Quantification and Scales in Change
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Quantification and scales in change Edited by Remus Gergel Jonathan Watkins language Topics at the Grammar-Discourse science press Interface 7 Topics at the Grammar-Discourse Interface Editors: Philippa Cook (University of Göttingen), Anke Holler (University of Göttingen), Cathrine Fabricius-Hansen (University of Oslo) In this series: 1. Song, Sanghoun. Modeling information structure in a cross-linguistic perspective. 2. Müller, Sonja. Distribution und Interpretation von Modalpartikel-Kombinationen. 3. Bueno Holle, Juan José. Information structure in Isthmus Zapotec narrative and conversation. 4. Parikh, Prashant. Communication and content. 5. Balogh, Kata, Anja Latrouite & Robert D. Van Valin‚ Jr. (eds.) Nominal anchoring: Specificity, definiteness and article systems across languages. 6. Næss, Åshild, Anna Margetts & Yvonne Treis (eds.). Demonstratives in discourse. 7. Gergel, Remus & Jonathan Watkins (eds.). Quantification and scales in change. ISSN: 2567-3335 Quantification and scales in change Edited by Remus Gergel Jonathan Watkins language science press Gergel, Remus & Jonathan Watkins (eds.). 2020. Quantification and scales in change (Topics at the Grammar-Discourse Interface 7). Berlin: Language Science Press. This title can be downloaded at: http://langsci-press.org/catalog/book/252 © 2020, the authors Published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Licence (CC BY 4.0): http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ ISBN: 978-3-96110-265-5 (Digital) 978-3-96110-266-2 (Hardcover) ISSN: 2567-3335 DOI:10.5281/zenodo.3929261 Source code available from www.github.com/langsci/252 Collaborative reading: paperhive.org/documents/remote?type=langsci&id=252 Cover and concept of design: Ulrike Harbort Typesetting: Felix Kopecky Proofreading: Ahmet Bilal Özdemir, Amir Ghorbanpour, Andreas Hölzl, Brett Reynolds, Carla Bombi Ferrer, Hella Olbertz, Janina Rado, Jeroen van de Weijer, Jean Nitzke Fonts: Libertinus, Arimo, DejaVu Sans Mono Typesetting software:Ǝ X LATEX Language Science Press xHain Grünberger Straße 16 10243 Berlin, Germany langsci-press.org Storage and cataloguing done by FU Berlin Contents Acknowledgments iii Editors’ preface Remus Gergel & Jonathan Watkins v 1 From a collective to a free choice determiner in Biblical Hebrew Edit Doron 1 2 Grammaticalization parameters and the retrieval of alternatives: Latin nec from discourse connector to uninterpretable feature Chiara Gianollo 33 3 Vagueness, context-sensitivity and scale structure of four types of adjectives with the suffix -ish Tabea Harris 67 4 On the semantic change of evidential argument jakoby-clauses in Polish Łukasz Jędrzejowski 85 5 Semantic and syntactic change of equis in Mexican Spanish Olga Kellert 131 6 German noch under reanalysis Martin Kopf-Giammanco 161 7 Givenness marking in a mixed system: Constituent order vs. determiners Alexandra Simonenko & Anna Carlier 199 Index 229 Acknowledgments The current volume profited from the insights of many, first and foremost of course from the contributing authors. Importantly, the articles included herein have also undergone a thorough peer-review process in two steps, first, for the ab- stracts submitted to the conference, second for the manuscripts submitted to the volume. All manuscripts have subsequently been revised by the authors based on input received from two or more reviewers for each manuscript. We would thus like to express our gratitude to the following colleagues for reviewing for the conference or the resulting volume, and in some cases for both occasions: Nadine Bade, Sigrid Beck, Nora Boneh, Marco Coniglio, Ashwini Deo, Regine Eckardt, Matthias Eitelmann, Kai von Fintel, Chiara Gianollo, Dag Haug, Agnes Jäger, Łukasz Jędrzejowski, Martin Kopf-Giammanco, Krzyztof Migdalski, Ger- hard Schade, Alexandra Simonenko, Augustin Speyer, Igor Yanovich, and Hedde Zeijlstra. After the submission of the second and revised version of her paper and before the publication of the volume, our appreciated colleague and contributor Edit Doron sadly passed away. We thank Malka Rappaport-Hovav for assisting us with the final editorial steps of the corresponding first chapter of this volume. Finally, we wish to thank the series editors Philippa Cook and Anke Holler for their advice as well as Felix Kopecky and Sebastian Nordhoff for their technical support in publishing the book with Language Science Press. Editors’ preface Remus Gergel Universität des Saarlandes Jonathan Watkins Universität des Saarlandes The articles for the current volume have emerged from presentations delivered at the second edition of Formal Diachronic Semantics, held at Saarland Univer- sity, Saarbrücken from November 21–22, 2017. The conference featured key-note addresses