History of English

Recent psycholinguistic studies by e.g. Carroll & Lambert (2003), von Stutterheim & Carroll (2005), and von Stutterheim & Rossdeutscher (2005) have uncovered a typological distinction
between English and German at the level of macrostructural planning (“deciding what to say and how to say it”) which influences the ways in which events are narrated and scenes are described. This distinction is closely linked to the grammatical options of each language. English is not verb-second but very subject-oriented, and it has a progressive, while German is verb-second, not very subject-oriented and does not have a progressive. Dutch, however, has a progressive of sorts (aan het), and claims have been made about Dutch becoming more subject-oriented (eg. Cornelis 2000), although it is still solidly verb-second. Old English sides with German and Dutch in being verb-second, not subject-oriented and not having a progressive of the type of Modern English. This suggests that there was a typological switch, and also that diachronic phenomena which are normally regarded as independent developments - the loss of verb-second and the rise of a progressive - are in fact connected at a deeper level. Dutch presents an interesting case study here, sandwiched as it is between German and English.

Linguists have traditionally represented patterns of divergence within a language family in terms of either a ‘splits’ model, corresponding to a branching family tree structure, or the wave model, resulting in a (dialect) continuum. Recent phylogenetic analyses, however, have tended to assume the former as a viable idealization also for the latter. But the contrast matters, for it typically reflects different processes in the real world: speaker populations either separated by migrations, or expanding over continuous territory. Since history often leaves a complex of both patterns within the same language family, ideally we need a single model to capture both, and tease apart the respective contributions of each. The ‘network’ type of phylogenetic method offers this, so we review recent applications to language data. Most have used lexical data, encoded as binary or multi-state characters. We look instead at continuous distance measures of divergence in phonetics. Our output networks combine branch- and continuum-like signals in ways that correspond well to known histories (illustrated for Germanic, and particularly English). We thus challenge the traditional insistence on shared innovations, setting out a new, principled explanation for why complex language histories can emerge correctly from distance measures, despite shared retentions and parallel innovations.