<Language> Crowley: Book Review

[H. Mark Hubey]

<><><><><><><><><><><><>--This is the Language List--<><><><><><><><><><><><><>

This is not a book review. This is just a bunch of snippets from
Crowley's book. I will reply to this to add my comments, and that
will be the book review. In this post, if you see anything in
square brackets [...] it is probably my addition.

-------------------------Crowley--------------------------------

Crowley, T. (1992) An Introduction to Historical Linguistics, Oxford
University Press, NY.

p.37
The concept of lenition is not very well defined, and linguists who use
the term often seem to rely more on intuition or guesswork than on a
detailed understanding of what lenition means.

p. 48
..I will define the concept of phonetic similarity. Two sounds can be
described as being phonetically more similar to each other after a sound
change has taken place if those two sounds have more phonetic features
in common than they did before the change took place. If a sound change
results in an increase in the number of shared features, then we can say
that assimilation has taken place.

p. 73
A phonetic description of a language simply describes the physical facts
of the sounds of the language. A phonemic description, however,
describes not the physical facts, but the way these sounds are related
to each other for speakers of that language. It is possible for two
languages to have the same physical sounds, yet to have very different
phonemic systems. The phonemic description therefore tells us what are
the basic sound units for a particular language that enables its
speakers to differentiate meanings.

p.88
...you have to look for forms in the various related languages which
appear to be derived from a common original form. Two such forms are
cognate with each other, and both are reflexes of the same form in the
protolanguage [PL].

p.89
In deciding whether two forms are cognate or not, you need to consider
how similar they are both in form and meaning. If they are similar
enough that it could be assumed that they are derived from a single
original form with a single original meaning, then we say that they are
cognate.

p.93
Having set out all of the sound correspondences [SC or RegSC] that you
can find in the data, you can now move on to the third step, which is to
work out what original sound in the protolanguage might have produced
that particular range of sounds in the various
 daughter languages. Your basic assumption should be that each separate
set of sound correspondences goes back to a distinct original phoneme.
In reconstructing the shapes of these original phonemes, you should
always be guided by a number of general principles:

(i) Any reconstruction should involve sound changes that are plausible.
(You should be guided by the kinds of things that you learned in Chapter
2 in this respect.)

(ii) Any reconstruction should involve as few changes as possible
between the protolanguage and the daughter languages.

It is perhaps easiest to reconstruct back from those sound
correspondences in which the reflexes of the original phoneme (or
protophoneme) are identical in all daughter languages. By principle (ii)
you should normally assume that such correspondences go back to the same
protophoneme as you find in the daughter languages, and that there have
been no sound changes of any kind.

p.95
(iii) Reconstructions should fill gaps in phonological systems rather
than create unbalanced systems.

Although there will be exceptions among the world's languages, there is
a strong tendency for languages to have 'balanced' phonological systems.
By this I mean that there is a set of sounds distinguished by a
particular feature, this feature is also likely to be used to
distinguish a different series of sounds in the language. For example,
if a language has two back rounded vowels (i.e. /u/ and /o/), we would
expect it also to have two front unrounded vowels (i.e. /i/ and /e/).

p. 98

(iv) A phoneme should not be reconstructed in a protolanguage unless it
is shown to be absolutely necessary from the evidence of the daugher
languages.

p.109

..But what do our reconstructions actually represent? Do they represent
a real language as it was actually spoken at some earlier time, or do
our reconstructions only give an approximation of some earlier language?
....according to this point of view, a 'protolanguage' as it is
reconstructed is not a 'language' in the same sense as any of its
descendant languages, or as the 'real' protolanguage' itself. It is
merely an abstract statement of correspondences.
...Other linguists, while not going as far as this, have stated that,
while languages that are related through common descent are derived from
a single ancestor language, we should not necessarily assume that this
language really existed as such. The assumption of the comparative
method is that we should arrive at an entirely uniform protolanguage and
this is likely to give us a distorted or false view of the
protolanguage. In some cases, the comparative method may even allow us
to reconstruct a protolanguage that never existed historically.

p.110
..One frequently employed device in these sorts of situations is to
distinguish the protophoneme by which two phonetically similar
correspondence sets are derived by using the lower and upper case forms
of the same symbol....Another option in these kinds of situations is to
use subscript or superscript numerals e.g. /*l1/ and /*l2).


p. 119 			[Internal Reconstruction chap. 6]

There is a second method of reconstruction that is known as internal
reconstruction which allows you to make guesses about the history of a
language as well.

p.123
...you would normally consider using internal method only in the
following circumstances:

(a) Sometimes, the language you are investigating might be a linguistic
isolate i.e. it may not be related to any other language (and is
therefore in a family of its own). In such a case, there is no
possibility of applying the comparative method as there is nothing to
compare this language with. Internal reconstruction is therefore the
only possibility that is available.


