Information Structure and Syntactic Change in Germanic and Romance Languages

Name: Information Structure and Syntactic Change in Germanic and Romance Languages
Brand: John Benjamins Publishing Company
Price: 130.99 EUR
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Kristin Bech Kristine Gunn Eide(Editor)

John Benjamins Publishing Company

1st Edition

Published on 7. May 2014

VII, 421 pages

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978-90-272-7046-7 (ISBN)

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Intro
Information Structure and Syntactic Changein Germanic and Romance Languages
Editorial page
Title page
LCC data
Table of contents
Acknowledgements
Information structure and syntax in old Germanic and Romance languages
1. Introduction
2. Approaches to information structure and syntax in historical linguistics
3. Annotated corpora
4. The structure of the book
References
Part I. Information-structural categories and corpus annotation
The theoretical foundations of givenness annotation
1. Introduction
1.1 Theory and practice
2. Theory
2.1 Discourse referents
2.2 Taggables
2.3 Reference contexts
2.4 Contexts and reference resolution in dynamic semantics
2.4.1 The discourse context
2.4.2 The encyclopaedic context and the situation context
2.4.3 The scenario context
2.4.4 Embedded contexts and non-specificity
2.5 Generic reference
2.6 The PROIEL tagset
3. Annotation in practice
3.1 General
3.2 Specificity - nonspec vs. new
3.3 Genericity
3.3.1 kind vs. nonspec
3.3.2 kind vs. acc-gen
3.4 Bridging
3.4.1 acc-inf vs old
3.4.2 acc-inf vs new, nonspec or no tag - the limits to inference
4. Evaluation and conclusions
4.1 The PROIEL scheme and other givenness annotation schemes
4.2 Annotation workflow and interannotator agreement
4.3 Data sample
4.4 Conclusions
References
Testing the theory
1. Introduction
2. The data
3. 'Old/given' information
4. Inferables
5. 'New' information
6. Conclusions
Appendix A: Notes on data collection
References
Part II. Changes on the interface between syntax and information structure
Quantifying information structure change in English
1. Introduction
1.1 Old English V2 syntax and the subject
1.2 The changing role of the English subject
1.3 Hypotheses
2. Corpora
2.1 Referential status
2.2 Enriched texts
3. Experiments
3.1 Subject ellipsis
3.2 Subject referent switch
3.2.1 A definition of subject-referent switch
3.2.2 Measuring subject-referent switch
3.2.3 Subject-referent switch results
3.2.4 Subject chain distribution
3.3 Subject animacy
3.3.1 Determining subject animacy
3.3.2 Subject animacy results
3.4 Pre-subject linking
3.4.1 Clause-initial linking
3.4.2 Determining pre-subject linking
3.4.3 Pre-subject linking results
4. Conclusions and discussion
5. Sources
References
Tracing overlap in function in historical corpora
1. Introduction
2. The passive and object fronting as 'information-rearrangers'
3. Comparing the function of passives and object fronting in Old English
3.1 Information status categories
3.2 Results for long passives
3.3 Results for object fronting
4. The frequency of topicalization and passivization in the history of English
5. Conclusion
References
Referential properties of the full and reduced forms of the definite article in German
1. Introduction
2. The distribution of full and reduced definite articles in Present-day German: Some theoretical concepts
2.1 On the pragmatic and semantic notions of definiteness (anaphoricity vs. uniqueness)
2.2 A cognitive approach to definiteness
3. The distribution of the definite article in German: A historical perspective
3.1 The distribution of the two types of the definite article in OHG and MHG
3.1.1 The reduced and full definite article in OHG
3.1.2 The reduced and full definite article in MHG
3.2 A change scenario in the distribution of the forms of the definite article
4. A case of definiteness cycle
5. Conclusion
References
Primary sources
Secondary sources
The cognitive status of referential null subjects in Old Norse and their Modern Norwegian counterparts
1. Introduction
2. Periods, data and methodology
3. Cognitive status and the form of DPs
4. Null subjects in Old Norse and their cognitive status
4.1 Null subjects in Old Norse - basic facts
4.2 The cognitive status of null subjects in Old Norse and unstressed pronouns in Modern Norwegian
4.2.1 Complements of prepositions
4.2.2 Elements in subordinate clauses
4.2.3 Possessive determiners/nouns
4.2.4 Clauses
4.2.5 Referents not represented in the immediately preceding clause
5. Comparing the stages
6. Conclusion
References
Appendix
Part III. Comparisons on the interface between syntax and information structure
