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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …