Principles of Syntactic Reconstruction

This is a collection of state-of-the-art papers in the field of syntactic reconstruction. It treats a range of topics which are representative of current debates in historical syntax. The novelty and merit of the present book is, the editors believe, that, in contrast to most previous work on diachronic syntax, it combines the perspectives of the traditional philological research on syntactic reconstruction with the insights of modern syntactic theory, as it is emphasised in the Foreword by Giuseppe Longobardi. The volume includes articles by well-recognized researchers in historical linguistics with a focus on syntactic change. In the present volume syntactic reconstruction is discussed from a variety of angles, including historical linguistics, phenomena of language contact, generative approaches as well as typological and variationist research. In the articles, languages from a diverse range of families are discussed, including Indo-European, North and South Caucasian, Sino-Tibetan, and Turkic.

Chiaro Gianollo, University of Konstanz, on Linguist List, Vol. 20.4367 (2009):
Ferraresi and Goldbach have brought together scholars approaching syntactic reconstruction from different theoretical perspectives, and drawing data from various language families. The resulting collection mirrors the challenges and uncertainties in the ongoing debate. The volume, with such heterogeneity, marks a milestone and will be of interest to historical linguists and those interested in models of linguistic variation.