Information Structure And Language Change —— New Approaches to Word Order Variation in Germanic

----- 日耳曼语言中字序的变化与变更新探

ISBN: 9783110205916 出版年：2009 页码：400 Hinterholzl, Roland Petrova, Svetlana De Gruyter Mouton

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.