Diachrony within Synchrony : Language History and Cognition - Papers from the Interational Symposium at the University of Duisburg, 26-28 March 1990

The articles in this collection are centred around the question of what can be meant by assuming that change is a property of language.

Either from general points of view, or in the light of specific examples, the following main topics are discussed: language use and language change as interrelated manifestations of human cognition; the directionality of linguistic development; the predictability of language change; methods of semantic reconstruction; aims of explaining language change and restrictions in doing so; the relationship between cognitive linguistics and philology.