Word order variation in late Middle English
1. Introduction
2. Background
3. The present study: Data, methodology and research questions
3.1 The corpus: Capgrave and his texts
3.2 Methodology
3.3 Research questions
4. Results
5. Discussion
6. Summary and conclusion
References
Preverbal word order in Old English
1. Introduction
2. Verb-second
3. Texts
4. Overview of Old English and Old French preverbal word order
5. Clauses with SXV word order
6. Clauses with XSV word order
6.1 The X element(s) in XSV clauses
7. Clauses with XSXV word order
8. Implications for the syntactic analysis
8.1 Verb movement to the C-domain
8.1.1 More than one element preceding the finite verb
8.2 Old French
8.3 Old English
8.3.1 V3 word orders
8.3.2 Verb-late word order
8.4 A comparison: Modal clauses
8.5 Interim summary
9. Implications for information structure
9.1 Some aspects of the information structure of XSV and XSXV clauses
9.2 Some aspects of the information structure of SXV clauses
10. Conclusion
Primary sources
References
Formal properties of event-reporting sentences in Old High German and Old French
1. Introduction
2. Post-verbal subject placement and the V2-constraint
2.1 V2 in early Germanic
2.2 V2 in Old French
3. The expression of event-reporting sentences in OHG and OF
3.1 The notion of event-reporting sentences
3.2 Contexts disfavouring a topic-comment interpretation
4. Corpus study
4.1 Data base
4.2 Results
4.2.1 Contexts specifying the personal domain of reference
4.2.2 Contexts specifying the spatial domain of reference
4.2.3 Contexts expressing a change of time
5. Conclusions
References
Text editions
Secondary literature
Subjects and objects in Germanic and Romance
1. Introduction
2. The data
2.1 Subjectless sentences
2.2 Arguments carrying new information
2.3 Arguments carrying given information
2.4 Postverbal nominatives in Old Norse
3. Explaining the changes
4. Conclusion
Old Norse sources
Old Spanish source
References
Object position and Heavy NP Shift in Old Saxon and beyond
1. Introduction
2. Background
3. Methodology
4. Object position: Results
4.1 Information status
4.2 Case
4.3 Grammatical weight
4.4 Strength of effect
5. Heavy NP Shift in Old Saxon and beyond: Analysis
5.1 A unified theory of Heavy NP Shift
5.2 Heavy NP Shift does not involve the clausal left periphery
5.3 Heavy NP Shift involves the 'low left periphery'
6. Conclusion and remaining problems
References
On the interaction between syntax, prosody and information structure
1. Introduction
2. Mixed word orders in Germanic
2.1 Mixed word orders in OE
2.2 Mixed word orders in OHG
3. Prosodic and information-structural conditions on word order
3.1 Prosodic/Metrical conditions
3.2 Information-structural conditions
4. Word order properties of modern German and modern English
4.1 Scrambling and scope transparency in German and English
4.2 The HCP and the placement of event-related adjuncts
5. HF-effects in German and English
5.1 HF-effects in the nominal domain in German
5.2 HF-effects in the verbal domain in German
5.3 The HFF as a syntactic condition
5.4 The HFF as a prosodic condition
5.5 The weight condition and word order restrictions
6. On the mapping between syntactic structure and prosodic structure
6.1 Prosodic domain formation in a phase-based approach
6.2 Focus, prominence and rules of accent placement
6.3 On the relation between syntax, IS and LF
7. Word order change in English and German
7.1 Word order variation in OE and OHG: Point of departure
7.2 The grammaticalization of the definite determiner
7.3 Word order variation in Early Middle English
7.4 Evidence for basic OV order in EME?
7.5 The grammaticalization of the definite determiner in German
7.6 The reanalysis of the preverbal focus position in the history of German
8. Conclusions
References
Contrastivity and information structure in the old Ibero-Romance languages
1. Introduction
2. Contrastivity in Modern Ibero-Romance languages
2.1 Decomposing the notion of contrast
2.2 The syntactic reflexes of contrast in Modern Spanish and Portuguese
3. The ISWOC corpus and the methodology in the historical record
4. Contrastivity in the ISWOC Old Ibero-Romance corpus: The empirical facts
4.1 Dominant contrast
4.2 Juxtaposing enumeration/membership in a set
4.3 Highlighting
4.4 Discussion of results
5. Conclusion
Text References
Editions from Electronic Texts of Alfonso X:
References
Index of languages
Databases and annotation schemes
Word index

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Information Structure and Syntactic Change in Germanic and Romance Languages

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