16.2681, Review: Historical Ling: Deutscher (2005)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-16-2681. Fri Sep 16 2005. ISSN: 1068 - 4875.

Subject: 16.2681, Review: Historical Ling: Deutscher (2005)

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1)
Date: 15-Sep-2005
From: Kenny Smith < kenny at ling.ed.ac.uk >
Subject: The Unfolding of Language 

	
-------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Fri, 16 Sep 2005 15:54:35
From: Kenny Smith < kenny at ling.ed.ac.uk >
Subject: The Unfolding of Language 
 

AUTHOR: Deutscher, Guy 
TITLE: The Unfolding of Language 
SUBTITLE: An Evolutionary Tour of Mankind's Greatest Invention 
PUBLISHER: Henry Holt and Company (Metropolitan Books)
YEAR: 2005 
Announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/16/16-1797.html 

Kenny Smith, Language Evolution and Computation Research Unit, School of 
Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences, University of Edinburgh

SUMMARY

"The Unfolding of Language" provides a thoroughly readable, popular-
science style discussion of the evolution of language. Deutscher's central 
thesis is that the same processes of destruction and creation which 
account for attested change in language can also provide an explanation 
for the origins of linguistic structure.

The book consists of a short introduction, seven main chapters, an 
epilogue, and five short appendices.  References to the primary literature 
reside in a set of notes at the end of the book.

The introductory chapter, "This Marvellous Invention", presents the 
question which the rest of the book attempts to answer: How can we account 
for the origins of linguistic structure?  Deutscher seeks to explain the 
structure of language as a consequence of cultural, rather than 
biological, evolution.  The main feature of this approach is to assume 
uniformity of process: the most parsimonious assumption is that processes 
which result in the creation of linguistic structure in attested cases of 
language change are the same processes which created linguistic structure 
in the first place.  Given this uniformitarian assumption, the bulk of the 
book (the first six chapters) are dedicated to an enjoyable introduction 
to language change, with the promise of a return to the question of 
language origins in chapter 7.

Chapter 1, "A Castle in the Air", provides some basic background on the 
structure of language (word order, hierarchical structure, systems for 
marking case, tense and so on), as well as some exceptions to this 
structure (irregular verbs, arbitrary gender systems).  As throughout the 
book, lots of examples of various kinds of structure and irregularity are 
provided, from a wide range of languages, including a discussion of the 
verbal system of the Semitic languages, which reappears in later chapters.

Chapter 2, "Perpetual Motion", provides an introduction to processes of 
language change.  The chapter begins with a broad look at language change 
in the Indo-European languages, with examples from English, French and 
German.  Deutscher then moves on to briefly discuss the causes of language 
change (economy, expressiveness, analogy), setting the scene for the 
subsequent chapters which look at mechanisms of change in more detail.

Chapter 3, "The Forces of Destruction", one of the bulkier chapters, 
focuses on the role of individual preferences for economy as a cause 
of "destructive" language change.  The chapter begins with a simple 
example of the way in which sound change can introduce irregularity into a 
regular paradigm, goes on to discuss Grimm's Law (a series of phonological 
erosions taking place in the Germanic branch of Indo-European), and 
continues with several pages of examples of the damage similar economy-
motivated changes can wreak on different kinds of linguistic structure.  
There is then a section on semantic bleaching, described as the erosion of 
meaning.  Finally, Deutscher describes some of the impressive 
accomplishments of 19th century linguists, achieved as a consequence of 
their conceptualisation of language change as a regular process, 
culminating in the spectacular confirmation of Saussure's hypothesis on 
the structure of Proto-Indo-European.

Chapter 4 moves on to consider the second cause of language change - the 
quest for expressiveness on the part of individual speakers.  As suggested 
by its title, "A Reef of Dead Metaphors", the chapter focuses on metaphor 
as a means of achieving expressiveness and an engine of language change.  
A series of well-chosen examples guide the reader from rather obvious 
metaphorical usages through to "dead metaphors" buried in the history of 
words such as "barmy", "sarcastic", and the less glamorous "have".  The 
chapter concludes with examples of common cross-linguistic patterns of 
metaphor, including the chain of metaphor from expressions for body parts 
to spatial terms to time to causation.

Chapter 5, "The Forces of Creation", signals a shift in focus from 
destructive change to change involving the creation of structure.  In a 
departure from the format of the rest of the book, this chapter takes the 
form of a Socratic dialogue, in the guise of a session at the George 
Orwell Centenary Conference on the decline of the English language (Orwell 
apparently "could not blow his nose without moralizing on conditions in 
the handkerchief industry" [p74]). Deutscher uses this format to present 
several cases in which gradual processes of phonological and semantic 
erosion result in the emergence of new grammatical markers for tense, 
person and case.

Chapter 6 introduces the third and final mechanism of language change - 
analogy.  "Craving for Order" outlines the ways in which analogy-making on 
the part of language learners introduces a pressure for regular structure 
in language.  The process of analogy is illustrated briefly with an 
example of back-formation (noun "grot" from adjective "grotty"), before 
Deutscher moves on to the role of analogy in the evolution of the Semitic 
verb.  The Semitic verbal system (consonant-only root, combined with vowel 
templates specified for person, number, tense, aspect, etc) was introduced 
in Chapter 1 as the pinnacle of algebraic perfection in the "design" of 
linguistic systems.  Here Deutscher demonstrates how such heights can be 
reached through an incremental series of changes involving several 
instances of analogy, as well as the familiar processes of erosion.

