Why Should a Demonstrative Turn into a Preposition? The Evolution of Welsh Predicative yn  

Oleh:

Gensler, Orin D.

Jenis: Article from Journal - ilmiah internasional
Dalam koleksi: Language (ada di JSTOR) vol. 78 no. 4 (2002), page 710-764.
Fulltext: Vol. 78, No. 4, pp. 710-764.pdf (1.3MB)

Isi artikel

This article is devoted to the anatomy of an unnatural syntactic change. It presents the life history of the Welsh predicative particle yn-its diachronic genesis in Indo-European, its syn- chronic status, and (much more centrally) what happened along the way, and why what happened happened specifically in Welsh. Synchronically, I give syntactic, semantic, typological, and textual arguments-some rather new-that both predicative yn and verb-periphrastic yn are adverbializers and count as grammatically polysemous subsenses of the preposition 'in'. Diachronically, I argue that the pan-Celtic adverbializing particles ynlentlintlind (thence ultimately Welsh predicative yn) all derive from an article-like demonstrative *sindo-lsinto- (and not from a preposition *endol ento). Radical categorial changes must therefore have occurred. I trace these changes and motivate a multistage metanalysis (not involving grammaticalization) whereby the original quasi-article first became an adverbializer and then was attracted into the orbit of the preposition 'in'. Though each microstage in the process makes good structural sense vis-a-vis the evolving systeme of the language, the achieved macrochange is highly unnatural.*

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