All lines lead to Proto-Arabic: a review article on Jonathan Owens, Arabic and the Case against Linearity in Historical Linguistics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023)

Reviewed by: Quantitative historical linguistics: A corpus framework by Gard B. Jenset and Barbara McGillivray Dirk Geeraerts Quantitative historical linguistics: A corpus framework. By Gard B. Jenset and Barbara McGillivray. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. Pp. xiii, 229. ISBN 9780198718178. $88 (Hb). The early twenty-first century has witnessed a major shift toward quantitative approaches in the methodology of linguistics. Specifically, whereas quantitative methods have long been a staple of sociolinguistic and psycholinguistic research, the past two decades have seen their expansion toward descriptive and theoretical grammar. In usage-based approaches to language in particular, like cognitive and probabilistic linguistics, a ‘quantitative turn’ has occurred that applies the statistical testing of hypotheses to data derived from text corpora. The central inspiration for Gard B. Jenset and Barbara McGillivray’s book is the observation that this turn toward quantitative corpus studies has not yet penetrated historical linguistics to the same extent as some other subfields of linguistics. It accordingly sets out to introduce ‘the framework for quantitative historical linguistics’. The seven chapters fall roughly into two parts. In Chs. 1 to 3, a general argumentation in support of quantitative historical linguistics is developed, whereas Chs. 4 to 7 deal with the implementation of the ensuing program. The discussion of ‘why’ thus leads naturally to a discussion of ‘how’. Two threads run through the first part of the text: a specification of the kind of quantitative historical linguistics that the authors intend to propagate, and an argumentation in favor of the model in question. Important features of this argumentation are a description of the actual situation in historical linguistics and a conceptual defense of the approach against potential objections. Organizationally, Ch. 1 introduces both threads, Ch. 2 develops the first thread, and Ch. 3 the second. With regard to the first thread, the first chapter introduces the authors’ notion of quantitative research in historical linguistics by means of a double contrast. On the one hand, quantitative research differs from the conventional use of evidence in historical linguistics that rests on example-based categorical judgments about the existence of specific linguistic phenomena but does not look into probabilistic, distributional data about trends of variation and change of the phenomenon in question. On the other hand, quantitative historical research needs to go beyond raw frequencies, in the sense that the multidimensional nature of language requires a multivariate statistical approach. In the second chapter, this conception is further developed in terms of the distinction between corpus-based and corpus-driven approaches. Whereas the former turn to corpora primarily for illustration and confirmation, the latter use corpus data at two stages of the empirical process: corresponding to the distinction between exploratory and confirmatory statistics, quantitative distributional evidence is initially used to generate hypotheses, and subsequently for testing them. With regard to the second thread, the text provides quantitative data (appropriately, one could say) to the effect that such a method is less entrenched in historical linguistics than other fields of linguistics. This argumentation rests on a comparison of the 2012 volume of Language with six journals with a (not necessarily unique) focus on language change, such as Diachronica, Folia Linguistica Historica, and Language Variation and Change. As an explanation for the observation that historical linguistics seems to be lagging behind, the book invokes early negative experiences with glottochronology, plus the influence of structuralist and generative theories (though this is of course a factor that is not specific to historical linguistics). At the same time, it is demonstrated how the rise of quantitative linguistics goes hand in hand with the growing availability of electronic corpus materials—a trend that obviously creates an opportunity for historical linguistics just as for the other branches of linguistics. [End Page 190] Next to the ‘the time is ripe, we shouldn’t lag behind’ argument, the plea for quantitative corpus research in historical linguistics includes a ‘nothing is wrong with it’ type of argumentation, in the form of a systematic rejection of potential objections. Section 3.7 skillfully refutes counterarguments from convenience, from redundancy, from scope limitations, from principle, and from pseudoscience. Crucially, it is argued that a quantitative approach is not incompatible with a categorial...

