[Lingtyp] Does bipolar polysemy exist?
Volker Gast
volker.gast at uni-jena.de
Fri Jun 1 09:22:55 UTC 2018
Dear Randy,
I don't think that anybody disagrees with what you say about language as a
medium of communication. And I think that many of us agree that it would
be nice to be able to compare languages not in terms of abstractions --
phonemes, lexemes etc. -- but in terms of real-world linguistic
interactions. As a matter of fact, there are some projects intending just
that, e.g. the SCOPIC-project directed by Nick Evans and
Danielle Barth (https://scopicproject.wordpress.com/).
As anybody involved in such high-resolution comparative projects knows,
the process of gathering and analysing real-world and situationally
embedded data is expensive and time-consuming. I do not see why we should
not, at the same time, continue to pursue 'traditional' low-resolution
approaches (grammar mining, large-scale comparisons based on word lists
etc.). Like the structuralists, typologists tend to abstract away from the
context of speech and regard abstractions such as 'phoneme' and 'lexeme'
-- and even 'languague' -- as real-world entities that can be counted,
generalized over, etc. I have to say that I find the idea of counting
languages very weird, but at the present state I do not see how we could
get hold of utterance-level real-world data associated with specific
speakers in specific contexts at a broader scale. Corpus-based approaches
to typology represent a step in this direction, but they also come with a
lot of difficulties, not just the factors of time and money. Problems of
comparability are multiplied as well (you'd need large samples of speakers
with comparable sociological properties; but then, even sociological
contexts are not really comparable).
Note also that we should take the notion of 'social cognition' seriously.
Grammars, words etc. have no existence outside of speakers; but speakers
are capable of social cognition, meaning, among other things, that they
have some representation of the linguistic systems that other speakers
work with. In some sense, linguistic systems (and their elements) are thus
distributed over the members of a speech community, with each speaker
having some (personal) representation of these distributed systems.
Linguistic elements thus have a social-cognitive reality. I therefore do
not think that questions like the one raised by Ian Joo are illegitimate,
even though I think that the answer to his question is 'no'.
Moreover, I do not think that formal approaches to language, e.g.
model-theoretical ones, are illegitimate. Like the structuralists, formal
semanticists abstract away from individual speakers and contexts. They
assign denotations to words (regarded as sets of individuals, or pairs of
indivuals, pairs of events and individuals etc.), to sentences (denoting
propositions/sets of worlds), etc. This implies a fair amount of
simplification, and some of the work done in this tradition has the
appearance of an intellectual exercise, but formal semantics has also
brought to light fascinating results, e.g. in the domain of negative
polarity items (just think of the impressive work done by W. Ladusaw, M.
Krifka and many others). As a matter of fact, sentence semantics is an
area in which typologists could learn a lot from formal semanticists. The
treatment of negative polarity items in grammars is often disappointing.
But in order to fully understand and model the often rather complex
interactions of polarity items and their contexts, a certain amount of
formal machinery is simply helpful. At the end of the day, the various
approaches to linguistics should be judged against the value of their
results, and I think it would be unfair to say that formal semanticists
have only been wasting their time (and note that Martin Haspelmath's book
on indefinites, one of very few typological studies dealing with matters
of sentence semantics, is probably one of the most 'successful'
typological publications beyond the typological community).
Best,
Volker
_____________
Prof. V. Gast
http://www.uni-jena.de/~mu65qev
On Fri, 1 Jun 2018, Randy J. LaPolla wrote:
> Hi All,This whole discussion shows how problematic some of the a priori, non-empirical assumptions of the Structuralist approach are. The assumption that there is a fixed association of
> sign and signifier, and so words have meaning in some abstract universe divorced from context, and the assumption that language can be dealt with mathematically, and the assumption that
> communication happens through coding and decoding (on the computational model), and that the “real” word is the written, abstract, out-of-phonetic-context form, and so phonology in
> context can be ignored, and as there is only one “real” meaning to a word, the different uses in context , such as irony, can be simply ignored or treated as deviant. The assumption that
> there is a fixed system that has iron-clad rules, and that there are aspects of the system that are necessary for communication to occur.
>
> There is much literature showing how problematic these assumptions are, but somehow they are still in force in much of linguistics, as reflected in some of this discussion.
