This book presents a new perspective on the interaction between word-order and grammaticalisation by investigating the changes that stylistic fronting and oblique subjects have undergone in Romance (Catalan, French, Spanish) as compared to Germanic (English, Icelandic). It discusses a great deal of historical comparative data showing that stylistic fronting and oblique subjects have (had) a semantic effect in the Germanic and in the Romance languages, and that they both appear in the same functional category.

This volume contains papers on general issues of language change, as well as specific studies of non-Germanic languages, including Romance, Slavonic, Japanese, Australian languages, and early Indo-European. A second volume, edited by Richard M. Hogg and Linda van Bergen, contains papers on Germanic.

Old English and Its Closest Relatives - A Survey of the Earliest Germanic Languages

At first glance, there may seem little reason to think of English and German as variant forms of a single language. There are enormous differences between the two in pronunciation, vocabulary, and grammar, and a monolingual speaker of one cannot understand the other at all. Yet modern English and German have many points in common, and if we go back to the earliest texts available in the two languages, the similarities are even more notable.

Ancient Germanic Warriors - Warrior Styles from Trajan's Column to Icelandic Sagas

Ancient Germanic warriors played a decisive role in historical events from 200 BC, when Germanic culture first became identifiable, to AD 1000 when Christianity swept through the Nordic countries. Arising from beliefs and states of mind, a variety of warrior styles manifested themselves in differences of dress, weaponry and fighting technique.

Comparative Studies in Germanic Syntax - From Afrikaans to Zurich German

This selection of papers presented at the 20th Comparative Germanic Syntax Workshop brings together contributions that address issues in syntactic predication and studies in the nominal system, as well as papers on data from the history of English and German. Showing a strong comparative commitment, the contributions include studies on previously neglected data on case and predicative structures in Icelandic and other Germanic languages, on the (non-)syntactic distinction of predicative vs. argument NP/DPs...