Areal Diffusion and Genetic Inheritance: Problems in Comparative Linguistics (review)

This book is extremely rich, competent, and well-edited. The volume is the fruit of an international workshop (17–22 August 1998) on ‘The connection between areal diffusion and the genetic model of language relationship’, held at the Research Centre for Linguistic Typology at the Australian National University. Its catalyst was Dixon’s The rise and fall of languages (1997), the work that lifted the idea of punctuation and equilibrium from evolutionary biology into linguistics.

The book contains fifteen chapters, beginning with Ch. 1, an introduction by the editors (1–26) that outlines the basic concepts (types of similarity, family trees, areas, and diffusion) and provides an overview of the volume. The family tree model is presented as a good sketch of punctuation (drastic splits), as it often would agree with population movements (9). The copying-of-manuscripts schema (5; also in Watkins, 59) is considered a good match for splits. Although the book has excellent treatments of population movements, nowhere does it come out that the manuscript schema itself came from the Greek population movements (colonization) within and around the Mediterranian area—and furthermore, the notion is not listed in the index.

Ch. 2, ‘Archaeology and the historical determinants of punctuation in language-family origins’ (27–43) by Peter Bellwood, is the only archaeological contribution in the volume (cf. also Bellwood 2000 and Carpelan et al. 2001) and generally supports Dixon’s ideas about punctuation, with the conclusion that connections between archaeology and language correlations are possible, although they need not or cannot be connected with styles of pottery.

Ch. 3, ‘An Indo-European linguistic area and its characteristics: Ancient Anatolia. Areal diffusion as a challenge to the comparative method?’ (44–63) by Calvert Watkins, gives the distributions of the Indo-European languages in addition to Anatolian. Watkins brings in parallels from Australia in disentangling genetic and typological comparisons, and finds that the situation in Anatolia looks like punctuation. Ultimately, the situations tend to be too messy to have clear dichotomies. But, importantly, the comparative method remains valid (cf. Bowern & Koch 2004).

Ch. 4, ‘The Australian linguistic area’ (64–104) by R. M. W. Dixon, the sober swashbuckler of the field (to coin a positive oxymoron), is a wonderful presentation of the complex situation(s). He promises a fuller treatment (Dixon 2002) so I do not want to discuss the matter here. It is significant that he reminds us that percentages of shared vocabulary can at best help us with low-level subgroupings. With effective and honest humility he states: ‘One thing which is certain is that we have everything to learn. The possibilities for research on the Australian linguistic area are boundless’ (88). The chapter ends with an appendix treating the history of (false) language classification in Australia, with a summary list of languages.

Alan Dench, in Ch. 5, ‘Descent and diffusion: The complexity of the Pilbara situation’ (105–33), gives us a rich slice of Western Australia with clear tables of the difficulty of trying to disentangle inheritance from contact influence. It is preferable to start with contact phenomena, as demonstration of a deeper genetic relationship might be unattainable.

Ch. 6, ‘Contact-induced change in Oceanic languages in North-West Melanesia’ (134–66) by Malcolm Ross, treats the contact situation between Takia and Waskia from Karkar Island (off the north[east] coast of Papua New Guinea). It was Ross who launched the term metatypy for something that goes beyond ‘syntactic borrowing’ into deeper manifestations of semantic cohesion, calques, and loan translation, that is, convergence into the same type. ‘Metatypy is thus the process whereby the language of a group of bi- or multilingual speakers is restructured on the model of a language they use to communicate with people outside their group’ (145–46). This affects either the language’s semantic patterns...