diachronic development of grammatical relations

[Randy LaPolla]

Dear Fritz,
I have two articles from 2006 that deal with aspects of this:

LaPolla, Randy J. 2006. On grammatical relations as constraints on referent identification. In Tasaku Tsunoda and Taro Kageyama (eds.), Voice and grammatical relations: Festschrift for Masayoshi Shibatani (Typological Studies in Language), 139-151. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins Pub. Co.
      http://tibeto-burman.net/rjlapolla/papers/LaPolla_2006_On_Grammatical_Relations_as_Constraints_on_Referent_Identification.pdf

LaPolla, Randy J. 2006. The how and why of syntactic relations. Invited plenary address and keynote of the Centre for Research on Language Change Workshop on Grammatical Change at the Annual Conference of the Australian Linguistics Society, University of Queensland, 7-9 July, 2006. To appear in Christian Lehmann, Stavros Skopeteas, Christian Marschke (eds.), Evolution of syntactic relations (Trends in Linguistics Series). Berlin: Mouton De Gruyter.
http://tibeto-burman.net/rjlapolla/papers/LaPolla_Draft_The_how_and_why_of_syntactic_relations.pdf

All the best,
Randy
-----
Prof. Randy J. LaPolla, PhD FAHA （罗仁地）| Head, Division of Linguistics and Multilingual Studies | Nanyang Technological University
HSS-03-80, 14 Nanyang Drive, Singapore 637332 | Tel: (65) 6592-1825 GMT+8h | Fax: (65) 6795-6525 | http://sino-tibetan.net/rjlapolla/

On Jun 17, 2014, at 4:31 AM, Frederick J Newmeyer wrote:

> Dear Funknetters,
> 
> I wonder if someone could help me out with a literature reference. I'm looking for a book, article, or handbook chapter that discusses the diachronic development of grammatical relations (subject, object, etc.). That is, how they originate, develop, and change over time and, in certain cases (e.g. Acehnese), they are lost. For example, is there a discussion somewhere of the factors that might lead a language to grammaticalize a subject position or a subject marker or (I assume more rarely) to degrammaticalize a subject position or marker?
> 
> Thanks!
> 
> --fritz
> 
> 
> Frederick J. Newmeyer
> Professor Emeritus, University of Washington
> Adjunct Professor, U of British Columbia and Simon Fraser U
> [for my postal address, please contact me by e-mail]
> 
>