Language Change At The Syntax-semantics Interface

Chiara Gianollo, Agnes Jäger, Doris Penka (Eds.) Language Change at the Syntax-Semantics Interface Trends in Linguistics Studies and Monographs Editor Volker Gast Editorial Board Walter Bisang Jan Terje Faarlund Hans Henrich Hock Natalia Levshina Heiko Narrog Matthias Schlesewsky Amir Zeldes Niina Ning Zhang Editor responsible for this volume Volker Gast Volume 278 Language Change at the Syntax-Semantics Interface Edited by Chiara Gianollo Agnes Jäger Doris Penka ISBN 978-3-11-035217-7 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-035230-6 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-039492-4 ISSN 1861-4302 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress. Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. 6 2015 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Munich/Boston Typesetting: RoyalStandard, Hong Kong Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck ♾ Printed on acid-free paper Printed in Germany www.degruyter.com Preface and acknowledgements Bringing together diachronic research from a variety of perspectives, this volume focuses on the interplay of syntactic and semantic factors in language change – an issue recently brought into the focus of formal linguistics by grammaticalization theory as well as Minimalist diachronic syntax. The contributions draw on data from numerous Indo-European languages including Vedic Sanskrit, Middle Indic, Greek as well as English and German, and discuss a range of phenomena such as change in negation markers, indefinite articles, quantifiers, modal verbs, argument structure among others. The papers analyze diachronic evidence in the light of contemporary syntactic and semantic theory, addressing the crucial question of how syntactic and semantic change are linked, and whether both are governed by similar constraints, principles and systematic mechanisms. This thematic volume grew out of a workshop we organized at the 34th annual meeting of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Sprachwissenschaft (DGfS) in Frankfurt/Main in March 2012. The workshop brought together researchers interested in diachrony from a variety of perspectives (typological/language- or family-specific, formal/functional), and prompted lively and constructive discussion of the methodological assumptions as well as empirical findings. The present volume collects a selection of the papers presented there, as well as a number of invited contributions complementing the results of the original discussion. We would like to thank first of all the authors who engaged in this project and submitted contributions for this volume. Without their cooperation at all stages, this book would not have been possible. We furthermore thankfully acknowledge the support of the organisers of the DGfS 2012 in Frankfurt who, in accepting the idea of the workshop, provided us with an optimal venue and allowed us to reach a high number of interested scientists. We also want to thank the speakers and the audience at this workshop for discussion and feedback. Besides those who contributed to this volume, we would in particular like to mention Regine Eckardt, Stefan Evert, Ian Roberts, Ewa Trutkowski, David Willis, Hedde Zeijlstra, and Mirjam Zumstein. We are also indebted to our colleagues, who with their comments and suggestions considerably contributed to the quality of the presented research and reviewed abstracts for the workshop or papers for this volume: Daniel Buncic, Cornelia Ebert, Eric Haeberli, Klaus von Heusinger, Paul Kiparsky, Sveta Krasikova, Chris Lucas, Silvia Luraghi, Jakob Maché, Umut Özge, Frans Plank, Beatrice Primus, Ian Roberts, Maribel Romero, Arnim von Stechow, Ruprecht von Waldenfels, Helmut W