Search

Language change can be conceptualized as a cyclical process of continuous renewal of the involved elements which somehow change their nature, with respect to phonological or lexico-grammatical features. A crucial aspect of such diachronic evolution is that cyclical change takes place systematically and follows regular and unidirectional patterns of development. Once the change is complete, the same developmental path will be undertaken by new linguistic items in the same cyclical fashion. In this paper, we illustrate the concept of cyclical change by discussing two examples of linguistic cycles. A first instance of cyclical development is displayed at the phonological level by the diachronic changes in the obstruent consonant system taking place from Indo-European to German through the First and the Second Sound Shift: the cycle is completed in the Cimbrian dialects. A second instance is provided by the diachronic process known as Jespersen’s cycle ([1917] 1966): sentential negation, initially expressed through a single negative marker, is later reinforced by an additional one; eventually, this second element becomes the only negative marker available in the sentence while the original marker is deleted. The discussion of the negative cycle takes also into consideration the results of an empirical research conducted on two varieties of an Italo-Romance dialect spoken in northern Italy.

In Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, the Cheshire Cat inquires after the screaming baby that the Duchess had left in Alice’s care. Alice replies, “‘It turned into a pig.’” After dis...

This article addresses the controversy about the reconstruction of the Proto-Indo-European consonant inventory, namely the question of whether the traditional, Neo-Grammarian reconstruction or one of the more recent alternatives such as the Glottalic Theory is correct. This question is directly related to that of the proper formulation of Grimm's Law. In the traditional framework the Proto-Germanic voiceless plosives derive from an Indo-European series of plain voiced plosives, whereas in the alternative account they derive from some kind of voiceless plosives, e.g. voiceless glottalics. The article brings to bear on the problem a new kind of evidence: the integration of prehistoric Semitic loanwords. This evidence unambiguously supports the traditional framework, in particular a shift of voiced to voiceless plosives under Grimm's Law.

Peak shift is a universal result of most discrimination learning: if an organism is taught to respond to one stimulus and not to respond to another stimulus lying along the same perceptual continuum, it shows maximal responsiveness not to the target stimulus but to a stimulus displaced along the continuum in a direction away from the unreinforced stimulus. It also responds more vigorously to the displaced stimulus than it would have to the target stimulus had discrimination training not occurred. This is the phenomenon of behavioral contrast. On the level of preference, peak shift means that if we prefer something, we shall like something a bit more extreme even more. Peak shift and behavioral contrast are probably the most important causes of sound change in language, but this has never been pointed out. The relevance of peak shift and behavioral contrast to phonological change is explained. Their most general consequence is that the phonetic realization of phonemes is usually in a continual state of evo...

В статье излагаются существующие в современной индоевропеистике лингвистические данные о происхождении санскрита, церковнославянского, готского и древнеанглийского языков; общепринятая периодизация церковнославянского и английского языков, а также происходит знакомство с экстралингвистическими фактами в истории вышеупомянутых древних языков. В статье освещается ларингальная теория Ф. де Соссюра, теория субстрата А. Мейе, закон Я. Гримма, глоттальная теория Т. В. Гамкрелидзе и В. В. Иванова, а также история появления англосаксонской эпической поэмы «Беовульф»., The article represents contemporary Indoeuropean comparative linguistics data on the provenance of Sanskrit, Old Slavonic, Gothic and Old English, the commonly accepted periods in the history of Old Slavonic and English and it familiarizes the reader with the extralinguistic facts in the development of the above mentioned ancient languages. The article dwells upon the laryngeal theory by F. de Saussure, the substratum theory by A. Meillet, J. Grimm`s law, the glottal theory by T. V. Gamkrelidze and V. V. Ivanov and also the history of composing the Anglo-Saxon epic poem “Beowulf”.

International audience; This paper treats a central question of the history of Indo-European and Early Germanic. It shows that with the adoption of the Glottalic Theory (which concerns the obstruent inventory of Proto-Indo-European) it is possible to analyze Grimm’s Law and Verner’s Law of Germanic combined as a single, bifurcating, chain shift. This assumption resolves a number of problems related to the traditional Neogrammarian view, according to which Verner’s Law is chronologically is from Grimm’s Law. This assumption of a bifurcating chain shift explains why the undergoers of Verner’s Law are properly included in that of Grimm’s Laws. It also replaces the traditionally assumed, but peculiar chronological development assumed for Germanic: voiceless plosive > *voiceless fricative > *voiced fricative > voiced plosive, by a scenario in which a voiced plosive derives directly from a voiceless one, without unattested detours. In the second part of his paper the author shows that the proposed scenario can be analyzed as a process in Contrast Preservation Theory (Łubowicz 2003, to appear), just like another historical chain shift was analyzed in this theory by Montreuil (2006).

This article summarizes the sound system reconstructed for Proto-Indo–European (PIE). After a brief historical introduction, the consonant and vowel inventories are outlined, with discussion of several attendant issues: the labels ‘centum’ and ‘satem,’ the glottalic theory, and the laryngeals. Special treatment is given to the evidence for the laryngeals and their effects on neighboring sounds. Following the outline of the sound inventory is a discussion of some of the phonological processes that have been reconstructed for PIE, including internal and external sandhi rules, conditioned assimilations and losses, syllabification, phonotactic rules, and prosodic phenomena.

Comparison of languages had been undertaken before the 19th century, but with the ‘discovery’ of Sanskrit and the rise of the Romantic movement in Germany a historical emphasis became dominant. During the first half of the century, the Romantic view of language as an ‘organism’ prevailed, but from the mid-century a new positivism was introduced which saw linguistics as a science, culminating in the Neogrammarian movement in the 1870s. The Neogrammarian thesis that sound laws have no exceptions was opposed by many, but the general principles of the movement became the orthodoxy. The end of the century brought a shift toward the non-historical study of language.

