TRENDS IN LINGUISTICS is a series of books that open new perspectives in our understanding of language. The series publishes state-of-the-art work on core areas of linguistics across theoretical frameworks as well as studies that provide new insights by building bridges to neighbouring fields such as neuroscience and cognitive science. TRENDS IN LINGUISTICS considers itself a forum for cutting-edge research based on solid empirical data on language in its various manifestations, including sign languages. It regards linguistic variation in its synchronic and diachronic dimensions as well as in its social contexts as important sources of insight for a better understanding of the design of linguistic systems and the ecology and evolution of language. TRENDS IN LINGUISTICS publishes monographs and outstanding dissertations as well as edited volumes, which provide the opportunity to address controversial topics from different empirical and theoretical viewpoints. High quality standards are ensured through anonymous reviewing.

TRENDS IN LINGUISTICS is a series of books that open new perspectives in our understanding of language. The series publishes state-of-the-art work on core areas of linguistics across theoretical frameworks, as well as studies that provide new insights by approaching language from an interdisciplinary perspective. TRENDS IN LINGUISTICS considers itself a forum for cutting-edge research based on solid empirical data on language in its various manifestations, including sign languages. It regards linguistic variation in its synchronic and diachronic dimensions as well as in its social contexts as important sources of insight for a better understanding of the design of linguistic systems and the ecology and evolution of language. TRENDS IN LINGUISTICS publishes monographs and outstanding dissertations as well as edited volumes, which provide the opportunity to address controversial topics from different empirical and theoretical viewpoints. High quality standards are ensured through anonymous reviewing. To discuss your book idea or submit a proposal, please contact Birgit Sievert.

This volume focuses on the interface of different motivating factors that contribute to language change. It combines linguistic case studies with current theoretical debate and contains hitherto unpublished data from English, French, Karaim, Modern Greek, Jordanian, Spanish, Latin and Arabic.

This volume collects ten studies that propose modern methodologies of analyzing and explaining language change in the case of various morpho-phonological and morpho-syntactic characteristics. The studies were first presented in the fourth, fifth and sixth workshops at the “Language Variation and Change in Ancient and Medieval Europe” summer schools, organized on the island of Naxos, Cyclades, Greece and online between 2019 and 2021. The book is divided into two parts that both focus on modern tools and methodologies of analyzing and accounting for language change. The first part focuses on common directions of change in Indo-European languages and beyond, and the second part emphasizes explanations that reveal the role of language contact. The volume promotes a dialogue between approaches to language change having their starting point in structural and typological aspects of the history of languages on the one hand, and approaches concentrating on external factors on the other. Through this dialogue, the volume enriches knowledge on the contrast or complementarity of internally- and externally-motivated causes of language change.

The languages of the world make use of a variety of techniques for describing events and putting sentences together. This volume takes a typological approach to clause chaining, a fascinating feature of the grammar of hundreds of languages outside Europe, especially in the Asia-Pacific region, East Africa, across Central Asia, and the Americas. Clause chains consist of several dependent clauses and one main clause, and are used to organize discourse and to foreground or background events and participants; they often go together with switch-reference marking, an indication of whether upcoming subjects will be co-referential with preceding subjects or not. The introductory chapter features a discussion of the typological properties of clause chaining, with a brief overview of previous approaches to and investigations of clause chains followed by an overview of their recurrent grammatical features; it ends with an appendix featuring notes for fieldworkers. The first part of the book explores general issues in clause chaining, including prosody, acquisition, and language contact and history; later parts then examine clause chaining and related phenomena in a wide range of languages from around the world.

Textual Parameters in Older Languages takes a contemporary approach to the inherent limitations of using older texts as data for linguistic analysis, drawing on methods of text analysis, pragmatics and sociolinguistics to supplement traditional historical and philological methods. The focus of the book is on the importance of controlling for textual parameters-defined by the editors as dimensions of variation associated with texts and their production, including text type, degree of poeticality, orality, and dialect-in the analysis of older language data. Failure to do so can result in invalid generalizations; recognizing the influence of textual parameters, conversely, raises a myriad of issues for the practice and theory of historical linguistics. The 12 essays in this collection apply this approach in analyses of anaphora, non-finite verbal forms, particles, punctuation, word order and other phenomena in a wide range of languages including Ancient Tamil, Sanskrit, Latin, Heian Japanese, Medieval Greek, Old French, Old Russian, Middle English, and Modern Danish. An in-depth introduction by the editors lays out the goals of the textual parameters approach, and considers the methodological and theoretical consequences of the evidence presented in the book as a whole.

Most journal articles, edited volumes and monographs on youth language practices deal with one specific variety, one geographical setting, or with one specific continent. This volume bridges these different studies, and it approaches youth language from a much broader angle. A global framework and a diversity of methodologies enable a wider perspective that gives room to comparisons of youth’s manipulations and linguistic agency, transnational communicative practices and language contact scenarios. The research presented addresses structural features of everyday talk and text, youth identity issues related to specific purposes and contexts, and sociocultural emphases on ideologies and belonging. Combining insights into sociolinguistic and structural features of youth language, the volume includes case studies from Asia (Indonesia), Australia and Oceania (Arnhem Land, New Ireland), South America (the Amazon, Chile, Argentina), Europe (Germany, Spain) and Africa (Uganda, Nigeria, DR Congo, Central African Republic, South Africa). It expands on existing publications and offers a more comparative and "global" approach, without a division of youth’s strategies in terms of geographical space or language family. This collection, including a conceptual introduction, is of interest to scholars from several linguistic subfields working in different regional contexts as well as sociologists and anthropologists working in the field of adolescence and youth studies.