From Harold.Koch at anu.edu.au  Fri May  1 11:44:01 1998
From: Harold.Koch at anu.edu.au (Harold Koch)
Date: Fri, 1 May 1998 07:44:01 EDT
Subject: Q: HL textbook
Message-ID: <FRI.1.MAY.1998.074401.EDT.HAROLD.KOCH@ANU.EDU.AU>

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
>
>To:Larry Trask <larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk>
>From:Harold.Koch at anu.edu.au (Harold Koch)
>Subject:Re: Q: HL textbook
>
>Larry
>What about early European efforts such as:
>Hermann Paul, Prinzipien der Sprachgeschichte, 1880, further editions 1886,
>1898, 1909, 1920.
>
>Or early/ pre-modern introductions to linguistics, where the latter is seen
>primarily in historical terms, such as:
>W.D. Whitney. Language and the study of language: Twelve lectures on the
>principles of linguistic science. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1867.
>W.D. Whitney. The life and growth of language. New York/London, 1875.
>Joseph Vendryes, Le langage: Introduction linguistique a` l'histoire.
>(L'évolution de l'humanité) Paris: La renaissance du livre, 1923. Eng transl
>by Paul Radin, Language: a linguistic introduction to history. London:
>Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1925.
>Otto Jespersen. Language: its nature, development and origin. London: George
>Allen and Unwin, 1922.
>Trombetti, Alfredo. Elementi di glottologia. Bologna: N. Zanichelli, 1923.
>And of course Bloomfield's Language in the early 1930s.
>
>Then, besides Sturtevant (mentioned by Janda), there is the partial textbook:
>Pike, Kenneth Lee. Axioms and procedures for reconstructions in comparative
>linguistics: an exerimental [i.e. experimental] syllabus. Glendale, Calif.:
>Summer Institute of Linguistics, 1950.
>
>Harold Koch
>
>>----------------------------Original message----------------------------
>>Does anybody know of a university-level textbook of historical
>>linguistics earlier than W. P. Lehmann's 1962 textbook?
>>
>>Larry Trask
>>COGS
>>University of Sussex
>>Brighton BN1 9QH
>>England
>>
>>larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk
>
 
Harold Koch, Senior Lecturer
Department of Linguistics
Faculty of Arts
The Australian National University
Canberra ACT 0200 Australia
 
Telephone:  (02) 6249 3203 (direct) / ..3026 (messages)
(overseas) 61 2 6249 3203
Fax:  (02) 6 279 8214
(overseas) 61 2 6279 8214
email:  Harold.Koch at anu.edu.au


From bwald at HUMnet.UCLA.EDU  Tue May  5 13:04:21 1998
From: bwald at HUMnet.UCLA.EDU (bwald)
Date: Tue, 5 May 1998 09:04:21 EDT
Subject: Paul 1880 vs. 1886 vs. 1920...; Bloomfield 1933/1965
Message-ID: <TUE.5.MAY.1998.090421.EDT.BWALD@HUMNET.UCLA.EDU>

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
Just a brief, possibly philosophical, comment on Rich Janda's following
passage on Paul and 19th c (historical) linguistics.
 
>     Moreover, though Paul's lapidary words are excellent for exem-
>plifying the period when linguistics was historical linguistics, they
>certainly show how far he was from contemporary physical scien-
>tists and modern scientists of all sorts in his insistence that, essen-
>tially, you don't have a scientific understanding of a system unless
>you know the history of every piece of it.  No sane geologist would
>today agree that understanding, say, the cliffs of Dover requires one
>to know the origin of every one of its molecules (or atoms, or elec
>trons [electra?], or quarks)....
>     What would have happened without de Saussure--or Bloomfield?
 
I would guess that like most 19th c intellectuals of the "scientific" type,
Paul was partial to the notion of determinism.  Clearly this goes beyond
linguistics to "everything", which includes the history of "everything".
But it still means you gotta know "everything" to *fully* "understand"
anything.  That is different from a partial and somewhat practical (or
heuristic) understanding of the phenomena delimited by some field /
discipline, whether linguistics, geology or whatever.  Faith in total
determinism ends for science with quantum physics and the uncertainty
principle in the earliest 20th c, but the implications were still resisted
by Einstein and people like that.
 
Within linguistics, early structuralism still has that somewhat mystical
deterministic notion, but restricted to "linguistics" as a discipline, as
in the gross exaggeration contained in Meillet's dictum about language
being a system "ou tout se tient", the idea being, I suppose, that if one
thing in the system changes no telling what other changes it will
eventually lead to (by necessity?).
 
I guess the latest outcome for how historical linguistics relates to
"synchronic" linguistics is restricted to such things as the problem of
encountering something strange / unexpected  in the attempted description
of some language.  In this case, we get interested in how the particular
language or dialect acquired this strange property, and we start looking at
its history.  (Even Chomsky & Halle still had the notion that the
synchronic properties of a linguistic system only worked up to the point at
which some aspect of the system was "in flux")  Historical insight into
"unusual" synchronic states we still think (I think) helps us gain insight
into the nature of the property and the implications it has for a language
at any particular time, and for "language" at all times whatsoever.


From nbvint at nessie.mcc.ac.uk  Thu May  7 16:48:36 1998
From: nbvint at nessie.mcc.ac.uk (nigel vincent)
Date: Thu, 7 May 1998 12:48:36 EDT
Subject: Lect HistLing
Message-ID: <THU.7.MAY.1998.124836.EDT.NBVINT@NESSIE.MCC.AC.UK>

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
>Lectureship in Historical Linguistics (Ref. no. 310/98)
>
>Applications will be considered from those specializing in any branch of
>historical linguistics. A strong research record is essential, and a
>completed PhD is desirable. Applicants must be able to demonstrate an
>interest both in the theoretical study of language change and in the
>history of one or more languages and language families. Preference may be
>given to candidates whose research relates to the history of a language or
>languages other than English. The starting date is 1 September 1998 or as
>soon as possible thereafter. Salary in the range: £16045 - £21894 p.a.
>(under review). Closing date for applications: 9 June 1998.
>Applications forms are available from and applications should be submitted
>to: Office of the Director of Personnel, The University of Manchester,
>Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL, UK. Tel: ++44 (0)161 275 2028; Fax: ++44
>(0)161 275 2221; Minicom (for the hearing impaired): ++44 (0)161 275 7889.
>Email: personnel at man.ac.uk
>Website: http://www.man.ac.uk
>Applications should quote the above reference number and contain the names
>of three referees. It is the responsibility of applicants to ensure that
>supporting letters of reference are sent to the same address by the closing
>date for applications.
>It is expected that interviews for this post will be conducted in the week
>beginning 15 June 1998.
>
>Person Description
>Candidates should possess a strong research record, including a PhD or
>equivalent publications, in the any area of historical linguistics. They
>must be able to demonstrate an interest both in the theoretical study of
>language change and in the history of one or more languages and language
>families. Preference may be given to candidates whose research relates to
>the history of a language or languages other than English. Candidates will
>need to have or acquire the presentational skills necessary for lectures,
>seminars and small group teaching, and the IT and organizational skills
>appropriate to departmental teaching and administration.
>
>Job Description
>The appointed candidate will be expected to contribute to the research,
>teaching (both undergraduate and postgraduate) and administration of the
>Department of Linguistics.
>        General particulars of appointment to posts of Lecturer refer to
>the duty to undertake research. In the Faculty of Arts it is a matter of
>policy that the capacity to fulfil that duty requires that care be taken by
>Heads of Department to ensure that the opportunity exists for staff to
>undertake research. Newly appointed staff in particular, serving a period
>of probation (normally up to four years), may expect to establish with
>their Head of Department appropriate arrangements for undertaking research
>activity and for publishing their results. A mentoring system also exists
>for new staff. In addition, probationary staff Reports on research activity
>undertaken by probationary Lecturers, compiled by various means including
>periodic appraisal by or for the Head of Department, will form a
>significant part of the information to be taken into account by the Faculty
>Review Committee and the Academic Promotions Committee in determining
>progress in probation, and in formulating their recommendations regarding
>the completion of probation.
>
>The Department of Linguistics
>The Department was rated 5 in the Research Assessment Exercise of 1996 and
>seeks to improve that score in the next Exercise. (If you are not familiar
>with this assessment system; there is one score, 5*, which is higher than
>5.) There are at present eight tenured and one temporary members of staff
>and three Research Fellows, whose names and research interests are set out
>below:
>
>Martin Barry    Lecturer        instrumental phonetics; forensic
>                                phonetics; Russian
>
>Susan Barry     Temp Lecturer   instrumental phonetics; child
>                                phonology Phonetics; Russian
>
>Delia Bentley   Research Fellow morphosyntactic change; Italian,
>                                Sicilian, Sardinian
>Kersti Borjars  Lecturer        syntax (HPSG, LFG); morphology;
>                                Swedish, Dutch
>William Croft   Reader          linguistic typology; semantics;
>                                cognitive linguistics;
>                                American Indian languages
>Alan Cruse      Senior Lecturer lexical semantics; pragmatics;
>                                cognitive linguistics; Arabic,
>                                Turkish
>Alan Cruttenden Professor       intonation theory; cross-linguistic
>                                and cross-dialectal intonations
>Thorhallur Eythorsson Research Fellow
>                                morphosyntactic change; Icelandic,
>                                Gothic, Tokharian
>Yaron Matras   Research Fellow  language contact; discourse pragmatics;
>                                Romany, Turkish, German, Kurdish
>John Payne     Senior Lecturer  syntax (Categorial Grammar);
>                                linguistic typology; English Grammar;
>                                Iranian Languages, Russian
>Katharine Perera  Professor     educational linguistics; the acquisition
>                                of reading and writing; stylistics
>Nigel Vincent   Professor       morphosyntactic change; morphology;
>                                Italian, Latin
>
>
>
>Professor Jacques Durand (Universiy of Toulouse) holds an Honorary Chair in
>Phonology in the Department, and is co-organizer of the annual Manchester
>Phonology Colloquium. The Department also has close links with the language
>specialists (Prof Richard Hogg, Prof David Denison, Dr Chris McCully) in
>the Department of English, and with Dr Wiebke Brockhaus in the Department
>of German.
>
>        The department currently hosts a British-Academy funded research
>project on Archaism and Innovation in the Languages of Europe jointly
>directed by Professors Vincent and Hogg. The researchers on thisproject are
>Drs Delia Bentley and Thorhallur Eythorsson. For more details about this
>project, visit the website at:  http://www.art.man.ac.uk/innovate/
>If appropriate, the successful candidate for the present post will have the
>opportunity to associate his/her research with this project, and to
>participate in activities that are organized under its aegis.
>
>        The Department has a programme of postgraduate courses which form
>in different ways the whole or the nucleus of various master's degrees,
>including ones linking the Department with language departments in the
>Faculty of Arts, with Psychology, Computer Science, and Mathematics (in the
>Faculty of Science), and with the Faculty of Education. There are currently
>13 Ph.D. students registered in the Department.
>        The Department is also involved in a large array of undergraduate
>degree programmes, including single honours linguistics and joint degrees
>with twelve other departments including Sociology and Social Anthropology.
>The Department also plays a role in the B.Sc. in Speech Pathology and
>Therapy and contributes to degrees in Combined Studies, besides having many
>students doing linguistics as a subsidiary subject.
>        The Department participates in a network in Linguistics under the
>Socrates scheme, involving exchanges with Amsterdam, Berlin, Gerona,
>Helsinki, Lund, Madrid, Naples, and Odense. Under the aegis of this
>programme a European M.A. exists whereby students who register in one
>country can do part of their degree in other countries. The Department also
>belongs to a Socrates programme in Phonetics.
>        The Department has its own Library and a Phonetics Laboratory,
>which has facilities for signal analysis, speech synthesis, laryngography,
>and electropalatography. Computation in the Department is primarily based
>on Macintosh; the Department's local area network runs over Ethernet and is
>connected to the campus backbone and thence to the Internet. A number of
>PCs are also available.
>        The Journal of the International Phonetic Association is edited
>from within the Department by Martin Barry.
>
>        The Department is a member of the North West Centre of Linguistics
>(NWCL), a collaborative body embracing all staff and postgraduate students
>in Linguistics in participating institutions in the North West. These
>currently include the Universities of Central Lancashire, Lancaster,
>Liverpool, Manchester, Salford, UMIST, and the University of Wales at
>Bangor. NWCL arranges seminars, conferences, workshops and
>inter-institutional postgraduate training.
>
>        More information about the Department and its activities can be
>obtained by consulting the following website: http://lings.ln.man.ac.uk/
>
>        Those invited for interview will be asked to give a presentation of
>their work to members of the Department. Applicants who require further
>information or who wish to discuss the details of the post are invited to
>contact either Prof Nigel Vincent (nigel.vincent at man.ac.uk,
>+44-(0)161-275-3194/3187) or the Head of Department, Mr John Payne
>(john.payne at man.ac.uk, +44 (0)161-275-3186/3187).
>
 
 
Nigel Vincent                  Tel: +44-(0)161-275 3194
Department of Linguistics      Fax: +44-(0)161-275 3187
University of Manchester       e-mail: nigel.vincent at man.ac.uk
Manchester M13 9PL              http://lings.ln.man.ac.uk/Html/NBV/
UK                               Visit our web-page:
                                http://lings.ln.man.ac.uk/


From DISTERH at UNIVSCVM.SC.EDU  Thu May  7 22:25:54 1998
From: DISTERH at UNIVSCVM.SC.EDU (Dorothy Disterheft)
Date: Thu, 7 May 1998 18:25:54 EDT
Subject: First Circular: ICHL XIV
Message-ID: <THU.7.MAY.1998.182554.EDT.DISTERH@UNIVSCVM.SC.EDU>

 First Circular
 
 ICHL XIV
 THE FOURTEENTH INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE
  ON HISTORICAL LINGUISTICS
 
 August 9-13, 1999
 
 The University of British Columbia
 Vancouver, B.C. Canada
 
PAPERS are invited on any topic in historical linguistics relating to any
language or language family. Papers which address the question of "Problems
for Historical Linguistics in the Twenty-first Century" are particularly
welcome.
 
DEADLINE for receipt of abstracts:   OCTOBER 15, 1998
 
FORMAT of abstracts: Abstracts of no more than 250 words should be sent
preferably via email (ASCII [text] file only), or one hard copy may be sent
by regular mail (disks are not required).
 
Proposals for WORKSHOPS or special sessions are also welcome.
Those wishing to organize a workshop should send their proposals to the
Conference Organizer by the end of JUNE 1998.
Workshop organizers are responsible for soliciting/inviting papers. One day
of the conference will be devoted to workshops.
A workshop on JAPANESE-KOREAN HISTORICAL/COMPARATIVE LINGUISTICS organized
by Ross King (Asian Studies, University of British Columbia) is already
planned.
 
 
Email address of conference: ichlxiv at interchg.ubc.ca
 
 
Conference Organizer
 Laurel Brinton
 Department of English
 #397-1873 East Mall
 University of British Columbia
 Vancouver, B.C. V6T 1Z1  CANADA
 FAX: (604) 822-6906
 
 
 
In order to receive the Second Circular, fill in and return (electronically)
the following form. (Since we plan to process addresses by computer, please
be certain to insert the requested information following the colon on each
line.)
__________________________________________________________
 
 
Surname:
 
First name:
 
Title:
 
University Affiliation:
 
Mailing address (line 1):
 
Mailing address (line 2):
 
Mailing address (line 3):
 
Email address:


From DISTERH at UNIVSCVM.SC.EDU  Fri May  8 13:13:25 1998
From: DISTERH at UNIVSCVM.SC.EDU (Dorothy Disterheft)
Date: Fri, 8 May 1998 09:13:25 EDT
Subject: ICHL circular
Message-ID: <FRI.8.MAY.1998.091325.EDT.DISTERH@UNIVSCVM.SC.EDU>

Dear collegues,
I'm very pleased at the response that the first circular for ICHL XIV
has prompted. I've forwarded the forms that I've received so far to
the ICHL Organizing Committee. However, you should send your completed
forms directly to Laurel Brinton at ichlxiv at interchg.ubc.ca (i.e. the
address provided on the circular) and not to me. If you have problems
doing this, I will be happy to receive your responses and to forward
them to the Organizing Committee.
 
Dorothy Disterheft
Secretary, ISHL


From delancey at darkwing.uoregon.edu  Sat May  9 16:30:52 1998
From: delancey at darkwing.uoregon.edu (Scott DeLancey)
Date: Sat, 9 May 1998 12:30:52 EDT
Subject: Paul 1880 vs. 1886 vs. 1920...; Bloomfield 1933/1965
In-Reply-To: <v02140b00b1739af26fc0@[128.97.208.90]>
Message-ID: <SAT.9.MAY.1998.123052.EDT.DELANCEY@DARKWING.UOREGON.EDU>

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
On Tue, 5 May 1998, bwald wrote:
 
> I guess the latest outcome for how historical linguistics relates to
> "synchronic" linguistics is restricted to such things as the problem of
> encountering something strange / unexpected  in the attempted description
> of some language.  In this case, we get interested in how the particular
> language or dialect acquired this strange property, and we start looking at
> its history.
 
A lot of people no longer think that that's all there is to it.
I (along with a long list of others) would argue that there is
in principle no way to understand a lot of facts about synchronic
structure except in terms of grammaticalization.  The fact, for
example, that syntactic categories are *normally* not airtight
and completely discrete.  How can there be any useful account of the
English "quasi-modals"--gonna, oughta, usta, etc.--that doesn't have
a clear diachronic dimension?
 
And it's been convincingly suggested (by Givon, Aristar, and my
humble self, and probably others) that many of the famous word-
order correlations are in fact just the synchronic projection
of diachrony.  Why do adpositions fall on the same side of their
NP as verbs do of their object?  Why, because adpositions commonly
originate diachronically in serialized transitive verbs.  There is
in fact no need for any synchronic account of this correlation (or
many of the others--and thus, inter alia, no need for much of X-
theory) apart from the very simple diachronic one.
 
For the most radical current argument along these lines, look at
Paul Hopper's "Emergent grammar", where the line between synchrony
and diachrony becomes invisible.
 
Although the field has let itself be convinced otherwise for the
last century, I think Paul was pretty close to the mark.
 
Scott DeLancey
Department of Linguistics
University of Oregon
Eugene, OR 97403, USA
 
delancey at darkwing.uoregon.edu
http://www.uoregon.edu/~delancey/prohp.html


From mcv at wxs.nl  Sat May  9 16:36:01 1998
From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal)
Date: Sat, 9 May 1998 12:36:01 EDT
Subject: Dixon's "The rise and fall of languages"
Message-ID: <SAT.9.MAY.1998.123601.EDT.>

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
 
I have just read R.M.W. Dixon's "The Rise and Fall of Languages"
(C.U.P. 1997), and I have found it deeply disturbing.  For two
completely different reasons.
 
The book (or essay) itself carries two separate messages.  One is an
attempt at a new theory of comparative linguistics.  The other is a
passionate plea for linguists to do what they should do, before it's
too late.
 
Thousands of languages will be irretrievably lost in the next hundred
years or so, and there is nothing we can do about it.  Dixon conveys
this disturbing message forcefully, while at the same time urging
us ('people who call themseleves linguists') to literally drop
everything and record the languages that are still extant NOW.
 
        The most important task in linguistics today  -- indeed, the
        only really important task -- is to get out in the field and
        describe languages, while this can still be done.  [Other
        things] can wait; that will always be possible.  Linguistic
        description must be undertaken now.
 
And:
 
        If this work is not done soon it can nver be done.  Future
        generations will then look back at the people who call
        themselves 'linguists' at the close of the twentieth and
        beginning of the twenty-first century, with bewilderment and
        disdain.
 
 
I don't know how this message could be conveyed more forcefully.  It
is with a sense of personal shame, as someone who unlike prof. Dixon
has never done fieldwork, that instead of turning to the Amazon
jungle I now turn to the other aspect of Dixon's book.
 
The new model that Dixon proposes, the "punctuated equilibrium
model", aims to integrate two distinct views on the development of
langage: the "family tree model", and various models based on areal
diffusion of linguistic pehenomena.
 
Dixon makes four basic assumptions:
 
1) Languages are always in a state of change
2) The rate of change is not constant and not predictable
3) Core vocabulary is not (universally) more resistent to change than
 
   "non-core" vocabulary
4) In the normal course of linguistic evolution, each language has a
   single parent
 
Assumption (4) denies the validity of the "rhizotic" models of
'glotto-genesis', at least "in the normal course of linguistic
evolution".  The existence of exceptions or apparent exceptions, like
mixed languages (Ma'a and Copper Island Aleut are reviewed) and maybe
creoles is acknowledged.
 
Assumptions (2) and (3) are aimed at lexicostatistics and
glottochronology as methods of linguistic classification and dating.
Unlike assumption (2), assumption (3) is surprising:
 
        This [greater stability of core vocabulary] does appear to
        hold for the languages of Europe [..] and of many other parts
        of the world.  But it does not apply everywhere [..]  In
        Australia, for instance, similar percentages of shared
        vocabulary are obtained by comparing 100 or 200 or 400 or
        2,000 lexemes, from adjacent languages.
 
Dixon reports evidence from New Guinea suggestive of the same
phenomenon.
 
Unlike, for instance, Malcolm Ross in his essay "Social networks and
kinds of speech-community event" (in: "Archaeology and Language I",
Roger Blench & Matthew Spriggs, eds., Routledge 1997), Dixon does not
give an exhaustive catalog of inguistic phenomena that are at odds
with the traditional model of the "family tree".  We are told that
"the family tree model was developed for -- and is eminently
appropiate to -- the Indo-European (IE) language family", that in
many parts of the world (Africa, Australia) no proto-languages have
been reconstructed [although in the case of Africa this is formulated
as "no attempt has been made" (p. 33), leaving us to wonder if the
fault is the comparative method's or the Africanists'], that
proto-languages [unlike real languages] are often too tidy and too
regular [?], that there is no linguistical method to assign dates to
proto-languages, that sub-grouping is often a problem, and that not
all sound-changes are recoverable (Appendix).
 
One argument that I hadn't seen before is given on pp. 29-30.  It is
based on the assumptions that PIE is 6,000 years old, and human
language 17 times as old as that, 100,000 years.  At the IE rate of
language split (100 IE lgs. in 6,000 years), that would have given
10^34 languages today (or even 10^60 at the Austronesian rate), when
in fact we only have 5,000.
 
        If we adopted a more modest rate of splitting, supposing that
        a language is likely to split into two languages every 6,000
        years, we would expect proto-Human to have given rose to2^17,
 
        or about 130,000, modern languages.  If we allow for a number
        of languages becoming extinct along the way, this would be a
        more reasonable number. [..] The lesson from these
        calculations is that language split and expansion on the
        scale that is put forward for the IE and Austronesian
        families is highly unusual.
 
Hold it right there.  Of course the expansions of IE and AN are
unusual. But do the numbers constitute an argument against the family
tree model?  Do they support the notion that "Language development
during the past 100,000 and more years has involved long periods of
equilibrium, with only the occasional punctuation"?  Dixon correctly
notes that the IE expansion in Australia and the Americas has been at
the expense of a 1,000 languages dead or dying.  We cannot just
"allow for a number of languages becoming extinct", we have to
include the extinctions in the mathematical model.  If that's not
done, the argument comes dangerously close to rejecting the "family
tree model" for rabbits because of the absurd rate of growth forecast
by the Fibonacci series.
 
Introducing the notion of "punctuated equilibrium" into linguistics
is an interesting idea.  I certainly agree with Dixon that certain
phenomena of language change (transitions between head and dependent
marking, certain kinds of phonological and lexical change, etc. can
and do take place in short periods of time), and that even the origin
of language itself might be adequately explained as a sudden
punctuation.
 
On the other hand, I'm deeply troubled by some of the unexplained
assumptions in Dixon's model.  Most importantly, Dixon's assertion
that a state of equilibrium is unobservable:
 
        European scientists have only ever been able to observe a
        time of punctuation since, wherever Europeans go (with their
        weapons and religions and writing), they effect a punctuation
        in the existing state of equilibrium
 
and:
 
        No equilibrium situation ever has been or ever could be
        observed by a scientist (although it can be readily
        reconstructed for Australia, and probably also for other
        parts of the world)
 
 
I'm also troubled by the notion of a "punctuation" that keeps going
on for "the last 2,000 years" (p. 4).
 
But let's allow these premises and see what difference they make in
practical terms for historical linguistics.
 
Dixon states the family tree model is only valid for periods of
punctuation, when a "proto-language" spreads out and diversifies into
a number of daughter languages.  After some time, equilibrium is
restored, and, within an area of diffusion, languages are repeatedly
said to "converge on a common prototype", regardless of their genetic
origin.  It is well known that phonology, lexicon and grammatical
categories are readily diffused.  Grammatical forms (morphemes) are
much more resistant, "but during periods of equilibrium there was
time-a-plenty (perhaps tens of millennia) and then grammatical forms
certainly were borrowed".  Language families "are slowly blurred" (p.
71).  "In time, the convergence will obscure the original genetic
relationships" (p. 96).  "Family membership ceases to be a useful
concept" (p. 99).  But, perhaps surprsingly, the languages in a
linguistic area in equilibrium do not merge (p. 71).  And most
surprisngly of all, when a new episode of punctuation ensues, and new
language families are created, Dixon warns that "the language family
may have emanated not from a single language, but from a small areal
group of distinct languages, with similar structures and forms".
This obviously undermines the very concept of a "genetic group", in
spite of Dixon's basic Assumption #4 that "each language has a single
parent".
 
In even more practical terms, Dixon reviews some concrete examples:
Austronesian (a classical case where the family tree model works
adequately in general), Australia and the Americas.
 
There is considerable controversy at the moment about the date of
earliest human settlement of the American continent.  There is
surprisingly little evidence for settlement before the Clovis horizon
of 12,000 BP, although a slightly earlier date (perhaps 16,000 or
20,000 BP) is now beginning to be accepted in archaeological circles.
 
The great linguistic diversity of the Americas, however, is a major
problem for linguists, and leaves only two options open: either to
accept the archaeological dates and to hell with the linguistics (my
assessment of Greenberg's "Language in the Americas"), or to posit a
more reasonable date for the initial settlement and to hell with
archaeology (my assessment of Johanna Nichols' argument for a
time-depth of c. 35,000 years, which I share).  Dixon, armed with his
model of punctuated equilibrium, sees no problem:
 
        [Nichols' argument].  I take a viewpoint that is
        diametrically opposed.  The fact that so many language
        families are recognisable indicates a relatively recent
        series of language splits, quite compatible with a
        12,000-20,000-year period.  Give the languages in the
        Americas another 20,000 years and the diffusional patterns
        that are now emerging would become far more pervasive.
 
Counterintuitive to say the least.
 
But, given the authors admission that "It was largely in order to
adequately account for the linguistic situation in Australia that I
had recourse to the idea of P.EQ. as a model for language
development", we should turn to Australia next.
 
The c. 260 languages of Australia show many similarities, and "have
been said to comprise a single language family".  One supposed
(sub-)family, Pama-Nyungan, covers about 85% of the continent.
However, neither for Pama-Nyungan (apparently [p. 91] a
lexicostatistic construct), nor for Australian as a whole have family
trees or proto-languages been succesfully set up.  "It is possible to
establish low-level subgroups in Australia -- groups of from two to a
dozen or so languages that appear to have a close genetic
relationship", but the usefulness of the family tree concept as far
as Australia goes is apparently so low, that Dixon does not even
bother to mention the number of distinct genetic groups.
 
 
        It is likely that the whole of Australia was populated within
        a few thousand years of the first colonisation, about 50,000
        BP.  Many scholars believe that all Australian languages
        belong to one linguistic family.  Assuming this hypothesis
        there are two alternative scenarios:
 
        (i) Proto-Australian, the putative ancestor of all the modern
        languages, was spoken by some of the first people in
        Australia, about 50,000 years ago.
 
        (ii) Modern Australian languages are descended from a proto-
        langugae that was spoken much more recently -- say, 10,000 or
        5,000 years ago.
 
Hypothesis (ii) is dismissed, because we do not find pockets or
substrates of non-Australian languages, and there is no plausible
mechanism (like agriculture) to explain the expansion.  "We are left
with scenario (i)":  rapid expansion (punctuation) throughout the
whole continent, followed by essentially 50,000 years of equilibrium
until the English invasion, during which time the Asutralian
languages gradually converged to "a common prototype".  This is, as
Dixon states, "the only model able to explain the relationships
between languages in Australia" (p. 68).
 
Is it?  One might object that New Guinea, settled at the same time as
Australia, and united to it by a land-bridge until c. 10,000 years
ago, despite some areal characteristics, and despite an attested
punctuation with the arrival of Austronesian-speakers maybe 4,000
years ago, shows a bewildering linguistic diversity, parallelled
nowhere on earth.  Dixon blames this on the mountainous character of
New Guinea (and, similarly, the Caucasus).  And then, how tranquil
was the Australian equilibrium during those 50,000 years?  On p. 92,
Dixon suggest that the low-level genetic groupings that he recognizes
in Australia arose during the last of possibly several cycles of
contraction of the population to the coast and main rivers during
periods of drought, followed by expansion when conditions improved.
Repeated episodes of contraction and expansion may well have blurred
the genetic affiliations of the Australian languages by the processes
described by Ross (loc.cit.), such as language/"linkage" fusion.
Elsewhere (note, p.76, we are told that the population of Tasmania,
part of Australia until 10,000 years ago, did not have axes,
spear-throwers, boomerangs or dingoes.  It seems to me that the
introduction of those items, after 10,000 BP, might have caused quite
a bit of punctuation (and incidentally makes a good candidate for
the mechanism of expansion required by scenario (ii) above).
 
Finally, Ross (op.cit, p. 244), mentions an important socio-cultural
factor, not mentioned by Dixon at all, which seems to be of the
utmost importance to explain the "blurring" of sound-correspondences,
and the consequent difficulty in establishing family trees and
proto-languages.  It bears repeating here.  The case has been
described for a group of related languages in southern New Caledonia:
 
        Because the south New Caledonian languages were closely
        related, there were once regular sound correspondences
        between their vocabularies.  Where speakers regularly used
        two or more lects, they had an intuitive grasp of some of
        these correspondences and used them to convert the
        phonological shapes of words from one lect to another.
        However, the speakers' intuitive correspondences and the real
        correspondences resulting from historical change often
        differed from each other.
 
The result of this "Volkskomparativismus" is that the
sound-correspondences are FUBAR, a complete mess.
 
        Similar situations to the one described for New Caledonia
        also occur in parts of Australia.  In traditional aboriginal
        Australia each person belonged to an exogamous patriclan and
        spoke its emblematic patrilect.  However, aboriginal
        Australians moved around hunting and gathering in bands whose
        members belonged to different patriclans.  A number of
        patrilects, often quite closely related to each other, were
        typically represented in a band, and band members spoke their
        own and other members' patrilects.  Their vocabularies seem
        to have been affected in much the same way as those of the
        south New Caledonian lects.
 
While this picture is not in itself incompatible with Dixon's state
of equilibrium, it offers the advantage of actually explaining why
and how some of the languages might have converged in a way that is
not readily tractable by traditional comparativist means.
 
 
Finally, a word of caution to linguists.  As Dixon states in his
introduction, "many groups of linguists may be offended by what is
said about their area of specialisation".  Africanists may not like
Dixon's assessment of their field on pp. 32-33.  If there are still
some lexicostatisticians/glottochronologists around (and Dixon
chastises on Australian member of the species) they won't like pp.
35-37.  "Armchair typologists" and linguists *talking* about
"endangered languages" are dealt with elsewhere.  The heaviest
criticisms, however, are reserved for two sub-species: the
formalists, and the Nostraticists.
 
Formal theories (Chomskyan or not) have a "typical half-life [of] six
to ten years", and "few formalists do attempt to write comprehensive
grammars of languages (which is just as well [..])", although some of
them do from time to time consult the descriptive gammars written by
"real linguists".  They are "like a group of 'surgeons', none of whom
has ever actually performed an operation, giving courses of lectures
on the principles of surgery".
 
Nostraticists (or 'Nostraticists' as Dixon calls them), especially of
the Russian kind "openly boasted (and still boast) that they are
cleverer than anyone who has come before" [reference?], their
theories are "palpable poppycock", and "they have put forward the
idea that the main thing to be considered when formulating a genetic
connection between two languages is lexemes" [no reference].  "There
is no reputable linguist [defined as "anyone who teaches the subject
at a leading university in the USA or in a EEC nation"], anywhere in
the world, who accepts the claims of Greenberg and the
Nostraticists".  If we accept Dixon's punk-eek model, "there could be
no tempation to perpetrate anything such as 'Nostratic'".
 
        These 'Nostraticists' purport to work in terms of the
        comparative method, by assembling cognate sets.  However,
        they achieve their results only by allowing excessive
        phonological and semantic leeway.  In the 'reconstructions',
        scarcely any vowels are specified (given just as V), N is
        often employed for an unspecified nasal, and so on.
 
Regrettably, Prof. Dixon, with this last remark, makes it painfully
clear that he has never so much as set eyes on Illich-Svitych's
Nostratic dictionary...
 
Apart from the unfounded accusations, the only reasoned critique
against the "Nostratic fallacy" in Dixon's book is the following:
 
        It is not sensible policy to try and compare the original
        proto-languages of language families, and attempt to
        reconstruct a  proto-proto-tableau.  Firstly, we have only an
        approximate idea of what a proto-language was like. Secondly,
        it may not have been one language, but instead a group of
        languages.  And thirdly, proto-languages or
        proto-linguistic-situations are likely to be the product of
        diffusional convergence, at the end of a period of
        equilibrium, rather than languages which result from a
        family-tree-type expansion and split.
 
Of course, to agree with objections (2) and (3), one has to buy into
Dixon's punctuated quilibrium model, which I'm not prepared to do
right now.  As to the first objection, well, let's do away with
archaeology and paleontology as well, then.
 
 
 
=======================
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
mcv at wxs.nl
Amsterdam


From manaster at umich.edu  Sat May  9 20:39:05 1998
From: manaster at umich.edu (manaster at umich.edu)
Date: Sat, 9 May 1998 16:39:05 EDT
Subject: Dixon's "The rise and fall of languages"
In-Reply-To: <3597be7c.190261651@news.wxs.nl>
Message-ID: <SAT.9.MAY.1998.163905.EDT.>

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
To my mind the really objectionable part of
Dixon's argument is that he makes assertions
w/o any documentation, about topics such as
Nostratic, Australian-Pamanyungan (whose unity
was proven years ago by Ken Hale), and Niger-Congo
in particular.  This of course has become quite
common in our field, but that does not make it
right.  The right way to argue about language
families one does want to accept is to go
into the specifics and show what one perceives
to be the problem, as Doerfer has done for years
in his critiques of Altaic or as I did with
ZUni-Penutian or as Campbell has done in his
critiques of my Pakawan work.  I find it
completely icomprhensible that publishers
and editors publish and that readers take
seriously flat assertions like Dixon's
about the three families mentioned w/o
asking "Excuse me, sir, but where exactly
is your beef".  The same applies to Doerfer's
repeated offhand dismisslas of Afroasiatic
Uralic and in one place even of IE (which
contrast with his excellent record in arguing
against Altaic), to much if not all of Janhunen's
and certainly Krippes' critiques of Altaic.
 
I do not marvel that people write such
stuff, I do that they get published and
even applauded.
 
AMR


From manaster at umich.edu  Sat May  9 20:39:34 1998
From: manaster at umich.edu (manaster at umich.edu)
Date: Sat, 9 May 1998 16:39:34 EDT
Subject: Language and Anthropology in the Americas
In-Reply-To: <3597be7c.190261651@news.wxs.nl>
Message-ID: <SAT.9.MAY.1998.163934.EDT.>

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
Miguel writes:
 
 
The great linguistic diversity of the Americas, however, is a major
problem for linguists, and leaves only two options open: either to
accept the archaeological dates and to hell with the linguistics (my
assessment of Greenberg's "Language in the Americas"), or to posit a
more reasonable date for the initial settlement and to hell with
archaeology (my assessment of Johanna Nichols' argument for a
time-depth of c. 35,000 years, which I share).
 
====
I dont understand the basis for this assessement.  One may not
accept Greenberg's linguistics (I myself am a moderately well
known critic of his Amerind work and indeed one of the few
who discuss the actual content of the work and not merely
methods or typographical etc. errors), but it is unfair to
say that he throws the lx overboard.  Instead, he argues for
alinguistic hypothesis which whether right or not is certainly
not worthy of casual  dismissal.  As for Nichols, her agument
crucially depends on teh assumption that the many language families
which most linguists do not regard as provably related are in
fact UNrelated. For if they are related, then Greenberg is
right and everybody goes home happy.  And of course the
assumoption that languages not known for a certainty to
be related are UNrelated is the most elementary kind of
mistake anyone can make when trying to do comparative
linguistics, and one which Eric Hamp in particular has done
much (though clearly not enough) to combat over the years.
 
AMR


From manaster at umich.edu  Sat May  9 20:40:13 1998
From: manaster at umich.edu (manaster at umich.edu)
Date: Sat, 9 May 1998 16:40:13 EDT
Subject: Paul 1880 vs. 1886 vs. 1920...; Bloomfield 1933/1965
In-Reply-To: <Pine.GSO.3.96.980508141250.20054F-100000@darkwing.uoregon.edu>
Message-ID: <SAT.9.MAY.1998.164013.EDT.>

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
 
 
On Sat, 9 May 1998, Scott DeLancey wrote:
 
[snip]
 
> And it's been convincingly suggested (by Givon, Aristar, and my
> humble self, and probably others) that many of the famous word-
> order correlations are in fact just the synchronic projection
> of diachrony.  Why do adpositions fall on the same side of their
> NP as verbs do of their object?  Why, because adpositions commonly
> originate diachronically in serialized transitive verbs.  There is
> in fact no need for any synchronic account of this correlation (or
> many of the others--and thus, inter alia, no need for much of X-
> theory) apart from the very simple diachronic one.
 
[snip]
 
Although I am always uncomfortable disagreeing with Scott, with
whom I think I see eye to eye on so many bigger issues, I am not
comfortable with this argument.  It does have some force, of course,
but it does not go nearly far enough.  Linguistic changes, if allowed
to go their merry way, would be capable of producing all kinds
of startling results.  For example, the attrition of various
word-final phonemes should have led, in French and in many other
languages, to the rise of synchronic systems in which many
grammatical categories (e.g., number or case) would be left
unexpressed in the vast majority of lexical items.  Instead,
usually either the categories themselves disappear (e.g.,
case in French nouns and indeed in most IE) or new ways
of marking them come out of the left field (like the plural
marking on articles and other prenominal words instead of
on the nouns themselves in French, the rise of adpositions
in place of vanished case marking in many languages, etc.).
Similarly, but without reference to sound change this time,
the loss of active verb forms in certain tenses or moods
in Indo-Iranian languages (and elsewhere) would seem to
lead to a system in which we would have no expresion of
active voice in those tenses or moods.  But instead what
we find is that the formerly passive forms which take over
are reinterpreted as active (and lo we have ergativity).
 
So, unless I am completely mistaken, there IS after all
some need for recognizing that certain logically possible
linguistic systems are not in fact possible or at least
are difficult to acquire or maintain, for some
psychological (for lack of a better term) reasons,
and that language changes which seem to be bound to
produce just such systems are either inevitably or
at least usually accompanied or followed in short
order by other changes which "fix" things up again.
Indeed, this seems to me to be the traditional view
of language change, going back to Saussure and other
Indo-Europeanists of that time.
 
As far as the order of adpositions and other function
words (conjunctions) is concerned, unless I am mistaken,
there are in fact well-known data indicating that in
situations where they end up in the "wrong" place
there is a strong tendency to "fix" the order.  If
memory serves, is it not the case that in Indo-Iranian
again (and in Ethiopian Semitic and elsewhere) we do
find languages which are OV but have inherited
prepositions or clause initial subordinating conjunctions
etc., and that there is a strong tendency (manifested,
predictably enough, much more in colloquial than in literary
languages) to "fix" this.  This is a sweeping generalization
of course and with many exceptions, but I think it is broadly
right.  And if so, then again we would seem to have to acknowledge
an invisible hand (alias UG or the like) which seems to
guide language change in the direction of replacing
systems that are impossible or unnatural by ones which
are possible or natural.
 
Or am I missing something?
 
AMR


From rjanda at midway.uchicago.edu  Sun May 10 12:53:50 1998
From: rjanda at midway.uchicago.edu (Richard Janda)
Date: Sun, 10 May 1998 08:53:50 EDT
Subject: Historical Linguistics Without Syn-chrony is Doomed to Di....
Message-ID: <SUN.10.MAY.1998.085350.EDT.RJANDA@MIDWAY.UCHICAGO.EDU>

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
 
[...With sincere apologies to G. E. Lessing...]
  "(Almost) no one will deny", implies Herr DeLancey, that 'there is in
principle no way to understand a lot of facts about synchronic structure
except in terms of grammaticalization'."
 
  Well, then:  I am that (almost) no one; I deny it thoroughly.  What ap-
pear to be diachronic grammaticalizational accounts of phenomena are in
fact essentially always just synchronically-based accounts involving two
or more different time periods.
 
  Further:  What is really "diachronic" (as opposed to synchronic) about
a child acquiring the VOT of voiced stops in English, say?  There have
to be voiced stops present in order for children to acquire them, but that
basically misses the point.  Similarly, English _dinner_ used to mean
'breakfast' (it's ultimately from Latin dis-jejun-are 'de-fast, break fast'),
but so what?  Paul's dictum--that you can't be scientific unless you're
diachronic--is just bad science, especially nowadays.  It seems as if
many grammaticalization theorists have leapt from the well-supported
conclusion that grammaticalization phenomena are characteristic of cer-
tain aspects of language to a more global but extremely premature and
ill-advised conclusion that the study of grammaticalization can essential-
ly replace grammar.
  Grammar doesn't always just emerge.  After it emerges, it often stays
around.  And Delancey's posting admits this:  e.g., it accepts that non-
discrete categories may continue to exist after emerging.
 
  As for myself, I seriously doubt whether any real mechanisms of lan-
guage change make reference to information or a vantage point which no
individual speaker could possess--like a perspective covering hundreds
or even thousands of years of language change.  (What linguists study
in order to collect their data is a different matter.)  If something is going
to keep a grammaticalization trend going over millennia, then it has to be
a chain of synchronic phenomena which are passed along in the manner
of a relay race.  An even better model for language transmission is a
children's "flip book" (the forerunner of motion pictures on film), in
which something that appears to move across one page is in fact really a
stack of distinct (albeit very similar) pages.
 
  It sounds so simplistic as to be platitudinous, but to deny it has conse-
quences that are fatal:
       Language change always takes place in the present, via synchronic
     mechanisms.  There are no diachronic "mechanisms"; there are only
     diachronic correspondences.  (The latter distinction has been most
     strongly emphasized by Henning Andersen.)
  But this has been said been said before, and well:  see especially Cose-
riu 1988 ("'Linguistic Change Does Not Exist'", reprinted in J. Albrecht
(ed.), _Energeia und Ergon..., Band I... [der] Schriften von Eugenio
Coseriu (1965-1987)_, pp. 147-157).
 
  There are, of course, idealizations involved here--e.g., in labeling data
collected over a period of 10 years as "synchronic"--but this clearly con-
trasts with, e.g., Greenberg's study of Aramaic suffixal -a "over a peri-
od of approximately 3,000 years" [in Traugott & Heine (eds.) 1991:
301-314].  I.e., the grammaticalization literature is astoundingly weak
on *synchronically* documented (non-reconstructional) studies where
*all* major stages are attested, even though the mechanisms involved
are admittedly going on around us all the time.  Some exceptions which
do focus on current synchrony are Romaine & Lange 1991 (in _Ameri-
can Speech_, on English _like_) and Joyce Tang Boyland's recent UC
Berkeley dissertation (which includes a focus on English would have).
But it's going to be a long time before centuries-long grammaticalization
as a sequenced complex of phenomena will have been truly established
empirically (though surely this will eventually happen).
  Hence one thing in particular bears emphasizing:  many studies which
claim to motivate grammaticalization theory in fact actually presuppose
it, because they rely crucially on unattested stages filled in using recon-
structions arrived at thanks to--you guessed it--grammaticalization theo-
ry.  "Don't disturb my circles!", indeed....
 
  The only time when anything ever happens is the present.  Think about
it:  the past is gone--or, rather, it exists only in present memory (or is
presently in the ground)--and the future isn't here yet.  Even if speakers
realize language change by pursuing functional teleologies, such goals
are synchronically present.  Synchrony is alive and well.  In the study
of change in the past, it is the only thing that has a future....
  The trouble with Paul's assumption that science must be diachronic is
that, as they say, "It's turtles all the way down".  Where do we stop?
Eventually, we reach phenomena we haven't observed, and then we
have to guess (and, at that point, our history can no longer be very
sure).  Then we realize that we're relying on *synchronic* typology as a
touchstone, anyway.
 
  To dwell on non-discrete categories is a red herring.  The reason why
non-discrete categories exist is that synchronic language-systems allow
them.  To conclude otherwise (by retreating into diachrony as the main
source for non-discreteness) is to be unnecessarily concessive to the
other side (the one that demands discreteness).  E.g., New Mexico
Spanish speakers at some point reanalyzed certain instances of the 1.pl.
verb-affix -mos as the bound-root subject clitic =nos (a degrammaticali-
zation showing an upgrading:  affix > clitic), whereas there were previ-
ously no personal subject-clitics in the dialect (though _se_ can be con-
sidered an impersonal subject-clitic).  The result was a ragged system
(with only =nos as a personal subject-clitic), but the people who inno-
vated it must obviously have thought that it was a possible organization
of human language.  And they certainly weren't just "grammaticalizing"
(cf. Janda 1995, in _CLS 31_, pp. 119-139, plus references there).
 
 This all ties in with one of Miguel Carrasquer Vidal's points in his post-
ing about Dixon's new book:  that many linguists lament the death of
undescribed languages without being willing to do anything to stop it
(through language description or language maintenance efforts).  Yes, I
accept the children's adage that, when you point one finger at someone
else, you're pointing three fingers at yourself.  But, still, what if even
just half of us refocused on the study of language change, including
grammaticalization correspondences, via a closer and longer-term look
at linguistic phenomena that are going on now?  Isn't that the real way to
understand grammaticalization?  Historical linguistics doesn't have to be
historic linguistics.
  Even Paul had something to say about variation and then-current inno-
vations in Modern German, and he himself accepted discrete categories
like inflection vs. derivation (and compounding).  In fact, his "Ueber
die Aufgaben der Wortbildungslehre" proposed a version of so-called
"blocking" (such that lexical particularities preempt general rules) in
1896 (published in 1897 as part of the _Sitzungsberichte_ ... [of the
Royal Bavarian Academy of Sciences for] 1896, pp. 692-713), though
Panini was much earlier on this one.
 
  We always have a/the present; we always have time.  And now is the
time to study grammaticalization--or perhaps also now and then.  But
not just/mainly then....  A historical linguistics that doesn't recongnize
syn-chrony is doomed to di....
 
[Some other references:
  Joseph, Brian  & Janda 1988 ("The How and Why of Diachronic Mor-
     phologization and Demorphologization", in Hammond & Noonan
     (eds.), _Theoretical Morphology_, pp. 193-210).
  Janda 1997-MS ("Beyond 'Pathways' and 'Unidirectionality':  On the
     Discontinuity of Language Transmission and the Reversibility of
     Grammaticalization").
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
 - - - - - - - - -
          Richard Janda


From mcv at wxs.nl  Sun May 10 12:54:33 1998
From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal)
Date: Sun, 10 May 1998 08:54:33 EDT
Subject: Language and Anthropology in the Americas
In-Reply-To: <Pine.SOL.3.95.980509135615.21585D-100000@frogger.rs.itd.umich.edu>
Message-ID: <SUN.10.MAY.1998.085433.EDT.>

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
Alexis (manaster at umich.edu) wrote:
 
>Miguel writes:
>
>The great linguistic diversity of the Americas, however, is a major
>problem for linguists, and leaves only two options open: either to
>accept the archaeological dates and to hell with the linguistics (my
>assessment of Greenberg's "Language in the Americas"), or to posit a
>more reasonable date for the initial settlement and to hell with
>archaeology (my assessment of Johanna Nichols' argument for a
>time-depth of c. 35,000 years, which I share).
>
>====
>I dont understand the basis for this assessement.  One may not
>accept Greenberg's linguistics (I myself am a moderately well
>known critic of his Amerind work and indeed one of the few
>who discuss the actual content of the work and not merely
>methods or typographical etc. errors), but it is unfair to
>say that he throws the lx overboard.
 
The "assessment" was of course deliberately charged.  (I don't think
it's *fair* to say that Johanna Nichols dismisses archaeology
either).
 
>Instead, he argues for
>alinguistic hypothesis which whether right or not is certainly
>not worthy of casual  dismissal.  As for Nichols, her agument
>crucially depends on teh assumption that the many language families
>which most linguists do not regard as provably related are in
>fact UNrelated.
 
I have not read the article in 'Language', but it seems to me that
the underlying assumption is that the Amerind languages ARE related,
but at a time-depth of c. 35,000 years (or at least that there was a
relatively small number of genetic units on entry, say half a dozen
or less).
 
I *have* read "Language in the Americas", and for whatever it's worth
(I have no first hand experience with any American Indian language),
the impression I got was that Greenberg had plainly failed to make a
convincing case for Amerind.  That doesn't mean that Amerind *is*
invalid, of course.  But considering that the time-depth of
Proto-Afro-Asiatic might well be 10-12,000 years, I think
(impressionistically!) that the odds that Amerind is a genetic unit
at a comparable time-depth are very small indeed.  Whether the real
time-depth is 20 or 50,000 years is anybody's guess, and depends
largely on work that has yet to be done (how much more than 3 and how
much less than 58+17+118 is the real number of "medium-range" genetic
units in the Americas?).
 
