Preface
SECTION 1
Survey
1 Language change as a matter of fact
Attitudes to language change
Language state and process
The aims and scope of historical linguistics
2 Reconstructing the past: data and evidence
The data of historical linguistics
The written evidence
Sources of evidence
Comparing and reconstructing languages
Correspondences between languages
Laws of change
Internal reconstruction
3 Vocabulary change
Coining new words
Changes of meaning
Why do word meanings change?
4 Grammatical change
Morphological change
Syntactic change
5 Sound change
How sounds are produced
Phonetic change
Phonemic change
6 Language contact
Borrowing from other languages
Convergence and linguistic areas
Language birth: pidgins and creoles
Language death
7 How and why do languages change?
Functional explanations
Psycholinguistic explanations: language acquisition
Sociolinguistic explanations
The origin and spread of changes
8 Postscript: further developments
Socio-historical linguistics and historical pragmatics
Evolutionary linguistics
Standardization and language planning
Conclusion
SECTION 2
Readings
SECTION 3
References
SECTION 4
Glossary
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