[Lingtyp] Innovation of functional categories

Tue Jun 16 12:28:34 UTC 2020

Dear Jürgen

I just sent you a review I co-authored,

Rie Obe and Hartmut Haberland 2018. “Review of Naomi Ogi, Involvement and Attitude in Japanese Discourse: Interactive Markers. Amsterdam: Benjamins." Nordic Journal of Linguistics 41 (1): 117–128. doi:10.1017/S0332586518000045.

(I don’t know if it is advisable or even possible to send attachments to the List.)

There we refer to a list of properties of modal particles in Russian (Arndt 1960), a list that reminds me much of the way you define functional categories, and even the last point

“are omissible, i.e. convey no element of the objective message (in its factual or cognitive function), but convey the subjective emotional or mental attitude of the speaker to his interlocutor, to the objective message content, or to another element of the linguistic situation (emotive function).”

is echoed in your claim that functional categories are redundant. (Arndt rather meant that these particles do not contribute to the (truth-conditional) meaning of an utterance.)

So maybe Germanic ‘dialogical particles’ and East Asian ‘interactive markers’ belong to the elements you are looking for?

English lacks any of these elements (as we know since Schubiger 1965), in Icelandic they are still normatively ostracized but well documented for on-line for the last over 100 years, so they could be a contact phenomenon (from Danish, maybe via Faroese).

All the other Germanic languages have them, so they are a areal phenomenon, but the data for a sub-group in

Vladimir Panov 2020. “The marking of uncontroversial information in Europe: presenting the Enimitive.” Acta Linguistica Hafniensia 52(1): 1-44 https://doi.org/10.1080/03740463.2020.1745618

do not make them likely to be a contact phenomenon (at least direct borrowing is in most cases excluded). (Panov will be on-line in a few days.)

For East Asia, interactive markers are an areal phenomenon, but hardly contact-induced (note though that they are much more common in Cantonese than in Putonghua). Lewin 1959 has a lot about the history of the Japanese markers.

Bruno Lewin 1959. Abriß der japanischen Grammatik. Wiesbaden: Harassowitz.

Hartmut

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Fra: Lingtyp <lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org> På vegne af Bohnemeyer, Juergen
Sendt: 16. juni 2020 03:48
Til: LINGTYP <lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org>
Emne: [Lingtyp] Innovation of functional categories

Dear colleagues — I’m looking for examples of innovations of functional categories. By ‘functional categories’, I mean the ‘grammatical categories’ of traditional grammar, such as tense, mood, person, gender, case, etc. I propose a more technical definition below.

Here is what I mean by ‘innovation’: language families or genera in which the functional expression in question is (i) grammaticalized in one or more members or branches while (ii) being absent in others, with (iii) the balance of evidence  pointing to acquisition in the former languages/branches rather than loss in the latter, and (iv) there being no obvious contact-based explanation for the emergence of the expression in question. (Of course one could define innovation to include contact-based innovation, but I happen to be specifically interested in innovation of functional categories in the absence of contact models.)

I realize of course that certainty about (iii) and (iv) is in many if not most cases not to be had. Consider for illustration the emergence of definite articles in Western Europe (Celtic, Romance, Germanic) during the “Dark Ages”. In this case, we can be certain that this was an innovation event due to the presence of historical records both from ancestors of some of the Indo-European languages that developed articles and from ancestors of those that didn’t. But when and where this innovation started, and what role (if any) contact with languages from outside Western Europe, such as Ancient Greek, Hebrew, and Arabic, may have played, appears to continue to be unclear.

It is possible if not likely that some of the clearest examples of innovations of functional categories arise in creole languages. Of interest here would be creoles that have grammaticalized a functional category not present in either the lexifier or any substrate or adstrate language.

As a working definition, functional expressions in general (a superordinate category of functional categories in the narrow sense) might be defined as (i) morphemes that (ii) do not belong to any major lexical category, but (iii) enter into fully productive and compositional combinations with (projections of) members of lexical categories. This very broad and general characterization would encompass a host of subtypes. Of great interest to me is the observation that these subtypes are not uniform in how commonly they are grammaticalized vs. missing in the languages of the world. Some functional expressions, such as negation, occur in every single human language. Some, such as adnominal or adverbial expressions of quantification, apparently are present in all languages except for languages that rely on complex predicative workarounds (existential predication for existential quantification, conditional-like structures for universal quantification).

Contrast this with the subtype of functional expressions I’m particularly interested in here, such as tense, viewpoint aspect, definiteness, number, and gender, which are typically present in only between a third and two thirds of the samples of the WALS chapters that report on them. My hypothesis is that this difference in variability correlates with the communicative function of the expressions: expressions such as tense, number, and gender are typically (in the great majority of utterances in which they occur) not needed to express part of the speaker’s communicative intention, as the information they contribute is predictable in context. The grammaticalization of such largely redundant expressions apparently serves to reduce the hearer’s inference load.

This gradual pragmatic redundancy is from my perspective a defining feature of the class of expressions in question. Obviously, this doesn’t translate into a simple diagnostic. However, it aligns with relatively advanced degrees of grammaticalization (compared to things such as negation, demonstratives, or modals), and advanced grammaticalization in turn jibes with the primarily metalinguistic function of the expressions in question: they are always backgrounded, never express “at issue” content, and as a result can never be focalized except metalinguistically.

I hope that wasn’t too convoluted ;-)

Thank you in advance for your help! I will post a summary if I receive a sufficient number of responses. — Best — Juergen

--

Juergen Bohnemeyer (He/Him)

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