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There are more native speakers of Sino-Tibetan languages than of any other language family in the world. Records of these languages are among the oldest for any human language, and the amount of active research on them, both diachronic and synchronic, has multiplied in the last few decades. This volume includes overview articles as well as descriptions of individual languages and comments on the subgroups in which they occur. In addition to a number of modern languages, there are descriptions of several ancient languages.
Moving upstream on the Irrawaddy broad tide, the ocean liner approaches the city of Rangoon, and the gold-leafed pinnacle of the celebrated Shwe Dagon pagoda welcomes it as it rises magnificently in the morning sunlight. The traveler is intrigued with the claim that this ancient shrine has been standing for three thousand years. This injects an anachronism, since Buddhism was founded not more than twenty-five centuries ago and something less than that for its lodgment in Burma. But no one seems to be embarrassed nor stultified by what, for them, is merely a slight chronological inaccuracy, which derives from the time-clocked occidental measurements, for theirs is that timeless eternity of the East.
Joan Bybee and her colleagues present a new theory of the evolution of grammar that links structure and meaning in a way that directly challenges most contemporary versions of generative grammar. This study focuses on the use and meaning of grammatical markers of tense, aspect, and modality and identifies a universal set of grammatical categories. The authors demonstrate that the semantic content of these categories evolves gradually and that this process of evolution is strikingly similar across unrelated languages. Through a survey of seventy-six languages in twenty-five different phyla, the authors show that the same paths of change occur universally and that movement along these paths is in one direction only. This analysis reveals that lexical substance evolves into grammatical substance through various mechanisms of change, such as metaphorical extension and the conventionalization of implicature. Grammaticization is always accompanied by an increase in frequency of the grammatical marker, providing clear evidence that language use is a major factor in the evolution of synchronic language states. The Evolution of Grammar has important implications for the development of language and for the study of cognitive processes in general.