This paper proposes a new look at the so-called ‘present-perfect puzzle’. I suggest that it is in fact part of a bigger problem, which also involves simple past tenses. I argue that present perfects compete with simple past tenses, and that the distribution of these tenses shows signs of the impact of this competition. The outcome of the competition is argued to be heavily dependent on which of the two tense-forms is the default. A pragmatic theory is proposed which accounts (...) for the reduced distribution of the present perfect in languages like English and (American) Spanish, and the reduced distribution of the simple past tense in languages like French and German. (shrink)

According to the neogrammarians and de Saussure, all linguistic change is either sound change, analogy, or borrowing.1 Meillet (1912) identified a class of changes that don’t fit into any of these three categories. Like analogical changes, they are endogenous innovations directly affecting morphology and syntax, but unlike analogical changes, they are not based on any pre-existing patterns in the language. Meillet proposed that they represent a fourth type of change, which he called GRAMMATICALIZATION. Its essential property for him was that (...) it gives rise to new grammatical categories — that is, to categories previously unexpressed in the language — and thereby transforms its overall system. (shrink)

Language change can be conceptualized as a cyclical process of continuous renewal of the involved elements which somehow change their nature, with respect to phonological or lexico-grammatical features. A crucial aspect of such diachronic evolution is that cyclical change takes place systematically and follows regular and unidirectional patterns of development. Once the change is complete, the same developmental path will be undertaken by new linguistic items in the same cyclical fashion. In this paper, we illustrate the concept of cyclical change (...) by discussing two examples of linguistic cycles. A first instance of cyclical development is displayed at the phonological level by the diachronic changes in the obstruent consonant system taking place from Indo-European to German through the First and the Second Sound Shift: the cycle is completed in the Cimbrian dialects. A second instance is provided by the diachronic process known as Jespersen’s cycle ([1917] 1966): sentential negation, initially expressed through a single negative marker, is later reinforced by an additional one; eventually, this second element becomes the only negative marker available in the sentence while the original marker is deleted. The discussion of the negative cycle takes also into consideration the results of an empirical research conducted on two varieties of an Italo-Romance dialect spoken in northern Italy. (shrink)