Continuity and Change in Grammar

Editors

Anne Breitbarth | Ghent University

Christopher Lucas | University of Cambridge

Sheila Watts | University of Cambridge

David Willis | University of Cambridge

Hardbound – Available

ISBN 9789027255426 | EUR 99.00 | USD 149.00

e-Book –

ISBN 9789027288073 | EUR 99.00 | USD 149.00

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.

[Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today, 159] 2010. viii, 359 pp.

Publishing status: Available

https://doi.org/10.1075/la.159

Table of Contents

List of contributors | pp. vii–viii

Introduction: Continuity and change in grammar

Anne Breitbarth, Christopher Lucas, Sheila Watts and David Willis | pp. 1–10

Part I. Continuity

What changed where? A plea for the re-evaluation of dialectal evidence

Katrin Axel-Tober and Helmut Weiß | pp. 13–34

Impossible changes and impossible borrowings: The Final-over-Final Constraint

Theresa Biberauer, Michelle Sheehan and Glenda Newton | pp. 35–60

Continuity is change: The long tail of Jespersen’s cycle in Flemish

Anne Breitbarth and Liliane Haegeman | pp. 61–76

Using the Matrix Language Frame model to measure the extent of word-order convergence in Welsh-English bilingual speech

Peredur Webb-Davies and Margaret Deuchar | pp. 77–96

On language contact as an inhibitor of language change: The Spanish of Catalan bilinguals in Majorca

Andrés Enrique-Arias | pp. 97–118

Towards notions of comparative continuity in English and French

Remus Gergel | pp. 119–144

Variation, continuity and contact in Middle Norwegian and Middle Low German

John D. Sundquist | pp. 145–166

Part II. Change

Directionality in word-order change in Austronesian languages

Edith Aldridge | pp. 169–180

Negative co-ordination in the history of English

Richard P. Ingham | pp. 181–200

Formal features and the development of the Spanish D-system

Masataka Ishikawa | pp. 201–224

The rise of OV word order in Irish verbal-noun clauses

Elliott Lash | pp. 225–248

The great siSwati locative shift

Lutz Marten | pp. 249–268

The impact of failed changes

Gertjan Postma | pp. 269–302

A case of degrammaticalization in northern Swedish

Henrik Rosenkvist | pp. 303–320

Jespersen’s Cycle in German from the phonological perspective of syllable and word languages

Renata Szczepaniak | pp. 321–334

An article on the rise: Contact-induced change and the rise and fall of N-to-D movement

Mila Dimitrova-Vulchanova and Valentin Vulchanov | pp. 335–354

Language index | pp. 355–356

Subject index | pp. 357–359

Cited by

Cited by 2 other publications

Larrivée, Pierre

2010. The pragmatic motifs of the Jespersen cycle: Default, activation, and the history of negation in French. Lingua 120:9 ► pp. 2240 ff.

Silva-Domínguez, Carme

2022. O posesivo non concordado en galego e en castelán de Galicia como mudanza sintáctica en curso. Madrygal. Revista de Estudios Gallegos 24 ► pp. 191 ff.

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 13 november 2023. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.

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