Functional Heads Across Time: Syntactic Reanalysis and Change

This volume explores the role that functional elements play in syntactic change and investigates the semantic and functional features that are the driving force behind those changes. Structural developments are explained in terms of the reanalysis of parts of the functional sequences in the clausal, nominal, and adpositional domains, through changes in parameter settings and feature specifications. The chapters discuss 'microdiachronic' syntactic changes that often have implications for large-scale syntactic effects, such as word order variation, the emergence (and lexicalization) of syntactic projections, grammaticalization, and changes in information-structural properties. The volume contains both case studies of individual languages, such as German, Hungarian, and Romanian, and detailed investigations of cross-linguistic phenomena, based primarily on digital corpora of historical and dialectal data. Contents: 1. The role of functional heads in syntactic change by Barbara Egedi and Veronika Hegedus 2. Changing patterns of clausal complementation in Latin: A parametric approach to ‘constructional’ changes by Lieven Danckaert 3. From split to remerged Fin in Romanian supine complements by Adina Dragomirescu and Virginia Hill 4. The diachronic path of senao: From conditional subordination to exceptive coordination by Ana Maria Martins, Sandra Pereira, and Clara Pinto 5. On Italian relative complementizers and relative pronouns: Rethinking grammaticalization by Emanuela Sanfelici, Jacopo Garzonio, and Cecilia Poletto 6. Information structure, functional left peripheries, and the history of a Hungarian interrogative marker by Julia Bacskai-Atkari 7. The recategorization of modals in English: Evidence from adverb placement by Eric Haeberli and Tabea Ihsane 8. Tense recursion, perfect doubling, and the grammaticalization of auxiliaries by Ida Larsson and Ellen Brandner 9. P-incorporation in the history of Icelandic by Johannes Gisli Jonsson and Brynhildur Stefansdottir 10. From Old to Modern Icelandic: Dative applicatives and NP/DP configurationality by Heimir F. Vidarsson References Index of Subjects Index of Languages.…