From Case to Adposition

“In a clear, succinct, and methodical way, but also with an amazing and admirable command of data from all twelve IE language branches spanning over 3000 years, Hewson and Bubenik offer us a wonderful book with answers to many perplexing questions. This book will become the reference work on the topic, but its worth for typological purposes will also become evident. As in T ense and Aspect in Indo-European Languages (1997), the authors demonstrate why history is important for any meaningful advancement of knowledge. I read the current book with a lot of pleasure and interest, and learned a lot.”

“It's not often that we witness a revolution in linguistics as we do in the present volume. But the study itself demonstrates revolution in language itself as we pass from Latin to French, from Brittanic to Welsh and so on. In the general and massive shift from case to adposition, we have a quantum leap. We have two different analyses of reality. Each is based on a radically different method of systematisation. We become witnesses to a major re-organisation of sentence structure throughout Indo-European, each revealing a similar, yet independent, System of systems. Such a typological shift, as a whole and in individual cases must also be a perceptual shift, i.e. one that looks at things differently, where relationships are realised from a different psycho-mechanical stance.”