Typology and typological change in English historical linguistics

OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRST-PROOF, 04/29/12, NEWGEN Typology and typological change 49_Nevalainen_Ch48.indd 603 4/29/2012 4:27:23 PM OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRST-PROOF, 04/29/12, NEWGEN 49_Nevalainen_Ch48.indd 604 4/29/2012 4:27:23 PM OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRST-PROOF, 04/29/12, NEWGEN Chapter 48 TYPOLOGY AND TYPOLOGICAL CHANGE IN ENGLISH HISTORICAL LINGUISTICS Bernd Kortmann 1. Introduction The main purpose of this lead chapter is to present and reflect on various ways in which established and recent theories, concepts, and methods in language typology are, or can be, relevant for exploring language change, in general, and the history of English(es), in particular. Like this section as a whole, it is an invitation to historical linguists and historians of the English language to see in what ways the study of the history of English may benefit from a modern typologist’s take on language variation and change. Center stage will be given to morphological and syntactic change as an outgrowth of performance (i.e. language in standard and nonstandard use). The overall spirit informing this chapter is that we need to put an end to compartmentalism in the study of (intra- and cross-) language variation and change (and, no doubt, in the study of language in general). Things need to be thought about together and deserve to be rethought in terms of each other. 49_Nevalainen_Ch48.indd 605 4/29/2012 4:27:23 PM OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRST-PROOF, 04/29/12, NEWGEN  approaches from contact and typology There are at least four ways in which language typology sheds new light on and invites us to rethink the history of English and English historical linguistics: (1) rethinking the history of English in light of (pervasive) cross-linguistic tendencies, as reflected in, for example, (implicational) universals or typological hierarchies; (2) rethinking the history of English in light of larger patterns or correlations among structural changes, having resulted in major typological shifts, such as from a synthetic to a highly analytic language, from a relatively free SOV to a relatively fixed SVO language, or from a language with grammatical gender to a language with semantic gender; (3) rethinking the history of English in light of the major branches of diachronic typology, notably diachronic word order typology and, above all, grammaticalization; and (4) rethinking English historical linguistics in light of recent theories and especially (quantitative) methods in language typology. Each of these four dimensions of the rethinking process, which this handbook invites us to engage in, will figure in the present chapter and in this section as a whole. There is a third party, or rather partner, which is involved in this rethinking process, namely dialectology, not in the guise of historical dialectology (cf. e.g. Dossena and Lass 2004) or because of its obvious relevance for areal typology (cf. e.g. Murelli and Kortmann 2011), but especially in the guise of large-scale typology-driven research on morphosyntactic variation in the nonstandard varieties of English around the world. By necessity, the inclusion of nonstandard varieties and language use makes spontaneous spoken language the object of study—although it has been neglected for a long time in both typology (at least with regard to European languages) and historical linguistics. Yet it is undebated that spontaneous spoken language is the prime locus and that the speaker engaging in verbal interaction is the motor of language change. This is why historical linguists, given the constantly growing wealth of digitized historical data and carefully compiled historical corpora, increasingly try to get hold of historical data bringing them as close as possible to the spoken registers in earlier stages of the language. The importance of the emergence of grammatical structure out of interaction is highlighted, for example, in a recent article by Traugott (2010). In a volume devoted to writing in nonstandard English (Taavitsainen, Melchers, and Pahta 1999), Taavitsainen and Melchers state the following on the natural connection between nonstandard speech (including its representation in writing) and language change: Besides residual variation, the dichotomy between standard and nonstandard is connected with the core issue of actuation, as speakers initiate changes. The role of nonstandard as speech-based is relevant in this connection as most changes come from below, and nonstandard speech in writing, or genres that are nearest to the spoken mode, may be the first to record innovations. (Taavitsainen and Melchers 1999: 9) 49_Nevalainen_Ch48.indd 606 4/29/2012 4:27:23 PM OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRST-PROOF, 04/29/12, NEWGEN AQ1 typology and typological change diachrony (history of English) 607 typology dialectology Figure 1. The “triangulation” of typology, diachrony, and dialectology as an outgrowth of the dynamicization of synchronic typology Yet the partnership of typology, diachrony (i.e. historical linguistics), and dialectology is not just important because of the nature of the data (spontaneous spoken, nonstandard) that are being focused on. This “triangulation” (see