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Understanding Language Change
Abstract
How and why do language changes begin; how and why do they spread; and how can they ultimately be explained? This new textbook sets out to answer these questions in a clear and helpful way which will be accessible to all students with an elementary knowledge of linguistics. In the first half of the book Dr McMahon analyses changes from every area of grammar. In the second she addresses recent developments in socio-historical linguistics, and looks at such topics as language contact, linguistic variation, pidgins and creoles, and language death. Throughout the discussion is illustrated by a wealth of examples from English and other languages. Understanding Language Change will be welcomed by students as a follow-up to such introductory books as Jean Aitchison's Language Change: Progress or Decay?, also published by Cambridge University Press.
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Citations
Cited by
Hopper, P. J., & Traugott, E. C. (2003) · doi:10.1017/cbo9781139165525 · Cited by 2,135
Creating a New Town koine: Children and language change in Milton Keynes
KERSWILL, P., & WILLIAMS, A. (2000) · Language in Society · doi:10.1017/s0047404500001020 · Cited by 699
Cross-Linguistic Variation and Efficiency
Hawkins, J. A. (2014) · doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199664993.001.0001 · Cited by 405
Metadata
- Authors
- McMahon, A. M. S.
- Venue
- Cambridge University Press eBooks
- Publisher
- Cambridge University Press
- Published
- 1994-03-17
- OpenAlex
- W2060717313
- Cited by
- 1,107
- References
- 0
- FWCI
- 19.57
- Type
- book
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
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- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Understanding Language Change. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1017/cbo9781139166591
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- McMahon, A. M. S. (1994). Understanding Language Change. Cambridge University Press eBooks. https://doi.org/10.1017/cbo9781139166591
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
