34.2244, Review: The Cambridge Handbook of Historical Syntax

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LINGUIST List: Vol-34-2244. Tue Jul 18 2023. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 34.2244, Review: The Cambridge Handbook of Historical Syntax

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Date: 20-Jun-2023
From: Sanford Steever [sbsteever at yahoo.com]
Subject: Syntax: Ledgeway, Roberts (eds.) (2022) 


Book announced at https://linguistlist.org/issues/34.271

EDITOR: Adam Ledgeway
EDITOR: Ian Roberts
TITLE: The Cambridge Handbook of Historical Syntax
PUBLISHER: Cambridge University Press
YEAR: 2022

REVIEWER: Sanford Steever

SUMMARY
The volume under review is a 2022 paperback version of the hardback
first published in 2017. It includes 31 chapters by 35 (co-)authors in
six parts investigating certain aspects of historic/diachronic syntax,
as conceptualized and practiced in the period 1995-2015.
This anthology begins with a brief Introduction by the editors, Adam
Ledgeway and Ian Roberts. Part I (Types and Mechanisms of Syntactic
Change) includes: Chapter 1, Grammaticalization, by Heiko Narrog and
Bernd Heine; Chapter 2, Degrammaticalization, by David Willis; Chapter
3, Exaptation, by John Haiman; Chapter 4, Reanalysis, by Nerea
Madariaga; Chapter 5, Analogy and Extension, by Alice Harris; Chapter
6, Restructuring, by David Lightfoot; Chapter 7, Parameter Setting, by
Therea Biberauer and Ian Roberts; Chapter 8, Contact and Borrowing, by
Tania Kuteva. Part II (Methods and Tools) includes Chapter 9, The
Comparative Method and Comparative Reconstruction, by James Clackson;
Chapter 10, Internal Reconstruction, by Gisella Ferraresi and Maria
Goldbach; Chapter 11, Corpora and Quantitative Methods, by Susan
Pintzuk, Ann Taylor and Anthony Warner; Chapter 12, Phylogenetic
Reconstruction in Syntax: The Parametric Comparison Method, by
Guiseppe Longobardi and Cristina Guardiano. Part III (Principles and
Constraints) includes Chapter 13, Universal Grammar, by Anders
Holmberg; Chapter 14, Abduction, by Henning Andersen; Chapter 15,
Transparency, by David Lightfoot; Chapter 16, Uniformitarianism, by
Ian Roberts; Chapter 17, Markedness, Naturalness and Complexity, by
Anna Roussou; Chatter 18, Acquisition and Learnability, by David
Lightfoot.
Part IV (Major Issues and Themes) includes Chapter 19, The Actuation
Problem, by George Walkden; Chapter 20, Inertia, by Ian Roberts;
Chapter 21, Gradience and Gradualness vs Abruptness, by Marit
Westergaard; Chapter 22, Cyclicity, by Elly van Gelderen. Part V
(Explanations) includes Chapter 23, Endogenous and Exogenous Theories
of Syntactic Change, by David Willis; Chapter 24, Imperfect
Transmission and Discontinuity, by David Lightfoot; Chapter 25, Social
Conditioning, by Suzanne Romaine; Chapter 26, Non-syntactic Sources
and Triggers of Syntactic Change, by Laurel Brinton and Elizabeth
Closs Traugott. Finally, Part VI (Models and Approaches) includes
Chapter 27, Principles and Parameters, by Adam Ledgeway and Ian
Roberts; Chapter 28, Biolinguistics, by Cedric Boeckx, Pedro Tiago
Martins and Evelina Leivada; Chapter 29, Lexical-Functional Grammar,
by Kersti Börjars and Nigel Vincent; Chapter 30, Typological
Approaches, by Sonia Cristofaro and Paolo Ramat; and Chapter 31,
Functional Approaches, by Marianne Mithun. An Index completes the
volume.
Each chapter is conceptually self-contained, though with frequent
cross-references to other chapters. Given the high degree of
repetition in the references in both the Introduction and 31 chapters,
the references might have been combined in one place to save space;
perhaps CUP hopes to market the chapters individually. The breadth of
languages covered in the volume is impressive; however, often only one
or two examples are cited.
Though a syntax-internal focus predominates in this volume, other
topics, such as child language acquisition, general cognitive
capacities, sociolinguistics, and information structure are introduced
where they are thought to shed light on the discussion.
The terms “diachronic” and “historical” are largely interchangeable in
this volume. The chapters study purported changes in syntax over time
whether or not the specific (E-)languages under discussion have
recorded histories. The inclusion of Chapters 9 and 10 drive home the
conclusion that the topic is diachronic syntax.
The volume seeks to promote originality in two areas. The first (p. 2)
is to integrate the results of different theoretical frameworks and
approaches to changes in syntax. However, rather than integrating
different approaches to syntactic change, this volume often merely
juxtaposes them. The second (p. 3) is to avoid traditional formats
that focus on particular languages or grammatical phenomena. In doing
so, however, the volume assumes a somewhat unfocused character with
the minimal unifying theme of treating syntactic change in some manner
or other.
EVALUATION
As may be expected with large anthologies, not all chapters and topics
will appeal equally to individual readers. My personal biases lean
towards two kinds of contributions: those that have sufficient data to
mount a compelling diachronic syntactic argument and those that invoke
other disciplines, such as sociolinguistics and cognitive science, to
illuminate or supplement an otherwise strictly syntactic analysis. For
my part, I particularly enjoyed chapters 1, 5, 7, 9, 13, 21, 25, 26,
29, 30, 31 for their various insights, and commend them to other
readers.
Several programs of linguistic analysis appear in this volume;
reflecting the editors’ own research, however, the dominant program is
universal grammar (UG) along with minimalism and principles and
parameters. But even among those chapters grounded in UG there often
seems little consensus on details apart from the inviolability of the
minimal content of UG. With its lucid explanation of UG, Chapter 13
might have served the volume better by appearing earlier.
Certain chapters seek to (re)define traditional concepts used in
describing and explaining historical change, such as abduction,
reanalysis and transparency in light of UG and the distinction between
I-language and E-languages. Their goal seems primarily to be whether
these concepts conform to UG and, secondarily if at all, whether they
can be shown to function successfully in diachronic analysis.
Lightfoot’s Chapter 15 describes how transparency functioned in early
UG-based models of syntactic change only to succumb to a theoretical
paradigm shift, the introduction of I-language and E-language, leaving
only some vestiges after this shift took place. The result is a mixed
bag: it sets down the recent history of transparency in linguistics,
but then removes that concept from the tool-box of historical
syntacticians.
Despite not concentrating on particular linguistic phenomena, certain
exemplars of syntactic change recur throughout the volume, e.g. the
development of English modal auxiliaries from “full verbs” to verbs
lacking nonfinite forms (Chapters 4, 6, 15, 18, 20, 21, 27); English
word order (Chapters 7, 11); English ‘do’ as an auxiliary or exponent
of INFL ( Chapters 3, 5, 11). In Chapter 18, Lightfoot provides
instances where a periphrastic form fills in gaps in modal morphology,
e.g. ‘to have to’ appears in nonfinite contexts where ‘must’ cannot
appear (there are no nonfinite forms *to must, *musting). While he
proposes to treat the emergence of ‘to have to’ as a kind of
reanalysis, a more traditional approach would take it as a
straightforward example of suppletion, a notion that may not have a
ready counterpart in UG and, in any event, appears nowhere in the
index.
Several chapters explore how and whether parameter (re-)setting may be
used to aptly express syntactic change. In earlier views, parameters
constituted part of UG while in later ones they are emergent or
epiphenomenal. Chapter 7 introduces macro-, meso-, micro- and
nano-parameters, which are correlated here and elsewhere in the volume
as targets of diachronic change to varying degrees. However, the
possibility of multiple I-languages muddles somewhat how changes to
I-language are to be mediated historically.
Some authors suggest that conformity to typological type at the level
of macro- or meso-parameter may set the stage for syntactic change by
influencing parameter (re-)setting, e.g. Chapter 7. Unfortunately,
some other chapters struggle to distinguish typological from
diachronic variation when they discuss parameters. Chapter 27
discusses parameter hierarchies as a way to represent the relative
markedness of various parameter settings. It should be stressed,
however, that the hierarchy in example 25 does not represent the
degree of historical relatedness between languages, but their
descriptive or typological closeness. It places French and Occitan far
closer together than Spanish and Occitan, and places Catalan more
closely to Sardinian and Italian than to Spanish. Similarly, the
hierarchy in (26) places Portuguese closer to Romanian than to
Occitan. In these instances, at least, parameters do not serve
diachronic purposes such as providing isoglosses.
Chapter 19 suggests that sociolinguistic factors promoted certain
diachronic changes to syntactic patterns that cannot be readily
explained by syntax-internal factors. In discussing the change in V2
word order in Middle English, the author speculates that certain
population movements took place to actuate this change, but asks (on