444LANGUAGE, VOLUME 76, NUMBER 2 (2000) REFERENCES Anttila, Raimo. 1972. Historical and comparative linguistics. New York: Macmillan. Bender, Marvin L. 1974. Omotic: A new Afro-Asiatic language family. (Southern Illinois University Museum Series 3.) Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press. Bendor-Samuel, John (ed.) 1989. The Niger-Congo languages. Lanham, MD: University Press of America. Bennett, Patrick R., and Jan P. Sterk. 1977. South Central Niger-Congo: A reclassification. Studies in African Linguistics 8.241-73. Bimson, Kent. 1978. Comparative reconstruction of proto-Northern-Western Mande. Ann Arbor: University Microfilms. Crowley, Terry. 1996. Introduction to historical linguistics. London: Oxford University Press. Dwyer, David. 1973. The comparative tonology of Southwestern Mande nomináis. Ann Arbor: University Microfilms. ------. 1974. The historical development of Southwestern Mande consonants. Studies in African Linguistics 5.59-94. ------. 1989. Mande. In Bendor-Samuel, 44-55. Greenberg, Joseph H. 1963. The languages of Africa. The Hague: Mouton. Gudschinsky, Sarah. 1956. The ABC's of lexicostatistics (glottochronology). Word 12.175-210. Lehmann, Winfred P. 1962. Historical linguistics: An introduction. New York: Holt. Meinhof, Carl. 1906. Grundztlge einer vergleichenden Grammatik der Bantusprachen. Berlin. 2nd edn. Hamburg: Reimer, 1948. Welmers, William E. 1970. Language change and language relationships in Africa. Language Sciences 12.1-8. Westermann, Diedrich. 1927. Die westlichen Sudansprachen und ihre Beziehungen zum Bantu. Berlin: de Gruyter. Department of English Ball State University Muncie, IN 47306 [hstahlke@bsu.edu] Queerly phrased: Language, gender, and sexuality. Ed. by Anna Livia and Kira Hall. (Oxford studies in sociolinguistics.) New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. Pp. 460. Reviewed by Sara Trechter, California State University, Chico Anna Livia and Kira Hall present 25 diverse articles concerning gay and lesbian expression that are a significant contribution to the growing field of queer language studies. Like most collections in language, gender, and sexuality, there is variety in the analytic approaches of the articles. They draw on literary theory, discourse analysis, phonology, semantics, and anthropology and include data from AAVE, ASL, French, Hausa, Hindi, and Japanese. Individual authors focus on a broad range of linguistic and queer concerns. For example, Tina Neumann describes the parallel discourse structures emergent in the double identity of a deaf lesbian's ASL comingout narrative. Elizabeth Morrish draws on critical discourse analysis to tease apart the presuppositions , themes, and intertextual connections of mainstream British newspapers as they stereotypically construct homosexuals. Bruce Bagemihl offers an extended analogy for understanding the same-sex desire of transsexuals by comparing transsexual queers to languages which express sounds through surrogate phonologies, using lutes, drums, etc. Given L & H's purposeful inclusion of such diverse material, their introduction provides a theoretical link connecting the articles to linguistic performativity and performativity to queer theory. The problem they see for the investigation of queer language is that past analyses relied on either linguistic determinism or social constructionism, the former leading researchers to dismiss the existence of gay culture unless it was encoded and the latter to eschew cross-cultural generalizations because discourse is specific to time and place (10). To solve the conundrum of an essentialist definition of gay vs. the inability to make any statement about liminal language REVIEWS445 at all, L & H locate their book at the crossroads of Butler's (1990) queer theory adaptations of performativity and its linguistic roots in Austin (1975). A focus on 'what people do with words' potentially offers analyses abstract enough to accommodate disparate cultures and historical change (13). Its success depends on the extent to which individual researchers succeed in defining performative commonalities for queering language without returning to identity as definition, e.g., 'Queering language is what queers do with language'. The book divides into three sections: (1) 'Liminal lexicality'—items denoting alternative sexual identities; (2) 'Queerspeak'—discourse strategies that might be taken as gay; and (3) 'Linguistic gender-bending'—the transformation of gendered linguistic systems. Several common themes arise out of this consideration of language of the periphery. These include a tension between resistance as secrecy/silence and performed opposition with uptake of intentional irony, the linguistic restrictions on ludic responses, and adequate definitions of the object of analysis when the goal of queering is resistance to hegemonic definition. An introduction to each of the three major sections would have helped...

Corpus linguistics is “the sine qua non of historical linguistics” (McEnery and Wilson 2001: 123). Contemporary corpus linguistics has led to significant advances in historical linguistics, most notably in the speed and ease with which data can be retrieved. The English historical linguist has available for use a wide variety of corpora. However, none is entirely ideal. Only two corpora, the Oxford English Dictionary and the Helsinki Corpus, provide the full diachronic span from Old English to the present day. The OED quotation bank, though not a corpus strictly speaking, can – with caution – be fruitfully used by the historical linguist (Hoffmann 2004). At only 1.5 million words for 1000 years of language history, the Helsinki Corpus, a balanced general-purpose corpus, may prove too small for some types of searches. Apart from these sources, the historical English linguist must cobble together a variety of corpora from the individual periods of English, ranging from the Dictionary of Old English Corpus containing almost all extant Old English texts, to the Middle English Dictionary (sharing many of the weaknesses of the OED), to the rich Chadwyck-Healey corpora designed primarily for the literary scholar (and quite user-unfriendly for the linguist). After a review of the historical corpora available to the English linguist, this paper explores some of the problems encountered by a scholar wishing to apply corpus linguistic methodology in the field of historical pragmatics. I articulate the strategies that I have adopted in my work on pragmatic markers and, more recently, on comment clauses in the history of English (Brinton 2008). As a case study, I explore the development of the comment clause (as) you say in the history of English. The use of a mixed qualitative/quantitative corpus-based approach allows for a detailed, empirically based description of the rise of (as) you say; at the same time, it permits testing of the “matrix clause hypothesis”, the prevailing theory concerning the origin of comment clauses that has been extrapolated from Thompson and Mulac’s synchronic work on I think/guess. Frequency counts of the presumed source construction (i.e., you say that S) in the earlier periods cast doubt on the validity of the matrix clause hypothesis. Corpus data suggest a more nuanced view of the rise of this comment clause, namely, that a variety of structures, including relative/adverbial as you say, main clause you say, and you say following a fronted element all contributed to its genesis.

