Article published In:
Studies in Language: Online-First ArticlesThe historical development of asymmetries
The case of directional demonstratives in Germanic
The structuring and encoding of space through language, the shape of the linguistic inventories found in
individual languages, as well as the symmetries and asymmetries manifested by such systems have received a great deal of attention
during the last four decades. The vast majority of the relevant studies adopted a purely synchronic perspective and diachronic
studies of the relevant phenomena are rare. The aim of this paper is to contribute to this discussion by analyzing the historical
development of directional demonstratives in Germanic languages, the structure of the relevant systems at different stages, the
reduction and loss of oppositions and the resultant creation of asymmetries. The results of the descriptions will be examined and
evaluated from a comparative and typological perspective.
Keywords: directional demonstratives, Germanic languages, coding asymmetries, historical development, loss of distinctions
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- (a)Semantic asymmetry
- (b)Lexical asymmetry
- (c)Morphological asymmetry
- (d)Syntactic asymmetry
- (e)Asymmetry in frequency
- 2.Systems of spatial demonstratives
- 3.The historical development of directional demonstratives in Germanic languages
- 3.1Icelandic
- 3.2English
- 3.2.1Old English
- 3.2.2Middle English
- 3.2.3Early Modern English
- 3.2.4Present-Day English
- 3.3German
- 4.The use of directional demonstratives as clitics in Modern German
- 4.1Distribution
- 4.2Directional deictics as separable prefixes of verbs
- 5.Deictic directionals in other Germanic languages
- 5.1Dutch and Afrikaans
- 5.2Swedish and Norwegian
- 5.3Danish
- 6.Summary and conclusions
- Acknowledgements
- Notes
- Abbreviations
-
References
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