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17 - Role and Reference Grammar and Diachronic Syntax

from Part Four - Applications of RRG

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 June 2023

By
Ranko Matasović
Edited by
Delia Bentley ,
Ricardo Mairal Usón ,
Wataru Nakamura  and
Robert D. Van Valin, Jr
Delia Bentley
Affiliation:
University of Manchester
Ricardo Mairal Usón
Affiliation:
Universidad National de Educación a Distancia, Madrid
Wataru Nakamura
Affiliation:
Tohoku University, Japan
Robert D. Van Valin, Jr
Affiliation:
Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf
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Summary

This chapter reviews the existing Role and Reference Grammar (RRG) work on diachronic syntax and morphosyntax and shows how the tools of language description developed by RRG can also be used to account for several aspects of language change. Drawing evidence from developments which have occurred in a wide range of languages, it is argued that RRG allows for a more fine-grained analysis of diachronic processes than theoretically neutral approaches, that it answers fundamental questions about the nature and causes of syntactic change, and that it is not a mere tool of linguistic description, but a theory that makes falsifiable empirical predictions.

Keywords

diachronic syntaxUniversal GrammarNatural Serialization PrinciplegrammaticalizationreanalysisextensionborrowingalignmentIndo-EuropeanCaucasian
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Handbook of Role and Reference Grammar , pp. 647 - 665
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2023

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References

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