From jhewson at morgan.ucs.mun.ca Sat Aug 1 19:25:25 1998 From: jhewson at morgan.ucs.mun.ca (John Hewson) Date: Sat, 1 Aug 1998 15:25:25 EDT Subject: Dative Pronouns In-Reply-To: <199807201344.OAA24335@nessie.mcc.ac.uk> Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- On Mon, 20 Jul 1998, Richard Hogg wrote: > Also of possible interest is the English phenomenon called "pronoun > exchange" by the late Ossi Ihalainen, which gives sentences such as: > Her (SUBJ) told I (OBJ) > Such forms are traceable throughout western England and in a few > varieties living forms remain even in this decade. See Ihalainen in > Cambridge History Vol. 5 pp.230-1, together with a number of his > articles on Somerset and West Country dialect. As Ihalainen points > out, it is probable that "you" is the descendant of the old > accusative/dative pronoun, which replaced nominative "ye" under > complex circumstances. In the regional dialects of Britain there is a good deal of free variation in the use of subject pronouns: one frequently hears "us" as a subject form, for example. Ihailen, as may be seen in the Cambridge History volume reference above, was clearly not aware, however, that subject pronouns "I, he, she", etc, are only used in direct object position when the D.O. is stressed, so that there is a minimal pair 1. He SEES me 2. He sees I where the object pronoun in (1) is unaccentuated, while that in (2) is stressed. It is common to hear speakers switching back and forth between the stressed and the unstressed versions. 3. He sees I, and I sees HE, and I says to 'un... Here 'un is a direct descendant of OE masc. sg. acc. "hine", which became generalized for both acc. and dative usage in Wessex. Where the verb is stressed, one would normally get, consequently 4. I SEES 'un This use of the stressed and unstressed forms of nominatives for two different functions would seem to stem from the need to replace a clitic, for expressive purposes, by a disjunctive pronominal form that can be stressed. We can see such usage leading to split paradigms in Romance 5. French MOI, TOI, LUI (stressed) vs. me, te, le What is of interest here is the development of the LUI vs. le pair, where "le" is from Latin acc. illu(m), and "lui" from dat. illi by analogy with L. cui "to whom". The form "lui" is now singular dative for both genders, and is also used as a stressed direct object (replacing or reinforcing clitic "le"). The stressed paradigm (MOI, TOI, LUI, etc) has taken on a quasi nominal function ("Le moi est haissible"), so that LUI can, for expressive purposes, be used as a subject, when the subject needs to be stressed. 6. LUI est parti hier HE left yesterday Il est parti hier He left yesterday The LUI used here is in origin a dative form used as a nominative, but only in exceptional circumstances, since subject is not the normal function of such a form; LUI is the pronominal form that is required after prepositions: avec moi, pour toi, de lui, etc., since the clitic forms (me, te, se, le) can only be used with verbs, never with prepositions. What we are looking at is a pronoun with quasi nominal function, that like all other French nouns, can be used as either subject or object of the verb, but only in the third person (MOI, TOI cannot be used as subjects without their corresponding clitics je, tu). Since there are often different personal pronouns with different functions, one has to be careful to go beyond the data of surface usage in the search for a dative form that has been transformed into a nominative. I think as well that the use of YOU as both subject and object form is a simple case of levelling, rather than the development of a dative/ accusative form into a nominative. YOU, in acquiring nominative function, has not ceased to be used as a dative/ accusative. John Hewson, FRSC tel: (709)737-8131 University Research Professor fax: (709)737-4000 Memorial University of Newfoundland St. John's NF, CANADA A1B 3X9 From bwald at HUMnet.UCLA.EDU Sat Aug 1 19:27:14 1998 From: bwald at HUMnet.UCLA.EDU (bwald) Date: Sat, 1 Aug 1998 15:27:14 EDT Subject: your mail Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Isidore Dyen writes with respect to such constructions as "workaholic": >I think that it might be important to add to the discussion that these >forms are artificialloy constructed and in that respect fall in with words >like AIDS or is it AIDs and CIA and G-man and the gamut that have >sprung up in at least a partial connection with writing and thus >differ from the types of analogical phenomena that appear in comparative >studies. I think ID raises a very interesting issue, but one which is more problematic than he suggests. To begin with, he no less than any other reader recognises that the examples he has given above are different from any of the examples we had been previously discussing, in that his examples make reference in one way or another to spelling. That is not true of the examples, call them "condensed compounds" for the moment, that we have been discussing. Nevertheless, an interesting *burden of proof* issue arises between those like ID who suggest that the types of condensations that give rise to "workaholic" and other examples -- indeed what ARE other examples and what are NOT? -- can only arise from some kind of literate perception of the condensed words (this is certainly NOT obvious), and those like me, who might say: PROVE IT! or at least, WHAT MAKES YOU THINK SO? For example, take "workaholic". ID's idea seems to be that the -aholic is abstracted by some literate means. I can't really follow this, and even the variation in spelling of the unstressed vowel *a*holic vs. (alc)*o*holic seems to argue against this. But I don't insist this is a strong argument against his assumption. A stronger argument against, I think, has to do with such diminutive derivatives as "alkie" for "alcoholic" (= a person who drinks too much), which, without any hint of literacy, abstracts, "back-clips" (thanks, Jim Rader and Hans Marchand) or "stumps" the first "syllable", leaving -oholic free by implication. OK. Why do I say -oholic is free by implication? Well, I haven't totally thought this through, but I think the stumping technique and its residual can be compared to the Romance (and more generally learned) stratum in English where speakers, whether literate or not, can generally perceive multi-morpheme combinations that recombine, but do not have the slightest idea what the constituent morphemes "mean" -- and indeed that poses a problem for us linguists to decide how to deal with them, cf. defect, perfect (say the verb), effect, detain, pertain, retain, etc etc. Again, I think people are quite clear about the constituent parts but quite unclear (and unconcerned) about their meanings in a great many Romance formations in English. (malaprops also show perception of constituent parts of Romance formations, e.g., defuse for diffuse, prevert for pervert, or whatever ones actually occur). Thus, such Romance forms provide a precedent (if that's historically relevant) to splitting things like "alcoholic" into constituents morphemes "alc+oholic". In fact, the latter are much more motivated than the Romance forms, since "alkie" gives the "alcohol content" of the alc-, and leaves -oholic for "addict", etc. I agree with ID that many forms like "workaholic" might have been coined by literate users for literate purposes (cf. the journalese proliferation of "-gate" forms for political scandals), but not that the technique presupposes literacy and could not happen/start without literacy. "cheeseburger" might be quite different from "workaholic", in that "burger" alone "fore-clips" "hamburger". No literacy seems necessary, certainly no more than in "gator" for "alligator" (cf. "gatorade", wherever that came from -- Florida? And NB "telephone" > "phone" does not presuppose the morphological independence of "tele", why not also for "microphone", "megaphone" and what-not, whoops "phone" also means "allophone" in one obscure jargon.) Thus, "cheeseburger" seems to be simply a convenience for "cheese hamburger", and not as complex as "workaholic" in its origin. All of this, of course, depends somewhat on whether "burger" as an independent word came into existence BEFORE OR AFTER "hamburger" (something we may never know, though it might seem almost within our reach to know, ESP, and NOTE THIS, if the origins of the two were ORAL, and their order of written appearance is relatively close -- as is probable -- and arbitrary. In fact, except for "dialect representation", we might expect "burger", like "gator", to be suppressed in written language until it had spread quite widely, leaving doubt about its true chronological relationship to the emergence of "cheeseburger" and the rest of the (-)burger family. EG one abridged 1994 dictionary gives "cheeseburger" from 1938 but does not acknowledge "burger" EXCEPT as a combined = dependent form, ignoring that "burger" has been short for "hamburger" to my ears for I-don't-know-how-long, many decades at least. Surprisingly, this dictionary, despite its intentional incompleteness, does list "gator" from 1844, no initial apostrophe or hyphen.) A final comment on this matter, which may be relevant to the "literacy" issue, but I'm not sure how, is that "workaholic" and many such structures have a certain humor or cleverness about them that suggests conscious manipulation. That in itself does not suggest literacy to me. But it contrasts the technique with the stump compound, which seems to be most often just a convenience which reduces or *abbreviates* -- something also done by such uncontroversially literate techniques as those which produce AIDS (acronyms) or CIA, LA etc.(crude initial abbreviations), without any humor and, in fact, often with a *bureaucratic tediousness* about them (but there is something humourous to me, at least, in referring to people by the initials of their names, e.g., BW and ID etc etc, so immediate context is important too -- similarly, humour or cleverness was a feature of many acronyms in 1960s-80s political discourse, cf. NOW!, and a crude kind of rhyming humour in things like "high fi" and "sci fi", the long vowel of "fi" in both cases also depending on spelling). But, in general, stump compounds and the spelling-reference types are relatively boring, convenient for users and opaque to non-users. Not so for either the "workaholic" or "cheeseburger" type (with regard to opacity), or for the "monokini" and "glitterati" types (with respect to specialised humour) about which more could be said. It may be that ID is confusing ALL (or TOO MANY) condensation techniques involving multi-word expressions with those which have a transparent literate base, though I find it hard to believe that he might have no more basis for his claim. As I said above, if he has more of a basis, WHAT IS IT? In a separate matter, ID replied to my comments on GG (or UG) and historical ling with: >How about contemplating whether language change is inevitable. If it is >not, theren should be some stable languages somewhere, If it is, then it >must be inherent in all languages and thus a universal. To which Jan Terje Faarlund replied: >..Change in itself cannot be part of >the system. The only interesting connection between universals and change >is the fact that no change can lead to a result which violates UG. I had been tempted to respond in a similar way, but I thought that ID was writing this tongue-in-cheek, and also that he might escape by insisting that "universal" does not necessarily mean "linguistic universal", since he might deny, like many, that there are specific linguistic universals unrelated to some more general cognitive or whatever universals, and that "change" is one of them ("linguistic change" being part of "change", as Faarlund observed with regard to social and biological change, i.e., life and death, in his longer reply). In view of this, I would agree with Faarlund's use of "interesting" in the above passage as keeping comments about LINGUISTIC change *on track*, but experience suggests to me that ID would object to the adjective and say that "interesting" is not an argument but an expression of taste. I'll leave it at that. From bwald at HUMnet.UCLA.EDU Sat Aug 1 19:27:37 1998 From: bwald at HUMnet.UCLA.EDU (bwald) Date: Sat, 1 Aug 1998 15:27:37 EDT Subject: burger, 'burger, -burger Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- In my last message I wrote at a certain point: >... All of this, of course, depends somewhat on whether "burger" as an >independent word came >into existence BEFORE OR AFTER "hamburger" That was a mistake. I meant "cheeseburger", not "hamburger", as in the parenthetical expansion that followed the above: >(something we may never know, though it might seem almost within our reach >to know, ESP, and NOTE THIS, if the origins of the two were ORAL, and >their order of written appearance is relatively close -- as is probable -- >and arbitrary. In fact, except for "dialect representation", we might >expect "burger", like "gator", to be suppressed in written language until >it had spread quite widely, leaving doubt about its true chronological >relationship to the emergence of "cheeseburger" and the rest of the >(-)burger family. EG one abridged 1994 dictionary gives "cheeseburger" >from 1938 but does not acknowledge "burger" EXCEPT as a combined = >dependent form, ignoring that "burger" has been short for "hamburger" to >my ears for I-don't-know-how-long, many decades at least. Surprisingly, >this dictionary, despite its >intentional incompleteness, does list >"gator" from 1844, no initial apostrophe or hyphen.) "hamburger" itself is dated back to 1884 by the dictionary, early enough to assume it is actually quite a bit older than "cheeseburger", even in speech (but the latter depends crucially on the emergence of the practice it describes; was there ever a commonly used expression "cheese hamburger"?). Thus, if "cheeseburger" is really older than "burger" for "hamburger", "hamburger" went unclipped for quite a long time (since no other clipping is reported). "frank" (1904) for "frankfurter" (1894) shows a different clipping technique (not to mention "hot dog" (1900), cf. the recent "corn dog"), but its relatively rapid condensation still leads to questions about either how people resisted condensation for so long with "hamburger" (if that is the case) or when the thing became at least as popular as the frank (or should I say the "hot dog"?) so that there was motivation for condensation. There is a lot of detail in historical linguistics, isn't there? From isidore.dyen at yale.edu Sat Aug 1 19:29:21 1998 From: isidore.dyen at yale.edu (Isidore Dyen) Date: Sat, 1 Aug 1998 15:29:21 EDT Subject: GG and change In-Reply-To: <3.0.3.32.19980731103333.0069d304@mail.hf.uio.no> Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- I have no doubt that you can supply us with the location of the society with the stable language (extraterrestrial locations are unacceptable). If all languages change, isn't that a universal attribute of a language? Isn't instability a universal attribute? Does it really help to say that the instability of language is due to its transmission as a cultural object is a theory which is useful and makes the instability, another theoretical proposition a corollary under a general theory that transmitted cultural objects are unstable. One could go on with the observation that transmitted non-cultural objects like DNA are also unstable, being subject to mutation. If you prefer to say that the property of instability is inherent in the system of a language rather than in the language itself, that is your right, but there is the question as to whether the distinction you are drawing is meanningful. Have we ended up at hair-splitting? On Fri, 31 Jul 1998, Jan Terje Faarlund wrote: > ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- > At 18:01 30.07.98 EDT, Isidore Dyan wrote: > >----------------------------Original message---------------------------- > > > >How about contemplating whether language change is inevitable. If it is > >not, theren should be some stable languages somewhere, If it is, then it > >must be inherent in all languages and thus a universal. > > > I think you can find a stable language if you look in the following type of > society: A society where no member ever changes profession or personal > relationships, where there is no outside contact, no immigration, no births > and no deaths. For languages spoken in other types of societies, change is > of course inevitable, not because change is a universal of language, but > because language after all is ALSO a cultural object transmitted through > the behavior of biological individuals. > > The idea that change should be a universal is meaningless since language > universals are based on generalizations over properties of *systems*. When > a language changes, a system changes, and this new system must again obey > whatever constraints are imposed by UG. Change in itself cannot be part of > the system. The only interesting connection between universals and change > is the fact that no change can lead to a result which violates UG. > > > ******************************************** > Professor Jan Terje Faarlund > Universitetet i Oslo > Institutt for nordistikk og litteraturvitskap > Postboks 1013 Blindern > N-0315 Oslo (Norway) > > Tel. (+47) 22 85 69 49 (office) > (+47) 22 12 39 66 (home) > Fax (+47) 22 85 71 00 > From isidore.dyen at yale.edu Sun Aug 2 16:35:05 1998 From: isidore.dyen at yale.edu (Isidore Dyen) Date: Sun, 2 Aug 1998 12:35:05 EDT Subject: your mail In-Reply-To: Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- It seems to me that the variety of new formations thatare involved in the discussion are all of recent origin. It would be interesting to examine whether the stump types or whatever can be exemplified before the present highly literate period and then the frequency of the contaminative types (i.e. analogy-like new formations where the models involve a nonce analysis) are common at earlier times anywhere. If not, there is circumstantial evidence that literacy is playing a role along with sportswriters, Madison Avenue, and other word-spinners. The fact that change is inevitable in the continuation of a language is not a peculiarity of language, since it is a pretty widely distributed characteristic. In fact it is pretty difficult these days to cite anything that is inlabile. The only reason for mentioning that lability is a language universal is that languages, though dialectally variable, give the impression of being stable. On Sat, 1 Aug 1998, bwald wrote: > ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- > Isidore Dyen writes with respect to such constructions as "workaholic": > > >I think that it might be important to add to the discussion that these > >forms are artificialloy constructed and in that respect fall in with words > >like AIDS or is it AIDs and CIA and G-man and the gamut that have > >sprung up in at least a partial connection with writing and thus > >differ from the types of analogical phenomena that appear in comparative > >studies. > > I think ID raises a very interesting issue, but one which is more > problematic than he suggests. To begin with, he no less than any other > reader recognises that the examples he has given above are different from > any of the examples we had been previously discussing, in that his examples > make reference in one way or another to spelling. That is not true of the > examples, call them "condensed compounds" for the moment, that we have been > discussing. Nevertheless, an interesting *burden of proof* issue arises > between those like ID who suggest that the types of condensations that give > rise to "workaholic" and other examples -- indeed what ARE other examples > and what are NOT? -- can only arise from some kind of literate perception > of the condensed words (this is certainly NOT obvious), and those like me, > who might say: PROVE IT! or at least, WHAT MAKES YOU THINK SO? > > For example, take "workaholic". ID's idea seems to be that the -aholic is > abstracted by some literate means. I can't really follow this, and even > the variation in spelling of the unstressed vowel *a*holic vs. > (alc)*o*holic seems to argue against this. But I don't insist this is a > strong argument against his assumption. A stronger argument against, I > think, has to do with such diminutive derivatives as "alkie" for > "alcoholic" (= a person who drinks too much), which, without any hint of > literacy, abstracts, "back-clips" (thanks, Jim Rader and Hans Marchand) or > "stumps" the first "syllable", leaving -oholic free by implication. OK. > Why do I say -oholic is free by implication? Well, I haven't totally > thought this through, but I think the stumping technique and its residual > can be compared to the Romance (and more generally learned) stratum in > English where speakers, whether literate or not, can generally perceive > multi-morpheme combinations that recombine, but do not have the slightest > idea what the constituent morphemes "mean" -- and indeed that poses a > problem for us linguists to decide how to deal with them, cf. defect, > perfect (say the verb), effect, detain, pertain, retain, etc etc. Again, I > think people are quite clear about the constituent parts but quite unclear > (and unconcerned) about their meanings in a great many Romance formations > in English. (malaprops also show perception of constituent parts of > Romance formations, e.g., defuse for diffuse, prevert for pervert, or > whatever ones actually occur). Thus, such Romance forms provide a > precedent (if that's historically relevant) to splitting things like > "alcoholic" into constituents morphemes "alc+oholic". In fact, the latter > are much more motivated than the Romance forms, since "alkie" gives the > "alcohol content" of the alc-, and leaves -oholic for "addict", etc. I > agree with ID that many forms like "workaholic" might have been coined by > literate users for literate purposes (cf. the journalese proliferation of > "-gate" forms for political scandals), but not that the technique > presupposes literacy and could not happen/start without literacy. > > "cheeseburger" might be quite different from "workaholic", in that "burger" > alone "fore-clips" "hamburger". No literacy seems necessary, certainly no > more than in "gator" for "alligator" (cf. "gatorade", wherever that came > from -- Florida? And NB "telephone" > "phone" does not presuppose the > morphological independence of "tele", why not also for "microphone", > "megaphone" and what-not, whoops "phone" also means "allophone" in one > obscure jargon.) Thus, "cheeseburger" seems to be simply a convenience for > "cheese hamburger", and not as complex as "workaholic" in its origin. All > of this, of course, depends somewhat on whether "burger" as an independent > word came into existence BEFORE OR AFTER "hamburger" (something we may > never know, though it might seem almost within our reach to know, ESP, and > NOTE THIS, if the origins of the two were ORAL, and their order of written > appearance is relatively close -- as is probable -- and arbitrary. In fact, > except for "dialect representation", we might expect "burger", like > "gator", to be suppressed in written language until it had spread quite > widely, leaving doubt about its true chronological relationship to the > emergence of "cheeseburger" and the rest of the (-)burger family. EG one > abridged 1994 dictionary gives "cheeseburger" from 1938 but does not > acknowledge "burger" EXCEPT as a combined = dependent form, ignoring that > "burger" has been short for "hamburger" to my ears for > I-don't-know-how-long, many decades at least. Surprisingly, this > dictionary, despite its intentional incompleteness, does list "gator" from > 1844, no initial apostrophe or hyphen.) > > A final comment on this matter, which may be relevant to the "literacy" > issue, but I'm not sure how, is that "workaholic" and many such structures > have a certain humor or cleverness about them that suggests conscious > manipulation. That in itself does not suggest literacy to me. But it > contrasts the technique with the stump compound, which seems to be most > often just a convenience which reduces or *abbreviates* -- something also > done by such uncontroversially literate techniques as those which produce > AIDS (acronyms) or CIA, LA etc.(crude initial abbreviations), without any > humor and, in fact, often with a *bureaucratic tediousness* about them (but > there is something humourous to me, at least, in referring to people by the > initials of their names, e.g., BW and ID etc etc, so immediate context is > important too -- similarly, humour or cleverness was a feature of many > acronyms in 1960s-80s political discourse, cf. NOW!, and a crude kind of > rhyming humour in things like "high fi" and "sci fi", the long vowel of > "fi" in both cases also depending on spelling). But, in general, stump > compounds and the spelling-reference types are relatively boring, > convenient for users and opaque to non-users. Not so for either the > "workaholic" or "cheeseburger" type (with regard to opacity), or for the > "monokini" and "glitterati" types (with respect to specialised humour) > about which more could be said. It may be that ID is confusing ALL (or > TOO MANY) condensation techniques involving multi-word expressions with > those which have a transparent literate base, though I find it hard to > believe that he might have no more basis for his claim. As I said above, > if he has more of a basis, WHAT IS IT? > > In a separate matter, ID replied to my comments on GG (or UG) and > historical ling with: > > >How about contemplating whether language change is inevitable. If it is > >not, theren should be some stable languages somewhere, If it is, then it > >must be inherent in all languages and thus a universal. > > To which Jan Terje Faarlund replied: > > >..Change in itself cannot be part of > >the system. The only interesting connection between universals and change > >is the fact that no change can lead to a result which violates UG. > > I had been tempted to respond in a similar way, but I thought that ID was > writing this tongue-in-cheek, and also that he might escape by insisting > that "universal" does not necessarily mean "linguistic universal", since he > might deny, like many, that there are specific linguistic universals > unrelated to some more general cognitive or whatever universals, and that > "change" is one of them ("linguistic change" being part of "change", as > Faarlund observed with regard to social and biological change, i.e., life > and death, in his longer reply). In view of this, I would agree with > Faarlund's use of "interesting" in the above passage as keeping comments > about LINGUISTIC change *on track*, but experience suggests to me that ID > would object to the adjective and say that "interesting" is not an argument > but an expression of taste. I'll leave it at that. > From ratcliff at fs.tufs.ac.jp Mon Aug 3 11:20:10 1998 From: ratcliff at fs.tufs.ac.jp (Robert R. Ratcliffe) Date: Mon, 3 Aug 1998 07:20:10 EDT Subject: GG and change Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- bwald wrote: > ----------------------------Original > message---------------------------- > Before I forget, I have some comments on Robert Ratcliffe's last > message. He states: > > >... if one takes seriously the generative claim that the > >goal of formal linguistic analysis is the discovery of an innate, > >biologically determined language faculty, then you sever the link > >between historical and formal linguistics. > > I would like to offer a different perspective. It is not about "severing > the link", but about distinguishing between what is innate and thus > presumably immutable, unchangeable, universal etc etc, VS. everything > else in language. The "everything else" is what is relevant to historical > linguistics, because it is what varies and changes within and across > particular languages from one time to another. Therefore, the search to > isolate what is innate or invariant in all languages also serves historical > linguistics by revealing those aspects of language, or of any particular > language, which are subject to change. The two programs complement > each other, and work together. I agree entirely with these points. But I think that the complimentarity is not symmetrical. Yes, what changes in language is necessarily not innnate, hence the study of change bears on the search for what IS (or may be) innate. But there is no reason to expect that a theory of an innate language faculty, once such is developed, would have any application to the problem of language change. > So, despite the difference in emphasis, synchronic linguistics continues its > historic mission to provide a grounding for the study of linguistic change. In practice I believe that this is very much the case. I myself have done a lot of work applying modern developments in phonology and morphology to problems in Semitic historical morphology. And I've found that new tools of formal linguistic analysis (in areas like syllable structure, prosody, non-concatenative morphology) are very useful for understanding diachronic problems that were not well understood in the past. But I wonder why this should be the case, since in THEORY generative formal linguistics is concerened with features of language which aren't subject to change. My solution is very simple-- I simply don't believe that generativists are really doing what they say they are doing. As I see it, there is a fundamental epistemological gap in the generative paradigm, which is papered over by the notion of 'Universal Grammar'. First, let's admit, there is good extralinguistic evidence (from acquisition, language impariment etc.) that language has a genetic basis-- that is for a language faculty (LF). Second, linguistic analysis of particular languages can uncover more general and abstract features of language structure. (And linguists have been doing so for millennia.) The UG 'notion' (it has never been properly formulated as a hypothesis) is simply the assertion or assumption that these two things are identical-- that the LF is a body of knowledge of some subset of the principles discovered by formal linguistic analysis. Some people are misled into thinking that arguments for LF are arguments for UG. They are not. UG is only one way of conceiveing the language faculty. The language faculty could be, for example, an ability to extract and construct knowledge, rather than a body of knowledge of, say, parts of speech and syntactic constructs. Similarly general (or even universal) principles of language structure discovered by analysis may not be directly attributable to a special genetic endowment. So increasinlgy I have come to read generative work as simply a continuation of structuralist formal analysis, and to regard the notion of UG as something of a smoke screen-- which makes it possible for linguists to claim they are doing natural science, while in fact they are doing social science. That is in studying languages (or certainly at least in studying language change), we are studying cultural artifacts. Of course the supposed dichotomy between language as cultural artifact and language as genetic endowment is entirely false. All cultural artifacts are a product of the human genetic endowment, and all social sciences can be reduced to natural science (subranches of that subranch of biology which deals with the behavior of social animals), if one wishes. My point ultimately is that I think we can make more progress in understanding language if we regard the general characteristics of languages as one thing, and the genetic endowment which makes possible the learning and construction of languages as something else, and if we regard the relationship between these two things as a question open for empirical investigation rather than simply assume that this relationship is captured by the notion of UG. By the way, I'd like to thank Anthony Kroch and David Lightfoot for informing me off list about work of theirs on these issues. I hope to have time to read these works carefully before pontificating further. In the meantime, I'd much appreciate further comments and discussion. (And thanks to Benji Wald and Isidore Dyen for their comments so far.) +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Robert R. Ratcliffe Senior Lecturer, Arabic and Linguistics, Dept. of Linguistics and Information Science Tokyo University of Foreign Studies Nishigahara 4-51-21, Kita-ku Tokyo 114 Japan From isidore.dyen at yale.edu Mon Aug 3 20:01:13 1998 From: isidore.dyen at yale.edu (Isidore Dyen) Date: Mon, 3 Aug 1998 16:01:13 EDT Subject: GG and change In-Reply-To: <35C5A845.663A143A@fs.tufs.ac.jp> Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- I believe that you are heading in the right direction. Generative Grammar, whatever it is, is an analysis of grmmar. It assumes that a language, despite the fact that it is subject to change, is at the moment of analysis, a static object. There are certain configurations in that analysis that permit the i9nference of prior states, in some cases alone, in others when combined with other information. If they are alone, they results are usually regarded as internal reconstruction. When combined with other information, well, how to clasify the inference depends on the particular case. In any case the key consideration for GG is that it regards the language for the nonce as static and is thus an analytical procedure. As for a language faculty, what is required is a facility for acquiring a phonemic system, something that is lacking in the other apes. My impression is that the others also seem to lack the ability to order meanigful symbols even though they can acquire some facility in handling symbols. Perhaps the language facility can be reduced to phoneme acceptance and the ability to recognize that the ordering AB is not the same as BA. On Mon, 3 Aug 1998, Robert R. Ratcliffe wrote: > ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- > bwald wrote: > > > ----------------------------Original > > message---------------------------- > > Before I forget, I have some comments on Robert Ratcliffe's last > > message. He states: > > > > >... if one takes seriously the generative claim that the > > >goal of formal linguistic analysis is the discovery of an innate, > > >biologically determined language faculty, then you sever the link > > >between historical and formal linguistics. > > From jrader at m-w.com Mon Aug 3 14:32:38 1998 From: jrader at m-w.com (Jim Rader) Date: Mon, 3 Aug 1998 10:32:38 EDT Subject: Dative Pronouns Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- In regard to John Hewson's comment about <'un> and Old English , excerpted below from his longer message on dative pronouns: I should point out that the survival of has been argued against fairly persuasively by Derek Britton in _Notes and Queries_ of March, 1994. Britton believes <'un> can be better explained as a reduction of . Jim Rader > > 3. He sees I, and I sees HE, and I says to 'un... > > Here 'un is a direct descendant of OE masc. sg. acc. "hine", which became > generalized for both acc. and dative usage in Wessex. Where the verb is > stressed, one would normally get, consequently > > 4. I SEES 'un > > > John Hewson, FRSC tel: (709)737-8131 > University Research Professor fax: (709)737-4000 > Memorial University of Newfoundland > St. John's NF, CANADA A1B 3X9 > From isidore.dyen at yale.edu Tue Aug 4 15:16:43 1998 From: isidore.dyen at yale.edu (Isidore Dyen) Date: Tue, 4 Aug 1998 11:16:43 EDT Subject: GG and change In-Reply-To: Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- On Mon, 3 Aug 1998, Isidore Dyen wrote: > ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- > > I believe that you are heading in the right direction. Generative Grammar, > whatever it is, is an analysis of grmmar. It assumes that a language, > despite the fact that it is subject to change, is at the moment of > analysis, a static object. There are certain configurations in that > analysis that permit the i9nference of prior states, in some cases alone, > in others when combined with other information. If they are alone, they > results are usually regarded as internal reconstruction. When combined > with other information, well, how to clasify the inference depends on the > particular case. In any case the key consideration for GG is that it > regards the language for the nonce as static and is thus an analytical > procedure. As for a language faculty, what is required is a facility for > acquiring a phonemic system, something that is lacking in the other apes. > My impression is that the others also seem to lack the ability to order > meanigful symbols even though they can acquire some facility in handling > symbols. Perhaps the language facility can be reduced to phoneme > acceptance and the ability to recognize that the ordering AB is not the > same as BA. I should have made clear that in modeling ordering (or sequencing) AB means B after A and vice versa for BA. Chances are good that animals would distinguish between simultaneous, but differently arranged identical items, but I don't know of any testing. Another factor in the language faculty is recognition of context since that allows for the distinction between homonyms. It may be that this facility can be present in other animals; I don't know of a test for it either. > > On Mon, 3 Aug 1998, Robert R. Ratcliffe wrote: > > > ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- > > bwald wrote: > > > > > ----------------------------Original > > > message---------------------------- > > > Before I forget, I have some comments on Robert Ratcliffe's last > > > message. He states: > > > > > > >... if one takes seriously the generative claim that the > > > >goal of formal linguistic analysis is the discovery of an innate, > > > >biologically determined language faculty, then you sever the link > > > >between historical and formal linguistics. > > > > From johanna at uclink.berkeley.edu Wed Aug 5 11:07:14 1998 From: johanna at uclink.berkeley.edu (Johanna Nichols) Date: Wed, 5 Aug 1998 07:07:14 EDT Subject: Cladistic language concepts Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Dear fellow HISTLING readers, I am forwarding to the list this inquiry from biologist Michael Ghiselin. He is not on the list, so if you reply to the list please also copy him at the address(es) at the end. I too would like to know where historical linguists stand on the issue and what we can consider to be received view. Thanks. Johanna Nichols >Date: Tue, 28 Jul 98 08:45:03 PST >From: mghiselin at casmail.calacademy.org (Ghiselin, Michael) >To: johanna at uclink.berkeley.edu >Subject: language concepts > > Dear Dr. Nichols: > I would be most grateful if you would post the > following message on HISTLING for me. > > In my recent book METAPHYSICS AND THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES > (State University of New York Press, 1997) I address a wide > range of topics related to the philosophy of classification. > Among these is the analogy between languages and species, a > topic that has interested both linguists and biologists > since the days of Schleicher and Darwin. I remarked that > Old English, Middle English, and Modern English are not > different languages, but rather stages of a single > historical entity. They are analogous to what are called > "chronospecies" in paleontology. > One might wish to contest this claim, and there are all > sorts of problems and perhaps I should have invoked Greek as > an example. I would welcome a discussion with linguists on > any aspect of this and related questions. For the moment, > however, I need a somewhat different kind of information. A > philosopher named David Stamos has recently denounced this > view (Biology and Philosophy 13:433-470). He writes: > "Indeed it seems to me that few outside the modern species > problem would wish to defend a _cladistic language concept_, > in other words the position that a language which undergoes > 'infinite evolution' without branching is numerically the > same language...." He thinks that unless two organisms can > communicate their idiolects are not elements of the same > language, though he does not put it in quite such terms. > Those who know about ring species and the like will see some > interesting connections here. > Unfortunately I have only read a few dozen books on > linguistics and that was some time ago. But I got the > impression that a cladistic, or evolutionary, language > concept, such that the languages are in fact lineages, has > been widely, if not generally, accepted. The few books that > I have consulted lately seem to have presupposed it, to the > point of not bothering to consider the alternatives. I am a > natural scientist, and I do not wish to make an empirical > claim unless it can be backed up by facts. But it is not > obvious where to get the information I need, so I thought I > would ask a lot of linguists. I need to know how widely > something like a cladistic language concept is now, and > historically has been, accepted by linguists. Even if it is > rejected, do they grant that such a position is reasonable? > Also, is there a good discussion of the issues in the > literature. Any suggestions that linguists might want to > pass on to me would be most appreciated. And of course I > would be interested in discussing some of the wider issues. > > Sincerely, > Michael T. Ghiselin > Center for the History and Philosophy of Science > California Academy of Sciences > Golden Gate Park > San Francisco, California 94118 > mghiselin at calacademy.org > (If that fails try mghiselin at casmail.calacademy.org > * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * Johanna Nichols Professor Department of Slavic Languages Mailcode 2979 University of California, Berkeley Berkeley, CA 94720, USA Phone: (1) (510) 642-1097 (direct) (1) (510) 642-2979 (messages) Fax: (1) (510) 642-6220 (departmental) * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * From Cindy.Allen at anu.edu.au Wed Aug 5 11:08:12 1998 From: Cindy.Allen at anu.edu.au (Cynthia Allen) Date: Wed, 5 Aug 1998 07:08:12 EDT Subject: I'm told Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Jacob Baltuch wrote: >So any language in which accusative & dative collapse >together (both nouns and pronouns) and both direct and >indirect objects are bare NPs in certain constructions >would be liable to undergo this? I believe that in English what was crucial was not the fact that both NPs were bare, but that the order became fixed, with the bare repicient always directly after the verb. The collapse of the accusative/dative distinction did not immediately result in the introduction of the indirect passive. The loss of the accusative/dative distinction happened in most dialects by the early part of the 13th century, but no genuine indirect passives are to be found at this time. There followed a period of about 125 years in which although the recipient and the were unmarked, they could occur in either order-either 'he gave the king a gift' (the only order possible in ModE) or 'he gave a gift the king'. (So it is not true, as is often believed, that the recipient and themealways had to be distinguised by either case, preposition, or word order, but this is not too surprising given that ambiguity is hardly likely to result, since the recipient is normally human and the theme is normally inanimate). Anyway, the modern order became more and more dominanant (there are figures in my book showing this) and eventually it became the only possibility. Immediately afterwards (late 14th century), the indirect passives appear because grammatically, the recipient is indistinguishable from the theme. > >On the other hand I seem to remember that Japanese has >direct and indirect object take different postpositions >(-(w)o vs. -ni if I remember correctly) and yet has >indirect passives. I am not competent to comment on the Japanese facts, but will only say that I am not claiming that it is impossible for a language to have an indirect passive without formal identity of the recipient and the theme-only that in a language like English in which only direct objects passivized originally, it is possible for the indirect passive to arise when former indirect objects are reanalysed as direct. Cynthia Allen Cynthia Allen Linguistics, Arts Faculty Australian National University Canberra, ACT 0200 Australia From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Wed Aug 5 17:59:52 1998 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Wed, 5 Aug 1998 13:59:52 EDT Subject: Reply to Ghiselin (long) Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- The question of whether Old English and modern English, or classical Greek and modern Greek, are the `same' or `different' languages has, I think, not commonly been seen as an issue of principle in linguistics. Indeed, this strikes me as reminiscent of that Greek philosophical query about whether one can step in the same river twice. For certain purposes, it is convenient to regard the various historical stages of English as "the same" -- for example, in writing a single continuous history of English. For other purposes, it is convenient to regard them as different -- for example in contrasting earlier and later English. If pressed for a response, however, I think most linguists would prefer the response `different'. Spoken Latin has broken up into several quite distinct languages, such as Italian, French and Romanian. Since presumably nobody would want to say that these are the same languages as one another, it is impossible to claim that any one of them is the same language as Latin. But the relation of modern English to Old English is the same as that of Italian to Latin, save only for the point that modern English is the *sole* descendant of Old English. So, if we tried to maintain that modern English was the same language as Old English on this ground, we would have to abandon this claim if we discovered that Old English had given rise to a second, distinct, descendant previously overlooked -- which seems a very odd outcome. Anyway, our recognition of a single modern language called `English' is largely an artefact, deriving from political and social factors, and above all the widespread recognition of a single standard form. Several centuries ago, the speech of the Scottish Lowlands, which was largely incomprehensible to Englishmen, was well on the way to acquiring its own quite distinct standard literary form. But the Act of Union, a political event, put paid to this, as Englishmen and English influence poured into Scotland, and the Scots eventually abandoned their own standards and accepted the standard English of England as their standard. So, without the Act of Union, we might have had two languages, not one. Even today, a few Scottish scholars prefer to regard Scots as a language distinct from English, but this a minority view. We have our own counterpart to ring species, in the form of dialect continua. In a typical dialect continuum, the local speech just changes slowly and gradually as you travel across the country, but the differences accumulate to the point of mutual incomprehensibility and beyond. Hence *anybody* in the continuum can talk easily to his near neighbors, with more difficulty to people farther away, and not at all to people still farther away. Consequently, there is no principled basis for deciding how many distinct languages we are looking at, or where we should put the boundaries. In practice, the "solutions", where there are any, usually come from non-linguistic factors, most often political factors. For example, much of the Low Countries, Alsace, Germany, Austria, much of Switzerland and part of Italy are all covered by a single Germanic dialect continuum. Speakers who live close together can understand each other regardless of any political boundaries, but speakers far apart cannot understand each other at all. It is not just the citizens of Zurich and Amsterdam who cannot understand each other's mother tongue: the citizens of Bonn and Berlin cannot understand each other's mother tongue either. So how many different languages are we looking at? There is no linguistically principled answer. But there is a political one. Citizens of Germany believe they are speaking German, while citizens of the Netherlands believe they are speaking Dutch. This is so even though people living on both sides of the Dutch-German border can understand each other easily, while neither can understand speech varieties which are "dialects" of his own language spoken farther away. And, of course, this perception is now reinforced by mass education and the mass media: everybody in the Netherlands learns in school a single variety called standard Dutch, while everybody in Germany learns in school a quite different variety called standard German. Indeed, the very existence of these two standards is a political accident, resulting from the early political separation of the Low Countries from the rest of the Germanic-speaking world. If the Netherlands had been absorbed politically into Germany, then standard Dutch would probably not exist, and the speech of Amsterdam would be regarded as merely another regional variety of German. What about the other countries? Well, the Swiss, the Austrians and the South Tyrolean Italians decided some time ago that they too speak German, and they have accepted standard German as their own standard. The Luxembourgers, after much vacillation, are now seemingly concluding that they do not speak German, and they are making efforts to construct a standard form of their own Letzebuergesch speech and to recognize this as a national language. The Alsatians in France, with long-standing political grievances against Germany, have apparently decided that they do not speak German, but a different language called Alsatian. However, if Germany had succeeded in her repeated efforts to annex Alsace, the outcome would be different. The Germanic-speaking Belgians have changed their minds during my lifetime. Formerly, they maintained that they did not speak Dutch, but a different language called Flemish, and they made efforts to establish a standard Flemish language distinct from standard Dutch. But, some years ago, they gave up on this, and agreed that they too speak Dutch, so they now accept standard Dutch as their own standard. (But note that the speech of West Flanders is just as incomprehensible to people in Antwerp as it is to people in Amsterdam.) This sort of thing is pretty much the norm with languages. Individual languages just do not exist "out there" as a general rule; instead, they are imposed *ex post facto* by non-linguistic means, especially political ones, today commonly reinforced by education and mass media (largely absent in the past). As my Germanic example shows, mutual intelligibility has little to do with it. German is not a single language because all German-speakers can understand one another -- they can't, if they use their mother tongues. Rather, German is a single language because its speakers have decided that it is. Anyway, mutual comprehensibility is not an either/or matter, but a matter of degree, and moreover it can easily change with exposure. Speakers of Basque from different parts of the country may have great difficulty understanding one another at first exposure, but, with a little practice, they quickly get used to one another's speech. Indeed, I've had this experience myself. I'm an American in England, and, the first time I met a Geordie -- a speaker from Newcastle-upon-Tyne -- I could not understand a single word the man was saying. I did not even believe he was speaking English. But, after a few days, my ear got attuned, and after that I was able to understand him without much difficulty. But there are limits to this. Speakers from Zurich, Bonn and Berlin cannot get used to one another's speech; the varieties are just too different. Either some people simply have to learn the other guy's speech, or (as happens in practice) they just shift to the standard German they have learned in school, which is the mother tongue of none of them but which is, of course, bloody convenient. This is perhaps not really so different from the case of Basques and Catalans in Spain, who cannot understand each other's (unrelated) languages and have to switch to Spanish to communicate. The `cladistic' model of linguistic descent, which we usually call the `family-tree' or `genetic' model, has indeed been the mainstream view in linguistics at least since the middle of the 19th century, and it still is today. Of course, linguists have been aware of the complications for just about as long: both the problem of dialect continua and the problem of contact -- the diffusion of linguistic features across language boundaries, which appears to be vastly more frequent than the diffusion of genetic material across species boundaries in biology. But the general view is that these complications, while real, are tractable: that we can deal with them by merely imposing some complications upon our basic family-tree model. Of course, there have always been linguists who took issue with this. The 19th-century dialectologists often disliked the family-tree model, which they saw as excessively idealized and not a good picture of reality. And such figures as Hugo Schuchardt (in the 19th century) and Bob Le Page and Charles-James Bailey (in our own day) have often protested against the family-tree model and drawn attention to the importance of what we call `convergence phenomena'. All these have perhaps been widely perceived as intellectual gadflies, what the Russians call `hooligans', stirring up trouble by over-emphasizing interesting but peripheral curiosities. But times may be changing. For a long time now, we have been forced to accept the reality of one type of what we call `non-genetic languages': creoles, which descend from pidgins, which themselves are not natural languages at all. Fine. But, in the last ten years or so, the essential validity of the `genetic' or `family-tree' model has been coming under sttack. Thomason and Kaufman's 1988 book Language Change, Creolization, and Genetic Linguistics argued that non-genetic languages were a real possibility, at least in certain circumstances. (A non-genetic language is one that does not descend from a single ancestor in the familiar way: either it has two or more direct ancestors, or it has no direct ancestor which is a natural language.) T&K were in fact very cautious in their claims, but not everyone since then has been quite so cautious. In the last few years, a number of very striking cases of non-genetic languages and possible non-genetic languages have been reported. Mixed languages (languages descended from a mixture of two or more existing languages), mooted about since the 19th century, have finally been securely identified, the best example being Michif in North America. New and dramatic contact phenomena like metatypy (extreme structural borrowing) have been identified and named. Jeff Leer has proposed that Tlingit, which has some odd characteristics, might be a `portmanteau language', derived from a meld of several related but quite distinct speech varieties. Bob Dixon, in his recent book The Rise and Fall of Languages (which has had a mixed reception), argues that massive diffusion of linguistic features across language boundaries is in fact the norm, and hence that family trees cannot even be constructed, except in certain special circumstances when divergence becomes temporarily more important than divergence. Even Thomason and Kaufman raised the possibility of `abrupt creoles', creoles arising directly from contact with no intervening pidgins. Many historical linguists remain unimpressed by this flurry of activity, but others are enthusiastic. Undoubtedly these new ideas are still largely at the stage of waving our arms at some surprising data and of tossing new ideas around excitedly. Not much has as yet coalesced out of this activity. But it *may* be that the next generation of linguists will come to accept convergence phenomena as being at least as important as the more familiar divergence, and that our models of linguistic descent may have to be revised accordingly. Then again, maybe not. Anyway, these are lively times in historical linguistics, and I predict a lot of bitter arguments in my field in the next twenty years or so. This is perhaps not the ideal time to ask us linguists what we think about models of linguistic descent. Twenty years ago, virtually all of us would have given the same answer. Today, not so. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From isidore.dyen at yale.edu Wed Aug 5 17:59:24 1998 From: isidore.dyen at yale.edu (Isidore Dyen) Date: Wed, 5 Aug 1998 13:59:24 EDT Subject: Cladistic language concepts In-Reply-To: Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- On Wed, 5 Aug 1998, Johanna Nichols wrote: > ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- I am discussing Nichols's communication as a linguist. The only comment on his questions that I am aware of is one I submitted in a festschrift offered to Henry M. Hoenigswald. It discusse, but rather briefly the analogy between genetic language classification and biological classification. I believe that you are on the right track. Stamos's objection, if I may put it that way concerns the treatment of continuities and the application of the term 'same'. One might ask whether a person at say twenty is the same person he was at two. The answer is 'yes' if the identity takes the continuity between the two stages into account and is 'no' if it is no taken into account. One might then introduce the awkward term 'continuoperson' or 'chronoperson' (to adopt the chronospecies model) and 'stageoperson' to specify the person at a particular time. For classification languages and species offer similar problems. One problem is again how to deal with continuities and points within the coninuities. Instead of using the term 'points', I usually speak of members. The continuity appears a set of members linked pairwise by the same relation which forms a chain as each member of a pair is additionally linked to members of other pairs. A chain which includes all possble members is exhaustive. The whole conglomerate can also be regarded as a network I believe, but I don't know what the rquirements of a network are. I define a language, regarded as a continuity formed by linked members at one stage or time (i.e. a 'stageolanguage', for which I have suggested the term 'hololect') as an exhaustive chain of pairs of mutually intelligible dialects (or if your perefer, idolects'). The term 'mutually intelligible' is a prime; its specification in prqactical terms offers difficulties for precision, but its rough utility seems obvious since it refers to function of language as a means of communication. I prefer to believe that its specifcation can be achieved, but would require serious and expensive investigative effort. A second point that concerns the definition of a language in this sense is that there is no geographical limitation on a pairing. Mutual intelligibility is thus viewed as potential rather than actual, but nevertheless testable in each case (regardless of necessary expenditures, as the case is with specifying the necessary minimum or zero mutual intelligility). I believe that you can carry out an analogical definition of a species on the criterion of the ability to mate and produce viable offspring or something of the sort. In any case I blieve that Stamos's objection to the notion that what undergoes '"infinite evolution' without branching is numerically the same language. It may help to know that linguists do not regard and for a long never have regarded (if they ever did) Old, Middle, and New English as disjoint, but rather as specified stages of a 'chronolanguage' (for which I believe I once suggested the term 'perhololect). They are connected succesively by an uninterruped sequence of native speakers. Linguists commit worse sins since we regard a protolanguage (i,e, a prior hololect) to be the same language (i.e. member of the same continuity) as each of its branches in their respective infinite evolutions. The definition of a hololect above does not require the mutually intelligibilty of all pairs. Provided they are linked through a chain of pairs of mutually intelligible idiolects, they are included in the same language. The alternative of not doing so is the consequence of attributing to different languages members of a mutually intellgible pair. Perhaps it is worthwhile adding that I would limit candidates to membership to native idiolects in what I think of as a first language dialectology. In dealing with cladistics it may clarify matters to draw a sharp distinction between what I think of as theory and the results of investigation or analysis. Theory deals with our formulations of how change occurs and in general provides us with the way we analyze. Cladistics in principle as a way of classifying is based on a way of analyzing data and xcomparing different analyzed collections of data. Back of it is to be sure evolutionary theory and the corollary that a pair of species sharing by a significant difference the most features of highest genetic value (or some such) have a greater likelihood of continuing a same distinct protospecies than either does with any other species. The problem in biology as I see it is how to weight the similarities and the qualitative difference between different similarities. I Imagine that many of these problems wil be eliminated with DNA studies. The same problem has existed in linguistics, but I believe that vocabulary studies will help change the nature of the problems involved in classification. > Dear fellow HISTLING readers, > > I am forwarding to the list this inquiry from biologist Michael Ghiselin. > He is not on the list, so if you reply to the list please also copy him at > the address(es) at the end. > > I too would like to know where historical linguists stand on the issue and > what we can consider to be received view. > > Thanks. > > Johanna Nichols > > >Date: Tue, 28 Jul 98 08:45:03 PST > >From: mghiselin at casmail.calacademy.org (Ghiselin, Michael) > >To: johanna at uclink.berkeley.edu > >Subject: language concepts > > > > Dear Dr. Nichols: > > I would be most grateful if you would post the > > following message on HISTLING for me. > > > > In my recent book METAPHYSICS AND THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES > > (State University of New York Press, 1997) I address a wide > > range of topics related to the philosophy of classification. > > Among these is the analogy between languages and species, a > > topic that has interested both linguists and biologists > > since the days of Schleicher and Darwin. I remarked that > > Old English, Middle English, and Modern English are not > > different languages, but rather stages of a single > > historical entity. They are analogous to what are called > > "chronospecies" in paleontology. > > One might wish to contest this claim, and there are all > > sorts of problems and perhaps I should have invoked Greek as > > an example. I would welcome a discussion with linguists on > > any aspect of this and related questions. For the moment, > > however, I need a somewhat different kind of information. A > > philosopher named David Stamos has recently denounced this > > view (Biology and Philosophy 13:433-470). He writes: > > "Indeed it seems to me that few outside the modern species > > problem would wish to defend a _cladistic language concept_, > > in other words the position that a language which undergoes > > 'infinite evolution' without branching is numerically the > > same language...." He thinks that unless two organisms can > > communicate their idiolects are not elements of the same > > language, though he does not put it in quite such terms. > > Those who know about ring species and the like will see some > > interesting connections here. > > Unfortunately I have only read a few dozen books on > > linguistics and that was some time ago. But I got the > > impression that a cladistic, or evolutionary, language > > concept, such that the languages are in fact lineages, has > > been widely, if not generally, accepted. The few books that > > I have consulted lately seem to have presupposed it, to the > > point of not bothering to consider the alternatives. I am a > > natural scientist, and I do not wish to make an empirical > > claim unless it can be backed up by facts. But it is not > > obvious where to get the information I need, so I thought I > > would ask a lot of linguists. I need to know how widely > > something like a cladistic language concept is now, and > > historically has been, accepted by linguists. Even if it is > > rejected, do they grant that such a position is reasonable? > > Also, is there a good discussion of the issues in the > > literature. Any suggestions that linguists might want to > > pass on to me would be most appreciated. And of course I > > would be interested in discussing some of the wider issues. > > > > Sincerely, > > Michael T. Ghiselin > > Center for the History and Philosophy of Science > > California Academy of Sciences > > Golden Gate Park > > San Francisco, California 94118 > > mghiselin at calacademy.org > > (If that fails try mghiselin at casmail.calacademy.org > > > > * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * > Johanna Nichols > Professor > Department of Slavic Languages > Mailcode 2979 > University of California, Berkeley > Berkeley, CA 94720, USA > > Phone: (1) (510) 642-1097 (direct) > (1) (510) 642-2979 (messages) > Fax: (1) (510) 642-6220 (departmental) > * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * > From ROGER at beattie.uct.ac.za Thu Aug 6 11:24:01 1998 From: ROGER at beattie.uct.ac.za (Lass, RG, Roger, Prof) Date: Thu, 6 Aug 1998 07:24:01 EDT Subject: cladistics Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- In reference to Johanna Nichols' and Isidore Dyen's remarks on this issue. I don't want to blow my own trumpet in public (or do I?), but there is an idiosyncratic and maybe useful discussion in my Historical Linguistics and language change (CUP, 1997), in which I discuss the virtues and problems of cladistic concepts in language filiation and reconstruction, with references to Hoenigswald and others. A year later I don't of course believe everything I said, but this might be a starting point for discussion, and does at least raise the question of the inter-applicability of biological and linguistics 'inheritance' of characters. Roger Lass Roger Lass Department of Linguistics University of Cape Town Rondebosch 7700/South Africa Tel +(021) 650 3138 Fax +(021) 650 3726 From bwald at HUMnet.UCLA.EDU Fri Aug 7 12:22:58 1998 From: bwald at HUMnet.UCLA.EDU (bwald) Date: Fri, 7 Aug 1998 08:22:58 EDT Subject: I'm told Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- With regard to the issue of the emergence of the indirect passive in English, Cynthia Allen notes: > The collapse of the accusative/dative distinction >did not immediately result in the introduction of the indirect passive. >The loss of the accusative/dative distinction happened in most dialects by >the early part of the 13th century, but no genuine indirect passives are to >be found at this time. There followed a period of about 125 years in which >although the recipient and the were unmarked, they could occur in either >order-either 'he gave the king a gift' (the only order possible in ModE) or >'he gave a gift the king'. It should be added that there remains a residue of this process in some (British) English dialects. That is, with a few verbs, esp. the "arch-dative" verb 'give' (but also "show"), the variation in object order has continued into the twentieth century (and even has a coherent geographic distribution according to the British dialect atlas reflecting the rural mid 20th c.) It seems to be largely if not exclusively limited to the inanimate pronominal theme "it", as well as to certain verbs, e.g., "give/show it me" (maybe even the recipient has to be a pronoun). I have long been interested in this issue, and also why the areal distribution is what it is, and why IO-DO order has been the trend for fixed order in most dialects. Cynthia mentions that the last problem is related to pragmatic features of topicality in discourse which favors the animate= indirect object as more often topical and given than the inanimate = direct object, so the ordering is related to grammaticalisation of pragmatic information structure of given before new in specific contexts. This is no doubt involved, but the issue is quite complex and has a number of features I do not sufficiently understand (yet), such as how and whether the survival of DO-IO order is constrained by choice of verb, e.g., grammatical formations like "cook it me" for "cook me it" (some "gimme it" speakers will even balk at "cook me it"). To my knowledge, such historical details remain to be resolved. (NB. As I have observed in print, the effect of inanimacy on exophoric deictic uses of pronouns is striking. Thus, "look at HIM" or any other animate, but NOT "look at IT" -- instead "look at THAT". For "them" it matters whether animate or inanimate. "look at THEM" (animate) but "look at THOSE" (inanimate). This seems to be on the cusp between pragmatics and grammaticalisation, having to do with the greater informational load of demonstratives compared to pronouns and the pragmatic relation of such things to animacy status. This is related to the probable preferential survival of "give it me" to "give them me", and, I think, plays an indirect but important role in the geographical distribution of "give it me", but my account would be digressive here. Suffice it to say that "it" shuns stress, except in metalinguistic contexts, more than any other pronoun, with the possible exception of "them" in inanimate contexts, cf. what happened to etymological "it" in Scandinavian.) Without checking, I think I have noted some cases like "cook it me" in Middle English texts, but I am not clear on how and when "Verb IO DO" = "Verb DO *FOR* IO (as opposed to ...*TO* IO) arose, or what constraints there are on choice of verb in such constructions, cf. "build me it", but, I think NOT "manufacture me it"(?), etc. Hence, it is not clear to me whether "benefactive" IO-DO constructions should be historically distinguished from "dative" IO-DO constructions, but I think so. (Uh, in context, by IO I mean where the *unmarked* Indirect Object). In any case, the lexical angle occurred to me because of some facts in some Bantu languages, where historically passivisations akin to English indirect passivisation are commonplace, and in some languages have even evolved to exclude direct (theme) passivisation when there is more than one "object". This is relevant to Cynthia's comment: >.... (late 14th century), the indirect passives appear >because grammatically, the recipient is indistinguishable from the theme. The key word is "grammatically". C's passage implies equation of grammatical object with unmarked argument, hence accusative/dative where these are no longer overtly distinguished. Nevertheless, why should speakers reinterpret non-themes as grammatical objects (and thus passivise them), absence of marking notwithstanding? I would suggest that the correlation between accusative marking and "theme" as a semantic concept was never invariant, even in Old English, and was very much dependent on the *lexical* verb (either for completely formal reasons, as far as speakers were concerned, or dependent on the particular meaning of the verb, e.g., "use" takes an instrument not a theme as object, etc etc) so that there was already notable reliance on accusative marking as an arbitrary license for passivisation. With the loss of the distinction between accusative and dative marking the situation was greatly exacerbated, so that one line of development was to ignore role, previously not often reliably marked anyway, and allow passivisation to eventually expand to all unmarked objects. Historical English scholars are quick to point out that early English word order allowed "impersonal passives", e.g., "the boy-DAT was given a book-ACC", where it is actually still "book" that is passivised, to be reinterpreted as "the boy-NOM ..." (German still approximates English indirect passivisation this way.) So that is usually offered as another factor occasioned by case loss/merger. It is, I think, not an inevitable development, since, as I noted above, there seems to be a lexical dimension to the survival of the unmarked DO-IO order (where it survives) according to the verb, and also to benefactive (unmarked) IO-DO order according to the verb. The latter, in particular, contrasts with the other line of development in which prepositional marking becomes mandatory with some verbs (and at least preferred in such additional cases as "he gave YOU to me" rather than "he gave me YOU", where inanimacy does not mitigate). (NB also alternative marking in English, as in such commonly discussed cases as "he sprayed the wall with paint" and "he sprayed paint all over the wall". This development seems to be in line with the hesitation with which English decides between the prepositional vs. unmarking of case relations.) Interestingly, English shows further development from indirect passivisation to prepositional passivisation, as in: this bed was eaten potato chips in, etc. (I think I have the chronological order right, if it is really clear. Does the preference for "the boy was given a book" over "the boy was given a book TO" have anything to do with historical order of stabilisation of the two types of passive?) So, eventually (in fact, fairly quickly) passivisation transcended whether role is marked or not. Again, this does not seem to have been inevitable, just possible (obviously, since it occurred). Maybe Cynthia can comment further on the historical relationship between these two processes in English and whether there was anything else favoring the generalisation of passsivisation, which I suspect was not an inevitable one. The lexical dimension continues to intrigue me. Embedded in a quite different grammar (but with many points of similarity) is the lexical difference between two verbs "give" in Umbundu, an Angolan Bantu language. One verb, iha, allows either theme or recipient passivisation, so that either argument can function as unmarked objects of that verb. This verb can be traced back to Proto and Pre-Bantu, and allows recipient passivisation in ALL Bantu languages (which retain passivisation as a productive process). In contrast, another verb, eca, has the same meaning but only allows theme passivisation, and the recipient must be prepositionally marked in all contexts. I don't know where it came from, only that it is underived in Umbundu. The verbs seem to differ only in this lexical property. Although iha reflects the Proto/Pre-Bantu situation, eca behaves like derived verbs in benefactive and dative contexts, allowing only the theme to passivise. Such constraints on passivisation are quite general in West Bantu, but contrast with East Bantu, where either both passivisations are allowed or the opposite constraint on passivisation (favoring "indirect") has developed for various reasons. Back to English, retention of unmarked DO-IO order with *some* verbs in *some* varieties of English seems to be lexically determined. My impression, needing further investigation, is that they are limited to relatively high frequency monosyllabic (Germanic) verbs which *imply a non-theme argument* (whatever that turns out to mean), e.g., "give", "show", maybe "send". Problematic to me is how "do", "make", "cook" and other *benefactively* used verbs without prepositional marking historically fit into this pattern. Unlike the other type, they do not *lexically* imply a non-theme argument. Cynthia may be able to shed further light on the history of this benefactive pattern, which seems to be syntactic rather than lexical, as in "do me that favour" (?? "do me it"//????? "do it me" -- for "give it me" dialects). Cynthia continues with respect to cross-linguistic generalisations: >I am not competent to comment on the Japanese facts, but will only say that >I am not claiming that it is impossible for a language to have an indirect >passive without formal identity of the recipient and the theme-only that in >a language like English in which only direct objects passivized originally, >it is possible for the indirect passive to arise when former indirect >objects are reanalysed as direct. Bantu evolution supports this claim, which amounts to saying that unmarked arguments are "potential" objects (perversely, this even applies to post-posed subjects in at least one Bantu language -- though in such a case it is not reflected in passivisation, of course, but in other grammatical processes.) At the same time, Bantu evolution does not support IE evolution in concern for preserving explicit marking of case relations/thematic roles. I have argued elsewhere that large areas of Bantu allowed "case" ambiguity to arise by preferrably grammaticalising topicality hierarchies (e.g., human > animal > inanimate). This goes against conventional wisdom concerning the role of case relations in constraining grammatical change. Thus, what may play a role in the direction of English change (i.e., grammatical compensation for weakening of inflectional case marking) is not to be taken for granted for all languages (esp those like Bantu, and Niger-Congo more generally, which do not have a history of case inflection but have intricate topic/focus ordering strategies). Apart from that, as Cynthia and many other careful investigators of the history of English have noted, reactions to weakening or loss of case-marking are much more complex and historically much more sluggish (according to the record) than theories glorifying "preservation" of case-relations (as an "essential" feature of "language") would lead one to suppose. From bwald at HUMnet.UCLA.EDU Fri Aug 7 12:23:26 1998 From: bwald at HUMnet.UCLA.EDU (bwald) Date: Fri, 7 Aug 1998 08:23:26 EDT Subject: Correction: I'm told Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- I hasten to correct a mistake I made in my last message. It's in the passage: >...Historical English scholars are quick to point out that early English >word order allowed "impersonal passives", e.g., "the boy-DAT was given a >book-ACC", where it is actually still "book" that is passivised, to be >reinterpreted as "the boy-NOM ..." (German still approximates English >indirect passivisation this way.) So that is usually offered as another >factor occasioned by case loss/merger... I overshot what I wanted to say. The OE impersonal passive, reflex of a more general older IE construction, is as given above, but the "theme" ("book") is NOT passivised, since it preserves the ACC marking. The passivisation gets rid of the subject and indicates that by a mark on the verb but does NOT change other case marking. Maybe anticipation of the German parallel momentarily confused me, since the German approximation of the English (and Bantu) indirect passivisation (common in German translations of indirect passivisation in Bantu) is "boy-DAT was a book-NOM given", where "book" is indeed passivised but postposed (according to German subject post-posing rules, i.e., to-the boy was a book given). (P.S. with neuters, e.g., "book", NOM and ACC are not distinct, an IE trait, but number agreement of the verb depends on the passivised ACC > NOM, e.g., "boy-DAT *were* book*s* given.). From Cindy.Allen at anu.edu.au Fri Aug 7 12:24:18 1998 From: Cindy.Allen at anu.edu.au (Cynthia Allen) Date: Fri, 7 Aug 1998 08:24:18 EDT Subject: Correction: I'm told In-Reply-To: Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Benji Wald writes: >I hasten to correct a mistake I made in my last message. It's in the passage: > >>...Historical English scholars are quick to point out that early English >>word order allowed "impersonal passives", e.g., "the boy-DAT was given a >>book-ACC", where it is actually still "book" that is passivised, to be >>reinterpreted as "the boy-NOM ..." (German still approximates English >>indirect passivisation this way.) So that is usually offered as another >>factor occasioned by case loss/merger... > >I overshot what I wanted to say. The OE impersonal passive, reflex of a >more general older IE construction, is as given above, but the "theme" >("book") is NOT passivised, since it preserves the ACC marking. The >passivisation gets rid of the subject and indicates that by a mark on the >verb but does NOT change other case marking. OE certainly had what is normally called an 'impersonal' passive, but there are none (so far as I know) of the sort which Wald mentions. When there were two objects, as with 'give', the theme always showed up in the nominative in a passive, e.g. either 'him(DAT) was given a book(NOM)' or 'A book(Nom) was given him(Dat) (with other permutations of word order possible). > >Maybe anticipation of the German parallel momentarily confused me, since >the German approximation of the English (and Bantu) indirect passivisation >(common in German translations of indirect passivisation in Bantu) is >"boy-DAT was a book-NOM given", where "book" is indeed passivised but >postposed (according to German subject post-posing rules, i.e., to-the boy >was a book given). (P.S. with neuters, e.g., "book", NOM and ACC are not >distinct, an IE trait, but number agreement of the verb depends on the >passivised ACC > NOM, e.g., "boy-DAT *were* book*s* given.). The OE was parallel to the German, with the theme causing subject-verb agreement (whether it was pre-or-post-verbal). I think perhaps Benji may have had some confusion with passives of verbs like *deman* to judge, which took a single object in the dative case. The verb had passive morphology but did not agree with anything, remaining in the neutral third singular, as in 'them was judged'. I'll reply to other parts of Benji's original posting when I get a bit more time. Cynthia Allen Linguistics, Arts Faculty Australian National University Canberra, ACT 0200 Australia From DISTERH at UNIVSCVM.SC.EDU Fri Aug 7 12:44:51 1998 From: DISTERH at UNIVSCVM.SC.EDU (Dorothy Disterheft) Date: Fri, 7 Aug 1998 08:44:51 EDT Subject: HISTLING subscriber list Message-ID: Dear Colleagues, >From time to time I post the HISTLING subscriber list. If you would like to receive your own copy at more frequent intervals, send the following as a message to LISTSERV at VM.SC.EDU: review histling by name. 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Thomason thompson at JLC.NET George Thompson larryt at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK Larry Trask traugott at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU Elizabeth Traugott tsuchida at TOOYOO.L.U-TOKYO.AC.JP Shigeru TSUCHIDA tuitekj at ERE.UMONTREAL.CA Kevin Tuite iris at U.WASHINGTON.EDU Siri G. Tuttle glen at METRO.NET Glen Uber KHC00344 at NIFTYSERVE.OR.JP Shinji Uchioke histling at COLI.UNI-SB.DE CoLi UdS usami at HAWAII.EDU Fumio Usami bvance at UCS.INDIANA.EDU Barbara Vance mvarley at UMICH.EDU Matthew Varley tvn at CIS.UNI-MUENCHEN.DE Theo Vennemann verda at LINGUA.FIL.UB.ES Isabel Verdaguer helgason at KOMMA.ZEDAT.FU-BERLIN.DE Vilhj�lmur Helgason n.b.vincent at MAN.AC.UK Nigel Vincent vovin at HAWAII.EDU Alexander Vovin bwald at HUMNET.UCLA.EDU Benji Wald dcwalker at ACS.UCALGARY.CA Douglas Walker tandy at CENTRAL.CIS.UPENN.EDU Tandy Warnow warvik at UTU.FI Brita Warvik swatts at TCD.IE Sheila Watts LEEUWVW at RULLET.LEIDENUNIV.NL Andrea de Leeuw van Weenen david_weiss at GBINC.COM David Weiss Paula.West at MERTON.OXFORD.AC.UK Paula West maxw at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK Max Wheeler whiting at CC.HELSINKI.FI Robert Whiting senorbiggles at MAIL.UTEXAS.EDU Tom Wier maw at ANNAP.INFI.NET Mark A. Wilson cwinter at ORION.IT.LUC.EDU Clyde Winters mew1 at SIU.EDU Margaret Winters joh.wood at ASU.EDU Johanna Wood cfwoolhiser at MAIL.UTEXAS.EDU Curt Woolhiser vdwouden at LET.RUG.NL Ton van der Wouden lcw21 at CUS.CAM.AC.UK Laura Wright rhpwri at LIVERPOOL.AC.UK Roger Wright wurzel at FAS.AG-BERLIN.MPG.DE W.U. Wurzel haruki at MSV.CC.IWATE-U.AC.JP Haruki Yamaguchi MZELLJADT at SMITH.SMITH.EDU Margaret S. Zelljadt Petr.Zemanek at FF.CUNI.CZ Petr Zemanek n-zide at UCHICAGO.EDU Norman Zide From ph1u+ at andrew.cmu.edu Fri Aug 7 14:29:39 1998 From: ph1u+ at andrew.cmu.edu (Paul J Hopper) Date: Fri, 7 Aug 1998 10:29:39 EDT Subject: I'm told In-Reply-To: Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- A footnote to Benji's posting: the special behavior of "it" has often been noticed. To his point about "it" shunning stress in Present-Day English can be added the absence or rarity of the possessive pronoun "its", which results in a hole in the paradigm (the hat is mine/?the lid is its). Yet apparently in older Germanic the reverse was the case: exophoric "that" was rare, "it" (OE hit) being used instead (see S O Andrew, Syntax & Style in OE, p. 38). The same seems to be true of Old High German (Behaghel, Deutsche Syntax I:280). - Paul Hopper From bwald at HUMnet.UCLA.EDU Sun Aug 9 16:14:08 1998 From: bwald at HUMnet.UCLA.EDU (bwald) Date: Sun, 9 Aug 1998 12:14:08 EDT Subject: Correction: I'm told Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- I appreciated Cynthia's further correction of my correction, and I look forward to her further comments. She notes: >The OE was parallel to the German, with the theme causing subject-verb >agreement (whether it was pre-or-post-verbal). I think perhaps Benji may >have had some confusion with passives of verbs like *deman* to judge, which >took a single object in the dative case. The verb had passive morphology >but did not agree with anything, remaining in the neutral third singular, >as in 'them was judged'. I'm still haven't checked, but my understanding of the "impersonal passive" in some earlier I-E languages is that there was no marked SUBJ (NOM) (hence, "impersonal" = no subject/NOM marker). It either occurred to me or I read that in the case of neuters, there was formal ambiguity of between "impersonal" and regular (ACC => NOM) passivisation for TWO reasons. (1) there is no formal distinction between neuter NOM/ACC, (2) the neuter may not require number agreement on verb inflection, remaining singular regardless of the number of the neuter NOM/ACC. The situation with *deman* mimics the "impersonal" passive, except that the verb does not allow an additional (non-neuter) object, in order to judge whether it would be marked as SUBJ or OBJ. From Cynthia's comments I gather that by OE, the "impersonal" passive has been lost in favor of the ACC-Passive (i.e., ACC -> NOM), assuming that it ever figured in the prehistory of English or earlier Germanic. I think it would be instructive to know what the function of the "impersonal passive" was which distinguished it from the "regular" passive in languages which have both, in order to determine whether it contributed anything to the development of the ACC*=DAT* passive in Middle English. This might be the case, if the impersonal passive favored topicalisation (pre-posing) of the DAT, i.e., a grammatical process which cooperated with word order strategies. Otherwise, it is simply the topicalisation strategy itself that identified DAT, like ACC, with subject (NOM), when the marking difference between DAT, ACC *and NOM* (!), was obscured. Unmarked preposed arguments came to be interpreted as subjects (= "objects") of passivisation. Non-passive residual phenomena associated with DAT preposing persisted for quite a while, but lexically controlled (with some increasingly dimly perceivable semantic motivation), as in "perception/cognition" ("psych") verbs like "methinks" (i.e., "it seems to me") and "melikes" (note the eventual spelling at the threshold of extinction in Early Modern E). (post-OE DAT/NOM variation has had various *lexical* fates. "seem" is an interesting case in which a DAT > NOM innovation has not survived e.g., we *seme* it no shame (1485) = consider, cf. we DEEM it no shame. "what *lacked* yew" (1175) eventually gave way to "both they *lakken* (1320 ) (still "he lacks both"), but survives marginally in "both are lacking *in/to/for* him" The masochistic "bitter griefs taste me best" (1586) continues only as the *marked* "DAT" "bitter griefs taste best *to me* cntr. "I taste bitter griefs best", where "best" is an adv not an adj. French "please" into ME got caught up with "like", but seems to retain only limited use with DAT > NOM, e.g., "they do what they please, when they please, if they please", compared to the range of contexts in which the experiencer remains the object, e.g., it pleases them to listen, listening pleases them, etc. Lexical peculiarities of individual verbs mitigate any exclusive direction of syntactic development, cf. I fear X, X scares/frightens me, etc., though X fears= scares me rests in a fresh grave awaiting rebirth through the "transitivisation" pattern, e.g., X fears and disappears me.) In any case, the lexical longevity of the "methinks" type of verb contrasts with the relatively rapid thoroughness with which DAT *passives* were reanalysed as NOM=Object passives. The German strategy for approximating the English/Bantu "indirect" passive attracted my attention because it shows a cooperation of word order and morphological marking strategies (passivisation) that is suggestive of similar strategies in OE as a similar case-inflected language. English DAT/ACC passivisation continues those word order strategies in the absence of case-marking (except for those famously conservative pronouns.) They are preferred to preposing prepositional phrases in recent and current English, i.e., "I was given a book" is preferred "to me a book was given". More precisely, "I was given a book" is used where the old DAT is "topical" and the clause "focus" is on the old ACC. "to me a book was given" denies post-verbal clause focus to either argument, with an effect that serves more restricted purposes. ("to me (there?!) was given a book" does not rate serious consideration as an alternative "theme focus" strategy to "I was given..." in current English.) I also appreciated Paul Hopper's additional observations on the neuter singular pronoun in various Germanic languages, including the observation about the avoidance (ungrammaticality??) of "that's *its*", parallel to "that's mine". In fact, I suspect similar avoidance of "that's *theirs*" iff "their-" refers to an inanimate plural. If that's the case (and I'm not sure), it would detract from the suggestion that the avoidance of *stress* on "its" (required by the construction) is the "primary" motivation (as opposed to the inanimacy of the reference) -- not that Paul was weighing alternative motivations. It remains tempting to somehow relate this avoidance of *its* to the disfavoring of case-marking (= GEN) with neuter possessives to the advantage of two alternative strategies (which I first read about in Sapir), the prepositional possessive construction with *of*, e.g., "the leg of the table" vs. "compounding", e.g., "the table leg". I wonder if "it belongs to the table" is favored over "it's the table's", again avoiding a GEN inanimate. NB Beyond the Present-Day pale is "WHOSE is it?" for an inanimate, cf. A: whose keys are those? B: Mine/??My car's (but A: WHAT/WHICH keys are those? B: My car's, cf. the car keys, the keys TO the car, ? the car's keys). Discomfort remains "non-standard" for the relative "a table WHOSE legs were broken" (pref reduction to "a table WITH broken legs" when possible, expect "a table THAT's legs were broken" when not). GEN, the surviving OE case inflection, is under severe and continuing attack in the context of inanimates. NNB. The surviving irregular plurals in English are *animates*. They allow "it's the (wo)men's/ children's/cattle's/mice's" etc. "it's the girls'/boys'/horses'/etc" only works in print, though in practice intended number is probably rarely a problem. Still, the surviving humans remain useful, cf. "it's the man's room" vs. "it's the men's room". Inanimates lose on all counts, cf. ??? it's the tables'(s). From bjarne.birkrem at iba.uio.no Mon Aug 10 12:00:23 1998 From: bjarne.birkrem at iba.uio.no (Bjarne Birkrem) Date: Mon, 10 Aug 1998 08:00:23 EDT Subject: Dative Pronouns Message-ID: A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: text/enriched Size: 3013 bytes Desc: not available URL: From mghiselin at casmail.calacademy.org Mon Aug 10 22:48:03 1998 From: mghiselin at casmail.calacademy.org (Ghiselin, Michael) Date: Mon, 10 Aug 1998 18:48:03 EDT Subject: Reply to Ghiselin (long) Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Dear Dr. Trask: Thank you for your long, thoughtful, and very useful response to my query about the attitude of linguists with respect to what might be called "chrono-languages" and "cladistic" language concepts. Michael Ross and Isidore Dyen have also responded and I hope that others will too. Your response about putting one's foot in the same river twice is right on target. When Heraclitus said that one cannot put one's foot in the same river twice, he was treating an individual river as the set of its components. At different times it consists of different water, therefore it is not the same set. You and I consist of molecules, and in fact are largely water, so when we drink or excrete, we are not the same set. Likewise with species: they are not the same as soon as one of the "set" dies or another is born. And with languages, dropping out or adding an idiolect makes it a different language. One solution for such an exercise is to try to make each river, organism, species, or language, be an intensionally-defined class. If we grant that, then there must be some defining property for the group of molecules, organisms, idiolects, or whatever. This seems wierd for Styx, or Larry Trask, but for many people meets their intuitions about Homo sapiens or English. The other solution is to treat all the aformentioned entities as individuals. Individuals have no defining properties, and they can change a great deal yet remain the same thing. When there are stages of development of an organism, we do not say treat a child and an adult as different organisms, but as the same organism that has come to differ. When we find cells dividing, we usually say that we have two new cells, except when they bud, and then we suppose that the original one continued to exist and the bud only is new. The analogies with languages are pretty straight forward and obvious, as well as frustrating. What you say suggests that linguists like the family tree model, but realize that there are all sorts of problems and puzzles with it, which, however, can be dealt with adequately. That is pretty much the position of zoologists with respect to the genealogical nexus that interests them. You mention pidgins and creoles. This is particularly interesting because it suggests something that biologists once considered a possibility: origin of unrelated species by spontaneous generation. Non-genetic languages of another kind would be ones with two or more direct ancestors. In fact we have these in biology. Allopolyploids are organisms with two diploid sets of chromosomes from different species. The famous Raphanobrassica is a cross between the cabbage and the radish; it has the root of a cabbage and the leaves of a radish. Such dual ancestry is however fully compatable with the view that the species are the lineages and that they can evolve indefinitely yet still remain the same thing. Likewise with languages. I was also very interested by your remarks about the political aspect of what a language is. There may not be much of a connection here. However, the decision that one dialect is a "standard" leading to intermediates going extinct suggests something like a model for sympatric speciation. Again, thank you very much. Sincerely, Micael Ghiselin From mghiselin at casmail.calacademy.org Tue Aug 11 14:14:31 1998 From: mghiselin at casmail.calacademy.org (Ghiselin, Michael) Date: Tue, 11 Aug 1998 10:14:31 EDT Subject: Cladistic language concepts Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Dear Dr. Dyen, Please accept my thanks for your thoughtful response to my query about cladistic language concepts and what might be called "chrono-languages." I have already received some good commentary from a couple of other linguists, and these preliminary responses are most encouraging. Your way of looking at these matters is somewhat different from that of my other informants but basically you all seem to agree that mere evolution does not cause a language to be replaced by another language. You suggest that one might wish to speak of a chronoperson, but unless I am mistaken you would not consider such stages as different persons in the sense that two siblings are. As I see it your solution is to treat languages as nexus or concatinations of idiolects, united by actual or potential mutual intelligibility, and to get a diachronic language concept you pass backward across generations. It is of some interest that in my book I refer to intercompatibility of organisms within a species as comparable to what we get in computer systems. Yes, the notion of a network is a bit hard to explicate, but what you say about them makes a lot of sense to me. You mention your commentary on such matters in a Festschrift for Hoenigswald. If it has been published I would appreciate a reference. Sincerely, Michael Ghiselin From Roger.Wright at liverpool.ac.uk Wed Aug 12 13:30:17 1998 From: Roger.Wright at liverpool.ac.uk (Roger Wright) Date: Wed, 12 Aug 1998 09:30:17 EDT Subject: Universals and change In-Reply-To: <3.0.3.32.19980731103333.0069d304@mail.hf.uio.no> Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Professor Farlund's contribution is nicely put and admirably concise; yet the existence of "Universal Grammar" is a theory; the properties that it is said to have are also theoretical (and they too change over time). The fact that languages change is universally true (empirically); surely only the latter qualifies as a genuine "universal"? Nor is it necessarily true that, every time a detail of a language changes, the whole "system" changes; that too is a theory, one which I know most linguists subscribe to (but which seems rather an unhelpful perspective to others). New details in practice usually introduce variability into the exisitng system, rather than abolishing it. It would be different if new linguistic phenomena always ousted the old ones at once, but (empirical truth) they don't. It's a real divide among linguists, this; whether we think facts or theory are more important. If in doubt, I'd plump for the facts. >The idea that change should be a universal is meaningless since language >universals are based on generalizations over properties of *systems*. When >a language changes, a system changes, and this new system must again obey >whatever constraints are imposed by UG. Change in itself cannot be part of >the system. The only interesting connection between universals and change >is the fact that no change can lead to a result which violates UG. From erickson at hawaii.edu Wed Aug 12 13:29:14 1998 From: erickson at hawaii.edu (Blaine Erickson) Date: Wed, 12 Aug 1998 09:29:14 EDT Subject: Chinese Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- More catching up. Isidore Dyen wrote: > In general bound morphemes--i.e. affixes--are not a universal > phenomenon. Consider Chinese, whichn has, I have been given > to understand, just one It is a common misconception that most (or all) Chinese morphemes are free. Verbal affixes which indicate aspect, sentence-final particles, and noun affixes (more than two dozen in Cantonese) are all bound. For an excellent and thoroughly readable debunking of the myths surrounding "Chinese," see DeFrancis, John. 1984. The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Best, Blaine Erickson erickson at hawaii.edu From erickson at hawaii.edu Wed Aug 12 13:28:51 1998 From: erickson at hawaii.edu (Blaine Erickson) Date: Wed, 12 Aug 1998 09:28:51 EDT Subject: Japanese Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Just catching up on some back messages. Jacob Baltuch wrote: > On the other hand I seem to remember that Japanese has direct > and indirect object take different postpositions (-(w)o vs. - > ni if I remember correctly) and yet has indirect passives. You remember correctly: for most verbs and in most cases, _o_ marks the DO, and _ni_ the IO. Not being a syntactician, I don't have too much to say about indirect passives. I'll just mention that the passive often (but not always) indicates some sort of adverse situation. oya ga shinda. parent(s) TOP die-PERFECT "(My) parent(s) died." versus oya ni shinareta. parent(s) AGT die-PASSIVE-PERFECT "(My) parent(s) died (and I sufferred as a result)." Or, more literally, "(I was) deaded by my parent(s)." Best, Blaine Erickson erickson at hawaii.edu From Cindy.Allen at anu.edu.au Wed Aug 12 13:28:29 1998 From: Cindy.Allen at anu.edu.au (Cynthia Allen) Date: Wed, 12 Aug 1998 09:28:29 EDT Subject: I'm told In-Reply-To: Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- >----------------------------Original message---------------------------- >With regard to the retention of bare objects, Benji Wald comments: > >It should be added that there remains a residue of this process in some >(British) English dialects. That is, with a few verbs, esp. the >"arch-dative" verb 'give' (but also "show"), the variation in object order >has continued into the twentieth century (and even has a coherent >geographic distribution according to the British dialect atlas reflecting >the rural mid 20th c.) It seems to be largely if not exclusively limited >to the inanimate pronominal theme "it", as well as to certain verbs, e.g., >"give/show it me" (maybe even the recipient has to be a pronoun). > This is certainly correct, but when I was talking about 'bare NP objects' I was referring to nominal, rather than pronominal objects-something that I could have made clearer. In my investigation of texts, I found this progression: 1.Two bare nominal objects in the order Theme Recipient disappear in the mid-14thC; the last example I found was 1340. However, when a pronoun was involved, the ordr TH REC was still possible; this happened when the Theme was a pronoun, regardless of whether the Recipient was a noun or a pronoun. In other words, a pronominal object still always preceded a nominal one, and when both were pronouns, the normal order was Th REC, just as it still is for some British varieties. 