Figure 1), as Nevalainen, Klemola, and Laitinen (2006b) have aptly called it, has more farreaching consequences, which are the result of a rethinking of each of the three disciplines in terms of each other. For reasons of space, only a selection of the relevant points and benefits of such a cross-fertilization of the three fields will be addressed in later parts of this chapter. Suffice it to say at this point that this triangulation has grown out of “dynamicizing” synchronic language typology, as first proposed by Joseph Greenberg (1974, 1978), and turning typology, in a next step, into a truly integrative approach to the study of language variation, as succinctly depicted by William Croft in his classic introductory textbook to the field: The ultimate goal for the typological approach is to unify the study of all types of linguistic variation: cross-linguistic (synchronic typology), intralinguistic (sociolinguistics and language acquisition) and diachronic (diachronic typology and historical linguistics; . . . ). . . . It is believed that the underlying factors in all types of linguistic variation are fundamentally the same; in particular, that external factors of all types play a major role in linguistic explanations. (Croft 2003: 289‒90) It is this understanding of typology that informs this chapter and the selection of topics and authors of the section chapters. 2. Functional typology Typology is a branch of comparative linguistics that searches for patterns and limits of linguistic variation on the basis of solid crosslinguistic comparison. This branch involves three major facets, which, as Croft (2003: 1–3) in his discussion of different 49_Nevalainen_Ch48.indd 607 4/29/2012 4:27:23 PM OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRST-PROOF, 04/29/12, NEWGEN  approaches from contact and typology definitions of typology points out correctly, “correspond to the three stages of any empirical scientific analysis” (2003: 2), namely typological classification, typological generalization, and functional-typological explanation. Ever since the 1970s, the latter has come to be identified as an influential approach in the study of language by itself and as the dominant approach in contemporary typology, widely known as the functional-typological or Greenbergian approach, or paradigm. Apart from Joseph Greenberg’s own contributions to the field, it suffices to recall the many stimulating publications by scholars like Bybee, Comrie, Corbett, Croft, Dahl, Givón, Haspelmath, Hawkins, Hopper, or Thompson, to name just a few, in order to prove the significance of this approach in and beyond comparative linguistics in the course of the last three decades. The following properties are constitutive of functional typology. First, it offers partial (as opposed to holistic) typologies, that is, it does not attempt to characterize whole languages, but investigates only individual subdomains, or indeed individual features, of grammar. Second, functional typology is primarily concerned with syntactic and morphological properties of languages. Third, crosslinguistic generalizations are typically not couched in terms of absolute or unrestricted universals, but rather in terms of implicational universals or tendencies. Fourth, functional typology is radically empirical, requiring the collection of data from a wide range of genetically, areally, and historically unrelated languages as a necessary precondition for formulating generalizations of the kind mentioned above. To this purpose a host of methods for language documentation and data collection has been developed (including sophisticated techniques for sampling and questionnaire design). Fifth, the semantic and pragmatic function of language structures is crucial in at least two respects: in defining the object of research in the first place and, above all, in explaining the observable crosslinguistic patterns of variation. Language structure is seen as adapting to (in a broad sense) functional (i.e. communicative and psycholinguistic) needs. The complex conditions of online processing and production, including the competing preferences by the speaker and the hearer, are considered as forces continuously shaping the grammars of human languages. Language use (or: performance, discourse, language in interaction) is thus considered to be the eternal shaper of language form (i.e. grammars). The sixth distinctive property of functional typology, and perhaps the most important one given the topic of this chapter and this entire section, is its extension into the diachronic dimension. As stated by Greenberg (1978: 64) himself, functional typology does not only want to contribute to answering the question “What is a possible human language?” but also—in its guise as diachronic typology—to answering the question “What is a possible transition among language states?”1 1 For more comprehensive and detailed surveys on the role that typology (and language comparison in general) may play in historical linguistics and vice versa, compare individual contributions to Fisiak (1984) on historical syntax, Croft (1995), and Greenberg (1995), and the relevant chapters in Croft (2003, especially chapter 8), Harris and Campbell (1995), as well as Nevalainen, Klemola, and Laitinen (2006a). The latter volume offers several interesting case studies of particular interest for historians of English. 