Grammatical Change: Origins, Nature, Outcomes

Dianne Jonas · John Whitman · Andrew Garrett

Nov 2011 · Oxford University Press

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This book advances research on grammatical change and shows the breadth and liveliness of the field. Leading international scholars report and reflect on the latest research into the nature and outcomes of all aspects of syntactic change including grammaticalization, variation, complementation, syntactic movement, determiner-phrase syntax, pronominal systems, case systems, negation, and alignment. The authors deploy a variety of generative frameworks, including minimalist and optimality theoretic, and bring these to bear on a wide range of languages: among the latter are typologically distinct examples from Germanic, Romance, Slavic, Greek, Korean and Japanese, Austronesian, Celtic, and Nahuatl. They draw on sociolinguistic evidence where appropriate. Taken as a whole, the volume provides a stimulating overview of key current issues in the investigation of the origins, nature, and outcome of syntactic change.

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Dianne Jonas (PhD Harvard University 1997) is currently replacement professor of English Linguistics at Goethe University, Frankfurt. Her main research interests are comparative Scandinavian syntax, Icelandic and Faroese in particular, syntactic variation and change, and dialect syntax (Shetland Dialect and Norfuk English). John Whitman (PhD Harvard 1984) is Professor of Linguistics at Cornell University. He works on structural variation among languages, with a focus on the languages of East Asia: Japanese, Korean, and Chinese, in that order, in addition to a more recent interest in Burmese and Karen languages. Recent projects have been on the syntactic alignment of Old Japanese (with Yuko Yanagida), the structure of applicatives, and the long-vexed question of the word order typology of Old Chinese and proto-Sino-Tibetan (with Redouane Djamouri and Waltraud Paul). Andrew Garrett (PhD Harvard 1990) is Professor of Linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley, where he also serves as Director of the Survey of California and Other Indian Languages. In historical linguistics he has published on general topics in sound change and morphological change as well as the dialectology, diversification, and prehistory of Yurok (an Algic language of California) and Western Numic (Uto-Aztecan), the dialectology and diachronic syntax of English, and the syntax and morphology of Anatolian, Greek, and Latin.