by Ashwini Deo, Chiara Gianollo, and an integrated invited student presentation by Verena Hehl along with a fair amount of high-quality scholarly work that was accepted for presentation. The majority of the contributions delivered to the conference revolved around topics of quantification and scales in the process of semantic change. Thisisa nice coincidence which we strove to incorporate in a volume. At the same time, it was also quite clear from the onset that quantification and scalarity in naturally attested case studies rarely appear as clear-cut as in idealized textbook trajecto- ries. This led to the current compendium with Language Science Press for which a subset of the papers presented at the conference was submitted and included in accordance with standard review and revision procedures. In the remainder of this preface, we offer a brief outlook on what the readers can expect from the contributions contained within. While the order of the articles in the volume is alphabetical, we introduce the papers from a thematic point of view. The papers by Doron, Jędrzejowski, Kellert and Simonenko & Carlier address – to varying degrees – issues pertaining to phenomena from language change, which are standardly treated in terms of quantification and therefore are hoped to be of interest, either in terms of data or analysis, to researchers concerned with the respective sub-topics, of which we will give a slightly longer outlook below. Remus Gergel & Jonathan Watkins. 2020. Editors’ preface. In Remus Gergel & Jonathan Watkins (eds.), Quantification and scales in change, v–viii. Berlin: Language Science Press. DOI:10.5281/zenodo.3929235 Remus Gergel & Jonathan Watkins By contrast, contributions by Gianollo, Harris, and Kopf-Giammanco are primar- ily concerned with scalar structures of different kinds and how they have evolved over time. Before introducing the individual articles, it seems of note to mention that all of the contributions presented contain a fair amount of discussion on the interfaces of interpretation – be it through structural facts, the pragmatic compo- nent (including e.g. information-structural factors), or important morphological factors. Doron’s article addresses some of the fundamental questions in the trajecto- ries which arise in the domain of universal quantification (see von Fintel 1995; Haspelmath 1995; Beck 2017) with a specific case study conducted on Biblical He- brew. The general trajectory of meanings is roughly paraphrasable as ‘all/any/ every’ (notice, however, that the original Hebrew noun kol had both similarities, but also key differences from English all) and it is couched in terms of a cycli- cal view of language change (cf. van Gelderen 2011, see e.g. Gergel 2016 for an application of cyclical theory to issues of interpretation). While Doron’s paper concentrates on the development from collective to distributive readings, it also sheds light on the so-called distributivity cycle as a whole and its role in the his- tory of a language which is proposed originally not to have had any distributive determiner of the ‘every’ type (but other alternative mechanisms to express such meanings). While Doron’s focus is on the development of universal interpretations, Simo- nenko & Carlier’s contribution incorporates the interaction of what they regard as a non-presuppositional existential inference with variation in the constituent order facts in the history of French. A key component of the analysis is a version of *New > Given principle of Kučerová (2012). The authors attribute the prin- ciple to a binding configuration, specifically to how situation binding operates in clauses. The resulting account and the quantitative data obtained should be of interest to researchers in the diachrony of French syntax and how it could be modeled in tandem with pragmatic factors such as givenness. The diachronic span covered ranges from the twelfth to the seventeenth century. Kellert’s paper relates to the large topic of indefinites of indifference. She in- vestigates the linguistic item called equis (x) in Mexican Spanish by giving a synchronic description and offering a diachronic suggestion. While the original meaning of the expression is that of the letter x, a discourse-related function is claimed to have appeared very recently. According to the discourse function, equis is used to refer to some utterance from the discourse which denotes a propo- sition and the speaker expresses her indifference as to whether this proposition is true or not. Descriptively, equis is claimed to have developed into a discourse adverb. The key idea beyond the diachronic analysis is that the language has undergone a shift in the domain of indifference associated with the wordunder vi 1 Editors’ preface discussion, namely from indifference with respect to the identities