Among the most dramatic achievements of early Indo–European scholarship, the elucidation of Verner's Law (VL) heralded a turning point in the history of the young discipline. This famous sound law owes its discovery to Karl Verner, the Danish scholar whose article of 1877 provided the first principled account of the conditions underlying apparent exceptions to Grimm's Law (GL). Through meticulous analysis and lucid argumentation, Verner brilliantly eliminated one of the most vexing cases of ‘irregular’ sound change. Hailed as decisive evidence in the main controversy of the day, Verner's insight immediately became the centerpiece of the Neo-grammarian argument that sound change operates ‘blindly’ and does not admit exceptions. Above all, Verner's approach exemplified the explanatory power afforded by scientific rigor, thereby setting a high standard for research to come.

Introduction: internal and external factors in change It is true, I think, that in what might be called the dominant tradition in historical linguistics, it has been assumed that languages change within themselves as part of their nature as languages. The ‘external’ agency of speaker/listeners and the influence of ‘society’ in language change have tended to be seen as secondary and, sometimes, as not relevant at all. Roger Lass has been a prominent, but balanced, defender of the traditional view. He has correctly pointed out (1980: 120) that in the tradition, it has been assumed that it is languages that change and not (necessarily) speakers who change languages. More recently (1990: 370), he has commented that language change is not something that speakers ‘do’ to their language, and that ‘endogenous change is part of the nature of the beast’ (1997: 208). He has also (largely correctly) suggested in various publications that speaker-based explanations have been unsatisfactory because of the attribution to speakers of qualities that they may not actually have. In some such accounts the speakers appealed to are disembodied abstractions who can be made to ‘do’ almost anything the researcher wants them to. Much more generally, however, the idea of endogenous or internally triggered change is so deeply embedded in our subject that it feeds into what can be called the discourse of historical linguistics. In this discourse, individual languages are typically presented as changing within themselves rather than being changed through the agency of speaker/ listeners.

Germanic: an innovation cluster In the conventional model of language relationships, as in the family trees in the previous chapter, the growth of linguistic diversity, the origin of ‘new’ languages, is imaged as a process of branching. The tree has one ultimate ‘mother’ node, and the rest of the languages in the family arise by successive splits. Genealogical trees of this kind are familiar from biology and other fields; in linguistic history however the parent-offspring relations are most often parthenogenetic (only one parent per child!). Multiple parentage (except in the case of pidgins and Creoles) is supposed to be relatively rare; though some ‘normal’ languages, like Dutch, may well be examples of something of the sort. There are problems in an oversimple interpretation of genealogical trees for languages (e.g. straight-line developments may be interrupted by diffusion of features from one dialect to another, etc.); but the metaphor is useful, is usually reasonably consistent with the facts, both linguistic and historical, and for most families is a useful organizing device. Linguistically, ‘branching’ can be defined more or less as it is in biology: we propose a split in a lineage when one subgroup becomes different enough to merit being assigned to a new class. In other words, branchings are dialect splits; they represent the emergence of one or more structural innovations that are striking enough to make us give a new name to the innovating group.

Reply to Knowlton, Edgar C., Jr.; Thundy, Zacharias P., rejoinder; Galloway, Andrew, rejoinder. “Philology and Anglo-Saxon Poetry.” PMLA. 1991 Mar; 106(2): 308-12.

It is now generally agreed that the obstruent system of Proto-Indo-European (henceforth PIE) was of this type

THIS is a very able and closely-reasoned book. Its object is to explain the cause and origin of that curious shifting of sounds known as Grimm's Law, in virtue of which a particular sound in one member of the Indo-European group of languages must answer to another particular sound in another member. The discovery of the law laid the foundation of comparative philology, and raised etymology from mere haphazard guesswork to the rank of a science, but the primary cause and reason of the law itself are still under discussion. We have still to learn why a classical aspirate must answer to a Low German media and a High German tenuis, or a classical tenuis to a Low German aspirate and a High German media. Grimm's Law: a Study. By T. Le M. Douse. (Trubner and Co., 1876.)

A set of rules is here presented to account for the changes of Grimm's and Verner's Laws, as well as for the Germanic consonant lengthening. It is shown that the changes which occurred were to some extent predictable from the system out of which they arose. The rules are ordered in such a way that Verner's Law and the consonant lengthening precede the simultaneous development of voiced and voiceless aspirates to spirants.

IN his autobiography, Cheerful Yesterdays, Thomas Wentworth Higginson recalled how he taught himself German by the "preposterous plan" advocated by Miss Elizabeth Peabody's "learned Hungarian," Dr. Charles Kraitsir. The plan he vaguely remembered and facetiously described: Dr. Kraitsir "had a theory of the alphabet and held that by its means all the Indo-European languages could be resolved into one; so that we could pass from each to another by an effort of will, like the process of mind-healing."' Higginson had first encountered Miss Peabody in her "atom of a bookshop" on Boston's West Street, "desultory, dreamy, but still insatiable in her love for knowledge and for helping others to it."2 Undoubtedly Miss Peabody had indoctrinated Higginson with the dictum later expressed in her Aesthetic Papers: "Philology should be studied as the most important of the sciences, not only for the sake of knowing the works of art and science that the various languages contain, but because the words themselves are growths of Nature and works of art; ... and because their analysis and history reveal the universe in its symbolic character."3 Her method of searching history, language, and literature for spiritual truths had been learned from a study of Herder's Spirit of Hebrew Poetry, which she used in James Marsh's 1833 translation as a textbook in "conversation classes" for the ladies of Boston