language users are constant­
ly adapting their «communicative instrument», i.e. their language, to their
needs of production, e.g. the need for ease of pronunciation, and percep­
tion, e.g. the need for unambiguity. (The needs of language acquisition, often
mentioned in this context, coincide with some of these.) This idea, which
is in fact an old one 1 , underlies not only Natural Phonology and Mor­
phology in a narrower sense 2 , but also several other recent functionalist
contributions to the explanation of linguistic change, proceeding from very
different viewpoints, e.g. information theory and information processing
(Lüdtke 1980 and, less formalized, Werner 1977, 1984 and Ronneberger-
Sibold 1980), typology and statistics (Altmann/Lehfeldt 1973, 1980),
language universais research (the Cologne project, programmatically Seiler
ed. 1978), pragmatics (Givón 1979), formal logic (Vennemann 1975), «func­
tional grammar» (Bossuyt 1983), notwithstanding their substantial theoretical
differences in other respects.
As part of the theoretical framework for such performance-based

1 For references to traditional work in this vein in phonology see Donegan/Stampe 1979,
126 and passim. For the topics to be discussed here, Jespersen 1894, 1941, Frei 1929, Zipf
1936, 1949, and of course functional structuralism - the Praguians and Martinet - are of special
interest. For a discussion see Ronneberger-Sibold 1980.
2 E.g. Stampe 1980, Donegan/Stampe 1979, Dressier 1980/1983 for Natural Phonology,
Hooper 1976 and Vennemann (in a diachronic perspective especially 1972) for Natural Generative
Phonology, Mayerthaler 1981, Wurzel 1984 on Natural Morphology, Dressier 1985 on Natural
Phonology and Morphology.
518 ELKE RONNEBERGER-SIBOLD

theories, a production-perception-model seems desirable, which shows in

a systematic way the different needs of the speaker and the hearer as well
as the interrelations of these needs. The most elementary concepts of such
a model are briefly outlined in the first part of this paper. (A much more
elaborated version is to be found in Ronneberger-Sibold 1980, 134 ff.) The
second part is concerned with its implications for the explanation of linguistic
change.

1. Description of the model

1.1 Operations and needs.

In the model, the complex operations of production and perception are
each divided into three levels. (Cf. figures I and II: I shows as an example
the production and perception of Engl, (these) houses and Lat. (hae) domus.
II shows the performance needs and their interrelations.)
To each level correspond certain basic operations of the speaker and the
hearer. Presenting these operations separately and in a quasi-chronological
order constitutes of course a strong abstraction from what is going on in
reality. But it is not an illicit abstraction, because although in reality these
operations are closely interlaced and some of them are even not carried out
in every case, they do exist as part of the language users' strategies for pro­
duction and perception, and they are performed when necessary.
This is particularly relevant to perception: Of course, not every por­
tion of an utterance is equally decoded step by step from sound to mean­
ing, because so much of it is redundant. Otherwise the great amount of am­
biguity of natural languages would be intolerable. But for every decoding
operation there are cases where it has to be performed and where ambiguity
consequently does complicate it up to the point where - in the extreme -
decoding becomes impossible.
We will outline for each level firstly the respective operations, second­
ly the easiest way to perform them, and thirdly at least one linguistic feature
which assures that they may be performed in this way. To these features
we refer as «needs».
On the morphosyntactic 3 planning level, the speaker of English re-

3 All operations referring to syntax (including congruence) and the respective needs are
excluded here. (But cf. Ronneberger-Sibold 1980, 134 ff).
 A PERFORMANCE MODEL FOR LINGUISTIC CHANGE
519

Figure I: Production and perception of Engl, (these) houses and Lat. (hae) domus.
 520
ELKE RONNEBERGER-SIBOLD

Figure II: Some performance needs and their interrelations

 A PERFORMANCE MODEL FOR LINGUISTIC CHANGE 521

places the meaningful elements [house] and [PL], here called morphemes,
(which he has produced on higher levels of production not included in the
model) by the corresponding morphs / h a u s / and / - z / 4 . These could be
called his primary phonological intentions.
In English, this mapping operation is performed in the easiest possible
way, because to each morpheme corresponds just one morph (leaving for
the moment out of consideration the few completely irregular forms like
feet etc.)· For a speaker of Latin going to say domūs (Nom. PL), however,
the task is more difficult. (This is expressed by the fat lines in figure I,
denoting operations which are not performed in the easiest possible way.)
The speaker of Latin must first combine [PL] and [Norn.) into one so-call­
ed portmanteau-morpheme, and then choose the corresponding morph
/-ūs/ from among a variety of allomorphs including
etc. 5
So we may note as a very important need on this level of production
the representation of one morpheme by one morph (syntagmatically and
paradigmatically). Note that this does not imply the converse, one morpheme
for each morph. This would mean unambiguity and is a need of the hearer,
not of the speaker 6 .

4 I take / - z / as the underlying form of the normal Engl. Plural suffix following the in­
terpretation of the evolution of the Engl, plural rule by Keyser/O'Neil 1980. All informations
about diachronic and synchronic facts concerning Engl, plural formation as well as the phonetic
transcription used here are taken from Brunner 1960.
5 As in the case of many other mental functions, our main source of evidence for ope­
rations of this type by the human brain are the cases where they do not function normally,
e.g. slips of the tongue (possibly under the influence of fatigue, alcohol etc.), aphasia, lan­
guage acquisition, and of course language change, which always starts as an «error». (Another
important source of evidence is the adaptation of loanwords.) For all these situations characte­
rized by reduced capacities for brainwork, planning errors e.g. in the choice of allomorphs
are typical. Normally, more regular allomorphs are substituted for less regular ones, e.g. mow-ed
for mow-n. The fact that this sort of errors occurs in situations where the speaker is just not
monitoring his production in favour of the hearer, is empirical evidence against the claim of
Mayerthaler 1981, 62, that production plays no role in the evaluation of morphological
naturalness.
6 This asymmetry between the speaker and the hearer is not properly expressed in the
often-cited formula «one meaning: one form», which suggests a biunique representation of
morphemes by morphs. Unambiguity becomes an aim for the speaker only indirectly as a result
of negative feedback from the hearer. So, if he is often misunderstood, because he has used
a particular ambiguous morph, he will tend to avoid this morph, but not ambiguity in general.
522 ELKE RONNEBERGER-SIBOLD

On the morphonological planning level, the «primary phonological in­

tentions» (here described as strings of systematic phonemes) are «carried
out», i.e. they are transformed into the mental picture of the phonetic string
which immediately governs the nervous impulses for actual articulation.
The easiest operation on this level is of course again the direct mat­
ching of each systematic phoneme with just one corresponding phone. In
the case of domūs this need is respected, but not in the case of houses: Here
the [i] of the ending has to be inserted and the stem-final As/ has to be chang­
ed into [-z]. The first of these two operations can be (nearly) described by
a phonological rule (it has an obvious phonetic motivation, and it is
automatically phonetically conditioned) 7 , the second by a morphonological
rule: Voicing of a stem-final fricative before /-z/ is lexically and mor­
phologically constrained (houses with [-z-] vs. glasses with [-s-], wives with
[-v-] vs. wife's with [-f-]).
The difference between the operations corresponding to these two types
of rules is relatively small for the speaker compared to the difference bet­
ween these operations and the ones of the morphosyntactical planning level:
Both phonological and morphonological rules describe modifications of his
primary phonological intentions 8 , whereas on the morphosyntactic plann­
ing level the speaker links elements of meaning to primary phonological in­
tentions. For the hearer, however, the distinction between morphonological
and phonological rules is very important, because the output of the first
ones may (co)signal meaning, whereas the output of the latter ones may not.
The same asymmetry between speaker and hearer obtains with respect to
the distinction between distinctive vs. non-distinctive phonetic features: The

So, as is well known, in the diachronic development of the expressions of grammatical categories,
ambiguity is avoided, where it would handicap the hearer. (E.g. «subject» and «direct object»
referring to [ + human] nouns tend to be kept apart by morphology and/or preferred word-
order, whereas homonymy between endings of the nominal and verbal paradigms (e.g. Engl.
/-z/) does not cause any reaction of the system because there is in most cases enough disam­
biguating context. This difference would be inexplicable if both, absence of allomorphy and
unambiguity were needs of the speaker or of the speaker and the hearer. (That they cannot
both be needs of the hearer alone is shown in note 5, above). Our assumption is that the need
for «1 morpheme →· 1 m r p h » (absence of allomorphy) is shared by the speaker and the hearer,
whereas unambiguity is a need of the hearer only.
7 This is in fact not entirely true, because it is blocked in the genitive plural for the se­
cond underlying / - z / . This is a slight morphological constraint.
8 The difference lies only in the source of the obligation to do so and in the degree to
which these operations serve the need for ease of pronunciation.
 A PERFORMANCE MODEL FOR LINGUISTIC CHANGE 523

speaker has to produce all of them, if he does not want to infringe upon
the norm (in the sense of Coseriu (1969) 1971). For the hearer, however,
the distinctive features are of course much more important than the non-
distinctive ones 9.
The basic need of the articulation level aims of course at ease of pro­
nunciation, which comprises in fact several needs concerning the structure
and arrangement of segments and the length of utterances (cf. Ronneberger-
Sibold 1980, 186 ff.) For the sake of brevity, these needs are subsumed here
under the heading «ease of pronunciation».
The hearer's first task on his way back from sound to meaning is the
recognition of the smallest distinctive segments in the sound stream, i.e. the
identification of the taxonomic phonemes. In actual speech processing this
must be a very complex operation, where segmentation and identification
are interlaced. Also, this level may be left out in many cases by immediate
recognition of whole syllables or morphs, and the respective strategies may
depend to a certain degree on language structure. We cannot go into these
details here.
Clearly, this task is the easier to perform, the more each segment perceiv­
ed resembles the ideal sound shape of the phoneme it has to be matched
with and only that one: In other words, the phones should be unambiguous
in relation to the taxonomic phonemes. In our examples this need is fairly
well satisfied, because there are no extrinsic allophones.
Unfortunately, the identification of the taxonomie phonemes does not
lead the hearer all the way back to the level of systematic phonemes. This
is due to possible neutralizations on the part of the speaker during mor-
phonological planning. So, the hearer will e.g. identify both sibilants in
[hauziz] as the taxonomie phoneme / z / . To identify the first one as the
systematic underlying / s / , he has to recognize the whole morph / h a u s / im­
mediately connected with the morpheme [house]. The recognition of mor­
phemes, however, is a complicated operation, which cannot be treated in
detail here. We just retain the needs for unambiguous phonemic represen­
tations and the need for unambiguous morphs. As shown by the dotted lines
in figure I, the first one is not satisfied in the case of /hauz/, the second
one in the case of Engl, / - z / and Lat. /-ūs/.

9 The distinction between phonological, morphonological, and (allomorphic) mor­

phological rules is treated very comprehensively in a Natural, semiotic framework in Dressier
1985, 57 ff. On co-signalling (indexicality) 308 ff.
524 ELKE RONNEBERGER-SIBOLD

In both cases, unambiguity is obtained only on the next level of

decoding, where larger units are concerned (in this case the NP with the
disambiguating determinatives these and hae).
So, if the need for unambiguity is not satisfied on a lower level of pro­
cessing, the problem will automatically be raised for solution on the next
higher one. In this sense, all the needs for unambiguity form one block,
graphically expressed by the frame in figure I.

1.2 Interrelation of the needs.

As has often been observed, all performance needs cannot be satisfied
simultaneously, because some of them contradict each other 10. This means
that one can only be satisfied at the expense of one or several others and
vice versa. E.g. the easy morphosyntactic planning of the Engl, plural has
to be paid for by the speaker himself on the morphonological planning level
and by the hearer on the morphological processing level. In the Latin ex­
ample, the distribution of effort is just reversed: The allomorph /-ūs/
burdening the morphosyntactic planning level has diachronically evolved
out of IE *ou-es by vowel merger 11 . From this articulatorily motivated
origin it has retained (like most inflected forms) the faculty of assuring an
easy passage through all lower levels of production and perception.
So the mutual incompatibility among the three needs of the speaker,
mentioned in this very reduced model, can be expressed in the following
way: In order to satisfy the hearer's need for unambiguous phones the
speaker can renounce either easy morphosyntactic planning, or easy mor­
phonological planning, or easy articulation. (This last case was approximately

10 For the most fundamental conflict between speaker and hearer (ease and necessity
to be understood) cf. Martinet 1955, 94 ff., and Liidtke 1980, 5. For conflicts with respect
to the structure of phonemic systems, cf. Martinet, loc. cit., with respect to processes and rules
in Natural Phonology Donegan/Stampe 1979, 129 ff., for conflicts within morphology Wurzel,
1984, 205, between morphology and phonology Martinet 1960/1963, 165 and Werner 1977,
1984 (mnemonic vs. articulatory ease), Mayerthaler 1981, 43 and Wurzel, loc. cit. (phonetic
naturalness vs. morphological naturalness) and Vennemann 1972 (phonetic analogy vs. con­
ceptual analogy). Enumerations and explanations of various conflicting needs on different levels
of production and perception are to be found in Givón 1979, 268 f. and, in the older literature,
very explicitely in Jespersen, especially 1941, and Frei 1929. (This list is of course far from
being exhaustive.) All of these authors refer (explicitly or implicitly) to conflicts between dif­
ferent performance needs.
π Krahe 1969, 24.
 A PERFORMANCE MODEL FOR LINGUISTIC CHANGE 525

realized in some stage of Middle English with the pluralmorph /-iz/ after
all consonants. This was easy to plan on both levels but longer to pronounce
than the Modern Engl, variants [-s] and [-z].) Only a very complete satisfac­
tion of all three needs together will inevitably result in difficult recognition
of the phonemes. This is symbolized by the converging arrows with an in­
verted head and the symbols for conjunction in figure II. To a certain ex­
tent this impediment to phonological processing can be compensated by the
higher levels of processing, but if also this «reserve» is used up, the absolute
limit of effort reduction for the speaker is reached: Communication will
be disturbed. In this sense, the hearer's need for unambiguity has an ab­
solute priority over all other needs.
Note that the symbols in figure II denote purely implicational and con­
junctive relations, namely: The more you satisfy the need at the tail of the
arrow, the less the need at its head will be satisfied, unless the decrease of
effort is compensated by an increase with respect to one of the other con­
junctively connected needs.
This is a very typical constellation of relations among different needs
- though by no means the only possible one. There are several other types
of relations, just as there are many other needs which cannot be explained
here, such as the needs concerning the inventories of linguistic units, the
length of utterances, and the order of words and morphemes. (Cf.
Ronneberger-Sibold 1980, 177 ff.) Rather than going into these details, we
will now focus on the question of how this type of performance-based model
can contribute to the explanation of linguistic change.

2. Motivations for linguistic change.

2.0 On predictiveness.
On the basis of this model, it is possible to distinguish at least five types
of motivations for the language users to change their language. Taken
together, these motivations may provide rather plausible explanations for
individual historical changes with a certain degree of predictiveness. Predic-
tiveness here means that, given all relevant data, the change in question would
have been predictable for the reasons given in the explanation with a fairly
high probability - of course not with certainty as required for a truly deter­
ministic (deductive-nomological) explanation.
In our view, predictiveness in historical linguistics is something like an
ideal goal: One should strive to reach it by reducing as much as possible
526 ELKE RONNEBERGER-SIBOLD

the number of competing possible developments, but at the same time one
has to be aware of the fact that the goal will never be entirely reached 12.
So, of two explanations accounting for the same facts, the one is to be prefer­
red which leaves less possibilities «that it might have been otherwise» (Lass
1980a, 9). But the fact that even the best explanation leaves a rest of in-
determinism should not keep us (as suggested by Lass) from accepting it
as an explanation. (Cf. the discussion between Lass 1980b and Dressier 1980.)

2.1 Local optimization.

The first and most elementary motivation for linguistic change is the
so-called local optimization («partikulare Optimierung» in Ronneberger-
Sibold 1980), i.e. the favouring of one performance need irrespective of the
consequences for the others. As we have seen, any optimization in one place
will create increased difficulties in another place, which will in turn call for
another local optimization, and so on.
Now, provided we can attribute a given historical change to one specific
performance need - which is often but not always possible - then the net­
work of correlations shows us which other need will automatically be
disfavoured and which are the possible reactions by favouring some other,
conjunctively connected need. So e.g. the often observed development of
phonological rules over morphonological to morphological ones 13 is exactly
the repeated compensation for diminishing effort on one level by increased
effort on the next higher one.
So far, the predictiveness of the model is not very high for two reasons:
Firstly, it is unable to determine the limit to which each need may be
disfavoured by favouring a contradictory one. E.g. how much allomorphy
can accumulate, until the speakers will react by some reorganization of the
morphosyntactic planning level? 14.
The second reason for the relatively low predictiveness of the model
outlined so far is the lack of criteria for choosing one out of several com-

12 This may be due to the practical reason that we are unable to know all the facts which
have played a role in a given linguistic change, or to the more principled reason of human
freedom to behave in a non-causal way, or to both.
13 E.g. Dressier 1985, 168 ff. on palatalization in Italian and Polish, Wurzel 1982 on
examples from Germanic languages, and Hooper 1976 from Spanish.
14 Quantitative answers to this type of questions are provided by statistical typological
investigations like e.g. those of Altmann/Lehfeldt 1973, where the limits for certain mor­
phological properties are determined for different classes of languages.
 A PERFORMANCE MODEL FOR LINGUISTIC CHANGE 527

peting local optimizations or one out of several equally possible compen­

satory reactions to a given local optimization. Fortunately, the next four
motivations for language change deducible from the model provide a refine­
ment in exactly these respects, because they constrain the interplay of local
optimizations in addition to inducing changes themselves.

2.2 Analogical behaviour.

The first of these is a very important need itself which could be called
the need for analogical behaviour in its broadest sense. It is the requirement
that in comparable situations the language users' behaviour should be compa­
rable, too. In fact, the relatively high consistency of natural languages, even
of those we consider as very irregular, with respect to paradigm coherence
as well as to typological uniformity would be impossible simply as the out­
come of the interplay of local optimizations without analogical behaviour
as a regulating factor. (Note that the need for «1 morpheme → 1 morph»
on the morphosyntactic planning level is also an instance of this need.)
Clearly, this principle is rather powerful in increasing the predictiveness
of our model: From several possible reactions to a given local optimization
the language users will choose the one to which they are already used from
similar cases - or, to put it from the linguist's point of view: the most system-
adequate one.
E.g. in Latin as well as in the ancient Germanic languages, vowel reduc­
tions through loss, fusion, neutralization etc. in unstressed inflectional en­
dings - a local optimization on the articulation level - typically lead to in­
crease of allomorphy - i.e. a complication on the morphosyntactic planning
level. All these languages were inflecting and therefore rather demanding
on the morphosyntactic planning level anyway 15 . So, the language users,
who were already used to complicated morphological operations, adopted
the new allomorphs rather easily16. E.g. the paradigm of the Lat. u-stems

15 On the advantages and disadvantages of different language types for the different per­
formance needs cf. Ronneberger-Sibold 1980, 137 ff. and, more concisely, 1976.
16 This explains, by the way, the logically unfounded but nevertheless often observed
affinity between inflection and allomorphy: Both rely on a tendency to expend the necessary
effort on the morphosyntactic planning level rather than on the lower levels. This comes very
close to the remark by Skalička (1951)/1979, 47, that (put in our words) the disregard of the
need for «1 morpheme → 1 morph» syntagmatically speaking (by the formation of portmanteau-
morphemes) facilitates the same disregard paradigmatically speaking (allomorphy).
528 ELKE RONNEBERGER-SIBOLD

(domus) would theoretically have been open for a morphonological analysis

of root (dom-) + stem vowel (u ~ ü) + endings for case and number (-s
etc.), if the speakers of Latin had been accustomed to produce their inflec­
tional forms in this way. That this was not the case - at least not for a long
time - is shown by the early substitutions of whole endings of other classes
(including the stem vowels) for those of the u-stems: e.g. Genit. PI. dom-
Orum for dom-uum after hort-örum «garden, Genit. PI», o-stem. Obvious­
ly, -uum and -õrum were considered as allomorphs, the number of which
was reduced by the substitution: a typical optimization on the morphosyn-
tactic planning level.
In Middle English, on the contrary, where the trend was precisely away
from complicated morphological planning operations through drastic reduc­
tion of allomorphy and inflection itself (at least in the nominal categories),
vowel reduction in the suffix -es typically lead only to complications on the
morphonological planning level. Even later optimizations like the rule in­
version from deletion to insertion of [i] in [iz] (Keyser/ O'Neil 1980) never
passed beyond the boundaries of the morphonological planning level. On
the contrary: «Germs» of morphologization (morphonological voicing of
stem-final fricatives, e.g. in houses [hauziz]) were and are still being given
up (older hooves vs. younger hoofs, Brunner 1960, 404). The aim of the
development is quite clearly a completely uniform plural formation with only
strictly phonetically determined modifications.
Of course, the need for analogical behaviour does not provide com­
plete predictiveness either because of the well-known problems connected
with competing lines for analogy to follow.
So e.g. Mayerthaler 1981, 23 ff. claims that analogical change always
follows the direction of iconicity (what is «more» semantically should be
«more» formally), uniformity (1 meaning → 1 form), and transparency (1
form → 1 meaning). All three are undoubtedly instances of the need for
analogical behaviour. But Wurzel 1984 shows that these principles may be
overrun by what he calls «system congruity» (205 ff.). This means that in
producing analogical changes, the language users follow the direction of what
they feel to be normal in their language, and this «depends to a crucial ex­
tent on the given language-specific structural properties». (205) This is simply
still another instance of the need for analogical behaviour, and Wurzel argues
very convincingly that analogical change following the direction of system
congruity against iconicity etc. is not «unnatural» (this would be the conse­
quence of Mayerthaler's definition of morphological naturalness which is
 A PERFORMANCE MODEL FOR LINGUISTIC CHANGE 529

too narrow) but that there is a conflict between system-independent

naturalness and system-dependent naturalness.
Furthermore, the need for analogical behaviour may of course be
outweighed - like all other needs - by other, contradictory needs. This is
especially true in the presence of the next motivation for language change
to be discussed here, namely changes of the relative frequency of linguistic
units.

2.3 Relative frequency.

Clearly, the most frequent forms of a language should be short, easy
to pronounce and to perceive, and they should be producible without much
morphonological planning. Exactly these requirements are met by the well-
known highly frequent and completely irregular suppletive forms of the type
(J) am, (you) are, (he, she, it) is in many languages. During production, they
are taken from an inventory of «ready packed» forms (like Lat. -üs etc.,
except that the whole word is produced in this way). Of course, such an
extremely one-sided distribution of effort in favour of the low-level needs
at the expense of the need for analogical behaviour, especially for «1 mor­
pheme → 1 morph», pays only for a few, very frequent items. (Otherwise
the inventory of morphs would become too big.) But for these, this is the
preferred mode of production, and any diachronic development leading to
it will be favoured. (Details and examples in Werner 1977, 1984 and
Ronneberger-Sibold 1980, 143 ff.)

2.4 Crucial linguistic features.

A fourth motivation for language change which may also help to in­
crease predictiveness are certain crucial characteristics of the language system
which favour one particular distribution of effort more than others. A well-
known case in point is the nature and place of the word accent. In a language
with a very prominent, expiratory accent in a fixed position, e.g. on the root
syllable like in Proto-Germanie, all syllables are divided into two groups:
Those which are always strongly stressed, and those which are always weakly
stressed or unstressed. Now the most reasonable distribution of the necessary
information on these two groups would be to concentrate it as much as possi­
ble in the strong one which is better perceptible for the hearer, and where
many distinctive features needing for their realization a certain amount of
breath volume are easier to realize. So, among the possible optimizations
530 ELKE RONNEBERGER-SIBOLD

on the articulation level in the strong group all those would be accepted which
create new distinctions or strengthen already existing ones. In the weak group,
on the contrary, all sorts of neutralizing changes would be accepted. This
is exactly what happened in the ancient Germanic languages with their two
vowel systems, an expanding one in stressed and a more and more reduced
one in unstressed position, and with the well-known consequences for their
inflectional systems. (Cf. Sigurd 1961.)

2.5 Language contact.

Probably the most obvious motivation for language change is of course
language contact. The most dramatic case is a historical situation forcing
adults to learn a foreign language very quickly and without specific train­
ing. For them, all needs have an absolute priority which contribute to make
a language easy to learn. In our reduced model, this is above all the need
for «1 morpheme → 1 morph». Complicated morphological and mor-
phonological rules are of course a nuisance to somebody who is trying to
learn the most elementary productional and perceptional operations of a
foreign language. Another problem is the mapping of the two sound-systems.
The result is pidginization, which can sweep away in one generation the whole
delicate balance among the different needs, developed over centuries in small
steps by the other motivations for linguistic change, described above.
We hope to have shown that, if one accepts explanation of linguistic
change by naturalness - as we think, one should - then the observation of
the language users' performance needs and of their interplay guided by the
five motivations cited above (and probably by others we have not thought
of) may be useful.

REFERENCES

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Prinzipien und Meßverfahren. München: Fink.
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 A PERFORMANCE MODEL FOR LINGUISTIC CHANGE 531

Brunner, Karl. 1960. Die englische Sprache. Ihre geschichtliche Entwicklung.

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Donegan, Patricia J. & David Stampe. 1979. The study of natural phonology.
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. (1980)/1983. A semiotic model of diachronic process phonology.
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historical linguistics, ed. by Winfred P. Lehmann and Yakov Malkiel,
93-131. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
. 1985. Morphonology: the dynamics of derivation. Ann Arbor: Karoma.
Frei, Henri. 1929. La grammaire des fautes. Paris: Geuthner.
Givón, Talmy. 1979. On understanding grammar. New York: Academic
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Hooper, Joan Bybee. 1976. An introduction to Natural Generative
Phonology. New York: Academic Press.
Jespersen, Otto. 1984. Progress in language. With special reference to
English. London: Swan Sonnenschein. New York: Macmillan.
. 1941. Efficiency in linguistic change. København: Munksgaard.
Keyser, Samuel J., Wayne O'Neil. 1980. The evolution of the English plural
rule. Journal of Linguistic Research 1,2. 17-35.
Krahe, Hans. 1969. Indogermanische Sprachwissenschaft. 5th ed., vol. 2.
Berlin: de Gruyter.
Lass, Roger. 1980a. On explaining language change. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
. 1980b. On some possible weaknesses of «strong naturalism». TCLC
20. 93-102.
Lüdtke, Helmut. 1980. Sprachwandel als universales Phänomen. Auf dem
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tische Grundlagen des Sprach wandeis, ed. by Helmut Lüdtke, 1-19,
182-252. Berlin: de Gruyter.
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Niemeyer.
. 1980. Sprachverwendung, Sprachsystem - Ökonomie und Wandel.
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Typologische Studien, 21-58. Braunschweig: Vieweg. Transl, of: Typ
češtiny. Prague.
Stampe, David. 1980. A dissertation on Natural Phonology. New York:
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Vennemann, Theo. 1972. Phonetic analogy and conceptual analogy.
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phonological change, ed. by Theo Vennemann and H.T. Wilbur, 183-204.
Frankfurt: Athenäum.
. 1975. An explanation of drift. Word order and word order change,
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 A PERFORMANCE MODEL FOR LINGUISTIC CHANGE 533

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 ON «NORMAL» FULL ROOT STRUCTURE
AND ITS HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT

H.B. ROSÉN
Hebrew University, Jerusalem

The justified reluctance most of us feel towards engaging in Indo-

European-Semitic comparison causes us to lose sight of the usefulness of
the discovery of parallelisms of mechanisms in the two families that are due
to inherent structural similarities. Thereby some explanatory advantages may
be lost, that would permit us to infer from established facts in one language-
family to less elucidated ones in the other. The one such similarity we shall
discuss here is that of root structure.
This is also justified in the history of our discipline since the very
notion of a «root» was taken over by Semitic native grammarians during
the Middle Ages from Indian national grammar, while the term «root» now
current is, historically, a loan-translation from Arabic ?asl via Hebrew
šoreš, traditionally rendered as radix, a part of a tree, in renaissance
Philologia sacra grammars. The Arabic term which we mentioned has the
intrinsic semantic value of «fundament» or «foundation», which is an ap­
propriate equivalent of Sanskrit . This notion is not one of seman­
tics, but rather of morphology. It applies to the one morphological segment
that is common to related systems of verbal inflection, such as the common
foundation of the personal inflectional system of an Indie verb in the future
and in the present or of the case inflection of all verbal nominal forms,
such as the present participle in relation to the perfect participle in -to from
which the root is inferred. In Semitic, that notion would go to the common
basis of, say, the personal and temporal inflection of the causative, inten­
sive and the non-causative-non-intensive stem of a given lexical verbal
entity.
Now it was soon discovered that the roots had certain phonological pro­
perties in common. In Semitic, it was the fact of their constituting a sequence
of three consonants, while Indo-European philology only much later for-
536 H.B. ROSÉN

mulated the properties of a root on grounds of the fact that the sequence
of the radical elements with an addition whatsoever can form a syllable,
a feature that is due to a particular restriction providing a limited selection
of the medial root element to a class of phonemes that may or may not serve
as syllable centres, that is the sonants. No such restriction is prevalent in
Semitic, where every phoneme admitted at the extremity of a root is also
admissible as its medial element. No sonant phoneme, in fact, exists in
Semitic, as a consequence whereof, Semitic has no morphological Abstufung
and no zero degree can be spoken of there in contrast to a Vollstufe. The
morphological mechanisms vested in Semitic more on so-called internal
change than on affixation, as they are in Indo-European, are also a result
of this fact, since in Semitic there is an interplay of monosyllabic and
disyllabic bases of one and the same root. On the other hand, every one
of the three radical elements in Semitic can be constituted by one single non-
vocalic phoneme only, while, as we know, Indo-European roots may have
composite radicals initially and finally, subject to the condition, however,
that these groupings should not infringe on syllable structure, that is that
an initial element should be of a sonority-ascending sequence towards the
root centre, while the opposite should be the case for the root-final compo­
nent, the central radical alone, the one preceding which all apophony takes
place, never being composite. This feature allows the distinction of roots
otherwise of identical or very similar phonological composition still to be
distinct, such as the two Verbal roots *g-n- «give birth» and *gn-... «know»
distinguished solely by strength of the relative position of the nasal, being,
in one case, the medial element itself and subject to apophony, in the other
case preceding the medial radical and not partaking in an apophonic
mechanism, since it constantly occupies a syllable-explosive position follow­
ing the root initial occlusive. Analogous statements may be made, for in­
stance, with reference to pairs such as *sw-d- «be pleasant» and *s-wd-
«sweat», *st-r- «be solid» and *str- «spread out» and the like.
It is obvious that I am not presenting IE. roots in a fashion consistent
with Benvenistian root-theory: principally, we are using the term «root» for
what would include by that theory the racine, the suffixe and the élargisse­
ment, and we are not ascribing any meaning-preserving function to a posited
alternation of a thème II. This is not the occasion to set out in detail what
could be considered as the advantages of our terminological and structural
approach; it is only our terminological usage I intended to make clear. What
is most important appears to be the fact that our presentation allows a
 ON «NORMAL» FULL ROOT STRUCTURE 537

phonological description of the root, as encouraged by Ammer 1 and

Kurytowicz2.
Now the phonological characterization of a root is very important in
that respect, that words of inflectional languages, unless compound, can
have only one morpheme consistent with the phonological characteristics
of a root. The functional hierarchical gradation of the constituent elements
of a word is also obvious in a hierarchical gradation of the phonetic volume
of the non-radical, that is either derivational or inflectional, morphemes.
Morphemes such as - are inconceivable as roots
in Indo-European, as are stem preformatives such as m-, in Semitic.
Indo-European has no stem preformatives; the normal structure of a
derivative morpheme is an optional consonant or consonant cluster with a
sonant, which renders apophony possible, in a way that the suffix normally
ends in that sonant with no descending syllable coda, e.g.
, etc. This makes it possible for verbal roots answering that descrip­
tion to change their status from final members of compounds into deriva­
tional suffixes, such as Lat. -fer, -ger, OInd. -ja-, - and the
like, a process that would not have been possible with roots of «full» volume.
However, all the roots do not correspond to the normal structure and
some may have a lesser volume. This has induced medieval Arabic and
Hebrew grammarians to set off so-called «debilitated» or «deficient» roots
from «complete» ones.
The existence of reduced-volume roots must in no way be confused with
assumed partial segments of full-volume roots, a process of speculation which
has been for many generations current in Hebrew linguistics, in the sense
that a common semantic basis was assumed for various full roots that have
two of their three radicals in common. Some of the «racines» of Benevenis-
tian theory that can take different «suffixes» remind us of that line of
thought, but are of no more semantic value. Only very recently has
Kurytowicz shown in what condition two Semitic roots that have only a pair

ι Ammer 1950-2: 213: «Die idg. Wurzel besteht aus mindestens zwei Elementen, d.i. der
zweimaligen Aufeinanderfolge von Konsonant und Vokal».
2 Kuryiowicz 1935: 121: «La definition phonétique, plus féconde que la définition séman­
tique, est la suivante: la racine est la partie du mot... qui comporte 1) la consonne initiale ou
le groupe consonantique initial, 2) la voyelle fondamentale, 3) la consonne finale ou le groupe
consonantique final». Cf. also Rosén 1961: 196 (= 1982:153).
3 Cf. Rosén 1968: 369f. (= 1982: 241f.).
538 H.B. ROSEN

of radicals in common can be considered to be the same: that is, if the two
interchanging radicals are cognate phonemes, phonemes which stand in some
relation to each other by virtue of a phonological rule 4 . Conditions of that
sort seem not to be prevalent in Indo-European, and consequently, any
theory of root determinatives has as little to stand on in Indo-European as
it has in Semitic. What we are concerned with are roots of reduced volume
or those that were such at least originally. They are found in both language
families that concern us here, and their status and history gives ground to
some typologically comparative observations.
The first and, as it seems, most important one, concerns the status of
these roots in the semantic framework of the language. These roots prevail
in the names of essential concepts of life 5 . In Semitic, verbal morphology
is such that it is only with considerable difficulty that biradical bases can
be maintained in inflection, and we shall see that many verbs undergo pro­
cesses by which they can adapt themselves to the requirements of inflec­
tion; that is why in Semitic we have parts of the body, Heb. yåd, Akk. qãt-,
«hand», Heb.. «tooth» ś-p-, «lip», ρ- «mouth», r-š «head», p-n- «face»,
c
-n- «eye», d-m «blood», š-t «the behind», to which we may also add šem
«name», as an individual characteristic of the human; verbs that may pro­
perly be described as semantically primitive have a basically biradical root
structure: t-η- «cause to be, give», -k-1- «eat», - - «seize», Heb. Ar. -r-?-
«see», Aram, h-z- «id.». This group is matched in Indo-European by verbs
which describe the elementary physical activities, functions and positions:
with no initial occlusive *X-d «eat», (in zero-degree *d- in dens etc. «tooth»),
*-y- «go», *-r- «move» (intr.), *X-q- «move» (trans.), *X-q- «see», further
*st- «be positioned», *p-X- «drink», *s-d- «sit» with its causative *si- «set»,
(?) «march» etc., Slav, xod-), *k-i- " *dr- «run», . ■
«speak», *gw-m- «go», *s-q- «go after», *su- or *pu- «give life to», *g-n-
(give) birth», *m-r- «die», *p-t- «move fast», *l-u- «wash», *t-g- «cover»,
«touch (?)», and also by some nouns such as *p-d- «foot», -s- «hand»
enlarged by a probable - suffix as in χειρ, kesseras, hasnam; further­
more, there are again the semantically «primitive» notions as *X-s- «be»,
-u- «exist». Then there are the basic kinship terms: «father»,

4 Kuryiowicz 1973: 16-26, cf. Rosén 1978: 444 (= 1984a: 340).

5 Moscati 1947: 116 (with a short survey of the history of the treatment of the problem);
Conti 1980: 12-14.
 ON «NORMAL» FULL ROOT STRUCTURE 539

«mother», bcen «son», ?ah «brother», ham «father in-law», d-o-d «male
relative in non direct blood relation», cåm «head of a people», metonymically
«people», sår with a feminine suffix -at «sanctioned concubine»; not only
does this selection effectively illustrate the categorization of the desert-Semitic
family unit, but it also shows — through the absence of corresponding IE.
counterparts — that the IE. family was not organized by blood relation­
ship, but by social and economic functions, the terms in question being nor­
mal derivatives of verbal roots denoting the mutual functions of the members
of the family, such as pater, bhratr - etc.; the economic nature of this seman­
tic field in IE. is underlined by the existence of a verb with «deficient» root:
d-m- «build a house».
We may add primitive objects of nature: m- «water», «tree», cf.
in IE. *w-d- with no initial occlusive «water», *dr-u- «big tree»; some time-
measuring units are of similar structure: y-m «day», š-n- «year» 6 .
Basic numerical terms have structures that do not correspond to nor­
mal root patterns: Aram, had, IE. *s-m- or *Xoi- enlarged by -n- or -k-
«one», Sem. *Θη-, IE. *dw- «two», IE. tr-i- «three», also Semitic «six»
and IE. non-apophonic «ten» may be added, underlining the essential
dissimilarity of the respective bases of the numerical system. But Semitic
has also a root *m-? «hundred», a value for which IE. already has a designa­
tion based on some full radical lexical entity.
Pronouns are radically deficient in both language families: Sem. š- or
h- «third person» or anaphoric, demonstrative IE. X-i-, q-, *gh-, *k - etc.,
and the same goes for adverbial notions such as C-I «above», m-η- «out of»,
etc. in Semitic, *X-n «within», *X-k «without» and the like in IE.
The integration of these terms in the morphological systems of the
language does not present any difficulty as long as they can be made to fit
into normal derivational and inflectional patternings. While this is essential
in Semitic for verbal and nominal lexemes alike, it pertains, in IE., to ver­
bal stems alone. The mechanism of this adaptation have to be such that a
deficient and less voluminous root assimilates itself to a full and normally
structured one. Where the supplementing elements are taken from, we will
shortly examine in the following.
The root is optionally expanded 7 by an element often alternating with
zero, so that such an extension can be interpreted as a phonological feature

