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Labov, William. Principles of linguistic change, Volume 1: Internal factors.
Oxford, UK/Cambridge, USA: Blackwell. 1994. xix + 641 pp. ISBN
0-631-
17914–3.
[Language in Society 20.]
Reviewed by ELIZABETH C. TRAUGOTT and SCOTT A. SCHWENTER
Stanford University
This volume is the first of three in which William Labov brings together
his cumulative findings, as they have developed and been extended by others
for more than three decades. Volume 2 will be concerned with "Social
Factors", including the location and social role of innovators of change, as
well as "change and the curvilinear pattern". Volume 3 will be concerned
with "Cognitive Factors", including "the effect of change on comprehension
across and within dialects", syntactic change, grammaticalization, and "the
forms of variable rules and their place in the grammar". The "Internal
Factors" to which the volume under review is dedicated are defined as
primarily concerned with three of the five empirical problems for a theory of
language change articulated by Weinreich, Labov, and Herzog (1968:
183-88): constraints on change, mechanisms of change, and ways in which
change is embedded within the linguistic system (42). The other two
empirical problems, evaluation of change and especially actuation of the start
of change will be the subjects of Volume 2. "Internal" then is to be under-
stood in the sense of inherent in and arising out of the structure of a syn-
chronic state (for various interpretations of "internal" vs. "external" change,
see Gerritsen and Stein 1992).
In this very rich book the domain of investigation is primarily phonolo-
gy, though toward the end considerable attention is paid to the interaction of
phonological variation and morphology. Sound change is considered to be
"the motive force that is most responsible for the continued metamorphoses
of languages throughout recorded and unrecorded history" (600). Although
our written records may obscure the extent of sound change, a focus on
syntax is likely to show that this is not correct, provided general properties
of change are considered, for example, the continuing recruitment of serial
verbs into case markers (Givón 1975) or auxiliaries (Bybee et al. 1994), or
other well-known examples of grammaticalization (for overviews, see
Lehmann 1995 [1982], Heine and Reh 1984, Hopper and Traugott 1993). It
remains to be seen whether the findings of Volume 3, which will focus on syntax
and grammaticalization, will call the primacy of sound change into question.
Studies in Language 21:1 (1997), 228–236. DOI 10.1075/sl.21.1.17clo
ISSN 0378–4177 / E-ISSN 1569–9978 © John Benjamins Publishing Company
REVIEWS 229
The major conclusions of the volume under review are summarized in
Chapter 21. They are deceptively simple, given the complexity of the data,
which is drawn from observations of speech and from experimental results.
Some of the conclusions will already be well known to even those who are
only slightly familiar with Labov's earlier work, although all the evidence
and analytic arguments for them may not be, e. g., generalizations about
chain shifts, including "The Vowel Shift Principle": "In chain shifts, periph-
eral vowels become more open and non-peripheral vowels become less open"
(601).
Familiar too is the theoretical conclusion that the existence and indeed
prevalence of near-mergers demonstrates that small differences in sound do
exist and count for speakers, and that the production and interpretation of
linguistic forms is asymmetrical (speakers may produce but not be able to
hear near-mergers). Some of his conclusions regarding various Neogram-
marian hypotheses appeared earlier in his 1981 article in Language. Building
on this work Labov has developed the "Principle of Regularity", his version
of the Neogrammarian principle of regularity: "Sound change is a change in
the phonetic realization of a phoneme, without regard to lexical identity"
(603),
that is, it is "the result of a gradual transformation of a single phonetic
feature of a phoneme in a continuous phonetic space" (542). Another
principle is the "Principle of Category Change" according to which "Changes
that affect several features of a sound simultaneously proceed by altering the
category membership of individual words" (603), that is, lexical diffusion is
a function of the "abrupt substitution of one phoneme for another in words
that contain that phoneme" (542). Labov further upholds the Neogrammarian
framework by arguing for a "Mechanical Principle": "The relative progress
of sound change is determined by phonetic factors alone, without regard to
the preservation of meaning" (603). In other words, he rejects what he calls
"functional motivations" for change, most particularly preservation of
information. We will discuss this issue further below.
Labov systematically goes through examples of instances where
theoretical frameworks not only shape certain assumptions but also "prevent
the recognition of facts" (368). Among his best-known examples of such
myopia is the insistence that sound change cannot be observed in progress or
/that near-mergers cannot exist, e.g., for some speakers, source/sauce,
fool/full, ferry/furry, line/loin. A lengthy section (Part C, Chapters 10-14) is
devoted to the topic of near-mergers, and to a demonstration from contempo-
rary data in Philadelphia, Essex (England), and Belfast (Ireland) that so-
called puzzles in the historical record regarding the history of such forms as
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meat/mate in sixteenth century London, are not puzzles at all if we move
away from theories of categorization to a theory of discrimination. While the
full implications of this claim (which seems to favor an "external" explana-
tion from psychoacoustics) remain to be revealed in Volume 3 (418), the
nature and force of Labov's mode of analysis is clear. He probes well-
accepted theories by exposing paradoxes and testing old claims with new
data recently made available through techniques such as instrumental
analysis in the case of near-mergers. Other techniques developed in the book
are multiple regression analysis and multidimensional scaling, in connection
with regularity of sound change (Part D, Chapters 15-18). Throughout, but
with varying degrees of success, Labov challenges himself and us to eschew
theory that invents data, and to favor uncovering of facts — for him a fact
is "a true synthetic predication about a particular singular object" (12).
