HISTORICAL LINGUISTICS 1991 -- Editorial page -- Title page -- Copyright page -- Table of contents -- Preface -- General programme of the conference -- The tendency towards right branching in the development and acquisition of Latin and French -- 1 Introduction -- 2 The shift from left to right branching -- 3 The comparison of diachronic and psycholinguistic data -- 4 The diachronic perspective -- REFERENCES -- Linguistics and its positivist handicap -- 1 The philosophical background -- 1.1 Excluding the gods -- 1.2 From legitimate fear to inhibition -- 2 Exhaustive etiology in medicine -- 3 Probing questions in evolutionary biology -- 4 Academic approach in linguistics -- 4.1 Collecting universals -- 4.2 Observing language acquisition -- 4.3 The contributions of typology -- 5 Converging views -- REFERENCES -- Questionwords in 18th-century and 20th-century Sranan -- 1 Introduction -- 2 Question words in 18th-century Sranan -- 3 Question words in 20th-century Sranan -- 4 The system of question words: emergence and development -- NOTES -- REFERENCES -- The explanation of syntactic change: a historical perspective -- 1 Introduction -- 2 Some general claims -- 3 The 'growth principle' -- 4 Language acquisition and grammatical change -- 4.1 Reanalysis (reinterpretation, abduction) -- 5 Functionalist perspectives -- 6 External explanations and syntactic borrowing -- 7 Conclusion -- NOTES -- REFERENCES -- Traffic between the pragmatic and structural levels -- 1 Constituent restructured on basis of illocution -- 2 Constituent "upgraded" to illocution -- 3 Illocution "downgraded" to lexical item -- Proper names -- Functional diversity -- Labelled phrases -- Compounds -- Morphological integration -- Reduction -- Syntactic fusion or mutation -- Lexicalisation and speech acts -- In conclusion -- NOTE -- REFERENCES -- Parameter resetting -- 1 Introduction.

2 The transparency principle -- 3 Abductive reanalysis -- 4 Parameter resetting -- 5 Reevaluating the mechanism of change -- 6 Conclusion -- NOTES -- REFERENCES -- Old French and constraints on consonant epenthesis -- Introduction -- 1 Facts -- 1.1 The essential facts of consonant epenthesis -- 1.2 Apparent and genuine exceptions -- 2 Explanation -- 2.1 Alleged syllabic structure -- 2.2 Fundamental objections -- 3 The function of consonant epenthesis -- 3.1 Nasal first, liquid second -- 3.2 Nasal first, obstruent or nasal second -- 3.3 Subsidiary conditions of accent -- 3.4 Other coronal clusters -- 4 Extensions and predictions -- 4.1 A revised typology -- 4.2 A proposal for a formal treatment -- Conclusion -- NOTES -- REFERENCES -- The definite article: early stages of development -- 1 Introduction -- 2 The definite article in Old French -- 3 The use of pu in Jamul Diegueño -- 3.1 The use of pu in isolated sentences -- 3.2 The use of pu in discourse -- 4 Discussion -- 5 Conclusion -- NOTES -- REFERENCES -- Language change: complex in its sources and directions, yet simple in systematicity -- 0 Introduction -- 1 The contemporary Russian case paradigm -- 2 Changes of case functions in the attested history of Russian -- 3 Case function changes and Functional Grammar -- 4 Conclusion -- REFERENCES -- Suppressionof a word-order pattern in Westgermanic -- 1 Westgermanic verb clusters -- 2 VPR through the ages -- 2.1 Dutch -- 2.2 German -- 3 The modern situation. Conclusions and prospectus -- NOTES -- REFERENCES -- Modularity in language change -- 0 Introduction -- 1 Introduction: syntactic independence and phonological dependence of Old Spanish weak pronouns -- 2 Triggers in linguistic change and history of Sp. WPs -- 2.0 Introduction -- 2.1 Formal trigger -- 2.2 Functional trigger -- 3 Aver as verbal clitic -- 4 Summary and concluding remarks -- NOTES.

