Morphosyntactic Variation Export

@inproceedings{citeulike:801233, abstract = {In a series of recent investigations of language change, a group of researchers at the University of Pennsylvania and elsewhere has described the grammatical character and time course of a number of gradual syntactic changes in various European languages. In all of these cases, the languages undergoing change exhibit variation in areas of grammar where we do not find optionality in stable systems. For example, Late Middle English, in the course of losing the verb-second constraint, manifests a variation between verb-second and simple SVO word order that is not found elsewhere among V2 languages. Similarly, Old English and Yiddish vary between INFL-final and INFL-medial phrase structure in the course of changing from the former option to the latter categorically; and Ancient Greek, in the centuries between the Homeric period and the New Testament, evolves from an SOV language to an SVO one, with extensive variation between the two orders during the long transition period. Indeed, in no case that we have investigated does the variation associated with syntactic change correspond to a diachronically stable alternation in another language. The present paper attempts to explain this result, extending an argument that we and others have made in the past (see especially the work of Santorini) to the effect that syntactic change proceeds via competition between grammatically incompatible options which substitute for one another in usage. Going beyond previous work, it asks why, from a theoretical perspective, change should generally proceed as it does. The answer given to this question follows the line of certain recent work in syntactic theory where it has been claimed that syntactic variation among languages is due to cross-linguistic differences in the morphosyntactic properties of functional heads. Syntactic heads, therefore, are taken to behave like morphological formatives in being subject to the well-known "Blocking Effect", which excludes doublets. Under our morphological conception of syntactic properties, the blocking effect also excludes variability in the feature content of syntactic heads, as the resultant variant heads would have the status of doublets. This exclusion, however, does not mean, either for morphology or for syntax, that languages never exhibit doublets. Rather it means that doublets are always reflections of unstable competition between mutually exclusive grammatical options.}, author = {Kroch, Anthony}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the 30th annual meeting of the Chicago Linguistics Society}, citeulike-article-id = {801233}, citeulike-linkout-0 = {ftp://babel.ling.upenn.edu/papers/faculty/tony_kroch/papers/morphosyntax.ps}, keywords = {language\_change}, month = {June}, pages = {180--201}, posted-at = {2006-08-14 19:28:35}, priority = {0}, title = {Morphosyntactic Variation}, url = {ftp://babel.ling.upenn.edu/papers/faculty/tony_kroch/papers/morphosyntax.ps}, volume = {2}, year = {1994} }

TY - CONF ID - citeulike:801233 L3 - citeulike-article-id:801233 N2 - In a series of recent investigations of language change, a group of researchers at the University of Pennsylvania and elsewhere has described the grammatical character and time course of a number of gradual syntactic changes in various European languages. In all of these cases, the languages undergoing change exhibit variation in areas of grammar where we do not find optionality in stable systems. For example, Late Middle English, in the course of losing the verb-second constraint, manifests a variation between verb-second and simple SVO word order that is not found elsewhere among V2 languages. Similarly, Old English and Yiddish vary between INFL-final and INFL-medial phrase structure in the course of changing from the former option to the latter categorically; and Ancient Greek, in the centuries between the Homeric period and the New Testament, evolves from an SOV language to an SVO one, with extensive variation between the two orders during the long transition period. Indeed, in no case that we have investigated does the variation associated with syntactic change correspond to a diachronically stable alternation in another language. The present paper attempts to explain this result, extending an argument that we and others have made in the past (see especially the work of Santorini) to the effect that syntactic change proceeds via competition between grammatically incompatible options which substitute for one another in usage. Going beyond previous work, it asks why, from a theoretical perspective, change should generally proceed as it does. The answer given to this question follows the line of certain recent work in syntactic theory where it has been claimed that syntactic variation among languages is due to cross-linguistic differences in the morphosyntactic properties of functional heads. Syntactic heads, therefore, are taken to behave like morphological formatives in being subject to the well-known "Blocking Effect", which excludes doublets. Under our morphological conception of syntactic properties, the blocking effect also excludes variability in the feature content of syntactic heads, as the resultant variant heads would have the status of doublets. This exclusion, however, does not mean, either for morphology or for syntax, that languages never exhibit doublets. Rather it means that doublets are always reflections of unstable competition between mutually exclusive grammatical options. EP - 201 TI - Morphosyntactic Variation VL - 2 T2 - Proceedings of the 30th annual meeting of the Chicago Linguistics Society SP - 180 KW - language_change AU - Kroch, Anthony PY - 1994/06// UR - ftp://babel.ling.upenn.edu/papers/faculty/tony_kroch/papers/morphosyntax.ps ER -