Syntactic Change

Abstract

Over historical time languages change at every level of structure: vocabulary, phonology, morphology and syntax. 1 How and why such change occurs are the key questions addressed by the discipline of historical linguistics. From the perspective of modern generative grammar, language change is narrowly constrained by the requirement that all languages conform to the specifications of the human language faculty; but the fact of language change, like the brute fact of the structural diversity of the world's languages, marks a limit to the biological specification of language. Just how wide a range of variation biology allows is perhaps the major open question of theoretical linguistics; but whatever that range may be, it is the field on which historical developments play themselves out. The necessity for a richly specified Universal Grammar follows from the logical problem of language acquisition, so that the synchronic linguist considers as candidate analyses only learnable ones couched in theories that specify clearly what is to be learned and what is built in. The modern study of syntactic change, the topic of this article, 2 is also often couched in terms of learning; but, as we will see, the study of diachrony adds complexities of its own. 1 Most of what I know about diachronic syntax, I have learned from years of discussion with my collaborators and colleagues in the field. Thanks for this ongoing dialog go first to my students and collaborators, especially Susan Pintzuk, Beatrice Santorini, and Ann Taylor, my collaborator on the Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Middle English.

Morphosyntactic Learning and the Development of Tense

“…We assume the variational learning approach to language acquisition (Yang (1999;2004); see Roeper (2000), Kroch (2001), Crain and Pietroski (2002), Rizzi (2005) for similar approaches). Under variational learning, the child's language is modeled as a population of hypotheses whose composition changes during the course of learning.…”

Universals and the Diachronic Life Cycle of Languages

“…The situation is complicated by many factors, including language contact, learning from one's peers as well as one's parents, and so on. But the two-phase nature of the life cycle of a language is well accepted by modern historical linguistics (Andersen, 1973;Kroch, 2000;Lightfoot, 1999). The two-phase existence of languages has typically not been widely applied to explaining universals of language (but see Chapter 4 and references there).…”

Beyond maturation

“…suggest that learners have no problems entertaining several linguistic (sub-)systems at a time (cf. also Verrips 1994, Gawlitzek-Maiwald et al 1992, Hohenberger 2006, Yang 2004), a point also raised by Roeper (1999), Kroch (2001) and Lightfoot (1999), among others. Hence one might claim that all children start out as bilinguals (or rather multilinguals) anyway, proceeding very much like simultaneous bilinguals who manage to keep their input languages apart, until they find sufficiently strong evidence for convergence (cf.…”