Growing syntax: The development of a DP in North Germanic

Abstract

Grammaticalization as standardly conceived is a change whereby an item develops from a lexical to a grammatical or functional meaning, or from being less to more grammatical. In this article we show that this can only be part of the story; for a full account we need to understand the syntactic structures into which grammaticalizing elements fit and how they too develop. To achieve this end we consider in detail the history of definiteness marking within the noun phrase in North Germanic, and in particular in Faroese. We show how this change requires us to distinguish between projecting and nonprojecting categories, and how a category can emerge over time and only subsequently develop into a head with its own associated functional projection. The necessary structure, rather than being intrinsic to an aprioristic universal grammar, grows over time as part of the grammaticalization process. We suggest that this in turn argues for a parallel correspondence theory of grammar such as the one adopted here, lexical-functional grammar, in which different dimensions of linguistic structure can change at different rates.*

The noun phrase and the ‘Viking Hypothesis’

“…The apparent freedom of word order in the Old Nordic noun phrase 19 has received different accounts: Faarlund (2002:730) suggested that Old Nordic could have been at a ‘transitional stage’ between Ancient Nordic, which has head-initial noun phrases with demonstratives and all modifiers following the noun, and modern Scandinavian, where these elements mostly appear prenominally. Börjars, Harries, and Vincent (2016) proposed an alternative analysis, whereby the pre- or postnominal position of demonstratives in ON is constrained by information-structure factors (see also, Harries, 2014:86–87): they argued that in ON, demonstratives are interpreted as anaphoric or cataphoric deictics, depending on their position relative to the head N.…”

“…In Icelandic, both in older stages and in the modern language, possessive pronouns frequently occur postnominally (see Börjars et al, 2016:e12; Faarlund, 2004:59; Harries, 2014:79–82). We confirmed this observation with quantitative evidence from the IcePaHC, presented in Table 5.…”

O Sintagma Determinante nas línguas românicas: Emergência, mudança e estrutura da periferia esquerda do SN

“…Assumimos esta proposta por duas razões: primeiramente, por ser teoricamente coerente com o parâmetro deChierchia (1998) e, em segundo lugar, por ela ter sido corroborada na mudança sintática das línguas germânicas(BÖRJARS et al, 2016).…”

Passivesein Romanian and Spanish: A subject cycle

“…Note also that diachronic claims parallel to ours have been made previously, namely that nominal structures ‘grow’ DPs over time. See Börjars, Harries & Vincent (2016) and references therein for Germanic. See also footnote 25 below.…”