Information Structure and Syntactic Change in Germanic and Romance Languages

✍ Scribed by Kristin Bech, Kristine Gunn Eide

• Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
• Year: 2014
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 432
• Series: Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 213
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

The contributions of this volume offer new perspectives on the relation between syntax and information structure in the history of Germanic and Romance languages, focusing on English, German, Norwegian, French, Spanish and Portuguese, and both from a synchronic and a diachronic perspective. In addition to discussing changes in individual languages along the syntax–information structure axis, the volume also makes a point of comparing and contrasting different languages with respect to the interplay between syntax and information structure. Since the creation of increasingly sophisticated annotated corpora of historical texts is on the agenda in many research environments, methods and schemes for information structure annotation and analysis of historical texts from a theoretical and applied perspective are discussed.

✦ Table of Contents

Kristin Bech & Kristine Gunn Eide: Information structure and syntax in old Germanic and Romance languages

Part I. Information-structural categories and corpus annotation
Dag Haug, Hanne Eckhoff & Eirik Welo: The theoretical foundations of givenness annotation
Ann Taylor & Susan Pintzuk: Testing the theory. Information structure in Old English

Part II. Changes on the interface between syntax and information structure
Erwin R. Komen, Rosanne Hebing, Ans van Kemenade & Bettelou Los: Quantifying information structure change in English
Gea Dreschler: Tracing overlap in function in historical corpora. A case study of English object fronting and passivization
Marco Coniglio & Eva Schlachter: Referential properties of the full and reduced forms of the definite article in German. A diachronic survey
Kari Kinn: The cognitive status of referential null subjects in Old Norse and their Modern Norwegian counterparts

Part III. Comparisons on the interface between syntax and information structure
Tamás Eitler & Marit Westergaard: Word order variation in late Middle English. The effect of information structure and audience design
Kristin Bech & Christine Meklenborg Salvesen: Preverbal word order in Old English
Svetlana Petrova & Esther Rinke: Formal properties of event-reporting sentences in Old High German and Old French
Jan Terje Faarlund & Kristin Hagemann: Subjects and objects in Germanic and Romance
George Walkden: Object position and Heavy NP Shift in Old Saxon and beyond
Roland Hinterhölzl: On the interaction between syntax, prosody and information structure. An interface approach to word order developments in Germanic
Kristine Eide & Ioanna Sitaridou: Contrastivity and information structure in the old Ibero-Romance languages

✦ Subjects

Языки и языкознание;Лингвистика;Синтаксис;