Scott DeLancey
LSA Summer Institute,
Santa Barbara, 2001
Lecture 1
On Functionalism
Our subject matter is
"functional syntax". This is
from the outset something of a misnomer, since one of the hallmarks of
functionalism is its refusal to recognize strict theoretical or methodological
boundaries among syntax and the explanatory realms of semantics, pragmatics,
and discourse, or for that matter among synchronic, diachronic, phylo- and
ontogenetic analysis and explanation.
That is, there is no such thing as "functionalist syntax" in
the sense that there is "generative syntax", since a generativist
assumes ex hypothesi that there is a distinct syntactic component in
Universal Grammar for "syntax" to be the study of.
Still, we all recognize that one of the
hallmarks of human language is the ability to combine symbolically-meaningful
signs into more complex structures.
Many clever mammals, and apparently a few birds, are able to learn a
substantial number of words, and even use them--but, with the marginal
exceptions of chimpanzees in the "ape language" experiments, only one
at a time. This uniquely human behavior
is what we call morphosyntax, and whether or not it forms a unitary and
legitimately discrete theoretical domain, it does form a roughly definable
field of inquiry.
Morphosyntax is indeed a wonderful, and
wonderfully complex, phenomenon. But
the true mystery, and the true locus of explanation for most of the fundamental
facts of syntax, is in what it is expressing.
We lightly debate whether or not language is "primarily" for
communication, without touching on exactly what linguistic
"communication" entails.
Human language is not simply a device for presenting and pointing to
interesting objects and events in the world.
It is a set of tools for communicating our experience, and its
structure is fundamentally informed by the structure of our experience and our
cultural models of experience.
Languages, for example, tend to afford distinct treatment of some kind
to expressions of individual internal experience ("experiencer
subject" predicates of emotion and cognition, internal states such as
hunger, etc.), which are treated differently grammatically from predicates
describing events typically known through perceptual data from the outside
world.
The purpose of this course will be to
demonstrate functionalist explanations of some of the phenomena which
constitute the subject matter of theories of core syntax. I will present a sequence of interwoven
accounts of aspects of clause structure from the inside out, and some
illustrations of the issues in clause combining phenomena. Grammaticalization will be a central theme,
and the outlines of grammaticalization theory will be presented in Lecture
3. With that as a basis, I will then
present an explanatory account of what we know about language, from the ground
up. Obviously this is too large a task
for the available time, and we will have to limit our scope in both breadth and
depth--there are limits to how far up from the ground we can get, and to how
many grammatical phenomena we can deal with.
But I hope to give you a sense of how much of linguistic structure can
be explained without recourse to untestable hypotheses about neural structure.
1.0 Functionalism
on the Linguistic Map
The term
"functional" has been attached to a variety of different models,
schools, movements, and methodologies, in and outside of linguistics. I am using it to refer specifically to the
movement which grew out of the work of a group of linguists mostly centered in
California in the 1970's, including Talmy Givón, Charles Li, Sandra Thompson,
Wallace Chafe, Paul Hopper, and others.
This grouping has also been referred to as "functional/typological
linguistics" or, informally, "West Coast" (Noonan 1999) or
"California" functionalism, though these last terms are by now
anachronistic, as there are prominent researchers closely identified with the
functional movement around the world.
Even within this narrowed application of
the term, there is certainly no monolithic "functional theory" shared
by all those who would identify themselves as part of or allied with the
functional movement. Givón (1984),
Hopper and Thompson (1984), and Langacker (1987), for example, present very
different (though not entirely incompatible) accounts of lexical categories, and
the "emergent grammar" of Hopper (1987, 1991) gives a very different
picture of syntax from, say, Givón 1995.
What all functionalists have in common is a rejection of the notion of
formalism as explanation. The basic
difference between functionalist and formalist linguistic frameworks is in
where explanations are lodged, and what counts as an explanation. Formal
linguistics generates explanations out of structure‑‑so that a
structural category or relation, such as command or Subjacency (see e.g. Newmeyer
1999:476-7) can legitimately count as an explanation for certain facts about
various syntactic structures and constructions. Most contemporary formal theories, certainly Generative Grammar
in all its manifestations, provide ontological grounding for these explanations
in a hypothesized, but unexplored and unexplained, biologically-based universal
language faculty.
Functionalists, in contrast, find
explanations in function,
and in recurrent
diachronic processes which are for the most part function-driven. That is, they see language as a tool, or,
better, a set of tools, whose forms are adapted to their functions, and thus
can be explained only in terms of those functions. Formal principles can be no more than generalizations over data,
so that most Generative "explanation" seems to functionalists to
proceed on the dormitive principle.[1] Functionalism in this sense overlaps
tremendously with--and in a real sense, subsumes--allied schools such as
Cognitive Grammar and the "Constructivist" school in Europe (e.g.
Schulze 1998).
Modern functionalism is, in important ways,
a return to the conception of the field of those linguists who founded the
linguistic approach to synchronic, as well as diachronic, phenomena in the late
19th century (see Whitney 1897, von der Gabelentz (1891), Paul (1886), inter
alia). These scholars understood
that linguistic structure must be explained in terms of functional, cognitive,
"psychological" imperatives:
Language,
then, signifies rather certain instrumentalities whereby men consciously and
with intention represent their thought, to the end, chiefly, of making it known
to other men; it is expression for the sake of communication. (Whitney 1897:1)
They also understood
that any language is a product of history, and that synchronic structure is
significantly informed by diachronic forces.
They looked to functional motivation for the basis of linguistic
structure, and to motivation and recurrent patterns of diachronic change for
explanations of cross-linguistic similarities of structure. In this respect modern functionalism is a
return to our roots after a nearly century-long structuralist (or, in Huck and
Goldsmith's (1995) useful term, "distributionalist") interregnum.
