28.3125, Review: Historical Linguistics; Syntax; Typology: van Gelderen (2016)

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Subject: 28.3125, Review: Historical Linguistics; Syntax; Typology: van Gelderen (2016)

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Date: Tue, 18 Jul 2017 17:08:07
From: Alexandru Nicolae [nicolae_bibi at hotmail.com]
Subject: Cyclical Change Continued

 
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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/27/27-1741.html

EDITOR: Elly van  Gelderen
TITLE: Cyclical Change Continued
SERIES TITLE: Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 227
PUBLISHER: John Benjamins
YEAR: 2016

REVIEWER: Alexandru Cosmin Nicolae, Romanian Academy, Institute of Linguistics

Reviews Editor: Helen Aristar-Dry

SUMMARY

“Cyclical Change Continued” is structured in four parts (“I. Characteristics
of cycles”, “II. Macro-cycles”, “III. The negative micro-cycles”, “IV.
Pronominal, quantifier, and modal micro-cycles”) which contain 13 chapters,
including the introduction to the volume written by the editor, Elly van
Gelderen.

The first part of the book (“Characteristics of cycles”) contains two
contributions which present a wider interest for issues raised by cyclical
change.

Elly van Gelderen’s introductory chapter, entitled “Cyclical change continued:
Introduction” (pp. 3-17), is more than a summary of the papers of the volume
(the standard practice of introductions to volumes of collected papers).
Rather, van Gelderen addresses substantive and definitional issues surrounding
‘the linguistic cycle’: its definition and the history of the hypothesis that
certain types of language change take place “in a systematic manner and
direction” (p. 3); the reference literature; the typology of language change,
where a distinction is made between ‘isolated changes’ (e.g. isolated
instances of grammaticalization), ‘micro-cycles’ (e.g. changes affecting
subparts of language), and ‘macro-cycles’ (e.g. change applying to the entire
language/language types); analyticity and syntheticity, i.a. 

The second contribution to the general characterization of cycles is Marianne
Mithun’s “What cycles when and why?” (pp. 19-45). Focusing mostly on languages
from the Iroquoian family and drawing many cross-linguistic analogies and
comparisons, Mithun identifies three causes that set cycles in motion and
provides rich illustration for each cause. To begin with, cycles may be set in
motion by the processing of complex strings (sequences of morphemes and words)
as single chunks; an illustration is provided by the renewal of the reflexive
in Mohawk. Secondly, cycles are set in motion by semantic change. The
grammaticalization of an anaphoric/discourse demonstrative into an article
triggered the renewal of the means of identifying concrete location through a
novel demonstrative (reinforced with a locative adverb, a recurring tendency)
in Mohawk and Tuscarora; interesting Iroquoian/Romance parallelisms are drawn.
Finally, the weakening of pragmatic force may also set in motion cycles. In
this respect, Mithun distinguishes three types of cycles depending on their
frequency: distributive cycles are rare (renewal of distributive suffixes
through compound suffixes, a rarer type of cycle which can be seen in
Iroquoian); pronominal cycles are more common (independent pronouns transform
into affixes/clitics and ultimately agreement morphemes); negative cycles are
pervasive cycles. The final part of the chapter focuses on language contact. 

The second part of the book, devoted to “Macro-cycles”, opens up with a
challenging paper by John McWhorter, “Is radical analyticity normal?
Implications of Niger-Congo and Southeast Asia for typology and diachronic
theory” (pp. 49-91). Starting from the premise that “radically analytic
languages are diachronically anomalous” McWhorter sets out to develop a
contact account of the radical analyticity characterizing the GYM
(Gbe-Yoruboid-Nupoid) African languages and of the languages of Southeast
Asia. Building on Trudgill’s (2011) distinction between ‘structural mixture’
and ‘structural abbreviation’ as effects of contact, McWhorter shows that
radical analyticity can only result from the second type of effect. Radical
analyticity – a rare phenomenon worldwide – is shown to be caused by rapid and
untutored non-native adult acquisition of a second language, not by
language-internal mechanisms via which grammars lose their inflectional
affixation entirely. 

