Full Description
This volume of selected papers from the 20th International Conference on Historical Linguistics (Osaka, Japan, July 2011) presents a set of stimulating and ground-breaking studies on a wide range of languages and language families. As the scope of studies that can be characterized as 'Historical Linguistics' has expanded, ICHL conferences have likewise seen a broadening of topics presented, and this conference was no exception, reflected by the inclusion in this volume of a plenary presentation on the grammaticalization of expressions of negation and gendered kinship in American Sign Language. Three other papers propose new views of the role of grammaticalization in English, Chinese, and Niger-Congo languages. Four of the papers discuss specific problems that arise in the comparison and reconstruction of linguistic features in a range of languages from Asia, Europe and South America. The last six studies deal with innovative approaches to the historical development of suppletion in Romance languages, possessive classifiers in Austronesian, universal quantifiers in Germanic, adjectival sequences in English, exaptation in Celtic and Early English, and drift in Ancient Egyptian.
Contents
1. Foreword and Acknowledgements; 2. Editors' introduction; 3. Part I. Grammaticalization; 4. The role of historical research in building a model of Sign Language typology, variation, and change (by Supalla, Ted); 5. On the origin of Niger-Congo nominal classification (by Kiessling, Roland); 6. A closer look at subjectification in the grammaticalization of English modals: From the main verb mo(o)t to the root modal must (by Sanada, Keisuke); 7. Subjectivity encoding in Taiwanese Southern Min (by Chen, I-Hsuan); 8. Part II. Problems in historical comparison and reconstruction; 9. Emergence of the tone system in the Sanjiazi dialect of Manchu (by Wang, Haibo); 10. Searching for undetected genetic links between the languages of South America (by Adelaar, Willem F.H.); 11. Reconstructing the category of "associated motion" in Tacanan languages (Amazonian Bolivia and Peru) (by Guillaume, Antoine); 12. The mirage of apparent morphological correspondence: A case from Indo-European (by Yoshida, Kazuhiko); 13. Part III. Historical development of morphosyntactic features; 14. Analogy as a source of suppletion (by Juge, Matthew L.); 15. The rise and demise of possessive classifiers in Austronesian (by Lichtenberk, Frantisek); 16. Immediate-future readings of universal quantifier constructions (by Hoeksema, Jack); 17. The historical development and functional characteristics of the go-adjective sequence in English (by Matsumoto, Noriko); 18. Recycling "junk": A case for exaptation as a response to breakdown (by Los, Bettelou); 19. Sapirian 'drift' towards analyticity and long-term morphosyntactic change in Ancient Egyptian (by Reintges, Chris H.); 20. Language index; 21. Index of terms
