<html><head><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"></head><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; line-break: after-white-space;" class="">Hello,<div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">I’m coming in on this late and there’s a lot of interesting stuff to catch up on in this thread on a Saturday morning (so I apologize if I missed where somebody already said this), but I have a couple of observations:</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">1) It seems to me that it is a mistake to want to attribute the term “functional” as an inherent property of any linguistic item (let’s go out on a limb and use the term “sign” here). Signs have meanings and they can be used in different ways in an utterance. Uses that are prescribed by structure, as opposed to instances that are “freely” selected to express meanings, are what I think the common parlance terms “functional”. Functional uses can be prescribed/allowed for by general rules of grammar or by specific constructions. Many items have only functional uses, many (most?) have non-functional uses, and there are some that have both, or that appear in constructions where it isn’t 100% clear whether we want to call them functional or not. A functional category for me would be the structural specification being filled (predicate, auxiliary, spatial adjunct, etc.) rather than the specific item that fills it. What you call a functional category in a language would really have to be defined in terms of how you describe the grammar, and what generalizable structural characteristics you need to posit to make that description work. The fact that signs can have both types of uses would explain how and why grammaticalization occurs, the “classic” cline being that of the lexical sign that moves progressively towards having only a functional use.</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">2) Jürgen’s observation that optional functional categories is real is spot on. This is what Igor Mel’čuk calls “quasi-inflection”—optional elements that are inflection-like in that they don’t form new lexical items, are generally applicable across members of a lexical class/classes, and express what he would call “grammatical meanings” (≈ (meaning belonging to a) functional category). As Jürgen observes, this is a common thing and a concept that we ignore at our peril.</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">David</div><div class=""><br class=""><div class="">
<div dir="auto" style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: rgb(0, 0, 0); letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; text-decoration: none; word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; line-break: after-white-space;" class=""><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-position: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-indent: 0px; widows: 2; border-spacing: 0px;"><div style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; line-break: after-white-space;" class="">================================<br class=""><br class="">David Beck, Professor<br class="">Department of Linguistics<br class="">University of Alberta<br class="">Edmonton, AB T6G 2E7<br class="">Canada<br class=""><br class="">Phone: (780) 492-0807<br class="">FAX: (780) 492-0806<br class=""><br class=""><a href="http://www.ualberta.ca/~dbeck/" class="">http://www.ualberta.ca/~dbeck/</a><br class="">http://www.artsrn.ualberta.ca/totonaco/</div></span></div>
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<div><br class=""><blockquote type="cite" class=""><div class="">On Jun 20, 2020, at 9:15 AM, <a href="mailto:lingtyp-request@listserv.linguistlist.org" class="">lingtyp-request@listserv.linguistlist.org</a> wrote:</div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><div class=""><div class="">Send Lingtyp mailing list submissions to<br class=""><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span><a href="mailto:lingtyp@listserv.linguistlist.org" class="">lingtyp@listserv.linguistlist.org</a><br class=""><br class="">To subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web, visit<br class=""><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>http://listserv.linguistlist.org/mailman/listinfo/lingtyp<br class="">or, via email, send a message with subject or body 'help' to<br class=""><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>lingtyp-request@listserv.linguistlist.org<br class=""><br class="">You can reach the person managing the list at<br class=""><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>lingtyp-owner@listserv.linguistlist.org<br class=""><br class="">When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more specific<br class="">than "Re: Contents of Lingtyp digest..."