Clause Structure and Word Order in the History of German

Clause Structure and Word Order in the History of German
Author: Agnes Jäger
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 423
Release: 2018
Genre: Foreign Language Study
ISBN: 0198813546

This volume presents the first comprehensive generative account of the historical syntax of German. Leading scholars in the field survey a range of topics and offer new insights into multiple central aspects of clause structure and word order, including verb placement, adverbial connectives, pronominal syntax, and information-structural factors.

Clause Structure and Word Order in the History of German

Clause Structure and Word Order in the History of German
Author: Agnes Jäger
Publisher:
Total Pages:
Release: 2018
Genre: FOREIGN LANGUAGE STUDY
ISBN: 9780191851414

This volume presents the first comprehensive generative account of the historical syntax of German. Leading scholars in the field survey a range of topics and offer new insights into multiple central aspects of clause structure and word order, including verb placement, adverbial connectives, pronominal syntax, and information-structural factors.

The Syntax of German

The Syntax of German
Author: Hubert Haider
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 387
Release: 2010-01-07
Genre: Foreign Language Study
ISBN: 0521865255

A broad coverage of German syntax, providing an in-depth look at object-verb sentence formation in comparison with other languages.

A Comparative Typology of English and German

A Comparative Typology of English and German
Author: John A. Hawkins
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 263
Release: 2015-07-03
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1317419723

First published in 1986, this book draws together analyses of English and German. It defines the contrasts and similarities between the two languages and, in particular, looks at the question of whether contrasts in one area of the grammar is systematically related to contrasts in another, and whether there is any ‘directionality’ or unity to contrast throughout grammar as a whole. It is suggested that there is, and that English and German can serve as a case study for a more general typology of languages than we now have. This volume will be of interest to a wide range of linguists, including students of Germanic languages; language typologists; generative grammarians attempting to ‘fix the parameters’ on language variation;’ historical linguists; and applied linguists.

Language Change at the Interfaces

Language Change at the Interfaces
Author: Nicholas Catasso
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
Total Pages: 265
Release: 2022-04-15
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9027257876

This volume offers an up-to-date survey of linguistic phenomena at the interfaces between syntax and prosody, information structure and discourse – with a special focus on Germanic and Romance – and their role in language change. The contributions, set within the generative framework, discuss original data and provide new insights into the diachronic development of long-burning issues such as negation, word order, quantifiers, null subjects, aspectuality, the structure of the left periphery, and extraposition. The first part of the volume explores interface phenomena at the intrasentential level, in which only clause-internal factors seem to play a significant role in determining diachronic change. The second part examines developments at the intersentential level involving a rearrangement of categories between at least two clausal domains. The book will be of interest for scholars and students interested in generative accounts of language change phenomena at the interfaces, as well as for theoretical linguists in general.

Verb Second

Verb Second
Author: Horst Lohnstein
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 460
Release: 2020-03-09
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1501508148

This book addresses a general phenomenon in the European languages: verb second. The articles provide a comprehensive survey of synchronic vs. diachronic developments in the Germanic and Romance languages. New theoretical insights into the interaction of the properties of verbal mood and syntactic structure building lead to hypotheses about the mutual influence of these systems. The diachronic change in the syntax together with changes in the inflectional system show the interdependence between the syntactic and the inflectional component. The fact that the subjunctive can license verb second in dependent clauses reveals further dependencies between these subsystems of grammar. "Fronting finiteness" furthermore constitutes an instance of a main clause phenomenon. Whether "assertion" or "at-issueness" are encoded through this grammatical process will be a matter in the debates discussed in the book. Moreover, information structure appears to be directly related to the fronting of other constituents in front of the finite verb. Questions concerning the interrelations between these various subcomponents of the grammatical system are investigated.

Studies on Old High German Syntax

Studies on Old High German Syntax
Author: Katrin Axel
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
Total Pages: 382
Release: 2007-07-19
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9027291985

This monograph is the first book-length study on Old High German syntax from a generative perspective in twenty years. It provides an in-depth exploration of the Old High German pre-verb-second grammar by answering the following questions: To what extent did generalized verb movement exist in Old High German? Was there already obligatory XP-movement to the left periphery in declarative root clauses? What deviations from the linear verb-second restriction are attested and what do such phenomena reveal about the structure of the left sentence periphery? Did verb placement play the same role in sentence typing as in the modern verb-second languages? A further major topic is null subjects: It is claimed that Old High German was a partial pro-drop language. All these issues are addressed from a comparative-diachronic perspective by integrating research on other Old Germanic languages, in particular on Old English and Gothic. This book is of interest to all those working in the fields of comparative Germanic syntax and historical linguistics.

Noun-Based Constructions in the History of Portuguese and Spanish

Noun-Based Constructions in the History of Portuguese and Spanish
Author: Patrícia Amaral
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 288
Release: 2021-12-15
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 0192586459

This book explores syntactic and semantic change in three types of construction in Spanish and Portuguese: (i) complex determiner phrases with clausal adjunction (el hecho de, o facto de), (ii) complex prepositions/complementizers and complex connectives (sin embargo de/sem embargo de, so(b) pena de), and (iii) complex predicates containing light verbs (dar consejo/conselho de). While these constructions are syntactically different, they are all clause-taking complex expressions containing a noun followed by the functional preposition de ('of'). This book is the first work to use a systematic comparative corpus study to explore these expressions together; this approach allows individual changes to be distinguished from general changes, as well as emphasizing the chronological clustering of changes that involve complex constructions in both languages. By studying mechanisms of language change and their outcomes in two sister languages, Patrícia Amaral and Manuel Delicado Cantero address questions such as: How do complex constructions evolve? How does the meaning of the noun change when considered in isolation and when compared to the meaning of the whole construction? And how do syntactic categories change over time? This study of two closely-related languages reveals distinct developments occurring in parallel, and provides a crucial test case for theories of language change.

The History of Negation in the Languages of Europe and the Mediterranean

The History of Negation in the Languages of Europe and the Mediterranean
Author: Anne Breitbarth
Publisher:
Total Pages: 312
Release: 2020
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 0199602549

This is the second book in a two-volume comparative history of negation in the languages of Europe and the Mediterranean. It identifies typical developments found repeatedly in the histories of different languages and explores their origins, as well as investigating the factors that determine whether change proceeds rapidly, slowly, or not at all.

Negation and Nonveridicality in the History of Greek

Negation and Nonveridicality in the History of Greek
Author: Katerina Chatzopoulou
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages: 283
Release: 2019
Genre: Foreign Language Study
ISBN: 0198712405

This book provides a thorough investigation of the expression of sentential negation in the history of Greek, based on extensive data from major stages of the language. It also provides a new semantic interpretation of Jespersen's cycle that explains the Greek developments and those in other languages.