Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Preliminaries
- 3 Linguistic areas and diffusion
- 4 The family tree model
- 5 Modes of change
- 6 The punctuated equilibrium model
- 7 More on proto-languages
- 8 Recent history
- 9 Today's priorities
- 10 Summary and prospects
- Appendix – where the comparative method discovery procedure fails
- References
- Index
1 - Introduction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Preliminaries
- 3 Linguistic areas and diffusion
- 4 The family tree model
- 5 Modes of change
- 6 The punctuated equilibrium model
- 7 More on proto-languages
- 8 Recent history
- 9 Today's priorities
- 10 Summary and prospects
- Appendix – where the comparative method discovery procedure fails
- References
- Index
Summary
Current work on the relationship between languages tends to be in terms either of a family tree model of ‘parent-and-child’ linkage, or of a linguistic area model of the diffusion of categories and forms between adjacent languages. Family tree and linguistic area are most often treated as distinct phenomena; in this essay I will attempt to integrate them within a global view of linguistic development.
A language does not exist in a vacuum but is the means for communication within a group of people, with a certain political and economic system. An integrated theory of language development must pay attention to the way of life of the group speaking a known language, or the postulated earlier stage of a language, and their political, social and linguistic relationships with neighbouring groups speaking other languages.
The family tree model was developed for – and is eminently appropriate to – the Indo-European (IE) language family. It has become the received view of how languages are related, so that linguists attempt to discover an IE-like family tree structure in every group of languages, from anywhere in the world (whatever their typological profile); along with this goes an attempt at detailed subgrouping. But in many cases there is no serious attempt to reconstruct part of the system of a proto-language (which is needed, as proof of a family-tree-type genetic relationship). For some groups of languages – for instance, Semitic and Polynesian – the family tree model is entirely applicable. For others it may be less so; the similarities that have been taken as evidence for genetic relationship may really be due to areal diffusion.
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- The Rise and Fall of Languages , pp. 1 - 6Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1997
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