This volume grew out of an international symposium held at the University of Helsinki in October 2003. Its major aim is to discuss linguistic variation, more exactly morphological and syntactic variation, from three angles (historical linguistics, dialectology and language typology), and in doing so ‘to raise the awareness of these linguistic subdisciplines of each other and to encourage their cross-fertilization to their mutual benefit’ (see cover text). Much in the spirit of an integrative functionalism as advocated by Croft (e.g. in Croft Reference Croft2003), which calls for a unified approach to the study of all types of variation (including diachronic, diatopic and crosslinguistic variation), the volume editors have brought together contributors presenting (sometimes only moderately) innovative methodological approaches for each of these three fields (for the most part this means quantitative, corpus-based methodologies) and who are willing to explore interfaces for all three or at least two of them. The various interfaces are also responsible for the overall structure of the volume: a scene-setting part I (editors' introduction plus one almost exclusively typological paper; pp. 3–50) is followed by three interface-based parts: papers addressing the interfaces between diachrony and typology (part II: seven papers, pp. 51–239), between dialectology and typology (part III: three papers, pp. 241–301) and between all three fields (part IV: three papers, pp. 303–69).
Since it is impossible to comment on all of the fourteen contributions to this volume in detail, the following issues will take centre stage below: (a) the range of topics, methods, materials and languages addressed in the volume; (b) the degree to which the individual contributions and the volume as a whole succeed in truly exploring interfaces and benefiting from such a cross-fertilization; and (c) the relevance of this volume for the English linguistics community. In addressing these issues, with (b) obviously as the central one, the very useful, well-structured and informative volume introduction (‘“Triangulation” of diachrony, dialectology and typology: an overview’, pp. 3–20) will variously be drawn upon (and is recommended to anyone with a strong interest in this ‘triangulatory’ approach, but with little time) since it is here that the three volume editors have done a truly fine job at presenting in a nutshell all the papers and the way in which they (believe them to) contribute to the overall aims of the volume and the research programme underlying it.
The vast majority of the papers in the volume deal with morphological and syntactic phenomena in West Germanic languages (Dutch, German, English), with various historical or regional varieties of English taking centre stage in ten papers (seven historical, three dialectological). Most of the papers dealing with older periods of English and, in one case, Older Scots (Joanna Bugaj on ‘Analytic of the samyn or synthetic its? The use of neuter possessives in Older Scots texts’) are to be found in part II of the volume, labelled ‘Diachrony and typology’. Old English is addressed in the papers by Dieter Kastovsky (‘Historical morphology from a typological point of view’) and Cynthia Allen (‘Possessives and determiners in Old English’). Early Modern English data are discussed, not surprisingly, by two of the members of the Helsinki team of formidable (socio-)historical linguists (and editors of this volume): Terttu Nevalainen (‘Vernacular universals? The case of plural was in Early Modern English’; see below on part IV) and, as one of the younger members of this team, Mikko Laitinen (‘Expressing human indefiniteness in English: typology and markedness of pronouns’). Only two of the historical papers on English are truly dia-chronic: Elina Sorva on ‘The concessive connective albeit: a diachronic corpus-based study’ and Thomas Schöneborn on ‘Primary adjectives in English and German: variation and change in diachrony and typology’.
The latter paper is one out of two which are – not only in spirit, but also as regards research issue and approach – pertinent to the marriage of historical linguistics and language typology, even if its results have a rather preliminary status and are in part not really surprising (see pp. 117f.). The second paper which is in fact almost exemplary in demonstrating how historical linguistics and language typology may benefit from each other is the one by Mikko Laitinen, where he applies the concepts of typological markedness and typological hierarchies to variation of third-person pronouns in Early Modern English (with the richly documented data obviously having been drawn from the Helsinki-based Corpus of Early English Correspondence). Most of the other papers in this part of the volume have the diachrony–typology interface less clearly written on their agenda, but nicely illustrate how typologists may profit from observable variation in historical data, as argued for example by Cynthia Allen when discussing Det Poss and Poss Det constructions in Old English. The interface between diachrony and typology also clearly figures in Konstantin Krasukhin's paper on ‘Typology and comparative linguistics: Jakobson revisited’. Here the author strongly argues in favour of Roman Jakobson's uniformitarian hypothesis (or principle), according to which historical reconstruction should be based on data from living cognate languages. He argues this point on the basis of a comparative analysis of the middle voice in various Indo-European languages, focusing on the historical and modern varieties of Greek, Lithuanian and Russian. Relevant as this article is for the interface between diachrony and typology, it is rather idiosyncratic in its structure and presentation, offers much detail but little in terms of generalization, and has an astonishing end, namely none, ending rather abruptly somewhere in mid-air.
According to the editors, grammaticalization is the common denominator of all those papers in the volume which ‘highlight the role of diachrony in approaching issues of typological relevance’ (p. 8). This is true only to an extent: it fully applies, for example, to the study on albeit by the late Elina Sorva, which is a truly fine piece of solid corpus-based research, serving as a wonderful case study of the emergence and development of a concessive connective (including its rediscovery in late twentieth-century English). In other papers, however, grammaticalization figures only indirectly, as is the case for the, as the editors rightly state, ‘most purely typologically-oriented’ of all the chapters in the volume by Anna Siewierska and Dik Bakker on ‘Bi-directional vs. uni-directional asymmetries in the encoding of semantic distinctions in free and bound person forms’. (This chapter, by the way, is also largely responsible for the long list of entries in the index of languages, which, like the very helpful subject and author indexes, has been compiled most carefully.) And in general, it is certainly fair to say that, from the interface perspective, grammaticalization is almost the smallest (and at the same time most expectable) common denominator of historical linguistics and language typology. It thus has little of newsworthiness to offer in terms of cross-fertilization of these two fields of linguistics.
