This study advances a new approach to the history of Russian aspect, integrating recent work on aspectology with contemporary theories of language changes and development. Using data from five Old Russian texts, the author traces the development of the aspectual opposition from its early lexical roots to the sixteenth century, when contextual and discourse concerns came to the fore.

Linguistic construal of time lies at the center of language and language use; it is also one of the cognitive foundations of culture. The focus of the papers in this volume is on historical developments of genetically different aspect and tense systems across continents, with contributions on the Sogeram languages of Papua New Guinea, the Arandic languages of Australia, Kisikongo Bantu, and Japanese. In addition, two prototypical Indo-European tense-aspect systems, those of Vedic and Latin, are analyzed in a comparative perspective. Across language groups and continents, the general principles revealed by the studies presented here contribute towards a novel and deepening understanding of tense and aspect. They contribute not only to modelling and theory, but also to a better understanding of processes in individual languages. Originally published as special issue of the Journal of Historical Linguistics 10:2 (2020).

In Verbal Aspect in Old Church Slavonic Jaap Kamphuis demonstrates that the aspect system of Old Church Slavonic can best be described if one divides the verbs into three main categories: perfective, imperfective and anaspectual. This differs from the traditional division into perfective and imperfective verbs only. To support the categorization, the study contains a corpus-based quantitative and qualitative analysis of the available Old Church Slavonic data. This analysis contributes to a better understanding of the development of aspect in Slavic. Kamphuis shows that aspect in Old Church Slavonic functions more like verbal aspect in the Western groups of Slavic languages (e.g. Czech) than verbal aspect in the Eastern group (e.g. Russian).

The articles of this volume are centered around two competing views on language change originally presented at the 2003 International Conference on Historical Linguistics in the two important plenary papers by Henning Andersen and William Croft. The latter proposes an evolutionary model of language change within a domain-neutral model of a ‘generalized analysis of selection’, whereas Henning Andersen takes it that cultural phenomena could not possibly be handled, i.e. observed, described, understood, in the same way as natural phenomena. These papers are models of succinct presentation of important theoretical framework. The other papers present and discuss additional models of change, e.g. invisible hand-processes, system-internal models, functional and cognitive models. Most papers do not subscribe to the evolutionary model; instead, they focus on functional factors in the selection and propagation of variants (as opposed to factors of code efficiency), or on cognitive and pragmatic perspectives. Several papers are inspired by the late Eugenio Coseriu and by Henning Andersen’s theories on language change. In particular, the volume contains articles proposing interesting grammaticalization studies and extended models of grammaticalization. The clear presentation of important and competing approaches to fundamental questions concerning language change will be of high interest for scholars and students working in the field of diachrony and typology. The languages referred to in the papers include Cantonese, the Chukotko-Kamchatkan languages, Danish, English, Eskimo languages, German, Norwegian, Russian, Spanish, and Swedish.

Over the last few decades, the widespread diffusion of digital technology has increased availability of primary textual sources, radically changing the everyday life of scholars in the humanities, who are now able to access, query and process a wealth of empirical evidence in ways not possible before. Also for ancient languages, corpora enhanced with increasingly complex layers of metalinguistic information, such as part-of-speech tagging and syntactic annotation (called 'treebanks') are now available. In particular, diachronic treebanks, which provide data for a language across several historical stages of a given language, allow for a new approach to diachronic studies of syntactic phenomena where scholars previously had to content themselves with empirical work on a much smaller scale. This volume brings together a set of papers that report research on various diachronic matters supported by evidence from diachronic treebanks. The contents of the papers cover a wide range of languages, including English, French, Russian, Old Church Slavonic, Latin and Ancient Greek. Originally published as special issue of Diachronica 35:3 (2018).

This volume unifies a wide breadth of interdisciplinary studies examining the expression of motion in Slavic languages. The contributors to the volume have joined in the discussion of Slavic motion talk from diachronic, typological, comparative, cognitive, and acquisitional perspectives with a particular focus on verbs of motion, the nuclei of the lexicalization patterns for encoding motion. Motion verbs are notorious among Slavic linguists for their baffling idiosyncratic behavior in their lexical, semantic, syntactical, and aspectual characteristics. The collaborative effort of this volume is aimed both at highlighting and accounting for the unique properties of Slavic verbs of motion and at situating Slavic languages within the larger framework of typological research investigating cross-linguistic encoding of the motion domain. Due to the multiplicity of approaches to the linguistic analysis the collection offers, it will suitably complement courses and programs of study focusing on Slavic linguistics as well as typology, diachronic and comparative linguistics, semantics, and second language acquisition. "This important book is a model of in-depth exploration that is much needed: intra-typological, diachronic, and synchronic exploration of contrasting ways of encoding a particular semantic domain û in this case the domain of motion events. The various Slavic languages present contrasting but related solutions to the intersection of motion and aspect. And, as a group, they offer alternate forms of satellite-framed typology, in contrast to the more heavily studied Germanic languages of this general type. The up-to-date and interdisciplinary nature of the volume makes it essential reading in cognitive and typological linguistics."-Dan I. Slobin, Professor Emeritus of Psychology and Linguistics, University of California, Berkeley "A feast for the mind, with untold riches and variety: different approaches, patterns and usage, diachronic as well as synchronic, Slavic and not just Russian. All on a high intellectual level from capable scholars. Ful besy were the editors in every thing, That to the feste was appertinent."-Alan Timberlake, Columbia University

The focus of this volume is the interdependence of diachrony and synchrony in the investigation of syntactic structure. A diverse set of modern and ancient languages is investigated from this perspective, including Hittite, the Classical languages, Old Norse, Coptic, Bantu languages, Australian languages and Creoles. A variety of topics are covered, including TAM, diathesis, valency, case marking, cliticization, and grammaticalization. This volume should be of interest tosyntacticians, typologists, and historical linguists with an interest in syntax and morphology.

This volume comprises refereed papers and abstracts of the 8th International Conference on the Evolution of Language (EVOLANG8), held in Utrecht on 14-17 April 2010. As the leading international conference in the field, the biennial EVOLANG meeting is characterized by an invigorating, multidisciplinary approach to the origins and evolution of human language, and brings together researchers from many subject areas, including anthropology, archaeology, biology, cognitive science, computer science, genetics, linguistics, neuroscience, palaeontology, primatology and psychology.The latest theoretical, experimental and modelling research on language evolution is presented in this collection, including contributions from many leading scientists in the field.

The linguistic study of the Slavic language family, with its rich syntactic and phonological structures, complex writing systems, and diverse socio-historical context, is a rapidly growing research area. Bringing together contributions from an international team of authors, this Handbook provides a systematic review of cutting-edge research in Slavic linguistics. It covers phonetics and phonology, morphology and syntax, lexicology, and sociolinguistics, and presents multiple theoretical perspectives, including synchronic and diachronic. Each chapter addresses a particular linguistic feature pertinent to Slavic languages, and covers the development of the feature from Proto-Slavic to present-day Slavic languages, the main findings in historical and ongoing research devoted to the feature, and a summary of the current state of the art in the field and what the directions of future research will be. Comprehensive yet accessible, it is essential reading for academic researchers and students in theoretical linguistics, linguistic typology, sociolinguistics and Slavic/East European Studies.