Historical Linguistics
Historical linguistics is a subfield of linguistics in which an investigation of the history of languages is used to learn about how languages are related, how languages change, and what languages were like hundreds and even thousands of years ago -- even before written records of a language.
has been pursuing several lines of research for
more than a decade. He continues to publish on Indo-European
comparative and historical linguistics, basically in the "traditional"
paradigm but attempting to make the work intelligible to modern
linguists; the first volume of his linguistic history of English
(tracing the development of Proto-Indo-European into Proto-Germanic) has
just been published by Oxford University Press, and Ringe continues to
publish short articles at a steady pace. He also continues to pursue
work in computational cladistics with a team that now includes Tandy
Warnow (Computer Science, Texas), Luay Nakhleh (Computer Science, Rice),
and Steve Evans (Statistics, Berkeley).
A large proportion of 's current research deals with
language change. He has developed a model of change based on grammar
competition (i.e., competition between conflicting parameter settings);
work on that hypothesis has led him to the discoveries that variation in
the settings of different parameters is independent, that children's
recovery from syntax learning errors follows a profile similar to that
of syntactic change, and that Middle English exhibited two competing
versions of the V2 constraint (one of which plausibly reflects adult
second-language learning of English by speakers of Norse). A crucial
tool in this line of research has been the construction of syntactically
parsed, searchable corpora, chiefly of various stages of English, but
also of French and Portuguese.
Kroch and Ringe see the need to develop a new kind of historical
linguistics, not isolated from the rest of the field, which preserves
the extensive and valuable findings of work in the Neogrammarian
tradition. They are jointly writing a graduate textbook
that will attempt to put historical
linguistics on a new footing, incorporating the insights of modern
theory and sociolinguistics.
aims to develop a set of formal models of
language change that mirrors the theories of population genetics in
evolutionary change. This new area of research combines research from
historical linguistics, corpus linguistics, and language acquisition,
which provides mechanisms of linguistic transmission. Recent work
includes models of syntactic and morphological change.