ENGLISH

Continuity and Change in Grammar (Linguistik Aktuell Linguistics Today)

By Anne Breitbarth , Christopher Lucas , Sheila Watts , Dr. David Willis (editors)

Book information

Publisher
John Benjamins Publishing Company
Year
2010
ISBN
9027255423, 9789027255426
LCC
P120.V37 C667 2010
Google Books ID
OdMSI-KbufQC
Open Library ID
OL24580676M
Language
english
Format
PDF
Filesize
7 MB (7472787 bytes)
Series
Linguistik Aktuell / Linguistics Today volume 159
Pages
369\369
Orientation
yes
Scanned
no
Time added
2012-03-09 12:00:00
Языки и языкознание;Лингвистика;Грамматика (общая

Description

One of the principal challenges of historical linguistics is to explain the causes of language change. Any such explanation, however, must also address the ‘actuation problem’: why is it that changes occurring in a given language at a certain time cannot be reliably predicted to recur in other languages, under apparently similar conditions? The sixteen contributions to the present volume each aim to elucidate various aspects of this problem, including: What processes can be identified as the drivers of change? How central are syntax-external (phonological, lexical or contact-based) factors in triggering syntactic change? And how can all of these factors be reconciled with the actuation problem? Exploring data from a wide range of languages from both a formal and a functional perspective, this book promises to be of interest to advanced students and researchers in historical linguistics, syntax and their intersection.

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