Cyclic Change in Grammar and Discourse
Maj-Britt Mosegaard Hansen · Richard Waltereit
Sep 2025 · Oxford Studies in Diachronic and Historical Linguistics Book 54 · Oxford University Press
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About this ebook
This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Academic and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. This volume explores the long-held assumption in linguistics that language change may proceed in a cyclical fashion. Cyclic change has recently attracted renewed interest, most notably with respect to the evolution of negation across a range of languages, but also in relation to a wide range of other phenomena. The chapters in this book take as their point of departure the hypothesis that cyclic change is pragmatically driven, and analyse forms of this change in morphosyntax, the lexicon, and semantics and pragmatics - as well as the interaction between these levels - across a range of mainly Indo-European languages and language families, but also including Semitic, Sinitic, and Austronesian languages. They also discuss the epistemological status of cycles; explore their relationship with other recognized forms of change; examine the limits of the notion of a cycle in language change; and discuss cyclicity from a cognitive-pragmatic and sociopragmatic perspective.
About the author
Maj-Britt Mosegaard Hansen has been Professor of Linguistics and Pragmatics at the University of Manchester since 2007. She received her PhD and her Higher Doctorate from the University of Copenhagen in 1996 and 2008 respectively. She is a member of the Academia Europaea and a fellow of the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences. Her book The Structure of Modern French: A Student Grammar was published by OUP in 2016. Richard Waltereit has been Professor of Romance Linguistics (French) at the Humboldt-University Berlin since 2017, having previously held positions at the University of Tübingen and Newcastle University. He was awarded his PhD in 1997 from the Freie Universität Berlin and his Habilitation in 2002 from Tübingen. His many publications include Reflexive Marking in the History of French (Benjamins, 2012).
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