Full Description
This volume explores the role that functional elements play in syntactic change and investigates the semantic and functional features that are the driving force behind those changes. Structural developments are explained in terms of the reanalysis of parts of the functional sequences in the clausal, nominal, and adpositional domains, through changes in parameter settings and feature specifications. The chapters discuss 'microdiachronic' syntactic changes that often have implications for large-scale syntactic effects, such as word order variation, the emergence (and lexicalization) of syntactic projections, grammaticalization, and changes in information-structural properties. The volume contains both case studies of individual languages, such as German, Hungarian, and Romanian, and detailed investigations of cross-linguistic phenomena, based primarily on digital corpora of historical and dialectal data.
Contents
1: Barbara Egedi and Veronika Hegedüs: The role of functional heads in syntactic change
2: Lieven Danckaert: Changing patterns of clausal complementation in Latin: A parametric approach to 'constructional' changes
3: Adina Dragomirescu and Virginia Hill: From split to remerged Fin in Romanian supine complements
4: Ana Maria Martins, Sandra Pereira, and Clara Pinto: The diachronic path of senão: From conditional subordination to exceptive coordination
5: Emanuela Sanfelici, Jacopo Garzonio, and Cecilia Poletto: On Italian relative complementizers and relative pronouns: Rethinking grammaticalization
6: Julia Bacskai-Atkari: Information structure, functional left peripheries, and the history of a Hungarian interrogative marker
7: Eric Haeberli and Tabea Ihsane: The recategorization of modals in English: Evidence from adverb placement
8: Ida Larsson and Ellen Brandner: Tense recursion, perfect doubling, and the grammaticalization of auxiliaries
9: Jóhannes Gísli Jónsson and Brynhildur Stefánsdóttir: P-incorporation in the history of Icelandic
10: Heimir F. Viðarsson: From Old to Modern Icelandic: Dative applicatives and NP/DP configurationality
