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This book examines the alternation between accusative-dative and dative-accusative order in Old Florentine clitic clusters and its decline in favor of the latter. Based on an exhaustive analysis of data collected from medieval Florentine and Tuscan texts we offer a novel analysis of the rise of the variable order, the transition from one order to the other, and the demise of the alternation that relies primarily on iconicity and analogy.The bookemploys exophoric pragmatic iconicity, a language-external iconic relationship based on similarity between linguistic structure and the speaker/writer's conceptualization of reality, and endophoric iconicity, a language-internal iconic relationship where the iconic ground is construed between linguistic signs and structures. Analogy is viewed as a productive process that generalizes patterns or extends grammatical rules to formally similar structures, and obtains the form of the analogical relationship between the masculine singular definite article and the third person singular accusative clitic, which shared the same phonotactically constrained distribution patterns. The data indicate that exophoric pragamatic iconicity exploits and maintains the alternation, whereas endophoric iconicity and analogy conspire to end it.

This volume explores the complex relationship between primary agreement by means of object marking or differential object marking (DOM), and secondary agreement through clitics in non-standardized variation data from Limeno Spanish contact varieties (LSCV). As such it is concerned with diachronic as well as synchronic morphosyntactic variation of the third person object pronoun paradigm, so called clitics, as used in Standard Spanish and non-standardized Spanish contact dialects. The argumentation as well as the data presented cross diachronic and synchronic boundaries.

This volume suggests a clear cross-linguistic tendency that mercantile writing displays a greater degree of language mixing, code-switching and linguistic innovation, and, by setting such precedents, promote language change.

This pioneer volume assembles thirteen etymological studies covering a broad range of languages, focusing in particular Australian Indigenous languages.

The majority of our evidence for language change in pre-modern times comes from the written output of scribes. This book provides a wealth of new data and new perspectives on old problems, and it raises new questions about the actual mechanisms of language change.