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 GelderenLinguistic Cycles as Economy: an introduction
Negatives
Jack HoeksemaJespersen recycled
University of Groningen
Olena TsurskaThe negative Cycle in Early Russian
Johan van der AuweraJespersen’s cycle –
AntwerpUniversityNotes from Egyptology and Flemish dialectology
Theresa Biberauer Multiple Jespersen’s Cycles in Afrikaans Negation
CambridgeUniversityand the Future of Afrikaans Negative Concord
Pronouns
Diana VedovatoWeak Pronouns in Italian: Instances of a Broken Cycle?
University of Padova
Leonard FaltzApproaching a Reflexive Cycle
ArizonaStateUniversity
Cecilia PolettoExpletives from Specifier to head
University of Venice
Clifton PyeCycles of agreement in the acquisition of five Mayan
University of Kansaslanguages
??David Ingram
Auxiliaries, verbs, and pronouns
Kyongjoon KwonSubject cycle of pronominal auxiliaries
HarvardUniversityin Old North Russian
Terje LohndalThe Copula Cycle
University of Oslo
Remus GergelCycling up (and ‘Late Merge’) on LF:
University ofTübingenEvidence from modal RATHER
Agreement and Adpositions
Catherine WatersAxial Part and Semantic Bleaching in English Prepositions
University of Toronto
Monica IrimiaSorting out cyclic variation in adpositions
University of Toronto
A psycholinguistic View
Thomas Bever, The study of language cycles in vivo and in vitro
Roeland Hancock, University of Arizona,
& Montse Sanz, KobeUniversity
Description of/Motivation for the book
On April 25th and 26th 2008, a Workshop on the Linguistic Cycle took place at ArizonaStateUniversity 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 ( 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 linguistswho 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:Chapter authors decide if they want to contribute to the volume
May 30:Proposal to Benjamins with ToC and length specification
August 30:Submit the first version to Elly
October 30: Deadline for internal review of two papers by each of you.
(This helps the thematic integrity of the volume)
2009
February 28:Final submission of manuscripts to Elly
April 30: Review of the finished manuscript by an external reviewer
(or two).
June 30: Final version to go to Benjamins
E-mails of the contributors:
; ;; Aryeh Faltz; ; ; ; ; ;;; ; ; ;;