[Lingtyp] Innovation of functional categories

Jan Rijkhoff linjr at cc.au.dk
Wed Jun 17 11:50:26 UTC 2020 

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

Indeed, to call grammatical (non-lexical) items ’functional’ elements is confusing and perpetuates the use of a misnomer (esp. popular in syntactico-centric circles). This can easily be illustrated by the fact that the ’functions’ (see below) of grammatical elements like articles and TAM markers can also be expressed in other ways: e.g. lexically (with adverbs like ‘yesterday’ or ‘probably’), syntactically or phonologically (as when definiteness is expressed by word order or tone) - not to mention non-verbal means of expression (like pointing in the case of deixis).
For a good example, see: Beier, C., Hansen, C., Lai, I-W., Michael, L., 2011. Exploiting word order to express an inflectional category: reality status in Iquito. Linguistic Typology 15, 65-99.

The terminological confusion is solved when we recognise that morphosyntactic units (such as clauses, phrases, words and free or bound morphemes) can all be characterised in terms of formal, semantic and functional (communicative, interpersonal) properties. Consequently, morphosyntactic units can simultaneously belong to a formal, a semantic and a functional category. Formal categories are, for example, ‘NP’ or ‘affix’; examples of semantic categories are ‘Agent ‘or ‘Transitive’).

Since Adam questioned the use of the label ‘functional categories’ in this context, here is how I defined them in an article in LT in 2016: Members of functional categories are the products of a speech act. Speech acts come in four main types.
In the table below these functional categories are called: Illocutions, Theticals, Propositions, and Pragmaticals. They are all products of an interpersonal or communicative speech, i.e. an Illocutionary, a Thetical, a Propositional, or a Pragmatic act. Hopefully the format of the Table stays intact (else see Rijkhoff 2016: 348):

= = = = = = = = = = = = = =
Speech Act.            Functional Category   Main Subtypes

Illocutionary Act       Illocutions                 Declarative, Imperative, Interrogative, …
Thetical Act             Theticals                    Address, Summons, Greeting, Leave-taking, afterthought, …
Propositional Act    Propositionals           Predicate, Referential Phrase (‘noun phrase’, complement clause, etc.),
                                                                  Modifier (adjective, relative clause, genitive, adverb, adverbial, prepositional
                                                                  phrase, article, demonstrative, numeral; also TAM affixes, number affixes, …)
Pragmatic Act.        Pragmaticals              Topic, Focus

Table 1. Speech acts, functional categories and some of their main subtypes.
= = = = = = = = = = = = = =

Propositional acts consist of three main subtypes - and their functional categories: (i) acts of predication, (ii) acts of referring, and (iii) acts of modification - which can be formally realised as e.g. TAM markers, manner adverbs, adjectives, genitives, to mention just a few (see also e.g. Croft 1990 on propositional acts and modification). Notice that both lexical (adjectives) and grammatical elements (like article and TAM markers) can be members of a functional category
In this approach, both definite articles and TAM markers are expressions of acts of modification (i.e. a subtype of one of the speech act types: Propositionals). Notice that each subtype has its own ‘minigrammar’.

In brief, I think ’grammatical (non-lexical) elements' is the correct label here.

References
   Beier, C., Hansen, C., Lai, I-W., Michael, L., 2011. Exploiting word order to express an inflectional category: reality status in Iquito. Linguistic Typology 15, 65-99.
   Croft, William. 1990. A conceptual framework for grammatical categories (or: a taxonomy of Propositional Acts). Journal of Semantics 7-3, 245-279.
   Rijkhoff, Jan. 2014. Modification as a propositional act. In María de los Ángeles Gómez González et al. (eds.), Theory and Practice in Functional-Cognitive Space (Studies in Functional and Structural Linguistics, 68), 129-150. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
   Rijkhoff, Jan. 2016. Crosslinguistic categories in morphosyntactic typology: Problems and prospects. Linguistic Typology 20-2, 333-363.

Jan R

J. Rijkhoff - Associate Professor, Linguistics
School of Communication and Culture, Aarhus University
Jens Chr. Skous Vej 2, Building 1485-621
DK-8000 Aarhus C, DENMARK
Phone: (+45) 87162143
URL: http://pure.au.dk/portal/en/linjr@cc.au.dk

________________________________________
From: Lingtyp <lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org> on behalf of Adam James Ross Tallman <ajrtallman at utexas.edu>
Sent: Wednesday, June 17, 2020 9:22 AM
To: LINGTYP at listserv.linguistlist.org
Subject: Re: [Lingtyp] Innovation of functional categories

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<mailto: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<mailto:frans.plank at uni-konstanz.de>>
Skickat: den 17 juni 2020 00:04
Till: Östen Dahl <oesten at ling.su.se<mailto:oesten at ling.su.se>>
Kopia: LINGTYP <lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org<mailto: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<mailto: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<mailto:lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org>> För Bohnemeyer, Juergen
Skickat: den 16 juni 2020 15:44
Till: LINGTYP <lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org<mailto: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<mailto: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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Adam J.R. Tallman
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