Books in the Oxford Studies in Diachronic and Historical Linguistics series

In a series of pioneering explorations of the diachrony of morphomes, this book throws new light on the nature of the morphome and the boundary - seen from both diachronic and synchronic perspectives - between what is and is not genuinely autonomous in morphology. Its findings will be of central interest to morphologists of all theoretical stripes.

This volume brings together contributions from leading specialists in syntax and morphology to explore the complex relation between periphrasis and inflexion from both a synchronic and diachronic perspective. The chapters draw on data from across the Romance language family, including standard and regional varieties and dialects.

This volume addresses syntactic change at the macro and the micro level, and explores how these different levels of change are related. It includes numerous case studies of changes in syntactic constructions including relative clauses, verb second, and negation, in a range of languages.

This book explores language variation and change from the perspective of generative syntax, based on a case study of relative clauses in Portuguese and other languages. It offers a comparative account of three linguistic phenomena in the synchrony and diachrony of Portuguese and an overview of competing theoretical analyses.

This book explores the wealth of evidence from early Indo-Aryan for the existence of transitive nouns and adjectives, a rare linguistic phenomenon. The data is set in the wider historical context, from Proto-Indo-European to Modern Indo-Aryan, and analysed from diachronic, typological, and theoretical perspectives.

This book traces the changes in argument alignment that have taken place in Aramaic during its 3000-year documented history, and proposes a new explanation for them. It draws important theoretical conclusions on the development of tense-conditioned alignment change cross-linguistically, and provides a valuable basis for further research.

The book provides a formal analysis of root and complement clauses in Old Romanian, focussing on the combination of Balkan syntactic patterns and Romance morphology. It presents a new perspective on the manifestation of Balkan Sprachbund properties in the language, and on the nature of parametric differences in relation to other Romance languages.

This book traces the origins and development of the Arabic grammatical marker s/si, which is found in interrogatives, negators, and indefinite determiners in many Arabic dialects. It argues that s/si does not derive from Arabic say 'thing' but from a Semitic demonstrative pronoun.

This book examines the diachronic development of negation in Low German, from Old Saxon to Middle Low German. It is the first substantial diachronic analysis of these changes and looks at both the development of standard negation and the changing interaction between the expression of negation and indefinites in its scope.

This book examines the historical development of discourse and pragmatic markers across the Romance languages. Based on extensive data from several languages, distinguished scholars examine issues relevant to grammaticalization, pragmaticalization, and the interface between grammar and discourse.

This book offers reconstructions of various syntactic properties of Proto-Germanic, including verb position in main clauses, the syntax of the wh-system, and the (non-)occurrence of null pronominal subjects and objects.

This book reconstructs the Semitic case system, based on a detailed analysis of the expression of grammatical roles and relations in the attested Semitic languages. It brings typological methods to bear on the study of comparative Semitics and includes detailed analyses of a wide range of data. The book will interest Semiticists and typologists.

Leading scholars examine languages ranging from old Egyptian to modern Afrikaans. They consider the insights parametric theory offers to understanding the dynamics of language change and test new hypotheses against an extensive array of data. In both the broad range of languages it discusses and its use of linguistic theory this is an outstanding book.

This book provides a critical investigation of syntactic change and how it is related to the lexicon, morphology, and information structure. It draws on data from a wide variety of languages and will be of interest to all linguists working on syntactic variation and change.

This book examines grammatical changes during the transition from Latin to the Romance languages and the factors proposed to explain them. It challenges orthodoxy, presents new perspectives on language change, structure, and variation.

This book examines the syntax and semantics of several thousand examples of tense-aspect stem participles in the Rigveda, one of the oldest extant texts in any Indo-European language. The author applies formal linguistic analysis to the data and produces a comprehensive formal model of how these participles are used.

This book offers new and detailed analyses of five long-standing problems in Latin historical phonology. It evaluates the relative roles of syllable structure and phonetics in these phenomena, examines the phonological conditions required, and reconstructs the motivations for the changes involved.

This volume brings together the latest diachronic research on syntactic features and their role in restricting syntactic change. The chapters explore topics relating to all three domains of the clause as well as issues in methodology and modelling, drawing on data from a range of languages and dialects.

This book offers the most comprehensive examination to date of referential null subjects in the history of English. It empirically examines the occurrence of subjectless finite clauses in more than 500 early English texts, spanning nearly 850 years, and re-evaluates previous claims concerning their distribution.

This book examines Latin word order patterns, in particular the relative ordering of i) lexical verbs and direct objects and ii) auxiliaries and non-finite verbs. Lieven Danckaert offers a corpus-based description of these alternations and demonstrates that Latin is a fully configurational language, contrary to received wisdom.

This book provides the first comprehensive synchronic and diachronic overview of the syntax of old Romanian written in English and targeted at a non-Romanian readership. It draws on an extensive new corpus analysis of the period between the beginning of the sixteenth century and the end of the eighteenth century.

This book adopts a generative framework to investigate the diachronic syntax of Hungarian, one of only a handful of non-Indo-European languages with a documented history spanning more than 800 years. It focuses particularly on the restructuring of Hungarian syntax from head-final to head-initial and the resultant changes that occurred.

This book examines morphosyntactic variation in the Romance varieties spoken in Italy from both a regional and historical perspective. It examines a range of phenomena, backed up by extensive empirical data, and will be a valuable resource not only for specialists in Italo-Romance but also for researchers in morphosyntactic change more generally

This book offers an integrated description of all aspects of word order in Old Italian, looking at the left periphery not only of the sentence, but also of the verbal phrase and determiner phrase. It makes important contributions to the study of medieval Italian, Romance historical linguistics, and diachronic syntactic change more generally.

This book develops an approach to language change based on construction grammar in order to reconceptualize grammaticalization and lexicalization. The authors show that language change proceeds by micro-steps involving every aspect of grammar including pragmatics and discourse functions. A new and productive approach to historical linguistics.

This volume is the first systematic, corpus-based examination of the development of dative external possessors in Old and Early Middle English. It draws on empirical data and recent developments in linguistic theory to evaluate language-internal and language contact-based explanations for the loss of these constructions in Middle English.

This volume explores multiple aspects of cyclical syntactic change, including the diachrony of negation, the internal structure of wh-words, and changes in argument structure. It combines descriptions of novel data with detailed theoretical analysis, and will appeal to historical linguists and to anyone working on language variation and change.

This book presents a formal, constraint-based account of the main diachronic and synchronic patterns of variation in the palatal sounds of the Romance languages. It will appeal to graduate students and researchers in historical linguistics, phonetics and phonology, Romance linguistics, and dialectology more broadly.

This book examines historical changes in the grammar of the Indo-Aryan languages from the period of their earliest attestations in Vedic Sanskrit (around 1000 BC) to contemporary Hindi, with specific focus on the rise of configurational structure as a by-product of the grammaticalization of postpositions.

This volume offers a wide-range of case studies on variation and change in the Gallo-Romance sub-family. It draws on a wealth of data from standard and non-standard varieties, and adopts a variety of theoretical and conceptual approaches, including traditional philology, sociolinguistics, formal syntax, and discourse-pragmatics.