Reorganising Grammatical Variation: Diachronic studies in the retention, redistribution and refunctionalisation of linguistic variants: 203 (Studies in Language Companion Series) - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 9027201641 ISBN 13: 9789027201645

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Co, 2018

Synopsis

With most studies on grammatical variation concentrating on the synchronic level, a systematic investigation of long-term grammatical variation within the context of language change, i.e. from a predominantly diachronic perspective, has largely remained a desideratum. The present volume fills this research gap by bringing together nine empirically rich bottom-up case studies on morphological and morphosyntactic variation phenomena in standard and dialect varieties of Indo-European languages (Germanic, Romance, Greek). While variation has often been regarded as merely a transitory epiphenomenal symptom of change, the findings of this volume show that variation is a resilient feature of human language and answer the question what makes variation time-stable. Bridging the gap between corpus-based research on language variation and more theory-driven typological and functional approaches, the volume is of special interest for all researchers concerned with interface phenomena seeking to gain a broader understanding of the mechanisms of linguistic variation and change.

Edition details

• Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Co
• Publication date: 2018
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 9027201641
• ISBN 13: 9789027201645
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 308
• Editor: Dammel Antje, Eitelmann Matthias, Schmuck Mirjam