Continuity and Variation in Germanic and Romance

This volume offers a range of synchronic and diachronic case studies in comparative Germanic and Romance morphosyntax. These two language families, spoken by over a billion people today, have played a central role in linguistic research, but many significant questions remain about the relationship between them. Following an introduction that sets out the methodological, empirical, and theoretical background to the book, the volume is divided into three parts that deal with the morphosyntax of subjects and the inflectional layer; inversion, discourse pragmatics, and the left periphery; and continuity and variation beyond the clause. The contributors adopt a diverse range of approaches, making use of the latest digitized corpora and presenting a mixture of well-known and under-studied data from standard and non-standard Germanic and Romance languages. Many of the chapters challenge received wisdom about the relationship between these two important language families. The volume will be an indispensable resource for researchers and students in the fields of Germanic and Romance linguistics, historical and comparative linguistics, and morphosyntax.

Sam Wolfe, Associate Professor of French Linguistics, University of Oxford,Christine Meklenborg, Professor of French Linguistics, University of Oslo

Sam Wolfe is Associate Professor of French Linguistics at the University of Oxford and Tutor and Official Fellow of St Catherine's College, having previously held teaching positions at the universities of Cambridge and Manchester. The principal focus of his current research is a monograph on syntactic change in French, and he has ongoing projects on Venetian and on contact-induced changes in Romance languages. His first book, Verb Second in Medieval Romance, was published by OUP in 2019, and he is the co-editor of the OUP volumes Rethinking Verb Second (with Rebecca Woods; 2020) and Variation and Change in Gallo-Romance Grammar (with Martin Maiden; 2020).


Christine Meklenborg is Professor of French Linguistics at the University of Oslo, Norway. She specializes in Medieval French but in recent years has also been working on medieval Germanic languages, especially Old Swedish. From 2014 to 2019 she was Principal Investigator of the research project 'Traces of History'. She is the editor of A Micro-Perspective on Verb Second in Romance and Germanic (special edition of Linguistic Variation; Benjamins 2019) and, co-editor of Challenging Clitics (with Hans Petter Helland; Benjamins 2013).