2. The first few true examples of 'he was given a book' are found later on in the 14thC. 3. By the early 16thC, there are no more examples in my texts of ProTh NREC order, although TH REC is the only order found when both objects are pronouns. This is still the situation as I understand it for a lot of British English speakers-i.e. He gave it him but *he gave it the king. 4. I US, Australian and some varieties of British English, the order REC TH has completely generalised so that it is the only possible order even with two pronouns. (Of course, a prepositional phrase instead is always possible, and is the only possibility with some combinations of pronouns). Of course, not all varieties of Modern English are the same in this respect. I have been told that some varieties of British English still allow 'He gave a gift the king' with two nominal objects in the TH REC order, and I would be glad to learn more about this. But the situation I described is what I found in the written texts. >I have long been interested in this issue, and also why the areal >distribution is what it is, and why IO-DO order has been the trend for >fixed order in most dialects. Cynthia mentions that the last problem is >related to pragmatic features of topicality in discourse which favors the >animate= indirect object as more often topical and given than the inanimate >= direct object, so the ordering is related to grammaticalisation of >pragmatic information structure of given before new in specific contexts. Where do I say this? It is certainly true that animates generally tend to be more topical than inanimates, but saying that the indirect object is normally more topical than the direct one does not seem to explain why the REC TH order was actually in a slight minority with two nominal objects in OE but this order increased in ME. Nor does it seem to explain why TH REC was always some much more frequent than REC TH with two pronouns. I agree with Benji that the matter is complex and cannot be explained simply as the grammaticalisation of an order which is more frequent for pragmatic reasons. What I actually said was simply that the REC TH order (with two nominals) became progressively more dominant. Later on, he says: > >In any case, the lexical angle occurred to me because of some facts in some >Bantu languages, where historically passivisations akin to English indirect >passivisation are commonplace, and in some languages have even evolved to >exclude direct (theme) passivisation when there is more than one "object". >This is relevant to Cynthia's comment: > >>.... (late 14th century), the indirect passives appear >>because grammatically, the recipient is indistinguishable from the theme. > >The key word is "grammatically". C's passage implies equation of >grammatical object with unmarked argument, hence accusative/dative where >these are no longer overtly distinguished. Nevertheless, why should >speakers reinterpret non-themes as grammatical objects (and thus passivise >them), absence of marking notwithstanding? I want to repeat here what I said earlier: there was apparently no equation of grammatical object with unmarked argument until the position of the old (nominal) IO became identical to the position of a DO of a mono-transitive verb: directly postverbal. The explanation that I suggest for why a language-learner would make such an equation crucially involves a level of grammatical relations, as opposed to semantic relations, and assumes that listeners like to use processing strategies that make use of either case-marking or grammatical relations. My idea is that once the order of two nominal objects became fixed, the language-learner came up with this processing strategy: Assume that the first postverbal NP is the (direct) object, unless an object clitic has already been encountered. (the proviso about the object clitic is necessary because of the retention of pronoun-TH order). The listener can then retrieve the semantic role through the grammatical role, because that's how verbs are stored in the lexicon. Such a processing strategy would have been of no use earlier, when the order was variable but there was no distinction in case marking, because it was not possible to make a direct link between constituent structure and grammatical relation. I refer any interested party to Chapter 9 of my book for further discussion of this approach. Later on: >Interestingly, English shows further development from indirect >passivisation to prepositional passivisation, as in: this bed was eaten >potato chips in, etc. (I think I have the chronological order right, if it >is really clear. Does the preference for "the boy was given a book" over >"the boy was given a book TO" have anything to do with historical order of >stabilisation of the two types of passive?) So, eventually (in fact, >fairly quickly) passivisation transcended whether role is marked or not. >Again, this does not seem to have been inevitable, just possible >(obviously, since it occurred). Maybe Cynthia can comment further on the >historical relationship between these two processes in English and whether >there was anything else favoring the generalisation of passsivisation, >which I suspect was not an inevitable one. There's a substantial literature on the prepositional passive in English, and anyone interested in the facts would do well to start with David Denison's 1993 book *English Historical Syntax*-Chapter 7 is entirely devoted to prep. passives and Denison's summary of earlier studies as well as the facts is excellent. I think that the reason why 'He was given a book to' is not favored in English is simply that if you are going to make a recipient be the subject, you might as well make it a core role (the object) to start with, instead of making it an oblique. I don't think it has anything to do with the historical progression. Certainly, what Denison refers to as the 'complex prepostional passive' (e.g. he was taken advantage of) seems to have entered the language a bit later than the 'indirect' passive, but not that much longer-there are convincing examples from the early 15th C. In his next message, Benji comments on the various fates of different verbs; in some instances, the Experiencer ends up a nominative subject, in others, a prepositional object, etc. The general point is certainly valid (and well known). I discuss some of the individual verbs in my book. I agree completely with Benji's comment: > Lexical peculiarities of individual verbs mitigate any >exclusive direction of syntactic development But I don't completely agree with all the details, and I'd like to respond to what Benji says about 'please': >French "please" into ME got caught up with "like", but seems to retain only >limited use with DAT > NOM, e.g., "they do what they please, when they >please, if they please", compared to the range of contexts in which the >experiencer remains the object, e.g., it pleases them to listen, listening >pleases them, etc. This rather makes it sound as though there was a general DAT>NOM trend with 'please' which only survived in that construction, but the reality seems to be that the Experiencer of *please* was always unambiguously the object except in this construction, where it starts showing up as a nominative subject in the early 16thC. I wrote an article on this verb called 'On doing as you please' which appeared in *Historical Pragmatics* edited by Andreas Jucker in 1995 and I also have a section in it in that book which I keep referring to. No ambiguity-driven syntactic reanalysis can have been involved for two reasons (1) the 'reanalysis' takes place much too late and (2) there was no model for a syntactic reanalysis; i.e. sentences like 'the king will do as the king pleases' are not found until 'the king will do as he pleases' are also found; before this, 'the king will do as it pleases the king (or him)' is the only possibility. It is in fact quite surprising how clearly object-like this experiencer is until it becomes a subject in this limited construction-nearly always postverbal and usually a (clearly object case) pronoun. So I think that we have to look at the semantics of the construction here. This experiencer is in fact more agentive than the experiencer of please usually is, because the construction is explicitly saying that I am in change of my own pleasure. So I think the experiencer started to get treated as a possible subject because it was similar semantically to a typical agentive subject, not because there was any confusion as to its grammatical relation . Of course, the object option remained as a possibility for a long time too. And: >In any case, the lexical longevity of the "methinks" type of verb contrasts >with the relatively rapid thoroughness with which DAT *passives* were >reanalysed as NOM=Object passives. It is certainly correct that the 'impersonal' verbs lingered much longer than the 'impersonal' passives of monotransitive verbs, which disappeared by the early thirteenth century. I interpret this as meaning that the possibility of case-marking marking objects lexically disappeared when the dative and accusative cases collapsed together. So we no longer get 'him was demed'. But I analyse the Experiencer of the impersonal 'methinks' etc. as a subject, despite the object case. Lexical case marking to subjects was retained because it was clearly distinct from the normal (structural) case for subjects. We still get impersonal uses like this until the early 16thC, although less and less frequently. Then they are reduced to fixed expressions like 'methink(s)'. I'm afraid that I will have tried the patience of any histlingers who have bothered to read this far and hereby declare my intention of ceasing to repeat what I have already said in print-for the time being, at least! : Cynthia Allen Linguistics, Arts Faculty Australian National University Canberra, ACT 0200 Australia From isidore.dyen at yale.edu Wed Aug 12 23:47:34 1998 From: isidore.dyen at yale.edu (Isidore Dyen) Date: Wed, 12 Aug 1998 19:47:34 EDT Subject: Cladistic language concepts In-Reply-To: <9807109027.AA902789286@casmail.calacademy.org> Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- I think you have understood what I was aiming at. As for the family-tree problem, that has to be separated into a theoretical problem and a practical problem. The first is easier to handle. It depends on the prohibition of mixing. If languages can divide, but not mix, the fami.y-tree diagram applies. Then multiple branching from the same point can only occur if they a resimultaneous. Practically however Only well-determined branches can be found with the consequence that multiple apparently simultaneous branchings result because the time-determinations cannot be fine enough. In principle this view of the family-tree can apply to bioology witholut difficulty if different species are not permitted to interbreed. As for the reference to my article I can't give to you now, but I can about three weeks from now at Dyen at hawaii.edu. The book has been published. On Tue, 11 Aug 1998, Ghiselin, Michael wrote: > ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- > Dear Dr. Dyen, > Please accept my thanks for your thoughtful response to > my query about cladistic language concepts and what might be > called "chrono-languages." I have already received some > good commentary from a couple of other linguists, and these > preliminary responses are most encouraging. > Your way of looking at these matters is somewhat > different from that of my other informants but basically you > all seem to agree that mere evolution does not cause a > language to be replaced by another language. You suggest > that one might wish to speak of a chronoperson, but unless I > am mistaken you would not consider such stages as different > persons in the sense that two siblings are. > As I see it your solution is to treat languages as > nexus or concatinations of idiolects, united by actual or > potential mutual intelligibility, and to get a diachronic > language concept you pass backward across generations. It > is of some interest that in my book I refer to > intercompatibility of organisms within a species > as comparable to what we get in computer systems. Yes, the > notion of a network is a bit hard to explicate, but what you > say about them makes a lot of sense to me. > You mention your commentary on such matters in a > Festschrift for Hoenigswald. If it has been published I > would appreciate a reference. > Sincerely, > Michael Ghiselin > From delancey at darkwing.uoregon.edu Wed Aug 12 23:48:44 1998 From: delancey at darkwing.uoregon.edu (Scott DeLancey) Date: Wed, 12 Aug 1998 19:48:44 EDT Subject: Cladistic language concepts In-Reply-To: Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Since Prof. Ghiselin is interested in collecting votes here, I'll add mine to the effect that 1) I don't think the issue of whether chronologically distant grammars representing a single continuous linguistic lineage constitute one or two distinct languages has generally been seen as a crucial or even very interesting problem in linguistics, and 2) That historical linguistics has *almost* always been resolutely cladistic as opposed to phenetic--the received tradition of historical linguistics has since its beginning been concerned with establishing genetic lineages. (Indeed, when I first encountered discussion of this issue in biology, I had a few moments difficulty in understanding what the issue was--it just hadn't occurred to me that anyone might for any reason be interested in any taxonomy other than a cladistic one). The "almost" proviso there is in reference to a bit of a vogue in the 19th century for a sort of linguistic equivalent to phenetic classification--the sort of research that gave us ideas like "Turanian", the hypothesis that most of the languages of Asia, from Dravidian up through Altaic, belong to a single family on the basis of what are indeed pretty pervasive similarities in grammatical organization. (This kind of argument crops up every now and then since the 19th century, too, but we tend to dismiss such suggestions as ignorant or downright crankish). But I think this may have been a problem of methodology rather than theory, that is, I suspect that the proponents of Turanian (was it Max Mueller's idea originally?) thought they *were* identifying a genetic lineage, they just didn't understand what kind of evidence is necessary for that purpose. Scott DeLancey Department of Linguistics University of Oregon Eugene, OR 97403, USA delancey at darkwing.uoregon.edu http://www.uoregon.edu/~delancey/prohp.html From mghiselin at casmail.calacademy.org Wed Aug 12 23:49:52 1998 From: mghiselin at casmail.calacademy.org (Ghiselin, Michael) Date: Wed, 12 Aug 1998 19:49:52 EDT Subject: Cladistic language concepts Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Dear Dr. DeLancey: Thank you very much for casting your vote. It would be nice if more linguists would do the same because the sample as it exists is small and perhaps not representative. In spite of that the preliminary results are very interesting. Not only has a cladistic language concept been generally presupposed but, as you say, linguists do not even consider the topic particularly interesting. Why should this be? One possibility is that where linguists have a written record it lacks the fragmentary nature of the fossil record that results from accidents of preservation and the like. Another is that what the linguists do perceive as important is trying to find older and older common ancestries and the genealogical relationships are all that they need. Linguists do not have the elaborate system of categories, such as phylum, class, order etc., that we zoologists do. And unless I am mistaken (please correct me if I am) they do not believe that there are important differences that need to be expressed by giving a taxon a higher rank, as when our own species has been put in a separate order or even kingdom. Linguists must have methodological problems with respect to paraphyly, parallelism and convergence. But so far as I can tell, they treat these as problems to be overcome in reaching a strictly genealogical arrangement. MG From delancey at darkwing.uoregon.edu Wed Aug 12 23:50:17 1998 From: delancey at darkwing.uoregon.edu (Scott DeLancey) Date: Wed, 12 Aug 1998 19:50:17 EDT Subject: Cladistic language concepts In-Reply-To: <9807129029.AA902948340@casmail.calacademy.org> Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- On Wed, 12 Aug 1998, Ghiselin, Michael wrote: > In spite of that the preliminary results are very > interesting. Not only has a cladistic language concept been > generally presupposed but, as you say, linguists do not even > consider the topic particularly interesting. Why should > this be? Isn't it the case that biological taxonomy started simply as a way of classifying biological phenomena in the world, and the idea that the categories discovered reflect common descent is a separate (and later) notion? Comparative historical linguistics is quite different; our origin myth traces it to William Jones observation that similarities among several languages which we since recognize as Indo-European can be explained only by recognizing them as descended from "some common source", and discovering and demonstrating descent groups has always been seen as what comparative linguistics is about. > they need. Linguists do not have the elaborate system of > categories, such as phylum, class, order etc., that we > zoologists do. And unless I am mistaken (please correct me > if I am) they do not believe that there are important > differences that need to be expressed by giving a taxon a > higher rank, as when our own species has been put in a > separate order or even kingdom. No, I don't think that's true, at least in principle. We certainly recognize families, branches, subbranches (think of orders, families, genera), although there's no standardized terminology for it. I think the reason why we don't have the articulated taxonomic framework that biology has is that we don't have any very clear idea of how to measure degrees of relationship--i.e. a statement like "the degree of relationship of Klamath and Sahaptian is roughly equivalent to that of English and German" is purely impressionistic, with no way of operationalizing a measure of relatedness that would guarantee that two linguists would agree on an answer. (Nevertheless, unfortunately in my view, one hears statemments of this sort all the time). Linguists might disagree about the need for higher-order categories-- extreme polygeneticists, I suppose, could argue that every currently- recognized linguistic lineage represents descent from a distinct invention of language. I don't think anyone really would, though-- again, the reason why we don't have terminology for higher-order groupings is that we don't really know how to recognize them. (The term "phylum" has been used a bit in linguistics, but without any strict definition--often it simply means "a relatively deep postulated genetic unit which is still controversial"). > Linguists must have methodological problems with > respect to paraphyly, parallelism and convergence. But so > far as I can tell, they treat these as problems to be > overcome in reaching a strictly genealogical arrangement. Unfortunately this has historically been true. As Larry Trask (I think it was?) mentioned, this is changing a bit--we may be on the verge of developing a framework for investigating contact phenomena sufficiently rigorous and explanatory to have a legitimate place in the same discipline as comparative linguistics. We really do need a science of areal linguistics, as we have for genetic linguistics, but we don't yet have one. Scott DeLancey Department of Linguistics University of Oregon Eugene, OR 97403, USA delancey at darkwing.uoregon.edu http://www.uoregon.edu/~delancey/prohp.html From Roger.Wright at liverpool.ac.uk Thu Aug 13 11:28:41 1998 From: Roger.Wright at liverpool.ac.uk (Roger Wright) Date: Thu, 13 Aug 1998 07:28:41 EDT Subject: Cladistic language concepts In-Reply-To: <9807129029.AA902948340@casmail.calacademy.org> Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- On Wed, 12 Aug 1998, Ghiselin, Michael wrote: > Thank you very much for casting your vote. It would be > nice if more linguists would do the same because the sample > as it exists is small and perhaps not representative. > In spite of that the preliminary results are very > interesting. Not only has a cladistic language concept been > generally presupposed but, as you say, linguists do not even > consider the topic particularly interesting. Why should > this be? I'm very interested in it, for one. I work in the field of Latin and the Romance Languages; and although (as Larry Trask said) the Romance languages are different now from each other, and from Latin as it has been taught to us for the last 1000 years or so (that is, the highest written registers only, in effect, even if recited), I still see them as a direct continuation of the original spoken language Latin (and not just "Vulgar" Latin); that's why I have often said in lectures, and sometimes written, that "Spanish *is* Latin, only later". I wish Romanists and Latinists in general would realize that this is indeed an interesting problem; and, as Larry Trask pointed out, it's only politically-inspired divergence (usually allied to the establishment of different spelling systems, as in 12th and 13th century Romance Europe, or Chile in 1900, or Asturias now) that leads us to think otherwise - RW From jhewson at morgan.ucs.mun.ca Thu Aug 13 17:37:26 1998 From: jhewson at morgan.ucs.mun.ca (John Hewson) Date: Thu, 13 Aug 1998 13:37:26 EDT Subject: Cladistic language concepts In-Reply-To: <9807129029.AA902948340@casmail.calacademy.org> Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- On Wed, 12 Aug 1998, Ghiselin, Michael wrote: > ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- > Dear Dr. DeLancey: > Thank you very much for casting your vote. It would be > nice if more linguists would do the same because the sample > as it exists is small and perhaps not representative. I suspect the sample is small because Larry Trask's answer was so comprehensive, and so well expressed, that nothing more remained to be said, except to emphasize particular points, as Roger Wright has done in stating that "Spanish *is* Latin, only later", a view that I often presented in class with the words "French is a 20th Century form of Latin". It is interesting that there is a related debate going on about Universals and change. Professor Farlund has claimed that any change in a language is a change "in the system". This is correct, but grossly oversimplified: a language is a system of systems; one can have change in the phonology that in no way affects the grammar. There is a system of parts of speech, and subsystems such as the nominal system, verbal system, etc. Within the verbal system one can have subsystems of tense, aspect, voice, and mood. Within aspect systems one has to treat synthetic aspects as different from analytic aspects, as the two interact rather than contrast. The only universals in systems like this are operational: binary contrast, secondary derivation, and so forth. Out of these systems syntax is constructed, and again the only universals are operational: predication to two levels, as in Jespersen's "very hot weather" (with "hot" predicated of "weather" and "very" predicated of "hot") and recycling whereby these three words can be treated as a single element, a NP which can then become the support of a verb, which can be expanded into a VP, etc. We build sentences the same way a child builds models with Lego blocks, and we don't need rules to do it, any more than the child does. All such construction depends on cognition: realizing what fits together and what does not: adverbs cannot be predicated of nominals for example: *very weather. Rules are created by linguists to describe regularities; they are part of the description, not of what is described. All this, alas, to make the point that linguistic change *is* a language universal, and that change is also systemic (although it can be, and too often is treated atomistically). I hope that it is also clear that what is meant by "universal" and what is meant by "system" can vary greatly from one linguist to another, and consequently there are enormous confusions concerning the very fundamentals of our discipline. The nature of systemic change was realized quite early in such statements as Grimm's Law, the lowering of all short Latin vowels by Late Latin, and the loss of length distinctions by early Romance, and so on. The regularity of sound change is also the direct result of change in the system: change the _s_ on a typewriter to _$_ (i.e. change the system), and the re$ult i$ a$ follow$... The systems of a language are mental realities that are not amenable to direct observation but, like gravity, are amenable to indirect observation. It is the phoneme, a systemic entity, that triggers the speech apparatus to produce a sound that will be modified in all kinds of ways in the processes of speech, producing an endless range of allophones, the directly observable data. If phonemes were directly observable, we would not need to train linguists. Such systems are to be treated as scientific substructures, not as abstractions, which may fail to correspond to any existential reality whatever. Abstractions, where anyone's "assumptions" are just as good as anyone else's, are very often, in methodological terms, a waste of time. John Hewson, FRSC tel: (709)737-8131 University Research Professor fax: (709)737-4000 Memorial University of Newfoundland St. John's NF, CANADA A1B 3X9 From j.t.faarlund at inl.uio.no Fri Aug 14 14:16:20 1998 From: j.t.faarlund at inl.uio.no (Jan Terje Faarlund) Date: Fri, 14 Aug 1998 10:16:20 EDT Subject: Universals and change In-Reply-To: Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- At 09:30 12.08.98 EDT, Roger Wright wrote: >----------------------------Original message---------------------------- > > >the existence of "Universal Grammar" is a theory; ------------- -- and what's more, the *form* of UG is no more than a (until now weakly supported) hypothesis. The way I used the term UG in my last posting was as a theory (or hypothesis) about possible grammars, and hence about learnability. Children learn grammars, not changes, but in the process of learning grammars they may execute changes. To be a bit more concrete: "VP -> V NP", "VP -> NP V" and "VP -> V,NP" (unspecified order) are all possible grammatical rules, licensed by UG, and learnable by children as part of their grammar. Once any of these rules has been internalized by members of a new generation, they can be used to predict the form of future utterences produced by those children. However, "[NP V] changes to [V NP]" is *not* a possible grammatical rule. It cannot be learned by children, it cannot be used to predict anything, not even future historical changes, since there are still plenty of OV languages around after at least 50 000 years of human language (or more, whatever you prefer). It is just a post hoc description of something that has happened in many speech communities. > Nor is it necessarily true that, every time a detail of a >language changes, the whole "system" changes; that too is a theory, one >which I know most linguists subscribe to (but which seems rather an >unhelpful perspective to others). New details in practice usually >introduce variability into the exisitng system, rather than abolishing >it. It would be different if new linguistic phenomena always ousted the >old ones at once, but (empirical truth) they don't. --- I guess I wasn't very clear on this point. I took "system" to include every subsystem and every detail. So if there is a change, say in the inflection of English strong verbs, there is a change in the system of strong verbs, and by implication in the grammar of English, however minor the change is. Of course also a system like the grammar of a natural language allows for variation. We seem to be back to the old synchrony/diachrony dispute. I do not claim that the two always should be separated, and that one does not depend on the other, but I think it is methodologically and theoretically sound sometimes to keep certain concepts within one or the other of those dimensions. Questions of possible grammars, universals of linguistic structure and learnability are different from the question of whether all languages necessarily change. The latter is not a very interesting question, since we can all observe that they do as long as they have live speakers. The question is *how* and perhaps *why*. > It's a real divide among linguists, this; whether we think facts >or theory are more important. If in doubt, I'd plump for the facts. > -- I don't think so. We cannot do one without the other. Theory without facts is not linguistics, and observing facts without an underlying theory is not possible. ******************************************** Professor Jan Terje Faarlund Universitetet i Oslo Institutt for nordistikk og litteraturvitskap Postboks 1013 Blindern N-0315 Oslo (Norway) Tel. (+47) 22 85 69 49 (office) (+47) 22 12 39 66 (home) Fax (+47) 22 85 71 00 From whiting at cc.helsinki.fi Mon Aug 17 12:17:09 1998 From: whiting at cc.helsinki.fi (Robert Whiting) Date: Mon, 17 Aug 1998 08:17:09 EDT Subject: GG and change In-Reply-To: Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Change is inevitable. This is a by-product of a universe with increasing entropy over time. Therefore change is a "universal universal" and has to do with the nature of the universe, not with the nature of language as such. It is my impression that almost all linguistic change is brought about by sociological factors. This impression is based on the following observations: 1) Linguistic change is unpredictable. By this I mean that the onset of a particular change at any given time can not be anticipated. Once a change has started or been completed, it can be analyzed and classified and (probably) parallels for such a change can be found in other languages. But the trigger for the change can not be shown to be the linguistic situation because one can also (probably) find parallel linguistic situations in other languages in which the change did not occur. Therefore the trigger for the change must come from outside the language (or outside language in general). Analogical changes to restore morphological features levelled by phonological change might appear to be an exception (as might analogical change in general, since a model form must already exist in the language for analogy to be productive), but in this case it is simply a reaction to a change (phonological) that did not have its origin in the linguistic situation (on this seeming contradiction, see below, point 5). 2) Any part of language can change. Changes can be observed in phonology, morphology, syntax, and lexicon. I think (someone will correct me if I am wrong) that there is no part of a language that can be considered immutable. Even features that were long considered inherent to a language, like word order or intonation, can and do change. 3) Linguistic change is irregular. With the exception of sound changes (which the neogrammarians tell us are without exception and once a sound change is initiated, it will affect every instance of that sound in the language [but the unpredictability of point 1 still applies: it cannot be predicted what will change or what it will change into]), a change in a form or construction may or may not affect similar forms or constructions. Or part of a system may change and leave the rest of the system unchanged. 4) Linguistic change is not unidirectional. A change (including phonetic changes) that goes in one direction in one language may go in the opposite direction in another language. One can count up the number of instances for the change in each direction and say which direction is statistically more likely for the change, but in essence, there is no change that is impossible. 5) Linguistic change can cause conflict in the language. This is a result of an inherent conflict in language between phonology and morphology. Since language expresses meaning through phonological form, there is constantly a conflict between phonological simplicity (ease and speed of articulation) and morphological complexity (more overt morphological marking to disambiguate meaning). What we have, then, is an "engineering trade-off" where changes for the better on one side will usually introduce changes for the worse on the other. Thus a phonological change that reduces overt morphological distinctions will frequently be countered by an analogical change that restores some (if not all) of the lost morphological marking. Thus while it may seem that analogical change is brought about by the linguistic situation, it is rather a response to a natural conflict between two competing systems, and, while it may be systematic, it is still unpredictable and irregular. But even the phonological change that causes the response is not necessarily caused by an attempt a phonological simplification, since many phonological changes result in more complex phonology, so even a rule that phonological changes result in simplified phonology is not predictable. Given these observations, it is obvious that the only thing about linguistic change that is universal is change itself, and that has nothing to do with language per se. Furthermore, with the exception of analogical restoration of morphological marking, a linguistic situation is seldom seen to be the trigger for a linguistic change, and even when it is, the nature and extent of the change is not predictable. Since linguistic change cannot be seen to originate within language, it must be imposed by its users, human beings, and therefore is sociological in nature since language use is a socio-cultural phenomenon. The sociological factors that affect (or effect) linguistic change would seem to have to do with such things as intergroup relationships and intragroup or cultural bonding. (I am not a sociologist, so this terminology may not be current; I remember sociology as the course where it didn't do any good to have last year's exam -- they always asked the same questions - only the answers changed :).) A high prestige language or dialect is likely to trigger changes in languages or dialects in contact with it by imitation. But it is not just high prestige languages that cause changes. Thus historical linguistics recognizes superstratum languages (higher prestige, e.g., conquerors), adstratum languages (more or less equal prestige, i.e, neighbors or ethno-linguistic mixtures sharing the same territory), and substratum languages (lower prestige, e.g., conquered populations). While the nature of the relationship between the languages may tend to influence the types of changes that may flow between them (based on statistical probability), again, any kind of influence of one language on another is possible. So all that is really needed for one language to influence another is contact. Even direct contact is not needed, because, through writing, even long dead or unused languages can cause changes (English has many Greek and Latin neologisms). Thus languages in almost any kind of contact can cause changes in the lexicon (loan words and loan translations) and grammar (areal features in phonology, morphology and syntax) of one another. Group or cultural bonding can have the opposite effect of causing a language to deliberately be altered to make it more unlike its neighboring languages. Loanwords may be systematically purged from the language to make it more specific to its culture or group. If linguistic change is sociological in nature, then like other sociological changes (changes in government, religious, and economic systems) it originates with the few, not the many. The many just follow along once the change is set in motion. The point to generative grammar is that grammar has to have a synchronic form that is independent of its history. The speakers of a language learn its grammar, very seldom the history of its grammar. But since the grammar (and lexicon) of a language is constantly changing, a synchronic (generative) grammar is at best a "snapshot" of the grammar of the language at a particular point in time. A synchronic grammar of the English of a century ago would be different from a synchronic grammar of today's English which would be different again from the synchronic grammar of English a century from now. What historical linguistics can do is link the different "snapshots" and explain the mechanisms of the changes. But the history of these changes is irrelevant to generative grammar which has to be able to explain the current grammar of the language as used by its speakers on its own terms. Now if universal grammar is a grammar that all languages must obey and is supposed to encompass immutable rules of language, then if everything in language can change in an unpredictable, irregular, non-unidirectional way that can lead to conflict in the language or if cross-linguistically every possible way of accomplishing a linguistic result occurs, then universal grammar either is a chimera or it is at best a restatement of Murphy's Law: Anything that can happen, will happen. Bob Whiting whiting at cc.helsinki.fi On Thu, 30 Jul 1998 Isidore Dyen wrote: > > ---------------------------Original message--------------------------- > > How about contemplating whether language change is inevitable. If > it is not, theren should be some stable languages somewhere, If > it is, then it must be inherent in all languages and thus a > universal. > >On Thu, 23 Jul 1998, bwald wrote: > >> --------------------------Original message--------------------------- Before I forget, I have some comments on Robert Ratcliff's last message. He states: >> >... if one takes seriously the generative claim that the >> >goal of formal linguistic analysis is the discovery of an innate, >> >biologically determined language faculty, then you sever the link >> >between historical and formal linguistics. >> >> I would like to offer a different perspective. It is not about >> "severing the link", but about distinguishing between what is >> innate and thus presumably immutable, unchangeable, universal etc >> etc, VS. everything else in language. The "everything else" is >> what is relevant to historical linguistics, because it is what >> varies and changes within and across particular languages from >> one time to another. Therefore, the search to isolate what is >> innate or invariant in all languages also serves historical >> linguistics by revealing those aspects of language, or of any >> particular language, which are subject to change. The two >> programs complement each other, and work together. >> Stated differently, GG, and no doubt any serious synchronic >> framework for analysis which claims to be applicable to all >> observable (and "possible") human languages, seeks to provide the >> invariant parameters of language within which variation and >> change are possible -- and to which variation and change are >> *limited*. This is quite different from severing the link >> between historical and formal (i.e., "universal") linguistics. >> So, despite the difference in emphasis, synchronic linguistics >> continues its historic mission to provide a grounding for the >> study of linguistic change. One need not be misled by what some >> GGists claim they are trying to do (not to mention what they >> claim is "important"). It is no different from what historical >> linguists are trying to do when they compare two changes and say >> they reflect the SAME process of change. >> >> Having said that, then, it turns out that virtually every >> substantive proposal that GG has made for something invariant in >> language turns out to be too concrete, and the exceptions in some >> language or other show that those features of language are indeed >> subject to change. And so the search goes on, as proposals for >> concrete universals retreat into greater abstraction as the data >> from more and more languages accumulate. Each failed universal >> is an opportunity for the historical linguist to contemplate and >> try to determine how it is that languages can evolve in one way >> or the other. From bwald at HUMnet.UCLA.EDU Mon Aug 17 12:18:04 1998 From: bwald at HUMnet.UCLA.EDU (bwald) Date: Mon, 17 Aug 1998 08:18:04 EDT Subject: I'm told Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- I was very pleased to receive Cynthia's more extended comments on the indirect passive and related phenomena in the history of English. Actually, while I was waiting I became intrigued with the general relationship between the indirect and impersonal passives, not only in the history of English, but in Eurafrasian (Nostratic?) ACC(usative) languages in general, e.g., early I-E and Semitic (Classical Arabic and OT Hebrew), in German, Uralic and Altaic. The whole nature of both passivisation and impersonal (non-subject, non-passive) varies in interesting ways across these contiguous case-marking families, leading to insight about what's common and what's distinctive about any particular line of evolution, of course including Middle English. This informs my following comments on Cynthia's message. I was encouraged that Cynthia confirmed my basic understanding of various developments in the history of English. Indeed, I have read Denison and some of Cynthia's earlier writings (among others), but I do not always trust my memory, and there's also always the possibility that an author has changed their (!) mind about something for some reason or other. Therefore, it is entirely appropriate for Cynthia to refer me to some of her writings, implying that she feels they express her current ideas to the extent that she understands my interests. The only disappointment I had is that she did not respond to my interest in the historical status of the XY = Y FOR X construction, as in "cook me it" = "cook it for me". I mentioned that I thought I had noted ME examples of the type "cook it me", but I hadn't studied the problem closely enough to determine whether this remnant of historical X-DAT Y-ACC case-marking and word order has become (or always was) distinct from the type which has become "XY = Y TO X", e.g., "give me it = give it to me". As far as I understand the literature, this is not an issue. It is not singled out one way or another. So, I would assume that analysts don't feel there is a basis to make a distinction between "X TO Y" and "X FOR Y" in relation to "XY". But I would not take it for granted. So I'm looking for explicit (dis)confirmation of that assumption. The difference could be in the relation of the two prepositions to thematic role (or whatever you want to call it) and/or in the degree of independence of that role from any particular lexical verb. That remains a concern for me, because of the level of comparison I want to make for syntactic constructions associated with ACC case-marking in Eurafrasian languages. The issue involves ACC and inevitably the ACC/NOM! relationship (and thus, for the moment, excludes the ergative case-marking languages that confront Eurafrasia). The objective is to explore whether the development of the ME indirect passive was indeed more likely than not under the circumstances (hence, what ARE the circumstances? cf. Semitic also develops NOM-marked indirect passivisation), or whether the linguistic (as opposed to, say, social) conditions were ever sufficient to favor this direction of change over others. Meanwhile, Cynthia's following comments particularly interested me. >... when I was talking about 'bare NP objects' I >was referring to nominal, rather than pronominal objects..... I think that can be taken for granted. And it occurred to me that lexical(ly filled) NPs (or whatever you want to call them) establish the lead for pronouns, despite the fact that the pronouns maintain a NOM/ACC (ACC = older ACC/DAT) distinction throughout the period of development of the indirect passive. The latter is a fact that is quite striking, though we generally take it for granted because it is so familiar to us. It is all the more striking, I suggested, in view of the much longer time period for which (pronominal) pre-verbal ACCs (from older DATs) remained with specific NON-passivised verbs. Something about the passive encouraged a much more rapid completion of the change. Some would relate this to the idea that change in the nature of "grammatical subject" in English (corresponding somewhat to changes in the nature of "grammatical object") began to occur much earlier than "grammaticalisation" of word order to preserve distinctions once indicated by (NOM/ACC) case-marking. The implication is that ("long") before word order became a prominent role-expressing device, case-marking continued to play a role (in directing NPs to "subjecthood" and "objecthood"), perhaps because of pronominal case-marking, where pronouns are generally more common than lexical NPs in relevant constructions in discourse. Cynthia mentions the following progression: >1....a pronominal object still always preceded a nominal one, >and when both were pronouns, the normal order was Th REC... That is a striking fact in view of the commonality of the order IO DO among languages. Th REC is DO IO. I might understand the underlying principle if Th was more likely to be pronominal than REC, but I do not think that is the case, i.e., I do not think it is based directly on an "information-status" order (cntr. PRO NP). I can only note that the same order occurred historically for the French object clitics, and still does for third persons (but was otherwise reversed to a "topicality" order 1,2 > 3). My vague notion about why Th REC order in such cases is that DAT came to be considered a more "marked" case than ACC in the history of Romance (I think more generally than French) and fit into a "markedness" order similar to the information-status order. Some might just call it a "heaviness (of information)" order (the DAT marker is also phonologically more prominent than the ACC, and remains so in current French, lui vs. le/la). >2. The first few true examples of 'he was given a book' are found later on >in the 14thC. This shows an increasing association of NOM with "subject" -- in the case of pronouns. It is probably difficult to securely establish a priority between this change and a shift of agreement for the passivised verb when the subject is a lexical NP and thus indistinguishable for "oblique" and NOM. The issue is where "the boys was given a book" > "the boys WERE given a book" fits in to "them was given a book" > "they were given a book". I think NOM presupposes verb agreement, but unmarked preverbal NPs do not. (I could anticipate attestation of "them were given books", but not "they was..." in the relevant period.) >3. By the early 16thC, there are no more examples in my texts of ProTh NREC >order, although TH REC is the only order found when both objects are >pronouns.... He gave it him but *he gave it the king. IO-DO order expands but is resisted by PRO-PRO, originally motivated by the higher "markedess" of DAT over ACC. IO-DO may be associated with the higher of DAT/IO as more favorable than DO to both humans (topicality) and pronominal reference (information status). (I am aware of unrelated languages in which IO-DO order generalised, conversely, to allow NP-PRO.) >4. I US, Australian and some varieties of British English, the order REC TH >has completely generalised so that it is the only possible order even with >two pronouns. There are even details here, if "they cooked it me" is less widespread than "they gave it me". Where the REC TH order becomes totally general, the markedness of IO focus increases, since it is preferably further marked by a preposition when it is stressed, i.e., "they cooked it *for* ME" rather than "they cooked ME it", etc. Cynthia goes on to say: > What I actually said was simply that the REC TH order (with two >nominals) became progressively more dominant. I'm interested in the how's and why's. Cynthia suggests: >...the position of the old (nominal) IO became identical to the position >of a DO of a >mono-transitive verb: directly postverbal. The explanation >that I suggest for why a >language-learner would make such an equation crucially involves a level of >grammatical relations, as opposed to semantic relations, and assumes that >listeners like to use processing strategies that make use of either >case-marking or grammatical relations. My idea is that once the order of >two nominal objects became fixed, the language-learner came up with this >processing strategy: The progress of word order as a pervasive strategy to the exclusion of case-marking continues to interest everyone concerned with English historical syntax. It took rather a long time for the IO-DO word order to completely take over PRO-PRO contexts. It suggests that case-marking has not been given up without a protracted struggle, as we still know. In a general way, the consequences of the former case-marking on English (as I-E) grammar were so pervasive that it is taking the evolution of *most* varieties of English a great deal of time to undo them all, and they seem to implicate a great deal of grammatical detail. I'm not really interested in predicting here, but the trends up to now are quite compelling. (NB. such late developments as pronominal compound objects like "him and I" further weaken the link between case-marking and grammatical role). >..... I think that the reason why 'He was given a >book to' is not favored in English is simply that if you are going to make >a recipient be the subject, you might as well make it a core role (the >object) to start with, instead of making it an oblique. That grammatical analysis need not conflict with the notion that there is a grammatical conflict between passivising an "object" and giving it the focus that a preposition establishes. Sometimes the conflict cannot be avoided, where passivisation is favored for some reason, but a case-marked strategy has not survived, e.g., with locatives ("the bed was eaten potatoes chips IN"). It remains interesting to contemplate why non-marking has survived for certain DAT and benefactives (perhaps even further developed for the latter). It does not seem to be only an arbitrary lexical matter (esp in the case of benefactives). >... Certainly, what >Denison refers to as the 'complex prepostional passive' (e.g. he was taken >advantage of) seems to have entered the language a bit later than the >'indirect' passive, but not that much longer-there are convincing examples >from the early 15th C. If it is securely "later", it shows accommodation of the prepositional object to other objects, all as unmarked for case. In any case, it strengthens the association of passivisation (and topicality) with NOM, to the extent that even PRO objects of prepositions are shifted to NOM marking. The stranding of prepositions is involved in such passivisation, but has a distinct history as a grammatical strategy in English. cf. Scandinavian strands prepositions, but stops short of the indirect passive. Case rearrangement is more radical in English. Cynthia notes that: >...the reality seems to >be that the Experiencer of *please* was always unambiguously the object >except in this construction, where it starts showing up as a nominative >subject in the early 16thC. ...No ambiguity-driven syntactic reanalysis >can have been >involved for two reasons (1) the 'reanalysis' takes place much too late and >(2) there was no model for a syntactic reanalysis; i.e. sentences like 'the >king will do as the king pleases' are not found until 'the king will do as >he pleases' are also found; before this, 'the king will do as it pleases >the king (or him)' is the only possibility. There's a misunderstanding here. The reanalysis is not too late, given that we are dealing with lexical diffusion of DAT > SUBJ for experiencers, and the OED (Onions, I guess) notes the innovation in "please" as corresponding to "like". It cites 1500 Dunbar (Northern) "your melody he pleases [= likes] not til hear" (in modern spelling). The equivalent use of "like" (current use) is cited as early as 1200, but the archaic "inverted" use (from DAT of experiencer) continues as late as 1616 in Ben Johnson: "if this play does not LIKE [= please], the Devil's in it" and even *1784* in Cowper: "they...howl and war as LIKES [= pleases] them". Cynthia suggests: >...I think that we have to look at the semantics of >the construction here. This experiencer is in fact more agentive than the >experiencer of please usually is, because the construction is explicitly >saying that I am in change of my own pleasure. This is generally true, at least currently. Generally, "like" does seem to have less of a "volitional" element in contexts that readily come to mind than "please". I'm not sure this is lexical rather than pragmatic. ("please" < "if you PLEASE" < "if it please you", as a politeness marker in requests appeals to volition similar to "you wanna..." = "would you please..."; "would you like to..." is used as a suggestion or invitation, not a request). She continues: >So I think the experiencer >started to get treated as a possible subject because it was similar >semantically to a typical agentive subject, not because there was any >confusion as to its grammatical relation . To me, what experiencers and agents have most in common is that they are extremely favorable to humans (and other animates). The association of experiencers with NOM and/or subject is quite common in I-E, although DAT, significantly, was more favorable to experiencers in earlier I-E languages than it became later. (Hence DAT > NOM or DAT/NOM variation with lexical conditioning occurs more widely and earlier in I-E than any of the other developments discussed here. There is plenty of precedent for the shift in "please", but usually not so faint-hearted). Sense verbs like "feel", "smell" and "taste" (and other verbs with those meanings in other I-E languages) have