Download or read book Papers from the 7th International Conference on Historical Linguistics written by Anna Giacalone Ramat and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 1987-01-01 with total page 689 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: These papers, deriving from the 7th International Conference on Historical Linguistics (ICHL) in Pavia in 1984, provide an overview of the current status of research in this field. They clearly show that new issues are emerging in the theory of linguistic change which tend to incorporate non-autonomous principles like naturalness in phonetic processes, the influence of socio-cultural settings and discourse pragmatics.