Previous Seasons Meetings

The purpose of this talk is to celebrate the scholarship of Dr Margaret (Meg) Laing (1953–2023). Meg spent most of her academic career as a Research Fellow in the University of Edinburgh. She and I carried out our activities in a research unit (currently the Angus McIntosh Centre for Historical Linguistics) dedicated to carrying on work begun by Angus McIntosh and M.L. Samuels relating to the dialectology of written Middle English. This had resulted in A Linguistic Atlas of Late Mediaeval English 1350–1450 (LALME), published first in 1986. Meg had contributed to LALME through her PhD thesis on the mediaeval dialectology of Lincolnshire, acquiring knowledge and skills on which she built for her subsequent work in Historical Dialectology. This was centred on A Linguistic Atlas of Early Middle English 1150–1325 (LAEME), published (2008, 2013). This was followed up by the Corpus of Narrative Etymologies (CoNE, 2013), compiled in collaboration with Professor Roger Lass (University of Cape Town) and Dr Rhona Alcorn (University of Edinburgh). CoNE is aimed at explaining the etymology of every orthographic form recorded in the lexico–grammatically tagged corpus which forms the data-base for LAEME. These large-scale works served as the well for a large number of articles dealing with problems of scripts, orthography and textual transmission in manuscripts containing Early Middle English. With Roger Lass, Meg developed the concept of Litteral and Potestatic Substitution Sets for interpreting complex orthographic systems of scribal languages. Meg and Professor Michael Benskin (University of Oslo) also edited a revision of LALME to create a freely available on-line version (eLALME, 2013). She was also an enthusiastic and valued consultant to the Oxford English Dictionary, which work she carried on after her retirement in 2013.

I will outline the concepts and methodologies of LALME, LAEME and CoNE, especially how Meg developed the methodologies for the Historical Dialectology of a mediaeval vernacular in the making of LAEME and for interpretation of complex orthographic systems. I will offer two examples of how the LAEME data might be further investigated and exploited.

North-Eastern Neo-Aramaic (NENA) is the largest remaining branch of the Aramaic language family (Semitic/Afroasiatic), although most surviving dialects are now endangered. The immense dialectal diversity, documented with increasing urgency in the last three decades, allows one to trace the emergence of new grammatical forms at different stages of grammaticalization.

One of these involves a prefix (QAM-, dialectal variants qam-, k?m-, q?m-, g?m- etc.) which apparently converts a present subjunctive into a past perfective. It exists alongside another, older past perfective form, but in many dialects the newer form with QAM- has become specialized for pronominal object indexing (the older form usually cannot take a full set of pronominal object suffixes).

Scholars since the 19th century have offered a variety of theories as to the origin of this strange tense-aspect marker. One theory, which I will develop, is that it originates in the NENA verb-form qay?m ‘he gets up’, used as a historic present (i.e. in lively oral narrative). This was proposed by Pennacchietti (1994, 1997), supported by historical, dialectal and cross-linguistic evidence, including the Catalan go-past vaig cantar ‘I sang’. Recently Fassberg (2015) has argued against this theory and proposed that the k?m- variant originates in a metanalysis of the indicative prefix k- (also in a historic present function) before the initial m- of certain verbs, with epenthetic vowel (i.e. k?-m- > k?m-).

The present paper will evaluate the theories, as well as show that the criticisms of Pennacchietti’s proposal are not well-founded. It will further bring new NENA data (both historical textual evidence and newly documented dialectal data) and cross-linguistic evidence from Romance and other language families which support a grammaticalization path from qay?m ‘he gets up’ as part of a serial verb construction used as a narrative technique. It will also show how verbs cognate to qay?m have been grammaticalized as discourse markers in other Semitic languages, most likely through a similar scenario (though with a different end result). The Neo-Aramaic case throws light upon how such grammaticalization paths work, as well as the particular circumstances under which the gram could be recycled for an additional use in facilitating object-indexing on the verb.

References
Fassberg, Steven E. 2015.‘The Origin of the Periphrastic Preterite k?m/qam-qa??lle in North-Eastern Neo-Aramaic.’ In Geoffrey Khan and Lidia Napiorkowska (eds), Neo-Aramaic and its Linguistic Context. Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press. 172–186.
Pennacchietti, Fabrizio A. 1994. ‘I preverbi del passato in semitici’. In V. Brugnatelli (ed.), Sem Cam Iafet. Atti della 7a Giornata di Studi Camito-Semitici e Indoeuropei (Milano, 1 giugno 1993), Milano 1994: Centro Studi Camito-Semitici. 133–150.
Pennacchietti, Fabrizio A. 1997. ‘On the etymology of the Neo-Aramaic particle qam/kim’ [in Hebrew]. In Moshe Bar-Asher (ed.), Gideon Goldenberg Festschrift (Massorot: Studies in Language Traditions and Jewish Languages 9–11). Jerusalem: Magnes, 475–82.

How do we adapt our grammar to communicate social detail? Do all working class people have a local dialect or are we able to adapt our language to communicate more subtle things about ourselves and our utterances? This talk seeks to answer these questions. Using data from an ethnographic study of high school girls, it demonstrates that we use grammatical variation to communicate alignments and to construct our social style or social identity. However, how and why we adapt our language is governed by our place in the social order. Engaging real life examples will show that grammatical variants, like negative concord (e.g. I didn’t do nothing to mean ‘I didn’t do anything’), have multiple interactional functions, but different people are more or less able (and more or less willing) to make use of these functions. This talk argues that, to truly understand how language works, we need to examine how three types of meaning – referential, pragmatic and social – interact. Understanding this spectrum of meaning (and its role in language acquisition) has implications for linguistic theory, but it has educational implications too, given that educational policy frequently asks young people to change their language style on demand. 

Despite intonation’s relevance for understanding speech, language, and communication, its study is often neglected or reduced to atheoretical phonetic measurements. In the first part of the talk, I will briefly cover the nature and functions of intonation and discuss the reasons why it is often seen as challenging and difficult to study, leading to the aforementioned reductionist approaches. In the second part, I will showcase the ways in which in my research, I try to address these challenges by presenting two complementary studies on the phonological status of high and rising accents (H* and L+H* respectively, in AM terms) in the intonation system of Southern British English. The presence of distinct high and rising accents has been disputed in treatises of English intonation for at least a century, while recent empirical studies provide equally inconclusive evidence. Here, I will present findings on the phonetic nature and information-related function of these accents in spontaneous speech, and present experimental results showing that individual cognitive styles affect how high and rising accents are processed by native speakers. Finally, I will discuss how the combined evidence from production and perception can shed light on this long disputed accentual contrast.

Causative and perception verbs are highly promiscuous in Romance languages, often permitting many different kinds of reduced non-finite complements. A cross-linguistic comparison reveals that there are nonetheless robust patterns here, with agentive perception verbs permitting only larger Exceptional Case Marking complements and causative verbs tending to permit only smaller clause union complements, and permissive and non-agentive perception verbs sandwiched between these two extremes (see Davies 1995, Soares da Silva 2005). A consideration of long passivisation of these verbs further shows, however, that even complements which appear alike on the surface can behave differently with respect to passivisation both within and across languages. I offer an overview of long passivisation in French, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese and argue that we can nonetheless find patterns in this apparent chaos. Long passives are permitted either where the complements of these verbs are very small (VPs) or where they are large enough to contain a grammatical subject position (TP). Passivisation is blocked where the complements are phasal VoicePs and this follows for principled reasons if we adopt the analysis developed by Sheehan & Cyrino (2022) based on Chomsky’s (2001) Phase Theory.