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As research on syntactic change within a broadly generative framework enters its fifth decade, it is possible to look back at the development and accomplishments of this enterprise. Three publications which appeared in the late 1970s serve as a useful demarcation of its beginning: the collection of papers in Li (1977), David Lightfoot's (1979) book, and Lightfoot's (1979) review of the Li volume. The three features that Lightfoot criticizes are the absence of a careful formal description of the synchronic stages referenced in the diachronic analysis, reliance on assumptions about reconstructed stages of a language, and a focus on independent diachronic principles and constraints on ‘diachronic processes’. The methodology of diachronic generative syntax as it has developed over the past four decades is closely based on Lightfoot's injunctions. Some theoretical assumptions change, but the methodology has remained remarkably consistent. Thus, while the chapters in this volume represent a broad theoretical range within the general rubric of a formal approach to language changes, their methodology hews largely to the basic scheme, which are outlined in this introductory chapter. An overview of the subsequent chapters is also presented.

This introductory overview chapter focuses on the relation between movement operations and word order by assembling the pieces of information offered by the book’s authors. It shows how the essays published in the book indicate, when considered together, that word order change is mainly the effect of the interaction between clause structure and syntactic movement, thus identifying these two components of grammar as the main factors behind word order variation. It also demonstrates that the study of word order change (set within the framework of diachronic generative syntax) is a means to test the descriptive adequacy and explanatory potential of competing analyses of word order phenomena not restricted to historical change, and identifies (theoretical and empirical) research issues that emerge from the type of approach to word order change envisaged in the book.

The chapters in this volume are concerned with syntactic features and their role in restricting syntactic change. Most of the contributions propose analyses in accordance with the Borer-Chomsky Conjecture, stating that all parameters of variation are attributable to differences in the features of particular items in the lexicon. The syntactic topics are of four types: the first three reflect different domains of the clause, while the fourth type is concerned with methodology. A great number of languages and dialects figure in the discussion, including languages that have not previously received a thorough treatment in terms of diachronic syntax such as Romeyka and Middle Low German. Other languages also discussed from a fresh theoretical perspective, e.g. Hungarian, Icelandic, Polish, English, and Austronesian languages, as well as Latin and Ancient Greek. This volume confirms the validity of the view that diachronic syntax is a scientific tool of inquiry in its own right.