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Copyright of Diachronica is the property of John Benjamins Publishing Co. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Prior to widespread contact with Russian, Khanty (Uralic; Finno-Ugric) did not have overt conjunctions or phrasal coordination. Instead, Khanty texts from the late 19th–early 20th centuries only include examples of conjunction-less clausal juxtaposition, which was used for both clausal and phrasal coordination. By comparing Khanty texts over the 20th century, we trace the emergence of overt conjunctions and coordination of phrasal constituents. We show that overt conjunctions first appeared in the context of clausal coordination, followed by coordination of smaller phrases. Based on novel elicitation data, we demonstrate that, in contemporary Khanty, (i) overt conjunctions are commonplace, (ii) coordinated clausal constituents may be derived via phrasal coordination or clausal coordination with conjunction reduction/ellipsis, but (iii) ellipsis of syntactic heads is banned (nouns & postpositions) or dispreferred (verbs). Based on this diachronic picture, we conclude that the coordination of phrasal constituents only emerged in Khanty once overt conjunctions became available. We derive this correlation from the Maximize On-line Processing principle (Hawkins 2004), and show that this maxim, usually invoked in the context of speech planning and production, can be successfully applied to modelling language change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the emergence of the partitive case in the three western-most branches of the Uralic language family, which are Saamic and Finnic in North Europe, and Mordvinic in Central Russia. The Finnic languages represent the outer edge of development in the partitive from an earlier ablative case, which used to manifest 'source', a specific property of spatial relations. In Finnic the partitive case is a multifunctional and conceptually distinct case, an inflectional category which has developed highly specific functions in object marking, negative phrase and as a case of non-canonical subject. Traces of this development are found in Saamic and Mordvinic as well, whereas other Uralic languages don't share this kind of secondary development and functional extension. The development of this particular affix consists of several stages, special bottlenecks, enhancing functional properties and triggering the reanalysis of an inherited affix *-ta/-tä. This article focuses on the diachrony of this particular affix with special emphasis on western Uralic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Diachronica is the property of John Benjamins Publishing Co. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The Amele language of Papua New Guinea is one of many Trans-New Guinea languages spoken in Papua New Guinea. Amele has a negator 'qee' ('q' represents a voiced dorso-labiovelar plosive), which follows the element negated. Yet, while having verb conjugations for persons and numbers, Amele has no negative conjugation in the present tense. Typologically, some other languages, for example, Finnish, also exhibit negative conjugations of verbs, but these behaviors of the negations differ in interesting ways. This contrastive study investigates the negation of grammars in Amele (Papua New Guinea) and Finnish (Finland, Uralic), by comparing negative particles and negative verb conjugations in both of these languages, while clarifying their morphological behaviors. As such, the study describes Amele's and Finnish's positive-negative and present/past distinctions through their verbal morphologies and through their functional markedness in past tenses, ultimately observing these functional points in the languages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The morphological expression of non-verbal predication is a geographically widespread, although not very frequent, typological feature. This paper highlights the existence of two radically contrasting types of non-verbal predicative inflection. Construction A has already been described in the literature. It consists of attaching person-sensitive inflection markers to non-verbal predicates, possibly extending this treatment to adverbs and adverbial phrases (locational and temporal), pronouns and quantifiers. This type is well attested in Uralic, Turkic, and Paleosiberian, as well as in some Amazonian language families (most notably Chicham), but it has also been pointed out for some sparse languages of Oceania and Africa. Such non-verbal person inflections diachronically stem from incorporation of conjugated copula elements. Construction B, by contrast, is much rarer and is described here for the first time. It also consists of a dedicated morphological form of the non-verbal predicate (limited, however, to nouns and adjectives), but such form stands out as morphologically lighter than any other form to be found in nouns or adjectives in argument or attribute position. While the latter forms carry some kind of case marker, the noun/adjective predicate merely consists (or historically did) of the word's root. This type of construction can be found in the small Zamucoan family and still survives in some Tupí-Guaraní languages. Diachronic inspection of Semitic indicates, however, that this predicative strategy was possibly adopted in some ancient varieties, although at later stages it intertwined with the expression of referential specificity. The paper compares the two construction types, highlighting similarities and differences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article shows that Yukaghir underwent a regular sound change whereby all word-internal and word-final w phonemes became j, probably in Early Proto-Yukaghir. After degemination had occurred, possibly in Middle Proto-Yukaghir, any j in an intervocalic position of disyllabic roots was followed by an epenthetic l, as it still is in the modern Yukaghir languages. Palatalization, labialization, uvularization, and assimilative effects finally formed the Late Proto-Yukaghir forms from which the modern languages have arisen. Word-class prosody controls epenthesis, vowel lengthening, and any further word-final vowel changes. Identifying these historical processes also strengthens the evidence that Yukaghir is genealogically related to Uralic. The Uralic and Yukaghiric correspondences are carefully analyzed as to phonology and semantics, resulting in over fifty new or revised cognate suggestions. Further, Yukaghiric shows a trend towards a reduction of the number of root syllables in the comparison. The semi-vowel w remained unchanged word-initially in Tundra Yukaghir and has thus been a continuous part of the Yukaghir phonemic register. Lexemes containing the semi-vowel w found in modern Yukaghir in word-internal and final positions arose from other sources only after the semi-vowel alternation sound change rule. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper first presents a little-known language, Mokša, belonging to the Uralic family, and investigates adverbs as they were listed in the first linguistic description of Mokša published by Ahlquist in 1861. It is shown that originally all adverbial forms in Mokša were motivated and transparent derivatives of deictics, adjectives and nouns. There apparently did not exist primary adverbs, unanalyzable in the synchronic system of Proto-Mokša. The unanalyzable adverbs stem from recent borrowings taken from Russian and Turkic languages. This situation opens the way toward a kind of lexical utopia where there would exist no primary unanalyzable adverbial form in a language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Diachronica is the property of John Benjamins Publishing Co. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)