<br class=""><br class=""><br class="">Today's Topics:<br class=""><br class=""> 1. Re: Innovation of functional categories (Kasper Boye)<br class=""><br class=""><br class="">----------------------------------------------------------------------<br class=""><br class="">Message: 1<br class="">Date: Sat, 20 Jun 2020 15:14:42 +0000<br class="">From: Kasper Boye <boye@hum.ku.dk><br class="">To: Idiatov Dmitry <honohiiri@yandex.ru>, Dan I.SLOBIN<br class=""><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span><slobin@berkeley.edu><br class="">Cc: "lingtyp@listserv.linguistlist.org"<br class=""><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span><lingtyp@listserv.linguistlist.org>, Peter Harder <harder@hum.ku.dk><br class="">Subject: Re: [Lingtyp] Innovation of functional categories<br class="">Message-ID: <ec2ff920829240a6bce969f36d51a686@hum.ku.dk><br class="">Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"<br class=""><br class="">Dear Dmitry,<br class=""><br class="">Thank you for continuing this interesting discussion!<br class=""><br class="">As for your claim that nobody is obliged to say anything: Languages are conventions and social facts, and if you want to make yourself understood, and to make yourself understood as belonging to a language community, you have to follow these conventions. Playing with social facts can be as dangerous as playing with physical facts. You can go around saying “-ed, -s, -ing” for months at home without producing any bases, but if you do it in public in an English language community, there is a risk that you will be put in a straightjacket until you start producing the bases.<br class=""><br class="">Your suggestion to refer to both “encoded secondariness” and obligatoriness in the definition of grammatical status would exclude all the lexical items, which is fine and due to “encoded secondariness”. However, as far as I can see, it would also exclude a lot of items that you might not want to exclude, e.g. some auxiliaries and a lot of schematic constructions. For instance, an English caused motion construction (NP V NP PP) is not obligatory in any useful sense of the term, but if you don’t include it under “grammar”, then you are defining a notion of grammar which is getting far from the notions that most people agree (and disagree) on. This is perfectly fine of course, but you may have to spend a considerable part of your life trying to get it accepted.<br class=""><br class="">So, why not stick with “encoded secondariness”, and say: Within the class of grammatical items there is an interesting subset of items that are obligatory – and then start thinking about the relationship between encoded secondariness, closed classes and obligatoriness? I would be very interested in hearing your thoughts on that relationship!<br class=""><br class="">With best wishes,<br class="">Kasper<br class=""><br class=""><br class=""><br class=""><br class=""><br class=""><br class=""><br class=""><br class="">Fra: Idiatov Dmitry <honohiiri@yandex.ru><br class="">Sendt: 20. juni 2020 15:23<br class="">Til: Kasper Boye <boye@hum.ku.dk>; Dan I.SLOBIN <slobin@berkeley.edu><br class="">Cc: lingtyp@listserv.linguistlist.org; Peter Harder <harder@hum.ku.dk><br class="">Emne: Re: SV: [Lingtyp] Innovation of functional categories<br class=""><br class="">Kasper, a quick reaction to this passage:<br class=""><br class="">“Obligatoriness also works the other way around: Whenever you select a tense inflection you also have to select a verb. So, verbs are themselves obligatory in relation to something else – and accordingly they come out as grammatical if you take obligatoriness as the only criterion.”<br class=""><br class="">While the application of the criterion of obligatoriness is surely a delicate matter, nobody is obliged to say anything…<br class=""><br class="">To avoid the kind of logical figures that you bring up, let’s say that grammatical categories are those sets of mutually exclusive discourse prominence secondary meanings whose expression is obligatory in the constructions to which they apply.<br class=""><br class="">Dmitry<br class=""><br class=""><br class="">20.06.2020, 15:12, "Kasper Boye" <boye@hum.ku.dk<mailto:boye@hum.ku.dk>>:<br class=""><br class="">Dear Dmitry and all,<br class=""><br class=""><br class=""><br class="">First a comment on obligatoriness, then one closed classes.<br class=""><br class=""><br class=""><br class="">Jürgen Bohnemeyer pointed out that obligatoriness is too restrictive as a definiens of grammatical status. Another problem is that it is also too inclusive. Consider a language like German where indicative verbs are inflected for past and present tense. The intuition (which is backed up by the “encoded secondariness” definition; Boye & Harder 2012) is that the tense inflections are grammatical. But neither the past nor the present tense inflection is of course obligatory in itself: instead of past we can choose present, and vice versa. So, instead we have to say that the tense paradigm – or the choice between tenses – is obligatory: whenever you select an indicative verb, you also have to select a tense inflection. Now comes the problem. Obligatoriness also works the other way around: Whenever you select a tense inflection you also have to select a verb. So, verbs are themselves obligatory in relation to something else – and accordingly they come out as grammatical if you take obligatoriness as the only criterion. Of course, there are many ways in which obligatoriness can be saved as a definiens, but they all require that this notion is combined with something else.