Notes on Contributors

African languages have played an important role in the development of linguistic theory but their role in the fields of historical linguistics and linguistic typology has been less prominent. Africa’s linguistic diversity has been long underestimated given the dominance of the four-family model proposed by Joseph Greenberg. Criticism of this model has long held among specialists in some of Africa’s smaller and lesser-known language families, but has only recently become more widely acknowledged among linguists. Archaeologists, geneticists, and others continue to model African prehistory based on African linguistic classifications, which are outdated and which have failed to withstand scrutiny. This teaching and learning guide suggests a program to train scholars in recognizing and evaluating the standards by which various African language classifications have been made. Africa’s linguistic diversity will be shown to be far greater than what is suggested by the four-family model.

The present article aims to survey and assess the current state of electronic historical corpora and corpus methodology, and attempts to look into possible future developments. It highlights the fact that within the wide spectrum of corpus linguistic methodology, historical corpus linguistics has emerged as a vibrant field that has significantly added to the appeal felt for the study of language history and change. In fact, according to a historical linguist with more than fifty years of experience, "[w]e could even go as far as to say that without the support and new impetus provided by corpora, evidence-based historical linguistics would have been close to the end of its life-span in these days of rapid-changing life and research, increasing competition on the academic career track and the methodological attractions offered to young scholars" (RISSANEN, forthcoming). Historical corpora and other electronic resources have also made the study of language history attractive: working on them engages students in an individual and interactive way that they find appealing (CURZAN 2000, p. 81).

Reviewed by: Micro-change and macro-change in diachronic syntax ed. by Éric Mathieu, Robert Truswell Chris H. Reintges Micro-change and macro-change in diachronic syntax. Ed. by Éric Mathieu and Robert Truswell. (Oxford studies in diachronic and historical linguistics 23.) Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. Pp. xxiii, 319. ISBN 9780198747840. $84 (Hb). The question of how and why languages change has intrigued linguists for a long time. One of the earliest attempts to address the issue scientifically was made by the Neogrammarians, who, in the 1870s, influentially argued that phonological changes, insofar as they apply mechanically, hold exceptionless (‘Aller lautwandel, soweit er mechanisch vor sich geht, vollzieht sich nach ausnahmslosen gesetzen’; Osthoff & Brugmann 1878:xiii). No such regularity and thoroughgoingness were credited to syntactic change, which was rather seen as an indicator of system-internal weaknesses. As Hermann Paul (1920 [1880]:251, §173), one of the foremost Neogrammarian authorities, put it boldly, ‘there is in language no precaution at all against the imperfections [Übelstände] that penetrate it, but only a reaction against those already present’ (my translation from the German). Paul’s statement sounds surprisingly controversial in the wake of the minimalist program and its foundational hypothesis that the human language faculty is ‘an optimal solution to minimal design specifications’ (Chomsky 2001:1). If the strong minimalist thesis were correct and sentence structures are built incrementally for effective use at the interfaces, why is it that the syntax itself is prone to change, at times with drastic consequences for the grammatical system at large? Over the past decades, much headway has been made in further understanding the logical problem of language change by integrating the conceptual and analytical tools of generative grammar into historical syntax research. Bridging synchrony and diachrony has been the raison d’être of the Diachronic Generative Syntax (DiGS) conference, which is widely recognized as the main international platform for the formal linguistic study of historical grammar change. The chapters of the volume under review here were first presented at the fifteenth meeting of DiGS at the University of Ottawa, August 2013—four years before their publication in the ‘Oxford studies in diachronic and historical linguistics’ series. The book’s title, Micro-change and macro-change in diachronic syntax (MiCMaCDS), is a tad misleading, as the ongoing debate on micro- vs. macro-parametric variation does not play a prominent role, even though questions about diachronic parametric differences between language stages are dealt with. In the introductory chapter, the editors Éric Mathieu and Robert Truswell bring up some interesting conceptual and methodological issues. While one may agree with the observation that ‘modern syntactic theory gives us so little to work with’, it does not follow from it that ‘all syntactic change must ultimately reduce to lexical change’ (1). The version of diachronic minimalism presented here raises a concern about its aptness to capture the complexity of syntax change [End Page 380] in a descriptively and explanatorily adequate way. Alternatively, one may seriously entertain the hypothesis that the syntax can change endogenously, without interface pressures from the lexicon and the morphology playing any decisive role (Reintges 2009). Ailís Cournane sets out to revalidate and reposition the acquisitional perspective on historical grammar change, first articulated in Lightfoot’s (1979) groundbreaking work. From kindergarten age onward, the acquisition process is no longer restricted to the family, but also involves peer-to-peer learning. This allows for the possibility that input-divergent analyses survive. The child-innovator approach to grammatical change is not supported by the parallels between developmental patterns in acquisition and diachronic pathways, nor does the absence thereof necessarily falsify it. We are therefore left with a still unproven working hypothesis, albeit a widely accepted one. The editors did not wish to group the individual chapters of MiCMaCDS into thematic sections, as the reader might expect, insisting that the topics addressed are too intertwined, so that ‘any attempt to draw boundaries just leads to artificiality’ (4). However, it is the present reviewer’s impression that chapters cluster together in both subject matter and approach. The book includes four methodologically oriented chapters, which use mathematical and statistical tools and...

