Historical Linguistics Without Syn-chrony is Doomed to Di....

[Scott DeLancey]

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
On Sun, 10 May 1998, Richard Janda wrote:
 
> [...With sincere apologies to G. E. Lessing...]
>   "(Almost) no one will deny", implies Herr DeLancey, that 'there is in
> principle no way to understand a lot of facts about synchronic structure
> except in terms of grammaticalization'."
 
Quite aside from the tone of this comment--which I don't understand,
but don't think I care for--I am at a loss to see how it is a useful
contribution to the argument.  It is, after all, not at all what I
said, which was:
 
> I (along with a long list of others) would argue that there is
> in principle no way to understand a lot of facts about synchronic
> structure except in terms of grammaticalization.
 
How one gets from "I and many others would argue" to "almost no one
will deny" is a mystery to me; in case anyone else might have been
tempted to this rather amazing leap, let me say for the record that,
despite my provincial isolation in a rural department where strange
beliefs may perhaps have taken hold, it certainly has not escaped my
attention that what I was suggesting in my post is still a minority view.
 
Much of the rest of Janda's post seems to be aimed at some straw man
that I'm afraid I don't recognize, but here and there it veers close
to somewhere where we might find common ground to stand and argue:
 
>   As for myself, I seriously doubt whether any real mechanisms of lan-
> guage change make reference to information or a vantage point which no
> individual speaker could possess
 
But that's not the point.  First--I'm not denying (whatever it may
have sounded like) that there are explanatory principles which afford
us nice theoretically grounded synchronic accounts of many facts about
language(s).  Second, I hope everyone accepts that there are
facts about any given language which from a synchronic point of view
are simply arbitrary, but which can be explained in historical
perspective.  Native speakers, of course, don't try to explain these,
or, when they do, they simply make up explanations.  (Of course, as we all
know, theoretical linguists who prefer to banish diachronic argument from
occasionally do the same thing).
    The point which I wanted to make (obviously I was too brief about
it) is that there are many facts, including some apparently systematic
facts about Language, which we have tried far too hard to account for
synchronically, when in fact the only explanatory account which can
be given for them is diachronic.
 
>   To dwell on non-discrete categories is a red herring.  The reason why
> non-discrete categories exist is that synchronic language-systems allow
> them.  To conclude otherwise (by retreating into diachrony as the main
> source for non-discreteness) is to be unnecessarily concessive to the
> other side (the one that demands discreteness).
 
No argument there--in fact, I'm inclined to suppose that "synchronic
language-systems" will allow just about anything.  But, nevertheless,
diachrony *is* in fact a significant source for non-discreteness.  Some
case studies:
 
        Bolinger, Dwight. 1980.  Wanna and the gradience of auxiliaries.
pp. 292-299 in G. Brettschneider and C. Lehmann, eds., Wege zur
universalien Forschung.  Tuebingen:  Gunter Narr.
        DeLancey, Scott.  1997. Grammaticalization and the gradience of
categories:  Relator nouns and postpositions in Tibetan and Burmese.  pp.
51-69 in J. Bybee, J. Haiman, and S. A. Thompson, eds., Essays on Language
Function and Language Type. Benjamins.
        Li, Charles, and Sandra Thompson. 1974. Co-verbs in Mandarin
Chinese: Verbs or prepositions? J. Chinese Linguistics 2.3:257-78.
 
 
Scott DeLancey
Department of Linguistics
University of Oregon
Eugene, OR 97403, USA
 
delancey at darkwing.uoregon.edu
http://www.uoregon.edu/~delancey/prohp.html