{"title":"Participial and gerundial clauses in sixteenth-century Spanish prose","authors":"Santiago del Rey Quesada","doi":"10.1075/bjl.00022.rey","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1075/bjl.00022.rey","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract The aim of this article consists in studying participial constructions (PC) and gerundial constructions (GC), especially absolute PCs and GCs, within a corpus of Spanish translated and non-translated texts from the 16th century written by two Castilian writers who were prominent exponents of the Erasmian prose in this era. Close attention is paid to translated texts in order to determine the extent to which different types and subtypes of PCs and GCs match PCs and/or any kind of structures in the source text (ST). This approach allows to discuss whether or not a syntactic equivalence between ST and target text (TT) predominates in the corpus under study and, when it is the case, to determine to what extent and by means of which mechanisms TT diverges from ST. The analysis shows that the influence of the Latin model in the ST on the syntax of the Romance TT becomes stronger when it works ex negativo, i.e. Latin turns out to be more influential in non-translated texts or in indirect – or not literally – translated contexts.","PeriodicalId":35124,"journal":{"name":"Belgian Journal of Linguistics","volume":"33 1","pages":"43-81"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-12-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41930418","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Latin influence on German word order?","authors":"H. H. Hock","doi":"10.1075/bjl.00027.hoc","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1075/bjl.00027.hoc","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Behaghel’s claim that verb finality in German dependent clauses (DCs) reflects Latin influence (1892, 1932) has been revived by Chirita (1997, 2003). According to Chirita, DC word order remains variable up to Early New High German, while in Latin, verb-finality is more frequent in DCs than main clauses (MCs); hence, she claims, German verb finality reflects Latin influence. This papers shows that the arguments for Latin influence are problematic and that the Modern German word order difference between MCs and DCs can be explained as the ultimate outcome of developments that started in early North and West Germanic. In the conclusion I briefly discuss similar developments in Western Romance and their implications for European contact linguistics.","PeriodicalId":35124,"journal":{"name":"Belgian Journal of Linguistics","volume":"33 1","pages":"183-209"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-12-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43372954","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"On the notion of linguistic influence in syntax","authors":"Paolo Greco","doi":"10.1075/bjl.00021.gre","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1075/bjl.00021.gre","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This paper tackles the topic of Latin influence on Italo-Romance syntax by addressing the question how to combine the analysis of structural data with socio-historical reflections. It views the genre and discourse tradition of a given medieval text as governing the extent to which Latin is used as a model in this text. The paper proposes a methodology which incorporates consideration of the historical, cultural, and sociolinguistic context of language change, focusing on evidence from the development of present participles in Italo-Romance. The main conclusion is that, rather than talking about the general influence of Latin syntax on Italian, we should be examining the influence of particular Latin models on the syntax of different texts written in Italo-Romance varieties in a given historical period.","PeriodicalId":35124,"journal":{"name":"Belgian Journal of Linguistics","volume":"33 1","pages":"11-42"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-12-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42415505","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Do the parallels meet?","authors":"Andrii Danylenko","doi":"10.1075/bjl.00026.dan","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1075/bjl.00026.dan","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract The paper is concerned with the origin and the development of the Accusative with Infinitive (AcI) construction in Slavic. Looking into the areal-typological, diachronic, and socio-typological parameters of the AcI construction, the author introduces new Slavic dialectal and comparative material and reconstructs the developmental cline of this construction along two parallel pathways of grammaticalization of the second accusative complement in Proto-Indo-European. The grammaticalization of infinitival complementation, typical primarily of those Slavic varieties which acquired secondary analytical features, is distinguished from the grammaticalization of participial complementation which is commonly attested in the history of low-contact Slavic languages and dialects like Southwest Ukrainian and some Polish dialects. Special emphasis is placed on the interaction between infinitival and participial grammaticalization in the history of Slavic standard and non-standard varieties, which allows the author to substantiate an initial switching between the two pathways as attested in Old Church Slavonic and early standard varieties of (West) Slavic.","PeriodicalId":35124,"journal":{"name":"Belgian Journal of Linguistics","volume":"33 1","pages":"150-182"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-12-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47473997","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Latin influence on the syntax of the languages of Europe","authors":"B. Cornillie, Bridget Drinka","doi":"10.1075/bjl.00020.cor","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1075/bjl.00020.cor","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000This special