Previous articleNext article FreeBook ReviewPhilology: The Forgotten Origins of the Modern Humanities. James Turner. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014. Pp. xxiv+550.Julie OrlemanskiJulie OrlemanskiUniversity of Chicago Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreThis book asks to be evaluated as an ambitious undertaking. The heft of its nearly six hundred pages and the mild extravagance of its production (such as the decorative endpaper maps, in pale blue and dusty brown, crawling with Latin place-names) argue that it is a volume to be pored over. Ambition is heralded, too, in the grandiosity of its subtitle, which claims philology as the “forgotten origins of the modern humanities,” and in notes and bibliography together running to 120 pages. And from some angles, James Turner’s study makes good on these portents of ambition. It stands as one of the first overarching histories of the humanities, joining Rens Bod’s A New History of the Humanities: The Search for Principles and Patterns from Antiquity to the Present (Oxford University Press, 2013) to pioneer a subfield that may one day stand alongside the history of science. It contributes to a lively ongoing conversation concerning the history of philology, braiding together many of that history’s disparate strands. These include biblical scholarship, classics, comparative historical philology, and the study of European vernaculars. With them, Turner weaves an account of broadly historical inquiry in England and the United States up until the end of the nineteenth century. The latter two-thirds of the book are archivally rich, drawing on unpublished or rarely considered sources (albeit anecdotally). Using these sources, Turner evokes the intellectual milieu and workaday concerns of practicing scholars during the period of the humanities’ gradually emergent academic disciplinarity.Philology: The Forgotten Origins of the Modern Humanities is not, however, a conceptually ambitious book. It never sufficiently interrogates its central notions of “philology,” “the humanities,” or “origins.” Philology, for instance, is defined from the outset in terms of a “likeness in method” shared by several discrete modes of nineteenth-century philological research: all share an “insistence on comparison and genealogy” (x). But should this common ground characterizing nineteenth-century scholarship be hypostatized as “philology” and traced from the ancient world to modern universities? Early in the book’s first chapter, Turner acknowledges the “unstable connotations and sometimes awkward fit” of the term in the ancient world, but he insists that it “provides the only adequate portmanteau word” (4). Another interpretation of this awkwardness would be that it signals the disparateness and heterogeneity of what Turner wishes to identify as philology. Because the book’s criteria for philology are so general—because any and all comparative historical research counts—philology ends up discoverable almost everywhere. And because the criteria are drawn from nineteenth-century research informed by historicism, philology’s story unsurprisingly reaches its apotheosis with nineteenth-century historicism. A similar degree of presumption shapes Turner’s idea of the humanities. Despite the apparent centrality of philosophy to the humanities, he deems it inessential: “Must not a history of the humanities include the oldest component, philosophy? Absolutely not. … Philosophy’s classification as one of the humanities in modern American higher education resulted only from administrative convenience and accident of timing” (381). With little more argumentation than this, Turner dismisses the relevance of the philosophic tradition. He similarly minimizes the roles of theology and natural science in the humanities’ evolution. Nomothetic pursuits are treated as prima facie irrelevant. While such decisions may be defensible, their grounds are not adequately argued here, nor are counterarguments robustly entertained.Meanwhile, an ideology of origins undergirds the book’s narrative and argument: according to Turner, the specialized disciplinarity of the modern humanities “masks a primal oneness,” a oneness that can be identified at a distant beginning and tracked through subsequent changes (386). In other words, Turner’s story of the humanities follows a plot line more or less minted by nineteenth-century historicism, a developmental plot that has since been shown (to say the least) to be a contingent device of history writing rather than the necessary shape of events. The resulting account feels correspondingly frictionless, as the self-same impulse to comparative historical research undergoes sundry adventures from ancient Alexandria to nineteenth-century Altertumswissenschaft and its subsequent rending into diverse academic specialties. The book’s central claim—that “the birth of the humanities in the English-speaking world” issues “from the womb of philology” (xiii)—gradually comes to seem like a foregone conclusion, which is to say, simultaneously obvious and tendentious, because already contained in the book’s premises. One is left with little sense of the stakes of the claim, or what use it could be to the modern humanities.The book is divided into three parts, charting the fate of philology, respectively, from antiquity to around 1800, from 1800 to 1850, and from 1850 to the end of the nineteenth century. The latter two sections are stronger than the first, bolstered as they are by Turner’s experience as a historian of the nineteenth century and his ambitious trawling of documentary archives for minor but illuminating figures, for the telling phrase or letter exchanged between seemingly distant figures, for the telling details of contents lists or marginalia. While nineteenth-century scholarship emerges in dense and teeming detail, the further Turner goes back in time, the more rote his account becomes. As a medievalist, I am inclined to notice how the Middle Ages are treated in broad-gauge histories. Here almost every Dark Ages cliché is indulged: the early Middle Ages were “chaotic centuries poisonous to any form of learning” (2); the “erudition born in Alexandria went into near hibernation in most of Europe after 1200” (29); and the classical heritage “lay on countless library shelves, in monasteries across Europe, waiting to be discovered anew” (32). Turner’s engagement with the Middle Ages makes up only a small fraction of his study, but it nonetheless illustrates his readiness to rely on potted grands récits. He would have done well to place these commonplaces of secular modernity within a more self-aware framework. Generally, the history writing in Philology minimizes disagreements between scholars, rarely discussing divergent interpretations of the evidence. The result is a well-oiled historical narrative that flattens historiographic controversy in its commitment to a story of pure origins.The prologue and epilogue locate the book’s utility within the ongoing crisis in the