Introduction [a: The Cambridge Handbook of Historical Syntax]

The study of historical linguistics has long been a concern of linguistic theory. Although it has antecedents in the Middle Ages, historical linguistics was not systematically studied until the nineteenth century, when it came to dominate the field. In the past sixty years, the development of both Greenbergian language typology and Chomsky's generative grammar (which has developed an explicitly comparative programme since the early 1980s) has led, at first independently but arguably with growing convergence, to a huge increase in our knowledge of cross-linguistic variation. Our notion of how grammatical systems vary and our ability to provide detailed, sophisticated analyses of this variation across a range of languages and grammatical phenomena is probably greater than it has been at any time in the past. Since synchronic variation reflects and is created by diachronic change, the study of historical syntax has also flourished and continues to do so. The pioneering work in historical syntax includes, but is not limited to, Kuryłowicz ([1965] 1976), Traugott (1965, 1969), Weinreich, Labov and Herzog (1968), Givón (1971), Andersen (1973), Lehmann (1973, 1974), Li (1975, 1977), Vennemann (1975), Allen ([1977] 1980), Langacker (1977), Timberlake (1977), Moravcsik (1978), Lightfoot (1979) and Lehmann ([1982] 1995). As has often been observed, change appears to be almost an inherent feature of all aspects of language, and syntax is certainly no exception. While the synchronic study of syntax, albeit from a comparative perspective both within and across different language families, does undoubtedly allow us to ask important questions and make insightful and enlightening hypotheses and discoveries about the nature of syntactic structure, the study of historical syntax arguably offers the linguist greater possibilities. Among other things, through the detailed comparison of different periods of the same language or language family we are able to track and document the individual stages in the development of particular syntactic structures, potentially allowing us to identify, pinpoint and explain the causes – whether endogenous or exogenous – of such changes, their overt reflexes and potential effects on other areas of the grammar, and the mechanisms involved therein. While successive historical stages of individual linguistic varieties are naturally closely related to each other, manifestly displaying in most cases a high degree of structural homogeneity, they often diverge minimally in significant and interesting ways which allow the linguist to isolate and observe what lies behind surface differences across otherwise highly homogenized grammars.