The Philological Society is the oldest learned society in Great Britain devoted to the scholarly study of language and languages. It is also a registered charity (no. 1014370). It was established in its present form in 1842, consisting partly of members of a society of the same name established at the University of London in 1830 “to investigate and promote the study and knowledge of the structure, the affinities, and the history of languages”. As well as encouraging all aspects of the study of language, PhilSoc has a particular interest in historical and comparative linguistics, and maintains its traditional interest in the structure, development, and varieties of Modern English.
Changes in status and paradigms? On subject pronouns in medieval French
by Michael Zimmermann (University of Konstanz)
This paper addresses the debate on the morpho‐syntactic status of subject pronouns in the pre‐modern stages of the French language by reinvestigating this issue along with that of the number of paradigms of such elements. On the basis of a collection of the various evidence provided in the literature as well as hitherto ignored and novel empirical insights, the paper discusses the different views put forward and essentially argues that, in its medieval stages, French had two paradigms of, respectively, strong and phonologically clitic subject pronouns. From this finding as well as standard assumptions on the modern (standard) stage of the language the paper eventually concludes that, diachronically, French evinces continuity, rather than changes regarding the two issues under investigation.
IE *peug′‐ /*peuk′‐ ‘to pierce’ in Celtic: Old Irish og ‘sharp point’, ogam, and uaigid ‘stitches’, Gallo‐Latin Mars Ugius, Old Welsh ‐ug and Middle Welsh ‐y ‘fist’, Middle Welsh vch ‘fox’, and ancient names like Uccius
by Patrick Sims-Williams (Aberystwyth University)
A systematic search for Celtic derivatives of IE *peug′‐ /*peuk′‐ ‘to pierce’ illustrates the extent to which Indo‐European etymological dictionaries have tended to overlook the existence of cognates in the Celtic languages.
Chinese cleft structures and the dynamics of processing
by Wei Liu (Beijing Jiaotong University) & Ruth Kempson (King’s College London)
This paper addresses the challenge of Chinese cleft structures, involving a pairing of the particles shi and de, which in different combinations display a variety of focus‐related effects and different potentials for ambiguity: clefts and pseudo‐clefts in particular differ only in order of the elements. We argue that retaining conventional assumptions necessarily involves positing unrelated structures and multiple ambiguities, leaving the systematicity of variation unexplained; and we go on to argue that it is only by turning to a dynamic framework in which syntax is defined as mechanisms for incremental build‐up of interpretation that an integrated characterisation of these effects is made possible. Adopting the Dynamic Syntax framework (Cann et al 2005), we argue that shi and de induce procedures for incremental build‐up of construal which feed and can be fed by other such procedures; and we show how the array of effects both in clefts and pseudo‐clefts can be shown to follow from the dynamics of building up interpretation reflecting online processing.
The Status of Passive Constructions in Old English
by Howard Jones (University of Oxford) & Morgan Macleod (University of Cambridge)
In Old English, passive‐type constructions involving a copula and a passive participle could be used to express both events and states. Two different types of copula are found in these constructions: weorðan, meaning ‘become’, and wesan and beon, meaning ‘be’. There has been some dispute as to how the meaning of these copulas relates to the meaning of the construction as a whole, in both its eventive and its stative uses, and whether any of these constructions was grammaticalized in the sense that its meaning was non‐compositional. We propose a semantic model that represents these constructions compositionally and test it against a selected corpus of Old English texts in order to address two questions: whether the data provide evidence of non‐compositional meaning that would suggest grammaticalization, and whether other factors are also responsible for the choice of copula. Our analysis suggests that the attested Old English passives are fully compatible with a compositional analysis; we also discuss additional semantic factors that may be responsible for the lower frequency of passives with weorðan.
