Editors’ introduction

Chapters in this book

1. Prelim pages i
2. Table of contents v
3. Foreword and Acknowledgements vii
4. Editors’ introduction 1
5. Part I. Grammaticalization
6. The role of historical research in building a model of Sign Language typology, variation, and change 15
7. On the origin of Niger-Congo nominal classification 43
8. A closer look at subjectification in the grammaticalization of English modals 67
9. Subjectivity encoding in Taiwanese Southern Min 83
10. Part II. Problems in historical comparison and reconstruction
11. Emergence of the tone system in the Sanjiazi dialect of Manchu 101
12. Searching for undetected genetic links between the languages of South America 115
13. Reconstructing the category of “associated motion” in Tacanan languages (Amazonian Bolivia and Peru) 129
14. The mirage of apparent morphological correspondence 153
15. Part III. Historical development of morphosyntactic features
16. Analogy as a source of suppletion 175
17. The rise and demise of possessive classifiers in Austronesian 199
18. Immediate-future readings of universal quantifier constructions 227
19. The historical development and functional characteristics of the go-adjective sequence in English 243
20. Recycling “junk” 267
21. Sapirian ‘drift’ towards analyticity and long-term morphosyntactic change in Ancient Egyptian 289
22. Language index 329
23. Index of terms 333