Continuity and Change in Grammar

Editors

Anne Breitbarth

| Ghent University

Christopher Lucas

| University of Cambridge

Sheila Watts

| University of Cambridge

David Willis

| University of Cambridge

Hardbound – Available

ISBN 9789027255426 | EUR 99.00 | USD 149.00

e-Book –

ISBN 9789027288073 | EUR 99.00 | USD 149.00

One of the principal challenges of historical linguistics is to explain the causes of language change. Any such explanation, however, must also address the ‘actuation problem’: why is it that changes occurring in a given language at a certain time cannot be reliably predicted to recur in other languages, under apparently similar conditions? The sixteen contributions to the present volume each aim to elucidate various aspects of this problem, including: What processes can be identified as the drivers of change? How central are syntax-external (phonological, lexical or contact-based) factors in triggering syntactic change? And how can all of these factors be reconciled with the actuation problem? Exploring data from a wide range of languages from both a formal and a functional perspective, this book promises to be of interest to advanced students and researchers in historical linguistics, syntax and their intersection.

[Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today, 159] 2010. viii, 359 pp.

Publishing status: Available

https://doi.org/10.1075/la.159

Table of Contents

List of contributors	vii–viii
Introduction: Continuity and change in grammar Anne Breitbarth, Christopher Lucas, Sheila Watts and David Willis	1–10
Part I. Continuity
What changed where?: A plea for the re-evaluation of dialectal evidence Katrin Axel-Tober and Helmut Weiß	13–34
Impossible changes and impossible borrowings: The Final-over-Final Constraint Theresa Biberauer, Michelle Sheehan and Glenda Newton	35–60
Continuity is change: The long tail of Jespersen’s cycle in Flemish Anne Breitbarth and Liliane Haegeman	61–76
Using the Matrix Language Frame model to measure the extent of word-order convergence in Welsh-English bilingual speech Peredur Webb-Davies and Margaret Deuchar	77–96
On language contact as an inhibitor of language change: The Spanish of Catalan bilinguals in Majorca Andrés Enrique-Arias	97–118
Towards notions of comparative continuity in English and French Remus Gergel	119–144
Variation, continuity and contact in Middle Norwegian and Middle Low German John D. Sundquist	145–166
Part II. Change
Directionality in word-order change in Austronesian languages Edith Aldridge	169–180
Negative co-ordination in the history of English Richard P. Ingham	181–200
Formal features and the development of the Spanish D-system Masataka Ishikawa	201–224
The rise of OV word order in Irish verbal-noun clauses Elliott Lash	225–248
The great siSwati locative shift Lutz Marten	249–268
The impact of failed changes Gertjan Postma	269–302
A case of degrammaticalization in northern Swedish Henrik Rosenkvist	303–320
Jespersen’s Cycle in German from the phonological perspective of syllable and word languages Renata Szczepaniak	321–334
An article on the rise: Contact-induced change and the rise and fall of N-to-D movement Mila Dimitrova-Vulchanova and Valentin Vulchanov	335–354
Language index	355–356
Subject index	357–359

Cited by

Cited by 1 other publications

Larrivée, Pierre

2010. The pragmatic motifs of the Jespersen cycle: Default, activation, and the history of negation in French. Lingua 120:9 ► pp. 2240 ff.

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 11 may 2021. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.

Subjects

Linguistics

Theoretical linguistics

Syntax

Functional linguistics

Generative linguistics

Sociolinguistics and Dialectology

BIC Subject: CFK – Grammar, syntax

BISAC Subject: LAN009000 – LANGUAGE ARTS & DISCIPLINES / Linguistics / General

U.S. Library of Congress Control Number: 2010014516 | Marc record