The roots of contemporary mainstream
linguistics, in contrast, go back only to the Structuralists who, in keeping
with the intellectual tenor of an era noteworthy for the ascendancy of
behaviorism in psychology and of Logical Positivism in philosophy, banished all
notion of explanation from the field, letting the structure simply be. (See, for example, the resolute empiricism
of Hockett 1966). This left them
without any avenue for explaining cross-linguistic similarities, but this was
an endeavor which most American Structuralists had little interest in. Note, for example, how Schmidt's (1926) and
Tesnière's (1959) documentation of extensive cross-linguistic correlations in
word order patterns aroused virtually no interest in American linguistics,
whereas within a decade of Greenberg's (1963) rediscovery of the phenomenon it
had launched the small but vigorous typological movement which is the direct
intellectual and sociological foundation of contemporary functionalism.[2]
The "Generative Revolution" which
began with Syntactic Structures is generally presented as a reaction to
this Structuralist agnosticism, a re-introduction of the notion of explanation
in the science of language.
Unfortunately, the Generativists inherited from their Structuralist
forbears a deep distrust of "external" explanation. They resolved the problem by positing
language-internal "explanations" for linguistic consistency. And to all appearances many contemporary
theoreticians continue to believe that they can have their cake and eat it too,
to have an autonomous theory of linguistics which explains structure without
itself needing explanation.
Functionalism in this respect is the true revolution--or, better,
counter-revolution, as it constitutes a return to a concept of explanation
which has been ignored since the Bloomfieldian Ascendancy.
2.0 Functionalist Metatheory
Defining a body of
opinion and research like Functionalism requires both a theoretical and a
sociological dimension. For Functional
linguistics, like Generative linguistics, or Minimalist syntax, or what have
you, refers both to a set of intellectual positions which define the school,
and to a group of scholars who adhere (to whatever degree) to it. Although they represent two different,
though overlapping, social groups, there is no sharp break in theory or
practice between the Functional and Cognitive movements in contemporary
linguistics. The difference between the
two schools, like, say, the difference between Autosegmental and Metrical Phonology,
has to do with the particular problems which their members find to be of the
most immediate interest, rather than any fundamental difference in their
approaches to explanation in linguistic theory, and the approaches of, on the
one hand, Cognitivists like Langacker, Lakoff, Fauconnier, or Goldberg, and on
the other functionalists like Givón, Hopper, Heine, or Bybee, clearly
complement one another.
I do not intend to present this course in
the format of "the Functionalist alternative to mainstream syntax". That is, I won't spend too much time
explaining at every juncture how and why our analysis is better than someone
else's. In the first place, sometimes
it's not--it may even be effectively the same analysis, couched in different
vocabulary. (Usually, though, the
terminological differences are the key to fundamental differences in the
theoretical framework within which the analysis is placed). More to the point, I can't consistently
address formalist alternatives to what I'm proposing, because I can't keep
track of what they are. It's hard to
hit a moving target ... But most of
all, because Functionalism is not simply a reaction to someone else's
theory--it is a framework for thinking about and explaining linguistic
structure and behavior, and, like any coherent framework, makes sense best when
it is presented in its own terms.
2.1 Structural and Functional
definitions
Linguistic categories can be defined in different ways. We will return to this in more detail in the
next lecture; here I simply want to introduce one of the basic aspects of
Functional analysis. Consider the
concept Noun. Start with the
traditional notional definition: '(word whose reference is) a person, place, or
thing'. The basic problem with this is
that it is not operationalizable. It
cannot reliably tell us whether a given concept will be a noun or a verb, since
many concepts can occur as both: the
classic example is fire and burn; similar problems arise with
English zero-derivation pairs like fight/fight. Moreover, a notional definition can't even
explain all nouns post hoc.
English honesty, for example, is clearly a noun. It does not refer to a person or place, so
it must qualify as a noun by referring to a thing. But by what criterion is HONESTY a thing? We are left chasing a circle: it must be a
thing, because it is labelled by a noun, honesty--and honesty is
a noun because it labels a thing, HONESTY.
(We will have occasion to deal further with this sort of circularity,
which is more apparent than real. The
perceived circularity inheres in the folk-theoretic conception of language as
an autonomous system into which meanings can be put. On this view, either "Nounness" or
"thingness" must be basic, and the other then must be defined in
terms of it. A better conception of
what we are looking at here starts from the premise that language is simply the
overt expression of cognitive structure.
Then THING is, indeed, a basic conceptual category, but Noun is not defined
in terms of THING, it is simply the linguistic manifestation of THING).
So Structuralists insist rigorously
structural definitions. A noun is a
word which fits into noun slots, pure and simple. This is operationalizable--to decide whether a word is a noun or
not, try and make it the subject of a clause, and see what happens. But this is unsatisfactory in three crucial
respects. First, as the Structuralists were
well aware, it makes it impossible to equate word classes across languages. And more critically, it offers no
explanation for why there should be such a thing as a "noun
slot", and why any particular word should fit into that slot rather
than some other. However much it might
outrage the positivistic assumptions of the likes of Bloch, there is no evading
the clear intuition that we all--linguists and non-linguists alike--have that
there is some notional basis at least to major categories like noun,
verb, adjective, and adposition.
2.2 Formal
and functional explanation
Consider the fact
that in a wide range of languages, across various language types, we find a
construction in which a constituent occurs in sentence-initial position, which
ordinarily would occur elsewhere in the sentence, and that in language after
language, this construction is used when the constituent is a contrastive or
resumptive topic, as in these examples from Thai and English (both basically
SVO languages):
1) khon naân maj ruucak
person
that NEG recognize
'I don't know that
guy.'