By employing usage- and frequency-based means of measuring the degree of
analyticity and syntheticity, Benedikt Szmrecsanyi’s contribution, “An
analytic-synthetic spiral in the history of English” (pp. 93-112), questions
the orthodoxy according to which the grammatical history of English is
characterized by a drift from syntheticity to analyticity. On the basis of a
12th to 20th century corpus of English, Szmrecsanyi shows that English did not
undergo a steady synthetic to analytic drift, but rather the linguistic
development had the shape of a spiral: analyticity constantly grew until the
end of Early Modern English, but declined subsequently, with 20th century
English displaying almost the same proportion of analyticity-syntheticity like
12th century English. As Szmrecsanyi insists in the concluding section where
he identifies the caveats of his approach, this proportion is to be
interpreted from a quantitative rather than qualitative perspective: it is the
proportion of analytic vs. synthetic structures that is being taken into
consideration, not the actual elements themselves (for example, determiners
became an important analytic category to the detriment of pronouns, which have
been in decline). 

On the basis of an impressive wealth of empirical data, in the last paper
devoted to macro-cycles (“The interaction between the French subject and
object cycles”, pp. 113-135), Mariana Bahtchevanova and Elly van Gelderen
discuss the linguistic phenomena that take place when two cycles involving
similar elements (pronouns) are in motion at the same time. Three important
insights for the inner workings of linguistic cycles are drawn from the
analysis: (i) different pronominal elements can be at different stages in a
cycle (i.e. there are differences between first, second person elements and
third person elements in the subject cycle, and there are general differences
between the subject cycle and the object cycle), (ii) it is possible for some
stages to be skipped (i.e. in the object cycle, the agreement marker stage is
skipped), and (iii) similar cycles can influence one another (i.e. the
pronominal position of both the object pronouns and the subject pronouns
causes interference between the two cycles). The results are formally
accounted for in the generative framework. 

The next consistent part of the book, part III, is devoted to the negative
micro-cycles. The first paper, “The negative existential cycle viewed through
the lens of comparative data” (pp. 139-187) by Ljuba N. Veselinova, proposes a
family-based sample analysis of the evolution of standard negation markers
from negative existentials, a path of linguistic change known as the Negative
Existential Cycle [NEC] (Croft 1991). Using data from six unrelated language
families, it is shown that stages with variation (in either the expression of
SN or in the expression of negative existence) are more common, hence more
important for this cycle than stages without variation. Importantly, the
author also compares NEC with other negative cycles (i.e. the Jespersen
Cycle), and highlights the differences between them: in contrast to the
Jespersen cycle, NEC rarely comes to full completion, due to the nature of the
elements involved in these different cycles. 

Johan van der Auwera and Frens Vossen (“Jespersen cycles in the Mayan,
Quechuan and Maipurean languages”, pp. 189-218) present a comprehensive
analysis of the behaviour of negative cycles in three language families of
Central and South America, on the basis of an impressive sample: 530
languages. It is shown that negation strengthening took place twice in Mayan
and Quechuan; the most interesting phenomenon encountered in Maipurean is the
extension of a prenominal marker to clausal negation, this being an instance
of a reversed Jespersen cycle which proceeds from right to left. Van der
Auwera and Vossen also stress the role of asymmetry in the development of the
Jespersen cycle, show that there is a relation between irrealis marking and
negative cycles, and discuss a rarer type of change encountered in the
grammaticalization of negation, i.e. the grammaticalization of nominal
privative markers as negators.

The final chapter on negative micro-cycles is Clifton Pye’s “Mayan negation
cycles” (pp. 219-247). What is characteristic of Mayan is the existence of
different types of negation cycles, with only one Mayan language exhibiting
the beginning of a classic Jespersen-type negation cycle. In general, in Mayan
negation is strengthened by adverbials in clause-external position. Pye takes
up the thorny task of reconstructing negation marking in the six main branches
of the Mayan languages. The extensive discussion of Mayan negation illustrates
three broad types of change: (i) extension (of existential negation); (ii)
division; (iii) clitic addition; clitic addition is taken by Pye to be
responsible for a short-circuited form of the Jespersen cycle. 

