Main description:
The Twelfth International Conference on Historical Linguistics, which is the major forum for the presentation of work in progress in the field of diachronic linguistics, took place at the University of Manchester in August 1995. The quality and breadth of the abstracts submitted for the general programme was such that four parallel sessions were needed throughout the conference. The present volume contains selected papers which deal with the Germanic languages. A companion volume contains papers on general problems in historical linguistics and studies of non-Germanic languages. The conference reflected the current health of diachronic linguistics. There were more papers and more participants than at past conferences, and the discussion covered a broader range of languages than hitherto.
Sometimes it has been possible to isolate a particular preoccupation which has dominated much of the conference; but the overall impression to be gained from the Manchester meeting was one of stimulating diversity 2; the discipline appears to be moving forward on many fronts simultaneously, yet without losing focus. This stimulating diversity is well reflected in this important collection.
Table of contents:
- Introduction
- A corpus study of would + have + past-participle
- From modal auxiliary to lexical verb
- A subject-verb agreement hierarchy
- Language change as reranking of constraints
- Loss of prototypical meanings in the history of English semantics or semantic redeployment
- How a man changed a parameter value
- Some constraints on the borrowability of syntactic features (and why none of them work)
- On the (non)loss of polarity sensitivity
- The development of secondary stress in Old English
- Morphological restructuring
- Backdating the English Constraint Grammar Parser for the analysis of English historical texts
- Vowel variation in Proto-Germanic ai in 16th and 17th-century Holland
- Language prescription
- Reconstructing the social dimension of diachronic language change
- Grammaticalization versus reanalysis
- Word frequency and lexical diffusion in English stress shifts
- Post-verbal complements in Old English
- Semantic stability in derivationally related words
- Language change in progress
- Phonological simplification vs. stylistic differentiation in the history of German word stress
- What is metonymy?
- On the development of marked negation systems
- On the development of incorporating structures in German
- Index of subjects
- Index of names
The Twelfth International Conference on Historical Linguistics, which is the major forum for the presentation of work in progress in the field of diachronic linguistics, took place at the University of Manchester in August 1995. The quality and breadth of the abstracts submitted for the general programme was such that four parallel sessions were needed throughout the conference. The present volume contains selected papers which deal with the Germanic languages. A companion volume contains papers on general problems in historical linguistics and studies of non-Germanic languages. The conference reflected the current health of diachronic linguistics. There were more papers and more participants than at past conferences, and the discussion covered a broader range of languages than hitherto.
Sometimes it has been possible to isolate a particular preoccupation which has dominated much of the conference; but the overall impression to be gained from the Manchester meeting was one of stimulating diversity 2; the discipline appears to be moving forward on many fronts simultaneously, yet without losing focus. This stimulating diversity is well reflected in this important collection.
Table of contents:
- Introduction
- A corpus study of would + have + past-participle
- From modal auxiliary to lexical verb
- A subject-verb agreement hierarchy
- Language change as reranking of constraints
- Loss of prototypical meanings in the history of English semantics or semantic redeployment
- How a man changed a parameter value
- Some constraints on the borrowability of syntactic features (and why none of them work)
- On the (non)loss of polarity sensitivity
- The development of secondary stress in Old English
- Morphological restructuring
- Backdating the English Constraint Grammar Parser for the analysis of English historical texts
- Vowel variation in Proto-Germanic ai in 16th and 17th-century Holland
- Language prescription
- Reconstructing the social dimension of diachronic language change
- Grammaticalization versus reanalysis
- Word frequency and lexical diffusion in English stress shifts
- Post-verbal complements in Old English
- Semantic stability in derivationally related words
- Language change in progress
- Phonological simplification vs. stylistic differentiation in the history of German word stress
- What is metonymy?
- On the development of marked negation systems
- On the development of incorporating structures in German
- Index of subjects
- Index of names