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256 results in Historical linguistics

Page 1 of 13

Uniformitarianism in Language Speciation
  • From Creolistics to Genetic Linguistics
  • Edited by Salikoko S. Mufwene, Enoch O. Aboh
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    November 2025
    Print publication:
    30 November 2025
  • Uniformitarianism is the widely held assumption that, in languages, changes in the past must have been subject to the same constraints as changes in the present. This volume, led by two of the most eminent scholars in language contact, brings together an international team of authors to shed new light on Uniformitarianism in historical linguistics. Applying the Uniformitarian Principle to creole and pidgin languages, as well as other languages, the chapters show that, contrary to the received doctrine, the former group of languages did not emerge in an exceptional way. Covering a typologically and geographically broad range of languages, and focusing on different contact ecologies in Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean, the book also dispels common misconceptions about what Uniformitarianism is. It shows how similar processes in different ecosystems result in different linguistic patterns, which don't require exceptional linguistic explanations in terms of creolization, pidginization, simplification, or incomplete acquisition.

Liquid Languages
  • Constructing Languages in Late Modern Cultures of Diffusion
  • Britta Schneider
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    August 2025
    Print publication:
    31 July 2025
  • Which ideas about language are prevalent in cultures that are not framed in Western nationalist and literate traditions? How do people conceptualise language if speakers of the same community are multilingual, have access to different language resources and only partially share ideas about what is right and wrong in language? This book explores the 'liquid' properties of language, highlighting how languages, as discursive-material assemblages, can differ in their degree of fixity. It provides a linguistic anthropological study of the language ideologies in Belize, where ethnic belonging and language practice do not necessarily match and where stable language norms are not always considered a value. Scrutinising ethnographic data and examinations of local performances of English, it shows that languages emerge in relation to belonging, prestige and material culture. Bringing to the fore liquid language cultures, it provides important additions to our understanding of late modern language assemblages in a globalising world.

The Parameter in Generative Grammar
  • A History of a Concept
  • Alessandro Riolfi
  • Published online:
    17 April 2025
    Print publication:
    24 April 2025
  • Focusing on the development of Noam Chomsky's linguistic framework, this book is the first full-length, in-depth treatment of the history of the concept of parameter, a central notion of syntactic theory. Spanning 60 years of syntactic theory, it explores all aspects of its development through the different phases of the Chomskyan school, from the 'standard theory' of the mid-1960 to the current Minimalist Program. Emphasis is put on three main topics: the foundational issues in the formulation of the Principles and Parameters model; the original formulation of the “classical” parameters of the Government-Binding Theory of the 1980s (which are then evaluated from the perspective of Chomskyan thought today), and current debates on the nature of parametric variation in light of Generative Grammar's most recent theoretical developments. Through step-by-step, detailed explanations, it provides the reader with a comprehensive account of both parametric theory and the development of Generative Grammar.

Linguistic Contact and Language Change
  • An Introduction
  • Robert McColl Millar
  • Published online:
    22 December 2024
    Print publication:
    05 December 2024
  • Linguistic contact is a reality of everyday life, as speakers of different languages come into contact with one another, often causing language change. This undergraduate textbook provides a means by which these processes, both modern and historical, can be analysed, based on cutting-edge theoretical and methodological practices. Chapters cover language death, the development of pidgins and creoles, linguistic convergence and language contact, and new variety formation. Each chapter is subdivided into key themes, which are supported by diverse and real-world case studies. Student learning is bolstered by illustrative maps, exercises, research tasks, further reading suggestions, and a glossary. Ancillary resources are available including extra content not covered in the book, links to recordings of some of the language varieties covered, and additional discussion, presentation and essay topics. Primarily for undergraduate students of linguistics, it provides a balanced, historically grounded, and up-to-date introduction to linguistic contact and language change.

Before the Word Was Queer
  • Sexuality and the English Dictionary, 1600–1930
  • Stephen Turton
  • Published online:
    14 March 2024
    Print publication:
    21 March 2024
  • Bringing together research from queer linguistics and lexicography, this book uncovers how same-sex acts, desires, and identities have been represented in English dictionaries published in Britain from the early modern to the inter-war period. Moving across time – from the appearance of the first standalone English dictionary to the completion of the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary – and shuttling across genres – from general usage, hard words, thieves' cant, and slang to law, medicine, classical myth, women's biography, and etymology – it asks how dictionary-writers made sense of same-sex intimacy, and how they failed or refused to make sense of it. It also queries how readers interacted with dictionaries' constructions of sexual morality, against the broader backdrop of changing legal, religious, and scientific institutions. In answering these questions, the book responds and contributes to established traditions and new trends in linguistics, queer theory, literary criticism, and the history of sexuality.

