Linguistics 556: Historical Syntax
Fall 2009
Course syllabus and suggested readings
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 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 topics and readings below are subject to change. In particular, the list of
readings will grow as the semester progresses. I will put some of the books on
the list on reserve in Rosengarten. Several of the papers of which I am the
author or a coauthor are available for download from my web page. The most recent paper
exists at the moment in draft form so that I don't want to put it on my papers
page, but you can download it from here. Please
do not cite it or pass it around.
This year the course will emphasize the quantitative analysis of corpus data. There will
be a series of exercises posted to this page in the course of the semester and the class
sessions will be organized around the discussion of these exercises. My hope is that, by
the end of the class, everyone will be comfortable with the techniques we use to extract
data from corpora and to analyze them. Grammatical issues, which are as central to historical
syntax as quantitative analysis will arise in the discussion of concrete cases.
Exercise 1: Periphrastic do
-
Readings:
- Alvar Ellegård. 1953. The auxiliary do: the establishment and
regulation of its use in English.
- Anthony Kroch. 1994. Morphosyntactic
variation. In Beals et al., eds., Proceedings of the Thirtieth Annual Meeting of the Chicago Linguistics Society.
- Anthony Kroch. 1989. Reflexes
of grammar in patterns of language change. Language Variation and Change, vol. 1, pp. 199-244.
- 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.
- Anthony Warner. 2005.
Why DO dove: Evidence for register variation in Early Modern English negatives. Language Variation and Change. vol. 17.
- R Stuff
- Introduction to R
- Data in R
- R Tutorial
- RSeek search engine
- CRAN site for R program and GUI
- Data
- Key to data codes
- Ellegård do data table for import
- Ellegård do graph to reproduce
- Ellegård do table underlying graph
The data table is a zipped text file. The columns are separated by commas and the there is a header row with default column names. Import this
table into R with the function "read.table". The graph and table from Ellegård's book are the objects you should be trying to reproduce
from the raw data.
- Handouts
- logistic model generation
- Cukor-Avila 2002 tables
- Warner 2005 tables
- Supplementary Reading
- Patricia Cukor-Avila. 2002.
She say, she go, she be like: verbs of quotation over time in african american vernacular english.
American Speech, 77(1):3-31.
- Ann Taylor. 1994.
The change from SOV to SVO in Ancient Greek. Language Variation and Change. vol. 6.
Exercise 2: English topicalization and V2