Abstract words such as Fr. livraison ‘delivery’, It. fedeltà ‘faithfulness’, Sp. semejanza ‘resemblance’, belong to the word class of nouns. They do not possess materiality and therefore lack sensory perceivability. Within the spectrum of nouns, abstract nouns are located on the opposite side of proper names; between them, there are common nouns, collective nouns, and mass nouns. Abstract nouns are in part non-count and not able to be pluralized.
In terms of meaning, there is typically a threefold division in groups: (a) Action/result nouns (e.g., Fr. lavage ‘washing’, It. giuramento ‘oath’, Sp. mordedura ‘bite’); (b) Quality nouns (e.g., Fr. dignité ‘dignity’, It. biancore ‘whiteness’, Sp. modestia ‘modesty’); and (c) Status nouns (e.g., Fr. episcopat ‘episcopate’, It. cuginanza ‘cousinhood’, Sp. almirantazgo ‘admiralship’). From a purely morphological standpoint, a classification of abstract nouns according to derivation basis appears suitable: (a) (primary) denominal abstract nouns (e.g., Fr. duché ‘dukedom’, It. linguaggio ‘language’, Sp. añada ‘vintage’); (b) (primary) deadjectival abstract nouns (e.g., Fr. folie ‘madness’, It. bellezza ‘beauty’, Sp. cortesía ‘courtesy’); and (c) (primary) deverbal abstract nouns (e.g., Fr. mouvement ‘movement’, It. scrittura ‘writing’, Sp. venganza ‘revenge’). Other abstract nouns arise from conversion, for example, Fr. le devoir ‘duty’, It. il freddo ‘coldness’, Sp. el cambio ‘change’.
In light of this, the question of how far the formation of abstract nouns in Romance languages follows Latin patterns (derivation with suffixes) or whether new processes emerge is of particular interest. In addition, the individual Romance languages display different preferences in choosing abstract-forming morphological processes. On the one hand, there is a large number of Latin abstract-forming suffixes whose outcomes preserve the same function in the Romance languages, such as -ía (astrología ‘astrology’), -ura (scriptura ‘writing’), -ĭtia (pigrĭtia ‘sloth’), -io (oratio ‘speaking’). Furthermore, there is a group of Latin suffixes that gave rise to suffixes deriving abstract nouns only in Romance. Among these are, for example, -aticu (Fr. péage ‘road toll’, Sp. hallazgo ‘discovery’), -aceu (Sp. cuchillazo ‘knife thrust’), -aria (Sp. borrachera ‘drunkenness’, It. vecchiaia ‘old age’). On the other hand, suffixless processes of abstract noun formation are coming to full fruition only in Romance: The conversion of past participles (e.g., Fr. vue ‘sight’, It. dormita ‘sleep’, Sp. llegada ‘arrival’) is of special importance. The conversion of infinitives to nouns with abstract meaning is least common in Modern French (e.g., penser ‘thought’) and most common in Romanian (iertare ‘pardon’, durere ‘pain’, etc.). Deverbal noun formation without suffixes (Fr. amende ‘fine’, It. carica ‘charge’, Sp. socorro ‘help’, etc.), in contrast, is known to have developed a broad pan-Romance geographic spread.
Article
Franz Rainer
All languages seem to have nouns and verbs, while the dimension of the class of adjectives varies considerably cross-linguistically. In some languages, verbs or, to a lesser extent, nouns take over the functions that adjectives fulfill in Indo-European languages. Like other such languages, Latin and the Romance languages have a rich category of adjectives, with a well-developed inventory of patterns of word formation that can be used to enrich it. There are about 100 patterns in Romance standard languages. The semantic categories expressed by adjectival derivation in Latin have remained remarkably stable in Romance, despite important changes at the level of single patterns. To some extent, this stability is certainly due to the profound process of relatinization that especially the Romance standard languages have undergone over the last 1,000 years; however, we may assume that it also reflects the cognitive importance of the semantic categories involved. Losses were mainly due to phonological attrition (Latin unstressed suffixes were generally doomed) and to the fact that many derived adjectives became nouns via ellipsis, thereby often reducing the stock of adjectives. At the same time, new adjectival patterns arose as a consequence of language contact and through semantic change, processes of noun–adjective conversion, and the transformation of evaluative suffixes into ethnic suffixes. Overall, the inventory of adjectival patterns of word formation is richer in present-day Romance languages than it was in Latin.