2) Costello
I'd hire in a minute.
One kind of account
"explains" this fact by saying that there is a syntactic position in
underlying structure at the beginning of a sentence. If a constituent is to be moved, it can only be moved to a syntactic
position, so there it goes. This is a
formal explanation: it follows the notion of explanation according to which a
phenomenon is explained if it can be given a place in a formal theory of
language, i.e. if the theory "can explain it on the basis of some
empirical assumptions about the form of language" (Chomsky 1965:26)[3]. But this is, once again, explanation by the
dormitive principle: essentially,
constituents get moved to initial position because, when they get moved, that's
where they end up.
To a functionalist, such an account cannot,
in principle, be an explanation. It is
simply a statement of the data. The
choice of vocabulary in which such a statement is made cannot constitute an
explanation. Moreover, it fails to
explain the apparent correlation between left-dislocation on the one hand and
topicality and contrastiveness on the other.
We do not, for example, find languages where contrastive constituents are
moved to sentence-second position, though this is also a syntactically-defined
position (cf. Newmeyer 1993:102-3).
A legitimate explanation for the
typological facts here must offer an account which provides a principled
reason for the association of topic function with initial position--otherwise
it is not an explanation, merely a description. And at least the basis of such an explanation is not far to
seek. It is a well-known and long
established fact in psychology that the first in a series--any kind of
series, in any modality--has a perceptually privileged position (Gernsbacher
and Hargreaves 1988, 1992). This fact
by itself is obviously not an explanation for any syntactic facts, but combined
with an adequate understanding of topicality and of sentence construction and
interpretation (see e.g. Gernsbacher 1990; we will return to this question in
later lectures) it offers the possibility of a truly explanatory
account.
For another example, consider the so-called
"Unaccusative Hypothesis". In
a significant number of languages the single arguments of monovalent verbs fall
into two classes in terms of some morphosyntactic behavior by which some of
them act like transitive subjects, others like transitive objects (see Mithun
1991; we will discuss some of these data more fully in a later lecture). In a fair number of languages, indeed, they
are explicitly coded like transitive subjects or objects by surface case
marking or indexation in the verb; a well-known example is Lakhota:
3) wa-kte 'I kill him'
wa-ñiwa~ 'I swim'
4) ma-kte 'he killed me'
ma-t'a 'I
die'
These are the data,
this is what must be explained. So what
explanation does the Unaccusative "Hypothesis" offer? Why, that some arguments of intransitives
are subjects, and some are "underlyingly" objects:
there
are two classes of intransitive verbs, the unaccusative verbs and the unergative
verbs, each associated with a different underlying syntactic configuration ...
an unergative verb takes a D-Structure subject and no object, whereas an
unaccusative verb takes a D-structure object ... and no subject ...
Alternatively, in argument structure terms, an unergative verb has an external
argument but no direct internal argument, whereas an unaccusative verb has a
direct internal argument but no external argument. (Levin and Rappaport Hovav 1995:2-3, emphasis original)
Clearly this
explanation is entirely theory-bound.
In order for it to even make sense, we have to first believe that there
simply are subjects and objects.
Then the claim that "there are two classes of intransitive
verbs" is not a hypothesis at all, but an empirical fact--it may or may
not be true (or have any morphosyntactic repercussions) in English or Chinese,
but in Lakhota, Pomo, Guarani, Acehnese, Lhasa Tibetan, Italian, Dutch, etc.,
it is an inescapable empirical fact that there are indeed two classes of
intransitive verb. Now, "each
associated with a different underlying syntactic configuration" is already
a theory-bound formulation; it is meaningful only in terms of some
interpretation of the phrase "underlying syntactic
configuration". L and R-H give us
some possible interpretations of this:
taking a "D-structure subject and no object" vs. "A
D-structure object and no subject", or an "external" but no
"internal" vs. "internal" but no "external"
argument.
But these formulations are meaningless
without a framework within which notions like "D-structure subject"
and "external argument" are defined.
From a functionalist perspective, notions like these cannot have any
explanatory value. We know that in
Lakhota, or Lhasa Tibetan, the subject (I am deliberately not saying
"surface subject"--that's the only "subject" there is) of
'jump' or 'swim' is marked like a transitive subject, and that of 'die' like a
transitive object. A functionalist
approach requires us to assume as a first hypothesis that this happens for a
functional reason--that in some cognitive or communicative respect the subject
of 'jump' is more like the subject than like the object of 'kill', and that of
'die' more like the object than like the subject. All that formulations like L & R-H's tell us is that they are
treated syntactically alike, and that is nothing more than we know from the
start. An explanatory account must
explain why they should be alike--why is a jumper more like a killer than a
killee, why is a dier more like a killee than a killer? Put otherwise, we need some story about how
you get to be an unaccusative or an unergative verb in this world.
Thus stated, part of the answer is
obvious. How is the subject of 'die'
like the object of 'kill'? Well,
because they both die, obviously. And,
similarly, how is a jumper like a killer?
Well, they both do something, cause something to happen in the world. Now, this begins to sound explanatory. If you want to develop an explanatory
theory, this is what needs to be developed.
If you want a formalized system, this is what you need to try and
formalize.
Relational Grammar accounts for these
patterns in terms of a priori categories, and thus says nothing concrete
beyond that the argument of some intransitive verbs is more subject-like, and
of others more object-like--in other words, is nothing more than a restatement
of the empirical facts--unless we buy the idea that "1",
"2", "3", and the associated theory of clause structure are
wired into the cortex, or in some other way determined by the structure of the
human organism. But even that is only a
preliminary "explanation"--somebody has to come up with a hypothesis
as to how (and why) such a thing could have gotten wired in.