<br class=""><br class=""><br class=""><br class="">Dan Slobin pointed to the fact that items that are intuitively (and by the “encoded secondariness” definition) lexical, may form closed classes. I would like to add that closed classes may comprise both lexical and grammatical members. Within the classes of prepositions and pronouns, for instance, distinctions have occasionally been made between lexical and grammatical prepositions. Just as closed class membership seems to have a processing impact, so does the contrast between grammatical and lexical. For instance, Ishkhanyan et al. (2017) showed that the production of French pronouns identified as grammatical based on Boye & Harder (2017) is more severely impaired in agrammatic aphasia than the production of pronouns classified as lexical, and Messerschmidt et al. (2019) showed that Danish prepositions classified as grammatical attract less attention than prepositions classified as lexical.<br class=""><br class=""><br class=""><br class="">Best wishes,<br class=""><br class="">Kasper<br class=""><br class=""><br class=""><br class="">Boye, K. & P. Harder. 2012. "A usage-based theory of grammatical status and grammaticalization". Language 88.1. 1-44.<br class=""><br class=""><br class=""><br class="">Ishkhanyan, B., H. Sahraoui, P. Harder, J. Mogensen & K. Boye. 2017. "Grammatical and lexical pronoun dissociation in French speakers with agrammatic aphasia: A usage-based account and REF-based hypothesis". Journal of Neurolinguistics 44. 1-16.<br class=""><br class=""><br class=""><br class="">Messerschmidt, M., K. Boye, M.M. Overmark, S.T. Kristensen & P. Harder. 2018. "Sondringen mellem grammatiske og leksikalske præpositioner" [’The distinction between grammatical and lexical prepositions’]. Ny forskning i grammatik 25. 89-106.<br class=""><br class=""><br class=""><br class=""><br class=""><br class=""><br class=""><br class=""><br class=""><br class=""><br class=""><br class="">Fra: Lingtyp <lingtyp-bounces@listserv.linguistlist.org<mailto:lingtyp-bounces@listserv.linguistlist.org>> På vegne af Dan I. SLOBIN<br class="">Sendt: 19. juni 2020 23:59<br class="">Til: Idiatov Dmitry <honohiiri@yandex.ru<mailto:honohiiri@yandex.ru>><br class="">Cc: lingtyp@listserv.linguistlist.or<mailto:lingtyp@listserv.linguistlist.or>g; Peter Harder <harder@hum.ku.dk<mailto:harder@hum.ku.dk>><br class="">Emne: Re: [Lingtyp] Innovation of functional categories<br class=""><br class=""><br class=""><br class="">Let me throw another distinction into this discussion: closed class. The plural markers in Yucatec, for example, are such a class. This factor is important on the level of processing. In speech production, a Yucatec speaker can quickly and automatically access the plural marker. Closed classes tend to be small, to carry general meanings, and to be of high frequency—all indications of their role in automaticity. This factor, in my opinion, goes beyond what are traditionally treated as “grammatical” elements. For example, the Germanic and Slavic directional particles are a small, closed class. But the same can be said of directional verbs in the Romance and Turkic languages, among others. A Spanish speaker does not innovate such verbs any more than a Russian speaker innovates verb prefixes. The Spanish speaker quickly and automatically selects the relevant verb—entrar, salir, etc., just as the Russian speaker selects v- or u- as the relevant verb prefix.<br class=""><br class=""><br class=""><br class="">Regards from an engaged psycholinguist,<br class=""><br class="">Dan<br class=""><br class=""><br class=""><br class="">On Fri, Jun 19, 2020 at 12:51 PM Idiatov Dmitry <honohiiri@yandex.ru<mailto:honohiiri@yandex.ru>> wrote:<br class=""><br class="">Dear Juergen,<br class=""><br class=""><br class=""><br class="">I am aware of such concerns that some linguists may have. There are two issues here. Well, actually three, since you brought in inflection at the end of your message.<br class=""><br class=""><br class=""><br class="">The first issue is whether optionality is an accurate description of the distribution of a given morpheme in each particular case where it may appear to be optional at first sight. There are many gradations of “optionality” possible. I mentioned some such cases (discussed in detail by others) in my (2008) paper.