25.5023, Review: Genetic Classification; Historical Ling; Socioling; Typology: Bickel, Grenoble, Peterson, Timberlake (2013)

Thu Dec 11 19:00:11 UTC 2014

LINGUIST List: Vol-25-5023. Thu Dec 11 2014. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 25.5023, Review: Genetic Classification; Historical Ling; Socioling; Typology: Bickel, Grenoble, Peterson, Timberlake (2013)

Moderators: Damir Cavar, Indiana U <damir at linguistlist.org>
            Malgorzata E. Cavar, Indiana U <gosia at linguistlist.org>

Reviews: reviews at linguistlist.org
Anthony Aristar <aristar at linguistlist.org>
Helen Aristar-Dry <hdry at linguistlist.org>
Sara Couture, Indiana U <sara at linguistlist.org>

Homepage: http://linguistlist.org

Do you want to donate to LINGUIST without spending an extra penny? Bookmark
the Amazon link for your country below; then use it whenever you buy from
Amazon!

USA: http://www.amazon.com/?_encoding=UTF8&tag=linguistlist-20
Britain: http://www.amazon.co.uk/?_encoding=UTF8&tag=linguistlist-21
Germany: http://www.amazon.de/?_encoding=UTF8&tag=linguistlistd-21
Japan: http://www.amazon.co.jp/?_encoding=UTF8&tag=linguistlist-22
Canada: http://www.amazon.ca/?_encoding=UTF8&tag=linguistlistc-20
France: http://www.amazon.fr/?_encoding=UTF8&tag=linguistlistf-21

For more information on the LINGUIST Amazon store please visit our
FAQ at http://linguistlist.org/amazon-faq.cfm.

Editor for this issue: Sara  Couture <sara at linguistlist.org>
================================================================

Visit LL's Multitree project for over 1000 trees dynamically generated
from scholarly hypotheses about language relationships:
          http://multitree.linguistlist.org/

Date: Thu, 11 Dec 2014 13:59:45
From: Dorothea Hoffmann [hoffmann.dorothea at gmail.com, dorohoffmann at yahoo.de]
Subject: Language Typology and Historical Contingency

E-mail this message to a friend:
http://linguistlist.org/issues/emailmessage/verification.cfm?iss=25-5023.html&submissionid=34512751&topicid=9&msgnumber=1

Discuss this message: 
http://linguistlist.org/pubs/reviews/get-review.cfm?subid=34512751

Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/25/25-67.html

EDITOR: Balthasar  Bickel
EDITOR: Lenore A.  Grenoble
EDITOR: David A.  Peterson
EDITOR: Alan  Timberlake
TITLE: Language Typology and Historical Contingency
SUBTITLE: In honor of Johanna Nichols
SERIES TITLE: Typological Studies in Language 104
PUBLISHER: John Benjamins
YEAR: 2013

REVIEWER: Dorothea Hoffmann, University of Chicago

Review's Editor: Anthony Aristar

SUMMARY

‘Language Typology and Historical Contingency’ is a comprehensive Festschrift
for Johanna Nichols and comprises of 22 chapters organized in three parts. 

The editors Balthasar Bickel, Lenore A. Grenoble, David A. Peterson, and Alan
Timberlake honor Johanna Nichols’ numerous contributions to the field of
linguistics in a short preface. They organize the contributions according to
Nichols’s interests. These range from issues in “pure structure” where papers
look at linguistic phenomena and interpret their typologies theoretically,
historical developments of modern distributions specific to language families
or areas or on a global level, methodological issues, and in-depth analyses of
individual languages.  Importantly, the volume brings together the significant
insight of Nichols’s that ‘linguistic typology and historical linguistics are
eventually the same enterprise, aiming at uncovering how languages came to be
the way they are’ (vii). At the same time, both are based on ‘attention to
details, a care for fieldwork and language documentation, precise analyses,
and philological knowledge’ (vii). The volume aims at and succeeds in bringing
these understandings together. 

