27.762, Review: Historical Ling; Ling Theories; Morphology; Typology: Vykypěl (2015)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-27-762. Tue Feb 09 2016. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 27.762, Review: Historical Ling; Ling Theories; Morphology; Typology: Vykypěl (2015)

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Date: Tue, 09 Feb 2016 16:45:21
From: Eleonora Sausa [eleonorasausa at gmail.com]
Subject: Problems of Historical Linguistics

 
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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/26/26-1266.html

AUTHOR: Bohumil  Vykypěl
TITLE: Problems of Historical Linguistics
SERIES TITLE: LINCOM Studies in Theoretical Linguistics 54
PUBLISHER: Lincom GmbH
YEAR: 2015

REVIEWER: Eleonora Sausa, Università degli Studi di Pavia

Reviews Editor: Helen Aristar-Dry

SUMMARY

The volume ‘Problems of Historical Linguistics’ by Bohumil Vykypěl is a
collection of fourteen brief author’s contributions, in German and in English,
written between 2005 and 2013, concerning comparative-historical linguistics,
with a special attention to the perspective of contact between languages. The
collected papers cover a range of different areas, from the history and theory
of the discipline to detailed diachronic problems in specific language
families, such as Celtic, Germanic and Slavic. A particular emphasis is given
to the Slavic branch of Indo-European languages and to its role in linguistic
comparison and reconstruction. This book is intended for an audience of
historical linguists, Indo-Europeanists, and scholars dealing with Slavic
languages and linguistics, language-contact, and diachronic change.

The article “Zur Noetik der historischen und vergleichenden
Sprachwissenschaft” is devoted to theoretical issues in comparative-historical
linguistics illustrated through the study of the dual number category in
Slavic and Baltic languages. In particular, the author directs his attention
to the origin of the morphological dual number category in Old Czech, which
then disappeared between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and its
relationship to the same category in Baltic languages.

In “Zum Begriff der genetischen Sprachverwandtschaft” the author provides a
reflection on the genetic relationship among languages, giving a contribution
to theoretical and practical issues in diachronic linguistics. Vykypěl
discusses the merits of the book ‘Language, Contact, Creolization, and Genetic
Linguistics’ by Sarah G. Thomason and Terrence Kaufman (1988) in this field.
He illustrates through some examples from the book the complexity of the
genetic classification of creole languages, such as Ma’a, a creole based on
Cushitic lexicon and Bantu grammar, or Angloromani, based on Romani lexicon
and English grammar.  

In “Das Problem der sprachlichen Elementarverwandtschaft” the author at first
presents a short biography of František Kopečný, a Czech linguist, focusing
the attention on his important writings on Old Czech Grammar and on the issue
of the Standard Czech language. He then discusses his concept of ‘elementary
relationship’ between languages, which is a parameter to describe the degree
of diversity among languages together with the genetic, typological and areal
approaches. 

Also the paper “Josef Miloslav Kořínek und sein Beitrag zur Erforschung der
sprachlichen Symbolik” opens with the description of the life and work of
another Czech linguist, Josef Miloslav Kořínek. The author underlines the
importance of the work of this scholar in Slavic and Indo-European research
and his contribution above all to the topics of interactionality,
expressivity, and iconicity and to Indo-European studies.

In “Emanuel Kovar’s contribution to evolutionary typology of languages”, the
author emphasizes the role of Emanuel Kovář, who was the first Czech teacher
of general linguistics, in the evolutionary typology of languages. This
linguist was interested in the insoluble and fascinating problem of the origin
of language, devoting a book to this topic titled ‘The history of the question
of the origin of human speech’ (1898).

Some articles are specifically devoted to language contact. First, the notion
of language contact in the School of Prague is discussed in the paper “Prager
Schule und Sprachkontakt”, in which the author underlines the closeness
between the structuralist and functional School of Prague and the research on
grammaticalization within the field of language contact.

In “Alltäglicher und feiertäglicher Sprachkontakt” the author argues for an
influence of the Czech language on the Sorbian language, beside the well-known
influence of German; he discusses some lexical examples and the nominal
predicate with instrumental construction as pieces of evidence in favor of his
hypothesis. 

The paper “Slavonic articles in areal context: a contribution to explicative
contrastive linguistics” is devoted to Slavonic articles within the European
linguistic area. The author discusses the category of article from a
structural and functional point of view, following Hjelmslev (1959) for the
first and Heine and Kuteva (2006) for the latter. Then he provides a brief
description of the status of the articles in the European area, focusing on
transitional zones with languages which do not belong to languages with
postpositional articles nor to languages with prepositional articles, nor to
languages with no article. In particular, this is the status of substandard
varieties of Central Europe, such as colloquial Czech, Slovak, and Slovenian,
which find between languages with articles, such as Italian, German and
Hungarian and languages without articles, such as standard Czech, Slovenian
and Upper Sorbian.