(b) A very similar situation to this would be the one in which the
language you are studying is so distantly related to its sister
languages that the comparative method is unable to reveal very much its
history. This would be because there are so few cognate words between
the language you are working on and its sister languages that it would
be difficult to set out the systematic sound correspondences.

(c) You may want to to know something about changes that have taken
place between a reconstructed protolanguage [RPL] and its descendant
languages.

(d) Finally, you may want to try to reconstruct further back still from
a protolanguage that you have arrived at by means of the comparative
method. The earliest language from which a number of languages is
derived is, of course, itself a linguistic isolate in the sense that we
are unable to show that any other languages are descended from it. There
is no reason  why you cannot apply the internal method of reconstruction
to a protolanguage, just as you could with any linguistic isolate, if
you wanted to go back still further back in time.

...this method can only be sued when a a sound change ahs resulted in
some kind of morphological alternation in a language. Morphological
alternations [MA] that arise as a result of sound changes always involve
conditioned sound changes [CSC]. If an unconditioned sound change [USCh]
has taken place in a language, there will be no synchronic residue of
the original situation in the form of morpological alternations, so the
internal method will be completely unable to produce any results in
these kinds of situations.

[more on intermediate changes leading to false reconstructions..]

p. 129 		[Grammatical, Semantic, and Lexical Change, chap. 7]

The number of individual phonemes of a language ranges from around a
dozen or so in some languages, to 140 or so at the very most in other
languages.

p.132
There is a tendency for languages to change typologically according to a
kind of cycle. Isolating languages tend to move towards agglutinating
structures. Agglutinating languages tend to move towards the
inflectional type, and finally, inflecting languages tend to become less
inflectional over time and more isolating. ..[diagram]..
Isolating languages become agglutinating in structure by a process of
phonological reduction. By this I mean that free form grammatical
markers may become phonologically reduced to unstressed bound form
markers (i.e. suffixes or prefixes).
p.134
...languages which are agglutinating type tend to change towards
inflectional type. By the process of morphological fusion, two
originally clearly divisible morphemes in a word may change in such a
way that the boundary is no longer clearly recognizable.
[defn of portmanteu morphemes].
p.135
Finally, languages of the inflectional type tend to the isolating type;
this process is called morphological reduction. It is very common for
inflectional morphemes to become more and more reduced, until sometimes
they disappear altogether. The forms that are left, after the complete
disappearance of inflectional morphemes, consist of single phonemes.

p.136
There is, in fact, a fourth type of language: those having polysynthetic
morphology. Such languages represent extreme forms of agglutinating
languages in which single word correspond to what in other kinds of
languages are expressed as whole clauses. Thus a single word may include
nominal subjects and objects, and possibly also adverbial information,
and even non-core nominal arguments in the clause such as direct objects
and spatial noun phrases.

p. 137
Polysynthetic languages can develop out of more analytic (i.e.
nonpolysynthetic) languages by a process of argument incorporation.

p. 144
Words in languages can be grouped into two basic categories: lexical
words, and grammatical words. Lexical words are those which have
definable meanings of their own when they appear independently of any
linguistic context: elephant, trumpet, large. Grammatical words, on the
other hand, only have meanings when they occur in the company of other
words, and they relate those other words together to form a grammatical
sentence. Such words in English include the, these, on, my. Grammatical
words constitute the mortar in a wall, while lexical words are more like
bricks.

p.145
The change from lexical word to grammatical word is only the first step
in the process of grammaticalization, with the next step being
morphologisation i.e. the development of a bound form out of what was
originally a free form.

In fact, morphologisation can involve degrees of bonding between bound
forms and other forms as it is possible to distinguish between clitics
and affixes. A clitic is a bound form which is analysed as being
attached to a whole phrase than to just a single word. An affix,
however, is attached as either a prefix or a suffix directly to a word.

p.168 			[Subgrouping  chapter 8]

Similarities between languages can be explained as being due either
shared retention from a protolanguage, or shared innovations since the
time of the protolanguage. If two languages are similar they share some
feature that has been retained from a protolanguage, you cannot use this
similarity as evidence that they have gone through a period of common
descent. The retention of a particular feature in this way is not
significant, because you should expect a large number of features to be
retained this way.