 
=======================
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
mcv at wxs.nl
Amsterdam


From manaster at umich.edu  Sun May 10 12:55:16 1998
From: manaster at umich.edu (manaster at umich.edu)
Date: Sun, 10 May 1998 08:55:16 EDT
Subject: Language and Anthropology in the Americas
In-Reply-To: <355ecc4c.259343860@mail.wxs.nl>
Message-ID: <SUN.10.MAY.1998.085516.EDT.>

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
My own view (based on I think not insignificant
1st-hand experience with American languages as well
as Old World ones) is that it is impossible to
overstate the extent to which American Indian lx
lags behind the Old World linguistics (always
with the exception of work by Bloomfield, Sapir,
and sometimes Whorf).  There are hundreds at least
linguists working on IE (and God knows there are
many unsolved problems there for them to work on) alone,
while in the Americas, esp. when it comes to comparative
work and even more so classificatory work, we are talking
of dozens or hundreds of languages per linguist.
Take Uto-Aztecan.  There are two people alive that
I know of who have worked on its possible external
connections to other language families, aside from
Greenberg, for a total of I think three published
papers over a period of decades, within UA, more
people work on Nahuatl than all the other languages
put together, and most of this is synchronic,
literary, or detail work.  There are very few
people doing comparative work across the family
as a whole.  In addition, despite all teh descriptive
work, we still do not possess adequate data for most
languages.  For many body part terms even, I canot
find ut what the word is in many if not most UA
languages.  The amount of info we have on Sanskrit,
Latin, Greek, and perhaps even such poorly attested
languages as Hittite vastly exceeds what we know
of almost any Amerindian language, so there is
a very severe limit on what we have to compare.
It was only a few years ago, with UA linguistics
entering its second century, that I found out
from a very obscure source the Tubatulabal word
for 'tear', for example.  Nor are teh gaps just
lexical.  We lack descriptions of the morphophonemics
of most languages, and bear in mind that morphophonemics
is by its nature usually a repository of information
about the past stages of teh phonology.
 
The Austerlitz-Nichols position, which Miguel seems
to be adopting, seems to be (this is expliclity
stated by Austerlitz) based on the assumption that
the opposite is teh case, that is, that American
Indian languages HAVE been investigated as fully
as Old World ones and that if there were easy
linguistic relationships to be found (say comparable
to IE or Uralic in depth) they would have been found.
As I say, Austerlitz says this explicitly, but this
is just absolutely incorrect.  I do not know
(aside from Haida-Nadene, Pakawan, and Pakawa-
Karankawan) just how many such relationships
have in fact been staring us in the face without
being found and acknowledged, but it is clear
that nothing even remotely approaching the amount
of work done on Old World problems has been
done here.  We are in the Americas at the stage
where Strahlenberg (whom Jakobson called the
father of comparative linguistics) entered
the arena of classifying the non-IE languages
of Northeastern Eurasia in the early 18th century.
 
Of course, we must always make that exception for
Sapir, but there again after 1920 or so
Sapir stopped providing adequate documentation for
his classificatory proposals, and so all his
proposals from that time on are in need of
reexamination from scratch.
 
So anybody who assumes that the universally accepted
language families of the New World can be compared to
those of the old and that consequently any lumping
to be done in the New World would be the moral
equivalent of Altaic or Nostratic is just ignoring
the whole history of the field.  Most recognized
New World families are the size of Romance or Slavic
or less.
 
AMR
 
On Sat, 9 May 1998, Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote:
 
[snip]
>
> I *have* read "Language in the Americas", and for whatever it's worth
> (I have no first hand experience with any American Indian language),
> the impression I got was that Greenberg had plainly failed to make a
> convincing case for Amerind.  That doesn't mean that Amerind *is*
> invalid, of course.  But considering that the time-depth of
> Proto-Afro-Asiatic might well be 10-12,000 years, I think
> (impressionistically!) that the odds that Amerind is a genetic unit
> at a comparable time-depth are very small indeed.  Whether the real
> time-depth is 20 or 50,000 years is anybody's guess, and depends
> largely on work that has yet to be done (how much more than 3 and how
> much less than 58+17+118 is the real number of "medium-range" genetic
> units in the Americas?).
>


From mcv at wxs.nl  Sun May 10 18:33:49 1998
From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal)
Date: Sun, 10 May 1998 14:33:49 EDT
Subject: Language and Anthropology in the Americas
In-Reply-To: <Pine.SOL.3.95.980509185149.25036A-100000@joust.rs.itd.umich.edu>
Message-ID: <SUN.10.MAY.1998.143349.EDT.>

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
Alexis (manaster at umich.edu) wrote:
 
[on the difficulties of doing American Indian lxs, and the lack of
both human and material resources]
>
>The Austerlitz-Nichols position, which Miguel seems
>to be adopting, seems to be (this is expliclity
>stated by Austerlitz) based on the assumption that
>the opposite is teh case, that is, that American
>Indian languages HAVE been investigated as fully
>as Old World ones and that if there were easy
>linguistic relationships to be found (say comparable
>to IE or Uralic in depth) they would have been found.
 
But that's exactly what I was *not* saying:
 
>On Sat, 9 May 1998, Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote:
>
>> Whether the real
>> time-depth is 20 or 50,000 years is anybody's guess, and depends
>> largely on work that has yet to be done
 
i.e. there is still much work to be done...  You have explained this
in rather more detail.
 
>> (how much more than 3 and how
>> much less than 58+17+118 is the real number of "medium-range" genetic
>> units in the Americas?).
 
i.e. the genetic units that are currently recognized (the numbers are
from Campbell's "American Indian Languages") are mostly the
equivalent of Old World "short-range" families (Germanic, Slavic...).
 
Greenberg's Amerind is the "moral equivalent" of Nostratic (in the
sense that it's definitely "long-range"), although given the fact
that Nostratic is based on more or less regular sound
correspondences, it isn't equivalent in any formal sense, nor *can*
it be: the Nostratic theory is based on the further comparison of
"medium-range" (IE, Uralic, AA) language family reconstructions, and
in the Americas, with few exceptions, we don't have those
"medium-range" families, and we don't have the reconstructions.
 
 
=======================
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
mcv at wxs.nl
Amsterdam


From manaster at umich.edu  Sun May 10 21:40:44 1998
From: manaster at umich.edu (manaster at umich.edu)
Date: Sun, 10 May 1998 17:40:44 EDT
Subject: Language and Anthropology in the Americas
In-Reply-To: <3555b8e4.48763632@mail.wxs.nl>
Message-ID: <SUN.10.MAY.1998.174044.EDT.>

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
I dont think that the concept 'long-range' is meaningful.
Afro-Asiatic and Uralic are no less diverse internally
than Altaic, but the former are universally accpeted
(except by Doerfer) while the latter is considered by
some to be in the 'long-range' category.  As for Nostratic,
without AA (as Starostin, Greenberg and some others would
like to see it), it ends up being not all that internally
diverse either.  And as for Amerind, first, I don't
think that there is any basis any more for critiquing
it (or any theory) for lack of regular correspondences.
A few years ago people could plead ignorance of teh history
of language classification and thus maintain the dogma
that relations are estblished on the basis of regular
correspondences and nothing more or less.  I would have
thought that such work as mine and Sidwell's on the
early history of language classification and mine
on the Sapir era would have helped put an end to this.
If not, then perhaps Lyle Campbell's recent publications
on N. American classification or Goddard's 1979 paper
on the Comecrudan language family would be enough.
I think Ives and Lyle are as well-regarded splitters
as anyone, but it is clear that they do not take
regular correspondences to be necessary and Ives
at least has always argued that they are not enough
either (because he says you need morphology).
 
Note well that I am defending Greenberg's Amerind
as such, but to say that it is no good for lack
of regular correspondences tabulated in a neat
little chart is definitely not acceptable in 1998
as it may once have been. Heck, I am pretty sure
I used to say this--before I learned better.
 
AMR
 
On Sun, 10 May 1998, Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote:
 
>
> Greenberg's Amerind is the "moral equivalent" of Nostratic (in the
> sense that it's definitely "long-range"), although given the fact
> that Nostratic is based on more or less regular sound
> correspondences, it isn't equivalent in any formal sense, nor *can*
> it be: the Nostratic theory is based on the further comparison of
> "medium-range" (IE, Uralic, AA) language family reconstructions, and
> in the Americas, with few exceptions, we don't have those
> "medium-range" families, and we don't have the reconstructions.
>
>
> =======================
> Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
> mcv at wxs.nl
> Amsterdam
>


From manaster at umich.edu  Mon May 11 20:08:29 1998
From: manaster at umich.edu (manaster at umich.edu)
Date: Mon, 11 May 1998 16:08:29 EDT
Subject: Munro on Greenberg
In-Reply-To: <Pine.GSO.3.96.980511121817.20731A-100000@darkwing.uoregon.edu>
Message-ID: <MON.11.MAY.1998.160829.EDT.>

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
I apologize for not having posted the reference to teh
article by Pam Munro I praised repeatedly in a recent
posting on Greenberg's Amerind theory.  I have it now:
 
"Gulf and Yuki-Gulf," AL vol. 36, no. 2 (1994), pp. 125-222.
 
AMR


From delancey at darkwing.uoregon.edu  Mon May 11 19:53:37 1998
From: delancey at darkwing.uoregon.edu (Scott DeLancey)
Date: Mon, 11 May 1998 15:53:37 EDT
Subject: Paul 1880 vs. 1886 vs. 1920...; Bloomfield 1933/1965
In-Reply-To: <Pine.SOL.3.95.980509140408.21585E-100000@frogger.rs.itd.umich.edu>
Message-ID: <MON.11.MAY.1998.155337.EDT.DELANCEY@DARKWING.UOREGON.EDU>

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
On Sat, 9 May 1998 manaster at umich.edu wrote:
 
> As far as the order of adpositions and other function
> words (conjunctions) is concerned, unless I am mistaken,
> there are in fact well-known data indicating that in
> situations where they end up in the "wrong" place
> there is a strong tendency to "fix" the order.  If
> memory serves, is it not the case that in Indo-Iranian
> again (and in Ethiopian Semitic and elsewhere) we do
> find languages which are OV but have inherited
> prepositions or clause initial subordinating conjunctions
> etc., and that there is a strong tendency (manifested,
> predictably enough, much more in colloquial than in literary
> languages) to "fix" this.
 
I don't know the facts here--my understanding is that the "fixing"
generally involves, not erstwhile prepositions changing their position,
but the innovation of new postpositions.  If so, this is exactly what
one would expect.  New adpositions--in fact, new anything--must
arise from existing structures, and if the existing structures from
which they can arise are head-initial, then the new structures will
be head-initial.
    If there are cases of "remediation" in which preexisting adpositions
actually change their position, I would be very interesting in details
or references.
 
> This is a sweeping generalization
> of course and with many exceptions, but I think it is broadly
> right.  And if so, then again we would seem to have to acknowledge
> an invisible hand (alias UG or the like) which seems to
> guide language change in the direction of replacing
> systems that are impossible or unnatural by ones which
> are possible or natural.
 
"Invisible hand" is a very appropriate metaphor here--the original
concept, in economics, refers not to some teleological force
which guides change in certain directions, but to apparent patterns
produced by the mechanical operation of local tendencies.
 
Scott DeLancey
Department of Linguistics
University of Oregon
Eugene, OR 97403, USA
 
delancey at darkwing.uoregon.edu
http://www.uoregon.edu/~delancey/prohp.html


From Roger.Wright at liverpool.ac.uk  Mon May 11 17:36:05 1998
From: Roger.Wright at liverpool.ac.uk (Roger Wright)
Date: Mon, 11 May 1998 13:36:05 EDT
Subject: Dixon's "The rise and fall of languages"
In-Reply-To: <3597be7c.190261651@news.wxs.nl>
Message-ID: <MON.11.MAY.1998.133605.EDT.ROGER.WRIGHT@LIVERPOOL.AC.UK>

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
 
 
But language splits need never occur at all.
It still seems important to realize that under normal circumstances
languages only "split" when the relevant groups of speakers are
mostly out of contact with each other (and not necessarily even then).
Greek has changed, but it is still one language, Greek, for the speakers
are still in contact with each other.
        The only reason I know of for exceptions to this are in literate
communities, where different areas might start writing in different ways
(this is what precipitated the conceptual split of what we now think of
as being separate Romance languages, for example). The Carrasquer Vidal
- Manaster Ramer discussion seeems not to refer to literate communities,
so it seems sensible to point out that if we find out that relevant
groups are still physically together, over whatever length of time, we
would not expect a split at all.
                                                RW
 
 
 
 
On Sat, 9 May 1998, Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote:
>
>One argument that I hadn't seen before is given on pp. 29-30.  It is
>based on the assumptions that PIE is 6,000 years old, and human
>language 17 times as old as that, 100,000 years.  At the IE rate of
>language split (100 IE lgs. in 6,000 years), that would have given
>10^34 languages today (or even 10^60 at the Austronesian rate), when
>in fact we only have 5,000.
>
>        If we adopted a more modest rate of splitting, supposing that
>        a language is likely to split into two languages every 6,000
>        years, we would expect proto-Human to have given rose to2^17,
>        or about 130,000, modern languages.  If we allow for a number
>        of languages becoming extinct along the way, this would be a
>        more reasonable number. [..] The lesson from these
>        calculations is that language split and expansion on the
>        scale that is put forward for the IE and Austronesian
>        families is highly unusual.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
>
>Hold it right there.  Of course the expansions of IE and AN are
>unusual. But do the numbers constitute an argument against the family
>tree model?  Do they support the notion that "Language development
>during the past 100,000 and more years has involved long periods of
>equilibrium, with only the occasional punctuation"?  Dixon correctly
>notes that the IE expansion in Australia and the Americas has been at
>the expense of a 1,000 languages dead or dying.  We cannot just
>"allow for a number of languages becoming extinct", we have to
>include the extinctions in the mathematical model.  If that's not
>done, the argument comes dangerously close to rejecting the "family
>tree model" for rabbits because of the absurd rate of growth forecast
>by the Fibonacci series.
>
>Introducing the notion of "punctuated equilibrium" into linguistics
>is an interesting idea.  I certainly agree with Dixon that certain
>phenomena of language change (transitions between head and dependent
>marking, certain kinds of phonological and lexical change, etc. can
>and do take place in short periods of time), and that even the origin
>of language itself might be adequately explained as a sudden
>punctuation.
>
>On the other hand, I'm deeply troubled by some of the unexplained
>assumptions in Dixon's model.  Most importantly, Dixon's assertion
>that a state of equilibrium is unobservable:
>
>        European scientists have only ever been able to observe a
>        time of punctuation since, wherever Europeans go (with their
>        weapons and religions and writing), they effect a punctuation
>        in the existing state of equilibrium
>
>and:
>
>        No equilibrium situation ever has been or ever could be
>        observed by a scientist (although it can be readily
>        reconstructed for Australia, and probably also for other
>        parts of the world)
>
>
>I'm also troubled by the notion of a "punctuation" that keeps going
>on for "the last 2,000 years" (p. 4).
>
>But let's allow these premises and see what difference they make in
>practical terms for historical linguistics.
>
>Dixon states the family tree model is only valid for periods of
>punctuation, when a "proto-language" spreads out and diversifies into
>a number of daughter languages.  After some time, equilibrium is
>restored, and, within an area of diffusion, languages are repeatedly
>said to "converge on a common prototype", regardless of their genetic
>origin.  It is well known that phonology, lexicon and grammatical
>categories are readily diffused.  Grammatical forms (morphemes) are
>much more resistant, "but during periods of equilibrium there was
>time-a-plenty (perhaps tens of millennia) and then grammatical forms
>certainly were borrowed".  Language families "are slowly blurred" (p.
>71).  "In time, the convergence will obscure the original genetic
>relationships" (p. 96).  "Family membership ceases to be a useful
>concept" (p. 99).  But, perhaps surprsingly, the languages in a
>linguistic area in equilibrium do not merge (p. 71).  And most
>surprisngly of all, when a new episode of punctuation ensues, and new
>language families are created, Dixon warns that "the language family
>may have emanated not from a single language, but from a small areal
>group of distinct languages, with similar structures and forms".
>This obviously undermines the very concept of a "genetic group", in
>spite of Dixon's basic Assumption #4 that "each language has a single
>parent".
>
>In even more practical terms, Dixon reviews some concrete examples:
>Austronesian (a classical case where the family tree model works
>adequately in general), Australia and the Americas.
>
>There is considerable controversy at the moment about the date of
>earliest human settlement of the American continent.  There is
>surprisingly little evidence for settlement before the Clovis horizon
>of 12,000 BP, although a slightly earlier date (perhaps 16,000 or
>20,000 BP) is now beginning to be accepted in archaeological circles.
>
>The great linguistic diversity of the Americas, however, is a major
>problem for linguists, and leaves only two options open: either to
>accept the archaeological dates and to hell with the linguistics (my
>assessment of Greenberg's "Language in the Americas"), or to posit a
>more reasonable date for the initial settlement and to hell with
>archaeology (my assessment of Johanna Nichols' argument for a
>time-depth of c. 35,000 years, which I share).  Dixon, armed with his
>model of punctuated equilibrium, sees no problem:
>
>        [Nichols' argument].  I take a viewpoint that is
>        diametrically opposed.  The fact that so many language
>        families are recognisable indicates a relatively recent
>        series of language splits, quite compatible with a
>        12,000-20,000-year period.  Give the languages in the
>        Americas another 20,000 years and the diffusional patterns
>        that are now emerging would become far more pervasive.
>
>Counterintuitive to say the least.
>
>But, given the authors admission that "It was largely in order to
>adequately account for the linguistic situation in Australia that I
>had recourse to the idea of P.EQ. as a model for language
>development", we should turn to Australia next.
>
>The c. 260 languages of Australia show many similarities, and "have
>been said to comprise a single language family".  One supposed
>(sub-)family, Pama-Nyungan, covers about 85% of the continent.
>However, neither for Pama-Nyungan (apparently [p. 91] a
>lexicostatistic construct), nor for Australian as a whole have family
>trees or proto-languages been succesfully set up.  "It is possible to
>establish low-level subgroups in Australia -- groups of from two to a
>dozen or so languages that appear to have a close genetic
>relationship", but the usefulness of the family tree concept as far
>as Australia goes is apparently so low, that Dixon does not even
>bother to mention the number of distinct genetic groups.
>
>
>        It is likely that the whole of Australia was populated within
>        a few thousand years of the first colonisation, about 50,000
>        BP.  Many scholars believe that all Australian languages
>        belong to one linguistic family.  Assuming this hypothesis
>        there are two alternative scenarios:
>
>        (i) Proto-Australian, the putative ancestor of all the modern
>        languages, was spoken by some of the first people in
>        Australia, about 50,000 years ago.
>
>        (ii) Modern Australian languages are descended from a proto-
>        langugae that was spoken much more recently -- say, 10,000 or
>        5,000 years ago.
>
>Hypothesis (ii) is dismissed, because we do not find pockets or
>substrates of non-Australian languages, and there is no plausible
>mechanism (like agriculture) to explain the expansion.  "We are left
>with scenario (i)":  rapid expansion (punctuation) throughout the
>whole continent, followed by essentially 50,000 years of equilibrium
>until the English invasion, during which time the Asutralian
>languages gradually converged to "a common prototype".  This is, as
>Dixon states, "the only model able to explain the relationships
>between languages in Australia" (p. 68).
>
>Is it?  One might object that New Guinea, settled at the same time as
>Australia, and united to it by a land-bridge until c. 10,000 years
>ago, despite some areal characteristics, and despite an attested
>punctuation with the arrival of Austronesian-speakers maybe 4,000
>years ago, shows a bewildering linguistic diversity, parallelled
>nowhere on earth.  Dixon blames this on the mountainous character of
>New Guinea (and, similarly, the Caucasus).  And then, how tranquil
>was the Australian equilibrium during those 50,000 years?  On p. 92,
>Dixon suggest that the low-level genetic groupings that he recognizes
>in Australia arose during the last of possibly several cycles of
>contraction of the population to the coast and main rivers during
>periods of drought, followed by expansion when conditions improved.
>Repeated episodes of contraction and expansion may well have blurred
>the genetic affiliations of the Australian languages by the processes
>described by Ross (loc.cit.), such as language/"linkage" fusion.
>Elsewhere (note, p.76, we are told that the population of Tasmania,
>part of Australia until 10,000 years ago, did not have axes,
>spear-throwers, boomerangs or dingoes.  It seems to me that the
>introduction of those items, after 10,000 BP, might have caused quite
>a bit of punctuation (and incidentally makes a good candidate for
>the mechanism of expansion required by scenario (ii) above).
>
>Finally, Ross (op.cit, p. 244), mentions an important socio-cultural
>factor, not mentioned by Dixon at all, which seems to be of the
>utmost importance to explain the "blurring" of sound-correspondences,
>and the consequent difficulty in establishing family trees and
>proto-languages.  It bears repeating here.  The case has been
>described for a group of related languages in southern New Caledonia:
>
>        Because the south New Caledonian languages were closely
>        related, there were once regular sound correspondences
>        between their vocabularies.  Where speakers regularly used
>        two or more lects, they had an intuitive grasp of some of
>        these correspondences and used them to convert the
>        phonological shapes of words from one lect to another.
>        However, the speakers' intuitive correspondences and the real
>        correspondences resulting from historical change often
>        differed from each other.
>
>The result of this "Volkskomparativismus" is that the
>sound-correspondences are FUBAR, a complete mess.
>
>        Similar situations to the one described for New Caledonia
>        also occur in parts of Australia.  In traditional aboriginal
>        Australia each person belonged to an exogamous patriclan and
>        spoke its emblematic patrilect.  However, aboriginal
>        Australians moved around hunting and gathering in bands whose
>        members belonged to different patriclans.  A number of
>        patrilects, often quite closely related to each other, were
>        typically represented in a band, and band members spoke their
>        own and other members' patrilects.  Their vocabularies seem
>        to have been affected in much the same way as those of the
>        south New Caledonian lects.
>
>While this picture is not in itself incompatible with Dixon's state
>of equilibrium, it offers the advantage of actually explaining why
>and how some of the languages might have converged in a way that is
>not readily tractable by traditional comparativist means.
>
>
>Finally, a word of caution to linguists.  As Dixon states in his
>introduction, "many groups of linguists may be offended by what is
>said about their area of specialisation".  Africanists may not like
>Dixon's assessment of their field on pp. 32-33.  If there are still
>some lexicostatisticians/glottochronologists around (and Dixon
>chastises on Australian member of the species) they won't like pp.
>35-37.  "Armchair typologists" and linguists *talking* about
>"endangered languages" are dealt with elsewhere.  The heaviest
>criticisms, however, are reserved for two sub-species: the
>formalists, and the Nostraticists.
>
>Formal theories (Chomskyan or not) have a "typical half-life [of] six
>to ten years", and "few formalists do attempt to write comprehensive
>grammars of languages (which is just as well [..])", although some of
>them do from time to time consult the descriptive gammars written by
>"real linguists".  They are "like a group of 'surgeons', none of whom
>has ever actually performed an operation, giving courses of lectures
>on the principles of surgery".
>
>Nostraticists (or 'Nostraticists' as Dixon calls them), especially of
>the Russian kind "openly boasted (and still boast) that they are
>cleverer than anyone who has come before" [reference?], their
>theories are "palpable poppycock", and "they have put forward the
>idea that the main thing to be considered when formulating a genetic
>connection between two languages is lexemes" [no reference].  "There
>is no reputable linguist [defined as "anyone who teaches the subject
>at a leading university in the USA or in a EEC nation"], anywhere in
>the world, who accepts the claims of Greenberg and the
>Nostraticists".  If we accept Dixon's punk-eek model, "there could be
>no tempation to perpetrate anything such as 'Nostratic'".
>
>        These 'Nostraticists' purport to work in terms of the
>        comparative method, by assembling cognate sets.  However,
>        they achieve their results only by allowing excessive
>        phonological and semantic leeway.  In the 'reconstructions',
>        scarcely any vowels are specified (given just as V), N is
>        often employed for an unspecified nasal, and so on.
>
>Regrettably, Prof. Dixon, with this last remark, makes it painfully
>clear that he has never so much as set eyes on Illich-Svitych's
>Nostratic dictionary...
>
>Apart from the unfounded accusations, the only reasoned critique
>against the "Nostratic fallacy" in Dixon's book is the following:
>
>        It is not sensible policy to try and compare the original
>        proto-languages of language families, and attempt to
>        reconstruct a  proto-proto-tableau.  Firstly, we have only an
>        approximate idea of what a proto-language was like. Secondly,
>        it may not have been one language, but instead a group of
>        languages.  And thirdly, proto-languages or
>        proto-linguistic-situations are likely to be the product of
>        diffusional convergence, at the end of a period of
>        equilibrium, rather than languages which result from a
>        family-tree-type expansion and split.
>
>Of course, to agree with objections (2) and (3), one has to buy into
>Dixon's punctuated quilibrium model, which I'm not prepared to do
>right now.  As to the first objection, well, let's do away with
>archaeology and paleontology as well, then.
>
>
>
>=======================
>Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
>mcv at wxs.nl
>Amsterdam
>


From Katachumen at aol.com  Mon May 11 17:30:09 1998
From: Katachumen at aol.com (Katachumen)
Date: Mon, 11 May 1998 13:30:09 EDT
Subject: Dixon's "The rise and fall of languages"
Message-ID: <MON.11.MAY.1998.133009.EDT.KATACHUMEN@AOL.COM>

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
In a message dated 5/10/98, 3:29:50 PM, mcv at wxs.nl writes:
<<
 
        It is likely that the whole of Australia was populated within
        a few thousand years of the first colonisation, about 50,000
        BP.  Many scholars believe that all Australian languages
        belong to one linguistic family.  Assuming this hypothesis
        there are two alternative scenarios:
 
        (i) Proto-Australian, the putative ancestor of all the modern
        languages, was spoken by some of the first people in
        Australia, about 50,000 years ago.
 
        (ii) Modern Australian languages are descended from a proto-
        langugae that was spoken much more recently -- say, 10,000 or
        5,000 years ago. >>
 
In regards to Australia  we should remember that the continent was not in fact
isolated from the rest of Indo-Asia until the end of the last Ice Age, when
the strait between the continent and New Guinea once again became submerged.
Until then the continent was open to migration from New Guinea (which would
explain the possibility that Tasmanian was an Indo-Pacific language, since
Tasmania was also linked to Austrailia). and New Guinea itself was accessible
from the rest of the Indonesian "peninsula".
For the Australian languages linguistic maps show the region of greatest
diversity to be on the northwest coast (only here are the non-Pamanyungen
languages found), and this area was relativity isolated during the
Paleolithic, since the Outback, during the Ice Ages, was a hyperarid desert\,
like the Rub'al-Khali today. I think it's at least possible that the
Australian proto-language could have evolved in this isolated setting, largely
separated from the rest of the continent (and from New Guinea), and after the
end of the Ice Age, when the continent became isolated, the Pamanyungen
speakers gradually spread across the rest of the continent (since the Outback
became somewhat wetter and able to support human life). The hypothetical other
inhabitants of Australia, related to the Papuans, would have gradually become
absorbed into the Australian population, or may also have been decimated by
diseases introduced to them by the long-isolated Australians and the stress of
climate change (except for newly-isolated Tasmania, where an Indo-Pacific-
speaking population survived until modern times.)


From manaster at umich.edu  Mon May 11 16:55:05 1998
From: manaster at umich.edu (manaster at umich.edu)
Date: Mon, 11 May 1998 12:55:05 EDT
Subject: Language and Anthropology in the Americas
In-Reply-To: <35602f78.79124076@mail.wxs.nl>
Message-ID: <MON.11.MAY.1998.125505.EDT.>

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
 
 
On Sun, 10 May 1998, Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote:
 
> The real reason that I reject Amerind is not its lack of sound
> correspondences.  John Bengtson has published sound-correspondences
> between North Caucasian and Basque, and I'm afraid I must reject that
> too.  The real reason is that I have read the evidence as presented,
> and I didn't like it.  I've read the evidence presented by
> Illich-Svitych for Nostratic, and I liked it.  I have not seen the
> evidence for Altaic, so I don't know if I like it.
It is hard to reject Altaic and accept Nostratic, actually
I think it is impossible, except in the technical sense
that you could reject Altaic as a valid node within Nostratic.
>I can explain
> what I like about Nostratic, but this is neither the time nor the
> place.
Actually, I think it would be interesting to have you expand on
this.  I myself have massive doubts about Nostratic but continue
to be sympathetic.
>It is much harder to explain the opposite reaction (apart
> from errors of fact etc.).  It is largely gut, I'm afraid.  That's
> why it's so difficult to have a fruitful discussion about these
> matters.  But we can try...
I dont see why it is hard to say what one does not like about
a proposed theory.  My own reaction to Greenberg is as follows:
 
(a) I like to break a problem up.
(b) Start with Nadene-Haida, which is a manageable chunk.
Greenberg responds in some detail to the critiques of this
connection and he is mostly right but he makes it seem as
though we did not need do anything beyond what Sapir
himself considered merely a "provisional" argument and
indeed has nothing whatever to add.  That is very disturbing
to me (and in my paper on the subject I did try to go beyond
Sapir and I also sketched a research program for doing even more
which I would like one day to undertake).  For one thing, much
of the data Sapir relied on was unreliable for Tlingit and
Haida both, and I at least tried to see what happens if
you look at corrected data I got from the best experts
on these two languages.  But Greenberg did nothing, so that
bothered me.
(c) I then reasoned that as far as Amerind is concerned,
Greenberg's mass comparison can at best mean that most
of these languages are related; it simply cannot mean
that every last one is.  This is actually a simple logical
consequence of using n-ary comparison (comparing n languages
all together), btu I could never get Greenberg to see this,
so THAT bothered me.
(d) Furher, I wanted to break Amerind down into some
manageable pieces too.
(e) One thing I thought was to find test cases, languages
which either have a long-standing history of being difficult
to classify or occur along the Nadene-Amerind frontier or
both. Tonkawa and Zuni qualified immediately. And so I
looked at them and realized that Tonkawa looks more Nadene
than Amerind using Greenberg's methods, and ZUni looks
no more Amerind than it does IE.  Greenberg;s response
to my initial publication on this did not still my
doubts, to say the least, but I am waiting for a response
to my much more detailed argument in IJAL.
(f) I then realized that the other and probably more
significant thing to do is forget about Amerind and
check each of Greenberg's proposed daughters of Amerind,
but I got sick before I could do this. However,
Pam Munro has done one such study and her results
seem to me to very interesting. Indeed, it is the
single most important study of the topic.
(g) I was puzzled by the fact that Greenberg
did not comment on the fact that in earlier
work he hd excluded Oto-Manguean from Amerind,
which would make this a particular interesting
case.
(h) I was like so many others disturbed to some
extent by Greenberg not using teh best or the
most recent data, although I am not convinced that
this is a crucial problem.
(i) I thought Greenberg's teratement of morphology
was suggestive but a bit cavalier.
 
On the other hand, I found almost all critiques
of Greenberg to be either methodological grandstanding
by people who have not done enough work on language
classification or studied the history of the field
enough and who were inventing a mythical "Comparative
Method" which never existed.  It also struck me
that the spate of publications correcting minor
or not so minor factual errors was not very
useful because it did not address the question of
whether the errrors were numerous enough to matter.
I myself did tackle this qustion for Zuni and
Tonkawa and found that the percentahe of errors
was not significant.  I was also struck by how
Greenberg's critics were no better than him at
picking selected test cases and seeing what they
really tell us.  The very fact that no critic
to my knowledge looked at the Tonkawa or Zuni
orOto-manguean question or at such proposed
daughters of Amerind as Central Amerind suggested
(and I said this in IJAL) that they were interested
merely in scoring points and not in classifying the
languages of the Americas.
 
As for Nostratic, it is true that I-S proposed
a mess of sound laws, but there are so many
problems that I do not see it as clearly
more convincing than Amerind.  For ex.,
it is striking that all teh kinship terms
posited for Nostratic are those for in-laws,which
would more natural to find in the case of borrowings
than inherited vocabulary, on the assumption of
exogamy. The sound laws are shaky, and there is
all maner of inconsistency.  For ex., the IE
word for 'milk' has the wrong velar but I-S
did not care.  In reality, as I have argued,
it is much more likely that it was borrowed
from Afro-Asiatic than that it is a cognate of
the AA and Uralic forms.  The sound laws, in
addition to being ignored as in the case just
mentioned, are quite shaky. Serebrennikov
was right to say that I-S took the Altaic
vowel system and the Kartvelian consoannts
and put them together to give us Nostratic
phonology.  And so on.
 
Of course, as I have written in several
places (most recently in JIES), I-S's
critics have been no better than Greenberg's,
except for Brent Vine, but he only deals
with IE and so does not really address
the real issues.
 
So as for me I am stuck in teh uncomfortable
position of not having any way to decide
about either Amerind or Nostratic, simply
because the relevant work has not been
done, except for little bits here and there,
and again Pam Munro's work on a part of
Amerind comes to mind. There is no
comparable work on ANY part of Nostratic,
and to that extent at least one migth say
that Amerinda is BETTER off than Nostratic,
since a significant part of it has been
tested and approved by a major indepenednt
scholar.  I dont think my work on Nostratic
or anybody else's even comes close.
 
The true-believers in each case totally
ignore all the problems and proceed as though
both theories were proven.  The critics are
acting as though they were proven wrong (which
is logically impossible), and as though there
were no point trying to classify the languages
in question AT ALL.  And indeed with people
like Nichols and Ringe getting loud applause
for their claims that no classifications
beyond those which we now know are ever going to
be possible, it is not hard to understand why
that should be.
 
Alexis MR


From delancey at darkwing.uoregon.edu  Mon May 11 16:50:18 1998
From: delancey at darkwing.uoregon.edu (Scott DeLancey)
Date: Mon, 11 May 1998 12:50:18 EDT
Subject: Historical Linguistics Without Syn-chrony is Doomed to Di....
In-Reply-To: <199805092122.QAA09152@harper.uchicago.edu>
Message-ID: <MON.11.MAY.1998.125018.EDT.DELANCEY@DARKWING.UOREGON.EDU>

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
On Sun, 10 May 1998, Richard Janda wrote:
 
> [...With sincere apologies to G. E. Lessing...]
>   "(Almost) no one will deny", implies Herr DeLancey, that 'there is in
> principle no way to understand a lot of facts about synchronic structure
> except in terms of grammaticalization'."
 
Quite aside from the tone of this comment--which I don't understand,
but don't think I care for--I am at a loss to see how it is a useful
contribution to the argument.  It is, after all, not at all what I
said, which was:
 
> I (along with a long list of others) would argue that there is
> in principle no way to understand a lot of facts about synchronic
> structure except in terms of grammaticalization.
 
How one gets from "I and many others would argue" to "almost no one
will deny" is a mystery to me; in case anyone else might have been
tempted to this rather amazing leap, let me say for the record that,
despite my provincial isolation in a rural department where strange
beliefs may perhaps have taken hold, it certainly has not escaped my
attention that what I was suggesting in my post is still a minority view.
 
Much of the rest of Janda's post seems to be aimed at some straw man
that I'm afraid I don't recognize, but here and there it veers close
to somewhere where we might find common ground to stand and argue:
 
>   As for myself, I seriously doubt whether any real mechanisms of lan-
> guage change make reference to information or a vantage point which no
> individual speaker could possess
 
But that's not the point.  First--I'm not denying (whatever it may
have sounded like) that there are explanatory principles which afford
us nice theoretically grounded synchronic accounts of many facts about
language(s).  Second, I hope everyone accepts that there are
facts about any given language which from a synchronic point of view
are simply arbitrary, but which can be explained in historical
perspective.  Native speakers, of course, don't try to explain these,
or, when they do, they simply make up explanations.  (Of course, as we all
know, theoretical linguists who prefer to banish diachronic argument from
occasionally do the same thing).
    The point which I wanted to make (obviously I was too brief about
it) is that there are many facts, including some apparently systematic
facts about Language, which we have tried far too hard to account for
synchronically, when in fact the only explanatory account which can
be given for them is diachronic.
 
>   To dwell on non-discrete categories is a red herring.  The reason why
> non-discrete categories exist is that synchronic language-systems allow
> them.  To conclude otherwise (by retreating into diachrony as the main
> source for non-discreteness) is to be unnecessarily concessive to the
> other side (the one that demands discreteness).
 
No argument there--in fact, I'm inclined to suppose that "synchronic
language-systems" will allow just about anything.  But, nevertheless,
diachrony *is* in fact a significant source for non-discreteness.  Some
case studies:
 
        Bolinger, Dwight. 1980.  Wanna and the gradience of auxiliaries.
pp. 292-299 in G. Brettschneider and C. Lehmann, eds., Wege zur
universalien Forschung.  Tuebingen:  Gunter Narr.
        DeLancey, Scott.  1997. Grammaticalization and the gradience of
categories:  Relator nouns and postpositions in Tibetan and Burmese.  pp.
51-69 in J. Bybee, J. Haiman, and S. A. Thompson, eds., Essays on Language
Function and Language Type. Benjamins.
        Li, Charles, and Sandra Thompson. 1974. Co-verbs in Mandarin
Chinese: Verbs or prepositions? J. Chinese Linguistics 2.3:257-78.
 
 
Scott DeLancey
Department of Linguistics
University of Oregon
Eugene, OR 97403, USA
 
delancey at darkwing.uoregon.edu
http://www.uoregon.edu/~delancey/prohp.html


From mcv at wxs.nl  Mon May 11 16:48:03 1998
From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal)
Date: Mon, 11 May 1998 12:48:03 EDT
Subject: Language and Anthropology in the Americas
In-Reply-To: <Pine.SOL.3.95.980510165226.24625G-100000@qbert.rs.itd.umich.edu>
Message-ID: <MON.11.MAY.1998.124803.EDT.>

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
Alexis (manaster at umich.edu) wrote:
 
>Note well that I am defending Greenberg's Amerind
>as such, but to say that it is no good for lack
>of regular correspondences tabulated in a neat
>little chart is definitely not acceptable in 1998
>as it may once have been. Heck, I am pretty sure
>I used to say this--before I learned better.
 
Alexis, you are putting words into my mouth.  I merely commented on
the methodological differences between Nostratic and Amerind.  Is it
not a fact that Nostratic has sound correspondences, and Amerind
doesn't?
 
The real reason that I reject Amerind is not its lack of sound
correspondences.  John Bengtson has published sound-correspondences
between North Caucasian and Basque, and I'm afraid I must reject that
too.  The real reason is that I have read the evidence as presented,
and I didn't like it.  I've read the evidence presented by
Illich-Svitych for Nostratic, and I liked it.  I have not seen the
evidence for Altaic, so I don't know if I like it.  I can explain
what I like about Nostratic, but this is neither the time nor the
place.  It is much harder to explain the opposite reaction (apart
from errors of fact etc.).  It is largely gut, I'm afraid.  That's
why it's so difficult to have a fruitful discussion about these
matters.  But we can try...
 
 
=======================
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
mcv at wxs.nl
Amsterdam


From johanna at uclink.berkeley.edu  Tue May 12 21:02:24 1998
From: johanna at uclink.berkeley.edu (Johanna Nichols)
Date: Tue, 12 May 1998 17:02:24 EDT
Subject: Language and Anthropology in the Americas
In-Reply-To: <Pine.SOL.3.95.980509135615.21585D-100000@frogger.rs.itd.umich.edu>
Message-ID: <TUE.12.MAY.1998.170224.EDT.JOHANNA@UCLINK.BERKELEY.EDU>

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
AMR writes:
 
>  As for Nichols, her agument
>crucially depends on teh assumption that the many language families
>which most linguists do not regard as provably related are in
>fact UNrelated. For if they are related, then Greenberg is
>right and everybody goes home happy.
 
Not right.  My argument depends crucially on the assumption that the many
language families for which no probative evidence of relatedness has been
presented (despite the fact that such evidence has been sought by
comparativists) are SEPARATE STOCKS.  A stock (the term isn't crucial; this
is the one I use) is the oldest family-type grouping (clade in technical
phylogenetic terms) for which (a) genetic relatedness has been demonstrated
and (b) reconstruction of ancestral grammar, vocabulary, and sounds is
possible.  Some examples of stocks are:
 
        Semitic
        Chadic
        Basque
        Indo-European
        Uralic
        Austronesian
        Algic
        Yokutian (= Yokutsan + Miwok-Costanoan)
 
(A family deeper than the stock for which relatednes has been demonstrated
but reconstruction may well never be possible is Afroasiatic.  I would also
assign Indo-Uralic this kind of relatedness.)
 
I have estimated ages for large geographical groupings of languages,
notably those of the Americas, by determining the average greatest age for
stocks (ca. 6000 years) and the average number of initial branches of
stocks (about 1.5), and using those to calculate the number of 6000-year
'generations' (at 1.5 'offspring' per 'generation') required to give rise
to the present number of stocks.  In the case of the Americas I have also
estimated an immigration rate and computed the time required to give rise
to the present number of stocks by combined differentiation and
immigration.  Every time I have discussed this I have also calculated an
age based on only genetic differentiation and no immigration.  The ages I
get with these calculations are:
 
        * at least 20,000 years to form the American population of stocks
by differentiation and immigration; most recent calculation: ca. 40,000
 
        * over 50,000 years without immigration; most recent calculation:
at least 60,000
 
When discussing these figures I have made it clear that the second scenario
obtains if all the indigenous languages of the Americas are presumed to
descend from one ancestor, and the first scenario obtains if they descend
from several ancestors.  I have never maintained that each stock descends
from a separate immigrating ancestor; to my knowledge nobody has ever
advocated this; in fact it has been used by both Greenberg and myself as a
reduction ad absurdum showing the ludicrous consequences of assuming that
no deep genetic connections hold between the American stocks.
 
AMR gives a caricature of my position in the quote above.  My actual
position (in *Language* 66, 1990 and later work) is this:  If the languages
Greenberg groups together as "Amerind" descend from several ancestors, then
Greenberg is wrong.  If they descend (or are assumed to descend) from a
single ancestor, then Greenberg is wrong (because an immigration over
50,000 years ago is implausible, because just one immigration is
implausible, and because Greenberg explicitly claims an age of about 11,000
years for "Amerind").  (So anyone who assumes Greenberg is right about
"Amerind" must believe he is wrong about "Amerind".)
 
That is, I have always assumed deeper relatedness holds among the native
American language stocks.  And I believe my position is friendlier to
assumptions of deep genetic relatedness than either Greenberg's or AMR's
(or that of any long-range comparativist known to me).  My position is that
we can assume deeper relatedness exists and can work out rates of
diversification, immigration, etc. and therefore dates of colonization EVEN
BEFORE WE CAN IDENTIFY, MUCH LESS RECONSTRUCT, THE ANCESTORS and regardless
of the opinions of one's colleagues on the matter.
 
So no, I have never maintained that languages not now known or believed to
be related are all ultimately and completely UNrelated.  I don't think
anyone on earth believes this.  Of course no scientific linguist believes
it, but I don't think anyone else does either.  Even those who believe that
the world was created in its modern form in (what was it) 4004 BC by
deliberate design and without prior or subsequent evolution believe that
the modern languages descend from a single ancestor and that the
differentiation occurred after creation.  I mention this viewpoint not
because it is particularly relevant to scientific linguistics but by way of
showing how radical it is.  AMR, please stop attributing to your colleagues
a position that no scientific linguist takes and that even a radical
religious fundamentalist wouldn't take.
 
Johanna Nichols


From manaster at umich.edu  Tue May 12 15:38:38 1998
From: manaster at umich.edu (manaster at umich.edu)
Date: Tue, 12 May 1998 11:38:38 EDT
Subject: Dixon's "The rise and fall of languages"
In-Reply-To: <Pine.SOL.3.96.980511133436.8654D-100000@uxa.liv.ac.uk>
Message-ID: <TUE.12.MAY.1998.113838.EDT.>

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
 
 
On Mon, 11 May 1998, Roger Wright wrote to suggest that
"language splits need never occur at all" and that
"under normal circumstances languages only "split" when the relevant
groups of speakers are mostly out of contact with each other (and not
necessarily even then). Greek has changed, but it is still one language,
Greek, for the speakers are still in contact with each other" and
suggested that the counterexample that springs to mind, Romance,
is due to "writing in different ways".
 
Two things: first, there are splits between dialects which are
as clear as though between languages, whether in Greek (which I
do not know well) or in, say, Yiddish (which I do).  Second,
I cannot believe that anyone would take such radical
differences as exist between French and Portuguese say
as being due to writing in different ways.  Even in
the case of Yiddish, whose speakers have certainly been
in touch w/ e.o. over the centuries, I would think that
the dialects of Lithuania and Alsace would not have been
mutually comprehensible in the 19th or this century, so
that they would qualify as separate languages.
 
AMR


From Katachumen at aol.com  Tue May 12 14:50:00 1998
From: Katachumen at aol.com (Katachumen)
Date: Tue, 12 May 1998 10:50:00 EDT
Subject: Australian Languages
Message-ID: <TUE.12.MAY.1998.105000.EDT.KATACHUMEN@AOL.COM>

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
In a message dated 5/12/98, 4:27:55 AM, C.Bowern at student.anu.edu.au writes:
<<Please note that the name of the language family is Pama-Nyungan, NOT
Pamanyungen. The name is dervied from two of the words for 'man' (Pama and
Nyunga) which are found in many languages in Australia.
 
Incidentally, with the quality of material that exists on the Tasmanian
languages, I'm surprised that anyone can make any hypotheses about its
genetic affiliations at all. When there are only a few hundred words in
orthopgraphies that might represent anything it wouldn't be surprising if
there were "cognates" with every language family in the world.
 
Finally, although it is true that the Torres Strait has only been a Strait
since the last Ice Age, I believe that Tasmania was a separate island long
before that - certainly the comparative depths of Bass Strait and the
Torres Strait would support this. While this doesn't disprove the
Indo-Pacific theory, it makes the time at which Indo-Pacific immigrants
must have reached Tasmania considerably earlier).
>>
 
Well, I was simply following suggestions by others (Ruhlen et al.) about the
affinities of Tasmanian, and also following geological maps which do show
Tasmania appended to Australia during the Paleolithic.
But my main point was that we should question any hypothesis which suggests
that Australia was settled once and once only, c. 50000 BC, and then was
subsequently isolated from the rest of humanity until modern times. There is
no reason at all why this should be true, and good reason to think that the
continent remained accessible for resettlement throughout the Paleolithic.
Therefore we can not simply assume an age of 50000 years or so for Proto-
Australian.


From C.Bowern at student.anu.edu.au  Tue May 12 14:46:42 1998
From: C.Bowern at student.anu.edu.au (Claire Bowern)
Date: Tue, 12 May 1998 10:46:42 EDT
Subject: Australian Languages
Message-ID: <TUE.12.MAY.1998.104642.EDT.C.BOWERN@STUDENT.ANU.EDU.AU>

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
Please note that the name of the language family is Pama-Nyungan, NOT
Pamanyungen. The name is dervied from two of the words for 'man' (Pama and
Nyunga) which are found in many languages in Australia.
 
Incidentally, with the quality of material that exists on the Tasmanian
languages, I'm surprised that anyone can make any hypotheses about its
genetic affiliations at all. When there are only a few hundred words in
orthopgraphies that might represent anything it wouldn't be surprising if
there were "cognates" with every language family in the world.
 
Finally, although it is true that the Torres Strait has only been a Strait
since the last Ice Age, I believe that Tasmania was a separate island long
before that - certainly the comparative depths of Bass Strait and the
Torres Strait would support this. While this doesn't disprove the
Indo-Pacific theory, it makes the time at which Indo-Pacific immigrants
must have reached Tasmania considerably earlier).
 
Claire Bowern
 
 
_____________________________
Centre for Linguistic Typology
Australian National University,
ACT, 0200,  AUSTRALIA
Ph: +61 2 6249 2222


From bwald at HUMnet.UCLA.EDU  Tue May 12 14:43:32 1998
From: bwald at HUMnet.UCLA.EDU (bwald)
Date: Tue, 12 May 1998 10:43:32 EDT
Subject: Dixon's "The rise and fall of languages"
Message-ID: <TUE.12.MAY.1998.104332.EDT.BWALD@HUMNET.UCLA.EDU>

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
Roger Wright writes:
 
>- Manaster Ramer discussion seeems not to refer to literate communities,
>so it seems sensible to point out that if we find out that relevant
>groups are still physically together, over whatever length of time, we
>would not expect a split at all.
 
That's wrong.  Dialect diversification does not depend on loss of physical
or communicative contact.  Since such diversification is true of all
languages known, it is reasonable to assume that it has other causes, some
of which are fairly well understood now, e.g., social differentiation,
local identification, etc.  Also, if what Roger says were true, then the
historical notion that the *area* of greatest diversification is the most
likely origin of a particular language would be completely illogical.
 
Scott Delancey wrote:
 
>I (along with a long list of others) would argue that there is
in principle no way to understand a lot of facts about synchronic
structure except in terms of grammaticalization.  The fact, for
example, that syntactic categories are *normally* not airtight
and completely discrete.  How can there be any useful account of the
English "quasi-modals"--gonna, oughta, usta, etc.--that doesn't have
>a clear diachronic dimension?
 
