29.1492, Review: Historical Linguistics; Sociolinguistics: Drinka (2017)

Thu Apr 5 19:20:58 UTC 2018

LINGUIST List: Vol-29-1492. Thu Apr 05 2018. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 29.1492, Review: Historical Linguistics; Sociolinguistics: Drinka (2017)

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Date: Thu, 05 Apr 2018 15:20:48
From: Francesca Cotugno [aurellin at gmail.com]
Subject: Language Contact in Europe

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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/28/28-1653.html

AUTHOR: Bridget  Drinka
TITLE: Language Contact in Europe
SUBTITLE: The Periphrastic Perfect through History
PUBLISHER: Cambridge University Press
YEAR: 2017

REVIEWER: Francesca Cotugno, University of Nottingham

REVIEWS EDITOR: Helen Aristar-Dry

SUMMARY

‘Language Contact in Europe: The Periphrastic Perfect through History’,
written by Bridget Drinka, professor at the University of Texas at San
Antonio, constitutes an extensive work on the history, diffusion and role of
periphrastic perfect in the framework of Indo-European languages. 

The book is organised into sixteen chapters, in which the author focuses her
scholarly interest in a clear and well-planned way. The first chapters of the
book (Chapters 1-4) are dedicated to a general consideration of the
periphrastic perfect through history and theoretical issues. The chapters have
been arranged in order to cover different topics but to addressing the same
issues: the diffusion of perfect and the relevance of language contact,
discussing the previous studies (e.g. Heine and Kuteva’s EUROTYPP project
concerning the gradual ‘Europeanization’ of languages of Europe, cf. Chapter
2; the hodological ‘path-oriented’ approach of Bybee, Perkins and Pagliuca
1994, cf. Chapter 3). Nonetheless, each chapter presents individual features
as, for each of the areas investigated, it was possible to explore a different
relevant sub-topic of the broad framework of the analysis of the periphrastic
perfect. 

The concept of Sprachbund which is generally studied by all students in
Linguistics is thoroughly analysed, questioned and redefined. The perfect as a
category is analysed in depth  from both the theoretical and applied
perspective. After this and a theoretical and general (but not superficial)
introduction, the author dedicates each of the following chapters (5-13; 15)
to a different Indo-European language, analysing an emblematic feature of the
perfect for each language. Only Chapters 14 and 16 differ, as they are
dedicated respectively to the updating of the concept of Sprachbund and to the
Conclusions, in which she summarises all the aforementioned topics, presenting
the final theoretical considerations. The applied framework is investigated
with multifarious examples from the different languages. The examples came not
only from the main languages – such as Latin, German or Dutch – but also from
minority languages (i.e. Rusyn, Latvian, Algherese, Belarusian), offering
visibility to languages which may be destined to fade even if they can add
relevant cues for the linguistic analysis.

It should be stressed that the main aim of the book is ambitious as the author
first  dismisses the monolithic view of perfect tense as an ‘universal
category’ as the elements involved are too varied for one explanation to be
valid for everything. She moves from this very general but important element –
after the premises of Chapter 1 – explaining that the notion of ‘Sprachbund’
may be appropriate for certain parts of Europe but it cannot be successfully
applied in other areas like the Circumbaltic area, where macro and micro-
linguistic contacts produced “multi-dimensional patterns of relationship among
varieties”. Because of this more stratified and complex linguistic framework,
she proposes a ‘Stratified Convergence Zone’ (cf. Chapter 2), offering further
consideration of this concept in Chapter 14, where, following the analysis
already offered by Wiemer and Giger (2005) she traces the distribution of the
new resultatives formed with *ṷes and *-n/t- in the Baltic and N. Slavic.
Another important concept introduced by the author is the crucial role of
‘roofing’, as any kind of innovation accumulates on the top of the other,
creating an overlapping effect.

EVALUATION

The author aimed at defining the perfect as a multi-layered category,
analysing its distribution in the different languages taken into consideration
and questioning its universality. She emphasizes that whether the concept of
morphosyntactic perfect can be understood as a universal category, the use of
the perfect was never obligatory and it is not an indispensable element in the
cognitive makeup. Conversely, it is noticeable that its use represents an
important means for adding subjective value to the discourse according to the
semantic perspective. 

This book may be intended to be highly specialised as the topics dealt with in
it are analysed in depth. However, the book is warmly recommended for a
thorough comprehension of the periphrastic perfect for the following reasons:
1) the author focuses her attention on redefining the concept of ‘Sprachbund’;
2) the matter is dealt with according to a multidisciplinary approach which
encompasses Historical linguistics, Sociolinguistics, and Typology; 3)  above
all, this work represents a wide-encompassing analysis of this topic which
moves both according to the synchronic and diachronic axes. 

As already remarked in the first part of this work, considerable controversy
has recently arisen concerning the notion of ‘Sprachbund’. On the one hand,
Campbell (2006: 2) stated that “linguistic areas boils down merely to a study
of local linguistic borrowing and its history, and little else” and also Stolz
(2006: 36; 45) added that Sprachbünde are mere “projections from the minds of
linguists” recommending a redefining of the matter. The analysis driven by
Bridget Drinka has the unparalleled purpose – which can be also considered
successful – of preserving the concept of the linguistic area (and she
eventually arranges different chapters of her book according to different
linguistic areas), but with substantial updating. The update proposed, which
represents the core of the book, is a more dynamic, three-dimensional
representation of the aforementioned linguistic area, as embodied in the
concept of a ‘Stratified Convergence Zone’. In order to reassess usefulness of
this redefined notion of the ‘Sprachbund’, the author has examined a rich
inventory of evidence from the periphrastic perfects and resultatives of three
proposed Sprachbünde, which are the Balkan Sprachbund, the Charlemagne
Sprachbund, and the Circumbaltic area, in order to discover what such an
updating would entail. 

