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The development of "junk" : irregularization strategies of HAVE and SAY in the Germanic languages
(2001)
Although it is a wellknown fact that the most frequent verbs are the most irregular ones (if not suppletive), it is rarely asked how they became irregular. This article deals with the irregularization process of two originally regular (weak) verbs, HAVE and SAY in the Germanic languages, e.g. have, but has/'s and had/'d (instead of regular *haves/*haved) or say [sei], but says [sez] and said [sed] in English. Other verbs, such as DO, GO, STAND, BE, COME, and so on, also tend to irregularizations again and again without any apparent reason. In contrast to HAVE and SAY these verbs have always been rather irregular, at least dating from their first written records.
Eduard Hermann writes (1916: 147): "Darüber, daß Wills Übersetzung des Enchiridions ein ganz schauderhaftes Preußisch ist, herrscht eine Stimme. Nur darüber sind die Meinungen geteilt, ob Will ein Stümper war und nichts vom Preußischen verstand oder ob das Preußische seiner Zeit dermaßen entartet war, daß Kasus und Formen fast beliebig miteinander wechseln konnten." This is a splendid formulation of the problem. Hermann’s article should be compulsory reading for students of historical syntax. In search of a solution to this problem, I have applied the following procedure. First I have put together the minor catechisms with those parts of the Enchiridion which translate the same German text. Words which are missing in any of the three versions have been italicized. The result is shown below.
The present study shows that though retroflex segments can be considered articulatorily marked, there are perceptual reasons why languages introduce this class into their phoneme inventory. This observation is illustrated with the diachronic developments of retroflexes in Norwegian (North- Germanic), Nyawaygi (Australian) and Minto-Nenana (Athapaskan). The developments in these three languages are modelled in a perceptually oriented phonological theory, since traditional articulatorily-based features cannot deal with such processes.
The paper explores factors that influence the distribution of constituent words of compounds over the head and modifier position. The empirical basis for the study is a large database of German compounds, annotated with respect to the morphological structure of the compound and the semantic category of the constituents. The study shows that the polysemy of the constituent word, its constituent family size, and its semantic category account for tendencies of the constituent word to occur in either modifier or head position. Furthermore, the paper explores the degree to which the semantic category combination of head and modifier word, e.g., x=substance and y=artifact, indicates the semantic relation between the constituents, e.g., y_consists_of_x.
The earliest known extensive texts in Gullah (and perhaps African American Vernacular English as well) to appear in print were published in The Riverside Magazine for Young People in November, 1868, under the title "Negro Fables" (p. 505-507). These are four animal stories, which the editor of the magazine, Horace Elisha Scudder, described in his column only as having been "taken down from the lips of an old negro, in the vicinity of Charleston" (see Appendix for the editor´s comments and the full text of the stories).2 The Story-Teller was evidently a genuine "man of words" (Abrahams, 1983), a true raconteur who could artistically embellish a simple traditional account (perhaps further embellished by the transcriber) in a variety of ways. That he commanded a certain range of Gullah is evident from particular signature features in the texts, but the absence of other typical Gullah features and the presence of shared Gullah/African American Vernacular English usages, together with the periodic appearance of standard English forms, demonstrate that these texts provide perhaps the earliest actual documentation (apart from early tertiary comments, cited e.g. in Feagin, 1997, p. 128-129) of register variation or style/code-switching among Gullah speakers. ...
The aim of this article is to follow the changes that took place in the history of easy-to-please constructions. To fully apprehend that, we will begin by looking at Middle English infinitives and the change which affected them. Our attempt here is to prove that Early Middle English to was at its intermediate stage of development, i.e. it was neither a preposition nor inflection. In Late Middle English, to reached its final stage of a gradual evolution heading TR On account of the analysis of to and infinitives in Middle English, new constructions in which easv-to-please appear will be explained.
This paper reconciles the standpoint that language users do not aim at improving their sound systems with the observation that languages seem to improve their sound systems. Computer simulations of inventories of sibilants show that Optimality-Theoretic learners who optimize their perception grammars automatically introduce a so-called prototype effect, i.e. the phenomenon that the learner’s preferred auditory realization of a certain phonological category is more peripheral than the average auditory realization of this category in her language environment. In production, however, this prototype effect is counteracted by an articulatory effect that limits the auditory form to something that is not too difficult to pronounce. If the prototype effect and the articulatory effect are of a different size, the learner must end up with an auditorily different sound system from that of her language environment. The computer simulations show that, independently of the initial auditory sound system, a stable equilibrium is reached within a small number of generations. In this stable state, the dispersion of the sibilants of the language strikes an optimal balance between articulatory ease and auditory contrast. The important point is that this is derived within a model without any goal-oriented elements such as dispersion constraints.
In this paper we provide an account of the historical development of Polish and Russian sibilants. The arguments provided here are of theoretical interest because they show that (i) certain allophonic rules are driven by the need to keep contrasts perceptually distinct, (ii) (unconditioned) sound changes result from needs of perceptual distinctiveness, and (iii) perceptual distinctiveness can be extended to a dass of consonants, i.e. the sibilants. The analysis is cast within Dispersion Theory by providing phonetic and typological data supporting the perceptual distinctiveness claims we make.
The Germanic weak preterit
(2007)
The main difficulty with the Germanic weak preterit is that one cannot endeavor an explanation of its origin without taking into account almost every aspect of the historical phonology and morphology of the Germanic languages. In the following I intend to show how a number of problems receive a natural explanation in a unified treatment on the basis of earlier studies. The theory presented here is not revolutionary, but aims at integrating earlier findings into a coherent whole. There is no reason to give a detailed account of the scholarly literature, which is easily accessible (cf. Tops 1974, Bammesberger 1986).