[Lingtyp] metaphor theory / cognitive grammar explanations for verb and noun argument symmetries

Sun Mar 20 07:26:11 UTC 2022

Dear Daniel,
A good example of what you are talking about is the development of person marking in many Tibeto-Burman languages, such as Angami (Giridhar 1980) where you have the same unstressed personal pronouns becoming cliticized to nouns and verbs, the former for possession, the latter for referent tracking. 

	Free pronoun	verb prefix	noun prefix
1sg	ā			ā-		â-
2sg	nō 			n̂-		n̂-
3sg	puô			puô- 		puô-

This also brings up the issue of what grammatical marking is doing. There seems to be an assumption that it is always marking a specific category, the latter often based on those of IE languages. Another possibility is that marking is constraining the interpretation in a particular way, but not necessarily in the way we are used to in IE languages. So in the case of Angami, as Daniel says, it might not be that the two uses of the pronominal prefixes are marking the same category, but either as David Gil argues, there is just some association, as with noun compounds, where there are many possibilities for the relationship between the head and modifier, or the marking is restricting the interpretation in an entirely different way. For example, in Tagalog the marking that appears with arguments is of a very different type, where non-topical direct arguments appear in phrases linked to the predicate by “ng” [naŋ], whereas the topical argument appears in a deictic-marked phrase in a copulaless equational clause with the “ng” phrase (the “ng” phrase and the topic have the same referent). The “ng” phrase is also used for possessives, but there is no specification that the argument in the clausal use of the “ng” phrase is necessarily the agent or the patient, so although there is then isomorphy of marking of possessives and arguments, the marking isn’t specifying a semantic role. (See Naylor 2005, LaPolla 2014, 2019 and references therein on the isomorphy of referential and predicative phrases).

Another phenomenon from Tibeto-Burman is the anti-agentive marking, which doesn’t mark a specific role, but distinguishes a non-agent from the agent, depending on the language, marking patient, recipient, and possessor (LaPolla 1992, 1994).

References:
Giridhar, P.P. 1980. Angami Grammar. CIIL Grammar Series-6. Mysore: Central Institute of Indian Languages.
LaPolla, Randy J. 1992. Anti-ergative marking in Tibeto-Burman. Linguistics of the Tibeto-Burman Area 15.1:1-9.
    https://randylapolla.info/Papers/LaPolla_1992_Anti-ergative_Marking_in_Tibeto-Burman.pdf 
LaPolla, Randy J. 1994. Parallel grammaticalizations in Tibeto-Burman: Evidence of Sapir’s ‘drift’. Linguistics of the Tibeto-Burman Area 17.1: 61-80.
    https://randylapolla.info/Papers/LaPolla_1994_Parallel_Grammaticalizations_in_Tibeto-Burman_-_Evidence_of_Sapirs_Drift.pdf 
LaPolla, Randy J. 2014. Constituent structure in a Tagalog text. Language and Linguistics 15.6: 761–774.
    https://randylapolla.info/Papers/LaPolla_2014_Constituent_structure_in_a_Tagalog_text.pdf   
LaPolla, Randy J. 2019. Arguments for Seeing Theme-Rheme and Topic-Comment as Separate Functional Structures. In J.R. Martin, G. Figuedero & Y. Doran (eds.), Systemic Functional Language Description: Making Meaning Matter, 162-186. London: Routledge. ISBN-13: 978-0-8153-9508-9.
   https://randylapolla.info/Papers/LaPolla_2019_Arguments_for_seeing_Theme-Rheme_and_Topic-Comment_as_separate_functional_structures.pdf    
Naylor, Paz Buenaventura. 2005. On the stative predicate: Tagalog “existentials” revisited. In Hsiu-chuan Liao and Carl R. Galvez Rubino (eds.), Current issues in Philippine linguistics and anthropology parangal kay Lawrence A. Reid . Manila: The Linguistic Society of the Philippines and SIL Philippines.    

