26.542, Review: Linguistic Theories; Syntax: Bakker, Haspelmath (2013)

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Subject: 26.542, Review: Linguistic Theories; Syntax: Bakker, Haspelmath (2013)

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Date: Mon, 26 Jan 2015 15:22:57
From: Daniel Hieber [dhieber at umail.ucsb.edu]
Subject: Languages Across Boundaries

 
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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/24/24-3353.html

EDITOR: Dik  Bakker
EDITOR: Martin  Haspelmath
TITLE: Languages Across Boundaries
SUBTITLE: Studies in Memory of Anna Siewierska
PUBLISHER: De Gruyter Mouton
YEAR: 2013

REVIEWER: Daniel William Hieber, University of California, Santa Barbara

Review's Editors: Malgorzata Cavar, Sara Couture

INTRODUCTION

This collection is dedicated to the memory of influential typologist Anna
Siewierska, who passed away suddenly in 2011. Anna’s accomplishments include
coordinating the Constituent Order group of the EUROTYP project (Siewierska
1998), and serving as the president of both the Societas Linguistica Europaea
and the Association for Linguistic Typology. She wrote the seminal work on
person (2004), co-edited an important volume on impersonal constructions
(Malchukov and Siewierska 2011), and contributed several chapters to the World
Atlas of Language Structures (2005a-f), among many other accomplishments.

This book is the outcome of the Anna Siewierska Memorial Workshop held in
Leipzig in April 2012, which sought to draw connections to and expand upon
Anna’s rich body of work. The book is xix + 400 pages, and the great care
shown by the editors and publisher in terms of layout and formatting makes the
book easy to reference and read.

SUMMARY

The first chapter, ‘Person by other means’ (by Matthew Baerman and Greville G.
Corbett), shows that the realization of person can be non-autonomous, i.e.,
expressed without morphology dedicated to that purpose. In some languages, the
only realization of verbal person is through asymmetries in gender agreement
on the verb. For example, third person in Archi may be distinguished by the
fact that only third person makes a three-way distinction in noun class. While
it is known that feature values can be non-autonomous in this way (Corbett
2013), the possibility that an entire feature might be non-autonomous is
remarkable. This chapter bears the hallmark of Corbett’s Canonical Typology
(Corbett 2005) in that it explores the indistinct boundaries of person
marking, and so expands our knowledge of the ways the phenomenon can be
realized.

The next chapter, ‘Patterns of alignment in verb agreement’ (by Balthasar
Bickel, Giorgio Iemmolo, Taras Zakharko and Alena Witzlack-Makarevich), seeks
to determine how frequently different criteria for assessing alignment in
agreement yield conflicting results in languages crosslinguistically,
depending on whether one examines the trigger potential, form, position, or
conditioning factors of the agreement. The authors call these discrepancies
Siewierska’s Problem, following her seminal article on alignment in
ditransitive constructions (2003). They find that two-thirds of the sampled
languages show some type of alignment discrepancy. In addition, they find that
languages with larger morphological paradigms show greater discrepancies in
their alignment. They suggest that this greater incidence of discrepancies
arises via the repeated layering of newly grammaticalized morphemes that gave
rise to such complex morphological systems in the first place. In short, the
evolution of complex morphological systems provides more chances for a
discrepancy to occur.

In ‘Human themes in Spanish ditransitive constructions,’ Bernard Comrie
studies the rare cases when a ditransitive construction in Spanish has both an
animate Theme and Recipient. Typically Recipients and Themes in Spanish
ditransitives are flagged with the preposition ‘a’ when animate and
referential, but when both the Recipient and Theme are animate, there is no
ideal coding solution. Flagging both with ‘a’ introduces a potential
ambiguity, but the ‘a’ is obligatory for animates. Comrie finds that speakers
resolve this dilemma by marking human Themes the same way as Patients, by
using ‘a’, despite the potential for ambiguity.

In ‘The generic use of the second person singular pronoun in Mandinka,’ Denis
Creissels provides synchronic and diachronic accounts of a hitherto
undocumented type of impersonal construction. Typically, 2nd person impersonal
pronouns may only refer anaphorically back to another 2nd personal generic
pronoun, as in expressions like the English aphorism, ‘you reap what you sow.’
While Mandinka allows for this pattern, second person generics may also ‘refer
back to a variety of antecedents that could equally be resumed by 3rd person
pronouns, without any difference in meaning’ (60). The function of this
non-specific noun phrase is to specify and delimit the semantic domain of the
impersonal pronoun, e.g. ‘[Anyone who contradicts me 1], [you 1] should go
there and look at it.’ He suggests that this construction originated in
vocative expressions, which were then reanalyzed as generics. This chapter is
an excellent contribution to expanding our understanding of the range of
behaviors that are possible in impersonal constructions.

