7 - Changes in classifying behaviour

Summary

What is true of the particular idiom that we started with is true of everything else in language … Every word, every grammatical element, every locution, every sound and accent is a slowly changing configuration, moulded by the invisible and impersonal drift that is the life of language

[Sapir, 1921: 171].

Introduction

Language is never static and much less so when it is unwritten. I wish to argue in this chapter that much work on classification has assumed – at least for the purposes of description – the reverse to be the case. In other words, it has ignored historical change. This has been partly because it has been thought irrelevant in a discourse largely underpinned by assumptions of synchronicity, and partly perhaps because those societies for which we have detailed empirical reports are those least likely to provide the kind of evidence required for an examination of such change. All this has reinforced the view of classifications as composed of reified categories, rather than classifying as a rule-bound process ever responsive to new situations. This is particularly curious since it would appear that inferences concerning the direction of evolutionary changes in classification – about which much has been written – rest upon an assumption of inherent flexibility in the arrangements of categories. If we start, explicitly, from a demonstration of the extent of such flexibility then our models and reconstructions are not only more consistent, but also more powerful [Dwyer, 1976b: 442].