Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-t8hqh Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-22T16:50:25.957Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Introduction: New perspectives on diachronic syntax in North Germanic

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 September 2019

David Håkansson*
Affiliation:
Department of Scandinavian Languages, Uppsala University, P.O. Box 527, SE-751 20 Uppsala, [email protected]
Erik Magnusson Petzell
Affiliation:
Institute for Language and Folklore, Vallgatan 22, SE-411 16 Gothenburg, [email protected]
Elisabet Engdahl
Affiliation:
Department of Swedish, University of Gothenburg, P.O. Box 200, SE-405 30 Gothenburg, [email protected]
Get access

Extract

This special issue of Nordic Journal of Linguistics is dedicated to diachronic generative syntax in the North Germanic languages. With the introduction of generative grammar in the late 1950s the historical perspective became less prominent within linguistics. Instead, contemporary language, normally represented by the researcher’s own intuitions, became the unmarked empirical basis within the generative field, although there were some early pioneering studies in generative historical syntax (e.g. Traugott 1972). It was not until the introduction of the Principles and Parameters theory in the 1990s that diachronic syntax emerged as an important domain of inquiry for generative linguists. Since then, the study of syntactic change has added a temporal dimension to the overall enterprise to better understand the nature of variation in human language.

Type
Introduction
Copyright
© Nordic Association of Linguistics 2019 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Alexiadou, Artemis & Fanselow, Gisbert. 2002. On the correlation between morphology and syntax. In Jan-Wouter, C. Zwart & Abraham, Werner (eds.), Studies in Comparative Germanic Syntax: Proceedings from the 15th Workshop on Comparative Germanic Syntax (Groningen, May 26–27, 2000), 219242. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bentzen, Kristine, Hrafnbjargarson, Gunnar Hrafn, Hróarsdóttir, Thorbjörg & Wiklund, Anna-Lena. 2007. Rethinking Scandinavian verb movement. Journal of Comparative Germanic Linguistics 10, 203233.Google Scholar
Bobaljik, Jonathan David & Thráinsson, Höskuldur. 1998. Two heads aren’t always better than one. Syntax 1, 3771.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Borin, Lars, Forsberg, Markus & Roxendal, Johan. 2012. Korp: The corpus infrastructure of Språkbanken. Proceedings of LREC 2012, 474–478. Istanbul: ELRA.Google Scholar
Falk, Cecilia. 1993. Non-referential Subjects in the History of Swedish. Ph.D. dissertation, Lund University.Google Scholar
Heycock, Caroline & Sundquist, John. 2017. Don’t rush to rehabilitate: A remark on Koeneman & Zeijlstra 2014. Linguistic Inquiry 48(1), 173179.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Holmberg, Anders & Platzack, Christer. 1995. The Role of Inflection in Scandinavian Syntax. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Koeneman, Olaf & Zeijlstra, Hedde. 2014. The Rich Agreement Hypothesis rehabilitated. Linguistic Inquiry 45(4), 571615.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rohrbacher, Bernhard. 1994. The Germanic VO Languages and the Full Paradigm: A Theory of V to I Raising. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Massachusetts at Amherst.Google Scholar
Sundquist, John D. 2003. The Rich Agreement Hypothesis and Early Modern Danish embedded-clause word order. Nordic Journal of Linguistics 26(2), 233258.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Traugott, Elizabeth Closs. 1972. A History of English Syntax: A Transformational Approach to the History of English Sentence Structure. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston.Google Scholar
Tvica, Seid. 2017. Agreement and Verb Movement: The Rich Agreement Hypothesis from a Typological Perspective. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Amsterdam.Google Scholar
Vikner, Sten. 1995. Verb Movement and Expletive Subjects in the Germanic Languages. New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Wallenberg, Joel C., Ingason, Anton Karl, Sigurðsson, Einar Freyr & Rögnvaldsson, Eiríkur. 2011. Icelandic Parsed Historical Corpus (IcePaHC). Version 0.9. http://www.linguist.is/icelandic_treebank.Google Scholar