Information Structure and Syntactic Change in the History of English

Information Structure and Syntactic Change in the History of Englishis the first book to apply information structure as it relates to language change to a corpus-based analysis of a wide range of features in the evolution of English syntax and grammars of prose in long diachrony. Its unifying topic is the role of information structure, broadly conceived, as it interacts with the other levels of linguistic description, syntax, morphology, prosody, semantics and pragmatics. The volume comprises twelve chapters by leading scholars who take a variety of theoretical and methodological approaches. Their work affirms, among other things, that motivations for selecting a particular syntactic option vary from information structure in the strict sense to discourse organization, or a particular style or register, and can also be associated with external forces such as the development of a literary culture.

Anneli Meurman-Solin is Senior Researcher in English Historical Linguistics, University of Helsinki.

María José López-Couso is Senior Lecturer in English Linguistics, Universidad de Santiago de Compostela.

Bettelou Los is Senior Lecturer in English Linguistics, Radboud University Nijmegen.