George WalkdenUniversität Konstanz | Uni-Konstanz · Department of Linguistics
George Walkden
PhD (Cantab)
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Additional affiliations
February 2012 - present
February 2012 - March 2017
October 2009 - January 2012
Publications
Publications (60)
This volume brings together contributions selected from papers delivered at the 21st International Conference on English Historical Linguistics (ICEHL, Leiden 2021). The contributions deal with various aspects of English language across time and geographical space, shedding light on both long-term developments and singular documents of particular l...
While phonological change has played a central role in assessing linguistic relatedness since the nineteenth century, the usefulness of syntactic change for this purpose has remained debated – despite recent work on the question with a variety of results. In our study, we analyze the phylogenetic signal of syntactic data using state-of-the-art Baye...
This chapter gives an overview of modifier position in noun phrases in the early Germanic languages Old English, Old High German, Old Icelandic, and Old Saxon. We first present data for the relative position of adjectives, cardinal numerals, pos-sessives, participles, and quantifiers in relation to the head noun. Then we compare aspects of the diff...
In this chapter, we investigate possessive constructions in the extinct North Germanic language Norn, spoken in the Shetland and Orkney Isles between the thirteenth and eighteenth centuries. In doing so, we apply the methods and findings of modern heritage language research. Norn can be readily characterised as a heritage language: From the late fi...
This chapter gives an overview of changes in morphology and syntax during the medieval English period that are plausibly induced or catalysed by language contact. Our emphasis is on accurately characterising the contact situations involved, and evaluating the evidence, rather than exhaustively listing every possible contact-induced change, and so t...
This paper makes the case for using historical corpora to assess questions of sociolinguistic typology. A full account of any contact‐induced change will need to establish what the linguistic innovation in question was, who was in contact, where and when the contact took place and how the change happened, both at the individual level and at the pop...
A recent quantitative study claims language structure, whether quantified as morphological or information-theoretic complexity, to be unaffected by the proportion of those speaking the language non-natively [A. Koplenig, Royal Society Open Science, 6, 181274 (2019)]. This result hinges on either the use of a categorical notion of ‘vehicularity’ as...
This chapter investigates the mechanisms of null subject licensing in direct interrogatives, an environment which is generally neglected in investigation into null subjects, using data from a range of early Romance and Germanic languages considered to be asymmetric pro -drop languages, i.e. languages in which null subjects are favoured in main clau...
This paper investigates clausal constituent order in Estonian, a language often described in the literature as exhibiting a verb-second “tendency”. We present a corpusbased study of ordering in independent affirmative declarative clauses, drawing data from both written and spoken corpora. Our results show that, while written Estonian is robustly a...
This chapter revisits the significant question of embedded Verb Second in historical Germanic, in light of recent developments in research on present-day V2 languages. Drawing on novel corpus data for Old English, Old Saxon, historical Icelandic, and historical Yiddish, it shows that there is little support for an analysis which permits embedded V2...
Recent work has cast doubt on the idea that all languages are equally complex; however, the notion of syntactic complexity remains underexplored. Taking complexity to equate to difficulty of acquisition for late L2 acquirers, we propose an operationalization of syntactic complexity in terms of uninterpretable features. Trudgill’s sociolinguistic ty...
While there has been a substantial body of research on the asymmetry between main and subordinate clauses in terms of the licensing of pro-drop, potential differences between types of unembedded clause have received much less attention – despite the fact that competing theories of pro-drop make strong, clear predictions about the distribution of nu...
The notion of uniformitarianism, originally borrowed into linguistics from the earth sciences, is widely considered to be a foundational principle in modern historical linguistics. However, there are almost as many interpretations of uniformitarianism as there are historical linguists who take the time to define the notion. In this paper I argue, f...
In this chapter, we focus on the choice of different genres in the Middle Low German part of the tagged and parsed Corpus of Historical Low German and its implications for syntax. We discuss how the inclusion or exclusion of genres has an impact on the study and the discovery of syntactic phenomena in Middle Low German, such as null referential sub...
The Constant Rate Hypothesis (Kroch 1989) states that when grammar competition leads to language change, the rate of replacement is the same in all contexts affected by the change (the Constant Rate Effect, or CRE). Despite nearly three decades of empirical work into this hypothesis, the theoretical foundations of the CRE remain problematic: it can...
In this paper, we consider two kinds of v P-fronting constructions in English and argue that they receive quite different analyses. First, we show that English v P-preposing does not have the properties that would be expected of a movement-derived dependency. Evidence for this conclusion is adduced from the licensing conditions on its occurrence, f...
Certain recently-attested varieties of Germanic V2 languages are known to deviate from the strict V2 requirement characteristic of the standard. This is the case, for example, for Kiezdeutsch, a new German dialect, as well as urban vernacular varieties of Danish, Norwegian and Swedish: descriptively speaking, in these varieties, subject-verb invers...
Full text: http://walkden.space/Salvesen_Walkden_2016_V2.pdf Old English (OE) and Old French (OF) both display verb-second (V2) word order in main declarative clauses. Different models may account for V2: (a) the finite verb must move to a head in the CP field; (b) it must remain in the IP field; or (c) it moves to the left periphery only when the...
In this paper we investigate the place of origin of the change from Jes-persen's Cycle stage II – bipartite ne + not – to stage III, not alone. We use the LAEME corpus to investigate the dialectal distribution in more detail, finding that the change must have begun in Northern and Eastern England. A strong effect of region and time period can be cl...
Change is an inherent feature of all aspects of language, and syntax is no exception. While the synchronic study of syntax allows us to make discoveries about the nature of syntactic structure, the study of historical syntax offers even greater possibilities. Over recent decades, the study of historical syntax has proven to be a powerful scientific...
