I.G. Roberts – författare

An analysis of the development of a number of English and French constructions involving various kinds of subject-verb inversion. The analysis is framed in terms of the principles-and-parameters approach to syntactic theory, and provides strong support for the adoption of this approach in the description and explanation of language change. The book is divided into three parts. The first part presents an overall framework for the analysis of inversion constructions and motivates, on the basis of synchronic data, several parameters which distinguish among the various Romance and Germanic languages. The second part shows how several near-simultaneous syntactic changes in the history of French can be explained as a change in one of the parameters introduced in Chapter One. A notable aspect of this analysis is the way in which the distribution of null subjects is shown to relate to verb-placement. The third part of the book treats verb-movement in the history of English, arguing in detail that the attested changes in this area are due to a change in the internal structure of "infl", a proposal which has important ramifications for the theory of functional heads.Throughout the book, emphasis is placed on the theoretical questions raised by language change. In this connection, the two notions of diachronic reanalysis and parametric change are distinguished.

This book combines several strands of my work, both individually and in collaboration with various people, over the last couple of years. To a very large extent, I have been inspired by the many talks, classes, appointments and other interactions that took place in the exciting intellectual environ­ ment that grew up among the linguists working in Geneva in the period 1989-90. It is impossible to mention by name everyone who influenced the devel­ opment of this material, but I'd particularly like to thank the students in my class 'linguistique diachronique' during that period, who had to suffer through preliminary versions of much of this book, and often seemed to understand what I was getting at better than I did. Luigi Rizzi did more than anyone else to create the unique atmosphere here in the last couple of years, and so he deserves our gratitude for that; he was also my collaborator on the synchronic work on French inversion that inspired much of this book; he also read the whole manuscript in draft form and gave detailed comments; he is also, as anyone working in current comparative syntax knows, a wellspring of knowledge, ideas and inspiration. Maria-Teresa Guasti also read the entire manuscript and gave me invaluable comments. Sten Vikner was a great help, for much more than just Danish data. Special thanks also to Adriana Belletti, Anna Cardinaletti, Liliane Haegeman and Cecilia Poletto.

These papers, dedicated to Osvaldo Jaeggli by some of his friends and colleagues, canvas a variety of topics central to the current development of syntactic theory. Anne Rochette and Mario Montalbetti tackle subjects concerning the relationship between argument structure and grammatical functions. Dominique Sportiche and Joseph Aoun take up two particularly puzzling aspects of the syntax of clitics; Sportiche provides a new analysis of critic inversion constructions in French, and Aoun offers a novel theory of critic doubling constructions, drawing on Arabic data. Maria Luisa Zubizarreta argues that inverted subjects in Spanish occupy a different structural position than the parallel inverted subjects of French or Italian, and relates this to other differences in the principles of word order these languages obey. Finally, the articles by Mamoru Saito and Keiko Murasugi, Hagit Borer and Hilda Koopman all touch on the rapidly developing syntax of Determiner Phrases. Together these articles represent the ongoing transition from models of syntactic variation that employ static sets of principles with open parameters in them.

Kyle Johnson University of Massachusetts at Amherst Ian Roberts University of Stuttgart An important chapter in the history of syntactic theory opened as the 70's reached their close. The revolution that Chomsky had brought to linguistics had to this point engendered theories which remained within the grip of the philologists' construction-based vision. Their image of language as a catalogue of independent constructions served as the backdrop against which much of transformational grammar's detailed exploration evolved. In a sense, the highly successful pursuit of th phonology and morphology in the 19 century as compared to the absence of similar results in syntax (beyond observations such as Wackemagel's Law, etc. ) attests to this: just noting that, for example, French relative clauses allow subject-postposing but not preposition-stranding while English relatives do not allow the former but do allow the latter does not take us far beyond a simple record of the facts. Prior to this point, th syntactic theory had not progressed beyond the 19 century situation. But as the 80's approached, this image began to give way to a different one: grammar as a puzzle of interlocking "modules," each made up of syntactic principles which cross-cut the philologist's constructions. More and more, "constructions" decomposed into the epiphenomenal interplay of encapsulated mini-theories: X Theory, Binding Theory, Bounding Theory, Case Theory, Theta Theory, and so on. Syntactic analyses became reoriented toward the twin goals of identifying the content of these modules and deconstructing into them the descriptive results of early transformational grammar.