New Book: Historical Linguistics

[Tony Schiavo]

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
John Benjamins Publishing would like to call your attention to the
following new title in the field of Historical Linguistics:
 
 
TENSE AND ASPECT IN INDO-EUROPEAN LANGUAGES
THEORY, TYPOLOGY AND DIACHRONY
John Hewson & Vit Bubenik
1997  xii, 403 pp.  Current Issues in Linguistic Theory, 145
US/Canada: Cloth: 1 55619 860 4  Price: $89.00
Rest of the world: Cloth: 90 272 3649 6  Price: Hfl. 150,--
John Benjamins Publishing web site: http://www.benjamins.com
For further information via e-mail: service at benjamins.com
 
This monograph presents a general picture of the evolution of IE verbal
systems within a coherent cognitive framework. The work encompasses all the
language families of the IE phylum, from prehistory to present day languages.
Inspired by the ideas of Roman Jakobson and Gustave Guillaume the authors
relate tense and aspect to underlying cognitive processes, and show that
verbal systems have a staged development of time representations
(chronogenesis). They view linguistic change as systemic and trace the
evolution of the earliest tense systems by (a) aspectual split and (b)
aspectual merger from the original aspectual contrasts of PIE, the evidence
for such systemic change showing clearly in the paradigmatic morphology of
the daughter languages.
The nineteen chapters cover first the ancient documentation, then those
families whose historical data are from a more recent date. The last
chapters deal with the systemic evolution of languages that are descended
from ancient forbearers such as Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin, and are
completed by a chapter on the practical and theoretical conclusions of the
work.
 
 
For further information please e-mail
Bernadette Keck: service at benjamins.com