[Lingtyp] Innovation of functional categories

Wed Jun 24 08:56:38 UTC 2020

Dear Jürgen,
Thank you very much for the clarification! Yes, if they are not conventionalized as carriers of background information, we would treat them as not grammaticalized. For some of the classes you distinguish, we would claim that they may have both lexical and grammatical members (this is a language-specific and empirical issue, however). For instance, some adpositions and pronouns (e.g. English off, that) are lexical, others grammatical (e.g. of, it). The former can be modified (it went straight off the road; I hate exactly that), the latter cannot (*they live within 10 miles straight of the city; *I hate exactly it). I look forward to following your work.
Over and out – with best wishes,
Kasper

Fra: Bohnemeyer, Juergen <jb77 at buffalo.edu>
Sendt: 24. juni 2020 05:09
Til: Kasper Boye <boye at hum.ku.dk>
Cc: TALLMAN Adam <Adam.TALLMAN at cnrs.fr>; lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org; Peter Harder <harder at hum.ku.dk>
Emne: Re: [Lingtyp] Innovation of functional categories

Dear Kasper — There are many kinds of functional expressions that are not inherently backgrounded, such as negation, quantificational determiners, modals, demonstratives, emphatic pronouns, and so on. If I remember Boyer & Harder (2012) correctly (apologies if I don’t!), you treat these as not grammaticalized. I consider them weakly grammaticalized. But more to the point, I consider them functional expressions, i.e., part of the grammatical = combinatorial system of language.

At the moment, I’m working with a classification of six subtypes of functional expressions. Here are some informal characterizations:

Placeholders such as pronominal elements are indexical representations of referents. Their referents may be at-issue content, but their lexical meanings are not, as they merely specify search domains for the referents.

Functors such as negation, numerals, adnominal or adverbial quantificational expressions, and modal operators express monovalent conceptual operators that are part of the speaker’s intended message and thus may be at-issue content.

Relators such as adpositions, connectives, and “semantic”/”lexical” case-markers, express conceptual relations that are part of the speaker’s intended message.

Social deictics, or ‘honorifics’ in a technical sense of that term, cannot be at-issue content and do not contribute to the truth-conditions of an utterance. Their presence in an utterance satisfies pragmatic felicity conditions that arise from societal norms of interpersonal relation management.

Restrictors, such as markers of tense, viewpoint aspect, mood, gender/noun class, number, or structural case, as well as complementizers, are redundant expressions of parts of the speaker’s communicative intention that cannot be at-issue content. Their presence in an utterance, which may or may not be morphosyntactically required, is motivated by a reduction of the hearer’s inference load. Restrictors are at the heart of the book. The theory employs a continuous probabilistic notion of redundancy/informativeness according to which an expression is the more redundant/less informative in a given context the more predictable its occurrence in the context is.

A possible sixths class is formed by facilitators, which like restrictors are metalinguistic expressions that help clarify the speaker’s communicative intention rather than to be themselves “essential” (non-redundant) expressions of part of the communicative intent. Facilitators differ from restrictors in that, rather than to clarify the lexical content of the utterance, they serve to facilitate the coordination between the interlocutors. Examples include illocutionary expressions, but also some interjections and discourse particles. (It is at present not clear to me whether it is necessary for an evolutionary theory of functional categories to distinguish between restrictors and facilitators.)

As you can see, the lower half of these are inherently backgrounded = non-at-issue, whereas the upper half are not.

But I’m primarily interested in restrictors, and as far as those are concerned, our approaches appear to be in agreement.

Best — Juergen

On Jun 22, 2020, at 6:03 AM, Kasper Boye <boye at hum.ku.dk<mailto:boye at hum.ku.dk>> wrote:

Dear Jürgen,

I am not sure I understand what you mean is the difference between your approach and Peter's and mine. We define grammatical items as those that are coded (= conventionalized) as backgrounded/secondary/'not at issue', and lexical items as those that have the potential to be foregrounded/etc. in usage. That is, we make a clear distinction between language potential and language usage, and define grammatical status as applying to language potential. How does this differ from yours?

Just to make sure: all adjectives I can think of just now in the languages I know of are lexical by our definition - they can be focalized, addressed and modified. But whether adjectives are lexical or grammatical is really an empirical question.

