Conference selection

ICHL 2022

Oxford, UK, 1-5 August 2022

John Benjamins will be present at ICHL.
Check out our promotional material and discount order form through
the links below. Or come and browse our books at the exhibit. If you
wish to talk about our books, your work, and possible publishing
projects please get in touch with anke.delooper at benjamins.nl

Check out our selection of top titles for this conference!


Showing all 48 titles.

TSL 129
Cover not available

Austronesian Undressed

How and why languages become isolating

Edited by David Gil and Antoinette Schapper

Many Austronesian languages exhibit isolating word structure. This volume offers a series of investigations into these languages, which are found in an "isolating crescent" extending from Mainland Southeast Asia through the Indonesian archipelago and into western New Guinea. Some of the languages examined in this... full description
October 2020. ix, 510 pp.
VEAW G64
Cover not available

Bermudian English

A sociohistorical and linguistic profile

Nicole Eberle

Bermudian English. A sociohistorical and linguistic profile focuses on a hitherto severely under-researched variety of English. The book traces the origins and development of Bermudian English, so as to situate the variety within the canon of other lesser-known varieties of English, and provides a first in-depth... full description
May 2021. xv, 231 pp.
SCLD 15
Cover not available

Cantonese GIVE and Double-Object Construction

Grammaticalization and word order change

Andy Chi-on Chin

GIVE is a versatile morpheme in many languages. While there have been extensive studies on the interplay between the syntax and semantics of GIVE in many languages, not much has been done in a similar manner on Cantonese, a member of the Yue dialect group of the Chinese language family. This monograph reports on the... full description
June 2022. xiv, 266 pp.
IVITRA 25
Cover not available

Changes in Meaning and Function

Studies in historical linguistics with a focus on Spanish

Edited by Jorge Fernández Jaén and Herminia Provencio Garrigós

Diachronic linguistics has been experiencing a strong revival during the last few decades, since an increasing number of researchers have assumed that evolutionary and historical factors must be considered to properly understand how natural languages work. This book offers new data and insights on some of the research... full description
April 2020. xii, 332 pp.
Z 172
Cover not available

Comparative Indo-European Linguistics

An introduction

Robert S.P. Beekes

This book gives a comprehensive introduction to Comparative Indo-European Linguistics. It starts with a presentation of the languages of the family (from English and the other Germanic languages, the Celtic and Slavic languages, Latin, Greek and Sanskrit through Armenian and Albanian) and a discussion of the culture... full description
October 2011. xxiv, 415 pp.
SCL 96
Cover not available

Corpora and the Changing Society

Studies in the evolution of English

Edited by Paula Rautionaho, Arja Nurmi and Juhani Klemola

This book showcases eleven studies dealing with corpora and the changing society. The theme of the volume reflects the fact that changes in society lead to changes in language and vice versa. Focusing on the English language, be it from Old English to the present, or a shorter time span in the immediate past, the... full description
April 2020. xii, 305 pp.
P&bns 330
Cover not available

Corpus Pragmatic Studies on the History of Medical Discourse

Edited by Turo Hiltunen and Irma Taavitsainen

The original studies in this volume provide new insights into the history of medical discourse across centuries in both professional and lay texts. The central themes deal with changes in medical writing in various societal and cultural contexts in search for best practices in corpus pragmatics for future work. Some... full description
July 2022. vii, 322 pp.
SiGL 5
Cover not available

Dating the Old Norse Poetic Edda

A multifactorial analysis of linguistic features

Christopher D. Sapp

This book offers new dating of the poems of the Old Norse Poetic Edda , perhaps our best sources about the mythology and legends of the Viking Age. This study compares the anonymous Eddic poems to dated skaldic poems with respect to five phenomena that develop diachronically in early Old Norse: the... full description
June 2022. xii, 246 pp.
BCT 113
Cover not available

Diachronic Treebanks for Historical Linguistics

Edited by Hanne Martine Eckhoff, Silvia Luraghi and Marco Passarotti

Over the last few decades, the widespread diffusion of digital technology has increased availability of primary textual sources, radically changing the everyday life of scholars in the humanities, who are now able to access, query and process a wealth of empirical evidence in ways not possible before.Also for ancient... full description
August 2020. v, 154 pp.
CAL 33
Cover not available

