Book announced at https://linguistlist.org/issues/34.271

EDITOR: Adam Ledgeway
EDITOR: Ian Roberts
TITLE: The Cambridge Handbook of Historical Syntax
PUBLISHER: Cambridge University Press
YEAR: 2022

REVIEWER: Sanford Steever

SUMMARY
The volume under review is a 2022 paperback version of the hardback first published in 2017. It includes 31 chapters by 35 (co-)authors in six parts investigating certain aspects of historic/diachronic syntax, as conceptualized and practiced in the period 1995-2015.
This anthology begins with a brief Introduction by the editors, Adam Ledgeway and Ian Roberts. Part I (Types and Mechanisms of Syntactic Change) includes: Chapter 1, Grammaticalization, by Heiko Narrog and Bernd Heine; Chapter 2, Degrammaticalization, by David Willis; Chapter 3, Exaptation, by John Haiman; Chapter 4, Reanalysis, by Nerea Madariaga; Chapter 5, Analogy and Extension, by Alice Harris; Chapter 6, Restructuring, by David Lightfoot; Chapter 7, Parameter Setting, by Therea Biberauer and Ian Roberts; Chapter 8, Contact and Borrowing, by Tania Kuteva. Part II (Methods and Tools) includes Chapter 9, The Comparative Method and Comparative Reconstruction, by James Clackson; Chapter 10, Internal Reconstruction, by Gisella Ferraresi and Maria Goldbach; Chapter 11, Corpora and Quantitative Methods, by Susan Pintzuk, Ann Taylor and Anthony Warner; Chapter 12, Phylogenetic Reconstruction in Syntax: The Parametric Comparison Method, by Guiseppe Longobardi and Cristina Guardiano. Part III (Principles and Constraints) includes Chapter 13, Universal Grammar, by Anders Holmberg; Chapter 14, Abduction, by Henning Andersen; Chapter 15, Transparency, by David Lightfoot; Chapter 16, Uniformitarianism, by Ian Roberts; Chapter 17, Markedness, Naturalness and Complexity, by Anna Roussou; Chatter 18, Acquisition and Learnability, by David Lightfoot.
Part IV (Major Issues and Themes) includes Chapter 19, The Actuation Problem, by George Walkden; Chapter 20, Inertia, by Ian Roberts; Chapter 21, Gradience and Gradualness vs Abruptness, by Marit Westergaard; Chapter 22, Cyclicity, by Elly van Gelderen. Part V (Explanations) includes Chapter 23, Endogenous and Exogenous Theories of Syntactic Change, by David Willis; Chapter 24, Imperfect Transmission and Discontinuity, by David Lightfoot; Chapter 25, Social Conditioning, by Suzanne Romaine; Chapter 26, Non-syntactic Sources and Triggers of Syntactic Change, by Laurel Brinton and Elizabeth Closs Traugott. Finally, Part VI (Models and Approaches) includes Chapter 27, Principles and Parameters, by Adam Ledgeway and Ian Roberts; Chapter 28, Biolinguistics, by Cedric Boeckx, Pedro Tiago Martins and Evelina Leivada; Chapter 29, Lexical-Functional Grammar, by Kersti Börjars and Nigel Vincent; Chapter 30, Typological Approaches, by Sonia Cristofaro and Paolo Ramat; and Chapter 31, Functional Approaches, by Marianne Mithun. An Index completes the volume.
Each chapter is conceptually self-contained, though with frequent cross-references to other chapters. Given the high degree of repetition in the references in both the Introduction and 31 chapters, the references might have been combined in one place to save space; perhaps CUP hopes to market the chapters individually. The breadth of languages covered in the volume is impressive; however, often only one or two examples are cited.
Though a syntax-internal focus predominates in this volume, other topics, such as child language acquisition, general cognitive capacities, sociolinguistics, and information structure are introduced where they are thought to shed light on the discussion.
The terms “diachronic” and “historical” are largely interchangeable in this volume. The chapters study purported changes in syntax over time whether or not the specific (E-)languages under discussion have recorded histories. The inclusion of Chapters 9 and 10 drive home the conclusion that the topic is diachronic syntax.
