Information Structure and Syntactic Change in Germanic and Romance Languages

Download or read book Information Structure and Syntactic Change in Germanic and Romance Languages written by Kristin Bech and published by John Benjamins Publishing Company. This book was released on 2014-05-15 with total page 431 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The contributions of this volume offer new perspectives on the relation between syntax and information structure in the history of Germanic and Romance languages, focusing on English, German, Norwegian, French, Spanish and Portuguese, and both from a synchronic and a diachronic perspective. In addition to discussing changes in individual languages along the syntax–information structure axis, the volume also makes a point of comparing and contrasting different languages with respect to the interplay between syntax and information structure. Since the creation of increasingly sophisticated annotated corpora of historical texts is on the agenda in many research environments, methods and schemes for information structure annotation and analysis of historical texts from a theoretical and applied perspective are discussed.