1 For A. van Kemenade & B. Los, eds. Handbook on the history of English. Blackwell. Cuing a new grammar David W. Lightfoot Georgetown University 1. E-language approaches. Our nineteenth-century predecessors developed linguistics as a distinct discipline and they were concerned exclusively with language change. They thought of texts as the essential reality and took languages to be entities “out there,” existing in their own right, waiting to be acquired by groups of speakers. For them, languages were external objects and changed in systematic ways according to "laws" and general notions of directionality. Languages were related to each other to different degrees, modeled in tree diagrams (Stammbäume), and they changed at certain rates which could be discovered. Linguists of the time focused on the products of human behavior rather than on the internal processes that underlie the behavior. By the end of the nineteenth century, the data of linguistics consisted of an inventory of sound changes but there were no general principles: the changes occurred for no good reason and tended in no particular direction. The historical approach had not brought a scientific, Newtonian-style analysis of language, of the kind that had been hoped for, and there was no predictability to the changes. The historicist paradigm - the notion that there are principles of history to be discovered - was largely abandoned in the 1920s (Lightfoot 1999: ch2). Languages were seen as objects floating smoothly through time and space, and that image survived the twentieth century. Despite the move away from historicism in the 1920s, linguists resumed the search for historical principles in the latter decades of the 20th century. In the 1970s much work recast the notion of "drift", originated by Sapir 1921: ch.7. The “typologists,” working from Greenberg’s (1963) word order harmonies, claimed that languages changed along universal diachronic continua, moving from one pure type to another via universally defined transitional stages. Languages change from one pure type to another by losing/acquiring the relevant orders in the sequence specified by the hierarchies. A pure subject-verb-object language, for example, has verb-object order, auxiliary-verb, noun-adjective, and preposition-DP, and these orders are ranked in a hierarchy. A subject-object-verb language is essentially the mirror image and has the opposite orders: object-verb, verb-auxiliary, adjective-noun, and DP-preposition, etc. If a language changes from the object-verb type to the verb-object type, it acquires all of the new orders in the sequence prescribed by the hierarchy: first verb-object, then auxiliary-verb, and so on. The hierarchy is the substance of a historical law which stipulates how a language of one type changes to a language of a different type. The typologists argued that notions like the subject-object-verb-to-subject-verb-object continua constituted diachronic explanations (Vennemann 1975); for them, the drift was the explanatory force, rather than being something which required explanation, and no local causes were needed. The typologists remained faithful to the methods of the nineteenth century. They dealt with the products of the language capacity rather than with the capacity itself, and they retained the same kind of historical determinism, believing that languages of one type change inexorably to a language of another type, like their nineteenth-century predecessors. The goal remained one of