Reconnecting language: morphology and syntax in functional perspectives

RECONNECTING LANGUAGE

AMSTERDAM STUDIES IN THE THEORY AND HISTORY OF LINGUISTIC SCIENCE General Editor E.F. KONRAD KOERNER (University of Ottawa) Series IV - CURRENT ISSUES IN LINGUISTIC THEORY

Advisory Editorial Board Henning Andersen (Los Angeles); Raimo Anttila (Los Angeles) Thomas V. Gamkrelidze (Tbilisi); John E. Joseph (Edinburgh) Hans-Heinrich Lieb (Berlin); Ernst Pulgram (Ann Arbor, Mich.) E. Wyn Roberts (Vancouver, B.C.); Danny Steinberg (Tokyo)

Volume 154

Anne-Marie Simon-Vandenbergen, Kristin Davidse and Dirk Noël (eds) Reconnecting Language Morphology and syntax in functional perspectives

RECONNECTING LANGUAGE MORPHOLOGY AND SYNTAX IN FUNCTIONAL PERSPECTIVES

Edited by

ANNE-MARIE SIMON-VANDENBERGEN University of Gent

KRISTIN DAVIDSE University of Leuven

DIRK NOËL University of Gent

JOHN BENJAMINS PUBLISHING COMPANY AMSTERDAM/PHILADELPHIA

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 Reconnecting language : morphology and syntax in functional perspectives / edited by AnneMarie Simon-Vandenbergen, Kristin Davidse, Dirk Noël. p. cm. -- (Amsterdam studies in the theory and history of linguistic science. Series IV, Current issues in linguistic theory, ISSN 0304-0763 ; v. 154) Most contributions are selected papers or plenary lectures presented at the 1st International Systemic Functional Congress in Ghent in 1994. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Grammar, Comparative and general-Morphology. 2. Grammar, Comparative and gen­ eral-Syntax. 3. Functionalism (Linguistics) 4. Dependency grammar. I. SimonVandenbergen, A. M. II. Davidse, Kristin. III. Noel, Dirk. IV. International Systemic Functional Congress (21st : 1994 : Ghent, Belgium) V. Series. P241.R43 1997 415-dc21 97-26690 ISBN 90 272 3659 3 (Eur.) / 1-55619-870-1 (US) (alk. paper) CIP © Copyright 1997 - 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 75577 · 1070 AN Amsterdam · The Netherlands John Benjamins North America · P.O.Box 27519 · Philadelphia PA 19118-0519 · USA

Table of contents

Introduction

vii

Part I: Reconnecting language Linguistics as metaphor M. A. K. Halliday

3

Language as a faculty, languages as 'contingent' manifestations and humans as function builders Claude Hagège

29

Linguistics — systemic and functional: Renewing the 'warrant' Robert de Beaugrande

49

Part II: Dependency Structure, meaning and use Petr Sgall

73

Control in constrained dependency grammar Stanley Starosta

99

Part III: Cross-linguistic morphosyntax Grammatical structures in noun incorporation William McGregor

141

The formal realization of case and agreement marking: A functional perspective Anna Siewierska

181

Part IV: Case and semantic roles in discourse Functions of case-marking vs. non-marking in Finnish discourse Marja-Liisa Helasvuo

213

The interaction of Russian word order, agreement and case marking Karen E. Robblee

227

Models of transitivity in French: A systemic-functional interpretation Alice Caffarel

249

Mental process clauses in Japanese Motoko Hori

297

Index

329

List of contributors

337

Introduction

The title of this collective volume reflects the thread running through the various chapters, in the sense that they are all, implicitly or explicitly, a plea for 'reconnecting language' in different meanings of the expression. The functional perspective on language which underlies the contributions to the volume calls for abandoning the 'isolationist' approach which has characterised much of 20th century linguistics and for a return to an integrated approach. There are four ways in which this book is about 'reconnecting language'. One sense in which we intend the expression to be understood is that of re-establishing a link between language and the world, of reconnecting language to the context in which it has evolved and in which it functions. In this first sense of the term, a linguistic theory which tries to accommo­ date for this link between language on the one hand and its history and external functions on the other hand, and which aims at explaining the grammar by relating it to those external factors, is functional. Various contributions argue for further research into the connections between the grammar, the text and the extralinguistic context. A second sense in which the title is to be understood is that of re­ establishing a link between the strata of language. The contributions share the aim of demonstrating the non-autonomous nature of morphology, syntax and lexicon, and the inadequacy of linguistic models which deal with them in separate, independent components. A recurrent theme throughout the book is, in fact, the inseparability of lexis and morphosyntax and it provides convincing argumentation against a modular theory with autonomous levels, the dominant framework in mainstream 20th century linguistics. The contributions vary with regard to the extent to which they take up the above issues in an explicit manner. Some aim primarily at providing

viii

INTRODUCTION

arguments for the necessity to adopt an integrated view of language, while others deal with a specific problem in detail as an instantiation of the connectedness of the linguistic system. They also vary with regard to the extent to which they proclaim themselves committed to both of the above meanings of the term 'reconnecting', as well as with respect to the version of 'functional linguistics' they adhere to. Although these differences might at first sight create the impression of a fairly heterogeneous collection of papers, we wish to emphasise that the variety is intentional and serves the purpose of bringing out the third and fourth senses in which the title of the book should be understood. In the third sense of the term, reconnecting language refers to re-establishing links between linguistic approaches. It is precisely because the linguists who have contributed to this volume do not belong to one particular 'school' that it seemed to us important to bring their views together. As argued in some of the papers, linguistics has for too long mimicked its object of investigation in that, just as language has been disconnected from the context in which it exists and has suffered from 'disintegration' in the sense that it has been studied as if it consisted of separate pieces instead of being an organic whole, in the same sense linguistics has fallen apart into separate schools which have had little or no contact. The contributors to this volume share a strong wish to renew the connections and to look for ways in which they can cooperate to extend our knowledge of language. Finally, it seemed to us important to bring together papers which are concerned with general issues of goals and priorities of linguistics with contributions on specific grammatical problems in individual languages. The papers which deal with very specific issues of morphology and syntax in a particular language show how, even when one is dealing with 'local' problems, one should never lose sight of the wider perspective of how the description contributes to an explanation of the meaning-creating nature of language as a whole (see M. A. K. Halliday, this volume). It is therefore just as important to reconnect studies of morphosyntactic detail with a general vision of language as a 'semiotic system' as it is for linguistic theory to reconnect with the concrete data from as many languages as possible. This is then the fourth sense in which the title is relevant to this volume. The papers grouped in part one are more general in scope. In their different ways, all three of them set up a cogent argumentation for functional linguistics. Michael Halliday's paper 'Linguistics as Meta-

INTRODUCTION

ix

phor' answers the question how a linguistic theory is like its object, language itself. Starting from the view that a theory is always, as a semiotic system, essentially a metaphor, linguistic theories will be differ­ ent metaphors depending on which features of language they consider as essential and necessary to account for. Halliday shows how systemicfunctional linguistics aims at reflecting the properties of language which give it its power as a meaning-making system. Since the semogenic power of language derives from its connection with the material world in which it functions, linguistics must enable us to explain in what way these connections exist. Claude Hagège's paper 'Language as a Faculty, Languages as 'Con­ tingent' Manifestations and Humans as Function Builders' pleads for reconnecting language in different ways. First, language needs to be linked again to its fundamental dimension, which is the social one; further, the study of language as a faculty needs to be reconnected with concrete data from languages as manifestations of the faculty; thirdly, linguistics must account for man's presence in language, and for the reflections of his intervention in it; fourthly, Hagège argues that the facts of language and language change, in particular processes of grammaticalisation and lexicalisation, demand a linguistic approach in which lexicon, morphol­ ogy and syntax are seen as essentially connected to one another. In 'Linguistics — Systemic and Functional: Renewing the Warrant' Robert de Beaugrande explains why formalist linguistics has not achieved the goals it expected to achieve, and why it could not possibly achieve them. The warrant for systemic-functional linguistics is the fact that the model integrates the connectedness of language to human knowledge and experience in social life. By means of the example of the verb 'warrant' as it occurs in the 'Bank of English' de Beaugrande demonstrates that grammar cannot be described in isolation from lexical data and suggests that the evidence that large computerised corpora yield and will yield in the future may contribute to solving the question as to how formal and functional descriptions should be. The papers in part two look at dependency, which they propose as a fundamental relation. Both Stanley Starosta and Petr Sgall argue that functionalism and formalisation are perfectly compatible, and that ex­ plicit formulations are useful in offering a basis for comparing different functional approaches among themselves as well as with other trends in theoretical linguistics. Both arrive, via different routes, at a description in which grammar and lexicon are inseparable components.

χ

INTRODUCTION

In 'Structure, Meaning and Use', Sgall gives a very clear account of the functional principles of the classical Prague School and of the way in which these are formalised by the Charles University research group of theoretical and computational linguistics. He describes dependency within the framework of 'Functional Generative Description' as devel­ oped by the Charles University research group. Sgall argues that only part of syntax can be accounted for by a constituency approach, and that large portions can best be explained from a description based on dependency. The link with Starosta's dependency framework is clear, and explicitly mentioned by Sgall. They share the belief that much of the grammatical information is stored in the lexicon, in that the lexical entry contains, amongst other things, a valency frame. Starosta's contribution 'Control in Constrained Dependency Gram­ mar' introduces the relevant properties of his lexicase framework, point­ ing out the extent to which they match or differ from their closest counterparts in the systemic-functional and Chomskyan frameworks. It then applies the dependency approach to the analysis of infinitival com­ plements in several European languages. While lexicase differs from other approaches in this volume in that it shares with the Chomskyan tradition a conception of language as a formal system generating an infinite set of sentences and a primary commitment to linguistics as related to psychol­ ogy rather than to anthropology, Starosta shares with the functionalists in this volume a belief in the need for data from large numbers of languages and an aversion to ethnocentric linguistics. The contributions by William McGregor and Anna Siewierska, grouped in part three, are both cross-linguistic studies of morphosyntactic phenomena. On the basis of data from widely divergent languages they are able to throw new light on their respective topics of investigation. Inter­ estingly, both authors have, in their search for explanations of morphosyn­ tactic phenomena, found it necessary to look at grammar in text and both point to the evidence of man's presence at the centre of language. McGregor's paper 'Grammatical Structures of Noun Incorporation' gives an answer to the crucial question (which has, as he points out, been of little concern to previous investigators) of the grammatical structures involved in noun incorporation and the grammatical roles served by the incorporated nouns. On the basis of a richly documented analysis McGregor gives a functional account of the existence of two primary types of noun incorporation, serving two different functions, roughly corre­ sponding to Halliday's logical and textual metafunctions. In addition he

INTRODUCTION

χι

offers an account of how it is that two such semiotically distinct grammati­ cal relationships have come to share similar formal realisations. Siewierska's paper on 'The Formal Realization of Case and Agree­ ment Marking' also aims at explanatory power based on empirical data. By examining a large number of languages the author manages to modify in significant ways the complementarity hypothesis, which states that there is complementarity in the nature of the arguments which display case as compared to agreement marking. Siewierska comes to the interesting conclusion that while the hypothesis is to some extent borne out across languages, there is little complementarity within languages. On the other hand, it appears from Siewierska's analysis that there is a functional explanation for the difference in the number and the nature of the argu­ ments favoured by case and agreement marking. The final part comprises studies of case and clausal roles in specific languages. All four contributions argue for an analysis of morphological and syntactic phenomena in the wider context of the discourse. Both Marja-Liisa Helasvuo and Karen Robblee present a corpus-based analysis of case marking. In 'Functions of Case-Marking vs. Non-Marking in Finnish Discourse' Helasvuo discusses the case system in Finnish as a discourse construct, concentrating on the use of noun phrases in conver­ sation. She discovers interesting links between case marking and systemexternal pressures, such as the need to track participants, the need to introduce new referents, the need to express identifiability. In other words, Helasvuo is able to show that the case system can only partially be explained in terms of structural oppositions, and more generally that the case system is another instantiation of the non-autonomous nature of linguistic systems. Robblee's paper 'The Interaction of Russian Word Order, Agreement and Case Marking' shows that word order interacts with agreement as well as with case marking, and that case marking and agreement also interact with each other. These interactions are motivated by similar f unctions of 'existentialisation' and 'individuation'. The author demonstrates that there are clear correlations between syntactic, morpho­ logical, lexical and discourse choices, and argues that these correlations provide evidence against a modular approach to grammar. The contributions by Alice Caffarel and Motoko Hori are systemicfunctional analyses of process types and functions in the clause. In 'Models of Transitivity in French: A Systemic-Functional Interpretation' Caffarel explores how French grammar construes the speaker's experi­ ence of the internal and external world. It is suggested that the experiential

xii

INTRODUCTION

structure of the French clause can be approached from a transitive and ergative perspective, and that these two models of participation in the process are simultaneously constructed by the French clause grammar by means of the process type and the agency systems respectively. It is then shown how the different models of transitivity are deployed in two texts chosen as representatives of different registers. The texts illustrate how different registers foreground different transitivity models. Finally, Hori re-examines the notion of 'subjecthood' in Japanese. Her paper Mental Process Clauses in Japanese' shows that formal descriptions of the parti­ cle ga (the so-called 'subject-marker') are inadequate, mainly as a result of the fact that they have invariably been based on self-constructed examples. Hori argues that the sentences which have been crucial to the argumentation are in fact either highly marked or simply ungrammatical. She therefore examines the use of the particle in 'real data'. Hori's account is based on an analysis in terms of the speaker's point of view and of information structure in casual conversation. The description beautifully illustrates the interaction of the experiential, the interpersonal and the textual aspects of meaning in the clause. In addition, the author produces strong arguments against ethnocentric linguistics, which tries to force languages into patterns too readily proclaimed as being universal. Most of the contributions to this book were presented as papers, some of them as plenary lectures, at the 21st International Systemic Functional Congress in Ghent in 1994. We hope that they reflect what we saw as the aim of that conference, to create a forum for an open-minded discussion of where we stand in linguistics and where we should be going. It appeared that there was a great amount of agreement on the priorities and the directions to take, also among linguists who, while embracing functional principles, are by no means systemicists. As organisers of that conference we are grateful to everybody who contributed to the discus­ sion, also to those people who presented very valuable papers which could not be included in this volume. Our sincere thanks are also due to the referees who sent us their pertinent and most helpful comments on the papers. They were: Fred Karlsson, Greville G. Corbett, Mick O'Donnell, Liliane Haegeman, Pirjo Karvonen, Véronique Lagae, Senko Maynard, Marianne Mithun, and Erich Steiner. Their expertise has been invaluable to us. Further, Robert de Beaugrande's help deserves special mention. The title of the present book was suggested by him and he was so kind as to provide us with a tape and transcript of Michael Halliday's plenary paper. Finally, we owe

INTRODUCTION

xiii

thanks to Keith Carlon for his work as style editor of the articles written by non-native speakers of English.

Ghent and Leuven, May 1997 AMSV, KD, DN

Part I Reconnecting language

Linguistics as metaphor M . A. K. Halliday University of Sydney

1. Introduction The burden of this paper is something that I feel is really very simple; yet I have found it quite difficult to formulate. The argument runs like this. Language is a meaning-making system — let me refer to this property as semogenesis, the semogenic power of language. We can, I suggest, identify some particular features of language that are associated with this semogenic power (I shall enumerate five that seem to me to be signifi­ cant). Now, a theory is also a semogenic system; this applies to all theories — they create meaning — and hence to all scientific theories, and hence to theoretical linguistics. Will we find these same features present in a scientific theory? In particular, since linguistics is theory about the making of meaning, will we find that a linguistic theory shares, or mimics, some of the semogenic properties of language itself? (Cf. Matthiessen and Nesbitt 1996) 2. Language as meaning potential I have always spoken of a language as a meaning potential; that was the motif behind the idea of a system network, which is an attempt to capture this potential. We try to construct networks for all the strata of language — perhaps concentrating particularly on the lexicogrammar since that is, as it were, the source of energy, the semogenic powerhouse of a language,

4

M. A. . HALLIDAY

but making it explicit that all strata participate in the overall construction of meaning. In a sense this central question underlies all the other questions we ask, at least at the present imperfect state of our knowledge: how do people mean? what is the real nature of this semogenic power, and how does it come to be attained by language — or, if you prefer, how is it that it comes to be attained by human beings through the forms of their various languages? I have always felt it important to try to view a language as a whole, to get a sense of its total potential as a meaning-making resource. This is not to imply that a language is some kind of a mechanical construct all of whose parts come together in a perfect fit, any more than if you try to see a human body as a whole you are conceiving of it as an idealized machine. Indeed it is precisely because the human body is not a mechanical assemblage of parts that it is important to view it paradigmatically as well as syntagmatically (to view it panaxially, if you like); and the same consideration applies to language. In trying to construe, and to maintain, this general perspective on language as a semogenic resource, I have found it helpful to keep in focus the mutually constructive sets of relationships that I referred to as metafunctions: the ideational, whereby language construes human expe­ rience; the interpersonal, whereby language enacts human relationships; and the textual, whereby language creates the discursive order of reality that enables the other two. This gives some substance to the notion of meaning potential. Language construes experience by transforming it into the experience of meaning; it enacts interpersonal relationships by per­ forming them as acts of meaning; in this way the world of semiosis unfolds alongside the material world, interpenetratingly. The semogenic power of language derives from, and depends on, its constantly reasserting its connection with the material conditions of existence; the concept of metafunction allows us to interpret where, and how, these connections are being made. I might perhaps mention here various more specific problems on which the metafunctional frame of reference has helped to throw some light, because these also relate to my general theme. One is the question of grammatical agnateness: how do we establish systematic patterns of predictable meaning relationship? Structural proportionalities provide evidence, but the underlying proportions are systemic, and located within metafunctionally defined regions of the grammar — which enable us to set up proportionalities such as these, from the region of modality in English:

LINGUISTICS AS METAPHOR I think [they're away] :: it's possible [they're away] :: they must [be away]

5

: I don't think [they're here] : it's not certain [they're here] : they can't [be here] ....

A second question is that of the relation of such patterns of agnateness to functional varieties — to variation in register, and hence to context of situation. And a third question, or set of questions, arises when we adopt a developmental perspective, seeing how small children build up their potential for meaning. The metafunctional framing makes it possible to approach these questions by setting up environments within the grammar, which can then be (a) interrelated one to another and (b) related to the diatypic and diachronic environments within which the grammar is de­ ployed and within which it is learnt. And this leads me to one further point before I finish with the preliminaries. If we talk of semogenesis, this implies something that takes place in time. But in order to locate it, to contextualize it in a temporal perspective, we find ourselves operating not with a single time dimension but with three different time dimensions, each constituting one strand of semohistory. There is the history of the system, and of this or that particular subsystem — the phylogenetic dimension, where meaning evolves. There is the history of the language user — the ontogenetic dimension, where meaning develops in a pattern of growth and matura­ tion, followed by senescence, decay and death. And there is the history of the text, the instance — the logogenetic dimension, where meaning unfolds in an individuated manner of progression. Thus, the potential; the instantial, or instantiated; and, in between as it were, the instantiator (and hence keeper of the potential) — the human brain. 3. Five critical features In my abstract for ISFC21, which (as is inevitably the case) had to be submitted over half a year in advance, I committed myself to trying to identify and elaborate on those features of the grammar of a natural language that it seemed to me were really critical as the source of grammatical energy: features from which a language derives its semogenic power and is enabled to evolve and function as a self-organizing system. I came up with five headings: language is comprehensive, ex­ travagant, indeterminate, non-autonomous and variable. Let me try to explain, now, why each of these seemed to me significant. One or two of

M. A. K. HALLIDAY

6

the headings I can deal with fairly briefly; others will need a rather longer exegetical note. .

Comprehensive

I referred just now to the ideational and interpersonal metafunctions: language as construing experience, language as enacting personal and social relationships. But what is striking about these is their coverage: language construes all of our experience, it enacts all of our interpersonal processes. Notice for example how from very early in their lives children's personal engagements are mediated, and modulated, through language; this is already well established at the stage of their protolanguage, even before they start learning a mother tongue. There are, of course, special­ ized registers of sublanguages which are by definition partial; but these are meaning-creating precisely because they are systematic variants within the comprehensive whole. (You could not start learning your mother tongue by learning some specialized variety of it.) Interpreted in quantitative terms, they are local resettings of the global probabilities of the system, and this gives them their semogenic power: they create new meanings by taking the non-specialized register (the discourses of commonsense knowledge) as their point of departure. A language is able to be comprehensive because it is very big. I am surprised how seldom people ask the question "how big is a language?" — but perhaps it is because they are not accustomed to looking at a language globally as a meaning-making resource. Some years ago I gave a paper on this topic, and with that title, to a psychology department seminar: I think it is a question that can, and should, be taken seriously. Chomsky had said that a language was a finite system generating an infinite body of text; I prefer to reverse that principle and characterize a language as an infinite system generating a finite body of text, but replacing "infinite" by "indefi­ nitely large" (mindful of Robert de Beaugrande's observation that lin­ guists typically do not know what "infinite" means). I illustrated this point, in another paper (1995), by presenting a network giving a partial representation of the English verbal group — the systemic potential open to a single verb, taken up to a certain moment in delicacy. It extended I think to about 75,000 possible selection expres­ sions (alternative combinations of features) ; and that was nowhere near the end of the story: I had stylized (to use the term employed by phoneti­ cians) many of the systems, such as those of modality and those realized

LINGUISTICS AS METAPHOR

7

by intonation; and I had included no systems involving a verbal group complex. We would soon find the output of such a network extending into the millions — still with one lexical verb as the point of entry. Let me remind you here of Christian Matthiessen's (1994) discussion of system networks, in which he demonstrated that, while a network is a presentation of the potential that is already there (those sets of options that are currently being instantiated), it is also a model of the further expansion of that potential, thus showing it to be inherently open-ended. In other words, a language is not just a meaning potential; it is a meaning potential potential, if we follow through the full implication of its character as a semogenic resource. Noticeably, however, this huge meaning potential is achieved by intersecting a rather small number of rather simple systems. After all, it only wants 25 independent binary choices to generate over 3 x 107 (thirty million) possibilities; and while the grammatical systems in a network are only patchily independent (Fawcett 1992), there are far more than 25 of them (over a thousand, in the COMMUNAL and Nigel computational systemic grammars), and by no means all of them are binary. So there is no great conceptual effort required to envisage a resource on such a scale. Nor is it difficult to envisage that such a resource can afford to generate surplus power; and that leads me into the second of my five headings. 3.2. Extravagant One of the clear signs of extravagance in language is its fondness for complementarities — for having things both ways. Whether or not our material practices are typically discrete (we have the impression that we are always either doing this or doing that, but that in turn may be the effect of having to categorize these practices in language), in semiotic practice, at least, we are often doing — or rather meaning — two different things at once. To put this in proverbial terms: in language you can eat your cake and have it (I notice that in current usage this has become "have your cake and eat it", which is a much blander form of wording, and also makes much less sense — the parataxis is linear: you eat your cake... but then you still have it). I am not talking here about the discursive ambiguities of public and domestic rhetoric (although the potential for these is ultimately an aspect of the same phenomenon in language), but rather about the systemic complementarities in the way that language categorizes and "constructs

8

M. A. . HALLIDAY

reality". Kristin Davidse's theoretical work (1992, 1996) has highlighted for English one of the major complementarities that seems to pervade all languages in their systems of transitivity: that between the transitive and the ergative construal of (material and other) processes. If there are two participants involved in a process, is the one acting on the other, or is it causing the other to act? One might say: in any given instance it may be either, but the two are contradictory — the same phenomenon cannot be both. Yet the grammar wants to have it both ways: not only does the system as a whole accommodate both perspectives but many processes are con­ strued as a tension between the two. In languages where the distinction is formally marked this dual perspective is often very clear. Another funda­ mental complementarity is that between aspect and tense as construals of time: is time a linear flow, out of past through present into future, or is it an emerging movement between the virtual and the actual? (This is ultimately related to the transitive/ergative nature of processes.) Again, it seems it cannot be both; yet the grammar insists that it is, in some mixture or other according to the language. (As you move across the Eurasian continent the balance tends to shift, with tense more highly systematized in languages at the western end and aspect in those at the eastern — and perhaps a more even mix in some languages in the middle, such as Russian and Hindi.) And in the construal of entities we find another complemen­ tarity, that between bounded and unbounded, or "count" and "mass". What is characteristic of such complementarities is that they offer alternative models of experience, such that, while it would be possible to construe the entire range of the phenomena in question in just one of the two perspectives, when you bring in both the picture gains in depth. Then it turns out that certain features are better illuminated when the phenom­ ena are viewed from one perspective, while other features show up more clearly from the other. The extravagance of modelling the same domain of experience in more than one way leads to a richer and more life-supporting account. Of course, this will always leave room for what Claude Hagège (this volume) referred to as "unheeded contradictions", the leftover bits of language-building materials that continue to lie around; but the principle of contradictory construal is intrinsically a productive one. Let me mention just two other examples of what I am calling extravagance in language. One is that of redundancy, in its technical, information theory sense. While some grammatical systems display roughly equal probabilities, others (such as positive/negative) are highly skew; and where probabilities are skew there is redundancy. The other is

LINGUISTICS AS METAPHOR

9

that of metaphor, the constant decoupling and recoupling between the semantics and the lexicogrammar that becomes possible once these evolve as separate strata. These are also forms of semiotic extravagance; and both are intrinsic to the working of language as a multifunctional semogenic system. 3.3.

Indeterminate

From extravagance to indeterminacy is again a natural step. We are familiar enough with indeterminacies in the realization patterns of lan­ guage: the puns (lexical and structural ambiguities) when we have to decide between two meanings, opting for either one or the other. Children start to play with these ambiguities from their earliest encounters with the mother tongue. But the more significant types of indeterminacy — signifi­ cant because they create new meanings — are those which do not resolve by enforcing choice: the overlaps, the borderline cases, and the blends. Overlapping categories are things like behavioural processes in English, which have some of the features of material processes and some of the features of mentals. A borderline case is something that can be interpreted in either of two ways, with different consequences for agnation; e.g., in English, participan 1 + get +participant 2+ to + process (we got it to stick), either as simple causative, like we made it stick (cf. agentive we stuck it), or as causative modulation, like we forced it to stick (cf. two processes: we forced it, so it stuck). Blends arise when, in some paradigmatic or syntagmatic environment, features which would otherwise be kept apart tend to lose their clear-cut distinction and become neutralized. With English modal verbs, for example, whereas in their non-oblique forms such as can and may the meanings of probability, usuality, obligation and readiness are typically rather distinct, in the oblique forms such as could and might these become somewhat blurred: he can be tough means either 'is sometimes tough' or is capable of being tough [if he needs to be] ' (one or the other); but in he could be tough there seems to be a blending of the two, and the listener does not find it necessary to choose. Indeterminacy is bound to arise in language because the grammar is constantly juggling with conflicting categorizations, accommodating them so as to construe a multidimensional meaning space, highly elastic and receptive to new meanings. In doing so, the grammar adopts a kind of trinocular vision, giving it a threefold perspective on the categories and their configurations. In the first place they are viewed as it were from

M. A. . HALLIDAY

10

above — the phenomena are construed according to their significance in some higher order construct; and in the second place they are viewed from below, the phenomena being construed by reference to how they appear and become manifest. But there is also the third angle of vision, that from round about: all phenomena are construed as being agnate to other phe­ nomena — no categories are set up in terms of themselves alone. The indeterminacy comes from reconciling the three perspectives of this trinocular vision: since all yield different pictures, the result will always be compromise. All grammatical description is the product of compro­ mise. 3.4.

Non-autonomous

I think there is little that need be said to explain this fourth heading. Language has evolved as part and parcel of human history, not as some mysterious epiphenomenon coming into being on its own. Thus, grammar is bound up with all the other aspects of the human condition, as part of the eco-social system constituted by a human community and its environment. It takes its shape from the other strata of language with which it interfaces, from the relation of "languaging" both to other semiotic and to social and material processes, and from the nature of those processes themselves. It is the outcome of the ongoing dialectic between the material and the semiotic in human life. 3.5.

Variable

A language is a space defined by dialectal and functional, or "registerial", variation. I think it is useful here to stress the analogy between dialect and register, as names for kinds of variation. They are both mass nouns. When we move from the category of "dialect", as mass noun, to that of "a dialect", as a count noun, we are modelling the experience whereby only certain feature combinations within this variable space are actually found to occur; they therefore stand out as rather clearly bounded patches. It is the same kind of shift we are making when we derive from the mass noun "register" the count noun "a register". What we recognize as "a register" is a clustering of features — in this case, predominantly features of the content plane, rather than features of the expression plane as with "a dialect" — that can be observed to cooccur in a regular fashion: a local resetting of the global probabilities of the system, as I expressed it earlier. Like a dialect, a register comes to exist only because the great majority of

LINGUISTICS AS METAPHOR

11

possible feature combinations never occur at all; there are huge disjunc­ tions, empty regions in a language's variable space. But there is also a third kind of variation within language, originally identified by Basil Bernstein (1971,1996) and ref erred to by him under the name of code. Ruqaiya Hasan (1989) has interpreted code, in terms of linguistic theory, as systematic semantic variation: that is, variation in the semantic features that are typically associated with a given social context. In other words, code variation (a) is semantic — and in this it is unlike dialect but like register; at the same time, (b) it is variation against a higher level constant — and in this it is unlike register but like dialect (cf. Figure 1). I would like at this point to follow up these notions a little further, as a way of exploring the consequences which arise from the characteristics I have been ascribing to language. All of these character­ istics — its comprehensiveness, its extravagance, its indeterminacy, its non-autonomy, its variability — are going to be implicated in any domain of practice where language is involved (which means, in effect, all human domains). But in the context of our present deliberations, this seems an appropriate point of entry into the next phase of my argument.

higher stratum at which variants are unified ("higher level constant")

semantics [content plane]

social context

[no higher level constant]

stratum at which variation typically occurs

phonology [expression plane]

semantics

semantics

type of variation

dialect

code

register

Figure 1: Types of variation in language 4. Language as a constraining force I have stressed the nature of language as semogenic resource: its character as "meaning potential", including in that characterization the potential for expanding itself — moving into new domains of construal and enactment,

12

M. A. . HALLIDAY

and refining the delicacy of those that are already in place. It is important, I think, in an age when the prevailing stance (on language, but also on other things besides) is the "critical" — and this often means only destructively critical —, to place the enabling power of language clearly in the centre of the stage; otherwise, in our own praxis, whether educa­ tional, clinical, forensic or whatever else, we will come up with only problems, and never any solutions to those problems. But it would be foolish merely to celebrate language as an enabling force without at the same time recognizing the other side of the picture: that while it is enabling, it is also constraining. As well as opening up, language also closes off; as well as liberating, it can also be enslaving. In part this is simply the general problem of form: to release the power that lies in anything — any substance, any process — you have to shape it, and in shaping it you also limit its scope. We see this most clearly perhaps in forms of art: generic structures and metric schemes in prose and poetry, composition forms in music, styles in architecture and so on, which first engender waves of creative artistry and then become rigid, stylized, stereotyped, and are discarded. In language, as in any semiotic mode, the "system" is what makes instantiation possible (that is in fact the definition of the system: the potentiality for being instantiated); by the same token, it sets limits, not only on what is possible — what can be instantiated — but also, no less significantly, on how whatever is instantiated will be interpreted and understood. This property is inherent in any system. But there is more to the "constraining" aspect of language than this. Because the grammar sets limits on what can be meant (even though those limits are constantly being extended), it constrains the ways in which experience comes to be con­ strued — to be "transformed into meaning", as I put it earlier. Our typical clausal grammars construe experience in the contexts of daily life; in doing so, they constrain our understanding, precluding us from becoming more deeply aware of the nature of everyday phenomena. Christian Matthiessen (1993b) has shown how the transitivity system of English (but with parallels in many other languages, at least those of Standard Average European), especially the grammar of mental processes, con­ strues a picture of mind that is functionally effective in the situations of daily life but seriously flawed as a basis for scientific understanding. When the semogenic resources of metaphor are deployed so as to overcome the limitations of the everyday grammar as a gateway to system­ atic technical knowledge, another form of constraint becomes apparent:

LINGUISTICS AS METAPHOR

13

that of limiting some people's access to certain realms of meaning. Con­ sider in this connection the specialized languages of science. The evolution of the nominalized grammar of scientific discourse enabled the founders of experimental science to reason and to theorize — to construct technical taxonomies and chains of logical argument; but it locked them, or their successors, into a world that was objectified (modelled as objects) and determinate, a construal in terms of abstract and virtual things remote from the positive disorder of everyday life — and as it turned out rather less helpful for conceptualizing the fluid and indeterminate "reality" required by quantum physics. The development of the grammar, towards the end of childhood, opens up to adolescents the route to educational knowledge; but by the same token it closes off the childhood forms of experience that have been first construed in the conversations of home and neighbourhood. And these two effects taken together — the disjunctions created by the grammar, its distancing both of their day-to-day experience and of their own semiotic past — create the conditions for yet another form of constraint: that while the language creates new knowledge it also limits access to that knowledge. Not everyone is enabled to control the new ways of meaning; thus the grammar is liberating for some, but enslaving for others. The grammar is not neutral, as Basil Bernstein put it in his talk (1994). Thus variation on the content plane, while it vastly increases a lan­ guage's meaning potential, is not an "unmixed blessing". Let me return now to the concepts of register and code. Register variation is semantic variation according to the social context: different activities volve with different registers. It thus supports — enables — the social division of labour, while also constraining — consolidating the divisions. Code variation, on the other hand, is semantic variation that is not driven by the situation: it is variation within "the same" social context. The two are not sharply distinct in every instance — there are borderline cases; but the theoretical distinction is a fundamental one. Ruqaiya Hasan (1994) has shown what this means: inves­ tigating, for example, patterns of question and answer in mother-child dyads in the home, during ordinary routinized sectors of the daily round — mealtime, bathtime, bedtime and the like, she found statistically significant semantic variation which divided her subjects into clearly defined sub­ groups, and always in one of two ways: mothers of boys versus mothers of girls, and middle class families versus working class families. Such differ­ ences are differences of code. In themselves, of course, all such variants are equally enabling: they open up for the child entry into the commonsense knowledge and values of the culture. But in their impact on the children's

14

M. A. . HALLIDAY

subsequent encounter with education, as Basil Bernstein had already discov­ ered in the sixties, one code may be vastly more constraining than another. Thus the phenomenon of code variation, together with the fact that a variant which is equally effective in one context may be less effective when transferred to another, brings out rather clearly the two opposing facets of language's semogenic power (cf. Sadovnik (ed.) 1995, Part III). As is well known, Bernstein labelled the predominant codes with the terms "restricted" and "elaborated", arguing that the restricted code was, typically, shared by all children, whereas the elaborated was accessible only to those who were privileged. The choice of these terms turned out to be unfortunate; Bernstein might have been better served by his own original nomenclature of "public and formal language". Even the term "code" itself was problematic, since it tended to reinforce the notion that language itself is a code — a thoroughly misleading notion with which it has nothing to do whatever. Like register variation, code variation does increase the total meaning potential of the language. Through it, the system organizes itself to favour (increase the probability of) just those meanings that are selected for by the relevant sub-culture, whether of social class, gender, provenance, age or any other. Hence it is the code selection which transmits the (sub-)cultural variation from one generation to the next; and this turns out to be the critical semiotic mechanism whereby social hierarchies are maintained and perpetuated, as Bernstein and Hasan have shown. By the same token, we know that the transmission process can be subverted so that new meanings arise at the disjunctions, new meanings whereby the social order can be, if not transformed, at least affected — sometimes unconsciously, sometimes prompted by design, or "linguistic engineering". The problem for Bernstein, when he was researching these issues in the 1960s, was where to locate the codes in the luxuriant jungle of language (cf. Halliday 1990). At that time, the system of language and the instance had been forced apart by Chomsky's notions of "competence" and "performance" as if they belonged to different orders of reality — a dichotomy that did considerable harm to linguistics. Bernstein knew that the codes were not different linguistic systems; so he tried locating them in performance. But, equally clearly, they were not sets of random in­ stances; so, wisely, he gave up the attempt of mapping them into the Chomskyan framework. The problem, however, is a real one — not in terms of competence and performance, but in terms of system and in­ stance: where do we model the codes on the cline of instantiation?

