What is it about?
A diachronic examination of its origin out of a coordination construction, related to the demise of the subjunctive in Old Frisian.
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Why is it important?
An embedded construction displaying Verb-First, normally embedded constructions in Frisian are Verb-Final, like in German and Dutch. It shows that present-day properties of a construction, which seem weird, are naturally related to their historical origin, much in the same way as is done in evolutionary biology.
Perspectives
Theories of syntactic structure must be to some extent unrestricted to allow of the grammatical reanalyses of this construction produced by the succeeding generations of speakers, yet also be specific enough to describe the specific path of grammaticalisation that was chosen.
Eric Hoekstra
Fryske Akademy, Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: On the Origin and Development of an Embedded v-Initial Construction in Frisian, Amsterdamer Beiträge zur älteren Germanistik, June 2017, Brill,
DOI: 10.1163/18756719-12340071.
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