Historical linguists have always known that some linguistic changes result from deliberate, conscious actions by speakers. But the general assumption has been that such changes are relatively trivial, confined mainly to the invention or borrowing of new words, changes in lexical semantics, and the adoption of a few structural features from a prestige dialect. The goal of this paper is to show t...

Michael Noonan University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

Peter Mühlhäusler is the Foundation Professor of Linguistics at the University of Adelaide, and Supernumerary Fellow of Linacre College, Oxford. He has taught at the Technical University of Berlin and in the University of Oxford. He is an active researcher in several areas of linguistics, including ecolinguistics, language planning, and language policy and language contact in the Australian-Pac...