issue explores the role of Latin in shaping the syntactic patterns of the European languages. Among the key issues examined are the identification of sources of syntactic change, whether internal or external, the chronologization of these changes, and their actualization. Authors have tackled such cutting-edge topics as the role of sociolinguistic motivation in syntactic change in the vernaculars, the complex role played by translators, and the syntactic creativity that may occur as a result of calquing. Several authors, conversely, question the role of Latin in influencing particular structures, and propose alternative explanations. It is hoped that the present special issue succeeds in filling some gaps in our understanding of the roofing effects of Latin, as we attempt to track down and interrogate the causes and effects of syntactic change in the languages of Europe.","PeriodicalId":35124,"journal":{"name":"Belgian Journal of Linguistics","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-12-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48343965","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"On the pace of syntactic elaboration from Latin calques","authors":"B. Cornillie","doi":"10.1075/bjl.00023.cor","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1075/bjl.00023.cor","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This paper addresses the auxiliation/grammaticalization of amenazar (Spanish), dreigen (Dutch), threaten (English), against the background of the competition between the vernacular languages and Latin. It shows that the subjective reading of ‘threaten’, expressing a prediction on the basis of some kind of evidence, is a Latin calque, and that the syntactic creativity or syntactic elaboration starts from this calque. In the three cases, ‘threaten’ is combined with the semantics of ‘fall’, which indicates the roofing role of Latin. The paper shows that the pace of the constructional change from ‘threaten’ + np to ‘threaten’ + inf is different from one language to another. Spanish amenazar grammaticalizes into an auxiliary during the Renaissance of the 15th and 16th century. In the case of Dutch, by contrast, only in the Golden Age of the 17th century do writers start to use dreigen ‘threaten’ as an auxiliary. Finally, English develops the auxiliary one century later than the Dutch one. The chronological differences are explained on the basis of the cultural and linguistic elaborations typical of Golden centuries, which vary from one nation to another.","PeriodicalId":35124,"journal":{"name":"Belgian Journal of Linguistics","volume":"33 1","pages":"82-107"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-12-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42953535","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"French adverbial cleft sentences","authors":"Anna-Maria De Cesare","doi":"10.1075/bjl.00017.dec","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1075/bjl.00017.dec","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 The goal of this contribution is to deepen our knowledge of French cleft sentences through the study of a special category of\u0000 clefts called adverbial clefts. The issues that we will address concern their form, discourse frequency and\u0000 boundaries with resembling structures. In order to shed light on these issues, we start by defining the concept of\u0000 adverbial from a morphosyntactic and functional point of view. We then present a corpus-based description of\u0000 the categories of adverbials that can be cleaved. Finally, we propose a general semantic principle capable of describing and\u0000 explaining, in a coherent and unitary way, both the data obtained in our empirical study and found in the form of constructed\u0000 examples in the existing literature. In addition to explaining why certain adverbials can be cleaved while others cannot, this\u0000 principle also allows for a distinction to be made between two syntactic realizations of the structure ‘c’est Adv que p’, as well\u0000 as for a solution to the controversial issue of the status of domain adverbials.","PeriodicalId":35124,"journal":{"name":"Belgian Journal of Linguistics","volume":"380 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-12-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"59366145","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Lena Karssenberg, Karen Lahousse, B. Lamiroy, S. Marzo, A. Drobnjaković
{"title":"Non-prototypical clefts","authors":"Lena Karssenberg, Karen Lahousse, B. Lamiroy, S. Marzo, A. Drobnjaković","doi":"10.1075/BJL.00014.KAR","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1075/BJL.00014.KAR","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 In this article we present an overview of current debates in the analysis of cleft sentences. The types of sentences that are often\u0000 seen as prototypical examples of the cleft category are introduced by it is or a cross-linguistic equivalent; in\u0000 addition, they have specificational semantics and a focus-background information structure articulation. We argue here that other,\u0000 less prototypical types of constructions, which have received less attention, also belong to the cleft category: sentences that\u0000 are introduced by expressions such as there is and you’ve got (and their cross-linguistic\u0000 equivalents), as well as sentences introduced by it is which do not have specificational semantics and which\u0000 express other types of information structure articulations (e.g. all-focus or topic-comment). We argue that it is fruitful to\u0000 analyse these ‘non-prototypical’ clefts in more depth, not only to come to a better understanding about these sentence types in\u0000 their own right, but also to arrive at insights in the phenomenon of ‘clefts’ in general.","PeriodicalId":35124,"journal":{"name":"Belgian Journal of Linguistics","volume":"44 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-12-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41273830","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}