An Introduction to Historical Linguistics

by Crowley, Terry; Bowern, Claire

• ISBN13: 9780195365542
• ISBN10: 0195365542
• Edition: 4th
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2010-02-18
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

All languages change, just as other aspects of human society are constantly changing. This book is an introduction to the concepts and techniques of diachronic linguistics, the study of language change over time. It covers all themajor areas of historical linguistics, presenting concepts in a clear and concise way. Examples are given from a wide range of languages, with special emphasis on the languages of Australia and the Pacific. While the needs of undergraduate students of linguistics have been kept firmly in mind, the book will also be of interest to the general reader seeking to understand langauge and language change. For this fourth edition, a number of new sections have been written, including many new problems and several datasets. Existing materials have been supplemented with new sections on grammaticalization, tonogenesis, morphological change, and using statistical methods in language classification.

Author Biography

Terry Crowley was Senior Lecturer in Linguistics at the University of Waikato in New Zealand.
Claire Bowern is Assistant Professor of Linguistics, Yale University.

Table of Contents

Tables, Figures, Maps, Preface, Phonetic Symbols, Language Maps

Introduction

Types of Sound Change

Expressing Sound Changes

Phonetic and Phonemic Changes

The Comparative Method (1): Procedures

Determining Relatedness

Internal Reconstruction

Computational and Statistical Methods

The Comparative Method (2.) History and Challenges

Morphological Change

Semantic and Lexical Change

Syntactic Change

Observing Language Change

Language Contact

Cultural Reconstruction

Data Sets

Language Index

References

Endnotes

Index

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