Download or read book Word Order and Phrase Structure in Gothic written by Gisella Ferraresi and published by Peeters Publishers. This book was released on 2005 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book aims at providing a precise description of part of the Gothic syntax in the context of a formal theory of syntax. The following questions are addressed: To what extent can Gothic - despite its limited corpus - be used as data material? Further, which of the ascertained syntactic characteristics does Gothic have in common with other old Indo-European languages? Which of these features can be characterized as typically Germanic? It is shown that - despite a certain Greek influence - the Gothic Bible is indeed a rich source of data which can with some certainty be regarded as typically Gothic. Phenomena concerning the left periphery like personal pronouns, topicalization, left-dislocation and discourse particles are described and discussed within the generative framework, with additions from pragmatic and cognitive linguistics for those issues where syntax seems to be inadequate to cover the whole range of the phenomena concerned. The readership aimed at is that of linguists and philologists, and of scholars interested in the interrelation between both disciplines.

Download or read book Clause Structure and Word Order in the History of German written by Agnes Jäger and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018 with total page 423 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Syntactic Change in French written by Sam Wolfe and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2022-01-22 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides the most comprehensive and detailed formal account to date of the evolution of French syntax. It makes use of the latest formal syntactic tools and combines careful textual analysis with a detailed synthesis of the research literature to provide a novel analysis of the major syntactic developments in the history of French. The empirical scope of the volume is exceptionally broad, and includes discussion of syntactic variation and change in Latin, Old, Middle, Renaissance, and Classical French, and standard and non-standard varieties of Modern French. Following an introduction to the general trends in grammatical change from Latin to French, Sam Wolfe explores a wide range of phenomena including the left periphery, subject positions and null subjects, verb movement, object placement, negation, and the makeup of the nominal expression. The book concludes with a comparative analysis of how French has come to develop the unique typological profile it has within Romance today. The volume will thus be an indispensable tool for researchers and students in French and comparative Romance linguistics, as well as for readers interested in grammatical theory and historical linguistics more broadly.

Download or read book Information Structure and Language Change written by Roland Hinterhölzl and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2009 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The volume presents new approaches to explaining word order variation and change in the Germanic languages and thus relates to one of the most prominent and widely discussed topics in the theory of language change and diachronic syntax. The novelty of our approach consists in three main points. First of all, we aim at describing functional variety in the field of word order and verb placement in the early Germanic languages not as a result of language contact, but rather as a language-internal phenomenon related to stylistic and grammatical conditions in information packaging. Second, given that information structure is not directly accessible in texts from historical corpora that are available only in written form and bear no or little information on prosody and intonation, it presents various methods of retrieving information-structural categories in such texts. Third, it presents empirical studies on the relation between word order and information structure of the four main texts of the Old High German period and embeds these results in the wider picture of word order change in Germanic. The volume will be of interest to students of German, English, and general linguistics as well as to researchers interested in diachronic syntax, philology of Older German, language change, information structure, discourse semantics, language typology, computational linguistics, and corpus studies.

Download or read book Studies on Old High German Syntax written by Katrin Axel and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2007-07-19 with total page 382 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book The Oxford Gothic Grammar written by D. Gary Miller and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2019-04-24 with total page 512 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume provides a comprehensive reference grammar of Gothic, the earliest attested language of the Germanic family (apart from runic inscriptions), dating to the fourth century. The bulk of the extant Gothic corpus is a translation of the Bible, of which only a portion remains, and which has been the focus of most previous works. This book is the first in English to also draw on the recently discovered Bologna fragment and Crimean graffiti, original Gothic texts that provide more insights into the language. Following an overview of the history of the Goths and the origin of the Gothic language, Gary Miller explores all the major topics in Gothic grammar, beginning with the alphabet and phonology, and proceeding through subjects such as case functions, prepositions and particles, compounding, derivation, and verbal and sentential syntax. He also presents a selection of Gothic texts with notes and vocabulary, and ends with a chapter on linearization, including an overview of Gothic in its Germanic context. The Oxford Gothic Grammar will be an invaluable reference for all Indo-Europeanists, Germanic scholars, and historical linguists, from advanced undergraduate level upwards.

