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On 30.11.18 16:16, Adam James Ross Tallman wrote:<br>
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<div class="gmail_default"
style="font-family:monospace,monospace;color:#4c1130">Thanks
Mark, Nigel, Daniel, David and Martin!</div>
<div class="gmail_default"
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<div class="gmail_default"
style="font-family:monospace,monospace;color:#4c1130">Very
helpful sources and things to consider!</div>
<div class="gmail_default"
style="font-family:monospace,monospace;color:#4c1130"><br>
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<div class="gmail_default"
style="font-family:monospace,monospace;color:#4c1130">On
Martin's comments. Yes, I agree that building an analysis off
of symptoms will lead to cherry picking (I think that's what
you are saying here). There is a proposal on the
theory/typology of case splits by Coon, Laka and Salanova (and
its an idea that I've explored in Chacobo), that typological
variation in the number of case splits (speaking strictly
about morphological encoding) can be reduced if we consider
that some of the case splits involve biclausal constructions.
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Yes, but why should one want to *reduce* the number of case splits?
From Coon's and Salanova's generative perspective, it doesn't seem
to make much sense, because their analyses don't contribute to
solving any learnability puzzle.<br>
<br>
It's of course an interesting diachronic question what kinds of
changes occur in different parts of the world (Mayan, Jê, Basque,
Panoan) and what they might have in common.<br>
<br>
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<div class="gmail_default"
style="font-family:monospace,monospace;color:#4c1130">Without
presupposing the existence of a monoclausal/biclausal
distinction (or at least a discrete distinction), it seems
like the correct line of research is to see what the
correlations are between the "symptoms of biclausality" and
the case splits (I think this would roughly follow the
methodology in Bickel that you mentioned, but Bickel doesn't
deal with complementation and auxiliary verb constructions).
If we get a perfect (or near perfect) correlation somewhere,
then maybe the Laka-Coon-Salanova proposal has something to
it, regardless of whether we happen to regard that symptom as
definitional of the monoclausal-biclausal distinction.</div>
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<br>
But why should there be a synchronic correlation? It seems clear
that some biclausal > monoclausal changes have happened in the
past, and some of them led to alignment changes (cf. also Denis
Creissels's work). This gives us diachronic explanations, but I
don't see how it would give us explanations of cross-linguistic
patterns. I would think that universal patterns are generally due to
some "pull" factor (= some functional motivation).<br>
<br>
Martin<br>
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<pre class="moz-signature" cols="72">--
Martin Haspelmath (<a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="mailto:haspelmath@shh.mpg.de">haspelmath@shh.mpg.de</a>)
Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History
Kahlaische Strasse 10
D-07745 Jena
&
Leipzig University
Institut fuer Anglistik
IPF 141199
D-04081 Leipzig
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