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There are over twenty separate language families within the more than 700 “Papuan” languages of New Guinea, East Nusa Tenggara, and Island Melanesia, none of which can be convincingly shown to be related. This degree of linguistic diversity is unsurpassed in any other region of comparable size in the world, and exceeds that of the whole of Africa. The classical Comparative Method does confirm the existence of a large Trans New Guinea language family within Papuan. It occupies the central mountain cordillera of New Guinea and some regions to the north and south. The creation of this large family is suggested to be associated with a farming-based population expansion there during the last 10,000 years. The major concentrations of unrelated Papuan language families occur in the Sepik/Ramu river regions, along the north coast to the west of the Sepik as far as the Bird's Head, and in Northern Island Melanesia. These concentrations of diverse families appear to be relics of ancient linguistic strata, the product of in situ diversification that began in each region in the late Pleistocene.

This chapter provides an overview of the Papuan and the Oceanic languages (a branch of Austronesian) in Northern Island Melanesia, as well as phenomena arising through contact between these groups. It shows how linguistics can contribute to the understanding of the history of languages and speakers, and what the findings of those methods have been. The location of the homeland of speakers of Proto-Oceanic is indicated (in northeast New Britain); many facets of the lives of those speakers are shown; and the patterns of their subsequent spread across Island Melanesia and beyond into Remote Oceania are indicated, followed by a second wave overlaying the first into New Guinea and as far as halfway through the Solomon Islands. Regarding the Papuan languages of this region, at least some are older than the 6,000-10,000 ceiling of the Comparative Method, and their relations are explored with the aid of a database of 125 non-lexical structural features. The results reflect archipelago-based clustering with the Central Solomons Papuan languages forming a clade either with the Bismarcks or with Bougainville languages. Papuan languages in Bougainville are less influenced by Oceanic languages than those in the Bismarcks and the Solomons. The chapter considers a variety of scenarios to account for their findings, concluding that the results are compatible with multiple pre-Oceanic waves of arrivals into the area after initial settlement.

This volume is a collection which includes the text of papers presented at the September 2008 Cambridge Symposium on Archaeology and Linguistics in the Andes. The Cambridge symposium sought to bring together the disciplines of linguistics and archaeology, in order to dispel a number of popular myths about the language history of the Andes. This introductory chapter first sets out the structure of the book and introduces its component chapters. Thereafter it clarifies briefly a number of principles from historical linguistics that are indispensable to an understanding of how language data can inform us about prehistory at all, as a general methodological background to the chapters that follow. Next, it reviews the traditional model for associating the linguistic and archaeological records in the Andes, and the problems that attend it. Finally, it looks at one particular cross-disciplinary proposal that has commanded much attention worldwide, but precious little hitherto in the Andes: the ‘farming/language dispersal’ hypothesis.

This chapter explores the possibility that the development of the Chavín Horizon may have stimulated the expansion of one of the major central Andean language families, particularly Aymara, once spread much more widely and further north than today. Pre-Chavín cultures on the coast and in the highlands are reviewed and found to be unlikely sources of this expansion. While the Chavín Horizon may provide a possible source for the first expansion of Aymara, in terms of both its chronology and widespread geographical impact, the ‘strong hypotheses’ proposed to explain the expansion are found to be unconvincing, particularly that linking the expansion to the adoption of maize as a staple. Other hypotheses emphasizing the role of religion and cosmopolitanism are proposed as possible alternatives. The current discussion is placed within the larger context of the history of Andean archaeology and historical linguistics and is viewed as an important step forward in resolving this long-standing problem.

This chapter explores various sociolinguistic scenarios of language contact which may be potentially invoked to account for the complex relationship between Quechua and Aymara. The evidence for the Quechuan and Aymaran language families having separate origins, but engaging in intensive borrowing, is stronger than that supporting common origin. One language may be assumed to have been ‘modelled’ on the other. It is argued here on linguistic grounds that it was most likely Aymara that provided the model for Quechua. The precise nature of their contact remains to be established, however. The chapter describes and evaluates eight scenarios, not necessarily mutually exclusive, that might be invoked to account for it. All are drawn from the literature on language contact studies, illustrating how results from such work can bear on deep-time historical linguistics. Finally, the chapter speculates on what might constitute archaeological evidence for these scenarios.

This chapter offers evidence for language as a complex adaptive system (CAS). This empirical support is drawn from computer simulations of language evolution, the development of pidgin and creole languages, Nicaraguan Sign Language, and historical linguistics.

