Continuity and change in grammar / edited by Anne Breitbarth ...[et al.].

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Breitbarth, Anne, 1976-

Series:

Linguistik aktuell/linguistics today, 0166-0829 ; 159

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Language and languages--Variation.

Language and languages.

Grammar, Comparative and general.

Sociolinguistics.

Physical Description:

viii, 359 p.

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Amsterdam ; Philadelphia : John Benjamins Pub. Company, 2010.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

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.

Contents:

What changed where? A plea for the re-evaluation of dialectal evidence / Katrin Axel & Helmut Weiss

Impossible changes and impossible borrowings: the Final-over-Final Constraint / Theresa Biberauer, Michelle Sheehan & Glenda Newton

Continuity is change: the long tail of Jespersen's cycle in Flemish / Anne Breitbarth & Liliane Haegeman

Using the Matrix Language Frame model to measure the extent of word-order convergence in Welsh-English bilingual speech / Peredur Davies & Margaret Deuchar

On language contact as an inhibitor of language change: the Spanish of Catalan bilinguals in Majorca / Andrés Enrique-Arias

Towards notions of comparative continuity in English and French / Remus Gergel

Variation, continuity and contact in Middle Norwegian and Middle Low German / John D. Sundquist Change, directionality in word-order change in Austronesian languages / Edith Aldridge

Negative co-ordination in the history of English / Richard Ingham

Formal features and the development of the Spanish D-system / Masataka Ishikawa

The rise of OV word order in Irish verbal-noun clauses / Elliott Lash

The great siSwati locative shift / Lutz Marten

The impact of failed changes / Gertjan Postma

A case of degrammaticalization in northern Swedish / Henrik Rosenkvist

Jespersen's Cycle in German from the phonological perspective of syllable and word languages / Renata Szczepaniak

An article on the rise: Contact-induced change and the rise

And fall of n-to-d movement / Mila Dimitrova-Vulchanova & Valentin Vulchanov.

Notes:

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9786612721670

9781282721678

1282721674

9789027288073

9027288070

OCLC:

663886680