Article
Rajend Mesthrie
Four types of English exist in Africa, identifiable in terms of history, functions, and linguistic characteristics. West African Pidgin English has a history going back to the 15th century, 400 years before formal colonization. Creole varieties of English have a history going back to repatriation of slaves from the Caribbean and the United States in the 19th century. Second language varieties, which are the most widespread on the continent, are prototypically associated with British colonization and its education systems. L1 (First language) English occurred mostly in Southern and East Africa, and is best represented in South Africa. The latter shows significant similarities with the other major Southern Hemisphere varieties of English in Australia and New Zealand. All four subgroups of English are growing in numbers.
Article
Marc-Olivier Hinzelin
Allomorphy and syncretism are both deviations from the one-to-one relationship between form and meaning inside the linguistic sign as postulated by Saussure as well as from the ideal of inflectional morphology as stipulated in the canonical approach by Corbett. Instances of both phenomena are well documented in all Romance languages. In inflection, allomorphy refers to the use of more than one root/stem in the paradigm of a single lexeme or to the existence of more than one inflectional affix for the same function. Syncretism describes the existence of identical forms with different functions in one and the same paradigm.
Verbs exhibiting stem allomorphy are traditionally called irregular, a label that describes the existence of unexpected and, sometimes, unpredictable forms from a learner’s perspective. Extreme forms of allomorphy are called suppletion, for which traditional accounts require two or more etymologically unrelated roots/stems to coexist within the paradigm of a single lexeme. Allomorphy often originates in sound change affecting only stems in a certain phonological environment. When the phonological conditioning of the stem allomorph disappears, which is frequently the case, its distribution within the paradigm may become purely morphological, thus constituting a morphome in the sense of Aronoff.
Recurrent patterns of syncretism may also be considered morphomes. Whereas syncretism was quite rare in Latin verb morphology, Romance languages feature it to much greater, if different, degrees. In extreme cases, syncretism patterns become paradigm-structuring in many Gallo-Romance varieties, as is the case in the verb morphology of standard French, where almost all forms are syncretic with at least one other.
Article
George Starostin
“Altaic” is a common term applied by linguists to a number of language families, spread across Central Asia and the Far East and sharing a large, most likely non-coincidental, number of structural and morphemic similarities. At the onset of Altaic studies, these similarities were ascribed to the one-time existence of an ancestral language—“Proto-Altaic,” from which all these families are descended; circumstantial evidence and glottochronological calculations tentatively date this language to some time around the 6th–7th millennium bc, and suggest Southern Siberia or adjacent territories (hence the name “Altaic”) as the original homeland of its speakers. However, since the mid-20th century the dominant view in historical linguistics has shifted to that of an “Altaic Sprachbund” (diffusion area), implying that the families in question have not sprung from a common source, but rather have acquired their similarities over a long period of mutual linguistic contact. The bulk of “Altaic” has traditionally included such uncontroversial families as Turkic, Mongolic, and Manchu-Tungusic; additionally, Japanese (Japonic) and Korean are also frequently seen as potential members of the larger Altaic family (the entire five branches are sometimes referred to as “Macro-Altaic”).
The debate over the nature of the relationship between the various units that constitute “Altaic,” sometimes referred to as “the Altaic controversy,” has been one of the most hotly debated topics in 20th-century historical linguistics and a major focal point of studies dealing with the prehistory of Central and East Eurasia. Supporters of “Proto-Altaic,” commonly known as “(pro-)Altaicists,” claim that only divergence from an original common ancestor can account for the observed regular phonetic correspondences and other structural similarities, whereas “anti-Altaicists,” without denying the existence of such similarities, insist that they do not belong to the “core” layers of the respective languages and are therefore better explained as results of lexical borrowing and other forms of areal linguistic contact.
