How does language change over time?
The Journal of Historical Syntax presents articles that discuss aspects of historical sentence structure in the widest range of languages – from Old High German to Taiwanese and Tocharian. This may be a language development that occurred over time – for example a change in verb position within a sentence – or a synchronous description of historical language use. The JHS also includes theoretical debates (such as in its special issue "Whither Reanalysis?") and discussions of experiences (such as "Creating annotated corpora for historical languages").
George Walkden, a professor of English and general linguistics at the University of Konstanz, founded JHS in 2011. At the time, it was part of "eLanguage". Since 2017, it has been an independent open access journal with Walkden as its editor-in-chief. All contributions are peer reviewed before publication and it is indexed in the following places: DOAJ, Google Scholar, Sherpa Romeo, Scopus and ANVUR.
The Journal of Historical Syntax (JHS) is an open access journal.