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Laurie Bauer, The Linguistics Student's

Handbook. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
Press, 2007. Pp. ix + 387.

Tania E. Strahan

Nordic Journal of Linguistics / Volume 32 / Issue 01 / June 2009, pp 165 - 174

DOI: 10.1017/S0332586509002078, Published online: 05 May 2009

Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0332586509002078

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Tania E. Strahan (2009). Nordic Journal of Linguistics, 32, pp 165-174 doi:10.1017/
S0332586509002078

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Nor Jnl Ling 32.1, 165–181  C Nordic Association of Linguists 2009
Printed in the United Kingdom

Reviews. Nordic Journal of Linguistics 32.1, 165–181.

Reviews

Laurie Bauer, The Linguistics Student’s Handbook. Edinburgh: Edinburgh

University Press, 2007. Pp. ix + 387.
doi:10.1017/S0332586509002078

Reviewed by Tania E. Strahan

Tania E. Strahan, Faculty of Humanities, The University of Iceland, 101 Reykjavı́k,

Iceland. tania@hi.is

In the preface to this book, Laurie Bauer (henceforth B) states that ‘it is a book which
the tertiary student of linguistics will need at hand for continual reference while they
are studying’ (vii). In this review, I will attempt to evaluate the extent to which I
believe this goal has been attained. Anticipating my discussion, I believe that this
book will fill a void that has existed in the study materials available to students of
linguistics, and I expect a second edition to be published which will fill in some of
the gaps still remaining, after feedback from students and reviewers.
In this review I give an outline of the book, including comments on the style and
layout, followed by a necessarily selective discussion of the benefits and potential
problems for students in using it, including mention of some improvements that I
think should be included in a second edition. I finish with a brief conclusion. My
comments are addressed to linguists working on Nordic languages, and will primarily
be of interest to this group of people. In addition, given the British and American
English-oriented selection of examples in the book, I offer some commentary from
the viewpoint of Australian English.
The book is divided into six parts, covering three distinct types of information.
Part I (chapters 1–15) contains useful background information that students will
encounter throughout their degree, but that might be only briefly mentioned in class
as ‘assumed knowledge’ or that might be assumed in one class to be covered in
another class. The chapters in this part include among others ‘The Saussurean
dichotomies’, ‘Chomsky’s influence’, ‘Trees’ and ‘The data of linguistics’. Parts
II–V (chapters 16–35) cover aspects of being a student of linguistics engaged in
reading, conducting and writing up academic work. These chapters cover topics such
as ‘Notation and terminology’, including a list of common abbreviations; ‘Reading
linguistics’, including a useful chapter on the pronunciation of some linguists’ names
and their sex; ‘Writing and presenting linguistics’, including how to spell some
166 R EVI EWS

commonly-used terms; and ‘Bibliographies’. The final part of the book (part VI)
contains a language file, with brief linguistic and sociolinguistic information on 280
languages.
The book is arranged logically and neatly. The short chapters mean that it takes
very little time to find the information one is looking for, which is a bonus for students
who will probably need to refer back to what they have read in the handbook more
than once. The style is informative and clear, and reads as one expects of a manual,
rather than a textbook or research article. I find B’s writing style very clear and
very concise, to the point that the sentences flow in a lovely manner through the
paragraphs, and the book is generally very enjoyable to read or browse through.
Given that this book is meant as a look-up resource, it is a little frustrating that
page numbers are hidden on the insides of each page near the binding, with only the
outside edge of each odd-numbered page showing the chapter title. This makes the
usual method of finding a topic by using the table of contents to find the page number,
then flicking through to that page number, very difficult. It also makes it difficult to
flick back and forth in search of a particular chapter, since the chapter name appears
only on odd-numbered pages. Since page numbers do not take up much space, I
wonder whether, in a subsequent edition, both the page number and the chapter
heading might appear on the outside edge of both odd- and even-numbered pages.
There are very clear benefits to students in owning and reading this manual,
although there are also some potential problems too. The very first sentence of the
text throws down a challenge to the student, at least to the thinking student: ‘Because
we have a word language, we assume that there must be some corresponding entity
for the word to denote’ (1). The rest of this chapter outlines some of the problems
with the term language, and could foreseeably prompt discussion by the student,
either in class or with friends, and I think is a clever way to open such a book. It sets
up the role of the book – not as that of providing answers to all possible questions
about linguistics, but rather as that of raising awareness of the fundamental questions
linguists face, and showing how these questions could be responded to, even when
no perfect answer exists.
The question of whether or not linguistics is a science is raised in chapter 3,
‘Linguistics’. To my mind, a useful response is given here, namely a description of
the way in which linguistics must be approached in order for it to be ‘scientific’. This
involves ‘careful observation of the relevant real-world phenomena, classification
of those phenomena, and the search for useful patterns in the phenomena observed
and classified’ (17). B further defines an ‘advanced’ version of this, which involves
‘seeking explanations for the phenomena of language and building theories which
will help explain why observed phenomena occur while phenomena which are not
observed will not occur’ (17). Both of these explanations will be useful for the
student, as they also describe the approach that the student should take in their own
work as a budding linguist, and the kinds of results they should endeavour to achieve.
 R EVI EWS 167

