Full Description
The volume contains 37 papers originally presented at the 8th International Conference on Historical Linguistics in Lille, France. The papers bring historical data to bear on issues in theoretical linguistics, both descriptive and diachronic or deal with specific questions in the history of individual languages. The theoretical issues range from phonology over morphology and syntax to the lexicon, as well as questions of historical dialectology, language contact, the theory of linguistic change, and problems of comparative reconstruction. The languages discussed are Finno-Ugric and Indo-European, most of the papers dealing with Germanic and Romance languages (especially English and French), but some being devoted to Greek, Celtic, Slavic, and Hittite.
Contents
1. Foreword; 2. The structure of drift (by Andersen, Henning); 3. Conflicting teleologies: drift and normalization in the history of Icelandic phonology (by Arnason, Kristjan); 4. Language change: cyclical or linear? The case of the Romance future (by Bichakjian, Bernard H.); 5. Syntactic reconstruction and Finno-Ugric (by Campbell, Lyle); 6. Case assignment and NP movement in the history of Scandinavian (by Faarlund, Jan Terje); 7. Domesday Book and Late Old English dialects (by Fisiak, Jacek); 8. Bilinguisme et interferences: le cas de l'anglais sud-africain (by Gallez, Pascal); 9. Reanalysing actualization, and actualizing reanalysis (by Garcia, Erica C.); 10. The rise of om in Middle Dutch infinitive constructions (by Gerritsen, Marinel); 11. Discourse functions and syntactic change (by Giacalone Ramat, Anna); 12. Framing the linguistic communication scene: ask vs. acsian and biddan (by Goossens, Louis); 13. La polysemie de of en vieil anglais et la metaphore spatialisante (by Groussier, Marie-Line); 14. Le cadre des changements phonetiques dans les langues romanes: mot et 'syntagme phonetique' (by Holm, Catherine); 15. Le role du systeme dans l'evolution d'un verbe en grec ancien (by Jacquinod, Bernard); 16. Whatever happened to the ablaut nouns in English - and why did it not happen in German? (by Kastovsky, Dieter); 17. Sources negligees dans l'histoire du vocabulaire: les dictionnaires bilingues du seizieme siecle (by Kibbee, Douglas A.); 18. Shall or will ? Choice of the variant form in Early Modern English, British and American (by Kyto, Merja); 19. Le developpement de ce que en francais et l'evolution du relatif- interrogatif-exclamatif (by Leard, Jean-Marcel); 20. L'enfer de brumes et marais dans la tradition germano-celtique. Un probleme mythologique et linguistique indo-europeen (by Le Bourdelles, H.); 21. The structure and development of possessive noun phrases in Hittite (by Luraghi, Silvia); 22. The ghost of the agent in Romance (by Manoliu, Maria M.); 23. Non-adjacency in geminate structure: an historical perspective (by Montreuil, Jean-Pierre Y.); 24. Modes of inference and the gradual/rapid issue: suggestions from the English modal (by Nagle, Stephen J.); 25. A case of Proto-Indo-European allomorphy: the instrument noun suffix *-tlom and its variants (by Olsen, Birgit Anette); 26. Ouir, entendre, comprendre: une vue psychomechanique sur le renouvellement du lexique (by Picoche, Jacqueline); 27. Neutralisation semantique et marquage fonctionnel: a propos de l'evolution de certains emplois de celui et de ce en francais (by Pierrard, Michel); 28. Romance comparative grammar and linguistic change (by Posner, Rebecca); 29. Local and global change in word formation (by Pounder, Amanda V.); 30. Germanic Verscharfung: tying up loose ends (by Rasmussen, Jens Elmegard); 31. Mecanismes et nature du changement syntaxique: le cas de la phrase complexe en indo-europeen (by Rousseau, Andre); 32. The unaccusative hypothesis and the history of the perfect auxiliary in Germanic and Romance (by Shannon, Thomas F.); 33. Functional differentiation in the emerging English standard language: the evolution of a morphological discourse and style marker (by Stein, Dieter); 34. Verb phrase conjunction in Old English (by Stockwell, Robert P.); 35. Evolution droite ou sinueuse: les palatales du francais (by Walter, Henriette); 36. On the history of grounding markers in English narrative: style or typology? (by Warvik, Brita); 37. Cognitive Grammar and Kurylowicz's laws of analogy (by Winters, Margaret E.); 38. Semantic change in Romance words for "cut" (by Wright, Roger); 39. Index of Names compiled by Hans Boon; 40. Index of Languages compiled by Hans Boon