The volume seeks to promote originality in two areas. The first (p. 2) is to integrate the results of different theoretical frameworks and approaches to changes in syntax. However, rather than integrating different approaches to syntactic change, this volume often merely juxtaposes them. The second (p. 3) is to avoid traditional formats that focus on particular languages or grammatical phenomena. In doing so, however, the volume assumes a somewhat unfocused character with the minimal unifying theme of treating syntactic change in some manner or other.
EVALUATION
As may be expected with large anthologies, not all chapters and topics will appeal equally to individual readers. My personal biases lean towards two kinds of contributions: those that have sufficient data to mount a compelling diachronic syntactic argument and those that invoke other disciplines, such as sociolinguistics and cognitive science, to illuminate or supplement an otherwise strictly syntactic analysis. For my part, I particularly enjoyed chapters 1, 5, 7, 9, 13, 21, 25, 26, 29, 30, 31 for their various insights, and commend them to other readers.
Several programs of linguistic analysis appear in this volume; reflecting the editors’ own research, however, the dominant program is universal grammar (UG) along with minimalism and principles and parameters. But even among those chapters grounded in UG there often seems little consensus on details apart from the inviolability of the minimal content of UG. With its lucid explanation of UG, Chapter 13 might have served the volume better by appearing earlier.
Certain chapters seek to (re)define traditional concepts used in describing and explaining historical change, such as abduction, reanalysis and transparency in light of UG and the distinction between I-language and E-languages. Their goal seems primarily to be whether these concepts conform to UG and, secondarily if at all, whether they can be shown to function successfully in diachronic analysis. Lightfoot’s Chapter 15 describes how transparency functioned in early UG-based models of syntactic change only to succumb to a theoretical paradigm shift, the introduction of I-language and E-language, leaving only some vestiges after this shift took place. The result is a mixed bag: it sets down the recent history of transparency in linguistics, but then removes that concept from the tool-box of historical syntacticians.
Despite not concentrating on particular linguistic phenomena, certain exemplars of syntactic change recur throughout the volume, e.g. the development of English modal auxiliaries from “full verbs” to verbs lacking nonfinite forms (Chapters 4, 6, 15, 18, 20, 21, 27); English word order (Chapters 7, 11); English ‘do’ as an auxiliary or exponent of INFL ( Chapters 3, 5, 11). In Chapter 18, Lightfoot provides instances where a periphrastic form fills in gaps in modal morphology, e.g. ‘to have to’ appears in nonfinite contexts where ‘must’ cannot appear (there are no nonfinite forms *to must, *musting). While he proposes to treat the emergence of ‘to have to’ as a kind of reanalysis, a more traditional approach would take it as a straightforward example of suppletion, a notion that may not have a ready counterpart in UG and, in any event, appears nowhere in the index.
Several chapters explore how and whether parameter (re-)setting may be used to aptly express syntactic change. In earlier views, parameters constituted part of UG while in later ones they are emergent or epiphenomenal. Chapter 7 introduces macro-, meso-, micro- and nano-parameters, which are correlated here and elsewhere in the volume as targets of diachronic change to varying degrees. However, the possibility of multiple I-languages muddles somewhat how changes to I-language are to be mediated historically.
Some authors suggest that conformity to typological type at the level of macro- or meso-parameter may set the stage for syntactic change by influencing parameter (re-)setting, e.g. Chapter 7. Unfortunately, some other chapters struggle to distinguish typological from diachronic variation when they discuss parameters. Chapter 27 discusses parameter hierarchies as a way to represent the relative markedness of various parameter settings. It should be stressed, however, that the hierarchy in example 25 does not represent the degree of historical relatedness between languages, but their descriptive or typological closeness. It places French and Occitan far closer together than Spanish and Occitan, and places Catalan more closely to Sardinian and Italian than to Spanish. Similarly, the hierarchy in (26) places Portuguese closer to Romanian than to Occitan. In these instances, at least, parameters do not serve diachronic purposes such as providing isoglosses.
