Clefting and discourse organization: Comparing Germanic and Romance

2017

In its 1,500-year history, the English language has seen dramatic grammatical changes. This book offers a comprehensive and reader-friendly account of the major developments, including changes in word order, the noun phrase and verb phrase, changing relations between clausal constituents and the development of new subordinate constructions. The book puts forward possible explanations for change, drawing on the existing and most recent literature and with reference to the major theoretical models. The authors use corpus evidence to investigate language-internal and language-external motivations for change, including the impact of language contact. The book is intended for students who have been introduced to the history of English and want to deepen their understanding of major grammatical changes, and for linguists in general with a historical interest. It will also be of value to literary scholars professionally engaged with older texts. Professor Emeritus of Germanic Linguistics at the University of Amsterdam, olga fischer is a contributor to the Cambridge History of the English Language (1992), co-author of The Syntax of Early English (2000), and author of Morphosyntactic Change: Functional and Formal Perspectives (2007). She has been an editor of the Language chapter in the Year'sW o r k in English Studies since 1998, and is co-editor of the book series Iconicity in Language and Literature. She has written widely on topics within English historical linguistics, grammaticalization, iconicity and analogy. hendrik de smet is a BOF research professor at KU Leuven. He is the author of Spreading Patterns: Diffusional Change in the English System of Complementation (2013) and co-editor of On Multiple Source Constructions in Language Change (2015). His work is primarily on mechanisms of language change, including reanalysis, analogy and blending. He is also involved in the compilation of several freely available text corpora for historical research, including the Corpus of Late Modern English Texts and the Corpus of English Novels. wim van der wurff is Senior Lecturer in Linguistics at Newcastle University, UK. He is co-author of The Syntax of Early English (2000), Colloquial Bengali (2009), and has co-edited volumes on reported speech, modality, imperatives and diachronic syntax. His recent work focuses on the way factors of different types interact in the emergence and decline of syntactic constructions.

2006

The retreat of be as perfect auxiliary in the history of English is examined. Corpus data are presented showing that the initial advance of have was most closely connected to a restriction against be in past counterfactuals. Other factors which have been reported to favor the spread of have are either dependent on the counterfactual effect, or significantly weaker in comparison. It is argued that the effect can be traced to the semantics of the be perfect, which denoted resultativity rather than anteriority proper.

Revista Alicantina de Estudios Ingleses, 1997

This paper reports some results from a bigger project analysing the relevance of Theme, i.e. clause initial position, in Present-day English (PresE). Our aim is to explore the formal features, the communicative properties and the frequencies of one thematic device, It-extrapositions of the type It is strange that the duke gave my aunt that teapot, in the Lancaster Spoken English Corpus (henceforth LSEC). 105 tokens of these constructions were studied, which represented 2.6% of the overall Themes in LSEC. It is argued that the use of It-extrapositions obeys three different, though interrelated, phenomena: (i) the principle of End Weight; (ii) the Given-Before- New principle; and (iii) Theme. As a conclusion, it is suggested that the raison d'être of this device is to act in two capacities: (1) an objective one, expressing an 'objectified', or depersonalised, modality or modulation, and (2) a subjective one, infusing the speaker's angle, or point of view, with thematic...

Journal of language relationship, 2016

It is a review of a volume dedicated to various issues of historical syntax and syntactic reconstruction. The book is a collection of contributions resulting from the workshop “Syntactic change and syntactic reconstruction: new perspectives” held at the University of Zurich in September 2012.

Neophilologus, 1995

English Studies, 2005

Journal of Historical Sociolinguistics, 2022

This paper analyses the alternation between complement clauses with and without complementizer (syndetic and asyndetic), in historical Spanish (15 th-18 th century). While previous studies have shown that this syntactic alternation was regulated by the degree of integration of the clauses, its stylistic distribution is understudied. In this paper we investigate whether the syndetic/asyndetic alternation is governed by socio-stylistic factors (discourse traditions, audience and speaker design). The analysis of the data from the corpus CODEA+2015, is carried out by using regression models. Our results indicate that the selection of asyndetic complements was predicted by the type of audience (reactive styleshift), employed especially when addressing superiors. Also, asyndetic complements were favored by the use of deferential request verbs such as suplicar ('to beg') that represents the petitioner as an inferior (proactive style-shift). Furthermore, the stylistic choice for an asyndetic complement was determined at the sentential level ("micro" discourse traditions), when the writer is also the performer of the speech-act. Thus, we show that in choosing alternative variants, writers are concerned with expressing grammatical meanings but also social identity. Additionally, the diachronic analysis indicates that while the proactive styleshift effect grows stronger over time, the relevance of the reactive style-shift declines, showing that socio-stylistic predictors, similarly to linguistic predictors, can be affected diachronic fluctuations. Our paper evinces the relevance of a multidimensional and diachronic approach to the study of syntactic variation, demonstrating how a monolithic view of the textual dimension can hide fine-grained socio-stylistic effects. 1 This research is part of a larger project entitled "Beyond the clause: encoding and inference in clause combining", funded by the KU Leuven Research Council (C14/18/034) and coordinated by Jean-Christophe Verstraete, Bert Cornillie, Kristin Davidse, and Elwys De Stefani. An earlier version of this research was presented at the panel "Historical Sociolinguistics: Variations in Methodologies" at the NWAV49 conference (online) in 2021, and previously at the V CoDiLi (Université libre de Bruxelles) in 2019. We thank all the participants for their comments and suggestions. We also greatly appreciate the thorough comments of two anonymous reviewers, who helped improving the content of the paper. We would like to thank Sophie Corazolla (FU Berlin) for carefully proofreading the manuscript. Any remaining errors are our own.

