Motives for Language Change (R. Hickey), Sociolinguistics the most important
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Motives for Language Change
This specially commissioned volume considers the processes involved in lan-
guage change and the issues of how they can be modelled and studied. The
way languages change offers an insight into the nature of language itself,
its internal organisation, and how it is acquired and used. Accordingly, the
phenomenon of language change has been approached from a variety of per-
spectives by linguists of many different orientations. This book brings together
an international team of leading figures from different areas of linguistics to
re-examine some of the central issues in this field and also to discuss new
proposals. The volume is arranged in six parts, focusing on the phenomenon
of language change, linguistic models, grammaticalisation, the social context,
contact-based explanations and the typological perspective. It seeks to cover
the subject as a whole, bearing in mind its relevance for the general analysis
of language, and will appeal to a broad international readership.
RAYMOND HICKEY is Professor of Linguistics at the Department of English,
Essen University, Germany. His main research interests are computer corpus
processing, extraterritorial varieties of English (especially Irish English) and
general questions of language change. In the first area he has published ex-
tensively and in the latter his most recent publications are
A source book for
Irish English
(2002), and
Collecting views on language change
(special issue
of
Language Sciences
, 2002).
Motives for Language Change
Edited by
Raymond Hickey
Essen University, Germany
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