Information Structure and Word Order Change in Germanic and Romance Languages

Prosjektetet har hatt to hovedoppgaver: 1) Å bygge og annotere (legge til lingvistisk informasjon) et elektronisk korpus av tekster fra de tidlige periodene av engelsk, norsk, fransk, spansk, portugisisk; 2) Å forske på disse språkene fra et kontrastivt perspektiv, spesielt hvordan endring i setningsstruktur henger sammen med setningers informasjonsstruktur. Det overordnede målet var å komme nærmere en forståelse for hvorfor språk endrer seg.

In this project we will, in collaboration with our partners, study information structure and word order in three older Germanic languages (English, German, Norse) and three older Romance languages (Portuguese, French, Spanish), with reference to the prese nt-day languages. Even though they belong to two different language groups, these languages had certain common word order structures in their older stages (most notably verb-second word order), and our main hypothesis is that the present-day word order va riation is a result of historical changes in the dynamics between information structure and syntax. We believe that by studying word order change from a pragmatic perspective, i.e. focusing on text structuring mechanisms rather than solely on syntactic me chanisms, and from a contrastive perspective, we may arrive at a greater understanding of the general mechanisms of language change. We aim to find out to what extent and in what way word order in the older stages of the languages was governed by informat ion-structural constraints, how the languages changed with respect to the relation between word order and information structure, and how the modern languages differ from their older versions concerning these properties. By means of annotated electronic co rpora, we will study the interplay between syntax and information structure in each of the six languages, as well as from a contrastive perspective. The corpora will be searchable and available to other researchers. Our aim is also to contribute to a revi sion of syntactic theory by mapping information structure onto syntax.