- Linguistic Diversity in Space and Time
" [http://books.google.com/books?id=hrT_xNaDkgQC&printsec=frontcover Linguistic Diversity in Space and Time] " (
University of Chicago Press ,1992 ) is linguistJohanna Nichols 's best known work, pioneering the use oflinguistic typology as a tool for understandinghuman migrations inprehistory .Nichols selects a sample of the world's languages (one per stock) and tabulates typological characteristics such as:
*Head-marking vs.dependent-marking
* Morphological complexity
*Word order
*Morphosyntactic alignment
* Valence-changing operations or voice system
* Presence or absence of distinction between inclusive and exclusive we
* Presence or absence of distinction betweeninalienable possession andalienable possession
* Presence or absence ofnumerical classifiers
* Presence or absence ofnoun class es (such asgrammatical gender oranimacy )
* Presence or absence ofgrammatical number ("plurality neutralization" is Nichols's term for absence)
* Presence or absence ofadpositional phrases ("PP's" in the book, for prepositional or postpositional phrases)
* Presence or absence ofnon-finite verb s (infinitive s orverbal noun s)for each language, using this data to discover regional patterns in the distribution of these features.One pattern is spread zones (geographical areas where a language family has spread widely, often repeated with several language families in sequence, like
Indo-European and laterTurkic languages in centralEurasia ) vs. residual zones (areas, often mountainous, where many languages of various families have been preserved, like theCaucasus orNew Guinea ). For example, head marking is more common in the residual zones, which Nichols suggests is a result of long-term language contact.At the broadest level, Nichols divides the world of languages into three large regions:
*Old World
*New World (Indigenous languages of the Americas )
*"'Pacific" (actuallyAustralian languages andPapuan languages )The Old World is geographically largest, but has the least typological diversity and lowest density of language families, suggesting that repeated spreads from its center have eliminated much diversity which previously existed, especially at the edges of theAfrica-Eurasia supercontinent. Surprisingly, typological statistics forAfrican languages are similar to those for the languages ofEurasia , though there has been little spread of languages between the two areas, other than theAfro-Asiatic languages that span both areas.The New World differs considerably from the Old World, with much higher frequencies of head-marking, ergativity and other features. The "Pacific" is intermediate on these features. One interpretation is that these patterns resulted from chance; another is that the New World was colonized from a Pacific region which was formerly larger and included unknown archaic languages of coastal
East Asia . Based on the latter interpretation, Nichols suggests a relatively early date (pre-Clovis) for the initialpeopling of the Americas .Nichols also suggests that change over time in head-marking languages tends to destroy the information needed for the
comparative method of reconstructing aprotolanguage that is the ancestor to a number of known languages, while dependent-marking languages are more likely to preserve it over time. This would help account for the large number of still-independent language families in the Americas andAustralasia , in contrast to the large families of considerable time depth that have been reconstructed in Eurasia and Africa.
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