Antipassive in Austronesian alignment change
in Grammatical Change
November 2011; published online January 2012.
Chapter. Subjects: historical and diachronic linguistics. 4966 words.
This chapter proposes that an ergative language becomes split-ergative by a reanalysis of its antipassive construction as syntactically transitive. A split-ergative language then can evolve into an...
The Arabic component of the Spanish lexicon
in A History of the Spanish Lexicon
June 2012; published online September 2012.
Chapter. Subjects: historical and diachronic linguistics. 14030 words.
This chapter begins with an overview of the introduction of Arabic into the Iberian Peninsula in the early eighth century, the sociolinguistic nature of the resulting contact situation, and problems...
The Archaeological Evidence of Language Origins: States of Art
in Language Evolution
July 2003; published online January 2010.
Chapter. Subjects: historical and diachronic linguistics. 6304 words.
This chapter deals with the human use of symbols from the viewpoint of archaeology. It argues that anatomical evidence from skeletal remains contributes little to the understanding of the evolution...
Are Stem Changes as Natural as Affixes?
in Frequency of Use and the Organization of Language
January 2007; published online January 2010.
Chapter. Subjects: historical and diachronic linguistics. 7788 words.
A prominent claim made in the theory of natural morphology is that among morphological processes, affixation is more “natural” than internal stem changes. According to this theory, the criteria for...
The areal dimension of grammaticalization
in The Oxford Handbook of Grammaticalization
October 2011; published online September 2012.
Article. Subjects: linguistics; historical and diachronic linguistics. 4033 words.
This article describes the areal dimension of grammaticalisation resulting from language contact. It shows that grammaticalisation is a ubiquitous process in language contact which may affect any...
The art of speech
in The Languages of the Amazon
May 2012; published online May 2012.
Chapter. Subjects: historical and diachronic linguistics. 12257 words.
Every Amazonian language has a remarkably rich lexicon, and a plethora of genres with their varied stylistic features, as befits essentially oral cultures. Shamans, with their supernatural powers,...
An article evolving: the case of Old Bulgarian
in Grammatical Change
November 2011; published online January 2012.
Chapter. Subjects: historical and diachronic linguistics. 6609 words.
This chapter discusses the structure of the nominal expression in Old Bulgarian with a focus on the rise of the article. It builds on earlier work and further develops the observations therein,...
Assessing the role of contact in the history of English
in The Oxford Handbook of the History of English
November 2012; published online November 2012.
Article. Subjects: linguistics; linguistics; historical and diachronic linguistics. 4808 words.
Language contact has long been the subject of extensive research in linguistics, but has recently been the object of increased attention by scholars working on both the history of English and...
An Atlas in the Mind
in When Languages Die
February 2007; published online January 2010.
Chapter. Subjects: historical and diachronic linguistics. 12055 words.
This chapter begins by discussing the writer's experiences while trekking the Sayan Mountains in search for Tofa language speakers. It then explains how the Tofa oriented themselves firstly by rivers...
Attitudes, prescriptivism, and standardization
in The Oxford Handbook of the History of English
November 2012; published online November 2012.
Article. Subjects: linguistics; sociolinguistics; historical and diachronic linguistics. 4219 words.
Some forms of language are assumed to be more correct than others, a prescriptive dictum with strong roots in the eighteenth-century grammatical tradition. The ideology was popular in the nineteenth...