Laws and Rules in Indo-European

Philomen Probert is University Lecturer in Classical Philology and Linguistics at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Wolfson College. She has written A new short guide to the accentuation of Ancient Greek (Duckworth 2003) and Ancient Greek accentuation: synchronic patterns, frequency effects, and prehistory (OUP 2006). Andreas Willi is Diebold Professor of Comparative Philology at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Worcester College. He has written The Languages of Aristophanes: aspects of linguistic variation in classical Attic Greek (OUP 2003) and Sikelismos: Sprache, Literatur und Gesellschaft im griechischen Sizilien (Basel, Schwabe 2008) and edited The Language of Greek Comedy (OUP 2002).

• 1. Introduction ; PART I: LINGUISTICS 'LAWS' IN PRE-MODERN THOUGHT ; 2. Fern do frestol na. u. consaine: Perceptions of sound laws, sound change, and linguistic borrowing among the medieval Irish ; PART II: RULES OF LANGUAGE CHANGE AND LINGUISTIC METHOLOGY ; 3. Cladistic Principles and Linguistic Reality: The case of West Germanic ; 4. Older Runic Evidence for Northwest Germanic a-umlaut of u (and 'the converse of Polivanov's Law') ; 5. A Law Unto Themselves? An Acoustic Phonetic Study of 'Tonal' Consonants in British Panjabi ; 6. Kurylowicz's First 'Law of Analogy' and the Development of Passive periphrases in Latin ; 7. Phonetic Laws, Relative and Absolute Chronology, Language Diffusion and the Drift: The loss of sibilants in the Greek dialects of the first millennium BC ; PART III: SEGMENTAL SOUND LAWS: NEW PROPOSALS AND REASSESSMENTS ; 8. A Rule of Deaspiration in Ancient Greek ; 9. Regular Sound Change and Word-initial in Armenian ; 10. Schrijver's Rules for British and Proto-Celtic *-o- and *-u- Before a Vowel ; PART IV: ORIGINS AND EVOLUTIONS ; 11. Origins of the Greek Law of Limitation ; 12. Re-examining Lindeman's Law ; 13. Exon's Law and the latin Syncopes ; PART V: SYSTEMIC CONSEQUENCES ; 14. Brugmann's Law: The problem of Indo-Iranian thematic nouns and adjectives ; 15. Kiparsky's Rule, Thematic Nasal Presents and Athematic verba vocalia in Greek ; PART VI: SYNCHRONIC LAWS AND RULES IN SYNTAX AND SOCIOLINGUISTICS ; 16. Praetor urbanus - urbanus praetor: Some aspects of attributive adjective placement in Latin ; 17. The Rules of Politeness and Latin Request Formulae ; References ; General Index ; Index of Words