As a rule, “pro-Altaicists” claim that “Proto-Altaic” is as reconstructible by means of the classic comparative method as any uncontroversial linguistic family; in support of this view, they have produced several attempts to assemble large bodies of etymological evidence for the hypothesis, backed by systems of regular phonetic correspondences between compared languages. All of these, however, have been heavily criticized by “anti-Altaicists” for lack of methodological rigor, implausibility of proposed phonetic and/or semantic changes, and confusion of recent borrowings with items allegedly inherited from a common ancestor. Despite the validity of many of these objections, it remains unclear whether they are sufficient to completely discredit the hypothesis of a genetic connection between the various branches of “Altaic,” which continues to be actively supported by a small, but stable scholarly minority.
Article
David Fertig
Analogy is traditionally regarded as one of the three main factors responsible for language change, along with sound change and borrowing. Whereas sound change is understood to be phonetically motivated and blind to structural patterns and semantic and functional relationships, analogy is licensed precisely by those patterns and relationships. In the Neogrammarian tradition, analogical change is regarded, at least largely, as a by-product of the normal operation (acquisition, representation, and use) of the mental grammar. Historical linguists commonly use proportional equations of the form A : B = C : X to represent analogical innovations, where A, B, and C are (sets of) word forms known to the innovator, who solves for X by discerning a formal relationship between A and B and then deductively arriving at a form that is related to C in the same way that B is related to A.
Along with the core type of analogical change captured by proportional equations, most historical linguists include a number of other phenomena under the analogy umbrella. Some of these, such as paradigm leveling—the reduction or elimination of stem alternations in paradigms—are arguably largely proportional, but others such as contamination and folk etymology seem to have less to do with the normal operation of the mental grammar and instead involve some kind of interference among the mental representations of phonetically or semantically similar forms.
The Neogrammarian approach to analogical change has been criticized and challenged on a variety of grounds, and a number of important scholars use the term “analogy” in a rather different sense, to refer to the role that phonological and/or semantic similarity play in the influence that forms exert on each other.
Article
Alexandru Nicolae
The loss of inflectional case marking in the passage from Latin to the Romance languages was accompanied by a profusion of analytic strategies of argument marking in Romance. The phenomenon of analytic marking of grammatical dependencies of arguments on their head is not limited to the usage of functional prepositions but also involves the emergence of non-prepositional freestanding markers (some of which take part in mixed, analytic and synthetic, marking). Furthermore, Romance languages display complex alternative strategies of encoding grammatical relations (differential object marking and clitic doubling), the emergence of which is unquestionably related to the changes in the system of case marking and to the subtle move away from dependent marking to head marking.
This article represents an extensive survey of the non-inflectional markers (prepositional constructions marking genitive, partitive, and dative relations; non-prepositional freestanding markers; mixed marking) as well as of some more complex alternative strategies of encoding grammatical relations (differential object marking and clitic doubling), placing emphasis on the markers themselves and on their distribution. From a broader historical perspective, the emergence and consolidation of the non-inflectional strategies of marking grammatical dependencies are reflexes of the change in the head-directionality parameter (head-final in Latin to head-initial in Romance), besides the transition from dependent-marking to head-marking.
The article looks both at standard Romance varieties and at dialects and places emphasis on issues less explored in the reference literature (e.g., the non-prepositional freestanding markers found in the historical dialects of Romanian or the phenomenon of mixed marking, where inflectional and non-inflectional markers co-occur within the same construction).
