An Introduction to Historical Linguistics

All languages change, just as other aspects of human society are constantly changing. This book is an introduction to the concepts and techniques of diachronic linguistics, the study of language change over time. It covers all themajor areas of historical linguistics, presenting concepts in a clear and concise way. Examples are given from a wide range of languages, with special emphasis on the languages of Australia and the Pacific. While the needs of undergraduate students of linguistics have been kept firmly in mind, the book will also be of interest to the general reader seeking to understand langauge and language change. For this fourth edition, a number of new sections have been written, including many new problems and several datasets. Existing materials have been supplemented with new sections on grammaticalization, tonogenesis, morphological change, and using statistical methods in language classification.

1. - Introduction
2. - Types of Sound Change
3. - Expressing Sound Changes
4. - Phonetic and Phonemic Changes
5. - The Comparative Method (1): Procedures
6. - Determining Relatedness
7. - Internal Reconstruction
8. - Computational and Statistical Methods
9. - The Comparative Method (2.) History and Challenges
10. - Morphological Change
11. - Semantic and Lexical Change
12. - Syntactic Change
13. - Observing Language Change
14. - Language Contact
15. - Cultural Reconstruction

Terry Crowley was Senior Lecturer in Linguistics at the University of Waikato in New Zealand. Claire Bowern is Assistant Professor of Linguistics, Yale University.