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1
McCallum-Bayliss, Heather. The modal verbs: Univocal lexical items. Bloomington: Indiana University Linguistics Club, 1988.
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2
McCallum-Bayliss, Heather. The modal verbs: Univocal lexical items. Bloomington, Ind: Reproduced by the Indiana University Linguistics Club, 1988.
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3
Conceptual structure in lexical items: The lexicalisation of communication concepts in English, German, and Dutch. Amsterdam: J. Benjamins Pub. Co., 2007.
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4
Więcławska, Edyta. A contrastive semantic and phraseological analysis of the HEAD-related lexical items in diachronic perspective. Rzeszów: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Rzeszowskiego, 2012.
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5
Puente, Ivette Sánchez de. Customs and commercial lexical items and expressions: Texto de definiciones y traducciones de terminología y expresiones técnicas ... Panamá: Universidad de Panamá, 1993.
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6
Bugun nyo thau: Bugun reader : a collection of bugun folk tales, stories, proverbs, rituals, songs, and lexical items. Guwahati: EBH Publishers, 2015.
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7
Smith, Viktor. The literal meaning of lexical items: Some theoretical considerations on the semantics of complex and transferred nominals with special reference to Danish and Russian. Frederiksberg: Institut for Fransk, Italiensk og Russisk, Handelshøjskolen i København, 2000.
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8
Dworkin, Steven N. The medieval Hispano-Romance lexicon. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780199687312.003.0005.
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This chapter examines the lexicon of Old Spanish. It first surveys the dictionaries and other lexical resources available to the student of the medieval language, before going on to describe briefly the various historical lexical strata and issues of lexical stability. It next offers a rich series of examples of nouns, adjectives, verbs, and function words found in Old Spanish that did not survive into the modern language. The chapter next gives examples of Old Spanish lexical doublets and of lexical items that have undergone major semantic changes over time. The remainder of the chapter is devoted to the creation in Old Spanish of neologisms through such processes of derivational morphology as suffixation, prefixation, and compounding. Emphasis falls here on words that did not survive into the modern language.
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Pietroski, Paul M. Conjoining Meanings. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198812722.001.0001.
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Humans naturally acquire languages that connect meanings with pronunciations. These distinctive languages are described here as generative procedures that respect substantive constraints. Children acquire meaningful lexical items that can be combined, in certain ways, to form meaningful complex expressions. This raises questions about what meanings are, how they can be combined, and what kinds of meanings lexical items can have. This book argues that meanings are neither concepts nor extensions, and sentences do not have truth conditions. Rather, meanings are composable instructions for how to access and assemble concepts of a special sort. More specifically, phrasal meanings are instructions for how to build monadic concepts (a.k.a. mental predicates) that are massively conjunctive, while lexical meanings are instructions for how to fetch concepts that are monadic or dyadic. This allows for polysemy, since a lexical item can be linked to an address that is shared by a family of fetchable concepts. But the posited combinatorial operations are limited and limiting. They impose severe restrictions on which concepts can be fetched for purposes of semantic composition. Correspondingly, the argument here is that in lexicalization, available representations are often used to introduce concepts that can be combined via the relevant operations.
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Gisborne, Nikolas, and Robert Truswell. Where do relative specifiers come from? Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198747840.003.0003.
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Headed relative clauses with filled Spec,CP positions are cross-linguistically rare, but have emerged repeatedly in Indo-European languages. We explore this unusual typological fact by examining the emergence and spread of English headed wh-relatives. The major claims developed in this chapter are: (1) aspects of the diachrony of headed wh-relatives must be reduced to competing specifications of the behaviour of a given lexical item, rather than to competition among multiple forms associated with a given function; (2) headed wh-relatives spread gradually from form to form, rather than spreading gradually up the Accessibility Hierarchy as assumed in much earlier work. We suggest that the unusual typology of headed relatives with filled specifiers can then be understood in terms of inheritance of a stable set of lexical items from Proto-Indo-European, and biases affecting acquisition of the syntactic properties of these items.
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Saugera, Valérie. Introducing French Anglicisms. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190625542.003.0001.
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Since French Anglicisms readily conjure up the Académie française, the introductory chapter presents purist views on Anglicisms, which tend to be implicitly political (Anglicisms as an allegory for the decline of French as an international language) and explicitly lexical (substitution of French words with English words). The raison d’être of this book was to provide an objective linguistic analysis that would test the myth, discussed here, that Anglicisms are lexical polluters, a myth magnified by the advent of the World Wide Web and the use of English as its lingua franca. The linguistic behavior of the resulting lexical items in the lexicon and morphology of French is the topic of this book, as, mainly because of this purism, linguistic research on these words has not been intensively pursued in France.