Now, the RG account does make one
interesting claim/prediction--a universal maximum of 3 terms per clause. Again, in a sense this
"prediction" is merely a restatement of the typological facts, and
the "terms" of Tesnière and his Relational successors are simply a
generalization over certain data. But
the theory does make an explicit prediction that this typological tendency is
universal and exceptionless. And indeed
it seems to be. So this is a prediction
which any alternative account should be eventually able to match. But still, even with a prediction, there is
no explanation here. The terms are
"primes" of the theory, but this is not physics or geometry, and
we're not entitled to primes, any more than, say, biologists are. Before the theory is anything interesting,
it owes us some story about where these "primes" come from, and why
the magic number 3?
In effect, the "Unaccusative
Hypothesis" is nothing but a less explicit statement of the facts. It accomplishes nothing except to situate
the problem within a presupposed theoretical framework. We are still left with the question, why
are some arguments Subjects and some Objects?
We want to know what determines the behavior of the argument or
arguments of a particular predicate; all that this "hypothesis" does
is to label it. (Perlmutter and
Postal's (1984) radical proposal that the phenomenon might possibly be
semantics-driven was shot down the instant it saw print--in fact, 50 pages before
it saw print (Rosen 1984)).
2.3 Innateness
and Autonomy
The so-called
"innateness" question is sometimes presented as a basic division
between Generative and Functional approaches to language. This is, however, a significant
misrepresentation. The real issue is
not the vaguely-defined notion of "innateness" of language capacity,
but the somewhat (though not yet satisfactorily) more precise issue of the autonomy
of syntax. Much of the dismissive
rhetoric from both camps fails to disentangle the issues. One extreme position associated with
Generative linguistics is that there is an autonomous language
"module" in the brain, and that most basic facts about language are
what they are because they are constrained by the structure of this
module. Since the structure of the
brain is obviously part of the genetic endowment of the human species, so are
the existence and form of the language module.
Functionalists generally are skeptical of
the autonomy hypothesis, which has historically served to short-circuit any
attempt to search for functional explanations.
For if language is the way it is because that's what's wired into the
brain, then explanations in terms of function are at best otiose, and at worst
perverse. But this represents an
egregious violation of parsimony--for if aspects of language can be explained
in terms of non-linguistic constructs which are independently needed to explain
other aspects of perception and cognition, then there is no reason to
hypothesize specifically linguistic structures to account for the same facts.
Obviously, though, these other constructs
must ultimately be grounded in the structure of the brain, and thus are in some
sense part of the innate endowment of the human species. The real issue between generativists and
functionalists is not whether there are generalizations about language for
which adequate explanation may require reference to innate structures, but rather
the extent to which an understanding of language requires reference to neural
structures genetically dedicated to language.
I will in fact appeal at several points
during these lectures to psychological constructs which have every appearance
of being in some meaningful and specific sense innate--for example, edge
effects in the grammar of topic and focus, or figure-ground organization at the
root of case theory. If, by
"Universal Grammar", we are simply (metaphorically?) referring to a
set of such psychological principles, then we are all on the same page. But in general usage Universal Grammar
means something different, an innate set of specifically linguistic
principles. There is a vicious
circularity at this root of Generative theory, since there is no independent
evidence for UG beyond the very data which it is supposed to explain. For our kind of innateness we can find
independent extralinguistic support.
It is entirely possible--indeed, highly
probable--that when we thoroughly understand how, for example, Figure-Ground
organization structures grammar, it will be clear that our inherited
prelinguistic structure has become specially adapted to language. In other words, it is probable that there
are in fact evolutionary developments in the organization of the human brain
which represent adaptations specifically to, and for, language. But there is every reason to believe that
these represent small changes in pre-existing cognitive and perceptual
structures, and no reason whatever to imagine that any of them, or the sum of
all of them, constitute a radically novel, "autonomous" system, or
can be usefully thought of as a distinct, coherent "language organ".
Man
possesses, as one of his most marked and distinctive characteristics, a faculty
or capacity of speech--or, more accurately, various faculties and capacities
which lead inevitably to the production of speech: but the faculties are one thing, and their elaborated products
are another and very different one. So
man has a capacity for art, for the invention of instruments, for finding out
and applying the resources of mathematics ... but no man is born an artist, an
engineer, or a calculist, any more than he is born a speaker. (Whitney 1897:278-9)
It is self-evident that the ability to
learn and use language as humans do is part of the evolutionary inheritance of
the species. But it is far from obvious
that this involves dedicated syntax hardware.
To take a simple example: the
tremendous increase in the association cortex in humans (Hebb 1949) is no doubt
crucial to our ability to acquire and access the huge, massively interconnected
lexicon which is characteristic of human language. Indeed, quite regardless of the question of whether this
adaptation alone is sufficient to explain the human capacity for language
(Jerison 1973, Passingham 1982), it is undoubtedly necessary, and its
contribution to language must be at least part of the selective advantage which
made such an investment in costly cortex adaptive. But clearly this is not what anyone in the current debate means
by "innate language faculty".
Let us stipulate, so as not to get bogged
down in pointless argument, that it is clear that there must be aspects of the
human nervous system, which are among those which distinguish it from all other
known nervous systems, which allow for language. It is less clear a priori that any of the structures involved
constitute adaptations specific to language, i.e. a discrete "language
faculty", but again we may stipulate for the sake of argument that there
is good reason to believe that the brain of Homo sapiens is as it is in part
because of evolutionary adaptations for and to language. Let us further stipulate two factors which
clearly must be present for the development of language, and which must
represent part of the human biological endowment: the urge to communicate (characteristic, to some degree, of any
truly social species) and the "symbolic capacity" described by Deacon
(1997).
