Diachronic Change in the English Passive

Diachronic Change in the English Passive

Author: J. Toyota

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2008-11-05

Total Pages: 305

ISBN-13: 0230594654

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In this coherent historical development of the passive voice in English, the main argument deals not only with the passive per se, but also with its related constructions, which can play vital parts in identifying both functional and structural motivations for creating the passive.


The Determinants of Diachronic Stability

The Determinants of Diachronic Stability

Author: Anne Breitbarth

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company

Published: 2019-03-20

Total Pages: 302

ISBN-13: 9027262756

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While much of the literature has focused on explaining diachronic variation and change, the fact that sometimes change does not seem to happen has received much less attention. The current volume unites ten contributions that look for the determinants of diachronic stability, mainly in the areas of morphology and (morpho)syntax. The relevant question is approached from different angles, both empirical and theoretical. Empirically, the contributions deal with the absence of change where one may expect it, uncover underlying stability where traditionally diachronic change was postulated, and, inversely, superficial stability that disguises underlying change. Determining factors ranging from internal causes to language contact are explored. Theoretically, the questions of whether stable variation is possible, and how it can be modeled are addressed. The volume will be of interest to linguists working on the causes of language change, and to scholars working on the history of Germanic, Romance, and Sinitic languages.


The Diachrony of Grammar

The Diachrony of Grammar

Author: T. Givón

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company

Published: 2015-09-15

Total Pages: 877

ISBN-13: 9027268886

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The case-studies assembled in these two volumes span a lifetime of research into the diachrony of grammar. That is, into the rise and fall of syntactic constructions and their attendant grammatical morphology. While focused squarely on the data, the studies are nonetheless cast in an explicit theoretical perspective – adaptive, developmental, variationist. Taken as a whole, this work constitutes a frontal assault on Ferdinand de Saussure's corrosive legacy in linguistics. Over the years, reviewers slapped the author's wrist periodically for having dared to commit that most heinous of sins against de Saussure's hallowed legacy – panchronic grammar. In this work he pleads guilty, having never seen a piece of synchronic data that didn't reek, to high heaven, of the diachrony that gave it rise. Reek in two distinct ways: first with the frozen relics of the past that prompt us to reconstruct prior diachronic states; and second with the synchronic variation that hints at ongoing change. Conversely, the author confesses to having never seen a diachronic explanation that did not hinge on the synchronic principles – Carnap's general propositions – that govern language behavior. The synchrony and diachrony of grammar are twin faces of the same coin. To study one without the other is to gut both. By understanding how synchronic grammars come into being we also understand the cognitive, communicative, neurological and developmental universals that constrain diachronic change – and through it synchronic typology.


Transitivity Alternations in Diachrony

Transitivity Alternations in Diachrony

Author: Nikolaos Lavidas

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2009-12-14

Total Pages: 325

ISBN-13: 1443818100

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Τhis book offers a new approach to the theory of change in argument structure and voice morphology. It investigates the diachrony of transitivity, and especially the changes in causative verbs and transitivity alternations, based on data mainly from the Greek and English diachrony (all historical data are transcribed and accompanied by glosses and translations into Modern English). Data from earlier periods provide new information on burning questions in both Historical and Theoretical Linguistics. The study shows that (a) causativisations are the result of reanalysis of intransitive verbs as transitive on the basis of the linguistic cue of Case; (b) the changes in voice morphology do not depend on the derivation and direction of new transitivity alternations. Finally, the study demonstrates that the generalisation that guides the changes in voice demands morphological differentiation of the anticausative from the passive types.


Diachronic Construction Grammar

Diachronic Construction Grammar

Author: Jóhanna Barðdal

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company

Published: 2015-07-15

Total Pages: 276

ISBN-13: 9027268614

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Construction Grammar as a framework offers a new perspective on traditional historical questions in diachronic linguistics and language change: how do new constructions arise, how should competition in diachronic variation be accounted for, how do constructions fall into disuse, and how do constructions change in general, formally and/or semantically, and with what implications for the language system as a whole? This volume offers a broad introduction to the confluence of Construction Grammar and historical syntax, and also detailed case studies of various instances of syntactic change modeled within Construction Grammar. The volume demonstrates that Construction Grammar as a theory is particularly well suited for modeling historical changes in morphosyntax, and it also documents challenging new phenomena that require a theoretical account within any competing framework of syntactic change.


Language and Linguistics in a Complex World

Language and Linguistics in a Complex World

Author: Beatrix Busse

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2023-03-06

Total Pages: 198

ISBN-13: 3111017435

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This book is a collection of the ICAME41 conference proceedings covering a range of topics in corpus linguistics. Busse et al. Explore contemporary trends and new directions in the field. Papers focusing on historical linguistics include Bohmann et al's study on the passive alternation in 19th and 20th century American English whilst Iyeiri and Fukunaga investigate negation in 19th century American missionary documents. Bohmann's emphasis is on the Contrastive usage profiling method to represent online discourse data. Empirical studies on discourse analysis include Brooks' analysis of how the UK press portrays obesity, Coats generating ASR transcripts to look at dialect data from YouTube, and Gonzalez-Cruz's pragmatic considerations of Anglicisms entering Canarian-Spanish digital headlines. Schneider use statistical models to look at language comprehension in an eye-tracking corpus.


Information Structure and Syntactic Change in Germanic and Romance Languages

Information Structure and Syntactic Change in Germanic and Romance Languages

Author: Kristin Bech

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company

Published: 2014-05-15

Total Pages: 431

ISBN-13: 9027270465

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The contributions of this volume offer new perspectives on the relation between syntax and information structure in the history of Germanic and Romance languages, focusing on English, German, Norwegian, French, Spanish and Portuguese, and both from a synchronic and a diachronic perspective. In addition to discussing changes in individual languages along the syntax–information structure axis, the volume also makes a point of comparing and contrasting different languages with respect to the interplay between syntax and information structure. Since the creation of increasingly sophisticated annotated corpora of historical texts is on the agenda in many research environments, methods and schemes for information structure annotation and analysis of historical texts from a theoretical and applied perspective are discussed.


Changes in Complementation in British and American English

Changes in Complementation in British and American English

Author: J. Rudanko

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2011-04-05

Total Pages: 218

ISBN-13: 0230305199

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The book shows how the system of English predicate complementation has been undergoing an amazing amount of variation and change in recent centuries, and identifies explanatory principles to account for this change and variation, with evidence from large electronic corpora of both British and American English.


Individuality in Language Change

Individuality in Language Change

Author: Lynn Anthonissen

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2021-10-25

Total Pages: 339

ISBN-13: 3110725843

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Linguists have typically studied language change at the aggregate level of speech communities, yet key mechanisms of change such as analogy and automation operate within the minds of individual language users. Drawing on lifespan data from 50 authors and the intriguing case of the special passives in the history of English, this study addresses three fundamental issues relating to individuality in language change: (i) how variation and change at the individual level interact with change at the community level; (ii) how much innovation and change is possible across the adult lifespan; (iii) and to what extent related linguistic patterns are associated in individual cognition. As one of the first large-scale empirical studies to systematically link individual- and community-based perspectives in language change, this volume breaks new ground in our understanding of language as a complex adaptive system.


Micro-change and Macro-change in Diachronic Syntax

Micro-change and Macro-change in Diachronic Syntax

Author: Eric Mathieu

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2017

Total Pages: 347

ISBN-13: 0198747845

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The chapters in this volume address 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 the micro- versus macro-approaches to parameters in synchronic syntax. One of its important contributions is the demonstration of how much we can learn 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.