agentive/experiencer capability, e.g., "I smelled a flower" (cntr. "sniff" is more biased to agent subj); "I felt a flower" vs. "I felt a pain", etc. NOM is not strictly agentive in NOM/ACC languages; that is how they differ from ergative languages. (Ironically, Halliday playfully used "ergative" with respect to English for developing further intransitive uses of transitive verbs, e.g., "the newspaper sold quickly", rather than the reverse development, e.g., "they disappeared the subversive newspaper".) >.... I analyse the Experiencer of the impersonal 'methinks' >etc. as a subject, despite the object case. Lexical case marking to >subjects was retained because it was clearly distinct from the normal >(structural) case for subjects. I agree that this is a useful analysis. It shows the separation of "subject" from NOM as a case marker. I believe a similar analysis is sometimes proposed for German, where a dummy subject 'es' (3s neuter) is required for impersonal passives like "es wird gevochten" (it fight-PASS) "there's fighting going on" (more lit. "there's being fought") vs. "indirect" passives like ihm wird geholfen (him-DAT help-PASS) "he's being helped", where the need for a dummy SUBJECT is obviated by the preposed DAT filling the SUBJECT position. This suggests that "subject" analysis of preposed DAT in OE, as with verbs like 'deman', could have preceded the shift to NOM marking. (Of course, English did not develop the impersonal passive in the same way as German, and the emergent construction "there's [[fight]V-ing]N..." is involved with the distinctive and striking grammatical development of the English gerund.) Cynthia also notes: We still get impersonal uses like this >until the early 16thC, although less and less frequently. Then they are >reduced to fixed expressions like 'methink(s)'. So I assume that she fixes "please" with EXP/AGENTIVE subject at a period when "methinks" was already fixed as an expression. The loss of such expressions suggests that they were still analysed grammatically in some way which disfavored their later survival (e.g., as non-NOM "subjects"). I already noted how "like" holds on with EXP OBJECT well beyond the early 16th c. (Yes, "methinks" is not historically descended from surviving "think", but as a fixed expression it is quite equivalent to "I think", which can thus be viewed as replacing it.) >I'm afraid that I will have tried the patience of any histlingers who have >bothered to read this far and hereby declare my intention of ceasing to >repeat what I have already said in print-for the time being, at least! I am less defensive about running on, but I think that there is nothing for you to apologise for here. You are informing readers who are interested but not familiar with the facts and your views. It is appropriate to use HIST.LING in this way, just as the question about "I'm told" encourages. Thanks for your replies. -- Benji From Cindy.Allen at anu.edu.au Tue Aug 18 13:52:05 1998 From: Cindy.Allen at anu.edu.au (Cynthia Allen) Date: Tue, 18 Aug 1998 09:52:05 EDT Subject: I'm told In-Reply-To: Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Concerning my latest, comments, Benji Wald remarks: The only disappointment I had is >that she did not respond to my interest in the historical status of the XY >= Y FOR X construction, as in "cook me it" = "cook it for me". I mentioned >that I thought I had noted ME examples of the type "cook it me", but I >hadn't studied the problem closely enough to determine whether this remnant >of historical X-DAT Y-ACC case-marking and word order has become (or always >was) distinct from the type which has become "XY = Y TO X", e.g., "give me >it = give it to me". As far as I understand the literature, this is not an >issue. It is not singled out one way or another. So, I would assume that >analysts don't feel there is a basis to make a distinction between "X TO Y" >and "X FOR Y" in relation to "XY". But I would not take it for granted. >So I'm looking for explicit (dis)confirmation of that assumption. The >difference could be in the relation of the two prepositions to thematic >role (or whatever you want to call it) and/or in the degree of independence >of that role from any particular lexical verb. That remains a concern for >me, because of the level of comparison I want to make for syntactic >constructions associated with ACC case-marking in Eurafrasian languages. >The issue involves ACC and inevitably the ACC/NOM! relationship (and thus, >for the moment, excludes the ergative case-marking languages that confront >Eurafrasia). The objective is to explore whether the development of the ME >indirect passive was indeed more likely than not under the circumstances >(hence, what ARE the circumstances? cf. Semitic also develops NOM-marked >indirect passivisation), or whether the linguistic (as opposed to, say, >social) conditions were ever sufficient to favor this direction of change >over others. I'm afraid that I just don't have any useful information to impart about this sort of benefactive. In my study, I was concentrating on the new passives, and whether the traditional 'reanalysis' view was supported by the facts. I was focusing on examples with a recipient. I agree that separating the different semantic types would be worthwhile. > >>2. The first few true examples of 'he was given a book' are found later on >>in the 14thC. > >This shows an increasing association of NOM with "subject" -- in the case >of pronouns. It isprobably difficult to securely establish a priority >between this change and a shift of agreement for the passivised verb when >the subject is a lexical NP and thus indistinguishable for "oblique" and >NOM. The issue is where "the boys was given a book" > "the boys WERE given >a book" fits in to "them was given a book" > "they were given a book". I >think NOM presupposes verb agreement, but unmarked preverbal NPs do not. >(I could anticipate attestation of "them were given books", but not "they >was..." in the relevant period.) It sounds from these comments as though Benji has accepted the tradional view that the new passives were caused by a reanalysis of a fronted dative as nominative-or at least that the dative was still fronted when change to nominative took place. I have tried to explain why I don't think that is the case. As far as I can see, there is absolutely no difficulty sorting out the timing of verbal agreement. I can only refer interested parties to chapter 9 of my book again. In response to my comment: >>...the reality seems to >>be that the Experiencer of *please* was always unambiguously the object >>except in this construction, where it starts showing up as a nominative >>subject in the early 16thC. ...No ambiguity-driven syntactic reanalysis >>can have been >>involved for two reasons (1) the 'reanalysis' takes place much too late and >>(2) there was no model for a syntactic reanalysis; i.e. sentences like 'the >>king will do as the king pleases' are not found until 'the king will do as >>he pleases' are also found; before this, 'the king will do as it pleases >>the king (or him)' is the only possibility. > >There's a misunderstanding here. The reanalysis is not too late, given >that we are dealing with lexical diffusion of DAT > SUBJ for experiencers, >and the OED (Onions, I guess) notes the innovation in "please" as >corresponding to "like". It cites 1500 Dunbar (Northern) "your melody he >pleases [= likes] not til hear" (in modern spelling). The equivalent use >of "like" (current use) is cited as early as 1200, but the archaic >"inverted" use (from DAT of experiencer) continues as late as 1616 in Ben >Johnson: "if this play does not LIKE [= please], the Devil's in it" and >even *1784* in Cowper: "they...howl and war as LIKES [= pleases] them". > There's no misunderstanding on my part, as far as I can see. The 'reanalysis' is certainly too late to be lumped in with the cases where a preposed dative starts showing up as a nominative. My basic point was that this could not have been an ambiguity-driven reanalysis. As for what the OED says-it is true that I oversimplified matters by not mentioning the brief life of nominative experiencers with 'please' followed by an infinitive, but anyone looking at the sources that I referred Benji to will know that I discuss these. I also discuss why the OED is simply wrong about 'please'. The OED is a wonderful tool, but a necessary limitations of dictionaries, however good, is that they cannot give a really systematic account of the history of any lexeme because they cannot show how the lexeme is embedded in the grammatical system of the time. The OED is a terrific place to start a historical investigation in English, but a bad place to stop. I hope Benji will look at the evidence which I have presented concerning this matter. Concerning my comments on non-nominative subjects, Benji says: > >I agree that this is a useful analysis. It shows the separation of >"subject" from NOM as a case marker. I believe a similar analysis is >sometimes proposed for German, where a dummy subject 'es' (3s neuter) is >required for impersonal passives like "es wird gevochten" (it fight-PASS) >"there's fighting going on" (more lit. "there's being fought") vs. >"indirect" passives like ihm wird geholfen (him-DAT help-PASS) "he's being >helped", where the need for a dummy SUBJECT is obviated by the preposed DAT >filling the SUBJECT position. This suggests that "subject" analysis of >preposed DAT in OE, as with verbs like 'deman', could have preceded the >shift to NOM marking. (Of course, English did not develop the impersonal >passive in the same way as German, and the emergent construction "there's >[[fight]V-ing]N..." is involved with the distinctive and striking >grammatical development of the English gerund.) I am pleased that Benji and I agree in believing that case marking and grammatical relations must be kept separate. But I have to correct the comment about 'deem'. There has been no shift DAT>NOM here, because the 'deemer' (judger) was always nominative in OE. The judged thing, not the experiencer, was dative. Benji ends with: >I am less defensive about running on, but I think that there is nothing for >you to apologise for here. You are informing readers who are interested >but not familiar with the facts and your views. It is appropriate to use >HIST.LING in this way, just as the question about "I'm told" encourages. >Thanks for your replies. I'm happy that Benji has found the discussion useful, and I hope that others have too. But I think that we have different views of what a list like this is for. It is great for raising questions such as the one which sparked this discussion and for finding out where to go to read what has been published on the subject, or for getting information that is not in print. But I think that once someone has been directed to literature on a topic (such as the history of please) they ought to read it so they have all the evidence at their before making further comments on the subject. I'm afraid I just don't have time to rewrite my book and my articles on this list, and I feel like that's what I've been doing. If someone reads my arguments and wants to say why they don't find them convincing, that's a different matter and I'll be glad to respond. Cynthia Cynthia Allen Linguistics, Arts Faculty Australian National University Canberra, ACT 0200 Australia From mghiselin at casmail.calacademy.org Tue Aug 18 13:24:11 1998 From: mghiselin at casmail.calacademy.org (Ghiselin, Michael) Date: Tue, 18 Aug 1998 09:24:11 EDT Subject: Cladistic language concepts Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Dear Professor Hewson: Thank you for adding one more "vote" to what by now seems to be a consensus. Thank you also for the substantive contribution to the discussion. Usually when it is said that something is universal that means that it is true of everything of which its universality is asserted. Therefore if something is a universal for languages, it is true of all of them, with no exceptions. Such universality can be necessary, as when we say that all prime numbers are odd; but it can also be a matter of contingent fact, for example, all mammals have hair. It is true but things could be otherwise. Mutation is universal among genetic systems, and we know that it is necessary because were it not the second law of thermodynamics would be false. Genetic change also seems to be universal in all biological species, and probably for the same reasons that you give for languages. Although one can imagine situations in which there is virtual stasis for a long number of generations, it would seem that a certain amount of genetic drift is likewise inevitable. So the universality of change may be a law of nature, and not just a matter of contingent, historical fact. As a comparative anatomist I have no difficulty understanding what is meant by a system in the sense at least of a group of parts within a whole that interact with one another. The component organisms of a species and whatever the corresponding entity in a language may be, also interact in a coordinated manner. Therefore changing parts affects the wholes of which they are parts. But some parts are affected more than others because of the functional linkages among them. In metameric animals, the body consists of serially repeated units having the same basic arrangement of parts, developing under a common control system, and functioning in more or less the same way. (We are metameric, though it is much more obvious in arthropods.) A gene that affects one limb also affects all the others, at least to some degree. This can be seen in bassets, dachshounds and quite generally. Switching to philosophy, one interesting point about how you conceptualize the problem is that you conceive of languages as systems in this sense. They are concrete, particular things, with interactions among their parts, that evolve as such. One way to characterize such a position is to say that it takes the individuality of languages very seriously. It is very easy for somebody who treats a whole as if it were its parts viewed atomistically to overlook such deeper connections. That is part of the problem with those who want to think of languages as defined by mutual intelligibility. So you have really added something to the discussion, and again I am most grateful. Michael T. Ghiselin Center for the History and Philosophy of Science California Academy of Sciences Golden Gate Park San Francisco, California 94118 From mghiselin at casmail.calacademy.org Tue Aug 18 13:21:07 1998 From: mghiselin at casmail.calacademy.org (Ghiselin, Michael) Date: Tue, 18 Aug 1998 09:21:07 EDT Subject: Cladistic language concepts Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Dear Dr. DeLancey, Of course the fact that biological systematics had a long history before it became historical helps to explain a lot. Common descent as you say was recognized pretty much from the outset in linguistics, and although there were some precursors it was Darwin who first made that abundantly clear to biologists. As to the articulated framework we biologists have developed, with its levels of family, order, class, phylum, etc., all we have is the names! And the more we think about it the more we realize that the categories other than the species are subjective. So there is no yardstick in biology either, but we have been behaving as if there were such a yardstick. In my book, Metaphysics and the Origin of Species, I say that the main criteria for ranking at higher levels are ignorance, tradition, and bad metaphysics. I am an expert on the classification of gastropods, and I can see no way to make an order of snails equivalent to an order of insects. The entomologists I have spoken to about such matters seem to agree. Thanks again for the helpful comments. Michael Ghiselin Center for the History and Philosophy of Science California Academy of Sciences Golden Gate Park San Francisco, CA 94118 From bwald at HUMnet.UCLA.EDU Wed Aug 19 16:02:39 1998 From: bwald at HUMnet.UCLA.EDU (bwald) Date: Wed, 19 Aug 1998 12:02:39 EDT Subject: Cladistic language concepts Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- With regard to the cladistic discussion I hope it is worth me noting a point where linguists most generally agree that biological and linguistic evolution seem to be quite different, even to the extent that some linguists discourage use of the term "evolution" for linguistic changes which are matters of consensus in linguistic studies, such as the changes from Old to current English, or from Latin to the current Romance languages, among many other cases. (Excluded from consideration is the evolution of language from "pre-language", an issue which is not at all a matter of agreement among linguists, and which has only recently reentered serious linguistic discussion after a long period of banishment). It is in the matter of selectional pressures disfavoring certain lines of evolution and favoring others at certain times. It is a generally held principle of linguists that all languages as systems are equal to all other languages as communicative systems, and that, with the exception of auxiliary languages (not a speaker's first language, maybe nobody's first language, e.g., in the case of pidgins), change does not make a language more suitable for survival as a communicative device. Linguists also do not have a notion of complexity that would presume that any language, as a total system, is more "complex" than any other language. The same can certainly not be said of biological entities (a separate point from the "survival" one). It seems that biological diversification is not motivated by survival; selection for survival operates on the diversification. The motivating factor seems to be changes in the entire bio-system, ultimately tied to physical (including chemical) changes in environment. No telling how far into the universe that ultimately leads. The closest analog for selection pressures in language seems to be social, and may involve the total replacement of one language by another, so that one language fails to survive, never because it could not adopt to the communicative demands put on it, but because it could not find a social niche to allow its continuation. Thus, many languages have disappeared without current trace (except for borrowings from them into surviving languages), and this continues to happen to surviving languages for socio-economic reasons. In general then, I think linguists could accept an analogy between instability and change in languages and life forms on the basis of not well understood interruptions in the continuity of systems as they are reproduced (in language through childhood and even later learning, in biology through changes in genetic coding), but do not find selectional pressures analogous in language and life forms. in particular, the following would not be found analogous by linguists. Ghiselin writes: > Mutation is universal among genetic systems, and we > know that it is necessary because were it not the second law > of thermodynamics would be false. If I understand the law referred to have to do with the "entropy" of systems, languages do not show recognisable signs of loss of systematic orderliness as they change. That follows from the consensus principle that languages are equally systematic at all stages of their evolution. At the same time, many, perhaps most, linguists believe that there are favored systems, so that one change in a system can favor a subsequent one. Genetic research probably suggests some analogies, but it is my impression that factors outside the system shared by a set of organisms are more frequently called upon in explaining the directions of biological change than in explaining the directions of linguistic change. Nevertheless, both linguists and biologists are concerned with internal constraints on possible directions of change, according to the principles by which the systems are organised. He continues: > the universality of change may be a law of nature, and not just > a matter of contingent, historical fact. Historical facts at the proper level of abstraction and "laws of nature" can be controversial as mutually exclusive philosophical alternatives. It is not clear that social change is either more or less arbitrary than linguistic change. Social change does seem to involve differences in the complexity of particular social systems, e.g., production of surplus and the rise of cities, technological change, etc. But, as I said, the linguistic systems that linguists usually investigate, i.e., grammatical systems, do not seem to vary in complexity. Subsystems of grammatical systems can indeed vary in complexity, but there seems to be a cross-linguistic balance of complexity when it comes to considering the interaction of sub-systems in the overall grammatical system of a language. Linguists do not agree on a basis to think otherwise. > Switching to philosophy, one interesting point about > how you conceptualize the problem is that you conceive of > languages as systems in this sense. They are concrete, > particular things, with interactions among their parts, that > evolve as such. One way to characterize such a position is > to say that it takes the individuality of languages very > seriously. In the same way that biologists find the concept of individual species useful, though the criteria for membership in a set differ from language to biological species. I think some respondents already discussed the commonality in terms of continuity (despite change) in successive members of a set. It is very easy for somebody who treats a whole > as if it were its parts viewed atomistically to overlook > such deeper connections. That is part of the problem with > those who want to think of languages as defined by mutual > intelligibility. Mutual intelligibility is an arbitrary criterion for membership in a particular language set from a historical linguistic point of view, as you have been informed. Continuity is the criterion used. There is the level of species in biology at which a criterial discontinuity can be posited on the basis of ability to reproduce (cross-fertilise). That seems to be a cleaner cut-off point than where mutual intelligibility decays. Still, even on this list, we had recent discussion of the possibility that mutual intelligibility allows change to spread from one variety of a language to another, but that lack of mutual intelligibility blocks it. That seems quite logical, and could be construed as analogous to cross-fertilisation. Its only weak point is that changes can spread across mutually unintelligible languages through the agency of intervening bilingualism, probably most often communal rather than isolated individuals. That ends the analogy between mutual intelligibility and cross-fertilisation with respect to continuity in evolution. From bwald at HUMnet.UCLA.EDU Wed Aug 19 16:02:07 1998 From: bwald at HUMnet.UCLA.EDU (bwald) Date: Wed, 19 Aug 1998 12:02:07 EDT Subject: I'm told Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Again I am indebted to Cindy for her further comments. At this point, my responses to her latest comments are simply to explain the reasons for my interest -- without asking for or expecting further comment by Cindy. >It sounds from these comments as though Benji has accepted the tradional >view that the new passives were caused by a reanalysis of a fronted dative >as nominative-or at least that the dative was still fronted when change to >nominative took place. The view strikes me as having some plausibility as a favoring factor (the preposed position of the DAT in a "subject" position). I do not take for granted that it is the only favoring factor. I perceive that Cindy comes from the view that a stronger hypothesis identifying a SINGLE factor as *decisive* in precipitating a change is the most useful one, because of its maximised vulnerability to disconfirmation. I see the point of this approach, but I find myself less capable of committing to such a strong hypothesis on the basis of what I know (and may not know). In short, for me it's not (yet) a matter of EITHER-OR (but NOT both -- or neither?). Of course, the issue is growing association of NOM with the grammatical category called "subject", rather than directly with a set of semantic roles. She finishes this comment with: I have tried to explain why I don't think that is >the case. As far as I can see, there is absolutely no difficulty sorting >out the timing of verbal agreement. I can only refer interested parties to >chapter 9 of my book again. That's sufficient for me. I want to see if number agreement precedes DAT > NOM. I think there are some similar phenomena with number agreement in Attic (Classical Greek) impersonal constructions (DAT allows number agreement but the gender of the verbal noun remains neuter). I wonder if at one time in OE > ME, NOM was a sufficient but not necessary condition for verb agreement toward the development of the indirect passive. I will certainly consult Chapter 9 of Cindy's book. Later with regard to IO > SBJ (= ACC/DAT > NOM w pronouns) for the verb "please" in early Modern English (or whatever you call it), Cindy comments: >The 'reanalysis' is certainly too late to be lumped in with the cases where a >preposed dative starts showing up as a nominative. My basic point was that >this could not have been an ambiguity-driven reanalysis. By lexical diffusion of the process I allow it to continue over a long period of time, jumping from one verb to another, which is necessarily later to receive it. I separate this from the fact that, as Cindy says, there is an early period when the process is very common and is supposed to be indicative of the 'reanalysis' shifts taking place in case-marking and subject position. I did not respond to her basic point about ambiguity-driven reanalysis, because I was not attracted to such a superficial hypothesis in the first place. Again, in my view, ambiguity could have been a factor favoring the change, but it seems like a minor and hardly decisive factor in view of the other factors that have been proposed -- by Cindy no less than by others. >As for what the OED says-it is true that I oversimplified matters by not >mentioning the brief life of nominative experiencers with 'please' followed >by an infinitive, but anyone looking at the sources that I referred Benji >to will know that I discuss these. I hope to read this article soon, though I consider what I said about "please" a minor point in the larger scheme of things. I mainly meant to suggest that certain lexico-grammatical processes involving verbs have continued to operate over a long period of time, maybe showing that their energy (or impetus) is not spent as quickly as grammatical changes which encourage them. Her comments on the OED are well-taken: >I also discuss why the OED is simply >wrong about 'please'. The OED is a wonderful tool, but a necessary >limitations of dictionaries, however good, is that they cannot give a >really systematic account of the history of any lexeme because they cannot >show how the lexeme is embedded in the grammatical system of the time. That is quite true. There are, of course, problems in its (traditional) classifications and its dependence on texts for dating. It's the problems in the traditional classifications it uses and its necessary economy in selecting grammatical contexts that prevents its examples from providing sufficient information about their embedding in a grammatical system at any point in time. They merely cover a few contexts that any analysis does well to consider, and suggest things that must be checked out by more detailed information than the OED or any other dictionary will ever offer -- because dictionaries are not detailed grammatical descriptions. She continues: The >OED is a terrific place to start a historical investigation in English, but >a bad place to stop. I hope Benji will look at the evidence which I have >presented concerning this matter. I agree whole-heartedly. Since I am not a specialist in the textual history of English, I rely on scholars like Cindy to tell me what I want to know, or to introduce me to a new hypothesis. She notes: >I am pleased that Benji and I agree in believing that case marking and >grammatical relations must be kept separate. But I have to correct the >comment about 'deem'. There has been no shift DAT>NOM here, because the >'deemer' (judger) was always nominative in OE. The judged thing, not the >experiencer, was dative. Right. I was too superficial in grouping 'deem' with the others. 'deem' is about the indirect passive as impersonal passive, i.e., DAT> NOM in that context. I think 'deem' is like 'help', where it wouldn't occur to English speakers today to consider the object of 'help' a "recipient" rather than a "direct object" -- since there' s no prepositional equivalent to the unmarked object, e.g., I helped (*to/for) him. Nevertheless, the pattern for a verb like 'help' in many older I-E languages is to mark this object as DAT, as if the verb were equivalent to English 'give-help', in which case a preposition occurs as expected in English, since the NP 'help' evidently fills the "object position" (as if a "theme" ACC were a "cognate accusative", e.g., we gave/*helped help *(to) them = we gave/*helped (?to) them help.) 'deem' presumably meant something like 'make/pass-judgment-on', where 'on' has somehow come to express the earlier DAT role in this context. Again, it does not seem to be simply an arbitrary lexical matter in the relevant time period, but motivated by the roles covered by DAT. I could expect disagreement here, since Cindy could insist that the change involved grammatical categories only, and that semantic roles are not directly relevant. Cindy ends with an interesting comment, which I can appreciate for its principles. >I think that we have different views of what a list >like this is for. It is great for raising questions such as the one which >sparked this discussion and for finding out where to go to read what has >been published on the subject, or for getting information that is not in >print. But I think that once someone has been directed to literature on a >topic (such as the history of please) they ought to read it so they have >all the evidence at their before making further comments on the subject. I think it is OK to negotiate that with any particular user of the list, because both time and interest are legitimate factors that might work at cross-purposes in the real world. The things I say on the list are usually and admittedly off the top of my head. However, in the case of the indirect passive I found myself motivated to check some older standard references that I had readily on hand. One question leads to another. (In fact, one of my ultimate interests in this topic has to do with how facts about other languages might improve my understanding of the various ways in which the Bantu passive has evolved, and my ability to reconstruct those paths of change.) As I said, it is negotiable whether a subscriber wants to stop at recommending relevant literature or not, and all choices are acceptable. However, maybe I should say that I would not go so far as to take for granted discussing ON THE LIST with any authors detailed points of their articles -- except if a review were expected by the list (this list doesn't do that, and I'm not volunteering). That, I think, is more formal than what this list is designed for, and what it is currently expected to accomplish. By the same token, for example, the ling.list has even experimented with conferences (I have not participated), but this list has not, and does not currently have the person-power to organise such an event. In any case, I appreciate that Cindy was willing to take her comments as far as she did. She concludes: >If someone reads >my arguments and wants to say why they don't find them convincing, that's a >different matter and I'll be glad to respond. That's a gracious invitation. As I said, I would first be inclined to contact Cindy off-list (or any author who invites me to read their work). That might simply be because I don't initiate discussions on the list, but respond to the ones that attract my interest. That way I know I'm not the only one who's interested. I treat the list something like a newspaper (since it approaches "daily" change). Topics generally don't go as deep or last as long as the specialised interests of any reader, but there's a lot of suggestive information for specialised concerns to pursue, and discussion sometimes goes in unexpected directions. (I, for one, did not expect to have some of the ideas I now have when I first started reading the "I'm told" discussion.) Thanks again to Cindy, and I will continue to value her expertise as a resource both in print and e-mail. -- Benji From m.cysouw at let.kun.nl Thu Aug 20 14:48:16 1998 From: m.cysouw at let.kun.nl (Michael Cysouw) Date: Thu, 20 Aug 1998 10:48:16 EDT Subject: Cladistic language concepts In-Reply-To: Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Continuing this thread, let me add some general thoughts on the comparison languages-species. A central point in this comparison is what is concieved as an 'individual' (or 'unit' if you don't like to anthropomorphize). In linguistics there are two basic views on language around: either the *speaker* is seen as a unit/individual, or a *language* is seen as a unit/individual. Depending on which stance you take, you'll get differing analogies to biological concepts. IMO, a far most interesting viewpoint on language is to view each individually uttered morpheme as a unit/individual. Before expanding on this stance let me stress that all three ways of looking are useful for certain insights, useless for others. This stance though is particularly apt for a biology-linguistics analogy. Imagine that each individual morpheme uttered is 'born' at the speaker and 'dies' an entropic death in the air, hoping in time to have reached a hearer to eventually propagate in his brain. What we normally in linguistics call a morpheme, is in this view seen as a species: a coherent group of individuals/units. A morpheme 'tree' is nothing more than the set of all individual utterences of it. A *language*, a set of interconnected morphemes, then becomes analogous to a biological *ecosystem*, bound to a certain expend by its natural surrounding: the social structures. This view makes it possible to see language change analogous to selection. e.g. bwald wrote that social pressure can only work on *whole* languages. But if a language is seen an ecosystem, then social selection pressure works only on parts of a language. bwald wrote: >The closest analog for selection >pressures in language seems to be social, and may involve the total >replacement of one language by another, so that one language fails to >survive, never because it could not adopt to the communicative demands put >on it, but because it could not find a social niche to allow its >continuation. If we want to make the analogy between biology and linguistics (which I think is very insightful), we might be looking at the wrong place by comparing *language* with *species*. Rethinking *language* as *ecosystem* seems much more promising. bye michael cysouw university of nijmegen, holland From bwald at HUMnet.UCLA.EDU Fri Aug 21 13:00:38 1998 From: bwald at HUMnet.UCLA.EDU (bwald) Date: Fri, 21 Aug 1998 09:00:38 EDT Subject: Cladistic language concepts Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- A brief (really!) comment on Michael Cysouw's passage: >bwald wrote that social pressure can only work on *whole* languages. No, that's not what I meant to be understood when I wrote: >>The closest analog for selection >>pressures in language seems to be social, and may involve the total >>replacement of one language by another, so that one language fails to >>survive, never because it could not adopt to the communicative demands put >>on it, but because it could not find a social niche to allow its >>continuation. That's why I used "may" for the verb of the second clause. I think that historical linguists view languages as collective units (not individual units for each single speaker), and are concerned with change and continuity in the succession of speakers who learn that collective unit over time. As long as any and all languages are viewed this way, then I think that any and all changes have a social motivation. The least that can be said about the social motivation is that it determines why the change occurs and is spread at a particular point in time rather than at some other point -- or never (in which case it fails to be a change, but perhaps just the idiosyncrasy of some speaker or a number of speakers who never meet or communicate with each other and will take their innovation to their graves with them). Some studies suggest that social motivation for change can be much more powerful in some cases, so I have only indicated what I think is minimally true about the role of social motivation for linguistic change. That understood, it simply occurred to me that language shift-and-death is the simplest and clearest analog for environmental conditioning on the SURVIVAL of life forms. Again, I think that the SURVIVAL of ALL linguistic changes (in the technical sense of linguistic change I gave above, and which I think is a consensus understanding of linguistic change) depends on social conditions (from the beginning of the change to its end, whether that takes days or millenia or any amount of time in between). From mghiselin at casmail.calacademy.org Mon Aug 24 21:08:56 1998 From: mghiselin at casmail.calacademy.org (Ghiselin, Michael) Date: Mon, 24 Aug 1998 17:08:56 EDT Subject: Cladistic language concepts Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Strong endorsements of cladistic language concepts keep coming in and I only wonder if somebody somewhere disagrees with them. Your comments raise some further questions about the putative analogies and disanalogues between linguistic and organic evolution. There have been in fact some heroic but not very effectual efforts on the part of biologists to measure complexity, and that makes me think that there is not much difference. One team of scientists attempted to decide whether bivalves or gastropods are the more complex by counting the number of words in glossaries! That probably means only that clams are a bit harder to talk about. Surely there are adaptive changes in language through time, at least in the sense of coinages and borrowings when there are new conditions of existence. The advent of new modes of transportation obviously evokes a needed vocabulary. That of course is a change within a language rather than competitive displacement. When there are just two species in perfect competition one will drive the other out, and the same would probably happen with languages. But that results from an unstable equilibrium, and which wins out can be due to a very minor difference. I would argue that the same kind of entropy exists with respect to languages, and that if they do maintain their organization it is due to something counteracting the tendency to decay. Consider the vocabulary as it gets passed from parent to child. The probability that every single word will get transmitted has to be somewhat less than one. But as everybody knows, children and adults alike coin words when they need them. Continuity does seem to me the basic criterion as you say, and discontinuity blocks it. That seems to be fundamental to the outlook of populational and cladistic thinking. What you say about the role of bilingual persons is very interesting when one tries to find biological analogies. A cell is often part of more than one organ system, but I cannot think of any that are part of more than one organism, although they can move from one organism to another. Organisms are never part of more than one species, but they can be part of more than one club or other organization. A bilingual person may be said to participate in more than one language, though I suppose nobody considers such a person a part of either. The person's idiolect is supposedly a part of a language, so the person would have more than one idiolect. But transfer from one idiolect to another within the same person and hence across languages, would not imply that there was just one idiolect or just one language. The situation is rather like what we encounter when a certain amount of gene flow occurs between populations through hybridization. But only partly. To get something like a bilingual person we would need organisms with two independent genetic systems that can coexist and get transmitted separately. I can imagine that, but to my knowledge there is no such thing in nature. MG From bwald at HUMnet.UCLA.EDU Wed Aug 26 12:32:03 1998 From: bwald at HUMnet.UCLA.EDU (bwald) Date: Wed, 26 Aug 1998 08:32:03 EDT Subject: Cladistic language concepts Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Michael Ghiselin writes: > Surely there are adaptive changes in language through > time, at least in the sense of coinages and borrowings when > there are new conditions of existence. The advent of new > modes of transportation obviously evokes a needed > vocabulary. Linguists do not differentiate languages for complexity on the basis of such things as how many names they have different kinds of machines (or snow, cattle, etc.) because size of vocabulary is not seen as an *inherent* property of the SYSTEM of any particular language. More could be said about this, including some problems, but linguists consider vocabulary size a trivial basis for comparing the complexity of languages, and tend to consider change in vocabulary (as it reflects change in what's recognised, referred to and talked about) as a trivial kind of change. Certainly such things are not trivial as reflections of change in the social environment in which the affected language is used, but they are trivial in terms of the notions of linguistic system that linguists have and continue to focus on. Anyway, it is totally unclear what the biological analogue of a "word" (or "lexical item" or "vocabulary") is. He continues: > I would argue that the same kind of entropy exists with > respect to languages, and that if they do maintain their > organization it is due to something counteracting the > tendency to decay. Consider the vocabulary as it gets > passed from parent to child. The probability that every > single word will get transmitted has to be somewhat less > than one. But as everybody knows, children and adults alike > coin words when they need them. I don't know about the entropy notion in this context, but linguists are indeed impressed by the existence of processes in all languages which allow users to coin new words. The processes vary from one language to another, but all languages have them and can use them equally successfully (as far as we can tell). Total continuity of vocabulary is not important. Productive/creative processes equal to the task of conveying and recognising "meaning" is what impresses linguists about linguistic systems, and where they can't find one language more complex than another, or more adept in some other way. Next, > A cell is often part of more than one organ > system, but I cannot think of any that are part of more than > one organism, although they can move from one organism to > another. Now definition of an "organism" might matter. Siamese twins of various degrees of severity comes to mind. If the "sharing" is slight, e.g., a non-vital limb (if that happens) one might be inclined to recognise TWO organisms which have partially melded by chance. It might be cultural for us to imagine that "a" person with two heads would have to be "two" people with "one" body. "twin" implies and is etymologically related to "two" (in English), but the concept of "organism" belongs to a more specialised expert system. Organisms are never part of more than one species, > but they can be part of more than one club or other > organization. Although I used "species" as analogous to "historically continuous language" (as implied by such linguistic terminology as GENETIC relationship), there are other viewpoints. On some level, the universalists -- linguists who are more impressed by what languages have in common (whatever that is) than how they differ -- might argue that ALL languages belong to the same "species", a species ultimately determined by the human species, and esp certain neurological structures in the brain enabling language and, according to innatists, unique to the human species. A bilingual person may be said to participate > in more than one language, though I suppose nobody considers > such a person a part of either. No. That's a social issue. Bilinguals can be parts of either or both languages, depending on the social circumstances. They are not necessarily recognisable as bilinguals when they spread particular changes which have germinated in their communities to monolingual communities. > The person's idiolect is > supposedly a part of a language, so the person would have > more than one idiolect. Idiolect is a tricky word. If it means the totality of an individual's repertory, then monolinguals and bilinguals cannot be distinguished in this way. If it means anything else, monolinguals and bilinguals will both still have more than one, because we can observe that people change the way they talk depending on the circumstances. Everyone is no doubt unique in the complete details of their repertory. Idiolect is not a user-friendly term for historical linguists; it obscures what it means for a "language" to "change", since it is associated with the individual, and the individual can only be recognised for "change" by comparison with other individuals. Generally, the "language" consists of what a socially (yes!) coherent group of "idiolects" HAVE IN COMMON at some point in time. That is never uniform over what is called a (particular) "language", so "language" is always somewhat variable and abstract at any point in time. Nevertheless, whatever they have in common (to the extent that they ALL do) can and does ALSO change from one period of time to another. Therefore, it is not vacuous to abstract the "language" from the overlap of "idiolects", despite the problem of irreducible variation, and still speak of change in successive collections of "idiolects". (I don't have much use for the term "idiolect", but many linguists accept the concept/s for whatever reasons they have, so I'm not challenging it here.) > But transfer from one idiolect to > another within the same person and hence across languages, > would not imply that there was just one idiolect or just one > language. I already made a comment about "idiolect" above. For the above passage I would also point out the concept "transfer". That is indeed the usual word used for the process by which features are recognised to have originated in one language and come into some varieties of another, and it is also often associated with what individual bilinguals do. However, we recognise transfer from a comparison of different speakers of the "same" language (for one or both of the languages involved), and it is most often the case that the bilingual is not aware of doing "transfer", but only of applying the same strategy (whatever it is) to both languages. If all languages are the "same" at some level (the universalist hypothesis), then "transfer" simply consists of failing to distinguish what is true of all (or at least the relevant) languages from what is specific to some particular languages. We say analytically that A is transferring something from language X to language Y, but the doer is often unaware that there is any difference between X and Y TO BEGIN WITH. (Bilingualism can be more complicated than this, but this seems sufficient than now.) > The situation is rather like what we encounter when a > certain amount of gene flow occurs between populations > through hybridization. But only partly. To get something > like a bilingual person we would need organisms with two > independent genetic systems that can coexist and get > transmitted separately. I can imagine that, but to my > knowledge there is no such thing in nature. Again, it may be useful to compare languages with species, but then again maybe it's not. Maybe the best analogy is between languages and sub-species/genera or whatever of a single species. Maybe languages differ from each other only like, say, different dogs (which vary anatomically much more than different people), but not like dogs and paramecia, or perhaps even dogs, bears and seals, etc. From jhewson at morgan.ucs.mun.ca Wed Aug 26 12:33:35 1998 From: jhewson at morgan.ucs.mun.ca (John Hewson) Date: Wed, 26 Aug 1998 08:33:35 EDT Subject: Cladistic language concepts In-Reply-To: <9807249039.AA903989700@casmail.calacademy.org> Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- It seems to me that an amphibian would be a biological parallel to a bilingual: an organism adapted to two different ecologies. Entropy is also to be seen in language in the form of phonetic erosion. French words, for example, normally retain only the stressed syllables of their Latin forbears. Latin Augustum becomes Fr. aout, pronounced [u]. If the initial syllable had a secondary stress, that would give a disyllabic word; Late L. dia-domenica (the Lord's day) became Fr. dimanche, six syllables to two. One way of countering this process was to use forms with a diminutive suffix: instead of L. aurem (ear), auriculam to give Fr. oreille, instead of L. apem (bee), apiculam to give Fr. abeille, thus adding to the phonic material of the word. The term negentropy was coined I think by Stephen Black in his very interesting 1969 book _Body and Mind_. His idea was that the energies of the universe, flowing into ultimate entropy, are harnessed for creative and meaningful purposes in much the same way as we harness rivers to create electricity. In his view all information is negentropic, his favourite example being a key, that fits a lock and opens a door (often replaced now with a card with computerized information on it). He consequently conceived of all biological info such as DNA as negentropic. Alongside the entropic forms of linguistic change we can also see the negentropic forms, which have at times raised passionate arguments as to how far linguistic change may be considered telic or purposeful. JH John Hewson, FRSC tel: (709)737-8131 University Research Professor fax: (709)737-4000 Memorial University of Newfoundland St. John's NF, CANADA A1B 3X9 From mghiselin at casmail.calacademy.org Mon Aug 31 22:24:56 1998 From: mghiselin at casmail.calacademy.org (Ghiselin, Michael) Date: Mon, 31 Aug 1998 18:24:56 EDT Subject: Cladistic language concepts Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Thanks for your very thoughtful commentary. What you say points out the fact that when we start asking what some of these fundamental units are, they become increasingly problematic; and when we try to compare across kinds of systems the parallels are evident, but they too are problematic. The problems of what a species is and of what a language is are not unusual. Indeed I would be surprised to find a theoretical term in any science that is not hard to define in a way that pleases all the practitioners. Small wonder then, that we cannot easily find exact parallels between the fundamental units of interest to linguists and to biologists. We can say that there are phonemes, words etc., and we can say that there are nucleotide pairs ..., but what we are looking at is hierarchical structure without exact functional correspondence. Geneticists do not agree as to what a gene is, though they work with them and talk about them all the time. One point that I still would like clarified is the relationship between the speaker of the language and the language itself. The speaker is a part of a language community and the vocabulary, grammar etc. are parts of the language. The speakers may be said to know, understand, speak, participate in, etc. the language. But we usually do not call them parts of the language. There are a whole range of related problems with respect to culture in general. The way Tylor defined "culture" it includes concrete artifacts. There must be an extensive literature on such issues. But such material as I have read (including the 1952 review by Kroeber and Kluckhohn) does not really face up to the ontological issues. MG From jhewson at morgan.ucs.mun.ca Sat Aug 1 19:25:25 1998 From: jhewson at morgan.ucs.mun.ca (John Hewson) Date: Sat, 1 Aug 1998 15:25:25 EDT Subject: Dative Pronouns In-Reply-To: <199807201344.OAA24335@nessie.mcc.ac.uk> Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- On Mon, 20 Jul 1998, Richard Hogg wrote: > Also of possible interest is the English phenomenon called "pronoun > exchange" by the late Ossi Ihalainen, which gives sentences such as: > Her (SUBJ) told I (OBJ) > Such forms are traceable throughout western England and in a few > varieties living forms remain even in this decade. See Ihalainen in > Cambridge History Vol. 5 pp.230-1, together with a number of his > articles on Somerset and West Country dialect. As Ihalainen points > out, it is probable that "you" is the descendant of the old > accusative/dative pronoun, which replaced nominative "ye" under > complex circumstances. In the regional dialects of Britain there is a good deal of free variation in the use of subject pronouns: one frequently hears "us" as a subject form, for example. Ihailen, as may be seen in the Cambridge History volume reference above, was clearly not aware, however, that subject pronouns "I, he, she", etc, are only used in direct object position when the D.O. is stressed, so that there is a minimal pair 1. He SEES me 2. He sees I where the object pronoun in (1) is unaccentuated, while that in (2) is stressed. It is common to hear speakers switching back and forth between the stressed and the unstressed versions. 