Syntactic Change

Toward a Theory of Historical Syntax

Jan T. Faarlund

• Publisher: De Gruyter Mouton
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN:
  9783110126518
• eBook ISBN:
  9783110854947
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Grammar & Punctuation
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

No detailed description available for "Syntactic Change".

Table of contents

• Preface
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1. Preliminaries
• 1.1. The subject-matter of diachronic syntax
• 1.2. The logic of syntactic change
• 1.3. The North Germanic languages and dialects
• 1.4. Theoretical framework
• 1.5. The data
• 2. Explanation and syntactic change
• 2.1. The locus of linguistic change
• 2.2. The meaning of “explanation”
• 2.3. Explaining linguistic change
• 2.4. Motivation and predictability
• 2.5. Formal and functional explanations – a summary
• 3. Functional change
• 3.1. Synchronic variation and diachronic change
• 3.2. Word order typology
• 3.3. The verb-second constraint
• 3.4. The expletive topic
• 4. Formal change
• 4.1. Predicate and argument
• 4.2. Grammatical function and semantic role
• 4.3. Configurationality
• 4.4. Prototypicality
• 5. Some consequences
• 5.1. Case systems
• 5.2. Passive
• 5.3. “Impersonal” constructions
• 5.4. From preposition to verbal particle
• 5.5. The expletive subject
• Notes
• References
• Index