5. Diversity and Stability in Language.pdf

5. Diversity and Stability in Language : The Handbook of Historical Linguistics : Blackwell Reference Online

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5. Diversity and Stability in Language

JOHANNA NICHOLS

Subject

Linguistics » Historical Linguistics

Key-Topics

cultural diversity , language

DOI:

10.1111/b.9781405127479.2004.00007.x

It is a textbook truism that some things in language are prone to change more rapidly than others, and that

some things are readily borrowed and others are not. For example, high-frequency verbs are less likely to

undergo analogical leveling than less frequent ones, and basic vocabulary is less likely to be borrowed than

cultural terminology. (For analogy and contact see Anttila, Dressler, Hock, and Thomason, this volume,

respectively.) These are cases of relative stability, and they require probabilistic modeling. This chapter is a

programmatic inquiry into the different kinds of stability that linguistic elements can exhibit and the

different degrees to which they can exhibit them. Stability or instability, it will be shown, is a matter of

competing forces, and explaining the uniformity or diversity of reflexes across a set of daughter languages

requires tracking separately the item's propensity to be inherited, its propensity to be restructured, its

propensity to be borrowed, etc., as well as the carrying power of any potential competitors. Diversity arises

when some element is relatively unstable and therefore prone to replacement in various ways. Of course we

are far from being able to reduce the different stabilities and viabilities of various linguistic elements to

precise numbers, and in any event language change is not entirely deterministic, but the discussion here is

intended to spur the kind of cross-linguistic work required to estimate stability and identify recurrent strong

and weak points in linguistic structure. For the most part, broad typological categories will be at issue here,

although in reality what a language inherits or borrows is not, say, ergativity in the abstract but a particular

pattern and its markers (e.g., ergative inflection of nouns with ergative case suffix - ek ). The Caucasus, with

its several language families and many contact situations, is a natural laboratory for surveying stability and

diversity, and it provides most of the examples used below. 1

1 Kinds of Diversity and Stability

1.1 Different kinds of diversity

Diversity, by the standard definition, obtains when a number of different features, properties, or types are

found in a population.

Consider the various major word-order types: SOV, SVO, VSO, etc. A language family is diverse to the extent

that the types are all well represented, and homogeneous to the extent that one type predominates. By this

measure, the Austronesian, Semitic, and Indo-European families are all fairly diverse with regard to word

order, as SOV, SVO, and verb-initial order are all found in all three families. (Maximal diversity would have

all basic types represented with about equal frequency, a situation which does not obtain in any language

family I know of.) In contrast to these families with diverse word order, Nakh-Daghestanian, another family

of a great age, has almost exclusively SOV word order among its daughter languages and is therefore highly

homogeneous.

Not only families but also areas can be described as diverse versus homogeneous. The Balkan language area

is relatively homogeneous in the word orders, morphologies, and consonant inventories of its constituent

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is relatively homogeneous in the word orders, morphologies, and consonant inventories of its constituent

languages, while the Caucasus is relatively homogeneous in word order (which is SOV in nearly all of the

languages) but quite diverse morphologically and in morpheme and syllable structure. The Pacific Northwest

of North America is diverse in all three properties. The languages of New Guinea are quite homogeneous in

word order (almost entirely SOV) but phonologically and morphologically diverse. The languages of Australia

are strikingly similar in phonology, not greatly different in word order, and moderately diverse in

morphology.

These are examples of structural diversity and structural homogeneity. The term “diversity” can also be used

of family tree structure and genetic origins. A language family can be described as diverse if it has many

high-order branches, and the languages in a geographical area can be called diverse if they represent many

different families. This chapter leaves genetic diversity aside and deals only with structural diversity.

1.2 Different kinds of stability

In this chapter stable does not mean “immutable”; it means “more resistant to change, loss, or borrowing

(than other elements of language).” Nothing in language, of course, is truly immutable. In fact nothing even

comes close to immutability. Few provable language families are much older than about 6000 years, which

means that after not much over 6000 years few things remain sufficiently unchanged to permit detection of

their original unity. After the 100,000 or so years representing the age of anatomically modern humanity, we

have no way of determining whether all the world's language families descend from a single ancestor or not.

