A Brief History of English Syntax

Olga Fischer is Professor of Germanic Linguistics at the Universiteit van Amsterdam. She is co-author of The Syntax of Early English (Cambridge, 2000), with Wim van der Wurff, Ans van Kemenade and Willem Koopman. She is also the author of Morphosyntactic Change: Functional and Formal Perspectives (2007) and a contributor to the Cambridge History of the English Language (Cambridge, 1992). Hendrik De Smet is a BOF (Bijzonder Onderzoeksfonds) Research Professor at Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium. He is the author of Spreading Patterns: Diffusional Change in the English System of Complementation (2012) and co-editor of On Multiple Source Constructions in Language Change (2015). Wim van der Wurff is Senior Lecturer in Linguistics at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne. He is co-author of The Syntax of Early English (Cambridge, 2000), with Olga Fischer, Ans van Kemenade and Willem Koopman. He is also co-author of Colloquial Bengali (2009) with Mithun B. Nasrin.

'A data-rich fresh look at the history of English, its NP, VP and clausal structure, with an eye for the role of language contact.' Elly Van Gelderen, Arizona State University

• 1. Introduction; 2. Data and data handling; 3. Theoretical models and morpho-syntactic change; 4. The role of contact in syntactic change in English; 5. The noun phrase; 6. The verb phrase; 7. Clausal constituents; 8. Subordinate clauses; 9. Word order; 10. References; Index.