The Historical Syntax of Middle English from a Comparative Perspective

9511368在过去十年中，生成语法学家对历史句法的兴趣大大增加，因为对语言历史发展的连续阶段的研究显然为比较语法领域提供了有用的结果。历史数据增加了两个维度来研究普遍语法参数的规范：(1)历史发展中连续阶段之间语法差异的最小特征允许进行比无关语言的比较更受控制的比较；(2)语言变化的顺序和时间上的一致性允许通过这些特征在历史记录中出现和消失的方式来检验关于表面上不同的特征与单个抽象潜在属性的相关性的假设。历史数据(幸存的文本)的性质要求使用一种不同于共时句法的方法，如果它要被充分利用的话。为此，研究人员建立了三个语料库，一个是中世纪英语，一个是意第绪语，还有一个较小的早期新高德语。在下一阶段的研究中，他们将把中世纪英语语料库的规模扩大一倍，从目前的51万字增加到110万字。中世纪英语中广泛的方言变异和这一时期发生的重要句法变化造成了对这一工作的需要。对这种变异性的适当研究需要比当前语料库包含的更多和更大的文本样本。前人使用中等规模的语料库对中世纪英语和早期意第绪语中动词移动和动词补语顺序的句法进行了研究，最近在西日耳曼语中的理论工作开辟了许多研究途径，计划中的研究将涉及：1)语法变化的历史过程，包括方言和语言接触的贡献；2)中古英语中V2的适当分析，考虑到方言数据和Pintzuk(1991)和van Kemenade(1992)的有见地但相反的理论；3)中心语和中心语动词短语结构变化的比较语法；(4)Kayne(1993)和Zwart(1993)最近提出的关于方向性变异的正确语法处理的建议对历史日耳曼语分析的潜在贡献。

9511368 Over the past decade, interest in historical syntax has grown substantially among generative grammarians as it has become clear that the study of successive stages in the historical development of languages provides useful results to the field of comparative grammar. Historical data adds two dimensions to investigations into the specification of the parameters of universal grammar: (1) the minimal character of the grammatical differences between successive stages in a historical development allows for more controlled comparison than do comparisons of unrelated languages; (2) the sequential order and temporal coincidence of linguistic changes allows hypotheses regarding the correlation of superficially disparate features to a single abstract underlying property to be tested by the way these features appear and disappear in the historical record. The nature of historical data (surviving texts) requires the use of a methodology different from that of synchronic syntax if it is to be exploited to its full potential. To this end, the investigators have constructed three corpora, one of Middle English, one of Yiddish, and a smaller one of Early New High German. In the next period of research, they will double in size the Middle English corpus, taking it from its current 510,000 to 1.1 million words. The need for this work is created by the wide range of dialect variation in Middle English and the important syntactic changes which take place in this period. Proper study of this variability requires more and larger text samples than the current corpus contains. Prior work on the syntax of verb movement and verb complement order in Middle English and Early Yiddish using moderate size corpora and recent theoretical work in West Germanic has opened up a number of avenues of inquiry which the planned research will address: 1) the historical processes by which grammars change, including the contribution of dialect and language contact; 2) the proper analysis of V2 in Middle English, taking into account dialect data, and the insightful but opposing theories of Pintzuk (1991) and van Kemenade (1992); 3) the comparative grammar of the variation between head-initial and head-final verb phrase structures; 4) the potential contribution to the analysis of historical Germanic of recent proposals by Kayne (1993) and Zwart (1993) regarding the proper grammatical treatment of variation in directionality.