Grammatical relations in change / edited by Jan Terje Faarlund.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Faarlund, Jan Terje, 1943-

Series:

Studies in language companion series ; v. 56.

Studies in language companion series ; v. 56

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Grammar, Comparative and general.

Historical linguistics.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (337 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Amsterdam ; Philadelphia : J. Benjamins, c2001.

Summary:

The eleven selected contributions making up this volume deal with grammatical relations, their coding and behavioral properties, and the change that these properties have undergone in different languages. The focus of this collection is on the changing properties of subjects and objects, although the scope of the volume goes beyond the central problems pertaining to case marking and word order. The diachrony of syntactic and morphosyntactic phenomena are approached from different theoretical perspectives, generative grammar, valency grammar, and functionalism. The languages dealt with include Old English, Mainland Scandinavian, Icelandic, German and other Germanic languages, Latin, French and other Romance languages, Northeast Caucasian, Eskimo, and Popolocan. This book provides an opportunity to compare different theoretical approaches to similar phenomena in different languages and language families.

Contents:

How far does semantic bleaching go : about grammaticalization that does not terminate in functional categories/ Werner Abraham

"Oblique subjects," structural and lexical case marking : some thoughts on case assignment in North Germanic and German/ John Ole Askedal

The notion of oblique subject and its status in the history of Icelandic/ Jan Terje Faarlund

Towards personal subjects in English : variation in feature interpretability/ Elly van Gelderen

Focus and universal principles governing simplification of cleft structures/ Alice C. Harris

Recasting Danish subjects : case system, word order and subject development/ Lars Heltoft

Ergative to accusative : comparing evidence from Inuktitut/ Alana Johns

Subject and object in Old English and Latin copular deontics/ D. Gary Miller

The loss of lexical case in Swedish/ Muriel Norde

The coding of the subject-object distinction from Latin to modern French/ Lene Schsler

Changes in Popolocan word order and clause structure/ Annette Veerman-Leichsenring.

Notes:

Six of the contributions were originally presented at a workshop held during the 14th International Conference of Historical Linguistics which was held in Vancouver, B.C., in 1999.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9786612162381

9781282162389

1282162381

9789027298041

9027298041

OCLC:

70766137