Until recently, it was commonly held that the basic syntactic structure of one language does not significantly differ from any other: the traditional Universal Grammar view had it that all languages had comparable syntactic templates, and that differences were superficial and basically due to parameter settings that could be switched on and off. This universality thesis has come under attack (Evans & Levinson 2009), and there is now a growing body of evidence that languages can differ considerably in their syntactic inventory: some languages have cases, others don't, some languages have subjects, others don't etc.

 

One of the differences concerns the presence or absence of noun phrases (Matthews 1981, 2007; Evans & Levinson 2009:440-442), and their internal morphosyntactic organisation. Integral noun phrases with a hierarchical constituency structure are a typical feature of the European languages (see Rijkhoff 1998:322-325, 362-363), and they seem to have acquired it in the course of time, as a close look at the nominal syntax of ancient Indo-European languages suggests that Proto-Indo-European probably lacked tight-structured NPs. This has been argued for at length in Van de Velde (2009a, b; 2010, 2011), and has been defended both for Germanic and Romance languages by Himmelmann (1997), Faarlund (2001:1713), Luraghi (2010), Ledgeway (2011, 2012) and Perridon & Sleeman (2011). In this lecture, I will trace the long-term drift of morphosyntactic expansion in the nominal domain in West-Germanic, which has taken place over the past several thousand years, by looking qualitatively and quantitatively at attested historical language data.

 

 

References

 

Evans, N. & S. Levinson. 2009. ‘The myth of language universals: language diversity and its importance for cognitive science’. Behavior and Brain Sciences 32: 429-492.

 

Faarlund, J.T. 2001. ‘From ancient Germanic to modern Germanic languages’. In: M. Haspelmath, E. König, W. Österreicher & W. Reible (eds.), Language typology and language universals. Vol 2. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1706-1719.

 

Himmelmann, N.P. 1997. Deiktikon, Artikel, Nominalphrase. Zur Emergenz syntaktischer Struktur. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag.

 

Ledgeway, A. 2011. ‘Syntactic and morphosyntactic typology and change’. In: A. Ledgeway, M. Maiden & J.-C.h Smith (eds), The Cambridge history of the Romance languages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 382-471.

 

Ledgeway, A. 2012. From Latin to Romance: morphosyntactic typology and change. Oxford: Oxford university press.

 

Luraghi, S. 2010. ‘The rise (and possible downfall) of configurationality’. In: S. Luraghi & V. Bubenik (eds.), A companion to historical linguistics. London: Continuum, 212-229.

 

Matthews, P.H. 1981. Syntax. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

 

Matthews, P. 2007. Syntactic relations: a critical survey. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

 

Perridon, H. & P. Sleeman. 2011. ‘The noun phrase in Germanic and Romance. Common developments and differences’. In: P. Sleeman & H. Perridon (eds.), The noun phrase in Romance and Germanic. Structure, variation, and change. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1-21.

 

Rijkhoff, J. 1998. ‘Order in the noun phrase of the languages of Europe’. In: A. Siewierska (ed.), Constituent order in the languages of Europe. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 321-382.

 

Van de Velde, F. 2009a. De nominale constituent. Structuur en geschiedenis. Leuven: Leuven University Press.

 

Van de Velde, F. 2009b. ‘The emergence of modification patterns in the Dutch noun phrase’. Linguistics 47: 1021-1049.

 

Van de Velde, F. 2010. ‘The emergence of the determiner in the Dutch NP’. Linguistics 48: 263-299.

 

Van de Velde, F. 2011. ‘Left-peripheral expansion of the English NP’. English Language and Linguistics 15: 387-415.