The rise of agreement : a formal approach to the syntax and grammaticalization of verbal inflection
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
The rise of agreement : a formal approach to the syntax and grammaticalization of verbal inflection
（Linguistik aktuell, v. 81）
J. Benjamins, c2005
- : hb
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Note
Rev. version of the author's dissertation (doctoral)--University of Frankfurt, 2004
Includes bibliographical references (p. [305]-324) and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
This book investigates the historical paths leading from pronouns to markers of verbal agreement and proposes a unified formal account of this grammaticalization process. In opposition to beliefs widely held in the literature, it is argued that new agreement formatives can be coined in a multitude of syntactic environments. Still, the individual paths toward agreement are shown to exhibit a set of underlying similarities which are attributed to universal principles that govern the reanalysis of pronominal clitics as exponents of verbal agreement across languages. It is claimed that syntactic principles impose only a set of necessary conditions on the reanalysis in question, while its ultimate trigger is morphological in nature. More specifically, it is argued that the acquisition of inflectional morphology is governed by blocking effects which operate during language acquisition and promote the grammaticalization of new markers if this change serves to replace 'worn-out', underspecified forms with new, more specified candidates.
Table of Contents
- 1. Acknowledgements
- 2. Notes for the reader and list of abbreviations
- 3. Introduction
- 4. Theoretical preliminaries
- 5. The structural design of agreement
- 6. The transition from pronoun to inflectional marker
- 7. The reanalysis of C-oriented clitics
- 8. Morphological blocking and the rise of agreement
- 9. Concluding summary
- 10. References
- 11. Index
by "Nielsen BookData"
