According to the neogrammarians and de Saussure, all linguistic change is either sound change, analogy, or borrowing.1 Meillet (1912) identified a class of changes that don’t fit into any of these three categories. Like analogical changes, they are endogenous innovations directly affecting morphology and syntax, but unlike analogical changes, they are not based on any pre-existing patterns in the language. Meillet proposed that they represent a fourth type of change, which he called GRAMMATICALIZATION. Its essential property for him was (...) that it gives rise to new grammatical categories — that is, to categories previously unexpressed in the language — and thereby transforms its overall system. (shrink)

The transition from the linguistics of codes, associated with structuralism and its neogrammarian ancestry, to a linguistics of discourses capable of seriously contemporary concerns has been a protracted transition. The average linguist has tended to find this transition somewhat confusing.

In the last few years a lively discussion on information packaging has arisen, where traditional dichotomies Theme/Rheme, Topic/Comment and Focus/Background have been taken up again and partly reinterpreted. The discussion is mainly being held in syntax, but also in the fields of semantics and pragmatics. Some remarkable progress has been made especially in Focus phonology. Even if the role of information conveying and information packaging in the Indoeuropean languages was hinted at as early as in the classical studies of the (...) Neogrammarians, this field has remained neglected in today's historical linguistics. This volume tries to partly cover this lack with a sample of papers which offer a various range of new empirical data analyzed from the point of view of information structure. The novelty of the papers consists in the modern theoretical perspective from which the data are analyzed and in the various phenomena considered, which range from the rise of clitic elements to word order change and verb movement. (shrink)

Continuing Pfeiffer 1972, Pfeiffer 2018 examines inherited Dravidian etyma of Kurux, one of the most northerly Dravidian languages. After an overview of the book, we discuss problems involved in Pfeiffer’s arguments, methods, and materials. Then we try to narrow down the conditions of some of the sound changes Pfeiffer proposes, in conformity with the Neogrammarian hypothesis of regularity. We also point out that closer study of word-final phonology would answer some of the pending questions of Kurux-Malto morphology. Finally, we argue (...) that phonological and morphological reconstruction can unveil more features to help revise the subgrouping of Kurux-Malto in the Dravidian family. (shrink)