Andersen Henning (ed.). Language Contacts in Prehistory: Studies in Stratigraphy

Papers from the Workshop on Linguistic Stratigraphy and Prehistory at the Fifteenth International Conference on Historical Linguistics, Melbourne, 17 August 2001. — John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2003. — viii+292 p. — (Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 239). — ISBN 90-272-4751-X.Every language includes layers of lexical and grammatical elements that entered it at different times in the more or less distant past. Hence, for periods preceding our earliest historical documentation, linguistic stratigraphy — the systematic study of such layers — may yield information about the prehistory of a given tradition of speaking in a variety of ways. For instance, irregular phonological reflexes may be evidence of the convergence of diverse dialects in the formation of a language, and layers of material from different source languages may form a record of changing cultural contacts in the past. In this volume are discussed past problems and current advances in the stratigraphy of Indo-European, African, Southeast Asian, Australian, Oceanic, Japanese, and Meso-American languages.Introduction (Henning Andersen).
Indo-European.
Stratum and shadow. A genealogy of stratigraphy theories from the Indo-European West (Bernard Mees).
Slavic and the Indo-European migrations (Henning Andersen).
The development of the perfect in Indo-European. Stratigraphic evidence of prehistoric areal influence (Bridget Drinka).
Africa.
Stratigraphy in African historical linguistics (Christopher Ehret).
Stratigraphy and prehistory: Bantu Zone F (B. F. Y. P. Masele & Derek Nurse).
Language contacts in Nilo-Saharan prehistory (Christopher Ehret).
Southeast Asia.
Evidence for Austroasiatic strata in Thai (Anthony Diller).
Australia.
Millers and mullers. The archaeo-linguistic stratigraphy of technological change in holocene Australia (Patrick McConvell & Michael Smith).
Oceania.
Loanword strata in Rotuman (Hans Schmidt).
Japan.
Substratum and adstratum in prehistoric Japan (J. Marshall Unger).
Meso-America.
Uto-Aztecan in the linguistic stratigraphy of Mesoamerican prehistory (Karin Dahin).