The remarks I made about the relation between synchrony and diachrony to
which Scott addressed this were not meant to be all-inclusive, but a
minimum for which I felt there was a general consensus.  Meanwhile, Scott's
suggestion is not totally clear to me.  I don't understand what he means by
'*useful* accounts', unless it tautologically means 'useful' to him as a
historical linguist.  I don't really think that.  I think he has adopted a
point of view of (synchronic) grammar as diachronic pragmatics, putting
priority on pragmatics as an explanatory principle underlying "grammar",
where, I suppose, "grammar" is a conventionalised set of pragmatic
strategies  (Givon proposes something like that).
 
The issue was raised by Janda about whether synchronic applies to an
individual speaker in space and time, so that such a person is not privy to
historical deductions.  To me the interesting issue is that in many cases,
built into the speaker's unconscious "knowledge" of his/her language is a
great deal of the history and even imminent, as well as possible, future
directions of change.  This was advanced, for example, for the variable
constraints on copula deletion in Black English, synchronic reflexes of a
non-English type copula system, and a number of other cases, to which I
could add from my own research on linguistic residues in speech production,
e.g., some tense-markers I have studied in Mombasa Swahili; speakers use
them in speech in ways they are not aware of, but that reflect
*DE-grammaticalisation* of a distinction which can be deduced to have once
been obligatory in the earlier history of East Bantu.  For me, the boundary
between synchrony and diachrony is empirically problematic, and does not
reside in the difference between an individual speaker and the language
spoken by a larger community of speakers over more than an individual's
lifetime.
 
An example of the problem of synchrony vs. diachrony that I have been
recently studying has to do with NV compounds in English.  Until recently,
the received wisdom was that they arise by backformation from NN (e.g.,
NV-er/ing) and NA (e,g, NV-en/ing) compounds.  That is, as epiphenomena of
NN or NA compounds.  But more recent proposals are that NV has the same
status as NN and NA in synchronic analysis.  Neither position is obvious,
and, indeed, I think the different proposals reflect both a change in point
of view (from diachronic to synchronic) and an actual change in English
"productivity" of NV, to which these points of view are reacting.  There's
more to it, but you get the gist.
 
Next, Miguel quotes Dixon's:
        The most important task in linguistics today  -- indeed, the
        only really important task -- is to get out in the field and
        describe languages, while this can still be done.  [Other
        things] can wait; that will always be possible.  Linguistic
        description must be undertaken now.
 
One cannot argue with this to the extent that ANY description is better
than none, no matter how limited, cf. Etruscan and many others.  In fact,
at the present time I think there is division of labour such that some
linguists are better at describing languages than others, and that some of
the others are better at raising interesting issues about language and
languages which the language describers can use to make better and fuller
descriptions.  Obviously, no language has been or ever will be fully
described, nor will it ever be obvious what issues will emerge from
linguistic phenomena that we do not currently pay attention to but which
will turn out to be important.  I would even say that Dixon is good at both
description and theory, and has not by any means forsaken his theoretical
excursi in order to concentrate solely on preservation of endangered
languages, even at the risk of garbling information about languages he is
not familiar with.  By all means, go out and preserve undescribed
languages, but note the problems that arise, and whether "theory" can be
dispensed with.


From manaster at umich.edu  Wed May 13 20:31:01 1998
From: manaster at umich.edu (manaster at umich.edu)
Date: Wed, 13 May 1998 16:31:01 EDT
Subject: Language and Anthropology in the Americas
Message-ID: <WED.13.MAY.1998.163101.EDT.>

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
On Tue, 12 May 1998, Johanna Nichols wrote:
 
[snip]
>
> Not right.  My argument depends crucially on the assumption that the many
> language families for which no probative evidence of relatedness has been
> presented (despite the fact that such evidence has been sought by
> comparativists) are SEPARATE STOCKS.  A stock (the term isn't crucial; this
> is the one I use) is the oldest family-type grouping (clade in technical
> phylogenetic terms) for which  (a) genetic relatedness has been
> demonstrated
> and (b) reconstruction of ancestral grammar, vocabulary, and sounds is
> possible.
>
[snip]
>
> AMR gives a caricature of my position in the quote above.  My actual
> position (in *Language* 66, 1990 and later work) is this:  If the languages
> Greenberg groups together as "Amerind" descend from several ancestors, then
> Greenberg is wrong.  If they descend (or are assumed to descend) from a
> single ancestor, then Greenberg is wrong (because an immigration over
> 50,000 years ago is implausible, because just one immigration is
> implausible, and because Greenberg explicitly claims an age of about 11,000
> years for "Amerind").  (So anyone who assumes Greenberg is right about
> "Amerind" must believe he is wrong about "Amerind".)
 
With all due respect to Johanna, I think I was right because the
position I attribute to her is necessarily implicit in what she
says.  Much as she tries to reduce Greenberg's views ad absurdo
(in my viwe, quite incorrectly), I am doing the same with hers.
 
Indeed, unless she really holds, as Austerlitz (to whom
we must trace this approach) apparently did, that the Amerindian
stocks are unrelated, then the rest of what she says cannot be
maintained.  Thus I find a contradiction between her latest
statement, to wit, that
she is prepared to admit that they might be related and
her argument about the age of stocks and about the average
age of stocks.  In fact, I cannot admit that it is valid to talk about the
average age of a stock, defined as a group of languages where
(a) genetic relatedness has been demonstrated
and (b) reconstruction of ancestral grammar, vocabulary, and sounds is
possible.
 
POint (a) depends on what people accept at any given time.  Before
Uralic and Afroasiatic were accepted, the average was much lower
than it is today.  This is like trying to calcuate the murder
rate by counting how many people have been convicted of murder.
Point (b) is one where we have to somehow decide what is "possible".
Aha!   What is Nichols' basis for assuming that this is NOT possible
in the case of Amerind or say Nostratic?  This is where for her
argument to go through, she must assuming that Amerind (or
Nostratic) cannot be stocks.  For if they were, they could
be as young as 5K years!
 
Specifically, unless we assume that the reconstruction of
a Proto-Amerind is impossible, we must grant that
it may be possible.  And
if it is possible, then maybe it will be done.  And if so, then
the relatedness of these groups will be considered by most
linguists to have been "demonstrated".  And then her whole case
falls apart.  Which is why I said earlier that she is
committed to these language families being spurious.  If she
is not, then she is left adrift.  I hope that is clear enough.
 
But I would further like to ask how Prof. Nichols knows how
old Uralic or Chadic or any of her other "stocks" are. I have
spent more than a decade working on Uto-Aztecan and some years
working on Kartvelian or IE and I have no idea how old they
really are, except for some vague feeling about IE that it
must be quite a bit older than Vedic or Old Hittite but
yet not enormously much older. So what is the basis for the
dates she assumes?  I have not heard of any new way
of computing the ages of protolanguages since glotto-
chronology, which even Swadesh admitted was not always
right and which most of us surely think is often not
right.
 
So in effect Johanna seems to be comitted to the
unrelatedness of the Amerind languages or at the
very least to their relatednesss being impossible
in principle to demonstrate.  If she does not
hold this view, then I will be delighted, of course.
AMR


From rmccalli at MUW.Edu  Wed May 13 20:29:31 1998
From: rmccalli at MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister)
Date: Wed, 13 May 1998 16:29:31 EDT
Subject: Australian Languages
In-Reply-To: <63d80503.355851f6@aol.com>
Message-ID: <WED.13.MAY.1998.162931.EDT.RMCCALLI@MUW.EDU>

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
At 9:43 AM -0400 5/12/98, Katachumen wrote:
[snip]
>Well, I was simply following suggestions by others (Ruhlen et al.) about the
>affinities of Tasmanian, [snip]
 
        Greenberg, I've been told, came up with this idea but Greenberg's
latter work has been pretty controversial. Given that whoever the
Tasmanians' ancestors were, they almost certainly passed through New
Guinea, there probably is a genetic relationship between Tasmanian and New
Guinea languages but the question is whether or not it can be proved.
 
>But my main point was that we should question any hypothesis which suggests
>that Australia was settled once and once only, c. 50000 BC, and then was
>subsequently isolated from the rest of humanity until modern times.
 
[snip]
 
        I've read in various sources, among them Cavalli-Sforza, that there
were at least 3 different settlements of Australia. Cavalli-Sforza,
however, is about as controversial as Greenberg. His logic on that point
did make quite a bit of sense --by linking one of the migrations to
Australia to the arrival of the dingo, more advanced technology, etc.
        Now, the question is, why wouldn't Australian languages be more
closely related to languages from New Guinea than Tasmanian languages were?
Australia, according to what I've read, was settled from New Guinea. The
only other language group in the area is Malayo-Pacific and --as far as I
know-- no one claims that Australian is related to Malayo-Pacific.
        Yes, I'm being a bit disengenuous in light of the fact that
Malayo-Pacific arrived in that area  only a few thousand years ago or so.
But do we know what the linguistic state of New Guinea was 10,000 years ago
or so? Was there a language change with the arrival of cultivation, etc.?
 
 
Rick Mc Callister
W-1634
MUW
Columbus MS 39701
rmccalli at sunmuw1.muw.edu


From manaster at umich.edu  Wed May 13 14:37:53 1998
From: manaster at umich.edu (manaster at umich.edu)
Date: Wed, 13 May 1998 10:37:53 EDT
Subject: Dixon's "The rise and fall of languages"
In-Reply-To: <Pine.SOL.3.96.980513110728.2931C-100000@uxa.liv.ac.uk>
Message-ID: <WED.13.MAY.1998.103753.EDT.>

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
This is I certainly agree with.  At the of risk of offending
various people, it seems clear that the creation of literary
Macedonian, literary Belorussian, etc., were in part at
least responsible for the perception that they are independent
languages.  Scandinavian is probably also one language treated
as three because of this.  Hindi and Urdu, Serbian and Croatian
are other examples.  SO I think I (and perhaps Benji) were
reading too much into Roger's earlier remarks.  I am glad we
can come to agree or if we must disagree that we can do it
quite civilly.  But I would like to hear Roger's view of
exactly what he thinks happens with nonliterate languages.
 
AMR
 
On Wed, 13 May 1998, Roger Wright wrote:
>
> No, that isn't what I meant (and these differences are greater now than
> they were in the 12th century, of course); it's just that - under normal
> circumstances - a large amount of variation can be taken to be
> language-internal, within *a single* speech community, if there are
> communications between the speakers in different areas, and there's an
> unspoken consensus that such a community is indeed monolingual. English
> is now a good example; there are many differences between English in
> different places, granted, but I don't think there's a general movement
> to argue that the English of Jamaica, Pakistan, Somerset, New Zealand,
> etc., are actually different languages [yet]. Similarly Spanish, French,
> Chinese, in the modern world, are usually conceived of as being
> monolingual, despite wide internal variation (of a normal kind), and
> Romance seems to have been thought of as monolingual up to the late
> twelfth or early thirteenth century. But if, in -say- thirty years time
> English-speakers somewhere decided to reform their spelling, and it then
> seemed convenient to reform the spelling in different ways in different
> places, then we would have the conditions for splits in the language.
> (Essentially, that's what happened around the year 1200 in the Romance
> area). After that, of course, individual language changes can easily
> stay within the boundaries of the thus-demarcated split cognate
> languages, and the differences will accelerate, and isoglosses will
> bundle at political frontiers, as people in different places have
> different new politically-inspired stylistic standards to style-shift
> towards, which is why Romance differentiation could and did accelerate
> after that time.                      RW
>


From Roger.Wright at liverpool.ac.uk  Wed May 13 14:37:13 1998
From: Roger.Wright at liverpool.ac.uk (Roger Wright)
Date: Wed, 13 May 1998 10:37:13 EDT
Subject: Dixon's "The rise and fall of languages"
In-Reply-To: <v02140b08b17cf8619e54@[128.97.208.85]>
Message-ID: <WED.13.MAY.1998.103713.EDT.ROGER.WRIGHT@LIVERPOOL.AC.UK>

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
 
 
>>so it seems sensible to point out that if we find out that relevant
>>groups are still physically together, over whatever length of time, we
>>would not expect a split at all.
>
>That's wrong.  Dialect diversification does not depend on loss of physical
>or communicative contact.  Since such diversification is true of all
>languages known ....
 
Yes, of course. I wasn't referring to dialect diversification (that is,
*language-internal* variation of a normal kind) but to actual splits
between languages. Am I really the only person on the List to find
actual language *splits* (as opposed to obvious and normal dialect
diversification) inherently unlikely, and thus in need of some kind of
non-linguistic explanation?
                                RW


From Roger.Wright at liverpool.ac.uk  Wed May 13 14:36:26 1998
From: Roger.Wright at liverpool.ac.uk (Roger Wright)
Date: Wed, 13 May 1998 10:36:26 EDT
Subject: Dixon's "The rise and fall of languages"
In-Reply-To: <Pine.SOL.3.95.980512105415.5433A-100000@tempest.rs.itd.umich.edu>
Message-ID: <WED.13.MAY.1998.103626.EDT.ROGER.WRIGHT@LIVERPOOL.AC.UK>

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
 
Alexis says:
>I cannot believe that anyone would take such radical
>differences as exist between French and Portuguese say
>as being due to writing in different ways.
 
 
No, that isn't what I meant (and these differences are greater now than
they were in the 12th century, of course); it's just that - under normal
circumstances - a large amount of variation can be taken to be
language-internal, within *a single* speech community, if there are
communications between the speakers in different areas, and there's an
unspoken consensus that such a community is indeed monolingual. English
is now a good example; there are many differences between English in
different places, granted, but I don't think there's a general movement
to argue that the English of Jamaica, Pakistan, Somerset, New Zealand,
etc., are actually different languages [yet]. Similarly Spanish, French,
Chinese, in the modern world, are usually conceived of as being
monolingual, despite wide internal variation (of a normal kind), and
Romance seems to have been thought of as monolingual up to the late
twelfth or early thirteenth century. But if, in -say- thirty years time
English-speakers somewhere decided to reform their spelling, and it then
seemed convenient to reform the spelling in different ways in different
places, then we would have the conditions for splits in the language.
(Essentially, that's what happened around the year 1200 in the Romance
area). After that, of course, individual language changes can easily
stay within the boundaries of the thus-demarcated split cognate
languages, and the differences will accelerate, and isoglosses will
bundle at political frontiers, as people in different places have
different new politically-inspired stylistic standards to style-shift
towards, which is why Romance differentiation could and did accelerate
after that time.                        RW


From Harold.Koch at anu.edu.au  Wed May 13 14:28:40 1998
From: Harold.Koch at anu.edu.au (Harold Koch)
Date: Wed, 13 May 1998 10:28:40 EDT
Subject: Dixon's "The rise and fall of languages"
Message-ID: <WED.13.MAY.1998.102840.EDT.HAROLD.KOCH@ANU.EDU.AU>

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
On Australian languages:
A. Manaster Ramer wrote 9.5.98:
<...Australian-Pamanyungan (whose unity was proven years ago by Ken Hale)..
 
My understanding is that the Pama-Nyungan family was established in the
early 1960s on the basis on lexicostatistical percentages, backed up with
the implicit structural knowledge of the languages gained by the
classifiers O'Grady, Hale, and Wurm.>
 
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal writes, the same day:
<Dixon makes four basic assumptions:.....
3) Core vocabulary is not (universally) more resistent to change than
   "non-core" vocabulary.......
 assumption (3) is surprising:
        This [greater stability of core vocabulary] does appear to
        hold for the languages of Europe [..] and of many other parts
        of the world.  But it does not apply everywhere [..]  In
        Australia, for instance, similar percentages of shared
        vocabulary are obtained by comparing 100 or 200 or 400 or
        2,000 lexemes, from adjacent languages.>
 
In my opinion it has been demonstrated sufficiently by Paul Black that
assumption 3 is indeed valid for Australian languages (Black, Paul, 1997,
"Lexicostatistics and Australian languages: problems and prospects". In
Tryon, D. and Walsh, M. (eds), The boundary rider: Studies in Honour of
Geoffrey O'Grady. (Pacific Linguistics C-136) Canberra: Research School of
Pacific and Asian Studies, The Australian National University, 51-69).
 
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal further writes:
 
< One supposed (sub-)family, Pama-Nyungan, covers about 85% of the continent.
However, neither for Pama-Nyungan (apparently [p. 91] a
lexicostatistic construct), nor for Australian as a whole have family
trees or proto-languages been succesfully set up.  "It is possible to
establish low-level subgroups in Australia -- groups of from two to a
dozen or so languages that appear to have a close genetic
relationship", but the usefulness of the family tree concept as far
as Australia goes is apparently so low, that Dixon does not even
bother to mention the number of distinct genetic groups.>
 
Readers interested in further information on the historical-comparative
situation of Australian languages, including alternative interpretations to
those expressed in Dixon's Rise and Fall, might consult two books on
Australian comparative linguistics which  appeared last year:
McConvell, Patrick & Nicholas Evans (eds). 1997. Understanding ancient
Australia: perspectives from archaeology and linguistics. Melbourne: Oxford
University Press.
Tryon, Darrell and Michael Walsh (eds). 1997. The boundary rider: Studies
in Honour of Geoffrey O'Grady. (Pacific Linguistics C-136) Canberra:
Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, The Australian National
University.
 
I excerpt below some of the views I expressed in each:
 
On Proto-Pama-Nyungan:
"It can probably not be said yet that pPN has been reconstructed in as much
detail as O'Grady (above) suggested is necessary before Arandic cognates
can be exploited. The number of reliably reconstructed words is still
pretty meagre. Moreover, we lack a handy list of reconstructions: there is
no etymological dictionary available (although O'Grady's comparative files
surely contain the makings of such a work). We still lack a proper subgroup
structure for the Pama-Nyungan family. While this situation prevails, we
have no certainty as to what spread of languages permits a set of cognates
to be reconstructed for pPN, as opposed to a subgroup of Pama-Nyungan...."
 
(Koch, Harold. 1997b: "Pama-Nyungan reflexes in Arandic languages". In
Tryon, D. and Walsh, M. (eds), The boundary rider: Studies in Honour of
Geoffrey O'Grady. (Pacific Linguistics C-136) Canberra: Research School of
Pacific and Asian Studies, The Australian National University, 271-302:
quotation pp 273ff)
 
 
A summary of the results of comparative methods applied to Aust lgs (the
rest of the article is an exposition of the methods of comp ling for the
benefit or archaeologists et al):
 
"Results for Australian linguistic prehistory
 
Little comparative linguistic research in the sense we have been discussing
it took place on Australian languages before the twentieth century. Father
Wilhelm Schmidt, working from Vienna at the beginning of this century,
managed to recognise some of the low-level subgroups (Schmidt 1919). But
these are always fairly obvious because of the masses of shared vocabulary
and grammatical forms.
 
        Capell (1956) compiled a set of words which are widely distributed
over the continent, and called this vocabulary "Common Australian", without
making overt claims about what level of proto-language it could be ascribed
to. Capell (1956, 1962) also distinguished typological groupings of
Australian languages, and presented scenarios whereby languages of one type
might be transformed into another type (see also Wurm 1972). It is to him
that we owe the classification of languages into prefixing and
non-prefixing types, and various kinds of noun-classifying types.
 
        A systematic survey of Australian languages in the late 1950s by
O'Grady, Hale, and Wurm resulted in a tentative genetic classification,
based largely on lexicostatistical data, of all the languages of the
mainland (O'Grady, Voegelin and Voegelin 1966, Wurm 1972, Walsh 1981). For
the application of the methods, see O'Grady (1960), O'Grady and Klokeid
(1969), Hale (1962). The terminology of this classification has been widely
used ever since, even though the classification of particular languages has
been changed and some linguists have expressed scepticism about the methods
used in arriving at the classification. One of the main results was the
finding that a large family, labeled Pama-Nyungan, extended over most of
the mainland excluding most of the Top End and the Kimberleys. Within the
northern area, a great degree of diversity exists; the classification
enumerated as many as twenty-eight families. A discontinuity is found in
Arnhem Land, where the Yolngu languages of Northeast Arnhem Land belong to
the great southern Pama-Nyungan family, unlike all their neighbours in the
north. Another significant finding was the relative uniformity of the
languages of Western Australia south of the Kimberley area. They were all
assigned to the Nyungic subgroup. Another widespread subgroup Pama-Maric
extends from the tip of Cape York Peninsula to as far south as the New
South Wales border.
 
        There has been considerable disagreement over the extent to which
shared vocabulary can be used as a guide to genetic subgroups. Those
responsible for the lexicostatistical classification regard the sharing of
a relatively great amount of basic vocabulary as at least a tentative
support for the positing of close genetic relations, in particular of
Pama-Nyungan (Wurm 1972, O'Grady  1979, Hale 1982). On the other hand,
Dixon (1970a, 1972a, 1980) and Heath (1981) have claimed that borrowing
between neighbouring languages can render the method of lexicostatistics
totally unreliable. As mentioned above, however, Black (1979) has proposed
a method to control for the lexical distortion caused by borrowing. Dixon
(1972a, 1980:255) has proposed that through borrowing adjacent languages
will over time reach a point of equilibrium, sharing 40-60% of their
vocabulary with each other, regardless of the closeness of their genetic
relation. Alpher and Nash (1984ms) argue that Dixon has overestimated the
proportion of vocabulary replacement that is attributable to borrowing, and
hence that the equilibrium level may be much lower than that claimed by
Dixon. In fact, cognate percentages of 10% or less are often found in Top
End languages. Dixon (1972a) also claims that the practice of tabooing the
names of the recently deceased (and similar sounding words) leads to a
relatively rapid replacement of vocabulary through borrowing. Arguments
presented by Heath (1979:409), by Black (1980) and by Alpher and Nash
(1984ms) suggest that the consequences of taboo for the recognition of
genetic relations are not as severe as suggested by Dixon. In spite of
these disputes, however, most linguists would agree that verbs are replaced
by borrowing much less easily than nouns and adjectives, and that a high
level of sharing of verbs is therefore a more reliable indicator of a close
genetic relation between languages than figures that group all kinds of
vocabulary. Personal pronouns and basic body part terms are also relatively
stable historically, whereas terms for flora, fauna, material culture, and
human classification are much more prone to borrowing (Breen 1990).
Furthermore, all linguists put more reliance on agreements in grammatical
forms than on the sharing of vocabulary items.
 
        The comparative method has been applied with success to reconstruct
the history of phonologically aberrant languages of Western Australia
(O'Grady 1966, Austin 1981), Cape York Peninsula (Hale 1964, Sutton 1976,
Black 1980, Dixon 1991), New England (Crowley 1976 and This volume), and
Central Australia (Koch To appear). In many of these cases, certain
languages had undergone radical sound changes while close relatives
remained unchanged. Thus the proto-forms for a subgroup often turn out to
be identical to forms surviving intact in other languages of the subgroup.
 
        We have a fairly good idea about Proto-Pama-Nyungan structural
features. Dixon (1970, 1980) has written on the phonology of the
proto-language-- although Crowley (This volume) reminds us that this
phonology has not been reconstructed by the strict application of the
comparative method. Evans (1988) has contributed further insights through
the application of the comparative method. Dixon (1980) and Blake (1979,
1988, 1990b) have reconstructed the main features of pronouns and noun
inflections; Alpher (1990) has done the same for verb inflection. O'Grady
and his students are working on Proto-Pama-Nyungan vocabulary
reconstruction (see O'Grady and Tryon 1990; Fitzgerald and O'Grady, This
volume); we are nevertheless far from being able to supply lists of
thousands of reconstructed Proto-Pama-Nyungan lexical items, comparable to,
say, Proto-Oceanic.
 
        It must be admitted that as long as so much remains unreconstructed
in lower-level subgroups, and the relation of these subgroups to one
another remains unclear, our picture  of Pama-Nyungan as a whole is still
rather incomplete. There is some doubt as to how, and whether, all of the
languages of southeast Australia fit into Pama-Nyungan (Evans 1988, Blake
1991:50-52). One researcher, Dixon (1980 passim), even remains unconvinced
of the validity of Pama-Nyungan as a genetic construct.
 
        A considerable amount of comparative study has been undertaken
recently on the northern language groups. Blake (1990b) has compared
personal pronouns across all the non-Pama-Nyungan languages, suggesting
that they give evidence that all these languages are related to one another
more closely than to the Pama-Nyungan languages. The postulated genetic
diversity in the north is being reduced: in place of the twenty-eight
families of the original lexicostatistical classification we may see
ultimately as few as eight or ten major genetic groupings among the
non-Pama-Nyungan languages of north Australia. The forthcoming works by
Dixon et al., Evans, and I. Green will make available much more of the
results of recent comparative study of these languages.
 
        No one can say much at this stage about Proto-Australian, the
assumed ancestor of all the continental Australian languages. It is now
widely accepted that Dixon's "Proto-Australian" reconstructions apply more
appropriately to Proto-Pama-Nyungan. Nevertheless Blake (1988, 1990b)
tentatively reconstructs a Proto-non-Pama-Nyungan set of personal pronouns,
which he finds to be relatable as "sisters" to the reconstructed
Proto-Pama-Nyungan set. This implies that both of these groups have a
common ancestor, which could be called Proto-Australian. Many of the verb
roots that Dixon (1980) discusses, but not his reconstructed inflectional
systems, may likewise go back to a Proto-Australian (Heath 1990; Alpher
1990; Alpher, Evans and Harvey To appear).
 
        It appears that all the languages of mainland Australia are
genetically related. The languages of Tasmania are doubtful, and there is
too little evidence for us ever to be sure whether they were genetically
related to the languages spoken on the mainland at the time of European
colonisation (for a discussion of the evidence, see Crowley and Dixon
1981). Whether there is a genetic relationship with languages of Papua New
Guinea and/or Irian Jaya remains to be demonstrated, although Foley (1986)
attempted a comparison. It should be mentioned that many North Australian
languages share typological features with some of the these so-called
"Papuan" languages (see Nichols This volume).
 
        Several interesting geographical discontinuities between
genetically related languages cry out for a historical explanation. As
mentioned earlier, the Yolngu languages of Northeast Arnhem Land are
separated from the rest of their Pama-Nyungan congeners. Yanyuwa, on the
Gulf of Carpentaria, is now accepted as belonging to the Warluwarric
subgroup of Pama-Nyungan (cf. section 5.2), whose other members are found
in West Queensland and the Northern Territory border area (Blake 1990a,
1990b). The Tangkic subgroup of languages at the head of the Gulf and on
offshore islands are separated from the rest of non-Pama-Nyungan. Finally,
the Barkly languages (Jingulu, Wambaya, Ngarnji, Kutanji) are separated, by
Pama-Nyungan languages and Wardaman, from their Djamindjungan relatives
near the Joseph Bonaparte Gulf coast (Chadwick 1979, 1984).
 
        Loanword studies have not been pursued very much as yet (but see
studies by Evans, McConvell, and Nash in this volume). Nevertheless Heath
(1978, 1979, 1981) has done an exemplary study of intense contact between
the Yolngu language Ritharrngu and its non-Pama-Nyungan neighbours Ngandi
and Nunggubuyu, and given many indications on how to do what he calls
"diffusional linguistics". An important study by Walker and Zorc (1981) of
loanwords from the Indonesian so-called "Macassan" languages has documented
the cultural influence of these foreign traders in Northeast Arnhem Land.
This study has been pursued further along the northern coast by Evans
(1992a). McConvell (1985) in a brilliant study was able to demonstrate the
likely locus and mechanism of the creation and diffusion of subsection
terms. Hercus (1972, 1987) has done pioneering studies of areal linguistics
in South Australia and southwest Queensland. In addition, Blake (1979:324)
and Dixon (1980) contain maps showing the geographical distribution of
various structural features, some of which may be due to areal diffusion
rather than genetic groupings. Dixon et al. (To appear) will include much
further discussion of diffusion among the Australian languages.
 
        Little if any work has been done on linguistic evidence for
proto-culture or the spread of cultural innovations. We await studies on
terminologies for such items as the woomera, returning boomerang,
didgeridoo, grinding and leaching techniques, the dog, etc. Almost no terms
of proto-culture or environment have been reconstructed for a deep genetic
level, except *kuya 'fish' (Dixon, p.c.). We could probably add *kana
'yamstick' on the basis of its wide distribution. Evans and Jones (This
volume) make some further promising suggestions for reconstructed tool
terminology. In addition, some bird names are very widespread; e.g.
 
 *kuruku, kuluku 'dove'
 *waaka  'crow'
 *tyitityiti     'willy wagtail'
 *kurrkurr       'boobook'
 
It is unlikely, however, that any inferences about early homelands or
population movements could be made on the basis of reconstructed bird
names. O'Grady (1990:86) reconstructs a proto-Pama-Nyungan *mungka
'anthill, termite mound', which also does little to localise the speakers
of this early language, since anthills are practically ubiquitous in
Australia."
 
(Koch, Harold. 1997a. "Comparative linguistics and Australian prehistory".
In P. McConvell & N. Evans (eds), Understanding ancient Australia:
perspectives from archaeology and linguistics. Melbourne: Oxford University
Press. 27-43; quotation 40-43)
 
Harold Koch, Senior Lecturer
Department of Linguistics
Faculty of Arts
The Australian National University
Canberra ACT 0200 Australia
 
Telephone:  (02) 6249 3203 (direct) / ..3026 (messages)
(overseas) 61 2 6249 3203
Fax:  (02) 6 279 8214
(overseas) 61 2 6279 8214
email:  Harold.Koch at anu.edu.au


From fcosw5 at mbm1.scu.edu.tw  Wed May 13 14:26:10 1998
From: fcosw5 at mbm1.scu.edu.tw (Steven Schaufele)
Date: Wed, 13 May 1998 10:26:10 EDT
Subject: Australian Languages
Message-ID: <WED.13.MAY.1998.102610.EDT.FCOSW5@MBM1.SCU.EDU.TW>

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
Katachumen wrote:
 
> Well, I was simply following suggestions by others (Ruhlen et al.) about the
> affinities of Tasmanian, and also following geological maps which do show
> Tasmania appended to Australia during the Paleolithic.
> But my main point was that we should question any hypothesis which suggests
> that Australia was settled once and once only, c. 50000 BC, and then was
> subsequently isolated from the rest of humanity until modern times. There is
> no reason at all why this should be true, and good reason to think that the
> continent remained accessible for resettlement throughout the Paleolithic.
> Therefore we can not simply assume an age of 50000 years or so for Proto-
> Australian.
 
Correct me if i'm wrong, but my atlas suggests that the Australian
continent isn't all that far from New Guinea or Indonesia.  I don't at
the moment have access to the kind of geological maps Katachumen refers
to, but it seems to me that any cultural group capable of navigating
amongst the islands of SE Asia would have had little trouble venturing
as far as northern Australia.  Not that they necessarily did so, but i'm
inclined to agree with Katachumen that geography doesn't seem to present
a significant barrier to continued settlement between SE Asia and
Australia.
 
And, with regard to Claire Bowern's statement,
 
> Incidentally, with the quality of material that exists on the Tasmanian
> languages, I'm surprised that anyone can make any hypotheses about its
> genetic affiliations at all. When there are only a few hundred words in
> orthopgraphies that might represent anything it wouldn't be surprising if
> there were "cognates" with every language family in the world.
 
It's certainly true that word-lists of a few hundred entries are very
shaky supports for any comparative-linguistic hypothesis, but they can
be quite adequate *`suggestors'* for such hypotheses.  Legitimate
scientific hypotheses can come from any sort of source at all, including
totally(?) irrational ones such as dreams (cf. Kekule).  The difference
between science and wild speculation doesn't lie in the source of the
hypothesis but in how it is, and can be, tested.  I grant i'm not a
specialist in comparative Australian and know very little about the data
and proposals Bowern is referring to, but i admit that what little i do
know strongly suggests that there is a serious lack of the probative
data necessary for testing any decent scientific hypothesis.  But surely
not for *suggesting* it.
 
Best,
Steven
--
Steven Schaufele, Ph.D., Asst. Prof. of Linguistics, English Department
 
Soochow University, Waishuanghsi Campus, Taipei 11102, Taiwan, ROC
 
(886)(02)2881-9471 ext. 6504     fcosw5 at mbm1.scu.edu.tw
 
http://www.prairienet.org/~fcosws/homepage.html
 
 
 
        ***O syntagmata linguarum liberemini humanarum!***
 
        ***Nihil vestris privari nisi obicibus potestis!***


From manaster at umich.edu  Thu May 14 16:27:36 1998
From: manaster at umich.edu (manaster at umich.edu)
Date: Thu, 14 May 1998 12:27:36 EDT
Subject: Cutting down on email clutter
Message-ID: <THU.14.MAY.1998.122736.EDT.>

May I suggest that when responding to something posted
on the list, people make sure they reply just to the list
and not all recipients? This would reduce the volume of
repetitious email and also prevent the confusion due
to responses coming to one before the message being
responded to was ever posted on the list?
AMR


From bwald at HUMnet.UCLA.EDU  Thu May 14 15:05:30 1998
From: bwald at HUMnet.UCLA.EDU (bwald)
Date: Thu, 14 May 1998 11:05:30 EDT
Subject: Dixon's "The rise and fall of languages"
Message-ID: <THU.14.MAY.1998.110530.EDT.BWALD@HUMNET.UCLA.EDU>

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
Roger Wright responds to my criticism:
 
>Yes, of course. I wasn't referring to dialect diversification (that is,
>*language-internal* variation of a normal kind) but to actual splits
>between languages. Am I really the only person on the List to find
>actual language *splits* (as opposed to obvious and normal dialect
>diversification) inherently unlikely, and thus in need of some kind of
>non-linguistic explanation?
 
>From further exchanges involving AMR and Roger, I see that Roger makes a
distinction, which seems to be arbitrrary, between "dialect" and
"language".  In fact, by "language" (in context) he means a socially
determined collection composed of historically related dialects.  AMR
points out that this view is arbitrary, and gives many examples, e.g.,
Scandinavian, Serbian/Croatian, Hindi/Urdu, Provencal/Catalan, etc.
Meanwhile, historical linguists sub-classify reconstructed languages
without this social implication, although there is clearly some kind of
social implication for any form of diversification, e.g., they do not
insist that Low Germanic and High Germanic were ever "languages" as opposed
to "dialects" of West Germanic.  (Well. they don't all insist.  Some assume
that for each historical dialect they reconstruct they are also
reconstructing the birth of a "tribe".  But this is illogical for any
*linguistic* split used as criterial for sub-classiifying of West Germanic,
etc, since similar splits occur within "languages".  Liverpool English, for
example, is reproducing part of the High German shift, i.e., voiceless stop
-> affricate/fricative.)
 
Various "languages" evolved from either (and maybe in some areas BOTH) the
Low and High Germanic "dialects", e.g., English, Dutch from Low, German and
Swiss-German from High.  Their status as languages is social, and only
linguistic to the extent that the varieties united in one language have all
evolved from at some time-depth from a single major source.  Most often
there is a reference dialect for the "language", far from always associated
with a dialect cultivated for literacy in that "language".  But the rise of
literary dialects, call them "languages" if you want,  seems to be what
Roger fixes on.  Literary or not, it seems, however, that plenty of
diversification has taken place before reference dialects achieve the
status of "language", and it is purely social that the same label appplies
to most other dialects, and stops applying to them at an arbitrary point --
not the point of mutual unintelligibility, for example.  (Mutual
intelligibility is a continuum quite independent of the continuum between
dialect and language for any closely related "languages"; obviously it
applies quite well to languages which are only distantly related, or,
pardon the expression, not related at all.)
 
I invite Roger to clarify what his concern is in distinguishing "language"
diversification from dialect diversification.  Is it the emergence of
literary dialects, or what?  From an older exchange between him and Miguel.
I think one of his concerns was the influence that the reference dialect
has in controlling the direction of change of the other dialects socially
subordinated to it in some way.


From Harold.Koch at anu.edu.au  Thu May 14 15:00:44 1998
From: Harold.Koch at anu.edu.au (Harold Koch)
Date: Thu, 14 May 1998 11:00:44 EDT
Subject: Australian reference correction
Message-ID: <THU.14.MAY.1998.110044.EDT.HAROLD.KOCH@ANU.EDU.AU>

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
Please note a correction to the reference cited in my posting of 13 May
as
>Tryon, Darrell and Michael Walsh (eds). 1997. The boundary rider: Studies
>in Honour of Geoffrey O'Grady. (Pacific Linguistics C-136) Canberra:
>Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, The Australian National
>University.
The title should read instead: "Boundary rider: Essays...."
Apologies for the oversight.
Harold Koch
 
Harold Koch, Senior Lecturer
Department of Linguistics
Faculty of Arts
The Australian National University
Canberra ACT 0200 Australia
 
Telephone:  (02) 6249 3203 (direct) / ..3026 (messages)
(overseas) 61 2 6249 3203
Fax:  (02) 6 279 8214
(overseas) 61 2 6279 8214
email:  Harold.Koch at anu.edu.au


From manaster at umich.edu  Fri May 15 02:37:33 1998
From: manaster at umich.edu (manaster at umich.edu)
Date: Thu, 14 May 1998 22:37:33 EDT
Subject: Diachronic vs. synchronic universals/tendencies
In-Reply-To: <Pine.GSO.3.96.980511121817.20731A-100000@darkwing.uoregon.edu>
Message-ID: <THU.14.MAY.1998.223733.EDT.>

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
In the discussion of this topic, which started with
Scott Delancey's defense of the idea that many or
even all (?) synchronic universals or tendencies
have a diachronic explanation,
I think there are two separate points involved
which we have all been confusing (myself included).
 
One,
as suggested by Richard Janda, there is a case to
be made (I am being deliberately conservative) that
all linguistic universals or tendencies ultimately
depend on our biological endowment and hence are
"synchronic".  But as far as I can see this does not
detract from the force of Scott Delancey's observation,
since it is logically possible that the way these
innate mechanisms manifest themselves is precisely
in the kind of language effect that Scott was talking
about.  So the question of whether certain word order
tendencies are the way they are because of certain
proposed diachronic tendencies is to my mind quite
separate from the deeper question of how the
diachronic tendencies arise from our wiring.
(Of course, I must add that I do not believe that
we are in position in linguistics
to really pinpoint what the wiring is, unlike in
research on bird songs, etc., and so we do NOT
in fact know whether things the way they are
because of a particular bit of putative wiring,
in general.  The fact that something appears to
occur univeresally in all languages known to
the author of any given article, whether that
is just English or a hundred languages, does
not in any way shape or form mean that it
is hardwired into human beings.)
 
Now, given that the innatist (everything is
synchronic) position is (a) possibly right
but this could is nonetheless consistent with
everything Scott says and (b) is not
either verifiable or falsifiable given
the limitations on what kind of research
linguists can do (e.g., we are not allowed
to deafen babies at birth), I think I would
like to get back to the other, more modest
question of whether Scott's model actually
fits the facts--regardless of whether it
ultimately reduces to some sort of innate
synchronic basis.  As I see, two kinds of
things are relevant here.
 
One, consider
Mandarin Chinese, where there seems to be
a clear trend towards SOV because it
often now prefers S ba O V to simple
SVO (where ba is some kind of verb),
but as ba O illustrates new kinds of
adpositional phrases made with a verb
that becomes an adposition are in fact
pre- and not postpositional, so here
we have a diachronic process which seems
designed to yield an SOV language with
prepositions of verbal origin, the opposite
of what Scott suggests.  And if this is
possible and if in addition tehre is no
purely synchronic tendency to make OV
languages postpositional, then we would
have expect no correlation between OV
and postpositions. But we do.
 
Two, the other
kind of example that is crucial is what
I referred to in an earlier message, the
tendency of languages to "fix" synchronically
unnatural systems.  I dont at the moment
have the data at my disposal (or else I am
suffering a lapse of memory) needed to
demonstrate that this happens in word
order phenomena.  But what of my other
examples, such as the ones in phonology
or the fact that the disappearance of
active-voice forms in certain tenses and
moods in Indo-Iranian languages does not
lead to the "unnatural" situation that
you have to use passives only but rather
to the passives are immediately reinterpreted
as actives and thus you have surface
ergativity.  You seem to have a diachronic
process, which itself is apparently quite
natural, which favors the loss of active
voice forms in certain tenses/moods (and
this process may indeed have some
unviersal basis since it always seems to
be the same tenses/moods that are involved),
but it produces an unnatural situation and
the language is forced to change FURTHER.
In phonology, of course, we seem to have
lots of examples of this: somehow all
IE languages in which the glottalized
stops shift to voiced manage to get lots
of [b]'s from somewhere even though
there are almost no glottalized *[p']'s
in PIE.  So something forces a language
to fill that gap (or near-gap).  Consider
another instance: English has lost in
most of its dialects the distinction
between sg. and pl. in the 2nd person,
but the result is that it is practically
obligatory in many dialects to say SOMETHING
in addition to 'you' to make the plural, e.g.,
you folks, you guys, the two of you, all of you,
you kids, you ... all, etc.   So again it
seems as though there is a synchronic
force which tries to make us not merely
use you (perceived as primarily sg.) when
we intend the plural.
 
I am not at all sure that this is right,
and I intend this purely as points for
discussion.  Maybe there IS a way to
account for all this Scott's way, but
I do not as yet see that.
 
AMR


From delancey at darkwing.uoregon.edu  Fri May 15 18:58:35 1998
From: delancey at darkwing.uoregon.edu (Scott DeLancey)
Date: Fri, 15 May 1998 14:58:35 EDT
Subject: Diachronic vs. synchronic universals/tendencies
In-Reply-To: <Pine.SOL.3.95.980511160008.19271A-100000@frogger.rs.itd.umich.edu>
Message-ID: <FRI.15.MAY.1998.145835.EDT.DELANCEY@DARKWING.UOREGON.EDU>

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
This is the second part of my reply to Alexis's post:
 
> One, consider
> Mandarin Chinese, where there seems to be
> a clear trend towards SOV because it
> often now prefers S ba O V to simple
> SVO (where ba is some kind of verb),
 
While this idea has been tossed around since the 70's,
it is IMO (and not mine alone) a serious distortion of
the facts.  The ba-construction is a marked construction,
it is not by any means the normal transitive pattern.
As far as I can see, there is not only no "clear trend"
toward SOV in Mandarin, there is no trend at all.
 
But even if this story were true, it would not be a problem
for what I am suggesting.  If indeed some peculiar combination
of diachronic processes in Mandarin were producing a "disharmonic"
disagreement between PP and VP order, that would be no problem at
all for my account--but, I submit, a fatal problem for an innatist
theoretical account.
 
> but as ba O illustrates new kinds of
> adpositional phrases made with a verb
> that becomes an adposition are in fact
> pre- and not postpositional, so here
> we have a diachronic process which seems
> designed to yield an SOV language with
> prepositions of verbal origin, the opposite
> of what Scott suggests.  And if this is
> possible and if in addition tehre is no
> purely synchronic tendency to make OV
> languages postpositional, then we would
> have expect no correlation between OV
> and postpositions. But we do.
 
But we don't find a perfect correlation.  (Partly because
adpositions can develop from relator nouns as well as from
serial verbs, but that's a separate issue).  Note that what
you're proposing here (incorrectly, but let's assume it for
the sake of argument) is a combination of two diachronic processes--
one, the serial verb > adposition story, a very common one, the
other, the ba-construction as the entering wedge of a SVO > SOV
shift, a very unusual one, in fact probably unique to Mandarin.
(Except that, as I've said, it's not really happening, so it's
even more unusual than that).  If that were true, then we would
have to say that the usual diachronic process, by itself, produces
the usual "harmonic" pattern, but that an unusual diachronic process,
or combination of processes, can produce an unusual pattern.  But
that's exactly what the diachronic account implies, and exactly
what a synchronic theoretical account does not imply.
 
Scott DeLancey
Department of Linguistics
University of Oregon
Eugene, OR 97403, USA
 
delancey at darkwing.uoregon.edu
http://www.uoregon.edu/~delancey/prohp.html


From delancey at darkwing.uoregon.edu  Fri May 15 18:53:40 1998
From: delancey at darkwing.uoregon.edu (Scott DeLancey)
Date: Fri, 15 May 1998 14:53:40 EDT
Subject: Diachronic vs. synchronic universals/tendencies
In-Reply-To: <Pine.SOL.3.95.980511160008.19271A-100000@frogger.rs.itd.umich.edu>
Message-ID: <FRI.15.MAY.1998.145340.EDT.DELANCEY@DARKWING.UOREGON.EDU>

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
Alexis brings up two different points, and I'm going to split
my reply to his post into two.  First:
 
> In the discussion of this topic, which started with
> Scott Delancey's defense of the idea that many or
> even all (?) synchronic universals or tendencies
> have a diachronic explanation,
 
Whoops.  No, I'm absolutely not suggesting that *all* of the robust
tendencies we find across languages are to be explained diachronically.
I think that linguistic structures start out motivated, not (at least
for the most part) by any specifically linguistic prewired structure,
but by various functional strategies of the kind often lumped together
in functionalist writing under the rubric of "iconicity" (which term I
quite agree, before anyone bothers to jump on it, is so broad and
vague as to be of little real use).
    My original post was in response to a couple of messages that I
took as suggesting that somehow real, "scientific", synchronic linguistics
need not have any diachronic dimension.  This is refuted by any
demonstration that there are *any* cross-linguistically robust synchronic
patterns which can only be satisfactorily explained in terms of diachronic
mechanisms, and that was all I was trying to argue.  (Though I did, it's
true, make reference to Paul Hopper's argument which can be interpreted
as implying that all is diachrony, I wasn't intending to endorse it).
 
> as suggested by Richard Janda, there is a case to
> be made (I am being deliberately conservative) that
> all linguistic universals or tendencies ultimately
> depend on our biological endowment and hence are
> "synchronic".  But as far as I can see this does not
> detract from the force of Scott Delancey's observation,
> since it is logically possible that the way these
> innate mechanisms manifest themselves is precisely
> in the kind of language effect that Scott was talking
> about.
 
There is an issue here.  If some "universal" pattern
can be completely explained by some universal aspect
of diachrony, e.g., N-Adposition order by the fact
that adpositional phrases diachronically develop from
verb phrases (not that that's absolutely true, but let's
take it as a hypothetical example--I'll say a little about
the empirical question in another post), then why do we need
any kind of story about "biological endowment"?  The
innatist story becomes superfluous.
 
And there's an important difference in empirical prediction.
Any innatist story about, for example, word-order "universals",
founders on the fact that the universals are not universal.
That is, and story based on X'-theory *as a theory of some
innate human linguistic endowment*, or any similar story based
on notions of "harmonic" order of dependent and head, can
account for the rather significant number of "disharmonic"
patterns attested in languages only by one or another sort of
special pleading.
   The diachronic account, in contrast, only says "X is a very
common pattern, because it is the result of a very common diachronic
tendency".  That of course requires separate diachronic accounts
for less common patterns -- but to the extent that such accounts
can be found, then "disharmonic" patterns are not "exceptions" to
some "universal".
 
 
Scott DeLancey
Department of Linguistics
University of Oregon
Eugene, OR 97403, USA
 
delancey at darkwing.uoregon.edu
http://www.uoregon.edu/~delancey/prohp.html


From manaster at umich.edu  Fri May 15 17:08:22 1998
From: manaster at umich.edu (manaster at umich.edu)
Date: Fri, 15 May 1998 13:08:22 EDT
Subject: Language/dialect differentiation
Message-ID: <FRI.15.MAY.1998.130822.EDT.>

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
I think that Bantu and several branches of Uto-Aztecan
(Numic, Californian, probably others) are examples of
linguistic units which split into several really distinct
languages despite the absence of literacy and without
losing contact completely (like Polynesian and such).
If this is right, then Roger's suggestion that
complete differentiation requires either physical
lack of contact or literacy would be clearly refuted.
But I dont know how much contact we can assume.
 
Perhaps a better example would be the differentiation
of the Dutch-Low German-High German area, where the
extreme dialects are surely completely mutually
unintelligible and much more radically different than
the literary languages.  Even with High German,
I'd supsect that extreme Swiss and say Thuringian
dialects are separate languages despite the existence
of a chain of intermediate forms and lack of
separation, and clearly Eastern Yiddish is a
distinct language from say the German of Schaffhausen
andyet again there was always (mediated) contact.
 
One can probably say the same about some extreme
varieties of English as well.
 
AMR


From ratcliff at fs.tufs.ac.jp  Fri May 15 14:58:00 1998
From: ratcliff at fs.tufs.ac.jp (Robert R. Ratcliffe)
Date: Fri, 15 May 1998 10:58:00 EDT
Subject: Wright's and Wald's comments on Dixon's "The rise and fall of
 languages"
Message-ID: <FRI.15.MAY.1998.105800.EDT.>

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
re: Roger Wright's question:
 
 
>Am I really the only person on the List to find
>actual language *splits* (as opposed to obvious and normal dialect
 
> >diversification) inherently unlikely, and thus in need of some kind
> of
> >non-linguistic explanation?
 
No, I would agree that clear splits are unlikely, at least in the case
where language spread doesn't involve loss of contact.  But I don't
think it is right to see the development of national orthographies as a
CAUSE for the diversification of languages.  I think the more important
point may the development of new patterns of political division and
concentration, of which the development of national orthographies is
merely one linguistic symptom.
 
The linguistic situation in the Arab world today is quite comparable
with the Romance situation in the 12th century. To begin with, you have
a huge dialect continuum stretching from Mauretania to Iraq, with more
or less mutual intelligibility between any two neighboring communities,
and unintelligbility between more widely separated groups. The only
official written Standard throughout the region is Classical Arabic,
different from all of the dialects, and comparable with Latin.  At the
same time in areas which have a stable, historically-established
political identity, like Egypt or Morocco, you do have a de facto
national spoken standard, based on the language of the capital cities,
which is understood and recognized throughout the country in spite of
regional dialect variation, and which could (if the political will were
present) be developed as national (written as well as spoken)
languages.  Levelling of regional dialects toward the standard of the
capital is already apparent in these countries.  In countries whose
political history is newer, Algeria, Jordan, Saudia Arabia, e.g., there
really isn't  a clearly defined national dialect, though if the
political boundaries remain as they are perhaps one will eventually
crystalize.
 
