From PLRounds at OREGON.UOREGON.EDU Mon Oct 16 21:55:18 1995 From: PLRounds at OREGON.UOREGON.EDU (Pat Rounds) Date: Mon, 16 Oct 1995 14:55:18 -0700 Subject: Conference for AL Becker Message-ID: Conference Announcement The Notion of Person: A Conference to Honor the Work of Alton L. Becker Many contemporary scholars have been inspired at some point in their careers by the work of A.L. Becker. In this conference invited speakers will acknowledge and celebrate that influence by presenting a series of papers addressing one aspect of Becker's framework defining the contextual constraints on text-building acts: the notion of person. Professor Becker has written that person, or the ordering of linguistic forms according to their distance from the speaker, may be the central thread in the semantic structuring of all languages. We will explore how the notion of person is expressed in aspects of linguistic systems; e.g. deictics, pronouns, classifiers, metaphors, style. Those interested in discourse analysis, sociolingustics, pragmatics, anthropology, and second language acquisition will find much of interest. The two day working conference, May 17 & 18 1996 at the University of Oregon in Eugene, Oregon, will include ample time for reflection with Professor Becker acting as respondent after presented papers and during round table discussions. For a registration form and accommodations, contact Pat Rounds: plrounds at oregon.uoregon.edu Please write "Becker Conference" on the Subject line of your message. The conference fee is $45. If you're interested in helping with the conference or need more information contact Charley Basham FFCSB at aurora.alaska.edu or Susan Fiksdal fiksdals at elwha.evergreen.edu Selected Bibliography of A.L. Becker's Work 1975. A Linguistic Image of Nature: The Burmese Numerative Classifier System. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 5:109-121 1976. Person in Kawi: Exploration of an Elementary Semantic Dimension (with I Gusti Ngurah Oka). Oceanic Linguistics 13, 229-255. 1979. The Figure a Sentence Makes: Interpretation of a Classical Malay Sentence. In Givon, T. (ed.), Syntax and Semantics 12. 1979. Text-building, Epistemology, and Aesthetics in Javanese Shadow Theatre. In Becker and Yengoyan (eds.), The Imagination of Reality. Norwood, N.J.: Ablex. 1981. The Poetics and Noetics of a Javanese Poem. In Tannen, D.(ed.) Spoken and Written Language. Norwood, N.J.:Ablex. 1981. On Emerson on Language. In Tannen, D. (ed.), Georgetown University Round Table on Languages and Linguistics 1981. 1982. Beyond Translation: Esthetics and Language Description. In Byrnes, H. (ed.), Georgetown University Round Table on Languages and Linguistics. 1982. Beyond Translation: Esthetics and Language Description. In Byrnes, H. (ed.), Georgetown University Round Table on Languages and Linguistics 1982. 1984. Biography of a Sentence: A Burmese Proverb. In Bruner, E. (ed.), Text, Play, and Story: The Construction and Reconstruction of Self and Society. 1983 Proceedings of the American Ethnological Society. 1985. The Figure a Classifier Makes. In Craig, (ed.), Categories and Noun Classification. Amsterdam:John Benjamins. 1985. Philology and Logophilia. 1984 Hoijer Memorial Lecture at UCLA. In Kroskrity, P. (ed.), Essays in Honor of Edward Sapir. UCLA Department of Anthropology. 1986. Person in Austro-Thai: comments on the Pronoun Paradigm in Benedict's Austro-Thai Language and Culture. In Matisoff, J. (ed.), Festshrift for Paul Benedict. 1988. Language in Particular: A Lecture. In Tannen, D. (ed.), Linguistics in Context. Norwood, N.J.: Ablex. 1991. A Short Essay on Languaging. In Steier, F., (ed.), Research and Reflexivity. London: Sage Publications. 1992. Silence Across Languages. In Kramsch, C. and McConnell-Ginet, S. (eds.), Text and Context. Toronto: Heath. 1994. Repetition and otherness: An Essay. In Johnstone, B. (ed.), Repetition in Discourse: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, Vol 2. Norwood, N.J.: Ablex. 1995. (to appear) Giving Distance its Due. Berkeley Linguistics Society. 1995. (to appear) Beyond Translation: Essays Toward a Modern Philology. University of Michigan Press. From dcyr at YORKU.CA Wed Oct 18 23:00:12 1995 From: dcyr at YORKU.CA (D. Cyr) Date: Wed, 18 Oct 1995 18:00:12 -0500 Subject: No subject Message-ID: Please note a change in my address : old address : dcyr at vm1.yorku.ca new address : dcyr at yorku.ca Thanks Danielle Cyr Marc Bernier mbernier at yorku.ca From spikeg at OWLNET.RICE.EDU Fri Oct 27 19:27:46 1995 From: spikeg at OWLNET.RICE.EDU (Spike Gildea) Date: Fri, 27 Oct 1995 14:27:46 -0500 Subject: Grammaticalization Message-ID: Hey all, We've been having a discussion here involving the term GRAMMATICALIZATION. Our discussion has evoked memories of the Workshop on Diachronic Syntax at the ICHL in Manchester last August. Harris and Campbell's 1995 book on diachronic syntax gives a pretty precise defintion of REANALYSIS, and everybody seemed pretty happy with it, but then when the word grammaticalization came up, arguments began flying around about which cases of reanalysis could also insightfully be called GRAMMATICALIZATION. It made me wonder if there is really a precise notion of GRAMMATICALIZATION that we all share, or if the notion is not perhaps more meant to evoke a concept with fuzzy edges, that everyone sees just a little bit differently. Anyway, to explore this question a little bit, I wonder if we could get some discussion here on FUNKNET about examples like the following: We all agree that the term GRAMMATICALIZATION is appropriate when a noun becomes an adposition and then continues on to become a case inflection, or when a complement-taking verb becomes an auxiliary and then continues on to become a tense-aspect inflection. Is it appropriate to use grammaticalization to refer to the kind of change which leads to suppletive paradigms for the surviving word? -- e.g. the modern paradigm for English _go_ was created in a process whereby the past tense form _went_ of the separate verb _wend_ became the past tense of _go_, and wend developed new, regular past tense form _wended_. Although I argued against the use of grammaticalization for this case, (since the change is limited to a single lexical item rather than occurring in a broad system), it can be argued that grammatical change is also taking place, since a new "allomorph" is being created to mark past tense. Another potentially controversial case is that where a demonstrative pronoun gets reanalyzed as a the third person present tense copula, perhaps later being extended to other persons (cf. Chinese) or tenses (cf. Panare), or perhaps becoming a suppletive form in a fuller inflectional paradigm (cf. Modern Hebrew and a number of Cariban languages). Given that a pronoun is already a "function word", and belongs to a closed class, and given that copulas are also essentially function words (although they may formally belong to the open class of verbs), do we have grammaticalization in any of these cases? Is it simply lexical change (especially in the case where the new forms end up as part of a suppletive paradigm)? A third case is that of the reanalysis of a verb to a pronoun. How's that? you ask. Well, some verbs get reanalyzed as adpositions which inflect for person, leading to (in essence) a new series of case-inflected pronouns. If a certain case is lost (i.e. becomes unmarked) on nouns, then the pronominal forms become unanalyzable as morphologically complex. The etymological verb form is now a series of pronouns. Is this grammaticalization carried out to its logical conclusion, or is this something else (either a 'reversal' of grammaticalization, or a case of LEXICALIZATION)? There must be a bunch more cases out there that would lead to disagreement... Spike From KATZ at RICEVM1.RICE.EDU Fri Oct 27 21:50:34 1995 From: KATZ at RICEVM1.RICE.EDU (KATZ, A) Date: Fri, 27 Oct 1995 16:50:34 CDT Subject: Grammaticalizaton: Process or result? Message-ID: As an addendum to Spike's query, I would like to point out the following issue: Is grammaticalization a process or a result? If it is a process, then it can be identified by the sorts of changes it effects on the linguistic material upon which it operates. So, under a process definition, grammaticalization might be something like: The process by which linguistic units become (a) reduced phonologically (b) bleached semantically (c) obligatory instead of optional (d) dependent rather than independent (e) arbitrary rather than motivated and (f) recruited as members of grammatical paradigms. Under a process definition, every linguistic unit can be judged to have undergone X degree of grammaticalization between points A and B in time, but saying that it is grammaticalized is meaningless without reference to change. On the other hand, if grammaticalization is a result (or condition), then units can be judged as more or less grammaticalized synchronically, but this sheds no light on their history. (That is, a unit may become an isolate after undergoing "maximal" grammaticalization under a process definition.) If we opt for the result definition, there is really not much difference between saying that a linguistic unit is `grammatical' (as opposed to `lexical') and saying that it is `grammaticalized'. If we opt for the process definition, we may find that after undergoing a considerable amount of grammaticalization, a unit becomes less grammatical (and more lexical) than when we started observing it. Either way, this presents difficulties for us if we hope to use grammaticalization theory as a tool for recovering earlier stages of language and for drawing conclusions about history from language typology. From cumming at HUMANITAS.UCSB.EDU Sat Oct 28 01:10:49 1995 From: cumming at HUMANITAS.UCSB.EDU (Susanna Cumming) Date: Fri, 27 Oct 1995 18:10:49 -0700 Subject: More questions on grammatic(al)ization Message-ID: Folks, I resonated with all of Spike's questions about grammatic(al)ization. I don't have any answers, but I have a few more questions of my own. These came up for me because I'm teaching a historical course for the first time in a few years this quarter, & we're doing grammaticization now. In catching up with the large amount of recent literature out there and trying to present it to my students, I noticed some surprising trends: notably that people, for the most