Like Carl Darling Buck's Comparative Grammar of Greek and Latin (1933), this book is an explanation of the similarities and differences between Greek and Latin morphology and lexicon through an account of their prehistory. It also aims to discuss the principal features of Indo-European linguistics. Greek and Latin are studied as a pair for cultural reasons only; as languages, they have little in common apart from their Indo-European heritage. Thus the only way to treat the historical bases for their development is to begin with Proto-Indo-European. The only way to make a reconstructed language like Proto-Indo-European intelligible and intellectually defensible is to present at least some of the basis for reconstructing its features and, in the process, to discuss reasoning and methodology of reconstruction (including a weighing of alternative reconstructions). The result is a compendious handbook of Indo-European phonology and morphology, and a vade mecum of Indo-European linguistics--the focus always remaining on Greek and Latin. The non-classical sources for historical discussion are mainly Vedic Sanskrit, Hittite, and Germanic, with occasional but crucial contributions from Old Irish, Avestan, Baltic, and Slavic.

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These essays by an outstanding group of linguists present case studies in contemporary comparative grammar, illustrating the rich and varied ways in which the principles and parameters framework of generative grammar can provide explanations for both the underlying universal properties of the world's languages and the ways in which they differ. The final essay by Noam Chomsky offers a new perspective on the principles and parameters approach to comparative grammar. In his introduction, Freidin describes the historical background of current work in comparative grammar and compares this work to the comparative studies of the nineteenth century. He notes how the current approach traces the fundamental unity of all languages to the language faculty, in contrast to that of the nineteenth century which was primarily concerned with the ancestral relations among languages. The essays that follow convey the wide scope of the interaction between current theory and crosslinguistic studies. Topics include the relevance of binding theory for crosslinguistic studies; the interaction between the syntax/lexical semantics interface and the theory of UG; the role of phrase structure and levels of representation in accounting or syntactic variation; crosslinguistic variation in word order phenomena; and the ways in which the study of comparative grammar can itself contribute to the understanding of UG. Contributors Joseph Aoun. Adriana Belletti. Noam Chomsky. Robert Freidin. Wayne Harbert. Norbert Hornstein. C.-T. James Huang. Anthony S. Kroch. Howard Lasnik. Yen-hui Audrey Li. David Lightfoot. Luigi Rizzi. Ken Safir. Beatrice Santorini. Rex A. Sprouse. Timothy Stowell. Tarald Taraldsen. Lisa deMena Travis. Edwin Williams