LINGUIST List 22.685
Thu Feb 10 2011
Diss: Historical Ling: Thornburg: 'Syntactic Reanalysis in Early ...'
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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
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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 morphologicaland syntactic changes that have come to distinguish it grammatically fromits parent language, Germanic, and such extant sister languages as German,Icelandic and Faroese, the latter remaining case-marking languages whileEnglish has become a fixed word-order language having only remnants of caseforms.
This dissertation undertakes an investigation of the sequences andmechanisms of change whereby oblique (dative) noun phrases were reanalyzedas 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 theproductivity of the passive operation, (3) the (apparent) discontinuoushistory 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 beunderstood more clearly in terms of (1) a non-discrete view of grammaticalrelations, (2) a theory of transitivity as a global property of a clausecomposed of an interrelated array of syntactic, semantic and pragmaticparameters, and (3) certain universal properties of discourse structure.
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