The Handbook of Linguistics

Mark Aronoff, Janie Rees-Miller, Mark Aronoff, Janie Rees-Miller

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781119072300
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Lingue e linguistica
• Subtopic: Linguistica

"The first edition of this Handbook is built on surveys by well-known figures from around the world and around the intellectual world, reflecting several different theoretical predilections, balancing coverage of enduring questions and important recent work. Those strengths are now enhanced by adding new chapters and thoroughly revising almost all other chapters, partly to reflect ways in which the field has changed in the intervening twenty years, in some places radically. The result is a magnificent volume that can be used for many purposes." David W. Lightfoot, Georgetown University

" The Handbook of Linguistics, Second Edition is a stupendous achievement. Aronoff and Rees-Miller have provided overviews of 29 subfields of linguistics, each written by one of the leading researchers in that subfield and each impressively crafted in both style and content. I know of no finer resource for anyone who would wish to be better informed on recent developments in linguistics." Frederick J. Newmeyer, University of Washington, University of British Columbia and Simon Fraser University

"Linguists, their students, colleagues, family, and friends: anyone interested in the latest findings from a wide array of linguistic subfields will welcome this second updated and expanded edition of The Handbook of Linguistics. Leading scholars provide highly accessible yet substantive introductions to their fields: it's an even more valuable resource than its predecessor." Sally McConnell-Ginet, Cornell University

"No handbook or text offers a more comprehensive, contemporary overview of the field of linguistics in the twenty-first century. New and thoroughly updated chapters by prominent scholars on each topic and subfield make this a unique, landmark publication." Walt Wolfram, North Carolina State University

This second edition of The Handbook of Linguistics provides an updated and timely overview of the field of linguistics. The editor's broad definition of the field ensures that the book may be read by those seeking a comprehensive introduction to the subject, but with little or no prior knowledge of the area.

Building on the popular first edition, The Handbook of Linguistics, Second Edition features new and revised content reflecting advances within the discipline. New chapters expand the already broad coverage of the Handbook to address and take account of key changes within the field in the intervening years. It explores: psycholinguistics, linguistic anthropology and ethnolinguistics, sociolinguistic theory, language variation and second language pedagogy. With contributions from a global team of leading linguists, this comprehensive and accessible volume is the ideal resource for those engaged in study and work within the dynamic field of linguistics.

Part I
Starting Points

1
Origins of Language

Andrew Carstairs-McCarthy

1 Introduction

Among the inhabitants of some African forests about eight million years ago were ape-like creatures including the common ancestors of chimpanzees and humans. Visualizing these creatures is easy enough; one imagines something resembling a modern gorilla, living substantially in trees and walking on all four limbs when on the ground, and with a vocal communication system limited to perhaps 20 or thirty 30 calls, like a chimpanzee's. But what about our ancestors two million years ago? By that stage they were a separate species from the ancestors of chimpanzees, but were not yet Homo sapiens. How did these creatures live, and in particular what sort of language did they have? Visualizing these more recent ancestors is harder. One feels that they must have been more like us, and in particular that their vocal communication system must have been more sophisticated than that of their ancestors six million years before. But how much more sophisticated? Which characteristics of modern human language did this communication system now possess, and which did it still lack?

There is something eerie and yet fascinating about these intermediate ancestors. This fascination underlies innumerable science fiction stories as well as the perennial interest in rumors that such creatures may still exist, in some remote Himalayan valley perhaps, or as descendants of the tiny nonsapiens humans who may have lived as recently as 15,000 years ago on the island of Flores in Indonesia (Knight 2005; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_floresiensis). To many nonlinguists, therefore, it seems self-evident that research on the linguistic abilities of such intermediate ancestors (that is, research on the origins and evolution of human language) should be a high priority in linguistics. Yet it is not. As a research topic, language evolution is only now beginning to regain respectability, after more than a century of neglect. In the remainder of this section I will say something about the reasons for this neglect before turning in Sections 2 to 5 to the evidence recently brought to bear by anthropologists, geneticists, primatologists, and neurobiologists, who have for decades been more adventurous than linguists in this area. Then in Section 6 I will discuss the kinds of contribution which some linguists also are now beginning to offer.

Many religions provide an account of the origin of language. According to the Judeo-Christian tradition, God gave to Adam in the Garden of Eden dominion over all the animals, and Adam's first exercise of this dominion consisted in naming them. The fact that there are now many languages rather than just one is explained in the story of the Tower of Babel: linguistic diversity is a punishment for human arrogance. So long as that sort of account was generally accepted, the origin of language was not a puzzle. But when secular explanations for natural phenomena began to be sought to supplement or replace religious ones, it was inevitable that a secular explanation would be sought for the origin of language too.