The chapter titled ‘The referential hierarchy: Reviewing the evidence in
diachronic perspective’ by Sonia Cristofaro presents a strong challenge to the
explanatory power of the referential hierarchy (a.k.a. the topicality or
animacy hierarchy). Cristofaro shows that many of the functional explanations
given for the referential hierarchy are untenable when one looks at the origin
of these hierarchies in different languages. Cristofaro explains that the
ergative markers in a split ergative system typically derive from indexicals,
and since indexicals cannot generally co-occur with pronouns, it is no
surprise that pronouns (on the left end of the referential hierarchy) do not
tend to display ergative alignment. In languages where ergative markers
originate in other devices, no such alignment splits are found. Thus there is
no need to resort the relative referentiality or topicality of arguments to
explain the hierarchy, and in fact such an explanation would be circular. This
chapter is a fine homage to Anna Siewierska, who herself emphasized the dual
synchronic-diachronic nature of alignment and the referential hierarchy.

‘Towards a distributional typology of human impersonal pronouns, based on data
from European languages’ (by Volker Gast and Johan van der Auwera) has as its
primary aim to combine two previously disparate semantic maps into a single
framework -- Giacalone Ramat and Sansõ’s (2007) cline of ‘man’-pronouns from
species-generic uses to definite pronominal uses, and Siewierska and
Papastathi’s (2011:604) semantic map of third person plural impersonals. The
resulting map is a ring connecting back on itself, where each node differs
from that next to it along just a few variables. The authors show that the
impersonal constructions of Europe cover the map in very different ways, with
some impersonal constructions encompassing every function in the map (e.g.
English ‘they’), others that cover just two nodes (e.g. English ‘someone’),
and most that cover some contiguous sub-portion of the map. This new map is a
potentially robust typological-descriptive tool for comparing impersonal
constructions crosslinguistically.

Beate Hampe and Christian Lehmann’s chapter  ‘Partial coreference’ addresses
the strategies with which languages handle partial coreference between the
subject and the object of a clause. What is at issue here is whether languages
code these constructions in the same way as full coreference expressions
(e.g., reflexives in English, as in ‘I exploit myself’) or disjoint reference
expressions (e.g. ‘I exploit us’, where no marking is necessary). The authors
review data from three languages with robust morphological coding of person
and number of both subject and object on the verb. They find that “whenever
there is partial coreference, the subject-object relation cannot be coded on
the verb at all” (165). That is, the cells for those parts of the agreement
paradigm (e.g. the slot for 1s>1p) are blank. Moreover, the avoidance of
partial coreference explains all the gaps in the paradigm.

Martin Haspelmath’s chapter ‘Argument indexing: A conceptual framework for the
syntactic status of bound person forms’ argues that the distinction between
‘agreement’ and ‘bound pronominals’ is an unhelpful one. He suggests that the
distinction is motivated by an ad hoc desire to avoid redundancy in
indexation, but that redundancy in language is well-attested elsewhere and
thus not problematic. He takes the position that ‘agreement’ and ‘bound
pronominals’ are merely different aspects of a broader phenomenon, which he
labels ‘indexation’. He then defines three subtypes of indexation:
cross-indexes, which may appear either with or without an independent noun
phrase; gramm-indexes, which must always appear with an independent noun
phrases; and pro-indexes, which never do. The result is to systematize a
project that Anna Siewierska set out to draw attention to, that is, the unity
of person forms, bound or free.

William Croft takes Haspelmath’s position a step further in his chapter
‘Agreement as anaphora, anaphora as coreference.’ Croft argues compellingly
that ALL indexes should be viewed as referring rather than anaphoric - in his
terms, an “independent-reference” analysis, as opposed to a traditional
“grammatical-dependency” analysis. An implication of this position for
anaphora in discourse is that it reframes anaphora as a matter of
''constructing, modifying, and accessing the contents of mental models of an
unfolding discourse within the minds of speaker and addressee'' (Cornish
1996:22, cited on p. 105). Thus anaphora signals a continuation of the
existing attention focus, while deixis shifts the addressee’s attention from
an existing object to a new one derived from context. The paper presents a
thought-provoking reconception of person marking and its function in discourse
and cognition.

