[Lingtyp] Innovation of functional categories

[Christian Lehmann]

Dear Jürgen,

the development of the definite article in Ancient Greek, which you 
mention, is probably a case in point.

The development of a conditional form in the conjugation of Romance 
languages may be another.

Numeral classifiers are apparently an innovation of the Viceitic and 
Naso branches of Chibcha, although this is not historically documented.

Most of the aspectual auxiliaries found in the Mayan languages are 
produced in post-Proto-Mayan times in one or another of the branches. 
There was certainly contact among them both with respect to the idea of 
an aspectual auxiliary and with respect to one or another of the 
specific aspect features coded. Nevertheless, the latter do not coincide 
among the Mayan languages. For instance, the Yucatec predictive future 
seems to be an independent innovation (although I may be mistaken about 
this).

Just a short comment on your generalization:

  The grammaticalization of such largely redundant expressions apparently serves to reduce the hearer’s inference load.

To the extent that the contribution made by such expressions to the 
sentence meaning is indeed redundant, it would mean that the respective 
information is already contained in the context, and to this extent 
there would be no need for the hearer to employ inferencing.

A more general (and rather defeatist) version of your hypothesis would 
be: Grammatical formatives and constructions contribute to structuring 
the message, thus enhancing expectability in it. This supports 
communication in general (Talmy Givón has been preaching this for 
decades); and to this extent, it is of secondary importance just which 
semantic features are coded by grammatical formatives, or which 
grammatical categories a language possesses.

Best,

Christian

-- 

Prof. em. Dr. Christian Lehmann
Rudolfstr. 4
99092 Erfurt
Deutschland

Tel.: 	+49/361/2113417
E-Post: 	christianw_lehmann at arcor.de
Web: 	https://www.christianlehmann.eu

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