part functionalists, when writing about grammaticization seem to display some assumptions and hidden theories of grammar and meaning that I don't think of as particularly functional. It may be that I'm just more radical relative to the functional community than I think I am! But in order to find out if that's true, I wonder what people think about the following issues: In my opinion, one of the reasons that there are so many different understandings of and ways of using the term "grammatic(al)ization" is that people have different ideas about what counts as "grammar". Unfortunately, when writing about grammaticalization, people rarely make it explicit what their theory of grammar is. In the easy cases Spike cites, grammar=morphology and that's that. For all the cases where the result isn't an affix, the question is harder. People usually talk about "open" and "closed" classes here, on the understanding that closed classes are "more grammatical" because they are listed in the grammar instead of in the lexicon. But I think many linguists today reject the hard-and-fast distinction between "lexicon" and "grammar" that we used to operate with, and it's not far from there to rejecting the distinction between closed and open classes. On the one hand, there are lots of reasons to want to let items like prepositions, conjunctions and even complementizers to be listed in the lexicon -- since they are clearly not simply "structure markers", but rather they have the kinds of semantics we associate with lexical items -- and on the other, why should we consider "verb" to be an open class in English, for instance, when virtually every high-frequency verb has its own unique set of distributional properties? The insights about the highly idiosyncratic grammatical distribution of all kinds of items brought to us courtesy of construction grammar should also shed some doubt on the open/closed opposition. So: if you use the term grammaticization, what's your theory of what is and isn't "in the grammar?" On the semantic side, there is of course some disagreement about how to characterize the changes that have been labeled "grammatic(al)ization", but many linguists subcribe to a "generalization" / "bleaching" / "abstraction" approach. This worries me too, since all these terms seem to presuppose an old-fashioned theory of semantics which I wouldn't otherwise have attributed to many of the linguists who use these terms: meanings as feature bundles arranged in a taxonomy, such that features are added as one moves down the taxonomy from more general to more specific. Grammaticization then is movement up the taxonomy by removing features: it results in "less" meaning (as implied in the laundry metaphors, i.e. weakening bleaching / fading) and ergo more "general" or more "abstract" meaning. WHile this approach to meaning works pretty well in some areas of lexicon -- especially biological domains -- there are many others where it is much more problematic to build taxonomies and/or do feature analysis -- especially anything which isn't a noun. Question: is there an approach to semantics within which the notion of "bleaching" makes sense that isn't a features-and-taxonomies theory? (Some linguists, of course, think of the changes involved in grammaticization as a change in kind rather than quantity of meaning; they're exempt from this question.) Finally, here's one for the grammaticization-is-syntax-from-discourse folks out there: how do you know when grammaticization has happened, that is, when something that was once a "loose pattern" has become a "tight construction"? SHould you be able to tell from looking at spoken discourse data when a particular stretch of speech is to be seen as a token of "a construction", and if so, how? Thanks to anyone who can provide some guidance here that I can share with my students! Susanna From jtang at COGSCI.BERKELEY.EDU Sat Oct 28 01:48:21 1995 From: jtang at COGSCI.BERKELEY.EDU (Joyce Tang Boyland) Date: Fri, 27 Oct 1995 18:48:21 -0700 Subject: gramzn Message-ID: Thank you for starting this discussion; it's exactly what I need to get me started on writing the next chapter of my dissertation, which is going to be all about what ought and oughtn't to count as gramzn (and why it doesn't matter!) I have three main ideas here. First, I agree that grammaticalization should rightfully be a fuzzy concept. It's already pretty much agreed by us funknetters that most concepts of real world things are fuzzy. What is a chair? (Right now I am sitting on a large green rubber ball, very comfortable.) Or, to be more specific, we should talk about dynamic processes that happen naturally in the real world. What is the Gulf Stream? or the Santa Ana winds (hot dry winds that blow on California usually in October (how hot? how dry? what about September? everywhere in California?))? We know about radial categories and prototypes, and that they're a better way to describe natural concepts than the old-fashioned hard-edged categories with clear boundaries. When we talk about grammaticalization, we recognize the prototypical cases, and we recognize what's sort of "borderline", and what just doesn't fit the picture. So I think that, if we try to impose criteria on grammaticalization, whatever we end up with is going to be somewhat artificial. This brings me to the second point. Does teenage rebelliousness count as an instance of maturation? or does taking up weaving count as an instance of finding oneself? Can I ask whether the falling of leaves counts as an instance of seasonal cycles? These questions sound very strange, and I think it may be just as strange to ask whether the formation of a suppletive paradigm for `go' counts as an instance of grammaticalization. What seems wrong is that these questions are taking natural phenomena that take place over long periods of time and that comprise whole chains of individual events (none of which really *have* to occur, but which instead form a general pattern), and then asking whether some isolated incident "counts" as an instance. But since we don't have a clear definition of grammaticalization, we have to do lots of research, in parallel, on both the individual events and on the general pattern. Is there something that always happens in the prototypical cases of grammaticalization, that leads naturally to this other more controversial type of change? Or, do we see something in this other type of change that reminds us of what happens normally? Does it make plain some new mechanism that we notice co-occurring with some well-known type of change? Maybe what we mean when we ask "Is this historical development a case of grammaticalization?" is really more like "Does it help us understand this development to look at it in the framework of grammaticalization?" and (conversely) "Does it help us understand the basic idea of grammaticalization (which we have an intuitive feel for) to look at what happens in this particular development?" But then it is no longer a question of definitions and boundaries. Questions such as these pretty much answer themselves. If we ask, "Does it help us understand?" we can just try it and see. You have figured out by now that I think of grammaticalization as a process, and one that is not defined by its results. It might be helpful to think of it more in terms of what drives it. I'm running out of time and space here, so I will quickly and rashly posit that grammaticalization is what happens (cognitively) when people figure out what was meant despite what was said, and then turning it into a rule about how that meaning is expressed. I guess this is a rephrasing and extension (vague-ifying?) of ECTraugott's definition. I may write again tomorrow retracting this when I've had more time to think about what I've just said. From WCSTOKOE at GALLUA.GALLAUDET.EDU Sat Oct 28 13:59:14 1995 From: WCSTOKOE at GALLUA.GALLAUDET.EDU (Stokoe, W.C.) Date: Sat, 28 Oct 1995 08:59:14 -0500 Subject: Grammaticalization Message-ID: Probably I should not be on funknet at all, for I think gzn is a process/ product in the thinking of grammarians and linguists, a class or classes that thinks of language in more rigid formulizations than do the majority of language users. Some users use language more imaginatively than others and some of the innovations die aborning, others last for a time in a small coterie, still others get into general use. The process is actual language use by real people. Of course it is good science to have an accurate and complete description but grammar may be an abstraction after the fact, grammatical is a coinage or derivation of grammar, made into a verb by the affix -ize, made into a noun by changing -ize to -ization--so perhaps grammaticalization is neither process nor product but just an artifact made by linguists. If this offends, please unsubscribe. WCStokoe From dlpayne at OREGON.UOREGON.EDU Sat Oct 28 17:37:05 1995 From: dlpayne at OREGON.UOREGON.EDU (Doris Payne) Date: Sat, 28 Oct 1995 10:37:05 -0700 Subject: Grammaticalization In-Reply-To: <199510271927.OAA09124@owlnet.rice.edu> Message-ID: I'm interested by W. Stoke's musings over whether "grammaticalization" is something that exists/a process that occurs more in the cognition of linguists, rather than general language users per se. I have mused over the same thing with regard to the time-honored Inflection-Derivation distinction. Perhaps inflection vs. derivation are categories that exist only in the language systems of linguists. I would be less inclined to take such a heritical position with regard to at least the extremes of a lexical/non-automization vs. grammatical/automization distinction. This leads me to the next point... i.e., on whether the development of (a) one type of grammatical morpheme (e.g. a pronoun) into another type of grammatical morpheme (e.g. a tense marker) [cf. Spike Gildea's comments], (b) one discourse pattern into a syntactic structure [cf. Susanna Cumming's comments], and (c) a lexical item (e.g. a noun or verb root) into a grammatical morpheme (e.g. an adposition) [cf. Spike's comments] should all equally be termed "grammaticalization": It seems to me that the "correct" answer to this is whether the type of human cognitive processing involved in all three changes is the same, or different. If the type of change cognitively is the same, then call them all by the same term. If the type of change is somehow substantively different, call them by different terms. Perhaps I'm naive here, but it does seem to me that all three involve (re)routinization or (re)automization of language behavior. For a case study of the potential development of highly automated syntactic structure out of less-automated discourse patterns (cf. Susanna Cumming's comments), consider the following article: Payne, Doris. 