3. He sees I, and I sees HE, and I says to 'un... Here 'un is a direct descendant of OE masc. sg. acc. "hine", which became generalized for both acc. and dative usage in Wessex. Where the verb is stressed, one would normally get, consequently 4. I SEES 'un This use of the stressed and unstressed forms of nominatives for two different functions would seem to stem from the need to replace a clitic, for expressive purposes, by a disjunctive pronominal form that can be stressed. We can see such usage leading to split paradigms in Romance 5. French MOI, TOI, LUI (stressed) vs. me, te, le What is of interest here is the development of the LUI vs. le pair, where "le" is from Latin acc. illu(m), and "lui" from dat. illi by analogy with L. cui "to whom". The form "lui" is now singular dative for both genders, and is also used as a stressed direct object (replacing or reinforcing clitic "le"). The stressed paradigm (MOI, TOI, LUI, etc) has taken on a quasi nominal function ("Le moi est haissible"), so that LUI can, for expressive purposes, be used as a subject, when the subject needs to be stressed. 6. LUI est parti hier HE left yesterday Il est parti hier He left yesterday The LUI used here is in origin a dative form used as a nominative, but only in exceptional circumstances, since subject is not the normal function of such a form; LUI is the pronominal form that is required after prepositions: avec moi, pour toi, de lui, etc., since the clitic forms (me, te, se, le) can only be used with verbs, never with prepositions. What we are looking at is a pronoun with quasi nominal function, that like all other French nouns, can be used as either subject or object of the verb, but only in the third person (MOI, TOI cannot be used as subjects without their corresponding clitics je, tu). Since there are often different personal pronouns with different functions, one has to be careful to go beyond the data of surface usage in the search for a dative form that has been transformed into a nominative. I think as well that the use of YOU as both subject and object form is a simple case of levelling, rather than the development of a dative/ accusative form into a nominative. YOU, in acquiring nominative function, has not ceased to be used as a dative/ accusative. John Hewson, FRSC tel: (709)737-8131 University Research Professor fax: (709)737-4000 Memorial University of Newfoundland St. John's NF, CANADA A1B 3X9 From bwald at HUMnet.UCLA.EDU Sat Aug 1 19:27:14 1998 From: bwald at HUMnet.UCLA.EDU (bwald) Date: Sat, 1 Aug 1998 15:27:14 EDT Subject: your mail Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Isidore Dyen writes with respect to such constructions as "workaholic": >I think that it might be important to add to the discussion that these >forms are artificialloy constructed and in that respect fall in with words >like AIDS or is it AIDs and CIA and G-man and the gamut that have >sprung up in at least a partial connection with writing and thus >differ from the types of analogical phenomena that appear in comparative >studies. I think ID raises a very interesting issue, but one which is more problematic than he suggests. To begin with, he no less than any other reader recognises that the examples he has given above are different from any of the examples we had been previously discussing, in that his examples make reference in one way or another to spelling. That is not true of the examples, call them "condensed compounds" for the moment, that we have been discussing. Nevertheless, an interesting *burden of proof* issue arises between those like ID who suggest that the types of condensations that give rise to "workaholic" and other examples -- indeed what ARE other examples and what are NOT? -- can only arise from some kind of literate perception of the condensed words (this is certainly NOT obvious), and those like me, who might say: PROVE IT! or at least, WHAT MAKES YOU THINK SO? For example, take "workaholic". ID's idea seems to be that the -aholic is abstracted by some literate means. I can't really follow this, and even the variation in spelling of the unstressed vowel *a*holic vs. (alc)*o*holic seems to argue against this. But I don't insist this is a strong argument against his assumption. A stronger argument against, I think, has to do with such diminutive derivatives as "alkie" for "alcoholic" (= a person who drinks too much), which, without any hint of literacy, abstracts, "back-clips" (thanks, Jim Rader and Hans Marchand) or "stumps" the first "syllable", leaving -oholic free by implication. OK. Why do I say -oholic is free by implication? Well, I haven't totally thought this through, but I think the stumping technique and its residual can be compared to the Romance (and more generally learned) stratum in English where speakers, whether literate or not, can generally perceive multi-morpheme combinations that recombine, but do not have the slightest idea what the constituent morphemes "mean" -- and indeed that poses a problem for us linguists to decide how to deal with them, cf. defect, perfect (say the verb), effect, detain, pertain, retain, etc etc. Again, I think people are quite clear about the constituent parts but quite unclear (and unconcerned) about their meanings in a great many Romance formations in English. (malaprops also show perception of constituent parts of Romance formations, e.g., defuse for diffuse, prevert for pervert, or whatever ones actually occur). Thus, such Romance forms provide a precedent (if that's historically relevant) to splitting things like "alcoholic" into constituents morphemes "alc+oholic". In fact, the latter are much more motivated than the Romance forms, since "alkie" gives the "alcohol content" of the alc-, and leaves -oholic for "addict", etc. I agree with ID that many forms like "workaholic" might have been coined by literate users for literate purposes (cf. the journalese proliferation of "-gate" forms for political scandals), but not that the technique presupposes literacy and could not happen/start without literacy. "cheeseburger" might be quite different from "workaholic", in that "burger" alone "fore-clips" "hamburger". No literacy seems necessary, certainly no more than in "gator" for "alligator" (cf. "gatorade", wherever that came from -- Florida? And NB "telephone" > "phone" does not presuppose the morphological independence of "tele", why not also for "microphone", "megaphone" and what-not, whoops "phone" also means "allophone" in one obscure jargon.) Thus, "cheeseburger" seems to be simply a convenience for "cheese hamburger", and not as complex as "workaholic" in its origin. All of this, of course, depends somewhat on whether "burger" as an independent word came into existence BEFORE OR AFTER "hamburger" (something we may never know, though it might seem almost within our reach to know, ESP, and NOTE THIS, if the origins of the two were ORAL, and their order of written appearance is relatively close -- as is probable -- and arbitrary. In fact, except for "dialect representation", we might expect "burger", like "gator", to be suppressed in written language until it had spread quite widely, leaving doubt about its true chronological relationship to the emergence of "cheeseburger" and the rest of the (-)burger family. EG one abridged 1994 dictionary gives "cheeseburger" from 1938 but does not acknowledge "burger" EXCEPT as a combined = dependent form, ignoring that "burger" has been short for "hamburger" to my ears for I-don't-know-how-long, many decades at least. Surprisingly, this dictionary, despite its intentional incompleteness, does list "gator" from 1844, no initial apostrophe or hyphen.) A final comment on this matter, which may be relevant to the "literacy" issue, but I'm not sure how, is that "workaholic" and many such structures have a certain humor or cleverness about them that suggests conscious manipulation. That in itself does not suggest literacy to me. But it contrasts the technique with the stump compound, which seems to be most often just a convenience which reduces or *abbreviates* -- something also done by such uncontroversially literate techniques as those which produce AIDS (acronyms) or CIA, LA etc.(crude initial abbreviations), without any humor and, in fact, often with a *bureaucratic tediousness* about them (but there is something humourous to me, at least, in referring to people by the initials of their names, e.g., BW and ID etc etc, so immediate context is important too -- similarly, humour or cleverness was a feature of many acronyms in 1960s-80s political discourse, cf. NOW!, and a crude kind of rhyming humour in things like "high fi" and "sci fi", the long vowel of "fi" in both cases also depending on spelling). But, in general, stump compounds and the spelling-reference types are relatively boring, convenient for users and opaque to non-users. Not so for either the "workaholic" or "cheeseburger" type (with regard to opacity), or for the "monokini" and "glitterati" types (with respect to specialised humour) about which more could be said. It may be that ID is confusing ALL (or TOO MANY) condensation techniques involving multi-word expressions with those which have a transparent literate base, though I find it hard to believe that he might have no more basis for his claim. As I said above, if he has more of a basis, WHAT IS IT? In a separate matter, ID replied to my comments on GG (or UG) and historical ling with: >How about contemplating whether language change is inevitable. If it is >not, theren should be some stable languages somewhere, If it is, then it >must be inherent in all languages and thus a universal. To which Jan Terje Faarlund replied: >..Change in itself cannot be part of >the system. The only interesting connection between universals and change >is the fact that no change can lead to a result which violates UG. I had been tempted to respond in a similar way, but I thought that ID was writing this tongue-in-cheek, and also that he might escape by insisting that "universal" does not necessarily mean "linguistic universal", since he might deny, like many, that there are specific linguistic universals unrelated to some more general cognitive or whatever universals, and that "change" is one of them ("linguistic change" being part of "change", as Faarlund observed with regard to social and biological change, i.e., life and death, in his longer reply). In view of this, I would agree with Faarlund's use of "interesting" in the above passage as keeping comments about LINGUISTIC change *on track*, but experience suggests to me that ID would object to the adjective and say that "interesting" is not an argument but an expression of taste. I'll leave it at that. From bwald at HUMnet.UCLA.EDU Sat Aug 1 19:27:37 1998 From: bwald at HUMnet.UCLA.EDU (bwald) Date: Sat, 1 Aug 1998 15:27:37 EDT Subject: burger, 'burger, -burger Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- In my last message I wrote at a certain point: >... All of this, of course, depends somewhat on whether "burger" as an >independent word came >into existence BEFORE OR AFTER "hamburger" That was a mistake. I meant "cheeseburger", not "hamburger", as in the parenthetical expansion that followed the above: >(something we may never know, though it might seem almost within our reach >to know, ESP, and NOTE THIS, if the origins of the two were ORAL, and >their order of written appearance is relatively close -- as is probable -- >and arbitrary. In fact, except for "dialect representation", we might >expect "burger", like "gator", to be suppressed in written language until >it had spread quite widely, leaving doubt about its true chronological >relationship to the emergence of "cheeseburger" and the rest of the >(-)burger family. EG one abridged 1994 dictionary gives "cheeseburger" >from 1938 but does not acknowledge "burger" EXCEPT as a combined = >dependent form, ignoring that "burger" has been short for "hamburger" to >my ears for I-don't-know-how-long, many decades at least. Surprisingly, >this dictionary, despite its >intentional incompleteness, does list >"gator" from 1844, no initial apostrophe or hyphen.) "hamburger" itself is dated back to 1884 by the dictionary, early enough to assume it is actually quite a bit older than "cheeseburger", even in speech (but the latter depends crucially on the emergence of the practice it describes; was there ever a commonly used expression "cheese hamburger"?). Thus, if "cheeseburger" is really older than "burger" for "hamburger", "hamburger" went unclipped for quite a long time (since no other clipping is reported). "frank" (1904) for "frankfurter" (1894) shows a different clipping technique (not to mention "hot dog" (1900), cf. the recent "corn dog"), but its relatively rapid condensation still leads to questions about either how people resisted condensation for so long with "hamburger" (if that is the case) or when the thing became at least as popular as the frank (or should I say the "hot dog"?) so that there was motivation for condensation. There is a lot of detail in historical linguistics, isn't there? From isidore.dyen at yale.edu Sat Aug 1 19:29:21 1998 From: isidore.dyen at yale.edu (Isidore Dyen) Date: Sat, 1 Aug 1998 15:29:21 EDT Subject: GG and change In-Reply-To: <3.0.3.32.19980731103333.0069d304@mail.hf.uio.no> Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- I have no doubt that you can supply us with the location of the society with the stable language (extraterrestrial locations are unacceptable). If all languages change, isn't that a universal attribute of a language? Isn't instability a universal attribute? Does it really help to say that the instability of language is due to its transmission as a cultural object is a theory which is useful and makes the instability, another theoretical proposition a corollary under a general theory that transmitted cultural objects are unstable. One could go on with the observation that transmitted non-cultural objects like DNA are also unstable, being subject to mutation. If you prefer to say that the property of instability is inherent in the system of a language rather than in the language itself, that is your right, but there is the question as to whether the distinction you are drawing is meanningful. Have we ended up at hair-splitting? On Fri, 31 Jul 1998, Jan Terje Faarlund wrote: > ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- > At 18:01 30.07.98 EDT, Isidore Dyan wrote: > >----------------------------Original message---------------------------- > > > >How about contemplating whether language change is inevitable. If it is > >not, theren should be some stable languages somewhere, If it is, then it > >must be inherent in all languages and thus a universal. > > > I think you can find a stable language if you look in the following type of > society: A society where no member ever changes profession or personal > relationships, where there is no outside contact, no immigration, no births > and no deaths. For languages spoken in other types of societies, change is > of course inevitable, not because change is a universal of language, but > because language after all is ALSO a cultural object transmitted through > the behavior of biological individuals. > > The idea that change should be a universal is meaningless since language > universals are based on generalizations over properties of *systems*. When > a language changes, a system changes, and this new system must again obey > whatever constraints are imposed by UG. Change in itself cannot be part of > the system. The only interesting connection between universals and change > is the fact that no change can lead to a result which violates UG. > > > ******************************************** > Professor Jan Terje Faarlund > Universitetet i Oslo > Institutt for nordistikk og litteraturvitskap > Postboks 1013 Blindern > N-0315 Oslo (Norway) > > Tel. (+47) 22 85 69 49 (office) > (+47) 22 12 39 66 (home) > Fax (+47) 22 85 71 00 > From isidore.dyen at yale.edu Sun Aug 2 16:35:05 1998 From: isidore.dyen at yale.edu (Isidore Dyen) Date: Sun, 2 Aug 1998 12:35:05 EDT Subject: your mail In-Reply-To: Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- It seems to me that the variety of new formations thatare involved in the discussion are all of recent origin. It would be interesting to examine whether the stump types or whatever can be exemplified before the present highly literate period and then the frequency of the contaminative types (i.e. analogy-like new formations where the models involve a nonce analysis) are common at earlier times anywhere. If not, there is circumstantial evidence that literacy is playing a role along with sportswriters, Madison Avenue, and other word-spinners. The fact that change is inevitable in the continuation of a language is not a peculiarity of language, since it is a pretty widely distributed characteristic. In fact it is pretty difficult these days to cite anything that is inlabile. The only reason for mentioning that lability is a language universal is that languages, though dialectally variable, give the impression of being stable. On Sat, 1 Aug 1998, bwald wrote: > ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- > Isidore Dyen writes with respect to such constructions as "workaholic": > > >I think that it might be important to add to the discussion that these > >forms are artificialloy constructed and in that respect fall in with words > >like AIDS or is it AIDs and CIA and G-man and the gamut that have > >sprung up in at least a partial connection with writing and thus > >differ from the types of analogical phenomena that appear in comparative > >studies. > > I think ID raises a very interesting issue, but one which is more > problematic than he suggests. To begin with, he no less than any other > reader recognises that the examples he has given above are different from > any of the examples we had been previously discussing, in that his examples > make reference in one way or another to spelling. That is not true of the > examples, call them "condensed compounds" for the moment, that we have been > discussing. Nevertheless, an interesting *burden of proof* issue arises > between those like ID who suggest that the types of condensations that give > rise to "workaholic" and other examples -- indeed what ARE other examples > and what are NOT? -- can only arise from some kind of literate perception > of the condensed words (this is certainly NOT obvious), and those like me, > who might say: PROVE IT! or at least, WHAT MAKES YOU THINK SO? > > For example, take "workaholic". ID's idea seems to be that the -aholic is > abstracted by some literate means. I can't really follow this, and even > the variation in spelling of the unstressed vowel *a*holic vs. > (alc)*o*holic seems to argue against this. But I don't insist this is a > strong argument against his assumption. A stronger argument against, I > think, has to do with such diminutive derivatives as "alkie" for > "alcoholic" (= a person who drinks too much), which, without any hint of > literacy, abstracts, "back-clips" (thanks, Jim Rader and Hans Marchand) or > "stumps" the first "syllable", leaving -oholic free by implication. OK. > Why do I say -oholic is free by implication? Well, I haven't totally > thought this through, but I think the stumping technique and its residual > can be compared to the Romance (and more generally learned) stratum in > English where speakers, whether literate or not, can generally perceive > multi-morpheme combinations that recombine, but do not have the slightest > idea what the constituent morphemes "mean" -- and indeed that poses a > problem for us linguists to decide how to deal with them, cf. defect, > perfect (say the verb), effect, detain, pertain, retain, etc etc. Again, I > think people are quite clear about the constituent parts but quite unclear > (and unconcerned) about their meanings in a great many Romance formations > in English. (malaprops also show perception of constituent parts of > Romance formations, e.g., defuse for diffuse, prevert for pervert, or > whatever ones actually occur). Thus, such Romance forms provide a > precedent (if that's historically relevant) to splitting things like > "alcoholic" into constituents morphemes "alc+oholic". In fact, the latter > are much more motivated than the Romance forms, since "alkie" gives the > "alcohol content" of the alc-, and leaves -oholic for "addict", etc. I > agree with ID that many forms like "workaholic" might have been coined by > literate users for literate purposes (cf. the journalese proliferation of > "-gate" forms for political scandals), but not that the technique > presupposes literacy and could not happen/start without literacy. > > "cheeseburger" might be quite different from "workaholic", in that "burger" > alone "fore-clips" "hamburger". No literacy seems necessary, certainly no > more than in "gator" for "alligator" (cf. "gatorade", wherever that came > from -- Florida? And NB "telephone" > "phone" does not presuppose the > morphological independence of "tele", why not also for "microphone", > "megaphone" and what-not, whoops "phone" also means "allophone" in one > obscure jargon.) Thus, "cheeseburger" seems to be simply a convenience for > "cheese hamburger", and not as complex as "workaholic" in its origin. All > of this, of course, depends somewhat on whether "burger" as an independent > word came into existence BEFORE OR AFTER "hamburger" (something we may > never know, though it might seem almost within our reach to know, ESP, and > NOTE THIS, if the origins of the two were ORAL, and their order of written > appearance is relatively close -- as is probable -- and arbitrary. In fact, > except for "dialect representation", we might expect "burger", like > "gator", to be suppressed in written language until it had spread quite > widely, leaving doubt about its true chronological relationship to the > emergence of "cheeseburger" and the rest of the (-)burger family. EG one > abridged 1994 dictionary gives "cheeseburger" from 1938 but does not > acknowledge "burger" EXCEPT as a combined = dependent form, ignoring that > "burger" has been short for "hamburger" to my ears for > I-don't-know-how-long, many decades at least. Surprisingly, this > dictionary, despite its intentional incompleteness, does list "gator" from > 1844, no initial apostrophe or hyphen.) > > A final comment on this matter, which may be relevant to the "literacy" > issue, but I'm not sure how, is that "workaholic" and many such structures > have a certain humor or cleverness about them that suggests conscious > manipulation. That in itself does not suggest literacy to me. But it > contrasts the technique with the stump compound, which seems to be most > often just a convenience which reduces or *abbreviates* -- something also > done by such uncontroversially literate techniques as those which produce > AIDS (acronyms) or CIA, LA etc.(crude initial abbreviations), without any > humor and, in fact, often with a *bureaucratic tediousness* about them (but > there is something humourous to me, at least, in referring to people by the > initials of their names, e.g., BW and ID etc etc, so immediate context is > important too -- similarly, humour or cleverness was a feature of many > acronyms in 1960s-80s political discourse, cf. NOW!, and a crude kind of > rhyming humour in things like "high fi" and "sci fi", the long vowel of > "fi" in both cases also depending on spelling). But, in general, stump > compounds and the spelling-reference types are relatively boring, > convenient for users and opaque to non-users. Not so for either the > "workaholic" or "cheeseburger" type (with regard to opacity), or for the > "monokini" and "glitterati" types (with respect to specialised humour) > about which more could be said. It may be that ID is confusing ALL (or > TOO MANY) condensation techniques involving multi-word expressions with > those which have a transparent literate base, though I find it hard to > believe that he might have no more basis for his claim. As I said above, > if he has more of a basis, WHAT IS IT? > > In a separate matter, ID replied to my comments on GG (or UG) and > historical ling with: > > >How about contemplating whether language change is inevitable. If it is > >not, theren should be some stable languages somewhere, If it is, then it > >must be inherent in all languages and thus a universal. > > To which Jan Terje Faarlund replied: > > >..Change in itself cannot be part of > >the system. The only interesting connection between universals and change > >is the fact that no change can lead to a result which violates UG. > > I had been tempted to respond in a similar way, but I thought that ID was > writing this tongue-in-cheek, and also that he might escape by insisting > that "universal" does not necessarily mean "linguistic universal", since he > might deny, like many, that there are specific linguistic universals > unrelated to some more general cognitive or whatever universals, and that > "change" is one of them ("linguistic change" being part of "change", as > Faarlund observed with regard to social and biological change, i.e., life > and death, in his longer reply). In view of this, I would agree with > Faarlund's use of "interesting" in the above passage as keeping comments > about LINGUISTIC change *on track*, but experience suggests to me that ID > would object to the adjective and say that "interesting" is not an argument > but an expression of taste. I'll leave it at that. > From ratcliff at fs.tufs.ac.jp Mon Aug 3 11:20:10 1998 From: ratcliff at fs.tufs.ac.jp (Robert R. Ratcliffe) Date: Mon, 3 Aug 1998 07:20:10 EDT Subject: GG and change Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- bwald wrote: > ----------------------------Original > message---------------------------- > Before I forget, I have some comments on Robert Ratcliffe's last > message. He states: > > >... if one takes seriously the generative claim that the > >goal of formal linguistic analysis is the discovery of an innate, > >biologically determined language faculty, then you sever the link > >between historical and formal linguistics. > > I would like to offer a different perspective. It is not about "severing > the link", but about distinguishing between what is innate and thus > presumably immutable, unchangeable, universal etc etc, VS. everything > else in language. The "everything else" is what is relevant to historical > linguistics, because it is what varies and changes within and across > particular languages from one time to another. Therefore, the search to > isolate what is innate or invariant in all languages also serves historical > linguistics by revealing those aspects of language, or of any particular > language, which are subject to change. The two programs complement > each other, and work together. I agree entirely with these points. But I think that the complimentarity is not symmetrical. Yes, what changes in language is necessarily not innnate, hence the study of change bears on the search for what IS (or may be) innate. But there is no reason to expect that a theory of an innate language faculty, once such is developed, would have any application to the problem of language change. > So, despite the difference in emphasis, synchronic linguistics continues its > historic mission to provide a grounding for the study of linguistic change. In practice I believe that this is very much the case. I myself have done a lot of work applying modern developments in phonology and morphology to problems in Semitic historical morphology. And I've found that new tools of formal linguistic analysis (in areas like syllable structure, prosody, non-concatenative morphology) are very useful for understanding diachronic problems that were not well understood in the past. But I wonder why this should be the case, since in THEORY generative formal linguistics is concerened with features of language which aren't subject to change. My solution is very simple-- I simply don't believe that generativists are really doing what they say they are doing. As I see it, there is a fundamental epistemological gap in the generative paradigm, which is papered over by the notion of 'Universal Grammar'. First, let's admit, there is good extralinguistic evidence (from acquisition, language impariment etc.) that language has a genetic basis-- that is for a language faculty (LF). Second, linguistic analysis of particular languages can uncover more general and abstract features of language structure. (And linguists have been doing so for millennia.) The UG 'notion' (it has never been properly formulated as a hypothesis) is simply the assertion or assumption that these two things are identical-- that the LF is a body of knowledge of some subset of the principles discovered by formal linguistic analysis. Some people are misled into thinking that arguments for LF are arguments for UG. They are not. UG is only one way of conceiveing the language faculty. The language faculty could be, for example, an ability to extract and construct knowledge, rather than a body of knowledge of, say, parts of speech and syntactic constructs. Similarly general (or even universal) principles of language structure discovered by analysis may not be directly attributable to a special genetic endowment. So increasinlgy I have come to read generative work as simply a continuation of structuralist formal analysis, and to regard the notion of UG as something of a smoke screen-- which makes it possible for linguists to claim they are doing natural science, while in fact they are doing social science. That is in studying languages (or certainly at least in studying language change), we are studying cultural artifacts. Of course the supposed dichotomy between language as cultural artifact and language as genetic endowment is entirely false. All cultural artifacts are a product of the human genetic endowment, and all social sciences can be reduced to natural science (subranches of that subranch of biology which deals with the behavior of social animals), if one wishes. My point ultimately is that I think we can make more progress in understanding language if we regard the general characteristics of languages as one thing, and the genetic endowment which makes possible the learning and construction of languages as something else, and if we regard the relationship between these two things as a question open for empirical investigation rather than simply assume that this relationship is captured by the notion of UG. By the way, I'd like to thank Anthony Kroch and David Lightfoot for informing me off list about work of theirs on these issues. I hope to have time to read these works carefully before pontificating further. In the meantime, I'd much appreciate further comments and discussion. (And thanks to Benji Wald and Isidore Dyen for their comments so far.) +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Robert R. Ratcliffe Senior Lecturer, Arabic and Linguistics, Dept. of Linguistics and Information Science Tokyo University of Foreign Studies Nishigahara 4-51-21, Kita-ku Tokyo 114 Japan From isidore.dyen at yale.edu Mon Aug 3 20:01:13 1998 From: isidore.dyen at yale.edu (Isidore Dyen) Date: Mon, 3 Aug 1998 16:01:13 EDT Subject: GG and change In-Reply-To: <35C5A845.663A143A@fs.tufs.ac.jp> Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- I believe that you are heading in the right direction. Generative Grammar, whatever it is, is an analysis of grmmar. It assumes that a language, despite the fact that it is subject to change, is at the moment of analysis, a static object. There are certain configurations in that analysis that permit the i9nference of prior states, in some cases alone, in others when combined with other information. If they are alone, they results are usually regarded as internal reconstruction. When combined with other information, well, how to clasify the inference depends on the particular case. In any case the key consideration for GG is that it regards the language for the nonce as static and is thus an analytical procedure. As for a language faculty, what is required is a facility for acquiring a phonemic system, something that is lacking in the other apes. My impression is that the others also seem to lack the ability to order meanigful symbols even though they can acquire some facility in handling symbols. Perhaps the language facility can be reduced to phoneme acceptance and the ability to recognize that the ordering AB is not the same as BA. On Mon, 3 Aug 1998, Robert R. Ratcliffe wrote: > ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- > bwald wrote: > > > ----------------------------Original > > message---------------------------- > > Before I forget, I have some comments on Robert Ratcliffe's last > > message. He states: > > > > >... if one takes seriously the generative claim that the > > >goal of formal linguistic analysis is the discovery of an innate, > > >biologically determined language faculty, then you sever the link > > >between historical and formal linguistics. > > From jrader at m-w.com Mon Aug 3 14:32:38 1998 From: jrader at m-w.com (Jim Rader) Date: Mon, 3 Aug 1998 10:32:38 EDT Subject: Dative Pronouns Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- In regard to John Hewson's comment about <'un> and Old English , excerpted below from his longer message on dative pronouns: I should point out that the survival of has been argued against fairly persuasively by Derek Britton in _Notes and Queries_ of March, 1994. Britton believes <'un> can be better explained as a reduction of . Jim Rader > > 3. He sees I, and I sees HE, and I says to 'un... > > Here 'un is a direct descendant of OE masc. sg. acc. "hine", which became > generalized for both acc. and dative usage in Wessex. Where the verb is > stressed, one would normally get, consequently > > 4. I SEES 'un > > > John Hewson, FRSC tel: (709)737-8131 > University Research Professor fax: (709)737-4000 > Memorial University of Newfoundland > St. John's NF, CANADA A1B 3X9 > From isidore.dyen at yale.edu Tue Aug 4 15:16:43 1998 From: isidore.dyen at yale.edu (Isidore Dyen) Date: Tue, 4 Aug 1998 11:16:43 EDT Subject: GG and change In-Reply-To: Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- On Mon, 3 Aug 1998, Isidore Dyen wrote: > ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- > > I believe that you are heading in the right direction. Generative Grammar, > whatever it is, is an analysis of grmmar. It assumes that a language, > despite the fact that it is subject to change, is at the moment of > analysis, a static object. There are certain configurations in that > analysis that permit the i9nference of prior states, in some cases alone, > in others when combined with other information. If they are alone, they > results are usually regarded as internal reconstruction. When combined > with other information, well, how to clasify the inference depends on the > particular case. In any case the key consideration for GG is that it > regards the language for the nonce as static and is thus an analytical > procedure. As for a language faculty, what is required is a facility for > acquiring a phonemic system, something that is lacking in the other apes. > My impression is that the others also seem to lack the ability to order > meanigful symbols even though they can acquire some facility in handling > symbols. Perhaps the language facility can be reduced to phoneme > acceptance and the ability to recognize that the ordering AB is not the > same as BA. I should have made clear that in modeling ordering (or sequencing) AB means B after A and vice versa for BA. Chances are good that animals would distinguish between simultaneous, but differently arranged identical items, but I don't know of any testing. Another factor in the language faculty is recognition of context since that allows for the distinction between homonyms. It may be that this facility can be present in other animals; I don't know of a test for it either. > > On Mon, 3 Aug 1998, Robert R. Ratcliffe wrote: > > > ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- > > bwald wrote: > > > > > ----------------------------Original > > > message---------------------------- > > > Before I forget, I have some comments on Robert Ratcliffe's last > > > message. He states: > > > > > > >... if one takes seriously the generative claim that the > > > >goal of formal linguistic analysis is the discovery of an innate, > > > >biologically determined language faculty, then you sever the link > > > >between historical and formal linguistics. > > > > From johanna at uclink.berkeley.edu Wed Aug 5 11:07:14 1998 From: johanna at uclink.berkeley.edu (Johanna Nichols) Date: Wed, 5 Aug 1998 07:07:14 EDT Subject: Cladistic language concepts Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Dear fellow HISTLING readers, I am forwarding to the list this inquiry from biologist Michael Ghiselin. He is not on the list, so if you reply to the list please also copy him at the address(es) at the end. I too would like to know where historical linguists stand on the issue and what we can consider to be received view. Thanks. Johanna Nichols >Date: Tue, 28 Jul 98 08:45:03 PST >From: mghiselin at casmail.calacademy.org (Ghiselin, Michael) >To: johanna at uclink.berkeley.edu >Subject: language concepts > > Dear Dr. Nichols: > I would be most grateful if you would post the > following message on HISTLING for me. > > In my recent book METAPHYSICS AND THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES > (State University of New York Press, 1997) I address a wide > range of topics related to the philosophy of classification. > Among these is the analogy between languages and species, a > topic that has interested both linguists and biologists > since the days of Schleicher and Darwin. I remarked that > Old English, Middle English, and Modern English are not > different languages, but rather stages of a single > historical entity. They are analogous to what are called > "chronospecies" in paleontology. > One might wish to contest this claim, and there are all > sorts of problems and perhaps I should have invoked Greek as > an example. I would welcome a discussion with linguists on > any aspect of this and related questions. For the moment, > however, I need a somewhat different kind of information. A > philosopher named David Stamos has recently denounced this > view (Biology and Philosophy 13:433-470). He writes: > "Indeed it seems to me that few outside the modern species > problem would wish to defend a _cladistic language concept_, > in other words the position that a language which undergoes > 'infinite evolution' without branching is numerically the > same language...." He thinks that unless two organisms can > communicate their idiolects are not elements of the same > language, though he does not put it in quite such terms. > Those who know about ring species and the like will see some > interesting connections here. > Unfortunately I have only read a few dozen books on > linguistics and that was some time ago. But I got the > impression that a cladistic, or evolutionary, language > concept, such that the languages are in fact lineages, has > been widely, if not generally, accepted. The few books that > I have consulted lately seem to have presupposed it, to the > point of not bothering to consider the alternatives. I am a > natural scientist, and I do not wish to make an empirical > claim unless it can be backed up by facts. But it is not > obvious where to get the information I need, so I thought I > would ask a lot of linguists. I need to know how widely > something like a cladistic language concept is now, and > historically has been, accepted by linguists. Even if it is > rejected, do they grant that such a position is reasonable? > Also, is there a good discussion of the issues in the > literature. Any suggestions that linguists might want to > pass on to me would be most appreciated. And of course I > would be interested in discussing some of the wider issues. > > Sincerely, > Michael T. Ghiselin > Center for the History and Philosophy of Science > California Academy of Sciences > Golden Gate Park > San Francisco, California 94118 > mghiselin at calacademy.org > (If that fails try mghiselin at casmail.calacademy.org > * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * Johanna Nichols Professor Department of Slavic Languages Mailcode 2979 University of California, Berkeley Berkeley, CA 94720, USA Phone: (1) (510) 642-1097 (direct) (1) (510) 642-2979 (messages) Fax: (1) (510) 642-6220 (departmental) * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * From Cindy.Allen at anu.edu.au Wed Aug 5 11:08:12 1998 From: Cindy.Allen at anu.edu.au (Cynthia Allen) Date: Wed, 5 Aug 1998 07:08:12 EDT Subject: I'm told Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Jacob Baltuch wrote: >So any language in which accusative & dative collapse >together (both nouns and pronouns) and both direct and >indirect objects are bare NPs in certain constructions >would be liable to undergo this? I believe that in English what was crucial was not the fact that both NPs were bare, but that the order became fixed, with the bare repicient always directly after the verb. The collapse of the accusative/dative distinction did not immediately result in the introduction of the indirect passive. The loss of the accusative/dative distinction happened in most dialects by the early part of the 13th century, but no genuine indirect passives are to be found at this time. There followed a period of about 125 years in which although the recipient and the were unmarked, they could occur in either order-either 'he gave the king a gift' (the only order possible in ModE) or 'he gave a gift the king'. (So it is not true, as is often believed, that the recipient and themealways had to be distinguised by either case, preposition, or word order, but this is not too surprising given that ambiguity is hardly likely to result, since the recipient is normally human and the theme is normally inanimate). Anyway, the modern order became more and more dominanant (there are figures in my book showing this) and eventually it became the only possibility. Immediately afterwards (late 14th century), the indirect passives appear because grammatically, the recipient is indistinguishable from the theme. > >On the other hand I seem to remember that Japanese has >direct and indirect object take different postpositions >(-(w)o vs. -ni if I remember correctly) and yet has >indirect passives. I am not competent to comment on the Japanese facts, but will only say that I am not claiming that it is impossible for a language to have an indirect passive without formal identity of the recipient and the theme-only that in a language like English in which only direct objects passivized originally, it is possible for the indirect passive to arise when former indirect objects are reanalysed as direct. Cynthia Allen Cynthia Allen Linguistics, Arts Faculty Australian National University Canberra, ACT 0200 Australia From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Wed Aug 5 17:59:52 1998 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Wed, 5 Aug 1998 13:59:52 EDT Subject: Reply to Ghiselin (long) Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- The question of whether Old English and modern English, or classical Greek and modern Greek, are the `same' or `different' languages has, I think, not commonly been seen as an issue of principle in linguistics. Indeed, this strikes me as reminiscent of that Greek philosophical query about whether one can step in the same river twice. For certain purposes, it is convenient to regard the various historical stages of English as "the same" -- for example, in writing a single continuous history of English. For other purposes, it is convenient to regard them as different -- for example in contrasting earlier and later English. If pressed for a response, however, I think most linguists would prefer the response `different'. Spoken Latin has broken up into several quite distinct languages, such as Italian, French and Romanian. Since presumably nobody would want to say that these are the same languages as one another, it is impossible to claim that any one of them is the same language as Latin. But the relation of modern English to Old English is the same as that of Italian to Latin, save only for the point that modern English is the *sole* descendant of Old English. So, if we tried to maintain that modern English was the same language as Old English on this ground, we would have to abandon this claim if we discovered that Old English had given rise to a second, distinct, descendant previously overlooked -- which seems a very odd outcome. Anyway, our recognition of a single modern language called `English' is largely an artefact, deriving from political and social factors, and above all the widespread recognition of a single standard form. Several centuries ago, the speech of the Scottish Lowlands, which was largely incomprehensible to Englishmen, was well on the way to acquiring its own quite distinct standard literary form. But the Act of Union, a political event, put paid to this, as Englishmen and English influence poured into Scotland, and the Scots eventually abandoned their own standards and accepted the standard English of England as their standard. So, without the Act of Union, we might have had two languages, not one. Even today, a few Scottish scholars prefer to regard Scots as a language distinct from English, but this a minority view. We have our own counterpart to ring species, in the form of dialect continua. In a typical dialect continuum, the local speech just changes slowly and gradually as you travel across the country, but the differences accumulate to the point of mutual incomprehensibility and beyond. Hence *anybody* in the continuum can talk easily to his near neighbors, with more difficulty to people farther away, and not at all to people still farther away. Consequently, there is no principled basis for deciding how many distinct languages we are looking at, or where we should put the boundaries. In practice, the "solutions", where there are any, usually come from non-linguistic factors, most often political factors. For example, much of the Low Countries, Alsace, Germany, Austria, much of Switzerland and part of Italy are all covered by a single Germanic dialect continuum. Speakers who live close together can understand each other regardless of any political boundaries, but speakers far apart cannot understand each other at all. It is not just the citizens of Zurich and Amsterdam who cannot understand each other's mother tongue: the citizens of Bonn and Berlin cannot understand each other's mother tongue either. So how many different languages are we looking at? There is no linguistically principled answer. But there is a political one. Citizens of Germany believe they are speaking German, while citizens of the Netherlands believe they are speaking Dutch. This is so even though people living on both sides of the Dutch-German border can understand each other easily, while neither can understand speech varieties which are "dialects" of his own language spoken farther away. And, of course, this perception is now reinforced by mass education and the mass media: everybody in the Netherlands learns in school a single variety called standard Dutch, while everybody in Germany learns in school a quite different variety called standard German. Indeed, the very existence of these two standards is a political accident, resulting from the early political separation of the Low Countries from the rest of the Germanic-speaking world. If the Netherlands had been absorbed politically into Germany, then standard Dutch would probably not exist, and the speech of Amsterdam would be regarded as merely another regional variety of German. What about the other countries? Well, the Swiss, the Austrians and the South Tyrolean Italians decided some time ago that they too speak German, and they have accepted standard German as their own standard. The Luxembourgers, after much vacillation, are now seemingly concluding that they do not speak German, and they are making efforts to construct a standard form of their own Letzebuergesch speech and to recognize this as a national language. The Alsatians in France, with long-standing political grievances against Germany, have apparently decided that they do not speak German, but a different language called Alsatian. However, if Germany had succeeded in her repeated efforts to annex Alsace, the outcome would be different. The Germanic-speaking Belgians have changed their minds during my lifetime. Formerly, they maintained that they did not speak Dutch, but a different language called Flemish, and they made efforts to establish a standard Flemish language distinct from standard Dutch. But, some years ago, they gave up on this, and agreed that they too speak Dutch, so they now accept standard Dutch as their own standard. (But note that the speech of West Flanders is just as incomprehensible to people in Antwerp as it is to people in Amsterdam.) This sort of thing is pretty much the norm with languages. Individual languages just do not exist "out there" as a general rule; instead, they are imposed *ex post facto* by non-linguistic means, especially political ones, today commonly reinforced by education and mass media (largely absent in the past). As my Germanic example shows, mutual intelligibility has little to do with it. German is not a single language because all German-speakers can understand one another -- they can't, if they use their mother tongues. Rather, German is a single language because its speakers have decided that it is. Anyway, mutual comprehensibility is not an either/or matter, but a matter of degree, and moreover it can easily change with exposure. Speakers of Basque from different parts of the country may have great difficulty understanding one another at first exposure, but, with a little practice, they quickly get used to one another's speech. Indeed, I've had this experience myself. I'm an American in England, and, the first time I met a Geordie -- a speaker from Newcastle-upon-Tyne -- I could not understand a single word the man was saying. I did not even believe he was speaking English. But, after a few days, my ear got attuned, and after that I was able to understand him without much difficulty. But there are limits to this. Speakers from Zurich, Bonn and Berlin cannot get used to one another's speech; the varieties are just too different. Either some people simply have to learn the other guy's speech, or (as happens in practice) they just shift to the standard German they have learned in school, which is the mother tongue of none of them but which is, of course, bloody convenient. This is perhaps not really so different from the case of Basques and Catalans in Spain, who cannot understand each other's (unrelated) languages and have to switch to Spanish to communicate. The `cladistic' model of linguistic descent, which we usually call the `family-tree' or `genetic' model, has indeed been the mainstream view in linguistics at least since the middle of the 19th century, and it still is today. Of course, linguists have been aware of the complications for just about as long: both the problem of dialect continua and the problem of contact -- the diffusion of linguistic features across language boundaries, which appears to be vastly more frequent than the diffusion of genetic material across species boundaries in biology. But the general view is that these complications, while real, are tractable: that we can deal with them by merely imposing some complications upon our basic family-tree model. Of course, there have always been linguists who took issue with this. The 19th-century dialectologists often disliked the family-tree model, which they saw as excessively idealized and not a good picture of reality. And such figures as Hugo Schuchardt (in the 19th century) and Bob Le Page and Charles-James Bailey (in our own day) have often protested against the family-tree model and drawn attention to the importance of what we call `convergence phenomena'. All these have perhaps been widely perceived as intellectual gadflies, what the Russians call `hooligans', stirring up trouble by over-emphasizing interesting but peripheral curiosities. But times may be changing. For a long time now, we have been forced to accept the reality of one type of what we call `non-genetic languages': creoles, which descend from pidgins, which themselves are not natural languages at all. Fine. But, in the last ten years or so, the essential validity of the `genetic' or `family-tree' model has been coming under sttack. Thomason and Kaufman's 1988 book Language Change, Creolization, and Genetic Linguistics argued that non-genetic languages were a real possibility, at least in certain circumstances. (A non-genetic language is one that does not descend from a single ancestor in the familiar way: either it has two or more direct ancestors, or it has no direct ancestor which is a natural language.) T&K were in fact very cautious in their claims, but not everyone since then has been quite so cautious. In the last few years, a number of very striking cases of non-genetic languages and possible non-genetic languages have been reported. Mixed languages (languages descended from a mixture of two or more existing languages), mooted about since the 19th century, have finally been securely identified, the best example being Michif in North America. New and dramatic contact phenomena like metatypy (extreme structural borrowing) have been identified and named. Jeff Leer has proposed that Tlingit, which has some odd characteristics, might be a `portmanteau language', derived from a meld of several related but quite distinct speech varieties. Bob Dixon, in his recent book The Rise and Fall of Languages (which has had a mixed reception), argues that massive diffusion of linguistic features across language boundaries is in fact the norm, and hence that family trees cannot even be constructed, except in certain special circumstances when divergence becomes temporarily more important than divergence. Even Thomason and Kaufman raised the possibility of `abrupt creoles', creoles arising directly from contact with no intervening pidgins. Many historical linguists remain unimpressed by this flurry of activity, but others are enthusiastic. Undoubtedly these new ideas are still largely at the stage of waving our arms at some surprising data and of tossing new ideas around excitedly. Not much has as yet coalesced out of this activity. But it *may* be that the next generation of linguists will come to accept convergence phenomena as being at least as important as the more familiar divergence, and that our models of linguistic descent may have to be revised accordingly. Then again, maybe not. Anyway, these are lively times in historical linguistics, and I predict a lot of bitter arguments in my field in the next twenty years or so. This is perhaps not the ideal time to ask us linguists what we think about models of linguistic descent. Twenty years ago, virtually all of us would have given the same answer. Today, not so. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From isidore.dyen at yale.edu Wed Aug 5 17:59:24 1998 From: isidore.dyen at yale.edu (Isidore Dyen) Date: Wed, 5 Aug 1998 13:59:24 EDT Subject: Cladistic language concepts In-Reply-To: Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- On Wed, 5 Aug 1998, Johanna Nichols wrote: > ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- I am discussing Nichols's communication as a linguist. The only comment on his questions that I am aware of is one I submitted in a festschrift offered to Henry M. Hoenigswald. It discusse, but rather briefly the analogy between genetic language classification and biological classification. I believe that you are on the right track. Stamos's objection, if I may put it that way concerns the treatment of continuities and the application of the term 'same'. One might ask whether a person at say twenty is the same person he was at two. The answer is 'yes' if the identity takes the continuity between the two stages into account and is 'no' if it is no taken into account. One might then introduce the awkward term 'continuoperson' or 'chronoperson' (to adopt the chronospecies model) and 'stageoperson' to specify the person at a particular time. For classification languages and species offer similar problems. One problem is again how to deal with continuities and points within the coninuities. Instead of using the term 'points', I usually speak of members. The continuity appears a set of members linked pairwise by the same relation which forms a chain as each member of a pair is additionally linked to members of other pairs. A chain which includes all possble members is exhaustive. The whole conglomerate can also be regarded as a network I believe, but I don't know what the rquirements of a network are. I define a language, regarded as a continuity formed by linked members at one stage or time (i.e. a 'stageolanguage', for which I have suggested the term 'hololect') as an exhaustive chain of pairs of mutually intelligible dialects (or if your perefer, idolects'). The term 'mutually intelligible' is a prime; its specification in prqactical terms offers difficulties for precision, but its rough utility seems obvious since it refers to function of language as a means of communication. I prefer to believe that its specifcation can be achieved, but would require serious and expensive investigative effort. A second point that concerns the definition of a language in this sense is that there is no geographical limitation on a pairing. Mutual intelligibility is thus viewed as potential rather than actual, but nevertheless testable in each case (regardless of necessary expenditures, as the case is with specifying the necessary minimum or zero mutual intelligility). I believe that you can carry out an analogical definition of a species on the criterion of the ability to mate and produce viable offspring or something of the sort. In any case I blieve that Stamos's objection to the notion that what undergoes '"infinite evolution' without branching is numerically the same language. It may help to know that linguists do not regard and for a long never have regarded (if they ever did) Old, Middle, and New English as disjoint, but rather as specified stages of a 'chronolanguage' (for which I believe I once suggested the term 'perhololect). They are connected succesively by an uninterruped sequence of native speakers. Linguists commit worse sins since we regard a protolanguage (i,e, a prior hololect) to be the same language (i.e. member of the same continuity) as each of its branches in their respective infinite evolutions. The definition of a hololect above does not require the mutually intelligibilty of all pairs. Provided they are linked through a chain of pairs of mutually intelligible idiolects, they are included in the same language. The alternative of not doing so is the consequence of attributing to different languages members of a mutually intellgible pair. Perhaps it is worthwhile adding that I would limit candidates to membership to native idiolects in what I think of as a first language dialectology. In dealing with cladistics it may clarify matters to draw a sharp distinction between what I think of as theory and the results of investigation or analysis. Theory deals with our formulations of how change occurs and in general provides us with the way we analyze. Cladistics in principle as a way of classifying is based on a way of analyzing data and xcomparing different analyzed collections of data. Back of it is to be sure evolutionary theory and the corollary that a pair of species sharing by a significant difference the most features of highest genetic value (or some such) have a greater likelihood of continuing a same distinct protospecies than either does with any other species. The problem in biology as I see it is how to weight the similarities and the qualitative difference between different similarities. I Imagine that many of these problems wil be eliminated with DNA studies. The same problem has existed in linguistics, but I believe that vocabulary studies will help change the nature of the problems involved in classification. > Dear fellow HISTLING readers, > > I am forwarding to the list this inquiry from biologist Michael Ghiselin. > He is not on the list, so if you reply to the list please also copy him at > the address(es) at the end. > > I too would like to know where historical linguists stand on the issue and > what we can consider to be received view. > > Thanks. > > Johanna Nichols > > >Date: Tue, 28 Jul 98 08:45:03 PST > >From: mghiselin at casmail.calacademy.org (Ghiselin, Michael) > >To: johanna at uclink.berkeley.edu > >Subject: language concepts > > > > Dear Dr. Nichols: > > I would be most grateful if you would post the > > following message on HISTLING for me. > > > > In my recent book METAPHYSICS AND THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES > > (State University of New York Press, 1997) I address a wide > > range of topics related to the philosophy of classification. > > Among these is the analogy between languages and species, a > > topic that has interested both linguists and biologists > > since the days of Schleicher and Darwin. I remarked that > > Old English, Middle English, and Modern English are not > > different languages, but rather stages of a single > > historical entity. They are analogous to what are called > > "chronospecies" in paleontology. > > One might wish to contest this claim, and there are all > > sorts of problems and perhaps I should have invoked Greek as > > an example. I would welcome a discussion with linguists on > > any aspect of this and related questions. For the moment, > > however, I need a somewhat different kind of information. A > > philosopher named David Stamos has recently denounced this > > view (Biology and Philosophy 13:433-470). He writes: > > "Indeed it seems to me that few outside the modern species > > problem would wish to defend a _cladistic language concept_, > > in other words the position that a language which undergoes > > 'infinite evolution' without branching is numerically the > > same language...." He thinks that unless two organisms can > > communicate their idiolects are not elements of the same > > language, though he does not put it in quite such terms. > > Those who know about ring species and the like will see some > > interesting connections here. > > Unfortunately I have only read a few dozen books on > > linguistics and that was some time ago. But I got the > > impression that a cladistic, or evolutionary, language > > concept, such that the languages are in fact lineages, has > > been widely, if not generally, accepted. The few books that > > I have consulted lately seem to have presupposed it, to the > > point of not bothering to consider the alternatives. I am a > > natural scientist, and I do not wish to make an empirical > > claim unless it can be backed up by facts. But it is not > > obvious where to get the information I need, so I thought I > > would ask a lot of linguists. I need to know how widely > > something like a cladistic language concept is now, and > > historically has been, accepted by linguists. Even if it is > > rejected, do they grant that such a position is reasonable? > > Also, is there a good discussion of the issues in the > > literature. Any suggestions that linguists might want to > > pass on to me would be most appreciated. And of course I > > would be interested in discussing some of the wider issues. > > > > Sincerely, > > Michael T. Ghiselin > > Center for the History and Philosophy of Science > > California Academy of Sciences > > Golden Gate Park > > San Francisco, California 94118 > > mghiselin at calacademy.org > > (If that fails try mghiselin at casmail.calacademy.org > > > > * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * > Johanna Nichols > Professor > Department of Slavic Languages > Mailcode 2979 > University of California, Berkeley > Berkeley, CA 94720, USA > > Phone: (1) (510) 642-1097 (direct) > (1) (510) 642-2979 (messages) > Fax: (1) (510) 642-6220 (departmental) > * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * > From ROGER at beattie.uct.ac.za Thu Aug 6 11:24:01 1998 From: ROGER at beattie.uct.ac.za (Lass, RG, Roger, Prof) Date: Thu, 6 Aug 1998 07:24:01 EDT Subject: cladistics Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- In reference to Johanna Nichols' and Isidore Dyen's remarks on this issue. I don't want to blow my own trumpet in public (or do I?), but there is an idiosyncratic and maybe useful discussion in my Historical Linguistics and language change (CUP, 1997), in which I discuss the virtues and problems of cladistic concepts in language filiation and reconstruction, with references to Hoenigswald and others. A year later I don't of course believe everything I said, but this might be a starting point for discussion, and does at least raise the question of the inter-applicability of biological and linguistics 'inheritance' of characters. Roger Lass Roger Lass Department of Linguistics University of Cape Town Rondebosch 7700/South Africa Tel +(021) 650 3138 Fax +(021) 650 3726 From bwald at HUMnet.UCLA.EDU Fri Aug 7 12:22:58 1998 From: bwald at HUMnet.UCLA.EDU (bwald) Date: Fri, 7 Aug 1998 08:22:58 EDT Subject: I'm told Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- With regard to the issue of the emergence of the indirect passive in English, Cynthia Allen notes: > The collapse of the accusative/dative distinction >did not immediately result in the introduction of the indirect passive. >The loss of the accusative/dative distinction happened in most dialects by >the early part of the 13th century, but no genuine indirect passives are to >be found at this time. There followed a period of about 125 years in which >although the recipient and the were unmarked, they could occur in either >order-either 'he gave the king a gift' (the only order possible in ModE) or >'he gave a gift the king'. It should be added that there remains a residue of this process in some (British) English dialects. That is, with a few verbs, esp. the "arch-dative" verb 'give' (but also "show"), the variation in object order has continued into the twentieth century (and even has a coherent geographic distribution according to the British dialect atlas reflecting the rural mid 20th c.) It seems to be largely if not exclusively limited to the inanimate pronominal theme "it", as well as to certain verbs, e.g., "give/show it me" (maybe even the recipient has to be a pronoun). I have long been interested in this issue, and also why the areal distribution is what it is, and why IO-DO order has been the trend for fixed order in most dialects. Cynthia mentions that the last problem is related to pragmatic features of topicality in discourse which favors the animate= indirect object as more often topical and given than the inanimate = direct object, so the ordering is related to grammaticalisation of pragmatic information structure of given before new in specific contexts. This is no doubt involved, but the issue is quite complex and has a number of features I do not sufficiently understand (yet), such as how and whether the survival of DO-IO order is constrained by choice of verb, e.g., grammatical formations like "cook it me" for "cook me it" (some "gimme it" speakers will even balk at "cook me it"). To my knowledge, such historical details remain to be resolved. (NB. As I have observed in print, the effect of inanimacy on exophoric deictic uses of pronouns is striking. Thus, "look at HIM" or any other animate, but NOT "look at IT" -- instead "look at THAT". For "them" it matters whether animate or inanimate. "look at THEM" (animate) but "look at THOSE" (inanimate). This seems to be on the cusp between pragmatics and grammaticalisation, having to do with the greater informational load of demonstratives compared to pronouns and the pragmatic relation of such things to animacy status. This is related to the probable preferential survival of "give it me" to "give them me", and, I think, plays an indirect but important role in the geographical distribution of "give it me", but my account would be digressive here. Suffice it to say that "it" shuns stress, except in metalinguistic contexts, more than any other pronoun, with the possible exception of "them" in inanimate contexts, cf. what happened to etymological "it" in Scandinavian.) Without checking, I think I have noted some cases like "cook it me" in Middle English texts, but I am not clear on how and when "Verb IO DO" = "Verb DO *FOR* IO (as opposed to ...*TO* IO) arose, or what constraints there are on choice of verb in such constructions, cf. "build me it", but, I think NOT "manufacture me it"(?), etc. Hence, it is not clear to me whether "benefactive" IO-DO constructions should be historically distinguished from "dative" IO-DO constructions, but I think so. (Uh, in context, by IO I mean where the *unmarked* Indirect Object). In any case, the lexical angle occurred to me because of some facts in some Bantu languages, where historically passivisations akin to English indirect passivisation are commonplace, and in some languages have even evolved to exclude direct (theme) passivisation when there is more than one "object". This is relevant to Cynthia's comment: >.... (late 14th century), the indirect passives appear >because grammatically, the recipient is indistinguishable from the theme. The key word is "grammatically". C's passage implies equation of grammatical object with unmarked argument, hence accusative/dative where these are no longer overtly distinguished. Nevertheless, why should speakers reinterpret non-themes as grammatical objects (and thus passivise them), absence of marking notwithstanding? I would suggest that the correlation between accusative marking and "theme" as a semantic concept was never invariant, even in Old English, and was very much dependent on the *lexical* verb (either for completely formal reasons, as far as speakers were concerned, or dependent on the particular meaning of the verb, e.g., "use" takes an instrument not a theme as object, etc etc) so that there was already notable reliance on accusative marking as an arbitrary license for passivisation. With the loss of the distinction between accusative and dative marking the situation was greatly exacerbated, so that one line of development was to ignore role, previously not often reliably marked anyway, and allow passivisation to eventually expand to all unmarked objects. Historical English scholars are quick to point out that early English word order allowed "impersonal passives", e.g., "the boy-DAT was given a book-ACC", where it is actually still "book" that is passivised, to be reinterpreted as "the boy-NOM ..." (German still approximates English indirect passivisation this way.) So that is usually offered as another factor occasioned by case loss/merger. It is, I think, not an inevitable development, since, as I noted above, there seems to be a lexical dimension to the survival of the unmarked DO-IO order (where it survives) according to the verb, and also to benefactive (unmarked) IO-DO order according to the verb. The latter, in particular, contrasts with the other line of development in which prepositional marking becomes mandatory with some verbs (and at least preferred in such additional cases as "he gave YOU to me" rather than "he gave me YOU", where inanimacy does not mitigate). (NB also alternative marking in English, as in such commonly discussed cases as "he sprayed the wall with paint" and "he sprayed paint all over the wall". This development seems to be in line with the hesitation with which English decides between the prepositional vs. unmarking of case relations.) Interestingly, English shows further development from indirect passivisation to prepositional passivisation, as in: this bed was eaten potato chips in, etc. (I think I have the chronological order right, if it is really clear. Does the preference for "the boy was given a book" over "the boy was given a book TO" have anything to do with historical order of stabilisation of the two types of passive?) So, eventually (in fact, fairly quickly) passivisation transcended whether role is marked or not. Again, this does not seem to have been inevitable, just possible (obviously, since it occurred). Maybe Cynthia can comment further on the historical relationship between these two processes in English and whether there was anything else favoring the generalisation of passsivisation, which I suspect was not an inevitable one. The lexical dimension continues to intrigue me. Embedded in a quite different grammar (but with many points of similarity) is the lexical difference between two verbs "give" in Umbundu, an Angolan Bantu language. One verb, iha, allows either theme or recipient passivisation, so that either argument can function as unmarked objects of that verb. This verb can be traced back to Proto and Pre-Bantu, and allows recipient passivisation in ALL Bantu languages (which retain passivisation as a productive process). In contrast, another verb, eca, has the same meaning but only allows theme passivisation, and the recipient must be prepositionally marked in all contexts. I don't know where it came from, only that it is underived in Umbundu. The verbs seem to differ only in this lexical property. Although iha reflects the Proto/Pre-Bantu situation, eca behaves like derived verbs in benefactive and dative contexts, allowing only the theme to passivise. Such constraints on passivisation are quite general in West Bantu, but contrast with East Bantu, where either both passivisations are allowed or the opposite constraint on passivisation (favoring "indirect") has developed for various reasons. Back to English, retention of unmarked DO-IO order with *some* verbs in *some* varieties of English seems to be lexically determined. My impression, needing further investigation, is that they are limited to relatively high frequency monosyllabic (Germanic) verbs which *imply a non-theme argument* (whatever that turns out to mean), e.g., "give", "show", maybe "send". Problematic to me is how "do", "make", "cook" and other *benefactively* used verbs without prepositional marking historically fit into this pattern. Unlike the other type, they do not *lexically* imply a non-theme argument. Cynthia may be able to shed further light on the history of this benefactive pattern, which seems to be syntactic rather than lexical, as in "do me that favour" (?? "do me it"//????? "do it me" -- for "give it me" dialects). Cynthia continues with respect to cross-linguistic generalisations: >I am not competent to comment on the Japanese facts, but will only say that >I am not claiming that it is impossible for a language to have an indirect >passive without formal identity of the recipient and the theme-only that in >a language like English in which only direct objects passivized originally, >it is possible for the indirect passive to arise when former indirect >objects are reanalysed as direct. Bantu evolution supports this claim, which amounts to saying that unmarked arguments are "potential" objects (perversely, this even applies to post-posed subjects in at least one Bantu language -- though in such a case it is not reflected in passivisation, of course, but in other grammatical processes.) At the same time, Bantu evolution does not support IE evolution in concern for preserving explicit marking of case relations/thematic roles. I have argued elsewhere that large areas of Bantu allowed "case" ambiguity to arise by preferrably grammaticalising topicality hierarchies (e.g., human > animal > inanimate). This goes against conventional wisdom concerning the role of case relations in constraining grammatical change. Thus, what may play a role in the direction of English change (i.e., grammatical compensation for weakening of inflectional case marking) is not to be taken for granted for all languages (esp those like Bantu, and Niger-Congo more generally, which do not have a history of case inflection but have intricate topic/focus ordering strategies). Apart from that, as Cynthia and many other careful investigators of the history of English have noted, reactions to weakening or loss of case-marking are much more complex and historically much more sluggish (according to the record) than theories glorifying "preservation" of case-relations (as an "essential" feature of "language") would lead one to suppose. From bwald at HUMnet.UCLA.EDU Fri Aug 7 12:23:26 1998 From: bwald at HUMnet.UCLA.EDU (bwald) Date: Fri, 7 Aug 1998 08:23:26 EDT Subject: Correction: I'm told Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- I hasten to correct a mistake I made in my last message. It's in the passage: >...Historical English scholars are quick to point out that early English >word order allowed "impersonal passives", e.g., "the boy-DAT was given a >book-ACC", where it is actually still "book" that is passivised, to be >reinterpreted as "the boy-NOM ..." (German still approximates English >indirect passivisation this way.) So that is usually offered as another >factor occasioned by case loss/merger... I overshot what I wanted to say. The OE impersonal passive, reflex of a more general older IE construction, is as given above, but the "theme" ("book") is NOT passivised, since it preserves the ACC marking. The passivisation gets rid of the subject and indicates that by a mark on the verb but does NOT change other case marking. Maybe anticipation of the German parallel momentarily confused me, since the German approximation of the English (and Bantu) indirect passivisation (common in German translations of indirect passivisation in Bantu) is "boy-DAT was a book-NOM given", where "book" is indeed passivised but postposed (according to German subject post-posing rules, i.e., to-the boy was a book given). (P.S. with neuters, e.g., "book", NOM and ACC are not distinct, an IE trait, but number agreement of the verb depends on the passivised ACC > NOM, e.g., "boy-DAT *were* book*s* given.). From Cindy.Allen at anu.edu.au Fri Aug 7 12:24:18 1998 From: Cindy.Allen at anu.edu.au (Cynthia Allen) Date: Fri, 7 Aug 1998 08:24:18 EDT Subject: Correction: I'm told In-Reply-To: Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Benji Wald writes: >I hasten to correct a mistake I made in my last message. It's in the passage: > >>...Historical English scholars are quick to point out that early English >>word order allowed "impersonal passives", e.g., "the boy-DAT was given a >>book-ACC", where it is actually still "book" that is passivised, to be >>reinterpreted as "the boy-NOM ..." (German still approximates English >>indirect passivisation this way.) So that is usually offered as another >>factor occasioned by case loss/merger... > >I overshot what I wanted to say. The OE impersonal passive, reflex of a >more general older IE construction, is as given above, but the "theme" >("book") is NOT passivised, since it preserves the ACC marking. The >passivisation gets rid of the subject and indicates that by a mark on the >verb but does NOT change other case marking. OE certainly had what is normally called an 'impersonal' passive, but there are none (so far as I know) of the sort which Wald mentions. When there were two objects, as with 'give', the theme always showed up in the nominative in a passive, e.g. either 'him(DAT) was given a book(NOM)' or 'A book(Nom) was given him(Dat) (with other permutations of word order possible). > >Maybe anticipation of the German parallel momentarily confused me, since >the German approximation of the English (and Bantu) indirect passivisation >(common in German translations of indirect passivisation in Bantu) is >"boy-DAT was a book-NOM given", where "book" is indeed passivised but >postposed (according to German subject post-posing rules, i.e., to-the boy >was a book given). (P.S. with neuters, e.g., "book", NOM and ACC are not >distinct, an IE trait, but number agreement of the verb depends on the >passivised ACC > NOM, e.g., "boy-DAT *were* book*s* given.). The OE was parallel to the German, with the theme causing subject-verb agreement (whether it was pre-or-post-verbal). I think perhaps Benji may have had some confusion with passives of verbs like *deman* to judge, which took a single object in the dative case. The verb had passive morphology but did not agree with anything, remaining in the neutral third singular, as in 'them was judged'. I'll reply to other parts of Benji's original posting when I get a bit more time. Cynthia Allen Linguistics, Arts Faculty Australian National University Canberra, ACT 0200 Australia From DISTERH at UNIVSCVM.SC.EDU Fri Aug 7 12:44:51 1998 From: DISTERH at UNIVSCVM.SC.EDU (Dorothy Disterheft) Date: Fri, 7 Aug 1998 08:44:51 EDT Subject: HISTLING subscriber list Message-ID: Dear Colleagues, >From time to time I post the HISTLING subscriber list. If you would like to receive your own copy at more frequent intervals, send the following as a message to LISTSERV at VM.SC.EDU: review histling by name. 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Tuttle glen at METRO.NET Glen Uber KHC00344 at NIFTYSERVE.OR.JP Shinji Uchioke histling at COLI.UNI-SB.DE CoLi UdS usami at HAWAII.EDU Fumio Usami bvance at UCS.INDIANA.EDU Barbara Vance mvarley at UMICH.EDU Matthew Varley tvn at CIS.UNI-MUENCHEN.DE Theo Vennemann verda at LINGUA.FIL.UB.ES Isabel Verdaguer helgason at KOMMA.ZEDAT.FU-BERLIN.DE Vilhj?lmur Helgason n.b.vincent at MAN.AC.UK Nigel Vincent vovin at HAWAII.EDU Alexander Vovin bwald at HUMNET.UCLA.EDU Benji Wald dcwalker at ACS.UCALGARY.CA Douglas Walker tandy at CENTRAL.CIS.UPENN.EDU Tandy Warnow warvik at UTU.FI Brita Warvik swatts at TCD.IE Sheila Watts LEEUWVW at RULLET.LEIDENUNIV.NL Andrea de Leeuw van Weenen david_weiss at GBINC.COM David Weiss Paula.West at MERTON.OXFORD.AC.UK Paula West maxw at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK Max Wheeler whiting at CC.HELSINKI.FI Robert Whiting senorbiggles at MAIL.UTEXAS.EDU Tom Wier maw at ANNAP.INFI.NET Mark A. Wilson cwinter at ORION.IT.LUC.EDU Clyde Winters mew1 at SIU.EDU Margaret Winters joh.wood at ASU.EDU Johanna Wood cfwoolhiser at MAIL.UTEXAS.EDU Curt Woolhiser vdwouden at LET.RUG.NL Ton van der Wouden lcw21 at CUS.CAM.AC.UK Laura Wright rhpwri at LIVERPOOL.AC.UK Roger Wright wurzel at FAS.AG-BERLIN.MPG.DE W.U. Wurzel haruki at MSV.CC.IWATE-U.AC.JP Haruki Yamaguchi MZELLJADT at SMITH.SMITH.EDU Margaret S. Zelljadt Petr.Zemanek at FF.CUNI.CZ Petr Zemanek n-zide at UCHICAGO.EDU Norman Zide From ph1u+ at andrew.cmu.edu Fri Aug 7 14:29:39 1998 From: ph1u+ at andrew.cmu.edu (Paul J Hopper) Date: Fri, 7 Aug 1998 10:29:39 EDT Subject: I'm told In-Reply-To: Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- A footnote to Benji's posting: the special behavior of "it" has often been noticed. To his point about "it" shunning stress in Present-Day English can be added the absence or rarity of the possessive pronoun "its", which results in a hole in the paradigm (the hat is mine/?the lid is its). Yet apparently in older Germanic the reverse was the case: exophoric "that" was rare, "it" (OE hit) being used instead (see S O Andrew, Syntax & Style in OE, p. 38). The same seems to be true of Old High German (Behaghel, Deutsche Syntax I:280). - Paul Hopper From bwald at HUMnet.UCLA.EDU Sun Aug 9 16:14:08 1998 From: bwald at HUMnet.UCLA.EDU (bwald) Date: Sun, 9 Aug 1998 12:14:08 EDT Subject: Correction: I'm told Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- I appreciated Cynthia's further correction of my correction, and I look forward to her further comments. She notes: >The OE was parallel to the German, with the theme causing subject-verb >agreement (whether it was pre-or-post-verbal). I think perhaps Benji may >have had some confusion with passives of verbs like *deman* to judge, which >took a single object in the dative case. The verb had passive morphology >but did not agree with anything, remaining in the neutral third singular, >as in 'them was judged'. I'm still haven't checked, but my understanding of the "impersonal passive" in some earlier I-E languages is that there was no marked SUBJ (NOM) (hence, "impersonal" = no subject/NOM marker). It either occurred to me or I read that in the case of neuters, there was formal ambiguity of between "impersonal" and regular (ACC => NOM) passivisation for TWO reasons. (1) there is no formal distinction between neuter NOM/ACC, (2) the neuter may not require number agreement on verb inflection, remaining singular regardless of the number of the neuter NOM/ACC. The situation with *deman* mimics the "impersonal" passive, except that the verb does not allow an additional (non-neuter) object, in order to judge whether it would be marked as SUBJ or OBJ. From Cynthia's comments I gather that by OE, the "impersonal" passive has been lost in favor of the ACC-Passive (i.e., ACC -> NOM), assuming that it ever figured in the prehistory of English or earlier Germanic. I think it would be instructive to know what the function of the "impersonal passive" was which distinguished it from the "regular" passive in languages which have both, in order to determine whether it contributed anything to the development of the ACC*=DAT* passive in Middle English. This might be the case, if the impersonal passive favored topicalisation (pre-posing) of the DAT, i.e., a grammatical process which cooperated with word order strategies. Otherwise, it is simply the topicalisation strategy itself that identified DAT, like ACC, with subject (NOM), when the marking difference between DAT, ACC *and NOM* (!), was obscured. Unmarked preposed arguments came to be interpreted as subjects (= "objects") of passivisation. Non-passive residual phenomena associated with DAT preposing persisted for quite a while, but lexically controlled (with some increasingly dimly perceivable semantic motivation), as in "perception/cognition" ("psych") verbs like "methinks" (i.e., "it seems to me") and "melikes" (note the eventual spelling at the threshold of extinction in Early Modern E). (post-OE DAT/NOM variation has had various *lexical* fates. "seem" is an interesting case in which a DAT > NOM innovation has not survived e.g., we *seme* it no shame (1485) = consider, cf. we DEEM it no shame. "what *lacked* yew" (1175) eventually gave way to "both they *lakken* (1320 ) (still "he lacks both"), but survives marginally in "both are lacking *in/to/for* him" The masochistic "bitter griefs taste me best" (1586) continues only as the *marked* "DAT" "bitter griefs taste best *to me* cntr. "I taste bitter griefs best", where "best" is an adv not an adj. French "please" into ME got caught up with "like", but seems to retain only limited use with DAT > NOM, e.g., "they do what they please, when they please, if they please", compared to the range of contexts in which the experiencer remains the object, e.g., it pleases them to listen, listening pleases them, etc. Lexical peculiarities of individual verbs mitigate any exclusive direction of syntactic development, cf. I fear X, X scares/frightens me, etc., though X fears= scares me rests in a fresh grave awaiting rebirth through the "transitivisation" pattern, e.g., X fears and disappears me.) In any case, the lexical longevity of the "methinks" type of verb contrasts with the relatively rapid thoroughness with which DAT *passives* were reanalysed as NOM=Object passives. The German strategy for approximating the English/Bantu "indirect" passive attracted my attention because it shows a cooperation of word order and morphological marking strategies (passivisation) that is suggestive of similar strategies in OE as a similar case-inflected language. English DAT/ACC passivisation continues those word order strategies in the absence of case-marking (except for those famously conservative pronouns.) They are preferred to preposing prepositional phrases in recent and current English, i.e., "I was given a book" is preferred "to me a book was given". More precisely, "I was given a book" is used where the old DAT is "topical" and the clause "focus" is on the old ACC. "to me a book was given" denies post-verbal clause focus to either argument, with an effect that serves more restricted purposes. ("to me (there?!) was given a book" does not rate serious consideration as an alternative "theme focus" strategy to "I was given..." in current English.) I also appreciated Paul Hopper's additional observations on the neuter singular pronoun in various Germanic languages, including the observation about the avoidance (ungrammaticality??) of "that's *its*", parallel to "that's mine". In fact, I suspect similar avoidance of "that's *theirs*" iff "their-" refers to an inanimate plural. If that's the case (and I'm not sure), it would detract from the suggestion that the avoidance of *stress* on "its" (required by the construction) is the "primary" motivation (as opposed to the inanimacy of the reference) -- not that Paul was weighing alternative motivations. It remains tempting to somehow relate this avoidance of *its* to the disfavoring of case-marking (= GEN) with neuter possessives to the advantage of two alternative strategies (which I first read about in Sapir), the prepositional possessive construction with *of*, e.g., "the leg of the table" vs. "compounding", e.g., "the table leg". I wonder if "it belongs to the table" is favored over "it's the table's", again avoiding a GEN inanimate. NB Beyond the Present-Day pale is "WHOSE is it?" for an inanimate, cf. A: whose keys are those? B: Mine/??My car's (but A: WHAT/WHICH keys are those? B: My car's, cf. the car keys, the keys TO the car, ? the car's keys). Discomfort remains "non-standard" for the relative "a table WHOSE legs were broken" (pref reduction to "a table WITH broken legs" when possible, expect "a table THAT's legs were broken" when not). GEN, the surviving OE case inflection, is under severe and continuing attack in the context of inanimates. NNB. The surviving irregular plurals in English are *animates*. They allow "it's the (wo)men's/ children's/cattle's/mice's" etc. "it's the girls'/boys'/horses'/etc" only works in print, though in practice intended number is probably rarely a problem. Still, the surviving humans remain useful, cf. "it's the man's room" vs. "it's the men's room". Inanimates lose on all counts, cf. ??? it's the tables'(s). From bjarne.birkrem at iba.uio.no Mon Aug 10 12:00:23 1998 From: bjarne.birkrem at iba.uio.no (Bjarne Birkrem) Date: Mon, 10 Aug 1998 08:00:23 EDT Subject: Dative Pronouns Message-ID: A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: text/enriched Size: 3013 bytes Desc: not available URL: From mghiselin at casmail.calacademy.org Mon Aug 10 22:48:03 1998 From: mghiselin at casmail.calacademy.org (Ghiselin, Michael) Date: Mon, 10 Aug 1998 18:48:03 EDT Subject: Reply to Ghiselin (long) Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Dear Dr. Trask: Thank you for your long, thoughtful, and very useful response to my query about the attitude of linguists with respect to what might be called "chrono-languages" and "cladistic" language concepts. Michael Ross and Isidore Dyen have also responded and I hope that others will too. Your response about putting one's foot in the same river twice is right on target. When Heraclitus said that one cannot put one's foot in the same river twice, he was treating an individual river as the set of its components. At different times it consists of different water, therefore it is not the same set. You and I consist of molecules, and in fact are largely water, so when we drink or excrete, we are not the same set. Likewise with species: they are not the same as soon as one of the "set" dies or another is born. And with languages, dropping out or adding an idiolect makes it a different language. One solution for such an exercise is to try to make each river, organism, species, or language, be an intensionally-defined class. If we grant that, then there must be some defining property for the group of molecules, organisms, idiolects, or whatever. This seems wierd for Styx, or Larry Trask, but for many people meets their intuitions about Homo sapiens or English. The other solution is to treat all the aformentioned entities as individuals. Individuals have no defining properties, and they can change a great deal yet remain the same thing. When there are stages of development of an organism, we do not say treat a child and an adult as different organisms, but as the same organism that has come to differ. When we find cells dividing, we usually say that we have two new cells, except when they bud, and then we suppose that the original one continued to exist and the bud only is new. The analogies with languages are pretty straight forward and obvious, as well as frustrating. What you say suggests that linguists like the family tree model, but realize that there are all sorts of problems and puzzles with it, which, however, can be dealt with adequately. That is pretty much the position of zoologists with respect to the genealogical nexus that interests them. You mention pidgins and creoles. This is particularly interesting because it suggests something that biologists once considered a possibility: origin of unrelated species by spontaneous generation. Non-genetic languages of another kind would be ones with two or more direct ancestors. In fact we have these in biology. Allopolyploids are organisms with two diploid sets of chromosomes from different species. The famous Raphanobrassica is a cross between the cabbage and the radish; it has the root of a cabbage and the leaves of a radish. Such dual ancestry is however fully compatable with the view that the species are the lineages and that they can evolve indefinitely yet still remain the same thing. Likewise with languages. I was also very interested by your remarks about the political aspect of what a language is. There may not be much of a connection here. However, the decision that one dialect is a "standard" leading to intermediates going extinct suggests something like a model for sympatric speciation. Again, thank you very much. Sincerely, Micael Ghiselin From mghiselin at casmail.calacademy.org Tue Aug 11 14:14:31 1998 From: mghiselin at casmail.calacademy.org (Ghiselin, Michael) Date: Tue, 11 Aug 1998 10:14:31 EDT Subject: Cladistic language concepts Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Dear Dr. Dyen, Please accept my thanks for your thoughtful response to my query about cladistic language concepts and what might be called "chrono-languages." I have already received some good commentary from a couple of other linguists, and these preliminary responses are most encouraging. Your way of looking at these matters is somewhat different from that of my other informants but basically you all seem to agree that mere evolution does not cause a language to be replaced by another language. You suggest that one might wish to speak of a chronoperson, but unless I am mistaken you would not consider such stages as different persons in the sense that two siblings are. As I see it your solution is to treat languages as nexus or concatinations of idiolects, united by actual or potential mutual intelligibility, and to get a diachronic language concept you pass backward across generations. It is of some interest that in my book I refer to intercompatibility of organisms within a species as comparable to what we get in computer systems. Yes, the notion of a network is a bit hard to explicate, but what you say about them makes a lot of sense to me. You mention your commentary on such matters in a Festschrift for Hoenigswald. If it has been published I would appreciate a reference. Sincerely, Michael Ghiselin From Roger.Wright at liverpool.ac.uk Wed Aug 12 13:30:17 1998 From: Roger.Wright at liverpool.ac.uk (Roger Wright) Date: Wed, 12 Aug 1998 09:30:17 EDT Subject: Universals and change In-Reply-To: <3.0.3.32.19980731103333.0069d304@mail.hf.uio.no> Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Professor Farlund's contribution is nicely put and admirably concise; yet the existence of "Universal Grammar" is a theory; the properties that it is said to have are also theoretical (and they too change over time). The fact that languages change is universally true (empirically); surely only the latter qualifies as a genuine "universal"? Nor is it necessarily true that, every time a detail of a language changes, the whole "system" changes; that too is a theory, one which I know most linguists subscribe to (but which seems rather an unhelpful perspective to others). New details in practice usually introduce variability into the exisitng system, rather than abolishing it. It would be different if new linguistic phenomena always ousted the old ones at once, but (empirical truth) they don't. It's a real divide among linguists, this; whether we think facts or theory are more important. If in doubt, I'd plump for the facts. >The idea that change should be a universal is meaningless since language >universals are based on generalizations over properties of *systems*. When >a language changes, a system changes, and this new system must again obey >whatever constraints are imposed by UG. Change in itself cannot be part of >the system. The only interesting connection between universals and change >is the fact that no change can lead to a result which violates UG. From erickson at hawaii.edu Wed Aug 12 13:29:14 1998 From: erickson at hawaii.edu (Blaine Erickson) Date: Wed, 12 Aug 1998 09:29:14 EDT Subject: Chinese Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- More catching up. Isidore Dyen wrote: > In general bound morphemes--i.e. affixes--are not a universal > phenomenon. Consider Chinese, whichn has, I have been given > to understand, just one It is a common misconception that most (or all) Chinese morphemes are free. Verbal affixes which indicate aspect, sentence-final particles, and noun affixes (more than two dozen in Cantonese) are all bound. For an excellent and thoroughly readable debunking of the myths surrounding "Chinese," see DeFrancis, John. 1984. The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Best, Blaine Erickson erickson at hawaii.edu From erickson at hawaii.edu Wed Aug 12 13:28:51 1998 From: erickson at hawaii.edu (Blaine Erickson) Date: Wed, 12 Aug 1998 09:28:51 EDT Subject: Japanese Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Just catching up on some back messages. Jacob Baltuch wrote: > On the other hand I seem to remember that Japanese has direct > and indirect object take different postpositions (-(w)o vs. - > ni if I remember correctly) and yet has indirect passives. You remember correctly: for most verbs and in most cases, _o_ marks the DO, and _ni_ the IO. Not being a syntactician, I don't have too much to say about indirect passives. I'll just mention that the passive often (but not always) indicates some sort of adverse situation. oya ga shinda. parent(s) TOP die-PERFECT "(My) parent(s) died." versus oya ni shinareta. parent(s) AGT die-PASSIVE-PERFECT "(My) parent(s) died (and I sufferred as a result)." Or, more literally, "(I was) deaded by my parent(s)." Best, Blaine Erickson erickson at hawaii.edu From Cindy.Allen at anu.edu.au Wed Aug 12 13:28:29 1998 From: Cindy.Allen at anu.edu.au (Cynthia Allen) Date: Wed, 12 Aug 1998 09:28:29 EDT Subject: I'm told In-Reply-To: Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- >----------------------------Original message---------------------------- >With regard to the retention of bare objects, Benji Wald comments: > >It should be added that there remains a residue of this process in some >(British) English dialects. That is, with a few verbs, esp. the >"arch-dative" verb 'give' (but also "show"), the variation in object order >has continued into the twentieth century (and even has a coherent >geographic distribution according to the British dialect atlas reflecting >the rural mid 20th c.) It seems to be largely if not exclusively limited >to the inanimate pronominal theme "it", as well as to certain verbs, e.g., >"give/show it me" (maybe even the recipient has to be a pronoun). > This is certainly correct, but when I was talking about 'bare NP objects' I was referring to nominal, rather than pronominal objects-something that I could have made clearer. In my investigation of texts, I found this progression: 1.Two bare nominal objects in the order Theme Recipient disappear in the mid-14thC; the last example I found was 1340. However, when a pronoun was involved, the ordr TH REC was still possible; this happened when the Theme was a pronoun, regardless of whether the Recipient was a noun or a pronoun. In other words, a pronominal object still always preceded a nominal one, and when both were pronouns, the normal order was Th REC, just as it still is for some British varieties. 