Article
Adina Dragomirescu
Balkan-Romance is represented by Romanian and its historical dialects: Daco-Romanian (broadly known as Romanian), Aromanian, Megleno-Romanian, and Istro-Romanian (see article “Morphological and Syntactic Variation and Change in Romanian” in this encyclopedia). The external history of these varieties is often unclear, given the historical events that took place in the Lower Danubian region: the conquest of this territory by the Roman Empire for a short period and the successive Slavic invasions. Moreover, the earliest preserved writing in Romanian only dates from the 16th century. Between the Roman presence in the Balkans and the first attested text, there is a gap of more than 1,000 years, a period in which Romanian emerged, the dialectal separation took place, and the Slavic influence had effects especially on the lexis of Romanian.
In the 16th century, in the earliest old Romanian texts, the language already displayed the main features of modern Romanian: the vowels /ə/ and /ɨ/; the nominative-accusative versus genitive-dative case distinction; analytical case markers, such as the genitive marker al; the functional prepositions a and la; the proclitic genitive-dative marker lui; the suffixal definite article; polydefinite structures; possessive affixes; rich verbal inflection, with both analytic and synthetic forms and with three auxiliaries (‘have’, ‘be’, and ‘want’); the supine, not completely verbalized at the time; two types of infinitives, with the ‘short’ one on a path toward becoming verbal and the ‘long’ one specializing as a noun; null subjects; nonfinite verb forms with lexical subjects; the mechanism for differential object marking and clitic doubling with slightly more vacillating rules than in the present-day language; two types of passives; strict negative concord; the SVO and VSO word orders; adjectives placed mainly in the postnominal position; a rich system of pronominal clitics; prepositions requiring the accusative and the genitive; and a large inventory of subordinating conjunctions introducing complement clauses.
Most of these features are also attested in the trans-Danubian varieties (Aromanian, Megleno-Romanian, and Istro-Romanian), which were also strongly influenced by the various languages they have entered in direct contact with: Greek, Albanian, Macedonian, Croatian, and so forth. These source languages have had a major influence in the vocabulary of the trans-Danubian varieties and certain consequences in the shape of their grammatical system. The differences between Daco-Romanian and the trans-Danubian varieties have also resulted from the preservation of archaic features in the latter or from innovations that took place only there.
Article
Maarten Kossmann
Since the start of the Islamic conquest of the Maghreb in the 7th century ce, Berber and Arabic have been in continual contact. This has led to large-scale mutual influence. The sociolinguistic setting of this influence is not the same, though; Arabic influence on Berber is found in a situation of language maintenance with widespread bilingualism, while Berber influence on Arabic is no doubt to a large degree due to language shift by Berber speakers to Arabic.
Linguistic influence is found on all levels: phonology, morphology, syntax, and lexicon. In those cases where only innovative patterns are shared between the two language groups, it is often difficult to make out where the innovation started; thus the great similarities in syllable structure between Maghrebian Arabic and northern Berber are the result of innovations within both language families, and it is difficult to tell where it started. Morphological influence seems to be mediated exclusively by lexical borrowing. Especially in Berber, this has led to parallel systems in the morphology, where native words always have native morphology, while loans either have nativized morphology or retain Arabic-like patterns. In the lexicon, it is especially Berber that takes over scores of loanwords from Arabic, amounting in one case to over one-third of the basic lexicon as defined by 100-word lists.
Article
Miriam Butt
Indo-Aryan languages have the longest documented historical record, with the earliest attested texts going back to 1900 bce. Old Indo-Aryan (Vedic, Sanskrit) had an inflectional case-marking system where nominatives functioned as subjects. Objects could be realized via several different case markers (depending on semantic and structural factors), but not the nominative. This inflectional system was lost over the course of several centuries during Middle Indo-Aryan, resulting in just a nominative–oblique inflectional distinction. The New Indo-Aryan languages innovated case markers and developed new case-marking systems. Like in Old Indo-Aryan, case is systematically used to express semantic differences via differential object marking constructions. However, unlike in Old Indo-Aryan, many of the New Indo-Aryan languages are ergative and all allow for non-nominative subjects, most prominently for experiencer subjects. Objects, on the other hand, can now also be unmarked (nominative), usually participating in differential object marking. The case-marking patterns within New Indo-Aryan and across time have given rise to a number of debates and analyses. The most prominent of these include issues of case alignment and language change, the distribution of ergative vs. accusative vs. nominative case, and discussions of markedness and differential case marking.
