ABSTRACT

Until very recently, the study of syntactic change could be fairly described as being still in its infancy. The last twenty to thirty years, however, have seen an extraordinary burst of activity in this area; we now know a good deal about syntactic change, and a few general principles have begun to emerge. Some of the ideas we encountered in the last chapter will turn up again here, and indeed it can be difficult to draw a sharp line between morphological change and syntactic change.