9511368 Over the past decade, interest in historical syntax has grown substantially among generative grammarians as it has become clear that the study of successive stages in the historical development of languages provides useful results to the field of comparative grammar. Historical data adds two dimensions to investigations into the specification of the parameters of universal grammar: (1) the minimal character of the grammatical differences between successive stages in a historical development allows for more controlled comparison than do comparisons of unrelated languages; (2) the sequential order and temporal coincidence of linguistic changes allows hypotheses regarding the correlation of superficially disparate features to a single abstract underlying property to be tested by the way these features appear and disappear in the historical record. The nature of historical data (surviving texts) requires the use of a methodology different from that of synchronic syntax if it is to be exploited to its full potential. To this end, the investigators have constructed three corpora, one of Middle English, one of Yiddish, and a smaller one of Early New High German. In the next period of research, they will double in size the Middle English corpus, taking it from its current 510,000 to 1.1 million words. The need for this work is created by the wide range of dialect variation in Middle English and the important syntactic changes which take place in this period. Proper study of this variability requires more and larger text samples than the current corpus contains. Prior work on the syntax of verb movement and verb complement order in Middle English and Early Yiddish using moderate size corpora and recent theoretical work in West Germanic has opened up a number of avenues of inquiry which the planned research will address: 1) the historical processes by which grammars change, including the contribution of dialect and language contact; 2) the proper analysis of V2 in Middle English, taking into account dialect data, and the insightful but opposing theories of Pintzuk (1991) and van Kemenade (1992); 3) the comparative grammar of the variation between head-initial and head-final verb phrase structures; 4) the potential contribution to the analysis of historical Germanic of recent proposals by Kayne (1993) and Zwart (1993) regarding the proper grammatical treatment of variation in directionality.