6 Conti 1980: 14.

7 Cf. Kuryłowicz 1973:11.
540 H.B. ROSÉN

(presence or absence of a phonetic materialization) rather than as an additio­

nal phoneme. E.g., the fact that -y- is in frequent conditions not realized in
word finals, is exploited in Semitic to metanalyze a bi-radical root as having
-y- in final position and make it thereby more apt to be integrated in verbal
morphology: p-η- «face» — verbal: «turn the face», c-l- «above» —
verb «mount», or to permit a bi-radical primitive noun to be more
conveniently inflected by person, the expansion involved being a generaliz­
ed vocalic case-morpheme: Heb. , Ar. 9abu-ka «thy father»; Heb.
, Ar. «thy brother», likewise in the type of the ex­
pansion of Ar. yad «hand» in the plural 9aya-din, determinated -diy.
In all likehood the same considerations may be applied to Indo-
European concerning some of the roots that are materialized in a set as well
as in an anit shape, since the laryngeal is a phoneme most frequently left
unmaterialized, which emphasizes the explanatory yield of the approach
presented here. Thus a verbal form like rtas, not reflecting the laryngeal,
may in fact be interpreted as implying a zero alternant of a laryngeal, which
would then evolve where it would be morphologically convenient: arisyati,
b h aratram, . We have noticed the root tr-r- in the enumeration of
some «primitive» kinship terms (above, p. 539), and may assume that similar
processes may be responsible for the reflexes of roots such as «give birth»,
«go», all «primitive» notions that appear variously as set or as anit in dif­
ferent Indo-European dialects.
The phonemic alternations made use of are, of course, subject to their
position in the root, so that phonemes used in medial position are not
necessarily the same as those used finally. For the medial position we have
also a sort of lengthening or repetition of the second consonantal radical
in Semitic, while Indo-European rather lengthens the degree vowel, as though
it implied a laryngeal. Examples:
Consonantal lengthening in Semitic: Heb. šen «tooth», pl. sin-åyim;
Heb. cåm «people», cam-i- «my people», pi. with reduplication c'amami-m.
Semitic vocalic lengthening with resulting resonant: Akk. bît-um
«house», Heb. b.e.t «house of», abs. sg. b-åyit, Ar. bayt «id», pl. Ar.
buyu.t, Heb. b.åt.im; heb. ro(?)š«head», Akk., Aram, rėš, pl. Ar. ruwu-s;
Ar. kana «was, existed», non-pret.3sg. ya-kwnu, Mid.Heb. kawën «cause
to exist, direct»; Heb. qam «stood (up)», fut.-impf.3sg. yåqu-m\ IE. vocalic
length or set (or other syllabic) expansion: Skr. kr-tas «done» vs. pres. karo­
ti, pf. sg. cakara, pl. cakrur; Skr. pacati «cooks» vs. pf. papâca, pecur;
Skr. -mr-tas «of death» vs. fut. mari-syati, caus. mar-ãyati, Lat. mor-t-u-os.
 ON «NORMAL» FULL ROOT STRUCTURE 541

Semitic roots with phonemically originating expansions in initial posi­

tion show, in fact, most lucidly the secondary character of these radicals,
since the consonantal extension may be divergent in different languages 8 ,
as the inventory of phonemes alternating with zero is richer preradically than
in any other position, cf. Aram, had «one», Heb. , «id.», Ar. wahad
«id.», Heb. «single»; Heb. t-ën «give (imptve.)», pf. 3sg. nåtån,
Phen. yVtVn «id.» Heb. lëk (imptve.) «go», pf. 3sg. , caus. ho-li-k
9
/hawli-k/; Ar. «seize, take» (imptve), pf. 3sg. ahada, Heb. , Heb.
impf. 3sg.m. _ . Particularly important is the expansion by glottal
stop (Heb. sëm «name», šm-o- «his name», Ar. ?ism; Heb. ben «son», bn-o-
«his son»; Ar. 9ibn, triggered by the emergence of a prosthetic vowel in in­
itial position in front of a vowelless base pattern. Although this calls to mind
several well-known phenomena of Indo-European, I was unable to find any
genuine Indo-European cases parallel to these Semitic instances 9 .
Some root expansions that serve for the normalization of the root pat­
terns are of morphological origin; they represent, however, in Semitic only
those morphological categories that are syntactically compulsory, that is,
can be assumed to be constantly present. Thus we find a case of determina­
tion suffix used for the expansion of the originally monoradical noun for
«mouth», p- in one Semitic dialect (Aram, p-um-, including what cor­
responds to a nominative morpheme ~u- and what equals an un-determiner
-m), while another employs a vocalic expansion (Heb. p-e «mouth», p·;·
«mouth of»). The uniconsonantal Semitic m- «water», shows in Middle
Hebrew a derived adjective mëym-i- and a plural construct mëym-ë- (both
based on the plural absolute m-åyim). Typologically similar is the well-known
case of dialectal Ar. ^ «brought», emerged out of ja «came», expanded
by a valency morpheme b- «with». We also find in Canaanite as well as,
remarkably enough, in Egyptian a nominal number-gender suffix, -t-, as
morphologically required formal expansions of bi-radical verbs: thus all
Hebrew verbs that are normally initially expanded, have an infinitive of
feminime shape and if substantivally employed, of corresponding gram­
matical gender (e.g. of the above-mentioned t-n, nåtån «give», the infinitive
t-ët is derived, or of «know», expanded to a perfect base the in-

8 Cf. Kuryłowicz, ibid.

9 The process is very archaic, as is borne out by the fact that it affects practically ex­
clusively roots that belong to the class of «semantically primitive» biconsonantal ones and those
that must have been in frequent employ.
542 H.B. ROSÉN

finitive or verbal noun d-åcat), while verbs whose final radical element is
a vowel, probably itself stemming from a root expansion (the so-called ver­
ba IIae infirmae), have an infinitive of feminine shape (e.g. qånå «bought»:
-qno-t inf.) and compulsorily transport the thus emerging consonantal ex­
pansion to the non-substantival 3rd person fem. sg. form of the perfect:
qånå-t-å (only the final -å is the normal ending of this form).
As to the analogous Egyptian feature, it consists in the occurrence, in
the Coptic infinitive, of a morphophonemically unstable -e, which goes back
to an Egyptian -it or -ut, e.g. Sahidicjese «lift» < Eg. ts-t; it is not immaterial
to note that the verbs belonging to this class show, in pre-Coptic Egyptian,
an expansion of the bi-radical base by means of consonantal lengthening
rather than by a vocalic extension 10. One also finds, as root pattern nor­
malizes, morphemes functioning as characterizers of parts of speech (e.g.
Middle Hebrew t-r-m «contribute» involving the nominalization morpheme
t- and the original bi-radical root r-m «elevated», in the causative «lift, bring
up as an offering») or of verbal valence (e.g. Heb. š-k-n «dwell», trans,
«settle», involving the causative morpheme 5-, probably from another dialect,
and the original biradical k-η «be (stable)», cf. Ar. kana, dealt with above,
p. 540) n ; in Indo-European, aspectual morphemes can be observed in this
phenomenon: διδάξαι shows a consonant cluster transposed («verschleppt»)
from the incohative present διδάσκειν. If we use these findings for the pur­
pose of explaining several not altogether lucid root variations in Indo-
European, we can include in this category not only the well-known
phenomena of univerbation (soluo (*se-luo, fressen (ver-essen, ,
nidus <*ni-sd-os, cf. Nest)13, but also some verschleppte nasals,
not only inside verbal paradigms, as in the familiar type of iungere, but also
taken over into nominal forms such as , panth (Lat. passus indicates
that the origin of does not involve n) or coniunx14; m- expansions
may be explained as hailing from a deverbative nominalizing suffix as in
(for which, admittedly, other explanations may also be of-

10 Steindorff 1951: 117f.

11 Kuryiowicz 1973: 7; Conti 1980: 19 with more instances.
12 Univerbation is furthered by the possibility of reinterpreting what originally is the
radical element as a suffixal component (cf. above, and Rosén 1962: 164).
13 My attention was drawn to this example by 0. Panagi in the discussion of this paper;
note the fact that the verbal root involved is a «semantically primitive» one.
14 Example contributed by Mr. Panagi.
 ON «NORMAL» FULL ROOT STRUCTURE 543

fered), while the present shows an interesting aMoflsarf-originating

expansion in the shape of -σκ- which is typically characteristic of deficient
roots. The «primitive» «thinking» or «searching» root apears, e.g., in
Lithuanian and Slavic with a «f-extension»15 (Lith. matyti, OCS1. motriti)
which stems from a «fossilized nominalization» morpheme to which perhaps
may be added, since in certain morphophonemic environments the
IE. adjectival -to- suffix is materialized in Greek with a θ 16.
In conclusion: the root in Semitic and in Indo-European, as well as most
likely in other genealogical entities, is a real, living functional unit with a
given normal phonemic patterning, which furthers a tendency for those
radical units, that do not show it originally, to assimilate themselves to it.
This process, if correctly assessed, is but one case of pattern levelling,
one of the most productive tendencies, I believe, in diachronic morpho­
logy.

REFERENCES

Ammer, Karl. 1950-52. Studien zur indogermanischen Wurzelstruktur. Die

Sprache 2. 193-214.
Conti, Giovanni. 1980. Studi sul bilitterismo in semitico e in egiziano. 1.
Il tema verbale N1212. (Quaderni di Semitistica, 9). Pelio Fronzaroli,
ed. Istituto di Linguistica e di Lingue Orientali, Università di Firenze.
Hamp, Eric P. 1984. IE *meHa. MSS 43.45-46
Kurytowicz, Jerzy. 1935. Etudes indo-européennes, I. (Prace Komisji
Językowej, 18.) Kraków: Polska Akademia Umiejętności.
1973. Studies in Semitic grammar and metrics. (Prace Językoznawcze,
67.) Wrocław-Warszawa-Kraków-Gdańsk: Polska Akademia Nauk,
Komitet Językoznawstwa.
Moscati, Sabatino. 1947. Il biconsonatismo nelle lingue semitiche. Biblica
28. 113-135.
Rosén, Haiim B. 1961. Greek evidence for laryngeals. Lingua 10.190-210.

15 Cf. Hamp 1984: 45.

16 Cf. Rosén 1984b: 435f.
544 H.B. ROSÉN

. 1962. Eine Laut- und Formenlehre der herodotischen Sprachform. (In­

dogermanische Bibliothek, I. Reihe: Lehr- und Handbücher). Heidelberg:
Carl Winter.
. 1968. Die Grammatik des Unbelegten. Gezeigt an den Nominalkom­
posita bei Ennius. Lingua 21. 359-381.
. 1978. Reflexes of extinct phonemes in Semitic. BSOAS 41.443-452.
. 1982. East and West. Selected writings in linguistics. Part I: General
and Indo-European linguistics. München: Wilhelm Fink.
. 1984a. East and West. Selected writings in linguistics. Part II: Hebrew
and Semitic linguistics. München: Wilhelm Fink.
. 1984b. Laryngales, allomorphes, et la validité de quelques «lois
phonétiques». In: Athlon. Satura grammatica in honorem F.R. Adrados,
I. (A. Bernabé et al., edd. Madrid: Editorial Gredos). 431-442.
Steindorff, Georg. 1951. Lehrbuch der koptischen Grammatik. Chicago:
The University of Chicago Press.
 THE RISE AND FALL OF FINAL DEVOICING

THOMAS F. SHANNON
German Department, University of California, Berkeley

1. Introduction: Typological Observations

It is a well-known and often stated fact that many languages have Final
or Terminal Devoicing (German: Auslaut(s)verhärtung). However, to my
knowledge no effort has as yet been made to empirically verify the claimed
pervasiveness of Final Devoicing (FD) and to ascertain its cross-linguistic
properties. Hence, I have embarked on a typological study of FD and would
like to present some of the preliminary findings in this section.
Unfortunately, there is not always agreement among linguists as to what
is meant by saying «language X has FD». In general, the following
phenomena seem to fall under various interpretations of such a statement l:
1) either synchronically or diachronically, the phonetic devoicing -
perhaps only partial and/or optional - of normally / historically voiced
final obstruents;
2) a (virtually) exceptionless synchronic phonotactic constraint pro­
hibiting final voiced obstruents, because the language in question either
does not
a) have a voicing opposition in obstruents, or
b) allow any final obstruents, or
c) allow voiced, but only voiceless final obstruents;
3) the presence of (regular) morphophonemic (MP) alternations in (in­
flectional) paradigms such that (some) final voiceless obstruents alter­
nate with their voiced counterparts medially.
Actually, most of these phenomena are probably related. However, FD in

1 For present purposes, sonorants and vowels are disregarded and only obstruents are
considered. The longstanding controversy over the relation between tense/lax (fortis/lenis) and
the voicing distinction is also left aside.
546 THOMAS F. SHANNON

the narrow sense typically involves a phonotactic constraint against final

voiced obstruents, so that whereas medially (and perhaps initially) voiced
and voiceless obstruents contrast phonemically, finally there are only
voiceless obstruents 2, many - but crucially not all! - of which alternate with
medial voiced ones in paradigms. This is probably the most commonly ac­
cepted interpretation of FD - certainly the one employed to motivate a
generative rule for languages like German and Russian - and the one that
we will be mainly concerned with here.
In surveying so far almost all the languages spoken in Europe, evidence
for FD has been found in the following3:
1) almost all the Slavic languages, including Russian (Shannon 1984a),
Belorussian, Ukrainian (Andersen 1972), Polish (Koschmieder 1977:
56), Czech (Townsend 1981: 22), Bulgarian (Scatton 1983: 66), Slovene
(Lencek 1982: 169f.), and Macedonian (Lunt 1952: 13), but not Serbo-
Croatian (Hamm 1985:20);
2) of the Germanic languages, all the Continental West Germanic stan­
dard languages, thus German (Moulton 1962: 48ff.), Dutch (Booij
1981: 41ff.), as well as its historical offshoot Afrikaans (Wissing 1982:
69ff.), and West Frisian (Tiersma 1979: 164 ff.), though not North
Frisian (Parker 1985).
3) of the Romance languages, only Catalan (Wheeler 1979: 310 ff.);
4) Turkish (Lees 1961: 5If) 4 .

2 Hence, the voicing opposition is usually said to be neutralized here. However, this
claim has recently been disputed; cf. Fourakis (1984) and literature cited there on this issue.
3 To save space, sources are omitted except for languages where FD was found; essen­
tially they are those of Ruhlen (1975) and Maddieson (1983). Besides the languages mentioned
in the text, the following were also investigated: Baltic - Lithuanian; Germanic - Danish, English,
Icelandic, Norwegian, Swedish, Yiddish; Romance - French, Italian, Portuguese, Rumanian,
Spanish; Celtic - Breton, Irish, Welsh; Greek; Albanian; East Armenian; Basque; Finno-Ugric
- Estonian, Finnish, Hungarian, Lapp; Caucasian - Abkhaz, Avar, Circassian, Georgian, Kabar-
dian. There was not enough information available on Breton, Basque, or Lithuanian to decide
whether they have FD: although they all neutralize voicing in final obstruents, my sources do
not indicate whether they have MP alternations. This list is, I believe, the most complete one
compiled to date, although it is surely not exhaustive. The author welcomes further informa­
tion from interested linguists.
4 Judging from the data in Zolkhoev (1980), other Altaic languages, viz. Buriat,
Kalmyck, Mongolian, Tuvinian, and Yakut may also have FD. They neutralize the voicing
opposition finally, and there are even MP alternations; but it is not clear whether these are
due to FD or a voicing rule.
 FINAL DEVOICING 547

In addition, other researchers have reported FD for the following: Ap­

palachian dialects of English (Stampe 1969: 448), Black English (Fasold &
Wolfram 1970: 53), a Greek dialect (Newton 1972: 103), one Italian dialect
(Dinnsen & Eckman 1978: 5), Old French, and Eastern Cheremis (Coates
1980: 12). Unfortunately, it is not always clear which sense of FD is intend­
ed in these claims.
Several generalizations concerning FD materialize from this study. Con­
sidering first synchronic ones, with regard to the domain of applicability,
the rule applies in most languages word-finally, never morpheme-finally (cf.
Shannon 1984a). In both German and Dutch (presumably also in Afrikaans
and Frisian) it is syllable-final, but German seems to be the only language
where FD can be formulated as an absolute prohibition against voiced
obstruents in syllable codas (cf. Bartsch & Vennemann 1982: 58). Most, if
not all, other languages have regressive voicing assimilation in obstruent
clusters, which produces at least some instances of syllable-final voiced
obstruents. In fact, German would appear to be a counterexample to An­
war's (1974:6) claim that «if a language has FD, it also has regressive
assimilation», at least if voicing assimilation is meant, since German has
only progressive, but not regressive voicing assimilation.
With respect to the classes of segments affected, only obstruents are
devoiced by the rule 5 . Moreover, Dinnsen & Eckman (1978) claim that
there is an implicational hierarchy: no language is known to restrict FD on­
ly to fricatives to the exclusion of stops, though some (Turkish, Ferrarese
Italian) only devoice stops, but not fricatives6. There do not appear to be
any implicational relations between segments; no language e.g. has been
found which restricts FD only to certain points of articulation.
Now a few diachronic generalizations. Citing various sources which
document the course of the change in various Slavic languages, Andersen
(1972) states that devoicing is introduced earlier before voiceless obstruents
than before a pause and that stops devoice prior to fricatives. Furthermore,
there is apparently no correlation with point of articulation. These repre­
sent the diachronic correlates to the above-mentioned synchronic generaliza-

5 Although in many languages final sonorants are devoiced, either partially or optionally,
this devoicing always appears to be purely phonetic. I know of no instances where a phonemic
distinction is neutralized.
6 This claim may in fact be empirically false, however. Goossens (1977) claims that
fricatives devoice first in certain Dutch dialects.
548 THOMAS F. SHANNON

tions. Further relevant data can be found in (West) Frisian, where Tiersma
(1979:166) finds that «at the beginning of this century, voiced obstruents
regularly occurred following short vowels and rising diphthongs, and were
regularly devoiced after a falling diphthong. When preceded by a long vowel
or sonorant consonant, there was free variation between the voiced obstruent
and its voiceless counterpart». Unfortunately, I know of no similar syn­
chronic restrictions.

2. The Rise of Final Devoicing.

Let us now consider how and why a rule of FD might be introduced
into a language: what might motivate speakers to devoice final obstruents,
perhaps preferentially stops? Standard Generative Phonology does not of­
fer an answer to this question; in fact, given the usual disinterest in «per­
formance phenomena», the question would probably never be asked. A rule
devoicing final obstruents, or just stops, would simply be added to the gram­
mar. But this is obviously tantamount to a restatement of the diachronic
correspondences (i.e. the sound change in synchronic terms), and in no way
helps us to understand or explain the rise of the rule and its properties.
The second theory to be considered is Stampe's Natural Phonology
(Stampe 1969, 1973, Donegan & Stampe 1977). In essence, this theory says
that children are born with a tendency to devoice obstruents. What hap­
pens when a language develops FD is that children learning the language
fail to suppress this natural tendency. This theory represents a step forward
in trying to relate possible sound changes to facts of child language acquisi­
tion. However, the theory does not go far enough in that it neglects to ex­
plain why the observed processes are natural. For instance, it does not show
why devoicing should apply word-finally and apparently to stops before
fricatives. Finally, Stampe does not to my mind clearly indicate whether he
considers these processes to be simply an inexplicable part of our mental
make-up (our «software») or due to explicable physical constraints on speech
production. If the latter is true, we should be able to offer some phonetic
motivation for the postulated tendencies and even in a sense explain them.
The next type of theory attempts to flesh out Stampe's proposed natural
processes by explicating the phonetic conditions behind these constraints.
Proponents of this aerodynamic approach have attempted to explain devoic­
ing by showing that it is physically difficult to produce voicing in obstruents
(cf. Ohala 1983 for specifics). With stops, e.g., the rapid increase of
 FINAL DEVOICING 549

supraglottal pressure associateci with them would impede voicing, which re­
quires greater subglottal pressure. Although this approach takes over where
Stampe's leaves off and succeedes in motivating certain facets of devoic-
ing, e.g. the lack of voiced velars in many languages (due to the greater im-
pendance of voicing associated with articulations farther back in the oral
track), it runs into problems with FD. It would seem to predict that velars
should devoice most readily, then dentals, then labials; but as was noted
earlier (cf. Dinnsen 1980), there is no empirical evidence in support of this
claim. Also, the proposal by itself provides no explanation for why devoic-
ing typically occurs in final position. Finally, this theory does not account
for the devoicing of final stops prior to fricatives. In balance, although this
approach offers motivation for obstruent devoicing in general, it does not
explain the specifics of FD.
For this we must look to the functional-perceptual explanation proposed
by Parker (1980, 1981). Here the following steps (table 1) are hypothesized
in the development of FD.

Table 1
I  V C V
[-voi] [-voi]
II  V C V
[-voi] [ + voi]
III  V C 
[-voi] [ + voi]
IV  V C-
[-voi] [ + voi]
V  V -1
[-voi] [-voi]
The language ideally starts out with CVCV word structure, initial stress and
voiceless stops; subsequently intervocalic stops naturally voice, after which
the final unstressed vowel reduces to schwa (stages II and III). With stage
IV the schwa is lost, thereby causing the final voiced stop to be unreleased.
Consequently, the final stop is in an «acoustically unstable environment»,
since it has lost its most salient perceptual cue, the release, and is in danger
of being confused with vowel-final words. Hence speakers devoice the stop,
voiceless final stops being perceptually more salient than voiced ones. Thus
speakers as it were «take unconscious action to preserve the intelligibility
of the speech signal» (136).
550 THOMAS F. SHANNON

I believe that this analysis is the most satisfactory because it accounts

for FD in a plausible and motivated fashion. However, it has shortcom­
ings which lead me to present an alternative. Parker's account does not ex­
plain the final devoicing of spirants, which are specifically excluded, nor
the possible preferential devoicing of stops. Furthermore, it is not clear that
the loss of final schwas necessarily «causes» final voiced stops to become
unreleased, since there are languages with final released voiced stops (French)
- although of course the release itself is acoustically very similar to a schwa.
Also I do not think that apocope is a necessary step immediately preceding
the rise of FD (though in all honesty, it is not certain that Parker means
to claim this). Thus, languages may develop FD without apocope as an im­
mediate predecessor, as I believe was true in the Slavic cases Andersen (1972)
cites. Furthermore, some languages have apocopated and not developed FD
(English). In fact, apocope can probably lead to the loss of FD (cf. section
3). The one thing that we can say about apocope is that it can introduce
new final voiced obstruents.
Although Parker's functional-perceptual explanation is very appealing,
I would argue that it cannot replace a production-based account. His analysis
is essentially correct in singling out the lack of release in final stops as a
major factor contributing to their devoicing. It is well known that final voiced
and voiceless stops are frequently unreleased and often have realizations
which are phonetically voiceless. In this inherent variation lie the seeds of
a potential sound change, the rise of FD, at least for stops. Incidentally,
this would also explain syllable-final devoicing, since here too stops are often
unreleased.
However, the lack of release will not explain the final devoicing of
fricatives. Nor can perceptual salience alone be involved in devoicing, for
in some languages final sonorants devoice phonetically, and surely this does
not increase their salience. Instead, I rather think that devoicing in general
may be traced to one underlying factor, what Lindblom (1983: 226) calls
«motor control optimization processes... [which contribute] toward mak­
ing speech gestures more economical». He observes that «when we examine
gestures in relation to the potential capacities of the system, we note a tenden­
cy toward underexploitation», which is because «energy expenditure tends
to be minimized» (219, 233). What is involved in FD is a kind of assimila­
tion «in anticipation of the abducted state of the glottis associated with nor­
mal breathing and silence» (237). In all cases, Lindblom claims, assimila­
tion «invariably implies shortened movement (glottal or supraglottal)».
 FINAL DEVOICING 551

Of course, the claim that FD is assimilation is by no means novel (cf.

Anwar 1974). Nor is the notion of «economy», for that matter. But it ap­
pears that a more rigorous theory of motor economy along the lines pro­
posed by Lindblom holds promise for a unified explanation of FD, in fact
all devoicing. Note that even in Parker's account, most of the stages posited
involve some sort of production-related changes due to economy: intervocalic
voicing is a typical case of assimilation («shortened glottal movement»), as
is reduction («undershoot») and subsequent loss of unstressed vowels, even
the lack of release in final stops, which plays such a crucial role in Parker's
analysis. Clearly, some sort of difficulty, which can be overcome, but at
times is not for reasons of economy, is involved here.
Under the present proposal, then, the devoicing of final stops and
fricatives is attributable to the same general factor governing speech pro­
duction: the minimization of energy expenditure. The preconsonantal devoic­
ing noted by Andersen would also be due to this, viz. it too is an instance
of assimilation. In fact, we may even be able to explain the reported fact that
preconsonantal devoicing precedes word-final devoicing, since the tendency
toward assimilation to the voicelessness of the actually occurring consonant
would arguably be greater than to a potential pause. Moreover, there may also
be an explanation here for the devoicing of stops prior to fricatives (if this
claim is indeed correct): the lack of release adds an additional impediment
to voicing production and perception in final stops as opposed to fricatives.
Thus, a production-based account may not only be able to account for FD,
but also for some of the generalizations associated with the rule. However,
the two proposals - production-versus perception-based - do not necessarily
have to conflict with one another. If final stops are typically realized unreleas-
ed, especially in more rapid and casual speech (where the ability or demand
for greater articulatory discrimination is lessened), speakers may eventual­
ly produce voiceless released stops, an articulatory «sharpening» in Lineli's
(1979) terms, in speech styles requiring greater perceptual differentiation7.

7 A nice example of this comes from a personal experience. Asked to produce a word
with a final voiced stop in his native language, an Indonesian friend produced an unreleased
stop, to my ear of indeterminate quality. When I asked him to repeat, he pronounced the same
sound, this time giving it a popping voiceless release after a brief pause. Finally, when I asked
whether the word in question really ended in a voiced stop, he said yes and, apparently making
an extra, conscious effort, pronounced a fully voiced released stop (normally, final stops are
unreleased in Indonesian and Javanese). This anecdote shows how final stops can be confused
and how careful pronunciations can even produce (sharpened) voiceless stops for voiced ones!.
552 THOMAS F. SHANNON

Hence the two sides may work together. Eventually a sound change may
occur and the language will acquire FD as a synchronic rule, if MP alterna­
tions result.
In fact, the process can continue: once the final obstruent is voiceless,
it may eventually be lost (cf. Chen & Wang 1975). We observe here roughly
the following chain of events, using a dental stop for illustration (everything
holds ceteris paribus for fricatives):

Apart from the possible sharpening to increase perceptual salience (6-7), there
is a continuous minimization of energy expenditure, leading to the gradual
weakening and loss of the obstruent through progressive curtailment of
various component gestures: labial release gesture (4-5), glottal voicing
gesture (4-5), supraglottal place gesture (7-8), and finally glottal place gesture
(8-9).

3. The Fall of FD.

Considering what was seen in the preceding section, it would appear
strange that a language should actually somehow «lose» FD. After all, if
it is such a natural process, how and why could it be lost? Put another way,
if voicing in final obstruents is in some way difficult to learn, what would
ever teach speakers of a language without them to make a voicing distinc­
tion here? But that is what reportedly happened in Yiddish, as well as in
some German and Dutch dialects. Since the Yiddish case is undoubtedly
the most well known, we will deal with it, focussing on King's (1980) ex­
planation of the loss.
The basic history of FD and its loss in Yiddish are quite well known,
so the exposition can be brief (cf. King 1980 for details). Yiddish is gene­
rally assumed to have inherited FD from its indirect historical progenitor
Middle High German. At a later date, final schwas were apocopated,
thereby producing new final voiced obstruents, which were then generaliz­
ed throughout paradigms. FD had become too opaque due to the expcep-
tions from apocope and was therefore lost. This is King's explanation
in a nutshell. It is simple, straightforward, and rather plausible; in fact,
it fits fairly well into the scenario proposed by Parker. However, I would
 FINAL DEVOICING 553

like to point out a few difficulties and then propose a somewhat different
account 8 .
First of all, observe that unlike such rules as umlaut in Germanic, FD
did not become opaque because its phonetic motivation, the conditioning
environment, was eliminated; rather it simply failed to apply to potential
new inputs resulting from apocope. Another way of saying this is that FD
became unproductive in Yiddish. But why? In other languages it has remain­
ed persistent, productive, and exceptionless9: when potential new inputs to
the rule arise, they regularly undergo it. In German, for instance, English
loan words (Job, Smog, Jazz) are subject to FD. Moreover, when a final
schwa is elided, the resultant form shows devoicing: böse [bö:ze] ~ bös
[bö:s], habe [ha:ba] ~ hab9 [hap]. FD can also be transferred in language
contact situations. As Parker (1985) notes, some younger North Frisian
speakers are applying FD in their use of the dialect, which normally does
have final voiced obstruents. Furthermore, when Germans learn English,
they have a notoriously difficult time mastering the final voicing distinc­
tion. Finally, most German (and Dutch) dialects have experienced apocope
to one degree or another, but few have lost FD as a result. All in all, FD
seems to be a very persistent rule. Why wasn't it in Yiddish?
King's answer here is to my way of thinking not fully satisfactory:
apocope was just added to the grammar and for some reason FD did not
apply to its output. In his theory (cf. table 2), King would somehow have
to block FD from applying after apocope in Yiddish (a), and yet let it apply
after apocope in Dutch and German (b), where FD remained productive.

Table 2
a) b)
sing,
sing. pl. sing.
sing, pl
Pl
tag tags tag tags
FD tac -— Apo -— tag
Apo tac tag FD tac tac
In order to handle the otherwise hard to explain counterfeeding order in-

8 The account give here is based on the more detailed work in Shannon (to appear a),
with the crucial difference that I now acknowledge the influence of apocope. Cf. that article
also for a more in depth critique of King's analysis.
9 Turkish is the only language I know of that seems to have FD and yet allows some
apparent exceptions to it.
554 THOMAS F. SHANNON

volved in Yiddish, one could always make the claim that rules are added to
the end of the grammar, but this is not motivated by any independent prin­
ciples of the theory, thus clearly ad hoc, and does not really shed any further
light on the matter. Besides, one would still need rule ordering or deriva­
tional constraints to prevent FD from applying. The question still remains:
why didn't FD just remain a productive, persistent rule in Yiddish and app­
ly to all new inputs? Insisting on a counterfeeding order here is tantamount
to claiming that the rule was no longer productive — which is patently true
—, but this does not explain how and why it became nonproductive. I am
not saying that it is a priori impossible for FD not to apply to the output
of apocope, but simply that the question of how and why this happened
is an extremely crucial one and must therefore be addressed more seriously.
One final, albeit weaker argument is that the analogical levelling in Yid­
dish violates the Semantic Transparency Hypothesis (Hooper 1977). Accor­
ding to this hypothesis, the semantically unmarked singular should form
the basis for analogy, but here it was apparently the marked plural form
which reshaped the singular. Of course, this argument is only as strong as
the principle invoked, which I will not try to defend. However, I believe
that my account obviates this objection.
My proposal is two-fold. First, I now agree with King that apocope
could have and probably did introduce final voiced obstruents, or something
that could have been so interpreted. The question is how. As I see it, the
problem with King's account lies in a view of phonology in which rules are
too monolithic and abstract: all kinds of sound relations are squeezed into a
single, supposedly homogeneous class, and sound changes are just further
members of this same type. Recent work in phonology, on the other hand,
has shown the importance of distinguishing between different rule types;
the typology used here is from Lineli (1979). Lineli distinguishes between
morphophonemic rules proper (MRPs), which are adjustments in morpholo­
gical operations, and all other phonological rules, which include phonotactic
rules (PhtRs) and articulatory reduction rules (ARRs). The former define pos­
sible careful pronunciations, while the latter basically map these forms onto
alternate reduced forms (probably as a function of pragmatic factors such
as register and tempo). MRPs and PhtRs are viewed as phonetic planning
rules — they jointly define careful pronunciations —, whereas ARRs 10 are

10 These seem to correspond to what Bartsch & Vennemann (1982) call «realisa-
tionsphonologische Regeln».
 FINAL DEVOICING 555

phonetic production rules and thus probably language-specific instantiations

of universal economic tendencies such as those noted earlier in this paper.
It appears that sound changes like apocope are largely due to ARRs.
In this view, they therefore must be «added at the end of the grammar»,
since by virtue of their function, they operate on surface forms to produce
new possible pronunciations. As such, they can produce violations of other­
wise valid PhtRs, whereas other types of rules cannot. This is, I feel, what
happened with apocope in Yiddish: as an ARR, apocope produced final
obstruents which could be interpreted as voiced — a weak final schwa would
sound like a voiced release. Learners confronted with such forms could then
take this as an indication to learn to produce final voiced obstruents, with
an «inverted» rule of schwa addition to handle careful pronunciations where
the ending was preserved. Now there is certainly nothing necessary about
this reanalysis; apparently most German and Dutch dialects did not allow
it. But it could have signalled the beginning of the fall of FD through the
introduction of final voiced obstruents in Yiddish, especially if other fac­
tors favored this development, e.g. foreign loan words with final voiced
obstruents.
Some other dialects apparently followed the same path as Yiddish, at
least this far; a number of German and Dutch dialects are reported to have
introduced final voiced obstruents through apocope. But as far as I am
aware, Yiddish is the only instance where etymologically voiced obstruents
were restored throughout the paradigm. What could have motivated this
further drastic change? Here we come to the second major factor which I
see at work in Yiddish: sandhi voicing. As King notes, Central Yiddish not
only still has FD, it also has widespread sandhi voicing. Birnbaum (1966)
states that «in close nexus a word-initial sonorant conditions voicing in the
terminal obstruent of the preceding word only when that word was mor-
phophonemically voiced historically». If at an earlier stage Yiddish generally
had this rule, it would mean that when apocope was eliminating final schwas,
language learners were largely confronted — at least in casual speech —
with final voiced obstruents in former alternating paradigms, since apocope
and sandhi voicing would both produce word-final voiced obstruents in all
forms except those followed by a voiceless consonant or a pause. Under these
circumstances, it would not be surprising if Yiddish speakers reanalyzed these
forms such that the voiced ones, which appeared in all cases, were basic and
the few voiceless forms, which only occurred under restricted circumstances,
were derived. Eventually the voiceless forms were lost or levelled out.
556 THOMAS F. SHANNON

This, then, is how I now view the demise of FD in Yiddish. Apocope

and sandhi voicing, two ARRs (the only kind of rule which can introduce
violations to otherwise valid PhtRs), as it were «conspired» to produce a
reanalysis of Yiddish paradigms with voiced forms throughout. Incidental­
ly, this account removes Yiddish as a possible counterexample to Hooper's
Semantic Transparency Hypothesis, since even the singular forms had voiced
realizations. Viewed this way, it is perhaps not unexpected that Yiddish «lost»
FD and even generalized the voiced forms throughout paradigms. It is also
not unusual that of the other dialects which reportedly introduced new final
voiced obstruents, to my knowledge none show this revoicing of formerly
devoiced final obstruents, since although they all shared apocope with Yid­
dish, none of them had sandhi voicing.

4. Conclusion.
I feel there are a few lessons to be learned from the preceding discus­
sion of the rise and demise of FD. Firstly, the underlying motivation for
linguistic naturalness, or its opposite markedness, must be sought; although
this is often ignored, these concepts are ultimately explicanda, not final ex­
planations (cf. Shannon, to appear b). Secondly, in order to understand
language in general and language change in specific, we must look more
carefully at what really goes on in linguistic communication. With respect
to sound change, this means that we cannot continue to theorize in over­
simplified terms of «rule addition/loss». Rather, as John Ohala (1983:189)
has aptly put it, phonology must seriously concern itself with «mind, mat­
ter, and manners».

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SHAN
 ON THE HISTORICAL RELATION BETWEEN MENTAL AND
SPEECH ACT VERBS IN ENGLISH AND JAPANESE

ELIZABETH CLOSS TRAUGOTT RICHARD DASHER

Stanford University Stanford University and the Foreign
Service Institute, Washington D. C.

