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 comparative method depends crucially on the phylogenetic tree of the languages under comparison, but in many linguistic families, including Indo-European, the true tree is unknown. To circumvent this issue, frequency heuristics have been devised …
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 …
One of the central goals of historical linguistics is to distinguish probable from improbable linguistic changes. This includes not only individual changes, but also interactions among changes (i.e., whether one change makes another more or less …
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 …