Here's Givon text: Dan Everett on Piraha and Universals

[Tom Givon]

Nice comments,  Jesse.  As for automatization--every high-frequency 
behavior becomes automated, be it syntactic, lexical, motor, visual, 
etc. So if it is true (speculation is not proof...) that in some 
cultures the frequency balance shifts from grammar to contents (i.e. 
lexicon) or to some "embodied" experience, if that occurs in high enough 
frequency, it'll get automated just as any other behavior.

Walter Kintsch had a nice paper (1992) about the balance between relying 
on grammar vs., relying on contents ("situational reasoning") in 
discourse processing. In both Pidgins & early child language (child 
pidgin), the balance is heavily tilted towards contents, given that they 
have little grammatical machinery. Both are, obviously, 
societies-of-intimates, where communications is tilted heaily towards 
the here-and-now, you-and-I, this-and-that-visible.

In /On Understandiung Grammar /(1979, ch. 5), where I set out this 
conjecture, I also noted that in adult communication between intimates 
the same ought to apply. So e.g., spoken vs. written language shows a 
huge skewing in the frequency of complex constructions. Eli Ochs had a 
nice paper on just this topic(1977/1979). So in hunting-and-gathering or 
small-scale village societies, one would expect less reliance, in terms 
of frequency, on grammar. But there's a huge number of caveats that must 
be added here. The parts of grammar dedicated to deontic & epistepic 
modality are probably just as rich--or richer--in face-to-face 
communication in societies of intimates. This also shows up in earlier 
acquisition & high frequency of such modalities (marked by various 
"higher" verbs)  in children ca. age 2-3, by the way. And of course, 
there's Revard Perkins' book (a TSL volume from way back) showing that 
small-scale, less-complex societies have much richer & more expanded 
deictic marking systems. So one has to be careful about frequency 
generalizations; they have to apply not to grammar at large, but to 
specific sub-systems.  Best,  TG

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jess tauber wrote:
> Aya Katz i:kama:nude:
>
> <<Hunter gartherers, like their non-human primate brethren, tend
> to be able to express an entire clause in a very compact phonological
> form, but don't be too sure that this form is not syntactically complex.
> There are meaningful recurrent subcomponents, and that's where recursivity
> comes in.>>
>
>
>
> My analysis of 'sound symbolism' in some of the analytical click languages reveals collapsed ancient morphological material within the supposed root. The meanings of Aya's 'recurrent subcomponents' here are quite different in flavor from the more expressive or lexical ones one often finds at the margins of words corresponding to old ideophone or lexical roots. Similar things seem to have been going on in a number of other families with isolating/analytical cast. Old productive morphology has left its now frozen and transformed mark on current lexicon.
>
> This makes sense from the POV of the Bybeean relevance principle- where meaningful internal stem changes are found late in the game of the analysis/synthesis cycle. How MUCH gets incorporated into the new analytical root is a variable, and even here one may see an increase in the ability to play with the form (as in Matisoff's Lahu).
>
> Recently I have speculated that such stem change may correlate with the size of the ideophone inventory (with some spectacular exceptions which seem motivated by areal influences)- the more synthetic a language is, and/or the more fusional it is, the smaller the ideophone inventory will tend to be. This may be because ideophones tend to code more 'relevant' information, and if such information is already redundantly marked either by productive or lexicalized morphology, economy will weed out ideophones as an unnecessary extravagance.
>
> As remnants of the old stem changes die away one should see the rise either of new equivalent morphology from set A of the lexicon (the usual grammaticalization resource suspects), or new ideophones from set B of the lexicon (more expressive forms)- the latter has been claimed for many languages.
>
> This may help to account for the fact that ideophones aren't a one-size-fits-all category- in some languages you get a short list with only completive aspectual senses, in others you get progressive, and so on. It remains to be seen whether one is dealing with an unprincipled mixture of formal means of expression, or something more akin to complementary distributions.
>
> I would suggest that knowledge of the structure of the lexicon of a particular language, by providing another yet related perspective, might help to differentiate supposed syntax-based cultural/grammatical property clusterings- for instance it has been hypothesized by Janis Nuckolls that cultures utilizing more ideophones would tend to see the world as more animistically organized, a more 'bottom up' approach to interpreting a world that requires far more negotiation on the part of the animate agent- the sort of place one would find less automaticization of behavior and more reliance instead on social memory and landmark-based navigation- where context looms large and fixed sets of rules may not work well.
>
> Jess Tauber
> phonosemantics at earthlink.net
>
>
>