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  • Historical linguistics 1995 ed. by John Charles Smith, Delia Bentley
  • Edward J. Vajda
Historical linguistics 1995. Vol. 1: General issues and non-Germanic languages. Ed. by John Charles Smith and Delia Bentley. (Current issues in linguistic theory 161.) Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2000. Pp. xii, 438.

The Twelfth International Conference on Historical Linguistics, held 13–18 August 1995 at the University of Manchester, England, yielded two publications. One appeared earlier as vol. 162 of the same series (Historical linguistics 1995. Vol. 2: Germanic linguistics, ed. by Richard M. Hogg and Linda van Bergen, Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1998). The present book contains papers on non-Germanic languages and general issues in comparative linguistics. The 25 articles range in length from 12 to 22 pages.

Studies of Indo-European languages constitute a majority of the contributions, but other families are represented as well. Vit Bubenik’s ‘Development of aspect from Ancient Slavic to Bulgaro-Macedonian’ (23–34) argues that internal factors have been more important than previously realized in shaping the Bulgaro-Macedonian verb system. In ‘Vedic causative nasal presents and their thematicization: A functional approach’ (191–210), Leonid Kulikov investigates the role played by causativity and transitivity in shaping the nasal present stem. Tim Pulju’s ‘Indo-European *d, *1, and *dl’ (311–26) posits an unstable cluster, *dl in Proto-IE, to account for such irregular correspondences as Gr. dákru ~ Lat. lacrima ~ OHG trahan ‘tear’. Articles on Romance linguistics are the most numerous, and space permits only a listing of their titles: ‘Emergence and evolution of French nasal vowels: Reconsidering data through the interplay of production and perception’ (1–22) by Jean-Luc Azra; ‘Patterns of “active” syntax in Late Latin pleonastic reflexives’ (35–56) by Michela Cennamo; ‘Variation between the French clitics y and lui: Semantics vs. morphology’ (87–98) by Denis Dumas; ‘From deixis ad oculos to discourse markers via deixis ad phantasma’ (243–60) by Maria M. Manoliu; ‘Declension in Old and Middle French: Two opposing tendencies’ (327–44) by Pieter van Reenen and Lene Schøsler; ‘From Latin metre to Romance rhythm’ (345–60) by Mario Saltarelli. ‘Expletives and change: A morphological approach to syntactic change’ (73–86) by Monique Dufresne, Fernande Dupius, and Mireille Tremblay explores the status of impersonal subjects in the evolution of French. Anna Giacalone Ramat’s ‘On some grammaticalization patterns for auxiliaries’ (125–54) discusses stages in the development of TAM affixes from auxiliary verbs in Italian.

There are also contributions on specific non-Indo-European languages. ‘Comparative reconstruction’ (57–72) by Alan Dench presents a method for describing the phonology of Nyungar, a nearly extinct language of Western Australia. In ‘The legacy of recycled aspect’ (261–78), Marianne Mithun discusses hierarchies of semantic relations among aspectual affixes in Central Pomo languages (California). The other article devoted to Native America is Nicholas Ostler’s ‘The development of transitivity in the Chibchan languages of Colombia’ [End Page 625] (279–94). In ‘Diverging sources of perfective aspect morphology in Tibeto-Kinnauri’ (361–76), Anju Saxena demonstrates the difficulty of separating the effects of external motivation vs. internal development as causal factors in the historical morphology of a Sino-Tibetan language. Three articles deal with Japanese: ‘Recent changes in the tonology of Kyoto Japanese’ (111–24) by Bjarke Frellesvig; ‘Kakari particles and the merger of the predicative and attributive forms in Old Japanese’ (155–68) by Peter Hendriks; and ‘Is quantifier-floating in Japanese a recent innovation? Contextual analysis of the numeral quantifier construction in Old Japanese’ (169–90) by Alan Hyun-Oak Kim.

A few articles discuss general issues. In ‘The origins of definiteness marking’ (223–42), Christopher Lyons argues that the category of ‘definiteness’ rather than ‘determiner’ is key in the emergence of a functional DP system. In ‘Bringing the invisible hand to cognitive grammar’ (409–22), Margaret E. Winters and Geoffrey S. Nathan offer support for...

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