The diachrony of flagging

Authors

Gilles Authier (ed)
Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, Paris
Kirill Kozhanov (ed)
University of Potsdam

Synopsis

The volume brings together studies of adpositions and cases from a historical perspective, covering a diverse sample of languages from around the world. The contributions are authored by specialists with first-hand expertise in the historical grammar of lesser-studied languages and the reconstruction of protolanguages. The languages analyzed belong to the following families: East Caucasian (Azerbaijan), Trans-New Guinea (Papua New Guinea), Pomoan and Wappo (North America), Northern Jê (Brazil), and Indo-European (Baltic and Indo-Aryan).

The volume grew out of the workshop The diachrony of flagging, organized by Gilles Authier in Paris in 2024.

Chapters

  • Heterogeneous flagging in Budugh
    Gilles Authier
  • Postpositions in Mian and Mountain Ok (Trans New Guinea): a diachronic perspective
    Sebastian Fedden
  • The role of word order in the diachrony of flagging
    Martin Haspelmath
  • Diachronic stability of flags
    Oblique in Romani
    Kirill Kozhanov
  • Parallel layered diachrony in dependent marking
    Marianne Mithun
  • Proto-Northern Jê postpositions
    Andrey Nikulin
  • Case and case-like phenomena in Hindu Kush Indo-Aryan
    Anastasia Panova, Vladimir Plungian
  • Prepositional case in Latvian
    Daniel Petit

Author Biographies

Gilles Authier, Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, Paris

Gilles Authier is a professor at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes in Paris, where he teaches on minority languages of the Eastern Caucasus (Daghestan and Azerbaijan), from a descriptive and historical perspective, based on linguistic typology and the analysis of traditional folklore corpora. His approach relies on long-term and close collaboration with native speakers and on the training of younger local colleagues.

Kirill Kozhanov, University of Potsdam

Kirill Kozhanov is a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Slavic Studies at the University of Potsdam. In addition to his work on Slavic and Baltic languages, he has conducted research on Neo-Aramaic varieties and Indo-Aryan languages, with a particular focus on Romani. His research interests include language evolution, the diachronic stability of grammatical features, and language contact.

References

book cover

Published

July 28, 2026

Series

Research on Comparative Grammar

Online ISSN

2749-781X

Print ISSN

2749-7801
Copyright (c) 2026 Gilles Authier; Sebastian Fedden; Kirill Kozhanov; Martin Haspelmath, Marianne Mithun, Andrey Nikulin, Anastasia Panova, Vladimir Plungian, Daniel Petit

License

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.