Transitivity Alternations In Diachrony

Τhis book offers a new approach to the theory of change in argument structure and voice morphology. It investigates the diachrony of transitivity, and especially the changes in causative verbs and transitivity alternations, based on data mainly from the Greek and English diachrony (all historical data are transcribed and accompanied by glosses and translations into Modern English). Data from earlier periods provide new information on burning questions in both Historical and Theoretical Linguistics. The study shows that (a) causativisations are the result of reanalysis of intransitive verbs as transitive on the basis of the linguistic cue of Case; (b) the changes in voice morphology do not depend on the derivation and direction of new transitivity alternations. Finally, the study demonstrates that the generalisation that guides the changes in voice demands morphological differentiation of the anticausative from the passive types.

This work is an exploration of the syntax of external arguments in transitivity alternations from a cross-linguistic perspective. It uses data principally from English, German, and Greek to investigate the causative/anti-causative alternation and the formation of adjectival participles.

Nobody can deny that an account of grammatical change that takes written contact into consideration is a significant challenge for any theoretical perspective. Written contact of earlier periods or from a diachronic perspective mainly refers to contact through translation. The present book includes a diachronic dimension in the study of written language contact by examining aspects of the history of translation as related to grammatical changes in English and Greek in a contrastive way. In this respect, emphasis is placed on the analysis of diachronic retranslations: the book examines translations from earlier periods of English and Greek in relation to various grammatical characteristics of these languages in different periods and in comparison to non-translated texts.

This work is an exploration of the syntax of external arguments in transitivity alternations from a cross-linguistic perspective. It uses data principally from English, German, and Greek to investigate the causative/anti-causative alternation and the formation of adjectival participles.

Valency patterns and valency orientation have been frequent topics of research under different perspectives, often poorly connected. Diachronic studies on these topics is even less systematic than synchronic ones. The papers in this book bring together two strands of research on valency, i.e. the description of valency patterns as worked out in the Leipzig Valency Classes Project (ValPaL), and the assessment of a language's basic valency and its possible orientation. Notably, the ValPaL does not provide diachronic information concerning the valency patterns investigated: one of the aims of the book is to supplement the available data with data from historical stages of languages, in order to make it profitably exploitable for diachronic research. In addition, new research on the diachrony of basic valency and valency alternations can deepen our understanding of mechanisms of language change and of the propensity of languages or language families to exploit different constructional patterns related to transitivity.

Annotation This volume addresses syntactic change at the macro and the micro level, and explores how these different levels of change are related. It includes numerous case studies of changes in syntactic constructions including relative clauses, verb second, and negation, in a range of languages.

This book explores the wealth of evidence from early Indo-Aryan for the existence of transitive nouns and adjectives, a rare linguistic phenomenon which, according to some categorizations of word classes, should not occur. John Lowe shows that most transitive nouns and adjectives attested in early Indo-Aryan cannot be analysed as a type of non-finite verb category, but must be acknowledged as a distinct constructional type. The volume provides a detailed introduction to transitivity (verbal and adpositional), the categories of agent and action noun, and to early Indo-Aryan. Four periods of early Indo-Aryan are selected for study: Rigvedic Sanskrit, the earliest Indo-Aryan; Vedic Prose, a slightly later form of Sanskrit; Epic Sanskrit, a form of Sanskrit close to the standardized 'Classical' Sanskrit; and Pali, the early Middle Indo-Aryan language of the Buddhist scriptures. John Lowe shows that while each linguistic stage is different, there are shared features of transitive nouns and adjectives which apply throughout the history of early Indo-Aryan. The data is set in the wider historical context, from Proto-Indo-European to Modern Indo-Aryan, and a formal linguistic analysis of transitive nouns and adjectives is provided in the framework of Lexical-Functional Grammar.

Although for some scholars the very possibility of syntactic reconstruction remains dubious, numerous studies have appeared reconstructing a variety of basic elements of Proto-Indo-European syntax based on evidence available particularly from ancient and/or archaic Indo-European languages. The papers in this volume originate from the Workshop “PIE Syntax and its Development” (Thessaloniki 2011), which aimed to bring together scholars interested in these problems and to shine new light on current research into ancient Indo-European syntax. Special attention was paid to the development of the hypothetical reconstructed features within the documented history of Indo-European languages. The articles in this volume were originally published in the Journal of Historical Linguistics Vol. 3:1 (2013).