[Histling-l] Deflexion query

[Cynthia Allen]

At the moment, I am specifically trying to find the earliest use of ‘deflexion’ or ‘deflection’ in English to describe loss of inflectional categories, rather than terms in general for the loss of inflection.  I wouldn’t say that recent discussions have called the reanalysis/degrammaticalisation of inflections as clitics ‘deflexion’, which is what your wording suggests to me, but rather that they are looking at the role of deflexion in such changes. It’s certainly true that the term has played a prominent role in debates about degrammaticalisation, but one recent paper I’m aware of treats deflexion as the final stage of grammaticalisation of the English passive (i.e. the loss of agreement morphology on the participle):
Martín Arista, Javier, and Ana Elvira Ojanguren López. 2018. "Grammaticalization and Deflexion in Progress. The Past Participle in the Old English Passive."  Studia neophilologica 90 (2):155-175. doi: 10.1080/00393274.2018.1463823.

It’s certainly true that the English term is usually used by people who are looking at the effects of the loss of inflection, but in the 2007 ed. of The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Linguistics, deflexion is simply defined as “Loss of inflections, e.g. in the history of English in the early Middle Ages.” That’s pretty vague and broad, since it would seem to encompass syncretism between forms (e.g. nominative and accusative singular in masculine a-stem nouns in OE) when category distinctions like nominative and accusative still exist, although the reference to ‘early Middle Ages’ is probably alluding to complete loss of categories. It’s of course important to distinguish between loss of exponents of a category and loss of the category itself, and it seems to me best to reserve ‘deflexion’ for the loss of one or more inflectional categories.


Dr Cynthia L. Allen FAHA
Emeritus Fellow, Australian National University
Baldessin Precinct Building Room W2.09

School of Literature, Languages, and Linguistics
Building 110
Australian National University
Acton ACT  2601

From: Uni KN <frans.plank at uni-konstanz.de>
Sent: Saturday, 20 March 2021 8:56 PM
To: Cynthia Allen <cynthia.allen at anu.edu.au>
Cc: histling-l at mailman.yale.edu
Subject: Re: [Histling-l] Deflexion query

Cynthia,  are you really interested in terms for loss of inflection in general, by whatever means (‘deflexie’ in Dutch, ‘Flexionsschwund’ in German …), or more specifically for the rare case of the reananlysis/degrammaticalisation of inflectional (word-)affixes as clitics (or phrase affixes or what not).  Isn’t it just the latter that has latterly sometimes been called ‘deflection/deflexion’ in English?

Frans



On 19. Mar 2021, at 08:48, Cynthia Allen <cynthia.allen at anu.edu.au<mailto:cynthia.allen at anu.edu.au>> wrote:

Greetings,
I’ve been trying to nail down the earliest use of ‘deflexion’/’deflection’ in reference to loss of inflection/inflectional categories. It is not a widely used term, but has been prominently used in the early 2000s by Muriel Norde and then myself, for example. The earliest reference I have found is in Trask’s (2000) The dictionary of historical and comparative linguistics. I would like to find out who first used this term, and would be grateful for any earlier references.

Dr Cynthia L. Allen FAHA
Emeritus Fellow, Australian National University
Baldessin Precinct Building Room W2.09

School of Literature, Languages, and Linguistics
Building 110
Australian National University
Acton ACT  2601

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