autonomous syntax

[Jon Aske]

Ellen F. Prince wrote:
> 
> well, i guess it all depends on where you're looking. for quite a few
> years now i've been looking at cases of language contact where the
> discourse functions associated with a syntactic form in one language
> come to be associated with an 'analogous' syntactic form in a contact
> language (and where the analogy is statable in purely syntactic terms)
> and where the two forms in question may have originally had totally
> unrelated discourse functions. in fact, it is precisely by studying
> such cases that i have come to believe in autonomous syntax, since, if
> the form-function connection were permanent or driven by iconicity, i
> could simply not begin to explain the data.
 
That is very interesting and I would like to know more about your
specific cases, but my experience with language contact and grammatical
change, though it sounds similar to yours, has led me to very different
conclusions.

I have found that Basque seems to be increasing the number of clauses
with postverbal elements, and the way it seems to be happening is that
minor, marked (and ‘optional’) constructions which, for a variety of
reasons, place the verb in rheme-initial position, and thus
superficially look like the unmarked constructions of Romance languages,
are being used more and more by those speakers which are most "under the
influence" of a Romance language.

The ‘overuse’ of these constructions results in a change in the contexts
in which these constructions are used, i.e. in the pragmatics of those
constructions.  In other words, the constructions are becoming
relatively less marked than we would expect them to be.  This, of course
is the well known phenomenon of convergence, a type of transfer that is
rather common in language contact situations. Thus syntactic change is
really pragmatic change in the constructions.  As I see it, these
pragmatics are not drafted onto otherwise formal constructions as an
afterthought, but are an intrinsic part of them.  The constructions in
question do not make sense without reference to functional categories
and the ordering relations are extremely iconic.

Anyway, this is probably more than what anybody wanted to know, but
since I don’t have anyone to talk to about my work in my exile, I
thought I’d share it with you.  (My LSA 97 paper on this very topic can
be seen at http://www.bates.edu/~jaske/askeling.html).

Best wishes, Jon

-- 
Jon Aske
jaske at abacus.bates.edu
http://www.bates.edu/~jaske/
--
Balantza duen aldera erortzen da arbola
"The tree falls towards the side it's leaning."