Information Structure and Syntactic Change in Germanic and Romance Languages

Editors

Kristin Bech | University of Oslo

Kristine Gunn Eide | University of Oslo

Hardbound – Available

ISBN 9789027255969 | EUR 105.00 | USD 158.00

e-Book –

ISBN 9789027270467 | EUR 105.00 | USD 158.00

The contributions of this volume offer new perspectives on the relation between syntax and information structure in the history of Germanic and Romance languages, focusing on English, German, Norwegian, French, Spanish and Portuguese, and both from a synchronic and a diachronic perspective. In addition to discussing changes in individual languages along the syntax–information structure axis, the volume also makes a point of comparing and contrasting different languages with respect to the interplay between syntax and information structure. Since the creation of increasingly sophisticated annotated corpora of historical texts is on the agenda in many research environments, methods and schemes for information structure annotation and analysis of historical texts from a theoretical and applied perspective are discussed.

[Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today, 213] 2014. vii, 421 pp.

Publishing status: Available

https://doi.org/10.1075/la.213

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements | pp. vii–viii

Information structure and syntax in old Germanic and Romance languages

Kristin Bech and Kristine Gunn Eide | pp. 1–14

Part I. Information-structural categories and corpus annotation

The theoretical foundations of givenness annotation

Dag T.T. Haug, Hanne Martine Eckhoff and Eirik Welo | pp. 17–52

Testing the theory: Information structure in Old English

Ann Taylor and Susan Pintzuk | pp. 53–78

Part II. Changes on the interface between syntax and information structure

Quantifying information structure change in English

Erwin R. Komen, Rosanne Hebing, Ans M.C. van Kemenade and Bettelou Los | pp. 81–110

Tracing overlap in function in historical corpora: A case study of English object fronting and passivization

Gea Dreschler | pp. 111–140

Referential properties of the full and reduced forms of the definite article in German: A diachronic survey

Marco Coniglio and Eva Schlachter | pp. 141–172

The cognitive status of null subject referents in Old Norse and their Modern Norwegian counterparts

Kari Kinn | pp. 173–200

Part III. Comparisons on the interface between syntax and information structure

Word order variation in late Middle English: The effect of information structure and audience design

Tamás Eitler and Marit Westergaard | pp. 203–232

Preverbal word order in Old English and Old French

Kristin Bech and Christine Meklenborg Salvesen | pp. 233–270

Formal properties of event-reporting sentences in Old High German and Old French

Svetlana Petrova and Esther Rinke | pp. 271–294

Subjects and objects in Germanic and Romance

Jan Terje Faarlund and Kristin Hagemann | pp. 295–312

Object position and Heavy NP Shift in Old Saxon and beyond

George Walkden | pp. 313–340

On the interaction between syntax, prosody and information structure: An interface approach to word order developments in Germanic

Roland Hinterhölzl | pp. 341–376

Contrastivity and information structure in the old Ibero-Romance languages

Kristine Gunn Eide and Ioanna Sitaridou | pp. 377–412

Index of languages | pp. 413–414

Databases and annotation schemes | pp. 415–416

Word index | pp. 417–422

Cited by

Cited by 7 other publications

Order by:

Börjars, Kersti & Nigel Vincent

2017. Lexical-Functional Grammar. In The Cambridge Handbook of Historical Syntax, ► pp. 642 ff.

Catasso, Nicholas

2015. On PostinitialAberand Other Syntactic Transgressions: Some Considerations on the Nature of V2 in German. Journal of Germanic Linguistics 27:4 ► pp. 317 ff.

LOS, BETTELOU, GEA DRESCHLER, ANS VAN KEMENADE, ERWIN KOMEN & STEFANO CORETTA

2023. The decline of local anchoring: a quantitative investigation. English Language and Linguistics 27:2 ► pp. 345 ff.

STRUIK, TARA & ANS VAN KEMENADE

2020. On the givenness of OV word order: a (re)examination of OV/VO variation in Old English. English Language and Linguistics 24:1 ► pp. 1 ff.

Taylor, Ann

2020. Treebanks in Historical Syntax. Annual Review of Linguistics 6:1 ► pp. 195 ff.

[no author supplied]

2014. PUBLICATIONS RECEIVED. English Language and Linguistics 18:3 ► pp. 599 ff.

[no author supplied]

2015. Publications received in 2014. Nordic Journal of Linguistics 38:1 ► pp. 109 ff.

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 11 april 2024. 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.

Subjects