The notion of uniformitarianism, originally borrowed into linguistics from the earth sciences, is widely considered to be a foundational principle in modern historical linguistics. However, there are almost as many interpretations of uniformitarianism as there are historical linguists who take the time to define the notion. In this paper I argue, following Gould (
In this paper I examine the notion of uniformitarianism in modern-day historical linguistics. Uniformitarianism is widely believed to have been borrowed into linguistics from Charles Lyell’s
Uniformitarianism can be defined, at a very broad-brush level, as the principle that the present is key to the past; in Section 2 I delve into the definition in more detail. The history and origins of linguistic uniformitarianism in the 19th and early 20th centuries have been addressed in detail in various works (
Though present-day linguists seeking intellectual antecedents for their uniformitarianisms occasionally cite 19th-century geologists, particularly Lyell, the later history of uniformitarianism in geology and the other historical sciences has rarely been taken into account.
A short but highly influential paper by Gould (
For Lyell, the substantive and methodological issues were related, but not conflated. Whewell (
Gould goes on to argue, with many others (
Methodological uniformitarianism, by contrast, is regarded by Gould both as a necessary assumption for scientific inquiry – the “basis for extrapolating from the known to the unknown” (1965: 226) – and as a redundant term in modern science, since it can be contrasted only with the now largely discredited view that supernatural interventions played a role in shaping world history (cf. also
Gould (
Rudwick and Gould also divide substantive uniformitarianism into two:
With Gould’s and Rudwick’s distinctions in mind, we can now turn to examine the uses linguists have made of the concept.
This section catalogues the linguistic equivalents of Gould’s and Rudwick’s four uniformitarianisms: state, rate, law, and process. In each case I consider what a linguistic uniformitarianism of this type could look like, and whether it has actually been proposed by a linguist.
Uniformity of rate is not a position that has had many defenders in the history of linguistics.
Work in evolutionary biology by Gould and others on punctuated equilibrium (see
Punctuated equilibrium has also found application in Lightfoot’s (
The only explicit defence of uniformity of rate I am aware of is in a recent chapter by Plank (
By contrast, uniformity of state is at the heart of many definitions of uniformitarianism in the linguistic domain. Croft (
The Cartesian position that evolutionarily modern humans are uniform with respect to their innate endowment for language has been held by the majority of modern linguists (cf. e.g.
Dediu & Ladd (
Some invocations of the uniformity of state in linguistics rest on shakier grounds. In particular, Roger Lass has repeatedly argued (
Lass defines the crucial principle as follows:
No linguistic state of affairs (structure, inventory, process, etc.) can have been the case only in the past.
Lass then takes a simple example (
The argument as stated is valid, but the problem lies with Lass’s General Uniformity Principle. To see why, consider another hypothetical example. No living language contains the words
Lass (
An instructive parallel to Lass’s (
In sum: the same reasoning that Lass (
To close this section, it should also be noted that several linguists in the 21st century have explicitly rejected the uniformitarian position. The examples I know of involve the rejection of one or more substantive uniformitarian claims. Newmeyer (
Debates over substantive uniformitarianism are also current in pidgin and creole studies. DeGraff (
The same holds for the considerations in Trudgill (2011). With reference to Labov’s discussion of the uniformitarian principle, Trudgill (2011: 168–169) writes:
“sociolinguistic typology shows us that there is one very important respect in which the present is not like the past at all. This has to do with the enormously rapid development of transport and communications facilities in the past 150 years – but even more importantly, it has to do with demography, and, as a consequence, social network structure […] the dominant standard modern languages in the world today are likely to be seriously atypical of how languages have been for nearly all of human history”
The point is well taken; but again, it is a caution against a particularly naïve application of substantive uniformitarianism to the nature of human society and communication, not an attack on uniformitarianism as methodology. See also Labov (
Rudwick (
Labov’s three-volume work
“The task of historical linguistics is to explain the differences between the past and the present; but to the extent that the past was different from the present, there is no way of knowing how different it was.”
