[Lingtyp] new LangSci book: Östen Dahl's "Grammaticalization in the North"

[Martin Haspelmath]

Dear LINGTYP readers,

Language Science Press <http://langsci-press.org> announces a new free 
book in the series "Studies in Diversity Linguistics":

Östen Dahl
2015
Grammaticalization in the North: Noun phrase morphosyntax in 
Scandinavian vernaculars
279 pp.
http://langsci-press.org/catalog/book/73

Like all LangSci books, this book is freely downloadable from the 
LangSci website (PDF). A hard copy is available from Amazon (.com: USD 
25, .co.uk: GBP 20, .de: EUR26.75)

Language Science Press is a scholar-owned 
<http://www.frank-m-richter.de/freescienceblog/2014/04/15/three-scenarios-for-the-future-of-linguistics-publishing/> 
publisher supported by the DFG and the LangSci Community. Please get in 
touch with me if you are interested in contributing to LangSci Press or 
supporting it.

Regards,
Martin Haspelmath

************************************

Synopsis:
This book looks at some phenomena within the grammar of the noun phrase 
in a group of traditional North Germanic varieties mainly spoken in 
Sweden and Finland, usually seen as Swedish dialects, although the 
differences between them and Standard Swedish are often larger than 
between the latter and the other standard Mainland Scandinavian 
languages. In addition to being conservative in many respects -- e.g. in 
preserving nominal cases and subject-verb agreement -- these varieties 
also display many innovative features. These include extended uses of 
definite articles, incorporation of attributive adjectives, and a 
variety of possessive constructions. Although considerable attention has 
been given to these phenomena in earlier literature, this book is the 
first to put them in the perspective of typology and grammaticalization 
processes. It also looks for a plausible account of the historical 
origin of the changes involved, arguing that many of them spread from 
central Sweden, where they were later reverted due to the influence from 
prestige varieties coming from southern Scandinavia.

-- 
Martin Haspelmath
Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History
Kahlaische Strasse 10, D-07745 Jena
haspelmath at shh.mpg.de
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