Thanks to the thorough analysis in this book, which takes into consideration
different variants (diachronic and synchronic change, social variation and
language contact), the author is able to draw a profile or map of the
linguistic landscape of Europe according to the distribution of the perfect:
the BE forms predominate in the East whereas the HAVE/BE perfects have both
spread in the West. The author leads the reader towards the understanding of
the matter, using examples from historical and modern languages, and inspects
the underlying motivation (micro and macro-processes, language contact and
roofing effect) for the diffusion for each of the areas taken into
consideration.

According to the author’s analysis, the concept of ‘Stratified Convergence
Zone’ better captures the dynamic nature of the complex linguistic area of the
Balkan Sprachbund, more than the monolithic and homogeneous characterization
of this area as a mere ‘Sprachbund’. This happens because there is a
stratification of innovation that resulted not in a “tidy bundle” of shared
features but in an array of scattered and scrambled isoglosses, whose
microlevels represent the responses of individuals and communities to
micro-historical processes. The analysis of this topic also emphasizes that
the mapping of this area needs to recognize two important elements: first, the
chronological layering and the variable geographical diffusion of other
innovation; second, the ‘roofing effect’ of Greek, Old Church Slavonic and
Turkish, which played an important linguistic role in this area.

Further considerations have been addressed concerning the Charlemagne
Sprachbund (first proposed by van der Auwera in 1998). This area encompasses
under its label languages which share a large number of similar features, i.e.
French, German, Dutch and northern Italian. In this part of the book, the
author demonstrates the ‘roofing’ role of Latin, starting from Early and
Classical Latin (with examples from literary texts, cf. Chapter 6) ranging to
Late Latin and Carolingian Latin (cf. Chapters 6 and 7). This complex and
diachronic analysis through three different stages of the evolution of Latin
languages demonstrates one more time the need for a stratification of the
layers of linguistic innovation across time. In this way, the dichotomy
between HAVE and BE of the present-day languages of Europe appears, then, and
it finds its explanation within the complex and multi-layered history of the
region.

The last linguistic area treated by Bridget Drinka’s analysis is the
Circumbaltic area, which presents a complex set of features related to a
persistent language contact among contiguous languages (Stolz 1991). For what
concerns this area, the role of stratification was emphasized by the spread of
the possessive resultative (cf. Chapter 14). As a matter of fact, in this area
it is possible to notice a two-stage development of the resultative. The
varieties which have experienced the heaviest contact with German show the
highest frequency of ‘have’ perfects or resultatives, as they calqued on the
model of the Low German Have perfect. Conversely, there are ‘transitional’
zones in which the possessive structures developed based on the Baltic Finnic
model of oblique possessor + BE.

In conclusion, it can be said that Bridget Drinka’s ‘Language Contact in
Europe: The Periphrastic Perfect through History’ successfully offers an
impressive account of the diachronic and synchronic diffusion of the perfect
in the languages in Europe. This represents a relevant contribution not only
for its main area of interest – that is the areal typology study and the
processes of grammaticalization – but also an important reference for
historical sociolinguistics. As a matter of fact, it dismantles the broad
universal category of ‘Sprachbund’, implementing a new interpretation of this
former concept with her multi-layered analysis, which takes into consideration
the different variants of the multi-faceted linguistic areas.

This work represents, for its scale of the geographical and historical breadth
across Europe, a suitable reference for both students and scholars also
because each chapter is balanced with the other but it can be taken as an
independent reference. 

The author dealt with the historical and typological perspective with
remarkable precision; each topic was analysed once contextualized in its
proper scholarly framework (with rich state-of-the art research for each
chapter), providing different examples from different languages. 

There is only one point which should be considered slightly misleading: the
main title of Bridget Drinka’s work is ‘Language Contact in Europe’ which can
suggest a very wide analysis of the different type of linguistic contacts in
the linguistic framework. However, this work offers a wide and
over-encompassing analysis of the periphrastic perfect – as defined by the
subtitle – but this is a morphological phenomenon and it does not encompass
the great variety of phenomena involved in the language contact in Europe.

REFERENCES

Bybee, Joan, Revere Perkins, and William Pagliuca. 1994. The Evolution of
Grammar: Tense, Aspect and Modality in the Languages of the World. Chicago and
London: University of Chicago Press.

Campbell, Lyle. 2006. Areal Linguistics: A Closer Scrutiny. In Matras, Yaron,
April McMahon, and Nigel Vincent (eds.). 2006. Linguistic Areas: Convergence
in Historical and Typological perspective. Houndmills and New York: Palgrave
and Macmillan.

Heine, Bernd and Tania Kuteva. 2003. On Contact induced Grammaticalization.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Stolz, Thomas. 1991. Sprachbund in Baltikum?: Etnisch und Lettisch im Zentrum
einer sprachlichen Konvergenzlandschaft. Bochum: Brochmeyer.

Stolz, Thomas. 2001. All or Nothing. In Matras, Yaron, April McMahon, and
Nigel Vincent (eds.). 2006. Linguistic Areas: Convergence in Historical and
Typological perspective. Houndmills and New York: Palgrave and Macmillan.

van der Auwera, Johan (ed.). 1998. Adverbial constructions in the languages of
Europe. (Empirical Approaches to Language Typology, EUROTYP 20-3), Berlin/New
York: Mouton de Gruyter.

Wiemer, Björn and Markus Giger. 2005. Manifestation of areal convergence in
rural Belarusian spoken in the Baltic-Slavic contact zone. LINCOM Studies in
Language Typology 10. Munich: LINCOM.

ABOUT THE REVIEWER

PhD in Latin linguistics (University of Pisa - Universiteit Gent). Research
topic: Non-literary texts from Roman Britain.

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