LINGUIST List 13.1646

Tue Jun 11 2002

Books: Historical Linguistics:Time Over Matter

Editor for this issue: Dina Kapetangianni <dinalinguistlist.org>

Directory

1. Christine Sosa, Time Over Matter by Miriam Butt & Tracy Holloway King

CSLI Publications is pleased to announce:

TIME OVER MATTER; Diachronic Perspectives on Morphosyntax ; Miriam
Butt (University of Konstanz) and Tracy Holloway King (Palo Alto
Research Center);paper ISBN: 1-57586-282-4, $25.00, cloth ISBN:
1-57586-281-6, $65.00, 255 pages. CSLI Publications 2001.
http://cslipublications.stanford.edu , email: pubscsli.stanford.edu.

To order this book, contact The University of Chicago Press. Call 
their toll free order number 1-800-621-2736 (U.S. & Canada only) or 
order online at http://www.press.uchicago.edu/ (use the search 
feature to locate the book, then order).

Book description: The field of historical linguistics has a long and
venerable tradition whose main focus has been a study of phonological
and morphological changes. In this century, the study of language
change has found a place within generative syntax and has established
itself as a fruitful line of inquiry.

The book presents, for the first time, a collection of work done in
historical linguistics from the perspective of Lexical-Functional
Grammar (LFG), a lexical unification-based theory. The problems
tackled are representative of the field of historical linguistics.
However, this volume stands apart through the number and types of
languages surveyed. In addition to presenting new approaches to data
from much studied languages like the Romance languages and Germanic,
the book introduces issues in the diachronic development of less well
studied languages, including Finnish, South Asian languages, and
Australian languages. The volume thus offers fresh perspectives on a
number of phenomena such as the development or shift of case marking
systems, the development of possessive systems, the rise of
auxiliaries and the origins of complex predication involving verb
particles or light verbs.