In The Genitive Case in Dutch and German: A Study of Morphosyntactic Change in Codified Languages, Alan K. Scott offers an account of the tension that exists between morphosyntactic change and codification, focusing on the effect that codification has had on the genitive case and alternative constructions in both languages. On the basis of usage data from a wide variety of registers, from the 16th century to the present day, Alan K. Scott demonstrates that codification has preserved obsolescent morphological genitive constructions in Dutch and German while suppressing their potential...

Meaning change in grammaticalization has been variously described in terms of decreasing semantic weight and increasing generality, abstraction, (inter)subjectivity or discourse orientation. The author shows that all these trends are subsumed by the notion of scope increase along a precise hierarchy of semantic and pragmatic layers of grammatical organization such as endorsed by Functional Discourse Grammar. The scope-increase hypothesis is immune from the exceptions and veritable counterexamples to all the aforementioned generalizations and has the decisive advantage of being more...

In this volume, long-standing assumptions about the formal changes involved in grammaticalization are evaluated in the light of the striking diversity of human languages. To this end, the traditional notions of morphological coalescence, syntactic fixation and phonological erosion are reassessed with regard to their relationship with the diachronic changes affecting the function of the construction and with larger-scale typological changes that affect the language as a whole (especially, shifts in morphological type and word-order patterns). The author reaches the conclusion that...

The Cangin languages of Senegal remained hidden from linguists for years, and have only recently been seriously documented. This book traces the history of the Cangin languages, and presents a reconstruction of Proto-Cangin through careful application of historical linguistic methods. This is one of few in-depth historical treatments of a West African language family, and takes into account all existing sources, including previously unpublished data from my own work on Noon. The reconstruction of Proto-Cangin reveals a number of important features now obscured in the modern languages,...