Internal and External Causes of Language Change

Nikolaos Lavidas is Associate Professor of Diachronic Linguistics at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece. His research interests lie in the areas of language change, (historical) language contact, historical corpora, and syntax-semantics interface. Alexander Bergs is Full Professor and Chair of English Language and Linguistics at the University of Osnabrück, Germany. His research interests include language variation and change, constructional approaches to language, the role of context in language, the syntax/pragmatics interface and cognitive poetics. Elly van Gelderen is Regents Professor at Arizona State University, USA. She is a syntactician interested in language change. Her work shows how regular syntactic change (grammaticalization and the linguistic cycle) provides insight into the faculty of language. Ioanna Sitaridou is a Professor of Spanish and Historical Linguistics atthe University of Cambridge and Fellow of Queens’ College, Cambridge, UK. Her main areas of research are comparative and diachronic syntax of the Romance languages, in particular 13th Century Spanish; and dialectal Greek, especially Pontic Greek.

• Chapter 1: Introduction.- Part I. The role of typological aspects and structural characteristics in language change.- Chapter 2: The prehistory of weak Adjective Phrases in Old Norse.- Chapter 3: The development of absolute participial constructions in Greek .- Chapter 4: Synecdochic chains and semantic change. The case of the upper limbs in Homeric Greek .- Chapter 5: The development of the copular participial periphrases in Ancient Greek: Evidence for syntactic change and reconstruction.- Chapter 6: Syntactic reanalysis and analogical generalization in the Late Modern English period: Verb-adjective combinations in focus.- Chapter 7: The evolution of temporal adverbs into discourse markers: Grammaticalization or pragmaticalization? The case of Romanian atunci ‘then’ and apoi ‘afterwards’ .- Part II. Linguistic diachronies and the role of language contact .- Chapter 8: Long-distance metathesis of liquids in Romance. A Property Theory analysis of diachronic change .- Chapter 9: Documenting Corfioto: Evidence for contact-induced grammaticalisation in the Romance variety of Corfu.- Chapter 10: Gender hypercharacterization in Modern Judeo-Spanish adjectives.- Chapter 11: The RUKI-rule in Indo-Iranian and the early contacts with Uralic.