The fact that the origin of language must predate recorded history did not inhibit eighteenth-century thinkers such as Rousseau, Condillac, and Herder, who were confident that simply by applying one's mind to the situation in which languageless humans would find themselves one could arrive at worthwhile conclusions about how language must have arisen. Unfortunately there was no consensus among these conclusions, and in the nineteenth century they came to seem increasingly feeble and speculative by contrast with the far-reaching yet convincing results attainable in historical and comparative linguistics (see Chapter 15). At its foundation in 1866, therefore, the Linguistic Society of Paris banned the presentation of any papers concerning the origin of language. Many linguists still support this ban, in the sense that they believe that any inquiry into the origin of language must inevitably be so speculative as to be worthless.

Since the 1960s, the theory of grammar has come to be dominated by the ideas of Noam Chomsky. For Chomsky, the central question of linguistics is the nature of the innate biological endowment which enables humans to acquire a language so rapidly and efficiently in the first years of life (see Chapter 19). From this viewpoint, it seems natural to regard the origin of language as a matter of evolutionary biology: how did this innate linguistic endowment evolve in humans, and what are its counterparts (if any) in other primates? But Chomsky for a long time discouraged interest in language evolution, and even suggested that language is so different from most other animal characteristics that it may be more a product of physical or chemical processes than of biological ones (1988: 167, 1991: 50). The paradoxical result is that, while Chomskyan linguists endeavored to explain characteristics of individual languages by reference to an innate linguistic endowment (or Universal Grammar), they were generally reluctant to pursue this inquiry one stage further, to the issue of how and why this innate endowment has acquired the particular characteristics that it has. Exceptions (e.g., Newmeyer 1991; Pinker and Bloom 1990; Pinker 1994) were relatively sparse.

In 2002, this situation changed dramatically with the publication of an article jointly written by Chomsky and the animal behavior experts Marc Hauser and Tecumseh Fitch (Hauser, Chomsky, and Fitch 2002). Since then, linguists associated with Chomsky have been willing to discuss language evolution in the context of a general “biolinguistic” exploration of biological bases for the language capacity (see e.g., Jenkins 2004). Their approach is, however, highly controversial (see e.g., Pinker and Jackendoff 2005).

2 Evidence from Anthropology and Archeology

Anthropology is concerned not only with human culture but also with humans as organisms in a biological sense, including their evolutionary development. (On human evolution in general, see, e.g., Stringer and Andrews (2005).) Language is both a cultural phenomenon and also the most salient distinguishing characteristic of modern Homo sapiens as a species. The question of how and why humans acquired language therefore interests both cultural and biological anthropologists. So what light can anthropology shed on these questions?

The earliest direct evidence of written language is no more than about 5,000 years old (see Chapter 5). It is therefore much too recent to shed any light on the origin of spoken language, and we must resort to indirect evidence. Unfortunately the available evidence is doubly indirect. The vocal apparatus (tongue, lips, and larynx) of early humans would tell us much if we could examine it directly; but, being soft tissue, it does not survive, and for information about it we have to rely on what we can glean from bones, particularly skulls. Alongside such evidence we have tools and other artefacts, as well as traces of human habitation such as discarded animal bones; but, again, what is available to us is skewed by the fact that stone survives better than bone and much better than materials such as wood or hide. In view of this, the only relatively firm dates which anthropology can provide are two terminuses, one after which we can be sure that language in its fully modern form did exist and one before which we can be sure that it did not. For the long period in between, the anthropological evidence is tantalizing but frustratingly equivocal; there are no uncontroversial counterparts in the fossil record for specific stages in linguistic evolution.

We can be reasonably confident that modern-style spoken language evolved only once. This is not logically necessary. It is conceivable that something with the communicative and cognitive functions of language, and using speech as its medium, could have evolved independently more than once, just as the eye has evolved independently more than once in the animal kingdom. However, if that had happened we would expect to find evidence of it today. We would expect to find two or more d...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Blackwell Handbooks in Linguistics
• Title Page
• Copyright
• List of Contributors
• Preface to the Second Edition
• Preface to the First Edition
• List of Abbreviations
• Part I: Starting Points
• Part II: Theoretical Bases
• Part III: Core Fields
• Part IV: Languages and the Mind
• Part V: Languages in Use
• Part VI: Applications of Linguistics
• Index
• End User License Agreement