humanities. “Higher education needs reconstruction,” Turner writes, “but rebuilding can only proceed intelligently if we understand how knowledge has evolved over time” (xv). While I do not disagree with the sentiment in principle, Turner’s study concludes around 1900 and consequently has little to say about the forces determining the shape of academia later in the twentieth century and in the twenty-first. For instance, Turner seems unaware that his claiming that disciplines are “peculiarly cramping” and have “fractured learning” meshes neatly with current administrative efforts to eliminate departments, reduce time to degree, and promote largely vocational training. Since foreign language departments are those most frequently closed in the pursuit of institutional efficiency, it seems unlikely that dismantling the humanities’ disciplines will result in “more extensive knowledge” and facility with “multiple languages” (386), as Turner forecasts.Nonetheless Turner’s study is timely. Philology is at present a lively and contested topic in the humanities. Since the 1980s, prominent thinkers have been revisiting the term, interrogating it, and polemically redefining it. Paul de Man called for a “return to philology” (“The Return to Philology,” in The Resistance to Theory [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986], 21–26); a 1989 multidisciplinary conference at Harvard wondered about its definition (see Jan Ziolkowski, “‘What Is Philology?’: Introduction,” in On Philology [University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1990], 1–12); and an issue of the journal of the Medieval Academy of America advocated a “new philology” (Speculum 65 [1990]). The conversation has continued to grow more diverse and more vibrant since then. A recent example is the publication of World Philology, edited by Sheldon Pollock, Benjamin A. Elman, Ku-ming Kevin Chang (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), which draws together different philological traditions from around the world. Philology is a name to conjure with.My sense is that part of the word’s allure has depended on its bifurcation into two very different definitions. One is the broad, idealist sense corresponding to the word’s etymological roots philia and logos, the love of language—or in the final sentence of Turner’s study, “Philology: the love of words” (387). The other definition might be summarized as “mere” philology and is the historicist subdiscipline centered on etymology and textual editing. The many invocations of philology in recent years have generally entailed pitting the first definition against the second, which is to say, advocating for some unsullied wellspring of philological ardor against fallen disciplinary practice. Indeed, the explicit polemic of Turner’s book follows these outlines by lamenting the artificial divisions of the modern humanities and lauding the comprehensive whole of a now-vanished erudition. Yet the true contribution of Turner’s Philology is more valuable than this familiar maneuver would suggest. The encompassing breadth of Turner’s research means that Philology has much to teach us beyond its summary formulations in prologue and epilogue. The book brings together the widest range of philological figures and practices yet surveyed, and the philology that emerges immanently from its many case studies is self-divided and dynamic, driven by counterpoised and heterogeneous tendencies. A weakness of Turner’s study is that it assumes philology to be one stable thing (comparative historical research), but its strength is that despite itself it illustrates the diversity of historical inquiry, together with the material and social connections by which this diversity leads to change. In effect, Turner’s book unfolds in the middle space between philology’s two dictionary definitions, the love of words and this love’s practical, institutional realization. The philological middle ground was a zone of scholarly experimentation that fomented new norms, means, and desires for understanding human culture. Despite its overly schematic central concepts, Philology actually shows the contestatory multiplicity of this middle ground and opens new archives to the ongoing reclamation and reinvention of philology.Over the course of his study Turner rarely reflects on the dispositions of gender, class, race, and global economy that shaped past erudition. Indeed, this book has little to say about philology’s systematic entanglement with antisemitism, nationalism, colonialism, imperialism, or globalized modernity. For instance, Turner mentions the anti-Judaism of this or that biblical scholar but declines to comment on the constitutively anti-Judaic premises of “Old Testament” scholarship. That William Jones was a judge in colonial Bengal is certainly acknowledged, and ample context testifies to the imbrication of American linguistics and ethnology with the US government’s administration of native peoples—but again no comment is ventured on the pervasiveness of philology’s relation to colonial domination. The chapter on the emergence of anthropology is particularly uncomfortable, where Turner elects to use the terms “savage” and “barbaric” without scare quotes, “if only to avoid littering pages with inverted commas” (328). As a result, at points his prose naturalizes nineteenth-century ideologies of racism. As I see it, a full-throated defense of philology or the humanities demands reckoning self-consciously with their violent legacies. Indeed, lacking some sense of how textual and historical knowledge can be turned back on itself critically, philology’s history elicits the question of why, morally and politically, it should be pursued at all. In light of this, the absence of Edward Said from the book’s massive bibliography is all the more egregious. Not only is Said’s Orientalism directly relevant to the history Turner here recounts, but late in life Said staged his own return to philology (“The Return to Philology,” in Humanism and Democratic Criticism [New York: Columbia University Press, 2004], 57–84). Said’s practice of genealogy—by way of the philologist-cum-philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche and Nietzsche’s heir Michel Foucault—could have provided a counterpoint to Turner’s historicism, even if only as a starting point for disagreement.The histories of philology and the humanities are also histories of modernity. Writing them demands argumentation about central concepts and historiographic forms, which Turner’s book neglects. Nevertheless, Philology: The Forgotten Origins of the Modern Humanities does provide a resource for undertaking such argumentation, namely, a fantastically encompassing account of philological practice from antiquity through the nineteenth century. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 115, Number 1August 2017 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/691428HistoryPublished online March 02, 2017 For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

