The rise of agreement : a formal approach to the syntax and grammaticalization of verbal inflection / Eric Fuss.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Fuss, Eric.

Series:

Linguistik aktuell ; Bd. 81.

Linguistik aktuell = Linguistics today, 0166-0829 ; v. 81

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Grammar, Comparative and general--Agreement.

Grammar, Comparative and general.

Grammar, Comparative and general--Verb.

Grammar, Comparative and general--Grammaticalization.

Historical linguistics.

Grammar, Comparative and general--Inflection.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (350 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Amsterdam ; Philadelphia : J. Benjamins, 2005.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

This book investigates the historical paths leading from pronouns to markers of verbal agreement and proposes a unified formal account of this grammaticalization process. In opposition to beliefs widely held in the literature, it is argued that new agreement formatives can be coined in a multitude of syntactic environments. Still, the individual paths toward agreement are shown to exhibit a set of underlying similarities which are attributed to universal principles that govern the reanalysis of pronominal clitics as exponents of verbal agreement across languages. It is claimed that syntactic principles impose only a set of necessary conditions on the reanalysis in question, while its ultimate trigger is morphological in nature. More specifically, it is argued that the acquisition of inflectional morphology is governed by blocking effects which operate during language acquisition and promote the grammaticalization of new markers if this change serves to replace 'worn-out', underspecified forms with new, more specified candidates.

Contents:

The Rise of Agreement

Editorial page

Title page

LCC data

Table of contents

Acknowledgements

Notes for the reader and list of abbreviations

Introduction

1.1. The grammaticalization of verbal agreement markers

1.2. Previous accounts

1.2.1. NP-detachment (Givón 1976)

1.2.2. Accessibility theory (Ariel 2000)

1.2.3. Reanalysis of focus shells (Simpson &amp

Wu 2002)

1.2.4. Section summary

1.3. Outline of the Book

Notes

Theoretical preliminaries

2.1. Introduction

2.2. Minimalist syntax

2.3. Distributed Morphology

2.4. Language change: A generative perspective

2.5. Grammaticalization

2.6. Summary

The structural design of agreement

3.1. Introduction

3.2. The phrase-structural representation of agreement

3.2.1. Conceptual arguments

3.2.2. Evidence from word order facts

3.2.3. The morphological realization of agreement

3.3. The structural relation involved in feature matching

3.4. Syntactic approaches to word formation

3.5. Interim summary: The design of agreement

3.6. Toward a realizational theory of agreement

3.6.1. The structural representation of agreement morphemes

3.6.2. Feature matching under closest c-command

3.6.3. Agreement and word formation

3.6.4. Section summary

3.7. Multiple agreement: Inflected complementizers in Germanic

3.7.1. Previous accounts of complementizer agreement

3.7.2. A Late Insertion account of complementizer agreement

3.8. Conclusion

The transition from pronoun to inflectional marker

4.1. Introduction

4.2. Telling apart clitics and agreement markers

4.2.1. Syntactic criteria

4.2.2. Morphological criteria

4.3. Syntactic preconditions for the rise of agreement

4.4. Paths toward agreement I: Infl-oriented clitics

4.5. Paths toward agreement II: C-oriented clitics.

4.6. Summary

The reanalysis of C-oriented clitics

5.1. Introduction

5.2. Bavarian

5.2.1. The diachronic development of Agr-on-C in Bavarian

5.2.2. Clitics, V2, and the rise of agreement

5.2.3. Developments in other German varieties

5.2.4. Section summary

5.3. Rhaeto-Romance

5.3.1. A grammatical sketch of the Swiss Rhaeto-Romance dialects

5.3.2. Earlier grammaticalization processes affecting enclitic pronouns

5.3.3. Clitic doubling and the rise of agreement

5.3.4. The reanalysis of emphatic doubling structures

5.3.5. Section summary

5.4. Reanalysis of C-oriented clitics in non-V2 languages

5.4.1. Uto-Aztecan

5.4.2. Mongolian

5.5. Conclusion

Morphological blocking and the rise of agreement

6.1. Introduction

6.2. The Blocking Principle

6.2.1. The rise of new verbal agreement endings in Bavarian

6.2.2. Morphological blocking versus analogical leveling

6.2.3. On the status of morphological doublets

6.2.4. Section summary

6.3. The pioneering role of 1st and 2nd person

6.4. French

6.5. Northern Italian dialects

6.5.1. Piattino

6.5.2. Vicentino

6.5.3. Section summary

6.6. Rhaeto-Romance

6.7. Language loss and the grammaticalization of agreement markers

6.8. Grammaticalization and multiple agreement in Skou

6.8.1. Strategies of agreement marking in present-day Skou

6.8.2. The historical origin of multiple agreement marking in Skou

6.9. Conclusion

Concluding summary

Note

References

Index

The series Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today.

Notes:

Rev. version of the author's doctoral dissertation (Frankfort), 2004.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9786612156434

9781282156432

1282156438

9789027294142

9027294143

OCLC:

191936092