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Alea iacta est : insights from corpus semantics into the diachrony of the Latin passive Ghent University
The current study aims to shed more light on the dynamics involved in the changing form-function pairings in the Latin passive system. On the one hand, the ‘old’ construction for perfectum stem passives (e.g. cantatus est) experiences competition from an innovation (e.g. cantatus fuit) which specializes in the function of ANTERIORITY and survived as a PAST PERFECTIVE in Romance (e.g. Fr. il fut chanté). On the other hand, cantatus est gave rise ...
Cycling through diachrony Ghent University
The diachrony of gender marking Ghent University
Standard negation in Awa Pit: from synchrony to diachrony University of Antwerp
This study deals with clausal negation in Awa Pit, a Barbacoan language spoken in South America. By bringing together the data on negation from different varieties of the language, we present an analysis of synchronic patterns of negation marking. Based on the variation we suggest a number of innovations in the negation system, for which we put forward diachronic scenarios. Some innovations are likely to be contact-induced, whereas others are ...
Modal adjectives: English deontic and evaluative constructions in diachrony and synchrony KU Leuven
This book revisits the notion of deontic modality from the perspective of an understudied category in the modal domain, viz. adjectives. On the basis of synchronic and diachronic corpus studies, it analyses the semantics of English adjectives like essential and appropriate, and uses this to refine traditional definitions of deontic modality, which are mainly based on the study of modal verbs. In a first step, it is shown that the set of meanings ...
From motion to causation : the diachrony of the Spanish causative constructions with traer (‘bring’) and llevar (‘take’) Ghent University
This paper describes the historical evolution of the Spanish causative micro-constructions with the motion verbs llevar (‘take’) and traer (‘bring’) (e.g., el miedo llevó al ladrón a cometer un error, ‘the fear caused the thief to make a mistake’). In order to reconstruct the historical development of these micro-constructions between the 13th and 20th centuries, all causative uses of llevar and traer were extracted from the Corpus del ...
Optional and alternating case marking: Typology and diachrony KU Leuven
© 2019 John Wiley & Sons Ltd This paper presents a survey of the typology and diachrony of optional and alternating case marking, in the context of related phenomena such as referent- and construction-based splits. While there is much recent work in this area, driven by text-based approaches to language description, as well as quantitative and areal approaches to typology, the domain remains somewhat scattered, conceptually and ...