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This article offers a quantitative study of the genitive and nominative/accusative plural inflections in Owun's gloss (Rushworth2) to the Rushworth Gospels in comparison with Aldred's gloss to the Lindisfarne Gospels. It focuses on three inter-paradigmatic analogical changes attested in Rushworth2: (1) the extension of genitive singular -es from the a-stems to other noun classes, (2) the spread of nominative/accusative plural -as from masculine a-stems to neuter a-stems and other declensions and (3) the extension of genitive plural -ena from the weak nouns to a-stems. The main aim of this article is to establish the scale on which these analogical changes are found in Rushworth2. The results are compared with those obtained in the study of Lindisfarne to determine the degree of similarity between the two glosses with regard to these processes and shed light on the question of whether Owun copied from Aldred or not. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses some textual questions in Ajax leading to the following conclusions: I. 54 add ⟨τ᾽⟩ after λείας. – II. 208 the emendation ἠρεμίας ("rest", "quietude") suggested by Thiersch. – III. 405a–b the proposal κράτη / μοι to fill the lacuna. – IV. 476 defence of the line as transmitted. – V. 546 τοσόνδε to go with ϕόνον. – VI. 719 ἄνδρες, ϕίλον τι πρῶτον instead of ἄνδρες ϕίλοι, τὸ πρῶτον. – VII. 869 instead of με write γε. – VIII. 951 ⟨σὸν⟩ ἄχθος as a reference to Tecmessa's heavy burden of woe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the influence of conceptuality on the distribution of four semantically equivalent possession-marking constructions in eighteenth-century Dutch: the prestigious genitive case (which was promoted in the prescribed norm but was decreasing in productivity at the time), as well as the (relatively) novel van-construction, possessive -s and periphrastic possessive. Comparing the division of labour between these constructions in private egodocuments and texts that were produced for publication, and viewing the findings in the context of contemporary language users’ everyday lives, the article reveals and analyses a complex picture of pragmatic variation. Even in the most norm-accordant texts, the prescribed genitive is never dominant. The egodocuments, which did not adhere strictly to the norm, display not only a productive use of the genitive, but also a noticeable rarity of the conceptually oral periphrastic possessive construction. This is attributed to the writers’ schooling and their familiarity with the written norm. It is concluded that conceptuality alone was not decisive in eighteenth-century language use, but also the mediality of the communication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on qualitative self-report data from a mixed-methods study which investigated Grade 5 and 6 (n = 274), 11–12-year-old, Irish-medium (IM) immersion students’ improvement in linguistic accuracy in response to an explicit-inductive approach to form-focused instruction (FFI). A series of typographically enhanced PowerPoint slides were designed to explicitly draw students’ attention to the genitive case in Irish over a four-week period. Students engaged in collaborative meta-talk with teacher and peers to construct rule-based knowledge and they recorded their findings in a reflective language journal. Qualitative data were gathered with a sub-sample of 56 students selected from 4 of the 12 schools that participated in the larger study. Student feedback indicates the potential effectiveness of an explicit-inductive approach to improve student language awareness and grammatical accuracy in immersion education. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

One may sometimes get the impression that (inter)subjectification is regarded as an aspect of grammaticalization, so that (roughly speaking) the more (inter)subjective an expression has become, the more grammaticalized it is. We propose that the two phenomena are better understood as clearly distinct. Grammaticalization in our view consists in a process whereby an expression becomesancillaryin relation to another expression (type), thereby at the same time creating a structural relation and a difference in prominence status. (Inter)subjectification, on the other hand, is purely a change in conventional semantic content. However, there is a particular type of diachronic process in which the two may go hand in hand. We try to give a precise account of what that type is and how it differs from other, related changes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Proper noun genitives and possessive pronouns occur more frequently in postnominal position than common noun genitives in Beowulf and in many Old English (OE) verse texts. This is the opposite of patterns seen in most OE prose texts; however, the word order variation in this text correlates with such linguistic factors as animacy and morphosyntactic weight. Postnominal position is most common for proper noun genitives and possessive pronouns when both the possessive element and the head noun are animate. With inanimate heads, prenominal proper noun genitives and possessive pronouns are preferred. These findings are consistent with predictions made by the animacy hierarchy that more animate nouns should precede less animate nouns, with more variation possible in the case that both nouns are animate. For noun phrases (NPs) with common noun genitives, both animate genitives and compound head nouns result in higher frequencies of postnominal genitive position. Metrical and alliterative considerations are further shown to have an impact on possessive position within NPs; however, these poetic factors alone do not account for all of the word order variation. Language change related to the role of animacy in adnominal genitive position is argued as a contributing factor in this variation, given the elevated levels of postnominal proper noun genitives and possessive pronouns relative to postnominal common noun genitives across OE verse, as well as higher levels of postnominal proper noun genitives in certain early OE prose texts, and finally similarities in adnominal genitive position in Beowulf and historical Germanic languages other than OE. As animacy of the possessor is widely held to correlate with prenominal genitive position from the OE period onward, these findings complicate that picture for the earliest OE. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper revisits the discussion of Saxon-type genitives in French-based Mauritian Creole. These genitives also occur in Seychelles Creole, Louisiana Creole, Karipuna Creole, and Guyanese Creole, but, interestingly, not in any of the other French creoles (e.g. Haitian Creole). How did they develop, and why do they only occur in a handful of these creoles? Several attempts have been made to explain their development and distribution. Focusing mainly on their occurrence in Mauritian Creole, Corne (1986) argues that they have their root in the Indo-Aryan languages spoken in Mauritius. Syea (1994, 1995) and Heine and Kuteva (2001), on the other hand, both reject this explanation and suggest, instead, that their presence is a consequence of internal developments. This paper offers a new solution which, while maintaining the internal development approach of Syea (1994, 1995), extends its empirical base with data from other French creoles and suggests that Saxon-type genitives in Mauritian Creole and the other French creoles originated in French doubling possessives such assa maison à lui/Marie(lit. his/her house to him/Marie ‘his/Mary's house’). It argues that this development was made possible by a downgrading of the possessive pronoun from clitic in French to agreement marker in French creoles. The discussion is couched in the framework of Principles and Parameters (Chomsky 1981) and Minimalism (Chomsky 1995, 2000). [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]