Historical syntax and linguistic theory (review)

Hermann Paul (1880) pontificated famously that ‘Es ist eingewendet, dass es noch eine andere wissenschaftliche Betrachtung des Sprache gäbe, als die geschichtliche. Ich muss das in Abrede stelle’ (20). Our current discipline of linguistics emerged as an exclusively historical enterprise, and historical linguists have always been concerned not only with describing changes but also with explaining them. Over the last two centuries there have been many approaches to the descriptive and explanatory work.

For the last two decades a diachronic generative syntax (DiGS) community has been meeting biennially, now annually, alternating from one side of the Atlantic to the other, generating a body of formal work on syntactic change and investigating the emergence of new grammars over time. This book results from the meeting in Trieste in July 2006 and illustrates the diversity of approaches under the generative umbrella.

Work on language change has been dominated by change in sound systems and morphology, but work on syntax has opened new dimensions. Two hallmarks of DiGS papers are using the mechanisms of current generative syntax, which, of course, vary over time, and searching for explanations for changes in the way that syntactic systems are acquired by children (earlier DiGS meetings have included work on ‘competition’ between coexisting grammars and the reconstruction of properties of unattested languages, but these themes play only a minor role in Historical syntax and linguistic theory (HSLT)).

Current mechanisms offer prospects of unifying phenomena in new ways and therefore may constitute explanations for the way in which phenomena cluster in changes, reflecting a focus on major structural shifts, sometimes called ‘catastrophes’ or ‘phase transitions’. This parallels work on phonological and morphological change and illuminates the kind of variation that syntactic theory permits. DiGS work has dealt mostly with the major western European languages, and it is refreshing to see a wider range of languages treated in HSLT, although the fact that few languages have extensive historical records over a long period limits the languages that historical syntacticians can work on.

Chris H. Reintges identifies two points of variation in ancient Egyptian: head-initial VSO and subject-initial SVO order, where the two orders correlate with different morphological and semantic properties, and VSO alternating with VOS order with no linked morphological or semantic properties. He does not discuss whether these phenomena manifest competing grammars or alternations within one grammar, a critical omission making it impossible to see what the grammars are and therefore what the changes are. His claim is that since there is variation, there can be spontaneous change whereby one of the variants comes to predominate; hence ‘syntactic change can happen without outside factors playing any role’ (46). Maybe, but he does not show what the changes are.

Edith Aldridge provides a unifying analysis for three uses of zhe in late archaic Chinese but does not discuss any changes. Alice Davison traces the history of correlative clauses from Vedic Sanskrit to modern Hindi/Urdu. Paratactic correlatives symmetrically adjoined to main clauses in Sanskrit develop into hypotactic structures, asymmetrically adjoined subordinate to main clauses, and she argues that the change was caused by the reanalysis of the CP structure in Vedic, a domino effect.

Victor Manfredi comes closest to the reconstruction of unattested languages. He argues that the main branch of the Niger-Congo family, Benue-Kwa, has within it a typological split resulting from ‘a switch from late to early timing of phase-based Spell-out (Chomsky 2001)’ (331). He claims that the switch took place catastrophically in a ‘punctuated evolution’ and offers an interesting acquisition-based explanation, whereby children were exposed to new triggering experiences because of the erosion of affixes, which led to lexical restructuring via tonogenesis.

For major western European languages, Denis Delfitto and Paola Paradisi study the replacement of the Latin synthetic genitive by prepositional case assignment in Romance; Kleanthes K. Grohmann and Richard Ingham deal with Late Middle...