[Lingtyp] linguistic reduction

[Juergen Bohnemeyer]

Dear all — There are a number of different perspectives on reduction, including psycholinguistics (cf. Jorge Labrada's response), morphosyntactic constraints on ellipsis (cf. Christian Lehmann’s response; there is a vast amount of more recent work, including by Jason Merchant, my colleague Rui Chaves, and the 2005 Simpler Syntax book by Culicover & Jackendoff), and of course grammaticalization.

But from an anthropological perspective, the most important variable driving reduction is register. It is a virtual universal that across speech communities, more formal registers - which is to say, registers used for more prestigious occasions, including in interactions with high-status interlocutors - involve increased morphosyntactic complexity and explicitness and a more “rarified” vocabulary - which is to say, a preference for lower-frequency items. 

I do not know of any true typological work on register. From where I look at this, such an undertaking would make an invaluable contribution. 

But there is certainly a wealth of relevant work that has been done by communication ethnographers. Let me mention a couple of classic papers by Judith Irvine in particular:

Irvine, J. T. (1985). Status and style in language. Annual Review of Anthropology 14: 557-581.

Irvine, J. T. (1992). Ideologies of honorific language. Pragmatics 2(3): 251-262. 

(Note, btw., that from the point of view of the ethnography of registers, reduction and expansion are two equally valid perspectives of study. People expand to express respect/deference and reduce to express solidarity.)

Best — Juergen


> On Jun 4, 2021, at 3:55 PM, Jorge Rosés Labrada <jrosesla at ualberta.ca> wrote:
> 
> My colleague Ben Tucker works on (phonetic) reduction; I'm cc'ing him here. He recommended the two sources below; if you're interested in phonetic/phonological reduction, I'd recommend looking at his work (a lot of it is available for download here: https://sites.ualberta.ca/~bvtucker/CV.html) 
> 	• Jaeger, T. F. (2010). Redundancy and reduction: Speakers manage syntactic information density. Cognitive Psychology, 61(1), 23–62. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cogpsych.2010.02.002
> 	• Jaeger, T. F., & Buz, E. (2017). Signal Reduction and Linguistic Encoding. In The Handbook of Psycholinguistics (pp. 38–81). John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/9781118829516.ch3
> Best,
> Jorge
> -------------
> Jorge Emilio Rosés Labrada
> Assistant Professor, Indigenous Language Sustainability
> 
> 4-22 Assiniboia Hall
> Department of Linguistics, University of Alberta
> Tel: (+1) 780-492-5698
> Email: jrosesla at ualberta.ca 
> 
> The University of Alberta acknowledges that we are located on Treaty 6 territory, and respects the history, languages, and cultures of the First Nations, Métis, Inuit, and all First Peoples of Canada, whose presence continues to enrich our institution.
> 
> 
> On Fri, Jun 4, 2021 at 12:34 PM Christian Lehmann <christian.lehmann at uni-erfurt.de> wrote:
> Dear Luigi,
> 
> a web search for 
> "Wolfgang Klein" Ellipse
> may find you a set of relevant publications.
> Best,
> Christian
> -- 
> Prof. em. Dr. Christian Lehmann
> Rudolfstr. 4
> 99092 Erfurt
> Deutschland
> 
> Tel.:	+49/361/2113417
> E-Post:	christianw_lehmann at arcor.de
> Web:	https://www.christianlehmann.eu
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