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Description:
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This volume aims to make a contribution to codifying the methods and
practices linguists use to recover language history, focussing
predominantly on historical morphology. The volume includes studies on a
wide range of languages: not only Indo-European, but also Austronesian,
Sinitic, Mon-Khmer, Basque, one Papuan language family, as well as a number
of Australian families. Few collections are as cross-linguistic as this,
reflecting the new challenges which have emerged from the study of
languages outside those best known from historical linguistics. The
contributors illustrate shared methodological and theoretical issues
concerning genetic relatedness (that is, the use of morphological evidence
for classification and subgrouping), reconstruction and processes of change
with a diverse range of data. The volume is in honour of Harold Koch, who
has long combined innovative research on understudied languages with
methodological rigour and codification of practices within the discipline.
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