[Lingtyp] Innovation of functional categories
Pier Marco Bertinetto
piermarco.bertinetto at sns.it
Tue Jun 16 16:46:42 UTC 2020
Dear Jürgen,
in a paper of mine, in which I took as starting point Neele Mueller's
dissertation on TAM markers in South American Indigenous Languages, I
developed a similar reasoning with respect to the arousal of TAM features
in those languages:
*PMB* 2014. Tenselessness in Southamerican indigenous languages with focus
on Ayoreo (Zamuco), *LIAMES* (*L**ínguas Indígenas Americanas*) 14. 149-171
(e-ISSN2177-7160).
http://revistas.iel.unicamp.br/index.php/liames/article/view/4269
There is evidence that these languages grammaticalized modal/evidential
markers first, then aspect, finally markers of temporality.
Apparently, with some grammatical categories language users have to decide
what should and what shouldn't be explicitly marked. There seems to be a
trade-off between how much speakers want to put the burden of inferencing
on hearers, and how much they make the hearers' life easier by flagging
such grammatical categories. Which indeed shows that their marking is not
strictly needed.
Best
Pier Marco
Il giorno mar 16 giu 2020 alle ore 03:48 Bohnemeyer, Juergen <
jb77 at buffalo.edu> ha scritto:
> 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)
> Professor and Director of Graduate Studies
> Department of Linguistics and Center for Cognitive Science
> University at Buffalo
>
> Office: 642 Baldy Hall, UB North Campus
> Mailing address: 609 Baldy Hall, Buffalo, NY 14260
> Phone: (716) 645 0127
> Fax: (716) 645 3825
> Email: jb77 at buffalo.edu
> Web: http://www.acsu.buffalo.edu/~jb77/
>
> Office hours will be held by Skype, WebEx, or phone until further notice.
> Email me to schedule a call at any time. I will in addition hold Tu
> 12:30-1:30 and Th 2:30-3:20 open specifically for remote office hours.
>
> There’s A Crack In Everything - That’s How The Light Gets In
> (Leonard Cohen)
>
> _______________________________________________
> Lingtyp mailing list
> Lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org
> http://listserv.linguistlist.org/mailman/listinfo/lingtyp
>
--
=========================================================
|||| Pier Marco Bertinetto
------ professore emerito
/////// Scuola Normale Superiore
------- p.za dei Cavalieri 7
/////// I-56126 PISA
------- phone: +39 050 509111
///////
------- HOME
/////// via Matteotti 197
------- I-55049 Viareggio LU
/////// phone: +39 0584 652417
------- cell.: +39 368 3830251
=========================================================
editor of "Italian Journal of Linguistics"
webpage <https://www.sns.it/it/bertinetto-pier-marco>
"Laboratorio di Linguistica" <http://linguistica.sns.it>
=========================================================
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/lingtyp/attachments/20200616/7b79b7d1/attachment.htm>
More information about the Lingtyp
mailing list