49_Nevalainen_Ch48.indd 608 4/29/2012 4:27:23 PM OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRST-PROOF, 04/29/12, NEWGEN typology and typological change 609 3. Diachronic typology 3.1 Basic assumptions Croft defines diachronic typology as “historical linguistics using a typological method” (2003: 246). It is a result of what Greenberg (1978) called the dynamicization of synchronic typology. This dynamicization involves reinterpreting the different language states (that figure as language types in synchronic typologies) as stages in language change. Synchronic typology can thus define constraints on and (possibly) universal paths of language change, so-called diachronic universals. Among diachronic universals that immediately spring to mind are many of the pathways of change identified in grammaticalization research in the course of the last three decades (e.g. from verb or noun to adposition, or from adposition to subordinator, as explored in Kortmann and König 1992; Kortmann 1997). Concerning constraints on language change (and thus, operationally, on the reconstruction of earlier languages or language states), the central assumption in diachronic typology is uniformitarianism. Crosslinguistic variation in language synchrony is taken to exhaust variation in language history, or simply “languages of the past . . . are [taken to be] not different in nature from languages of the present” (Croft 2003: 233).2 Further assumptions underlying the reinterpretation of synchronic typologies as evolutionary stages are the following three (cf. Croft 2003: 233–36): connectivity (a language can shift from any state to any other state), stability, and frequency. Stability concerns the likelihood that a language can change out of a given language state once it is in it; among other things, stability corresponds to the degree of concentration of this language type in a language family or geographical area. Frequency concerns the likelihood that a language will change into a certain language state; it corresponds to the frequency with which this language type occurs in the world’s languages. We find the situation of an unstable language state in early Indo-European, where many phyla have OV-word order and prepositions, a most unusual situation for OV-languages across the world (only about 7 percent; cf. Hawkins 1990: 119). The normal situation is that OV-languages have postpositions (93 percent) and VO-languages have prepositions. Against this background it makes sense that most Indo-European daughters developed out of this unstable state into one of the two stable states, with the result that, for example, the Slavic, Romance, and Germanic languages (with German as a special case) 2 Note that there are different interpretations of the uniformitarian principle. Different from e.g. Croft, as Comrie (2003: 254–57) makes clear in his illuminating discussion, the uniformitarian hypothesis as usually understood in the philosophy of science implies “a typological consistency of processes, not of typological states” (2003: 256). Applied to reconstruction in historical linguistics, this means that a reconstructed language state of an earlier period may well be different from all currently known typologically attested language states as long as no new type(s) of process(es) of language change is (are) postulated. 49_Nevalainen_Ch48.indd 609 4/29/2012 4:27:24 PM OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRST-PROOF, 04/29/12, NEWGEN  approaches from contact and typology developed VO order. This then makes the shift of English from an SOV to an SVO language likely, a shift that was independent of the fixing of word order as a consequence of the almost complete loss of inflectional morphology (for a detailed discussion of the shift in the position of the verb in English, cf. Hawkins, 49). Variation and gradualness are further basic assumptions of diachronic typology (cf. Greenberg 1995: 150, 154; Croft 2003: 237‒38). Where in a sub-domain of grammar a given language exhibits variation and thus somehow falls in between certain language types, for instance, by employing two alternative constructions each of which is characteristic of a different language type (like the s-genitive and the of-genitive in English), this is interpreted as indicating an ongoing change in language type (e.g. from a synthetic to an analytic language). Situations like these are by no means uncommon; in fact, they represent the rule rather than the exception (cf. also Croft 2003: 42‒43). Finally, the all-important notion of “function” in explaining crosslinguistic patterns of variation is central to diachronic typology, too. The relevant point has been made succinctly by John Payne (1990: 304): There are good grounds for thinking that many of the functional explanations for grammatical universals are . . . best thought of in . . . [a] diachronic sense. . . . Why should languages develop in such a way as to conform, in the majority, to a particular functional principle, unless it is the functional principle itself which motivates the change? Within diachronic typology, two major branches can be distinguished: diachronic word order typology and grammaticalization. 