Labov briefly discusses the principle’s use in the work of Whitney and the Neogrammarians. More importantly, he cites Gould (
The methodological nature of Labov’s principle of uniformitarianism is clear throughout (e.g. “We have no other choice”,
A similar stance is found in Song (
Gould’s (
The fundamental problem is that all methodological uniformitarianisms are reliant on a corresponding substantive claim. For instance, if it can be shown that, in a given domain, the processes or causes operative in the past were not the same as those operative today, this poses severe problems for the view that it is a matter of scientific good practice to assume that they were. Even the uniformity of law is not immune in principle to this objection: it is at least a logical possibility that natural law does
This leads to an alternative view of methodological uniformitarianism, which I will term
“the processes that we see operating around us in the present must be assumed to have operated in the same ways at any given time in the past,
“
The empirical scope of the substantive claims involved in these two definitions, mere lines apart, is radically different: only processes/causes in the first quotation, whereas the second brings in types, range, and distribution. As above, what we need to discover is whether these are immanent or configurational. However, the italicized sections are crucial: given the right kind of evidence, it is possible to make a case against this version of uniformitarianism in a given domain. Uniformitarianism here involves making an assumption as a starting point for historical research, and is not to be understood as an intellectual straitjacket. It is methodological in that there is “no practical alternative” to this assumption (
The most crucial thing for modern historical linguists, in light of the above, is
Historical linguists should be more aware than most that lexical items change, and that attempting to legislate about their usage is often a distraction from more contentful questions (cf.
The principle of actualism may reduce to Ockham’s razor in general terms, but specific invocations of it involve the assumption of a substantive uniformity as null hypothesis, and historical linguists should try
Finally, it is advisable
As I have demonstrated above, uniformitarianism as understood in linguistics is not itself a uniform notion, and does not reflect the conceptual or empirical advances in other areas of historical science. The most important cut is between substantive uniformitarianism and methodological “actualism”: are we dealing with a hypothesis with empirical content, or a methodological precept that is necessary in order to do good historical science? The distinction is crucial, since the danger exists that substantive hypotheses are illegitimately elevated to the status of methodological necessities for rhetorical purposes, in order to score points against those who disagree. This danger is exacerbated by the fact that for every methodological principle of uniformity there is a corresponding substantive assumption that does duty as null hypothesis.
I have made four concrete prescriptions for historical linguists to consider:
to adopt Hooykaas’s (
to clarify whether their uniformitarianism is a substantive claim or a methodological heuristic;
to specify what exactly is supposed to be uniform;
to avoid using uniformitarianism as a stick to beat other researchers with.
OV = object-verb, UG = Universal Grammar, VO = verb-object
In fact, Lyell did not coin the term “uniformitarianism”; that was Whewell (
Kennedy (
Writing slightly earlier, Hooykaas (
This recognition did not originate with Gould. In a review of Müller (
There exist more fine-grained decompositions of the notion of uniformitarianism. Mayr (
Despite its name, the Constant Rate Hypothesis of Kroch (
See Bochkarev, Solovyev & Wichmann (
For explicit reference to punctuated equilibrium see e.g. Lightfoot (
From a functionalist perspective or a Minimalist perspective, things are not so simple. At least some of the rules that govern language structure in general may be the result of functional pressures canalized through diachrony, and at least some may reflect principles that are not inherent to UG but rather more deeply grounded in natural law (the “third factor” of
This depends, of course, on what UG contains. Roberts (
It is also a moot point whether the systems developed by our evolutionary ancestors before modern Universal Grammar, if we follow Pinker & Bloom’s reasoning, should receive the label “languages” (cf.
Lass (
For further criticism of Lass’s arguments against unidirectionality, see Comrie (
Another case study comes from historical pragmatics. Bax (
As observed by a reviewer, the empirical basis of Newmeyer’s claim is dubious, and likely skewed by the fact that the well-studied European branches of Indo-European have undergone the OV > VO change. VO > OV, meanwhile, is attested in at least some Mande languages of West Africa and Ethiopian branches of Semitic, while many historically well-attested languages (e.g. Japanese, Korean, Tamil) have remained consistently OV throughout their history.
In defining uniformitarianism, DeGraff (
As Janda & Joseph (
Shea (
This is, of course, a case of a non-scientific factor exerting influence upon the scientific domain. While in principle it is desirable to avoid this, in practice there are many other factors of this kind, not all of which are avoidable (researchers’ subconscious biases, the vicissitudes of funding bodies, the cognitive effect of what the researcher had for breakfast, etc.). Hooykaas (
Thanks to editor Johan Rooryck and three anonymous reviewers for
The author has no competing interests to declare.