Syntax over Time Lexical, Morphological, and Information-Structural Interactions

by Biberauer, Theresa; Walkden, George

• ISBN13: 9780191767319
• ISBN10: 019176731X
• Format: eBook
• Copyright: 2014-05-15
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Author Biography

Theresa Biberauer, Senior Research Associate, University of Cambridge,George Walkden, Lecturer in English Linguistics, University of Manchester

Theresa Biberauer is a Senior Research Associate at the University of Cambridge, where she is also a Fellow of Churchill College, and Associate Professor Extraordinary at her South African alma mater, Stellenbosch University. Her research interests are principally in theoretical and comparative (synchronic and diachronic) morphosyntax, with Germanic generally and Afrikaans in particular being areas of specific interest. Her past work has focused on word-order variation, (null) subject phenomena, negation, information structure, and the larger question of the nature of parametric variation. She is the co-editor, with Michelle Sheehan, of Theoretical Approaches to Disharmonic Word Order (OUP 2013).

George Walkden is a Lecturer in the Department of Linguistics and English Language at the University of Manchester. His research is in historical syntax, and his doctoral dissertation focused on aspects of syntactic reconstruction as applied to the early Germanic languages. He is the author of Syntactic Reconstruction and Proto-Germanic (OUP 2014), and is also Associate Editor of Language, with responsibility for its Historical Syntax section.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction, Theresa Biberauer and George Walkden
PART I: Syntax and the Lexicon
2. Expletive there in West Germanic, Caitlin Light
3. From passive to active: Stages in the Icelandic New Impersonal, Joan Maling and Sigriðdur Sigurjonsdottir
4. Change in the syntax and semantics of be like quotatives, William Haddican, Eytan Zweig, and Daniel Ezra Johnson
5. The grammaticalization of postpositions in Old Hungarian, Veronika Hegedűs
6. A negative cycle in 12th - 15th century Hungarian, Katalin E. Kiss
7. Negation and NPI composition inside DP, Ana Maria Martins
PART II: Syntax and Morphology
8. Increasing morphological complexity and how syntax drives morphological change, Chris H. Reintges
9. Reconstructing complementizer-drop in the dialects of the Salento: A syntactic or phonological phenomenon, Adam Ledgeway
10. On negation, tense, and participles in Finnic and Sami, Marit Julien
11. On the loss of tense and verb-adjacent clitics in Slavic, Krzysztof Migdalski
12. The evolution of Inherent Case in the diachrony of Greek, Dimitris Michelioudakis
PART III: Syntax and Information Structure
13. From preposition to topic marker: Old Romanian pe, Virginia Hill
14. Verb-third in early West Germanic: A comparative perspective, George Walkden
15. Changes in Friulano subject clitics: Conflation and interactions with the left periphery, Ed Cormany
16. The decline of Latin left-peripheral presentation foci: Causes and consequences, Lieven Danckaert
17. Weak focus and polarity: Asymmetries between Spanish and Catalan, Montserrat Batllori and Maria-Lluisa Hernanz
18. An interface account of word order variation in Old High German, Roland Hinterholzl
19. Verb order, object position, and information status in Old English, Ann Taylor and Susan Pintzuk
20. Antisymmetry and heavy NP shift across Germanic, Joel C. Wallenberg
21. Pronominal object shift in Archaic Chinese, Edith Aldridge