[Lingtyp] Innovation of functional categories

[David Gil]

Dear Juergen and all,

My favourite example of an innovation of functional categories comes 
from some Malayic dialects of central Sumatra — see references below.  
For the most part, Malayic languages are completely devoid of functional 
categories; however, in some parts of central Sumatra, culminating in 
Kerinci, a system has developed whereby almost every word in the 
language has two forms, absolute and oblique, formally distinguished by 
complex rules of ablaut. The functions of the absolute/oblique 
alternation are also complex, but I'll mention just one of them, since 
it ties in to earlier discussion in this thread about the development of 
articles: in phrase final position, a noun will typically occur in the 
absolute, however, if it takes the oblique form it is interpreted as 
definite.  McKinnon et al trace the historical development of the 
absolute/oblique alternation in terms of a coalescence of two separate 
developments: (a) the grammaticalization of erstwhile phrase-final 
phonological alternations; and (b) the phonological attraction of an 
erstwhile free form//(cognate to Standard Malay /nya/). Comparative 
evidence suggests that these developments are very recent, and since 
there are no non-Malayic languages in the vicinity that would form the 
basis for a contact explanation, it seems pretty clear that the 
absolute/oblique alternation constitutes an internally-motivated 
development of a functional category.

Best,

David


McKinnon, Timothy (2011) /The morphophonology and morphosyntax of 
Kerinci Word-shape alternations/, PhD Dissertation, University of 
Delaware, Newark.

McKinnon, Timothy, Peter Cole and Gabriella Hermon (2011) Object 
agreement and ‘pro-drop’ in Kerinci Malay, /Language/ 87.4:715–750.

McKinnon, Timothy, Gabriella Hermon, Yanti and Peter Cole (2018) "From 
Phonology to Syntax: Insights from Malay", in H. Bartos, M. den Dikken, 
Z. Bánreti and T. Varadi eds., /Boundaries Crossed, at the Interfaces of 
Morphosyntax, Phonology, Pragmatics and Semantics/, Studies in Natural 
Language and Linguistic Theory 94, Springer, Berlin, 349-371.DOI: 
10.1007/978-3-319-90710-9_22 
<http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90710-9_22>

McKinnon, Timothy, Yanti, Peter Cole and Gabriella Hermon (2015) 
"Infixation and Apophony in Malay: Description and Developmental 
Stages", /Linguistik Indonesia/ 33.1:1-19.



On 16/06/2020 04:48, Bohnemeyer, Juergen wrote:
> 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
>
-- 
David Gil
  
Senior Scientist (Associate)
Department of Linguistic and Cultural Evolution
Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History
Kahlaische Strasse 10, 07745 Jena, Germany
  
Email: gil at shh.mpg.de
Mobile Phone (Israel): +972-556825895
Mobile Phone (Indonesia): +62-81344082091

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