Part I, ‘Structures and typologies’ consists of eight chapters. Andrej A.
Kibrik discusses ‘Discourse semantics and the form of the verb predicate in
Karachay-Balkar’, a language of the northern Caucasus. He proposes that the
choice of using finite and nonfinite verb forms to report narrative events is
motivated by discourse semantics. “The unmarked option in narrative sequences
is the use of finite verb forms. The major nonfinite alternative, the
consecutive converb, is used when the clause in question is connected to
discourse context by a causal-temporal relation, in contrast to plain temporal
relation” (41). Methodologically, the paper promotes a combination of
observational and experimental techniques to investigate lesser-studied
languages in fieldwork settings.

The following three chapters all build on Nichols’ influential 1986 paper on a
typological contrast between head marking and dependent marking languages
(Bickel and Nichols 2007; Nichols 1986; Nichols 1992). Dan Slobin in “Typology
and channel of communication: Where do signed languages fit in?” uses
Nichols’s typological distinction to argue for sign languages best being
“characterized as head marking and that this typological status is determined
by the manual/visual modality, with its iconic uses of space and movement,
along with face and gaze direction’ (49). Additionally, six dimensions of how
sign languages may be typologically analyzed are laid out, based on 1)
dependent vs head marking; 2) case marking, agreement, alignment; 3)
satellite- vs. verb-framing; 4) subject- vs. topic-prominence; 5) reference
tracking; and 6) simultaneous morphology. He comes to the conclusion that
“standard sign languages are head-marking, complex verb-framed, and
topic-prominent languages with polycomponential predicates distinguished by a
high degree of simultaneous morphology” (62).

The following chapter “Marking versus indexing: Revisiting the Nichols
marking-locus typology” by Nicholas Evans and Eva Fenwick supplements
Nichols’s distinction “with a further dimension, that of indexing” (69). The
difference between marking and indexing is that “’marking’ typologizes where
inflectional information goes, [and] ‘indexing’ typologizes what that
information is about” (69). The data comes from an opportunistic “onto-probe”
of 138 languages and the analysis ultimately shows that indexing and marking
need to be treated as separate dimensions in typologies of possessive
structures as well as NP modification structures in general. 

Robert D. Van Valin, Jr. explores “the various approaches that have been taken
in an attempt to capture the difference between head-marked and
dependent-marked syntax in different linguistic theories” (91) in his chapter
“Head-marking and linguistic theory”. He summarizes some generative approaches
before analyzing head-marked structure in Role and Reference Grammar. His
discussion is focused on “head-marked morphosyntax, independent of issues of
nonconfigurationality or polysynthesis” (94). He concludes that Role and
Reference Grammar is a valuable approach to show how the differences between
head-marked clause structure and dependent-marked clause structure can be
captured in a principled way. 

“Lessons of variability in clause coordination: Evidence from North Caucasian
languages” by Aleksandr E. Kibrik investigates syntactic constructions of
semantically coordinated clauses in 23 Daghestanian languages. His analysis is
based on a multifactorial mechanism of mapping cognitively adjacent events
which usually share participants. Comparing coordinating constructions creates
serious difficulties which Kibrik examines within a new framework of
“cognitively oriented typology” (127). He particularly emphasizes the
“importance of a typological approach to related languages” (149) and
concludes that “variation does not correlate with genetic and areal proximity”
(150). 

The following chapter “Noun classes grow on trees: Noun classification in the
North-East Caucasus” by Keith Plaster, Maria Polinsky and Boris Harizanov also
focuses on the Dagestanian language family by presenting and analyzing the
division of noun classes into classes in Tsez. The study uses a computational
approach to model the Tsez noun classification system. The authors conclude
that the system is “highly predictable with a simple semantic core and a set
of highly salient formal features that can be ranked with respect to one
another” (153). 

David A. Peterson examines the repertoire of valence-affecting constructions
in Khumi (Tibeto-Burman) in his chapter “Affecting valence in Khumi”. He also
considers possible historical sources for the prefixal and suffixal valence
markers. 

