[Lingtyp] Moods and non-finites?

Sat Jul 15 11:33:18 UTC 2023

Yikes! Temper, temper, dear colleagues! Fwiw, Adam, I read your statement the same way as Christian apparently did, even though I’m a defender of particularism 😉

Finiteness: I’ve been trying hard to resist the temptation to weigh in on this. Very very briefly:

  *   Obviously, many languages make no morphological distinction between matrix predications and subordinate predications.
  *   And many other languages do make such a distinction.
  *   In some languages, this distinction involves the categories of person and tense familiar from IE finiteness.
  *   In others, it does not. In Yucatec (you knew this was coming!), all verb forms carry cross-reference markers (‘person’) regardless of syntactic context, unless they are morphologically nominalized. However, matrix predications projected from verbs require a preverbal marker that expresses viewpoint aspect, modality, or temporal remoteness, and that marker is ungrammatical in most complements (arguably all that are actually embedded into the matrix, as opposed to adjoined to it, which is what happens with complements of speech act predicates etc.). I’ve associated the presence/absence of this marker as expressing a finiteness contrast, particularly considering two additional factoids: (i) The functional meanings expressed in this slot all directly relate to the utterance’s topic situation; and (ii) the language is tenseless, so functional expressions other than tense arguably assume the role tense plays in other languages. I’ve tried to hash this out a bit here<https://www.acsu.buffalo.edu/~jb77/Bohnemeyer_2019_RRG_keynote_operator.pdf>.
  *   When I said upthread that there’s no theory of finiteness I’m ready to endorse, I meant specifically that there’s no theory that doesn’t in some way or other make reference to what I consider language-particular properties by treating those as if they were universals. With that exact caveat, though, I’ve been sympathetic to the semantic side of Wolfgang Klein’s work on finiteness. Money quote:

“(…) finiteness (a) links the descriptive content of the sentence (the 'sentence basis') to its topic component (in particular, to its topic time), and (b) it confines the illocutionary force to that topic component.” (Klein 2006: 245)

I’ll try even harder to shut up now 😉 – Best – Juergen

Klein, W. (2006). On finiteness. In V. van Geenhoven (ed.), Semantics in acquisition. Berlin: Springer. 245-272.

Juergen Bohnemeyer (He/Him)
Professor, Department of Linguistics
University at Buffalo

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From: Lingtyp <lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org> on behalf of Adam James Ross Tallman <ajrtallman at utexas.edu>
Date: Saturday, July 15, 2023 at 13:03
To: Christian Lehmann <christian.lehmann at uni-erfurt.de>
Cc: lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org <lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org>
Subject: Re: [Lingtyp] Moods and non-finites?
Dear Cristian and everyone,

Read the comments more carefully before replying because I did not say nor imply that the concept should be dispensed with.

Adam

On Sat, Jul 15, 2023 at 12:46 PM Christian Lehmann <christian.lehmann at uni-erfurt.de<mailto:christian.lehmann at uni-erfurt.de>> wrote:
Dear Adam and everybody,

just a brief reply to this:

For a functional-typological audience, I'm sort of surprised the distinction is still brought up as if it was discrete (or not just a matter of definition as Martin points out), since Bybee discussed the issue of inflectional status as a continuum with lexical/derivational in her Morphology book some 30+ years ago. It's also well-known that these notions of inflection/finiteness are tricky or nonapplicable in many so-called polysynthetic languages (e.g. de Reuse 2009).
It is a recurrent misunderstanding among typologists, chiefly of particularist persuasion, that a grammatical concept should be dispensed with because it is not discrete, covers a continuum, is not applicable to all languages or what not. If one takes this position, then no grammatical concept whatsoever can be used in the description of more than one language. It seems more realistic, and even methodologically more fruitful, to live by concepts whose cross-linguistic application is "tricky".
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Adam J.R. Tallman
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