Journal of Slavic Linguistics

Indo-European comparative grammar offers many fascinating and complex language phenomena for synchronic and diachronic analysis. The dual number is undoubtedly one of the most puzzling and intensively discussed items among these. Almost all ancient IE languages had a dual in addition to singular and plural. But most of the modern languages have lost their dual in the course of their history; no IE language has gained a new dual. In the book under review, Tatyana G. Slobodchikoff gives a methodologically highly elaborated presentation and excellent analysis of how this grammatical category must have developed in the Slavic language group from a prehistoric stage through to the modern spoken languages, drawing on a large set of IE and non-IE languages for comparison. We see it as both a thrilling scholarly read and an indispensable example of methodology for many other fields of analytic language science.

Starting with a panoramic overview of the grammatical category of dual in a general perspective against a background of typology and universals, the author passes to a selection of sources from the newer history of Slavic languages. She focusses on these and considers them in the light of several insightful theoretical approaches—Humboldt 1827, Jespersen 1965, Plank 1989, Corbett 2000, Cysouw 2009—followed by a thorough step-by-step analysis and explanation of the difficult, apparently unsolvable and paradoxical linguistic problem of why the dual number is conserved in just a few of the contemporary Slavic languages while it has been entirely lost in the rest of them under seemingly identical conditions. Her new account involves a reinterpretation of Chomsky’s concept of language as a biological and economic organism (Chomsky 2005, 2008 etc.), constantly changing with the purpose of improving its system of grammatical relations, oppositions, and rules, proceeding [End Page 71] from a given stage to another that appears to speakers to be as consistent and appropriate as possible.

If we analyze the early Slavic system of singular/dual/plural as [+singular –augmented], [–singular –augmented], and [–singular +augmented] respectively (p. 114), the dual turns out to be the most marked. This excess of markedness can simply be eliminated by “impoverishment”, as most of the Slavic languages have done in creating their singular vs. plural systems. Or it can become less marked as a “reanalyzed dual” through the principle of Morphosyntactic Feature Economy, yielding [–singular] [–augmented] expressed by two separate exponents (p. 115ff). Upper and Lower Sorbian add -j to their dual forms, and Slovenian adds dva ‘two’ to its inherited dual pronouns (e.g., ona > onadva). Therefore, as excellently demonstrated by Slobodchikoff, the different final results in the respective languages—a full three-number-system (singular, dual, and plural) in pronominal, verbal, and nominal inflexion in Slovenian and Lower and Upper Sorbian, opposed to the reduced two-number-system (singular and plural) of the pronouns, nouns and verbs in Old East Slavic and Kashubian—are due to the same driving wheel of change, the gradual appearance of a syncretism in a group of personal pronouns, as can be traced mainly to the 2nd and 1st person forms for dual and plural number, inherited from the well documented, common former language stages. Against the background of the universal rule of systematization, speakers using the respective idiom are forced to reinterpret the asymmetry of the deficient system, and to either add or remove the critical forms in order to repair it. Thus, the tendency for systematization can be considered as the motivating force of almost any step of change within a language system—with irregularities revealing remnant elements of former stages of a changing whole, at the same time usually causing its “improvement”, the direction and extent of which depend on the interpretation by the speakers.

The methodical fidelity to Chomsky’s principle of biological economy can lead...