This short paper introduces the HeliPaD, a new parsed corpus of Old Saxon (Old Low German). It is annotated according to the standards of the Penn Corpora of Historical English, enriched with lemmatization and additional morphological attributes as well as textual and metrical annotation. This paper provides an overview of its main features and com...
The Language Change collection has become substantially larger thanks to the partnership between Brill Publishing and ScienceOpen . All three of the journals presented - Indo-European Linguistics , Journal of Greek Linguistics and Language Dynamics and Change - contain juicy language-change-related papers, and I have added a generous selection of t...
This article investigates the occurrence and distribution of referential null subjects in Middle English. Whereas Modern English is the textbook example of a non-null-subject language, the case has recently been made that Old English permits null subjects to a limited extent, which raises the question of what happens in the middle period. In this a...
This collection is ScienceOpen's first linguistics collection - and, to my knowledge, its first collection that might be said to fall into the humanities rather than the sciences. There are many reasons for this state of affairs. For one, the humanities lag behind the sciences in both green and gold open access - though linguistics is leading the w...
This paper investigates the possibility of subject omission in the history of Icelandic, including the syntactic and pragmatic conditions under which it could arise. Based on regression analysis of substantial data drawn from the IcePaHC corpus, we provide robust quantitative support for Hjartardóttir's (1987) claim that null subjects persist until...
Full text: http://walkden.space/Walkden_2015_RingeTaylorreview.pdf
Full text: http://walkden.space/Walkden_2015_V3.pdf In this paper I develop an analysis of the alternation between verb-third (V3) and verb-second (V2) in the older West Germanic languages in terms of information-structural considerations. I present the situation in Old English and Old High German as well as new data from Old Saxon, proposing on th...
This book investigates methods, possibilities, and limitations in the reconstruction of syntax in a framework which holds that the object of enquiry is knowledge of language and which acknowledges that the transmission of that knowledge is discontinuous. The main objections to syntactic reconstruction raised in the literature are assessed, and it i...
This book investigates methods, possibilities, and limitations in the reconstruction of syntax in a framework which holds that the object of enquiry is knowledge of language and which acknowledges that the transmission of that knowledge is discontinuous. The main objections to syntactic reconstruction raised in the literature are assessed, and it i...
This book investigates methods, possibilities, and limitations in the reconstruction of syntax in a framework which holds that the object of enquiry is knowledge of language and which acknowledges that the transmission of that knowledge is discontinuous. The main objections to syntactic reconstruction raised in the literature are assessed, and it i...
This book offers reconstructions of various syntactic properties of Proto-Germanic, including verb position in main clauses, the syntax of the wh-system, and the (non-)occurrence of null pronominal subjects and objects. Although previous studies have looked at the lexical and phonological reconstruction of Proto-Germanic, little is currently known...
Full text: http://walkden.space/Walkden_2014_DiGS11review.pdf
Full text: http://walkden.space/Walkden_2014_OSHNPS.pdf This paper investigates the position of 'heavy' nominal objects in Old Saxon and other Germanic languages. A new empirical study of Old Saxon is carried out and regression analysis performed, with information status, grammatical weight and case all serving as predictors. On the theoretical sid...
Full text: http://walkden.space/Walkden_2013_hwaet.pdf It is commonly held that Old English hwæt, well known within Anglo-Saxon studies as the first word of the epic poem Beowulf, can be ‘used as an adv[erb]. or interj[ection]. Why, what! ah!’ (Bosworth & Toller 1898, s.v. hwæt, 1) as well as the neuter singular of the interrogative pronoun hwā ‘wh...
Full text: http://walkden.space/Walkden_2013_NSOE.pdf The possibility of referential null subjects in Old English has been the subject of conflicting assertions. Hulk and van Kemenade (1995:245) stated that “the phenomenon of referential pro-drop does not exist in Old English,” but van Gelderen (2000:137) claimed that “Old English has pro-drop.” Th...
While considerable swathes of the phonology and morphology of proto-languages have been reconstructed using the comparative method, syntax has lagged behind. Jeffers (1976) and Lightfoot (2002a), among others, have questioned whether syntax can be reconstructed at all, claiming that a fundamental problem exists in applying the techniques of phonolo...
Full text: http://walkden.space/Walkden_2012_CyclicalChangereview.pdf
In this paper I question the Inertial Theory of language change put forward by Longobardi (2001), which claims that syntactic change does not arise unless caused and that any such change must originate as an ‘interface phenomenon’. It is shown that these two claims and the contention that ‘syntax, by itself, is diachronically completely inert’ (Lon...
This thesis investigates methods, possibilities and limitations in the reconstruction of syntax in a framework which holds that the object of inquiry is knowledge of language and which acknowledges that the transmission of that knowledge is discontinuous. The main objections to syntactic reconstruction raised in the literature are assessed, and it...
Two assumptions often considered principles of inquiry in historical generative syntax are that linguistic change is abductive (Andersen 1973) and that syntax is inert (Longobardi 2001). In this paper it is demonstrated that these two notions, if meaningfully interpreted, are not compatible: if we wish to develop a coherent theory of language acqui...
This thesis investigates the question of whether it is possible, or desirable, to use the comparative method as applied in phonological reconstruction to identify syntactic correspondences. I show that approaches proposed in the literature (e.g. by Lehmann 1974 or Harris & Campbell 1995) are problematic either because they do not follow the compara...
In this squib I examine two superficially competing explanations for the Final-over-Final Constraint (FOFC): those of Hawkins (2004) and of Biberauer, Holmberg & Roberts (2007, 2008). I argue that while an external, quantitative approach cannot account for all the relevant facts, such an approach, correctly formulated, may play a role in explaining...