Internal Reconstruction in Indo-European: Methods, Results, and Problems (Copenhagen Studies in Indo-European)

This volume contains selected papers from a symposium on "Internal Reconstruction in Indo-European: Methods, Results and Problems," which formed a subsection of the 16th International Conference on Historical Linguistics held at the University of Copenhagen. Internal reconstruction is what the historical linguist resorts to when the possibilities of more traditional comparative reconstruction have been exhausted. This is certainly the case at the level of the protolanguage. When Proto-Indo-European has been reconstructed on the basis of a painstaking comparative analysis of the entire data field drawing on the full range of extant IE languages, there are, quite often, questions still left unanswered. Comparable methods can be applied to later stages of the language where the immediate prehistory is not accessible or corroboration is wanted. Today, internal reconstruction is routinely applied at all levels of historical linguistic analysis as one of the tools that open up the linguistic prehistory. These papers illustrate the full range of the phenomenon of internal reconstruction.