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Lectures on Functional Syntax

Scott DeLancey

University of Oregon

Draft--comments welcome Department of Linguistics 1290 University of Oregon Eugene, OR 97403- U.S.A [email protected]

1.4 Functional Explanation: Motivation, Routinization, and

3.3.1 The Semantic Structure of Ditransitive Clauses ................................................ 68 3.3.2 The Semantic Structure of Possessional Clauses 3.4.1 Defining Relations in Terms of Event Structure

8.2.3.1 Expansion of the Cislocative in Kuki-Chin

• Lecture 1: On Functionalism.....................................
  • 1.1 Functionalism on the Linguistic Map...................
  • 1.2 Functionalist Metatheory.............................
    • 1.2.1 Structural and Functional definitions.........
    • 1.2.2 Formal and functional explanation.............
    • 1.2.3 Innateness and Autonomy.......................
    • 1.2.4 The Typological Approach......................
  • 1.3 The Form of a Functional Grammar.....................
    • Diachrony............................................
    • 1.4.1 Motivation....................................
    • 1.4.2 Routinization.................................
    • 1.4.3 The Origins of Opacity........................
• Lecture 2: Lexical Categories..................................
  • 2.1 Defining categories..................................
    • 2.1.1 Structural categories.........................
  • 2.2 Nouns and Verbs......................................
    • 2.2.1 Nouns and Verbs as Universal Categories.......
    • 2.2.2 What are Nouns and Verbs?.....................
  • 2.3 Adjectives...........................................
    • 2.3.1 Verbal and Nominal Property Concept Words.....
    • 2.3.2 Adjective as a Functional Sink................
  • 2.4 Problems for a Theory of Minor Categories............
    • 2.4.1 Categories of one.............................
    • 2.4.2 Universal categories? The adposition story...
• Lecture 3: Figure and Ground in Argument Structure.............
  • 3.1 The Concept of Case..................................
  • 3.2 On Case Grammar......................................
    • 3.2.1 Early suggestions.............................
    • 3.2.2 Typology and case.............................
  • 3.3 The grammar of THEME and LOC.........................
    • 3.3.3 "Experiencers" as locatives...................
    • 3.3.4 Locative and Theme objects....................
    • 3.3.5 The Syntax and Semantics of Theme and Loc.....
  • 3.4 The Theoretical Importance of Thematic Relations.....
    • 3.4.2 Theme, Loc, and Innateness....................
• Lecture 5: Grammaticalization..................................
  • 5.1 Introduction.........................................
    • 5.1.1 History of grammaticalization studies..........
    • 5.1.2. Grammatical and lexical meaning...............
      • studies......................................... 5.1.3. Theoretical significance of grammaticalization
  • 5.2. An overview of grammaticalization....................
    • 5.2.1. Grammaticalization exemplified................
    • 5.2.2. Stages of grammaticalization..................
    • 5.2.3. The cycle.....................................
    • 5.2.4 Sources and Pathways..........................
  • 5.3. The process of grammaticalization...................
    • 5.3.1 Functional aspects of grammaticalization.......
    • 5.3.2 Syntactic aspects of grammaticalization.......
    • 5.3.3 Grammaticalization and Lexicalization........
• Lecture 6: Two Questions of Phrase Structure..................
  • 6.1 The Gradience of Categories.........................
    • 6.1.2 Postpositions and Relator Nouns in Tibetan...
    • 6.1.3 Problems of Phrase Structure.................
    • 6.2.1 Early Word Order Studies.....................
    • 6.2.2 Grammaticalization and Typology..............
      • Structure...................................... 6.2.3 Grammaticalization and the Theory of Phrase
• Lecture 7: Toward a Typology of Grammatical Relations.........
  • 7.1 A Typology of Grammatical Relations.................
    • 7.1.1 The Nominative-Accusative Pattern............
    • 7.1.2 Ergative Patterns............................
    • 7.1.3 Split S......................................
  • 7.2 A language without syntactic subjects or objects....
    • 7.2.1 Case in Tibetan..............................
      • 7.2.1.1 Absolutive.............................
      • 7.2.1.2 Locative..............................
      • 7.2.1.3 Ergative..............................
      • 7.2.1.4 Case and Grammatical Relations........
    • 7.2.2 Relativization...............................
      • 7.2.2.1 Relativization and Thematic Relations.
      • 7.2.2.2 Evidence for Incipient Subjecthood....
    • 7.2.3 Auxiliary selection..........................
    • 7.2.4 Subject and Object in Tibetan................
• Lecture 8: Split-ergative and Inverse Systems.................
  • 8.1 Split Ergative and Inverse Marking..................
    • 8.1.1 Split-ergative Case Marking and Indexation...
    • 8.1.2 Inverse systems..............................
      • 8.1.2.1 Nocte.................................
      • 8.1.2.2 The classic direction system: Cree...
      • 8.1.2.3 The direction-marking prototype.......
  • 8.2 Variations on a Theme...............................
    • 8.2.1 Hierarchical agreement.......................
    • 8.2.2 Sahaptian....................................
    • 8.2.3 Inverse with non-hierarchical agreement......
      • 8.2.3.2 The Dravidian "Special Base"..........
      • 8.2.3.3 Subject and Deictic Center............
  • 8.3 A Unified Approach to Hierarchical systems..........
    • 8.3.1 Viewpoint and Attention Flow.................
    • 8.3.2 The "Pragmatic Inverse"......................
      • 8.3.2.1 Expansion of the Concept..............
      • 8.3.2.2 "Semantic" and "Pragmatic" Inverse....
• Lecture 9: Subject and Topic: Starting Points.................
  • 9.1 Approaches to Subjecthood...........................
    • 9.1.1 Formal definitions...........................
    • 9.1.2 Typological approaches.......................
    • 9.1.3 Basic and Derived Subjects...................
  • 9.2 Theories of Subject.................................
    • 9.2.1 Subject and Topic............................
    • 9.2.2 Subject as Starting Point....................
    • 9.2.3 Attention and subject formation.............. - controlled discourse production........... 9.2.3.1 Attention and subject selection in
      • 9.2.3.2 Attention and topicality..............
  • 9.3 Basic Subjects......................................
• References....................................................

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

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 1 The explanation given in Molière's Le malade imaginaire for why opium induces sleep is that it contains a "dormitive principle".

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. 1.2 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 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.

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. 1.2.2 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): I.) khon naân maj ruucak person that NEG recognize 'I don't know that guy.' II.) 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. 3 Sic. The content of the word "empirical" in this sentence has never been clear to me.

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: III.) wa-kte 'I kill him' wa-ñiwa~ 'I swim' IV.) 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

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)). 1.2.3 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.

"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.

1.2.4 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