Johnson 2004 - CDLI - UCLA

Preface
Before turning to the first chapter I would like to spend a few moments discussing the
role of linguistic theory and the absence of tree diagrams and other kinds of linguistic
formalism in this dissertation as well as providing a restatement of the hypothesis to be
investigated.
Theoretical preliminaries
One of the most surprising aspects of the linguistic investigation of archaeologically
recovered languages is the particular type of linguistic theory that is most often used in
such investigations, primarily “broad” or “inclusive” typology of the Greenbergian
variety and “psychological” and/or “extreme” functionalism (cf. Nichols 1984, 100-101,
103) with few if any formal or distributional criteria whatsoever. These theories are not,
for the most part, predictive, but, on the contrary, merely act to confirm the plausibility of
a reconstruction that is based on either philological investigation or analogies based on
the set of languages familiar to the analyst. The actual method of investigation often boils
down to a rather selective reading of recent typological descriptions followed by an
attempt to match a particular construction in the dead language with the linguistic type
that most closely resembles it. The “identification” is rarely tested and distributional
criteria that might link the construction in question to other morphosyntactic
distributional patterns are usually omitted. I have attempted, wherever possible, to avoid
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