LINGUISTICS AS METAPHOR

15

We can throw some light on this question by looking into the other type of semantically-based variation, that of register. It might be worth noting here that the distinction between the language of commonsense knowledge and the language of educational and technical knowledge, as discussed by Jim Martin and myself in our book Writing Science (1993), is also a difference of code, though one that is a little closer to variation of the register kind than are the original Bernstein codes. I have suggested elsewhere the reasons why I think that code is the most difficult kind of variation to model: because it lies near enough to the "system" end of the cline to be hard to typify instantially. Figure 2 makes this point in diagrammatic form. System and instance form a complementarity such that we can examine variation, as a phenomenon having to be located intermediately between the two, from either end. If we consider register variation first: viewing from the "instance" end, we can recognize a text type as a collection of similar instances. But when we shift perspective and see it as systemic variation, each of these text types appears as a register, a kind of subsystem which redounds with the properties of the context in terms of field, tenor and mode.

Figure 2: Code on the "cline of

instantiation"

Likewise, we can look at code variation from the perspective of the instance. It is extremely difficult to do this, because it means recognizing

16

M. A. . HALLIDAY

different semantic styles (different "ways of meaning", in Hasan's terms) within one and the same language — which may appear, from above, as different ways of "meaning the same thing" (e.g. of grounding the reasons for a given judgment, or of interpreting a given complex class of experi­ ences), but end up by creating different models of reality. The critical step here is to identify that which various instances have in common, such that the shared features constitute a code. Bernstein, having recognized that the commonalities and differences were not a product of chance, examined the resulting codes from the system perspective, and found in them a pattern of systematic variation which constructs and maintains an edifice of social hierarchy, with social class as the most significant variable. He also showed that this was not something that resided in a few lexical items, or overt grammatical markers; it was much more deeply enshrined in the cryptotypic regions of the grammar. At that time we had only a very partial picture of the grammar, and even less of a model of semantics; it was not yet possible to represent such particular orientations within the semantic system. Now that we have a more comprehensive account of the grammar, Hasan's work on mother-child interaction together with her theoretical modelling of semantic variation have been able to provide both a powerful demonstration of the principle of code variation and a further confirma­ tion of the validity of Bernstein's original findings. Today people like to refer to (actual and potential) text collectives as "discourses", again deriving a count noun from a mass one; it is not always clear whether they see "a discourse" as a collection of text instances or as a subsystemic meaning potential. Part of the problem is that we are often not told what lexicogrammatical or semantic features the exemplars of a particular discourse have in common that distinguish them from other discourses. And yet this is critical, if it is being suggested that such discourses act differentially in the construction of ideologies, in the distribution of political power and the like. The principle of code variation (like variation of any kind) is that it can be modelled in explicit linguistic terms; and when this is done, it helps us to understand one of the fundamental ways in which language, despite — or, in the final analysis, because of — its enabling power, also functions to constrain — liberating some while enslaving others, as I put it earlier. That, as I saw it, was the sense in which the grammar could be said to be not neutral. And yet, when we step back and look at it in relation to the human condition as a whole, the grammar surely is neutral. It must be, if language has the enormous powers that we are constantly having to ascribe to it. The

LINGUISTICS AS METAPHOR

17

grammar is neutral in the same sense that technology, or scientific knowl­ edge, is neutral. Language may be coopted, unconsciously or even by design, in the service of some particular ideology, or some social and political power play; but it is as readily adaptable to one as to another. The grammar itself does not favour any one group, or any one interest, within a society. Where it does come to privilege one particular segment, this happens through the interaction between language and the historical processes which constitute its environment; not through any intrinsic properties possessed by a language as such. The critical factor is, I think, what I had in mind earlier in saying that language evolved as part of human history. Let me make this more explicit, perhaps, by saying that language evolved as an aspect of the evolution of the human species. This is made clear by Gerald Edelman (1992), in his work on "neural Darwinism" — his model of the evolution of the human brain. Human beings, it seems uniquely, have what Edelman calls "higher order consciousness": this includes consciousness of self, of past and future, and of reportable subjective experience. This higher order consciousness is still the outcome of evolutionary processes operating in the physical universe; there is no need to postulate some mysterious form of disembodied mind. But it differs from "primary consciousness", that of (as far as we know) all other species that have consciousness at all, in that our brains have mappings, and then further mappings of these mappings, not only of previous experience but also of the values that further experi­ ence has assigned to it. The brain evolves in a specific historical context: that the organism requires increasingly complex construal of its experi­ ence in order to survive. Primary consciousness is efficacious in that it enables the individual to abstract and organize complex changes in an environment involving multiple parallel signals; but it is limiting in that it lacks a concept of self and so cannot model past and future to form a complex scheme — it is subject to what Edelman calls the "tyranny of the remembered present". This can be transcended only by the evolution of social symbols: that is, of language. Language is absolutely necessary for distinguishing self from non-self and for remembering beyond the small memorial interval which illuminates the present. Like all biologists concerning themselves with language, at least as far as I am aware, Edelman recognizes only the ideational, experienceconstruing metafunction and ignores the equally important interpersonal metafunction — the fact that language evolves also in the context of enacting increasingly complex social (intraspecies) relationships. We

18

M. A. K. HALLIDAY

may want to criticize him on these grounds. But his characterization of language would not need to be altered in order to account for this. In our terms, what Edelman ascribes to language demands a stratified semiotic: that is, language in its prototypical post-infancy form. It could not be achieved by a system such as the human infant's protolanguage, which reflects the lower level of the evolution of consciousness — primary consciousness. Language in its evolved, higher order form depends ge­ netically on certain morphological changes in the brain: specifically, on the evolution of the supralaryngeal tract. Edelman goes on to ask: "Can we account for language's evolutionary emergence without creating a gulf between linguistic theory and biology?" His answer is "Yes — provided we account for speech in epigenetic as well as genetic terms": that is, relating the developmental history to the evolutionary one. The child's development of language must follow a certain trajectory; and this trajec­ tory in a deep sense copies or mimics the evolutionary trajectory of the system. This means, says Edelman, "abandoning any notion of a geneti­ cally programmed language acquisition device". Language develops epigenetically in a definable sequence, beginning as a non-stratified (or minimally stratified) pairing of meaning and sound — or let us say meaning and expression, since the expression may be sound or gesture; only later, with the move to higher order consciousness in the second year of life, does the stratum of grammar (lexicogrammar) appear — and its appearance depends on interaction with other human beings in the envi­ ronment. Edelman again: This theory of speech is a nativist theory insofar as it requires the prior evolution of special brain structures. But it invokes no new principles beyond those of the TNGS [theory of neuronal group selection — ΜΑΚΗ]. It is not a computational theory, nor one that insists on a language acquisition device containing innate geneti­ cally specified rules for a universal grammar. Syntax is built epigenetically under genetic constraints, just as human faces (which are about as universal as grammar) are similarly built by different developmental constraints. The principles of topobiology [...] apply to both cases. (p. 131) It is clear from Edelman's discussion that the evolution of language has been an integral and necessary component in the evolution of humankind; that language is a socially constructed system, leading to a socially constructed self; and that it is a stratified construct, with lexicogrammar

LINGUISTICS AS METAPHOR

19

as the latest phase. (It has always seemed to me problematic to claim that grammar could be innate, given that children begin by constructing a fully functioning protosemiotic that has no grammar in it at all, and then abandon this when they are ready to replace it by a stratified system of the adult kind.) It is of course this evolved adult system, social, stratified, and epigenetically as well as genetically developed, that I have been charac­ terizing in these terms, as comprehensive, extravagant, indeterminate, non-autonomous and variable. Let me now in the final section turn to the question with which I started: to what extent are these features of language reflected in the ways in which we talk about language, in our linguistics and, more specifically, in our grammatics? 1 5. Linguistics as metaphor Regarding comprehensiveness, I think there are two points, related but still distinct, that need to be made. Since our present discipline-based structure of knowledge first became firmly institutionalized, a little over a century ago, each discipline has tended to fragment into separate "branches"; linguistics, apart from its traditional split into historical and descriptive, held together until fairly late, but it too has now become a collection of specializations. This carried with it all the usual dangers — plus some others that are unique to linguistics. Because language is a system that is at once physical, biological and social, as well as having its own special property of being semiotic (it is a system of fourth-order complexity, as I have remarked elsewhere), it is by nature open to interpretation from a maximum number of different standpoints; it seemed to me all the more important, therefore, that a theory of language was itself comprehensive, in the specific sense of accommodating these different modes of being. Otherwise, the parts of the picture are unlikely to fit together; and if it is argued that there is no reason why they should fit together, I would suggest that if they don't, then we create a very impoverished picture, one which could never explain, for example, how language comes to be learnt by a human child. But there is a second sense in which our theory attempts to be comprehensive: that of viewing the grammar of a language (or any other stratum) in its entirety. I am aware that the formulation "language as resource" can easily come to sound like a pious slogan; but to me it has a quite substantive import. I think we can only fully understand particular

20

M. A. . HALLIDAY

features of a language with reference to the system as a whole; so we try to develop models, methods, and forms of representation which encom­ pass the grammar as a totality rather than as a collection of discrete parts — as a network of systems, not as an inventory of structures. Otherwise, however elegant the exposition of one part of the grammar, it may fall apart, or at least it may fail to cohere, when it is put together with the rest. There is a natural metaphor here, between language and metalanguage: if the grammar is comprehensive enough to encompass the whole of human experience and human relationships, then could not our grammatics, given that (like the grammar) it accommodates variable delicacy, be comprehen­ sive enough to model the whole of the grammar? The notion that a theory might be extravagant is probably more controversial; but I have always seen this as a positive feature, in the sense that there are more conceptual resources available than are necessitated for any particular task. This seems, perhaps, to go against the usual demand for theoretical parsimony, for "the simplest solution that is compatible with the facts"; and it is true that I see no great virtue in simplicity — I prefer the criterion of "the best tool for the job". But the issue is a more substantive one. It is a common experience in working with language that what is locally simpler becomes globally more complex — and also the other way round. One meets with examples of this all the time; one that happens to be in the front of my attention is that of the relationship between intonation and grammar. It is clear that intonation is systemic: it construes meanings in regular and predictable ways. It might seem sim­ pler, therefore, to treat intonation patterns as the direct realization of semantic features, without grammaticizing it along the way. If that is all you are interested in, and you ignore the rest of the language, it obviously is; but once you want to interpret intonation as part of a more general picture of the language, then it becomes vastly more complex to try to circumvent the grammar (among other things, the meaning of intonation choices depends on their grammatical environment), and setting up gram­ matical systems realized by intonation leads to what is ultimately the simpler account. Paul Tench's (1996) studies of English intonation put this very well in perspective. The theory is also extravagant, I think, in ways that are analogous to the extravagance of language itself. As I suggested earlier, language often construes experience in terms of complementarities: models deriving from alternative perspectives which contradict each other and yet are both "true" (for example, many objects being both bounded and unbounded at

LINGUISTICS AS METAPHOR

21

the same time, like rock, a rock). Such complementarities also have a place in a theoretical modelling of language. A clear case is the complementarity of grammar and lexis: a paradigm is either a closed system ("grammatical") or an open set ("lexical"), but presumably the same paradigm cannot be both. What we find, however, is a continuum. At one end, there are paradigms that appear clearly closed, and at the other end are those that appear clearly open; so we write grammars, and we write dictionaries. But there is an extensive region in the middle where it is not clear which kind we are dealing with (prepositions in English, postverbal completives in Chinese, etc.); these we can look at from either of the two perspectives. Yet when we do this, it becomes clear that we can in fact look from either perspective at the whole of the lexicogrammar, and that we may gain considerable further insight when we do so. Hasan's (1996, chapter 4) 'Lexis as delicate grammar' shows how lexical items do form closed systems when treated as complexes of features; on the other hand, the COBUILD grammar (Sinclair et al 1990), being "driven by" lexis, treats grammatical classes as open sets. There will always be more than one way to skin a category.2 Our theory is indeterminate, I think, again in two different ways. First, it celebrates the indeterminacy in language itself, instead of sweep­ ing it under the carpet and then treading on it to force it into shape. What this means is that it becomes possible to operate with descriptive catego­ ries that are themselves fluid and unstable — that constitute fuzzy sets like the categories of language itself. Describing a language demands the same kind of trinocular vision that language has, and in a very specific sense that is defined by stratification: in setting up grammatical systems, for exam­ ple, we are necessarily approaching them from above (semantic perspec­ tive: what meanings they realize), from below (morphological and phonological perspective: how they are realized) and also from rounda­ bout (lexicogrammatical perspective: what are their patterns of agnation). This means that the categories themselves are inescapably the product of compromise, since the different perspectives locate the boundaries be­ tween categories at different places. Secondly, the general theoretical framework offers ways of model­ ling indeterminacy. The most important of these, perhaps, is the notion of probability. Probability has been accorded rather little place in linguistics; but that is because mainstream linguistics is largely preoccupied with syntagmatic considerations, whereas probability is inherently a paradig­ matic concept — it relates to system, not to structure. In a systemic

22

M. A. . HALLIDAY

grammar, probability has a central place: firstly as a feature of any given system, so that a system a /b is characterized not just as "either a or b" but as either a or b with a certain probability attached"; secondly as a feature of the relationship (association) between systems, so that two systems a / b andx/y are not simply "either freely associated (simultane­ ous) or not at all" but "partially associated, such that a + x, b +y are the favoured combinations" (cf. Halliday 1996). Another concept that allows for indeterminacy is stratification, and in particular the representation of the content plane. There is no doubt that the content plane requires to be modelled bistratally, with a distinction being drawn between lexicogrammar and semantics (without this separation there would be no possibility of metaphor). But the boundary between the two strata is not determinate, and it will be shifted "up" and "down" according to circumstances: in particular, the nature of the task and the state of knowledge about the language concerned. (cf. Fawcett 1992; Hasan 1996, chapter 5). That the theory is non-autonomous is I think obvious; since language is a semiotic system (no doubt the prototypical one, but nevertheless one among a wider class of systems), theorizing about language is an aspect of theorizing about meaning-making systems as a whole. My earlier formu­ lation "language as social semiotic" was an attempt to make this approach explicit. In that sense, there is no way in which a linguistic theory could be expected to be independent of a general theory of meaning, as Saussure had already made clear. But this lack of autonomy takes on an additional significance at a time when the structure of knowledge as a whole is changing, with transdisciplinary motifs or themes beginning to complement, or even to replace, subject disciplines as the organizing principle. There are two kinds of pressure under which this change is affecting linguistics. One is from the theoretical end: new understanding of the nature and typology of systems, and of processes of change. This makes it possible to comprehend language in terms of its place in a self-organizing, dynamic open system of the type referred to by Jay Lemke (1993) as an "eco-social system"; and to comprehend language evolution and development in terms of the more general kinds of history to which these belong — as well as in the context of new understanding of the nature and evolution of the brain (where evolution, in turn, is interpreted by Gerald Edelman as one instance of a more general category of "selective recognition" processes). The other kind of pressure comes from the applications end. Now that our under­ standing of language has come, or is coming, to be directed on a significant

LINGUISTICS AS METAPHOR

23

scale to enterprises in education, in medicine and in the law, these have generated new motifs of educational, clinical and forensic linguistics which have defined rather clearly certain contexts and directions in which theoretical studies of language need to be pursued. One might add here the enterprise of linguistic computing, now that it is becoming clear that a computer is not simply an engine for processing text and speech but one that, as Michio Sugeno (1995) has shown, needs to be driven and control­ led by natural language. At such a moment in history it would be perverse to theorize about language as an autonomous intellectual game. Coming to my final heading, "variable", it might be argued that linguistic theory has never been anything but variable, given the compet­ ing models and methods that have sprouted and, in some cases at least, flourished since the beginning of the present century. But I am concerned rather with variation within one general model, which is where it becomes interesting and potentially positive. Robin Fawcett has referred to "dia­ lects" within systemic theory: variations in the way those using a systemic functional model interpret some domain of linguistic phenomena, such as exchange structure, or register and genre (Matthiessen 1993a), or the relation between grammar and semantics. Are these more like dialects, or more like registers? If they have arisen in the context of dealing with distinct problems and issues, they are more register-like; but if they are different ways of dealing with the same problems and issues they do resemble dialects — or even codes, depending perhaps on how many levels of abstraction one had to go through to reach what I referred to as the higher level constant (that which they have in common). It does not really matter where the analogy is drawn — except that, the more code­ like the variation, the greater the danger that the parties will cease to communicate with one another, and that is something that does need to be borne in mind. Given that any scientific theory forms a semiotic system, it is perhaps not surprising to find that a theory of language (language itself being, in turn, a semiotic system) should be rather closely analogous to what it is theorizing about. Basil Bernstein (1994) has remarked that every theory in the semiotic and social sciences is essentially a metaphor; and I think this metaphoric quality is an important feature of our theoretical thinking. A theory is, inevitably, both enabling and constraining, just as I have tried to suggest that language is. Its constraints can still be a positive force for thinking with, provided the theoretical domain — in this

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case, language — is construed as a highly elastic space, in the same spirit in which language construes experience. One might ask: why these preoccupations at this particular moment? In one sense, any moment would serve as an appropriate context: one can always ask the questions how language is able to achieve all the potency, both positive and negative, with which we credit it, and how we can most effectively model language in relation to this or that particular enquiry or application. But from another point of view the present is an especially appropriate moment. For the first time, we, as linguists, have access to adequate data (we might recall here Robert de Beaugrande's observations (this volume) on the significance of the large-scale corpus) ; this will — or at least it should — transform much of the discipline, enabling us to get rid of some of the more mythical elements in our thinking. It will provide evidence for our system networks, allowing them to extend much further in delicacy while continuing to model language as a potential — one in which each instance, every clause in every text, nudges the probabilities of the whole. The output of the system is clearly finite (COBUILD's two hundred million words is no nearer to infinity than a single clause) ; but the semogenic power of the system is open-ended. The system operates, as de Beaugrande put it, by interfacing local constraints; in Christian Matthiessen's (1994) terms, creating instantial sub-systems, copies of parts of itself with which to function as it goes along. Ultimately, the overall power of our theory — the overarching metaphor, perhaps — attempts to replicate the power of language. With power, of course, comes responsibility: as David Rose (1993) has put it, if grammar has the power to construe experience, this means that it is charged with the responsibility of transmitting that experience — not just the categories and relations, but the categories together with their experi­ ential value — across the generations. It cannot therefore be subject to random or trivial distortions, to the special interest of this or that section of society, however much they may control the material resources. Power groups try, of course, to control the semiotic resources as well: the Nazis were able to carry out some pretty effective lexical engineering; but even they could not change the meanings of the grammatical categories of the everyday German language. As Paul Thibault (1991) has observed, the meaning potential of a culture is not that of any ruling elite. Grammar, in its role as what I called the semogenic powerhouse of language, is essentially a democratic force. It takes a rather long-term view, and is largely out of reach of those who might try to manipulate it.

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25

Claude Hagège (e.g. 1993) is one of the few linguists who has been sensitive to the power of language, drawing on a vast store of knowledge of languages from around the world. In talking of the power of language, I do not mean only its power as exploited in political contexts, but what it achieves at every institutional and personal level in human lives. What I find surprising, in this light, is the discrepancy between the potency of language and the trivial picture that is so often presented of it — not least by some of the folk who most strongly caution against its powerful effects. One wonders whether it is almost part of the programme of language to hide its potential under a clutter of superficial detail. It seems to me that however local may be our immediate focus in any one moment of profes­ sional activity, and whether we think we should be foregrounding the opening up or the closing off, the liberating or the enslaving, we do need to harbour the conception of a language's global semogenic force, and of the grammatical energy by which it is ongoingly powered. And, talking of linguistics as metaphor: it takes a lot of theoretical energy to cope with that. Notes 1.

See Martin (1996a) for a recent study (of a language other than English) illustrat­ ing very cogently many of the theoretical features that are being raised here.

2.

For further work incorporating the notion of complementarity at the theoretical level see Martin and Matthiessen (1991), Martin (1996b).

References Bernstein, B. 1971. Class, Codes and Control Vol 1: Theoretical Studies towards a Sociology of Language. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Bernstein, B. 1996. Pedagogy, Symbolic Control and Identity: Theory, Research, Critique. London: Taylor and Francis, [ch. 5, 'Codes and research'] Sinclair, J. et al. 1990. Collins COBUILD English Grammar. London: Collins. Davidse, K. 1992. Transitivity/ergativity: The Janus-headed grammar of actions and events. In M. Davies and L. Ravelli (eds.) Advances in Systemic Linguis­ tics: Recent Theory and Practice. London: Pinter. 105-135. Davidse, K. 1996. Ditransitivity and possession. In R. Hasan,  Cloran and D. Butt (eds.), 85-144. Edelman, G. 1992. Bright Air, Brilliant Fire: On the Matter of the Mind. New York: Basic Books, and London: Allen Lane.

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Fawcett, R. P. 1992. The COMMUNAL project: How to get from semantics to syntax. Proceedings of COLING 92, 14th International Conference on Com­ putational Linguistics, Nantes, Hagège, . 1993. The Language Builder: An Essay on the Human Signature in Linguistic Morphogenesis. Amsterdam: Benjamins. Halliday, M. A. K. 1990. New ways of meaning: A challenge to applied linguistics. Journal of Applied Linguistics [Greek Applied Linguistics Asso­ ciation] 6: 7-36. Reprinted in M. Pütz (ed.) Thirty Years of Linguistic Evolution. Amsterdam: Benjamins 1992. 59-95. Halliday, M. A. K. 1995. On language in relation to the evolution of human consciousness. In S. Allén (ed.) Of Thoughts and Words: Proceedings of Nobel Symposium 92, The Relation between Language and Mind. London: Imperial College Press, and Singapore: World Scientific Publishing Co. Halliday, M. A. K. (ed.) 1993. Language as Cultural Dynamic. (=Cultural Dynamics 6, 1-2.) Halliday, M. A. K. and J. R. Martin. 1993. Writing Science: Literacy and Discursive Power. London: Falmer. Hasan, R. 1989. Semantic variation and sociolinguistics. Australian Journal of Linguistics 9: 221-275. Hasan, R. 1992. Meaning in sociolinguistic theory. In K. Bolton and H. Kwok (eds.) Sociolinguistics Today: International Perspectives. London: Routledge. 80-119. Hasan, R. 1994. On some goals of linguistic description: Reflections on certain binary perspectives. Paper presented at the 21st International Systemic Func­ tional Congress, University of Gent, 1-5 August 1994. Hasan, R. 1996. Ways of Saying: Ways of Meaning. Selected papers of Ruqaiya Hasan edited by Carmel Cloran, David Butt and Geoff Williams. London: Cassell. Hasan, R., C. Cloran and D. Butt (eds.) 1996. Functional Descriptions: Theory in Practice. Amsterdam: Benjamins. Lemke, J. L. 1993. Discourse, dynamics, and social change. In M. A. K. Halliday (ed.), 243-276. Martin, J. R. 1996a. Transitivity in Tagalog: A functional interpretation of case. In M. Berry et al. (eds.) Grammatical Structure: A Systemic Functional Perspective. Norwood, N.J.: Ablex. 229-296. Martin, J. R. 1996b. Metalinguistic diversity: The case from case. In R. Hasan, C. Cloran and D. Butt (eds.), 323-374. Martin, J. R. and C. Matthiessen. 1991. Systemic typology and topology. In F. Christie (ed.) Literacy in Social Processes: Papers from the Inaugural Australian Systemic Linguistics Conference, Deakin University, January 1990. Darwin: Northern Territory University. 345-383.

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Matthiessen, C. 1993a. Register in the round: Diversity in a unified theory of register analysis. In M. Ghadessy (ed.) Register Analysis: Theory and Prac­ tice. London: Pinter. 20-54. Matthiessen, C. 1993b. The object of study in cognitive science in relation to its construal and enactment in language. In M. A. K. Halliday (ed.), 187-242. Matthiessen, C. 1994. Paradigmatic organization: 30 years of system networks — today's potential. Paper presented at the 21st International Systemic Functional Congress, University of Gent, 1-5 August 1994. Matthiessen,  and C. Nesbitt. 1996. On the idea of theory-neutral descriptions. In R. Hasan,  Cloran and D. Butt (eds.), 39-83. Rose, D. 1993. On becoming: The grammar of causality in Pitjantjatjara and English. In M. A. K. Halliday (ed.), 42-84. Sadovnik, A. R. (ed.) 1995. Knowledge and Pedagogy: The Sociology of Basil Bernstein. Norwood, N.J.: Ablex. [Part III: 'The sociology of language and code theory'] Sugeno, M. 1995. Intelligent computing. Paper presented to PACLING II (Second Conference of the Pacific Association of Computational Linguis­ tics), Brisbane, March-April 1995. Tench, P. 1996. The Intonation Systems of English. London: Cassell. Thibault, P. 1991. Social Semiotics as Praxis: Text, Social Meaning Making, and Nabokov's "Ada". Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Language as a faculty, languages as 'contingent' manifestations and humans as function builders Claude Hagège Collège de France, Paris

1. Introduction Most schools of linguistics today, whether or not they state it explicitly, work within one of two possible frameworks: they take as their main object of study either language as a faculty, or languages as historical and social entities which are manifestations of this faculty. In other words, most linguists deal with either linguistique du langage or linguistique des langues. This has obvious consequences for the method and the results of linguistic research. I will therefore try, in the first part of the present paper, to examine the relationship between language as a faculty and languages as its concrete manifestations (section 2). As a logical result of this attempt, I will then present a reassessment of the component which lies at the heart of most contemporary work on both language and lan­ guages, i.e. syntax and its place in linguistic theory (section 3). The strictly synchronic view of syntax which underlies current research in Universal Grammar will then be confronted with dynamic phenomena such as grammaticalization (section 4). This will lead us to a consideration of the work whose result is language building, and whose actors are humans as function builders: I will characterize them as both submitted to constraints and free to make certain choices (section 5).

30 2. The faculté

CLAUDE HAGEGE de langage and human languages

To the extent that language as a faculty characteristic of the human species is considered to be the main object of linguistic theory, the peculiar features of the various individual languages are logically regarded as accidental or contingent. The reason for this is that as soon as we lift an abstraction up to the rank of a hypostasis, we hold it to be the only thing that is essential and necessary, and consequently, we deny this status to the empirical object which is its concrete representation (cf. e.g. Desclés 1988: 16). It then becomes easy to understand the institutional manifesta­ tion of such a methodological choice, i.e. the fact that a growing number of research centres and universities in the US and Western Europe now have, instead of departments of linguistics, as one used to say some decades ago, departments of 'linguistic sciences'. This hospitable plural, in fact, explicitly points out that unity has been given up: several disci­ plines, including psychology or sociology, have, at one stage or another, something to say about language, whereas linguistics is the only scientific activity which deals with human languages, in addition to language in general. Significantly, we mostly speak of cognitive sciences in the plural. Why? Precisely because there is no specific object belonging to a socalled cognitive science in the singular. Rather, cognitive research is an association of various disciplines, starting with the study of Artificial Intelligence (AI), a technology rather than a science. This association has come to embrace many other fields, including linguistics. The pressure exerted on linguists by research in AI appears very clearly in the fact that linguistic engineering, which defines AI products, harbours great hopes with regard to speech synthesis and the techniques for generating texts. It is well known that in both of these activities, enormous financial interests are at stake, and linguistics is thus pressed to participate in huge economic competition. Moreover, only a very small number of languages are in­ volved here, perhaps 1 % of those which constitute the domain of descrip­ tive linguistics; in addition; this small number is mostly restricted to Indo-European languages, which, not surprisingly, are those of leading countries. However, there is another field which also has demands to make on linguistics, i.e. language teaching. This activity is akin to linguistics, since it directly turns to profit the results of linguistic research. More importantly for linguists, language teaching, just like linguistics, takes into account a fundamental fact: the diversity of human languages. Profes-

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sional linguists, from the beginning of the 20th century, have stressed the threefold aspect of linguistic diversity: a) languages are synchronically diverse, and this characteristic constitutes the main topic of comparative linguistics and typological research; b) languages are diachronically diverse, i.e. they evolve from one historical stage to a following one, though also maintaining permanent features, and this characteristic con­ stitutes the main topic of historical linguistics, a field of study whose importance in Western Europe is not unrelated to the nationality problems of the end of the 19th and first part of the 20th centuries; c) languages have an internal diversity: there are regional variants, dialects, patois, etc., and consideration of this characteristic has brought about in modern linguis­ tics the progress of dialectology and, indirectly, creolistics. Now, it so happens that this threefold diversity is today in danger of being severely reduced: a) the number of living languages is inexorably decreasing, due to physical extinction, lexical and grammatical borrowing, acculturation, and the pressure of about two scores of languages which are spoken more and more, while all the remaining ones less and less (cf. Brenzinger (ed.) 1992 and Hagège 1993b); b) linguists' interest in the history of languages has decreased; c) due to the influence of the written norms, the exorbitant power of the mass media and the centralized policy of most modern States, the internal diversity of human languages has been drastically reduced. Concomitantly with the action of these negative factors on linguistic diversity, there is a renewal of universalist studies, which have little to say both about language variation and language diachrony. Research on Universal Grammar (UG) as a contribution to studies in cognitive sciences and the structure of the brain have benefited from the support provided by the National Science Foundation and the Sloan Foundation. According to Rastier (1991: 38-39), this is not surprising, when we recall that cultural imperialism, which is spreading its intellectual models everywhere, 'has always got on well with universalist theories, since they expel cultural differences and constitute the most perfect form of ethnocentrism.' In fact, it seems that, despite this tendency of a certain part of contemporary research in UG, it should be possible to enrich cognitive studies by taking into account the role played by cultural phenomena in cognition. Moreover, it does not suffice to say that the faculté de langage forms part of the innate endowment of mankind, and that for this reason, linguistics is related to the cognitive sciences, i.e. to the sciences which study the way mankind, through its neurobiological equipment, organizes its knowledge of the world. In fact, biology, which has become a model for

32

CLAUDE HAGEGE

these sciences, is itself an intrinsically evolutionist science. Conse­ quently, linguists, even when working within the framework of UG, cannot eschew a serious consideration of one of the main features of human languages, i.e. their historical dynamism. This is why it does not seem very promising to reduce the empirical object of linguistics to languages whose synchronic and diachronic diversity has been artificially reduced, and even less so to create ideal objects called possible lan­ guages'. Linguists have much to learn from a thorough study of real languages, many of which are on the brink of extinction, so that their description is urgently needed. 3. Reassessing the place of syntax in linguistic theory As a result of the foregoing, it is worth recalling the importance of a field which gives due consideration to the diversity of languages: linguistic typology, which is in search of universals, but not in the sense UG gives to this term. The famous distinction that German grammarians of the early 19th century made between three types of languages, isolating, agglutina­ tive and fusional, is mainly based on morphology. But morphology is not an autonomous domain. It has been shown (cf. Hagège 1990b: 305) that 'word structure cannot be analyzed short of having recourse to historical phonetics'. But syntax cannot provide a criterion either, since syntactic functions, whatever the diversity of their realizations, are found in all languages. Consequently, it seems that the most reliable criterion in order to establish language types as distinct from one another is a combination of syntactic and morphological features, i.e. a morphosyntactic criterion. In other words, languages differ in the morphological way they express syntactic functions. This can be illustrated at the two levels of Noun Phrase (NP) syntax and the syntax of the full sentence. As far as the first case is concerned, the relationship between head and dependent within the NP of possession, for example, is marked by various means, among which, according to the language type, the main ones are, in addition to word order (head-dependent or dependent-head): either a possessive affix at­ tached to the head (e.g. Palauan, cf. Hagège 1986: 77-92, or Abkhaz), or a case affix (genitive or dative) attached to the dependent (e.g. Latin, Slavic languages other than Bulgarian and Macedonian), or a connective morpheme linking the two parts of the NP (e.g. Romance languages, Chinese, Japanese), or an article before the dependent, itself preceded by

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the head, which is often truncated (e.g. Semitic languages such as Hebrew or Arabic), or, depending on the context, the existence of two of these means (e.g. Germanic languages like English or German). As far as the level of the full sentence is concerned, subject and object are distinguished either by word order alone in relation to the predicate (SVO, SOV, VSO, VOS, etc.), as in English or French, or by function markers, as in Korean, or by coreferential personal indices within the VP, or by a combination of two of these devices. Clearly, word order, in this perspective, when it is the only means to distinguish between functions, should be considered as the equivalent of a morpheme, i.e. a morphological means expressing syntactic relation­ ships. Syntax, then, can no longer appear as an autonomous domain in relation to morphology. It is not autonomous, either, in relation to phonol­ ogy, if we take into account another phenomenon which, like word order, crosses the boundaries between components, i.e. intonation. Consider the French sentence in (1) below:

This sentence may be realized with at least two distinct intonational curves, either (a), which contains, from/e to film, a first contour with an unchanging medium register, characterized as continual, followed by a second one, falling from high to low, then infra-low, and characterized as terminal, or (b) which has a peak onpas, followed by a low register from allé to cri-, itself followed by a sudden and strong raising of the pitch on the last syllable, -tique, which is realized as a falling tone, from high to low. This difference between these two intonational contours is enough to produce two contrary meanings: in (la) the speaker has not seen the film; in (lb) the speaker has seen it. We must conclude that the intonational curve, a phonetic phenomenon, controls the syntactic structure of this sentence, and, hence, its semantic interpretation.

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34

Not only is syntax, as is shown by this type of facts, narrowly related to other components, but it is also liable to be internally split up. Let us examine, for instance, the Japanese sentence in (2): (2)

Japanese imôto wa Yokohama no kôkô ni tû+gaku+site+iru sister TOPIC Yokohama CON- high school in go+school+doing+is MARKER NECTIVE 'my sister attends a high school in Yokohama'

In the Sino-Japanese V + N compound tû +gaku 'go + school', the Chinese word order, V + object N, is borrowed along with the words themselves. This kind of compound, which is extremely frequent in Japanese, thus represents a violation of the Japanese word order, which is the opposite: object N + V. This Japanese N + V word order is also found when the N has an adverbial function, which is precisely the case of kôkô ni in (2). Therefore, (2) displays two opposite types of syntax within one and the same sentence, and this does not occur in Japanese only, but in many of the languages where a certain sequential strategy is borrowed from a foreign language. Thus, syntax is neither an autonomous, nor a unified component of languages. We may, therefore, wonder whether syntax is the locus of language at all. The meanings, as represented by the underlying predica­ tive structures, are prior to the strategies by which they become linearized in speech, i.e. to syntactic strategies. In such a view, syntax would appear as 'an epiphenomenon of the vocalising of meanings', since 'speaking requires us to articulate our meanings onto linearized predicative sche­ mata that derive ultimately from manual operations' (Benjamin 1993: 342). 4. Grammaticalization and its interpretation Another fundamental reason why syntax cannot be autonomous is that it is constantly fed by the lexicon. The lexicon itself is organized and reorganized according to the necessities of communication. This is clearly illustrated by the process known as grammaticalization. In all the lan­ guages where grammaticalization is still at work, or has been proved to have been at work by the comparison between well-described stages of an historical evolution, we see lexemes yielding morphemes, i.e. full words

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35

producing grammatical tools, by a modification of their meaning and restrictions on their syntactic use, accompanied, as the case may be, by some phonetic changes. In many cases, the lexematic and the grammaticalized use of one and the same unit are coexistent and can even appear in contiguity, as is seen, for example, in (3), a Finnish sentence: (3)

Finnish lentokone-et suris-i-vat pää-mme päällä plane-PL hum-PAST-PL head-lPL.POSS above 'the planes were humming above our heads'

In this sentence the postposition päällä, analyzable as pää 'head' + -llä, suffix of the adessive, governs the noun pää, on which it was itself built; but for any Finnish speaker, pää-mme päällä means 'above (and not 'on the head of') our head'. Thus, a relator may appear contiguous to the very N from which it is historically derived by grammaticalization (and this is also true of relators that are of verbal origin, cf. Chínese gĕi tā gĕi '(give=) to him give' = 'give him'). By the same token, an auxiliary may appear in immediate contiguity with the verb which is its historical source. This is what we see in (4), a Hindi sentence where lo and do are the imperative forms, respectively of le(na) 'to take' and de(na) 'to give', and behave here as an aversive and a benef active auxiliary respectively, i.e. they have the status of what I have proposed (Hagège 1982: 75) calling verbants: (4)

Hindi Râm-se le-lo or Shyam-ko de-do Ram-from take-AVERS. and Shyam-to give-BENEF. AUX.(IMPER) AUX.(IMPER)  t'  (it) from Ram and give (it) to Shyam!'

