Morphosyntactic Change Functional and Formal Perspectives [Hardcover]

Part I General Issues in Morphosyntactic Change
1. What is 'Good Practice' in Historical Linguistics: Aims and Methods
2. Conflict and Reconciliation: Two Theories Compared
3. Principles, Mechanisms, and Causes of Change
Part II Case Studies
4. A Paradigm Case: The Story of the Modals (and other auxiliaries)
5. From Discourse to (morpho)syntax and Vice Versa: The Case of Clause-fusion
6. Subjectification, Scope, and Word Order
7. Towards a Usage-based Theory of Morphosyntactic Change: Summary and Conclusions
References
Index

Olga Fischer is Professor of Germanic Linguistics at the University of Amsterdam, where her PhD thesisSyntactic Change and Causation: Developments in Infinitival Constructions in Englishwas accepted in 1990. She is a contributor to theCambridge History of the English Language(CUP 1992), co-author ofThe Syntax of Early English(CUP 2000), and co-editor ofForm Miming Meaning and Pathways of Change(Benjamins 2000 and 2001).