I want to talk
now about historical linguistics and
the role they played in my career and
some thoughts about the right way and
the wrong way to do historical
linguistics through the right way and
the wrong way to look at it. Historical
linguistics like any historical
enterprise including political history
or social history or what-have-you
has to focus ultimately on the issue
 whether the transmission of
languages or social structures across
time is basically revolutionary or
basically conservative. Now the issue,  the
difficulty in making that decision is
that one way of... one form of conservatism is keeping the basic underlying
structure going while changing all the
details so that the surface is changing
but the the underlying substance is not
this is what makes historical
linguistics ultimately I think an
interesting issue - do we change for
the sake of change? Is change constantly
occurring on its own? Is it is it driven
by some external propulsion? or is it
just a lot of reshuffling of the cards
so that you end up with the same hand at
the at the end of the day. Alright I was
an undergraduate at Harvard in 1967 to
'71. I had the very good fortune of being
among some very good historical
linguists there, including
Calvert Watkins who was probably the dominant
Indo-Europeanist of his era
including Frank Cross a specialist in Northwest Semitic languages
including Thorkild Jacobsen a famous Assyriologist and also Einar Hagen a famous Norwegian
linguist with a lot of interests in
language contact and heritage languages
and language politics and things of that
sort in addition there were junior
faculty members who were very helpful to
me including Anthony Arlotto
so it was an environment where there was
a lot of interest in historical
linguistics there was also
some interest in American Indian
languages there. There was in particular
there were people there working on
Algonquian languages and languages
related to Algonquin including
Karl Teeter and Ives Goddard so there was a circle of people and although I never
really got into those particular
languages or language families very
deeply I absorbed a lot from that
environment and it had had a lot of
influence on my thinking about language
in general and not just about processes
of historical change. In a nutshell my...  as my career has evolved my emphasis in
historical linguistics has been on
cycles of disruption and repair now by
disruption I usually mean some kind of
phonological changes that are disruptive
to the to the morphology and I will say
that most of the languages I've worked on
are languages with fairly rich and
some cases extremely rich morphology so
that keeping the system going is no easy
matter when there are disruptive forces
at work. Now the disruptions themselves
are somewhat interesting. Perhaps the
least interesting or the most obvious is
just simple phonetic attrition of the
sort that frequently happens at the end
of words where the final vowel or the
final consonant or even the final
syllable gets reduced
or deleted or things like syncope which
does pretty much the same thing
immediately in words of three or more
syllables so just simple phonetic
attrition which is it just it happens
it's the the normal course of events
over time for phonological systems
now I became interested in one
particular type of phonological shift
not necessarily.... not necessarily
destructive but more in terms of
shifting features. I became interested in
the idea that the vowel cycles that
people have talked about going back to
the English vowel shift  - the great
vowel shift and also the various
cyclical phenomena that Bill Labov and
others have described for English
dialects I became interested in the idea
that one driving factor in that is a
a pull toward the sound the vowel [i]
written with with the letter i usually
in IPA but [i] as the sound and
that the movements
of the type [æ] to [ɛ] to [e] to [i] were pull chains as there was something pulling people or certain
types of people to that and I connected
that with John Ohala a phonetician
his work on frequency code and on the
idea that the the vowel [i] because of its
high second formant and its second
formant interacts with the third formant
and so you get a kind of a... what is
perceived often it's a high-pitched vowel
even if it isn't really high-pitched and
that that fed into the business about
daintiness or lack of threat
of things that are high-pitched and
therefore you can be presumed to be
small and inoffensive as opposed to
darker heavier vowels like [ɑ] which we
would associate in the other direction
that are perceived to
some degree is having lower pitches and
coming from larger creatures than
the ones that have vowels like [i] so
I became interested in that as a way of
accounting for...it's one of the drivers
of these cyclical changes. Now for that
to work you have to kind of get into
delicate territory because the
social linguistics of those things is
this often described as being very
