Browsing by Subject "Linguistic change"

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Adult writing vocabularies : a study of changes in parts of speech between 1930-1956 of words in current use
(1962) Cook, Martha Pearl Hollis; Horn, Thomas D., 1918-1993
The present study utilized 2,730 words from a combined compilation of recent studies completed at The University of Texas. The problem proposed to determine and verify changes in parts of speech that have occurred between 1930 and 1956. After a comparison of the words was made between two volumes of Webster's New International Dictionary (1930 printing and 1956 printing), the following conclusions were reached: (1) the total number of words having "gained" parts of speech was 2,121; (2) the total number of words having "lost" parts of speech was 164; (3) the total number of words having both "gained" and "lost" parts of speech was 43; (4) the total number of words not tabulated because they were derived forms or had no changes in parts of speech was 402
The role of typological drift in the development of the romance subjunctive : a study in word-order change, grammaticalization and synthesis
(2008-08) Murphy, Melissa Dae; Bauer, Brigitte L. M., 1961-; Hensey, Fritz
In spite of the vast amount of research on mood in Romance languages, certain fundamental issues are clearly underrepresented, particularly in the field of diachronic linguistics. With this in mind, the primary goal of this dissertation is to provide a comprehensive explanation for developments in Romance mood distribution. Unlike the majority of existing research, this approach does not analyze mood in isolation, nor does it look outward for language-external explanations. Instead, changes in mood usage are related to major typological developments via several interconnected analyses which rely heavily on data from Latin and medieval Spanish and French. This investigation, which takes as its starting point the well-attested typological shift from OV to VO word order, addresses four major issues. The first of these is branching congruency, whereby post-posed subordinate clauses are more closely associated with explicit subordinating conjunctions. This hypothesis is tested via a quantitative analysis of Latin data, in order to establish a link between conjunctions and VO word order. The development of these subordinating elements is then analyzed within the grammaticalization framework, which provides insight into the nature of specific Latin and Romance forms, in addition to demonstrating the usefulness of certain theoretical notions. The outcome of this process is a highly generalized Romance subordinator, which is argued to have undergone partial synthesis with the subjunctive, evidenced by an increase in both obligatoriness and contiguity. Finally, these cumulative changes in the linguistic system are shown to have had substantial destabilizing effects on the existing subjunctive / indicative contrast. The significance of this claim is that, already in Latin, mood selection is characterized by a loss of motivation and an increase in automaticity. As a result, subsequent changes in mood distribution in Romance languages are not viewed merely as reductive phenomena, but rather as signs of the refunctionalization of a destabilized, yet viable, paradigm.