Language change for the worse. Dieser Artikel ist nicht verfügbar.Language change for the worse

Many theories hold that language change, at least on a local level, is driven by a need for improvement. The present volume explores to what extent this assumption holds true, and whether there is a particular type of language change that we dub language change for the worse, i.e., change with a worsening effect that cannot be explained away as a side-effect of improvement in some other area of the linguistic system. The chapters of the volume, written by leading junior and senior scholars, combine expertise in diachronic and historical linguistics, typology, and formal modelling. They focus on different aspects of grammar (phonology, morphosyntax, semantics) in a variety of language families (Germanic, Romance, Austronesian, Bantu, Jê-Kaingang, Wu Chinese, Greek, Albanian, Altaic, Indo-Aryan, and languages of the Caucasus). The volume contributes to ongoing theoretical debates and discussions between linguists with different theoretical orientations.

Dankmar W. Enke has been a research associate at LMU Munich. His main research interest lies at the morphology-semantics-pragmatics interface. He is particularly interested in systematic patterns in the diachronic pairing between form and meaning of functional categories such as aspect, negation, and case.

Larry M. Hyman is Distinguished Professor of the Graduate School, Department of Linguistics, University of California, Berkeley. He has worked extensively on phonological theory, tone systems, as well as on the history, typology, and description of the Niger-Congo languages, focusing especially on the Bantu languages. He co-founded the Comparative Bantu On-Line Dictionary (CBOLD).

Johanna Nichols is Professor Emerita of Slavic Languages and Literatures as well as Affiliate Professor Emerita of Linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research focuses on historical typology (e.g., Slavic), distributional typology (e.g., Eurasian languages), and the description of the two Nakh-Daghestanian languages Chechen and Ingush. She is a co-developer of the Autotyp network of typological databases.

Guido Seiler is a professor of Germanic Linguistics at the University of Zurich. He has worked on variation and change in phonological and morphsyntactic structure of Germanic varieties, with a focus on aspects language contact. Much of his recent work is centered around varieties spoken by Amish and Mennonite minorities in North America.

Thilo Weber is a researcher at the Leibniz Institute for the German Language in Mannheim. His research interests include the grammar of German and its varieties, language variation and change and corpus linguistics.