The Editor's Department: Thoughts on Transitions: From Diachrony to Dicladia

Readers familiar with my Editor’s Department from a year ago (‘With all due respect. . .’, Language 80.1.4–6, 2004) may think, by the time they get to the end of this piece, that I have a morbid streak, and this feeling perhaps is only compounded by the fact that I have indeed had obituaries on my mind in recent months.¹ I mention this as, to some extent, my musings in this space here have been prompted by my reaction to reading Braj Kachru’s moving obituary tribute to Henry Kahane in this issue.²

Perhaps it is simply a function of getting older, or, as I would prefer to think, of working so much these days in the Language office with history all around me, so to speak—William Dwight Whitney’s desk (rescued from Whitney’s old farm by George Lane in 1962 and donated eventually to the LSA, moving from Language editor to Language editor ever since) is here,³ as, of course, are all the back issues of Language and related works, including Special publications, Language monographs, the William Dwight Whitney linguistic series, and the LSA Bulletin—or perhaps it is just an extension of my interest in language history, but for whatever reason I find myself increasingly drawn to the history of our field. And maybe as the inevitable result of reading 100-plus quite diverse and interesting papers a year that are submitted to the journal, I find myself increasingly drawn as well to thoughts about our field in general.

My interest in diachronic linguistics provides a natural bridge to an interest in obituaries and what they tell us about the way our field developed, since obituaries are personal diachronies, accounts of various figures’ individual passages through time. And these passages are essentially transitions from one phase of their life to another phase and another one and so on. In these personal histories, therefore, we see exactly what diachrony means, namely nothing more than the transitions and passages through successive synchronic states—they tell us that in life, in language, and in human institutions in general, there really is no independent diachrony, rather only synchronic states and time.⁴ Since time, figuratively speaking, ‘goes by’ or ‘passes’ by its very nature—or by our interpretation of our experience with it—‘diachrony’ is a necessary by-product of the intersection of time with whatever synchronic states we identify.

Life, and language, therefore, are filled with transitions, and in Henry Kahane’s life, we see numerous transitions, inasmuch as he was a scholar who bridged several eras in linguistics, several cultures, and several periods in the history of the world. Working on this piece at a point when one year bridges over into the next, I am naturally led to think about how one handles transitions and ultimately fits temporally, culturally, and professionally into a world and a field so much in change.

Not only is his personal diachrony at issue, but we see as well in Henry Kahane and in his work the blending of old approaches and new approaches, and therefore a transition of methods and prevailing doctrine and frameworks. His work serves as a reminder to me of the relevance of the old even in the midst of the new, thus suggesting the utility of gradual rather than abrupt transitions, of the blending of methods and approaches.

I like to tell my historical linguistics classes about the ways in which the field of linguistics has changed but to emphasize as well how there is still room for insights from days gone by. In particular, it is clear that there have been dramatic changes in the field in the past century, indeed in the past quarter century, that can serve the study of language change. I have in mind here new methodologies, such as those of quantitative sociolinguistics, and technological advances, such as the capability to create and search huge corpora. Moreover, work in the second half of the twentieth century, especially by William Labov and others following his lead, has enriched and altered the way we view how...