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This volume explores multiple aspects of cyclical syntactic change, including the diachrony of negation, the internal structure of wh-words, and changes in argument structure. It combines descriptions of novel data with detailed theoretical analysis, and will appeal to historical linguists and to anyone working on language variation and change.

This volume is the first systematic, corpus-based examination of the development of dative external possessors in Old and Early Middle English. It draws on empirical data and recent developments in linguistic theory to evaluate language-internal and language contact-based explanations for the loss of these constructions in Middle English.

This is the first of a two-volume comparative history of negation in the languages of Europe and the Mediterranean. It examines the development of sentential negation and negative indefinites and quantifiers in languages and language groups such as Italian, English, Dutch, German, Celtic, Slavonic, Greek, Uralic, and Afro-Asiatic.

This book develops an approach to language change based on construction grammar in order to reconceptualize grammaticalization and lexicalization. The authors show that language change proceeds by micro-steps involving every aspect of grammar including pragmatics and discourse functions. A new and productive approach to historical linguistics.

This book offers an integrated description of all aspects of word order in Old Italian, looking at the left periphery not only of the sentence, but also of the verbal phrase and determiner phrase. It makes important contributions to the study of medieval Italian, Romance historical linguistics, and diachronic syntactic change more generally.

This book examines morphosyntactic variation in the Romance varieties spoken in Italy from both a regional and historical perspective. It examines a range of phenomena, backed up by extensive empirical data, and will be a valuable resource not only for specialists in Italo-Romance but also for researchers in morphosyntactic change more generally

This book adopts a generative framework to investigate the diachronic syntax of Hungarian, one of only a handful of non-Indo-European languages with a documented history spanning more than 800 years. It focuses particularly on the restructuring of Hungarian syntax from head-final to head-initial and the resultant changes that occurred.

This book provides the first comprehensive synchronic and diachronic overview of the syntax of old Romanian written in English and targeted at a non-Romanian readership. It draws on an extensive new corpus analysis of the period between the beginning of the sixteenth century and the end of the eighteenth century.

This book offers new and detailed analyses of five long-standing problems in Latin historical phonology. It evaluates the relative roles of syllable structure and phonetics in these phenomena, examines the phonological conditions required, and reconstructs the motivations for the changes involved.

This book offers the most comprehensive examination to date of referential null subjects in the history of English. It empirically examines the occurrence of subjectless finite clauses in more than 500 early English texts, spanning nearly 850 years, and re-evaluates previous claims concerning their distribution.

This volume brings together the latest diachronic research on syntactic features and their role in restricting syntactic change. The chapters explore topics relating to all three domains of the clause as well as issues in methodology and modelling, drawing on data from a range of languages and dialects.

This book provides an integrated account of the phonetic causes of the diachronic processes of palatalization, assibilation, and affrication. It draws on a variety of historical, dialectological, and phonetic data from a wide range of language families, including Romance, Bantu, Slavic, and Germanic.

In a series of pioneering explorations of the diachrony of morphomes, this book throws new light on the nature of the morphome and the boundary - seen from both diachronic and synchronic perspectives - between what is and is not genuinely autonomous in morphology. Its findings will be of central interest to morphologists of all theoretical stripes.

This book examines the syntax and semantics of several thousand examples of tense-aspect stem participles in the Rigveda, one of the oldest extant texts in any Indo-European language. The author applies formal linguistic analysis to the data and produces a comprehensive formal model of how these participles are used.

This book examines grammatical changes during the transition from Latin to the Romance languages and the factors proposed to explain them. It challenges orthodoxy, presents new perspectives on language change, structure, and variation.

This book provides a critical investigation of syntactic change and how it is related to the lexicon, morphology, and information structure. It draws on data from a wide variety of languages and will be of interest to all linguists working on syntactic variation and change.

Leading scholars examine languages ranging from old Egyptian to modern Afrikaans. They consider the insights parametric theory offers to understanding the dynamics of language change and test new hypotheses against an extensive array of data. In both the broad range of languages it discusses and its use of linguistic theory this is an outstanding book.

This book reconstructs the Semitic case system, based on a detailed analysis of the expression of grammatical roles and relations in the attested Semitic languages. It brings typological methods to bear on the study of comparative Semitics and includes detailed analyses of a wide range of data. The book will interest Semiticists and typologists.

This book offers reconstructions of various syntactic properties of Proto-Germanic, including verb position in main clauses, the syntax of the wh-system, and the (non-)occurrence of null pronominal subjects and objects.

This book examines the historical development of discourse and pragmatic markers across the Romance languages. Based on extensive data from several languages, distinguished scholars examine issues relevant to grammaticalization, pragmaticalization, and the interface between grammar and discourse.