>
> My own view is that communication involves one person performing a communicative act in a particular place and time and to a particular addressee, and the addressee abductively inferring
> that person’s reason for performing that act in that particular context to that particular person at that particular time. So it is completely context dependent, as Nick shows, and there
> is no minimum morphosyntactic structure required, as David Gil has shown. No part of the communicative situation or act can be left out in terms of understanding the meaning that the
> addressee creates in inferring the communicator’s intention (as Mark shows in including gesture in his discussion, though it also includes non-conventionalised behaviour, e.g. gaze and
> body movements; and it is creation of meaning, not transfer of meaning, and so subjective and non-determinative). Language and other conventionalised communicative behaviour (language is
> behaviour, not a thing, and does not differ in nature from other conventionalised behaviour) emerges out of the interaction of the people involved.
>
> So the question asked is like a Zen koan: you can’t answer it yes or no, as it is based on problematic assumptions.
>
> Randy
>
> -----Randy J. LaPolla, PhD FAHA （羅仁地）
> Professor of Linguistics and Chinese, School of Humanities
> Nanyang Technological University
> HSS-03-45, 14 Nanyang Drive | Singapore 637332
> http://randylapolla.net/
> Most recent book:
> https://www.routledge.com/The-Sino-Tibetan-Languages-2nd-Edition/LaPolla-Thurgood/p/book/9781138783324
>
>
>
> On 1 Jun 2018, at 7:42 AM, Nick Enfield <nick.enfield at sydney.edu.au> wrote:
>
> In Lao:
>
> 1. The verb cak2 means ‘know’, and can be negated as in man2 bòò1 cak2 [3sg neg know] ‘S/he doesn’t know.’ But when used alone, with no subject expressed, often with the perfect
> marker (as in cak2 or cak2 lèèw4) it means “I don’t know.”
> 2. The verb faaw4 means ‘to hurry, rush’, and can be negated as in man2 bòò1 faaw4 [3sg neg rush] ‘S/he doesn’t hurry/isn’t hurrying.’ But when used alone as an imperative, with
> no subject expressed, often repeated, or with an appropriate sentence-final particle (as in faaw4 faaw4 or faaw4 dee4) it means “Don’t hurry, Stop hurrying, Slow down”.
> 3. Often, both positive and negative readings of verbs are available when the irrealis prefix si is used (with context or perhaps intonation doing the work); eg khaw3 si kin3 [3pl
> irr eat] could mean ‘They will eat it’ or ‘They will definitely not eat it’ with a meaning similar to the colloquial English expression “As if they would eat it.” The second
> meaning is made more likely by insertion of the directional paj3 ‘go’ before the verb (khaw3 si paj3 kin3 [3pl irr go eat] ‘As if they would eat it.’).
>
> Nick
>
>
>
>
>
> N. J. ENFIELD | FAHA FRSN | Professor of Linguistics
> Head, Post Truth Initiative https://posttruthinitiative.org/
> Director, SSSHARC (Sydney Social Sciences and Humanities Advanced Research Centre)
> Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences
> THE UNIVERSITY OF SYDNEY
> Rm N364, John Woolley Building A20 | NSW | 2006 | AUSTRALIA
> T +61 2 9351 2391 | M +61 476 239 669
> orcid.org/0000-0003-3891-6973
> E nick.enfield at sydney.edu.au | W sydney.edu.au nickenfield.org
>
>
>
> From: Lingtyp <lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org> on behalf of Mark Donohue <mark at donohue.cc>
> Date: Friday, 1 June 2018 at 7:13 AM
> To: David Gil <gil at shh.mpg.de>
> Cc: "LINGTYP at LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORG" <lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org>
> Subject: Re: [Lingtyp] Does bipolar polysemy exist?
>
> In Tukang Besi, an Austronesian language of Indonesia, the verb 'know' is dahani; verbs are generally prefixed to agree with the S,A argument, thus
>
> ku-dahani 'I know'
> 'u-dahani 'you know'
>
> etc.
> In some contexts (imperatives, emphatic generic (TAME-less) assertion), the prefix can be omitted.
>
> dahani 'I/you certainly know'
>
> Now, I've heard this (and only this) verb used, in the absence of any inflection, with exactly its opposite meaning
>
> Dahani 'I don't know'
>
> in what might be a sarcastic sense. Unlike the antonymic uses of many adjectives in many languages, including English, this use of dahani is actually a simple (though emphatic)
> negation of the verb's 'normal' meaning.
>
> -Mark
>
> On 1 June 2018 at 04:43, David Gil <gil at shh.mpg.de> wrote:
> Yes, as Matti points out, negative lexicalization is not quite as rare as I was implying. Yet at the same time, I suspect that it might not be as common as Matti is
> suggesting. Looking at the examples that he cites in his Handbook chapter, I suspect that in some cases, the negative counterpart isn't "just" negative, but is also
> associated with some additional meaning components.
