Dative External Possessors in Early English PDF Download

Author: Cynthia L. Allen
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192568264
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
This volume is the first systematic, corpus-based examination of dative external possessors in Old and Early Middle English and their diachronic development. Modern English is unusual among European languages in not having a productive dative external possessor construction, whereby the possessor is in the dative case and behaves like an element of the sentence rather than part of the possessive phrase. This type of construction was found in Old English, however, especially in expressions of inalienable possession; it appeared in variation with the internal possessors in the genitive case, which then became the only productive possibility in Middle English. In this book, Cynthia Allen traces the use of dative external possessors in the texts of the Old and early Middle English periods and explores how the empirical data fit with the hypotheses put forward to date. She draws on recent developments in linguistic theory to evaluate both language-internal explanations for the loss of the dative construction and the possible role of language contact, especially with the Brythonic Celtic languages. The book will be of interest to students and researchers in the fields of historical syntax and morphology, language variation and change, and the comparative syntax of the Germanic languages.

Author: Cynthia L. Allen
Publisher: Oxford Studies in Diachronic a
ISBN: 0198832265
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 307

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Book Description
This volume is the first systematic, corpus-based examination of dative external possessors in Old and Early Middle English and their diachronic development. Modern English is unusual among European languages in not having a productive dative external possessor construction, whereby the possessor is in the dative case and behaves like an element of the sentence rather than part of the possessive phrase. This type of construction was found in Old English, however, especially in expressions of inalienable possession; it appeared in variation with the internal possessors in the genitive case, which then became the only productive possibility in Middle English. In this book, Cynthia Allen traces the use of dative external possessors in the texts of the Old and early Middle English periods and explores how the empirical data fit with the hypotheses put forward to date. She draws on recent developments in linguistic theory to evaluate both language-internal explanations for the loss of the dative construction and the possible role of language contact, especially with the Brythonic Celtic languages. The book will be of interest to students and researchers in the fields of historical syntax and morphology, language variation and change, and the comparative syntax of the Germanic languages.

Author: Kristian A. Rusten
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192535765
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
This book offers a large-scale quantitative investigation of referential null subjects as they occur in Old, Middle, and Early Modern English. Using corpus linguistic methods, and drawing on five corpora of early English, it empirically examines the occurrence of subjectless finite clauses in more than 500 early English texts, spanning nearly 850 years. On the basis of this substantial data, Kristian A. Rusten re-evaluates previous conflicting claims concerning the occurrence and distribution of null subjects in Old English. He explores the question of whether the earliest stage of English can be considered a canonical or partial pro-drop language, and provides an empirical examination of the role played by central licensors of null subjects proposed in the theoretical literature. The predictions of two important pragmatic accounts of null arguments are also tested. Throughout, the book builds its arguments primarily by means of powerful statistical tools, including generalized fixed-effects and mixed-effects logistic regression modelling. The volume is the most comprehensive examination of null subjects in the history of English to date, and will be of interest to syntacticians, historical linguists, and those working in English and Germanic linguistics more widely.

Author: Doris L. Payne
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027298602
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 587

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Book Description
External Possession Constructions (EPCs) are found in nearly all parts of the world and across widely divergent language families. The data-rich papers in this first-ever volume on EPCs document their typological variability, explore diachronic reasons for variations, and investigate their functions and theoretical ramifications. EPCs code the possessor as a core grammatical relation of the verb and in a constituent separate from that which contains the possessed item. Though EPCs express possession, they do so without the necessary involvement of a possessive predicate such as “have” or “own”. In many cases, EPCs appear to “break the rules” about how many arguments a verb of a given valence can have. They thus constitute an important limiting case for evaluating theories of the relationship between verbal argument structure and syntactic clause structure. They also raise core questions about intersections among verbal valence, cognitive event construal, voice, and language processing.

Author: Ruth Möhlig-Falke
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199777799
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 565

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Book Description
The Early English Impersonal Construction aims to demonstrate that an understanding of the functional and semantic aspects of impersonal verbs in Old and Middle English can shed light on questions that remain about these verbs today.

Author: Miriam Bouzouita
Publisher:
ISBN: 0198824963
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 331

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Book Description
This volume explores multiple aspects of cyclical syntactic change, including the diachrony of negation, the internal structure of wh-words, and changes in argument structure. It combines descriptions of novel data with detailed theoretical analysis, and will appeal to historical linguists and to anyone working on language variation and change.

Author: Jóhanna Barðdal
Publisher: Brill's Studies in Historical
ISBN: 9789004391994
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 377

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Book Description
"During several decades, syntactic reconstruction has been more or less regarded as a bootless and an unsuccessful venture, not least due to the heavy criticism in the 1970s from scholars like Watkins, Jeffers, Lightfoot, etc. This fallacious view culminated in Lightfoot's (2002: 625) conclusion: "[i]f somebody thinks that they can reconstruct grammars more successfully and in more widespread fashion, let them tell us their methods and show us their results. Then we'll eat the pudding." This volume provides methods for the identification of i) cognates in syntax, and ii) the directionality of syntactic change, showcasing the results in the introduction and eight articles. These examples are offered as both tastier and also more nourishing than the pudding Lightfoot had in mind when discarding the viability of reconstructing syntax"--

Author: Sam Wolfe
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192576534
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 480

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Book Description
This volume offers a wide-range of case studies on variation and change in the sub-family of the Romance languages that includes French and Occitan: Gallo-Romance. Both standard and non-standard Gallo-Romance data can be of enormous value to studies of morphosyntactic variation and change, yet, as the volume demonstrates, non-standard and comparative Gallo-Romance data have often been lacking in both synchronic and diachronic studies. Following an introduction that sets out the conceptual background, the volume is divided into three parts whose chapters explore a variety of topics in the domains of sentence structure, the verb complex, and word structure. The empirical foundation of the volume is exceptionally rich, drawing on standard and non-standard data from French, Occitan, Francoprovençal, Picard, Wallon, and Norman. This diversity is also reflected in the theoretical and conceptual approaches adopted, which span traditional philology, sociolinguistics, formal morphological and syntactic theory, semantics, and discourse-pragmatics. The volume will thus be an indispensable tool for researchers and students in French and (Gallo-) Romance linguistics as well as for readers interested in grammatical theory, sociolinguistics, and historical linguistics.

Author: André Zampaulo
Publisher:
ISBN: 0198807384
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 249

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Book Description
This book presents a formal, constraint-based account of the main diachronic and synchronic patterns of variation in the palatal sounds of the Romance languages. It will appeal to graduate students and researchers in historical linguistics, phonetics and phonology, Romance linguistics, and dialectology more broadly.

Author: Daniel Recasens
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192583638
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
This book provides an integrated account of the phonetic causes of the diachronic processes of palatalization and assibilation of velar and labial stops and labiodental fricatives, as well as the palatalization and affrication of dentoalveolar stops. While previous studies have been concerned with the typology of sound inventories and of the processes of palatalization and assibilation, this volume not only deals with the typological patterns but also outlines the articulatory and acoustic causes of these sound changes. In his articulation-based account, Daniel Recasens argues that the affricate and fricative outcomes of these changes developed via an intermediate stage, namely an (alveolo)palatal stop with varying degrees of closure fronting. Particular emphasis is placed on the one-to-many relationship between the input and output consonant realizations, on the acoustic cues that contribute to the implementation of these sound changes, and on the contextual, positional, and prosodic conditions that most favour their development. The analysis is based on extensive data from a wide range of language families, including Romance, Bantu, Slavic, and Germanic, and draws on a variety of sources, such as linguistic atlases, articulatory and acoustic studies, and phoneme identification tests.