gender specific with women moving in one
direction and men either moving nowhere
or moving occasionally in the
other direction and there was a lot of
evidence for that - not that that's the
that gender as such is the real
phenomenon in question it's much more of
a psychological thing or a.. what you
might call femininity and masculinity as
symbolic patterns but anyway there did seem to be considerable
evidence that this was going on so
that's one disruptive effect and I did a
paper with Matt Gordon the sociolinguist Matt Gordon is now at
University of Missouri on that in
current anthropology. Another type of
in addition to just regular attrition and
this type of social linguistically
motivated or social phonetically
motivated shift all of which can disrupt
by neutralizing by merging vowels and so
forth in addition to that there's
substratum effects in the course of
language shift. So typically you've got a
substratum they've got their language
with their prosodic and phonological
patterns and another language
comes in, sweeps over and in a
certain number of generations everybody
switched to the new language the
target language but they keep the
prosodic and phonological patterns of
the original substratum language, so this
would be your your rapid spread of
languages like Indo-European, which ended
up being pronounced in radically
different ways in different parts of
the world depending on what the
substrata were, Romance languages which
are very different in...  pronounced
very differently in France and the
Iberian Peninsula and in Romania because
of the languages the substrata languages
or even adstrata languages so the idea
of language contact that has
phonological effects all of these can
disrupt morphology a very good example
of the the latter is old the oldest
dialects of Moroccan Arabic which I am
convinced were lost their vowel length
distinction under the influence of a
substratum which was none other than Latin
None other than late Latin as
still spoken into the... into perhaps the
eighth century in the northern areas
of Morocco. So there are disruptive
effects most of which don't have
anything to do with function... they don't
care about function they don't care
about what disruptions they caused
in the morphology but once they happen
the morphology has to patch itself up
has to keep going and so how does that
happen? well I have to go back to my
undergraduate days at Harvard where my
specialty my own specialty was
Uto-Aztecan languages. Now the Boston area is not terribly well known for as a
location where you're going to
get lots of Hopi and Shoshone or
Aztec people going
through. So my work was entirely from books
Fortunately Uto-Aztecan is
blessed with a very long tradition of
excellent descriptive grammars going
back to Edward Sapir even beyond that to
some of the great Mexican Spanish
linguists of the post-colonial period
and people like Benjamin Lee Whorf and
Sidney Lamb and a lot of other people
have worked on individual Uto-Aztecan languages so there's there is a very
good literature on many of them but
with the exception of the very early
work by Edward Sapir on the historical
linguistics which is which was based on
a very limited amount of data there
hasn't been very much good historical
work on Uto-Aztecan and so I had an opportunity to do that and I wrote a
very long undergraduate honors thesis
several hundred pages although that was
with very large letters and generous
margins and generous line spacing so
probably would have been much more than
a 150 pages nowadays but it was
my first major work in historical
linguistics. Now it was about verbal
morphology and verbal morphophonemics and it was I think competent but not
theoretically very exciting but later on
I became... I went back to Uto-Aztecan
and it was from the point of view of
how repair functions when you have
when you have attrition or other
processes that are making the
the incumbent or inherited morphology
putting it on the edge of extinction so
typically when you have suffixes that
are down to one consonant because the
vowel has been attrited. And so i was interested in the process of how those things are renewed
And I showed that, or tried to show that in several cases what had happened
was that they kept the word forum with the suffix at the end being attrited and what
they did is they brought in another
morpheme such as a verb that was hanging
around out there and they brought that in
and the connection being that the verb
began with the same consonant as what
the endangered suffix that was
still there but just barely hanging on
in the form of a single constant you
brought it in so what you were doing was
you were saving the morphology by
bulking up on the suffix
phonologically bulking up where it was
in the process of disappearing... hadn't
quite disappeared but was on the verge
of disappearing. Now I called those
hermit crab restructurings and I found
some other examples of that. I'm actually
inclined to think that the
Germanic dental preterites have a...