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Mathieu, Eric, and Robert Truswell, eds. Micro-change and Macro-change in Diachronic Syntax. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198747840.001.0001.
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This volume contains sixteen chapters addressing the process of syntactic change at different granularities. The language-particular component of a grammar is now usually assumed to be nothing more than the specification of the grammatical properties of a set of lexical items. Accordingly, grammar change must reduce to lexical change. And yet these micro-changes can cumulatively alter the typological character of a language (a macro-change). A central puzzle in diachronic syntax is how to relate macro-changes to micro-changes. Several chapters in this volume describe specific micro-changes: changes in the syntactic properties of a particular lexical item or class of lexical items. Other chapters explore links between micro-change and macro-change, using devices such as grammar competition at the individual and population level, recurring diachronic pathways, and links between acquisition biases and diachronic processes. This book is therefore a great companion to the recent literature on micro- versus macro-approaches to parameters in synchronic syntax. One of its important contributions is the demonstration that we can learn a great deal about synchronic linguistics through the way languages change: the case studies included provide diachronic insight into many syntactic constructions that have been the target of extensive recent synchronic research, including tense, aspect, relative clauses, stylistic fronting, verb second, demonstratives, and negation. Languages discussed include several archaic and contemporary Romance and Germanic varieties, as well as Greek, Hungarian, and Chinese, among many others.
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Saugera, Valérie. Remade in France. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190625542.001.0001.
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Remade in France: Anglicisms in the Lexicon and Morphology of French chronicles the current status of French Anglicisms, a hot topic in the history of the French language and a compelling example of the influence of global English. The abundant data come from primary sources—a large online newspaper corpus (for unofficial Anglicisms) and the dictionary (for official Anglicisms)—and secondary sources. This book examines the appearance and behavior of English items in the lexicon and morphology of French, and explains them in the context of French neology and lexical activity. The first phase of the latest contact period (1990–2015) has its own complex linguistic characterization, including a significant influx of nonce borrowings and very low-frequency Anglicisms, heterogeneous and creative borrowing outcomes, and direct phraseological borrowing. This book is a counterargument to the well-known criticism that Anglicisms are lexical polluters. On the contrary, the use of Anglicisms requires the inventive application of complex linguistic rules, and the borrowing of Anglicisms into the French lexicon is convincing proof that language change is systematic. The findings bring novel interdisciplinary insights to the domains of borrowing in a non-bilingual contact setting; global English as a source of lexical creativity in the French lexicon; the phases, patterns and processes of integration of English loanwords; the morphology of borrowing; and computational corpus linguistics. The appended database is a snapshot of a synchronic period of linguistic contact and a useful lexicographic resource.
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Warner-Lewis, Maureen. The African Diaspora and Language. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190657543.003.0015.
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Nowhere in the Americas is any African language used for routine communicative purposes. But fossilized spoken texts, songs, and chants are still performed for rituals, largely but not exclusively of a religious nature. Such events exist in non-mainstream cultural spaces. However, African lexical items and phrases have been retained in the lingua francas of the Americas, languages which have themselves been shaped by the confluence of African, European, and Native American language speakers. Most of these languages are considered “creoles.” They contain not only lexical but also syntactic, phonological, semantic, and idiomatic residues of various West African and West Central African languages. In a reverse movement of language diffusion, English-lexified creole speakers have influenced the formation of Krio in Sierra Leone and its offshoot “pidgins.”
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Hu, Xuhui. The syntax and semantics of Chinese resultatives. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198808466.003.0004.
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This chapter investigates the syntactic derivation of Chinese resultatives. While in English resultatives the [uDiv] feature is valued with the mechanism of feature sharing, in Chinese resultatives it is valued by a verbal C-functor, by nature equivalent to en in flatten. The Chinese V–V resultative compound is a single de-adjectival verb: the first verb is a verbal C-functor and the second one is an adjective. The V–V resultative construction is therefore analyzed as a causative construction involving a de-adjectival verb. This single hypothesis provides a unified account of the seemingly mysterious properties of Chinese resultatives as well as the differences from English resultatives. This account is based on a general hypothesis of Synchronic Grammaticalization: in an analytical language like Chinese where there is only a very limited array of functional items, lexical items are selected to serve as functional items to meet the universal requirement of feature valuation.
