The Life Cycle of Language Past, Present, and Future

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. Historical linguistics does not solely focus on reconstructing a language's linguistic past and exploring the mechanisms underlying previous language changes; it also addresses broader questions concerning the development and ongoing evolution of language. The chapters in this book draw on data both from languages from the distant past, such as Hittite, Proto-Turkic, and Proto-Bantu, and from present-day languages including Akan, Cantonese, Kuuk Thaayorre, Seliš-Ql'ispé, Nivaclé, and Spanish. The contributions showcase current research in historical linguistics and exemplify the dynamism and inherently interdisciplinary nature of the field.

1 - The fall and rise of vowel length in Bantu
2 - The rise and fall of rounding harmony in Turkic
3 - The life cycle of the Kuuk Thaayorre desiderative
4 - Akan morphological 'reversal' in historical context
5 - Increasing morphological mismatch via category loss: The Spanish future subjunctive
6 - Toward a non-teleological account of demonstrative reinforcement
7 - Typology and history of unusual traits in Nivaclé
8 - Greek ??*w?a and the perfect of PIE *?neh3 'know'
9 - The surface position of Hittite subordinating kuit
10 - PIE *meh2- 'grow, be fruitful' and Proto-Basque *ma, *maha 'fruit': An apple by any other name...
11 - Paradigm structure in Sanskrit reduplicants
12 - Sound symbolic words in Séliš;-Ql'ispé
13 - Tone and morphological structure in a documentation-based grammar of Choguita Rarámuri
14 - The structure of dialect diversity in Mono: Evidence from the Sydney M. Lamb papers
15 - Recovering prosody from Karuk texts: Deciphering J. P. Harrington's diacritics
16 - Stylistic differentiation in California Dene texts
17 - Winter story themes in Meskwaki: Familiar creatures seen with new eyes
18 - The material and the textual in documentation of Native American languages
19 - Community-participatory orthography development in the Máíjùnà communities of Peruvian Amazonia
20 - The value of family relations for revitalization
21 - Sound structure and the psycholinguistics of language contact
22 - Child-directed speech as a potential source of phonetic precursor enhancement in sound change: Evidence from Cantonese
23 - Paradigmatic heterogeneity and homogenization: Probing Paul's principle
24 - Language change in small-scale multilingual societies: Trees, waves, and magnets?
25 - Gradualness and abruptness in linguistic split: A Nyulnyulan case study

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.