Article
Alexandru Nicolae
Case-marking is subject to several important developments in the passage from Latin to the Romance languages. With respect to synthetic marking, nouns and adjectives witness considerable simplification, leading (with some exceptions, i.e., the binary case systems) to the almost complete disappearance of inflectional case-marking, while pronouns continue to show consistent inflectional case-marking. In binary case systems, case distinctions are also marked in the inflection of determiners. Inflectional simplification is compensated for by the profusion of analytic and mixed case-marking strategies and by alternative strategies of encoding grammatical relations.
Article
Alessandro De Angelis
Although respective Central (= CIDs) and Southern (= SIDs) Italo-Romance dialects display peculiar linguistic features, they also share a substantial number of common isoglosses such that they can be classified as two subdivisions of the same geolinguistic unit. Some of these are simply represented by the absence of Tuscan features, such as diphthongization in open syllable or anaphonesis. Other features are idiosyncratic and are discussed within the main body of this article, such as: (a) the different types of vowel systems; (b) the two main patterns of metaphony; (c) propagation; (d) phonosyntactic doubling that is not sensitive to stress. Regarding the morphological phenomena present in these varieties, the encliticization of possessives and the loss of both of the future indicative and the present subjunctive will be discussed. With regard to (morpho)syntax, these varieties are known for: (a) the rise of a mass neuter (neo-neuter) class of nouns; (b) an alternating gender value; (c) the extensive use of a dedicated marker to encode the accusative case in highly referential nouns; (d) dual complementizer systems; (e) split intransitivity in auxiliary systems; (f) extensive participial agreement (as well as similar agreement in manner adjectives); and, (g) pseudo-coordination, among other notable phenomena.
Article
Marcin Kilarski and Marc Allassonnière-Tang
Classifiers are partly grammaticalized systems of classification of nominal referents. The choice of a classifier can be based on such criteria as animacy, sex, material, and function as well as physical properties such as shape, size, and consistency. Such meanings are expressed by free or bound morphemes in a variety of morphosyntactic contexts, on the basis of which particular subtypes of classifiers are distinguished. These include the most well-known numeral classifiers which occur with numerals or quantifiers, as in Mandarin Chinese yí liàng chē (one clf.vehicle car) ‘one car’. The other types of classifiers are found in contexts other than quantification (noun classifiers), in possessive constructions (possessive classifiers), in verbs (verbal classifiers), as well as with deictics (deictic classifiers) and in locative phrases (locative classifiers). Classifiers are found in languages of diverse typological profiles, ranging from the analytic languages of Southeast Asia and Oceania to the polysynthetic languages of the Americas. Classifiers are also found in other modalities (i.e., sign languages and writing systems).
Along with grammatical gender, classifiers constitute one of the two main types of nominal classification. Although classifiers and gender differ in some ways, with the presence of a classifier not being reflected in agreement (i.e., the form of associated words), in others they exhibit common patterns. Thus, both types of nominal classification markers contribute to the expansion of the lexicon and the organization of discourse. Shared patterns also involve common paths of evolution, as illustrated by the grammaticalization of classifier systems into gender systems. In turn, particular types of classifiers resemble various means of lexical categorization found in non-classifier languages, including measure words, class terms, as well as semantic agreement between the verb and direct object. All these three means of classification can be viewed in terms of a continuum of grammaticalization, ranging from lexical means to partly grammaticalized classifiers and to grammaticalized gender systems.
Although evidence of classifiers in non-Indo-European languages has been available since the 16th century, it was only the end of the 20th century that saw a formative stage in their study. Since then, classifier systems have offered fascinating insights into the diversity of language structure, including such key phenomena as categorization, functionality, grammaticalization, and the distinction between lexicon and grammar as well as the language-internal and external factors underlying the evolution of morphosyntactic complexity.