Another point about Arabic dialects ties in (I think) with Benji Wald's
point:
 
> Meanwhile, historical linguists sub-classify reconstructed languages
> without this social implication, although there is clearly some kind
> of
> social implication for any form of diversification
 
It is strange to me that people who work on sub-classification of Arabic
dialects use entirely different methods and assumptions from people who
work on sub-classification of prehistoric Semitic.  In the first case,
no one ever tries to use a tree diagram, because everyone realizes it
wouldn't have much explanatory value. The more isoglosses you use the
more confused and contradictory the situation becomes.  In addition to
isoglosses defining areas, and the usual sort of Rhenish fan effect, you
have isoglosses which crosscut areas and correlate with social factors--
such as communal membership (Muslim, Christian, Jewish) or socioeconomic
stratum (Bedouin vs. Rural vs. Urban).  But Arabic dialectologists are
not disturbed about this complex linguistic situation because we
actually know from historical and other non-linguistic sources that the
spread and diffusion of Arabic was a complex historical process, and it
is quite easy to match the linguistic situation with the actual
historical events which brought it about. (For example the Hasaniyya
dialect of Mauretania has a pattern of verb conjugation which is typical
of the dialects of North Africa, but in some of its phonology and
lexicon it is quite different from these dialects and close to the
Bedouin dialects of the Arabian peninsula.  This correlates with the
fact, known from history, that this dialect was brought into the area by
a bedouin group from Arabia some six hundred years after the initial
Arab settlement of North Africa.)
 
In Semitics, on the other hand, many people seem terribly disturbed
about the fact that some languages (notably Classical Arabic) can't be
fit neatly into a tree diagram because they share some isoglosses with
languages on one branch of the tree, and another set of isoglosses with
languages on another distinct branch.  When confronted with such a
situation what we should be doing is asking "what kind of
socio-historical situation (what patterns of migration or contact) does
this contradictory linguistic situation imply?"  Instead many Semitists
have focussed on trying to theorize away the contradictory isoglosses in
order to preserve a sharply delineated tree model.  This procedure is
tantamount to asserting that the normal or expected process of language
spread in pre-history involves a sharp split in a speech community
followed by little or no contact, whereas in historical times this
pattern of langauge spread seems very rare indeed.
 
 
 
 
 
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Robert R. Ratcliffe
Senior Lecturer, Arabic and Linguistics,
Dept. of Linguistics and Information Science
Tokyo University of Foreign Studies
Nishigahara 4-51-21, Kita-ku
Tokyo 114 Japan


From manaster at umich.edu  Sun May 17 13:31:57 1998
From: manaster at umich.edu (manaster at umich.edu)
Date: Sun, 17 May 1998 09:31:57 EDT
Subject: Wright's and Wald's comments on Dixon's "The rise and fall of
 languages"
In-Reply-To: <355C6B3D.12F73820@fs.tufs.ac.jp>
Message-ID: <SUN.17.MAY.1998.093157.EDT.>

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
I think Robert R. overstates things a tad.  I dont think
that family trees are as useless in dialectology as he
makes out.  The fact of chains of mutually intelligible
dialects does not mean that there are not neat splits.
There is no contradiction here at all.  Dutch-German is
a continuum but I dont anyone would question that there
is a major split within between Low German and High German,
even though neighboring LG and HG communities communicate
very easily.  I dont know enough about Arabic dialects
off the top of my head to be able to say much to this
example, but in several languages or language families
where people once despaired of family trees new
research shows just wrong they were.  Uto-Aztecan
is a clear example, where i believe that my
demosntration of the reality of the Northern-Uto-Aztecan
node has been fairly widely accepted and has not been
as far as I know contested publicly at all.
 
AMR


From manaster at umich.edu  Sun May 17 13:32:45 1998
From: manaster at umich.edu (manaster at umich.edu)
Date: Sun, 17 May 1998 09:32:45 EDT
Subject: Diachronic vs. synchronic universals/tendencies
In-Reply-To: <Pine.GSO.3.96.980515104807.12659B-100000@darkwing.uoregon.edu>
Message-ID: <SUN.17.MAY.1998.093245.EDT.>

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
And here I thought that blessed are the peacemakers(:-).
Scott Delancey does not seem to like my point that
a theory of diachronic tendencies can (perhaps must)
be ulitmately reducible to a theory of a synchronic
nature because these tendencies are things that
speakers do and speakers are not usually historical
linguists.  Perhaps I was not clear.  All I am saying
that there are two levels.  At one level we can
argue as to whether the reason for the high correlation
between OV and postpositions is due (a) to the fact
postpositions tend to come from serial verbs or
(b) to the fact that speakers have a synchronic
bit of wiring which makes them arrange things like
this no matter what the history of their language
lands them with.  I have tentatively tried to argue
for (b), but I am quite sympathetic to (a) and
some of the published arguments for it.  I regard
this as an open and fruitful issue and one on
which we need lots more data and disucssion.
 
But there is a deeper level at which whether
(a) or (b) is true, they could and perhaps must
be reducible to
synchronic statements--much as Richard Janda
argued, although I take a much more moderate
line than he did.  Moreover, I think that
this is a very difcicult topic to say anything
substantive about because we are not allowed
to deafen babies like songbird researchers
deafen chicks and such other atrocities.
 
And so I dont see the reason for the disagreement.
I think we are talking about two different levels.
So I am quite open to (a) or (b) in any
given case or in general.   Actually,
I am absolutely sure of only two things. One
is that these two levels are distinct and the
questions involving them should be kept
distinct.  The other is that I dont deserve
the severe condemnation in Scott's rebuttal
of my Mandarin example, to wit:
 
"While this idea has been tossed around since the 70's,
it is IMO (and not mine alone) a serious distortion of
the facts.  The ba-construction is a marked construction,
it is not by any means the normal transitive pattern.
As far as I can see, there is not only no "clear trend"
toward SOV in Mandarin, there is no trend at all."
 
I never said that the ba-construction was not marked
or otherwise "distorted" the facts.  All I said
was that I see a trend towards Mandarin becoming
an OV language with prepositions.  We will not
know if this is right until Mandarin fully changes
to OV if it ever does.  It would be, I admit,
better to find an example further along, but
I do not have the resources at hand to undertake
this.  What I was trying to do is to point to
a KIND of example that might be relevant to
settling the question of (a) vs. (b).  And
I am hoping that someone will be moved to
find the right INSTANCES of the kind--if they
exist.  But in any case that will not tell
us anything about the deeper question on
which I tend to agree with Janda, namely, that
short of resurrecting some notion of language
as an organism, diachronic tendenceies would
seem to have to reflect synchronic mechanisms.
 
AMR


From Brent_Scarcliff at cch.com  Mon May 18 16:40:01 1998
From: Brent_Scarcliff at cch.com (Brent Scarcliff)
Date: Mon, 18 May 1998 12:40:01 EDT
Subject: Grokking into the Future - Language Change
Message-ID: <MON.18.MAY.1998.124001.EDT.>

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
 
Hi!  My name is Ryan Scarcliff.  I'm in the 5th grade at Jefferson
Elementary School in Redondo Beach, California.  As part of a unit called
"Grokking into the Future", my assignment is to survey a group of experts
about "LANGUAGE CHANGE".  I would really appreciate it if you could answer
some of the following questions:
 
1.  Some day, I would like to learn a lot of languages so I can communicate
with people all over the world.  In order to do that, I will need to learn
the most commonly used languages. How should I learn them and what
languages should I learn?
 
2.  Some people don't realize that there have been so many changes in
languages. How much do we really know about why languages change?
 
3.  This year I did my science project on the Polynesian sound changes.
Although most people found it really interesting, a lot of them asked, "How
is linguistics a science?" How should I answer them?
 
4.  I don't know about you, but I like to use my imagination. I was
wondering, what do you think English will look like in the 21st Century?
Will it be the world's common language?
 
5.  If you had to guess, what really important discovery about language
change will be made by the time I go to college?
 
6.  Sometimes, I think about  the beginning of languages. Could you tell
me, why are there so many languages? Do you think we'll eventually find out
that all languages are related?
 
7.  Because I think of the beginning of languages, I think of the end of
them. Why do languages disappear? What languages are in danger of becoming
extinct and why should we care ?
 
8.  When I get into high school, I want to study linguistics. I soon found
out that there was no such class. How come?
 
9.  What's the etymology of "grok"?  My teacher told me it means "to see,"
but it's not in my dictionary.
 
10.  Are there any other big questions I should be asking you about
language change?  Anything else I should know?
 
Thank you for your time and help. Please contact me care of my father's
e-mail address, brent_scarcliff at cch.com.  I will post a summary of your
answers to the list.


From DISTERH at UNIVSCVM.SC.EDU  Mon May 18 14:01:25 1998
From: DISTERH at UNIVSCVM.SC.EDU (Dorothy Disterheft)
Date: Mon, 18 May 1998 10:01:25 EDT
Subject: Potsdam Conference on Grammaticalization
Message-ID: <MON.18.MAY.1998.100125.EDT.DISTERH@UNIVSCVM.SC.EDU>

To: DISTERH at vm.sc.edu
From: wischer at rz.uni-potsdam.de (Ilse Wischer)
Subject: Symposium on Grammaticalization
UNIVERSIT=C4T POTSDAM
Am Neuen Palais 10, 14469 Potsdam
 
 
PD Dr.  Ilse Wischer                                                     Tel. :
(+49)0331-977-2533
Institut f=FCr Anglistik/Amerikanistik                                   Fax  :
(+49)0331-977-2061
Universit=E4t Potsdam, Postfach 601553, 14415 Potsdam                     Sekr.:
(+49)0331-977-2500
                                                                        e-mail:
wischer at rz.uni-potsdam.de
 
 
        Call for Papers
        April 1998
 
        New Reflections on Grammaticalization
 
        An International Symposium at Potsdam University
        17-19 June 1999
 
Since Meillet=92s first mentioning of the term grammaticalization in 1912
several generations of scholars have contributed to a better understanding
of this process of linguistic change. Recent studies are closely connected
with the names of Paul Hopper and Elizabeth Traugott. Further major impulses
came from a number of works in Cologne, from an International Symposium at
the University of Oregon at Eugene in 1988, or from empirical research based
on computer corpora edited in a collective volume by Matti Rissanen et al.
 
Numerous publications and conference contributions in the last ten years
have revealed a growing interest in the theory of grammaticalization. People
have worked on several topics reaching from theoretical investigations on
its status with respect to various theories of grammar up to its practical
application to linguistic phenomena in many languages of the world. This has
led, on the one hand, to new insights and a deeper understanding, it has
also revealed, however, new questions that call for an answer and require
further research.
 
The aim of this symposium is to bring together scholars who are working in
this area to present their findings and discuss such topics as e.g. whether
there are two different types of grammaticalization, one on the
propositional level and another one on the discourse level, whether there
are convincing examples of the reversability of grammaticalization, what
kind of relationship holds between grammaticalization and lexicalization, or
which internal and external factors can accelerate or retard=
 grammaticalization.
 
Papers are invited on all aspects related to grammaticalization in its
synchronic or diachronic perspective, with respect to theoretical
reflections or practical findings. Studies based on linguistic phenomena in
English are particularly welcome.
 
 
 
Academic programme:
 
Opening lecture:                Christian Lehmann, University of Bielefeld,
Germany
 
Plenary lectures (so far):      Joan Bybee, University of New Mexico, United=
 States
                                T. Giv=F3n, University of Oregon, United States
                                Bernd Heine, University of Cologne, Germany
                                Paul Hopper, University Pittsburgh, United
States
                                Ekkehard K=F6nig, Free University Berlin,
Germany
 
 
Social Programme:
There will be a conference dinner, a guided tour through the city of Potsdam
including a visit of one of its famous castles, a visit of the Potsdam Film
Studios or a boat tour on the Havel. Details about the social programme will
be given in the 2nd circular.
 
 
Accomodation:
Accomodation will be in hotels in town at conference rates. A limited number
of moderately priced rooms will be available in the guest house of the
University. You will have to book the rooms on your own, mentioning your
participation in the symposium. Addresses will be given in the 2nd circular.
 
 
About the city of Potsdam and Potsdam University:
In 1993 Brandenburg=92s capital celebrated the 1000th anniversary of its
founding. Potsdam's distinctive appearance began to emerge when the town
became the residence of Prussian royalty. To this day the capital attracts
many visitors. The grounds of the three royal parks, the palace of Sans
Souci and the New Palace, Schinkel's Charlottenhof, an architectural gem,
the Cecilienhof Palace as well as numerous churches and Italianate villas
continue to charm visitors today. Caf=E9s, restaurants, museums and galeries
are an integral part of the capital's unique cityscape.
        Among 140,000 Potsdamers, there are 11,000 university students, most of
whom live in halls of residence on the outskirts of town. Potsdam's location
could not be more ideal for leisure time activities: it is surrounded by
forests, lakes and rivers and a short commuter train ride takes you to the
nation's nearby capital, Berlin.
        Since the last century, Potsdam has been a centre for research in the
natural sciences. Today Potsdam is again the home of respected research
institutes. For a few years now it has also been a university town.=20
        The University of Potsdam was founded on 15 July 1991. Located on three
campuses - Am Neuen Palais, Golm and Potsdam-Babelsberg - the university
absorbed most of the staff of Brandenburg State College (previously the
Potsdam College of Education) and a few members of the staff of the College
of Law and Administration (previously the Academy of Government and Law of
the GDR, dissolved in 1990).
        The Institute of English and American Studies is situated on the campus
in
Golm. It is divided into Linguistics, Literary Studies, Cultural Studies,
Didactics and Practical Language Acquisition.  Research Projects in the
Linguistics Department include such topics as Principles of Linguistic
Change, Celtic Englishes, Second Language Acquisition, English in Australia.
        For further information on Potsdam and the University see the
university's
homepage at http://www.uni-potsdam.de.
 
 
 
 
 
Submission of papers
E-mail your abstract (approximately 250 words) by 15 January 1999 to:
wischer at rz.uni-potsdam.de=20
or send it on paper together with disc (in Word or Word Perfect) to:=20
Ilse Wischer, Universit=E4t Potsdam, Institut f=FCr Anglistik und=
 Amerikanistik,
Postfach 601553, D-14415 Potsdam. Germany.
Acceptance notifications will be sent to the authors by 1 March 1999. I plan
to publish the proceedings.
 
 
Deadlines
I ask for your preliminary registration (to get on our mailing list) as soon
as possible. The Second Circular with details about accomodation and other
costs will reach you by mid- November 1998. An early registration at reduced
rate is possible by 15 December 1998, registration at normal rate by 15
April 1999.
 
For further information contact:         wischer at rz.uni-potsdam.de
 
 
PD Dr. Ilse Wischer
Potsdam, 22 April 1998
 
=0CPreliminary registration form
 
To receive the next circular, please fill in and send this form (by e-mail
or ordinary mail) to:
wischer at rz.uni-potsdam.de, or on paper together with disc to: Ilse Wischer,
Universit=E4t Potsdam, Institut f=FCr Anglistik und Amerikanistik, Postfach
601553, D-14415 Potsdam, Germany.
 
 
 
Name:
 
 
Affiliation:
 
 
Mailing address:
 
 
 
 
 
E-mail:
 
 
Phone:
 
 
Fax:
 
 
I would like / would not like to present a paper.
Title of paper, if any:
 
--=====================_895523335==_
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="CALLPAP.TXT"
 
 
 
UNIVERSIT=8ET POTSDAM
Am Neuen Palais 10, 14469 Potsdam
 
 
PD Dr.  Ilse Wischer                                                     Tel. :
(+49)0331-977-2533
Institut f=81r Anglistik/Amerikanistik                                    Fax  :
(+49)0331-977-2061
Universit=84t Potsdam, Postfach 601553, 14415 Potsdam
Sekr.:=
 (+49)0331-977-2500
                                                                        e-mail:
wischer at rz.uni-potsdam.de
 
 
        Call for Papers
        April 1998
 
        New Reflections on Grammaticalization
 
        An International Symposium at Potsdam University
        17-19 June 1999
 
Since Meillet s first mentioning of the term grammaticalization in 1912=
 several generations of scholars have contributed to a better understanding=
 of this process of linguistic change. Recent studies are closely connected=
 with the names of Paul Hopper and Elizabeth Traugott. Further major=
 impulses came from a number of works in Cologne, from an International=
 Symposium at the University of Oregon at Eugene in 1988, or from empirical=
 research based on computer corpora edited in a collective volume by Matti=
 Rissanen et al.
 
Numerous publications and conference contributions in the last ten years=
 have revealed a growing interest in the theory of grammaticalization.=
 People have worked on several topics reaching from theoretical=
 investigations on its status with respect to various theories of grammar up=
 to its practical application to linguistic phenomena in many languages of=
 the world. This has led, on the one hand, to new insights and a deeper=
 understanding, it has also revealed, however, new questions that call for=
 an answer and require further research.
 
The aim of this symposium is to bring together scholars who are working in=
 this area to present their findings and discuss such topics as e.g. whether=
 there are two different types of grammaticalization, one on the=
 propositional level and another one on the discourse level, whether there=
 are convincing examples of the reversability of grammaticalization, what=
 kind of relationship holds between grammaticalization and lexicalization,=
 or which internal and external factors can accelerate or retard=
 grammaticalization.
 
Papers are invited on all aspects related to grammaticalization in its=
 synchronic or diachronic perspective, with respect to theoretical=
 reflections or practical findings. Studies based on linguistic phenomena in=
 English are particularly welcome.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Academic programme:
 
Opening lecture:                Christian Lehmann, University of Bielefeld,
Germany
 
Plenary lectures (so far):      Joan Bybee, University of New Mexico, United=
 States
                                T. Giv=A2n, University of Oregon, United States
                                Bernd Heine, University of Cologne, Germany
                                Paul Hopper, University Pittsburgh, United
States
                                Ekkehard K=94nig, Free University Berlin,
Germany
 
 
Social Programme:
There will be a conference dinner, a guided tour through the city of Potsdam=
 including a visit of one of its famous castles, a visit of the Potsdam Film=
 Studios or a boat tour on the Havel. Details about the social programme=
 will be given in the 2nd circular.
 
 
Accomodation:
Accomodation will be in hotels in town at conference rates. A limited number=
 of moderately priced rooms will be available in the guest house of the=
 University. You will have to book the rooms on your own, mentioning your=
 participation in the symposium. Addresses will be given in the 2nd=
 circular.
 
 
About the city of Potsdam and Potsdam University:
In 1993 Brandenburg s capital celebrated the 1000th anniversary of its=
 founding. Potsdam's distinctive appearance began to emerge when the town=
 became the residence of Prussian royalty. To this day the capital attracts=
 many visitors. The grounds of the three royal parks, the palace of Sans=
 Souci and the New Palace, Schinkel's Charlottenhof, an architectural gem,=
 the Cecilienhof Palace as well as numerous churches and Italianate villas=
 continue to charm visitors today. Caf=82s, restaurants, museums and=
 galeries are an integral part of the capital's unique cityscape.
        Among 140,000 Potsdamers, there are 11,000 university students, most of=
 whom live in halls of residence on the outskirts of town. Potsdam's=
 location could not be more ideal for leisure time activities: it is=
 surrounded by forests, lakes and rivers and a short commuter train ride=
 takes you to the nation's nearby capital, Berlin.
        Since the last century, Potsdam has been a centre for research in the=
 natural sciences. Today Potsdam is again the home of respected research=
 institutes. For a few years now it has also been a university town.=20
        The University of Potsdam was founded on 15 July 1991. Located on three=
 campuses - Am Neuen Palais, Golm and Potsdam-Babelsberg - the university=
 absorbed most of the staff of Brandenburg State College (previously the=
 Potsdam College of Education) and a few members of the staff of the College=
 of Law and Administration (previously the Academy of Government and Law of=
 the GDR, dissolved in 1990).
        The Institute of English and American Studies is situated on the campus
in=
 Golm. It is divided into Linguistics, Literary Studies, Cultural Studies,=
 Didactics and Practical Language Acquisition.  Research Projects in the=
 Linguistics Department include such topics as Principles of Linguistic=
 Change, Celtic Englishes, Second Language Acquisition, English in=
 Australia.
        For further information on Potsdam and the University see the
university's=
 homepage at http://www.uni-potsdam.de.
 
 
 
 
 
Submission of papers
E-mail your abstract (approximately 250 words) by 15 January 1999 to:
wischer at rz.uni-potsdam.de=20
or send it on paper together with disc (in Word or Word Perfect) to:=20
Ilse Wischer, Universit=84t Potsdam, Institut f=81r Anglistik und=
 Amerikanistik, Postfach 601553, D-14415 Potsdam. Germany.
Acceptance notifications will be sent to the authors by 1 March 1999. I plan=
 to publish the proceedings.
 
 
Deadlines
I ask for your preliminary registration (to get on our mailing list) as soon=
 as possible. The Second Circular with details about accomodation and other=
 costs will reach you by mid- November 1998. An early registration at=
 reduced rate is possible by 15 December 1998, registration at normal rate=
 by 15 April 1999.
 
For further information contact:         wischer at rz.uni-potsdam.de
 
 
PD Dr. Ilse Wischer
Potsdam, 22 April 1998
 
=0CPreliminary registration form
 
To receive the next circular, please fill in and send this form (by e-mail=
 or ordinary mail) to:
wischer at rz.uni-potsdam.de, or on paper together with disc to: Ilse Wischer,=
 Universit=84t Potsdam, Institut f=81r Anglistik und Amerikanistik, Postfach=
 601553, D-14415 Potsdam, Germany.
 
 
 
Name:
 
 
Affiliation:
 
 
Mailing address:
 
 
 
 
 
E-mail:
 
 
Phone:
 
 
Fax:
 
 
I would like / would not like to present a paper.
Title of paper, if any:
 
--=====================_895523335==_--


From Roger.Wright at liverpool.ac.uk  Mon May 18 13:47:28 1998
From: Roger.Wright at liverpool.ac.uk (Roger Wright)
Date: Mon, 18 May 1998 09:47:28 EDT
Subject: Language splits and bundled isoglosses
In-Reply-To: <v02140b00b17f9ebe7732@[128.97.208.93]>
Message-ID: <MON.18.MAY.1998.094728.EDT.ROGER.WRIGHT@LIVERPOOL.AC.UK>

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
 
 
>I invite Roger to clarify what his concern is in distinguishing "language"
>diversification from dialect diversification.  Is it the emergence of
>literary dialects, or what?
 
 
        Thankyou for the invitation - if the speakers involved are
geographically contiguous, we could use the following criterion: cognate
*languages* will have many isoglosses bundled along the same line (which
might coincide with a political boundary, or might not); dialect
diversification *within the same language* is likely to involve a
dialect continuum, with many isoglosses, but which rarely coincide
geographically in this way. (The emergence of Literary standards can
lead to bundling, rather than being caused by them.)
        This is a suggestion, not a dogmatic view.
        Alexis asked how I applied this to unwritten languages; I would
suggest that the language-internal dialect continuum is the default
case, so that language-splits should imply loss of physical contact
(such as population movements, or perhaps the fact that a once easily
traversable sea had become a hostile pirate-infested environment ....)
Perhaps I can recommend here the proceedings of a historical
sociolinguistics conference held in Denmark in 1994, published as "The
Origins and Developments of Emigrant Languages", ed. H. F. Nielsen and
L. Schosler, Odense University Press, 1996, ISBN 87-7838-226-2; we
didn't come to a consensus on this, really, but there's good food for
thought here.
                        RW


From bwald at HUMnet.UCLA.EDU  Tue May 19 15:56:59 1998
From: bwald at HUMnet.UCLA.EDU (bwald)
Date: Tue, 19 May 1998 11:56:59 EDT
Subject: Language splits and bundled isoglosses
Message-ID: <TUE.19.MAY.1998.115659.EDT.BWALD@HUMNET.UCLA.EDU>

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
Roger Wright responded to my invitation to clarify what he meant by the
difference between "language diversification" amd "dialect diversification"
as follows:
 
> if the speakers involved are
>geographically contiguous, we could use the following criterion: cognate
>*languages* will have many isoglosses bundled along the same line (which
>might coincide with a political boundary, or might not); dialect
>diversification *within the same language* is likely to involve a
>dialect continuum, with many isoglosses, but which rarely coincide
>geographically in this way. (The emergence of Literary standards can
>lead to bundling, rather than being caused by them.)
>        This is a suggestion, not a dogmatic view.
 
I appreciate the tentativeness with which Roger makes the suggestion.  I
would separate two points in the suggestion.  (1)  I would maintain that
the distinction between "language dv" and "dialect dv" as a label for
distinguishing bundling of isoglosses vs. areal ordering of isoglosses is
potentially misleading, since "language" is a label applying to the social
construal of a set of dialects (meaning that the set has a common
historical origin). Thus, there will be a confusing mismatch between
"language" as bundling of isoglosses amd as a socially determined areal
domain where the sociopolitical boundary does NOT coincide with bundling.
(2)  The emergence of literary standards, or conceivably some other kind of
central influence, can lead to bundling.  That is an interesting idea, and
an empirically testable claim with regard to coincidence with a
sociopolitical unit.  I would assume that whether or not there is such
coincidence would depend on the relative strength of the sociopolitical
boundary vis-a-vis  cross-boundary influences, e.g., whether speakers at
the boundary are more influenced by dialects of "another language"  across
the boundary or by the "central / prestige" dialect possibly at a greater
distance but within the sociopolitical boundary.  Either case could be
characterised as a case of "diglossia", "bilingualism" in the case of cross
boundary influence but "bidialectalism" in case of influence from a
prestige dialect of the same language.  NB the "bilingualism" in some cases
could require less difference between the varieties than "bidialectalism".
 
No doubt in most, if not all, cases there is some of both kinds of
influence on border dialects.  It remains to empirical investigation to see
how such border dialects actually behave.  One problem is the selection of
features to observe bundling of isoglosses, since there are potentially one
bundle which aligns the focus dialect with a neighboring dialect of the
language across the sociopolitical boundary and an opposing bundle
distinguishing these two and aligning the focus dialect with the prestige
dialect in the same language.  Offhand, I am not aware of intersecting
bundles, only of the possibility that a neighboring dialect from the other
language may penetrate more "deeply" into the focus dialect, a change from
"below" (or the "side"), while the prestige dialect may remain more or less
distinct in its use by speakers of the focus dialect, but eventually filter
down and have diachronic consequences as an example of change from "above".
Phonological and syntactic change may differ in that syntactic change may
be more susceptible to prestige influence and phonological change to
neighboring influence.  In any case, diachronic interpretation of a bundle
depends crucially on the possibility of distinguishing fragmentation of a
single dialect over space, such that the bundle represents conservative
features of the original single dialect, from spread of a bundle of
features (over time) so that they are innovative in the receiving dialects,
regardless of their status in the source dialect, i.e., in distinguishing
divergence (cf. tree diversification) from convergence (cf. "Sprachbunde")
in such an area.  That is not always easy, and may even be the wrong way to
approach interpretation of the bundle in some cases.
 
If the discussion is to be continued, I invite concrete examples so that
the methodology and decision mechanism for historical interpretation of
bundling can be examined.  Maybe included for Romance could be such
syntactic phenomena as object clitic ordering, among other things.  How
does the boundary between, say, Provencal and Catalan, or Provencal and
"French", display bundling for a number of features (maybe under the
influence of prestige varieties of French and Spanish among bilinguals;
aren't Catalan and Provencal speakers mostly bilingual in Castillian and
"general colloquial" -- if not standard -- French, respectively?)
 
P.S.  I actually think that the best place to look for bundling which tests
adjacency vs. prestigious centers is in the lexicon, since lexical items
approximate the "linguistic" arbitrariness of separating one language from
a closely related one.  But even here I guess that, say, if there is
cross-political boundary agrarianism, then there could be a bundle of
agrarian terms which crosses the language boundary, in contrast to a bundle
of political terms emanating from the prestige center of the same language
that stops at the language boundary.  It remains to be seen how effective
"languages" are at drawing a bundle of isoglosses aorund themselves to the
exclusion of their historically related neighbors.  To be anticipated is
indeterminacy about how to treat border dialects of the low prestige
variety where there is popular sentiment to the effect that it reflects a
"mixed" language or the "other" language has "contaminated" the first.
Then we get into the whole issue of folk-beliefs about language and the
difference between people's idealisations of their "language" and what is
actually happening in the language/s they speak.


From tonybreed at juno.com  Tue May 19 15:56:42 1998
From: tonybreed at juno.com (D. Anthony Tschetter-Breed)
Date: Tue, 19 May 1998 11:56:42 EDT
Subject: Basque and Georgian cousins?
Message-ID: <TUE.19.MAY.1998.115642.EDT.TONYBREED@JUNO.COM>

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
 
I'm curious if anyone out there has heard if Basque and Georgian are
related
languages and cultures.  The man who told me this was not a linguist; he
was
an expert on intelligence, as in CIA-type intelligence.  Still, he seemed
quite
sure that it was true, and that everyone knew about it and accepted it.
That's
why I'm putting this question to this list; if everyone knows about it,
then
you'll be able to confirm it.
 
The story, thoroughly plausible, is that a group of Georgians broke away
from
Georgian society (perhaps during a drought; this fact, he said, is found
in the
traditional Georgian mythos or oral history).  They traveled west,
looking for
a place to settle, and continued until they found a place like their old
Georgia:
mountains near the sea, i.e. the eastern Pyrenees.
 
This came to light when a Georgianist happened to notice that the folk
dances
of the Basque are remarkably similar to those of the Georgians.
 
Is this on the level?  If it's true, then how well known is it really?
I'd always
been taught that Basque was an isolate.
 
-Tony Breed
 
_____________________________________________________________________
You don't need to buy Internet access to use free Internet e-mail.
Get completely free e-mail from Juno at http://www.juno.com
Or call Juno at (800) 654-JUNO [654-5866]


From mcv at wxs.nl  Wed May 20 16:04:20 1998
From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal)
Date: Wed, 20 May 1998 12:04:20 EDT
Subject: Basque and Georgian cousins?
In-Reply-To: <19980518.223132.12574.1.TonyBreed@juno.com>
Message-ID: <WED.20.MAY.1998.120420.EDT.>

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
"D. Anthony Tschetter-Breed" <tonybreed at juno.com> wrote:
 
>The story, thoroughly plausible, is that a group of Georgians broke away
>from
>Georgian society (perhaps during a drought; this fact, he said, is found
>in the
>traditional Georgian mythos or oral history).  They traveled west,
>looking for
>a place to settle, and continued until they found a place like their old
>Georgia:
>mountains near the sea, i.e. the eastern Pyrenees.
 
Assuming they took the route north of the Black Sea, it seems strange
that they missed Slovenia, the Cote d'Azur or the gorgeous mountains
near the sea [Costa Brava] of the eastern Pyrinees (the Basque
country is located on the western Pyrinees).
 
>Is this on the level?
 
I'm no expert on Basque or Georgian folk-dances, but as far as the
languages are concerned, there is no reason to assume a special link
between Basque and Georgian.  The two languages share a number of
characteristics, like not being Indo-European and having ergative
morphology (Basque more so than Georgian), and even a few
tantalizingly similar grammatical morphemes (Bq. gu "we", Geo. gv-
"us"), but despite efforts by several people (most notably Rene'
Lafon), nobody has been able to present a convincing case for an
Euskaro-Kartvelian connection.  Current efforts to link Basque to
something else are focusing on North Caucasian (Abkhaz-Circassian and
Nakh-Daghestanian) and the South Caucasian (Kartvelian, Georgian)
hypothesis has been largely abandoned.  The North Caucasian languages
are also not Indo-European and have in part ergative morphology.  I
don't know about their folk-dances.
 
I suspect that another reason people have looked for connections
between Basque and Georgian is the ancient name of the Georgian
kingdom, to wit "Iberia".  But Basque is not Iberian, and the
Georgians call their country Sakartvelo (I have no idea if "Iberia"
is a native Georgian word).  And then modern Azerbaijan (then
probably inhabited by Iranian speaking peoples, of
Scytho-Sarmatian-Alan stock) was called "Albania" in those days, so
what's in a name?
 
 
=======================
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
mcv at wxs.nl
Amsterdam


From n.nicholas at pgrad.unimelb.edu.au  Wed May 20 15:14:36 1998
From: n.nicholas at pgrad.unimelb.edu.au (Nick Nicholas)
Date: Wed, 20 May 1998 11:14:36 EDT
Subject: Dhumbadji! 4.1 TOC
Message-ID: <WED.20.MAY.1998.111436.EDT.>

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
The latest issue of _Dhumbadji! Journal for the History of Language_, Vol.
4.1, published by the Association for the History of Language, has just
appeared. The feature article is a paper by Vaclav Blazek on the etymology of
Uralic Numerals; there is also an interview with Sergei Starostin on
lexicostatistics, and a long review of V. Chirikba's reconstruction of
Proto-West Causasian.
 
More information is available on:
http://www.lexicon.net/opoudjis/Work/ahl.html .
 
--
How can the king and nobles make ends meet,   Nick Nicholas; Linguistics,
if not by eating you and all the others?         University of Melbourne.
(Lynx to Ox; _Tale of the Quadrupeds_,    http://www.lexicon.net/opoudjis
 Byzantium, 14thC)                  n.nicholas at linguistics.unimelb.edu.au


From manaster at umich.edu  Wed May 20 15:13:23 1998
From: manaster at umich.edu (manaster at umich.edu)
Date: Wed, 20 May 1998 11:13:23 EDT
Subject: Trask on Ringe
Message-ID: <WED.20.MAY.1998.111323.EDT.>

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
Larry asks about a point made by Ringe (1992), viz.,
"...resemblances between the basic vocabularies of
languages commonly believed to be related occur
with clearly greater-than-chance frequency, while
resemblanes between teh basic vocabularies of languages
not commonly believed to be demonstrably related do
not occur with greater-than-chance freuquency"
(p. 80).  Since he appears to hold (p. 80-81)
that such resemblances are the only way to test
for language relatedness, this seems to be saying
that any set of lgs not ALREADY commonly recognzied
as related can NEVER pass the test, since the
probabilities involved cannot change.
 
Ofcourse, not only this and but the whole
argument is really bad mathematics, as
shown by Baxter and MR in Diachronica.
 
AMR


From ph1u+ at andrew.cmu.edu  Sat May 23 18:25:01 1998
From: ph1u+ at andrew.cmu.edu (Paul J Hopper)
Date: Sat, 23 May 1998 14:25:01 EDT
Subject: Vade Mecum fuer den Herrn Janda
Message-ID: <SAT.23.MAY.1998.142501.EDT.PH1U@ANDREW.CMU.EDU>

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
Rich Janda's allusion to Lessing in defense of synchronicity seems a
little ironic. Lessing, in his 1766 essay "Laokoon: Ueber die Grenzen
der Malerei und Poesie", drew a distinction between art forms that are
intrinsically temporal, like music and literature, and those that are
intrinsically spatial (plastic), like painting and sculpture. Lessing
builds the essay around the story of Laokoon and his sons wrestling with
the serpents that had been sent to punish them; he compares the
treatment of this incident in the 2nd century BC Greek sculpture and by
Virgil in Book II of the Aeneid. A temporal art form deals with the
unfolding of events in time, a plastic one with spatial relationships at
a single point in time. Perhaps the issue of synchronicity in language
has become confused because of the tendency in the discipline of
linguistics to equate "diachronic" with "historical", when the real
issue is the very one that Lessing focuses on: is language a
spatial/plastic phenomenon or a temporal one?
 
Paul
 
PS As Rich knows, my title is an allusion to another essay by Lessing!


From Yury at aveinfo.sci-nnov.ru  Wed May 27 14:26:12 1998
From: Yury at aveinfo.sci-nnov.ru (Yury L. Rodygin)
Date: Wed, 27 May 1998 10:26:12 EDT
Subject: synchronic vs diachronic causes of language changes
Message-ID: <WED.27.MAY.1998.102612.EDT.YURY@AVEINFO.SCINNOV.RU>

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
 Let me (for my first including into discussion) return to    diachronic vs
 synchronic explanations of language tendencies. It
seems to me the real base of this discussion is the real
possibility to put 2 types of the question "Why?" about any
language (and not only language) phenomen. 1st "Why?" is close to
"How?", "How did this phenomen appear?" It's diachronic
explanation considering a chain of previous facts, resulting in
this phenomen. (And there is mighty tradition to be content with
only a chain of previous states of this part of language system,
without an explanation at all). 2nd "Why?" is close to
"For what?". "Why this phenomen is necessary in this system for
the  users?"  "Why  it's  alive in this system?" It's synchronic
explanation considering needs of speakers in expression of
concrete neutral or emotional information, in economy of time,
force, memory, etc. Both "Why?" have equivalent rights to
exist. Some phenomen appears because concrete need of
speakers is existing (in synchrony) and this phenomen has
exactly this form because such-and-such previous facts
had resulted in it (in diachrony).
The forms 'you guys, you kids, etc.' (look AMR's letter,
14 May) appeared both from previous losting of difference between
pl. and sg. and from the continuing need of speakers in this
difference (at least in some situations).
 The same reason, I think, is for the appearing the modern
Russian non-standart forms 'platjA, sredstvA etc.' "dresses,
means" (with stressed second  a). Standart forms of o-neutra
nouns with fixed stress ('plAtja etc.') in fact lost difference
with pl. because sg. and pl. here differ in endings [o]/[a]
and theese phonems, if unstressed, don't differ in most of
contemporary dialects.  27 Russian nouns o-neutra total
changed from 16 centure fixed stress to movable, some from
them in literare Russian. I see in this fact an interesting
example of language self-regulation under impact of mighty need
of speakers in the short (grammar) expression of number.
(This category is almost universal as you know.) But this
loss isn't noticeable because it isn't visible in writing.
Some of such tendencies in Russian accentuation from 16
centure to novadays are considering in both aspects "Why?" in
my recent paper "Grammaticalization of Russian accentuation:
why?", not publishing yet. If anybody interests, I can send
it.
       Ireena Lifshitc-Fufajeva
       postmaster at aveinfo-sci.nnov.ru
       Nizhnij Novgorod, Russia


From Paula.Fikkert at uni-konstanz.de  Thu May 28 14:06:05 1998
From: Paula.Fikkert at uni-konstanz.de (Paula Fikkert)
Date: Thu, 28 May 1998 10:06:05 EDT
Subject: call for papers
Message-ID: <THU.28.MAY.1998.100605.EDT.PAULA.FIKKERT@UNIKONSTANZ.DE>

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
====================== CALL FOR PAPERS=====================
 
 
                   CHANGE IN PROSODIC SYSTEMS
 
                University of Konstanz, Germany
 
                        February 24-26, 1999
 
 
Invited speakers:
Elan Dresher (University of Toronto)
Carlos Gussenhoven (University of Nijmegen)
Tomas Riad (University of Stockholm)
 
===========================================================
 
We are pleased to announce the workshop 'Change in Prosodic Systems' as
part of the 21st annual meeting of the German Society of Linguistics (DGfS)
in Konstanz, Germany.
 
This workshop addresses various aspects of change in prosodic systems with
the aim to enlarge our understanding of the range of variation and the
types of change that are attested in languages. We organise three
subsections, which are closely related and investigate the topic of change
in prosodic systems from a different perspective.
 
(a) Stress, tone and stress-related phenomena
This section discusses the changing prosodic systems of languages, not only
with respect to stress and syllable structure, but also quantity, syncope,
epenthesis, the domain of segmental rules, etc.
 
(b) Evidence from Metrics
The study of metrical systems also provides insight into issues like the
prosodic structure of complex words, loans, the way in which weight and
quantity are reflected in metrical structure, etc.
 
(c) Sources of Change: Analogy, Loans etc.
The main focus of the third subsection is on the source of change and
variation in prosodic systems, and addresses questions like the following.
What leads to variation and or change? What triggers change in a prosodic
system? Can language contact directly influence prosodic systems? What is
the role of analogy? Which paradigms resist analogical change more than
others? What is the role of morphology?
 
PAPERS are invited on any of the three topics above. Send a one-page
abstract (preferably by email) to:
 
Paula Fikkert
Fachgruppe Sprachwissenschaft, Universitaet Konstanz
Postfach D186
D-78457 Konstanz
Germany
email: Paula.Fikkert at uni-konstanz.de
 
DEADLINE for receipt of abstracts: AUGUST 15, 1998
 
Workshop Organisers:
Paula Fikkert
Haike Jacobs


From bwald at HUMnet.UCLA.EDU  Thu May 28 14:00:54 1998
From: bwald at HUMnet.UCLA.EDU (bwald)
Date: Thu, 28 May 1998 10:00:54 EDT
Subject: synchronic vs diachronic causes of language changes
Message-ID: <THU.28.MAY.1998.100054.EDT.BWALD@HUMNET.UCLA.EDU>

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
Ireena Lifshitc-Fufajeva makes a valid distinction between "how?" and
"why?" with respect to any particular linguistic change.  However, her
assumption that "why?" is answered by "need" leaves something to be
desired.  She writes with regard to the shift from fixed to movable stress
for certain Russian neuter nouns:
 
27 Russian nouns o-neutra total
>changed from 16 centure fixed stress to movable, some from
>them in literare Russian. I see in this fact an interesting
>example of language self-regulation under impact of mighty need
>of speakers in the short (grammar) expression of number.
 
No doubt this change is motivated by the *desire* to restore an audible
distinction between the singular and the plural of the nouns in question
(following a/o phonetic merger in unstressed positions, where -a is the
plural counterpart of -o as Russian suffixes) .  However, she spoils her
explanation with the parenthetical comment:
 
>(This category is almost universal as you know.)
 
Here she assigns languages which do not have plural as an obligatory
category to the realm of "unnatural" curiosities, an ethnocentric position
that few of "you" will accept.  The real explanation does not have to do
with "need" in such a universal sense.  It has to do with the grammatical
nature of Russian.  In Russian, number is an obligatory category for
(count) nouns.  Speakers feel a discomfort with losing the distinction for
what seem to them to be an arbitrary set of nouns (based on their form, not
their semantics).  Therefore, they act to restore the distinction and
regularise (or, as she says, "regulate") singular:plural marking when there
is no semantic motivation for suspending it.
 
If the restoration was based on "communicative" need (to dismiss the notion
of "universal need"), then it would not occur when a modifier is present
which unambiguously indicates the number of the noun, as in the case of
Uralic or Altaic (with a number, or, in Russian, when the modifier already
has movable stress).  But I doubt that this is the case for the Russian
innovation.  However, it is the case for the English "plurals" of "you".
It is not always clear pragmatically whether "you all/guys/etc" is
necessary to clarify that some single addressee is not being picked out of
a group, but it is clear that "you" indicating "one", as in "*you* can't
make a silk purse out of a sow's ear" is rhetorically closer to the
"plural" as a "generic" generalising to "everybody", than it is to a
specific single addressee.  And yet it is unheard of to say "*you guys*
can't make a silk purse..." to indicate "*one* cannot make a silk purse..."
("*you can't", in this sense, implies "nobody can", "you guys can't"
allows "somebody else can")
 
As I mentioned last time this subject came up, I am not convinced that "you
guys/etc" is a paradigmatic "plural" of "you" (and we don't have the same
option of suspending number marking for "we" and "they" that we do for
"you"), rather than an optional phrase, producing further specificity.
Similarly, I would expect someone whose language distinguishes an
inclusive/exclusive first plural to be either be amazed that IE languages
(among others) don't make it, or to analyse "me-and-you / you-and-I" as the
"inclusive 1p" in English.  I guess in the next stage we also get a "plural
inclusive" 1p, "me-and-you guys/all/etc", etc.  distinguished from the
"dual" 'me-and-you'.
 
NB.  Shocking as some of you more conservative speakers may find it
(despite your self-discipline as linguists), 'you-and-I' has indeed become
a unit for some American speakers.  They spontaneously say, "I wonder why
he didn't invite you and I" as well as the usual suspects, e.g.,  following
prepositions and in pivot contexts like: 'he wants you and I to come'. --
'me-and-you' as a unit is less of a problem, since the only innovation is
generalisation to subject contexts, but that also makes it less obvious
that it is indeed a pronominal unit rather than the result of loss of case
distinctions in favor of "me" as "unmarked" on the basis of its already
superior privileges of occurrence, as Sapir suggested in his comments on
'drift'.


From dnapoli1 at swarthmore.edu  Sat May 30 17:19:05 1998
From: dnapoli1 at swarthmore.edu (Donna Jo Napoli)
Date: Sat, 30 May 1998 13:19:05 EDT
Subject: JOBS
Message-ID: <SAT.30.MAY.1998.131905.EDT.DNAPOLI1@SWARTHMORE.EDU>

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
PLEASE POST (as of May 29, 1998) OR FORWARD TO ALL MEMBERS-- THANK YOU
 
Jobs for Linguists.
        Swarthmore College has applied for an NSF grant to set up a
Linguistics Forum.  We will hear on August 1, 1998, whether or not we get
the funding.  If we do, we will have positions for one Ph.D. in Linguistics
and two BAs or MAs in Linguistics starting in Sept., 1998, and running for
two years with the possibility of an extension depending on further funding.
        We are now accepting applications for these positions with the
understanding that funding is pending.
        The Linguistics Forum will be an on-line educational forum for
Kindergarten through 12th grade students and their teachers.  These people
will write in to our web site with questions about language.  The questions
will be posted on a bulletin board, where linguist volunteers will select
questions to answer.  The answers will come back to the Linguistics Forum
staff (physically located at Swarthmore College) and we will then make sure
that they are appropriate for the age child/ classroom they are intended
for.  All answers should be designed to lead the child to the answer if
possible, through reasoning and experimentation.  And all answers should be
designed so that the child can bring an activity back for sharing in his or
her classroom.  Any questions that volunteer linguists do not answer will
be answered by the Forum staff (the three people we will hire plus various
faculty at Swarthmore College).
        The staff of the Forum must have a solid foundation in linguistics
(we won't consider anyone without at least a BA in Linguistics proper).
But the staff must also have:
        1) clear communicative skills
        2) creativity and vision
        3) comfort dealing with the internet
        4) interest across the board in theoretical and applied linguistics
        5) comfort dealing with children
        6) high tolerance for frustration
        All three staff members we hire will be involved both with
answering questions and in designing the Forum.  Part of our job over the
first two years will be to define our niche and to communicate that clearly
to the public.  The potential of the Forum is huge, and we need staff that
can envision that potential and help realize it.
        The Ph.D. will teach one course at Swarthmore College each academic
year.  In the fall of 1998, that course will probably be Morphology.  In
the fall of 1999, that course will probably be Historical & Comparative
Linguistics.  For this reason, the person must be a generativist (because
that's the kind of department we have at Swarthmore).  However, the person
need not be a specialist in either morphology or historical work, but
simply have a firm grounding in it.  The person will have the option of
working for only the 9 academic months the first year, or for working 12
months with a 1 month vacation in the summer.  During the second year,
however, the person must work for 12 months with just 1 month vacation.
The first year academic salary will be $45,000.  The summer salary (should
the person decide to work in the summer) will be $10,000.
        One of the BAs will be our web master and should have experience in
system administration, programming, and the internet.  This person will
write and maintain software, connect us with existing web resources, inform
us of these resources, set up a holding tank for the questions that come
in, design the archives for our answers, and basically build the structure
of the Forum. Skills in Unix/Linux will be helpful.
        One of the BAs will be our jack-of-all-trades, responsible for
outreach to the public and desk-top publishing as well as administrative
duties.  This person will handle all printed materials, publicity,
schedules of meetings with teachers and organizations, and so on.
        While the above descriptions make the two BA positions sound quite
distinct, in fact, the separation and sharing of duties will depend on the
particular people we hire -- so please consider the above descriptions as
fluid.
        Both BAs will be on a 12-month contract, with one summer month
vacation, salary being between $25k and $30k depending on duties.
 
        If you want to apply, here's what you must do.
 
(1) There is a Math Forum analogous to the Linguistics Forum we are
proposing.  You must take the internet tour of the Math Forum:
        http://forum.swarthmore.edu/dr.math/office_help/
Once you have done that tour, answer these two questions:
        (a) What are the strengths and weakness of the Math Forum?
        (b) How would you design a Linguistics Forum?
Your answers can be detailed or not, but they should not be longer than 3
double-spaced pages each please.  Send us those answers as part of your
initial application.
 
2) Please send a c.v. that includes your e-mail address if you have one (we
will communicate with you only by e-mail if you have an e-mail address),
your educational history, a description of your computer and internet
experience, and a description of your experience with children K-12.
        If you are not yet up to speed on the internet, tell us whether or
not you are willing to get up to speed on it before August and how you plan
to do that.
 
3) Please have three letters of recommendation sent and send us the names
of these recommenders with their e-mail addresses.  At least one
recommendation should be from a linguistics professor.  At most one can be
from a child aged K-12 that you have taught or tutored.
 
4) If you have a Ph.D. in linguistics, send three papers on linguistics
that you have written which show the breadth of your interests in the field.
    If you have a BA or MA in linguistics, send one paper in any area of
linguistics.
 
Swarthmore is an Equal Opportunity Employer.  Women and Minorities are
encouraged to apply.  Primary or secondary teaching experience is a plus.
 
All materials must be sent in hard copy form by August 10, 1998 to the
Forum Director:
        Donna Jo Napoli
        Linguistics
        Swarthmore College
        Swarthmore, PA 19081
Do not send these materials by e-mail.  However, if you have questions and
absolutely need a response before you can apply, please address them by
e-mail to dnapoli1 at swarthmore.edu.
 
