Nonfinite Structures In Theory And Change
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Nonfinite Structures in Theory and Change
Author: D. Gary Miller
language: en
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Release Date: 2002
This book investigates the precise nature of nonfinite structures and explores the ways in which they change. Gary Miller examines a broad range of structures, including traditional infinitives, gerunds, and participles, across different Indo-European (and some non-Indo-European) languages now and in the past.As structures which are nonfinite in some languages are not so in others, the question arises whether the concept 'nonfinite' has any meaning or explanatory power. In seeking an answer to this conundrum, the author shows that infinitives with subject person agreement, such as in West Greenlandic, Modern Greek, Portuguese, Welsh, and Hungarian, share properties with prototypical nonfinite formations. Professor Miller examines languages with morphologically marked tense on infinitives, including Ancient Greek and Latin, and Modern Turkish. He demonstrates that nonfinite structures that can be assigned non-structural (inherent or semantic) case differ systematically from those with either structural or no case.The book concludes with a substantial history of infinitives, gerunds, and participles in Old and Middle English, which reveals why and how nonfinite structures change and vary over time.Gary Miller1s innovative theoretical reasoning and the wide range of evidence on which it is brought to bear make this book a considerable contribution to the understanding of grammatical change and its formal expression, as well as to the history of English.
Corpus-Based Studies on Non-Finite Complements in Recent English
This book showcases fresh research into the underexplored territory of complementation through a detailed analysis of gerunds and ‘to’ infinitives involving control in English. Drawing on large electronic corpora of recent English, it examines subject control in adjectival predicate constructions with ‘scared’, ‘terrified’ and ‘afraid’, moving on to a study of object control with the verbal predicate ‘warn’. In each chapter a case study is presented of a matrix adjective that selects both infinitival and gerundial complements, and a central theme is the application of the Choice Principle as a novel factor bearing on complement selection. The authors argue that it is helpful to view the patterns in question as constructions, as combinations of form and meaning, within the system of English predicate complementation, and convincingly demonstrate how a new gerundial pattern has emerged and spread in the course of the last two centuries. This book will appeal to scholars of semantics, corpus linguistics, and historical linguistics as well as those with an interest in variation and change in recent English more generally.
Reorganising Grammatical Variation
Author: Antje Dammel
language: en
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
Release Date: 2018-10-15
With most studies on grammatical variation concentrating on the synchronic level, a systematic investigation of long-term grammatical variation within the context of language change, i.e. from a predominantly diachronic perspective, has largely remained a desideratum. The present volume fills this research gap by bringing together nine empirically rich bottom-up case studies on morphological and morphosyntactic variation phenomena in standard and dialect varieties of Indo-European languages (Germanic, Romance, Greek). While variation has often been regarded as merely a transitory epiphenomenal symptom of change, the findings of this volume show that variation is a resilient feature of human language and answer the question what makes variation time-stable. Bridging the gap between corpus-based research on language variation and more theory-driven typological and functional approaches, the volume is of special interest for all researchers concerned with interface phenomena seeking to gain a broader understanding of the mechanisms of linguistic variation and change.