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Syntactic Features and the Limits of Syntactic Change
This volume brings together the latest diachronic research on syntactic features and their role in restricting syntactic change. The chapters explore topics relating to all three domains of the clause as well as issues in methodology and modelling, drawing on data from a range of languages and dialects.
Principles of Historical Linguistics
Historical linguistic theory and practice consist of a large number of chronological "layers" that have been accepted in the course of time and have acquired a permanence of their own. These range from neogrammarian conceptualizations of sound change, analogy, and borrowing, to prosodic, lexical, morphological, and syntactic change, and to present-day views on rule change and the effects of language contact. To get a full grasp of the principles of historical linguistics it is therefore necessary to understand the nature of each of these "layers". This book is a major revision and reorganization of the earlier editions and adds entirely new chapters on morphological change and lexical change, as well as a detailed discussion of linguistic palaeontology and ideological responses to the findings of historical linguistics to this landmark publication.
Building Modality with Syntax
Despite the intensive research carried out in recent years, modality remains an intriguing and challenging issue in linguistics. This book investigates modality from a syntactic viewpoint and with a bottom-up approach. A strong focus of the book is the interaction between the different linguistic tools that build modality (moods, modal verbs, modal adverbs, etc.), taking both the role of syntactic structure and the compositionality of modal meanings into account. The volume comprises corpus-based studies devoted to several syntactic aspects of modality in Ancient Greek, within different theoretical frameworks. The chapters shed new light on different modal categories (e.g. epistemicity, possibility, counterfactuality, evidentiality, subjectivity) and show how these modal meanings arise from the combination of different linguistic devices in specific syntactic contexts (e.g. combinations of modal elements, types of main and dependent clauses, types of illocutionary acts, etc.). By approaching modality from a different perspective and providing an up-to-date discussion of several aspects of modality, the book makes a significant contribution to current debates.
Postclassical Greek
The present volume collects contributions given at the First Postclassical Greek Conference Cologne (March 24–26, 2021), dealing with different topics related to the Greek language of the Postclassical period. In particular, it addresses the following issues: diachrony of the Greek language (e.g. as regards word order, negation, semantic shifts, counterfactuals); standardization processes; dialect convergence and linguistic change; linguistic innovation vs. reuse in literary Greek; layout of ancient texts in manuscripts. The papers include further elaborations with respect to their discussion within the activities of the DFG scientific network on Postclassical Greek (March 2022 – Feb. 2024) organized by the editors. The thirteen contributions aim at giving the readers new insights into this extremely complex and internally diverse stage of Greek, taking into consideration literary and documentary sources, New Testament Greek and inscriptions. Moreover, they show the productivity of the combination of philological and linguistic approaches when analyzing ancient languages.
Language Change at the Interfaces
This volume offers an up-to-date survey of linguistic phenomena at the interfaces between syntax and prosody, information structure and discourse – with a special focus on Germanic and Romance – and their role in language change. The contributions, set within the generative framework, discuss original data and provide new insights into the diachronic development of long-burning issues such as negation, word order, quantifiers, null subjects, aspectuality, the structure of the left periphery, and extraposition. The first part of the volume explores interface phenomena at the intrasentential level, in which only clause-internal factors seem to play a significant role in determining diachronic change. The second part examines developments at the intersentential level involving a rearrangement of categories between at least two clausal domains. The book will be of interest for scholars and students interested in generative accounts of language change phenomena at the interfaces, as well as for theoretical linguists in general.
The Limits of Syntactic Variation
Against the background of the past half century s typological and generative work on comparative syntax, this volume brings together 16 papers considering what we have learned and may still be able to learn about the nature and extent of syntactic variation. More specifically, it offers a multi-perspective critique of the Principles and Parameters approach to syntactic variation, evaluating the merits and shortcomings of the pre-Minimalist phase of this enterprise and considering and illustrating the possibilities opened up by recent empirical and theoretical advances. Contributions focus on four central topics: firstly, the question of the locus of variation, whether the attested variation may plausibly be understood in parametric terms and, if so, what form such parameters might take; secondly, the fate of one of the most prominent early parameters, the Null Subject Parameter; thirdly, the matter of parametric clusters more generally; and finally, acquisition issues.
Quantification and scales in change
This volume contains thematic papers on semantic change which emerged from the second edition of Formal Diachronic Semantics held at Saarland University. Its authorship ranges from established scholars in the field of language change to advanced PhD students whose contributions have equally qualified and have been selected after a two-step peer-review process. The key foci are variablity and diachronic trajectories in scale structures and quantification, but readers will also find a variety of further (and clearly non-disjoint) issues covered including reference, modality, givenness, presuppositions, alternatives in language change, temporality, epistemic indefiniteness, as well as - in more...
Determiners and Quantifiers
This volume explores the interface between morphosyntax and semantics-pragmatics in the domain of referential and quantificational nominal expressions, by means of synchronic and diachronic case studies from Romance and Germanic languages.
On the Role of Contrast in Information Structure
In research on Information Structure, there is an ongoing discussion about the role of contrast. While most linguists consider contrast to be compatible with both focus and topic, some argue that it is an autonomous IS category. Contrast has been shown to be encoded by different linguistic means, such as specific morphemes, adverbials, clefts, prosodic cues. Hence, this concept is also related to other domains, in particular morphosyntax and prosody. The precise way in which they interact is however not yet entirely clear. Moreover, from a methodological point of view, the identification and annotation of contrast in corpora is not straightforward. This volume provides a selection of articles discussing the definition of contrast, the importance of distinguishing different types of contrast, the use of several encoding strategies, and the annotation of contrast in corpora using the Question Under Discussion Model. The contributions offer data on English, French, French Belgian Sign Language, German, Hindi, Italian and Spanish.
Affectedness at the Morphosyntax-Semantics Interface
The monograph explores the semantic and morphosyntactic representation of affectedness, i.e., the property of an event participant to undergo change, in transitive predicates. Specifically, it provides a first in-depth investigation of how affectedness, the notion of path, and resultativity determine Differential Object Marking (DOM) in Turkish. It argues that affectedness is the crucial event semantic characteristic enhancing DOM, and articulates a theoretical link between affectedness in the lexical syntactic structure and morphological accusative marking. The study addresses affectedness from a cross-linguistic perspective and makes a remarkable contribution to our understanding and modelling of the syntax-semantics interface.
