Diachronic Syntax: Models and Mechanisms (review)

Diachronic syntax (hence DS) combines a selection of papers presented at the Fifth Diachronic Generative Syntax Conference (York, UK, 1998). The book contains fourteen chapters and is divided into ‘Introduction’, ‘Frameworks’, ‘Comparative basis’, and ‘Mechanisms’. The ‘Introduction’ starts out by emphasizing that both acquisition and diffusion are of central interest to historical linguists. It reviews the minimalist program within which linguistic change would be seen as change in the feature composition of lexical items (7). However, most contributions are in a slightly older framework, for example, feature change is only relevant in a few of the papers. Richard Kayne’s antisymmetry hypothesis, very relevant when the emphasis is on Germanic, is used by Lars-Olof Delsing and þorbjörg Hróarsdóttir but not by others.

The ‘Frameworks’ section includes three papers, each representing a different framework: Nigel Vincent on null arguments in Latin and Romance, using lexical-functional grammar and optimality theory; Ans van Kemenade on Jespersen’s cycle, using a minimalist approach; and Ted Briscoe on an evolutionary perspective to language change. The other papers in the volume use principles and parameters/minimalism. Briscoe’s approach is perhaps the least known among historical linguists. Briscoe argues that E-languages are best characterized as dynamic systems or ‘complex adaptive systems’ (75) where the source of linguistic selection is the ‘language acquisition “bottleneck” through which successful grammatical variants must pass repeatedly with each generation of language learners’ (97).

The ‘Comparative basis’ section contains chapters by Eric Haeberli, Anthony Kroch and Ann Taylor, and Alexander Williams. The data is corpus-based and taken mainly from Middle English. Haeberli and Kroch & Taylor examine dialect variation; Williams is more concerned with date of composition. Haeberli’s ‘Adjuncts and the syntax of subjects’ argues that the verb-second of Germanic is not the same as that of Old English. Kroch & Taylor’s ‘Verb-object order in Early Middle English’ compares five early thirteenth-century Midlands texts and considers VO order as well as INFL-medial vs. INFL-final position in keeping with earlier work that grammars can be in competition in a text/speaker. Williams’s ‘Null subjects in Middle English existentials’ (169) shows that after 1250, the number of expletive subjects increases dramatically: from 29% to 85%. Null expletives are allowed, he argues, as long as there is a finite verb higher than the expletive, that is V-to-C. Hence, null expletives are important for word order theories such as Kroch & Taylor’s.

‘Mechanisms’ is divided into two parts. There are two chapters on features: Ana Maria Martins’s ‘Polarity items in Romance’ and John Whitman’s ‘Relabelling’; and five chapters on movement: Montse Batllori and Fransesc Roca’s ‘The value of definite determiners from Old Spanish to Modern Spanish’, Lars-Olof Delsing’s ‘From OV to VO in Swedish’, Chung-Hye Han’s ‘Evolution of do-support in English imperatives’, þorbjörg Hróarsdóttir’s ‘Interactions movements in the history of Icelandic’, and David Willis’s ‘Verb movement in Slavonic conditionals’. These chapters are the most varied in terms of topics and languages.

With the recent availability of electronic texts (provided e.g. by the Oxford Text Archive and the Toronto-based Dictionary of Old English) and corpora (e.g. Helsinki, Penn-Helsinki, Brooklyn-Geneva-Amsterdam-Helsinki), careful historical studies have become much more feasible, and this volume provides many good examples of this new methodology. The breadth of the topics makes the (nicely produced) book a pleasure to read.