During the last decade, there has been a growing interest in the relation between sentence grammar and discourse grammar and in the diachrony of grammatical coding of discourse phenomena, such as the left sentence periphery, information structure and word order, the nominal system and reference, and the grammaticalization and pragmaticalization of speaker-oriented elements.
The workshop series "From Discourse Grammar to Sentence Grammar" was initiated by an international group of historical linguists and currently connects researchers at the universities of Bochum, Göttingen, Konstanz, Nijmegen, Oslo, Potsdam, Tübingen, Venice, and Wuppertal.
The aim of this workshop series is to facilitate the exchange of ideas among researchers on various theoretical and empirical questions of current diachronic syntax and language change in Germanic and Romance languages. Central to the series is the role of pragmatics and discourse in the development of sentence syntax in Romance and Germanic languages. In particular, we want to promote synergies between diachronic research and recent advances in synchronic theories of the syntax-pragmatics interface and formal pragmatics.
Our next workshop will be held May 23-24 at the University of Göttingen.
Previous workshop venues were:
May 2024: Ca' Foscari University of Venice
November 2023: Bergische Universität Wuppertal
July 2022: University of Tübingen
October 2019: University of Oslo
June 2018: University of Göttingen
November 2017: Radboud University Nijmegen
October 2016: Ca' Foscari University of Venice
Selected publications by our members
Axel-Tober, Katrin, Marco Coniglio, Kalle Müller & Katharina Paul (to appear). Grammaticalization of sentence adverbs and particles revisited. In H. Kennard, E. Lindsay-Smith, A. Lahiri & M. Maiden (eds.), Historical Linguistics 2022: Selected Papers from the 25th ICHL, Oxford 1-5 August 2022. Amsterdam: Benjamins, 233-249.
Axel-Tober, Katrin & Kalle Müller (2017). Evidential adverbs in German. Diachronic development and present-day meaning. Journal of Historical Linguistics 7.1/2, 9-47.
Axel-Tober, Katrin & Ans van Kemenade (under revision). Root and non-root phenomena. In Gergel, Remus & Ans van Kemenade (eds.), The Grammatical History of the Germanic Languages. Berlin: De Gruyter.
Blümel, Andreas & Marco Coniglio (2019). What kind of constructions yield what kind of constructions? In M. Bouzouita, A. Breitbarth, L. Danckaert & E. Witzenhausen (eds.), Cycles in Language Change [Oxford Studies in Diachronic & Historical Linguistics 37]. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 131-154.
Björnsdóttir, Sigríður, Lisa Gotthard & George Walkden (under review). Tracing the rise of raising in Early Modern English.
Catasso, Nicholas & Christine Meklenborg (accepted). Complex left peripheries and adverbial resumption in the history of Germanic. A comparison of Scandinavian and German. In Gergel, Remus & Ans van Kemenade, A. (eds.), Handbook of Germanic language history. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Catasso, Nicholas (accepted). Another adverbial expletive in German? In Fuß, Eric & Benjamin L. Sluckin (eds.), Theoretical and historical perspectives on expletives, Special Issue in Evolutionary Linguistic Theory.
Catasso, Nicholas (2021). How large is the left periphery of Present-Day German? A unifying approach to multiply-filled-prefield configurations. Open Linguistics 7/1: 760-801.
Coniglio, Marco (accepted). Modal particles. In Remus Gergel & Ans van Kemenade (eds.), The Grammatical History of the Germanic Languages. Berlin: De Gruyter.
Coniglio, Marco (2022). On the adverbial origin of German modal particles. In X. Artiagoitia, A. Elordieta & S. Monforte (eds.), Discourse Particles. Syntactic, semantic, pragmatic and historical aspects. [Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 276]. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 13-39.
Coniglio, Marco, Chiara De Bastiani, Roland Hinterhölzl & Thomas Weskott (2021). In the right mood, in the right place: On mood and verb placement in Old Germanic subordinate clauses. Journal of Historical Syntax 5: 1-27.