A Critical Edition of Caroline Norton's Love in 'The World'
  • Edited by Ross Nelson, Marie Mulvey-Roberts
  • Published by:
    Anthem Press
    Published online:
    01 March 2024
    Print publication:
    10 October 2023
  • Caroline Norton's forgotten novel, which has remained unpublished until now, tells of the perils of courtship facing a naïve young girl Alixe, who has been launched onto the London social season. Her encounters with both a worthy and an undesirable suitor open an intriguing window onto the fashionable society of the 1820s in which Love in 'the World' takes place. In placing her heroine in these predicaments Norton was able to draw upon her own experiences of the bon ton, as the time in which the novel is set coincides with her first ball in March 1826, when she burst upon the scene with all her beauty and brilliance, later recalling, 'I came out […] to find all London at my feet.' She believed that London could be as callous as the metropolitan social scene might prove treacherous, and in alerting the reader to the dangers of fashionable society she makes ample use of her own observations as a debutante at her first London season. In a highly readable and coherent narrative with an indeterminate ending, which throws a spotlight onto her life and times, the plot of Love in 'the World' initially follows a pattern broadly representative of her own experience before developing in unexpected and surprising ways.

Wilhelm von Humboldt and Early American Linguistics
  • Resources and Inspirations
  • Emanuel J. Drechsel
  • Published online:
    11 January 2024
    Print publication:
    01 February 2024
  • Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835), an early pioneer in the philosophy of language, linguistic and educational theory, was not only one of the first European linguists to identify human language as a rule-governed system –the foundational premise of Noam Chomsky's generative theory – or to reflect on cognition in studying language; he was also a major scholar of Indigenous American languages. However, with his famous naturalist brother Alexander 'stealing the show,' Humboldt's contributions to linguistics and anthropology have remained understudied in English until today. Drechsel's unique book addresses this gap by uncovering and examining Humboldt's influences on diverse issues in nineteenth-century American linguistics, from Peter S. Duponceau to the early Boasians, including Edward Sapir. This study shows how Humboldt's ideas have shaped the field in multiple ways. Shining a light on one of the early innovators of linguistics, it is essential reading for anyone interested in the history of the field.

Early Latin
  • Constructs, Diversity, Reception
  • Edited by J. N. Adams, Anna Chahoud, Giuseppe Pezzini
  • Published online:
    27 July 2023
    Print publication:
    17 August 2023
  • This is the most detailed and comprehensive study to date of early Latin language, literary and non-literary, featuring twenty-nine chapters by an international team of scholars. 'Early Latin' is interpreted liberally as extending from the period of early inscriptions through to the first quarter of the first century BC. Classical Latin features significantly in the volume, although in a restricted sense. In the classical period there were writers who imitated the Latin of an earlier age, and there were also interpreters of early Latin. Later authors and views on early Latin language are also examined as some of these are relevant to the establishment of the text of earlier writers. A major aim of the book is to define linguistic features of different literary genres, and to address problems such as the limits of periodisation and the definition of the very concept of 'early Latin'.

Latin Loanwords in Ancient Greek
  • A Lexicon and Analysis
  • Eleanor Dickey
  • Published online:
    25 May 2023
    Print publication:
    15 June 2023
  • Why, when, and how did speakers of ancient Greek borrow words from Latin? Which words did they borrow? Who used Latin loanwords, and how? Who avoided them, and why? How many words were borrowed, and what kind of word? How long did the loanwords survive? Until now, attempts to answer such questions have been based on incomplete and often misleading evidence, but this study offers the first comprehensive collection of evidence from papyri, inscriptions, and literature from the fifth century BC to the sixth century AD. That collection – included in the book as a lexicon of Latin loanwords – is examined using insights from linguistic work on modern languages to provide new answers that often differ strikingly from earlier ones. The analysis is accessibly presented, and the lexicon offers a firm foundation for future work in this area.

The Long Journey of English
  • A Geographical History of the Language
  • Peter Trudgill
  • Published online:
    25 May 2023
    Print publication:
    08 June 2023
  • English is one of the most widely-spoken languages in the world, with native-speaking communities at the furthest ends of the earth. However, just three thousand years ago, the language-which-became-English was not spoken anywhere in Britain. Trudgill, one of the foremost authorities on the English language, takes us on a remarkable journey through the history of English to show how it grew to become the global phenomenon that we know today. Over ten short, easily digestible chapters, he traces its development and global spread, starting with the earliest genesis of English five thousand years ago, exploring its expansion in the British Isles, and finishing with an overview of how the language looks today, including its use in an increasingly digital world. Particular attention is paid to the native-speaker varieties of English from all around the world, and the relationship between colonial varieties of English and indigenous languages.

