Usitative

[Mia Kalish]

Hi, Rudy, 

Grammaticalization was one of the first things I researched when I came back
to school. I think it makes a big difference whether you look at a) how
people influenced the development of common parlance; vs. b) how the
language changes when you just look at the surface. 

Jesperson did a lot with the disappearance of the dative (the pears were
pleasing to the king) in common parlance. His theory was that because each
generation wishes to distance itself from the previous one, that it stopped
using the dative. 

Hopper looks at grammaticalization, but doesn’t spend too much time looking
at how people influence that process. He looks at it in diachronic terms,
for example, how long will it take for a form to appear or disappear in the
common parlance. 

Penelope wrote a whole book about how people use grammaticalization, making
subjects appear and disappear. She talks about how bias influences the use
of grammaticalized forms (the man beat his wife, vs. the beaten wife). In
the first case, we see the man beating his wife, but in the second case,
“beaten” has become a property of wife, the focus is entirely on her, and
the wife-beater has disappeared from the scene.  

I am going to tender a maybe-new hypothesis :-). I’m going to say that
grammar is more stable, harder to change. (And there are probably lots of
people who have already said this.) But the hypothesis is that “Concepts
that are embedded in the grammar are culturally older than concepts that are
added on in the semantics.” 

A recent article by Sara Solla
(http://biology.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?request=get-document&doi=10.1371/
journal.pbio.0040122) looks at neurons. In this article, she states what
should be obvious but what many people don’t seem to see: “A crucial
function of our brains, as well as the brains of many other organisms, is to
provide an interface with the external world. This interface has two
fundamental components: the processing of sensory information and the
control of movement.”

When we look at Diné verbs, we see a close connection between the
grammatical forms and the reference to the kinesthetic properties related to
moving the object(s) of the specified shape and number. Solla looks at the
number of variables needed to describe features vs. the width of the tuning
curve, which I think is interesting in itself (the article is free, by the
way. You can read the whole thing at the link I gave you). 

What if I extrapolate from this and say that Southern Athapascan languages
more closely reflect an awareness and understanding of psychological
perception than English? Then, what if I go one step further, and say that
English is deficit because it sees the world only on the surface and has no
inherent awareness of the depth of complexity in the world? Addressing
complexity is then a function of the sophistication of the English-language
user, rather than of the sophistication of the tool.  

Mia 

-----Original Message-----
From: Indigenous Languages and Technology [mailto:ILAT at LISTSERV.ARIZONA.EDU]
On Behalf Of Rudy Troike
Sent: Thursday, May 18, 2006 1:58 AM
To: ILAT at LISTSERV.ARIZONA.EDU
Subject: Re: [ILAT] Usitative

Mia,

      Good question. It's commonplace for languages to evolve
"grammaticalization"
of certain distinctions/features, while other languages express these
distinctions/features "periphrastically" (to use a good term from
traditional
grammar), others lexically, and still others not at all. A good example is
plural, which most European languages express grammatically, while other
languages such as some of those in South-east Asia, express the 
distinction only
lexically, by using numbers or quantifier words.

      Scott's example of English "used to" belongs in the grammatically gray
(grey?) area of what Martin Joos called "quasi-modals". These involve the
use of verbs which have been "bleached" of their primary meaning, and are
in the process of becoming purely grammatical markers (we are inhibited in
seeing this because of the practice of putting white spaces around "words"
(whatever those are)). Examples are things like "be going to", "have to",
"want to" (= desiderative), "start" (=inceptive), "stop" (=cessative), + a
main Verb. Often these are reduced phonologically, as in "ahmonna" ('I'm
going to'), Scott's "usta", and "hafta", "wanna", etc., showing further
(again obscured by spelling) how these are becoming grammaticalized.

      Whether something is clearly part of the purely grammatical structure
of a language, or somewhere on the slippery slope toward becoming
grammaticalized, may be an accident of the historical point at which
we examine the language, since a thousand years earlier or later, the
language might show very different grammatical/structural features.

      Rudy Troike