27.675, Review: Historical Ling; Syntax: Lavidas, Kulikov (2015)
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Subject: 27.675, Review: Historical Ling; Syntax: Lavidas, Kulikov (2015)
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Date: Thu, 04 Feb 2016 13:30:21
From: Geoffrey Sampson [sampson at cantab.net]
Subject: Proto-Indo-European Syntax and its Development
Discuss this message:
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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/26/26-3600.html
EDITOR: Leonid Kulikov
EDITOR: Nikolaos Lavidas
TITLE: Proto-Indo-European Syntax and its Development
SERIES TITLE: Benjamins Current Topics 75
PUBLISHER: John Benjamins
YEAR: 2015
REVIEWER: Geoffrey Sampson, University of South Africa
Reviews Editor: Helen Aristar-Dry
SUMMARY
In reconstructing the ancestral Proto-Indo-European (PIE) language from the
data provided by descendant languages of the historical period, reasonable
progress was made at an early date with respect to phonological and
morphological structure. Reconstructing PIE syntax is a harder problem, and
some have argued that the evidence is so inadequate that the attempt is not
worth making. But there have always been other scholars who believed that
something might be achieved in this area. Eduard Hermann in the 1890s
famously argued that PIE probably lacked clause subordination (Hermann 1895).
Recently there has been a small-scale blossoming of interest in the topic.
The book under review comprises six papers originally delivered at a workshop
on “PIE Syntax and its Development”, held at Thessalonica in 2011. (The same
material was first published as a special issue of the ‘Journal of Historical
Linguistics’ in 2013.) Of the thirteen authors and co-authors, the
overwhelming majority are European, five working in Italy; the only exceptions
are Hans Hock and Bernhard Koller, both of whom are based in the USA (though
European by origin).
As a conference proceedings, the volume obviously does not pretend to be a
comprehensive survey of what is currently known or surmised about the overall
syntactic structure of PIE. It assembles a collection of specialized studies
on which the authors happen to have been engaged recently. (Some chapters
seem to be summaries, for conference purposes, of material that has been
published in fuller detail elsewhere.) Nevertheless, the book probably does
offer readers a reasonable impression of the current state of play in this
area generally.
The authors and topics of the six chapters (which are not numbered) are as
follows.
Paola Cotticelli Kurras and Alfredo Rizza discuss the possible origins of what
is known (for instance in Ancient Greek) as “middle” voice, with particular
reference to the Hittite language, a member of the extinct Anatolian subfamily
of Indo-European.
Ioannis Fykias and Christina Katsikadeli use Classical and Pre-Classical Greek
data to investigate the emergence of a system of complementizers, such as
Greek ‘hoti’.
Hans Heinrich Hock argues for the traditional view that PIE was an SOV
language, against a number of recent dissenting voices.
Bernhard Koller examines syntactic structures in Hittite which look like
“serial verb” constructions, normal enough in various non-Indo-European
languages but exceptional for Indo-European, where clauses are normally
restricted to containing a single finite verb. Koller argues for a syntactic
analysis of Hittite which makes it a more “ordinary” Indo-European language in
this respect.
Leonid Kulikov and Nikolaos Lavridas examine the origins and development of
grammatical devices for expressing passive meaning in various Indo-European
subfamilies. They argue that the subfamilies can be divided into two groups
in terms of how later voice systems evolved out of the material available in
PIE, and that these are geographically coherent, comprising a Western and an
Eastern group (with the implication that the divergence occurred early).
Giuseppe Longobardi and four co-authors describe a series of experiments
intended to demonstrate that syntactic data are more valuable than lexical
data as input to statistical software for inferring the shape of the family
tree of a language-family. This chapter is an odd one out, since it does not
aim to shed light on PIE grammar, but to use what we know about grammar in
recorded Indo-European languages in order to shed light on linguistic
phylogeny.
Naturally, the authors of the chapters before the last, who do aim to make
inferences about aspects of PIE grammar, do not give us clear cut, definitive
descriptions, such as one might hope to find in a grammatical description of a
present-day language. Rather, they show us PIE grammar “as through a glass,
darkly”. We get hints of how things may have been – which is as much as we
can expect from scholarship as it stands today, and probably as much as can
ever be hoped for.
EVALUATION
With a book of this kind, comprising many independent contributions, it is not
possible to assess each chapter separately – it would take too much space.
What I can do is comment on what the book reveals about the general
assumptions held by current researchers. It happens that I had close contacts
with leading Indo-Europeanists for a while in the 1960s, and almost none
since. I was quite surprised by some aspects of how the mood of the subject
seems to have changed.
In particular, many of these authors seem to show remarkable respect for
alleged theoretical findings by linguists of the generative school. For
instance, to linguists in general probably the most interesting issue raised
in the book is the idea originally put forward by Eduard Hermann (as mentioned
above) that PIE might have lacked subordinate clauses. Apart from its
intrinsic significance, this idea has immediate repercussions for current
discussion of recursion as a universal (perhaps the only universal) of human
language, and controversy about Daniel Everett’s description of a South
American language as lacking recursion (see e.g. Nevins et al. 2009 against
Everett 2005). Surely, then, it would be worth looking hard to check whether
available data offer serious support (or the reverse) for Hermann’s idea. Yet
for Fykias and Katsikadeli the question is settled in advance. They write:
“... it cannot be seriously maintained that earlier stages of certain
languages may have lacked subordination altogether, since this would be
tantamount to rejecting the idea that all languages at all times reflect the
same basic U[niversal ]G[rammar].”
