This paper presents an analysis of the conjugational systems ofWest Germanic that highlights the central role of two basic stem types and suggests some consequences for the description of inflectional systems in general. The analyses distinguish morphomic stems, which underly morphosyntactically distinct word forms, from inflectional stems, which realise tense and mood features and provide the ...

Speyer (2008) finds an overall decline in the rate of topicalization in historical English, which we refer to pretheoretically as direct object fronting. He attributes it to two separate phenomena: 1) the early loss of unaccented pronominal and demonstrative fronting, and 2) a gradient decline in the use of accented, contrastive fronting due to prosodic well-formedness conditions imposed by the...

For about a century and a half now one of the usual tasks of historical linguistics has been reconstructing the prehistory of linguistic communities. (That is, of course, the side of reconstruction that non-linguists are interested in.) A perennial question is what sort of model of linguistic diversification best fits the data. This paper will explore that question in the light of data supporti...

In our paper, we deal with the Germanic–Romance language contact, focusing on Cimbrian, a Germanic minority spoken in Northern Italy. Specifically, focus violation of well-known that-trace filter, as it appears to be an interesting case superficial convergence that ascribe status T, which is either too rich (model language) or weak (replica represent viable landing site for subject extraction.

THE FRENCH SYSTEM, INTRODUCED under Napoleon and derived from Roman law, relies on statutes, comprehensive codes, and detailed input from legal scholars. The British system focuses more on decentralized dispute regulation by judges, legal precedent, and voluntary contracts. In earlier research, Shleifer and his co-workers have argued that the differences in legal arrangements explain a lot of t...