However, if two languages are similar because they have both undergone
the same innovation or change, then you can say that this is evidence
that they have had a period of common descent and that they therefore do
belong to the same subgroup. You can say that a shared innovation in two
languages is evidence that those two languages belong in the same
subgroup, because exactly the same change is unlikely to take place
independently in two separate languages. By suggesting that the
languages have undergone a period of common descent, you are saying that
the particular change took place only once between the higher level
protolanguage and the intermediate protolanguage which is between this
and the various modern languages that belong in the subgroup. [problem
of multiple scales!]

p.168
While it is shared innovations that we use as evidence for establishing
subgroups, certain kinds of innovations are likely to be stronger
evidence for subgrouping than other kinds. ...subgrouping rests on the
assumption that shared similarities are unlikely to be due to chance.
However some kinds of similarities between languages are in fact due to
chance, i.e. the same changes do sometimes take place quite
independently in different languages. This kind of situation is often
referred to as parallel development or drift.
...
In classifying languages into subgroups, you therefore need to avoid the
possibility that innovations in two languages might be due to drift or
parallel development. YOu an do this by looking for the following in
linguistic changes:

(i) Changes that are particularly unusual.
(ii) Sets of several phonological changes, especially unusual changes
which would not ordinarily be expected to have taken place together.
(iii) Phonological changes which correspond to unconnected grammatical
or semantic changes.
...
If two languages share common sporadic or irregular phonological change,
this provides even better evidence for subgrouping those two languages
together as the same irregular change is unlikely to take place twice
independently.

p. 171    		[Lexicostatistics and Glottochronology]

Lexicostatistics is a technique that allows us to determine the degree
of relationship between two languages, simply by comparing the
vocabularies of the languages and determining the degree of similarity
between them. This method operates under two basic assumptions. The
first of these is that there are some parts of the vocabulary of
language that are much less subject lexical change than other parts,
i.e. there are certain parts of the lexicon in which words are less
likely to be completely replaced by non-cognate forms. The area of the
lexicon that is assumed to be more resistant to lexical change is
referred to as core vocabulary (or a basic vocabulary).

There is a second aspect to this first general assumption underlying the
lexicostatistical method, and that is the fact that this core of
relatively change-resistant vocabulary is the same for all languages.
The universal core vocabulary includes items such as pronouns, numerals,
body parts, geographical features, basic actions, and basic states.
Items like these are unlikely to be replaced by words copied from other
langauges, because all people, whatever their cultural differences, have
eyes, mouths, and legs, and know about the sky and clouds, the sun, and
the moon, stones, and trees and so on. Other concepts however may be
culture-specific.
...
The second assumption that underlies the lexicostatistical method is
that the actual rate of lexical replacement in the core vocabulary is
more or less stable, and is therefore aboutg the same for all languages
over time. In peripheral vocabulary of course, the rate of lexical
replacement is not stable at all, and may be relatively fast or slow
depending on the nature of cultural contact between speakers of
different languages. This second assumption has been tested in 13
languages for which there are written records going back over long
periods of time. It has been found that there has been an average
vocabulary retention of 80.5 percent every 1,000 years.

p.173   		[basic or core vocabulary]
The most popular list of this length is known as the Swadesh list, which
is named after the linguist Morris Swadesh who drew it up in the early
1960s.

p.181
Once the percentage of cognate forms has been worked out, we can use the
following mathematical formula to work out the time depth, or the period
of separation of two languages;

		t = log C/(2*logR)

In the formula above, t stands for the number of thousands of years that
two languages have been separated, C stands for the percentage of
cognates as worked out by comparing basic vocabularies, and R stands for
the constant change factor mentioned earlier (the value in this formula
is set at 0.85).

p.183
Firstly, there is the problem of deciding which words should be regarded
as core vocabulary and which should not. Obviously, it may be possible
for different sets of vocabulary to produce differing results.

Another difficulty involves the actual counting of forms that are
cognate against those that are not cognate in basic vocabulary lists
from two different languages.
...
Lexicostatisticians in fact rely heavily on what is often
euphemistically called the inspection method of determining whether two
forms are cognate or not in a pair of languages. What this amounts to is
that you are more or less free to apply intelligent guesswork as to
whether you think two forms are cognate or not.
...
Of course, two different linguists can take the same lists from two
different languages
, and since there is no objective way of determining what should be
ticked 'yes' and what should be ticked 'no', it is possible that both
will come up with significantly different cognate figures at the end of
the exercise.
[p. 186 example of languages of Milne Bay area of Papua New Guinea]
[minimal spanning tree can be drawn from these figures]

p. 201		[causes of language change ]

One famous linguist Otto Jesperson made a great deal of the importance
of simplity as a factor in bringing about sound change:
	I am not afraid of hearing  the objection that I ascribe too great a
power to
	human laxness, indolence, inertia, shirking, easy-goingness,
sluggishness, or
	whatever other beautiful synonyms have been invented for 'economy of
	effort' or 'following the line of least resistance'. The fact remains
that there is
	such a tendency in all human beings, and by taking it into account in
explaining
	changes of sound, we are doing nothing else than applying here the
same 	principle.

