SYNTAX OVER TIME OSDHL 15 C

Erscheinungsjahr 2015
ISBN: 978-0-19-968792-3
Verlag: ACADEMIC

Buch, Englisch, 440 Seiten, Format (B × H): 161 mm x 240 mm, Gewicht: 822 g

This book provides a critical investigation of syntactic change and the factors that influence it. Converging empirical and theoretical considerations have suggested that apparent instances of syntactic change may be attributable to factors outside syntax proper, such as morphology or information structure. Some even go so far as to propose that there is no such thing as syntactic change, and that all such change in fact takes place in the lexicon or in the phonological component.

In this volume, international scholars examine these proposals, drawing on detailed case studies from Germanic, Romance, Chinese, Egyptian, Finnic, Hungarian, and Sámi. They aim to answer such questions as: Can syntactic change arise without an external impetus? How can we tell whether a given change is caused by information-structural or morphological factors? What can 'microsyntactic' investigations of changes in individual lexical items tell us about the bigger picture? How universal are the clausal and nominal templates ('cartography'), and to what extent is syntactic structure more generally subject to universal constraints?

The book will be of interest to all linguists working on syntactic variation and change, and especially those who believe that historical linguistics and linguistic theory can, and should, inform one another.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Biberauer, Theresa

Walkden, George

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Sprachwissenschaft Grammatik, Syntax, Morphologie
• Geisteswissenschaften Sprachwissenschaft Historische & Vergleichende Sprachwissenschaft, Sprachtypologie

Inhaltsverzeichnis

- 1.: Theresa Biberauer and George Walkden: Introduction

- PART I: Syntax and the Lexicon

- 2: Caitlin Light: Expletive there in West Germanic

- 3: Joan Maling and Sigriðdur Sigurjónsdottir: From passive to active: Stages in the Icelandic New Impersonal

- 4: William Haddican, Eytan Zweig, and Daniel Ezra Johnson: Change in the syntax and semantics of be like quotatives

- 5: Veronika Hegedus: The grammaticalization of postpositions in Old Hungarian

- 6: Katalin Ã. Kiss: A negative cycle in 12th - 15th century Hungarian

- 7: Ana Maria Martins: Negation and NPI composition inside DP

- PART II: Syntax and Morphology

- 8: Chris H. Reintges: Increasing morphological complexity and how syntax drives morphological change

- 9: Adam Ledgeway: Reconstructing complementizer-drop in the dialects of the Salento: A syntactic or phonological phenomenon

- 10: Marit Julien: On negation, tense, and participles in Finnic and Sámi

- 11: Krzysztof Migdalski: On the loss of tense and verb-adjacent clitics in Slavic

- 12: Dimitris Michelioudakis: The evolution of Inherent Case in the diachrony of Greek

- PART III: Syntax and Information Structure

- 13: Virginia Hill: From preposition to topic marker: Old Romanian pe

- 14: George Walkden: Verb-third in early West Germanic: A comparative perspective

- 15: Ed Cormany: Changes in Friulano subject clitics: Conflation and interactions with the left periphery

- 16: Lieven Danckaert: The decline of Latin left-peripheral presentation foci: Causes and consequences

- 17: Montserrat Batllori and Maria-Lluïsa Hernanz: Weak focus and polarity: Asymmetries between Spanish and Catalan

- 18: Roland Hinterhölzl: An interface account of word order variation in Old High German

- 19: Ann Taylor and Susan Pintzuk: Verb order, object position, and information status in Old English

- 20: Joel C. Wallenberg: Antisymmetry and heavy NP shift across Germanic

- 21: Edith Aldridge: Pronominal object shift in Archaic Chinese

Über Autor(innen)

Theresa Biberauer is a Senior Research Associate at the University of Cambridge, where she is also a Fellow of Churchill College, and Associate Professor Extraordinary at her South African alma mater, Stellenbosch University. Her research interests are principally in theoretical and comparative (synchronic and diachronic) morphosyntax, with Germanic generally and Afrikaans in particular being areas of specific interest. Her past work has focused on word-order variation, (null) subject phenomena, negation, information structure, and the larger question of the nature of parametric variation. She is the co-editor, with Michelle Sheehan, of Theoretical Approaches to Disharmonic Word Order (OUP 2013).

George Walkden is a Lecturer in the Department of Linguistics and English Language at the University of Manchester. His research is in historical syntax, and his doctoral dissertation focused on aspects of syntactic reconstruction as applied to the early Germanic languages. He is the author of Syntactic Reconstruction and Proto-Germanic (OUP 2014), and is also Associate Editor of Language, with responsibility for its Historical Syntax section.