Motives for Language Change

This specially commissioned volume considers the processes involved in language change and the issues of how they can be modelled and studied. The way languages change offers an insight into the nature of language itself, its internal organisation, and how it is acquired and used. Accordingly, the phenomenon of language change has been approached from a variety of perspectives by linguists of many different orientations. This book, originally published in 2003, brings together an international team of leading figures from different areas of linguistics to re-examine some of the central issues in this field and also to discuss new proposals. The volume is arranged into sections, including grammaticalisation, the typological perspective, the social context of language change and contact-based explanations. It seeks to cover the subject as a whole, bearing in mind its relevance for the general analysis of language, and will appeal to a broad international readership.

Introduction Raymond Hickey; Part I. The Phenomenon of Language Change: 1. On change in 'E-language' Peter Matthews; 2. Formal and functional motivation for language change Frederick J. Newmeyer; Part II. Linguistic Models and Language Change: 3. Metaphors, models and language change Jean Aitchison; 4. Log(ist)ic and simplistic S-curves David Denison; 5. Regular suppletion Richard Hogg; 6. On not explaining language change: optimality theory and the Great Vowel Shift April McMahon; Part III. Grammaticalization: 7. Grammaticalization: cause or effect? David Lightfoot; 8. From subjectification to intersubjectification Elizabeth Traugott; Part IV. The Social Context for Language Change: 9. On the role of the speaker in language change James Milroy; Part V. Contact-based Explanations: 10. The quest for the most 'parsimonious' explanations: endogeny vs. contact revisited Markku Filppula; 11. Diagnosing prehistoric language contact Malcolm Ross; 12. The ingenerate motivation of sound change Gregory K. Iverson and Joseph C. Salmons; 13. How do dialects get the features they have? On the process of new dialect formation Raymond Hickey; Part VI. The Typological Perspective: 14. Reconstruction, typology, and reality Bernard Comrie; 15. Reanalysis and typological change Raymond Hickey.

The way languages change offers an insight into the nature of language itself. This specially commissioned volume, originally published in 2003, considers the processes involved in language change and how they can be modelled and studied. In it, leading figures from different branches of linguistics re-examine some of the central issues in this field.