As for the issue of whether you can divide all items of a given language into two buckets, one lexical and one grammatical, I fully agree that it cannot be done neatly. The issue is complicated by e.g. polyselmy, layering and the gradualness of conventionalization. If you distinguish meanings or variants of the same items, it gets less complicated. Obviously, full verbal "have" ('I have a book') is lexical, while perfect auxiliary 'have' is grammatical, for instance.

As for the question whether lexical and grammatical items can have the same inherent-semantic meaning, at least they can be very close, cf. harmonic combination. What is important, however, is that some meaning domains can be expressed both lexically and grammatically. This means that grammatical status cannot be defined in terms of inherent-semantic meaning (some grammaticalizable notions can be expressed also lexically).

As for grammatical meaning, it can be defined in analogy with grammatical items. Grammatical meaning is meaning that is coded as backgrounded/secondary/not at issue. According to this definition, the past tense meaning of the English suffix "-ed" is grammatical, but so is the past tense meaning of "went". "Went" also has lexical meaning ('go'), and it is by virtue of this meaning that the item as a whole is lexical.

Best wishes,
Kasper

-----Oprindelig meddelelse-----
Fra: Lingtyp <lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org<mailto:lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org>> På vegne af Bohnemeyer, Juergen
Sendt: 20. juni 2020 17:46
Til: TALLMAN Adam <Adam.TALLMAN at cnrs.fr<mailto:Adam.TALLMAN at cnrs.fr>>
Cc: lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org<mailto:lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org>
Emne: Re: [Lingtyp] Innovation of functional categories

Dear Adam — The notion of ‘at-issue content’ is defined in models of information structure that assume that utterances in their discourse contexts introduce or answer explicit or implicit ‘questions under discussion’ (QuDs). Craige Robert’s work is probably the most widely known exponent of this approach (Roberts 1996, 2012). Others include Büring (1997, 2003), Carlson (1982), Klein & von Stutterheim (1987, 2002), and van Kuppevelt (1995, 1996). The at-issue content of an utterance (if any) is that part of its content that provides a (complete or partial) answer to the QuD of the utterance context.

I do indeed assume that there is no categorical boundary between lexicon and grammar. Any assumption to the contrary would seem to be inconsistent with both grammaticalization theory and most versions of Construction Grammar. Is there a problem with that?

I wonder whether the source of your confusion regarding the variable status of adjectives stems from a failure to distinguish between an expression’s actual information status as a token in a given utterance and the expression’s inherent capability as a type of expressing at-issue content. Only the latter, not the former, is part of the proposed definition of restrictors (which I’ll remind you is merely a subtype of functional expressions - I’m *not* actually claiming that *all* functional expressions are inherently backgrounded. That is where I part company with Boye & Harder 2012, to whom I otherwise owe a debt of gratitude, as Kasper pointed out). Adjectives *can* express at-issue content, restrictors cannot. Adjectives do not become restrictors just because they are used in a backgrounded position in a given utterance. It’s type properties not matter, not token properties.

What you say about adjectives and classifiers in Chacobo is of great interest to me. There is a similar phenomenon in Mayan languages: so-called ‘positionals’ (I prefer ‘dispositionals’, since the great majority of the roots lexicalize properties of inanimate referents, not postures) constitute a lexical category in their own right in Mayan. They surface as both verbs and stative predicates (traditionally, but arguably misleadingly, the latter are considered participles), but subsets of them require derivational morphology in both cases. Mayan languages have hundreds of such roots.

Crucially for present purposes, many if not most of these roots can also be used as numeral classifiers. And when they are, I treat them as functional expressions. I consider this polysemy - that is to say, I assume that there is a single lexicon entry that licenses both the dispositional predicate uses and the classifier uses. In other words, I put less distance between these two uses of dispositional morphemes than I put between, say, _have_ used as a possessive predicators vs. auxiliary. That’s because it seems to me that speakers draft dispositional roots into classifier duty on the fly creatively. In other words, I see the relation between the two kinds of uses as more dynamic than static.

Bottomline: we should definitely not assume that we can sort the morphemes of a language (and here I mean strings of sound used as one or multiple signs in the speech community) neatly into two buckets, one labeled “lexicon”, the other “grammar”. That is just really not how natural languages work. I’m surprised that this seems controversial?