Download or read book Studies in Gothic written by Jared S. Klein and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2024-07-23 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume investigates a wide range of topics in the study of Gothic, the oldest Germanic language to be attested in any substantial texts, some three centuries before the earliest Old English. It covers issues in sociolinguistics, historical linguistics, phonology, derivational morphology, verbal syntax, and discourse structure. Individual chapters examine Gothic-Latin bilingualism in sixth-century Italy, some hitherto undiscovered aspects of the production of the first edition of the Codex Argenteus associated with England, and the translations of Greek nominal compounds in the Gospels. Phonological and morphological topics covered include vowel lowering (?breaking?), the distinction between abstract nouns in -ei and -i?a, the shape of the 'yon'-word in Proto-Germanic, and the morphology and derivational history of the word fidur-dogs 'four-days-old'. The syntactic studies explore the development of verb + particle constructions in Gothic and Old Saxon, attempt to discern the order of noun plus adnominal possessive, and analyse the complex and in part cross-linguistically unparalleled markers of Gothic relative clauses. The volume concludes with two chapters that explore discourse structure: the first studies the particles nu and ?an in their dual roles as anaphoric elements ('now' and 'then') and as discourse particles, while the second examines the system of discourse articulation as a whole in the Gothic Gospels.

Download or read book Verb Second in Medieval Romance written by Sam Wolfe and published by Oxford Studies in Diachronic a. This book was released on 2018-12-06 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume provides the first book-length study of the controversial topic of Verb Second and related properties in a range of Medieval Romance varieties. It presents an examination and analysis of both qualitative and quantitative data from Old French, Occitan, Sicilian, Venetian, Spanish, and Sardinian, in order to assess whether these were indeed Verb Second languages. Sam Wolfe argues that V-to-C movement is a point of continuity across all the medieval varieties - unlike in the modern Romance languages - but that there are rich patterns of synchronic and diachronic variation in the medieval period that have not previously been observed and investigated. These include differences in the syntax-pragmatics mapping, the locus of verb movement, the behaviour of clitic pronouns, the syntax of subject positions, matrix/embedded asymmetries, and the null argument properties of the languages in question. The book outlines a detailed formal cartographic analysis of both the attested synchronic patterns and the diachronic evolution of Romance clausal structure. The findings have widespread implications for the understanding of both the key typological property of Verb Second and the development of Latin into the modern Romance languages.

Download or read book Principles and Parameters in a VSO Language written by Ian G. Roberts and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2005-02-03 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first book-length study of Welsh syntax in English using minimalist theory. The central empirical issue addressed is an analysis of word order and clause structure in Welsh, within the context of the Principles and Parameters theory and Welsh as a VSO language. Roberts's central question: Which values of which parameters of Universal Grammar determine VSO order? To answer it, he makes use of parameters whose values are rooted in considerations of typology and language acquisition. Along the way, he shows that Chomsky's recent conception of the Extended Projection Principle is highly relevant, although it requires a slightly more abstract formulation. Roberts's careful use of parameters, his unique cross-linguistic coverage between Welsh and Romance languages, and his reformulation of the Extended Projection Principle make this book of interest to linguists concerned with generative theory and comparative syntax.