Article
Ulrich Detges
Cognitive semantics (CS) is an approach to the study of linguistic meaning. It is based on the assumption that the human linguistic capacity is part of our cognitive abilities, and that language in general and meaning in particular can therefore be better understood by taking into account the cognitive mechanisms that control the conceptual and perceptual processing of extra-linguistic reality. Issues central to CS are (a) the notion of prototype and its role in the description of language, (b) the nature of linguistic meaning, and (c) the functioning of different types of semantic relations. The question concerning the nature of meaning is an issue that is particularly controversial between CS on the one hand and structuralist and generative approaches on the other hand: is linguistic meaning conceptual, that is, part of our encyclopedic knowledge (as is claimed by CS), or is it autonomous, that is, based on abstract and language-specific features? According to CS, the most important types of semantic relations are metaphor, metonymy, and different kinds of taxonomic relations, which, in turn, can be further broken down into more basic associative relations such as similarity, contiguity, and contrast. These play a central role not only in polysemy and word formation, that is, in the lexicon, but also in the grammar.
Article
Wiltrud Mihatsch
Just like other semantic subtypes of nouns such as event nouns or agent nouns, collectives may be morphologically opaque lexemes, but they are also regularly derived in many languages. Perhaps not a word-formation category as productive as event nouns or agent nouns, collective nouns still represent a category associated with particular means of word formation, in the case of the Romance languages by means of derivational suffixes. The Romance languages all have suffixes for deriving collectives, but only very few go directly back to Latin. In most cases, they evolve from other derivational suffixes via metonymic changes of individual derived nouns, notably event nouns and quality nouns. Due to the ubiquity of these changes, series of semantically and morphologically equivalent collectives trigger functional changes of the suffixes themselves, which may then acquire collective meaning. Most of these suffixes are pan-Romance, in many cases going back to very early changes, or to inter-Romance loans. The different Romance languages have overlapping inventories of suffixes, with different degrees of productivity and different semantic niches. The ease of transition from event or quality noun to collective also explains why only few suffixes are exclusively used for the derivation of collective nouns.
Article
Franz Rainer
Compounding in the narrow sense of the term, that is, leaving aside so-called syntagmatic compounds like pomme de terre ‘potato’, is a process of word formation that creates new lexemes by combining more than one lexeme according to principles different from those of syntax. New lexemes created according to ordinary syntactic principles are by some called syntagmatic compounds, also juxtapositions in the Romance tradition since Darmesteter. In a diachronically oriented article such as this one, it is convenient to take into consideration both types of compounding, since most patterns of compounding in Romance have syntactic origins. This syntactic origin is responsible for the fact that the boundaries between compounding and syntax continue to be fuzzy in modern Romance varieties, the precise delimitation being very much theory-dependent (for a discussion based on Portuguese, cf. Rio-Torto & Ribeiro, 2009). Whether some Latin patterns of compounding might, after all, have come down to the Romance languages through the popular channel of transmission continues to be controversial. There can be no doubt, however, that most of them were doomed.
Article
Christopher Pountain
Definition of the copula as a discrete grammatical category is problematic. It is the semantically unmarked copulas (simple equivalents of the English verb ‘to be’) which deserve most attention in a comparison of the Romance languages; they have a typically suppletive historical morphology and are often the result of the grammaticalization of full lexical verbs, the point at which true unmarked copular status is achieved being sometimes difficult to identify. The unmarked copulas of the Ibero-Romance languages (Spanish, Portuguese, and Catalan) have the most complex distribution and have proved the most difficult to account for synchronically.
The situation in the early 21st century is the consequence of a progressive encroachment of the reflexes of Latin stare and other verbs on the functions of Latin esse (reference is made to the Classical Latin form esse for convenience; however, the Romance paradigms must be taken to derive from a Vulgar Latin form *essĕre, into which other verbs, notably sedēre ‘to sit’ in the case of the Ibero-Romance languages, were suppletively incorporated). The contrastive study of the development of cognate copular verbs in closely related languages needs closer attention in regard to the identification of the parameters of copula choice with adjectival complements.