Discourse Structuring Markers in English

A historical constructionalist perspective on pragmatics

Elizabeth Closs Traugott

This book is a contribution to the growing field of diachronic construction grammar. Focus is on corpus evidence for the importance of including conventionalized pragmatics within construction grammar and suggestions for how to do so. The empirical domain is the development of Discourse Structuring Markers in English... full description
March 2022. xviii, 274 pp.
FTL 5
Cover not available

Drawing Attention to Metaphor

Case studies across time periods, cultures and modalities

Edited by Camilla Di Biase-Dyson and Markus Egg

The communicative act of drawing attention to metaphor is a relatively recent topic in metaphor studies and one that has remained contentious from a cognitive perspective. This book brings philologists of ancient languages together with metaphor experts from several modalities to interrogate whether ancient and modern... full description
April 2020. v, 265 pp.
P&bns 317
Cover not available

The Dynamics of Text and Framing Phenomena

Historical approaches to paratext and metadiscourse in English

Edited by Matti Peikola and Birte Bös

This volume explores the complex relations of texts and their contextualising elements, drawing particularly on the notions of paratext, metadiscourse and framing. It aims at developing a more comprehensive historical understanding of these phenomena, covering a wide time span, from Old English to the 20th century, in... full description
November 2020. vii, 313 pp.
VEAW G66
Cover not available

Earlier North American Englishes

Edited by Merja Kytö and Lucia Siebers

Varieties of English in the U.S. and Canada display fascinating developments from colonial times up until the twenty-first century. To throw light on the linguistics of North American Englishes and their socio-historical contexts, this volume brings together research from various traditions, including corpus... full description
July 2022. viii, 261 pp.
SLSI 32
Cover not available

Emergent Syntax for Conversation

Clausal patterns and the organization of action

Edited by Yael Maschler, Simona Pekarek Doehler, Jan Lindström and Leelo Keevallik

This volume explores how emergent patterns of complex syntax – that is, syntactic structures beyond a simple clause – relate to the local contingencies of action formation in social interaction. It examines both the on-line emergence of clause-combining patterns as they are ‘patched together’ on the fly, as well as... full description
February 2020. vi, 343 pp.
CILT 359
Cover not available

English Historical Linguistics

Historical English in contact

Edited by Bettelou Los, Chris Cummins, Lisa Gotthard, Alpo Honkapohja and Benjamin Molineaux

This volume drawn from the 20th International Conference on English Historical Linguistics (ICEHL, Edinburgh 2018) focuses on the role of language contact in the history of English. It showcases a wide variety of historical linguistic approaches, including ‘big data’ analyses of large corpora, dialectological methods,... full description
February 2022. vi, 185 pp.
CILT 358
Cover not available

English Historical Linguistics

Change in structure and meaning

Edited by Bettelou Los, Claire Cowie, Patrick Honeybone and Graeme Trousdale

This volume contains a set of articles based on papers selected from those delivered at the 20th International Conference on English Historical Linguistics (ICEHL, Edinburgh 2018). It focuses on cutting-edge research in the history of English, while reflecting the diversity that exists in the current landscape of... full description
February 2022. viii, 349 pp.
SLCS 223
Cover not available

Extravagant Morphology

Studies in rule-bending, pattern-extending and theory-challenging morphology

Edited by Matthias Eitelmann and Dagmar Haumann

Taking extra-vagans literally (Lat. ‘wandering outside, out of bounds’), this volume comprises nine case studies on extravagant morphology ranging from pattern-extending derivational processes via theory-challenging compounding processes to interface-straddling morphosyntactic phenomena. As a heuristic approach,... full description
March 2022. v, 258 pp.
Z 227
Cover not available

Historical Linguistics

A cognitive grammar introduction

Margaret E. Winters

This textbook serves a dual purpose. It is, first, a comprehensive introduction to historical linguistics, intended for both undergraduate and graduate students who have taken, at the least, an introductory course in linguistics. Secondly, unlike many such textbooks, this one is based in the theoretical framework of... full description
May 2020. xvii, 241 pp.
CILT 348
Cover not available

Historical Linguistics 2015

Selected papers from the 22nd International Conference on Historical Linguistics, Naples, 27-31 July 2015

