LINGUIST List 5.1370

Thu 01 Dec 1994

Disc: Can the comparative method be applied to syntax?

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1. Frederick Newmeyer, The comparative method and syntactic reconstruction

The ongoing discussion in the List about the comparative method has
raised questions about its applicability to syntactic reconstruction. I
have the impression that with increasing frequency, one comes across
statements such as the following in the literature :

"Most of the attested languages in language family X have some syntactic
property. Therefore we can assume that Proto-X had this property."

or

"Of all the languages in family Y, only language (a) has some particular
syntactic property. Therefore we can assume that this property of (a) is
an innovation not present in Proto-Y."

In other words, there is the tacit assumption that the comparative method
can be applied to syntax. But can it? Could anything resembling Latin
syntax be reconstructed through comparison of the syntax of the modern
Romance languages? Most of the modern Germanic languages are SVO. Should
we therefore reconstruct Proto-Germanic (almost surely incorrectly) as SVO?

Standard introductions to historical linguistics (e.g. Anttila, Jeffers &
Lehiste, etc.) argue that the comparative method is inapplicable to
syntactic reconstruction due to the fact that there is no analog in
syntax to regular sound change. Oversimplifying a bit, words are composed
of phonemes; the comparative method assumes that phonemic change in one
word in a particular environment will be mirrored by like changes in
other words in similar environments. But what are the syntactic analogues
of words and phonemes? And furthermore, syntactic change can be fairly
catyclysmic, restructuring grammars wholesale in one generation --
unlikely or impossible with phonological systems.

I would be interested in hearing the opinions of others on the question
of syntactic reconstruction on the basis of comparing similarities and
differences; also, I wonder if there has been discussion in the
literature that has led to a change in opinion from what I took to be the
standard position that the comparative method is inapplicable.

Fritz Newmeyer
fjnu.washington.edu