 
 
Donna Jo Napoli
Prof. and Chair
Linguistics
Swarthmore College
Swarthmore, PA 19081
USA
(610) 328-8422
(610) 328-6558 - home
fax (610) 328-7323
dnapoli1 at swarthmore.edu


From Harold.Koch at anu.edu.au  Fri May  1 11:44:01 1998
From: Harold.Koch at anu.edu.au (Harold Koch)
Date: Fri, 1 May 1998 07:44:01 EDT
Subject: Q: HL textbook
Message-ID: <FRI.1.MAY.1998.074401.EDT.HAROLD.KOCH@ANU.EDU.AU>

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
>
>To:Larry Trask <larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk>
>From:Harold.Koch at anu.edu.au (Harold Koch)
>Subject:Re: Q: HL textbook
>
>Larry
>What about early European efforts such as:
>Hermann Paul, Prinzipien der Sprachgeschichte, 1880, further editions 1886,
>1898, 1909, 1920.
>
>Or early/ pre-modern introductions to linguistics, where the latter is seen
>primarily in historical terms, such as:
>W.D. Whitney. Language and the study of language: Twelve lectures on the
>principles of linguistic science. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1867.
>W.D. Whitney. The life and growth of language. New York/London, 1875.
>Joseph Vendryes, Le langage: Introduction linguistique a` l'histoire.
>(L'?volution de l'humanit?) Paris: La renaissance du livre, 1923. Eng transl
>by Paul Radin, Language: a linguistic introduction to history. London:
>Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1925.
>Otto Jespersen. Language: its nature, development and origin. London: George
>Allen and Unwin, 1922.
>Trombetti, Alfredo. Elementi di glottologia. Bologna: N. Zanichelli, 1923.
>And of course Bloomfield's Language in the early 1930s.
>
>Then, besides Sturtevant (mentioned by Janda), there is the partial textbook:
>Pike, Kenneth Lee. Axioms and procedures for reconstructions in comparative
>linguistics: an exerimental [i.e. experimental] syllabus. Glendale, Calif.:
>Summer Institute of Linguistics, 1950.
>
>Harold Koch
>
>>----------------------------Original message----------------------------
>>Does anybody know of a university-level textbook of historical
>>linguistics earlier than W. P. Lehmann's 1962 textbook?
>>
>>Larry Trask
>>COGS
>>University of Sussex
>>Brighton BN1 9QH
>>England
>>
>>larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk
>
 
Harold Koch, Senior Lecturer
Department of Linguistics
Faculty of Arts
The Australian National University
Canberra ACT 0200 Australia
 
Telephone:  (02) 6249 3203 (direct) / ..3026 (messages)
(overseas) 61 2 6249 3203
Fax:  (02) 6 279 8214
(overseas) 61 2 6279 8214
email:  Harold.Koch at anu.edu.au


From bwald at HUMnet.UCLA.EDU  Tue May  5 13:04:21 1998
From: bwald at HUMnet.UCLA.EDU (bwald)
Date: Tue, 5 May 1998 09:04:21 EDT
Subject: Paul 1880 vs. 1886 vs. 1920...; Bloomfield 1933/1965
Message-ID: <TUE.5.MAY.1998.090421.EDT.BWALD@HUMNET.UCLA.EDU>

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
Just a brief, possibly philosophical, comment on Rich Janda's following
passage on Paul and 19th c (historical) linguistics.
 
>     Moreover, though Paul's lapidary words are excellent for exem-
>plifying the period when linguistics was historical linguistics, they
>certainly show how far he was from contemporary physical scien-
>tists and modern scientists of all sorts in his insistence that, essen-
>tially, you don't have a scientific understanding of a system unless
>you know the history of every piece of it.  No sane geologist would
>today agree that understanding, say, the cliffs of Dover requires one
>to know the origin of every one of its molecules (or atoms, or elec
>trons [electra?], or quarks)....
>     What would have happened without de Saussure--or Bloomfield?
 
I would guess that like most 19th c intellectuals of the "scientific" type,
Paul was partial to the notion of determinism.  Clearly this goes beyond
linguistics to "everything", which includes the history of "everything".
But it still means you gotta know "everything" to *fully* "understand"
anything.  That is different from a partial and somewhat practical (or
heuristic) understanding of the phenomena delimited by some field /
discipline, whether linguistics, geology or whatever.  Faith in total
determinism ends for science with quantum physics and the uncertainty
principle in the earliest 20th c, but the implications were still resisted
by Einstein and people like that.
 
Within linguistics, early structuralism still has that somewhat mystical
deterministic notion, but restricted to "linguistics" as a discipline, as
in the gross exaggeration contained in Meillet's dictum about language
being a system "ou tout se tient", the idea being, I suppose, that if one
thing in the system changes no telling what other changes it will
eventually lead to (by necessity?).
 
I guess the latest outcome for how historical linguistics relates to
"synchronic" linguistics is restricted to such things as the problem of
encountering something strange / unexpected  in the attempted description
of some language.  In this case, we get interested in how the particular
language or dialect acquired this strange property, and we start looking at
its history.  (Even Chomsky & Halle still had the notion that the
synchronic properties of a linguistic system only worked up to the point at
which some aspect of the system was "in flux")  Historical insight into
"unusual" synchronic states we still think (I think) helps us gain insight
into the nature of the property and the implications it has for a language
at any particular time, and for "language" at all times whatsoever.


From nbvint at nessie.mcc.ac.uk  Thu May  7 16:48:36 1998
From: nbvint at nessie.mcc.ac.uk (nigel vincent)
Date: Thu, 7 May 1998 12:48:36 EDT
Subject: Lect HistLing
Message-ID: <THU.7.MAY.1998.124836.EDT.NBVINT@NESSIE.MCC.AC.UK>

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
>Lectureship in Historical Linguistics (Ref. no. 310/98)
>
>Applications will be considered from those specializing in any branch of
>historical linguistics. A strong research record is essential, and a
>completed PhD is desirable. Applicants must be able to demonstrate an
>interest both in the theoretical study of language change and in the
>history of one or more languages and language families. Preference may be
>given to candidates whose research relates to the history of a language or
>languages other than English. The starting date is 1 September 1998 or as
>soon as possible thereafter. Salary in the range: ?16045 - ?21894 p.a.
>(under review). Closing date for applications: 9 June 1998.
>Applications forms are available from and applications should be submitted
>to: Office of the Director of Personnel, The University of Manchester,
>Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL, UK. Tel: ++44 (0)161 275 2028; Fax: ++44
>(0)161 275 2221; Minicom (for the hearing impaired): ++44 (0)161 275 7889.
>Email: personnel at man.ac.uk
>Website: http://www.man.ac.uk
>Applications should quote the above reference number and contain the names
>of three referees. It is the responsibility of applicants to ensure that
>supporting letters of reference are sent to the same address by the closing
>date for applications.
>It is expected that interviews for this post will be conducted in the week
>beginning 15 June 1998.
>
>Person Description
>Candidates should possess a strong research record, including a PhD or
>equivalent publications, in the any area of historical linguistics. They
>must be able to demonstrate an interest both in the theoretical study of
>language change and in the history of one or more languages and language
>families. Preference may be given to candidates whose research relates to
>the history of a language or languages other than English. Candidates will
>need to have or acquire the presentational skills necessary for lectures,
>seminars and small group teaching, and the IT and organizational skills
>appropriate to departmental teaching and administration.
>
>Job Description
>The appointed candidate will be expected to contribute to the research,
>teaching (both undergraduate and postgraduate) and administration of the
>Department of Linguistics.
>        General particulars of appointment to posts of Lecturer refer to
>the duty to undertake research. In the Faculty of Arts it is a matter of
>policy that the capacity to fulfil that duty requires that care be taken by
>Heads of Department to ensure that the opportunity exists for staff to
>undertake research. Newly appointed staff in particular, serving a period
>of probation (normally up to four years), may expect to establish with
>their Head of Department appropriate arrangements for undertaking research
>activity and for publishing their results. A mentoring system also exists
>for new staff. In addition, probationary staff Reports on research activity
>undertaken by probationary Lecturers, compiled by various means including
>periodic appraisal by or for the Head of Department, will form a
>significant part of the information to be taken into account by the Faculty
>Review Committee and the Academic Promotions Committee in determining
>progress in probation, and in formulating their recommendations regarding
>the completion of probation.
>
>The Department of Linguistics
>The Department was rated 5 in the Research Assessment Exercise of 1996 and
>seeks to improve that score in the next Exercise. (If you are not familiar
>with this assessment system; there is one score, 5*, which is higher than
>5.) There are at present eight tenured and one temporary members of staff
>and three Research Fellows, whose names and research interests are set out
>below:
>
>Martin Barry    Lecturer        instrumental phonetics; forensic
>                                phonetics; Russian
>
>Susan Barry     Temp Lecturer   instrumental phonetics; child
>                                phonology Phonetics; Russian
>
>Delia Bentley   Research Fellow morphosyntactic change; Italian,
>                                Sicilian, Sardinian
>Kersti Borjars  Lecturer        syntax (HPSG, LFG); morphology;
>                                Swedish, Dutch
>William Croft   Reader          linguistic typology; semantics;
>                                cognitive linguistics;
>                                American Indian languages
>Alan Cruse      Senior Lecturer lexical semantics; pragmatics;
>                                cognitive linguistics; Arabic,
>                                Turkish
>Alan Cruttenden Professor       intonation theory; cross-linguistic
>                                and cross-dialectal intonations
>Thorhallur Eythorsson Research Fellow
>                                morphosyntactic change; Icelandic,
>                                Gothic, Tokharian
>Yaron Matras   Research Fellow  language contact; discourse pragmatics;
>                                Romany, Turkish, German, Kurdish
>John Payne     Senior Lecturer  syntax (Categorial Grammar);
>                                linguistic typology; English Grammar;
>                                Iranian Languages, Russian
>Katharine Perera  Professor     educational linguistics; the acquisition
>                                of reading and writing; stylistics
>Nigel Vincent   Professor       morphosyntactic change; morphology;
>                                Italian, Latin
>
>
>
>Professor Jacques Durand (Universiy of Toulouse) holds an Honorary Chair in
>Phonology in the Department, and is co-organizer of the annual Manchester
>Phonology Colloquium. The Department also has close links with the language
>specialists (Prof Richard Hogg, Prof David Denison, Dr Chris McCully) in
>the Department of English, and with Dr Wiebke Brockhaus in the Department
>of German.
>
>        The department currently hosts a British-Academy funded research
>project on Archaism and Innovation in the Languages of Europe jointly
>directed by Professors Vincent and Hogg. The researchers on thisproject are
>Drs Delia Bentley and Thorhallur Eythorsson. For more details about this
>project, visit the website at:  http://www.art.man.ac.uk/innovate/
>If appropriate, the successful candidate for the present post will have the
>opportunity to associate his/her research with this project, and to
>participate in activities that are organized under its aegis.
>
>        The Department has a programme of postgraduate courses which form
>in different ways the whole or the nucleus of various master's degrees,
>including ones linking the Department with language departments in the
>Faculty of Arts, with Psychology, Computer Science, and Mathematics (in the
>Faculty of Science), and with the Faculty of Education. There are currently
>13 Ph.D. students registered in the Department.
>        The Department is also involved in a large array of undergraduate
>degree programmes, including single honours linguistics and joint degrees
>with twelve other departments including Sociology and Social Anthropology.
>The Department also plays a role in the B.Sc. in Speech Pathology and
>Therapy and contributes to degrees in Combined Studies, besides having many
>students doing linguistics as a subsidiary subject.
>        The Department participates in a network in Linguistics under the
>Socrates scheme, involving exchanges with Amsterdam, Berlin, Gerona,
>Helsinki, Lund, Madrid, Naples, and Odense. Under the aegis of this
>programme a European M.A. exists whereby students who register in one
>country can do part of their degree in other countries. The Department also
>belongs to a Socrates programme in Phonetics.
>        The Department has its own Library and a Phonetics Laboratory,
>which has facilities for signal analysis, speech synthesis, laryngography,
>and electropalatography. Computation in the Department is primarily based
>on Macintosh; the Department's local area network runs over Ethernet and is
>connected to the campus backbone and thence to the Internet. A number of
>PCs are also available.
>        The Journal of the International Phonetic Association is edited
>from within the Department by Martin Barry.
>
>        The Department is a member of the North West Centre of Linguistics
>(NWCL), a collaborative body embracing all staff and postgraduate students
>in Linguistics in participating institutions in the North West. These
>currently include the Universities of Central Lancashire, Lancaster,
>Liverpool, Manchester, Salford, UMIST, and the University of Wales at
>Bangor. NWCL arranges seminars, conferences, workshops and
>inter-institutional postgraduate training.
>
>        More information about the Department and its activities can be
>obtained by consulting the following website: http://lings.ln.man.ac.uk/
>
>        Those invited for interview will be asked to give a presentation of
>their work to members of the Department. Applicants who require further
>information or who wish to discuss the details of the post are invited to
>contact either Prof Nigel Vincent (nigel.vincent at man.ac.uk,
>+44-(0)161-275-3194/3187) or the Head of Department, Mr John Payne
>(john.payne at man.ac.uk, +44 (0)161-275-3186/3187).
>
 
 
Nigel Vincent                  Tel: +44-(0)161-275 3194
Department of Linguistics      Fax: +44-(0)161-275 3187
University of Manchester       e-mail: nigel.vincent at man.ac.uk
Manchester M13 9PL              http://lings.ln.man.ac.uk/Html/NBV/
UK                               Visit our web-page:
                                http://lings.ln.man.ac.uk/


From DISTERH at UNIVSCVM.SC.EDU  Thu May  7 22:25:54 1998
From: DISTERH at UNIVSCVM.SC.EDU (Dorothy Disterheft)
Date: Thu, 7 May 1998 18:25:54 EDT
Subject: First Circular: ICHL XIV
Message-ID: <THU.7.MAY.1998.182554.EDT.DISTERH@UNIVSCVM.SC.EDU>

 First Circular
 
 ICHL XIV
 THE FOURTEENTH INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE
  ON HISTORICAL LINGUISTICS
 
 August 9-13, 1999
 
 The University of British Columbia
 Vancouver, B.C. Canada
 
PAPERS are invited on any topic in historical linguistics relating to any
language or language family. Papers which address the question of "Problems
for Historical Linguistics in the Twenty-first Century" are particularly
welcome.
 
DEADLINE for receipt of abstracts:   OCTOBER 15, 1998
 
FORMAT of abstracts: Abstracts of no more than 250 words should be sent
preferably via email (ASCII [text] file only), or one hard copy may be sent
by regular mail (disks are not required).
 
Proposals for WORKSHOPS or special sessions are also welcome.
Those wishing to organize a workshop should send their proposals to the
Conference Organizer by the end of JUNE 1998.
Workshop organizers are responsible for soliciting/inviting papers. One day
of the conference will be devoted to workshops.
A workshop on JAPANESE-KOREAN HISTORICAL/COMPARATIVE LINGUISTICS organized
by Ross King (Asian Studies, University of British Columbia) is already
planned.
 
 
Email address of conference: ichlxiv at interchg.ubc.ca
 
 
Conference Organizer
 Laurel Brinton
 Department of English
 #397-1873 East Mall
 University of British Columbia
 Vancouver, B.C. V6T 1Z1  CANADA
 FAX: (604) 822-6906
 
 
 
In order to receive the Second Circular, fill in and return (electronically)
the following form. (Since we plan to process addresses by computer, please
be certain to insert the requested information following the colon on each
line.)
__________________________________________________________
 
 
Surname:
 
First name:
 
Title:
 
University Affiliation:
 
Mailing address (line 1):
 
Mailing address (line 2):
 
Mailing address (line 3):
 
Email address:


From DISTERH at UNIVSCVM.SC.EDU  Fri May  8 13:13:25 1998
From: DISTERH at UNIVSCVM.SC.EDU (Dorothy Disterheft)
Date: Fri, 8 May 1998 09:13:25 EDT
Subject: ICHL circular
Message-ID: <FRI.8.MAY.1998.091325.EDT.DISTERH@UNIVSCVM.SC.EDU>

Dear collegues,
I'm very pleased at the response that the first circular for ICHL XIV
has prompted. I've forwarded the forms that I've received so far to
the ICHL Organizing Committee. However, you should send your completed
forms directly to Laurel Brinton at ichlxiv at interchg.ubc.ca (i.e. the
address provided on the circular) and not to me. If you have problems
doing this, I will be happy to receive your responses and to forward
them to the Organizing Committee.
 
Dorothy Disterheft
Secretary, ISHL


From delancey at darkwing.uoregon.edu  Sat May  9 16:30:52 1998
From: delancey at darkwing.uoregon.edu (Scott DeLancey)
Date: Sat, 9 May 1998 12:30:52 EDT
Subject: Paul 1880 vs. 1886 vs. 1920...; Bloomfield 1933/1965
In-Reply-To: <v02140b00b1739af26fc0@[128.97.208.90]>
Message-ID: <SAT.9.MAY.1998.123052.EDT.DELANCEY@DARKWING.UOREGON.EDU>

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
On Tue, 5 May 1998, bwald wrote:
 
> I guess the latest outcome for how historical linguistics relates to
> "synchronic" linguistics is restricted to such things as the problem of
> encountering something strange / unexpected  in the attempted description
> of some language.  In this case, we get interested in how the particular
> language or dialect acquired this strange property, and we start looking at
> its history.
 
A lot of people no longer think that that's all there is to it.
I (along with a long list of others) would argue that there is
in principle no way to understand a lot of facts about synchronic
structure except in terms of grammaticalization.  The fact, for
example, that syntactic categories are *normally* not airtight
and completely discrete.  How can there be any useful account of the
English "quasi-modals"--gonna, oughta, usta, etc.--that doesn't have
a clear diachronic dimension?
 
And it's been convincingly suggested (by Givon, Aristar, and my
humble self, and probably others) that many of the famous word-
order correlations are in fact just the synchronic projection
of diachrony.  Why do adpositions fall on the same side of their
NP as verbs do of their object?  Why, because adpositions commonly
originate diachronically in serialized transitive verbs.  There is
in fact no need for any synchronic account of this correlation (or
many of the others--and thus, inter alia, no need for much of X-
theory) apart from the very simple diachronic one.
 
For the most radical current argument along these lines, look at
Paul Hopper's "Emergent grammar", where the line between synchrony
and diachrony becomes invisible.
 
Although the field has let itself be convinced otherwise for the
last century, I think Paul was pretty close to the mark.
 
Scott DeLancey
Department of Linguistics
University of Oregon
Eugene, OR 97403, USA
 
delancey at darkwing.uoregon.edu
http://www.uoregon.edu/~delancey/prohp.html


From mcv at wxs.nl  Sat May  9 16:36:01 1998
From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal)
Date: Sat, 9 May 1998 12:36:01 EDT
Subject: Dixon's "The rise and fall of languages"
Message-ID: <SAT.9.MAY.1998.123601.EDT.>

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
 
I have just read R.M.W. Dixon's "The Rise and Fall of Languages"
(C.U.P. 1997), and I have found it deeply disturbing.  For two
completely different reasons.
 
The book (or essay) itself carries two separate messages.  One is an
attempt at a new theory of comparative linguistics.  The other is a
passionate plea for linguists to do what they should do, before it's
too late.
 
Thousands of languages will be irretrievably lost in the next hundred
years or so, and there is nothing we can do about it.  Dixon conveys
this disturbing message forcefully, while at the same time urging
us ('people who call themseleves linguists') to literally drop
everything and record the languages that are still extant NOW.
 
        The most important task in linguistics today  -- indeed, the
        only really important task -- is to get out in the field and
        describe languages, while this can still be done.  [Other
        things] can wait; that will always be possible.  Linguistic
        description must be undertaken now.
 
And:
 
        If this work is not done soon it can nver be done.  Future
        generations will then look back at the people who call
        themselves 'linguists' at the close of the twentieth and
        beginning of the twenty-first century, with bewilderment and
        disdain.
 
 
I don't know how this message could be conveyed more forcefully.  It
is with a sense of personal shame, as someone who unlike prof. Dixon
has never done fieldwork, that instead of turning to the Amazon
jungle I now turn to the other aspect of Dixon's book.
 
The new model that Dixon proposes, the "punctuated equilibrium
model", aims to integrate two distinct views on the development of
langage: the "family tree model", and various models based on areal
diffusion of linguistic pehenomena.
 
Dixon makes four basic assumptions:
 
1) Languages are always in a state of change
2) The rate of change is not constant and not predictable
3) Core vocabulary is not (universally) more resistent to change than
 
   "non-core" vocabulary
4) In the normal course of linguistic evolution, each language has a
   single parent
 
Assumption (4) denies the validity of the "rhizotic" models of
'glotto-genesis', at least "in the normal course of linguistic
evolution".  The existence of exceptions or apparent exceptions, like
mixed languages (Ma'a and Copper Island Aleut are reviewed) and maybe
creoles is acknowledged.
 
Assumptions (2) and (3) are aimed at lexicostatistics and
glottochronology as methods of linguistic classification and dating.
Unlike assumption (2), assumption (3) is surprising:
 
        This [greater stability of core vocabulary] does appear to
        hold for the languages of Europe [..] and of many other parts
        of the world.  But it does not apply everywhere [..]  In
        Australia, for instance, similar percentages of shared
        vocabulary are obtained by comparing 100 or 200 or 400 or
        2,000 lexemes, from adjacent languages.
 
Dixon reports evidence from New Guinea suggestive of the same
phenomenon.
 
Unlike, for instance, Malcolm Ross in his essay "Social networks and
kinds of speech-community event" (in: "Archaeology and Language I",
Roger Blench & Matthew Spriggs, eds., Routledge 1997), Dixon does not
give an exhaustive catalog of inguistic phenomena that are at odds
with the traditional model of the "family tree".  We are told that
"the family tree model was developed for -- and is eminently
appropiate to -- the Indo-European (IE) language family", that in
many parts of the world (Africa, Australia) no proto-languages have
been reconstructed [although in the case of Africa this is formulated
as "no attempt has been made" (p. 33), leaving us to wonder if the
fault is the comparative method's or the Africanists'], that
proto-languages [unlike real languages] are often too tidy and too
regular [?], that there is no linguistical method to assign dates to
proto-languages, that sub-grouping is often a problem, and that not
all sound-changes are recoverable (Appendix).
 
One argument that I hadn't seen before is given on pp. 29-30.  It is
based on the assumptions that PIE is 6,000 years old, and human
language 17 times as old as that, 100,000 years.  At the IE rate of
language split (100 IE lgs. in 6,000 years), that would have given
10^34 languages today (or even 10^60 at the Austronesian rate), when
in fact we only have 5,000.
 
        If we adopted a more modest rate of splitting, supposing that
        a language is likely to split into two languages every 6,000
        years, we would expect proto-Human to have given rose to2^17,
 
        or about 130,000, modern languages.  If we allow for a number
        of languages becoming extinct along the way, this would be a
        more reasonable number. [..] The lesson from these
        calculations is that language split and expansion on the
        scale that is put forward for the IE and Austronesian
        families is highly unusual.
 
Hold it right there.  Of course the expansions of IE and AN are
unusual. But do the numbers constitute an argument against the family
tree model?  Do they support the notion that "Language development
during the past 100,000 and more years has involved long periods of
equilibrium, with only the occasional punctuation"?  Dixon correctly
notes that the IE expansion in Australia and the Americas has been at
the expense of a 1,000 languages dead or dying.  We cannot just
"allow for a number of languages becoming extinct", we have to
include the extinctions in the mathematical model.  If that's not
done, the argument comes dangerously close to rejecting the "family
tree model" for rabbits because of the absurd rate of growth forecast
by the Fibonacci series.
 
Introducing the notion of "punctuated equilibrium" into linguistics
is an interesting idea.  I certainly agree with Dixon that certain
phenomena of language change (transitions between head and dependent
marking, certain kinds of phonological and lexical change, etc. can
and do take place in short periods of time), and that even the origin
of language itself might be adequately explained as a sudden
punctuation.
 
On the other hand, I'm deeply troubled by some of the unexplained
assumptions in Dixon's model.  Most importantly, Dixon's assertion
that a state of equilibrium is unobservable:
 
        European scientists have only ever been able to observe a
        time of punctuation since, wherever Europeans go (with their
        weapons and religions and writing), they effect a punctuation
        in the existing state of equilibrium
 
and:
 
        No equilibrium situation ever has been or ever could be
        observed by a scientist (although it can be readily
        reconstructed for Australia, and probably also for other
        parts of the world)
 
 
I'm also troubled by the notion of a "punctuation" that keeps going
on for "the last 2,000 years" (p. 4).
 
But let's allow these premises and see what difference they make in
practical terms for historical linguistics.
 
Dixon states the family tree model is only valid for periods of
punctuation, when a "proto-language" spreads out and diversifies into
a number of daughter languages.  After some time, equilibrium is
restored, and, within an area of diffusion, languages are repeatedly
said to "converge on a common prototype", regardless of their genetic
origin.  It is well known that phonology, lexicon and grammatical
categories are readily diffused.  Grammatical forms (morphemes) are
much more resistant, "but during periods of equilibrium there was
time-a-plenty (perhaps tens of millennia) and then grammatical forms
certainly were borrowed".  Language families "are slowly blurred" (p.
71).  "In time, the convergence will obscure the original genetic
relationships" (p. 96).  "Family membership ceases to be a useful
concept" (p. 99).  But, perhaps surprsingly, the languages in a
linguistic area in equilibrium do not merge (p. 71).  And most
surprisngly of all, when a new episode of punctuation ensues, and new
language families are created, Dixon warns that "the language family
may have emanated not from a single language, but from a small areal
group of distinct languages, with similar structures and forms".
This obviously undermines the very concept of a "genetic group", in
spite of Dixon's basic Assumption #4 that "each language has a single
parent".
 
In even more practical terms, Dixon reviews some concrete examples:
Austronesian (a classical case where the family tree model works
adequately in general), Australia and the Americas.
 
There is considerable controversy at the moment about the date of
earliest human settlement of the American continent.  There is
surprisingly little evidence for settlement before the Clovis horizon
of 12,000 BP, although a slightly earlier date (perhaps 16,000 or
20,000 BP) is now beginning to be accepted in archaeological circles.
 
The great linguistic diversity of the Americas, however, is a major
problem for linguists, and leaves only two options open: either to
accept the archaeological dates and to hell with the linguistics (my
assessment of Greenberg's "Language in the Americas"), or to posit a
more reasonable date for the initial settlement and to hell with
archaeology (my assessment of Johanna Nichols' argument for a
time-depth of c. 35,000 years, which I share).  Dixon, armed with his
model of punctuated equilibrium, sees no problem:
 
        [Nichols' argument].  I take a viewpoint that is
        diametrically opposed.  The fact that so many language
        families are recognisable indicates a relatively recent
        series of language splits, quite compatible with a
        12,000-20,000-year period.  Give the languages in the
        Americas another 20,000 years and the diffusional patterns
        that are now emerging would become far more pervasive.
 
Counterintuitive to say the least.
 
But, given the authors admission that "It was largely in order to
adequately account for the linguistic situation in Australia that I
had recourse to the idea of P.EQ. as a model for language
development", we should turn to Australia next.
 
The c. 260 languages of Australia show many similarities, and "have
been said to comprise a single language family".  One supposed
(sub-)family, Pama-Nyungan, covers about 85% of the continent.
However, neither for Pama-Nyungan (apparently [p. 91] a
lexicostatistic construct), nor for Australian as a whole have family
trees or proto-languages been succesfully set up.  "It is possible to
establish low-level subgroups in Australia -- groups of from two to a
dozen or so languages that appear to have a close genetic
relationship", but the usefulness of the family tree concept as far
as Australia goes is apparently so low, that Dixon does not even
bother to mention the number of distinct genetic groups.
 
 
        It is likely that the whole of Australia was populated within
        a few thousand years of the first colonisation, about 50,000
        BP.  Many scholars believe that all Australian languages
        belong to one linguistic family.  Assuming this hypothesis
        there are two alternative scenarios:
 
        (i) Proto-Australian, the putative ancestor of all the modern
        languages, was spoken by some of the first people in
        Australia, about 50,000 years ago.
 
        (ii) Modern Australian languages are descended from a proto-
        langugae that was spoken much more recently -- say, 10,000 or
        5,000 years ago.
 
Hypothesis (ii) is dismissed, because we do not find pockets or
substrates of non-Australian languages, and there is no plausible
mechanism (like agriculture) to explain the expansion.  "We are left
with scenario (i)":  rapid expansion (punctuation) throughout the
whole continent, followed by essentially 50,000 years of equilibrium
until the English invasion, during which time the Asutralian
languages gradually converged to "a common prototype".  This is, as
Dixon states, "the only model able to explain the relationships
between languages in Australia" (p. 68).
 
Is it?  One might object that New Guinea, settled at the same time as
Australia, and united to it by a land-bridge until c. 10,000 years
ago, despite some areal characteristics, and despite an attested
punctuation with the arrival of Austronesian-speakers maybe 4,000
years ago, shows a bewildering linguistic diversity, parallelled
nowhere on earth.  Dixon blames this on the mountainous character of
New Guinea (and, similarly, the Caucasus).  And then, how tranquil
was the Australian equilibrium during those 50,000 years?  On p. 92,
Dixon suggest that the low-level genetic groupings that he recognizes
in Australia arose during the last of possibly several cycles of
contraction of the population to the coast and main rivers during
periods of drought, followed by expansion when conditions improved.
Repeated episodes of contraction and expansion may well have blurred
the genetic affiliations of the Australian languages by the processes
described by Ross (loc.cit.), such as language/"linkage" fusion.
Elsewhere (note, p.76, we are told that the population of Tasmania,
part of Australia until 10,000 years ago, did not have axes,
spear-throwers, boomerangs or dingoes.  It seems to me that the
introduction of those items, after 10,000 BP, might have caused quite
a bit of punctuation (and incidentally makes a good candidate for
the mechanism of expansion required by scenario (ii) above).
 
Finally, Ross (op.cit, p. 244), mentions an important socio-cultural
factor, not mentioned by Dixon at all, which seems to be of the
utmost importance to explain the "blurring" of sound-correspondences,
and the consequent difficulty in establishing family trees and
proto-languages.  It bears repeating here.  The case has been
described for a group of related languages in southern New Caledonia:
 
        Because the south New Caledonian languages were closely
        related, there were once regular sound correspondences
        between their vocabularies.  Where speakers regularly used
        two or more lects, they had an intuitive grasp of some of
        these correspondences and used them to convert the
        phonological shapes of words from one lect to another.
        However, the speakers' intuitive correspondences and the real
        correspondences resulting from historical change often
        differed from each other.
 
The result of this "Volkskomparativismus" is that the
sound-correspondences are FUBAR, a complete mess.
 
        Similar situations to the one described for New Caledonia
        also occur in parts of Australia.  In traditional aboriginal
        Australia each person belonged to an exogamous patriclan and
        spoke its emblematic patrilect.  However, aboriginal
        Australians moved around hunting and gathering in bands whose
        members belonged to different patriclans.  A number of
        patrilects, often quite closely related to each other, were
        typically represented in a band, and band members spoke their
        own and other members' patrilects.  Their vocabularies seem
        to have been affected in much the same way as those of the
        south New Caledonian lects.
 
While this picture is not in itself incompatible with Dixon's state
of equilibrium, it offers the advantage of actually explaining why
and how some of the languages might have converged in a way that is
not readily tractable by traditional comparativist means.
 
 
Finally, a word of caution to linguists.  As Dixon states in his
introduction, "many groups of linguists may be offended by what is
said about their area of specialisation".  Africanists may not like
Dixon's assessment of their field on pp. 32-33.  If there are still
some lexicostatisticians/glottochronologists around (and Dixon
chastises on Australian member of the species) they won't like pp.
35-37.  "Armchair typologists" and linguists *talking* about
"endangered languages" are dealt with elsewhere.  The heaviest
criticisms, however, are reserved for two sub-species: the
formalists, and the Nostraticists.
 
Formal theories (Chomskyan or not) have a "typical half-life [of] six
to ten years", and "few formalists do attempt to write comprehensive
grammars of languages (which is just as well [..])", although some of
them do from time to time consult the descriptive gammars written by
"real linguists".  They are "like a group of 'surgeons', none of whom
has ever actually performed an operation, giving courses of lectures
on the principles of surgery".
 
Nostraticists (or 'Nostraticists' as Dixon calls them), especially of
the Russian kind "openly boasted (and still boast) that they are
cleverer than anyone who has come before" [reference?], their
theories are "palpable poppycock", and "they have put forward the
idea that the main thing to be considered when formulating a genetic
connection between two languages is lexemes" [no reference].  "There
is no reputable linguist [defined as "anyone who teaches the subject
at a leading university in the USA or in a EEC nation"], anywhere in
the world, who accepts the claims of Greenberg and the
Nostraticists".  If we accept Dixon's punk-eek model, "there could be
no tempation to perpetrate anything such as 'Nostratic'".
 
        These 'Nostraticists' purport to work in terms of the
        comparative method, by assembling cognate sets.  However,
        they achieve their results only by allowing excessive
        phonological and semantic leeway.  In the 'reconstructions',
        scarcely any vowels are specified (given just as V), N is
        often employed for an unspecified nasal, and so on.
 
Regrettably, Prof. Dixon, with this last remark, makes it painfully
clear that he has never so much as set eyes on Illich-Svitych's
Nostratic dictionary...
 
Apart from the unfounded accusations, the only reasoned critique
against the "Nostratic fallacy" in Dixon's book is the following:
 
        It is not sensible policy to try and compare the original
        proto-languages of language families, and attempt to
        reconstruct a  proto-proto-tableau.  Firstly, we have only an
        approximate idea of what a proto-language was like. Secondly,
        it may not have been one language, but instead a group of
        languages.  And thirdly, proto-languages or
        proto-linguistic-situations are likely to be the product of
        diffusional convergence, at the end of a period of
        equilibrium, rather than languages which result from a
        family-tree-type expansion and split.
 
Of course, to agree with objections (2) and (3), one has to buy into
Dixon's punctuated quilibrium model, which I'm not prepared to do
right now.  As to the first objection, well, let's do away with
archaeology and paleontology as well, then.
 
 
 
=======================
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
mcv at wxs.nl
Amsterdam


From manaster at umich.edu  Sat May  9 20:39:05 1998
From: manaster at umich.edu (manaster at umich.edu)
Date: Sat, 9 May 1998 16:39:05 EDT
Subject: Dixon's "The rise and fall of languages"
In-Reply-To: <3597be7c.190261651@news.wxs.nl>
Message-ID: <SAT.9.MAY.1998.163905.EDT.>

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
To my mind the really objectionable part of
Dixon's argument is that he makes assertions
w/o any documentation, about topics such as
Nostratic, Australian-Pamanyungan (whose unity
was proven years ago by Ken Hale), and Niger-Congo
in particular.  This of course has become quite
common in our field, but that does not make it
right.  The right way to argue about language
families one does want to accept is to go
into the specifics and show what one perceives
to be the problem, as Doerfer has done for years
in his critiques of Altaic or as I did with
ZUni-Penutian or as Campbell has done in his
critiques of my Pakawan work.  I find it
completely icomprhensible that publishers
and editors publish and that readers take
seriously flat assertions like Dixon's
about the three families mentioned w/o
asking "Excuse me, sir, but where exactly
is your beef".  The same applies to Doerfer's
repeated offhand dismisslas of Afroasiatic
Uralic and in one place even of IE (which
contrast with his excellent record in arguing
against Altaic), to much if not all of Janhunen's
and certainly Krippes' critiques of Altaic.
 
I do not marvel that people write such
stuff, I do that they get published and
even applauded.
 
AMR


From manaster at umich.edu  Sat May  9 20:39:34 1998
From: manaster at umich.edu (manaster at umich.edu)
Date: Sat, 9 May 1998 16:39:34 EDT
Subject: Language and Anthropology in the Americas
In-Reply-To: <3597be7c.190261651@news.wxs.nl>
Message-ID: <SAT.9.MAY.1998.163934.EDT.>

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
Miguel writes:
 
 
The great linguistic diversity of the Americas, however, is a major
problem for linguists, and leaves only two options open: either to
accept the archaeological dates and to hell with the linguistics (my
assessment of Greenberg's "Language in the Americas"), or to posit a
more reasonable date for the initial settlement and to hell with
archaeology (my assessment of Johanna Nichols' argument for a
time-depth of c. 35,000 years, which I share).
 
====
I dont understand the basis for this assessement.  One may not
accept Greenberg's linguistics (I myself am a moderately well
known critic of his Amerind work and indeed one of the few
who discuss the actual content of the work and not merely
methods or typographical etc. errors), but it is unfair to
say that he throws the lx overboard.  Instead, he argues for
alinguistic hypothesis which whether right or not is certainly
not worthy of casual  dismissal.  As for Nichols, her agument
crucially depends on teh assumption that the many language families
which most linguists do not regard as provably related are in
fact UNrelated. For if they are related, then Greenberg is
right and everybody goes home happy.  And of course the
assumoption that languages not known for a certainty to
be related are UNrelated is the most elementary kind of
mistake anyone can make when trying to do comparative
linguistics, and one which Eric Hamp in particular has done
much (though clearly not enough) to combat over the years.
 
AMR


From manaster at umich.edu  Sat May  9 20:40:13 1998
From: manaster at umich.edu (manaster at umich.edu)
Date: Sat, 9 May 1998 16:40:13 EDT
Subject: Paul 1880 vs. 1886 vs. 1920...; Bloomfield 1933/1965
In-Reply-To: <Pine.GSO.3.96.980508141250.20054F-100000@darkwing.uoregon.edu>
Message-ID: <SAT.9.MAY.1998.164013.EDT.>

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
 
 
On Sat, 9 May 1998, Scott DeLancey wrote:
 
[snip]
 
> And it's been convincingly suggested (by Givon, Aristar, and my
> humble self, and probably others) that many of the famous word-
> order correlations are in fact just the synchronic projection
> of diachrony.  Why do adpositions fall on the same side of their
> NP as verbs do of their object?  Why, because adpositions commonly
> originate diachronically in serialized transitive verbs.  There is
> in fact no need for any synchronic account of this correlation (or
> many of the others--and thus, inter alia, no need for much of X-
> theory) apart from the very simple diachronic one.
 
[snip]
 
Although I am always uncomfortable disagreeing with Scott, with
whom I think I see eye to eye on so many bigger issues, I am not
comfortable with this argument.  It does have some force, of course,
but it does not go nearly far enough.  Linguistic changes, if allowed
to go their merry way, would be capable of producing all kinds
of startling results.  For example, the attrition of various
word-final phonemes should have led, in French and in many other
languages, to the rise of synchronic systems in which many
grammatical categories (e.g., number or case) would be left
unexpressed in the vast majority of lexical items.  Instead,
usually either the categories themselves disappear (e.g.,
case in French nouns and indeed in most IE) or new ways
of marking them come out of the left field (like the plural
marking on articles and other prenominal words instead of
on the nouns themselves in French, the rise of adpositions
in place of vanished case marking in many languages, etc.).
Similarly, but without reference to sound change this time,
the loss of active verb forms in certain tenses or moods
in Indo-Iranian languages (and elsewhere) would seem to
lead to a system in which we would have no expresion of
active voice in those tenses or moods.  But instead what
we find is that the formerly passive forms which take over
are reinterpreted as active (and lo we have ergativity).
 
So, unless I am completely mistaken, there IS after all
some need for recognizing that certain logically possible
linguistic systems are not in fact possible or at least
are difficult to acquire or maintain, for some
psychological (for lack of a better term) reasons,
and that language changes which seem to be bound to
produce just such systems are either inevitably or
at least usually accompanied or followed in short
order by other changes which "fix" things up again.
Indeed, this seems to me to be the traditional view
of language change, going back to Saussure and other
Indo-Europeanists of that time.
 
As far as the order of adpositions and other function
words (conjunctions) is concerned, unless I am mistaken,
there are in fact well-known data indicating that in
situations where they end up in the "wrong" place
there is a strong tendency to "fix" the order.  If
memory serves, is it not the case that in Indo-Iranian
again (and in Ethiopian Semitic and elsewhere) we do
find languages which are OV but have inherited
prepositions or clause initial subordinating conjunctions
etc., and that there is a strong tendency (manifested,
predictably enough, much more in colloquial than in literary
languages) to "fix" this.  This is a sweeping generalization
of course and with many exceptions, but I think it is broadly
right.  And if so, then again we would seem to have to acknowledge
an invisible hand (alias UG or the like) which seems to
guide language change in the direction of replacing
systems that are impossible or unnatural by ones which
are possible or natural.
 
Or am I missing something?
 
AMR


From rjanda at midway.uchicago.edu  Sun May 10 12:53:50 1998
From: rjanda at midway.uchicago.edu (Richard Janda)
Date: Sun, 10 May 1998 08:53:50 EDT
Subject: Historical Linguistics Without Syn-chrony is Doomed to Di....
Message-ID: <SUN.10.MAY.1998.085350.EDT.RJANDA@MIDWAY.UCHICAGO.EDU>

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
 
[...With sincere apologies to G. E. Lessing...]
  "(Almost) no one will deny", implies Herr DeLancey, that 'there is in
principle no way to understand a lot of facts about synchronic structure
except in terms of grammaticalization'."
 
  Well, then:  I am that (almost) no one; I deny it thoroughly.  What ap-
pear to be diachronic grammaticalizational accounts of phenomena are in
fact essentially always just synchronically-based accounts involving two
or more different time periods.
 
  Further:  What is really "diachronic" (as opposed to synchronic) about
a child acquiring the VOT of voiced stops in English, say?  There have
to be voiced stops present in order for children to acquire them, but that
basically misses the point.  Similarly, English _dinner_ used to mean
'breakfast' (it's ultimately from Latin dis-jejun-are 'de-fast, break fast'),
but so what?  Paul's dictum--that you can't be scientific unless you're
diachronic--is just bad science, especially nowadays.  It seems as if
many grammaticalization theorists have leapt from the well-supported
conclusion that grammaticalization phenomena are characteristic of cer-
tain aspects of language to a more global but extremely premature and
ill-advised conclusion that the study of grammaticalization can essential-
ly replace grammar.
  Grammar doesn't always just emerge.  After it emerges, it often stays
around.  And Delancey's posting admits this:  e.g., it accepts that non-
discrete categories may continue to exist after emerging.
 
  As for myself, I seriously doubt whether any real mechanisms of lan-
guage change make reference to information or a vantage point which no
individual speaker could possess--like a perspective covering hundreds
or even thousands of years of language change.  (What linguists study
in order to collect their data is a different matter.)  If something is going
to keep a grammaticalization trend going over millennia, then it has to be
a chain of synchronic phenomena which are passed along in the manner
of a relay race.  An even better model for language transmission is a
children's "flip book" (the forerunner of motion pictures on film), in
which something that appears to move across one page is in fact really a
stack of distinct (albeit very similar) pages.
 
  It sounds so simplistic as to be platitudinous, but to deny it has conse-
quences that are fatal:
       Language change always takes place in the present, via synchronic
     mechanisms.  There are no diachronic "mechanisms"; there are only
     diachronic correspondences.  (The latter distinction has been most
     strongly emphasized by Henning Andersen.)
  But this has been said been said before, and well:  see especially Cose-
riu 1988 ("'Linguistic Change Does Not Exist'", reprinted in J. Albrecht
(ed.), _Energeia und Ergon..., Band I... [der] Schriften von Eugenio
Coseriu (1965-1987)_, pp. 147-157).
 
  There are, of course, idealizations involved here--e.g., in labeling data
collected over a period of 10 years as "synchronic"--but this clearly con-
trasts with, e.g., Greenberg's study of Aramaic suffixal -a "over a peri-
od of approximately 3,000 years" [in Traugott & Heine (eds.) 1991:
301-314].  I.e., the grammaticalization literature is astoundingly weak
on *synchronically* documented (non-reconstructional) studies where
*all* major stages are attested, even though the mechanisms involved
are admittedly going on around us all the time.  Some exceptions which
do focus on current synchrony are Romaine & Lange 1991 (in _Ameri-
can Speech_, on English _like_) and Joyce Tang Boyland's recent UC
Berkeley dissertation (which includes a focus on English would have).
But it's going to be a long time before centuries-long grammaticalization
as a sequenced complex of phenomena will have been truly established
empirically (though surely this will eventually happen).
  Hence one thing in particular bears emphasizing:  many studies which
claim to motivate grammaticalization theory in fact actually presuppose
it, because they rely crucially on unattested stages filled in using recon-
structions arrived at thanks to--you guessed it--grammaticalization theo-
ry.  "Don't disturb my circles!", indeed....
 
  The only time when anything ever happens is the present.  Think about
it:  the past is gone--or, rather, it exists only in present memory (or is
presently in the ground)--and the future isn't here yet.  Even if speakers
realize language change by pursuing functional teleologies, such goals
are synchronically present.  Synchrony is alive and well.  In the study
of change in the past, it is the only thing that has a future....
  The trouble with Paul's assumption that science must be diachronic is
that, as they say, "It's turtles all the way down".  Where do we stop?
Eventually, we reach phenomena we haven't observed, and then we
have to guess (and, at that point, our history can no longer be very
sure).  Then we realize that we're relying on *synchronic* typology as a
touchstone, anyway.
 
  To dwell on non-discrete categories is a red herring.  The reason why
non-discrete categories exist is that synchronic language-systems allow
them.  To conclude otherwise (by retreating into diachrony as the main
source for non-discreteness) is to be unnecessarily concessive to the
other side (the one that demands discreteness).  E.g., New Mexico
Spanish speakers at some point reanalyzed certain instances of the 1.pl.
verb-affix -mos as the bound-root subject clitic =nos (a degrammaticali-
zation showing an upgrading:  affix > clitic), whereas there were previ-
ously no personal subject-clitics in the dialect (though _se_ can be con-
sidered an impersonal subject-clitic).  The result was a ragged system
(with only =nos as a personal subject-clitic), but the people who inno-
vated it must obviously have thought that it was a possible organization
of human language.  And they certainly weren't just "grammaticalizing"
(cf. Janda 1995, in _CLS 31_, pp. 119-139, plus references there).
 
 This all ties in with one of Miguel Carrasquer Vidal's points in his post-
ing about Dixon's new book:  that many linguists lament the death of
undescribed languages without being willing to do anything to stop it
(through language description or language maintenance efforts).  Yes, I
accept the children's adage that, when you point one finger at someone
else, you're pointing three fingers at yourself.  But, still, what if even
just half of us refocused on the study of language change, including
grammaticalization correspondences, via a closer and longer-term look
at linguistic phenomena that are going on now?  Isn't that the real way to
understand grammaticalization?  Historical linguistics doesn't have to be
historic linguistics.
  Even Paul had something to say about variation and then-current inno-
vations in Modern German, and he himself accepted discrete categories
like inflection vs. derivation (and compounding).  In fact, his "Ueber
die Aufgaben der Wortbildungslehre" proposed a version of so-called
"blocking" (such that lexical particularities preempt general rules) in
1896 (published in 1897 as part of the _Sitzungsberichte_ ... [of the
Royal Bavarian Academy of Sciences for] 1896, pp. 692-713), though
Panini was much earlier on this one.
 
  We always have a/the present; we always have time.  And now is the
time to study grammaticalization--or perhaps also now and then.  But
not just/mainly then....  A historical linguistics that doesn't recongnize
syn-chrony is doomed to di....
 
[Some other references:
  Joseph, Brian  & Janda 1988 ("The How and Why of Diachronic Mor-
     phologization and Demorphologization", in Hammond & Noonan
     (eds.), _Theoretical Morphology_, pp. 193-210).
  Janda 1997-MS ("Beyond 'Pathways' and 'Unidirectionality':  On the
     Discontinuity of Language Transmission and the Reversibility of
     Grammaticalization").
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
 - - - - - - - - -
          Richard Janda


From mcv at wxs.nl  Sun May 10 12:54:33 1998
From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal)
Date: Sun, 10 May 1998 08:54:33 EDT
Subject: Language and Anthropology in the Americas
In-Reply-To: <Pine.SOL.3.95.980509135615.21585D-100000@frogger.rs.itd.umich.edu>
Message-ID: <SUN.10.MAY.1998.085433.EDT.>

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
Alexis (manaster at umich.edu) wrote:
 
>Miguel writes:
>
>The great linguistic diversity of the Americas, however, is a major
>problem for linguists, and leaves only two options open: either to
>accept the archaeological dates and to hell with the linguistics (my
>assessment of Greenberg's "Language in the Americas"), or to posit a
>more reasonable date for the initial settlement and to hell with
>archaeology (my assessment of Johanna Nichols' argument for a
>time-depth of c. 35,000 years, which I share).
>
>====
>I dont understand the basis for this assessement.  One may not
>accept Greenberg's linguistics (I myself am a moderately well
>known critic of his Amerind work and indeed one of the few
>who discuss the actual content of the work and not merely
>methods or typographical etc. errors), but it is unfair to
>say that he throws the lx overboard.
 
The "assessment" was of course deliberately charged.  (I don't think
it's *fair* to say that Johanna Nichols dismisses archaeology
either).
 
>Instead, he argues for
>alinguistic hypothesis which whether right or not is certainly
>not worthy of casual  dismissal.  As for Nichols, her agument
>crucially depends on teh assumption that the many language families
>which most linguists do not regard as provably related are in
>fact UNrelated.
 
I have not read the article in 'Language', but it seems to me that
the underlying assumption is that the Amerind languages ARE related,
but at a time-depth of c. 35,000 years (or at least that there was a
relatively small number of genetic units on entry, say half a dozen
or less).
 
I *have* read "Language in the Americas", and for whatever it's worth
(I have no first hand experience with any American Indian language),
the impression I got was that Greenberg had plainly failed to make a
convincing case for Amerind.  That doesn't mean that Amerind *is*
invalid, of course.  But considering that the time-depth of
Proto-Afro-Asiatic might well be 10-12,000 years, I think
(impressionistically!) that the odds that Amerind is a genetic unit
at a comparable time-depth are very small indeed.  Whether the real
time-depth is 20 or 50,000 years is anybody's guess, and depends
largely on work that has yet to be done (how much more than 3 and how
much less than 58+17+118 is the real number of "medium-range" genetic
units in the Americas?).
 
