A diachronic study on word order variation of object and action-measure complement in Chinese

This chapter examines word order variation and change in the high CP-domain of Hungarian embedded clauses containing the finite subordinating C head hogy ‘that’. It is argued that the complementizer hogy developed from an operator of the same morphophonological form, meaning ‘how’, and that its grammaticalization path develops in two steps. In addition to the change from an operator, located in a specifier, into a C head (specifier-to-head reanalysis), the fully grammaticalized complementizer hogy also changed its relative position on the CP-periphery, ultimately occupying the higher of two C head positions (upward reanalysis). Other complementizers that could co-occur with hogy in Old Hungarian eventually underwent similar reanalysis processes. Hence the possibility of accommodating two separate C heads in the left periphery was lost and variation in the relative position of complementizers was replaced by a fixed order.

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OV versus VO in Old High German

10.1093/oso/9780198813545.003.0013 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Svetlana Petrova ◽

Helmut Weiß

Keyword(s):

Word Order ◽

Landing Site ◽

Old High German ◽

Verb Movement ◽

Functional Projection ◽

Functional Head ◽

Word Order Variation ◽

Order Variation ◽

The Right

This chapter surveys the word order variation in the right periphery of the clause in OHG. The investigation is based on a corpus including all dependent clauses introduced by the complementizer thaz ‘that’ in the minor OHG documents, a collection of up to forty smaller texts of various genres. The analysis shows that the majority of the data can be explained within a standard OV grammar, assuming additional extraposition of heavy XPs to the right. But apart from these cases, there is evidence supporting the assumption of leftward movement of the verb to an intermediate functional projection vP which is optional with basic OV but obligatory with basic VO. In addition, the chapter presents patterns which evidently involve verb movement to a higher functional head, above vP, and discusses the nature of the landing site of the verb in these cases.

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Voice and Little v and VO–OV Word‐Order Variation in Chinese Languages

Syntax ◽

10.1111/synt.12211 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 24 (1) ◽

pp. 44-77

Author(s):

Rint Sybesma

Keyword(s):

Word Order ◽

Word Order Variation ◽

Order Variation

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Syntactic complexity, discourse status and animacy as determinants of grammatical variation in Modern English

English Language and Linguistics ◽

10.1017/s1360674309990153 ◽

2009 ◽

Vol 13 (3) ◽

pp. 365-384 ◽

Cited By ~ 10

Author(s):

ELENA SEOANE

Keyword(s):

Word Order ◽

Semantic Role ◽

Syntactic Complexity ◽

Word Order Variation ◽

Number Of Factors ◽

Grammatical Variation ◽

Order Variation ◽

Corpus Data

The aim of this article is to provide an overview of the syntactic, pragmatic and semantic determinants of word-order variation in Modern English, exemplified by the specific case of the use of long passives as order-rearranging devices. Word order in English and in most other SVO languages is affected by a number of factors such as animacy, semantic role, discourse status and syntactic complexity (Sornicola 2006). In this article, which analyses the influence of such factors in the use of long passives, I will try to show that their effects are construction-specific; in particular, that factors which are crucial in determining word order in some constructions – factors such as the animacy of the constituents involved – are entirely overruled by others in the case of Modern English long passives. Corpus data presented here will also serve to address issues pertaining to the nature of the determinants of grammatical variation, such as their independent versus epiphenomenal character, their interactions, and the locus of their effects on word order.

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