The title of this review article is inspired by Jean Aitchison's (1981) textbook, Language change: Progress or decay?, although I do not intend to discuss her book here. By including historical linguistics, I want to focus attention on the question of whether there has been any progress in the discipline of historical linguistics rather than whether, as Aitchison queries, language change can be thought of in terms of progress or decay (although that question, too, had its heyday [see, for example, Jespersen 18941]). I will start with a simplistic view of “progress” and assume that the notion can be coherently applied to a discipline or research paradigm: assuming that a central goal of historical linguistics is to “explain” language change, if historical linguistics can provide an answer to this question, then the discipline has “progressed.” The two books which I will discuss here, David Lightfoot's Principles of diachronic syntax (1979) and Roger Lass's On explaining language change (1980), bear on this issue although in rather different ways.

Reviewed by: Turkish grammar By Geoffrey Lewis Claire Bowern Turkish grammar. 2nd edn. By Geoffrey Lewis. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Pp. 300. ISBN 0198700369. $39.95. Geoffrey Lewis’s Turkish grammar is well known to students of Turkish as a concise reference for points of morphosyntax. The first edition of the book was published in 1967. This edition has been revised and updated to take into account more recent work on Turkish language reform (summarized from Lewis’s Turkish language reform: A catastrophic success, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). At first sight, however, there are few differences. The structure and layout of the book are the same, and many of the same topics are covered, although in more detail in this edition. L concentrates on written rather than spoken Turkish, although constructions that are only found in written or spoken discourse are flagged as such. The book also heavily emphasizes morphology and word formation and much less so word order and clausal structure. L covers all the main areas of traditional grammar, including phonology and orthography (and the different treatment of Persian, Arabic, and Turkic words within the morphology, such as exceptions to harmony), nominal case marking, personal suffixes, derivational morphology, suffix ordering, and post-positions and their case government. L lists many exceptions and nontransparent derivational forms (such as çek- ‘pull’, but çekecek ‘shoehorn’). As might be expected, a large proportion of the book is concerned with verbal morphology and derivation. Although there are copious paradigms and short examples throughout the book, the final chapter gives extended illustrations and discussions of some of the grammatical points discussed in the text. This book is not a textbook or a guide to how to speak Turkish—it is not meant to be one and makes little attempt in that direction. It is a grammar handbook in the traditional sense, a reference work that sets out the paradigms and basic syntax. Nonetheless, L does frequently comment on the usage of various constructions. The index is helpful and contains both grammatical terminology and key words. The only criticism of this handbook is its lack of references to other works dealing with Turkish grammar and historical linguistics. There are some references to other publications, but a more detailed bibliography and cross-reference list would make Turkish grammar even more useful. Claire Bowern Harvard University Copyright © 2004 Linguistic Society of America

Reviewed by: Sociolinguistic typology: Social determinants of linguistic complexity by Peter Trudgill Sali A. Tagliamonte Sociolinguistic typology: Social determinants of linguistic complexity. By Peter Trudgill. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Pp. 288. ISBN 9780199604357. $35. In this book Peter Trudgill tells the story of what he has been wondering about most of his academic career: to what extent do 'different types of human society produce different types of language and, if this is the case, what [does] this mean for the future typology of human languages' (viii)? T is a master linguist and a consummate storyteller, making this book not only a culminating piece of scholarship but also a page-turner. You get a hint at the magnitude of the story he wants to tell when you see that his book is dedicated to William Labov and the sheer number of famous researchers that are thanked for contributing to its telling (xii-xiii). T has synthesized a linguistic treasure trove-data from all over the globe and an amalgamation of insights from sociolinguistics, dialectology, historical linguistics, and typology. T's story begins with an overview of innumerable 'Social correlates of linguistic structures' (xv). From the thirty Sami words for types of snow through the honorifics of Korean, the directional prefixes of Tibeto-Burman and the lexicon of British carpenters, readers are led through a dizzying array of correlations between language phenomena and climate, geography, and culture. The relationship between a language's lexis and grammar and its social circumstances is strong.\ But curiously, there are also many examples where there is no correlation at all. T proposes to 'get a grip' on this dilemma by looking at other aspects of human societies that may offer insight. Here begins the exploration of what factors 'might be promising to look at in our search for explanations for why certain languages select certain structures and not others' (1). T naturally turns to the sociolinguistic literature where it is well known that sociocultural phenomena are critically linked to linguistic change, transmission, diffusion, incrementation, and lifespan change (Labov 1972, 2007). Cataclysmic events and economic upheavals accelerate the rate of linguistic change. Different levels of language structure change at different rates. Change in phonology and in features that are pragmatically sensitive proceed relatively rapidly. In contrast, grammatical features can remain stable for centuries. Yet some languages and dialects change faster than others. Why? In fact, there is good evidence to argue that linguistic change is strongly influenced by: (i) the relative degree of contact vs. isolation of a speech community, and (ii) the relative social stability vs. instability of a community. In low-contact, socially stable circumstances, change proceeds slowly, in fact very slowly. Language change is also influenced by contact, which leads to simplification in linguistic phenomena and processes such as regularization, increasing lexical and morphological transparency, and loss of redundancy. Yet complexification [End Page 378] may also occur under the same circumstances, such as when there is transfer of features from one language to another, borrowing, and the like. This leads to a conundrum: 'what are the circumstances in which contact leads to simplification, and what are the circumstances when it leads to complexification' (33)? T argues that there is a solution to this paradox because there are different types of contact, which in turn impact the way language learning and acquisition evolve within the speech community; that is, who are the people in contact with each other, adults or children (see e.g. Kerswill 1996)? Complexification develops in low-contact situations where there is long-term transmission from parent to child, there are shared norms, and change proceeds down an uninterrupted path. Simplification arises in high-contact situations where there is a significant history of the language having been acquired by adult nonnative speakers, and individuals may not have much in common. There is yet another factor implicated in language change-community size. When a population is relatively small, tight social networks can 'push through, enforce, and sustain linguistic changes which would have a much smaller chance of success in larger, more fluid communities' (103). In high-contact communities, leveling and the loss of arbitrary distinctions develop in order to accommodate communication among...

