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Word-external properties in a typology of Modern English: a comparison with German

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 May 2018

JOHN A. HAWKINS
JOHN A. HAWKINS*
Affiliation:
Department of Linguistics, University of California Davis, Kerr Hall, One Shields Avenue, Davis CA 95616, USAjhawkins@ucdavis.edu
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Abstract

A large number of grammatical and lexical changes occurred in Middle and Early Modern English leading to the type of language we witness today. Other West Germanic languages were more conservative. This article focuses on some of the major contrasts between Modern English and German and proposes a new unifying generalization for them, going beyond Sapir's (1921) ‘drift’ and the comparative typology of Hawkins (1986, 1995). The contrasts involve a systematic expansion in word-external properties in English, whereby individual words carry less syntactic and semantic information in their grammatical and lexical representations and have become more reliant on neighboring words for the assignment of linguistic properties. Defining drift in this way captures more of the observed contrasts and subsumes counterexamples to earlier unifying generalizations. It also has implications for theories of real-time language processing and for the interface between linguistic typology and psycholinguistics.

Keywords

English–German contrastshistorical driftmulti-word verbstypologyword-external properties
Type
Research Article
Information
English Language & Linguistics , Volume 23 , Issue 3 , September 2019 , pp. 701 - 727
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2018 

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Footnotes

This article has benefited considerably from the comments made by two anonymous ELL reviewers and by ELL editor Bernd Kortmann. I am grateful to them for the time they invested in giving their feedback, which has greatly improved the article. I also received invaluable feedback from several people who gave me comments on an earlier version (in alphabetical order): Peter Culicover, Fernanda Ferreira, Luna Filipović, Florian Jaeger, Ed Keenan, Ekkehard König, Fritz Newmeyer, William O'Grady, Tamara Swaab and Tom Wasow. I thank them all. Useful feedback was also received from presentations to the Cognetwork Group at UC Berkeley and to the UC Davis Psycholinguistics Group in Fall 2016, and from students in advanced interdisciplinary seminars on linguistics-psycholinguistics-computational linguistics held at UC Davis in Spring 2016 and 2017. All remaining errors and shortcomings are very much my own.

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