Best — Juergen

Berlin, B. (1968). Tzeltal numeral classifiers: A study in ethnographic semantics. The Hague: Mouton.
Büring, Daniel (1997). The 59th Street Bridge Accent. London: Routledge.
Büring, Daniel (2003). On D-trees, beans, and B-accents. Linguistics and Philosophy 26: 511-545.
Carlson, Lauri. 1982. Dialogue games: an approach to discourse analysis (Synthese Language Library 17). Dordrecht, The Netherlands: D. Reidel.
Klein, W., & Von Stutterheim, C. (1987). Quaestio und referenzielle Bewegung in Erzählungen [Quaestio and referential shift in narratives]. Linguistische Berichte 109: 163-183.
--- (2002). Quaestio and L-perspectivation. In C. F. Graumann, & W. Kallmeyer (Eds.), Perspective and perspectivation in discourse. Amsterdam: Benjamins. 59-88.
Roberts, C. (1996). Information Structure in Discourse: Towards an Integrated Formal Theory of Pragmatics. In Jae Hak Yoon and Andreas Kathol (eds.), Ohio State University Working Papers in Linguistics Volume 49.
Roberts, C. (2012). Information structure in discourse: Towards an integrated formal theory of pragmatics. Semantics & Pragmatics 5 (Article 6): 1-69.
van Kuppevelt, Jan (1995). Discourse structure, topicality and questioning. Linguistics 31, 109–147.
van Kuppevelt, Jan (1996). Inferring from topics. Linguistics and Philosophy 19, 393–443.

On Jun 20, 2020, at 10:19 AM, TALLMAN Adam <Adam.TALLMAN at cnrs.fr<mailto:Adam.TALLMAN at cnrs.fr>> wrote:

Dear all,

A few of you have elaborated on my question about the meaning of "functional" and and then critiqued Juergen's terminological choices. I wonder if my question about adjectives was interpreted facetiously (like "wouldn't it be absurd if adjectives were considered functional?!").

Actually, it was not meant as a facetious question at all as I was attempting to understand Juergen's research question in its own terms to discern whether there was anything in the languages I was familiar with that would count as functional, but diachronically lexical without contact.

Juergen, you answered my question, in the sense, that I think I have a better idea of how one might go about operationalizing a distinction between lexical and functional. But now I am less sure about what your original question to the listserve was. Allow me to elaborate.

Here is your new definition:

"a ‘lexical category’ is a class of expressions defined in terms of shared morphosyntactic properties. The members of lexical categories are inherently suitable for expressing ‘at-issue’ content and are backgrounded only when they appear in certain syntactic positions (e.g., attributive as opposed to predicative adjectives). Their combinatorial types (e.g., in a Categorial Grammar framework) are relatively simple. They express concepts of basic ontological categories."

I think this points in the right* direction and makes me understand where you are coming from (I assume at-issue just means anything that is not presuppositional nor just implicates some meaning). But crucially the concept is now scalar or gradient (depending on how we operationalize the notion). Saying that it concerns at-issue meaning in "certain syntactic positions" (I would prefer "morphosyntactic" positions) means that for some set of morphemes / constructs / categories or whatever a, b, c, d … we could rank them in terms of the number of positions they can occur in where they express (or tend to express?) at-issue content a>b>c>d …. Or we could formulate this in terms of tokens in discourse rather than constructions abstracted from their use, but you get my point. And indeed you state.

"It might be best to treat this list of properties as defining the notion of ‘lexical category’ as a cluster/radio/prototype concept."

But now there is no nonarbitrary cut-off point between lexical and grammatical. If there is a boundary it will refer to quantal shifts in the distribution of elements along the lexical-grammatical scale: or stated another way, we know there is some sort of boundary because the distribution of elements along the scale is bimodal and elements in between the modes are statistically marginal.

