Abstracts:
Universal grammar, empirical universals, and functional explanations
In this talk I discuss the empirical evidence for the notion of "universal grammar", which was advanced by Noam Chomsky and became very influential in 20th century linguistics. I argue that universal grammar, while perhaps motivated philosophically, does not receive support from empirical grammatical studies with world-wide scope. Empirical generalizations tend to be implicational and scalar, which is not compatible with the philosophical notion of universal grammar. Since the Chomskyan conception of grammar has been very influential also outside linguistics, it is time for scientists of all fields to take note of the fact that the empirical linguistic evidence lends support to a rather different view of the foundations of grammar.
Ditransitive alignment types, alignment splits, and inverse alignment
By "ditransitive constructions", I mean constructions of three-place verbs taking an agent, a theme and a (macro-) recipient argument. I start with Dryer's (1986) observation that the grammatical behavior of recipient and theme is in many ways analogous to the behavior of (macro-) agent and (macro-) patient in monotransitive constructions, and I pursue the analogy further.
The basic alignment types are defined by the argument-marking patterns, i.e. case-marking and indexing ("agreement") patterns (word order is largely ignored). Corresponding to the basic monotransitive types (accusative, neutral, ergative), there are three ditransitive types: indirective (treating theme like patient), neutral (treating both theme and recipient like patient), and secundative (treating recipient like patient). A further logically possible type (neither theme nor recipient treated like patient) is unattested. All types are found both in case-marking and indexation, but case-marking heavily favors indirective alignment, whereas indexation favors secundative alignment. I will discuss explanations for the correlations, and I will show a world map of the different patterns, demonstrating that their geographical distribution is far from random.
Like monotransitive constructions, ditransitive constructions sometimes show animacy-based alignment splits. For instance, in Yimas and French first and second person pronouns show neutral alignment, whereas third person NPs show indirective alignment. Even more common are alignment splits depending on lexical classes of verbs, but other types of split which are attested in monotransitives (conditioned by tense/aspect or subordination) do not seem to occur. Again, I ask whether explanations proposed for monotransitive alignment splits can be extended to ditransitive alignment.
Finally, I discuss a common type of ditransitive inverse pattern, where the "direct" construction, used when the recipient is higher than the theme on the person hierarchy (e.g. '(give) him to me'), cannot be used in the "inverse" situation, i.e. when the theme is higher than the recipient (e.g. '(give) me to him'), so that a different construction must be resorted to. Here too, explanatory models offered to account for monotransitive inverse patterns will be found useful for understanding the typological generalizations.
Frequency vs. iconicity in the explanation of grammatical asymmetries
The notion of iconicity has become very popular in the last 25 years among cognitive-functional linguists, and it has been applied to language structure in a wide variety of ways. Here I focus on thee subtypes of iconicity, which I label "iconicity of quantity" (more meaning is expressed by more form, e.g. long/long-er/long-est), "iconicity of complexity" (more complex meanings are expressed by more complex forms, e.g. Japanese ik-/ik-ase-), and "iconicity of cohesion" (meanings belonging together are expressed by more cohesive forms, e.g. alienable vs. inalienable possession). I argue that the cross-linguistic tendencies that have been accounted for by appealing to these kinds of iconicity are better explained by frequency asymmetries. More frequent forms are expected to be shorter, and more frequent combinations are expected to show greater cohesion. Iconicity is not needed for these cases.
Creating economical morphosyntactic patterns in language change
In this talk, I start by arguing that all universal morphosyntactic asymmetries can be explained on the basis of frequency asymmetries, i.e. they all show economic motivation: more frequent patterns are coded with less material. In a second step, I want to examine the ways in which the economic motivation is implemented in languages through diachronic change. Economic motivation, like other types of functional motivation, needs to be interpreted in diachronic terms: From the point of view of the speakers' grammars, economical patterns are arbitrary (because speakers would be able to acquire non-economical patterns just as well), but the changes leading to them are not accidental but motivated by economy. I show that iachronically, economical patterns arise by? (i) differential phonological reduction, (ii) by differential inhibition of periphrasis/grammaticalization, or (iii) by analogical change. "Differential morphosyntactic reduction", while logically perfectly possible, apparently does not occur.
Typology of language change: Lexical borrowability and beyond
Language is often seen as a window into the past, and historical-comparative linguists have achieved astonishing results in their efforts to reconstruct past language states and historical relationships. Yet, they are hampered by a lack of sufficient typological knowledge about how language change proceeds. I show that reconstructions often depends on knowledge of likely and unlikely changes, but such probabilities are typically still assessed impressionistically rather than in a principled, empirically based way.
For example, in the area of lexical change, it is important to separate inherited material from borrowed material. Loanwords point to historical contact between two languages (there must have been speakers with sufficient knowledge of both languages at some stage), but not to genealogical relatedness (i.e. descent from a common ancestral language). But which words are the most likely to be inherited? Linguists often assume that there is a set of words that are highly stable, unlikely to be replaced by borrowings, meaning shift, or new formations, but they rely on impressionistic observations, such as "body part terms are unlikely to be borrowed", or "terms for new artifacts are often borrowed". The likelihood of lexical borrowing also depends on the type of contact situation. A language of a population conquered by war may be likely to borrow military terms from the conquerors' language, and seafaring populations may contribute marine words to languages spoken inland. An invading population may borrow terms for local flora and fauna even if it is technologically and economically superior to the indigenous population. Once such generalizations have been securely established (on the basis of attested examples), it will be possible to draw inferences about the history of a population from the loanword patterns of a language.
I will report on an ongoing effort to study loanwords in a sytematic way in a sample of about 40 languages from around the world, based on a fixed meaning list of 1460 items, and I will discuss prospects and challenges for this kind of typological study of language change. |
問い合わせ先: