Paul 1880 vs. 1886 vs. 1920...; Bloomfield 1933/1965

[Scott DeLancey]

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
On Tue, 5 May 1998, bwald wrote:
 
> I guess the latest outcome for how historical linguistics relates to
> "synchronic" linguistics is restricted to such things as the problem of
> encountering something strange / unexpected  in the attempted description
> of some language.  In this case, we get interested in how the particular
> language or dialect acquired this strange property, and we start looking at
> its history.
 
A lot of people no longer think that that's all there is to it.
I (along with a long list of others) would argue that there is
in principle no way to understand a lot of facts about synchronic
structure except in terms of grammaticalization.  The fact, for
example, that syntactic categories are *normally* not airtight
and completely discrete.  How can there be any useful account of the
English "quasi-modals"--gonna, oughta, usta, etc.--that doesn't have
a clear diachronic dimension?
 
And it's been convincingly suggested (by Givon, Aristar, and my
humble self, and probably others) that many of the famous word-
order correlations are in fact just the synchronic projection
of diachrony.  Why do adpositions fall on the same side of their
NP as verbs do of their object?  Why, because adpositions commonly
originate diachronically in serialized transitive verbs.  There is
in fact no need for any synchronic account of this correlation (or
many of the others--and thus, inter alia, no need for much of X-
theory) apart from the very simple diachronic one.
 
For the most radical current argument along these lines, look at
Paul Hopper's "Emergent grammar", where the line between synchrony
and diachrony becomes invisible.
 
Although the field has let itself be convinced otherwise for the
last century, I think Paul was pretty close to the mark.
 
Scott DeLancey
Department of Linguistics
University of Oregon
Eugene, OR 97403, USA
 
delancey at darkwing.uoregon.edu
http://www.uoregon.edu/~delancey/prohp.html