1994. "OVSu versus VSuO in Panare (Cariban): Do syntax and discourse match?" _Text_ 14.581-609. In this article I refered to the process in question as "syntacticization", but only because I did not want to get derailed into arguments over whether it was, or wasn't "grammticalization" according to one person or another's tradition. Since I was not dealing with lexical vs. grammatical morphemes in this particular paper, it was a safe cop-out. -- Doris Payne From jaske at ABACUS.BATES.EDU Sun Oct 29 00:42:51 1995 From: jaske at ABACUS.BATES.EDU (Jon Aske) Date: Sat, 28 Oct 1995 20:42:51 -0400 Subject: Grammatic(al)ization Message-ID: The prototypical examples of grammatic(al)ization in the literature have been examples of morphologic(al)ization, but this should not prevent us from seeing the larger picture, namely that grammaticalization should be considered as a phenomenon of wider scope than the development (process or product) of grammatical morphemes from lexical ones. Furthermore, we cannot really always very well separate the development of morphemes (morphologic(al)ization) from the development of constructions (syntactic(al)ization), since they are both so intimately intertwined. Even when it seems that all that's happening is the development of a grammatical morpheme, we must keep in mind that the morpheme is part of a construction too, as emphasized in constructional approaches to linguistics (such as construction grammar) and as illustrated in the following quote from Christian Lehmann: "The grammaticalization of a sign is bound up inseparably with the reduction of its syntagmatic variability. This means that grammaticalization does not merely seize a word or a morpheme--namely the one which it reduces to a grammatical formative and finally to zero--, but instead the whole construction formed by the syntagmatic relations of the element in question. To the extent that the external relations of this construction are contracted by the grammaticalized formative, they are also seized by the grammaticalization process. Consequently, with the grammaticalization of a bound morpheme the syntagmatic variability of its host shrinks, too. Thus, the fixation of any word order can be a consequence of grammaticalization." (C. Lehmann 1992:406) This doesn't mean that there isn't a big difference between the development of a grammatical morpheme and the reanalysis of a construction in which there might not even be any new morphemes being developed or changed (though there may well be some, as it typically happens), as for instance in word order change (which takes place by means of changes in individual constructions in the first place). All I'm saying is that we need an inclusive term to group all (diachronic) changes which affect the grammar, and if we don't use grammatic(al)ization, then what else could we use? Hopper and Traugott do exclude word order change from the study of grammaticalization because it is not unidirectional and thus "should not be identified with grammaticalization in the narrower sense" (H&T 1993:50). However, I'm not sure that dividing "narrow-sense" grammaticalization from other types of grammaticalization is always a wise idea, for at some point we must acknowledge the similarities, or the (cognitive and linguistic) commonalities of the two processes, and having a single label for both seems to me like a good place to start. But of course we should not get stuck on labels and should strive to understand the processes themselves. As always. I'm not sure this adds any light to the debate, I just hope it doesn't add any heat to it :) Jon References: Hopper, Paul J. and Traugott, Elizabeth Closs. 1993. Grammaticalization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lehmann, Christian. 1992. Word order change by grammaticalization. In: Marinel Gerritsen and Dieter Stein, eds., Internal and external factors in syntactic change (Trends in linguistics. Studies and monographs, 61), pp. 395-416. (A selection of papers that were presented at the workshop ... held during the Ninth International Conference on Historical Linguistics at Rutgers University in August 1989.) Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Jon Aske / jaske at bates.edu (Bates) / jonaske at garnet.berkeley.edu (UCB) =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- From stampe at HAWAII.EDU Sun Oct 29 01:02:02 1995 From: stampe at HAWAII.EDU (David Stampe) Date: Sat, 28 Oct 1995 15:02:02 -1000 Subject: Grammatic(al)ization In-Reply-To: <9510290042.AA16296@abacus.bates.edu> (message from Jon Aske on Sat, 28 Oct 1995 14:42:51 -1000) Message-ID: Jon Aske askes All I'm saying is that we need an inclusive term to group all (diachronic) changes which affect the grammar, and if we don't use grammatic(al)ization, then what else could we use? Why not "changes"? David From jaske at ABACUS.BATES.EDU Sun Oct 29 02:05:54 1995 From: jaske at ABACUS.BATES.EDU (Jon Aske) Date: Sat, 28 Oct 1995 22:05:54 -0400 Subject: Grammatic(al)ization (fwd) Message-ID: David Stampe said: | Jon Aske ask[e]s | All I'm saying is that we need an inclusive term to group all | (diachronic) changes which affect the grammar, and if we don't use | grammatic(al)ization, then what else could we use? | | Why not "changes"? That's a good question, which I guess shows perhaps how much we're still in the dark here (I mean the fact that the answer is not obvious does). My first reaction would be to say that "changes" is too inclusive. Supposedly there are emic-type changes which affect the grammatical system (for reasons having to do with the automatization of communication routines, which in turn are constrained by our cognitive makeup), and there are other (more etic) types of changes. Of course, it is true that emic changes have their start as etic changes, in grammar proper as well as (perhaps more obviously so) in phonology. Grammaticalization would be the grammatical analog (loosely speaking) of phonologization perhaps? Of course, some might say that in grammar, unlike in phonetics/phonology, all changes are meaningful, and thus there is no such thing as etic changes. All changes are emic, although changes may be more or less tightly integrated in the "system", more or less incipient/emergent. That would be a pretty good point. Perhaps David is right and they're all just changes. I guess I better get back to my dissertation too (like Joyce), cause it's several years overdue ;), and let other people argue this one out. Jon =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Jon Aske / jaske at bates.edu (Bates) / jonaske at garnet.berkeley.edu (UCB) =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- From yishai at BGUMAIL.BGU.AC.IL Sun Oct 29 07:20:43 1995 From: yishai at BGUMAIL.BGU.AC.IL (Yishai Tobin) Date: Sun, 29 Oct 1995 09:20:43 +0200 Subject: Grammaticalization In-Reply-To: <199510271927.OAA09124@owlnet.rice.edu> Message-ID: For anyone interested in an alternative semiotic or sign-oriented approach to grammaticalization and lexicalization derived from aspect and auxiliaries in English and extended to other forms in Hebrew and Romance languages let me suggest chapters 10-12 in my book: Aspect in the English verb: process and result in language. Longman. 1993. Yishai Tobin From Debra.Ziegeler at ARTS.MONASH.EDU.AU Mon Oct 30 12:03:05 1995 From: Debra.Ziegeler at ARTS.MONASH.EDU.AU (Ziegeler, D.) Date: Mon, 30 Oct 1995 12:03:05 GMT+1000 Subject: grammaticalization Message-ID: Just a thought with regard to Spike Gildea's queries on whether 'it is appropriate to use grammaticalization to refer to the kind of suppletive paradigms for the surviving word' - it must be the case that suppletive forms are one of the resulting consequences of grammaticalization, rather than a part of the processes, since surely the progressive decrease of lexical functions for a grammaticalizing element would leave behind a 'vacuum' in lexical domains, to be filled by a new suppletive form. Also (and this is just off the top of my head), did the form 'wended' assume the place of the former 'went' at the time that irregular past forms were becoming historically less frequent? Perhaps if this is the case, then was the incoming past form 'wended' merely in accord with the historical changes of the time? Debbie Ziegeler From styler at RUF.RICE.EDU Mon Oct 30 16:29:33 1995 From: styler at RUF.RICE.EDU (Stephen A Tyler) Date: Mon, 30 Oct 1995 10:29:33 -0600 Subject: Grammaticalization In-Reply-To: <199510271927.OAA09124@owlnet.rice.edu> Message-ID: why not reanalysis as the general case with grammaticalization and lexicalization as specific processes, the one applying to the inception of grammatical functions, the other to the emergence of words out of grammatical categories? From David_Tuggy at SIL.ORG Mon Oct 30 13:52:00 1995 From: David_Tuggy at SIL.ORG (Tuggy, D.) Date: Mon, 30 Oct 1995 08:52:00 -0500 Subject: Process-morpheme stems Message-ID: Do any of you funknetters know of a case of a root or stem which consists of a process morpheme? Zero stems have occasionally been posited (and I'd be interested in any good examples of those you have), but I don't know of any stems consisting of say a tone pattern or (more likely) tone shift, an umlaut or ablaut, a reduplication, palatalization, etc. It seems like they should be a predicted kind of limiting case, though there are good reasons for them to be pretty rare. Any examples? --David Tuggy From stampe at HAWAII.EDU Mon Oct 30 22:08:59 1995 From: stampe at HAWAII.EDU (David Stampe) Date: Mon, 30 Oct 1995 12:08:59 -1000 Subject: Process-morpheme stems In-Reply-To: <01HX22ZA4E3Q00H9ZK@SIL.ORG> (David_Tuggy@SIL.ORG) Message-ID: David_Tuggy at SIL.ORG asks Do any of you funknetters know of a case of a root or stem which consists of a process morpheme? ... consisting of say a tone pattern or (more likely) tone shift, an umlaut or ablaut, a reduplication, palatalization, etc. If a morphological process normally operates on a base to produce a derivative