the development of that in Gothic I
think is the same kind of process where
you have you have a suffix and you have
a verb out here and they get they get
connected so that the larger
paradigm brings in a verb form in
the form of the suffix well anyway that
was that was one form of repair where
the key is that the suffix and the
independently occurring stem begin with
the same segment in general with the
consonant. So there's a link not
necessarily a very close link in the
meaning but a phonological connecting
thread that facilitates that merger
now this is an in opposition to models
where you when you see as a suffix that
looks like a verb that you can identify
with the verb you assume that there was
a an original construction,
with one verb here in another verb
here perhaps a subordinated verb or an
infinitive or something and that you
have a gradual process of grammaticalization where this gets squashed into
from syntax into morphology a kind of
thing that the grammaticalization
theorists talk about. So I was arguing
for a different process a more abrupt
one where you repair an existing
structure rather than jettisoning it and
allowing a new structure to come in from
the syntax and become gradually grammaticalized.
Another example of this type that
I found in connection with Australian
languages was what I called lost wax as
a process of repair. Now lost wax as a
way of doing bronze sculpture. What you
do is you create molds you have an inner
mold and an outer mold and in between
you've got some wax that's in the shape
of the thing you're trying to make and
then what you do is you pour molten
bronze into the cracks and it drives out
the wax and then the bronze hardens and
then you pull the molds out and you've
got your structure. The reason that
that metaphor was interesting to me was
because in these Australian languages
you have what we call a direct inverse
system what that means is that you have
a subject and object marking in the verb
subject and object agreement you have
but instead of having the subject here
in its slot now all the different
subject possibilities in another slot
which has the object markers instead you
have a linear order that's determined by
pronominal hierarchy so first and
second person always comes first and
then the third person human plural and
the third person human singular and then
the various non-human classes. So you
don't know just from the just from the
position of the pronominals which one
is the subject in which one is the
object.
So what you do is you put a morpheme
called the inverse morpheme in between
the subject and the... in between the first
element and the second one if the first
element is the object and the second one
is the is the subject. So if it's "me" and
then "him" here - if that means "I saw him"
or I did something to him nothing
happens if it means he did something to
me
it's gonna be "I" inverse "he" and then
the rest of the of the verb. So this is a
critically important relational morpheme.
This is a morpheme that you can't do
without because if it disappears you
have massive confusion as to what
is subject and what is object
well in some of these languages the
inverse morpheme was in fact attrited
and it was in some cases it was a
nasal and then it would be zeroed before
another nasal and so that was really a
problem that was looming and what the
language did was it found another
morpheme that had a syllable shape and
occurred as a kind of epenthetic
context and a very limited range of
forms on the edges of this
inverse system and it got a got a foot
in the door in one of these combinations
and then it spread like wildfire through
all of the of the inverse combinations.
So you end up with a very productive... so you saved the system while replacing the key
the absolutely essential
morpheme being replaced throughout
by this other morpheme and this must have
happened before the old morphine was
totally dead must have happened while
the old morphine was still visibly
present and at least a subset of those
combinations. So it was a repair
It was not something were you the system
collapsed and then you started all over
again and you rebuilt it up from scratch.
It was a repair it was a it showed how
important it was for speakers of this
image to keep that system going even
under the threat of attrition. So that's
another another way to do it not
involving phonological..  the same consonants or anything like that but the same basic principle.
