Language variation and change through an experimental lens: Contextual modulation in the use of the Progressive in three Spanish dialects

Spanish exhibits two markers to convey a progressive meaning: the Simple Present and the Present Progressive. The use of these markers is contextually biased: the Simple Present requires contexts where speaker and addressee share perceptual access to the situation at issue, while the Present Progressive does not require such support. We test this generalization through real-time comprehension: the Simple Present marker in contexts without shared perceptual access should elicit slower reading times than within shared perceptual access contexts. A self-paced reading study (n = 176) in three different varieties of Spanish (Mexican, Rioplatense, and Castilian) bears this prediction out. Additionally, we find that the Mexican variety appears further advanced in the Progressive-to-Imperfective diachronic shift than its dialectal counterparts

The sacral stamp of Greek: Periphrastic constructions in New Testament translations of Latin, Gothic, and Old Church Slavonic

Among the sociolinguistc forces at work in the languages of the world, religious affiliation and the accompanying reverence for the symbols of that affiliation must rank among the most powerful. Religious texts serve as repositories of cultural tradition and become, for their followers, reliquaries of the very word of God. Besides the conservatizing, archaizing pressures which often grow up within a religious tradition, these texts also act as conduits for cultural and linguistic innovation as they spread, through transmission and translation, to surrounding populations. The New Testament (NT) represents just such a cultural conduit, providing not only a blueprint for Christian social behavior but also a pattern for Christian linguistic expression, providing a new lexicon, a special syntax, a style of its own, simple and spare. It was this style, these lexical and syntactic patterns, which came to be imbued with social value to connote membership in the Christian community, and which came to be imitated, sometimes subtly, sometimes blatantly, by translators of the New Testament

Latin influence on the syntax of the languages of Europe: Foundations and new perspectives

This 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.status: publishe

Two euroversals in a global perspective : auxiliation and alignment

A number of studies in linguistic typology over the past few years have concentrated on what have come to be called ‘euroversals’. In this paper, I shall examine two of them, viz. accusative alignment and the occurrence of a ‘have’/‘be’ alternation in perfective auxiliation. Focusing on Romance dialects, I will show that thorough inspection of dialect variation in (a subset of) the languages of Europe provides crucial insights that have escaped so far the attention of typologists who dealt with these topics. The main results are that, firstly, alternation in perfective auxiliation is not accusatively aligned and, hence, the two euroversals at issue are mutually contradictory; and that, secondly, variation and change in perfective auxiliation across time and space in Romance reflects a shift in the alignment properties of the varieties at issue. More generally, the moral of the present discussion is that serious consideration of dialect variation is a necessary precondition for dispelling the commonplace that represents Europe as a rather dull linguistic landscape with very little structural diversity

Language variation and change through an experimental lens: Contextual modulation in the use of the Progressive in three Spanish dialects

Spanish exhibits two markers to convey a progressive meaning: the Simple Present and the Present Progressive. The use of these markers is contextually biased: the Simple Present requires contexts where speaker and addressee share perceptual access to the situation at issue, while the Present Progressive does not require such support. We test this generalization through real-time comprehension: the Simple Present marker in contexts without shared perceptual access should elicit slower reading times than within shared perceptual access contexts. A self-paced reading study (n = 176) in three different varieties of Spanish (Mexican, Rioplatense, and Castilian) bears this prediction out. Additionally, we find that the Mexican variety appears further advanced in the Progressive-to-Imperfective diachronic shift than its dialectal counterparts