A Brief History of English Syntax

Abstract

In its 1,500-year history, the English language has seen dramatic grammatical changes. This book offers a comprehensive and reader-friendly account of the major developments, including changes in word order, the noun phrase and verb phrase, changing relations between clausal constituents and the development of new subordinate constructions. The book puts forward possible explanations for change, drawing on the existing and most recent literature and with reference to the major theoretical models. The authors use corpus evidence to investigate language-internal and language-external motivations for change, including the impact of language contact. The book is intended for students who have been introduced to the history of English and want to deepen their understanding of major grammatical changes, and for linguists in general with a historical interest. It will also be of value to literary scholars professionally engaged with older texts. Professor Emeritus of Germanic Linguistics at the University of Amsterdam, olga fischer is a contributor to the Cambridge History of the English Language (1992), co-author of The Syntax of Early English (2000), and author of Morphosyntactic Change: Functional and Formal Perspectives (2007). She has been an editor of the Language chapter in the Year'sW o r k in English Studies since 1998, and is co-editor of the book series Iconicity in Language and Literature. She has written widely on topics within English historical linguistics, grammaticalization, iconicity and analogy. hendrik de smet is a BOF research professor at KU Leuven. He is the author of Spreading Patterns: Diffusional Change in the English System of Complementation (2013) and co-editor of On Multiple Source Constructions in Language Change (2015). His work is primarily on mechanisms of language change, including reanalysis, analogy and blending. He is also involved in the compilation of several freely available text corpora for historical research, including the Corpus of Late Modern English Texts and the Corpus of English Novels. wim van der wurff is Senior Lecturer in Linguistics at Newcastle University, UK. He is co-author of The Syntax of Early English (2000), Colloquial Bengali (2009), and has co-edited volumes on reported speech, modality, imperatives and diachronic syntax. His recent work focuses on the way factors of different types interact in the emergence and decline of syntactic constructions.

Predicative and markedness bias in loan adjectives

“…prose has the advantage of being more representative of real-life speech than poetry, where metre and rhythm could influence word order and syntactic structures (cf. van Kemenade 1987;Fischer et al 2017). The Parson's Tale (pt; 30,626 words) is one of geoffrey chaucer's Canterbury Tales.…”

Book Review: English Historical Linguistics: Approaches and Perspectives

“…In some ways, the appeal of English Historical Linguistics can similarly be attributed to the fact that it is designed as an aggregation of perspectives on a single topic. With a few (relatively recent) exceptions (e.g., Fischer, De Smet & van der Wurff 2017), "histories of the English language (. .…”

<i>Explorations in English Historical Syntax</i>

“…This book under review is a collection of 11 papers, which explore English historical syntax, focusing on changes in language output rather than changing processes in the underlying grammar system. In the introduction, Cuyckens, one of the editors of this book, suggests that the broadly functional approach considers language use as the locus of change, and views change as gradual, although the generative approach considers language acquisition as the locus of change, and views change as radical (see van Gelderen (2016) and Fischer et al (2017)). All the papers in this volume are situated within the functional approach, making use of large sets of text data and paying attention to the sociohistorical context of the language phenomena.…”