In the first contribution to (the more heterogeneous) part IV (“Pronominal,
quantifier, and modal micro-cycles”), T. Givón discusses “[t]he diachrony of
pronominal agreement. In Ute and maybe elsewhere” (pp. 251-286). The pronoun
cycle is a typical cycle (with relatively few exceptions) by which stressed
pronouns first turn into clitic pronouns, which subsequently turn into verbal
pronominal agreement; the last step is the erosion (i.e. disappearance) of
verbal pronominal agreement. Among many other interesting findings on Ute (for
example, the fact that this language is in the midst of the change from
clitics to verbal suffixes) and on the inner workings of referential
(dis)continuity, Givón also advances a very interesting diachronic-typological
generalization, namely that “[languages] that currently display obligatory
pronominal agreement are either now, or have been in the past, languages with
flexible word-order and second-position pronominal clitics” (p. 284). This
generalization, formulated mostly on the basis of the analysis of Ute, will
have to be substantiated and verified by further research in order to be
proved valid (as the author himself acknowledges).

Johanna L. Wood’s chapter (“The degree cycle”) triggers interest from at least
two perspectives: firstly, because her chapter discusses and analyses ‘a cycle
within a word’, and secondly, because the type of linguistic change under
scrutiny is of a rarer type, namely ‘functional-to-functional’ (the most often
examined type being from lexical categories to functional categories).
Focusing on English “th-” demonstrative forms, the following facts are
discussed: (i) the participation of “thus” in the CP-cycle (the change by
which lower (VP) adverbs acquire higher (CP) adverbs functions); (ii) the
development of demonstrative “this” and “that” into degree adverbs. 

Remus Gergel (“Modality and gradation. Comparing the sequel of developments in
‘rather’ and ‘eher’ ”, pp. 319-350) discusses the interaction of two different
‘spirals’ undergone by comparatives like “rather”: a semantic change from an
original temporal based comparison to modal meanings, and a change from modal
ordering to a modificational use. The temporal-to-modal change shows a spiral
in which trajectories already seen with earlier items are accessed repeatedly.
If we agree that (epistemic) modality is higher in the functional structure
than temporality (cf. Cinque 1999 a.o.), we observe that the first spiral
discussed by Gergel represents a prototypical instance of grammaticalization,
with the changing element undergoing movement upwards on the functional spine
(Roberts & Roussou 2003); the repetitive nature of the change allows us to
label it as a cycle. The second spiral (the development of the modificational
use) is a follow-up of the first spiral – or rather, as Gergel puts it, an
independent sequel, as it takes the input of the first development, but not
automatically follows from it.

In “All you need is another ‘Need’. On the verbal NPI cycle in the history of
German” (pp. 351-394), Łukasz Jędrzejowski examines the NPI cycle in the
diachrony of German on the basis of three NPIs: “dürfen”, “bedürfen”, and
“brauchen”. Challenging traditional wisdom, Jędrzejowski shows that “dürfen”
was not directly replaced by “brauchen”, but rather that “bedürfen” acted as a
go-between in this change. The data investigated here strengthen the
characterization of the linguistics cycles: as stressed by van Gelderen (2011
and passim), a cycle is uniform as the same general repeated change is
observed; however, at the end of the cycle, when the change starts again, its
pace and its fine-grained transformations are slightly different from the
previous similar developments.

In the last chapter of the book (“The grammaticalization of 要 Yao and the
future cycle from Archaic Chinese to Modern Mandarin”, pp. 395-418), Robert
Santana LaBarge discusses the grammaticalization of the Chinese word “yāo /
yào” and shows that this change is illustrative of the future cycle: “yāo /
yào” (whose early semantics is related to Compulsion and Volition) developed
new functional meanings (including deontic and future time meanings), and its
full verbal usage is currently being ‘renewed’/ ‘reinforced’ by a another
lexical item – all these changes being the hallmarks of cyclical change. In
contrast to English “will”, Chinese “yāo / yào” still has a dual grammar –
full verb on the verge of being renewed and auxiliary – a fact that created
controversy among scholars. LaBarge advances an interesting theoretical idea
on the grammaticalization of auxiliaries: in V1-V2 structures, the promotion
of a full verb to an auxiliary may be the consequence of a labelling conflict
of the type discussed by Chomsky (2013). 

