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Diachronica at 40

Divergence-time estimation in Indo-European: The case of Latin

Divergence-time estimation is one of the most important endeavors in historical linguistics. Its importance is matched only by its difficulty. As Bayesian methods of divergence-time estimation have become more common over the past two decades, a …

Correlated grammaticalization: The rise of articles in Indo-European

Grammaticalization is characterized by robust directional asymmetries (e.g., Kuteva et al. 2019). For instance, body-part nominals develop into spatial adpositions, minimizers develop into negation markers, and subject pronouns become agreement …

The Old Irish article

Although the Old Irish article in is standardly described as a marker of definiteness, it also co-occurs with indefinite nouns. This phenomenon has long been known in the literature, but thus far even an adequate descriptive account of it has proven …

A multifactorial account of differential agent marking in Herodotus

Passive agents in ancient Greek exhibit a well-known alternation between dative case and prepositional phrase. It has long been recognized that grammatical aspect plays a crucial role in this alternation: dative agents preponderate among aspectually …

Indo-European phylogenetics with R

The last twenty or so years have witnessed a dramatic increase in the use of computational methods for inferring linguistic phylogenies. Although the results of this research have been controversial, the methods themselves are an undeniable boon for …

Homeric -phi(n) is an oblique case marker

The synchronic distribution and diachronic trajectory of Homeric -phi(n) have been the source of long-standing debate, with the result that scholarly opinion has yet to settle on a consensus regarding the morphosyntax of forms realized by this …

Language change and linguistic theory

Many archaic Indo‐European languages exhibit a system of dual conjunction in which they possess both a head‐initial exponent (e.g., Latin et) and an enclitic exponent (e.g., Latin ⸗que). Mitrović (2014) and Mitrović & Sauerland (2016) argue that …

Variation versus change: Clausal clitics between Homer and Herodotus

Enclitic distribution in Greek (and archaic Indo-European generally) is governed by a set of generalizations known as Wackernagel’s Law, according to which enclitics occur in “second position.” As has long been known, surface …

Object agreement in Lycian