Diachronic Syntax

Historical syntax occupies a pivotal position within the larger field of research into the nature, use and acquisition of language. It is responsive to theoretical advances in linguistic theory, language acquisition and theories of language use, as well as to less adjacent fields such as statistical techniques and evolutionary biology. Linguistic theory has undergone deep changes since the early 1990s, given the widespread impact of Chomsky's "Minimalist Programme", Kayne's "Antisymmetry Theory", and Kayne's "Theory of Overt Movement". This work has brought into sharper focus questions concerning the architecture of linguistic theory that have a direct impact on our understanding of the process of change. At the same time, the recently developed framework of "Optimality Theory", which has had a major influence in phonology, is beginning to provide new insights and raise new questions as it is applied to syntax and historical change. This collection of essays by largely generative-based syntacticians advances this work. It contains selected material from the Fifth Diachronic Generative Syntax Conference (DIGS 5) held in 1998.

Review from hardback edition ... provides an excellent survey of recent developments in the field ... The editors have assembled a collection of very substantial papers in which extensive databases, sophisticated statistical analyses, and clever theoretical interpretations are abundantly present.

Susan Pintzuk is Lecturer in Linguistics at the University of York. She has research interests in syntactic variation and change in the history of English and other Germanic languages. She is currently working on a research project on the syntax of Old English poetry and (with Anthony Warner and Ann Taylor) the York-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Old English. She has published articles on Old English syntax; Phrase Structures in Competition: Variation and Change inOld English Word Order (Garland, 1999); and (with David Adger, Bernadette Plunkett, and George Tsoulas) Specifiers: Minimalist Approaches (OUP, 1999).George Tsoulas is Lecturer in Linguistics at the University of York. He has published articles on the interpretation of pronouns and the syntax of non-finite sentential complementation. His recent research is concerned with the formal theory of quantification, the syntax and semantics of pronominal anaphora, and the syntax of scrambling and multiple subject constructions in Korean and Japanese. He has edited (with David Adger, Bernadette Plunkett, and Susan Pintzuk) Specifiers: MinimalistApproaches (OUP, 1999).Anthony Warner is Professor of English Linguistics at the University of York. He has a major interest in variation and change in the history of English syntax. He is the author of papers in syntactic change and in phrase structure grammar, and of Complementation in Middle English and the Methodology of Historical Syntax (Croom Helm, 1982), and English Auxiliaries: Structure and History (CUP, 1993).