In this book Guy Deutscher examines the historical development of Akkadian, the oldest recorded Semitic language and one of the earliest attested languages. Two thousand years of texts from 2500BC to 500BC provide a unique source for the study of linguistic change. The first two parts of the book present an historical grammar of sentential complementation. Part one traces the emergence of new structures, describing how finite complements first developed, and tracing the grammaticalization of the quotative construction. Part two examines the language's functional history. It looks at the evolut