Diachronic Syntax

Susan Pintzuk is Lecturer in Linguistics at the University of York. She has research interests in syntactic variation and change in the history of English and other Germanic languages. She is currently working on a research project on the syntax of Old English poetry and (with Anthony Warner and Ann Taylor) the York-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Old English. She has published articles on Old English syntax; Phrase Structures in Competition: Variation and Change in Old English Word Order (Garland, 1999); and (with David Adger, Bernadette Plunkett, and George Tsoulas) Specifiers: Minimalist Approaches (OUP, 1999).George Tsoulas is Lecturer in Linguistics at the University of York. He has published articles on the interpretation of pronouns and the syntax of non-finite sentential complementation. His recent research is concerned with the formal theory of quantification, the syntax and semantics of pronominal anaphora, and the syntax of scrambling and multiple subject constructions in Korean and Japanese. He has edited (with David Adger, Bernadette Plunkett, and Susan Pintzuk) Specifiers: Minimalist Approaches (OUP, 1999).Anthony Warner is Professor of English Linguistics at the University of York. He has a major interest in variation and change in the history of English syntax. He is the author of papers in syntactic change and in phrase structure grammar, and of Complementation in Middle English and the Methodology of Historical Syntax (Croom Helm, 1982), and English Auxiliaries: Structure and History (CUP, 1993).

Review from hardback edition... provides an excellent survey of recent developments in the field ... The editors have assembled a collection of very substantial papers in which extensive databases, sophisticated statistical analyses, and clever theoretical interpretations are abundantly present.

• 1. Syntactic Change: Theory and Method ; PART I: FRAMEWORKS FOR THE UNDERSTANDING OF CHANGE ; 2. Competition and Correspondence in Syntactic Change: Null Arguments in Latin and Romance ; 3. Jespersen's Cycle Revisited: Formal Properties of Grammaticalization ; 4. Evolutionary Perspectives on Diachronic Syntax ; PART II: THE COMPARATIVE BASIS OF DIACHRONIC SYNTAX ; 5. Adjuncts and the Syntax of Subjects in Old and Middle English ; 6. Verb-Object Order in Early Middle English ; 7. Null Subjects in Middle English Existentials ; PART III: MECHANISMS OF SYNTACTIC CHANGE ; 8. Polarity Items in Romance: Underspecification and Lexical Change ; 9. Relabelling ; 10. The Value of Definite Determiners from Old Spanish to Modern Spanish ; 11. From OV to VO in Swedish ; 12. The Evolution of Do-Support in English Imperatives ; 13. Interacting Movements in the History of Icelandic ; 14. Verb Movement in Slavonic Conditionals