Clause Structure and Language Change

✍ Scribed by Adrian Battye, Ian Roberts

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Year: 1995
Tongue: English
Leaves: 380
Series: Oxford Studies in Comparative Syntax
Category: Library

No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.

✦ Synopsis

The Principles-and-Parameters approach to linguistic theory has triggered an enormous amount of work in comparative syntax over the last decade or so. A natural consequence of the growth in synchronic comparative work has been a renewed interest in questions of diachronic syntax, and this collection testifies to that trend. These papers focus on questions of clause structure which have become a central theme of theoretical work since the pioneering work in the late 1980s by Chomsky, Pollock, and others. The languages studied by an international roster of contributors include all the major Romance and Germanic languages. This volume is of central importance for anyone working in theoretical, comparative, or historical syntax.

✦ Table of Contents

Contents......Page 8
1. Introduction......Page 14
PART ONE: The Diachrony of Verb Second......Page 40
2. "Why UG Needs a Learning Theory: Triggering Verb Movement"......Page 42
3. "Two Types of Verb Second in the History of Yiddish"......Page 64
4. "The Locus of Verb Movement in Non-Asymmetric Verb-Second Languages: The Case of Middle French"......Page 91
5. "Evidence for a Verb-Second Phase in Old Portuguese"......Page 121
6. "Indo-European Origins of Germanic Syntax"......Page 151
PART TWO: Verb Second and the Null-Subject Parameter......Page 182
7. "On the Decline of Verb Movement to Comp in Old and Middle French"......Page 184
8. "The Loss of Verb Second in English and French"......Page 211
9. "Verb Second, Pro-drop, Functional Projections and Language Change"......Page 238
10. "Null Subjects in Verb-First Embedded Clauses in Philippe de Vigneulles' Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles"......Page 268
PART THREE: Clitics and Verb Second......Page 304
11. "The Diachronic Development of Subject Clitics in North Eastern Italian Dialects"......Page 306
12. "Complement Clitics in Medieval Romance: the Tobler-Mussafia Law"......Page 336
13. "Cases of Verb Third in Old High German"......Page 356

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