<Language> Lass: Part 2 of 3; Electronic Review

[H. Mark Hubey]

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"H. Mark Hubey" wrote:
>
> Lass, Historical Linguistics, 1998.
>
> -------------Part 2 of 3 --------------------------------------

> p.290                   Linguistic Time (Arrows and cycles)
>
> The modern physical sciences now recognize both types of: reversible or
> classical (Newtonian) time, and non-reversible or thermodynamic time.
> Reversible time in physics is not normally construed as cyclic; though
> specific reversibilities can lead to equilibrium, which may be.

The laws of classical physics cannot be (or have not been) construed
in a way in which time is not reversible. That is a lack. It is due
to not having the mathematics which creates such laws. Real time of
course is irreversible (as far as we know). Only in the equations of
thermodynamics can we finally write the equations in such a way that
time cannot be reversed.


> p.291
> Whereas under a thermodynamic regime (say you the current order of the
> universe on the heat death interpretation), entropy increases in a close
> system and leads to a static equilibrium, maximal disorder, etc.  This
> has been a basic philosophical problem in physics since the
> 19th-century, when classical dynamics, in which time is reversible, came
> into an apparent conflict with the irreversibility associated with the
> second law of thermo dynamics, and the idea of entropy. ... the idea
> that there is an immutable substrate or background to all or temporal
> experience is compelling, since it imposes the special kind of order on
> the universe; one could see the same kind of motivation in Katicic's
> position as in Parmenides's or Newton's or Einstein's; if timing change
> on illusions, the universe has a `ground' that blacks in the presence of
> general line transformation.
>
> Such visions animate not only larger scale philosophical or Cosmo
> logical schemata, but may manifest more locally, in linguists attitudes
> toward their own subject matter, particularly as it unfolds in time.
> The issue of the direction and linguistic evolution has been of interest
> since antiquity; as early as Plato's Cratylus the idea was broached that
> if the first Namer named things by nature and not by convention, the
> form/meaning fit has become (unidirectionally) less transparent.
>
> p.292
> During the 19th and 20th centuries, three more or less articulated views
> of the shape of linguistic history have emerged, each for its radical
> proponents the result of some kind of directional law.  These overall
> metaphysical characterizations seem to be of two general kinds:
>
> 1.      Uniform directionality..  There are three main types:
>
>         (a) positive (Progressivism): languages evolve a particular optimizing
> direction, becoming more efficient or simple or sophisticated or
> whatever. ...
>
>         (b) negative (decay): languages move from a perfect type towards some
> less perfect one: e.g. Bopp (1833) from analytic into a synthetic, for
> Jesperson the opposite.
>
>         (c) non-evaluative: there simply are directions, either in actual
> glottogenesis (from a primitive state) or in the evolution of languages,
> but those do not necessarily have anything to do with quality (perhaps
> Humboldt 1882).

Since none of these people are fighting over expressing language change
using equations, there is no reason why the choices should be kept only
to these three. One can create change that is not uniform or constant
and even add randomness, or make the change a function of borrowing
and social upheaval etc etc.


> 2. Cyclicity.  Languages moves through life-cycles like organisms (cf
> Davies 1987); they may have periods of youth, maturity, and senescence
> (as in 1b), but recycle over and over, e.g. each great type comes around
> again after language has passed through the others in some particular
> series: e.g. isolating> agglutinative > inflecting/fusional, etc (von
> der Gabelentz 1981), at a local rather than a global level Meillet
> 1912.)


If we are going to use mathematical systems as models, then there is
no reason why lots of other ideas cannot be used including chaotic
dynamics.

> Few scholars now would believe that any of these principal legislates
> for language change overall: there are no global directionalities fixed
> by natural law.  Individual histories (or parts of them) can be any one

There is no reason to assume that global directions do not exist. They
probably do exist. The rest is good reading.

