Speyer Topicalization and Stress Clash Avoidance in the History of English

1. Auflage 2010
ISBN: 978-3-11-022024-7
Verlag: De Gruyter
Format: PDF
Kopierschutz: 1 - PDF Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, Band 69, 295 Seiten, Gewicht: 10 g

Reihe: Topics in English Linguistics [TiEL]ISSN

The book is concerned with the interaction of syntax, information structure and prosody in the history of English, demonstrating this with a case study of object topicalization. The approach is data-oriented, using material from syntactically parsed digital corpora of Old, Middle and Early Modern English, which serve as a solid foundation for conclusions.

The use of object topicalization underwent a sharp decline from Old English until today. In the present volume, a basic prosodic well-formedness condition, the Clash Avoidance Requirement, is identified as the main factor for this change. With the loss of V2-syntax, object topicalization led more easily to cases in which two focalized phrases, the topicalized object and the subject, are adjacent. The two focal accents on these phrases would produce a clash, thus violating the Clash Avoidance Requirement. In order to circumvent this, the use of topicalization in critical cases is avoided.

The Clash Avoidance Requirement is highly relevant also today, as experimental data on English and German show. Further, the Clash Avoidance Requirement helps to explain the well-known syntactic structure of the left periphery in Old English. An analysis positing two subject positions is defended in the study. The variation of these subject positions is shown to depend not on pronominal vs. lexical status of the subject but on information structural properties.

Zielgruppe

Linguists, English Language Historians and General Linguists, His

Autoren/Hrsg.

Speyer, Augustin

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Sprachwissenschaft Historische & Vergleichende Sprachwissenschaft, Sprachtypologie
• Geisteswissenschaften Sprachwissenschaft Phonetik, Phonologie, Prosodie
• Geisteswissenschaften Sprachwissenschaft Grammatik, Syntax, Morphologie

Inhaltsverzeichnis

1;Preface;5
2;Contents;7
3;1. Introduction;11
4;2. Topicalization in Middle and Modern English – A prosodically induced change in syntactic usage;34
5;3. The Clash Avoidance Requirement in Modern English and German;90
6;4. Phonological Aspects of the Clash Avoidance Requirement;142
7;5. Topicalization and the Clash Avoidance Requirement in Old English;187
8;6. Concluding remarks;244
9;Appendix: All Old English OSV-sentences with full noun phrase accusative object and subject;247
10;Notes;265
11;References;276
12;Index of names;293
13;Index of subjects;295

Über Autor(innen)

Augustin Speyer, Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität Frankfurt, Germany.