Carrying Verbs Across the Channel: Modelling Change in Bilingual Medieval England

This book examines grammatical changes that took place in the medieval language contact situation between English and French from 1066 until 1500. It investigates structural copying phenomena and their connection with the lexicon, finding that copying of lexical verbs with a predicate-argument structure accelerated wider grammatical changes, and shows why the traditional notion of borrowing should be replaced with the more adequate concept of copying. The authors start by taking a fresh look...