Elly van Gelderen, “The Linguistic Cycle: Language Change and the Language Faculty” (Oxford UP, 2011)

In Conversation: An OUP Podcast · Mar 1, 2013 · 52m

In language, as in life, history is constantly repeating itself. In her book The Linguistic Cycle: Language Change and the Language Faculty (Oxford University Press, 2011), Elly van Gelderen tackles the question of such ‘cyclical’ changes. The book is a catalogue of examples of linguistic history repeating itself, with over a thousand example sentences drawn from nearly 300 different language varieties, and ranging over negation, tense, case, object agreement and beyond. Beyond this descriptive role, however, the book is also an attempt to understand the processes that we see within a…