[Lingtyp] Lingtyp Digest, Vol 82, Issue 16

Tue Jul 20 18:31:15 UTC 2021

Dear Vladimir

I worked on this topic for my dissertation (2018). Someone else here
mentioned the Elliot 2000 paper and I'd add Mithun 1995 "On the relativity
of irreality" and Contini-Morava 2012 "(ir)realis and negation in Swahili",
in my opinion those 3 are really helpful papers.

For my dissertation I worked on a language called Chini spoken in PNG,
which (I could be wrong) has encoded realis/irrealis distinctions perhaps
more robustly than any other described language. It's the primary
distinction in the verbal morphology and the clause chain linkers also code
realis vs irrealis. Let me know if you would like a copy of my
dissertation, it is full of mistakes but the first chapter could be
helpful. There I discuss the literature and go through (what I find to be)
some of the main problems in approaching this area of grammar.

Anyways my contribution here won't exactly answer your question but I'll
mention just a couple things which I learned from working on this topic.

Personally I think this is one area of grammar where typology, blanket
definitions, and assumptions about what can or can't be included within
realis or irrealis – do not ultimately prove as representative or useful as
we might wish. Just because we want nice and neat definitions for our
publications doesn't mean that's the way things work, and when it comes to
a grammatical distinction that runs the gamut of semantic and pragmatic
meanings (not forgetting the other huge issue which is that culture doesn't
ever go away), we shouldn't expect nice and neat or straightforward with
realis and irrealis. (There are also a couple papers out there that claim
to have "disproven" realis/irrealis, but for a number of reasons, I don't
believe those end up working much less providing an alternative explanation
for r/irr distinctions as they clearly do occur in a number of languages
esp in New Guinea and the Americas).

One complication in the literature is that some languages have been
described as having a (lone) realis or an irrealis category, while others
have been described as having a realis-irrealis distinction. I think
typologists ought to be careful not to mix these things up in the perusal
of grammars, they're not the same thing even if there are semantic
similarities.

Another issue is the area of grammar where the distinction is marked. As
Elliott and others point out, realis/irrealis distinctions are found in
verb morphology, in clause linking, and also other places depending on the
language. Best to keep the area of grammar separate lest we create
unnecessary confusion.

Another area of confusion, I think it's Bybee who pointed this out and it's
often ignored, is the issue of whether it's the realis or irrealis marking
which itself contributes the meaning, or whether the r/irr marking merely
co-occurs with another grammatical category in a language-specific
construction. There's more to say there but I think it's an important
point. If a realis or irrealis affix is included in a negative verb form
because it grammaticalized that way along with a separate negative marker,
it's not the same as if the lone irrealis affix is doing the work of
negation.

In my view a major issue that's not considered enough is differences in methods
and evidence. For Chini I kept seeing that this mattered a lot. In
particular I found that the second I started looking at examples from
naturalistic conversations, I saw people were using realis and irrealis
constructions in all sorts of ways that elicitation could never have
predicted, and which also didn't tend to show up in narrative. I wouldn't
have even had the same analysis if I hadn't looked at conversational Chini,
(in fact for the distinction in the clause chain linkers, I wouldn't even
have had anything but a rudimentary analysis.) This gets at a bit of
problem for typological comparison. If we are going to compare grammars
that have very different approaches to /types of evidence, and then seek to
derive typological definitions, we could be comparing apples with oranges
without realizing it. I realize this is something we'll never get away from
entirely, but for an area of grammar that is so notoriously "slippery", it
seems especially important.

My personal view is that like Mithun 1995 argues, there is a general trend
that we can see across languages, that what is at issue is
language-specific distinctions for what counts as being within the realm of
reality vs the realm imaginary. I don't know about you but purely as a
conceptual distinction, just in my social group alone, the differences in
what's real vs imaginary between individuals even of similar cultural
backgrounds are quite significant :-) So, we would expect the
language-specific differences to be anything but minor, though many
patterns can still be identified, of course. The role of culture is also
central, and we can't ignore that. For ex if we are going to look into how
realis and/or irrealis pattern with imperative constructions in a language,
we have to start asking questions about what imperatives get used for in
that culture. (In Chini culture, there's almost never any expectation for
the compliance of the addressee, no matter what the relationship is, so
that's really very different from say, Western countries, where the
expectation for compliance is often the whole point).

Lastly, another point of consideration for typological comparison and
fieldwork on this topic, is we shouldn't expect predictability or rigidity
in the distribution of the two halves of the distinction. A number of works
for ex predict that counterfactuals won't co-occur with realis marking.
Well, in Chini, they do. It doesn't mean the whole jenga tower is going to
collapse, it's just the way it is (in this case, for historical/contact
reasons).

Cheers
Joseph

On Tue, Jul 20, 2021 at 1:10 PM <lingtyp-request at listserv.linguistlist.org>
wrote:

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> Today's Topics:
>
>    1. realis: definition (Vladimir Panov)
>    2. Re: realis: definition (Riccardo Giomi)
>    3. Re: realis: definition (Juergen Bohnemeyer)
>
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Message: 1
> Date: Tue, 20 Jul 2021 11:04:11 +0300
> From: Vladimir Panov <panovmeister at gmail.com>
> To: LINGTYP at listserv.linguistlist.org
> Subject: [Lingtyp] realis: definition
> Message-ID:
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>
> Dear colleagues,
>
> I would be grateful you could recommend me works which provide typological
> definitions of *the realis*. Crucially, I wonder how it is distinguished
> from the assertive speech act or the declarative.
>
> Best,
> Vladimir
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> Message: 2
> Date: Tue, 20 Jul 2021 15:23:31 +0200
> From: Riccardo Giomi <rgiomi at campus.ul.pt>
> To: Vladimir Panov <panovmeister at gmail.com>
> Cc: LINGTYP at listserv.linguistlist.org
> Subject: Re: [Lingtyp] realis: definition
> Message-ID:
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>
>  Dear Vladimir,
>
> As far as I know, the 'standard' definitions of realis and irrealis are to
> be found in
>
> Comrie, Bernard. 1985. *Tense.* Cambridge: CUP.
>
> A more recent contribution, which specifically addresses these notions, is
>
> Elliot, Jennifer R. 2000. Realis and irrealis: Forms and concepts of the
> grammaticalisation of reality. *Linguistic Typology* 4(1), 55-90.
>
> In my understanding, realis and irrealis are modal notions relating to the
> reality or actuality status of states of affairs and usually (or, at least,
> often) encompass temporal oppositions such as future vs non-future and
> aspectual ones such as specific vs habitual. Assertive and declarative are
> illocutionary notions and contrast with interrogative, imperative, etc.
> (although 'declarative mood' is used with quite variable meanings in
> different descriptive traditions). But probably others can make these
> concepts more precise and add further, typologically-based definitions.
>
> Cheers,
> Riccardo
>
> Vladimir Panov <panovmeister at gmail.com> escreveu no dia terça, 20/07/2021
> à(s) 10:04:
>
> > Dear colleagues,
> >
> > I would be grateful you could recommend me works which provide
> typological
> > definitions of *the realis*. Crucially, I wonder how it is distinguished
> > from the assertive speech act or the declarative.
> >
> > Best,
> > Vladimir
> > _______________________________________________
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> > Lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org
> > http://listserv.linguistlist.org/mailman/listinfo/lingtyp
> >
>
>
> --
> Riccardo Giomi, Ph.D.
> Faculdade de Letras da Universidade de Lisboa (FLUL)
> Departamento de Linguística Geral e Românica (DLGR)
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> Message: 3
> Date: Tue, 20 Jul 2021 13:53:21 +0000
> From: Juergen Bohnemeyer <jb77 at buffalo.edu>
> To: Vladimir Panov <panovmeister at gmail.com>
> Cc: "LINGTYP at listserv.linguistlist.org"
>         <LINGTYP at listserv.linguistlist.org>
> Subject: Re: [Lingtyp] realis: definition
> Message-ID: <31385FF1-A0CA-4520-A60C-8CDDFCA97AC7 at buffalo.edu>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
>
> Dear Vladimir — I hesitate to offer a definition that’s explicitly
> typological (for reasons I’ll mention below). But in unpublished work
> presented in various places (and versions), I’ve worked with a definition
> of realis mood for Yucatec according to which it locates the topic world
> inside (i.e., as part of) the utterance world. This assumes an ontology in
> which worlds are maximal spacetime entities that “grow” into the future,
> meaning their own past, but not their future, is part of them.
>
> This effectively makes realis mood very similar to non-future tense, with
> the crucial difference that, unlike a non-future tense, it cannot be used
> in past counterfactual contexts. I show that this prediction is borne out
> for Yucatec.
>
> Here is a version of the talk that specifically focuses on the distinction
> between realis mood and nonfuture tense:
>
> http://www.acsu.buffalo.edu/~jb77/Bohnemeyer_2019_tenselessness_Lisbon.pdf
>
> And here is an earlier talk that focuses on the conflation of mood and
> viewpoint aspect in inflectional paradigms in Mayan languages:
>
> http://www.acsu.buffalo.edu/~jb77/Handouts/TLS_JB_v1.pdf
>
> Now, the reason I hesitate when it comes to endorsing the above definition
> for typological purposes is that the “growing worlds” model will cause the
> entire past of the utterance world to be realis and none of the future. But
> I’m pretty sure there are languages in which the remote past is treated as
> irrealis, and others in which parts of the future (or perhaps we should say
> certain types of future time reference) are treated as realis.
>
> For typological purposes, I would suggest that a language has a
> realis-irrealis contrast if it classifies utterances in terms of whether
> they are (purported to be) about the real/factual world or not. What counts
> as “real” varies somewhat from language to language, but from my
> understanding of the typological literature, the crosslinguistic prototype
> seems to be the speech situation and at least part of its past, with the
> likelihood of inclusion perhaps decreasing with distance from the speech
> situation.
>
> Now, when it comes to distinguishing between ‘realis’, ‘declarative’, and
> ‘assertive’, in practice, there is of course a great deal of overlap in how
> these are used. That said, I would reserve the terms ‘declarative’ and
> ‘assertive’ for mood categories that classify utterances exclusively by
> speech act, i.e., all assertions/‘representational’ speech acts (in
> Searle’s terms) occur with the declarative, regardless of whether they
> concerns the real world, a future world, or some (present, past, or future)
> counterfactual scenario.
>
> Lastly, I should mention that Manfred Krifka recently developed a very
> different approach to the semantics of the realis/irrealis contrast in
> Daakie or Port Vato (Oceanic, Vanuatu):
>
>
> https://journals.linguisticsociety.org/proceedings/index.php/SALT/article/view/26.566
>
> As I recall, Krifka’s proposal is based on presuppositions.
>
> Best — Juergen
>
>
>
> > On Jul 20, 2021, at 4:04 AM, Vladimir Panov <panovmeister at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >
> > Dear colleagues,
> >
> > I would be grateful you could recommend me works which provide
> typological definitions of the realis. Crucially, I wonder how it is
> distinguished from the assertive speech act or the declarative.
> >
> > Best,
> > Vladimir
> > _______________________________________________
> > Lingtyp mailing list
> > Lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org
> > http://listserv.linguistlist.org/mailman/listinfo/lingtyp
>
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