Typology:

(competing) motivations

МД

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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 – «обстоятельства» усвоения и

использования языка

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Cristofaro’s ‘universals’

Universals of language proper

Functional universals =external motivations

Conceptual space (and its structure)

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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

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Кибрик 1992: on alignment

Underlying principles:

Economy Dicrimination Semanticity

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Cristofaro 2012

Functional universals (=motivations)

Iconicity Markedness Processing ease

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Croft 2003

(Competing) motivations

Processing ease Frequency of use …

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Inventory of motivations Iconicity

Economy/Markedness/Processing ease Economy Markedness Frequency Processing ease

Processing ease

Anthropo-/egocentricity

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Кибрик 1992: on alignment

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Motivations confront GG Cf.: processing ease, frequency and other

external motivations

Hawkins: “Chomsky … has argued that grammars are ultimately autonomous and 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 (pressions) but because they are the way they are (inherited UG)

Doris Payne’s leaf

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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? person hierarchies (e.g. clusivity)

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Iconicity

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”

underlying performance

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Economy(=markedness?) 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 (*Grice) Underlying performance (processing ease)

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Croft 2003

“Typology and Universals” links the discussion of economy and iconicity to the notion of markedness

marked category receives not less marking, allows for less suppletion/allomorphy/irregularities, distinguishes less cross-cutting categories, and occurs less often (than the unmarked one)

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Croft 2003

+Pl -Pl

+Sg

+ -

-Sg + +

Sg Pl

M he theyF she

N it

‘structural coding’

(morphological)

(paradigmatic)

‘behavorial potential’

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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

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Croft: economy vs. iconicity

How to prove their (co-)existence of competing economy and iconicity?

There are no patterns that are not motivated by either rare empty morphemes

(oFR) jeo ne di -> je ne dis pas -> je dis pasde l’eau -> dlo (HC)

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Croft: economy vs. iconicity

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Croft: economy vs. iconicity

Iconicity is understood as “paradigmatic isomorphism” (Hyman): the correspondence between meaning and form in a pradigmatic relation Lexical: synonymy, monosemy, homonymy,

polysemyPolysemy! recurrent similarity of form must reflect similarity in meaning

Form

Meaning

Economy

Iconicity

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Croft: economy vs. iconicity

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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

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Croft: markedness and frequency

How is this 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

What about behavorial?

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Why compete?

If functionalists are right in that linguitic 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

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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

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

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Back to universals: Indeed, in order for non-implicational and

implicational universals to be part of Universal Grammar, they have to be exceptionless, because by definition Universal Grammar involves the same components for all speakers. Yet very few, if any, typological universals are free from exceptions

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Hawkins 2003

preferred word orders in languages that permit choices are generally those that are productively grammaticalized in languages with fixed orders

Keenan-Comrie Accessibility Hierarchy is supported both by processing ease and frequency data from performance, and by grammatical data in the form of cut-off points for relativization

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Hawkins 2003

Performance-Grammar Correspondence Hypothesis:

Grammars have conventionalized syntactic structures in proportion to their degree of preference in performance, as evidenced by patterns of selection in corpora and by ease of processing in psycholinguistic experiments

In order to test the PGCH we need to examine variation data both across and within languages. If patterns in the one (in grammars) match patterns in the other (in performance), the hypothesis will be supported

Should also be supported by PsyLing evidence

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Hawkins 2012 Performance based principles (some of)

Minimize form: as in number hierarchy, oblique cases etc

(correlation between grammaticalization and frequency of use; link to the notion of markedness)

Minimize domain: as in relativization: accessibility, gapping

(correlation between grammaticalization and frequency of use)

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Summary Kibrik

shifting towards explanatory typology Haiman

iconicity (in a very abstract sense) Croft

markedness (melted iconicity and economy) Hawkins

focus on specific models of performance-grammar correspondance

Cristofaro – an overview