It is interesting to observe that there is a gradient in grammaticality judgements, and that this gradient may be taken as evidence for a gradual, rather than immediate, shift from lexeme towards morpheme. Thus, in Central Thai, prepositions such as bon 'on' ork'with', often taken to be 'true' prepositions since there is no homophonous verb from which they could come, do not admit of being stranded in relative clauses for most native speakers: these speakers reject direct Thai counterparts of the English sentences the table I put it on or the person I went with, whereas coverbs, i.e units that are used as prepositions but which are also used as

CLAUDE HAGEGE

36

full verbs in other contexts, can be stranded. Such is the case of thu'ng in (5) below (Diller 1994:20): (5)

Thai ru'ang thi: khaw phu:t thu'ng matter REL 3 speak reach 'the matter he spoke about'

We may conclude from this that grammaticality judgements of Central Thai informants reflect the way native speakers choose to organize the morphosyntax of their language. This does not mean, however, that communicative needs are the cause which triggers grammaticalization processes. Such a view would imply that language change is oriented towards an aim, and would thus run counter to an objective statement of the facts. It is true that there has been some excess in the well-known tendency, mainly observable in American linguistics, to distrust teleological statements. But it is also true that the view according to which the development of morphemes from lexemes is principally motivated by unfulfilled communicative needs does not re­ ceive much support from the known facts. Nevertheless there are, in the course of speaker-hearer interaction, a problem-solving activity and com­ municative strategies by which speakers and hearers produce and interpret the flow of speech. In other words, languages are not necessarily goaloriented, but their users may be. Moreover, if it is true that language change is not triggered by communicative needs, this must not prevent us from paying attention to the adaptation of human languages to social changes. It has been observed that in ancient Indo-European languages, there was a correlation between the use of middle voice and a certain type of social relationships. Thus, Benveniste writes (1971: 157): Through this diathesis [i.e. the middle voice], lexical oppositions have found their way into verbs able to indicate by a variation in their endings either 'taking' or 'giving': Sanskrit dāti 'he gives': ādāte 'he receives'; Greek misthoun 'to give on hire': misthousthai 'to take on hire'; daneizein 'to lend': daneizesthai 'to borrow'; Latin licet '(the object) is put up for auction': licetur '(the man) stands as buyer'. We should notice that these are important notions when human relations are based on the reciprocity of public or private services in a society in which one must commit oneself in order to obtain something.

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37

As is noted by Benjamin (1993: 379), Insofar as Benveniste is here discussing the disappearance of the inflected middle voice (his ' internal diathesis') from the later IndoEuropean languages as social changes took place, he is implicitly proposing the hypothesis that an overt middle-voice morphology is more likely to be present in a language if it is spoken in a community that follows a dialectically orientated cultural regime in its public life. A comparable interpretation is offered by Alisjahbana (1978: 35-36), with regard to quite a different cultural world, in his remarks on the evolution from spoken Malay to standard Indonesian. He writes: The difference between the two prefixes [me- andrer-] is very clear. Ber- expresses more: 'having' and 'being in a situation', while the prefix me- creates words which are nearer to the Indo-German active transitive verbs. A comparison between a classical text like the Hikayat Seri Rama and a modern novel like Layar Terkembang shows the clear tendency in modern Indonesian to use more active predicate words with the prefix me- than with the prefix ber-, which functions more like an adjective. This tendency of the change of the predicate from the description of a situation to the description of an activity runs parallel with the social tendency of the individuali­ sation and dynamisation of the individual subject in Indonesian culture today through the influence of modern culture [emphasis added]. In this line of reasoning a guideline is found for the decision in alternatives, where two predicate words with different prefixes are used for nearly the same function and meaning, e.g. the forms bernyanyi and menyanyi are used in Indonesia to express the same meaning: 'to sing'. Menyanyi is used more and more, and is, accord­ ing to the line of reasoning above, also preferable to bernyanyi (cited by Benjamin 1993: 379-380). 5. Humans as partly conscious language builders We have just seen that language users may be goal-oriented and that there is an adaptation of language to social changes. Thus we are logically led to characterize human beings as language users and even to look for a more precise characterization of them in relationship to their linguistic behav­ iour. I have proposed conceptualizing them as Language Builders (cf. Hagège 1993a, which bears precisely this title). I now prefer calling them

CLAUDE HAGEGE

38

Language Engineers (LE). It appears from the above that LEs are far from being totally unconscious users of their language, as has repeatedly been said by most linguists since, at least, Boas (1911: 67, 70-71). In fact, LEs are both submitted to constraints and able to free themselves from these constraints in the process of language building. I will examine these two points in succession. 5.1. Constraints on LEs Grammar can be considered as the domain, in language, of things that are obligatory. LEs are obliged to conform with certain formal devices which are not, or no longer, synchronically justifiable. An interesting example is case agreement. Like gender and number agreement, case agreement can be conceived of as a cohesion strategy, but it often yields particular structures which do not parallel semantic requirements. For instance, in Arabic, especially in the neo-classical prose of the beginning of the 20th century, we come across such sentences as (6) below: (6)

Arabic bi-hi he-refuse that 3FEM.SG.SUB-feel-SBJCTVEwith-3MASC.SG.Ct hatta even ART-earth ART-treading on-3FEM.SG.Ct (FEM.SG)-NOMIN (MASC.SG)-NOMIN 'he does not wish that even the earth which he is treading should become aware of him'

The striking feature in this sentence is that the participial attribute dârigu agrees in case with the N it follows, while at the same time agreeing in gender and number not with this N, but with another, external, element, the MASC. SG personal index ya- on the verb of the main clause. This agreement is expected, while the case agreement has no other justification than structural cohesion. There is even more than this formal agreement at the cost of semantic requirements. It may happen that purely phonetic pressure wins over these requirements. This is illustrated by what I have proposed labelling the Heavy Close Law (HCL) (Hagège 1990a: 142-144). In many binomial (often idiomatic) phrases, most of them expressive or even ideophonic, the second term is, by virtue of an iambic affinity, typical of speech, heavier than the first: it has more syllables, or its consonants or vowels are longer

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39

(or (more) diphthongized), or back as opposed to front, or characterized by lower frequencies on the acoustic spectrum. Thus, English has/7//?-flop, by guess and by gosh, French has prendre ses cliques et ses claques, etc. Now, the HCL may come into conflict with ego-centred deixis, what I have called (Hagège 1982: 100-101) egophoricity (a deictic system in which I include Halliday's terms endo- and exophorics, and added in Hagège (1974) a new term which was later taken over by many others after I introduced it, i.e. logophorics). Egophoricity is a meaning-directed sequential phenomenon by virtue of which things semantically closer to ego are mentioned first. Consider the French binomials in (7) below: (7)

ici et là tôt ou tard plus ou moins

'here and there' 'sooner or later' 'more or less'

These binomials happen to meet both the requirements of the HCL and those of egophoricity and deixis-triggered word order, since là, tard and moins are both phonetically heavier than ici, tôt and plus, and deictically farther from ego in spatial, temporal and axiological terms respectively. Now consider (8) : (8)

Russian tam i sjam (there and here) Spanish tarde o temprano (late or soon) Hindi-Urdu ə  bes (less and more)

'here and there' 'sooner or later' 'more or less'

The second term in each of these binomials is heavier than the first one, but as is shown in the literal translations given between brackets, it violates egophoricity and deixis-triggered word order. Thus, formal con­ straints are stronger here than semantic requirements: the HCL applies at the cost of ego-centred deixis and egophoric dominance. Many cases of grammaticalization are the results of a process by which LEs lose the memory of these semantic requirements. One example among a host of others is the Dutch sentence in (9) : (9)

Dutch dit effect is nu bezig te verdwijnen this effect is now 'busy to' (=PROGR) disappear 'This effect is now disappearing'

40

CLAUDE HAGEGE

Dutch bezig te 'busy to' has come to express the progressive aspect, whether or not the co-indexed N refers to a busy individual, and even if it refers to a concrete thing or to a concept, as in (9). Such semantic freezing may, if looked at in diachronic terms, bring about meaning contradictions, of which LEs are not conscious, hence the designation I proposed in Hagège (1993a: 224): Unheeded Contradiction Principle (UCP). (10) and (11) below may serve as illustrations: (10) Ewe e-se-e kp a 2SG-hear-3SG 'see'QUEST 'did you really hear that?/have you ever heard that?' (Heine et al, 1991: 194) (11) Cahuilla ne-yuluka-y pis pe-n-ma'-une-qal POSS.lSG-head-OBL with OBJ-lSG.SUB-hand-show-DURAT 'I am showing something with my head' (Seiler 1984: 41) In (10), an Ewe sentence, kp is not the verb meaning 'to see' which appears in other contexts as main verb: it is a marker of counterexpectation. In (11), a Cahuilla sentence, -ma' 'hand' is not used in this sense (which it has when functioning as a N), but is used as an instrumental marker. If the meanings were not frozen, we would have to consider that in Ewe, the normal way to express one's doubts about someone's having heard something is to ask: 'did you hear it (to such an extent that you) saw it?', which would be somewhat strange. As for (11), we would have to posit that in Cahuilla, in order to say that one is showing something with one's head, one must say that one is showing it with one's hand, which, whatever the culture in question, is rather surprising. It is obvious that all these facts point to LEs' submission to con­ straints of which they are unconscious. Some phenomena, on the other hand, while also unconscious, reveal very complex operations, quite naturally accomplished by LEs. For example, there are structures in which we observe both incorporation and peninsularity. Consider (12) below, from Angmassalik Eskimo: (12) Angmassalik Eskimo sapannga-mik kusanartu-mik pi-sivoq bead-INSTR beautiful-INSTR thing-bought(INDIC.3SG) 'he bought a beautiful bead' (Hagège 1993a: 180)

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Here,pi 'thing' is incorporated to sivoq 'he bought', and the result is an intransitive compound verb, since if we want to mention an object, it must be in the instrumental, marked, in (12), by the suffix -mik (singular). But it is also possible to incorporate, instead of the generic object pi, the specific object sapannga. The striking fact, then, is that the adjective which depends on this noun, i.e. kusanartu, keeps its case suffix, even though the N with which it agrees in case, has lost this suffix (in addition to other formal changes) due to the very process of incorporation. Thus we get (13): (13) Angmassalik Eskimo kusanartu-mik sapangar-sivoq beautiful-INSTR bead-bought (INDIC.3SG) same meaning as (12) (Hagège 1993a: 180) This loss of the case suffix does not prevent sapannga from maintaining a syntactic relationship with the adjective, and, thus, from behaving like a part of a peninsula, instead of behaving like a part of an island, as could be expected, due to incorporation. It could be objected, of course, that only ethnocentric-minded lin­ guists can claim that a structure like (13), with both incorporation and peninsularity, is a very complex one, and that it is so viewed because it does not exist in European languages. But although it is itself fairly rare, this structure is only one among many illustrations of the complex opera­ tions that LEs, in all languages, are able to accomplish. The question that arises, then, is a simple one: if LEs can accomplish such operations, is it still possible to maintain that they are always unaware of what they are doing when speaking? 5.2. LEs'freedom

and

consciousness

We have seen above (section 4) that communicative needs cannot account for language change phenomena such as grammaticalization. The trigger­ ing factor would rather seem to be LEs' creativeness. LEs constantly strive for expressiveness and renewal of forms. The dialectics of constraints and freedom, or of freezing on the one hand, and search for expressiveness on the other, controls the evolution of grammatical structures. Spoken styles are good examples of the search for expressiveness. For instance, in French slang, argot, there is a process by which the syllables of

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certain words are permuted, and one of them is reduced or deleted. The name of this process itself illustrates this phenomenon: verlan, by permu­ tation of à l'envers 'the other way round'. Examples of verlan are as in instead of Arabe 'Arabian', through the stages (14) beur (deletion of initial a (syllable permutation and deletion of final a); or keuf instead of flic (itself slangy) through the stages [flikØ] (revo(syllable permuta­ calization of mute final ə like in tion), the syllable -li being eventually deleted. But it is possible, for expressive purposes, to permute back these words, which themselves result from permutation. Thus we have two reverse processes: verlanisation and then, reverlanisation, as in (14): (14) French slang: Verlan arabe 'Arabian* beur ) by verlanisation → reubeu by reverlanisation flic 'cop' keuf by verlanisation →feukeu by reverlanisation We see, therefore, that this slang, like other secret codes, is constantly seeking new methods to remotivate words, as soon as they seem to have lost, through use, a part of their expressiveness. But slang is a relatively spontaneous code, which is invented and re-invented by people belonging to the working classes, or to closed groups, excluded, or excluding themselves, from the bulk of society. In fact, the conscious effort to enrich the lexicon by building new forms also characterizes the neological activity of scholars seeking to adapt their language to the expression of new objects and concepts. Neological activity has considerably increased after World War II in many countries where the attempt to cope with unprecedented economic and cultural changes was felt to require, first of all, that language itself be modernized. One example among many is Arabic. This language is well-known for its very rich derivational system, by which verbs and nouns are derived, through various affixation processes, from (mostly) tri-syllabic verbal roots. On the other hand, compounding, as opposed to derivation, is very little used in Arabic. However, committees of language experts urged to create new terms in order to meet new requirements, have gone so far as to introduce new complex words by having recourse to compounding, and, what is more, by using truncated units as first elements of compounds, a device which was, so far, practically unknown in classical Arabic: for example, we have

LANGUAGE AS A FACULTY (15) Arabic qab+mantiq+iyy (before+logic+ADJ) faw+sawt+iyy (above+sound+ADJ)

43

'prelogical' 'supersonic'

qab- is a truncated form of the preposition qabla 'before', and faw- is a truncated form of the preposition fawqa 'above'; neither of them is ever used in other contexts than these modern compound adjectives. Even in languages that use compounds on a large scale, there are many individual inventions which, although easily understandable since the process is very productive, do not exist in official dictionaries, and reflect a conscious need for expressive renewal on the part of LEs. The German writer Arno Holz used such complex compounds as (16) German mammut+stosszahn -eingeritzten (mammoth+tusk+carved) '(myths) carved in mammoths' tusks' Günter Grass, too, used the past participle seeräubert 'stolen by an act of pirating', which he freely derived from Seeräuber 'pirate'. Similarly, the modern Swedish press creates complex compounds extensively: (17) Swedish tåg+dödades (train+was killed) 'was killed by a train'; raket+hota (rocket+to threaten) 'to threaten with rockets'; snö+försenade (snow+belated) '(people who) were late because of snow' (Tauli 1968: 115-116) The conscious search for a linguistic identity can also be observed at other levels, for example among political leaders. There are several examples of monarchs or other holders of political power, who con­ sciously left their mark on a particular language. One of the most famous among such examples is that of the Siamese kings of the 19th century. King Rama IV, who reigned from 1851 to 1868, had studied philology for a long time before assuming the throne, and he had long wished to make Thai, a predominantly monosyllabic language of the South-East Asian type, into more of a tantipha:sǎ (from Sanskrit tanti 'string' + pha:så 'language'), i.e. a formally structured and rule-organized language, hav­ ing paradigms of declension and conjugation (cf. Diller 1993: 397). Of course, this enterprise, which took as its ideal models such languages as

CLAUDE HAGEGE

44

Sanskrit, Pali, Latin and English, was, to a large extent, a delusion. However, King Rama IV succeeded in introducing, by using them perma­ nently in his royal writings, such latinate tenses as the perfect: in order to set up an equivalence with the Latin perfect, he chose the Thai verb dây 'to get, obtain', placed before the main Thai verb. The perfect marker dây has now become a standard tense verbant in high level Thai. It is true that King Rama IV was less successful in his attempt to impose specific predicate patterns for certain verbs, such as say 'to put', which, in contemporary Thai, continues to be used with a direct locative adjunct N, as in (18) Thai sày thung put bag '(I, we, they, etc.) put (sth) into a bag' (Diller 1993: 398) although Rama IV proscribed this usage, and ordered that in immediate collocation with this verb, only a direct object referring to a patient should be used, and not a locative-goal NP without preposition. The king was, of course, influenced by the model of English, which, applied to Thai, would require an explicit prepositional phrase, as in (19), the type of structure he recommended: (19) *sày nay thung put in bag But even though King Rama IV's recommendations, in this particular case, did not become common usage, the success of his attempt to introduce a perfect tense in Thai is enough to show that certain parts of morphosyntax itself can be built by a conscious action of political power. This is even more striking when a government is looking for linguistic arguments to support a claim to national identity. A typical example of this situation is provided by the linguistic policy of contemporary Croatia. Despite many dialectal differentiations throughout ex-Yugoslavia, a literary norm, called Serbo-Croatian, which is based upon the most widespread dialect, (Iekavian) Stokavian, had been set up by Serbian and Croatian grammarians and patriots in 1850 (cf. Hagège 1992:141-142). But today, the Croatian government, taking over the traditional attitude of many Croatian intellectuals who never accepted what they held to be Serbian imperialism, is striving to restore the Cakavian and Kaikavian dialects, the first of which was the basis of literary Croatian, in order to give a firm cultural basis to its

LANGUAGE AS A FACULTY

45

newly acquired political independence. Its expression, according to Zagreb, must be a language as far removed from Serbian as possible. Serbian variants of Croatian words are thus rejected, like odvjetnik, glazba, sustav, sijecanj, veljaca, ozujak, only their Croatian equivalents, i.e. advokat, muzika,sistem, januar,ebruar, mart, respectively, being accepted. This is also a reply to the policy of Belgrade, which, at the time of the Federation of Yugoslavia, in 1972, had forbidden the use of many Croatian words (cf. Hagège 1993c: 286). Syntax itself is involved in this identity conflict. The Croats lay emphasis on the importance of the use of the infinitive in sentences where the subject of the main clause and that of the dependent clause are coref erential. They thus ignore that in fact, it is not possible to take the survival of the infinitive in Croatian as one of the main criteria that distinguish it from Serbian, since in Serbian, contrary to what is repeatedly stressed, the infinitive is still in use today, except in the South-East. Thus, in both Serbian and Croatian, one can say either (20) or (21): (20) (Serbo-) Croatian volim raditi I-like to work 'I am fond of working' (21) Serbo(-Croatian) volim da radim I-like that I-work same meaning as (20) To sum up the last part of this paper, we can say that LEs' conscious­ ness and freedom to participate in linguistic morphogenesis are observed on the individual level as well as on the level of philologists enriching their language, and on the level of political leaders sometimes succeeding in introducing linguistic innovations. And this applies not only to the lexicon, a more flexible part of language, but also to morphosyntax, a more tightly-structured part. Phonetics itself is sometimes a domain of successful human intervention (Hagège 1993a: 30-31). 6. Conclusion Throughout this article, I have tried to show two things. First, it is not sufficient to explain linguistic behaviour in terms of the capacity of the human mind to generate an infinite number of sentences, whatever find-

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ings such an approach makes possible. Similarly, although cognitive approaches to language seem to promise new insights into the functioning of the human brain, there remains the need for a thorough study of another, hardly less important, aspect of language: the building of linguistic forms, a process reflecting a fundamental human activity, whose framework is speech interaction, and whose motivation is the need to meet, in social intercourse, the requirements of communication. Second, the building of linguistic forms is not so unconscious as is traditionally believed, explic­ itly or implicitly, in most schools of linguistic thought. Humans may be characterized as function builders. Although this does not necessarily imply that language is a goal-directed activity, the fact remains that in this building process, a conscious participation can often be observed, not only in the lexicon, through the study of the individual and collective activity of neology, but even in morphosyntax, and particularly in the process of grammaticalization. Thus, the theoretical conception of linguistic re­ search which underlies the present study is that of glossogenesis as an activity which has always been a feature of human beings. It is my conviction that this kind of research should be extended because of what it can teach us about the place of human beings in the world. References Alisjahbana, S. T. 1978. The concept of language standardisation and its appli­ cation to the Indonesian language. In A. Q. Perez, A. O. Santiago, Nguyen Dang Liêm (eds.) Papers from the Conference on the Standardisation of Asian Languages, Manila 1974. Canberra: Pacific Linguistics. 19-41. Benjamin, G. 1993. Grammar and polity: The cultural and political background to Standard Malay. In W. A. Foley (ed.), 341-392. Benveniste, E. 1971. Active and middle voice in the verb. In E. Benveniste, Problems in General Linguistics. (Translated by M. E. Meek.) Coral Gables: University of Miami Press. 144-151. Boas, F. 1911. Introduction. In Handbook of American Indian Languages. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office. 5-83. Brenzinger, M. (ed.) 1992. Language Death, Factual and Theoretical Explora­ tions with Special Reference to East-Africa. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Desclés, J.-P. 1988. Langage et cognition. Intellectica 6: 1-41. Diller, A. 1993. Diglossic grammaticality in Thai. In W. A. Foley (ed.), 393-420. Diller, A. 1994. Grammaticalization and Tai syntactic change. In M. R. Kayala Tingsabadh and A. S. Abramson (eds.) Essays in Tai Linguistics. Bangkok: Chulalongkorn University Press. 1-34.

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Foley, W. A. (ed.) 1993. The Role of Theory in Language Description. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Hagège, . 1982. La Structure des Langues. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Hagège,  1974. Les pronoms logophoriques. BSLP LXIX, 2: 287-310. Hagège, C. 1986. La Langue Palau: Une Curiosité Typologique. Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag. Hagège, . 1990. The Dialogic Species: A Linguistic Contribution to the Social Sciences. (Translated by S. L. Shelly.) New York: Columbia University Press. Hagège, . 1990b. Do the classical morphological types have clear-cut limits? In W. U. Dressier, H.  Luschützky, O. E. Pfeiffer, J. R. Rennison (eds.) Contemporary Morphology. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. 297-308. Hagège, C. 1992. Le Souffle de la Langue: Voies et Destins des Parlers d'Europe. Paris: Odile Jacob. Hagège, C. 1993a. The Language Builder: An Essay on the Human Signature in Linguistic Morphogenesis. Amsterdam: Benjamins. Hagège, . 1993b. Review of Brenzinger (ed.). BSLP LXXXVIII, 2: 64-75. Hagège, . 1993c. Review of J. Cemerikic, G. Imart, V. Tikhonova-Imart 1988. Paronymes Russo-ISerbo-croates ('Amis ' et 'Faux-amis '). BSLP LXXXVIII, 2: 284-290. Heine, ., U. Claudi and F. Hünnemeyer. 1991. Grammaticalization: A Concep­ tual Framework. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Rastier, F. 1991. La croisée des chemins: Situation de la linguistique. Bulletin de la Section de Linguistique de la Faculté des Lettres de Lausanne 11: 33-46. Seiler, H. 1984. Die Indianersprachen Nordamerikas. Cologne: Institut für Sprachwissenschaft, Arbeitspapier 44. Tauli, V. 1968. Introduction to a Theory of Language Planning. Uppsala: Almqvist and Wiksells.

Linguistics — systemic and functional Renewing the 'warrant' Robert de Beaugrande Universität Wien and Universidade do Amazonas, Manaus

1. Disconnecting 'language': a technical fiction? 1. The terms 'functional linguistics' and 'systemic linguistics' might not seem particularly abstruse to a casual observer. There is nothing obviously radical about saying that language meets important 'functions' in human action and interaction, or that language constitutes a 'system'. Yet in the history and development of the science of language called 'modern linguistics', the two terms and their interpretations have had a chequered history. To appreciate why, we can briefly contemplate the historical development of the discipline. 2. When linguistics was seeking to be established as a science in the early decades of this century, it confronted the difficult choice between acknowledging the multifarious connectedness between language and human knowledge and experience in social life, or else disconnecting it and describing it by itself. Because the general scientific landscape was rather austere, especially in English-speaking countries like the UK and the US, the second option was widely preferred. The 'mainstream posi­ tion' was gradually consolidated around a research programme whose chief tenets had far-reaching consequences:

50 (a)

(b)

(c) (d)

ROBERT DE BEAUGRANDE Linguistics should be an autonomous science, fortified against absorption by other human sciences, such as philology, philosophy, psychology, sociology, or anthropology. The proper and sole object of investigation should thus be language by itself, as opposed to language in the contexts of history, society, culture, literature, and so on. The ultimate goal of investigation would be to provide a description of language stated in exclusively linguistic criteria. The description should be couched in statements at the highest level of generality: what is true of an entire language or even 'universal' for all languages.

3. But what is 'language by itself' — 'langue' that Saussure's Cours (1966 [1916]: 232) announced to be 'the true and unique object of linguistics', disconnected from 'parole', i.e. language in use? It is not a real phenomenon or class of phenomena: language never appears by itself in the world we live in. So linguists duly set about reconstructing it, trying to imagine what a language would look like disconnected from the rich and messy contexts of everyday communication. Thus emerged a science of language whose central object of investigation was essentially a technical fiction — an entity that had to be created by means of the investigation itself. Subsequently, two main courses of action have pre­ vailed. Either linguists have worked to make their notion of language less fictitious by relating it to steadily richer constraints, e.g. to social inter­ action — the programme of functionalism. Or, linguists have worked to make their notion of language more technical by relating it to sparse, abstract formal models, e.g., to predicate calculus — the programme of formalism. 2. Fieldwork versus homework 4. These two programmes have loosely corresponded to two major work styles. Fieldwork linguists go out to work in the 'field' of cultural and social 'reality' and carefully record examples of what native speakers are actually observed to say. Homework linguists (to coin a new phrase) stay at home (or in the office) and use introspection and intuition to invent examples of what native speakers (including themselves) are presumed to know about their language (cf. § 12). Fieldworkers need

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extensive training and rigorous methods of elicitation and transcription to make sense of data about which they know very little at the start. Homeworkers need little training to invent their own data that they have always already understood and to transpose it into equally invented formal notations whose format pre-empts or obviates much of the analy­ sis, e.g., by deciding the boundaries of units and the structure of phrases — just what the fieldworker has yet to find out. 5. Whatever official 'linguistic theories' may prevail, fieldwork necessarily contributes to making the concept of 'language' less ficti­ tious. The fieldworker has neither the means or the motives to confront 'language by itself'. The object of inquiry is always language in society and culture, and if it were not, it couldn't be described at all, because the fieldworker, who starts out as a total outsider, wouldn't discover rich enough constraints to determine what utterances or utterance-units mean or how to label and classify them. Of course, the constraints may well not be linguistic ones of the type you might expect to find, say, in a theory of syntax; they may arise from cultural activities like buying and selling wares (cf. Mitchell 1975 [1957]; Halliday and Hasan 1985). But they are essential for making sense of the data well enough to uncover the linguis­ tic constraints, e.g. the patterns of modifying the nouns used for designat­ ing things, including wares. 6. Moreover, fieldworkers continually subject their findings to the important operational test of discursive practice. If your own version of the language isn't accurate, you can get misunderstood, ridiculed, or ignored by native speakers. So your assumptions and conclusions are continually being checked and refined long before you publish your results. Socially, the results are most significant when they enable com­ munication with a language community that was previously isolated, e.g., in order to demonstrate more effective methods of hygiene or agriculture. 7. In contrast, 'homeworkers' face no such operational test of discur­ sive practice, and can tranquilly publish their results without such check­ ing. Much of the homework is done under the counter: the homeworker has already made sense of the data, and much of the analysis occurs tacitly while putting the data into the notation, such as the familiar 'syntactic trees' for sentences. This method necessarily contributes to making the concept of 'language' more fictitious, and renders the whole process rather circular. It does not so much explain the language data as get rid of them in favour of sparser substitutes. The results would be genuinely significant only if the description and notation could reveal major under-

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lying principles of language organisation. The frequent promises of the formalists to achieve this goal have largely remained unfulfilled; and I submit that they will continue to be so as long as the concept of language just gets more and more technical and no less fictional. 3. Testing the hypothesis: is language a uniform stable system? 8. The programme of 'mainstream linguistics' stated in § 2 takes it for granted that language is a uniform stable system we can 'discover', and 'describe'. Terms like 'discovery' imply the optimistic prospect that we are merely removing some concealing 'outward cover' to reveal an 'un­ derlying reality'. But the factors I have cited raise the more pessimistic prospect that we may instead be constructing a technical fiction. How could we adjudicate which of these two prospects is more justified? Our business as usual of gathering and presenting data will not suffice, because we can only draw conclusions about these data and not about 'language itself'. 9.1 would therefore propose a different and broader test for adjudi­ cation. If language is indeed a uniform, stable system we can 'discover' and 'describe' in 'purely linguistic terms', then we can predict steady long-term increases on three scales: (a) the coverage of language data; (b) the convergence among descriptions of data; and (c) the consensus among linguists about how the description should be stated and interpreted. Now, the overall history of modern linguistics has not shown any such increase. On the contrary, these three scales were highest in the early stages, when phonology was the primary domain. Here, linguistics did 'discover' a uniform stable system of 'phonemes': theoretical minimal sound-units whose quantity and nature can be precisely described for any language by distinctive criteria that are both physical (how and where the sound is articulated) and mental (whether the difference in sounds can also differ­ entiate meanings). Moreover, a fair share of the 'explanatory work' was done by the transcription of phonemes into the 'phonetic alphabet', thereby achieving a visually neat segmentation of data that might actually be heard as a continuous stream of sounds. 10. This resounding success in meeting our three-part test enshrined the notion of language being a uniform, stable system and made the study of sound-systems in phonology into the model paradigm for 'modern linguistics', as we can see from the proliferation of '-erne' terms (e.g.,

RENEWING THE 'WARRANT'

53

'morphème', 'lexeme', 'syntagmeme', 'sememe') modelled after 'pho­ neme'. Henceforth, 'mainstream' theories confidently projected language to be a system or rather a set of 'subsystems', usually called 'levels', each consisting of a repertory of minimal combinable units, each units defined by how it differs from all the others. 11. But linguistic research has had only mixed success in reapplying the same view beyond phonology: fairly good for morphology, less good for syntax, and rather bad for semantics (Beaugrande 1996a). Thus, our three-part test has been met steadily less well, so that when we get to semantics, it's hard to see any major advances in coverage, convergence, and consensus over the last thirty years or so. Instead, we see stagnation amid a flurry of episodic proposals, each with a handful of artificially constructed demonstrations and results that by no means add up to a reliable shared method. 12. The so-called 'generative revolution' in American linguistics during the 1960s did more to conceal this stagnation than to cure it. The prevailing conception of language became substantially more fictional when it got shifted from being a repertory of minimal combinable units over to being a set of rules for putting units into patterns. Now, whereas the units like 'phonemes and morphemes' are still discoverable in the data, the rules are not — they have to be invented by linguists. And this operation is highly sensitive to the conditions under which it is performed. If the data have been recorded from fieldwork, they are subject to rich, authentic constraints that get relayed into the 'rules', though possibly in implicit or disguised ways. But if the data are invented from 'homework', the constraints are sparse and artificial, and the rules inherit these quali­ ties. 'Homework formalists' confidently claimed that their own introspec­ tion and intuition would supply a reliable basis for a rigorous description — a claim now soundly refuted by work with large corpuses of authentic data (§ 29). We can thus see why the formalisms 'fictionalise' language in being not just unsupported by authentic data, but programmatically hostile to authentic data, insofar as they naturally resist formalisation (§ 36) (cf. Beaugrande 1994, 1996b, c). 13. In compensation, the technicality of the enterprise was sharply increased amid a burgeoning apparatus of formal notations. The casual and undisciplined manner whereby the data get 'formalised' has been disguised by the arcane formality of the notations. This artful dodge was financed by essentially sacrificing coverage, convergence, and consensus to carry on a top-heavy controversy about what to formalise and how. The

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last three decades of formal homework linguistics presents a diffuse picture recently diagnosed by José Luis Escribano (1993: 229f): there seem to be a great many approaches 'on the market' whose interrelationships remain as poorly understood as ever. In fact, it is not easy to even determine which of the thirty-odd major syntactic frameworks that have appeared over the last forty years continue 'alive'. [Some might] not have been 'theories' at all, but just 'formalisms' built in such a minimalistic way from the very begin­ ning that practically no progress was possible in principle! The proliferation of 'minimalistic formalisms' has been a historical adap­ tation to the academic decorum that tends to evolve when language as it is historically and empirically encountered is replaced by a timeless and idealised formal abstraction. Theories are then advocated on such selfdetermining criteria as formality, abstractness, and rigour, which resist any compelling consensus). 14. The factor that formal linguists seem unwilling or unable to acknowledge is that the various domains or subsystems' of language are not equally disconnectable from human knowledge and experience in social life. The sounds of phonology are fairly disconnectable, the mean­ ings of semantics are not, and the patterns of syntax are in between. Formal linguistics has merely masked this differential and the problems it entails by making syntax and semantics steadily more technical (§ 3, 13). In effect, the process of fitting language data to the technical notation works as a hidden, and thus uncontrolled, activity of disconnecting; and if, as I assert, the data are not genuinely disconnectable, the lack of convergence and consensus currently displayed in formal linguistics is just what we could predict. The very act of disconnecting dilutes the constraints that are needed to arrive at a reliable description. 15. In retrospect, we can see that the advent of formal 'generative' linguistics was not, as it proudly proclaimed, a new way to solve the problems facing the study of syntax and semantics, but merely a new and more imposing way to divert attention from undeniably real problems, e.g. how much consensus a language community has about usage, over to artificial problems, e.g., at exactly what point sentences switch from 'grammatical' to 'ungrammatical' and why (cf. § 23). Surely the time is at hand to finally close the books on the unproductive and destabilising quest for 'language by itself' and on the spiralling dilemmas we must encounter in trying to construct it.

