During several decades, syntactic reconstruction has been more or less regarded as a bootless and an unsuccessful venture, not least due to the heavy criticism in the 1970s from scholars like Watkins, Jeffers, Lightfoot, etc. This fallacious view culminated in Lightfoot's (2002: 625) conclusion: "[i]f somebody thinks that they can reconstruct grammars more successfully and in more widespread fashion, let them tell us their methods and show us their results. Then we'll eat the pudding." This volume provides methods for the identification of i) cognates in syntax, and ii) the directionality of syntactic change, showcasing the results in the introduction and eight articles. These examples are offered as both tastier and also more nourishing than the pudding Lightfoot had in mind when discarding the viability of reconstructing syntax.

Geoffrey Kimball presents the first grammar of the American Indian language Yukhíti Kóy, better known in English as Atakapa, once spoken in coastal southwestern Louisiana and coastal eastern Texas. The late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries saw a drastic fall in the Atakapa population, and by the first decades of the twentieth century the Atakapa language ceased to be spoken. The grammar is based on the field notes collected by Albert Samuel Gatschet in January of 1885, with additional material collected by John R. Swanton in 1907–8. Gatschet worked with two speakers of the language, Kišyuc, also known as Yoyot, and her cousin Tottokš, whose English names were Louison Huntington and Delilah Moss, respectively. John R. Swanton wrote a grammatical sketch of Atakapa in 1929 based on Gatschet’s notes and in 1932 published the texts Gatschet had gathered, as well as a dictionary. The materials, originally written phonetically, have been phonemicized, and the nature of the grammar has been elucidated. The nine surviving texts in Yukhíti have been phonemicized, analyzed, and translated, and the parallels between them and other traditional oral literatures of Native American languages of the Southeast are discussed. This reference grammar includes a vocabulary of all words contained in the field notes.  

This book provides an updated view of our knowledge about Phrygian, an Indo-European language attested to have been spoken in Anatolia between the 8th century BC and the Roman Imperial period. Although a linguistic and epigraphic approach is the core of the book, it covers all major topics of research on Phrygian: the historical and archaeological contexts in which the Phrygian texts were found, a comprehensive grammar with diachronic and comparative remarks, an overview of the linguistic contacts attested for Phrygian, a discussion about its position within the Indo-European language family, a complete lexicon and index of the Phrygian inscriptions, a study of the Phrygian glosses and a complete, critical catalogue of the Phrygian inscriptions with new readings and interpretations.

In this book, Martin Hilpert lays out how Construction Grammar can be applied to the study of language change. In a series of ten lectures on Diachronic Construction Grammar, the book presents the theoretical foundations, open questions, and methodological approaches that inform the constructional analysis of diachronic processes in language. The lectures address issues such as constructional networks, competition between constructions, shifts in collocational preferences, and differentiation and attraction in constructional change. The book features analyses that utilize modern corpus-linguistic methodologies and that draw on current theoretical discussions in usage-based linguistics. It is relevant for researchers and students in cognitive linguistics, corpus linguistics, and historical linguistics.

Nobody can deny that an account of grammatical change that takes written contact into consideration is a significant challenge for any theoretical perspective. Written contact of earlier periods or from a diachronic perspective mainly refers to contact through translation. The present book includes a diachronic dimension in the study of written language contact by examining aspects of the history of translation as related to grammatical changes in English and Greek in a contrastive way. In this respect, emphasis is placed on the analysis of diachronic retranslations: the book examines translations from earlier periods of English and Greek in relation to various grammatical characteristics of these languages in different periods and in comparison to non-translated texts.

This volume presents the research insights of twelve new studies by fourteen linguists examining a range of Biblical Hebrew grammatical phenomena. The contributions proceed from the second international workshop of the Biblical Hebrew Linguistics and Philology network (www.BHLaP.wordpress.com), initiated in 2017 to bring together theoretical linguists and Hebraists in order to reinvigorate the study of Biblical Hebrew grammar. Recent linguistic theory is applied to the study of the ancient language, and results in innovative insight into pausal forms, prosodic dependency, ordinal numeral syntax, ellipsis, the infinitive system, light verbs, secondary predicates, verbal semantics of the Hiphil binyan, and hybrid constructions.

How can we explain metrical irregularities in Homeric phrases like ? What do such phrases tell us about the antiquity of the epic tradition? And how did doublet forms such as beside originate? In this book, you will find the first systematic and complete account of the syllabic liquids in Ancient Greek. It provides an up-to-date, comprehensive and innovative etymological treatment of material from all dialects, including Mycenaean. A new model of linguistic change in the epic tradition is used to tackle two hotly-debated problems: metrical irregularities in Homer (including muta cum liquida) and the double reflex. The proposed solution has important consequences for Greek dialect classification and the prehistory of Epic language and meter.

This is the first comprehensive description of Tutrugbu(Nyangbo-nyb), a Ghana Togo Mountain(gtm) language of the Kwa family. It is based on a documentary corpus of different genre of linguistic and cultural practices gathered during periods of immersion fieldwork. Tutrugbu speakers are almost all bilingual in Ewe, another Kwa language. The book presents innovative analyses of phenomena like Advanced Tongue Root and labial vowel harmony, noun classes, topological relational verbs, the two classes of adpositions, obligatory complement verbs, multi-verbs in a single clause, and information structure. This grammar is unparalleled in including a characterization of culturally defined activity types and their associated speech formulae and routine strategies. It should appeal to linguists interested in African languages, language documentation and typology.

"The echo of the stone/ where I carved the [Buddha's] honorable footprints/ reaches the Heaven, [...]". This book presents the transcription, translation, and analysis of Chinese (753 AD) and Japanese inscriptions (end of the 8th century AD) found on two stones now in the possession of the Yakushiji temple in Nara. All these inscriptions praise the footprints of Buddha, and more exactly their carvings in the stone. The language of the Japanese inscription, which consists of twenty-one poems, reflects the contemporary dialect of Nara. Its writing system shows a quite unique trait, being practically monophonic. The book is richly illustrated by photos of the temple and of the inscriptions.