Archives

• Tolerating subject-experiencers? Yang's Tolerance Principle applied to psych verbs under contact in Middle English

  Vol. 6 No. 12 (2022)

  This article investigates the acquisition of psych verbs in diachrony by applying Yang's (2016) Tolerance and Sufficiency Principles. It has been observed that psych verbs change from expressing the EXPERIENCER as object to expressing it as subject cross-linguistically. According to van Gelderen (2018) and others, this development has also taken place in the history of English. What is much less well-known, however, is that a considerable number of Old French psych verbs were copied to Middle English. Using lexicon-based and corpus-based data, we will apply Yang's (2016) Tolerance and Sufficiency Principles to evaluate historical "tipping points" in the development of the psych verb class, i.e. examine whether either amuse-type or admire-type argument structures were productive in Middle English. Since subject-EXPERIENCERS were commonly used with intransitive and reflexive constructions we will further investigate whether a more general rule that any psych verb may take a subject-EXPERIENCER passed the productivity threshold. We will show that this was indeed the case in Middle English and that the copying of Old French verbs accelerated this development.

• Special issue: Cross-disciplinary approaches to linguistic variation in Early Modern West Germanic

  Vol. 6 No. 13-18 (2022)

  This thematic issue on Early Modern West Germanic homes in on the processes underlying the extensive amount of morphosyntactic variation and change within and between language users in this era. It demonstrates that language structure and language use often interacted with each other, and illustrates that, to fully understand the triggers and extent of this variation and change, we need to combine perspectives and methodological tools from different (sub)disciplines. That is why this issue brings together scholars working on Early Modern West Germanic in different fields and disciplines -- in particular scholars from early modern literary studies, formal (historical) linguistics, computational linguistics and historical sociolinguistics -- to present a wide array of possible methodologies to investigate historical language variation, and to explore how the different approaches can complement each other to help further our understanding of the complex setting of variation.

• Special Issue: Creating annotated corpora for historical languages

  Vol. 6 No. 4-11 (2022)

  This Special Issue derives from a workshop ‘Creating annotated corpora for historical languages’, held at Selwyn College, Cambridge on 26–27 September 2019. The workshop formed part of a wider project ‘Developing a Welsh Historical Treebank’, funded by the British Academy and Leverhulme Trust, which aimed to develop conventions and procedures that might form the basis for a fully parsed representative corpus of historical Welsh texts. The workshop was designed to share experience of building annotated historical corpora, focusing in particular on the technical issues involved. Contributions to the workshop and the resulting Special Issued focused both on corpus creation (text creation or the difficulties involved in creating parsing conventions, for instance) or on the issues involved in using corpora in linguistic research.

• The position of the verb with respect to the adverb sempre over four centuries: diagnosis for the (loss of high) verb movement in Brazilian Portuguese

  Vol. 6 No. 3 (2022)

  Paulo Ângelo Araújo-Adriano

• ‘So great a desire’: Investigating the BIG MESS construction in Early Modern English

  Vol. 6 No. 2 (2022)

  Lotte Sommerer

• OV/VO variation and information structure in Old Saxon and Middle Low German

  Vol. 6 No. 1 (2022)

  Tara Struik

• A hierarchical TP structure in Ancient Greek

  Vol. 5 No. 41 (2021)

  Andrea Matticchio, Emanuela Sanfelici

• On the unified change of directional/aspectual verb particles in French

  Vol. 5 No. 40 (2021)

  Michelle Troberg, Justin Leung

• Special Issue: Whither Reanalysis?

  Vol. 5 No. 32-39 (2021)

  Special issue inspired by the workshop “Whither Reanalysis?” (Humboldt University Berlin, 1–2 March 2019). Dedicated to the memory of Uli Detges.

• Parametric Stability and Word Order Change: The Case of Middle French

  Vol. 5 No. 31 (2021)

  Sam Wolfe. Part of the Special Collection "Secrets of Success".

• Do the wealthy stay healthy? Rich agreement and verb movement in early English

  Vol. 5 No. 30 (2021)

  George Walkden. Part of the Special Collection "Secrets of Success".

• V2 Beyond Borders: The Histoire Ancienne jusqu'à César

  Vol. 5 No. 29 (2021)

  Adam Ledgeway. Part of the Special Collection "Secrets of Success".

• Verb-second and verb-first in the history of Icelandic

  Vol. 5 No. 28 (2021)

  Hannah Booth, Christin Beck

• Review of Cristofaro & Zúñiga (eds.), 'Typological Hierarchies in Synchrony and Diachrony'

  Vol. 5 No. 27 (2021)

  Eystein Dahl

• Proceedings of the 21st Diachronic Generative Syntax (DiGS) Conference

  Vol. 5 No. 16-25 (2021)

  Proceedings of the 21st Diachronic Generative Syntax (DiGS) Conference, which was held at Arizona State University in June 2019.

• Voice neutrality in Hittite infinitives: a restructuring analysis

  Vol. 5 No. 15 (2021)

  Ekaterina Lyutikova, Andrei Sideltsev

• Review of Breitbarth, Lucas & Willis (2020), The history of negation in the languages of Europe and the Mediterranean, volume II: Patterns and processes

  Vol. 5 No. 14 (2021)

  Roisin Cosnahan

• Proceedings of the 20th Diachronic Generative Syntax (DiGS) Conference

  Vol. 5 No. 1-13 (2021)

  Proceedings of the 20th Diachronic Generative Syntax (DiGS) Conference, which was held in York, UK, in June 2018.

• Review of Hundt, Mollin & Pfenninger (2017), 'The changing English language'

  Vol. 4 No. 7 (2020)

  Lena Kaltenbach, Carola Trips

• Language 95 (2)

  "Contact-induced variation in Transylvanian Saxon verb clusters", by Ariana Bancu. Published as part of the Historical Syntax section of Language 95 (2). Articles reproduced here with authors' permission.

• The grammaticalisation of an auxiliary and a copula: the Arabic 'sit' participle

  Vol. 4 No. 6 (2020)

  Maris Camilleri, Louisa Sadler

• A syntactic approach to the grammaticalization of modal markers in Middle Chinese: The modal dāng 當 

  Vol. 4 No. 5 (2020)

  Barbara Meisterernst

• Testing causal associations in language change: The replacement of subordinating then with when in Middle English

  Vol. 4 No. 4 (2020)

  Richard Zimmermann

• Review article: Van Gelderen (2018), 'Analyzing Syntax Through Texts'

  Vol. 4 No. 3 (2020)

  Sune Gregersen

• Review of Yáñez-Bouza et al (2019), Categories, constructions, and change in English Syntax

  Vol. 4 No. 2 (2020)

  Tamara Bouso Rivas