The expression of impersonals in Middle English

Light, Caitlin; Wallenberg, Joel

doi:10.1017/s1360674315000076

Cited by 5 publications

References 15 publications

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A Brief History of English Syntax

Fischer

Smet

Wurff

2017

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In its 1,500-year history, the English language has seen dramatic grammatical changes. This book offers a comprehensive and reader-friendly account of the major developments, including changes in word order, the noun phrase and verb phrase, changing relations between clausal constituents and the development of new subordinate constructions. The book puts forward possible explanations for change, drawing on the existing and most recent literature and with reference to the major theoretical models. The authors use corpus evidence to investigate language-internal and language-external motivations for change, including the impact of language contact. The book is intended for students who have been introduced to the history of English and want to deepen their understanding of major grammatical changes, and for linguists in general with a historical interest. It will also be of value to literary scholars professionally engaged with older texts. Professor Emeritus of Germanic Linguistics at the University of Amsterdam, olga fischer is a contributor to the Cambridge History of the English Language (1992), co-author of The Syntax of Early English (2000), and author of Morphosyntactic Change: Functional and Formal Perspectives (2007). She has been an editor of the Language chapter in the Year'sW o r k in English Studies since 1998, and is co-editor of the book series Iconicity in Language and Literature. She has written widely on topics within English historical linguistics, grammaticalization, iconicity and analogy. hendrik de smet is a BOF research professor at KU Leuven. He is the author of Spreading Patterns: Diffusional Change in the English System of Complementation (2013) and co-editor of On Multiple Source Constructions in Language Change (2015). His work is primarily on mechanisms of language change, including reanalysis, analogy and blending. He is also involved in the compilation of several freely available text corpora for historical research, including the Corpus of Late Modern English Texts and the Corpus of English Novels. wim van der wurff is Senior Lecturer in Linguistics at Newcastle University, UK. He is co-author of The Syntax of Early English (2000), Colloquial Bengali (2009), and has co-edited volumes on reported speech, modality, imperatives and diachronic syntax. His recent work focuses on the way factors of different types interact in the emergence and decline of syntactic constructions.

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