The paper “Scheinprobleme in contact linguistics” deals with pseudo-problems
in contact linguistics, taking into account the case of German and north
Slavonic future tense. In particular, the author discusses the relationship
between the German and Slavonic future constructions, one of which is
considered by some authors to be the calque of the other, or vice versa. The
author discusses the possible independent formation of the two constructions
and their probable establishment and grammaticalization through contact. More
in general, the author stresses one more time the interaction between internal
independent development of constructions and external factors in diachronic
change and grammaticalization.

In the paper “Emblematismen in der Morphologie” the author focuses on the
notion of function in language through the exemplification of two examples in
Celtic and Slavic languages, i.e. the status of dual number category in Breton
and Czech languages and the development of the article in Celtic and Slavic
languages. 

The article “Old Church Slavonic etymology and Indo-European studies” is
devoted to the role of Old Church Slavonic in Indo-European studies and more
generally to historical-comparative linguistics. In particular, the author
denounces a marginal attention in Indo-European studies to the importance of
Old Czech, invoking a reassessment of its role within this research field and
calling urgently for the creation of an Etymological Dictionary of the Old
Czech language.

In “Indogermanen und Indogermanistik” the author provides some brief critical
remarks on the book ‘Indogermanischen Sprachen’ by Ernst Kausen (2012). 

In “Language influenced and influencing” the relationship between language and
the world is briefly addressed: in particular, the author discusses the
interaction between the mother-tongue of linguists and their theories of
language, claiming not only that the organization of languages is influenced
by the external reality, but also that languages influence our thought about
and our understanding of language itself. 

The book closes with a review of the book Genesis of Syntactic Complexity by
Givón (2009), in which Vykypěl discusses some arguments against the
explanatory exclusivity of history, evaluating the causal diachronic approach
not an exhaustive explanatory perspective and invoking a more comprehensive
theory of synchronic language diversity, with more attention for functions and
tasks of languages.

EVALUATION

As it is a collection of different papers, this book covers a  range of
topics, all focused around the theme of comparative-historical linguistics and
language contact. In almost all works there is a special attention devoted to
the role of Slavic languages in  comparative linguistic studies. In
particular, the need for a reassessment of the status of Old Czech, a
neglected language in Indo-European research, emerges as one of the most
urgent and prominent issues for the author.

The variety of the topics developed in different articles constituting this
volume is certainly one of the merits of this book, which makes it interesting
and useful for specialists in different linguistic fields. The importance of
Slavic languages in Indo-European studies strongly emerges from this book: in
this respect, the author accomplishes one of his goals.  

A limit of this volume could be discerned in a poor explicit link among the
papers and the lack of clear statement of intent, which could have been
developed in the preface, used instead by the author, not to introduce and
frame his articles, but to inform the reader about his opinions concerning the
situation of present-day linguistics.  

It is laudable that the author organizes each article taking into account the
general and the particular perspective, keeping together specific case-studies
with theoretical general discussions. Vykypěl, beside the illustration of the
single linguistic phenomenon, explicitly expresses his points of view on
different issues concerning the study of languages and their change during
time, wisely using the examples to support his claims. 

Sometimes, the description and framing of some interesting linguistic
phenomena deserved more space and details, for example the treatment of Slavic
articles, or the influence of Czech language on the Upper Sorbian language. 

Overall, this volume contains a number of interesting papers on the topic of
language change in many areas of historical linguistics and language contact
and is a useful resource for those who are interested both in theoretical
issues of comparative-historical linguistics and in the role of Slavic
languages and Old Czech in Indo-European studies.   

REFERENCES

Givón, Talmy. 2009. The genesis of Syntactic Complexity: Diachrony, ontogeny,
neuro-cognition, evolution. Amsterdam-Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Kausen, Emanuel. 2012. Die indogermanischen Sprachen von der Vorgeschichte bis
zur Gegenwart. Hamburg: Helmut Buske.

Kovář, Emanuel. 1898. O půdvodě lidské mluvy. Praha: Bursík a Kohout.

Heine, Bernd and Kuteva, Tania. 2006. Changing Languages of Europe. Oxford:
Oxford University Press. 

Hjelmslev, Louis. 1959. Essais linguistique. Copenhagen: Nordisk Sprog-og
Kultirforlag.

Thomason, Sara and Kaufman, T. 1988. Language Contact, Creolization, and
Genetic Linguistics. Berkeley: University of Los Angeles Press.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Eleonora Sausa is finishing her PhD in Linguistics at University of Pavia,
Italy. She works on Ancient Greek in a constructionist approach, and her
thesis focuses on argument structure constructions in Homer. She is also
interested in computational methods and digital resources for ancient
languages, and in teaching Italian as second language.





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