1. Introduction.
In his book, Res cogitans: an essay in rational psychology (1972), Zeno
Vendler discusses a number of correspondences between mental verbs like
know, believe, wish, and speech act verbs like claim, report, promise1.
Mental verbs name certain attitudes and states of mind. Speech acts verbs
name an action performed in saying something; a subset of them, called
performative verbs, not only name the action but can have the force of that
action, given the right linguistic, social, and psychological conditions of
satisfaction (cf. Searle 1979, 1983).
Vendler's purpose is to reveal that the semantic organization of verbs
of «speech and thought» is very similar. Although his approach is essen­
tially synchronic, he notes in passing that there is a certain amount of what
he calls «leakage» of items across the two categories 2 . For example, the
speech act verbs maintain, agree, conclude, guess, diagnose, distinguish are
said to be leaking in the direction of mental verbs, and mental verbs such
as estimate, judge, recognize, identify, decide, choose, forgive are said to

ι This paper arose out of Elizabeth Traugott's several stimulating conversations with
David Olson, who introduced her to Vendler (1972). She is grateful for financial support for
this study from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, and from the Center for Advanced
Study in the Behavioral Sciences (with partial funding under NSF Grant BNS 76-22943). Both
authors are deeply grateful to Judith Hochberg for her help in collecting the English data,
to S.-W. Kuroda and Mary L. Pratt for comments on an earlier version of this paper, and
to Mayumi Ohira for native speaker intuitions concerning Modern Japanese. Any errors of
fact or interpretation are the sole responsibility of the authors.
2 Vendler classifies the verbs in question into verbs of mental state (e.g. know), mental
action (e.g. discover), and speech act verbs (e.g. claim) and shows that these classes have aspectual
properties similar to those exhibited elsewhere in the lexicon by state, process, and achieve­
ment verbs (note the difference between *I am knowing that X, I am discovering that X, and
562 ELIZABETH C. TRAUGOTT - RICHARD DASHER

be leaking in the direction of speech act verbs. Although Vendler's com­

ments on leakage are meant to capture differences between prototypical and
nonprototypical meanings, they nevertheless also (if only inadvertantly) imply
some kind of dynamic process.
In this paper we will show that a diachronic approach to mental and
speech act verbs, with focus on the semantic domains from which the terms
derive, supports the claim that there is substantial similarity in semantic
organization. Furthermore, this similarity is evidenced both in English and
in Japanese, so it is a candidate for investigation as a universal. However,
the diachronic approach also reveals that Vendler's views on leakage do not
hold up from a historical perspective. There is little evidence for leakage
(in the dynamic sense) from speech act verb to mental verb, but leakage in
the opposite direction from mental verb to speech act verb occurs quite fre­
quently. We will show that the directionality here coheres with, and indeed
is predicted by, a far more general variation-defining universal of change
whereby linguistic items shift from propositional to interpersonal meaning
(cf. Traugott 1982). Specifically, the meanings of mental verbs are proposi­
tional: when a speaker uses the word recognize as a mental verb, e.g. in
the sentence Of course I recognize your handwriting, the speaker refers on­
ly to his or her role as the experiencer of a mental process. In contrast, the
performative meaning of recognize, as in the sentence I hereby recognize
Mr. Smith, presupposes interpersonal elements inherent to the speech act
situation, such as the social relationship between the speaker and in­
terlocutors.

2. Etymological sources.
We turn now to a demonstration that the chief source domains for men­
tal and speech act verbs are essentially the same. The discussion will be limited
to performative speech act verbs, but appears to apply equally well to speech
act verbs in general. The source domains in question are terms for i) mental
states and actions, ii) visual perception, iii) spatial relations, and iv) vocaliza-

I promise/ am promising that X). In addition, Vendler points to cross-class semantic cor­
respondences, e.g. between the speech act verbs promise, undertake, guarantee, vow, mental
action verbs like decide, choose, and mental state verbs such as want, mean, all of which in­
volve commitment toward a course of action or state of affairs. The present paper is concern­
ed primarily with the dichotomy between mental and speech act verbs; both mental state and
mental action verbs are included in the category mental verb.
 MENTAL AND SPEECH ACT VERBS 563

tion. There are some differences in the extent to which terms are drawn from
these four domains, both with respect to the field (mental or speech act verb)
and the language in question. There are also differences in the extent to which
other source domains are drawn from. However, the general picture that
emerges is of striking overall similarity 3.

2.1 Sources in terms for mental state and action.

It is useful to subdivide terms for mental states and actions into three
groups: cognitive, evaluative, and affective. The first involves knowledge
and belief, the second evaluation according to the parameters true-false,
good-bad, and the third desires, pleasures, and sorrows.
Among mental verbs that derive from terms for mental states and ac-
tions are:
Cog. know, notice, recognize < IE*gno- «know»
think < IE *tong- «think, feei»
mean < IE *mei-no- «opinion, intention»
oboeru «remember» < OJ omoFu «think, feei»
+ yu passive/potential suffix
kokoroeru <<understand, be aware of» < LOJ kokoro 0 eru (= kokoro
«mind, heart» + 0 direct obj particle + eru «acquire, gain»
Eval. disapprove < Lat. probus «good»
appreciate < Lat. pretiare «value»
judge < IE *yewo «law»
handan suru «judge» < Chinese ~J li1f
«judge, decide» +
Jp. suru «do» [Chi.~J] «judge, decide» + mr
«determine, decide»]
Aff. wish < IE *wen «desire, strive fon>
believe < IE *leubh- «care, desire, love»
omoiyaru «sympathize» < OJ omoFu «think, feei»
+ yaru «send, give»

3 The study of English mental and speech act verbs relies substantiallyon lists available in
Vendler (1972) and Fraser (1975), from etymologies provided in the American Heritage Dictiona-
ry of the English Language, and on Traugott's (1985) study of the origins of speech act verbs.
Equivalent mental and speech act verbs in Japanese were obtained from dictionaries and from
Martin (1975: 996f), and their usage was confirmed by consulting a native speaker. Data con-
cerning the earlier meanings and derivations of Japanese items come primarily from attested
uses cited in the Nihon Kokugo Daiziten (1974) and Morohasi (1955). Reconstructions of pre-
literary Japanese meanings and etymologies, which are in many cases spurious, were avoided.
564 ELIZABETH C. TRAUGOTT - RICHARD DASHER

To point out that mental verbs originate in terms for mental states and
actions no doubt appears to be trivial at first. It is when we see the similarity
in the sources for speech act verbs and consider the question of directionality
of change from the one category to another that the data become interesting.
Among speech act verbs that derive from terms for mental states and actions are:
Cog. admonish, comment, mention, remind < IE *men- «think» (cf. mind)
acknowledge, note, notify, recognize, diagnose < IE *gno- «know»
kotowaru «refuse» < OJ kotowaru «discern, judge, discriminate»
Eval. accuse, excuse < Lat. causa «cause/reason/lawsuit»
appraise, praise < Lat. pretiare «value» [ultimately < pretium «price,
that which is opposite/equal»]
hihan suru «criticize» < Mid 13th  Jpns «judge, evaluate» (used as
speech act verb since later 19th C.)
Aff. consent < Lat. sentire «feel»
agree, disagree < Lat. ad + gratus «to + pleasing»
plead < Lat. placitum «legal action, agreement» < piacere «to please»
hagemasu «encourage, urge» < O J «cause to be enthusiastic» (caus.
of OJ hagemu «become emotional»?)

2.2 Sources in terms for visual perception.

Among mental verbs derived from visual perception are:
see { IE*sekw- «perceive, see»
expect, suspect < Lat. specere «see, look at»
imagine < Lat. imago «image», ultimately < imitan «imitate»
consider < IE *sweid- «shine»

+ Jp. suru

Among speech act verbs are:

advise < Lat. advisare «watch, observe» < videre «see»
speculate, specify < *IE spek- «observe» (for speculate, see Lat.
speculari «spy out, watch»)
theorize < Gk. theoros «spectator» < thea «a viewing»
 MENTAL AND SPEECH ACT VERBS 565

akiraka ni suru «clarify, disclose» (used in announcements of govern­

ment policy, etc.) < OJ akira-ka «bright, clear» + ni goal, man­
ner + suru «do».
The link between terms for the senses, especially sight and hearing, and
terms for the intellect has long been noted (for a full length study see Sweetser
1984). It is interesting to observe that it is almost exclusively representative
speech act verbs, i.e. those that primarily express the speaker's belief in the
truth of the proposition, that derive from terms for visual perception.

2.3 Sources in spatial terms.

The most frequent source for both mental and speech act verbs is spatial
terms. Spatial terms are often considered to be of five kinds: location (rela­
tion, static or dynamic, to a point of reference, cf. at-on-in, from-to), plane
or dimension (cf. front-back, up-down), shape (round, square, flat), exten­
sion (cf. large-small), and distance (cf. far-close), (cf. Lyons 1977; also
Friedrich 1971 for the first three). By far the most predominant spatial rela­
tion from which the verbs under investigation derive is location, although
plane and shape play a role too 4 .
Among mental verbs derived from terms for location are:
deduce < Lat. ducere «lead»
hold < IE *kel- «drive, set in motion»
intend < Lat. tendere «stretch»
decide < Lat. caedere «cut (i.e. divide in parts)»
guess ( IE *ghend- «seize» (borrowed in ME < Scand. gissa; cognate
with get),
establish < Lat. sta- «stand»
zonziru «think, know (humiliative)» < Chi. zon «put, place, keep»
+ Jp. suru «do»
omoitatu «resolve/plan to do» < OJ omoFu «think» + tatu «stand
up»
kokorozasu «intend to do» < OJ kokoro «mind, heart» + sasu «to
point»
wakaru «understand, know» < OJ wakaru «split up (from), depart»

4 The list would be greatly expanded if terms were included which are not obviously
locative but which can only be fully understood in terms of such spatial relations as transfer
of X from Y to Z, e.g. those derived from give and receive (cf. Jackendoff 1983).
566 ELIZABETH C. TRAUGOTT - RICHARD DASHER

Among those derived from terms for plane and shape are understand and:
surmise < Lat. super + mittere «send off, throw»
suppose < Lat. sub + ponere «under + put»
learn < IE *leis «furrow»
plan < Lat. planus «flat» (cf. ground plan, map)
(note that in several of these the root expresses location; plane is expressed
by the prefix). So far, no mental verbs involving plane or shape have been
noted in Japanese.
Among speech act verbs derived from spatial terms are:
cite, solicit < Lat. ciere «put in motion, move»
suggest < Lat. gerere «carry»
assent < IE *sent- «go, head for»
admit, commit, dismiss, permit, promise, submit < Lat. mittere «send»
conjecture, object, reject < Lat. jacere «throw»
command, demand, commend, countermand, recommend < Lat.
manu dare «into hand give»
concede < Lat. concedere «go away, withdraw»
insist, restore, state < IE *sta- «stand» (state < N for status, rank)
assert < Lat. asserere «join oneself to» < IE *ser- «line up»
exonerate < Lat. exonerare «free from burden»
iihukumeru «convince, give (a person) to understand» < EMidJ iu
«say» + hukumeru «insert, enclose, include»
iiharu «insist < EModJ compound of iu «speak» + ham «stretch»
and, from plane and shape:
propose < Lat. pro + habere/ponere «in front + have/put»
hypothesize < Gk. hypo + tithenai «under + place»
submit < Lat. sub + mittere «under + send»
inform < Lat. informare «give shape to»
reply < Fr. replier «fold back»
abrogate, direct, rank, reckon, rule < IE *reg- «move in straight line»
yakusoku suru «promise» «tie into a bundle» + Jp.
suru «do»

2.4 Sources in terms for vocalization.

The fourth main source from which mental and speech act verbs are
derived is what we will call vocalization. This involves speaking, usually in
a special manner, whether with a certain degree of intensity (e.g. shout, call),
 MENTAL AND SPEECH ACT VERBS 567

or a certain emotion or rhetorical stance (e.g. moaning, groaning, laughing).

Very few mental verbs derive from vocalization. We may, however, note:
recall < *IE gal- «call»
blame < Gk. blasphemos «evil-speaking»
inoru «pray, wish from the heart» < O J i «sacredness» + noru «speak»
[OJ noru only for ritualistic speech]
Among speech act verbs derived from this category are:
call < IE *gal- «call, shout» (borrowed into ME from ONorse kalla)
confess, profess, prophesy < IE *bha- «speak»
announce, denounce, renounce < Lat. particle + nuntiare «say/shout»
deplore, implore < Lat. plorare «wail»
tonaeru «advocate» < OJ tonaFu «recite, chant, yell»
nageku «lament, deplore» < OJ nageku «sigh, lament»
nonosiru «criticize, lay blame on» < late 8th  Jpns «speak in a loud
voice, (crowd) makes noise» («criticize» from mid 10th C).
It should be noted that since speech act verbs necessarily involve some
type of utterance, we have here a case of a precondition for the speech act
verb becoming part of its lexical meaning. The majority of the terms listed
here probably were not terms for action in speaking but rather for manner
of speaking, and therefore were not originally true speech act verbs. These
manners of vocalization are themselves associated with very specific mental
or emotional states. However, a few of these verbs, e.g. blame (< «evil-
speaking») and Old Jp. inoru «vocally perform an act in ritual in which
one seeks happiness from the gods» appear to have been used in very early
times in ritualistic speech, which is performative in many societies. Therefore
we cannot ignore the possibility that at least those mental and speech act
verbs that originate in vocalization may have had a performative function
in some limited situations (cf. also Benveniste (1973) on the sacral and legal
aspects of «saying» in IE) 5 . Whether or not the performative functions
were themselves specialized and derived uses is open to question, but it seems
likely that they were, and that they are not the truly original meanings of
the verbs in question.

5 Relevant here is also the category of «delocutive verbs» (Benveniste 1971) in which
various locutions such as formulae of greeting are converted into verbs of saying, cf. welcome,
which means «to say «Welcome!»».
568 ELIZABETH C. TRAUGOTT - RICHARD DASHER

3. The issue of directionality.

So far we have shown evidence for the semantic similarity of thought
and speech as revealed by a study of the etymological origins of mental and
speech act verbs. This historical evidence supports Vendler's claim of similari­
ty by providing entirely independent evidence for it. We turn now to the
question of the directionality of change where one word may have both men­
tal and speech act verb functions.
Part of Vendler's argument for parallelism is that there is some
«leakage» between speech act and mental verb categories. Working as he
does from a synchronic perspective, and apparently from intuition about
the direction on leakage, he says:
there is a particularly strong tendency to use some original perfor­
matives in an extended sense — that is, to denote not a speech-act,
but a mental act or even state (Vendler 1972:28).
The fact that a fair number of speech act verbs like admonish, remind,
acknowledge, recognize, certify, and guarantee derive from mental verbs
is enough to make us query the direction of «leakage» that Vendler pro­
poses. Furthermore, there is a broad theoretical reason for postulating that
the direction will be from mental verb to speech act verb, rather than the
reverse. This is that meanings in general tend to shift from propositional
meanings to interpersonal and speaker-based meanings, not vice versa. Thus
in English, the interactive, discourse-oriented well and why of Well/Why,
I like it develop later than the adverb well and the question form why; in
Spanish pues meaning interactive «well» is later than pues meaning causal
«since», which in turn is later than pues meaning temporal «after», itself
< Lat. postea quam «behind which» (cf. Traugott 1982, Paez-Urdaneta
1982). Since mental verbs are propositional in nature and speech act verbs
presuppose interactive meanings, the latter can be expected to be later
developments. And indeed this appears to be the case.
Let us take a look at some of the speech act verbs that Vendler explicit­
ly indicates as «leaking» in the direction of mental verbs: agree, disagree,
conclude, distinguish, find, guess and maintain. Of these, several are both
mental and speech act verbs from their very beginnings in English, but some

6 Simon Dik (p.c.) pointed out that ask oneself, say to oneself are in part mental, and
perhaps could be counted as cases of speech act verbs leaking toward mental verbs. The semantics
of the reflexive speech act verb construction and its history deserve special study.
 MENTAL AND SPEECH ACT VERBS 569

show changes within the history of English. In the following examples mental
verb and speech act verb are abbreviated as MV and SAV respectively.
find: appears from OE on as MV; does not appear as SAV
until 1400, and then only in legal contexts (e.g. find
guilty means «determine and declare guilty»)
guess: appears in the meaning «form a judgement» from 1340;
the first instances cited in the OED with any
resemblance of SAV function date from two hundred
years later.
Other verbs show the shift in French:
agree: originally meaning «please» (12th C), Fr. agréer readily
acquired the meaning of receiving favorably, therefore
welcoming; from an expressive speech act meaning
«welcome» it developed the meaning of «allow». The
original Lat. source, adgratare «please» shows this
originated in a MV of the affective type.
distinguish: Lai. distinguo meant «separate mentally»; most Fr. and
even Eng. uses are difficult to establish as clearly per­
formative.
Thus, these items actually underwent a shift from mental verb to speech
act verb in their historical development. In so far as a verb like agree now
has peripheral meanings of the mental verb type, they are relics, not innova­
tions. We have found no examples of the shift from speech act verb to mental
verb in Japanese.
Indeed, the so-called «leakage» from mental verb to speech act verb
is well-attested and has a long history. Consider the following examples:
assume: first used in the 16th  to mean «take upon oneself/
adopt», this verb had the concrete sense of «taking on
employment or an employee», and the mental sense «to
suppose»; the first clear SAV sense of «claim, pretend
that» cited in the OED is from 1714.
blame: the very first entries in the OED from the 13th  attest
to the fact that this has always been used as a SAV in
Eng.
recognize: although clearly mental in origin (cf. cognize), this has
been used with the SAV meaning of «admit» from 11th
 Fr. times on; Souter (1949) cites a 4th  Lat. exam­
ple of cognoscere with the same meaning.
570 ELIZABETH C. TRAUGOTT - RICHARD DASHER

observe: originally used in ME to express «pay practical atten­

tion to rule» (e.g. observe Sunday, observe the law),
it came to be used for «perceive by the senses», then
«take scientific notice» (1559), and, with the SAV
meaning, «remark» in 1605 (used this way by Bacon;
the first SAV meaning in French is dated 1609).
The direction of shift is also attested in Japanese, cf.
kotowaru: attested as a MV meaning «discern, discriminate» from
the 8th C, and as a SAV with the meanings «give
reasons, apologize» from the later 12th C, «announce
judgement» from the late 13th C. The present mean­
ing «refuse» is attested from the mid 19th C.
mitomeru: < mi-miru «see» + tomeru «stop» attested as a MV
meaning «recognize» from the 13th C, and as a SAV
from the 17th.
mitosu: < mi- «see» + tosu «send through» attested as a MV
meaning «see through to the end, understand» from
the 10th C, and as a SAV act verb meaning «prophesy»
from the 17th
A question naturally arises concerning the path of shift from mental
verb to speech act verb meaning. Being in a certain state of mind is a prere­
quisite for a speech act: although there is considerable disagreement about
how exactly to characterize the conditions of satisfaction for e.g. claim,
order, promise etc., it appears to be generally agreed that claim involves
the speaker's belief in the proposition, order involves the speaker's desire
for the addressee to do whatever is named in the proposition, and promise
involves the speaker's intention to do whatever is named in the proposition.
We could say, as in the case of vocalization, that a condition for speech
acting, this time, the state of mind, becomes the name for a speech act (a
kind of metonymy).
But more needs to be said. It is often extremely difficult to tell whether
we really have a speech act verb use. For example, is find in I find that he
is guilty a mental or a speech act verb? In certain contexts this may be just
a statement about an attitude, but even as a statement made by someone,
who is neither judge nor juror, it invites the inference that there will be con­
sequences of the statement. When the first clear instances of speech act verb
meanings for earlier mental verbs do appear they often occur in passive
 MENTAL AND SPEECH ACT VERBS 571

sentences (i.e. not in sentences of the prototypical performative type I hereby

Verb that). There is always the question of how another person's mental
state can be known to the speaker (cf. Kuroda (1973) on epistemology). When
the subject (experiencer) of a mental state is not specified in a sentence, the
question becomes even more significant. The inference is that the mental
state has been made known by that other person and is therefore reportable.
For example.
1515 Wriothesley Chr on. 1.9. They saide he hanged himselfe, but it was
founde contrarie. (OED find 17.b)
invites the inference that those who «found contrarie» said or wrote that
they so found. The shift from mental to speech act verb is then an example
of the lexicalization of an invited inference, in the sense of Geis and Zwicky
(1971) (cf. also Cole (1975)).

4. Conclusion.
This particular study of the relation between mental and speech act verbs
leads to a number of conclusions. For one, the hypothesis that propositional
meanings give rise to interpersonal ones and not vice versa was used to ques­
tion Vendler's claims, and the evidence supported the hypothesis. This shows
once more that there are powerful regularities in semantic change of a far
more specific sort than the «extension of meaning, metaphoric shift,
metonymie shift, amelioration» or «pejoration» we hear so much about in
earlier treatments of semantic change.
Secondly, the hypotheses that propositional meanings give rise to in­
terpersonal ones and that invited inference can be a factor in semantic change
were both developed in connection with the history of grammatical forms
on the borders between syntax and morphology (conjunctions, articles, turn
takers, etc.). The present study shows that regularities and the processes that
lie behind them are by no means limited to grammatical forms but are rele­
vant at the lexical level as well (cf. Traugott, in preparation).
Thirdly, the evidence considered here suggests that as far as lexicaliza­
tion of metalinguistic repertoires is concerned, «having in mind» seems to
be more fundamental than «asserting that». This is further supported by
the fact that the number of IE roots identifying mental states is fairly substan­
tial, and also by the fact that a large number of mental verbs are native
(e.g. know, hold, think, believe, hope, fear, deem, mean, blame, wonder,
etc.), but many Old English speech act verbs have been replaced by terms
572 ELIZABETH C. TRAUGOTT - RICHARD DASHER

of Latinate origin. It is further supported by the fact that in many other

languages speech act terms tend to be more phrasal and less strongly lex-
icalized than mental verbs (i.e. they tend to be morphologically more deriva­
tional than many mental verbs). In Swahili, for example, native (as oppos­
ed to borrowed Arabic) speech act verbs are often of the type sema «say»
+ a phrase. Similarly, in Japanese the general verb for «say», iu, is often
used to refer to a broad range of speech acts, which are distinguished ac­
cording to context. To argue that mental verbs precede speech act verbs
historically, are more likely to be morphologically simple and more likely
to be native, and are therefore more fundamental may seem counterintuitive
to those who regard thought and speech as mutually constitutive. However,
thought and speech are not the same thing as the metacognitive and meta­
linguistic terms that lexicalize them. Where conscious language about think­
ing and language about speech is concerned, the relation is no longer mutually
constitutive, at least in part because of the constraint that more interactive
meanings are derived from less interactive ones, not vice versa.

REFERENCES

Benveniste, Emile. 1979. Delocutive verbs. Problems in general linguistics,

trans, by Mary Elizabeth Meek. Coral Gables, Florida: University of Mia­
mi Press.
. 1973. Indo-European language and society, trans, by Elizabeth Pal­
mer. Coral Gables, Florida: University of Miami Press.
Cole, Peter. 1975. The synchronic and diachronic status of conversational
implicature. Syntax and Semantics III: Speech acts, ed. Peter Cole and
Jerry L. Morgan. New York: Academic Press.
Fraser, Bruce. 1975. Hedged performatives. Syntax and semantics III: Speech
acts., ed. by Peter Cole and Jerry L. Morgan. New York: Academic Press.
Friedrich, Paul. 1971. The Tarascan suffixes of locative space: meanings
and morphotactis. Indiana University Publications, Language Science
Monographs 9. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Geis, Michael L. and Arnold Zwicky. 1971. On invited inference. Lingui-.
stic Inquiry 2: 561-66.
Jackendoff, Ray. 1983. Semantics and cognition. Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T.
Press.
 MENTAL AND SPEECH ACT VERBS 573

Kuroda. S.-Y. 1973. Where epistemology, style, and grammar meet: a case
study from Japanese. A Festschrift for Morris Halle, ed. by Stephen R.
Anderson and Paul Kiparsky. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.
Lyons, John. 1977. Semantics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Martin, Samuel. 1975. A reference grammar of Japanese. New Haven: Ya­
le University Press.
Morohasi, Tetuzi. 1955. Dai kanwa ziten [Great Chinese-Japanese dictio­
nary]. 13 vols. Tokyo: Taisyuukan Syoten.
Nihon kokugo daiziten [Unabridged dictionary of Japanese]. 1974. 20 v.
Tokyo: Shogakukan.
Paez Urdaneta, Iraset. 1982. Conversational «pues» in Spanish: a process
of degrammaticalization? Papers from the Fifth International Conference
on Historical Linguistics, ed. by Anders Ahlqvist. Amsterdam: Benja­
mins.
Searle, John R. 1979. Expression and meaning. Cambridge: Cambridge Uni­
versity Press.
. 1983. Intentionality: an essay in the philosophy of mind. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Souter, Alexander. 1949. A glossary of later Latin to 600 A.D. London:
Oxford at the Clarendon Press.
Sweetser, Eve Eliot. 1984. Semantic structure and semantic change: a co­
gnitive linguistic study of modality, perception, speech acts, and logical
relations. Ph.D. Dissertation, University of California, Berkeley.
Traugott, Elizabeth Closs. 1982. From propositional to textual and expres­
sive meanings: some semantic-pragmatic aspects of grammaticalization.
Perspectives on historical linguistics, ed. Winfred P. Lehmann and Ya-
kov Malkiel. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Traugott, Elizabeth Closs. 1985. Speech act verbs: a historical perspective.
The First International Roman Jakobson Conference, New York, Octo­
ber 10-13th.
. In preparation. On regularity in semantic change.
Vendler, Zeno. 1972. Res cogitans: an essay in rational psychology. Ithaca:.
Cornell University Press.
 ON THE PERSISTENCE OF IMPERFECT GRAMMARS:
CLITIC MOVEMENT FROM LATE LATIN TO ROMANCE*

DIETER WANNER
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (USA)

1. Formal syntax postulates perfectly generalized grammatical analyses

as essential for an idealized grammar acquisition process. The discovery of
a missed generalization across a diachronic sequence of language stages (i.e.
grammars) casts a shadow on the appropriateness of any strong version of
the generalization hypothesis. Such cases are not unknown l. At the same
time, the strong generalization hypothesis has already been weakened to a
considerable degree by the formulation of the Transparency Principle
(Lightfoot 1979) which accounts for a macroscopic delay in the onset of
a potential generalization as long as substantive transparency is assured by
the data. The Latin to Romance history of Clitic Movement (CM) is a fine
example of a missed generalization persisting over long periods of time in
its formal impurity, a case history which may shed important light on the
form and content of language change. The two poles of historical develop­
ment are on the one hand material continuity of linguistic phenomena as
they occur in the speech community and, on the other hand, reorganiza-
tional discontinuity of individual grammar reconstruction in the native

* This paper constitutes a bare bones summary of essential points dealing with the topic
of Clitic Movement; the source study is Wanner 1986: Ch. 7,9. All bibliographical details and
review of existing literature are treated in there. A short published account of one case of Old
to Modern Romance development is available in Wanner 1982. — The research presented in
this study has been supported in part by grants from the Research Board of the University
of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and by a Fellowship for Individual Study and Research by
the National Endowment for the Humanities, 1983/84; both contributions are gratefully
acknowledged, as well as the travel subsidy from the Scholar's Travel Fund (University of Il­
linois) for attending the Pavia meeting.
ι Cf. Wanner 1979 for a reconstruction of the development of word stress place from
Latin to Romance in this sense. Many instances of incomplete lexical diffusion can be reinter­
preted in this way, as well as instances of linguistic interference (cf. Wanner 1980).
576 DIETER WANNER

language learning process of early childhood. In this continuum of degree

of change we find thus both holistic reanalysis in the form of a new regularity
deriving from a less comprehensive data arrangement in the input data of
the learning process, and anecdotal, localistic, analogical abduction of new
forms which will constitute more or less important cases of (surface) ir­
regularity. Clearly, there will also be unchanged maintenance of the previous
condition. In order to understand an evolution such as that of Latin-to-
Romance Clitic Movement, it will be necessary to adopt a position of non-
categorial grouping based on the concepts of prototype and analogy, rather
than clear-cut categorial contours: It will not be possible to connect a sharply
defined property [ + CM] with another equally clear property or condition
[+ P ] 2 . This revised way of looking at change implies the recognition of
much approximation to more ideal solutions, of variability in behavior in
conformity with «grammaticality», and of potential surface contradictions
in adopted solutions of the language in question.

2. Modern Italian as the exponent of typical Romance CM contains

an open set of pairs such as (1) where the only constant difference between
the two members is the position of the clitic object pronoun, attached to
the infinitive in (la) vs. attached to the governing verb in (lb).
(1) a. così possiamo capirti meglio «in this way we can understand you
better»
b. così ti possiamo capire meglio «id.»
In a normative description of the phenomenon, one may distinguish a gover­
ning verb V(l) or V(cm) — here possiamo —, the subordinate infinitive V(2)
or inf(2) — here the morphological alternants capir-/capire —, and the essen­
tial clitic cl — here ti. The two strings (la,b) may be differentiated in prin­
ciple through their sentential structure: biclausal for (la) vs. monoclausal
for (lb), as sketched in (2a,b).
(2) a. [Sl ... V(l)[S 2 inf(2)-cl...]]
b. [S ... cl - V(l) inf(2) ...]
The property of admitting CM or not, i.e. of admitting the alternative struc­
ture/string (2b/lb) alongside the normal (2a/la) depends on the identity

2 Some essential sources for such ideas are Rosch 1978, Gleitman and Wanner 1982,
Lakoff 1982; Coseriu 1961, 1974; Andersen 1973, Lass 1979, Givón 1979, 1984. A broader
treatment of the question of historical change in this context is contained in Wanner 1986:
Ch. 9.4.
 CLITIC MOVEMENT FROM LATE LATIN TO ROMANCE 577

of V(l) so that a predicate such as insistere «to insist» is found only with
the (a) type expression; cf. () vs. *(3b). insistere is thus a V(not-cm) as
compared to potere as V(cm).
(3) a. Perché insisti a invitar/o? «Why do you insist on inviting him?»
b. * Perché io insisti a invitare? «id.»
For Italian in its illustrative function as a Modern Romance idiom, the class
V(cm) comprises the following groups of predicates:
(4) a. causative fare, lasciare
b. perception vedere, sentire; guardare, ascoltare
(5) a. MODal potere, dovere, volere, sapere
b. ASPectual cominciare, finire, continuare, solere, etc.
c. CONative cercare, provare, tentare, etc.
d. MOTion andare, venire, tornare, etc.
e. SUBject embedding sembrare, parere, bisognare, etc.
f. OTHer (speaker oriented constituency)
The causative and perception predicates of (4) form a group apart with regard
to the placement properties of the embedded subject NP or subject clitic;
they shall not be treated here separately in much detail. For the true V(cm)
predicates of (5), a summary description can attribute to them a number
of variable scalar settings on relevant parameters:
(6) a. Normalcy of admission of + CM strings of type (lb/2b):
decreasing from MOD to ASP/CON/MOT to SUB to OTH
b. Exhaustiveness of V(cm) group with regard to each class:
decreasing from MOD to ASP/CON/MOT to SUB to OTH
 Frequency of + CM string use per single V(cm):
decreasing from MOD to ASP/CON/MOT to SUB to OTH
d. Acceptability of + CM string types with regard to style levels:
decreasing from low to high style, and from spoken to written ex­
pression
e. Ease of processing of +CM string types:
decreasing with specifity of V(cm) meaning,
decreasing with «transformational complexity» of + CM string (con­
cerning various dislocation operations)
f. Geographic distribution of + CM string acceptability:
absence of + CM in Modern French, presence of + CM in all other
Romance language and dialects
Regardless of what might be considered a correct formal linguistic analysis
578 DIETER WANNER

for this complex of phenomena abbreviated as CM, it is unlikely that it is

the consequence of a simple, undivided property concerning clitics or in­
finitival complementation 3 . The major difficulty for such an analysis
derives mainly from the variable instantiation of the listed component dimen­
sions in (6); CM is not a proper category of a modern Romance grammar,
it is rather a derivative surface effect.
3. The evolution and history of CM from Latin to Romance yielding
the fragmentary process described in the preceding paragraph, covers the
essential stages given in fig. 1. The horizontal axis represents time; ver­
tically, the degree of completeness of manifest CM is indicated (as an
approximative comprehensive measure composed of the dimensions di­
scussed).

Fig. 1: Schematic CM evolution from Latin to Romance

3 Some treatments of CM in terms of formal grammar are found in Kayne 1975, Quicoli
1976, Strozer 1976, 1981, Rivas 1977, Rizzi 1978, Lujan 1979, Suñer 1980, Napoli 1981, Wan­
ner 1982, Zubizarreta 1983. — The two additional classes CAUS(ative) and PERC(eption) verbs
fit in the above schema (6) in two ways. With regard to the embedded subject expression (e.g.
mi in (i)), CM is categorically present in all dimensions, thus highest position in (6a-f). Con­
cerning an embedded object pronoun (e.g. la in (ii)), CM conforms to a high degree of realiza­
tion, parallel to MOD(als). For modern Italian, the subject pronoun aspect is a problem separate
from CM proper; in Old Italian/Old Romance, both aspects were still unified and belong under
the same heading of highest level of CM realization,
(i) mi lasciarono partire «they let me leave»
(ii) sentiamo Carlo eseguirla su un vero fortepiano! «let's hear Carlo play it (e.g. la sonata)
on a true fortepiano».
 CLITIC MOVEMENT FROM LATE LATIN TO ROMANCE 579

While Latin as such does not have a relevant phenomenon of CM due to

diverse infinitival syntax and broad freedom of word/constituent order, Late
Latin manifests a considerable concentration of contiguity between a gover­
ning V(l) and the subject NP or pronoun of an accusativus-cum-infinitivo
(a.c.i) construction.
This accidental approximation of the two terms leads in Old Romance
to a partial reanalysis of the construction as involving a V(l) with a depen­
dent object pronoun of inf(2) in host-plus-clitic configuration; this surface
phenomenon of CM becomes important (yet not categorial) with the code
switch from Late Latin into Old Romance (before the 9th century). In the
period after the 12th century the wide coverage of CM is gradually reduc­
ed, finding itself restricted now to a core constituency of verbs, construc­
tions, and styles, and losing of its original productivity. Most idioms reach
their present stage by the 17th century; only French (through in part direct
interference with the standard language) loses CM in its entire range. The
Modern Romance CM phenomenon thus represents a remnant of an earlier
more important class of surface string forms.

4. Comparing Old to Modern Italian, CM takes the same core shape

in the 13th century as in the 20th — (5) and (6) yield an adequate picture
again —; but each dimension has a stronger presence in the language: nor­
malcy of + CM string admission, exhaustiveness of the V(cm) groups, fre­
quency of + CM string use per verb, acceptability with regard to style, ease
of processing for complex constructions and specific verb meanings, and
extension across Romania are all considerably higher than in Modern Italian.
One example of acceptable structural complexity may illustrate this difference
of degree; cf. the string sandwiched between V(l) credere and the inf(2)
potere (fornire) in (7) (against Modern Italian) 4 .
(7) credendomi della mia ricchezza potere fornire (Novellino, p. 837; 13th
cent.)
believing-me of my riches be-able make-use
«believing to be able to avail myself of my fortune [in this matter]»
As a matter of fact, CM is a para-categorial phenomenon since it affects

4 The texts studied for Old Italian comprise the Novellino, Bono Giamboni, Libro de'
vizi e delle virtudi, and the Tristano Riccardiano, all from the 13th century (all quoted after
Segre and Marti 1959). — In modern Romance, no elements may intervene between V(l) and
inf(2) other than a complementizing preposition (or an incorporated clitic element).
580 DIETER WANNER

practically all instances of V(l), inf(2) and cl(2) combinations. The typical
string form (9b) instead of expected (9a) is avoided only in those cases where
the + CM string would produce either an incompatible clitic cluster (cf.
(10)), or where V(l) has a pronominal object of its own (cf. (11)), or where
V(l) has the form of a complex verbal expression (e.g. V + NP; cf. (12)).
(9) a. - C M string: V(l) inf(2) - cl(2)
b. +CM string: cl(2) - V(l) inf(2)
(10) a. estiatia mente dirallegrartidel poco (Giam. 47) «and keep in mind
to appreciate the little which...»
b. *ti + ti under all conditions
(11) si teme di offendermi «he fears (for himself) to offend me»
(12) io avrò balia di mandarli (Nov. 829) «I'll have power to send them».
Only from the 13th century on in French, and from the 14th on in Italian
and other Romance languages can one find arrangements of -CM type (9a)
outside of the forced situations described by the classification of (10) to (12).
These rare examples expand however rapidly to constitute a sizeable por­
tion of all potential strings, producing from the 16th century on a picture
of fully optional CM realization 5 .
5. What looked like a good example of a categorial phenomenon of
its own standing in Old Romance, a coherent process of moving the clitic
from an infinitive to its governing verb — hence Clitic Movement — lost
ground gradually, providing an instance of the lost generalization of general
interest here. Since a direct attribution of the evolution to «rule loss or reduc­
tion» does not explain anything here, the study of the origin of Old Romance
CM from Latin will prove to contain an answer to the question of the reason
for this surprising change: CM was not an independent process neither in
Old Romance nor in Modern Romance, and it takes its driving force from
a convergence of a small number of other processes independent from clitic
syntax in the area of complementation. Being accidental and heterogeneous
in its origin, CM remains fragmented even in the period of its apparent
categorial status (Old Romance), paving the way for the modern anecdotal
presence of this string type. CM is a lost opportunity with regard to
generalizations, an interesting example of irrelevance of formal grammatical
notions.

