Séminaire de Recherche en Linguistique

This work looks at several well-known cases of syntactic change and attempts to cast them in a general, simple framework of parametric change. It begins with several synchronic and diachronic observations concerning null subjects, verb-movement and word order across the Romance and Germanic languages. Altogether five dimensions of variation are observed across 16 languages, giving 80 data points. The next step is to systematically describe the observations using features. For the diachronic data, such a description makes crucial reference to changes in features and feature values. Given the Borer-Chomsky Conjecture (parametric variation reduces to formal features of functional heads), this amounts to parameter change. Next, the theory of parameters and parameter types is developed, building on earlier work by Biberauer & Roberts (2012, 2017); the central notion here is the syntactic domain in which a given parameter applies. This takes us a general, simple model of parameters, almost an explanation of syntactic change.