A Typology of Purpose Clauses (Typological Studies in Language)

A Typology of Purpose Clauses Typological Studies in Language (TSL) A companion series to the journal Studies in Lang...

Author: Karsten Schmidtke-Bode

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A Typology of Purpose Clauses

Typological Studies in Language (TSL) A companion series to the journal Studies in Language. Volumes in this series are functionally and typologically oriented, covering specific topics in language by collecting together data from a wide variety of languages and language typologies.

Editor Spike Gildea

University of Oregon

Editorial Board Balthasar Bickel

John Haiman

Andrew Pawley

Bernard Comrie

Martin Haspelmath

Doris L. Payne

Denis Creissels

Bernd Heine

Franz Plank

William Croft

Paul J. Hopper

Anna Siewierska

Nicholas Evans

Andrej A. Kibrik

Dan I. Slobin

Carol Genetti

Marianne Mithun

Sandra A. Thompson

Leipzig

Leipzig / Santa Barbara Lyon

Albuquerque Canberra

Santa Barbara

St Paul

Leipzig Köln

Pittsburgh Moscow

Santa Barbara

Volume 88 A Typology of Purpose Clauses by Karsten Schmidtke-Bode

Canberra Oregon

Konstanz

Lancaster Berkeley

Santa Barbara


Karsten Schmidtke-Bode Friedrich Schiller University, Jena

John Benjamins Publishing Company Amsterdam / Philadelphia

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TM

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences – Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.48-1984.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Schmidtke-Bode, Karsten. A typology of purpose clauses / Karsten Schmidtke-Bode. p. cm. (Typological Studies in Language, issn 0167-7373 ; v. 88) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Grammar, Comparative and general--Clauses. 2. Grammar, Comparative and general-Subordinate constructions. I. Title. P297.S35 2009 415--dc22 isbn 978 90 272 0669 5 (hb; alk. paper) isbn 978 90 272 8898 1 (eb)

2009028110

© 2009 – John Benjamins B.V. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any other means, without written permission from the publisher. John Benjamins Publishing Co. · P.O. Box 36224 · 1020 me Amsterdam · The Netherlands John Benjamins North America · P.O. Box 27519 · Philadelphia pa 19118-0519 · usa

Table of contents Acknowledgements Abbreviations and notational conventions 1. Aims and scope of the book

vii ix 1

2. Theoretical and methodological foundations 5 2.1 Typological generalizations and distributions 5 2.2 A usage-based approach to explaining typological generalizations 9 2.2.1 Functional-typological accounts of language structure 9 2.2.2 The usage-based nature of language universals 14 2.2.3 Interim summary 16 2.3 A functional definition of ‘purpose clause’ 17 2.4 Language sampling 20 2.5 Previous work 26 3. The grammar of purpose: Documentation and explanation 3.1 Preliminaries 29 3.1.1 On the identification of purpose clause constructions 29 3.1.2 On the quantitative analysis of constructions 33 3.2 Coding of the situation: The form of the verb 34 3.2.1 Finiteness and deranking in purpose clauses 35 3.2.2 Tense, aspect and mood in purpose clauses 42 3.3 Coding of participants: Argument structure 50 3.3.1 The notional subjects of purpose clauses 51 3.3.2 Further constraints on argument realization in p urpose clauses 62 3.3.3 Argument structure and the ecology of constructional systems 69 3.4 Constructional gestalt features and the coding of purpose 71 3.4.1 Structure and distribution of primary gestalt features 72 3.4.2 Secondary gestalt features and the semantics of purpose 88 3.4.3 ‘No marking’: Purposive inferences and ambiguities 103

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3.5 Positioning patterns of purpose clauses 110 3.5.1 Data and analysis 110 3.5.2 Explanation and discussion 116 3.6 Semantic and pragmatic idiosyncrasies in purpose clauses 129 3.6.1 Avertive (‘lest’) constructions 129 3.6.2 Further issues 144 urpose clauses in the syntactic and conceptual space 4. P 147 of complex sentences 4.1 The synchronic status of purpose clauses 147 4.1.1 The conceptual and syntactic space of complex sentences 147 4.1.2 Coordination and subordination: (A)symmetry in purpose clauses 150 4.1.3 Purpose clauses and other adverbial clauses 151 4.1.4 Purpose clauses and complement clauses 157 4.1.5 Purpose clauses and relative clauses 165 4.2 The diachronic development of purpose clauses 170 4.2.1 Grammaticalization and the dynamic nature of grammar 170 4.2.2 Constructional intraference: From purpose to complement (and relative) clauses 172 4.2.3 The purpose-reason-result cline(s) 176 4.2.4 From ‘motion-cum-purpose’ to TAM constructions 178 4.2.5 From avertive (‘lest’) clauses to apprehensional epistemics 185 4.2.6 The origins of purpose clauses 186 4.2.7 Summary: The developmental trajectories of purpose clauses 196 Conclusion and outlook

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References

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Index of authors Index of languages Index of subjects

221 224 226

Acknowledgements In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since: “Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,” he told me, “just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.” (F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby)

The advantages that I have had during all stages of this publication are enormous, indeed. Therefore, I would like to seize the opportunity to thank a number of people who I am greatly indebted to, as they have made invaluable contributions on my way to completing this book. First and foremost, I wish to express my gratitude to Johanna Nichols and Holger Diessel, who are undoubtedly responsible for arousing my interest in linguistic typology and who have strongly encouraged me to conduct the present study. Throughout the entire research process, I have benefited from their ideas, professional enthusiasm and great support. On my way to finalizing the manuscript, I have received feedback and valuable suggestions from numerous colleagues and friends. I would like to thank in particular Daniel Wiechmann, John Thomson and Katja Hetterle for insightful discussions about quantitative analysis, astute nativer-speaker advice and patient proof-reading of draft versions, respectively. I am also very grateful to a number of language specialists, notably Keren Rice, Igor Nedjalkov and John Roberts, who provided most insightful comments on the grammars of Slave, Evenki and Amele, respectively. Needless to say, none of them is to blame for any errors in the interpretation of the data. I alone am responsible for coding, interpreting and discussing the material used in this book. Special thanks also go to an anonymous reviewer for extremely helpful comments and suggestions for improvement, as well as to the late Mickey Noonan for his editorial guidance and Kees Vaes from John Benjamins Publ. Co. for impeccable assistance and communication during the publishing process. I have also been in the very fortunate and privileged position to be funded most generously by the German National Academic Foundation (Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes), which opened up an array of research possibilities that would otherwise have been beyond my reach, including my stay at the Linguistics Department of the University of California at Berkeley. But most importantly, I owe the greatest debt of gratitude to my wife Tina and my family for their constant emotional and intellectual support. It is with deepest affection that I dedicate this book to them and to the memory of my grandfather, who would have loved to see it published.

Abbreviations and notational conventions For each example sentence from a language other than English, an idiomatic translation is provided alongside a literal (interlinear ‘morpheme-by-morpheme’) one. The interlinear abbreviations given below were adopted by the Framework for Descriptive Grammars project (1991) and they largely correspond to the Leipzig Glossing Rules, which have now become standard practice in linguistic typology. Abbreviations for interlinear morpheme translation 1, 2, 3 I, II, III a abl abs abstr acc adv aff agt all an ant antip aor appl art asp aux ben cau caus clf cmpm co

1st, 2nd, 3rd person morphological classes transitive agent ablative (‘from’) absolutive abstract accusative adverbial (case) affirmative agent(ive) allative (‘to’) animate anterior antipassive aorist applicative article aspectual auxiliary benefactive causal causative classifier compound marker coordination

com comp compl conn cont conv cop cor dat def dem denoml des det dim dir dist ds dtr du dur dyn erg evid

comitative complementizer completive connector, connective continuous converb copula coreference dative definite demonstrative denominalizer desiderative determiner diminutive directional, directive distal, distance different subject (switch-reference) detransitivizer dual durative dynamic ergative evidential

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ex excl exp f ff fin foc freq frust fut g gen gl gnr hod hyp imm imp impf inan inch incl incompl ind indf inf instr int intr io irr iter lest loc log m mdl med

exclusive exclamation expected (aspect) femine fulfillment finite focus frequentative frustrative future ditransitive recipient genitive goal generic hodiernal (past, future) hypothetical immediate (past, future) imperative imperfective inanimate inchoative inclusive incompletive indicative indefinite infinitive instrumental intentional (mood, aspect) intransitive indirect object irrealis iterative avertive marker, apprehensional epistemic locative logophoric masculine modal medial

modifier mod mot motion masdar (gerund) msd neuter n n- non- (e.g. nsg non singular, npst nonpast) negative, negation neg non-finite nf nominative nom nominalizer noml nonlocut disjunct indexation near (future, past) nr object obj oblique obl optative opt transitive patient p passive pass plural pl plpf pluperfect (past perfect) punctual pnct polite pol possessive poss potential pot preposition prep preverb prev perfect prf perfective prfv prog progressive proprietive prop pros prospective (aspect) proximal, proximate prox present prs prvt privative (‘without’) past pst ptc participle particle ptcl purpose, purposive purp quot quotative reduplication rdp ref referential

refl rel rem res rl s sbj seq sg sim spec src srel sress ss

Abbreviations and notational conventions

reflexive relative clause marker remote (past, future) resultative realis intransitive subject subject sequential, consecutive singular simultaneous specific, specifier source superelative superessive same subject (switchreference)

sub subj sugg sup temp th tns ton top tr trns ven vis vrbl

subordinate, subordinator subjunctive suggestive superlative temporal thematic vowel tense tonal marker (affix) topic transitive transitivizer ventive visual (evidential) verbalizer

Symbols In both original language and interlinear morpheme translation x y x–y x+y x=y

word boundary between x and y morpheme boundary between x and y x and y form a compound or a derivative stem x and y are joined by clisis

In original language only ø null expression of meaning [x] x is a syntactic constituent (purpose clauses are generally bracketed this way) / end of intonation unit In interlinear morpheme translation only (x) x is not overtly marked in the original (i.e. null expression of meaning) x.y x and y are grammatical (sub-)categories of one original language morpheme Notational conventions In example sentences, structures to be highlighted are printed in boldface. L anguage-particular lexemes or grammatical markers are generally given in italics.

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xii A Typology of Purpose Clauses

The meaning of linguistic elements is usually given in ‘inverted commas’, and whenever reference is made to conceptual domains (e.g. the concept of purpose), they are capitalized. Alternatives are given in {winged brackets}. Ungrammaticality is indicated by an *asterisk, and semantically odd sentences carry a ?question mark.

chapter 1

Aims and scope of the book The present study seeks to provide the first comprehensive typology of purpose clause constructions across the world’s languages. Purpose clauses are part of complex sentence constructions which encode that one verbal situation, that of the matrix clause, is performed with the intention of bringing about another situation, that of the purpose clause, as in the following examples from English:

(1) Maria went to the bakery [in order to get some croissants].

(2) Brendan put the bike into the garage [so that it would not get wet in the rain].

(3) I brought a book [for Aaron to read on the plane].