3.2 Diachronic word order typology Ever since Greenberg’s classic publications in the 1960s, word order typology has been of central importance to syntactic typology. From a diachronic perspective, there was a vigorous debate in the 1970s and 1980s as to whether synchronic word order correlations can be made the basis for reconstructing previous language stages, especially the word order of Proto-Indo-European, and for developing theories on how and especially why languages change their basic word order from SOV, the alleged word order of Proto-Indo-European, to SVO or VSO.3 The central notion in this discussion was consistency. All languages were assumed to “strive for” consistency (i.e. to reach a state where the language exhibits in as many domains of syntax as possible an arrangement of elements in line with the basic word order, more exactly with the order of verb and object). For example, the assumption went that all modifiers in a language will appear consistently on one side of their heads, with the modifiers being placed to the right of the head in VO-languages (which, consequently, should have prepositions) and to the left 3 For a full discussion of this debate, compare Harris (1984), McMahon (1994: 143–53), and Comrie (1995: 210–18). 49_Nevalainen_Ch48.indd 610 4/29/2012 4:27:24 PM OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRST-PROOF, 04/29/12, NEWGEN typology and typological change 611 of the head in OV-languages, which are thus postpositional. This “Principle of Natural Serialisation”, as Vennemann (1975) called it, was held to be responsible for languages changing from one word order type to the other. The idea was that if a language changes the order of verb and object, then it will try to restore consistency, or harmony, by changing the order of all its modifier-head structures accordingly. This way of historical reasoning on the basis of synchronic word order correlations has convincingly been rejected for a variety of reasons. Apart from the fact that numerous counterexamples can be given, the notion of consistency itself, for example, is in need of explanation, since consistent languages are neither the most frequent ones (in fact they are very infrequent) nor are they easier to learn than socalled “inconsistent” languages. These flaws in early (so-called “trigger-chain”) theories in diachronic typology have largely been remedied. Among other things, Hawkins (1983) provided a plausible account why English changed from an SOV to an SVO language, namely as a change away from a crosslinguistically dispreferred and thus unstable language type to a stable one. More recently, Hawkins has underpinned this account by giving a psycholinguistic motivation for this change, couched in terms of his Performance Theory of word order, with the Performance-Grammar Correspondence Hypothesis at its center (Hawkins 1990, 1994; 49, in this volume). 3.3 Grammaticalization The typological approach to language change has been more successful in the domain of grammaticalization than in the reconstruction and explanation of word order changes. Grammaticalization research has played a key role in the return of historical linguistics to the scene of mainstream linguistics toward the end of the twentieth century and has created a large, heterogeneous, and highly productive research community of its own in the course of the last 30 years. In a wide range of grammatical domains, based on many crosslinguistic but also language-specific studies, grammaticalization has convincingly been shown to involve changes that are gradual, regular, and tend to be unidirectional. Moreover, the relevant syntactic, morphological, phonological, and semantic changes tend to correlate, without necessarily being synchronized. In grammaticalization the reinterpretation of states in synchronic typology as stages in language change shows up in the form of the clines or gradients that are often used in representing grammaticalization processes (compare e.g. Lehmann 1985, 1995; Heine 1994). Diachronic typology and especially its offspring grammaticalization, both a result of the dynamicization of synchronic typology, have provided rich empirical bases for, among other things, making claims as to more probable and less probable language changes, and for formulating hypotheses that can be tested against the historical developments in individual languages. Well-known historical facts often find their proper place if judged against other languages, especially when they are genetically unrelated. Typology also helps to show that much in language evolution is not unique but, within limits, recurrent, and that this can be motivated 49_Nevalainen_Ch48.indd 611 4/29/2012 4:27:24 PM OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRST-PROOF, 04/29/12, NEWGEN  approaches from contact and typology in different ways: cognitively, by performance considerations (i.e. ease of production and processing), and with the help of the central functions that language fulfills in verbal interaction. Moreover, Croft reminds us that, as in synchronic typology, variation must not be neglected in grammaticalization research either: Above all, diversity (variation) in language is basic. Variation is the normal state of language which we have to deal with. It is dealing mainly with cross-linguistic variation that is the domain of typology. But typologists have also come to integrate diachronic variation and language-internal variation in their purview as in grammaticalization theory. (Croft 2003: 282; bold original) Advocating a modern typology that is not only sensitive, but gives a central place, to language-internal variation forms the perfect transition to an outline of a research program that builds on the partnership of typology and dialectology (cf. also A. Schneider, 53). 