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This volume brings together an international group of linguists from a diverse range of research backgrounds to explore the cycles of change in the world's languages. The chapters in this book draw on data both from languages from the distant past, such as Hittite and Proto-Bantu, and from a wide range of present-day languages.
List of contents
- Part I. Reconstructing the past
- 1: Larry M. Hyman: The fall and rise of vowel length in Bantu
- 2: Darya Kavitskaya and Adam McCollum: The rise and fall of rounding harmony in Turkic
- 3: Alice Gaby: The life cycle of the Kuuk Thaayorre desiderative
- 4: Mary Paster: Akan morphological 'reversal' in historical context
- 5: Matthew L. Juge: Increasing morphological mismatch via category loss: The Spanish future subjunctive
- 6: David Goldstein: Toward a non-teleological account of demonstrative reinforcement
- 7: Lyle Campbell: Typology and history of unusual traits in Nivaclé
- 8: Jay H. Jasanoff: Greek ¿¿*w¿¿ and the perfect of PIE *¿neh3 'know'
- 9: H. Craig Melchert: The surface position of Hittite subordinating kuit
- 10: Juliette Blevins: PIE *meh2- 'grow, be fruitful' and Proto-Basque *ma, *maha 'fruit': An apple by any other name...
- Part II. Philological and documentary past and present
- 11: Donca Steriade: Paradigm structure in Sanskrit reduplicants
- 12: Sarah Thomason: Sound symbolic words in Séliš;-Ql'ispé
- 13: Gabriela Caballero: Tone and morphological structure in a documentation-based grammar of Choguita Rarámuri
- 14: Hannah J. Haynie and Maziar Toosarvandani: The structure of dialect diversity in Mono: Evidence from the Sydney M. Lamb papers
- 15: Clare S. Sandy: Recovering prosody from Karuk texts: Deciphering J. P. Harrington's diacritics
- 16: Justin Spence: Stylistic differentiation in California Dene texts
- 17: Lucy Thomason: Winter story themes in Meskwaki: Familiar creatures seen with new eyes
- 18: Lisa Conathan: The material and the textual in documentation of Native American languages
- 19: Christine Beier and Lev Michael: Community-participatory orthography development in the Máíjùnà communities of Peruvian Amazonia
- 20: Marianne Mithun: The value of family relations for revitalization
- Part III. Looking forward: New approaches
- 21: Molly Babel and Melinda Fricke: Sound structure and the psycholinguistics of language contact
- 22: Alan C. L. Yu, Carol K. S. To, and Yao Yao: Child-directed speech as a potential source of phonetic precursor enhancement in sound change: Evidence from Cantonese
- 23: Chundra Cathcart: Paradigmatic heterogeneity and homogenization: Probing Paul's principle
- 24: Jeff Good: Language change in small-scale multilingual societies: Trees, waves, and magnets?
- 25: Claire Bowern: Gradualness and abruptness in linguistic split: A Nyulnyulan case study
About the author
Darya Kavitskaya is Associate Professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures and in the Linguistics Department at the University of California, Berkeley. Her main research interests are contrast preservation and loss and opacity, and she is particularly interested in palatalization and vowel harmony. Her work focuses on phonological issues in Slavic, Turkic, and Uralic, and is connected to other linguistic fields such as historical linguistics, phonetics, and language acquisition.
Alan C. L. Yu is the William Colvin Professor of Linguistics and the College at the University of Chicago. His research focuses on language variation and change, particularly from an individual-difference perspective. He is the author of A Natural History of Infixation (OUP, 2007), the editor of Origins of Sound Change: Approaches to Phonologization (OUP, 2013), and co-editor of The Handbook of Phonological Theory, 2nd Edition (Wiley Blackwell, 2011). He is co-General Editor of Laboratory Phonology, and Associate Editor of the International Journal of American Linguistics. He was elected a Fellow of the Linguistic Society of America in 2016.
Summary
This volume brings together an international group of linguists from a diverse range of research backgrounds to explore the cycles of change in the world's languages. The chapters in this book draw on data both from languages from the distant past, such as Hittite and Proto-Bantu, and from a wide range of present-day languages.
Additional text
I warmly recommend the volume to potential readers. This is a significant publication that offers new and invaluable academic insights into the underlying dynamics of different kinds of language change phenomena at different linguistic levels and related research interfaces.
