The collected articles in this volume address an array of cutting-edge issues in the field of historical linguistics, including new theoretical approaches and innovative methodologies for studying language through a diachronic lens. The articles focus on the following themes: I. Case & Argument Structure, II. Alignment & Diathesis, III. Patterns, Paradigms, & Restructuring, IV. Grammaticalization & Construction Grammar, V. Corpus Linguistics & Morphosyntax, VI. Languages in Contact. Papers reflect a wide range of perspectives, and focus on issues and data from an array of languages and language families, from new analyses of case and argument structure in Ancient Greek to phonological evidence for language contact in Vietnamese, from patterns of convergence in Neo-Aramaic to the development of the ergative in Basque. The volume contributes substantially to the debate surrounding core issues of language change: the role of the individual speaker, the nature of paths of grammaticalization, the role of contact, the interface of diachrony and synchrony, and many other issues. It should be useful to any reader hoping to gain insight into the nature of language change.

This concise history of structural linguistics charts its development from the 1870s to the present day. It explains what structuralism was and why its ideas are still central today. For structuralists a language is a self-contained and tightly organised system whose history is of changes from one state of the system to another. This idea has its origin in the nineteenth century and was developed in the twentieth by Saussure and his followers, including the school of Bloomfield in the United States. Through the work of Chomsky, especially, it is still very influential. Matthews examines the beginnings of structuralism and analyses the vital role played in it by the study of sound systems and the problems of how systems change. He discusses theories of the overall structure of a language, the 'Chomskyan revolution' in the 1950s, and the structuralist theories of meaning.

This volume represents the wide range of interests that comprise applied linguistics today. Contains new approaches to such current topics as discourse analysis, code-switching, second-language acquisition, and functional/notational syllabi for language teaching.

In the last decade, computational linguistics has produced a revival of the interest in the mathematical study of the various levels of human language. This volume contains a selection of recent research papers approaching mathematical and computational topics in natural languages, with a special attention being paid to syntax and semantics. According with their main focus, the papers are distributed into four parts: Syntax, Semantics, Natural language processing and Varia, which cover a vast range of problems. The book may be of interest to all those who intend to know which kind of mathematics is used when giving account of natural language, as well as to people working on computational issues involving human-machine interaction.

The 31st BAAL Annual Meeting, held in September 1997 at the University of Birmingham, had as its theme Language at Work. The papers in this collection, although they relate to a wide variety of different contexts, all deal with people using language as part of their working life, and they are all concerned with how language functions to construct participant relationships and institutions. In short, these papers demonstrate how people at work make language for them.