ABSTRACT

In order to understand where languages have come from and where they might be heading, historical linguistics has to draw on many aspects of the study of living languages. e discipline embraces a range of dierent subelds within linguistics, including those core areas that handle the structural features of language (e.g. phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax), those that deal with different aspects of language and communication (e.g. pragmatics and discourse), language and society (sociolinguistics) and the mental make-up of human beings (cognitive linguistics and psycholinguistics). More recently, it has accommodated new topics to do with language endangerment, language change and new media, corpora and computational applications. It’s not surprising, then, that research in historical linguistics now encompasses a wide range of very dierent theoretical frameworks.