HISTORICAL LINGUISTICS 1995 -- Editorial page -- Title page -- Copyright page -- Table of contents -- Introduction -- A corpus study of would + have + past-participle -- 1. Introduction -- 2. Background -- 3. Adverb placement corpus data -- 4. Interpretation -- 5. Summary -- TEXTS USED -- REFERENCES -- From modal auxiliary to lexical verb The curious case of Pennsylvania German wotte -- 1. Introduction -- 2. Pennsylvania German modals - verbs in transit -- 3. A split in the modals - preterite subjunctives take the fast lane -- 4. From modal to lexical verb - wotte does a U-turn -- 5. Conclusion -- REFERENCES -- A subject-verb agreement hierarchy Evidence from analogical change in modern English dialects -- 1. Introduction -- 2. The distribution of analogical -s in modern English dialects -- 3. A subject-verb agreement hierarchy -- 4. Conclusion -- REFERENCES -- Language change as reranking of constraints -- 1. Introduction -- 2. Theoretical assumptions -- 3. r ~ Ø alternation in English -- 4. n ~ Ø alternation in Korean -- 5. Conclusion -- REFERENCES -- Loss of prototypical meanings in the history of English semantics or semantic redeployment -- 1. Introduction -- 2. Loss of prototypical meanings: some data -- 3. Loss of prototypical meanings: type of change and functional motivation -- REFERENCES -- How a man changed a parameter value The loss of SOV in Estonian subclauses -- 1. Introduction -- 2. Theoretical background -- 3. The loss of SOV in Old English -- 4. The word order patterns in Estonian -- 5. The dynamics of word order patterns from 1905-1940 -- 6. Conclusion -- REFERENCES -- Some constraints on the borrowability of syntactic features (and why none of them work) -- 1. Introduction -- 2. Internal constraints -- 3. Extralinguistic constraints -- 4. Conclusion -- REFERENCES -- On the (non)loss of polarity sensitivityDutch ooit.

1. Introduction: polarity sensitivity and historical linguistics -- 2. The story of ooit -- 3. Conclusion -- REFERENCES -- The development of secondary stress in Old English -- 1. Introduction -- 2. Earlier views -- 3. Stress in Old English -- 4. Historical background -- 5. The development of non-cyclic secondary stress -- 6. Conclusions -- REFERENCES -- Morphological restructuring The case of Old English and Middle English verbs -- 1. Introduction -- 2. Principles of morphological classification -- 3. The Germanic situation -- 4. Old English -- 5. Middle English -- REFERENCES -- Backdating the English Constraint Grammar Parser for the analysis of English historical texts -- 1. Background to the study -- 2. Textual coverage -- 3. Enhancing the tagger -- 4. Evaluating the results -- 5. Final remarks -- REFERENCES -- Vowel variation in Proto-Germanie ai in 16th and 17th-century Holland -- 1. Introduction -- 2. Proto-Germanie ai and 20th-century dialectal variety -- 3. Dialectal variety in the 13th century -- 4. Dialectal variety around 1600 -- 5. Conclusion -- REFERENCES -- Language prescriptionA success in failure's clothing? -- 1. Introduction -- 2. What is prescription/prescriptivism? -- 3. The standardisation/standard languages link -- 4. The prescriptive/normative muddle -- 5. Conclusion -- REFERENCES -- Reconstructing the social dimension of diachronic language change -- 1. Sociolinguistics and language history -- 2. Social conditioning in history: three variables -- 3. Concluding remarks -- REFERENCES -- Grammaticalization versus reanalysisThe case ofpossessiveconstructions in Germanic -- 1. Introduction -- 2. Grammaticalization and reanalysis -- 3. Possessive constructions in the Germanic languages -- REFERENCES -- Word frequency and lexical diffusion in English stress shifts -- 1. Introduction -- 2. Methodology -- 3. Results -- 4. Discussion.

5. Conclusion -- DICTIONARIES -- REFERENCES -- Post-verbal complements in Old English -- 1. Introduction -- 2. Background assumptions and terminology -- 3. Verb-complement order in the history of English: the standard analysis -- 4. Evidence for synchronic variation in Old English -- 5. The distribution of NP complements -- 6. Conclusions and implications -- APPENDIXA -- REFERENCES -- Semantic stability in derivationally related words -- 1. Introduction -- 2. Semantic stability as a window on the acquisition of word meaning -- 3. Evidence for defining base candidates on phonological grounds -- 4. Empirical evidence for base recognition -- 5. Other types of relations -- 6. Conditions on partial transparency in derivational relations -- 7. The role of inflectional "allomorphy" in the base recognition of derivationally related words -- 8. Conclusion -- REFERENCES -- Language change in progressMorphological erosion in present-day "South African Dutch" and 18th century "Cape Dutch" -- 1. Introduction -- 2. The state of Dutch in South Africa -- 3. Morphological interference -- 4. Conclusion -- REFERENCES -- Phonological simplification vs. stylistic differentiation in the history of German word stress -- 1. Introduction -- 2. Loan-words in the German lexicon: a brief diachronic account -- 3. Stress rules for non-native words in German -- 4. Extension of the non-native stress rules to native words -- 5. Arguments in favour of two distinct (sets of) rules -- 6. Conclusions -- REFERENCES -- What is metonymy? -- 1. Introduction -- 2. Alternative definitions -- 3.Metonymic links -- 4. What is a good definition of metonymy? -- REFERENCES -- On the development of marked negation systemsThe Dutch situation in the seventeenth century -- 1. Introduction -- 2. Jespersen's cycle and Dutch -- 3. Developing Standard Dutch.

4. The rise, decline and fall of en in Vondel's tragedies -- 5. Towards an explanation of the distribution of en in Vondel's tragedies -- REFERENCES -- On the development of incorporating structuresin German -- 1. Verbs with incorporating structure in Modern German -- 2. Sources of verbs with incorporating structure: diachronic classes -- 3. Morphological classification of verbs with incorporating structure in New High German: synchronic classes -- 4. Synchronic and diachronic classes -- 5. Class changes -- 6. Conclusions -- REFERENCES -- Indexof subjects -- Index of names.