Language Change and Typological Variation: In Honor of Winfred P. Lehmann on the Occasion of His 83rd Birthday (review)

This Festschrift honors one of the true giants of American linguistics, Winfred P. Lehmann of the University of Texas at Austin. Among other honors, Professor Lehmann was a Guggenheim Fellow, received the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany, Commander’s Cross, and served as President of both the Linguistic Society of America and the Modern Language Association of America. He has worked on a broad range of topics, including linguistic typology, historical linguistics, syntax, and Indo-European linguistics, and the papers published in these volumes cover a similar range.

Vol. 1 begins with brief descriptions of the papers it contains, a list of Professor Lehmann’s publications (which covers 41 pages), and a biographical sketch. I particularly enjoyed two papers from this volume, ‘Umlaut as regular sound change: The phonetic basis of “ingenerate umlaut” ’ (207–24) by Gregory K. Iverson and Joseph C. Salmons and ‘On the role of typology in reconstructing phonological rules’ (260–74) by Frederic W. Schwink. Iverson and Salmons argue that umlaut was not the monolithic process that earlier accounts suppose but rather can be divided into two parts, primary and nonprimary umlaut, which followed different developmental paths (e.g. primary umlaut had specific phonetic conditioning and was consistently carried out, while nonprimary umlaut lacked specific phonetic conditioning and was less consistently carried out, among others). They go on to argue that their analysis better accounts for a number of pieces of data than the traditional view, including the blocking of umlaut by certain consonant clusters. In his paper, Schwink points out that, while typology has often been employed in phonological reconstruction, too often it has been desultory in nature, where similar cases have been hunted out in support of a theory. He contends, however, that this should not be taken as a reason to reject the use of typology in reconstruction but rather as incentive to improve our understanding of typology and our use of typological considerations in reconstruction.

Vol. 2 focuses on universals and typology; here one could single out papers like Michael Clyne’s discussion, ‘Typology and language change in bilingualism and trilingualism’ (444–63), which examines various types of syntactic change in the speech of multilingual individuals; ‘Gender in a historical perspective: Radial categories meet language change’ (566–87) by Bernard Comrie and Maria Polinsky, which discusses changes in the gender system of Tsez, a member of the Nakh-Daghestanian family, spoken in the Caucasus; and the final paper in the Festschrift, ‘Indo-European “have”: A grammatical etymology’ (613–41) by Carol F. Justus, which analyzes the development of an Indo-European word for ‘have’.

While no reader will enjoy all the papers here, the wide array of topics ensures that all readers will find something that pleases them. The volumes themselves are paper-bound and cleanly edited, with only a handful of typographical errors.