Lyle Campbell

University of Hawai'i System · Linguistics

Language Contact and Language Documentation: Whence and Whither? Proceedings of SALSA 25, Texas Linguistics Form 60, ed. by Hannah Foster, Michael Everdell, Katie Bradford, Lorena Orjuela, Frances Cooley, Hammal Al Bulushi, and Ambrocio Gutierrez Lorenzo. http://salsa.ling.utexas.edu/proceedings/2017/Campbell.pdf.

Salikoko Mufwene raises significant questions about how and why languages become endangered (and die). The purpose of this reply is to provide additional perspective on what goes into answering these questions. Several of Mufwene’s claims are responded to. Questions are raised concerning what the theorizing about language endangerment and loss (LEL...

Early developments in linguistics were considered part of philosophy, rhetoric, logic, psychology, biology, pedagogy, poetics, and religion, making it difficult to separate the history of linguistics from intellectual history in general, and, as a consequence, work in the history of linguistics has contributed also to the general history of ideas....

Este artículo examina el estado actual de la Lingüística Comparada aplicada a las diez familias lingüísticas y lenguas aisladas de Mesoamérica. La clasificación de las lenguas mesoamericanas está bien establecida y también está avanzada la reconstrucción de las protolenguas. Se evalúan algunas propuestas de relación genética distante que implican a...

Trivia for linguistics, from citations / quotations mostly noted down in the 1980's and 1990's.

This paper examines aspects of how linguistics and human genetics can collaborate in the investigation of human prehistory. Matters that need more careful attention for linguistic-genetic correlations to have value are emphasized. Some ways to make collaboration between geneticists and linguists more productive are considered, while some misconcept...

In press.

In press

This accessible, hands-on introduction to historical linguistics - the study of language change - does not just talk about topics. With abundant examples and exercises, it helps students learn for themselves how to do historical linguistics. Distinctive to the book is its integration of the standard traditional topics with others now considered vit...

Linguistic acculturation in Nivaclé and Chorote is striking since there are very few Spanish loanwords in either of these two languages, unlike many other Latin American Indian languages, and because there are remarkable examples of the deployment of native linguistic resources to accommodate concepts acquired through contact with Spanish culture....

The multilingualism and patterns of language use in Misión La Paz, Salta Province, Argentina are described and analyzed. Three indigenous languages, Chorote, Nivaclé, and Wichí, are spoken here, but interlocutors in conversations usually do not speak the same language to one another. There is extensive linguistic exogamy, and husbands and wives typ...

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt:How many language isolates are there in the world? (How many language families are there?) Most linguistics do not know, and opinions vary greatly. The answers to these questions are complicated because they depend on different views about fundamental issues in historical linguistics. The goal of this...

A standard form of analysis for linguistic typology is the universal implication. These implications state facts about the range of extant languages, such as ``if objects come after verbs, then adjectives come after nouns.'' Such implications are typically discovered by painstaking hand analysis over a small sample of languages. We propose a comput...

IntroductionGrammatical TraditionsThe Rise of Universal GrammarThe Rise of the Comparative Method Philosophical-Psychological(-Typological-Evolutionary) ApproachesThe Rise of StructuralismNoam Chomsky and Linguistic Theory since 1957TypologyConclusions

What could be more natural for the linguistics profession than a catalogue of the world's languages? In Ethnologue we have one, highly valuable, yet not produced by an organization of academic linguistics but by the Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL), whose primary focus is Bible translation. Ethnologue (henceforth E) has become the standard ref...

How are relationships established between the world's languages? This is one of the most topical and most controversial questions in contemporary linguistics. The central aims of this book are to answer this question, to cut through the controversies, and to contribute to research in distant genetic relationships. In doing this the authors aim to:...

This paper is about internal reconstruction and the history of Chulupí, a Matacoan language of Argentina and Paraguay. We apply internal reconstruction and postulate several sound changes in the history of Chulupí. We bring the results of this internal reconstruction to bear on external comparisons based on cognates in other Matacoan languages, and...

Areal linguistics is defined; a few of the better-known linguistic areas of the world are surveyed for the features that characterize them. Issues concerning how areally diffused features are identified, how linguistic areas are established, and what impact areal linguistics has on other aspects of historical linguistics are addressed. Conceptual p...

The goal of this chapter is to re-examine areal linguistics and in doing so to arrive at a clearer understanding of the notion of ‘linguistic area’. The conclusion reached is that it is individual historical events of diffusion that count, not the post hoc attempts to impose geographical order on varied conglomerations of these borrowings.

