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Auxiliary Selection in Old Spanish. Supplementary materials
No full textSupplementary materials to Rosemeyer, Malte (2014). Auxiliary Selection in Spanish. Gradience, Gradualness, and Conservation. Amsterdam, Philadelphia, Benjamins
Acting on actuation
Full text linkSynopsis:
This volume presents a timely discussion on one of the most fundamental and yet elusive questions in historical linguistics: why do certain linguistic changes take place in some languages at specific times, but not in others, even under similar conditions? The actuation problem, first articulated by Weinreich, Labov, and Herzog (1968), remains a central puzzle in the study of language change, at the crossroads between language structure, cognitive processes, and social dynamics. While significant progress has been made in identifying pathways and constraints on change and in understanding the social embedding of linguistic variation, the ultimate challenge of predicting language change remains unresolved, raising the question of whether historical linguistics can ever be a predictive science. The main reason for skepticism is that the inherent complexity of language structure and use makes it extremely challenging to predict when and how a given change may occur. Even so, a reassessment of where the discipline stands with respect to its most central research question is in order.
Building on recent advances in variationist sociolinguistics, grammaticalization theory, and probabilistic modeling of language, the contributions in this volume offer fresh theoretical and methodological perspectives on the actuation problem, discussing the interplay between principles of language change, the role of bilingualism and language contact more generally, the distinction between innovation and propagation, and the role of sociocultural change. Research presented in this volume shows that there is indeed cause for hope, bringing at least a probabilistic answer to the actuation problem within closer reach
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
How to measure replacement: Auxiliary selection in Old Spanish bibles
No full text© 2012 by Walter de Gruyter Berlin Boston. Studies of the development of compound tense auxiliary selection in Spanish frequently analyse ser ('to be') + past participle (PtP) as an anterior construction, and its disappearance as a slow replacement process starting in Old Spanish, in which the new anterior auxiliary aver ('to have') replaced it. This article investigates and rejects the empirical basis for this claim on the basis of a comparative analysis of Old Spanish bible translations. It is argued that the majority of tokens of ser + PtP has a resultative function, as indicated by typical patterns of verbal mood, coordination and temporal-aspectual morphology. Old Spanish translators of the bible appear to have regarded aver + PtP as being more similar to simple imperfective preterit forms like cantaba ('s/he sang') than to ser + PtP. Comparing the types and rates of use of aver + PtP and ser + PtP in earlier and later bible versions with the help of generalised linear mixed-effects regression models shows that ser + PtP was more stable in Old Spanish than hitherto assumed. Rather than replacing ser + PtP in Old Spanish, aver + PtP expanded at the expense of simple preterit forms. In summary, this article provides empirical evidence against the replacement hypothesis for Old Spanish, while at the same time assessing ways to quantitatively identify replacement processes in diachronic linguistics.status: Publishe
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