Complex sentence constructions have figured prominently in the last decades of typological research. While some clause types have continuously received particular attention, such as relative clauses (e.g. Comrie 1998), complement clauses (e.g. Horie 2000) or conditional constructions (e.g. Khrakovskij 2005), purpose clauses are considerably less well-studied. On the one hand, an in-depth (monographic) study of the phenomenon is available for only one language, i.e. English (Jones 1991). Cross-linguistic research, on the other hand, has focused on particular, relatively isolated features of purpose clauses (e.g. Haspelmath 1989, Kazenin 1994, Cristofaro 2003 and 2005, Verstraete 2008). However, no attempt has yet been made to integrate all aspects into a comprehensive and empirically well-founded cross-linguistic survey. This is precisely the aim of the present study. Based on a geographically and genetically diverse sample of 80 languages, I will provide, firstly, a synchronic documentation of the grammatical properties of purpose clauses. The central goal is to uncover the unity and diversity of the linguistic means by which purposive relations are encoded in human languages. Explanations for universal tendencies of morphosyntactic coding will be sought in the conceptual characteristics of purposive situations, in the communicative functions of purpose clauses, and in the cognitive-psychological mechanisms involved in language use. Therefore, the explanatory apparatus to be applied is embedded in the more general functional and particularly usage-based approach to language structure. Secondly, purpose clauses will be investigated in relation to other types of complex sentences. By virtue of modifying the proposition in the matrix clause,

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purpose clauses are a specific semantic type of adverbial clause combining. It will be shown, however, that purposive relations deviate from typical adverbial relations in a number of important ways, and at the same time need to be characterized by features commonly associated with other types of complex sentences, notably complementation structures. This constellation often results in peculiar coding properties of purposive constructions that are not shared by (most) other adverbial clauses in a given language. Moreover, at the synchronic level, one frequently gets the impression that purpose clauses are under a certain classificatory tension in the variation space that complex sentences unfold across languages. They appear to be ‘expelled’ by adverbial clauses as a set and show considerable overlap instead with complement clauses, (some) relative clauses and the domain of deontic modality. This static impression is, however, a result of principled pathways of diachronic extension, which are rooted in cognitive and communicative pressures on the use of purpose clauses in actual discourse. For this reason, the typological survey of purpose clauses presented here will also take stock of what is known about the historical pathways along which purpose constructions develop. The goals of my investigation are reflected in the structure of the book. In Chapter 2, I will outline the theoretical and methodological foundations for the cross-linguistic study of purpose clauses. This will include some important theoretical premises of functional-typological work, a notional (i.e. structure-independent) definition of purpose clauses ensuring cross-linguistic comparability, and a presentation and justification of the language sample that forms the database of the current study. An important methodological aspect in regard to which this book deviates from other typological works is the tight integration of language-particular and cross-linguistic work. Specifically, we will exploit the rich data on English purposive constructions supplied by previous research in formal, discourse-pragmatic and historical linguistics, which often provides useful parameters and stimuli for a systematic cross-linguistic investigation. Conversely, a usage-based approach to typological distributions requires us to relate cross-linguistic data about grammars to actual usage events, particularly exhaustive frequency data. At several stages of the investigation, we will thus draw on corpora of English to supplement (or motivate) typological generalizations. In an incidental way, then, the present study thus also aims to make a contribution to a recent research programme in English linguistics (cf. Kortmann 2007), which seeks to assess the relative typicality of grammatical phenomena of English against the variation space of human languages. Chapter 3 constitutes the first (and largest) of two empirical parts of the book. It will document and analyse the ways in which purposive relations are encoded in the world’s languages. Since it is common for one language to have several strategies for the expression of purpose, it was essential to compile a database of all dis-

Chapter 1. Aims and scope of the book

tinct purposive constructions found across the 80 languages sampled. This procedure does not only ensure that less common coding patterns are considered as well; it also allows for precise quantitative analyses since constructions define much narrower, fine-grained typological variables and categories than languages. Working with these variables, in turn, paves the way for the application of significance tests whenever feasible. The chief grammatical properties to be analysed in this way are the form of the verb, argument structure configurations (including co-reference patterns), clause-linking and purposive morphology, the positioning patterns of purpose clauses and, finally, some selected semantic and pragmatic idiosyncrasies such as the encoding of negative purpose in so-called avertive (‘lest’) constructions. Significant distributions and correlations will be formulated as probabilistic implications, each of which is tested for geographical independence so that areal patterns can be distinguished from genuinely universal tendencies. Chapter 4 will be concerned with the place of purpose clauses in the conceptual and syntactic space of complex sentence constructions. This requires a shift from the construction-specific analysis to a ‘whole-language’ perspective since we wish to probe into the synchronic connection of purpose clauses with other types of complex sentences. By systematically relating purposive constructions to all traditional classes of clause combining (adverbial clauses, complementation, relativization, coordination), a special status of purpose clauses in the typology of complex sentences will be empirically uncovered. Finally, we will explore the historical trajectories that give rise to this peculiar synchronic status. The concluding Chapter 5 contains a brief summary of the most important results of this study and points to some promising directions for future research. For environmental reasons, the publication will dispense with an elaborate appendix. As an alternative, the reader is invited to visit the companion website of this book: . It provides high-resolution (and occasionally coloured) images of all original graphs contained in this book, as well as illustrative excerpts from the databases that provide an impression of coding and analytical practices. On the whole, I hope that the integration of typological and language-specific analyses, the combination of synchronic and diachronic perspectives, and a synthesis of documentation and explanation will provide a comprehensive and coherent picture of purpose clauses that unveils universal preferences in coding purposive relations, but at the same time does justice to the fascinating breadth of variation that the grammars of human languages display.

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chapter 2

Theoretical and methodological foundations This chapter will delineate some important theoretical and methodological concepts that are essential to a typological study of the kind envisaged here. It is divided into five sections. In §2.1, I will broadly sketch the fundamental premises of crosslinguistic research, focussing on the characteristics of typological generalizations and distributions. §2.2 will situate the present study in the so-called functional- typological and more generally the usage-based approach to language, and is meant to expound in considerable detail the explanatory apparatus relevant to my investigation. In §2.3, it will be shown that a serious commitment to the basic principles of language typology requires us to define the domain of enquiry in structure-independent terms. Therefore, a functional, universally applicable definition of complex sentences and purpose clauses will be provided. In §2.4, the issue of language sampling will be addressed. Since the present study aims to provide a survey of the cross-linguistic range of variability of purpose clauses, it is of vital importance that the primary database be a diversified and representative sample of the world’s languages. I will thus outline and justify the policies which guided the sampling of languages for this analysis. Finally, in §2.5, I will briefly take stock of previous research on purpose clauses that will provide a valuable basis for the present study.

2.1 Typological generalizations and distributions The present study is situated in the framework of modern linguistic typology as pioneered by Greenberg (1963). In this respect, it is concerned with the crosslinguistic comparison and classification of linguistic structures, with the aim of uncovering both the diversity and systematic constraints on structural variation in human languages. The latter can be conceived of as empirical generalizations drawn inductively from a large body of cross-linguistic data, and usually go by the name of language universals. Accordingly, a principal goal of this book is to provide a comprehensive description of the linguistic means by which purposive relationships are encoded across the world’s languages, and, by way of comparing purpose clause constructions in a representative sample of languages, to reveal significantly recurrent trends of grammatical coding in this domain. Importantly, the universals thus obtained differ tremendously from the homonymous notion in formal, notably generative, linguistics. In those approaches,

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linguistic universals are commonly seen as genetically endowed principles of linguistic organization, collectively known as Universal Grammar (henceforth UG; cf. Chomsky 2000 for a classic exposition). By virtue of being innate and speciesspecific, the ingredients of UG are necessarily ‘absolute universals’ in Bickel’s (to appear) sense: They form an indispensible part of a descriptive metalanguage that is necessary to capture the grammatical organization of human languages. According to Newmeyer (2007: 135), one may succinctly formulate the (mainstream) generative position as follows: “There exists a set of formal categories FC1, FC2, FC3, … FCn provided by universal grammar from which languages may choose, without it necessarily being the case that each be manifested in each language.” In other words, universals in formal linguistic theory intend to capture the deep structure of human languages (e.g. Anderson 1976 on the ‘deep’ universality of the category ‘subject’) and derive from an innate predisposition for language, i.e. from what has been called ‘representational innateness’ (Elman et al. 1996: 25) or even a ‘language organ’ (Anderson and Lightfoot 2002). This position is not only extremely controversial from a psychological and ontogenetic view (e.g. Dąbrowska 2004), but has also proven difficult for the very practice of cross-linguistic research. Apart from the fact that no authoritative list of UG components is currently available (cf. Tomasello’s [2004] critique), the most serious challenge is that hardly any grammatical category seems to be a necessary prerequisite for the description of every language, or can even be equated across languages (cf. Croft 2001, Dryer 1997, Haspelmath 2007). For this reason, linguistic typology in the Greenbergian tradition has concerned itself with the observable surface structures of human languages. Universals are but extrapolations from significant statistical trends in samples of languages (or structures, for that matter). Rather than falling out deductively from a preconceived formal architecture of grammar, they are empirical results of inductive research. To be sure, typologists, too, need a metalanguage to define their domain of investigation (more on this below); but they would generally be reluctant to consider the categories and constructs of this metalanguage to be of any biological reality for individual speakers (cf. Haspelmath 2008a on this point). In keeping with this practice, the present study relies on a universally applicable metalanguage for defining purpose clauses (cf. §2.3 below) and formulates alleged universals of coding strategies in purposive constructions as probabilistic (and hence exception-ridden) generalizations. More often than not, such statements will take the form of conditional implications: For instance, we may find that if a purpose clause construction allows for its direct object to be controlled by a matrix clause argument, it will also license its subject to be controlled this way. Whenever such implications are formulated, it should be borne in mind that they have a statistical (rather than a strictly logical) structure (cf. Cysouw 2003),

Chapter 2. Theoretical and methodological foundations

and should thus always taken to be interpreted as ‘If p, then F(q) > F(not-q)’ (cf. Bickel 2006a), with F being shorthand for the observed frequencies of q and not-q in the sample. Note that such statistical implications are not necessarily less powerful constructs as compared to the absolute principles of UG. On the contrary, they “give us some additional insight into the nature of grammar: If a property A is implied by a property B, then it is quite likely that the two are causally related” (Haspelmath 1997: 8). This insight paves the way for developing explanatory models for grammatical structure which are anchored, not in a universal formal architecture of grammar, but in (functionally) motivated relationships between structures in a given domain (so-called ‘intra-domain implications’ in Haspelmath 2008b), as we will see shortly. To sum up thus far, the picture obtained by Greenbergian typological research represents, as it were, the cross-linguistic counterpart to the ‘orderly heterogeneity’ of sociolinguistic variation within a single language (Weinreich et al. 1968). The basic idea is that grammatical coding is subject to vast, but structured (nonrandom) variation across the world’s languages, and typologists, just like most sociolinguists, take seriously the possibility that patterns of variation in the data can be due to extralinguistic factors rather than to innately specified grammatical knowledge. The comparison with sociolinguistics (and other ‘behavioural’ sciences more generally) may also be justified in light of more recent developments in linguistic typology. As Bickel (2007) points out, modern typology has become a full-grown distribution-oriented discipline. On this view, the cross-linguistic distribution of a structural variable can thus be understood from several revealing perspectives.1 Firstly, a typological distribution is a geographical object, with non-accidental skewings in space. In the form of macro-areas (Dryer 1989), Sprachbund, enclave and spread zone effects (Nichols 1992, Bickel and Nichols 2006), or large-scale geographical mappings of linguistic variables (e.g. in The World Atlas of Language Structures [Haspelmath et al. 2005]), areal patterns have gained new prominence in typological research. In the analysis of purpose clauses, therefore, we will not only seek to control for areal confounds in the sampling process, but also, once the sample is established, consider the distribution of particular coding strategies and construction types in geographical space. Secondly, a typological distribution is a historical object, which may show significant skewings in time. While the present study does not address the historical stability or ‘accidentality’ (Daniel 2007: 71) in the distribution of purpose clauses, thus effectively assuming a stationary distribution, it is cognizant of the fact that universal trends in grammatical coding are in essence diachronically transmitted, 1. The following conceptual outline of typological distributions is based on Bickel (2006a).