New Zealand English - at just 150 years old - is one of the newest varieties of English, and is unique in that its full history and development are documented in extensive audio-recordings. The rich corpus of spoken language provided by New Zealand's ‘mobile disk unit’ has provided insight into how the earliest New Zealand-born settlers spoke, and...

In the last 10 yr the study of Mayan languages has seen both tremendous advances and setbacks. Lamentable political events in Central America, particularly in Guatemala, have stalled some Mayan specialists who launched their investigations in the 1970s, while others have reoriented their research to Mayan groups in Mexico. This paper surveys recent...

My aim here is to clarify some misinterpretations in Aikhenvald's (2002) review of my book (Campbell 1997). It is an unusual review, written four years after the book appeared, and not so much a book review as a critique of one chapter, on South American languages; even here it concentrates only on languages of Amazonia.

Comments: Link to publisher's version is http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?aid=135231.

Introduction One element of the recent controversy over historical methodology set off by Greenberg (1987)'s classification of American Indian languages has been his reliance on superficial lexical resemblances, with no attempt to establish phonological correspondences and no evidence from submerged morphology. Proponents of this methodology argue...

Ethnohistory 48.3 (2001) 552-555 New World Babel: Languages and Nations in Early America. By Edward G. Gray. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999. xiv + 188 pp., acknowledgments, introduction, conclusion, bibliography, index. $40.00 cloth.) New World Babel is divided into six diffusely written chapters, arranged chronologically, each de...

The primary purpose of this paper is to introduce the papers in this issue of Language Science, dedicated to taking stock of both grammaticalization and so-called “grammaticalization theory” (i.e. claims about grammaticalization). This introduction sets the stage for the other papers by surveying the large range of definitions of grammaticalization...

Claims about grammaticalization, and especially about “grammaticalization theory,” are assessed. It is argued that grammaticalization is derivative, that is, that it has no independent status of its own, but rather relies on other processes and mechanisms of linguistic change which are independent of grammaticalization but which provide the explana...

SUMMARY The controversial Quechumaran proposal, of a distant genetic relationship between the Quechuan and Aymaran families, is an excellent case for checking techniques for dealing with hypothesized remote linguistic kinship and for testing the ability of methods to distinguish diffused from inherited material. This paper examines the arguments ag...

In this major new work Alice Harris and Lyle Campbell set out to establish a general framework for the investigation of linguistic change. Systematic cross-linguistic comparison of syntactic change across a wide variety of languages is used to construct hypotheses about the universals and limits of language change more generally. In particular, the...

Le but de l'article est de rendre accessible un manuscript de Benjamin L. Whorf a propos du Nahuatl. Whorf presente des textes issus de deux dialectes (Milpa Alta et Tepoztlan) pour une analyse phonemique. L'auteur montre l'importance des travaux de Whorf dans le developpement de la linguistique Uto-Azteque

SUMMARY In this paper similarities in tree names shared by Indo-European and Finno-Ugric (and Uralic) languages are presented which demonstrate an old historical connection between the two language families. These correspondences are due either to a genetic relationship or to language contact, or perhaps to both. This evidence should contribute tow...

Languages die for political, economic and cultural reasons, and can disappear remarkably quickly. Between ten and fifty per cent of all languages currently spoken can be considered endangered, but it is only in the past ten years or so that due importance has been given to the study of contracting and dying languages. This volume represents the fir...

Studies of word-order universals have had great impact in modern linguistics, thanks to Greenberg’s (1963) work and to Hawkins’s (1983) refinements. Greenberg’s conclusions were based on a sample of 30 languages “for more detailed information” and 142 languages “for certain limited cooccurrences of basic word order” (Hawkins 1983:xi; cf. Greenberg...

That Meso-America constitutes a legitimate linguistic area has been questioned. To address this question, concepts of 'areal linguistics' are here surveyed and refined. Proposed Meso-American areal traits are reconsidered against these findings, and are compared with those of other established linguistic areas. Meso-America proves to be a particula...

SuárezJorge A., The Mesoamerican Indian languages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. Pp. xvii + 206, 3 maps. - Volume 21 Issue 1 - Lyle Campbell

The series builds an extensive collection of high quality descriptions of languages around the world. Each volume offers a comprehensive grammatical description of a single language together with fully analyzed sample texts and, if appropriate, a word list and other relevant information which is available on the language in question. There are no r...