Linguistics

This book focuses on some of the most important issues in historical syntax. In a series of close examinations of languages from old Egyptian to modern Afrikaans, chapters present work on Afro-Asiatic, Latin and Romance, Germanic, Albanian, Celtic, Indo-Iranian, and Japanese. The book revolves around the linked themes of parametric theory and the dynamics of language change. The former is a key element in the search for explanatory adequacy in historical syntax: if the notion of imperfect learning, for example, explains a large element of grammatical change, it is vital to understand how parameters are set in language acquisition and how they might have been set differently in previous generations. The book tests particular hypotheses against data from different times and places with the aim of understanding the relationship between language variation and the dynamics of change. Is it possible, for example, to reconcile the unidirectionality of change predominantly expressed in the phenomenon of ‘grammaticalization’, with the multidirectionality predicted by generativist approaches?

This book describes the historical emergence and spread of the to-infinitive in English. It shows that to + infinitive emerged from a reanalysis of the preposition to plus a deverbal nominalization, which spread first to purpose clauses, then to other non-finite environments. The book challenges the traditional reasoning that infinitives must have been nouns in Old English because they inflected for dative case and can follow prepositions. In fact, as early as Old English, the to-infinitive was established in most of the environments in which it is found today, and its syntactic behaviour clearly shows that it is already a clause rather than a phrase at this early date. Its spread was largely due to competition with finite subjunctive that-clauses, which it gradually replaced. Later chapters consider Middle English developments. The book provides a measured evaluation of the evidence that the infinitive marker to undergoes a period of degrammaticalization. It concludes that the extent to which to gains syntactic freedom in Middle English is due to the fact that speakers began to equate it with the modal verbs, and therefore to treat it syntactically as a modal verb. The rise of to-infinitival Exceptional Case-Marking constructions is a Middle English innovation, triggered by changes in information structure that were in turn caused by the loss of verb-second.

This book addresses the question: why do sound changes happen when and where they do? It discusses the origins of a series of sound changes in English. It relates the arguments to larger questions about the nature of explanation in history and historical linguistics, and examines the interplay between sound change and social change. Drawing on the latest research in linguistics and history, it shows how insights in one field illuminate the other. After the opening chapter describing the book's approach and a general theoretical framework for the study of sound-change, the book discusses problems of evidence and considers the nature of phonological processes. It then presents detailed investigations of major sound-changes from three transitional periods: first, when English emerged as a language distinct from the other West Germanic varieties; secondly, during the transition from Old to Middle English; and thirdly, during the time when Middle English evolved into Modern English.

This new interpretation of the early history of Chinese argues that Old Chinese was typologically a ‘mixed’ language. It shows that, though its dominant word order was subject-verb-object, this coexisted with subject-object-verb. This book demonstrates that Old Chinese was not the analytic language it has usually been assumed to be, and that it employed morphological and lexical devices as well as syntactic means. The book describes the typological changes that have taken place since the Han period and shows how Chinese evolved into a more analytic language, supporting this exposition with abundant examples. The book draws where possible on archaeological findings in order to distinguish between versions of texts transmitted and sometimes modified through the hands of generations of copyists. The book focuses on syntactic issues, including word order, verbs, causative structures, resultative compounds, and negation, but also pays close attention to what the book demonstrates are closely related changes in phonology and the writing system.

This book presents for the first time an in‐depth historical account of vowel prosthesis in the Romance languages. Vowel prosthesis is a change which involves the appearance of a non‐etymological vowel at the beginning of a word: a familiar example is the initial e which appears in the development of Latin sperare to Spanish esperar and French espérer ‘to hope’. Despite its widespread incidence in the Romance languages, it has remained poorly studied. In his wide‐ranging comparative coverage, Professor Sampson identifies three main categories of vowel prosthesis that have occurred and explores in detail their historical trajectory and the relationship between them. The presentation draws freely throughout on the rich philological materials available from Romance and brings to light various unexpected changes in the productive use of prosthesis through time. For example in French and Italian (which is Tuscan‐based), one category of prosthesis became well established in the early Middle Ages only to lose productivity and subsequently become moribund. With its extensive use of empirical data and findings from theoretical linguistics, the book offers a thorough and revealing account of a fascinating chapter in the phonological history of Romance.

It is commonly agreed by linguists and anthropologists that the majority of languages spoken now around the globe will likely disappear within our lifetime. The phenomenon known as language death has started to accelerate as the world has grown smaller. This extinction of languages, and the knowledge therein, has no parallel in human history. This book focuses on the essential questions: What is lost when a language dies?; What forms of knowledge are embedded in a language's structure and vocabulary?; And how harmful is it to humanity that such knowledge is lost forever? The book spans the globe from Siberia to North America to the Himalayas and elsewhere, to look at the human knowledge that is slowly being lost as the languages which express it fade from sight. It uses fascinating anecdotes and portraits of some of these languages' last remaining speakers, in order to demonstrate that this knowledge about ourselves and the world is inherently precious, and once gone, will be lost forever. This knowledge is not only our cultural heritage (oral histories, poetry, stories, etc.) but very useful knowledge about plants, animals, the seasons, and other aspects of the natural world—not to mention our understanding of the capacities of the human mind.