[Lingtyp] Innovation of functional categories

[Susanne Michaelis]

Dear Jürgen,

Many thanks for this interesting discussion.

> 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.

Apparently your interpretation of the role of contact in creolization 
seems to be reduced to scenarios where we can clearly trace a functional 
category to either being adopted from the lexifer or imposed by the 
substrate. You seem to say that if some grammaticalized functional 
category in a creole is purely innovated such a process shouldn’t be 
linked to language contact.

But I think that the role of language contact in creoles cannot be 
restricted in such a way because language contact and multilingualism is 
key throughout every creolization scenario and beyond: societies where 
creoles were created consisted at various times to various degrees of 
second/third language users. Therefore, *extra transparency* is a major 
driving communicative force in understanding the functional grammatical 
make-up of creole languages. It leads to multiple accelerated 
functionalization and grammaticalization processes irrespectively of 
whether they continue lexifier/substrate functional categories or show 
innovated functional categories (see Michaelis & Haspelmath 2021, I'm 
happy to send you the paper if you are interested).Therefore, creole 
cases of innovated functional categories that you are interested in will 
*always* reflect language contact and should therefore be excluded given 
your condition (iv).

There is very little large-scale comparative *qualitative* work in 
creole studies (but see e.g. Gil 2014, Michaelis 2019, Daval-Markussen 
2018), but from my knowledge of the data in WALS and APiCS, it is indeed 
the case that instances, such as the innovative indefinite article in 
Juba Arabic against both lexifier and substrate patterns lacking an 
indefinite article, seem to be rare (see Daval-Markussen 2018), as you 
suggest.

But in my view, this whole discussion crucially depends on the 
finegrainedness of your definition of the functional category in 
question and on the criteria for measuring whether a functional category 
in a given language/variety is*the same* or *a different one* compared 
to its parent/sister languages' functional categories. What we often see 
in creoles, is that grammatical markers expressing functional categories 
are inspired by one or more of their parent languages, but are certainly 
always innovated to some degree in the creole itself.

> 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.

Tense and aspect are both widely grammaticalized in creoles (largely 
inspired by substrates). I'm wondering what your prediction for creoles 
would be given your "hearer's inference load approach"? Because what is 
needed and what is not needed to express the speaker/signer's 
communicative intention crucially depends on the sociolinguistics of the 
communication setting. I think of language contact in a much more 
radical way (something along the line of Croft 2000): Every 
speaker/signer has their ideolect giving rise to multiple layers of 
variation in all speech/sign communities, and in this sense language 
contact is rampant even in so-called homogeneous speech communities. 
Your constraint (iv) says:

" (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 would say that there is no innovation of functional categories without 
language contact or contact models in the first place.

Best wishes,

Susanne


>
> 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
>
-- 
Plant new trees while searching the internet: https://www.ecosia.org/

Susanne Maria Michaelis
Universität Leipzig
Institut für Anglistik (IPF 141199)
04081 Leipzig

https://research.uni-leipzig.de/unicodas/susanne-maria-michaelis/

Department of Linguistic and Cultural Evolution
Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History
Kahlaische Str. 10
07745 Jena

http://www.shh.mpg.de/person/42386/25522

Atlas of Pidgin and Creole Language Structures: http://apics-online.info/

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