In:The Limits of Syntactic Variation
Edited by Theresa Biberauer
[Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 132] 2008
► pp. 441–456
Diachronic stability and feature interpretability
Published online: 17 September 2008
https://doi.org/10.1075/la.132.19pan
https://doi.org/10.1075/la.132.19pan
This contribution examines diachronic change in the Greek nominal phrase.
It proposes an analysis to capture the diachronic stability of certain syntactic
structures in the nominal domain, suggesting that points of stability reflect
macroparametric rather than microparametric choices, which are more
vulnerable to change and loss. Macroparametric choices are assumed to involve
choices pertaining to the presence versus absence in a grammar of functional
categories, while microparametric choices relate to the presence versus absence
of uninterpretable features on otherwise identical functional categories. The
difference in diachronic stability is linked to the generally “defective” status of
uninterpretable features in the human language faculty.
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