Compare this with the record of biological genetics, which is able to trace descent lines back with certainty

for millions of years. We do not know and cannot know whether English and Navajo ultimately descend from

the same ancestor language of 100,000 years ago (or even more recently), while we do know that humans

and chimpanzees descend from a single ancestor species of about five million years ago.

Table 5.1 Three Indo-European features and their stability in selected daughter languages.

Language 1sg. suppletion Genders Declension classes

English Yes

German Yes

Yes

Traces

Lithuanian Yes

Yes

Russian Yes

Yes

Bulgarian Yes

Yes

French

Yes

Albanian Yes

Yes

In part

Ossetic Yes

Armenian Yes

Traces

Linguistic stability may therefore seem to be something of a misnomer. Some elements of languages,

however, are more prone to change than others, and stable is the best term for those that are least prone to

change.

1.2.1 Stability of a system in a family

Most Indo-European daughter languages preserve the suppletive stems of the first person pronoun * eĝō :

* me . Fewer, but still a good many, preserve the inherited gender system or a collapsed version of it with

merger of the old neuter and masculine genders. Still fewer preserve the original system of noun declension

classes or even the major classes (see table 5.1 ). We can say that the first person pronoun stem suppletion

is very stable in Indo-European, gender is fairly stable, and the declension classes are not particularly stable.

A theory of genetic stability will identify and explain these and other more and less stable phenomena in the

world's language families, and empirical cross-family surveys will tell us what features actually are most and

least genetically stable.

Ergativity provides another example. As will be discussed in more detail below, ergativity is a recessive

feature (Nichols 1993), that is, a feature which is almost always lost by at least some daughter languages in

a family and is not readily borrowed in contact situations. Thus, though not always inherited, when found in

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a language it is more likely to have been inherited than borrowed. Therefore, ergativity can be an important

component of the grammatical signature of a language family: not every daughter language has it, but its

mere presence in several or most languages of the family helps characterize the family and identify

languages belonging to the family. Should we call it stable or not? A theory of stability will give us

terminology and a descriptive apparatus for various kinds of retention situations.

1.2.2 Cross-linguistic stability of a type of system

Agglutinating suffixal morphology, simple syllable structure, vowel harmony, cases, and head-final word

order characterize languages of several different families in northern Eurasia. Some of these traits are known

to be linked by typological implicational relations, but not all of them (the various implications are discussed

in Greenberg 1963; Dryer 1992; Plank 1998). The whole set of traits can be described as stable in northern

Eurasia. A full theory of stability should be able to account for where the stability resides (in the syllable

structure? in the head-final principle? in cross-categorial relations?) and why it has taken root so firmly in

this area but nowhere else.

1.2.3 Cross-linguistic and inter-linguistic durability of a single element

There are cases of specific structural traits which seem to be cross-linguistically favored and are stable in

families where they are present and prone to spread areally from languages having them to languages

lacking them. Accusative alignment is an example; SVO order, in comparison to other VO types, is another.

These are the favored, or most frequent, or unmarked types in their categories, and their status has received

much theoretical attention over the years. Another kind of cross-linguistic durability arises where small

systems of elements are strongly glued together by phonosymbolic or paronomastic resonances, to be

discussed below (section 3.2). The formal coding of small resonant systems is likely to be stable if already

present, and likely to be borrowed if available, where it is phonosymbolic. A theory of stability can account

for this heightened viability and quantify it for purposes of modeling its tendency to spread.

2 Stability in Transmission

2.1 Inherited and acquired elements

The normal state of affairs in language transmission is that all elements of language are transmitted, and

therefore that they are inherited by daughter languages from ancestral languages. Of course, in reality not

everything is inherited. In addition to being inherited, elements of language can be acquired from various

sources in various ways: by borrowing, through substratal effects, and as a result of what I will call selection .