To make this more concrete, in Chácobo there are some adjectives /
adverbials that express small size or small amount of time. In certain
syntactic positions they are more likely to express backgrounded
information and in a classifier like manner appear "redundantly", but
plausibly help to track referents (referring to someone as honi yoi
'poor man' throughout the discourse). If I scan around related
languages (I haven't done this, but let's just say hypothetically) and
I find that in these other languages they more typically display
at-issue notions (perhaps they more commonly appear in a predicative
function), have I found a case of a "functional element" that has
grammaticalized? Certainly, it expresses at-issue content less often
than others …

I think there are *a lot* of morphemes like this in Amazonia. In my description of Chacobo I actually called them "semi-functional" (it includes associated motion morphemes, time of day adverbials, temporal distance markers) and I try to make the explicit argument that temporal distance morphemes mix and match properties of temporal adverbials with those of tense. It would be hard for me to make the case that these were not a result of contact (in fact, myself and Pattie Epps have a paper where we argue that such liminal cases might be an areal property of Southwestern Amazonia), but the point is that I find a performative contradiction in your attempt to exclude (certain types of?) adjectives and adverbs and the definition you supply. Seems like if you really wanted to test the idea that languages grammaticalize functional notions for the specific reasons you claim, you would need to actually include all of these liminal cases and explain why they do not all disappear under communicative pressure or else drop off of the grammaticalization cline and become lexical / primarily at-issue expressing elements.

So the upshot is that I was actually wondering whether you would consider adjectives, adverbs etc. but not because they are lexical or functional, but rather because, according to your own definition they awkwardly sit in between. I was interested in what you would say about them, not whether they should be classified discretely as lexical versus functional.

Adam

*By "right direction" I mean interesting direction in that it could lead to developing testable hypotheses with an operationalizable set of variables that define the domain of lexical versus functional categories. I am not making the essentialist claim that it is the best definition regardless of the problem context, research question, or audience.

Adam James Ross Tallman (PhD, UT Austin) ELDP-SOAS -- Postdoctorant
CNRS -- Dynamique Du Langage (UMR 5596) Bureau 207, 14 av. Berthelot,
Lyon (07) Numero celular en bolivia: +59163116867 De : Lingtyp
[lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org<mailto:lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org>] de la part de Idiatov
Dmitry [honohiiri at yandex.ru<mailto:honohiiri at yandex.ru>] Envoyé : samedi 20 juin 2020 15:23 À :
Kasper Boye; Dan I.SLOBIN Cc : lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org<mailto:lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org>;
Peter Harder Objet : Re: [Lingtyp] Innovation of functional categories

Kasper, a quick reaction to this passage:

“Obligatoriness also works the other way around: Whenever you select a tense inflection you also have to select a verb. So, verbs are themselves obligatory in relation to something else – and accordingly they come out as grammatical if you take obligatoriness as the only criterion.”

While the application of the criterion of obligatoriness is surely a
delicate matter, nobody is obliged to say anything…

To avoid the kind of logical figures that you bring up, let’s say that grammatical categories are those sets of mutually exclusive discourse prominence secondary meanings whose expression is obligatory in the constructions to which they apply.

Dmitry

20.06.2020, 15:12, "Kasper Boye" <boye at hum.ku.dk<mailto:boye at hum.ku.dk>>:
Dear Dmitry and all,

First a comment on obligatoriness, then one closed classes.

Jürgen Bohnemeyer pointed out that obligatoriness is too restrictive as a definiens of grammatical status. Another problem is that it is also too inclusive. Consider a language like German where indicative verbs are inflected for past and present tense. The intuition (which is backed up by the “encoded secondariness” definition; Boye & Harder 2012) is that the tense inflections are grammatical. But neither the past nor the present tense inflection is of course obligatory in itself: instead of past we can choose present, and vice versa. So, instead we have to say that the tense paradigm – or the choice between tenses – is obligatory: whenever you select an indicative verb, you also have to select a tense inflection. Now comes the problem. Obligatoriness also works the other way around: Whenever you select a tense inflection you also have to select a verb. So, verbs are themselves obligatory in relation to something else – and accordingly they come out as grammatical if you take obligatoriness as the only criterion. Of course, there are many ways in which obligatoriness can be saved as a definiens, but they all require that this notion is combined with something else.

Dan Slobin pointed to the fact that items that are intuitively (and by the “encoded secondariness” definition) lexical, may form closed classes. I would like to add that closed classes may comprise both lexical and grammatical members. Within the classes of prepositions and pronouns, for instance, distinctions have occasionally been made between lexical and grammatical prepositions. Just as closed class membership seems to have a processing impact, so does the contrast between grammatical and lexical. For instance, Ishkhanyan et al. (2017) showed that the production of French pronouns identified as grammatical based on Boye & Harder (2017) is more severely impaired in agrammatic aphasia than the production of pronouns classified as lexical, and Messerschmidt et al. (2019) showed that Danish prepositions classified as grammatical attract less attention than prepositions classified as lexical.

