Some English verbs use distinct forms for the preterite (i.e., simple past; e.g., I broke the door) and the past participle (e.g., I’ve broken the door). These verbs may variably show use of the ...preterite form in place of the participle (e.g., I’ve broke the door), which the authors call participle leveling. This article contributes the first detailed variationist study of participle leveling by investigating the phenomenon in perfect constructions using data collected from three corpora of conversational speech: two of American English and one of British English. A striking degree of similarity is found between the three corpora in both the linguistic and the extralinguistic constraints on variation. Constraints on participle leveling include tense of the perfect construction, verb frequency, and phonological similarity between preterite and participle forms. The variable is stable in real time and socially stratified. The article relates the findings to theoretical linguistic treatments of the variation and to questions of its origin and spread in Englishes transatlantically.
In Japanese, a series of morphophonological changes that reorganizes the verbal inflectional
paradigms is currently underway. The changes in potential forms involve two innovative processes:
...ar-Deletion and re-Insertion. This paper analyzes these morphophonological changes in the Japanese
potential forms, and models the mechanism that governs the sequential changes, using the Corpus of
Spontaneous Japanese. By positing a chronological order between the changes, I argue that the initial
change in consonant-final verbs is motivated by semantic disambiguation, and the subsequent change
in vowel-final verbs is triggered by analogical leveling for the optimization of the conjugation paradigm.
This analogical leveling reorganizes the paradigm in order to counter the increased discrepancy between
potential forms of consonant-final verbs and vowel-final verbs caused by the previous change. I propose
that positing this two-step process is crucial to understanding the diachronic changes at issue.
Demonstratives are cross-linguistically widespread expressions. The use of demonstratives is flexible due to their semantic elasticity, which allows them to describe more or less extensive regions or ...referents in a communicative scenario. The constant remapping between demonstratives and referents might lead to a restructuring of the deictic system itself in accordance with the parameters affecting its use. To that end, we analyzed the structural changes affecting demonstratives in Majorcan Catalan by analysing whether speakers use three or two terms (
vs.
) to convey spatial information. We also assessed whether any change in the adnominal/pronominal forms mirrored locative adverbs reduction. We elicited the production of demonstratives in 36 simultaneous Majorcan/Spanish bilinguals via a psycholinguistic experiment and we found two main results. First, simultaneous bilingual speakers do not extensively use the term
to convey information related to physical distance. Second, the pronominal/adnominal reduction from three- to two-terms differs from the adverbial reduction. In the first case,
is dropping out of the system, while locative adverbs present a shift with substitution of
for
. Overall, our results shed new light on how the Majorcan Catalan demonstrative system is structured and explain structural changes in terms of ‘analogical levelling’ in paradigmatic relations.
Abstract
Demonstratives are cross-linguistically widespread expressions. The use of demonstratives is flexible due to their semantic elasticity, which allows them to describe more or less extensive ...regions or referents in a communicative scenario. The constant remapping between demonstratives and referents might lead to a restructuring of the deictic system itself in accordance with the parameters affecting its use. To that end, we analyzed the structural changes affecting demonstratives in Majorcan Catalan by analysing whether speakers use three or two terms (
aquest/aqueix/aquell
vs.
aquest/aquell
) to convey spatial information. We also assessed whether any change in the adnominal/pronominal forms mirrored locative adverbs reduction. We elicited the production of demonstratives in 36 simultaneous Majorcan/Spanish bilinguals via a psycholinguistic experiment and we found two main results. First, simultaneous bilingual speakers do not extensively use the term
aqueix
to convey information related to physical distance. Second, the pronominal/adnominal reduction from three- to two-terms differs from the adverbial reduction. In the first case,
aqueix
is dropping out of the system, while locative adverbs present a shift with substitution of
açí
for
aquí
. Overall, our results shed new light on how the Majorcan Catalan demonstrative system is structured and explain structural changes in terms of ‘analogical levelling’ in paradigmatic relations.
In a number of studies of analogical levelling, it has been found that the conservation of irregular formation patterns is typically correlated with the token frequency of the members of a changing ...class. Interestingly, although it was suggested decades ago that this “conserving effect” of high token frequency may also affect ongoing analogical change, only one case of a change-in-progress in morphology has been investigated so far. Moreover, instead of scrutinizing the concept of frequency, previous research has largely taken the importance of lemma token frequency for granted. The present contribution analyses a case of ongoing analogical levelling in the formation of the imperative singular of German strong verbs with e/i-gradation. A corpus-based study is used to test whether the phenomenon is rightly classified as ongoing change and whether and which frequency variables can explain the trajectory of this change. Evidence is presented that justifies the assumption of a conserving effect of token frequency in ongoing morphological change; however, the study stresses the importance of reconsidering the concept of frequency for different languages and different phenomena of change because even measures like
are not as indisputable as they seem.
The reason which is generally given in the usage-based literature to account for the retention of irregularity in high frequency items during analogical change is
: a frequently occurring irregular ...linguistic unit resists analogical levelling because it is highly entrenched in speakers’ mental lexicons through its repeated use. Although previous research similarly suggests that the entrenchment of irregular and regularised forms competing during analogical levelling should be proportional to their frequency of use, evidence for this relation between frequency and entrenchment comes exclusively from corpus-based studies; what is missing, therefore, are behavioural tests contrasting the competing innovative and conservative forms. The present paper aims to provide converging evidence for an entrenchment-based explanation of frequency patterns in analogical change on the basis of data obtained from an experiment in which participants are presented with traditional and analogical variants of a variable currently undergoing analogical levelling. Differences in processing latencies obtained during the experiment are interpreted as differences in entrenchment. The results provide i) evidence in favour of the prevalent entrenchment-based explanation of the conserving effect of frequency in analogical change, and ii) evidence of the current state and spread of the change under investigation.
This paper presents a detailed account of the changes affecting pronoun paradigms in a sample of thirteen languages of the Pilbara region of Western Australia. The reconstruction demonstrates a ...number of interesting diachronic trends including analogical levelling, the loss and later reintroduction of inclusive/exclusive person categories and the waxing and waning of nominative/ergative case syncretisms. In addition, it appears that many of the changes are the result of pattern diffusion. Taken together, the changes detailed in this study present a rich catalogue of the kinds of changes which can be expected to have occurred in the development of Australian languages more generally.
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