Diachronic stability and typology

Abstract

This chapter focuses on differences among structural features of phonology, morphology, and syntax with regard to their temporal stabilities. When Joseph H. Greenberg opened up the research of diachronic stability of typological features he, in a sense, simultaneously took two steps into this realm of unknowns by considering combinations of changes before working out a way of measuring the stabilities of features individually. The relationship between transition probabilities and the distribution of paired typological features is discussed in Dunn et al., Michael Cysouw, and Croft et al. Soren Wichmann and Eric W. Holman provided a table with stabilities for individual feature values in addition to the table with stabilities for whole features. Summarising the results of Wichmann and Holman, it is shown there for the first time that differential stability is indeed inherent in abstract typological features, whereas differential diffusibility is not.