Critique of the Comparative Method  

Oleh:

Gray, Bennison

Jenis: Article from Journal - ilmiah internasional
Dalam koleksi: Language Sciences (Full Text) vol. 4 no. 1 (1982), page 1-33.
Fulltext: 04_01_Gray.pdf (1.8MB)

Isi artikel

Biologists seeking to reform their Linnaean taxonomy so that it will embody the history of the evolution of organisms are looking to historical linguistics as a successful model of a truly genealogical (phylogenetic) classification system. Yet despite the boasts of Bloomfield and of Schleicher before him, the comparative method, by which languages are classified genealogically, is seriously flawed. Its premises are admitted - even by Bloomfield himself - to be false. And its results to date are (1) that there is no agreed upon hierarchical classification (taxonomy) of any group of attested languages; and (2) that a large, though indeterminate, number of the world's languages have turned out to be unclassifiable according to the comparative method. The reason for this failure, only suggested here but explained in full in The Limits of Grammar: The New Paradigm, is that, while genealogical classification presupposes that common characteristics reflect divergence from a common origin, the known (as opposed to reconstructed) history of languages shows that they are coming together from diverse origins. Therefore their common characteristics are the result of merging, and thus they are not amenable to classification by a method that presupposes the opposite.

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