Friday, August 14, 2009

Grammatical Change in Indo-European Languages

Memorial's historical linguists have published proceedings from the workshop on Indo-European Linguistics at the 18th International Conference on Historical Linguistics (6-11th August 2007) at the University of Qubec a Montreal. This workshop was convened by Dr. Vit Bubenik, Dr. John Hewson and Dr. Sarah Rose (Department of Linguistics, Memorial University of Newfoundland).

The volume titled 'Grammatical Change in Indo-European Languages' is a collection of 17 articles selected from the presentations by scholars working on new directions in Historical Linguistics focusing on questions of grammatical change, and the central issue of grammaticalization in Indo-European languages. Several studies examine examine particular problems in specific languages, but often with implications for the Indo-European phylum as a whole. Given the historical scope of the data (over a period of four millenia) long range grammatical changes such as the development of gender differences, strategies of definiteness, the prepositional phrase, or of the syntax of the verbal diathesis and aspect, are also treated. The shifting relevance of morphology to syntax, and syntax to morphology, a central motif of this research, has provoked lively debate and discussion in the discipline of Historical Linguistics.

The book has been published by John Benjamins (Amsterdam/Philadelphia) in July 2009 in the series Current Issues in Linguistic Theory.

No comments:

Post a Comment