Building on evidence from near-merger that production and perception
are highly asymmetric, Labov argues that children may ignore certain tokens
(that is, fail to use them as data from perception) if those tokens are misun-
derstood. The consequence is that such tokens will be used less and less over
the generations. If there is an alternative form which is not misunderstood,
it will over time become part of the larger pool that is used to establish
probabilities. The role of misunderstandings is discussed in terms of near
mergers, -t, d deletion, and, briefly, the development of Jo-support, based on
Kroch (1989a, 1989b). The syntactic example of do-support is introduced in
a book otherwise devoted to phonology and some morphology as the data
that, according to Labov, "indicates that it is not the desire to be understood
but the consequence of misunderstanding that influences language change"
(586,
italics original). However, Kroch (1989b) specifically rejects his
(1989a) hypothesis about misunderstanding, and says:
Unfortunately, the evidence that would be needed to actually show that
some linguistic factor had a causal effect in advancing a change under the
differential misunderstanding model, or under any functional model as far
as we can see, would seem to be of a kind unavailable to historians
(Kroch 1989b: 240).
As Kroch goes on to say, change in progress may shed some light on
misunderstanding, but assigning it a causal role in the grammatical domain
is complex since grammatical contexts do not evolve singly (ibid.). Misun-
derstanding would seem to play a plausible role only in sound change, where
semantics is not at issue (though pragmatics is).
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In any event, the emphasis in the final section of the book on misunder-
standing, and also on probability matching as major factors in change, calls
into question the extent to which Labov is indeed investigating "internal"
change in this volume. Although he claims that "[n]o complete separation is
intended" (2), Labov nevertheless argues that internal factors are "effective-
ly" independent from external factors because "If an internal factor is
dropped or changed, changes appear in other internal factors, but the external
factors remain as they were" (3). It is widely held that language acquisition
can give a window on "internal" change (see for example especially Light-
foot 1979). However, acquisition is motivated by neurological, psychological,
or social factors, and is therefore external. Even more importantly, what are
called "internal factors" are actually only factors that "are reconstructible in
terms of linguistic theory" (Anttila 1995). For example, Labov regards chain
shifts as internal. He observes, and also reconstructs, such shifts in terms of
the theoretical concept of phonological space organized in terms of "the
feature of peripherality". He argues that in Germanic languages tense vowels
are peripheral, lax vowels non-peripheral. In Romance languages, however,
the front unrounded and back rounded vowels are peripheral, whereas the
front rounded or "mixed" vowels are nonperipheral (601). The theoretical
concept is somehow reified to an entity with its own motivations, a singular
organism that determines change:
When language changes, its information-carrying capacity is often threat-
ened; but in the long run, most languages do preserve their means of
conveying information, more or less, by one route or another (568).
By the end of the book, however, Labov does acknowledge that the evolu-
tionary and historical perspective presented "demands an understanding of
human behavior in its social context" (599). At the end too, he acknowledges
another major puzzle: how does one reconcile the fact that language changes
in mechanical ways with its function as a communicative device? (605). This
puzzle, although said to be raised by the facts, is surely created by his
theoretical position that "function" involves preservation of referential
information.
With a view to the interests of many readers of Studies in Language, we
now turn to a more detailed critique of Labov's view of functionalism. In
Part E (Chapters 19-21) Labov presents the controversial Neogrammarian
claim that sound change is independent of the communicative needs of
speakers and listeners (547), and claims to argue from "the facts" that the
232 REVIEWS
Neogrammarian rejection of "functionalism" is correct. The point of depar-
ture for Labov's discussion is Kiparsky's universal distinctness condition
(1982),
which states that there is a tendency for semantically relevant
information to be maintained in the surface structure of utterances (554).
This "functional hypothesis" (547) holds that if an overtly realized element
carries referential meaning (e.g., an inflection), then that element should be
insulated from deletion by phonological processes that otherwise affect the
sound(s) in question (e.g., in monomorphemic forms). This view of sound
change as sensitive to the communicative needs of speakers intending "to be
understood and not misunderstood" (41) is at odds with the Neogrammarian
(and Labov's) position, which holds that sound change is completely regular,
exceptionless, and blind to speaker/hearer needs or intentions.
Labov argues that the functionalist hypothesis has "overestimated" the
effect of meaning on sound change, which is instead controlled by purely
mechanical factors like phonetic conditioning (568). He points out that
empirical testing of Kiparsky's hypothesis has yielded data that clearly
invalidate the view that functional considerations affect phonological
variation, in particular that meaning has a controlling effect on change (549).
But the narrow view equating function with referential meaning or "informa-
tion states" (41) underestimates the multiplicity of factors that can exert
influence on the form of utterances. Furthermore, as even the small sampling
of studies discussed by Labov shows, the findings with respect to Kiparsky's
hypothesis have actually been quite equivocal, both supporting and refuting
the so-called "functionalist" stance (see Guy 1993 for more examples).
Labov further clarifies his position with regard to functionalism, saying:
we must be skeptical of all arguments that claim to explain linguistic
changes through the speaker's desires or intentions to communicate a
given message (549).
Again, the "message" Labov is alluding to is meaning from a purely referen-
tial point of view. What seems particularly strange in this passage is that
although Labov (rightly, in our view) conceives of language as "the instru-
ment of communication" (9), he rejects the concept of speakers as expressive
agents who push linguistic forms beyond their accepted boundaries, and in
the process facilitate new changes or sustain ongoing ones. Labov's view
seems especially untenable in the case of grammaticalization, where innova-
tive,
pragmatically expressive, extensions of forms are surely the impetus for
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