<br class=""><br class=""><br class=""><br class="">However interesting the study of these various gradations of optionality may be, this issue is not really fundamental here. What is fundamental is that being a grammatical meaning is a property of the system of a specific language. A certain meaning is not grammatical a priori, universally. Admittedly, cross-linguistically some meanings turn out to be grammatical much more frequently than others (such as plural) and can thus be described as prototypical grammatical meanings, but still prototypical is not the same as universal. So, yes, if the Yucatec plural suffix is completely optional, plural is not a grammatical meaning in Yucatec, despite the fact it is a grammatical meaning in English and many other languages. Similarly, as you would probably agree that evidentiality is a grammatical meaning in many South American languages, probably you would not wish to say the same about English.<br class=""><br class=""><br class=""><br class="">The third issue is the frequent conflation of being grammatical with being morphologically bound. Grammatical pertains above all to meanings, not to the way these meanings are expressed. The fact that I said that derivational meanings are not grammatical, if you use obligatoriness as the defining criterion, does not mean that grammatical is the same as inflectional, as I briefly explain in that paper of mine (2008:155-156). By the way, I do agree with you that the concept of inflection is rather flawed and I try to avoid using it in my own work as much as possible.<br class=""><br class=""><br class=""><br class="">Best,<br class=""><br class="">Dmitry<br class=""><br class=""><br class=""><br class=""><br class=""><br class="">19.06.2020, 19:57, "Bohnemeyer, Juergen" <jb77@buffalo.edu<mailto:jb77@buffalo.edu>>:<br class=""><br class="">Dear Dmitry — I think the typological literature on functional expressions has been warped by the obligatoriness criterion in unfortunate ways. To give you a simple illustration: Yucatec has optional plural marking on both nouns and in verbal agreement. The Yucatec plural suffix bears no obvious semantic differences to the English _-s_ suffix - it only differs from it in that it is optional (and in its phonological form, obviously). Should I not treat the Yucatec plural marker as expressing a functional category just because it is optional? That seems a rather suboptimal move to me.<br class=""><br class="">A similar problem arises in the literature on tense and tenselessness: if a language has a marker with exactly the same semantics as the English past tense, except that its use is optional, should we therefore consider the language tenseless? That would seem a mistake to me.<br class=""><br class="">My sense is that what we are dealing with here is just one aspect of a larger problem: theorists and even typologists continue to operate with a notion of ‘inflection’ that was developed on the basis and for the treatment of Indo-European languages. It’s a concept that seems unproblematic as long as you restrict your attention to languages that package inflectional information in fusional desinences that are part of strictly obligatory templates. Step outside this type of languages, and you begin to run into all kinds of problems.<br class=""><br class="">So what I’m saying is this: (i) optional functional categories are very real; (ii) they are at present brutally under-theorized; (iii) this is just one symptom of a larger malaise: a theorizing of the concept of inflection that is typologically woefully inadequate.<br class=""><br class="">(As a sidenote to Jan Rijkhoff and others: I like the term ‘functional expressions’ (irrespective of its provenance) as an updated label expressing pretty much the same concept as the traditional ‘syncategoremata’. But, I also believe that we should worry about the concepts of our terms first and the labels maybe second or third. I realize that that view is arguably a little ironic for a (moderate) Whorfian :-))<br class=""><br class="">Best — Juergen<br class=""><br class=""><br class=""> On Jun 19, 2020, at 11:48 AM, Idiatov Dmitry <honohiiri@yandex.ru<mailto:honohiiri@yandex.ru>> wrote:<br class=""><br class=""> I would like to react to Kasper Boye’s summary of the “solutions to the problem of defining ‘grammatical’ on the market”.<br class=""><br class=""> There is also the good old solution of using obligatoriness for these purposes. It goes back to at least Jakobson and Boas, as expressed in the well-known quote by Jakobson “Languages differ essentially in what they _must_ convey and not in what they _may_ convey” (see https://linguistlist.org/issues/6/6-411.html<https://eur02.