Salmons Joseph C. Salmons – författare

The “Nostratic” hypothesis — positing a common linguistic ancestor for a wide range of language families including Indo-European, Uralic, and Afro-Asiatic — has produced one of the most enduring and often intense controversies in linguistics. Overwhelmingly, though, both supporters of the hypothesis and those who reject it have not dealt directly with one another’s arguments. This volume brings together selected representatives of both sides, as well as a number of agnostic historical linguists, with the aim of examining the evidence for this particular hypothesis in the context of distant genetic relationships generally.The volume contains discussion of variants of the Nostratic hypothesis (A. Bomhard; J. Greenberg; A. Manaster-Ramer, K. Baertsch, K. Adams, & P. Michalove), the mathematics of chance in determining the relationships posited for Nostratic (R. Oswalt; D. Ringe), and the evidence from particular branches posited in Nostratic (L. Campbell; C. Hodge; A. Vovin), with responses and additional discussion by E. Hamp, B. Vine, W. Baxter and B. Comrie.

This volume contains ten revised and expanded papers selected from the dozens presented at the last Michigan-Berkeley Germanic Linguistics Roundtable, five contributions each from syntax (by Werner Abraham, Sarah Fagan, Isabella Barbier, John te Velde, and Ruth Lanouette) and historical linguistics (by Garry Davis and Gregory Iverson, Mary Niepokuj, Neil Jacobs, Edgar Polomé, and David Fertig).The authors start from current theoretical discussions in syntactic and diachronic research, using theory to address longstanding but still current problems in Germanic linguistics, from clitic placement and verb-second phenomena through the Verschärfung to the Twaddellian view of umlaut. Each contribution relies on careful sifting of data situated in the relevant comparative context, Germanic, Indo-European and cross-linguistic.