Edited by Michela Cennamo and Claudia Fabrizio

The collection of articles presented in this volume addresses a number of general theoretical, methodological and empirical issues in the field of Historical Linguistics, in different levels of analysis and on different themes: (i) phonology, (ii) morphology, (iii) morphosyntax, (iv) syntax, (v) diachronic typology,... full description
September 2019. viii, 639 pp.
CILT 350
Cover not available

Historical Linguistics 2017

Selected papers from the 23rd International Conference on Historical Linguistics, San Antonio, Texas, 31 July – 4 August 2017

Edited by Bridget Drinka

The collected articles in this volume address an array of cutting-edge issues in the field of historical linguistics, including new theoretical approaches and innovative methodologies for studying language through a diachronic lens. The articles focus on the following themes: I. Case & Argument Structure, II.... full description
July 2020. xi, 495 pp.
Z 161
Cover not available

Historical Linguistics and the Comparative Study of African Languages

Gerrit J. Dimmendaal

This advanced historical linguistics course book deals with the historical and comparative study of African languages. The first part functions as an elementary introduction to the comparative method, involving the establishment of lexical and grammatical cognates, the reconstruction of their historical development,... full description
June 2011. xviii, 421 pp.
Z 183
Cover not available

A History of the English Language

Revised edition

Elly van Gelderen

The English language in its complex shapes and forms changes fast. This thoroughly revised edition has been refreshed with current examples of change and has been updated regarding archeological research. Most suggestions brought up by users and reviewers have been incorporated, for instance, a family tree for... full description
April 2014. xx, 338 pp.
DAPSAC 95
Cover not available

History, Discourse, and Policy in Modern Turkey

Alper Çakmak

Through critical discourse analysis (CDA) and the discourse-historical approach (DHA), this book probes into political discourse imbued with historical legacies, with particular focus on explicating the structure and function of AKP stories and its relationship with Turkish politics. It offers an alternative way of... full description
October 2021. xvi, 212 pp.
SILV 24
Cover not available

Intermediate Language Varieties

Koinai and regional standards in Europe

Edited by Massimo Cerruti and Stavroula Tsiplakou

The papers in this volume address the interplay of factors underlying the formation of intermediate varieties in the ‘dialect-standard’ landscape of present-day Europe. Research is presented on varieties of several different languages (Norwegian, Dutch, German, Italian, Spanish, Greek), on speech communities with... full description
June 2020. vi, 258 pp.
Z 147
Cover not available

An Introduction to Old Frisian

History, Grammar, Reader, Glossary

Rolf H. Bremmer, Jr.

This is the first text book to offer a comprehensive approach to Old Frisian. Part One begins with a succinct survey of the history of the Frisians during the Middle Ages, their society and literary culture. Next follow chapters on the phonology, morphology, word formation and syntax of Old Frisian. This part is... full description
January 2009. xii, 237 pp.
LA 275
Cover not available

Language Change at the Interfaces

Intrasentential and intersentential phenomena

Edited by Nicholas Catasso, Marco Coniglio and Chiara De Bastiani

This volume offers an up-to-date survey of linguistic phenomena at the interfaces between syntax and prosody, information structure and discourse – with a special focus on Germanic and Romance – and their role in language change. The contributions, set within the generative framework, discuss original data and provide... full description
April 2022. viii, 255 pp.
Impact 50
Cover not available

Language Contact in the Territory of the Former Soviet Union

Edited by Diana Forker and Lenore A. Grenoble

The former Soviet Union (USSR) provides the ideal territory for studying language contact between one and the same dominant language (Russian) and a wide range of genealogically and typologically diverse languages with varying histories of language contact. This is the first book that bundles different case studies... full description
June 2021. vi, 386 pp.
SILV 25
Cover not available

Language Variation – European Perspectives VIII

Selected papers from the Tenth International Conference on Language Variation in Europe (ICLaVE 10), Leeuwarden, June 2019

Edited by Hans Van de Velde, Nanna Haug Hilton and Remco Knooihuizen

This volume contains a selection of papers from the 10th International Conference on Language Variation in Europe (ICLaVE 10), which was organized by the Fryske Akademy and held in Leeuwarden/Ljouwert (the Netherlands) in June 2019. The editors have selected thirteen papers on a wide range of language varieties,... full description
June 2021. vi, 316 pp.
SLCS 214
Cover not available