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i.e. brought about by pressures on diachronic change (cf. also Bickel 2008a). We will thus devote an entire chapter to the historical pathways of purpose clauses and how they impinge on the synchronic distribution of related construction types, such as complement clauses. Finally, a typological distribution is a statistical object. Just as language-internal (i.e. sociolinguistic) variation can be submitted to precise quantitative analysis and statistical evaluation (e.g. Séguy’s [1973] groundbreaking work on measuring dialectal differences), so too do typological data lend themselves well to rigorous empirical treatment. This solid quantitative underpinning of cross-linguistic research is certainly one of the most vital developments in recent linguistic typology (cf. Cysouw 2005 for an overview) and, at the time of writing this book, still in its infancy. Therefore, while the present study could not fully exploit the array of methods that has only most recently been made available to the typologist (e.g. logistic regression analyses for universal pressures [Bickel 2008a] or multidimensional scaling [Croft and Poole 2008]), it nevertheless incorporates a good deal of quantitative thinking about the typological distribution of purpose clauses. To begin with, the present database of purpose clauses does not only take languages as data points, but shifts the locus of analysis to individual purpose clause constructions (cf. also §3.1.1 below). Each distinct construction is characterized by a particular constellation of structural elements and, for the purpose of cross-linguistic comparison, can be analysed with respect to a multitude of theoretically and descriptively relevant variables (e.g. TAM properties, argument reduction, clause order, etc.). Depending on the quality and quantity of the information available, variables were generally developed on a fine-grained level and operationalized in such a way that their distribution could be submitted to statistical evaluation whenever feasible. It is in this way that it becomes possible to quantify particular coding preferences in the grammar of purpose. Additionally, as will be discussed in more detail below, the present work deviates from much typological research in including rich quantitative data from language-specific analyses of purpose clauses. In particular, it often taps electronic corpora of English to reveal significant patterns of usage of purposive constructions and relates them to the conventionalized grammatical properties found in the typological study of purpose clauses. This procedure is ultimately grounded in the theoretical backdrop to this study, in which universal properties and constraints of morphosyntactic coding are seen as conventionalizations of usage preferences and their ultimate explanation hence as rooted in pressures on language use. The following sections will elaborate on this framework in a more detailed and systematic way.


2.2 A usage-based approach to explaining typological generalizations 2.2.1 Functional-typological accounts of language structure Most typological research does not stop at the descriptive and analytical level of cross-linguistic comparison. The ultimate goal of many comparative studies is to provide a principled explanatory account of the distributional skewings revealed by cross-linguistic generalizations. Whereas generative researchers working on cross-linguistic data have often accounted for variation by recourse to UG-based ‘parameters’, i.e. “mental switches” (Chomsky 2000: 8) that categorically set the value of a linguistic variable to a particular phenotype,2 most ‘Greenbergian’ typologists have preferred a rather different explanatory framework. In their view, similarities in grammatical coding are motivated by universally operative factors relating to language use and to the language user. As Bickel (2007: 240) puts it, “linguistic structures tend to be systematically interrelated among themselves and with other anthropological patterns”, so that we find “close correlations between universal preferences in structure with universal preferences in cognition and communication.” Linguistic diversity, on the other hand, is the result of weighting the multitude of cognitive and communicative pressures in different ways, with each language-specific construction reflecting a conventionalized solution to this weighting problem. The appeal to extralinguistic explanatory variables and their competition in actual usage is the essence of what has come to be known as the ‘functional-typological approach’ or functionalism more generally (cf. Givón 1990 or Van Valin 2001 for overviews). A popular trend within the functionalist literature, which will also be adopted in this book, is its evolutionary, Darwinian orientation: Language structures are often seen as adaptations to complex environmental pressures on the way language is used in communicative interaction, and on the way it is accessed and processed in speech production and comprehension. Along these lines, Deacon (1997) has likened the emergence of cross-linguistic structural similarities to the convergent evolution of analogous forms in unrelated biological species: Just as “the dorsal fins of sharks, ichthyosaurs, and dolphins are independent convergent adaptations of aquatic species” (Deacon 1997: 116), namely to the problem of moving smoothly through water, so do statistical universals of language structure reflect similar, but independently arisen solutions to communicative and cognitive pressures. The relative frequencies of different alignment systems, for example, 2. While the idea of parameters is still highly relevant to generative accounts of cross-linguistic variation, it has to be acknowledged explicitly that there has been a substantial reconceptualization of parametric explanations within the generative movement. The reader may be referred, for instance, to Newmeyer (2005) or the papers in Biberauer (2008) for recent views.

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are jointly motivated by the communicative necessity to discriminate the semantic roles of a and p in transitive clauses, and the economical choice to identify the single participant of intransitive clauses (s) with either a or p. On this account, both nominative-accusative and ergative-absolutive systems are equally well-motivated, but indiscriminate and tripartite systems would be expected to be comparatively rare, which is confirmed by empirical data (e.g. Comrie 2005).3 Similarly, the joint forces of conceptual, discourse-pragmatic and processing pressures can account for the extremely high frequency of languages that place the subject before the direct object, rather than the other way around (cf. Tomlin 1986). Conceptually, language users appear to prefer a linear ordering that adheres to the ‘action-chain’ model (Langacker 1999: 30ff.). On this view, subjects typically encode semantic roles that are ‘energy sources’, whereas prototypical direct objects represent ‘energy sinks’, and the natural flow of energy proceeds from source to sink. In addition, however, it has been shown that subjects typically also encode discourse-old or topical information (e.g. Li and Thompson 1976: 484) and hence would be preferred in clause-initial position, or at least before the focal- or comment-encoding direct object. Finally, Hawkins (2004) argues that object NPs are asymmetrically dependent on their corresponding subject NPs with respect to assigning several syntactic and semantic properties on-line, and hence ideally follow subjects for ease of processing. These relatively simple and well-known examples demonstrate the complex array of potential factors that cause universal structural skewings, and it is the task of the following sections to attempt a more systematic overview of those forces that are particularly relevant to the study of purpose clauses (or complex syntax, for that matter). Let us begin with a factor that is invoked by linguists of many theoretical persuasions, i.e. the idea that structural properties of language are constrained by our cognitive apparatus. As we saw earlier, however, typologists do not generally subscribe to the view that those constraints reside in innate domain-specific principles of grammar (what we called ‘representational innateness’), but in cognitive mechanisms of a domain-general sort. This is what Elman et al. (1996) dub ‘architectural innateness’, which basically refers to the anatomy and physiology of the human (mind and) brain. Perhaps the best-known architectural constraint arises from the linearity of speech: When language is produced, hearers are necessar3. Comrie’s overview definitely testifies to the extreme rarity of tripartite systems (4∕190 languages = 2.1%). The relatively high frequency of neutral (i.e. indiscriminate) systems (98∕190 = 51.6%) should be taken with a grain of salt, though, since Comrie here only considers overt case marking as a means to establish alignment systems: Especially the neutral class comprises cases in which rigid word order patterns disambiguate syntactic functions. Therefore, at least some languages in this class would be considered nominative or ergative by criteria other than case, reducing the total number of indiscriminate systems.


ily confronted with a linear sequence of linguistic elements to which they need to assign the appropriate structural and conceptual properties that ultimately map onto the communicative message intended by the speaker. On-line pressures of language processing, therefore, have been studied intensively in psycholinguistic research and have also been brought to bear on typological distributions, most cogently on phenomena of constituent order, as in Hawkins (1994, 2004). Accordingly, they will constitute an important explanatory variable in the ordering constraints on purpose clauses. In this domain, they will be shown to join forces with another processing principle: It has variously been argued that on-line processing is facilitated if the experience to be conveyed is similar to its linguistic expression (cf. Clark 1971 for a classic psycholinguistic study). This refers, of course, to the well-known concept of iconicity (Haiman 1980, Givón 1985). If applied to phenomena of constituent order (e.g. affix ordering in Bybee 1985, or clause order in Diessel 2008), the relevant notion is that of diagrammatic iconicity, i.e. a match between the experiential and the verbalized order of the concepts involved. We shall thus examine more closely to what extent diagrammatic iconicity has an impact on the ordering distribution (and other properties) of purpose clauses. Apart from on-line processing considerations, some more overarching architectural constraints arguably affect linguistic structure. Specifically, the relatively young but immensely fast-growing field of cognitive linguistics (cf. Evans and Green 2006 for a comprehensive overview) has developed the idea that language is systematically grounded in human cognition, to the extent that linguistic knowledge is essentially seen as akin to other kinds of knowledge. Language, on this view, is basically auditory or visual information that needs to be perceived, attended to, categorized into meaningful elements, stored in and retrieved from memory, etc. In other words, it is amenable to general cognitive processes also involved in non-linguistic tasks. Croft and Cruse (2004: 45ff.) have devised an extensive list of general cognitive processes recognized in psychology and of their application to language production and comprehension. Let us briefly highlight the notions that will prove relevant to the analysis of purpose clauses. One of the most basic perceptual processes is that of attention, the allocation of cognitive resources to particular aspects of a perceptual event, so that those aspects become the focus of consciousness (cf. Chafe 1994). Importantly, even within this focus, we are selective and ‘detect’ (in Tomlin and Villa’s [1994] terminology) specific parts of information as more relevant to a given task than others. This allows us to highlight or profile different facets of a percept. In language use, this ability is often exploited in such a way that the verbalization of one facet effectively evokes another facet of the same domain, or even comes to stand for the entire domain. Thus we can talk about faces in a crowd even though, of course, we are referring to people of whom faces are just a part. This construal operation

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is known as conceptual metonymy in cognitive linguistics (cf. Leite 1994 for its p ervasiveness in discourse). Metonymic construals rely on the hearer’s inference capacity, and it will be argued that such contextually- or metonymically-driven inferences can be crucial in the evolution and diachronic development of grammatical formatives, precisely also purpose markers. A second important set of cognitive operations relates to the fact that the perception of incoming stimuli or information is always guided by prior experience and hence involves what Croft and Cruse (2004: 54) call judgement and comparison. This encompasses all processes of categorization (cf. Murphy 2002), as they rely on judgements of similarity to previous encounters. Category formation by similarity judgements is particularly conspicuous in language when new meanings are accommodated under an already existing form, leading to polysemy in the lexicon or grammar, and when existing grammatical constructions are analogically extended to new contexts (such as the gradual diffusion of the English Progressive to new verb classes, cf. Potter 1969). We will encounter both phenomena in the historical development of purposive constructions. A specific type of analogical extension that has spawned much research in cognitive linguistics is the phenomenon of conceptual metaphor (cf. Lakoff and Johnson 1980 for a classic reference). In this construal operation, a conceptual category or domain is apprehended in terms of another, usually more concrete or physically grounded domain. Thus we can talk of being in love as if this emotional state were a container, i.e. a bounded entity in physical space. Again, metaphors have a key role to play in the extension of grammatical constructions to new, notably more abstract, lexical contexts and thus in the growing productivity of a construction. Therefore, diachronic phenomena such as ‘rule generalization’ or ‘semantic bleaching’ (e.g. Aitchison 2001) usually involve a certain amount of metaphorical conceptualization, and it is in this context that we will encounter and elaborate on the notion of metaphor later on. In addition to those fundamental cognitive constraints and operations, it is the instrumental embedding of language in social interaction that shapes grammatical structure in profound ways. The central idea is that across cultures (and hence languages), human beings “share a great deal of prelinguistic and extralinguistic experience” (Sweetser 1990: 7), which gives rise to certain basic “communicative functions that can be fulfilled by all languages” (Haspelmath et al. 2001: v; cf. also Lee 1988: 211–12 on this point). For example, members of all speech communities undoubtedly experience situations of motion or rest in space (go, stand, sleep), manipulation of objects (catch, eat, carry) or physical transfer (give), which typically involve one, two and three participants, respectively. In other words, there seems to be an experientially motivated and presumably universal inventory (sometimes called a ‘conceptual space’ in typology, cf. Croft 2001: 92–8)


of event-participant constellations. Argument structure constructions in individual languages (e.g. the Absolutive case construction in Epena Pedee) then map onto this universal space in a language-specific way. Figure 1 depicts the universal space of event-participant distinctions, introducing the participant labels that will be used throughout this book. It also exemplifies how language-specific case constructions stretch across this space and thus create their own ‘semantic maps’ (cf. Haspelmath 2003, Croft 2003: ch. 5 for a general synopsis of the semantic map model in typology). Figure 1 illustrates an important point of typological research: Form is highly language-specific, i.e. the choice of bound morphological marking on NPs in this particular way is a conventionalized pattern of the Epena Pedee speech community. Language universals, on the other hand, are generalizations pertaining to how such language-specific forms map onto functions, i.e. they capture which semantic maps recur in similar ways and significantly often across the world’s languages. The value of the semantic map model as a typological tool, then, is that it “allows us to relate functional categories identifiable across languages […] to their syntactic expression within particular languages” (Croft 2001: 97). When we deal with the semantics of purpose markers and constructions, we will thus frequently appeal to such maps. Communicative aspects of language constrain grammar also in more specific ways. Some syntactic constructions, for instance, are adaptations to particular

intransitive event

transitive event

ditransitive event A

A S

T P G

S = Participant of a single-participant event A = most agent-like participant of a twoparticipant event P = most patient-like participant of a twoparticipant event T = theme (or patient) of a three-participant event G = goal of a three-participant event

Epena Pedee (ChocÓ: Colombia; Harms 1994: 10–11) wã-hí. Mi akhṍre-Ø wa-hi. my father- go- ‘My father left.’ pa Mi wẽẽ rá-pa khoráa-Ø kha-pá-ri. my woman- basket- weave-- ‘My wife weaves baskets.’

