Review article / Rapport critique / Forschungsbericht
Formal syntax and language change Developments and outlook* Ans van Kemenade Radboud University, Nijmegen
In this article, I trace some of the some of the core issues and recent developments in formal approaches to syntactic change, with some special attention on how the development from the Principles and Parameters (P&P) approach to the Minimalist framework has had an impact on issues in syntactic change. The primary forum for work on syntactic change in this vein are the Diachronic Generative Syntax Conferences (DIGS), which are a debating ground confronting P&P/minimalist theorizing with many fairly detailed empirical, often corpus-based case studies of change. Most of the DIGS conferences have produced thematic collections of articles which reflect the core issues under discussion here. The approach I adopt here is one of taking stock, sketching the ideas as they have evolved in the recent literature. The article is organized as follows: The core issues of the approach are taken up in the various sections. §1 is on first language acquisition as a locus of change; §2 is on the relation between inflection and syntax; §3 is devoted to approaches to language variation.
1. First language acquisition as a locus of change It may be useful to briefly reiterate the basic view, first set out fully in Lightfoot (1979), that the main locus of language change is grammar change that takes place during the process of first language acquisition. The object of research is then squarely the I-language, which is at a considerable level of abstraction from the * This article represents something like a state-of-the-art report on current minimalist work on syntactic change. There will be special focus on Diachronic Syntax: Models and mechanisms ed. by Susan Pintzuk, Georges Tsoulas & Anthony Warner (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); on Syntactic Effects of Morphological Change ed. by David Lightfoot (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); and on Syntactic Change: A minimalist approach to grammaticalization by Ian Roberts & Anna Roussou (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Diachronica 24:1 (2007), 155–169. issn – / e-issn – © John Benjamins Publishing Company
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E-language, the language that historical linguists have to deal with in an imperfect shape in the texts that form their body of data. This follows from the general spirit of inquiry of Chomsky’s work from its earliest formulation, thus: [t]he child who learns a language has in some sense constructed the grammar for himself on the basis of his observation of sentences and non-sentences (i.e. corrections by the verbal community). Study of the actual observed ability of a speaker to distinguish sentences from non-sentences, detect ambiguities, etc., apparently forces us to the conclusion that this grammar is of an extremely complex and abstract character, and that the young child has succeeded in carrying out what from the formal point of view, at least, seems to be a remarkable type of theory construction. Furthermore, this task is accomplished in an astonishingly short time, to a large extent independently of intelligence, and in a comparable way by all children. Any theory of learning must cope with these facts. (Chomsky 1959:57)
If we consider historical change from this perspective, it follows that the focus of investigation is on grammar (I-language) change rather than on (E-)language change. This distinction is crucial and has important ramifications for how we approach historical change. One major implication of this view is the notion that the process of acquisition of the grammar of the native language is the main locus of change. Data from language change are of particular interest to this approach because we can get a clearer view of a partially hidden abstract system when it changes from one state to another. During the 1990s, much work on language acquisition in a formal syntactic perspective holds that during the process of first language acquisition, children match the input from the language environment as much as possible, matching it with possible parameter values made available by UG. Lightfoot (1999) argues against this approach, on the one hand because this view assigns too large a role to UG; on the other hand because learners do not always match the input. Lightfoot follows up work that argues in favour of what is called ‘cue-based learning’. The cue-based child, rather than exploring all the parametric options that are made available by UG, picks up patterns that are robustly represented in the language environment. These patterns (‘triggers’) feed into cues. We may think of cues as pieces of structure, little grammar fragments, deduced by the learner from robust pieces of evidence available in main clauses (degree 0) in the language environment. Consider, for instance, a Verb Second (V2) grammar as in present-day Dutch and German, yielding clauses such as the Dutch ones in (1) and (2): (1) Gisteren heeft Joe Martha een boek over Rembrandt gegeven yesterday has Joe Martha a book on Rembrandt given “Yesterday, Joe gave Martha a book on Rembrandt”
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(2) Aan Caravaggio wordt in dat boek veel aandacht geschonken to Caravaggio becomes in that book much attention paid “Much attention is paid to Caravaggio in that book”
The trigger for acquiring the V2 grammar of languages like Dutch presumably consists of the subset of main clauses introduced by a non-subject, such as those in (1) and (2). What children have to learn is that the structure of those sentences is something like in (3), where XP stands for a range of subject and non-subject constituents:
(3) [CP XP [C Vf [IP SOV ]]]
Lightfoot (1999:152–153) argues that the cue for the learner is that a robust number of main clauses begin with an arbitrary phrasal category. The account for why this is accompanied by movement of the finite verb to C must come from a UG condition saying that material in Spec,CP must be licensed by a lexically filled C. This is because the learner cannot know that movement of the finite verb is obligatory, since she does not have access to ungrammatical data: She does not hear main clauses with [ XP … Vf]. This part of the account must therefore come from a UG condition. Hence, the trigger is, according to Lightfoot, the 30 per cent main clauses beginning with XP, to which the learner assigns a piece of structure, the cue:
(4)
SpecCP
[ XP]
A cue is, therefore, an element of I-language, which in turn feeds into the parameter responsible for V2. Thus, the child gradually builds up a grammar, following a learning path. The implication for historical work, e.g. on the loss of V2 in the history of English or French, is clear: As changes in the E-language environment, e.g. dialect contact, cause the trigger to fall below some critical percentage (perhaps 30%), the V2 cue will cease to be triggered. Westergaard (in press) extends Lightfoot’s argument to a V2 typology in which the CP is split into many different functional heads as in (5):
(5)
CP[ ForceP[Int°
… Top° … Pol° … ] … Foc° Top° … Fin° IP[
These functional heads correspond to different clause types (interrogative, topic, polarity, focus, topic, finite) and this yields a typology in which V2 may vary according to clause type. Westergaard discusses the acquisition of variation with respect to V2 in dialects of Norwegian, arguing that language learners master such variation by clause type and claiming that such fine-grained variation is readily learnable. Observe that Westergaard must assume that the clausal architecture as in (5) is given by UG. The cue would then be whether in the clause type corresponding to each functional head, the Specifier is filled by an XP or not.
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1.1 Reanalysis: The key mechanism Ever since Lightfoot (1979), the generative approach to syntactic change has considered that the key mechanism of change is reanalysis, essentially the language learner’s attribution of a novel underlying analysis to the same surface form. Typical examples recurring in the literature over the years are a reanalysis from verb to auxiliary; from underlying OV to VO word order; the loss of verb movement strategies. At the heart of the approach is the attempt to make sense of such reanalyses as shifts in the balance between inflectional morphology and syntax, from the point of view of a theoretical framework that makes tight claims about how this relationship should be formulated in structural terms. The development of historical work in this vein has therefore closely followed various incarnations of minimalist theorizing, spearheaded in particular by the work of Ian Roberts and various associates, and counterbalanced by extensive theoretically informed corpus-based work. It is worth emphasizing, however, that in spite of considerable reformulations in the course of these various incarnations, the underlying claims remain essentially about morpho-syntactic variation between languages, following the insight formulated by Borer (1984) that parametric variation between languages is essentially morphological in nature, i.e. it is in the functional rather than the lexical domain.
2. Evolving views on the relation between morphology and syntax The above approach to morpho-syntactic change has developed with increasing emphasis since the introduction of grammatical constituents or functional projections, evidently because the concept of a syntactic projection for grammatical/inflectional properties potentially represents a powerful tool in analysing the relationship between inflectional morphology and syntax. Since Chomsky (1986) replaced the sentential structure in terms of S/S’ by one in terms of CP/IP both conforming to the standard phrase structure format, these two projections have come to be split ever further. Thus CP, essentially the clausal domain in which clause type is encoded, has since Rizzi (1997) become split minimally into wh, focus, topic and finiteness (and see Vangsnes (2005) and Westergaard (in press) for further elaborations). IP, essentially the extended projection of the verb, has come to be split minimally into Agreement, Mood, Negation, Tense, and see Cinque (1999) for a considerable elaboration accounting for adverb order. The rationale is that each such projection hosts relevant morphology, e.g. tense and agreement, and a finite verb must somehow be associated with such grammatical features.
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Functional categories (FCs) potentially make a very strong claim about the relation between inflectional morphology and syntax, and much of the theorizing of the past decade has been about how this relationship is best formulated, and what the nature is of their impact on syntax. In pre-minimalist work, it was often assumed that this impact is quite direct: Thus, in a sequence of functional heads C Agr Neg T … (Pollock 1989, Belletti 1990), a verb would move to T-Neg-Agr to pick up the relevant morphology. This movement would be triggered by a relative richness of the relevant morphology, accounting e.g. for the contrast in finite verb position between French and English as in (6): (6) Marie mange jamais du chocolat “Marie never eats chocolate”
Assuming that a finite verb position preceding the adverb as in French mange jamais reflects V-movement to some functional head on the left of the adverb, whereas the English word order never eats indicates the lack of such movement, the parametric difference between French and English would be that relatively rich verbal agreement triggers movement to a functional head in French, whereas English lost this movement, at least in part as a result of the loss of verbal agreement morphology. Note that this represents a strong and direct claim about the relation between rich morphology and movement to a functional head as reflected in word order, and this resulted in a lively industry on word order change following inflectional loss, for instance the loss of null subjects (e.g. Hulk & van Kemenade 1993, Battye & Roberts 1995); the loss of V-movement strategies (e.g. Kroch 1989, following up Roberts 1985; Roberts 1993; Warner 1997). The claim of a quite direct relation between inflection and syntax raises some issues concerning learnability as discussed above in connection with cue-based learning: The assumption of a strong and direct link between inflection and word order would seem to predict that loss of morphology acts as a direct cue for the loss of V-movement. This in turn implies that language learners might draw on evidence from inflectional morphology rather than on robust positive word order evidence. The language learner in this view then seems to rely rather heavily on a UG-prescribed relation between inflection and word order. Bobaljik (2001) gives an interesting discussion of the relation between rich agreement and verb movement: He argues that on the basis of examination of the evidence from Germanic languages, the view that morphology drives syntax cannot be upheld. The alternative proposed is that there is an (imperfect) relation between inflectional morphology and syntax in that the syntax has to provide the necessary vehicles for inflectional morphology (in the form of functional structure). For instance, only languages with overt (syntactic) evidence of a split IP have the potential for multiple inflectional morphemes on the verb, so Bobaljik claims.
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Observe that such a view, which to my knowledge has not been applied to cases of historical change, does seem to be at least compatible with the idea of a syntax that is in an (imperfect but nevertheless systematic) mapping relation with the inflectional morphology corresponding with the functional architecture. In the alternative view presented by Bobaljik (op. cit.), morphological loss would at best be one of the cues for the language learner, rather than the only or primary one. Let us also briefly consider triggers for movement of constituents to the specifiers of functional heads. These likewise are assumed to be keyed to functional properties of the functional heads. A run-of-the-mill set of examples here might include, given a functional head sequence of C Agr T AgrO … : In a VO order, the object might move to spec, AgrOP to check for Case; a subject DP might move to Spec,TP to check for nominative Case, and then to Spec, AgrSP to check for agreement, and so on. The advent of minimalism has rendered the relation between inflection and syntax considerably more tenuous; while the underlying claim continues to be that functional heads encode “morphological” information, that term is to be understood as “grammatical/functional” information rather than as relating to actual morphologically realized inflection. This has been clear from the earliest formulations of minimalism, in which functional features could be strong (triggering overt syntactic movement) or covert/weak (triggering covert (i.e. LF) checking). Feature strength bears no direct relation to the presence of inflectional morphology, thus basically rendering the relation between these abstract morphological requirements and their inflectional counterparts void of any direct empirical content. This fact has contributed largely towards restricting any empirically meaningful discussion of the relation between inflectional morphology and syntax in grammar change to grammaticalization phenomena. One minimalist analysis of Old and Middle English word order may serve rather well to illustrate this issue: Biberauer & Roberts (2005, henceforth BR). BR build on the theory of movement and checking/agreement of functional features proposed in Chomsky (2000, 2001, 2004), namely that of being a Probe (a feature in need of “checking”) on the one hand and that of being associated with an EPP-feature (Extended Projection Principle feature) on the other. In terms of this theory, a functional head may bear an (active) uninterpretable/unvalued feature (e.g. a structural Case feature) which functions as a Probe, necessitating the location of an appropriate Goal (a constituent to check the feature) bearing an interpretable/valued counterpart of the Probing feature since this latter feature must be eliminated from the derivation in order for convergence (well-formedness) to be possible. The operation facilitating this feature-elimination is assumed to be Agree. Agree holds between a Probe P and a Goal G under the following three conditions:
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(7) a. P must (asymmetrically) c-command G; b. P and G must be non-distinct in features; and c. there must be no Goal G’ ≠ G such that P c-commands G’, G’ ccommands G and G does not c-command G’.
Crucially, Agree relationships can be successfully set up without the need for movement: As long as P and G meet the conditions outlined above, they can enter an Agree relation and uninterpretable/unvalued feature-elimination can therefore take place in situ. In this case then, the Probe feature does not trigger syntactic movement. BR’s theory of feature-checking (or, more accurately, feature-valuing/ Agree) therefore crucially departs from earlier Minimalist proposals (cf. Chomsky 1995) in terms of which movement and the creation of a very local (Spec-head/ head-head) configuration was regarded as a prerequisite for feature-checking. BR’s Agree-based theory does not, however, rule out the possibility that feature-checking (Agree) and movement may coincide: Wherever a Probe-bearing head is associated with an EPP-feature, convergence is in fact only possible if the creation of the appropriate Agree relation is accompanied by movement of the Goal-bearing category. Observe then, that an EPP feature corresponds roughly to what in earlier incarnations of Minimalism was termed a strong feature: One triggering syntactic movement. A further important ingredient of BR’s theory is that a Probe EPP feature can trigger movement of some constituent, but also, modulo typological features of a language, of a larger constituent properly containing it. This is called ‘pied piping’, and is best illustrated by the phenomenon that this term usually refers to, as illustrated in(8) (8) A qui as-tu parlé? “To whom have you spoken?”
Assuming that the Probe EPP feature here is the wh-feature and that the Goal is the wh-word qui/whom, as schematized in (9), it is clear that the moved constituent is larger that the strict target, viz. the PP containing the wh-word.
(9) whPROBE … [PP whGOAL .. ] ..
BR embed this phenomenon in a typology of modes of EPP satisfaction related to T (Tense) and propose an analysis of the history of English making crucial use of an extended pied piping analysis for the earlier stages. In Old English, as in Dutch and German (present-day and historical), T has a Probe EPP feature which may be satisfied by movement of the subject DP, but also by movement of the constituent properly containing the subject, which in their view is υP:
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(10) TPROBE [υP Su υ [VP O V ]]
The EPP feature on T may trigger movement of the subject DP alone, or of the whole υP . This would yield the following possible word order variation, assuming for ease of exposition that a finite modal has moved to T to satisfy a head feature: (11) a. Đa se Wisdom þa þis fitte asungen hæfde … when the Wisdom then this poem sung had “When Wisdom had sung this poem …” [Boethius 30.68.6; Fischer et al. 2000:143, 25] b. þæt hie mihton swa bealdlice Godes geleafan bodian that they could so boldly God’s faith preach “that they could preach God’s faith so boldly” [The Homilies of the Anglo-Saxon Church I 232; van Kemenade 1987: 179, 7b]
The analysis for (11a) would be that the finite verb hæfde is in T and the whole υP has moved to satisfy T’s EPP feature. In (11b), only the subject has moved to satisfy T’s EPP feature and υP has remained in situ. BR’s analysis for the further history of English includes, of course, an account in terms of the loss of the pied piping option of EPP satisfaction of Tprobe. In BR’s analysis, the motivation for movement of the subject or of a larger constituent to satisfy an EPP requirement is couched in morphological/functional terms: There are differences between the T properties of finite and non-finite clauses, for instance, but there is no relation between these requirements and inflection as morphologically realized on the finite verb. It is this fact that has to a large extent silenced the discussion about the relation between inflectional morphology and word order; where this discussion is still around, e.g. in many papers in Lightfoot 2002, it mostly features in (implicitly) pre-minimalist analyses. The conundrum is represented nicely in Lightfoot’s introduction to this volume: Having briefly explicated the development of ideas on the relation between morphology and syntax, he notes that pre-minimalist ideas on the relation between inflection and word order have led to the theme of the volume, but “the correlations are controversial and things are not as simple as they suggest” (Lightfoot 2002:8). The dilemma here is that a direct relation between inflectional morphology and word order triggers is problematic as noted, but it seems that from a minimalist perspective, there is no meaningful way of looking at this relation. A direct result of this fact is that genuinely minimalist analyses of word order change (such as BR) . The assumption of an OV order is made here for ease of exposition. This emphatically deviates from BR’s proposal which is crucially and essentially in terms of Kayne’s 1994 anti-symmetric approach.
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give an account of what happened, but pass on why and how this happened, this in stark contrast to the literature on word order change in the early nineties, which is full of hypotheses, successful or not, on how the loss of inflections triggered change. Here again, it may be fruitful to reconsider the relation between inflection and word order along the lines suggested by Bobaljik (2001) as discussed above: In his view, it is not inflection that drives syntax, but the other way around: The syntax provides the functional architecture onto which inflectional morphology can be mapped; this relation will never be one to one, but nevertheless the correlations between syntax and inflection are crosslinguistically strong. 2.1 Grammaticalization Another domain of morpho-syntactic change in which functional constituents play an important role is grammaticalization. Functional categories provide an excellent rationale for the analysis of morpho-syntactic aspects of grammaticalization, and it comes as no surprise that in the work done so far on grammaticalization from a generative/minimalist perspective, the analysis crucially revolves around functional constituents. As a brief presentation of the gist of grammaticalization as modelled from this perspective, let’s take the well-known history of the English modals (references include Roberts 1985; 1993; Kroch 1989; van Kemenade 1993; Beths 1999; Roberts & Roussou 1999; 2003). In the case of the modals, we are looking at the gradual development of a class of verbs that at an earlier stage had at least a number of lexical properties (like a limited range of complementations), and which itself took part in a system of tense, mood, person and number marking, to a set of syntactically fixed free morphemes (auxiliaries) marking modality. Important conditioning factors in this chain of development were the loss of inflection marking the subjunctive mood, person and number, in addition to the loss of what complementation they had. In a framework which expresses grammatical categories in terms of functional constituents in a phrasal projection, we can model this complex of developments as follows: In a grammatical system with syntactic mood marking, the finite verb checks for mood against the head of MoodP: (12) MoodP Spec Mood′ Mood … VP | … V …
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In older English, this checking is very often done overtly, in which case it is visible as syntactic movement to Mood, subject to the usual constraints on head movement. As long as this movement dependency is recognizable as such for the language learner, modal verbs are interpreted as V-heads that undergo syntactic movement to check for Mood. Warner (1993) makes it clear that what happened to the verb system in the course of the Old and Middle English periods (and beyond) was an ever increasing divergence between lexical verbs on the one hand, and the later auxiliaries on the other. Following on the loss of certain main verb properties and, crucially, morphology marking the subjunctive mood, modals were no longer recognized as part of the paradigmatic class of verbs, and instead became frozen in the Mood position, ending up as free morphemes in the Mood head, hence with a fixed syntax. The most extensive minimalist treatment to date here is Roberts & Roussou (2003). Their case studies feature the well-known history of the English modals and instances of the negative cycle, but also a number of lesser known cases concerning TMA systems, complementizer systems and determiner systems. Roberts & Roussou extend this account to a number of other well-known cases: The emergence of determiners out of erstwhile demonstrative pronouns can be thought of naturally as the reanalysis from demonstrative pronoun (as a constituent in Spec, DP) to a head D. Similar analyses are found for the history of French negation (similar in spirit to van Kemenade’s 2000 account for the history of English), and for a collection of other changes. A crucial underlying claim here is that grammaticalization is essentially a morpho-syntactic change, but note again here that the driving force behind the process does not appear to bear any direct relation to inflectional morphology. Roberts & Roussou’s rationale for the analysis of grammaticalization is as follows: (13) a. Functional categories (limits on the number are undesirable) are visible to syntactic operation. b. Functional categories have only interpretable features; these are LFinterpretable; variation between languages is in their PF-realization. c. This leaves three options for any functional head: 1. F is not PF-realized. 2. Merge: PF-realization of F is by lexicalizing it as a grammatical word (such as a modal auxiliary in present-day English). 3. Move: PF-realization of F is by attracting another head.
Roberts & Roussou further motivate an economy condition: Merge (lexicalization) is preferred over Move. This economy condition can be viewed as a driving force behind grammaticalization: Other things being equal, the realization of a
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functional head as a lexically realized grammatical word will be preferred. This would ensure that, unless there is robust evidence for the language learner for the Move strategy, a lexicalized head analysis is opted for. Observe, however, that again we have an analysis here in which the parametrization options are keyed in syntactic terms depending on the feature values in the functional architecture. This is less than satisfactory: Given that reanalysis to functional head status, which is in essence the creation of a periphrastic expression, is usually taken to be preceded by inflectional loss, it would seem to be desirable to have a little more to say about the relation between inflection and syntax here.
3. Syntactic variation and change Some of the key characteristics of morpho-syntactic change are gradualness, optionality and diffuseness. The formal approach to syntactic change initiated by Lightfoot (1979) has led to a surge of productive work making sense of the mechanisms underlying syntactic change. However, with its typical emphasis on grammar change and reanalysis as the key mechanism of change, the approach has been at pains to come to grips with the facts of gradualness, optionality and diffuseness. One model of variation that has been influential is Kroch’s (1989; 2001) grammar competition. In transition stages, for instance when a language changes from predominantly OV to VO, as English has, a formal approach in terms of tightly defined underlying grammars is bound to assume that transition stages reflect more than one grammar. According to Kroch, such transition stages reflect grammar competition: OV competes with VO in a shifting balance (syntactic diglossia) in which the competing forms may differ in social register, with an unreflecting vernacular variant slowly driving a conservative written one out of use (see below). Where no such process is at work, there is evidence, according to Kroch, that usage frequencies remain stable over long periods of time. The principle of grammar competition has been most convincingly demonstrated in Kroch’s remodelling of Ellegård’s (1953) data concerning the rise of do-support between 1400 and 1750, showing that the do-support grammar competes with one in which the finite verb is moved to I (the Aux position). The case of OV/VO competition has so far resisted a full analysis. Partial analyses have been presented in the work of Pintzuk (e.g. 2002), Pintzuk & Taylor (2006), and Kroch & Taylor (2000), but these present a narrow focus on relatively small subperiods, which does not show that there is a period of grammar competition spanning the entire period taken by loss of OV (Kroch & Taylor 2000); or a diachronic view of one subset of OV orders such as those involving negated and
