Books in the Oxford Studies in Diachronic and Historical Linguistics series

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 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 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 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 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 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.

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 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 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 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.

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.