Language Change

This substantially revised third edition gives a lucid and up-to-date overview of language change.

(Bookdata)

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'The book is a very good and readable introduction to the discipline of historical linguistics and covers a very large number of questions.' The Linguist

(Whitaker)

Part I. Preliminaries: 1. The ever-whirling wheel: the inevitability of change; 2. Collecting up clues: piecing together the evidence; 3. Charting the changes: studying changes in progress; Part II. Transition: 4. Spreading the word: from person to person; 5. Conflicting loyalties: opposing social pressures; 6. Catching on and taking off: how sound changes spread through a language; 7. Caught in the web: how syntactic changes work through a language; 8. The wheels of language: grammaticalization; 9. Slip slidin' away: change of meaning; Part III: 10. The reason why: sociolinguistic causes of change; 11. Doing what comes naturally: inherent causes of language change; 12. Repairing the patterns: therapeutic changes; 13. The Mad Hatter's tea-party: chain reaction changes; Part IV: 14. Development and breakdown: child language and language disorders; 15. Language birth: how languages begin; 16. Language death: how languages end; 17. Progress or decay?: Assessing the situation.

(Whitaker)