How theoretical is your (historical) syntax? Towards a typology of Verb-Third in Early Old High German

Verb-Third (V3) constructions, i.e. root clauses displaying more than one element in their prefield, have been attested throughout the history of German. In this paper, I discuss some methodological issues related to the investigation of this structure in Early Old High German (EOHG, eighth to ninth century). In this language stage, the linear syntax of matrix clauses is very unstable—mainly due to the not-yet complete systematization of the V2/verb-final distinction and to the considerable amount of extraposition in main clauses—which makes the detection of this construction in the available texts particularly challenging. Moreover, little substantial and reliable prose data are extant for this period. In order to get a realistic picture of the distribution of the phenomenon at stake in EOHG, it is therefore necessary to evaluate the data by means of diagnostic tests for verb movement and only consider those cases in which the verb is unambiguously located in C and the preverbal area hosts multiple (head or non-head) elements. I will show that: (1) some of the patterns that are usually assumed to be good candidates for the category of V3 in the relevant literature are never attested in the diagnostic dataset; (2) a typology consisting of five non-correlative and three correlative diagnostic V3 constructions can be identified on the basis of an approach based on replicable methods; (3) some of these patterns display historical continuity; (4) non-prose texts are inadequate for syntactic investigations.

On Changes in Complex Sentences Syntax in the Russian Language of the 17th Century (on Material of Siberian Petitions)

The article deals with the problem of forming grammatical (syntactic) norms of the Russian national language based on the material of Siberian monuments of business writing of the 17th century. Relevance of the work is determined by the fact that Russian syntax and the history of the Russian language in Siberia are insufficiently studied, as well as by the need to expand the source base of such research. Scientific novelty of the work consists in the study of historical syntax of the complex sentences in the texts of Siberian petitions, most of which are not published and has not previously been brought to the historical-grammatical research. The high source value and linguistic informativeness of the Siberian petitions of the 17th century are proved. These texts analyze complex sentences with paratactic and hypotactic connections. The article traces the peculiarities of their use in monuments of local business writing in the aspect of developing syntactic norms of the Russian national language. The arsenal of compositional and subordinate conjunctions used in such sentences is defined. The changes in the structure of complex sentences are found out. They reflect live folk speech, language consciousness of the Russian people in Siberia and at the same time they are typical for the syntactic system of the Russian national language in the initial period of its formation.

The Historical Syntax of the Subordinative Morphemes in Assyrian Akkadian

The Assyrian subordinative morphemes -u/-ni are treated as allomorphs with the same distribution and function. In this paper we will examine the syntax of these morphemes in Assyrian and argue that they are in fact two distinct morphemes with no allomorphic relation. We will further follow a number of significant syntactic developments in the use of the subordinative morphemes in Neo-Assyrian.

ECEP: historical corpora, historical phonology and historical pronouncing dictionaries

This article presents the Eighteenth-Century English Phonology Database (ECEP) in the context of historical phonology and historical corpora. The eighteenth century witnessed the proliferation of works on elocution and orthoepy and yet the field lacks searchable digital sources comparable to those available in other disciplines like historical syntax or historical pragmatics. Because of this and for other reasons such as the difficulty in deciphering idiosyncratic notation systems in the original materials, there has been a certain disregard for the study of eighteenth-century phonological evidence. The ECEP database aims to redress this absence of research material by collecting data from eighteenth-century pronouncing dictionaries in the form of IPA transcriptions (c. 1,600 different example words totalling c. 17,600 transcriptions) and supplementary metadata, with a view to facilitating systematic analyses of phonological, chronological and geographic patterns, and also normative attitudes. The richness of the contents in ECEP will thus be of interest to phonologists, dialectologists and language variationists from the historical as well as the synchronic perspective, in that eighteenth-century orthoepists laid the ground for what became ‘Received Pronunciation’. Methodologically, the compilation of the ECEP database aims to contribute to the thriving field of corpus linguistics with a new research tool for the study of the history of English.

Treebanks in Historical Syntax

Over the last 20 years, the development of a wide range of treebanks that track the evolution of languages’ syntactic patterns through time has revolutionized the field of historical syntax. The range of treebanks now available facilitates research into the long histories of many of the major Indo-European languages. Although the field's essentially corpus-based methodology has not changed, the quantity of data now available and the ease and precision with which those data can be extracted have created new opportunities. For example, with a treebank it is possible to extract all examples of surface strings associated only with abstract structures (e.g., relative clauses, extraposition), to investigate predictions made by syntactic analyses, to search for rare constructions, and to extract enough data to support sophisticated statistical analyses. Crucially, treebanks make verification and replicability of results possible.

Z historii składni polskiej

The subject of the article are certain conjuctional constructions in ancient Polish language with (1) sociative preposition, (2) participle, (3) verbe – sentence, (4) hypotaxis – parataxis, (5) repeated conjunction (polysyndeton). In conclusion is presented state and perspectives of researches in historical syntax.