Historical Linguistics: Toward a Twenty-First Century Reintegration

Citation

Ringe, D., & Eska, J. F. (2013). Historical Linguistics: Toward a Twenty-First Century Reintegration. Cambridge University Press.

Chapter Summary

The book is a compact textbook of about 325 pages that sets out to integrate three bodies of work: the Neogrammarian tradition of historical linguistics, the study of change in progress pioneered by William Labov, and the generative tradition. The authors add research on language acquisition, since they hold that most language changes arise as errors in native language learning. It is written for students with prior training in linguistics. It has an introduction, eleven chapters that move from the nature and mechanisms of change, through sound, morphological and syntactic change, to reconstruction, and an appendix on recovering the pronunciation of dead languages.

Introduction

The introduction describes the special difficulties of historical linguistics, as the study of change, and how the field's strategies for coping with them shape it. It states what the book presupposes: elementary phonetics, the principle of phonemic contrast, and generative phonology and syntax, with some version of the generative paradigm taken as the standard model of description.

Chapters 1–4: The nature of human language and language variation; Language replication and language change; Language change in the speech community; Language contact as a source of change

Chapter 1 is explicitly background reading, setting out the authors' views on the nature of language within the generative tradition; readers with a strong cognitive background, or interested only in historical linguistics narrowly defined, may skip or postpone it. Chapter 2 asks how change begins, treating the universality of change and the sources of innovation, with learner errors that survive into adulthood as the first filter. Chapter 3 follows an innovation as it spreads through a community and becomes a variant in the adult speech community, the second filter, drawing on sociolinguistic work on change in progress. Chapter 4 distinguishes dialect contact from contact between mutually unintelligible languages and the borrowing of lexical from structural material.

Chapters 5–6: Sound change; The evolution of phonological rules

Chapter 5 presents the basic facts of sound change: its trajectory, its regularity, its probable origins in acquisition errors such as failure to learn a contrast, its phonetic motivation and its effects on a phonological system. Chapter 6 follows how sound changes develop into rules within a phonological system, using a generalized generative phonology with ordered rules, autosegments and metrical structure; the authors explain that they did not use Optimality Theory because they find it ill suited to describing phonological change.

Chapters 7–8: Morphology; Morphological change

Chapter 7 reviews traditional analogy, defined in terms of proportions between sets of forms, and introduces Distributed Morphology as the framework for what follows. Chapter 8 applies it to types of morphological change, for example the reinterpretation of word-internal terminal nodes seen in English -dom, -hood and -ship, which come from Old English words; the authors note that this kind of study has hardly begun.

Chapter 9: Syntactic change

The chapter notes that syntax has received little attention in historical work because it is hard to say what is compared between two stages, and it reviews earlier attempts to explain syntactic change through typological consistency (Lehmann, Friedrich, Miller) together with the criticisms made of them, noting that shifts such as OV to VO have multiple causes.

Chapters 10–11: Reconstruction; Beyond comparative reconstruction

Chapter 10 defines linguistic descent and presents the comparative method, which exploits the way regular sound change accumulates in underlying forms "like geological strata." Chapter 11 considers further uses of a reconstructed protolanguage, beginning with subgrouping on tree diagrams, and stresses that they vary greatly in feasibility and scientific validity.

Appendix: Recovering the pronunciation of dead languages: types of evidence

A short orientation to philology, "salvage linguistics," explaining how the pronunciation of past languages can be recovered approximately, with Classical Latin as the example.

Key Concepts

Chapters 1–4: Mechanisms of change

• Learner errors as the source of change: innovations begin as errors in native language acquisition that survive.
• Change in the context of variation: an innovation that spreads becomes a variant in the speech community before it goes to completion.
• Structural versus lexical borrowing: the distinction central to the account of language contact.

Chapters 5–9: Types of change

• Regularity of sound change: the principle on which reconstruction depends.
• Evolution of phonological rules: how a completed sound change becomes part of the grammar.
• Distributed Morphology: the framework used for morphological change.

Chapters 10–11 and appendix: Reconstruction

• Descent and the comparative method: reconstruction by reversing regular sound change.
• Subgrouping: grouping languages by shared lines of descent on a family tree.
• Philological evidence for pronunciation: how texts and verse show how a dead language sounded.

Critical Analysis

Strengths

• A clear, integrated thesis. The preface states the aim of uniting the Neogrammarian, Labovian and generative traditions with acquisition research, and the book argues for it throughout. Philomen Probert (Oxford) calls it engaging, clear, modern and intellectually honest, and Michael Weiss (Cornell) praises its command of traditional methods together with wide familiarity with current theoretical linguistics.
• Case studies that connect theory with data. The publisher describes numerous case studies showing that theoretical linguistics can solve problems where traditional approaches have not, and that historical results can bear on theory.
• Candid about its choices. The authors say plainly which models they use, and why: generative phonology rather than Optimality Theory, and Distributed Morphology for morphological change.
• Material for work with older texts. The appendix on the evidence for the pronunciation of dead languages is a distinctive addition for readers who work with written records of past languages, and the last chapter surveys what can be done with a reconstructed protolanguage.

Limitations

• Committed to one framework. The authors say they present the view they believe correct rather than surveying controversies, and that their perspective falls squarely within the generative tradition. Readers working in other frameworks will need other sources.
• Requires substantial prior knowledge. The introduction presupposes phonetics, phonemic contrast, and generative phonology and syntax. It is not a first introduction to historical linguistics.
• Uneven development of some areas. The authors note that the study of morphological change in Distributed Morphology has hardly begun and that syntax has been neglected by historical linguists, so those chapters work on less settled ground.
• Compact coverage. At about 325 pages and eleven chapters it has no separate chapter on semantic change or on the classification of languages into families, which the larger general textbooks include.

Where It Fits in the Course

Ringe and Eska is the theory-oriented book in the historical linguistics course. It is best read after a general introduction. Campbell's Historical Linguistics: An Introduction is the broader and more method-focused textbook, and Crowley and Bowern's An Introduction to Historical Linguistics, Trask's Historical Linguistics and Hock and Joseph's Language History, Language Change, and Language Relationship are other introductions that cover the main types of change and the comparative method. Aitchison's Language Change: Progress or Decay? is a readable account of why people think change is decay and what the evidence shows.

Read Ringe and Eska once the basics are in hand, when the question is why change happens and how it relates to acquisition, variation and formal grammar, rather than only how to carry out the comparative method.

How to Use This Book

The book is for upper-level undergraduates and graduate students who have taken linguistics courses including generative phonology and syntax, and for historical linguists who want an argued, theory-informed account.

A practical plan: read the introduction first, then Chapters 2–4 as the core of the account of how change originates and spreads; Chapter 1 can be skipped or postponed by readers with a cognitive-science background. Chapters 5–6 and 10–11 serve a course whose emphasis is sound change and reconstruction. Chapters 7–9 suit readers interested in morphology and syntax and in how formal frameworks handle change. Use the appendix when working with ancient texts, and read the book alongside a general textbook that supplies more language families and exercises.