Language Change at the Syntax-Semantics Interface

Chiara Gianollo, Agnes Jäger, Doris Penka

• Publisher: De Gruyter Mouton
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9783110352177
• eBook ISBN: 9783110394924
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistic Semantics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Bringing together diachronic research from a variety of perspectives, notably typology, formal syntax and semantics, this volume focuses on the interplay of syntactic and semantic factors in language change - an issue so far largely neglected both in (mostly lexical) historical semantics as well as historical syntax, but recently brought into focus by grammaticalization theory as well as Minimalist diachronic syntax. The contributions draw on data from numerous Indo-European languages including Vedic Sanskrit, Middle Indic, Greek as well as English and German, and discuss a range of phenomena such as change in negation markers, indefinite articles, quantifiers, modal verbs, argument structure among others. The papers analyze diachronic evidence in the light of contemporary syntactic and semantic theory, addressing the crucial question of how syntactic and semantic change are linked, and whether both are governed by similar constraints, principles and systematic mechanisms. The volume will appeal to scholars in historical linguistics and formal theories of syntax and semantics.

Chiara Gianollo, Agnes Jäger and Doris Penka

1 Language change at the syntax-semantics interface. Perspectives and challenges

1 Introduction

The contributions in this volume address, from various theoretical and methodological perspectives, the interplay of grammatical structure and meaning through time. The “interface” between syntax and semantics is understood here in two different senses, a technical and a methodological one.

In the technical sense, change at the syntax-semantics interface is represented by events targeting both the structural configuration and the meaning of a certain item. This is, for example, the typical situation in grammaticalization phenomena, whose effects range across multiple linguistic modules. All contributions in this volume are based on diachronic data attesting this kind of interface change, and aim at uncovering temporal and causal relationships between interpretational and structural factors. Besides proposing a detailed reconstruction of their particular case studies, the authors engage in the challenge of precisely modeling – according to their respective theoretical frameworks – the interaction of meaning and form, thus suggesting general formats.

In a more methodological sense, the term “interface” is also understood in this volume as the theoretical comparison and dialogue between syntactic and semantic models of diachronic processes. Traditionally, the investigation of causes and forms of regularity in language change has prompted the formulation of general mechanisms, which guide the reorganization of grammatical systems. Cognitively based frameworks, in particular, have been successful in proposing abstract schemes for processes of syntactic change, which are now widely assumed in current diachronic research. With respect to meaning, historical work has focused especially on lexical semantics, and formal semanticists have only recently taken interest in exploring how truth-conditional models of propositional meaning can be fruitfully applied to diachronic problems. The first results of this line of research open exciting perspectives for the study of the syntax-semantics interface: a comparison between abstract mechanisms of change proposed for syntax on the one hand and semantics on the other has the potential of fostering our understanding not only of historical dynamics in language, but also of the general architecture of grammar. Some studies in this volume have in common a marked focus on semantics, as well as the aim of singling out abstract formats of change in the domain of functional meaning. This kind of work is a natural and necessary prerequisite for the further step of comparing mechanisms of development in syntax and semantics.

In what follows, we give a short overview of the general issues addressed by the contributions in this collection, and of the challenges and open questions that motivate our joint efforts. In Section 2 we present the factors that prompt a renewed attention for the syntax-semantics interface in historical linguistics. In Section 3 we formulate the questions that, in our opinion, should guide research in this area. In Section 4 we review recent advances in the understanding of systematicity in syntactic and semantic change. Section 5 offers an overview of the various studies collected in this volume.