An understanding of what linguistics is is essential for the student in helping to

define their own object of learning. However, this descriptive approach to linguistics
does not always appear to be clearly adhered to throughout the handbook, something
which I think is its greatest weakness.
For example on page 49, B states that, while ‘it would be preposterous to
deny the value of the variationist programme’, Chomsky’s idea that linguists study
the grammatical system of the ‘ideal speaker-listener’ is generally followed. Thus,
according to B, a lexicographer who attempted to include anenome in the dictionary
‘on the grounds that many people are heard to say that’ would be ‘mocked’, since the
real word is actually anemone. According to B, just because some people regularly
or occasionally mispronounce a word does not make it part of the language, which
is a valid point. However, I think this is an unfortunate choice of example, for two
reasons. Firstly, I have only ever heard the first (apparently ‘incorrect’) version,
while the second (apparently ‘proper’) version sounds to me completely ridiculous. I
note that Wikipedia calls anenome ‘a common misspelling and mispronunciation
of anemone’, in agreement with B. However Wikipedia’s reference given for
this ‘mispronunciation’ also states that Australians (and the English, apparently)
consistently use anenome. My quick survey of a score of friends and family has turned
up only one Australian who uses the ‘correct’ form, but several non-Australians who
do. Thus, B appears to be saying that all Australians use the incorrect form of this
word, something that I strenuously object to.
The second, and somewhat more serious problem with this example is that it
seems at this point that B’s goal is to provide a prescriptive rule as to the pronunciation
of this word. This is unfortunate, as it gives the student the impression that linguists
study ‘correct’ English. As a teacher, it is difficult enough teaching students (at least
native English speakers) that how they and their friends speak is a fine object of study,
and that we do not wish to either a) investigate how well they learned ‘grammar’ at
school, nor b) tell them how to speak (although we do wish them to acquire different
styles of speech and writing!). Thus, even though B states that modern linguistics
is a descriptive discipline, he does not seem to be applying that approach here. But
there are certainly some interesting issues here – when DO lexicographers want to
accept mispronounciation or embiggened as words,1 and when are they merely speech
errors or idiosyncratic expressions? And just where do the limits of ‘Standard English’
lie?
B states later that linguists view ‘a language like German [as] being made up of
such agreement as there is between those people who believe that they are speaking
and listening to German’ (192). This seems to contradict his earlier statement that a
lexicographer should not include anenome in the dictionary, and that neither should
a syntactician include an account of How come is the Wellington gas twice the price
of the Hutt Valley’s? In fact, I have trouble understanding B’s point with the syntactic
example here. The sentence How come is the Wellington gas twice the price of the
168 R EVI EWS

Hutt Valley’s? is a perfectly acceptable sentence in Australian English (based on my

