Textual parameters in older languages [revised versions of papers originally presented at the 11. International Conference on Historical Linguistics, held at the University of California, Los Angeles, Aug. 1993

Textual Parameters in Older Languages takes a contemporary approach to the inherent limitations of using older texts as data for linguistic analysis, drawing on methods of text analysis, pragmatics and sociolinguistics to supplement traditional historical and philological methods. The focus of the book is on the importance of controlling for textual parameters-defined by the editors as dimensions of variation associated with texts and their production, including text type, degree of poeticality, orality, and dialect-in the analysis of older language data. Failure to do so can result in invalid generalizations; recognizing the influence of textual parameters, conversely, raises a myriad of issues for the practice and theory of historical linguistics. The 12 essays in this collection apply this approach in analyses of anaphora, non-finite verbal forms, particles, punctuation, word order and other phenomena in a wide range of languages including Ancient Tamil, Sanskrit, Latin, Heian Japanese, Medieval Greek, Old French, Old Russian, Middle English, and Modern Danish. An in-depth introduction by the editors lays out the goals of the textual parameters approach, and considers the methodological and theoretical consequences of the evidence presented in the book as a whole. cilt.195 TEXTUAL PARAMETERS IN OLDER LANGUAGES 2 Editorial page 2 Title page 2 LCC data 2 Dedication 6 Preface 8 Contents 10 On Textual Parameters and Older Languages 12 Methodologies and Ideologies in Historical Linguistics: On Working with Older Languages 44 The Pragmatic Functions of the Old French Particles AINZ, APRES, DONC, LORS, OR, PUIS, and SI 70 Discourse Organization and Anaphora in Latin 118 The Importance of Discourse Types in Grammaticalization: The Case of Anon 150 Genre, Discourse, and Syntax in Early Indo-European, with Emphasis on Sanskrit 174 Poeticality and Word Order in Old Tamil 208 Suppressed Assertion and the Functions of the Final-Attributive in Prose and Poetry of Heian Japanese 248 Robert Keayne’s Notebooks: A Verbatim Record of Spoken English in Early Boston? 284 Textual Authenticity: Evidence from Medieval Greek 320 Parameters Underlying Punctuation in Older Russian Texts 342 The Middle English Verb-Second Constraint: A Case Study in Language Contact and Language Change 364 A la Recherche du Word Order Not Quite Perdu: A methodological progress report 404 Index of Languages 444 Index of Subjects 448 CURRENT ISSUES IN LINGUISTIC THEORY 460 Although focusing on different linguistic phenomena from different theoreatical perspectives, this volume centres on how linguistic analysis of an older language may depend crucially on variable properties of the textual data themselves.