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4. The functional alternative 16. The issues I have raised in the foregoing sections may provide a suitable rhetorical context to assess the warrant for 'systemic functional linguistics' as a project steadfastly designed to resolve some of the deeper dilemmas of language science. The various branches of functional linguis­ tics did not endorse the project of disconnecting and describing 'language by itself', and has often been critical of Saussure's counter-productive dichotomy between 'langue and 'parole' (e.g. Trnka 1964; Pike 1967; Halliday 1973; Stubbs 1993). 17. Over the years, several schools of functional linguistics have been quietly developing apart from the noisy prominence of formalism. Despite their theoretical and geographic diversity, they have shared a research interest in languages which, unlike English or French, have relatively few 'frozen' patterns of prototypical word order in clauses: Russian studied in the Soviet Union (e.g. Roman Jakobson), Czech, Slovak, and Anglo-Saxon in Czechoslovakia by the Prague School (e.g. Vilém Mathesius, Frantisek Danes, Jan Firbas), Chinese and Japanese for Orientalists in various places, including Britain (Firth, Halliday), the United States (Y. R. Chao, Susumu Kuno), Germany (Peter Hartmann), and so on. In such languages, even artificial invented data quickly bring into focus such functional factors as relative degrees of knownness and informativity — what the Prague School has called 'communicative dynamism' (see now Firbas 1992). In consequence, functional linguists were much more inclined than their formalist counterparts to regard contextual factors as an integral part of the description and explanation of language even at high levels of generality. 18. One characteristic of this outlook was the concern for intonation or prosody, i.e., the flow or melody of whole utterances, as compared to the minimal units of 'phonemes' described by phonology (e.g. Danes 1957; Halliday 1967; Brazil 1975). Here also, the significant role of context is immediately evident, even if some of its chief factors, such as emotions, are not 'linguistic' ones in any conventional sense. 19. Another characteristic has been to incorporate the lexicon, a domain which formal linguistics has widely neglected in lack of means to formalise it, by exploring its rich interactions with grammar. The Prague School suggested viewing the lexicon as 'implicit syntax' (Skalicka 1960); and the next year, Halliday (1961: 256) invoked the 'grammarian's dream' of 'showing that lexis can be defined as "most delicate grammar"'

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(see also Hasan 1985, 1987; Cross 1993). This 'gnomic statement' (to borrow a term John Sinclair uses for some pronouncements of J. R. Firth) envisioned the concept of lexicogrammar in systemic functional linguis­ tics, which rejects the expedient assumption of formalist approaches that the grammar of a language is its central, self-sufficient system determin­ ing which types of units can appear in which types of patterns, whereas the particular units are stored away with their meanings in the 'lexicon'. The formalists doubtless expected to make their job tidier by describing general and 'regular' grammatical data and discounting specific and 'irregular' lexical data, but were actually stymied by being unable to take account of lexical constraints upon word order (cf. § 28). 20. But the most important characteristic, in my view, lies in ac­ knowledging the multifarious connectedness of language to human knowledge and experience in social life. The 'systemic functional' approach has taken the greatest initiative in this direction, undaunted by the steadily expanding dimensions of the task. This acknowledgement is nowhere more forcefully articulated than in Halliday's programmatic papers recently published under the apt title of Language in a Changing World (1994a). 22. Yet the programme of this approach has not always been properly understood by those outside it. The twin terms 'systemic' and 'functional' are, as I said, not instantly enlightening (cf. § 1); in fact, each of them can be and at times has been expropriated for approaches that fall squarely in the purview of the dilemmas I raised in sections 1 to 3. All formalist models of language at least since Saussure have been systemic in some sense. Indeed, the formalists have evidently been committed to the belief that the existence of some 'underlying system' would vindicate their idealised concept of 'language by itself'. Thus, when Saussure vowed that language is 'a synchronic system of differences' outside of time, he must have imagined that linguistics would be able to discover precisely which differences were the relevant ones for defining the organisation of the 'system'. But this goal has been actually achieved only for phonology and for some of the more tractable areas of morphology and syntax — the frozen islands where forms and patterns remain fairly consistent irrespec­ tive of context (§ 17, 24, 30). The disappointing stagnation of formal semantics with its 'features' and 'markers' indicates that for meaning at least, Saussure's notion of 'system' is idle. We might just as idly say that a human society is 'a system of differences' ; every person or social group

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is trivially different in some ways, but we need to know which differences or similarities are relevant to social roles and human rights. 23. Also, every utterance is trivially different from every other in at least some details; but the conclusion drawn by linguists from Saussure to Chomsky that we should describe the system apart from the utterances has only stranded linguists in the impossible job of inventing a system (§ 3). The differences and similarities manifested by authentic utterances (rather than by isolated invented sentences) arise from the interaction between the language system that specifies constraints and the language data that manifest constraints (Beaugrande 1996a) Moreover, each discourse context interfaces the standing constraints of the system (e.g. the formation of plural pronouns) with the emergent constraints tailored to the occasion (e.g. the need to address a visiting dignitary in a ceremo­ nious style). Many problems in modern linguistics have been artifacts of a disproportionate concern for standing constraints at the expense of emergent constraints. The paradoxical tendency has been to assume that the standing constraints situated within the system are at the same time highly general in applying irrespective of contexts, and yet highly specific in determining just which sentences or utterances are 'grammati­ cal'. Not surprisingly, the paradox has churned out unending controver­ sies over the relation of the system to various batches of data examples and counter-examples, e.g., over which invented sentences are or are not 'grammatical' (cf. § 15). 24. The term functional is similarly diffuse. When it is defined as 'the grammatical role a linguistic form has or the position it occupies in at utterance' {Random House Webster's Dictionary, p. 539), the usage is largely formalist. The decisive distinction lies between approaches assert­ ing that the single and unique function of linguistic units is determined by formal criteria within an abstract system, versus approaches asserting that linguistic units are multifunctional and that their functions are determined partly by the system through standing constraints and partly by the specific context of situation through emergent constraints. The first assertion is shared by all variants of formalism and implies that the system is 'frozen' in its entirety, which in effect sets us the hopeless task of 'freezing' it by means of our own methods and descriptions (e.g. by a 'cryogenerative grammar'). The second assertion is implicitly shared by all variants of functionalism and has been made explicit most elaborately by 'systemic functional linguistics'. But it is essential to emphasise the programmatic commitment implied in this name.

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25. My impression is that over the last fifteen or twenty years, a number of approaches have been converging on a programme similar to that of systemic functional linguistics but — due, perhaps, to not fully appreciating just what ' s behind the bland name — have not been expressly steering towards it. Such was certainly the case for my own work on text and discourse in the late 1970s and early 1980s (e.g. Beaugrande 1980, 1984). Only when I closely studied Halliday's writings in my survey of 'fundamental works' (Beaugrande 1991) did I realise that I had been developing concepts and arguments that he had already firmly established. Some months ago, I had the same sobering but somehow also comforting experience when I read his Language in a Changing World (Halliday 1994a), this time in respect to my own forthcoming volume on New Foundations for a Science of Text and Discourse (Beaugrande 1996a). 5. Renewing the 'warrant' for systemic functional linguistics 26. I would like to illustrate this convergence of approaches with a development which has pleasantly surprised both Halliday and myself and which may well be leading us toward a genuine resolution to the dilemmas sketched in sections 1 to 3. It is driven by a technological innovation: by large computerised corpuses of authentic texts and discourses, such as the 'Bank of English' developed at Birmingham University by John Sinclair and his team (cf. Baker et al. (eds.) 1993). In July 1994, the 'Bank' reached the size of some 200 million words of running text from contem­ porary spoken and written sources, including: British and American books; newspapers (Times, Independent, Guardian, Today, Wall Street Journal, New Scientist, Economist); magazines (e.g., Esquire, Good Housekeeping); 'ephemera' such as letter-box mailings (e.g., YMCA appeal for homeless people, Friends of the Earth Tropical Rainforest Campaign), radio broadcasts (British Broadcasting Corporation and Na­ tional Public Radio); and recordings of conversations. This is the widest coverage we have ever had of a language, though it is still much too small and partial in its reliance on public media discourse, which has special, preferences about what counts as 'newsworthy' (cf. Beaugrande 1996c). 27. Large-corpus banks do not merely make accessing real language data for functional description far more convenient and comprehensive. They are also fundamentally reshaping the relation between system versus data and giving the final impetus to 'deconstructing' the dichotomy of

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'langue' versus 'parole' (§ 16) (see now Halliday 1994a). By allowing us to collate and compare such numerous instances of authentic usage, the bank throws into startling focus the rich connectedness of language to human knowledge and experience in social life and yet does not — as a chorus of formal linguists from Saussure to Chomsky have too much protested — make the description of language less systematic and reli­ able, but vastly more so. We no longer need to labour under the idealised self-defeating notion of formal linguistics that language can be discon­ nected from people's knowledge of world and society and yet can be cleanly circumscribed in this disconnected state (cf. § 3). The quest for such a system has only impelled many linguists to throw out bales of regularities — not 'rules'! — that large corpuses are now bringing into clear view. 28. An important result is a fresh impetus for moving the lexicogrammar along from the 'grammarian's dream' (§ 19) toward the sys­ temic functionalist's reality. Instead of conveniently assuming that the grammar of a language can be described in isolation from the daunting volume and variety of lexical data, large corpuses provide data-driven criteria for co-ordinating grammatical data with lexical data and general with specific, and for capturing 'regularities' along an extensive and finetuned line of 'delicacy'. 29. Large-corpus data are currently revealing just such a cline. Making categorical decisions about where 'regularity' ends and 'irregu­ larity' begins is now seen to be a rather arbitrary activity for which introspection and intuition do not at all supply the reliable sources claimed by homework formalists (§ 12). Of course, these two sources are still implicated in how we interpret large-corpus data. But the very wide coverage makes convergence and consensus among those interpretations far more likely than they can be when introspection and intuition are implicated in both inventing and interpreting the data (cf. § 4). 30. To stay with my 'cryogenic' metaphor (§ 24), a data bank might be said to rest upon a 'pool' of constraints like water near the critical mass when it will suddenly freeze. The 'frozen islands' in the language system help keep the pool near the freezing point but do not by themselves impose the detailed crystalline structures that the data actually assume at the moment of utterance or inscription. By focusing so strongly on the 'frozen islands' (§ 24), formal linguistics had assumed that a significant portion of those 'surface structures' are 'unrevealing' (Chomsky 1965: 24), and that the language is to be described in terms of 'deep structures'. As I

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remarked, the explanation was in effect achieved by getting rid of data (§ 7). Now, large corpuses allow us to keep a close eye on the surface and to let the data decide how 'deep' we should look for an explanation. 31.1 shall briefly demonstrate with the corpus data I took from the Bank of English on the Verb 'warrant', from which I made a hand-sorted selection of 228 lines. One initial heuristic is to create a 'positional frequency table' in which the words in the several slots to the left and right of the key word are displayed in descending order of frequency, as shown in Table 1. sufficient enough serious too the and that not sufficient in is was it of which but good done a 's be important

enough evidence did do does not as didn may doesn nothing the and seem t trivial that will so small seemed they appear

to not 't would might really that yet should search and will circumstances arrest could can may soon '11 conditions germane death certainly

warrant warrant warrant warrant warrant warrant warrant warrant warrant warrant warrant warrant warrant warrant warrant warrant warrant warrant warrant warrant warrant warrant warrant

a the investigation the an a it such attention any of further action this trial with that his and to more some special their even mention no another intervention my 's its it for because than more concern new officer an < / h > further one sort

Table 1: Positional frequency table for

of the in a but action and to trial that for into by it is than some as an here then

WARRANT

We can see that the 'Process' nouns indicating the typical content of what does or doesn't 'warrant' what are plainly outranked by the main 'Aspect' items and patterns indicating the polarity, i.e. positive or negative, and the intensity of the 'warrant', e.g. how 'small' or 'serious' it is (or is not). The Aspect signals win out in frequency and regularity because English has far

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fewer of them and tends to put them in consistent positions, e.g. the 'to' just ahead of 'warrant'. 32. I further hand-sorted the lines to collect and highlight content categories; a partial version is shown in Table 2. < David Boren says the accusations warrant concern. David Boren (Committee > < return. This achievement seemed to warrant a couple of days' rest, a few > < because we don't have the acreage to warrant <M01> Yes. one. But I don't > < aggressions, each too small to warrant war. Because possession of the > < office and that his behaviour could warrant both criminal and political steps> < Boren says the charges , if true, warrant serious concern, but he stresses > < chickens which are good enough to warrant their own appellation > < their circumstances simply do not warrant charitable assistance. For > < bark disease. Degenerating trees warrant specialist attention. Felling or > < city's past discriminatory practices warrant a strict plan, one that includes > < distress levels severe enough to warrant professional intervention > < On its own the documentary wouldn't warrant more than a 4: out-takes of films > < Costa Rica's economic conditions warrant the cut in aid, which the country > < insists there is enough evidence to warrant an investigation # One suggestion > < food shortage is severe enough to warrant breaking the embargo # This report > < of impropriety alone is enough to warrant punishment # Ralph Lotkin, the > < were internal matters that warrant no outside interference. Shay > < nothing in the market today to warrant optimism or pessimism, and that > < the national objectives at stake warrant the deaths of US troops # Oil, > < these old homes are chilly enough to warrant guests wearing thermal long johns > < a serious enough operation to warrant intensive care. Dining at > < revelations of an affair did not warrant my leaving the Government . I > < situation is not bad enough yet to warrant that type of appeal. We do not see > < violence in South Africa to warrant any relaxation in security > < women were too unimportant to warrant a special ritual, and in societies >

Table 2: Content categories for WARRANT Such displays help make perspicuous the constraints from the several formal or functional 'levels' or 'components' of linguistic analysis. For pragmatics, we could note the explicit but fairly rare Performative 'I'll warrant' (the contraction is motivated by prosody, hence not '?I will warrant') or 'I warrant' used when you want to indicate you feel sure though you can't point to actual facts. Alongside the usual invented sentences of formal linguistics (like 'John is easy to please'), a sample like (2) looks quite complex, with four Dependent Clauses boxed into each other, but in real discourse it would be easy enough to comprehend for the adolescents it is addressed to.

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(1)

The soil may look innocuous enough when you've dug it over but I'11 warrant it's teeming with root-eating wireworms. (2) I'11 warrant I even heard Honey Bane shuffling by somewhere in the background of a song that will provide the perfect soundtrack for when your mum won't let you out of your room until you've done your homework.

Less explicit but far more common and influential is the pragmatic force implied in declaring what does or does not 'warrant' what. The implication is that the event or situation that might do the 'warranting' is informative (unusual, significant) enough, that a reaction might well be in order, and that those who might be expected to react will say why or why not they are going to, and how. Accordingly, the speaker — or, when the discourse is reported, the originator of the message — is likely to be a person repre­ senting some institution or authority, and the data suggest what kind: government, judiciary, military, sports, business, science, and medicine. Other persons who use 'warrant' imply they have some authority, e.g., the journalists and media persons who said 'the Chevrolet Beretta' 'does not warrant particular mention' or 'the documentary wouldn't warrant more than a 4' . 33. For semantics, we could note that many of the subjects and direct objects of clauses fall into associative classes we can group under general headings, e.g.: (a)

as SUBJECTS: ACTIONS: 'aggressions, behaviour, blow, brawl'; RESOURCES: 'acreage, growing area, scrappable cars'; KNOWLEDGE: 'evidence, information, perception, scientific authority'; MES­ 'accusations, complaints, juicy stuff, message, piece of tittle-tattle, revelations'; PROBLEMS: 'air leaks, ambiguity, anti­ trust conspiracy, casualty rate, chilly old homes, degenerating trees, disability, discriminatory practices, distress levels, food shortage, ill health, impropriety, violence'; as DIRECT OBJECTS: (IN)APPROPRIATE REACTIONS: 'change, conclu­ sion, consideration, expansion, formation, increases, motion, (cautious) move, plan, step, treatment'; CONSUMPTION OF RE­ SOURCES: 'cost, expenditure, loss of any troop's lives, overeating, paying the steeper taxes, shelf-space'; MESSAGES: 'apology, bill­ ing, briefing, brochure, column inches, comment, description, footnote, mention, satire, serious talk, suggestion, talking-to'; KNOWLEDGE-GATHERING: 'airing, attention, consultations, examiSAGES:

(b)

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nation, hearing, inquiry, investigation, retrospective survey, re­ view, trial'; SOLVING PROBLEMS: 'answering machine, economic assistance, breaking the embargo, easing of interest rates, wear­ ing thermal long johns, intensive care, introducing more elabo­ rate feeding, (professional/prompt/surgical) intervention, making peace, mid-season break, sending of those supplies, using these drugs'; RETALIATING: 'banning the show, charge(s), God's anger, jail time, lengthy ban, massive American retaliation, pen­ alties, pre-emptive strike, criminal prosecution, capital punish­ ment'. Such groupings need not be cleanly distinct, since a broad category like '(in)appropriate reactions' could cover narrower ones like problemsolving', and an action like 'legal trial' could be either knowledgegathering about misdeeds or retaliating against the accused. Still, we can make a modest 'semantic table' showing subject-groupings and objectgroupings and their typical correlations: SUBJECT-GROUPINGS

OBJECT-GROUPINGS

actions resources messages knowledge problem

(in) appropriate reactions/retaliations consumption of resources messages knowledge-gathering problem-solving

Often, a correlation in the left and right hand columns shows up on the same line in the data, e.g. 'evidence' (knowledge) plus 'investigation/ trial' (knowledge-gathering) or 'degenerating trees' (problem) plus 'spe­ cialist attention' (problem-solving). But this co-occurrence of semantic groupings on one line is by no means a rule. We can also have, say, an action plus message, e.g. Operation' plus 'briefing'; or knowledge plus action, e.g. 'evidence' plus 'banning the show'. 34. The domain of semantics is being construed here far more widely than in the abstract formal approaches striving to use only 'purely linguis­ tic' categories. Important constraints are also supplied by attitudes about ameliorative or pejorative values. For 'warranting', the pejorative values clearly predominate. The value may be lexicalised in the subject only (e.g. a 'casualty rate warrants a step'), in the direct object only (e.g. 'cases warrant capital punishment'), or in both (e.g. 'aggressions warrant war'). Hence, seemingly general lexical items ('circumstances, conditions, oc-

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casion, operation, qualities, situation') that would not have values as a part of their own meaning (or as a 'semantic feature') do carry values in most of my corpus data. This valuation belongs to the meaning of V a r ränt' even though it may be made explicit in various contextual positions and by various grammatical categories, e.g. Nouns ('job bias, violence') or Modifiers ('discriminatory practices, chilly old homes'). Even without more context, data like 'there wasn't a single incident to warrant any action from me' imply a pejorative 'incident' calling for retaliatory 'action'. Or, in 'scientific authority does not warrant the exaggerated respect', a normally ameliorative value is shifted toward a pejorative one. 35. I return here to my surmise that semantics is the least disconnectable domain of language (§ 14). Work with rich authentic data enables us to reach a convergent interpretation even for data that might appear semantically ambiguous or ill-formed, e.g.: (3) (4) (5) (6) (7)

< as a major threat sufficient to warrant a pre-emptive strike of their own.> < the White House says these air leaks do not warrant military interception > < disability is not felt sufficient to warrant his inclusion in the wheelchair > < stories of ill health that appear to warrant surgical intervention. Frequently > < not bad enough nor predictable enough to warrant a mid-season break. >

In (3), the 'major threat' is unlike the 'performative speech act' of 'threatening', and is not a reaction to a previous action but an anticipation of such action; yet the context fits the familiar domain of military and political discourse that disguises aggression as defence. The same domain lends an unusual sense to 'air leak' in (4), where planes or missiles rather than air are passing through. In (5), 'inclusion' is odd but was probably chosen to avoid a more usual but harsher term like 'confinement'. In (6), 'appear' rather than 'appears' oddly suggests that surgery is to be done on 'stories' or story-tellers rather than on the people in 'ill health'; but neither the author nor editors noticed this because world-knowledge counsels the opposite. In (7), 'w/zpredictable' seems intuitively better with 'bad' if, as I at first thought, the performance of an athlete or team might call for a 'break'; but when I accessed the source text, the missing subject was 'British weather' (you know it's 'bad' but not how bad or when).

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36. These various constraints seem fearfully grainy and diffuse when you want to 'formalise' them into 'rules' or 'features', but are cheerfully tidy and precise when you put them to use. They hover between semantics and pragmatics, and make rich connections between language versus knowledge of the world and society (cf. § 27). Yet it is not hard to reach a consensus about them and a convergence among our analyses of the data, because we are proceeding very much like the participants who produce and receive such discourse. In addition, we gain a useful framework for deciding which data in smaller units and on 'shallower' levels might be relevant. For morphology, we might note the accumulations of several prefixes among the processes, fitting the semantic and pragmatic con­ straints that 'warranting' often involves situations in which people act together (viz. 'commitment, complaints, consideration, conspiracy, con­ sultations'); or where something is not what it should be (viz. 'impropri­ ety, insufficient, unimportant, unorthodox, unsatisfactory, untutored'); or where people want 'inside' knowledge (viz. 'inquiry, investigation') or want to break 'in' on the chain of events (viz. 'interception, interference, intervention, introducing'); and so on. Whether such morpheme accumu­ lations reflect the standing constraints of the language or the emergent constraints in the discourse is an important open question that only comes into focus when we have the corpus data display. For syntax or grammar, we could note the extreme dominance of third person subjects (222 occurrences), as opposed to just 4 in first person and none at all in the second person; and, within the third person, the handful of pronoun subjects 'he' (6 occurrences), 'she' (0), 'they (5), and 'it' (5), as con­ trasted with the large numbers of noun subjects. People are much less likely to 'warrant' something than are their actions or the situations they create. And the authoritative force may encourage nouns stating what 'warrants' instead of just saying 'it warrants'. We might notice here how the distinction between grammar versus lexicon fades away when lexical items typically have some grammatical constraints and grammatical pat­ terns tend to prefer certain types of lexical items — eloquent support for the systemic functionalist concept of 'lexicogrammar' (cf. § 19, 28). 37. The scale of the lexicogrammar of a language like English might seem dauntingly huge, witness the amount of data turned up just by my modest analysis of one set of collocations for a lexical item that is not terribly common. The compilation of a lexicogrammar will require large teams of researchers deploying sophisticated support software to provide a sufficiently substantive description of corpus data and determine what

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sorts of constraints, categories, terms, and so on could enable wide yet compact coverage. The description would become part of a growing annotated corpus from which users could access manageably modest displays of data along with their description. If such a corpus had a multiple design, it could be consulted as a lexicon, a grammar, a lexicogrammar, a guide to usage, a special-purpose lexicon, a pedagogical resource, and so on; this design may well be like the storage of language in the human mind (cf. Beaugrande 1996a). Instead of having bulky books labelled 'grammar' or 'lexicon', people would have computer terminals where you could regulate how far to push the lexicogrammar toward the grammatical or the lexical side and at what degrees of delicacy, as suits your purpose. 38. John Sinclair has indeed raised the prospect of allowing a 'grammar' to emerge from the corpus as the type and status of regularities are progressively established by large research teams using powerful computers. His vision holds a considerable shock value for traditional and formalist grammarians and linguists, e.g., with the jovial conclusion that 'we can leave them to get on with it because we don't need them any more' (Sinclair 1994). How far it can be seriously put into practice is a matter requiring some cautious reservations. 39. One reservation is the theoretical impossibility of a transition from 'no grammar' to 'grammar'. As Halliday (1994b: xvi) notes, an 'analysis' that would not be 'based on grammar is not an analysis at all, but simply a running commentary', appealing to 'linguistic features' 'like the number of words per sentence'. Neither practice would support the sys­ tematic entry of a 'grammar' where none was before. Instead, the tendency would be for conventional or intuitive grammar to creep in sporadically and without the necessary critical reflection. 40. Another reservation is the necessarily systemic nature of gram­ mar, which cannot be simply patched together as the various components drop out of the analysis software one by one. The system must be constructed at least in its outlines before we can know where to assign particular classes of regularities. The results would thus have the main function of specifying the grammar and increasing its delicacy, rather than producing it from scratch. 41. A third reservation is the design of software and the parsing programs needed for supporting the grammatical analysis of corpus data, e.g. for telling apart noun from verb for the same key word like 'warrant'. Such software cannot be written without incorporating, implicitly or

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explicitly, a good bit of grammar, which would again be specified and enhanced in delicacy by the results of description and analysis. 42. Reservations like these suggest that Sinclair's notion of allowing the grammar to emerge from the corpus is best interpreted as program­ matic resolve to approach the corpus with a minimum of prior theoretical commitment about how the grammar will evolve. The most crucial factor to keep open is the ratio between grammar and lexicon. In the next generation of linguistic theories, the lexicon can be expected to acquire a vastly expanded ' s y n t a g m a t a dimension, while grammar acquires much higher delicacy in its 'paradigmatic' dimension. 43. In contrast to Sinclair, Halliday (1991) has proposed to put a corpus behind an already elaborated systemic functional lexicogrammar of the type he himself projects. It too can be expected to be supplemented or revised as 'delicacy' increases. The major difference vis-á-vis Sin­ clair's proposal would be the principled disposition to look for certain types or modes of evidence among the data according to the central triad of 'textual, ideational, and interpersonal', and to follow up interconnec­ tions among these three 'meta-functions' (cf. Halliday 1994b). 44. I would hope that the old contest between formal versus func­ tional perspectives might reach an amicable resolution by using the parameters discovered with the aid of a very large corpus to determine on rational rather than a priori or dogmatic grounds how 'formal' and how 'functional' a consensual description of English should be. My own motto would be: as formal as necessary but as functional as possible. Our formalist colleagues may just state the reverse; but they are no longer in any position to intimate that functional descriptions are 'unscientific' (cf. Beaugrande 1994). 45. In the meantime we can replace the two main formalist defini­ tions of language: either a repertory of items or else a repertory of rules for constructing and arranging items (§ 10, 12). We can now conceive a language to be an open set of texts and discourses for which a very large and growing corpus is a steadily finer approximation. The description will not be uniform but be finer-grained in some areas and coarsergrained in others, depending on what the data indicate, e.g. for single Verb like 'warrant' versus a whole class of Verbs. Statistical measures across the corpus can indicate what the relative probability might be for a given set or type of constraints, and thus which ones are more standing or more emergent — and how uniform or stable the language system is.

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46. Corpus linguistics might also resolve the split between fieldwork versus homework approaches (§ 12f). We are now working only with real data whose collection has been supported by technology to enable far wider coverage than was possible before, Many people can contribute without having to go out into the field and can sharpen or adjust their intuitions by pooling them with each other's. So far, the technology is limited to familiar languages like English. Building computer corpuses of unwritten and previously undescribed languages would be quite slow and laborious in the early stages, where the reliability of transcriptions might be doubtful, e.g., when the language is suspected to have a complex tone-system, as in Aymara of Bolivia and Peru. Such a corpus could never reach the size of the 'Bank of English', but some of the data-handling strategies and the software for analysis could be helpfully transferred from the large corpuses to the small ones. And fully computerised speech recognition would relieve the brunt of the problem. 6. The case rests 47. Here I rest my case about the programme of systemic functional linguistics. I have produced two 'warrants': the old motivation to ac­ knowledge the connectedness of language to human knowledge and expe­ rience in social life; and the new motivation to use large corpuses of authentic data to bridge the aggravating disconnection and dichotomies: 'langue' versus 'parole', theory versus practice, general versus specific, grammar versus lexicon, formal versus functional, and fieldwork versus homework. We can profit immensely both when a systemic functional description has a large corpus behind it, and when a corpus offers us guidelines about how to formulate our description and what types of constraints deserve to be acknowledged. I would see here a grand oppor­ tunity for a convergence that will lead us out of the traditional dilemmas linguistics had made for itself, and that will open an exciting new chapter for systemic functional linguistics. References Baker, M., G. Francis and E. Tognini-Bonelli (eds.) 1993. Text and Technology, Amsterdam: Benjamins. Beaugrande, R. de. 1980. Text, Discourse, and Process. Norwood, NJ.: Ablex.

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Beaugrande, R. de. 1984. Text, Production. Norwood, N.J.: Ablex. Beaugrande, R. de. 1991. Linguistic Theory: The Discourse of Fundamental Works. London: Longman. Beaugrande, R. de. 1994. Function and form in language theory and research: The tide is turning. Functions of Language 1, 2: 163-200. Beaugrande, R. de. 1996a. New Foundations for a Science of Text and Discourse. Norwood, N.J.: Ablex. Beaugrande, R. de. 1996b. The story of discourse analysis. In T. A. van Dijk (ed.), Introduction to Discourse Analysis. London: Sage. Beaugrande, R. de. 1996c. The 'pragmatics' of doing language science: The 'warrant' for large-corpus linguistics. Journal of Pragmatics 25: 505-535. Brazil, D. 1975. Discourse Intonation. Birmingham: English Language Re­ search. Chomsky, N. 1965. Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Cross, M. 1993. Collocation in computer modelling of lexis as most delicate grammar. In M. Ghadessy (ed.) Register Analysis. London: Pinter. 196-220. Danes, F. 1957. Intonace a veta ν spisovné cestiné. Prague: Academia Věd. Escribano, J. L. 1993. On syntactic metatheory. Atlantis 15, 1: 229-267. Firbas, J. 1992. Functional Sentence Perspective in Written and Spoken Commu­ nication. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Halliday, Μ. Α. Κ. 1960. Grammar, Society, and the Noun. London: Arnold. Halliday, Μ. Α. Κ. 1961. Categories of a theory of grammar. Word 17, 3: 241292. Halliday, Μ. Α. Κ. 1967. Intonation and Grammar in British English. The Hague: Mouton. Halliday, Μ. Α. Κ. 1973. Explorations in the Functions of Language. London: Arnold. Halliday, M. A. K. 1991. Corpus studies and probabilistic grammar. In K. Aijmer and B. Altenberg (eds.) English Corpus Linguistics. London: Longman. 3043. Halliday, M. A. K. 1994a. Language in a Changing World. Sydney: Australian Association of Applied Linguistics. Halliday, M. A. K. 1994b. An Introduction to Functional Grammar. Second edition. London: Arnold. Halliday, M. A. K. and R. Hasan. 1985. Language, Context, and Text. Victoria: Deakin University Press. Hasan, R. 1985. Lending and borrowing: From grammar to lexis. In J. E. Clark (ed.) The Cultivated Australian. Hamburg: Buske. 55-67. Hasan, R. 1987. The grammarian's dream: Lexis as most delicate grammar. In M. A. K. Halliday and R. Fawcett (eds.) New Developments in Systemic Linguis­ tics. London: Pinter. 184-211.

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Mitchell, T. F. 1975 [1957]. The language of buying and selling in Cyrenaica. In Principles of Firthian Linguistics, London: Longman. 167-200. Pike, K. 1967. Language in Relation to a Unified Theory of the Structure of Human Behavior. The Hague: Mouton. Sinclair, J. McH. 1994. Lecture on corpus linguistics at the English Institute, University of Vienna. Skalicka, V. 1960. Syntax promluvy. Slovo a slovesnost 21: 241-249. Stubbs, M. 1993. British traditions in text analysis: From Firth to Sinclair. In M. Baker et al. (eds.), 1-33. Trnka, . 1964. On the linguistic sign and the multi-level organisation of language. Travaux Linguistiques de Prague 1: 33-40.

Part II Dependency

Structure, meaning and use Petr Sgall Charles University, Prague

1. Introduction I would like to concentrate on four points, three of which concern the different aspects or understandings of the functional attitude of the clas­ sical Prague School of structural linguistics, the fourth one being evoked by more recent discussions on linguistic theory: 1. functions of items in larger wholes — structure 2. semantic functions of expressions — meaning 3. functions of language in communication — use 4. functional and formal views. In Prague, the first two points have been dealt with especially by Mathesius (1929, 1936) and Skalicka (1962) in their studies on the levels of language (phonemics, morphemics, and syntax or the two levels of sentence structure, later distinguished as the grammatical structure and the meaning of the sentence) and the relationships between their units. More explicit analyses of these issues were presented by Trnka (1964), by Dokulil and Danes (1958) and by Danes (1987). Among the basic ideas shared by these different accounts and coming close to Halliday's (1967/ 1968, 1985) theory, there is (i) the relation between elementary and complex units, and (ii) the articulation of the relation between de Saussure's 'signifié' and 'signifiant' (the relation of sign) into stages corresponding to the oppositions between units of a lower (or shallower)

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level, understood as 'forms', and those of the adjacent higher (or deeper) level, understood as 'functions'. Attempts to unify these two dimensions into a system of levels such as those of phonemes, morphemes, words, sentences and discourses (where the prototypical units of a level would occur both as parts and as means of expression, 'signifiants', of (parts of) units of the next level) have not been fully convincing. Therefore, in the Charles University research group of theoretical and computational linguistics, where since the 1960's we have concen­ trated our efforts on applying and developing the classical ideas in the new methodological context, we have understood the language system to be basically patterned along the two dimensions just mentioned, those of (i) structure, and (ii) meaning. This endeavour has been concentrated on an explicit, more or less formal and computationally tractable elaboration of the principles, which has determined the shape of our descriptive frame­ work, the Functional Generative Description. Our approach has much in common with the other trends in func­ tional linguistics — those started by Michael Halliday, Simon Dik, Susumu Kuno and others. The orientation on explicit formulations may be useful in offering a basis for a systematic comparison of these approaches among themselves and with the other trends of theoretical linguistics. In the current situation in linguistics, such a comparison is necessary if a reliable evaluation of the individual trends of theoretical linguistics is to be achieved, if their positive features are to be identified, and, eventually, combined into new, methodologically well established description frame­ works. 2. Structure 2.1. Elementary and complex units in the system of language Natural language is a complex system the parts of which have their functions in the construction of larger wholes. Thus, on the individual levels of the system, attention has been given above all to the following relations between elementary and complex units, or to functions of the former in the structure of the latter: distinctive features in sounds (phones), phonemes in morphs, morphs in word forms, word forms in sentence structure. These relations certainly do not cover the whole domain of the interplay between (more or less) elementary and complex units. Thus,

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even on the levels of phonetics and phonology, it is also necessary to describe the suprasegmental phenomena, and it is no easy task to specify the phonologically relevant ones, e.g. in the domain of the sentence intonation pattern. Along with the prototypical distribution of units on the individual levels, such peripheral asymmetries also have to be analyzed as the cases in which a simple function is expressed by a complex form (cf. complex prepositions such as with regard to, on behalf of). What may be interesting for a discussion concerning the differences between functional approaches to grammar are, first of all, the issues of the structure of the sentence. Describing sentence structure as a complex network, Prague School members (especially Lucien Tesnière) have de­ scribed its core on the basis of syntactic dependency (i.e. the relation between head and modifier). This treatment of syntax works with a repertoire of complementations (valency slots, kinds of the dependency relation), as specified in the valency frames within lexical entries. 2.2. Functional background of dependency

syntax

It is widely accepted today that language is a system based on human interaction. Natural languages have developed in the conditions given by human communication and they exhibit properties shaped under the impact of these conditions. One of the basic properties of this kind is the anthropocentrism of syntax. Let us briefly recall along which lines the way of thinking proper to the Prague School may contribute to understanding this aspect of sentence structure. The prototypical sentence patterns have either the shape of a (hu­ man) action (N1 V N2 as in (1), or N V, as in (2)), or that of a property (N is A, as in (3)): 1 (1) (2) (3)

The man built a house. The girl walks. The boy is tall.

Referring to a relationship between two participants other than a simple action of one of them affecting (or effecting) the other, it is often necessary to use the action scheme, although it is not fully appropriate. Thus, e.g. (4) is structured in the same way as (1), although it contains no cognitive role of Agentive. (4)

The boy sees the girl.

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Similarly, (5) is structured in analogy with (2), and (6) with (3), although their cognitive patterns differ. (5) (6)

The sun shines, The man is older than you.

In (6), a relation between two members is referred to, and the structure of many languages makes the speaker treat one of the members as prominent, expressed by the subject, i.e. regard the relation as a property of this member. Similarly, with actions more complex than those for which the structure of natural language was primarily prepared, it is often necessary to choose one of the participants as the (analog of the) deliberate causer or initiator of the action, although this may not be cognitively appropriate. Thus, for example with (7) a certain degree of activity (approval) at least is necessary on both sides. (7)

Jim bought a car from Philip,

Thus, an action constitutes the prototypical content of an assertion. This corresponds to the conditions in which language came into being, and also to those in which language acquisition normally starts. 2 The lexical coun­ terpart of an action is a verb, and one of the points in which the com­ municative function of language has been decisive for sentence structure is the central role of the verb in the sentence. The grammatical categories corresponding to modal, temporal and aspectual parameters of actions generally concentrate on the verb, and the valency of the verb determines the possible and the necessary ingredients of the sentence. The lexical units filling these valency slots display their own valency and, together with their complementations, they specify, step by step, the content of the sentence, the main point of which (the action or another event, state, etc.) is referred to or denoted by the verb. With such a view of the basis of syntax, it may be understood that constituency, although now accepted by several major trends in theoretical linguistics, is not the only possible starting point. The concept of (immediate) constituents has been taken over by Chomsky and his followers (as well as by those developing new ap­ proaches reacting to his theory with a high degree of polemical attitudes) from Bloomfieldian descriptive linguistics, whose view of language Chomsky has found unsatisfactory in perhaps all other respects. An

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approach based on views known from classical European structural and functional linguistics may constitute a challenge for the main trends in the theory of language, since with the exception of Fillmore's Case Theory, it was not registered in these trends that a view of syntax based on depend­ ency has been elaborated in Europe. Similarly like Igor Mel'cuk, Richard Hudson, Jurij Apresjan, Jürgen Kunze, Stanley Starosta, Peter Hellwig and many other linguists, the Prague group of theoretical and com­ putational linguistics has found the dependency based approach adequate for a theoretical description, as well as for a computational treatment. This approach helps to describe the language system not just as an abstract mechanism enumerating sentences with their structural descrip­ tion, but rather as substantially influenced by communicative factors. The sentence should be described with due regard to its position in the context, including the aspects analyzed by M. A. K. Halliday under the headings of focus and theme. An elaboration of the classical Prague views has led to an understanding of what we call the topic-focus articulation (TFA) of the sentence as reflecting, in an anthropocentric way, the impact of communication on the structure of natural language. We share the view of Halliday and others according to which this layer belongs to the basic hierarchies in the sentence structure. As illustrated in Section 3.2, TFA is expressed by grammatical means and is semantically relevant, so that it should be described within grammar. This is perfectly possible with dependency syntax, but runs into serious difficulties in phrase structure based descriptions, in which either topic or focus often has a shape other than a single constituent of whichever level. 3 2.3. Valency as the core of syntax If dependency is understood as a fundamental relation, then the syntactic properties of a lexical unit can be described on the basis of its possible complementations, including restrictions on their combinations, their relationships to the surface (morphemic) shape of sentences, and so on. The syntactic valency of a word, characterized from this viewpoint, is usually specified in the form of the valency frame, in which the (optional and obligatory) complementations of a head are listed and described with respect to their combinatory properties, their appearance as (possible or compulsory) controllers, restrictions on their movement, their deletability, and so on.