Chapter 1 sets out the aims of the book, and introduces the core topics of models in historical linguistics, and the role of quantitative vs. qualitative methods in historical linguistics. The importance of use of both quantitative and qualitative models simultaneously is discussed. The chapter also introduces the ‘chasm’ metaphor for the current situation in historical linguistics, where quantitative methods are still confined to a minority of researchers in the field, but a methodological ‘chasm’ seems to separate them from the majority. A meta study of current research in historical linguistics is presented to substantiate this claim. The meta study shows that, compared to the leading general linguistics journal, historical linguistics is lagging behind in adopting quantitative research methods.

Academics experienced some of the same accusations of disloyalty and mistrust as Mencken during World War I, which led to the firing of faculty members for treasonous teachings. It was in this embattled and uncertain context that the literary canon of “American literature” and the field of linguistics as the scientific study of language were constituted. Professors of English noted that one of their most evident methods of demonstrating national loyalty as a profession was to highlight their expertise in the study of what was presumed by many to be the national language. Like Mencken, they sought to capitalize on the growing fascination with U.S. English and the governmental interest in legitimating the existence of an undeclared national language. This chapter situates the new methodology of linguistics in the 1920s in this postwar environment. Linguists participated in the larger historical trends of interwar language institutionalization, and the field of study was constituted in relation to the language politics of the day both in terms of its existence as an academic field and its coalescing methodologies.

Most current thinking about language change is directly linked to ideas from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This chapter shows how the neogrammarian concept of synchronic regularity tested and improved the techniques of reconstruction in Chapter 2. By highlighting the concerns of the past and reviewing the accomplishments that became the building blocks of modern historical linguistics, this chapter offers contemporary discussions of such past problems as Grassmann's Law, Grimm's Law, Verner's Law, and the Indo‐European consonants. An Appendix briefly sketches standard Proto‐Indo‐European phonology for the novice.

Chapter 3 provides an overview of the use of corpora and quantitative methods in historical linguistics over time. This chapter further substantiates the claims in Chapter 1 regarding the underuse of corpora and quantitative methods in historical linguistics, and traces some of the historical roots of the current situation. The chapter demonstrates that there has been a persistent underrepresentation of quantitative research in historical linguistics, but that various material (lack of cheap and accessible computing power) and conceptual factors (early quantitative methods that provoked a negative reaction) have held back a more widespread adoption of quantitative corpus methods. A number of common counterarguments to the use of quantitative methods are discussed and refuted.

This chapter takes a look at efforts to identify the origins of language. It studies research that was conducted on language from the Enlightenment until the romanticism period, and then identifies empirical evidence that emerged from historical and comparative linguistics. The next section considers challenge for historical linguists, which was the search for roots, or the hypothetical seeds of language's words. This chapter also discusses language origins in the context of Darwinian evolution and Heyman Steinthal's psychology of language that could explain the origins of language.

Chapter 2 deals with the foundations of the framework outlined in the book. The basic assumptions of the framework are made explicit, and the chapter continues with three main sections on the major principles of the framework, best practices for conducting research within the framework, and a section on data-driven historical linguistics. The section on principles lays down twelve principles underpinning the framework. These principles are referred to throughout the rest of the book, including the case studies. The aim of these principles is to make historical linguistic research more transparent and reproducible, to facilitate communication across different theoretical paradigms, and to allow researchers to tackle complex problems in a systematic way. The best practices section explains additional methodological points, while the final section discusses the role of corpora in historical linguistics research practice.

In her introductory chapter, the author specifies the aims of the study and its theoretical background. Basing her approach on Leech and Short’s (1981) and Semino and Short’s (2004) categories of discourse presentation, she further develops their model to suit 19th-century fiction and to enable corpus annotation for quantitative next to qualitative investigation, in order to allow for systematically investigating the previously impressionistic observations about discourse presentation modes in historical English on a sound empirical basis. She further outlines how her corpus-stylistic approach will be enriched by contextualization to address the portrayal of subjectivity as well as diachronic pragmatic differences between 19th- and 20th-century narrative fiction. Defining the key issues in her approach of New Historical Stylistics, the study is to provide new insights into the nature of 19th-century narrative fiction that are useful for corpus stylistics, text-linguistics, historical linguistics and pragmatics, as well as narratology and literary criticism.

This final chapter wraps up the main conclusions of the book: the origin of the to-infinitive and its reanalysis as a non-finite subjunctive clause, and its rise and spread at the expense of the finite subjunctive clause. It also reflects on wider issues to do with the interpretation of historical linguistic data, especially the absence of certain constructions (the problem of ‘negative evidence’) and how we can make the most of the data we have. The key to these problems is not to look at syntactic constructions in isolation, but to focus on their function in the language. This means that historical linguists sometimes have to cast their nets wide and look at other fields — discourse, theories of textual cohesion, translation studies, and pragmatics — in order to find the answers to syntactic problems.