Tracing The Development Of An Old Old Story: Intensificatory Repetition In English
by Victorina González‐Díaz (University of Liverpool)
The present paper explores the synchronic distribution and historical development of an intensificatory construction that has so far received little attention in previous literature on English; i.e. what Huddleston and Pullum (2002) label as INTENSIFICATORY REPETITION (e.g. old old story, long long way). Synchronically, the paper records the existence of two functional subtypes of repetitive intensification (affection and degree) and expands previous accounts by showing the functional versatility of the degree intensificatory subtype. At the diachronic level, the paper dates the establishment of (degree) intensificatory repetition to the Late Modern English (LModE) period. It also suggests that (a) intensificatory affection was the first repetitive (sub)type to develop in the language, and (b) that its collocational expansion from Early Modern English (EModE) onwards may have paved the way for the establishment of its degree intensification counterpart.
More generally, the paper shows that formulaic phraseology can contribute to the development of fully productive constructions and advocates the need for further study of ‘minor’ intensificatory constructions (such as the one explored here) and the way in which they may help to refine current standard descriptions of the English Noun Phrase.
Contrastive Feature Hierarchies in Old English Diachronic Phonology
by Elan Dresher (University of Toronto)
This article looks at the origins and uses of contrastive hierarchies in Old English diachronic phonology, with a focus on the development of West Germanic vowel systems. I begin with a rather enigmatic remark in Richard Hogg’s A grammar of Old English (1992), and attempt to trace its provenance. We will find that the trail leads back to analyses by some prominent scholars that make use of contrastive feature hierarchies. However, these analyses often appear without context or supporting framework. I will attempt to provide the missing framework and historical context for these analyses, while showing their value for understanding the development of phonological systems. I will show that behind these apparently isolated analyses there is a substantial theoretical edifice that once held a central role in synchronic as well as diachronic phonological theory, and which is still capable of providing insights into the workings of phonology.
The neogrammarian approach to historical phonology involves propounding sound-change laws and explaining exceptions by means such as sub-laws, rearranging the relative chronology, and appeal to special factors such as analogy, borrowing, incomplete lexical diffusion, and sporadic phenomena like metathesis. Progress is mostly made manually, but in the second half of the 20th century some linguists looked forward to the ‘triumph of the electronic neogrammarian’. Although this hasn’t been realized yet, I’ll argue that there are opportunities to make important advances with comparatively little effort.
This paper will be read at the Philological Society meeting in Cambridge, Selwyn College, Diamond Room, on Saturday, 10 March, 4.15pm.
It is with great sadness that the Society has received news of the death of Matti Rissanen, Professor Emeritus of English Philology at the University of Helsinki, at the age of 80 on 24 January 2018.
A long-time member and supporter of the Philological Society, Matti Rissanen was a pioneer in English historical corpus linguistics, and the director of the project that produced the Helsinki Corpus of English Texts, which covers a thousand years of the history of English and has been used widely since its publication in 1991.
Matti Rissanen was one of the rare scholars to command the history of the English language from its early stages to the present, beginning with his PhD thesis (1967) on the Old English numeral ONE. His wide range of publications includes a number of original articles and several co-edited volumes of corpus-based research, such as Early English in the Computer Age (1993), English in Transition and Grammaticalization at Work (1997), as well as the much cited chapter on ‘Early Modern English syntax’ in The Cambridge History of the English Language (vol. 3, 1999). Also taking an active interest in early American English, he was one of the international team that re-edited the Records of the Salem Witch-Hunt (2009).
His retirement in 2001 did not mark an end to his research activities. His philological expertise made an important contribution to the publication project that resulted in a new Finnish translation of all Shakespeare’s works. One of his long-lasting research interests was the history of English connectives, on which he was working to the very last days of his life.
Active in numerous professional organizations, Matti Rissanen served as president of the Societas Linguistica Europaea and chaired the Board of the International Computer Archive of Modern and Medieval English (ICAME). He was the founder and first director of the Research Unit for Variation, Contacts and Change in English (VARIENG), an Academy of Finland Centre of Excellence from 2000 to 2011. He was also a driving force in the foundation of the Finnish Institute in London and the Language Centre of the University of Helsinki. In recognition of his achievements Matti Rissanen received many awards, including an honorary doctorate of the University of Uppsala, Sweden, and being elected to the Finnish Academy of Science and Letters. He was an Honorary member of the Modern Language Society, the International Society of Anglo-Saxonists, and the Japan Association for English Corpus Studies.
