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  • English historical syntax and morphology: Selected papers from 11 ICEHL, Santiago de Compostela, 7–11 September 2000, vol. 1 ed. by Teresa Fanego, María José López-Couzo, and Javier Pérez-Guerra
  • Alexander Bergs
English historical syntax and morphology: Selected papers from 11 ICEHL, Santiago de Compostela, 7–11 September 2000, vol. 1. Ed. by Teresa Fanego, María José López-Couzo, and Javier Pérez-Guerra. (Current issues in linguistic theory 223.) Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2002. Pp. 297. ISBN 158811192X. $131 (Hb).

This companion volume to Sounds, words, texts and change from the Eleventh International Conference on English Historical Linguistics contains twelve papers focusing on morphology and syntax. [End Page 172]

Minoji Akimoto discusses ‘Two types of passivization of “V+NP+P” constructions in relation to idiomatization’ between 1600 and today. He points out that a distinction must be made between suffixed and nonsuffixed nouns. In ‘On the development of a friend of mine’, Cynthia Allen looks into the origin and expansion of the so-called ‘double-genitive’ construction. She demonstrates that the construction went through three different stages between early Middle English and today. Douglas Biber and Victoria Clark also examine developments in the noun phrase in ‘Historical shifts in modification patterns with complex noun phrase structures’. They focus on more recent developments and stress that changes in noun-modifying structures have gained momentum during the last 50–100 years. For Laurel Brinton, it is ‘Grammaticalization versus lexicalization reconsidered: On the late use of temporal adverbs’. Brinton shows that changes in the use of temporal adverbs as attribute adjectives pose serious problems for concepts such as lexicalization and (de-)grammaticalization. Dieter Kastovsky contributes a paper on verbal derivational morphology: ‘The derivation of ornative, locative, ablative, privative and reversative verbs in English’. He argues that many of the items in question share a cognitive-semantic basis which in turn accounts for similar and highly productive derivational patterns. Lucia Kornexl’s ‘From gold-gifa to chimney sweep?’ probes the problem of morphological (un)markedness of agent nouns in Modern English from a diachronic perspective. One of her key findings is that zero-derivation of agentives has never been as productive as is commonly assumed.

The development of volitional modality is at the heart of Manfred Krug’s ‘A path to volitional modality’. Incorporating corpus findings and grammaticalization theory, Krug traces the development of want and want to from the Early Modern period to the present day. Ursula Lenker asks: ‘Is it, stylewise or otherwise, wise to use -wise?’. She shows that -wise in sentence adverbials appears to be a recent innovation in English. Bettelou Los is not interested in innovations but rather in ‘The loss of the indefinite pronoun man’. She identifies the loss of V2, the use of passive constructions, and the competition of to-infinitives and subjunctives as contributing factors to the loss of man. Anneli Meurman-Solin presents a corpus-based description of development and use of ‘The progressive in Older Scots’. She focuses on systematic factors in idiolectal grammars and the corresponding discourse-specific, text-typological distributions of the variants. ‘Detransitivization in the history of English from a semantic perspective’ is the topic of Ruth Möhlig and Monika Klage’s paper. On the basis of selected verb pattern developments, Möhlig and Klage demonstrate that a range of semantic factors played a crucial role in this complex syntactic change. Julia Schlüter’s ‘Morphology recycled: The principle of rhythmic alternation at work in Early and Late Modern English grammatical variation’ presents extensive corpus studies which exemplify the interaction of factors such as rhythmic alternation, standardization pressure, the horror aequi principle, semantics, and phonology in the use of four different morphosyntactic variables.

Like its companion volume, this book is scrupulously compiled and edited; it belongs on the shelf of every scholar of English historical linguistics, right next to its sister volume.

Alexander Bergs
Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf
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