Best wishes,
Kasper

Boye, K. & P. Harder. 2012. "A usage-based theory of grammatical status and grammaticalization". Language 88.1. 1-44.

Ishkhanyan, B., H. Sahraoui, P. Harder, J. Mogensen & K. Boye. 2017. "Grammatical and lexical pronoun dissociation in French speakers with agrammatic aphasia: A usage-based account and REF-based hypothesis". Journal of Neurolinguistics 44. 1-16.

Messerschmidt, M., K. Boye, M.M. Overmark, S.T. Kristensen & P. Harder. 2018. "Sondringen mellem grammatiske og leksikalske præpositioner" [’The distinction between grammatical and lexical prepositions’]. Ny forskning i grammatik 25. 89-106.

Fra: Lingtyp <lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org<mailto:lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org>> På vegne af
Dan I. SLOBIN
Sendt: 19. juni 2020 23:59
Til: Idiatov Dmitry <honohiiri at yandex.ru<mailto:honohiiri at yandex.ru>>
Cc: lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org<mailto:lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org>; Peter Harder <harder at hum.ku.dk<mailto:harder at hum.ku.dk>>
Emne: Re: [Lingtyp] Innovation of functional categories

Let me throw another distinction into this discussion: closed class.  The plural markers in Yucatec, for example, are such a class.  This factor is important on the level of processing.  In speech production, a Yucatec speaker can quickly and automatically access the plural marker.  Closed classes tend to be small, to carry general meanings, and to be of high frequency—all indications of their role in automaticity.  This factor, in my opinion, goes beyond what are traditionally treated as “grammatical” elements.  For example, the Germanic and Slavic directional particles are a small, closed class.  But the same can be said of directional verbs in the Romance and Turkic languages, among others.  A Spanish speaker does not innovate such verbs any more than a Russian speaker innovates verb prefixes.  The Spanish speaker quickly and automatically selects the relevant verb—entrar, salir, etc., just as the Russian speaker selects v- or u- as the relevant verb prefix.

Regards from an engaged psycholinguist, Dan

On Fri, Jun 19, 2020 at 12:51 PM Idiatov Dmitry <honohiiri at yandex.ru<mailto:honohiiri at yandex.ru>> wrote:
Dear Juergen,

I am aware of such concerns that some linguists may have. There are two issues here. Well, actually three, since you brought in inflection at the end of your message.

The first issue is whether optionality is an accurate description of the distribution of a given morpheme in each particular case where it may appear to be optional at first sight. There are many gradations of “optionality” possible. I mentioned some such cases (discussed in detail by others) in my (2008) paper.

However interesting the study of these various gradations of optionality may be, this issue is not really fundamental here. What is fundamental is that being a grammatical meaning is a property of the system of a specific language. A certain meaning is not grammatical a priori, universally. Admittedly, cross-linguistically some meanings turn out to be grammatical much more frequently than others (such as plural) and can thus be described as prototypical grammatical meanings, but still prototypical is not the same as universal. So, yes, if the Yucatec plural suffix is completely optional, plural is not a grammatical meaning in Yucatec, despite the fact it is a grammatical meaning in English and many other languages. Similarly, as you would probably agree that evidentiality is a grammatical meaning in many South American languages, probably you would not wish to say the same about English.

The third issue is the frequent conflation of being grammatical with being morphologically bound. Grammatical pertains above all to meanings, not to the way these meanings are expressed. The fact that I said that derivational meanings are not grammatical, if you use obligatoriness as the defining criterion, does not mean that grammatical is the same as inflectional, as I briefly explain in that paper of mine (2008:155-156). By the way, I do agree with you that the concept of inflection is rather flawed and I try to avoid using it in my own work as much as possible.

Best,
Dmitry

19.06.2020, 19:57, "Bohnemeyer, Juergen" <jb77 at buffalo.edu<mailto:jb77 at buffalo.edu>>:
Dear Dmitry — I think the typological literature on functional expressions has been warped by the obligatoriness criterion in unfortunate ways. To give you a simple illustration: Yucatec has optional plural marking on both nouns and in verbal agreement. The Yucatec plural suffix bears no obvious semantic differences to the English _-s_ suffix - it only differs from it in that it is optional (and in its phonological form, obviously). Should I not treat the Yucatec plural marker as expressing a functional category just because it is optional? That seems a rather suboptimal move to me.

