Kyle Johnson University of Massachusetts at Amherst Ian Roberts University of Stuttgart An important chapter in the history of syntactic theory opened as the 70's reached their close. The revolution that Chomsky had brought to linguistics had to this point engendered theories which remained within the grip of the philologists' construction-based vision. Their image of language as a catalogue of independent constructions served as the backdrop against which much of transformational grammar's detailed exploration evolved. In a sense, the highly successful pursuit of th phonology and morphology in the 19 century as compared to the absence of similar results in syntax (beyond observations such as Wackemagel's Law, etc. ) attests to this: just noting that, for example, French relative clauses allow subject-postposing but not preposition-stranding while English relatives do not allow the former but do allow the latter does not take us far beyond a simple record of the facts. Prior to this point, th syntactic theory had not progressed beyond the 19 century situation. But as the 80's approached, this image began to give way to a different one: grammar as a puzzle of interlocking "modules," each made up of syntactic principles which cross-cut the philologist's constructions. More and more, "constructions" decomposed into the epiphenomenal interplay of encapsulated mini-theories: X Theory, Binding Theory, Bounding Theory, Case Theory, Theta Theory, and so on. Syntactic analyses became reoriented toward the twin goals of identifying the content of these modules and deconstructing into them the descriptive results of early transformational grammar.

This book analyses the development of a number of English and French constructions involving various kinds of subject-verb inversion. The analysis is framed in terms of the principles-and-parameters approach to syntactic theory, and provides strong support for the adoption of this approach in the description and explanation of language change. The book falls into three parts. The first presents an overall framework for the analysis of inversion constructions and motivates, on the basis of synchronic data, several parameters which distinguish among the various Romance and Germanic languages. The second part shows how several near-simultaneous syntactic changes in the history of French can be explained as a change in one of the parameters introduced in Chapter One. A notable aspect of this analysis is the way in which the distribution of null subjects is shown to relate to verb-placement. The third part of the book treats verb-movement in the history of English, arguing in detail that the attested changes in this area are due to a change in the internal structure of Infl', a proposal which has important ramifications for the theory of functional heads. Throughout the book, emphasis is placed on the theoretical questions raised by language change. In this connection the two notions of diachronic reanalysis and parametric change are distinguished. Verbs and Diachronic Syntax will interest all theoretical linguists as well as specialists in the history of English, history of French, Germanic philology and Romance philology.

Kyle Johnson University of Massachusetts at Amherst Ian Roberts University of Stuttgart An important chapter in the history of syntactic theory opened as the 70's reached their close. The revolution that Chomsky had brought to linguistics had to this point engendered theories which remained within the grip of the philologists' construction-based vision. Their image of language as a catalogue of independent constructions served as the backdrop against which much of transformational grammar's detailed exploration evolved. In a sense, the highly successful pursuit of th phonology and morphology in the 19 century as compared to the absence of similar results in syntax (beyond observations such as Wackemagel's Law, etc. ) attests to this: just noting that, for example, French relative clauses allow subject-postposing but not preposition-stranding while English relatives do not allow the former but do allow the latter does not take us far beyond a simple record of the facts. Prior to this point, th syntactic theory had not progressed beyond the 19 century situation. But as the 80's approached, this image began to give way to a different one: grammar as a puzzle of interlocking "modules," each made up of syntactic principles which cross-cut the philologist's constructions. More and more, "constructions" decomposed into the epiphenomenal interplay of encapsulated mini-theories: X Theory, Binding Theory, Bounding Theory, Case Theory, Theta Theory, and so on. Syntactic analyses became reoriented toward the twin goals of identifying the content of these modules and deconstructing into them the descriptive results of early transformational grammar.

This book analyses the development of a number of English and French constructions involving various kinds of subject-verb inversion. The analysis is framed in terms of the principles-and-parameters approach to syntactic theory, and provides strong support for the adoption of this approach in the description and explanation of language change. The book falls into three parts. The first presents an overall framework for the analysis of inversion constructions and motivates, on the basis of synchronic data, several parameters which distinguish among the various Romance and Germanic languages. The second part shows how several near-simultaneous syntactic changes in the history of French can be explained as a change in one of the parameters introduced in Chapter One. A notable aspect of this analysis is the way in which the distribution of null subjects is shown to relate to verb-placement. The third part of the book treats verb-movement in the history of English, arguing in detail that the attested changes in this area are due to a change in the internal structure of Infl', a proposal which has important ramifications for the theory of functional heads. Throughout the book, emphasis is placed on the theoretical questions raised by language change. In this connection the two notions of diachronic reanalysis and parametric change are distinguished. Verbs and Diachronic Syntax will interest all theoretical linguists as well as specialists in the history of English, history of French, Germanic philology and Romance philology.