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Flinguistlist.org%2Fissues%2F6%2F6-411.html&data=02%7C01%7Cboye%40hum.ku.dk%7C1c7366638d224303e4b508d8151d120c%7Ca3927f91cda14696af898c9f1ceffa91%7C0%7C0%7C637282561896312851&sdata=riHZyeTSDDl%2FjYnEu73rm7ZEE4hT2HSFUtqr09Bsxkg%3D&reserved=0>). The criterion of obligatoriness results in a more restricted set of meanings being categorized as grammatical, as compared to Boye & Harder (2012)’s criterion of conventionalized secondary discourse prominence. Notably, it excludes the meanings of derivational morphemes. Boye & Harder (2012) do discuss obligatoriness as one of the possible way of defining “grammatical”, but dismiss it for a number of reasons, for example precisely because it would exclude derivational morphemes. As this kind of objections had been around long before Boye & Harder (2012)’s paper, it so happened that I discussed why I do not find these objections valid in my (2008) paper on the concepts of grammaticalization and antigrammaticalization.<br class=""><br class=""> Obviously, there is no absolute truth here and the term, in this case “grammatical meaning”, will mean what we decide it to mean. However, using one criterion or another will have different implications. In practical terms, I personally find it useful to have a more restrictive definition of “grammatical meaning”, for example because it’s easier to apply consistently.<br class=""><br class=""> Best wishes,<br class=""> Dmitry<br class=""><br class=""> --------<br class=""> Idiatov, Dmitry. 2008. Antigrammaticalization, antimorphologization and the case of Tura. In Elena Seoane, María José López-Couso & (in collaboration with) Teresa Fanego (eds.), Theoretical and empirical issues in grammaticalization, 151–169. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. doi: 10.1075/tsl.77.09idi.<br class=""> (accessible at: https://filesender.renater.fr/?s=download&token=24ecb7f0-3d5f-48ad-8da0-bd739bd16d95<https://eur02.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Ffilesender.renater.fr%2F%3Fs%3Ddownload%26token%3D24ecb7f0-3d5f-48ad-8da0-bd739bd16d95&data=02%7C01%7Cboye%40hum.ku.dk%7C1c7366638d224303e4b508d8151d120c%7Ca3927f91cda14696af898c9f1ceffa91%7C0%7C0%7C637282561896322846&sdata=0WJAiefPp2zhgZ%2FkCaROwOjudBfIZu%2F5tPxmIfDgVFs%3D&reserved=0> ; it’s also available from my website, but the server has been down for some time, hence this temporary link)<br class=""><br class=""><br class=""> 17.06.2020, 20:11, "Kasper Boye" <boye@hum.ku.dk<mailto:boye@hum.ku.dk>>:<br class=""> Dear all,<br class=""><br class=""> I would like to first respond to David Gil’s comment on the problems of defining grammatical, then to follow up on Jürgen Bohnemeyer’s ideas about the job grammatical items do.<br class=""><br class=""> There are a couple of solutions to the problem of defining ”grammatical” on the market. One is Christian Lehmann’s (2015) structural definition in terms of autonomy; another one is Peter Harder’s and my own functional and usage-based definition (to which I think Bohnemeyer was referring in his initial message) in terms of conventionalized secondary discourse prominence (or backgroundedness) (Boye & Harder 2012; references below). Both definitions bring together morphosyntactic and semantic properties of being grammatical. For instance, being by convention backgrounded (that is, being conventionally associated with background meaning only) entails being dependent on a host expression: a background requires a foreground.<br class=""><br class=""> Based on our 2012 definition, Peter and I are currently working in the same direction (book in prep.) as Bohnemeyer. As we see it, the raison d’être for grammatical items is that they offer a shortcut to meaning, which may be inferable from the context: knowing by conventions is faster than inferring from context, even if inferencing is guided by expectations (cf. Lehmann’s remark earlier in this thread). In fact, they offer a cheap shortcut: representing background information they can be processed rather superficially and thus quickly by the hearer.<br class=""><br class=""> Looking now at grammatical items from the speaker perspective, it is clear that the production of grammatical items requires an extra effort. Not only does it require something extra to produce a grammatical item than not to produce anything, recent studies suggest that grammatical items are in fact a little harder to produce than lexical ones (e.g. Michel Lange et al. 2015; Nielsen et al. 2019). This may be seen as a consequence of their dependency: when you produce a grammatical item, you also have to consider which host expression to attach it to.<br class=""><br class=""> If we now look at grammatical items from the speaker and hearer perspective at the same time, a rather sympathetic picture of human communication emerges, a picture that can be characterized in terms of the notion of ‘audience design’: the speaker invests a little extra production resources so that the hearer can save a little processing resources.