32.1438, Review: Cognitive Science; Historical Linguistics: Winters (2020)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-32-1438. Fri Apr 23 2021. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 32.1438, Review: Cognitive Science; Historical Linguistics: Winters (2020)

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Date: Fri, 23 Apr 2021 13:06:38
From: Camil Staps [info at camilstaps.nl]
Subject: Historical Linguistics

 
Discuss this message:
http://linguistlist.org/pubs/reviews/get-review.cfm?subid=36641897


Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/31/31-1970.html

AUTHOR: Margaret E. Winters
TITLE: Historical Linguistics
SUBTITLE: A cognitive grammar introduction
PUBLISHER: John Benjamins
YEAR: 2020

REVIEWER: Camil Staps, Leiden University Centre for Linguistics

SUMMARY

The book under review is intended as a comprehensive introduction to
historical linguistics. It is aimed at both undergraduate and graduate
students with the background a typical introductory course would provide. As a
comprehensive introduction, it has chapters covering lexical, phonetic,
phonological, morphological, and syntactic change. These five core chapters
are surrounded by a general introduction in two chapters, and, at the end of
the book, chapters on actuation and spread, methodology, and a discussion on
causation and prediction of change. Each chapter comes with a couple of mostly
open-ended questions as well as some suggestions for further study, which can
be taken as the starting point of a term paper or senior project. There are no
answer keys. The examples come mainly but not exclusively from Germanic and
Romance.

What is special about this book is that it takes Cognitive Linguistics as its
framework. It thus emphasizes the cognitive, physiological, and social
backdrop of language change.

EVALUATION

This is a textbook of historical linguistics and it discusses family trees and
wave diagrams, phonemic mergers and splits, grammaticalization, the
comparative method, etc., as one would expect. One can always quibble about
the relative importance of topics and whether some things should have been
included or not. In a course, the teacher can always provide some supplemental
material to shift the emphasis, so I will try to avoid doing this: I will not
describe the contents of each chapter in much detail, and will skip over some
sections, highlighting instead a number of cases where the cognitive
background of the book is most clearly visible and discussing these in more
depth. It is after all with this cognitive perspective that the book really
makes a contribution.

The first chapter begins with some introductory remarks which function as a
teaser for the rest of the book, including a concrete example of the ways a
language may change: four English translations of the first verses of Genesis,
from different time periods, are given, describing the differences in lexicon,
morphology, and syntax. Winters then explains what it means to take Cognitive
Grammar as a framework. This section may be directed more toward the
instructor than the student, especially the undergraduate one; basic notions
like embodiment are explained (for the development of spatial vocabulary), but
only briefly. This is of course not a major problem given that the book is not
an introduction to Cognitive Linguistics. The overview of the book that is
given at the end of chapter 1 should have been structured better. As it
stands, the following chapters are described out of order, and some chapters
are not mentioned in the overview.

Chapter 2 gives an overview of the ways in which languages can be similar or
different to each other, and is still somewhat introductory. The author
explains well how universal human features (physiological as well as
cognitive) limit differences between languages. She then moves on to the
classical tree and wave models (for the latter, a concrete figure instead of
an abstract one would have been appreciated, like the Indo-European example of
the tree model). The final section is on language contact, which, after
drawing attention to the effect of the duration and intensity of contact and
the reasons for borrowing (some necessity or attraction to the donor
language), makes a distinction between stratal influence, areal influence, and
pidgins and creoles. Here the division could have been made clearer. The terms
'substrate' and 'superstrate' could easily be missed in the text, and
adstrates are discussed under areal instead of stratal influence—together with
Sprachbunds. As explained, all types of stratal influences presuppose regional
coexistence of multiple languages, while examples such as Yiddish (with a
Hebrew-Aramaic adstrate) and the Greek and Latin adstrate in scientific
terminology ('terminology' being a case in point) could have been adduced to
clearly keep these situations apart.