or inflection, since a root or stem is such a base, what could it operate on? An example of a zero root can be found in the description of the verb come/go in H. S. Biligiri's _Kharia_ (Poona: Deccan College, c. 1965), which under certain conditions is realized as nothing but a sequence of bound inflectional prefixes and suffixes with no root between them. The conditions are not synchronically or diachronically phonological. Rather a sort of ellipsis seems to be involved. (Kharia is a South Munda language spoken in Bihar and Orissa provinces of India.) David From 6500njk at UCSBUXA.UCSB.EDU Mon Oct 30 23:36:15 1995 From: 6500njk at UCSBUXA.UCSB.EDU (Nicholas Kibre) Date: Mon, 30 Oct 1995 15:36:15 -0800 Subject: Process-morpheme stems In-Reply-To: <01HX22ZA4E3Q00H9ZK@SIL.ORG> Message-ID: As someone with an interest in morphological form, this question is quite interesting to me. But I'm having trouble thinking of what such a thing would be; what would a process morpheme root's process be carried out on? Nick Kibre, UCSB o - - - - - - - - o _ Nicholas Kibre --- 6500njk at ucsbuxa.ucsb.edu _ Adran Ieithyddiaeth, Prifysgol Califfornia, Santa Barbara o - - - - - - - - o From Debra.Ziegeler at ARTS.MONASH.EDU.AU Tue Oct 31 11:44:05 1995 From: Debra.Ziegeler at ARTS.MONASH.EDU.AU (Ziegeler, D.) Date: Tue, 31 Oct 1995 11:44:05 GMT+1000 Subject: Forwarded: grammaticalization Message-ID: From: Self To: funknet at rice.edu. Subject: grammaticalization Date: Mon, 30 Oct 1995 12:03:02 Just a thought with regard to Spike Gildea's queries on whether 'it is appropriate to use grammaticalization to refer to the kind of suppletive paradigms for the surviving word' - it must be the case that suppletive forms are one of the resulting consequences of grammaticalization, rather than a part of the processes, since surely the progressive decline in lexical functions for a grammaticalizing element would leave behind a 'vacuum' in lexical domains, to be filled by a new suppletive form. Also (and this is just off the top of my head), did the form 'wended' assume the place of the former 'went' at the time that irregular past forms were becoming historically less frequent? Perhaps if this is the case, then was the incoming past form 'wended' merely in accord with the historical changes of the time? Debbie Ziegeler From oyokoyam at HUSC.HARVARD.EDU Tue Oct 31 02:00:23 1995 From: oyokoyam at HUSC.HARVARD.EDU (Olga Yokoyama) Date: Mon, 30 Oct 1995 21:00:23 -0500 Subject: Process-morpheme stems In-Reply-To: <01HX22ZA4E3Q00H9ZK@SIL.ORG> Message-ID: On Mon, 30 Oct 1995, Tuggy, D. wrote: > Do any of you funknetters know of a case of a root or stem which > consists of a process morpheme? Zero stems have occasionally been > posited (and I'd be interested in any good examples of those you > have), but I don't know of any stems consisting of say a tone pattern > or (more likely) tone shift, an umlaut or ablaut, a reduplication, > palatalization, etc. It seems like they should be a predicted kind of > limiting case, though there are good reasons for them to be pretty > rare. Any examples? > It's not clear to me what exactly you ar looking for, but Goldsmith's dissertation on autosegmental phonol has many examples of morphemes that consists only ;of a tone contour. As for zero segment and zero feature root, thre is one in Russian: vynut' 'to take out' "vy" is a productive prefix meaning 'out' "nu" is a productive suffix meaning 'one quick perfective action' "t'" is the standard infinitive suffix Cf. vyprygnut' 'to jump out', where pryg is the root 'jump', or vytrjaxnut' 'to shake out', where trjax is the root 'shake' etc. etc. Regards From W.Croft at MANCHESTER.AC.UK Tue Oct 31 11:27:35 1995 From: W.Croft at MANCHESTER.AC.UK (Bill Croft) Date: Tue, 31 Oct 1995 11:27:35 +0000 Subject: Grammaticalization, grammaticization, etc. Message-ID: Although there seems to be a dialectal split among functionalists in the use of the terms "grammaticalization" and "grammaticization", I actually think there is a substantive distinction to be made, for which I try to use these two terms: GRAMMATICIZATION: the process by which some grammatical construction becomes a conventional linguistic unit (cf. Langacker, "Foundations of cognitive grammar", Vol. I, chapter 2) GRAMMATICALIZATION: the process by which certain types of conventional linguistic units become certain other types of conventional linguistic units, specifically syntactic constructions with characteristic lexemes become "smaller" syntactic constructions or single words with affixes---the kinds of phonological, morphosyntactic and "functional" processes discussed by C. Lehmann, Heine et al., Hopper & Traugott etc. I also believe these are two different kinds of historical processes (two of many, by the way; there are lots of other kinds of historical linguistic processes). Grammaticization is "from discourse to syntax", and has to do with the interplay between how our linguistic knowledge is stored in the mind and used in social interaction. Its central concern should be (in my opinion) how linguistic convention is established. But of course looking at grammaticization tells us a lot about the nature of discourse as well---of great interest to functionalists (well, at least some functionalists). Grammaticalization, on the other hand, has to do with the restructuring of linguistic signs, that is pairings of form and meaning. Change in both the signifier and the signified, of a particular type whose true nature still eludes us (in my opinion) is involved in grammaticalization. Here the central concern should be the interrelationship between signifier and signified. But of course looking at grammaticalization tells us lot about conceptual semantic structure---of great interest to functionalists (well, at least some functionalists). Grammaticalization will always involve grammaticization though. Any language change must start off as an innovation which is not the conventional way for expressing the conceptual content (or discourse function). That innovation must become conventionalized---grammaticized, in the sense I am suggesting---for the item in question to become further grammaticALized. (I must admit that potential confusion invites the use of "conventionalization" for "grammaticization" in the sense I am suggesting.) Bill Croft Dept of Linguistics, U Manchester, Oxford Rd, Manchester M13 9PL, UK w.croft at manchester.ac.uk FAX: +44-161-275 3187 Phone: 275 3188 From mbuijs at RULLET.LEIDENUNIV.NL Tue Oct 31 11:21:43 1995 From: mbuijs at RULLET.LEIDENUNIV.NL (Michel Buijs) Date: Tue, 31 Oct 1995 12:21:43 +0100 Subject: Process-morpheme stems Message-ID: > Do any of you funknetters know of a case of a root or stem which > consists of a process morpheme? Zero stems have occasionally been > posited (and I'd be interested in any good examples of those you > have), but I don't know of any stems consisting of say a tone pattern > or (more likely) tone shift, an umlaut or ablaut, a reduplication, > palatalization, etc. It seems like they should be a predicted kind of > limiting case, though there are good reasons for them to be pretty > rare. Any examples? > > --David Tuggy I am puzzled as to what exactly you mean, but the phenomena you are looking for may include the following examples from Ancient Greek: - reduplication: the stem of the substantive ag-oog-e (training) as compared to the verb ag-oo (to lead) - shortening of a long final vowel of a stem, as in dika-io-s (just; short a): stem: dika- (long a) - dropping of part of the stem: the substantive soophro-sune (+/- moderation): stem: soophron-, and the like. Or am I completely mistaken? Michel Buijs |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| Drs Michel Buijs Classics Department Leiden University P.O. Box 9515 2300 RA Leiden The Netherlands phone +31 (0)71 - 527 2774 / fax +31 (0)71 - 527 2615 World Wide Web: http://oasis.leidenuniv.nl/gltc/michel/home.html |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| From David_Tuggy at SIL.ORG Tue Oct 31 15:05:00 1995 From: David_Tuggy at SIL.ORG (Tuggy, D.) Date: Tue, 31 Oct 1995 10:05:00 -0500 Subject: Process-morpheme stems Message-ID: I received a number of interesting and useful replies to my question about possible process-morpheme stems (for which, Thanks). There were a couple of good examples of zero stems, but no process-morpheme stems yet. Several respondents questioned the coherence of the idea. For instance Nick Kibre: "I'm having trouble thinking of what such a thing would be; what would a process morpheme root's process be carried out on?" Or David Stampe: "If a morphological process normally operates on a base to produce a derivative or inflection, since a root or stem is such a base, what could it operate on?" The answer is on whatever is next to it, of course. Usually this would be an affix, though I suppose it could conceivably be a compounded stem or even an adjacent word. The sort of thing I have in mind is this: we recognize a zero stem when the affixes that would usually attach to a stem seem to attach to nothing; either the rightmost prefix attaches to the leftmost suffix (and vice versa), or there are only prefixes or only suffixes there. (Of course there will typically be meaning components which logically pertain to a stem, as well.) It is at least conceivable that a language might have two such zero stems, differentiated phonologically in that one of them triggers one tone pattern in the affixes and the other another pattern, or one palatalizes and the other doesn't, etc. (It wouldn't really be necessary for there to be two such stems in contrast, as long as the change in the affixes could be recognized as such.) Any process morpheme can be thought of as a zero that betrays its presence by producing some change in the neighboring morphemes. Such change-triggering is of course not limited to zeroes, nor is it limited to affixes--lots of stems do it. I just don't know of any zero stems that do it, only zero affixes. The existence of process-morpheme stems would tend to imply a less-than-absolute division between stems and affixes, which would be no big problem to me (in fact positing an absolute division would be quite problematical on other grounds.) But of course the really interesting question is the empirical one: are there any out there? Hope this clarifies the question a bit. David Tuggy