Historical Linguistics 2009: Selected papers from the 19th International Conference on Historical Linguistics, Nijmegen, 10-14 August 2009 (Current Issues in Linguistic Theory)

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. Editors’ introduction Part I: General and specific issues of language change Theresa Biberauer: Competing reinforcements. When languages opt out of Jespersen’s Cycle Vit Bubenik: On the Reconstruction of Experiential Constructions in (Late) Proto-Indo-European Jadranka Gvozdanović: Criteria for differentiating inherent and contact-induced changes in language reconstruction John Whitman: Misparsing and syntactic reanalysis Margaret E. Winters & Geoffrey S. Nathan: How different is prototype change? Yuko Yanagida: The syntactic reconstruction of alignment and word order. The case of Old Japanese Part II: Linguistic Variation and Change in Germanic C. Jac Conradie: The Dutch-Afrikaans participial prefix ge-. A case of degrammaticalization? Jack Hoeksema & Ankelien Schippers: Diachronic changes in long-distance dependencies. The case of Dutch Eric Hoekstra, Bouke Slofstra & Arjen Versloot: Changes in the Use of the Frisian Quantifiers Ea/ Oait “Ever” between 1250 and 1800 Ida Larsson: On the development of the perfect (participle) Erik Magnusson Petzell: OV and V-to-I in the History of Swedish Gerald Stell: Ethnicity as an independent factor of language variation across space. Trends in morphosyntactic patterns in spoken Afrikaans Rik Vosters, Gijsbert Rutten & Wim Vandenbussche: The sociolinguistics of spelling. A corpus-based case study of orthographical variation in nineteenth-century Dutch in Flanders Part III: Linguistic variation and change in Greek Adam Cooper & Effi Georgala: Dative loss and its replacement in the history of Greek Allison Kirk: Word order variation in New Testament Greek wh-questions Part IV: Linguistic change in Romance Louise Esher: The morphological evolution of infinitive, future and conditional forms in Occitan Heather Burnett & Mireille Tremblay: The Evolution of the Encoding of Direction in the History of French. A quantitative approach to argument structure change Edward Cormany: Velle-type prohibitions in Latin. The rise and fall of a morphosyntactic conspiracy Mari Johanne Hertzenberg: The Use and Development of Habere + Infinitive in Latin. An LFG approach The International Conference on Historical Linguistics has always been a forum that allows the conclusion that the field has been thriving over the years. This title presents studies that are an expression of ongoing theoretical discussions as well as analytical approaches to the study of issues concerning language change. Edited By Ans Van Kemenade, Nynke De Haas. Includes Bibliographical References And Index.