Edited by Anne Breitbarth, Miriam Bouzouita, Lieven Danckaert and Melissa Farasyn
While much of the literature has focused on explaining diachronic variation and change, the fact that sometimes change does not seem to happen has received much less attention. The current volume unites ten contributions that look for the determinants of diachronic stability, mainly in the areas of… read more
This monograph is one of the first studies that approaches Latin syntax from a formal perspective, combining detailed corpus-based description with formal theoretical analysis. The empirical focus is word order in embedded clauses, with special attention to clauses in which one or more constituents… read more
While not a pro drop language, English allows subject drop in specific registers such as abbreviated writing and colloquial speech. This paper studies subject drop in the representation of speech in British crime fiction. The core material consists of three stories by Agatha Christie, who uses… read more
This paper aims at analysing English structures in which a wh-moved subject triggers agreement both in the clause it is extracted from and in the immediately higher clause. This pattern is only accepted by some native speakers, and it is also attested in corpora. Although the relevant structures… read more
The focus of this paper is on apparent cases of subject-to-subject raising out of finite clauses in English, which are accepted as (fully) grammatical by a minority of native speakers. The basic pattern involves a bi-clausal structure in which a displaced subject triggers agreement in both the… read more
In Danckaert (2014), the Latin particle quidem was analysed as a marker of emphatic affirmative polarity. Building on this proposal, this paper elaborates on the pragmatic properties of this element. I argue that quidem is not a neutral but a so-called “presuppositional” polarity marker, which… read more
The main aim of this contribution is to argue that a linear string of Latin words can correspond to more than one syntactic structure, and that this potential for structural ambiguity has important methodological consequences for the synchronic and diachronic study of Latin word order. On the basis… read more
The focus of this paper is the syntax of Latin clauses in which a finite auxiliary occurs in clause-final position, which in Classical Latin (ca. 100 BC–200 AD) is the most frequently attested word order pattern. I argue that these structures are derived through VP movement, which is analysed as an… read more
This paper addresses two properties of conditional clauses: (i) their incompatibility with Main Clause Phenomena (MCP), exemplified by English argument fronting, and (ii) the unavailability of Speaker Oriented Adverbs (Ernst 2009) (SpOAs). The paper elaborates the hypothesis (Bhatt & Pancheva 2002,… read more
