Information Structure and Language Change : : New Approaches to Word Order Variation in Germanic / / ed. by Roland Hinterhölzl, Svetlana Petrova.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter DGBA Backlist Complete English Language 2000-2014 PART1
• MitwirkendeR: Axel, Katrin,; Fleischer, Jürg,; Hinterhölzl, Roland,; Hróarsdóttir, Þorbjörg,; Kemenade, Ans,; Krisch, Thomas,; Linde, Sonja,; Lötscher, Andreas,; Lühr, Rosemarie,; Petrova, Svetlana,; Schlachter, Eva,; Solf, Michael,
• HerausgeberIn: Hinterhölzl, Roland,; Petrova, Svetlana,
• Place / Publishing House: Berlin ;, Boston : : De Gruyter Mouton, , [2009]; ©2009
• Year of Publication: 2009
• Language: English
• Series: Trends in Linguistics. Studies and Monographs [TiLSM] , 203
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (394 p.)

The volume presents new approaches to explaining word order variation and change in the Germanic languages and thus relates to one of the most prominent and widely discussed topics in the theory of language change and diachronic syntax. The novelty of our approach consists in three main points. First of all, we aim at describing functional variety in the field of word order and verb placement in the early Germanic languages not as a result of language contact, but rather as a language-internal phenomenon related to stylistic and grammatical conditions in information packaging. Second, given that information structure is not directly accessible in texts from historical corpora that are available only in written form and bear no or little information on prosody and intonation, it presents various methods of retrieving information-structural categories in such texts. Third, it presents empirical studies on the relation between word order and information structure of the four main texts of the Old High German period and embeds these results in the wider picture of word order change in Germanic. The volume will be of interest to students of German, English, and general linguistics as well as to researchers interested in diachronic syntax, philology of Older German, language change, information structure, discourse semantics, language typology, computational linguistics, and corpus studies.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Table of Contents -- Introduction -- The role of information structure in the grammar -- The verb-second property in Old High German: Different ways of filling the prefield -- The role of information structure in word order variation and word order change -- OV languages: Expressions of cues -- Discourse relations and word order change -- Methodological problems of the information-structural analysis of data from historical text corpora -- On the methods of information-structural analysis in historical texts: A case study on Old High German -- Paleographic clues to prosody? – Accents, word separation, and other phenomena in Old High German manuscripts -- On the “syntax of silence” in Proto-Indo-European -- Information-structural categories in the main texts of the early German inheritance -- Word order variation and information structure in Old High German: An analysis of subordinate dhazs-clauses in Isidor -- Information structure and word order variation in the Old High German Tatian -- Verb placement and information structure in the OHG Gospel Harmony by Otfrid von Weissenburg -- Translating information structure: A study of Notker’s translation of Boethius’s Latin De Consolatione Philosophiae into Old High German -- Aspects of word order and information structure in Old Saxon -- Backmatter