Genetic Descent

[David L. White]

[ Moderator's note:
  The following quoted material is taken from a post by Larry Trask dated
  11 May 2001.
  -- rma ]

> Hmmm.  May I know where in their book T and K assert that "anything goes"?
> My reading of the book reveals only the more cautious claim that we cannot
> know what happens in language contact until we look.

        Somewhere in the intro.  Hasty perusal has not revealed where. Do
they say anything does not go?

>>         Taking all these things together, plus the fact that finite verbs
>> are ordinarily "higher in the tree" than NPs,

> OK; I'm afraid I don't understand this.

> I don't think it's *generally* true that syntactic theorists put verbs
> higher in trees than NPs.  Verb-at-the-top is more a feature of
> dependency-based approaches than of constituency-based approaches.  But
> some contemporary dependency theorists put verbs and all argument NPs at
> the same level in their trees.  Non-Chomskyan constituency theorists
> typically put subject NPs higher than verbs.  Chomskyans change their
> analysis regularly, but they typically put abstract elements highest in
> their trees, not verbs.

        I think the "verbal side" is right about subjects, but be that as it
may, many NPS are not subjects, and these are almost all "under" verbs.

>> I suggest that the genetic
>> descent of a language can always (theoretically) be traced through
>> finite verbal morphology, where this exists.

> This strikes me as a highly arbitrary proposal, though perhaps an
> interesting one.  But it does have the immediate consequence that a
> language with no verbal morphology has no ancestor -- unless the intention
> is to supplement this proposal with one or more unstated back-up proposals.

       The back-up proposal is to use basic vocabulary, in the traditional
manner.  And even "isolating" languages usually do habitually associate some
items with the verb.  In Vietnamese there is a word "se" meaning future, for
example.

>> This will never be mixed,

> Well, a bold claim.  I confess I can't falsify it off the top of my head.

        That's the idea.  My only source is TK, but the examples they give
do not falsify it either.

> But I wonder what a survey of, say, native American languages might turn up.

>> and its
>> affixes will always be found closer to lexical verbs than are foreign
>> affixes, if the examples I am aware of are a reliable guide.  Using this
>> standard, Mednyj Aleut is Russian, Michif is Cree, and Ma'a is Bantu.
>> Each is a rather bizarre and severely influenced version of its putative
>> genetic ancestor, but technically there is little reason to think that
>> what Thomason and Kaufmann call "normal transmission" of finite verbal
>> morphology has in fact been interrupted, for in each case it is there,
>> unmixed and un-intruded upon. To some extent it is a matter of what we
>> call things rather than what they are,

> OK.  Very interesting.  Let me draw attention to two examples.

> First, Anglo-Romani.  According to T and K, this consists of wholly Romani
> lexis plus wholly English grammar.  According to David White's proposal,
> then, Anglo-Romani is English, since it has English verbal morphology.  Is
> this a satisfactory conclusion so far?

    Yes.

> Now, consider how Anglo-Romani came into existence.  I assume it didn't
> spring into being overnight, but must have evolved gradually.  So there are
> broadly two possibilities.

> First, Anglo-Romani started off as plain English, but was gradually
> relexified from Romani until no English lexis was left.  According to
> David's proposal, this *must* be what happened, since the alternative below
> seems to be impossible.

        Yes.

> Second, Anglo-Romani started off as Romani, but it gradually borrowed more
> and more grammar from English, until there was no Romani grammar left.
> Under David's proposal, this appears to be impossible, since the language,
> in this scenario, has shifted from having Romani verbal morphology to
> having English verbal morphology -- seemingly in conflict with the proposal
> on the table, which sees verbal morphology as inviolate.  It also, of
> course, has the peculiar consequence that Anglo-Romani has changed from
> being Romani to being English -- an outcome surely more bizarre than
> anything contemplated in T and K.

        Yes, that is why I favor the first.

> Assuming overnight creation can be excluded, then, David's scenario forces
> us to conclude that the first interpretation *must* be right.  Well, this
> is an empirical question.

        Is it?

> My second case is the Austronesian language Takia.  As it is commonly
> described, Takia has borrowed the *entire* grammatical system from the
> Papuan language Waskia, so that every Takia sentence is now a
> morpheme-by-morpheme calque of the corresponding Waskia sentence -- while
> at the same time Takia has borrowed no morphemes at all from Waskia.

> So, in Takia, the *patterns* of the verbal morphology are Waskia, while the
> *morphemes* are Takia.  In David's scenario, then, which is decisive?  Is
> Takia Austronesian, because it exhibits only Austronesian morphemes?  Or is
> it Papuan, because it exhibits only Papuan morphological patterns?

> A pretty little puzzle, don't you think?

        It is Austronesian, and not much of a puzzle, except for TK, who
must try to figure out, without any very clear standard, whether it is 1)
Austronesian, 2) Papuan, or 3) a new "mixed" language.

>> but in any event I thought it
>> worthwhile to point out that the somewhat wild claims of Thomason and
>> Kaufmann are arguably exaggerated, as there are restrictions 1) that they
>> fail to note, and 2) that can at least possibly be used to determine
>> genetic descent, considerably reducing the incidence of "linguo-genesis"
>> and/or "mixed languages", perhaps to zero.

> Again, I don't see T and K as making any wild claims.  They seem to me to
> be doing no more than quoting Hamlet: "There are more things in heaven and
> earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."

           I have "dreamt" of many things, but _seen_ none of the wilder
ones that TKs "philosophy" would seem to permit.