New prepositions in the house

In the literature on semantic and categorial change French chez and Mainland Scandinavian hos are often cited together as parallel examples of locative prepositions deriving from nouns referring to the concept ‘house’. In this paper we compare in detail the philological records and the more recent development of the two items as well as that of the cognate Insular Scandinavian hjá. We show that while there are similarities in the development of Latin CASA / French chez and hos, as frequently suggested in the literature, there are also significant divergences. We argue in favour of a reevaluation of the origin of hos aligning it with hjá rather than casa as suggested in Noreen (1892), and show that if so revised, the differences can be shown to arise from the different meanings of the source terms: Latin casa ‘hut, house’ and later ‘place’ as opposed to Old Swedish hos and Old Icelandic hjá ‘group of people, company’. We then go on to explore the consequences of these different diachronic trajectories for our general understanding of the connected semantic and syntactic developments and the time course of categorial change.