Table Of ContentLanguage Typology and Historical Contingency
Typological Studies in Language (TSL)
A companion series to the journal Studies in Language. Volumes in this
series are functionally and typologically oriented, covering specific topics in
language by collecting together data from a wide variety of languages and
language typologies.
For an overview of all books published in this series, please see
http://benjamins.com/catalog/tsl
Editors
Spike Gildea Fernando Zúñiga
University of Oregon University of Bern
Editorial Board
Balthasar Bickel John Haiman Marianne Mithun
Zurich St Paul Santa Barbara
Bernard Comrie Martin Haspelmath Doris L. Payne
Leipzig / Santa Barbara Leipzig Eugene, OR
Denis Creissels Bernd Heine Franz Plank
Lyon Köln Konstanz
William Croft Paul J. Hopper Dan I. Slobin
Albuquerque Pittsburgh Berkeley
Nicholas Evans Andrej A. Kibrik Sandra A. Thompson
Canberra Moscow Santa Barbara
Carol Genetti František Lichtenberk
Santa Barbara Auckland
Volume 104
Language Typology and Historical Contingency. In honor of Johanna Nichols
Edited by Balthasar Bickel, Lenore A. Grenoble, David A. Peterson
and Alan Timberlake
Language Typology
and Historical Contingency
In honor of Johanna Nichols
Edited by
Balthasar Bickel
University of Zurich
Lenore A. Grenoble
University of Chicago
David A. Peterson
Dartmouth College
Alan Timberlake
University of California, Berkeley and Columbia University
John Benjamins Publishing Company
Amsterdam / Philadelphia
TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of
8
the American National Standard for Information Sciences – Permanence
of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.48-1984.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Language typology and historical contingency : in honor of Johanna Nichols / edited by
Balthasar Bickel, Lenore A. Grenoble, David A. Peterson and Alan Timberlake.
p. cm. (Typological Studies in Language, issn 0167-7373 ; v. 104)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Typology (Linguistics) 2. Historical linguistics. I. Bickel, Balthasar, editor of compila-
tion. II. Grenoble, Lenore A., editor of compilation. III. Peterson, David A.
(David August), 1968- editor of compilation. IV. Timberlake, Alan, editor of
compilation. V. Nichols, Johanna, honouree. VI. Series: Typological studies in
language ; v. 104.
P204.L298 2013
415.01--dc23 2013038029
isbn 978 90 272 0685 5 (Hb ; alk. paper)
isbn 978 90 272 7080 1 (Eb)
© 2013 – John Benjamins B.V.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any
other means, without written permission from the publisher.
John Benjamins Publishing Co. · P.O. Box 36224 · 1020 me Amsterdam · The Netherlands
John Benjamins North America · P.O. Box 27519 · Philadelphia pa 19118-0519 · usa
Table of contents
Preface vii
part i. Structures and typologies
Discourse semantics and the form of the verb predicate in Karachay-Balkar:
A corpus-based and experimental study 3
Andrej A. Kibrik
Typology and channel of communication: Where do signed languages fit in? 47
Dan I. Slobin
Marking versus indexing: Revisiting the Nichols marking-locus typology 69
Nicholas Evans & Eva Fenwick
Head-marking languages and linguistic theory 91
Robert D. Van Valin
Lessons of variability in clause coordination: Evidence from North
Caucasian languages 125
Aleksandr E. Kibrik
Noun classes grow on trees: Noun classification in the North-East Caucasus 153
Keith Plaster, Maria Polinsky & Boris Harizanov
Affecting valence in Khumi 171
David A. Peterson
Capturing diversity in language acquisition research 195
Sabine Stoll & Balthasar Bickel
part ii. Distributions in time and space
Who inherits what, when? Toward a theory of contact, substrates,
and superimposition zones 219
Mark Donohue
Polysynthesis in the Arctic/Sub-Arctic: How recent is it? 241
Michael Fortescue
vi Language Typology and Historical Contingency
A (micro-)accretion zone in a remnant zone? Lower Fungom
in areal-historical perspective 265
Jeff Good
A history of Iroquoian gender marking 283
Michael Cysouw
The satem shift, Armenian siseṙn, and the early Indo-European of the Balkans 299
Bill J. Darden
Penultimate lengthening in Bantu: Analysis and spread 309
Larry M. Hyman
Culture and the spread of Slavic 331
Alan Timberlake
The syntax and pragmatics of Tungusic revisited 357
Lenore A. Grenoble
Some observations on typological features of hunter-gatherer languages 383
Michael Cysouw & Bernard Comrie
Typologizing phonetic precursors to sound change 395
Alan C. L. Yu
Distributional biases in language families 415
Balthasar Bickel
The morphology of imperatives in Lak: Stem vowels in the second singular
simplex transitive affirmative 445
Victor A. Friedman
Subgrouping in Tibeto-Burman: Can an individual-identifying standard be
developed? How do we factor in the history of migrations
and language contact? 463
Randy J. LaPolla
part iii. A (cautionary) note on methodology
Real data, contrived data, and the Yokuts Canon 477
William F. Weigel
Language index 495
Name index 499
Subject index 505
Preface
It is a great honor for us to present and introduce this volume in honor of Johanna
Nichols.
