Linguistic Areas: Convergence in Historical and Typological Perspective edited by Yaron Matras, April McMahon and Nigel Vincent (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2006) ISBN 1403996571.
Linguistic Areas ed. Matras, McMahon and Vincent is a collection of 11 papers on areal linguistics, from scholars holding a variety of different views. The first two papers intriguingly suggest doing away with the term Sprachbund. Lyle Campbell’s paper ‘Areal linguistics: a closer scrutiny’ and Thomas Stolz’ ‘All or nothing’ recommend focusing on the facts of the individual loans and historical changes instead of chasing after a definition of Sprachbund, a definition which is perhaps impossible to establish because linguistics is difficult to quantify.
We then find a number of papers focusing mainly on individual linguistic areas. I won’t comment on all of them, as I read only those that I thought related to my research interestings. Maria Koptjevskaja-Tamm’s ‘The Circle that won’t come full’ shows that neither of the two isoglosses often used to define a “Circum-Baltic Sprachbund’ — polytonicity and GenN word order combined with SVO basic order — encompass together all the languages in the region. Her scepticism goes well with the views of Campbell and Stolz. Lars Johanson’s ‘On the Roles of Turkic in the Causasus Area’ makes use of a wealth of sociolinguistic information to explain how Turkic languages in the region have both influenced non-Turkic languages and converged toward their models. Claire Bowern’s ‘Another Look at Australia as a Linguistic Area’ is a response to Dixon’s controversial theory of ‘punctuated equilibrium’, essentially reading for anyone following that debate.