Morphology and Language History

This volume aims to make a contribution to codifying the methods and practices linguists use to recover language history, focussing predominantly on historical morphology. The volume includes studies on a wide range of languages: not only Indo-European, but also Austronesian, Sinitic, Mon-Khmer, Basque, one Papuan language family, as well as a number of Australian families. Few collections are as cross-linguistic as this, reflecting the new challenges which have emerged from the study of languages outside those best known from historical linguistics. The contributors illustrate shared methodological and theoretical issues concerning genetic relatedness (that is, the use of morphological evidence for classification and subgrouping), reconstruction and processes of change with a diverse range of data. The volume is in honour of Harold Koch, who has long combined innovative research on understudied languages with methodological rigour and codification of practices within the discipline.

Nick Evans, Professor of Linguistics, Australian National University:
Comparative studies of Australian languages have recurrently suffered either from a lack of methodological rigour, or from the belief that the comparative method simply does not apply on this continent. Over three decades Harold Koch's patient and painstaking work, by bringing an Indo-Europeanist training to bear on what appear to be intractable problems, is a welcome corrective to these trends. The papers in this volume pay a suitable tribute to his work, ranging over a number of philological problems in Australian languages with a leavening of other reconstructive work on Hittite, Papuan, Mon-Khmer, Basque and Sino-Tibetan. There is a particular emphasis on morphological reconstruction, which is at the same time a still-underdeveloped aspect of the comparative method and the likely key to many problems in comparative Australian linguistics.