Functional Heads Across Time: Syntactic Reanalysis and Change (Oxford Studies in Diachronic and Historical Linguistics)

This volume explores the role that functional elements play in syntactic change and investigates the semantic and functional features that are the driving force behind those changes. Structural developments are explained in terms of the reanalysis of parts of the functional sequences in the clausal, nominal, and adpositional domains, through changes in parameter settings and feature specifications. The chapters discuss 'microdiachronic' syntactic changes that often have implications for large-scale syntactic effects, such as word order variation, the emergence (and lexicalization) of syntactic projections, grammaticalization, and changes in information-structural properties. The volume contains both case studies of individual languages, such as German, Hungarian, and Romanian, and detailed investigations of cross-linguistic phenomena, based primarily on digital corpora of historical and dialectal data. "This volume brings together studies that contribute to our knowledge about the role functional elements play in syntactic changes, and the semantic and functional features that are the driving force behind the changes. Parameter resettings, structural reanalyses, and changes in the feature specification of functional heads are explored related to the functional sequence of the clausal as well as the nominal and adpositional domains. The chapters in this book discuss 'microdiachronic' syntactic changes that often have implications for large-scale syntactic effects, such as word order variation and change, the emergence (and lexicalization) of syntactic projections, grammaticalization, and changes in information structural properties. The volume contains case studies of individual languages (English, German, Hungarian, Icelandic, Italian, Latin, Portuguese, and Romanian are included) as well as discussions of cross-linguistic phenomena. The studies heavily rely on digital corpora of historical or dialectal data. The chapters are organized in an order that essentially reflects the hierarchy of projections in the clausal functional sequence and the other distinguished ph(r)asal projections from CP to DP"-- Provided by publisher cover 1 series page 3 Titlepage 4 Copyright 5 Contents 6 Series Preface 8 List of Abbreviations 9 List of Contributors 12 1 The role of functional heads in syntactic change 14 2 Changing patterns of clausal complementation in Latin: A parametric approach to ‘constructional' changes 32 3 From split to remerged Fin in Romanian supine complements 69 4 The diachronic path of senão: From conditional subordination to exceptive coordination 83 5 On Italian relative complementizers and relative pronouns: Rethinking grammaticalization 103 6 Information structure, functional left peripheries, and the history of a Hungarian interrogative marker 124 7 The recategorization of modals in English: Evidence from adverb placement 149 8 Tense recursion, perfect doubling, and the grammaticalization of auxiliaries 172 9 P-incorporation in the history of Icelandic 199 10 From Old to Modern Icelandic: Dative applicatives and NP/DP configurationality 223 References 260 Index of subjects 284 Index of languages 296