On the personal level, Matti was supervisor to several generations of undergraduate and doctoral students in Helsinki, while providing unfailing encouragement and support to many more students and colleagues both in Finland and abroad. He will be greatly missed by his wide circle of friends.
Anyone who would like to share their memories and recollections of him is invited to do so by adding them as comments (in English or Finnish) to this VARIENG blog post.
This notice has been adapted, with permission, from the notice posted by Matti’s colleagues in Helsinki.
Usage-based theories of language are built on the assumption that our ability to extract and entrench the distributional patterns available in the input enables learners to build a grammar from the ground up. This circumvents the needs for an innate universal grammar. But it does not tell us which patterns are relevant. And it remains customary for linguists to approach the data using linguistic categories—such as Case or Tense, Aspect and Mood—categories that were never intended to reflect the workings of the mind. In this talk, I will argue that it might be better to take the input as starting point and derive categories that resemble those native speakers might derive. Models from Learning Theory can help with this. I will present two case studies that capitalize on a merger of cognitive linguistics and cognitive psychology, and aim to infuse Usage-Based linguistics with insights from Learning Theory … with a little help from computational engineering.
The first case study uses insights from Learning Theory to challenge the idea that theoretical linguistic constructs such as tense, aspect and mood (TAM) predict best how native speakers of Russian read sentences containing verbs meaning to try in real time. Discrimination learning, as implemented in the NDL algorithm, proposes simple 3-letter usage-patterns and predicts the time it takes subjects to read and integrate these verbs into a sentence significantly better than all TAM markers combined.
Contrary to what mainstream (psycho)linguistic models assume, speakers do not (and do not need to) analyse verb forms in terms of abstract linguistic concepts such as tense, aspect and mood when they process language. Instead, they can rely on simple letter sequences that are linked directly to an experience and embed crucial information about that experience (i.e., is it over, ongoing, or coming up; was it something that they completed, or simply did for a while; was it an order). This demonstrates that honouring parsimony (naivety and simplicity) in the structures that are hypothesized to exist, and in the way in which behaviour is explained, is a powerful research stance, in particular for designing cognitively realistic accounts of language knowledge and representation.
The second case study demonstrates how biologically inspired machine learning techniques can pinpoint the essence of native speaker intuitions. Polish boasts fascinating examples of seemingly unmotivated allomorphy, and the genitive singular of masculine inanimate nouns (which can be -a or -u) is its prime example. Criteria for choice have been proposed that are semantic, morphological or phonological in nature, but most of these are unreliable, yielding conflicting predictions (Dąbrowska 2005). Furthermore, although -u occurs with at least twice as many nouns, -a is the default ending for new words entering the language. The NDL algorithm, that implements discrimination learning, predicts the choice between -a and -u better using simple sequences of 3 letters (letter triplets or trigraphs) than models running on richly annotated corpus data. In addition, it explains the unexpected preference of -a as genitive ending for new words in terms of the learnability of words taking the -a ending, their phonological predictability and their contextual (semantic) typicality.
On their own, linguists and psychologists would have approached these questions rather differently and, from within their disciplinary cages, would have arrived at answers that would necessarily have remained partial. Integrative interdisciplinarity, on the other hand, relies on a simultaneous, interspersed methodological endeavour to arrive at more encompassing answers that combine depth of analysis with breadth of explanation. It presupposes mutually complementary theories, shared testable hypotheses as well as compatibility of research methodologies. But what wins the game is a good dose of willingness to question your customary ways of doing things.
A video of the talk can be found below.
This paper was read at the Philological Society meeting in London, SOAS Main Building, Room 116, on Friday, 9 February, 4.15pm.
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