[Lingtyp] Temporal features?

[Jan Rijkhoff]

Eckehard,

I lent my copy of Perkins’ book to a student and never got it back - so I cannot check the original text at the moment. I would say his overall conclusion was that complex cultures make fewer distinctions in the deictic domain than less complex cultures. Perkins also found, for example, a positive correlation between cultural complexity and the number of relativizable positions.

I seem to remember the book was considered to be politically incorrect at the time. My review of the book can be found in Sprachtypologie und Universalienforschung (1994), vol. 47-3.

Rijkhoff, Jan. 1994. Review of Revere D. Perkins (1992), Deixis, Grammar, and Culture (Typological Studies in Language 24), Amsterdam: Benjamins. Sprachtypologie und Universalienforschung (STUF) 47-3, 230-233.

Jan R
--
J. Rijkhoff - Associate Professor
Linguistics, Aarhus University
Jens Chr. Skous Vej 2, Building 1485-621
DK-8000 Aarhus C, DENMARK
      mail delivery: Building 1485-335
Phone: (+45) 87162143
E-mail: linjr at cc.au.dk
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On 02/10/2018, 20.56, ""Ekkehard König"" <koenig at zedat.fu-berlin.de> wrote:

    Jan,
    
    what exactly is the nature of the dependence or correlation?
    
    Ekkehard
    
    
    > Perkins (1992)  investigated deictic distinctions in a sample of 49
    > languages taken from different linguistic families and spoken in cultures
    > of varying complexity (ranked on a scale of 5). The main hypothesis (which
    > was generally confirmed in this study) is “that the number of
    > grammaticized deictic distinctions (those likely to be coded by affixes
    > and in closed grammatical classes such as personal pronouns) depend on the
    > complexity of the culture where the language is spoken” (p. 7).
    >
    > Revere D. Perkins. 1992. Deixis, grammar, and culture (Typological Studies
    > in Language 24). Amsterdam: Benjamins.
    >
    > Jan Rijkhoff
    > --
    > J. Rijkhoff - Associate Professor
    > Linguistics, Aarhus University
    > Jens Chr. Skous Vej 2, Building 1485-621
    > DK-8000 Aarhus C, DENMARK
    > Phone: (+45) 87162143
    > E-mail: linjr at cc.au.dk<mailto:linjr at cc.au.dk>
    > URL: http://pure.au.dk/portal/en/linjr@cc.au.dk