Beyond this, it is clear on general grounds
of scientific methodology that without specific evidence we must be cautious
about how much structure we want to attribute to specifically linguistic neural
adaptations. In practice, this means
that whatever we can explain without invoking otherwise unmotivated linguistic
structure should be so explained, and that our "language faculty",
"LAD", "Universal Grammar", or however we wish to think of
it, should be invoked only to explain patterns which cannot be explained using
more general, independently motivated principles. If we assume the hypothesis of innate, dedicated Universal
Grammar, this necessarily implies that we are hypothesizing complex neural
structures. By the standard economy
argument which is the basis of all science, simpler is better: the less structure we have to hypothesize
here, the better a theory we've got.
And, of course, the less that the theory of Universal Grammar has to
account for, the simpler it can be.
In the Chomskyan tradition, the goal of
linguistics is an abstract formal theory of Universal Grammar. Therefore, the less that the theory has to
explain, the better. This line of
reasoning leads inexorably to a research strategy in which we attempt to
provide explanations for as much as possible in terms of already established
psychological or neurological constructs, trying to identify the irreducible
residue that might plausibly reflect hard wired structures. And this necessarily leads to a research
strategy which is, essentially, Functionalism.
If you start from the assumption that nothing about language is innate,
if you're wrong, you'll eventually have to face the fact. As linguists, we are ultimately responsible
for explaining everything, and if you're left with an irreducible residue, then
you know you have to start thinking that some aspects of the subject matter
might just be given. But starting with an old‑fashioned Generative
innatist hypothesis, if you're wrong you'll never discover it‑‑your
theory would be falsified only if it could be proven that something you assume
is innate is actually explainable in other terms, but if you assume that there
are no other explanations for your data, you won't look for them, and that is a
good way not to find them.
2.4 The
Typological Approach
In the early days of
the Functionalist movement, attention to typology was one of the defining
methodological differences between Generative and Functionalist research. Orthodox opinion of the time regarded
typical typological facts as too superficial to be of any interest; only
detailed investigation of the facts of a specific language could cast any light
on the depths of linguistic theory. It
is certainly true that deep understanding requires deep analysis, and this must
always start with a thorough understanding of the facts of a particular
language. What typology does for us is
to help sort out what kinds of data require functional explanation. Isolated arbitrary facts of a particular
language may have many different sorts of explanation, including unique and
unrecoverable historical developments.
But patterns of structure, and of structure-function correlation, that
repeat themselves throughout the world, must be motivated. (Typological awareness could have done the
equivalent task, at any point in time, for Generative Grammar, of sorting out
what kinds of data need to be accounted for at the theoretical level--but
Generativists, in general, have tended to want to fold as much structure as
possible into theory).
Constructions can be classified and
compared across languages structurally and functionally. For example, we can look at recurrent
structural properties across languages of, say, reduplication--prefixal,
suffixal, infixal, full, partial, affecting verbs, nouns, etc. This is, for the most part, the research
program of formalist syntax. And we can
look at recurrent functional properties of reduplication: plural, distributive, imperfective,
persistive, etc. Or we can start from
function, and look cross-linguistically at the various expressions of
imperfectivity, of which reduplication would be one of several.
Of course it is logically possible that
there could be no principled relation between structure and function--that we
could expect to find equal numbers of languages where reduplication of a verb
stem codes imperfectivity or perfectivity, of a noun stem equally likely to
code plural or singular. (If you think
this example some kind of self-evident reductio ad absurdum, can you
explain why?) Or, for another example,
we might expect to find, among languages with structurally equivalent
noun-incorporation constructions, that in some the incorporated form codes
partitivity of the object, in others definiteness, while in others still it
might be the unmarked transitive construction, with the unincorporated
"normal" construction coding some pragmatically marked function. A basic task of typological exploration has
been to determine whether this is the case.
And it clearly is not--we find recurrent structure-function pairings
across languages. Reduplication has a
number of possible functions associated with it in different languages, but
marking the singular category of nouns is not one of them, while marking plural
a common one. On the other hand, it is
imaginable that we might find perfect correlation, i.e. that a given semantic
or pragmatic function is always expressed by the same structural means in every
language. But this is notoriously not
the case, otherwise there would be no grounds for argument.
But we DO find that, cross-linguistically,
certain structures tend to be used for certain functions, and certain functions
to be coded by certain structures. This
inescapably implies that syntax cannot be "autonomous" with respect
to function. Further, typological
investigation shows a principled relation between structure and function, most
easily seen in the process of grammaticalization.
3.0 The
Form of a Functional Grammar
Functional and
Generative theory differ on the very conception of the object of study. For Bloomfield (1926/1957) and his
successors, a language is "the totality of utterances that can be made in
a speech-community" (Bloomfield 1927/1957:26) or "a set (finite or
infinite) of sentences, each finite in length and constructed out of a finite
set of elements" (Chomsky 1957:13).[4] This is not the ordinary language meaning of
language, of course; when we speak of "knowing" a language, we
mean knowing how to produce appropriate utterances (not necessarily
"sentences") at will. In
Generative terms, this knowledge would consist of the grammar, with the
"appropriateness" handled by a set of interfaces between the grammar
and some undetermined set of extralinguistic cognitive modules.
For Functionalists, a language is a set of
constructions, from morphemes to discourse structures. A construction is a pairing of form and
function (Langacker 1987, Goldberg 1995).
(Construction Grammar is an attempt to formalize one conception of a
Functionalist grammar). These
constructions are the tools which speakers use to organize and communicate
mental representations, and, as with any tool, their form can only be
understood in relation to their function.
But, like any artifact, their form is not completely determined by their
function. Any tool is the product of a
particular culture, and reflects the design history, esthetics, and the
particular technological needs and wants of the culture and the individual
maker.
