Historical Linguistics: Questions of reconstruction and relatedness

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Historical Linguistics Questions of
reconstruction and relatedness

• Ian Roberts
• Downing College
• igr20_at_cam.ac.uk

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The Indo-European family tree
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The Indo-European Language Family
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(No Transcript)
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(More) Correspondences

• English mouse, father, three, fish
• German Maus, Vater, drei, Fisch
• Latin mus, pater, tres, piscis
• Kannada ili, appa, muru, minu

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The Comparative Method

• If a similarity between forms in two languages is
  observed this can in principle be attributed to
• Necessity (BUT linguistic signs are arbitrary,
  and cf. Kannada etc etc)
• Chance (this is always the most boring account of
  anything, but cf. English dog, Mbambaram dog)
• Borrowing (e.g. Japanese kompyutaa)
• A historical connection common origin
• So we can conclude that English and German are
  quite closely related, and that Latin is more
  distantly related to both, while Kannada is
  unrelated to either.

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Grimms Law (or the First Germanic Consonant
Shift) (oder die erste Lautverschiebung)
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Verners Law (the second Germanic consonant
shift die zweite Lautverschiebung)

• PIE bhrater- p?ter-
• Gothic broþar fadar
• German Bruder Vater
• brother father
• Why the different medial consonants?
• Verner voiceless intervocalic stops become
  voiced when the preceding vowel is unaccented.
• Sanskrit, Greek show father originally had an
  unstressed first syllable.
• (cf. http//mr-verb.blogspot.com/2009/10/verners-l
  aw-movie.html)

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The Neogrammarian Thesis

• Sound laws are exceptionless!! (Osthoff
  Brugmann 1878)
• Ausnahmslosigkeit!
• Hence phonological reconstruction can be relied
  on.
• But what about syntax?

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What we know about PIE I Phonology
Proto-Indo-European consonant segments Proto-Indo-European consonant segments Proto-Indo-European consonant segments Proto-Indo-European consonant segments Proto-Indo-European consonant segments Proto-Indo-European consonant segments Proto-Indo-European consonant segments Proto-Indo-European consonant segments
Labial Coronal Velar Velar Velar Laryngeal  
Labial Coronal palatal plain labial Laryngeal  
Nasal Nasal m n  
Plosive voiceless p t ? k k?    
Plosive voiced (b) d ? g g?    
Plosive aspirated b? d? ?? g? g??    
Fricative Fricative s h1, h2, h3  
Liquid Liquid r, l  
Semivowel Semivowel y w  
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What we know about PIE IIMorphology

• Singular Dual Plural
• Anim Neut Anim Neut Anim. Neut.
• Nominative -s, -Ø -m, -Ø -h1(e) -ih1
  -es -h2, -Ø
• Accusative -m -m,-Ø -ih1 -ih1
  -ns -h2, -Ø
• Vocative -Ø -m, -Ø -h1(e) -ih1
  -es -h2, -Ø
• Genitive -(o)s -h1e
  -om
• Dative -(e)i -me
  -mus
• Instrumental -(e)h1 -b?ih1
  -b?i
• Ablative -(o)s -ios
  -ios
• Locative -i, -Ø -h1ou -su
• (from Beekes (1995) Comparative Indo-European
  Linguistics An Introduction, John Benjamins).

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Syntax?

• Lightfoot (1998257) the kind of reanalyses
  that occur in catastrophic change constitute
  cutoff points to reconstruction. Proto-languages
  are no more amenable to reconstruction than
  proto-weather.
• Harris Campbell (1995353) syntactic
  reconstruction may be possible provided we can
  solve the correspondence problem. In phonology,
  this problem is straightforward yesterdays
  segments correspond in some fairly systematic way
  to todays (e.g. Gmc /f/ is the inherited reflex
  of PIE /p/). But what was the Latin parent of
  Létat, cest moi?
• Watkins (1976306) the confirmation by Hittite
  of virtually every assertion about Indo-European
  word order patterns made by Berthold Delbrück ..
  is .. as dramatic as the surfacing of the
  laryngeals in that language.

