Books > Language & Literature > Language & linguistics > Historical & comparative linguistics
|
Buy Now
Topicalization and Stress Clash Avoidance in the History of English (Hardcover)
Loot Price: R5,094
Discovery Miles 50 940
|
|
Topicalization and Stress Clash Avoidance in the History of English (Hardcover)
Series: Topics in English Linguistics [TiEL]
Expected to ship within 12 - 17 working days
|
The book is concerned with the interaction of syntax, information
structure and prosody in the history of English, demonstrating this
with a case study of object topicalization. The approach is
data-oriented, using material from syntactically parsed digital
corpora of Old, Middle and Early Modern English, which serve as a
solid foundation for conclusions. The use of object topicalization
underwent a sharp decline from Old English until today. In the
present volume, a basic prosodic well-formedness condition, the
Clash Avoidance Requirement, is identified as the main factor for
this change. With the loss of V2-syntax, object topicalization led
more easily to cases in which two focalized phrases, the
topicalized object and the subject, are adjacent. The two focal
accents on these phrases would produce a clash, thus violating the
Clash Avoidance Requirement. In order to circumvent this, the use
of topicalization in critical cases is avoided. The Clash Avoidance
Requirement is highly relevant also today, as experimental data on
English and German show. Further, the Clash Avoidance Requirement
helps to explain the well-known syntactic structure of the left
periphery in Old English. An analysis positing two subject
positions is defended in the study. The variation of these subject
positions is shown to depend not on pronominal vs. lexical status
of the subject but on information structural properties.
General
Is the information for this product incomplete, wrong or inappropriate?
Let us know about it.
Does this product have an incorrect or missing image?
Send us a new image.
Is this product missing categories?
Add more categories.
Review This Product
No reviews yet - be the first to create one!
|
You might also like..
|
Email address subscribed successfully.
A activation email has been sent to you.
Please click the link in that email to activate your subscription.