Eintrag

Titel

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

Personen

Roland Hinterhölzl, Svetlana Petrova

Jahr

2009

Typ

Sammelband

Verlag

Mouton de Gruyter

Ort

Amsterdam, Berlin, New York

Reihe

Trends in linguistics

Band

203

Schlagwörter

Informationsstruktur
Sprachwandel
Wortstellung

Beiträge

• Hinterhölzl: The role of information structure in word order variation and word order change
• Fleischer: Paleographic clues to prosody? – Accents, word separation, and other phenomena in Old High German manuscripts

Abstract

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 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.

https://grammis.ids-mannheim.de/bdg/35283