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The IE clause

• Hales (1995) structure for the Vedic Sanskrit
  clause
• Topic CP C Focus IP
• A tendency for the verb to be second
• (cf. also Garrett (1990) on Anatolian, Kiparsky
  (1995) on the prehistory of Germanic, Newton
  (2006) on Celtic, and Fortson (2004) for a
  summary)

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Older Germanic

• Fuß (2008) on Old High German
• Topic wh-phrase V IP
• Roberts (1996) on Old English
• Topic Focus (Verb) weak pronoun ..
  

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Latin

• a. Si bovem .. serpens momorderit.
• If cow-Acc.sg. snake-Nom.sg. has-bitten
• If a snake has bitten a cow
• (DS 116 Cato De Agri Cultura 102.1)
• b. in adulterio uxorem tuam si
  prehendisses
• in adultery wife-Acc. your-Acc if
  you-have-caught
• If you have caught your wife in adultery
• (DS 119 Cato Orat 222.1)
• probably represents a more archaic typology
• (Devine Stephens (2006) Latin Word Order OUP).

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PIE Syntax

• Null subjects (like Modern Italian, Greek)
• SOV word order (like Modern Indic)
• Wh-movement (like Modern English)
• Productive topicalisation/focalisation to the
  left periphery (like Modern Slavonic)
• Second-position effects (pronouns, adverbs,
  verbs) (like Modern Germanic, South Slavonic)

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Nostratic Syntax

• Definitely head-final (Dolgopolsky, Bomhard
  2008).
• Uh

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A related question quantifying distances between
languages

• while languages differ from one another in all
  aspects of their structure, some pairs of
  languages differ from each other more than others
  do Spanish and Portuguese are very similar to
  each other indeed, English is quite similar to
  German and Japanese is significantly unlike
  almost all other languages.
• many, if not all, of these degrees of structural
  and lexical difference can be correlated to
  historical relationships. The central activity of
  historical linguists for two centuries has been
  the establishment and organisation of these
  relationships. 
• Recent developments are changing this picture
  though

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Indo-European cladistics

• Ringe et al (2000) used techniques from
  evolutionary biology to try to identify the
  first-order subgrouping of Indo-European
  languages.
• More recent work on the same idea by Nakleh et al
  (2005), Warnow et al (2005) and
  http//www.cs.rice.edu/nakhleh/CPHL

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Character

• "an identifiable point of grammar or lexical
  meaning which evolves formally over the course of
  the language family's development, .. each state
  of the character ought to represent an
  identifiable unique historical stage of
  development - a true homology shared trait
  inherited from a common ancestor" (71).

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Examples of characters

• Ø   a lexical character Eng hand (1), Ger Hand
  (1), Fr main (2), It mano (2), Rus ruká (3).
• Ø a phonological character sequence of changes
  Grimm's Law, Verner's Law, initial-syllable
  stress, merger of unstressed e with i except
  before r. Absent 1, present 2 (singles out
  Germanic).
• Ø a morphological character most archaic
  superlative suffix 1. -isto-, 2. -ismo-, 3 etc.
  absent (2 singles out Italo-Celtic).
•  

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Database

•    24 languages representing all 10 IE
  subgroups, and 322 characters (22 phonological,
  15 morphological and the rest lexical).
•    Result of running tree-optimisation software
  18 characters were incompatible with the best
  tree, "in computational terms our result is a
  total failure (86).
•        Italo-Celtic, Balto-Slavonic, the satem
  group and Graeco-Armenian emerge as IE subgroups.

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Possible Indo-European tree(Ringe, Warnow and
Taylor 2000)
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Controversies for Indo-European history

• Subgrouping Other than the 10 major subgroups,
  what is likely to be true? In particular, what
  about
• Indo-Hittite
• Italo-Celtic,
• Greco-Armenian,
• Anatolian Tocharian,
• Satem Core?

