The studies in this volume are revised versions of a selection from the papers presented at the Fourth International Conference on Historical Linguistics, held at Stanford University on 26 30 March 1979. Papers at this conference, and in this volume, treat aspects of all current topics in historical linguistics, including topics that are only recently considered relevant, such as acquisition, structure, and language use.

This volume presents a selection of papers from the 6th International Conference on Historical Linguistics (ICHL), which was held in 1983, in Pozna?, Poland.

This volume presents a selection of the best papers from the Fifth International Conference on Historical Linguistics (ICHL), which was held in Galway, April 6–10 1981. These papers provide an overview of work in the field of historical linguistics, covering a wide variety of topics and languages.

These papers, deriving from the 7th International Conference on Historical Linguistics (ICHL) in Pavia in 1984, provide an overview of the current status of research in this field. They clearly show that new issues are emerging in the theory of linguistic change which tend to incorporate non-autonomous principles like naturalness in phonetic processes, the influence of socio-cultural settings and discourse pragmatics.

For more than three decades, the International Conference on Historical Linguistics (ICHL) has been characterized by diversity, both in terms of the theoretical frameworks used by its researchers and the wide variety of languages that are analyzed. ICHL 18, which took place at the Université du Québec à Montréal in August 2007, was no exception to the continuation of this tradition. The articles in the present volume encompass many different approaches and a wide range of theories, including grammaticalization, generative approaches to linguistic change and variation, reanalysis, the use of analogy, and the interplay between internal and external factors. The volume is divided into four sections, dealing with phonology, with syntax, morphology, and semantics, with external factors in linguistic change, and with tools and methodologies. This way, this volume aims to be a reflection of the diverse trends in current historical linguistic study.