own intuitions and those of my aforementioned family and friends), and, as such, a
grammar of English should be able to generate it.2 I know that my mother objects to
me saying ‘how come’ instead of ‘why’, but I fail to see why B says that syntacticians
would not be interested in it.
Chapter 9, ‘Form and function’, is a little confusing. It seems to be a discussion
of word classes and the difficulty of defining the term adjective. This is based on
the observation that the ‘obvious set of words’ which can occur in the frame the __
bracelet is that of adjectives, although nouns referring to materials such as copper,
amber, etc. also appear here (59). Thus, the difference between the FORM of the
adjective and the FUNCTION of the pre-modifier is blurred here. The idea of FUNCTION
is stated in terms of the grammatical functions of subject and object, using examples
including The mouse ran away, I’ve caught the mouse, I gave the mouse a piece of
cheese (58), but the FORMS given are prepositional phrases e.g. in the park, noun
phrases e.g. red onions, adjective phrases e.g. extremely unusual and the verb form
run (57). It would seem to me to be clearer to state explicitly that, for example, give
and given are ‘different forms’ of the same word, as are mouse and mice, (in keeping
with the examples given above). Furthermore, while examples are given of the same
form having different grammatical functions (ie, the mouse can be both a subject and
an object), no examples are given of the reverse. So, for example, it should be shown
that, in English, the same verb form is used in all persons and numbers except for the
third person singular. Thus, different FORMS may have the same FUNCTION and the
same FORM may have different FUNCTIONS.
The final chapter of part I, ‘The data of linguistics’ offers an interesting viewpoint,
when B states that ‘dictionaries given [typo: ‘give’] no direct information on word
frequency’ (83). However, while this is certainly true of many dictionaries, the Collins
Cobuild dictionaries stand out with their method of indicating the most frequently
used words in English with 1–3 diamonds, as based on actual usage. In addition,
given that most students nowadays know how to use Google (and apparently some
use other search engines too), accessing word frequencies does not require special
skills or methods. Using B’s examples of fiacre and fiancé, the relative frequency
of these expressions is given indirectly, through the numbers of pages containing
each word (fiacre returns around 800,000 hits, and fiancé an order of magnitude
greater, at over 10 million). Even using the define: function in Google returns only
two dictionary definitions for fiacre and six definitions for fiancé. This gives another
indication of the relative frequency of the words. Thus, word frequency information
is easily available, even if B is correct in stating that it is somewhat indirect.
Concerning the use of naturally-occurring data, the existence of ready-made
corpora eliminates, or at least minimises, the need for linguists to compile
their own collections. This in turn lessens the difficulties of data collection as
 R EVI EWS 169

expressed by B on page 85, such as the time-consuming nature of transcribing

spoken data, the need for large amounts of data to investigate rare linguistic
phenomena, dealing with ethical and legal matters, etc. Ready-made corpora include
Scandinavian corpora, some of which are already freely available (to researchers)
online (e.g. http://uit.no/scandiasyn, or direct access to the Norwegian corpora at
http://www.tekstlab.uio.no/nota/oslo/, the Swedish corpus at http://www.ling.gu.se/
projekt/tal/index.cgi? PAGE=3&SUBPAGE=4 and so on), and which provide instant
access to natural conversational data, with easily searchable transcriptions and
accompanying video. The International Corpus of English (http://www.ucl.ac.uk/
english-usage/ice/) and many other linguistic corpora provide much data in an
instantly usable format. Thus, I think that B’s concern with the difficulties of naturally-
occurring data collection, while valid, may be too negative towards this kind of data,
and his mentions of electronic corpora (e.g. pages 86–87 of ‘standard corpora’
including ‘most newspapers’ and ‘the world-wide web’) are a little too brief.
On page 92, B comments that some linguistic experiments demand
‘sophisticated technical equipment’, which he says is a disadvantage to conducting
experiments. However, this ignores the fact that many students nowadays have
ready access to much ‘sophisticated technical equipment’, including recording
equipment, digital playback, and digital analysis software. The free tools Audacity
(http://audacity.sourceforge.net/; for recording, converting, playing and doing
basic waveform and spectrographic analysis of sound files) and Transcriber
(http://sourceforge.net/projects/trans/; for transcribing and playing sound and video
files) are very simple to use, and Praat (http://www.fon.hum.uva.nl/praat/; for
phonetic analysis), while more complicated, is also freely available.
In parts II–V, B very helpfully covers terminological issues in some detail, with
a chapter each on ‘Notational conventions’ (chapter 16), ‘Frequent abbreviations’
(chapter 17), ambiguous terminology (chapter 18) and synonymous terminology
(chapter 19). These chapters are generally in the form of tables, which present the
material very concisely and simply, but there are small omissions throughout that
could easily be filled in. In chapter 16, on notation, table 16.1 seems to be missing
a couple of frequent ‘single character notations’, namely phi φ, which is commonly
used in syntax for person, number, gender features, and lower-case sigma σ , which
commonly represents semantics. The single full-stop in discourse transcriptions to
indicate an intonational phrase boundary is also omitted.
I particularly like chapter 18, ‘Terminology: Ambiguity’. Many of the
disambiguations will be useful for the student, such as that of expletive, which
is defined as both ‘pragmatics: a swear-word’ and ‘syntax: an element seen as
carrying no meaning, a dummy word’ (110). However, there is the problem of the text
contradicting what students learn in class. In the study of semantics, most first-years
will learn how fundamentally unsatisfactory circular definitions are, as Wierzbicka
170 R EVI EWS