De Bastiani, Chiara (2020). Verb and Object Order in the History of English. A language-internal Account. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
De Bastiani, Chiara (2023). Crossing the Borders between Meter, Syntax and Information Structure Some Methodological Notes. LEA 12: 377-400. https://doi.org/10.36253/lea-1824-484x-14488.
Eckardt, Regine & George Walkden (2022). A particle-like use of hwæþer: Wisdom’s questions in Boethius. In Xabier Artiagoitia, Sergio Monforte & Arantzazu Elordieta Alcibar (eds.), Discourse particles. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 41-64.
Kemenade, Ans (accepted) (2025). The diachrony of V2-V3 alternations. In Gvozdanovich, Jadranka (ed.), Historical Linguistics 2023. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Kemenade, Ans & Meta Links (2020). Discourse particles in early English: clause structure, pragmatics and discourse management. Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics 5(1), 3. DOI: http://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.1020
Kemenade, Ans van, Roland Hinterhölzl & Tara Struik (2023). Word order change, architecture and interfaces: evidence from the development of V to C movement in the history of English. Journal of Historical Syntax 7.25. DOI: 10.18148/hs/2023.
Los, Bettelou, Gea Dreschler, Ans van Kemenade, Erwin Komen, & Stefano Coretta (2023). The decline of local anchoring: A quantitative investigation. English Language and Linguistics 27(2): 345-372. doi:10.1017/S1360674323000047
Los, Bettelou & Stefano Coretta (accepted). V2-Relatives in Old English. Language Sciences.
Meklenborg, Christine (2020). Resumptive particles and Verb Second. In Woods, Rebecca & Sam Wolfe (eds), Rethinking Verb Second. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Müller, Kalle & Katrin Axel-Tober (2025). A syntactic approach to pragmaticalization. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics 10(1). doi: https://doi.org/10.16995/glossa.16342
Müller, Kalle & Svetlana Petrova (under revision). Adjectives and Adverbs. In Remus Gergel & Ans van Kemenade (eds.), The Grammatical History of the Germanic Languages. Berlin: De Gruyter.
Petrova, Svetlana (2023). Hauptsätze mit Verbspäterstellung im Althochdeutschen: Bestand, Distribution, Interpretation. Beiträge zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache und Literatur 145 (4): 515–562. https://doi.org/10.1515/bgsl-2023-0035.
Petrova, Svetlana (2020). Variation and change in the licensing of dependent V2 in German. In Lohnstein, Horst & Antonios Tsiknakis (eds.), Verb Second. Grammar Internal and Grammar External Interfaces. Berlin: de Gruyter, 251 – 276.
Petrova, Svetlana (2024). Zur Verbstellung in dat-Sätzen im Mittelniederdeutschen. In Coniglio, Marco, Anabel Recker & Heike Sahm (eds.), Mittelniederdeutsch zwischen Korpuslinguistik und Literaturwissenschaft. Göttingen: University Press, 69-94.
Sluckin, Benjamin L., Silvio Cruschina & Fabienne Martin (2021). Locative inversion in Germanic and Romance: A conspiracy theory. In Sam Wolfe & Christine Meklenborg (eds), Germanic and Romance: Continuity and variation, 165-191.
Sluckin, Benjamin L. (2024). The covert perceiver in English Locative Inversion: an alternative to expletive pro. Evolutionary Linguistic Theory 6(1-2), 194–245.
Sluckin, Benjamin L. (2025/to appear). Revisiting the syntax and development of Kiezdeutsch V3: a new perspective. Journal of Germanic Linguistics 37(1).
Struik, Tara (2022). OV/VO variation and information structure in Old Saxon and Middle Low German. Journal of Historical Syntax 6(1), 1-36. https://doi.org/10.18148/hs/2022.v6i1.127
Struik, Tara & Gert-Jan Schoenmakers (2023). When information structure exploits syntax: The relation between the loss of VO and scrambling in Dutch. Journal of Linguistics 59(3), 655-690. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0022226722000172
Struik, Tara & Ans van Kemenade (2022). Information structure and OV word order in Old and Middle English: a phase-based approach. Journal of Comparative Germanic Linguistics 25(1), 79-114. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10828-022-09131-1