S A

P

Figure 1. The conceptual space of participant roles and a semantic map for Epena Pedee core cases

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ways of information packaging. Passive or cleaving constructions thus typically regulate the flow of information by foregrounding participants that would not normally be given special emphasis in simple active declarative clauses. Similarly, quite a few information-packaging constructions realign the order of constituents in a clause (e.g. inversion, dislocation, extraposition in Huddleston and Pullum’s [2002: 1366] taxonomy) to adjust topical and focal information in a proposition. Along these lines, we will inspect the distribution of purpose clauses in discourse and relate it to their structural properties across languages. Finally, the very nature of human behaviour in communicative interaction leaves its mark on the structure of language. Some well-known functional-typological principles are, in fact, anchored in the classic Gricean maxims of conversational practice. According to the ‘maxim of quantity’, for instance, people tend to make their contributions to the conversation as informative as required, but, crucially, no more informative than necessary (cf. Grice 1975: 45). On this account, communicative behaviour is rational and aims at efficiency (‘least effort’) whenever possible. A major domain of application of this economical behaviour is that of frequently occurring constructions. From a psychological point of view, frequent exposure and practice lead to routinization, entrenchment and predictability (Bybee and Thompson 1997, Haspelmath 2008c). It is, therefore, not surprising that frequent linguistic items are prone to economical coding across the world’s languages. The inversely proportional relation of frequency and overt coding has long been known as Zipf ’s Law (cf. Zipf 1935: 29). It is embodied in Du Bois’ famous slogan that “grammars code best what speakers do most” (Du Bois 1985: 363) and by now supported by a wealth of empirical data, particularly also typological phenomena (cf. Haspelmath 2008d). Since economy is such a pervasive principle of linguistic organization, it will surface repeatedly in the typology of purpose clauses, from the coding properties of individual constructions to efficiency in the processing of complex sentences. Incidentally, frequency effects also have an important theoretical dimension: As they reflect our experience with language, they are central to an approach that anchors typological distributions in language performance and incremental change across usage events. It is this approach that constitutes the final theoretical building block of this book, and thus deserves to be fleshed out more explicitly.

2.2.2 The usage-based nature of language universals What has always been implicit in the functionalist enterprise is the idea that selection pressures operate on individual utterances and the linguistic units embedded in those utterances. In conversational practice, this means that some variants will inevitably be selected more often than others, until they become conventional-


ized in the speech community (cf. Croft 2000 for a detailed exposition, including its sociolinguistic dimension). In other words, structures and constraints emerge, as it were, from language use (Hopper 1987), so that the grammar of a language is but a systematic inventory of ‘frozen’ preference patterns. As Hawkins (2004: 3) puts it, “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.” This is what Hawkins calls the ‘Performance-Grammar-Correspondence Hypothesis’ (henceforth PGCH), which is at the heart of an overarching theoretical approach to language that Langacker (1987) first termed the ‘usage-based model’. Over the last decade, this approach has become an important paradigm for the study of linguistic representations and ontogenetic development,4 but in its emergentist, PGCH orientation, its scope extends well beyond the individual and ultimately becomes highly relevant to typological distributions. This has two immediate consequences for the present study, a thematic and a methodological one. Thematically, a commitment to the usage-based approach inevitably leads us to consider the historical dimension in the synchronic typology of purpose clauses. We noted earlier that typological distributions are historically grown objects, emerging as the cumulative effect of several speech communities choosing well-motivated variants at the expense of alternative ones in language use (cf. Croft 2000, Good 2008, Keller 1994 for particular mechanisms of diachronic convergence). Variants themselves are generated because form-function mappings are constantly negotiated in actual discourse. Occasional or peripheral meanings can be reanalysed as the central one(s) associated with a particular form; forms themselves are often modified for economical or expressive purposes; and languages may ‘acquire’ innovative or alternative form-function mappings in discursive interaction: “When human beings use symbols to communicate with one another, stringing them together into sequences, patterns of use emerge and become consolidated into grammatical constructions.” (Tomasello 2003: 5) The best-known phenomenon in this context is grammaticalization. It can roughly be defined as the diachronic process in which independent lexical items (including demonstratives, cf. Diessel 1999) assume the characteristics of grammatical morphemes, or in which grammatical items and constructions adopt new grammatical functions. The important insight of grammaticalization theory for 4. On this psychological plane of the usage-based approach, our linguistic competence is exemplar-based, abstracted from the sum total of individual linguistic experiences during our lifetime (Bybee 2006). It is thus built up from and refined by a vast body of input data (Tomasello 2003), and never identical to any other human being’s competence, i.e. the linguistic categories and abstractions we operate with may be slightly or even substantially diverse across different speakers of the same language (Dąbrowska 2008).

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typologists is that across languages, there are strikingly similar pathways of change in similar linguistic environments. For example, case markers, tense and aspect constructions, markers of subordination and many more grammatical formatives develop along the following ‘cline of grammaticality’ (cf. Hopper and Traugott 2003: 7):

(4) content item > grammatical word > clitic > inflectional affix

Moreover, this pathway is usually unidirectional and involves a restricted set of typical semantic, morphosyntactic and even phonetic changes recurring in language after language. These processes will be treated in more detail in §4.2, when we ask where purposive markers and constructions come from, and whether they typically develop into certain classes of other markers, i.e. give rise to further grammaticalization. We will see that this historical dimension also provides a valuable clue to understanding the synchronic status of purpose clauses in the system of complex sentences, and their specific relationship to other types of subordinate clauses. The methodological consequence of adopting a usage-based approach derives from the fact that motivations for universal trends in structure are to be sought at the level of individual usage events. Without doubt, those can be studied most fruitfully in rich usage data of specific languages, notably in large electronic collections of authentic data. English is currently unique in being documented in several outstanding corpora, such as the tagged (i.e. word-class annotated) British National Corpus (BNC) or the syntactically parsed International Corpus of English (ICE). This enables us to systematically complement typological material with performance data from English, just as required by the PGCH, and to determine more reliably whether certain grammatical constraints are, in fact, grounded in language use. Needless to say, not every variable in the typology of purpose clauses is amenable to this methodological programme, but whenever sensible and suggestive, the present study will make use of corpus material from English. With some features, we will fortunately be able to fall back on previous studies (e.g. from quantitative discourse analysis), whereas others require a completely novel analysis in their own right. The relevant corpora and methods will be introduced more thoroughly in the respective chapters.

2.2.3 Interim summary At the end of this section, we are now in a position to succinctly characterize the theoretical and methodological framework in which this study is located. In the words of Bickel (2007: 248), [m]odern typology is a discipline that develops variables for capturing crosslinguistic similarities and differences of structures both within and across languages (qualitative


typology), explores clusters and skewings in the distribution of these variables (quantitative typology), and proposes theories that explain the clusters and skewings (theoretical typology).

In this book, the theoretical approach to explaining typological clusters and skewings will be functional in nature, emphasizing the interplay of cognitive and communicative pressures on structural properties of language. In addition, it will be fundamentally usage-based in claiming that typological distributions and generalizations are ultimately anchored in language performance and diachronic shifts or conventionalizations of performance preferences. Given that modern typology is about capturing similarities and differences in language-specific structures, an elementary question is which structures are taken into account. We will deal with this issue in the following section.

2.3 A functional definition of ‘purpose clause’ One of the greatest challenges for any typological study stems from the fact that “[t]he fundamental prerequisite for cross-linguistic comparison is cross-linguistic comparability, that is the ability to identify the same grammatical phenomenon across languages” (Croft 2003: 13). Crucially, because of the arbitrariness of language-specific forms (cf. de Saussure 1922), it is notoriously difficult to define the domain of investigation in purely structural terms. Grammatical systems simply differ too radically from one another to devise a list of necessary and sufficient criteria that embraces the variation space of a particular construction. After all, we are not only interested in capturing the typological prototypes of purpose clauses, but also rarer, more ‘exotic’ construction types that may exhibit grammatical properties outside the realm of a highly restrictive formal definition.5 Additionally, even though some grammatical categories may seem strikingly similar across languages (‘past tense’, ‘passive’, ‘subject’), they are hardly ever identical because the very criteria for establishing those categories in the first place are fundamentally language-specific (cf. Croft 2001 for an elaborate argumentation). Consequently, 5. At first glance, this may seem like an outright objection to the recent movement of autotypology (Bickel and Nichols 2002), in which typological structures and variables are defined on structural rather than conceptual grounds. Crucially, however, the start structure, i.e. the very phenomenon to be investigated, is often also broadly defined in semantic-conceptual terms (“semantic equivalences” in Bickel 2006b) in this approach (without any commitments to universal semantic concepts, though). Once the overall domain is thus delimited, variables for describing structural variation in the domain can, of course, be entirely morphosyntactic and derived bottom-up from language-specific descriptions. This procedure is, in fact, not too dissimilar from the present study. The following outline of how to define purpose clauses cross-linguistically is thus not incompatible with the autotypological agenda.

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cross-linguistic comparison cannot be based on structural criteria with very specific distributions in individual languages. These problems have, of course, long been noticed by typologists. Greenberg (1966: 74) already suggested that “in identifying […] phenomena in languages of differing structure, one is basically employing semantic criteria” (cf. also Kibrik 1985). Since the scope of typological research has widened considerably ever since, now often also comprising variables pertaining to social interaction (e.g. Brown and Levinson 1996 on politeness strategies) and discourse-pragmatic organization (e.g. Bickel 2003 on referential density), it is more correct to speak of functional (rather than strictly semantic) definitions. Moreover, many typological definitions are not purely functional, but contain some formal notions (e.g. Diessel’s [1999] definition of demonstratives, or Pustet’s [1993] identification of copulas across languages). For these reasons, a more comprehensive notion of a cross-linguistic tertium comparationis has emerged in the typological literature. This is what Haspelmath (2008a) calls a ‘comparative concept’, i.e. a linguistic construct specifically created for the purpose of typological research. Crucially, comparative concepts abstract away from language-specific formal categories, and also from language-specific semantic categories, i.e. the particular meaning(s) associated with an individual linguistic unit. Instead, they rely, firstly, on universal conceptual-semantic concepts, “meanings which presumably any human being can conceive of ” (Haspelmath 2008a: 13). As I have tried to demonstrate above, those meanings reside in basic communicative functions, and purposeful, i.e. intentional, action is precisely such a universal functional concept. Searle (2006: 2) argues, in fact, that perception, consciousness and intentionality constitute “biologically primitive […] prelinguistic capacities” that are central to our understanding of human existence.6 It is simply a vital characteristic of human beings that we act, not only instinctively, but largely consciously and intentionally. We direct our actions to achieve certain goals that match our intentions. We can thus define the purpose of a particular action as a “reason formulated in terms of [the] intended outcome” of that action (Jackson 1995: 57). This conceptual-semantic structure of purpose is illustrated in Figure 2. Figure 2 also captures some more specific conceptual properties of purposes. For 6. It must be emphasized that intentional action is not meant to evoke the highly culture-specific idea of a ‘purposeful’ conception of life, a societal goal- or ambition-orientation that involves, for instance, extensive planning and conceptualizations of time as a valuable, limited resource (cf. Lakoff and Johnson 1980: 8). What it refers to instead is purposes on a much smaller scale, such as those daily ones driven by our instinct of self-preservation (e.g. getting something to eat, or some rest, shelter, etc.). It is those purposes that every human being can arguably conceive of, and that grammaticalized constructions such as purpose clauses typically encode across languages.


INTENTION

ACTION

(desired) RESULT

Figure 2. The conceptual structure of purposes (A similar conceptual structure in terms of semantic primitives is given by Wierzbicka (1998: 183), who notes as the primitive ingredients of purpose ‘want, because and think’.)

one thing, the successive arrows symbolize that purposes are intrinsically futureoriented; that is, intentions give rise to actions which in turn may yield the desired outcome. Importantly, though, there is no necessity for the desired result state to come about: not every intention is successfully realized by action. This will prove to be a crucial characteristic in the coding of purpose clauses. In sum, the central conceptual ingredients of purpose are intentionality, target-directedness, future orientation, and a hypothetical result state. Comparative concepts rely, secondly, on universal formal concepts. Crucially, these are not categories required by any particular restrictive theoretical framework (e.g. X-Bar Theory, LFG, HPSG, etc.), but formal concepts that are themselves well-grounded in communicative functions of language shared across speech communities. One such formal concept, which is highly relevant to our topic, is that of the clause. The clause is often referred to as the pivotal unit of syntactic representation since it can be conceived of as the linguistic instantiation of a proposition, a chunk of conceptual knowledge formed whenever we construe a particular situation in the world and the participants engaged in this stateof-affairs (cf. Payne 1997: 71).7 It has been argued from several perspectives that clauses, by virtue of encoding propositional acts (Searle 1969: 29), should be regarded as the “locus of grammar and interaction” (Thompson and Couper-Kuhlen 2005: 481) and, therefore, taken to be a universal concept in syntax. Because of their central communicative function, clauses even figure as universal formal concepts in syntactic theories that are generally very sceptical of formal notions beyond language-specific categories (e.g. Croft 2001, Van Valin and LaPolla 1997). Going one step further, languages also typically provide their speakers with grammatical constructions that reflect a combination of two or more situations or propositions. In these cases, clauses are linked in specific ways, forming what is conventionally called a complex sentence. In what follows, I will thus assume that 7. Situation is supposed to be a technical term similar to Langacker’s (1987: ch.7) process, a temporal and relational conceptual unit commonly expressed by verbs. It is a cover term subsuming all aspectual construal classes traditionally referred to as states, activities, achievements and accomplishments (cf. Comrie 1976, Croft to appear [a]).

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a complex sentence expresses a specific contingent relationship between (at least) two situations in (at least) two clauses (cf. also Langacker 1991: 417ff., Longacre 1985: 235). In our case, the specific relationship between the two situations is purposive. One of the two clauses, which we will call the matrix clause, encodes the proposition of the ‘action’ part of our conceptual model of purposes (cf. Figure 2 above), while the purpose clause proper encodes the proposition pertaining to the ‘desired result’ state. We have now arrived at the definition of purpose clauses that was already given at the very beginning of this book: Purpose clauses are part of complex sentences which encode that one verbal situation, that of the matrix clause, is performed with the intention of bringing about another situation, that of the purpose clause. Notice that this definition qualifies as being external or functional since it does not include any structural notion that is not itself defined functionally. This definition will guide our identification of purpose clauses in the world’s languages. In fact, given the previous argumentation that intentionality is central to human behaviour, it is not at all surprising that most languages have at least one conventionalized complex construction specifically dedicated to the expression of purpose. These constructions, which are easily spotted in reference grammars, will be considered the prototypical candidates for purpose clauses and hence constitute the body of the database used in this study. In addition, however, there are quite a few constructions that are polysemous or vague with respect to the notion of purpose, and provided that the reference grammar is informative enough about those structures, they will also be taken into account. Notice also that our functional definition of purpose clauses does not restrict us to subordinate clauses in the traditional sense. On the contrary, particularly interesting (albeit marginal) construction types will be found in the domain of coordination, such as strong purposive implicatures of ‘and’-coordination gradually developing into more specialized purpose constructions. Our universally applicable metalanguage for identifying purpose clauses prevents us from glossing over such remarkable phenomena. In the context of defining purpose clauses, it should finally be mentioned that the alternative term ‘final clause’ is also used by many, especially more traditional, grammarians. In order to avoid potential confusion with ‘final’ as a variable for describing linearization and constituent order (e.g. ‘verb-final language’), I will not use this term as a synonym of purpose clauses.

2.4 Language sampling In addition to catering for the cross-linguistic comparability of purpose clauses, we now need to ensure that the languages chosen for the comparison are (a) rep-


resentative of the world’s languages, so as to capture the linguistic diversity of the phenomenon in question, and (b) independent of one another, so as to make both tenable and revealing generalizations. Both criteria are, of course, related and can be met by carefully controlled sampling. In the typological literature, there have been several original and influential proposals for adequate sampling (e.g. Bell 1978, Dryer 1989, Perkins 1989, Rijkhoff et al. 1993, Maslova 2000). Nichols (2004) has recently drawn together the major insights of these approaches in a practically oriented guide to sampling, which is also informed by her own research experience. Nichols classifies the range of samples used in typological studies according to a number of criteria, and in the following I will present my sample with respect to these criteria. The first and probably most important criterion is the chief classificatory principle used to establish the sample. This book is similar to many typological studies in using a genealogically based sample. A representative subset of the world’s languages is sensitive to the fact that historically closely related languages tend to be similar in their typological behaviour since they have inherited many typologically relevant properties from a common ancestor language. Therefore, genealogical independence is a major criterion for sample design. It is determined on the basis of a well-established and reliable genetic classification of the world’s languages. The best-known classifications are Ruhlen (1991) and the Ethnologue database (latest version Gordon 2005). However, it is widely recognized that Ruhlen follows a ‘lumping’ approach, grouping together vast numbers of languages into a single family. This method is based on Greenberg’s idea of multilateral comparison (cf. Greenberg 2005 for an overview), by which he arrived at extremely large groupings, such as Amerindian (for basically all of Northern, Middle and South America except for three other families) and IndoPacific (for all non-Austronesian languages of Oceania). Greenberg’s and hence Ruhlen’s classification is not uncontroversial, and a number of typologists prefer ‘splitting’ approaches until a genetic relationship between two languages can be reconstructed by means of the comparative method. Nichols uses the term ‘stock’ for the highest level of genetic classification, i.e. the highest node in a genealogical tree “reached by the comparative method and permitting reconstruction” (Nichols 2004: 5, cf. also Nichols 1992: 25 and Bell 1978: 148). Consequently, the number of stocks will be much larger than the number of ‘families’ in the macro-groupings by Greenberg and Ruhlen: Nichols (2004) estimates that presently there are 200–300 reconstructed stocks in the world, and this classification will be adopted here. A genealogically based sample then ideally takes one language per stock, unless a stock is either particularly “old, geographically widespread and not contiguous in distribution, structurally diverse or genetically diverse, i.e. having more than two branches at the root level” (Nichols 2004: 6). For ex-

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ample, it would be perfectly legitimate to consider more than one Indo-European language because these fulfil all of the above criteria simultaneously, whereas some small and relatively young stocks do not. For both theoretical and practical reasons (cf. below), it is not possible to consider all stocks in this study; I rather decided in advance on compiling a medium-sized sample of 80 languages (topdown sampling). Another criterion for characterizing the sample is its stratification. It is wellknown that stocks are not distributed evenly across the globe, so a genetically based sample should attempt some areal stratification. The idea is that the number of stocks in geographically independent areas is reflected proportionally in the sample. Dryer (1989, 1992) suggested distinguishing six macro-areas, and Nichols (2004) takes up this idea, with some modifications. Her areal stratification is shown in Table 1. Based on the distribution of stocks in these areas, and considering the number of available descriptions, Nichols makes the following suggestions for top-down sampling (Table 2). The sample chosen for the present study follows these recommendations. Calculating the number of languages that should enter an 80-language sample while reflecting the exact proportions of stocks to area, one arrives at the following picture (Table 3). The last column already points to some severe sampling difficulties. Two areas, Oceania and South America, are understudied in the sense that many of their native languages have not yet been documented in a reference grammar. Many North American languages, by contrast, could not be taken into account because we lack detailed information on the topic in question, i.e. complex sentences in general and purpose clauses in particular. Crucially, however, the accuracy of the results is improved if only well-described languages are considered. The availTable 1. Number of linguistic stocks, by area (Nichols 2004: 10) Macro-areas

Approx. number of stocks

Old World

Africa Eurasia Total

27 23–24 ca. 50

Pacific

Austronesian New Guinea Australia Total

1 60 15 ca. 76

New World

North America Mesoamerica South America Total

ca. 50 12 ca. 50–80 ca. 100–30

World total

ca. 240–70


Table 2. Recommended numbers of stocks for various sample designs (adapted from Nichols 2004: 10) Area

Africa Eurasia Oceania & NG Australia North America Mesoamerica South America Total

Maximum number of stocks

Welldescribed stocks

Lgs. in a large sample

Lgs. in a medium sample

Prportional (based on the percentage of stocks that each area contains)

28 24 83 30 50 12 80

20 20 30 25 40 6 20

20 20 20 20 20 5 15

10 10 10 10 10 3 7

9 8 27 10 16 4 26

5 4 13 5 8 2 13

307

161

120

60

100

50

Note: Oceania & NG = all Pacific islands plus New Guinea.

ability of comprehensive descriptions thus comes in as a so-called ‘convenience criterion’ for the sampling procedure employed here. In contrast to the Americas, many stocks of the Old World, particularly those in Eurasia and Africa, are known to be very old, geographically wide-spread and typologically diverse. Furthermore, we are fortunate to have excellent descriptions for many languages of these stocks. Therefore, there is some good reason to adjust the original proportions, to the effect that both Africa and Eurasia get a much stronger representation in the sample.8 This will be taken into account when formulating and testing empirical generalizations later on. Wherever multiple lanTable 3. Ideal representation of stocks in a top-down 80-language sample Area

Africa Eurasia Oceania and New Guinea Australia North America Mesoamerica South America Total

Stocks per area (in %)

Ideal number of languages in the sample

9 8 27 10 16 4 26

7 6 22 8 13 3 21

100

80

Problems

under-documentation insufficient descriptions under-documentation

8. Notice that if we had adopted Ruhlen’s or Greenberg’s genetic classification, we would have selected much fewer Amerindian languages in the first place. The sample employed here may thus in effect not be too different from traditional typological samples.

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Table 4. Representation of stocks in the present sample Area

No. of languages

Africa Eurasia Oceania and New Guinea Australia North America Mesoamerica South America

14 19 12 10 9 3 13

guages were selected from one stock, I tried to maximize areal dispersion. In this way, structural similarities shared between two languages in close geographical vicinity (so-called Sprachbund effects) can be reduced in advance and hence will not distort the results of the investigation. Finally, as the present study intends to represent the diversity of means by which languages encode purposive relations, multiple languages may be chosen from a stock if they differ in significant or remarkable ways on particular structural variables of purpose clauses. Some Pama-Nyungan languages, for instance, vary with respect to the organization of grammatical relations in purpose clauses, and contribute different types of purposive constructions that would go unnoticed by strictly independent (‘probability’) sampling.9 Therefore, to the extent that the present sample is now stratified both genetically and geographically, and that the degree of internal diversity of large stocks is reflected by picking out more than one language, it may well be called a variety sample. In fact, the sampling procedure roughly conforms to Bakker’s (to appear) characterization of variety sampling, even though its scope of 80 languages is rather modest in comparison to many well-known variety samples (e.g. most of the surveys in The World Atlas of Language Structures, cf. Haspelmath et al. 2005). able 4 presents the macro-areal distribution of the sample languages, while T Table 5 provides the sample in full. Drawing on the interactive reference tool of the The World Atlas of Language Structures (Haspelmath et al. 2005), we can depict the sample graphically (see Figure 3). It should be noted that although the map contains English as a data point, this is only because English will figure prominently as a ‘control group’ throughout this book. Specifically, given the wealth of available information on English purpose 9. When this study was close to completion, Bickel (2008b) proposed an innovative, computationally sound procedure for genealogically-based sampling. Specifically, it takes statistically significant structural variation within stocks into account and would, therefore, have been a viable option for the present sample.


