Chapters in this book

1. Prelim pages i
2. Table of contents v
3. Introduction vii
4. A corpus study of would + have + past-participle 1
5. From modal auxiliary to lexical verb 19
6. A subject-verb agreement hierarchy 35
7. Language change as reranking of constraints 45
8. Loss of prototypical meanings in the history of English semantics or semantic redeployment 63
9. How a man changed a parameter value 73
10. Some constraints on the borrowability of syntactic features (and why none of them work) 89
11. On the (non)loss of polarity sensitivity 101
12. The development of secondary stress in Old English 115
13. Morphological restructuring 131
14. Backdating the English Constraint Grammar Parser for the analysis of English historical texts 149
15. Vowel variation in Proto-Germanic ai in 16th and 17th-century Holland 167
16. Language prescription 177
17. Reconstructing the social dimension of diachronic language change 189
18. Grammaticalization versus reanalysis 211
19. Word frequency and lexical diffusion in English stress shifts 223
20. Post-verbal complements in Old English 233
21. Semantic stability in derivationally related words 247
22. Language change in progress 269
23. Phonological simplification vs. stylistic differentiation in the history of German word stress 285
24. What is metonymy? 301
25. On the development of marked negation systems 311
26. On the development of incorporating structures in German 331
27. Index of subjects 345
28. Index of names 357