Cycling through diachrony

Abstract

The notion of ‘linguistic cycle’ has long been recognized as being relevant to the description of many processes of language change. This introduction deals with different phenomena of cyclical change, making clear that while grammaticalization is one area where cyclical change can be found, it is not the only one. The chapter provides an overview of the theoretical literature about cyclical change, with particular emphasis on a diachronic generative approach. It contextualizes the chapters in this volume against the background of this literature, and groups them into more theoretical and more empirical contributions, addressing cyclical changes in both the nominal and the clausal domains.