Table 5. The sample Africa

Stock

Family/genus

No. of lgs. Language(s)

Afro-Asiatic

Chadic Cushitic Gur Benue-Congo Atlantic/Cangin Kadugli Nilotic Songhay Central Sudanic Central Khoisan

2 2 1 3 1 1 1 1 1 1

Hdi, Hausa Somali, Wolaytta Supyire Babungo, Kana, Nkore-Kiga Noon Krongo Lango Koyra Chiini Ma’di Nama (Khoekhoe)

Greek Indic Iranian

1 1 1 2 1 1

Modern Greek Punjabi Persian Basque, Korean Hungarian Abkhaz

1 1 1 1 3 1 1 1 1

Lezgian Georgian Turkish Evenki Tibetan, Meithei, Qiang Mandarin Chinese Kolyma Yukaghir Semelai Hmong Njua (Miao)

1

Kannada

4

Martuthunira, Yidiɲ, Ngiyambaa, Duuŋidjawu Kayardild Wardaman Nunggubuyu Wambaya Tiwi Ungarinjin

Niger-Congo Nilo-Saharan

Khoisan Eurasia

Indo-European

Isolates Uralic Northwest Caucasian Nakh-Daghestanian Kartvelian Turkic Tungusic Tibeto-Burman Sino-Tibetan Sinitic Yukaghir Austroasiatic Mon-Khmer Hmong-Mien (Miao-Yao) Dravidian Australia

Pama-Nyungan Tangkic Gunwinyguan West Barkly Tiwian Wororan

Oceania and Austronesian New Guinea

Yangmanic Nunggubuyu

1 1 1 1 1 1

Central Malayo- 1 Polynesian Eastern Malayo- 2 Polynesian Western Malayo- 2 Polynesian Trans-New Guinea Madang 2 Engan 1

Tetun Maori, Boumaa Fijian Tukang Besi, Acehnese Amele, Kobon Kewa

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Table 5. (cont.) Stock

N. America

Mesoam. S. America

Family/genus

No. of lgs. Language(s)

Solomons-East Central Solomons Papuan Lower Sepik-Ramu Lower Sepik West Papuan Border Eskimo-Aleut Inuit Athapaskan Siouan Kiowa-Tanoan Algic

1

Lavukaleve

1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1

Uto-Aztecan

2 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 2

Yimas Abun Imonda West Greenlandic Slave Lakhota Kiowa Nishnaabemwin (Eastern Ojibwe) Tümpisa Shoshone, Ute Yaqui Jamul Tiipay Tzutujil Lealao Chinantec Chalcatongo Mixtec Paumarí Huallaga Quechua Hixkaryana Wari’ Barasano Sanuma Ndyuka Yagua Pirahā Epena Pedee Mapuche (Mapudungun) Warao, Trumai

Hokan Mayan Oto-Manguean

Numic Cáhitic Yuman

Arauan Quechuan Carib(an) Chapacura-Wanham Tucanoan Yanomam Creole Peba-Yaguan Mura Chocó Araucanian Isolates

Chinantecan Mixtecan

clauses, we will either take English as our point of departure for specific analyses (thereby setting language-particular findings in a cross-linguistic perspective), or draw on English corpus data in order to substantiate those universal trends in purpose clauses whose explanations make reference to language use (e.g. economical coding). In other words, English is not part of the typological sample proper, and will hence not enter the statistical computations performed on this sample.

2.5 Previous work The present study draws on valuable previous research on purpose clause constructions. To start with the language-specific literature, every comprehensive grammar of the better-known and extensively documented languages contains


Figure 3. The sample

some section on purpose clauses, sometimes with excellent discussions (see, for example Huddleston and Pullum 2002: 725–31 for English) or even quantitative data (e.g. van Klinken 1999 on Tetun). In addition, there are a number of papers that deal with (a specific aspect of) purpose clauses in a single language; these will be introduced and discussed at the relevant places in this study. However, the only full-length study of purpose clauses that I am aware of is Jones’ generatively oriented treatise on English purpose clauses (1991). No comparable monographic study seems currently available for any other language. Cross-linguistic, i.e. comparative research on purpose clauses has been fairly limited in scope since it has usually focused on particular aspects that are compared across languages. Cristofaro (2005) examines characteristics of the verb form in purpose clauses, and in her study on subordination systems (Cristofaro 2003), overt participant coding is also taken into consideration. Kazenin (1994) compares the argument marking in coordinate, purpose and relative clauses with regard to patterns of syntactic ergativity. While I was conducting this study, I became aware that Verstraete had just completed an investigation into purpose and reason clauses; thus Verstraete (2008) makes insightful observations on modal marking in purpose clauses, and points to the special status of purpose clauses in subordination systems from the perspective of Systemic Functional Grammar. Finally, Haspelmath (1989) carried out a well-known study in grammaticalization that exploits cross-linguistic data in order to suggest a common historical pathway of morphosyntactic change from purpose clauses to infinitival complements. These major studies, and a number of others in which purpose clauses are discussed yet are not the primary topic of investigation, will be brought to

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bear on the present study. The major contribution of this book consists in integrating the diverse set of studies on purpose clauses with a large-scale empirical analysis into a coherent account that characterizes universal as well as language- particular aspects of purpose clauses and thereby enriches our understanding of the phenomenon.

chapter 3

The grammar of purpose Documentation and explanation

3.1 Preliminaries This chapter will map out the space of morphosyntactic variation in the encoding of purposive relations across the world’s languages. Its first major goal is to provide a comprehensive documentation of both coding and behavioural properties of purpose clauses. To this end, each section of the present chapter will be devoted to one major aspect of the morphosyntax of purpose clauses. We will start by investigating the basic syntactic structure of purpose clauses, as manifested by the characteristics of verb form and argument structure (§3.2 and §3.3 respectively). Afterwards, a detailed description will be given of the markers that lend a clause its purposive semantics (§3.4). These comprise typical purposive markers such as specific conjunctions or affixes, but also additional features in the clause that contribute to evoking a purposive interpretation. Two further sections will then deal with properties concerning purpose clauses as a whole, i.e. their position vis-à-vis the associated matrix clause (§3.5) and selected semantic and pragmatic idiosyncrasies of purposive constructions (§3.6). In the entire discussion, considerably more attention will be paid to those aspects that have not been subject to detailed previous investigations. The second goal of this chapter consists in seeking explanations for cross-linguistically recurring features of purpose clauses, drawing, where appropriate, on the rich apparatus of cognitive-functional explanations introduced in Chapter 2. These will not be dealt with in a separate paragraph, but instead be invoked directly in the discussion of each morphosyntactic feature. In this way, I attempt a synthesis of documentation and explanation for each section. Before we embark on the actual analysis, however, two preliminary comments are necessary. In particular, we need to stake out purposive constructions as our primary object of investigation, and introduce some statistical concepts for the quantitative analysis of constructions.

3.1.1 On the identification of purpose clause constructions As specified by our definition, purpose clauses are complex morphosyntactic con-

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structions for the expression of purposive relations between two states-of-affairs in the world. Crucially, languages may develop more than one such construction in their inventory of complex sentences and each language in our sample may, consequently, contribute more than one purpose clause for analysis. But how can we identify constructions in the first place? Following a recent movement in syntactic theory, a construction is taken to be a complex linguistic sign in the Saussurean sense, a specific constellation of formal features (significans) that is associated or paired directly with a particular semantic or discourse-pragmatic function (significatum). This characterization might be reminiscent of concrete morphemes such as tree, un- or -ed, and in most versions of Construction Grammar (cf. Goldberg 2003 for an overview), these are, in fact, just the smallest and most substantive (i.e. lexically filled) constructions in a language. Syntactic constructions, such as the Present Perfect or the Passive in English, differ from words not in kind but in complexity and schematicity. That is, they are also symbolic units, but their formal pole usually comprises several syntactic elements, many of which are not defined as specific lexical items but as variable slots (e.g. an infinitival verb form, a subject category, a prepositional phrase, etc.). According to Croft (2001: 52), the identification of a construction (for both native speakers in communicative interaction and for the linguistic analyst) is essentially a cognitive problem of categorization (cf. also §2.2.1 above). What makes up a particular construction and differentiates it sufficiently from other constructions in a language is its unique constellation of ‘gestalt features’ (i.e. formal properties) that ultimately maps onto a specific communicative function. In order to express purposive semantics as defined here, for instance, speakers of English can opt for a finite subordinate clause, introduced by the conjunction so that, which follows the associated main clause. Crucially, though, the clause usually also contains a modal auxiliary, so that the construction is sufficiently different from a result clause, a semantically closely related concept that lacks the purposive characterisformal properties of the English finite purpose clause construction We went to the concert early So so that we would get good seats. lexically modal main specific auxiliary verb slot conjunction postposed position in relation to matrix clause

CONSTRUCTION syntactic properties morphological properties phonological properties

semantic properties pragmatic properties discourse-functional properties

FORM symbolic correspondence (link) (CONVENTIONAL) MEANING

Figure 4. The anatomy of a construction and formal (gestalt) features of English finite p urpose clauses

Chapter 3. The grammar of purpose

tic of hypotheticality. Figure 4 illustrates the theoretical notion of a construction (adapted from Croft 2001: 18) and characterizes an example clause as an instance of the English Finite Purpose Clause construction. It should be obvious that constructions, the gestalt features they contain and the syntactic categories they define can only be language-specific. In Ute, for example, purpose clauses are structurally very different from English, with one construction being characterized by a particular combination of suffixes, i.e. a subordinating or complementation suffix, a future tense suffix with inherent hypothetical orientation, and concatenative possessive marking on the subordinate subject:

(5) Ute (Uto-Aztecan: Colorado; Southern Ute Tribe 1980: 258) Mama-ci 'uwáy maĝá-vaa-ku-'u. woman-poss she.poss feed-fut-sub-him ‘(The man entered the house,) so that the woman would feed him.’

The task of language typology, then, is to sample and compare such language-specific constructions by means of a set of variables applicable to all of them (e.g. position, marker of purpose, argument reduction relative to a main clause construction, etc.). In keeping with this agenda, I scanned the 80 sample languages for the distinct purposive constructions they contain. This procedure yielded a subcorpus of N = 218 constructions, each coming with its own language-specific set of gestalt features.1 We can thus carry out analyses on languages as such, but also on constructions as individual data points. In this introductory section, we will briefly ask two basic questions concerning the overall distribution of those data points. First, we are interested in how many purpose clause constructions are contributed on average by a language, and in whether or not the major geographical macro-areas are comparable with respect to the number of constructions they host. Table 6 provides a succinct quantitative overview of these issues. All macro-areas make respectable and quantitatively comparable contributions to the database (Mesoamerica is exceptional since it is, of course, a much smaller macro-area with fewer data points in the first place). The table also shows that on average, each language has at least two distinct constructions encoding a purposive relation. As will become clear throughout the analysis, separate purpose constructions in a single language are usually associated with different semantic or discourse-pragmatic properties. A second initial question concerns the number of gestalt features that typically characterize purpose clauses across the world’s languages. As was touched 1. An overview of those constructions and an illustrative excerpt of the analytical data frame can be found on the companion website.