4. Typology meets dialectology: Perspectives for rethinking historical linguistics and the history of English “Typology-driven dialectology” or “variationist typology” (as suggested by Chambers 2004: 142‒43) would have made crisper titles for this section. But since both alternatives are outgrowths of the same research program, the decision was made in favor of the more neutral and descriptive option “Typology meets dialectology”, which is, not by coincidence, also the title of a programmatic collective volume (Kortmann 2004). Rethinking dialectology in terms of functional typology and, vice versa, typology in terms of dialectology—from a data, theoretical, and methodological perspective—has been the hallmark of the present author’s research program and research group ever since the end of the 1990s (compare e.g. Anderwald and Kortmann, forthcoming, on typological methods in dialectology). Thus, what will be broadly sketched here is some relevant work from the Freiburg research group (e.g. Kortmann et al. 2005; Hernandez, Kolbe, and Schulz 2011) and researchers and research teams inspired by it (consider various contributions to Kortmann 2004; Nevalainen, Klemola, and Laitinen 2006a; or Siemund 2011). The focus will be on the question of what the implications for English historical linguistics are or can be. Nonstandard (by definition, spontaneous spoken) dialects may serve as a corrective for language typology. Standard varieties may well distort the picture of what constitutes “the” linguistic type of a given language. For example, 49_Nevalainen_Ch48.indd 612 4/29/2012 4:27:24 PM OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRST-PROOF, 04/29/12, NEWGEN typology and typological change 613 the representation of most European languages as “relative pronoun languages” (a feature that makes European languages appear quite exotic compared with the languages in the rest of the world) in typological studies and atlases like the WALS (World Atlas of Language Structures)4 completely disregards the situation prevailing in nonstandard varieties. In English dialects, for example, relative particles (i.e. invariant markers like that and, as a newcomer, what) are the default option. Also it has been shown that nonstandard varieties may be typologically “more well-behaved” than the standard varieties with regard to typological hierarchies. For instance, zero-relative clauses in nonstandard varieties of English conform to Keenan and Comrie’s (1977) NP Accessibility Hierarchy, while zero-relatives in standard English do not (see e.g. Anderwald and Kortmann, forthcoming). The NP Accessibility Hierarchy is a nice example of rethinking the history of English in terms of typology anyway. Take Romaine’s study (1984) on relativization strategies in Germanic, which made this classic typological hierarchy its starting point and demonstrated its value for diachronic syntax. Since areal and diachronic typology form part of typology, it should at this point also be noted that dialects need to be made a central ingredient of areal typology and (as having exclusively emerged out of spontaneous spoken discourse) in grammaticalization studies. Crosslinguistic preferences and functional-typological explanations of (implicational) universals or, even below that level of generalization, of widely observable structural patterns and correlations may shed new light on the current situation (and emergence) of the morphosyntax of dialects, showing how their grammars fully conform to crosslinguistically preferred patterns. Anderwald has demonstrated this most convincingly for various nonstandard negation features (e.g. in Anderwald 2003) and, most recently, for past tense and past participle formation strategies of irregular verbs of the sling—slung—slung, strike—struck—struck type in the dialects of England (Anderwald 2009, 2011). A typology-driven dialectology should also follow the model of typology in identifying variety types (as in typological classification) and generalizations across the structural properties of nonstandard varieties (e.g. across the vast number of nonstandard varieties and Englishes in the Anglophone world). This has been done in a series of publications by Kortmann and Szmrecsanyi over the last few years (e.g. Kortmann and Szmrecsanyi 2004, 2011; Szmrecsanyi and Kortmann 2009a, 2009c). Inspired by Trudgill’s (2009) contact-based typology of English dialects and Chambers’s (2004) account of vernacular universals, they have provided criteria and evidence (a) for five different variety types, whose morphosyntactic profiles reflect their sociohistorical and, above all, their contact (or lack of contact) history (i.e. low-contact L1 varieties, high-contact L1 varieties, L2 varieties, pidgins, creoles), and (b) for generalizations that can be couched in terms of vernacular angloversals (non-implicational and implicational), varioversals (typical 4 See http://wals.info/ for the new (May 2011) online edition of the World Atlas of Language Structures. 