Criticisms of the comparative method
- Related Topics:
- grammar
- stylistics
- comparative linguistics
- historical linguistics
- psycholinguistics
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One of the criticisms directed against the comparative method is that it is based upon a misleading genealogical metaphor. In the mid-19th century, the German linguist August Schleicher introduced into comparative linguistics the model of the “family tree.” There is obviously no point in time at which it can be said that new languages are “born” of a common parent language. Nor is it normally the case that the parent language “lives on” for a while, relatively unchanged, and then “dies.” It is easy enough to recognize the inappropriateness of these biological expressions. No less misleading, however, is the assumption that languages descended from the same parent language will necessarily diverge, never to converge again, through time. This assumption is built into the comparative method as it is traditionally applied. And yet there are many clear cases of convergence in the development of well-documented languages. The dialects of England are fast disappearing and are far more similar in grammar and vocabulary today than they were even a generation ago. They have been strongly influenced by the standard language. The same phenomenon, the replacement of nonstandard or less prestigious forms with forms borrowed from the standard language or dialect, has taken place in many different places at many different times. It would seem, therefore, that one must reckon with both divergence and convergence in the diachronic development of languages: divergence when contact between two speech communities is reduced or broken and convergence when the two speech communities remain in contact and when one is politically or culturally dominant.
The comparative method presupposes linguistically uniform speech communities and independent development after sudden, sharp cleavage. Critics of the comparative method have pointed out that this situation does not generally hold. In 1872 a German scholar, Johannes Schmidt, criticized the family-tree theory and proposed instead what is referred to as the wave theory, according to which different linguistic changes will spread, like waves, from a politically, commercially, or culturally important centre along the main lines of communication, but successive innovations will not necessarily cover exactly the same area. Consequently, there will be no sharp distinction between contiguous dialects, but, in general, the further apart two speech communities are, the more linguistic features there will be that distinguish them.
Internal reconstruction
The comparative method is used to reconstruct earlier forms of a language by drawing upon the evidence provided by other related languages. It may be supplemented by what is called the method of internal reconstruction. This is based upon the existence of anomalous or irregular patterns of formation and the assumption that they must have developed, usually by sound change, from earlier regular patterns. For example, the existence of such patterns in early Latin as honos : honoris (“honor” : “of honor”) and others in contrast with orator : oratoris (“orator” : “of the orator”) and others might lead to the supposition that honoris developed from an earlier *honosis. In this case, the evidence of other languages shows that *s became r between vowels in an earlier period of Latin. But it would have been possible to reconstruct the earlier intervocalic *s with a fair degree of confidence on the basis of the internal evidence alone. Clearly, internal reconstruction depends upon the structural approach to linguistics.
The most significant 20th-century development in the field of historical and comparative linguistics came from the theory of generative grammar (see above Transformational-generative grammar). If the grammar and phonology of a language are described from a synchronic point of view as an integrated system of rules, then the grammatical and phonological similarities and differences between two closely related languages, or dialects, or between two diachronically distinct states of the same language can be described in terms of the similarities and differences in two descriptive rule systems. One system may contain a rule that the other lacks (or may restrict its application more or less narrowly); one system may differ from the other in that the same set of rules will apply in a different order in the one system from the order in which they apply in the other. Language change may thus be accounted for in terms of changes introduced into the underlying system of phonological and grammatical rules (including the addition, loss, or reordering of rules) during the process of language acquisition. So far these principles have been applied principally to sound change. There has also been a little work done on diachronic syntax.
Language classification
There are two kinds of classification of languages practiced in linguistics: genetic (or genealogical) and typological. The purpose of genetic classification is to group languages into families according to their degree of diachronic relatedness. For example, within the Indo-European family, such subfamilies as Germanic or Celtic are recognized; these subfamilies comprise German, English, Dutch, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, and others, on the one hand, and Irish, Welsh, Breton, and others, on the other. So far, most of the languages of the world have been grouped only tentatively into families, and many of the classificatory schemes that have been proposed will no doubt be radically revised as further progress is made.
A typological classification groups languages into types according to their structural characteristics. The most famous typological classification is probably that of isolating, agglutinating, and inflecting (or fusional) languages, which was frequently invoked in the 19th century in support of an evolutionary theory of language development. Roughly speaking, an isolating language is one in which all the words are morphologically unanalyzable (i.e., in which each word is composed of a single morph); Chinese and, even more strikingly, Vietnamese are highly isolating. An agglutinating language (e.g., Turkish) is one in which the word forms can be segmented into morphs, each of which represents a single grammatical category. An inflecting language is one in which there is no one-to-one correspondence between particular word segments and particular grammatical categories. The older Indo-European languages tend to be inflecting in this sense. For example, the Latin suffix -is represents the combination of categories “singular” and “genitive” in the word form hominis “of the man,” but one part of the suffix cannot be assigned to “singular” and another to “genitive,” and -is is only one of many suffixes that in different classes (or declensions) of words represent the combination of “singular” and “genitive.”
There is, in principle, no limit to the variety of ways in which languages can be grouped typologically. One can distinguish languages with a relatively rich phonemic inventory from languages with a relatively poor phonemic inventory, languages with a high ratio of consonants to vowels from languages with a low ratio of consonants to vowels, languages with a fixed word order from languages with a free word order, prefixing languages from suffixing languages, and so on. The problem lies in deciding what significance should be attached to particular typological characteristics. Although there is, not surprisingly, a tendency for genetically related languages to be typologically similar in many ways, typological similarity of itself is no proof of genetic relationship. Nor does it appear true that languages of a particular type will be associated with cultures of a particular type or at a certain stage of development. From work in typology in the second half of the 20th century, it emerged that certain logically unconnected features tend to occur together, so the presence of feature A in a given language will tend to imply the presence of feature B. The discovery of unexpected implications of this kind calls for an explanation and gives a stimulus to research in many branches of linguistics.
