The relationship between inflectional case marking and the emergence of definite and indefinite articles has been widely invoked but rarely tested quantitatively. This study provides a large-scale statistical evaluation across 94 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 …
It has long been debated whether morphosyntactic change is teleological. Jespersen (1917:4), for instance, maintained that emphatic negative constructions are created in response to the weakening of older negative adverbs. Others have argued that …
Ennius 550 Sk (atque atque accedit muros Romana iuventus, ‘The Roman youth atque atque advanced against the walls’) has long puzzled scholars on account of what appear to be side-by-side tokens of the conjunction atque ‘and’. …