Most of the major and many minor
constructions in a language are in substantial part functionally (i.e.
semantic/pragmatically) motivated. But
note that function has to work with what is there--new tools can only be
fashioned out of the materials at hand, which are the product of thousands of
generations of language creation and adaptation. A common misunderstanding (or parody) of the concept of
functional explanation arises when it is interpreted against a background of
Generative theory, which is conceived of in terms of a pre-determined set of
syntactic elements. If we begin with
the assumption that there is a fixed, universal set of functions, and a fixed,
universal set of possible structural patterns, then the idea that form follows
function implies a theory in which there is an appropriate structure for each
predefined function. In that case, of
course, all languages would be pretty much alike. But there is no predefined set of functions--there are functions
which are relevant to all human communities, but it is their universal
relevance which makes them universally linguistic, not some imaginary neural
representation of them. And there is no
predefined set of structures--again, there are recurrent patterns, found in
languages around the world, but they are recurrent because they are effective
designs for carrying out recurrent tasks--the fact (to the extent that it is a
fact, which we will discuss later) that every language has something that can
be called a subject is a fact of the same kind as the fact that every culture
has something that could be called a hammer, or some kind of technological fix
for starting fires.
Constructions include all individual
morphemes and words, and categories like noun, subject, NP,
modal, antipassive, etc., to the extent that they can be
structurally justified in a particular language. Functionalists differ on how many and which of the multitudinous
attested categories of languages they are willing to simply assume the
existence and universality of--noun and verb are pretty popular; subject
has its adherents (Givón 1984, 1997) and detractors (Dryer 1997, Chafe and
Mithun 1999). NP gets a pretty
free ride, but is not an article of faith for anyone; VP is problematic
(Givón 1995). In general, though,
Functionalists do not subscribe to any doctrine of universal structure;
recurrent structures reflect functional rather than structural universals.
Language is a learned system, a system of
learned categories (NP, sentence, etc.)
This is hardly controversial. We
therefore expect the category structure of this system to follow general
principles of knowledge representation--e.g. to manifest prototype effects, if
this is in fact how cognitive categories behave. This is extremely controversial, but has to be taken as the null
hypothesis--even if linguistic knowledge is actually represented in a different
cognitive "module", why would we expect the nature of the
representation and of our access to it to be fundamentally different in kind
from what goes on in the rest of cognition?
4.0 Functional Explanation: Motivation, Routinization, and Diachrony
A popular caricature
of functionalism depicts it as asserting that a clear synchronic semantic or
pragmatic motivation can be found for every fact of every language. But no such claim belongs as part of
Functionalist theory. Quite the contrary--functionalists,
much more than generativists, are at home and comfortable with arbitrariness in
grammar, because we can actually explain it.
Since the earliest days of the functionalist movement it has been
standard practice to invoke diachronic explanations for certain kinds of linguistic
fact (see e.g. Greenberg 1969, 1979, Givón 1971, 1975, 1976, and especially
1979, Li and Thompson 1974, 1977, etc.)
The conspicuous inability of most formal linguists to understand this
aspect of functionalism stems from an unwavering, and often unthinking,
conviction of the reality and broad relevance of the "learnability"
problem.
Historical linguistics has traditionally
worked on the intuitively obvious assumption that morphology always starts out
regular and transparent. Irregularity
and opacity arise as sound change obscures old conditioning environments,
erasing the motivation for alternations which once upon a time made sense, but
over time become unpredictable.
(Essentially the same idea is recognized (synchronically) in the
Generative distinction between core and peripheral grammar, which is to say,
between the syntactic facts that can be easily motivated in terms of the theory
and those which can't, and therefore don't need to be).
This is exactly our approach to explaining
syntax. In any language, or in any set
of typological data, some syntactic facts are clearly functionally
motivated--for example, surface case marking in a typical Agent-Patient marking
language. Others lack an evident
functional motivation--for example, Greenberg-type cross-categorial ordering
correlations. Formal theory in general
makes no serious distinction between these two types of syntactic fact, since
it does not recognize function as an explanatory factor. To functionalists, obviously, both types,
and the differences between them, are of fundamental theoretical
importance. In a commonplace parody of
functionalism (see e.g. Newmeyer 1983), functionalists are assumed to claim
that every syntactic fact must have a functional motivation. But there are well-known empirical problems
with such a claim, and we don't need to take it seriously, even as a straw man.
Motivation
The simplest and most
fundamental motivation is simple reference.
That is, the reason why an English speaker wanting to communicate
something about a dog--even something so simple as the presence of one--might
say dog, is because that's what the word means--its function, simply
put, is to refer to the concept 'dog'.
While this example is simple, it is not trivial; it is the starting
point for the whole concept of motivation as it is used in Functional
linguistics.
The next step is the idea of motivated association. If someone wants to talk about a dog
barking, among other things, they will tend to put the word referring to the
dog and the word referring to bark together.
This can be thought of as a guide to the hearer to try and construct a
mental representation in which these two concepts occur together, but its
fundamental motivation is probably the fact that the two concepts occur as part
of a single representation in the speaker's mind, and the connection is
automatically reflected in the arrangement of words as the speaker expresses
the thought. This
tendency--"Behagel's Law", as it is sometimes labelled--is the basis
of constituency. If I am trying to get
my addressee to conceptualize a big black dog, I will keep the words for 'big',
'black', and 'dog' together, representing their conceptual contiguity. (This much of a notion of constituency is
neatly captured in a simple dependency representation with a prohibition
against lines crossing). Note that
there is nothing peculiarly syntactic about this tendency. I someone is telling a story, or describing
something, the narrative or description will group related elements
together--people who are unable or don't bother to do this are regarded as
incompetent, or even incoherent, narrators or describers. For that matter, a painter painting a
representational scene will represent things in the continguity relations in
which they actually occur--or else will change them in order to represent the
scene differently than he sees it. At a
fundamental conceptual level, putting the elements of a noun phrase in
syntactic contiguity is exactly the same thing.