The Indo-European Puzzle Revisited
  • Integrating Archaeology, Genetics, and Linguistics
  • Edited by Kristian Kristiansen, Guus Kroonen, Eske Willerslev
  • Published online:
    29 April 2023
    Print publication:
    11 May 2023
  • This book examines the impact of ancient DNA research and scientific evidence on our understanding of the emergence of Indo-European languages in prehistory. Offering cutting-edge contributions from an international team of scholars, it considers the driving forces behind the Indo-European migrations during the 3rd and 2nd millenia BC. The volume explores the rise of the world's first pastoral nomads the Yamnaya Culture in the Russian Pontic steppe including their social organization, expansions, and the transition from nomadism to semi-sedentism when entering Europe. It also traces the chariot conquest in the late Bronze Age and its impact on the expansion of the Indo-Iranian languages into Central Asia. In the final section, the volumes consider the development of hierarchical societies and the origins of slavery. A landmark synthesis of recent, exciting discoveries, the book also includes an extensive theoretical discussion regarding the integration of linguistics, genetics, and archaeology, and the importance of interdisciplinary research in the study of ancient migration.

The Edinburgh Companion to Romanticism and the Arts
  • Edited by Maureen McCue, Sophie Thomas
  • Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    25 April 2023
    Print publication:
    31 December 2022
  • From the birth of the museum to the explosion of mass-produced illustrated books, the Romantic period (c. 1770-1840) was a moment of rapid change and fruitful experimentation in the fields of art and literature alike. New advances in print production encouraged a wider range of readers to engage with literary forms that opened a path into the once aristocratic field of the visual arts. This Companion captures the way recent engagements with visual studies have reshaped how we approach and understand the boundaries between print and visual culture in the period. It brings together 27 research-led chapters that offer a detailed account of the productive, if sometimes tense, interactions between emergent forms of intermedial expression that were redefining culture in the Romantic period - as they continue to do today.

Victorian Fictions of Middle-Class Status
  • Forms of Absence in the Age of Reform
  • Albert D. Pionke
  • Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    25 April 2023
    Print publication:
    30 November 2022
  • Victorian Fictions of Middle-Class Status recovers the novelistic pervasiveness of a Reform-Era rhetorical form, the negative assertion of value, which grounds middle-class claims to social authority in repudiations of such conventional warrants as birth, wealth, numerical preponderance, command of fact and, specifically for women, the symbolic phallus. Bringing together historical, literary and sociological theory, this study recaptures the Victorians' broad sense of epistemological uncertainty about their rapidly changing society, reconstructs novelists' specific attempts to legitimate their traditionally low-status genre and offers fresh readings of novels by Charlotte Brontë, Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, William North, Anthony Trollope, William Makepeace Thackeray and Charlotte Yonge, among others.

James Joyce and Samaritan Hospitality
  • Postcritical and Postsecular Reading in Dubliners and Ulysses
  • Richard Rankin Russell
  • Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    25 April 2023
    Print publication:
    31 January 2023
  • James Joyce and Samaritan Hospitality reads Dubliners and Ulysses through studies of hospitality, particularly that articulated in the Lukan parable of the Good Samaritan. It traces the origins of the novel in part to the physical attacks on Joyce in 1904 Dublin and 1907 Rome, showing how these incidents and the parable were incorporated into his short story 'Grace' and throughout Ulysses, especially its last four episodes. Richard Rankin Russell discusses the rich theory of hospitality developed by Joyce and demonstrates that he sought to make us more charitable readers through his explorations and depictions of Samaritan hospitality.

Literary Critique, Modernism and the Transformation of Theory
  • Mena Mitrano
  • Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    25 April 2023
    Print publication:
    31 December 2022
  • Literary Critique, Modernism and the Transformation of Theory demonstrates the non-linear temporalities and trajectories through which theory operates. Italian Theory acts as the fulcrum of a more inclusive and less combative notion of critique. This 'living thought' cuts across the translation of European thought into Anglo-American theory and carries with it lingering modernist motifs linked to feminist and psychoanalytic criticism. While connecting to the 'post-critique' debate, the study focuses on recovering the ethical underpinnings of critique. Mena Mitrano demonstrates that before being a specific method or disciplinary practice, critique is a stance towards others including indocility, receptiveness, openness to transformation, awareness of relationality, attention to language, attunement to the body, distance, displacement, externality and wonder.

