"This volume offers an up-to-date survey of linguistic phenomena at the interfaces between syntax and prosody, information structure and discourse - with a special focus on Germanic and Romance - and their role in language change. The contributions, set within the generative framework, discuss original data and provide new insights into the diachronic development of long-burning issues such as negation, word order, quantifiers, null subjects, aspectuality, the structure of the left periphery, and extraposition. The first part of the volume explores interface phenomena at the intrasentential level, in which only clause-internal factors seem to play a significant role in determining diachronic change. The second part examines developments at the intersentential level involving a rearrangement of categories between at least two clausal domains. The book will be of interest for scholars and students interested in generative accounts of language change phenomena at the interfaces, as well as for theoretical linguists in general"--.

• Language Change at the Interfaces
• Editorial page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Table of contents
• Acknowledgments
• Interface phenomena and language change: Where we are and where we are going
  • 1. The notion of interface
  • 2. Interfaces in language change
  • 3. Contents of the volume
  • References
• Part I. Interface phenomena at the intrasentential level
• Information structure and Jespersen’s cycle: The dialects of Veneto as a window on processes of language change
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. Incipient and full-scale Jespersen’s cycle
  • 3. Information structure and incipient Jespersen’s cycle
  • 4. Pilot study
  • 5. Results
  • 6. Summary and conclusion
  • Abbreviations
  • Funding
  • References
• The object position in Old Norwegian: An interplay between syntax, prosody, and information structure
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. Word order variation in Old Norse
  • 3. Methodology
  • 4. Results and theoretical implications
  • 5. Some remarks on the data
  • 6. Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
• Bare quantifiers and Verb Second: The view from Old Italian
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. Tutto, molto and niente in the low IP area
  • 3. Bare QPs and V2
  • 4. Fronting of molto is different
  • 5. Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Funding
  • Source Abbreviations and Editions of Texts
  • References
• On the role of information structure in the licensing of null subjects in Old High German
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. Null subjects in Old High German
  • 3. The present investigation
  • 4. Proposed analysis
  • 5. Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
• Part II. Interface phenomena at the intersentential level
• Gehen as a new auxiliary in German
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. Background: The grammaticalization of gehen in German
  • 3. Experiments
  • 4. Theoretical interpretation
  • 5. Summary
  • Acknowledgements
  • Funding
  • References
• Discourse-driven asymmetries between embedded interrogatives and relative clauses in West Germanic
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. Reanalysis
  • 3. Doubling and information structure
  • 4. Historical changes in English
  • 5. Information structure and the Accessibility Hierarchy
  • 6. Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
• Discourse relations and the German prefield
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. The prefield and discourse relations in Modern German
  • 3. The prefield and discourse relations in Early New High German
  • 4. The ranking of PPF in Early New High German and Modern German
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
• Informational aspects of the extraposition of relative clauses
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. Research hypotheses
  • 3. Methodology
  • 4. Data
  • 5. Discussion
  • Funding
  • References
• Index