Book contents
- Millennia of Language Change
- Millennia of Language Change
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Prologue: the Long View
- 1 Prehistoric Sociolinguistics and the Uniformitarian Hypothesis: What Were Stone-Age Languages Like?
- 2 From Ancient Greek to Comanche: on Many Millennia of Complexification
- 3 First-Millennium England: a Tale of Two Copulas
- 4 The First Three Thousand Years: Contact in Prehistoric and Early Historic English
- 5 Verner’s Law, Germanic Dialects and the English Dialect ‘Default Singulars’
- 6 Deep into the Pacific: the Austronesian Migrations and the Linguistic Consequences of Isolation
- 7 The Hellenistic Koiné 320 bc to 550 ad and Its Medieval and Early Modern Congeners
- 8 Indo-European Feminines: Contact, Diffusion and Gender Loss around the North Sea
- Sources
- References
- Index
2 - From Ancient Greek to Comanche: on Many Millennia of Complexification
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 March 2020
Book contents
- Millennia of Language Change
- Millennia of Language Change
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Prologue: the Long View
- 1 Prehistoric Sociolinguistics and the Uniformitarian Hypothesis: What Were Stone-Age Languages Like?
- 2 From Ancient Greek to Comanche: on Many Millennia of Complexification
- 3 First-Millennium England: a Tale of Two Copulas
- 4 The First Three Thousand Years: Contact in Prehistoric and Early Historic English
- 5 Verner’s Law, Germanic Dialects and the English Dialect ‘Default Singulars’
- 6 Deep into the Pacific: the Austronesian Migrations and the Linguistic Consequences of Isolation
- 7 The Hellenistic Koiné 320 bc to 550 ad and Its Medieval and Early Modern Congeners
- 8 Indo-European Feminines: Contact, Diffusion and Gender Loss around the North Sea
- Sources
- References
- Index
Summary
Nettle (1999: 138) has written that ‘no relationships of grammatical typology to structure or social organisation have been convincingly demonstrated’, but that ‘it seems quite plausible that some such relationship could exist’, although ‘the question has received little rigorous scholarly attention’. It is precisely this question which sociolinguistic typology is intended to devote scholarly attention to. The term sociolinguistic typology, as noted in the Prologue and in Chapter 1, refers to research which attempts to apply sociolinguistic data and insights to the study of the typology of the world’s languages.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Millennia of Language ChangeSociolinguistic Studies in Deep Historical Linguistics, pp. 17 - 36Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2020