From PLRounds at OREGON.UOREGON.EDU Mon Oct 16 21:55:18 1995 From: PLRounds at OREGON.UOREGON.EDU (Pat Rounds) Date: Mon, 16 Oct 1995 14:55:18 -0700 Subject: Conference for AL Becker Message-ID: Conference Announcement The Notion of Person: A Conference to Honor the Work of Alton L. Becker Many contemporary scholars have been inspired at some point in their careers by the work of A.L. Becker. In this conference invited speakers will acknowledge and celebrate that influence by presenting a series of papers addressing one aspect of Becker's framework defining the contextual constraints on text-building acts: the notion of person. Professor Becker has written that person, or the ordering of linguistic forms according to their distance from the speaker, may be the central thread in the semantic structuring of all languages. We will explore how the notion of person is expressed in aspects of linguistic systems; e.g. deictics, pronouns, classifiers, metaphors, style. Those interested in discourse analysis, sociolingustics, pragmatics, anthropology, and second language acquisition will find much of interest. The two day working conference, May 17 & 18 1996 at the University of Oregon in Eugene, Oregon, will include ample time for reflection with Professor Becker acting as respondent after presented papers and during round table discussions. For a registration form and accommodations, contact Pat Rounds: plrounds at oregon.uoregon.edu Please write "Becker Conference" on the Subject line of your message. The conference fee is $45. If you're interested in helping with the conference or need more information contact Charley Basham FFCSB at aurora.alaska.edu or Susan Fiksdal fiksdals at elwha.evergreen.edu Selected Bibliography of A.L. Becker's Work 1975. A Linguistic Image of Nature: The Burmese Numerative Classifier System. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 5:109-121 1976. Person in Kawi: Exploration of an Elementary Semantic Dimension (with I Gusti Ngurah Oka). Oceanic Linguistics 13, 229-255. 1979. The Figure a Sentence Makes: Interpretation of a Classical Malay Sentence. In Givon, T. (ed.), Syntax and Semantics 12. 1979. Text-building, Epistemology, and Aesthetics in Javanese Shadow Theatre. In Becker and Yengoyan (eds.), The Imagination of Reality. Norwood, N.J.: Ablex. 1981. The Poetics and Noetics of a Javanese Poem. In Tannen, D.(ed.) Spoken and Written Language. Norwood, N.J.:Ablex. 1981. On Emerson on Language. In Tannen, D. (ed.), Georgetown University Round Table on Languages and Linguistics 1981. 1982. Beyond Translation: Esthetics and Language Description. In Byrnes, H. (ed.), Georgetown University Round Table on Languages and Linguistics. 1982. Beyond Translation: Esthetics and Language Description. In Byrnes, H. (ed.), Georgetown University Round Table on Languages and Linguistics 1982. 1984. Biography of a Sentence: A Burmese Proverb. In Bruner, E. (ed.), Text, Play, and Story: The Construction and Reconstruction of Self and Society. 1983 Proceedings of the American Ethnological Society. 1985. The Figure a Classifier Makes. In Craig, (ed.), Categories and Noun Classification. Amsterdam:John Benjamins. 1985. Philology and Logophilia. 1984 Hoijer Memorial Lecture at UCLA. In Kroskrity, P. (ed.), Essays in Honor of Edward Sapir. UCLA Department of Anthropology. 1986. Person in Austro-Thai: comments on the Pronoun Paradigm in Benedict's Austro-Thai Language and Culture. In Matisoff, J. (ed.), Festshrift for Paul Benedict. 1988. Language in Particular: A Lecture. In Tannen, D. (ed.), Linguistics in Context. Norwood, N.J.: Ablex. 1991. A Short Essay on Languaging. In Steier, F., (ed.), Research and Reflexivity. London: Sage Publications. 1992. Silence Across Languages. In Kramsch, C. and McConnell-Ginet, S. (eds.), Text and Context. Toronto: Heath. 1994. Repetition and otherness: An Essay. In Johnstone, B. (ed.), Repetition in Discourse: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, Vol 2. Norwood, N.J.: Ablex. 1995. (to appear) Giving Distance its Due. Berkeley Linguistics Society. 1995. (to appear) Beyond Translation: Essays Toward a Modern Philology. University of Michigan Press. From dcyr at YORKU.CA Wed Oct 18 23:00:12 1995 From: dcyr at YORKU.CA (D. Cyr) Date: Wed, 18 Oct 1995 18:00:12 -0500 Subject: No subject Message-ID: Please note a change in my address : old address : dcyr at vm1.yorku.ca new address : dcyr at yorku.ca Thanks Danielle Cyr Marc Bernier mbernier at yorku.ca From spikeg at OWLNET.RICE.EDU Fri Oct 27 19:27:46 1995 From: spikeg at OWLNET.RICE.EDU (Spike Gildea) Date: Fri, 27 Oct 1995 14:27:46 -0500 Subject: Grammaticalization Message-ID: Hey all, We've been having a discussion here involving the term GRAMMATICALIZATION. Our discussion has evoked memories of the Workshop on Diachronic Syntax at the ICHL in Manchester last August. Harris and Campbell's 1995 book on diachronic syntax gives a pretty precise defintion of REANALYSIS, and everybody seemed pretty happy with it, but then when the word grammaticalization came up, arguments began flying around about which cases of reanalysis could also insightfully be called GRAMMATICALIZATION. It made me wonder if there is really a precise notion of GRAMMATICALIZATION that we all share, or if the notion is not perhaps more meant to evoke a concept with fuzzy edges, that everyone sees just a little bit differently. Anyway, to explore this question a little bit, I wonder if we could get some discussion here on FUNKNET about examples like the following: We all agree that the term GRAMMATICALIZATION is appropriate when a noun becomes an adposition and then continues on to become a case inflection, or when a complement-taking verb becomes an auxiliary and then continues on to become a tense-aspect inflection. Is it appropriate to use grammaticalization to refer to the kind of change which leads to suppletive paradigms for the surviving word? -- e.g. the modern paradigm for English _go_ was created in a process whereby the past tense form _went_ of the separate verb _wend_ became the past tense of _go_, and wend developed new, regular past tense form _wended_. Although I argued against the use of grammaticalization for this case, (since the change is limited to a single lexical item rather than occurring in a broad system), it can be argued that grammatical change is also taking place, since a new "allomorph" is being created to mark past tense. Another potentially controversial case is that where a demonstrative pronoun gets reanalyzed as a the third person present tense copula, perhaps later being extended to other persons (cf. Chinese) or tenses (cf. Panare), or perhaps becoming a suppletive form in a fuller inflectional paradigm (cf. Modern Hebrew and a number of Cariban languages). Given that a pronoun is already a "function word", and belongs to a closed class, and given that copulas are also essentially function words (although they may formally belong to the open class of verbs), do we have grammaticalization in any of these cases? Is it simply lexical change (especially in the case where the new forms end up as part of a suppletive paradigm)? A third case is that of the reanalysis of a verb to a pronoun. How's that? you ask. Well, some verbs get reanalyzed as adpositions which inflect for person, leading to (in essence) a new series of case-inflected pronouns. If a certain case is lost (i.e. becomes unmarked) on nouns, then the pronominal forms become unanalyzable as morphologically complex. The etymological verb form is now a series of pronouns. Is this grammaticalization carried out to its logical conclusion, or is this something else (either a 'reversal' of grammaticalization, or a case of LEXICALIZATION)? There must be a bunch more cases out there that would lead to disagreement... Spike From KATZ at RICEVM1.RICE.EDU Fri Oct 27 21:50:34 1995 From: KATZ at RICEVM1.RICE.EDU (KATZ, A) Date: Fri, 27 Oct 1995 16:50:34 CDT Subject: Grammaticalizaton: Process or result? Message-ID: As an addendum to Spike's query, I would like to point out the following issue: Is grammaticalization a process or a result? If it is a process, then it can be identified by the sorts of changes it effects on the linguistic material upon which it operates. So, under a process definition, grammaticalization might be something like: The process by which linguistic units become (a) reduced phonologically (b) bleached semantically (c) obligatory instead of optional (d) dependent rather than independent (e) arbitrary rather than motivated and (f) recruited as members of grammatical paradigms. Under a process definition, every linguistic unit can be judged to have undergone X degree of grammaticalization between points A and B in time, but saying that it is grammaticalized is meaningless without reference to change. On the other hand, if grammaticalization is a result (or condition), then units can be judged as more or less grammaticalized synchronically, but this sheds no light on their history. (That is, a unit may become an isolate after undergoing "maximal" grammaticalization under a process definition.) If we opt for the result definition, there is really not much difference between saying that a linguistic unit is `grammatical' (as opposed to `lexical') and saying that it is `grammaticalized'. If we opt for the process definition, we may find that after undergoing a considerable amount of grammaticalization, a unit becomes less grammatical (and more lexical) than when we started observing it. Either way, this presents difficulties for us if we hope to use grammaticalization theory as a tool for recovering earlier stages of language and for drawing conclusions about history from language typology. From cumming at HUMANITAS.UCSB.EDU Sat Oct 28 01:10:49 1995 From: cumming at HUMANITAS.UCSB.EDU (Susanna Cumming) Date: Fri, 27 Oct 1995 18:10:49 -0700 Subject: More questions on grammatic(al)ization Message-ID: Folks, I resonated with all of Spike's questions about grammatic(al)ization. I don't have any answers, but I have a few more questions of my own. These came up for me because I'm teaching a historical course for the first time in a few years this quarter, & we're doing grammaticization now. In catching up with the large amount of recent literature out there and trying to present it to my students, I noticed some surprising trends: notably that people, for the most