On Everett on Givon (on Everett)

[Esa Itkonen]

In his reply to Givon, Dan Everett seems to be saying that Ken Hale was the first to claim (in 1976) that embedding/hypotaxis emerges from parataxis. I must have misunderstood him, but for the benefit of those who may be guilty of the same misunderstanding, I would like to add the following comment.

Hermann Paul (1975 [1880]: 145) points out, first, that hypotaxis is generally thought to emerge from parataxis and, second, that this view (if meant to state the whole truth) is wrong: "Irrtuemlich ist ferner die gewoenliche Ansicht, dass die Hypotaxe durchgaengig aus der Parataxe entstanden sei." Thus, more than 100 years before Ken Hale, most people thought what he thought, but Paul thinks that they are wrong. But how, then, can hypotaxis come into being, if not from parataxis? The answer is not blowing in the wind, but is, rather, mentioned in the title of my 2005 book (published by Benjamins).

Paul adduces several cases of parataxis from his own speech. Surely Germany under Bismarck is a less-than-ideal example of a hunter-gatherer community. So those seem to be right who doubt the plausiblity of a very close correlation between linguistic structure and social structure.

Another thing. In 1816, Franz Bopp started his historical-comparative work by assuming that the Indo-European verb contains the end results of two grammaticalization processes: from copula to tense marker and from pronoun to person suffix. This is explains why, for those who learned this in their first student year, grammaticalization is no big deal. Besides, more should be said about the emergence of ablaut (which fails to conform with the lexical > grammatical cline)

To conclude, I have to mention an important contribution by Vera da Silva and Chris Sinha on how to teach the Pirahas to read and write (sic!). Perhaps expectedly, the New Yorker refused to publish it. Fortunately, however, it is to be be found in Linguist List and Cogling (in late April, I think).

Esa Itkonen 

Reference
Paul, Hermann (1975 [first ed. 1880, fifth ed. 1920]): Prinzipien der Sprachgeschichte. Tuebingen: Niemeyer.


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