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In a valency based description not only complementations deter­ mined (subcategorized) by individual heads in the sense of conf igurationality or in a similar way (arguments) can be handled systematically, but also the whole classes of free complementations (adjuncts, especially adverbials). Such a description (in our approach, this is the 'tectogrammaticar sentence structure, which in most of the main points comes close to 'lexicogrammar', characterized as 'functional' e.g. by Halliday and Fawcett 1987: 7) allows for a great deal of grammatical information to be included in lexical entries and for a specification of the representati­ ons of sentences by means of an economical mechanism, based on a few general and natural principles (see Section 5). The orientation of the dependency relation can be specified on the basis of an operational criterion, viz. of one of the members being syntactically omissible, if not in a lexically specified pair of words (as is the case with the endocentric syntagms), then at the level of word classes: e.g. in ((very) slow) progress the syntactic potential of the heads prototypically is identical with that of the whole groups; in Jim met Sally nothing can be deleted, but we know from other cases that the verb is never deletable (without a specific context), whereas the object can be absent e.g. with read, and the subject is absent e.g. with rain (where the English pronoun is just a morphemic filler, having no semantic relevance, since no other option is present). Other questions open to discussion are difficult for every kind of syntactic description, cf. for instance the boundary line between so-called equi- and raising-verbs in English; such issues have to be discussed as concerning individual languages, having in mind the specific relationships between their underlying structures and the outer shape of their sentences. Function words are not connected with similar problems, since in the syntactic structure of the sentence they do not occupy specific positions. Articles and prepositions are always connected with nouns, auxiliary verbs and conjunctions with verbs, and they cannot be freely comple­ mented. Thus it appears not to be appropriate to assign them the same status that autosemantic lexical units have. Their counterparts in the (underlying) syntactic representations are more adequately handled as parts of complex symbols (node labels), i.e. as indices of lexical symbols themselves, which denote the values of categories such as definiteness, number, tense, modality, and the syntactic relations, be they expressed by morphs (endings, affixes, function words), alternations, or by word order.

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It is symptomatic that elements of valency are present in theories overtly based on other approaches. Fillmore's account of 'deep cases', which includes a continuation of Tesnière's valency, has found a reflec­ tion in Chomsky's theta roles and theta grids. Even in the preceding stages of constituency based approaches, notions derived from dependency were present: terms such as 'head' and 'modifier' have always been used, and names of categories such as NP, AP, etc., have disclosed that phrases are understood to have their heads, their governors; moreover, the X-bar theory can be directly compared with formalisms accounting for depen­ dency syntax. 4 Thus, ingredients inherent in a dependency based approach are combined with constituency not only in theories proclaiming a basic attention to functions and relations, such as Lexical Functional Grammar, Relational Grammar or Head Driven PSG, but also in Principles and Parameters theory. The valency slots then may be understood as primitive notions, instead of being derived from constituent structure, and a compa­ rable, or even a more economical description without constituency can be elaborated. 5 Combinations of dependency and constituency might be found to be redundant, since an account of dependency, if properly combined with a treatment of coordination and apposition, 6 of control and binding, and of topic and focus, can, perhaps, cover the whole domain of sentence syntax. 2.4. Dependency

trees

The basic pattern of the structure of the sentence can be described by the dependency tree, i.e. a connected finite graph in which every pair of nodes is connected by a single path (sequence of edges) and in which a single node is determined as the root of the tree. A detailed discussion of the dependency trees used as basic parts of sentence representations can be found in Sgall et al. (1986). An example of a dependency tree, correspond­ ing to the preferred reading of sentence (8), is presented in Figure 1. (8)

My friend Jim worked in the domain of archeology.

The complex labels of the nodes of our trees indicate (a) lexical meanings (which should be denoted by abstract symbols reflecting their inner composition, but are just substituted here by the graphemic shape of words), and (b) values of morphological categories such as tense, 7 aspect, number, etc. The labels of edges indicate the valency slots or kinds of dependency relation (Actor, Addressee, Objective, Means, Locative, etc.).

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Figure 1 : A simplified representation of the syntactic structure of sentence (8), with the morphological indices (grammatemes) for Preterite, De­ clarative, Singular, Definite, and syntactic symbols for Actor/Bearer, Locative, Appurtenance, Identity. The units of tectogrammatics can be delimited on the basis of operational criteria, as has been discussed in Sgall et al. (1986) and in the writings quoted there. One of the crucial questions concerns the fact that if the complementations are classified into inner and free ones (arguments and adjuncts), it should be taken into account that the character of the individual complementations (valency slots) as such has to be distin­ guished from their relationships to their individual heads. Thus, with our approach, Actor, Addressee, Objective, Origin and Effect, most of which are illustrated by (9), are understood as inner participants, the main criterion being that each of them can occur at most once with a head verb token (if neither coordination nor apposition is present). (9)

She changed her hair from a braid into another shape. Actor Objective Origin Effect

The 'free' complementations (adjuncts) in some cases are obligatory with individual head words, such as the complementation of Directional.2 with to arrive, that of Manner with to behave, that of Appurtenance with brother, etc. Thus there are four possible combinations, three of which (obligatory and optional arguments, and obligatory adjuncts) have to be denoted in individual lexical entries (perhaps by means of indices identi-

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cal for small groups of words), whereas the fourth one (that of optional adjuncts) can be handled uniformly for a whole word class. Complementations present in syntactic representations often can be deleted on the surface (if the speaker assumes that the context makes them easily recoverable for the hearer). A suitable operational criterion can be seen in Panevová's (1974) dialogue test: If A says: Jim has already arrived, s/he assumes that the hearer will know whether here or there has been deleted; however, if this assumption is not met and the hearer asks Where to?, then A cannot answer I don't know. This shows that such a complementation is obligatory, although deletable. The following examples of valency frames illustrate our classifica­ tion of complementations (the subscript 'o' standing for obligatory', ' i ' for 'inner participant', argument; the symbol of the word class allows one to identify a generally available list of free adjuncts (see Section 3.2 below for such a list for verbs, with many omissions): bring V Act oi Obj oi Dir.2 change V Act oi Obj oi Ori Effoi give V Act oi Addroi Obj oi rain V

brother N Appurt0 glass N Materiali man N full A Materialoi

2.5. The position of coordination and further

relations

Along with dependency, the syntactic representations include a specifica­ tion of several further relations. One of these is TFA, expressed mainly by an interplay of word order and sentence prosody (in particular the position of intonation centre) ; in our trees it is represented by the left-to-right order of the nodes with the boundary line between topic, standing to the left, and focus, to the right of this line (we will deal with TFA in Section 3.2). Other kinds of syntactic relations are those of coordination (conjunc­ tion, disjunction and others) and of apposition. Their interplay with dependency cannot be accounted for by trees with full adequacy; more than two dimensions are needed. However, it is important that the relationships between the different dimensions are strongly restricted by such conditions as that of projectivity: a dependency tree is projective if for every three-element set of nodes a, b, c present in the tree, it holds that if a depends on c, and b is placed between a and  in the left-to-right order, then b is subordinated to c, where "subordinated" means the transitive closure of "depends" (to put it less formally: "b is subordinated to c" means "b immediately or through mediation of other nodes depends on c").

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Similar restrictions hold for the relationships between coordination and the basic two dimensions of the tree; see Janátová (1991). Thanks to these restrictions, the representations can be handled by limited means, although they have more than two dimensions. They can be denoted by a linearized version of the network, namely by a string of complex symbols with two kinds of parentheses, one of which denotes dependency (in our notation these are the usual parentheses, a pair of which surrounds every dependent item), the other (square brackets in our example) denoting coordination and apposition. The valency slots (and the kinds of coordi­ nation) are written as indices of parentheses. The possibility of using such a framework to describe very different combinations of the two kinds of relations can be illustrated by the following example, where (10)(b) is a simplified underlying representation of the sentence (10)(a), i.e. the representation of one of its readings. (10) (a) Ann and Jim, Martin's brother, who are a nice pair, moved from a town to a village.

The symbols for Actor, Appurtenance, General Relationship, Objec­ tive, Directional.1 and .2 as kinds of dependency (written as subscripts to parentheses, indicating by their position at the left or the right parenthesis the direction from the dependent item to its head), for Conjunction (versus Disjunction, Apposition and other values) as a kind of Coordination (denoted by subscripts to rightside brackets), and for Definite, Specifying, Singular, Present, Declarative, etc., as values of morphological catego­ ries, should be self-explanatory; Rel denotes the (prototypical case of a) relative pronoun; the difference between the underlying and the surface word order positions of the noun, pair and the adjective nice is due to the scale of communicative dynamism differing from the surface word order, cf. Section 3.2; in the prototypical case, an adjective is more dynamic than its head noun. Further examples (with highly simplified representations):

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(12) (a) My friend's daughter, Mary Smith, and her husband are a very nice couple. (b)

3. Meaning 3.1. The layers of meaning The tectogrammatical representations of sentences (in which the irregulari­ ties of their outer shapes, including synonymy and ambiguity, are absent) can be viewed as the level of the Saussurean 'form of the content', or 'meaning' (language specific patterning of the cognitive content, discussed especially by Hjelmslev 1943, Dokulil and Danes 1958, Coseriu 1973). This layer can be brought into close relationship with the formulae or constructions of a system of intensional logic (see Materna et al. 1987), although it differs from the result of the semantic (-pragmatic) interpreta­ tion. 8 Such devices as those of the type theory, of the lambda calculus, or prenex quantifiers and overt variables with explicitly denoted scopes are absent in the linguistic structure itself. Thus, from the viewpoint of formal semantics, this is still one of the layers of syntax, of the system of language. It is a disambiguated level, which can serve as the input for the semantic (-pragmatic) interpretation, rather than as its output. It seems that tectogrammatics can serve as the only level of sentence structure and be immediately connected with morphemics, without an intervening level of 'surface syntax' (see Sgall 1992). A series of explicata for the presystemic notion of meaning seems to be appropriate: (a) the linguistic (literal) meaning of a sentence and its parts (a tectogrammatical representation) ; (b) the sense of an utterance (including also reference assignment and figurative meanings with linguistic categorization, as studied by cognitive linguistics) ; (c) the structured meaning (output of the semantic interpretation formulae of intensional logic); such a layer (cf. the discussion by Lewis 1981) presents specifications more subtle than Carnapian propositions; the relationship between (b) and (c) may perhaps be viewed as reflecting

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the difference between psychology ('realistic' models of cognition) and logic (systematic analysis); (d) the intension, truth conditions, Carnapian propositions (functions from possible worlds into truth values), as determined both by (b) and (c); if h is a sense of an utterance of a declarative sentence, then Prop(h) is a proposition; however, Prop is a partial function, since in the case of self-reference Prop is not defined for every h: one has to admit that no proposition is assigned to the literal meaning of (13), since the Liar's paradox would still be present with a proposition assigning (13) no truth value for any possible world (see Tichy 1988); also a proposition itself, Prop(h), is a partial function, cf. utterances with presupposition failure, where Prop(h) assigns a possible world no truth value; (13) Sentence (13) in Sgall's paper from ISFC94 is not true, (e) the extension, the truth value of a sentence in a given possible world, one of the basic aspects of the meaning of the sentence, although it certainly cannot be accepted as a single explicatum of the notion of meaning; (f) the cognitive (ontological) content of an utterance, for a description of which context-dependence should be made explicit in the sense of situational conditioning; starting points for a formal theory of the content of an utterance, seen as an operation on the information state, can be found in Heim's (1983) 'file change semantics' or in Kamp's (1984) 'discourse representation theory' (cf. Section 4). 9 If the sentence is to be understood as anchored in the context (including situation), i.e. if the interactive nature of language is to be reflected, then it is important to include — as most functional approaches to the theory of language do — also the layer of information structure into the description of sentence syntax. In Functional Generative Description this subdomain is rendered as that of topic and focus, the semantic (not only pragmatic) relevance of which makes it appropriate to subsume this layer under the linguistic (literal) meaning of the sentence. 3.2, Topic-focus articulation as one of the syntactic

hierarchies

As pointed out in Sgall (1987), the main discrepancies in the functionalist views of the topic-focus articulation (TFA) concern the following points: (i) in the question whether one or two articulations are present in the sentence structure, we adhere to the "combining" approach, as do Firbas,

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Dik, Zemb and some other linguists (arguing that, although the first position in the sentence is prototypically thematic, it has a rhematic or focal character whenever bearing the intonation centre), and differ from Halliday and some others; (ii) in dividing the sentence into two, rather than three parts, we come close to Halliday and Dik, and differ from Firbas or Zemb (although we admit that the outcome of the semantic-pragmatic interpretation should contain a main operator dividing the content of topic from that of focus); (iii) in understanding the relationship of TFA to word order and sentence prosody as an instance of the opposition of signifié and signifiant, we perhaps do not substantially differ from most other researchers; (iv) we belong to those registering and describing the semantic (not just pragmatic) relevance of TFA, see examples (19)-(22) below. The repertoire of the types of complementation (valency slots) displays a certain ordering, which within the focus is reflected by the scale of communicative dynamism (CD), known from Firbas' (1957, 1992) analysis of 'functional sentence perspective'. As was discussed by Sgall et al. (1986, Chapter 3), within the focus (contextually non-bound, NB) part of the sentence the scale of CD (or the underlying word order) reflects this basic order of complementations, called systemic ordering (SO). 10 Only if one or more of the complementations occur in a sentence as contextually bound (CB), can their position in CD then switch more to the left than what would correspond to SO. Such a switch can be illustrated by example (14), if compared with (10)(a) above: (14) Martin and Ann moved to a village from a town. This sentence (pronounced with normal intonation, i.e. with the intonation centre at its end) is less ambiguous than (10)(a), in that here the to-group belongs to the topic (is CB) in all readings, whereas the /row-group belongs to the topic in some of the readings of (10)(a) and to the focus in others; the rightmost group, bearing the intonation centre, always belongs to the focus. This points to Dir.l (from) preceding Dir.2 (to) under SO. With other pairs of complementations, a similar relationship can be found, see the following examples: (15) (a) They went by car to the river. (b) They went to the river by car. (16) (a) Jim dug a ditch with a hoe.

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86 (b) (17) (a) (b) (18) (a) (b)

Jim dug a DITCH with a hoe. Ron cannot sleep quietly in a hotel In a hotel Ron cannot sleep quietly. Dutch companies published many books on linguistics. Many books on linguistics were published by Dutch compa­ nies.

Here again, the most dynamic complementation in each of the sentences (the rightmost group, with the exception of (16)(b), where it is the bearer of the intonation centre in its secondary placement, indicated by capitals) belongs to the focus. Each of the (a) examples is ambiguous: in some of its readings the last-but-one complementation belongs to the focus and in others to the topic. The (b) examples are less ambiguous in that the group that is not most dynamic here belongs to the topic in all readings (with the given intonation pattern). Let us add that the "free" word order, which to a certain degree is also present in English, as especially examples (14) and (15) show, is not actually free, but is determined by TFA, more precisely, by CD. The limitations of surface word order in English are connected with a secondary placement of intonation centre occurring relatively often here, as (16)(b) illustrates, and with such syntactic devices as passivization in some cases being used to allow for the surface word order to correspond to CD, see (18)(b). Examples of this kind have been analyzed with several series of psycholinguistic tests (for Czech, recently also for German, see Sgall et al. 1995), with the result that SO differs from one language to the other. It appears that for some of the main complementations of English the scale of SO is as follows: Actor - Addressee - Objective - Origin - Effect - Manner - Direc­ tional.1 - Means - Directional.2 - Locative As most of the functional approaches point out, the layer of topic and focus is not only a matter of contextual positions of sentences, of pragmat­ ics, but it is semantically relevant, even for the truth conditions. This concerns not only sentences with such overt complex quantifiers as those illustrated by (19) and (20), but also other examples, such as (21) and (22): 11 (19) (a) Everybody in this room knows at least two languages. (b) At least two languages are known by everybody in this room.

STRUCTURE, MEANING AND USE (20) (a) (b) (21) (a) (b) (22) (a) (b)

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John talked to few girls about many problems. John talked about many problems to few girls. English is spoken in the Shetlands. ENGLISH is spoken in the Shetlands. They smoke in the corridor. They SMOKE in the corridor.

The means of expression of TFA clearly belong to grammar: they concern the surface word order, specific morphemes in some languages (Japanese, Tagalog and other), the difference between clitic and "strong" forms of pronouns (e.g. in Czech), syntactic constructions such as passivization, clefting, or such inversion verb constructions as English make into vs. make out of; in addition, the placement of the intonation centre should be regarded as a phonologically and grammatically relevant feature. Therefore, it is possible to understand TFA as one of the hierarchies of the underlying structure of the sentence; TFA belongs to the system of language, not only to the functioning of language in communication. However, the semantic interpretation (cf. layer (c) in Section 3.1) also immediately concerns TFA, not only in connection with focus sensi­ tive operators and with other differences in truth conditions proper (where the opposition of truth versus falsity is at play), but in other, specific issues as well. The question whether a definite noun group triggers a genuine presupposition or just a weaker kind of entailment depends (at least with those noun groups the definiteness of which is determined by the cognitive uniqueness of their referents, rather than by contextual specif­ ication) on the appurtenance of the noun group to the topic of the sentence (more exactly, on the contextual boundness of this group): in (23) the preferred reading (in which the definite subject is included in the topic) is connected with the presupposition of the existence of the King of France in the world spoken about and in connection with the obvious reference assignment; thus, presupposition failure is present with respect to the world we (believe we) live in; neither an utterance of the positive sen­ tence, nor that of its negative counterpart is true, i.e. the sentence cannot be appropriately used in such a case. (23) The King of France is bald. (24) Yesterday Prague was visited by the King of France. On the other hand, with (24), where the cited noun group belongs to the focus, no such presupposition is triggered; the negative counterpart is

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true, so that there is no presupposition failure present, and an utterance of the positive sentence is false. What is entailed by the positive sentence (the existence of the King of France in the world spoken of) is neither entailed nor excluded by its negative counterpart, as was pointed out by Hajicová (1976, 1984), who calls this kind of entailment an allegation. 3.3. The meanings of phonemic and morphemic items If the description of the system of language is based on its partition into levels such as syntax (underlying and, perhaps, surface), morphemics, phonology and phonetics, this means that the relationship between signifiant and signifié is being divided into several steps. A morpheme is then regarded as a function of a morph (string of phonemes) and, at the same time, the morpheme has its own syntactic and semantic functions (cf. the syntactic relations, the lexical meanings and the grammatemes, as discussed in Section 2). (See Mathesius (1929) on actor and topic as functions of subject; subject itself can be understood as the primary function of the morphemic nominative case.) Primary and secondary functions, or markedness rules, are useful in describing the relationships between units of adjacent levels. The concept of (surface) subject (as differing from Actor, or under­ lying subject) certainly is necessary, since the choice of subject is semantically relevant in some cases (e.g. with passivization of a sentence including an adverbial of attitude). 12 This also concerns the relation of control, since it is the subject of the infinitive (active or passive) that is the controllee. Thus the identification of subject should perhaps be handled as immediately concerning underlying structure; in such a case the notion of subject would not represent a support for the alleged necessity of a level of surface syntax. Surface word order can be understood to belong to the level of morphemics, where the representation of the sentence has the shape of a string without parentheses, rather than that of a tree (or even a more complex network, or its linearization). Working with an immediate transition from tectogrammatics to the level of morphemics may open the possibility of how to handle the issue of non-projective constructions. They are strictly limited and the question is how to account for them as exceptions. It appears that they may be described as such by means of shallow rules changing the underlying projective order under certain specific conditions. In the output of these

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rules, i.e. on the morphemic level, the condition of projectivity is absent, and sentence (25), for example, could now be described with the help of a shallow rule bringing the heavy relative clause to the end of the sentence in a similar way as elsewhere the prepositions (the sources of which are among the grammatemes as parts of complex node labels in the underlying representations) are brought to the beginning of their nouns' projections. The same holds for the conjunction and the verb's projection in (26), since being derived from the underlying syntactic item (subscript) characteriz­ ing the dependent verb in this case as occupying the position of the head of an adverbial of Cause. (25) / met a man yesterday who asked me for your address. (26) Jim visited Claire since he wanted to ask her for help. Furthermore, word order shifts concerning a marked position of the intonation centre should be handled by similar shallow rules, cf., for instance, example (16) above. The partition of the relation of sign into several levels embodies different asymmetries, one of which comprises ambiguity and synonymy, another concerning the fact that a simple unit of a level can be realized by a complex unit of the next lower level, and there are also more marginal cases in which restricted classes of units display functions that primarily belong to units of another class, cf. complex prepositions such as in order to, idiomatic phraseological items, complex verb forms, etc. 4. Use Among the functions of language discussed in the classical Prague School especially by Roman Jakobson, the communicative function is not the most primitive, but it has exercised the deepest influence on the structure of language (cf. Section 2.2). The description of language should pay due attention to this impact. One of the main requirements now put on theoretical linguistics is the fundamental significance of the interactive nature of language. The very basic object of linguistics is the process of communication, rather than the system of language, or linguistic competence. We would not like to follow this requirement so far as to see the core of a new linguistic paradigm in adopting an orientation towards regularities of communica­ tion instead of those of language system. Rather, we interpret the basic

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requirement mentioned so that (a) the regularities of communication should be accounted for, and (b) the utterance should be understood as an operation on the state of mind of the hearer, i.e. the sentence representa­ tion should serve as a reliable basis for specifying the effect of an utterance of the given sentence in a certain context. The regularities of the use of language in communication and the existence of varieties of a national language make it necessary to work not only with the notion of an 'ideal speaker', but rather with language both as an interactively based psychological entity (as in net-linguistics) and as an abstract object, internalized by its speakers only to a certain degree. In Section 3.1, paragraph (f), we have mentioned how the interactive nature of language may be reflected in the series of explicata for the notion of meaning. With such a series one can proceed from a description of the sentence structure (meaning) to that of the intension (the truth conditions) and then to the impact of the utterance of a sentence as an operation on the hearer's memory (cf. Bickhard and Campbell (1992) on the basically interactive nature of language). By context-dependence of the content of an utterance we do not mean only its dependence on the verbal co-text, but also its dependence on the situation of the discourse. This impact of the situation includes the effect of the speaker's intention, with 'mutual belief' and the layers of speech acts and of illocution and perlocution. If the semantics of discourse is described by the means developed in DRT and in dynamic logic, the context change potential of the sentence may be viewed as the proper object of sentence semantics. Wanting to describe how an utterance affects the hearer's information state, we have to distinguish between the contextually bound items contained in the sentence, which serve to indicate the specific positions in the information state that are to be modified, and the non-bound items, which bring the information on the modification to be made (cf. Section 3.2; Engdahl and Vallduvi 1995). In any case, it is important to distinguish between the system of language (including the level of linguistic meaning as the interface between language and cognition) and the use or functioning of language in communication. We understand the notion of discourse as belonging to the latter domain, i.e. to that of parole, performance, rather than as constituting a unit of the language system, which would be (always?) 'larger than the sentence'. If sentence is understood as a unit of the system of language, then discourse should preferably be viewed as consisting of sentence occur-

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rences, i.e. of utterances, rather than of sentences. A basic difference between these two concepts can be seen in the following points. To understand (the meaning of) a sentence means to resolve its ambiguities as far as this is possible on the basis of the intrasentential context (and to identify those cases of ambiguity for the handling of which intersentential context or factual knowledge is needed) and to specify its linguistic meaning as determined by the expressions the sentence contains and by their syntactic combinations. On the other hand, to understand an utterance means also to remove the remaining ambiguities and the vague­ ness displayed by the linguistic meaning of the sentence, as well as to specify the reference of the referring expressions included. Other such steps involve identifying the presuppositions of the (sense of) the utterance, checking the utterance for absence of presuppo­ sition failures, contradictions or paradoxes (see Sgall 1994), for stylistic and other connotations. These steps also involve distinguishing between possible figurative meanings and hyperbolic ways of speaking, and iden­ tifying the illocutionary force of the primary or secondary speech act determined on this basis. In addition (with declarative sentences), the truth conditions of the utterance (or, in other cases, its felicity conditions) have to be indicated and, after their confrontation with the situation spoken about, also the truth value of the utterance. As is well known, especially from Halliday and Hasan (1976), the pragmatically conditioned reference assignment plays a crucial role in the cohesion of a discourse. It is then important to analyze the form of a finite mechanism that enables the hearer to identify the specification of referen­ ce in correspondence with the speaker's intention. As pointed out by Hajicová et al (1982, 1995, in press), it appears that such a mechanism is based on the degrees of salience of the items contained in what the speaker assumes to be the hearer's stock of information at the given point in time. Prototypically, the referent of an expression included in the focus of the preceding utterance is the most salient item. What was referred to in the topic of that utterance is one degree less salient. In the presence of such a small difference in salience, a weak pronoun is often not sufficient to disambiguate, but a strong pronoun is. This is especially clear with such oppositions as that between German er ('he') and der ('this') or between the Czech zero pronoun form and ten ('this'). If an activated item is not mentioned in the next utterance, its salience is reduced by more than one degree, so that in the prototypical case a weak pronoun cannot refer to it any more. An analysis of the

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development of discourse from the viewpoint of the degrees of salience may also be useful in establishing interdependencies between the topic of the sentence and that of (a given segment of) a discourse. 5. Concluding remarks: reconciling functional and formal views These two perspectives do not exclude each other, as is sometimes claimed. If the use of a formal framework is understood as serving to formulate results of empirical research as explicitly as possible, then all the aspects of functionalism mentioned above can well be combined with attempts at formal description. However, if the core of a formal approach to language is seen as describing language purely on the basis of the outer shape of sentences, without paying due attention to semantically relevant oppositions, then the outcome may be dangerous. A description of the sentence structure based exclusively on constituency meets difficulties concerning the fundamental aspects of syntax. The large portion of grammaticalized word order in English makes it possible to describe a part of syntax (the relationships between verb, subject and object) on this basis, but for an account of the circumstantials, of the semantic relevance of word order (TFA) and of other aspects of syntax it is probably necessary to use notions based on dependency syntax. In a functionally oriented and dependency based formal description of sentence structure, 13 a good deal of grammatical information can be stored in the lexicon. In Functional Generative Description, the lexical entry contains, along with a representation of the lexical unit itself, a specification of the values of relevant grammatical categories, 14 the val­ ency frame of the given lexical unit, (see Section 2.3) 15 and subcategorization conditions. The class of underlying representations can then be specified either by means of a generative procedure, or by a corresponding declarative definition, either of which can use a small number of general principles to describe the core of grammar. The procedure (the first preliminary formulation of which can be found in Hajicová et al. 1990) can be based on the following points: (i) To generate a node means (a) to create the node either as the root of a representation (in which case its label is determined by its grammatemes as a finite verb form and is denoted as belonging either to the topic or to the focus), or as a node dependent on another one and placed to the right

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of all its sister nodes, and also (b) to choose its lexical value and the values of its grammatemes (meeting the subcategorization conditions of the mother node and the restrictions on the combinations of grammatemes as specified in the lexical entry of the head or in the data concerning the respective word class) ; (ii) If there is a complementation listed in the frame of the given node, then it is possible to generate (a) either a left (CB) daughter, assigning it a complementation value chosen from the frame, or (b) a right (NB) daugh­ ter, assigning it a complementation value chosen from the left end of the frame. 16 (iii) If no complementation is present in the frame, then the procedure goes back to the mother node or, if no mother node is present, the procedure is finished. A declarative specification of the class of the underlying represen­ tations can use the well known operation of unification, if this is so complemented as to allow for marking the saturated items and for check­ ing the order of NB sister nodes as corresponding to systemic ordering. This specification of the core of syntax has to be completed in several respects, especially concerning coordinated structures and the position of such syntactically specific items as of negation and other focus sensitive operators (only, even, also, etc.). The general character of the principles of this description allows it to be seen as a useful alternative to Chomsky's Universal Grammar. A highly natural account of innate properties allowing for the acquisition of language as fundamentally interactive, embedded in context, may be gained in this way. Notes 1.

See Skalicka (1962). In some languages the 'action' scheme has another shape than that of most European ones, e.g. that of ergative syntax, or that based on possession (as in some languages of Northern Asia). However, with these shapes too the scheme is primarily adapted to expressing human action, i.e. a relationship between an Agentive and an (affected or effected) Object as basic cognitive roles.

2.

Cf. Schnelle (1991) on the importance of the ability to grab objects in the infant's life for the rise of the basic features of cognition patterns, or of natural ontology. His observations on the basic significance of the imperative are also relevant. Schnelle's view of valency as having been only superficially taken over from chemistry does not appear to be convincing; the fact that in linguistics valency is asymmetric points to an adaptation of the concept for the needs of linguistics.

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3.

The constituency-based approaches working with some kind of focus inheritance find it difficult to account for cases, for instance, in which the focus consists of something more than a single NP, but less than the whole VP; cf. Koktová (1988).

4.

The definition of dependency we prefer, see Plátek et al. (1978, 1984), Petkevic (1987), Sgall et al. (1986), has certain advantages in that it allows for an unlimited number of sister nodes and for a relatively free use of nonterminals in the derivations of sentence representations and in that the representations contain only terminal symbols.

5.

This concerns not only the theta roles proper (arguments, participants), but also the free complementations (adjuncts). If their number is assumed to be too big for such an account, then it should be recalled that most of the kinds of complementations are underlying counterparts of prepositions, subordinating conjunctions or similar morphemes, which most theories do understand as primi­ tives. They cannot be regarded as purely lexical items, since they clearly function as grammatical means.

6.

These two syntactic relations correspond to another dimension than syntactic dependency, as has always been recognized in European linguistics; a formal treatment has been presented by Petkevic (1987; in press).

7.

As was stated by Panevová in Hajicová et al. (1971), with a dependency based approach the long discussed opposition of absolute and relative tenses can be economically described, the main point being that relative tense is present in that part of a complex sentence which is subordinated to a verb of saying (in a broader sense) as a (part of a) so-called content clause.

8.

The term 'semantic(-pragmatic) interpretation' is motivated by the necessity to include those pragmatic aspects of meaning which are structured by natural language, i.e. such items depending on the participants of the utterance as modality, tense, the meanings of words such as today, y esterday (which combine the semantics of day with a pragmatic feature based on the time point of the utterance), and the assignment of reference.

9.

Another question concerns the remaining vagueness of meaning. For example, using expressions such asyoung people or small towns, the speaker may not know where to draw the boundary in the grey zone which includes other people or towns. An account of vagueness can be based on Vopěnka's (1979) analysis of classes with unclear membership (Novàk 1993).

10.

The differences between underlying and surface word order include those deter­ mined by shallow rules on the verb, on the parts of noun groups, the function words and the clitics. (With dependency grammar, Wackernagel's position is relatively easy to define as the second position in the uppermost part of the dependency tree.) A secondary surface position of the intonation centre of the sentence marks the most dynamic element of the sentence as replaced from the rightmost position; in such a case the complementations following the intonation centre belong to the topic (are CB).

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11.

The subtle differences in scope of focus sensitive operators (cf. Hajicová, Partee and Sgall in press) are not fully rendered by TFA, which belongs to the linguistic structure, i.e. to (b) from Section 3.1. However, these differences have to be rendered explicitly in the output of the semantic analysis, i.e. in (c). Semantically relevant oppositions and ambiguities such as those in We are required to study almost no foreign languages (where almost no can have a wide scope, although it is included in the focus of the sentence) should be further discussed to make clear whether they may be specified as cases of ambiguity, differing in their tectogrammatical representations.

12.

Active and passive cannot be understood as synonymous in the general case, since e.g. He observed them happily differs semantically from They were observed by him happily.

13.

A formal elaboration of such a system can be found in Petkevic (in press).

14.

These are the grammatemes belonging to the given word class (e.g. number and definiteness with nouns, or tense, aspect, different kinds of modalities etc., with verbs, degrees of comparison with adjectives); restrictions on the combinations of these values are listed for every word class as a whole, exceptions only having to be registered in the individual lexical entries.

15.

The optional or obligatory function of an argument as controller is also marked here (e.g. Actor is an obligatory controller with to try, an optional one with to decide; Addressee is an optional one with to advise). Furthermore, indices of the individual complementations characterize them as being able to occupy certain specific positions (e.g. that of subject, or of a wh-element).

16.

If the chosen complementation is an inner participant, it is deleted in the frame (as having been saturated). Choosing a complementation "from the left end" means that optional complementations can be skipped; the chosen and also the skipped complementations are deleted in the frame; if the last one present there has been deleted, no more daughter nodes can be generated in this step, and point (iii) below is carried out.

References Bickhard, M. H. and R. H. Campbell. 1992. Some foundational questions concerning language studies. Journal of Pragmatics 17: 401-433. Coseriu, E. 1973. Probleme der strukturellen Semantik. Tübingen: Narr. Danes, F. 1987. On Prague School functionalism in linguistics. In R. Dirven and V. Fried (eds.) Functionalism in Linguistics. Amsterdam: Benjamins. Dokulil, M. and F. Danes. 1958.  tzv. vyznamové a mluvnické stavbë vëty. In O vëdeckém poznání soudobych jazyku. Prague: Academia. Shortened trans­ lation: On the so-called semantic and grammatical structure of the sentence.

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In Ph. Luelsdorff, J. Panevová and P. Sgall (eds.) 1994. Praguiana 19451990. Amsterdam: Benjamins. 21-37. Engdahl, E. and E. Vallduvi. 1995. Information packaging and grammar archi­ Structure into Con­ tecture. In E. Engdahl (ed.) Integrating Information straint-based and Categorial Approaches: DYANA 2. Amsterdam: ESPRIT Basic Research Project 6852. 39-79. Firbas, J. 1957. Some thoughts on the function of word order in Old English and Modern English. In Sbornik pracífiloso fické fakulty brnënské university A5: 72-100. Firbas, J. 1992. Functional Sentence Perspective in Written and Spoken commu­ nication. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hajicová, E. 1976. Some remarks on presuppositions. In F. Papp and G. Szépe (eds.) Papers on Computational Linguistics. Budapest: Akadémiai kiadó: 189-197. Hajicová, E. 1984. Presupposition and allegation revisited. Journal of Pragmat­ ics 8: 155-167. Hajicová, E., T. Hoskovec and P. Sgall. 1995. Discourse modelling based on hierarchy of salience. Prague Bulletin of Mathematical Linguistics 64: 5-24. Hajicová, E, J. Panevová and P. Sgall. 1971. The meaning of tense and its recursive properties. Philologica Pragensia 14: 1-15, 57-64. Hajicová, E, J. Panevová and P. Sgall. 1990. Why do we use dependency grammar? Buffalo Working Papers in Linguistics 90-01: 90-93. Hajicová, Ε, Β. Η. Partee and P. Sgall. in press. Topic, Focus and Tripartite Structures. Dordrecht: Kluwer. Hajicová, E. and J. Vrbová 1982. On the role of the hierarchy of activation in the process of natural language understanding. In J. Horecky (ed.) COLING-S2. Prague: Academia/Amsterdam: North Holland. 107-113. Halliday, M. A. K. 1967/1968. Notes on transitivity and theme in English. Journal of Linguistics 3: 37-81, 199-244; 4: 179-215. Halliday, M. A. K. 1985. An Introduction to Functional Grammar. London: Arnold. Halliday, M. A. K. and R. P. Fawcett. 1987. Introduction. In M. A. K. Halliday and R. P. Fawcett (eds.) New Developments in Systemic Linguistics. London: Pinter. 1-13. Halliday, M. A. K. and R. Hasan. 1976. Cohesion in English. London: Longman. Heim, I. R. 1983. On the projection problem for presuppositions. WCCFL 2. Stanford, CA: Stanford Linguistics Association. Hjelmslev, L. 1943. Omkring sprogteoriens grundlaeggelse. Copenhagen. Akademisk forlag. Janátová, Z. 1991. Complex dependency structures and graphs. Prague Bulletin of Mathematical Linguistics 56: 5-36.