The last chapter of this part is by Sabine Stoll and Balthasar Bickel on
“Capturing diversity in language acquisition research”. The authors propose to
use a new strategy of sampling languages using ‘fuzzy clustering’ to be
applied to a typological database to maximize typological differences between
languages. The algorithm is applied to a number of typological variables, such
as case-marking, word order or inflectional classes. An advantage of this
approach is that “samples can be relatively small, but still capture diversity
and allow pairwise studies at specific contrasts” (208). 

Part II, ‘Distribution in time and space’ represents the largest thematic
piece of the volume and deals with historical and areal developments and
distributions of languages. It consists of thirteen chapters, the majority of
which are on phonological issues. 

Mark Donohue in “Who inherits what, when? Toward a theory of contact,
substrates, and superimposition zones” presents a case study of Australian
phonological systems within a typology that suggests that phonological
aberrancies “in the ‘core’ phonology are indicative of an older substrate,
while morphosyntactic aberrancies indicate superimposition” (219). The author
addresses “the question of the kind of structural features that can be
expected to be borrowed in different kinds of contact scenarios and which
contact scenarios are more likely to result in language shift” (220). 

In “Polysynthesis in the Arctic/Sub-Arctic: How recent is it?” Michael
Fortescue “presents a diagnostic for distinguishing older from newer forms of
polysynthesis” (241). It has been found “difficult to assess how much of the
morphological complexity of the language(s) involved is due to purely internal
developments and how much is due to areal or general contact influence from
neighboring families” (241). He concludes his chapter with a case-study in the
Amur-Sakhalin-Hokkaido region attempting to answer the question whether Ainu
and Nivkh can be linked to languages of North America. 

Jeff Good also looks at languages from a historical and areal perspective. His
chapter entitled “A (micro-)accretion zone in a remnant zone? Lower Fungom in
areal-historical perspective” “explores the multifaceted notion of an
accretion zone, examining how the linguistic situation of Lower Fungom allows
us to refine Nichols’s typology of linguistics areas and also suggests new
kinds of research questions for areal typology” (265). The chapter is based on
Nichols’s (1992) where she argues for the Caucasus as an accretion zone. Such
zones are characterized by “(i) high genealogical diversity; (ii) high
structural diversity; (iii) deep language families; (iv) no appreciable spread
of language families; (v) no clear center of innovation; (vi) language
accretion; and (vii) lack of a lingua franca” (271-272). By way of his
analysis, Good suggests to adopt a more comprehensive notion of ‘language
documentation’ beyond the collection of communicative events. 
Michael Cysouw in “A history of Iroquoian gender marking” proposes a history
of gender marking in North Iroquoian languages building on earlier work by
Chafe (1977). To account for the convergence that some aspects of the proposal
do not follow genetic or areal connections “independent parallel developments
are proposed” (283). The chapter particularly stresses the “importance of
paradigmatic structure for the historical reconstruction” (284). 

The following short chapter “The satem shift, Armenian ‘sisern’, and the early
Indo-European of the Balkans” by Bill J. Darden investigates three separate
phonetic changes for the satem languages, namely “the affrication of the
palate-velars, the delabialization of the labiovelars, and, for most of this
group, the change of *s to a back variant after r, u, k, i.” (299). He
concludes that the satem shift “must have taken place after the spread of
Indo-European into the Balkans, and it clearly encompassed some dialects in
that area” (306).

Larry M. Hyman in “Penultimate lengthening in Bantu: Analysis and spread”
addresses “the process of penultimate lengthening in Bantu” (309). He
concludes that “penultimate lengthening is widespread in Bantu but varied in
its distribution by utterance type” (322). 

In “culture and the spread of Slavic” Alan Timberlake discusses “the origin
and spread of Slavic for its own sake and in order to use the case of the
spread of Slavic to discuss general issues in demic and linguistic spread”
(331). He comes to the conclusion that “like the Slavic language, Slavic
culture was passed down from earlier times to later groups, although it could
be modified or, in the extreme case, disrupted” (353). 

