This volume explores the role that functional elements play in syntactic change and investigates the semantic and functional features that are the driving force behind those changes. Structural developments are explained in terms of the reanalysis of parts of the functional sequences in the clausal, nominal, and adpositional domains, through changes in parameter settings and feature specifications. The chapters discuss 'microdiachronic' syntactic changes that often have implications for large-scale syntactic effects, such as word order variation, the emergence (and lexicalization) of syntactic projections, grammaticalization, and changes in information-structural properties. The volume contains both case studies of individual languages, such as German, Hungarian, and Romanian, and detailed investigations of cross-linguistic phenomena, based primarily on digital corpora of historical and dialectal data.

Barbara Egedi is Senior Research Fellow at the Hungarian Research Centre for Linguistics. She has published several papers on the noun phrase structures of Old and Middle Hungarian as well as Ancient Egyptian and Coptic. Her major interests are changes in definiteness marking and possessive constructions, grammaticalization, and the comparative syntax of Uralic languages.
Veronika Hegedüs is Senior Research Fellow at the Hungarian Research Centre for Linguistics. She has worked on the structure and grammaticalization of adpositions and verbal particles in Hungarian, and on the syntactic properties of non-verbal primary and secondary predicates. Her main interests include the syntax of adpositions, grammaticalization, and word order change, as well as the structure of copular clauses.