2 Historical linguistics and the syntax-semantics interface

Contemporary historical linguistics has greatly profited from the interaction with synchronic theory building, and, in turn, thanks to its significant results, has contributed in shaping the more general research agenda in linguistics. The syntax-semantics interface has become salient in historical linguistics due to a number of theoretical, empirical and methodological advances. Nonetheless, diachronic syntax and semantics have largely developed as separate disciplines. In particular, formal frameworks have been extended to the investigation of diachrony much earlier in syntax than in semantics. For syntax, Lightfoot (1979) opened the way to the application of generative models of syntactic structure and language competence to historical questions. This research direction gained momentum in connection with the synchronic study of cross-linguistic variation within the Principles and Parameters approach. In semantics, the first ground-breaking work to provide a truth-conditional account of change in functional meaning, and to formalize general principles guiding it, is Eckardt (2006). If theory building by formalization has proceeded separately in syntax and semantics until now, empirical comparative work at the syntax-semantics interface has been experiencing a surge in interest among diachronic linguists of all persuasions in the last decades.

2.1 Grammaticalization

A privileged area of research, where historical syntax and semantics naturally meet, is grammaticalization.¹ In grammaticalization phenomena, new exponents of grammatical categories (“function words”) develop out of pre-existing lexical material, or grammatical elements change their function through time. In the investigation of the lexical development of e.g. complementizers, modal particles, negation exponents, auxiliaries, pronouns, and determiners, syntactic and semantic considerations are necessarily intertwined.

The cross-linguistic investigation of grammaticalization has uncovered a number of interesting generalizations concerning the kind of categories most typically involved, the interaction between phonological, morpho-syntactic, and semantic change, and the types of processes observed. In particular, it has been possible to single out linguistic “cycles”, that is, cross-linguistically recurrent developments at the syntax-semantics interface, which remarkably go through similar stages. Perhaps the most famous of such cycles is the one affecting negation (Jespersen’s cycle): it has been extensively studied in diachronic syntax, also thanks to the fact that negation is a synchronically well-studied area in current theoretical semantics and syntax.² But many other domains have been shown to offer examples of cyclic development too (aspectual forms, modal verbs, indefinite pronouns, among numerous others, cf. van Gelderen 2011 for a recent comprehensive picture).

This substantial body of empirical work has highlighted the necessity to integrate the methods and research questions of historical syntax and semantics.

On the one hand, syntacticians have been confronted with the fact that the input elements getting grammaticalized as exponents for certain functional categories show a remarkable semantic similarity (e.g. minimizers in the case of negation, demonstratives in the case of definite articles) and undergo parallel extensions or restrictions in their contexts of use in a stepwise fashion. This calls for a semantic explanation, which takes into consideration which part(s) of the meaning trigger grammaticalization, and which elements are retained after the category and structure change.

On the other hand, the limits of an exclusively lexical approach to diachronic semantics have become evident, since semantic change in one word is often accompanied by change in the surrounding structure, and thus in the compositional interface with the interpretive mechanism. It is therefore not productive to draw a rigid dividing line between lexical and propositional semantics in diachronic work. The application of modern compositional theories of meaning can be instrumental in pursuing a better understanding of semantic change.

A number of insights gained from grammaticalization theory have been captured in recent diachronic work within the generative framework (cf. e.g. Roberts and Roussou 2003; van Gelderen 2004, 2011; and Section 4 below). Generative syntactic analyses are usually coupled with a semantic mechanism of “bleaching” or “weakening”, which has been first accounted for in a formal framework by von Fintel (1995). However, grammaticalization often brings about the enrichment of some meaning components (cf. Hopper and Traugott 2003; Eckardt 2006; and our Section 4), a process which still awaits a proper syntactic treatment.

2.2 Systematicity in language change

Crucially, research on grammaticalization and on linguistic cycles has provided important support to the idea that a clear systematicity underlies syntactic and semantic diachronic processes, at least in these types of change. This claim has represented an absolute novelty in the field of historical linguistics, where only sound change was considered to be subject to regularity. For syntax, this led to a renewed interest on the part of theoretical linguists in diachronic issues, for the observed systematicity lent itself to formal, cognitively motivated rule-based treatments.