The following chapter “The syntax and pragmatics of Tungusic revisited” by
Lenore A. Grenoble presents a follow-up investigation of Nichols’s (1979) CLS
paper on the syntax and pragmatics in the Tungusic languages. She does so by
considering changes in clause-combining structures in Evenki while undergoing
shift during contact with Russian. She compares data from monolingual (the
basis of Nichols’s study), bilingual, and Russian-dominant speakers whose
proficiencies can be correlated with different clause-combining strategies in
Evenki. This ultimately raises questions about “the processes of typological
restructuring versus language shift” (357). 

Michael Cysouw and Bernard Comrie in “Some observations on typological
features of hunter-gatherer languages” aim to “answer the question of whether
there are particular structural linguistic features, from among those included
in WALS (Dryer and Haspelmath 2011), that show an unexpected difference
between the feature-values for hunter-gatherer languages and those for
non-hunter-gatherer languages” (384). The authors identify a number of such
structural features of languages with regards to constituent order, phonology,
and lexicon, but stress that this analysis only represents the first stage of
this investigation. 

In “Typologizing phonetic precursors to sound change” Alan Yu discusses how
“the robustness of a phonetic precursor can be assessed [...] in terms of its
likelihood to create enough confusion for misperception-based sound change”
(395). He also “proposes a model of quantifying relative precursor robustness,
using a rational model of speech perception” (398).

Balthasar Bickel introduces the ‘Family Bias Method’ in “Distributional biases
in language families” to estimate “statistical biases in diachronic
developments on the basis of synchronic samples” (415). Based on Nichols
(2003) where she argues that “degrees of stability are not self-contained
indices of language change but the result of competing forces, such as
diachronic replication, borrowing, substratal effects, and universals” (416),
Bickel develops “methods for estimating the role of these forces on the basis
of statistical analyses of synchronic typological datasets” (416). A practical
consequence of his findings is that “because all estimates of inheritance and
external pressure, including any extrapolation to isolates, are based on
distributions in known families, typological databases need to sample families
as densely as possible” (442).

The next chapter “The morphology of imperatives in Lak: Stem vowel in the
second singular simplex transitive affirmative” by Victor A. Friedman is an
in-depth analysis of the Lak second singular affirmative transitive imperative
as the least normalized area of Lak grammar. It is suggested that any observed
differences “go back to the same sort of animacy and transitivity criteria
suggested by the system that survives in Dargi” (445). The paper includes
comprehensive appendices of a complete list of the second singular simplex
transitive affirmative formation for simplex verbs. 

The final chapter of this part II “Subgrouping in Tibeto-Burman: Can an
individual-identifying standard be developed? How can we factor in the history
of migrations and language contact?” by Randy J. LaPolla tries to determine
genetic relatedness among Sino-Tibetan languages based on Nichols (1996).
Results are discussed with reference to the migration patterns of the
Sino-Tibetan peoples. 

Methodological considerations are the focus of the volume’s last part III ‘A
(cautionary) note on methodology’ with only one chapter by William F. Weigel:
“Real data, contrived data, and the Yokuts Canon”. The paper discusses how the
interaction between linguistic fieldwork and philology and linguistic theory
has gone awry with the Yokuts languages serving as ‘testing grounds’ in
theoretical phonology. He urgently suggests that “there are some altogether
legitimate uses for contrived forms, but the uncritical way in which they are
used in much of the literature seriously undermines the validity and
credibility of theoretical argumentation” (479). 

EVALUATION

The Festschrift’s main aim is to argue strongly for a combined view of
typological and historical linguistics to discover where languages’ features
come from and how linguistic types distribute geographically. 

A group of distinguished scholars covers phonological, morphosyntactic,
pragmatic, language acquisition, methodological, and language contact
phenomena examining individual languages as well as areal and global
distributions. As such, this volume provides a highly valuable collection of
typological papers on the current state of typological research from a range
of perspectives. The papers address theoretical problems related to Johanna
Nichols’s research and also map future theoretical, methodological, and
empirical directions. 

