- 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
The return of the Subset Principle *
The return of the Subset Principle *
- Chapter:
- (p.58) 4 The return of the Subset Principle*
- Source:
- Historical Syntax and Linguistic Theory
- Author(s):
Theresa Biberauer
Ian Roberts (Contributor Webpage)
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
This chapter reconsiders the role of the Subset Principle in language acquisition and change, arguing that consideration of true formal optionality enables one to define grammars generating languages that are in inclusion relations. This in turn facilitates an explanation of diachronic changes where absence of sufficiently robust PLD led acquirers to ‘default’ to ‘smaller language’‐generating grammars.
Keywords: Subset Principle, learnability, true optionality, pied‐piping, OV and VO word order/word‐order variation, Old and Middle English
Oxford Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs , and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us .
- 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