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Dworkin, Steven N. Anthology of texts. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780199687312.003.0006.
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This short anthology contains extracts from three Castilian prose texts, one from the second half of the thirteenth century (General estoria IV of Alfonso X the Wise), one from the first half of the fourteenth century (El conde Lucanor of don Juan Manuel), and one from near the mid-point of the fifteenth century (Atalaya de las corónicas of Alfonso Martínez de Toledo, Arcipreste de Talavera). These passages illustrate in context many of the phonological, orthographic, morphological, syntactic, and lexical features of medieval Hispano-Romance described in the body of this book. A linguistic commentary discussing relevant forms and constructions, as well as the meaning of lexical items no longer used or employed with different meanings in modern Spanish, with cross references to the appropriate sections in the five main chapters, accompanies each selection.
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Goldberg, Adele E. Constructionist Approaches. Edited by Thomas Hoffmann and Graeme Trousdale. Oxford University Press, 2013. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780195396683.013.0002.
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This chapter highlights the fundamental assumptions shared by all constructionist approaches, distinguishing them from mainstream generative grammar. In particular, phrasal constructions, like traditional lexical items, are learned pairings of form and function. Grammar does not involve any transformational or derivational component. Phrasal constructions, words, and partially filled words (aka morphemes) are related in a network in which nodes are related by inheritance links. Languages are acknowledged to vary in wide-ranging ways; the cross-linguistic generalizations that do exist are explained by domain-general cognitive processes or by the functions of the constructions involved.
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Jackendoff, Ray. Constructions in the Parallel Architecture. Edited by Thomas Hoffmann and Graeme Trousdale. Oxford University Press, 2013. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780195396683.013.0005.
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This chapter discusses what the Parallel Architecture has taken from Construction Grammar and what it might contribute to Construction Grammar. After outlining the fundamentals of the architecture, it explains why rules of grammar should be formulated as lexical items encoded as pieces of structure: there is no hard line between words, constructions, and standard rules. The chapter also argues for a “heterogeneous” variety of Construction Grammar, which does not insist that every syntactic construction is invested with meaning. Finally, it discusses the crucial issue of semiproductivity, usually thought to be a property of morphology, showing that constructions too can be either productive or semiproductive.
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Lobina, David J. The derivations into the interfaces. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198785156.003.0004.
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The structure of a given linguistic expression and the structure of the derivation that generates such an expression are two very different things; hence, they need not bear an isomorphic relationship. This chapter shows that the derivations of linguistic expressions are not recursive in the sense of computer science: there are no self-calls, and thus no deferred operations. Instead, the combination of merge, interface conditions, lexical items, and general computational properties brings about an iterative process, even if every stage of a derivation is recursively generated, keeping to the subtle distinction discussed in chapter 1 between recursively specified algorithms and the actual computational processes being executed at any particular point—in other words, a distinction between procedures and processes.
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Stein, Gabriele. Peter Levins’ description of word-formation (1570). Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198807377.003.0008.
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One of the most original English lexicographical ventures in the sixteenth century was Peter Levins’ Manipulus vocabulorum (1570). This is the first English rhyming dictionary. Some nine thousand English words were arranged in the alphabetical order of their last syllable and then translated into Latin. Levins’ word selection will thus have been largely based on the sound structure of the lexical items. The long years spent by Levins on assembling and arranging the dictionary material inevitably drew his attention to English suffixes like -able, -er, -ish, -less, and -ness and such second elements in compounds as fold, garth, house, man, and yard. The column arrangement of the dictionary is thus often interrupted by explicit specifications of synchronic English word-formation patterns (and Latin correspondences).
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McGregor, William B. Grammaticalization of Ergative Case Marking. Edited by Jessica Coon, Diane Massam, and Lisa Demena Travis. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198739371.013.19.
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This chapter overviews some of the patterns of emergence and development of ergative case markers in the world’s languages. What shines through most clearly is diversity: the range of possible source morphemes, constructions, and developmental pathways is much broader than might be expected. Rarely, it is possible to identify lexical sources for ergative case markers. More common sources are other case markers (notably instrumental, genitive, oblique, and ablative), and indexical items (such as demonstratives and pronominals); other possible sources include directional elements and focus markers. Ergative case markers can also be the sources of further grammatical developments, and can develop into markers of other grammatical categories, including other cases and verbal categories such as tense and aspect. Some observations are also included on the emergence and development of ergative case marking in language contact situations.
