The Linguistic Cycle: Language Change and the Language Faculty 1st edition by van Gelderen, Elly (2011) Paperback

by Elly van Gelderen

Elly van Gelderen provides examples of linguistic cycles from a number of languages and language families, along with an account of the linguistic cycle in terms of minimalist economy principles. A cycle involves grammaticalization from lexical to functional category followed by renewal. Some well-known cycles involve negatives, where full negative phrases are reanalyzed as words and affixes and are then renewed by full phrases again. Verbal agreement is another full pronouns are reanalyzed as agreement markers and are renewed again. Each chapter provides data on a separate cycle from a myriad of languages. Van Gelderen argues that the cross-linguistic similarities can be seen as Economy Principles present in the initial cognitive system or Universal Grammar. She further claims that some of the cycles can be used to classify a language as analytic or synthetic, and she provides insight into the shape of the earliest human language and how it evolved.

Paperback

First published April 1, 2011

Reviews

[Ans Schapendonk · Rating 1 out of 5]

Van Gelderen wrote a wonderful book in 2011 about what she calls the linguistic cycle. What was missing was a final conclusion: sounds, syllables and words become longer at the back (adjectio) and wear down at the front (detraction), so that one language completely did replaced the other. Van Gelderen also mentioned the permutatio A in which repetition takes place, but she did not mention the permutatio B (retrogarde) in which one has to read from the back to the front. She also had no idea of the formation of spaces (delivery) nor of the fourth vertical row of W next to the existing three P, T and K. Nor did she know that there was a fourth horizontal row of the M. Because of these universal sound patterns, repetitions take place, which is why van Gelderen calls the shift cyclical, which is only partly correct. In the meantime, van Gelderen has also taken note of the rediscovery of the ‘universal soundhelix’, which led to this second book in 2023. Like so many other linguists, including the great Mr. Noam Chomsky, van Gelderen has neglected to name her actual source. And that's a bad thing. She keeps hammering on grammar and syntax, while the soundhelix is in the end only a matter of phonetics, what linguists never did realised. The fact that with the help of the sound helix we can not only reconstruct the past (and then correctly) and that we can also spell and thus predict the future with it is a discovery that the pre-Jewish midwives already made, not in Israel, but in the North of France, where they come from! From STAR > (s)TORA helix not only TUAS GLOS (bible), but also (t)ORAKEL since the Dutch language is the oldest still spoken language! After the permutatio of ORAK / KORA(n) leads to KOIRAN > KWARAN (Qua’ran) and then to (Dutch) KWINTESSENS alias QUINTESSENCE. This knowledge does not only concern students, but everyone, because helixing is a skill that can be compared to learning to read and write!