Re-orienting the agenda
The theoretical goals of those of us who have been studying grammatical change in the context of trying to understand language universals are radically different from those of the 19th Century comparativists. While we never lament coming up with — as by products — reconstructed pre-, pre-pre or even proto- forms, the goals of our enterprise, ever since Bopp and Meillet, have been different. We are interested first and foremost in the process of diachronic change itself. Even more specifically, we have been trying ever since the early 1970s to elucidate and understand the general principles — universals — that govern morpho syntactic change.
The underlying motivation for this new agenda is thus not inherently diachronic. Rather, it springs from an attempt to understand synchronic grammatical structure and its typological diversity. What we have been observing is that each grammatical — functional — domain seems to be grammaticalized via a relatively small number of diachronic pathways. The typological range of structures that can code, synchronically, any particular grammatical functional domain is thus highly constrained. And the constraints seem to apply diachronically. That is, what is constrained is the number and type of diachronic pathways via which each domain can be grammaticalized.
This is, of course, not altogether surprising in the context of Darwinian evolutionary thinking. In biology too, the distribution of current (‘synchronic’) types of organisms is totally constrained — and explained — by the available evolutionary (‘diachronic’) pathways that led to the extant types.
Quite legitimately, then, one may wish to study diachrony not for its own sake, but rather to gain better understanding of seemingly-synchronic universals that govern the range of possible grammatical typological diversity.
This agenda, it is easy to see, diverges rather sharply from the 19th Century’s magnificent obsession with proto-form reconstruction. In addition, it also departs from the 19th Century comparativists’ profoundly empiricist, inductivist methodological bias against non-inductive methods, as well as against any sort of theorizing, especially that which may require a ‘deep’ conceptual apparatus.
The strong inductivist bias of the Grand Tradition was shared by Bloomfield and his structuralist acolytes. This is evident in Bloomfield’s (1922) attack on Sapir’s mentalism:
“…We must study people’s habits of language — the way they talk — without bothering about mental processes that we conceive to underlie or accompany habits. We must dodge this issue by a fundamental assumption, leaving it to a separate investigation in which our results will figure as data along with the results of other social sciences…” (Bloomfield 1922:142)
The bias was also extended toward typological diversity, a subject to which at least some exponents of the Grand Tradition (Bopp, Schleicher, von Humboldt) tried to apply universalist thinking. Thus:
“…The only useful generalizations about language are inductive generalizations…The fact that some features are, at any rate, widespread, is worthy of notice and calls for an explanation; when we have adequate data about many languages, we shall have to return to the problem of general grammar [universals] and to explain those similarities and divergences, but this study, when it comes, will be not speculative but inductive…” (Bloomfield 1933:20)
As one can see, Bloomfield’s main beef with theory was indeed methodological. From his perspective, induction reigns and speculation is to be shunned. But the theoretical counterpart of this methodological purism is neigh inevitable. Thus, in pronouncing on linguistic diversity, Bloomfield (1933) again reveals his ingrained anti-universalist bias:
“…north of Mexico alone there are dozens of totally unrelated groups of languages, presenting the most varied types of structure. In the stress of recording utterly strange forms of speech one soon learned that philosophical presuppositions [a theory of universals] were only a hindrance…” (1933:19)
Bloomfield’s structuralist minions fairly wallowed in unconstrained diversity. In extolling the intellectual legacy of Bloomfield and other early American structuralists, M. Joos (1958) writes:
“…Their leading principle was that every language has to be explained from the inside out, the explanation being formulated under the logic of that language…” (1958:v)
Once one’s agenda shifts from reconstructing proto forms to universals of language change and thus of language, the balance between the Comparative Method and Internal Reconstruction shifts, inevitably, often radically. It is thus hardly an accident that the renascent interest in grammaticalization, beginning in the early 1970s but catalyzed by Greenberg’s seminal typological approach to universals (in particular Greenberg 1966), brought to the fore unabashed universalists. Combining a functional (‘mentalist’) and typological (‘universalist’) orientation, the new generation of synchronic-cum-diachronic linguists gravitated rather naturally toward Internal Reconstruction — suspect, speculative, non inductive — as their signature method.
