Information Structure and Syntactic Changein Germanic and Romance Languages -- Editorial page -- Title page -- LCC data -- Table of contents -- Acknowledgements -- Information structure and syntax in old Germanic and Romance languages -- 1. Introduction -- 2. Approaches to information structure and syntax in historical linguistics -- 3. Annotated corpora -- 4. The structure of the book -- References -- Part I. Information-structural categories and corpus annotation -- The theoretical foundations of givenness annotation -- 1. Introduction -- 1.1 Theory and practice -- 2. Theory -- 2.1 Discourse referents -- 2.2 Taggables -- 2.3 Reference contexts -- 2.4 Contexts and reference resolution in dynamic semantics -- 2.4.1 The discourse context -- 2.4.2 The encyclopaedic context and the situation context -- 2.4.3 The scenario context -- 2.4.4 Embedded contexts and non-specificity -- 2.5 Generic reference -- 2.6 The PROIEL tagset -- 3. Annotation in practice -- 3.1 General -- 3.2 Specificity - nonspec vs. new -- 3.3 Genericity -- 3.3.1 kind vs. nonspec -- 3.3.2 kind vs. acc-gen -- 3.4 Bridging -- 3.4.1 acc-inf vs old -- 3.4.2 acc-inf vs new, nonspec or no tag - the limits to inference -- 4. Evaluation and conclusions -- 4.1 The PROIEL scheme and other givenness annotation schemes -- 4.2 Annotation workflow and interannotator agreement -- 4.3 Data sample -- 4.4 Conclusions -- References -- Testing the theory -- 1. Introduction -- 2. The data -- 3. 'Old/given' information -- 4. Inferables -- 5. 'New' information -- 6. Conclusions -- Appendix A: Notes on data collection -- References -- Part II. Changes on the interface between syntax and information structure -- Quantifying information structure change in English -- 1. Introduction -- 1.1 Old English V2 syntax and the subject -- 1.2 The changing role of the English subject -- 1.3 Hypotheses -- 2. Corpora.

2.1 Referential status -- 2.2 Enriched texts -- 3. Experiments -- 3.1 Subject ellipsis -- 3.2 Subject referent switch -- 3.2.1 A definition of subject-referent switch -- 3.2.2 Measuring subject-referent switch -- 3.2.3 Subject-referent switch results -- 3.2.4 Subject chain distribution -- 3.3 Subject animacy -- 3.3.1 Determining subject animacy -- 3.3.2 Subject animacy results -- 3.4 Pre-subject linking -- 3.4.1 Clause-initial linking -- 3.4.2 Determining pre-subject linking -- 3.4.3 Pre-subject linking results -- 4. Conclusions and discussion -- 5. Sources -- References -- Tracing overlap in function in historical corpora -- 1. Introduction -- 2. The passive and object fronting as 'information-rearrangers' -- 3. Comparing the function of passives and object fronting in Old English -- 3.1 Information status categories -- 3.2 Results for long passives -- 3.3 Results for object fronting -- 4. The frequency of topicalization and passivization in the history of English -- 5. Conclusion -- References -- Referential properties of the full and reduced forms of the definite article in German -- 1. Introduction -- 2. The distribution of full and reduced definite articles in Present-day German: Some theoretical concepts -- 2.1 On the pragmatic and semantic notions of definiteness (anaphoricity vs. uniqueness) -- 2.2 A cognitive approach to definiteness -- 3. The distribution of the definite article in German: A historical perspective -- 3.1 The distribution of the two types of the definite article in OHG and MHG -- 3.1.1 The reduced and full definite article in OHG -- 3.1.2 The reduced and full definite article in MHG -- 3.2 A change scenario in the distribution of the forms of the definite article -- 4. A case of definiteness cycle -- 5. Conclusion -- References -- Primary sources -- Secondary sources.

The cognitive status of referential null subjects in Old Norse and their Modern Norwegian counterparts -- 1. Introduction -- 2. Periods, data and methodology -- 3. Cognitive status and the form of DPs -- 4. Null subjects in Old Norse and their cognitive status -- 4.1 Null subjects in Old Norse - basic facts -- 4.2 The cognitive status of null subjects in Old Norse and unstressed pronouns in Modern Norwegian -- 4.2.1 Complements of prepositions -- 4.2.2 Elements in subordinate clauses -- 4.2.3 Possessive determiners/nouns -- 4.2.4 Clauses -- 4.2.5 Referents not represented in the immediately preceding clause -- 5. Comparing the stages -- 6. Conclusion -- References -- Appendix -- Part III. Comparisons on the interface between syntax and information structure -- Word order variation in late Middle English -- 1. Introduction -- 2. Background -- 3. The present study: Data, methodology and research questions -- 3.1 The corpus: Capgrave and his texts -- 3.2 Methodology -- 3.3 Research questions -- 4. Results -- 5. Discussion -- 6. Summary and conclusion -- References -- Preverbal word order in Old English -- 1. Introduction -- 2. Verb-second -- 3. Texts -- 4. Overview of Old English and Old French preverbal word order -- 5. Clauses with SXV word order -- 6. Clauses with XSV word order -- 6.1 The X element(s) in XSV clauses -- 7. Clauses with XSXV word order -- 8. Implications for the syntactic analysis -- 8.1 Verb movement to the C-domain -- 8.1.1 More than one element preceding the finite verb -- 8.2 Old French -- 8.3 Old English -- 8.3.1 V3 word orders -- 8.3.2 Verb-late word order -- 8.4 A comparison: Modal clauses -- 8.5 Interim summary -- 9. Implications for information structure -- 9.1 Some aspects of the information structure of XSV and XSXV clauses -- 9.2 Some aspects of the information structure of SXV clauses -- 10. Conclusion -- Primary sources.

