Reconstructing complex structures: A typological perspective

Depending of the type of results we wish to achieve, different methods need to be employed in reconstructing proto-languages. In the first part of this paper I shall discuss the Comparative Method and elaborate why, I believe, this method is in principle not suitable for syntactic reconstruction. In the second part of the paper, I shall discuss alternative methods, which, although not unproblematic either, are, in my view, more promising for this purpose from a typological perspective. One is the use of implicational universals and the inferences on diachronic processes that can be drawn from them. In the second approach, cross-linguistic regularities of grammaticalization processes are used to reconstruct complex structures in proto-languages. Both these approaches have in common that they draw on crosslinguistic data, but both also display considerable differences.

Published online: 3 December 2008
https://doi.org/10.1075/cilt.302.06men