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Kamp, H, 1984. A theory of truth and semantic representation. I n J . Groenendijk, T. M. V. Janssen and M. Stokhof (eds.) Truth, Interpretation and Informa­ tion. Dordrecht: Foris. Koktová, E. 1988. Review of M. Rochemont, Focus in Generative Grammar. Amsterdam: Benjamins 1986. Journal of Pragmatics 12: 241-253. Lewis, D. 1981. Index, context, and content. In S. Kanger and S. Öhman (eds.) Philosophy and Grammar. Dordrecht: Reidel. 79-100 Materna, P., E. Hajicová and P. Sgall. 1987. Redundant answers and topic-focus articulation. Linguistics and Philosophy 10: 101-113. Mathesius, V. 1929. Zur Satzperspektive im modernen Englisch. Archiv für das Studium der neueren Sprachen 155: 202-210. Mathesius, V. 1936. On some problems of the systematic analysis of grammar. Travaux du Cercle linguistique de Prague 6: 95-107. Reprinted in J. Vachek (ed.) A Prague School Reader in Linguistics. Bloomington: Indiana Univer­ sity Press. 306-319. Novák, V. 1993. The Alternative Mathematical Model of Linguistic Semantics and Pragmatics. New York: Plenum. Panevová, J. 1974/1975. On verbal frames in Functional Generative Description. Prague Bulletin of Mathematical Linguistics 22: 3-40; 23: 17-52. Petkevic, V. 1987. A new dependency based specification of underlying repre­ sentations of sentences. Theoretical Linguistics 14: 143-172. Petkevic, V. in press. Underlying Structure of Sentence Based on Dependency. Prague: Charles University. Plátek, M., J. Sgall and P. Sgall. 1984. A dependency base for a linguistic description. In P. Sgall (ed.) Contributions to Functional Syntax, Semantics and Language Comprehension. Prague: Academia/Amsterdam: Benjamins. 63-97. Plátek, M. and P. Sgall. 1978. A scale of context-sensitive languages: Applica­ tions to natural language. Information and Control 38: 1-20. Schnelle, H. 1991. Natur der Sprache. Berlin: de Gruyter. Sgall, P. 1987. The position of Czech linguistics in theme-focus research. In R. Steele and T. Threadgold (eds.) Language Topics. Amsterdam: Benjamins. 47-55. Sgall, P. 1992. Underlying structure of sentences and its relations to semantics. In T. Reuther (ed.) Wiener Slawistischer Almanach. Sonderband 33. Wien: Gesellschaft zur Förderung slawistischer Studien. 273-282. Sgall, P. 1994. Meaning, reference and discourse patterns. In Ph. Luelsdorff (ed.) The Prague School of Structural and Functional Linguistics. Amster­ dam: Benjamins. 277-309. Sgall, P., E. Hajicová and J. Panevová. 1986. The Meaning of the Sentence in its Semantic and Pragmatic Aspects. (Edited by J. L. Mey.) Dordrecht: Reidel/ Prague: Academia.

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Sgall, P., W. U. Dressler, O. Pfeiffer and M. Pucek. 1995. Experimental research on systemic ordering. Theoretical Linguistics 21: 197-239. Skalicka, V. 1962. Das Wesen der Morphologie und der Syntax. Acta Universitatis Carolinas Slavica Pragensia 4: 123-127. Tichy, P. 1988. Foundations of Frege's Logic. Berlin: de Gruyter. Trnka, B. 1964. On the linguistic sign and the multilevel organization of language. Travaux Linguistiques de Prague 1: 33-40. Vopënka, P. 1979. Mathematics in the Alternative Set Theory. Leipzig: Teubner. Zemb, J.-M. 1969. Les structures logiques de la proposition allemande. Paris: O.C.D.L.

Control in constrained dependency grammar Stanley Starosta University of Hawai'i

1. Introduction 1 This paper will survey a range of 'control' phenomena within a con­ strained dependency grammar framework. The term 'control' as used in this paper refers in a broad sense to the anaphoric relation between the missing subject of an infinitival predicate and a discourse referent (1), and in the narrower sense to the grammatically determined anaphoric relation between the missing subject or object of an infinitival predicate comple­ ment and a noun-headed dependent of its regent predicate (2, 3): (1) (2) (3)

Δ0 To have a Ph.D. degree in linguistics doesn't mean much anymore. The Miss America candidates1 plan Δ1 to get their doctorates in exobiology. You won't have Nixon 1 to kick around Δ1 any more.3

The variety of dependency grammar to be employed is lexicase, which evolved from 1960s Chomskyan 2 syntax and Fillmorean case gram­ mar under the benign influence of John Anderson's The grammar of case (Anderson 1971) and subsequently Richard Hudson's Word grammar (Hudson 1984) and finally Lucien Tesnière's Élements de syntaxe structurale (Tesnière 1959). The first section of the paper introduces the framework, and the second applies it to control phenomena.

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2. Introduction to lexicase 2.1.

Generativity

Given the company in which this paper finds itself in the present volume, the first point that would be addressed is whether lexicase dependency grammar is formalist or functionalist. The answer is: both. It is hard for me to see how it could be otherwise. Lexicase is generative in the original sense: formal and explicit. In that sense, it is formalist, and it has to be: 'The grammar needs to be explicit, if it is to go on being useful; it must be possible to generate wordings from the most abstract grammatical catego­ ries by some explicit set of intermediate steps' (Halliday 1985: xix); 'By generative [Chomsky] meant explicit: written in a way which did not depend on the unconscious assumptions of the reader but could be oper­ ated as a formal system.' (Halliday 1985: xxviii). The point is that if linguistics is a science, and if a scientific statement is one that is capable of being disproved, then a grammar has to be explicit in order to make clear predictions which will be either right or wrong. Lexicase is dependency grammar, and dependency grammar is 'functional' in Halliday's third sense: Thirdly, each element in a language is explained by reference to its function in the total linguistic system. In the third sense, therefore, a functional grammar is one that construes all the units of a language — its clauses, phrases, and so on — as organic configurations of functions. (Halliday 1985: xiii-xiv) This characterizes a dependency stemma nicely: a stemma is a network of relationships between pairs of words, a 'regent' word and a 'dependent' word, and each word in a sentence enters into one or more binary dependency relations with other words as allowed or required by its lexically ordained valence and features. 2.2.

Constraints

It is not good enough for a scientific theory of language to be explicit if it is not also constrained. If a scientific theory tells us with clarion clarity about any given sequence of words in any language that it may or may not be well-formed, how could it ever by proven wrong? That is, a stronger theory makes a weaker claim. Conversely, a theory that tells us clearly that nothing at all is possible is much more useful and usable. It makes wrong

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predictions right and left, and each time it does, it can be corrected so it won't make the same bad prediction again. As time goes on, it increases in wisdom and stature until it correctly characterizes the nature of human language. Lexicase grammar began as Chomskyan transformational grammar, and has tried to benefit by avoiding some of the mistakes made within that framework, especially errors of expressive power which brought it to its current stage of excessive abstraction and empirical vacuity. The primary constraints imposed in a lexicase grammar in an attempt to avoid a similar fate are the following two: MONOSTRATALITY: a lexicase grammar has only one level of representa­ tion. 4 There are no movement rules, no deletions, no insertions, no adjunctions, no 'fusions' (Halliday 1985: 72), no empty categories, and no non-lexical categories. LEXICOCENTRICITY: Lexicase is lexi-, that is, it is 'word grammar' (cf. Hudson 1984): a lexicase STEMMA is a network of pairwise dependency relationships between words, with every word except the root word depending on one and only one regent word. 'Syntax' is just word distribution. There are no separate phrase structure rules, and conse­ quently no multiple 'bar levels', 'specifiers', base-generated empty cat­ egories, or 'functional projections'. Additional constraints will be discussed below as they arise. 2.3. Valency, case relations, and case forms In place of a set of phrase structure rules, each word in a lexicase grammar is marked with a 'valence', a statement of its combinatory potential with other words (required and optional dependency links and linear prec­ edence relations). The phrases generated by the grammar, including the sentences as a proper subset, are all and only the strings of words in which one word directly or indirectly governs each of the others via a chain of dependency links, and in which all the words have all their obligatory valency requirements satisfied. In effect, each word is a well-formedness condition on stemmas, and a phrase is well-formed if the valence of each word is satisfied. Valence features may be 'skeletal', requiring that a word have a dependent belonging to a particular part of speech (e.g. [?[+N]] ), or they may be 'functional', requiring that a dependent bear a particular relation to its regent. As might be expected from the name of the theory, CASE is the

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most salient of these relationships. Following on from the Fillmorean case grammar tradition, the term 'case' in lexicase covers three categories: CASE RELATIONS, CASE FORMS, a n d CASE MARKERS. CASE RELATIONS (CR) are similar to Halliday's so-called 'ergative' pattern of process - participant configurations (Halliday 1985:144-157). They are also to a lesser extent comparable to Halliday's participant functions in his transitive interpretation (Halliday 1985: 101-144) and to 'thematic relations' or '0-roles' in Chomskyan syntax and its derivatives, with at least four important differences: 1) Lexicase case relations encode perceptions of external situations, rather than directly encoding these situations, and their assignment is justified to the extent that they facilitate the capture of grammatical generalizations. In this they are comparable to Halliday's 'ergative' participant functions but different from his 'transitive' participant func­ tions and Chomsky-style θ-roles. 2) Only nouns and noun-headed exocentric constructions (PPs and coordinate NPs and PPs) may bear CRs; 5 and 3) There is a fixed and limited inventory of five such relations:

PAT AGT LOC COR MNS

'patient'; cf. MEDIUM (Halliday) (obligatory with every predicate) 'agent'; cf. AGENT (Halliday) (obligatory with all transitive verbs) 'locus' 'correspondent' 'means' Figure 1: Case relation

inventory

PAT and AGT occur only as COMPLEMENTS, that is, as grammatically required dependents of their regent lexical items (e.g. [?[+PAT]] ), while LOC, COR, and MNS may appear either as complements or as ADJUNCTS, grammatically allowed but not required dependents (e.g. [?([+COR])] ). 4) Every noun must either bear a case relation or be a predicate [+prdc]. The appearance of the CRs is limited by the following constraints: a) The One per Sent constraint: no more than one of each of these case relations can occur marking a complement of a single predicate. Depending on the language, there may be an exception to this principle if the iterated CRs refer to different aspects of the same entity. Thus in English, there may be more than one instance of a LOC if all of the LOCs

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in the clause encode contiguous segments of a concrete or abstract path along which the PAT moves, as shown in example (4); (4)

Martha sent the Girl Scout troop from the shore across the LOC LOC thin ice to the quaking island. LOC

and in Korean, any number of instances of a given CR may appear as dependents of a given predicate, as long as they satisfy the 'macro-micro relation' (Yang 1972), that is, if each one can be interpreted as a special case of or more specific characterization of the entity designated by the preceding one (Jeong 1992, section 3.3), as illustrated in (5)-(7). (5)

(6)

(7)

(l)a; CRs added by me Mira -ka son -i e -ta. Mira -Nom hand -Nom be pretty -DEC PAT PAT 'As for Mira, her hands are pretty/ (l)b; CRs added by me Mino -ka thokki -lul twu kwi -lul cap -ass -ta. Mino -Nom rabbit -Acc two ear -Acc hold -Pst -DEC PAT PAT 'Mino held a rabbit by its two ears.' (l)c; CRs added by me Mino -ka namwu -ey ppwuli -ey mwul -ul ppwuli-ess -ta. Mino -Nom tree -to root -to water -Ace spray -Pst -DEC LOC LOC 'Mino sprayed the water on the root of the tree/

b) PAT is obligatory for every predication. Thus it is rather comparable to Halliday's MEDIUM: 'Every process has associated with it one participant that is the key figure in that process [...] Let us call this element the medium [...]' (Halliday 1985: 146). This correspondence is illustrated in (8) and (9), where the Hallidayan categories are marked by single quotes: (8)

The dog barked. PAT 'Medium'

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104 (9)

The dog AGT 'Agent'

bit the mailman, PAT 'Medium'

The two categories are however not identical; e.g. It's raining has no Medium for Halliday 6 (Halliday 1985: 146), just as it has no θ-relation in a Chomskyan grammar, 7 by exactly the same grammatically unmotivated reasoning. As the subject of an intransitive verb, however, it is a PAT in a lexicase analysis, as shown in (10). (10) It 's PAT

raining.

The two frameworks also differ in the assignment of participant roles to ' direct objects' and 'indirect objects'. All other theories I am familiar with, including systemic-functional grammar, treat the item transferred in a ditransitive English clause as bearing the same case relation regardless of whether it was preceded by to (cf. Halliday 1985: 149), whereas by the lexicase analysis the CRs are different for the constructions with and without to. This is illustrated below in (13)-(15) Given the lexicase characterization of Patient, it is possible to capture various grammatical and semantic generalizations, including e.g. a generalization about semantic scope: other complement CRs have the PAT in their semantic scopes, in the sense that a complement LOC for example gives the location of PAT (11), not the location of the action as a whole, and this is also true in a slightly different sense for INFINITIVAL COMPLEMENTS: the missing subject is coreferential with the regent PAT (12): (11) Tommy threw Pussy in the well. PAT LOC (12) Buford paid the fireman1 to Δ1 get her out. PAT c) Every grammatically transitive clause has one instance of the AGT CR, and any clause with an AGT CR is grammatically transitive. The lexicase AGT is comparable to Halliday's AGENT: '[...] in addition to the Medium, there may be another participant functioning as an external cause. This participant we will refer to as the AGENT.' (Halliday 1985:

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147); 'The Agent is the external agency/ (Halliday 1985: 147), but again not identical, since AGT in lexicase is less tied to external situations. Thus for example probably all syntactic theories except lexicase that analyze the subject of a transitive sentence as an 'Agent' would regard the byphrase in an English passive sentence as an 'Agent' as well (cf. Halliday 1985: 148-154). This is however not the case in a lexicase analysis, as illustratedin (13)-(15). (13) The duke gave this teapot to my aunt AGT PAT LOC 'Agent' 'Medium' 'Beneficiary' (14) The duke gave my aunt this teapot. AGT PAT COR 'Agent' 'Beneficiary' 'Medium' (15) My aunt was given this teapot by the duke PAT COR MNS 'Beneficiary' 'Medium' 'Agent' The lexicase analysis illustrated in (13)-(15) is grammatically much better motivated: almost all the grammatical properties of 'passive agents' are quite different from those of the subjects of transitive verbs, so giving them the same participant role loses syntactic and morphological generali­ zations; and analyzing the first bare NP after a transitive verb as a PAT allows the capture of important generalization about case marking, word order, verb derivation, and semantic scope: non-Nominative PAT gets Accusative marking, is the closest NP to the verb, is the actant that gets passivized, and is the point of reference of other complement case rela­ tions. A lexicase category closely related to case relations is the 'macrorole' ACTOR: actr 'actor'; corresponds with the AGT if any; else with the PAT Figure 2: Macrorole

actor

The lexicase macrorole 'actor' [+actr] is quite similar to Halliday's 'Actor' (Halliday 1985: 35, 102), but is grammatically constrained to matching either AGT or PAT. Again, the English passive construction will serve to point up the differences:

106

STANLEY STAROSTA (14') The duke gave my aunt this teapot. AGT PAT actr Actor' (15') My aunt was given this teapot by the. duke PAT MNS actr 'Actor'

Defining actr in the lexicase way makes it possible to capture languageinternal and cross-linguistic generalizations about imperative construc­ tions, clitic pronouns, and reflexives (cf. Starosta 1988: 151-154). CASE FORMS ( C F S ) are the grammatical configurations that mark the presence of case relations. In a lexicase analysis, case forms are estab­ lished in strict accord with the grammatical patterns revealed by the language data, and are justified by the extent to which they facilitate the capture of language-internal and cross-linguistic grammatical generaliza­ tions. 8 There is no fixed inventory of case forms, but there is one CF that appears in all languages, i.e. Nominative (Nom), and one that appears in all accusative languages, i.e. Accusative. Given the GR, CF, and macrorole categories of a lexicase grammar, it is possible to capture various language-internal and cross-linguistic grammatical generalizations. For example, 1) The Nominative category is typically the least morphologically marked of the case forms of a language, and at least Nom NPs agree with the verbs morphologically if any NPs do. 2) An ergative language is one in which Nom always marks PAT and vice versa (Nom PAT), whereas an accusative language is one in which Nom always marks actr (Nom actr), and Acc always marks PAT in grammatically transitive clauses (Acc PAT / [+trns]). 9 The lexicase Nom CF is not equivalent to 'grammatical subject' as used by Halliday (Halliday 1985: 34-35) and other modern grammatical frameworks. That is, 'grammatical subject' is an unanalyzable primitive category in other frameworks, but would have to be defined derivatively as 'a Nom-marked constituent bearing a CR' in a lexicase grammar. (When I use the term ' subject' for convenience in the following pages, that is how it is to be understood.) Moreover, the Chomskyan framework and its derivatives allow clauses to be subjects, but a lexicase grammar does not, since they bear neither a CF nor a CR. The claim made in lexicase

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grammar is that any generalization that can be stated in terms of the category 'grammatical subject' or 'logical subject' in other frameworks can be captured better by analyzing this category into components of CF, CR, and possibly macrorole. According to Halliday, 'The Subject is not an arbitrary grammatical category; being the Subject of a clause means something. ' (Halliday 1985: 73), but in lexicase, it is a purely formal grammatical category which has no distinct meaning of its own. From the lexicase point of view, a grammatical subject 'means something' only to the extent that it encodes a CR, that is, a perceptual role, or happens to coincide with the category of 'theme' [+them] = 'psychological subject', a category adapted from work by Keith Brown and Jim Miller (cf. Brown and Miller 1980: 357 ff, Halliday 1985: 33-35). A predicate may have nouns as dependents, but it may also have nonN dependents. One way in which lexicase differs from other syntactic frameworks, including Systemic Functional Grammar (Halliday 1985: 923, 111) and Chomskyan grammar and its derivatives is that in a lexicase grammar, only nouns may bear case relations ('representational func­ tions', 'thematic relations', '0-roles') or case forms. 10 A V-headed con­ stituent (phrase, clause) can bear neither. This means that within the lexicase system, there can be no such thing as a clausal subject or object. The relation between a predicate and a non-N dependent is different in kind from relations between predicates and dependent nouns. 11 The ques­ tion of control, discussed in the second part of this paper, is concerned with such predicate-dependent verb links, in particular, the relation be­ tween verbs and infinitival complements. 3. Control 3.1. Infinitives, complements, adjuncts, and

surrogates

I will use the term CONTROL to refer to the grammatically and/or pragmati­ cally determined relation of coref erence that obtains between the missing subject (or object) of an infinitival complement of some predicate and another (actual or implied) noun in the same sentence. The category INFINITIVE in a lexicase grammar is defined syntactically as a predicate which does not allow a clausemate Nominative noun, rather than in terms of morphological criteria that were established for classical Indoeuropean

STANLEY STAROSTA

108

languages. 12 Finiteness in a lexicase grammar is marked as an inflectional feature [-fint] on the lexical head of a predicate. 13 (16)

An infinitive does not allow a Nominative dependent. This is illus­ trated in (16), where the lexical matrix of the infinitive (V2) lacks a [?[+Nom]] feature. When an infinitive is in a complement position, that is, when its presence is grammatically required [n[-fint]] by a regent word (V 1 ), the missing Nom element can be identified with another N. in the same sentence, though not in the same clause. This other N. is said to 'control' the missing Nom (or missing Acc-PAT). One of the tasks of the syntactician is to discover the rules which explain how speakers are able to consistently identify the nouns which correspond to the systematically missing nouns of infinitival complements. In most syntactic theories I am familiar with, this has to be done by stipulation. For example, a verb has to be marked with a feature identifying it as 'subject control' or object control'. 14 In the following section, I will trace this failure in generaliza­ tion to a situationally based conception of case relations, and show how control patterns fall out naturally from the case relation definitions assumed in a lexicase grammar. In an adequate analysis of control constructions, infinitival comple­ ments must be distinguished from infinitival adjuncts and subject surro­ gates. INFINITIVAL ADJUNCTS are optional infinitival dependents, typically 'purpose clauses, e.g. (17) Buford bought an Uzi to protect his potato chip collection. (Pagotto 1985b: 1 ff.) are infinitival phrases which fill the subject position of English impersonal verbs, e.g.

SUBJECT SURROGATES

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109

(18) To swim the Hellespont before tea always produces a ravening appetite. This verb is analyzed as impersonal because (i) an impersonal verb is one that lacks a grammatical subject, (ii) in lexicase, only a noun-headed actant can be a 'subject' (a CR-bearing Nom constituent), (iii) to swim the Hellespont before tea is a V-headed PP and thus not a subject, and no other subject can be inserted into this sentence, therefore (iv) this produce is an impersonal verb. The distinction between these constructions is formalized in terms of the features [±xtns] 'extension', [±fact], and [±mprs] 'impersonal'. A [+xtns] word is one which requires a [+prdc] 'predicate' dependent. 15 [+fact] identifies words which require finite predicate dependents, while [-fact] words require non-finite predicate dependents. [+mprs] verbs are verbs which expect non-referential Nom dependents and which may exclude overt Nom dependents altogether. The distinction between infinitival complements, infinitival adjuncts, and subject surrogates can then be depicted by stemmas (19)-(21). (19) Infinitival complement

110

STANLEY ST AROSTA (21) Subject surrogate

3ndex

In these stemmas, an optional valence feature, [?([-fint])], indicates an infinitival adjunct. An obligatory infinitival dependent [?[-fint]] may be either an infinitival complement [+xtns, ?[-fint]] or a subject surrogate [+mprs,-xtns,?[-fint]], depending on the class of the regent verb. If the infinitival predicate is a dependent of a prepositional ' complementizer' (to in English), then the 'complementizer' carries the index for the whole exocentric construction. 3.2. Transitivity and control 3.2.1. Patterns and control rules It will be seen that the distinction between complement, adjunct, and subject surrogate is a crucial one: control rules interpreting the missing Nom noun of complement infinitives are statable in terms of purely grammatical configurations, whereas rules for recovering the missing Nom Ns of adjuncts and subject surrogates may involve considerations of linear precedence (Pagotto 1985b: 44) and semantic consistency (cf. Jackendoff 1972: 112), and may refer to discourse or context of situation. On the basis of the coreference pattern displayed, lexicase distin­ guishes three different kinds of infinitival complement construction. In accordance with the functions of the Ns or N positions linked by such rules, these are labeled P2A (Patient to actor), P2P (Patient to Patient), and A2A (actor to actor). The first pattern, P2a, is accounted for by the default rule for infinitival complements, which can be stated informally as '-PAT coref ¯actr', or in terms of (22) (linear order not significant). This was the first control rule posited

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in the lexicase framework, 16 and applies regardless of the transitivity of the regent and dependent verbs. (29)-(32) illustrate this pattern. The rule which accounts for the second pattern, P2P, applies to a much smaller marked set of constructions, in particular potential con­ structions 17 (cf. Pagotto 1985b: 40-45) and 'serial verb' constructions (cf. Wilawan 1993). It can be stated informally as -PAT coref ¯PAT', and is depicted in stemma (23). (25) exemplifies the potential construction, and (26) the 'serial verb' construction. (25) John1 is easy to please Δr PAT +ptnl PAT (26) Mary found a house to rent Δi +ptnl PAT PAT The third pattern, a2a, is the most recently identified one (cf. Wilawan 1993: 76-79). It characterizes a set of constructions in which the regent verb describes the manner in which the action of the dependent verb is performed, including a characterization of the instrument used in performing the action. The control rule for this pattern can be stated informally as '-actr coref ¯actr', and is depicted in (24). (27) and (28) exemplify it. (27) Seymour1 used a switchblade to Δ1 slice the salami. actr +manr actr (28) Little Miss Muffet 1 sat on a tuffet Δ1 eating her curds and whey. actr +manr actr The rules applying to P2P and a2a constructions are triggered by independently motivated lexical features of the regent verbs in these

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112

constructions. By convention, if the structural description for a more marked rule (P2P, a2a) is not met, the default rule (P2a) applies. Because of length constraints in this article I will analyze only the first type of control relationship, P2a, presenting examples to illustrate the verb classes involved and the types of dependents they take. My primary emphasis will be on demonstrating the kinds of generalizations made possible by assuming the particular set of case relations and macrorole provided by lexicase dependency grammar. 3.2.2. P2a The P2a control rule (22) is independent of word order, and applies generally to structures with transitive or intransitive regent and dependent verbs. This is illustrated in stemmas (29)-(32): 18 (29) [-trns] - [-trns], 'Subject control'

Because of the way that Patient is defined in a lexicase grammar, there is no need to stipulate that a particular verb is a 'Subject control' verb or an Object control' verb; the four control configurations illustrated as (29)-(32) fall out automatically. One apparent exception to the pattern, 19 however, is the verb promise, where the subject rather than the object controls the missing infinitival subject, e.g. (33) The mailman1 promised the dog to Δ1 bite the meter maid.

CONTROL IN CONSTRAINED DEPENDENCY GRAMMAR (30) [-trns] - [+trns], 'Subject control'

114

STANLEY STAROSTA (32) [+trns] - [+trns], 'Object control'

The lexicase solution depicted for this problem in stemma (34) is that despite the fact that it has two bare NP dependents,promise is grammatically an intransitive verb (cf. Jackendoff 1972). Lexicase thus adopts the distinc­ tion made by Paul Hopper and Sandra Thompson (Hopper and Thompson 1980) between semantic and syntactic transitivity, and rejects the grammati­ cally unsupported situational semantic definition of transitive clauses as 'those that involve a verb and two or more core NPs' (Dixon 1994: 6). In accordance with the P2a rule, the upper PAT, mailman, controls the missing actr of the infinitival complement verb bite, so it is the mailman who will bite the meter maid. Evidence for this analysis includes (i) the fact that the verb does not undergo the usual P2a rule and (ii) the non-existence of a corresponding passive verb: (35) *The dog was promised to bite the meter maid by the mailman.

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(34) [-trns, +crsp] - [+trns], 'Subject control'

(iii) The direct object of a transitive verb normally corresponds to a PP with of in its nominalized counterpart, e.g. (36) a) b)

Bubbles constructed an amphitheater. Bubbles' construction of an amphitheater confounded the archaeologist

but in the nominalization of promise, the corresponding element takes the preposition to: (37) The mailman's promise to the dog to bite the meter maid was never kept.

STANLEY STAROSTA

116 3.2.3. Auxiliary

verbs

It has long been realized by non-Chomskyan syntaeticians 20 that English * auxiliaries', including modals, are verbs (cf. e.g. Starosta 1977, Starosta 1991). Starosta (1977) groups them as shown in (38). (38)

In fact, English auxiliary verbs are straightforward examples of the intransitive non-fact extension verb class, subject to the default P2a control rule, as shown in (39) and (40). This is a major advantage over Chomskyan analyses which have been unable to capture this generaliza­ tion and instead continue to make a distinction between raising and control verbs, typically grouping auxiliary verbs with the former set. 3.2.4. Adjectival

predicates

So-called 'predicate adjectives' also fit the P2a pattern. In a lexicase analysis, they are intransitive ADJECTIVAL VERBS which are lexically nonfinite: [+V,+djct,-trns,-fint]. The subtypes in (41) will be referred to in this paper. Because adjectival verbs are lexically non-finite, they can only occur in a full sentence as infinitival dependents of other verbs, e.g. (42) and (43).

CONTROL IN CONSTRAINED DEPENDENCY GRAMMAR (39) [-trns] - [-trns]: 'Subject control'

(40) [-trns] - [+trnsj: 'Subject control'

117

STANLEY STAROSTA

118 (41)

(42) [-tras] - [-trns]: 'Subject control'

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119

(43) [+trns] - [-trns]: Object control'

In Asian languages such as Chinese, Thai, Japanese, and Korean, there can be little doubt that such predicates are grammatically verbs, but even in European languages the evidence is there. Thus in English, the forms that occur as stative predicates are not identical to the forms that modify nouns. For example, adjectival verbs beginning with a- typically don't occur as adnominal modifiers, while certain adnominal modifiers, e.g. mere and utter, never occur as predicates: (44) a) b) (45) a) b) (46) a) b) (47) a) b)

The cat is still aJive[+V]. *The (still) aJive[+V] cat came back. The boat was ajirift[+V] for a week. *The ajlrift[+V] boat was sighted by a cruise ship. Biff is a mere[+Adj] syntactician. *The syntactician is mere[+Adj]. Lola is an utter[+Adj] ignorama. *The ignoramus is utter[+Adj].

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Finally, the meaning shift in (48 a, b) can be explained by the existence of homophones differing in meaning. (48) a) b)

The Speaker is !ate1[+V]for the ACLU love-in. The late2[+Aa)] Speaker will always be remembered for his honesty and modesty.

In German, the same distinction is reflected in the morphology: adjectives are inflected for gender, number, and case, while verbs are not: (49) a)

Das frohe[+Ad]]/*froh[+V] Kind lief in das Wohnzimmer. the happy child ran intothe living room 'The happy child ran into the living room.'

(49) b)

[-trns] - [-trns]: 'Subject contror

CONTROL IN CONSTRAINED DEPENDENCY GRAMMAR (50) a) (50) b)

121

Die Lehrerin ißt gern kalte[+Adj]/*kalt[+V] Suppe. the teacher eats gladly cold soup 'The teacher likes to eat cold soup/ [+trns] - [-trns]: Object control'

The teacher eats the soup cold. The category of present, past, and passive participles in European and Indo-Aryan languages fits nicely into the pattern of adjectival verbs and derivationally related adjectives discussed above. Thus predicating partici­ ples are lexically non-finite adjectival verbs [+V,+djct,-fint], though they are not necessarily intransitive. This analysis is illustrated in (51) and (52). Once we have brought auxiliary verbs and participles into the control domain, it is easy to describe chains of ' auxiliaries' as successive binary regent-dependent control links, as shown in (53)-(58). The control mechanisms provided so far automatically provide a means for accounting in a generative and constrained way for long­ distance gender agreement between participles and subjects in Romance languages such as Italian and French. This is illustrated for Italian in examples (59)-(63), and for French in examples (64) and (65).

122

STANLEY STAROSTA (51) [-trns] - [+trns]: 'Subject control'

(52) Present participles; [+trns] - [-trns]: Object control'

CONTROL IN CONSTRAINED DEPENDENCY GRAMMAR (53) [-trns] - [-trns]: 'Subject control', auxiliary regent

(54)

123

STANLEY STAROSTA

124 (55)

CONTROL IN CONSTRAINED DEPENDENCY GRAMMAR (56) German; perfective; [-trns] - [-trns]; 'Subject control'

125

126

STANLEY STAROSTA (57) Passive; [-trns] - [-trns]: 'Subject control

(58) [+trns] - [-trns]: Object control'

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127

(59) Gender agreement: Italian22

"Paula is invited.'

In (59), the regular P2a control rule marks Paola as the Nominative actor Patient of e and the actor Patient of invitata. As a third person singular verb, e requires word 1 to be third person singular [-spkr,-adrs,-plrl], and as a feminine singular adjectival verb predicate, invitata requires word 1 to be feminine singular [+fmnn,-plrl]. The noun Paola, being lexically third person singular feminine, satisfies both these requirements. The additional Italian examples, (60)-(63), show how the P2a rule, which applies locally to a regent and its immediate dependent, can account for long-range agreement of any depth by passing the index of the subject down the stemma to embedded predicates which assign attributes to it as it passes.

STANLEY STAROSTA

128 (60) Italian

CONTROL IN CONSTRAINED DEPENDENCY GRAMMAR (61) Italian

129

STANLEY STAROSTA

130 (62)

Italian

CONTROL IN CONSTRAINED DEPENDENCY GRAMMAR

131

STANLEY STAROSTA

132

Note that the P2a rule provides an automatic solution to the problem of gender agreement with words that are inherently genderless. Thus in the French examples (64) and (65), the passive participles invitée and invité respectively agree with the subject pronoun vous 'you', which has no apparent grammatical gender, depending on whether the addressee is male or female: (64) French

By this analysis, vous is not lexically marked for gender, but its index is passed down the stemma to the matrix of the participles, invitée and invité, which interpret it as feminine and masculine respectively.

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(65) French

4. Conclusion It will not be possible within the size limits of this paper to survey the two remaining control patterns, P2P and a2a. The reader is referred to Wilawan 1993 for a discussion and application to Thai, Khmer, Mandarin Chinese, and Yoruba. A discussion of noun predicates, pleonastic pronouns, and 'idiom chunks' in control constructions could also not be included. I hope that the discussion of a limited range of data will be enough to illustrate the possibility of accounting for unbounded dependency relations of various kinds within an explicit and strongly constrained framework.

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Notes 1.

I would like to thank Cathy Sin-ping Wong for comments on an earlier draft of this paper.

2.

I use the term 'Chomskyan' rather than 'generative' or 'generativist', since Chomskyan linguistics is no longer generative.

3.

Chomskyan syntax treats object control as wh-movement of a null operator (comment by an anonymous reviewer of this paper), i.e. You. won't have Nixon [cp OP.[IPPRO. to kick around t. any more] Such an analysis is of course impossible in a constrained framework like lexicase.

4.

In fact there have also been sporadic proposals within the Chomskyan tradition to reduce the number of levels to one; cf. Koster (1987) and Brody (1995). However, these do not seem to have been received the official imprimatur.

5.

I have not found a specific answer to this question in Halliday (1985), but he does explicitly allow for clausal subjects (Halliday 1985: 93), and all his (nonexpletive) subjects seem to get assigned participant functions.

6.

'For the sake of simplicity we represent meteorological processes such as it's raining as having no Medium; but it would be more accurate to say that here the Medium is conflated with the Process.' (Halliday 1985: 146). The distinction he makes is not relevant here, since in neither case does it have a participant function, whereas in lexicase it does.

7.

I refer here to the kind of analysis found in introductory textbooks such as Haegeman (1994). Given the power and inexplicitness of this framework, it should not come as a surprise that other alternative proposals have been made in the literature. Thus the pleonastic it has also been referred to in the Chomskyan literature as a 'quasi-argument' (comment by an anonymous reviewer of this article), which is apparently something different from an element without a theta role and from an element with a theta role. This kind of equivocation is of course not possible in a precise and constrained theory.

8.

Lexicase case forms are somewhat similar to what is referred to as 'Case' in Chomskyan syntax and its derivatives, with at least one important difference: almost all of the Chomskyan Case system is based on a configurational analysis of English grammar. If the formally identifiable syntactic and morphological properties of NPs in Language X fail to match up with the Cases in the English glosses of the sentences of Language X, then the Cases of the English translations are given primacy, as 'abstract Case', and the actual grammatical configurations in Language X are regarded as 'morphological case', a category which is irrel­ evant to the syntactic analysis of Language X/English. In a lexicase analysis, by contrast, English glosses are not directly relevant to the syntactic analysis.

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9.

For a more extensive discussion of ergativity in a lexicase dependency frame­ work, and for a critique of the Dixon/Comrie 'S'/'A'/'O' ('P') analysis of transi­ tivity and ergativity, see Starosta (to appear).

10.

Again the powerful Chomskyan theory does not contribute to reaching much unanimity on this point. Thus Liliane Haegeman (Haegeman 1994: 171) states that clausal dependents have thematic relations but do not bear Case. An anony­ mous reviewer of this paper mentions Stowell (1981) and Zwart (1996) as taking the position that clauses 'resist case' (Stowell) or 'are not subject to the case filter (or at least not in the same way as NPs)' (Zwart), and cites Koster (1978) as arguing that so-called subject clauses never occupy the canonical subject position at all.

11.

Erich Steiner and Ursula Reuther (Steiner and Reuther 1989: 17-18) speak of such dependents as having a 'sentential SR', which is apparently different in kind from the SRs marked on noun-headed constituents, and may be comparable to the lexicase [+prdc] 'predicate'.

12.

This definition, in conjunction with independently motivated principles of case marking, excludes the Chomskyan 'exceptional Case marking' analysis and its traditional predecessors, since by the textcase definition an infinitive can never cooccur with a 'subject' in the same clause.

13.

Cf. '[finite]', Jensen (1990: 54).

14.

'We have introduced the features "sctrl" and "octrl", which can also be used in dictionary readings to differentiate control readings from non-control readings. The additional entires [sic] which we will get this way are not semantically motivated, but apparently cannot be avoided for the time being.' (Steiner and Reuther 1989: 26-27)

15.

Cf. Steiner and Reuther's 'proposition' semantic role (Steiner and Reuther 1989: 20-21).

16.