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Poplack, Shana. Rationale. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190256388.003.0001.
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This chapter identifies the rationale behind this volume: the enduring controversy over how to theorize language-mixing strategies. Relating this controversy to discrepancies in the conceptualization and treatment of the data of language mixing, it outlines a method to distinguish among other-language phenomena based on spontaneous bilingual performance, quantitative analysis, and rigorous standards of proof. It justifies the focus on the three quantitatively predominant manifestations of language mixing: nonce borrowing, lexical retrieval of previously borrowed words and code-switching. It introduces and defines integration, the major tool in characterizing language-mixing types. Ensuing chapters identify and illustrate an array of integration strategies, whereby the vast majority of lone other-language items are adapted to the morphological and syntactic patterns of a recipient language, in a variety of language pairs.
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Pietroski, Paul M. Locating meanings. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198812722.003.0002.
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This chapter characterizes meanings in terms of certain generative procedures. We can begin to locate the natural phenomenon of linguistic meaning by focusing on (Chomsky-style) examples of constrained homophony. Two or more lexical items can connect distinct meanings with the same pronunciation; and phrases like ‘ready to please’ are similarly homophonous. But as ‘eager to please’ and ‘easy to please’ illustrate, phrasal homophony is constrained. Such facts provide important clues about what meanings are, and how they can(not) be combined. The details provide reasons for identifying the languages that children naturally acquire with biologically implemented procedures, and not sets of expressions. There are English procedures; but English is not a thing that speakers share and use to communicate. In this context, some initial reasons are given for doubting that the relevant procedures generate sentences that have truth conditions.
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Lee, Hye-Kyung. Self-referring in Korean, with reference to Korean first-person markers. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198786658.003.0004.
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Lee’s chapter provides a corpus-based analysis of Korean first-person markers by examining the semantic and pragmatic features emerging from their dictionary definitions and their usages in discourse. Specifically, it is demonstrated that the use of the grammatical category of a pronoun does not quite fit the Korean data, because the exceptionally large number of the lexical items are highly specialized in their use. While the first-person markers have the primary function of referring to the speaker, self-referring via first-person markers in Korean is mediated by the speaker’s awareness of his perceived social role or public image, which is expected to conform to honorification norms. The author also argues that the situation with first-person reference in Korean supports the view that the indexical/non-indexical distinction standardly adopted in semantic theory ought to be reconsidered.
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Stein, Gabriele. Early polyglot word lists: Investigating their relationship. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198807377.003.0004.
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The pan-European character of Renaissance dictionaries is well represented by the very successful polyglot word lists. Their origins are the small bilingual works by Adam von Rottweil and Noel de Berlaimont, which were expanded by more and more vernaculars, listing up to eight languages. The handy pocket-size works were arranged according to topics, the headword language was Latin, and the vernacular translation equivalents, usually one-word lexical items, were presented in vertical columns. The number of languages included and their order greatly varied to meet the needs of the countries in which the works were printed. Copies of an undated six-language edition (including English) printed by the Augsburg printer Philipp Ulhart have been preserved. As a date of publication, 1530 has been suggested. The chapter investigates the intricate relationship between the various editions on the basis of a number of criteria to establish a more plausible publication date.
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Poplack, Shana. Epilogue. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190256388.003.0012.
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Analysis of language mixing in the actual production data of bilingual individuals has permitted us to test and overturn many long-standing assumptions about borrowing and code-switching empirically: borrowing is not monolithic but takes many forms in the speech community; it does not originate as code-switching; integration is not gradual but abrupt; speakers tend not to code-switch individual words but to borrow them. This work has also confirmed that code-switching and borrowing are diametrically opposed, not only structurally but from the perspective of the individuals who engage in them. The observable differences between multiword code-switches and lone other-language items, coupled with the overwhelming preponderance of the latter in every bilingual dataset that has been quantitatively analyzed, together demonstrate that any model of language mixing with pretensions to constituting a “unified” theory of language contact phenomena is in fact a theory of lexical borrowing.
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Zsiga, Elizabeth C., and One Tlale Boyer. Sebirwa in Contact with Setswana. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190256340.003.0015.
