Nerea Madariaga Doctoral dissertation

GRAMMAR CHANGE AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF NEW CASE RELATIONS

THE INTERACTION BETWEEN CORE SYNTAX AND THE LINGUISTIC PERIPHERY

IN OLD AND PRESENT-DAY RUSSIAN

(Supervisors: Iván Igartua Ugarte & Myriam Uribe-Etxebarria Goti)

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ABSTRACT: This dissertation proposes a minimal way to account for syntactic change, and more specifically, for changes in case relations, under the Lightfootian (1999, 2006) view of the discontinuity of language transmission between generations. Namely, I propose two conditions that determine the way change takes place between one generation and following generations of speakers: the first condition predicts that a parsing conflict is triggered when there is some superfluous PF / LF symbol in the linguistic input a learner must parse. In this case, the offending element must either be eliminated (not acquired), or integrated as part of the periphery, outside core grammar. The second condition restricts reanalysis to the cases where it is strictly necessary, and applies in two ways: (i) when a parsing conflict arises, reanalysis takes place only in case all the evidence pointing to the old structure is lost; (ii) otherwise, reanalysis takes place when a reanalyzed form provides some functional advantage or makes parsing easier.

My hypothesis is that these two conditions also determine changes in grammatical case in the history of a language, and namely, that the parsing conflicts determining case change are in fact conflicts at the LF interface level, i.e. in the theta-role (semantic) relation between a certain head and a NP. Such a thematic conflict arises when the data a learner receives seem to violate the correlation “theta-role assignment to a NP by the same head, which values case on that NP”. The two conditions I propose predict two ways to override these conflicts: (i) to acquire the irregular sequence by “learning” it as a special lexical specification of a verb; (ii) to reanalyze the conflicting data. To illustrate this hypothesis, I analyze the process of rising and spreading of new case markers in several Old Russian and Present-day Russian constructions. On their initial stages, these processes started as an innovation, which was restricted to certain linguistic performances; on a second stage, the linguistic data that have been affected by the innovation were analyzed in a new way by young learners; and finally, the new structures spread, which eventually led to the replacement of the old structures with the new ones. The last step in the extension of these changes was a long process where the new structure was spread during several centuries in a discontinuous way, being the extension still in progress even in Present-day Russian.

The two instances of change in Russian case analyzed in this thesis are the following ones: (i) the triggering of the use of instrumental predicate case in Old Russian NPs and its extension through other categories and syntactic environments until nowadays, with special attention to the restrictions of this spreading; and (ii) the shift from genitive to accusative object marking undergone by several classes of verbs in Middle and Present-day Russian. The historical data analyzed in this dissertation show that the “difficulties” which can take place in language processing during the acquisition period can be diachronically eliminated from a language or adapted to it; where the adaptation process involves either a syntactic or a semantic change of the problematic structures. This work focuses on syntactic adaptive changes although, as will be seen throughout this dissertation, semantic change can take place in a collateral way to the syntactic processes studied.

Another central issue investigated in this thesis is the question of the so-called linguistic periphery. I will argue that some synchronic phenomena, which escape the regular architecture of a grammar, are in fact residues of certain historical changes and function as micro-parameters governed by special spell-out morphological rules; in other words, these can be defined as phenomena that have not been integrated in the core syntax of the language and differ from this core syntax in specific features I will analyze in this thesis.

The general contents of this dissertation can be summarized as follows: Chapter 0 (Preliminaries) lists the old texts quoted along the thesis, together with their approximate date, as well as other useful information that can be useful for the reader in the following chapters, such as the transliteration guidelines, and the lists of abbreviations and linguistic glosses of the examples used throughout this thesis. This is followed by chapter 1, which provides a general introduction to the thesis. Chapter 2 summarizes the theoretical framework I will adopt for the synchronic and diachronic analyses developed in this thesis; as will be seen, the theory adopted here is the generative approach to syntactic analysis, in particular, the classic version of the minimalist program (Chomsky 1995, 2000, 2001). For the analysis of diachronic change, I will also follow the generative perspective, defended by the so-called DI(achronic) G(enerative) S(yntax) approaches (Lightfoot 1979 and afterwards). Chapter 3 deals with the shift in case marking undergone by the arguments that moved from a lexical genitive case pattern into a structural (accusative) pattern. In the first part of this chapter, I analyze the change process observed in the objects of the group of verbs denoting ‘taking care’ around the 17^th century, and then, on the basis of this analysis, I compare this change with a similar change in the Present-day Russian psych-verbs bojat’sja ‘to be afraid’ and slušat'sja 'to obey'. Chapter 4 begins with a detailed description of the complex phenomenon of Russian second cases and predicative case marking. Together with the general description of the phenomenon, I provide a general up-to-day review of the major synchronic works on Russian predicative case. These synchronic facts are then compared in chapter 5 with the historical data related to the triggering and spreading of the Slavic instrumental predicative case. In chapter 6, I offer a new global analysis of the phenomenon of Russian predicate marking, which stresses the role of peripheral factors in the development of core grammars, and underlines the limits of explanations built only on syntactic grounds. The central topic of chapter 7, the “conclusion” chapter, is the analysis of the features that the different changes in grammatical case relations analyzed throughout this thesis have in common. This chapter recovers all the facts and hypotheses studied in the previous chapters, and provides a general overview on the changes that case systems can undergo cross-linguistically, paying special attention to the consequences that change can have at different levels of the linguistic analysis, as well as to the interaction between language periphery and grammar. Finally, the last part of the thesis lists the references of the works quoted throughout it.