Overview

The eleven selected contributions making up this volume deal with grammatical relations, their coding and behavioral properties, and the change that these properties have undergone in different languages. The focus of this collection is on the changing properties of subjects and objects, although the scope of the volume goes beyond the central problems pertaining to case marking and word order. The diachrony of syntactic and morphosyntactic phenomena are approached from different theoretical perspectives, generative grammar, valency grammar, and functionalism. The languages dealt with include Old English, Mainland Scandinavian, Icelandic, German and other Germanic languages, Latin, French and other Romance languages, Northeast Caucasian, Eskimo, and Popolocan. This book provides an opportunity to compare different theoretical approaches to similar phenomena in different languages and language families.

Full Product Details

Author:   Jan Terje Faarlund (University of Oslo)
Publisher:   John Benjamins Publishing Co
Imprint:   John Benjamins Publishing Co
Volume:   56
Weight:   0.570kg
ISBN:  

9789027230584

ISBN 10:   9027230587
Pages:   326
Publication Date:   13 July 2001
Audience:   Professional and scholarly ,  Professional and scholarly ,  Professional & Vocational ,  Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   In Print  
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Table of Contents

1. Preface; 2. Introduction (by Faarlund, Jan Terje); 3. How far does semantic bleaching go: About grammaticalization that does not terminate in functional categories (by Abraham, Werner); 4. 'Oblique subjects', structural and lexical case marking: Some thoughts on case assignment in North Germanic and German (by Askedal, John Ole); 5. The notion of oblique subject and its status in the history of Icelandic (by Faarlund, Jan Terje); 6. Towards personal subjects in English: Variation in feature interpretability (by Gelderen, Elly van); 7. Focus and universal principles governing simplification of cleft structures (by Harris, Alice C.); 8. Recasting Danish subjects: Case system, word order and subject development (by Heltoft, Lars); 9. Ergative to accusative: Comparing evidence from Inuktitut (by Johns, Alana); 10. Subject and object in Old English and Latin copular deontics (by Miller, D. Gary); 11. The loss of lexical case in Swedish (by Norde, Muriel); 12. The coding of the subject-object distinction from Latin to Modern French (by Schosler, Lene); 13. Changes in Popolocan word order and clause structure (by Veerman-Leichsenring, Annette); 14. Index

Reviews

A useful summary of the issues and treatments of some interesting problems in historical syntax. -- Claire Bowern, Harvard University, in Language 80(1), 2004

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