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quantified objects, which is not necessarily representative of the overall development (Pintzuk 2002, Pintzuk & Taylor 2006). The facts seem to show that it is necessary to distinguish between various types of OV-grammars: For instance, the Old English word order exemplified above and repeated here for convenience as (14), entirely comparable with the present-day German word order, is pretty much extinct long before other types of OV word orders (such as those exemplified by (15)) became extinct: (14)
Đa se Wisdom þa þis fitte asungen hæfde … when the Wisdom then this poem sung had “When Wisdom had sung this poem …” [Boethius 30.68.6; Fischer et al. 2000:143, 25]
(15)
þæt hie mihton swa bealdlice Godes geleafan bodian that they could so boldly God’s faith preach “that they could preach God’s faith so boldly” [The Homilies of the Anglo-Saxon Church I 232; van Kemenade 1987: 179, 7b]
While the two word orders were both possible in Old English, (14) declined very sharply indeed in the transition to Middle English, while word orders such as those in (15) continued into late Middle English, and much later even when the object was a pronoun. In spite of the overall gradualness of the loss of OV, (14) seems to be a word order that is in some typological sense different from the OV orders found in Middle English. An alternative analysis for this problem, and an alternative approach to syntactic variation, is presented in Biberauer & Roberts 2005. Recall their analysis as outlined above: Assuming that in both (14) and (15), the finite verb has undergone syntactic movement to T, the variation between the two word orders is keyed to one typological property of Old English: Old English allows two options for satisfaction of the EPP feature of T: One is by moving the subject DP (15); the other is by moving the whole υP containing the subject, resulting in the word order in (14). Thus, the word order variation in Old English can be analysed as follows: Old English allowed EPP satisfaction of T by moving the subject DP alone or by pied piping a larger constituent properly containing the subject DP. The syntactic variation is thus built into one grammar. The pied piping option (represented by (14)) was lost a good while before the other OV word orders such as those in (15) were lost. At least in this respect, this analysis seems to fare better than the grammar competition modelling of the loss of OV. But this in no way invalidates the principle of grammar competition. The approaches to syntactic variation discussed here implicitly or explicitly assume that the syntax provides the potential scope for variation, while its exact
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shape is determined by sociolinguistic factors, which for good measure are referred to the domain of E-language. An example of this is the loss of V2 in English according to Kroch & Taylor (1997) and Lightfoot (1999): They assume that the loss of V2 is the result of contact between dialects featuring different V2 systems. The Northern dialect has a Scandinavian-type V2 system, and the southern dialects a mixed system with more variable patternings of subject-verb inversion. This is an initially plausible hypothesis and Kroch & Taylor present some interesting evidence to support the idea, but the actual dialectal spread and the process of the loss of V2 has never been looked at in detail. The point serves to illustrate that some hypothesis is needed to provide a rationale for a change in the E-language environment that triggers an I-language reanalysis. More recently, there is a growing interest in reconstructing the process of change. The notion of dialect contact presupposes a situation of bilingualism or multilingualism, involving varying degrees of impact of second language acquisition, which, depending on the intensity of contact, age of the speakers involved, and the typological distance between the varieties involved, is known to typically trigger inflectional loss and rigidification of syntax to varying degrees. It is highly plausible that this type of influence was important, more especially in the transition from the late Middle Ages to the Modern period. 15th century London and Paris were evidently huge metropolises attracting people from places far and wide. On a somewhat smaller scale, Goss & Howell (2006) show that in the 16th and 17th centuries, a number of smaller Dutch cities in Holland quadrupled in size in a matter of two decades. Such impact may be expected to change the E-language indeed, in ways we do not yet fully understand, especially in terms of morpho-syntactic effect. As our insight in the impact of bi- and multilingualism increases, and it is becoming possible to chart large historical corpora with sophisticated quantitative methods, we may be able to learn a lot about how a rapidly changing E-language triggered grammatical reanalysis. There is considerable scope for further work in this area.
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Reviewer’s address Ans van Kemenade CLS/Department of English Radboud University Nijmegen Postbus 9103 6500 HD Nijmegen The Netherlands E-mail:
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