Despite the obvious appeal of this argument as a major factor in
explaining language change, there are also several problems associated
with it. The first is that it is extremely difficult, perhaps even
impossible, to define explicitly what we mean by 'simplicity' in
language. Simplicity is clearly a relative term.

p. 212		[observing language change, chapter 10]

The concept of linguistic indeterminacy also relates to the idea of the
linguistic system as used by Saussure. He argued that in describing a
language (i.e. phonemes, morphemes, words, phrases, clauses, and so on)
and describing the ways in which these units interrelate (i.e. the
grammatical rules for putting them together for making up larger units).
In talking about describing the system of a particular language,
Saussure is implying that for every language, there is one -- and only
one -- linguistic system.

p. 215
One of the most influential linguists of the past few decades, Noam
Chomsky, expresses this view when he said that a grammar should describe
an 'ideal speaker-hearer relationship', and it should ignore factors
from outside the language itself (such as formality of a social
situation). But language is not an ideal system at all.

p. 227			[problems with traditional assumptions, chap. 11]

Jones emphasized that it was similarities in the structure of the
Indo-European languages, rather than it was similarities between words,
that were important in determining language relationships. This
observation led to a new intellectual climate in the study of language
relationships, as scholars started looking instead for grammatical
similarities between languages to determine whether or not they should
be considered to be related. Lexical similarities, it was argued, were
poor evidence of genetic relationship, as similarities between
practically any word in any two languages can be established with enough
effort.

p. 232
In reconstructing the history of languages, you therefore need to make
the important distinction between a systematic (or a regular)
correspondence and an isolated (or sporadic) correspondence. This is a
distinction that I did not make in Chapter 5 when I was talking about
the comparative method, but it is very important.

p. 256			[Language Contact, chapter 12]

The influence of one of the linguistic systems of an individual on the
other linguistic system of that individual is referred to in general as
interference.

Interference can occur in the phonological system of a language, in its
semantics, or in its grammar. Phonological interference simply means the
carrying over of the phonological features of one language into the
other as an accent of some kind.
...
p. 257
Semantic interference can also be referred to as semantic copying, as
loan translation, or as calquing. A calque (or a semantic copy or a loan
translation) is when we do not copy a lexical item as such from one
language into another, but when just the meanings are transferred from
one language to the other, while at teh same time we use the
corresponding forms of the original language.

p. 260
There is a significant body of literature on the subject of linguistic
diffusion and convergence, which is based on the assumption that
languages can and do influence one another. The term diffusion is used
to refer to the spread of a particular linguistic feature from one
language to another (or, indeed to several other languages).

p.262
The diffusion of grammatical features in this way has caused some
linguists to question further the validity and basic assumptions of the
whole comparative method. Some languages appear to have undergone so
much diffusion in the lexicon and the grammar that it can be difficult
to decide which protolanguage they are derived from. According to the
comparative method as I have described it in this volume, it is possible
for a language to be derived from only a single protolanguage, yet some
linguists have found it necessary to speak of mixed languages, which
seem to derive from two different protolanguages at once.

p.270
Many linguists have been struck by the fact that pidgin and creole
languages often show strong parallels in their structure with their
substrate languages than their superstrate languages.

p.312		[cultural reconstruction, chapter 13]

While many attempts at paleolinguistic comparisons fall far short of
scientific respectability, the writings of Johanna Nichols since the
mid-1980s have attracted considerable interest among some linguists, as
well as archaeologists and others interested in establishing
relationships at much greater-time depths than is possible using the
comparative method.

Nichols' approach is more akin to population science in that she does
not aim to study the evolution of individual languages, or even closely
related groups of languages. Rather she aims to study the history of
'populations' of languages. By this, she means that she considers large
groupings of languages together, dealing not with particular features
of individual languages, but broader general features of language
groupings. Thus, she considers for example, the languages of Australia
or Africa as a whole. She pays attention not to whether structural
features are present or absent, but to what are the statistical
frequencies and distributions of features are within these larger
populations of languages.

Such linguistic markers are considered to be akin to biological markers
in that they can be used to identify affinities between populations at
considerable time-depths. She argues that if, in the languages of a
continent (or some other large geographical area) a feature shows up
with a high frequency, this distribution is not something that is due to
recent diffusion. When several markers of this type are shared, this is
taken as being indicative of historical affinity. Of course, such
features must be known to be typologically unrelated.
...
The actual application and interpretation of Nichols' method is complex
and it is unlikely to become the standard model by which individual
historical linguists will attempt to study linguistic relationships.

--
Best Regards,
Mark
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