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Our best PPN (Language, 2005)
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Modularised Global Parametrisation

• Developed by Chiara Gianollo, Christina Guardiano
  and Giuseppe Longobardi, U of Trieste
• Uses Universal Grammar syntactic parameters to
  measure distances among languages

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Universal Grammar (UG)

• the set of grammatical principles which makes
  human language possible (and defines a possible
  human language)
• determined by the human genome
• physically exists (in res extensa) in the brain
• otherwise known as the language faculty, the
  language acquisition device (LAD), the initial
  state of language acquisition and the language
  bioprogram.

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Some assumptions

• a. There exists a rich, innate language faculty
  (UG) which is a species characteristic.
• b. There are no racial or cultural biases towards
  particular languages or language types.
• c. There is clear evidence that a sentence which
  is well-formed in one language L may be
  ill-formed in some other language L
•   i. John Mary hit.
• ii. John-ga Mary-o butta.

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UG contains

• invariant principles
• associated parameters of variation
• OV (e.g. Japanese, German) vs. VO (e.g. English,
  Italian).
• UG principles define V, O and how they go
  together (VP) a parameter determines their
  order.

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Parameters tell us what is variant (and by
implication what is invariant) in grammars, and
as such they -

•         predict the dimensions of language
  typology
•         predict aspects of language acquisition
•         predict what can change in the
  diachronic dimension.
•  
• A particular language L is an instantiation of
  the initial state of the cognitive system of the
  language faculty with options specified (Chomsky
  (1995219)).
•  

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Things that can vary inside a simple nominal
expression (a DP)

• Ø      is number marked?
• (English YES Japanese NO)
• Ø      is there a system of articles?
• (English YES Japanese NO)
• Ø      is there a system of classifiers?
• (English NO Japanese YES)

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The expression of possession

• Type A Possessor gt Possessee
• Johns sister
• John-no imooto-ga
• Type B Possessee gt Possessor
• la soeur de Jean (French)
• chwaer Siôn (Welsh)

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Method

• Parameters limited to the extended nominal phrase
  (DP)
• 27 languages from 4 families (IE, Semitic, Uralic
  and Niger-Kordofanian)
• 57 binary parameters

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TABLE A
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Optimisation by Kitch
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Optimisation by UPGMA57
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An approach to measuring relatedness which relies
on parametric syntax has certain advantages over
an approach based on lexical similarities

• discreteness the values of a parameter do not
  form a continuum or cline of any kind
• binarity a maximally simple range of
  possibilities
• finiteness the number of parameters is finite,
  and in fact rather small, usually thought to be
  more than 20 but less than 100
• no uncertainty of comparanda we are in principle
  always sure when we are comparing like with
  like (Guardiano Longobardi (20034))

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A possible synthesis

• treat parameter values as characters, thereby
  adding syntax to the cladistic comparison.
• The parametric grid can be taken to indicate the
  syntactic characters.

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Backmutation (or homeoplasy)

• "either improbable or vanishly rare" (70), i.e.
  "we simply do not find cases in which the
  contrast between two elements A and B in a
  structured system is eliminated from the
  language, then .. reintroduced in precisely the
  same distribution that it originally exhibited"
  (ibid). Clearly true of phonemic split/merger,
  loss/gain of inflection, changes in word-meaning,
  etc. But is it true of parameters?
• The case of French and the null-subject parameter.

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Homoplasy-free evolution

• When a character changes state, it changes to a
  new state not in the tree
• In other words, there is no homoplasy (character
  reversal or parallel evolution)
• First inferred for weird innovations in
  phonological characters and morphological
  characters in the 19th century.

0
0
1
0
0
0
0
1
1
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Two issues

• Parallel development (analogy rather than
  homology) such cases must simply be set aside.
  Alternatively one can take sets of changes rather
  than individual changes as evidence for clades.
  In any case, it seems doubtful that syntactic
  change poses any problems not already encountered
  in the area of phonology.
• much less is known about the syntax of a number
  of older IE languages compared to their
  phonology, lexicon and morphology (see above).

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Conclusion

• Syntax has played a relatively minor role in
  establishing relations among languages, but this
  can change.
• Parametric comparison can quantify grammatical
  differences and thus play a major role in
  developing our theories of typology, acquisition
  and change.
• Cladistic methods combined with parametric
  comparison may shed light on major questions in
  historical linguistics.

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THANK YOU!!