Ever / neverWhy are certain borrowings so successful?

Eric Hoekstra, Bouke Slofstra & Arjen Versloot

ICHL 19 – 2009 Radboud University Nijmegen

Road map

• Trace the changes in the use of the quantifiers meaning ‘ever’ and ‘never’ in the history of Frisian.

• Attempt to answer the question why certain changes occurred.

History of Frisian

• Old Frisian 1200 – 1550

• Middle Frisian 1550 – 1800

• Modern Frisian 1800 – 2000

=> Overview spanning 700 years.

Language Corpus Frisian / size

• Around 1 million of words of Old Frisian

• Around 1 million of words of Middle Frisian

• Around 25 million of words of Modern Frisian (mainly 20th century, 1 million 19th century)

Corpus Frisian / other info

• Middle Frisian subcorpus: exhaustive, tagged, lemmatised.

• Old Frisian subcorpus will be exhaustive, tagged, lemmatised.

• Corpus available now on the intranet.

• Corpus on-line in 2010 through internet.

• Presentation during Euralex conference 2010, Leeuwarden, The Netherlands

Syntactic environments

• Rhetorical questions

• In the scope of a negative DP such as nobody

• In the scope of an excluding head such as if, before, deny, alas that.

• Relative clauses (free relative clauses)

• Clauses with a clausal negation

• Main (non-negative) clauses

Rhetorical question

Wa zoe dat ooit fin LYSKE zizzewho would that ever of Lyske say(1748)

Negative DP (XP) as preceding clausemate

Joa zille nin fortriet Oyt syæn, (1755) they will no sadness ever see

Clause in the scope of an excluding head

• Dat mij ien koegel reitse (1748)that me a bullet may-hiteiar ik ien slaaf ooit hiet before I a slave ever was-called

• Excluding heads: noch ‘nor’, ear / foardat ‘before’, as’’if’, as ‘than’, foei ‘shame’, bûten ‘outside, apart from’, etc.

(Free) relative clause

• Free relativeJoa trogzieke wis (1755) they search surely het hier ooyt trog toa sieken iswhat here ever through to search is

• Relative with nominal antecedentOm to rjuechtjen 't wird dat hy æ joe (1666)For [thus] to do the word which he ever gave‘So as to do whichever command he gave’

Clauses with a clausal negation

• In dy zil oyt næt eyne, (1755)and that shall ever not end ‘and that shall never end’

Main (non-negative) clauses

• wand God bad a nethe because God offered ever mercy‘because God always offered mercy’(Hunsingo R. 30 [16], 1330)

Old Frisian (1300-1550)

• A ‘ever’ and NA ‘never’.

• A word meaning ‘always’ absent until late Old Frisian and then infrequent.

• Body of surviving texts is mainly legal.

• Texts have been transmitted orally before being written down in the 13-14th century.

Syntactic contexts ‘A’ - OF

Rhetorical questions 0

Neg DP (XP) 0

Excluding head 10 ‘ever’

(Free) relative clauses 16 ‘ever’

Clause negation: 3>never

Main non-negative clause 19‘always’

Syntactic contexts ‘EA’ – 17th c.

Rhetorical questions 6

Neg DP 5

Excluding head 10

(Free) relative clause 14

Clause negation: ea net 0

Main (non-negative) clause 1 ‘always’

Changes OF – 17th c. Frisian

• Rhetorical Qs 0:48 => 6:30 0.48• Neg DPs 0:48 => 5:31 1.22• Excluding head 10:38 => 10:26 -• Rel clauses 16:32 => 14:22 -• Clause negation 3:45 => 0:35 -• Main nonneg cl 19:29 => 1:34 0.006

(Fisher Exact, http://www.langsrud.com/fisher.htm)

Discussion OF – 17th c.

a) Presence of rhetorical questions in OF texts

b) Could negative DPs trigger ‘a’?sa se nenne wigand a tein netwhen she no son ever born NEG-has‘when she didn’t bear any son ever’

c) The decrease of EA ‘always’ (main non-negative clauses)

EA after 1700

• 18th c. EA is not attested!

• 19th c. Numerous attestations after 1830

• 20th c. Numerous attestions

• EA was dead for some 130 odd years between 1700 and 1830. How come?

Resurrection

• EA was resurrected by the Frisian Language Movement.

• As a result EA is now used in formal writing and speech.

• What happened around 1700?

• => The word OAIT ‘ever’ was borrowed from Dutch around that date.

OAIT 18th c.

Rhetorical questions 26

Negative DP 35

Excluding head 31

(Free) relative clause 11

Clause neg oait net 27

Main non-neg clause 0

Changes EA 17th c. – OAIT 18th c.

• Rhetorical qs 6:30 26:104 -

• Negative DP 5:31 35:95 -

• Excluding head 10:26 31:99 -

• (Free) relatives 14:22 11:119 0.00

• Clause negation 0:36 27:103 0.14

• Main non-neg cl 1:35 0:130 -

EA: relatives versus free relatives

• Only 3 relatives are free relatives.

• The other 11 relatives have a nominal antecedent.

• The nominal antecedent is 9x introduced by the definite article, 2x by ‘all’.

• The relative clause is introduced by a D-relative 12x (1x zero).

OAIT: relatives versus free relatives

• No relative has a nominal antecedent, except one has a pronominal antecedent.

• All clauses except one are introduced by a WH-item, hence free relatives.

• (Incidentally: WH-item 5x preceded by ‘all’.)

Relatives: free versus nominal

EA 17th OAIT 18th p-valueFree:nom rel Free:nom rel3:11 10:1 0.09

Rel. pron WH:DRel. pron WH:D2:12 10:1 0.02

=> Increase in free relatives, decrease in relatives with a nominal antecedent.

=> Decrease in D-pronouns, increase of WH-pronouns. Having a nominal antecedent correlates strongly with having a D-relative pronoun.

Clause neg: oait net - *ea net

• In dy zil oyt næt eyneand that shall ever not end

• Oait net = noait = never.

• At least 4 writers.

• 27 occurrences

• Never with EA in 17th c.

What about the oait net construction?

• Hypercorrection of double negation?

• Is there evidence for hypercorrection in prescriptive grammars?

• Or is it a maximizer-emphasizer like in:I wouldn’t do it in a hundred years / ever

Overview Frisian EVER 1200-2000

• Decrease of use in main clauses (universal interpretation).

• Increase of co-occurrence with DPs as triggers.• Increase and decrease in relative clauses with

nominal antecedent.• Increase and decrease of use with clause

negation

Why the switch from EA to OAIT

• Why was (N)OAIT so easily borrowed?

• Why did it win out against (N)EA?

• Is it mere frequency? But lots of Dutch words, equally frequent, were not borrowed!

• Did EA lack distinctness? (Hopper & Traugott 2003)

Talking about easy to learn …

• The expressions NOOIT NEVER (4360) and OOIT EVER (418) are currently entering the Dutch language.

• Ok, so they are easy to learn.

• What makes them special compared to other words which are easy to learn?

• Frisian :: Dutch = Dutch :: English

Are quantifier systems especially susceptible?

• The whole Frisian quantifier system is affected at an early date!

• JIT => NOCH

• ELTS => ELK

• ELKENIEN => IDERIEN

• (N)EARNE => (N)ERGENS

• (N)EA => (N)OAIT

Preliminary conclusions EA => OAIT

• Learnability (easy to learn)

• Sociological conditions

• Distinctness: OAIT was more optimal than EA.

• What determines speaker/hearer (production/perception) optimality?

Thank you