Terry CROWLEY & Claire BOWERN, *An Introduction to
Historical Linguistics*

Oxford University Press, 2010, 376 pages

Oscar Garcia-Marchena

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URL: http://journals.openedition.org/lexis/2843
DOI: 10.4000/lexis.2843
ISSN: 1951-6215

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Université Jean Moulin - Lyon 3

**Electronic reference**

Oscar Garcia-Marchena, « Terry CROWLEY & Claire BOWERN, *An Introduction to Historical Linguistics* », Lexis [Online], Book reviews, Online since 15 February 2019, connection on 23 September 2020. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/lexis/2843 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/lexis.2843

This text was automatically generated on 23 September 2020.

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Terry CROWLEY & Claire BOWERN, An
*Introduction to Historical Linguistics*

Oxford University Press, 2010, 376 pages

Oscar Garcia-Marchena

REFERENCES

Terry Crowley, Claire Bowern

*An Introduction to Historical Linguistics*. Oxford University Press, New York, 2010. ISBN: 978-0-19-536554-2, Price: 26 €, 376 pages

1. This introductory textbook on historical linguistics is 376 pages long, including an introduction, 15 chapters, data sets, notes and references. This is the fourth edition of a work originally published in 1983 by Terry Crowley. Claire Bowern updates, corrects and enlarges the scope of the original work, which was concerned primarily with linguistic data from Oceania and Australia, by adding data from other languages beyond this scope. It provides a thorough introduction to diachronic sound change and methods of analysis. It also introduces other topics such as morphological, semantic and syntactic change.

2. This book is addressed to the readers with basic knowledge in phonetics, since the basic terminology on the nature of sounds is assumed. Its informal style makes the book easy and pleasant to read, while keeping a high degree of precision and introducing technical terminology on the subject.

3. Every chapter is accompanied by some "reading guide questions" and a set of exercises, which allows the reader to check his or her understanding and to better assimilate its content, by applying the concepts presented to new linguistic data. Also, the notes at the end of the book give precisions about some key aspects without losing the straightforwardness and fluidity of its style.
4

The book provides examples from European languages, which can be more familiar to Western students, and introduces a considerable number of data from Austronesian languages. The book highlights the links between the traditional accounts on Indo-European language change and data of very different language families and shows how linguistic change concepts and methods can be applied to languages all over the world.

5

Besides, the book contains a number of tables of linguistic data, explanatory figures, maps and an updated bibliography that allow its use as a reference book for basic concepts and methods on historical linguistics. Also, the “further reading” tips at the end of every chapter provide a link between the bibliography and the chapters. Thanks to them, the reader in search of further illustration or information about a precise chapter or concept can easily find the suitable bibliographic reference.

6

The pedagogical structure of the book is remarkable: firstly, the initial parts expose the key concepts of language change (chapters 1-4); secondly, it presents some procedures that allow to establish relatedness between languages (chapter 6) and between different stages of a same language (chapter 7). Thirdly, the book presents some contributions of computational and statistical methods to study linguistic change. Fourthly, it deals with the history and current challenges of the comparative method (chapter 9). Fifthly, it considers how language change can be approached not only by the analysis of phonetics, but also morphology (chapter 10), lexical semantics (chapter 11) and syntax (chapter 12). And finally, this account is completed with some more recent key concepts (chapter 13) and enriched with a presentation about changes caused by language contact, and also with a final chapter on cultural reconstruction (chapter 14).

7

The introduction presents basic notions on language change with some examples. These concepts are just presented and illustrated, but not detailed. Nevertheless, the reader will conveniently find a “further reading” list at the end of each chapter. Among these notions, the authors distinguish non-scientifically proven causes of language change, such as ethnic character, climate and geography, and concentrate on scientific aspects like substratum, functional need, local identification and structural pressure.

8

Chapter 2 constitutes a compendium of the types of sound change, illustrated with examples which are mostly taken from Austronesian and Indo-European languages. The phenomena exposed here are classified according to three kinds: sound loss, sound addition and sound change. It also distinguishes changes produced by phonetic context from changes motivated by the phonetic system. This presentation is followed by 21 exercises that illustrate these concepts and allow the reader to practise.

9

Chapter 3 is a short presentation of the linguistic conventions used to express sound changes and the environments that condition them. It also exposes the ordering of changes and the difficulties to establish them. The examples are represented by using the International Phonetic Alphabet, which requires some previous degree of familiarity with phonetics.

10

Chapter 4 introduces the distinction between phonemic and phonetic changes. It distinguishes changes that concern only one of the two levels of analysis, and details the changes that concern both: loss, addition and rephonemicization. Examples from Austronesian languages, as well as a comparison between proto-Indo-European and some Indo-European words serve to illustrate these phenomena.
11

Once the basic concepts of language change have been presented, chapter 5 exposes the procedures of the comparative method and exemplifies it with the reconstruction of Proto-Polynesian. The chapter also distinguishes two different types of phonetic changes: changes which are conditioned by their phonetic environment and changes which are not. Finally, it details the difficulties and necessary steps to reconstruct a proto-language from a set of cognate words belonging to related languages. This chapter is therefore essential to understand the way in which linguistic data need to be arranged in order to be correctly interpreted. This account is limited to phonetic reconstruction, but subsequent chapters enrich the description with data from other levels of analysis such as morphology, lexical semantics and syntax.