REFERENCES -- Blood, tears, and murder: the evidence for Proto-Uto-Aztecan syllable-final consonants -- 1 -- 2 -- 3 -- 4 -- 5 -- 6 -- 7 -- 8 -- NOTES -- REFERENCES -- On leapfrogging in historical phonology -- 1 Terminology: metaphors we jump by -- 2 The leapfrogging test cases from English: the Jones data -- 2.1 Lowering of [i] when lengthened by MEOSL -- 2.2 The Great Vowel Shift case -- 2.3 The Belfast case -- 2.4 Summary: the good and the bad cases -- 3 Consonantal leapfrogging -- 3.1 The reduction of initial kn- and gn- in English -- 3.2 The non-gradualness of/x/ → /f/ -- 3.3 15th c. fn -» sn -- 4 Conclusion -- NOTES -- REFERENCES -- Greenberg'sAmerican Indian classification: a report on the controversy -- The background -- The issues -- Conclusion -- NOTES -- REFERENCES -- The grammaticalization of Spanish haber plus participle -- 0 Introduction -- 1 Latin -- 1.1 Possession -- 1.2 Possessive metaphor -- 1.3 Summary -- 2 Haber plus participle in Spanish -- 2.1 CID -- 2.2 From CID to the Golden Age -- 2.3 From the Golden Age to modern Spanish -- 3 Conclusion -- NOTES -- REFERENCES -- Latinto Romance (again!): change or genesis? -- REFERENCES -- Linguistic variants and language change: deictic variants in some German and Dutch dialects vis-à-vis Afrikaans -- 1 Introduction -- 2 Deictic variants in German and Dutch -- 3 The Afrikaans demonstrative pronouns -- 3.1 The situation in presentday Afrikaans -- 3.2 The situation before 1864 -- 3.3 The situation after 1864 -- 4 Conclusion -- 5 Postscript -- NOTES -- REFERENCES -- 'Typological conservatism' and framing constructions in German morphosyntax -- 1 Introduction -- 2 The inflection of the noun phrase -- 3 Word order -- 3.1 The word order of the noun phrase -- 3.2 The word order of the verb phrase -- 4 Typological considerations -- NOTES -- REFERENCES.

On the evidence for bimoric vowels in Early English -- NOTES -- REFERENCES -- Longtermevolution of the syntax of discourse and the Swahili person markers -- 1 Introductory remarks -- 2 The Swahili person markers -- 3 The evolution of the Swahili person markers -- 3.1 Topicality and the topic order strategy -- 3.2 Transitivity and the Bantu transitivising extensions -- 3.3 Topicality and transitivity in Pre-Bantu -- 3.4 Late Pre-Bantu evolution of multiple OMs -- 3.5 Reversal of multiple OM order in post-Bantu evolution -- 3.6 Early East Coast Bantu multiple OM order and inherent topicality -- 3.7 Northern East Coast Bantu transicality -- 3.8 Northern East Coast split transicality of inanimate EOs -- 4 Implications of Swahili for a thematic role hierarchy -- 5 A recent innovation in the Swahili OM -- 6 Concluding remarks -- NOTES -- REFERENCES -- Jewish historical linguistics: 1981-1991-2001 -- 1 The face of Jewish linguistics in 1981 -- 2 The face of Jewish linguistics in 1991 -- 3 The face of Jewish linguistics in 2001 -- NOTES -- REFERENCES -- Gerunds and their objects in the Modern English period -- 1 Introduction -- 2 The gerund in the Modern English period: empirical data -- 3 A possible explanation for the change -- 4 The syntactic structure of the gerund -- 5 Two grammatical motivations for the polarization of gerunds -- 6 Conclusions -- NOTES -- REFERENCES -- Index of names -- Index of languages -- Index of subject matter.