Lectures on Functional Syntax
Scott DeLancey
University of Oregon
Draft--comments welcome
Department of Linguistics
1290 University of Oregon
Eugene, OR 97403-1290
U.S.A
Lecture 1: On Functionalism...... 6
1.1Functionalism on the Linguistic Map...... 7
1.2 Functionalist Metatheory...... 10
1.2.1 Structural and Functional definitions...... 10
1.2.2 Formal and functional explanation...... 11
1.2.3 Innateness and Autonomy...... 16
1.2.4 The Typological Approach...... 19
1.3The Form of a Functional Grammar...... 20
1.4Functional Explanation: Motivation, Routinization, and Diachrony 23
1.4.1 Motivation...... 24
1.4.2 Routinization...... 27
1.4.3 The Origins of Opacity...... 29
Lecture 2: Lexical Categories...... 31
2.1 Defining categories...... 31
2.1.1 Structural categories...... 34
2.2 Nouns and Verbs...... 36
2.2.1 Nouns and Verbs as Universal Categories...... 36
2.2.2 What are Nouns and Verbs?...... 39
2.3 Adjectives...... 43
2.3.1 Verbal and Nominal Property Concept Words....45
2.3.2 Adjective as a Functional Sink...... 49
2.4 Problems for a Theory of Minor Categories...... 51
2.4.1 Categories of one...... 51
2.4.2 Universal categories? The adposition story..54
Lecture 3: Figure and Ground in Argument Structure...... 59
3.1 The Concept of Case...... 59
3.2 On Case Grammar...... 61
3.2.1 Early suggestions...... 64
3.2.2 Typology and case...... 65
3.3 The grammar of THEME and LOC...... 68
3.3.1 The Semantic Structure of Ditransitive Clauses 68
3.3.2 The Semantic Structure of Possessional Clauses 70
3.3.3 "Experiencers" as locatives...... 73
3.3.4 Locative and Theme objects...... 74
3.3.5 The Syntax and Semantics of Theme and Loc....76
3.4 The Theoretical Importance of Thematic Relations....79
3.4.1 Defining Relations in Terms of Event Structure 79
3.4.2 Theme, Loc, and Innateness...... 82
Lecture 5: Grammaticalization...... 87
5.1 Introduction...... 87
5.1.1 History of grammaticalization studies...... 87
5.1.2. Grammatical and lexical meaning...... 89
5.1.3. Theoretical significance of grammaticalization studies 89
5.2. An overview of grammaticalization...... 91
5.2.1. Grammaticalization exemplified...... 91
5.2.2. Stages of grammaticalization...... 93
5.2.3. The cycle...... 95
5.2.4 Sources and Pathways...... 97
5.3. The process of grammaticalization...... 99
5.3.1 Functional aspects of grammaticalization...... 99
5.3.2 Syntactic aspects of grammaticalization...... 100
5.3.3 Grammaticalization and Lexicalization...... 102
Lecture 6: Two Questions of Phrase Structure...... 104
6.1 The Gradience of Categories...... 104
6.1.1 Relator Nouns and the gradience of categories 105
6.1.2 Postpositions and Relator Nouns in Tibetan..108
6.1.3 Problems of Phrase Structure...... 110
6.2 Grammaticalization and Cross-categorial Correlations 113
6.2.1 Early Word Order Studies...... 113
6.2.2 Grammaticalization and Typology...... 115
6.2.3 Grammaticalization and the Theory of Phrase Structure 117
Lecture 7: Toward a Typology of Grammatical Relations...... 119
7.1 A Typology of Grammatical Relations...... 119
7.1.1 The Nominative-Accusative Pattern...... 120
7.1.2 Ergative Patterns...... 121
7.1.3 Split S...... 123
7.2 A language without syntactic subjects or objects...124
7.2.1 Case in Tibetan...... 124
7.2.1.1 Absolutive...... 125
7.2.1.2 Locative...... 125
7.2.1.3 Ergative...... 126
7.2.1.4 Case and Grammatical Relations...... 127
7.2.2 Relativization...... 128
7.2.2.1 Relativization and Thematic Relations128
7.2.2.2 Evidence for Incipient Subjecthood...131
7.2.3 Auxiliary selection...... 134
7.2.4 Subject and Object in Tibetan...... 135
Lecture 8: Split-ergative and Inverse Systems...... 137
8.1 Split Ergative and Inverse Marking...... 137
8.1.1 Split-ergative Case Marking and Indexation..137
8.1.2 Inverse systems...... 140
8.1.2.1 Nocte...... 141
8.1.2.2 The classic direction system: Cree..143
8.1.2.3 The direction-marking prototype...... 145
8.2 Variations on a Theme...... 146
8.2.1 Hierarchical agreement...... 146
8.2.2 Sahaptian...... 147
8.2.3 Inverse with non-hierarchical agreement.....150
8.2.3.1 Expansion of the Cislocative in Kuki-Chin 150
8.2.3.2 The Dravidian "Special Base"...... 152
8.2.3.3 Subject and Deictic Center...... 153
8.3 A Unified Approach to Hierarchical systems...... 153
8.3.1 Viewpoint and Attention Flow...... 154
8.3.2 The "Pragmatic Inverse"...... 156
8.3.2.1 Expansion of the Concept...... 156
8.3.2.2 "Semantic" and "Pragmatic" Inverse...158
Lecture 9: Subject and Topic: Starting Points...... 162
9.1 Approaches to Subjecthood...... 163
9.1.1 Formal definitions...... 163
9.1.2 Typological approaches...... 164
9.1.3 Basic and Derived Subjects...... 166
9.2 Theories of Subject...... 167
9.2.1 Subject and Topic...... 167
9.2.2 Subject as Starting Point...... 169
9.2.3 Attention and subject formation...... 170
9.2.3.1 Attention and subject selection in controlled discourse production 170
9.2.3.2 Attention and topicality...... 172
9.3 Basic Subjects...... 173
References...... 176
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.
1.1Functionalism 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 structureso 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.
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 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.
1.2.1 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.
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.
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.