33.1101, Review: Greek, Modern; Linguistic Theories; Syntax: Givón (2021)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-33-1101. Fri Mar 25 2022. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 33.1101, Review: Greek, Modern; Linguistic Theories; Syntax: Givón (2021)

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Date: Fri, 25 Mar 2022 21:47:14
From: Ezra la Roi [ezralaroi at gmail.com]
Subject: The Life Cycle of Adpositions

 
Discuss this message:
http://linguistlist.org/pubs/reviews/get-review.cfm?subid=36761937


Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/32/32-2629.html

AUTHOR: T.  Givón
TITLE: The Life Cycle of Adpositions
PUBLISHER: John Benjamins
YEAR: 2021

REVIEWER: Ezra la Roi, Ghent University

SUMMARY

Thomas (Talmy) Givón’s latest book examines the life cycle of adpositions,
focusing in particular on the tail-end of the life cycle when adpositions end
up as verbal affixes. As one may expect from Givón’s track-record, his
examination seeks to go beyond a linear diachronic analysis. He weighs the
theoretical import of the changes observed in this life cycle (esp. the change
from nominal to verbal domain) as well as the syntactic constraints (e.g. word
order) and discourse-pragmatic processes (e.g. zeroing) which lie at the heart
of the life cycle of adpositions. After a typological introduction to the
syntax and diachrony of adpositions, he provides a corpus study of a few books
of Homer’s Iliad, as its language, he argues, contains a synchronic
distribution of diachronic variants which supports the life cycle of
adpositions that he devises. The book closes with a corpus study of
adpositions in the history of English which, due to its VO word order,
provides the mirror image of the developments in Homeric Greek (with its OV
word order). 

Chapter 1 introduces the diachronic study of adpositions. Givón describes
their functional domain as typically marking indirect object roles which
express either the location of the subject, the source/goal of its motion, or
the source/goal of the object’s motion. Next he discusses Greenbergian
correlations of prepositions with “basic” VO order and postpositions with OV
and goes on to point out the diachronic relevance of the cross-linguistic
conditional association which states that languages with verb-attached
adpositions will also have nominal attached verbs. Using a survey of three
unrelated languages (i.e. English, Kinya-Rwanda (Bantu), and Rama (Chibchan))
he then hypothesizes how their originally nominal adpositions may have changed
to verb affixes through various discourse-pragmatic mechanisms. He posits that
English verbs with prefixes (derived from both Romance and Germanic sources,
e.g. ‘con-tain’ vs ‘for-get’) are the result of an older cycle reflecting the
older OV syntax of Latin and Germanic, while a more recent cycle reflecting
the more modern VO syntax of English has caused prepositions to be stranded
behind the verb (e.g. ‘she shut him up’). In Givón’s view, the
discourse-pragmatic processes that can help shift nominal adpositions to the
verb involve zeroing out of objects (indirect or direct) when they are
predictable from their anaphoric or generic context or have higher topicality
(cf. antipassive ‘she often reads in bed’ or anaphorically accessible ‘we were
at the house when she came by [=by the house]’). On page 31 Givón presents a
preliminary version of his life cycle and connects a syntactic-typological
prediction. His life cycle consists of three major stages: in stage 1,
adpositions are case-role markers attached to or associated with nominals; in
stage 2, the nominal object is in the appropriate discourse context of
anaphoric/generic predictability zeroed out and the adposition is detached or
free-floating; in stage 3 the adposition re-attaches itself to the remaining
lexical word, the verb. On the basis of his survey, Givón makes two diachronic
predictions: (1) in VO languages (e.g. English), stranded adpositions are more
likely to become post-verbal clitics and eventually verb suffixes, whereas (2)
in OV languages (e.g. Homeric Greek, Proto-Germanic/Romance), stranded
adpositions are more likely to become pre-verbal clitics and eventually verb
prefixes. In the chapters that follow, he details how the synchronic variants
in Homeric Greek can be reinterpreted as evidence for the life cycle of (2),
whereas the last chapter of the book supports the life cycle for (1). 

