Svetlana Petrova

Roland Hinterhölzl

The book addresses one of the most prominent and widely discussed topics in diachronic syntax, namely, word order variation and change in older Germanic. It presents a novel approach that explains these issues not in terms of parameters and parameter change or in terms of competition between two grammars, but in terms of competition between information-structurally marked and unmarked forms within one grammar.

New Approaches to Word Order Variation in Germanic

Information Structure and Language Change

The volume presents new approaches to explaining word order variation and change in the Germanic languages and thus relates to one of the most prominent and widely discussed topics in the theory of language change and diachronic syntax. The novelty of our approach consists in three main points. First of all, we aim at describing functional variety in the field of word order and verb placement in the early Germanic languages not as a result of language contact, but rather as a language-internal phenomenon related to stylistic and grammatical conditions in information packaging. Second, given that information structure is not directly accessible in texts from historical corpora that are available only in written form and bear no or little information on prosody and intonation, it presents various methods of retrieving information-structural categories in such texts. Third, it presents empirical studies on the relation between word order and information structure of the four main texts of the Old High German period and embeds these results in the wider picture of word order change in Germanic. The volume will be of interest to students of German, English, and general linguistics as well as to researchers interested in diachronic syntax, philology of Older German, language change, information structure, discourse semantics, language typology, computational linguistics, and corpus studies.

Josef Bayer

Andreas Trotzke

Until recently, little attention has been paid within syntax to components of discourse meaning that go beyond information structure and fall into the domain of non-at-issue meaning operating at the level of illocutionary force. To approach this domain, many of the contributions of this volume deal with the syntax of discourse particles. However, the issue of how to account for discourse particles within a more explicit map of the illocutionary domain is a good starting point for considering further phenomena related to the syntax of speech acts. By focusing on speech-act related particles and/or meaning domains, this volume makes a new contribution to the field, as existing collections either do not offer a comparatively narrow focus on particles or are not limited to syntax-oriented approaches. The primary audience of this volume are researchers and graduate students interested in state-of-the-art approaches to the syntax-discourse interface within the cartographic approach to syntax.

Discourse-oriented Syntax

In this book, Hinterholzl provides a comprehensive study of three sailent phenomena of West Germanic, namely scrambling, remnant movement and restructuring, and discusses their interrelatedness. In particular, restructuring is shown to break down into remnant movement of the major phases of the infinitival clause, accounting for the formation of verb clusters and the transparency of restructuring infinitives.

Roland Hinterhölzl

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