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.

Local history and folklore often inform the naming of people and places. Does eThekwini mean "place of the lagoon" or "place of the single testicle"? How are the names of dogs used to accuse a neighbor of witchcraft? What is the origin of Jamludi? Is the Zulu isibongo the same as a surname? Zulu Names explores the meanings of and metaphors behind more than a thousand Zulu names grouped into different categories: from personal names and nicknames to clan names and praises; from place, homestead and regimental names to school and shop names; and from domestic animal and bird names to the names of the Zulu lunar months. For the more serious scholar, Zulu Names also contains ground-breaking research and onomastic material. This is an indispensable guide for anyone interested in Zulu language or culture, or in naming practices generally.

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.