A collection of previously unpublished papers on a specific topic in historical linguistics - clause structure. These papers testify to the recent renewal of interest in diachronic syntax, a consequence of the new emphasis on comparative issues in the principles and parameters framework.

Clause structure is the most widely-studied phenomenon within syntactic theory. This accessible book synthesizes the most important research findings, examines a range of examples taken from data acquisition, typology and language change, and includes discussion questions, helpful suggestions for further reading and a useful glossary.

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.

The researchers in the field of theoretical and theoretically inclined descriptive linguistics have for a long time felt a need for detailed and clearly presented linguistic treatments of various syntactic phenomena in South Asian languages. Clause Structure in South Asian Languages: provides a comprehensive overview and covers major aspects of clause structure in a variety of South Asian languages; provides detailed analyses of several aspects of phrase structure of many prominent South Asian languages; gives theoretically up-to-date treatment of several important issues in South Asian syntax and semantics; contains papers by some of the most prominent linguists working on South Asian languages.

First published in 1980, this book provides a clear and practical introduction to a wide variety of English structures. It concentrates on a large and crucial area of English grammar, which covers units of higher rank than words, and structures that have verbs rather than nouns as their nuclear elements. Throughout the book, David Young focuses on the English language as it is actually spoken. At every point his discussion of syntax is closely integrated with meaning, and he pays particular attention to the ways in which speakers of English signal their intensions. The author points out how verbal patterning is meaningful, and outlines the criteria used by grammarians to distinguish one structure from another. The result is an analytical framework that can be applied to any real-life text in order to understand its structure. This is a book that will encourage a realistic, exploratory and investigative attitude towards the English language.

This volume offers an up-to-date survey of linguistic phenomena at the interfaces between syntax and prosody, information structure and discourse - with a special focus on Germanic and Romance - and their role in language change. The contributions, set within the generative framework, discuss original data and provide new insights into the diachronic development of long-burning issues such as negation, word order, quantifiers, null subjects, aspectuality, the structure of the left periphery, and extraposition. The first part of the volume explores interface phenomena at the intrasentential level, in which only clause-internal factors seem to play a significant role in determining diachronic change. The second part examines developments at the intersentential level involving a rearrangement of categories between at least two clausal domains. The book will be of interest for scholars and students interested in generative accounts of language change phenomena at the interfaces, as well as for theoretical linguists in general.

This volume offers an up-to-date survey of linguistic phenomena at the interfaces between syntax and prosody, information structure and discourse – with a special focus on Germanic and Romance – and their role in language change. The contributions, set within the generative framework, discuss original data and provide new insights into the diachronic development of long-burning issues such as negation, word order, quantifiers, null subjects, aspectuality, the structure of the left periphery, and extraposition. The first part of the volume explores interface phenomena at the intrasentential level, in which only clause-internal factors seem to play a significant role in determining diachronic change. The second part examines developments at the intersentential level involving a rearrangement of categories between at least two clausal domains. The book will be of interest for scholars and students interested in generative accounts of language change phenomena at the interfaces, as well as for theoretical linguists in general.

This volume centers on three important theoretical concepts for the study of language change and the ways in which language structure emerges and turns into new structure: reanalysis, actualization, and indexicality. Reanalysis is a part of ongoing everyday language use, a process through which language is reproduced and changed. Actualization refers to the processes through which a reanalyzed structure spreads throughout single communities and society. Indexicality covers the way in which parts of a linguistic system can point to other parts of the system, both syntagmatically and paradigmatically. The inclusion of indexicality leads to fine-grained analysis in morphology, word order, and constructional syntax.

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)

The emergence of Modern Hebrew as a spoken language constitutes a unique event in modern history: a language which for generations only existed in the written mode underwent a process popularly called “revival”, acquiring native speakers and becoming a language spoken for everyday use. Despite the attention it has drawn, this particular case of language-shift, which differs from the better-documented cases of creoles and mixed languages, has not been discussed within the framework of the literature on contact-induced change. The linguistic properties of the process have not been systematically studied, and the status of the emergent language as a (dis)continuous stage of its historical sources has not been evaluated in the context of other known cases of language shift. The present collection presents detailed case studies of the syntactic evolution of Modern Hebrew, alongside general theoretical discussion, with the aim of bringing the case of Hebrew to the attention of language-contact scholars, while bringing the insights of the literature on language contact to help shed light on the case of Hebrew.