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Principles of Historical Linguistics
Historical linguistic theory and practice consist of a large number of chronological "layers" that have been accepted in the course of time and have acquired a permanence of their own. These range from neogrammarian conceptualizations of sound change, analogy, and borrowing, to prosodic, lexical, morphological, and syntactic change, and to present-day views on rule change and the effects of language contact. To get a full grasp of the principles of historical linguistics it is therefore necessary to understand the nature of each of these "layers". This book is a major revision and reorganization of the earlier editions and adds entirely new chapters on morphological change and lexical change, as well as a detailed discussion of linguistic palaeontology and ideological responses to the findings of historical linguistics to this landmark publication.
The Nature and Origin of Language
Denis Bouchard looks at how the human brain got the capacity for language and how language evolved. He argues that language is a system of signs and considers how these elements first came together in the brain. His account of language origins offers insights into language and to constructions that have defied decades of linguistic analysis.
Standardization as Sociolinguistic Change
This volume seeks to extend and expand our current understanding of the processes of language standardization, drawing on both quantitative and qualitative approaches to examine how linguistic variation plays out in various ways in everyday life in Denmark. The book compares linguistic variation across three different rural speech communities, underpinned by a transversal framework, which draws upon different methodological and analytical approaches, as well as data from different contexts across different generations, and results in a nuanced and dynamic portrait of language change in one region over time. Examining communities with varying degrees of linguistic variation with this multi-la...
The Oxford Handbook of Historical Phonology
This book presents a comprehensive and critical overview of historical phonology as it stands today. Scholars from around the world consider and advance research in every aspect of the field. In doing so they demonstrate the continuing vitality and some continuing themes of one of the oldest sub-disciplines of linguistics. The book is divided into six parts. The first considers key current research questions, the early history of the field, and the structuralist context for work on segmental change. The second examines evidence and methods, including phonological reconstruction, typology, and computational and quantitative approaches. Part III looks at types of phonological change, including...
Iconicity and Analogy in Language Change
This book examines the alternation between accusative-dative and dative-accusative order in Old Florentine clitic clusters and its decline in favor of the latter. Based on an exhaustive analysis of data collected from medieval Florentine and Tuscan texts we offer a novel analysis of the rise of the variable order, the transition from one order to the other, and the demise of the alternation that relies primarily on iconicity and analogy. The book employs exophoric pragmatic iconicity, a language-external iconic relationship based on similarity between linguistic structure and the speaker/writer's conceptualization of reality, and endophoric iconicity, a language-internal iconic relationship ...
The Evolution of Negation
Why do grammars change? The cycle of negation proposed by Jespersen is crucially linked to the status of items and phrases. The definition of criteria establishing when a polarity item becomes a negative element, and the identification of the role of phrases for the evolution of negation are the two objectives pursued by the contributions to this volume. The contributions look at the emergence of negative items, and their relation within a given sentence, with particular reference to English and French. The comparative perspective supports the documentation of the fine-grained steps that shed light on the factors that (i) determine change and those that (ii) accompany actuation, which are co...
Competition in Language Change
This book addresses one of the most pervasive questions in historical linguistics – why variation becomes stable rather than being eliminated – by revisiting the so far neglected history of the English dative alternation. The alternation between a nominal and a prepositional ditransitive pattern (John gave Mary a book vs. John gave a book to Mary) emerged in Middle English and is closely connected to broader changes at that time. Accordingly, the main quantitative investigation focuses on ditransitive patterns in the Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Middle English; in addition, the book employs an Evolutionary Game Theory model. The results are approached from an ‘evolutionary constructi...