>
> Matti doesn't list "good"/"bad" as being such a pair, though, citing work by Ulrike Zeshan on sign languages, he does mention other evaluative concepts such as "not
> right", "not possible", "not enough". in English, at least, "bad" is not the negation of "good", it is the antonym of "good"; there's all kind of stuff in the world
> which we attach no evaluative content to, and which hence is neither good nor bad. (It's true that in English, in many contexts, the expression "not good" is understood
> as meaning "bad", which is interesting in and of itself, but still, it is not necessarily understood in this way.) While I have no direct evidence, I would strongly
> suspect that in languages that have lexicalized expressions for "not right", "not possible", and "not enough", the meanings of these expressions will be the antonyms of
> "right", "possible" and "enough", and not their negations.
>
> Under lexicalized negatives in the domain of tense/aspect, Matti lists "will not", "did not", "not finished". Well the one case that I am familiar with that falls into
> this category is that of the Malay/Indonesian iamative/perfect marker "sudah", which has a lexicalized negative counterpart "belum". However, "belum" isn't just "not
> sudah"; it also bears a strong (if not invariant) implicature that at some point in the future, the state or activity that is not complete will be completed — in fact,
> just like the English expression "not yet". (When people in Indonesia ask you if you're married, it's considered impolite to answer with a simple negation "tidak";
> you're supposed to say "belum" precisely because of its implicature that you will, in the future, get married. By avoiding this implicature, the simple negation
> "tidak" is viewed as a threat to the natural order of things, in which everybody should get married.)
>
> I suspect that many if not all of the cases characterized by Matti as "lexicalized negatives" will turn out to be associated with some additional meaning component
> beyond that of "mere" negation.
>
>
>
>
> On 31/05/2018 20:06, Miestamo, Matti M P wrote:
>
> Dear David, Zygmunt and others,
>
> negative lexicalization is not quite as rare as David seems to imply. There is a cross-linguistic survey of this phenomenon by Ljuba Veselinova (ongoing work,
> detailed and informative presentation slides available through her website), and Zeshan (2013) has written on this phenomenon in sign languages. There's also a
> short summary in my recent Cambridge Handbook of Linguistic Typology chapter on negation (preprint available via the link in the signature below).
>
> Best,
> Matti
>
> --
> Matti Miestamo
> http://www.ling.helsinki.fi/~matmies/
>
>
>
> Zygmunt Frajzyngier <Zygmunt.Frajzyngier at COLORADO.EDU> kirjoitti 31.5.2018 kello 17.23:
>
> David, Friends
> Related to David’s post, not to the original query.
> In any individual language, there may exist a few of ‘Not-X’ items.
> In Mina (Central Chadic) there is a noun which designates ‘non-blacksmith’.
> In several Chadic languages there exist negative existential verb unrelated to the affirmative existential verb.
> Zygmunt
>
> On 5/31/18, 5:52 AM, "Lingtyp on behalf of David Gil" <lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org on behalf of gil at shh.mpg.de> wrote:
>
>
>
> On 31/05/2018 13:37, Sebastian Nordhoff wrote:
> On 05/31/2018 01:18 PM, David Gil wrote:
> A point of logic. "Not X" and "Antonym (X)" are distinct notions, and
> the original query by Ian Joo pertains to the former, not the latter.
>
> but is there any (monomorphemic) lexeme which expresses not-X which is
> not the antonym of X?
>
> But how many (monomorphemic) lexemes expressing not-X are there at all?
> The only ones I can think of are suppletive negative existentials, e.g.
> Tagalog "may" (exist) > "wala" (not exist). Even suppletive negative
> desideratives don't quite fit the bill, e.g. Tagalog "nais"/"gusto"
> (want) > "ayaw", which is commonly glossed as "not want", but actually
> means "want not-X", rather than "not want-X" — "ayaw" is thus an antonym
> but not a strict negation of "nais"/"gusto".
>
> What is not clear to me about the original query is whether it is asking
> for negations or for antonyms.
>
> --
> David Gil
>
> Department of Linguistic and Cultural Evolution
> Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History
> Kahlaische Strasse 10, 07745 Jena, Germany
>
> Email: gil at shh.mpg.de
> Office Phone (Germany): +49-3641686834
> Mobile Phone (Indonesia): +62-81281162816
>
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> --
> David Gil
>
> Department of Linguistic and Cultural Evolution
> Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History
> Kahlaische Strasse 10, 07745 Jena, Germany
>
> Email: gil at shh.mpg.de
> Office Phone (Germany): +49-3641686834
> Mobile Phone (Indonesia): +62-81281162816
>
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