Efnisyfirlit

• Cover
• Half Title
• Endorsements
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• To the reader
• To the teacher
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• 1 The fact of language change
• 1.1 Irregardless
• 1.2 English then and now
• 1.3 Attitudes to language change
• 1.4 The inevitability of change
• Case study: kind regards
• Further reading
• Exercises
• 2 Lexical and semantic change
• 2.1 Borrowing
• 2.2 Phonological treatment of loans
• 2.3 Morphological treatment of loans
• 2.4 Formation of new words
• 2.5 Change in word meaning
• Case study: nice
• Further reading
• Exercises
• 3 Phonological change 1: change in pronunciation
• 3.1 The phonetic basis of phonological change
• 3.2 Assimilation and dissimilation
• 3.3 Lenition and fortition
• 3.4 Addition and removal of phonetic features
• 3.5 Vowels and syllable structure
• 3.6 Whole-segment processes
• 3.7 The regularity issue: a first look
• Case study: Germanic */xw/ in the present-day dialects
• Summary
• Further reading
• Exercises
• 4 Phonological change II: change in phonological systems
• 4.1 Conditioning and rephonologization
• 4.2 Phonological space
• 4.3 Chain shifts
• Case study: large scale change in the Germanic consonant system – Grimm’s Law and Verner’s Law
• Summary
• Further reading
• Exercises
• 5 Morphological change
• 5.1 Reanalysis
• 5.2 Analogy and levelling
• 5.3 Universal principles of analogy
• 5.4 Morphologization
• 5.5 Morphologization of phonological rules
• 5.6 Change in morphological type
• Case study: the evolution of the definite article from the demonstrative paradigm in English
• Further reading
• Exercises
• 6 Syntactic change
• 6.1 Reanalysis of surface structure
• 6.2 Shift of markedness
• 6.3 Grammaticalization
• 6.4 Typological harmony
• 6.5 Syntactic change as restructuring of grammars
• Case study: the rise of ergativity
• Further reading
• Exercises
• 7 Relatedness between languages
• 7.1 The origin of dialects
• 7.2 Dialect geography
• 7.3 Genetic relationships
• 7.4 Tree model and wave model
• 7.5 The language families of the world
• Case study: a Martian’s view on the Germanic language family
• Further reading
• Exercises
• 8 The comparative method
• 8.1 Systematic correspondences
• 8.2 Comparative reconstruction
• 8.3 Pitfalls and limitations
• 8.4 The Neogrammarian Hypothesis
• 8.5 Semantic reconstruction
• 8.6 The use of typology and universals
• 8.7 Reconstructing grammar
• 8.8 The reality of proto-languages
• Case study: a reconstruction too far?
• Further reading
• Exercises
• 9 Internal reconstruction
• 9.1 A first look at the internal method
• 9.2 Alternations and internal reconstruction
• 9.3 Internal reconstruction of grammar and lexicon
• Case study: the laryngeal theory of PIE
• Further reading
• Exercises
• 10 The origin and propagation of change
• 10.1 The Saussurean paradox
• 10.2 Variation and social stratification
• 10.3 Variation as the vehicle of change
• 10.4 Lexical diffusion
• 10.5 Near-mergers
• Case study: historical sociolinguistics
• 10.6 A closing note
• Further reading
• Exercises
• 11 Social and historical pressures upon language
• 11.1 Linguistic contact
• 11.2 Linguistic areas
• 11.3 Language birth: pidgins and creoles
• 11.4 Language planning
• 11.5 Language death
• Case study: the genesis and development of American and New Zealand English
• Further reading
• Exercises
• 12 Language and prehistory
• 12.1 Introduction
• 12.2 Linguistic palaeontology
• 12.3 Links with archaeology
• 12.4 Statistical methods
• Case study: Greenberg’s mass comparison
• Further reading
• Exercises
• Appendix: the Swadesh 200-word list
• References
• Index