Chapter 7, the eponymous "The Unfolding of Language", finally returns to 
the question of the origins of linguistic structure.  Deutscher sketches a 
scenario under which the processes of change outlined in earlier chapters 
can take us from a loosely structured protolanguage to a language 
featuring recursive hierarchical structure, syntactic categories, 
inflectional markers, pronouns, prepositions, and so on. As acknowledged 
by Deutscher, the precise steps he suggests are largely irrelevant to the 
central point: if we make the uniformitarian assumption that the processes 
operating in the present also operated in the past, we can plausibly 
account for the evolution of much of the structure of language purely in 
terms of such processes.

Finally, in the epilogue, Deutscher speculates on a possible future 
linguistics which seeks to unearth the relationship between social and 
linguistic structure.  Starting from the observation that Indo-European 
languages seem to be on a steady trajectory towards morphological 
simplification, Deutscher suggests that aspects of modern society such as 
the increased need to communicate with strangers (favouring simplicity) 
and widespread literacy (fossilizing word boundaries) may block the cycle 
back, via fusion, to morphological complexity.

CRITICAL EVALUATION

This is an extremely enjoyable book to read, with a solid strand of 
(rather scholarly) humour throughout.  It is not just an entertaining 
read, however, tackling as it does some complex subject matter in a manner 
which is always enthusiastic, always engaging, and ultimately, always 
understandable.  Deutscher seems to have a gift for missing stuff out - 
illustrative examples are stripped to their essential parts, needless 
complications are rapidly swept aside, lines which do not directly 
contribute to the main thrust of the argument are deferred to an 
appendix.  As a consequence, this book flows merrily along, with the 
reader seldom becoming bogged down in unnecessary detail.  The topics 
covered in chapters 1-5 may be fairly standard historical linguistics 
fare, but the wit and clarity of their exposition make this book worth a 
look for these alone.

Chapter 6, on the evolution of the striking verbal structure of Semitic 
languages, is a departure from the ordinary, and again skillfully 
handled.  I must confess, however, that I had expected a chapter devoted 
solely to the process of change through analogy, illustrated using a range 
of examples from a variety of language - this is the successful formula 
used in the rest of the book. Deutscher takes an alternative tack with 
analogy, which is mainly illustrated in terms of its role in the evolution 
of the Semitic verb. Consequently, analogy felt a somewhat neglected 
process, lost against the complex background of Semitic verbal structure.  
A stand-alone chapter on analogy, followed up by the current chapter 6 as 
a complex test-case for the developing theory, might have been a safer 
option.

The chapters "This Marvellous Invention" (introduction) and "The Unfolding 
of Language" (chapter 7), where Deutscher develops his uniformitarian 
position and tackles the origins of linguistic structure, make the book.  
These chapters broaden the scope of the book beyond the traditional 
confines of historical linguistics to deal with a question which will, I 
imagine, excite the imaginations of a wide readership.  Even better, 
Deutscher takes a thoroughly contemporary stance, characteristic of an 
increasingly influential branch of evolutionary linguistics.  His 
treatment captures three important aspects of this contemporary approach.

Firstly, there is a rejection of speculation, and an insistence that 
theories of the origins of language should be constrained and informed by 
empirical data.  Deutscher take his data from historical linguistics, 
although there are of course alternative sources (for example, comparative 
biology, or developmental linguistics).

Secondly, as highlighted in the introductory chapter, taking cultural 
evolution seriously allows us to identify what remains to be explained by 
any innate language faculty.  Cultural processes lead to linguistic 
structure, and if certain linguistic structures are a consequence of 
cultural evolution then we needn't claim that these structures are hard-
wired into the human language faculty.

Thirdly, his uniformitarian position is increasingly common among those 
who allow a role for cultural processes in language origins. There are 
alternatives to this viewpoint - for example, we could imagine a scenario 
under which piecemeal evolution of the capacity for language leads to 
radically different dynamics to those occurring against the backdrop of a 
fully-modern language capacity.  But it is doubtful how profitable this 
alternative, non-uniformitarian line of attack can hope to be - far better 
surely to stick to known or knowable processes, as Deutscher does.

Of course I have objections and queries on some of the details of 
Deutscher's Chapter 7 argument.  I would have been fascinated to see his 
opinion on theories based around a holistic protolanguage (Wray 1998), and 
how such a conception of protolanguage would fit in with his theory, if at 
all, given the recent debate over this (e.g., Bickerton 2003; Tallerman 
forthcoming).  I could also lament his failure to make reference to what I 
regard as the fourth tenet of contemporary evolutionary linguistics - the 
insistence on using formal models to test the internal consistency of 
evolutionary theories.  But these are minor quibbles, which should in no 
way detract from an admirable position, presented in an excellent book.

REFERENCES

Bickerton, Derek (2003) Symbol and structure: A comprehensive framework 
for language evolution. In Christiansen & Kirby (2003), 77-93.

Christiansen, Morten H. & Simon Kirby (2003) Language Evolution. Oxford: 
Oxford University Press.

Tallerman, Maggie (forthcoming) Did our ancestors speak a holistic 
protolanguage?, to appear in Lingua.

Wray, Alison (1998) Protolanguage as a holistic system for social 
interaction, Language and Communication, 18, 47-67. 

ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Kenny Smith is a British Academy Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the 
Language Evolution and Computation Research Unit in Edinburgh.  His 
research deals with the evolution of language and the human capacity for 
language. Specific areas of interest include: learning bias and cultural 
evolution of language, biological evolution of learning biases, and the 
impact of population dynamics on language evolution.





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