Here's Givon text: Dan Everett on Piraha and Universals

[A. Katz]

Tom Givon wrote:

>And second, grammatical constructions rise and fall. And their
>renovation seems to be motivated largely by communicative need. In
>most language where we have historical or reconstructive evidence,
>one could show two or even three generations of rise-and-fall of the
>same construction. And  most often  no cultural change is correlated
>with such diachronic cycles. Did German revert to a society-of-
>intimates ca. 300-400  years ago when it was renovating its REL-
>clause construction, reverting to parataxis?  And did it then sprint
>back to the industrial revolution when it eventually proceeded to
>well-grammaticalized syntaxis (merged intonation contours, de-
>stressed REL-pronouns)?  Did the ascendant Han empire change from an
>intimate hunting-and-gathering society to a complex  society-of-
>strangers  as it created, one piece at a time, the complex syntactic
>construction of  Mandarin Chinese--in every case starting  from
>parataxis  of clause-chaining? And did Han culture collapse earlier
>on, back to an intimate small society of   hunters-and- gatherers,
>when it expanded imperially, moved east and south, and took over the
>vast Austro-Asiatic


My response:

1)_Grammaticalization is indeed cyclical, so much so that observing a
language at a single point in time cannot determine whether it is on its
way from an isolating typology to a more bound, agglutinative from, or
wthether it is becoming less bound, on its way to an isolating typology
from one that is fusional or affixing. You need to take a snapshot at
several different points to see which place in the eternal cycle any given
language, construction, or even word is.

2) Don't assume that a society of intimates would have a more isolating
typology. Hunter gartherers, like their non-human primate brethren, tend
to be able to express an entire clause in a very compact phonological
form, but don't be too sure that this form is not syntactically complex.
There are meaningful recurrent subcomponents, and that's where recursivity
comes in.


Best,


        --Aya Katz
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