Directions for Historical Linguistics: Reprint of the 1968 Original

This book, a reprint of one of the classics of historical linguistics, contains five papers originally presented at a 1966 symposium at the University of Texas at Austin. The individual contributions cover a broad range of topics, from Ferdinand de Saussure’s influence on historical linguistics to the connection between inflectional paradigms and sound change to language change in contemporary linguistic communities. Each of the contributions has had a sizable effect on the development of linguistics; the final paper, by Uriel Weinreich, Marvin Herzog, and William Labov, for instance, laid the foundation for contemporary historical sociolinguistics. The volume has long been out of print; this new edition will make it accessible to a new generation of linguists.

Winfred P. Lehmann, Ph.D. (1941), The University of Wisconsin-Madison, was Louann and Larry Temple Centennial Professor in the Humanities at the University of Texas at Austin. He is widely recognized for his work in historical linguistics, Indo-European and Germanic linguistics, language pedagogy, and typology. Before passing away in 2007, aged 91, he authored over 50 books and about 250 scholarly articles, many of them highly influential.

Yakov Malkiel, Ph.D. (1938), Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität (now Humboldt-Universität), Berlin, was Professor of Spanish and Linguistics at the University of California at Berkeley. He published in a number of areas of Romance and general linguistics, including word formation, phonology, sound change, and the history of linguistics, particularly on Spanish. He was the founder of the journal Romance Philology, which he edited for thirty-five years. Malkiel passed away in 1998, aged 83.

Hans C. Boas, Ph.D. (2000), The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, is Professor of Germanic Studies and Linguistics at The University of Texas at Austin and the Director of the Linguistics Research Center. His publications include A Constructional Approach to Resultatives (CSLI Publications, 2003) and The Life and Death of Texas German (Duke University Press, 2009).

Marc Pierce, Ph.D. (2002), The University of Michigan, is Associate Professor of Germanic Studies and an Affiliated Faculty Member in French and Italian at the University of Texas at Austin. His research interests include historical linguistics, the history of linguistics, and language contact.

Contributors are: Émile Benveniste, Hans C. Boas, Marvin Herzog, J. Kurylowicz, William Labov, Winfred P. Lehmann, Yakov Malkiel, Marc Pierce, Uriel Weinreich.