This special issue of Nordic Journal of Linguistics is dedicated to diachronic generative syntax in the North Germanic languages. With the introduction of generative grammar in the late 1950s the historical perspective became less prominent within linguistics. Instead, contemporary language, normally represented by the researcher’s own intuitions, became the unmarked empirical basis within the generative field, although there were some early pioneering studies in generative historical syntax (e.g. Traugott 1972). It was not until the introduction of the Principles and Parameters theory in the 1990s that diachronic syntax emerged as an important domain of inquiry for generative linguists. Since then, the study of syntactic change has added a temporal dimension to the overall enterprise to better understand the nature of variation in human language.

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简介：北日耳曼语历时句法的新观点

本期特刊北欧语言学杂志致力于研究北日耳曼语系的历时生成句法。随着 1950 年代后期生成语法的引入，历史观点在语言学中变得不那么突出。相反，通常以研究者自己的直觉为代表的当代语言成为生成领域中没有标记的经验基础，尽管在生成历史句法方面有一些早期的开创性研究（例如 Traugott 1972）。直到 1990 年代原则和参数理论的引入，历时句法才成为生成语言学家研究的一个重要领域。从那时起，句法变化的研究为整个企业增加了一个时间维度，以更好地理解人类语言变化的本质。