Studies in the History of the English Language

About this book

One of the much-discussed themes of linguistic work in the last hundred years has been how to think about the relationships between synchrony and diachrony, between structure and use, between arbitrariness and motivatedness, between what Roberts has called "a random 'walk' through the space defined by the set of possible parameter values" (Roberts 1993: 252) and observed directionalities of change.