EVALUATION

The book reviewed is impressive from many points of view. 

First and foremost, it is impressive from an empirical perspective: the
material discussed in the chapters of the book is from a large number of
(genealogically unrelated, typologically distinct and geographically diverse)
languages, some of which rarely discussed in the literature. 

Secondly – and more importantly – the book is impressive from the point of
view of its contribution to the concept of ‘linguistic cycle’. Van Gelderen’s
and Mithun’s chapters represent an excellent applied discussion of cycles,
every general theoretical and methodological aspect concerning this linguistic
concept being taken into account in these contributions. The Sapirian ‘drift’
is conceptually undermined by some of the papers, e.g. McWhorter or
Szmrecsanyi. The role of the external factors in linguistic change is stressed
by McWhorter, who shows that radical analyticity in a few African and Asian
languages arose from rapid and untutored non-native adult acquisition of a
second language, not from language-internal changes. A (somewhat tacitly
assumed) universal directionality of cycles is questioned in van der Auwera
and Vossen, who analyse a reversed instance of the Jespersen cycle which
proceeds from right to left. Another important recurring idea which is
explicitly made prominent by Pye is that linguistic cycles are sensitive to
the underlying structure of the language (“We will not know what historical
paths that negation takes until we have investigated negation in all
languages”, Pye, p. 245). Givón introduces a distinct, but related idea,
namely that the universality of a cycle/chain is, to some extent, an illusory
epiphenomenon: “local diachronic changes, constrained locally, tend to have
global consequences without being necessarily globally constrained” (Givón, p.
253). In her analysis, Wood shows that the cyclic change does not proceed only
from lexical-to-functional; rather, functional-to-functional is also a path of
change. Finally, more or less explicitly, many of the papers converge on the
idea that cycles actually involve repeated instances of grammaticalization.

In conclusion, it goes without saying that the book is illuminating for many
categories of scholars: first and foremost, for descriptive and historical
linguists, but also for theoreticians of all persuasions (generative
grammarians, functionalists, etc.) and typologists. 

REFERENCES

Chomsky, Noam. 2014. Problems of projection. Lingua 130: 33-49. 

Cinque, Guglielmo. 1999. Adverbs and Functional Heads. Oxford: Oxford
University Press. 

Croft, William. 1991. The evolution of negation. Journal of Linguistics 27:
1-39. 

Roberts, Ian, Roussou, Anna. 2003. Syntactic Change: A Minimalist Approach to
Grammaticalization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Trudgill, Peter. 2011. Sociolinguistic Typology. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Alexandru Nicolae is a researcher at the “Iorgu Iordan - Al. Rosetti”
Institute of Linguistics, Bucharest, and a lecturer in the Department of
Linguistics, University of Bucharest. PhD dissertation (2013): ''Types of
Ellipsis in Romanian'', University of Bucharest (& University of Cambridge,
cotutelle). He is currently working on word order and configurationality in
(old) Romanian. His research interests include: minimalist syntax, diachronic
syntax, and the syntax of Romanian. He has co-authored the latest academic
grammars of Romanian (“Gramatica de bază a limbii române”, ed. Gabriela Pană
Dindelegan, 2010/2016; “The Grammar of Romanian”, Oxford University Press, ed.
Gabriela Pană Dindelegan, 2013; “The Syntax of Old Romanian”, Oxford
University Press, 2016), wrote a book on word order change in Romanian
(“Ordinea constituenților în limba română. O perspectivă diacronică”,
Bucharest University Press, 2015), and has been working in the past seven
years with Alexandra Cornilescu on the syntax of the Romanian nominal phrase.
Visiting PhD Student (2012) and Visiting Researcher (2015) at the University
of Cambridge; Fulbright Senior Scholar at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology (2016).





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