(1972) famously pointed out. Thus, B’s definition (or ‘disambiguation’) of the term
inflection as ‘morphology: an inflectional affix’ (constrasting with ‘phonetics: an
intonation pattern’ and ‘morphology: one of the major branches of morphology’)
(111) seems to fall foul of this observation, which students will likely notice. Some
reference to an opposition with derivational affixes, along with a comment like ‘such
as verbal person markers and nominal case markers’ would give the student more
useful information.
Also in this chapter, the syntactic definition of free as ‘syntax: of a pronoun, not
bound in its construction’ (110) is more usually phrased as ‘not bound in its domain’,
which to me sounds clearer. Alternatively, the term ‘clause’ or ‘phrasal constituent’,
or similar might be clearer. (The other definitions of free include ‘morphology: of a
morph, with the potential to stand alone as a word form’, ‘phonology: of stress, not
constrained so as to fall on a particular syllable in the word’, ‘syntax: of word order,
in which the order of elements is determined by pragmatic and stylistic factors rather
than by strictly grammatical ones’, and ‘translation: determined by the requirements
of the target language, rather than sticking literally to the source language’. The
conciseness and clarity of the definitions generally makes the few I note here more
visible.)
Finally in this chapter, I would add a syntactic definition for blocking (in addition
to the morphological and psycholinguistic ones given, on page 108), to include
‘syntax: a blocking node in a phrase structure tree does not permit movement,
checking or coreference through it’. (The definition of ‘double articulation’ is given
as ‘duality of structure’, but the linguistic field for this definition is omitted.)
Chapter 19, ‘Terminology: Synonymy’, contains a useful table of synonymous
terms, such as Aryan and Indo-European; baby-talk, caregiver language, child-
directed speech and motherese; and Grimm’s Law and the First Germanic Consonant
Shift. Some terms are marked as obsolete (such as Aryan), although the opposite
information (i.e. highly frequent) is not marked, presumably because all of the terms
are in fact quite common (as can be seen from the list given above). I would like
to see the triplet anaphor, pronoun, pronominal reflexive included here, since these
are used as synonyms by some linguists in at least some contexts, and with distinct
meanings by others.
In chapter 23, ‘Letters, accents and diacritics’, which helpfully gives names
to the most commonly occurring non-English characters, B notes that ß is called
‘Eszett’ and ‘beta-ess’, but omits ‘schafes-ess’. B also describes the letter æ as ‘a
vowel intermediate between <a> and <e>. Used thus in Old English, Danish,
Norwegian and Icelandic’ (141). While this is true for Danish, Norwegian and Old
English, modern Icelandic probably should not be in this list, since this vowel is
a diphthong in Icelandic, which can have a open central-backish onset and a very
high front off-glide. Also in this chapter, P (‘slashed o’) is described as being ‘used
for a front rounded vowel, e.g. in Danish’ (141), without its use in syntax to refer
 R EVI EWS 171

to an empty word slot or to represent a morpheme which has no phonetic content

being mentioned. These omissions should be corrected in a second edition. Finally,
a pronunciation key for , (capital and small) yogh would be useful here.
In the very useful chapter 25, on linguists’ names (and their sexes), there is
a footnote explaining that there are two ways of pronouncing Labov, following
­ ­
the American and British ‘traditions’ (149, fn. 3), as either /l´ b´Uv/ or /l´ bÅf/. I
­
would like to add a third variant, /l´ bÅv/, which follows the traditional Australian
phonological rules, which pronounces the name with a short vowel followed by
a voiced fricative, which is a combination of the American and British variants.
Since the British variant is acceptable, and the Australian pronunciation is closer to
the American than the British, I presume that this is an acceptable variant as well.
Also, Randy LaPolla does accept a short vowel in the middle of his surname, as
­
it is pronounced in Australian English: /la pÅla/ (provided the following /l/ is also
short! – Randy LaPolla, p.c.), as well as the version given by B with a diphthong:
­
/la poUla/.
Chapter 26, ‘Laws and principles’, in which many frequently-cited statements
about linguistic phenomena are gathered, is an excellent idea. It includes statements of
such fundamentals as Binding Theory, the Empty Category Principle (ECP), Grimm’s
Law, the semantic Is-a [kind of] Condition, the Obligatory Contour Principle (OCP),
and Ockham’s Razor, among the 39 conditions, constraints, hypotheses, principles
and laws (including six additional synonymous expressions, such as the Linguistic
Relativity principle, which refers the reader to the definition under Sapir-Whorf
hypothesis) covered in this chapter, spanning many different areas of linguistics. I
am unsure how many students would understand the formulation of the Elsewhere
Condition as it is presented in Kiparsky (1973:94) but B very usefully gives a plain-
English clarification, in the words of Anderson (1992:12): ‘Application of a more
specific rule blocks that of a more general one’. However, the omission in this chapter
of Grice’s Maxims is a little surprising, and, while a full paragraph is given to the
Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, no hint is given of the ‘strong’ and ‘weak’ versions of this
hypothesis.
In chapter 29, ‘Essay writing’, along with general essay-writing tips, a
particularly helpful pointer is given (183) to the sil.org website for downloading free
linguistic fonts, which currently includes the unicode-based (and thus ‘universal’)
IPA font Doulos SIL, as well as fonts for Greek, Hebrew, Burmese, African Vai
and other languages. Another site is suggested for fonts for Mac users (even though
the sil.org website also provides Mac fonts). Chapter 30, on glossing, gives very
clear guidelines on how to write (and read) linguistic examples, although B uses the
symbol · instead of the more usual . to join words/morphs together.
I particularly like chapter 33, on spelling, and was pleased to see complementary
in the list, as the collocation complimentary distribution, frequently found in students’
writing, is a personal pet peeve. Vocal cords is another pleasing inclusion in an
172 R EVI EWS