p. 419) what might have prompted such movements. In the wake of the
Black Death (1348-1350), French ceases to be the sole legal language
(1362); lower class Britons move upwards socially into the ranks of
the gentry, nobility and clerics where French and Latin had
flourished; and, reflecting the virtual abandonment of serfdom by
1400, lower class workers and artisans become much more geographically
mobile to fulfill labor shortages. Perhaps the linguistic leveling
that this social disruption and increased mobility implies helped to
actuate the change in V2 order.
Chapter 24 discusses the contribution of E-language to I-language in
understanding children’s language acquisition. However, as the author
notes, this understanding has not been achieved so far in experimental
work. So, for the time being, appeal to this distinction remains
speculative in diachronic linguistic analysis.
Chapter 28 presents the most extreme position in the volume. Positing
that the narrow syntax operations of MERGE and AGREE in UG are
invariant, the authors argue that there can be, strictly speaking, no
true syntactic change across space, time and I-grammars. Any change
there would imply a fundamental evolutionary change. Thus, wherever
linguists suspect apparent syntactic change, they are directed to look
at morphological or phonological change instead. In a less drastic
move, Chapter 8 proposes to narrow the set of potential diachronic
syntactic changes by excluding syntactic features from borrowing; in
one interpretation, apparently, syntactic features may always be
referred to UG.
It what seems to me to be one of the most successful blends of UG and
historical syntactic analysis in the entire anthology, van Gelderen’s
Chapter 22 discusses six kinds of diachronic cycle (Table 22.2), whose
historical trajectories may be described as the interaction between
the twin poles of clarity and comfort of expression. The specificity
of the chapter will help to equip researchers with the tools to
recognize new cycles and provide enhanced analyses of existing ones.
She summarizes a particularly compelling and succinct reconstruction
of the negative cycle in Minimalism in Table 22.3.
Rounding out the volume, Mithun’s Chapter 31 illustrates how
functional approaches may illuminate our understanding of syntactic
change. The demands of information structure and discourse are shown
to influence such areas as alignment and word order over the course of
time. Rather than positing invariant categories and operations, the
chapter demonstrates how changes in both, often small and at the
boundaries, may arise and accumulate over time, leading to larger
scale changes in syntactic structure.
In descending order of priority, this anthology (1) memorializes how
linguists were talking to each other about various theoretical and
practical approaches to diachronic syntax during the period 1995-2015;
(2) provides new commentaries on already existing historical syntactic
analyses; and (3) suggests how linguists might exploit various
theories, in particular UG, to develop new analyses by looking at
kinds of evidence and connections that traditional programs of
analysis had not considered. The ‘shop-floor level’ grammarian, in
Holmberg’s happy phrase (p. 287) and with whom I identify, might well
wish that these themes had been accorded the opposite priority.
A good follow-on book to this volume is “Language Change at the
Interfaces” by Philemon Gomwalk reviewed in LinguistList LINGUIST
List: Vol-34-1634. Thu May 25 2023. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.
As to copyediting lapses. The volume’s styling promotes a subtle
orthographic colonialism. In many of the non-European language
examples, whose orthographies do not distinguish between lower- and
upper-case letters, copyeditors have capitalized the initial letter of
an example sentence, imposing a Western convention on languages that
lack them. This strikes me as contrary to good linguistic practice.
The text on p. 21 mentions an arrow in Table 1.3, which has no arrow.
On p. 208, example 1, the last two lines are mixed up. On page 215,
the lines 8 and 9 are scrambled. Figures 12.1 and 12.2 are illegible.
In Chapter 29, example (11a) translates Medieval Faroese haga as
‘field’ while example (11c) translates it as ‘pen’; perhaps
‘enclosure’ would work for both. On p. 524 the German noun Individuuum
‘individual’ should be Individuum.

ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Sanford Steever is an independent scholar specializing in Dravidian
linguistics. He has researched and written extensively on historical
Dravidian syntax and morphology. A relevant book is ''Analysis to
Synthesis'' (OUP, 1993).



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