Description

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The Routledge Handbook of Historical Linguistics provides a survey of the field covering the methods which underpin current work; models of language change; and the importance of historical linguistics for other subfields of linguistics and other disciplines.

Divided into five sections, the volume encompass a wide range of approaches and addresses issues in the following areas:

historical perspectives

methods and models

language change

interfaces

regional summaries

Each of the thirty-two chapters is written by a specialist in the field and provides: a introduction to the subject; an analysis of the relationship between the diachronic and synchronic study of the topic; an overview of the main current and critical trends; and examples from primary data. The Routledge Handbook of Historical Linguistics is essential reading for researchers and postgraduate students working in this area.

Chapter 28 of this book is available for free in PDF format as Open Access at www.tandfebooks.com. It has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 3.0 license.

About the Author

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Claire Bowern is Associate Professor of Linguistics at Yale University. Her research focuses on the Indigenous languages of Australia, and is concerned with documentation/description and prehistory. Bethwyn Evans is currently a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, but will take up a position as Research Fellow in Linguistics at the Australian National University in 2012. Her current research centres on issues of language history and contact with a focus on the languages of Melanesia.