Campbell Lyle. Historical linguistics: An Introduction

The MIT Press, 1999. — xx, 396 pp. — ISBN: 0-262-53159-3.Historical linguistics is the study of how and why language changes—both the methods of investigating language change and the theories designed to explain these changes. This highly accessible introductory text takes a hands-on, how-to approach, rather than just talking about the subject as many texts do. The book contains abundant examples both from familiar European languages, to make the topics accessible, and from a variety of non-European languages, to illustrate the depth and range of the concepts. The book also covers a number of essential topics neglected by most texts, including syntactic change, methods for investigating distant genetic relationship, linguistic prehistory, and grammaticalization.What is Historical Linguistics About?
Kinds of Linguistic Changes: An English Example
Exercises
Sound ChangeKinds of Sound Change
Non-phonemic (Allophonic) Changes
Phonemic Changes
General Kinds of Sound Changes
Kinds of Common Sound Changes
Relative Chronology
Chain Shifts
Exercises
BorrowingWhat is a Loanword?
Why do Languages Borrow from One Another?
How do Words get Borrowed?
How do We Identify Loanwords and Determine the Direction of Borrowing?
Loans as Clues to Linguistic Changes in the Past
What Can Be Borrowed?
Cultural Inferences
Exercises
Analogical ChangeProportional Analogy
Analogical Levelling
Analogical Extension
The Relationship between Analogy and Sound Change
Analogical Models
Other Kinds of Analogy
Exercises
The Comparative Method and Linguistic ReconstructionThe Comparative Method Up Close and Personal
A Case Study
Indo-European and the Regularity of Sound Change
Basic Assumptions of the Comparative Method
How Realistic are Reconstructed Proto-languages?
Exercises
Linguistic ClassificationThe World’s Language Families
Terminology
How to Draw Family Trees: Subgrouping
Glottochronology (Lexicostatistics)
Exercises
Models of Linguistic ChangeThe Family-tree Model
The Challenge from Dialectology and the ‘Wave Theory’
Dialectology (Linguistic Geography, Dialect Geography)
A Framework for Investigating the Causes of Linguistic Change
Sociolinguistics and Language Change
The Issue of Lexical Diffusion
Internal ReconstructionInternal Reconstruction Illustrated
Relative Chronology
The Limitations of Internal Reconstruction
Internal Reconstruction and the Comparative Method
Exercises
Syntactic ChangeMechanisms of Syntactic Change
Reanalysis and Extension Exemplified
Generative Approaches
Grammaticalisation
Syntactic Reconstruction
Exercises
Semantic Change and Lexical ChangeTraditional Considerations
Attempts to Explain Semantic Change
Other Kinds of Lexical Change - New Words
Exercises
Explaining Linguistic ChangeEarly Theories
Internal and External Causes
Interaction of Causal Factors
Explanation and Prediction
Areal LinguisticsDefining the Concept
Examples of Linguistic Areas
How to Determine Linguistic Areas
Implications of Areal Linguistics for Linguistic Reconstruction and Subgrouping
Areal Linguistics and Proposals of Distant Genetic Relationship
Distant Genetic RelationshipLexical Comparison
Sound Correspondences
Grammatical Evidence
Borrowing
Semantic Constraints
Onomatopoeia
Nursery Forms
Short Forms and Unmatched Segments
Chance Similarities
Sound-Meaning Isomorphism
Only Linguistic Evidence
Erroneous Morphological Analysis
Non-cognates
Spurious Forms
Methodological Wrap-up
Philology: The Role of Written RecordsPhilology
Examples of What Philology Can Contribute
The Role of Writing
Getting Historical Linguistic Information for Written Sources
Linguistic PrehistoryIndo-European Linguistic Prehistory
The Methods of Linguistic Prehistory
Limitations and Cautions