our BBS paper

[Tom Givon]

Good points, Oesten. If you look at my 1988 paper on the pragmatics of 
word-order flexibility (a TSL volume out of a Milwaukee symposium), you 
will see that these questions are addressed  there from a 
cognitive-communicative perspective--accessibility, communicative 
centrality/topicality and  focus-of-attention.  So certainly one would 
interpret the SUBJECT-before-OBJECT ordering tendency as a reflection of 
PRIMARY-TOPIC-before- SECONDARY-TOPIC principle, one I labeled in 1983 
(Topic Continuity in Discourse) "attend first to the most important 
task". (These are, by the way, only short-hand labels, to this day still 
in need of detailed neuro-cognitive elaborations).

Though of course, diachronic processes are themselves constrained (i.e. 
motivated) by cognitive- communicative universals. So by saying 
"diachronic" one does not aim to ignore those.  Best,  TG

=========



Östen Dahl wrote:
> Dear Tom, 
>
> you write:
>
>   
>> In the case of language, explanatory hypotheses must take into account, 
>> communication, cognition, neurology, diachrony, acquisition and 
>> evolution.
>>     
>
> This is hard to disagree with, although I think a few more areas could be added
> (demography, language contact, social structure etc.). However, a bit earlier in
> your posting you say:
>
>   
>> And of course, you are absolutely right 
>> about his [Greenberg's] word-order universals. Beginning with 1971 (CLS #7
>> paper), I have tried to show that their only cogent interpretation is
>> diachronic. 
>>     
>
> So do you want to say that word-order universals are not in need of any of the
> other areas that you listed? Maybe you were here having in mind a generous
> definition of "diachrony". Indeed, there are many different kinds of diachronic
> explanation, but the problem is that some of them are not exclusively
> diachronic. One kind of explanation that you have advocated in your work is
> "source-oriented": linguistic structures retain properties of their diachronic
> sources. But another kind would be "target-oriented": language change tends to
> give rise to certain structures because these structures are in some sense
> "preferred". And such an explanation may become quite hard to distinguish from
> ones which explain cross-linguistic tendencies in purely functional, synchronic
> terms. If we try to apply this to Greenberg's word-order universals, the
> source-oriented approach may be used to explain the implicational ones
> (languages with word-order A tend to also have word-order B, since B can be
> showed to be historically derived from A), but are less plausible for
> non-implicational ones (such as "subjects tend to precede objects"). So it seems
> to me that your generalization is a bit too sweeping.
>
> Best regards,
> Östen
>
>