A similar problem arises in the literature on tense and tenselessness: if a language has a marker with exactly the same semantics as the English past tense, except that its use is optional, should we therefore consider the language tenseless? That would seem a mistake to me.

My sense is that what we are dealing with here is just one aspect of a larger problem: theorists and even typologists continue to operate with a notion of ‘inflection’ that was developed on the basis and for the treatment of Indo-European languages. It’s a concept that seems unproblematic as long as you restrict your attention to languages that package inflectional information in fusional desinences that are part of strictly obligatory templates. Step outside this type of languages, and you begin to run into all kinds of problems.

So what I’m saying is this: (i) optional functional categories are very real; (ii) they are at present brutally under-theorized; (iii) this is just one symptom of a larger malaise: a theorizing of the concept of inflection that is typologically woefully inadequate.

(As a sidenote to Jan Rijkhoff and others: I like the term ‘functional
expressions’ (irrespective of its provenance) as an updated label
expressing pretty much the same concept as the traditional
‘syncategoremata’. But, I also believe that we should worry about the
concepts of our terms first and the labels maybe second or third. I
realize that that view is arguably a little ironic for a (moderate)
Whorfian :-))

Best — Juergen

On Jun 19, 2020, at 11:48 AM, Idiatov Dmitry <honohiiri at yandex.ru<mailto:honohiiri at yandex.ru>> wrote:

I would like to react to Kasper Boye’s summary of the “solutions to the problem of defining ‘grammatical’ on the market”.

There is also the good old solution of using obligatoriness for these purposes. It goes back to at least Jakobson and Boas, as expressed in the well-known quote by Jakobson “Languages differ essentially in what they _must_ convey and not in what they _may_ convey” (see https://eur02.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Flinguistlist.org%2Fissues%2F6%2F6-411.html&data=02%7C01%7Ctrondhjem%40hum.ku.dk<https://eur02.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=http%3A%2F%2F40hum.ku.dk%2F&data=02%7C01%7Cboye%40hum.ku.dk%7C4ad9ea56ecce46db5ec508d817ec0470%7Ca3927f91cda14696af898c9f1ceffa91%7C0%7C0%7C637285649769148650&sdata=nXxFFP1Dc894rPnw96gEGQwjIhc5d3yg7bF8YU%2Bnui8%3D&reserved=0>%7C7ec0bdd8ad904fe36aae08d815312966%7Ca3927f91cda14696af898c9f1ceffa91%7C0%7C0%7C637282648668709238&sdata=2oApFblvdWuo%2Fh6Az6pMUZl%2BH4NE0BZSt%2FrPwZetsxU%3D&reserved=0). The criterion of obligatoriness results in a more restricted set of meanings being categorized as grammatical, as compared to Boye & Harder (2012)’s criterion of conventionalized secondary discourse prominence. Notably, it excludes the meanings of derivational morphemes. Boye & Harder (2012) do discuss obligatoriness as one of the possible way of defining “grammatical”, but dismiss it for a number of reasons, for example precisely because it would exclude derivational morphemes. As this kind of objections had been around long before Boye & Harder (2012)’s paper, it so happened that I discussed why I do not find these objections valid in my (2008) paper on the concepts of grammaticalization and antigrammaticalization.

Obviously, there is no absolute truth here and the term, in this case “grammatical meaning”, will mean what we decide it to mean. However, using one criterion or another will have different implications. In practical terms, I personally find it useful to have a more restrictive definition of “grammatical meaning”, for example because it’s easier to apply consistently.

Best wishes,
Dmitry

--------
Idiatov, Dmitry. 2008. Antigrammaticalization, antimorphologization and the case of Tura. In Elena Seoane, María José López-Couso & (in collaboration with) Teresa Fanego (eds.), Theoretical and empirical issues in grammaticalization, 151–169. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. doi: 10.1075/tsl.77.09idi.
(accessible at:
https://eur02.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Ffile
sender.renater.fr%2F%3Fs%3Ddownload%26token%3D24ecb7f0-3d5f-48ad-8da0-
bd739bd16d95&data=02%7C01%7Ctrondhjem%40hum.ku.dk%7C7ec0bdd8ad904f
e36aae08d815312966%7Ca3927f91cda14696af898c9f1ceffa91%7C0%7C0%7C637282
648668719231&sdata=O0qLFjyJn3jUGIFdbd8M9L90FTzOL2EJ72eaF3pnnng%3D&
amp;reserved=0 ; it’s also available from my website, but the server
has been down for some time, hence this temporary link)

17.06.2020, 20:11, "Kasper Boye" <boye at hum.ku.dk<mailto:boye at hum.ku.dk>>:
Dear all,

I would like to first respond to David Gil’s comment on the problems of defining grammatical, then to follow up on Jürgen Bohnemeyer’s ideas about the job grammatical items do.

