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An increasingly popular approach in linguistics is to locate the causes of recurrent grammatical patterns in the historical process of language change, claiming that all principled explanations for linguistic universals have a diachronic dimension. But then, are these recurrent grammatical patterns true universals? And what is the relation between synchronic and diachronic factors in accounting for linguistic universals? These questions are the main concern of the present volume, which collects specially commissioned work by leading scholars of generative and functional linguistics.
In addition to a summary of the individual contributions, Jeff Good's 'Introduction' offers an excellent overview of different ways of understanding and explaining universals. In response to this introduction, Johanna Nichols presents an overall conclusion in the final chapter, 'Universals and diachrony: Some observations', in which general background questions for further work are raised as well as questions for each contribution in the book. Apart from the introduction and conclusion, the book contains ten papers grouped into five parts, which except for part I, 'Universals and change: General perspectives', deal with universals on different levels of linguistic organization, viz. phonology, morphology, morphosyntax and syntax.
Part I begins with Paul Kiparsky's contribution, 'Universals constrain change; change results in typological generalizations'. Kiparsky makes a principled distinction between true universals, which 'constrain both synchronic grammars and language change', and typological generalizations, which are 'simply the results of typical paths of change' (52). True universals are identified by five criteria: they are exceptionless, process-independent, analogically generalized, encoded as constraints and manifested in contexts 'where higher-ranking constraints that override them are not in play' (49). Applying these criteria to a number of proposed typological generalizations and universals, Kiparsky argues that the 'D-hierarchy' (more usually known under the term 'animacy hierarchy'), which is relevant in the phenomena of split ergativity, number marking and number agreement, is a linguistic universal. In contrast, the binding properties of complex anaphors derive from a typological generalization with a historical explanation. Nichols offers additional evidence from Slavic languages that the D-hierarchy plays a role in areas of grammar other than case marking. However, she also raises the question of how we can falsify the claim that a hierarchy is available to all languages but not necessarily active in any language.
'On the explanation of typologically...