In her contribution to a 2007 special issue of Linguistic Typology, Johanna asserted
that her “own interest is pure structure and its distribution. Explanation and hypoth-
eses in typology come from all quarters – function, processing, cognition, acquisition,
neuroanatomy, sociolinguistics, history, and language evolution (including the math-
ematics thereof, as in Maslova 2000).” Although it obviously cannot cover all aspects
of Johanna’s interests, we believe the present collection does address the key issues
around which Johanna’s research agenda has revolved over the past forty years and still
does revolve in current work. Several papers address issues of “pure structure” (which
for Johanna has always included discourse structure). These papers discuss how to
best typologize a range of linguistic phenomena and how to interpret the resulting
typology theoretically (A.A. Kibrik, Slobin, Evans & Fenwick, Van Valin, A.E. Kibrik,
Plaster et al.). Another large set of papers is concerned with questions of how modern
distributions were shaped over time and space by numerous forces, from processing
to historical contingencies, either specific to individual families or areas (Donohue,
Fortescue, Good, Cysouw, Darden, Hyman, Timberlake, Grenoble) or globally across
the world (Cysouw & Comrie, Yu, Bickel). Finally, two papers also address method-
ological issues (Bickel & Stoll, Weigel), and two zoom in on the challenges of in-depth
analysis of individual languages (Friedman, Peterson), representing yet other impor-
tant concerns in Johanna’s work.
Issues in language history range in this volume from classical comparative work
(e.g. Darden’s or LaPolla’s chapters) to large-scale typological analysis (e.g. Cysouw &
Comrie’s or Bickel’s chapters), and this squares well with what we believe is one of the
most important lessons that we can draw from Johanna’s work: the insight that lin-
guistic typology and historical linguistics are eventually the same enterprise, aiming at
uncovering how languages came to be the way they are. Typology and classical histori-
cal linguistics use different means and methods, and different datasets, but the ideal
research project incorporates both, and this is indeed a hallmark of many of Johanna’s
publications.
This combination brings with it another characteristic of Johanna’s work
that is reflected in the present volume: typological and historical work need to go
together with attention to details, a care for fieldwork and language documenta-
tion, precise analyses, and philological knowledge. While Johanna has been one of
the most important promoters of statistical approaches to global distributions and
viii Language Typology and Historical Contingency
deep-time developments, she has always at the same time reminded the field that
such approaches are not a shortcut around the need and the difficulties of empirical
groundwork, most of all through her seminal work on Ingush and Chechen.
In recent years it has become popular to draw oppositions between a concern for
particulars (including linguistic and cultural relativity, and the idiosyncrasies of local
or areal histories) versus a concern for universals (including global trends and prin-
ciples). However, as Johanna put it in the quote above, “explanation and hypotheses
in typology come from all quarters,” and this includes general, universal principles
(e.g. in processing, function or cognition) as much as the effects of idiosyncratic, one-
off contingencies in history. We hope that the diverse range of contributions of this
volume help to reaffirm Johanna’s cause for a fully integrated approach that does not
get lost in simplistic headlines that pitch universals against particulars, or viceversa.
The structure of the volume roughly follows a basic division between papers on
structures and their typologies (A.A. Kibrik, Slobin, Evans & Fenwick, Van Valin, A.E.
Kibrik, Polinsky et al., Peterson, Stoll & Bickel) and papers on distributions in time and
space (Donohue, Fortescue, Good, Cysouw, Darden, Hyman, Timberlake, Grenoble,
Cysouw & Comrie, Yu, Bickel, Friedman, LaPolla) and is closed by a methodological
reminder by Weigel.
part i
Structures and typologies
