Information structure and language change : new approaches to word order variation in Germanic / / editors, Roland Hinterhölzl, Svetlana Petrova

• Record Nr.: UNINA9910778134603321
• Pubbl/distr/stampa: Berlin ; ; New York : , : Mouton de Gruyter, , 2009; ©2009
• ISBN: 1-282-18800-3; 9786612188008; 3-11-021611-6
• Descrizione fisica: 1 online resource (vi, 394 pages) : illustrations
• Collana: Trends in linguistics. Studies and monographs, , 1861-4302 ; ; 203
• Classificazione: GB 4851
• Altri autori (Persone): HinterhölzlRoland; PetrovaSvetlana <1969->
• Disciplina: 430/.045
• Soggetti: Germanic languages - Word order; Germanic languages - Syntax
• Lingua di pubblicazione: Inglese
• Formato: Materiale a stampa
• Livello bibliografico: Monografia
• Note generali: Description based upon print version of record.
• Nota di bibliografia: Includes bibliographical references and index.
• Nota di contenuto: Introduction / Roland Hinterhölzl and Svetlana Petrova -- The role of information structure in the grammar -- The verb-second property in Old High German : different ways of filling the prefield / Katrin Axel -- The role of information structure in word order variation and word order change / Roland Hinterhölzl -- OV languages: expressions of vues / Þorbjörg Hróarsdóttir -- Discourse relations and word order change / Ans van Kemenade -- Methodological problems of the information-structural analysis of data from historical text corpora -- On the methods of information-structural analysis in historical texts : a case study on Old High German / Svetlana Petrova and Michael Solf -- Paleographic clues to prosody? : accents, word separation, and related phenomena in Old High German manuscripts / Jürg Fleischer -- On the "syntax of silence" in Proto-Indo-European / Thomas Krisch -- Information-structural categories in the main texts of early German inheritance -- Word order variation and information structure in Old High German : an analysis of subordinate dhazs-clauses in Isidor / Eva Schlachter -- Information structure and word order variation in the Old ; High German Tatian / Svetlana Petrova -- Verb placement and information structure in the OHG Gospel Harmony by Otfrid von Weissenburg / Andreas Lötscher -- Translating information structure : a study of Notker's translation of Boethius's Latin De consolatione philosophiae into Old High German / Rosemarie Lühr -- Aspects of word order and information structure in Old Saxon / Sonja Linde -- Subject index.
• Sommario/riassunto: The volume presents new approaches to explaining word order variation and change in the Germanic languages and thus relates to one of the most prominent and widely discussed topics in the theory of language change and diachronic syntax. The novelty of our approach consists in three main points. First of all, we aim at describing functional variety in the field of word order and verb placement in the early Germanic languages not as a result of language contact, but rather as a language-internal phenomenon related to stylistic and grammatical conditions in information packaging. Second, given that information structure is not directly accessible in texts from historical corpora that are available only in written form and bear no or little information on prosody and intonation, it presents various methods of retrieving information-structural categories in such texts. Third, it presents empirical studies on the relation between word order and information structure of the four main texts of the Old High German period and embeds these results in the wider picture of word order change in Germanic. The volume will be of interest to students of German, English, and general linguistics as well as to researchers interested in diachronic syntax, philology of Older German, language change, information structure, discourse semantics, language typology, computational linguistics, and corpus studies.