Historical Linguistics 1999 (review)

This book contains 23 of the papers that were presented at the International Conference on Historical Linguistics (ICHL 14), Vancouver, BC, August 1999. These papers, which range in length from 11 to 26 pages, are arranged in alphabetical order by the authors’ names and are followed by an index of languages and language families, an index of names, and an index of subjects.

Most of the articles can be roughly divided into those that deal mainly with (morpho)phonology and those that are concerned primarily with (morpho)syntax. In the first category, we find ‘Recent advances in the reconstruction of the Proto-Munda verb’ by Gregory D. S. Anderson and Norman H. Zide, ‘On ablaut and aspect in the history of Aramaic’ by Vit Bubenik, ‘Language change and the phonological lexicon of Korean’ by Young-mee Y. Cho, ‘Distinctive vowel length in Old French: Evidence and implications’ by Randall Gess, and ‘Remains of a submerged continent: Preaspiration in the languages of Northwest Europe’ by Gunnar Ólafur Hansson. Papers in which the languages dealt with are not obvious from the title include Janice M. Aski’s ‘Multivariable reanalysis and phonological split’, which examines the variable outcome of Latin /tj/ and /dj/ in a variety of Tuscan dialects, and Johanna Nichols’s ‘Why “me” and “thee”?’, which looks at the worldwide distribution of these pronouns as well as ‘mama’–‘papa’ lexemes in terms of phonosymbolism.

Among the papers that have (morpho)syntax as their major theme, there is ‘How far has far from become grammaticalized?’ by Minoji Akimoto, ‘Are Old English conjunct clauses really verb-final?’ by Kristin Bech, ‘Alternation according to person in Italo-Romance’ by Delia Bentley and Thórhallur Eythórsson, ‘On the origin of the Portuguese inflected infinitive: A new perspective on an enduring debate’ by Ana Maria Martins, ‘Innovation of the indirect reflexive in Old French’ by D.Gary Miller, ‘The English s-genitive: Animacy, topicality, and possessive relationship in a diachronic perspective’ by Anette Rosenbach, ‘Coreference in the Popolocan languages’ by Annette Veerman-Leichsenring, and ‘Atlantis Semitica: Structural contact features in Celtic and English’ by Theo Vennemann. Other languages that are the focus of research in this area are English in David Denison’s ‘Gradience and linguistic change’, Romanian in Maria M. Manoliu’s ‘The conversational factor in language change: From prenominal to postnominal demonstratives’, Mohawk in Marianne Mithun’s ‘Lexical forces shaping the evolution of grammar’, and Vedic in Gregory Stump’s ‘Default inheritance hierarchies and the evolution of inflectional classes’.

The four articles that do not fit into these two general categories are ‘Animals and vegetables, Uto-Aztecan noun derivation, semantic classification, and cultural history’ by Karen Dakin, which seeks to establish the direction in which certain borrowed terms were diffused in a number of unrelated Mesoamerican languages; ‘Rapid change among expletive polarity items’ by Jacob Hoeksema, which explores the semantic development of certain collocation relations in Dutch; ‘On the eve of a new paradigm: The current challenges to comparative linguistics in a Kuhnian perspective’ by Marie-Lucie Tarpent, wherein the author speculates on the possible emergence of a new paradigm in historical linguistics to remedy what she sees as its present-day crisis; and ‘Modeling koineization’ by Donald N. Tuten, which argues that this process should not be seen as a ‘mere reduction to a “least common denominator” ’ since it ‘can also lead to the introduction of novel features not found in any of the established contributing dialects’ (325).

According to the editor, the selection of these particular articles for publication (less than 15% of the total number of presentations) was ‘intended to display the state of current research in the field of historical linguistics’ (xi). Indeed, a remarkable...