[Lingtyp] Innovation of functional categories

[David Gil]

Dear all,

I sympathize with Adam Tallman's struggling with the notion of "functional":

On 17/06/2020 10:22, Adam James Ross Tallman wrote:
> Dear Juergen,
>
> Just a clarifying question (I'm interested because I've attempted to 
> develop a method to quantify the degree to which some set of morphemes 
> is morphologized and I have struggled with defining "functional" in a 
> consistent fashion, and actually I have just given up)

I have also struggled with the related notion of "grammatical". In my 
2015 paper (reference below), I argued that languages of the 
Mekong-Mamberamo linguistic area are characterized by "Low Grammatical 
Morpheme Density".  While I remain convinced that this is a really 
central core property of these languages, I was painfully aware of the 
difficulties in objectively defining the notion of grammatical 
morpheme.  In an earlier draft of the paper I proposed a 
semantically-based definition, but in the final version it got whittled 
down to a single lengthy footnote (no. 26), which I have reproduced 
below for those who are interested. It's a topic that I am hoping to 
work on more in the future.

Best,

David


Gil, David (2015) "The Mekong-Mamberamo Linguistic Area", in N.J. 
Enfield and B. Comrie eds., /Languages of Mainland Southeast Asia, The 
State of the Art/, Pacific Linguistics, DeGruyter Mouton, Berlin, 266-355.


Footnote 26:

It must be acknowledged that the distinction between contentives and 
grammatical markers is itself somewhat problematical, not least because 
it conflates two orthogonal dimensions, formal and semantic. In part, 
the distinction is of a formal nature: whereas contentives are typically 
independent words or word stems belonging to open word classes, 
grammatical markers are usually either words or word stems belonging to 
closed classes or else bound morphemes, often exhibiting idiosyncratic 
morphosyntactic behaviour. Nevertheless, the formal distinction exhibits 
a strong empirical correlation to a logically-independent semantic 
distinction, between different kinds of concepts. For example, within 
the domain of time, days of the week are the kind of concept expressed 
by contentives such as English /Tuesday/, whereas past is the kind of 
concept typically expressed by grammatical morphemes such as English 
/-ed/, though exceptions do exist (e.g. the Riau Indonesian proximate 
past expression /tadi,/ a separate word belonging to the single open 
word-class of the language and exhibiting no idiosyncratic grammatical 
properties whatsoever). These two kinds of concepts may be characterized 
with reference to /encyclopaedic knowledge/, that is to say, our 
structured and highly detailed understanding of the way things are in 
the world around us. Particular concepts may be said to be encyclopaedic 
to the extent that they draw upon such encyclopaedic knowledge, 
resulting in a classification of concepts as either 
/encyclopaedically-rich/ or /encyclopaedically-poor/. Examples of 
encyclopaedically-rich concepts are ‘Tuesday’, ‘dog’, and ‘buy’, which 
make reference to complex and detailed knowledge in various domains of 
human activity and experience. In contrast, encyclopaedically-poor 
concepts are ones like past, plural and locative, typically of a more 
abstract, logical and relational nature, with little or no reference to 
such detailed real-world knowledge. For the most part, 
encyclopaedically-rich concepts are expressed by words and larger 
phrases, while encyclopaedically-poor concepts are encoded by 
grammatical markers, but there are exceptions (e.g. the non-grammatical 
but encyclopaedically-poor Riau Indonesian /tadi/ above). This points 
towards a possible alternative semantically-based characterization of 
Mekong-Mamberamo languages as displaying /low 
encyclopaedically-poor-concept articulation/, in that the expression of 
encyclopaedically-poor concepts by means of overt morphemes is 
impoverished, that is to say, paradigmatically optional and 
syntagmatically infrequent.


-- 
David Gil
  
Senior Scientist (Associate)
Department of Linguistic and Cultural Evolution
Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History
Kahlaische Strasse 10, 07745 Jena, Germany
  
Email: gil at shh.mpg.de
Mobile Phone (Israel): +972-556825895
Mobile Phone (Indonesia): +62-81344082091

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