Historical and comparative linguistics

Akkadian is one of the earliest attested languages and the oldest recorded Semitic language.

How does human language work?

This book looks at the relationship between linguistic universals and language change.

The languages and dialects of Europe, this book shows, are becoming increasingly alike.

This book addresses the question: why do sound changes happen, when and where they do?

A Linguistic History of Arabic presents a reconstruction of proto-Arabic by the methods of historical-comparative linguistics.

This is the most comprehensive survey ever published of auxiliary verb constructions, as in 'he could have been going to drink it' and 'she does eat cheese'.

This book deals with one aspect of Greek and Proto-Indo-European nominal morphology, the formation, inflection and semantics of s-stem nouns and adjectives.

The accent of many Greek words has long been considered arbitrary, but Philomen Probert points to some striking correlations between accentuation and a word's synchronic morphological transparency, and between accentuation and word frequency, that give clues to the prehistory of the accent system.

Helma Dik approaches word order in Greek tragic dialogue from the perspective of language rather than metre.

This volume of new work explores the forms and functions of serial verbs.

This book considers how languages have traditionally been divided into families, and asks how they should be classified in the future.

This book describes the historical emergence and spread of the to-infinitive in English.

This book explores the interface between syntax and the other components of the grammar, in particular phonology, morphology, and argument structure.

This book introduces readers to the remarkable linguistic diversity of East and Southeast Asia.

In this outstanding collection of new work the methods and theories of formal syntax are focussed on grammatical variation and change.

This book offers the first account of Old Norse syntax for almost a hundred years and the first ever in a non-Scandinavian language.

On the basis of a cross-linguistic study of more than 250 languages, this book brings to light several fascinating characteristics of pronouns.

Philip Burton explores Augustine's treatment of language in his Confessions - a major work of Western philosophy and literature, with continuing intellectual importance.

This book explores the semantic and pragmatic mechanisms underlying grammaticalization.

This book brings together new and original work by forty two of the world's leading scholars of Indo-European comparative philology and linguistics from around the world.

This is the most comprehensive account of Catalan phonology ever published.

"e;Jasanoff comes up with some of the strongest arguments yet made for assuming that Indo-European languages other than Hittite and Tocharian underwent a substantial period of common development, and this needs to be fitted into any model of the dispersal of the language family.

Semantic alignment refers to a type of language that has two means of morphosyntactically encoding the arguments of intransitive predicates, typically treating these as an agent or as a patient of a transitive predicate, or else by a means of a treatment that varies according to lexical aspect.

This book explores the origin and evolution of speech.

This book reconstructs what the earliest grammars might have been and shows how they could have led to the languages of modern humankind.

A Historical Greek Reader provides an introduction to the history of the ancient Greek language by means of a series of texts with linguistic commentary, cross-referenced to each other and to a reference grammar at the front.

This is the first comprehensive treatment of Latin extra-paradigmatic verb forms, that is, verb forms which cannot easily be assigned to any particular tense in the Latin verbal system.

A complement clause is used instead of a noun phrase; for example one can say either I heard [the result] or I heard [that England beat France].

This book introduces Proto-Indo-European, describes how it was reconstructed from its descendant languages, and shows what it reveals about the people who spoke it between 5,500 and 8,000 years ago.

This book provides (a) the first comprehensive description of the phonology and phonetics of Standard Mongolian, known as the Halh (Khalkha) dialect and spoken in Ulaanbaatar, the capital of the Republic of Mongolia; and (b) the first account in any language of the historical phonology of the Mongolian group of languages.

This book presents an exhaustive treatment of a long-standing problem of Proto-Indo-European and Italic philology: the development of the Proto-Indo-European voiced aspirates in the ancient languages of Italy.

Languages can be similar in many ways - they can resemble each other in categories, constructions and meanings, and in the actual forms used to express these.

Two languages can resemble each other in the categories, constructions, and types of meaning they use, and in the forms they employ to express these.

This book presents a critical comparison of the two leading theories of linguistic change.

This book collects Joseph Greenberg's most important writings on the genetic classification of the world's languages.

This book provides a critical investigation of syntactic change and the factors that influence it.

This book is a general introduction to the structures of the different medieval Romance vernaculars most commonly known as Old or Medieval Spanish, as preserved in texts from Spain from the eleventh to the fifteenth centuries.

This book examines the diachronic development of negation in Low German, from Old Saxon up to the point at which Middle Low German is replaced by High German as the written language.

This book offers the first comprehensive description of the prosody of nine Romance languages that takes into account internal dialectal variation.

This book introduces a new system for describing non-biblical ancient Jewish literature.

This handbook offers an extensive crosslinguistic and cross-theoretical survey of polysynthetic languages, in which single multi-morpheme verb forms can express what would be whole sentences in English.

This handbook offers an extensive crosslinguistic and cross-theoretical survey of polysynthetic languages, in which single multi-morpheme verb forms can express what would be whole sentences in English.

This book examines the historical development of discourse and pragmatic markers across the Romance languages.

This book investigates how semivowels were realized in Indo-European and in early Greek.

This book is a comprehensive introductory manual that guides beginners to a functional reading knowledge of late medieval and early modern Yiddish (c.

Small Dictionaries and Curiosity tells a story which has not been told before, that of the first European wordlists of minority and unofficial languages and dialects, from the end of the Middle Ages to the early nineteenth century.

Scribal Repertoires in Egypt from the New Kingdom to the Early Islamic Period deals with the possibility of glimpsing pre-modern and early modern Egyptian scribes, the actual people who produced ancient documents, through the ways in which they organized and wrote those documents.

Quotations are an essential part of the fabric of the language.

Quotations are an essential part of the fabric of the language.