altogether rather short list. This should please teachers of phonetics who are frequently
confronted with the collocation vocal chords, which, as with complimentary
distribution, also verges on the malapropistic.
The rationale presented at the beginning of chapter 34, ‘Citation etiquette’, is
very clear, explaining the difference between using someone else’s words or ideas
when the reader or hearer can be expected to ‘get’ the reference, and giving an
exact citation when the reader might not be able to locate the source themselves.
However, the subsequent chapter 35, ‘Reference lists’, strikingly omits any reference
to bibliographic software such as EndNote or Biblioscape. Given the difficulties
most students have with correctly providing a reference list, this is a rather serious
omission; especially since EndNote is often made freely available by universities for
students’ use (especially post-graduates). In addition, a light-weight bibliographic
tool such as BiblioExpress (biblioscape.com), designed specifically for students, is
available freely. These (and other) tools make most of the job of including a list of
references in an essay trivial. Nonetheless, the coverage given in this chapter as to
what a reference list should look like will be extremely useful for all students. This
chapter also includes a list of Latin abbreviations that students may encounter, such
as ibid. and loc. cit. (207).
Part VI of the handbook contains the Language File. Scanning through the list
of 280 languages included reveals that most of the languages that university students
are likely to encounter in their lectures and textbooks are included in this file. A very
brief, tabulated overview of each language is given, including the language family,
where the language is spoken, approximate number of speakers, the writing system,
some phonological, morphological and syntactic features, some ‘points of interest’
(although not all languages have one), and a couple of references to lead students on
to further investigation. These language overviews provide students with some basic
information about languages without being overwhelming.
The information given on each language is necessarily very brief and, at least for
the languages I can check, is occasionally outdated or even inaccurate. For example,
the entry for Icelandic gives an outdated spelling of the Icelandic autonym using z
instead of s, and omits the accent on the first letter, thus ‘izlenska’ instead of ‘ı́slenska’
is given for ‘Icelandic’.
The entry for Norwegian is refreshingly complete for a non-Scandinavian source,
in terms of mentioning both official forms/languages, nynorsk and bokmål, although
it makes no reference to the multitude of dialects. This means that Norwegian is
said to ‘[contain] following rare consonant types: retroflex’ (315) implying that all
dialects have this feature, something that is obviously not true, in particular those
western and southern dialects which have a velar or uvular /r/. In contrast, the entry
for English states that there are said to be ‘approx. 20 [vowels] including diphthongs,
depending on variety’ (259), so the indication of variation is not fully consistent
or rigorous. To be fair, B cautions the reader about this in the introduction to the
 R EVI EWS 173

