Quantitative approaches to grammar and grammatical change : perspectives from germanic / / edited by Sam Featherston and Yannick Versley

• Record Nr.: UNINA9910816266003321
• Pubbl/distr/stampa: Berlin, [Germany] ; ; Boston, [Massachusetts] : , : De Gruyter : , : Mouton, , 2016; ©2016
• ISBN: 3-11-040212-2; 3-11-040192-4
• Descrizione fisica: 1 online resource (240 p.)
• Collana: Trends in Linguistics.Studies and Monographs, , 1861-4302 ; ; Volume 290
• Disciplina: 430.045
• Soggetti: Germanic languages - Grammar
• 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 at the end of each chapters and index.
• Nota di contenuto: Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- Complex center embedding in German – The effect of sentence position -- Constituent order in German multiple questions: Normal order and (apparent) anti-superiority effects -- On the Limits of Non-Parallelism in ATB Movement: Experimental Evidence for Strict Syntactic Identity -- Measure Phrase Constructions in English, German, and French: The (Non-)Occurrence of Antonyms and Effects of Evaluativity -- Interpreting aggregated distances. The case of Old High German texts -- Relative Object Order in High and Low German -- Modeling language contact with diachronic crosslinguistic data -- Diachronic Development of Null Subjects in German -- What Determines ‘Freezing’ Effects in was-für Split Constructions? -- Index
• Sommario/riassunto: The newly-emerging field of theoretically informed but simultaneously empirically based syntax is dynamic but little-represented in the literature. This volume addresses this need. While there has previously been something of a gulf between theoretical linguists in the generative tradition and those linguists who work with quantitative data types, this gap is narrowing. In the light of the empirical revolution in the study of ; syntax, even people whose primary concern is grammatical theory take note of processing effects and attribute certain effects to them. Correspondingly, workers focusing on the surface evidence can relate more to the concepts of the theoreticians, because the two layers of explanation have been brought into contact. And these workers too must account for the data gathered by the theoreticians. An additional innovation is the generative analysis of historical data – this is now seen as psycholinguistic theory-relevant data like any other. These papers are thus a snapshot of some of the work currently being done in evidence-based grammar, using both experimental and historical data.