Linguistics 556: Historical Syntax
Fall 2016
Course syllabus
Linguistics 556 is an introduction to the study of the syntax of languages
as attested in historical texts, from both the synchronic and the diachronic
perspective. As such, it is necessarily interdisciplinary, raising questions
of syntactic theory, language acquisition, and sociolinguistics. Among
the issues it addresses are:
-
looking for grammatical parameters in the syntactic variation among closely
related languages and dialects
-
using textual examples and frequency information to draw grammatical conclusions
for languages with no living native speakers
-
interpreting the time course of syntactic change
-
the possible role of first language acquisition effects as a source of change
-
language contact and second language acquisition effects as a source
of change
- modeling language change in a population as a dynamical system
The requirement for the course is a term paper that investigates a syntactic
or morphosyntactic change based on data from a parsed corpus. Other data
sources can be used to supplement the parsed corpus data but not instead of
it. Currently, there are available extensive historical parsed corpora for
English,
French,
Icelandic
and Portuguese
that have been annotated to modified Penn Treebank standards. There are also
other resources for these and other languages that are worth looking into.
This year, for the first time, we will broaden the course's coverage a bit to
include the study of contemporary languages in which interesting syntactic
variation and change have been reported in recent years. The primary
motivation for this addition is the newly available parsed corpus of spoken
Applachian English that Christina Tortora of CUNY and Beatrice Santorini at
Penn have nearly completed. A pre-release version of the AAPCAPPE
(Audio-Aligned and Parsed Corpus of Appalachian English) Corpus is available
for our use this semester. Other reasons for this addition are the work on the
Icelandic New Passive/Impersonal construction, a morphosyntactic change in
progress that Icelandic linguists have been analyzing, including colleagues
at Penn, and work on variation in Korean negation that former Penn students
and postdocs have been investigating.
Below are some topics that we will be exploring. These are
subject to change depending on how the class discussion develops. Readings for the
course will be provided as the semester progresses. Papers
of which I am the author or a coauthor are available for download from my web site. I also
recommend reading Ian Roberts' 2007 textbook, Diachronic
Syntax, published by Oxford University Press.
I. Introductory lectures
1. Language transmission and language change
- the overall diachronic stability of language and syntax in particular
- inaccuracy in transmission as a source of change
- learning effects
- contact effects
Readings:
2. Language variation and language change
- the apparent gradualness of change
- the Constant Rate Effect
Readings:
3. Treating an evolving linguistic population as a dynamical system
Readings and Materials:
II. Case studies
- The loss of V2 word order in English and French
- The loss of OV word order in English and French
- The loss of V-to-T movement in English and Mainland Scandinavian
- The shift from Infl-final to Infl-medial word order in English, Yiddish and Greek
- Diachronic stability and instability in the frequency of topicalization in Germanic
Readings: TBA
General Suggested Readings
- I. Introduction
- Bobaljik, Jonathan. 2002. Realizing
Germanic inflection: Why morphology does not drive syntax..
Journal of Comparative Germanic Linguistics, 6:2, 129-167.
- Han, Chung-hye, Jeffrey Lidz and Julien Musolino. 2007.Verb-raising and grammar competition in Korean: Evidence from negation and quantifier scope.
Linguistic Inquiry, 38:1, 1-47.
- Anthony Kroch. 2001. Syntactic
change. In Baltin and Collins, eds., Handbook of Contemporary Syntactic
Theory. Blackwell.
- David Lightfoot. 1999. The Development of Language.
Blackwell. chapter 3:
Grammars and language acquisition.
- Susan Pintzuk. 2002.
Verb-object order in Old English: variation as grammatical
competition. In Lightfoot, ed., Syntactic Effects of Morphological Change. Oxford University Press.
- Thomas McFadden. 2002.
The rise of the to-dative in Middle English.. In Lightfoot, ed., Syntactic Effects of
Morphological Change. Oxford University Press.
- Ian Roberts. 2007. Diachronic Syntax.
Oxford. chapter 2:
Types of syntactic change.
- Ian Roberts. 2007. Diachronic Syntax.
Oxford. chapter 3:
Acquisition, learnability, and syntactic change.
- supplementary readings:
- Kampen, J. and N. Corver. 2006. Diversity of
possessor marking in Dutch child language and Dutch dialects. Maurice Vliegen, ed. Proceedings of the 39th
Linguistic Colloquium 2004 pp. 385-398. Berlin: Peter Lang.
- Fred Weerman et al. 2006. L1 and L2
Acquisition of Dutch Adjectival Inflection. ACLC Working Papers, vol. 2006, Issue 1.
- Ia. Inertia
- Hlíf Árnadóttir et al. 2011. The passive
of reflexive verbs in Icelandic. Nordlyd: Tromsø University Working
Papers in Language and Linguistics, vol. 37, pp. 39-97.
- Giuseppe Longobardi. 2001. Formal
syntax, diachronic minimalism, and etymology: the history of French
chez. Linguistic Inquiry, vol. 32, pp. 275-302.
