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This volume comprises a selection of papers that were presented at the 24th International Conference on Historical Linguistics (ICHL24), which took place at the Australian National University (ANU) in Canberra from 1-5 July, 2019. The volume's aim is to reflect the breadth of research presented at the conference, with each chapter representative of a workshop or themed session. A striking aspect of ICHL24 was the three-day workshop on computational and quantitative approaches to historical linguistics and two of the chapters represent different aspects of this workshop. A number of chapters present research that explores mechanisms and processes of change within specific domains of language, while others explore interactions of change across linguistic domains. Two chapters represent a common theme at the conference and consider the role of historical linguistics in explaining non-linguistic histories of language diversification.

This volume comprises a collection of contrastive studies on language and time. Languages represented include Czech, French, German, Mandarin, Norwegian and Swedish, all of which are contrasted with English. While the amount of published research on temporal relations in general is considerable, less work has been carried out on comparing how we talk about time in various languages and how languages change over time. Several methodological challenges are addressed and solutions proposed, such as how to deal with poor quality historical data and how to identify n-grams in typologically different languages for purposes of comparison. The results of the various studies show how multilingual corpora can increase our knowledge of language-specific features as well as linguistic, typological and cultural differences and similarities across languages.

This interdisciplinary volume explores the unique role of the sociohistorical factors of isolation and contact in motivating change in the varieties of Spanish worldwide. Recognizing the inherent intersectionality of social and historical factors, the book's eight chapters investigate phenomena ranging from forms of address and personal(ized) infinitives to clitics and sibilant systems, extending from Majorca to Mexico, from Panamanian Congo speech to Afro-Andean vernaculars. The volume is particularly recommended for scholars interested in historical linguistics, sociolinguistics, history, sociology, and anthropology in the Spanish-speaking world. Additionally, it will serve as an indispensable guide to students, both at the undergraduate and graduate level, investigating sociohistorical advances in Spanish.

The collected articles in this volume address an array of cutting-edge issues in the field of historical linguistics, including new theoretical approaches and innovative methodologies for studying language through a diachronic lens. The articles focus on the following themes: I. Case & Argument Structure, II. Alignment & Diathesis, III. Patterns, Paradigms, & Restructuring, IV. Grammaticalization & Construction Grammar, V. Corpus Linguistics & Morphosyntax, VI. Languages in Contact. Papers reflect a wide range of perspectives, and focus on issues and data from an array of languages and language families, from new analyses of case and argument structure in Ancient Greek to phonological evidence for language contact in Vietnamese, from patterns of convergence in Neo-Aramaic to the development of the ergative in Basque. The volume contributes substantially to the debate surrounding core issues of language change: the role of the individual speaker, the nature of paths of grammaticalization, the role of contact, the interface of diachrony and synchrony, and many other issues. It should be useful to any reader hoping to gain insight into the nature of language change.

The collection of articles presented in this volume addresses a number of general theoretical, methodological and empirical issues in the field of Historical Linguistics, in different levels of analysis and on different themes: (i) phonology, (ii) morphology, (iii) morphosyntax, (iv) syntax, (v) diachronic typology, (vi) semantics and pragmatics, and (vii) language contact, variation and diffusion. The topics discussed, often in a comparative perspective, feature a variety of languages and language families and cover a wide range of research areas. Novel analyses and often new diachronic data — also from less known and under-investigated languages — are provided to the debate on the principles, mechanisms, paths and models of language change, as well as the relationship between synchronic variation and diachrony. The volume is of interest to scholars of different persuasions working on all aspects of language change.

The International Conference on Historical Linguistics is the main conference for specialists in language change, and the 2013 conference in Oslo drew more than 300 participants, with 182 papers presented in the general session. The 16 papers selected for inclusion in this volume from the general session of ICHL 2013 not only provide a clear picture of the state of the art in various subfields of historical linguistics but also present recent insights in diachronic phonology, typology, morphology and morphosyntax. The languages and families covered include English, German, Scandinavian, French, Occitan, Portuguese, Sardinian, Spanish, Ancient Greek, Old Japanese and Austronesian. The volume will be useful to any linguist with an interest in diachronic matters as well as general linguistic theory.

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.

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.