References -- Formal properties of event-reporting sentences in Old High German and Old French -- 1. Introduction -- 2. Post-verbal subject placement and the V2-constraint -- 2.1 V2 in early Germanic -- 2.2 V2 in Old French -- 3. The expression of event-reporting sentences in OHG and OF -- 3.1 The notion of event-reporting sentences -- 3.2 Contexts disfavouring a topic-comment interpretation -- 4. Corpus study -- 4.1 Data base -- 4.2 Results -- 4.2.1 Contexts specifying the personal domain of reference -- 4.2.2 Contexts specifying the spatial domain of reference -- 4.2.3 Contexts expressing a change of time -- 5. Conclusions -- References -- Text editions -- Secondary literature -- Subjects and objects in Germanic and Romance -- 1. Introduction -- 2. The data -- 2.1 Subjectless sentences -- 2.2 Arguments carrying new information -- 2.3 Arguments carrying given information -- 2.4 Postverbal nominatives in Old Norse -- 3. Explaining the changes -- 4. Conclusion -- Old Norse sources -- Old Spanish source -- References -- Object position and Heavy NP Shift in Old Saxon and beyond -- 1. Introduction -- 2. Background -- 3. Methodology -- 4. Object position: Results -- 4.1 Information status -- 4.2 Case -- 4.3 Grammatical weight -- 4.4 Strength of effect -- 5. Heavy NP Shift in Old Saxon and beyond: Analysis -- 5.1 A unified theory of Heavy NP Shift -- 5.2 Heavy NP Shift does not involve the clausal left periphery -- 5.3 Heavy NP Shift involves the 'low left periphery' -- 6. Conclusion and remaining problems -- References -- On the interaction between syntax, prosody and information structure -- 1. Introduction -- 2. Mixed word orders in Germanic -- 2.1 Mixed word orders in OE -- 2.2 Mixed word orders in OHG -- 3. Prosodic and information-structural conditions on word order -- 3.1 Prosodic/Metrical conditions -- 3.2 Information-structural conditions.

4. Word order properties of modern German and modern English -- 4.1 Scrambling and scope transparency in German and English -- 4.2 The HCP and the placement of event-related adjuncts -- 5. HF-effects in German and English -- 5.1 HF-effects in the nominal domain in German -- 5.2 HF-effects in the verbal domain in German -- 5.3 The HFF as a syntactic condition -- 5.4 The HFF as a prosodic condition -- 5.5 The weight condition and word order restrictions -- 6. On the mapping between syntactic structure and prosodic structure -- 6.1 Prosodic domain formation in a phase-based approach -- 6.2 Focus, prominence and rules of accent placement -- 6.3 On the relation between syntax, IS and LF -- 7. Word order change in English and German -- 7.1 Word order variation in OE and OHG: Point of departure -- 7.2 The grammaticalization of the definite determiner -- 7.3 Word order variation in Early Middle English -- 7.4 Evidence for basic OV order in EME? -- 7.5 The grammaticalization of the definite determiner in German -- 7.6 The reanalysis of the preverbal focus position in the history of German -- 8. Conclusions -- References -- Contrastivity and information structure in the old Ibero-Romance languages -- 1. Introduction -- 2. Contrastivity in Modern Ibero-Romance languages -- 2.1 Decomposing the notion of contrast -- 2.2 The syntactic reflexes of contrast in Modern Spanish and Portuguese -- 3. The ISWOC corpus and the methodology in the historical record -- 4. Contrastivity in the ISWOC Old Ibero-Romance corpus: The empirical facts -- 4.1 Dominant contrast -- 4.2 Juxtaposing enumeration/membership in a set -- 4.3 Highlighting -- 4.4 Discussion of results -- 5. Conclusion -- Text References -- Editions from Electronic Texts of Alfonso X: -- References -- Index of languages -- Databases and annotation schemes -- Word index.