Cover -- Half-title -- Title -- Copyright -- Contents -- Notes on the contributors -- Acknowledgements -- Introduction -- REFERENCES -- Part I The phenomenon of language change -- 1 On change in 'E-language' -- REFERENCES -- 2 Formal and functional motivation for language change -- 1 Introduction -- 2 Formal explanations of language change -- 3 Problems with formal explanations of language change -- 4 Functional explanations for language change -- 5 Problems with functional explanations of language change -- 6 Conclusion -- REFERENCES -- Part II Linguistic models and language change -- 3 Metaphors, models and language change -- 1 Introduction -- 2 Definition -- 3 Types -- 4 Metaphor sources -- 5 Language metaphors -- 5.1 Conduit -- 5.2 Tree -- 5.3 Waves and ripples -- 5.4 Game -- 5.5 Chain -- 5.6 Plants -- 5.7 Buildings -- 5.8 Dominator model -- 5.9 Other metaphors -- 6 Success of static metaphors -- 7 Maintenance of the static viewpoint -- 7.1 Successful linguistics metaphors -- 8 Conclusion -- 4 Log(ist)ic and simplistic S-curves -- 1 Introduction -- 2 Why an S-shaped curve? -- 3 The axes of the graph -- 4 Syntactic illustrations -- 5 Variables and variants -- 6 Conflation of S-curves: the shape of English -- 7 Concluding remark -- REFERENCES -- 5 Regular suppletion -- 1 Introduction -- 2 Bad -- 3 Went -- 4 Syndon -- 5 Be -- 6 Conclusion -- REFERENCES -- 6 On not explaining language change: Optimality Theory and the Great Vowel Shift -- 1 Explanation and motivation -- 2 Constraint reranking and the explanation of change -- 2.2 The Great Vowel Shift: Miglio (1998) -- 2.3 Historical segment loss -- 3 Learning the limits -- REFERENCES -- Part III Grammaticalisation -- 7 Grammaticalisation: cause or effect? -- 1 A nineteenth-century legacy -- 2 Long-term directionality in the twentieth century -- 3 Grammars and time -- 4 English auxiliary verbs.

5 Chaos -- REFERENCES -- 8 From subjectification to intersubjectification -- 1 Introduction -- 2 Subjectivity and subjectification -- 3 Intersubjectivity -- 4 Intersubjectification -- 5 Concluding comments -- REFERENCES -- Part IV The social context for language change -- 9 On the role of the speaker in language change -- 1 Introduction: internal and external factors in change -- 2 Actuation -- 3 The discourse of endogeny -- 4 Socially triggered change: an example -- 5 Concluding remarks -- REFERENCES -- Part V Contact-based explanations -- 10 The quest for the most 'parsimonious' explanations: endogeny vs. contact revisited -- 1 Introduction -- 2 The principle of parsimony -- 3 The general nature of the Celtic-English contacts -- 4 Problems with lexical parallels -- 5 Grammatical borrowing between English and the Celtic languages -- 6 Conclusion -- REFERENCES -- 11 Diagnosing prehistoric language contact -- 1 Introduction -- 2 Speech communities and social networks -- 3 Catastrophic change -- 4 Noncatastrophic change and the structures of speech communities -- 4.1 Closed communities -- 4.2 Open and tightknit communities -- 4.3 Open and looseknit communities -- 4.4 Drawing threads together -- REFERENCES -- 12 The ingenerate motivation of sound change -- 1 Introduction -- 2 i-umlaut -- 3 The phonetic basis of umlaut -- 4 Blocking effects as the failure of coarticulation -- 5 Place geometry: peripherality -- 6 The High German Consonant Shift -- 7 Peripherality and extension of the shift -- 8 Conclusions -- REFERENCES -- 13 How do dialects get the features they have? On the process of new dialect formation -- 1 Introduction -- 2 New dialect formation -- 2.1 Three stages in new dialect formation -- The first stage: rudimentary levelling -- The second stage (a): extreme variability -- The second stage (b): further levelling -- Third stage focussing.

2.2 The quantitative argument -- 2.3 The survival of minority variants -- 2.4 The interpretation of mergers -- 2.5 Numbers, distribution and status -- 2.5.1 Nineteenth-century emigration to New Zealand -- 2.5.2 How many Irish went to New Zealand? -- 2.5.3 Where did the Irish settle? -- 2.5.4 What type of emigrants were the Irish? -- 2.6 The quantitative argument again -- 2.7 The transmission of ongoing change -- 2.8 Favouring variants -- 2.9 An illumination of drift -- 2.9.1 HAPPY-tensing -- 2.10 Supraregionalisation -- 3 Conclusion -- REFERENCES -- Part VI The typological perspective -- 14 Reconstruction, typology and reality -- 1 Introduction -- 2 Reconstruction and reality -- 3 Grammaticalisation, typology and the origin of language complexity -- 4 The uniformitarian hypothesis revisited -- 5 Conclusions -- REFERENCES -- 15 Reanalysis and typological change -- 1 Introduction -- 1.1 Stress type and placement in Celtic -- 1.2 Developing alternative strategies -- 1.3 Functionalisation of phonetic weakening -- 1.3.1 Release from phonetic motivation -- 1.3.2 Blocking of further developments -- 1.4 The development of palatalisation -- 1.5 Inherent deficiencies in the system -- 1.6 Later disturbances of the system -- 2 A morphological typology of Irish -- 2.1 Base and root -- 2.2 Type of alteration -- 2.3 Initial mutations -- 2.3.1 Lenition -- 2.3.2 Nasalisation -- 2.4 Manifestation of the initial mutations -- 2.4.1 Anomalies in the mutation system -- 2.5 Base-margin alteration -- 2.5.1 Root extension and remnants of older patterns -- 2.5.2 Scope of base-margin alteration -- 3 Irish developments in a broader perspective -- 4 Conclusion -- REFERENCES -- Index.