Other examples of motivation require that
we postulate some motivations or cognitive structures on the part of
speakers. Since Bloomfield,
distributionalist theoreticians have found this a dangerous practice, smacking
of circularity. After all, how do we
know that speakers have mental representations which include
"topics", except for the structural facts which force us to recognize
topic as a linguistic category? And can
we then use this construct to "explain" the very facts which
motivated us to recognize it? (Cf.
Tomlin 1997)
Some Functionalist researchers have made
considerable efforts to break out of this apparent circularity, by, for
example, developing syntax-independent ways of measuring (Givón 1983) or
manipulating (Tomlin 1997) topicality.
But for the most part the circularity is more apparent than real. In many cases, as we will see, the syntactic
evidence points to a motivation for which there is ample psychological or, for
that matter, common-sense justification.
The basic function of language is to encode
a schematic representation of a mental representation. (Despite the rather bizarre demurrals which
occasionally pop out from the Generative camp, the basic function of such
encoding is self-evidently to communicate a representation to other people--but
there is no need to pursue that argument at the moment). The content of a mental representation of a
scene/event includes a representation of the scene, presented from a
particular perspective, with a particular hierarchy of foci of attention. Representation and attention
represent mechanisms of perception well-studied by psychologists. Perspective, and the domain of deixis,
represent a sort of categorial problem child, being neither entirely perceptual
nor cognitive nor social, and to my knowledge has received less systematic
attention from psychologists (but see e.g. Bühler 1934, Osgood 1980, von
Glaserfeld, Rommetweit, inter alia).
Neither has it been a topic of great interest in late 20th century
linguistics, perhaps being regarded as a pragmatic phenomenon of marginal
relevance to "core syntax".
But it is of far more than marginal relevance--as we will see, such
phenomena as inverse systems and split ergative marking are fundamentally
deictic in nature (DeLancey 1981a). In
any case, perspective and point of view are undeniably a basic part of our
everyday phenomenological experience, and hardly need extensive justification
as functional motivations. The basic
structures of attention and representation are built into the perceptual and
cognitive system--so why should we not expect these structures to inform
syntax, which is after all a system (or, set of strategies) for encoding representation
and attention?
A discourse--which may be only a single
utterance--involves one or more (but typically two or more) interlocutors and
takes place at an actual place and time.
It may also have a narrative deictic center distinct from the (which may
change in the course of an extended narrative) and a location in space and time
in an established shared fictive universe (i.e one presented in terms of the
network of culturally-defined models indexed by the language of the
discourse)--by default the present shared world of the interlocutors. Utterances and sentences in the discourse
are anchored to the speech situation by tense marking, 1st and 2nd person
(Speech Act Participants, or SAPs) pronouns and other grammatical
reflections of their deictic centrality (e.g. inverse and split ergative clause
structure (DeLancey 1981a, we will discuss some of these data in Lecture 6; for
more exotic examples see DeLancey 1992a)[5],
lexically deictic 'go'/'come' verbs or grammatical devices for specifying
deictic orientation of motion. Inverse
marking and motional deixis may also be used to anchor a sentence to a
narrative deictic center and to a fictional universe--i.e. anything
other than the culturally sanctioned public interpretation of the shared
present. (A "true" account of
a past event takes place in a fictional universe by this definition).
So a discourse "takes place" in a
mental space constructed cooperatively by the interlocutors. This space has the essential structure of
actual space-time, as perceived by a particular viewpoint character. Within this defined space, a clause
represents a single event or described state.
A finite clause presents an event or state, organized like
a percept, that is, presented from a specific point of view, with attention
focussed on a particular element in the scene, which is thus organized into
Figure and Ground, like any other percept--indeed, a sentence has the same kind
of nested Figure-Ground structure as a percept. I intend to show in these lectures that, given a such few
psychological constructs--figure/ground, motion, point-of-view, focus of
attention, elementary causation à la Michotte--I can give you a lot of syntax. Yes, there is innate structure, but it is pretty
basic, and none of it fundamentally linguistic.
Routinization
Routinization is the
genesis of grammar. In the third
lecture we will discuss at much greater length the theory of
grammaticalization, which is the diachronic study of the routinization process
and its effects. The basic principle is
a simple one, again familiar from many areas of human activity. An organism faced with carrying out an
unfamiliar task must expend significant amounts of cognitive capacity on it,
and will not necessarily hit upon the most efficient and streamlined way of
carrying it out. But a task which has
to be carried out frequently eventually becomes routinized--it requires little
thought, because anything that needs to be figured out about how to do it has
been figured out long ago. If the task
is one which must be regularly carried out by many or all people in a
particular community, over time the community will develop a set, streamlined way,
or a specially designed tool, for doing it.
The set strategy, or the use of the special tool, will then be learned
as part of the culture of the community, so that succeeding generations don't
have to invent new strategies for dealing with a problem which their ancestors
already solved.
Let us return to our imaginary primordial
language scene, and imagine a language builder, with a substantial vocabulary
of nouns and verbs (where those come from we will talk about in the next
lecture) but no syntax. She observes
someone someone picking up a stick. For
reasons we have already discussed, a language builder wishing to communicate
this representation will say the words for 'pick up' and 'stick'. If the stick-picker is not already a focus
of attention of both speaker and hearer, she may also produce a word referring
to him (most likely a name), but for now let's just think about
"inner" arguments (a topic which we will return to, in a very
different guise, in Lecture 4).