Language File, advising the reader that ‘where any particular piece of information
becomes crucial in the testing of some hypothesis it is suggested that it should be
thoroughly rechecked’ (222).
Stress is said to be word-initial in Norwegian (315), although this is not true
for many loan-words, while it is generally true of loan-words in Icelandic. That the
Scandinavian languages have affixal definiteness is not mentioned in the descriptions
of Icelandic, Norwegian, Danish, Faroese or Swedish, something which I consider
one of the more interesting features of these languages. Faroese is said to have infixes
generally (262), which is inaccurate according to the Faroese Overview and Reference
Grammar (Thráinsson et al., 2004), where ‘suffixation’ and ‘prefixation’ are indexed
and in the table of contents, but ‘infixation’ is not. Finally, the Scandinavian languages
are classified as ‘Indo-European – Germanic’, following the two-tiered system of
classifying language families. I think that, where the information is available, as is
the case with the Scandinavian languages, an extra tier of classification should be
included in the next edition.
Lastly, there is the small issue of the choice of transcription symbols. In the
‘Abbreviations and conventions used in the text’, the word comma is given as an
example of a word containing a schwa. However, in Australian English, when this
word is pronounced in isolation, the final vowel in this word is quite open, and
would not be considered a schwa. Furthermore, I would expect this same problem
for Scandinavian students, given that this word is pronounced with a rather open
vowel in most, if not all, varieties of Scandinavian. For such a handbook, with a wide
intended audience, it would be helpful to choose a word that contains a schwa in
more than just Standard British English, such as the usual examples of the first vowel
in ‘about’ or ‘above’, or the vowel in ‘the’ in an expression such as ‘the herd’.
In conclusion, I will be strongly recommending this book to students, and I am
sorry it did not exist when I was a student. However, I believe that the second edition
(and I am fairly sure there will be one, given the usefulness of such a text) will be a
better reference. Parts II–V alone contain material that every student needs to know,
while the first 15 chapters (comprising part I) could almost form the basis for an
end-of-undergraduate-course test of basic knowledge. I have yet to refer to this book
in the classroom, but I am very pleased that it exists, and I expect it to be a useful
addition to every linguistics student’s bookshelf.

NOTES
1. These two words would possibly be better examples than anenome.
2. Although I understand from a helpful reviewer that it not acceptable in Standard British
English, I am still not sure what is wrong with this sentence, whether ‘how come’ is not
an acceptable expression, whether the V2 word order is unacceptable, or whether it has
something to do with the possessive.
174 R EVI EWS

REFERENCES
Anderson, Stephen R. 1992. A-Morphous Morphology. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Kiparsky, Paul. 1973. ‘Elsewhere’ in phonology. In Stephen R. Anderson & Paul Kiparsky
(eds.), A Festschrift for Morris Halle, 93–106. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.
Thráinsson, Höskuldur, Hjalmar P. Petersen, Jógvan ı́ Lon Jacobsen & Zakaris Svabo Hansen,
2004. Faroese: An Overview and Reference Grammar. Tórshavn: FProya
FróDskaparfelag.
Wierzbicka, Anna. 1972. Semantic Primitives. Frankfurt: Athenäum.

Lyle Campbell & William J. Poser, Language Classification: History and Method.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Pp. ix + 536.
doi:10.1017/S033258650900208X

Reviewed by Stig Eliasson

Stig Eliasson, Department of English and Linguistics, Program of Northern European

and Baltic Languages and Cultures, FB 05, Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz,
Jakob-Welder-Weg 18, D-55099 Mainz, Germany. eliasson@uni-mainz.de

The main goal of this important, thought-provoking work is ‘to set the stage
for understanding the successful methods for establishing genetic relationships
among languages’ (34), i.e. the techniques for classifying languages on historical
linguistic (rather than, for instance, typological) grounds. Special attention is paid
to ‘the methodology for investigating possible cases of remote linguistic kinship
among languages not yet known to be related’ (394). As Campbell & Poser
(henceforth C&P) observe, ‘[i]t is a general problem we have when dealing with
prehistory that we are at the mercy of the evidence available’ (328). In order to
achieve its objective of grouping languages ‘genetically’ (i.e. according to linguistic
kinship), reconstructing the common proto-language, and, conversely, tracing the
development from the proto-language down to the individual attested languages, the
classical method of historical-comparative linguistics resorts to three main kinds of
criteria or evidence: (i) basic vocabulary, (ii) systematic sound correspondences, and
(iii) agreement of grammatical patterns, including shared aberrancy (4, 11, 31, etc).
However, the comparative method can only reach as far back in time as these types
of data allow. Given a sufficiently long lapse of time and because no structural
or lexical feature that characterizes one individual language as opposed to another
is immune to change, incessantly ongoing linguistic change will eventually wipe
out all traces of the properties of a temporally remote ancestral language. Before
the process has run its full course, though, there is a considerable time-span, for
which the data that might attest kinship are more or less fragmentary or diffuse.