Developments in English Historical Morpho-Syntax

✍ Scribed by Claudia Claridge, Birte Bös

• Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
• Year: 2019
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 320
• Series: Current Issues in Linguistic Theory, 346
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

Spanning the time from Old English to modern American English, this volume provides fresh perspectives on core issues and theories in the morphosyntactic history of English nominal, verbal and adverbial constructions. The contributions discuss the loss, rise and restructuring of morphonological marking, periphrastic verbal constructions, auxiliary variation and evolution, as well as changing word order options. Favouring corpus-linguistic, frequency-based and statistical approaches, the studies are firmly empirically grounded. The book is aimed at scholars interested in the history of the English language and in language variation and change.  Read more...

✦ Table of Contents

Introduction / Claudia Claridge and Birte Bös --
The dynamics of changes in the early English inflection: Evidence from the Old English nominal system / Elzbieta Adamczyk --
'Subsumed under the dative'? The status of the Old English instrumental / Kirsten Middeke --
'Thone vpon thother': On pronouns one and other with initial th- and t- in Middle English / Jerzy Nykiel --
Leveraging grammaticalization: The origins of Old Frisian and Old English / Rebecca Colleran --
Old English wolde and sceolde: A semantic and syntactic analysis / Ilse Wischer --
A corpus-based study on the development of dare in Middle English and Early Modern English / Sofia Bemposta Rivas --
Counterfactuality and aktionsart: Predictors for BE vs. HAVE + past participle in Middle English / Judith Huber --
Conservatism or the influence of the semantics of motion situation in the choice of perfect auxiliaries in Jane Austen's letters and novels / Nuria Calvo Cortes --
Signs of grammaticalization: Tracking the get-passive through COHA / Sarah Schwarz --
From time-before-place to place-before-time in the history of English: A corpus-based analysis of adverbial clusters / Susanne Chrambach --
Variation and change at the interface of syntax and semantics: Concessive clauses in American English / Ole Schützler --
Further explorations in the grammar of intensifier marking in Modern English / Günter Rohdenburg --
The rivalry between far from being + predicative item and its counterpart omitting the copula in Modern English / Uwe Vosberg and Günter Rohdenburg --
Index.

✦ Subjects

English language -- Grammar, Historical;English language -- Morphosyntax