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Setswana, spoken by about 4.5 million people throughout Botswana, is well-known in the literature for “post-nasal devoicing,” in which /b/ and /l/ become [p] and [t] after nasals, contra the expected, phonetically-grounded pattern of post-nasal voicing. Sebirwa, in contrast, has at most 15,000 speakers concentrated in the far eastern corner of the country. Sebirwa is being overwhelmed by Setswana, and in a process of “massive Tswananization,” has borrowed some aspects of post-nasal devoicing. Our analysis, based on fieldwork in the village of Molalatau, shows that the Sebirwa pattern is doubly unexpected: only /b/ devoices, not /d/ and /g/. We attribute the asymmetry to frequency effects from Setswana, where, due to a skewed voicing inventory, the majority of lexical items that exhibit the alternation have underlying /b/. We discuss the implications of this type of borrowing, both for the typology of alternations, and for patterns of language loss.
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Poplack, Shana. Borrowing. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190256388.001.0001.
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In virtually every bilingual situation empirically studied, borrowed items make up the overwhelming majority of other-language material, but short shrift has been given to this major manifestation of language contact. As a result, scholars have long been divided over whether borrowing is a process distinct from code-switching, leading to long-standing controversy over how best to theorize language mixing strategies. This volume focuses on lexical borrowing as it actually occurs in the discourse of bilingual speakers, building on more than three decades of original research. Based on vast quantities of spontaneous performance data and a highly ramified analytical apparatus, it characterizes the phenomenon in the speech community and in the grammar, both synchronically and diachronically. In contrast to most other treatments, which deal with the product of borrowing, this work examines the process: How speakers incorporate foreign items into their bilingual discourse, how they adapt them to recipient-language grammatical structure, how these forms diffuse across speakers and communities, how long they persist in real time, and whether they change over the duration. It proposes falsifiable hypotheses about established loanwords and nonce borrowings and tests them empirically on a wealth of unique datasets on a wide variety of typologically similar and distinct language pairs. A major focus is the detailed analysis of integration, the principal mechanism underlying the borrowing process. Though the shape the borrowed form assumes may be colored by community convention, we show that the act of transforming donor-language elements into native material is universal.
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Hu, Xuhui. Non-canonical objects, motion events, and verb/satellite-framed typology. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198808466.003.0007.
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Based on the Synchronic Grammaticalisation Hypothesis and the theory of the syntax of events, this chapter explores the syntactic nature of the Chinese non-canonical object construction. The object in this construction is introduced by a null P, which is incorporated into the verbal head position, and a lexical verb serves as a functional item, vDO. This account is extended to the analysis of the motion event construction in Chinese. It involves the incorporation of a P into the verbal head position filled with a vDO in the form of a lexical verb. The only difference is that this P is phonologically overt. Therefore, the [V+Path] chunk in Chinese is a single lexical item. This means that the Chinese motion event construction by nature patterns with its counterpart in verb-framed languages, a conclusion that goes against the common assumption that Chinese is a satellite-framed language.
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Saugera, Valérie. Dictionary-unsanctioned Anglicisms. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190625542.003.0004.
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This core chapter reports on the findings from the investigation of the Libération corpus. Systematic tracking of dictionary-unattested Anglicisms occurring over a year of press language reveals that contact with global English has resulted in new patterns of borrowing and processes for extending the French lexicon, for the short and long term. A major finding is that the database includes many types of Anglicisms with very few tokens: global English is a robust supplier of transient words (nonce borrowings and very low-frequency items) which complement the more durable lexicon. Diachronic comparisons show that these Anglicisms typically have a short life cycle in the French lexicon, though some Anglicisms from the corpus entered subsequent editions of the dictionary. The data also reveal the less common borrowing of items from closed classes, including pronoun himself, stressed article the, and the preposition-like series starring/featuring/including.
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Booij, Geert. Inheritance and motivation in Construction Morphology. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198712329.003.0002.
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The basic question to be addressed in this chapter is: what is the status of the notions ‘inheritance’ and ‘default inheritance’ in the theoretical framework of Construction Morphology (CM)? This framework, developed in Booij (2010), assumes a hierarchical lexicon with both abstract morphological schemas and stored complex words that instantiate these schemas. The lexicon of a language can be modelled in such a way that the abstract word formation schemas dominate their individual instantiations. Thus, the lexicon is partially conceived of as a hierarchical network in which lower nodes, the existing complex words, can be assumed to inherit information from dominating higher nodes. Advantages of a full-entry theory over an impoverished entry theory are outlined, and the chapter includes discussion of polysemy, allomorphy, and the class of items that fall between derivatives and compounds using ‘affixoids’.
