Historical Syntax in Cross-Linguistic Perspective
Historical Syntax in Cross-Linguistic Perspective

Author: Alice C. Harris

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 1995-09-21

Total Pages: 512

ISBN-13: 9780521478816

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In this major new work Alice Harris and Lyle Campbell set out to establish a general framework for the investigation of linguistic change. Systematic cross-linguistic comparison of syntactic change across a wide variety of languages is used to construct hypotheses about the universals and limits of language change more generally. In particular, the authors seek to move closer towards describing the range of causes of syntactic change to develop an understanding of the mechanisms of syntactic change, and to provide an understanding of why some languages undergo certain changes and not others. The authors draw on languages as diverse as Pipil and French, Georgian and Estonian, and the data presented is one of the book's great strengths. Rigor and precision are combined here with a great breadth of scholarship to produce a unique resource for the study of linguistic change, which will be of use to scholars and students alike.

Historical Linguistics, fourth edition
Historical Linguistics, fourth edition

Author: Lyle Campbell

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2021-03-30

Total Pages: 521

ISBN-13: 0262542188

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The new edition of a comprehensive, accessible, and hands-on text in historical linguistics, revised and expanded, with new material and a new layout. This accessible, hands-on textbook not only introduces students to the important topics in historical linguistics but also shows them how to apply the methods described and how to think about the issues. Abundant examples from a broad range of languages and exercises allow students to focus on how to do historical linguistics. The book is distinctive for its integration of the standard topics with others now considered important to the field, including syntactic change, grammaticalization, sociolinguistic contributions to linguistic change, distant genetic relationships, areal linguistics, and linguistic prehistory.

Clause Linkage in Cross-Linguistic Perspective
Clause Linkage in Cross-Linguistic Perspective

Author: Volker Gast

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter

Published: 2012-10-01

Total Pages: 464

ISBN-13: 3110280698

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The volume is a collection of thirteen papers given at the “Third Syntax of the World’s Languages” conference, complemented with four additional papers as well as an introduction by the editors. All contributions deal with clause combining, focusing on one or both of the following two dimensions of analysis: properties of the clauses involved, types of dependency. The studies are data-driven and have a cross-linguistic or typological orientation. In addition to survey papers the volume contains in-depth studies of particular languages, mostly based on original data collected in recent field work.

Adverbs and Functional Heads
Adverbs and Functional Heads

Author: Guglielmo Cinque

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 1999

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 0195115279

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This text presents evidence locating adverb phrases in the specifiers of distinct functional projections within a theory of the clause. In this theory, both adverbs and heads, which encode the functional notions of the clause, are ordered in a rigid sequence. The author's proposal suggests that the structure of natural language sentences is much richer than previously assumed.

Historical Linguistics, third edition
Historical Linguistics, third edition

Author: Lyle Campbell

Publisher: National Geographic Books

Published: 2013-03-22

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 026251849X

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The new edition of a comprehensive, accessible, and hands-on text in historical linguistics, revised and expanded to reflect recent developments in the field. This accessible, hands-on textbook not only introduces students to the important topics in historical linguistics but also shows them how to apply the methods described and how to think about the issues. Abundant examples and exercises allow students to focus on how to do historical linguistics. The book is distinctive for its integration of the standard topics with others now considered important to the field, including syntactic change, grammaticalization, sociolinguistic contributions to linguistic change, distant genetic relationships, areal linguistics, and linguistic prehistory. It also offers a defense of the family tree model, a response to recent claims on lexical diffusion/frequency, and a section on why languages diversify and spread. Examples are taken from a broad range of languages; those from the more familiar English, French, German, and Spanish make the topics more accessible, while those from non-Indo-European languages show the depth and range of the concepts they illustrate. This third edition includes new material based on the latest developments in the field, increased coverage of computational approaches, and additional exercises. Many of the chapters have been revised or expanded, with new coverage of such topics as morphological change, language families, language isolates, language diversity, the Romani migration case, and misconceptions in recent work about historical linguistics. New for this edition is a downloadable instructor's manual with answers to exercises.

Similative and Equative Constructions
Similative and Equative Constructions

Author: Yvonne Treis

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company

Published: 2017-05-31

Total Pages: 445

ISBN-13: 9027265976

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While comparative constructions have been extensively studied in the past decades, the expression of equality and similarity has so far attracted little attention in the typological literature. The fifteen contributions assembled in this volume study similative and equative constructions in typologically and genetically distant languages, albeit with a focus on Africa, and from a range of perspectives. Purely synchronically oriented case studies are supplemented by contributions that also shed light on the diachronic development of similative and equative constructions in language contact situations. Sources of similative morphemes and lexically expressed concepts of likeness are examined, and little-known multifunctionality patterns and grammaticalisation targets of similative morphemes – such as purpose clause markers, modality morphemes and markers of glottonyms – are discussed. Based on a sample of 119 languages worldwide, a new typology of equative constructions is proposed. The book should be of interest to typologists, semanticists, specialists of grammaticalization, historical linguistics and syntax.

Historical Linguistics
Historical Linguistics

Author: Lyle Campbell

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2004

Total Pages: 478

ISBN-13: 9780262532679

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This accessible, hands-on text not only introduces students to the important topicsin historical linguistics but also shows them how to apply the methods described and how to thinkabout the issues; abundant examples and exercises allow students to focus on how to do historicallinguistics. Distinctive to this text is its integration of the standard topics with others nowconsidered important to the field, including syntactic change, grammaticalization, sociolinguisticcontributions to linguistic change, distant genetic relationships, areal linguistics, and linguisticprehistory. Examples are taken from a broad range of languages; those from the more familiarEnglish, French, German, and Spanish make the topics more accessible, while those fromnon-Indo-European languages show the depth and range of the concepts they illustrate.This secondedition features expanded explanations and examples as well as updates in light of recent work inlinguistics, including a defense of the family tree model, a response to recent claims on lexicaldiffusion/frequency, and a section on why languages diversify and spread.

Chinese Syntax in a Cross-linguistic Perspective
Chinese Syntax in a Cross-linguistic Perspective

Author: Yen-hui Audrey Li

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 2015

Total Pages: 461

ISBN-13: 0199945675

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Chinese Syntax in a Cross-linguistic Perspective collects twelve new papers that explore the syntax of Chinese in comparison with other languages.

Syntactic Features and the Limits of Syntactic Change
Syntactic Features and the Limits of Syntactic Change

Author: Jóhannes Gísli Jónsson

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2021-02-26

Total Pages: 352

ISBN-13: 0192568744

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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 ?P/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.