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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Information Structure and Language Change: New Approaches to Word Order Variation in Germanic

Information Structure and Language Change: New Approaches to Word Order Variation in Germanic

Hinterhölzl, Roland
Petrova, Svetlana

Hardcover

Series: Trends in Linguistics. Studies and Monographs [Tilsm], Book 203

GermanGrammar & StyleLinguistics

ISBN10: 3110205912
ISBN13: 9783110205916
Publisher: de Gruyter Mouton
Published: May 20 2009
Pages: 400
Weight: 1.62
Height: 0.88 Width: 6.14 Depth: 9.21
Language: English

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.

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