The English Clause Hierarchy Over History

What is it about?

The aim of this chapter is to investigate development in the English clause system over the history of the language. The main focus will be on the emergence and quantitative development of English combined clauses in a series of recently developed diachronic corpora in order to determine if there are historical trends that can be related to the clause hierarchy described in previous chapters. If so, this would suggest further evidence that hierarchy is an important property of the English clause system. We will focus on two different theories of diachronic syntax have made contrasting hypotheses about such development over time. The first hypothesis, from within the generative framework of linguistics, is often given the nomenclature the Inertia Principle (Roberts 2007) or Inertial Theory (Longobardi 2001; Walkden 2012). The second is from the Adaptive Approach to Grammar (Givon 2012).

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Why is it important?

The theories surrounding linguistic drift and clause grammmar go to the heart of of major disputes in the study of language cognition.