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Description:
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This book contains 15 revised papers originally presented at a symposium at
Rosendal, Norway, under the aegis of The Centre for Advanced Study (CAS) at
the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters. The overall theme of the
volume is ‘internal factors in grammatical change.’ The papers focus on
fundamental questions in theoretically-based historical linguistics from a
broad perspective. Several of the papers relate to grammaticalization in
different ways, but are generally critical of ‘Grammaticalization Theory’.
Further papers focus on the causes of syntactic change, pinpointing both
extra-syntactic (exogenous) causes and – more controversially – internally
driven (endogenous) causes. The volume is rounded up by contributions on
morphological change ‘by itself.’ A wide range of languages is covered,
including Tsova-Tush (Nakh-Dagestan), Zoque, and Athapaskan languages, in
addition to Indo-European languages, both the more familiar ones and some
less well-studied varieties.
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