Recent years have seen intense debates between formal (generative) and functional linguists, particularly with respect to the relation between grammar and usage. This debate is directly relevant to diachronic linguistics, where one and the same phenomenon of language change can be explained from… read more
In this article, which examines the cyclic evolution of future markers in Western Romance (mainly French and Spanish), I make use of the “satellite model” in the version proposed by Koch and Oesterreicher (1996) to capture the complex interplay between functional change, synchronic variation and… read more
In this article it will be argued that both from a syntactic and a prosodic point of view, the so-called disjoined or tonic pronouns of Modern Spoken French are neither necessarily disjoined nor stressed elements any more. Based on syntactic and phonetic corpus data, I will show that especially the… read more
This paper discusses the loss of the Old French two-case system within the theory of Preferred Argument Structure (Du Bois 2003, 1987). It will be shown that the chronology of this process followed a hierarchy of relative frequency, which in turn was driven by discourse preferences. Apart from… read more
This article presents a critical discussion of Inertia Theory (Longobardi 2001; 2003), according to which syntactic change never originates in syntax itself. We argue that syntactic change originates in language usage, which includes the possibility that it may be triggered by genuinely syntactic… read more
This paper is concerned with the “invisible hand” behind the polygenetic pathways of semantic change in grammaticalization. A comparison between Old English habban + Past Participle and Spanish tener + Past Participle brings to light specific discourse strategies which speakers use resultatives for. read more
