The present volume contains revised versions of selected papers from the general sessions of ICHL 9. The 34 papers cover topics from the full range of contemporary historical linguistic scholarship. The papers address issues of language change in a large variety of languages and language families, both Indo-European and non-Indo-European: students of Germanic linguistics will likely find the volume to be of particular interest, as more than a dozen contributions deal with developments in Afrikaans, Dutch, English, German and Icelandic. The volume includes an index of names and languages.

This volume contains a selection of 34 of the 96 papers presented at ICHL 1993, including several of the contributions to the workshop on Parameters and Typology organized jointly by Henning Andersen and David W. Lightfoot. Major topics represented are grammaticalization and functional renewal (illustrated with changes in romance, French, Pennsylvania German, Afrikaans, English, Finnish), changes in syntax (Indo-European, Indo-Aryan, Ancient Greek, Romanian, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Japanese, Dutch, English) and discourse structure (Old Russian, Old French), morphology (German, Turkic), phonology (Romance, Italian, French, German, Old English, English). Several papers include sociolinguistic, areal, and typological perspectives on change; a few are specifically concerned with reconstruction or with the principles of reconstruction, and several demonstrate the continued importance of the philological methods in the study of texts.

The Twelfth International Conference on Historical Linguistics, which is the major forum for the presentation of work in progress in the field of diachronic linguistics, took place at the University of Manchester in August 1995. The quality and breadth of the abstracts submitted for the general programme was such that four parallel sessions were needed throughout the conference. The present volume contains selected papers which deal with the Germanic languages. A companion volume, edited by J.C. Smith and Delia Bentley, contains papers on general problems in historical linguistics and studies of non-Germanic languages. The conference reflected the current health of diachronic linguistics. There were more papers and more participants than at past conferences, and the discussion covered a broader range of languages than hitherto. Sometimes it has been possible to isolate a particular preoccupation which has dominated much of the conference; but the overall impression to be gained from the Manchester meeting was one of stimulating diversity — the discipline appears to be moving forward on many fronts simultaneously, yet without losing focus. This stimulating diversity is well reflected in this important collection.

This is a selection of papers from the 14th International Conference on Historical Linguistics held August 9-13, 1999, at the University of British Columbia. From the rich program and the many papers given during this conference, the present twenty-three papers were carefully selected to display the state of current research in the field of historical linguistics.

The contributors to this volume cover the international range of scholarship in the field of Historical Linguistics, as well as some of its major themes. The work and ideas they discuss are relevant not only to other aspects of Historical Linguistics but also to more general developments in linguistic theory. Along with Professor Jones' Introduction, their comments provide a major overview of Historical Linguistics that will be the reference point for its development for many years to come and form an important contribution to general theories of linguistic behaviour.

This volume presents a selection from the papers given at the 13th International Conference on Historical Linguistics. It offers a window on the current state of the art in historical linguistics: the papers cover a wide range of different languages, different language families, and different approaches to the study of linguistic change, ranging from optimality theory, theories of grammaticalization and the invisible hand, treatments of language contact and creolization to the linguistic consequences of political correctness. Among the languages under discussion are Akkadian, Catalan, Dutch, Finnish, Japanese, Sranan, Western Malayo-Polynesian, Yiddish, and a variety of Romance and Native American languages.

This is the first of two volumes deriving from papers presented at the Nineteenth Annual UVM Linguistics Symposium held in Milwaukee in April 1990. The contributions in this volume investigate the general question of what constitutes an explanation of diachronic change, and illustrate their proposals in the context of various specific problems in historical linguistics. The present volume also includes a solicited paper by Eric P. Hamp (“On remote reconstruction”) that addresses the validity of distant reconstructions like those of Nostratic and Proto-World.

The papers selected for this volume were first presented at the 14th International Conference on English Historical Linguistics (Bergamo, 2006). At that important event, alongside studies of phonology, lexis, semantics and dialectology (presented in two companion volumes in this series), many innovative contributions focused on syntax and morphology. A carefully peer-reviewed selection, including one of the plenary lectures, appears here in print for the first time, bearing witness to the quality of the scholarly interest in this field of research. In all the contributions, well-established methods combine with new theoretical approaches in an attempt to shed more light on phenomena that have hitherto remained unexplored, or have only just begun to be investigated. State-of-the-art tools, such as electronic corpora and concordancing software, are employed consistently, ensuring a methodological homogeneity of the contributions.

This is a selection of papers from the 15th International Conference on Historical Linguistics held in Melbourne 13-17 August 2001, hosted by the Linguistics Program at La Trobe University. The papers range from the general theoretical to the study of particular languages and embrace most areas of linguistics, particularly morpho-syntax.

Roger Lass offers a critical survey of the foundations of the art of historical linguistics.