Abstract:
When examining syntactic changes, the primary aim has traditionally often been to describe the process of change in as much detail as possible, to reconstruct intermediate stages, and sometimes to explain it in terms of a particular syntactic framework.
Since the advent of cognitive linguistic approaches, however, there is an increasing interest in what actually causes syntactic change, i.e. what it is that makes language users change the way they speak.
Identifying these causes is, however, not a simple task. Particularly when investigating changes that have taken place in the past, we cannot ask speakers about their syntactic choices, so we have to draw all our information from a limited corpus of historical textual material (if there is any at all) and from the structure of the language itself.
It is here that the comparative approach proves to be of great value: whilst conclusions regarding the reasons for an individual syntactic change to take place in a specific language may be very speculative, it is often possible to identify cross-linguistically recurring patterns that provide us with deeper insights into the triggers and mechanisms of comparable processes of change. In particular, usage frequency can be shown to play a crucial part in syntactic change; if we find that certain usage patterns commonly coincide with certain types of change, this makes a causal link highly likely.
In this lecture, the usefulness of a comparative approach for the purpose of identifying causes of syntactic change will be demonstrated by scrutinizing the exact process by which many languages develop a series of non-finite adverbial clauses. Beginning with a diachronic, corpus-based analysis of several Romance languages, it will be shown how cross-linguistically frequent semantic patterns lead to the emergence of cross-linguistically common syntactic structures. It will also be shown how these comparative observations enable us to understand diachronic syntactic processes even in languages of which we have no documentary evidence from earlier stages.
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