[Lingtyp] Innovation of functional categories

[Östen Dahl]

This topic happened to come up in my recent conversation with Martin Haspelmath on his blog (https://dlc.hypotheses.org/2361). There are also some references there to earlier literature.

I would not bet on the definite article in Ancient Greek as an independent development. After all, definite articles were around in the neighbouring Semitic languages. If the Greeks got their alphabet from the Semitic-speaking peoples, they could also get the article from them, I think.

 - Östen 


-----Ursprungligt meddelande-----
Från: Lingtyp <lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org> För Bohnemeyer, Juergen
Skickat: den 16 juni 2020 15:44
Till: LINGTYP <lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org>
Ämne: Re: [Lingtyp] Innovation of functional categories

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

--
Juergen Bohnemeyer (He/Him)
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