Every language includes layers of lexical and grammatical elements that entered it at different times in the more or less distant past. Hence, for periods preceding our earliest historical documentation, linguistic stratigraphy — the systematic study of such layers — may yield information about the prehistory of a given tradition of speaking in a variety of ways. For instance, irregular phonological reflexes may be evidence of the convergence of diverse dialects in the formation of a language, and layers of material from different source languages may form a record of changing cultural contacts in the past. In this volume are discussed past problems and current advances in the stratigraphy of Indo-European, African, Southeast Asian, Australian, Oceanic, Japanese, and Meso-American languages.

This volume brings together 15 papers on the evolution and origin of language. The authors approach the subject from various angles, exploring biological, cultural, psychological and linguistic factors. A wide variety of topics is discussed, such as animal communication, language acquisition, the essentialist-evolutionist debate, and genetic classification.

These papers from the 1987 Typology Symposium a follow-up to the 1985 meeting in Moscow deal with the relevance of typology for historical linguistics. Its application in understanding phonological and grammatical change is examined for a variety of languages. Its relevance for application of the comparative method and the method of internal reconstruction is noted with reference to the glottalic theory and problems in other language families. Among the several approaches, alignment typology is especially examined, with languages defined as accusative, ergative or stative-active an approach to which linguists of the USSR have made important contributions in recent years.Among specific problems examined are tonogenesis in Na-Dene, the origin of the genitive in ergative languages, and relative pronouns of Indo-European languages in the context of the Eurasiatic hypothesis. Along with changes in other languages (like those of East and Southeast Asia), these problems are discussed in an effort to determine general and specific tendencies in language change, and to contribute towards the development of diachronic typology.

This volume contains 22 of the 95 papers presented during ICHL 10. The articles included here clearly reflect the on-going interest in the general mechanisms of language change, the close relationship between present-day historical linguistics and linguistic theory, and the renewed interest in language contact. The papers deal with more general issues as well as with specific problems in diverse languages and language groups. The volume contains three indexes: of names, of languages, and of subjects.

The present volume contains revised versions of selected papers from the general sessions of ICHL 9. The 34 papers cover topics from the full range of contemporary historical linguistic scholarship. The papers address issues of language change in a large variety of languages and language families, both Indo-European and non-Indo-European: students of Germanic linguistics will likely find the volume to be of particular interest, as more than a dozen contributions deal with developments in Afrikaans, Dutch, English, German and Icelandic. The volume includes an index of names and languages.

This is the first of two volumes deriving from papers presented at the Nineteenth Annual UVM Linguistics Symposium held in Milwaukee in April 1990. The contributions in this volume investigate the general question of what constitutes an explanation of diachronic change, and illustrate their proposals in the context of various specific problems in historical linguistics. The present volume also includes a solicited paper by Eric P. Hamp (“On remote reconstruction”) that addresses the validity of distant reconstructions like those of Nostratic and Proto-World. Content: Garry W. Davis & Gregory K. Iverson: Foreword Werner Abraham: Event structure accounting for the emerging periphrastic tenses and the passive voice in German Raimo Anttila: Historical explanation and historical linguistics J. Clancy Clements: Elements of resistance in language contact-induced change Alice Faber: Articulatory variability, categorical perception, and the inevitability of sound change Monika Forner, Jeanette K. Gundel, Kathleen Houlihan & Gerald Sanders: On the historical development of marked forms Eric P. Hamp: On misusing similarity Hans Henrich Hock: Reconstruction and syntactic typology: A plea for a different approach Brian D. Joseph: Diachronic explanation: Putting speakers back into the picture Suzanne Kemmer: Grammatical prototypes and competing motivations in a theory of linguistic change Flora Klein-Andreu: Understanding standards Carol Lynn Modor: Rules and analogy Mary Niepokuj: The development of perfect reduplication in Indo-European Joseph E. Salmons: A look at the data for a global etymology. Subject and Language Index.

