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The Handbook of Historical Linguistics provides a detailed account of the numerous issues, methods, and results that characterize current work in historical linguistics, the area of linguistics most directly concerned with language change as well as past language states. Contains an extensive introduction that places the study of historical linguistics in its proper context within linguistics and the historical sciences in general Covers the methodology of historical linguistics and presents sophisticated overviews of the principles governing phonological, morphological, syntactic, and semantic change Includes contributions from the leading specialists in the field

This classroom-tested volume aspires to be a brief but technically and factually accurate exposition of linguistic description and history. Whether studied as prime subject or as background information, it should help students understand the assumptions and reasoning that underlie the contents of their handbooks and etymological dictionaries.This book should be a useful guide for anyone unfamiliar with (historical) linguistics who is studying the history of a language, and also for those who are enrolled in courses devoted to reading texts in old languages.

Discusses all aspects of language change as a dynamic process against a background of the differing approaches of the structuralist, neogrammarian and transformational generative schools.

The book presents an analysis of selected domains of morphosyntactic variation in a 250,000 word collection of the Middle English Paston Letters (1421-1503) from a historical sociolinguistic point of view. In the three case studies, two nominal and one verbal variable are described and discussed in detail: the replacement of Old English “i>h-th-wh-take, make, give, have, do plus deverbal noun). While the study aims at a balanced integration of theories and methods from a number of different approaches in sociolinguistics, cognitive linguistics, typology, and language change, its main focus is social network theory and the role of the linguistic individual in the formation and change of language structures. Questions of individual language use and of deliberate versus unmonitored changes in the (individual) system take center stage and are discussed in the light of social network analysis. Traditional empirical social network analysis is carefully revised. Despite its many merits in present-day sociolinguistics, it often needs to be supplemented by hermeneutic-biographical analyses of the individual speakers' lives when applied to historical data. With this background, common theories and models of language change, such as grammaticalization, paradigmatic pressure, typological alignment, and generational shifts, are illustrated and evaluated from the point of view of single speakers and social groups, and their particular embedding in the speech community through various network structures. The book is of interest to advanced students and researchers in English and general linguistics, Middle English, historical linguistics and language change, corpus linguistics, as well as sociolinguistics.

This book, a reprint of one of the classics of historical linguistics, contains five papers originally presented at a 1966 symposium at the University of Texas at Austin. The individual contributions cover a broad range of topics, from Ferdinand de Saussure's influence on historical linguistics to the connection between inflectional paradigms and sound change to language change in contemporary linguistic communities. Each of the contributions has had a sizable effect on the development of linguistics; the final paper, by Uriel Weinreich, Marvin Herzog, and William Labov, for instance, laid the foundation for contemporary historical sociolinguistics. The volume has long been out of print; this new edition will make it accessible to a new generation of linguists.

This volume presents seven extensive essays by specialists in their respective fields of historical linguistics. The first essay after the Introduction states the principles presented in Directions for Historical Linguistics (1968) and assesses the progress made since then towards constructing a general theory of language change. Like the following essays on phonology and morphology, it poses new questions that have arisen in the increasingly ambitious research. Historical attention to discourse, the topic of the next essay, is virtually new, though it too finds predecessors among philologists who devoted themselves to texts. Finally, two essays treat etymology, one concentrating on the rigorously investigated Romance field, the other on Indo-European, especially on new insights prompted by attention to Hittite.

For more than three decades, the International Conference on Historical Linguistics (ICHL) has been characterized by diversity, both in terms of the theoretical frameworks used by its researchers and the wide variety of languages that are analyzed. ICHL 18, which took place at the Université du Québec à Montréal in August 2007, was no exception to the continuation of this tradition. The articles in the present volume encompass many different approaches and a wide range of theories, including grammaticalization, generative approaches to linguistic change and variation, reanalysis, the use of analogy, and the interplay between internal and external factors. The volume is divided into four sections, dealing with phonology, with syntax, morphology, and semantics, with external factors in linguistic change, and with tools and methodologies. This way, this volume aims to be a reflection of the diverse trends in current historical linguistic study.

An entirely new follow-up volume providing a detailed account of numerous additional issues, methods, and results that characterize current work in historical linguistics. This brand-new, second volume of The Handbook of Historical Linguistics is a complement to the well-established first volume first published in 2003. It includes extended content allowing uniquely comprehensive coverage of the study of language(s) over time. Though it adds fresh perspectives on several topics previously treated in the first volume, this Handbook focuses on extensions of diachronic linguistics beyond those key issues. This Handbook provides readers with studies of language change whose perspectives range from comparisons of large open vs. small closed corpora, via creolistics and linguistic contact in general, to obsolescence and endangerment of languages. Written by leading scholars in their respective fields, new chapters are offered on matters such as the origin of language, evidence from language for reconstructing human prehistory, invocations of language present in studies of language past, benefits of linguistic fieldwork for historical investigation, ways in which not only biological evolution but also field biology can serve as heuristics for research into the rise and spread of linguistic innovations, and more. Moreover, it: offers novel and broadened content complementing the earlier volume so as to provide the fullest available overview of a wholly engrossing field includes 23 all-new contributed chapters, treating some familiar themes from fresh perspectives but mostly covering entirely new topics features expanded discussion of material from language families other than Indo-European provides a multiplicity of views from numerous specialists in linguistic diachrony. The Handbook of Historical Linguistics, Volume II is an ideal book for undergraduate and graduate students in linguistics, researchers and professional linguists, as well as all those interested in the history of particular languages and the history of language more generally.