Lexical Reconstruction and Semantic Reconstruction

• Published in: Diachronica
• Main Author: Blust, Robert A.
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: John Benjamins Publishing Company 1987
• Subjects: Proto-Athapaskan
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/dia.4.1-2.05blu; http://www.jbe-platform.com/deliver/fulltext/dia.4.1-2.05blu.pdf

SUMMARY In their book of 1974, Lexical Reconstruction: The case of the Proto-Athapaskan kinship system, Isidore Dyen and David F. Aberle developed a methodology for matching reconstructed morphemes with semantic categories. The promise that their contribution holds out to the linguist and to the culture-historian is that of a rigorous tool of historical inference free from the arbitrariness sometimes associated with the linguistic treatment of meaning. In fact, Dyen & Aberle themselves arbitrarily exclude the possibility that a proto-meaning could differ from the meanings of all its reflexes and yet be inferrable. As a consequence, they are concerned not with semantic reconstruction, but with the matching of reconstructed forms and predetermined semantic categories. In this paper the Dyen-Aberle approach to diachronic semantics ('lexical reconstruction1) is juxtaposed with a less formalized but more widely employed approach ('semantic reconstruction') in which meaning is not presupposed, but is defined by contrast. Each approach is applied to five Austronesian cognate sets that are widely distributed in the meaning "house". It is concluded that the semantic history of these forms cannot be represented adequately, and is in certain respects seriously obscured by the method of lexical reconstruction. RÉSUMÉ Dans leur livre Lexical Reconstruction: The case of the Proto-Athapas-kan kinship system (Cambridge, 1974), I. Dyen et D. F. Aberle ont développe une méthodologie pour accorder des morphemes reconstruits avec des categories semantiques. La promesse d'une telle approche est de donner au linguiste et a l'historien d'une civilisation un outil rigoreux de deduction historique depourvu de l'arbitraire parfois associe avec le traitment linguistique du sens. En effet, Dyen & Aberle eux-memes exclurent arbitrairement la possibilité qu'un proto-sens pourrait differer de toutes de ses reflexes et qu'il serait pourtant deductible. Par consequence, ils ont affaire a l'accorde-ment des formes reconstruites avec des ...