Category Archives: Historical linguistics

Crysmann on Apparent Reversal in Old French Declension

November 19 & 20, Berthold Crysmann (Paris) visited Frankfurt to give two talks on his joint work with Alain Kihm on Apparent reversal in Old French declension. Berthold and Alain argue that even though the Old French declension looks like a case of reversal, it should better be described in terms of generalizations over various declension classes.

Figure 3 of Crysmann & Kihm (2018)

Berthold’s visit was funded as part of the Paris-Frankfurt network One-to-Many Correspondences in Morphology, Syntax, and Semantics (2017 & 2018). Continue reading Crysmann on Apparent Reversal in Old French Declension

Jonas on the morphosyntax of the verb “think” from a comparative and diachronic perspective

During her visit to Australia, Dianne Jonas is giving two presentations on  her recent work on the diachronic change of the argument pattern of the verb think in a number of Germanic languages. On February 27, she gave a talk at the unversity of Melbourne on “Thinking comparatively and diachronically. A case study on the verb think“.  March 6, she will give a talk on “Morphosyntactic change – a case study of the verb think” at Monash university (Clayton campus).

Continue reading Jonas on the morphosyntax of the verb “think” from a comparative and diachronic perspective

Language Change

by Assif Am-David, Frankfurt a.M.

One of the most intriguing and widely studied topics in linguistics is the nature of language change. It is a well-known fact that natural languages of all types keep changing constantly. Language change can be studied from several angles: One can reconstruct extinct languages, classify languages to language families, recognise trends in lexical and grammatical changes and draw historical conclusions from language change. However, perhaps the most prominent question regarding language change is why it happens in the first place. Continue reading Language Change