2. The first few true examples of 'he was given a book' are found later on in the 14thC. 3. By the early 16thC, there are no more examples in my texts of ProTh NREC order, although TH REC is the only order found when both objects are pronouns. This is still the situation as I understand it for a lot of British English speakers-i.e. He gave it him but *he gave it the king. 4. I US, Australian and some varieties of British English, the order REC TH has completely generalised so that it is the only possible order even with two pronouns. (Of course, a prepositional phrase instead is always possible, and is the only possibility with some combinations of pronouns). Of course, not all varieties of Modern English are the same in this respect. I have been told that some varieties of British English still allow 'He gave a gift the king' with two nominal objects in the TH REC order, and I would be glad to learn more about this. But the situation I described is what I found in the written texts. >I have long been interested in this issue, and also why the areal >distribution is what it is, and why IO-DO order has been the trend for >fixed order in most dialects. Cynthia mentions that the last problem is >related to pragmatic features of topicality in discourse which favors the >animate= indirect object as more often topical and given than the inanimate >= direct object, so the ordering is related to grammaticalisation of >pragmatic information structure of given before new in specific contexts. Where do I say this? It is certainly true that animates generally tend to be more topical than inanimates, but saying that the indirect object is normally more topical than the direct one does not seem to explain why the REC TH order was actually in a slight minority with two nominal objects in OE but this order increased in ME. Nor does it seem to explain why TH REC was always some much more frequent than REC TH with two pronouns. I agree with Benji that the matter is complex and cannot be explained simply as the grammaticalisation of an order which is more frequent for pragmatic reasons. What I actually said was simply that the REC TH order (with two nominals) became progressively more dominant. Later on, he says: > >In any case, the lexical angle occurred to me because of some facts in some >Bantu languages, where historically passivisations akin to English indirect >passivisation are commonplace, and in some languages have even evolved to >exclude direct (theme) passivisation when there is more than one "object". >This is relevant to Cynthia's comment: > >>.... (late 14th century), the indirect passives appear >>because grammatically, the recipient is indistinguishable from the theme. > >The key word is "grammatically". C's passage implies equation of >grammatical object with unmarked argument, hence accusative/dative where >these are no longer overtly distinguished. Nevertheless, why should >speakers reinterpret non-themes as grammatical objects (and thus passivise >them), absence of marking notwithstanding? I want to repeat here what I said earlier: there was apparently no equation of grammatical object with unmarked argument until the position of the old (nominal) IO became identical to the position of a DO of a mono-transitive verb: directly postverbal. The explanation that I suggest for why a language-learner would make such an equation crucially involves a level of grammatical relations, as opposed to semantic relations, and assumes that listeners like to use processing strategies that make use of either case-marking or grammatical relations. My idea is that once the order of two nominal objects became fixed, the language-learner came up with this processing strategy: Assume that the first postverbal NP is the (direct) object, unless an object clitic has already been encountered. (the proviso about the object clitic is necessary because of the retention of pronoun-TH order). The listener can then retrieve the semantic role through the grammatical role, because that's how verbs are stored in the lexicon. Such a processing strategy would have been of no use earlier, when the order was variable but there was no distinction in case marking, because it was not possible to make a direct link between constituent structure and grammatical relation. I refer any interested party to Chapter 9 of my book for further discussion of this approach. Later on: >Interestingly, English shows further development from indirect >passivisation to prepositional passivisation, as in: this bed was eaten >potato chips in, etc. (I think I have the chronological order right, if it >is really clear. Does the preference for "the boy was given a book" over >"the boy was given a book TO" have anything to do with historical order of >stabilisation of the two types of passive?) So, eventually (in fact, >fairly quickly) passivisation transcended whether role is marked or not. >Again, this does not seem to have been inevitable, just possible >(obviously, since it occurred). Maybe Cynthia can comment further on the >historical relationship between these two processes in English and whether >there was anything else favoring the generalisation of passsivisation, >which I suspect was not an inevitable one. There's a substantial literature on the prepositional passive in English, and anyone interested in the facts would do well to start with David Denison's 1993 book *English Historical Syntax*-Chapter 7 is entirely devoted to prep. passives and Denison's summary of earlier studies as well as the facts is excellent. I think that the reason why 'He was given a book to' is not favored in English is simply that if you are going to make a recipient be the subject, you might as well make it a core role (the object) to start with, instead of making it an oblique. I don't think it has anything to do with the historical progression. Certainly, what Denison refers to as the 'complex prepostional passive' (e.g. he was taken advantage of) seems to have entered the language a bit later than the 'indirect' passive, but not that much longer-there are convincing examples from the early 15th C. In his next message, Benji comments on the various fates of different verbs; in some instances, the Experiencer ends up a nominative subject, in others, a prepositional object, etc. The general point is certainly valid (and well known). I discuss some of the individual verbs in my book. I agree completely with Benji's comment: > Lexical peculiarities of individual verbs mitigate any >exclusive direction of syntactic development But I don't completely agree with all the details, and I'd like to respond to what Benji says about 'please': >French "please" into ME got caught up with "like", but seems to retain only >limited use with DAT > NOM, e.g., "they do what they please, when they >please, if they please", compared to the range of contexts in which the >experiencer remains the object, e.g., it pleases them to listen, listening >pleases them, etc. This rather makes it sound as though there was a general DAT>NOM trend with 'please' which only survived in that construction, but the reality seems to be that the Experiencer of *please* was always unambiguously the object except in this construction, where it starts showing up as a nominative subject in the early 16thC. I wrote an article on this verb called 'On doing as you please' which appeared in *Historical Pragmatics* edited by Andreas Jucker in 1995 and I also have a section in it in that book which I keep referring to. No ambiguity-driven syntactic reanalysis can have been involved for two reasons (1) the 'reanalysis' takes place much too late and (2) there was no model for a syntactic reanalysis; i.e. sentences like 'the king will do as the king pleases' are not found until 'the king will do as he pleases' are also found; before this, 'the king will do as it pleases the king (or him)' is the only possibility. It is in fact quite surprising how clearly object-like this experiencer is until it becomes a subject in this limited construction-nearly always postverbal and usually a (clearly object case) pronoun. So I think that we have to look at the semantics of the construction here. This experiencer is in fact more agentive than the experiencer of please usually is, because the construction is explicitly saying that I am in change of my own pleasure. So I think the experiencer started to get treated as a possible subject because it was similar semantically to a typical agentive subject, not because there was any confusion as to its grammatical relation . Of course, the object option remained as a possibility for a long time too. And: >In any case, the lexical longevity of the "methinks" type of verb contrasts >with the relatively rapid thoroughness with which DAT *passives* were >reanalysed as NOM=Object passives. It is certainly correct that the 'impersonal' verbs lingered much longer than the 'impersonal' passives of monotransitive verbs, which disappeared by the early thirteenth century. I interpret this as meaning that the possibility of case-marking marking objects lexically disappeared when the dative and accusative cases collapsed together. So we no longer get 'him was demed'. But I analyse the Experiencer of the impersonal 'methinks' etc. as a subject, despite the object case. Lexical case marking to subjects was retained because it was clearly distinct from the normal (structural) case for subjects. We still get impersonal uses like this until the early 16thC, although less and less frequently. Then they are reduced to fixed expressions like 'methink(s)'. I'm afraid that I will have tried the patience of any histlingers who have bothered to read this far and hereby declare my intention of ceasing to repeat what I have already said in print-for the time being, at least! : Cynthia Allen Linguistics, Arts Faculty Australian National University Canberra, ACT 0200 Australia From isidore.dyen at yale.edu Wed Aug 12 23:47:34 1998 From: isidore.dyen at yale.edu (Isidore Dyen) Date: Wed, 12 Aug 1998 19:47:34 EDT Subject: Cladistic language concepts In-Reply-To: <9807109027.AA902789286@casmail.calacademy.org> Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- I think you have understood what I was aiming at. As for the family-tree problem, that has to be separated into a theoretical problem and a practical problem. The first is easier to handle. It depends on the prohibition of mixing. If languages can divide, but not mix, the fami.y-tree diagram applies. Then multiple branching from the same point can only occur if they a resimultaneous. Practically however Only well-determined branches can be found with the consequence that multiple apparently simultaneous branchings result because the time-determinations cannot be fine enough. In principle this view of the family-tree can apply to bioology witholut difficulty if different species are not permitted to interbreed. As for the reference to my article I can't give to you now, but I can about three weeks from now at Dyen at hawaii.edu. The book has been published. On Tue, 11 Aug 1998, Ghiselin, Michael wrote: > ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- > Dear Dr. Dyen, > Please accept my thanks for your thoughtful response to > my query about cladistic language concepts and what might be > called "chrono-languages." I have already received some > good commentary from a couple of other linguists, and these > preliminary responses are most encouraging. > Your way of looking at these matters is somewhat > different from that of my other informants but basically you > all seem to agree that mere evolution does not cause a > language to be replaced by another language. You suggest > that one might wish to speak of a chronoperson, but unless I > am mistaken you would not consider such stages as different > persons in the sense that two siblings are. > As I see it your solution is to treat languages as > nexus or concatinations of idiolects, united by actual or > potential mutual intelligibility, and to get a diachronic > language concept you pass backward across generations. It > is of some interest that in my book I refer to > intercompatibility of organisms within a species > as comparable to what we get in computer systems. Yes, the > notion of a network is a bit hard to explicate, but what you > say about them makes a lot of sense to me. > You mention your commentary on such matters in a > Festschrift for Hoenigswald. If it has been published I > would appreciate a reference. > Sincerely, > Michael Ghiselin > From delancey at darkwing.uoregon.edu Wed Aug 12 23:48:44 1998 From: delancey at darkwing.uoregon.edu (Scott DeLancey) Date: Wed, 12 Aug 1998 19:48:44 EDT Subject: Cladistic language concepts In-Reply-To: Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Since Prof. Ghiselin is interested in collecting votes here, I'll add mine to the effect that 1) I don't think the issue of whether chronologically distant grammars representing a single continuous linguistic lineage constitute one or two distinct languages has generally been seen as a crucial or even very interesting problem in linguistics, and 2) That historical linguistics has *almost* always been resolutely cladistic as opposed to phenetic--the received tradition of historical linguistics has since its beginning been concerned with establishing genetic lineages. (Indeed, when I first encountered discussion of this issue in biology, I had a few moments difficulty in understanding what the issue was--it just hadn't occurred to me that anyone might for any reason be interested in any taxonomy other than a cladistic one). The "almost" proviso there is in reference to a bit of a vogue in the 19th century for a sort of linguistic equivalent to phenetic classification--the sort of research that gave us ideas like "Turanian", the hypothesis that most of the languages of Asia, from Dravidian up through Altaic, belong to a single family on the basis of what are indeed pretty pervasive similarities in grammatical organization. (This kind of argument crops up every now and then since the 19th century, too, but we tend to dismiss such suggestions as ignorant or downright crankish). But I think this may have been a problem of methodology rather than theory, that is, I suspect that the proponents of Turanian (was it Max Mueller's idea originally?) thought they *were* identifying a genetic lineage, they just didn't understand what kind of evidence is necessary for that purpose. Scott DeLancey Department of Linguistics University of Oregon Eugene, OR 97403, USA delancey at darkwing.uoregon.edu http://www.uoregon.edu/~delancey/prohp.html From mghiselin at casmail.calacademy.org Wed Aug 12 23:49:52 1998 From: mghiselin at casmail.calacademy.org (Ghiselin, Michael) Date: Wed, 12 Aug 1998 19:49:52 EDT Subject: Cladistic language concepts Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Dear Dr. DeLancey: Thank you very much for casting your vote. It would be nice if more linguists would do the same because the sample as it exists is small and perhaps not representative. In spite of that the preliminary results are very interesting. Not only has a cladistic language concept been generally presupposed but, as you say, linguists do not even consider the topic particularly interesting. Why should this be? One possibility is that where linguists have a written record it lacks the fragmentary nature of the fossil record that results from accidents of preservation and the like. Another is that what the linguists do perceive as important is trying to find older and older common ancestries and the genealogical relationships are all that they need. Linguists do not have the elaborate system of categories, such as phylum, class, order etc., that we zoologists do. And unless I am mistaken (please correct me if I am) they do not believe that there are important differences that need to be expressed by giving a taxon a higher rank, as when our own species has been put in a separate order or even kingdom. Linguists must have methodological problems with respect to paraphyly, parallelism and convergence. But so far as I can tell, they treat these as problems to be overcome in reaching a strictly genealogical arrangement. MG From delancey at darkwing.uoregon.edu Wed Aug 12 23:50:17 1998 From: delancey at darkwing.uoregon.edu (Scott DeLancey) Date: Wed, 12 Aug 1998 19:50:17 EDT Subject: Cladistic language concepts In-Reply-To: <9807129029.AA902948340@casmail.calacademy.org> Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- On Wed, 12 Aug 1998, Ghiselin, Michael wrote: > In spite of that the preliminary results are very > interesting. Not only has a cladistic language concept been > generally presupposed but, as you say, linguists do not even > consider the topic particularly interesting. Why should > this be? Isn't it the case that biological taxonomy started simply as a way of classifying biological phenomena in the world, and the idea that the categories discovered reflect common descent is a separate (and later) notion? Comparative historical linguistics is quite different; our origin myth traces it to William Jones observation that similarities among several languages which we since recognize as Indo-European can be explained only by recognizing them as descended from "some common source", and discovering and demonstrating descent groups has always been seen as what comparative linguistics is about. > they need. Linguists do not have the elaborate system of > categories, such as phylum, class, order etc., that we > zoologists do. And unless I am mistaken (please correct me > if I am) they do not believe that there are important > differences that need to be expressed by giving a taxon a > higher rank, as when our own species has been put in a > separate order or even kingdom. No, I don't think that's true, at least in principle. We certainly recognize families, branches, subbranches (think of orders, families, genera), although there's no standardized terminology for it. I think the reason why we don't have the articulated taxonomic framework that biology has is that we don't have any very clear idea of how to measure degrees of relationship--i.e. a statement like "the degree of relationship of Klamath and Sahaptian is roughly equivalent to that of English and German" is purely impressionistic, with no way of operationalizing a measure of relatedness that would guarantee that two linguists would agree on an answer. (Nevertheless, unfortunately in my view, one hears statemments of this sort all the time). Linguists might disagree about the need for higher-order categories-- extreme polygeneticists, I suppose, could argue that every currently- recognized linguistic lineage represents descent from a distinct invention of language. I don't think anyone really would, though-- again, the reason why we don't have terminology for higher-order groupings is that we don't really know how to recognize them. (The term "phylum" has been used a bit in linguistics, but without any strict definition--often it simply means "a relatively deep postulated genetic unit which is still controversial"). > Linguists must have methodological problems with > respect to paraphyly, parallelism and convergence. But so > far as I can tell, they treat these as problems to be > overcome in reaching a strictly genealogical arrangement. Unfortunately this has historically been true. As Larry Trask (I think it was?) mentioned, this is changing a bit--we may be on the verge of developing a framework for investigating contact phenomena sufficiently rigorous and explanatory to have a legitimate place in the same discipline as comparative linguistics. We really do need a science of areal linguistics, as we have for genetic linguistics, but we don't yet have one. Scott DeLancey Department of Linguistics University of Oregon Eugene, OR 97403, USA delancey at darkwing.uoregon.edu http://www.uoregon.edu/~delancey/prohp.html From Roger.Wright at liverpool.ac.uk Thu Aug 13 11:28:41 1998 From: Roger.Wright at liverpool.ac.uk (Roger Wright) Date: Thu, 13 Aug 1998 07:28:41 EDT Subject: Cladistic language concepts In-Reply-To: <9807129029.AA902948340@casmail.calacademy.org> Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- On Wed, 12 Aug 1998, Ghiselin, Michael wrote: > Thank you very much for casting your vote. It would be > nice if more linguists would do the same because the sample > as it exists is small and perhaps not representative. > In spite of that the preliminary results are very > interesting. Not only has a cladistic language concept been > generally presupposed but, as you say, linguists do not even > consider the topic particularly interesting. Why should > this be? I'm very interested in it, for one. I work in the field of Latin and the Romance Languages; and although (as Larry Trask said) the Romance languages are different now from each other, and from Latin as it has been taught to us for the last 1000 years or so (that is, the highest written registers only, in effect, even if recited), I still see them as a direct continuation of the original spoken language Latin (and not just "Vulgar" Latin); that's why I have often said in lectures, and sometimes written, that "Spanish *is* Latin, only later". I wish Romanists and Latinists in general would realize that this is indeed an interesting problem; and, as Larry Trask pointed out, it's only politically-inspired divergence (usually allied to the establishment of different spelling systems, as in 12th and 13th century Romance Europe, or Chile in 1900, or Asturias now) that leads us to think otherwise - RW From jhewson at morgan.ucs.mun.ca Thu Aug 13 17:37:26 1998 From: jhewson at morgan.ucs.mun.ca (John Hewson) Date: Thu, 13 Aug 1998 13:37:26 EDT Subject: Cladistic language concepts In-Reply-To: <9807129029.AA902948340@casmail.calacademy.org> Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- On Wed, 12 Aug 1998, Ghiselin, Michael wrote: > ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- > Dear Dr. DeLancey: > Thank you very much for casting your vote. It would be > nice if more linguists would do the same because the sample > as it exists is small and perhaps not representative. I suspect the sample is small because Larry Trask's answer was so comprehensive, and so well expressed, that nothing more remained to be said, except to emphasize particular points, as Roger Wright has done in stating that "Spanish *is* Latin, only later", a view that I often presented in class with the words "French is a 20th Century form of Latin". It is interesting that there is a related debate going on about Universals and change. Professor Farlund has claimed that any change in a language is a change "in the system". This is correct, but grossly oversimplified: a language is a system of systems; one can have change in the phonology that in no way affects the grammar. There is a system of parts of speech, and subsystems such as the nominal system, verbal system, etc. Within the verbal system one can have subsystems of tense, aspect, voice, and mood. Within aspect systems one has to treat synthetic aspects as different from analytic aspects, as the two interact rather than contrast. The only universals in systems like this are operational: binary contrast, secondary derivation, and so forth. Out of these systems syntax is constructed, and again the only universals are operational: predication to two levels, as in Jespersen's "very hot weather" (with "hot" predicated of "weather" and "very" predicated of "hot") and recycling whereby these three words can be treated as a single element, a NP which can then become the support of a verb, which can be expanded into a VP, etc. We build sentences the same way a child builds models with Lego blocks, and we don't need rules to do it, any more than the child does. All such construction depends on cognition: realizing what fits together and what does not: adverbs cannot be predicated of nominals for example: *very weather. Rules are created by linguists to describe regularities; they are part of the description, not of what is described. All this, alas, to make the point that linguistic change *is* a language universal, and that change is also systemic (although it can be, and too often is treated atomistically). I hope that it is also clear that what is meant by "universal" and what is meant by "system" can vary greatly from one linguist to another, and consequently there are enormous confusions concerning the very fundamentals of our discipline. The nature of systemic change was realized quite early in such statements as Grimm's Law, the lowering of all short Latin vowels by Late Latin, and the loss of length distinctions by early Romance, and so on. The regularity of sound change is also the direct result of change in the system: change the _s_ on a typewriter to _$_ (i.e. change the system), and the re$ult i$ a$ follow$... The systems of a language are mental realities that are not amenable to direct observation but, like gravity, are amenable to indirect observation. It is the phoneme, a systemic entity, that triggers the speech apparatus to produce a sound that will be modified in all kinds of ways in the processes of speech, producing an endless range of allophones, the directly observable data. If phonemes were directly observable, we would not need to train linguists. Such systems are to be treated as scientific substructures, not as abstractions, which may fail to correspond to any existential reality whatever. Abstractions, where anyone's "assumptions" are just as good as anyone else's, are very often, in methodological terms, a waste of time. John Hewson, FRSC tel: (709)737-8131 University Research Professor fax: (709)737-4000 Memorial University of Newfoundland St. John's NF, CANADA A1B 3X9 From j.t.faarlund at inl.uio.no Fri Aug 14 14:16:20 1998 From: j.t.faarlund at inl.uio.no (Jan Terje Faarlund) Date: Fri, 14 Aug 1998 10:16:20 EDT Subject: Universals and change In-Reply-To: Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- At 09:30 12.08.98 EDT, Roger Wright wrote: >----------------------------Original message---------------------------- > > >the existence of "Universal Grammar" is a theory; ------------- -- and what's more, the *form* of UG is no more than a (until now weakly supported) hypothesis. The way I used the term UG in my last posting was as a theory (or hypothesis) about possible grammars, and hence about learnability. Children learn grammars, not changes, but in the process of learning grammars they may execute changes. To be a bit more concrete: "VP -> V NP", "VP -> NP V" and "VP -> V,NP" (unspecified order) are all possible grammatical rules, licensed by UG, and learnable by children as part of their grammar. Once any of these rules has been internalized by members of a new generation, they can be used to predict the form of future utterences produced by those children. However, "[NP V] changes to [V NP]" is *not* a possible grammatical rule. It cannot be learned by children, it cannot be used to predict anything, not even future historical changes, since there are still plenty of OV languages around after at least 50 000 years of human language (or more, whatever you prefer). It is just a post hoc description of something that has happened in many speech communities. > Nor is it necessarily true that, every time a detail of a >language changes, the whole "system" changes; that too is a theory, one >which I know most linguists subscribe to (but which seems rather an >unhelpful perspective to others). New details in practice usually >introduce variability into the exisitng system, rather than abolishing >it. It would be different if new linguistic phenomena always ousted the >old ones at once, but (empirical truth) they don't. --- I guess I wasn't very clear on this point. I took "system" to include every subsystem and every detail. So if there is a change, say in the inflection of English strong verbs, there is a change in the system of strong verbs, and by implication in the grammar of English, however minor the change is. Of course also a system like the grammar of a natural language allows for variation. We seem to be back to the old synchrony/diachrony dispute. I do not claim that the two always should be separated, and that one does not depend on the other, but I think it is methodologically and theoretically sound sometimes to keep certain concepts within one or the other of those dimensions. Questions of possible grammars, universals of linguistic structure and learnability are different from the question of whether all languages necessarily change. The latter is not a very interesting question, since we can all observe that they do as long as they have live speakers. The question is *how* and perhaps *why*. > It's a real divide among linguists, this; whether we think facts >or theory are more important. If in doubt, I'd plump for the facts. > -- I don't think so. We cannot do one without the other. Theory without facts is not linguistics, and observing facts without an underlying theory is not possible. ******************************************** Professor Jan Terje Faarlund Universitetet i Oslo Institutt for nordistikk og litteraturvitskap Postboks 1013 Blindern N-0315 Oslo (Norway) Tel. (+47) 22 85 69 49 (office) (+47) 22 12 39 66 (home) Fax (+47) 22 85 71 00 From whiting at cc.helsinki.fi Mon Aug 17 12:17:09 1998 From: whiting at cc.helsinki.fi (Robert Whiting) Date: Mon, 17 Aug 1998 08:17:09 EDT Subject: GG and change In-Reply-To: Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Change is inevitable. This is a by-product of a universe with increasing entropy over time. Therefore change is a "universal universal" and has to do with the nature of the universe, not with the nature of language as such. It is my impression that almost all linguistic change is brought about by sociological factors. This impression is based on the following observations: 1) Linguistic change is unpredictable. By this I mean that the onset of a particular change at any given time can not be anticipated. Once a change has started or been completed, it can be analyzed and classified and (probably) parallels for such a change can be found in other languages. But the trigger for the change can not be shown to be the linguistic situation because one can also (probably) find parallel linguistic situations in other languages in which the change did not occur. Therefore the trigger for the change must come from outside the language (or outside language in general). Analogical changes to restore morphological features levelled by phonological change might appear to be an exception (as might analogical change in general, since a model form must already exist in the language for analogy to be productive), but in this case it is simply a reaction to a change (phonological) that did not have its origin in the linguistic situation (on this seeming contradiction, see below, point 5). 2) Any part of language can change. Changes can be observed in phonology, morphology, syntax, and lexicon. I think (someone will correct me if I am wrong) that there is no part of a language that can be considered immutable. Even features that were long considered inherent to a language, like word order or intonation, can and do change. 3) Linguistic change is irregular. With the exception of sound changes (which the neogrammarians tell us are without exception and once a sound change is initiated, it will affect every instance of that sound in the language [but the unpredictability of point 1 still applies: it cannot be predicted what will change or what it will change into]), a change in a form or construction may or may not affect similar forms or constructions. Or part of a system may change and leave the rest of the system unchanged. 4) Linguistic change is not unidirectional. A change (including phonetic changes) that goes in one direction in one language may go in the opposite direction in another language. One can count up the number of instances for the change in each direction and say which direction is statistically more likely for the change, but in essence, there is no change that is impossible. 5) Linguistic change can cause conflict in the language. This is a result of an inherent conflict in language between phonology and morphology. Since language expresses meaning through phonological form, there is constantly a conflict between phonological simplicity (ease and speed of articulation) and morphological complexity (more overt morphological marking to disambiguate meaning). What we have, then, is an "engineering trade-off" where changes for the better on one side will usually introduce changes for the worse on the other. Thus a phonological change that reduces overt morphological distinctions will frequently be countered by an analogical change that restores some (if not all) of the lost morphological marking. Thus while it may seem that analogical change is brought about by the linguistic situation, it is rather a response to a natural conflict between two competing systems, and, while it may be systematic, it is still unpredictable and irregular. But even the phonological change that causes the response is not necessarily caused by an attempt a phonological simplification, since many phonological changes result in more complex phonology, so even a rule that phonological changes result in simplified phonology is not predictable. Given these observations, it is obvious that the only thing about linguistic change that is universal is change itself, and that has nothing to do with language per se. Furthermore, with the exception of analogical restoration of morphological marking, a linguistic situation is seldom seen to be the trigger for a linguistic change, and even when it is, the nature and extent of the change is not predictable. Since linguistic change cannot be seen to originate within language, it must be imposed by its users, human beings, and therefore is sociological in nature since language use is a socio-cultural phenomenon. The sociological factors that affect (or effect) linguistic change would seem to have to do with such things as intergroup relationships and intragroup or cultural bonding. (I am not a sociologist, so this terminology may not be current; I remember sociology as the course where it didn't do any good to have last year's exam -- they always asked the same questions - only the answers changed :).) A high prestige language or dialect is likely to trigger changes in languages or dialects in contact with it by imitation. But it is not just high prestige languages that cause changes. Thus historical linguistics recognizes superstratum languages (higher prestige, e.g., conquerors), adstratum languages (more or less equal prestige, i.e, neighbors or ethno-linguistic mixtures sharing the same territory), and substratum languages (lower prestige, e.g., conquered populations). While the nature of the relationship between the languages may tend to influence the types of changes that may flow between them (based on statistical probability), again, any kind of influence of one language on another is possible. So all that is really needed for one language to influence another is contact. Even direct contact is not needed, because, through writing, even long dead or unused languages can cause changes (English has many Greek and Latin neologisms). Thus languages in almost any kind of contact can cause changes in the lexicon (loan words and loan translations) and grammar (areal features in phonology, morphology and syntax) of one another. Group or cultural bonding can have the opposite effect of causing a language to deliberately be altered to make it more unlike its neighboring languages. Loanwords may be systematically purged from the language to make it more specific to its culture or group. If linguistic change is sociological in nature, then like other sociological changes (changes in government, religious, and economic systems) it originates with the few, not the many. The many just follow along once the change is set in motion. The point to generative grammar is that grammar has to have a synchronic form that is independent of its history. The speakers of a language learn its grammar, very seldom the history of its grammar. But since the grammar (and lexicon) of a language is constantly changing, a synchronic (generative) grammar is at best a "snapshot" of the grammar of the language at a particular point in time. A synchronic grammar of the English of a century ago would be different from a synchronic grammar of today's English which would be different again from the synchronic grammar of English a century from now. What historical linguistics can do is link the different "snapshots" and explain the mechanisms of the changes. But the history of these changes is irrelevant to generative grammar which has to be able to explain the current grammar of the language as used by its speakers on its own terms. Now if universal grammar is a grammar that all languages must obey and is supposed to encompass immutable rules of language, then if everything in language can change in an unpredictable, irregular, non-unidirectional way that can lead to conflict in the language or if cross-linguistically every possible way of accomplishing a linguistic result occurs, then universal grammar either is a chimera or it is at best a restatement of Murphy's Law: Anything that can happen, will happen. Bob Whiting whiting at cc.helsinki.fi On Thu, 30 Jul 1998 Isidore Dyen wrote: > > ---------------------------Original message--------------------------- > > How about contemplating whether language change is inevitable. If > it is not, theren should be some stable languages somewhere, If > it is, then it must be inherent in all languages and thus a > universal. > >On Thu, 23 Jul 1998, bwald wrote: > >> --------------------------Original message--------------------------- Before I forget, I have some comments on Robert Ratcliff's last message. He states: >> >... if one takes seriously the generative claim that the >> >goal of formal linguistic analysis is the discovery of an innate, >> >biologically determined language faculty, then you sever the link >> >between historical and formal linguistics. >> >> I would like to offer a different perspective. It is not about >> "severing the link", but about distinguishing between what is >> innate and thus presumably immutable, unchangeable, universal etc >> etc, VS. everything else in language. The "everything else" is >> what is relevant to historical linguistics, because it is what >> varies and changes within and across particular languages from >> one time to another. Therefore, the search to isolate what is >> innate or invariant in all languages also serves historical >> linguistics by revealing those aspects of language, or of any >> particular language, which are subject to change. The two >> programs complement each other, and work together. >> Stated differently, GG, and no doubt any serious synchronic >> framework for analysis which claims to be applicable to all >> observable (and "possible") human languages, seeks to provide the >> invariant parameters of language within which variation and >> change are possible -- and to which variation and change are >> *limited*. This is quite different from severing the link >> between historical and formal (i.e., "universal") linguistics. >> So, despite the difference in emphasis, synchronic linguistics >> continues its historic mission to provide a grounding for the >> study of linguistic change. One need not be misled by what some >> GGists claim they are trying to do (not to mention what they >> claim is "important"). It is no different from what historical >> linguists are trying to do when they compare two changes and say >> they reflect the SAME process of change. >> >> Having said that, then, it turns out that virtually every >> substantive proposal that GG has made for something invariant in >> language turns out to be too concrete, and the exceptions in some >> language or other show that those features of language are indeed >> subject to change. And so the search goes on, as proposals for >> concrete universals retreat into greater abstraction as the data >> from more and more languages accumulate. Each failed universal >> is an opportunity for the historical linguist to contemplate and >> try to determine how it is that languages can evolve in one way >> or the other. From bwald at HUMnet.UCLA.EDU Mon Aug 17 12:18:04 1998 From: bwald at HUMnet.UCLA.EDU (bwald) Date: Mon, 17 Aug 1998 08:18:04 EDT Subject: I'm told Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- I was very pleased to receive Cynthia's more extended comments on the indirect passive and related phenomena in the history of English. Actually, while I was waiting I became intrigued with the general relationship between the indirect and impersonal passives, not only in the history of English, but in Eurafrasian (Nostratic?) ACC(usative) languages in general, e.g., early I-E and Semitic (Classical Arabic and OT Hebrew), in German, Uralic and Altaic. The whole nature of both passivisation and impersonal (non-subject, non-passive) varies in interesting ways across these contiguous case-marking families, leading to insight about what's common and what's distinctive about any particular line of evolution, of course including Middle English. This informs my following comments on Cynthia's message. I was encouraged that Cynthia confirmed my basic understanding of various developments in the history of English. Indeed, I have read Denison and some of Cynthia's earlier writings (among others), but I do not always trust my memory, and there's also always the possibility that an author has changed their (!) mind about something for some reason or other. Therefore, it is entirely appropriate for Cynthia to refer me to some of her writings, implying that she feels they express her current ideas to the extent that she understands my interests. The only disappointment I had is that she did not respond to my interest in the historical status of the XY = Y FOR X construction, as in "cook me it" = "cook it for me". I mentioned that I thought I had noted ME examples of the type "cook it me", but I hadn't studied the problem closely enough to determine whether this remnant of historical X-DAT Y-ACC case-marking and word order has become (or always was) distinct from the type which has become "XY = Y TO X", e.g., "give me it = give it to me". As far as I understand the literature, this is not an issue. It is not singled out one way or another. So, I would assume that analysts don't feel there is a basis to make a distinction between "X TO Y" and "X FOR Y" in relation to "XY". But I would not take it for granted. So I'm looking for explicit (dis)confirmation of that assumption. The difference could be in the relation of the two prepositions to thematic role (or whatever you want to call it) and/or in the degree of independence of that role from any particular lexical verb. That remains a concern for me, because of the level of comparison I want to make for syntactic constructions associated with ACC case-marking in Eurafrasian languages. The issue involves ACC and inevitably the ACC/NOM! relationship (and thus, for the moment, excludes the ergative case-marking languages that confront Eurafrasia). The objective is to explore whether the development of the ME indirect passive was indeed more likely than not under the circumstances (hence, what ARE the circumstances? cf. Semitic also develops NOM-marked indirect passivisation), or whether the linguistic (as opposed to, say, social) conditions were ever sufficient to favor this direction of change over others. Meanwhile, Cynthia's following comments particularly interested me. >... when I was talking about 'bare NP objects' I >was referring to nominal, rather than pronominal objects..... I think that can be taken for granted. And it occurred to me that lexical(ly filled) NPs (or whatever you want to call them) establish the lead for pronouns, despite the fact that the pronouns maintain a NOM/ACC (ACC = older ACC/DAT) distinction throughout the period of development of the indirect passive. The latter is a fact that is quite striking, though we generally take it for granted because it is so familiar to us. It is all the more striking, I suggested, in view of the much longer time period for which (pronominal) pre-verbal ACCs (from older DATs) remained with specific NON-passivised verbs. Something about the passive encouraged a much more rapid completion of the change. Some would relate this to the idea that change in the nature of "grammatical subject" in English (corresponding somewhat to changes in the nature of "grammatical object") began to occur much earlier than "grammaticalisation" of word order to preserve distinctions once indicated by (NOM/ACC) case-marking. The implication is that ("long") before word order became a prominent role-expressing device, case-marking continued to play a role (in directing NPs to "subjecthood" and "objecthood"), perhaps because of pronominal case-marking, where pronouns are generally more common than lexical NPs in relevant constructions in discourse. Cynthia mentions the following progression: >1....a pronominal object still always preceded a nominal one, >and when both were pronouns, the normal order was Th REC... That is a striking fact in view of the commonality of the order IO DO among languages. Th REC is DO IO. I might understand the underlying principle if Th was more likely to be pronominal than REC, but I do not think that is the case, i.e., I do not think it is based directly on an "information-status" order (cntr. PRO NP). I can only note that the same order occurred historically for the French object clitics, and still does for third persons (but was otherwise reversed to a "topicality" order 1,2 > 3). My vague notion about why Th REC order in such cases is that DAT came to be considered a more "marked" case than ACC in the history of Romance (I think more generally than French) and fit into a "markedness" order similar to the information-status order. Some might just call it a "heaviness (of information)" order (the DAT marker is also phonologically more prominent than the ACC, and remains so in current French, lui vs. le/la). >2. The first few true examples of 'he was given a book' are found later on >in the 14thC. This shows an increasing association of NOM with "subject" -- in the case of pronouns. It is probably difficult to securely establish a priority between this change and a shift of agreement for the passivised verb when the subject is a lexical NP and thus indistinguishable for "oblique" and NOM. The issue is where "the boys was given a book" > "the boys WERE given a book" fits in to "them was given a book" > "they were given a book". I think NOM presupposes verb agreement, but unmarked preverbal NPs do not. (I could anticipate attestation of "them were given books", but not "they was..." in the relevant period.) >3. By the early 16thC, there are no more examples in my texts of ProTh NREC >order, although TH REC is the only order found when both objects are >pronouns.... He gave it him but *he gave it the king. IO-DO order expands but is resisted by PRO-PRO, originally motivated by the higher "markedess" of DAT over ACC. IO-DO may be associated with the higher of DAT/IO as more favorable than DO to both humans (topicality) and pronominal reference (information status). (I am aware of unrelated languages in which IO-DO order generalised, conversely, to allow NP-PRO.) >4. I US, Australian and some varieties of British English, the order REC TH >has completely generalised so that it is the only possible order even with >two pronouns. There are even details here, if "they cooked it me" is less widespread than "they gave it me". Where the REC TH order becomes totally general, the markedness of IO focus increases, since it is preferably further marked by a preposition when it is stressed, i.e., "they cooked it *for* ME" rather than "they cooked ME it", etc. Cynthia goes on to say: > What I actually said was simply that the REC TH order (with two >nominals) became progressively more dominant. I'm interested in the how's and why's. Cynthia suggests: >...the position of the old (nominal) IO became identical to the position >of a DO of a >mono-transitive verb: directly postverbal. The explanation >that I suggest for why a >language-learner would make such an equation crucially involves a level of >grammatical relations, as opposed to semantic relations, and assumes that >listeners like to use processing strategies that make use of either >case-marking or grammatical relations. My idea is that once the order of >two nominal objects became fixed, the language-learner came up with this >processing strategy: The progress of word order as a pervasive strategy to the exclusion of case-marking continues to interest everyone concerned with English historical syntax. It took rather a long time for the IO-DO word order to completely take over PRO-PRO contexts. It suggests that case-marking has not been given up without a protracted struggle, as we still know. In a general way, the consequences of the former case-marking on English (as I-E) grammar were so pervasive that it is taking the evolution of *most* varieties of English a great deal of time to undo them all, and they seem to implicate a great deal of grammatical detail. I'm not really interested in predicting here, but the trends up to now are quite compelling. (NB. such late developments as pronominal compound objects like "him and I" further weaken the link between case-marking and grammatical role). >..... I think that the reason why 'He was given a >book to' is not favored in English is simply that if you are going to make >a recipient be the subject, you might as well make it a core role (the >object) to start with, instead of making it an oblique. That grammatical analysis need not conflict with the notion that there is a grammatical conflict between passivising an "object" and giving it the focus that a preposition establishes. Sometimes the conflict cannot be avoided, where passivisation is favored for some reason, but a case-marked strategy has not survived, e.g., with locatives ("the bed was eaten potatoes chips IN"). It remains interesting to contemplate why non-marking has survived for certain DAT and benefactives (perhaps even further developed for the latter). It does not seem to be only an arbitrary lexical matter (esp in the case of benefactives). >... Certainly, what >Denison refers to as the 'complex prepostional passive' (e.g. he was taken >advantage of) seems to have entered the language a bit later than the >'indirect' passive, but not that much longer-there are convincing examples >from the early 15th C. If it is securely "later", it shows accommodation of the prepositional object to other objects, all as unmarked for case. In any case, it strengthens the association of passivisation (and topicality) with NOM, to the extent that even PRO objects of prepositions are shifted to NOM marking. The stranding of prepositions is involved in such passivisation, but has a distinct history as a grammatical strategy in English. cf. Scandinavian strands prepositions, but stops short of the indirect passive. Case rearrangement is more radical in English. Cynthia notes that: >...the reality seems to >be that the Experiencer of *please* was always unambiguously the object >except in this construction, where it starts showing up as a nominative >subject in the early 16thC. ...No ambiguity-driven syntactic reanalysis >can have been >involved for two reasons (1) the 'reanalysis' takes place much too late and >(2) there was no model for a syntactic reanalysis; i.e. sentences like 'the >king will do as the king pleases' are not found until 'the king will do as >he pleases' are also found; before this, 'the king will do as it pleases >the king (or him)' is the only possibility. There's a misunderstanding here. The reanalysis is not too late, given that we are dealing with lexical diffusion of DAT > SUBJ for experiencers, and the OED (Onions, I guess) notes the innovation in "please" as corresponding to "like". It cites 1500 Dunbar (Northern) "your melody he pleases [= likes] not til hear" (in modern spelling). The equivalent use of "like" (current use) is cited as early as 1200, but the archaic "inverted" use (from DAT of experiencer) continues as late as 1616 in Ben Johnson: "if this play does not LIKE [= please], the Devil's in it" and even *1784* in Cowper: "they...howl and war as LIKES [= pleases] them". Cynthia suggests: >...I think that we have to look at the semantics of >the construction here. This experiencer is in fact more agentive than the >experiencer of please usually is, because the construction is explicitly >saying that I am in change of my own pleasure. This is generally true, at least currently. Generally, "like" does seem to have less of a "volitional" element in contexts that readily come to mind than "please". I'm not sure this is lexical rather than pragmatic. ("please" < "if you PLEASE" < "if it please you", as a politeness marker in requests appeals to volition similar to "you wanna..." = "would you please..."; "would you like to..." is used as a suggestion or invitation, not a request). She continues: >So I think the experiencer >started to get treated as a possible subject because it was similar >semantically to a typical agentive subject, not because there was any >confusion as to its grammatical relation . To me, what experiencers and agents have most in common is that they are extremely favorable to humans (and other animates). The association of experiencers with NOM and/or subject is quite common in I-E, although DAT, significantly, was more favorable to experiencers in earlier I-E languages than it became later. (Hence DAT > NOM or DAT/NOM variation with lexical conditioning occurs more widely and earlier in I-E than any of the other developments discussed here. There is plenty of precedent for the shift in "please", but usually not so faint-hearted). Sense verbs like "feel", "smell" and "taste" (and other verbs with those meanings in other I-E languages) have agentive/experiencer capability, e.g., "I smelled a flower" (cntr. "sniff" is more biased to agent subj); "I felt a flower" vs. "I felt a pain", etc. NOM is