LINGUIST List 14.2282

Sat Aug 30 2003

Disc: Response to Pyatt's review of Lightfoot 2002

Editor for this issue: Karen Milligan <karenlinguistlist.org>

Directory

1. Susan Pintzuk, Response to E Pyatt's review of Lightfoot 2002 (Linguist 14.2208)

Message 1: Response to E Pyatt's review of Lightfoot 2002 (Linguist 14.2208)

Lightfoot, David W., ed. (2002) Syntactic Effects of Morphological
Change, Oxford University Press. (Linguist 13.3342)
Elizabeth J. Pyatt, Penn State University 

Re Linguist 14.2208

Re the description of article seventeen (Pintzuk): It is true that my
article questions the common assumption that the loss of the
morphological case system in English had an effect on word
order. However, the description of the evidence that I used to do so
is incorrect. I used an Old English corpus in which morphological case
was alive and well, not a Middle English corpus in which morphological
case was being lost. I found that the split between VO and OV orders
was about 37% - 63%, not an even split. I looked at data before the
reduction of the case system, not after it. I claimed that the change
from OV to VO started in the Old English period, before the loss of
morphological case, and therefore could not have been a result of this
loss.

It might also be pointed out that Junes' analysis in article eighteen
requires some stipulations (as I noted at the end of article
seventeen), and only handles some of the data that are problematic for
a Kayne 1994 (uniformly head-initial) account.