Gildea has two goals in this book, first to argue that grammaticalization theory has advanced to the point that it can be used with the comparative method to reconstruct the grammar of Proto-Languages; and second to give a detailed case study of this methodology in examining the typologically interesting Cariban language family in South America - a group of languages which has provided counterexamples to a number of proposed typological universals of morphosyntax. His conclusions challenge a long-standing tradition which asserts that syntax cannot be reconstructed. It will interest linguists working on South American languages as well as on grammaticalization, and linguists working in the descriptive or functional traditions.

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.