part functionalists, when writing about grammaticization seem to display some assumptions and hidden theories of grammar and meaning that I don't think of as particularly functional. It may be that I'm just more radical relative to the functional community than I think I am! But in order to find out if that's true, I wonder what people think about the following issues: In my opinion, one of the reasons that there are so many different understandings of and ways of using the term "grammatic(al)ization" is that people have different ideas about what counts as "grammar". Unfortunately, when writing about grammaticalization, people rarely make it explicit what their theory of grammar is. In the easy cases Spike cites, grammar=morphology and that's that. For all the cases where the result isn't an affix, the question is harder. People usually talk about "open" and "closed" classes here, on the understanding that closed classes are "more grammatical" because they are listed in the grammar instead of in the lexicon. But I think many linguists today reject the hard-and-fast distinction between "lexicon" and "grammar" that we used to operate with, and it's not far from there to rejecting the distinction between closed and open classes. On the one hand, there are lots of reasons to want to let items like prepositions, conjunctions and even complementizers to be listed in the lexicon -- since they are clearly not simply "structure markers", but rather they have the kinds of semantics we associate with lexical items -- and on the other, why should we consider "verb" to be an open class in English, for instance, when virtually every high-frequency verb has its own unique set of distributional properties? The insights about the highly idiosyncratic grammatical distribution of all kinds of items brought to us courtesy of construction grammar should also shed some doubt on the open/closed opposition. So: if you use the term grammaticization, what's your theory of what is and isn't "in the grammar?" On the semantic side, there is of course some disagreement about how to characterize the changes that have been labeled "grammatic(al)ization", but many linguists subcribe to a "generalization" / "bleaching" / "abstraction" approach. This worries me too, since all these terms seem to presuppose an old-fashioned theory of semantics which I wouldn't otherwise have attributed to many of the linguists who use these terms: meanings as feature bundles arranged in a taxonomy, such that features are added as one moves down the taxonomy from more general to more specific. Grammaticization then is movement up the taxonomy by removing features: it results in "less" meaning (as implied in the laundry metaphors, i.e. weakening bleaching / fading) and ergo more "general" or more "abstract" meaning. WHile this approach to meaning works pretty well in some areas of lexicon -- especially biological domains -- there are many others where it is much more problematic to build taxonomies and/or do feature analysis -- especially anything which isn't a noun. Question: is there an approach to semantics within which the notion of "bleaching" makes sense that isn't a features-and-taxonomies theory? (Some linguists, of course, think of the changes involved in grammaticization as a change in kind rather than quantity of meaning; they're exempt from this question.) Finally, here's one for the grammaticization-is-syntax-from-discourse folks out there: how do you know when grammaticization has happened, that is, when something that was once a "loose pattern" has become a "tight construction"? SHould you be able to tell from looking at spoken discourse data when a particular stretch of speech is to be seen as a token of "a construction", and if so, how? Thanks to anyone who can provide some guidance here that I can share with my students! Susanna From jtang at COGSCI.BERKELEY.EDU Sat Oct 28 01:48:21 1995 From: jtang at COGSCI.BERKELEY.EDU (Joyce Tang Boyland) Date: Fri, 27 Oct 1995 18:48:21 -0700 Subject: gramzn Message-ID: Thank you for starting this discussion; it's exactly what I need to get me started on writing the next chapter of my dissertation, which is going to be all about what ought and oughtn't to count as gramzn (and why it doesn't matter!) I have three main ideas here. First, I agree that grammaticalization should rightfully be a fuzzy concept. It's already pretty much agreed by us funknetters that most concepts of real world things are fuzzy. What is a chair? (Right now I am sitting on a large green rubber ball, very comfortable.) Or, to be more specific, we should talk about dynamic processes that happen naturally in the real world. What is the Gulf Stream? or the Santa Ana winds (hot dry winds that blow on California usually in October (how hot? how dry? what about September? everywhere in California?))? We know about radial categories and prototypes, and that they're a better way to describe natural concepts than the old-fashioned hard-edged categories with clear boundaries. When we talk about grammaticalization, we recognize the prototypical cases, and we recognize what's sort of "borderline", and what just doesn't fit the picture. So I think that, if we try to impose criteria on grammaticalization, whatever we end up with is going to be somewhat artificial. This brings me to the second point. Does teenage rebelliousness count as an instance of maturation? or does taking up weaving count as an instance of finding oneself? Can I ask whether the falling of leaves counts as an instance of seasonal cycles? These questions sound very strange, and I think it may be just as strange to ask whether the formation of a suppletive paradigm for `go' counts as an instance of grammaticalization. What seems wrong is that these questions are taking natural phenomena that take place over long periods of time and that comprise whole chains of individual events (none of which really *have* to occur, but which instead form a general pattern), and then asking whether some isolated incident "counts" as an instance. But since we don't have a clear definition of grammaticalization, we have to do lots of research, in parallel, on both the individual events and on the general pattern. Is there something that always happens in the prototypical cases of grammaticalization, that leads naturally to this other more controversial type of change? Or, do we see something in this other type of change that reminds us of what happens normally? Does it make plain some new mechanism that we notice co-occurring with some well-known type of change? Maybe what we mean when we ask "Is this historical development a case of grammaticalization?" is really more like "Does it help us understand this development to look at it in the framework of grammaticalization?" and (conversely) "Does it help us understand the basic idea of grammaticalization (which we have an intuitive feel for) to look at what happens in this particular development?" But then it is no longer a question of definitions and boundaries. Questions such as these pretty much answer themselves. If we ask, "Does it help us understand?" we can just try it and see. You have figured out by now that I think of grammaticalization as a process, and one that is not defined by its results. It might be helpful to think of it more in terms of what drives it. I'm running out of time and space here, so I will quickly and rashly posit that grammaticalization is what happens (cognitively) when people figure out what was meant despite what was said, and then turning it into a rule about how that meaning is expressed. I guess this is a rephrasing and extension (vague-ifying?) of ECTraugott's definition. I may write again tomorrow retracting this when I've had more time to think about what I've just said. From WCSTOKOE at GALLUA.GALLAUDET.EDU Sat Oct 28 13:59:14 1995 From: WCSTOKOE at GALLUA.GALLAUDET.EDU (Stokoe, W.C.) Date: Sat, 28 Oct 1995 08:59:14 -0500 Subject: Grammaticalization Message-ID: Probably I should not be on funknet at all, for I think gzn is a process/ product in the thinking of grammarians and linguists, a class or classes that thinks of language in more rigid formulizations than do the majority of language users. Some users use language more imaginatively than others and some of the innovations die aborning, others last for a time in a small coterie, still others get into general use. The process is actual language use by real people. Of course it is good science to have an accurate and complete description but grammar may be an abstraction after the fact, grammatical is a coinage or derivation of grammar, made into a verb by the affix -ize, made into a noun by changing -ize to -ization--so perhaps grammaticalization is neither process nor product but just an artifact made by linguists. If this offends, please unsubscribe. WCStokoe From dlpayne at OREGON.UOREGON.EDU Sat Oct 28 17:37:05 1995 From: dlpayne at OREGON.UOREGON.EDU (Doris Payne) Date: Sat, 28 Oct 1995 10:37:05 -0700 Subject: Grammaticalization In-Reply-To: <199510271927.OAA09124@owlnet.rice.edu> Message-ID: I'm interested by W. Stoke's musings over whether "grammaticalization" is something that exists/a process that occurs more in the cognition of linguists, rather than general language users per se. I have mused over the same thing with regard to the time-honored Inflection-Derivation distinction. Perhaps inflection vs. derivation are categories that exist only in the language systems of linguists. I would be less inclined to take such a heritical position with regard to at least the extremes of a lexical/non-automization vs. grammatical/automization distinction. This leads me to the next point... i.e., on whether the development of (a) one type of grammatical morpheme (e.g. a pronoun) into another type of grammatical morpheme (e.g. a tense marker) [cf. Spike Gildea's comments], (b) one discourse pattern into a syntactic structure [cf. Susanna Cumming's comments], and (c) a lexical item (e.g. a noun or verb root) into a grammatical morpheme (e.g. an adposition) [cf. Spike's comments] should all equally be termed "grammaticalization": It seems to me that the "correct" answer to this is whether the type of human cognitive processing involved in all three changes is the same, or different. If the type of change cognitively is the same, then call them all by the same term. If the type of change is somehow substantively different, call them by different terms. Perhaps I'm naive here, but it does seem to me that all three involve (re)routinization or (re)automization of language behavior. For a case study of the potential development of highly automated syntactic structure out of less-automated discourse patterns (cf. Susanna Cumming's comments), consider the following article: Payne, Doris. 