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In historical linguistics, the Tree Model (German Stammbaumtheorie) is a model of language change in which daughter languages are genetically descended from a proto-language through a regular process of gradual change and is due in its most strict formulation to the Neogrammarians. The model relies on earlier conceptions of William Jones and Franz Bopp by adding the exceptionlessness of the sound laws and the regularity of the process. The notions of exceptionlessness and regularity as factors of process and change are challenged by the proponents of the Wave Model of change.
However, what seemed at the outstart as two incompatible conceptions of how languages change has coalesced today into one single explanatory theory. Hock already noted in 1991 (1991:454):1
“The discovery in the late nineteenth century that isoglosses can cut across well-established linguistic boundaries at first created considerable attention and controversy. And it became fashionable to oppose a wave theory to a tree theory... Today, however, it is quite evident that the phenomena referred to by these two terms are complementary aspects of linguistic change...
As demonstrated by Labov (2007)2, what needed to be reconciled within one framework of thinking were the transmission and the diffusion principles of linguistic change. The transmission of change within a speech community is characterized by incrementation within a faithfully reproduced pattern characteristic of the tree model, while diffusion across communities shows weakening of the original pattern and a loss of structural features. This is the result of the differences between the learning abilities of children and adults as intercommunal contacts are primarily between the latter.
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