With Chapter 3 ('Lexical change') the main body of the book, a series of
chapters on change on different levels, begins. It starts with a basic
discussion of coinage and lexical loss and then works out an example of a
radial set of the meanings of English 'cup'. It then generalizes and gives
specific terms for processes of change (generalization, narrowing,
melioration, pejoration, shift) and the conceptual paths behind it (metaphor
and metonymy). A minor comment could be that melioration and pejoration could
have been described as specific kinds of shift instead of completely separate
processes. On the other hand, metaphor and metonymy could have been kept apart
more clearly. Winters argues that the extension of 'leg' (body part) to
'support for table or chair' is metonymical (p. 66, citing Urban 2015), while
Urban describes this extension as metaphorical (pp. 374–375: the shift from
‘bone’ to ‘leg’ is metonymical, based on spatial contiguity, but the extension
to table legs depends on similarity and is metaphorical). It is also not
entirely clear what role metaphor and metonymy play in Winters’ view. At
first, they are described as causing change like generalizations, narrowings,
etc. ('the conceptual paths taken by language users in causing change', p.
63); later they are mentioned as separate processes of change parallel to
generalization, narrowing, etc. ('processes as narrowing or amelioration bring
about new or transformed members [of a semantic set], as do metaphor and
metonymy'). Because of small apparent inconsistencies like this, the reader
does not walk away with a solid framework to work with. On the other hand, it
has been a good decision to start with a chapter on lexical change (which so
often comes at the end), and to introduce radial sets already here, where the
changes can be understood on an intuitive level. Cognitive aspects also play
an important role here—naturally when discussing metaphor and metonymy, but
also for instance in the discussion of pejoration with the example of the term
'lady' and the feminist objection to it (pp. 60–62), and most importantly in a
final section on general tendencies (such as spatial meanings being more basic
than abstract ones; pp. 68–69).

Cognitive aspects are of course less relevant in the discussion of phonetic
change in chapter 4, although this chapter does end with some remarks on the
reasons for such changes (imitation, borrowing, fortitions and lenitions). The
next chapter ('Phonological change') relies more on the cognitive framework,
as it describes phonemes as radial sets of sounds, and phonological change as
changes in such sets. This allows the author to draw some parallels with
lexical change, describing each as operations on (members of) radial sets.

Chapter 6 ('Morphological change') begins with the coinage of new words by
adding affixes and changes to words due to reanalysis of word boundaries. In a
way this section is an addendum to Chapter 3 ('Lexical change'), but because
the processes discussed here do not so much change the semantic sets of
existing words as they change the morphological representation of semantic
sets (or create whole new semantic sets), its place in Chapter 6 is indeed
more suitable. The chapter also describes analogy, discussing in much depth
the six cognitively highly relevant tendencies of analogical processes
described by Kuryɬowicz (1945). These tendencies also serve to restrict the
explanatory power of analogy (e.g., 'basic forms influence derived forms'), an
important methodological point. Finally it is explained how cognitive
processes lead to certain words being grouped together (such as small numerals
or kinship terms), which then as a group undergo the same changes. (It is not
clear to me why it is included in this chapter, since the examples concern
phonetic change, but the observation itself is useful.)

The last chapter on a specific component of language looks primarily at the
semantic sides of syntactic change (emphasising, for example, how the French
negator 'pas' was first used with verbs of movement in the sense of 'walk not
even a step', then generalized to other environments; p. 147). The cognitive
side of word order change (pp. 151–161) could have been worked out more (why
do languages shift more often from OV to VO than vice versa?). The section on
word order change also contains a discussion of iconicity (exemplified with
dislocation: 'I like him' vs. 'Him, I like'), but it is mainly synchronic, and
its relation to the rest of the section is not entirely clear. This section
then finishes with the analytic-synthetic cycle, which also does not seem to
be necessarily related to word order change.

The last three chapters discuss some theoretical and methodological topics.
Chapter 8 considers how change begins, spreads, and can finally be said to
have taken place. It contains useful examples and is more elaborate than what
has already been said about this throughout the book, if somewhat repetitive
because of this.

The penultimate chapter discusses methodology. It begins by explaining some
issues in philology (palaeographical problems, corruptions, etc.) and corpus
data (e.g. query types). I feel this section is too general to be truly useful
or memorable; this kind of issue is in my opinion only truly understood once
one has actually worked with ancient sources or corpora. The chapter then
turns to the comparative method, internal reconstruction, and syntactic
reconstruction. But here as well the explanations are somewhat superficial,
sufficient as toy examples that serve to follow an argument but not enough to
prepare the student for more complex problems.