1994. "OVSu versus VSuO in Panare (Cariban): Do syntax and discourse match?" _Text_ 14.581-609. In this article I refered to the process in question as "syntacticization", but only because I did not want to get derailed into arguments over whether it was, or wasn't "grammticalization" according to one person or another's tradition. Since I was not dealing with lexical vs. grammatical morphemes in this particular paper, it was a safe cop-out. -- Doris Payne From jaske at ABACUS.BATES.EDU Sun Oct 29 00:42:51 1995 From: jaske at ABACUS.BATES.EDU (Jon Aske) Date: Sat, 28 Oct 1995 20:42:51 -0400 Subject: Grammatic(al)ization Message-ID: The prototypical examples of grammatic(al)ization in the literature have been examples of morphologic(al)ization, but this should not prevent us from seeing the larger picture, namely that grammaticalization should be considered as a phenomenon of wider scope than the development (process or product) of grammatical morphemes from lexical ones. Furthermore, we cannot really always very well separate the development of morphemes (morphologic(al)ization) from the development of constructions (syntactic(al)ization), since they are both so intimately intertwined. Even when it seems that all that's happening is the development of a grammatical morpheme, we must keep in mind that the morpheme is part of a construction too, as emphasized in constructional approaches to linguistics (such as construction grammar) and as illustrated in the following quote from Christian Lehmann: "The grammaticalization of a sign is bound up inseparably with the reduction of its syntagmatic variability. This means that grammaticalization does not merely seize a word or a morpheme--namely the one which it reduces to a grammatical formative and finally to zero--, but instead the whole construction formed by the syntagmatic relations of the element in question. To the extent that the external relations of this construction are contracted by the grammaticalized formative, they are also seized by the grammaticalization process. Consequently, with the grammaticalization of a bound morpheme the syntagmatic variability of its host shrinks, too. Thus, the fixation of any word order can be a consequence of grammaticalization." (C. Lehmann 1992:406) This doesn't mean that there isn't a big difference between the development of a grammatical morpheme and the reanalysis of a construction in which there might not even be any new morphemes being developed or changed (though there may well be some, as it typically happens), as for instance in word order change (which takes place by means of changes in individual constructions in the first place). All I'm saying is that we need an inclusive term to group all (diachronic) changes which affect the grammar, and if we don't use grammatic(al)ization, then what else could we use? Hopper and Traugott do exclude word order change from the study of grammaticalization because it is not unidirectional and thus "should not be identified with grammaticalization in the narrower sense" (H&T 1993:50). However, I'm not sure that dividing "narrow-sense" grammaticalization from other types of grammaticalization is always a wise idea, for at some point we must acknowledge the similarities, or the (cognitive and linguistic) commonalities of the two processes, and having a single label for both seems to me like a good place to start. But of course we should not get stuck on labels and should strive to understand the processes themselves. As always. I'm not sure this adds any light to the debate, I just hope it doesn't add any heat to it :) Jon References: Hopper, Paul J. and Traugott, Elizabeth Closs. 1993. Grammaticalization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lehmann, Christian. 1992. Word order change by grammaticalization. In: Marinel Gerritsen and Dieter Stein, eds., Internal and external factors in syntactic change (Trends in linguistics. Studies and monographs, 61), pp. 395-416. (A selection of papers that were presented at the workshop ... held during the Ninth International Conference on Historical Linguistics at Rutgers University in August 1989.) Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Jon Aske / jaske at bates.edu (Bates) / jonaske at garnet.berkeley.edu (UCB) =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- From stampe at HAWAII.EDU Sun Oct 29 01:02:02 1995 From: stampe at HAWAII.EDU (David Stampe) Date: Sat, 28 Oct 1995 15:02:02 -1000 Subject: Grammatic(al)ization In-Reply-To: <9510290042.AA16296@abacus.bates.edu> (message from Jon Aske on Sat, 28 Oct 1995 14:42:51 -1000) Message-ID: Jon Aske askes All I'm saying is that we need an inclusive term to group all (diachronic) changes which affect the grammar, and if we don't use grammatic(al)ization, then what else could we use? Why not "changes"? David From jaske at ABACUS.BATES.EDU Sun Oct 29 02:05:54 1995 From: jaske at ABACUS.BATES.EDU (Jon Aske) Date: Sat, 28 Oct 1995 22:05:54 -0400 Subject: Grammatic(al)ization (fwd) Message-ID: David Stampe said: | Jon Aske ask[e]s | All I'm saying is that we need an inclusive term to group all | (diachronic) changes which affect the grammar, and if we don't use | grammatic(al)ization, then what else could we use? | | Why not "changes"? That's a good question, which I guess shows perhaps how much we're still in the dark here (I mean the fact that the answer is not obvious does). My first reaction would be to say that "changes" is too inclusive. Supposedly there are emic-type changes which affect the grammatical system (for reasons having to do with the automatization of communication routines, which in turn are constrained by our cognitive makeup), and there are other (more etic) types of changes. Of course, it is true that emic changes have their start as etic changes, in grammar proper as well as (perhaps more obviously so) in phonology. Grammaticalization would be the grammatical analog (loosely speaking) of phonologization perhaps? Of course, some might say that in grammar, unlike in phonetics/phonology, all changes are meaningful, and thus there is no such thing as etic changes. All changes are emic, although changes may be more or less tightly integrated in the "system", more or less incipient/emergent. That would be a pretty good point. Perhaps David is right and they're all just changes. I guess I better get back to my dissertation too (like Joyce), cause it's several years overdue ;), and let other people argue this one out. Jon =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Jon Aske / jaske at bates.edu (Bates) / jonaske at garnet.berkeley.edu (UCB) =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- From yishai at BGUMAIL.BGU.AC.IL Sun Oct 29 07:20:43 1995 From: yishai at BGUMAIL.BGU.AC.IL (Yishai Tobin) Date: Sun, 29 Oct 1995 09:20:43 +0200 Subject: Grammaticalization In-Reply-To: <199510271927.OAA09124@owlnet.rice.edu> Message-ID: For anyone interested in an alternative semiotic or sign-oriented approach to grammaticalization and lexicalization derived from aspect and auxiliaries in English and extended to other forms in Hebrew and Romance languages let me suggest chapters 10-12 in my book: Aspect in the English verb: process and result in language. Longman. 1993. Yishai Tobin From Debra.Ziegeler at ARTS.MONASH.EDU.AU Mon Oct 30 12:03:05 1995 From: Debra.Ziegeler at ARTS.MONASH.EDU.AU (Ziegeler, D.) Date: Mon, 30 Oct 1995 12:03:05 GMT+1000 Subject: grammaticalization Message-ID: Just a thought with regard to Spike Gildea's queries on whether 'it is appropriate to use grammaticalization to refer to the kind of suppletive paradigms for the surviving word' - it must be the case that suppletive forms are one of the resulting consequences of grammaticalization, rather than a part of the processes, since surely the progressive decrease of lexical functions for a grammaticalizing element would leave behind a 'vacuum' in lexical domains, to be filled by a new suppletive form. Also (and this is just off the top of my head), did the form 'wended' assume the place of the former 'went' at the time that irregular past forms were becoming historically less frequent? Perhaps if this is the case, then was the incoming past form 'wended' merely in accord with the historical changes of the time? Debbie Ziegeler From styler at RUF.RICE.EDU Mon Oct 30 16:29:33 1995 From: styler at RUF.RICE.EDU (Stephen A Tyler) Date: Mon, 30 Oct 1995 10:29:33 -0600 Subject: Grammaticalization In-Reply-To: <199510271927.OAA09124@owlnet.rice.edu> Message-ID: why not reanalysis as the general case with grammaticalization and lexicalization as specific processes, the one applying to the inception of grammatical functions, the other to the emergence of words out of grammatical categories? From David_Tuggy at SIL.ORG Mon Oct 30 13:52:00 1995 From: David_Tuggy at SIL.ORG (Tuggy, D.) Date: Mon, 30 Oct 1995 08:52:00 -0500 Subject: Process-morpheme stems Message-ID: Do any of you funknetters know of a case of a root or stem which consists of a process morpheme? Zero stems have occasionally been posited (and I'd be interested in any good examples of those you have), but I don't know of any stems consisting of say a tone pattern or (more likely) tone shift, an umlaut or ablaut, a reduplication, palatalization, etc. It seems like they should be a predicted kind of limiting case, though there are good reasons for them to be pretty rare. Any examples? --David Tuggy From stampe at HAWAII.EDU Mon Oct 30 22:08:59 1995 From: stampe at HAWAII.EDU (David Stampe) Date: Mon, 30 Oct 1995 12:08:59 -1000 Subject: Process-morpheme stems In-Reply-To: <01HX22ZA4E3Q00H9ZK@SIL.ORG> (David_Tuggy@SIL.ORG) Message-ID: David_Tuggy at SIL.ORG asks Do any of you funknetters know of a case of a root or stem which consists of a process morpheme? ... consisting of say a tone pattern or (more likely) tone shift, an umlaut or ablaut, a reduplication, palatalization, etc. If a morphological process normally operates on a base to produce a derivative