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Table 6. Overview of purposive constructions per language and macro-area Macro-area

Number of languages Number of purpose clause Average no. of PCs in the sample constructions (PCs) per language

Africa Eurasia Australia Oceania North America Mesoamerica South America

14 19 10 12 9 3 13

37 49 30 37 28 4 33

2.6 2.6 3.0 3.1 3.1 1.3 2.5

Total

80

218

2.7

upon above, this deceptively trivial question can be of vital importance from the theoretical perspective of Construction Grammarians. On this account, overt coding properties are perceptual stimuli that can serve as ‘cues’, in psycholinguistic terminology, to the categorization of a clause as an instance of a purposive construction. If we analyse all 218 constructions in our sample for the number of overt gestalt features they contain, the following picture emerges (Figure 5).2 In almost half of all purposive constructions (106∕218 = 48.6%), there is only one identifying cue, notably a subordinating morpheme denoting purposive semantics. In §3.4.1, we will deal with the remarkably broad typological variation of this particular element. More often than not, however, the gestalt of purpose constructions is commonly also defined by a joint effort of two (38.1%) or less commonly 120 100 80 60 40 20 0 No. No.ofofcxns. lgs.

one

one or two

two

one, two or three

two or three

three

four

106

13

83

1

5

9

1

Figure 5. Number of gestalt features in purpose clauses (N = 218) 2. Since we are primarily interested in overt coding cues here, we disregard, for instance, the position of the purpose clause or implicit arguments (which are rather behavioural properties).


three or more markers (4.6%). Apparently, there is some variation with respect to the optional occurrence of features (cf. columns 2, 4 and 5). Yet, as §3.4.2 will uncover, the additional gestalt features occurring in purpose clauses are amazingly uniform across languages, as they fall into a very limited number of distinct types. As a result of this first overview, we can contend that all languages sampled for the present study have at least one, more commonly two or three, syntactic constructions that are conventionally used to encode purposive relations. There is no gross areal bias in the quantitative distribution of purposive constructions, which makes it possible to compare the geographical macro-areas with respect to the parameters in question.

3.1.2 On the quantitative analysis of constructions The organization of the present database into two subcorpora makes it possible to address research questions both at the level of whole languages (‘How many languages have a grammaticalized ‘lest’-construction?’) and at the more fine-grained construction-specific level (‘Which types of markers are used in a finite purpose clause?’). At both levels, I operated with categorically defined parameters, so that potential correlations between individual variables as well as distributional skewings in the data — be they areal or structural — can be detected. Whenever feasible, alleged associations between variables are submitted to statistical analysis. As has been pointed out in the literature, many classic statistical tests are not felicitously applicable to typological samples (cf. Janssen et al. 2006, Perkins 2001: 427, Cysouw 2005: 566f.).3 Following the most recent proposal by Janssen et al. (2006), I will apply non-parametric significance tests throughout the analysis. In particular, the tests employed do not place any tight constraints on the underlying distribution of the data. The Fisher Exact test, for example, is preferred to Pearson’s Chi-squared test for 2×2 tables since it is not contingent on a specific probability distribution and can be applied to expected frequencies smaller than 5. Tables exceeding the 2×2-outline are submitted to randomized Chi-squared testing. In this 3. Specifically, the inferential logic of parametric tests is violated by the peculiar conditions of the typological sampling procedure: With small families and language isolates, sampling is (nearly) exhaustive, so that in these cases, the sample and the population are identical. As a consequence, random sampling becomes impossible, and the principal aim of parametric tests, i.e. to assess whether a skewing in the sample reflects a skewing in the population, cannot be achieved because “if the sample is identical to the population”, any skewing is “significant by definition and no testing is necessary or required” (Janssen et al. 2006: 422). In other words, the (near-) exhaustive sampling carried out for small families and language isolates influences the probability value of the skewing in the overall sample, to the effect that the skewing will more likely be judged to be significant.

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procedure, the observed data are compared to randomly-generated alternative t ables with the same margin totals. More technically, the χ²-value of the observed table is evaluated against those of 100,000 alternative tables constructed in a socalled Monte-Carlo simulation (cf. Robert and Casella 2005).4 If only very few tables in this simulation can match or outrank the observed χ²-value, it is highly unlikely that our present distribution has arisen by mere chance. In other words, if our observed table scores amongst the five percent highest χ²-values of all tables that entered the simulation, we can conclude that there is a statistically significant association between the variables under investigation (cf. Janssen et al. 2006 for a full exposition of the method). Whenever randomization tests are carried out in the present analysis, I will report the χ²-value of the table in question, the number of alternative tables that were generated for the statistical evaluation (B = 100,000), and an associated probability p indicating the likelihood of obtaining our data in the chance-based simulation. In addition, an appropriate effect size measure, such as φ (for 2x2 contingency tables) or Cramer’s V (for larger tables), will be provided for all statistical tests. In contrast to ordinary p-values, effect size measures do not vary with the sample size and hence offer a more reliable test for the association of two typological variables (cf. also Cohen 1994, Gries 2006). As a final technical remark, it is worth mentioning that non-parametric permutation statistics such as the Fisher Exact test and randomized Chi-squared testing are not designed to make statistical inferences beyond the observable cases (cf. Janssen et al. 2006: 430). However, a logical inference to the entire population from which the present sample was drawn is perfectly possible since the sample itself was designed to be representative of the population underlying it (cf. §2.4 for justification). That is, on the grounds of carefully controlled sampling, we can argue that the statistically significant skewings and patterns we observe in the data are likely to carry over to the population of languages the sample is supposed to represent.

3.2 Coding of the situation: The form of the verb This section will explore the form of the verb in purpose clauses, the parameter that has been investigated most extensively in previous research, notably by Cristofaro (2003, 2005). The variables of interest chiefly refer to what has traditionally been called ‘finiteness’, i.e. overtly coded information that restricts the interpretation of the verb form in terms of time reference, modality and person or number specifications. In the typological literature, it has been pointed out repeatedly that finite4. The simulations and the significance tests were computed in the open-source statistical software package R (R Development Core Team 2007).


ness is a complex scalar or gradient phenomenon rather than a binary distinction (cf. Givón 1991: 853) and is, therefore, not readily applicable to cross-linguistic research (Cristofaro 2007, Koptjevskaja-Tamm 1994: 1247). Some constructions practically resist being characterized in terms of finiteness (e.g. most serial verbs), while many other verb forms are marked for some of the above distinctions only, but not for others, the specific distributions being extremely diverse and difficult to capture by a binary distinction between ‘finite’ and ‘non-finite’ predicates. Therefore, a recent proposal has been to distinguish between semantic finiteness, the condition for an independent interpretation of a clause, and (various degrees of) morphological finiteness, i.e. overt ‘finite’ marking of a verb form (Maas 2004). A similar, by now well-known solution is to replace finiteness by the notion of ‘deranking’ (Stassen 1985). This notion basically rests on a dichotomous distinction between so-called ‘balanced’ verb forms, which are potentially capable of appearing as the verbs of independent declarative clauses, and so-called ‘deranked’ verb forms, which are defective to some degree in that they cannot occur as main verbs in canonical declarative clauses. Deranking can be reconciled with finiteness if the latter is interpreted from a discourse-functional vantage point. Givón (1991: 853) argues that finiteness is “the systematic grammatical means used to express the degree of integration of a clause into its immediate clausal environment.” By means of deranking a verb, the clause in which the verb appears is essentially deprived of its status as an independent proposition (cf. also Givón 1980: 338) and hence needs to be associated with another proposition for its full interpretation. From this perspective, finiteness as described in reference grammars, i.e. the languagespecific set of criteria for coding dependent events, is but a heuristic device for the assessment of the balanced or deranked status of a clause. In the following, we will thus ask whether purpose clauses are characterized cross-linguistically by a rather high or low degree of integration, viz. whether they are prone to deranked or balanced expression (§3.2.1). We will then, in §3.2.2, home in on the best-known variables of traditional finiteness. Specifically, the focus will be on uncovering and explaining the particular phenotypes of tense-aspect-mood (henceforth TAM) marking in purpose clauses.

3.2.1 Finiteness and deranking in purpose clauses When it comes to describing the complex sentence system of a particular language, most field workers or grammarians do actually operate with the notion of finiteness. Although the individual criteria are language-specific and hence differ necessarily from one description to another, they mostly capture our functional interpretation of finiteness and actually correspond to the notion of deranking. In Korean, for instance, finiteness is not defined by traditional features of

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TAM or person marking, but by a set of sentence-type and speech-act suffixes that o ccur obligatorily on verbs of independent clauses (cf. Sohn 1994: 53). Subordinate clauses, by virtue of lacking those suffixes, are described as non-finite by Sohn, which precisely amounts to a deranked status of subordinate verb forms. All of the 80 languages in the sample were analysed from this perspective, i.e. the finiteness decisions of the respective authors were evaluated in functional, deranking terms. Before we quantify the cross-linguistic preferences in finiteness, some of the recurrent typological patterns on this parameter shall be illustrated briefly. To begin with, a typical candidate for a fully finite or balanced purpose clause is found in Wari’. It is marked for its own independent time reference and shows overt participant coding:

(6) Wari’ (Chapacura-Wanham: Brazil; Everett and Kern 1997: 97) Mi' xi'-on pain carawa ca cao' wa give 1pl:incl.rl:fut-3sg.m prep:3n animal infl:n.rl:pst eat inf [ma' ta ma'am ca]. [that.prox:hearer infl:rl:fut full 3sg.m ‘We will give him something to eat, so that he will be full.’

The opposite situation arises when there is no independent specification of temporal relations, the time reference of the purpose clause being dependent on that of the matrix clause. This phenomenon, which Comrie (1985: 56) labels ‘relative tense’, is a criterion for deranking in Warao:

(7) Warao (isolate: Venezuela; Romero-Figueroa 1997: 21) [Waba-naka-mioroi] kokotuka ine nahoro-te. [die-neg-purp everything 1sg eat-npst ‘I eat everything in order that I do not die.’

In this example, the purposive event is located temporally in the same ‘time sphere’ (Declerck 1991: 16) as the matrix event, i.e. non-past. This does, of course, not mean that the events are conceived of as simultaneous. The non-past sphere is coarse enough to allow for a successive interpretation of the situations. At any rate, the crucial point here is that this purpose clause construction is different from causal and concessive clauses in Warao, which, just like main verbs, carry their own temporal markers and hence signal independent time reference (‘absolute tense’). Consequently, purpose clauses like the one in (7) must be regarded as non-finite or deranked. The absence of TAM marking is also characteristic (though not a necessary feature) of subordinate verb forms that are inherently deranked because they cannot normally occur in independent main clauses. Specifically, this set of forms comprises the well-known infinitives (cf. [8]) and nominalizations (cf. [9]), but


also converbs and participles (which we will illustrate later on in the study).

(8) Hungarian (Uralic: Hungary; Kenesei et al. 1998: 56) Anna elküldte Péter-t [a könyvet olvas-ni]. Anna sent Peter-acc the book-acc read-inf ‘Anna sent Peter to read the book.’

(9) Basque (isolate: Spain, France; Hualde and Ortiz de Urbina 2003: 739) [Zuek hemen sartzeko], lehenago guk irten egin beharko dugu. [you here enter.noml before we.erg leave do must.fut aux ‘In order for you to get in, first we will have to get out.’