49_Nevalainen_Ch48.indd 613 4/29/2012 4:27:24 PM OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRST-PROOF, 04/29/12, NEWGEN  approaches from contact and typology only of individual of the five variety types), and areoversals (pervasive only in individual Anglophone world regions). Moreover, their studies (especially Kortmann and Szmrecsanyi 2009; Szmrecsanyi and Kortmann 2009b) have significantly contributed to the complexity debate in typology, dialectology, and pidgin and creole studies. They developed metrics that allow them to measure different degrees of structural (i.e. overt) complexity and simplicity, which, ultimately, confirm claims that varieties of a language (just as languages in general) do differ in structural complexity and, more exactly, that pidgins and creoles are to be found at the lower end of the simplicity scale, while low-contact L1 varieties are at the top end. More generally, these studies confirm—at least when looking at the spectrum of variety types of English—that extensive and long-term language contact leads to simplification of grammatical structures. 5. The chapters in this section Morphological and syntactic change takes center stage in all chapters except for the one by Wichmann and Urban (54). Four chapters deal with major typological shifts that the English language has undergone in its morphology and syntax in the course of the last 1,000 years. Perhaps the most general message to be taken home from these chapters is that shifts in language type take place at different speeds and may be of different nature on different structural levels in different periods of English. The shift in morphological language type from a synthetic to a highly analytic language is addressed in two entirely novel ways in the chapters by Haselow (51) and Szmrecsanyi (52). Benedikt Szmrecsanyi applies a set of quantitative syntheticity/ analyticity metrics to the inflectional markers and inventory of function words in historical corpus data (beginning with Middle English), which he first developed for and tested out in his analyses of naturalistic corpus data of nonstandard varieties of English (compare Szmrecsanyi and Kortmann 2009b). This method yields interesting insights into the following two questions: Has there been a steady drift in English to become consistently more analytic in the course of its history, with Present-Day English as the most analytic stage? And was the nature of analyticity in earlier periods of English the same as in later periods? Alexander Haselow’s chapter is in large part an exercise in quantitative morphological typology, too, but he for the first time systematically explores this shift in morphological type for derivational, more exactly nominalization, processes and thus also sheds new light on the shift of English from stem-based morphology in Old English to word-based morphology in later periods. In a second part, Haselow applies Talmy-type lexical typology, which establishes typologies based on the way languages package semantic material into lexemes, in a morphosemantic analysis of motion verbs in the history of English. The shift of English in syntactic type from a relatively free SOV to a relatively fixed SVO language and, especially from a contrastive English-German perspective, 49_Nevalainen_Ch48.indd 614 4/29/2012 4:27:24 PM OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRST-PROOF, 04/29/12, NEWGEN typology and typological change 615 its shift from a tight-fit to a loose-fit language is the central topic of the chapter by John Hawkins (49). This chapter is a textbook example of what constitutes a fully worked out functional-typological account, giving center stage to performance-based, more exactly processing, explanations for why English has developed the way it has. Hawkins gives a succinct synopsis of the “processing typology” he has advocated since the early 1990s and of his comparative typology of English and German. This comparative typology (Hawkins 1986) had triggered a renewed interest and rethinking in contrastive linguistics in the mid-1980s. Along the way this chapter offers a key to understanding more than a dozen seemingly unrelated syntactic changes which English has undergone in the course of its history, and which have increased its contrasts with other (SOV and SVO) languages, above all with its closest relative German. The shift of language type investigated by Mikko Laitinen (50) is the shift of English from a grammatical gender language to a semantic gender language, with the result that referential properties like animacy or sex came to determine the form of the pronoun in pronominal agreement. On the basis of qualitative and quantitative corpus-based studies, Laitinen interprets a range of diachronic changes in the English pronoun system in light of this gender shift and, from a typological perspective, in light of Corbett’s agreement hierarchy, according to which pronouns are most likely to exhibit semantic agreement with their antecedents. Besides Hawkins’s exemplary study in diachronic word order typology, diachronic typology figures in the guise of grammaticalization. Based on the survey data of the World Atlas of Varieties of English (WAVE; Kortmann and Lunkenheimer 2011), Agnes Schneider (53) identified 72 morphosyntactic features that can plausibly be argued to be the result of grammaticalization processes in the WAVE dataset (more than 70 nonstandard varieties of English, including English-based pidgins and creoles). Out of