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"This specially commissioned volume considers the processes involved in language change and the issues of how they can be modelled and studied. Theway languages change offers an insight into the nature of language itself, its internal organisation, and how it is acquired and used. Accordingly, the phenomenon of language change has been approached from a variety of perspectives by linguists of many different orientations. This book brings together an international team of leading figures from different areas of linguistics to re-examine some of the central issues in this field and also to discuss new proposals. The volume is arranged in six parts, focusing on the phenomenon of language change, linguistic models, grammaticalisation, the social context, contact-based explanations and the typological perspective."

"In the last 500 years or so, the English language has undergone remarkable geographical expansion, bringing it into contact with other languages in new locations. This also caused different regional dialects of the language to come into contact with each other in colonial situations. This book is made up of a number of fascinating tales of historical- sociolinguistic detection. These are stories of origins, of a particular variety of English or linguistic feature, which together tell a compelling general story. In each case, Trudgill presents an intriguing puzzle, locates and examines the evidence, detects clues that unravel the mystery, and fi nally proposes a solution. The solutions are all original, often surprising, sometimes highly controversial. Providing a unique insight into how language contact shapes varieties of English, this entertaining yet rigorous account will be welcomed by students and researchers in linguistics, sociolinguistics and historical linguistics."

"Language Acquisition and Learnability is an accessible introduction to learnability theory and its interactions with linguistic theories. Working within the Principles and Parameters frame-work, the book surveys general concepts from formal learning theory and complexity theory, together with important fndings from developmental psycholinguistics, historical linguistics and language processing. Written by a team of leading researchers, it examines important techniques that can be used to obtain interesting and empirically testable predictions from parametric theories of language variation and includes chapters on syntax, diachronic syntax and the relationship between linguistic complexity and the form of parameters. Fully integrated, and complete with a large number of exercises to test readers on their understanding of the material."

"Lexicalization, a process of language change, has been conceptualized in a variety of ways. Broadly defined as the adoption of words into the lexicon, it has been viewed by some as the reverse process of grammaticalization, by others as a routine process of word formation, and by others as the development of concrete meanings. In this up-to-date survey, Laurel Brinton and Elizabeth Traugott examine the various conceptualizations of lexicalization that have been presented in the literature. In light of contemporary work on grammaticalization, they then propose a new, unified model of lexicalization and grammaticalization. Their approach is illustrated with a variety of case studies from the history of English, including present participles, multi-word verbs, adverbs, and discourse markers, as well as some examples from other Indo-European languages. As a first overview of the various approaches to lexicalization."

"A research perspective that takes language use into account opens up new views of old issues and provides an understanding of issues that linguists have rarely addressed. Referencing new developments in cognitive and functional linguistics, phonetics, and connectionist modeling, this book investigates various ways in which a speaker/hearer’s experience with language affects the representation of phonology. Rather than assuming phonological representations in terms of phonemes, Joan Bybee adopts an exemplar model, in which specific tokens of use are stored and categorized phonetically with reference to variables in the context. This model allows an account of phonetically gradual sound change that produces lexical variation, and provides an explanatory account of the fact that many reductive sound changes affect highfrequency items first. The well-known effects of type and token frequency on morphologically conditioned phonological alterations are shown also to apply to larger sequences, such as fixed phrases and constructions, solving some of the problems formulated previously as dealing with the phonology–syntax interface."

"Language demonstrates structure while at the same time showing considerable variation at all levels: languages differ from one another while still being shaped by the same principles; utterances within a language differ from one another while still exhibiting the same structural patterns; languages change over time, but in fairly regular ways. This book focuses on the dynamic processes that create languages and give them their structure and their variance. Joan Bybee outlines a theory of language that directly addresses the nature of grammar, taking into account its variance and gradience, and seeks explanation in terms of the recurrent processes that operate in language use. The evidence is based on the study of large corpora of spoken and written language, and what we know about how languages change, as well as the results of experiments with language users. The result is an integrated theory of language use and language change which has implications for cognitive processing and language evolution."

"The phenomenon of grammaticalization, the historical process whereby new grammatical material is created, has attracted a great deal of attention within linguistics in recent years. However, until now no attempt has been made to provide a general account of this phenomenon in terms of a formal theory of syntax. The aim of this new and original book is to do precisely that. Using Chomsky’s Minimalist Programme for linguistic theory, Roberts and Roussou show how this approach gives rise to a number of important conceptual and theoretical issues concerning the nature of functional categories and the form of parameters, as well as the relation of both of these to language change. Drawing on examples from a wide range of languages, they construct a general account of grammaticalization with implications for linguistic theory and language acquisition."