Syntactic Features and the Limits of Syntactic Change

by Jónsson, Jóhannes Gísli; Eythórsson, Thórhallur

• ISBN13: 9780198832584
• ISBN10: 0198832583
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2021-05-11
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Author Biography

J?hannes G?sli J?nsson, Professor of Icelandic Linguistics, University of Iceland,Th?rhallur Eyth?rsson, Professor of Linguistics, University of Iceland

J?hannes G?sli J?nsson is Professor of Icelandic Linguistics at the University of Iceland. His work focuses on theoretical and diachronic syntax, and particularly on case marking, passives, Object Shift, and the left periphery in Icelandic and Faroese. He is currently the principal investigator, along with Cherlon Ussery, of a research project exploring ditransitives in Island Scandinavian.


Th?rhallur Eyth?rsson is Professor of Linguistics at the University of Iceland. His main research interests lie in word order, cliticization, and verbal syntax in Germanic from a diachronic perspective; case, argument structure, and voice in Icelandic and other old and modern Germanic languages; the development of overt and covert pronominals, reflexives, and expletives in Icelandic; and prefixation in Germanic from a historical and comparative perspective.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction: Syntactic features and the limits of syntactic change, J?hannes G?sli Jonsson and Th?rhallur Eyth?rsson
Part I: The Left Periphery
2. Degree semantics, polarity, and the grammaticalization of comparative operators into complementizers, Julia Bacskai-Atkari
3. Cyclic change in Hungarian relative clauses, Julia Bacskai-Atkari and ?va D?kany
4. Diachronic change and feature instability: The cycles of Fin in Romanian obligatory control, Gabriela Alboiu and Virginia Hill
5. Null subjects in Middle Low German: Diachronic stability and change, Melissa Farasyn and Anne Breitbarth
Part II: The T-domain
6. Feature reanalysis and the Latin origin of Romance Negative Concord, Chiara Gianollo
7. Degrammaticalization of pronominal clitics in Slavic, Hakyung Jung and Krzysztof Migdalski
8. (In)vulnerable inflected infinitives as complements to modals: Evidence from Galician and Romeyka, Ioanna Sitaridou
9. Assessing phonological correlates of syntactic change: The case of Late Latin weak BE, Lieven Danckaert
10. Investigating the past of the futurate present, Elizabeth Cowper, Daniel Currie Hall, Bronwyn M. Bjorkman, Rebecca Tollan, and Neij Banerjee
Part III: Case marking
11. From lexical to dependent: The case of the Greek dative, Elena Anagnostopoulou and Christina Sevdali
12. The nature and origin of syntactic ergativity in Austronesian languages, Edith Aldridge
13. Featural dynamics in morphosyntactic change, Iris Edda Nowenstein and Anton Karl Ingason
Part IV: Syntactic reconstruction
14. Syntactic reconstruction based on linguistic fossils: Object-marking in Uralic, Katalin ?. Kiss
15. Regular syntactic change and syntactic reconstruction, Mark Hale and Madelyn Kissock