Cyclical Change
Edited by Elly van Gelderen
May 2008 proposal to John Benjamins’ Linguistics Today series
Total estimated book length: 300-350 pages
Maximum length per contribution: 20 pages single space, or 10,000 words.
Table of Contents
Cycles in general
Elly van Gelderen
Linguistic Cycles as Economy: an introduction
Negatives
Jack Hoeksema
University of Groningen
Jespersen recycled
Olena Tsurska
The negative Cycle in Early Russian
Johan van der Auwera
Antwerp University
Jespersen’s cycle –
Notes from Egyptology and Flemish dialectology
Theresa Biberauer
Cambridge University
Multiple Jespersen’s Cycles in Afrikaans Negation
and the Future of Afrikaans Negative Concord
Pronouns
Diana Vedovato
University of Padova
Weak Pronouns in Italian: Instances of a Broken Cycle?
Leonard Faltz
Arizona State University
Approaching a Reflexive Cycle
Cecilia Poletto
University of Venice
Expletives from Specifier to head
Clifton Pye
University of Kansas
Cycles of agreement in the acquisition of five Mayan
languages
??David Ingram
Auxiliaries, verbs, and pronouns
Kyongjoon Kwon
Harvard University
Subject cycle of pronominal auxiliaries
in Old North Russian
Terje Lohndal
University of Oslo
The Copula Cycle
Remus Gergel
University of Tübingen
Cycling up (and ‘Late Merge’) on LF:
Evidence from modal RATHER
Agreement and Adpositions
Catherine Waters
University of Toronto
Axial Part and Semantic Bleaching in English Prepositions
Monica Irimia
University of Toronto
Sorting out cyclic variation in adpositions
A psycholinguistic View
Thomas Bever,
The study of language cycles in vivo and in vitro
Roeland Hancock, University of Arizona,
& Montse Sanz, Kobe University
Description of/Motivation for the book
On April 25th and 26th 2008, a Workshop on the Linguistic Cycle took place at Arizona
State University and the current volume will mainly consist of a series of articles that
were presented during the workshop. The discussions during the workshop were lively
and very focussed and emphasized the variation in the cycles.
There are early advocates of the view that language change is cyclical, e.g. de Condillac
(1746), Tooke (1786-1805), von Humboldt (1822), and Bopp (1816). More recently Tauli
(1958) has provided many examples, but apart from sporadic work, e.g. by Hodge (1970)
and Tauli, not much research had been done up to very recently. From June 2008, there
will be one-day events on the negative cycle in Birmingham
(http://www.lhds.bcu.ac.uk/english/cycles-of-grammaticalization) but other cycles have
not had as much interest. Apart from the negative cycle, cycles of language change have
not been studied in generative linguistics and only sporadically in other frameworks. The
workshop was therefore an attempt to bring together linguists who are interested in this
change from a variety of frameworks.
The Linguistic Cycle is a name for changes where a phrase or word gradually disappears
and is replaced by a new linguistic item. The most well-known cycle involves Negatives,
where an initial single negative such as not gets to be reinforced by nothing or replaced
by never, and subjects, where full pronouns are reanalyzed as endings on the verb.
Clauses, aspect markers, articles, and copula verbs also undergo cycles of internal change
followed by external change.
A crucial step in the linguistic cycle is grammaticalization. This kind of change was
identified early on in linguistics and, as is well-known, the term was coined in 1912 by
Meillet. It is also well-known that grammaticalization leads to loss and renewal. In the
1980s and 1990s, works such as Lehmann (1982) and Heine & Traugott (1991) inspired
many linguists to pay closer attention to this phenomenon again, especially in a
functionalist framework. Recently, however, structural accounts have started to appear,
e.g. Roberts & Roussou 2003; van Gelderen 2004. Van Gelderen, for instance, uses
general cognitive Economy Principles that help the learner acquire a grammar that is
more economical, and as a side-effect more grammaticalized.
Grammaticalization is a descriptive term and it is more appropriate to use reanalysis to
emphasize the role of the child acquiring the language. A child listens to a particular
language and will analyze the linguistic input in the most economic way. This may result
in an internal grammar different from that of an earlier generation. In such a view,
grammaticalization and cyclical change is seen as following from Universal Principles
(possibly third factor) and the task of the linguist is to unearth these principles.
Time line:
2008
May 15:
May 30:
August 30:
October 30:
2009
February 28:
April 30:
June 30:
Chapter authors decide if they want to contribute to the volume
Proposal to Benjamins with ToC and length specification
Submit the first version to Elly
Deadline for internal review of two papers by each of you.
(This helps the thematic integrity of the volume)
Final submission of manuscripts to Elly
Review of the finished manuscript by an external reviewer
(or two).
Final version to go to Benjamins
E-mails of the contributors:
johan.van.der.auwera1@telenet.be; johan.vanderauwera@ua.ac.be; mtb23@cam.ac.uk;
Aryeh Faltz; remus.gergel@uni-tuebingen.de; j.hoeksema@rug.nl;
monica.irimia@utoronto.ca; kkwon@fas.harvard.edu; terjeloh@gmail.com;
pyersqr@ku.edu; diana.vedovato@unipd.it; cathleen.waters@utoronto.ca;
olena.tsurska@asu.edu; ellyvangelderen@asu.edu; cecilia.poletto@unipd.it;