Late Modern English

Novel encounters

Edited by Merja Kytö and Erik Smitterberg

The past few decades have witnessed an unprecedented surge of interest in the language of the Late Modern English period. Late Modern English: Novel Encounters covers a broad range of topics addressed by international experts in fields such as phonology, morphology, syntax, lexis, spelling and pragmatics; this makes... full description
March 2020. vii, 359 pp.
Z 236
Cover not available

The Life Cycle of Adpositions

T. Givón

Adpositions are used, universally, to mark the roles of nominal participants in the verbal clause, most commonly indirect object roles. Practically all languages seem to have such markers, which begin their diachronic life as lexical words -- in this case either serial verbs or positional nouns. In many languages,... full description
July 2021. xii, 205 pp.
SLCS 218
Cover not available

Lost in Change

Causes and processes in the loss of grammatical elements and constructions

Edited by Svenja Kranich and Tine Breban

While research on language change has formulated robust empirical generalisations about processes and motivations underlying the emergence and spread of linguistic elements, their decline and loss is less well understood. So far a systematic investigation into the processes and motivations of decline and loss in... full description
June 2021. vi, 366 pp.
P&bns 312
Cover not available

Manners, Norms and Transgressions in the History of English

Literary and linguistic approaches

Edited by Andreas H. Jucker and Irma Taavitsainen

This volume traces the multifaceted concept of manners in the history of English from the late medieval through the early and late modern periods right up to the present day. It focuses in particular on transgressions of manners and norms of behaviour as an analytical tool to shed light on the discourse of polite... full description
August 2020. viii, 298 pp.
CAL 32
Cover not available

Modality and Diachronic Construction Grammar

Edited by Martin Hilpert, Bert Cappelle and Ilse Depraetere

This volume explores how Diachronic Construction Grammar can shed new light on changes in a central and well-researched domain of grammar, namely modality. Its main goal is to show how constructional analyses can help us address some of the long-standing questions that have informed discussions of modal expressions... full description
October 2021. v, 251 pp.
TAR 4
Cover not available

The Mysterious Address Term anata 'you' in Japanese

Yoko Yonezawa

The use of the second person singular pronoun anata ‘you’ in modern Japanese has long been regarded as mysterious and problematic, generating contradictory nuances such as polite, impolite, intimate, and distancing. Treated as a troublesome pronoun, scholars have searched for a semantically loaded meaning in anata,... full description
October 2021. xv, 208 pp.
TSL 127
Cover not available

The NP-strategy for Expressing Reciprocity

Typology, history, syntax and semantics

Elitzur A. Bar-Asher Siegal

This book provides a comprehensive treatment of the syntax and semantics of a single linguistic phenomenon – the NP-strategy for expressing reciprocity – in synchronic, diachronic, and typological perspectives. It challenges the assumption common in the typological, syntactic, and semantic literature, namely that... full description
March 2020. xv, 291 pp.
CAL 27
Cover not available

Nodes and Networks in Diachronic Construction Grammar

Edited by Lotte Sommerer and Elena Smirnova

This volume brings together ten contributions by leading experts who present their current usage-based research in Diachronic Construction Grammar. All papers contribute to the discussion of how to conceptualize constructional networks best and how to model changes in the constructicon, as for example node creation or... full description
May 2020. vi, 355 pp.
LA 265
Cover not available

Past Participle Agreement

A study on the grammaticalization of formal features

Jorge Vega Vilanova

In this book, the traditional definition of ‘grammaticalization’ is challenged in the light of current developments in grammar theory. The main innovation of this approach is the focus on the feature composition of lexical items. From this perspective, the loss of past participle agreement in Catalan is analyzed on... full description
December 2020. xix, 236 pp.
CILT 352
Cover not available

Perfects in Indo-European Languages and Beyond

Edited by Robert Crellin and Thomas Jügel

This volume provides a detailed investigation of perfects from all the branches of the Indo-European language family, in some cases representing the first ever comprehensive description. Thorough philological examinations result in empirically well-founded analyses illustrated with over 940 examples. The unique... full description
September 2020. xiv, 686 pp.
AHS 11
Cover not available

Records of Real People

Linguistic variation in Middle English local documents

Edited by Merja Stenroos and Kjetil V. Thengs

English local documents – leases, wills, accounts, letters and the like – provide a unique resource for historical sociolinguistics. Abundant from the early fifteenth century, they represent the language and concerns of people from a wide range of social, institutional and geographical backgrounds. However, as... full description
December 2020. ix, 310 pp.
SILV 26
Cover not available