5 This stage is reached e.g. in the 15th century text of the Lettere by Alessandra Ma-
cinghi Strozzi; cf. Wanner 1981b.
 CLITIC MOVEMENT FROM LATE LATIN TO ROMANCE 581

6. Tracing the origin of CM in Latin and Late Latin is a complex

undertaking which cannot even be summarized adequately in this context.
Only a skeleton of indispensable considerations can be given now, reducing
the complexity of Latin syntax and textual evidence to a pitiful shadow.
Latin has basically two infinitival constructions, pure infinitive (13a) and
a.c.i. (13b); cf. Hofmann and Szantyr 1972: 344,353.
(13) a. possum currere «I am able ((with regard) to) run(ning)»
b. iubeo(= order you to leave»
One can distinguish three major types of constituent arrangement in the a.c.i.
range, a Basic string with left-of-V(l) occurrence of the a.c.i. (cf. (14)), an
Extraposed pattern where the a.c.i. appears to the (immediate) right of the
originally clause final V(l) (cf. (15)), and a Restructured type where the a.c.i.
clausal status appears to be dissolved since elements from the governing
clause (i.e. X(l)) and from the subordinate a.c.i. clause (i.e. X(2)) occur
interspersed (cf. (16)).
(14) a. [Sl ... [S 2 subj(2),..inf(2)] ... V(l)]
b. quia [enim [te ex puella prius percontari2] volo] (Plt. Persa)
«because I want you beforehand to question the girl yourself»
(15) a. [S l ... V(l) [Sl subj(2)... inf(2)]]
b. [ non puto [illu capillos liberos haber e2]] (Cena Trim.)
«I do not believe him to have [even] free hair»
(16) a. [S ... subj(2) ... V(l)... inf(2) ...]
b. cum se vi videritj abduci2 (Greg. Hist. Franc.)
«when he saw himself being led away by force»
Various pronoun functions are involved in the relevant constructions; only
the three cases of a subject of the a.c.i. (17), object of a.c.i. (18), and ob­
ject of infinitive (19) must be considered here.
(17) su.aci: enim volo te adesse (Plt. Persa (12)), «yet I want you to be present»
(18) ob.aci: earn te volo accurare (523) «her I want you to take care of»
(19) ob. inf : ne quicquam nisi non est sciunt mihi respondere (6) «and nothing
but that it is not do they know to answer me»
These typical Latin string types can be connected to the Romance CM
categorization via a rough grid of - C M , +CM, and ±CM préfiguration6.

6 There is a double presumption of relevant préfiguration contained in this step of the

argument: Not only does the (subject) pronoun plus infinitive string yield a potential precur-
582 DIETER WANNER

[-CM] characterizes a Late Latin string where subj(2) and V(l) are separated,
and where subj(2) stands closer to inf(2) than to V(l); cf. (20). +CM
manifests contact between subj (2) and V(l) such that V(l) separates subi(2)
from its original anchor inf(2); cf. (21). ± C M foresees contact between
subj(2) and V(l) but without inf(2) being spaced from its subj(2) by V(l);
cf. (22).
(20) a. string: ... subj(2) ... inf(2) .. V(l).. (typically = Basic (14a)).
b. quem se illuc missurum2 ... testatus est2 (Peregr. 17.1)
«whom he affirmed ... to be ready to send there»
(21) a. string: ... subj(2) V(l) ... inf(2) .. (typically = Restructured (16a))
b. illud autem vos volo1 scire2, dominae (Peregr. 3.8)
«This however I want you to know, myladies»
(22) a. string: ... V(l) subj(2) ... inf(2)... (typically = Extraposed (15a))
b. putat 1 se maximum peccatum incurrisse2 (Peregr. 49.2)
«he believes to have incurred very great sinfulness»
The two classifications + CM and ± CM together constitute the source of
proto-Romance precursors of CM strings where a subordinate clause pronoun
appears associated with the governing verb rather than with its infinitive.
7. A study conducted on ten (Late) Latin texts between the 1st and
6th centuries — from the Cena Trimalchionis to the Peregrinatio ad loca
sancta to Gregory of Tours, and others more 7 — establishes the relevance
of this scenario on the basis of frequency and theoretical considerations.
The interpretive results show the increasing numerical dominance during the
period from the first to the sixth century of Extraposition strings with ± CM

sor to Romance CM composed of the same elements — even though in somewhat different
function —, but at the same time it can be shown (Wanner 1986: Ch. 4,5) that a non-emphatic
Latin non-subject pronoun (inlcuding a subject accusative pronoun of the a.c.i.) exhibits
behavioral traits which are closer to a Romance clitic object pronoun than to a free strong
pronoun — this latter being the original condition of a Latin pronoun. The subject accusative
pronouns of interest here are proto-clitics in a proto-CM situation.
7 The texts are the following: Two of more classical orientation, Plautus, Persa (2nd
cent. ), and Bellum hispaniense (1st cent. ); three of more spontaneous stamp, Cena
Trimalchionis (1st cent. AD), papyrus letters from Karanis (letters to and by CI. Terentianus,
2nd cent.), and Peregrinatio ad loca sancta (end 4th cent.); four texts of non-Biblical Chris­
tian Latin, letters by Cyprianus, and letters by correspondents of Cyprianus (both 3rd cent.),
sermons by Augustinus (4/5th cent.), and Acta martyrorum christianorum (6th cent.); finally
a later historical text, Gregory of Tours, Historia Francorum (end 6th cent.). Details are found
in Wanner 1986: Ch. 7.
 CLITIC MOVEMENT FROM LATE LATIN TO ROMANCE 583

interpretation and of Restructured strings with + CM status in their Romance

projection; the large majority of strings falls under one of the two types
of (23) where V(l) and cl(2) are contiguous.
(23) a. ... V(l) [S2 cl(2) ... inf(2)] Extrap., ± C M
b. ... cl(2) V(l) ... inf(2) Restruct., + C M
Thus, cl(2) is typically associable with V(l) rather than inf(2) from the point
of view of a surface string decoding. This increasing tendency coincides in
the relevant centuries with an independent trend to construe an unstressed
object pronoun (a protoclitic element in Romance terms) with the verb as
its syntactic host in monoclausal situations. This development is clearly an­
nounced in documents starting with the papyrus letters from Karanis (2nd
cent., Egypt). The linearization difference between the potentially enclitic
arrangement (23a) and the proclitic (23b) is irrelevant at this stage of an
early emergence of Verb Based (VB) clitic pronoun placement in Late Latin:
Both linear arrangements are found with a considerable amount of open
variation 8 . The product of these trends is the reinterpretation of an ob.inf
or su.aci pronoun as an argument of the governing verb V(l) instead of their
semantico-logical origin as arguments of inf(2). The new (concomitant) func­
tion as a dependent of V(l) takes effect between proto-Romance and newly
identified Old Romance. Old Romance is characterized by extensive CM
phenomena as described above; their origin resides thus in an organic, but
tangential Latin development.

8. The clue for understanding Old Romance CM is the accidental jux­

taposition between V(l) and cl(2) which is due to the Latin stock of gram­
matical processes; it yields a programmatic reinterpretation from the
Romance viewpoint. Due to Latin complications, it is necessary to distinguish
between the behavior of su.aci pronouns and ob.aci instances: As the fre­
quency figures can demonstrate, the preponderance of ±CM or + CM status

8 Latin object pronouns as proto-clitics can be grouped as obeying one of three place­
ment options (referring to a simple clause): placement into second position (2ND) as the
autochthonous IE condition, placement contiguous to the verb (VB) as the newer (proto-)
Romance trend, or no identifiable placement pattern, i.e. free pronoun placement either due
to undetected emphatic status of the pronoun or due to the general lack of categorial adherence
to any and all of these placement patterns in Latin. For VB placement as the relevant proto-
Romance vector, both preverbal and postverbal linear position are admissible within certain
bounds, the indigenous solution being preverbal position leading into basic Romance proclisis
of the pronoun, with defined contexts of encliticization. Details again in Wanner 1986: Ch. 5.
584 DIETER WANNER

for su.aci pronouns corresponds to a 90% -CM status for the ob.aci pro­
nouns. The schematic string (24) visualized the crucial difference consisting
in the peripheral place of su.aci — leading to V(l) contiguity — and the
protected position of ob.aci as a necessarily internal constituent of the in­
finitival clause. The example in (25) shows both pronoun types in the same
utterance in their typical place.
(24)
(25)

In contrast with this rational syntactic arrangement on two clausal levels

leading to ± C M status for su.aci and -CM valutation for ob.aci, the dissolv­
ed, monoclausal cases of Restructuring may contain even more adventurous
ob.aci pronouns of +CM status as mihi in (26).
(26) quos mihi scitis praeter ... domesticis affectibus inhaesisse (Acta
Mart. 14.1.2) «of which you know that they were impending upon
me in addition to ... the domestic feelings»
This much goes to show that the combination of V(l) and cl(2) for the Late
Latin phase does not have anything to do with a pronoun specific or
infinitival-complementation specific development in principle: su.aci is the
essential, first contact between the two terms and this contact is due to the
inherent properties and tendencies of Latin syntactic arrangement (increas­
ed Extraposition, and left peripheral place of a subordinate subject mainly).

9. In a second sense, the role of su. aci in the emergence of Romance

CM is essential. While Latin had a full array of different pronoun types
of potential relevance for the new arrangement, Romance preserved only
ob.inf as a regular candidate for + C M placement. In Late Latin, ob.inf
pronouns do participate in the préfiguration of the CM reinterpretation,
but not prominently in the way of su.aci. At the time of the demise of Latin
a.c.i. complementation — before the time of code switch from Latin to
Romance — all such pronouns, and chiefly su.aci, ob.aci, and ob.inf, were
treated the same way with regard to accidental association with V(l): i.e.,
wherever the two terms were contiguous. While the su.aci instances disap­
peared with the corresponding a.c.i. syntax, the tenacious continuity of Latin
patterns in Romance — and the crucial function of su.aci pronouns in the
formation of Romance CM — can be gleaned from the survival of strict
V(l) association for the salvaged su.aci clitics in the Romance causative and
 CLITIC MOVEMENT FROM LATE LATIN TO ROMANCE 585

perception verb constructions, even in Modern French which does not know
CM otherwise.
(27) a. on lui a fait abjurer sa conviction
«one made her swear off her convinctions»
b. on le verra interpréter son meilleur rôle
«one will see him interpret his best role»
 *on le voudrait convaincre du contraire
«one would like to convince him of the opposite»
d. on voudrait le convaincre du contraire «id.»
10. An entire battery of forces and conditions has been at work to
produce the Old Romance situation of para-categorial CM observance. Brief­
ly listed, they are the following:
(28) a. Extraposition of the infinitival complement; in Latin grammar
b. Juxtaposition of V(l) and subj(2) in Extraposed and Restructured
strings; Latin
 Bonding of V(l) and cl(2) under verb based (VB) placement for pro-
toclitic pronouns; Late Latin and chiefly Old Romance
d. Semantic and pragmatic ease of V(l) construal of cl(2) for core
predicates; Latin, Late Latin, and Romance
e. Analogical extension of V(l) dependence from su.aci to ob.inf; Late
Latin and Romance
f. Code switch from Late Latin to Romance for full manifestation of
CM phenomena.
These component factors are sufficient to produce the ultimate effect of
Old Romance CM; thereby, CM is a natural result of Latin syntactic trends
which manifested themselves more prominently in the lower register speech
situations reflected somehow — even though only very fragmentarily — in
the texts investigated in the comprehensive study, i.e. texts of known proto-
Romance tendencies in metachronic and teleological perspective 9 .

9 The texts investigated here are all Latin; they are clearly distinct from Romance not
only through their chronological position, but more importantly through the auctorial intent
of writing in Latin. As such, these texts will never be a mirror of true spontaneous speech =
proto-Romance of the day; they can only reflect some features which may pass through the
contrcl net of grammatical/rhetorical education of the writer. The transition from Latin to
Romance cannot be documented in its realistic gradualness, only in the abrupt code switch
of incipient Romance writing (8th/9th cent.). For some interesting discussion of such problems,
cf. e.g. Reichenkron 1965 and Wright 1982.
586 DIETER WANNER

11. CM is not a unitary phenomenon or a single process of indepen­

dent status. In its Old Romance form it is a product of the V(l) and cl(2)
link; for Modern Romance, the amalgamation goes one step beyond and
concerns also the block formation between V(l) and inf(2). In Old Romance,
CM is the result of a secondary exaltation of Late Latin word order trends
and of the Romance clitic placement principle VB = TM, the Tobler-
Mussafia law 10. This principle associating clitic pronoun and verb of a
clause is the positive term of CM constitution in Old Romance; in the fur­
ther evolution, the decay of the Tobler-Mussafia law is the negative condi­
tion which reduces the wider relevance of CM: The chronological coincidence
of the dissolution of TM and the redimensioning of CM is striking in the
single language histories. The effects of CM are preserved into Modern
Romance through the material continuity in the core cases, in spite of the
decay of the original licensing principle (i.e., TM); these acted, and con­
tinue to do so, as prototypically salient lead cases. Where old CM is linked
to other phenomena (for causative and perception verb structures), its ex­
istence is fully assured. The characteristic gradience of CM importance along
the hierarchical chain MODal - ASPectual - SUBject embedding - OTHer
verbs is connected, through the decreasing generality of the verbal content,
with the preferred unit interpretation of the two verbs V(l) and inf(2) in
the modern idioms.

12. According to normal expectations of formal grammatical prin­

ciples, CM was an excellent candidate for categorical behavior in the Old
Romance phase. The absence of unaccountable counterexamples to a
generalized CM principle would have predicted the preservation of CM in
later phases as a language learning hypothesis which should have been
unavoidable in the context of the Old Romance data. The failure of this
expectation to materialize indicates that no strong principle was involved
which would have elevated the CM effect to an independent process of pro­
totypical saliency (and thus making it learnable). CM was always a derivative
phenomenon.

10 TM is the Romance form of VB placement (cf. ո. 8) combined with encliticization

conditions, chiefly and obligatorily in clause initial situation plus its analogical extensions (cf.
Sorrento 1951, Ulleland 1960, Wanner 1981a for Italian). TM refers to the clause level, in­
cluding the verb-plus-infinitive string as a monoclausal unit; this latter condition is the equivalent
of the observed CM behavior of the Old Romance period.
 CLITIC MOVEMENT FROM LATE LATIN TO ROMANCE 587

Within the CM domain, the observed behavior corresponds to a pro­

totype situation where a small, but solid core area maintains itself (around
the normal occurrences of MODals and ASPectuals) while this core does
not necessarily drag in the peripheral predicates and constructions. The reach
and direction of the case-by-case analogical extensions are unpredictable,
thus again militating against a categorical solution for CM.
Such phenomena are open to direct interference on the part of the
speakers of a language: A surface rational, manifest phenomenology such
as that of CM lies open to manipulation by organic or inorganic interven­
tion of various degrees of consciousness. The French elimination of CM
(except for causative and perception verbs) is clearly codetermined by such
external interference in a linguistic period of intense preoccupation with
language and grammar, the 17th century.11
Frequency of a construction or string type (in its many possible ver­
sions) is an important factor in prototype constitution and in the direction
of synchronic and diachronic propagation of a feature of language. The per­
sistence of the unchanged core component of CM is a case in point.

13. To conclude an isolated case history with a far-reaching perspec­

tive of historical change, it may be pointed out that linguistic development
may be: non-categorical, rather prototype guided; analogically extended (fre­
quently by abduction); constrained by linguistic and cultural tradition; non-
reorganizational, avoiding possible, but not necessary generalizations of for­
mal linguistic status; in general, linguistic change is embedded in a continuous
learning process which does not lead to sharp cleavages in grammar con­
stitution between proximate linguistic phases of an individual or a speech
community.

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THE AIM OF MORPHOLOGICAL CHANGE IS A GOOD MIXTURE
- NOT A UNIFORM LANGUAGE TYPE

OTMAR WERNER
Universität Freiburg i. Br.

0. Our topic, language-types on the basis of their morphology and

morphological change, is certainly not new: it was discovered as a problem
in the early 19th century and it was the subject of repeated discussion since
then 1. I hope, however, we can throw some new light on it. We have the
advantage of clarifying our points in connection with and in opposition to
a discussion going on at present under the title of «Natural Morphology» 2 .
Their proposals so far are, however, - as I understand it - rather short-sighted
and one-sided, with the result that they miss the mark. What is needed is
a more complex and balanced model (a) suitable for dealing with the seem­
ingly confusing facts, and (b) providing an explanation for why languages
change in precisely the complicated way they do.
In the early 19th century, when the genetic relationship of very different languages and
their common origin were discovered, the researchers were puzzled by the fact that the old
«Ursprache» (Sanskrit, Indo-European) must have had a highly elaborated morphology and
that the later developments show, above all, a progressive decay of inflection. On this evidence
they formed a theory of morphological development with three stages: Primitive speech with
isolated units in the childhood of mankind led to the development of rich inflection in its
adolescence; this richness was gradually lost in the languages' old age of our times. Similar
to biological life, languages experience a rise and fall, a certain circular development from
isolation through agglutination and inflection back to isolation .
It was soon recognized that these ideas were too simple working on a single global develop­
ment; and they were over-interpreted in their dependency on the evolution of the human mind:
Our languages do not belong to just one type, and all sorts of inflection can be created, chang­
ed or abandoned at any stage of language development.
So this sort of morphological typology was soon given up and constituted no longer a

1 Cf. summarizing Ineichen 1979, Werner 1984a. - I should like to thank Dr. Janet
Harkness for numerous corrections of my English text.
2 Cf. e.g. Mayerthaler 1980, Wurzel 1982, 1984.
3 Cf. from Humboldt 1836 to Schleicher 1850.
592 OTMAR WERNER

focal point of linguistic theory. It was reduced by some to the observation of analogy: what
are the «laws» of these morphological regulations after the destructions which the sound-laws
had brought about? 4 Other scholars (Finck 1909, Sapir 1921) greatly enlarged the number of
morphological types and gave certain languages as ideal examples of these types. Since, how­
ever, most languages show features of different ideal types, it seemed to be more legitimate,
to study the different mixtures of typological features and their diachronic change, instead
of looking for language-types 5.
In spite of this, the idea that these actual mixtures are to be understood as states of transi­
tion from one ideal type to another one, was never completely relinquished. And the question
why morphological development moves in one direction or another, was looked for in connec­
tion with other linguistic levels; this especially, after a new language typology, based on syn­
tactic criteria, became dominant 6. So Vennemann 1974 developed a sort of a pendulum-model
with the languages gradually wandering from the extreme of isolation to the extreme of inflec­
tion and back again without end, under the influence of case-marking by word-order or by
nominal inflection.
In «Natural Morphology», however, the interrelation between phonological change and
morphological analogy is - again - the dominant idea:

«Natural phonological» change is considered to be primary; it is steered by

the universal aim to ease speech-production. One by-product of the phonetic
simplifications is the disturbance and destruction of ideal morphology, i.e.
agglutination with a clear 1:1 relation of inflectional expression and gram­
matical category or even meaning. Instead of unequivocal suffixes there ap­
pear allomorphy, homophony, non-segmentable markings for several
categories, stem or root variants or a lack of morphological expression; and
the ideal iconocy «the more contents the more expression» can be violated.
All this is considered as a less advantageous form of morphology, as
undesirable complications.՛ Against this blind phonological trend with its
morphological destruction there is a comparable, likewise «natural» mor­
phological trend with its aim to restore ideal agglutination and iconocy. And
the more «opaque» a morphological form has become by an accumulation
of sound-changes, the sooner it will be abolished. The reality of mixed and
complicated structures results from this continual conflict between natural
phonology and natural morphology: it is a sisyphus-task, which natural mor­
phology has to fullfill on the slope of phonological crumbling.
A certain modification of this very straightforward and universally con­
ceived model is the idea, that individual languages can develop certain

4 Cf. the report by Best 1973.

5 Cf. Skalička's contributions, collected 1979, Altmann & Lehfeldt 1973.
6 Since Greenberg 1963.
 THE AIM OF MORPHOLOGICAL CHANGE 593

dominant morphological devices, say, e.g., root-vowel change for plural.

Natural morphology, according to Wurzel 1984, reinforces these favourite
devices of a particular language by analogy, and not necessarily agglutina­
tion only on a universal basis.
We do not want to deny that all these ideas describe real possibilities
of morphological change to a certain extent; but they do not capture the
full central mechanism, which comprises both morphological segmenta­
tion/simplification/unification and condensation/complication/diversifica­
tion for good morphological reasons - and not only as an undesired conse­
quence of sound-change. «Natural Morphology» has so far neglected or even
rejected the decisive point of frequency in language-use and the resulting
principles of economy. This prevents a full understanding of the real mor­
phological developments. We want now to explain what we mean by this 7 .
1. As a starting point we can state that inflectional morphology as
a whole can be considered as a special case of syntax, of sign-combination:
the meaningful elements have a high degree of obligatory interdependency
and are phonologically closely bound together. In er sagte e.g. er und sagte
are syntactically highly interdependent, but not phonetically united in one
word-form; in sag-te ['za: kto] the two signs belong to one phonotactic unit
(with [k] before [t], and [] in a dependent unstressed syllable). To arrive
at such a status phonological reductions are needed, in this case between
a root and - probably - a former auxiliary, say Proto-Germ. *sag + đēđa.
A first step in the direction of inflection is from «two isolated word-
forms» to «word-form + clitic» by closing the underlying juncture and
simultaneous phonotactic adaptations: assimilations, loss of stress, shorten­
ing/weakening of vowels. We find these «closed junctures» and correspon­
ding adaptations in actual speech between all sorts of words, varying accor­
ding to speed and speech style; e.g. was sagt er /Va(:)s + °,za:kt + 'e:r/
→ /va'sa:ktə/. Some of these combinations, however, can become very fre­
quent and even obligatory as clitics, as we have them in German substan­
dard sagt er /saktə/, sagst du es /sakstəs/, or in Ital. devo dir-te-lo «I must
say you it».
It is a complex of its own to clarify the exact conditions, additional
alternations and restrictions that promote these clitics - of different degrees

7 Ideas of the following sketch are also contained in Werner 1984b, concentrating on
the different possibilities of morphological change, and in Werner 1984c, more materialbound;
here we emphasize the consequences for language-typology.
594 OTMAR WERNER

- to full agglutination and inflection. And it is of special interest to describe

which of the many clitics were later given up (cf. MHG enweiz → weiß nicht)
and which ones were selected to become full inflection (ON kalla sik →
kallask → Sw kallas «passiv, to be called»). It is certainly only those com­
binations which are highly frequent in speech (token-frequency) and which
seem important enough that become an established grammatical category
instead of the speaker's free syntactic combination; this, even if the
obligatory usage of categories (like case or tense) can, in certain contexts,
create redundancy and repetition.
Thus, phonological reduction («decay») is a condition, a necessary step
for the rise of morphology. The two great trends, phonological and mor­
phological change, do not conflict in these cases; they are here in reality
one process, which can be considered under two different aspects.
Phonological reduction, which originates primarily in ease of speech, creates
at the same time a certain simplification in the sign-chain from a free syn­
tactic compilation in the parole to a ready-made combination in the langue.
Phonological reduction offers in the beginning, at the stage of spėech-clitics,
rich possibilities for the rise of inflection; it is a morphological decision which
of the combinations are substituted by new syntagms and which of them expe­
rience enlarged usage and additional regulations, so that they move on to
the status of obligatory clitics or even inflections. Which of the developments
are stopped at an early stage, and which are allowed to pass on?
It could appear as a paradox, that the development of inflection
demands mainly, so to say, sloppiness and inactivity (let fused things stay,
what they have become); the prevention, the abolishment of inflection, the
maintenance of the previous situation, need an extra activity and a plus in
expression (some separated substitution must be found). A special force is
needed to hinder change.

2. Phonological reduction, and that means the rise of morphology,

is normal behaviour whenever we speak, particularly in fast speech; the fer­
tile soil of inflection is fed by carelessness. It is a matter of frequency and
selection which of the fused and reduced combinations possibly become the
only ones and thus new systematic, underlying forms - and which ones re­
main mere variants and can eventually be completely replaced.
But if a combination has become a stable agglutination, the phonological
reduction would continue to operate on it. One development could be that
suffixes which have been distinct so far become more similar and coalesce
 THE AIM OF MORPHOLOGICAL CHANGE 595

(OHG zungün - zungõm → MHG zungen) or alternatively disappear {hano

→ han(e) → Hahn). This leads us to the conclusion that steady phonological
reduction both creates and destroys inflection; we might compare this to
a turning wheel making a rod move to and fro. Or, in other words, the
building-up of inflection is also a step on the way to the destruction of
linguistic signs - an idea, especially promoted by Lüdtke 1980.
Before this radical disappearance of suffixes, phonological reduction
can, however, produce other, more useful morphological devices:
One possibility is that a sequence of two (or more) meaningful suffixes
fuse into one; e.g. OHG nem-ē-n «take + conj. + 3.pl.» > MHG nem֊en
with -en «3. pl. conj» vs. ֊ent «3. pl. ind.». We have in our languages many
such combinations of different categories in one suffix preserved through
millenniums (e.g. «pers. + number» in the verb, «case + number + gender»
in the adjective). They have the advantage of shortness, but the disadvan­
tage of a greater inventory of suffixes, which is put up with in case of highly
frequent combinations 8 . We can compare these morphological structures
with lexical cases like Kind/Kalb, where the features «human/cattle +
young» are combined, in contrast to Kätz-chen, junge Katze where the two
pieces of information are given separately - all this according to frequency
principles in usage.
A second possibility is that the (distance-) assimilations between root
and suffix increase, producing root-variants with umlaut, breaking and alike:
OHG gast ֊ gesti ) Gast - Gäste; ON fjörður - firði - fjarðar; or that root-
developments take different directions according to the different phonological
structures of the suffixes, including 0 : ON bru - brú-m «bridge, dat. pl.» >
Faroese brúgv [brιgv] - brum [br???un]. At this stage we have partly discon­
tinuous expressions for the grammatical categories: root-variants and suffixes.
This process can go even further when combined with suffix-decay:
Proto-N barn - barnu ) ON barn - börn «child-children». Now the two pieces
of information, that of the lexical unit and that of the grammatical categories
(which formerly was in the suffix) are even more condensed: they are no
longer a sequence of expressions but are simultaneous in the root. So the
two sound-changes of root assimilation and suffix-decay produce a new type
of morphological expression, which requires even less phonetic effort and
still contains the same amount of information.

8 On all these language-economy considerations cf. Ronneberger-Sibold 1980.

596 OTMAR WERNER

In a way we have a repetition of the process, mentioned above, of the

two suffixes fusing into one; but now it is the root and a suffix which fuse,
and at this stage it is only a part of the root (e.g. the root vowel in börn)
that changes according to the grammatical category. Since the former suf­
fix can already have several grammatical categories united, the root-change
can also contain a number of categories (e.g. nom./acc.pl. in börn). It is
also possible, that the information carried by the root-vowels increases in
the course of time: OHG nām-ī-n «we should have taken» marked pret. in
the root -ā- and conj. in the suffix -J՜-; in MHG næm-en «pret. + conj.»
is expressed in -æ- only.
Thus the development of condensation has arrived at a very high degree,
from «1 content: 1 expression» to «several different contents: 1 expression».
An obvious advantage of this is the shortness of expression involving low
articulatory effort. It would, however, demand considerable encoding-work
before the articulation can start and decoding-work before full comprehen­
sion is possible; i.e., these mental activities can normally not be fullfilled
in stages - as the learner of a language would do - but have to be drilled
as a whole. From this it follows that these morphological devices are useful
and tolerable only in the case of inflectional forms which have a relatively
high frequency in usage. We understand, for example, that the present-day
German forms ich wäre, hätte, bräuchte, hielte, schöbe are not all equally
normal - the examples here represent a diminishing scale - and that forms
like ich briete, sötte, befähle are merely theoretical and in actuality not or
no longer used.
We do not want to discuss all the implications of root-inflection here 9 ;
but we must mention one special effect which often accompanies the change
from suffix to root-inflection: What was once a uniform suffix, say -í-, has
now dissolved into a multitude of root-variants, here all the different umlaut-
vowels like ä [ε: - ε], ö [ø: - œ], äu... and by umlaut untouched vowels like
ie [і:]. Instead of the IE simple ablaut-system e -  - 0 - 0 we have MHG
verbs like werden - wart - wurden - geworden, bieten - bôt - buten - geboten,
riten - reit - riten - geriten. This split into a large and ever-increasing number
of morphological subclasses is another price to be paid for the advantage
of condensation and shortening. We come now to cases, where these
subclasses are reduced even further to individual cases.

9 Cf. Ronneberger-Sibold 1980 again and her contribution to this volume.

 THE AIM OF MORPHOLOGICAL CHANGE 597

3. In the course of time such root-changes can accumulate. The con­

sequence of this can be (a) that not only the root-vowel but other parts or
the whole of the root become diversified in different inflectional forms: e.g.
IE deuk- ֊ duk- > Proto-Germ. teuk- - tug > OHG ziohan - zogen > ziehen
[tsi:ən] - zogen [tso:gən]; IE es-ti - (e)s-nti ) ist - sind. And a simultaneously
effect ist (b) that the accumulation of changes results in so individually diver­
sified forms that there are no longer any parallel cases which allow for a
morphemic rule; there are eventually only singular inflectional word-forms,
which must be registered in the lexicon. This extreme development can safely
be called suppletion, even if this term was originally reserved for cases of
root-combination like bin - war, go - went which pair etymologically dif­
ferent words. An example of overlapping of phonological differentiation
first, followed by combination of these different roots we have in cases like
hab-e ֊ ha-է, where phonologically strong and weakened roots were united
to form a new paradigm; the root forms show only light suppletion with
regard to their still existing similarities, but nevertheless suppletion, since
there is no phonological or general morphological rule to make the two root-
forms derivable from each other. The fact that the status of suppletion is
achieved by very different means teaches us that also this extreme of
phonological evolution is not only an accident in the light of morphology,
but - in the case of highest frequency - can very well be a desirable and useful
inflectional device: the condensed and short forms are highly differentiated,
so that - this is one of their advantages - they even function under low stress
and in fast speech; the price paid for this is that the singular inflectional
forms are completely individualized and have to be learned like different
lexical items 10.
Natural morphologists do not completely deny that suppletion -
although totally contrary to their ideal 1:1 correspondence - can be con­
sidered to be useful under certain conditions. However, the mistake they
make is to isolate these cases as exceptions from the rest of the develop­
ment 11. It would be much more elucidating to take suppletion fully into
consideration as the extreme of a long development, and to consider the
stages leading to them - i.e. lighter degrees of condensation and irregularity
- also in the light of these obviously «desirable» heavy irregularities. This
would more likely lead to the conception of a scale with extremes at both

 Cf. on this Werner 1977.

11 As Mayerthaler (1980:98), for example, does in a footnote.
Figure: the scale of morphological devices and ways of morphological change.
 THE AIM OF MORPHOLOGICAL CHANGE 599

ends and with respective advantages and disadvantages in reverse propor­

tion to each other; it would be possible to consider morphological change
as always moving between two extreme poles in both directions, which would
result in a morphology which might, to my understanding, better deserve
the name «natural».
In the following we develop such a model of morphological change,
using the figure above 12·
4, So far we have considered how phonological change can
simultaneously change the morphological type: the expressions for gram­
matical categories can become more and more fused with the lexical roots;
and in the course of these condensations it is usual, that irregularity comes
up and is more and more increased.
During all these stages of development the question arises, whether
morphology should accept these new offers made by sound-change. Similar
to the theory of Darwin a selection must always be made out of the
new mutations: Should the new types be accepted? In this case the decision
of morphology consists of «no change». Or should it be rejected, mostly
because of its complications? In this case a morphological analogy would
follow and abolish the new condensed form. Both reactions can be equally
well founded by a number of circumstances - «no change» as well as
analogy.
Above all the frequency of the word-forms in usage (token-frequency)
seems to be most influential: In high frequency word forms the speakers
will consider it an advantage to use condensed forms in spite of their sub­
class complications, and in the most frequent cases even suppletion will be
accepted as a favourable technique in spite of its irregularity. The price of
learning and memorizing idiosyncratic rules or single word-forms can be
easily paid, since frequent usage guarantees that these forms are always ready
at hand. - In less frequent words condensed and therefore irregular forms
will be considered as a nuisance, their construction or recall will cause trou-

12 Ramat 1985 works with a similar scale of Germanic verb forms from agglutination
to suppletion, which latter is surpassed by former participles now separated from the verb in­
flection (like the adv. während). His polarity is primarily «grammar ֊ lexicon»/«regularity ֊
idiosyncracy» and its psychological implications. In our scale the aspect of «isolation/separa­
tion ֊ fusion/condensation» and its economic implications is in the foreground, with «regularity
- irregularity» parallel to a high degree. It seems to me it would be worthwhile to scrutinize
the parallelism of these parameters more closely than possible here (cf. footnote 14 below).
600 OTMAR WERNER

ble and hesitation, the remodelling after a simpler pattern will be more ap­
pealing; i.e., analogy to a simpler technique or a new composition will take
place.
Since we have both in the frequency and in the morphological devices
not just two extreme poles but gradual scales the movements of analogy
can also go back to more or less isolated and regular stages; they need not
aim at full isolation or a simple 1:1 agglutination. We can compare, for ex­
ample, MHG/NHG wir ziehen - zogen, a fairly high-frequency verb, which
is left unchanged, and MHG kiesen - kuren, which has gradually become
rare and is nowadays even archaic, mostly because of the existence of the
synonym wählen «to choose, (s)elect, vote»; here we have analogies like
küren - koren (still a strong verb with root-inflection, but now with uniform­
ed consonantism and phonetically more related vowels) or küren - kürten
(now a weak verb with a simple pret. suffix) or - today more common, if
ever used - wir küren - haben gekürt (with a periphrastic perfect to express
past tense, i.e., still more decomposed into two words).
So, if an inflectional form has been moved by sound-change too far
in the direction of condensation and irregularity - too far according to its
frequency - or if a condensed and irregular form has lost of its former fre­
quency, then an analogy will take place: In other words this form will be
substituted for by an inflectional technique more or less further left (in our
figure). Alternatively there might be a jump to the very beginning of our
scale, to the combination of separated/ «isolated» elements. In the case of
our German perfect, the elements which are combined to express a new in­
flectional category are highly inflected in themselves: haben/sein are cases
of suppletion with suffixes, and a past part. like ge-kür-t has both prefix
and suffix; gezogen has in addition a high-degree of root inflection. That
means that even in the case of new combinations, we not necessarily have
just isolated units; they can be built up of elements which are highly inflected
themselves. All stages of our scale can coexist - nothing is necessarily unified,
not even «the beginning» (on the very left of our figure). And it is by no
way universally given how far the jump back in the development is made:
whether the analogical new form just abolishes root-consonant variation,
makes the root-vowel variation more regular, produces a regular suffixed
form without root-variants, or starts with a new combination of two forms.
All these possibilities correspond to the fact that frequency of usage is a
scalar and varying factor, too.
 THE AIM OF MORPHOLOGICAL CHANGE 601

5. Now we can try to summarize our findings and theoretical insights

and contrast these with current ideas 13:
(1) Morphological change comprises the two directions discussed: from
isolation to condensation and from condensation to isolation - its aim is
not only the jump back to 1:1 agglutination. Developments in both direc­
tions are «natural» and demand morphological evaluation and decision -
in spite of their asymmetry:
Condensation is fundamentally and in most actual cases a gradual pro­
cess brought about by phonologically motivated changes; its results must,
however, be judged in the light of morphological practicability, and that
means in relation to frequency of usage: whether the results are accep­
table/desirable in the particular case or not. So a new morphological class
of inflectional forms, which has arisen through a uniform sound-change,
can become completely diversified and re-ordered by morphological
demands; not all the words which happen to have a similar phonological
structure would also have the same frequency; in fact, it is often quite the
contrary. And on the other hand, not all the words which might well use
a more condensed inflection, need be the objects of such sound-changes that
produce condensation. In this way, it is quite possible that words are also
analogically moved to a more condensed status: weak verbs become strong,
if the frequency is high enough and the rules are not too complicated: cf.
Germ. tauchen - tauchte and the innovated Dutch duiken - dook 14. Alter­
natively, a move to more condensation/suppletion/irregularity can be
brought about simply by an exception to a general analogy: MHG si-nt did
not change its suffix -nt → -n the way all the other verbs did (sie nem-ent
> nehmen); in this way NHG sind has become a simple suppletive root with­
out any suffix.
The changes to more separation/isolation and regularity are in princi­
ple analogical jumps, not gradual developments, and therefore mor­
phologically motivated from the very beginning. It is, however, quite possi-