<br class=""><br class=""> Why then do languages differ when it comes to the amount of grammatical morphemes? Well, firstly evolution is not optimizing, but satisficing, and we can easily live without grammatical morphemes (our forefathers probably did; cf. Hurford 2012) – it puts an extra burden on inferencing, but we are quite good at inferencing. Secondly, phonologically concrete morphemes are not the only kind of grammatical items we have. Also construction grammar’s schematic constructions qualify as grammatical items: they are conventionalized as carriers of background info.<br class=""><br class=""> With best wishes,<br class=""> Kasper<br class=""><br class=""> References<br class=""> Boye, K. & P. Harder. (2012). A usage-based theory of grammatical status and grammaticalization. Language 88.1. 1-44.<br class=""> Link: https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/41348882.pdf<https://eur02.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.jstor.org%2Fstable%2Fpdf%2F41348882.pdf&data=02%7C01%7Cboye%40hum.ku.dk%7C1c7366638d224303e4b508d8151d120c%7Ca3927f91cda14696af898c9f1ceffa91%7C0%7C0%7C637282561896322846&sdata=ItpUzB%2FfA3eEY%2Fex6sZkIxpym5pkS0Mino8DSv9ZsSk%3D&reserved=0><br class=""><br class=""> Hurford, J.R. (2012). The origins of grammar: Language in the light of evolution. Oxford: Oxford University Press.<br class=""><br class=""> Lehmann, Christian. 2015. Thoughts on grammaticalization, 3rd ed. Berlin, Germany: Language Science Press.<br class=""><br class=""> Michel Lange, V., M. Messerschmidt, P. Harder, H.R. Siebner & K. Boye. (2017). Planning and production of grammatical and lexical verbs in multi-word messages. PLoS ONE 12.11. e0186685. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0186685<https://eur02.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fdoi.org%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0186685&data=02%7C01%7Cboye%40hum.ku.dk%7C1c7366638d224303e4b508d8151d120c%7Ca3927f91cda14696af898c9f1ceffa91%7C0%7C0%7C637282561896332836&sdata=5SalZ91DmIfVujv%2FzIPjxk807%2BEa7oCAVvaK%2F1gnYWg%3D&reserved=0><br class=""><br class=""> Nielsen, S.R., K. Boye, R. Bastiaanse & V. Michel Lange. 2019. The production of grammatical and lexical determiners in Broca’s aphasia. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, DOI: 10.1080/23273798.2019.1616104.<br class=""> Link: https://doi.org/10.1080/23273798.2019.1616104<https://eur02.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fdoi.org%2F10.1080%2F23273798.2019.1616104&data=02%7C01%7Cboye%40hum.ku.dk%7C1c7366638d224303e4b508d8151d120c%7Ca3927f91cda14696af898c9f1ceffa91%7C0%7C0%7C637282561896332836&sdata=ZFOwE4gK4HgJgDIKoIj7axqhYGfTBs02u5%2B1qmFitTY%3D&reserved=0><br class=""><br class=""><br class=""><br class=""><br class=""> Fra: Lingtyp <lingtyp-bounces@listserv.linguistlist.org<mailto:lingtyp-bounces@listserv.linguistlist.org>> På vegne af David Gil<br class=""> Sendt: 17. juni 2020 14:14<br class=""> Til: lingtyp@listserv.linguistlist.org<mailto:lingtyp@listserv.linguistlist.org><br class=""> Emne: Re: [Lingtyp] Innovation of functional categories<br class=""><br class=""> Dear Juergen and all,<br class=""><br class=""> My favourite example of an innovation of functional categories comes from some Malayic dialects of central Sumatra — see references below. For the most part, Malayic languages are completely devoid of functional categories; however, in some parts of central Sumatra, culminating in Kerinci, a system has developed whereby almost every word in the language has two forms, absolute and oblique, formally distinguished by complex rules of ablaut. The functions of the absolute/oblique alternation are also complex, but I'll mention just one of them, since it ties in to earlier discussion in this thread about the development of articles: in phrase final position, a noun will typically occur in the absolute, however, if it takes the oblique form it is interpreted as definite. McKinnon et al trace the historical development of the absolute/oblique alternation in terms of a coalescence of two separate developments: (a) the grammaticalization of erstwhile phrase-final phonological alternations; and (b) the phonological attraction of an erstwhile free form (cognate to Standard Malay nya). Comparative evidence suggests that these developments are very recent, and since there are no non-Malayic languages in the vicinity that would form the basis for a contact explanation, it seems pretty clear that the absolute/oblique alternation constitutes an internally-motivated development of a functional category.<br class=""><br class=""> Best,<br class=""><br class=""> David<br class=""><br class=""><br class=""> McKinnon, Timothy (2011) The morphophonology and morphosyntax of Kerinci Word-shape alternations, PhD Dissertation, University of Delaware, Newark.<br class=""> McKinnon, Timothy, Peter Cole and Gabriella Hermon (2011) Object agreement and ‘pro-drop’ in Kerinci Malay, Language 87.4:715–750.<br class=""> McKinnon, Timothy, Gabriella Hermon, Yanti and Peter Cole (2018) "From Phonology to Syntax: Insights from Malay", in H. Bartos, M. den Dikken, Z. Bánreti and T. Varadi eds., Boundaries Crossed, at the Interfaces of Morphosyntax, Phonology, Pragmatics and Semantics, Studies in Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 94, Springer, Berlin, 349-371. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-90710-9_22<br class=""> McKinnon, Timothy, Yanti, Peter Cole and Gabriella Hermon (2015) "Infixation and Apophony in Malay: Description and Developmental Stages", Linguistik Indonesia 33.1:1-19.<br class=""><br class=""><br class=""> On 16/06/2020 04:48, Bohnemeyer, Juergen wrote:<br class=""> Dear colleagues — I’m looking for examples of innovations of functional categories. By ‘functional categories’, I mean the ‘grammatical categories’ of traditional grammar, such as tense, mood, person, gender, case, etc. I propose a more technical definition below.<br class=""><br class=""> Here is what I mean by ‘innovation’: language families or genera in which the functional expression in question is (i) grammaticalized in one or more members or branches while (ii) being absent in others, with (iii) the balance of evidence pointing to acquisition in the former languages/branches rather than loss in the latter, and (iv) there being no obvious contact-based explanation for the emergence of the expression in question. (Of course one could define innovation to include contact-based innovation, but I happen to be specifically interested in innovation of functional categories in the absence of contact models.)<br class=""><br class=""> I realize of course that certainty about (iii) and (iv) is in many if not most cases not to be had. Consider for illustration the emergence of definite articles in Western Europe (Celtic, Romance, Germanic) during the “Dark Ages”. In this case, we can be certain that this was an innovation event due to the presence of historical records both from ancestors of some of the Indo-European languages that developed articles and from ancestors of those that didn’t. But when and where this innovation started, and what role (if any) contact with languages from outside Western Europe, such as Ancient Greek, Hebrew, and Arabic, may have played, appears to continue to be unclear.<br class=""><br class=""> It is possible if not likely that some of the clearest examples of innovations of functional categories arise in creole languages. Of interest here would be creoles that have grammaticalized a functional category not present in either the lexifier or any substrate or adstrate language.<br class=""><br class=""> As a working definition, functional expressions in general (a superordinate category of functional categories in the narrow sense) might be defined as (i) morphemes that (ii) do not belong to any major lexical category, but (iii) enter into fully productive and compositional combinations with (projections of) members of lexical categories. This very broad and general characterization would encompass a host of subtypes. Of great interest to me is the observation that these subtypes are not uniform in how commonly they are grammaticalized vs. missing in the languages of the world. Some functional expressions, such as negation, occur in every single human language. Some, such as adnominal or adverbial expressions of quantification, apparently are present in all languages except for languages that rely on complex predicative workarounds (existential predication for existential quantification, conditional-like structures for universal quantification).<br class=""><br class=""> Contrast this with the subtype of functional expressions I’m particularly interested in here, such as tense, viewpoint aspect, definiteness, number, and gender, which are typically present in only between a third and two thirds of the samples of the WALS chapters that report on them. My hypothesis is that this difference in variability correlates with the communicative function of the expressions: expressions such as tense, number, and gender are typically (in the great majority of utterances in which they occur) not needed to express part of the speaker’s communicative intention, as the information they contribute is predictable in context. The grammaticalization of such largely redundant expressions apparently serves to reduce the hearer’s inference load.<br class=""><br class=""> This gradual pragmatic redundancy is from my perspective a defining feature of the class of expressions in question. Obviously, this doesn’t translate into a simple diagnostic. However, it aligns with relatively advanced degrees of grammaticalization (compared to things such as negation, demonstratives, or modals), and advanced grammaticalization in turn jibes with the primarily metalinguistic function of the expressions in question: they are always backgrounded, never express “at issue” content, and as a result can never be focalized except metalinguistically.