Andras Rona-Tas, distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of Szeged, Hungary, winner of several international prestigious prizes, has devoted his long academic career to the study of Chuvash, Turkic elements in Hungarian, Mongolic-Tibetan linguistic contacts, the Para-Mongolic language Khitan and other Central Asian languages and cultures. This book, presented to him in the occasion of his 90th birthday, contains a collection of papers in Turkic and Mongolic Studies, with a focus on the literacy, culture, and languages of the steppe civilizations. It is organized in three sections: Turkic Studies, Mongolic Studies, and Linguistic and cultural contacts of Altaic languages. It contains papers by some of most renowned experts in Central Asia Studies. Contributors are Klara Agyagasi, Akos Bertalan Apatoczky, Agnes Birtalan, Uwe Blasing, Eva Csaki, Eva Agnes Csato, Edina Dallos, Marcel Erdal, Stefan Georg, Peter Golden, Maria Ivanics, Juha Janhunen, Lars Johanson, Gyoergy Kara, Bayarma Khabtagaeva, Jens Peter Laut, Raushangul Mukusheva, Olach Zsuzsanna, Benedek Peri, Elisabetta Ragagnin, Pavel Rykin, Uli Schamiloglu, Janos Sipos, Istvan Vasary, Alexander Vovin, Michael Weiers, Jens Wilkens, Wu Yingzhe, Emine Yilmaz, and Peter Zieme.

This volume contains a selection of papers presented at the Fifth Conference on the Foundations of Arab Linguistics (FAL V, Cambridge, 2018). The first part of the book deals with Sibawayhi's Kitab, the oldest known treatise of Arabic grammar: after providing insights on some of its specific terminology, these chapters evaluate its place as a source within the long-term tradition of grammatical studies. The second part of the book focuses on parallel developments in the Arabic grammatical theory, both in the classical and postclassical periods up to the 15th century. Some contributions also address the relationship between grammar and other disciplines, notably philosophy and Qur'anic exegesis. As such, this volume aims to deepen our knowledge of the development of linguistic theories in the Islamicate world.

To date little work has been done on pragmatics within cognitive linguistics, especially from a historical perspective. The lectures presented in this volume give the first systematic account of how pragmatics can be incorporated into cognitive linguistics using a Diachronic Construction Grammar perspective. The author combines detailed study of the historical development of Discourse Structuring Markers like all the same, after all and by the way and propose ways in which to model them. A number of topics are addressed including what a usage based approach to language change is, differences between innovation and change, how to think about analogy and networks, how combinations of Discourse Structuring Markers like now then became a unit, and whether clause-initial and -final positions are constructions. Refinements of Diachronic Construction Grammar are proposed and tested.

Studying the Indo-European languages means having a privileged viewpoint on diachronic language change, because of their relative wealth of documentation, which spans over more than three millennia with almost no interruption, and their cultural position that they have enjoyed in human history. The chapters in this volume investigate case-studies in several ancient Indo-European languages (Ancient Greek, Latin, Hittite, Luwian, Sanskrit, Avestan, Old Persian, Armenian, Albanian) through the lenses of contact, variation, and reconstruction, in an interdisciplinary and intradisciplinary way. This reveals at the same time the multiplicity and the unity of our discipline(s), both by showing what kind of results the adoption of modern theories on "old" material can yield, and by underlining the centrality and complexity of the text in any research related to ancient languages.

This volume presents the up-to-date results of investigations into the Asian origins of the only two language families of North America that are widely acknowledged as having likely genetic links in northern Asia. It brings together all that has been proposed to date under the respective rubrics of the Uralo-Siberian (Eskimo-Yukaghir-Uralic) hypothesis and the Dene-Yeniseian hypothesis. The evolution of the two parallel research strategies for fleshing out these linguistic links between North America and Asia are compared and contrasted. Although focusing on stringently controlled linguistic reconstructions, the volume draws upon archaeological and human genetic data where relevant.