> of the above.  Though, especially in the work growing out of the
> tradition of grammaticalization studies started by Meillet (1912) and
> revived recently by Elizabeth Traugott, Bernd Heine and others (Traugott
> & Heine 1991), Hopper & Traugott 1993), certain directions are
> increasingly being singled out as major or overwhelming.
>
> p.293
> The history of any dynamic system can be mapped as a trajectory in a
> multidimensional space (phase space) where each point in the space
> represents a possible system state.  By a dynamic system, I mean any
> evolving ensemble where variation of parameter setting produces a change
> of state.  Under this (relatively standard) mathematical definition, not
> only a mechanical or thermodynamic systems (e.g. a swinging pendulum,
> convection in a needed fluid) dynamical, but so are evolving
> populations, whether systems and even valued sets generated by
> completely abstract equations, where changing the numerical values
> satisfying some control parameter produces an evolution.  Such evolution
> was maybe partly linear, or at least show continuous change, but may
> then settle into other configurations....
>
> Dynamical systems in general can be characterized as tending to move
> towards regions in phase space called attractors: an attracted as a
> region 'such that any point which starts nearby gets closer and closer
> to it' (Stewart, 110).  In simple and rather loose terms, and attractor
> is region into which a system tends to set up, and in which it remains
> unless it is dislodged in some special way.  The most common or typical
> attractors are single point attractors or sinks, and limit cycles.  The
> precise mathematical definitions is not at issue here, since this is a
> heuristic rather than mathematical discussion; what counts is the image
> of an evolving system as a kind of flow in some n-dimensional space, and
> the existence of regions in that space towards which the flow tends to
> converge.
>
> P. 294
> Such imagery and terminology are very general, and apply to innumerable
> evolving systems, both purely abstract and physical.  This kind of
> language was originally developed for talking about quantifiable
> mathematical systems, but that are (at least so far) non-quantifiable
> systems that exhibit this same type of behavior, or at least have
> properties similar enough so that we can  informally but appropriately
> borrow the terminology.  The point of such borrowing is that
> terminology's neutral with respect to content though the system; to put
> another way, a general dynamical description is a syntax without
> semantics.  Such a neutral expository language allows us to talk about
> the shapes of historical developments without an ontological commitment,
> and may lead us see things that we would not otherwise, or at least see
> things differently.  The larger -- scale philosophical implications of
> this point will be taken up in 7.6; for now I am interested mainly in
> the utility of the notion of trajectories and related concepts for
> talking about histories as trajectories in time.  Their function for
> moment is defining types of temporal configurations that seem to repeat,
> and serving as a source of generalized images for visualizing them as
> trajectories.  Sinks and limit cycles are what might be called typical
> or ordinary attractors.  But there is another type, appearing in system
> after system, which is rather different properties.  Such a strange
> attractive user region in phase -- space (typically found when a system
> is far from equilibrium) in which the behavior on the system becomes
> increasingly unpredictable and chaotic, and parameter values less and
> less orderly, and less and less likely to repeat. But within such
> attractors are often occur what are called windows of order in which
> orderly phenomenon are apparently self generated out of the chaos...
> That is (deterministicaly) chaotic systems can generate their own
> order.  It is becoming increasingly clear, both in chaos theory and the
> developments now often grouped under complexity theory (Lewin 1993) that
> the edge of chaos regimes in all sorts of natural (and artificial)
> systems in which self regulation and order are generated out of apparent
> disorder (this is sometimes referred to as autopoiesis).  The evidence
> for this kind of temporal trajectory isn't relevant for the historical
> linguists, because RMON other things he suggests that there simply are
> rather general system types that behave in certain ways, regardless of
> what the systems are composed of, or who happens to be using them.
>
> P. 295
>
> Many evolutionary pathways in language change seem to lead to sinks... a
> good example is the set of phenomenon now usually grouped under the
> general heading of grammaticalization.  For instance (cf. Givon 1971,
> Comrie 1980, Campbell 1990c) it seems that case markers typically (even
> according to Givon and some others exclusively) evolve out of
> grammaticalized free nouns, along the pathway, Noun > Postposition >
> Clitic > Case-marker.  The step along this pathway seems irreversible or
> nearly so; once a now has become a pulse position it can't become one
> out again, a case market cannot detach itself than become a
> postposition. {examples from Kannada, Estonian, Hungarian}

--
Best Regards,
Mark
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hubeyh at montclair.edu =-=-=-= http://www.csam.montclair.edu/~hubey
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