Areal Diffusion And Genetic Inheritance

This book is about the diffusion of languages and how they develop over time. It is a very rich and competent book, and it covers a wide range of topics.

Two languages can resemble each other in the categories, constructions, and types of meaning they use, and in the forms they employ to express these. Such resemblances may be the consequence of universal characteristics of language, of chance or coincidence, of the borrowing by one language of another's words, or of the diffusion of grammatical, phonetic, and phonological characteristics that takes place when languages come into contact. Languages sometimes show likeness because they have borrowed not from each other but from a third language. Languages that come from the same ancestor may have similar grammatical categories and meanings expressed by similar forms: such languages are said to be genetically affiliated. This work considers how and why forms and meanings of different languages at different times may resemble one another. The editors aim to explain and identify the relationship between the diffusion and the genetic development of languages, and to discover the means of distinguishing what may cause one language to share the characteristics of another. Review: extremely rich, competent, and well-edited. Language, ... invaluable volume ... the uniformly high quality of the contributions demonstrates that all contributors know whereof they speak ... The geographical range of the contributions is impressive ... The quality of the production is high. The Journal of The Royal Anthropological Institute ... certainly a book worth acquiring and reading. Journal of Linguistics This book is a pleasure to sample, and will serve as a resource for years to come. The salutary lesson that emerges from every chapter is that diffusion studies are necessarily complementary to genetic studies, and that our methodology for studying various types of contact needs to be extended and refined. Diachronica This book is highly recommended for all those interested in historical linguistics, linguistic typology, language contact and language change ... this book represents a good opportunity to meditate, on the one side, on models of language evolution and, on the other side, on actual phenomena of language change. LINGUIST List