 
=======================
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
mcv at wxs.nl
Amsterdam


From manaster at umich.edu  Sun May 10 12:55:16 1998
From: manaster at umich.edu (manaster at umich.edu)
Date: Sun, 10 May 1998 08:55:16 EDT
Subject: Language and Anthropology in the Americas
In-Reply-To: <355ecc4c.259343860@mail.wxs.nl>
Message-ID: <SUN.10.MAY.1998.085516.EDT.>

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
My own view (based on I think not insignificant
1st-hand experience with American languages as well
as Old World ones) is that it is impossible to
overstate the extent to which American Indian lx
lags behind the Old World linguistics (always
with the exception of work by Bloomfield, Sapir,
and sometimes Whorf).  There are hundreds at least
linguists working on IE (and God knows there are
many unsolved problems there for them to work on) alone,
while in the Americas, esp. when it comes to comparative
work and even more so classificatory work, we are talking
of dozens or hundreds of languages per linguist.
Take Uto-Aztecan.  There are two people alive that
I know of who have worked on its possible external
connections to other language families, aside from
Greenberg, for a total of I think three published
papers over a period of decades, within UA, more
people work on Nahuatl than all the other languages
put together, and most of this is synchronic,
literary, or detail work.  There are very few
people doing comparative work across the family
as a whole.  In addition, despite all teh descriptive
work, we still do not possess adequate data for most
languages.  For many body part terms even, I canot
find ut what the word is in many if not most UA
languages.  The amount of info we have on Sanskrit,
Latin, Greek, and perhaps even such poorly attested
languages as Hittite vastly exceeds what we know
of almost any Amerindian language, so there is
a very severe limit on what we have to compare.
It was only a few years ago, with UA linguistics
entering its second century, that I found out
from a very obscure source the Tubatulabal word
for 'tear', for example.  Nor are teh gaps just
lexical.  We lack descriptions of the morphophonemics
of most languages, and bear in mind that morphophonemics
is by its nature usually a repository of information
about the past stages of teh phonology.
 
The Austerlitz-Nichols position, which Miguel seems
to be adopting, seems to be (this is expliclity
stated by Austerlitz) based on the assumption that
the opposite is teh case, that is, that American
Indian languages HAVE been investigated as fully
as Old World ones and that if there were easy
linguistic relationships to be found (say comparable
to IE or Uralic in depth) they would have been found.
As I say, Austerlitz says this explicitly, but this
is just absolutely incorrect.  I do not know
(aside from Haida-Nadene, Pakawan, and Pakawa-
Karankawan) just how many such relationships
have in fact been staring us in the face without
being found and acknowledged, but it is clear
that nothing even remotely approaching the amount
of work done on Old World problems has been
done here.  We are in the Americas at the stage
where Strahlenberg (whom Jakobson called the
father of comparative linguistics) entered
the arena of classifying the non-IE languages
of Northeastern Eurasia in the early 18th century.
 
Of course, we must always make that exception for
Sapir, but there again after 1920 or so
Sapir stopped providing adequate documentation for
his classificatory proposals, and so all his
proposals from that time on are in need of
reexamination from scratch.
 
So anybody who assumes that the universally accepted
language families of the New World can be compared to
those of the old and that consequently any lumping
to be done in the New World would be the moral
equivalent of Altaic or Nostratic is just ignoring
the whole history of the field.  Most recognized
New World families are the size of Romance or Slavic
or less.
 
AMR
 
On Sat, 9 May 1998, Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote:
 
[snip]
>
> I *have* read "Language in the Americas", and for whatever it's worth
> (I have no first hand experience with any American Indian language),
> the impression I got was that Greenberg had plainly failed to make a
> convincing case for Amerind.  That doesn't mean that Amerind *is*
> invalid, of course.  But considering that the time-depth of
> Proto-Afro-Asiatic might well be 10-12,000 years, I think
> (impressionistically!) that the odds that Amerind is a genetic unit
> at a comparable time-depth are very small indeed.  Whether the real
> time-depth is 20 or 50,000 years is anybody's guess, and depends
> largely on work that has yet to be done (how much more than 3 and how
> much less than 58+17+118 is the real number of "medium-range" genetic
> units in the Americas?).
>


From mcv at wxs.nl  Sun May 10 18:33:49 1998
From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal)
Date: Sun, 10 May 1998 14:33:49 EDT
Subject: Language and Anthropology in the Americas
In-Reply-To: <Pine.SOL.3.95.980509185149.25036A-100000@joust.rs.itd.umich.edu>
Message-ID: <SUN.10.MAY.1998.143349.EDT.>

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
Alexis (manaster at umich.edu) wrote:
 
[on the difficulties of doing American Indian lxs, and the lack of
both human and material resources]
>
>The Austerlitz-Nichols position, which Miguel seems
>to be adopting, seems to be (this is expliclity
>stated by Austerlitz) based on the assumption that
>the opposite is teh case, that is, that American
>Indian languages HAVE been investigated as fully
>as Old World ones and that if there were easy
>linguistic relationships to be found (say comparable
>to IE or Uralic in depth) they would have been found.
 
But that's exactly what I was *not* saying:
 
>On Sat, 9 May 1998, Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote:
>
>> Whether the real
>> time-depth is 20 or 50,000 years is anybody's guess, and depends
>> largely on work that has yet to be done
 
i.e. there is still much work to be done...  You have explained this
in rather more detail.
 
>> (how much more than 3 and how
>> much less than 58+17+118 is the real number of "medium-range" genetic
>> units in the Americas?).
 
i.e. the genetic units that are currently recognized (the numbers are
from Campbell's "American Indian Languages") are mostly the
equivalent of Old World "short-range" families (Germanic, Slavic...).
 
Greenberg's Amerind is the "moral equivalent" of Nostratic (in the
sense that it's definitely "long-range"), although given the fact
that Nostratic is based on more or less regular sound
correspondences, it isn't equivalent in any formal sense, nor *can*
it be: the Nostratic theory is based on the further comparison of
"medium-range" (IE, Uralic, AA) language family reconstructions, and
in the Americas, with few exceptions, we don't have those
"medium-range" families, and we don't have the reconstructions.
 
 
=======================
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
mcv at wxs.nl
Amsterdam


From manaster at umich.edu  Sun May 10 21:40:44 1998
From: manaster at umich.edu (manaster at umich.edu)
Date: Sun, 10 May 1998 17:40:44 EDT
Subject: Language and Anthropology in the Americas
In-Reply-To: <3555b8e4.48763632@mail.wxs.nl>
Message-ID: <SUN.10.MAY.1998.174044.EDT.>

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
I dont think that the concept 'long-range' is meaningful.
Afro-Asiatic and Uralic are no less diverse internally
than Altaic, but the former are universally accpeted
(except by Doerfer) while the latter is considered by
some to be in the 'long-range' category.  As for Nostratic,
without AA (as Starostin, Greenberg and some others would
like to see it), it ends up being not all that internally
diverse either.  And as for Amerind, first, I don't
think that there is any basis any more for critiquing
it (or any theory) for lack of regular correspondences.
A few years ago people could plead ignorance of teh history
of language classification and thus maintain the dogma
that relations are estblished on the basis of regular
correspondences and nothing more or less.  I would have
thought that such work as mine and Sidwell's on the
early history of language classification and mine
on the Sapir era would have helped put an end to this.
If not, then perhaps Lyle Campbell's recent publications
on N. American classification or Goddard's 1979 paper
on the Comecrudan language family would be enough.
I think Ives and Lyle are as well-regarded splitters
as anyone, but it is clear that they do not take
regular correspondences to be necessary and Ives
at least has always argued that they are not enough
either (because he says you need morphology).
 
Note well that I am defending Greenberg's Amerind
as such, but to say that it is no good for lack
of regular correspondences tabulated in a neat
little chart is definitely not acceptable in 1998
as it may once have been. Heck, I am pretty sure
I used to say this--before I learned better.
 
AMR
 
On Sun, 10 May 1998, Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote:
 
>
> Greenberg's Amerind is the "moral equivalent" of Nostratic (in the
> sense that it's definitely "long-range"), although given the fact
> that Nostratic is based on more or less regular sound
> correspondences, it isn't equivalent in any formal sense, nor *can*
> it be: the Nostratic theory is based on the further comparison of
> "medium-range" (IE, Uralic, AA) language family reconstructions, and
> in the Americas, with few exceptions, we don't have those
> "medium-range" families, and we don't have the reconstructions.
>
>
> =======================
> Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
> mcv at wxs.nl
> Amsterdam
>


From manaster at umich.edu  Mon May 11 20:08:29 1998
From: manaster at umich.edu (manaster at umich.edu)
Date: Mon, 11 May 1998 16:08:29 EDT
Subject: Munro on Greenberg
In-Reply-To: <Pine.GSO.3.96.980511121817.20731A-100000@darkwing.uoregon.edu>
Message-ID: <MON.11.MAY.1998.160829.EDT.>

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
I apologize for not having posted the reference to teh
article by Pam Munro I praised repeatedly in a recent
posting on Greenberg's Amerind theory.  I have it now:
 
"Gulf and Yuki-Gulf," AL vol. 36, no. 2 (1994), pp. 125-222.
 
AMR


From delancey at darkwing.uoregon.edu  Mon May 11 19:53:37 1998
From: delancey at darkwing.uoregon.edu (Scott DeLancey)
Date: Mon, 11 May 1998 15:53:37 EDT
Subject: Paul 1880 vs. 1886 vs. 1920...; Bloomfield 1933/1965
In-Reply-To: <Pine.SOL.3.95.980509140408.21585E-100000@frogger.rs.itd.umich.edu>
Message-ID: <MON.11.MAY.1998.155337.EDT.DELANCEY@DARKWING.UOREGON.EDU>

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
On Sat, 9 May 1998 manaster at umich.edu wrote:
 
> As far as the order of adpositions and other function
> words (conjunctions) is concerned, unless I am mistaken,
> there are in fact well-known data indicating that in
> situations where they end up in the "wrong" place
> there is a strong tendency to "fix" the order.  If
> memory serves, is it not the case that in Indo-Iranian
> again (and in Ethiopian Semitic and elsewhere) we do
> find languages which are OV but have inherited
> prepositions or clause initial subordinating conjunctions
> etc., and that there is a strong tendency (manifested,
> predictably enough, much more in colloquial than in literary
> languages) to "fix" this.
 
I don't know the facts here--my understanding is that the "fixing"
generally involves, not erstwhile prepositions changing their position,
but the innovation of new postpositions.  If so, this is exactly what
one would expect.  New adpositions--in fact, new anything--must
arise from existing structures, and if the existing structures from
which they can arise are head-initial, then the new structures will
be head-initial.
    If there are cases of "remediation" in which preexisting adpositions
actually change their position, I would be very interesting in details
or references.
 
> This is a sweeping generalization
> of course and with many exceptions, but I think it is broadly
> right.  And if so, then again we would seem to have to acknowledge
> an invisible hand (alias UG or the like) which seems to
> guide language change in the direction of replacing
> systems that are impossible or unnatural by ones which
> are possible or natural.
 
"Invisible hand" is a very appropriate metaphor here--the original
concept, in economics, refers not to some teleological force
which guides change in certain directions, but to apparent patterns
produced by the mechanical operation of local tendencies.
 
Scott DeLancey
Department of Linguistics
University of Oregon
Eugene, OR 97403, USA
 
delancey at darkwing.uoregon.edu
http://www.uoregon.edu/~delancey/prohp.html


From Roger.Wright at liverpool.ac.uk  Mon May 11 17:36:05 1998
From: Roger.Wright at liverpool.ac.uk (Roger Wright)
Date: Mon, 11 May 1998 13:36:05 EDT
Subject: Dixon's "The rise and fall of languages"
In-Reply-To: <3597be7c.190261651@news.wxs.nl>
Message-ID: <MON.11.MAY.1998.133605.EDT.ROGER.WRIGHT@LIVERPOOL.AC.UK>

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
 
 
But language splits need never occur at all.
It still seems important to realize that under normal circumstances
languages only "split" when the relevant groups of speakers are
mostly out of contact with each other (and not necessarily even then).
Greek has changed, but it is still one language, Greek, for the speakers
are still in contact with each other.
        The only reason I know of for exceptions to this are in literate
communities, where different areas might start writing in different ways
(this is what precipitated the conceptual split of what we now think of
as being separate Romance languages, for example). The Carrasquer Vidal
- Manaster Ramer discussion seeems not to refer to literate communities,
so it seems sensible to point out that if we find out that relevant
groups are still physically together, over whatever length of time, we
would not expect a split at all.
                                                RW
 
 
 
 
On Sat, 9 May 1998, Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote:
>
>One argument that I hadn't seen before is given on pp. 29-30.  It is
>based on the assumptions that PIE is 6,000 years old, and human
>language 17 times as old as that, 100,000 years.  At the IE rate of
>language split (100 IE lgs. in 6,000 years), that would have given
>10^34 languages today (or even 10^60 at the Austronesian rate), when
>in fact we only have 5,000.
>
>        If we adopted a more modest rate of splitting, supposing that
>        a language is likely to split into two languages every 6,000
>        years, we would expect proto-Human to have given rose to2^17,
>        or about 130,000, modern languages.  If we allow for a number
>        of languages becoming extinct along the way, this would be a
>        more reasonable number. [..] The lesson from these
>        calculations is that language split and expansion on the
>        scale that is put forward for the IE and Austronesian
>        families is highly unusual.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
>
>Hold it right there.  Of course the expansions of IE and AN are
>unusual. But do the numbers constitute an argument against the family
>tree model?  Do they support the notion that "Language development
>during the past 100,000 and more years has involved long periods of
>equilibrium, with only the occasional punctuation"?  Dixon correctly
>notes that the IE expansion in Australia and the Americas has been at
>the expense of a 1,000 languages dead or dying.  We cannot just
>"allow for a number of languages becoming extinct", we have to
>include the extinctions in the mathematical model.  If that's not
>done, the argument comes dangerously close to rejecting the "family
>tree model" for rabbits because of the absurd rate of growth forecast
>by the Fibonacci series.
>
>Introducing the notion of "punctuated equilibrium" into linguistics
>is an interesting idea.  I certainly agree with Dixon that certain
>phenomena of language change (transitions between head and dependent
>marking, certain kinds of phonological and lexical change, etc. can
>and do take place in short periods of time), and that even the origin
>of language itself might be adequately explained as a sudden
>punctuation.
>
>On the other hand, I'm deeply troubled by some of the unexplained
>assumptions in Dixon's model.  Most importantly, Dixon's assertion
>that a state of equilibrium is unobservable:
>
>        European scientists have only ever been able to observe a
>        time of punctuation since, wherever Europeans go (with their
>        weapons and religions and writing), they effect a punctuation
>        in the existing state of equilibrium
>
>and:
>
>        No equilibrium situation ever has been or ever could be
>        observed by a scientist (although it can be readily
>        reconstructed for Australia, and probably also for other
>        parts of the world)
>
>
>I'm also troubled by the notion of a "punctuation" that keeps going
>on for "the last 2,000 years" (p. 4).
>
>But let's allow these premises and see what difference they make in
>practical terms for historical linguistics.
>
>Dixon states the family tree model is only valid for periods of
>punctuation, when a "proto-language" spreads out and diversifies into
>a number of daughter languages.  After some time, equilibrium is
>restored, and, within an area of diffusion, languages are repeatedly
>said to "converge on a common prototype", regardless of their genetic
>origin.  It is well known that phonology, lexicon and grammatical
>categories are readily diffused.  Grammatical forms (morphemes) are
>much more resistant, "but during periods of equilibrium there was
>time-a-plenty (perhaps tens of millennia) and then grammatical forms
>certainly were borrowed".  Language families "are slowly blurred" (p.
>71).  "In time, the convergence will obscure the original genetic
>relationships" (p. 96).  "Family membership ceases to be a useful
>concept" (p. 99).  But, perhaps surprsingly, the languages in a
>linguistic area in equilibrium do not merge (p. 71).  And most
>surprisngly of all, when a new episode of punctuation ensues, and new
>language families are created, Dixon warns that "the language family
>may have emanated not from a single language, but from a small areal
>group of distinct languages, with similar structures and forms".
>This obviously undermines the very concept of a "genetic group", in
>spite of Dixon's basic Assumption #4 that "each language has a single
>parent".
>
>In even more practical terms, Dixon reviews some concrete examples:
>Austronesian (a classical case where the family tree model works
>adequately in general), Australia and the Americas.
>
>There is considerable controversy at the moment about the date of
>earliest human settlement of the American continent.  There is
>surprisingly little evidence for settlement before the Clovis horizon
>of 12,000 BP, although a slightly earlier date (perhaps 16,000 or
>20,000 BP) is now beginning to be accepted in archaeological circles.
>
>The great linguistic diversity of the Americas, however, is a major
>problem for linguists, and leaves only two options open: either to
>accept the archaeological dates and to hell with the linguistics (my
>assessment of Greenberg's "Language in the Americas"), or to posit a
>more reasonable date for the initial settlement and to hell with
>archaeology (my assessment of Johanna Nichols' argument for a
>time-depth of c. 35,000 years, which I share).  Dixon, armed with his
>model of punctuated equilibrium, sees no problem:
>
>        [Nichols' argument].  I take a viewpoint that is
>        diametrically opposed.  The fact that so many language
>        families are recognisable indicates a relatively recent
>        series of language splits, quite compatible with a
>        12,000-20,000-year period.  Give the languages in the
>        Americas another 20,000 years and the diffusional patterns
>        that are now emerging would become far more pervasive.
>
>Counterintuitive to say the least.
>
>But, given the authors admission that "It was largely in order to
>adequately account for the linguistic situation in Australia that I
>had recourse to the idea of P.EQ. as a model for language
>development", we should turn to Australia next.
>
>The c. 260 languages of Australia show many similarities, and "have
>been said to comprise a single language family".  One supposed
>(sub-)family, Pama-Nyungan, covers about 85% of the continent.
>However, neither for Pama-Nyungan (apparently [p. 91] a
>lexicostatistic construct), nor for Australian as a whole have family
>trees or proto-languages been succesfully set up.  "It is possible to
>establish low-level subgroups in Australia -- groups of from two to a
>dozen or so languages that appear to have a close genetic
>relationship", but the usefulness of the family tree concept as far
>as Australia goes is apparently so low, that Dixon does not even
>bother to mention the number of distinct genetic groups.
>
>
>        It is likely that the whole of Australia was populated within
>        a few thousand years of the first colonisation, about 50,000
>        BP.  Many scholars believe that all Australian languages
>        belong to one linguistic family.  Assuming this hypothesis
>        there are two alternative scenarios:
>
>        (i) Proto-Australian, the putative ancestor of all the modern
>        languages, was spoken by some of the first people in
>        Australia, about 50,000 years ago.
>
>        (ii) Modern Australian languages are descended from a proto-
>        langugae that was spoken much more recently -- say, 10,000 or
>        5,000 years ago.
>
>Hypothesis (ii) is dismissed, because we do not find pockets or
>substrates of non-Australian languages, and there is no plausible
>mechanism (like agriculture) to explain the expansion.  "We are left
>with scenario (i)":  rapid expansion (punctuation) throughout the
>whole continent, followed by essentially 50,000 years of equilibrium
>until the English invasion, during which time the Asutralian
>languages gradually converged to "a common prototype".  This is, as
>Dixon states, "the only model able to explain the relationships
>between languages in Australia" (p. 68).
>
>Is it?  One might object that New Guinea, settled at the same time as
>Australia, and united to it by a land-bridge until c. 10,000 years
>ago, despite some areal characteristics, and despite an attested
>punctuation with the arrival of Austronesian-speakers maybe 4,000
>years ago, shows a bewildering linguistic diversity, parallelled
>nowhere on earth.  Dixon blames this on the mountainous character of
>New Guinea (and, similarly, the Caucasus).  And then, how tranquil
>was the Australian equilibrium during those 50,000 years?  On p. 92,
>Dixon suggest that the low-level genetic groupings that he recognizes
>in Australia arose during the last of possibly several cycles of
>contraction of the population to the coast and main rivers during
>periods of drought, followed by expansion when conditions improved.
>Repeated episodes of contraction and expansion may well have blurred
>the genetic affiliations of the Australian languages by the processes
>described by Ross (loc.cit.), such as language/"linkage" fusion.
>Elsewhere (note, p.76, we are told that the population of Tasmania,
>part of Australia until 10,000 years ago, did not have axes,
>spear-throwers, boomerangs or dingoes.  It seems to me that the
>introduction of those items, after 10,000 BP, might have caused quite
>a bit of punctuation (and incidentally makes a good candidate for
>the mechanism of expansion required by scenario (ii) above).
>
>Finally, Ross (op.cit, p. 244), mentions an important socio-cultural
>factor, not mentioned by Dixon at all, which seems to be of the
>utmost importance to explain the "blurring" of sound-correspondences,
>and the consequent difficulty in establishing family trees and
>proto-languages.  It bears repeating here.  The case has been
>described for a group of related languages in southern New Caledonia:
>
>        Because the south New Caledonian languages were closely
>        related, there were once regular sound correspondences
>        between their vocabularies.  Where speakers regularly used
>        two or more lects, they had an intuitive grasp of some of
>        these correspondences and used them to convert the
>        phonological shapes of words from one lect to another.
>        However, the speakers' intuitive correspondences and the real
>        correspondences resulting from historical change often
>        differed from each other.
>
>The result of this "Volkskomparativismus" is that the
>sound-correspondences are FUBAR, a complete mess.
>
>        Similar situations to the one described for New Caledonia
>        also occur in parts of Australia.  In traditional aboriginal
>        Australia each person belonged to an exogamous patriclan and
>        spoke its emblematic patrilect.  However, aboriginal
>        Australians moved around hunting and gathering in bands whose
>        members belonged to different patriclans.  A number of
>        patrilects, often quite closely related to each other, were
>        typically represented in a band, and band members spoke their
>        own and other members' patrilects.  Their vocabularies seem
>        to have been affected in much the same way as those of the
>        south New Caledonian lects.
>
>While this picture is not in itself incompatible with Dixon's state
>of equilibrium, it offers the advantage of actually explaining why
>and how some of the languages might have converged in a way that is
>not readily tractable by traditional comparativist means.
>
>
>Finally, a word of caution to linguists.  As Dixon states in his
>introduction, "many groups of linguists may be offended by what is
>said about their area of specialisation".  Africanists may not like
>Dixon's assessment of their field on pp. 32-33.  If there are still
>some lexicostatisticians/glottochronologists around (and Dixon
>chastises on Australian member of the species) they won't like pp.
>35-37.  "Armchair typologists" and linguists *talking* about
>"endangered languages" are dealt with elsewhere.  The heaviest
>criticisms, however, are reserved for two sub-species: the
>formalists, and the Nostraticists.
>
>Formal theories (Chomskyan or not) have a "typical half-life [of] six
>to ten years", and "few formalists do attempt to write comprehensive
>grammars of languages (which is just as well [..])", although some of
>them do from time to time consult the descriptive gammars written by
>"real linguists".  They are "like a group of 'surgeons', none of whom
>has ever actually performed an operation, giving courses of lectures
>on the principles of surgery".
>
>Nostraticists (or 'Nostraticists' as Dixon calls them), especially of
>the Russian kind "openly boasted (and still boast) that they are
>cleverer than anyone who has come before" [reference?], their
>theories are "palpable poppycock", and "they have put forward the
>idea that the main thing to be considered when formulating a genetic
>connection between two languages is lexemes" [no reference].  "There
>is no reputable linguist [defined as "anyone who teaches the subject
>at a leading university in the USA or in a EEC nation"], anywhere in
>the world, who accepts the claims of Greenberg and the
>Nostraticists".  If we accept Dixon's punk-eek model, "there could be
>no tempation to perpetrate anything such as 'Nostratic'".
>
>        These 'Nostraticists' purport to work in terms of the
>        comparative method, by assembling cognate sets.  However,
>        they achieve their results only by allowing excessive
>        phonological and semantic leeway.  In the 'reconstructions',
>        scarcely any vowels are specified (given just as V), N is
>        often employed for an unspecified nasal, and so on.
>
>Regrettably, Prof. Dixon, with this last remark, makes it painfully
>clear that he has never so much as set eyes on Illich-Svitych's
>Nostratic dictionary...
>
>Apart from the unfounded accusations, the only reasoned critique
>against the "Nostratic fallacy" in Dixon's book is the following:
>
>        It is not sensible policy to try and compare the original
>        proto-languages of language families, and attempt to
>        reconstruct a  proto-proto-tableau.  Firstly, we have only an
>        approximate idea of what a proto-language was like. Secondly,
>        it may not have been one language, but instead a group of
>        languages.  And thirdly, proto-languages or
>        proto-linguistic-situations are likely to be the product of
>        diffusional convergence, at the end of a period of
>        equilibrium, rather than languages which result from a
>        family-tree-type expansion and split.
>
>Of course, to agree with objections (2) and (3), one has to buy into
>Dixon's punctuated quilibrium model, which I'm not prepared to do
>right now.  As to the first objection, well, let's do away with
>archaeology and paleontology as well, then.
>
>
>
>=======================
>Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
>mcv at wxs.nl
>Amsterdam
>


From Katachumen at aol.com  Mon May 11 17:30:09 1998
From: Katachumen at aol.com (Katachumen)
Date: Mon, 11 May 1998 13:30:09 EDT
Subject: Dixon's "The rise and fall of languages"
Message-ID: <MON.11.MAY.1998.133009.EDT.KATACHUMEN@AOL.COM>

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
In a message dated 5/10/98, 3:29:50 PM, mcv at wxs.nl writes:
<<
 
        It is likely that the whole of Australia was populated within
        a few thousand years of the first colonisation, about 50,000
        BP.  Many scholars believe that all Australian languages
        belong to one linguistic family.  Assuming this hypothesis
        there are two alternative scenarios:
 
        (i) Proto-Australian, the putative ancestor of all the modern
        languages, was spoken by some of the first people in
        Australia, about 50,000 years ago.
 
        (ii) Modern Australian languages are descended from a proto-
        langugae that was spoken much more recently -- say, 10,000 or
        5,000 years ago. >>
 
In regards to Australia  we should remember that the continent was not in fact
isolated from the rest of Indo-Asia until the end of the last Ice Age, when
the strait between the continent and New Guinea once again became submerged.
Until then the continent was open to migration from New Guinea (which would
explain the possibility that Tasmanian was an Indo-Pacific language, since
Tasmania was also linked to Austrailia). and New Guinea itself was accessible
from the rest of the Indonesian "peninsula".
For the Australian languages linguistic maps show the region of greatest
diversity to be on the northwest coast (only here are the non-Pamanyungen
languages found), and this area was relativity isolated during the
Paleolithic, since the Outback, during the Ice Ages, was a hyperarid desert\,
like the Rub'al-Khali today. I think it's at least possible that the
Australian proto-language could have evolved in this isolated setting, largely
separated from the rest of the continent (and from New Guinea), and after the
end of the Ice Age, when the continent became isolated, the Pamanyungen
speakers gradually spread across the rest of the continent (since the Outback
became somewhat wetter and able to support human life). The hypothetical other
inhabitants of Australia, related to the Papuans, would have gradually become
absorbed into the Australian population, or may also have been decimated by
diseases introduced to them by the long-isolated Australians and the stress of
climate change (except for newly-isolated Tasmania, where an Indo-Pacific-
speaking population survived until modern times.)


From manaster at umich.edu  Mon May 11 16:55:05 1998
From: manaster at umich.edu (manaster at umich.edu)
Date: Mon, 11 May 1998 12:55:05 EDT
Subject: Language and Anthropology in the Americas
In-Reply-To: <35602f78.79124076@mail.wxs.nl>
Message-ID: <MON.11.MAY.1998.125505.EDT.>

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
 
 
On Sun, 10 May 1998, Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote:
 
> The real reason that I reject Amerind is not its lack of sound
> correspondences.  John Bengtson has published sound-correspondences
> between North Caucasian and Basque, and I'm afraid I must reject that
> too.  The real reason is that I have read the evidence as presented,
> and I didn't like it.  I've read the evidence presented by
> Illich-Svitych for Nostratic, and I liked it.  I have not seen the
> evidence for Altaic, so I don't know if I like it.
It is hard to reject Altaic and accept Nostratic, actually
I think it is impossible, except in the technical sense
that you could reject Altaic as a valid node within Nostratic.
>I can explain
> what I like about Nostratic, but this is neither the time nor the
> place.
Actually, I think it would be interesting to have you expand on
this.  I myself have massive doubts about Nostratic but continue
to be sympathetic.
>It is much harder to explain the opposite reaction (apart
> from errors of fact etc.).  It is largely gut, I'm afraid.  That's
> why it's so difficult to have a fruitful discussion about these
> matters.  But we can try...
I dont see why it is hard to say what one does not like about
a proposed theory.  My own reaction to Greenberg is as follows:
 
(a) I like to break a problem up.
(b) Start with Nadene-Haida, which is a manageable chunk.
Greenberg responds in some detail to the critiques of this
connection and he is mostly right but he makes it seem as
though we did not need do anything beyond what Sapir
himself considered merely a "provisional" argument and
indeed has nothing whatever to add.  That is very disturbing
to me (and in my paper on the subject I did try to go beyond
Sapir and I also sketched a research program for doing even more
which I would like one day to undertake).  For one thing, much
of the data Sapir relied on was unreliable for Tlingit and
Haida both, and I at least tried to see what happens if
you look at corrected data I got from the best experts
on these two languages.  But Greenberg did nothing, so that
bothered me.
(c) I then reasoned that as far as Amerind is concerned,
Greenberg's mass comparison can at best mean that most
of these languages are related; it simply cannot mean
that every last one is.  This is actually a simple logical
consequence of using n-ary comparison (comparing n languages
all together), btu I could never get Greenberg to see this,
so THAT bothered me.
(d) Furher, I wanted to break Amerind down into some
manageable pieces too.
(e) One thing I thought was to find test cases, languages
which either have a long-standing history of being difficult
to classify or occur along the Nadene-Amerind frontier or
both. Tonkawa and Zuni qualified immediately. And so I
looked at them and realized that Tonkawa looks more Nadene
than Amerind using Greenberg's methods, and ZUni looks
no more Amerind than it does IE.  Greenberg;s response
to my initial publication on this did not still my
doubts, to say the least, but I am waiting for a response
to my much more detailed argument in IJAL.
(f) I then realized that the other and probably more
significant thing to do is forget about Amerind and
check each of Greenberg's proposed daughters of Amerind,
but I got sick before I could do this. However,
Pam Munro has done one such study and her results
seem to me to very interesting. Indeed, it is the
single most important study of the topic.
(g) I was puzzled by the fact that Greenberg
did not comment on the fact that in earlier
work he hd excluded Oto-Manguean from Amerind,
which would make this a particular interesting
case.
(h) I was like so many others disturbed to some
extent by Greenberg not using teh best or the
most recent data, although I am not convinced that
this is a crucial problem.
(i) I thought Greenberg's teratement of morphology
was suggestive but a bit cavalier.
 
On the other hand, I found almost all critiques
of Greenberg to be either methodological grandstanding
by people who have not done enough work on language
classification or studied the history of the field
enough and who were inventing a mythical "Comparative
Method" which never existed.  It also struck me
that the spate of publications correcting minor
or not so minor factual errors was not very
useful because it did not address the question of
whether the errrors were numerous enough to matter.
I myself did tackle this qustion for Zuni and
Tonkawa and found that the percentahe of errors
was not significant.  I was also struck by how
Greenberg's critics were no better than him at
picking selected test cases and seeing what they
really tell us.  The very fact that no critic
to my knowledge looked at the Tonkawa or Zuni
orOto-manguean question or at such proposed
daughters of Amerind as Central Amerind suggested
(and I said this in IJAL) that they were interested
merely in scoring points and not in classifying the
languages of the Americas.
 
As for Nostratic, it is true that I-S proposed
a mess of sound laws, but there are so many
problems that I do not see it as clearly
more convincing than Amerind.  For ex.,
it is striking that all teh kinship terms
posited for Nostratic are those for in-laws,which
would more natural to find in the case of borrowings
than inherited vocabulary, on the assumption of
exogamy. The sound laws are shaky, and there is
all maner of inconsistency.  For ex., the IE
word for 'milk' has the wrong velar but I-S
did not care.  In reality, as I have argued,
it is much more likely that it was borrowed
from Afro-Asiatic than that it is a cognate of
the AA and Uralic forms.  The sound laws, in
addition to being ignored as in the case just
mentioned, are quite shaky. Serebrennikov
was right to say that I-S took the Altaic
vowel system and the Kartvelian consoannts
and put them together to give us Nostratic
phonology.  And so on.
 
Of course, as I have written in several
places (most recently in JIES), I-S's
critics have been no better than Greenberg's,
except for Brent Vine, but he only deals
with IE and so does not really address
the real issues.
 
So as for me I am stuck in teh uncomfortable
position of not having any way to decide
about either Amerind or Nostratic, simply
because the relevant work has not been
done, except for little bits here and there,
and again Pam Munro's work on a part of
Amerind comes to mind. There is no
comparable work on ANY part of Nostratic,
and to that extent at least one migth say
that Amerinda is BETTER off than Nostratic,
since a significant part of it has been
tested and approved by a major indepenednt
scholar.  I dont think my work on Nostratic
or anybody else's even comes close.
 
The true-believers in each case totally
ignore all the problems and proceed as though
both theories were proven.  The critics are
acting as though they were proven wrong (which
is logically impossible), and as though there
were no point trying to classify the languages
in question AT ALL.  And indeed with people
like Nichols and Ringe getting loud applause
for their claims that no classifications
beyond those which we now know are ever going to
be possible, it is not hard to understand why
that should be.
 
Alexis MR


From delancey at darkwing.uoregon.edu  Mon May 11 16:50:18 1998
From: delancey at darkwing.uoregon.edu (Scott DeLancey)
Date: Mon, 11 May 1998 12:50:18 EDT
Subject: Historical Linguistics Without Syn-chrony is Doomed to Di....
In-Reply-To: <199805092122.QAA09152@harper.uchicago.edu>
Message-ID: <MON.11.MAY.1998.125018.EDT.DELANCEY@DARKWING.UOREGON.EDU>

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
On Sun, 10 May 1998, Richard Janda wrote:
 
> [...With sincere apologies to G. E. Lessing...]
>   "(Almost) no one will deny", implies Herr DeLancey, that 'there is in
> principle no way to understand a lot of facts about synchronic structure
> except in terms of grammaticalization'."
 
Quite aside from the tone of this comment--which I don't understand,
but don't think I care for--I am at a loss to see how it is a useful
contribution to the argument.  It is, after all, not at all what I
said, which was:
 
> I (along with a long list of others) would argue that there is
> in principle no way to understand a lot of facts about synchronic
> structure except in terms of grammaticalization.
 
How one gets from "I and many others would argue" to "almost no one
will deny" is a mystery to me; in case anyone else might have been
tempted to this rather amazing leap, let me say for the record that,
despite my provincial isolation in a rural department where strange
beliefs may perhaps have taken hold, it certainly has not escaped my
attention that what I was suggesting in my post is still a minority view.
 
Much of the rest of Janda's post seems to be aimed at some straw man
that I'm afraid I don't recognize, but here and there it veers close
to somewhere where we might find common ground to stand and argue:
 
>   As for myself, I seriously doubt whether any real mechanisms of lan-
> guage change make reference to information or a vantage point which no
> individual speaker could possess
 
But that's not the point.  First--I'm not denying (whatever it may
have sounded like) that there are explanatory principles which afford
us nice theoretically grounded synchronic accounts of many facts about
language(s).  Second, I hope everyone accepts that there are
facts about any given language which from a synchronic point of view
are simply arbitrary, but which can be explained in historical
perspective.  Native speakers, of course, don't try to explain these,
or, when they do, they simply make up explanations.  (Of course, as we all
know, theoretical linguists who prefer to banish diachronic argument from
occasionally do the same thing).
    The point which I wanted to make (obviously I was too brief about
it) is that there are many facts, including some apparently systematic
facts about Language, which we have tried far too hard to account for
synchronically, when in fact the only explanatory account which can
be given for them is diachronic.
 
>   To dwell on non-discrete categories is a red herring.  The reason why
> non-discrete categories exist is that synchronic language-systems allow
> them.  To conclude otherwise (by retreating into diachrony as the main
> source for non-discreteness) is to be unnecessarily concessive to the
> other side (the one that demands discreteness).
 
No argument there--in fact, I'm inclined to suppose that "synchronic
language-systems" will allow just about anything.  But, nevertheless,
diachrony *is* in fact a significant source for non-discreteness.  Some
case studies:
 
        Bolinger, Dwight. 1980.  Wanna and the gradience of auxiliaries.
pp. 292-299 in G. Brettschneider and C. Lehmann, eds., Wege zur
universalien Forschung.  Tuebingen:  Gunter Narr.
        DeLancey, Scott.  1997. Grammaticalization and the gradience of
categories:  Relator nouns and postpositions in Tibetan and Burmese.  pp.
51-69 in J. Bybee, J. Haiman, and S. A. Thompson, eds., Essays on Language
Function and Language Type. Benjamins.
        Li, Charles, and Sandra Thompson. 1974. Co-verbs in Mandarin
Chinese: Verbs or prepositions? J. Chinese Linguistics 2.3:257-78.
 
 
Scott DeLancey
Department of Linguistics
University of Oregon
Eugene, OR 97403, USA
 
delancey at darkwing.uoregon.edu
http://www.uoregon.edu/~delancey/prohp.html


From mcv at wxs.nl  Mon May 11 16:48:03 1998
From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal)
Date: Mon, 11 May 1998 12:48:03 EDT
Subject: Language and Anthropology in the Americas
In-Reply-To: <Pine.SOL.3.95.980510165226.24625G-100000@qbert.rs.itd.umich.edu>
Message-ID: <MON.11.MAY.1998.124803.EDT.>

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
Alexis (manaster at umich.edu) wrote:
 
>Note well that I am defending Greenberg's Amerind
>as such, but to say that it is no good for lack
>of regular correspondences tabulated in a neat
>little chart is definitely not acceptable in 1998
>as it may once have been. Heck, I am pretty sure
>I used to say this--before I learned better.
 
Alexis, you are putting words into my mouth.  I merely commented on
the methodological differences between Nostratic and Amerind.  Is it
not a fact that Nostratic has sound correspondences, and Amerind
doesn't?
 
The real reason that I reject Amerind is not its lack of sound
correspondences.  John Bengtson has published sound-correspondences
between North Caucasian and Basque, and I'm afraid I must reject that
too.  The real reason is that I have read the evidence as presented,
and I didn't like it.  I've read the evidence presented by
Illich-Svitych for Nostratic, and I liked it.  I have not seen the
evidence for Altaic, so I don't know if I like it.  I can explain
what I like about Nostratic, but this is neither the time nor the
place.  It is much harder to explain the opposite reaction (apart
from errors of fact etc.).  It is largely gut, I'm afraid.  That's
why it's so difficult to have a fruitful discussion about these
matters.  But we can try...
 
 
=======================
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
mcv at wxs.nl
Amsterdam


From johanna at uclink.berkeley.edu  Tue May 12 21:02:24 1998
From: johanna at uclink.berkeley.edu (Johanna Nichols)
Date: Tue, 12 May 1998 17:02:24 EDT
Subject: Language and Anthropology in the Americas
In-Reply-To: <Pine.SOL.3.95.980509135615.21585D-100000@frogger.rs.itd.umich.edu>
Message-ID: <TUE.12.MAY.1998.170224.EDT.JOHANNA@UCLINK.BERKELEY.EDU>

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
AMR writes:
 
>  As for Nichols, her agument
>crucially depends on teh assumption that the many language families
>which most linguists do not regard as provably related are in
>fact UNrelated. For if they are related, then Greenberg is
>right and everybody goes home happy.
 
Not right.  My argument depends crucially on the assumption that the many
language families for which no probative evidence of relatedness has been
presented (despite the fact that such evidence has been sought by
comparativists) are SEPARATE STOCKS.  A stock (the term isn't crucial; this
is the one I use) is the oldest family-type grouping (clade in technical
phylogenetic terms) for which (a) genetic relatedness has been demonstrated
and (b) reconstruction of ancestral grammar, vocabulary, and sounds is
possible.  Some examples of stocks are:
 
        Semitic
        Chadic
        Basque
        Indo-European
        Uralic
        Austronesian
        Algic
        Yokutian (= Yokutsan + Miwok-Costanoan)
 
(A family deeper than the stock for which relatednes has been demonstrated
but reconstruction may well never be possible is Afroasiatic.  I would also
assign Indo-Uralic this kind of relatedness.)
 
I have estimated ages for large geographical groupings of languages,
notably those of the Americas, by determining the average greatest age for
stocks (ca. 6000 years) and the average number of initial branches of
stocks (about 1.5), and using those to calculate the number of 6000-year
'generations' (at 1.5 'offspring' per 'generation') required to give rise
to the present number of stocks.  In the case of the Americas I have also
estimated an immigration rate and computed the time required to give rise
to the present number of stocks by combined differentiation and
immigration.  Every time I have discussed this I have also calculated an
age based on only genetic differentiation and no immigration.  The ages I
get with these calculations are:
 
        * at least 20,000 years to form the American population of stocks
by differentiation and immigration; most recent calculation: ca. 40,000
 
        * over 50,000 years without immigration; most recent calculation:
at least 60,000
 
When discussing these figures I have made it clear that the second scenario
obtains if all the indigenous languages of the Americas are presumed to
descend from one ancestor, and the first scenario obtains if they descend
from several ancestors.  I have never maintained that each stock descends
from a separate immigrating ancestor; to my knowledge nobody has ever
advocated this; in fact it has been used by both Greenberg and myself as a
reduction ad absurdum showing the ludicrous consequences of assuming that
no deep genetic connections hold between the American stocks.
 
AMR gives a caricature of my position in the quote above.  My actual
position (in *Language* 66, 1990 and later work) is this:  If the languages
Greenberg groups together as "Amerind" descend from several ancestors, then
Greenberg is wrong.  If they descend (or are assumed to descend) from a
single ancestor, then Greenberg is wrong (because an immigration over
50,000 years ago is implausible, because just one immigration is
implausible, and because Greenberg explicitly claims an age of about 11,000
years for "Amerind").  (So anyone who assumes Greenberg is right about
"Amerind" must believe he is wrong about "Amerind".)
 
That is, I have always assumed deeper relatedness holds among the native
American language stocks.  And I believe my position is friendlier to
assumptions of deep genetic relatedness than either Greenberg's or AMR's
(or that of any long-range comparativist known to me).  My position is that
we can assume deeper relatedness exists and can work out rates of
diversification, immigration, etc. and therefore dates of colonization EVEN
BEFORE WE CAN IDENTIFY, MUCH LESS RECONSTRUCT, THE ANCESTORS and regardless
of the opinions of one's colleagues on the matter.
 
So no, I have never maintained that languages not now known or believed to
be related are all ultimately and completely UNrelated.  I don't think
anyone on earth believes this.  Of course no scientific linguist believes
it, but I don't think anyone else does either.  Even those who believe that
the world was created in its modern form in (what was it) 4004 BC by
deliberate design and without prior or subsequent evolution believe that
the modern languages descend from a single ancestor and that the
differentiation occurred after creation.  I mention this viewpoint not
because it is particularly relevant to scientific linguistics but by way of
showing how radical it is.  AMR, please stop attributing to your colleagues
a position that no scientific linguist takes and that even a radical
religious fundamentalist wouldn't take.
 
Johanna Nichols


From manaster at umich.edu  Tue May 12 15:38:38 1998
From: manaster at umich.edu (manaster at umich.edu)
Date: Tue, 12 May 1998 11:38:38 EDT
Subject: Dixon's "The rise and fall of languages"
In-Reply-To: <Pine.SOL.3.96.980511133436.8654D-100000@uxa.liv.ac.uk>
Message-ID: <TUE.12.MAY.1998.113838.EDT.>

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
 
 
On Mon, 11 May 1998, Roger Wright wrote to suggest that
"language splits need never occur at all" and that
"under normal circumstances languages only "split" when the relevant
groups of speakers are mostly out of contact with each other (and not
necessarily even then). Greek has changed, but it is still one language,
Greek, for the speakers are still in contact with each other" and
suggested that the counterexample that springs to mind, Romance,
is due to "writing in different ways".
 
Two things: first, there are splits between dialects which are
as clear as though between languages, whether in Greek (which I
do not know well) or in, say, Yiddish (which I do).  Second,
I cannot believe that anyone would take such radical
differences as exist between French and Portuguese say
as being due to writing in different ways.  Even in
the case of Yiddish, whose speakers have certainly been
in touch w/ e.o. over the centuries, I would think that
the dialects of Lithuania and Alsace would not have been
mutually comprehensible in the 19th or this century, so
that they would qualify as separate languages.
 
AMR


From Katachumen at aol.com  Tue May 12 14:50:00 1998
From: Katachumen at aol.com (Katachumen)
Date: Tue, 12 May 1998 10:50:00 EDT
Subject: Australian Languages
Message-ID: <TUE.12.MAY.1998.105000.EDT.KATACHUMEN@AOL.COM>

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
In a message dated 5/12/98, 4:27:55 AM, C.Bowern at student.anu.edu.au writes:
<<Please note that the name of the language family is Pama-Nyungan, NOT
Pamanyungen. The name is dervied from two of the words for 'man' (Pama and
Nyunga) which are found in many languages in Australia.
 
Incidentally, with the quality of material that exists on the Tasmanian
languages, I'm surprised that anyone can make any hypotheses about its
genetic affiliations at all. When there are only a few hundred words in
orthopgraphies that might represent anything it wouldn't be surprising if
there were "cognates" with every language family in the world.
 
Finally, although it is true that the Torres Strait has only been a Strait
since the last Ice Age, I believe that Tasmania was a separate island long
before that - certainly the comparative depths of Bass Strait and the
Torres Strait would support this. While this doesn't disprove the
Indo-Pacific theory, it makes the time at which Indo-Pacific immigrants
must have reached Tasmania considerably earlier).
>>
 
Well, I was simply following suggestions by others (Ruhlen et al.) about the
affinities of Tasmanian, and also following geological maps which do show
Tasmania appended to Australia during the Paleolithic.
But my main point was that we should question any hypothesis which suggests
that Australia was settled once and once only, c. 50000 BC, and then was
subsequently isolated from the rest of humanity until modern times. There is
no reason at all why this should be true, and good reason to think that the
continent remained accessible for resettlement throughout the Paleolithic.
Therefore we can not simply assume an age of 50000 years or so for Proto-
Australian.


From C.Bowern at student.anu.edu.au  Tue May 12 14:46:42 1998
From: C.Bowern at student.anu.edu.au (Claire Bowern)
Date: Tue, 12 May 1998 10:46:42 EDT
Subject: Australian Languages
Message-ID: <TUE.12.MAY.1998.104642.EDT.C.BOWERN@STUDENT.ANU.EDU.AU>

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
Please note that the name of the language family is Pama-Nyungan, NOT
Pamanyungen. The name is dervied from two of the words for 'man' (Pama and
Nyunga) which are found in many languages in Australia.
 
Incidentally, with the quality of material that exists on the Tasmanian
languages, I'm surprised that anyone can make any hypotheses about its
genetic affiliations at all. When there are only a few hundred words in
orthopgraphies that might represent anything it wouldn't be surprising if
there were "cognates" with every language family in the world.
 
Finally, although it is true that the Torres Strait has only been a Strait
since the last Ice Age, I believe that Tasmania was a separate island long
before that - certainly the comparative depths of Bass Strait and the
Torres Strait would support this. While this doesn't disprove the
Indo-Pacific theory, it makes the time at which Indo-Pacific immigrants
must have reached Tasmania considerably earlier).
 
Claire Bowern
 
 
_____________________________
Centre for Linguistic Typology
Australian National University,
ACT, 0200,  AUSTRALIA
Ph: +61 2 6249 2222


From bwald at HUMnet.UCLA.EDU  Tue May 12 14:43:32 1998
From: bwald at HUMnet.UCLA.EDU (bwald)
Date: Tue, 12 May 1998 10:43:32 EDT
Subject: Dixon's "The rise and fall of languages"
Message-ID: <TUE.12.MAY.1998.104332.EDT.BWALD@HUMNET.UCLA.EDU>

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
Roger Wright writes:
 
>- Manaster Ramer discussion seeems not to refer to literate communities,
>so it seems sensible to point out that if we find out that relevant
>groups are still physically together, over whatever length of time, we
>would not expect a split at all.
 
That's wrong.  Dialect diversification does not depend on loss of physical
or communicative contact.  Since such diversification is true of all
languages known, it is reasonable to assume that it has other causes, some
of which are fairly well understood now, e.g., social differentiation,
local identification, etc.  Also, if what Roger says were true, then the
historical notion that the *area* of greatest diversification is the most
likely origin of a particular language would be completely illogical.
 
Scott Delancey wrote:
 
>I (along with a long list of others) would argue that there is
in principle no way to understand a lot of facts about synchronic
structure except in terms of grammaticalization.  The fact, for
example, that syntactic categories are *normally* not airtight
and completely discrete.  How can there be any useful account of the
English "quasi-modals"--gonna, oughta, usta, etc.--that doesn't have
>a clear diachronic dimension?
 