Download or read book Diachronic Syntax written by and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021-11-18 with total page 751 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This second edition of Ian Roberts's highly successful textbook on diachronic syntax has been fully revised and updated throughout to take account of the multiple developments in the field in the last decade. The book provides a detailed account of how standard questions in historical linguistics - including word order change, grammaticalization, and reanalysis - can be explored in terms of current minimalist theory and Universal Grammar. This new edition offers expanded coverage of a range of topics, including null subjects, the Final-over-Final Condition, the diachrony of wh-movement, the Tolerance Principle, and creoles and creolization, and explores further advances in the theory of parametric variation. Each chapter includes suggestions for further reading, and the book concludes with a comprehensive glossary of key terms. Written by one of the leading scholars in the field, the volume will remain an ideal textbook for students of historical linguistics and a valuable reference for researchers and students in related areas such as syntax, comparative linguistics, language contact, and language acquisition.

Download or read book Diachronic and Comparative Syntax written by Ian Roberts and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-09-03 with total page 558 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book brings together for the first time a series of previously published papers featuring Ian Roberts’ pioneering work on diachronic and comparative syntax over the last thirty years in one comprehensive volume. Divided into two parts, the volume engages in recent key topics in empirical studies of syntactic theory, with the eight papers on diachronic syntax addressing major changes in the history of English as well as broader aspects of syntactic change, including the introduction to the formal approach to grammaticalisation, and the eight papers on comparative syntax exploring head-movement, the nature and distribution of clitics, and the nature of parametric variation and change. This comprehensive collection of the author’s body of research on diachronic and comparative syntax is an essential resource for scholars and researchers in theoretical, comparative, and historical linguistics.

Download or read book Parametric Variation written by Theresa Biberauer and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 375 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Parametric variation in linguistic theory refers to the systematic grammatical variation permitted by the human language faculty. This book is a defence of the parametric approach to linguistic variation, set within the framework of the Minimalist Program.

Download or read book Noun phrases in early Germanic languages written by Kristin Bech and published by Language Science Press. This book was released on 2024-03-01 with total page 430 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On the premise that syntactic variation is constrained by factors that may not always be immediately obvious, this volume explores various perspectives on the nominal syntax in the early Germanic languages and the syntactic diversity they display. The fact that these languages are relatively well attested and documented allows for individual cases studies as well as comparative studies. Due to their well-observable common ancestry at the time of their earliest attestations, they moreover permit close-up comparative investigations into closely related languages. Besides the purely empirical aspects, the volume also explores the methodological side of diagnosing, classifying and documenting the details of syntactic diversity. The volume starts with a description by Alexander Pfaff and Gerlof Bouma of the principles underlying the Noun Phrases in Early Germanic Languages (NPEGL) database, before Alexander Pfaff presents the Patternization method for measuring syntactic diversity. Kristin Bech, Hannah Booth, Kersti Börjars, Tine Breban, Svetlana Petrova, and George Walkden carry out a pilot study of noun phrase variation in Old English, Old High German, Old Icelandic, and Old Saxon. Kristin Bech then considers the development of Old English noun phrases with quantifiers meaning ‘many’. Alexandra Rehn’s study is concerned with the inflection of stacked adjectives in Old High German and Alemannic. Old High German is also the topic of Svetlana Petrova’s study, which looks at inflectional patterns of attributive adjectives. With Hannah Booth’s contribution we move to Old Icelandic and the use of the proprial article as a topic management device. Juliane Tiemann investigates adjective position in Old Norwegian. Alexander Pfaff and George Walkden then take a broader view of adjectival articles in early Germanic, before Alexander Pfaff rounds off the volume with a study of a peculiar class of adjectives, the so-called positional predicates, which occur across the early Germanic languages.

Download or read book The Gothic Version of the Gospels and Pauline Epistles written by Carla Falluomini and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2015-05-19 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Gothic version of the New Testament is the oldest extant writing in a Germanic language and one of the earliest translations from the Greek. This volume offers a re-examination of fundamental questions concerning the historical and cultural context in which the version was prepared, the codicology of the manuscripts, and the value of the Gothic text for the reconstruction of the underlying Greek, together with a history of text-critical research and a new evaluation of the significance of the Gothic text in the light of current New Testament textual criticism.

