Nikolaus Ritt - Publications#

SELECTED MONOGRAPHS

1. 1994 Quantity adjustment: vowel lengthening and shortening in Early Middle English. Cambridge: University Press.
2. 2004 Selfish sounds. A Darwinian approach to language change. Cambridge: University Press.

SELECTED ARTICLES in refereed journals and volumes:

3. 1990 “The dictionary of Justus Georg Schottelius or ‘generativism’ in a 17th-century grammar!?”. Tomaszcyk, Jerzy and Barbara Tomaszcyk-Lewandowska, eds., 1990: Meaning and lexicography. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
4. 1993 “Early Middle English vowel quantity, universal tendencies and the explanation of sound change”. Studia Anglica Poznaniensa. 24. 47-65.
5. 2000 “Theory, ‘empiry’, and textual witnesses: acutes in the ‘Lindisfarne Gospel’ and Early English vowel quantity”. Sprachwissenschaft. 25. 497-512.
6. 2001 “The spread of Scandinavian 3rd Psn. Pl. pronouns in English: optimization, adaptation, and evolutionary stability”. In: Kastovsky, Dieter und Arthur Mettinger. (eds.): Languages and Contact in the History of English. Frankfurt/Main: Lang. 279-304.
7. 2010. "Memes and Language". Hogan, Patrick Colm (ed.): Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language Sciences, s.v. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
8. 2010 “Middle English (mor-)phonotactics: system, usage, change” In: SELIM: Journal of the Spanish society of medieval English language and literature 17, 43-68.
9. 2011 “Neutrality, drift, and the diversification of languages”. Journal of Theoretical Biology. 287: 1-12. [together with Pawlowitsch, Christina and Panayotis Mertikopoulos].
10. 2012 “Middle English phonology in the digital age: what written corpora can tell us about sound change”. In: Nevallainen, Terttu and Elizabeth C. Traugott (eds.). The Oxford Handbook of the History of English. Oxford: University Press. 81-87.
11. 2012. "How to weaken one’s consonants, strengthen one’s vowels and remain English at the same time". In: Bermúdez-Otero, Ricardo, Denison, David, McCully, Christopher and Emma Moore (eds.). 2012. Analysing Older English. Cambridge: University Press. 213-232.
12. 2013 “Evolutionary Linguistics”. In: Kortmann, Bernd and Johannes Kabatek (eds.). Linguistic theory and methodology. (WSK-Dictionaries of Language and Communication Science). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. In print.