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Introduction [a: The Cambridge Handbook of Historical Syntax]
No full textThe study of historical linguistics has long been a concern of linguistic theory. Although it has antecedents in the Middle Ages, historical linguistics was not systematically studied until the nineteenth century, when it came to dominate the field. In the past sixty years, the development of both Greenbergian language typology and Chomsky's generative grammar (which has developed an explicitly comparative programme since the early 1980s) has led, at first independently but arguably with growing convergence, to a huge increase in our knowledge of cross-linguistic variation. Our notion of how grammatical systems vary and our ability to provide detailed, sophisticated analyses of this variation across a range of languages and grammatical phenomena is probably greater than it has been at any time in the past. Since synchronic variation reflects and is created by diachronic change, the study of historical syntax has also flourished and continues to do so. The pioneering work in historical syntax includes, but is not limited to, Kuryłowicz ([1965] 1976), Traugott (1965, 1969), Weinreich, Labov and Herzog (1968), Givón (1971), Andersen (1973), Lehmann (1973, 1974), Li (1975, 1977), Vennemann (1975), Allen ([1977] 1980), Langacker (1977), Timberlake (1977), Moravcsik (1978), Lightfoot (1979) and Lehmann ([1982] 1995). As has often been observed, change appears to be almost an inherent feature of all aspects of language, and syntax is certainly no exception. While the synchronic study of syntax, albeit from a comparative perspective both within and across different language families, does undoubtedly allow us to ask important questions and make insightful and enlightening hypotheses and discoveries about the nature of syntactic structure, the study of historical syntax arguably offers the linguist greater possibilities. Among other things, through the detailed comparison of different periods of the same language or language family we are able to track and document the individual stages in the development of particular syntactic structures, potentially allowing us to identify, pinpoint and explain the causes – whether endogenous or exogenous – of such changes, their overt reflexes and potential effects on other areas of the grammar, and the mechanisms involved therein. While successive historical stages of individual linguistic varieties are naturally closely related to each other, manifestly displaying in most cases a high degree of structural homogeneity, they often diverge minimally in significant and interesting ways which allow the linguist to isolate and observe what lies behind surface differences across otherwise highly homogenized grammars
Principles and parameters
No full textIntroduction: Principles and ParametersThe Principles-and-Parameters (P&P) approach to cross-linguistic variation was first developed by Chomsky and his associates in the early 1980s (see in particular Chomsky (1981), and, for more general introductions, Roberts (1996), Baker (2001); see also discussions in §7.2, §13.5, §16.4.1, §28.2). The leading idea is that Universal Grammar (UG) contains an invariant set of principles associated with parameters which define the space of possible variation among actual languages. Taking the principles to be innately given, and the parameters to be triggered by salient parts of the primary linguistic data (PLD) for language acquisition, this approach was held to be a major step in the direction of explanatory adequacy (in the sense of Chomsky 1964), since language acquisition could be seen as setting the parameters of the native language on the combined basis of the innate UG and the triggering aspects of the PLD. To give a concrete, if rather simplified, example: we know that languages can be divided into those which have unmarked VO order, e.g. English, and those which have OV order, e.g. Japanese (see also the discussion of Romance and Latin in §27.3 below). On the classical P&P view, the notion of ‘verb’ is given by the universal theory of syntactic categories, the notion of ‘object’ is given by the universal theory of grammatical functions, and the idea that the two combine to form a VP is given by the universal theory of phrase structure. These are all taken to be reflexes of UG principles. But experience tells the child which order of O and V inside VP is the appropriate one, and so a child hearing Japanese sets the parameter to OV, while the child hearing English sets it to VO. Parameters describe what is variant in natural-language syntax, and as such they predict the dimensions of language typology, predict aspects of language acquisition and predict what can change in the diachronic dimension
Phylogenetic Reconstruction in Syntax: The Parametric Comparison Method
No full textThe Parametric Comparison Method (PCM) is a novel tool for studying the historical evolution and classification of languages. The intuition behind it is that purely theoretical advances of linguistics over the past few decades may provide an innovative system for reconstructing language phylogenies
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
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