For these scholars, apparently, the idea that different languages are no more
than alternative conventions for giving audible expression to the same
genetically-fixed range of logical or semantic content is so solidly
established that it can be used to constrain what hypotheses about PIE
structure may be entertained.
Yet for many linguists “Universal Grammar” is no more than a speculative
possibility, and not one for which much hard evidence has ever yet been
provided. To the present reviewer it seems a thoroughly misguided idea
(Sampson and Babarczy 2014, Sampson 2016). But even generative theorists
hardly appear to treat it as a well-established finding. Steven Pinker, the
leading popularizer of Chomskyan ideas about genetic determination of language
structure, has written that “U[niversal ]G[rammar] has been poorly defended
and documented in the linguistics literature” (Pinker 1998) – seventeen years
later that remains true, so far as I can see. I am not aware of any
publication which claims to specify Universal Grammar in detail (whereas
plenty of linguists have urged that the languages of the world share few or no
common structural properties – see e.g. Evans and Levinson 2009). If we can
find data bearing one way or the other on the validity of Hermann’s idea about
PIE, that might help to support or to refute the hypothesis of Universal
Grammar, but it is hard to accept that Universal Grammar can rank as an axiom
which refutes Hermann.
Furthermore, when Fykias and Katsikadeli discuss empirical language data,
what they say seems to offer mild support for Hermann’s idea, rather than the
reverse. They acknowledge the longstanding belief that the earliest recorded
languages showed traces of a shift from parataxis to hypotaxis, and they
discuss sympathetically a suggestion by Paul Kiparsky (1995) that finite
subordinate clauses in PIE were “syntactically adjoined to the M[ain
]C[lause]” rather than “syntactically embedded”; they offer evidence from
early Greek to support Kiparsky. I do not understand what it could mean to
call a sequence a “subordinate clause”, if it is not embedded as a grammatical
constituent of a higher clause. It is easy to imagine a language in which the
content of a complex English sentence such as “I met a man who was angry” had
to be expressed by successive main clauses, say as “I met a man; he was
angry”. But that would not be a language in which relative clauses lack
explicit subordinate-clause marking. It would be a language without relative
clauses.
Hans Hock’s chapter here offers evidence from Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin which
suggests that relative clauses might have developed out of just such
structures, because early “relative clauses” were conjoined main clauses
rather than subordinate clauses (though they were marked as relatives by
containing relative pronouns). In the case of complement clauses (that is,
subordinate clauses which function as nominal constituents within their higher
clause, whereas relative clauses function adjectivally), Guy Deutscher (2000)
has shown that the early records of Akkadian display this type of
subordination developing, perhaps as a response to new communicative needs,
out of an earlier language-state lacking any mechanism for expressing it. If
we can watch this development happening in Akkadian, why should a parallel
development not have occurred in Indo-European? (For a book which posed such
a fundamental challenge to fashionable theories about Universal Grammar,
Deutscher’s book has been shockingly neglected by the discipline, receiving
few reviews and rarely if ever cited in subsequent research literature.)
Hermann’s idea about PIE syntax seems to remain quite plausible in the light
of current research (though no-one, I imagine, would claim that its truth has
been definitely established).
I have discussed Fykias and Katsikadeli’s inappropriate appeal to a
speculative generativist theory at length, because the specific issue in
question has such broad relevance for linguists. But Fykias and Katsikadeli
are far from the only authors here who place surprising weight on generative
theories that are hardly robust enough to bear that weight. What is
especially surprising about that, apart from the intrinsic implausibility of
these theories, is that it seems to rob the language-reconstruction enterprise
of its motivation. For most of us who devote ourselves to the life of
scholarship, surely, what drives us on is a belief that we are making some
admittedly puny contribution to a body of knowledge with broader significance.
We are trying to add a brick or two to an edifice of understanding of human
nature, or of the world we inhabit, or the like. But if Indo-Europeanists are
convinced about Universal Grammar, then even if they succeed rather fully in
reconstructing PIE, what have they got? – just one more case of the same kind
of language which can be studied much more easily via the many examples spoken
today. How could that repay the massive effort involved? I do not understand
this.
The final chapter of this book does need to be assessed separately; we have
seen that it is different in kind from the others. It addresses the task of
inferring linguistic family-tree shapes via techniques of statistical
computation, of a type best known to the discipline through the work of Don
Ringe and his collaborators (e.g. Nakhleh et al. 2005). Longobardi et al.’s
special twist is a claim that, ever since August Schleicher, linguists who
have tried to establish family trees have relied too heavily on the evidence
of vocabulary (which is readily borrowed between languages), and that syntax
offers a more valuable source of data.