Download or read book Diachronic Studies on Information Structure written by Gisella Ferraresi and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2010-08-31 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the last few years a lively discussion on information packaging has arisen, where traditional dichotomies Theme/Rheme, Topic/Comment and Focus/Background have been taken up again and partly reinterpreted. The discussion is mainly being held in syntax, but also in the fields of semantics and pragmatics. Some remarkable progress has been made especially in Focus phonology. Even if the role of information conveying and information packaging in the Indoeuropean languages was hinted at as early as in the classical studies of the Neogrammarians, this field has remained neglected in today's historical linguistics. This volume tries to partly cover this lack with a sample of papers which offer a various range of new empirical data analyzed from the point of view of information structure. The novelty of the papers consists in the modern theoretical perspective from which the data are analyzed and in the various phenomena considered, which range from the rise of clitic elements to word order change and verb movement. Editorial board Dr. habil. Kai Alter (Newcastle University Medical School) Prof. Dr. Ulrike Demske (Universität des Saarlandes) Prof. Dr. Ewald Lang (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin) Prof. Dr. Rosemarie Lühr (Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena) Prof. Dr. Thomas Pechmann (Universität Leipzig) Prof. em. Dr. Anita Steube (Universität Leipzig)

Download or read book Handbook of Comparative and Historical Indo European Linguistics written by Jared Klein and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2018-06-11 with total page 1025 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents the most comprehensive coverage of the field of Indo-European Linguistics in a century, focusing on the entire Indo-European family and treating each major branch and most minor languages. The collaborative work of 120 scholars from 22 countries, Handbook of Comparative and Historical Indo-European Linguistics combines the exhaustive coverage of an encyclopedia with the in-depth treatment of individual monographic studies.

Download or read book Phases written by Ángel J. Gallego and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2012-04-10 with total page 455 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume explores and develops the framework of phases (so-called Phase Theory), first introduced in Chomsky (2000). The antecedents of such framework go back to the well-known notion of “cycle”, which concerns broader notions, such as compositionality, locality, and economy conditions. Within generative grammar, this idea of the cycle took a concrete form in the fifties, with Chomsky, Halle, and Lukoff’s (1955) pioneering work on stress, later on extended in Chomsky & Halle (1968), Halle & Vergnaud (1987), and further applied to morpho-phonology (Mascaró 1976 and Kiparski 1982), semantics (Jackendoff 1969), and syntax (Chomsky 1965, 1973). In recent years, several attempts have tried to refine and reformulate the cycle (Freidin 1999, Lasnik 2006, Uriagereka 2011). Such was the goal behind explorations on bounding nodes (Chomsky 1973) and barriers (Chomsky 1986), for which there is substantial empirical evidence showing how computation proceeds in a step-by-step fashion. Much work within minimalism has been devoted to investigate the nature of phases and their relevance for other areas of linguistic inquiry. Although it has been argued that phases have natural correlates at the interfaces, it is still unclear what the defining properties of these domains are, whether they can help us understand language acquisition, language variation, or language evolution. This book aims at addressing these questions, sharpening our understanding about phases and the nature of the Faculty of Language. Ángel J. Gallego (ed.), Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona 1. Cedric Boeckx, Institució Catalana de Recerca i Estudis Avançats / Universitat de Barcelona 2. Zeljko Bošković, University of Connecticut 3. Noam Chomsky, Massachusetts Institute of Technology 4. Samuel D. Epstein, University of Michigan 5. Wolfram Hinzen, Durham University 6. Hisatsugu Kitahara, Keio University 7. Julie Anne Legate, University of Pennsylvania 8. Hiroki Narita, Waseda Institute for Advanced Study 9. Miki Obata, Mie University 10. Marc D. Richards, University of Frankfurt 11. Ian G. Roberts, University of Cambridge 12. Bridget Samuels, University of Southern California 13. Yosuke Sato, National University of Singapore 14. T. Daniel Seely, Eastern Michigan University 15. Juan Uriagereka, University of Maryland