The remarks I made about the relation between synchrony and diachrony to
which Scott addressed this were not meant to be all-inclusive, but a
minimum for which I felt there was a general consensus.  Meanwhile, Scott's
suggestion is not totally clear to me.  I don't understand what he means by
'*useful* accounts', unless it tautologically means 'useful' to him as a
historical linguist.  I don't really think that.  I think he has adopted a
point of view of (synchronic) grammar as diachronic pragmatics, putting
priority on pragmatics as an explanatory principle underlying "grammar",
where, I suppose, "grammar" is a conventionalised set of pragmatic
strategies  (Givon proposes something like that).
 
The issue was raised by Janda about whether synchronic applies to an
individual speaker in space and time, so that such a person is not privy to
historical deductions.  To me the interesting issue is that in many cases,
built into the speaker's unconscious "knowledge" of his/her language is a
great deal of the history and even imminent, as well as possible, future
directions of change.  This was advanced, for example, for the variable
constraints on copula deletion in Black English, synchronic reflexes of a
non-English type copula system, and a number of other cases, to which I
could add from my own research on linguistic residues in speech production,
e.g., some tense-markers I have studied in Mombasa Swahili; speakers use
them in speech in ways they are not aware of, but that reflect
*DE-grammaticalisation* of a distinction which can be deduced to have once
been obligatory in the earlier history of East Bantu.  For me, the boundary
between synchrony and diachrony is empirically problematic, and does not
reside in the difference between an individual speaker and the language
spoken by a larger community of speakers over more than an individual's
lifetime.
 
An example of the problem of synchrony vs. diachrony that I have been
recently studying has to do with NV compounds in English.  Until recently,
the received wisdom was that they arise by backformation from NN (e.g.,
NV-er/ing) and NA (e,g, NV-en/ing) compounds.  That is, as epiphenomena of
NN or NA compounds.  But more recent proposals are that NV has the same
status as NN and NA in synchronic analysis.  Neither position is obvious,
and, indeed, I think the different proposals reflect both a change in point
of view (from diachronic to synchronic) and an actual change in English
"productivity" of NV, to which these points of view are reacting.  There's
more to it, but you get the gist.
 
Next, Miguel quotes Dixon's:
        The most important task in linguistics today  -- indeed, the
        only really important task -- is to get out in the field and
        describe languages, while this can still be done.  [Other
        things] can wait; that will always be possible.  Linguistic
        description must be undertaken now.
 
One cannot argue with this to the extent that ANY description is better
than none, no matter how limited, cf. Etruscan and many others.  In fact,
at the present time I think there is division of labour such that some
linguists are better at describing languages than others, and that some of
the others are better at raising interesting issues about language and
languages which the language describers can use to make better and fuller
descriptions.  Obviously, no language has been or ever will be fully
described, nor will it ever be obvious what issues will emerge from
linguistic phenomena that we do not currently pay attention to but which
will turn out to be important.  I would even say that Dixon is good at both
description and theory, and has not by any means forsaken his theoretical
excursi in order to concentrate solely on preservation of endangered
languages, even at the risk of garbling information about languages he is
not familiar with.  By all means, go out and preserve undescribed
languages, but note the problems that arise, and whether "theory" can be
dispensed with.


From manaster at umich.edu  Wed May 13 20:31:01 1998
From: manaster at umich.edu (manaster at umich.edu)
Date: Wed, 13 May 1998 16:31:01 EDT
Subject: Language and Anthropology in the Americas
Message-ID: <WED.13.MAY.1998.163101.EDT.>

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
On Tue, 12 May 1998, Johanna Nichols wrote:
 
[snip]
>
> Not right.  My argument depends crucially on the assumption that the many
> language families for which no probative evidence of relatedness has been
> presented (despite the fact that such evidence has been sought by
> comparativists) are SEPARATE STOCKS.  A stock (the term isn't crucial; this
> is the one I use) is the oldest family-type grouping (clade in technical
> phylogenetic terms) for which  (a) genetic relatedness has been
> demonstrated
> and (b) reconstruction of ancestral grammar, vocabulary, and sounds is
> possible.
>
[snip]
>
> AMR gives a caricature of my position in the quote above.  My actual
> position (in *Language* 66, 1990 and later work) is this:  If the languages
> Greenberg groups together as "Amerind" descend from several ancestors, then
> Greenberg is wrong.  If they descend (or are assumed to descend) from a
> single ancestor, then Greenberg is wrong (because an immigration over
> 50,000 years ago is implausible, because just one immigration is
> implausible, and because Greenberg explicitly claims an age of about 11,000
> years for "Amerind").  (So anyone who assumes Greenberg is right about
> "Amerind" must believe he is wrong about "Amerind".)
 
With all due respect to Johanna, I think I was right because the
position I attribute to her is necessarily implicit in what she
says.  Much as she tries to reduce Greenberg's views ad absurdo
(in my viwe, quite incorrectly), I am doing the same with hers.
 
Indeed, unless she really holds, as Austerlitz (to whom
we must trace this approach) apparently did, that the Amerindian
stocks are unrelated, then the rest of what she says cannot be
maintained.  Thus I find a contradiction between her latest
statement, to wit, that
she is prepared to admit that they might be related and
her argument about the age of stocks and about the average
age of stocks.  In fact, I cannot admit that it is valid to talk about the
average age of a stock, defined as a group of languages where
(a) genetic relatedness has been demonstrated
and (b) reconstruction of ancestral grammar, vocabulary, and sounds is
possible.
 
POint (a) depends on what people accept at any given time.  Before
Uralic and Afroasiatic were accepted, the average was much lower
than it is today.  This is like trying to calcuate the murder
rate by counting how many people have been convicted of murder.
Point (b) is one where we have to somehow decide what is "possible".
Aha!   What is Nichols' basis for assuming that this is NOT possible
in the case of Amerind or say Nostratic?  This is where for her
argument to go through, she must assuming that Amerind (or
Nostratic) cannot be stocks.  For if they were, they could
be as young as 5K years!
 
Specifically, unless we assume that the reconstruction of
a Proto-Amerind is impossible, we must grant that
it may be possible.  And
if it is possible, then maybe it will be done.  And if so, then
the relatedness of these groups will be considered by most
linguists to have been "demonstrated".  And then her whole case
falls apart.  Which is why I said earlier that she is
committed to these language families being spurious.  If she
is not, then she is left adrift.  I hope that is clear enough.
 
But I would further like to ask how Prof. Nichols knows how
old Uralic or Chadic or any of her other "stocks" are. I have
spent more than a decade working on Uto-Aztecan and some years
working on Kartvelian or IE and I have no idea how old they
really are, except for some vague feeling about IE that it
must be quite a bit older than Vedic or Old Hittite but
yet not enormously much older. So what is the basis for the
dates she assumes?  I have not heard of any new way
of computing the ages of protolanguages since glotto-
chronology, which even Swadesh admitted was not always
right and which most of us surely think is often not
right.
 
So in effect Johanna seems to be comitted to the
unrelatedness of the Amerind languages or at the
very least to their relatednesss being impossible
in principle to demonstrate.  If she does not
hold this view, then I will be delighted, of course.
AMR


From rmccalli at MUW.Edu  Wed May 13 20:29:31 1998
From: rmccalli at MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister)
Date: Wed, 13 May 1998 16:29:31 EDT
Subject: Australian Languages
In-Reply-To: <63d80503.355851f6@aol.com>
Message-ID: <WED.13.MAY.1998.162931.EDT.RMCCALLI@MUW.EDU>

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
At 9:43 AM -0400 5/12/98, Katachumen wrote:
[snip]
>Well, I was simply following suggestions by others (Ruhlen et al.) about the
>affinities of Tasmanian, [snip]
 
        Greenberg, I've been told, came up with this idea but Greenberg's
latter work has been pretty controversial. Given that whoever the
Tasmanians' ancestors were, they almost certainly passed through New
Guinea, there probably is a genetic relationship between Tasmanian and New
Guinea languages but the question is whether or not it can be proved.
 
>But my main point was that we should question any hypothesis which suggests
>that Australia was settled once and once only, c. 50000 BC, and then was
>subsequently isolated from the rest of humanity until modern times.
 
[snip]
 
        I've read in various sources, among them Cavalli-Sforza, that there
were at least 3 different settlements of Australia. Cavalli-Sforza,
however, is about as controversial as Greenberg. His logic on that point
did make quite a bit of sense --by linking one of the migrations to
Australia to the arrival of the dingo, more advanced technology, etc.
        Now, the question is, why wouldn't Australian languages be more
closely related to languages from New Guinea than Tasmanian languages were?
Australia, according to what I've read, was settled from New Guinea. The
only other language group in the area is Malayo-Pacific and --as far as I
know-- no one claims that Australian is related to Malayo-Pacific.
        Yes, I'm being a bit disengenuous in light of the fact that
Malayo-Pacific arrived in that area  only a few thousand years ago or so.
But do we know what the linguistic state of New Guinea was 10,000 years ago
or so? Was there a language change with the arrival of cultivation, etc.?
 
 
Rick Mc Callister
W-1634
MUW
Columbus MS 39701
rmccalli at sunmuw1.muw.edu


From manaster at umich.edu  Wed May 13 14:37:53 1998
From: manaster at umich.edu (manaster at umich.edu)
Date: Wed, 13 May 1998 10:37:53 EDT
Subject: Dixon's "The rise and fall of languages"
In-Reply-To: <Pine.SOL.3.96.980513110728.2931C-100000@uxa.liv.ac.uk>
Message-ID: <WED.13.MAY.1998.103753.EDT.>

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
This is I certainly agree with.  At the of risk of offending
various people, it seems clear that the creation of literary
Macedonian, literary Belorussian, etc., were in part at
least responsible for the perception that they are independent
languages.  Scandinavian is probably also one language treated
as three because of this.  Hindi and Urdu, Serbian and Croatian
are other examples.  SO I think I (and perhaps Benji) were
reading too much into Roger's earlier remarks.  I am glad we
can come to agree or if we must disagree that we can do it
quite civilly.  But I would like to hear Roger's view of
exactly what he thinks happens with nonliterate languages.
 
AMR
 
On Wed, 13 May 1998, Roger Wright wrote:
>
> No, that isn't what I meant (and these differences are greater now than
> they were in the 12th century, of course); it's just that - under normal
> circumstances - a large amount of variation can be taken to be
> language-internal, within *a single* speech community, if there are
> communications between the speakers in different areas, and there's an
> unspoken consensus that such a community is indeed monolingual. English
> is now a good example; there are many differences between English in
> different places, granted, but I don't think there's a general movement
> to argue that the English of Jamaica, Pakistan, Somerset, New Zealand,
> etc., are actually different languages [yet]. Similarly Spanish, French,
> Chinese, in the modern world, are usually conceived of as being
> monolingual, despite wide internal variation (of a normal kind), and
> Romance seems to have been thought of as monolingual up to the late
> twelfth or early thirteenth century. But if, in -say- thirty years time
> English-speakers somewhere decided to reform their spelling, and it then
> seemed convenient to reform the spelling in different ways in different
> places, then we would have the conditions for splits in the language.
> (Essentially, that's what happened around the year 1200 in the Romance
> area). After that, of course, individual language changes can easily
> stay within the boundaries of the thus-demarcated split cognate
> languages, and the differences will accelerate, and isoglosses will
> bundle at political frontiers, as people in different places have
> different new politically-inspired stylistic standards to style-shift
> towards, which is why Romance differentiation could and did accelerate
> after that time.                      RW
>


From Roger.Wright at liverpool.ac.uk  Wed May 13 14:37:13 1998
From: Roger.Wright at liverpool.ac.uk (Roger Wright)
Date: Wed, 13 May 1998 10:37:13 EDT
Subject: Dixon's "The rise and fall of languages"
In-Reply-To: <v02140b08b17cf8619e54@[128.97.208.85]>
Message-ID: <WED.13.MAY.1998.103713.EDT.ROGER.WRIGHT@LIVERPOOL.AC.UK>

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
 
 
>>so it seems sensible to point out that if we find out that relevant
>>groups are still physically together, over whatever length of time, we
>>would not expect a split at all.
>
>That's wrong.  Dialect diversification does not depend on loss of physical
>or communicative contact.  Since such diversification is true of all
>languages known ....
 
Yes, of course. I wasn't referring to dialect diversification (that is,
*language-internal* variation of a normal kind) but to actual splits
between languages. Am I really the only person on the List to find
actual language *splits* (as opposed to obvious and normal dialect
diversification) inherently unlikely, and thus in need of some kind of
non-linguistic explanation?
                                RW


From Roger.Wright at liverpool.ac.uk  Wed May 13 14:36:26 1998
From: Roger.Wright at liverpool.ac.uk (Roger Wright)
Date: Wed, 13 May 1998 10:36:26 EDT
Subject: Dixon's "The rise and fall of languages"
In-Reply-To: <Pine.SOL.3.95.980512105415.5433A-100000@tempest.rs.itd.umich.edu>
Message-ID: <WED.13.MAY.1998.103626.EDT.ROGER.WRIGHT@LIVERPOOL.AC.UK>

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
 
Alexis says:
>I cannot believe that anyone would take such radical
>differences as exist between French and Portuguese say
>as being due to writing in different ways.
 
 
No, that isn't what I meant (and these differences are greater now than
they were in the 12th century, of course); it's just that - under normal
circumstances - a large amount of variation can be taken to be
language-internal, within *a single* speech community, if there are
communications between the speakers in different areas, and there's an
unspoken consensus that such a community is indeed monolingual. English
is now a good example; there are many differences between English in
different places, granted, but I don't think there's a general movement
to argue that the English of Jamaica, Pakistan, Somerset, New Zealand,
etc., are actually different languages [yet]. Similarly Spanish, French,
Chinese, in the modern world, are usually conceived of as being
monolingual, despite wide internal variation (of a normal kind), and
Romance seems to have been thought of as monolingual up to the late
twelfth or early thirteenth century. But if, in -say- thirty years time
English-speakers somewhere decided to reform their spelling, and it then
seemed convenient to reform the spelling in different ways in different
places, then we would have the conditions for splits in the language.
(Essentially, that's what happened around the year 1200 in the Romance
area). After that, of course, individual language changes can easily
stay within the boundaries of the thus-demarcated split cognate
languages, and the differences will accelerate, and isoglosses will
bundle at political frontiers, as people in different places have
different new politically-inspired stylistic standards to style-shift
towards, which is why Romance differentiation could and did accelerate
after that time.                        RW


From Harold.Koch at anu.edu.au  Wed May 13 14:28:40 1998
From: Harold.Koch at anu.edu.au (Harold Koch)
Date: Wed, 13 May 1998 10:28:40 EDT
Subject: Dixon's "The rise and fall of languages"
Message-ID: <WED.13.MAY.1998.102840.EDT.HAROLD.KOCH@ANU.EDU.AU>

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
On Australian languages:
A. Manaster Ramer wrote 9.5.98:
<...Australian-Pamanyungan (whose unity was proven years ago by Ken Hale)..
 
My understanding is that the Pama-Nyungan family was established in the
early 1960s on the basis on lexicostatistical percentages, backed up with
the implicit structural knowledge of the languages gained by the
classifiers O'Grady, Hale, and Wurm.>
 
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal writes, the same day:
<Dixon makes four basic assumptions:.....
3) Core vocabulary is not (universally) more resistent to change than
   "non-core" vocabulary.......
 assumption (3) is surprising:
        This [greater stability of core vocabulary] does appear to
        hold for the languages of Europe [..] and of many other parts
        of the world.  But it does not apply everywhere [..]  In
        Australia, for instance, similar percentages of shared
        vocabulary are obtained by comparing 100 or 200 or 400 or
        2,000 lexemes, from adjacent languages.>
 
In my opinion it has been demonstrated sufficiently by Paul Black that
assumption 3 is indeed valid for Australian languages (Black, Paul, 1997,
"Lexicostatistics and Australian languages: problems and prospects". In
Tryon, D. and Walsh, M. (eds), The boundary rider: Studies in Honour of
Geoffrey O'Grady. (Pacific Linguistics C-136) Canberra: Research School of
Pacific and Asian Studies, The Australian National University, 51-69).
 
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal further writes:
 
< One supposed (sub-)family, Pama-Nyungan, covers about 85% of the continent.
However, neither for Pama-Nyungan (apparently [p. 91] a
lexicostatistic construct), nor for Australian as a whole have family
trees or proto-languages been succesfully set up.  "It is possible to
establish low-level subgroups in Australia -- groups of from two to a
dozen or so languages that appear to have a close genetic
relationship", but the usefulness of the family tree concept as far
as Australia goes is apparently so low, that Dixon does not even
bother to mention the number of distinct genetic groups.>
 
Readers interested in further information on the historical-comparative
situation of Australian languages, including alternative interpretations to
those expressed in Dixon's Rise and Fall, might consult two books on
Australian comparative linguistics which  appeared last year:
McConvell, Patrick & Nicholas Evans (eds). 1997. Understanding ancient
Australia: perspectives from archaeology and linguistics. Melbourne: Oxford
University Press.
Tryon, Darrell and Michael Walsh (eds). 1997. The boundary rider: Studies
in Honour of Geoffrey O'Grady. (Pacific Linguistics C-136) Canberra:
Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, The Australian National
University.
 
I excerpt below some of the views I expressed in each:
 
On Proto-Pama-Nyungan:
"It can probably not be said yet that pPN has been reconstructed in as much
detail as O'Grady (above) suggested is necessary before Arandic cognates
can be exploited. The number of reliably reconstructed words is still
pretty meagre. Moreover, we lack a handy list of reconstructions: there is
no etymological dictionary available (although O'Grady's comparative files
surely contain the makings of such a work). We still lack a proper subgroup
structure for the Pama-Nyungan family. While this situation prevails, we
have no certainty as to what spread of languages permits a set of cognates
to be reconstructed for pPN, as opposed to a subgroup of Pama-Nyungan...."
 
(Koch, Harold. 1997b: "Pama-Nyungan reflexes in Arandic languages". In
Tryon, D. and Walsh, M. (eds), The boundary rider: Studies in Honour of
Geoffrey O'Grady. (Pacific Linguistics C-136) Canberra: Research School of
Pacific and Asian Studies, The Australian National University, 271-302:
quotation pp 273ff)
 
 
A summary of the results of comparative methods applied to Aust lgs (the
rest of the article is an exposition of the methods of comp ling for the
benefit or archaeologists et al):
 
"Results for Australian linguistic prehistory
 
Little comparative linguistic research in the sense we have been discussing
it took place on Australian languages before the twentieth century. Father
Wilhelm Schmidt, working from Vienna at the beginning of this century,
managed to recognise some of the low-level subgroups (Schmidt 1919). But
these are always fairly obvious because of the masses of shared vocabulary
and grammatical forms.
 
        Capell (1956) compiled a set of words which are widely distributed
over the continent, and called this vocabulary "Common Australian", without
making overt claims about what level of proto-language it could be ascribed
to. Capell (1956, 1962) also distinguished typological groupings of
Australian languages, and presented scenarios whereby languages of one type
might be transformed into another type (see also Wurm 1972). It is to him
that we owe the classification of languages into prefixing and
non-prefixing types, and various kinds of noun-classifying types.
 
        A systematic survey of Australian languages in the late 1950s by
O'Grady, Hale, and Wurm resulted in a tentative genetic classification,
based largely on lexicostatistical data, of all the languages of the
mainland (O'Grady, Voegelin and Voegelin 1966, Wurm 1972, Walsh 1981). For
the application of the methods, see O'Grady (1960), O'Grady and Klokeid
(1969), Hale (1962). The terminology of this classification has been widely
used ever since, even though the classification of particular languages has
been changed and some linguists have expressed scepticism about the methods
used in arriving at the classification. One of the main results was the
finding that a large family, labeled Pama-Nyungan, extended over most of
the mainland excluding most of the Top End and the Kimberleys. Within the
northern area, a great degree of diversity exists; the classification
enumerated as many as twenty-eight families. A discontinuity is found in
Arnhem Land, where the Yolngu languages of Northeast Arnhem Land belong to
the great southern Pama-Nyungan family, unlike all their neighbours in the
north. Another significant finding was the relative uniformity of the
languages of Western Australia south of the Kimberley area. They were all
assigned to the Nyungic subgroup. Another widespread subgroup Pama-Maric
extends from the tip of Cape York Peninsula to as far south as the New
South Wales border.
 
        There has been considerable disagreement over the extent to which
shared vocabulary can be used as a guide to genetic subgroups. Those
responsible for the lexicostatistical classification regard the sharing of
a relatively great amount of basic vocabulary as at least a tentative
support for the positing of close genetic relations, in particular of
Pama-Nyungan (Wurm 1972, O'Grady  1979, Hale 1982). On the other hand,
Dixon (1970a, 1972a, 1980) and Heath (1981) have claimed that borrowing
between neighbouring languages can render the method of lexicostatistics
totally unreliable. As mentioned above, however, Black (1979) has proposed
a method to control for the lexical distortion caused by borrowing. Dixon
(1972a, 1980:255) has proposed that through borrowing adjacent languages
will over time reach a point of equilibrium, sharing 40-60% of their
vocabulary with each other, regardless of the closeness of their genetic
relation. Alpher and Nash (1984ms) argue that Dixon has overestimated the
proportion of vocabulary replacement that is attributable to borrowing, and
hence that the equilibrium level may be much lower than that claimed by
Dixon. In fact, cognate percentages of 10% or less are often found in Top
End languages. Dixon (1972a) also claims that the practice of tabooing the
names of the recently deceased (and similar sounding words) leads to a
relatively rapid replacement of vocabulary through borrowing. Arguments
presented by Heath (1979:409), by Black (1980) and by Alpher and Nash
(1984ms) suggest that the consequences of taboo for the recognition of
genetic relations are not as severe as suggested by Dixon. In spite of
these disputes, however, most linguists would agree that verbs are replaced
by borrowing much less easily than nouns and adjectives, and that a high
level of sharing of verbs is therefore a more reliable indicator of a close
genetic relation between languages than figures that group all kinds of
vocabulary. Personal pronouns and basic body part terms are also relatively
stable historically, whereas terms for flora, fauna, material culture, and
human classification are much more prone to borrowing (Breen 1990).
Furthermore, all linguists put more reliance on agreements in grammatical
forms than on the sharing of vocabulary items.
 
        The comparative method has been applied with success to reconstruct
the history of phonologically aberrant languages of Western Australia
(O'Grady 1966, Austin 1981), Cape York Peninsula (Hale 1964, Sutton 1976,
Black 1980, Dixon 1991), New England (Crowley 1976 and This volume), and
Central Australia (Koch To appear). In many of these cases, certain
languages had undergone radical sound changes while close relatives
remained unchanged. Thus the proto-forms for a subgroup often turn out to
be identical to forms surviving intact in other languages of the subgroup.
 
        We have a fairly good idea about Proto-Pama-Nyungan structural
features. Dixon (1970, 1980) has written on the phonology of the
proto-language-- although Crowley (This volume) reminds us that this
phonology has not been reconstructed by the strict application of the
comparative method. Evans (1988) has contributed further insights through
the application of the comparative method. Dixon (1980) and Blake (1979,
1988, 1990b) have reconstructed the main features of pronouns and noun
inflections; Alpher (1990) has done the same for verb inflection. O'Grady
and his students are working on Proto-Pama-Nyungan vocabulary
reconstruction (see O'Grady and Tryon 1990; Fitzgerald and O'Grady, This
volume); we are nevertheless far from being able to supply lists of
thousands of reconstructed Proto-Pama-Nyungan lexical items, comparable to,
say, Proto-Oceanic.
 
        It must be admitted that as long as so much remains unreconstructed
in lower-level subgroups, and the relation of these subgroups to one
another remains unclear, our picture  of Pama-Nyungan as a whole is still
rather incomplete. There is some doubt as to how, and whether, all of the
languages of southeast Australia fit into Pama-Nyungan (Evans 1988, Blake
1991:50-52). One researcher, Dixon (1980 passim), even remains unconvinced
of the validity of Pama-Nyungan as a genetic construct.
 
        A considerable amount of comparative study has been undertaken
recently on the northern language groups. Blake (1990b) has compared
personal pronouns across all the non-Pama-Nyungan languages, suggesting
that they give evidence that all these languages are related to one another
more closely than to the Pama-Nyungan languages. The postulated genetic
diversity in the north is being reduced: in place of the twenty-eight
families of the original lexicostatistical classification we may see
ultimately as few as eight or ten major genetic groupings among the
non-Pama-Nyungan languages of north Australia. The forthcoming works by
Dixon et al., Evans, and I. Green will make available much more of the
results of recent comparative study of these languages.
 
        No one can say much at this stage about Proto-Australian, the
assumed ancestor of all the continental Australian languages. It is now
widely accepted that Dixon's "Proto-Australian" reconstructions apply more
appropriately to Proto-Pama-Nyungan. Nevertheless Blake (1988, 1990b)
tentatively reconstructs a Proto-non-Pama-Nyungan set of personal pronouns,
which he finds to be relatable as "sisters" to the reconstructed
Proto-Pama-Nyungan set. This implies that both of these groups have a
common ancestor, which could be called Proto-Australian. Many of the verb
roots that Dixon (1980) discusses, but not his reconstructed inflectional
systems, may likewise go back to a Proto-Australian (Heath 1990; Alpher
1990; Alpher, Evans and Harvey To appear).
 
        It appears that all the languages of mainland Australia are
genetically related. The languages of Tasmania are doubtful, and there is
too little evidence for us ever to be sure whether they were genetically
related to the languages spoken on the mainland at the time of European
colonisation (for a discussion of the evidence, see Crowley and Dixon
1981). Whether there is a genetic relationship with languages of Papua New
Guinea and/or Irian Jaya remains to be demonstrated, although Foley (1986)
attempted a comparison. It should be mentioned that many North Australian
languages share typological features with some of the these so-called
"Papuan" languages (see Nichols This volume).
 
        Several interesting geographical discontinuities between
genetically related languages cry out for a historical explanation. As
mentioned earlier, the Yolngu languages of Northeast Arnhem Land are
separated from the rest of their Pama-Nyungan congeners. Yanyuwa, on the
Gulf of Carpentaria, is now accepted as belonging to the Warluwarric
subgroup of Pama-Nyungan (cf. section 5.2), whose other members are found
in West Queensland and the Northern Territory border area (Blake 1990a,
1990b). The Tangkic subgroup of languages at the head of the Gulf and on
offshore islands are separated from the rest of non-Pama-Nyungan. Finally,
the Barkly languages (Jingulu, Wambaya, Ngarnji, Kutanji) are separated, by
Pama-Nyungan languages and Wardaman, from their Djamindjungan relatives
near the Joseph Bonaparte Gulf coast (Chadwick 1979, 1984).
 
        Loanword studies have not been pursued very much as yet (but see
studies by Evans, McConvell, and Nash in this volume). Nevertheless Heath
(1978, 1979, 1981) has done an exemplary study of intense contact between
the Yolngu language Ritharrngu and its non-Pama-Nyungan neighbours Ngandi
and Nunggubuyu, and given many indications on how to do what he calls
"diffusional linguistics". An important study by Walker and Zorc (1981) of
loanwords from the Indonesian so-called "Macassan" languages has documented
the cultural influence of these foreign traders in Northeast Arnhem Land.
This study has been pursued further along the northern coast by Evans
(1992a). McConvell (1985) in a brilliant study was able to demonstrate the
likely locus and mechanism of the creation and diffusion of subsection
terms. Hercus (1972, 1987) has done pioneering studies of areal linguistics
in South Australia and southwest Queensland. In addition, Blake (1979:324)
and Dixon (1980) contain maps showing the geographical distribution of
various structural features, some of which may be due to areal diffusion
rather than genetic groupings. Dixon et al. (To appear) will include much
further discussion of diffusion among the Australian languages.
 
        Little if any work has been done on linguistic evidence for
proto-culture or the spread of cultural innovations. We await studies on
terminologies for such items as the woomera, returning boomerang,
didgeridoo, grinding and leaching techniques, the dog, etc. Almost no terms
of proto-culture or environment have been reconstructed for a deep genetic
level, except *kuya 'fish' (Dixon, p.c.). We could probably add *kana
'yamstick' on the basis of its wide distribution. Evans and Jones (This
volume) make some further promising suggestions for reconstructed tool
terminology. In addition, some bird names are very widespread; e.g.
 
 *kuruku, kuluku 'dove'
 *waaka  'crow'
 *tyitityiti     'willy wagtail'
 *kurrkurr       'boobook'
 
It is unlikely, however, that any inferences about early homelands or
population movements could be made on the basis of reconstructed bird
names. O'Grady (1990:86) reconstructs a proto-Pama-Nyungan *mungka
'anthill, termite mound', which also does little to localise the speakers
of this early language, since anthills are practically ubiquitous in
Australia."
 
(Koch, Harold. 1997a. "Comparative linguistics and Australian prehistory".
In P. McConvell & N. Evans (eds), Understanding ancient Australia:
perspectives from archaeology and linguistics. Melbourne: Oxford University
Press. 27-43; quotation 40-43)
 
Harold Koch, Senior Lecturer
Department of Linguistics
Faculty of Arts
The Australian National University
Canberra ACT 0200 Australia
 
Telephone:  (02) 6249 3203 (direct) / ..3026 (messages)
(overseas) 61 2 6249 3203
Fax:  (02) 6 279 8214
(overseas) 61 2 6279 8214
email:  Harold.Koch at anu.edu.au


From fcosw5 at mbm1.scu.edu.tw  Wed May 13 14:26:10 1998
From: fcosw5 at mbm1.scu.edu.tw (Steven Schaufele)
Date: Wed, 13 May 1998 10:26:10 EDT
Subject: Australian Languages
Message-ID: <WED.13.MAY.1998.102610.EDT.FCOSW5@MBM1.SCU.EDU.TW>

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
Katachumen wrote:
 
> Well, I was simply following suggestions by others (Ruhlen et al.) about the
> affinities of Tasmanian, and also following geological maps which do show
> Tasmania appended to Australia during the Paleolithic.
> But my main point was that we should question any hypothesis which suggests
> that Australia was settled once and once only, c. 50000 BC, and then was
> subsequently isolated from the rest of humanity until modern times. There is
> no reason at all why this should be true, and good reason to think that the
> continent remained accessible for resettlement throughout the Paleolithic.
> Therefore we can not simply assume an age of 50000 years or so for Proto-
> Australian.
 
Correct me if i'm wrong, but my atlas suggests that the Australian
continent isn't all that far from New Guinea or Indonesia.  I don't at
the moment have access to the kind of geological maps Katachumen refers
to, but it seems to me that any cultural group capable of navigating
amongst the islands of SE Asia would have had little trouble venturing
as far as northern Australia.  Not that they necessarily did so, but i'm
inclined to agree with Katachumen that geography doesn't seem to present
a significant barrier to continued settlement between SE Asia and
Australia.
 
And, with regard to Claire Bowern's statement,
 
> Incidentally, with the quality of material that exists on the Tasmanian
> languages, I'm surprised that anyone can make any hypotheses about its
> genetic affiliations at all. When there are only a few hundred words in
> orthopgraphies that might represent anything it wouldn't be surprising if
> there were "cognates" with every language family in the world.
 
It's certainly true that word-lists of a few hundred entries are very
shaky supports for any comparative-linguistic hypothesis, but they can
be quite adequate *`suggestors'* for such hypotheses.  Legitimate
scientific hypotheses can come from any sort of source at all, including
totally(?) irrational ones such as dreams (cf. Kekule).  The difference
between science and wild speculation doesn't lie in the source of the
hypothesis but in how it is, and can be, tested.  I grant i'm not a
specialist in comparative Australian and know very little about the data
and proposals Bowern is referring to, but i admit that what little i do
know strongly suggests that there is a serious lack of the probative
data necessary for testing any decent scientific hypothesis.  But surely
not for *suggesting* it.
 
Best,
Steven
--
Steven Schaufele, Ph.D., Asst. Prof. of Linguistics, English Department
 
Soochow University, Waishuanghsi Campus, Taipei 11102, Taiwan, ROC
 
(886)(02)2881-9471 ext. 6504     fcosw5 at mbm1.scu.edu.tw
 
http://www.prairienet.org/~fcosws/homepage.html
 
 
 
        ***O syntagmata linguarum liberemini humanarum!***
 
        ***Nihil vestris privari nisi obicibus potestis!***


From manaster at umich.edu  Thu May 14 16:27:36 1998
From: manaster at umich.edu (manaster at umich.edu)
Date: Thu, 14 May 1998 12:27:36 EDT
Subject: Cutting down on email clutter
Message-ID: <THU.14.MAY.1998.122736.EDT.>

May I suggest that when responding to something posted
on the list, people make sure they reply just to the list
and not all recipients? This would reduce the volume of
repetitious email and also prevent the confusion due
to responses coming to one before the message being
responded to was ever posted on the list?
AMR


From bwald at HUMnet.UCLA.EDU  Thu May 14 15:05:30 1998
From: bwald at HUMnet.UCLA.EDU (bwald)
Date: Thu, 14 May 1998 11:05:30 EDT
Subject: Dixon's "The rise and fall of languages"
Message-ID: <THU.14.MAY.1998.110530.EDT.BWALD@HUMNET.UCLA.EDU>

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
Roger Wright responds to my criticism:
 
>Yes, of course. I wasn't referring to dialect diversification (that is,
>*language-internal* variation of a normal kind) but to actual splits
>between languages. Am I really the only person on the List to find
>actual language *splits* (as opposed to obvious and normal dialect
>diversification) inherently unlikely, and thus in need of some kind of
>non-linguistic explanation?
 
>From further exchanges involving AMR and Roger, I see that Roger makes a
distinction, which seems to be arbitrrary, between "dialect" and
"language".  In fact, by "language" (in context) he means a socially
determined collection composed of historically related dialects.  AMR
points out that this view is arbitrary, and gives many examples, e.g.,
Scandinavian, Serbian/Croatian, Hindi/Urdu, Provencal/Catalan, etc.
Meanwhile, historical linguists sub-classify reconstructed languages
without this social implication, although there is clearly some kind of
social implication for any form of diversification, e.g., they do not
insist that Low Germanic and High Germanic were ever "languages" as opposed
to "dialects" of West Germanic.  (Well. they don't all insist.  Some assume
that for each historical dialect they reconstruct they are also
reconstructing the birth of a "tribe".  But this is illogical for any
*linguistic* split used as criterial for sub-classiifying of West Germanic,
etc, since similar splits occur within "languages".  Liverpool English, for
example, is reproducing part of the High German shift, i.e., voiceless stop
-> affricate/fricative.)
 
Various "languages" evolved from either (and maybe in some areas BOTH) the
Low and High Germanic "dialects", e.g., English, Dutch from Low, German and
Swiss-German from High.  Their status as languages is social, and only
linguistic to the extent that the varieties united in one language have all
evolved from at some time-depth from a single major source.  Most often
there is a reference dialect for the "language", far from always associated
with a dialect cultivated for literacy in that "language".  But the rise of
literary dialects, call them "languages" if you want,  seems to be what
Roger fixes on.  Literary or not, it seems, however, that plenty of
diversification has taken place before reference dialects achieve the
status of "language", and it is purely social that the same label appplies
to most other dialects, and stops applying to them at an arbitrary point --
not the point of mutual unintelligibility, for example.  (Mutual
intelligibility is a continuum quite independent of the continuum between
dialect and language for any closely related "languages"; obviously it
applies quite well to languages which are only distantly related, or,
pardon the expression, not related at all.)
 
I invite Roger to clarify what his concern is in distinguishing "language"
diversification from dialect diversification.  Is it the emergence of
literary dialects, or what?  From an older exchange between him and Miguel.
I think one of his concerns was the influence that the reference dialect
has in controlling the direction of change of the other dialects socially
subordinated to it in some way.


From Harold.Koch at anu.edu.au  Thu May 14 15:00:44 1998
From: Harold.Koch at anu.edu.au (Harold Koch)
Date: Thu, 14 May 1998 11:00:44 EDT
Subject: Australian reference correction
Message-ID: <THU.14.MAY.1998.110044.EDT.HAROLD.KOCH@ANU.EDU.AU>

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
Please note a correction to the reference cited in my posting of 13 May
as
>Tryon, Darrell and Michael Walsh (eds). 1997. The boundary rider: Studies
>in Honour of Geoffrey O'Grady. (Pacific Linguistics C-136) Canberra:
>Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, The Australian National
>University.
The title should read instead: "Boundary rider: Essays...."
Apologies for the oversight.
Harold Koch
 
Harold Koch, Senior Lecturer
Department of Linguistics
Faculty of Arts
The Australian National University
Canberra ACT 0200 Australia
 
Telephone:  (02) 6249 3203 (direct) / ..3026 (messages)
(overseas) 61 2 6249 3203
Fax:  (02) 6 279 8214
(overseas) 61 2 6279 8214
email:  Harold.Koch at anu.edu.au


From manaster at umich.edu  Fri May 15 02:37:33 1998
From: manaster at umich.edu (manaster at umich.edu)
Date: Thu, 14 May 1998 22:37:33 EDT
Subject: Diachronic vs. synchronic universals/tendencies
In-Reply-To: <Pine.GSO.3.96.980511121817.20731A-100000@darkwing.uoregon.edu>
Message-ID: <THU.14.MAY.1998.223733.EDT.>

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
In the discussion of this topic, which started with
Scott Delancey's defense of the idea that many or
even all (?) synchronic universals or tendencies
have a diachronic explanation,
I think there are two separate points involved
which we have all been confusing (myself included).
 
One,
as suggested by Richard Janda, there is a case to
be made (I am being deliberately conservative) that
all linguistic universals or tendencies ultimately
depend on our biological endowment and hence are
"synchronic".  But as far as I can see this does not
detract from the force of Scott Delancey's observation,
since it is logically possible that the way these
innate mechanisms manifest themselves is precisely
in the kind of language effect that Scott was talking
about.  So the question of whether certain word order
tendencies are the way they are because of certain
proposed diachronic tendencies is to my mind quite
separate from the deeper question of how the
diachronic tendencies arise from our wiring.
(Of course, I must add that I do not believe that
we are in position in linguistics
to really pinpoint what the wiring is, unlike in
research on bird songs, etc., and so we do NOT
in fact know whether things the way they are
because of a particular bit of putative wiring,
in general.  The fact that something appears to
occur univeresally in all languages known to
the author of any given article, whether that
is just English or a hundred languages, does
not in any way shape or form mean that it
is hardwired into human beings.)
 
Now, given that the innatist (everything is
synchronic) position is (a) possibly right
but this could is nonetheless consistent with
everything Scott says and (b) is not
either verifiable or falsifiable given
the limitations on what kind of research
linguists can do (e.g., we are not allowed
to deafen babies at birth), I think I would
like to get back to the other, more modest
question of whether Scott's model actually
fits the facts--regardless of whether it
ultimately reduces to some sort of innate
synchronic basis.  As I see, two kinds of
things are relevant here.
 
One, consider
Mandarin Chinese, where there seems to be
a clear trend towards SOV because it
often now prefers S ba O V to simple
SVO (where ba is some kind of verb),
but as ba O illustrates new kinds of
adpositional phrases made with a verb
that becomes an adposition are in fact
pre- and not postpositional, so here
we have a diachronic process which seems
designed to yield an SOV language with
prepositions of verbal origin, the opposite
of what Scott suggests.  And if this is
possible and if in addition tehre is no
purely synchronic tendency to make OV
languages postpositional, then we would
have expect no correlation between OV
and postpositions. But we do.
 
Two, the other
kind of example that is crucial is what
I referred to in an earlier message, the
tendency of languages to "fix" synchronically
unnatural systems.  I dont at the moment
have the data at my disposal (or else I am
suffering a lapse of memory) needed to
demonstrate that this happens in word
order phenomena.  But what of my other
examples, such as the ones in phonology
or the fact that the disappearance of
active-voice forms in certain tenses and
moods in Indo-Iranian languages does not
lead to the "unnatural" situation that
you have to use passives only but rather
to the passives are immediately reinterpreted
as actives and thus you have surface
ergativity.  You seem to have a diachronic
process, which itself is apparently quite
natural, which favors the loss of active
voice forms in certain tenses/moods (and
this process may indeed have some
unviersal basis since it always seems to
be the same tenses/moods that are involved),
but it produces an unnatural situation and
the language is forced to change FURTHER.
In phonology, of course, we seem to have
lots of examples of this: somehow all
IE languages in which the glottalized
stops shift to voiced manage to get lots
of [b]'s from somewhere even though
there are almost no glottalized *[p']'s
in PIE.  So something forces a language
to fill that gap (or near-gap).  Consider
another instance: English has lost in
most of its dialects the distinction
between sg. and pl. in the 2nd person,
but the result is that it is practically
obligatory in many dialects to say SOMETHING
in addition to 'you' to make the plural, e.g.,
you folks, you guys, the two of you, all of you,
you kids, you ... all, etc.   So again it
seems as though there is a synchronic
force which tries to make us not merely
use you (perceived as primarily sg.) when
we intend the plural.
 
I am not at all sure that this is right,
and I intend this purely as points for
discussion.  Maybe there IS a way to
account for all this Scott's way, but
I do not as yet see that.
 
AMR


From delancey at darkwing.uoregon.edu  Fri May 15 18:58:35 1998
From: delancey at darkwing.uoregon.edu (Scott DeLancey)
Date: Fri, 15 May 1998 14:58:35 EDT
Subject: Diachronic vs. synchronic universals/tendencies
In-Reply-To: <Pine.SOL.3.95.980511160008.19271A-100000@frogger.rs.itd.umich.edu>
Message-ID: <FRI.15.MAY.1998.145835.EDT.DELANCEY@DARKWING.UOREGON.EDU>

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
This is the second part of my reply to Alexis's post:
 
> One, consider
> Mandarin Chinese, where there seems to be
> a clear trend towards SOV because it
> often now prefers S ba O V to simple
> SVO (where ba is some kind of verb),
 
While this idea has been tossed around since the 70's,
it is IMO (and not mine alone) a serious distortion of
the facts.  The ba-construction is a marked construction,
it is not by any means the normal transitive pattern.
As far as I can see, there is not only no "clear trend"
toward SOV in Mandarin, there is no trend at all.
 
But even if this story were true, it would not be a problem
for what I am suggesting.  If indeed some peculiar combination
of diachronic processes in Mandarin were producing a "disharmonic"
disagreement between PP and VP order, that would be no problem at
all for my account--but, I submit, a fatal problem for an innatist
theoretical account.
 
> but as ba O illustrates new kinds of
> adpositional phrases made with a verb
> that becomes an adposition are in fact
> pre- and not postpositional, so here
> we have a diachronic process which seems
> designed to yield an SOV language with
> prepositions of verbal origin, the opposite
> of what Scott suggests.  And if this is
> possible and if in addition tehre is no
> purely synchronic tendency to make OV
> languages postpositional, then we would
> have expect no correlation between OV
> and postpositions. But we do.
 
But we don't find a perfect correlation.  (Partly because
adpositions can develop from relator nouns as well as from
serial verbs, but that's a separate issue).  Note that what
you're proposing here (incorrectly, but let's assume it for
the sake of argument) is a combination of two diachronic processes--
one, the serial verb > adposition story, a very common one, the
other, the ba-construction as the entering wedge of a SVO > SOV
shift, a very unusual one, in fact probably unique to Mandarin.
(Except that, as I've said, it's not really happening, so it's
even more unusual than that).  If that were true, then we would
have to say that the usual diachronic process, by itself, produces
the usual "harmonic" pattern, but that an unusual diachronic process,
or combination of processes, can produce an unusual pattern.  But
that's exactly what the diachronic account implies, and exactly
what a synchronic theoretical account does not imply.
 
Scott DeLancey
Department of Linguistics
University of Oregon
Eugene, OR 97403, USA
 
delancey at darkwing.uoregon.edu
http://www.uoregon.edu/~delancey/prohp.html


From delancey at darkwing.uoregon.edu  Fri May 15 18:53:40 1998
From: delancey at darkwing.uoregon.edu (Scott DeLancey)
Date: Fri, 15 May 1998 14:53:40 EDT
Subject: Diachronic vs. synchronic universals/tendencies
In-Reply-To: <Pine.SOL.3.95.980511160008.19271A-100000@frogger.rs.itd.umich.edu>
Message-ID: <FRI.15.MAY.1998.145340.EDT.DELANCEY@DARKWING.UOREGON.EDU>

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
Alexis brings up two different points, and I'm going to split
my reply to his post into two.  First:
 
> In the discussion of this topic, which started with
> Scott Delancey's defense of the idea that many or
> even all (?) synchronic universals or tendencies
> have a diachronic explanation,
 
Whoops.  No, I'm absolutely not suggesting that *all* of the robust
tendencies we find across languages are to be explained diachronically.
I think that linguistic structures start out motivated, not (at least
for the most part) by any specifically linguistic prewired structure,
but by various functional strategies of the kind often lumped together
in functionalist writing under the rubric of "iconicity" (which term I
quite agree, before anyone bothers to jump on it, is so broad and
vague as to be of little real use).
    My original post was in response to a couple of messages that I
took as suggesting that somehow real, "scientific", synchronic linguistics
need not have any diachronic dimension.  This is refuted by any
demonstration that there are *any* cross-linguistically robust synchronic
patterns which can only be satisfactorily explained in terms of diachronic
mechanisms, and that was all I was trying to argue.  (Though I did, it's
true, make reference to Paul Hopper's argument which can be interpreted
as implying that all is diachrony, I wasn't intending to endorse it).
 
> as suggested by Richard Janda, there is a case to
> be made (I am being deliberately conservative) that
> all linguistic universals or tendencies ultimately
> depend on our biological endowment and hence are
> "synchronic".  But as far as I can see this does not
> detract from the force of Scott Delancey's observation,
> since it is logically possible that the way these
> innate mechanisms manifest themselves is precisely
> in the kind of language effect that Scott was talking
> about.
 
There is an issue here.  If some "universal" pattern
can be completely explained by some universal aspect
of diachrony, e.g., N-Adposition order by the fact
that adpositional phrases diachronically develop from
verb phrases (not that that's absolutely true, but let's
take it as a hypothetical example--I'll say a little about
the empirical question in another post), then why do we need
any kind of story about "biological endowment"?  The
innatist story becomes superfluous.
 
And there's an important difference in empirical prediction.
Any innatist story about, for example, word-order "universals",
founders on the fact that the universals are not universal.
That is, and story based on X'-theory *as a theory of some
innate human linguistic endowment*, or any similar story based
on notions of "harmonic" order of dependent and head, can
account for the rather significant number of "disharmonic"
patterns attested in languages only by one or another sort of
special pleading.
   The diachronic account, in contrast, only says "X is a very
common pattern, because it is the result of a very common diachronic
tendency".  That of course requires separate diachronic accounts
for less common patterns -- but to the extent that such accounts
can be found, then "disharmonic" patterns are not "exceptions" to
some "universal".
 
 
Scott DeLancey
Department of Linguistics
University of Oregon
Eugene, OR 97403, USA
 
delancey at darkwing.uoregon.edu
http://www.uoregon.edu/~delancey/prohp.html


From manaster at umich.edu  Fri May 15 17:08:22 1998
From: manaster at umich.edu (manaster at umich.edu)
Date: Fri, 15 May 1998 13:08:22 EDT
Subject: Language/dialect differentiation
Message-ID: <FRI.15.MAY.1998.130822.EDT.>

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
I think that Bantu and several branches of Uto-Aztecan
(Numic, Californian, probably others) are examples of
linguistic units which split into several really distinct
languages despite the absence of literacy and without
losing contact completely (like Polynesian and such).
If this is right, then Roger's suggestion that
complete differentiation requires either physical
lack of contact or literacy would be clearly refuted.
But I dont know how much contact we can assume.
 
Perhaps a better example would be the differentiation
of the Dutch-Low German-High German area, where the
extreme dialects are surely completely mutually
unintelligible and much more radically different than
the literary languages.  Even with High German,
I'd supsect that extreme Swiss and say Thuringian
dialects are separate languages despite the existence
of a chain of intermediate forms and lack of
separation, and clearly Eastern Yiddish is a
distinct language from say the German of Schaffhausen
andyet again there was always (mediated) contact.
 
One can probably say the same about some extreme
varieties of English as well.
 
AMR


From ratcliff at fs.tufs.ac.jp  Fri May 15 14:58:00 1998
From: ratcliff at fs.tufs.ac.jp (Robert R. Ratcliffe)
Date: Fri, 15 May 1998 10:58:00 EDT
Subject: Wright's and Wald's comments on Dixon's "The rise and fall of
 languages"
Message-ID: <FRI.15.MAY.1998.105800.EDT.>

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
re: Roger Wright's question:
 
 
>Am I really the only person on the List to find
>actual language *splits* (as opposed to obvious and normal dialect
 
> >diversification) inherently unlikely, and thus in need of some kind
> of
> >non-linguistic explanation?
 
No, I would agree that clear splits are unlikely, at least in the case
where language spread doesn't involve loss of contact.  But I don't
think it is right to see the development of national orthographies as a
CAUSE for the diversification of languages.  I think the more important
point may the development of new patterns of political division and
concentration, of which the development of national orthographies is
merely one linguistic symptom.
 
The linguistic situation in the Arab world today is quite comparable
with the Romance situation in the 12th century. To begin with, you have
a huge dialect continuum stretching from Mauretania to Iraq, with more
or less mutual intelligibility between any two neighboring communities,
and unintelligbility between more widely separated groups. The only
official written Standard throughout the region is Classical Arabic,
different from all of the dialects, and comparable with Latin.  At the
same time in areas which have a stable, historically-established
political identity, like Egypt or Morocco, you do have a de facto
national spoken standard, based on the language of the capital cities,
which is understood and recognized throughout the country in spite of
regional dialect variation, and which could (if the political will were
present) be developed as national (written as well as spoken)
languages.  Levelling of regional dialects toward the standard of the
capital is already apparent in these countries.  In countries whose
political history is newer, Algeria, Jordan, Saudia Arabia, e.g., there
really isn't  a clearly defined national dialect, though if the
political boundaries remain as they are perhaps one will eventually
crystalize.
 
