33.1152, Books: Information Structure Triggers for Word Order Variation and Change: Struik

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-33-1152. Wed Mar 30 2022. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 33.1152, Books: Information Structure Triggers for Word Order Variation and Change: Struik

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Date: Wed, 30 Mar 2022 22:59:01
From: Karijn Hootsen [lot at uva.nl]
Subject: Information Structure Triggers for Word Order Variation and Change: Struik

 


Title: Information Structure Triggers for Word Order Variation and
Change 
Subtitle: the OV/VO alternation in the West-Germanic Languages 
Series Title: LOT Dissertation Series  

Publication Year: 2022 
Publisher: Netherlands Graduate School of Linguistics / Landelijke (LOT)
	   http://www.lotpublications.nl/
	

Book URL: https://www.lotpublications.nl/information-structure-triggers-for-word-order-variation-and-change-the-ovvo-alternation-in-the-west-germanic-languages 


Author: Tara Struik

Paperback: ISBN:  9789460934018 Pages: 281 Price: Europe EURO 


Abstract:

The West-Germanic language family is characterized by a remarkable variation
in word order. The continental varieties, including Dutch and German, have
largely Object-Verb (OV) word order, whereas English has strict Verb-Object
(VO) word order. It is intriguing that such closely related languages show
such a fundamental word order distinction, the more so when considering that
the older stages of the languages show varying mixtures of OV and VO word
order. This variation raises many questions regarding its motivation and its
syntactic status, both from a synchronic and diachronic perspective.

This thesis approaches OV/VO variation from a comparative and diachronic
perspective, building on the hypothesis that OV/VO variation is motivated by
information structure. By means of a series of detailed corpus studies on the
earlier stages of English, Dutch, Low German and High German it shows that -
while the variation in earlier English, Dutch, and German is structurally
similar - the way that information structure governs the OV/VO alternation in
the earliest attested language stages already signals the difference between
English as a VO language, and Dutch and German as an OV language; in early
English VO is the pragmatically neutral word order, whereas in early Dutch and
German OV is pragmatically neutral. These findings feed into a novel
antisymmetric analysis, in which the variation is derived in the same way for
all West-Germanic languages, but which is flexible enough to allow for
variation between the individual languages.
 



Linguistic Field(s): Historical Linguistics

Subject Language(s): Dutch (nld)
                     English (eng)
                     German (deu)


Written In: English  (eng)

See this book announcement on our website: 
http://linguistlist.org/pubs/books/get-book.cfm?BookID=160693




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