not strictly agentive in NOM/ACC languages; that is how they differ from ergative languages. (Ironically, Halliday playfully used "ergative" with respect to English for developing further intransitive uses of transitive verbs, e.g., "the newspaper sold quickly", rather than the reverse development, e.g., "they disappeared the subversive newspaper".) >.... I analyse the Experiencer of the impersonal 'methinks' >etc. as a subject, despite the object case. Lexical case marking to >subjects was retained because it was clearly distinct from the normal >(structural) case for subjects. I agree that this is a useful analysis. It shows the separation of "subject" from NOM as a case marker. I believe a similar analysis is sometimes proposed for German, where a dummy subject 'es' (3s neuter) is required for impersonal passives like "es wird gevochten" (it fight-PASS) "there's fighting going on" (more lit. "there's being fought") vs. "indirect" passives like ihm wird geholfen (him-DAT help-PASS) "he's being helped", where the need for a dummy SUBJECT is obviated by the preposed DAT filling the SUBJECT position. This suggests that "subject" analysis of preposed DAT in OE, as with verbs like 'deman', could have preceded the shift to NOM marking. (Of course, English did not develop the impersonal passive in the same way as German, and the emergent construction "there's [[fight]V-ing]N..." is involved with the distinctive and striking grammatical development of the English gerund.) Cynthia also notes: We still get impersonal uses like this >until the early 16thC, although less and less frequently. Then they are >reduced to fixed expressions like 'methink(s)'. So I assume that she fixes "please" with EXP/AGENTIVE subject at a period when "methinks" was already fixed as an expression. The loss of such expressions suggests that they were still analysed grammatically in some way which disfavored their later survival (e.g., as non-NOM "subjects"). I already noted how "like" holds on with EXP OBJECT well beyond the early 16th c. (Yes, "methinks" is not historically descended from surviving "think", but as a fixed expression it is quite equivalent to "I think", which can thus be viewed as replacing it.) >I'm afraid that I will have tried the patience of any histlingers who have >bothered to read this far and hereby declare my intention of ceasing to >repeat what I have already said in print-for the time being, at least! I am less defensive about running on, but I think that there is nothing for you to apologise for here. You are informing readers who are interested but not familiar with the facts and your views. It is appropriate to use HIST.LING in this way, just as the question about "I'm told" encourages. Thanks for your replies. -- Benji From Cindy.Allen at anu.edu.au Tue Aug 18 13:52:05 1998 From: Cindy.Allen at anu.edu.au (Cynthia Allen) Date: Tue, 18 Aug 1998 09:52:05 EDT Subject: I'm told In-Reply-To: Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Concerning my latest, comments, Benji Wald remarks: The only disappointment I had is >that she did not respond to my interest in the historical status of the XY >= Y FOR X construction, as in "cook me it" = "cook it for me". I mentioned >that I thought I had noted ME examples of the type "cook it me", but I >hadn't studied the problem closely enough to determine whether this remnant >of historical X-DAT Y-ACC case-marking and word order has become (or always >was) distinct from the type which has become "XY = Y TO X", e.g., "give me >it = give it to me". As far as I understand the literature, this is not an >issue. It is not singled out one way or another. So, I would assume that >analysts don't feel there is a basis to make a distinction between "X TO Y" >and "X FOR Y" in relation to "XY". But I would not take it for granted. >So I'm looking for explicit (dis)confirmation of that assumption. The >difference could be in the relation of the two prepositions to thematic >role (or whatever you want to call it) and/or in the degree of independence >of that role from any particular lexical verb. That remains a concern for >me, because of the level of comparison I want to make for syntactic >constructions associated with ACC case-marking in Eurafrasian languages. >The issue involves ACC and inevitably the ACC/NOM! relationship (and thus, >for the moment, excludes the ergative case-marking languages that confront >Eurafrasia). The objective is to explore whether the development of the ME >indirect passive was indeed more likely than not under the circumstances >(hence, what ARE the circumstances? cf. Semitic also develops NOM-marked >indirect passivisation), or whether the linguistic (as opposed to, say, >social) conditions were ever sufficient to favor this direction of change >over others. I'm afraid that I just don't have any useful information to impart about this sort of benefactive. In my study, I was concentrating on the new passives, and whether the traditional 'reanalysis' view was supported by the facts. I was focusing on examples with a recipient. I agree that separating the different semantic types would be worthwhile. > >>2. The first few true examples of 'he was given a book' are found later on >>in the 14thC. > >This shows an increasing association of NOM with "subject" -- in the case >of pronouns. It isprobably difficult to securely establish a priority >between this change and a shift of agreement for the passivised verb when >the subject is a lexical NP and thus indistinguishable for "oblique" and >NOM. The issue is where "the boys was given a book" > "the boys WERE given >a book" fits in to "them was given a book" > "they were given a book". I >think NOM presupposes verb agreement, but unmarked preverbal NPs do not. >(I could anticipate attestation of "them were given books", but not "they >was..." in the relevant period.) It sounds from these comments as though Benji has accepted the tradional view that the new passives were caused by a reanalysis of a fronted dative as nominative-or at least that the dative was still fronted when change to nominative took place. I have tried to explain why I don't think that is the case. As far as I can see, there is absolutely no difficulty sorting out the timing of verbal agreement. I can only refer interested parties to chapter 9 of my book again. In response to my comment: >>...the reality seems to >>be that the Experiencer of *please* was always unambiguously the object >>except in this construction, where it starts showing up as a nominative >>subject in the early 16thC. ...No ambiguity-driven syntactic reanalysis >>can have been >>involved for two reasons (1) the 'reanalysis' takes place much too late and >>(2) there was no model for a syntactic reanalysis; i.e. sentences like 'the >>king will do as the king pleases' are not found until 'the king will do as >>he pleases' are also found; before this, 'the king will do as it pleases >>the king (or him)' is the only possibility. > >There's a misunderstanding here. The reanalysis is not too late, given >that we are dealing with lexical diffusion of DAT > SUBJ for experiencers, >and the OED (Onions, I guess) notes the innovation in "please" as >corresponding to "like". It cites 1500 Dunbar (Northern) "your melody he >pleases [= likes] not til hear" (in modern spelling). The equivalent use >of "like" (current use) is cited as early as 1200, but the archaic >"inverted" use (from DAT of experiencer) continues as late as 1616 in Ben >Johnson: "if this play does not LIKE [= please], the Devil's in it" and >even *1784* in Cowper: "they...howl and war as LIKES [= pleases] them". > There's no misunderstanding on my part, as far as I can see. The 'reanalysis' is certainly too late to be lumped in with the cases where a preposed dative starts showing up as a nominative. My basic point was that this could not have been an ambiguity-driven reanalysis. As for what the OED says-it is true that I oversimplified matters by not mentioning the brief life of nominative experiencers with 'please' followed by an infinitive, but anyone looking at the sources that I referred Benji to will know that I discuss these. I also discuss why the OED is simply wrong about 'please'. The OED is a wonderful tool, but a necessary limitations of dictionaries, however good, is that they cannot give a really systematic account of the history of any lexeme because they cannot show how the lexeme is embedded in the grammatical system of the time. The OED is a terrific place to start a historical investigation in English, but a bad place to stop. I hope Benji will look at the evidence which I have presented concerning this matter. Concerning my comments on non-nominative subjects, Benji says: > >I agree that this is a useful analysis. It shows the separation of >"subject" from NOM as a case marker. I believe a similar analysis is >sometimes proposed for German, where a dummy subject 'es' (3s neuter) is >required for impersonal passives like "es wird gevochten" (it fight-PASS) >"there's fighting going on" (more lit. "there's being fought") vs. >"indirect" passives like ihm wird geholfen (him-DAT help-PASS) "he's being >helped", where the need for a dummy SUBJECT is obviated by the preposed DAT >filling the SUBJECT position. This suggests that "subject" analysis of >preposed DAT in OE, as with verbs like 'deman', could have preceded the >shift to NOM marking. (Of course, English did not develop the impersonal >passive in the same way as German, and the emergent construction "there's >[[fight]V-ing]N..." is involved with the distinctive and striking >grammatical development of the English gerund.) I am pleased that Benji and I agree in believing that case marking and grammatical relations must be kept separate. But I have to correct the comment about 'deem'. There has been no shift DAT>NOM here, because the 'deemer' (judger) was always nominative in OE. The judged thing, not the experiencer, was dative. Benji ends with: >I am less defensive about running on, but I think that there is nothing for >you to apologise for here. You are informing readers who are interested >but not familiar with the facts and your views. It is appropriate to use >HIST.LING in this way, just as the question about "I'm told" encourages. >Thanks for your replies. I'm happy that Benji has found the discussion useful, and I hope that others have too. But I think that we have different views of what a list like this is for. It is great for raising questions such as the one which sparked this discussion and for finding out where to go to read what has been published on the subject, or for getting information that is not in print. But I think that once someone has been directed to literature on a topic (such as the history of please) they ought to read it so they have all the evidence at their before making further comments on the subject. I'm afraid I just don't have time to rewrite my book and my articles on this list, and I feel like that's what I've been doing. If someone reads my arguments and wants to say why they don't find them convincing, that's a different matter and I'll be glad to respond. Cynthia Cynthia Allen Linguistics, Arts Faculty Australian National University Canberra, ACT 0200 Australia From mghiselin at casmail.calacademy.org Tue Aug 18 13:24:11 1998 From: mghiselin at casmail.calacademy.org (Ghiselin, Michael) Date: Tue, 18 Aug 1998 09:24:11 EDT Subject: Cladistic language concepts Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Dear Professor Hewson: Thank you for adding one more "vote" to what by now seems to be a consensus. Thank you also for the substantive contribution to the discussion. Usually when it is said that something is universal that means that it is true of everything of which its universality is asserted. Therefore if something is a universal for languages, it is true of all of them, with no exceptions. Such universality can be necessary, as when we say that all prime numbers are odd; but it can also be a matter of contingent fact, for example, all mammals have hair. It is true but things could be otherwise. Mutation is universal among genetic systems, and we know that it is necessary because were it not the second law of thermodynamics would be false. Genetic change also seems to be universal in all biological species, and probably for the same reasons that you give for languages. Although one can imagine situations in which there is virtual stasis for a long number of generations, it would seem that a certain amount of genetic drift is likewise inevitable. So the universality of change may be a law of nature, and not just a matter of contingent, historical fact. As a comparative anatomist I have no difficulty understanding what is meant by a system in the sense at least of a group of parts within a whole that interact with one another. The component organisms of a species and whatever the corresponding entity in a language may be, also interact in a coordinated manner. Therefore changing parts affects the wholes of which they are parts. But some parts are affected more than others because of the functional linkages among them. In metameric animals, the body consists of serially repeated units having the same basic arrangement of parts, developing under a common control system, and functioning in more or less the same way. (We are metameric, though it is much more obvious in arthropods.) A gene that affects one limb also affects all the others, at least to some degree. This can be seen in bassets, dachshounds and quite generally. Switching to philosophy, one interesting point about how you conceptualize the problem is that you conceive of languages as systems in this sense. They are concrete, particular things, with interactions among their parts, that evolve as such. One way to characterize such a position is to say that it takes the individuality of languages very seriously. It is very easy for somebody who treats a whole as if it were its parts viewed atomistically to overlook such deeper connections. That is part of the problem with those who want to think of languages as defined by mutual intelligibility. So you have really added something to the discussion, and again I am most grateful. Michael T. Ghiselin Center for the History and Philosophy of Science California Academy of Sciences Golden Gate Park San Francisco, California 94118 From mghiselin at casmail.calacademy.org Tue Aug 18 13:21:07 1998 From: mghiselin at casmail.calacademy.org (Ghiselin, Michael) Date: Tue, 18 Aug 1998 09:21:07 EDT Subject: Cladistic language concepts Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Dear Dr. DeLancey, Of course the fact that biological systematics had a long history before it became historical helps to explain a lot. Common descent as you say was recognized pretty much from the outset in linguistics, and although there were some precursors it was Darwin who first made that abundantly clear to biologists. As to the articulated framework we biologists have developed, with its levels of family, order, class, phylum, etc., all we have is the names! And the more we think about it the more we realize that the categories other than the species are subjective. So there is no yardstick in biology either, but we have been behaving as if there were such a yardstick. In my book, Metaphysics and the Origin of Species, I say that the main criteria for ranking at higher levels are ignorance, tradition, and bad metaphysics. I am an expert on the classification of gastropods, and I can see no way to make an order of snails equivalent to an order of insects. The entomologists I have spoken to about such matters seem to agree. Thanks again for the helpful comments. Michael Ghiselin Center for the History and Philosophy of Science California Academy of Sciences Golden Gate Park San Francisco, CA 94118 From bwald at HUMnet.UCLA.EDU Wed Aug 19 16:02:39 1998 From: bwald at HUMnet.UCLA.EDU (bwald) Date: Wed, 19 Aug 1998 12:02:39 EDT Subject: Cladistic language concepts Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- With regard to the cladistic discussion I hope it is worth me noting a point where linguists most generally agree that biological and linguistic evolution seem to be quite different, even to the extent that some linguists discourage use of the term "evolution" for linguistic changes which are matters of consensus in linguistic studies, such as the changes from Old to current English, or from Latin to the current Romance languages, among many other cases. (Excluded from consideration is the evolution of language from "pre-language", an issue which is not at all a matter of agreement among linguists, and which has only recently reentered serious linguistic discussion after a long period of banishment). It is in the matter of selectional pressures disfavoring certain lines of evolution and favoring others at certain times. It is a generally held principle of linguists that all languages as systems are equal to all other languages as communicative systems, and that, with the exception of auxiliary languages (not a speaker's first language, maybe nobody's first language, e.g., in the case of pidgins), change does not make a language more suitable for survival as a communicative device. Linguists also do not have a notion of complexity that would presume that any language, as a total system, is more "complex" than any other language. The same can certainly not be said of biological entities (a separate point from the "survival" one). It seems that biological diversification is not motivated by survival; selection for survival operates on the diversification. The motivating factor seems to be changes in the entire bio-system, ultimately tied to physical (including chemical) changes in environment. No telling how far into the universe that ultimately leads. The closest analog for selection pressures in language seems to be social, and may involve the total replacement of one language by another, so that one language fails to survive, never because it could not adopt to the communicative demands put on it, but because it could not find a social niche to allow its continuation. Thus, many languages have disappeared without current trace (except for borrowings from them into surviving languages), and this continues to happen to surviving languages for socio-economic reasons. In general then, I think linguists could accept an analogy between instability and change in languages and life forms on the basis of not well understood interruptions in the continuity of systems as they are reproduced (in language through childhood and even later learning, in biology through changes in genetic coding), but do not find selectional pressures analogous in language and life forms. in particular, the following would not be found analogous by linguists. Ghiselin writes: > Mutation is universal among genetic systems, and we > know that it is necessary because were it not the second law > of thermodynamics would be false. If I understand the law referred to have to do with the "entropy" of systems, languages do not show recognisable signs of loss of systematic orderliness as they change. That follows from the consensus principle that languages are equally systematic at all stages of their evolution. At the same time, many, perhaps most, linguists believe that there are favored systems, so that one change in a system can favor a subsequent one. Genetic research probably suggests some analogies, but it is my impression that factors outside the system shared by a set of organisms are more frequently called upon in explaining the directions of biological change than in explaining the directions of linguistic change. Nevertheless, both linguists and biologists are concerned with internal constraints on possible directions of change, according to the principles by which the systems are organised. He continues: > the universality of change may be a law of nature, and not just > a matter of contingent, historical fact. Historical facts at the proper level of abstraction and "laws of nature" can be controversial as mutually exclusive philosophical alternatives. It is not clear that social change is either more or less arbitrary than linguistic change. Social change does seem to involve differences in the complexity of particular social systems, e.g., production of surplus and the rise of cities, technological change, etc. But, as I said, the linguistic systems that linguists usually investigate, i.e., grammatical systems, do not seem to vary in complexity. Subsystems of grammatical systems can indeed vary in complexity, but there seems to be a cross-linguistic balance of complexity when it comes to considering the interaction of sub-systems in the overall grammatical system of a language. Linguists do not agree on a basis to think otherwise. > Switching to philosophy, one interesting point about > how you conceptualize the problem is that you conceive of > languages as systems in this sense. They are concrete, > particular things, with interactions among their parts, that > evolve as such. One way to characterize such a position is > to say that it takes the individuality of languages very > seriously. In the same way that biologists find the concept of individual species useful, though the criteria for membership in a set differ from language to biological species. I think some respondents already discussed the commonality in terms of continuity (despite change) in successive members of a set. It is very easy for somebody who treats a whole > as if it were its parts viewed atomistically to overlook > such deeper connections. That is part of the problem with > those who want to think of languages as defined by mutual > intelligibility. Mutual intelligibility is an arbitrary criterion for membership in a particular language set from a historical linguistic point of view, as you have been informed. Continuity is the criterion used. There is the level of species in biology at which a criterial discontinuity can be posited on the basis of ability to reproduce (cross-fertilise). That seems to be a cleaner cut-off point than where mutual intelligibility decays. Still, even on this list, we had recent discussion of the possibility that mutual intelligibility allows change to spread from one variety of a language to another, but that lack of mutual intelligibility blocks it. That seems quite logical, and could be construed as analogous to cross-fertilisation. Its only weak point is that changes can spread across mutually unintelligible languages through the agency of intervening bilingualism, probably most often communal rather than isolated individuals. That ends the analogy between mutual intelligibility and cross-fertilisation with respect to continuity in evolution. From bwald at HUMnet.UCLA.EDU Wed Aug 19 16:02:07 1998 From: bwald at HUMnet.UCLA.EDU (bwald) Date: Wed, 19 Aug 1998 12:02:07 EDT Subject: I'm told Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Again I am indebted to Cindy for her further comments. At this point, my responses to her latest comments are simply to explain the reasons for my interest -- without asking for or expecting further comment by Cindy. >It sounds from these comments as though Benji has accepted the tradional >view that the new passives were caused by a reanalysis of a fronted dative >as nominative-or at least that the dative was still fronted when change to >nominative took place. The view strikes me as having some plausibility as a favoring factor (the preposed position of the DAT in a "subject" position). I do not take for granted that it is the only favoring factor. I perceive that Cindy comes from the view that a stronger hypothesis identifying a SINGLE factor as *decisive* in precipitating a change is the most useful one, because of its maximised vulnerability to disconfirmation. I see the point of this approach, but I find myself less capable of committing to such a strong hypothesis on the basis of what I know (and may not know). In short, for me it's not (yet) a matter of EITHER-OR (but NOT both -- or neither?). Of course, the issue is growing association of NOM with the grammatical category called "subject", rather than directly with a set of semantic roles. She finishes this comment with: I have tried to explain why I don't think that is >the case. As far as I can see, there is absolutely no difficulty sorting >out the timing of verbal agreement. I can only refer interested parties to >chapter 9 of my book again. That's sufficient for me. I want to see if number agreement precedes DAT > NOM. I think there are some similar phenomena with number agreement in Attic (Classical Greek) impersonal constructions (DAT allows number agreement but the gender of the verbal noun remains neuter). I wonder if at one time in OE > ME, NOM was a sufficient but not necessary condition for verb agreement toward the development of the indirect passive. I will certainly consult Chapter 9 of Cindy's book. Later with regard to IO > SBJ (= ACC/DAT > NOM w pronouns) for the verb "please" in early Modern English (or whatever you call it), Cindy comments: >The 'reanalysis' is certainly too late to be lumped in with the cases where a >preposed dative starts showing up as a nominative. My basic point was that >this could not have been an ambiguity-driven reanalysis. By lexical diffusion of the process I allow it to continue over a long period of time, jumping from one verb to another, which is necessarily later to receive it. I separate this from the fact that, as Cindy says, there is an early period when the process is very common and is supposed to be indicative of the 'reanalysis' shifts taking place in case-marking and subject position. I did not respond to her basic point about ambiguity-driven reanalysis, because I was not attracted to such a superficial hypothesis in the first place. Again, in my view, ambiguity could have been a factor favoring the change, but it seems like a minor and hardly decisive factor in view of the other factors that have been proposed -- by Cindy no less than by others. >As for what the OED says-it is true that I oversimplified matters by not >mentioning the brief life of nominative experiencers with 'please' followed >by an infinitive, but anyone looking at the sources that I referred Benji >to will know that I discuss these. I hope to read this article soon, though I consider what I said about "please" a minor point in the larger scheme of things. I mainly meant to suggest that certain lexico-grammatical processes involving verbs have continued to operate over a long period of time, maybe showing that their energy (or impetus) is not spent as quickly as grammatical changes which encourage them. Her comments on the OED are well-taken: >I also discuss why the OED is simply >wrong about 'please'. The OED is a wonderful tool, but a necessary >limitations of dictionaries, however good, is that they cannot give a >really systematic account of the history of any lexeme because they cannot >show how the lexeme is embedded in the grammatical system of the time. That is quite true. There are, of course, problems in its (traditional) classifications and its dependence on texts for dating. It's the problems in the traditional classifications it uses and its necessary economy in selecting grammatical contexts that prevents its examples from providing sufficient information about their embedding in a grammatical system at any point in time. They merely cover a few contexts that any analysis does well to consider, and suggest things that must be checked out by more detailed information than the OED or any other dictionary will ever offer -- because dictionaries are not detailed grammatical descriptions. She continues: The >OED is a terrific place to start a historical investigation in English, but >a bad place to stop. I hope Benji will look at the evidence which I have >presented concerning this matter. I agree whole-heartedly. Since I am not a specialist in the textual history of English, I rely on scholars like Cindy to tell me what I want to know, or to introduce me to a new hypothesis. She notes: >I am pleased that Benji and I agree in believing that case marking and >grammatical relations must be kept separate. But I have to correct the >comment about 'deem'. There has been no shift DAT>NOM here, because the >'deemer' (judger) was always nominative in OE. The judged thing, not the >experiencer, was dative. Right. I was too superficial in grouping 'deem' with the others. 'deem' is about the indirect passive as impersonal passive, i.e., DAT> NOM in that context. I think 'deem' is like 'help', where it wouldn't occur to English speakers today to consider the object of 'help' a "recipient" rather than a "direct object" -- since there' s no prepositional equivalent to the unmarked object, e.g., I helped (*to/for) him. Nevertheless, the pattern for a verb like 'help' in many older I-E languages is to mark this object as DAT, as if the verb were equivalent to English 'give-help', in which case a preposition occurs as expected in English, since the NP 'help' evidently fills the "object position" (as if a "theme" ACC were a "cognate accusative", e.g., we gave/*helped help *(to) them = we gave/*helped (?to) them help.) 'deem' presumably meant something like 'make/pass-judgment-on', where 'on' has somehow come to express the earlier DAT role in this context. Again, it does not seem to be simply an arbitrary lexical matter in the relevant time period, but motivated by the roles covered by DAT. I could expect disagreement here, since Cindy could insist that the change involved grammatical categories only, and that semantic roles are not directly relevant. Cindy ends with an interesting comment, which I can appreciate for its principles. >I think that we have different views of what a list >like this is for. It is great for raising questions such as the one which >sparked this discussion and for finding out where to go to read what has >been published on the subject, or for getting information that is not in >print. But I think that once someone has been directed to literature on a >topic (such as the history of please) they ought to read it so they have >all the evidence at their before making further comments on the subject. I think it is OK to negotiate that with any particular user of the list, because both time and interest are legitimate factors that might work at cross-purposes in the real world. The things I say on the list are usually and admittedly off the top of my head. However, in the case of the indirect passive I found myself motivated to check some older standard references that I had readily on hand. One question leads to another. (In fact, one of my ultimate interests in this topic has to do with how facts about other languages might improve my understanding of the various ways in which the Bantu passive has evolved, and my ability to reconstruct those paths of change.) As I said, it is negotiable whether a subscriber wants to stop at recommending relevant literature or not, and all choices are acceptable. However, maybe I should say that I would not go so far as to take for granted discussing ON THE LIST with any authors detailed points of their articles -- except if a review were expected by the list (this list doesn't do that, and I'm not volunteering). That, I think, is more formal than what this list is designed for, and what it is currently expected to accomplish. By the same token, for example, the ling.list has even experimented with conferences (I have not participated), but this list has not, and does not currently have the person-power to organise such an event. In any case, I appreciate that Cindy was willing to take her comments as far as she did. She concludes: >If someone reads >my arguments and wants to say why they don't find them convincing, that's a >different matter and I'll be glad to respond. That's a gracious invitation. As I said, I would first be inclined to contact Cindy off-list (or any author who invites me to read their work). That might simply be because I don't initiate discussions on the list, but respond to the ones that attract my interest. That way I know I'm not the only one who's interested. I treat the list something like a newspaper (since it approaches "daily" change). Topics generally don't go as deep or last as long as the specialised interests of any reader, but there's a lot of suggestive information for specialised concerns to pursue, and discussion sometimes goes in unexpected directions. (I, for one, did not expect to have some of the ideas I now have when I first started reading the "I'm told" discussion.) Thanks again to Cindy, and I will continue to value her expertise as a resource both in print and e-mail. -- Benji From m.cysouw at let.kun.nl Thu Aug 20 14:48:16 1998 From: m.cysouw at let.kun.nl (Michael Cysouw) Date: Thu, 20 Aug 1998 10:48:16 EDT Subject: Cladistic language concepts In-Reply-To: Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Continuing this thread, let me add some general thoughts on the comparison languages-species. A central point in this comparison is what is concieved as an 'individual' (or 'unit' if you don't like to anthropomorphize). In linguistics there are two basic views on language around: either the *speaker* is seen as a unit/individual, or a *language* is seen as a unit/individual. Depending on which stance you take, you'll get differing analogies to biological concepts. IMO, a far most interesting viewpoint on language is to view each individually uttered morpheme as a unit/individual. Before expanding on this stance let me stress that all three ways of looking are useful for certain insights, useless for others. This stance though is particularly apt for a biology-linguistics analogy. Imagine that each individual morpheme uttered is 'born' at the speaker and 'dies' an entropic death in the air, hoping in time to have reached a hearer to eventually propagate in his brain. What we normally in linguistics call a morpheme, is in this view seen as a species: a coherent group of individuals/units. A morpheme 'tree' is nothing more than the set of all individual utterences of it. A *language*, a set of interconnected morphemes, then becomes analogous to a biological *ecosystem*, bound to a certain expend by its natural surrounding: the social structures. This view makes it possible to see language change analogous to selection. e.g. bwald wrote that social pressure can only work on *whole* languages. But if a language is seen an ecosystem, then social selection pressure works only on parts of a language. bwald wrote: >The closest analog for selection >pressures in language seems to be social, and may involve the total >replacement of one language by another, so that one language fails to >survive, never because it could not adopt to the communicative demands put >on it, but because it could not find a social niche to allow its >continuation. If we want to make the analogy between biology and linguistics (which I think is very insightful), we might be looking at the wrong place by comparing *language* with *species*. Rethinking *language* as *ecosystem* seems much more promising. bye michael cysouw university of nijmegen, holland From bwald at HUMnet.UCLA.EDU Fri Aug 21 13:00:38 1998 From: bwald at HUMnet.UCLA.EDU (bwald) Date: Fri, 21 Aug 1998 09:00:38 EDT Subject: Cladistic language concepts Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- A brief (really!) comment on Michael Cysouw's passage: >bwald wrote that social pressure can only work on *whole* languages. No, that's not what I meant to be understood when I wrote: >>The closest analog for selection >>pressures in language seems to be social, and may involve the total >>replacement of one language by another, so that one language fails to >>survive, never because it could not adopt to the communicative demands put >>on it, but because it could not find a social niche to allow its >>continuation. That's why I used "may" for the verb of the second clause. I think that historical linguists view languages as collective units (not individual units for each single speaker), and are concerned with change and continuity in the succession of speakers who learn that collective unit over time. As long as any and all languages are viewed this way, then I think that any and all changes have a social motivation. The least that can be said about the social motivation is that it determines why the change occurs and is spread at a particular point in time rather than at some other point -- or never (in which case it fails to be a change, but perhaps just the idiosyncrasy of some speaker or a number of speakers who never meet or communicate with each other and will take their innovation to their graves with them). Some studies suggest that social motivation for change can be much more powerful in some cases, so I have only indicated what I think is minimally true about the role of social motivation for linguistic change. That understood, it simply occurred to me that language shift-and-death is the simplest and clearest analog for environmental conditioning on the SURVIVAL of life forms. Again, I think that the SURVIVAL of ALL linguistic changes (in the technical sense of linguistic change I gave above, and which I think is a consensus understanding of linguistic change) depends on social conditions (from the beginning of the change to its end, whether that takes days or millenia or any amount of time in between). From mghiselin at casmail.calacademy.org Mon Aug 24 21:08:56 1998 From: mghiselin at casmail.calacademy.org (Ghiselin, Michael) Date: Mon, 24 Aug 1998 17:08:56 EDT Subject: Cladistic language concepts Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Strong endorsements of cladistic language concepts keep coming in and I only wonder if somebody somewhere disagrees with them. Your comments raise some further questions about the putative analogies and disanalogues between linguistic and organic evolution. There have been in fact some heroic but not very effectual efforts on the part of biologists to measure complexity, and that makes me think that there is not much difference. One team of scientists attempted to decide whether bivalves or gastropods are the more complex by counting the number of words in glossaries! That probably means only that clams are a bit harder to talk about. Surely there are adaptive changes in language through time, at least in the sense of coinages and borrowings when there are new conditions of existence. The advent of new modes of transportation obviously evokes a needed vocabulary. That of course is a change within a language rather than competitive displacement. When there are just two species in perfect competition one will drive the other out, and the same would probably happen with languages. But that results from an unstable equilibrium, and which wins out can be due to a very minor difference. I would argue that the same kind of entropy exists with respect to languages, and that if they do maintain their organization it is due to something counteracting the tendency to decay. Consider the vocabulary as it gets passed from parent to child. The probability that every single word will get transmitted has to be somewhat less than one. But as everybody knows, children and adults alike coin words when they need them. Continuity does seem to me the basic criterion as you say, and discontinuity blocks it. That seems to be fundamental to the outlook of populational and cladistic thinking. What you say about the role of bilingual persons is very interesting when one tries to find biological analogies. A cell is often part of more than one organ system, but I cannot think of any that are part of more than one organism, although they can move from one organism to another. Organisms are never part of more than one species, but they can be part of more than one club or other organization. A bilingual person may be said to participate in more than one language, though I suppose nobody considers such a person a part of either. The person's idiolect is supposedly a part of a language, so the person would have more than one idiolect. But transfer from one idiolect to another within the same person and hence across languages, would not imply that there was just one idiolect or just one language. The situation is rather like what we encounter when a certain amount of gene flow occurs between populations through hybridization. But only partly. To get something like a bilingual person we would need organisms with two independent genetic systems that can coexist and get transmitted separately. I can imagine that, but to my knowledge there is no such thing in nature. MG From bwald at HUMnet.UCLA.EDU Wed Aug 26 12:32:03 1998 From: bwald at HUMnet.UCLA.EDU (bwald) Date: Wed, 26 Aug 1998 08:32:03 EDT Subject: Cladistic language concepts Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Michael Ghiselin writes: > Surely there are adaptive changes in language through > time, at least in the sense of coinages and borrowings when > there are new conditions of existence. The advent of new > modes of transportation obviously evokes a needed > vocabulary. Linguists do not differentiate languages for complexity on the basis of such things as how many names they have different kinds of machines (or snow, cattle, etc.) because size of vocabulary is not seen as an *inherent* property of the SYSTEM of any particular language. More could be said about this, including some problems, but linguists consider vocabulary size a trivial basis for comparing the complexity of languages, and tend to consider change in vocabulary (as it reflects change in what's recognised, referred to and talked about) as a trivial kind of change. Certainly such things are not trivial as reflections of change in the social environment in which the affected language is used, but they are trivial in terms of the notions of linguistic system that linguists have and continue to focus on. Anyway, it is totally unclear what the biological analogue of a "word" (or "lexical item" or "vocabulary") is. He continues: > I would argue that the same kind of entropy exists with > respect to languages, and that if they do maintain their > organization it is due to something counteracting the > tendency to decay. Consider the vocabulary as it gets > passed from parent to child. The probability that every > single word will get transmitted has to be somewhat less > than one. But as everybody knows, children and adults alike > coin words when they need them. I don't know about the entropy notion in this context, but linguists are indeed impressed by the existence of processes in all languages which allow users to coin new words. The processes vary from one language to another, but all languages have them and can use them equally successfully (as far as we can tell). Total continuity of vocabulary is not important. Productive/creative processes equal to the task of conveying and recognising "meaning" is what impresses linguists about linguistic systems, and where they can't find one language more complex than another, or more adept in some other way. Next, > A cell is often part of more than one organ > system, but I cannot think of any that are part of more than > one organism, although they can move from one organism to > another. Now definition of an "organism" might matter. Siamese twins of various degrees of severity comes to mind. If the "sharing" is slight, e.g., a non-vital limb (if that happens) one might be inclined to recognise TWO organisms which have partially melded by chance. It might be cultural for us to imagine that "a" person with two heads would have to be "two" people with "one" body. "twin" implies and is etymologically related to "two" (in English), but the concept of "organism" belongs to a more specialised expert system. Organisms are never part of more than one species, > but they can be part of more than one club or other > organization. Although I used "species" as analogous to "historically continuous language" (as implied by such linguistic terminology as GENETIC relationship), there are other viewpoints. On some level, the universalists -- linguists who are more impressed by what languages have in common (whatever that is) than how they differ -- might argue that ALL languages belong to the same "species", a species ultimately determined by the human species, and esp certain neurological structures in the brain enabling language and, according to innatists, unique to the human species. A bilingual person may be said to participate > in more than one language, though I suppose nobody considers > such a person a part of either. No. That's a social issue. Bilinguals can be parts of either or both languages, depending on the social circumstances. They are not necessarily recognisable as bilinguals when they spread particular changes which have germinated in their communities to monolingual communities. > The person's idiolect is > supposedly a part of a language, so the person would have > more than one idiolect. Idiolect is a tricky word. If it means the totality of an individual's repertory, then monolinguals and bilinguals cannot be distinguished in this way. If it means anything else, monolinguals and bilinguals will both still have more than one, because we can observe that people change the way they talk depending on the circumstances. Everyone is no doubt unique in the complete details of their repertory. Idiolect is not a user-friendly term for historical linguists; it obscures what it means for a "language" to "change", since it is associated with the individual, and the individual can only be recognised for "change" by comparison with other individuals. Generally, the "language" consists of what a socially (yes!) coherent group of "idiolects" HAVE IN COMMON at some point in time. That is never uniform over what is called a (particular) "language", so "language" is always somewhat variable and abstract at any point in time. Nevertheless, whatever they have in common (to the extent that they ALL do) can and does ALSO change from one period of time to another. Therefore, it is not vacuous to abstract the "language" from the overlap of "idiolects", despite the problem of irreducible variation, and still speak of change in successive collections of "idiolects". (I don't have much use for the term "idiolect", but many linguists accept the concept/s for whatever reasons they have, so I'm not challenging it here.) > But transfer from one idiolect to > another within the same person and hence across languages, > would not imply that there was just one idiolect or just one > language. I already made a comment about "idiolect" above. For the above passage I would also point out the concept "transfer". That is indeed the usual word used for the process by which features are recognised to have originated in one language and come into some varieties of another, and it is also often associated with what individual bilinguals do. However, we recognise transfer from a comparison of different speakers of the "same" language (for one or both of the languages involved), and it is most often the case that the bilingual is not aware of doing "transfer", but only of applying the same strategy (whatever it is) to both languages. If all languages are the "same" at some level (the universalist hypothesis), then "transfer" simply consists of failing to distinguish what is true of all (or at least the relevant) languages from what is specific to some particular languages. We say analytically that A is transferring something from language X to language Y, but the doer is often unaware that there is any difference between X and Y TO BEGIN WITH. (Bilingualism can be more complicated than this, but this seems sufficient than now.) > The situation is rather like what we encounter when a > certain amount of gene flow occurs between populations > through hybridization. But only partly. To get something > like a bilingual person we would need organisms with two > independent genetic systems that can coexist and get > transmitted separately. I can imagine that, but to my > knowledge there is no such thing in nature. Again, it may be useful to compare languages with species, but then again maybe it's not. Maybe the best analogy is between languages and sub-species/genera or whatever of a single species. Maybe languages differ from each other only like, say, different dogs (which vary anatomically much more than different people), but not like dogs and paramecia, or perhaps even dogs, bears and seals, etc. From jhewson at morgan.ucs.mun.ca Wed Aug 26 12:33:35 1998 From: jhewson at morgan.ucs.mun.ca (John Hewson) Date: Wed, 26 Aug 1998 08:33:35 EDT Subject: Cladistic language concepts In-Reply-To: <9807249039.AA903989700@casmail.calacademy.org> Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- It seems to me that an amphibian would be a biological parallel to a bilingual: an organism adapted to two different ecologies. Entropy is also to be seen in language in the form of phonetic erosion. French words, for example, normally retain only the stressed syllables of their Latin forbears. Latin Augustum becomes Fr. aout, pronounced [u]. If the initial syllable had a secondary stress, that would give a disyllabic word; Late L. dia-domenica (the Lord's day) became Fr. dimanche, six syllables to two. One way of countering this process was to use forms with a diminutive suffix: instead of L. aurem (ear), auriculam to give Fr. oreille, instead of L. apem (bee), apiculam to give Fr. abeille, thus adding to the phonic material of the word. The term negentropy was coined I think by Stephen Black in his very interesting 1969 book _Body and Mind_. His idea was that the energies of the universe, flowing into ultimate entropy, are harnessed for creative and meaningful purposes in much the same way as we harness rivers to create electricity. In his view all information is negentropic, his favourite example being a key, that fits a lock and opens a door (often replaced now with a card with computerized information on it). He consequently conceived of all biological info such as DNA as negentropic. Alongside the entropic forms of linguistic change we can also see the negentropic forms, which have at times raised passionate arguments as to how far linguistic change may be considered telic or purposeful. JH John Hewson, FRSC tel: (709)737-8131 University Research Professor fax: (709)737-4000 Memorial University of Newfoundland St. John's NF, CANADA A1B 3X9 From mghiselin at casmail.calacademy.org Mon Aug 31 22:24:56 1998 From: mghiselin at casmail.calacademy.org (Ghiselin, Michael) Date: Mon, 31 Aug 1998 18:24:56 EDT Subject: Cladistic language concepts Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Thanks for your very thoughtful commentary. What you say points out the fact that when we start asking what some of these fundamental units are, they become increasingly problematic; and when we try to compare across kinds of systems the parallels are evident, but they too are problematic. The problems of what a species is and of what a language is are not unusual. Indeed I would be surprised to find a theoretical term in any science that is not hard to define in a way that pleases all the practitioners. Small wonder then, that we cannot easily find exact parallels between the fundamental units of interest to linguists and to biologists. We can say that there are phonemes, words etc., and we can say that there are nucleotide pairs ..., but what we are looking at is hierarchical structure without exact functional correspondence. Geneticists do not agree as to what a gene is, though they work with them and talk about them all the time. One point that I still would like clarified is the relationship between the speaker of the language and the language itself. The speaker is a part of a language community and the vocabulary, grammar etc. are parts of the language. The speakers may be said to know, understand, speak, participate in, etc. the language. But we usually do not call them parts of the language. There are a whole range of related problems with respect to culture in general. The way Tylor defined "culture" it includes concrete artifacts. There must be an extensive literature on such issues. But such material as I have read (including the 1952 review by Kroeber and Kluckhohn) does not really face up to the ontological issues. MG