Parameters of Morphosyntactic Change

The relationship between changes in (inflectional) morphology and the consequences of these changes in syntax has been a perennial issue in historical linguistics. The contributors to this 1997 volume address the issue of how to model the phenomena of syntactic and morphological change within recent frameworks, in particular the Minimalist Program. A special concern is the way different criteria for the selection of argument structure - especially aspect and mood - interact over time with various types of argument marking: case, word order, clitics, agreement. The volume contains papers by many of the leading scholars in the field. There is a substantial introduction which reviews the development of ideas in generative historical syntax, and assesses the distinctive properties of the generative position.