Íslenskt mál og almenn málfræði - 2020, Page 287

caroline heycock
Comments and questions at the doctoral defence
of Heimir Freyr van der Feest Viðarsson
1. Preliminary comments
The overarching question addressed by this dissertation is why and how change
happens in historical time in a linguistic system. The dissertation builds on work
that has been carried out over the last several decades in bringing syntactic
change — change in the grammar of a language, as opposed to its phonology or
morphology, for example — into the ambit of empirical and theoretical linguistic
research. So the overarching question is then narrowed down to that of why and
how change happens in historical time in the syntax of a language. And within
this, Heimir devotes considerable attention to a topic that is not so often
addressed: namely, can syntactic change be hastened, or alternatively slowed
down or even reversed, by deliberate intervention?
The study of change over historical time is one of the oldest and best estab-
lished branches of linguistics, but research into change in syntactic systems is
still in its infancy. There are various reasons for this; the most evident is that
theoretical work on syntax more generally is itself relatively young, and without
any theory we do not even have a way to describe a single synchronic slice of a
language, and a fortiori cannot investigate the transition between different syn-
chronic stages. A second reason, however, is that diachronic syntactic work is
particularly difficult because the evidence for many aspects of a syntactic system
is relatively sparse.
We are now beginning to develop the resources to address this challenge. On
the one hand, from the mid-20th century significant progress has been made in
our understanding of syntactic systems and the development of syntactic theory.
And on the other, more recent developments have led to the availability of digi-
tised historical corpora and, most recently and of crucial importance for syntacti-
cians, historical corpora that have been parsed so that they can be searched for
structural units.
While the comments above look at the issues of syntactic change from the
point of view of a linguist, there is also a connection to the point of view of a
learner and user of a language. It was mentioned above that a fundamental diffi-
culty for the diachronic syntactician is the relative sparseness of data for many
syntactic phenomena. But if the data are sparse for a linguist, the same is true for