13 Poitou 1984 discusses and criticizes current «Natural Morphology», too֊ likewise
mostly under aspects of language economy; we hope to be able to compare his points more
closely at another opportunity.
14 Moves from weak to strong verbs are discussed by Ramat 1985; in his treatment, it
is more a change to higher regularity, an analogy to existing patterns, than a change to more
condensation. So he gets into difficulties about, how to place these processes into the scale:
is it parallel to «strong - weak» a move to more grammaticalisation, or is it, contrary to this,
a move towards suppletion (169) (cf. footnote 12 above).
602 OTMAR WERNER

ble that some phonological changes can, by chance, also produce more mor­
phological uniformity and simpler inflection: the two OHG verb classes
heizan - hiaz and loufan - liof, for example, have coalesced in MHG into
one class with the pret. forms hiez, lief.
On the whole, however, sound-change would lead to condensation and
irregularity; and it is analogy, that produces more separation and regulari­
ty. The decision whether morphological forms remain or change in one of
the two directions is made on autonomous morphological grounds.
(2) We cannot simply and unconditionally declare certain morphological
types to be desirable and others to be undesirable. All of these possibilities
as they exist in reality, have their advantages and disadvantages; it is not
mere chance that we have in the German verb quite a number of different
techniques alongside one another to express past tense: wir reden - haben
geredet, - redeten, sagen - sagten [za:ktən], nennen - nannten, nehmen -
nahmen, ziehen - zogen, gehen - gingen, sind ֊ waren. It depends mostly
on the relative frequency in usage, whether, for example, the advantages
of condensation are great enough to put up with the disadvantages of ir­
regularity. Consequently, which solution is the most appropriate differs from
verb to verb.
Since frequency is a factor which changes between different groups of
speakers, on different occasions and in the course of time, the tendencies
to move in one of the two directions are highly variable. So we cannot ex­
pect that every change in frequency immediately triggers a morphological
change. There is also a certain wholesome general tendency to keep to the
traditional form or to accept the new form created by sound-change; a cer­
tain disproportion between average-frequency and morphological device
must be achieved (a «quantum», so to say), before an analogical jump is
made - and this happens on individual occasions first, later on it is possibly
accepted by the community and by normalization.
(3) Phonological reduction and thus morphological condensation goes
on, more or less, steadily and would eventually lead all forms to dissolution
or to suppletion - unless stopped and recommitted to an early type on the
scale of development. This «go back to Go» can happen at any stage of
the development: very early, after cliticalisation only, from the stage of ag­
glutination, from any stage of inflection or from the final stage of supple­
tion. And the jumps back can be short or long.
With this in mind we cannot expect the morphology of a language to
assemble around just one morphological type; on the contrary, a mixture
 THE AIM OF MORPHOLOGICAL CHANGE 603

of many morphological devices is - given the frequency-conditions discussed

so far - the optimum we can expect. In light of all this it is rather surprising
that there are also some languages/groups of languages which seem to repre­
sent «pure» or almost pure morphological types: isolating, agglutinating,
and - a very broad mixture in itself - inflecting in the narrow sense. What
has brought such languages to renounce all the other possibilities?
(4) There is certainly, beside the tendency to mix, in extreme cases word-
wise, also a tendency to assemble in groups or even to make uniform within
certain boundaries in spite of diverging frequency values. So, after the polari­
ty between isolation - condensation according to frequency, we arrive at a
higher polarity between this diversification at the one end and unification
with its different possibilities at the other. We can illustrate this by a mobile­
like figure:

The morphology of a language moves between

diversification from and unification in

isolation to condensation

Certainly, isolation is a device favoured by language in contact and by

pidgin-developments; here we can expect and find a uniforming tendency
to isolation. And a complicated inflection is best preserved in small, isolated
and socially uniform communities. But this is only a very provisional and
rough characterization.
If we can say that unification is never an ultimate, unchallenged and
optimal aim of morphological development, that there will always be a
predisposition to make use of different means, then agglutination cannot
be the only nor even the preferred target of morphology. If «1 content: 1
expression» were the ultimate and only aim because of its «simplicity», then
why not full isolation, which is simpler still in this sense? And in the cases
of extreme pidgin or early child-language we can actually observe this tenden­
cy. I think it is a mere «slip of the mind» of Natural morphologists, that
they do not come to this conclusion; because this conclusion would mean
that «the aim of natural morphological change is the abolition of mor­
phology». So they preferred not to take the last step towards this conse­
quence, declaring a low degree of combination as the optimal.
604 OTMAR WERNER

(5) A later insight of Natural morphology is that it need not be 1:1 ag­
glutination; any device which is well-established and typical of a language
can become the aim of morphological change15, e.g. root-inflection in Ger­
man noun-plurals, since there are already many nouns functioning with this
feature. This view would mean that there is no absolute universal aim in
morphology, but only a language-individual aim, which is determined by
the number of items which already follow a certain morphological device.
Here we find, it is true, that a numeric criterion is decisive, that of type-
frequency; but this type of frequency is restricted to data within the linguistic
system, it does not take the data of language use into consideration, which
seem to me to be crucial to explain the structure of the system. And type-
frequency and token-frequency are, on the whole, inversely proportional
to each other.
So this reasoning can provide a certain explanation of why analogy very
often aims at this morphological device, if analogy takes place; it is an in­
dication that for a while there can be certain groupings around a certain
type. It is not an explanation, however, for why there are usually different
morphological devices alongside one another and why even stages of higher
irregularity are preserved in individual word-forms or even produced in dif­
ferent ways. In addition to the observation of temporary trends to unifica­
tion within certain limits, we need an explanation for the more fundamen­
tal and permanent trend to diversification and mixture.
Understanding of the elementary economic polarity between separa­
tion and condensation as directed by usage seems to me primary; with this
in mind we can ask further, why certain preferences or preponderances of
different morphological devices can be found in individual and temporary
language-developments. Such a wider model helps us to avoid asking wrong
questions, like: Why don't we have just one uniform language type? What
morphological technique is the really «natural» one? Why are most languages
kept so long in a state of undesired mixture and irregularity?
I would suppose that the ideal of a dynamic system in everchanging
balances between different polarities according to economic principles are
not only useful and enlightening in the domain of morphology but in all
other fields of language.

15 Cf. Wurzel 1984.

 THE AIM OF MORPHOLOGICAL CHANGE 605

REFERENCES

Altmann, Gabriel, and Werner Lehfeldt. 1973. Allgemeine Sprachtypologie.

Prinzipien und Meßverfahren. München: Fink.
Best, Karl-Heinz. 1973. Probleme der Analogieforschung. München:
Hueber.
Finck, Nicolaus. 1965. Die Haupttypen des Sprachbaus. Darmstadt: Wiss.
Buchgesellschaft (First edition 1909).
Fisiak, Jacek (ed.). 1980. Historical morphology. The Hague: Mouton.
Greenberg, Joseph (ed.). 1963. Universals of language. Cambridge, Mass.:
M.I.T. Press.
Humboldt, Wilhelm von. 1836. Über die Verschiedenheit des menschlichen
Sprachbaues und ihren Einfluß auf die geistige Entwicklung des
Menschengeschlechts. Vol. 1: Über die Kawisprache auf der Insel Java.
Berlin. Also published in: Humboldt, Wilhelm von. 1963. Werke in 5
Bänden, Vol. III: Schriften zur Sprachphilosophie. Darmstadt: Wiss.
Buchgesellschaft.
Ineichen, Gustav. 1979. Allgemeine Sprachtypologie: Ansätze und
Methoden. Darmstadt: Wiss. Buchgesellschaft.
Lüdtke, Helmut (ed.). 1980. Kommunikationstheoretische Grundlagen des
Sprachwandels. Berlin/New York: de Gruyter.
Mayerthaler, Willy. 1980. Aspekte der Analogietheorie. Kommunika­
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31.49-66.
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ty. Language variants and mental operations. International Inter­
disciplinary Conference held at Gummersbach/Cologne, Germany,
September 18-23, 1983, ed. by Hansjakob Seiler and Gunter Brett­
schneider, 162-71. Tübingen: Narr.
Ronneberger-Sibold, Elke. 1980. Sprachverwendung - Sprachsystem.
Ökonomie und Wandel. Tübingen: Niemeyer.
Sapir, Edward. 1921. Language. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co. (Ger­
man translation 1961: Die Sprache. Eine Einführung in das Wesen der
Sprache. München: Hueber).
606 OTMAR WERNER

Schleicher, August. 1850. Die Sprachen Europas in systematischer Über­

sicht. Bonn: König.
Skalička, Vladimir. 1979. Typologische Studien. Mit einem Beitrag von Petr
Sgall, ed. by Peter Hartmann. Braunschweig/Wiesbaden: Vieweg.
Vennemann, Theo. 1974. Topics, subjects, and word order: from SXV to
SVX via TVX. Historical Linguistics I. Syntax, morphology, internal and
comparative reconstruction. Proceedings of the First International Con­
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son and Charles Jones, 339-76. Amsterdam/Oxford: North-Holland.
Werner, Otmar. 1977. Suppletivwesen durch Lautwandel. Akten der 2.
Salzburger Frühlingstagung für Linguistik, ed. by Gaberell Drachman,
169-183. Tübingen: Narr.
. 1984a. Historische Morphologie. Sprachgeschichte. Ein Handbuch zur
Geschichte der deutschen Sprache und ihrer Erforschung, Vol. 1, ed. by
Werner Besch, Oskar Reichmann and Stefan Sonderegger, 409-18.
Berlin/New York: de Gruyter.
. 1984b. Prinzipien und Methoden historischer Morphologie. Ibid.,
535-45.
. 1984c. Morphologische Entwicklungen in den germanischen Sprachen.
Das Germanische und die Rekonstruktion der indogermanischen Grund­
sprache. Akten des Freiburger Kolloquiums der Indogermanischen
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. 1984. Flexionsmorphologie und Natürlichkeit. Berlin: Akademie
Verlag.
 SYNTACTIC AND SEMANTIC SPACE:
THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE FRENCH SUBJUNCTIVE *

MARGARET E. WINTERS
Southern Illinois University - Carbondale

0. Introduction.
In this paper I would like to consider some of the questions raised by
the subjunctive mood in French, and especially those pertaining to its con­
trast with the indicative. These questions (perhaps more so than the various
answers proposed to them) have repercussions in the study of change in the
subjunctive, from Latin to early Romance, and from Old French to the con­
temporary language. What will be proposed here is the application of a
recently emerging theory concerning the nature and organization of language
to the evolution of the meaning of the subjunctive. I will begin with a brief
restatement of some question about this mood, present the theory of
cognitive/space grammar, and then show some of its power in accounting
for the data.

1. Questions Raised by the Subjunctive.

Basic to studies of mood in Romance is a methodological choice which
has been made, implicitly or explicitly: Is the subjunctive a syntactic or a
semantic phenomenon? With examples of the type
1 a Je veux qu'il parte.
b *Je veux qu'il part.
2 a Je sais qu'il est présent.
b *Je sais qu'il soit présent.
one might be led to conclude that the phenomenon is syntactic; with certain
triggers (which can be listed), the mood of the subordinate verb is

* This paper and the research project it represents would not be possible without the
help of Geoffrey Nathan, who has given me encouragement, reactions, and suggestions at every
step. I would also like to thank Jo Rubba for listening and reacting to my work.
608 MARGARET E. WINTERS

automatically the indicative, with others it is the subjunctive. Other con­

trasts seem to indicate a semantic phenomenon:
3 a Je cherche un homme qui sait parler russe.
b Je cherche un homme qui sache parler russe.
4 a Paul dit que Pierre vient.
b Paul dit que Pierre vienne.
In 3 a and b the difference in mood indicates the different degrees of cer­
tainty felt by the speaker of the sentence (here coincidental with the gram­
matical subject) that she/he will indeed find a man who speaks Russian.
In 4a and b the difference in mood indicates a change in the meaning of
the main verb:
5 a Paul says that Pierre is coming.
b Paul says that Pierre should come.
If one chooses the second analysis, namely that the subjunctive is a
semantic category, there are other questions to be asked: How many basic
meanings does the subjunctive have? (For an overview, cf. Moignet 1959:
16-132). For French alone, the answers have ranged from one (Clédat 1932,
Moignet 1959, 1973, Hanse 1960), two (Wartburg and Zumthor 1947), three
(Rothe 1967, Nordahl 1969) to a multitude (Imbs 1953, Glatigny 1979). Fur­
ther, is the subjunctive still an evolving, live category, or is it a set of fixed
expressions with the number of creative choices to be made becoming ever
smaller? (For a characterization as a non-productive series of automatic con­
structions, cf. Harris 1978: 173-4, and for the contrary, cf. Glatigny 1976:17).
All these questions are of interest to historians in that they shape their
approach to the evolution of the subjunctive. If it is no longer productive,
it can be studied only by looking back to examine the various categories
where choice of mood meant choice of meaning in previous stages of French,
making it an example of semantic erosion or loss. If one believes, as I do,
in the vitality of the mood in contemporary French, one may ask questions
about its continuing evolution, and how changes in the past can be studied
to shed light on modern variation and possible future change. Again, the
choice between a syntactic and a semantic approach is important for one's
historical viewpoint and methodology.
For reasons which will become clear in the body of this paper, I will
approach the subjunctive as a largely creative, still vital category of French
grammar which has, of course, evolved over time, but without losing its
semantic value for speakers of French.
 THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE FRENCH SUBJUNCTIVE 609

2. Cognitive/Space Grammar.
During the last five years, research has been published within a
theoretical framework called space grammar (Langacker 1982, 1983) and
cognitive grammar (Lakoff 1982, ms.)· Although there are some differences
between these theories, they lie mostly in the emphasis placed on one or
another facet of language processing. I will accordingly treat them as a single
theory. Underlying it are two very basic assumptions. First, there is no im­
portant division between human language use and other cognitive processes;
they are not to be sharply separated (Langacker 1983: 6). As a result, the
same kinds of strategies used in other kinds of cognition are at work in
human linguistic functioning. Second, the basis of language is semantic rather
than syntactic. Language is inherently symbolic, and hence meaningful at
all levels of organization (Langacker 1983: 6). Phonology and syntax are
both symbolizations of meaning and are to be understood in terms of an
underlying semantic organization (for an overview, cf. Winters and Nathan
1985).
As a result of the above conceptualization of language, one can also
say that every unit is meaningful and there is no division other than posi­
tion along a continuum between what are usually divided into lexical items
and grammatical morphemes. It is on these bases that the view of the sub­
junctive as mere «servitude grammaticale» should be rejected, even in con­
texts where the speaker has no choice of mood. Larger grammatical units
(like compound lexical items or idioms) can be viewed on two levels, that
of the construction, where they are perceived as broken down into their com­
ponents, and that of the unit, the whole as meaningful in itself. Langacker
(1982:28) states that language processing is done on both these levels, and
(1983:50) that it is inaccurate to analyze one to the exclusion of the other.
For the subjunctive in more or less automatic contexts, then, one can
argue that the trigger (that is, the verb, conjunction, or expression in the
main clause) is meaningful, as is the subjunctive form itself, and that there
is further meaning to be found in the collocation of the two (for a related
view,.cf. Nordahl 1969: 248-9 and Imbs 1953: 19). In a sentence like
6 II est possible qu'il parte.
for example, in addition to the meaning of each word (or morpheme) as a
separate item, the constructions «il est possible» and «qu'il parte» have
meaning, as does the whole sentence. In addition, part of the meaning of the
whole sentence is the juxtaposition of the two smaller constructions, as a unit.
610 MARGARET E. WINTERS

To use a cliché, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, or, in
the context, the whole is more meaningful than the sum of its parts 1:
7 il est possible qu'il parte

construction: «possibility» «what is possible»

unit: «subjectivity»
One futher notion extensively explored by cognitive/space grammar is
the general cognitive strategy of prototype effect. Studied first as part of
psychology and general cognition (notably by Rosch 1973, 1975), the effect
is seen in the way in which human beings classify items as belonging to some
mental set. Rather than depending on a finite list of criteria for member­
ship in the set, they compare items (that is, anything which can be classified:
animate and inanimate objects, colors, grammatical constructions, uses of
mood) to prototypical members of the set, those members which best ex­
emplify the class they are illustrating. A prototypical bird, for example, is
a robin or a sparrow, not an ostrich or a kiwi, and a prototypical green
has a certain balance of blue and yellow in its components which makes
it look totally green and not green verging on another color.
In addition to looking at prototype criteria for set membership,
cognitive/space grammar also studies the internal structure of sets by means
of what Lakoff (ms.: 72-82) calls the radial structure. Central to a given
set, and having special cognitive status as such, are prototypical members
against which others are compared. Radiating out from them in various ways
are extensions, items in the set which differ from the central, prototypical
members by one or more than one feature. Other, even less prototypical
members are extensions of extensions. The overall design is a set whose
members are directly or indirectly related to the central members, but which
may not at all be related directly to each other. One can think of variations
on physical things: a prototypical cup has a handle, is used with a saucer,
and is usually a container for hot liquids to be drunk. But a nonprototypical,
but contextually recognizable cup may be handleless, have no saucer, con­
tain solids, or even be equivalent, as an abstract measure, to two four-ounce
sticks of butter.

1 This diagram is to be seen not as a formalism with theoretical importance, but as a

(rough) way of making visual the discussion in the preceding paragraph.
 THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE FRENCH SUBJUNCTIVE 611

On a grammatical level, work has been done on the prototypical

sentence: an affirmative, declarative, active and simple sentence. Variations
on it (negatives, questions, passives or middles, compound or complex
sentences) are extensions of the prototype, but, as more features differen­
tiate them from that prototype, they may be less and less like each other
and related only through comparison to the center (cf. Rubba 1985):
8 complex

compound question
SAAD
passive negative

I would hold that the uses of the subjunctive form a cognitive set as
contrasted to the uses of the indicative in a given language at a given time.
What constitues each set is a matter for research, as is the internal, radial
structure of the sets.

3. Cognitive/Space Grammar and Diachrony.

If language can be conceived of as organized in sets (of constructions,
sounds, morphemes, words) with prototypical and non-prototypical members
(again, along a continuum of prototypicality rather than with necessary clear-
cut finite divisions), then change in language can be seen as change in set
membership or in the internal structure of a set. Such a mechanism of change
is particularly applicable to a category such as the subjunctive. There are,
certainly, more or less prototypical examples of combinations of a trigger
and a subjunctive form:
9 II est content que je finisse le travail.
Less prototypical is a collocation such as 10:
10 II espère que je finisse le travail.
which, although attested, is debatable both for acceptability and for the
meaning of the mood. I shall return to this example later.
Change, therefore, may be change in set membership; a trigger of the
subjunctive may become, over time, a trigger of the indicative. Less radical
a change, and also less easy to perceive directly, would be a change in pro­
totypicality. A possible way to judge prototypicality, and one applied to
612 MARGARET E. WINTERS

10 above, would be hesitation in acceptability and in use, as well as perceiv­

ed distance from the central meaning. I propose that it is in these less pro­
totypical (and therefore more peripheral) uses that change occurs more easily,
that is, the kind of change that results in movement from one set to another.
On the periphery, too, as a result, would be expressions which do not make
up part of the central membership of the set or even the immediate exten­
sions from the center. Among these are found some uses explainable only
from a historical point of view. A further conclusion is that when enough
of the internal structure of a given set has changed.over time, there may
be changes in what constitutes core meaning, and therefore prottypicality.
The following examples from the development of the subjunctive in French
will illustrate some of these points.

4. Examples.
4.1 At the simplest level, triggers of the subjunctive (which, as was
said above, contain part of the meaning of the whole expression) may transfer
because of analogical extension from the set of subjunctive uses to the set
of indicative uses, or vice versa. A change now taking place in French is
the use of «après que» with the subjunctive:
11 Je ne repartirai qu'après que vous m'ayez donné votre réponse.
Prescriptive grammar still, however, dictates the indicative (Grevisse 1961:
201-2). This question has been discussed extensively (Grevisse 1961, Barral
1967, Wilmet 1976) and there is general agreement that the change to the
subjunctive in the second clause is by analogy with the conjunction «avant
que» which has always governed the subjunctive. Since they are both ex­
pressions of temporal sequencing and, possibly, because of their rather
similar prosodic shape, their syntactic and semantic behavior are now perceiv­
ed as closer together.
This is not to argue, though, that all expressions with «que» form a
class, or are in the process of forming a class, regardless of the meaning
of the trigger; «parce que», «puisque» show no sign of becoming subjunc­
tive triggers in French just because they have the same prosodic shape and
morphological structure as other one and two-syllable prepositions and
adverbs combined with «que» to form conjunctions. They are, in fact, pro­
totypical instances of triggers in the indicative set.
4.2 The following examples show how items on the periphery of a
given set may transfer to another set. In each case they are extensions of
 THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE FRENCH SUBJUNCTIVE 613

the central meaning of their set and, with very little reinterpretation, have
become instead extensions of meaning in the other set.
4.2.1 As was mentioned above, the verb «espérer», which in Old
French generally governed the future indicative and in modern French an
indicative tense, either future, or past, or present, shows more signs now,
even in the affirmative, of being used with the subjunctive. The usual forms
are the following2:
12 a c'est mes espoirs/Que courtoisie me ferez
«it is my hope that you will do me courtesy»
b Car j'ay espoir que Dieu ma guerison/Ordonnera
«For I hope that God will order my cure»
13 J'espère que ce café vous a plu/plaira/plaît.
There are, in addition, sentences of the following kind:
14 J'espère que ce café vous plaise
In the older, indicative form the semantic extension is from knowledge, a
form of certainty which takes the indicative, to a non-judgment about cer­
tainty, and then extended to hope, with very little volition involved. With
a diachronic shift of emphasis towards volition, and therefore more uncer­
tainty about the outcome of hope, comes a shift to the subjunctive. The
distance from the central, certain-knowledge meaning of the indicative set
has made this shift, still very much optional, a possibility. In addition, Old
French allowed only the future with «espérer», so that the lack of sure
knowledge about the verb in the sentential object was marked by the mean­
ing of that tense. With the extension of the tense expression to the past and
present as well, other forms of marking the meaning of the relationship bet­
ween «espérer» and another verb are becoming more attractive to the speaker
of modern French.
4.2.2 Similar analyses can be made for the verb «croire» in the affir­
mative and «savoir» in the negative. Contrary to the usual use in modern
French, «croire» and its near equivalents «cuidier» and «penser» (cf. Jensen
1974: 53-4 on their differences) are found with the subjunctive in Old French,
especially in the second and third persons where the belief of some one else

2 Examples from Old French come variously from Jensen 1974, Ménard 1973, and
Moignet 1973. For modern French, examples have been fabricated or taken from the Larousse
de la grammaire 1983.
614 MARGARET E. WINTERS

is being reported and cannot, therefore, be as strongly expressed as a reality:

15 a si le voit si viel par semblant qu'il quide bien qu'il ait trois cenz ans
ou plus d'aage.
«and he sees him so old in appearance that he believes indeed that
he is 300 years or more»
b car anemis pense il bien que ce soit
«for he believes indeed that he is an enemy»
They are also attested for this class of verb in the first person:
16 a Je cuide bien que ce soit voir.
«I do indeed believe that this is true»
b Je croi qu'il soit mout bers.
«I believe that he is very noble»
 Je me pens que ce soit ma fame.
«I believe that this is my wife».
Jensen (1974: 54-6) calls them attenuated belief expressions. This attenua­
tion brings them into the realm of greater doubt, probably via an extension
from doubt itself through negative belief to belief that something is not so.
In modern French these verbs generally take the indicative in affirmative
contexts. They are now extensions of a class of indicative uses clustered
around certainty, extended to knowledge, and then to belief in what one
knows 3 :
17 Old French: doubt → negative belief → belief that not → belief 
Modern French: certainty → knowledge → belief

4.2.3 With negation, the verb «savoir» is collocated with the subjunc­
tive in Old French:
18 a Mais nus ne set que ce soit il.
«But nobody knows that it is he»
b Ne sorent que il fuissent frere.
They did not know that they were brothers»
In modern French, the indicative is found:
19 a Mais personne ne sait que c'est lui.
b Ils ne savaient qu'ils étaient frères.

 I am using a single arrow to designate synchronic extensions of meaning, and a double-

tailed arrow to mark diachronic change.
 THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE FRENCH SUBJUNCTIVE 615

As with «croire» above, the move from one set to another is based on the
strength of identification with a core meaning from a distance. Not know­
ing is seen in Old French as a kind of doubting, while in modern French
it has become an extension of the same set as «croire»-type verbs, via seman­
tic movement from certainty to knowledge and then, via negative knowledge
(knowledge of something's not being so) to not knowing:
20 Old French: doubt → not knowing 
Modern French: certainty → knowledge → negative knowledge →
not knowing
4.3 The last example concerns verbs and expressions of evaluation,
such as the modern French «je regrette», «il est content», which are now
used with a subjunctive for the verb designating what is being evaluated.
Some standard examples are:
21 a Je regrette qu'il pleuve aujourd'hui.
b II est bien que tu sois prête à partir.
 Elle est contente qu'il nous ait vus.
In Old French the indicative was much more the rule, with the subjunctive
being used to express the fact that the process being evaluated was a possibili­
ty or hypothetical rather than a reality:
22 a De ce li poise qu'il ne vient.
«For this reasons he was sorry that he wasn't coming»
b Forment li plest qu'ira chacier.
«It pleases him greatly to be going hunting»
23 Certes ce poise moi molt fort/Que je li doie doner mort.
«Certainly I am very sorry that I must kill him»
In 22 are instances of the indicative, while 23 has one example which con­
forms to modern use. What has happened is that the meaning underlying
the collocation of the trigger and second verb has shifted. In Old French
the focus is on the opposition of reality to non-reality or hypothesis, not
necessarily with reference to something envisaged as unreal, but where the
reality may simply be in doubt. In modern French, on the other hand, the
subjectivity of the judgment governs the choice of mood.
The above discussion about evaluative verbs provides an instance of
a shift, not in the relationship between extensions of prototypical meanings
616 MARGARET E. WINTERS

and mood, but in the very prototype itself. In addition to expressions of

evaluation, many other mood triggers in Old French depended on the degree
of reality of the verb presented in the second clause. Some of these (Ménard
1973: 148-55) are triggers expressing desire, restriction, volition, result. In
many cases modern French does not have this choice, not because use has
become frozen to the point of losing meaning, but because other prototype
meanings are more central. As extensions change class, the set itself, in some
almost physical way, changes shape, and what was once central is now in
turn peripheral or even lost from the set.

5. Conclusion.
A firm statement of what exactly this prototype (or prototypes) in
modern French is for the meaning of the subjunctive must wait for further
research. Based on some of the above discussion, I would posit non-reality
(but not necessarily unreality) as an Old French prototypical meaning of
the subjunctive, with a shift toward greater emphasis on subjectivity in
modern French. It will be a question for further analysis whether there is
or ever has been one central meaning of this mood or several, an analysis
which ultimately will need to consider carefully Middle French and Classical
French as intermediate stages, to look back to Latin and sideways to the
other Romance languges.
The present paper is obviously preliminary. To summarize my proposal,
I am working within a theory of grammar based in semantics, with syntax
as symbolic of meaning and therefore meaningful in itself. By using a radial
model of the internal structure of sets, syntactic (and therefore semantic)
change can be studied by consideration of the relationship of a given con­
struction to prototypical members of the set to which it belongs.
Diachronically, sets change, first through rearrangement of members within
a set and then through membership or non-membership in the set. Those
set members at the periphery, that is, those which are related to the pro­
totypical members through semantic extension, are most vulnerable to
change. Changes occurring first at the periphery, however, may ultimately
result in a different shape for the set itself and thus for perceptions by native
speakers about what constitutes prototypicality.
 THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE FRENCH SUBJUNCTIVE 617

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 THE STUDY OF SEMANTIC CHANGE
IN EARLY ROMANCE (LATE LATIN)

ROGER WRIGHT
University of Liverpool

The history of the development and divergence of the Romance

languages out of the Latin of the Roman Empire is the most fully
documented case of language change that we possess. This ought to mean
that the development of the discipline of historical linguistics is closely in­
terwoven with the theoretical and practical advances made by Romance
philologists; that the proponents of theories of language change which are
meant to have universal validity check with care the attested details of the
development of Latin into the various Romance languages; and, converse­
ly, that Romance philologists take account of the accepted discoveries of
historical linguistics when interpreting their evidence. But some of them have
been happy to work with assumptions that seem absurd to a general historical
linguist. For example, specialists in Late Latin texts, that is, those written
between the end of the Roman Empire and the Twelfth-Century Renaissance,
once tended to regard the language of those texts as some kind of direct
transcription of speech. It was partly a reaction to the weaknesses in this
approach that encouraged the application to the Early Romance languages
of reconstruction techniques originally designed for languages with no
documentation at all. By working backwards from the Romance languages,
scholars created a hypothetical entity called Proto-Romance, postulated to
have existed at the same time as surviving Latin texts were written but not
to be identified with Latin. This did lead to occasional illuminating reex­
aminations of the textual evidence, as in the brilliant article by Politzer (1961),
but some scholars never looked at the texts, in effect priding themselves on
not taking into account the copiously available evidence that is the envy of
those who study other language families. Specialists in Bantu or Athabaskan
languages, for example, would be delighted to have a seventh-century text,
wouldn't they? At the very least, they wouldn't ignore it.
These barriers are not impermeable. At our conference at Stanford in
620 ROGER WRIGHT

1979 I pointed out that lexical diffusion theory demolished the phonetic
evidence that had bolstered the view that Late Latin and Early Romance
were totally separate languages. Esa Itkonen in Helsinki, Michael Richter
in Dublin, Marc van Uytfanghe in Ghent and others have been working
simultaneously on Romance historical linguistics and Late Latin texts.
Romance historical linguists quite often now consider together Late Latin
and subsequent Early Romance documentary evidence without erecting an
artificial barrier between the two; e.g., among others, Timo Riiho's work
on Spanish prepositions, Mario Saltarelli's paper on syntactic diffusion at
the Stanford conference, Dieter Wanner's paper to this conference and
Suzanne Fleischman's book on the future. But there are still scholars who
ignore the Late Latin evidence entirely; for example, Saussol wrote an in­
teresting book on the use of the Spanish copulative verbs estar and ser in
the Poema de Mío Cid, and then included in the book's title the phrase
«Origins of their functions», as if nobody in Spain had talked at all until
the twelfth century, or as if their Latin etyma STARE and SEDERE had
never existed.
The Romance Reconstructionists are of course right to be wary of some
of the Mediaeval Latin texts: texts written in England, Ireland or Germany,
because these were probably written by native speakers of languages other
than Romance. In addition, texts written after the ninth-century educational
reforms in France and much of Italy, or after 1080 in most of Spain, are
likely to be written by authors who did regard Latin as a conceptually en­
tirely distinct language from their own spoken Romance; but texts from
before those dates in Romance-speaking areas were probably written by
speakers of Old Romance, who were using the only written mode they knew
for recording their language (cp. Wright, 1982). This was not a direct
transcription of speech any more than modern written French or English
is a direct phonetic transcription of spoken French or English. This lack
of direct correspondence means that some phonetic and morphological
reconstruction is necessary, but it is even in these fields a good idea to look
at texts and see if genuinely attested spellings appear in a chronological order
compatible with the order required by the simplicity metric. And in lexical
studies, the appearance of a new word in written form is precisely the
evidence we need (as when Moralejo discovered the source of Spanish
jerigonza written in a seventh-century text as Ihericuntina lingua).
In many respects the language of Late Latin texts seems to us archaic.
But there is no reason to assume that the apparent coexistence of an attested,
 SEMANTIC CHANGE IN EARLY ROMANCE 621

but archaic, usage in a Late Latin text with a convincingly reconstructable

spoken form in the coetaneous Proto-Romance implies necessarily that the
older usage did not also exist in the speech of the time. A new linguistic
phenomenon can arise long before the eventual disappearance of the old
form which it seems in retrospect to have neatly replaced; the author of the
text, rather than indulging in antiquarianism in using an older form, might
merely have been favouring one competing variant over another, the
favoured one being one which we know now, but couldn't have known then,
was destined to die out. I've argued before (Wright, 1983) that new and old
uses could regularly coexist in Early Romance until the eighth century or
so. This comment is pertinent to morphological and syntactic change in
Romance because, for example, of the probable lengthy coexistence of the
use of old and new methods of rendering the passive (recently studied by
Codoñer); it is pertinent to phonetic change, since for stylistic and sociolin­
guistic reasons old pronunciations are under no compulsion to die out merely
because new ones have come in; and it is particularly pertinent to semantic
change, since words regularly acquire new meanings without losing the old.
In general terms, the survival of the old despite the arrival of the new
is not without interest. For another perspective which has shifted over the
last thirty years in historical linguistics concerns the theoretical status of
features that have not changed. Once upon a time it was presumed in a vague
sort of way that if it were left to itself a language wouldn't change at all,
so that the only interesting objects of study were taken to be those aspects
which indeed had changed. More recently, people have realized that it is
natural for all languages to evolve, so that what has not changed is poten­
tially significant. Hence the recent interest taken by historical linguists in
Classical Arabic and Hebrew, Katharevusa Greek, Post-Carolingian
Mediaeval Latin, etc, as artificially maintained invariant systems. Hence also
the realization that sounds that have not changed might have as much
theoretical significance as those which have, with the resulting elaboration
of theories of consonantal strength hierarchies (as in Cravens's excellent
paper to this conference); hence also the interest shown by lexical diffusion
theorists in words that have not undergone phonetic changes as well as in
those that have. This too applies to semantic change. For example, the fact
that the eye is the only part of the face whose normal lexical item has not
been involved in a semantic shift in the history of the Romance languages
is of considerable interest, and could be interpreted as indicating that the
622 ROGER WRIGHT

eye has semantically real psychological boundaries in a way that other parts
of the face have not. For in Spanish, for example, the word for «mouth»
used to mean «cheek» (boca), the word for «chin» used to mean «little
beard» (barbilla), the word for «eyebrow» used to mean «eyelids» (ceja),
the word for «nose» used to mean «nostril» (nariz/ces), and the word for
«cheek» used to mean «jawbone» (mejilla), but the word for eye has not
changed (ojo). And now, at last, I'll turn to semantic change directly.
Semantic change in lexical items is often intelligently discussed by
etymologists whose primary focus is on the phonetic: e.g. Malkieľs paper
to this conference; but in general it is an underdeveloped branch of historical
linguistic theory. This is not because it is in itself a small subject. Countless
lexical items have acquired new meanings. Yet historical linguistic textbooks,
while occasionally mentioning it, rarely even give it a separate chapter (and
even these conferences average only about one paper per conference on the
topic). Writers on semantic theory, at least within the European tradition,
have been more likely to discuss change; Ullmann, Vilches Acuña, Waldron
and Baldinger, for example; but specifically diachronic semantic principles
seem not to have been elaborated in the last twenty years. Perhaps this is
because of Gilliéron's famous motto, which is certainly true, that each word
has its own history. Since historical linguistics, like other branches of
linguistics, has recently been dominated by believers in universals, the
generally accepted presumption that there are no universals in semantic
change may have led some linguists to assume that it is of no interest. This
is to put the cart before the horse. There can be no objection to looking
for universals, but there are strong objections to the assumption that if
universals are not found the whole investigation must therefore be pointless.
Roger Lass's realization that in diachronic linguistics there are no rigorous­
ly predictive principles was a great step forward; no matter that many Euro­
pean linguists have always taken this for granted anyway, it is an advance
for an instinctive seeker after clear universals to admit that there may not
be any. In diachronic semantics, no scholar has seriously been tempted to
claim that there are.
How and why does the modern Spanish word verdugo, «executioner»,
come from a mediaeval word meaning «sapling»? Schulte-Herbrüggen's ar­
ticle will tell you how. It is hardly a predictable development. Nobody wants
to predict that the English word sapling will mean «executioner» in 700 years
time. But the change is explicable if we understand the difference between
sense and reference, if we know a little semantic theory, and, above all, if
 SEMANTIC CHANGE IN EARLY ROMANCE 623

we look at the textual evidence. In that article the intermediate stages of

the semantic change are helpfully documented in chronologically intermediate
texts. I am not now going to tell you what those stages are, because my point
is that it is not easy to guess, simply by using general techniques of reconstruc­
tion, but that it is easy to follow if we look at the texts. My point today
is that we can do the same for semantic changes known to have taken place
in the Late Latin - Early Romance period.
López Pereira, of the department of Latin at the University of San­
tiago de Compostela, has recently explained a baffling semantic fact of
Mediaeval Spanish and Catalan by looking at a Late Latin text: Old Spanish
and Catalan civil undoubtedly come from Latin CIVILEM, «civil», but why
should they also be able to mean «cruel»? In the Crónica Mozárabe of 754
A.D. López Pereira found attested civiliter meaning «in civil war»; a ruler
who behaved civiliter was treating his opponents cruelly. No amount of
guesswork and reconstruction could have established that as the route of
change; but because the Santiago Latin department is building up a vast
filing system of attestations in seventh and eighth century texts, López Pereira
could.
The development of Latin MAXILLA «jawbone» into Spanish mejilla
«cheek» is clarified for us by Isidore of Seville, who, in his seventh-century
Etymologiae, regards the two maxillae as still being bones, but distinguish­
ed from each other as left and right, as cheeks are, rather than as upper
and lower, as jawbones are; he says there are four canine teeth in the human
mouth, two in the right maxilla and two in the left maxilla (sequentes canini
vocantur, quorum duo in dextra maxilla et duo in sinistra sunt). Semantic
changes in Spanish words for parts of the face are discussed at length in
Wright (1985), and one of the interesting things to come out that investiga­
tion was that even a writer as hyper-literate as Isidore of Seville could use
his words this way with their developed meanings, often - as in this case
- of a kind that we might be able tentatively to guess at, but without our
otherwise being able to reconstruct the chronology or the precise semantic
nature of the intermediate stages. As it is, we can see from this sentence
that the ninety-degree shift in the perception of maxilla's sphere of reference
happened before that sphere of reference moved away from the bones out­
wards to the flesh.
If we can find semantic development in Romance attested even in the
vocabulary of the scholar Isidore, does this mean that a word used by Isidore
without the reconstructable developed meaning implies conversely that the
624 ROGER WRIGHT

semantic change in question has not yet happened in Spanish Romance?

