Synopses & Reviews
This book advances research on grammatical change and shows the breadth and liveliness of the field. Leading international scholars report and reflect on the latest research into the nature and outcomes of all aspects of syntactic change including grammaticalization, variation, complementation, syntactic movement, determiner-phrase syntax, pronominal systems, case systems, negation, and alignment. The authors deploy a variety of generative frameworks, including minimalist and optimality theoretic, and bring these to bear on a wide range of languages: among the latter are typologically distinct examples from Germanic, Romance, Slavic, Greek, Korean and Japanese, Austronesian, Celtic, and Nahuatl. They draw on sociolinguistic evidence where appropriate. Taken as a whole, the volume provides a stimulating overview of key current issues in the investigation of the origins, nature, and outcome of syntactic change.
About the Author
Dianne Jonas is currently replacement professor of English Linguistics at Goethe University, Frankfurt. Her main research interests are comparative Scandinavian syntax, Icelandic and Faroese in particular, syntactic variation and change, and dialect syntax (Shetland Dialect and Norfuk English).
John Whitman is Professor of Linguistics at Cornell University. He works on structural variation among languages, with a focus on the languages of East Asia: Japanese, Korean, and Chinese, in that order, in addition to a more recent interest in Burmese and Karen languages. Recent projects have been on the syntactic alignment of Old Japanese (with Yuko Yanagida), the structure of applicatives, and the long-vexed question of the word order typology of Old Chinese and proto-Sino-Tibetan (with Redouane Djamouri and Waltraud Paul).
Andrew Garrett is Professor of Linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley, where he also serves as Director of the Survey of California and Other Indian Languages. In historical linguistics he has published on general topics in sound change and morphological change as well as the dialectology, diversification, and prehistory of Yurok (an Algic language of California) and Western Numic (Uto-Aztecan), the dialectology and diachronic syntax of English, and the syntax and morphology of Anatolian, Greek, and Latin.
Table of Contents
1. Introduction,
John Whitman, Dianne Jonas, and Andrew GarrettPart 1: Grammaticalization and Directionality of Change
2. Grammaticalization as Optimization, Paul Kiparsky
3. The Historical Syntax Problem: Reanalysis and Directionality, Andrew Garrett
4. Grammaticalization of ser and estar in Romance, Montse Batllori and Francesc Roca
5. A Minimalist Approach to Jespersen's Cycle in Welsh, David Willis
Part 2: Change in the Nominal Domain: Internal and External Factors
6. A New Perspective on the Historical Development of English Intensifiers and Reflexives, Uffe Bergeton and Roumyana Pancheva
7. Language Contact and Linguistic Complexity - The Rise of the Reflexive Pronoun zich in a 15th Century Netherlands' Border Dialect, Gertjan Postma
8. An Article Evolving: The Case of Old Bulgarian, Mila Dimitrova-Vulchanova and Valentin Vulchanov
9. Parametric Changes in the History of the Greek Article, Christina Guardiano
10. Triggering Syntactic Change: Inertia and Local Causes in the History of English Genitives, Paola Chrisma
Part 3: Change in the Clausal Domain: Cues, Triggers, and Articulation
11. Revisting Verb (Projection) Raising in Old English, Eric Haeberli and Susan Pintzuk
12. Syntax and Discourse in Old English and Middle Word Order, Ans van Kemenade and Tanja Milicev
13. Subjects in Early English: Syntactic Change as Gradual Constraint Reranking, Brady Clark
14. Coordination, Gapping, and the Portuguese Inflected Infinitive: The Role of Structural Ambiguity in Syntactic Change, Ana Maria Martins
15. Neg Movement in the History of Norwegian: The Evolution of a Grammatical Virus, John Sundquist
Part 4: Morphosyntactic Change and Language Type
16. On the Gradual Development of Polysynthesis in Nahuatl, Jason Haugen
17. Antipassive in Austronesian Alignment Changeg, Edith Aldridge
References
Acknowledgements
Index