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101377 results in Language and Linguistics

Page 577 of 5069

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

  • Orin D. Gensler
  • Journal:
    Language / Volume 78 / Issue 4 / December 2002
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    19 February 2026, pp. 710-764

  • 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 synchronic 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 yn/ent/int/ind (thence ultimately Welsh predicative yn) all derive from an article-like demonstrative sindo-/sinto- (and not from a preposition endo/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-à-vis the evolving système of the language, the achieved macrochange is highly unnatural.

  • APROPOS pro

  • Sabine Iatridou, David Embick
  • Journal:
    Language / Volume 73 / Issue 1 / March 1997
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    19 February 2026, pp. 58-78

  • Pro-drop languages have restrictions on the reference of pro not found with the overt pronominals of non-pro-drop languages. In particular, while the overt pronouns of non-pro-drop languages may take clausal antecedents, C/IPs, pro may not take these elements as linguistic antecedents. This restriction on the referential properties of pro follows from a mismatch in Phi-features; pro, which is or is licensed by Phi-features, cannot corefer with a clause, which is Phi-featureless. We discuss implications of our analysis for linguistic theory.

Page 577 of 5069