or inflection, since a root or stem is such a base, what could it operate on? An example of a zero root can be found in the description of the verb come/go in H. S. Biligiri's _Kharia_ (Poona: Deccan College, c. 1965), which under certain conditions is realized as nothing but a sequence of bound inflectional prefixes and suffixes with no root between them. The conditions are not synchronically or diachronically phonological. Rather a sort of ellipsis seems to be involved. (Kharia is a South Munda language spoken in Bihar and Orissa provinces of India.) David From 6500njk at UCSBUXA.UCSB.EDU Mon Oct 30 23:36:15 1995 From: 6500njk at UCSBUXA.UCSB.EDU (Nicholas Kibre) Date: Mon, 30 Oct 1995 15:36:15 -0800 Subject: Process-morpheme stems In-Reply-To: <01HX22ZA4E3Q00H9ZK@SIL.ORG> Message-ID: As someone with an interest in morphological form, this question is quite interesting to me. But I'm having trouble thinking of what such a thing would be; what would a process morpheme root's process be carried out on? Nick Kibre, UCSB o - - - - - - - - o _ Nicholas Kibre --- 6500njk at ucsbuxa.ucsb.edu _ Adran Ieithyddiaeth, Prifysgol Califfornia, Santa Barbara o - - - - - - - - o From Debra.Ziegeler at ARTS.MONASH.EDU.AU Tue Oct 31 11:44:05 1995 From: Debra.Ziegeler at ARTS.MONASH.EDU.AU (Ziegeler, D.) Date: Tue, 31 Oct 1995 11:44:05 GMT+1000 Subject: Forwarded: grammaticalization Message-ID: From: Self To: funknet at rice.edu. Subject: grammaticalization Date: Mon, 30 Oct 1995 12:03:02 Just a thought with regard to Spike Gildea's queries on whether 'it is appropriate to use grammaticalization to refer to the kind of suppletive paradigms for the surviving word' - it must be the case that suppletive forms are one of the resulting consequences of grammaticalization, rather than a part of the processes, since surely the progressive decline in lexical functions for a grammaticalizing element would leave behind a 'vacuum' in lexical domains, to be filled by a new suppletive form. Also (and this is just off the top of my head), did the form 'wended' assume the place of the former 'went' at the time that irregular past forms were becoming historically less frequent? Perhaps if this is the case, then was the incoming past form 'wended' merely in accord with the historical changes of the time? Debbie Ziegeler From oyokoyam at HUSC.HARVARD.EDU Tue Oct 31 02:00:23 1995 From: oyokoyam at HUSC.HARVARD.EDU (Olga Yokoyama) Date: Mon, 30 Oct 1995 21:00:23 -0500 Subject: Process-morpheme stems In-Reply-To: <01HX22ZA4E3Q00H9ZK@SIL.ORG> Message-ID: On Mon, 30 Oct 1995, Tuggy, D. wrote: > Do any of you funknetters know of a case of a root or stem which > consists of a process morpheme? Zero stems have occasionally been > posited (and I'd be interested in any good examples of those you > have), but I don't know of any stems consisting of say a tone pattern > or (more likely) tone shift, an umlaut or ablaut, a reduplication, > palatalization, etc. It seems like they should be a predicted kind of > limiting case, though there are good reasons for them to be pretty > rare. Any examples? > It's not clear to me what exactly you ar looking for, but Goldsmith's dissertation on autosegmental phonol has many examples of morphemes that consists only ;of a tone contour. As for zero segment and zero feature root, thre is one in Russian: vynut' 'to take out' "vy" is a productive prefix meaning 'out' "nu" is a productive suffix meaning 'one quick perfective action' "t'" is the standard infinitive suffix Cf. vyprygnut' 'to jump out', where pryg is the root 'jump', or vytrjaxnut' 'to shake out', where trjax is the root 'shake' etc. etc. Regards From W.Croft at MANCHESTER.AC.UK Tue Oct 31 11:27:35 1995 From: W.Croft at MANCHESTER.AC.UK (Bill Croft) Date: Tue, 31 Oct 1995 11:27:35 +0000 Subject: Grammaticalization, grammaticization, etc. Message-ID: Although there seems to be a dialectal split among functionalists in the use of the terms "grammaticalization" and "grammaticization", I actually think there is a substantive distinction to be made, for which I try to use these two terms: GRAMMATICIZATION: the process by which some grammatical construction becomes a conventional linguistic unit (cf. Langacker, "Foundations of cognitive grammar", Vol. I, chapter 2) GRAMMATICALIZATION: the process by which certain types of conventional linguistic units become certain other types of conventional linguistic units, specifically syntactic constructions with characteristic lexemes become "smaller" syntactic constructions or single words with affixes---the kinds of phonological, morphosyntactic and "functional" processes discussed by C. Lehmann, Heine et al., Hopper & Traugott etc. I also believe these are two different kinds of historical processes (two of many, by the way; there are lots of other kinds of historical linguistic processes). Grammaticization is "from discourse to syntax", and has to do with the interplay between how our linguistic knowledge is stored in the mind and used in social interaction. Its central concern should be (in my opinion) how linguistic convention is established. But of course looking at grammaticization tells us a lot about the nature of discourse as well---of great interest to functionalists (well, at least some functionalists). Grammaticalization, on the other hand, has to do with the restructuring of linguistic signs, that is pairings of form and meaning. Change in both the signifier and the signified, of a particular type whose true nature still eludes us (in my opinion) is involved in grammaticalization. Here the central concern should be the interrelationship between signifier and signified. But of course looking at grammaticalization tells us lot about conceptual semantic structure---of great interest to functionalists (well, at least some functionalists). Grammaticalization will always involve grammaticization though. Any language change must start off as an innovation which is not the conventional way for expressing the conceptual content (or discourse function). That innovation must become conventionalized---grammaticized, in the sense I am suggesting---for the item in question to become further grammaticALized. (I must admit that potential confusion invites the use of "conventionalization" for "grammaticization" in the sense I am suggesting.) Bill Croft Dept of Linguistics, U Manchester, Oxford Rd, Manchester M13 9PL, UK w.croft at manchester.ac.uk FAX: +44-161-275 3187 Phone: 275 3188 From mbuijs at RULLET.LEIDENUNIV.NL Tue Oct 31 11:21:43 1995 From: mbuijs at RULLET.LEIDENUNIV.NL (Michel Buijs) Date: Tue, 31 Oct 1995 12:21:43 +0100 Subject: Process-morpheme stems Message-ID: > Do any of you funknetters know of a case of a root or stem which > consists of a process morpheme? Zero stems have occasionally been > posited (and I'd be interested in any good examples of those you > have), but I don't know of any stems consisting of say a tone pattern > or (more likely) tone shift, an umlaut or ablaut, a reduplication, > palatalization, etc. It seems like they should be a predicted kind of > limiting case, though there are good reasons for them to be pretty > rare. Any examples? > > --David Tuggy I am puzzled as to what exactly you mean, but the phenomena you are looking for may include the following examples from Ancient Greek: - reduplication: the stem of the substantive ag-oog-e (training) as compared to the verb ag-oo (to lead) - shortening of a long final vowel of a stem, as in dika-io-s (just; short a): stem: dika- (long a) - dropping of part of the stem: the substantive soophro-sune (+/- moderation): stem: soophron-, and the like. Or am I completely mistaken? Michel Buijs |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| Drs Michel Buijs Classics Department Leiden University P.O. Box 9515 2300 RA Leiden The Netherlands phone +31 (0)71 - 527 2774 / fax +31 (0)71 - 527 2615 World Wide Web: http://oasis.leidenuniv.nl/gltc/michel/home.html |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| From David_Tuggy at SIL.ORG Tue Oct 31 15:05:00 1995 From: David_Tuggy at SIL.ORG (Tuggy, D.) Date: Tue, 31 Oct 1995 10:05:00 -0500 Subject: Process-morpheme stems Message-ID: I received a number of interesting and useful replies to my question about possible process-morpheme stems (for which, Thanks). There were a couple of good examples of zero stems, but no process-morpheme stems yet. Several respondents questioned the coherence of the idea. For instance Nick Kibre: "I'm having trouble thinking of what such a thing would be; what would a process morpheme root's process be carried out on?" Or David Stampe: "If a morphological process normally operates on a base to produce a derivative or inflection, since a root or stem is such a base, what could it operate on?" The answer is on whatever is next to it, of course. Usually this would be an affix, though I suppose it could conceivably be a compounded stem or even an adjacent word. The sort of thing I have in mind is this: we recognize a zero stem when the affixes that would usually attach to a stem seem to attach to nothing; either the rightmost prefix attaches to the leftmost suffix (and vice versa), or there are only prefixes or only suffixes there. (Of course there will typically be meaning components which logically pertain to a stem, as well.) It is at least conceivable that a language might have two such zero stems, differentiated phonologically in that one of them triggers one tone pattern in the affixes and the other another pattern, or one palatalizes and the other doesn't, etc. (It wouldn't really be necessary for there to be two such stems in contrast, as long as the change in the affixes could be recognized as such.) Any process morpheme can be thought of as a zero that betrays its presence by producing some change in the neighboring morphemes. Such change-triggering is of course not limited to zeroes, nor is it limited to affixes--lots of stems do it. I just don't know of any zero stems that do it, only zero affixes. The existence of process-morpheme stems would tend to imply a less-than-absolute division between stems and affixes, which would be no big problem to me (in fact positing an absolute division would be quite problematical on other grounds.) But of course the really interesting question is the empirical one: are there any out there? Hope this clarifies the question a bit. David Tuggy