Selection is the process whereby elements that embody language universals, cross-categorial harmony,

unmarked terms, and other typological desiderata are incorporated into a language. An allophone,

allomorph, word order variant, etc. may either expand or retract in function, and evidently the universally

preferred, unmarked, and otherwise favored variants are most prone to expand and have a good chance of

eventually ending up as the main or sole variant.

An element is lost if it is not inherited. A lost element may be replaced (with an acquired one, or with an

extended or reanalyzed one), or it may go unreplaced.

In linguistic transmission, unlike biological transmission, acquired elements are inheritable. Whether the

ancestral language obtained a given trait by inheritance or acquisition is immaterial as far as further

transmission is concerned: the expectation is that new traits as well as old ones will be inherited. For

example, Proto-Slavic * melko - ‘milk’ was borrowed from Germanic, but it was a Proto-Slavic word

nonetheless and was inherited by the Slavic daughter languages just as the ultimately native vocabulary was.

The theory of stability sketched out here attempts to determine the propensity of various elements of

language for inheritance, acquisition of various kinds, and loss. What is at issue is inheritance versus non-

inheritance from language to language and not from generation to generation or individual to individual in

the speech-community. Of course, language learning by the individual is the day-to-day mechanism of

language transmission and change, but this study deals with the longer-term results, after variation has to

some extent been sorted out and we can speak of a norm and a grammar and a daughter language. A time

frame of 1000–1500 years is about what it takes for an ancestor language to give rise to a set of clearly

distinct daughter languages, and this is probably the shortest period of time to which study of inheritance

and non-inheritance can usefully be applied.

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Not considered at all in this sketch of stability are two of the most important considerations in all of

historical linguistics: sound change and sociolinguistics. Sound change occurs constantly, always threatening

to unravel or destroy inherited systems no matter how strong their propensity for inheritance. Sociolinguistic

factors of contact and prestige are the major determinants of whether and to what extent borrowing,

substratal effects, and selection take place. Modeling stability requires that the inherent inheritability,

borrowability, etc. of linguistic elements be determined independent of the particular situations that trigger

particular instances of borrowing, selection, etc. Sound change is, however, involved in stability to the extent

that high propensity to be inherited entails high propensity to head off the consequences of sound change

by restructuring or reanalysis.

2.2 Measuring propensity to be inherited, acquired, or lost

The normal situation is what happens in a conservative language: things are inherited from the ancestral

language. That is, the probability of inheritance is absolutely high overall. In this survey, however, the

absolutely high tendency for inheritance will be ignored, and elements will be described as relatively high

versus relatively low in their tendency to be inherited.

Table 5.2 Sample scenarios and hypothetical outcomes

Scenario

Inherit

Borrow

Substratum

Select

(a)

High

Low

(b)

High

Low

(c)

Low

High

(d)

High

Low

High

(e)

Low

High

Low

(f)

Low

High

(g)

Low

Note :

* = unknown or not considered

(a) The item is inherited in most of the daughter languages.

(b) The element is borrowed in several of the daughter languages.

source, the daughter languages will exhibit an acquired resemblance.

(d) The element is inherited in most of the daughter languages, but replaced in several that have

prominent substratal effects.

(e) The element is unstable in the daughter languages, often replaced though not by borrowing,

often retained from a substratum where there was one. If several daughter languages share the

same substratum, it will look as though a rare and unstable feature has been independently

innovated several times.

(f) Non-inherited or non-cognate forms in the daughter languages converge (multiple parallel

innovation, or similar outputs from different processes or sources).

(g) Structural change occurs independently in several or many daughter languages: the element is

lost and not replaced.

The different transmission probabilities can be summarized as follows:

• Inheritance: High (the default); low.

• Borrowing: High; neutral (the default); low.

• Substratum: High; neutral?; low. It is not clear whether neutral and low are different, and if so

which is default; there has been too little study of substratum.