In phonetics and morphology, because all the scribes were taught from the
Artes Grammaticae to follow the old norms, the presence of such unevolv-
ed forms in the texts of these times tells us little about pronunciation or
spoken morphology. Semantics, however, was not covered by these Artes;
yet Isidore had read many ancient works, and it is possible that he used words
with an archaic sense more often than most of his contemporaries. That
is a professional hazard of his being a lexicographer. But it is also true that
in general semantic changes seem to take longer to complete than phonetic
ones, particularly in that the old meaning can often coexist happily with
the new meaning, and fail to drop out at all. So in such cases Isidore may
be just favouring one meaning current in the community rather than another.
Even so it is sometimes possible to deduce that a development cannot have
got far yet, if we find a sentence where the new meaning, if it was available
to the contemporary reader, would have stultified the sense of the sentence.
For example, Spanish colgar, «to hang», comes from CONLOCARE, «to
place». When we find in the seventh-century prayer-book the request that
we be placed by God's right hand on the Day of Judgment (ut... a dextris
tuis tempore iudicii conlocemur: Oracional), we can provisionally assume
that the liturgists did not consider it possible for the ordinary Christian to
misunderstand that as being «hung by your right hand». Since other con­
temporary uses of this verb all seem not to mean «hang», we can for the
moment date that development as starting later than the seventh century.
This is what a reconstructionist would probably guess, from the fact that
Catalan and Occitan colgar, and French coucher, from the same etymon,
have specialized in a different way to mean «put to bed»; but it is comfor­
ting to have some documentary support.
More examples of useful attestations. Spanish madera and Portuguese
madeira, «wood», come from Latin MATERIA; to follow this shift it is
helpful to see Isidore say (XIX. 19.4) that all pieces of wood which are destin­
ed to be made into artefacts are known as materia (materia inde dicitur omne
lignum quod ex ea aliquid effìciatur). Spanish llegar «to arrive» derives from
Latin PLICARE «to fold». It was once suggested that this development arose
from ships folding their sails. In fact, the oldest Spanish vernacular texts
also have allegar, from ADPLICARE, and the seventh-century evidence
shows adplicare used with the meaning of «arrive»: e.g. the Visigothic Laws
8.2.3., qui in itinere constitutus in cuiuscumque forsitam campo adplicaverit
 SEMANTIC CHANGE IN EARLY ROMANCE 625

(whoever is going on a journey and comes into someone's lands); the older
meaning of «put together» is also attested. Since there seem to be no uses
of plicare in these texts, the evidence supports the view put forward by Cor­
ominas that the direct development of these words was that of allegar from
ADPLICARE, which could in Imperial Roman times be used of ships com­
ing into dock (not of folding sails); we could add now that the subsequent
backformation of llegar is not surprising, since many Old Spanish verbs have
two forms, one with a prefix a- and one without. Corominas (1980) quotes
Classical uses, the early fifth-century Peregrinatio Aetheriae, and eleventh-
century Mediaeval Latin uses, but the seventh-century ones would have
helped him considerably.
Spanish querer, «want» and «love», from Latin QUAERERE, «seek»,
is copiously attested meaning «love» in the seventh-century Visigothic prayer-
book, where the congregation are described simply as te querentes (as op­
posed to those who hate the Lord: e.g. Oracional 765, Ne obliviscaris,
Domine, vocem querentium te, ut superbia eorum qui te oderint...)՛, it can
also mean «seek» (117: et querere et invenire), or both at once. Spanish dom­
ingo «Sunday», comes from the adjective DOMINICUS: in seventh-century
texts this can still be a general adjective connected with any lord, any
dominus, but there are also six uses as a noun meaning «Sunday» in the
Visigothic prayerbook, and eight in the full phrase die dominico՛, we can
suggest that the new nominal use had arrived without implying that the old
more general and adjectival use had dropped from speech yet. We also find
feria used for «weekday», as in Modern Portuguese feira, developed away
from the original «holiday». Other new Christian meanings include missa
as a noun meaning «mass» in Oracional 550; sermo meaning «sermon» as
well as the older and less specialized «speech»: communicare and commumo
with both new specialized and older general meanings; whereas there is no
sign yet, for example, of the development of incensum from a participle
meaning «burnt» to a noun meaning «incense». It has also proved possible
to use this documentary evidence (Wright, in press) to argue that a word
often thought to have undergone a semantic change did not in fact do so:
Mediaeval Spanish ladino, meaning «vernacular», comes from LATINUM;
but rather than changing from meaning «Latin» to meaning «Romance»,
this lexical item always meant «vernacular», in the Roman Empire, in Isidore,
in the ninth-century Christian writers of Moslem Spain, and in Old Spanish.
Scholars have been looking at the usage of Isidore since his own lifetime,
626 ROGER WRIGHT

of course: the work of Sofer and Fontaine, for example, is essential. All
I want to do today is to point out that both general and Romance students
of diachronic semantics have got documentation available for a long period,
documentation which they tend to ignore but which might well be more
helpful than reconstruction. Rothwell has pointed out that discussing seman­
tic change in Old French from a basis of theoretical reconstruction has often
led to published analyses that can be simply disproved by actually looking
at Old French texts; in essence I want to move that argument five centuries
earlier.

REFERENCES

Baldinger K. 1980. Semantic Theory. Oxford. Spanish original, Madrid 1970.

Codoñer . 1983. Rasgos configuradores de un estilo popular. Serta
Philologica F. Lázaro Carreter I. Madrid pp. 109-18.
Corominas J. and Pascual J.Α. 1980. Diccionario crítico etimológico
castellano e hispánico vol. III. Madrid.
Cravens T. 1986. The syllable and phonological strength: gradient loss of
gemination in Corsican. Paper for the Seventh International Conference
on Historical Linguistics. This volume.
Fleischman S. 1982. The future in thought and language: diachronic evidence
from Romance. Cambridge.
Fontaine J. 1959. Isidore de Séville et la culture classique. Paris.
Isidore of Seville. 1983. Etymologiae, ed. with Spanish translation by J. Oroz
Reta and M.A. Marcos Casquero. Madrid.
Itkonen E. 1978. The significance of Merovingian Latin to linguistic theory.
Linguistic Studies in Classical Languages 5. 9-64.
Lass. R. 1980. On explaining language change. Cambridge.
López Pereira J.E. 1983. Latín medieval y filología hispánica. A propósito
de civiliter, celata y virtus. Verba 10. 155-68.
Malkiel Y. 1986. Integration of phonosymbohsm with other categories of
language change. Paper for the Seventh International Conference on
Historical Linguistics. This volume.
Moralejo Laso A. 1978. Para la etimología de la palabra jerigonza. Revista
de Filología Española 60. 327-31.
 SEMANTIC CHANGE IN EARLY ROMANCE 627

Politzer R.L. 1961. The interpretation of correctness in Late Latin texts.

Language 37. 209-14.
Richter M. 1983. À quelle époque a-t-on cessé de parler latin en Gaule? À
propos d'une question mal posée. Annales 38. 439-48.
Riiho T. 1979. POR y PARA: estudio sobre los orígenes y la evolución de
una oposición prepositiva iberorrománica. Helsinki.
Rothwell W. 1981. Historical semantics and the structure of Mediaeval
French vocabulary. Language, Meaning and Style: Essays in memory of
Stephen Ullmann. Leeds. 145-55.
Saltarelli M. 1980. Syntactic Diffusion. Papers from the Fourth Interna­
tional Conference on Historical Linguistics. Amsterdam. Pp. 183-91.
Saussol J.M. 1977. Ser y Estar. Orígenes de sus funciones en el Cantar de
Mío Cid. Seville.
Schulte-Herbrüggen H. 1978. Polisemia y cambio semántico: verde y ver­
dugo. Verba 5. 47-61.
Sofer J. 1930. Lateinisches und Romanisches aus den Etymologiae des
Isidorus von Sevilla. Göttingen.
Ulimann S. 1967. Semantics: an introduction to the science of meaning. Ox­
ford.
Van Uytfanghe M. 1977. Latin mérovingien, latin carolingien et rustica
romana lingua: continuité ou discontinuité?. Revue de ľ Université de
Bruxelles. Pp. 65-88.
. 1984. Histoire du latin, protohistoire des langues romanes et histoire
de la communication. Francia 11. 579-613.
Vilches Acuña R. 1954. Semańtica española. Buenos Aires.
Vives J. 1946 (ed.). Oracional Visigótico. Barcelona.
Waldron R.A.. 1967. Sense and sense development. London.
Wanner D. 1986. On the persistėnce of «imperfect grammars»: clitic move­
ment from Late Latin to Romance. Paper for the Seventh International
Conference on Historical Linguistics. This volume.
Wright R. 1980. Linguistic reasons for phonetic archaisms in Romance.
Papers from the Fourth International Conference on Historical
Linguistics, Amsterdam. Pp. 331-37.
. 1982. Late Latin and Early Romance. Liverpool.
628 ROGER WRIGHT

. 1983. Unity and diversity among the Romance Languages. Transac­

tions of the Philological Society. 1-22.
. 1985. Indistinctive features (facial and semantic), Romance Philology
38. 275-92.
. in press. Early Mediaeval Spanish, Latin and ladino. Litterae
Judaeorum in Terra Hispanica. Jerusalem.
 PARADIGMENSTRUKTURBEDINGUNGEN:
AUFBAU UND VERÄNDERUNG VON FLEXIONSPARADIGMEN

WOLFGANG ULLRICH WURZEL

Akademie der Wissenschaften der DDR, Berlin

Es ist allgemein bekannt, daß in der Morphologie («Formenlehre») der

sogenannten traditionellen Grammatik der Begriff des Flexionsparadigmas
eine zentrale Position einnimmt. So besteht Grimms Lehre «Von den Wort­
biegungen» im wesentlichen in der Aufstellung, der Erläuterung und dem
Vergleich von Paradigmen als Repräsentanten der angenommenen Flexions­
klassen; das Paradigma ist gleichsam die Existenz- und Organisationsform
der Flexionsmorphologie. Die sprachhistorische Bedeutung der Paradigmen
wird dann später in den Arbeiten der Junggrammatiker deutlich; die Rela­
tionen innerhalb des Paradigmas bilden für sie eine ganz entscheidende
Grundlage der als «Analogien» gefaßten morphologischen Veränderungen
(vgl. speziell Paul 1909). Demgegenüber fand die Problematik des Flexions­
paradigmas in den letzten Jahrzehnten bei den Vertretern strukturalistischer
und generativer Grammatikkonzeptionen eine recht geringe Aufmerksam­
keit. So hebt de Saussure (1931: 151f) hervor, daß es z.B. zwischen den Ka­
susformen eines Flexionsparadigmas keine irgendwie fixierte Ordnung gebe.
Aufgrund ihrer vermeintlich fehlenden oder doch geringen Strukturiertheit
sind die Paradigmen für ihn theoretisch uninteressant. Auch in seiner Nach­
folge betrachtete man die Paradigmen meist einfach als bloße Anhäufun­
gen von Flexionsformen ohne sie in irgendeiner Weise strukturierende Re-
gularitäten; als Beispiel aus der jüngsten Zeit dafür vgl. Lieber 1981. Doch
in den letzten Jahren vollzieht sich unübersehbar ein Prozeß der Wieder­
entdeckung des Flexionsparadigmas als Forschungsobjekt der theoretisch
orientierten Morphologie; vgl. dazu die Arbeiten von Carstairs 1981 und
1983, Wurzel 1982/84, Karlsson 1983, Bittner 1984 und Zwicky 1985. Die­
se Arbeiten haben die Annahme gemeinsam, daß das Flexionsparadigma
nicht einfach ein wissenschaftliches Konstrukt ist, sondern daß es für den
Sprecher real in einer bestimmten Form existiert. Wenn das der Fall ist, dann
muß es auch entsprechende morphologische Regularitäten geben, die das
630 WOLFGANG ULLRICH WURZEL

Paradigma «zusammenhalten», indem sie die Relationen zwischen den ein­

zelnen Flexionsformen erfassen, und so den spezifischen Aufbau des Pa­
radigmas festlegen, ganz unabhängig davon, welchen Status man den Fle­
xionsformen im Rahmen einer formalisierten Grammatik zuschreibt, d.h.
ob man sie als regelerzeugt oder als lexikongespeichert wertet. Wir wollen
diese Regularitäten - wie bereits in Wurzel 1982/84 - als PARADIGMENSTRUK-
TURBEDINGUNGEN ( P S B ) b e z e i c h n e n .
Mit der Annahme des Vorhandenseins von PSB ist überhaupt noch
nichts darüber gesagt, welche spezifische Form sie haben. Da die PSB wie
alle grammatischen Regeln nicht unmittelbar zu beobachten sind, sondern
nur aufgrund ihrer Wirkung rekonstruiert werden können, sind recht un­
terschiedliche Formulierungen von PSB vorstellbar, die die in einer gegebe­
nen Sprache vorkommenden Kombinationen von Flexionsformen erfassen
und die nicht vorkommenden Kombinationen ausschließen. Es sind also be­
stimmte Kriterien notwendig, aufgrund deren man überprüfen kann, in wel­
cher Weise die Kenntnis der Sprecher von der Struktur der Paradigmen or­
ganisiert ist. Wie in vielen anderen Bereichen der Grammatik bietet sich auch
hier die SPRACHVERÄNDERUNG als ein entsprechendes Kriterium an, denn
spezifische Sprachveränderungen setzen bekanntermaßen immer eine ganz
bestimmte Organisation der Grammatik der Sprecher voraus: Die für die
Sprecher real vorliegenden Strukturverhältnisse in den Paradigmen werden
dann korrekt erfaßt, wenn die PSB nicht nur die Zusammenhänge zwischen
den Flexionsformen der Paradigmen irgendwie zum Ausdruck bringen, son­
dern sie zugleich auch begründete Vorhersagen über eintretende und zu er­
wartende Veränderungen in den Paradigmen ermöglichen. Wir wollen im
folgenden überprüfen, wie bei diesen Voraussetzungen die PSB zu formu­
lieren sind, wobei wir nacheinander vier unterschiedliche Varianten disku­
tieren werden. Als Faktenbereich für diese Überprüfung wählen wir die auf
Konsonant endenden einsilbigen Feminina des Isländischen, d.h. die folgen­
den vier Deklinationsklassen 1 :

1 Wir vernachlässigen, daß es im Isländischen noch zwei weitere Klassen von auf Kon­
sonant endenden einsilbigen Feminina gibt, die vō- und die jō-Deklination. Sie haben die glei­
chen Flexive wie die ō-Deklination, zeigen aber vor diesen die Elemente -v- bzw. -j-, vgl. stöð
«Station» - G.Sg. stöð-v-ar und skel «Muschel» - G.Sg. skel-j-ar usw. Sie lassen sich leicht
in die hier erörterten Zusammenhänge einordnen. (In der schließlich favorisierten Variante IV
der PSB haben sie wie der Typ vél im Lexikon das Merkmal [ar/N.A.Pl.] und zusätzlich
[v-Erweiterung] bzw. [j-Erweiterung], wodurch ihr Status im Flexionssystem gut erfaßt wird).
 PARADIGMENSTRUKTURBEDINGUNGEN 631

i-Dekli­ ō-Dekli- Konsonant. Konsonant.

nation nation Deklination Deklination
1 2
«Bild» «Maschine» «Ziege» «Bucht»
N.Sg. mynd vél geit vík
G.Sg. mynd-ar vél- geit- vík-ur
D.A.Sg. 2 mynd vél geit vík
N.A.P1. mynd-ir vél- geit-ur vík-ur
G.P1. mynd-a vél- geit-a vík-a
D.P1. mynd-um vél-um geit-um vík-um
In der Übersicht sind die Formen hervorgehoben, in denen sich die Para­
digmen unterscheiden, d.h. der G.Sg. und der N.A.P1.

Variante I
Als faktisch einfachste Variante könnte man sich PSB der folgenden Art
vorstellen, die die Flexionsparadigmen der vier Klassen erfassen:
(I) (1) fem. i-Dekl.: [Ø/N.Sg., ar/G.Sg., 0 / D . A . S g . ,
i r / N . A . P 1 , a/G.Pl., um/D.Pl.}
(2) fem. ō-Dekl. [ 0 / N . S g . , ar/G.Sg., 0/D.A.Sg.,
einsilbig: ar/N.A.Pl., a/G.Pl., um/D.Pl.}
(3) fem. kons. [ 0 / N . S g . , ar/G.Sg., 0/D.A.Sg.,
Dekl. 1: ur/N.A.Pl., a/G.Pl., um/D.Pl.}
(4) fem. kons. [ 0 / N . S g . , ur/G.Sg., 0/D.A.Sg.,
Dekl. 2: ur/N.A.Pl., a/G.Pl., um/D.Pl.}
Es ist leicht zu sehen, daß diese PSB im wesentlichen nichts anderes
ausdrücken als die Zusammengehörigkeit der mit bestimmten Flexionsen­
dungen gebildeten Formen zu einem Paradigma 3 . Die Formen sind rein
konjunktiv zusammengefaßt; das Paradigma erscheint nur als die Summe
seiner Formen. Alle Formen einschließlich des N.Sg. werden als für den Auf-

2 In «gehobener Sprache» erscheinen z.T. im D.A.Sg. von einsilbigen Feminina wie höll
«Schloß», jörð «Erde» und laug auch Formen auf -u. Vgl. dazu weiter unten.
3 Allerdings nehmen diese PSB nur auf die Flexionsendungen und nicht auf die Vokal­
wechselerscheinungen Bezug, die wir hier der Übersichtlichkeit halber außerhalb der Betrach­
tung lassen. Für die Fakten vgl. Kress 1963: 62 ff.
632 WOLFGANG ULLRICH WURZEL

bau des Paradigmas gleichwertig eingeordnet. Allerdings treten Synkretis­

men im Paradigma, so im D.A.Sg. und N.A.P1., als solche in Erscheinung.
Dagegen werden Übereinstimmungen zwischen den verschiedenen Flexions­
klassen nicht erfaßt, d.h. mögliche Generalisierungen über das Paradigma
einer Flexionsklasse hinaus nicht vorgenommen. In dieser Form erfassen da­
mit die PSB eigentlich nicht mehr Zusammenhänge als die in den Gebrauchs­
grammatiken üblichen Flexionsparadigmen. Ebenso wie diese basieren sie
auch auf der traditionellen Einteilung in Flexionsklassen wie «i-Deklination»,
«ō-Deklination» usw. in Verbindung mit Genusangaben. Da ein Teil der
mehrsilbigen ō-Feminina im D.A.Sg. das Flexiv -  aufweist (z.B. obligato­
risch die Substantive auf -ing, fakultativ die auf -ung), muß in diesem Fall
noch zusätzlich auf die phonologische Eigenschaft der Silbenzahl Bezug ge­
nommen werden.
Betrachten wir die Konsequenzen dieser Regularitäten für die Sprach­
veränderung: Wenn wir plausiblerweise annehmen, daß nur die Paradigmen
in einer Sprache erlaubt sind, die den PSB entsprechen, so besagen die PSB
hier lediglich, daß es nur ganz bestimmte zugelassene Kombinationen von
Flexionsformen gibt; damit sind alle von den PSB nicht ausdrücklich auf­
geführten Paradigmen ausgeschlossen. So ist zwar indirekt prädiziert, daß
sich Neuwörter einem der geltenden Paradigmen der Sprache anschließen
müssen, nicht aber welchem der im Prinzip möglichen. Damit bleibt unklar,
weshalb sich entlehnte Wörter wie z.B. das erst jüngst aus dem Englischen
übernommene Femininum kok «Flasche Cola» gerade der i-Deklination an­
schließen und keiner anderen. Ähnlich besagen die PSB, daß eventuell vor­
kommende defekte oder sonst abweichende Paradigmen einem der zugelas­
senen Muster angepaßt werden sollten, aber nicht, wie das geschieht. Die
PSB erklären ferner nicht, weshalb Flexionsparadigmen von Wörtern, ob­
wohl sie den PSB entsprechen, typischerweise morphologischen Verände­
rungen in Form von Flexionsklassenwechsel unterliegen können, also wes­
halb in unserem Fall bereits eine große Anzahl von Wörtern wie beispiels­
weise sól «Sonne», gjöf «Gabe», rún «Rune» und örk «Bogen» aus den
anderen Klassen in die i-Deklination übergetreten ist, andere Wörter wie grein
«Zweig», önd «Ente» und mörk «Wildmark» heute im Übergang begriffen
sind und offenbar auch künftig noch weitere Wörter diesen Weg gehen
werden.
Die Unzulänglichkeiten der PSB in dieser Form liegen also klar zuta­
ge: Sie verzichten schon rein synchron gesehen auf mögliche Generalisie-
 PARADIGMENSTRUKTURBEDINGUNGEN 633

rungen und können auftretende Veränderungen im Bereich der Paradigmen

nicht erklären.

Variante II
Diese Variante der Fomulierung von PSB geht im Unterschied zur Variante
I davon aus, daß die Paradigmen der verschiedenen Flexionsklassen sich nicht
notwendigerweise in allen Formen unterscheiden, sondern auch bestimmte
von der jeweiligen Flexionsklassenzugehörigkeit unabhängige gemeinsame
Flexionsformen haben können:
(II) (A) Substantiv: { um/D.P1} 4
(B) Substantiv auf Konsonant bzw. schweren Vokal:
{a/G.Pl.}
(C) einsilbige Feminina: [ø/D.A.Sg.)
(1) fem. i-Dekl.: {ar/G.Sg., ir/N.A.Pl.}
(2) fem. ō-Dekl.: {ar/G.Sg., ar/N.A.P1}
(3) fem. kons. Dekl. 1: (ar/G.Sg., ur/N.A.Pl.)
(4) fem. kons. Dekl. 2: {ur/G.Sg., ur/N.A.Pl.}
Anders als bei Variante I gibt es hier zwei verschiedene Typen von PSB.
Die PSB (A) bis (C) spezifizieren auf der Basis von unabhängigen syntakti­
schen und phonologischen Eigenschaften der Grundform der Wörter, d.h.
des N.Sg., wie «Substantiv», «Femininum», Silbenzahl und Auslautsegment
solche Flexionsformen der Paradigmen, die über die einzelnen Flexionsklas­
sen hinaus gelten. Diese flexionsklassenübergreifenden Eigenschaften brau­
chen dann nicht mehr in den PSB (1) bis (4) zu erscheinen, die sich jeweils
auf eine bestimmte Flexionsklasse beziehen. Da die PSB des erstgenannten
Typs von Eigenschaften der lexikalischen Grundform ausgehen, ist im Un­
terschied zur Variante I die Form des N.Sg. hier bereits vorausgesetzt und

4 Eine solche generelle Formulier???ng der PSB (A) ist nur möglich, wenn wir annehmen,
daß bei einsilbigen Substantiven auf schweren Vokal wie á «Fluß» der Vokal des Flexivs -um
durch eine phonologische Regel getilgt wird, vgl. den D.Pl. á-m. Diese Annahme ist jedoch
streng genommen nicht haltbar, weil eine solche Regel, die ohnehin für Adjektive und Verben
nicht gelten würde (vgl. blá-r «blau» ֊ D.Pl. blá-um und fá «bekommen» - 1. Ps. Sg. Präs.
Ind. vid-fá-um), nicht einmal alle einschlägigen Substantive erfassen würde, vgl. z.B. vé «Hei­
ligtum» - D.Pl. vé-um und snjó-r «Schnee» - D.Pl. snjó-um «Schneefällen». Es wäre also ei­
gentlich für den D.Pl. neben -um noch ein Flexiv -m anzusetzen. Wir wollen die PSB (A) hier
dennoch in der aufgeführten Form stehenlassen und kommen später auf die Problematik zurück.
634 WOLFGANG ULLRICH WURZEL

wird nicht erst durch die PSB spezifiziert. Damit kommt in dieser Variante
der gegenüber den übrigen Flexionsformen ausgezeichnete spezifische Sta­
tus des N.Sg. als lexikalischer Grundform, d.h. als «Lern-und Merkform»,
klar zum Ausdruck. Weiterhin werden - wie bereits gesagt - über die Einzel­
paradigmen hinausgehende Generalisierungen über den Aufbau der Para­
digmen der Sprache getroffen und insofern wird zwischen generellen und
spezielleren Flexionsformen unterschieden. Auch die PSB der Variante II
setzen noch partiell die traditionelle Flexionsklasseneinteilung voraus, wenn
sie sich auch so weit wie möglich schon auf unabhängige Eigenschaften der
Wörter beziehen.
Was die Erfassung, d.h. die Erklärung und Vorhersage, von Sprachve­
ränderungen betrifft, so stellt sich Variante II nur in einem Punkt angemes­
sener als die Vorgängervariante dar. Auch hier geben die PSB nicht an, wie
potentielle abweichende Paradigmen angepaßt werden, und die Frage, wes­
halb den PSB entsprechende Paradigmen die Flexionsklasse wechseln kön­
nen, bleibt unbeantwortet. Variante II erlaubt jedoch begründete Vorher­
sagen darüber, wie Neuwörter mit ihren gegebenen unabhängigen Eigen­
schaften einige ihrer Flexionsformen bilden: Die PSB (A) bis (C) besagen,
daß im Isländischen neue Substantive im D.Pl. das Flexiv -um erhalten, daß
neue Substantive auf Konsonant bzw. schweren Vokal im G.P1. das Flexiv
-a zugewiesen bekommen und daß neue einsilbige Feminina im D.A.Sg. ohne
Flexiv bleiben, so daß also z.B. das entlehnte Wort kók die Formen D.A.Sg.
kók, G.P1. kók-a und D.Pl. kók-um bilden mußte. Für die übrigen von der
Flexionsklassenzugehörigkeit abhängigen Formen des G.Sg. und des N.A.P1.
legen sie dagegen nichts fest; die entsprechenden Formen bleiben nach wie
vor unerklärt 5 .

Variante III
Die Variante III unterscheidet sich von ihren Vorgängervarianten prinzipiell
darin, daß bei ihr im Paradigma existierende implikative Zusammenhänge
zwischen den Flexionsformen nachvollzogen werden. Vgl. die Formulie­
rungen:

5 Für Substantive, die aufgrund ihrer unabhängigen (syntaktischen und/oder phono-

logischen) Eigenschaften nur genau einer Flexionsklasse angehören können, spezifiziert
allerdings Variante II bereits die gesamte Flexion. Vgl. dazu ein maskulines Neuwort wie hippi
«Hippie», das eben nur als schwaches Maskulinum vom Typ penni «Feder» dekliniert werden
kann.
 PARADIGMENSTRUKTURBEDINGUNGEN 635

(III) (A) [ + Subst ] D [um/D.Pl.]

() + Subst D [a/G.Pl.]

() D [0/D.A.Sg.]

(D [i'r/N.A.Pl. ]  [ar/G.Sg.]
(2) [ ar/N.A.Pl. ]  [ar/G.Sg.]
(4) [ ur/G.Sg. ] D [ur/N.A.Pl.]
Die PSB (A) bis (C) in Variante III drücken die gleichen faktischen Gege­
benheiten aus wie ihre Entsprechungen in Variante II, allerdings indem sie
den implikativen Charakter der Zusammenhänge zwischen den Eigenschaf­
ten der Grundform und den anderen Flexionsformen explizit machen (-K
bedeutet «auf Konsonant endend», - V «auf schweren Vokal endend», # Σ #
steht für «Einsilbigkeit»). Eine völlig andere Form als ihre Pendants in Varian­
te II haben dagegen die PSB (1) bis (4). Sie nehmen generell keinen Bezug auf
die traditionellen Flexionsklassen mehr, sondern konstatieren statt dessen im-
plikative Zusammenhänge zwischen Flexionsformen. Diese implikativen Zu­
sammenhänge beziehen sich zwar rein faktisch auf bestimmte Flexionsklassen,
haben aber - was wichtig ist - für das gesamte Flexionssystem Gültigkeit; bei­
spielsweise zeigen eben alle isländischen Substantive mit -ir im Ν./Α.P1. ent­
sprechend -ar im G.Sg. usw. Die PSB (3) von Variante II hat kein Gegen­
stück in Variante III, weil zwischen den beiden relevanten Formen keine im-
plikative Beziehung existiert. Vgl. die Implikationen zwischen den variierenden
Flexionsformen der vier in die Betrachtung einbezogenen Flexionsklassen:

i-Dekli- ō-Dekli- Konsonant. Konsonant.

nation nation Deklination Deklination
1 2
N.Sg. mynd vél geit vík
G.Sg. -ar -ar -ar -ur
N.A.P1. -ir -ar -ur -ur
Mit der Konstatierung von implikativen Zusammenhängen in den Flexions­
paradigmen wird zugleich der spezifische Status der einzelnen Flexionsfor­
men hinsichtlich ihrer Bedeutung für den Aufbau des Paradigmas erfaßt.
Es wird unterschieden zwischen vom Sprecher zusammen mit der Grund-
636 WOLFGANG ULLRICH WURZEL

form zu erlernenden «Kennformen» wie z.B. dem N.A.Pl. auf -ir uns sich
implikativ ergebenden Formen wie z.B. dem G.Sg. auf -ar beim Typ mynd
sowie dem flexivlosen D.A.Sg. der einsilbigen Feminina.
Wörter miteinander konkurrierender Flexionsklassen mit den gleichen
unabhängigen syntaktischen und/oder phonologischen Eigenschaften wie
hier die einsilbigen Feminina auf Konsonant können dann im Lexikon ge­
nerell durch die Angabe der differenzierenden «Kennformen» repräsentiert
werden, so der Typ mynd durch [ir/N.A.P1], der Typ vél durch [ar/N.A.P1]
und der Typ vík durch [ur/G.Sg.]. Man beachte, daß der Typ geit, bei dem
es keine implikative Beziehung zwischen den Formen des G.Sg. und des
N.A.Pl. (in welcher Richtung auch immer) gibt, durch die beiden Kennfor­
men [ar/G.Sg., ur/N.A.PL] zu repräsentieren ist. Die übrigen, im Lexikon
nicht spezifizierten Formen ergeben sich redundanterweise aufgrund der PSB.
Auch im Lexikon brauchen damit keine Merkmale von traditionellen Fle­
xionsklassen (wie i-oder ō-Deklination) mehr zu erscheinen 6 .
Was leisten nun die PSB in dieser Form für die Erklärung von auftre­
tenden und zu erwartenden Sprachveränderungen? Wie die PSB der Varia-
ten I und II determinieren sie, daß Neuwörter ins Flexionssystem eingepaßt
und abweichende Paradigmen an dieses angepaßt werden. Wie die PSB der
Variante II legen sie fest, in welcher Weise Neuwörter aufgrund ihrer unab­
hängigen syntaktischen und/oder phonologischen Eigenschaften bestimm­
te Flexionsformen bilden; das Gesamtparadigma von Neuwörtern können
aber auch sie nicht erklären.
Zusätzlich zur Variante II erfassen die PSB jedoch aufgrund ihres im-
plikativen Charakters die mögliche Reihenfolge des Auftretens neuer For­
men bei stufenweise verlaufenden Klassenübertritten. Die konsonantische
Deklination 2 unterscheidet sich in zwei Formen von der i-Deklination, vgl.
vík- vs. mynd-ar im G.Sg. und vík- vs. mynd-ir im N.A.Pl. Damit gibt
es theoretisch gesehen drei Wege des Übergangs vom Typ vík zum Typ mynd:
den Wechsel beider Formen zugleich, den Wechsel über G.Sg. -ar/N.A.Pl.
-ur und den Wechsel über G.Sg. -ur/N.A.PL -ir. Doch die PSB (4) besagt
ja, daß -ur im G.Sg. auch -ur im N.A.Pl. impliziert, und schließt damit die
Kombination -ur/-ir aus. Deshalb erfolgt der Übergang vom Typ vík zum

6 Man vgl. dazu die Angabe von «Kennformen» in Gebrauchswörterbüchern, die aller­
dings in der Regel unreflektiert und daher inkonsequent erfolgt. So geben z.B. alle isländi­
schen Wörterbücher von jedem Substantiv G.Sg. und N.P1. an, obwohl oft eine der beiden
Formen zur Erschließung der Deklinationsklasse ausreichen würde und in Fällen wie penni über­
haupt keine «Kennform» notwendig wäre.
 PARADIGMENSTRUKTURBEDINGUNGEN 637

Typ mynd direkt oder aber über -ar/-ur (den Typ geit), was die Fakten ein­
deutig erweisen. So schwankt gegenwärtig z.B. das Substantiv mörk «Wild­
mark» zwischen -ur/-ur und -ar/-ir, und Wörter wie eik «Eiche», steik «Bra­
ten» und tìk «Hündin» schwanken zwischen -ur/-ur und -arAur. Ein
Schwanken zwischen -ur/-ur und -urAir gibt es aber nicht. Man kann also
sagen, daß Variante III den Verlauf von Klassenübertritten erfaßt. Nach
wie vor wird jedoch nicht erklärt, weshalb solche Übertritte überhaupt statt­
finden und wodurch ihre Richtung bestimmt ist.

Variante IV
Die letzte zu diskutierende Variante der Fomulierung von PSB zeichnet sich
gegenüber den anderen dadurch aus, daß sie auf Markiertheitsverhältnisse
Bezug nimmt. Sie unterscheidet zwischen unmarkierten und markierten Fle­
xionsformen und damit auch zwischen unmarkierten und markierten Para­
digmen:
(IV) (A) [ + Subst ] d [um/D.P1.]

d [a/G.P1.]
() D

d [0/D.A.Sg.]
(Q
D

d
) D
([ir/N.A.P1.] ) [ar/G.Sg.]

(4) [ur/G.Sg. ] d [ur/N.A.P1.]