Chapter 2 provides the preliminaries to the analysis of Homeric Greek and the
baseline of the life cycle, i.e. pre-nominal prepositions. Givón opens with
three related claims which he forcefully puts forward: (1) based on just two
grammars of Ancient Greek, i.e. Monro’s of Homeric Greek (1891) and the
Cambridge Grammar of Classical Greek (2019), he claims that Classical Greek
grammars fail to predict the syntactic effects of suffixal case, prepositions,
and their combinations; (2) similarly, he claims that they do not offer
syntactic or diachronic explanations of those cases where prepositions are
stranded as they entertain the notion of tmesis (i.e. free standing adverbs
through severance); and (3) he notes that verb forms with prefixes (=
preverbs) are “augmented” much more often than those without, “which most
Classicist grammarians have chosen to ignore” (p.36). He subsequently pits his
theoretical approach against what he believes is the norm in Ancient Greek
linguistics, as his method of Internal Reconstruction (i.e. inferring
diachronic processes from synchronic evidence based on language universals and
typological diversity) “diverges radically from the Classicist obsession with
Comparative Reconstruction of Indo-European proto forms” (p.36). Thus, his
approach focuses on synchronic variation of attested forms, their functions,
and their respective quantitative textual distributions. Givón notes his
caveats and apologia for phonological and grammatical transcription of Homeric
Greek (e.g. letters, vowel elision, accents, word division, and status), the
text, and the translation. The remainder of the chapter illustrates the usage
of pre-nominal prepositions in books 1 and 2 of Homer’s Iliad; Givón observes
that in those two books (out of 24) all pre-nominal prepositions are used to
mark indirect objects (in a concrete or more abstract fashion) of the
obligatory or optional kind. He finds a slight preference for OV order of
preposition-marked indirect objects in book 1 of the Iliad (55%), which he
takes as evidence for why prepositions cliticized pre-verbally in Homeric
Greek, since, according to his reconstruction, OV order must have been even
stronger before. 

Chapter 3 focuses on the diachronic target, i.e. pre-verbal prepositions as
prefixes. Givón gives four diachronically different syntactic realizations of
the pre-verbal target constructions: (a) nominal indirect object overtly
present, (b) not overtly present but accessible, (c) not present nor
accessible but a transparent association between the preposition and the verb,
and (d) semantic arbitrariness. The end of this cline consists of cases where
the preverb is semantically arbitrary (cf. English ‘speak up’ or Iliad 1.87
‘anaphaineis’ ‘you pronounce’, ‘ana-‘ meaning ‘up’). Using this diachronic
trajectory he classifies the different preverbs as one of these stages on the
basis of the semantic transparency and syntactic functioning of the preverb. A
contrastive count of these preverbal prepositions with their previous stage as
pre-nominal prepositions (Chapter 2) subsequently reveals that some
prepositions still have a higher distribution as prenominal (e.g. ‘en-‘ ‘in’,
‘ekh/k-’ ‘out’, ‘eis-’ ‘to’, ‘peri-‘ ‘around’) whereas others already have a
majority preverbal use (e.g. ‘apo-’ ‘from’ or ‘ana-’ ‘up’).  These figures are
said to reveal a diachronic continuum toward the diachronic target, something
which he supports with percentages illustrating that stages (c) and (d) are in
the minority (resp. 14.7% and 20.4%) as opposed to stages (a) (50.9%) and (b)
(14%). 

Chapter 4 details the stage preceding cliticization as preverb, i.e. detached
(“severed”) prepositions in Homeric Greek. As expected, these detached
prepositions precede the verb (except in some occasions labeled problematic
but left unexplained, pp. 94-96). Given that detached prepositions develop
into preverbs, Givón argues that their indirect objects are zeroed out in
different stages, first losing the syntactic restriction and then the semantic
restriction to the indirect object. He supports these stages with examples of
different kinds (e.g. examples where a zeroed indirect object is anaphorically
accessible or where it is not accessible anymore). The relative textual
distributions in two books of the Iliad are again adduced to support these
stages (e.g. 19.5% in stages (c) an (d) versus 80.5% in stages (a) and (b)).
Another point of attention is the role played by the vast group of
second-position “particles” which can follow a detached preposition. Givón
characterizes these particles as a form of clause chaining. He then
tentatively hypothesizes that all these particles could reflect an earlier use
of detached propositions in some context of contrast or emphasis, since they
(on the whole) serve these functions. The higher distribution of these
occurrences with a particle (72.3%) would in his view support his diachronic
reconstruction. 

