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Word Order Change

This book is a collection of thirteen detailed studies on word order change within the framework of diachronic generative syntax. An initial chapter contextualizes them and introduces the theme in order to make clear from the onset its relevance and appeal. The sample of languages investigated is diverse and displays significant historical depth. Different branches of the Indo-European family are represented both through classical and living languages, namely: a wide range of Early Indo-European languages (Sanskrit, Greek, Indic, Avestan, Hittite, Tocharian, among others), Romance languages (Latin, Italian, European Portuguese, Brazilian Portuguese), Germanic languages (Dutch, English), and a Celtic language (Irish). Besides, three chapters are dedicated to Hungarian and one chapter deals with Coptic Egyptian. The essays in the book use the tools provided by the generative theory of grammar to investigate the constrained ways in which older linguistic variants give rise to new ones in the course of time, with the aim of contributing insights into the properties of natural language. Two ingredients of the generative framework make it especially appropriate to deal with word order phenomena, namely movement as a syntactic operation (embedded in the theory of grammar) and a richly articulated clausal architecture composed with lexical but also abstract functional categories. This collective volume is unique in the way it provides through in-depth language-internal or comparative studies new perspectives on the relation between word order change and syntactic movement, under the constraints imposed by particular instantiations of clausal architecture.