There are a couple of solutions to the problem of defining ”grammatical” on the market. One is Christian Lehmann’s (2015) structural definition in terms of autonomy; another one is Peter Harder’s and my own functional and usage-based definition (to which I think Bohnemeyer was referring in his initial message) in terms of conventionalized secondary discourse prominence (or backgroundedness) (Boye & Harder 2012; references below). Both definitions bring together morphosyntactic and semantic properties of being grammatical. For instance, being by convention backgrounded (that is, being conventionally associated with background meaning only) entails being dependent on a host expression: a background requires a foreground.

Based on our 2012 definition, Peter and I are currently working in the same direction (book in prep.) as Bohnemeyer. As we see it, the raison d’être for grammatical items is that they offer a shortcut to meaning, which may be inferable from the context: knowing by conventions is faster than inferring from context, even if inferencing is guided by expectations (cf. Lehmann’s remark earlier in this thread). In fact, they offer a cheap shortcut: representing background information they can be processed rather superficially and thus quickly by the hearer.

Looking now at grammatical items from the speaker perspective, it is clear that the production of grammatical items requires an extra effort. Not only does it require something extra to produce a grammatical item than not to produce anything, recent studies suggest that grammatical items are in fact a little harder to produce than lexical ones (e.g. Michel Lange et al. 2015; Nielsen et al. 2019). This may be seen as a consequence of their dependency: when you produce a grammatical item, you also have to consider which host expression to attach it to.

If we now look at grammatical items from the speaker and hearer perspective at the same time, a rather sympathetic picture of human communication emerges, a picture that can be characterized in terms of the notion of ‘audience design’: the speaker invests a little extra production resources so that the hearer can save a little processing resources.

Why then do languages differ when it comes to the amount of grammatical morphemes? Well, firstly evolution is not optimizing, but satisficing, and we can easily live without grammatical morphemes (our forefathers probably did; cf. Hurford 2012) – it puts an extra burden on inferencing, but we are quite good at inferencing. Secondly, phonologically concrete morphemes are not the only kind of grammatical items we have. Also construction grammar’s schematic constructions qualify as grammatical items: they are conventionalized as carriers of background info.

With best wishes,
Kasper

References
Boye, K. & P. Harder. (2012). A usage-based theory of grammatical status and grammaticalization. Language 88.1. 1-44.
Link:
https://eur02.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.
jstor.org%2Fstable%2Fpdf%2F41348882.pdf&data=02%7C01%7Ctrondhjem%4
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7r8SPkQH3iQGKvwjpUHII5QUmzk%3D&reserved=0

Hurford, J.R. (2012). The origins of grammar: Language in the light of evolution. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Lehmann, Christian. 2015. Thoughts on grammaticalization, 3rd ed. Berlin, Germany: Language Science Press.

Michel Lange, V., M. Messerschmidt, P. Harder, H.R. Siebner & K.
Boye. (2017). Planning and production of grammatical and lexical verbs
in multi-word messages. PLoS ONE 12.11. e0186685.
https://eur02.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fdoi.
org%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0186685&data=02%7C01%7Ctrondhjem%40hu
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Nielsen, S.R., K. Boye, R. Bastiaanse & V. Michel Lange. 2019. The production of grammatical and lexical determiners in Broca’s aphasia. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, DOI: 10.1080/23273798.2019.1616104.
Link:
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org%2F10.1080%2F23273798.2019.1616104&data=02%7C01%7Ctrondhjem%40h
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Fra: Lingtyp <lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org<mailto:lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org>> På vegne af
David Gil
Sendt: 17. juni 2020 14:14
Til: lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org<mailto:lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org>
Emne: Re: [Lingtyp] Innovation of functional categories

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  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

--
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<><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><>
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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
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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.

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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<mailto: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)

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