It was first proposed, in a slightly different form, by Louise Pagotto (Pagotto 1985a: 44), who called it 'AIR-1 (AIR = 'argument identification rule'). It appears to be similar in conception to the approach used in the MiMo project, e.g. 'The infinitival open subject [...] will then be controlled by coindex rules (van der Eijk 1988: 13); '[...] we extend the basic MiMo system of G rules with co-index rules. Each of these rules is a triple, (i) a rule name, (ii) a description of a structural relation under which the relation may hold, and (iii) a characterisation of other properties of the relation — its type.' (Arnold e n al 1988: 52). Cf. Steiner and Reuther's informal statement regarding 'an empty Subject of the embedded sentence which shares its index feature with the Subject of the superordinate verb' (Steiner and Reuther 1989: 21-22).

17.

Referred to in the classic transformational literature as 'tough movement' con­ structions.

STANLEY STAROSTA

136 18.

The TOBiisi features (Springer 1993: 109) which allow ?([+N]) to be linked to ? [+Nom], etc., have been omitted from these diagrams to limit the processing load on the reader.

19.

There are others for which I so far have no good formal account. For example, verbs of manner of speaking such as whisper ma scream don't fit any of the three strategies: (i)

Clint screamed to me to Δ ; pull the rope. LOC actr and I think I have seen causative constructions in Japanese and Korean which exhibit a similar control configuration. 20.

Chomskyan syntax has also been gradually moving away from Chomsky's origi­ nal misguided analysis of English auxiliaries as unique non-verbal elements, beginning with Ross (1967). In some later introductory textbooks, have and be have come to be generated under V nodes and later move under I, with only modal auxiliaries still getting generated directly under the I node in the underlying representation. Others, however, e.g. Van Riemsdijk and Williams (1986: 273), are loyal to the end, maintaining the original 1957 'Syntactic Structures' analysis in spite of the extensive counterevidence which has accumulated in the last twenty years.

21.

(16) is an abbreviation for four distinct patterns, depending on whether V1 and V2 are transitive or intransitive. These four patterns are exemplified in (29)-(32).

22.

The Italian examples, though not the dependency analyses, are taken from Karel Oliva, 'Back to the fonts - dependency vs. other grammar models', dependency grammar net posting, 11 Aug 1993.

References Anderson, J. M. 1971. The Grammar of Case: Towards a Localistic Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Arnold, D., S. Krauwer, L. Sadler, G. van Noord, and L. des Tombe. 1985.MiMo/ V3: Theoretical Aspects of the System [working title]. Department of lan­ guage and linguistics, University of Essex, and Rijksuniversiteit Utrecht, Utrecht. Brody, M. 1995. Lexico-Logical Form: A radically minimalist theory. Cam­ bridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Brown, E. K., and J. E. Miller. 1980. Syntax: A Linguistic Introduction to Sentence Structure. London: Hutchinson. Dixon, R. M. W. 1994. Ergativity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Halliday, M. A. K. 1985. An Introduction to Functional Grammar. London: Arnold.

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Haegeman, L. 1994. Introduction to Government and Binding Theory. Oxford: Blackwell. Hopper, P. J. and S. A. Thompson. 1980. Transitivity in grammar and discourse. Language 56: 251-299. Hudson, R. A. 1984. Word Grammar. Oxford: Blackwell. Jackendoff, R. S. 1972. Semantic Interpretation in Generative Grammar. Cam­ bridge, Mass.: The MIT Press. Jensen, J. T. 1990. Morphology. Amsterdam: Benjamins. Jeong, H. R. 1992. A Valency Subcategorization of Verbs in Korean and Russian: A Lexicase Dependency Approach. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Hawai'i. Koster, J. 1978. Why Subject sentences don't exist. In S. J. Keyser (ed.) Recent Transformational Studies in European Languages. Koster, J. 1987. Domains and Dynasties. Dordrecht: Foris. Pagotto, L. 1985a. Missing nominais in wh-questions and infinitives: a lexicalist view. University of Hawaii Working Papers in Linguistics 17, 1: 23-75. Pagotto, L. 1985b. On impersonal verbs in English. University of Hawaii Working Papers in Linguistics 17, 2: 1-70 (published in 1987). Ross, J. R. 1967. Auxiliaries as main verbs. In W. Todd (ed.) Studies in Philosophical Linguistics (Series 1). Carbondale, Illinois: Great Expecta­ tions Press. 77-102. Springer, H. K. 1993. Perspective-shifting Constructions in Japanese: A Lexicase Dependency Analysis. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Hawai'i. Starosta, S. 1977. Affix hobbling. University of Hawaii Working Papers in Linguistics 9, 1: 62-158. Reprinted in L.A. U. T. Series A, Paper no. 95, 1982. Trier: University of Trier. Starosta, S. 1988. The Case for Lexicase. London: Pinter. Starosta, S. 1991. The great AUX cataclysm: Diachronic justification for a synchronic analysis. In B. Lakshmi Bai and B. Ramakrishna Reddy (eds.) Studies in Dravidian and General Linguistics: A Festschrift for Bh. Krishnamurti. Department of Linguistics, Osmania University, Hyderabad. Unabridged preliminary version in University of Hawaii Working Papers in Linguistics 17, 2: 95-114 (published in 1987). Starosta, S. to appear. Formosan clause structure: Transitivity, ergativity, and case marking. In Proceedings of the Parasession: Typological Studies of Languages in China; Fourth International Symposium on Chinese Languages and Linguistics (IsCLL-4). Taipei, Taiwan: Academia Sínica. Steiner, E. and U. Reuther. 1989. Semantic relations. WP 11/89. EUROTRA-D working papers. Saarbrücken: Institut für Angewandte Informations­ forschung (IAI), University of Saarbrücken. Stowell, T. 1981. Origins of phrase structure. Tesnière, L. 1959. Éléments de Syntaxe Structurale. Paris: Klincksieck.

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van der Eijk, P. 1988. Linguistic analysis in the MiMo translation system. (= Working Papers in Natural Language Processing, 3.) Utrecht: Taal Technologie, Utrecht University and Leiden: Rijksuniversiteit Leiden. van Riemsdijk, H., and E. Williams. 1986. Introduction to the Theory of Grammar. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Wilawan, S. 1993. A Reanalysis of so-called 'Serial Verb Constructions' in Thai, Khmer, Mandarin, and Yoruba. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Hawai'i. Yang, I. 1972. Korean Syntax. Seoul: Paek Hap Sa. Zwart, . J. W. 1996. Morphosyntax of Verb Movement: A Minimalist Approach to the Syntax of Dutch. Amsterdam: Kluwer. Appendix: feature names Abl Acc actr Adj adrs AGT copl COR crsp Det dfnt djct fact fint fmnn Gen goal lctn LOC mnnr MNS modl mprt N

ablative accusative actor adjective addressee Agent copula correspondent (CR) correspondent (verb) determiner definite adjectival fact finite feminine genitive goal location locus manner means modal imperative noun

ndex ngtv Nom Ρ pasv PAT path plrl prdc prfc prim prnn prtp sorc spct spkr spot trmn them trns V xlry xtns

index negative nominative preposition, postposition passive Patient path plural predicate perfect primary pronoun participle source aspect speaker spotlight terminus theme transitive verb auxiliary extension

Part III Cross-linguistic morphosyntax

Grammatical structures in noun incorporation William McGregor University of Melbourne

1. Introduction 1 The phenomenon of NOUN INCORPORATION (NI) has recently attracted con­ siderable attention in linguistic theory, and various proposals have been put forward to account for it within Government and Binding theory (Baker 1988, 1993), Relational Grammar (Rosen 1989), West Coast Functional Grammar (Mithun 1984), 2 Autolexical Syntax (Sadock 1991), and "general" linguistics (i.e. the type of linguistics which attempts to describe linguistic phenomena without necessarily incorporating (or per­ haps forcing) them into a single existing theory — e.g. Evans forthcom­ ing). This paper investigates NI within the framework of Semiotic Grammar, a sign-based theory of grammar which I have been developing over the past five years (e.g. McGregor 1990b, and in press). As will be seen, NI can be readily accounted for with the theoretical machinery of Semiotic Grammar, and moreover this theory provides new insights into the phenomenon. NI involves combination of a noun with a verb in which the two form a single complex verbal unit together, as in the following examples: (1)

Southern Tiwa (Allen et al. 1984: 293) te-shut-pe-ban 1sg.C-shirt-make-PAST3 'I made the shirts.'

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142 (2)

(3)

Southern Tiwa (Allen et al. 1984: 294) seuanide i-mukhin-tuwi-ban man A.B-hat-buy-PAST 'The/a man bought the/a hat.' Mohawk (Mithun and Woodbury 1980: 92) kwískwis y-a?-t-ho-7nyukwal-íhshta-7 pig TRS-AOR-DPL-3M.3M-snout-grab-PUNC 'He grabbed the pig's nose/

I restrict the term NI to constructions like these, which involve a noun stem and a verb stem, excluding denominal verb constructions such as are found in Eskimo which have also been called NI (e.g. Sadock 1986, 1991). As Mithun (1986a: 32) points out (see also Sapir 1911: 254 and Hagège 1978), [D]enominal verb formation is a different formal process [to NI]. In noun incorporation, as commonly understood since Sapir 1911, a noun stem is compounded with a verb stem to yield a more specific, derived verb stem. The Greenlandic [Eskimo] construction is based on a single noun stem with a derivational suffix. It is not entirely clear why one would refer to this as noun incorporation, since it is not obvious what such nouns are incorporated into. In incorporating languages, a verb minus its incorporated noun is still a well-formed verb; but in Greenlandic, a denominal verb minus its noun stem would be no word at all. Furthermore, as she goes on to say, the denominal verb construction is both formally and functionally different from NI. 4 Such disparate phe­ nomena should not be grouped together under the same rubric — we must, as Baker (1993: 18) puts it, "narrow in on the natural class about which something worthwhile can be said" (although I disagree with Baker as to what the natural class is). Recent literature on NI has been concerned with two main issues, which invoke the primary interests and debates within mainstream theo­ retical linguistics, and concern the global architecture of linguistic theo­ ries: (i) What are the constraints on the external clausal roles which may incorporate? And (ii) is NI a syntactic or morphological process? The significance of (i) relates to debates within mainstream linguis­ tics between those who, following Chomsky, advocate the view that grammatical relationships are derivative notions which can be character­ ised conf igurationally in terms of "phrase structure" (e.g. the subject is the

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leftmost NP dominated by S), and those who take the view that grammati­ cal relationships are fundamental, and cannot be accounted for by phrase structure configurations. Mark Baker, for example, proposes that facts about constraints on which external roles may incorporate argue for "phrase structure" conditions in preference to conditions on semantic roles (Baker 1988 and 1993) —thus supporting Chomsky's position. (We return to this issue in section 2.2.) (ii) has loomed large in the recent literature. Mainstream generative grammar proposes a modular architecture for grammar in which morphol­ ogy and syntax constitute distinct and independent modules. This has been variously challenged and adopted by post-generative theories, and phe­ nomena such as NI have been marshalled in support of the non-discrete­ ness or discreteness of morphology and syntax. In the former camp, Sadock (e.g. 1986, 1991) argues strongly for non-discreteness, that mor­ phology and syntax are not completely independent components, invoking NI as evidence. In the latter, Rosen (1989), argues that NI is a purely morphological phenomenon (as did Sapir 1911, albeit with a certain degree of equivocation). A variety of facts about the grammars of languages argue that morphology and syntax cannot be entirely independent — e.g. the fact that in many languages clausal negation is expressed by a verbal affix; that verbal categories such as subjunctive mood may have a full clause in their scope; that bound pronominals may index clausal roles; etc. (see also Sadock 1991: 100). Morphology as it is generally conceptualised is the study of the structure of words as distributional units, as minimal free forms. These do not correspond precisely to lexical, phonological or grammatical words. Distributional words habitually include within their boundaries morphemes which do not 'belong' with the grammatical or lexical words which constitute them (e.g. verbs are frequently marked for tense, although it is generally the case that it is a clausal phenomenon). NI is just one of a number of phenomena which could be marshalled in support of arguments for some connection between morphology and syntax. But irrespective of whether or not NI adds to the case against modularity, its significance as a grammatical phenomenon goes far wider. The crucial question is: What are the grammatical structures involved in NI, and what grammatical role does the incorporated noun (IN) serve? Strangely, this question seems to have been of little concern to most investigators. Sapir (1911) contents himself with analysing NI as "com-

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pounding". Mithun (1984 and 1986a) suggests nothing more substantial. Working within Government and Binding theory, Baker (1988 and 1993) places little weight on this issue, treating the 'deep structure' relationship as the only significant one. He seems content to treat NI as a surface structure phenomenon characterisable in terms of an N and V added together lexically, together with a trace in the position that the N moved from. My primary aim in this paper is to suggest some answers to this fundamental question. I begin, in section 2, by examining general proper­ ties of NI. Then in section 3 I identify and discuss the primary types of NI, proposing grammatical analyses for them. Section 4 compares NI with related grammatical phenomena, and section 5 presents a conclusion. 2. Preliminaries: the nature of noun incorporation In the following subsections we briefly discuss four properties strongly associated cross-linguistically with NI. The discussion is brief and selec­ tive, and cannot possibly cover NI in all its manifestations and complexi­ ties: this would require a monograph-length study. What we discuss are recurrent characteristics, which are not necessarily associated with NI in every language. 2.1. Incorporation

and agnation with "external"

arguments

As Mithun (1984: 847-849) observes, NI constructions always agnate with constructions in which the nominal serves in an external role, comparable to the role the corresponding N would serve in a language like English. For example, corresponding to the Guaraní (of the Tupí-Guaraní family, located in lowland South America) NI constructions of (4) and (6) are the "external"-role constructions of (5) and (7). (4)

(5)

Guaraní (Velázquez-Castillo 1993: 130) a -m b a 'e -jogua -ta ko -ka laru lAC-thing-buy-FUT this-afternoon I'11 go shopping this afternoon/ Guaraní (Velázquez-Castillo 1993: 130) a-jogua-ta petei mba'e lAC-buy-FUT one thing 'I will buy something/

NOUN INCORPORATION (6)

(7)

145

Guaraní (Velázquez-Castillo 1993: 130) a-vaka-ami-ta ko-py hareve lAC-cow-milk-FUT this-morning 'I'll do some milking this morning/ Guaraní (Velázquez-Castillo 1993: 130) a-ñami-ta -vaka moroti lAC-milk-FUT that-cow white TU milk that white cow.'

This crucial property indicates that NI is semantically motivated, and is not merely the result of application of an arbitrary rule of syntax. As the free translations for these examples indicate, NI contrasts not just formally with the "external" type construction, but also semantically. (However, the semantic contrasts are not always as obvious as in these examples, and the constructions not infrequently appear synonymous). It should be noted, however, that it is not stipulated that correspond­ ing to every instance of an IN there must be an agnate clause in which the N is external. As Sadock (1986) points out, NI is sometimes obligatory: in Taos, a dialect of Tiwa (a Tanoan language of American southwest), N1 is "obligatory for singular direct objects" (Sapir 1911, Harrington 1910). The point is that the agnates are missing in precisely characterisable conditions, and that for other types of direct object NI does contrast with non-NI. Indeed, the existence of well defined circumstances in which the expected agnate does not occur may actually strengthen the argument that NI is semantically motivated in a particular language (see also Mithun 1986a). If, for instance, the circumstance shows the properties character­ istic of NI, then the absence of the "external" agnate is explicable, and moreover, this fact supports the hypothesis that NI constructions actually do contrast with constructions in which the nominal serves in an external role. 5 It follows that the property of having an actual clausal agnate in which the verb does not have an IN cannot be taken as an essential requirement for every specific instance of NI, as has been suggested by some linguists (e.g. Evans forthcoming; cf. Harvey 1995: 137). 2.2. Noun incorporation and grammatical

roles

It is widely believed that NI shows an absolutive pattern of orientation: objects of transitive clause and subjects of intransitive clauses incorpo­ rate, but transitive subjects do not. This is illustrated in the following Mayali examples. In (8) the subject of the intransitive clause has been

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incorporated — observe that in the second clause it is simultaneously represented by an "external" NP. But in (9) the object of the transitive clause must be the baby; it cannot be the woman. Similarly, in (10) the hand must be a part of the object's body, not of the subject's. (8)

Mayali (Evans forthcoming) ba-m-bo-re-i, ba-bo-lobm-i an-bo-kimuk 3P-hither-liquid-go-PI 3P-liquid-run-PI Ill-liquid-big 'When the floodwaters used to come running high . . / (9) Mayali (Evans forthcoming) bi-yaw-na-ng daluk 3/3hum-baby-see-PP woman 'The woman saw the baby/ (Not: 'The baby saw the woman.') (10) Mayali (Evans forthcoming) a-bid-karrme-ng daluk 1/3-hand-grasp-PP woman 'I touched the woman on the hand/ (Not: 'I touched the woman with my hand/)

There are two main ways in which this absolutive patterning of NI has been accounted for: (i) in terms of grammatical roles; and (ii) in terms of phrase-structure configurations. Mithun (1984) proposes an explana­ tion in terms of roles: V[erb]-internally, IN's bear a limited number of possible semantic relationships to their host V's [...] If a language incorporates N's of only one semantic case, they will be patients of transitive V's — whether the language is basically ergative, accusative or agent/ patient type. [...] If a language incorporates only two types of arguments, they will be patients of transitive and intransitive V's — again, regardless of the basic case structure of the language. The majority of incorporating languages follow this pattern. Many lan­ guages additionally incorporate instruments and/or locations. (Mithun 1984: 875) By contrast, Baker (1993) argues against role-based accounts such as this, and proposes instead an account based entirely on constituency relationships: A noun can be incorporated into another category in the system of a polysynthetic language only if a noun phrase headed by that noun

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would be the sister of the category in the phrase structure system of an isolating language. (Baker 1993: 14) This is not the place to discuss Baker's arguments in detail (see however Velazquez-Castillo 1993 and Evans forthcoming). Suffice it to say that they are all quite easily answered in terms of a grammatical role hierarchy with cut-off points which prevent the incorporation of certain roles. Such a hierarchy could be something like the following: (11) Patient > Instrument > Location > Benefactive > Agent Here Patient designates the Goal (object) of a transitive clause, and a proper subset of the Mediums (to use Halliday's 1985 terminology) of intransitive clauses, namely those which are semantic patients or under­ goers: those which are subjects of UNACCUSATIVE verbs (see e.g. Aissen 1991: 77), which include (in English) verbs such as be born, fall, remain, become, etc. Agent designates the Agent of a transitive clause, and the complementary subset of Mediums of intransitive clauses, those which are semantic doers, which are subjects of UNERGATIVE verbs (see e.g. Aissen 1991: 77), which include run, climb, telephone, and so forth. As this hierarchy indicates, Agents may incorporate — contrary to Baker (1993) — although they are less likely to do so than other roles. For example, according to Myhill (1992: 244ff), Agents (in transitive clauses) may be incorporated in Indonesian, as in (12). And in Mayali prototypical unergative verbs such as ' crawl' and 'get up' can incorporate their Agent subjects, as shown by (13) (cf. Baker 1993: 20, who treats 'crawl' as indeed unergative). (12) Indonesian (Myhill 1992: 244) Dan Lenan Gedergeder dibunuh Jepang and Lieutenant Gedergeder killed Japanese 'And Lieutenant Gedergeder was killed by the Japanese.' [Liter­ ally: 'And Lieutenant Gedergeder was Japanese-killed*.] (13) Mayali (Evans forthcoming) ka-yaw-wake 3NP-baby-crawl:NP 'The baby is crawling/ There are, however, inadequacies with hierarchy (11). For one thing, it does not identify the full range of incorporable roles. Guaraní permits

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the incorporation of Ns which indicate manner resemblances in the way in which the agent performs an action, as in tatu-pyuoi [armadillo-kick] 'kick like an armadillo' and mboi-juka [snake-kill] 'beat someone in the way one does when killing a snake' (Velàzquez-Castillo 1993: 118). 6 And in Warray, as Harvey (1995: 143) points out, the unaccusativity of an intransitive verb is irrelevant to the incorporability of body part Ns: incorporation is possible whenever the corresponding whole N is a subject of an intransitive clause, even if it is highly volitional, agentive and controlled, as in (14) : 7 (14) Warray (Harvey 1995: 143) at-nab at-ny im an-bokbok-u-lik yumbal-lik lsgS-hand-enter III-hollow-OBL-LOC log-LOC 'I put my hand into the hollow log. ' [Literally: 'I hand-entered the hollow log.'] Clearly (11) could be refined and augmented to take account of these additional roles. However, evidence from Warray indicates that even then the hierarchy would not be without problems: specifically, it makes the wrong predictions about the roles which incorporate in that language. Unlike most incorporating languages, Warray does not normally incorpo­ rate patient objects in non-body part incorporation. Non-body part NI is essentially adverbial/locative in nature: the vast majority of instances of this type of incorporation have the IN bearing a locative role, as in example (15). (15) Warray (Harvey 1995: 144) gaj'i warri-ba-llul bin-ba-wili-ngiw-a wili-lik that child-PL-pair 3plO-2plS-house-put:in-IMP house-LOC 'You mob put those two children in the house!' As Harvey (1995: 146) argues, Warray requires a rather different role hierarchy than the one above, namely that suggested by Bresnan and Moshi (1990: 169): (16) Locative > Theme/Patient > Instrument > Goal > Benefactive > Agent It can be concluded from this discussion that it is impossible to adequately characterise the incorporability of a N into a V in terms of

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universal stipulations on the role that the N would serve as an "external" argument in an agnate clause, or which the corresponding N would serve in a non-incorporating language (according to Baker's formulation). The restrictions are not absolute; they are tendencies, semantic regularities, and NI appears to be possible for a much wider range of role types than predicted by either (11) or (16), which are necessarily language specific. The important point is that in general incorporation is possible only when certain semantic conditions have been met. Formal accounts such as Baker's, along with functional/role accounts such as Mithun's, fail to EXPLAIN (rather than simply state) the prevalence of Patient incorporation as compared to the rarity of Agent incorporation, and why only a subset of the roles which are predicted to incorporate actually do incorporate. 2.3. NI and animacy It is not just the role borne by the corresponding external NP that is relevant to the incorporability of an N: internal semantic characteristics of the N are often also important. Two types of N are strongly associated with NI: body part Ns and inanimate Ns. It appears that in all languages which show NI, the incorporation of body part Ns appears to be possible; indeed, body part N incorporation appears to be the most common — perhaps even the most primary — type of incorporation across the world's languages (e.g. Sapir 1911, Harvey 1995). Strangely, however, it is one of the least well studied types, many investigators specifically excluding it in the belief that it is less subject to regularities than other types of NI — see for example Baker (1988: 4). This belief has been shown to be quite erroneous by e.g. Evans (1995 and forthcoming), Harvey (1995) and Mithun (1995). Animate Ns are much less likely to be incorporated than inanimate Ns. Thus, for example, in Mayali there are some thirty incorporable Ns other than body part Ns (all of which are incorporable), all but one of which (the N 'baby') are inanimates belonging to the vegetable or kunclasses. And, according to Rosen (1990: 680), in Southern Tiwa an intransitive subject cannot incorporate if it is animate, but must incorpo­ rate if it is inanimate, as demonstrated by (17) and (18); a transitive object must incorporate if it is inanimate, and may incorporate if it meets certain other requirements.

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(17) Southern Tiwa (Rosen 1990: 680) a. musan i-teurawe-ban cats B-run-PAST 'The cats ran/ b. *i-musa-teurawe-ban (18) Southern Tiwa (Rosen 1990: 680) a. we-fan-lur-mi C.neg-snow-fall-PRES.NEG 'Snow is not falling/ b. *fan we lur-mi Evans (forthcoming) shows that in certain circumstances in Mayali in which there are two objects — an ordinary direct object, and a comitative applicative object — one will be cross-referenced by a bound pronominal in the verb, while the other will be incorporated. Which is incorporated is determined by a referential prototype: Taking as given the limited possibilities for encoding inanimates by pronominal prefix and humans by incorporated noun, both Mayali and Southern Tiwa systems set up the argument structure in such a way that arguments most likely to be human are assigned a gram­ matical relation sanctioning a pronominal slot, and arguments most likely to be inanimate are assigned a grammatical relation sanction­ ing an incorporated-nominal slot. (Evans forthcoming) 2.4. Categorality of the IN INs do not show many properties prototypically associated with Ns; they show low categorality as Ns, as pointed out by Hopper and Thompson (1984: 711-714). They are never marked for case, number, definiteness, or gender. In Mayali non-incorporated Ns take gender prefixes such as an(class III) and - (class IV); but these prefixes are not found on the N when it is incorporated — e.g. corresponding to the unincorporated kunkanj 'meat' is the incorporated form -kanj- 'meat'. INs tend to be generic. They are frequently non-referring expres­ sions which cannot designate individuated entities, and may not be marked for definiteness. Usually they do not refer to specific and count­ able objects. For example, Mithun (1984: 849) points out that whereas (19) refers to specific coconuts, (20) does not.

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(19) Mokilese (Harrison 1976, cited in Mithun 1984: 849) ngoah kohkoa oaring-kai I grind coconut-these 'I am grinding these coconuts/ (20) Mokilese (Harrison 1976, cited in Mithun 1984: 849) ngoah ko oaring I grind coconut 'I am coconut-grinding/ As Velazquez-Castillo (1993) further suggests, the same holds for incorporated body part Ns in Guaraní: they show low categorality as Ns; and although they may be identifiable, this is purely by virtue of the identifiability of the person who the part belongs to. Furthermore, these Ns are not marked for definiteness when incorporated. But the property of being non-referential is not displayed by all types of IN; it seems to be most strongly associated with what Mithun (1984) calls Type I incorporation (see below). In another type of incorporation the IN is usually referential. In various languages — including e.g. Mayali — a new entity is normally introduced into discourse by means of a full NP. If that entity is not a major participant — e.g. if it is a part of someone's body, or an inanimate — it may be subsequently referred to by means of an IN. 3. Types and structures of NI We now turn to the primary question: What is the grammatical relationship borne by the IN? One possibility, mooted by various scholars, is that the IN serves a participant (roughly, argument) role, specifically that borne by the corresponding "external" NP in the agnate "normal" construction. However, this conflicts with the normal low categoriality of INs as nominais: participant roles are associated with nominal expressions of the most referential and animate/human types, which show the highest nomi­ nal categoriality. It also conflicts with the transitivity hypothesis of Semiotic Grammar, according to which transitivity is universally a clausal phenomenon, and thus participant roles are clausal constituents (McGregor in press: section 4.2.1). Furthermore, there seems to be little evidence in favour of the proposal, and accordingly I reject it — additional reasons will emerge as the argument unfolds. Instead, I propose that two primary types of NI must be identified which are grammatically distinct,

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in which the grammatical relationships served by the IN are quite dissimi­ lar. Specifically, it is suggested that in one type of NI the IN serves in a LOGICAL or dependency relationship to the verb (usually), whereas in other types it serves a TEXTURAL or linking relationship to clausal roles. These terms correspond roughly to Halliday's (1985) logical and textual metafunctions respectively; their meanings should become clear as the discussion proceeds (see McGregor 1990b and in press for further discus­ sion). 3.1. Classificatory

incorporation

Perhaps the simplest type of NI is found in Oceanic languages such as the Mokilese and Samoan (see (20) and (21)). Although in (20) the N and V constitute distinct words, there is a close syntagmatic bond between them: oaring 'coconut' is distributionally bound to the V ko 'grind', and it is impossible to modify the N by adding the definite determiner -kai. Likewise, in (21) the V and N form a unit together: the particle ai follows the V+N unit, whereas in general it follows the V, as in the unincorporated agnate (22). (21) Samoan (Chung 1978; cited in Mithun 1984: 850) po 'o afea e tausi-tama ai 'oía Q PRED when TNS care-child PRO ABS.he 'When does he baby-sit?' (22) Samoan (Chung 1978; cited in Mithun 1984: 850) po 'o āfea e tausi ai e ia tama Q PRED when TNS care PRO ERG he child 'When does he take care of children?' A similar situation obtains in Tongan, which is also an ergative language, the Agent of a transitive clause being marked by the ergative preposition 'é, as illustrated by example (24). The N corresponding to the Goal of a transitive clause may be incorporated, in which case the clause is intransitive, as shown by (23), where Sione is marked by the absolutive preposition instead of by the ergative postposition. (21) and (23) show furthermore that the INs cannot be serving as clausal participants in this type of NI construction — the Ns tama 'child' and kava 'kava' in (21) and (23) respectively cannot be Goals, since Goals are marked by the absolutive preposition, while Agents in transitive clauses are marked by the ergative postposition.

NOUN INCORPORATION (23) Tongan (Churchwood 1953; cited kava 'a Sione na'e inu PAST drink kava ABS John 'John kava-drank.' (24) Tongan (Churchwood 1953; cited na'e inu 'a e kavá PAST drink ABS CONN kava 'John drank the kava/

153

in Mithun 1984: 851)

in Mithun 1984: 850) 'é Sione ERG John

Whereas in Oceanic languages the N and V are juxtaposed and the N retains its word status, in many other NI languages they are more tightly fused, and form a single word. This is the case in many NI languages of North and South America — as shown by examples (l)-(3), (4) and (6) above. But the N and V in NI constructions are not only closely bound distributionally, they are also semantically tightly bound. As Mithun (1984: 850) comments in relation to (20), The sentences with independent objects would be used if the objects were noteworthy in their own right; but those with incorporated objects indicate unitary, institutionalized activities of coconutgrinding [...] . The objects do not refer to specific coconuts [...] but simply modify the type of activity under discussion. As Harrison notes ([1976:] 162), "The addition of the noun refines the meaning of the verb in question, limiting its application to the set of objects named by the noun". This explanation invokes the main semantic characteristic of the logical relationship CLASSIFICATION (McGregor in press): the idea that the N modifies the V, indicating its type, some subtype of the set of processes designated by V.8 The N narrows the scope of the V, as Mithun (1984) puts it, and the various N+V combinations indicate different kinds of V-ing. Thus, in (20) the N oaring 'coconut' specifies the type of grinding the speaker had been engaged in, amongst various other possible types; in (21) tama 'child' specifies the type of caring the person might have been engaged in; and in (23) kava specifies the type of drinking John did. The IN defines the subtype by virtue of the fact that the processes designated by the V include as a proper subset some which are closely associated with the N. Mithun (1984) discusses this type of NI (which she calls Type I) quite extensively, and suggests that it involves lexical compounding of the

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N and V whereby the "noun and verb are joined to form a single lexical item denoting an institutionalized, unitary concept" (see also Sapir 1911, Rosen 1989 and Velazquez-Castillo 1993). Examples such as (20), (21), and (23) above provide clear exemplification of this point — e.g. in regard to (23), kava drinking is a well known institutionalised activity. Accord­ ing to Velazquez-Castillo (1993: 151), comparable examples of NI in Guaraní should be understood in terms of frames which "evoke... a social scene of some kind beyond the combined meaning of their individual components" and "[n]ovel events which are not associated with an estab­ lished pattern cannot be labeled with an N-V construction" (VelazquezCastillo 1993: 152). Similarly, according to Sapir (1911: 264), NI in Paiute is used for typical, characteristic activities in which an object is typically found with the action, while accidental and occasional activities are more likely to be represented by clauses with external objects. The term compounding, however, refers to the purely formal process whereby two roots cohere to form a new lexical stem; this is a semantically vacuous grammatical (morphological or syntactic) process, and does not pertain to any linguistic sign. By contrast, according to the classification analysis, the grammatical relationship between the IN and the V is a linguistic sign, and thus is semantically saturated. Classification is the signified logical meaning associated with the particular signifying rela­ tionship of dependence between the IN and the V. The classification analysis thus makes a stronger claim about the grammatical structure involved in this type of NI. Indeed, lexicalisation and compounding are not unexpected — though certainly not necessary — consequences of classification. One would normally expect to distinguish subtypes of some general type when there is some point in doing so and when they are motivated — especially when they are socially relevant in the ways Mithun (1984) and Velazquez-Castillo (1993) describe.9 Classification, on the other hand, does not naturally follow as a consequence of com­ pounding: many compounds do not involve classification. For example, an underdog is not usually a type of dog; in Mayali, bo-ngu- [water-eat] 'drink' is a compound, but bo- 'water' does not classify ngu- 'eat', and this is not an NI construction (see Evans forthcoming). The compounding analysis is less adequate than the classification analysis in accounting for the range of types of Ns and roles that may incorporate. Under the compounding analysis it would be an arbitrary fact of morpho-syntax that INs agnate with Mediums more frequently than they do with Agents. But in the classification analysis this association is moti-

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vated: the Medium is the role most closely associated with the action, the NP realising it designates the thing which is most central to the situation — the thing without which the situation could not have eventuated. An NP in this role would surely have the greatest potential for characterising the kind of action involved: being so central it should be the best indicator of the type of action — providing that it is not specific or referential. Incorporation of Ns which agnate with roles other than Medium can also be explained in terms of the classification analysis. It has already been mentioned that locational incorporation is the most common type in Warray (other than body part incorporation); (25) and (26) are typical illustrations. (25) Warray (Harvey 1995: 144) an-mewel at-windi at-mirral-lagi-yn Ill-clothes lsgS-hang:out lsgS-sun-put-PP 'I hung the clothes out in the sun/ (26) Warray (Harvey 1995: 144) at-wik-lagi-yn an-mewel wik-lik gaku lsgS-water-toss-PP IH-clothes water-LOC later bat-wurlek-miyn lsgS:NP-wash-Aux:A 'I tossed the clothes in the water. Later I will wash them/ It seems clear that the IN in these examples does indeed indicate the kind of activity undertaken: putting (something) in the sun is a kind of putting — typically the type involved in drying that thing (the Medium) out; 10 and tossing in the water is a type of tossing, the type associated with soaking (the Medium). 11 Similar remarks hold for manner incorporation, as in Guaraní (see section 2.2 above), and instrument incorporation, as illustrated by the Lahu example (27) below. In fact, classification of killing of human beings into types would appear to be more likely to depend on how the activity was undertaken, or what was used to achieve it, rather than according to who suffered it — the Medium, it will be recalled, is a good candidate for a classifier only if it is non-referential. (27) Lahu (Matisoff 1981, cited in Mithun 1984: 853) haw jû'-ρε speargun pierce-to:death 'to kill with a speargun'

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Summing up, what has been suggested is that in Mithun's Type I NI the N does not serve a participant (argument) role in either the clause or the V; it does not bear an experiential role in the clause, and is not a constituent of the clause (see McGregor in press: chapter 4). Rather, it bears a logical relationship of classification to the V; more precisely, the IN is a hypotactic dependent of the V, which it classifies (McGregor in press: chapter 5; Halliday 1985: 195). The syntagmatic relationship in­ volved is dependency (McGregor in press). Sapir (1911: 275) makes a comparable observation (making allowances for his almost contradictory terminology) in the following words: In both cases the grammatical expression of a logical relation [read: experiential relationship], in other words, a syntactic process, is sacrificed to a componential process [read logical relationship] in which the logical relation is only implied. The sacrifice of syntax to morphology or word-building is indeed a general tendency in more than one American language. 3.2. Body part

incorporation

As has already been mentioned, the most common type of NI is body part NI: a type of NI in which the INs are prototypically body part Ns. Almost all languages which show NI permit this type of NI, including such languages as Mohawk (example (3)); Mayali (example (10)); Warray (example (14)); Blackfoot (example (28)); and many others. Indeed, body part incorporation is the only type of NI found in Muskogean (Haas 1941) and Ngan.gikurung.gurr (Harvey 1995: 143, citing Nick Reid, pers. comm.); and in Guaraní, Huauhtla Nahuatl (Uto-Aztecan), and Panare (Cariban) body part incorporation is more pervasive and frequent than other types of NI (Velazquez-Castillo 1993: 281, Merlan 1976: 188, and Payne 1995: 300-301, respectively) — (32) and (33) are Guaraní exam­ ples; (29) is a Huauhtla Nahuatl example. It thus seems clear that Mithun's claim (1984: 856ff) that this type is secondary, and emerges only in languages that show classifying NI, is in need of revision. (28) Blackfoot (Frantz 1971, cited in Mithun 1984: 858) nit-ssik-o'kakin-aw óma nínaawa I-break-back-him that man 'I broke the man's back/

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(29) Huauhtla Nahuatl (Merlan 1976: 188) ne'čikši-wite?ki 3SG:lSG-foot-hit 'It hit my foot.' A qualification is necessary at this point. The term "body part" NI is somewhat inaccurate: the phenomenon is not normally restricted to body parts, and conversely most languages show body part Ns which do not typically incorporate. In Mayali, according to Evans (1995: 94), the set of Ns which may incorporate like body parts includes items associated with human beings and higher order animates in such a way that they imply or index the existence of the latter — see examples (30), (31) and (43) below. It generally seems, however, that in other languages a smaller range of non-body part Ns incorporate into this type of NI construction. In Warray (Harvey 1995: 128ff), and Guaraní (Velázquez-Castillo 1993: 216-226) an N may be incorporated which designates an aspect of someone's personal sphere or domain (see Bally 1926/1995, and Chappell and McGregor 1995). The term body part NI is retained purely for conven­ ience. (30) Mayali (Evans 1995: 93) na-morrorddo gabi-waral-ma-ng gabi-waral-yi-rrolga-n I-shooting:star 3/3NP-spirit-take-NP 3/3NP-spirit-COM-go:up-NP 'The shooting star [believed to be an agent of death] takes his spirit, and goes up into the sky with his spirit/ (31) Mayali (Evans 1995: 93) David ga-ngey-burrbu-n David 3/3-name-know-NP 'David will know its name/ When a body part N is incorporated, the possessor of the part typically serves a participant role in the clause, normally the one which is most closely associated with NI, the Medium; body parts of Agents often cannot be incorporated. This situation obtains in Mayali (Evans 1995), Guaraní (Velázquez-Castillo 1993) and Warray (Harvey 1995). However, in some languages body parts of Agents can be incorporated. Sapir (1911: 274) cites a number of examples of incorporated body part instruments in transitive clauses — which parts of course belong to the Agent — in Takelma; e.g. daasgek!eïha 'he kept listening', in which daa- 'ear' is incorporated as an instrument.

