[Lingtyp] Innovation of functional categories

[Bohnemeyer, Juergen]

Dear Christian — Thank you very much for your response! I'll have much more to say about your suggestions, but for now, I’d just like to try a clarification:

> On Jun 16, 2020, at 6:41 AM, Christian Lehmann <christian.lehmann at uni-erfurt.de> wrote:
> 
> 
> 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.


I’m assuming a view of communication on which it is largely inference-based. The question on this view is not whether but how much inferencing the hearer has to do. 

Consider the information added by gender markers to pronouns and agreement morphology. In the vast majority of cases, this information is not needed for identifying the referent. But having it by my hypothesis still facilitates processing  by further boosting the predictability of the referent. As long as the added effort for speaker and hearer in processing the gender information is minimal (that’s where grammaticalization comes in), this may confer a minuscule processing advantage. 

Same story with tense or definiteness: in the vast majority of uses, tense markers and articles are not terribly informative (witness all the speech communities that get by happily without them), so that can’t be the reason why we grammaticalize them (that’s my thinking, anyway).

(As to Givón, yes, absolutely, I’m well aware that I’m merely trying to retell a story functionalists have been telling since the dawn of functionalism :-))

Best — Juergen

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