Andrej A. Kibrik’s chapter ‘Peculiarities and origins of the Russian
referential system’ aims to determine how East Slavic languages came to have
near-obligatory subject pronouns in contrast to West and South Slavic
languages. Kibrik provides two complementary answers to this question:
internal (grammaticalization) and external (language contact). Internally, he
shows that past tense forms used to be synthetic, consisting of a participle
plus person-marked copula. This copula was subsequently lost, and so the
subject pronouns became the “main carriers of referential function” (228).
Externally, the East Slavic system closely resembles that of obligatory
subject pronouns in Germanic, which is suggestive of contact. None of the
neighboring non-Germanic languages could have been the source of the East
Slavic pattern, because none of them exhibited this pattern historically.
Kibrik also presents archival evidence for showing that the pattern of
high-frequency subject pronouns spread from areas of economic contact with
Germanic to the rest of the East Slavic area.

Andrej L. Malchukov’s paper examines ‘Alignment preferences in basic and
derived ditransitives’, where derived ditransitives are constructions like
causatives and applicatives. Using data from the ditransitive database
(Malchukov and Haspelmath, in preparation), Malchukov finds several
typological tendencies. First, if a language has indirective alignment of
derived ditransitives, then it will also have indirective alignment for basic
ditransitives. Conversely, if a language exhibits neutral alignment with basic
ditransitives, it will exhibit neutral alignment with derived ditransitives.
There is a general tendency for basic and derived ditransitive constructions
to match their alignment patterns. Moreover, in order for derived
ditransitives to show neutral alignment, basic ditransitives must show neutral
alignment as well (thus neutral alignment forms an implicational scale). By
way of explanation, Malchukov points to cognitive research showing that
derived ditransitives are modeled on basic ones, and that “derived
ditransitives often allow two objects because they are more complex formally
and thus can have more arguments” (281).

Marianne Mithun’s chapter, ‘Prosody and independence: Free and bound person
marking’ brings prosodic evidence to bear on the question of what underlies
the difference between bound and free person forms in Mohawk. She surveys each
of the functions of free person forms and their prosodic effects. Crucially,
in every case the free pronouns are accompanied by a notable increase in
pitch, while - by contrast - bound pronouns have a relatively flat pitch
contour . Free forms also appear in different positions when used for
topicalization. Mithun shows that it is precisely this marked prosody and
placement in positions apart from the verb that prevented these particular
uses of the free pronouns from undergoing grammaticalization to bound person
forms on the verb. Thus what characterizes the free person forms in Mohawk as
a group is that they are “simply an assortment of forms that do not share in
the positional and prosodic patterns that would be conducive to fusion with a
host” (311). This is a straightforward and clearly argued chapter that makes a
powerful point regarding the importance of prosody and discourse in shaping
morphosyntactic patterns.

‘The origin and evolution of case-suppletive pronouns: Eurasian evidence’ by
Johanna Nichols presents a typology of historical pathways by which suppletive
pronouns may arise. This in itself makes the chapter an excellent typological
reference. Nichols then applies this typology to explaining suppletive
paradigms in the languages of Eurasia. To summarize broadly, inflectional
person marking tends to dominate in the east, while lexical person forms
dominate in the west, with a gradual cline between the two.

The final chapter in the volume, ‘Suppletion in person forms: The role of
iconicity and frequency,’ was coauthored by Dik Bakker and Anna Siewierska
just prior to her death, and aims to provide a functional explanation for the
distribution of suppletion in person forms. It compares data from a
488-language sample with predictions made by iconicity-based and
frequency-based explanations. Of particular interest is the fact that
suppletion is more frequent for number than case, and more frequent for first
and second person than third. Their results show that the distribution of
suppletion in number across languages “does not conform to any but a rather
watered down interpretation of the iconicity principle” (371). Similar results
stem from the examination of case suppletion. At the same time, the authors
show that there is only a partial correlation between frequency and the
distribution of suppletion for number, and no correlation to suppletion for
case. They conclude that “frequency cannot be the single explanation behind
the distribution of suppletion [...] It may, however, be a force in
competition with others, arguably iconicity” (385-386). It is thus the
interaction of iconicity with the less-prominent frequency that may best
account for the distribution of suppletion in their sample.

EVALUATION

The fortuitous result of the memorial workshop, where each author was
encouraged to focus on research for which Anna is known, is a surprisingly
well-focused volume that pushes the boundaries of research on person, treating
a number of subtle and key issues in the field. These forays into the less
clear-cut areas of the typology of person would not have been possible without
Anna’s pioneering and foundational works, which therefore serve as the
framework that each of the papers in this volume begins with. This shared
stance gives the volume a cohesion that other edited volumes lack.