- Joan Maling. 2011. From
passive to active: syntactic change in progress in Icelandic. In
Lyngfelt
and Solstad, 2006, Demoting the Agent, John Benjamins,
Amsterdam/Philadelphia, pp. 197-223.
- Joan Maling. 2011. Nothing
personal? The emergence of a new syntactic construction in Icelandic.
Presented at LSA, Pittsburgh, January 2011.
- Joan Maling et al. 2011. Nothing
personal? A system-internal syntactic change in Icelandic. Presented at
DGfS, Göttingen, February 2011.
- George Walkden 2011. Abduction or
Inertia? The logic of syntactic change. In Proceedings of the Sixth
Cambridge Postgraduate Conference in Language Research, pp 230-239.
- II. The Constant Rate Effect
- Anthony Kroch. 1989. Reflexes
of grammar in patterns of language change. Language Variation and Change, vol. 1, pp. 199-244.
- Beatrice Santorini. 1993. The rate of
phrase structure change in the history of Yiddish. Language Variation and
Change, vol. 5, pp. 257-283.
- Ann Taylor. 1999. The change from
SOV to SVO in Ancient Greek. Language Variation and Change, vol. 6,
pp. 1-37.
- III. Dynamical Modeling of Language Change
- Jeff Elman et al. 1996. Rethinking Innateness. chapter 4: the shape of change.
- Partha Niyogi. ms.
Phase transitions in language evolution. University of Chicago.
- Charles Yang. 2002.
Grammar competition and language change. In Lightfoot, ed., Syntactic Effects of Morphological
Change. Oxford University Press.
- supplementary readings:
- Ted Briscoe. 2000.
Evolutionary perspectives on diachronic syntax. In Pintzuk, Tsoulas and Warner,
eds., Diachronic Syntax: Models and Mechanisms. Oxford University Press.
- Partha Niyogi and Robert Berwick. 1997.
Evolutionary consequences of language learning. Linguistics and Philosophy. vol. 20.
- IV. Grammaticalization
- Ian Roberts and Anna Roussou. 2005. Syntactic Change: A Minimalist
Approach to Grammaticalization.Cambridge U. Press. chapters 1 and 2.
- IV. The Character and Evolution of V2 in English
- Eric Haeberli. 2000. Adjuncts
and the syntax of subjects in Old and Middle English. In Pintzuk, Tsoulas and Warner,
eds., Diachronic Syntax: Models and Mechanisms. Oxford University Press.
- Eric Haeberli. 2002. Inflectional
morphology and the loss of V2 in English. In Lightfoot, ed., Syntactic Effects of Morphological Change. Oxford University Press.
- Anthony Kroch, Ann Taylor, and Donald Ringe. 2000. The
Middle English verb-second constraint: a case study in language contact and
language change. In Herring, van Reenan and Schoesler, eds., Textual
Parameters in Older Languages. John Benjamins.
- supplementary readings:
- Eric Haeberli. 2002. Observations
on the loss of Verb Second in the history of English In In C.J.W. Zwart
and W. Abraham (eds.), Studies in Comparative Germanic Syntax. John Benjamins.
- Anthony Kroch and Ann Taylor. 1997. Verb
movement in Old and Middle English: dialect variation and language contact.
In Kemenade and Vincent, eds., Parameters of Morphosyntactic
Change. Cambridge University Press.
- V. The Loss of OV Word Order in Germanic
- Anthony Kroch and Ann Taylor. 2001. Verb-Object
Order in Early Middle English.
In Pintzuk et al., eds., Diachronic
Syntax: Models and Mechanisms. Oxford University Press.
- VI. Periphrastic do
- Chung-hye Han. 2000.
The evolution of do-support in English imperatives. In Pintzuk, Tsoulas and Warner, eds., Diachronic Syntax: Models and Mechanisms. Oxford University Press.
- Chung-hye Han and Anthony Kroch. 2000. The
rise of do-support in English: implications for clause structure. In
Hirotani et al., eds., Proceedings of the 30th Meeting of the North East Linguistics Society.
- Stefan Frisch. 1997.
The change in negation in Middle English: a NEGP licensing account. Lingua. no. 101, pp. 21-64.
- Aaron Ecay. 2010.
On the gradual and articulated emergence of auxiliary 'do' in Early Modern English. ms. University of Pennsylvania
- Anthony Warner. 2005.
Why DO dove: Evidence for register variation in Early Modern English negatives. Language Variation and Change. vol. 17.
- VII. The historical evolution of clitics
- Fontana, J. 1997. On the
integration of second position phenomena.
Kemenade, Ans and Nigel Vincent, eds. Parameters of Morphosyntactic Change pp. 207-249.
- Galves, C. et al. 2005. The
change of clitic placement from Classical to Modern European
Portuguese. Portuguese Journal of Linguistics vol. 4, pp. 39-67.
- Pancheva, R. 2005. The rise and fall of second position clitics. Natural
Language and Linguistic Theory. vol. 23, pp. 103-167.