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

Boudewijn Rempt wrote:
> Well, it's none too dear, so I might actually buy it - especially
> since Dixon's other work is so good. But I buy linguistics books
> essentially by table-of-contents and index - could you give a quick
> overview of the toc?
Okay:

1 Introduction (quick overview of his theory, and what led him to it)
2 Preliminaries (statement of assumptions, usage of the word "language")
3 Linguistic areas and diffusion
  3.1 What can diffuse (a discussion on what features are more or less
    likely to diffuse, and examples)
  3.2 Languages in contact (a discussion on languages in contact, both
    unidirectional and bidirectional borrowing)
4 The family tree model (a discussion of the family tree model, and its
    inadequacies in some families)
  4.1 Criteria (what is required for the family tree model to be valid,
    and how a proposed family tree can be proved)
  4.2 Proto-languages (a discussion on reconstructions)
  4.3 Dating (the difficulty of figuring out when a protolang was
spoken)
  4.4 Subgrouping
5 Modes of change
  5.1 Changes within languages (argues that some kinds of changes tend
    to be rapid, rather than gradual)
  5.2 Language splitting (different ways in which a language can split
    into daughter language(s))
  5.3 Language origin (speculation on the development of language in the
    first place
6 The punctuated equilibrium model (statement of Dixon's theory that
    punctuated equilibrium - long periods of stability, with diffusion,
    punctuated by sudden changes
  6.1 Linguistic equilibrium (languages existing in equilibrium, with
    diffusion between them)
  6.2 Punctuation (periods of rapid change, including lots of language
    splitting)
    6.2.1 Causes (what can trigger punctuation)
    6.2.2 Geographical parameters
  6.3 Some examples (examples from Austronesian, Australia, and the
    Americas)
7 More on proto-languages
8 Recent history (examples from the expansion of the Indo-European
    family; developments in communication, resulting in greater contact
    between dialects; loss of languages and dialects)
9 Today's priorities
  9.1 Why bother? (reasons we should be concerned with language
loss,     includes great examples of "exotic" grammatical structures)
  9.2 Some modern myths (criticisms of the contemporary state of
linguistics)
  9.3 What every linguist should do (calls for linguists to study as
many unrecorded languages, especially endangered ones, as humanly
possible)
10 Summary and prospects
  10.1 The punctuated equilibrium model (a summary of the theory)
  10.2 Concerning comparative linguistics
  10.3 Concerning descriptive linguistics
  10.4 Concerning languages
Appendix - Where the comparative method discovery procedure fails

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