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Reconstructing last week's weather: Syntactic reconstruction and Brythonic free relatives1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 December 2010

DAVID WILLIS
DAVID WILLIS*
Affiliation:
Department of Linguistics, University of Cambridge
*
Author's address: Department of Linguistics, University of Cambridge, Sidgwick Avenue, Cambridge CB3 9DA, UK[email protected]
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Abstract

Lightfoot (2002) argues that syntactic reconstruction is rendered impossible by the lack of any analogue in syntax to the traditional notion of the phonological ‘correspondence set’ of the Comparative Method and by the radical discontinuity caused by reanalysis between successive grammars. Alice Harris and Lyle Campbell, in various works, have defended the notion of ‘syntactic pattern’ as the analogue of the correspondence set, arguing that patterns can be compared across languages, with innovations being stripped away to reveal aspects of the protolanguage. In this article, I argue that syntactic reconstruction can be carried out while maintaining and indeed utilizing core notions in generative approaches to syntactic change such as the central role of reanalysis and child language acquisition and the distinction between the abstract grammatical system and the surface output of that system. Reanalysis itself is constrained by the fact that both pre- and post-reanalysis grammars must be acquirable on the basis of the same primary linguistic data. This imposes limits on the possible hypotheses that can be entertained (‘local directionality’) even in the absence of any crosslinguistic generalizations about patterns of change (‘universal directionality’). This approach is then applied to aspects of the syntax of free relative clauses and negation in the early Brythonic Celtic languages (Welsh, Breton and Cornish), showing that non-trivial reconstructions can be achieved even where the daughter languages manifest significant differences.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Linguistics , Volume 47 , Issue 2 , July 2011 , pp. 407 - 446
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2010

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Footnotes

[1]

The research presented here developed as part of the research project ‘The development of negation in the languages of Europe’, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. Earlier versions were presented to audiences at the British Academy Research Project ‘The development of the Welsh language’, the Seventeenth Welsh Syntax Seminar and the Linguistics Association of Great Britain Meeting 2010. I am grateful to those audiences and to three anonymous Journal of Linguistics referees for their perceptive comments. I am also grateful to various other people for comments and discussion on the research presented here: Gareth Bevan, Bob Borsley, Torsten Meissner, Ian Roberts, Peter Schrijver and George Walkden. All remaining errors or omissions are my own.

References

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