LINGUIST List 22.685 Thu Feb 10 2011 Diss: Historical Ling: Thornburg: 'Syntactic Reanalysis in Early ...' Editor for this issue: Mfon Udoinyang <mfonlinguistlist.org> New! Visit LL's Multitree project for over 1000 trees dynamically generated from scholarly hypotheses about language relationships:             http://multitree.linguistlist.org/ To post to LINGUIST, use our convenient web form at http://linguistlist.org/LL/posttolinguist.cfm. Directory         1.     Linda Thornburg , Syntactic Reanalysis in Early English Message 1: Syntactic Reanalysis in Early English Date: 10-Feb-2011 From: Linda Thornburg <lthornburgalumni.usc.edu> Subject: Syntactic Reanalysis in Early English E-mail this message to a friend Institution: University of Southern California Program: Department of Linguistics Dissertation Status: Completed Degree Date: 1984 Author: Linda L. Thornburg Dissertation Title: Syntactic Reanalysis in Early English Linguistic Field(s): Historical Linguistics Subject Language(s): English (eng) Dissertation Director: Bernard Comrie John A. Hawkins Dissertation Abstract: From 900 to 1500 the English language accomplished the major morphological and syntactic changes that have come to distinguish it grammatically from its parent language, Germanic, and such extant sister languages as German, Icelandic and Faroese, the latter remaining case-marking languages while English has become a fixed word-order language having only remnants of case forms. This dissertation undertakes an investigation of the sequences and mechanisms of change whereby oblique (dative) noun phrases were reanalyzed as Subject and Direct Object noun phrases. Under specific analysis are: (1) the discrepant histories of nominal and pronominal inflectional leveling, (2) the reanalysis of non-direct objects into direct objects and the productivity of the passive operation, (3) the (apparent) discontinuous history of the reanalysis of impersonal to personal constructions, and (4) the relation of (1) and (3) to each other. The claim is made and supported that these diachronic changes can be understood more clearly in terms of (1) a non-discrete view of grammatical relations, (2) a theory of transitivity as a global property of a clause composed of an interrelated array of syntactic, semantic and pragmatic parameters, and (3) certain universal properties of discourse structure. New! Visit LL's Multitree project for over 1000 trees dynamically generated from scholarly hypotheses about language relationships:             http://multitree.linguistlist.org/ Read more issues|LINGUIST home page|Top of issue Page Updated: 10-Feb-2011       About LINGUIST    |   Contact Us       While the LINGUIST List makes every effort to ensure the linguistic relevance of sites listed on its pages, it cannot vouch for their contents.