Degrees of grammaticalization across languages

Lamiroy, Béatrice; Mulder, Walter De

doi:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199586783.013.0024

Cited by 16 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 49 publications

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“…This may be due to the geographic origin of the translator or to the conservative register of translations. 13 As we have shown elsewhere, the same conclusion holds for many other components of language (Lamiroy 1999, Lamiroy 2003, Lamiroy and De Mulder 2011, Lahousse and Lamiroy 2012, Carlier et al 2012, Carlier and Lamiroy 2014 As mentioned above, Modern Spanish displays certain characteristics that we observed in Old French, at Stage III: whereas the definite article is well-established, the indefinite article is still in competition with various indefinite determiners (see (14)) and with the still-frequent zero marking (see (15)). …”

Section: Comparative Analysis Of Nominal Determination In Romancesupporting

confidence: 64%

The emergence of the grammatical paradigm of nominal determiners in French and in Romance: Comparative and diachronic perspectives

Carlier

Lamiroy

2018

Can. J. Linguist.

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This article is devoted to the emergence of a new paradigm in French and Romance: that of nominal determiners. Latin had no articles, and although possessives, demonstratives and indefinites could determine the noun, they could also be used as pronouns or adjectives, so that the morpho-syntactic category of nominal determiners did not exist as such. We first examine the diachronic evolution of French, where a far-reaching grammaticalization process took place. Syntagmatically, all determiners end up in the NP-initial position as the only available syntactic slot, contributing to the highly configurational NP pattern characteristic of Modern French. From a paradigmatic viewpoint, determiners no longer correspond to a syntactic function, but to a separate morpho-syntactic category. We also evaluate to what extent this evolution took place in two other Romance languages, Italian and Spanish. Through the analysis of this particular evolution, based on parallel corpora consisting of a Latin text and its translations in Old, Middle, and Modern French on the one hand, and in Spanish and Italian on the other, our study also provides evidence for more general mechanisms, analogy in particular, at work in the creation of new paradigms.Keywords: Analogy, French, Romance, Grammaticalization, Nominal Determiner Part of this research has been carried out in the framework of the ANR-DFG project PaLaFra (ANR-14-FRAL-0006). We are grateful to two anonymous reviewers for their detailed and useful comments on the submitted version. All remaining errors are of course ours. RésuméCet article est consacré à l'émergence d'un nouveau paradigme grammatical en français et dans les langues romanes, celui de la détermination nominale. Le latin n'avait pas d'articles, alors que les possessifs, les démonstratifs et les indéfinis, tout en pouvant servir de déterminant nominal, étaient par ailleurs utilisés comme pronom ou adjectif. La détermination nominale en tant que catégorie morpho-syntaxique autonome était donc inexistante. Nous examinons d'abord comment a eu lieu, au cours de l'évolution diachronique du français, un processus important de grammaticalisation. Syntagmatiquement, tous les déterminants se retrouvent dans la position initiale du NP comme seule position syntaxique disponible, ce qui contribue au caractère hautement configurationnel du constituant nominal du français moderne. D'un point de vue paradigmatique, les déterminants ne correspondent plus à une fonction syntaxique, mais à une catégorie morphosyntaxique distincte. Nous évaluons ensuite dans quelle mesure cette évolution a eu lieu dans deux autres langues romanes, l'italien et l'espagnol. Notre analyse est basée sur des corpus parallèles comprenant un texte latin et ses traductions en français médiéval et moderne, d'une part, et ses traductions en espagnol et en italien, d'autre part. Elle met en évidence des mécanismes et des motivations plus généraux, notamment l'analogie, qui sont à l'oeuvre dans la création de nouveaux paradigmes.

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Section: Comparative Analysis Of Nominal Determination In Romancesupporting

confidence: 64%

The emergence of the grammatical paradigm of nominal determiners in French and in Romance: Comparative and diachronic perspectives

Carlier

Lamiroy

2018

Can. J. Linguist.

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“…The situation is summarized in Table 1. This differential speed of language change 20 in the West Germanic languages has been noted in the literature (Van Haeringen 1956;Weerman 2006;König and Gast 2009: 14;Lamiroy and De Mulder 2011). As Faarlund (2001Faarlund ( : 1718 puts it: "The differences between the Germanic languages can to a large extent be ascribed to their different stages on a continuous line of development."…”

Section: An Alternative Account Of the Distribution Of The External P...mentioning

confidence: 61%

12. External possessors in West Germanic and Romance: Differential speed in the drift toward NP configurationality

Velde¹,

Lamiroy²

2016

Aspects of Grammaticalization

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This paper inquires into the external possessor in West Germanic and Romance. Against other accounts in the literature, it argues that the distribution of the dative external possessor can be explained neither by reference to Standard Average European nor by direct substrate influence. Instead, it argues that its diachronic decline is better explained as the result of increased configurationality or a tighter structure of the noun phrase. Although the emergence of a tight NP structure may itself be traced back to language contact factors, substrate influence on the diachrony of the external possessor is shown to be more indirect than what is suggested in the literature. The increase in configurationality can be considered a case of constructional grammaticalization (i.e. constructionalization), as the slots for determination and modification become progressively more fixed. One of the main claims here is that this grammaticalization process proceeds at different rates in cognate languages.(1) German Die Mutter wäscht dem Kind die Haare. the mother washes the.DAT child the hair 'The mother is washing the child's hair. ' (König and Haspelmath 1998: 526) (2) SpanishNo le he visto la cara. not 3SG.DAT have.1SG seen the face 'I have not seen his face.' (Lamiroy and Delbecque 1998: 29)

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“…33 This is the point where definition d becomes relevant since a functional category that was formerly realised by moved material, in a subsequent stage, may be realised by merged material (possibly the case of topics in Old Romance). If this line of thought is on the right track, then the implications of such an analysis are: (a) the more functional projections a language has, the more grammaticalised it is since multiple functional projections would impose more restrictions on linearisation; (b) a language is progressively restricting word-order combinations (in line with Marchello-Nizia 2006: 232;Lamiroy andDe Mulder (2011), andLehmann 1995); (c) both incipient and enabling causes interact in yielding OV loss. change sets off grammaticalisation in the functional categories, which is then followed by the loss of morphology.…”

Section: Diachronic Evolution Of Word Order From Old Romance To Modermentioning

confidence: 99%

A comparative study of word order in Old Romance

Sitaridou¹

2012

Folia Linguistica

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The main objective of this article is to discuss word-order phenomena in Old French, Old Spanish, Old Portuguese, and Old Occitan from a comparative perspective. In particular, the following are examined: (i) the empirical evidence in order to assess the theoretical arguments for and against a verbsecond analysis of the Old Romance languages; (ii) verb movement in Old Romance; and (iii) whether the changes in the word-order patterns in the history of the Romance languages can be captured as yet another instance of grammaticalisation. By means of a uniform methodology and statistical analysis of novel data, it is claimed that: (a) Old Romance does not possess a Germanic V2; (b) there is variation in terms of word order among Old Romance languages, which is shown to be linked to the individual history of the languages; (c) V2 order is mostly an epiphenomenon of the discourse mechanisms and the nature of the left functional field in these languages.

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Degrees of grammaticalization across languages

Cited by 16 publications

References 49 publications

The emergence of the grammatical paradigm of nominal determiners in French and in Romance: Comparative and diachronic perspectives

The emergence of the grammatical paradigm of nominal determiners in French and in Romance: Comparative and diachronic perspectives

12. External possessors in West Germanic and Romance: Differential speed in the drift toward NP configurationality

A comparative study of word order in Old Romance

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