Written by a team of international scholars, this outstanding Handbook provides a complete overview of research into historical syntax.

Introduction Adam Ledgeway and Ian Roberts; Part I. Types and Mechanisms of Syntactic Change: 1. Grammaticalization Heiko Narrog and Bernd Heine; 2. Degrammaticalization David Willis; 3. Exaptation John Haiman; 4. Reanalysis Nerea Madariaga; 5. Analogy and extension Alice C. Harris; 6. Restructuring David W. Lightfoot; 7. Parameter setting Theresa Biberauer and Ian Roberts; 8. Contact and borrowing Tania Kuteva; Part II. Methods and Tools: 9. The comparative method and comparative reconstruction James Clackson; 10. Internal reconstruction Gisella Ferraresi and Maria Goldbach; 11. Corpora and quantitative methods Susan Pintzuk, Ann Taylor and Anthony Warner; 12. Phylogenetic reconstruction in syntax: the parametric comparison method Giuseppe Longobardi and Cristina Guardiano; Part III. Principles and Constraints: 13. Universal grammar Anders Holmberg; 14. Abduction Henning Andersen; 15. Transparency David W. Lightfoot; 16. Uniformitarianism Ian Roberts; 17. Markedness, naturalness and complexity Anna Roussou; 18. Acquisition and learnability David W. Lightfoot; Part IV. Major Issues and Themes: 19. The actuation problem George Walkden; 20. Inertia Ian Roberts; 21. Gradience and gradualness vs abruptness Marit Westergaard; 22. Cyclicity Elly van Gelderen; Part V. Explanations: 23. Endogenous and exogenous theories of syntactic change David Willis; 24. Imperfect transmission and discontinuity David W. Lightfoot; 25. Social conditioning Suzanne Romaine; 26. Non-syntactic sources and triggers of syntactic change Laurel J. Brinton and Elizabeth Closs Traugott; Part VI. Models and Approaches: 27. Principles and parameters Adam Ledgeway and Ian Roberts; 28. Biolinguistics Cedric Boeckx, Pedro Tiago Martins and Evelina Leivada; 29. Lexical-functional grammar Kersti Börjars and Nigel Vincent; 30. Typological approaches Sonia Cristofaro and Paolo Ramat; 31. Functional approaches Marianne Mithun.