EBOOK Information Structure and Syntactic Change in the History of English

Information Structure and Syntactic Change in the History of English is the first        book to apply information structure as it relates to language change to a        corpus-based analysis of a wide range of features in the evolution of English syntax        and grammars of prose in long diachrony. Its unifying topic is the role of        information structure, broadly conceived, as it interacts with the other levels of        linguistic description, syntax, morphology, prosody, semantics and pragmatics. The        volume comprises twelve chapters by leading scholars who take a variety of        theoretical and methodological approaches. Their work affirms, among other things,        that motivations for selecting a particular syntactic option vary from information        structure in the strict sense to discourse organization, or a particular style or        register, and can also be associated with external forces such as the development of        a literary culture.