<br class=""><br class=""> I hope that wasn’t too convoluted ;-)<br class=""><br class=""> Thank you in advance for your help! I will post a summary if I receive a sufficient number of responses. — Best — Juergen<br class=""><br class=""> --<br class=""> David Gil<br class=""><br class=""> Senior Scientist (Associate)<br class=""> Department of Linguistic and Cultural Evolution<br class=""> Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History<br class=""> Kahlaische Strasse 10, 07745 Jena, Germany<br class=""><br class=""> Email: gil@shh.mpg.de<mailto:gil@shh.mpg.de><br class=""> Mobile Phone (Israel): +972-556825895<br class=""> Mobile Phone (Indonesia): +62-81344082091<br class=""> ,<br class=""> _______________________________________________<br class=""> Lingtyp mailing list<br class=""> Lingtyp@listserv.linguistlist.org<mailto:Lingtyp@listserv.linguistlist.org><br class=""> http://listserv.linguistlist.org/mailman/listinfo/lingtyp<https://eur02.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=http%3A%2F%2Flistserv.linguistlist.org%2Fmailman%2Flistinfo%2Flingtyp&data=02%7C01%7Cboye%40hum.ku.dk%7C1c7366638d224303e4b508d8151d120c%7Ca3927f91cda14696af898c9f1ceffa91%7C0%7C0%7C637282561896332836&sdata=Xkoab6dhE0i0qJ%2B2QLhfp9AdEVmf2jCHyhL%2FyhTqB8Y%3D&reserved=0><br class=""><br class=""> _______________________________________________<br class=""> Lingtyp mailing list<br class=""> Lingtyp@listserv.linguistlist.org<mailto:Lingtyp@listserv.linguistlist.org><br class=""> http://listserv.linguistlist.org/mailman/listinfo/lingtyp<https://eur02.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=http%3A%2F%2Flistserv.linguistlist.org%2Fmailman%2Flistinfo%2Flingtyp&data=02%7C01%7Cboye%40hum.ku.dk%7C1c7366638d224303e4b508d8151d120c%7Ca3927f91cda14696af898c9f1ceffa91%7C0%7C0%7C637282561896342833&sdata=J%2FzS33qDkhYizdd2TRXyJIq9Ft%2Bq5v7QTIZwHxazMck%3D&reserved=0><br class=""><br class=""><br class=""><br class="">--<br class="">Juergen Bohnemeyer (He/Him)<br class="">Professor and Director of Graduate Studies<br class="">Department of Linguistics and Center for Cognitive Science<br class="">University at Buffalo<br class=""><br class="">Office: 642 Baldy Hall, UB North Campus<br class="">Mailing address: 609 Baldy Hall, Buffalo, NY 14260<br class="">Phone: (716) 645 0127<br class="">Fax: (716) 645 3825<br class="">Email: jb77@buffalo.edu<mailto:jb77@buffalo.edu><br class="">Web: http://www.acsu.buffalo.edu/~jb77/<https://eur02.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=http:%2F%2Fwww.acsu.buffalo.edu%2F~jb77%2F&data=02%7C01%7Cboye%40hum.ku.dk%7C1c7366638d224303e4b508d8151d120c%7Ca3927f91cda14696af898c9f1ceffa91%7C0%7C0%7C637282561896342833&sdata=vX2rrGWLFUhZ8BBGolU1N80PdX2koW680tyFHMzGp3w%3D&reserved=0><br class=""><br class="">Office hours will be held by Skype, WebEx, or phone until further notice. Email me to schedule a call at any time. I will in addition hold Tu 12:30-1:30 and Th 2:30-3:20 open specifically for remote office hours.<br class=""><br class="">There’s A Crack In Everything - That’s How The Light Gets In<br class="">(Leonard Cohen)<br class=""><br class=""><br class="">_______________________________________________<br class="">Lingtyp mailing list<br class="">Lingtyp@listserv.linguistlist.org<mailto:Lingtyp@listserv.linguistlist.org><br class="">http://listserv.linguistlist.org/mailman/listinfo/lingtyp<https://eur02.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=http%3A%2F%2Flistserv.linguistlist.org%2Fmailman%2Flistinfo%2Flingtyp&data=02%7C01%7Cboye%40hum.ku.dk%7C1c7366638d224303e4b508d8151d120c%7Ca3927f91cda14696af898c9f1ceffa91%7C0%7C0%7C637282561896352824&sdata=jWJ5w4iNGOmirpouALL9SwWjRpQ34aUOtjpdkxqkWAQ%3D&reserved=0><br class=""><br class=""><br class=""><br class=""><br class=""><br class="">--<br class=""><br class=""><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><br class=""><br class="">Dan I. Slobin<br class=""><br class="">Professor Emeritus of Psychology and Linguistics<br class=""><br class="">University of California, Berkeley<br class=""><br class="">email: slobin@berkeley.edu<mailto:slobin@berkeley.edu><br class=""><br class="">address: 2323 Rose St., Berkeley, CA 94708<br class=""><br class=""><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><br class="">-------------- next part --------------<br class="">An HTML attachment was scrubbed...<br class="">URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/lingtyp/attachments/20200620/c7907a64/attachment.html><br class=""><br class="">------------------------------<br class=""><br class="">Subject: Digest Footer<br class=""><br class="">_______________________________________________<br class="">Lingtyp mailing list<br class="">Lingtyp@listserv.linguistlist.org<br class="">http://listserv.linguistlist.org/mailman/listinfo/lingtyp<br class=""><br class=""><br class="">------------------------------<br class=""><br class="">End of Lingtyp Digest, Vol 69, Issue 25<br class="">***************************************<br class=""></div></div></blockquote></div><br class=""></div></body></html>