Article
Martin Maiden
Dalmatian is an extinct group of Romance varieties spoken on the eastern Adriatic seaboard, best known from its Vegliote variety, spoken on the island of Krk (also called Veglia). Vegliote is principally represented by the linguistic testimony of its last speaker, Tuone Udaina, who died at the end of the 19th century. By the time Udaina’s Vegliote could be explored by linguists (principally by Matteo Bartoli), it seems that he had no longer actively spoken the language for decades, and his linguistic testimony is imperfect, in that it is influenced for example by the Venetan dialect that he habitually spoke. Nonetheless, his Vegliote reveals various distinctive and recurrent linguistic traits, notably in the domain of phonology (for example, pervasive and complex patterns of vowel diphthongization) and morphology (notably a general collapse of the general Romance inflexional system of tense and mood morphology, but also an unusual type of synthetic future form).
Article
Marcello Barbato
The study of Romance linguistics was born in the 19th-century German university, and like all linguistics of that era it is historical in nature. With respect to Indo-European and Germanic linguistics, a difference was immediately apparent: Unlike Indo-European and Common Germanic, Latin’s attestation is extensive in duration, as well as rich and varied: Romance linguists can thus make use of reconstruction as well as documentation.
Friedrich Diez, author of the first historical grammar and first etymological dictionary on Romance languages, founded Romance linguistics. His studies singlehandedly constructed the foundations of the discipline. His teaching soon spread not only across German-speaking countries, but also into France and Italy.
Subsequently, the most significant contributions came from two scholars trained in the Indo-European field: the German linguist Hugo Schuchardt, whose doctoral thesis studied with sharp theoretical awareness the passage from Latin to the Romance languages, and the Italian Graziadio Isaia Ascoli, who showed how the Romance panorama could be extraordinarily enriched by the analysis of nonstandard varieties.
The discipline thus developed fully and radiated out. Great issues came to be debated: models of linguistic change (genealogical tree, wave), the possibility of distinguishing dialect groups, the relative weight of phonology, and semantics in lexical reconstruction. New disciplines such as linguistic geography were born, and new instruments like the linguistic atlas were forged. Romance linguistics thus became the avant-garde of general linguistics.
Meanwhile, a new synthesis of the discipline had been created by a Swiss scholar, Wilhelm Meyer-Lübke, who published a historical grammar and an etymological dictionary of the Romance languages.
Article
In the process of communication, different expressions in discourse often convey unequal amounts of information: some expressions have rich semantic content, expressing the specific message that the speaker wishes to convey; others seem to be nonsemantic and non-truth-conditional. The latter are not part of the propositional content the message conveys and do not contribute to the meaning of the proposition. These expressions mainly function as a relational operator to connect the propositions in the discourse.
In a sequence of discourse segments S1–S2, such expression usually occurs at the initial position of S2 followed by a phonological break (a comma in writing), i and it does not affect the propositional content of the messages conveyed in the segments of the discourse.
The discourse-functional expressions in language have long been the focus of attention on the part of scholars, and the term “discourse markers” (DMs) (huayu biaoji, in Chinese) has often been used in previous studies. The concept of DMs originated from “recurrent modifiers,” the common modifiers in spoken language proposed by the British linguist Randolph Quirk in the 1950s. He pointed out that “recurrent modifiers” have an important role in information transmission but have no grammatical effect. In the 1980s, DMs gradually became an independent linguistic topic among Western scholars. In the field of Chinese linguistics, from the 21st century onward, the concept of DMs has been examined in depth, and the application of the related theories to the research of Chinese DMs has been the topic of widespread discussion. However, most Chinese studies on DMs are case-based, and therefore systematic and theorized understandings of Chinese DMs have not yet been reached. This article reviews the research status of DMs in recent Western and Chinese linguistic communities, summarizes the studies on the synchronic semantics-pragmatics and diachronic development of Chinese DMs, and reveals issues worthy of further study in the future.