In fact, the investigation of regularity in sound change (the Neogrammarians’ formulation of “sound laws”, and their application to questions of genealogical relatedness) had been the first empirical field in which linguistics developed into a science.³ Morphology and the lexicon played a very important role in this enterprise, but mostly in their interface with phonology: meaning was only taken into consideration insofar as it contributed evidence for establishing diachronic and cross-linguistic links between lexical and grammatical items. In the perspective of the classical comparative method, the impression gained from lexical semantics was that semantic change is fairly unconstrained: “By and large, semantic change operates in a rather random fashion, affecting one word here (in one way), and another form there (in another way). Given the ‘fuzzy’ nature of meaning, this is of course not surprising. What is surprising is that there should be any instances at all in which semantic change exhibits a certain degree of systematicity. But some such cases can be found” (Hock 1991: 305).

As for syntax, a body of important observations had been collected within the comparative framework, and some linguistic cycles, as well as the very notion of grammaticalization, had already gained the attention of historical linguists. The first decisive impulse towards addressing the question of systematicity in syntactic change came, however, with Greenberg’s research on language universals (Greenberg 1963, 1966, 1978 a.o.), which inspired a number of studies on the diachronic role of implicational universals (among the earliest Lehmann 1974 and contributions in Li 1975). Since this work dealt with long-term changes, sometimes spanning several centuries, the question arose how to account for the gradual nature of change and for supra-individual forces driving it. A decisive methodological turn, in this respect, was represented by Lightfoot’s (1979) application of the generative approach to syntactic change. Lightfoot argued that a deeper understanding of the principles of change would be attained by analyzing in detail single case studies, reconstructing individual grammars, intended as systems of cognitive rules, and looking for local causes of disruption in language transmission during acquisition: he rooted systematicity of syntactic change in the structure of synchronic rules and in the conservative nature of first-language acquisition.

At this point, the investigation of syntactic change came to be tied more and more to synchronic models of competence and of cross-linguistic variation, especially with the rise of the Principles and Parameters framework: the process of parameter-resetting during acquisition came to be considered “the principal explanatory mechanism in diachronic syntax” (Roberts 2007: 121).

In order to better understand diachronic processes, a grasp of the extent of cross-linguistic variation, and of its formalization at a synchronic level, is a necessary prerequisite. It is probably because of the lack of a comparable interest in variation that diachronic research in semantics did not undergo a similar development.

Attempts to formulate general mechanisms involved in meaning change started early, and could build on the vast evidence provided by the lexicographic and etymological work in the Indo-European comparative tradition.⁴ Paul ([1880] 1995: 87–103), for instance, proposed four basic mechanisms (generalization, specification, metaphor, metonymy); within the structuralist tradition, the study of word-fields prompted generalizations concerning the dynamics of meaning systems, sometimes formulated in terms of loss / acquisition of distinctive features (cf. e.g. Coseriu 1964). In fact, until very recently, the investigation of semantic change was limited to lexical semantics. As in the case of syntax, a decisive turn towards the investigation of systematicity in structure-sensitive / structure-relevant semantic change came from grammaticalization research. As noted by Eckardt (2006: 28), though, despite the large amount ...

Table of contents

• Trends in Linguistics Studies and Monographs
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface and acknowledgements
• Table of Contents
• 1 Language change at the syntax-semantics interface. Perspectives and challenges
• 2 Semantic and formal features: Feature economy in language change
• 3 Linking syntax and semantics of adnominal possession in the history of German
• 4 Most historically
• 5 The “indefinite article” from cardinal to operator to expletive
• 6 The Greek Septuagint and language change at the syntax-semantics interface: from null to “pleonastic” object pronouns
• 7 The agreement of collective nouns in the history of Ancient Greek and German
• 8 Vedic local particles at the syntax-semantics interface
• 9 Aspect shifts in Indo-Aryan and trajectories of semantic change
• 10 The development of conditional should in English
• 11 The Greek Jespersen’s cycle: Renewal, stability and structural microelevation
• Subject index