Introduction : etymology beyond word histories

As suggested in its title, this volume explicitly attempts to go beyond the more traditional notion of etymology as focusing on words and their history in extending the etymological approach to linguistic units outside the classical lexical domain. In two senses these extensions can be seen as structural rather than lexical. First, constructions, such as relative clauses, are defined by their structure, and the origin of such a structure is the object of a subfield of etymology that can be called "structural etymology". Second, structural components of language, for instance, grammatical morphemes, such as pronouns, TAM markers, and periphrastic forms, e.g. the English passive, can be investigated etymologically by applying the same research strategy. Many of the studies assembled in this volume follow one of these two pathways beyond classical lexical etymology and apply the etymological approach to structures or structural units.