[Lingtyp] Plural markers on (already) plural pronouns

[Bernhard Wälchli]

Dear Martin,


> Bybee (1985) showed that "more relevant" affix meanings are more likely to occur close to the root...

How do you account for Bybee’s notion of “relevance”? By frequency? The way I read Bybee (1985) is that this at least originally was conceived of as iconicity: “If linguistic expression is iconic, then we would predict that the categories that are more relevant to the verb will occur closer to the stem than those that are less relevant” (Bybee 1985: 24). I read this argument as follows: Since relevance is a semantic property, the iconicity assumption makes it testable empirically in form.
I cannot find any answer in Haspelmath (2008), where Bybee (1985) is mentioned just once (to strengthen a frequency argument) how Relevance relates to iconicity. Haspelmath (2008) is very useful in offering a typology of different approaches to iconicity. Among those, there are two whose difference I never managed to understand: iconicity of cohesion: “Meanings that belong together more closely semantically are expressed by more cohesive forms” (this type is rejected in the paper; note also that its original name given by Haiman was “conceptual distance”) and “iconicity of contiguity ("forms that belong together semantically occur next to each other; this is similar to iconicity of cohesion, but different in crucial ways”. This type is “beyond question” in Haspelmath 2008: 15; does “next to” mean "immediately adjacent" here, and that is why it is different from cohesion?).
Now, Bybee speaks of “closer” rather than “distance” (Haiman), but it seems to me that “more distant” is the antonym of “closer”, so am I wrong if I consider Bybee’s Relevance to be an instance of iconicity of conceptual distance? (cf. also “More specifically, among the inflectional categories that we have surveyed, we would expect the most relevant to occur closest to the verb stem, and the least relevant to occur at the greatest distance from the verb stem”, Bybee 1985: 34-35).
Of course, it may be the case that the empirically tested hypothesis behind the notion of “relevance” still holds, but that the underlying assumption (“iconic”) was wrong. Relevance might then be an unexplained force like gravity. So, provided we assume that Relevance is a fact, how is it explained?

Best wishes,

Bernhard W.


Bybee, Joan L. 1985. Morphology: A Study of the Relation between Meaning and Form. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Haspelmath, Martin. 2008. Frequency vs. iconicity in explaining grammatical asymmetries." Cognitive linguistics 19.1: 1-33.


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