[Lingtyp] Temporal features?

Hartmut Haberland hartmut at ruc.dk
Wed Oct 3 11:34:08 UTC 2018


And what is ‘complex’? Malinowski was still allowed to write about ‘primitive languages’ but due to their - seen from our point of view - high information load (i. e. unfamiliarity) they and the associated cultures often appear to be more complex than those more familiar to us. Cultural change seems to have some kind of streamlining as the preferred option. Hartmut

> Den 3. okt. 2018 kl. 10.36 skrev Jan Rijkhoff <linjr at cc.au.dk>:
> 
> 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
> URL: http://pure.au.dk/portal/en/linjr@cc.au.dk
> 
> 
> 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
> 
> 
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