Competition in Language Change: The Rise of the English Dative Alternation (Topics in English Linguistics [TiEL], 103) - Hardcover

Zehentner, Eva

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 3110630346 ISBN 13: 9783110630343

Verlag: De Gruyter Mouton, 2019

Inhaltsangabe

This book addresses one of the most pervasive questions in historical linguistics – why variation becomes stable rather than being eliminated – by revisiting the so far neglected history of the English dative alternation.

The alternation between a nominal and a prepositional ditransitive pattern (John gave Mary a book vs. John gave a book to Mary) emerged in Middle English and is closely connected to broader changes at that time. Accordingly, the main quantitative investigation focuses on ditransitive patterns in the Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Middle English; in addition, the book employs an Evolutionary Game Theory model. The results are approached from an ‘evolutionary construction grammar’ perspective, combining evolutionary thinking with diachronic constructionist notions, and the alternation’s emergence is interpreted as a story of constructional innovation, competition, cooperation and co-evolution.

The book not only provides a thorough and detailed analysis of the history of one of the most-discussed syntactic phenomena in English, but by fusing two frameworks and employing two different methodologies also presents a highly innovative approach to a problem of relevance to historical linguistics in general.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Eva Zehentner, University of Zurich, Switzerland.

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: De Gruyter Mouton
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2019
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 3110630346
• ISBN 13: 9783110630343
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Auflage: 1
• Anzahl der Seiten: 496
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: preigu GmbH & Co. KG; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; Niedersachsen; 49078; Deutschland