Robert M. W. Dixon

http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/2294767.html

A brief book about language change, which dates back to 1997 but I don't know how fast the field moves. The author has two main points to make. First off, he compares the evolution of language to Steven Jay Gould's concept of punctuated equilibrium in biology: long periods of steady development with little change, interspersed with periods when the environment changes rapidly and organisms, or languages, must adapt equally rapidly to survive. The show more impact of Western colonialism is the most recent and largest such traumatic change to have hit the world's language groups and ddiversity.

His other main point is to propose an alternative to the "family tree" model of language relationships. It works well for Indeo-European (within limits) and also for the Austronesian languages of the Pacific; but he is sceptical, to put it politely, of Greenblatt's claims to have constructed family trees for the African and Amerindian languages, let alone the pretensions of Nostratic. Surely in most cases where different language groups exist side by side for centuries, it makes at least as much sense to consider a "linguistic area" where neighbouring speakers may steal vocabulary and grammar from each other. His example is Australia, the area he knows best, but I can see relevance for the Albanian / Macedonian / Bulgarian / Romanian relationship which I've always found fascinating. He makes the point that even Proto-Indo-European doesn't appear to have been homogenous - did the instrumental plural end with *-bhis or *-mis ?

Anyway, I found this rather more digestible than dear old C.-J. Bailey's essay collection. Must look out for more on this topic... show less

Highly enjoyable essay, mostly about language change and on whether the concept of family trees and `genetic relations' give a good overview of what's going on. Interspersed is thoughts on comparative and descriptive linguistics, the duty of linguists and views on Chomskyism.

Do read the footnotes!

What is ergativity?
This book gives a small definition of ergativity as " a grammatical pattern in which the subject of an intransitive clause is treated in the the same way as the object of a transitive clause, and differently from transitive subject."

Did this definition help you? It did if you are interested in languages and linguistics. No doubt!
If you are interested in languages, then this book should be obligatory reading. It can help us understanding languages in a different way.

Prof. show more R.M.W. Dixon has done research on ergativity in several countries since at least the 1970's.

What is most interesting in this book is the discussion of how languages might get or lose ergativity and different kinds of ergative split.

We as speakers of non-ergative (i.e. acusative) languages like English might think that our way of expressing is either the only one that is logical. This book shows that there are other ways of organizing words in clauses.

Some languages show ergativity in only certain clauses. This applies for example to the Caucasian languages in general (from the three groups: South, Northeast and Nothwest). This book gives only the example of Tsova-Tush (or Bats). What lacks here in the book is showing that they have ergative features in mostly one aspect and tense, aorist. Other clauses might even have the subject in the dative case.
Split ergativity even applies to most of the Indo-Iranian languages from Hindi-Urdu to Kurdish.
However, as the languages that have ergative systems belong to different languages groups the author gives examples mainly of those he was involved in research like for instance in Australia. show less

Linguistics