THEORY: Areal features. was: THEORY: Storage Vs. Computation

On Tue, 15 Jun 1999, Raymond A. Brown wrote:

>
> Yes, indeed.  It's like all theories that posit some unidirectional
> tendency in language - the theory would be fine if it weren't for all the
> multitude of natlangs actually spoken!  As homines spaientes have been
> using language for many millennia, unidirectionalism should've got us all
> speaking the same by now - and we ain't.
>
I've always found it interesting that languages do indeed
seem to converge - in certain geographical areas, even if they
are of different families. The Tibeto-Burman languages of
Nepal and India have kept the original morphological complexity,
where they are in contact with the morphological complex
Indo-Aryan languages; the Tibeto-Burman languages of
south-east Asia, such as the southern Chinese languages,
but also Akha and Lahu, have lost a lot of that complexity
and gained tones - like the surrounding Mon-Khmer and Thai
languages. And I've heard the tonal simplicity and innovative
morphology of the northern Chinese dialect explained by
the proximity to the Altaic languages.

I guess that what this means is that it would be interesting
to investigate whether there's an areal version of Sapirs
'drift'. (That was Sapir - wasn't it?)

But there's little good literature on the subject of
areal norms, and as soon as it is mentioned, people
tend to get up complicated sub-, super-, and ad-stratal
theories, that are not always really satisfactory.

Boudewijn Rempt  | http://www.xs4all.nl/~bsarempt