| Summary: | "This volume brings together studies that contribute to our knowledge about the role functional elements play in syntactic changes, and the semantic and functional features that are the driving force behind the changes. Parameter resettings, structural reanalyses, and changes in the feature specification of functional heads are explored related to the functional sequence of the clausal as well as the nominal and adpositional domains. The chapters in this book discuss 'microdiachronic' syntactic changes that often have implications for large-scale syntactic effects, such as word order variation and change, the emergence (and lexicalization) of syntactic projections, grammaticalization, and changes in information structural properties. The volume contains case studies of individual languages (English, German, Hungarian, Icelandic, Italian, Latin, Portuguese, and Romanian are included) as well as discussions of cross-linguistic phenomena. The studies heavily rely on digital corpora of historical or dialectal data. The chapters are organized in an order that essentially reflects the hierarchy of projections in the clausal functional sequence and the other distinguished ph(r)asal projections from CP to DP"--
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