Chapter 19 suggests that sociolinguistic factors promoted certain diachronic changes to syntactic patterns that cannot be readily explained by syntax-internal factors. In discussing the change in V2 word order in Middle English, the author speculates that certain population movements took place to actuate this change, but asks (on p. 419) what might have prompted such movements. In the wake of the Black Death (1348-1350), French ceases to be the sole legal language (1362); lower class Britons move upwards socially into the ranks of the gentry, nobility and clerics where French and Latin had flourished; and, reflecting the virtual abandonment of serfdom by 1400, lower class workers and artisans become much more geographically mobile to fulfill labor shortages. Perhaps the linguistic leveling that this social disruption and increased mobility implies helped to actuate the change in V2 order.
Chapter 24 discusses the contribution of E-language to I-language in understanding children’s language acquisition. However, as the author notes, this understanding has not been achieved so far in experimental work. So, for the time being, appeal to this distinction remains speculative in diachronic linguistic analysis.
Chapter 28 presents the most extreme position in the volume. Positing that the narrow syntax operations of MERGE and AGREE in UG are invariant, the authors argue that there can be, strictly speaking, no true syntactic change across space, time and I-grammars. Any change there would imply a fundamental evolutionary change. Thus, wherever linguists suspect apparent syntactic change, they are directed to look at morphological or phonological change instead. In a less drastic move, Chapter 8 proposes to narrow the set of potential diachronic syntactic changes by excluding syntactic features from borrowing; in one interpretation, apparently, syntactic features may always be referred to UG.
It what seems to me to be one of the most successful blends of UG and historical syntactic analysis in the entire anthology, van Gelderen’s Chapter 22 discusses six kinds of diachronic cycle (Table 22.2), whose historical trajectories may be described as the interaction between the twin poles of clarity and comfort of expression. The specificity of the chapter will help to equip researchers with the tools to recognize new cycles and provide enhanced analyses of existing ones. She summarizes a particularly compelling and succinct reconstruction of the negative cycle in Minimalism in Table 22.3.
Rounding out the volume, Mithun’s Chapter 31 illustrates how functional approaches may illuminate our understanding of syntactic change. The demands of information structure and discourse are shown to influence such areas as alignment and word order over the course of time. Rather than positing invariant categories and operations, the chapter demonstrates how changes in both, often small and at the boundaries, may arise and accumulate over time, leading to larger scale changes in syntactic structure.
In descending order of priority, this anthology (1) memorializes how linguists were talking to each other about various theoretical and practical approaches to diachronic syntax during the period 1995-2015; (2) provides new commentaries on already existing historical syntactic analyses; and (3) suggests how linguists might exploit various theories, in particular UG, to develop new analyses by looking at kinds of evidence and connections that traditional programs of analysis had not considered. The ‘shop-floor level’ grammarian, in Holmberg’s happy phrase (p. 287) and with whom I identify, might well wish that these themes had been accorded the opposite priority.
A good follow-on book to this volume is “Language Change at the Interfaces” by Philemon Gomwalk reviewed in LinguistList LINGUIST List: Vol-34-1634. Thu May 25 2023. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.
As to copyediting lapses. The volume’s styling promotes a subtle orthographic colonialism. In many of the non-European language examples, whose orthographies do not distinguish between lower- and upper-case letters, copyeditors have capitalized the initial letter of an example sentence, imposing a Western convention on languages that lack them. This strikes me as contrary to good linguistic practice.
The text on p. 21 mentions an arrow in Table 1.3, which has no arrow. On p. 208, example 1, the last two lines are mixed up. On page 215, the lines 8 and 9 are scrambled. Figures 12.1 and 12.2 are illegible. In Chapter 29, example (11a) translates Medieval Faroese haga as ‘field’ while example (11c) translates it as ‘pen’; perhaps ‘enclosure’ would work for both. On p. 524 the German noun Individuuum ‘individual’ should be Individuum.

ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Sanford Steever is an independent scholar specializing in Dravidian linguistics. He has researched and written extensively on historical Dravidian syntax and morphology. A relevant book is ''Analysis to Synthesis'' (OUP, 1993).