260B: Historical Morphosyntax, Spring 2007
Readings marked with a *star are required. The others are recommended.
3.4. Introduction:
Stability and change. Contact, acquisition, and language use as
causes of change. The transition problem. Deblocking vs. the seed
hypothesis: the spread of the periphrastic comparative. Using textual
evidence.
5.4.
Mechanisms of change. The constraints problem. Connections between morphological and
syntactic change. Goals of a theory of change.
Read:
*A. Kroch,
Syntactic change, Sections 1,2 (M. Baltin and Chris
Collins, edd., Handbook of Syntax, 2001).
*D. Lightfoot, Grammatical approaches to syntactic change (Brian
D. Joseph and R.D Janda, edd., Handbook of Historical
Linguistics, 2003).
*Susan Pintzuk, Variationist approaches to syntactic change (ibid).
10.4.
Historical explanation. Typology and universals. The amphichronic program.
Read:
*Kroch, sections 3-6. M. Hale, Diachronic Syntax. P. Kiparsky, Amphichronic linguistics
vs. Evolutionary Phonology. Theoretical Linguistics, 32: 217-236, 2006.
Syntax
1:1-18 (1998) (download from Stanford Library E-resources).
12.4.
The spread of innovations. The constant rate hypothesis.
Read:
*Anthony Kroch,
Reflexes of grammar in patterns of language change, Language
Variation and Change 1: 199-244.
David Denison, Log(ist)ic and
simplistic S-curves. In Hickey,
ed., Motives for Language Change, CUP 2003.
17.4. Germanic and Old English clause structure. V-to-C and V-to-I.
Read:
*P. Kiparsky, The Shift to Head-Initial VP in Germanic. In H. Thrainsson, J. Peter,
and S. Epstein (eds.), Comparative Germanic Syntax. Kluwer, 1996.
*Eric Fuss, On the historical core of V2 in Germanic, Nordic Journal of
Linguistics 26.2 (2003), 195-231 (download from Stanford Library E-resources).
19.4. The OV to VO shift.
Read:
*Paul Kiparsky,
The Rise of Positional
Licensing,
*Ans van Kemenade and Nigel Vincent (eds.), Parameters of
Morphosyntactic Change. OUP 1997, Susan Pintzuk,
Verb-object order in Old English:
variation as grammatical competition. In Lightfoot, ed., Syntactic
Effects of Morphological Change. OUP 2002.
24.4. The OV to VO shift, continued.
Read:
*Eric Fuss and Carola
Trips. 2001. Variation and change in Old and Middle English: on the
validity of the double base hypothesis. Journal of Comparative
Germanic Linguistics vol. 4 (Download from
here).
Ch. 3 of Brady Clark,
A Stochastic Optimality Theory Approach to Syntactic Change
(2004).
26.4. do-support and the auxiliary system.
Read:
*Andrew Garrett, On the Origin of Auxiliary Do, English
Language and Linguistics 2 (1998) 283-330.
1.5. The rise of functional projections: Greek and Indo-Aryan
parallels. Explaining the shifts from passive to ergative and lexical
to structural case.
Read:
P. Kiparsky and Cleo Condoravdi, Clitics and Clause Structure
Journal of Greek Linguistics, 2:1-39, 2002.
Ashwini Deo and Devyani Sharma, Typological Variation in the ergative morphology of the
Indo-Aryan languages.
3.5. Grammaticalization.
Read:
*Elizabeth Traugott, Grammaticalization Encyclopedia
of languages and linguistics, Vol 3. Pergamon Press, 1994,
*Haspelmath, Martin, Why is grammaticalization irreversible?
Linguistics 37.1043-1068 (1999).
*P. Kiparsky,
Grammaticalization as
optimization , 2005.
8.5.
Grammaticalization, continued.
Read:
*Whitney Tabor and Elizabeth Traugott, Structural scope
expansion and grammaticalization, In A.G. Ramat and Paul Hopper (eds.)
The limits of grammaticalization. Benjamins, 1998.
*Elizabeth Traugott and Paul Hopper, Grammaticalization (2nd
edition), Ch. 3 ("Mechanisms: Reanalysis and Analogy").
10.5. Jespersen's cycle.
Read:
Regine Eckardt, Semantic Change in Grammaticalization, in Graham Katz, Sabine Reinhard, and
Philip Reuter (edd.) Sinn und Bedeutung, Vol VI.
P. Kiparsky and Cleo Condoravdi, Tracking
Jespersen's Cycle. In Janse, M., B.D. Joseph, and A. Ralli (edd.) Proceedings of the 2nd International
Conference of Modern Greek Dialects and Linguistic Theory. Mytilene: Doukas, 2006.
8.5. Grammaticalization, continued.
15.5. Finite sentential complementation: the origin of
that-clauses.
Read:
*P. Kiparsky, Indo-European Origins of Germanic Syntax. In Ian Roberts and Adrian
Battye (eds.), Clause Structure and Language Change, p. 140-167.
Oxford University Press, 1994.
*Guy Deutscher, Syntactic Change in Akkadian: The evolution of sentential
complementation, OUP 2000 (brief selection).
17.5. From prepositions to complementizers: to and for
to.
Read:
*Olga Fischer, The rise of the for NP to V
construction: an explanation. In Graham Nixon and John Honey (edd.)
An historic tongue: studies in linguistics in memory of Barbara
Strang. 1988.
22.5. Tense, aspect, voice, mood. The rise of
periphrastic perfects and passives.
24.5.
The evolution of pronouns, reflexives, and articles. The subset
principle.
29.5.
Optimality-theoretic approaches to variation and change:
free constraint ranking, stochastic OT.
31.5.
Formal learning-theoretic approaches. Yang's model of grammar competition.
Read:
*Charles Yang, Internal and external forces in language change. Language Variation and
Change. 12:231-250 (2000).
5.6 Computational models of language evolution.
Read:
*Brady Clark, Matthew Goldrick, and Kenneth Konopka, Language Change as a source of word order generalizations.
Henry Brighton, Kenny Smith, and Simon Kirby. Review: Language as an evolutionary system.
Physics of Life Reviews. 2:177-226 (2005). Available online at www.sciencedirect.com.
Last modified
Apr 03, 2007