Modernist War Poetry
  • Combat Gnosticism and the Sympathetic Imagination, 1914-19
  • Jamie Wood
  • Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    13 April 2023
    Print publication:
    31 December 2022
  • This study examines the work of the principle architects of Anglo-American modernist poetics - T. S. Eliot, H. D., Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, Edward Thomas and Wallace Stevens - and their response to the challenge of combatant war poetries. It argues that these civilian poets sought to negotiate directly with the combatant's gnosticism, specifically with the combatant's assertion that only those present at a catastrophe could properly represent its horrors. The modernists rightly identified that gnosticism was a threat to their own representational claims on an increasingly traumatic modernity. How was the imagination to be salvaged in order that it could still feel into the wounded experience of others? In response to this challenge, the modernists drafted their own imagined war poems, developing in the process several different and contradictory poetic systems. Whereas scholarship ordinarily tells the story of intra-war modern poetry as a series of different schools - the trench lyric, the home front elegy and the modernist long poem - each moving in a different direction, this study brings those traditions back together into one history by treating them as idiosyncratic responses to the same aesthetic problem.

The Geographies of David Foster Wallace's Novels
  • Spatial History and Literary Practice
  • Laurie McRae Andrew
  • Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    13 April 2023
    Print publication:
    31 December 2022
  • The Geographies of David Foster Wallace's Novels takes a fresh look at David Foster Wallace's novels through the lens of historical geography. It explores the connections between Wallace's literary practice and the reshaping of American geographical space that resulted from the transition between Fordist and post-Fordist forms of capitalism, presenting critical readings of the novels together with analysis of manuscripts and notebooks from Wallace's archive. Deploying an innovative methodology that combines aspects of cultural geography and literary criticism, each novel is historically situated through a spatial keyword, expanding our understanding of the connections between social context and formal innovation in Wallace's work.

The Evolution of Chinese Grammar
  • Yuzhi Shi
  • Published online:
    16 March 2023
    Print publication:
    23 March 2023
  • The Chinese language has the longest well-documented history among all human languages, making it an invaluable resource for studying how languages develop and change through time. Based on a twenty-year long research project, this pioneering book is the English version of an award-winning study originally published in Chinese. It provides an evolutionary perspective on the history of Chinese grammar, tracing its development from its thirteenth-Century BC origins to the present day. It investigates all the major changes in the history of the language within contemporary linguistic frameworks, and illustrates these with a wide range of examples taken from every stage in the language's development, showing how the author's findings are relevant to contemporary descriptive, theoretical, and historical linguistics. Shedding light on the essential properties of Chinese and, ultimately, language in general, it is essential reading for academic researchers and students of Asian linguistics, historical linguistics and syntactic theory.

Place Names
  • Approaches and Perspectives in Toponymy and Toponomastics
  • Francesco Perono Cacciafoco, Francesco Cavallaro
  • Published online:
    02 March 2023
    Print publication:
    09 March 2023
  • What are place names? From where do they originate? How are they structured? What do they signify? How important are they in our life? This groundbreaking book explores these compelling questions and more by providing a thorough introduction to the assumptions, theories, terminology, and methods in toponymy and toponomastics – the studies of place names, or toponyms. It is the first comprehensive resource on the topic in a single volume, and explores the history and development of toponyms, focusing on the conceptual and methodological issues pertinent to the study of place names around the world. It presents a wide range of examples and case studies illustrating the structure, function, and importance of toponyms from ancient times to the present day. Wide ranging yet accessible, it is an indispensable source of knowledge for students and scholars in linguistics, toponymy and toponomastics, onomastics, etymology, and historical linguistics.

Native Speakers, Interrupted
  • Differential Object Marking and Language Change in Heritage Languages
  • Silvina Montrul
  • Published online:
    15 December 2022
    Print publication:
    22 December 2022
  • A heritage language is the term given to a language spoken at home by bilingual children of immigrant parents. Written by a leading figure in the field, this pioneering, in-depth study brings together three heritage languages – Hindi, Spanish and Romanian - spoken in the United States. It demonstrates how heritage speakers drive morphosyntactic change when certain environmental characteristics are met, and considers the relationship between social and cognitive factors and timing in language acquisition, bilingualism, and language change. It also discusses the implications of the findings for the language education of heritage speakers in the USA and considers how the heritage language can be maintained in the English-speaking school system. Advancing our understanding of heritage language development and change, this book is essential reading for students and researchers of linguistics and multilingualism, immigration, education studies and language policy, as well as educators and policy makers.

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