diachronic functionalism

Joan Bresnan bresnan at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU
Thu Dec 16 18:07:49 UTC 1999


Martin Haspelmath's response to my question ("But precisely how?")
makes it clear to me that there might not be any real
incompatibility between our views, once they are spelled out more
precisely and terminological differences are clarified.

>From his initial statement--

> The basic idea is that functional factors apply in performance.

--I infer that he thinks that the differences in our views have
something to do with "performance" vs. "competence".  But I don't
recall mentioning that chestnut in any of my postings.  [In fact, I
believe I once wrote that the competence/performance distinction has
served as a convenient way for some linguists to insulate their
theories from empirical disconfirmation.]  Is Martin embracing the
classic generative view of competence grammar as part of his
historical explanation or just (incorrectly) presupposing that I own
that view or that anyone who does OT must subscribe to that particular
view articulated by Chomsky in 1965?   It certainly isn't true.
Let's simply drop it as a false barrier to communication.

To explain the typological and language-internal patterns of voiceless
obstruents, Martin supposes that

> Speakers are thus constantly "tempted" to devoice consonants (partially
> or completely) under these conditions, and sometimes they give in to the
> temptation.

Is the "constant" presence of this "phonetic temptation" any different
the OT hypothesis that the contextual markedness of voiced obstruents
is a universal constraint is present in every individual by virtue of
the human articulatory and perceptual systems?

Martin suggests that once speakers "give in to the temptation" to
devoice, devoicing may spread throughout the speech community and
result in language change.  Yes, but when we try to model precisely
what "giving in to the temptation" means, we may come up with the idea
that the "phonetic temptation" becomes more dominant compared to the
temptation to preserve constrasts.  OT provides some very precise and
nice ways to model this.  One I like very much is the Boersma-Hayes
model of probabilistically varying constraint rankings that I referred
to recently.  (See their recent ROA paper.)  Constraints have
continuous (not scalar) ranking values which vary according to a
normal distribution.  When two conflicting constraints very close in
their ranking are applied to the same form, either one may dominate,
yielding a certain frequency of variation in the forms produced.

I said nothing in my postings about how variation of this kind spreads
through populations, and that is certainly where diachronic and
sociolinguistic explanations come in.  We must look at all sorts of
"external" issues such as the relative influence and power of social
groups and networks of individuals.  One way such factors can exert
their influence on individual linguistic patterns, in OT terms, is by
modifying the rankings of constraints.  In some recent work I have
done on negative auxiliary inversion in several English dialects
including Scots and Hiberno-English, I show how through a
sociolinguistically determined ranking of this kind, variations in
both the syntactic distribution and the semantic scope of negation can
be explained.  One striking syntactic difference is this:

        Scots English:
          Amn't I your friend?
          *I amn't your friend?
        Hiberno English:
          Amn't I your friend?
          I amn't your friend?

Note that OT does not determine the ranking of constraints, but only
an explicit space of possible variation within which changes and their
implications and interactions may be studied in precise detail.
[Nigel Vincent has begun to apply this kind of model to historical
change from Latin to Romance: see his recent posting to the LFG archive:
http://www-lfg.stanford.edu/lfg/.]

--Unfortunately, I must interrupt this conversation and go now.

Best wishes to you functionalists and here's hoping for a productive
and interactive new millenium!

Joan
>
> P.S. Joan Bresnan seems to use the term "evolutionary" where I use
> "diachronic". I think this terminological usage should be avoided,
> because "evolutionary" is ambiguous between "phylogenetic (Darwinian)
> evolution" and "glossogenetic evolution" (i.e. diachronic change").

I completely agree.  Sorry, I just unthinkingly picked up some words
from Matthew's msg, and realized later that they weren't what I really
intended.



More information about the Funknet mailing list