The contributions of this volume offer new perspectives on the relation between syntax and information structure in the history of Germanic and Romance languages, focusing on English, German, Norwegian, French, Spanish and Portuguese, and both from a synchronic and a diachronic perspective. In… read more
In this paper, I trace a word order change from Old Portuguese (OP) to Modern European Portuguese (MEP) that affected subjects of unaccusative verbs and argue that these subjects lost their object-like position along two different paths: subjects that contain old information follow the same… read more
In this article, we discuss how contrastivity can be identified in historical texts where we have no direct access to prosodic features such as stress and intonation. We depart from our knowledge of contrastivity in the modern languages and their exponence in Modern Spanish and Portuguese, where… read more
The single argument of unaccusative verbs has gone from being predominantly postverbal in Classical (16th century) Portuguese to being predominantly preverbal in Modern Portuguese. While Portuguese has no morphological case marking, we find that the position immediately before the verb is becoming… read more
