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Continuity and Change in Grammar
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
Published online on 2 August 2010
Published online on 2 August 2010
© John Benjamins Publishing Company
Table of Contents
- List of contributors | pp. vii–viii
- Introduction: Continuity and change in grammarAnne Breitbarth, Christopher Lucas, Sheila Watts and David Willis | pp. 1–10
- Part I. Continuity
- What changed where? A plea for the re-evaluation of dialectal evidenceKatrin Axel-Tober and Helmut Weiß | pp. 13–34
- Impossible changes and impossible borrowings: The Final-over-Final ConstraintTheresa Biberauer, Michelle Sheehan and Glenda Newton | pp. 35–60
- Continuity is change: The long tail of Jespersen’s cycle in FlemishAnne Breitbarth and Liliane Haegeman | pp. 61–76
- Using the Matrix Language Frame model to measure the extent of word-order convergence in Welsh-English bilingual speechPeredur Webb-Davies and Margaret Deuchar | pp. 77–96
- On language contact as an inhibitor of language change: The Spanish of Catalan bilinguals in MajorcaAndrés Enrique-Arias | pp. 97–118
- Towards notions of comparative continuity in English and FrenchRemus Gergel | pp. 119–144
- Variation, continuity and contact in Middle Norwegian and Middle Low GermanJohn D. Sundquist | pp. 145–166
- Part II. Change
- Directionality in word-order change in Austronesian languagesEdith Aldridge | pp. 169–180
- Negative co-ordination in the history of EnglishRichard P. Ingham | pp. 181–200
- Formal features and the development of the Spanish D-systemMasataka Ishikawa | pp. 201–224
- The rise of OV word order in Irish verbal-noun clausesElliott Lash | pp. 225–248
- The great siSwati locative shiftLutz Marten | pp. 249–268
- The impact of failed changesGertjan Postma | pp. 269–302
- A case of degrammaticalization in northern SwedishHenrik Rosenkvist | pp. 303–320
- Jespersen’s Cycle in German from the phonological perspective of syllable and word languagesRenata Szczepaniak | pp. 321–334
- An article on the rise: Contact-induced change and the rise and fall of N-to-D movementMila Dimitrova-Vulchanova and Valentin Vulchanov | pp. 335–354
- Language index | pp. 355–356
- Subject index | pp. 357–359
Cited by (3)
Cited by three other publications
Silva-Domínguez, Carme
Niehaus, Konstantin
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