Edinburgh Historical Linguistics – serie

How do learners and speakers make sense of their language and make their language make sense. Is it dived or dove? Dwarfs or dwarves? If the best students aced the test, did the pretty good students beece it? You've probably often pondered such questions yourself, but did you know that similar questions have inspired some of the most important advances in our understanding not only of how languages change but also of how children acquire grammar and how the human mind works? This book is designed to help readers make sense of morphological change and, more generally, of the concept of analogy and its role in language and in human cognition. With a critical look at the past 150 years of linguistic work on analogical change, David Fertig brings clarity to a field rife with terminological and theoretical confusion.

This textbook invites the student to explore early English syntax by looking at the linguistic characteristics of well- known texts throughout the early history of English. It shows how that piece of the language fits in to the broader picture of how English is developing and introduces the student to the real writing of the period as you look at the original manuscript version of selected excerpts. For each text, issues such as the word order, the presence of auxiliaries, articles, and pronouns, the types of pronouns, and the nature of complex sentences are explored. It is designed for those who have already been introduced to the history of English and who are now going on to look more closely at the syntax and morphology using actual manuscripts. With an emphasis on the original manuscript, this book equips you with the tools to analyse linguistic characteristics of a variety of texts and periods in the early history of English.

Languages do not exist beyond their speakers, but the history of individual languages has often been told as if they had a life of their own, emerging from other languages, growing and sometimes dying. When applied to Spanish, this story line commonly begins in spoken Latin, with the language taking shape in medieval Spain before spreading beyond Europe in the colonial period.This book proposes a new take on this narrative. Instead of seeing Spanish as a linguistic entity with linear development, what would its history look like if we think of it as a centuries-long constellation of contact events? A History of Spanish as a Contact Language revisits the evolution of Spanish from the perspective of the ecology of language, centring speakers as the only historical agents of language transmission and change. Taking the speakers' vantage point opens up exciting possibilities to rethink what Spanish is, how it has changed, and who has played a role in this process.

Languages do not exist beyond their speakers, but the history of individual languages has often been told as if they had a life of their own, emerging from other languages, growing and sometimes dying. When applied to Spanish, this story line commonly begins in spoken Latin, with the language taking shape in medieval Spain before spreading beyond Europe in the colonial period.This book proposes a new take on this narrative. Instead of seeing Spanish as a linguistic entity with linear development, what would its history look like if we think of it as a centuries-long constellation of contact events? A History of Spanish as a Contact Language revisits the evolution of Spanish from the perspective of the ecology of language, centring speakers as the only historical agents of language transmission and change. Taking the speakers' vantage point opens up exciting possibilities to rethink what Spanish is, how it has changed, and who has played a role in this process.

Drawing examples from a range of world languages, this textbook introduces the ways in which speech sounds become different over time. It explores how we produce and hear particular sounds and how overall word shapes and the pronunciation of individual words change. The roles of phonetics and phonology, morphology and syntax, traditional formal models and recent exemplar-based work in sound change are all examined. In covering both structural and societal issues, the book integrates different kinds of historical evidence and different theories into a coherent understanding of the full process of sound change.