Now in the Moroccan case
that I'm talking about, if you know
anything about Arabic you know that
vowel length is very important
grammatically and lexically so for
example you make a participle out of the
verb by lengthening the the the [a] vowel
you various plurals are expressed by
with long vowels it's very important in
the in the morphology as well as in the
basic lexicon. Now when Moroccan Arabic first came
into northern Morocco and you had people
speaking late latin and you had only a
few Arabised Berber soldiers holding the
fort for the Arabs you had a situation
where the substratum pronunciation could
dramatically affect the
pronunciation of arabic and that's what
happened and at the time late Latin like
early Romance had long since lost vowel
length distinctions from from early
classical Latin and so the vowel length
disappeared in the oldest forms
of Moroccan Arabic. Now that sets off a
whole set of changes particularly
in verbs. I won't go into the details but
it led to a dramatic restructuring
where what you end up with is a kind of
crazy identity of one half of the
perfected paradigm with the imperfective
paradigm leaving the other part of the
protective paradigm by itself. We're
talking about the form of the verb
itself before pronominal endings and
it's because of the flattening of the
distinction between short [o] and long
[oː] and short [i]  and
long [iː] and the result is to create
artificially or secondarily
or by accident a homophony
between the imperfective and part of the
perfective paradigm and then this
pattern spreads to other cases where
there was no historical reason for that
change to happen - just that became the
pattern that the imperfective for
all categories and the first and second
person perfective that's now a
morphological unit and then the third
person perfective is a different one and
that spreads throughout the verbal
system so this is not so much a repair
because it doesn't really...
it doesn't really solve any functional problems but it's an example of a reorganization
that is triggered - accidentally - by a
phonological system anyway I think you
can gather from the comments I've
made that I don't have much
use for extreme forms of grammaticalization theory I think that in many
cases of what's really happening is not
that you have a syntactic construction
that has a kind of built-in destiny to
contract and move into the grammar and
push some some older incumbent
construction out of the grammar without
any reference to what's around it I'm
much more interested in historical
processes that are conservative in
nature, rather than unnecessarily
disruptive in nature. I'm talking about
grammatical changes not phonological and
where the the system the incumbent
system brings things in selectively
to keep itself going so it doesn't just
get bombarded with new constructions
barging their way into the grammar,
rather the native system
the speakers of the language have a lot
invested in that native system
and they they work hard to keep it going. So my
general philosophical approach is that
historical linguistics with the
exception of the language contact
phenomena but if languages are left on
their own without socially disruptive
phenomena happening involving other
languages they're gonna...they're
going to be fairly similar from one
point in time to another. Even when
a lot of the the actual grammatical
morphemes have been reshuffled
and so I think I understand what
Edward Sapir was getting at when he thought he said long ago that languages the pattern
of a particular language family could be
distinctive even when the morphemes have
been replaced by other morphemes. He was
thinking of cases like Algonquin and the
the California languages that are
related to it. He was thinking of things
like Athabascan and he was looking at
the he was thinking about how you get
these patterns which keep going even as
the superficial details vary.
Now recently... I used to think that a
lot of this was about functionalism I
used to think that repair was something
because when you had these disruptive
forces it meant that there was going
to be ambiguities and so forth
and that was really what the repair was
all about. I have lately begun
reconsidering that, although I still
think that where there are...
there is a threat of significant
ambiguity that that's that is enough to
to induce speakers to repair the grammar
but I've been reading all this work
about simplification and in
complexification of languages and I've
been reading the work of people like
like McWhorter and so if
worth and they've partially convinced me
that elaborate morphological complexity
is kind of decorative it isn't really
necessary for conveying messages that
speakers are... also David Gill points out
that you don't really need much grammar
to get your meanings across as long as
the speaker is coming from the same
place that you are and that has made me
reconsider the idea that repair in
historical linguistics is primarily
about saving the ship from sinking
It might simply be at least in some cases
or to some extent that it's just really
a matter of habit. That is that speakers
new speakers come into the world and
they learn the language of their of
their parents and their elders and they
acquire habits of speaking and that as
as these phonological disruptive effects
happen they disrupt the way you have
learned to speak they don't necessarily
cause massive
miscommunication or ambiguity that gets
you into trouble or causes people to
drive off cliffs and so forth but
that it... it is... just disrupts the way you
are used to speaking and the people
around you have been speaking so that it
might be that repair is something that's
going to happen even with forms of
morphology that aren't really critically
essential but that are just the way
we've... we are used to speaking and that
would be a different kind of way of
looking at at conservatism
that it isn't just about fighting to
maintain the integrity of language as a
communicative system - but it's it's a way
of fighting to maintain
the the styles of speaking that we are
used to
