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.

In Grammaticalising the Perfect and Explanations of Language Change: Have- and Be-Perfects in the History and Structure of English and Bulgarian, Bozhil Hristov investigates key aspects of the verbal systems of two distantly related Indo-European languages, highlighting similarities as well as crucial differences between them and seeking a unified approach. The book reassesses some long-held notions and functionalist assumptions and shines the spotlight on certain areas that have received less attention, such as the role of ambiguity in actual usage. The detailed analysis of rich, contextualised material from a selection of texts dovetails with large-scale corpus studies, complementing their findings and enhancing our understanding of the phenomena. This monograph thus presents a happy marriage of traditional philological techniques and recent advances in theoretical linguistics and corpus work.

This volume provides an up-to-date discussion of a foundational issue that has recently taken centre stage in linguistic typology and which is relevant to the language sciences more generally: To what extent can cross-linguistic generalizations, i.e. statistical universals of linguistic structure, be explained by the diachronic sources of these structures? Everyone agrees that typological distributions are the result of complex histories, as “languages evolve into the variation states to which synchronic universals pertain” (Hawkins 1988). However, an increasingly popular line of argumentation holds that many, perhaps most, typological regularities are long-term reflections of their diachronic sources, rather than being ‘target-driven’ by overarching functional-adaptive motivations. On this view, recurrent pathways of reanalysis and grammaticalization can lead to uniform synchronic results, obviating the need to postulate global forces like ambiguity avoidance, processing efficiency or iconicity, especially if there is no evidence for such motivations in the genesis of the respective constructions. On the other hand, the recent typological literature is equally ripe with talk of "complex adaptive systems", "attractor states" and "cross-linguistic convergence". One may wonder, therefore, how much room is left for traditional functional-adaptive forces and how exactly they influence the diachronic trajectories that shape universal distributions. The papers in the present volume are intended to provide an accessible introduction to this debate. Covering theoretical, methodological and empirical facets of the issue at hand, they represent current ways of thinking about the role of diachronic sources in explaining grammatical universals, articulated by seasoned and budding linguists alike.

This book is the first of the two-volume collection of papers on formulaic language. The collection is among the first ones in the field. The book draws attention to the ritualized, repetitive side of language, which to some estimates make up over 50% of spoken and written text. While in the linguistic literature, the creative and innovative aspects of language have been amply highlighted, conventionalized, pre-fabricated, “off-the-shelf” expressions have been paid less attention – an imbalance that this book attempts to remedy. The first of the two volumes addresses the very concept of formulaic language and provides studies that explore the grammatical and semantic properties of formulae, their stylistic distribution within languages, and their evolution in the course of language history. Since most of the papers are readily accessible to readers with only basic familiarity with linguistics, besides being a resource in linguistic research, the book may be used in courses on discourse structure, pragmatics, semantics, language acquisition, and syntax, as well as being a resource in linguistic research.

In putting 'morphonology' up for adoption as a chapitre particulier in 1929, Trubetzkoy started a debate regarding the boundary between phonology and morphology that has not ended yet. Essentially a record of a roundtable devoted to that boundary (Montréal, October 1994), Trubetzkoy's Orphan is a full and fascinating picture of some very important contemporary attempts to define it. In addition to papers that focus on it, the volume also contains important papers on the closely related topics of 'morphoprosody' and the 'lexicon', views from 'the floor' and 'the outside', and edited transcripts of the discussions that took place at the Montréal Roundtable. Intended both for practicising and future phonologists and morpho-logists, Trubetzkoy's Orphan is a valuable record of a very important debate regarding one of the most central questions in phonology and morphology.

This volume offers a variety of viewpoints on the functional approach to the study of language. After an exposition of the Prague School functionalism, and Dik's and Halliday's functional approaches, it presents a wider area of text-linguistic, psycholinguistic, sociolinguistic, theoretical, descriptive and applied issues from a functional point of view, testifying of the very wide-spread and in-depth impact of functionalist thought on the present-day linguistic scene.