these she subjects all those grammaticalization features relating to the NP (or rather DP) to a close analysis in her chapter. This is one of the first attempts at a systematic exploration of grammaticalization in spontaneous spoken and nonstandard English(es). Schneider’s chapter also offers rich data and interpretations helping historians of English(es) (a) identify differences in grammaticalization patterns and paths taken by nonstandard and standard English, (b) distinguish innovative from conservative features, and (c) determine the role played in grammaticalization by the contact history of varieties of English around the world. The latter part of Schneider’s chapter should specifically be read in light of the discussion of “specific implications of pidgins and creoles for grammaticalization” in Hopper and Traugott (2003: 224–30). The analysis of nonstandard varieties of English (along with the factor of language and dialect contact) does not just play a role in the chapters by Schneider (53) and, from the point of view of methodology, Szmrecsanyi (52). In the last chapter of this section, Søren Wichmann and Matthias Urban (54) present an exercise in automated classification of English dialects (including more than 40 high- and low-contact L1 and L2 varieties, as well as 20 English-based pidgins and creoles) on the basis of a methodology (automatic similarity judgments of phonological similarity of words from the same word list) they first developed for classifying thousands of languages. This chapter thus scores high in terms of innovative 49_Nevalainen_Ch48.indd 615 4/29/2012 4:27:24 PM OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRST-PROOF, 04/29/12, NEWGEN  approaches from contact and typology methodology, especially with regard to dialect (inspired by typological) classification and its implications for the history (more exactly the dispersal) of English, and as such nicely complements the study by McMahon et al. (2007). Among other things, this chapter allows us to judge the strength of the geographical signal among the varieties of English in the anglophone world (across the different variety types and anglophone world regions) and the appropriateness of classifying English-based pidgins and creoles as varieties of English. Moreover, the authors take up an idea voiced, for example, by Sapir (1916), according to which the region of highest diversity is likely to be at the same time the center of the origin of a language group. They operationalize this idea by calculating diversity indices for each of the dialects in their sample for inferring the historical centers of innovation and dispersal among the dialects of the British Isles and North America. The two central figures in American linguistics to shape language typology, Edward Sapir and Joseph Greenberg, figure prominently in several of the chapters. In the first place, this has to do with the two undoubtedly most fundamental typological shifts English has undergone, namely “the drift towards the invariable word” (as Sapir (1921: 168) put it, i.e. from a synthetic to a highly analytic language), and the drift toward invariable word order, more exactly from a relatively free SOV (pragmatic word order) language to a (grammaticalized word order) language with a relatively fixed SVO order. Moreover, as the founding father of both word order typology and diachronic typology, Greenberg necessarily looms large in this section, especially in the chapter by Hawkins (49). But this is true for the chapters by Haselow (51) and Szmrecsanyi (52), too, as Greenberg (1954), building on Sapir’s (1921) morphological typology, was the first to develop metrics for measuring different types and degrees of morphological marking (both inflectional and derivational) in languages. The founding fathers of modern language typology are thus still helpful sources of inspiration for rethinking the history of English. This survey concludes with Figure 2. In the somewhat broad terms of the triangulation of typology, diachrony, and dialectology sketched above, this figure is Hawkins Haselow Laitinen typology hn Sc er & Sc hn eid eid n an m ich W an i ny sa b Ur c re m Sz er W ich m an n& Sz Ur m ba re n cs an yi diachrony dialectology Figure 2. The chapters of this section in terms of the “triangulation” 49_Nevalainen_Ch48.indd 616 4/29/2012 4:27:24 PM OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRST-PROOF, 04/29/12, NEWGEN typology and typological change 617 intended to show the following. Three of the section chapters (Hawkins, Haselow, Laitinen) are solely concerned with a typological view on the history of English, namely major and minor shifts of English in language type. The other three chapters, directly (solid lines) or indirectly (broken lines), all involve dialectology and the study of nonstandard varieties of English as the partner of typology and diachrony, for descriptive, explanatory (both especially in Schneider), or methodological reasons (especially in Szmrecsanyi, and Wichmann and Urban). 