The Comparative Method Reviewed: Regularity and Irregularity in Language Change Book

While historical-comparative linguistics had traditionally been driven by the Neogrammarian ideal that sound change is regular and exceptionless, and one just has to formulate the right rules, advances in the 20th century slightly altered that picture. The sociolinguistics work of Labov, for instance, proved that sound changes could spread gradually through the lexicon, and this process might be interrupted before completion. Dialect-mixing too is better understood today. With that in mind, several linguistics contributed to this mid-1990s volume The Comparative Method Reviewed that tests the comparative method and proposes refinements.

Johanna Nichols presents how the comparative method, as traditionally employed, contains a heuristic component. Few historical linguistics have a rigorous background in statistics, and it is enlightening to read her explanation of how a firm cognate set (her example are the Indo-European "widow" words) would be extremely unlikely to arise by chance.

Lyle Campbell affirms the general value of the comparative method, but notes irregular sound changes that should be taken into account. He gives real-world examples of sound symbolism and homophone avoidance. John Newman's paper uses the history of Cantonese as an example of irregular sound change through taboo avoidance or influence from the literary register. Mark Durie advocates the use of variable rule analysis, treating sound laws as probabilistic, not categorical. His data for the paper is drawn from a computer database of early Germanic forms.

Several papers, by Grace, Blust, and Ross, use Austronesian languages examples. This family is well-reconstructed, but nonetheles features what Blust calls "pandemic irregularity". These authors explore how Sprachbund phenomenon can be just as much a force for sound change as "language-internal" processes.

Harold Koch's paper shed further light on how morphology can affect phonological change, and is important reading for anyone who has finished a basic textbook of historical linguistics. Finally, in what might be the most ambitious paper in the book, David Wilkins traces the web of semantic shifts that can happen to roots and complicate the issue of finding cognates.

Almost two decades after its publication, this collection remains very valuable. Interested readers might want to also look at Ringe & Eska's Historical Linguistics: Towards a 21st-Century Reintegration, which reflects more recent research and deals with the effects of second-language acquisition, but this volume too helps bring people up to speed with newish trends in linguistics.