The Naxos Papers, Volume I: On the Diachrony of English
About this ebook
This book brings together 10 studies on various characteristics of the historical development of English, and mainly Old and Middle English, first presented in workshops at the “Old and Middle English” and “Language Variation and Change in Ancient and Medieval Europe” summer schools, organized in Naxos, Greece. It includes studies derived from the first four workshops: “New Approaches to the History of Early English(es)” I, II and III and “Language Change in Indo-European” I. The first part of the volume emphasizes the synchronic description of syntactic, morphological and semantic features of Old English, while the second section emphasizes explanations of the development of various features of English, starting with Old English.
About the author
Alexander Bergs joined the Institute for English and American Studies of the University of Osnabrück, Germany, in 2006, when he became Full Professor and Chair of English Language and Linguistics. His research interests include language variation and change, constructional approaches to language, the role of context in language, the syntax/pragmatics interface, and cognitive poetics. His works include the books Social Networks and Historical Sociolinguistics, Modern Scots, and Contexts and Constructions, and the two-volume Handbook of English Historical Linguistics (edited with Laurel Brinton).
Elly van Gelderen is a syntactician interested in language change. Her 2011 book The Linguistic Cycle: Language Change and the Language Faculty shows how cyclical change can be accounted for through an economy principle, while her Clause Structure (2013) examines a number of current debates in theoretical syntax. Her book The Diachrony of Meaning (2018) examines the history of argument structure.
