Davis Garry W., Iverson Gregory K. (Editors). Explanation in Historical Linguistics

John Benjamins, 1992. — xiv. 238 pages. — (Current Issues in Linguistic Theory). — ISBN: 90-272-3581-3 / 1-55619-139-1.The following collection of essays constitutes the first of two publications to result from the Nineteenth Annual University of Wisconsin — Milwaukee Linguistics Symposium, held April 20-22,1990 on the topic, Explanation in Historical Linguistics. The papers that appear in these volumes were selected from among the seventy-nine presented at the conference, including eight by invited speakers; the present anthology, in addition, includes special solicited articles by Eric Hamp and Joseph Salmons (in lieu of his symposium paper) on the validity of such remote reconstructions as Nostratic and Proto-World.Event structure accounting for the emerging periphrastic tenses and the passive voice in German
Historical explanation and historical linguistics
Elements of resistance in contact-induced language change
Articulatory variability, categorical perception, and the inevitability of sound change
On the historical development of marked forms
On misusing similarity
Reconstruction and syntactic typology: A plea for a different approach
Diachronic explanation: Putting speakers back into the picture
Grammatical prototypes and competing motivations in a theory of linguistic change
Understanding standards
Rules and analogy
The development of perfect reduplication in Indo-European
A look at the data for a global etymology: *tik 'finger'