Another point about Arabic dialects ties in (I think) with Benji Wald's
point:
 
> Meanwhile, historical linguists sub-classify reconstructed languages
> without this social implication, although there is clearly some kind
> of
> social implication for any form of diversification
 
It is strange to me that people who work on sub-classification of Arabic
dialects use entirely different methods and assumptions from people who
work on sub-classification of prehistoric Semitic.  In the first case,
no one ever tries to use a tree diagram, because everyone realizes it
wouldn't have much explanatory value. The more isoglosses you use the
more confused and contradictory the situation becomes.  In addition to
isoglosses defining areas, and the usual sort of Rhenish fan effect, you
have isoglosses which crosscut areas and correlate with social factors--
such as communal membership (Muslim, Christian, Jewish) or socioeconomic
stratum (Bedouin vs. Rural vs. Urban).  But Arabic dialectologists are
not disturbed about this complex linguistic situation because we
actually know from historical and other non-linguistic sources that the
spread and diffusion of Arabic was a complex historical process, and it
is quite easy to match the linguistic situation with the actual
historical events which brought it about. (For example the Hasaniyya
dialect of Mauretania has a pattern of verb conjugation which is typical
of the dialects of North Africa, but in some of its phonology and
lexicon it is quite different from these dialects and close to the
Bedouin dialects of the Arabian peninsula.  This correlates with the
fact, known from history, that this dialect was brought into the area by
a bedouin group from Arabia some six hundred years after the initial
Arab settlement of North Africa.)
 
In Semitics, on the other hand, many people seem terribly disturbed
about the fact that some languages (notably Classical Arabic) can't be
fit neatly into a tree diagram because they share some isoglosses with
languages on one branch of the tree, and another set of isoglosses with
languages on another distinct branch.  When confronted with such a
situation what we should be doing is asking "what kind of
socio-historical situation (what patterns of migration or contact) does
this contradictory linguistic situation imply?"  Instead many Semitists
have focussed on trying to theorize away the contradictory isoglosses in
order to preserve a sharply delineated tree model.  This procedure is
tantamount to asserting that the normal or expected process of language
spread in pre-history involves a sharp split in a speech community
followed by little or no contact, whereas in historical times this
pattern of langauge spread seems very rare indeed.
 
 
 
 
 
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Robert R. Ratcliffe
Senior Lecturer, Arabic and Linguistics,
Dept. of Linguistics and Information Science
Tokyo University of Foreign Studies
Nishigahara 4-51-21, Kita-ku
Tokyo 114 Japan


From manaster at umich.edu  Sun May 17 13:31:57 1998
From: manaster at umich.edu (manaster at umich.edu)
Date: Sun, 17 May 1998 09:31:57 EDT
Subject: Wright's and Wald's comments on Dixon's "The rise and fall of
 languages"
In-Reply-To: <355C6B3D.12F73820@fs.tufs.ac.jp>
Message-ID: <SUN.17.MAY.1998.093157.EDT.>

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
I think Robert R. overstates things a tad.  I dont think
that family trees are as useless in dialectology as he
makes out.  The fact of chains of mutually intelligible
dialects does not mean that there are not neat splits.
There is no contradiction here at all.  Dutch-German is
a continuum but I dont anyone would question that there
is a major split within between Low German and High German,
even though neighboring LG and HG communities communicate
very easily.  I dont know enough about Arabic dialects
off the top of my head to be able to say much to this
example, but in several languages or language families
where people once despaired of family trees new
research shows just wrong they were.  Uto-Aztecan
is a clear example, where i believe that my
demosntration of the reality of the Northern-Uto-Aztecan
node has been fairly widely accepted and has not been
as far as I know contested publicly at all.
 
AMR


From manaster at umich.edu  Sun May 17 13:32:45 1998
From: manaster at umich.edu (manaster at umich.edu)
Date: Sun, 17 May 1998 09:32:45 EDT
Subject: Diachronic vs. synchronic universals/tendencies
In-Reply-To: <Pine.GSO.3.96.980515104807.12659B-100000@darkwing.uoregon.edu>
Message-ID: <SUN.17.MAY.1998.093245.EDT.>

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
And here I thought that blessed are the peacemakers(:-).
Scott Delancey does not seem to like my point that
a theory of diachronic tendencies can (perhaps must)
be ulitmately reducible to a theory of a synchronic
nature because these tendencies are things that
speakers do and speakers are not usually historical
linguists.  Perhaps I was not clear.  All I am saying
that there are two levels.  At one level we can
argue as to whether the reason for the high correlation
between OV and postpositions is due (a) to the fact
postpositions tend to come from serial verbs or
(b) to the fact that speakers have a synchronic
bit of wiring which makes them arrange things like
this no matter what the history of their language
lands them with.  I have tentatively tried to argue
for (b), but I am quite sympathetic to (a) and
some of the published arguments for it.  I regard
this as an open and fruitful issue and one on
which we need lots more data and disucssion.
 
But there is a deeper level at which whether
(a) or (b) is true, they could and perhaps must
be reducible to
synchronic statements--much as Richard Janda
argued, although I take a much more moderate
line than he did.  Moreover, I think that
this is a very difcicult topic to say anything
substantive about because we are not allowed
to deafen babies like songbird researchers
deafen chicks and such other atrocities.
 
And so I dont see the reason for the disagreement.
I think we are talking about two different levels.
So I am quite open to (a) or (b) in any
given case or in general.   Actually,
I am absolutely sure of only two things. One
is that these two levels are distinct and the
questions involving them should be kept
distinct.  The other is that I dont deserve
the severe condemnation in Scott's rebuttal
of my Mandarin example, to wit:
 
"While this idea has been tossed around since the 70's,
it is IMO (and not mine alone) a serious distortion of
the facts.  The ba-construction is a marked construction,
it is not by any means the normal transitive pattern.
As far as I can see, there is not only no "clear trend"
toward SOV in Mandarin, there is no trend at all."
 
I never said that the ba-construction was not marked
or otherwise "distorted" the facts.  All I said
was that I see a trend towards Mandarin becoming
an OV language with prepositions.  We will not
know if this is right until Mandarin fully changes
to OV if it ever does.  It would be, I admit,
better to find an example further along, but
I do not have the resources at hand to undertake
this.  What I was trying to do is to point to
a KIND of example that might be relevant to
settling the question of (a) vs. (b).  And
I am hoping that someone will be moved to
find the right INSTANCES of the kind--if they
exist.  But in any case that will not tell
us anything about the deeper question on
which I tend to agree with Janda, namely, that
short of resurrecting some notion of language
as an organism, diachronic tendenceies would
seem to have to reflect synchronic mechanisms.
 
AMR


From Brent_Scarcliff at cch.com  Mon May 18 16:40:01 1998
From: Brent_Scarcliff at cch.com (Brent Scarcliff)
Date: Mon, 18 May 1998 12:40:01 EDT
Subject: Grokking into the Future - Language Change
Message-ID: <MON.18.MAY.1998.124001.EDT.>

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
 
Hi!  My name is Ryan Scarcliff.  I'm in the 5th grade at Jefferson
Elementary School in Redondo Beach, California.  As part of a unit called
"Grokking into the Future", my assignment is to survey a group of experts
about "LANGUAGE CHANGE".  I would really appreciate it if you could answer
some of the following questions:
 
1.  Some day, I would like to learn a lot of languages so I can communicate
with people all over the world.  In order to do that, I will need to learn
the most commonly used languages. How should I learn them and what
languages should I learn?
 
2.  Some people don't realize that there have been so many changes in
languages. How much do we really know about why languages change?
 
3.  This year I did my science project on the Polynesian sound changes.
Although most people found it really interesting, a lot of them asked, "How
is linguistics a science?" How should I answer them?
 
4.  I don't know about you, but I like to use my imagination. I was
wondering, what do you think English will look like in the 21st Century?
Will it be the world's common language?
 
5.  If you had to guess, what really important discovery about language
change will be made by the time I go to college?
 
6.  Sometimes, I think about  the beginning of languages. Could you tell
me, why are there so many languages? Do you think we'll eventually find out
that all languages are related?
 
7.  Because I think of the beginning of languages, I think of the end of
them. Why do languages disappear? What languages are in danger of becoming
extinct and why should we care ?
 
8.  When I get into high school, I want to study linguistics. I soon found
out that there was no such class. How come?
 
9.  What's the etymology of "grok"?  My teacher told me it means "to see,"
but it's not in my dictionary.
 
10.  Are there any other big questions I should be asking you about
language change?  Anything else I should know?
 
Thank you for your time and help. Please contact me care of my father's
e-mail address, brent_scarcliff at cch.com.  I will post a summary of your
answers to the list.


From DISTERH at UNIVSCVM.SC.EDU  Mon May 18 14:01:25 1998
From: DISTERH at UNIVSCVM.SC.EDU (Dorothy Disterheft)
Date: Mon, 18 May 1998 10:01:25 EDT
Subject: Potsdam Conference on Grammaticalization
Message-ID: <MON.18.MAY.1998.100125.EDT.DISTERH@UNIVSCVM.SC.EDU>

To: DISTERH at vm.sc.edu
From: wischer at rz.uni-potsdam.de (Ilse Wischer)
Subject: Symposium on Grammaticalization
UNIVERSIT=C4T POTSDAM
Am Neuen Palais 10, 14469 Potsdam
 
 
PD Dr.  Ilse Wischer                                                     Tel. :
(+49)0331-977-2533
Institut f=FCr Anglistik/Amerikanistik                                   Fax  :
(+49)0331-977-2061
Universit=E4t Potsdam, Postfach 601553, 14415 Potsdam                     Sekr.:
(+49)0331-977-2500
                                                                        e-mail:
wischer at rz.uni-potsdam.de
 
 
        Call for Papers
        April 1998
 
        New Reflections on Grammaticalization
 
        An International Symposium at Potsdam University
        17-19 June 1999
 
Since Meillet=92s first mentioning of the term grammaticalization in 1912
several generations of scholars have contributed to a better understanding
of this process of linguistic change. Recent studies are closely connected
with the names of Paul Hopper and Elizabeth Traugott. Further major impulses
came from a number of works in Cologne, from an International Symposium at
the University of Oregon at Eugene in 1988, or from empirical research based
on computer corpora edited in a collective volume by Matti Rissanen et al.
 
Numerous publications and conference contributions in the last ten years
have revealed a growing interest in the theory of grammaticalization. People
have worked on several topics reaching from theoretical investigations on
its status with respect to various theories of grammar up to its practical
application to linguistic phenomena in many languages of the world. This has
led, on the one hand, to new insights and a deeper understanding, it has
also revealed, however, new questions that call for an answer and require
further research.
 
The aim of this symposium is to bring together scholars who are working in
this area to present their findings and discuss such topics as e.g. whether
there are two different types of grammaticalization, one on the
propositional level and another one on the discourse level, whether there
are convincing examples of the reversability of grammaticalization, what
kind of relationship holds between grammaticalization and lexicalization, or
which internal and external factors can accelerate or retard=
 grammaticalization.
 
Papers are invited on all aspects related to grammaticalization in its
synchronic or diachronic perspective, with respect to theoretical
reflections or practical findings. Studies based on linguistic phenomena in
English are particularly welcome.
 
 
 
Academic programme:
 
Opening lecture:                Christian Lehmann, University of Bielefeld,
Germany
 
Plenary lectures (so far):      Joan Bybee, University of New Mexico, United=
 States
                                T. Giv=F3n, University of Oregon, United States
                                Bernd Heine, University of Cologne, Germany
                                Paul Hopper, University Pittsburgh, United
States
                                Ekkehard K=F6nig, Free University Berlin,
Germany
 
 
Social Programme:
There will be a conference dinner, a guided tour through the city of Potsdam
including a visit of one of its famous castles, a visit of the Potsdam Film
Studios or a boat tour on the Havel. Details about the social programme will
be given in the 2nd circular.
 
 
Accomodation:
Accomodation will be in hotels in town at conference rates. A limited number
of moderately priced rooms will be available in the guest house of the
University. You will have to book the rooms on your own, mentioning your
participation in the symposium. Addresses will be given in the 2nd circular.
 
 
About the city of Potsdam and Potsdam University:
In 1993 Brandenburg=92s capital celebrated the 1000th anniversary of its
founding. Potsdam's distinctive appearance began to emerge when the town
became the residence of Prussian royalty. To this day the capital attracts
many visitors. The grounds of the three royal parks, the palace of Sans
Souci and the New Palace, Schinkel's Charlottenhof, an architectural gem,
the Cecilienhof Palace as well as numerous churches and Italianate villas
continue to charm visitors today. Caf=E9s, restaurants, museums and galeries
are an integral part of the capital's unique cityscape.
        Among 140,000 Potsdamers, there are 11,000 university students, most of
whom live in halls of residence on the outskirts of town. Potsdam's location
could not be more ideal for leisure time activities: it is surrounded by
forests, lakes and rivers and a short commuter train ride takes you to the
nation's nearby capital, Berlin.
        Since the last century, Potsdam has been a centre for research in the
natural sciences. Today Potsdam is again the home of respected research
institutes. For a few years now it has also been a university town.=20
        The University of Potsdam was founded on 15 July 1991. Located on three
campuses - Am Neuen Palais, Golm and Potsdam-Babelsberg - the university
absorbed most of the staff of Brandenburg State College (previously the
Potsdam College of Education) and a few members of the staff of the College
of Law and Administration (previously the Academy of Government and Law of
the GDR, dissolved in 1990).
        The Institute of English and American Studies is situated on the campus
in
Golm. It is divided into Linguistics, Literary Studies, Cultural Studies,
Didactics and Practical Language Acquisition.  Research Projects in the
Linguistics Department include such topics as Principles of Linguistic
Change, Celtic Englishes, Second Language Acquisition, English in Australia.
        For further information on Potsdam and the University see the
university's
homepage at http://www.uni-potsdam.de.
 
 
 
 
 
Submission of papers
E-mail your abstract (approximately 250 words) by 15 January 1999 to:
wischer at rz.uni-potsdam.de=20
or send it on paper together with disc (in Word or Word Perfect) to:=20
Ilse Wischer, Universit=E4t Potsdam, Institut f=FCr Anglistik und=
 Amerikanistik,
Postfach 601553, D-14415 Potsdam. Germany.
Acceptance notifications will be sent to the authors by 1 March 1999. I plan
to publish the proceedings.
 
 
Deadlines
I ask for your preliminary registration (to get on our mailing list) as soon
as possible. The Second Circular with details about accomodation and other
costs will reach you by mid- November 1998. An early registration at reduced
rate is possible by 15 December 1998, registration at normal rate by 15
April 1999.
 
For further information contact:         wischer at rz.uni-potsdam.de
 
 
PD Dr. Ilse Wischer
Potsdam, 22 April 1998
 
=0CPreliminary registration form
 
To receive the next circular, please fill in and send this form (by e-mail
or ordinary mail) to:
wischer at rz.uni-potsdam.de, or on paper together with disc to: Ilse Wischer,
Universit=E4t Potsdam, Institut f=FCr Anglistik und Amerikanistik, Postfach
601553, D-14415 Potsdam, Germany.
 
 
 
Name:
 
 
Affiliation:
 
 
Mailing address:
 
 
 
 
 
E-mail:
 
 
Phone:
 
 
Fax:
 
 
I would like / would not like to present a paper.
Title of paper, if any:
 
--=====================_895523335==_
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="CALLPAP.TXT"
 
 
 
UNIVERSIT=8ET POTSDAM
Am Neuen Palais 10, 14469 Potsdam
 
 
PD Dr.  Ilse Wischer                                                     Tel. :
(+49)0331-977-2533
Institut f=81r Anglistik/Amerikanistik                                    Fax  :
(+49)0331-977-2061
Universit=84t Potsdam, Postfach 601553, 14415 Potsdam
Sekr.:=
 (+49)0331-977-2500
                                                                        e-mail:
wischer at rz.uni-potsdam.de
 
 
        Call for Papers
        April 1998
 
        New Reflections on Grammaticalization
 
        An International Symposium at Potsdam University
        17-19 June 1999
 
Since Meillet s first mentioning of the term grammaticalization in 1912=
 several generations of scholars have contributed to a better understanding=
 of this process of linguistic change. Recent studies are closely connected=
 with the names of Paul Hopper and Elizabeth Traugott. Further major=
 impulses came from a number of works in Cologne, from an International=
 Symposium at the University of Oregon at Eugene in 1988, or from empirical=
 research based on computer corpora edited in a collective volume by Matti=
 Rissanen et al.
 
Numerous publications and conference contributions in the last ten years=
 have revealed a growing interest in the theory of grammaticalization.=
 People have worked on several topics reaching from theoretical=
 investigations on its status with respect to various theories of grammar up=
 to its practical application to linguistic phenomena in many languages of=
 the world. This has led, on the one hand, to new insights and a deeper=
 understanding, it has also revealed, however, new questions that call for=
 an answer and require further research.
 
The aim of this symposium is to bring together scholars who are working in=
 this area to present their findings and discuss such topics as e.g. whether=
 there are two different types of grammaticalization, one on the=
 propositional level and another one on the discourse level, whether there=
 are convincing examples of the reversability of grammaticalization, what=
 kind of relationship holds between grammaticalization and lexicalization,=
 or which internal and external factors can accelerate or retard=
 grammaticalization.
 
Papers are invited on all aspects related to grammaticalization in its=
 synchronic or diachronic perspective, with respect to theoretical=
 reflections or practical findings. Studies based on linguistic phenomena in=
 English are particularly welcome.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Academic programme:
 
Opening lecture:                Christian Lehmann, University of Bielefeld,
Germany
 
Plenary lectures (so far):      Joan Bybee, University of New Mexico, United=
 States
                                T. Giv=A2n, University of Oregon, United States
                                Bernd Heine, University of Cologne, Germany
                                Paul Hopper, University Pittsburgh, United
States
                                Ekkehard K=94nig, Free University Berlin,
Germany
 
 
Social Programme:
There will be a conference dinner, a guided tour through the city of Potsdam=
 including a visit of one of its famous castles, a visit of the Potsdam Film=
 Studios or a boat tour on the Havel. Details about the social programme=
 will be given in the 2nd circular.
 
 
Accomodation:
Accomodation will be in hotels in town at conference rates. A limited number=
 of moderately priced rooms will be available in the guest house of the=
 University. You will have to book the rooms on your own, mentioning your=
 participation in the symposium. Addresses will be given in the 2nd=
 circular.
 
 
About the city of Potsdam and Potsdam University:
In 1993 Brandenburg s capital celebrated the 1000th anniversary of its=
 founding. Potsdam's distinctive appearance began to emerge when the town=
 became the residence of Prussian royalty. To this day the capital attracts=
 many visitors. The grounds of the three royal parks, the palace of Sans=
 Souci and the New Palace, Schinkel's Charlottenhof, an architectural gem,=
 the Cecilienhof Palace as well as numerous churches and Italianate villas=
 continue to charm visitors today. Caf=82s, restaurants, museums and=
 galeries are an integral part of the capital's unique cityscape.
        Among 140,000 Potsdamers, there are 11,000 university students, most of=
 whom live in halls of residence on the outskirts of town. Potsdam's=
 location could not be more ideal for leisure time activities: it is=
 surrounded by forests, lakes and rivers and a short commuter train ride=
 takes you to the nation's nearby capital, Berlin.
        Since the last century, Potsdam has been a centre for research in the=
 natural sciences. Today Potsdam is again the home of respected research=
 institutes. For a few years now it has also been a university town.=20
        The University of Potsdam was founded on 15 July 1991. Located on three=
 campuses - Am Neuen Palais, Golm and Potsdam-Babelsberg - the university=
 absorbed most of the staff of Brandenburg State College (previously the=
 Potsdam College of Education) and a few members of the staff of the College=
 of Law and Administration (previously the Academy of Government and Law of=
 the GDR, dissolved in 1990).
        The Institute of English and American Studies is situated on the campus
in=
 Golm. It is divided into Linguistics, Literary Studies, Cultural Studies,=
 Didactics and Practical Language Acquisition.  Research Projects in the=
 Linguistics Department include such topics as Principles of Linguistic=
 Change, Celtic Englishes, Second Language Acquisition, English in=
 Australia.
        For further information on Potsdam and the University see the
university's=
 homepage at http://www.uni-potsdam.de.
 
 
 
 
 
Submission of papers
E-mail your abstract (approximately 250 words) by 15 January 1999 to:
wischer at rz.uni-potsdam.de=20
or send it on paper together with disc (in Word or Word Perfect) to:=20
Ilse Wischer, Universit=84t Potsdam, Institut f=81r Anglistik und=
 Amerikanistik, Postfach 601553, D-14415 Potsdam. Germany.
Acceptance notifications will be sent to the authors by 1 March 1999. I plan=
 to publish the proceedings.
 
 
Deadlines
I ask for your preliminary registration (to get on our mailing list) as soon=
 as possible. The Second Circular with details about accomodation and other=
 costs will reach you by mid- November 1998. An early registration at=
 reduced rate is possible by 15 December 1998, registration at normal rate=
 by 15 April 1999.
 
For further information contact:         wischer at rz.uni-potsdam.de
 
 
PD Dr. Ilse Wischer
Potsdam, 22 April 1998
 
=0CPreliminary registration form
 
To receive the next circular, please fill in and send this form (by e-mail=
 or ordinary mail) to:
wischer at rz.uni-potsdam.de, or on paper together with disc to: Ilse Wischer,=
 Universit=84t Potsdam, Institut f=81r Anglistik und Amerikanistik, Postfach=
 601553, D-14415 Potsdam, Germany.
 
 
 
Name:
 
 
Affiliation:
 
 
Mailing address:
 
 
 
 
 
E-mail:
 
 
Phone:
 
 
Fax:
 
 
I would like / would not like to present a paper.
Title of paper, if any:
 
--=====================_895523335==_--


From Roger.Wright at liverpool.ac.uk  Mon May 18 13:47:28 1998
From: Roger.Wright at liverpool.ac.uk (Roger Wright)
Date: Mon, 18 May 1998 09:47:28 EDT
Subject: Language splits and bundled isoglosses
In-Reply-To: <v02140b00b17f9ebe7732@[128.97.208.93]>
Message-ID: <MON.18.MAY.1998.094728.EDT.ROGER.WRIGHT@LIVERPOOL.AC.UK>

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
 
 
>I invite Roger to clarify what his concern is in distinguishing "language"
>diversification from dialect diversification.  Is it the emergence of
>literary dialects, or what?
 
 
        Thankyou for the invitation - if the speakers involved are
geographically contiguous, we could use the following criterion: cognate
*languages* will have many isoglosses bundled along the same line (which
might coincide with a political boundary, or might not); dialect
diversification *within the same language* is likely to involve a
dialect continuum, with many isoglosses, but which rarely coincide
geographically in this way. (The emergence of Literary standards can
lead to bundling, rather than being caused by them.)
        This is a suggestion, not a dogmatic view.
        Alexis asked how I applied this to unwritten languages; I would
suggest that the language-internal dialect continuum is the default
case, so that language-splits should imply loss of physical contact
(such as population movements, or perhaps the fact that a once easily
traversable sea had become a hostile pirate-infested environment ....)
Perhaps I can recommend here the proceedings of a historical
sociolinguistics conference held in Denmark in 1994, published as "The
Origins and Developments of Emigrant Languages", ed. H. F. Nielsen and
L. Schosler, Odense University Press, 1996, ISBN 87-7838-226-2; we
didn't come to a consensus on this, really, but there's good food for
thought here.
                        RW


From bwald at HUMnet.UCLA.EDU  Tue May 19 15:56:59 1998
From: bwald at HUMnet.UCLA.EDU (bwald)
Date: Tue, 19 May 1998 11:56:59 EDT
Subject: Language splits and bundled isoglosses
Message-ID: <TUE.19.MAY.1998.115659.EDT.BWALD@HUMNET.UCLA.EDU>

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
Roger Wright responded to my invitation to clarify what he meant by the
difference between "language diversification" amd "dialect diversification"
as follows:
 
> if the speakers involved are
>geographically contiguous, we could use the following criterion: cognate
>*languages* will have many isoglosses bundled along the same line (which
>might coincide with a political boundary, or might not); dialect
>diversification *within the same language* is likely to involve a
>dialect continuum, with many isoglosses, but which rarely coincide
>geographically in this way. (The emergence of Literary standards can
>lead to bundling, rather than being caused by them.)
>        This is a suggestion, not a dogmatic view.
 
I appreciate the tentativeness with which Roger makes the suggestion.  I
would separate two points in the suggestion.  (1)  I would maintain that
the distinction between "language dv" and "dialect dv" as a label for
distinguishing bundling of isoglosses vs. areal ordering of isoglosses is
potentially misleading, since "language" is a label applying to the social
construal of a set of dialects (meaning that the set has a common
historical origin). Thus, there will be a confusing mismatch between
"language" as bundling of isoglosses amd as a socially determined areal
domain where the sociopolitical boundary does NOT coincide with bundling.
(2)  The emergence of literary standards, or conceivably some other kind of
central influence, can lead to bundling.  That is an interesting idea, and
an empirically testable claim with regard to coincidence with a
sociopolitical unit.  I would assume that whether or not there is such
coincidence would depend on the relative strength of the sociopolitical
boundary vis-a-vis  cross-boundary influences, e.g., whether speakers at
the boundary are more influenced by dialects of "another language"  across
the boundary or by the "central / prestige" dialect possibly at a greater
distance but within the sociopolitical boundary.  Either case could be
characterised as a case of "diglossia", "bilingualism" in the case of cross
boundary influence but "bidialectalism" in case of influence from a
prestige dialect of the same language.  NB the "bilingualism" in some cases
could require less difference between the varieties than "bidialectalism".
 
No doubt in most, if not all, cases there is some of both kinds of
influence on border dialects.  It remains to empirical investigation to see
how such border dialects actually behave.  One problem is the selection of
features to observe bundling of isoglosses, since there are potentially one
bundle which aligns the focus dialect with a neighboring dialect of the
language across the sociopolitical boundary and an opposing bundle
distinguishing these two and aligning the focus dialect with the prestige
dialect in the same language.  Offhand, I am not aware of intersecting
bundles, only of the possibility that a neighboring dialect from the other
language may penetrate more "deeply" into the focus dialect, a change from
"below" (or the "side"), while the prestige dialect may remain more or less
distinct in its use by speakers of the focus dialect, but eventually filter
down and have diachronic consequences as an example of change from "above".
Phonological and syntactic change may differ in that syntactic change may
be more susceptible to prestige influence and phonological change to
neighboring influence.  In any case, diachronic interpretation of a bundle
depends crucially on the possibility of distinguishing fragmentation of a
single dialect over space, such that the bundle represents conservative
features of the original single dialect, from spread of a bundle of
features (over time) so that they are innovative in the receiving dialects,
regardless of their status in the source dialect, i.e., in distinguishing
divergence (cf. tree diversification) from convergence (cf. "Sprachbunde")
in such an area.  That is not always easy, and may even be the wrong way to
approach interpretation of the bundle in some cases.
 
If the discussion is to be continued, I invite concrete examples so that
the methodology and decision mechanism for historical interpretation of
bundling can be examined.  Maybe included for Romance could be such
syntactic phenomena as object clitic ordering, among other things.  How
does the boundary between, say, Provencal and Catalan, or Provencal and
"French", display bundling for a number of features (maybe under the
influence of prestige varieties of French and Spanish among bilinguals;
aren't Catalan and Provencal speakers mostly bilingual in Castillian and
"general colloquial" -- if not standard -- French, respectively?)
 
P.S.  I actually think that the best place to look for bundling which tests
adjacency vs. prestigious centers is in the lexicon, since lexical items
approximate the "linguistic" arbitrariness of separating one language from
a closely related one.  But even here I guess that, say, if there is
cross-political boundary agrarianism, then there could be a bundle of
agrarian terms which crosses the language boundary, in contrast to a bundle
of political terms emanating from the prestige center of the same language
that stops at the language boundary.  It remains to be seen how effective
"languages" are at drawing a bundle of isoglosses aorund themselves to the
exclusion of their historically related neighbors.  To be anticipated is
indeterminacy about how to treat border dialects of the low prestige
variety where there is popular sentiment to the effect that it reflects a
"mixed" language or the "other" language has "contaminated" the first.
Then we get into the whole issue of folk-beliefs about language and the
difference between people's idealisations of their "language" and what is
actually happening in the language/s they speak.


From tonybreed at juno.com  Tue May 19 15:56:42 1998
From: tonybreed at juno.com (D. Anthony Tschetter-Breed)
Date: Tue, 19 May 1998 11:56:42 EDT
Subject: Basque and Georgian cousins?
Message-ID: <TUE.19.MAY.1998.115642.EDT.TONYBREED@JUNO.COM>

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
 
I'm curious if anyone out there has heard if Basque and Georgian are
related
languages and cultures.  The man who told me this was not a linguist; he
was
an expert on intelligence, as in CIA-type intelligence.  Still, he seemed
quite
sure that it was true, and that everyone knew about it and accepted it.
That's
why I'm putting this question to this list; if everyone knows about it,
then
you'll be able to confirm it.
 
The story, thoroughly plausible, is that a group of Georgians broke away
from
Georgian society (perhaps during a drought; this fact, he said, is found
in the
traditional Georgian mythos or oral history).  They traveled west,
looking for
a place to settle, and continued until they found a place like their old
Georgia:
mountains near the sea, i.e. the eastern Pyrenees.
 
This came to light when a Georgianist happened to notice that the folk
dances
of the Basque are remarkably similar to those of the Georgians.
 
Is this on the level?  If it's true, then how well known is it really?
I'd always
been taught that Basque was an isolate.
 
-Tony Breed
 
_____________________________________________________________________
You don't need to buy Internet access to use free Internet e-mail.
Get completely free e-mail from Juno at http://www.juno.com
Or call Juno at (800) 654-JUNO [654-5866]


From mcv at wxs.nl  Wed May 20 16:04:20 1998
From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal)
Date: Wed, 20 May 1998 12:04:20 EDT
Subject: Basque and Georgian cousins?
In-Reply-To: <19980518.223132.12574.1.TonyBreed@juno.com>
Message-ID: <WED.20.MAY.1998.120420.EDT.>

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
"D. Anthony Tschetter-Breed" <tonybreed at juno.com> wrote:
 
>The story, thoroughly plausible, is that a group of Georgians broke away
>from
>Georgian society (perhaps during a drought; this fact, he said, is found
>in the
>traditional Georgian mythos or oral history).  They traveled west,
>looking for
>a place to settle, and continued until they found a place like their old
>Georgia:
>mountains near the sea, i.e. the eastern Pyrenees.
 
Assuming they took the route north of the Black Sea, it seems strange
that they missed Slovenia, the Cote d'Azur or the gorgeous mountains
near the sea [Costa Brava] of the eastern Pyrinees (the Basque
country is located on the western Pyrinees).
 
>Is this on the level?
 
I'm no expert on Basque or Georgian folk-dances, but as far as the
languages are concerned, there is no reason to assume a special link
between Basque and Georgian.  The two languages share a number of
characteristics, like not being Indo-European and having ergative
morphology (Basque more so than Georgian), and even a few
tantalizingly similar grammatical morphemes (Bq. gu "we", Geo. gv-
"us"), but despite efforts by several people (most notably Rene'
Lafon), nobody has been able to present a convincing case for an
Euskaro-Kartvelian connection.  Current efforts to link Basque to
something else are focusing on North Caucasian (Abkhaz-Circassian and
Nakh-Daghestanian) and the South Caucasian (Kartvelian, Georgian)
hypothesis has been largely abandoned.  The North Caucasian languages
are also not Indo-European and have in part ergative morphology.  I
don't know about their folk-dances.
 
I suspect that another reason people have looked for connections
between Basque and Georgian is the ancient name of the Georgian
kingdom, to wit "Iberia".  But Basque is not Iberian, and the
Georgians call their country Sakartvelo (I have no idea if "Iberia"
is a native Georgian word).  And then modern Azerbaijan (then
probably inhabited by Iranian speaking peoples, of
Scytho-Sarmatian-Alan stock) was called "Albania" in those days, so
what's in a name?
 
 
=======================
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
mcv at wxs.nl
Amsterdam


From n.nicholas at pgrad.unimelb.edu.au  Wed May 20 15:14:36 1998
From: n.nicholas at pgrad.unimelb.edu.au (Nick Nicholas)
Date: Wed, 20 May 1998 11:14:36 EDT
Subject: Dhumbadji! 4.1 TOC
Message-ID: <WED.20.MAY.1998.111436.EDT.>

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
The latest issue of _Dhumbadji! Journal for the History of Language_, Vol.
4.1, published by the Association for the History of Language, has just
appeared. The feature article is a paper by Vaclav Blazek on the etymology of
Uralic Numerals; there is also an interview with Sergei Starostin on
lexicostatistics, and a long review of V. Chirikba's reconstruction of
Proto-West Causasian.
 
More information is available on:
http://www.lexicon.net/opoudjis/Work/ahl.html .
 
--
How can the king and nobles make ends meet,   Nick Nicholas; Linguistics,
if not by eating you and all the others?         University of Melbourne.
(Lynx to Ox; _Tale of the Quadrupeds_,    http://www.lexicon.net/opoudjis
 Byzantium, 14thC)                  n.nicholas at linguistics.unimelb.edu.au


From manaster at umich.edu  Wed May 20 15:13:23 1998
From: manaster at umich.edu (manaster at umich.edu)
Date: Wed, 20 May 1998 11:13:23 EDT
Subject: Trask on Ringe
Message-ID: <WED.20.MAY.1998.111323.EDT.>

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
Larry asks about a point made by Ringe (1992), viz.,
"...resemblances between the basic vocabularies of
languages commonly believed to be related occur
with clearly greater-than-chance frequency, while
resemblanes between teh basic vocabularies of languages
not commonly believed to be demonstrably related do
not occur with greater-than-chance freuquency"
(p. 80).  Since he appears to hold (p. 80-81)
that such resemblances are the only way to test
for language relatedness, this seems to be saying
that any set of lgs not ALREADY commonly recognzied
as related can NEVER pass the test, since the
probabilities involved cannot change.
 
Ofcourse, not only this and but the whole
argument is really bad mathematics, as
shown by Baxter and MR in Diachronica.
 
AMR


From ph1u+ at andrew.cmu.edu  Sat May 23 18:25:01 1998
From: ph1u+ at andrew.cmu.edu (Paul J Hopper)
Date: Sat, 23 May 1998 14:25:01 EDT
Subject: Vade Mecum fuer den Herrn Janda
Message-ID: <SAT.23.MAY.1998.142501.EDT.PH1U@ANDREW.CMU.EDU>

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
Rich Janda's allusion to Lessing in defense of synchronicity seems a
little ironic. Lessing, in his 1766 essay "Laokoon: Ueber die Grenzen
der Malerei und Poesie", drew a distinction between art forms that are
intrinsically temporal, like music and literature, and those that are
intrinsically spatial (plastic), like painting and sculpture. Lessing
builds the essay around the story of Laokoon and his sons wrestling with
the serpents that had been sent to punish them; he compares the
treatment of this incident in the 2nd century BC Greek sculpture and by
Virgil in Book II of the Aeneid. A temporal art form deals with the
unfolding of events in time, a plastic one with spatial relationships at
a single point in time. Perhaps the issue of synchronicity in language
has become confused because of the tendency in the discipline of
linguistics to equate "diachronic" with "historical", when the real
issue is the very one that Lessing focuses on: is language a
spatial/plastic phenomenon or a temporal one?
 
Paul
 
PS As Rich knows, my title is an allusion to another essay by Lessing!


From Yury at aveinfo.sci-nnov.ru  Wed May 27 14:26:12 1998
From: Yury at aveinfo.sci-nnov.ru (Yury L. Rodygin)
Date: Wed, 27 May 1998 10:26:12 EDT
Subject: synchronic vs diachronic causes of language changes
Message-ID: <WED.27.MAY.1998.102612.EDT.YURY@AVEINFO.SCINNOV.RU>

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
 Let me (for my first including into discussion) return to    diachronic vs
 synchronic explanations of language tendencies. It
seems to me the real base of this discussion is the real
possibility to put 2 types of the question "Why?" about any
language (and not only language) phenomen. 1st "Why?" is close to
"How?", "How did this phenomen appear?" It's diachronic
explanation considering a chain of previous facts, resulting in
this phenomen. (And there is mighty tradition to be content with
only a chain of previous states of this part of language system,
without an explanation at all). 2nd "Why?" is close to
"For what?". "Why this phenomen is necessary in this system for
the  users?"  "Why  it's  alive in this system?" It's synchronic
explanation considering needs of speakers in expression of
concrete neutral or emotional information, in economy of time,
force, memory, etc. Both "Why?" have equivalent rights to
exist. Some phenomen appears because concrete need of
speakers is existing (in synchrony) and this phenomen has
exactly this form because such-and-such previous facts
had resulted in it (in diachrony).
The forms 'you guys, you kids, etc.' (look AMR's letter,
14 May) appeared both from previous losting of difference between
pl. and sg. and from the continuing need of speakers in this
difference (at least in some situations).
 The same reason, I think, is for the appearing the modern
Russian non-standart forms 'platjA, sredstvA etc.' "dresses,
means" (with stressed second  a). Standart forms of o-neutra
nouns with fixed stress ('plAtja etc.') in fact lost difference
with pl. because sg. and pl. here differ in endings [o]/[a]
and theese phonems, if unstressed, don't differ in most of
contemporary dialects.  27 Russian nouns o-neutra total
changed from 16 centure fixed stress to movable, some from
them in literare Russian. I see in this fact an interesting
example of language self-regulation under impact of mighty need
of speakers in the short (grammar) expression of number.
(This category is almost universal as you know.) But this
loss isn't noticeable because it isn't visible in writing.
Some of such tendencies in Russian accentuation from 16
centure to novadays are considering in both aspects "Why?" in
my recent paper "Grammaticalization of Russian accentuation:
why?", not publishing yet. If anybody interests, I can send
it.
       Ireena Lifshitc-Fufajeva
       postmaster at aveinfo-sci.nnov.ru
       Nizhnij Novgorod, Russia


From Paula.Fikkert at uni-konstanz.de  Thu May 28 14:06:05 1998
From: Paula.Fikkert at uni-konstanz.de (Paula Fikkert)
Date: Thu, 28 May 1998 10:06:05 EDT
Subject: call for papers
Message-ID: <THU.28.MAY.1998.100605.EDT.PAULA.FIKKERT@UNIKONSTANZ.DE>

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
====================== CALL FOR PAPERS=====================
 
 
                   CHANGE IN PROSODIC SYSTEMS
 
                University of Konstanz, Germany
 
                        February 24-26, 1999
 
 
Invited speakers:
Elan Dresher (University of Toronto)
Carlos Gussenhoven (University of Nijmegen)
Tomas Riad (University of Stockholm)
 
===========================================================
 
We are pleased to announce the workshop 'Change in Prosodic Systems' as
part of the 21st annual meeting of the German Society of Linguistics (DGfS)
in Konstanz, Germany.
 
This workshop addresses various aspects of change in prosodic systems with
the aim to enlarge our understanding of the range of variation and the
types of change that are attested in languages. We organise three
subsections, which are closely related and investigate the topic of change
in prosodic systems from a different perspective.
 
(a) Stress, tone and stress-related phenomena
This section discusses the changing prosodic systems of languages, not only
with respect to stress and syllable structure, but also quantity, syncope,
epenthesis, the domain of segmental rules, etc.
 
(b) Evidence from Metrics
The study of metrical systems also provides insight into issues like the
prosodic structure of complex words, loans, the way in which weight and
quantity are reflected in metrical structure, etc.
 
(c) Sources of Change: Analogy, Loans etc.
The main focus of the third subsection is on the source of change and
variation in prosodic systems, and addresses questions like the following.
What leads to variation and or change? What triggers change in a prosodic
system? Can language contact directly influence prosodic systems? What is
the role of analogy? Which paradigms resist analogical change more than
others? What is the role of morphology?
 
PAPERS are invited on any of the three topics above. Send a one-page
abstract (preferably by email) to:
 
Paula Fikkert
Fachgruppe Sprachwissenschaft, Universitaet Konstanz
Postfach D186
D-78457 Konstanz
Germany
email: Paula.Fikkert at uni-konstanz.de
 
DEADLINE for receipt of abstracts: AUGUST 15, 1998
 
Workshop Organisers:
Paula Fikkert
Haike Jacobs


From bwald at HUMnet.UCLA.EDU  Thu May 28 14:00:54 1998
From: bwald at HUMnet.UCLA.EDU (bwald)
Date: Thu, 28 May 1998 10:00:54 EDT
Subject: synchronic vs diachronic causes of language changes
Message-ID: <THU.28.MAY.1998.100054.EDT.BWALD@HUMNET.UCLA.EDU>

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
Ireena Lifshitc-Fufajeva makes a valid distinction between "how?" and
"why?" with respect to any particular linguistic change.  However, her
assumption that "why?" is answered by "need" leaves something to be
desired.  She writes with regard to the shift from fixed to movable stress
for certain Russian neuter nouns:
 
27 Russian nouns o-neutra total
>changed from 16 centure fixed stress to movable, some from
>them in literare Russian. I see in this fact an interesting
>example of language self-regulation under impact of mighty need
>of speakers in the short (grammar) expression of number.
 
No doubt this change is motivated by the *desire* to restore an audible
distinction between the singular and the plural of the nouns in question
(following a/o phonetic merger in unstressed positions, where -a is the
plural counterpart of -o as Russian suffixes) .  However, she spoils her
explanation with the parenthetical comment:
 
>(This category is almost universal as you know.)
 
Here she assigns languages which do not have plural as an obligatory
category to the realm of "unnatural" curiosities, an ethnocentric position
that few of "you" will accept.  The real explanation does not have to do
with "need" in such a universal sense.  It has to do with the grammatical
nature of Russian.  In Russian, number is an obligatory category for
(count) nouns.  Speakers feel a discomfort with losing the distinction for
what seem to them to be an arbitrary set of nouns (based on their form, not
their semantics).  Therefore, they act to restore the distinction and
regularise (or, as she says, "regulate") singular:plural marking when there
is no semantic motivation for suspending it.
 
If the restoration was based on "communicative" need (to dismiss the notion
of "universal need"), then it would not occur when a modifier is present
which unambiguously indicates the number of the noun, as in the case of
Uralic or Altaic (with a number, or, in Russian, when the modifier already
has movable stress).  But I doubt that this is the case for the Russian
innovation.  However, it is the case for the English "plurals" of "you".
It is not always clear pragmatically whether "you all/guys/etc" is
necessary to clarify that some single addressee is not being picked out of
a group, but it is clear that "you" indicating "one", as in "*you* can't
make a silk purse out of a sow's ear" is rhetorically closer to the
"plural" as a "generic" generalising to "everybody", than it is to a
specific single addressee.  And yet it is unheard of to say "*you guys*
can't make a silk purse..." to indicate "*one* cannot make a silk purse..."
("*you can't", in this sense, implies "nobody can", "you guys can't"
allows "somebody else can")
 
As I mentioned last time this subject came up, I am not convinced that "you
guys/etc" is a paradigmatic "plural" of "you" (and we don't have the same
option of suspending number marking for "we" and "they" that we do for
"you"), rather than an optional phrase, producing further specificity.
Similarly, I would expect someone whose language distinguishes an
inclusive/exclusive first plural to be either be amazed that IE languages
(among others) don't make it, or to analyse "me-and-you / you-and-I" as the
"inclusive 1p" in English.  I guess in the next stage we also get a "plural
inclusive" 1p, "me-and-you guys/all/etc", etc.  distinguished from the
"dual" 'me-and-you'.
 
NB.  Shocking as some of you more conservative speakers may find it
(despite your self-discipline as linguists), 'you-and-I' has indeed become
a unit for some American speakers.  They spontaneously say, "I wonder why
he didn't invite you and I" as well as the usual suspects, e.g.,  following
prepositions and in pivot contexts like: 'he wants you and I to come'. --
'me-and-you' as a unit is less of a problem, since the only innovation is
generalisation to subject contexts, but that also makes it less obvious
that it is indeed a pronominal unit rather than the result of loss of case
distinctions in favor of "me" as "unmarked" on the basis of its already
superior privileges of occurrence, as Sapir suggested in his comments on
'drift'.


From dnapoli1 at swarthmore.edu  Sat May 30 17:19:05 1998
From: dnapoli1 at swarthmore.edu (Donna Jo Napoli)
Date: Sat, 30 May 1998 13:19:05 EDT
Subject: JOBS
Message-ID: <SAT.30.MAY.1998.131905.EDT.DNAPOLI1@SWARTHMORE.EDU>

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
PLEASE POST (as of May 29, 1998) OR FORWARD TO ALL MEMBERS-- THANK YOU
 
Jobs for Linguists.
        Swarthmore College has applied for an NSF grant to set up a
Linguistics Forum.  We will hear on August 1, 1998, whether or not we get
the funding.  If we do, we will have positions for one Ph.D. in Linguistics
and two BAs or MAs in Linguistics starting in Sept., 1998, and running for
two years with the possibility of an extension depending on further funding.
        We are now accepting applications for these positions with the
understanding that funding is pending.
        The Linguistics Forum will be an on-line educational forum for
Kindergarten through 12th grade students and their teachers.  These people
will write in to our web site with questions about language.  The questions
will be posted on a bulletin board, where linguist volunteers will select
questions to answer.  The answers will come back to the Linguistics Forum
staff (physically located at Swarthmore College) and we will then make sure
that they are appropriate for the age child/ classroom they are intended
for.  All answers should be designed to lead the child to the answer if
possible, through reasoning and experimentation.  And all answers should be
designed so that the child can bring an activity back for sharing in his or
her classroom.  Any questions that volunteer linguists do not answer will
be answered by the Forum staff (the three people we will hire plus various
faculty at Swarthmore College).
        The staff of the Forum must have a solid foundation in linguistics
(we won't consider anyone without at least a BA in Linguistics proper).
But the staff must also have:
        1) clear communicative skills
        2) creativity and vision
        3) comfort dealing with the internet
        4) interest across the board in theoretical and applied linguistics
        5) comfort dealing with children
        6) high tolerance for frustration
        All three staff members we hire will be involved both with
answering questions and in designing the Forum.  Part of our job over the
first two years will be to define our niche and to communicate that clearly
to the public.  The potential of the Forum is huge, and we need staff that
can envision that potential and help realize it.
        The Ph.D. will teach one course at Swarthmore College each academic
year.  In the fall of 1998, that course will probably be Morphology.  In
the fall of 1999, that course will probably be Historical & Comparative
Linguistics.  For this reason, the person must be a generativist (because
that's the kind of department we have at Swarthmore).  However, the person
need not be a specialist in either morphology or historical work, but
simply have a firm grounding in it.  The person will have the option of
working for only the 9 academic months the first year, or for working 12
months with a 1 month vacation in the summer.  During the second year,
however, the person must work for 12 months with just 1 month vacation.
The first year academic salary will be $45,000.  The summer salary (should
the person decide to work in the summer) will be $10,000.
        One of the BAs will be our web master and should have experience in
system administration, programming, and the internet.  This person will
write and maintain software, connect us with existing web resources, inform
us of these resources, set up a holding tank for the questions that come
in, design the archives for our answers, and basically build the structure
of the Forum. Skills in Unix/Linux will be helpful.
        One of the BAs will be our jack-of-all-trades, responsible for
outreach to the public and desk-top publishing as well as administrative
duties.  This person will handle all printed materials, publicity,
schedules of meetings with teachers and organizations, and so on.
        While the above descriptions make the two BA positions sound quite
distinct, in fact, the separation and sharing of duties will depend on the
particular people we hire -- so please consider the above descriptions as
fluid.
        Both BAs will be on a 12-month contract, with one summer month
vacation, salary being between $25k and $30k depending on duties.
 
        If you want to apply, here's what you must do.
 
(1) There is a Math Forum analogous to the Linguistics Forum we are
proposing.  You must take the internet tour of the Math Forum:
        http://forum.swarthmore.edu/dr.math/office_help/
Once you have done that tour, answer these two questions:
        (a) What are the strengths and weakness of the Math Forum?
        (b) How would you design a Linguistics Forum?
Your answers can be detailed or not, but they should not be longer than 3
double-spaced pages each please.  Send us those answers as part of your
initial application.
 
2) Please send a c.v. that includes your e-mail address if you have one (we
will communicate with you only by e-mail if you have an e-mail address),
your educational history, a description of your computer and internet
experience, and a description of your experience with children K-12.
        If you are not yet up to speed on the internet, tell us whether or
not you are willing to get up to speed on it before August and how you plan
to do that.
 
3) Please have three letters of recommendation sent and send us the names
of these recommenders with their e-mail addresses.  At least one
recommendation should be from a linguistics professor.  At most one can be
from a child aged K-12 that you have taught or tutored.
 
4) If you have a Ph.D. in linguistics, send three papers on linguistics
that you have written which show the breadth of your interests in the field.
    If you have a BA or MA in linguistics, send one paper in any area of
linguistics.
 
Swarthmore is an Equal Opportunity Employer.  Women and Minorities are
encouraged to apply.  Primary or secondary teaching experience is a plus.
 
All materials must be sent in hard copy form by August 10, 1998 to the
Forum Director:
        Donna Jo Napoli
        Linguistics
        Swarthmore College
        Swarthmore, PA 19081
Do not send these materials by e-mail.  However, if you have questions and
absolutely need a response before you can apply, please address them by
e-mail to dnapoli1 at swarthmore.edu.
 
 
 
Donna Jo Napoli
Prof. and Chair
Linguistics
Swarthmore College
Swarthmore, PA 19081
USA
(610) 328-8422
(610) 328-6558 - home
fax (610) 328-7323
dnapoli1 at swarthmore.edu