Particularly enlightening in part I are the three chapters addressing issues
of Nichols’s influential typological distinction between head- and dependent
marking languages. Here, authors examine previously undescribed language
families such as sign languages (Slobin), suggest additional dimensions to the
typology to account for semantic information in inflectional paradigms (Evans
and Fenwick), and provide solutions for some long-standing problems by
offering theoretical analyses of the phenomenon on Role and Reference Grammar
(Van Valin). Combined the papers further advance the importance of Nichols’s
original research and strengthen its significance for typological linguistic
theory. 

In part II, I find those chapters particularly compelling that extend the
realm of typological research into other linguistic and non-linguistic fields.
Language contact and typology is a fascinating subject excellently discussed
by Donohue and Grenoble. Similarly, combining typological and anthropological
and cultural data has the potential to expose fascinating insight into the
interface of these domains (Cysouw and Comrie, Timberlake). 

In general, the comprehensive part II provides a highly valuable collection of
chapters for linguists working on under-described languages, and language
families aiming to make sense of areal, cultural and historical developments
and patterns. 

There is not much to be criticized in this book except that I believe it would
have benefited from an introductory chapter outlining the main areas of
Johanna Nichols’s work relevant for this collection and for the fields of
linguistic typology and historical linguistics in general. Furthermore, the
ordering of chapters could have been more clustered towards contextual
similarities to make it easier for a potential reader to find relevant
chapters. Finally, there were some minor inconsistencies in spelling and
naming conventions (e.g. ‘Dagestanian vs. Daghestanian’ languages) which could
have easily been eliminated. 

In sum, this edited volume is an excellent compilation of highly relevant
topics on linguistic typology and historical linguistics. As such it will
become a valuable resource and reference for linguists and anthropologists
from a range of theoretical and language backgrounds. 

REFERENCES

Bickel, Balthasar and Johanna Nichols. 2007. Inflectional morphology. Language
typology and syntactic description, ed. by T. Shopen, 169-240. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.

Chafe, Wallace L. 1977. The evolution of third person verb agreement in the
Iroquoian languages. Mechanisms of syntactic change, ed. by C.N. Li, 493-524.
Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.

Dryer, Matthew and Martin Haspelmath. 2011. The World Atlas of Language
Structures Online. Munich: Max Planck Digital Library.

Nichols, Johanna. 1979. Syntax and pragmatics in Manchu-Tungus languages.
Paper presented to the The Elements: A Parasession on Linguistic Units and
Levels Including Papers from the Conference on Non-Slavic Languages of the
USSR. Chicago: Chicago Linguistics Society, Chicago, IL, 1979.

------. 1986. Head-marking and dependent-marking grammar. Language 62.56-119.

------. 1992. Linguistic diversity in space and time Chicago, IL: University
of Chicago Press.

------. 1996. The comparative method as heuristic. The comparative method
revisited: Regularity and irregularity in language change, ed. by M. Durie and
M. Ross, 39-71. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

------. 2003. Diversity and Stability in Language. The handbook of historical
linguistics, ed. by R.D. Janda and B.D. Joseph, 283-310. London: Blackwell.

ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Dorothea Hoffmann received her PhD from the University of Manchester, UK in
2012. Her dissertation, within a functionalist-typological linguistic
approach, focused on structural and conceptual components of motion event
expressions, paying particular attention to discourse usage in two Australian
indigenous languages, namely Jaminjung, and Kriol. 

She is now a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Chicago on a language
documentation project of MalakMalak, an endangered language of the Daly River
Area in Australia, funded by the Endangered Language Documentation Program.
Her research interests include typology, language documentation, lexical
semantics, language contact, narrative structure, cognitive linguistics,
Australian Indigenous languages and culture, as well as discourse-based
studies of space and motion.

----------------------------------------------------------
LINGUIST List: Vol-25-5023	
----------------------------------------------------------
Visit LL's Multitree project for over 1000 trees dynamically generated
from scholarly hypotheses about language relationships:
          http://multitree.linguistlist.org/