The Twelfth International Conference on Historical Linguistics, which is the major forum for the presentation of work in progress in the field of diachronic linguistics, took place at the University of Manchester in August 1995. The quality and breadth of the abstracts submitted for the general programme was such that four parallel sessions were needed throughout the conference. The present volume contains selected papers which deal with the Germanic languages. A companion volume, edited by J.C. Smith and Delia Bentley, contains papers on general problems in historical linguistics and studies of non-Germanic languages. The conference reflected the current health of diachronic linguistics. There were more papers and more participants than at past conferences, and the discussion covered a broader range of languages than hitherto.Sometimes it has been possible to isolate a particular preoccupation which has dominated much of the conference; but the overall impression to be gained from the Manchester meeting was one of stimulating diversity — the discipline appears to be moving forward on many fronts simultaneously, yet without losing focus. This stimulating diversity is well reflected in this important collection.

This volume presents a selection of papers from the 6th International Conference on Historical Linguistics (ICHL), which was held in 1983, in Poznan, Poland.

This volume presents a selection of the best papers from the Fifth International Conference on Historical Linguistics (ICHL), which was held in Galway, April 6–10 1981. These papers provide an overview of work in the field of historical linguistics, covering a wide variety of topics and languages.

These papers, deriving from the 7th International Conference on Historical Linguistics (ICHL) in Pavia in 1984, provide an overview of the current status of research in this field. They clearly show that new issues are emerging in the theory of linguistic change which tend to incorporate non-autonomous principles like naturalness in phonetic processes, the influence of socio-cultural settings and discourse pragmatics.

This volume presents a selection from the papers given at the 13th International Conference on Historical Linguistics. It offers a window on the current state of the art in historical linguistics: the papers cover a wide range of different languages, different language families, and different approaches to the study of linguistic change, ranging from optimality theory, theories of grammaticalization and the invisible hand, treatments of language contact and creolization to the linguistic consequences of political correctness. Among the languages under discussion are Akkadian, Catalan, Dutch, Finnish, Japanese, Sranan, Western Malayo-Polynesian, Yiddish, and a variety of Romance and Native American languages.

This volume contains a selection of 34 of the 96 papers presented at ICHL 1993, including several of the contributions to the workshop on Parameters and Typology organized jointly by Henning Andersen and David W. Lightfoot. Major topics represented are grammaticalization and functional renewal (illustrated with changes in romance, French, Pennsylvania German, Afrikaans, English, Finnish), changes in syntax (Indo-European, Indo-Aryan, Ancient Greek, Romanian, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Japanese, Dutch, English) and discourse structure (Old Russian, Old French), morphology (German, Turkic), phonology (Romance, Italian, French, German, Old English, English). Several papers include sociolinguistic, areal, and typological perspectives on change; a few are specifically concerned with reconstruction or with the principles of reconstruction, and several demonstrate the continued importance of the philological methods in the study of texts.

The papers in this volume are a selection from those presented at the 3rd International Conference on Historical Linguistics (ICHL), held in 1977 at the University of Hamburg. These selected papers deal with a wide variety of issues, some from a more general-theoretical perspective, some deriving new theoretical insights from language data ranging from Ojibwa to Old-Saxon.

The studies in this volume are revised versions of a selection from the papers presented at the Fourth International Conference on Historical Linguistics, held at Stanford University on 26–30 March 1979. Papers at this conference, and in this volume, treat aspects of all current topics in historical linguistics, including topics that are only recently considered relevant, such as acquisition, structure, and language use.

The volume contains 37 papers originally presented at the 8th International Conference on Historical Linguistics in Lille, France. The papers bring historical data to bear on issues in theoretical linguistics, both descriptive and diachronic or deal with specific questions in the history of individual languages. The theoretical issues range from phonology over morphology and syntax to the lexicon, as well as questions of historical dialectology, language contact, the theory of linguistic change, and problems of comparative reconstruction. The languages discussed are Finno-Ugric and Indo-European, most of the papers dealing with Germanic and Romance languages (especially English and French), but some being devoted to Greek, Celtic, Slavic, and Hittite.

This volume presents the outcome of a workshop, held in Amsterdam in 1985, on the nature, even possibility, of explanation in Historical Linguistics: why changes take place and others do not, and why they occur at a particular time and place. The workshop, and this volume, aim to explore questions such as i) are the factors which explain the actuation of a change different from those that explain its implementation?; ii) is it possible to give a typology of changes?; iii) should linguistic explanation hope to meet the same requirements as explanation in the pure sciences?; iv) are all linguistic changes necessarily the product of variation?; v) should there be a formal theory of change apart from a general thoery of grammar?