12

Chapter 6 goes further in the presentation of methods used to determine relatedness between languages. If chapter 5 allows us to understand the procedure of reconstructing a proto-language, chapter 6 explains how to determine the genealogic tree of a language family. Its methods are first illustrated with data from Proto-Indo-European languages, and later with data from Austronesian languages. The chapter wisely warns about the inherent difficulties of these methods and insists that a considerable amount of data is required for the reconstruction of a proto-language. In this way, the exercises at the end of the chapter provide enough data to allow the reader to extract conclusions by using the methods presented to interpret them.

13

Chapter 7 completes the presentation in chapters 5 and 6 by explaining and providing a summary on the procedures that are required for reconstructing internal changes within a given language. A general account of the synchronic alternations is exemplified with the reconstruction of some data from Proto-Samoan and, in more detail, with Saussure's reconstruction of Indo-European laryngeals.

14

Chapter 8 covers some of the most important quantitative methods used for the study of language change, from the controversial method of glottochronology, to the more recent phylogenetic methods. Glottochronology methods are presented with a critical eye, and illustrated with the application of Swadesh list to languages in Papua New Guinea, whereas probabilistic methods such as phylogenetic networks are explained and illustrated by showing the relationship between languages like Quechua and Aymara, on the one hand, and Australian languages on the other hand.

15

Chapter 9 further completes the presentation of the comparative method, stating its historical importance and its challenges. This is illustrated with the reconstruction of Proto-Indo-European plosive system, which can be fully understood thanks to the analyses presented previously in the book. Among the challenges to this method, the chapter mentions notions such as non-systematic changes, non-phonetic conditioning and convergent lexical development. This account is further enriched with the presentation of more recent models like the wave model of lexical diffusion and the dialect chains, which are, as usual, illustrated by both Indo-European and Austronesian data.

16

Chapter 10 briefly presents changes affecting the morphology; these changed are caused either by analogy or by phonetic changes that affect the morphological structure of a word. It also presents some aspects on comparative morphological reconstruction. In a similar way, chapter 11 exposes the main types of semantic change like pejoration, metaphor and hypercorrection (just to cite a few) with simple examples from English and other languages. This chapter also deals with two types of lexical
change: borrowing and shortening words, which are illustrated with some simple examples.

17 Chapter 12 completes the previous two chapters by dealing with changes in the syntactic structure and word order. It exposes the classic idea that languages follow a typological cycle in the way they vary: they change from isolating to agglutinating; from agglutinating to inflecting; from inflecting to isolating, and so on. The chapter also considers briefly some syntactic change phenomena, as well as the mechanisms of grammatical change.

18 Chapter 13 completes the work by introducing some key concepts to explain language variation, such as the relatively recent idea that grammaticality is not a discrete concept, but a continuum that happens in a given degree. Another interesting idea presented here is that variation needs to take social factor into account, since a given change can affect some social classes more than others. Similarly, chapter 14 deals with the other factor that affects language change: language contact. The chapter exposes some of these phenomena, such as convergence, pidgins, mixed languages, esoterogeny and language death. As in other chapters, the profusion of data in the exercises allow the reader to further illustrate and apply the content to practical cases.

19 The book finishes with a chapter on cultural reconstruction, where linguistic methods are used to reconstruct the history and relations between the cultures of different human groups. If one can say that the content of this chapter goes beyond the scope of linguistics, it also has the evident virtue of highlighting the ties between linguistics with other human sciences such as history and anthropology.

20 Because of the diversity of the data presented and the completeness displayed in these chapters, this book constitutes an essential tool for linguistics students, and for all readers with a smattering in phonetics. Nonetheless, some defects are worth mentioning. The main criticism that can be made about this book is that the answers to the exercises at the end of each chapter are missing, except for one single exercise in chapter 1. Providing answers would allow readers to progress while learning the notions and procedures presented in the book.

21 As a second criticism, it can be said that on some rare occasions, scientific precision is sacrificed to the sake of clarity and simplicity. For instance, in chapter 7 (p. 125), English irregular plurals are presented as forms that “must clearly go back to irregular forms even in Pre-English”. The mention of this ambiguous term in a book on historical linguistics and the classification of these forms as “irregulars” are, at least, imprecisions.

22 Another example of imprecision can be found in chapter 10 (p. 188), where Latin infinitive form *essere* is said to “descend” as *être* ‘to be’ in French. Indeed, this example is often cited as a case of complex evolution, since some forms of French *être* derive from Latin *essere* and some from *stare*. A third imprecision is found in chapter 12, where grammatical words are identified by their property of being omissible (“*will* is a grammatical word and *later* is not because we cannot omit the future marker *will*, whereas we can omit the future marker *later*”). All in all, this updated edition shows that the classic work of T. Crowley remains an essential tool both for its completeness and its simplicity, especially thanks to C. Bowern’s addition to this new edition.
AUTHOR

OSCAR GARCIA-MARCHENA

Oscar Garcia-Marchena, EILA, Université Sorbonne Nouvelle Paris 3

Dr. Oscar Garcia Marchena teaches Spanish linguistics at the University Sorbonne Nouvelle Paris 3. He teaches Spanish syntax, morphology, phonetics and phonology to undergraduates. His research revolves around the syntax of verbless clauses in corpora of contemporary Spanish. He holds an MA from the University Sorbonne Nouvelle Paris 3 in Linguistics, an MA from the University of Seville in Spanish and English, and a PhD in Linguistics from University Paris Diderot. He is a member of the AESLA and AELINCO linguistic associations.