[Lingtyp] Innovation of functional categories

Wed Jun 17 07:22:18 UTC 2020

Dear Juergen,

Just a clarifying question (I'm interested because I've attempted to
develop a method to quantify the degree to which some set of morphemes is
morphologized and I have struggled with defining "functional" in a
consistent fashion, and actually I have just given up)

Wouldn't your definition imply that anything that was not an open lexical
class would be "functional"?

There's plenty of languages that have a closed class of adjectives -
shouldn't these be "functional" in your sense?

Maybe adjectives could be added to your class of morphemes that tend to
become functional regardless of contact [?]... but just in case they are
not a lexical class.  But do adjectives express redundant information or
not?
I'm also skeptical that an easy decision can be made regarding the lexical
vs. functional status of classifiers, but this is perhaps outside the scope
of your research question.
(I would take a close look at Krasnoukhova's dissertation on the Noun
Phrase in South American languages for both of these issues)

best,

Adam

On Wed, Jun 17, 2020 at 8:25 AM Östen Dahl <oesten at ling.su.se> wrote:

> Thanks, Frans, for the link to this paper, which I had not seen. (I did
> read Fehling’s paper, however, quite long ago.) For the record, though:
> although Peust claims (reasonably, it seems) that Egyptian is the ultimate
> source, he doesn’t say that Greek got it straight from there. Instead, he
> says that it is remarkable that the definite article shows up in Greek in
> the same time period as the Greeks took over the Phoenician script, thus
> suggesting Phoenician, a Semitic language, as the proximate source for the
> Greek definite article.
>
>
>
> In light of Peust’s claims, it is maybe Egyptian that is most relevant for
> Jürgen’s project. Although who knows if they didn’t get the article from
> somebody else?
>
>
>
>    - Östen
>
>
>
>
>
> *Från:* Uni KN <frans.plank at uni-konstanz.de>
> *Skickat:* den 17 juni 2020 00:04
> *Till:* Östen Dahl <oesten at ling.su.se>
> *Kopia:* LINGTYP <lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org>
> *Ämne:* Re: [Lingtyp] Innovation of functional categories
>
>
>
> Close, Östen:  they got it from Egyptian.  Or so argues Carsten Peust, in Göttinger
> Beiträge zur Sprachwissenschaft 2, 1999, S. 99-120
>
>
>
> Fälle von strukturellem Einfluss des Ägyptischen auf europäische Sprachen
>
>
> (1) Die Herausbildung des definiten Artikels, (2) Die Entwicklung des grammatischen femininen Genus, (3) Die inklusive Zählweise von Zeitintervallen
>
>
>
>
> https://archiv.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/propylaeumdok/2274/1/Peust_Faelle_von_strukturellen_Einfluessen_1999.pdf
>
>
>
> Similarly
>
>
> LEVIN, Saul 1992: Studies in comparative grammar: I. The definite article, an Egyptian/Semitic/IndoEuropean etymology, in General Linguistics 32:1-15.
>
>
> FEHLING, Detlev 1980: The origins of European syntax, in Folia Linguistica Historica 1:353-387.
>
>
>
> Frans
>
>
>
>
>
> On 16. Jun 2020, at 18:25, Östen Dahl <oesten at ling.su.se> wrote:
>
>
>
> 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)
> Professor and Director of Graduate Studies Department of Linguistics and
> Center for Cognitive Science University at Buffalo
>
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>
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>
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-- 
Adam J.R. Tallman
PhD, University of Texas at Austin
Investigador del Museo de Etnografía y Folklore, la Paz
ELDP -- Postdoctorante
CNRS -- Dynamique Du Langage (UMR 5596)
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