Haider’s target paper presents a fresh and inspiring look at the nature of grammar change. The overall impression of his approach is very convincing, especially his insistence on the point that language was not selected for communication – hence it is no adaptation to communicative use.… read more
It is an old and widespread assumption in historical linguistics that hypotactic structures evolved out from paratactic structures. In more recent times, the parataxis-to-hypotaxis hypothesis was associated with the assumption that syntactic structures are discourse-based. This means that… read more
The concept of Gliederungsverschiebung (rebracketing) was introduced by the Neogrammarians and it is probably the first explanation of syntactic change proper. Originally, it was conceived of to explain the emergence of the complementizer dass “that”, which was held to go back to a demonstrative… read more
This paper discusses morphological variation that is pragmatically determined. We focus on the distribution of personal pronouns and definite articles which both systematically show at least two different morphological forms – full and reduced – and we claim that their syntactic distribution… read more
The syntax of (first or last) names shows many interesting properties in Bavarian – as well as in other German dialects. Yet this paper will focus on a type of construction that seems to occur only in Bavarian. Family Names (FN) are combined with a preposition which can be von ‘of’ or bei ‘at’… read more
The traditional explanation of the emergence of DP-internal possessors (due to H. Paul and O. Behaghel) assumes a kind of structural reanalysis: The DP-internal possessor originated from an adverbal dative DP which became reanalysed as part of the possessee-DP since both DPs supposedly happened to… read more
In the field of generative diachronic syntax, it has often been disregarded at which level of the language (dialect or Standard) syntactic change has occurred. However, just as in the case of phonological developments, the syntax often (though not always) turns out to be more conservative at the… read more
Data from natural languages (in contrast to, say, the results of psycholinguistic experiments) are still a major source of evidence used in linguistics, whether they are elicited through grammatical judgments, as in generative linguistics, or by collecting samples, as preferred in typology. The… read more
Data from natural languages (in contrast to, say, the results of psycholinguistic experiments) are still a major source of evidence used in linguistics, whether they are elicited through grammatical judgments, as in generative linguistics, or by collecting samples, as preferred in typology. The… read more