New Benjamins title: Breitbarth et al. - Continuity and Change in Grammar

[Paul Peranteau]

Continuity and Change in Grammar
Edited by Anne Breitbarth, Christopher Lucas, Sheila Watts and David Willis
Ghent University / University of Cambridge

Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 159

2010. viii, 359 pp.
Hardbound
978 90 272 5542 6 / EUR 99.00 / USD 149.00
e-Book  Not yet available
978 90 272 8807 3 / EUR 99.00 / USD 149.00

One of the principal challenges of historical linguistics is to 
explain the causes of language change. Any such explanation, however, 
must also address the 'actuation problem': why is it that changes 
occurring in a given language at a certain time cannot be reliably 
predicted to recur in other languages, under apparently similar 
conditions? The sixteen contributions to the present volume each aim 
to elucidate various aspects of this problem, including: What 
processes can be identified as the drivers of change? How central are 
syntax-external (phonological, lexical or contact-based) factors in 
triggering syntactic change? And how can all of these factors be 
reconciled with the actuation problem? Exploring data from a wide 
range of languages from both a formal and a functional perspective, 
this book promises to be of interest to advanced students and 
researchers in historical linguistics, syntax and their intersection.

Table of contents

List of contributors  viiviii
Introduction: Continuity and change in grammar
Anne Breitbarth, Christopher Lucas, Sheila Watts and David Willis 110
Part I. Continuity
What changed where? A plea for the re-evaluation of dialectal evidence
Katrin Axel and Helmut Weiß 1334
Impossible changes and impossible borrowings: The Final-over-Final Constraint
Theresa Biberauer, Michelle Sheehan and Glenda Newton 3560
Continuity is change: The long tail of Jespersen's cycle in Flemish
Anne Breitbarth and Liliane Haegeman 6176
Using the Matrix Language Frame model to measure the extent of 
word-order convergence in Welsh-English bilingual speech
Peredur Davies and Margaret Deuchar 7796
On language contact as an inhibitor of language change: The Spanish 
of Catalan bilinguals in Majorca
Andrés Enrique-Arias 97118
Towards notions of comparative continuity in English and French
Remus Gergel 119144
Variation, continuity and contact in Middle Norwegian and Middle Low German
John D. Sundquist 145166
Part II. Change
Directionality in word-order change in Austronesian languages
Edith Aldridge 169180
Negative co-ordination in the history of English
Richard Ingham 181200
Formal features and the development of the Spanish D-system
Masataka Ishikawa 201224
The rise of OV word order in Irish verbal-noun clauses
Elliott Lash 225248
The great siSwati locative shift
Lutz Marten 249268
The impact of failed changes
Gertjan Postma 269302
A case of degrammaticalization in northern Swedish
Henrik Rosenkvist 303320
Jespersen's Cycle in German from the phonological perspective of 
syllable and word languages
Renata Szczepaniak 321334
An article on the rise: Contact-induced change and the rise and fall 
of N-to-D movement
Mila Dimitrova-Vulchanova and Valentin Vulchanov 335354
Language index  355356
Subject index  357359




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