Typology: (competing) motivations

1. Typology: (competing) motivations

2. А.Е. Кибрик • От таксономической к объяснительной • ‘Как’ типология -> ‘Почему’ типология • Объяснение следует искать вне собственно языковой структуры • отличается от объяснений через «обобщение» • Для Кибрика собственно вне структуры находятся «обстоятельства» усвоения и использования языка

3. Кибрик 1992: on alignment • Underlying principles (=motivations): • Economy • Discrimination • Semanticity

4. Payne’s leaf • Why is the leaf flat? • It’s done so • It’s father was so (it was born so) • … • It maximizes its surface for photosynthesis • Functionalism is biology!

5. Cristofaro’s ‘universals’ • Universals of language proper • Functional universals • =external motivations • Conceptual space (and its structure)

6. Cristofaro 2012 • Functional universals (=motivations) • Iconicity • Markedness • Processing ease

7. Croft 2003 • (Competing) motivations • Processing ease • Frequency of use • …

8. Inventory of motivations • Iconicity • Economy/Markedness/Processing ease • Economy • Markedness • Frequency • Processing ease • Processing ease • Anthropo-/ego-centricity

9. x-centricity • anthropo- • animacy hierarchy • probably, related to salience (see Comrie on markedness and DuBois on frequency below) • ego- • the central place all shifters have in human language? (probably, logo- rather than ego-) • logophoricity (see Nikitina on Africa) • person hierarchies (e.g. clusivity)

10. Grice’s maxims of co-operation • Maxim of Quality: • Try to make your contribution one that is true • Do not say what you believe to be false! • Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence!

11. Grice’s maxims of co-operation • Maxim of Quality • Maxim of Quantity: • Make your contribution as informative as is required! • Do not make your contribution more informative than is required!

12. Grice’s maxims of co-operation • Maxim of Quality • Maxim of Quantity • Maxim of Relevance: • Be relevant

13. Grice’s maxims of co-operation • Maxim of Quality • Maxim of Quantity • Maxim of Relevance • Maxim of Manner: • Be perspicuous • Avoid obscurity of expression! • Avoid ambiguity! • Be brief! • Be orderly!

14. Grice’s maxims of co-operation • Maxim of Quality Maxim of Quantity Maxim of Relevance • Maxim of Manner

15. Iconicity • Talmy Givon: “All other thing being equal, a coded experience is easier to store, retrieve and communicate if the code is maximally isomorphic to the experience” • derived from performance/processing

16. Economy -> markedness Sonia Cristofaro: if conceptual situations that are less frequent at the discourse level are associated with zero-marking, so will conceptual situations that are more frequent at the discourse level • this is (arguably) because more frequent conceptual situations are easier to recognize and therefore need not be expressed overtly • an instance of the general economic principle whereby speakers do not express information overtly whenever they can afford to do so - Gricean • derived from performance/processing

17. Economy & Iconicity ~ Markedness “Typology and Universals” Croft 2003 links the discussion of economy and iconicity to the notion of markedness • cognitively marked categories receive not less marking, allow for less suppletion/allomorphy/ irregularities, distinguish less cross-cutting categories, and occur less often (than the unmarked ones)

18. Croft 2003 (paradigmatic) ‘behavorial potential’ ‘structural coding’ (morphological)

19. Croft: economy vs. iconicity • Iconicity is understood as “syntagmatic isomorphism” (Hyman): the correspondence between meaning and form in a syntagmatic relation • Economy is understood (primarily) as amount of morphological material

20. Croft: economy vs. iconicity How to prove (co-)existence of (competing) economy and iconicity? • There are no patterns that are not motivated by either • rarity of empty morphemes (oFR) jeo ne di -> je ne dis pas -> je dis pas de l’eau -> dlo (HC) VpN: vocative pro nominative

21. Croft: economy vs. iconicity

22. Croft: economy vs. iconicity • Iconicity is understood as “paradigmatic isomorphism” (Hyman): the correspondence between meaning and form in a paradigmatic relation • Lexical: synonymy, monosemy, homonymy, polysemy Polysemy! recurrent similarity of form must reflect similarity in meaning (or what else can it reflect?) Iconicity Meaning Form Economy

23. Croft: economy vs. iconicity

24. Croft: markedness and frequency • The unmarked tokens will occur at least as frequently as marked tokens (Greenberg) • Connects properties of language structure to properties of language use

25. Croft: markedness and frequency How is frequency connected to economy? • Zipf’s law: more frequent tokens are shorter • DuBois: Grammars code best what speakers do most • Non-iconic economical mappings (cumulation, suppletion; homonymy, polysemy) are found in frequent tokens

26. Motivations challenge GG Processing ease, frequency and other external motivations • Hawkins: “Chomsky … has argued that grammars are ultimately autonomousand independent of performance factors, and are determined by an innate U(niversal) G(rammar)” • Cristofaro: Chomsky insists that languages are the way they are not because of external reasons (pressures) but because they are the way they are (inherited UG)

27. … challenge GG Indeed,in order for a universal to be part of Universal Grammar, they have to beexceptionless, because by definition Universal Grammar involves the same components for all speakers. Yet veryfew, if any, typological universals are free from exceptions.

28. Why compete? • If functionalists are right in that linguistic structures are ‘externally’ motivated, why do languages have different structures? • Competing motivations • Different motivations are differently strong; they all have chances – though different chances – to win

29. Cristofaro’s points Competing motivations explain cross-linguistic variation • Existence of competing motivations explains not only existence of relatively well represented types (ergative vs. accusative) which can be explained away by ‘parameters’ of GG but also the fact that (almost) no universal is absolute: all are statistical

30. Cristofaro’s points Contra e.g. Kibrik, motivations do not affect language acquisition or spread or use but only language change (creation of novel constructions) • motivations do not pertain to language use but to language change; explains effect of vestiges

31. Hawkins 2003 • preferred word orders inlanguages that permit choices are generallythose that are productively grammaticalizedin languages with fixed orders • Keenan-ComrieAccessibility Hierarchy is supportedboth by processing ease and frequencydata from performance, and by data in the form of cut-off points for relativization from grammar

32. From Givon to Hawkins • Today’s morphology is yesterday’s syntax (Givon) • Today’s synax is yesterday’s discourse!

33. Hawkins 2003 Performance-Grammar Correspondence Hypothesis: • Grammars have conventionalized syntactic structures in proportion to their degree of preference inperformance, as evidenced by patterns of selection in corpora and by ease of processing in psycholinguisticexperiments • In order to testthe PGCH we need to examine variation data both across and within languages. If patterns in the one (ingrammars) match patterns in the other (in performance), the hypothesis will be supported • Should also be supported by PsyLing evidence

34. Hawkins 2012 Performance based principles (some of) • Minimize form: • as in number hierarchy, oblique cases etc (correlation between grammaticalization and frequency of use; connection to markedness) • Minimize domain: • as in relativization: accessibility, gapping (correlation between grammaticalization and frequency of use)

35. Summary • Kibrik • shifting towards explanatory typology • Haiman • abstracting iconicity • Croft • markedness: melting iconicity and economy • Hawkins • modeling performance-grammar correspondence • Cristofaro – an overview