Randy
——
Professor Randy J. LaPolla（罗仁地), PhD FAHA 
Center for Language Sciences
Institute for Advanced Studies in Humanities and Social Sciences
Beijing Normal University, Zhuhai Campus
A302, Muduo Building, #18 Jinfeng Road, Zhuhai City, Guangdong, China

https://randylapolla.info
ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6100-6196    

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> On 20 Mar 2022, at 11:48 AM, Daniel Ross <djross3 at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Thanks, everyone, for an interesting discussion. My reply here may not be very insightful, certainly not especially theoretical, but I wanted to share it anyway.
> 
> I remember this coming up when I took a Quechua class, and at the time I felt like it simply made sense, e.g. from the perspective of formal features: 1SG (for example) is the same in two locations, which seems both convenient for the language learner, and also efficient in terms of grammatical organization.
> 
> But yes, it's a bit of a leap from that abstract perspective (that the person features would by default be realized in different places identically, and that's certainly not the case in general across languages).
> 
> So I wonder if this isn't just a simple explanation via grammaticalization: subject pronouns are often juxtaposed with verbs, and similarly (though perhaps less often, or with some other marker, e.g. case) posessors may be juxtaposed with posessees. The shared forms are a historical accident. And perhaps with a little analogy between them (from the perspective of grammatical consistency, along the lines of formal features), the correspondence (including reduction corresponding to morphologization) would be maintained.
> 
> Cognitive explanations are ultimately diachronic, either that certain usage is more frequent and grammaticalizes, or because certain grammaticalized usage is maintained through continued usage. Here in both cases the identity in some languages would seem to be explained without need for cognitive principles, beyond simply having the same forms in both contexts being somewhat convenient.
> 
> (As for explaining why they sometimes differ, it would simply be because they came from different syntactic sources. We also can find examples within either domain that are split, such as the prefixing vs. suffixing conjugation patterns in Semitic languages that have distinct, although somewhat overlapping, forms, presumably all grammaticalized from pronouns, but at different diachronic stages and in different positions.)
> 
> Daniel
> 
> 
> On Sat, Mar 19, 2022 at 8:30 PM William Croft <wcroft at unm.edu> wrote:
> Semantic/cognitive parallelism between referring phrase and clause structure in general were proposed by formal semanticists such as Emmon Bach (1986); see also the layered structure of the phrase and clause in RRG and Dik’s Functional Grammar as well as the cognitive linguistic versions found in Langacker (1991) mentioned by Siva, or in Croft (1990, 2007).
> 
> The empirical relationship between possessors and verbal arguments, and hence its explanation, is much more complex than “possessor = subject”; see Siewierska (1998) (she starts from Seiler’s hypothesis that inalienable = P/O and alienable = A, but finds it needs at best to be revised).
> 
> Bill
> 
> Bach, Emmon. 1986. Natural language metaphysics. Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science VII, ed. R. Barcan-Marcus, G. J. W. Dorn & P. Weingartner, 573-95. Amsterdam: North-Holland.
> 
> Croft, William. 1990. A conceptual framework for grammatical categories (or, a taxonomy of propositional acts). Journal of Semantics 7.245-79.
> 
> 
> Croft, William. 2007. The origins of grammar in the verbalization of experience. Cognitive Linguistics 18.339-82.
> 
> Langacker, Ronald W. 1991. Foundations of cognitive grammar, vol II: descriptive application. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
> 
> Siewierska, Anna. 1998. On nominal and verbal person marking. Linguistic Typology 2.1-55.
> 
> 
>> On Mar 19, 2022, at 10:04 AM, Yury Lander <yulander at yandex.ru> wrote:
>> 
>>   [EXTERNAL]
>> 
>> Dear all,
>>  
>> Just a small note. I believe that Langacker's idea of "reference-point constructions" was anticipated by Edward Keenan in his:
>> Keenan, Edward L. 1974, 'The Functional Principle: Generalizing the Notion of "Subject of''', Papers from the Tenth Regional Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society, Chicago, pp. 298-309.
