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<div class="moz-signature"><b>ICHL20 workshop proposal: <br>
Drift and long-term morphosyntactic change</b><br>
Organised by Ioanna Sitaridou (<a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="mailto:is269@cam.ac.uk">is269@cam.ac.uk</a>) and David Willis
(<a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="mailto:dwew2@cam.ac.uk">dwew2@cam.ac.uk</a>) (Cambridge)<br>
<br>
Preliminary expressions of interest are invited for the following
proposed workshop for the 20th International Conference on Historical
Linguistics (Osaka, 2011). Please contact David Willis
(<a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="mailto:dwew2@cam.ac.uk">dwew2@cam.ac.uk</a>) (Cambridge), ideally with a preliminary title, by 12
October 2010. If the workshop proposal is accepted, a formal call for
papers will be issued in October.<br>
<br>
<b>Drift and long-term morphosyntactic change</b><br>
Frequently a language undergoes a set of changes that seem to be
related to one another. Sometimes, these changes may occur together
quickly, perhaps even in the space of one generation. Sometimes,
however, changes that seem to be linked may span long periods of time,
hundreds, sometimes even thousands, of years. The question arises as to
how these changes maintain their momentum and direction. Put simply,
how do today’s speakers act as though they ‘know’ that their language
has been moving in a particular direction, say, for the last five
hundred years and that they should continue to move the language a
little way in the same direction?<br>
<br>
The phenomenon was identified as ‘drift’ as long ago as 1921 by Edward
Sapir, who famously noted that ‘language moves down time in a current
of its own making. It has drift.’ (Sapir 1949 [1921]: 150). Sapir
himself attributed drift to psychological causes, which one might
consider to be rooted either in performance or in language acquisition,
namely ‘the unconscious selection on the part of its speakers of those
individual variations that are cumulative in some special direction’
(Sapir 1949 [1921]: 155). As cases in point, he cited, from the history
of English:<br>
<br>
(i) the tendency to level the formal distinction between subject and
object (loss of case inflections)<br>
(ii) the tendency towards fixed (SVO) word order<br>
(iii) the drift towards the invariant word forms (analytism)<br>
<br>
Since then the concept of ‘drift’ has been used loosely to refer to any
apparently directed change, as in the drift from synthetic towards
analytic syntax observed repeatedly in many Indo-European languages,
and thus often amounts to a description of a phenomenon in search of an
explanation. The notion of drift is paradoxical since it seems to fly
in the face of elementary facts: native speakers have no inbuilt
knowledge of the history of their language, and so cannot possibly know
how to change their language in the direction ‘determined’ by history.<br>
<br>
While the term ‘drift’ has come to be regarded with some suspicion as
implying some kind of mysterious force guiding language – indeed
McMahon refers to it as ‘the rather mystical concept of drift’ (McMahon
1994: 138) – the phenomenon nevertheless remains and demands
explanation. It may be more neutrally identified as ‘long-term change’
and ‘long-term development’, avoiding the geological metaphor of plate
tectonics. Explanations for drift have a long history in typological
approaches to language change, where the notion that there are regular
pathways down which change is channelled goes back at least to the
Schleicher’s morphological cycle (isolating > agglutinating >
synthetic). More recently, typological work has focused on limiting the
possible pathways between typologically consistent language states
(Hawkins 1979, 1990, Lehmann 1973, Vennemann 1974). There has been a
resurgence of interest also among formally oriented linguists, with the
idea of ‘cascading parametric change’, embedded within a theory of
markedness (Biberauer & Roberts 2008, Roberts 2007). According to
this approach, one syntactic change (a change in a parameter setting)
may skew the primary linguistic data for language acquisition, making a
subsequent change more likely. Other factors that have been suggested
as causes of long-term change include markedness, economy and the need
to reestablish a synchronically motivated stable system. Both of these
last ideas brings us back to Andersen’s earlier structuralist approach
to drift, according to which long-term change is real and motivated by
‘the drive toward internal conformity between the type of the language
and its system, and between the system and the norms’, as witnessed in
his analysis of long-term development of the Polish past tenses. The
pace and structure of long-term developments are influenced by complex
hierarchies of markedness, according to which the propensity of a given
feature to conform to the broader linguistic system correlates with
abstract notions of markedness (Andersen 1990).<br>
<br>
This workshop aims to enhance our understanding of the processes that
may lead to long-term, apparently directional, changes and sequences of
changes and to enhance our understanding of the internal make-up of
these changes. In particular, we seek to explore the following
questions:<br>
<br>
(a) Is drift different from other processes of language change, such
as analogy, grammaticalisation and/or parametric change? If yes, how?<br>
(b) Is drift the system’s reaction towards asymmetry? If yes, what
is the evidence for that?<br>
(c) Can there be short-term drift? Or drift should be viewed as the
opposite process from “catastrophic” (i.e., parametric) change?<br>
(d) Is the notion of drift only compatible with a deterministic
approach to language change? <br>
(e) Is drift unidirectional?<br>
(f) How can drift be rendered compatible with random variability?
Can random chance cause a drift?<br>
<br>
Papers are invited which address these questions, either the reality of
such developments or possible explanations for them, in any language or
language family, from any of a number of possible perspectives, whether
typological, structuralist or formal. Papers that compare or reconcile
different approaches are particularly welcome.<br>
<br>
<b>References</b><br>
Andersen, Henning. 1990. The structure of drift. In Henning Andersen
& Konrad Koerner (eds.), Historical linguistics 1987: Papers from
the 8th International Conference on Historical Linguistics (8. ICHL):
(Lille, 31 August - 4 September 1987), 1–20. Amsterdam: Benjamins.<br>
Biberauer, Theresa & Ian Roberts. 2008. Cascading parameter change:
Internally-driven change in Middle and Early Modern English. In
Thórhallur Eythórsson (ed.), Grammatical change and linguistic theory:
The Rosendal papers, 79–113. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.<br>
Hawkins, John A. 1979. Implicational universals as predictors of word
order change. Language 55, 618–48.<br>
Hawkins, John A. 1990. A parsing theory of word order universals.
Linguistic Inquiry 21, 223–61.<br>
Lehmann, Winfred P. 1973. A structural principle of language and its
implications. Language 49, 47–66.<br>
McMahon, April. 1994. Understanding language change. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.<br>
Roberts, Ian. 2007. Diachronic syntax. Oxford: Oxford University Press.<br>
Sapir, Edward. 1949 [1921]. Language: An introduction to the study of
speech. London: Harvest.<br>
Vennemann, Theo. 1974. Topics, subjects, and word order: From SXV to
SVX via TVX. In John M. Anderson & Charles Jones (eds.), Historical
linguistics: Proceedings of the First International Conference on
Historical Linguistics, Edinburgh, 2nd–7th Sept. 1973, 339–76.
Amsterdam: North Holland.<br>
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<pre class="moz-signature" cols="72"><font face="Verdana"><a
href="http://people.pwf.cam.ac.uk/dwew2"><b>Dr David Willis</b></a>
University Senior Lecturer
<a href="http://www.mml.cam.ac.uk/ling/">Department of Linguistics, University of Cambridge</a>
Fellow in Linguistics
<a href="http://www.sel.cam.ac.uk/">Selwyn College</a>, Cambridge CB3 9DQ
Tel: +44 1223 335885 Office: 23 West Road, Rm 5
Secretary, Degree Committee, Modern and Medieval Languages
Honorary Secretary, <a href="http://www.lagb.org.uk">Linguistics Association of Great Britain</a>
Director of Studies in Linguistics, Emmanuel, Pembroke, Selwyn and Trinity Hall.
Please use college address for postal correspondence.
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