6. Conclusion and outlook The ultimate aim of this chapter was to help English historical linguists develop a clearer idea concerning the question of what present-day typology has to offer to the study of language change and the history of English. This applies especially to typology in its guise as a dynamic typology integrating what we know about language variation, with all its different facets, into the scope and nature of its descriptions, generalizations and, above all, explanations. Historical linguistics and such an “enlightened” kind of typology, as I dare call it, complement and enrich each other in many interesting ways. They provide missing links for each other, and corroborate or falsify hypotheses on language change formulated in the other field. Neither approach to language variation and change can afford to ignore the insights gained and hypotheses formulated by the other. All these advantages also hold if we add dialectology to this interplay of typology and historical linguistics. The most important added value this triangulation gives us is the focus of dialectology and the study of World Englishes on spontaneous spoken language, which is the main locus of language change and has, at least for the European languages, long been neglected in typological research. Nonstandard varieties and regional Englishes allow us to learn more about (partly ongoing) processes and effects of language change, such as grammaticalization processes, both in contact and noncontact situations. At the risk of oversimplifying things, the benefit of the typological and dialectological perspectives on language change can be sketched as follows. Typology helps the historical linguist of a given language to see, on the one hand, the general and the expectable. Given a certain constellation of structural, especially morphological and syntactic, properties, it is to be expected that this language underwent a (set of) minor or even major typological change(s) between stage A and stage B. At the same time typology helps you see what is truly unexpected, unusual, even unique about individual structural properties, larger sub-domains of grammar, or the morphosyntactic profile of a given language as a whole. Such features or feature constellations may be due to the relative isolation of the language in question or, by contrast, due to an extensive history of language (or dialect) contact—aspects of language change that fall outside the scope of traditional typology (cf. also Bisang 49_Nevalainen_Ch48.indd 617 4/29/2012 4:27:24 PM OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRST-PROOF, 04/29/12, NEWGEN  approaches from contact and typology 2004). This is exactly where variationist typology and typology-driven dialectology come in. Especially for a language like English, with its worldwide spread and unrivalled range of varieties, the dialectological perspective helps the typologist and historical linguist judge the particularities, or even downright oddities, of the (written) standard variety vis-à-vis (spoken) nonstandard L1 varieties. Moreover, we can draw on the detailed knowledge we have about the contact histories of the different varieties of English around the world to correlate their morphosyntactic profiles with the conditions under which these varieties emerged. This allows us to postulate with confidence five basic variety types for English: low-contact L1 varieties, high-contact L1 varieties, L2 varieties, English-based pidgins, and Englishbased creoles—the latter three obviously all high-contact varieties. The dialectological and World Englishes perspective on language change is also relevant for projections from the currently observable structural variation in the Anglophone world both to the past (e.g. in separating conservative from innovative structural features) and to the future. Moreover, this perspective helps us find plausible functional motivations why, for example, certain nonstandard features with a long history continue to thrive (compare e.g. Anderwald (2011) on the continuing “popularity” of past tense dialectal forms like drunk or sung instead of standard English drank/sang), or why certain nonstandard features (e.g. certain angloversals and L1 varioversals) stand a good chance of becoming part of (at least spoken) international standard English within the next few generations. We need to be realistic, though. Compartmentalization in linguistics is still going strong. Truly integrative “interface research” is still something largely programmatic and needs to be worked out much more fully in individual studies. This also applies to the triangulation of typology, dialectology, and historical linguistics. The following chapters thus represent no more than a start, and yet they illustrate, each in its own way, how the history of English can profitably be rethought from a (dynamicized) functional-typological perspective. References Anderwald, Lieselotte. 2003. ‘Non-Standard English and Typological Principles: The Case of Negation’. In Determinants of Linguistic Variation, ed. Günter Rohdenburg and Britta Mondorf, 507–29. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. ———. 2009. The Morphology of English Dialects: Verb Formation in Non-Standard English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2011. ‘Norm vs Variation in British English Irregular Verbs: The Case of Past Tense Sang vs Sung’. English Language and Linguistics 15: 85–112. Anderwald, Lieselotte, and Bernd Kortmann. In press. ‘Typological Methods in Dialectology’. In Research Methods in Language Variation and Change, ed. Manfred Krug and Julia Schlueter. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 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