Reviewed by Nikolai Penner, McMaster University

This volume consists of seventeen articles in five thematic sections selected from presentations at the workshop, Grammatical Changes in Indo-European Languages, held at the Université du Québec à Montréal in August 2007.

Section A contains five articles on gender, animacy, and number. Silvia Luraghi’s paper on the origin of the *-h₂ suffix in Indo-European (IE) is followed by an article on cognitive categories and noun classification by Maria M. Manoliu that examines the reduction from the threefold noun class of Latin tothe twofold system of the Romance languages. Next, Hans H. Hock focuses on the resolution of mixed-gender antecedents through a ‘nearest conjunct’ agreement strategy. Kyongjoon Kwon looks at the development of literacy in Early East Slavic, and argues that the Old Novgorod dialect developed the grammatical category of animacy much earlier than the other Slavic dialects. Finally, Inés Fernández-Ordóñez’s article deals with the way in which pronominal systems can become noun systems, and examines these processes in Western IE varieties in light of the hypotheses of Joseph Greenberg and Greville Corbett.

Section B—concerning definiteness, case, and prepositions—starts with Brigitte Bauer’s paper on strategies of definiteness in Latin. It is followed by Vit Bubenik’s article, which analyzes the Middle Iranian genitival construction in the context of the replacement of morphological case distinctions by an analytic phrasal system. The final paper in this section, by Gag T. T. Haug, is a theory-oriented discussion of the categorical status of ‘place holders’ in Homeric Greek.

Section C consists of four articles on tense/aspect and diathesis. Henning Andresen’s article aims to establish the relative chronology of the grammaticalization of Common Slavic aspect. Next, the paper by Driget Drinka on the *-to-/-no- construction in IE assesses the claim that periphrastic formations can be reconstructed for Proto-Indo-European (PIE). The last two papers in this section, by J. Hewson and Sarah Rose, examine the grammaticalization of Germanic verbal diathesis, and the origin and meaning of the Hittite hi/mi conjugations, respectively.

Section D features four papers on morphosyntactic problems: by Johanna Barðdal and Thórhallur Eythórsson on the origin of the oblique-subject-construction in IE languages, Azam Estaji on the origin of the ezafe construction in Persian, Hakyung Jung on the development of the North Russian be-perfect construction, and Eugenio R. Luján on the process of grammaticalization of *k^wi-/k^wo- relative clauses in PIE.

The fifth section of the collection consists of a paper by Luís Garcia-Ramón examining the reconstruction of inflectional categories in IE.

Dedicated to the memory of Carol F. Justus, the volume is a solid collection of articles in historical linguistics that will appeal to anyone interested in language change and the development of the IE languages.