Cyclical Change Continued

This book presents new data and additional questions regarding the linguistic cycle. The topics discussed are the pronoun, negative, negative existential, analytic-synthetic, distributive, determiner, degree, and future/modal cycles. The papers raise questions about the length of time that cycles take, the interactions between different cycles, the typical stages and their stability, and the areal factors influencing cycles. The languages and language families that are considered in depth are Central Pomo, Cherokee, Chinese, English, French, Gbe, German, Hmong-Mien, Maipurean, Mayan, Mohawk, Mon-Khmer, Niger-Congo, Nupod, Quechuan, Sino-Tibetan, Tai-Kadai , Tuscarora, Ute, and Yoruboid. One paper covers several of the world’s language families. Cyclical change connects linguists working in various frameworks because it is exciting to find a reason behind this fascinating phenomenon.

Alexandru Cosmin Nicolae, Romanian Academy, Institute of Linguistics, on Linguist List 28.3125 (2017):
The book reviewed is impressive from many points of view. First and foremost, it is impressive from an empirical perspective: the material discussed in the chapters of the book is from a large number of (genealogically unrelated, typologically distinct and geographically diverse) languages, some of which rarely discussed in the literature. Secondly – and more importantly – the book is impressive from the point of view of its contribution to the concept of ‘linguistic cycle’. Van Gelderen’s and Mithun’s chapters represent an excellent applied discussion of cycles, every general theoretical and methodological aspect concerning this linguistic concept being taken into account in these contributions. The Sapirian ‘drift’ is conceptually undermined by some of the papers, e.g. McWhorter or Szmrecsanyi. The role of the external factors in linguistic change is stressed by McWhorter, who shows that radical analyticity in a few African and Asian languages arose from rapid and untutored non-native adult acquisition of a second language, not from language-internal changes. A (somewhat tacitly assumed) universal directionality of cycles is questioned in van der Auwera and Vossen, who analyse a reversed instance of the Jespersen cycle which proceeds from right to left. Another important recurring idea which is explicitly made prominent by Pye is that linguistic cycles are sensitive to the underlying structure of the language (“We will not know what historical paths that negation takes until we have investigated negation in all languages”, Pye, p. 245). Givón introduces a distinct, but related idea, namely that the universality of a cycle/chain is, to some extent, an illusory epiphenomenon: “local diachronic changes, constrained locally, tend to have global consequences without being necessarily globally constrained” (Givón, p. 253). In her analysis, Wood shows that the cyclic change does not proceed only from lexical-to-functional; rather, functional-to-functional is also a path of change. Finally, more or less explicitly, many of the papers converge on the idea that cycles actually involve repeated instances of grammaticalization. In conclusion, it goes without saying that the book is illuminating for many categories of scholars: first and foremost, for descriptive and historical linguists, but also for theoreticians of all persuasions (generative grammarians, functionalists, etc.) and typologists.