Word-order Change as a Source of Grammaticalisation PDF Download

Author: Susann Fischer
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027255407
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 216

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followed by the loss of morphology. --Book Jacket.

Author: Ana Maria Martins
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0191064467
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
This volume explores word order change within the framework of diachronic generative syntax. Word order is at the core of natural language grammatical systems, linking syntax with prosody and with semantics and pragmatics. The chapters in this volume use the tools provided by the generative theory of grammar to examine the constrained ways in which historical word order variants have given way to new ones over time. Following an introduction by the editors, the book is divided into four parts that investigate changes regarding the targets for movement within the clausal functional hierarchy; changes (or stability) in the nature of the triggers for movement; verb movement into the left peripheries; and types of movement, with specific focus on word order change in Latin. Data are drawn from a wide variety of languages from different families and from both classical and modern periods, including Sanskrit, Tocharian, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, Irish, Hungarian, and Coptic Egyptian. The book's broad coverage and combination of language-internal and comparative studies offers new perspectives on the relation between word order change and syntactic movement. The volume also provides a range of wider insights into the properties of natural language and the way in which those properties constrain language variation and change.

Author: Charles N. Li
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 488

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Author: Anne Breitbarth
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027255423
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 369

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One of the principal challenges of historical linguistics is to explain the "causes" of language change. Any such explanation, however, must also address the actuation problem: why is it that changes occurring in a given language at a certain time cannot be reliably predicted to recur in other languages, under apparently similar conditions? The sixteen contributions to the present volume each aim to elucidate various aspects of this problem, including: What processes can be identified as the drivers of change? How central are syntax-external (phonological, lexical or contact-based) factors in triggering syntactic change? And how can all of these factors be reconciled with the actuation problem? Exploring data from a wide range of languages from both a formal and a functional perspective, this book promises to be of interest to advanced students and researchers in historical linguistics, syntax and their intersection."

Author: Jeremy Charles Collins
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781361319963
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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This dissertation, "Grammaticalization and Greenberg's Word Order Correlations" by Jeremy Charles, Collins, was obtained from The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong) and is being sold pursuant to Creative Commons: Attribution 3.0 Hong Kong License. The content of this dissertation has not been altered in any way. We have altered the formatting in order to facilitate the ease of printing and reading of the dissertation. All rights not granted by the above license are retained by the author. Abstract: Word order universals constitute a well-known problem in language typology, first outlined in Greenberg (1963). It has been firmly established in databases of over 1500 languages that languages with verb-object ordering are very likely to have prepositions and noun-genitive ordering, while languages with object-verb ordering are very likely to have postpositions and genitive-noun ordering (Dryer and Haspelmath 2011). This thesis attempts to give a historical explanation for these facts in terms of the origin of syntactic categories: adpositions have historically developed from nouns and verbs (Givon 1984, Aristar 1991); and verbs often develop from nominalizations used with a genitive object. These types of grammaticalization can explain why adpositions retain the ordering of their source nouns or verbs, and why verb/object ordering often parallels noun/genitive ordering. This historical explanation is elaborated on, with data from different language families. Examples of verbs grammaticalizing from nominalizations used with genitive objects are given, drawing on historical work such as Salanova (2007) on Brazilian Je languages and Starosta, Pawley and Reid (1982) on Austronesian. Different languages show varying degrees of 'nominalism', the morphosyntactic resemblance between verb forms and noun phrases/nominalizations. Other languages show a less developed distinction between adpositions and verbs/nouns. These examples of gradience in syntactic categories are argued to be behind resemblances in word orderings. Language contact is responsible for preserving word order types, when languages undergo change in more than one word order (e.g. Greenberg 1969); and the difference in rates of word order change across constructions is argued to be behind hierarchies such as Hawkins (1983)'s Prepositional Noun Modifier Hierarchy. This explanation of word order universals contrasts with more mainstream accounts such as Hawkins (1994) in terms of processing efficiency, and Kirby and Christiansen (2003) in terms of learnability. While these explanations are perhaps compatible with the historical explanation, they are argued to be redundant; grammaticalization arguably is not driven or constrained by learnability and processing efficiency, with memetics, 'typological poise' (Enfield 2003) and language contact given as alternatives. Instead of reflecting functional biases, word order patterns are argued to reflect language history, both the history of language contact, and the history of syntactic categories developing through grammaticalization. DOI: 10.5353/th_b5053413 Subjects: Grammar, Comparative and general - Grammaticalization Grammar, Comparative and general - Word order

Author: Riccardo Giomi
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004520589
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 252

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Drawing on typological arguments, the volume challenges the widespread assumption that morphosyntactic and phonological change are fundamental aspects of grammaticalization and replaces it by a definition of grammaticalization as an essentially functional (semantic and pragmatic) process of language change.

Author: Susann Fischer
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110311860
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 702

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Different components of grammar interact in non-trivial ways. It has been under debate what the actual range of interaction is and how we can most appropriately represent this in grammatical theory. The volume provides a general overview of various topics in the linguistics of Romance languages by examining them through the interaction of grammatical components and functions as a state-of-the-art report, but at the same time as a manual of Romance languages.

Author: Jarich Hoekstra
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 902725544X
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 400

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In this volume, Germen de Haan gives a multi-faceted view of the syntax, sociolinguistics, and phonology of West-Frisian. The author discusses distinct aspects of the syntax of verbs in Frisian: finiteness and Verb Second, embedded root phenomena, the verbal complex, verbal complementation, and complementizer agreement. Because Frisian has minority language status and is of interest to sociolinguists, the author reviews the linguistic changes in Frisian under the influence of the dominant Dutch language and, more generally, reflects on how to deal with contact-induced change in grammar. Finally, in three phonological articles, the author discusses nasalization in Frisian, the putatively symmetrical vowel inventory of Frisian, and the variation between schwa + sonorant consonants and syllabic sonorant consonants.

Author: Marian C. Bean
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 9780389203568
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 178

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The major focus of this book involves the testing of theories of word order change with data on change in Old English. The data are drawn from such sources as the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and from the work of other scholars in Old English and historical linguistics. The book provides support for the ideas of earlier linguists such as Sapir, and will represent a major study for those working in Old English and historical linguistics. Contents: Introduction; Natural Word Order Types and Natural Word Order Change; Proto-Indo-European and Proto-Germanic Word Order Patterns; Order of Major Elements in Main Clauses in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle; Word Order Patterns in Conjunct, Relative and Subordinate Clauses; Further Studies in Old English Word Order; Conclusions.^R

Author: Christina Sevdali
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192635417
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 641

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This book deals with the category of case and where to place it in grammar. The crux of the debate lies in how the morphological expression of grammatical function should relate to formal syntax. In the generative tradition, this issue was addressed by the influential proposal that abstract syntactic Case should be dissociated from the morphological expression of case. The chapters in this book deal with a number of key issues in the ongoing debates that have emerged from this proposal. The first part discusses the modes that we need for structural case assignment, and how Case would relate to a theory of parameters. In the second part, contributors explore the division of labour between structural and inherent case, synchronically and diachronically, while the third part investigates individual cases and how they can illuminate case theory. The chapters discuss a wide range of phenomena, including differential object marking (DOM), global case splits, prepositional genitives and other prepositional phrases, nominative infinitival subjects, nominalizations of deponent verbs, and three-place predicates. They also draw on data from a variety of languages and language families, such as Hindi, Lithuanian, Kashmiri, Kinande, Greek, Hiberno-English, Romance, and Sahapatin.