Chapter 5 presents an alternative solution to the vexed issue of the
unpredictable “augment” in Homeric Greek, which in Classical Greek functions
as a past tense marker for verbs in the indicative. Givón claims that the
Homeric augment should be reinterpreted as an earlier cycle of pre-verbal
prepositions, viz. a phonologically reduced variant of ‘en-’ ‘in’, ‘ekh/k-’
‘out’ or ‘eis-’ ‘to’.  Contrary to the prevailing opinion among linguists of
Ancient Greek, Givón therefore does not limit the augment to past indicative
verbs, despite its target in Classical Greek; rather, he claims that augments
can even be found with participles, presents, or subjunctives. Since the
augment has what he calls a “mixed bag of conditioning contexts” (p. 110) in
Homeric Greek, Givón claims that all previous explanations fail to fully
explain the distribution of the augment. However, he observes “that the
verbal-clausal contexts in which the ‘Augment’ e- is found are highly
predictable, with the vast majority involving clauses with verbs of location,
motion or direction that, in most languages, take adposition-marked indirect
objects” (p. 113). The main part of the chapter describes the verb types and
syntactic contexts in which the augment is found in book 1 of the Iliad: (1)
intransitive verbs with indirect object or with it being zeroed out  (e.g. ‘be
in/at’, ‘come to’, ‘look at’, ‘hear from’), (2) bi-transitive verbs with
indirect object or with it being zeroed out (e.g. ‘bring x to/from’, ‘put x
at/in/out’, ‘tell x to’, ‘receive x from’), (3) residue of “plausible
diachronic derivatives” (p. 151) of verbs from the previous categories. These
contexts make up 71.6% of the instances in book 1 of the Iliad. The fact that
the instances of type 1 and 2 are found with various adpositions in the clause
(e.g. pre-nominal preposition, post-nominal post-position, or detached
preposition) is reinterpreted by Givón as diachronic evidence that these
instances recapitulate or augment the original sense which has fossilized as
augment. The residue class of 28.4% (e.g. with volition verbs, manipulative
verbs, ‘know/see’ and ‘be in/at’ verbs) is explained on typological grounds,
that is, there are languages which code their objects with adpositions, e.g.
‘I want to eat’, ‘I told him to leave’, ‘be in’. After his survey of the
evidence (drawn only from book 1 of the Iliad), Givón concludes that his
predictions are preferable to those offered in the literature, albeit without
falsifying those predictions. 

In the next chapter, Givón takes his hypothesis about the augment a step
further. Most importantly, he argues that those verbs which have an augment
but are preceded by a preverb are also mostly found in the same syntactic
contexts. He suggests that, as a synchronic variant, these contexts provide
diachronic evidence that those preverbs were cliticized before the augment as
recapitulation of the original adpositional sense of the fossilized augment.
He then illustrates the similarity in syntactic context of these variants with
various preverbs (e.g. ‘kath(a)-’ ‘down’, ‘an(a)-’ ‘up’, ‘par(a)-’ ‘by’,
‘ep(i)-’ ‘to’, ‘met(a)-’ ‘with’) with examples from the first 3 books of the
Iliad (making up 89.2% of the total amount), while suggesting that these
preverbs recapitulate or augment the senses of ‘en-’ ‘in’, ‘ex/k-’ ‘out’,
‘eis-’ ‘to’ from which he thinks the augment has developed. Finally, he
justifies his hypothesis in scientific terms of falsification and claims that
only his hypothesis can serve as a “plausible etymology” (p. 165) to explain
why it is ‘e-’ that is prefixed to these verbs. 

The last chapter of the book provides us with a mirror image of the
developments that were discussed for Homeric Greek and its prehistory, in the
form of a diachronic survey of the life cycle of adpositions in the history of
English. Using small case-studies of different diachronic varieties of English
(from 14th-century Chaucer to modern-day English), he demonstrates that
adpositions developed in the reverse direction in English, as pre-nominal
prepositions developing into post-verbal stranded prepositions which
eventually turn into post-verbal clitics. As a form of closure, Givón points
to the theoretical import of his studies, the most important being that
synchronic syntactic variants reveal a diachronic continuum and even Homeric
Greek, which is considered a unique language by many, reveals language
universals in diachrony like other typologically diverse languages. 

