Why do languages change? (review)

Larry (Robert Lawrence) Trask was a well-known member of the linguistics community and a professor of linguistics at the University of Sussex. His premature death in 2004 at the age of 59 (from motor neurone disease) was a cause of deep regret to many. He was admired above all for his scholarly work on the Basque language (a tongue that prior to his work had inspired more than its share of bizarre ideas), but also for his clearly written introductions to both general and historical linguistics. Those of us who also write on these topics (e.g. Aitchison 2001, 2010) are saddened to have lost someone who contributed so clearly and helpfully to these fields. Sadly, the book under review will be the last written by him. It was finally published in 2010, having been left incomplete, and the manuscript was revised by Robert McColl Millar, a senior lecturer at the University of Aberdeen. According to the publisher, it is impossible to disentangle the roles played by each, though Trask is named as the author, and I continue to refer here to the author as T, even though M may well be responsible for some of the good (and not as good) points found in the book.

The text shows the customary clarity of T’s work. The book is really an introduction to an introduction, as it is written at a more elementary level than his chunky 430-page book on historical linguistics, which he himself claimed to be ‘an introductory textbook’ (Trask 1996:ix). Indeed, this final book might be better titled An intro to language change since it clearly does not just address the question of Why do languages change?, as ‘Why are languages always changing?’ forms only one chapter (Ch. 2).

The book contains eight chapters, which are arranged in a coherent order. Ch. 1, ‘How do languages change?’, provides a sample of different types of change. The sample begins (sensibly enough) with word meaning, since this is probably the easiest way to introduce language alterations to beginning students. The chapter then moves on to changes in grammar. The selection of the progressive passive as a linguistic example is useful, outlining the historical move from My house is painting to the more recent My house is being painted. There follow ten examples of the stages of the change, from 1662 to 1983. The linguist David Denison, we are told (8), was the source of almost all of the examples, yet Denison’s widely read book (Denison 1993) is not properly referenced anywhere, nor is it mentioned in the ‘Further reading’ (187–89), although all ten examples are easily found in Denison’s well-organized chapter on the progressive (Denison 1993:389, 391). Similarly, the very next page (9) contains two more unreferenced examples from Denison in a discussion of the perfect (Denison 1993:359). Surely it was the task of M to check these easy-to-find references in his revision—whatever that entailed—since a sick T might understandably have postponed this task.

The chapter then moves on to the changing sounds of the language. Yet disappointingly, in spite of an outline discussion of the American Northern Cities Shift and recent changes in the UK’s Received Pronunciation (RP), there are no lists of phonetic symbols anywhere in the book, and no phonetics books are referenced even in the further reading section. There is a single phonetics figure (1.1) illustrating the geographical distribution of the American cot/caught merger (14).

The best section of this chapter is probably the useful discussion of the increase in ‘uptalk’, the informal name for high-rise terminals (rising intonation at the ends of statements), as in Well, we went canoeing on the lake? (18). Unfortunately, however, no further information is provided about those who have worked on this phenomenon, beyond mention of an article in The Guardian (21 September 2001). Extra references on this topical issue could usefully have been added to the section...