Lehmann Winfred P., Malkiel Yakov (Eds.). Perspectives on Historical Linguistics: Papers from a Conference Held at the Meeting of the Language Theory Division, Modern Language Assn., San Francisco, 27-30 December 1979

John Benjamins Publishing Company, 1982. — 392 p. — (Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 24).This volume presents seven extensive essays by specialists in their respective fields of historical linguistics. The first essay after the Introduction states the principles presented in Directions for Historical Linguistics (1968) and assesses the progress made since then towards constructing a general theory of language change. Like the following essays on phonology and morphology, it poses new questions that have arisen in the increasingly ambitious research. Historical attention to discourse, the topic of the next essay, is virtually new, though it too finds predecessors among philologists who devoted themselves to texts. Finally, two essays treat etymology, one concentrating on the rigorously investigated Romance field, the other on Indo-European, especially on new insights prompted by attention to Hittite.Introduction: diachronic linguistics - Winfred P. Lehmann
Building on empirical foundations - William Labov
A semiotic model of diachronic process phonology - Wolfgang U. Dressler
Semantically-marked root morphemes in diachronic morphology - Yakov Malkiel
From propositional to textual and expressive meanings; some semantic-pragmatic aspects of grammaticalization - Elizabeth Closs Traugott
Romance Etymology - Steven N. Dworkin
Indo-european etymology with special reference to grammatical category - Carol F. Justus