This volume accomplishes even more than it set out to. Not only is it a worthy
homage to the impact that Anna Siewierska has had on typology and the study of
person, but it also contributes to typology in more general ways. It furthers
our understanding of the role of person indexing in discourse and cognition
(Haspelmath and Croft’s contributions), illustrates the importance of prosodic
and discourse-based explanations for synchronic distributions (Mithun’s
chapter), and shows that alignment surfaces in many different ways in
different parts of the grammar, urging us to be more nuanced in our
descriptions (Bickel et al.’s chapter). It questions one of the most important
implicational hierarchies in typological explanation (the referential
hierarchy; see Cristofaro's chapter), and provides an extremely useful
historical typology of case suppletion in pronouns (the chapter by Nichols).
Finally, Siewierska and Bakker conclude by showing that two of the most oft
utilized explanations in functionalism -- frequency and iconicity -- are not
as straightforward as is typically assumed, and challenge functionalists to
explore their complex interaction further.

In all, the contributions to this volume do much to advance the field of
typology. I believe any typologist would be remiss not to have this book on
their shelf, especially given its reasonable price. I strongly recommend this
book to anyone with an interest in person or typology, and I suspect that it
will soon become an important and much-referenced book in the field.

REFERENCES

Corbett, Greville G. 2005. The canonical approach in typology. In Zygmunt
Frajzyngier, David Rood and Adam Hodges (eds.), Linguistic diversity and
language theories. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Corbett, Greville G. 2013. Canonical morphosyntactic features. In Dunstan
Brown, Marina Chumakina and Greville G. Corbett (eds.), Canonical morphology
and syntax, 48-65. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Giacalone Ramat, Anna and Andrea Sansò. 2007. The spread and decline of
indefinite “man”-constructions in European languages: An areal perspective. In
Paolo Ramat and E. Roma (eds.), Europe and the Mediterranean as linguistic
areas: Convergences from a historical and typolological perspective, 95-131.
Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Malchukov, Andrej L. and Martin Haspelmath. in preparation. Ditransitive
constructions.

Malchukov, Andrej L. and Anna Siewierska (eds.). 2011. Impersonal
constructions: A cross-linguistic perspective. (Studies in Language Companion
Series 124). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Siewierska, Anna (ed.). 1998. Constituent order in the languages of Europe.
Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Siewierska, Anna. 2003. Person agreement and the determination of alignment.
In Dunstan Brown, Greville G. Corbett and Carole Tiberius (eds.), Agreement: a
typological perspective, vol. 101, 339-370. (Transactions of the Philological
Society 101). Oxford: Blackwell.

Siewierska, Anna. 2004. Person. (Cambridge Textbooks in Linguistics).
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Siewierska, Anna. 2005a. Gender in personal pronouns. In Martin Haspelmath,
Matthew S. Dryer, David Gil and Bernard Comrie (eds.), World Atlas of Language
Structures, 182-185. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Siewierska, Anna. 2005b. Alignment of verbal person marking. In Martin
Haspelmath, Matthew S. Dryer, David Gil and Bernard Comrie (eds.), World Atlas
of Language Structures, 406-409. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Siewierska, Anna. 2005c. Verbal person marking. In Martin Haspelmath, Matthew
S. Dryer, David Gil and Bernard Comrie (eds.), World Atlas of Language
Structures, 414-417. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Siewierska, Anna. 2005d. Third-person zero of verbal person marking. In Martin
Haspelmath, Matthew S. Dryer, David Gil and Bernard Comrie (eds.), World Atlas
of Language Structures, 418-421. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Siewierska, Anna. 2005e. Order of person agreement markers. In Martin
Haspelmath, Matthew S. Dryer, David Gil and Bernard Comrie (eds.), World Atlas
of Language Structures, 422-425. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Siewierska, Anna. 2005f. Passive constructions. In Martin Haspelmath, Matthew
S. Dryer, David Gil and Bernard Comrie (eds.), World Atlas of Language
Structures, 434-437. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Siewierska, Anna and Maria Papastathi. 2011. Towards a typology of third
person plural. Linguistics 49(3). 575–610.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Daniel W. Hieber is a graduate student in linguistics at the University of
California, Santa Barbara, where he focuses on language revitalization in the
U.S. Southeast and language documentation of the endangered languages of
Kenya. Prior to graduate school, he worked for the language-learning software
company Rosetta Stone, first as part of their Endangered Language Program
where he created language-learning software for the Chitimacha, Navajo, and
Iñupiaq language communities, and later as a member of their research labs
developing tagged corpora. His primary research interests are typology,
functionalist explanation, language documentation and revitalization, and the
economics of language.








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