Languages that are gaining morphological distinctions

Question

In diachronic comparison of languages, say PIE to Latin to Romance, it is a classic recognition that the later languages strictly lose some of the morphologically marked categories. PIE had 8 noun cases (nominative, accusative, genitive, etc), Latin 5, Romance 2 or even 1. Pick a morphological category and pretty much always the complexity is reduced: past participles in English are more likely to become weak rather than strong, the subjunctive is disappearing, there's no grammatical gender at all.

Presumably those forms (that were later lost) came from somewhere, those categories and phonological markers were created. I can imagine a cycle of inflected to isolating (a period of loss) and then back to inflectional where the grammatical markers get phonologically assimilated (fused onto the root), but i have no data to support this.

I feel like I heard a long time ago that Finnish/Hungarian/Turkish might be gaining distinctions or that the word initial inflections in verbs in Irish came from phonological interaction between a pronoun and the following verb, but those are just vague intimations. I am looking for more substantively presented examples.

Is there any definitive data of a language moving from isolating to inflected? Present day examples are best, but attested versions (not theoretical) from the past would be good too.

Answer 1

In Spanish, infinitives and imperatives have their object-pronouns attached to them, as in dámelo ("give it to me"), a compound of da ("give"), me ("to me"), lo ("it"). To me, these look like proto-conjugations. In particular, they have already begun to develop irregularities: "give it to him" should logically be dálelo, but some sort of euphonic change (not sure what this is called) has changed the middle consonant to s, creating the modern Spanish dáselo. With a few more such changes, this simple agglutination may someday become become a "morphological category" as impenetrable as the Latin noun.

Answer 2

Inflectional markers can come from originally isolated words (e.g. pronouns) so there is definitely a cycle where:

1. separate words become clitics
2. clitics become inflections
3. inflections get reanalyzed as part of the stem
4. inflectional syncretism takes place
5. separate words are introduced to disambiguate the syncretism
6. rinse-and-repeat

Answer 3

I can't think of examples off the top of my head, but I'm sure you can find some in the work of linguists like Elly van Gelderen, who has a theory about exactly what you're talking about ("the linguistic cycle"), and I believe has written or edited at least one book about it recently. You probably should also take a look at the grammaticalization literature. I think Joan Bybee might be a good place to start, if you haven't already.

This is not absolutely precisely the question you asked, but you might also find this article interesting. It claims roughly that morphological systems tend to get simpler as speaker population increases. As you might imagine, it's controversial in some quarters.

Answer 4

It has been argued that in French, subject pronouns are in the process of becoming inflectional elements. Culbertson (2010) "Convergent evidence for Categorial Change in French" Language vol. 86 num. 1 is a recent paper arguing this hypothesis.

Answer 5

In languages with serial verb constructions, some standardized verbs are reanalyzed as cases, for instance in Akan a sentence that is glossed "Kofi take knife cut meat" it can be argued that "take" is an instrumental. "give" this often becomes a dative-marker, "have" turns into a genitive etc. Hm, was that in Paul Schachters paper in Language Typology and Syntactic Description?

Answer 6

Even the languages you mentioned as losing inflections in your question gained others, several of the inflections of verbs in romance languages came from periphrastic constructions in vulgar latin, most prominent the future and conditional tenses, for example, french "tiendrai, tiendras, tiendra, tiendrons, tiendrez, tiendront" come from contractions of tenire and a conjugation of habere in latin, the resemblance in the future tense suffixes and conjugations of avoir can even be seen in the modern language, "ai as a avons avez ont". The conditional endings are of a similar origin, coming from a fusion of the infinitive and the imperfect conjugations of habere. I'm surprised no one above me mentioned this.

Answer 7

One well-known example is the emerging Russian neo-vocative:

In modern colloquial Russian given names and a small family of terms often take a special "shortened" form that some linguists consider a reemerging vocative case.[4] This form is applied only to given names and nouns that end in -a and -я, which are optionally dropped in the vocative form: "Лен, где ты?" ("Lena, where are you?"). This is basically equivalent to "Лена, где ты?", the only difference being that the former version suggests a positive personal, emotional bond between the speaker and the person being addressed. Names that end in -я acquire a soft sign in this case: "Оль!" = "Оля!" ("Olga!"). In addition to given names, this form is often used with words like "мама" (mama, mom) and "папа" (papa, dad), which would be respectively "shortened" to "мам" (mam) and "пап" (pap). In plural this form is used with words such as "ребят", "девчат" (nominative: "ребята" "девчата", guys gals).

Such usage differs from historical vocative (which would be "Лено" in the example above) and is not related to such historical usage.

I am no native speaker but my sense is that for now it is used more with some words than with others, and rarely with words that already have a diminutive ending (eg "Ленка", "бабушка", "бабуля", "секретарша").

Answer 8

I think such fusion of morphemes onto word-roots to form morphological categories is happening in spoken language, but in today’s world where languages tend to have standardised orthographies, they are seen as colloquial, corrupted, or uneducated, and thus are considered by linguists to be not worth analysing.

For example, I would argue that most dialects of English already have forms such as gimme, givya, givim/giver, givus, givyall and givem. In standard orthography they would be written as give me etc., but we all know most people pronounce them as these fused forms. So the real question is when these will become established orthography, and my suspicion is that it will never happen given how strongly English spelling resists reform despite its clearly showing age.

Also, if I may add a claim that I cannot substantiate, I thought I read somewhere that PIE had only two genders (animate and inanimate). If this is indeed the case, the distinction between masculine and feminine was gained at some point. I think it was said that the feminine evolved out of the plural of inanimates; I don’t know exactly how that’s supposed to work, but it would explain why neuter nominative plural and feminine nominative singular tend to have the same ending, -a, in many IE languages.

Answer 9

As indicated by Anschel Schaffer-Cohen, certain changes in Romance languages can be considered as gaining new inflections. Spanish is a very nice example but Portuguese is even better because there is actually some phonetic merger that makes the words even more difficult to separate:

fazer+os = fazê-los (to do them)

In French, where the structure of a phrase is quite rigid, you can separate the subject and the verb basically only by grammatical morphemes and from a certain perspective, the subject pronoun can be considered a conjugational prefix of a verb and considering it a separate word is just a matter of linguistic/orthographic tradition (it is separated with a space).

Of course there are counter arguments, e.g. in 3rd person, the pronoun may be replaced by a noun, so it is not strictly obligatory, but still you have phrases like "Éric, il travaille", where the noun is highlighted and thus the pronoun needs to be present.

In certain pidgins of French, this evolution actually goes further - in French there is a phenomenon called liaison, basically a consonant that used to be pronounced at the end of the word and disappeared is still preserved and resurfaces in certain contest (ils parlent /il parl/ - they talk vs ils aiment /il zem/ - they love), and the pidgins reinterpreted the resurfacing /z/ phoneme is an initial marker of plural (qui s-aiment ils? /ki zem il/ - who do they like?) and you can find this tendency emerging in spoken French too.

Answer 10

[...] the word initial inflections in verbs in Irish came from phonological interaction between a pronoun and the following verb [...]

I'm not quite sure what you mean here.

Irish is VSO. As such, a verb very rarely (if indeed ever) follows a pronoun:

Chonaic  mé    an       cailín.
Saw-PRET I-NOM the-SING girl-MASC.

We can see the use of prepositions (more so the associate agreements) in Irish affecting the past tense, though. Traditionally, the past tense was created by preceding the infinitive with to preposition "do" (Ith -> D'ith), which causes a lenition (Bí -> Do bhí -> Bhí).