Information structure and syntactic change in Germanic and Romance languages

• Main Authors: Bech, Kristin, Eide, Kristine Gunn
• Format: eBook Book
• Language: English
• Published: Amsterdam J. Benjamins 2014; John Benjamins Publishing Company
• Edition: 1
• Subjects: Comparative linguistics; Germanic; Germanic languages; Germanic languages > Grammar, Comparative > Romance; Grammar, Comparative; Grammar, Comparative and general; Grammar, Comparative and general > Syntax; Grammar, Comparative and general > Topic and content; Language and languages; Language and languages > Variation; Romance; Romance languages; Romance languages > Grammar, Comparative > Germanic; Syntax; Topic and content; Variation

In this article, we discuss how contrastivity can be identified in historical texts where we have no direct access to prosodic features such as stress and intonation. We depart from our knowledge of contrastivity in the modern languages and their exponence in Modern Spanish and Portuguese, where bot...