The final chapter summarises the main cognitive aspects the book has dwelled
on, and adds some theoretical considerations. A new aspect introduced here is
the question to what extent change is predictable (based on typology and
frequent grammaticalization patterns). Other topics such as different causes
for change (biological, social, cognitive) depend almost entirely on the
preceding chapters.

On the whole, the book is a pleasant read despite the occasional run-on
sentence (p. 114: 'To summarize, then, phonological change can affect entire
systems and not just individual sounds, although one of the most basic changes
is phonologization, by which phonetic entities become phonemes, which as a
result become the prototypical member of a complex of allophones'). Copy
editing issues are rare and almost never hinder understanding. However, there
are three aspects that make me hesitant to advise it as a textbook.

First, there are relatively few exercises and these are sometimes unclear.
More importantly, no answer keys are provided, which are essential for
self-learners. It would also have been useful if the exercises would have been
interspersed throughout the text, so that the student knows when they are (or
should be) ready to address them, and which sections they should review when
they have trouble with certain exercises. The exercises could also have been
subdivided, gradually feeding the student more information, and thus forcing
them to reconsider their answers. Such an organisation might be more effective
in teaching methodology, for example to realize which data can be ignored for
the time being.

Second, the structure is at times hard to follow. I have commented on
particular cases above; I believe that a textbook should highlight the
important terms and give a clear definition for each of them. In this book,
terms are described only through examples and in some cases the differences
can be unclear. In addition, a list of key concepts at the end of each chapter
or learning objectives at the beginning would make the content easier to
digest.

Third, while there are examples throughout the book, they are generally only
discussed rather succinctly. The author does not guide the reader through an
increasingly complex analysis, but presents the example from the outset in
full regalia. The radial set example (pp. 54–57), for instance, is presented
as is, without explaining why the given prototype is indeed prototypical, or
what guidelines can be used to choose where to draw the lines between distinct
meanings. Although this is not problematic per se, since examples can be
worked out in the classroom, this does make the book less suitable for
self-study.

The cognitive perspective of the book is helpful. It also allows the author to
exploit parallels between similar types of changes on different linguistic
levels. These abstract parallels may not be appreciated by all (under)graduate
readers, but the book is also understandable without these connections.

However, the desire to draw attention to cognitive aspects leads to some
repetition, especially where it is harder to integrate these aspects. Thus the
chapters on phonetic and phonological change both end with a general
discussion on (motivations for) imitation, fortition, and lenition, topics
which to some extent had already been covered in Chapter 2, and treated in
more detail in the final chapters of the book. In the end, the cognitive
processes that the author points to are so infrequent and similar to each
other that I wonder whether it would not be better to fully present them at
the end of a more traditionally set-up textbook. Such a section on 'Cognitive
aspects' could for example have a section on semantic sets and their
application in various components of language, highlighting similarities,
whereas this discussion is now spread out throughout the book.

Let me end with a positive note though. When, shortly after receiving the
book, I was looking for a documented example of people consciously adapting
their speech to sound more like they belong to a specific social class, I
found one such example in just a few minutes (p. 175). Therefore, although I
am not convinced this book is suitable as a first introduction to historical
linguistics, it is certainly useful for historical linguists seeking to learn
more about cognitive aspects, and to some extent also for cognitive linguists
seeking to do historical work.

REFERENCES

Kuryɬowicz, Jerzy. 1945. La nature des procès dits ''analogiques''. Acta
Linguistica 5: 121–138. 

Urban, Mattias. 2015. Lexical Semantic Change and Semantic Reconstruction. In
C. Bowern and B. Evans (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Historical
Linguistics, 374–392. London and New York: Routledge.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Camil Staps is a PhD candidate at Leiden University. He received his M.A. in
Hebrew and Aramaic Studies from the same university and holds a M.Sc. in
Software Science from the Radboud University Nijmegen. His research focuses on
the syntax-semantics interface in Biblical Hebrew and related languages, in
particular with respect to reciprocal constructions, prepositions, and their
interaction.





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