Full Description
This volume brings together an international group of linguists from a diverse range of research backgrounds to explore the cycles of change in the world's languages. Historical linguistics does not solely focus on reconstructing a language's linguistic past and exploring the mechanisms underlying previous language changes; it also addresses broader questions concerning the development and ongoing evolution of language. The chapters in this book draw on data both from languages from the distant past, such as Hittite, Proto-Turkic, and Proto-Bantu, and from present-day languages including Akan, Cantonese, Kuuk Thaayorre, Seliš-Ql'ispé, Nivaclé, and Spanish. The contributions showcase current research in historical linguistics and exemplify the dynamism and inherently interdisciplinary nature of the field.
Contents
Part I. Reconstructing the past
1: Larry M. Hyman: The fall and rise of vowel length in Bantu
2: Darya Kavitskaya and Adam McCollum: The rise and fall of rounding harmony in Turkic
3: Alice Gaby: The life cycle of the Kuuk Thaayorre desiderative
4: Mary Paster: Akan morphological 'reversal' in historical context
5: Matthew L. Juge: Increasing morphological mismatch via category loss: The Spanish future subjunctive
6: David Goldstein: Toward a non-teleological account of demonstrative reinforcement
7: Lyle Campbell: Typology and history of unusual traits in Nivaclé
8: Jay H. Jasanoff: Greek )e*g*w*k*a and the perfect of PIE *ogneh3 'know'
9: H. Craig Melchert: The surface position of Hittite subordinating kuit
10: Juliette Blevins: PIE *meh2- 'grow, be fruitful' and Proto-Basque *ma, *maha 'fruit': An apple by any other name...
Part II. Philological and documentary past and present
11: Donca Steriade: Paradigm structure in Sanskrit reduplicants
12: Sarah Thomason: Sound symbolic words in Séli%s;-Ql'ispé
13: Gabriela Caballero: Tone and morphological structure in a documentation-based grammar of Choguita Rarámuri
14: Hannah J. Haynie and Maziar Toosarvandani: The structure of dialect diversity in Mono: Evidence from the Sydney M. Lamb papers
15: Clare S. Sandy: Recovering prosody from Karuk texts: Deciphering J. P. Harrington's diacritics
16: Justin Spence: Stylistic differentiation in California Dene texts
17: Lucy Thomason: Winter story themes in Meskwaki: Familiar creatures seen with new eyes
18: Lisa Conathan: The material and the textual in documentation of Native American languages
19: Christine Beier and Lev Michael: Community-participatory orthography development in the Máíjùnà communities of Peruvian Amazonia
20: Marianne Mithun: The value of family relations for revitalization
Part III. Looking forward: New approaches
21: Molly Babel and Melinda Fricke: Sound structure and the psycholinguistics of language contact
22: Alan C. L. Yu, Carol K. S. To, and Yao Yao: Child-directed speech as a potential source of phonetic precursor enhancement in sound change: Evidence from Cantonese
23: Chundra Cathcart: Paradigmatic heterogeneity and homogenization: Probing Paul's principle
24: Jeff Good: Language change in small-scale multilingual societies: Trees, waves, and magnets?
25: Claire Bowern: Gradualness and abruptness in linguistic split: A Nyulnyulan case study
