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Historical linguistics and language change: Progress or decay? (Review article)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 December 2008

Suzanne Romaine
Suzanne Romaine
Affiliation:
Department of Linguistics, University of Birmingham
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Extract

The title of this review article is inspired by Jean Aitchison's (1981) textbook, Language change: Progress or decay?, although I do not intend to discuss her book here. By including historical linguistics, I want to focus attention on the question of whether there has been any progress in the discipline of historical linguistics rather than whether, as Aitchison queries, language change can be thought of in terms of progress or decay (although that question, too, had its heyday [see, for example, Jespersen 18941]). I will start with a simplistic view of “progress” and assume that the notion can be coherently applied to a discipline or research paradigm: assuming that a central goal of historical linguistics is to “explain” language change, if historical linguistics can provide an answer to this question, then the discipline has “progressed.” The two books which I will discuss here, David Lightfoot's Principles of diachronic syntax (1979) and Roger Lass's On explaining language change (1980), bear on this issue although in rather different ways.

Type
Articles
Information
Language in Society , Volume 12 , Issue 2 , June 1983 , pp. 223 - 237
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1983

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