One of the principal challenges of historical linguistics is to explain the "causes" of language change. Any such explanation, however, must also address the ac

For more than three decades, the International Conference on Historical Linguistics (ICHL) has been characterized by diversity, both in terms of the theoretical

In recent linguistic theory, there has been an explosion of detailed studies of language variation. This volume applies such recent analyses to the study of chi

First Published in 1994. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

The functional notion of “topic” or “topicality” has suffered, traditionally, from two distinct drawbacks. First, it has remained largely ill defined or