- Title Pages
- Dedication
- Notes on Contributors
- Foreword
- 1 Change, relatedness, and inertia in historical syntax
- 2 Linguistic theory and the historical creation of English reflexives
- 3 Spontaneous syntactic change
- 4 The return of the Subset Principle*
- 5 Many small catastrophes: gradualism in a microparametric perspective
- 6 Feature economy in the Linguistic Cycle
- 7 Sources of change in the German syntax of negation
- 8 The consolidation of verb‐second in Old High German: What role did subject pronouns play?
- 9 Syntactic change as <i>chain reaction</i>: the emergence of hyper‐raising in Brazilian Portuguese
- 10 On the emergence of <i>TER</i> as an existential verb in Brazilian Portuguese
- 11 Gradience and auxiliary selection in Old Catalan and Old Spanish
- 12 Verb‐to‐preposition reanalysis in Chinese*
- 13 Downward reanalysis and the rise of stative HAVE <i>got</i>
- 14 The Old Chinese determiner <i>zhe</i>
- 15 Grammaticalization of modals in Dutch: uncontingent change
- 16 Correlative clause features in Sanskrit and Hindi/Urdu*
- 17 Towards a Diachronic Theory of Genitive Assignment in Romance*
- 18 Expletive pro and misagreement in Late Middle English*
- 19 Morphosyntactic parameters and the internal classification of Benue‐Kwa (Niger‐Congo)*
- 20 On the Germanic properties of Old French
- 21 A parametric shift in the D‐system in Early Middle English: relativization, articles, adjectival inflection, and indeterminates*
- References
- Index
Spontaneous syntactic change
Spontaneous syntactic change
- Chapter:
- (p.41) 3 Spontaneous syntactic change
- Source:
- Historical Syntax and Linguistic Theory
- Author(s):
Chris H. Reintges
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
To come to terms with the logical problem of language change, many historical linguists subscribe to the view that the syntax is in a state of equilibrium and does not change by itself. This chapter develops an alternative theory, which derives the complexity of syntactic change from the inherent dynamism and flexibility of an autonomous syntactic component. In explaining syntactic variation and change in terms of language design, it seeks to bridge the gap between historical linguistics and (synchronic) syntactic theory.
Keywords: Inertia Theory, spontaneous syntactic change, syntactic variation, morphological cues, vP‐internal subjects
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- Title Pages
- Dedication
- Notes on Contributors
- Foreword
- 1 Change, relatedness, and inertia in historical syntax
- 2 Linguistic theory and the historical creation of English reflexives
- 3 Spontaneous syntactic change
- 4 The return of the Subset Principle*
- 5 Many small catastrophes: gradualism in a microparametric perspective
- 6 Feature economy in the Linguistic Cycle
- 7 Sources of change in the German syntax of negation
- 8 The consolidation of verb‐second in Old High German: What role did subject pronouns play?
- 9 Syntactic change as <i>chain reaction</i>: the emergence of hyper‐raising in Brazilian Portuguese
- 10 On the emergence of <i>TER</i> as an existential verb in Brazilian Portuguese
- 11 Gradience and auxiliary selection in Old Catalan and Old Spanish
- 12 Verb‐to‐preposition reanalysis in Chinese*
- 13 Downward reanalysis and the rise of stative HAVE <i>got</i>
- 14 The Old Chinese determiner <i>zhe</i>
- 15 Grammaticalization of modals in Dutch: uncontingent change
- 16 Correlative clause features in Sanskrit and Hindi/Urdu*
- 17 Towards a Diachronic Theory of Genitive Assignment in Romance*
- 18 Expletive pro and misagreement in Late Middle English*
- 19 Morphosyntactic parameters and the internal classification of Benue‐Kwa (Niger‐Congo)*
- 20 On the Germanic properties of Old French
- 21 A parametric shift in the D‐system in Early Middle English: relativization, articles, adjectival inflection, and indeterminates*
- References
- Index
