Constraints on syntactic variation: noun phrases in early Germanic languages

This project has been concerned with noun phrases in early Germanic languages (4th to 14th century), more specifically Old English, Old High German, Old Norse, Old Saxon, and Gothic, and marginally also Old Swedish. As these languages belong to the same Germanic language family and come from the same proto-language, we can assume that they were more similar in their early stages than they are today, and that they have later diverged in their development. On the sentence level these older languages differ considerably in sentence structure, and we wanted to study whether this is also the case on the noun phrase level, and what might cause the variation. Little research has been done on this, and nothing of a cross-linguistic kind. Research on historical linguistics often aims to understand better how and why languages change, and this was also one of our aims. In particular, the project aimed to 1) create a database for noun phrases where linguistic information is added so that it is possible to search for combinations of linguistic features and thereby reveal linguistic patterns, 2) increase our empirical knowledge of these languages compared to each other, and thereby understand better the developments that led to the modern languages, and 3) develop theories to explain linguistic variation and constraints on variation.

En virkning av prosjektet er selvsagt mer kunnskap om feltet som dekkes av prosjektet. Databasen vi har utviklet, vil være til nytte for andre forskere. Vi har etablert nye samarbeidskonstellasjoner med partnere internasjonalt, også med tanke på fremtidig samarbeid. En veldig viktig virkning av prosjektet er at postdoken har gjort store fremskritt i sin kompetanse, slik at han står rustet til å fortsette sin akademiske karriere i en stilling eller et annet prosjekt. Da dette er ren grunnforskning hvor målet er å søke empirisk og teoretisk kunnskap, kan det ikke forventes endringer på samfunnsnivå, eller effekt i relasjon til forvaltning eller bedrifter.

This project seeks to understand the mechanisms that contribute to syntactic variation in language, and to model linguistic change in the light of constraints on variation. We study seven closely related languages in their older stages: Old English, Old Icelandic, Old Norwegian, Old Swedish, Old High German, Old Saxon, and Gothic. The crosslinguistic object of study is noun phrases. A phrase is a smaller syntactic unit than a clause, and consists of a head (a noun in the case of noun phrases) and modifiers, for example determiners and adjectives; a simple example is 'the big car'. While research on Germanic languages has in recent decades successfully dealt with language variation and change in the domain of the clause, the structure of the noun phrase has been neglected. Studies of clausal word order in the Germanic languages have found that syntactic change involved a change from word order constrained by information structure to one constrained by syntactic rules. Noun phrases also display flexibility in word order at the early Germanic stage. The aim of the project is to establish whether the flexibility at this level was constrained by factors similar to those that applied to clauses, and whether the changes the languages have undergone at noun-phrase level parallel those at clause level. In order to study this variation, a cross-linguistic database will be created, which will be made available to other researchers when the project is completed. We will then use the discoveries made in the empirical part of the project to evaluate how three formal frameworks might account for the data captured: Minimalism, Construction Grammar, and Lexical-Functional Grammar. Based on the properties coded in the database, we will also carry out statistical analyses to establish what factors are relevant in determining the order and to compare the strength of the different factors across the languages. The project is thus historical, empirical, quantitative and theoretical.