The paradox of grammatical change : perspectives from romance / / edited by Ulrich Detges, Richard Waltereit

• Record Nr.: UNINA9910825566803321
• Pubbl/distr/stampa: Philadelphia PA, : J. Benjamins Pub. Co., c2008
• ISBN: 1-282-15229-7; 9786612152290; 90-272-9163-2
• Edizione: [1st ed.]
• Descrizione fisica: 252 p
• Collana: Amsterdam studies in the theory and history of linguistic science. Series IV, Current issues in linguistic theory, , 0304-0763 ; ; v. 293
• Altri autori (Persone): DetgesUlrich; WaltereitRichard
• Disciplina: 440/.045
• Soggetti: Linguistic change; Grammar, Comparative and general; Romance languages - Grammar, Historical
• Lingua di pubblicazione: Inglese
• Formato: Materiale a stampa
• Livello bibliografico: Monografia
• Note generali: Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph
• Nota di bibliografia: Includes bibliographical references and index.
• Nota di contenuto: The Paradox of Grammatical Change -- Editorial page -- Title page -- LCC data -- CONTENTS -- ACKNOWLEDGMENTS -- INTRODUCTION -- REFERENCES -- SYNTACTIC CHANGE FROM WITHIN AND FROM WITHOUT SYNTAX -- 1. The problem: The locus of syntactic change -- 2. The rise of French est-ce que as an interrogative particle: a pragmatically motivated syntactic change -- 3. Shift of grammatical function in Spanish presentational constructions: a syntactic change caused by syntactic factors -- 4. Conclusion -- REFERENCES -- Secondary Literature -- Old French Texts -- ON EXPLAINING THE RISE OF C'EST-CLEFTS IN FRENCH -- 1. Introduction -- 2. The grammar of c'est-clefts in French -- 3. On the alleged trade-off between clefting and focus in situ -- 3.1 Clefts in speech and in writing -- 3.2 Implications for diachrony -- 4. Syntactic motivations for the rise of c'est-clefts in French -- 4.1 Discourse-governed constituent order from Latin to Modern French -- 4.2 Corpus evidence -- 5. On explaining clefting 'beyond necessity' -- REFERENCES -- Corpora -- Further References -- THE ROLE OF THE PLURAL SYSTEM IN ROMANCE ; -- 1. Introduction: Different systems of indefinite nominal determiners in Romance nominals as results of language change -- 2. A functional 'explanation': Romance indefinite determiners as 'classification devices' -- 3. A formal account of Romance indefinite nominals -- 3.1 'Manufacturing plurality' -- 3.2 Romance languages: gender, number and 'classification' -- 4. From Latin to Romance: what happened in the structure? -- 5. Conclusion -- REFERENCES -- MORPHOLOGICAL DEVELOPMENTS AFFECTING SYNTACTIC CHANGE -- 1. Introduction -- 2. The development of the Latin ACI -- 3. The evolution of French infinitives -- 4. Explaining grammatical change -- REFERENCES -- Latin texts -- French texts -- Spanish text -- Italian texts -- Secondary literature.; GRAMMATICALISATION WITHIN THE IP-DOMAIN -- 1. Introduction -- 2. The Data -- 2.1 Stylistic Fronting -- 2.2 Clitic Distribution -- 3. Connecting and explaining the phenomena -- 4. Explaining Syntactic Change -- 4.1 Language change within the generative tradition -- 4.2 Grammaticalisation within minimalism -- 5. Loss of stylistic fronting and postverbal clitics in Romance -- REFERENCES -- IMPERFECT SYSTEMS AND DIACHRONIC CHANGE -- 1. The si construction in Modern Italian -- 1.1 Passive si -- 1.2 Impersonal si -- 2. Old Italian -- 2.1 Passive si -- 2.2 *Impersonal si -- 3. Intermediate stages -- 3.1 Stage I -- 3.2 Stage II -- 3.3 Stage III -- 4. Conclusions -- REFERENCES -- FROM TEMPORAL TO MODAL -- 1. A puzzle -- 2. The historical situation in Old Spanish -- 3. The pluperfect as the starting point for the development of irrealis readings -- 4. The developments in Portuguese -- 5. The turning-point in Spanish: from condition-based irreality to generalised counterfactuality -- 6. The third stage: from counterfactual (irrealis) to subjunctive II -- 7. Interpretation and conclusions -- REFERENCES -- Primary texts -- Latin -- Spanish -- Portuguese -- NON-LEXICAL CORE-ARGUMENTS IN BASQUE, GERMAN AND ROMANCE -- 1. Introduction -- 2. The Realisation of non-lexical arguments in Basque -- 2.1 Basque, one argument (intransitive, Nor) -- 2.2. Basque, two arguments S-DO (transitive, Nor-Nork) -- 2.3. Basque, three arguments S-IO-DO (transitive, Nor-Nori-Nork) -- 3. The typological parameter head-marking vs. dependent marking -- 4. The other end of the hierarchy: German -- 5. The Romance languages - problematic intermediate cases -- 6. Language change: intermediary stages of a change from dependent-marking towards head-marking -- 7. Conclusion -- 8. Closing remarks: no "object-conjugation" in Romance (or elsewhere)! -- REFERENCES.; TOWARDS A COMPREHENSIVE VIEW OF LANGUAGE CHANGE -- 1. Introduction -- 2. Language and biology: Three positions -- 3. Main orientations and key elements of evolutionary accounts -- 3.1. Adaptive views: Adaptation and optimization -- 3.2. Critique -- 3.3. Interim Summary I -- 3.4. Two-level views: Innovation and propagation -- 3.5. Critique -- 3.6. Interim Summary II -- 4. Two-level views and traditional approaches to language change -- 5. A revised explanation scheme of language change -- 6. Conclusions -- REFERENCES -- SUBJECT INDEX -- The series CURRENT ISSUES IN LINGUISTIC THEORY.
• Sommario/riassunto: This article investigates whether evolutionary accounts can offer new insights into the paradox of language change. Specifically, I will examine three recent influential accounts (Haspelmath 1999, Keller 1994, and Croft 2000). As they contain a broad spectrum of positions on the relations between language and biology, they can be divided into metaphorical, biologistic and generalized views. Cross-cutting these, two types of evolutionary accounts are distinguished, which I call adaptive and two-level views, respectively. I critically evaluate their potential to provide satisfactory explanations for various types of ; change, drawing on examples from Romance and Germanic. Finally, I propose a revised explanation scheme which brings together the two-level approaches with theoretical distinctions and explanatory factors that have been suggested in earlier non-evolutionary frameworks, so that a more comprehensive view of language change can be obtained.