D
Die PSB (A) bis (C) entsprechen in ihrer Formulierung völlig der Variante
III, abgesehen davon, daß die Implikationen (durch das übergestellte «d»)
als Default-Implikationen gekennzeichnet sind. Das bedeutet, daß die PSB
nach dem Default- oder Abwesenheitsprinzip operieren; sie implizieren nicht
strikt, sondern gelten nur, wenn die Stelle der implizierten Form im Para­
digma nicht schon durch eine andere Form besetzt ist. Die Bedeutung des
Prinzips für die PSB wird speziell im Zusammenhang mit PSB (1) klar. Diese
besagt in ihrer vollen Form (d.h. einschließlich des durch runde Klammern
als fakultativ gekennzeichneten Teils), daß ein einsilbiges, auf Konsonant
endendes feminines Substantiv im N.A.P1. das Flexiv -ir erhält, wenn nicht
638 WOLFGANG ULLRICH WURZEL

eine andere N.A.P1. - Form spezifiziert ist, und daß ein Substantiv mit -ir
im N.A.P1. im G.Sg. das Flexiv -ar erhält, wenn nicht eine andere G.Sg.
- Form spezifiziert ist. Damit benötigen die Substantive des Typs mynd im
Lexikon keine Flexionsklassenspezifizierung mehr; sie bekommen sie durch
die PSB «automatisch» zugeschrieben. Anders die drei übrigen Typen: Die
Wörter des Typs vél müssen im Lexikon das Merkmal [ar/N.A.Pl.] spezifi­
ziert haben, ihnen kann also nicht der N.A.P1. auf -ir zugewiesen werden.
Die erste Default-Implikation der PSB (1) ist blockiert. Da aber, weil der
mittlere Teil der PSB fakultativ ist, die unabhängigen Merkmale den G.Sg.
auf -ar auch direkt implizieren, bekommen diese Wörter ebenfalls ihre kor­
rekte G.Sg. - Form auf -ar zugewiesen. In völlig gleicher Weise erhalten die
Wörter des Typs geit ihre Flexionsformen zugeschrieben, nur daß es hier
das Lexikonmerkmal [ur/N.A.Pl.] ist, das die Zuweisung von [ir/N.A.P1.]
blockiert. Auch diese Substantive bekommen dann aufgrund der auch di­
rekten Implikation von den unabhängigen Merkmalen zu [ar/G.Sg.] ihre
G.Sg. - Form. Die Wörter des Typs vík schließlich sind im Lexikon durch
das Merkmal [ur/G.Sg.] gekennzeichnet. Für die Behandlung dieser Wör­
ter ist wichtig, daß (entsprechend einem allgemein angenommenen Prinzip
der Regelordnung) im Falle der möglichen Anwendung zweier sich wider­
sprechender Regeln die jeweils speziellere Vorrang gegenüber der allgemei­
neren hat 7 . PSB (1) gilt für alle Feminina auf Konsonant, PSB (4) aber nur
für die Substantive auf -ur im G.Sg., eine echte Teilklasse davon. Deshalb
bekommen die Wörter vom Typ vík durch PSB (4) das Merkmal
[ur/N.A.Pl.]. Weil damit auch die N.A.P1. - Form spezifiziert ist, kann PSB
(1) auf diese Substantive überhaupt nicht angewandt werden. (Hätte dage­
gen PSB (1) Vorrang gegenüber PSB (4), dann würde für solche Wörter in­
korrekterweise [ir/N.A.Pl.] spezifiziert).
Die Formulierung der PSB als Default-Implikationen, durch die sich
die Variante IV von den vorher diskutierten unterscheidet, ermöglicht es,
den unterschiedlichen Status von Flexionsparadigmen innerhalb eines Fle­
xionssystems hinsichtlich ihrer Markiertheit in recht angemessener Weise wi­
derzuspiegeln: Bei den auf Konsonant endenden einsilbigen Feminina des
Isländischen ist in Übereinstimmung mit den bereits erwähnten sprachhi­
storischen Fakten der Typ mynd, also die i-Deklination, unmarkiert, die an­
deren drei Typen sind entsprechend markiert. Die Unmarkiertheit der i-

7 Für die Praktizierung dieses Prinzips in der Morphologie vgl. z.B. Anderson 1982:
593f., 606ff. Kiparsky 1982: 9 ff. und Zwicky 1985: 3 ff.
 PARADIGMENSTRUKTURBEDINGUNGEN 639

Deklination ergibt sich jedoch nicht aus deren sprachhistorischem Verhal­

ten, sondern sie ist unabhängig motiviert: Sie beruht darauf, daß die i-
Deklination unter den vier Klassen die bei weitem am stärksten belegte Klasse
darstellt und so für die Sprecher die normale, prototypische Flexion solcher
Substantive bildet 8 . Die drei anderen Klassen sind markiert, weil sie von
der normien, prototypischen Flexion, dem Typ mynd, abweichende und da­
mit markierte Flexionsformen enthalten. Die Konsequenz der gewählten For­
mulierung der PSB besteht darin, daß nur Wörter markierter Flexionsklas­
sen im Lexikon spezifische Flexionsangaben in Form von «Kennform-
Merkmalen» haben, während das bei Wörtern unmarkierter Flexionsklas­
sen nicht der Fall ist.
Wir haben in Variante IV alle PSB, also auch die mit strikter Geltung
wie PSB (4), als Default-Implikationene formuliert, was nicht zwingend ist.
Damit wird in erster Linie der Tatsache Rechnung getragen, daß ihrem We­
sen nach alle PSB Ausnahmen haben können, wenn freilich auch nicht
müssen.
Hier sind Ausnahmen nicht logisch ausgeschlossen wie bei bestimmten
phonologischen Strukturbedingungen, denn jede Flexionsendung ist ja im
Prinzip mit jeder anderen innerhalb eines Paradigmas kombinierbar, aber
bekanntlich nicht jedes phonologische Merkmal mit jedem anderen inner­
halb eines Segments 9 . Hinzu kommt folgendes: Wenn wir grundsätzlich
zwei verschiedene Typen von PSB, solche mit strikten und solche mit Default-
Implikationen, unterscheiden wollten, würden wir mit dem Problem kon­
frontiert, daß ansonsten generelle PSB, denen keine Flexionsklasse wider­
spricht, durchaus einzelne periphere Ausnahmen haben können. So tritt z.B.
(wie bereits in Anmerkung 2 erwähnt) bei bestimmten einsilbigen Feminina
wie höll «Schloß», jörð «Erde» und laug «warme Quelle» in «gehobener
Sprache» im D.A.Sg. gegen PSB (C) das Flexiv -u statt der erwarteten 0 -
Endung auf; in dieser Sprachschicht sind dann diese Wörter durch das Le­
xikonmerkmal [u/D.A.Sg.] spezifiziert, so daß sie nicht durch PSB (C) das
Merkmal [0/D.A.Sg.] erhalten können. Auch PSB (B) hat eine (einzige)
solche Ausnahme; das Wort sól «Sonne», das als Wort auf Konsonant im

8 Zu den hier relevanten Fakten s. Noreen 1923: 269 für das Altisländische und Kress
1963: 84 für das Neuisländische. Zur Unterscheidung zwischen unmarkierten (stabilen) und
markierten (instabilen) Flexionsklassen und deren Begründung vgl. Wurzel 1984: 116 ff.
9 So sind z.B. die phonologischen Merkmale [ + hoch] und [ + niedrig] nicht in einem
Segment miteinander kombinierbar.
640 WOLFGANG ULLRICH WURZEL

G.Pl. statt des erwarteten Flexivs -a das Flexiv -na aufweist. Was PSB (A)
betrifft, so wurde bereits (in Anmerkung 4) darauf verwiesen, daß für den
D.P1. neben -um noch ein selbständiges Flexiv -m vorzusehen ist. Dieses Fle­
xiv erscheint ganz regulär bei den Feminina auf schweren Vokal, vgl. á
«Fluß» - D.P1. á-m und bru «Brücke» - D.P1. bru-. Das Isländische ver­
fügt also noch über eine zusätzliche PSB (A'), die Feminina auf schweren
Vokal das Merkmal [m/D.PL] zuweist10. Diese PSB kann sich aber nicht
in gleicher Weise auf die ebenfalls vorkommenden Neutra auf schweren Vo­
kal beziehen, da bei diesen z.T. -m und z.T. -um erscheint, vgl. tré «Baum»
- D.P1. trjá-m (mit Vokalwechsel) und vé «Heiligtum» - D.P1. vé-um. Die
vereinzelten Neutra auf -m im D.P1. wie tré sind also Ausnahmen zu PSB
(A); sie müssen im Lexikon durch [m/D.P1.] spezifiziert sein, damit sie nicht
das ihnen regulär eigentlich zukommende Merkmal [um/D.Pl.] durch PSB
(A) erhalten können. Fälle dieser Art, die gar nicht so selten sind 11, bilden
faktisch einen Übergangsbereich zwischen PSB mit strikten und Default-
Implikationen, und es ist nicht klar wie sie plausibel zu klassifizieren wä­
ren, so daß uns auch in dieser Hinsicht die Annahme, daß alle PSB einheit­
lich Default-Charakter haben, angemessener erscheint12.
Es sind aber dennoch ihrem Aufbau nach zwei verschiedene Typen von
PSB zu unterscheiden, wie man leicht sehen kann. Die PSB (A), (B), (C)
und (1) stellen jeweils einen implikativen Zusammenhang zwischen unab­
hängigen Eigenschaften der Grundform der Wörter und unmarkierten For­
men her, während PSB (4) einen implikativen Zusammenhang zwischen ei­
ner im Lexikon spezifizierten markierten Form und einer weiteren markier-

10 Die PSB (A') ist spezieller als PSB (A), weil sie sich auf Feminina auf schweren Vo­
kal bezieht, während sich PSB (A) auf alle Substantive bezieht. Sie hat demzufolge Vorrang
in der Anwendung; vgl. weiter oben.
11 Solche Fälle sind natürlich keineswegs auf das Isländische beschränkt. So gilt im Rus­
sischen nahezu durchgängig, daß Substantive im Instr. P1. -ami/-jami haben, doch erscheint
in zwei Fällen obligatorisch und in drei Fällen fakultativ statt dessen -mi; vgl. det-i «Kinder»
- det'-mi, ljud'-i «Menschen» - ljud'-mi; dver' «Tür» - dver'-mi, doč' «Tochter» - dočer'-mi
und loŠad' «Pferd» - loŠad'-mi. Im Deutschen haben alle Maskuline auf -e außer dem Einzel­
fall Käse im Plural -n usw. usf.
12 Damit besagt dann allerdings PSB (4), zu der es keine Ausnahmen gibt, auch nur
noch, daß normalerweise keine Substantive mit G.Sg. - ur/N.A.Pl. -ir vorkommen; sie sind
nicht mehr grundsätzlich ausgeschlossen. Ein Übergang von G.Sg. -ur/N.A.Sg. -ur zu G.Sg.
-ar/N.A.Pl. -ir über G.Sg. -ur/N.A.Pl. -ir kommt deshalb nicht vor, weil die erste Stufe der
Entwicklung keinen Abbau morphologischer Komplexität in Termen der Lexikonrepräsenta­
tion darstellt.
 PARADIGMENSTRUKTURBEDINGUNGEN 641

ten Form herstellt. Das Vorhandensein von implikativen Beziehungen

zwischen markierten Formen hat wichtige Konsequenzen für die lexikali­
sche Repräsentation von Wörtern markierter Flexionsklassen. Man vgl. den
Typ vík, der in zwei Formen vom Typ mynd abweicht, während die Typen
vél und geit nur in einer Form davon abweichen. Da sich aber der abwei­
chende N.A.Pl. auf -ur implikativ aus [ur/G.Sg.] ableitet, genügt auch bei
vík ein einziges lexikalisches Flexionsklassenmerkmal. Die Lexikonrepräsen­
tation gibt also hier nur an, ob eine markierte Flexion vorliegt oder nicht,
aber nicht notwendigerweise auch den Grad der Markiertheit. Dieser ergibt
sich erst in Verbindung mit den von den PSB eingeführten markierten
Formen.
Wir wollen wie bei den vorher behandelten Varianten überprüfen, wie­
weit die PSB der Variante IV Sprachveränderungen erklären. Die PSB der
Variante III haben, wie zu zeigen war, noch zwei entscheidende Mängel hin­
sichtlich der Erfassung von Veränderungen in den Flexionsparadigmen. Sie
erklären erstens nicht, auf welche Weise Neuwörter insgesamt ins Flexions­
system eingepaßt werden, und sagen zweitens nichts über Ursache und Rich­
tung von Klassenübertritten. Beide Mängel sind in Variante IV nicht mehr
vorhanden.
Daß Neuwörter auf eine ganz bestimmte Weise ins System eingepaßt
werden, resultiert daraus, daß solche Wörter bei ihrem Auftauchen noch
über keine Spezifizierungen für die Flexion verfügen13 und deshalb ihr Fle­
xionsparadigma durch die für unmarkierte Fälle geltenden PSB (in unse­
rem Falle also (A) bis (1)) zugewiesen bekommen. Das ist wie festgestellt
für die auf Konsonant endenden einsilbigen Feminina das Paradigma des
Typs mynd. So haben sich entlehnte Wörter mit den entsprechenden Eigen­
schaften diesem Typ angeschlossen, schließen sich ihm gegenwärtig an und
werden sich ihm auch künftig anschließen, vgl. z.B. ältere Entlehnungen
wie dós «Dose» - G.Sg. dós-ar - N.A.Pl. dós-ir und ebenso auch sort «Sor­
te» und törn «Törn, Arbeit» sowie das schon erwähnte erst jüngst aufge­
tauchte Wort kók «Flasche Cola».
In gleicher Weise erklären die PSB Übertritte von einer Flexionsklasse
in eine andere als Ersetzung von markierten durch unmarkierte Flexions­
formen. Wenn das bei einem Wort konsequent erfolgt, dann werden die Fle-

13 Es sei denn, sie sind mit Derivativen (Suffixen) gebildet, die bestimmten Flexionsklas­
sen zugeordnet sind.
642 WOLFGANG ULLRICH WURZEL

xionsklassenmerkmale im Lexikon abgebaut; wenn das dagegen nur partiell

erfolgt, dann kann es auch so vonstatten gehen, daß ein Lexikonmerkmal,
das eine weitere markierte Form impliziert, durch ein markiertes Merkmal
ersetzt wird, das keine markierte Form weiter impliziert. In beiden Fällen
wird damit morphologische Komplexität abgebaut. Flexionsmerkmale im
Lexikon verschwinden in unserem Fall, wenn Wörter aus den anderen Klas­
sen zur i-Deklination übertreten. Aus der relativ großen ō-Klasse haben sich
bereits im Altisländischen z.B. jörö «Erde», sorg «Trauer» und sól der i-
Klasse angeschlossen und Wörter wie gjöf «Gabe», gröf «Grab» und sök
«Sache, Schuld» zeigen Doppelformen; vom Altisländischen zum Neuislän­
dischen haben u.a. for «Furche», geil «Kluft» und rún die Klasse gewech­
selt, und heute tendieren beispielsweisegrein «Zweig», kvisl «Flußarm» und
sneid «Scheibe» zum Übertritt. Ein großer Teil der Feminina der konso­
nantischen Deklination 1 wie önd «Ente», strönd «Strand», glóð «Glut»,
nót «Heringsnetz» und heimt «Geldforderung» zeigen gegenwärtig zuneh­
mend neue Formen nach der i-Deklination, und aus der (ohnehin kleinen)
konsonantischen Deklination 2 ist örk zur i-Klasse übergetreten und mörk
«Wildmark» schwankt. Aufgrund der bestehenden Markiertheitsverhältnisse
ist zu erwarten, daß solche Übergänge auch weiterhin anhalten 14 . Beim
ebenfalls zu konstatierenden Übergang von der konsonantischen Deklina­
tion 2 zur konsonantischen Deklination 1 wird das Lexikonmerkmal
[ur/G.Sg.], das aufgrund von PSB (4) eine weitere markierte Form impli­
ziert, durch das Merkmal [ur/N.A.PL] ersetzt, das keine weitere markierte
Form impliziert. Dieser Klassenwechsel liegt bei Wörtern wie eik «Eiche»,
steik «Braten», tík «Hündin» und brik «Brett» vor 15 . Wir können also in­
sgesamt für die PSB der Variante IV feststellen, daß sie die diskutierten
sprachhistorischen Anforderungen erfüllen, die wir zum Kriterium für ihre
angemessene Formulierung gemacht haben.
Damit haben wir also anhand der Diskussion von vier möglichen Va­
rianten der Formulierung von PSB nacheinander vier, u.E. wesentliche Eigen-

14 Es gibt im übrigen auch Übertritte von der (in Anm. 1 erwähnten) vō-Deklination zur
i-Deklination, z.B. ist dögg «Tau» übergetreten und ör «Pfeil» befindet sich im Übergang.
15 Man beachte, daß in Variante III die i-Deklination, die o-Deklination und die kon­
sonantische Deklination 2 durch jeweils ein Lexikonmerkmal und die konsonatische Deklina­
tion 1 durch zwei Lexikonmerkmale spezifiziert sind. Bei diesen Spezifizierungen läßt sich im
Unterschied zu Variante IV weder der Übergang der übrigen Klassen zur i-Deklination noch
der Übergang der konsonantischen Klasse 2 zur konsonantischen Klasse 1 erklären.
 PARADIGMENSTRUKTURBEDINGUNGEN 643

schaften der Struktur von Flexionsparadigmen erarbeitet, die wir kurz als
Regelhaftigkeit (Variante I), Bezugnahme auf unabhängige Eigenschaften
der Wörter (Variante II), implikativen Aufbau (Variante III) und Einbezie­
hung von Markiertheitsverhältnissen (Variante IV) charakterisieren können.
Die schließlich daraus resultierenden PSB der Variante IV spiegeln nicht nur
die Zusammengehörigkeit der Flexions formen zu einem einheitlichen Para­
digma wider, sondern sie erklären auch, weshalb im Bereich der Flexions­
paradigmen einer Sprache ganz bestimmte morphologische Veränderungen
eintreten und andere theoretisch mögliche nicht eintreten16, wodurch dann
entsprechend dem oben formulierten Kriterium die Annahmen über den Pa­
radigmenaufbau ihren spekulativen Charakter verlieren und bei weitem plau­
sibler werden. Verallgemeinernd läßt sich sagen, daß sich hier wie in vielen
anderen Bereichen der Grammatik die entscheidende Bedeutung der Sprach­
veränderung für die Erarbeitung einer angemessenen und verifizierbaren
Grammatiktheorie zeigt. Die Notwendigkeit der Erklärung von Sprachve­
ränderungen bedingt einerseits zusätzliche Anforderungen an die Gramma­
tik, doch sie führt andererseits zu Einsichten in das Wesen grammatischer
Strukturen, die einem bornierten Synchronismus schlicht verschlossen blei­
ben müssen.

LITERATURANGABEN

Anderson, Stephen R. 1982. Where's morphology? Linguistic Inquiry 13/4.

Bittner, Andreas. 1984. Implikative Hierarchien in der Morphologie: Das
«Stark-schwach-Kontinuum» der neuhochdeutschen Verben. Vortrag auf
der internationalen Morphologie-Konferenz in Veszprém/Ungarn. Er­
scheint in Acta Linguistica.
Carstairs, Andrew. 1981. Notes on affixes, clitics, and paradigms. Bloo­
mington: Indiana University Linguistics Club.
. 1983. Paradigm economy. Journal of Linguistics 19.
Grimm, Jakob. 1822. Deutsche Grammatik, Erster Theil; Zweite Ausgabe.
Göttingen: Dieterichsche Buchhandlung.

16 Die PSB erklären aber natürlich nicht alle möglichen Veränderungen in der Flexions­
morphologie; vgl. dazu speziell die durch die Tendenz zur Systemangemessenheit bedingten
Veränderungen, s. Wurzel 1984: 81 ff.
644 WOLFGANG ULLRICH WURZEL

Gudmundsson, Valtýr. 1922. Islandsk Grammatik. København: Hagerups

Forlag.
Karlsson, Fred. 1983. Paradigms and word forms. Vortrag auf dem Work­
shop on Natural Morphology in Poznań/Polen. Erscheint in R. Laskows­
ki (ed.), Papers on Natural Morphology.
Kiparsky, Paul. 1982. Lexical Morphology and Phonology; vervielfältigt.
M.I.T.
Kress, Bruno. 1963. Laut-und Formenlehre des Isländischen. Halle/Saale:
Niemeyer.
Lieber, Rochelle. 1981. On the Organization of the Lexicon. Bloomington:
Indiana University Linguistics Club.
Noreen, Adolf. 1923. Altisländische Grammatik. 4. Auflage. Halle/Saale:
Niemeyer.
Paul, Hermann. 1909. Prinzipien der Sprachgeschichte, 4. Auflage. Hal­
le/Saale: Niemeyer.
de Saussure, Ferdinand. 1931. Grundfragen der allgemeinen Sprachwissen­
schaft. Berlin: de Gruyter.
Wurzel, Wolfgang Ullrich. 1982/84. Flexionsmorphologie und Natürlich­
keit. Dissertation B: Akademie der Wissenschaften der DDR (1982). Stu­
dia Grammatica XXI. Berlin: Akademie-Verlag (1984).
Zwicky, Arnold M. 1985. How to describe inflection. Vervielfältigt.
 INDEX OF NAMES

Adams, G. . 274 Baist, G.

Adelung, J. C. 340 Baldinger, . 662
Adrados, F. R. 258 Banfield, A. 45
Aigotti, D. 80 Barber, Ε. J. W. 184
Aitzetmüller, R. 253 f. Barnes, . 40
Alarcos Llorach, E. 379 Barral, M. 612
Albrecht, M. von 139 f. Barry, M. V. 275
Alessio, G. 397 Bartholomae, Ch. 61, 63, 438
Alleyne, M. 268, 274 Bartsch, R. 65, 547, 554
Alonso, A. 379 Bates, E. 407
Altmann, G. 517, 526, 592 Battisti, . 397
Ammer, . 537 Bauche, H. 47
Andersen, H. 49, 267, 285, 478, 546 Baudet, M. M. 476
f., 550 f., 576 Baumbach, L. 429
Anderson, J. M. 2 f., 10, 170 Bean, M. C. 217
Anderson, S. R. 212 f., 216, 638 Bean, S. 413 f.
André, J. 394 Bechtel, F. 435, 437, 439
Andrew, S. O. 221 Becker, Ph. A. 340
Anttila, R. 218 Bedell, G. 35
Anwar, M. S. 547, 551 Behagel, O. 13, 16, 28, 38, 59, 64,
Arakin, V. D. 456 103
Arcixovskij, A. V. 259 Belardi, W. 334, 431
Ard, W. J. 124 Belasco, S. 48
Arnott, D. W. 184 f. Belic, Α. 255
Ascoli, G. I. 374, 388, 392 Bell, A. 454
Ashby, W. J. 46, 64 Benigni, L. 407
Bennett, J. A. W. 447
Bacquet, P. 13, 18, 22, 24, 221 Benveniste, E. 256, 358, 430 f., 438,
Bader, F. 13 ff. 536 f., 567
Bailard, J. 51 Bernini, G. 58, 65
Bailey, C.-J. M. 274, 461 Berrettoni, P. 77, 83
646 INDEX OF NAMES

Berruto, G. 335 Buchfield, R. W. 447 f.

Bertinetto, P. M. 74, 78 Bursch, H. 384
Bertocchi, A. 147 Bybee, J. L. 114, 358, 471
Bertoldi, V. 375 Bynon, T. 124, 134, 267, 326 f.
Best, K.-H. 592
Bezoen, H. L. 292 f. Cable, T. 455 f.
Bhatia, T. Kr. 60, 62, 65 f. Calboli, G. 146 f.
Bichakjian, . . 87, 98, 101, 103 Caldarelli, R. 327
Bickerton, D. 271, 473 f., 476 ff. Canello, U. Α. 390
Birnbaum, . 328 Carstairs, Α. 209, 629
Birnbaum, S. A. 555 Casadio, . 147
Bittner, A. 629 Cassidy, F. G. 272 ff., 277
Bliss, A. J. 270, 274 Castro, Α. 392
Bloomfield, Լ. 341, 376 f. Cedergren, FI. 333, 475
Boisacq, E. 429 f., 432, 434, 439 Chadwick, J. 429
Bonfante, G. 308 Chambers, J. . 286
Booij, G. E. 546 Champ Roux, . 476
Bopp, F. 341 Chantraine, P. 358, 360, 363 f., 429
Borkovskij, V. J. 259 ff.
Bossuyt, Α. 517 Chao, W. 134
Bourciez, E. 408 Chatman, S. 224
Bowen, J. T. 64 Chen, M. 552
Bowerman, M. 102 Chierchia, G. 165, 167
Böthlingk, . 601 Chomsky, . 102
Brachet, Α. 390 Chomsky, N.A. 45, 147, 172, 275,
Brandenstein, W. 60 341, 479
Braune, W. 8 Christy, T.C. 340
Breedveld, A. 199 Chung, S. 213 f.
Bremen, P. 436 Chvany, C. V. 223
Brown, P. 409 f., 412, 414, 475 f. Clark, . 447
Brown, R. 100, 407, 410, 412, 417 Clédat, Լ. 608
Brugmann, K. 13, 57, 61, 62, 97, Coates, J. 110, 115, 119 f.
251,330,341 f., 358 f., 363,436, Coates, R. 547
595 Codoñer, . 621
Brunner, . 521 Cohn, H. 35
Bruns . G. 143 f., 146 Cole, P. 213 ff. 419, 571
Buck, C. D. 216, 431 Coleman, R. 355
Bunina, I. . 256 Colman, F. 1
 INDEX OF NAMES 647

Comrie, . 60, 66, 410, 475 Dobson, E.J. 272, 274, ff., 469
Conradie, J. 157 Donegan, P. 517, 524, 548
Conti, G. 538 f., 542 Doria, M. 326
Čop, . 433 Dover, K.J. 23
Corominas, J. 375, 380, 382, 384, Dressler, W.U. 13, 28, 208, 517, 523,
625 526
Cortelazzo, M. 398 Dubois, L. 22
Coseriu, E. 421, 428, 478, 523, 576 Dunkel, G.E. 66
Cowgill, W. 251, 257, 284 Durand, J. 3
Cravens, T. 171, 621 Duranti, A. 42
Croft, W. 181, 183, 186, 188, 358 Durkheim, A. 258
Cromer, R. F. 101 Duro, A. 398
Cummings, Α. 48
Ebbinghaus, E.A. 8
Dahl, Ö. 58, 62 f. Ebeling, G. 398
Dahl, T. 447 Eckman, F. 547
Dalbera-Stefanaggi, M.-L. 163 ff. Edgerton, F. 484 f.
D'Ans, A.-M. 476 Edgren, A.H. 488
Darmesteter, Α. 387 Eichner, H. 499
Dauses, Α. 79, 81, 83 Einarsson, S. 155
De Abrew, . . 65 Einstein, A. 341
Deane, P. 358 Ekwall, E. 153
Debrunner, A. 61 Elmer, W. 124 ff., 132 f.
Delbrück, . 13, 16, 23, 28, 51, 61 Endzelin, J. 24
f., 251, 308, 358 f., 363 f., 366 Enkvist, N.E. 221, 228
De Meo, . 140 Ernout, A. 394 f.
de Serpa Leitão, Α. 469 Espinosa, A.M. 392
Denniston, J. D. 25 Espinosa hijo, A.M. 392
Densusianu, . 424 Ewen, . 3 f.
De Simone, . 596
Devoto, G. 137 f., 143, 397 Faine, J. 476
Diez, F. 382 Faiss, . 239
Dik, S. . 41, 357 ff., 568 Fanciullo, F. 333
Dillon, M. 59 Fant, G. 469
Dilthey, W. 295 Fasold, R. 547
Dimmendaal, G.J. 197, 199, 206 ff. Feuillet, J. 256
Dinnsen, D.A. 547, 549 Fick, Α. 434
Disterheft, D. 215 f., 218, 474 Finck, N:. 592
648 INDEX OF NAMES

Fiorelli, P. 398 Glatigny, M. 608

Fischer, O.C.M. 124, 129 ff. Gleitman, L. 576
Fleischrnan, S. 109, 117, 119, 419, Goetze, Α. 18, 21
620 Gonda, J. 24, 61 ff., 186, 307, 321
Foley, J. 170 Goodwin, W.W. 184 f.
Fontaine, J. 626 Goossens, J. 547
Ford, J.D.M. 383 Grammont, M. 330, 374
Foster, R. 221 Graur, Α. 394
Foulet, Լ. 38 Green, A. 239, 241
Fourakis, M. 546 Green, J. 48
Fournier, R. 475 Greenberg, J.H. 13, 35 ff., 40, 57,
Fourquet, J. 13, 24 f., 28 59, 87, 93, 186, 194, 197 f., 361,
Fowler, J.H. 57 592
Fraenkel, E. 59, 146 Gregg, R.J. 277
Fraser, . 563 Grégoire, A. 101
Frei, H. 44, 517, 524 Grevisse, M. 612
Friedrich, J. 16, 19, 22, 24 f., 28, 60, Grice, .. 420
314 Grickat, I. 260
Friedrich, P. 13, 21, 57, 60, 565 Grimm, J. 341, 629
Fries, C.C. 109 Gröber, G. 398
Fries, U. 222 Guillaume, G. 241 f.
Frisk, H. 429 f., 432, 438 f. Gumperz, J.J. 268
Furnivall, F.J. 156 Günter, H. 438

Gabba, E. 144 Habinek, T.N. 140

Galton, H. 260 Haiman, J.A. 181, 191, 306
Gamkrelidze, T. 307 Hajek, J. 163
García de Diego, V. 384, 392, 398 Hall, R.A. Jr. 267
Gauchat, L. 331 Halle, M. 103, 172, 275, 467
Geis, M.L. 571 Hamel, G.A. van 8
Giacalone Ramat, Α. 475 Hamm, J. 546
Giegerich, Η. 455 Hamp, E.P. 60 f.
Gildersleeve, Β.L. 184 Hancock, I.F. 268, 270
Gilliéron, J. 375, 622 Hanse, J. 608
Gilman, Α. 407, 410, 412, 417 Hanssen, F. 384
Giseke, . 28 Harbert, W. 213 ff.
Givón, T. 42, 58, 90, 93, 103, 211, Harkness, J. 591
216, 219, 296 f., 517, 524, 576 Harris, J. 170, 271 f., 276
 INDEX OF NAMES 649

Harris, M.B. 35 f., 40, 46 f., 49, 51 Humboldt, W. von 340, 591
f., 96, 217, 608 Hyman, L.M. 42, 89 ff., 216
Hatcher, A.G. 188
Haudry, J. 142, 363, 365 Imbs, P. 608 f.
Haugen, E. 155, 407 Ineichen, G. 591
Haviland, J.B. 411 Ingold, T. 347
Hawkins, J.A. 57, 87, 93 Ingria, R. 167
Hayes, B. 449 f., 455 Iordan, I. 331, 427
Hazan, . 346 Isačenko, Α. 260
Head, . 408, 413 Itkonen, E. 620
Heine, . 111 Ivanov, V.V. 255, 307
Heisenberg, W. 341
Hermann, E. 308 Jackendoff, R. 565
Hermon, G. 213 ff. Jacobi, H. 27
Hettrich, H. 358 Jakobson, R. 3, 87, 359, 376
Heubeck, Α. 437 Janda, R. 151, 156
Hill, J.H. 415 Jansen, F. 291
Hill, K.C. 415 Javkin, H. 465
Hirschbühler, P. 475 Jeffers, R.J. 305, 308, 310, 313, 319
Hirt, H. 16, 62, 251 f., 431, 434 f.
Hochberg, J. 561 Jensen, F. 613 f.
Hockett, Ch. F. 336 Jensen, H. 24
Hoenigswald, H.M. 327 f. Jespersen, . 24, 125, 151, 154 ff.,
Hoffman, O. 439 239, 272, 275, 341, 375 f., 465,
Hofmann, J.B. 62, 139, 145, 147, 517, 524
394 f. Job, M. 355
Hogg, R.M. 2 Jokinen, U. 475
Holland, G. 318 f. Jones, . 3
Hooper, J.B. 170, 219, 454, 517, Jordan, R. 447, 449
526, 554, 556 Joret, Ch. 387
Hoppenbrouwers, C.A.J. 285 f., 290 Joseph, B.D. 124, 218
Hopper, P.J. 59, 221, 223 f., 296, Josephson, F. 18
307 Jucquois, G. 16
Horn, W. 446 Jud, J. 392
Horning, A. 374 Justus, C.F. 309
Huang, G.T.J. 36
Hughes, J.P. 274 Kalmar, І. 223
Hulst, H. van der 4 Karlsson, F. 629
650 INDEX OF NAMES

Kaufman, T. 268 Labov, W. 276, 292 f., 331, 335,

Kayne, R.S. 475, 578 344
Keenan, E. 475 Ladefoged, P. 285, 469
Kemmer, S. 181, 186, 188 Lakoff, G. 124, 576, 609 f.
Kempf, R. 407 f. Lambert, W. 407
Keyser, S.J. 521 Lamberteire, Ch. de 24
Kieckers, E. 439 Lambertz, M. 60 f.
King, R.D. 326 f., 329, 552 ff. Lambrecht, . 35, 39 f., 42 f., 47,
Kiparsky, P. 193, 326, 329, 638 49
Kiparsky, V. 260 Langacker, R.W. 609
Kirsner, R.S. 119 Lanmann, C.R. 598
Klaiman, M. 184 Lapesa, R. 378
Klavans, J.L. 159 Laroche, E. 13, 17, 360
Klein, J.S. 14 Larsson, E. 37 f., 40 f., 45
Klein-Andreu, F. 301 Lass, R. , 170, 207, 269, 272, 276,
Klemensiewicz, Z. 261 333, 461, 465, 526, 576, 622
Klimov, G.A. 94 Lazard, G. 98
Klingenschmitt, G. 284 Lazzeroni, R. 138 f.
Kluge, F. 399 Lee, D.J.N. 18
Koch, M. 89 Leek, F.C. van der 124, 129 ff.
Kohlheim, V. 332 Lees, R.B. 546
Kökeritz, H. 277 Lefebvre, C. 475 f.
Kopečný, F. 261 Lehfeldt, W. 517, 526, 592
Koschmieder, E. 546 Lehmann, Ch. 13, 21, 23, 142, 144,
Koziol, H. 448 362, 601
Krahe, H. 524 Lehmann, W.P. 57, 60 f., 63., 103,
Krause, W. 24 f., 139, 601 308 ff., 333
Kress, . 631, 639 Lehnert, M. 446
Kroll, W. 141 Lejeune, M. 284, 325, 430, 593
Krüger, F. 392 Lencek, R.L. 546
Kruisinga, E. 160 Le Page, R.B. 268, 272 ff. 277
Kuiper, F. B.J. 284 Leskien, A. 254
Kumaniecki, K.F. 140 Létoublon, F. 146
Kuno, S. 98, 310 Leumann, M. 62 f., 432
Kurath, H. 275 Levinson, S.C. 409 f., 412, 414, 420
Kuroda, S.-Y. 45, 561, 571 Levy, E. 296
Kuri???owicz, J. 16, 21, 253, 255, 325, Lewis, . 28, 59, 64
362, 537 ff., 541 f., 598 Lewy, E. 260
 INDEX OF NAMES 651

Li, C.N. 36, 38 ff., 43, 89, 93, 217 Maurei, J.-P. 146
Liddell, S.K. 58 Mayerthaler, W. 517, 521, 524, 528,
Liddel, H.G. 430, 434 591, 597
Lieber, R. 629 Mayr, E. 207
Lightfoot, D. 49, 87, 124, 212, 219, Mayrhofer, M. 60, 599
267, 310 f., 341, 575 Mc David, R.I. 275
Lightner, T. M. 435 Meier, H. 384
Lindblom, . 469, 550 f. Meier, J. 332
Lindeman, F.O. 584, 589 f., 600 Meillet, A. 16, 24 f., 267 f., 308, 342,
Lindholm, F. 140 377 f., 394 f. 435, 439
Lineli, P. 554 Melchert, H.C. 363, 366
Lodge, G. 184 Ménard, P. 613, 616
Loi Corvetto, I. 165 Menéndez Pidal, R. 378, 384, f.,
Longacre, R.E. 221 389, 391 f., 461
López Pereira, J.E. 623 Merlo, . 398
Lord, C. 216 Meyer-Lübke, W. 325, 374, 382,
Lubotsky, A. 584 384, 398
Lüdtke, Η. 517, 524, 595 Michaëlis (de Vasconcelos), . 387
Luick, . 446 ff., 452, 456 f., 390
Luiselli, . 137 ff. Migliorini, . 398
Lunt, Η. 546 Mignot, X. 355
Lujan, M. 578 Miller, D.G. 13, 89, 96
Luraghi, S. 359, 364 ff. Miller, G.A. 469
Lyons, J. 565 Milroy, J. 275 ff.
Minard, Α. 16, 24, 318
Macdonell, A.A. 16, 22, 61 ff. Minkova, D. 446, 448 f., 454
Mace, J. 601 Mitchell, . 221 f.
Maddieson, I. 546 Mitzka, W. 399
Malkiel, Y. 202, 333, 376 ff., 383, Mogk, E. 27
394, 622 Moignet, G. 242, 608, 613
Mańczak, W. 353 Molinelli, P. 58, 65
Manoliu-Manea, M. 421 f. Monteil, P. 314
Marchese, L. 116 Moralejo Laso, A. 620
Marm, I. 64 Morohasi, T. 563
Marti, M. 579 Moscati, S. 538
Martin, R. 420 Mossé, F. 24, 455
Martin, S. 563 Moulton, W.G. 8, 546
Martinet, A. 170, 394, 517, 524 Mowrey, R. 465, 468
652 INDEX OF NAMES

Mussafia, A. 586 Pascual, J.A. 625

Mustanoja, T.F. 154, 156, 239 Pasquali, G. 137
Paul, H. 308, 374, 391, 629
Nagy, G. 594 Paulston, C. 407
Napoli, D.J. 169, 578 Payne, J.R. 58, 63, 65
Nathan, G.S. 607, 609 Pedersen, H. 28, 59, 64
Nedjalkov, V.P. 184 Pellegrini, G.B. 336
Nespor, M. 169 Penzl, H. 2
Neumann, H. 332, 476 Pepicello, W.J. 313, 319, f.
Neu, E. 358 Pereľmuter, I.A. 252 f.
Newton, D. 547 Perkins, R.D. 110 f.
Nicely, P.E. 469 Perpillou, J.-L. 26, 394
Niedermann, M. 431 Peter, H. 137
Nigra, . 398 Pighi, G.B. 137 f., 140, 143
Niles, N.A. 274 Pinkster, H. 355 f., 358 f.
Nordahl, H. 608, f. Pisani, V. 145, 432 ff., 438
Norden, E. 137 ff., 141 Plank, F. 356, 361
Noreen, Α. 639 Planta, R. von 139, 329
Poitou, J. 601
Ochs, E. 42 Pokorny, J. 57, 430, 434
Ohala, J.J. 465, 468, 548, 556 Politzer, R.L. 619
Ohira, M. 561 Posner, R. 474, 479
Oldenberg, H. 139 Pratt, M.L. 561
Olson, D. 561 Prellwitz, W. 439
Ó Cróinín, D. 59 Primmer, A. 141
O'Neil, W. 521 Prokosch, E. 344, 360
Orr, J. 331 Prosdocimi, A.L. 163, 583 ff., 593
Orton, H. 275 ff.
Osgood, C E . 223 Puhvel, J. 312, 328, 433
Osthoff, H. 439 Pullum E.K., 152 f., 571