One problem I find is that this alternative is not exclusive. As well as
vocabulary, historical linguists have surely made heavy use of phonology
(sound-changes) in this connexion. And although they may not have used
specifically syntactic aspects of grammar to any great extent, they certainly
have used morphology.
Be that as it may, it is clearly reasonable for Longobardi et al. to try
whether feeding syntactic properties of recorded Indo-European languages into
the tree-building software gives good results. Again, these authors expect
this approach to be specially fruitful because the syntactic properties they
use are drawn from a list of parameters defined by a putative Universal
Grammar, whereas by implication the language features relied on by earlier
researchers were unrelated to Universal Grammar and hence were less reliable
indicators. (Unfortunately, Longobardi et al. identify the features used in
their experiments only by brief phrases which are sometimes cryptic, or
puzzling even if they seem clear. They mark modern English as positive for
“gramm. gender”. In what sense does English have grammatical gender? Does
the ‘he/she’ opposition justify that categorization – and, if so, is that
specifically a syntactic rather than morphological feature?)
These latter issues aside, the proof of the pudding lies presumably in the
eating. Applied to a set of 26 present-day Indo-European languages, the
statistical software does succeed in producing tree structures which agree
reasonably well with the accepted groupings into subfamilies. I am not sure,
though, that Longobardi et al.’s results using syntactic data are _better_
than those of earlier researchers who used other language properties.
Longobardi et al. apply several alternative algorithm variants, and it appears
that without exception these all yield trees which link the Celtic languages
in the sample most closely with the Germanic languages, and place the former
very far away from the Romance languages. Ever since Schleicher it has widely
been believed that the Italic and Celtic branches form a closely-related
subgroup within the Indo-European family, and that the Germanic subgroup is
only distantly related to it. Schleicher believed that the ancestors of the
Italo-Celtic and Germanic subgroups were separated by the very earliest
splitting of the ancestral language-stock. (Nowadays it is thought that the
first groups to split off were Anatolian and Tocharian, whose membership of
the Indo-European family was unknown to Schleicher.)
The traditional Italo-Celtic grouping might be mistaken, of course, but
Longobardi et al. offer no serious reason to believe it is mistaken. And
Ringe’s use of these algorithms, based on non-syntactic data, seems to yield
results for Indo-European which match traditional views better – in Ringe’s
results, Italic and Celtic do form a subgroup. So the claim that family trees
are most reliably established using syntactic data is at best not proven.
The book is well produced, with a low incidence of misprints (inevitably there
are a few). I was startled to see that the publisher had paid for colour
printing in a graph on p. 142, yet the text never explains what the colours
stand for.
It is perhaps regrettable that the various authors make little attempt to
clarify obscure technical terms, some of which I suspect might be unfamiliar
even to fellow Indo-Europeanists who do not specialize in the same ancient
language or the same brand of linguistic theory as the author who uses them.
A few pieces of terminology which I did not understand were: “dative
_commodi_”, p. 13; “written heterographically”, p. 64; “string-vacuous”, p.
97; “Anti-Babelic principle”, p. 126. Many readers will find some of these
terms perfectly familiar, but I wonder how many will be familiar with all of
them.
I found it irritating that the index includes no proper names. In my
experience, the quickest way to locate an elusive passage in a book will often
be via the thought “that’s the place where Smith & Jones (2010) are cited”.
REFERENCES
Deutscher, Guy. 2000. Syntactic Change in Akkadian. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Evans, Nicholas and Stephen C. Levinson. 2009. The myth of language
universals. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 32.429–92.
Everett, Daniel L. 2005. Cultural constraints on grammar and cognition in
Pirahã. Current Anthropology 46.621–46.
Hermann, Eduard. 1895. Gab es im Indogermanischen nebensätze? Zeitschrift
für vergleichende Sprachforschung, new series 13.481–535.
Kiparsky, Paul. 1995. The Indo-European origins of Germanic syntax. In
Adrian Battye and Ian Roberts, eds, Clause Structure and Language Change, pp.
140–70. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Nakhleh, Luay, Don Ringe, and Tandy Warnow. 2005. Perfect phylogenetic
networks. Language 81.382–420.
Nevins, Andrew, David Pesetsky, and Cilene Rodrigues. 2009. Pirahã
exceptionality: a reassessment. Language 85.355–404.
Pinker, Steven. 1998. Posting 9.1209 on the LINGUIST List. <
linguistlist.org/issues/9/9-1209.html >.
Sampson, Geoffrey. 2016. Rigid strings and flaky snowflakes. To be in
Language and Cognition; available online at < www.grsampson.net/ARsy.pdf >.
Sampson, Geoffrey and Anna Babarczy. 2014. Grammar Without Grammaticality.
Berlin: de Gruyter.
ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Geoffrey Sampson graduated in Oriental Studies at Cambridge University in
1965, and studied Linguistics and Computer Science as a graduate student at
Yale University before teaching at the universities of Oxford, LSE, Lancaster,
Leeds, and Sussex. Since retiring from his Computing chair at Sussex he has
been a research fellow in Linguistics at the University of South Africa.
Sampson has published in most areas of Linguistics and on a number of other
subjects. His most recent book is a new edition of ''Writing Systems''
(Equinox, 2015).
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