Linguistics 556: Historical Syntax
Spring 2012

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:

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 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.

Below are some topics and readings that we will be exploring. These are subject to change depending on how the class discussion develops. The list of readings is especially likely to grow as the semester progresses and I may 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 site. I also recommend buying Ian Roberts' 2007 textbook, Diachronic Syntax, published by Oxford University Press.

Introductory lectures

1. Language transmission and language change
                a. the overall diachronic stability of language and syntax in particular
                b. inaccuracy in transmission as a source of change
                        learning effects
                        contact effects

2. Language variation and language change
                a. the apparent gradualness of change
                b. the Constant Rate Effect

3. Treating an evolving linguistic population as a dynamical system
 

Download Excel template for varbrul (requires Excel Solver module)

David Sankoff varbrul paper

Brief addendum to Yang 2000.

Alternative update functions (in Excel)

Case studies

1. Verb movement to functional heads
                a. V-to-Infl
                        loss of agreement and loss of V-to-I
                            English, Scandinavian
                b. V-to-Comp
                        varieties of verb-second
                        change and loss of V2
                            English, French, Spanish, Yiddish

2. Change and stability in the order of verbs and complements
                a. Loss and maintenance of OV word order in Germanic
                            English, German, Icelandic, Yiddish
                b. The evolution of word order in the history of Greek

3. Variation and change in the syntax of negation
                a. The Jespersen cycle in the history of English
                b. Other cases: German and Dutch, West Flemish, Quebec French


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.
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. 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. 2000. Internal and external forces in language change. Language Variation and Change. vol. 12.
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.