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Is the Australian linguistic area, because of its unique history, one in which the established methods of historical and comparative linguistics have limited appropriateness? Do neighboring languages in this situation come to share an "equilibrium level" of 50 percent basic vocabulary regardless of their degree of genetic relatedness? Is the Pama-Nyungan grouping totally without foundation and something that must be discarded if any progress is to be made in studying the nature of the linguistic situation in Australia? Are Australian scholars more hesitant than scholars elsewhere to criticize the work of colleagues? These and other "deliberately unorthodox" views of R. M. W. Dixon set forth in Australian Languages (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2002) are countered, while conceding that the book brings together an enormous amount of historically and typologically relevant material in one place.
1.INTRODUCTION.1 Bob Dixon concludes his recent book, Australian Languages (2002) (henceforth AL), with the following provocative claim: "The Australian linguistic area poses problems of investigation and analysis unlike those found anywhere else in the world. The established methods of historical and comparative linguistics, which can be applied so successfully elsewhere, have limited appropriateness in Australia. The special nature of the Australian situation must be acknowledged for real progress to be made in describing the nature of this linguistic situation, and for an understanding to be attained concerning the nature of interrelations between its constituent languages" (699). On this characterization, Australian languages are not just one more family that will yield a reconstructed protolanguage and family tree, once enough descriptive materials have been gathered, and analyzed by enough well-trained comparativists: "The language situation in Australia is simply unlike that of Austronesian; or of Indo-European or Uralic or Uto-Aztecan. It is unique" (xx). Rather, its special characteristics, in Dixon's view, mark it as the ultimate result of an unimaginably long state of "equilibrium"-the likely result of around forty millennia of undisturbed and exclusive coresidence of a whole continent by people who were in regular mutual contact and were united by cultural similarities that deny any one group significantly greater status or power.
Not only would this make the Australian situation an extreme test case for the comparative method, but it would condemn to futility the efforts of those scholars imperceptive enough to apply...