EVALUATION
  
Although theoretically interesting and also stimulating in terms of some
findings, Givón’s book is probably best evaluated  as a “mixed bag” itself.
The book’s merits surely lie in the internal syntactic reconstruction of the
data, which offers insightful views on how adpositions develop diachronically
and which discourse-pragmatic processes enable their evolution. As such,
chapters 2 through 4 on Homeric Greek and Chapter 7 on English surely yield
some relevant insights, both about the distribution of adpositions and
preverbs and their syntactic or pragmatic motivation. That being said, there
are some shortcomings and problematic aspects to the book which I am afraid
could impede the use of the book by future scholars. 

The most critical shortcoming is the fact that, as evidenced by Givón’s
bibliography of just three pages for a 200-page book, there is no satisfactory
effort to engage with the existing literature on adpositions, neither of
general linguistics nor specifically of Ancient Greek or English linguistics.
For the general linguistic audience, Givón does not engage at all with books
on adpositions (e.g. Hagège 2010 or Kurzon & Adler 2008) nor with important
earlier findings on the diachrony of adpositions (see the discussion of
adpositions by many chapters in Narrog & Heine 2011 and by Plank 2011, who
also discusses the role of diachrony and universals). Despite the promise of
“well deserved homage to the traditional Classical scholarship” on the book’s
cover, the book’s engagement with the audience of Ancient Greek linguists
disappoints as well. On the one hand, their depiction as obsessed with
comparative reconstruction (p. 36) is both unfair and untrue and, on the other
hand, their hypotheses on adpositions and the augment are not tested.
Obviously, not all linguists working on Ancient Greek depend on the
comparative method, as this method is typically used by Indo-Europeanists,
while others have rightly analyzed the corpus data from a variety of
theoretical perspectives, such as discourse-pragmatic, syntactic, and
cognitive frameworks (cf. Logozzo & Poccetti 2017 and Mocciaro & Short 2019).
What Givón presents as new, then, is not new at all: (i) as early as
Kühner-Gerth (1898: 449-450 & 530-531), still one of the most highly praised
standard grammars of Ancient Greek, it has been said that what is called
‘tmesis’ is actually a different diachronic variant; (ii) Ancient Greek
linguists know very well that the augment had not yet stabilized as a rule in
Homeric Greek (as it stabilized as a past marker only later on in Classical
Greek), but was rather ruled partially by metrical needs and pragmatic factors
of usage; and (iii) Indo-Europeanists have identified and analyzed the life
cycle of adpositions to preverbs as well (see Hewson and Bubenik 2006 and
Fortson 2010: 154-156) but are left out of Givón’s discussion. Although I am
no expert on English, similar remarks probably apply there as well, as the
only reference given in the discussion of the corpus evidence for English is
to Givón’s own work. 