Now let us imagine a more complicated
event--someone picks up a stick and uses it to pry the bark off a fallen log.[6] The most obvious way of expressing this will
be to separately describe the two events:
pickup stick and pry bark. We have already explained why pickup and stick go
together, and likewise pry and bark. Though our primordial language builders may not have hit on word
order yet, they will still have this much constituency: this clustering is
self-evidently far more natural than any other possibility, e.g. pry stick
bark pickup.
Now, a fundamental biological fact about
human beings is that we are tool users--we use things, like sticks, to
accomplish tasks, like prying up bark.
Therefore event clusters like this, in which someone takes a potential
instrument in hand and uses it to carry out a task, will be very common in the
experience of any human being. If this
constellation of subevents is something which speakers often have reason to
want to represent linguistically, then over time the construction pickup N
will become routinized as the linguistic device for expressing this category of
experience. In our primordial scenario
there's still no other grammar, except for our nascent instrumental
construction, so I cannot salt the example with evidence of grammaticalization. But in actual languages, we know that there
is a set of structural changes which typically accompany this kind of
routinization--as a verbal construction becomes routinized in this kind of
function, it tends to lose its typically verbal behaviors (e.g. agreement,
tense/aspect marking and other specifically verbal morphology), turning into a
more streamlined tool, more precisely designed for its specific purpose.
Thus routinization is usually itself
motivated--it represents the linguistic instantiation of a behavior universal
to humans, and indeed to higher vertebrates.
But some routinization may be more arbitrary than that. In our primordial scenario, word order has
not yet been discovered--the words 'pick up' and 'stick' can presumably occur in
either of the possible orders. (When we
come to the study of topicality we will see possible motivations which might
affect this choice, but for our present thought experiment let us leave it as
arbitrary). But human beings are
creatures of habit and of fashion, and cultures often settle on arbitrary,
formulaic ways of performing common tasks.
If, in our community of language-builders, it has become the custom to
present propositions such as we are imagining with the argument first, or with
the verb first, then they have invented basic word order, by arbitrarily
routinizing the choice of order. As we
will see, this can have far-reaching effects on the future development of the
language. Let us suppose that in this
community the fashion is verb first. As
pickup becomes routinized in its instrumental function, it will, over
time, develop into the functional equivalent of an adposition. (It cannot develop into a true,
structurally-diagnosable adposition until we have some more syntax). More specifically, it will develop into a preposition,
because its position preceding its argument is already fixed. In many languages, subordinating
conjunctions develop from adpositional constructions, so that if this
particular language has developed prepositions, we can predict that it is
likely, further down the road, to develop clause-initial subordinators. The opposite choice of argument-verb order,
in contrast, would give us postpositions and clause-final subordinators.
The Origins of Opacity
Just as in phonology,
diachronic processes frequently obscure the original motivation for a
construction. Consider a simple
example. English has a productive
construction of the form V (NP) PP, in which the PP represents its NP as the
cause of the state or event, as faint from exhaustion, be laid up
with pneumonia, or crack under pressure. In most instances of this type we can identify a semantic
motivation for the choice of preposition.
Undoubtedly the commonest preposition in this function is from,
and it is no coincidence that this is also the most semantically
transparent. The use of ablative forms
to indicate a causal relationship is crosslinguistically widespread[7]
(Anderson 1971, Diehl 1975, DeLancey 1981), and well-attested in both adult and
child English (DeLancey 1984, Clark and Carpenter 1989). Under occurs with a set of nouns
literally or metaphorically associated with the idea of weight bearing on
something (weight, pressure, strain, etc.). The simplest concrete physical instance of
such a configuration involves a heavy mass on top of something else, which then
bears the strain of the weight or, as the case may be, fails to bear it. This is the concrete basis for metaphorical
construals like He broke under interrogation. Thus under, like from, has a synchronic semantic
motivation in this construction.
There is, however, one prepositional use of
this kind which is completely opaque.
We find of used with causal force in the fixed lexical
expressions sick and/or tired of, and with die (die
of cancer/hunger/embarrassment/a broken heart, etc.) This usage lacks synchronic motivation;
there is nothing in the productive use of of in modern English which
predicts or explains it. However, the
documentary history of English provides ample evidence for earlier productive
uses of of with explicit causal force.
It occurs in something very like its modern use with die with a
much wider range of predicates (all examples from the Oxford English
Dictionary):
5) Ionas
was exceadinge glad of the wylde vyne.
(1535)
It also occurred
productively marking the agents of passive sentences:
6) That the
juice that the ground requires be not sucked out of the sunne. (1577)
7) The
relatiue is not always gouerned of the verbe that he commeth
before. (1590)
8) Being
warned of God in a dream ... (1611)
Both of these are
well-attested synchronic uses of from, but this sense of of is no
longer a productive part of the language.
Nevertheless, as we see, it persists in a handful of contemporary
constructions.
Thus the explanation for why we use of
in die of cancer is of a different kind from the explanation for the use
of from in
exhausted from
overwork. The use of from in this construction
is motivated, it makes semantic sense.
The use of of in the same function is not synchronically
motivated; it does not make semantic sense.
However, when that construction first developed, the semantics of of
were different, and its use in this sense was semantically motivated, in
exactly the same way that the contemporary use of from is. Thus we have a case where diachronic change has
erased the original motivation for a particular aspect of a construction.
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[1]The explanation given in Molière's Le malade imaginaire for why
opium induces sleep is that it contains a "dormitive principle".
[2]Though, in justice to our predecessors, it could well have had
something to do with embarrassment at Schmidt's highly speculative ideas about
ethnological typology, and his attempts to correlate them with linguistic
typology.