In this category, we also find verb forms which are made dependent by the co-occurrence of a special mood marker that cannot normally be used on independent main verbs. Persian purpose clauses are a case in point since their verbs are usually prefixed with the subjunctive inflection, which is reserved for subordinate clauses and hence a marker of deranked status (Mahootian 1997: 247). Notice, finally, that the absence of TAM marking on purposive verbs in some languages, such as Kana, may look deceptively non-finite, resembling ‘bare infinitives’ in others: (10) Kana (Benue-Congo: Nigeria; Ikoro 1996: 279) Dá ló [(lō)k ō-bṵ̀ ̰ὲ lé ŋwíí]. lick salt [purp you-father good child ‘Take enough salt so that you can father a good-looking baby.’ However, we should consider, first, that the main verb does not display any TAM marking either and, secondly, that there is a distinct non-finite (infinitival) construction in Kana used for the expression of purpose: (11) Kana (Ikoro 1996: 280) [lóó à-kp̰à̰ mɛ̅]. N pīè study medicine purp inf-save me ‘Study medicine so as to save me.’ Thus we have reason to classify the purpose clause in (10) as fully balanced. Similarly unmarked verb forms can also be found in other languages (e.g. balanced purpose clauses in Mandarin Chinese). Apart from TAM distinctions, languages may also indicate finiteness by means of verbal agreement (indexation) markers. By implication, a lack of such markers is taken to instantiate a non-finite or deranked construction. Kiowa, for example, has an incorporated purpose construction which lacks pronominal indexation

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prefixes. The main verb, by contrast, carries precisely such a prefix: (12) Kiowa (Kiowa-Tanoan: Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas; Watkins 1984: 229) Gyà-kí·+kɔ·tɔ+tòt. 1sg.agt:3sg.obj-meat+buy+send.prf ‘I sent him to buy meat.’ The last and trickiest category is that of serial verbs, in which two verb forms are welded into a complex verbal expression, as in Acehnese: (13) Acehnese (Austronesian: Indonesia; Durie 1985: 196) Ku = jak = seumayang kee dilee u = krueng. 1 go pray 1 now to = river ‘I am going to the river to pray.’ Typical serial verbs are used to conceptualize the two situations involved as being part of one complex event (Payne 1997: 307), and it is the entire complex that can receive TAM or person marking. For this reason, we will isolate serial verbs in the following counts of deranking and code them as n.a. ‘not applicable’. We can now proceed to analysing the typological distribution of deranking in purpose clauses. At the construction-specific level, we can assign each construction the status of balanced, deranked or n.a., the results of which are displayed in Table 7. Table 7. Verb forms in purpose clauses (N = 218) Verb status

Absolute frequency

Relative frequency (in %)

Balanced Deranked n.a.

76 137 5

34.9 62.8 2.3

Total

218

100.0

As we can see, at the construction-specific level, deranked purpose clauses outweigh balanced purpose clauses considerably. This difference by itself is statistically significant under an exact binomial test (p result, cf. Hwang 1995). On this account, both ordering patterns look iconic in some respect, but this, of course, makes iconicity void as an explanatory principle; it simply shifts the burden to explaining why one of the two iconic conceptualizations is apparently preferred across the world’s languages. Perhaps, then, a potential pitfall lies in postulating a priori that a surface structure which looks iconic is also iconically motivated. For the position of purpose clauses within complex sentences, this means that before we can claim that iconicity motivates sentence-final position, we should have sufficient reasons to exclude other factors that may favour this particular linear order. Let us consider the possible factors in turn. The important processing factor of consistent branching directions across all complex syntactic constituents of a language has already been ruled out because

117

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of the significant amount of postposed purpose clauses in OV languages. Another factor that has been invoked for explaining the postposing or right extraposition of clauses is their length. There seems to be abundant evidence that speakers of many languages shift particularly long or ‘heavy’ elements towards the right end of the constituent of which they are part (De Smedt 1994, Wasow 1997). Subordinate clauses, on this account, are often heavy elements that would be expected at the end of the complex sentence. If valid from a cross-linguistic point of view, this principle would lead to extraposition in OV languages and thus nicely capture the great amount of postposed purpose clauses. On the face of it, some data in our sample would appear to corroborate this intuition. Compare the following examples from Punjabi: (124) Punjabi (Indo-European: India; Bhatia 1993: 74–5) a. Mãi [shikaago vekhaN] giaa. 1sg [Chicago see-inf.obl go-pst.m ‘I went to see Chicago.’ b. Ó ne kamar TaTolii [ki rakam Thiik bánnii 3sg erg waist.f.sg feel-pst.f.sg [purp money fine tie-ptc.pst.f.sg páii sii jaa náii]. sit-pst.f.sg was or neg ‘He felt his waist (to see) if the money was tied safely (to his waist).’ Whereas in (124a), the purpose clause is very short and placed before the main verb, the one in (124b) is rather lengthy and appears after the whole main clause. Notice, however, that we are dealing with two entirely different constructions here: the first is a non-finite (infinitival) purpose clause with an equi-deleted subject, while the second is a finite purpose clause with an overt purposive conjunction and an explicit subject. Each of the two constructions is maximally adapted to its own ecological niche: The economical construction is used for highly predictable same-subject, preferably motion-matrix contexts, and due its reduced status, it comes close to verbal complements and can also appear in the preverbal position canonically associated with such sentential objects. The more elaborate construction, by contrast, needs overt subjects due to non-coreferentiality and hence also more roundabout expression. It then cannot easily be incorporated into the main clause and is thus postposed. Purpose clauses in Punjabi, therefore, are ‘mixed’ with regard to their positioning patterns. Even if length were to be invoked for the construction in (124b), it could not account more generally for OV languages in which all purpose clauses are rigidly postposed, no matter whether they are long or short, finite or non-finite, same-subject or different-subject. In these cases, there simply is no option of preposing a purpose clause, even if it is short. This

Chapter 3. The grammar of purpose 119

appears to hold, for instance, in Ungarinjin (Pama-Nyungan: Australia), Yaqui (Uto-Aztecan: Mexico) and Epena Pedee (Chocó: Colombia). What is more, in these and quite a few other languages, purpose clauses are not longer on average than temporal and conditional clauses, but are still postposed, while temporal and conditional clauses preferably precede the main clause. Therefore, it is unlikely that length or heaviness are highly ranked motivations for postposing purpose clauses after the main clause. A more important factor for the position of adverbial clauses has recently been brought to our attention. In a cross-linguistic study of 40 languages, Diessel (2001) shows that there is a significant correlation between the position of the subordinating element in adverbial clauses and the position of the entire adverbial clause vis-à-vis the main clause. More precisely, Diessel argues that if a language employs clause-final adverbial subordinators, the adverbial clause precedes the main clause. If, by contrast, a language employs clause-initial subordinators, the position of adverbial clauses tends to be mixed: they occur before and after the main clause. This generalization entails that in the majority of cases, the subordinating element occurs right in between the clauses that it combines. Hawkins (1994, 2004) argues that such a linear arrangement of constituents facilitates the on-line parsing of complex sentences. Specifically, Hawkins suggests that the subordinator constitutes an important processing node which helps the hearer to recover that the unit to be parsed is a subordinate (adverbial) clause; at the same time, this provides a cue to the immediate constituent (IC) structure of the sentence as a whole. That is, once the hearer encounters an (adverbial) subordinator, it is immediately recoverable that the whole structure to be parsed is a complex sentence (IC ‘construction’), and that the constituent currently parsed needs to be integrated with a matrix clause (‘attachment’). Notice, therefore, that while (adverbial) subordinators are ‘mother node constructing categories’ (MNCCs), the associated main clause does not carry any overt cue to the complex sentence structure. Hawkins then goes on to claim that efficiency plays an important role in on-line processing. On his view, processing is facilitated if IC construction and attachment can be made by the hearer as early as possible. This can be captured quantitatively in so-called ‘constituent recognition domains’ (Hawkins 2004: 32), i.e. roughly the amount of linguistic elements (words or morphemes) that must be parsed “in order to recognize […] all ICs of a phrase once the parser has recognized the mother node M of the phrase.” (Diessel 2005: 456) Let me illustrate this line of reasoning with a concrete example, a complex sentence with a postposed purpose clause from Noon:

120 A Typology of Purpose Clauses

(125) Noon (Niger-Congo/Atlantic: Senegal; Soukka 2000: 283) M IC1

IC2

dii] sub[doo ɓuwaa mín-u ki-hot]. [sit-imp here [purp people can(aux)-pl inf-see main sub ‘Sit here so that people can see.’ main[Yug-aa

In this example, the sentence begins with the matrix clause, but there is no element in the structure that allows the hearer to recognize that this is, in fact, IC1 of a complex sentence (hence the broken line between M and IC1). The subordinate clause then begins with an initial conjunction, and it is at this point that the mother node M can be constructed. As indicated by the bold line, the conjunction allows for the construction of the mother node and for the recognition that a second IC will now be attached to M. From this perspective, it is optimal to have the conjunction as a linking morpheme between IC1 and IC2. In other words, once the last word of the main clause has been processed, it really only needs one additional morpheme, i.e. the subordinator, until construction and attachment can take place. The IC-to-morpheme ratio is thus 2: 2 = 1, a ‘minimal domain’ in Hawkins’ (2004) terminology. Now, imagine the adverbial clause were preposed, with the conjunction remaining in clause-initial position. In this case, there would be an immediate signal at the beginning of the sentence that a complex-sentence M will have to be constructed; crucially, however, this leads to the on-line expectation that a main clause will have to follow, but its attachment to M is now delayed until after the entire subordinate clause has been processed. Here is an example of an English temporal clause to illustrate this principle: M

(126) IC1

IC2

[When I went to the cellar without the light switched on], the door slammed behind me. In this sentence, the attachment of IC2 needs 11 (!) words (or 12 morphemes) after the construction of IC1 and M; the constituent recognition domain (2:12 = 0.16) is thus fundamentally different from the 1: 1 relation we had before. This is, of course, not necessarily problematic (as the ample attestation of preposed adverbial clauses in English demonstrates), but the structure in (126) is simply less efficient than the


one in (125). On this account, preposed purpose clauses should preferably have their subordinator at the end of the clause, as in Abkhaz: (127) Abkhaz (Northwest Caucasian: Georgia; Hewitt 1989: 42) [S-y°əza də-z-bà-r+c] [à-kalak’ (a-)ax’ s-co-yt’]. [my-friend him-I-see-purp [art-town it-to I-go-fin ‘I am going to town to see my friend.’ Here, too, the IC-to-morpheme ratio is 2 : 2 = 1 again, the optimal or most efficient value in Hawkins’ matrix. If Diessel’s (2001) hypothesis is correct and efficient IC construction and attachment were, indeed, crucial for the position of adverbial clauses, then we would expect that purpose clauses precede their matrix clause if they are marked by a clause-final subordinator and follow if they are marked by a clause-initial subordinator. If there is a significant bi-directional correlation to this effect, then online processing pressures would account for particular positioning patterns of purpose clauses. In order to test this hypothesis, we first determine the precise position of each marker. Figure 22 illustrates which positioning classes of subordinators can be distinguished and how often the different marking types fall into these categories. These figures demonstrate that most purpose clauses place their primary marker at the clause-boundary, either in clause-initial (33.0%) or clause-final (51.4%) position. Only rarely do purposive markers embrace the purpose clause as a circumfix (0.9%), or occur in clause-medial position (2.3%). The category ‘flexible or 120 100 80 60 40 20 0

S-SUB

SUB-S

circum

medial

112

72

2

6

flexible or no marking other 9

17

Figure 22. Position of the primary marker (‘subordinator’) in the purpose clause (N = 218)

121

122 A Typology of Purpose Clauses

Table 28. Position of the purpose marker and the purpose clause Position of the subordinator

Position of the purpose clause Flexible

Post preferred Pre preferred Other

Total

No marker SUB-S S-SUB Circum Medial Flexible or other

1 7 17 0 4 2

13 65 48 2 2 6

2 0 47 0 0 0

1 0 0 0 0 1

17 72 112 2 6 9

Total

31

136

49

2

218

other’, finally, covers those 4.1% of all cases in which the marker is either flexible with regard to its position in the clause or occurs on the main clause (e.g. as a clitic). Once those positioning classes are in place, we can correlate them with the position of the whole clause in which they occur. The results are displayed in Table 28. This highly significant distribution (χ2 = 88.19, df = 15, p

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