Paez Urdaneta, I. 568 Quesada, F. 118, 461

Pagliuca, W. 114, 465, 468 f. Quicoli, C.A. 578
Panagi, O. 542
Panhuis, D. 13 Ramat, P. 58 f., 62, 64 f., 361, 367,
Papa, E. 167 599, 601
Parker, F. 549 f., 552 Reeds, J.A. 469
Parker, T.S. 546, 553 Regula, M . 334, 398
 INDEX OF NAMES 653

Reh, M. 1ll Sassen, Α. 287

Rehg, . 411 Saussol, J.M. 620
Reichenkron, G. 585 Saussure, F. de 341, 349, 432, 585
Reinhart, T. 45 ff., 629
Renou, Լ. 16, 21, 27 Sauvageot, A 50
Reynolds, M. 163 Sbordone, F. 137
Rhys Jones, T.J. 64 Scatton, E.A. 546
Ribbeck, O. 137 Scheffer, J. 116
Richter, E. 325 f., 398 Scheib, M.E. 469
Richter, M. 620 Scherer, A. 439
Rickford, J.R. 271 Schindler, J. 584 f., 589 f., 599
Ries, J. 27 Schleicher, A. 341, 591
Riiho, T. 620 Schmidt, G. 604
Risch, E.E. 438 Schmidt, J. 585, 601 f.
Ritschl, F. 137 Schmidt, K.H. 94, 252
Rivas, A. 578 Schmitt, R. 61
Rivero, M.-L. 475 Schuchardt, H. 375, 392
Rizzi, L. 578 Schuh, R.G. 198
Rodríguez Marín, F. 382 Schulte-Herbrüggen, H. 622
Rohlfs, G. 331 Schwentner, E. 13
Romaine, S. 320 Schwyzer, E. 61, 430 ff., 439
Ronneberger-Sibold, E. 517 f., 525 Scott, R. 430, 434
ff., 529, 595 Searle, J.R. 561
Rosch, E. 576, 610 Seebold, E. 588, 592 f.
Rosén, H.B. 328, 537, f., 542 Seefranz-Montag, A. von 124, 132,
Rothe, W. 608 ff.
Rousselot, P.J. 331 Segre, . 579
Rubba, J. 607, 611 Seiler, H. 23, 254, 365, 517
Ruhlen, M. 546 Selkirk, E. 175, 449 f.
Rūķe-Draviņa, V. 99, 101 f. Serbat, G. 258, 356, 360, 366
Shannon, T.F. 163, 546, 553, 556
Safarewicz, J. 257 Sheldon, A.L. 102
Saltarelli, M. 163, 167, 169, 620. Shields, K. 360
Samuels, M.L. 455 f. Shimomiya, T. 258
Sankoff, G. 475 f. Shyldkrot, H. 181, 186
Sapir, E. 133, 202, 205, 376, 398, 592 Sievers, E. 584
Sarrasin, R. 475 Sigurd, B. 530
Sasse, H.-J. 87, 89 ff. Silverstein, M. 412
654 INDEX OF NAMES
Simmel, G. 414
Sivertsen, E. 468 f.
Skalička, V. 527, 592
Slobin, D.I. 99, 101 f.
Smithers, G.V. 447
Sofer, J. 626
Solberg, M.E. 104
Solmsen, F. 431, 437, 439
Sommer, F. 434, 594, 597
Sommerfelt, Α. 64
Sorrento, Լ. 586
Specht, F. 436
Speijer, J.S. 62, 186
Spitzer, Լ. 375, 380
Sridhar, S.N. 213 ff.
Stampe, D. 517, 524, 547 ff.
Stang, Ch. S. 253, 258
Starke, F. 359, 364
Steiger, A. 379 f.
Steindorff, G. 542
Steiner, R. 276
Stern, . 99
Stern, W. 99
Stefanovič, M. 261
Stevick, R.D. 207
Straka, G. 325
Strang, . 448
Streitberg, W. 2, 9, 59
Strozer, J.A. 578
Strunk, K. 13
Stuart Jones H. 430, 434
Sturtevant, E.H. 18
Sullivan, J.P. 274
Sun, C. 90
Suñer, M. 578
Swadesh, M. 194
Sweet, H. 275, 446
Sweetser, E.E. 565
Sylvain, S. 268
Szantyr, Α. 62 f., 139, 145, 147
Szemerényi, . 251, 253, 355, 359.
Szober, S. 261
Tabouret-Keller, A. 268
Talmy, L. 183
Taylor, D. 267 f.
Taylor, M. 376
Tekavčić, P. 82
Teriingen, J.H. 397
Thomas, Α. 392
Thomas W. 25
Thomason, S.G. 268
Thompson, S. Α. 35 f., 38 ff., 43,
89, 93, 217, 221, 223 f., 228
Thulin, C. 137
Thumb, A. 439
Thurneysen, R. 19, 24 f., 28
Tiersma, P.M. 196, 546, 548
Timberlake, Α. 128, 212
Tobler, Α. 586
Tomlin, R.S. 223 f.
Townsend, C.E. 546
Traugott, E.C. 297, 301, 561 ff.,
568, 571
Trávniček, F. 261
Trudgill, P.J. 286, 333, 408
Tschižewskij, D. 259
Ulleland, M. 586
Ullmann, S. 622
Ultan, R. 109 ff. 119
Unamuno, M. de 392
Uytfanghe, M. van 620
Vago, R. 465
Vaillant, A. 18 f., 25, 60, 62, 253,
255 f., 362
 INDEX OF NAMES 655

Valentin, P. 368 Wells, J.C. 272

Varvaro, A. 325, 331 Werner, . 353, 517, 524, 529, 591,
Veenker, W. 260 593, 597
Vendler, Z. 561 ff., 568, 571 Westermann, D. 476
Vendryes, J. 16, 22, 430 Westphal, R. 137
Vennemann, T. 43, 65, 88, 217, 517, Wheeler, M. 546
524, 547, 554, 592 Wheeler, R.S. 358
Verner, . 9 Wieacker, F. 137 f., 144, 146
Vilches Acuña, R. 622 Wijk, N. van 258
Villiard, P. 476 Williams, E.B. 378
Vincent, N. 163 Wilmet, M. 82, 612
Visser, F.T. 133, 154, 239, 248 Wimmer, L.F.A. 2
Vogel, I. 167, 175 Winitz, H. 469
Vossen, R. 194, 200 f. Winter, W. 135, 311
Voyles, J.B. 2, 9 Winters, M.E. 609
Wissing, D.P. 546
Wackernagel, J. 16,23, 38, 57, 61 ff., Wolfram, W. 547
252, 362, 365, 431, 433, 440, 598 Wright, E.M. 449
Wahlgren, E.G. 377 Wright, J. 2, 449
Wald, . 301 Wright, R. 163, 585, 620 f., 623, 625
Walde, Α. 431, 433 f. Wurzel, W.U. 517, 524, 526, 528,
Waldron, R.A. 622 591, 593, 604, 629 f., 639
Wales, K. 407 f. Wyld, H.C. 156, 277
Wang, W.S.-Y. 552
Waugh, L. 376
Yaeger, M. 276
Wanner, D. 163, 576, 578, 580, 582
f., 586
Wanner, E. 576 Zimmer, S. 13, 16
Warmington, E.H. 143 f. Zipf, G.K. 437, 517
Wartburg, W. von 332, 349, 608 Zolkhoev, V. I. 546
Waterhouse, R. 222 Zolli, P. 398
Watkins,  13, 21, 217, 311 ff. Zubizarreta, M.L. 578
Watson, A. 137 Zumthor, P. 608
Weinreich, U. 275, 336 Zwicky, A.M. 151 ff., 159 f., 170,
Wekker, Η. Chr. 110, 115, 117 465, 571, 629, 638
 INDEX OF LANGUAGES

Abkhaz 546 Athabaskan 619

Abipon 111 Australian 183, 321, 411, 470
Acoma 190 Avar 546
Acholi 111 Avestan 60, 61, 62, 63, 284, 431, 435
African (languages) 91, 93, 474
Afrikaans 64, 157 f., 546 f. Baltic 59, 60, 262, 546, 593, 594
Afro-Asiatic 202 Balto-Slavic 261
Akkadian 538, 540 Bantu 182, 619
Albanian, 58, 60 f., 354, 546 Bari 194-203
allemand 28 (s. also deutsch, Ger­ Basque 381, 546
man, tedesco) Bassa 111
Altaic 546 Baule 465
altindisch 138 f. (s. also Indian and Béarnese 381
Sanskrit) Belorussian 546
altnordisch 509 (s. also Old Norse) Berlinese 399
American Sign Language 58 Breton 59, 64, 65, 546
Amharic 180, 181 f. Bulgarian 259 f., 546
Anatolian 60, 312 ff. (s. also anato- Buriat 546
lisch)
anatolisch 142 (s. also Anatolian) Canaanite 541
Andean 183 Castilian (s. Spanish)
Anglosaxon 239 Catalan 381, 382, 546, 624
Arabic 111, 344, 379, 380, 535, 540, Old Catalan 623
541, 542, 572 Caucasian 546
Classical Arabic 621 Celtic 59, 60, 546, 583, 600
Aragonese 383 Chadic 202
Aramaic 538, 540, 541 Cheremis (Eastern) 547
Armenian 58, 60, 66, 88 (s. also ar­ Chickasaw 212
ménien) Chinese (Mandarin) 35, 36, 38 ff.,
East Armenian 546 42, 89, 217, 354, 474, 563-566
arménien 24 (s. also Armenian) passim
658 INDEX OF LANGUAGES
Chukchi 111
Circassian 546
Cockney 468, 469
Coptic 542
Corsican 163-176
Creoles
Carribean Creole 269 ff.
French Creoles 474-479 passim
Guyanese Creole 268
Indian Ocean Creoles 474 f.
Jamaican Creole 270 ff.
Cuna 111 f.
Cushitic 180, 182
Czech 59, 261 f., 546
Danish 111, 155, 214, 546
deutsch 507, 509 f., 640 (s. also alle­
mand, German, tedesco)
Djapu 412, 416
Dodos 202
Dravidian 65, 66, 470
Duala 111
Dutch 64, 91 f., 96, 157 f., 208, 285,
546, 547, 601
Flemish Dutch 398
Dyirbal 411
Dyola 182
Egyptian 541, 542
englisch 632 (see also English)
English 58, 62, 64, 88, 97 f., 102, 111
f., 116-119, 153-161, 213 f., 239,
247 f., 295-302, 341 ff., 354, 386,
392, 393, 394, 398, 445-456 pas­
sim, 465, 469, 474, 476, 518-530
passim, 546, 547, 550, 553,
561-571 passim, 597, 608, 620, 622
(s. also englisch, inglese)
American English 9, 170, 176,466
Black English 274, 347
British English 110, 115
British Southern Modern English
453
Hiberno-English 269 ff.
Middle English 114, 123-138, 152
ff., 239 f., 244 ff., 445-456 pas­
sim, 525, 528, 565, 566, 570
Modern English 132, 190, 196
Old English 2, 58, 114, 123-135,
152 ff., 214, 221-236, 239 f., 244
ff., 297 ff., 399, 431, 445 f. pas­
sim, 569, 571, (s. also vieil anglais)
Estonian 66, 546
Ewe 111, 476
Faroese 595
Finnish 66, 89, 354, 546
Finno-Ugric 546
francese 325, 330, 334, 336 (s. also
French)
French 35, 37, 42, 48, 50 f., 53, 59,
64, 65,79, 82, 97 f., 1 l l , 119, 181
f., 188 ff., 212, 240, 242, 284, 285,
289, 346, 353, 379-397 passim,
424, 447, 474-479 passim, 546,
550, 566, 569, 570, 578, 579, 580,
585, 587, 607-616 passim, 620, 624
(s. also francese)
Angevin French 111
Canadian French 474
Classical French 616
Middle French 475, 479, 616
Old French 388, 396, 398, 475,
547, 607, 613-616 passim, 626
Frisian 547
West Frisian 546, 548
 INDEX OF LANGUAGES
North Frisian 546, 553
Fula 180, 181, 183, 190
Ga 58
Gascon 381
Georgian 546, 213 f.
German 64, 65, 94, 103, 112, 155,
213,354,373,381,399,542,546,
547, 553, 591, 593-597 passim,
599-601 passim, 603, 604 (s. also
allemand, deutsch, plattdeutsch,
tedesco)
Middle High German, 63, 436,
552, 594-596 passim, 600-602
passim
Modern German 134
Old High German 64, 239, 256,
343, 431, 439, 595-597 passim, 602
Germanic 1, 2, 5, 6, 59, 62, 64, 65,
90, 154, 158, 217, 239 f., 445, 526
f., 529, 546, 553, 584, 593, 597,
599 f., 603 f. (s. also germanique)
North Germanic 155
Old Germanie 362, 367 f.
Proto-Germanie 196, 213 f., 529,
597
West Germanie 217, 187 f.
germanique 27 (s. also Germanie)
Gothic 1-, 58, 59, 63, 112, 213 f.,
239, 399, 430, 431, 436, 439, 600
(s. also gotique)
gotique 24 f. (s. also Gothic)
grec 17 ff., 23, 25 (s. also greco,
Greek, griechisch)
greco 326, 329, 429-439 (s. also grec,
Greek, griechisch)
Greek 2, 3, 57, 58, 61, 64, 66, 213,
254 ff., 258, 284, 314 ff., 354, 357
659
ff., 378, 392, 394, 395, 538, 540, 542,
543, 546, 564, 566, 567, 591, 596,
600, 602 (s. also grec, greco,
griechisch)
Classical Greek 180, 182 f., 184 f.
Homeric Greek 61
Katharevusa 621
Modern Greek 111, 212
griechisch 147 (s. also grec, greco,
Greek)
Gugadje 412
Gujarati 470
Gungu Yimidirr 183, 411
Haitian 111, 476-479
Hausa 202
Hebrew 399, 535, 538, 540, 541, 542
Classical Hebrew 181, 621
Middle Hebrew 541, 542
hethitisch 138 f., 142 f. (s. also Hit­
tite)
Hindi 58, 60, 62, 65
Hispanic 380
Hittite 17 ff., 22, 24, 28, 60, 138 f.,
142 f., 216, 312 ff., 358 ff., 431
(s. also hethitisch)
і 416
Hungarian 399, 546
Icelandic 155, 341 ff., 546 (s. also
isländisch)
Modern Icelandic 214
Old Icelandic 181 ff.
Indian 584, 591
Old Indian 537 (s. also altindisch)
Indic Languages 60, 65
Indo-European 57-66 passim, 251,
305-321, 374, 524, 535-543 passim,
660 INDEX OF LANGUAGES

563-567 passim, 571, 583, 591, Early Middle Japanese 566

596, 597 (s. also indogermanisch) Early Modern Japanese 566
Indoeuropean (languages) 87, 91, 93, Old Japanese 563-565 passim, 567
94, 98, 99, 102, 124, 132, 190, 196, Jie 202
212, 215 f., 355-368
Proto-Indo-European, 57-66, 196, Kabardian 546
431, 434 ff., 439 Kalmyck 546
indogermanisch 513 (s. also Indo- Kannada 413
European) Karankawa 111
Indo-Iranian 314, 318, 344 Karimojong 202
Indonesian 182 Karmuri 181
îndese 333 (s. also englisch, English) Kashmiri 66
Iranian, 60, 98, 102 f., (s. also ira­ Keresan 190
nico) Kiowa 181
iranico 329 (s. also Iranian) Klamath 181
Irish 59, 64, 546 Korean 111 f., 119, 417
Middle Irish 212, 218 Kru 116
Old Irish 59, 212 (š. also vieil ir­ Eastern Kru 112
landais) Kuku 194, 200
isländisch 630-642 passim (s. also Kwara ? ae 111
Icelandic)
altisländisch 639, 642 Lango 111
neuisländisch 639, 642 Lapp 546
Italian 59, 65, 71-84, 354, 373-398 lateinisch 137-147, 509 (s. also Latin)
passim, 546, 576-580 passim, 586, Latin 2, 8, 57, 61, 62, 63, 66, 88, 90,
593 95, 96 f., 124, 132, 181, 183, 184,
Ferrarese Italian 547 186, 188 ff., 164, 242, 253, 256,
Italian Southern Dialects 320 298, 315 ff., 346, 354, 357, 366 f.,
Old Italian 378, 398 377-400 passim, 424, 479, 518-530
Standard Italian 165, 167, 168, 172 passim, 537, 540, 542, 563-569
(s. also italiano meridionale) passim, 575-587 passim, 592, 607,
italiano meridionale, 335 (s. also Ita­ 616 (s. also lateinisch, latino)
lian) Late Latin 619-626 passim
Italic 389 Post-Carolingian Mediaeval Latin
Italic-Latin 583 621
latino 325, 430, 431, 433, 439 (s. al­
Japanese 45 f., 310, 341 ff., 354, so lateinisch, Latin)
561-572 passim lettone 434
 INDEX OF LANGUAGES 661

Lithuanian 59, 253, 429, 431, 436, Eastern Nilotic 193-209

543, 546, 591 f., 594, 597, 599 f. Eastern, Western, Southern
(s. also lituanien) Nilotic 198
lituanien 23 f. (s. also Lithuanian) Non-Bari 194, 197, 207 f.
Logbara 111 Nordic languages 64
Lotuko 111 Norwegian 64, 111, 214, 546
Lotuxo 194, 199 Nyangatom 202
Lotuxo-Maa 194, 206
louvite 13, 17, 18, 26, 138 f. (s. also Occitan 48 ff., 624
luwisch) Old Lombard 397
luwisch 138 f. (s. also louvite) Old Norse 240, 509, 431, 435, 439,
447, 567, 594-596 passim (s. also
Maasai 194-198, 206 altnordisch)
Macedonian 259 f., 354, 546 Old Prussian 430, 431
Macro-Penutian 182 Old Sardinian 398
Malay 182, 190 Old Saxon 431
Mano 58 Ossetic 258
Maori 214
Marathi 65 Pali 63
Märkisch 399 Pangwa 182
Mauritian 477 Papago 182
Messapic 484, 497 Persian 60
miceneo 429-439 passim (s. also Old Persian 60
Mycenean, mycénien) Phoenician 541
Miwok (Central Southern Sierra) 111 Piedmontese (Andorno) 335
Mongolian 546 plattdeutsch 398 (s. also German)
Mozarabic 384 f. Polish 261 f., 526, 546
Mycenean 358, (s. also miceneo, Polynesian 212 f.
mycénien) Pokot (Southern Nilotic) 200
mycénien 26 f. (s. also miceneo, Ponapean 411 ff.
Mycenean) Portuguese 59, 354, 546, 624, 625,
378-395 passim
Navaho 413 Galician Portuguese 378, 381, 383
Nepali 60, 65 Old Portuguese 382, 383
Niger-Congo 58, 217 Prakrit 603
Nilo-Saharian 181, 194 Proto-Norse 595
Nilotic 182 Punjabi 60, 65
662 INDEX OF LANGUAGES

Quechua 111, 118 f., 461 Sinhala 65 (s also Sinhalese)

Ayacucho Quechua 183 Sinhalese 416 (s. also Sinhala)
Ecuadorian Quechua 112 slave 19, 34 (s. also Slavic, slavisch,
Quiche 181 Slavonic)
vieux slave 24
Réunionnais 477 Slavic 89, 251-262, 354, 362, 543, 546
Romance 59, 60, 65, 83, 90, 164, 186 f., 550 (s. also s7ave, slavisch,
ff., 240, 374-399 passim, 473-479 Slavonic)
passim, 546, 575-587 passim, 607, slavisch 511, 513 (s. also slave,
616 Slavic, Slavonic)
Early Romance 619-626 passim ost-slavisch 509
Gallo-Romance 111 west-slavisch 509
Hispano-Romance 378-398 passim Slavonic 59 f., 62, 509, 538 (s. also
Italo-Romance 163, 396 slave, Slavic, slavisch)
Luso-Romance 398 Slovakian 416
Paleo-Romance 387 Slovene 546
Proto-Romance 88, 619, 621 Somali 111, 180, 181 f.
Western Romance 112 Sonay 111
Romatsh (Engadine) 475 spagnolo 333 (s. also Spanish)
Rumanian 59, 111, 176, 379, 419-428, Spanish 48, 59, 111 f., 116, 164, 173,
475, 546 180, 461, 526, 546, 568, 620,
Russian 59, 99, 181 f., 184, 217, 252, 622-625 passim, 377-399 passim (s.
260, 373, 381, 392, 393, 394, 546, also spagnolo)
640 (s. also russisch) Caribbean Spanish 461
russisch 507-514, 560 (s. also Russian) Iberian Spanish 461
Old Spanish 623, 625, 378-391
Sahidic 542 passim
Samoan 214 South American Spanish 461
Sanskrit 17, 18, 20, 21, 22, 24, 27 f., Swahili 111, 572
58, 61,62, 63, 186,253,284, 314 Swedish 354, 546, 594
f., 357 ff., 430, 431, 433, 435, 436, Old Swedish 214
535, 540, 542, 591
Vedic (Sanskrit) 62, 63, 215, 484, Tadzhik 60
592 Tagalog 111
Scandinavian 565 Takelma 62
Semitic 535-543 passim Tamil 410 f., 416
Serbo-Croatian 11, 260 f., 546 tedesco 329 (s. also allemand,
Sidamo 182 deutsch, German)
 INDEX OF LANGUAGES 663

Teso 194, 199, 204 umbro 329, 336 (s. also umbrisch)
Teso-Turkana Cluster 193-206 Uto-Aztecan 182
Tocharian 58, 60 (s. also tokharien)
Tojalabal 111 Venetic 591 ff., 600
tokharien 24 (s. also Tocharian) vieil anglais 22 (s. also English)
Tok Pisin 475 vieil irlandais 24, 25 (s. also Irish)
Tongan 213 f. Vietnamese 417
Toposa 194, 204
Torinese 335 Walbiri 321
Tunen 182 Welsh 59, 64 f., 354, 546
Turkana 194, 201, 206
Turkish 182, 190, 399, 546, 547, 553
Tuscan 378, 384, 397 Yakut 546
Tuvinian 546 Yiddish 399, 546, 552-556 passim
Yokuts 181 f.
Ukrainian 112, 546 Yoruba 416
umbrisch 138, 142 (s. also umbro)
Uralic 58 Zuñí 62
 INDEX OF SUBJECT MATTER

Abduction (s. also Change) 576, 587 Anapher 147

Ablaut 198 Animacy 359, 368
Accent 15 ff., 529 Aorist 255 ff.
Accentuation 283 Apophony 536 f., 490, 494, 596
Accessibility Hierarchy 475 Article 100
Acoustic Indefinite — 295-302
— Energy 461 f. Articulatory
— Similarity 469 f. — Evolution 459-471
Acquisition — Gesture 5 ff., 460, 463,
Language — 345 465-468, 471, 550, 552
First language — 477, 517, 521, Artikulationsbasis 176
548, 555, 575 f., 586 f., 603 Asianismus 141
Second language — 530 Aspect 71, 256 ff.
— of pronouns and verbs 101 «Habitual» — 73
Affix-Clitic Distinction 151-161 Assimilation 163, 381, 459 ff., 547,
Affixes 151-161 550 f., 593
Affrication 460 ff. Auxiliary Verbs 260 ff., 349-355
Afterthought 41 f., 91 f. Definitions of — 352
Agency 239-248 Life Cycle of — 353
Agglutination 591-604 passim Semantic Range of — 353
Aktionsart 79
Allomorphy 155, 193, 195 f. Beziehungsadiektiv 507-514
Phonological — 201 Biological Model 206 f.
Morphological — 201 Bioprogram
Alternation Language Bioprogram Hypothesis
Synchronic — 169 474.479 passim
Analogia 326 Borrowing 382, 391, 397
Analogie 629
Analogy 374, 527, 543, 554, 576, Caesura 486 ff., 493, 496
587, 591-604 passim, 612 Case
Proportional — 200 Directive — 361 f.
666 INDEX OF SUBJECT MATTER

— Markers 99 Clitic
Semantic and Syntactic Value of — Group 450, 453 ff.
— 357 ff. — Movement 575-587
— Syncretism 355-368 — Pronouns and Particles 52,
— Synonimy 356, 358 151-161, 313
— System 355 Cliticization 593 ff.
Causality 183 Cognitive/Space Grammar 607,
Change 478, 556 609-612, 616
Abductive — 478 Complementation 147
Analogical — 528 Infinitival — 578-581 passim, 584
Contingent — 99 Complementizer 474-479 passim
Deductive — 478 Condensation 599-604 passim
Directionality of — 562, 568-571, Consonat Shift
601-604 Germanic — 344 f.
Explanation of — 47 High German — 461
Inherent — 98 Contact 65 f., 459, 468, 470, 473 ff.,
Morphological — 193-209, 474, 477, 530, 553, 603
591-604, 621, 630-643 passim — Vernacular 268-279
Motivations for —344 ff., 525-530 Core Grammar 474, 476
— of Type 478 Coreferentiality 319
Phonetic/Phonological—271 -279, Correlation 94
285 ff., 325-337, 373-406, 459-471, Covariation 493, 496
592-604 passim, 621 Creoles 473-479 passim
Rate of — 343 Creolization 268, 473-479
Semantic — 351, 507-514, Cronologia relativa 325-337
561-572, 607-616, 619-626
Social — 407 Decreolization 477
Syntactic — 35-53, 123-135, Deference 407, 416 f.
211-219, 474-479, 575-587, 621 — Markers 413
Theory of Language — 49, 349 Degemination 171
ff., 517-530 Dependency Phonology 3 f.
Therapeutic — 50, 208 Determination
Universal Laws of Language — Sentence — 222
350 Determiners
Clauses Noun (Phrase) — 476 f.
Adjoint — 321 Detransitivizing Phenomenon 184
Adverbial — 318 f. Diachronic
 INDEX OF SUBJECT MATTER 667

— Morphology 535-543 Morphological — 88

— Relationship 211-219
— Semantics 179-191
Diachrony 151-161, 295 ff.
Diasistema 332
Differential Retention 467 f.
Diphthongization 288 ff.
Diptychon 142, 145
Discourse Semantics 296 ff.
Dislocation
Left — 40
Right — 40 f., 50
Displacement
Paradigmatic — 193, 198-200
Dissimilation 388, 459 ff.
Distinctive Phonetic Feature 522
Drift 193-209
«Determinate Duration» 73
«Dysfunction» 208
Ease
— of perception 470, 517, 529, 549
ff.
— of Pronunciation 517, 522 f.,
529, 592, 594
Economy Priciples 518-525 passim,
595, 604
Effection 242 f.
Empty Node Convention 167 f.
Embedding-Adjoining Continuum
320
Energy Expenditure 551 f.
Enoncé (Indoeuropéen) 13-29
Entlehnung, 541 f., 632, 634, 636
Epenthesis 163, 468
Ergativische Konstruktion 146
Erosion
— of the Case 126
Face-to-Face Interaction 414-417
Face Wants 414 f.
Feature-and-Rule Notation 464 ff.
Final Devoicing 545-556
Fall of — 552-556
Rise of — 548-552
Flexionsparadigmen 629-643
Formal Grammar/Syntax 575, 578
f., 586
Formalisierte Grammatik 630
Fortition 459 ff.
Frequency 529 f., 587, 593-604
passim
Fricativization 460 f.
Front-raising 275 ff.
Fusion
— of Suffixes 595 f., 599
Future
Evolution of Future Meaning
109-121
— Morphemes 110
Gemination
(Corsican) — 163-177
Gender Markers 197
Generative
— Grammar 123, 129
— Phonology 548
Genetic Relationship 267
Genitive Construction 151-161
Geografia linguistica 330
Gesetz der wachsenden Glieder 140
Glottalic Theory 307
Grammatical Relations 43 ff.
668 INDEX OF SUBJECT MATTER

Grammaticalization 89 f., 351, Labialization 469

407-417, 476, 478, 601 Laryngeals 485-504 passim
Grammaticization 120 Law
Grammatikalisierung 142 Bartholomae's — 503
֊grounding Grassmann's — 504
Back — 223 Sievers' — 483-504
Fore — 223 Sievers-Edgerton — 485
Tobler-Mussafia — 586
Hierarchic Organization 225 Verner's — 9, 374, 504
Hierarchy Wackernageľs — 212
Sonority — 4, 6 Legge
Strength — 621 — di Grassmann 435
Honorific 409 — di Lachmann 327
Leggi fonetiche 330
Iconic/Pragmatic Factors 321 Length Loss 164-177
Iconicity 528, 592 Lenition 459 ff.
Imperfect 255 f. Lexical
«Narrative» — 71-84 — Diffusion 620 f., 374
Imperfective 71 — Features 358, 366
Implicature Lexicalization 571 f.
Conventional — 419-428 Lexicon 279
Conversational — 419-428 — and Syntactic Change 123-135
Implikation 634-643 Loan 289 f.
Incorporation 306, 321 Loi
Indeterminacy 72 — de Bergin 28
Infinitival Constructions 579-584 — de Wackernagel 21
Infinitive 215, 218 — de la suffisance expressive 241
Inflection 591-604 passim, 629-643
Influence Main Clause 306 ff.
Foreign — 239 Main-line Sequentiality 223
Inserimento di regola 326 Maladaptation 208
Insinuating Words 419 ff. Markedness 4, 6, 48, 65, 159, 554,
Intensivity Criterion 153 f., 158 f., 161 556
Isolation 591-604 passim Phonological — 4, 6
Isomorphism 193 Markiertheit 637-643
Maximum Differentiation 470
Konditionalsatz 144 f. Meaning
 INDEX OF SUBJECT MATTER 669

Interpersonal — 562, 568, 571 f. Pronominal — 407-417

«Progressive» — 73 — Suffixation 196, 201, 204
Propositional — 562, 568, 571
Prototypical — 562, 571, 608-616 Obstruents 1 -  , 552-556 passim
Merger of Meaningful Items 350 Optimization 526 f., 528 f., 550
Middle Voice 179-191 Operations:
Modal Verbs 215 «Causation» 242 ff.
Mora 163 «Inclusion» 244
Counting of — 194, 202, 206 «Interiorization» 244
Morphological Naturalness 528 ff. «Juxtaposition» 244
Morphologische Sprachveränderung «Mediation» 244
630, 632, 636 f., 641 ff. «Origination» 245
Move 226 «Superposition» 244
Multifunctionality 221 «Transference» 247
Mutamenti fonetici 325-337 «Translation» 247
Ordine
Narrative Structure 221-234 — di depauperamento (Bleeding
Nasal Infix 382, 388, 393 Order) 329, 334
Nasalization 462 f. — di incremento (Feeding Order)
Natural 329, 334, 336
— Morphology 517, 591-604 pas­ — marcato e non marcato 326
sim, 637-643
— Phonology 517, 524, 548 Paedomorphic Explanation ( = Pae-
Generative Natural Phonology 517 domorphosis) 87-104
Naturalness 548, 552, 556 Palatalization 272 f., 462 f.
Negation 57-66, 474, 614 Paradigmenstruktur 629-643
Discontinuous — 54 f. Parallelismus membrorum 139, 145,
Genesis of a New — 63 f., 66 147
Incorporation of — 63 f. Parataxe 13 ff., 26 ff.
Postverbal — 63 ff. Parataxis 308, 321
Shift of — 63, 65 f. Particules modales 22 f.
Négation 23 f. Passive Construction 239-248
Neutralization 4, 7 f., 127, 448, 523, Perfect
527, 546 Indo-European — 251-262
Neutralizzazione 335 — Participle 252, 261
Non-anaphoric Devices 297 ff. Perfective 71
Number Performance Needs 517-530
670 INDEX OF SUBJECT MATTER
Performative 561 f., 567 f., 571
Peripheral Vowels 285-293
Phonetic Attrition 200
Phonological
— Decay 88
— Reduction 593-604 passim
— Strength 163-177
— Weakening 176
Phonology
Dependency — 3
Phonosymbolism 373-400
Pidgin 477, 603
Pidginization 268, 530, 603
Pluperfect 252, 260
Politeness 409
Postverbation 25
Postverbes 22 ff.
Power and Solidarity 407 ff.
Pragmatic
— Environment 419 ff.
— Functions 409 ff.
«Predictability» 119
Prediction 109 f., 115
Prepositions 239-248
Present 257 f.
Presentative 298 ff.
— of an Action 180
Presupposition 46
Preterite
Simple — 71, 73, 76, 79
Slavic — 251 ff.
Strong — 215
Préverbation 25
Préverbes 21 ff.
Primitive Notions 538 ff.
Principle
— of Simultaneity 350
— of Subsequence 350
PRO-DROP 475
Prolepsis 147
Pronouns 37 f., 52
Indefinite — 58 f.
— of Identity 419-428
Personal — 100 f.
Pleonastic Subject — 52
— Systems as Social Deictics 407
ff.
Prosa
altlateinische — 137-147
Prosodic Domains 449, 454
Prosody 445-456, 612
Prototype 576, 586 f., 610 ff., 616
Prototypische Flexion 639
Psycho-semiology 241
Punto linguistico 331
Qualitätsadjektiv 507-514
Quantifier 300
Raddoppiamento sintattico 164-177
Reanalysis 49, 128, 133 f., 155 f., 213
ff., 474, 555 f., 576, 579
Actualization of — 128
Reconstruction 267-279, 459 f., 467
f., 471, 563, 619 f., 623 f., 626
Comparative — 267-279
— of Indo-European 483 ff.
Limits of — 1-
Syntactic — 56 f., 305-321
Reduction
Substantive — 460 ff.
Temporal — 460 ff.
Reduplication 6
 INDEX OF SUBJECT MATTER 671

Referentiality 296 ff. Sentence

Reflexive 182, 186 Basic — 36 ff.
Regiolect 286, 292 — Qualifier 53, 57
Relative Unmarked — 36, 40
— Clause(s) 310, 318 ff., 475-479 Sibilants 377-400
— Conjunctions 314, 318 Social
— Marker 307, 312 f., 476 ff. — Change 407
— Pronoun 475 — Differences in Language Chan­
Relativsatz 142 ff. ge 342-347
Restructuring 268 — Relationship 407-417
Rhythmic Phrasing 449 ff. Sociolect 286, 291
Root Inflection 596 ff., 600 Sociolinguistic Parameters 292
Root Structure 535-543 Sonantism 487, 489
Rotazione consonantica 328
Strategies
Rule(s)
Textorganizing — 227
Domain Juncture — 450
Stratificazione lessicale 333
Lindeman's — 490 ff.
Strength Relations 450
Morphonological — 522
Stress Difference 491
Phonological — 450, 465, 522,
Structuralism 295
538, 546, 554
Subject 300
Saussure's — 502
Schwa Deletion — 448, 452, 454 Subjectless Construction 129
f. Subjunctive Mood 607-616
Subordination 94, 101 f., 306 ff.
S interconsonantica 429-439 Substrate 474
Salience 223 f. Substratum 270
Samprasāraņa 494 Irish Gaelic — 274
Sandhi 449, 555 f. West African — 274
Schwa Deletion 445-456, 549 f., 553 Superstrate 269, 477
Schwebeablaut 483 Suppletion 597-604 passim
Segmento di estensione di un fone­ Syllabicity 483-504
ma 335 Syncretism 199
Selectivity 193-204 Functional — 355
Semantactic Accretion 350 Morphological — 356
Semantic Transparency Hypothesis Semantic — 357, 362 ff.
554, 556 Syntactic — 357, 362, 366 ff.
Semantische Inhalte 507-514 Synkretismus 632
672 INDEX OF SUBJECT MATTER
Syntax
Functional — 53
Inter-clause — 305-321
System-adequacy 208
Temporal Chains 221-234
Tense-Aspect Marker 474
Time 339-347
— and Space 341
— as an Independent Dimension
340
Tmèse 21 ff.
Topic(s) 35-53, 300
— and Comment 36
— Initial Languages 47, 49
Left-side — 44 f.
Right-side — 44 f.
Topicalization 40 ff.
Topicalizer 318
Transparency Principle 575
Truth Value 46
Type
Language — 591-604
Typological
— Method 309 f.
— Shift 35, 42, 46 f.
Typology 538 ff., 545 f.
Morphological — 591-604
Syntactic — 592
Uniformitarianism 340
Univerbation 21 ff.
Universals 381, 478 f., 555, 562, 604,
622
— of Word Order: s. Word Order
Phonological — 454
Pragmatic — 57
Valency 183 f.
Variabili sociolinguistiche 331 ff.
Verbs
Mental — 561-572
Etymology of — 562-568
— of Desire 110 ff.
— of Intention 112, 115
— of Movement 110 ff.
— of Obligation 112, 115
— of Possession 112
— of Volition 112, 115
Speech Act — 561-572
Etymology of — 562-568
Stative — 79
Vocality 486, 489
Volitionality 184
Vowel Harmony 195
Wortbildung 509 f., 511
Word Order 35-53, 58, 60 f., 63, 65
f., 579, 583, 586, 592
— Change 35-53, 77-104, 361
— Evolution 87
Pragmatically Determined — 43
Syntactically Determined — 43
Universals of — 57, 59