Vincent, Nigel: CP and COMP in Diachrony
The present paper explores the various ways in which a single Latin construction, the accusative and infinitive (AcI), has been replaced in different Romance languages and in a range of different syntactic contexts. The parallel correspondence architecture of LFG, with its separation of a-, f-, c- and i-structure, provides an account which is both more illuminating and theoretically more economical than that available to approaches which mediate all aspects of grammatical structure - and therefore all aspects of change - through a single set of syntactic categories and projections. Both categories and functions are seen to have their own diachronic profiles and the changes they exhibit over time do not necessarily proceed in parallel. The paper also raises some questions about the internal structure of these categories and whether for example Rizzi’s split CP model needs to be incorporated into LFG a a way of dealing with the phenomenon of recomplementation. More generally, the paper aims to show how both synchronic and diachronic data are relevant to the construction of theories about the structure and organization of human languages.
December 22, 2022 |
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