At the end of the eighteenth century, between 250 and 700 languages were spoken on the Australian continent. No genetic link has been proven between these languages and those elsewhere, and there was remarkably little contact between speakers of Australian aboriginal languages and others during the tens of thousands of years that intervened between the first occupation of the continent and the arrival of English speakers. Although there are many hallmarks of Australian phonologies, morphology and syntax, as well as recurrent themes in semantic categorization and the linguistic reflexes of cultural preoccupations, there is considerable current debate over which of these may be attributed to shared inheritance from a common ancestor and which to more recent contact between linguistic groups. A course on the aboriginal languages of Australia might cover: (i) the structural features typical of Australian languages (highlighting those that are atypical in global perspective); (ii) whether and how these can be related to typical features of Australian cultures; (iii) the particular challenges Australian languages have posed to linguistic theories and typologies developed on the basis of other languages; and (iv) the genetic relationships between Australian languages and how well these are modelled by traditional methodologies.

Reviewed by: Australian languages: Classification and the comparative method ed. by Claire Bowern and Harold Koch Barry J. Blake Australian languages: Classification and the comparative methodEd. by Claire Bowern and Harold Koch. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2004. Pp. x, 377, with CD-ROM. ISBN 1588115127. $150 (Hb). This book comprises papers presented at the Workshop on Reconstruction and Subgrouping in Australian Languages which formed part of the 15th International Conference on Historical Linguistics held in Melbourne in August 2001. In ‘Introduction: Subgrouping methodology in historical linguistics’, the editors state that ‘this book arose out of our desire to test, as rigorously as possible, the traditional ideas of subgrouping and the comparative method in the Australian context’ (1). They note that a subgroup is a set of languages more closely related to one another than to others in the family by virtue of shared innovations. They also note that subgrouping can be represented by the family tree model where splits are neat and discrete, but it needs to be adapted where diffusion has obscured clean splits (9). Harold Koch provides ‘A methodological history of Australian linguistic classification’ in which he gives a thorough overview of the various classifications of Australian languages. Of particular relevance to the papers in this volume is his account of the recent views of R. M. W. Dixon (48–60). Dixon has doubts about how successfully the comparative method can be applied in Australia where, in his view, languages have converged after a long period of equilibrium (Dixon 2001, 2002:20–44), and he trenchantly attacks the validity of the widely accepted Pama-Nyungan family (Dixon 2002:xx, 44–54). In the most widely used classification of Australian languages compiled by Geoffrey O’Grady, Kenneth Hale, and Stephen Wurm (1966; see also O’Grady, Voegelin, & Voegelin 1966), the languages of the Australian mainland are classified into twenty-nine families with one family, Pama-Nyungan, covering all of the mainland except for the northern part of Western Australia and the Top End of the Northern Territory. The basis for the classification was lexicostatistical, but Blake 1988 shows that certain pronoun forms such as ngali ‘we two’ are found only in Pama-Nyungan, as are the ergative case alternation -lu/-ngku and the analogous locative -la/-ngka. Moreover, Evans 1988 shows that initial apicals merge with initial laminals in Pama-Nyungan (t → ty, n → ny). Dixon points out that lexicostatistics cannot provide evidence for genetic classification, and he claims the figures do not support Pama-Nyungan anyway (2002:44ff.). He dismisses the evidence of pronouns like ngali with the claim that they are likely to have been spread via diffusion and the evidence of distinctive case alternations on the grounds that they have a restricted areal distribution within Pama-Nyungan. He also shows that the area reflecting the apical-laminal merger does not coincide exactly with Pama-Nyungan (2002:51). In ‘Pama-Nyungan as a genetic entity’, Luisa Miceli points out that Pama-Nyungan needs to be established as a family rather than a subgroup ‘because there is no known larger entity of which these languages could form a branch’ (61). This echoes a now widely held view that it will be difficult to reconstruct proto-Australian convincingly: although all of the languages of the Australian mainland look as if they are related since there are a number of widespread roots such as bu- ‘to hit’, ka- ‘to carry’, and na-/nha-/nya- ‘to see’, in general, cognates are scarce, particularly among the non-Pama-Nyungan languages of the north. It is worth keeping in mind that humans entered the Sahul landmass—comprising Australia (including Tasmania) and New Guinea—about 50,000 years ago, and the roots widespread on the Australian mainland are not found in Tasmania (cut off from the mainland 14,000 years ago) or New Guinea (cut off 7,000 years ago). In ‘The coherence and distinctiveness of the Pama-Nyungan language family within the Australian linguistic phylum’, Geoff O’Grady and the late Ken Hale argue strongly against Dixon’s alleged denial that the comparative method can be applied to Australian languages and say that...