>> (Also reprinted in his book "Universal Grammar: 15 essays")
>>  
>> As far as I remember, there he draws parallels between the possessor/possessum and the subject/predicate relations in terms of the dependency of interpretation. (Note that for Keenan in 1974 the typical subject was definitely S/A.) But maybe I am wrong in details...
>>  
>> Kind regards,
>> Yury
>>  
>> 19.03.2022, 15:34, "Siva Kalyan" <sivakalyan.princeton at gmail.com>:
>> Hi Adam,
>>  
>> Langacker’s writings on Cognitive Grammar touch on this, particularly his paper on “reference-point constructions”:
>>  
>> Langacker, Ronald W. 1993. Reference-point constructions. Cognitive Linguistics 4(1): 1–38. Available at https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/cogl.1993.4.1.1/html
>>  
>> He introduces the concept of “reference points” in the context of his semantic analysis of possessive constructions, and then notes a broad range of parallels in other areas of grammar, including “topic and topic-like constructions, pronoun-antecedent relationships, metonymy, and the discrepancy typically encountered between those entities that figure most directly in a relationship and the explicitly coded relational participants”. He doesn’t use the notion of “reference point” to analyse agenthood or subjecthood—but given that subjects are often grammaticalised topics, there is at least an indirect relation.
>>  
>> One of the early chapters of volume 2 of Foundations of Cognitive Grammar (1991) contains a discussion of nominalised clauses, and in particular the fact that the agent often appears with possessive marking, (Unfortunately, this book is no longer available on Google Books, and I don’t have easy access to my physical copy, so I can’t provide a page reference.)
>>  
>> More generally, analogies between nominal and verbal structure are a recurring theme in Cognitive Grammar (particularly in volume 2 of Foundations; see especially the discussions of “grounding”, “quantification”, and “instantiation”), and in functionalism more generally. (In fact, I think Van Valin & LaPolla 1997 explicitly cite Langacker on this point.)
>>  
>> Hope this helps.
>>  
>> Siva
>>  
>> On 19 Mar 2022, at 9:28 pm, Adam James Ross Tallman <ajrtallman at utexas.edu> wrote:
>>  
>> Hello all,
>>  
>> I thought there must be sources on this - but I haven't really found anything specific. I'm looking for sources that discuss potential semantic links between possessors in the nominal domain and agents (A subjects) in the verbal domain. Or just semantic explanations for structural homologies between noun and verb structure in general.
>>  
>> I am aware of diachronic works that discuss the development of verbal alignment systems from (clausal) nominalizations. For instance, Gildea's work On Reconstructing Grammar gives a good explanation as to why we might find structural similarities between nouns and verbs for diachronic reasons (today's verbal structures were reanalyzed from a nominalized structure).
>>  
>> Generative works, at least dating back to Chomsky's Remarks, explain structural homologies between noun and verb structure based on abstract formal schema (like X' theory).
>>  
>> But, I was wondering if there were works in cognitive grammar or metaphor theory that have attempted to give a more synchronic explanation for potential symmetries between noun and verb phrase structure, based on the idea that noun and verb structures might have some common schematic form - or based on the idea that there is some metaphorical mapping between referential and event (verby) domains.
>>  
>> The idea would be that somehow possessors in the nominal (referential) domain are at some abstract level like agents in the verbal (event/situation?) domain (and perhaps analogies with other arguments could be made, but those seem less obvious). Maybe there's nothing like this, but I assumed that there must be, given discussions of "transcategoriality" in the literature. Any leads would be appreciated.
>>  
>> best,
>>  
>> Adam
>>  
>>  
>>  
>>  
>>  
>> 
>> --
>> Adam J.R. Tallman
>> Post-doctoral Researcher 
>> Friedrich Schiller Universität
>> Department of English Studies
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>>  
>> ***********************************************
>> Yury Lander
>> HSE University, Linguistics
>> http://www.hse.ru/staff/yulander
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>> https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Yury-Lander
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