In addition, there are several problematic aspects to this book with regard to
how it develops its hypotheses. Firstly, the use of limited amounts of corpus
data undermines Givón’s analyses, especially where he bases his theory that
the augment is an old preposition on quantitative textual distributions of
just one book of the Iliad (i.e. 611 lines) although it consists of 24 books
(i.e. over 15.000 lines). In fact, even for the data from that one book his
explanation is not absolute nor would it explain obvious counterexamples of an
augmented past verb where an (optional or obligatory) indirect object cannot
be added in the interpretation (e.g. ‘e-trephon se’ ‘I reared you’ Il. 1.414).
 Secondly, his hypothesis that the ‘e- augment’ is an old preposition (‘en-’
‘in’, ‘ekh/k-’ ‘out’ or ‘eis-’ ‘to’) is inconsistent because it is sometimes
realized as a long vowel and other times it is not (‘ēlthon’ ‘I came’ vs
‘elthön’ ‘having come (participle)), and crucially contradicts the less
evolved status of these alleged preposition sources which are still typically
pre-nominal in Homeric Greek (see p. 81). Givón’s theory also fails to explain
why the augment in these fossilized prepositions would have developed into a
past tense marker in Classical Greek. Thirdly, his attempt to use Homeric
Greek as a natural language causes problems for his analysis, as metrical
alternations for long vowel or short vowel augmentation in the same verb are
not explained, see Il. 1.399 ‘ēthelon’ vs. 4.380 ‘ethelon’ ‘they wanted’ (cf.
Fortson 2010: 154-157 on the artificial nature of Homeric Greek). Fourthly,
the Greek is incorrectly glossed on many occasions, e.g ‘ēke’ ‘she sent’ from
‘iēmi’ ‘to send’ is glossed as ē-k-e to-send-3s, which disregards the long
vowel in the stem (see p. 93 and p. 99), the ‘-ai’ and ‘-sthai’ infinitive
ending variants are glossed as irrealis forms (e.g. p. 119), a subjunctive is
glossed as a future (p. 123 ex. 53) and some main verbs as non-finite forms
(e.g. the pluperfect ‘eilelouthas’ ‘you came’ or ‘ekluon’ ‘they listened’ on
p. 122 ex. 47 and ex. 48). Similarly, Givón’s argument that intervening
second-position particles (in Wackernagel position) show the syntactic status
of detached prepositions is problematic, since these particles could not have
been in the first position of the clause. Finally, one could argue that his
augment hypothesis is to some degree circular, because (i) the interpretation
of a zeroed indirect object (either obligatory or optional) is possible in
principle in most syntactic clause types (and even facilitated when there is
already a preverb before the ‘augment’ see chapter 6), (ii) the augment is
anachronistically interpreted with adpositional functions, something their
source does not have in Homeric Greek e.g. ‘eklue’ ‘s/he listened to’, where
e- is interpreted as ‘eis-’ ‘to’ by Givón but ‘eis-’ ‘to’ had no such
functions in Homeric Greek (see Luraghi 2003: 107-117), and (iii) a
typological parallel should not provide the sole basis for a diachronic
reconstruction, e.g. ‘want to’ for ‘e-thelon’ ‘I/they wanted’, whose object
was never marked by an adposition in Ancient Greek, especially not ‘eis’ ‘to’.
   

Despite these shortcomings, I would still recommend the book both to general
linguists and to those working on Ancient Greek or Indo-European, provided its
findings are approached with caution. Disregarding the chapters on the augment
and the lack of engagement with the literature, Givón presents findings which
challenge ideas on adpositions and their diachrony and deepen our
understanding of adpositions and preverbs.

REFERENCES

Fortson, Benjamin W. IV. 2010. Indo-european language and culture : an
introduction. 2nd ed. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell.

Hagège, Claude. 2010. Adpositions. Oxford : Oxford University Press.

Hewson, John & Vít Bubeník. 2006. From case to adposition : the development of
configurational syntax in Indo-European languages. Amsterdam ; Philadelphia :
Benjamins Pub. Co.

Kühner, Raphael & Bernard Gerth. 1898. Ausführliche Grammatik der griechischen
Sprache. Zweiter Teil: Satzlehre. Erster Band. Hannover : Hahnsche
Buchhandlung.

Kurzon, Dennis & Silvia Adler (eds.). 2008. Adpositions: pragmatic, semantic
and syntactic
perspectives. Amsterdam ; Philadelphia: John Benjamins Pub. Company.

Logozzo, Felicia & Paolo Poccetti (eds.). 2017. Ancient Greek Linguistics: New
Approaches,
Insights, Perspectives. Berlin; Boston: de Gruyter.

Luraghi, Silvia. 2003. On the meaning of prepositions and cases : the
expression of semantic roles in
Ancient Greek. Amsterdam : Benjamins.

Mocciaro, Egle & William Short (eds.). 2019. Toward a Cognitive Classical
Linguistics: The Embodied
Basis of Constructions in Greek and Latin, Warsaw, Poland: De Gruyter Open
Poland.

Narrog, Heiko & Bernd Heine. 2011. The Oxford handbook of grammaticalization.
Oxford : Oxford
university press.

Plank, Frans. 2011. Where’s diachrony? Linguistic Typology 15(2).
doi:10.1515/lity.2011.030


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Ezra la Roi is currently a PhD student in the linguistics department at Ghent
University in Belgium. In his research he examines the history of
counterfactuals from Archaic to Post-Classical Greek (VIII BC- III AD) whilst
testing diachronic typologies of counterfactuals. In his work he combines the
most recent insights from theoretical linguistics (esp. linguistic typology,
historical linguistics and pragmatics) with rigorous corpus-based analyses of
various stages of Ancient Greek. His recent publications concern modality,
counterfactuals, insubordination, habituals and the category change of mood
forms.





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