Full Description
The International Conference on Historical Linguistics has always been a forum that reflects the general state of the art in the field, and the 2009 edition, held in Nijmegen, The Netherlands, fully allows the conclusion that the field has been thriving over the years. The studies presented in this volume are an expression of ongoing theoretical discussions as well as new analytical approaches to the study of issues concerning language change. Taken together, they reflect some of the current challenges in the field, as well as the opportunities offered by judicious use of theoretical models and careful corpus-based work. The volume's contributions are organized under the following headings: I. General and Specific Issues of Language Change, II. Linguistic Variation and Change in Germanic, III. Linguistic Variation and Change in Greek, and IV. Linguistic Change in Romance.
Contents
1. Foreword & Acknowledgements; 2. Editors' introduction; 3. Part I. General and specific issues of language change; 4. Competing reinforcements: When languages opt out of Jespersen's Cycle (by Biberauer, Theresa); 5. On the reconstruction of experiential constructions in (Late) Proto-Indo-European (by Bubenik, Vit); 6. Criteria for differentiating inherent and contact-induced changes in language reconstruction (by Gvozdanovic, Jadranka); 7. Misparsing and syntactic reanalysis (by Whitman, John); 8. How different is prototype change? (by Winters, Margaret E.); 9. The syntactic reconstruction of alignment and word order: The case of Old Japanese (by Yanagida, Yuko); 10. Part II. Linguistic variation and change in Germanic; 11. The Dutch-Afrikaans participial prefix ge-: A case of degrammaticalization? (by Conradie, C. Jac); 12. Diachronic changes in long-distance dependencies: The case of Dutch (by Hoeksema, Jack); 13. Changes in the use of the Frisian quantifiers ea/oait "ever" between 1250 and 1800 (by Hoekstra, Eric); 14. On the development of the perfect (participle) (by Larsson, Ida); 15. OV and V-to-I in the history of Swedish (by Petzell, Erik Magnusson); 16. Ethnicity as an independent factor of language variation across space: Trends in morphosyntactic patterns in spoken Afrikaans (by Stell, Gerald); 17. The sociolinguistics of spelling: A corpus-based case study of orthographical variation in nineteenth-century Dutch in Flanders (by Vosters, Rik); 18. Part III. Linguistic variation and change in Greek; 19. Dative loss and its replacement in the history of Greek (by Cooper, Adam); 20. Word order variation in New Testament Greek wh-questions (by Kirk, Allison); 21. Part IV. Linguistic change in Romance; 22. The morphological evolution of infinitive, future and conditional forms in Occitan (by Esher, Louise); 23. The evolution of the encoding of direction in the history of French: A quantitative approach to argument structure change (by Burnett, Heather); 24. Velle-type prohibitions in Latin: The rise and fall of a morphosyntactic conspiracy (by Cormany, Edward); 25. The use and development of habere + infinitive in Latin: An LFG approach (by Hertzenberg, Mari Johanne); 26. Index