INTRODUCTORY REMARKS: HISTORICAL LINGUISTICS AND THE DATING OF HEBREW TEXTS CA. 1000–300 B.C.E.* Ziony Zevit University of Judaism In 1927, M. H. Segal’s A Grammar of Mishnaic Hebrew (Oxford University Press, 1927, reprinted in 1958 with corrections and addenda) helped launch a new sub-discipline in historical linguistics: The History of Hebrew. In order for him to establish that Mishnaic Hebrew was a well-defined linguistic stage in the history of Hebrew meriting a description on its own terms, it was necessary to demonstrate the ways in which it was unlike Biblical Hebrew. He produced impressive lists of data illustrating that the differences between Biblical Hebrew and Mishnaic Hebrew extended to style of expression, vocabulary , and grammar, that is, phonology, morphology, and syntax. His lists illustrated that of the 1350 verbs in the Biblical Hebrew lexicon, Mishnaic Hebrew lost 250 verbs while gaining about 300 new ones. Through analysis of its lexicon, Segal showed how Aramaic semantic calques on Hebrew changed the meanings of Biblical Hebrew words that continued into Mishnaic Hebrew or how Biblical Hebrew words were replaced by Aramaic words or how new Hebrew words replaced old Hebrew words. Segal’s research indicated beyond doubt that Mishnaic Hebrew was not a debased or slightly evolved form of Biblical Hebrew. The repertoire of its linguistic norms was not described in grammars of Biblical Hebrew while its lexical resources were larger and more diverse than those of Biblical Hebrew. From an historical perspective it had to be studied on its own because it was geographically discontinuous with most of Biblical Hebrew, because the linguistic environment in which it was spoken differed significantly from that of Biblical Hebrew, and because it was a few centuries younger than Biblical Hebrew but not necessarily its direct stemmatic continuation. Historical linguistics begins by noting that living languages change. Their phonology changes as do their morphology and syntax and vocabulary when new words are introduced and old ones drop out of use or when the semantic load of individual vocables shift. Linguists have observed, on the basis of two centuries of research into many languages, that change occurs more easily and hence rapidly—when and if it occurs—in phonology and lexicon than in * !These introductory remarks were delivered November 22, 2004 before presentations by a panel of scholars dealing with the question of whether or not biblical texts can be dated linguistically. Hebrew Studies 46 (2005) 322 Zevit: Introductory Remarks morphology and syntax. But change occurs, exactly the type of changes that Segal described in 1927. Since the 1920s, work on delimiting the characteristic features of Hebrew in many of its historical periods has continued unabated, primarily at institutions in Israel, but also in some located in Europe and North America. Nowadays , scholars talk about Modern Israeli Hebrew, Haskalah Hebrew, Medieval Hebrew, Mishnaic/Tannaitic Hebrew, and, of course, Biblical Hebrew. Researchers in Israel work on all periods of Hebrew, from Biblical Hebrew through the contemporary language, whereas those outside of Israel work primarily on Hebrew from both the First and Second Temple periods, including some Mishnaic Hebrew, but more often on the Hebrew of the Dead Sea Scrolls, an ill-defined type that fits chronologically somewhere between Biblical Hebrew and Mishnaic Hebrew. A bibliographically rich summary of the achievements and the state of research in Mishnaic Hebrew is available in Moshe Bar Asher, “Mishnaic Hebrew: An Introduction,” HS 40 (1999): 115– 151. Projects aimed at refining notions about Hebrew of the First Temple period were stimulated not only by the comparative data supplied by the Ugaritic after the 1930s, but also by research into Aramaic dialects from early antiquity through the modern period, and by work on Akkadian in general and the Amarna dialects in particular. In addition, such projects benefited directly from advances in semantics and dialect studies, by studies of the living linguistic and textual traditions in diasporic Jewish communities, and by the study and analysis of newly discovered Hebrew and Aramaic inscriptions. The inscriptions proved to be of major importance because they supplied archaeologically dated, uncurated texts for linguistic analysis. Many scholars contributed to the advance of knowledge in this area and I name a few whose...

The article analyses the project of “Linguistic encyclopedia” of the 1930s. The concept of publication was designed by the famous historian and theoretician of linguistics R. O. Shor in the form of expanded memorandum to the Research Institute of linguistics. The idea of creating a “Linguistic encyclopedia” included in the context of scientific discussions, social and political situation of the 1920- 1930s and those tasks which arose before the Soviet scientists on the language construction, technique of learning languages of the southern regions of the country, the development of the General theory and methodology of linguistics. The author emphasizes obvious ideological nature of many statements, which testifies to the struggle of different directions in linguistics and the growing pressure of marrism. For the first time the original text of this project from the collection of the Archives of Russian Academy of Sciences is presented and commented. The paper solves an obscure problem in the history of linguistics and contributes to the objective understanding of the complex processes of linguistic sociology of science in the period of adaptation to the new conditions (discussions, repression of traditional comparative studies, fighting with “polivanovchshina”, etc.).