The development from an allative preposition to a purposive marker to an infinitival marker is a common one cross-linguistically. In this paper, we look in some detail at this change in Pennsylvania German. We demonstrate that fer has completed this change in that it now occurs in a full range of complements. It has gone paired with a loss of the original infinitival marker zu. Functionally, the element has undergone a drastic change and given the loss of zu, one might expect that there would be equally far-reaching structural changes. The standard account of this type of change is one of reanalysis, but in this paper, we argue that the change is likely not to have involved reanalysis. Key words: Allative; grammaticalization; infinitival marker; Lexical-Functional Grammar; Pennsylvania German; purposive; reanalysis
2014. It's Speaking Australian English We Are: Irish Features in Nineteenth Century Australia. Australian Journal of Linguistics 34:1 ► pp. 24 ff.
Börjars, Kersti & Nigel Vincent
2017. Lexical-Functional Grammar. In The Cambridge Handbook of Historical Syntax, ► pp. 642 ff.
Börjars, Kersti, Nigel Vincent & George Walkden
2015. On Constructing a Theory of Grammatical Change. Transactions of the Philological Society 113:3 ► pp. 363 ff.
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