Book contents
- The New Cambridge History of the English Language
- The New Cambridge History of the English Language
- The New Cambridge History of the English Language
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Tables
- Contributors to Volume II
- General Preface
- Abbreviations for Corpora and Other Electronic Resources
- General Editor’s Introduction
- Introduction to Volume II
- Part I The Textual Record
- Part II Lighthouse Works and Authors
- Part III Genre and Medium in the Record
- Part IV Modelling the Record: Methods and Theories
- 27 Quantitative Methods and the History of English
- 28 Generative Accounts of Change
- 29 Functional Accounts of Change
- 30 Grammaticalisation
- 31 Cognitive Approaches to the History of English
- 32 Construction Grammar and English Historical Linguistics
- 33 Psycholinguistic Perspectives on Language Change
- Appendix: List of Corpora and Other Electronic Resources
- Index
- References
28 - Generative Accounts of Change
from Part IV - Modelling the Record: Methods and Theories
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 October 2025
Book contents
- The New Cambridge History of the English Language
- The New Cambridge History of the English Language
- The New Cambridge History of the English Language
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Tables
- Contributors to Volume II
- General Preface
- Abbreviations for Corpora and Other Electronic Resources
- General Editor’s Introduction
- Introduction to Volume II
- Part I The Textual Record
- Part II Lighthouse Works and Authors
- Part III Genre and Medium in the Record
- Part IV Modelling the Record: Methods and Theories
- 27 Quantitative Methods and the History of English
- 28 Generative Accounts of Change
- 29 Functional Accounts of Change
- 30 Grammaticalisation
- 31 Cognitive Approaches to the History of English
- 32 Construction Grammar and English Historical Linguistics
- 33 Psycholinguistic Perspectives on Language Change
- Appendix: List of Corpora and Other Electronic Resources
- Index
- References
Summary
Generative approaches to synchronic linguistics attempt to describe what is part of a language in a mathematically precise way, and generative approaches to the history of English and other languages model diachronic changes as a sequence of stages of the language with differing formal properties. Formalising the grammars of these stages makes falsifiable predictions about what was grammatical in each stage. Generative accounts include phonological analysis, but this chapter focuses on accounts of morphosyntactic changes. Generativists take child language acquisition to be the locus of language change, which is assumed to occur when children are exposed to different Primary Linguistic Data from what older generations encountered, due to factors like phonological change and language contact. Syntactic changes that have been studied extensively within generative frameworks include the development of modal and other auxiliary verbs, clausal negation and changes in word order, particularly in the positioning of the tensed verb.
Information
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The New Cambridge History of the English LanguageDocumentation, Sources of Data and Modelling, pp. 694 - 717Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2025
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