Historical Linguistics, fourth edition

Book excerpt: The new edition of a comprehensive, accessible, and hands-on text in historical linguistics, revised and expanded, with new material and a new layout. This accessible, hands-on textbook not only introduces students to the important topics in historical linguistics but also shows them how to apply the methods described and how to think about the issues. Abundant examples from a broad range of languages and exercises allow students to focus on how to do historical linguistics. The book is distinctive for its integration of the standard topics with others now considered important to the field, including syntactic change, grammaticalization, sociolinguistic contributions to linguistic change, distant genetic relationships, areal linguistics, and linguistic prehistory.