Information Structure and Language Change

Roland Hinterhölzl

ISBN 10: 3110205912 / ISBN 13: 9783110205916

Verlag: De Gruyter, DE, 2009

Beschreibung

The volume presents new approaches to explaining word order variation and change in the Germanic languages and thus relates to one of the most prominent and widely discussed topics in the theory of language change and diachronic syntax. The novelty of our approach consists in three main points. First of all, we aim at describing functional variety in the field of word order and verb placement in the early Germanic languages not as a result of language contact, but rather as a language-internal phenomenon related to stylistic and grammatical conditions in information packaging. Second, given that information structure is not directly accessible in texts from historical corpora that are available only in written form and bear no or little information on prosody and intonation, it presents various methods of retrieving information-structural categories in such texts. Third, it presents empirical studies on the relation between word order and information structure of the four main texts of the Old High German period and embeds these results in the wider picture of word order change in Germanic. The volume will be of interest to students of German, English, and general linguistics as well as to researchers interested in diachronic syntax, philology of Older German, language change, information structure, discourse semantics, language typology, computational linguistics, and corpus studies.

Bestandsnummer des Verkäufers LU-9783110205916

Bibliografische Details

• Titel: Information Structure and Language Change
• Verlag: De Gruyter, DE
• Erscheinungsjahr: 2009
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN-10: 3110205912
• ISBN-13: 9783110205916
• Einband: Hardback
• Zustand: New
• Gewicht: 685 Gramm

Über diesen Titel

Inhaltsangabe

The book addresses one of the most prominent and widely discussed topics in diachronic syntax, namely, word order variation and change in older Germanic. It presents a novel approach that explains these issues not in terms of parameters and parameter change or in terms of competition between two grammars, but in terms of competition between information-structurally marked and unmarked forms within one grammar.

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Roland Hinterhölzl and Svetlana Petrova, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany.