Areal Diffusion and Genetic Inheritance: Problems in Comparative Linguistics

This book considers how and why forms and meanings of different languages at different times may resemble one another. Its editors and authors aim to explain and identify the relationship between areal diffusion and the genetic development of languages, and to discover the means of distinguishing what may cause one language to share the characteristics of another.

This book considers how and why forms and meanings of different languages at different times may resemble one another. Its editors and authors aim to explain and identify the relationship between areal diffusion and the genetic development of languages, and to discover the means of distinguishing what may cause one language to share the characteristics of another. The introduction outlines the issues that underlie these aims, introduces the chapters which follow, and comments on recurrent conclusions by the contributors. The book includes an archaeologist's view on what material evidence offers to explain cultural and linguistic change, and a general discussion of which kinds of linguistic feature can and cannot be borrowed. The chapters are accessibly-written and illustrated by twenty maps. The book will interest all students of the causes and consequences of language change and evolution.

Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald is Associate Director of the Research Centre for Linguistic Typology, La Trobe University. She worked in the North Africa and Middle East section of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow, and was then Professor of Linguistics at the Universidade Federal de Santa Caterina in Brazil before coming to Australia in 1994. She has worked on descriptive and historical aspects of Berber languages and has published, in Russian, grammars of Modern and Biblical Hebrew. She is a major authority on languages of the Arawak family from northern Amazonia, and has written grammars of Bare, Warekena, and Tariana, in addition to essays on various typological and areal features of South American languages. Professor R. M. W. Dixon is Director of the Research Centre for Linguistic Typology, La Trobe University. He has written grammars of a number of Australian languages (including Dyirbal and Yidiny), published one survey volume ('The Languages of Australia', 1980), and is currently working on a comprehensive areal study of all 247 languages of the continent. For the past nine years he has been working in the southern Amazonian jungle of Brazil, writing a grammar of Jarawara, and pursuing a comparative study of the Arawa language family.