• Selection: High; neutral; low; n/a. (Selection generally operates on forms, or on values of

categories, so its applicability depends on what element is at issue.)

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Table 5.2 gives some examples of different transmission probabilities and their likely outcomes. To judge

genetic stability, assume we are dealing with a family of considerable age with a good number of daughter

languages; the effects of the different transmission probabilities make themselves felt in the statistical

distribution of various elements in the daughter languages. To judge areal stability, assume a linguistic area

involving languages from several different families; the transmission probabilities make themselves felt in

the consistency or diversity of an element in the various languages.

In scenario (a), the element is genetically stable. In the others, it is genetically unstable in various ways and

to various extents. In (b)-(e), areal effects can make themselves felt, and in (c) and (e) we have different

kinds of areal stability.

Linguistic practice is aware of different propensities to be inherited, borrowed, etc., but it does not take

explicit enough cognizance of the fact that transmission is a two-sided or several-sided matter. It is not

enough to know only whether an element is likely to be inherited, or whether it is likely to be acquired. To

account for the probability of various transmission scenarios in a contact situation, it is necessary to know

both the propensity of the item to be inherited and its propensity to be acquired.

2.3 Stability, viability, etc.

A number of different kinds of linguistic perseverance can be distinguished and may need to be

distinguished terminologically. Genetic stability obtains when there is both high probability of inheritance

and low probability of acquisition. A genetically stable system or category therefore tends to be retained in a

family. High probability of inheritance, borrowing, substratal retention, and /or selection can be termed

viability. A viable form or paradigm tends to be retained if already present or acquired if available.

The term recessive describes features with low probability of inheritance and low probability of borrowing

(e.g., ergativity, described as recessive in Nichols 1993). A recessive feature tends to become less and less

frequent over time in a family or area.

For a maximally explicit technical terminology, it may prove useful to reserve stable for genetic stability and

choose a term such as consistent for areal stability. Terms such as dominant and persistent could be used

for high propensity to be acquired by borrowing or from a substratum respectively. A generic term may be

needed for the two kinds of viability represented by high inheritability and substratal persistence, both of

which are kinds of tenacious resistance to other alternatives. A full terminology will not be proposed here, as

identification of the phenomena actually in need of labels is best left to emerge from an empirical literature.

2.4 A full theory of stability and diversity

The goal of a theory of stability and diversity is to account for the probability of various elements of

language to be inherited or acquired, and the various conditions that may hold for particular elements and

scenarios. This will include working out the relative viability of broad structural categories such as word

order and alignment, more specific categories such as verb-initial order and ergative alignment, and still

more specific form-meaning-structure sets such as (hypothetically) ergative case paradigms of nouns with

case suffixes -Ø (nominative), - lo (ergative), - sa (dative).

Since stability is never absolute, it can be thought of as the mortality rate or life expectancy of a feature of

an ancestral language. It can be modeled as the inheritance rate for ancestor-to-daughter transmission, or

(more accurately) as the timespan through which the feature can be expected to perdure in a language

family. Life-expectancy distributions are modeled with what is known as survival analysis , so called because

it models the life expectancies of medical patients after various interventions and under various conditions

(see, e.g., Selvin 1995: ch. 11). Survival analysis applied to linguistic transmission would compute, for each

element and under each transmission scenario, a probability of loss over a given timespan and the influence

of various conditions on this rate of loss. Working out such survival probabilities for linguistic stability even

in the broadest terms will be a very large task, for it requires tracing numerous elements of grammar and

lexicon through numerous transmission scenarios, each in enough different languages (genetically,

structurally, and areally independent) that the proportion of changed and unchanged, inherited and

acquired, etc. in each set can be taken with some confidence to represent actual probabilities. This in turn

will require thorough comparative historical and descriptive work in many different languages of many

different families. The study of any one element might well be monograph- or dissertation-sized. For

instance, a survival analysis for ergativity would gather data from as many ergative languages as possible

and determine or reconstruct whether the ancestor was ergative; control for family age to the extent

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