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This bulky chapter is devoted to the examination of Late Medieval Greek (11th–15th c. AD), the first period after late antiquity which provides us with material in a “vernacular” variety of Greek. The investigation, based on both literary and non‐literary sources, gives new insights into a great variety of issues, such as the semantic development of the μέλλω AVC—illustrated here for the first time. The much discussed and debated “θέ νά” construction is investigated at length, and a new account of its development is proposed, partly based on language contact between Greek‐ and Romance‐speaking populations, a largely unexplored issue.

The division of labor between storage and computation in language behavior can be studied empirically in a number of ways, such as psycholinguistic experimentation and language change. Paul Kiparsky investigated phonological change as evidence for the structure of grammar. This chapter examines the extent to which phonological change provides evidence for the kinds of phonological information about lexical items stored in lexical memory. Focusing on what can be learned from phonological change about lexical storage and memory is consistent with Kiparsky's argument that linguistic change does not offer insights into the structure of the grammar. The chapter also discusses the phonemicization of allophonic properties, phonologization and lexicalization, vowel lengthening in Dutch, and lexical diffusion.

This chapter showcases the From Inglis to Scots (FITS) Project database, which comprises texts from the Linguistic Atlas of Older Scots (LAOS), of the period 1380-1500. This new resource for historical dialectology makes it possible to test earlier assumptions about phonological changes that are characteristic of Scots and not shared with Southern English. This chapter uses LAOS to test the claim that L-vocalisation, which entails the loss of coda-/l/ following short back vowels with concomitant vocalic lengthening or diphthongisation (as in OE full > OSc fow), was completed by the beginning of the sixteenth century. Based on attestations of <l>-less forms and reverse spellings, including /l/~ø alternations in borrowed items from (Norman) French (as in realme~reaume ‘realm’), the chapter maps the spread of <l> loss in different phonological contexts over time and space, and presents evidence of <l> loss in less than 1% of relevant environments. The final position of <l> is an important locus, but there is no evidence of a spread.

The Great Vowel Shift refers to a series of phonological changes affecting the long vowel system of Middle English and Early Modern English. There is considerable dispute about how long the GVS took to reach its conclusion, about what caused the shift in the first place and whether it was a unitary development. The argument here is that traditional a periodisation of English giving us Chaucer on one side of the line and Shakespeare on the other. In the face of substantial evidence of smaller shifts beginning in the twelfth century and current shifts effecting the short vowel system, the canonical interpretation of the GVS is thus suspiciously ideological and has all the trappings of a language myth, the myth of greatness. The overall argument is thus that deconstructing the general agenda lying at the base of the term GVS reveals the myths that drive that ideology.

The Ngajan (N) dialect of Dyirbal has gained one contrast in its phonology and lost another. This chapter describes the series of changes through which N developed a distinction between short and long vowels, and those through which it neutralised the opposition between two rhotic phonemes. It is interesting to compare N with the adjoining Waribarra Mamu (Wari, or W) dialect which has also innovated long vowels—although not so many as N—but has retained the rhotic contrast. It is suggested that the continuant rhotic naturally engendered length on a preceding vowel and that this length then became the contrastive feature, with the continuant and trill rhotics falling together as a single phoneme. Vowel length then spread both (i) within Ngajan, through the replacement of syllable-final l and y by length on the preceding vowel; and (ii) by diffusion of some of the Ngajan changes into the Wari dialect.

The widespread adoption of the Chomsky-Borer Hypothesis, with its assumption of a crosslinguistically (and thus diachronically stable) syntactic computational system, removes an explanation for syntactic change the once widely-invoked concept of a ‘syntactic parameter’. This chapter explores some of the implications of this conceptual shift for an acquisition-driven model of syntactic change. It then leverages that discussion to explore some central issues surrounding syntactic reconstruction –especially the so-called ‘correspondence problem’, attempting to bring to light some previously underdiscussed aspects of what it means to stand ‘in correspondence.’

One of the major contributions of John Goldsmith’s autosegmental approach to tone was its application to Bantu. A new way was opened up to account for the often opaque relationship between underlying vs. surface H(igh) and L(ow) tonal representations. Goldsmith’s intuition was that H and L tones in Bantu do not behave in an equipollent way as they do in many West African and other tone systems, instead have an accentual character requiring a more syntagmatic and privative, accentual interpretation. In this paper I address Goldsmith’s accent-to-tone approach, which I apply to Lusoga, a Bantu language closely related to Luganda, whose tone system has not been previously well studied. The goal of this paper is thus threefold: I will (i) document the tonal system of Lusoga; (ii) demonstrate that it is both synchronically and diachronically intermediate between Luganda and Lulamogi; and (iii) argue that John Goldsmith’s autosegmental phonology still provides the best tools to the express the basic insights as to what is going on in these close, but different Bantu tone systems.

This chapter outlines the etymologies that have been proposed for the seven simple postpositions of Hindi. The historical attestations of these postpositions form the empirical backbone of this book, so that their etymological reconstruction is essential for assembling the data corpus. Whereas some of the postpositions can be traced as far as Old Indic with certainty (Hindi mẽ ‘in’ and par ‘on’), others do not have an uncontroversial etymological reconstruction, such as Hindi ko (DAT/ACC) or se (INS/ABL). Even though the historical phonology of Indo-Aryan has been researched in detail, high frequency elements such as adpositions do not abide by the general phonological changes, which is a challenge for reconstruction. Therefore, it is pointed out what can be relied on and what is more speculative, which will be referred back to in subsequent chapters.