Reconstructing last week's weather: Syntactic reconstruction and Brythonic free relatives

Abstract

Lightfoot (2002) argues that syntactic reconstruction is rendered impossible by the lack of any analogue in syntax to the traditional notion of the phonological 'correspondence set ' of the Comparative Method and by the radical discontinuity caused by reanalysis between successive grammars. Alice Harris and Lyle Campbell, in various works, have defended the notion of ' syntactic pattern ' as the analogue of the correspondence set, arguing that patterns can be compared across languages, with innovations being stripped away to reveal aspects of the protolanguage. In this article, I argue that syntactic reconstruction can be carried out while maintaining and indeed utilizing core notions in generative approaches to syntactic change such as the central role of reanalysis and child language acquisition and the distinction between the abstract grammatical system and the surface output of that system. Reanalysis itself is constrained by the fact that both pre-and post-reanalysis grammars must be acquirable on the basis of the same primary linguistic data. This imposes limits on the possible hypotheses that can be entertained ('local directionality ') even in the absence of any crosslinguistic generalizations about patterns of change ('universal directionality'). This approach is then applied to aspects of the syntax of free relative clauses and negation in the early Brythonic Celtic languages (Welsh, Breton and Cornish), showing that non-trivial reconstructions can be achieved even where the daughter languages manifest significant differences.

The Quest for Cognates: A Reconstruction of Oblique Subject Constructions in Proto-Indo-European

“…Several other arguments against syntactic reconstruction have been brought forward in the literature, such as lack of arbitrariness in syntax, lack of cognates, lack of regularity, and the problem of discontinuous transmission. However, in addition to the early work of Harris and Campbell (1995) arguing for the reconstructability of syntax, more recent work has also supported the claim that syntactic reconstruction is not only possible but also quite feasible (Gildea, 1998;Campbell and Harris, 2003;Kikusawa, 2003;Harris, 2008;Bowern, 2008;Eythórsson and Barðdal, 2011;Willis, 2011;Eythórsson, 2012a, 2012b;Barðdal, 2013). We will begin with a discussion of arbitrariness and use the remainder of this article to continue with the argument that there need not be any lack of cognates in syntax.…”

Evaluating directionality in the internal reconstruction of pre-Old Irish copular clauses

“…As with any syntactic analysis, the grammars themselves are modeled through observing the properties of surface strings combined with the theory of ug. Two examples of this kind of syntactic reconstruction in action are Willis (2011) and Walkden (2014). Walkden (2009Walkden ( : 35, 2014 attempts to address the correspondence problem by relying on the comparison of features of lexical items, particularly the exponents of (potentially null) functional heads.…”

“…The fact that older varieties of British have occasional instances of vso beside some fronting examples (Schrijver 2011: 72-73) is, on this view, not problematic, since the use of vso would be in some way marked, but not precluded by the grammar. Willis (2011) suggests further that other important techniques that are common in phonological reconstruction can also be applied to syntax, including considerations of economy (the smallest number of innovations in the daughter languages should be posited), majority rules (only to be used when subgrouping is certain), archaisms, and the presence of anomalies. The last two are particularly important for internal reconstruction, which is the main focus of this paper.…”

Dative sickness: A phylogenetic analysis of argument structure evolution in Germanic

“…This alleged lack of directionality has, in fact, been argued to be a pseudo-problem by many scholars, who have suggested analyses where this purported problem is satisfactorily dealt with (cf. Harris & Campbell 1995, Gildea 1998, Kikusawa 2003, Eythórsson & Barðdal 2011, Willis 2011, Barðdal & Eythórsson 2012a, 2017, Barðdal 2013, Barðdal & Smitherman 2013, Walkden 2014.…”