Preface
Section 1
Sruvey
1. Language change as a matter of fact
- Attitudes to language change
- Language state and process
- The aims and scope of historical linguistics

2. Reconstructing the past : date and evidence
- The data of historical linguistics
- The written evidence
- Sources of evidence
- Comparing and reconstructing languages
- Correspondences between languages
- Laws of change
- Internal reconstruction

3. Vocabulary change
- Coining new words
- Changes of meaning
- Why do word meanings change?

4. Grammatical change
- Morphological change
- Syntactic change

5. Sound Change
- How sounds are produced
- Phonetic change
- Phonemic change

6. Language contact
- Borrowing from other languages
- Convergence and linguistic areas
- Language birth : pidgins and creoles
- Languae death

7. How and why do language change?
- Functional explanations
- Psycholinguistic explanations : language acquisition
- Sociolinguistic explanations
- The orgin and spread of changes

8. Postscript : further developments
- Socio-historical linguistics and historical pragmatics
- Evolutionary linguistics
- Standardization and languae planning
- Conclusion

Section 2
Readings

Section 3
References

Section 4
Glossary