In recent years, within the cognitive linguistics approach there has been a trend of scholarly research committed to exploring the motivation for language change. The way in which people use language in communication, together with principles of human categorization, are the locus where language change and innovations are to be found. Interactional contexts in particular, seen as playing a crucial role in bringing about syntactic change (Traugott 2010b), have figured prominently in recent contributions on diachronic micro-changes, bringing to the fore the role played by dialogue as both the manifestation of the participants' own voices and the realization of the constant negotiation that characterizes human communication. Against this background, this contribution focuses on a particular use of the Occitan post-verbal negator pas in negative rhetorical questions, which was very productive in fifteenth-century collections of religious theatrical texts. It is claimed that these dialogic contexts allowed a polyphonic use of pas, crucially restricted to this post-verbal negator, which is key to identifying the reasons behind the eventual establishment of pas as the generalized sentential negator in the modern language.

This contribution is an investigation of the distribution and nature of a structure found across Northern Italian varieties, a reflex of Latinhabereto which a locative particleghas been added, within the contexts of the relation between microvariation and gradual language change. A detailed morpho-syntactic description forms the basis for an analysis that suggests a probable path of univerbation of the two elements. Driving the analysis is the consideration of the original semantic features of the Latin element from which the locative particle has developed, in particular of the order of their weakening.

Through an investigation of morphologically defective pronominal object paradigms in a number of northern Italian dialects, this article offers a reflection on the relation between the development and the loss of linguistic items based on the reconstruction of the possible diachronic path that has led to the current situation. The paper sets out to achieve two objectives. First, it presents a detailed description of the peculiarities of the object clitic paradigm in the northern Italian dialects and places them within the wider Romance context. Secondly, it discusses and evaluates the way the processes of emergence and loss of linguistic items relate to one another, with specific reference to what appears to be a more general hierarchy operative in languages, the Referential Hierarchy (Silverstein 1976, Comrie 1981, and many others).