Part III ‘Dialectology and typology’ consists of three papers, two of which are purely descriptive (but given their solid empirical grounding nonetheless highly interesting, especially for anyone interested in the Somerset dialect, or in Irish or Australian English of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries). The third one though is, from the point of linguistic theorizing, clearly the most important one in the whole volume. The author of this paper (‘Dialect and typology. Where they meet – and where they don't’) is Werner Abraham, one of the pioneers of microparametric variation, i.e. the study of dialect morphosyntax from a formalist perspective. One of its positive features is that it is written in a rather nontechnical way, so that nonfamiliarity with the latest formalist jargon will not hamper understanding the major line of its argument (which does not mean that Abraham's paper is always easy to follow). But his major argument, which he illustrates with the help of the demise of the simple past in Upper German and the rise of the analytic perfect, is clear enough and convincing: empirical adequacy requires the inclusion of dialect data, which, given the fact that they are exclusively spoken codes, in turn means that such historical accounts cannot be based on the written standard variety/ies of a single language alone but must take on board everything known about spoken vernaculars and their specific strategies for discourse and grammatical parsing. From a UG perspective, the two central questions Abraham, rightly, raises are the following: ‘If dialects, being spoken-only codes, are analysed under parsing constraints, why would they be determined by a Chomskyan UG in the first place? Likewise, if children learn their own language in the spoken code only, what makes this L1-code amenable to an analytical UG inventory, if the latter is aimed at, and motivated by, written standards only?’ (p. 244).
The two at the same time purely descriptive and purely English-based papers in the dialectological part of the volume are the ones by Kirsti Peitsara (‘Somerset relativizers revisited’) and Clemens Fritz (‘Resilient or yielding? Features of Irish English syntax and aspect in early Australia’). Peitsara's paper is, somewhat unnecessarily, a defence of a much earlier article (1980) by the well-known Helsinki dialectologist Ossi Ihalainen, whose statements on relative clauses in the Somerset dialect had been challenged in subsequent research since Ihalainen's Somerset data violated Keenan and Comrie's Noun Phrase Accessibility Hierarchy. Peitsara gives rich new evidence, essentially filling gaps in Ihalainen's first account, which also resolves the apparent conflict between his data and the Accessibility Hierarchy. Clemens Fritz reports on the analysis of the Corpus of Oz Early English (a self-compiled 2-million-word corpus of Australian English, or perhaps rather English in Australia, between 1788 and 1900) and what can be learnt from it about the development of speakers of Irish English in Australia, and the emerging Australian English in general. The morphosyntactic phenomena he investigates are unbound uses of reflexives and perfective and habitual aspect.
The paper in part IV (‘Dialectology, typology, and diachrony’) that comes closest to the ideal of these three fields mutually enriching each other is the one by Johan van der Auwera, Ludovic De Cuypere and Annemie Neuckermans on ‘Negative indefinites: a typological and diachronic perspective on a Brabantic construction’. Brabantic dialects are Dutch dialects spoken in the Flemish part of Belgium. In the domain of negative indefinite pronouns they use the construction iemand niet ‘somebody not’, i.e. a positive indefinite pronoun followed by a sentential negator, instead of the negative indefinite pronoun niemand ‘nobody’ which is the normal Germanic form. The authors discuss the regional spread, the evolution and the crosslinguistic frequency of this construction. They conclude that the construction itself may well be very frequent across languages, but that the way it came about, namely developing from a niemand . . . niet (‘nobody not’) strategy, is typologically unattested outside the region of Brabant.
In the last two papers of the volume, English takes centre stage again, diachrony and dialectology move to the foreground and typology withdraws to the background. Patricia Poussa's ‘The relatives who and what in northern East Anglia’ is largely a traditional dialectological paper rich in historical and synchronic detail. Typology enters this article only in the guise of a comparison of the two relativization strategies in the East Anglian dialects with relativization strategies in West and, especially, North Germanic languages and dialects. As in the topicwise closely related paper by Peitsara on relativizers in the Somerset dialect, it is somewhat surprising that neither of these articles makes reference to the comprehensive study on relative clauses and relativizers in English dialects by Hermann (Reference Herrmann, Kortmann, Herrmann, Pietsch and Wagner2005). Terttu Nevalainen's ‘Vernacular universals? The case of plural was in Early Modern English’ is primarily a historical paper stimulated by Jack Chambers' notion of vernacular universals (cf. e.g. Chambers Reference Chambers and Kortmann2004). Based on data from the Corpus of Early English Correspondence, Nevalainen discusses the variation between the past tense forms was and were in North England, East Anglia and the London area between the early fifteenth century and the late seventeenth century.
To conclude: compartmentalization in linguistics is increasingly giving way to integrated, interdisciplinary approaches. A most promising approach of this kind in the domain of language variation is the integrative, or dynamic, approach as first propagated by Croft in 1990 (published in a second edition in 2003) and elaborated, for example, by Bisang (Reference Bisang and Kortmann2004). As yet, and this is clearly reflected in this volume, truly integrative ‘interface research’ is still something largely programmatic and needs to be worked out much more fully in individual studies. This notwithstanding, the readers of this volume, especially all those interested in English historical syntax and morphology, will find a range of high-quality studies offering interesting new data and, in part, new interpretations and/or vistas which the integrative paradigm has in store for anyone willing to take a fresh look at the study of diachronic, dialectological and crosslinguistic variation.