This case study demonstrates that non-syntactical factors such as prosody can play a crucial role in syntactic change. The hypothesis is that loss of topicalization was an epiphenomenon of the loss of V2, but the link between these two processes is prosodic well-formedness. Because the loss of V2 led to situations in which topicalization would lead to CAR-violations in cases where both the topicalized phrase and the subject bear focus, language users ceased to apply topicalization in these critical environments. By overgeneralization, they ceased to apply it also if the subject was non-pronominal in general, regardless of whether it bore focus or not. Under this view, the property of topicalization that it led to prosodically ill-formed outputs was responsible for the subsequent decline in usage.

ArXiv, 2020

This thesis investigates word order change in infinitival clauses from Object-Verb (OV) to VerbObject (VO) in the history of Latin and Old French. By applying a variationist approach, I view word order change as a diachronic variation, which is probabilistically influenced by internal and external language contexts. That is, I examine a synchronic word order variation in each stage of language change, from which I infer the character, periodization and constraints of diachronic variation. I also show that in discourse-configurational languages, such as Latin and Early Old French, it is possible to identify pragmatically neutral contexts by using information structure annotation, a recent method developed for historical texts. I further argue that by mapping pragmatic categories into a syntactic structure, we can detect how word order change unfolds.

Old English morpho-syntax allows a degree of word order flexibility that is exploited by discourse strategies. Key elements here are: adverbs functioning as discourse partitioners, and a wider range of pronominal elements, extending the number of strategies for anaphoric reference. The syntactic effect is an extended range of subject and object positions, which are exploited for discourse flexibility. In particular, a class of high adverbs, including primarily pa "then" and ponne "then", define on their left an area in which discourse-(linked) elements occur, including a range of pronouns, but also definite nominal subjects. The latter occur here because the Old English weak demonstrative pronouns that serve to mark definiteness also allow specific anaphoric reference to a discourse antecedent. We also develop a model of quantitative analysis that brings out the relationship between the narrowly circumscribed syntactic system and the relative diffuseness of the discourse referential facts.

2009

Oxford University Press eBooks, 2005

From the perspective of language change, grammaticalization is generally viewed as the process whereby "a lexical item or construction in certain uses takes on grammatical characteristics" (Hopper & Traugott 2003:2). account for this type of change as resulting from the reanalysis of lexical heads into functional heads. The diachronic changes we discuss in this paper do not fall under this definition, but we view them as exemplifying a type of grammaticalization whereby illocutionary features come to be associated with distinct functional heads. We analyse the changes in the clausal organisation of Old French as following from the fact that the Topic/Focus functional head common to all clause types of the first stage gives way to a system with a number of separate illocutionary heads. We argue that the weakening of the Tobler-Mussafia (TM) constraint excluding object clitic pronouns from initial position in main clauses in Old French (OF) results from a gradual replacement of a common representation for V1 initial clauses by a new system where 1) satisfaction of a discourse-related [Top]/[Foc] feature by V is minimized, and 2) there is a reanalysis of the CP layer, with grammaticalization of illocutionary type features. 1. Old French as a V2 language. Old French is considered a V2 language (see e.g. , Roberts 1993), with the verb generally following a topic or focus element in main clauses. We account for that characteristic by adopting a split-CP approach (Rizzi 1997), and assume that the C system is composed of two functional projections ZP and FinP, as shown in (1). Z bears a discourse-related Topic or Focus feature, which we label [+D] (Discourse) for simplicity. Fin is the interface of the C * This work has been made possible thanks to a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (#410-mmmmmmm). We thank Ana Maria Martins and Itziar Laka for their comments and suggestions on a previous version of this work.