Internal and External Causes of Language Change The Naxos Papers

This volume collects ten studies that propose modern methodologies of analyzing and explaining language change in the case of various morpho-phonological and morpho-syntactic characteristics. The studies were first presented in the fourth, fifth and sixth workshops at the “Language Variation and Change in Ancient and Medieval Europe” summer schools, organized on the island of Naxos, Cyclades, Greece and online between 2019 and 2021. The book is divided into two parts that both focus on modern tools and methodologies of analyzing and accounting for language change. The first part focuses on common directions of change in Indo-European languages and beyond, and the second part emphasizes explanations that reveal the role of language contact. The volume promotes a dialogue between approaches to language change having their starting point in structural and typological aspects of the history of languages on the one hand, and approaches concentrating on external factors on the other. Through this dialogue, the volume enriches knowledge on the contrast or complementarity of internally- and externally-motivated causes of language change.

1 Introduction

Part I The Role of Typological Aspects and Structural Characteristics in Language Change

2 The Prehistory of Weak Adjectival Phrases in Old Norse

3 The Development of Absolute Participial Constructions in Greek

4 Synecdochic Chains and Semantic Change: The Case of the Upper Limbs in Homeric Greek

5 The Development of the Copular Participial Periphrases in Ancient Greek: Evidence for Syntactic Change and Reconstruction

6 Verb-Adjective Combinations in Late Modern English: Syntactic Reanalysis and Analogical Generalisation

7 The Evolution of Temporal Adverbs into Discourse Markers: Grammaticalization or Pragmaticalization? The Case of Romanian atunci “then” and apoi “afterwards”

Part II Linguistic Diachronies and the Role of Language Contact

8 Long-Distance Metathesis of Liquids in Romance: A Property Theory Analysis of Diachronic Change

9 Documenting Corfioto: Evidence for Contact-Induced Grammaticalization in the Romance Variety of the Jewish Community of Corfu

10 Gender Hypercharacterization in Modern Judeo-Spanish Adjectives

11 The RUKI Rule in Indo-Iranian and the Early Contacts with Uralic

Nikolaos Lavidas is Associate Professor of Diachronic Linguistics at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece. His research interests lie in the areas of language change, (historical) language contact, historical corpora, and syntax-semantics interface. 

Alexander Bergs is Full Professor and Chair of English Language and Linguistics at the University of Osnabrück, Germany. His research interests include language variation and change, constructional approaches to language, the role of context in language, the syntax/pragmatics interface and cognitive poetics. 

Elly van Gelderen is Regents Professor at Arizona State University, USA. She is a syntactician interested in language change. Her work shows how regular syntactic change (grammaticalization and the linguistic cycle) provides insight into the faculty of language.

Ioanna Sitaridou is a Professor of Spanish and Historical Linguistics at the University of Cambridge and Fellow of Queens’ College, Cambridge, UK. Her main areas of research are comparative and diachronic syntax of the Romance languages, in particular 13th Century Spanish; and dialectal Greek, especially Pontic Greek.