Atkin, Albert

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77and system of  language that following generations infer often diff er from the system earlier generations are using. Th is often results in  semantic change, syntactic change , and sound change.  – Albert  Atkin  WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING  Anderson ,  Henning .  1973 . “ Abductive and deductive change. ”  Language  49 :  765– 93.  Burks ,  Arthur .  1946 . “ Peirce’s theory of abduction. ”  Philosophy of Science  13 :  301– 6.  McMahon ,  April .  1994 .  Understanding Language Change .  Cambridge :  Cambridge University Press .  Peirce ,  C. S.  1935 .  Th e Collected Papers of Charles  S. Peirce . Vol. 5.  Cambridge :  Harvard University Press .  ABSOLUTE AND STATISTICAL UNIVERSALS  Language universals are statements that are true of all lan-guages; for example, “all languages have stop consonants.” But beneath this simple defi nition lurks deep ambiguity, and this triggers misunderstanding in both interdisciplinary discourse and within linguistics itself. A core dimension of the ambiguity is captured by the opposition “absolute versus statistical uni-versal,” although the literature uses these terms in varied ways. Many textbooks draw the boundary between absolute and statis-tical according to whether a sample of languages contains excep-tions to a universal. But the notion of an exception-free sample is not very revealing, even if the sample contained all known languages: Th ere is always a chance that an as yet undescribed language, or an unknown language from the past or future, will provide an exception.  It is impossible, in principle, to survey all languages of our spe-cies. If we nevertheless want to make claims about all languages, only two routes are open: a priori deduction of necessarily true statements or statistical extrapolation from empirical samples to the entire set. Absolute universals can then be defi ned as those that are necessarily true, statistical universals as those that are extrapolated from samples.  Absolute Universals  For statements to be necessarily true, they must follow from a priori assumptions. Th e assumptions that linguists make are diverse and heavily debated. An example is the assumption that  words consist of  morphemes , that is, minimal form-mean-ing pairs. If one accepts this, then it is necessarily true that all languages have morphemes, and there cannot be exceptions. Why? Suppose someone claims to have discovered a language without morphemes. One can of course simply analyze the lan-guage without mentioning morphemes, but obviously that can-not challenge the universal just because one can always defend it by reanalyzing the language  with morphemes.  Th e only true challenge would be to show that analyzing some data in terms of morphemes leads to structures that are in confl ict with other assumptions, for example, that form-meaning pairs combine exclusively by linear concatenation.  Th e confl ict can be  illustrated by languages with  morphologies like the English plural  geese , where the meanings  plural and  goose do not correspond to linear  A  ABDUCTION  Abduction is a form of reasoning fi rst explicated by the nine-teenth-century philosopher  C. S. Peirce. Th e central concept he wishes to introduce is that of generating new hypotheses to explain observed phenomena partly by guesswork or specu-lation. In his early work, Peirce tried to explain abductive rea-soning, as distinct from deductive and inductive reasoning, by reference to syllogistic form. For instance, the following schema is an example of deductive reasoning: All the beans in the bag are white  Th ese beans came from this bag  Th erefore, these beans are white  Th is is distinct from inductive reasoning which, Peirce argues, follows this pattern: Th ese beans came from this bag  Th ese beans are white  Th erefore, all the beans in this bag are white  And both these forms are distinct from abductive reasoning which, Peirce argues, follows this pattern: Th ese beans are white  All the beans in this bag are white  Th erefore, the beans came from this bag  In later work, however, Peirce felt that trying to fi t abduc-tive reasoning into such a strict syllogistic form was restric-tive, and instead he opted for the following schema to explain abduction:  Th e surprising fact C is observed  But if A were true, C would be a matter of course  Hence, there is a reason to suspect that A is true.  (Peirce  1935 , 189)  For example, suppose I observe that my car will not start. One good explanation for this would be that it is out of fuel. Consequently, it seems that we have a good reason to think that my car’s refusal to start is due to its being out of fuel. Of course, we may very quickly discover that my car has plenty of fuel, and a diff erent hypothesis must be adopted, but Peirce always intended that abductive reasoning was fallible and conjectural, awaiting confi rmation from other testing.  Peirce’s account of abduction has been widely adopted in the philosophy of science, but it has also been of some interest to linguists. One particularly prominent use of abduction has been in  historical linguistics  for explaining  language change (see, for instance, Anderson  1973 ). Th e systematic features of a language that govern the use of one generation are opaque to the following generation as they acquire that lan-guage – the only access is through language output. It appears, then, that following generations must use abductive inferences to access the rules of language before applying those rules to new cases . And, of course, since abduction is fallible, the rules  Abduction  Absolute and Statistical Universals 9780521866897AH.indd   77 2/24/2010   5:01:15 PM

Abduction

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Abduction

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