Historical morphology and morphological theory: Introduction

In its first part, this introduction situates research in historical morphology in the context of linguistic research in general, highlighting the renewed interest that the field has witnessed since the turn of the millennium. Historical morphology has profited from progress in grammaticalization studies, language typology, language reconstruction, historical sociolinguistics and innovations in quantitative linguistics, and decisively contributed in turn to these fields. The second part presents the nine contributions of this special issue, which were selected among two dozen talks given in the focus section on historical morphology at the 21st International Morphology Meeting in Vienna in 2024.