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Ramchand, Gillian. Situations and Syntactic Structures. The MIT Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/9780262037754.001.0001.
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Syntax has shown that there is a hierarchical ordering of projections within the verb phrase, although researchers differ with respect to how fine grained they assume the hierarchy to be). This book explores the hierarchy of the verb phrase from a semantic perspective, attempting to derive it from semantically sorted zones in the compositional semantics. The empirical ground is the auxiliary ordering found in the grammar of English. A new theory of semantic zones is proposed and formalized, and explicit semantic and morphological analyses are presented of all the auxiliary constructions of English that derive their rigid order of composition without recourse to lexical item specific ordering statements.
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Mitkov, Ruslan. Anaphora Resolution. Edited by Ruslan Mitkov. Oxford University Press, 2012. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199276349.013.0014.
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The article provides a theoretical background of anaphora and introduces the task of anaphora resolution. The importance of anaphora resolution in natural language parsing (NLP) is distinct, and early work and recent developments are outlined in this article. Finally, issues that need further attention are discussed. Anaphora is the linguistic phenomenon of pointing back to a previously mentioned item in the text. Varieties of anaphora include pronominal anaphora, lexical noun phrase anaphora, and nominal anaphora. The interpretation of anaphora is crucial for the successful operation of a machine translation system. It is essential to resolve the anaphoric relation when translating into languages that mark the gender of pronouns. Finally, the article suggests that the last years have seen considerable advances in the field of anaphora resolution, but there are still a number of outstanding issues that either remain unsolved or need further attention.
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Jónsson, Jóhannes Gísli, and Thórhallur Eythórsson, eds. Syntactic Features and the Limits of Syntactic Change. Oxford University Press, 2021. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198832584.001.0001.
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This volume brings together the latest diachronic research on syntactic features and their role in restricting syntactic change. The chapters address a central theoretical issue in diachronic syntax: whether syntactic variation can always be attributed to differences in the features of items in the lexicon, as the Borer-Chomsky conjecture proposes. In answering this question, all the chapters develop analyses of syntactic change couched within a formalist framework in which rich hierarchical structures and abstract features of various kinds play an important role. The first three parts of the volume explore the different domains of the clause, namely the C-domain, the T-domain and the νP/VP-domain respectively, while chapters in the final part are concerned with establishing methodology in diachronic syntax and modelling linguistic correspondences. The contributors draw on extensive data from a large number of languages and dialects, including several that have received little attention in the literature on diachronic syntax, such as Romeyka, a Greek variety spoken in Turkey, and Middle Low German, previously spoken in northern Germany. Other languages are explored from a fresh theoretical perspective, including Hungarian, Icelandic, and Austronesian languages. The volume sheds light not only on specific syntactic changes from a cross-linguistic perspective but also on broader issues in language change and linguistic theory.
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Bouzouita, Miriam, Anne Breitbarth, Lieven Danckaert, and Elisabeth Witzenhausen, eds. Cycles in Language Change. Oxford University Press, 2019. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198824961.001.0001.
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The notion of ‘linguistic cycle’ has long been recognized as being relevant to the descriptions of many processes of language change. In a process known as grammaticalization, a given linguistic form loses its lexical meaning as well as some of its phonological content, and then gradually weakens, until it ultimately vanishes. This process of change becomes cyclic when the grammaticalized form is replaced by an innovative item, which can develop along exactly the same pathway. This volume unites thirteen chapters which address aspects of cyclical change from a wide variety of empirical perspectives. Couched in the generative framework, the contributions to this book bear witness to the rapidly growing interest among Chomskyan syntacticians in the phenomenon of grammaticalization. Topics touched upon include, but are not limited to, the diachrony of negation (in the context of, but also beyond, Jespersen’s Cycle), the syntax of determiners and pronominal clitics, the internal structure of wh-words and logical operators, cyclical changes in argument structure, and the relationship between morphology and syntax. One conclusion that transpires is that the correlation between cyclical change and grammaticalization—though undeniable—is perhaps less strong than sometimes assumed. Given its emphasis on empirical data description and theoretical analysis, Cycles in Language Change will be of interest to historical linguists working in formal and usage-based frameworks, and more broadly to scholars interested in language variation and change.