Sociolinguistic Variation and Language Acquisition across the Lifespan

Edited by Anna Ghimenton, Aurélie Nardy and Jean-Pierre Chevrot

This volume provides a broad coverage of the intersection of sociolinguistic variation and language acquisition. Favoured by the current scientific context where interdisciplinarity is particularly encouraged, the chapters bring to light the complementarity between the social and cognitive approaches to language... full description
August 2021. vi, 319 pp.
P&bns 329
Cover not available

The Sociopragmatics of Stance

Community, language, and the witness depositions from the Salem witch trials

Peter J. Grund

Anchored in historical pragmatics, historical sociolinguistics, and corpus linguistics, this book weaves together a powerful narrative of the significance of stance marking in the history of English. Focusing on the community of practice that developed during the witch trials in Salem (Massachusetts) in 1692–1693, it... full description
November 2021. ix, 246 pp.
AHS 12
Cover not available

Spanish Socio-Historical Linguistics

Isolation and contact

Edited by Whitney Chappell and Bridget Drinka

This interdisciplinary volume explores the unique role of the sociohistorical factors of isolation and contact in motivating change in the varieties of Spanish worldwide. Recognizing the inherent intersectionality of social and historical factors, the book’s eight chapters investigate phenomena ranging from forms of... full description
May 2021. v, 235 pp.
SCL 101
Cover not available

Time in Languages, Languages in Time

Edited by Anna Čermáková, Thomas Egan, Hilde Hasselgård and Sylvi Rørvik

This volume comprises a collection of contrastive studies on language and time. Languages represented include Czech, French, German, Mandarin, Norwegian and Swedish, all of which are contrasted with English. While the amount of published research on temporal relations in general is considerable, less work has been... full description
September 2021. vi, 307 pp.
CoLL 59
Cover not available

Variation Rolls the Dice

A worldwide collage in honour of Salikoko S. Mufwene

Edited by Enoch O. Aboh and Cécile B. Vigouroux

Variation Rolls the Dice: A worldwide collage in honour of Salikoko S. Mufwene aims to celebrate Mufwene’s ground-breaking contribution to linguistics in the past four decades. The title also encapsulates his approach to language as both systemic and socio-cultural practices, and the role of variation in determining... full description
October 2021. xiv, 330 pp.
IHLL 29
Cover not available

Variation and Evolution

Aspects of language contact and contrast across the Spanish-speaking world

Edited by Sandro Sessarego, Juan J. Colomina-Almiñana and Adrián Rodríguez-Riccelli

This book is a collection of original studies analyzing how different internal and external factors affect Spanish language variation and evolution across a number of (socio)linguistic scenarios. Its primary goal is to expand our understanding of how native and non-native varieties of Spanish co-exist with other... full description
August 2020. viii, 277 pp.
SCL 97
Cover not available

Voices Past and Present - Studies of Involved, Speech-related and Spoken Texts

In honor of Merja Kytö

Edited by Ewa Jonsson and Tove Larsson

This volume provides a diachronic and synchronic overview of linguistic variability and change in involved, speech-related and spoken texts in English. While previous works on the topic have focused on more limited time periods, this book covers data from the 16th century up to the present day. The studies offer new... full description
October 2020. xiii, 348 pp.
SILV 23
Cover not available

Walking on the Grammaticalization Path of the Definite Article

Functional Main and Side Roads

Edited by Renata Szczepaniak and Johanna Flick

This volume focuses on the grammaticalization of the definite article in German. It contains eight empirically-based papers which examine individual stages of the grammaticalization path from its beginnings as a demonstrative to the definite article and beyond. Focusing on cognitive, pragmatic, semantic and syntactic... full description
April 2020. vi, 253 pp.
Z 237
Cover not available

“All families and genera”

Exploring the Corpus of English Life Sciences Texts

Edited by Isabel Moskowich, Inés Lareo and Gonzalo Camiña

“All families and genera”: Exploring the Corpus of English Life Sciences Texts aims at exploring scientific writing in late Modern English. This volume is the fourth of its kind devoted to the analysis of the relations between language and different scientific disciplines from 1700 to 1900. Here, forty texts on... full description
September 2021. xv, 310 pp.