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In body part NI, by definition, the NP designating the person pos­ sessing the part (rather than the IN denoting the part itself — see e.g. Mithun 1984: 859) serves in a participant role in the clause, and thus possessor "ascension" or "promotion" appears to be involved. This term (originally from Relational Grammar), however, suggests that the con­ struction is derivative, and that the most basic form involves the body part in the participant role. Both of these suggestions are problematic (Chappell and McGregor 1995: 6-7), and for this reason I avoid the terms possessor ascension and possessor promotion — POSSESSOR PARTICIPANT 12 CONSTRUCTION being the preferred alternative. Guaraní examples (32) and (33) illustrate this phenomenon. (32) Guaraní (Velázquez-Castillo 1993: 176) a-hova-hei-ta pe-mitã lAC-face-wash-FUT that-child 'I'll wash that child's mouth.' (33) Guaraní (Velázquez-Castillo 1993: 176) (Che) che-resay-syry (I) lIN-tear-flow 'I cried profusely.' However, as should be expected from previous comments, agnate clauses normally exist in which the body part N is not incorporated. Thus corresponding to the body part NI examples (32) and (33) are the agnates in which the body part N serves in participant roles, Goal and Actor respectively: (34) Guaraní (Velázquez-Castillo 1993: 176) a-johei-ta pe-mitä rova lAC-face-wash-FUT that-child face 'I'll wash that child's face.' (35) Guaraní (Velázquez-Castillo 1993: 176) che-resay o-syry UN-tear 3AC-flow 'My tears flowed.' It seems that at least in some languages incorporated body part Ns may serve a classifying function: they may classify the V as described in the previous section. Thus, Velázquez-Castillo (1993: 153) argues that body part NI in Guaraní has a similar "lexicalising" effect as non-body

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part incorporation: it is employed to designate culturally defined and institutionalised kinds of activities, social frames and emotions; it desig­ nates a unitary concept. Particularly clear illustration of the classifying effect of the IN is provided by the following agnates: (36) Guaraní (Velázquez-Castillo 1993: 208) ha'e o-ñe-mbe-su'u o-maña yvy-re hase-ta katu-ete s/he 3AC-RFL-lip-bite -look ground-at 3IN-cryalmost 'He bit his lip, looked at the ground on the verge of crying/ (37) Guaraní (Velázquez-Castillo 1993: 207) o-karu-aja oi-su'u hembe 3AC-eat-while -bite his lip 'While eating he bit his lip/ In the NI construction (36) not only is the person more emotionally affected than in (37), but also the IN serves to indicate a particular kind of biting, namely lip-biting, which, as Velázquez-Castillo (1993: 208) indi­ cates, suggests that the person is in a particular emotional state. Lip-biting is not involved in (37); here the lip was inadvertently bitten while the person was eating. Similarly, in (33) 'tear' specifies the kind of flowing that the speaker was engaged in as an Actor, namely crying. By contrast, in the unincorporated agnate of (35) classification of the process of flowing is not involved: what is being described here is simply a process of flowing engaged in by the 'tears' as Actor. Velázquez-Castillo (1993: 234ff) discusses at length the factors motivating choice between NI and expression by an external NP, conclud­ ing that: [... ] incorporation of body-part terms serves a descriptive purpose in the discourse even when the sentence is in the narrative mode. Using both NI and PA [possessor ascension], the story teller offers an interpretational comment on the personality, emotional state, or physical appearance of a participant currently in focus. The descrip­ tion can be of four types: i) an interpretational comment on the significance of a narrated event or its effect on a prominent partici­ pant, ii) a portrayal of bodily activities as manifestations of the emotional or mental state of discourse participants, iii) a construal of bodily activities as characteristic or habitual behaviour, and iv) construal of a body-part quality as a permanent physical character­ istic of the participant. (Velázquez-Castillo 1993: 260)

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Similarly, Mithun (1995: 646) suggests that incorporated body part Ns in Mohawk — like other INs — serve to narrow the scope of the V, i.e. to classify it. And Harvey (1995: 146) comments that INs "modify" the verb in Warray. It thus appears that body part incorporation is a type of classifying incorporation, the IN classifying the V. This, however, does not appear to be universally the case for body part NI. In Mayali, for example, body part incorporation does not systematically or consistently serve a classifying function. Rather, according to Evans (1995), grounding is the primary factor — incorporated body part Ns are backgrounded, while non-incorporation of eligible body-part nominais signals discourse salience due to various factors: conjunction, contrast, and independ­ ent interest as a discourse participant. Note that although physical or cognitive separation may on occasion go together with discourse salience, ... the two factors are in principle independent, and have different formal realizations: discourse salience is shown by nonincorporation; cognitive separation by encoding as a distinct argu­ ment and control of person and number marking by the body part. (Evans 1995: 101) Backgrounding appears also to be involved in body part NI in languages such as Guaraní (Velázquez-Castillo 1993: 261-269) and Warray (Harvey 1995: 130). However, in these languages grounding is presumably a contextually engendered semantic interpretation, rather than part of the inherent meaning of body part NI. To decide which type of body part NI is represented in a particular language is not a simple matter — and there is no reason why both types should not co-exist in a language. To distinguish between them requires a level of descriptive detail not found in the majority of accounts of the phenomenon. Nevertheless, it appears that one type and/or the other is always involved in body part NI. Payne (1995: 301), for example, suggests that incorporation of body part Ns in Panare indicates "that an activity of removal or destruction of some part of something else has been completely accomplished". By contrast, the agnate with external NP denoting the body part, is employed when the activity has less effect on the part — and thus as a consequence,less effect on the whole. Body part NI in Panare is most likely of the grounding type, the part being naturally backgrounded when the whole is most affected by the action (see further Chappell and McGregor eds. 1995). However, it could also be classifying: parts which

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have been totally affected by actions provide reasonable means of classi­ fying actions, more so than do parts which are only slightly affected. In the next section I discuss how backgrounding NI can be analysed grammatically. 3.3. Textural NI Incorporated Ns other than body part Ns may also be used to background given or incidental information. As Mithun (1984: 859) points out, lan­ guages which show this type of NI — which she dubs Type III "The manipulation of discourse structure" — are always polysynthetic lan­ guages whose verbal construction is particularly complex, and contains pronominal affixes cross-referencing the major clausal participant roles, as well as other inflections for tense, mood and aspect. The verb carries in an attenuated form the bulk of the information essential to the clause, and often clauses consist of verbal complexes alone. Huauhtla Náhuatl, shows this type of NI (in addition to classif icatory and body part NI). According to Merlan (1976: 185), when a new entity is introduced into discourse, it is typically designated by an "external" NP; subsequent references to it may be by means of an IN, as in (38). (38) Huauhtla Nahuatl (Merlan 1976: 185) A: aske-man ti-?-kwa nakatl never you-it-eat meat 'You never eat meat.' B: na? ipanima ni-naka-kwa I always I-meat-eat 'I eat meat all the time/ In (38), the meat is non-specific and indefinite. But an incorporated N may have a quite definite and specific referent, even though it may not be marked as definite. This is illustrated by the instrument incorporation in (39): (39) Huauhtla Nahuatl (Merlan 1976: 185) :  eltok koclllo? na1 ni-?-neki amanci where it:is knife I I-it-want now 'Where is the knife? I want it now/ B: ya? ki-kocilio-tete+ki panei he he/it-knife-cut bread 'He cut the bread with it (the knife)/

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Another example is provided by (40), from the Paleo-Siberian lan­ guage Koryak. Observe that when it is first mentioned an "external" NP is employed to designate the whale; thereafter the N is incorporated. (40) Koryak (Mithun 1984: 862) wutcu iñínñin yúñi qulaívun. mal-yúñi. this:time:only such whale it:comes good-whale ga-yuñy-upényilenau. they-whale-attacked 'This is the first time that such a whale has come near us. It is a good one (whale). They attacked it (the whale)/ Mithun (1984: 859) suggests that what is involved in this type of NI is backgrounding: the N is backgrounded once it has been introduced; she does not however make any tangible suggestions as to how the IN should be analysed grammatically. An alternative proposal, which can be incor­ porated within grammatical theory, is that the IN serves a TEXTURAL function. More specifically, the IN serves to establish an anaphoric referential-type link with a previous mention of the N in an "external" NP, or (less commonly), an exophoric link with some entity present in the referent world of the discourse. As Merlan (1976: 177) puts it in her seminal discussion of the discourse status of NI in Huauhtla Nahuatl: In terms of discourse, it is possible to show that incorporated nouns serve to maintain definiteness of discourse reference by functioning as anaphors which maintain -reference with previously introduced lexical nouns. Because the lexical properties of nouns are preserved under incorporation, noun incorporation functions as a strong refer­ ence-maintaining device intermediate between complete repetition of the co-referential adjunct and complete anaphoric pronominalisation. Similarly, according to Evans (forthcoming), INs in Mayali are "fre­ quently used to track non-human referents in discourse". What is involved in this type of NI is a type of cohesion which is both lexical and referential (Halliday and Hasan 1976) or indexical in the Peircian sense (e.g. Sebeok 1994: 31-33). The INs typically relate to their referents by establishing a lexical tie to a previous mention in an "exter­ nal" NP. They may be understood as indices which achieve their effect not in terms of the usual categories of deixis, person, number, gender and so on, but in terms of the experiential type of thing referred to, as is indicated

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by the lexical item itself — which can of course be used as effectively to identify the intended referent as any of the other categories. This account predicts that NI should normally be found once the N has already been introduced. This prediction is borne out in most lan­ guages which show this type of NI, including such diverse languages as Mayali (Evans 1995: 97 and forthcoming), Chuckchee (Mithun 1984), Tewa (Mithun 1986a), Mohawk (Mithun 1986a), Huauhtla Nahuatl (Merlan 1976), and many others. Sadock (1986) has, however, raised questions about the validity of this prediction. Part of his objection is based on evidence from Greenlandic; this may be disregarded since it is not true NI (see section 1 above). But he also questions it in regard to Tiwa, which does have NI, citing a counterexample from Harrington's (1910) Tiwa text. However, as Sadock (1986: 25) admits, this example involves an inanimate object — a type which is obligatorily incorporated in the language. Moreover, there is an obvious way to account for such counter­ examples within the parameters of my proposed analysis, as we will now see. Anaphoric reference is, of course, only one of a number of types of reference. And just as pronominal and determiner reference can also be cataphoric (forward-linking) or exophoric (referring outside of the text), it should not be too surprising if the type of reference in NI was not restricted to anaphoric reference. In Mayali, for example, an IN can establish an exophoric link to some referent that has not been mentioned in the previous discourse, but is either given in the context of speech — as is the case in example (41) — or predictable from the preceding discourse (Evans 1991: 273). Mithun (1986a: 34) cites a similar Mohawk example in which the IN has no free lexical anaphor, but the previous clause contains the verb 'eat soup'; the IN 'soup' may thus presumably be regarded as textually given. (41) Mayali (Evans 1991: 273) bonj ba-rrolkka-ng ba-bolk-melme-ng ba-rra-nginj gamak OK 3P-get:up-PP 3P-ground-tread-PP 3P-stand-PP good 'OK. He got up, he tested his foot on the ground, he put his weight on it, it was alright.' Furthermore, as (42) demonstrates, IN is possible in Mayali with verbs of stance in presentative constructions: typically, a generic N is incorporated into the verb, and this is followed in the same clause by an

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external specific NP. In this construction it could be proposed that the IN generic serves as a cataphoric index for the following specific NP — and an inanimate entity which is introduced in this way may persist in the discourse, being subsequently indexed by an IN alone (Evans 1991: 274). (42) Mayali (Evans 1991: 274) gonhdah ga-rrulk-di an-dubang here 3sgNP-tree-standNP III-ironwood:tree 'There's an ironwood tree here/ It should now be clear that the grammatical relationship involved in body part NI in Mayali is textural. This accounts for the fact that body part incorporation extends to a larger class of non-body part Ns than usual, embracing bodily products, exuviae, etc. — see example (43). As men­ tioned in the previous section, the important thing about this type of IN is that the IN implies or indexes the existence of the relevant animate being (Evans 1995: 94). (43) Mayali (Evans 1995: 94) na-wurrkbil ga-yed-yo-0 I-eagle 3NP-nest-lie-NP 'There is the eagle's nest/ I maintain that classifying and textural NI are fundamentally dis­ tinct, and involve completely different grammatical structures — i.e. they are grammatical signs of different semiotic types. There is no significant semantic commonality between them. Thus I disagree with Mithun (1984: 863, 1986a and 1986b: 379, 382), who suggests that the primary function of all types of NI is to "qualify the host verb", narrowing its scope. A classifying interpretation would, for example, be highly improbable for (39)B, given its context of occurrence — the interaction was concerned with the location of a particular knife, not with distinguishing types of cutting. Similar remarks hold for the other examples cited in Merlan (1976: 184-185), and likewise the examples of this type of NI in Evans (forthcoming). 13 This is not to say that textural INs never admit the classificatory interpretation; sometimes they do, as might be possible for examples (38), (40) and (41) above. This, however, is a consequence of the fact that Mediums — and thus their incorporated counterparts — not infrequently serve to narrow the scope of the verb, albeit in a non-semiotically signifi-

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cant way. Textural NI does not involve classification, although some examples may admit this interpretation — just as some grammatical Agents may admit patientive interpretations (as in e.g. He received a resounding whack on the back of the head). 3.4. Other types of NI? Mithun (1984) distinguishes a fourth type of NI, Type IV "Classificatory noun incorporation" (not to be confused with my classifying NI). In this type the IN is a relatively general N which may be accompanied by a more specific "external" NP which further specifies and characterises its refer­ ent. On subsequent mentions, the IN may occur alone, without an external NP. Because the IN is relatively generic, what may result is a system which classifies Ns. Examples (44) and (45) from the Amerindian language Caddo (Caddoan, Oklahoma) illustrate this: the incorporated N clearly serves as a sortal classifier, distinguishing between coffee in a liquid form and coffee in a powder form — a distinction which might be made in a noun-classifier language by means of a nominal classifier. (44) Caddo (Mithun 1986b: 386) kapi: kancâmïah coffee liquid-buy-past 'He bought (liquid) coffee/ (45) Caddo (Mithun 1986b: 386) kapi: dân:câ:ni'ah coffee powder-buy-past 'He bought (ground) coffee/ The Brazilian language Tariana also incorporates nominal classifi­ ers in certain types of clause, including passives (example (46)), relative clauses and purposive clauses (Aikhenvald 1994: 426-427). In (46) -ku is a classifier meaning 'folded stretch of cloth'. (46) Tariana (Aikhenvald 1994: 426)  iri-peri-ne na-pita-ni-ku hammock red-CL:ABSTR-INSTR 3PL-paint-PASS-CL:HAMMOCK 'Hammock has been painted red/ Mithun's type IV NI is, I would argue, a subtype of textural NI, in which the IN is generic in nature, and by virtue of this may impose a classification on Ns. But the "may" is crucial here. A system of NI which

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incorporates generics need not necessarily deploy them in N classifica­ tion. For instance, in Mayali around 30 generic Ns are incorporable; however, these INs do not appear to serve as classifiers of "external" Ns. In terms of the way in which it is employed in discourse, Type IV NI is clearly a type of textural NI. Noun classification is an "optional extra" which may be shown by some systems of generic NI. But this is no more inherent to NI than is the phenomenon of noun classes inherent to pro­ nominal cross-referencing in languages in which cross-referencing pro­ nominal prefixes index third person referents according to their noun class. Cross-referencing as a grammatical phenomenon has to do with the marking of grammatical roles (McGregor in press); as a system, it indexes referent NPs according to their person, number and possibly noun class. It thus appears that Mithun's Type III and Type IV NI are grammati­ cally identical, and represent a type of textural NI in which the incorpo­ rated N links by means of a lexical tie to a previous occurrence of the N. Neither backgrounding nor noun classification are parts of the inherent meaning of the construction, although they may be part of the associated contextual meanings. (We return to this point below.) Another type of NI is found in Rembarrnga (non-Pama-Nyungan, Arnhem Land): secondary predicate incorporation. (See Nichols 1978 on secondary predication.) Examples (47) and (48) are illustrative. The Amerindian languages Iroquois and Pawnee also show this type of NI (Sapir 1911: 258); and Mainland Comox permits incorporation of primary predicates (i.e. attributes in relational clauses), as in (49). (47) Rembarrnga (McKay 1975: 290) Ø-kartpurr-many 3:min :S-wounded-went '(The buffalo) went off wounded.' (48) Rembarrnga (McKay 1975: 292) kalij-0-ma panta yarra-turra-ra-0 others-NOM-ma here l:aug:S-alive-go-PRES 'Others of us are still (getting around) alive/ (49) Mainland Comox (Hagège 1978: 69) not:be-lp.subj./bad-woman-lp.inf. 'I am not a bad woman/ This type of NI is fairly clearly not classifying. 14 It may, however, be amenable to description in terms of the general parameters of the frame-

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work laid out in this paper. Simultaneous with the attribution by the IN of a quality to the Actor, it is possible that the IN relates to the V by means of a temporal logical relationship — i.e. it is specified that the attribute holds when or while the Actor is engaged in the situation (see Nichols 1978, McGregor in press: section 5.2.2). (This opens up the possibility that there may be other types of NI in which the IN relates to the verb by logical relationships (as per McGregor in press: chapter 5) other than these two.) A more likely possibility is that this is a second type of textural NI, in which the linking relationship is not one of lexical reference, in which a referent is indexed, but one in which a link is established with a property or quality. No discourse context is provided for the examples cited in McKay (1975), but they are of types which suggest previous mention, or at least predictability (givenness) of the quality: one would expect (47) in a context in which it was clear that a buffalo had been wounded, and (48) in a context in which the quality of being alive was at stake. Similar remarks hold for (49): as is well known, negative utterances are generally restricted to circumstances in which the proposition — in this case, the possession of the quality by the speaker — is presupposed, in which case the quality would be also given. The quality is doubtless also back­ grounded, as one would naturally expect for secondary predication. Some NI languages permit the phenomenon of "doubling", in which an external NP occurs which is lexically identical with the verb-internal IN (e.g. Sadock 1991, Rosen 1989, Rosen 1990, etc.). Rembarrnga exam­ ples (50) and (51) are illustrative. 15 1 suggest that it is reasonable to regard this type of NI as textural. (50) Rembarrnga (McKay 1975: 296) amunungku?-Ø ka-yi-nguwaØ-many white:ochre-NOM 3sg.INTR.S-COMIT-white:ochre-went 'Some white ochre arrived (i.e. brought by someone)/ (51) Rembarrnga (McKay 1975: 296) kaja-0 par-kajal-ta-nginy paperbark-NOM 3min:O-3aug:A-paperbark-stand(CAUS)-PAST:CONT 'They would spread paperbark (on the ground)/ 4. NI and related grammatical phenomena Before bringing the paper to a conclusion attention should be drawn to the fact that NI does not stand alone: there are a number of other grammatical

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phenomena which relate to — resemble and contrast with — it in a variety of ways. First, classifying NI relates to at least one other grammatical phe­ nomenon. The type of classification involved with NI is subclassification: the incorporated N serves to characterise some subset of the processes designated by V. Another type of classification is superclassification. Here the classifying unit serves to indicate the generic type or supertype to which the classified unit belongs. Whereas subclassification is compa­ rable with the type of classification found in the English NP, superclassification resembles the type of noun classification found in languages like Chinese and various South-East Asian and Amerindian languages, where the classifier indicates the general type of thing that the referent of the N is: e.g. whether it is a long thin object, a round object, or whatever. In superclassification everything that might be referred to by any N is potentially grouped into one of a relatively small number of classes; in subclassification, it is the things that might be referred to by some particular N that are assigned to classes. Superclassification of Vs is found in some languages. Many lan­ guages of the northern part of Western Australia and Northern Territory show a "compound" verb construction in which an (almost) invariant preverb occurs together with an inflecting verb, as in the following examples from Warrwa (a Nyulnyulan language spoken near Derby, in the Western Kimberley): (52) jidlarra ngindan descend he:goes 'He's descending/ (53) lakarr jan climb he:does 'He's climbing/ This preverb-inflecting verb construction is a verb superclassifying system in which the inflecting verb classifies the preverb (see e.g. McGregor 1990a for Gooniyandi; 1993 for Nyulnyul; and 1994 for Warrwa; see also Silverstein 1986 for a similar claim in regard to Worrorra). The inflecting verb indicates the type of action involved: it divides actions into a relatively small number — usually between half a dozen and a score — of different types. The criteria employed for division into types are varied, but fall into two major groups: Aktionsart (aspectual

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character) and voice. For example, the dozen verb classifiers in Gooniyandi distinguish processes according to two primary dimensions: whether they are accomplishments (have an inherent end point) or extendible (have no inherent end point, and can potentially continue forever); and simultane­ ously according to whether the process is reflexive/reciprocal, inherently monovalent, or inherently bivalent. Classifying NI is a similar grammatical phenomenon to verb classi­ fication; but there are genuine grammatical differences between them (cf. Mithun (1984: 874), who treats the verb classification system of languages such as Walmajarri as involving NI). The differences relate principally to the "direction" that the logical relationship takes. In NI the V is subclassified, and the referent processes divided into contrasting types; in verb classification it is superclassified, and grouped together with other verbs according to shared commonalities which indicate that they are of the same general type. Second, textural NI must be compared with the grammatical phe­ nomenon of cross-referencing by means of bound pronominal affixes within the verb. Both are textural-grammatical means for linking linguis­ tic and extra-linguistic phenomena. They differ in terms of the criteria they invoke for the identification of their referents: person, number, gender, etc. vs. lexical category. Thus there is, as Evans (forthcoming) points out, "a significant complementarity of overt coding between pro­ nominal affixes and incorporated nomináis" — contrary to Sapir's claim that the two phenomena are not analogous (1911: 251). This account of textural NI provides a natural explanation of the fact that NI favours inanimates. Reference by means of free pronouns tends to be strongly associated with humans and higher-order animates, rather than with inanimates in many languages — e.g. in Gooniyandi it is highly unusual for the free third person pronoun niyi 'he, she, it' to be employed in reference to an inanimate. If reference is made to a previously men­ tioned inanimate by means of an NP, this will have a lexical, rather than pronominal, head. That is, textural links to human (and to a lesser extent animate) referents are by means of the system of personal reference; to inanimates it is typically by means of lexical links or ties (possibly together with spatial deixis). Granted that "person" is the category most closely associated with indexing humans and animates, it is not unex­ pected that cross-referencing pronominalisation is associated with ani­ mates, and NI with inanimates.

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This conclusion is in fundamental agreement with Evans' (forthcom­ ing) observation that in Mayali there is a "functional complementarity between the pronominal prefix slot, which is adapted to code information about humans [...] and the incorporated nominal slot, adapted to code information about inanimates". Taken together, these systems function in such a way as to maximise the degree of morphological representation of participants within the verbal distributional word. Furthermore, Mayali shows a verbal applicative affix -yi- which occurs with transitive verbs; the clause has two "objects": a Goal, and a "comitative object" (i.e. a second object which corresponds with a comitative PP in an agnate transitive clause). Only one of these "objects" may be incorporated, and the choice of which is incorporated is explicable, according to Evans, only in terms of referential prototypes: a pronominal prefix will cross-refer­ ence that "object" that is prototypically human; an IN will designate that "object" that is prototypically inanimate. Thus, the comitative object of 'follow' is prototypically inanimate, and so the verb shows an IN linking to it in (54). On the other hand, it is the Goal of 'put' which is prototypi­ cally inanimate, and thus is linked to by an IN in (55). (54) Mayali (Evans forthcoming) an -madj-yi-kadju ~ng 3/1-swag-COM-follow-PP 'He follows me in the swag/with respect to the swag.' [Of colovers taking turns to sleep in the same woman's bed.] (55) Mayali (Evans forthcoming) an-kole-yi-kurrme 3/l-spear-COM-put:NP 'He puts the spear with me, leaves the spear with me/ In polysynthetic languages like Mayali the verbal distributional word becomes, as it were, a minor replica of the clause, capable of standing alone as the sole overt element. This is possible not because the verb contains within it the inherent participant roles, but because it contains within its boundary as a distributional word elements which establish links to these roles, either by person, number (etc.), or by lexical means. This permits an account of textural incorporation which does not conflict with the transitivity hypothesis of Semiotic Grammar (on which see above and McGregor in press: section 4.2.1). Loosely, the existence of cross-referencing pronominals and textural NI in polysynthetic languages might be seen as consequences of a tendency in such languages towards

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representing full clauses in single distributional — but not grammatical — words. 5. Conclusions This paper has not attempted a systematic typological investigation of NI based on a statistically significant sampling of languages. Rather, my concern has been to suggest some ways in which NI may be accounted for grammatically, in particular, within the parameters of Semiotic Grammar (McGregor 1990b, in press). I am well aware that I have only scratched the surface of a very complex set of phenomena, and much more work needs to be done to adequately substantiate my proposals. The evidence discussed in this paper demonstrates that NI is not a clausal phenomenon, that INs are not clausal constituents serving partici­ pant (or argument) roles. They serve either logical (classifying) or textural functions (lexical-indexical), not experiential ones. These two types of NI are grammatically distinct. One manifestation of their distinctiveness concerns the possibility of occurrence of an NP in a corresponding external participant role. This is impossible for classifying NI (which is unsurprising, given that these INs have no referent), but possible in many languages for textural NI (see also Rosen 1989: 311). The question naturally arises as to how and why two such semiotically distinct grammatical relationships should come to share such similar formal realisations: why should phenomena from quite different semiotic domains both be realised by means of tight-knit N+V constructions? It seems to me that body part incorporation provides an answer. As we saw in section 3.2, body part incorporation in languages such as Guaraní is of the classifying type. Perhaps it is actually the most funda­ mental type of classifying NI, which represents the earliest manifestation of the phenomenon in languages. Non-body part classifying NI may be less basic, and may emerge later (cf. Mithun 1984: 874). We also saw that body part NI constructions serve a backgrounding function. Such a func­ tion could easily develop over time into a textural function: backgrounded Ns are prototypically given, and thus the IN could be linked to a previous occurrence of the N (or of some other N designating that entity). This textural-linking function could ultimately be reanalysed as inherently associated with NI, replacing classification. Grammatical reanalysis, from dependency to linking, would accompany this reinterpretation of the

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core meaning of NI. Once this reanalysis has occurred, a widening.of the range of Ns that can occur in the NI construction from body part to generic Ns would then account for the emergence of fully generalised textural NI. According to this scenario, the link between the two types of NI is not established by virtue of an inherent connection between the two construc­ tions themselves. Rather, it is established via an association, contextually driven, between subtypes of the two grammatical types, between body part NI representing possessor participant construction, and grounding. If such a historical scenario could be validated, it would indicate that there is no semiotic (semantic) commonality between the two types of NI, and that there is no need to seek any deep connection between them, as does Mithun (1984 and 1986a). Such a scenario is quite consistent with patterns of grammaticalisation found cross-linguistically. As Hopper and Traugott (1993) point out, grammaticalisation typically begins in a "corner" of the grammar, apply­ ing to a small subset of the phenomenon in question, gradually working outwards from there. Thus, for example, body part incorporation in Mayali has apparently shifted functionally so far towards the grounding usage that it has been reanalysed grammatically as textural NI. It is hypothesised that all languages show globally comparable experiential (i.e. constituency) organisations, such that roles like Actor, Agent, Medium and so on will prove to be universal clausal roles (McGregor in press: section 4.2.1). Phenomena such as NI and crossreferencing bound pronominals in verbs do not indicate essential differ­ ences among languages in terms of their experiential organisation: they have nothing to do with the experiential semiotic. Rather, they represent grammatical phenomena of the logical and textural types. Thus I am in complete agreement with Mark Baker that: [...] there are no radical differences in the underlying configurationality of languages along the lines that have often been discussed; for example, there would be no "non-configurational" languages (lan­ guages with no VP at any level) [or, I would add, "flat languages" (languages without NPs, such as has been claimed of some Austral­ ian languages) — WMcG] (Baker 1993: 26) As he goes on to say, polysynthetic languages and the more familiar isolating types of language share the same underlying — I would say experiential — structures. 16

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The way I have conceptualised the phenomenon of noun incorpora­ tion is compatible with the ways Sapir (1911), Mithun (1984, 1986a, 1986b), Harvey (1995), Evans (1995 and forthcoming), and various other linguists have conceptualised it. A radically different conceptualisation has been promoted by Jerrold Sadock, who, as mentioned previously, includes various types of denominal verbal constructions under the rubric of NI. What Sadock proposes is a characterisation of incorporation which relates to the morphology-syntax divide. He conceives of incorporation as "referring] to any morphological process (other than cliticization) that produces morphological units in which some of the morphological con­ stituents can be shown to have independent syntactic reality" (Sadock 1991: 100-101). To put things simply, incorporation for Sadock encom­ passes a set of grammatical phenomena which bridge the morphologysyntax divide, just as does the phenomenon of cliticisation, which he explicitly links to NI.I would strongly resist such a characterisation of NI; it seems preferable to conceive of it in semiotic terms, rather than in terms of boundary-defying and/or boundary-defining phenomena. A characteri­ sation of the latter type is fundamentally unsuitable in my view. Among other things, adopting it means that far too many disparate phenomena, bearing no relationship whatever to one another, will be grouped together, while other phenomena which clearly belong together are separated, and treated as though they are markedly different. For instance, NI in Oceanic languages would be excluded, since full words are always involved. Notes 1.

This paper reports on an investigation which is corollary to my current research into verb classification in the Aboriginal languages of the Kimberley region of Western Australia, supported by an Australian Research Council Research Fel­ lowship (A9324000) and Grant (A59332055). I am grateful to Claude Hagège, Mark Harvey, Graham McKay, Dirk Noël and an anonymous referee for useful comments on earlier versions of this paper.

2.

The term West Coast Functional Grammar refers to the theoretical paradigm adopted by a loosely-knit community of researchers working mainly on the West Coast of the United States of America, including e.g. Wallace Chafe, Talmy Givón and Sandra Thompson. This is not an 'all-or-nothing' theory, but rather a collection of strategies and assumptions, from which researchers pick and choose. Partly for this reason, those working within this paradigm are reluctant to label it a 'theory', and generally eschew the label 'West Coast Functional Grammar' — which is adopted here for convenience of reference.

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3.

In the glosses for Southern Tiwa, A indicates singular for animate nouns, and some inanimates;  indicates plural for animate nouns and some inanimates, as well as singular inanimates; and  indicates plural inanimate. In general I employ the abbreviations and glosses of the sources — as well as the orthography (although in some cases a modified practical alternative is used, which avoids diacritics and digraphs) — without providing explanation. This should cause little confusion since the phenomena at issue here relate specifically to the N and V in the verbal construction, and not to the various inflectional and derivational morphemes that may also occur within it; and in most cases the abbreviations are self evident.

4.

As Harvey (1995: 135-137) points out, there are problems with the way Sapir and Mithun draw the distinction between NI and denominal verb constructions. In Warray there are N+V constructions in which both the N and the V may occur independently, but the construction appears to resemble a denominal verb con­ struction more than a NI construction. The verb bu-m 'to hit', for example, functions productively as a factitive denominaliser meaning 'to make X', as in wek-bu-m 'to make a fire' (from wek 'fire'). Slight modifications to Sapir's (1911) and Mithun's (1984) characterisations would exclude the Warray denomi­ nal constructions without the need to invoke Harvey's requirement that the N bear an argument role — a requirement which, as we will see, runs into difficulties.

5.

This situation resembles the situation in phonology where two contrasting phonemes may fail to contrast in certain environments, as a result of contextual features. For instance, in English the contrast between /p/ and /b/ is neutralised following /s/: no minimal pairs exist for these two phonemes in this environment. But this fact in itself adds further support to the proposal that /p/ and /b/ contrast in terms of the feature [±voice]: only the phoneme showing a negative value of this feature occurs following a consonant which is marked as [-voice].

6.

In Guaraní body part Ns may also be incorporated if they belong to subjects of verbless relational clauses, as in che-resa-guasu [HN-eye-big] 'I have big eyes' (Velazquez-Castillo 1993: 118). This of course does not satisfy the definition of NI adopted in this work, which requires that the IN be incorporated into a V. This type of incorporation is, in fact, quite common in incorporating languages. So also is the incorporation of nomináis which express attributes in the correspond­ ing clauses with verbs of stance or being. We briefly return to the latter construc­ tion in section 3.4 below.

7.

It has been suggested to me that this example involves the incorporation of an instrument, and thus is consistent with hierarchy (11). This is not, however, the case. In Warray, as in many other Australian Aboriginal languages, the external body part expression in such constructions is an unmarked (or absolutive) NP, exactly as is the expression representing the whole to which the part belongs. The former NP serves as a type of Range (defined approximately as per Halliday 1985: 134) associated with the Actor — McGregor (1985); Harvey (1995). This is illustrated in:

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Warray (Harvey 1995: 147) an-nebe at-nabat-nyim yumbal-lik Ill-hand lsgS-hand-enter log-LOC 'I put my hand in the log.' [Literally: 'Hand, I hand-entered the log.'] 8.

Similar suggestions have been made by other linguists. Talmy (1985: 102), for instance, suggests that INs are verbal satellites, peripheral modifiers of the verb head which go together to form a unit with the V. However, Talmy goes no further than this vague proposal, and does not discuss the semantics of the modifying relationship. The point I am making is that the relationship is not attribution, but classification.

9.

However, I am sceptical that lexicalisation is necessarily involved in this type of NI, and that the referent event need be an institutionalised, culturally significant activity. For instance, in the following Blackfoot examples (from Frantz 1971, cited in Mithun 1984: 858), it seems unlikely that lexicalisation is necessarily involved, or that getting and giving balls are culturally significant acts: iihpokón-sskaawa nóko'sa ball-acquire:he myxhild 'My child got a ball.' nít-ohpokón-sskoawa nóko'sa I-ball-acquire.him myxhild 'I provided my child with a ball.' The weaker claim that the collocation of IN and verb represent a single unitary action appears, however, to be valid. It has been suggested more generally that compounding and classification are possible only when the resulting collocation designates something which is culturally significant. Thus, Mithun (1984: 848) suggests that berry money "might be used by someone employed as a berry-picker, but probably not by someone unexpectedly spying boysenberries at the market". However, as Graham McKay has pointed out to me (pers. comm.), berry money could be used by interactants budgeting for berries in a market, even if on a one-off basis. And like Mithun (1984), Harvey (1992) proposes that nominal pairs involving classifica­ tion in Gooniyandi must be culturally relevant. However, as McGregor (1992) points out , NPs such as labawoo jiga [white flower] 'white flower' involve classification, but there is no evidence that white flowers had any cultural significance to the Gooniyandi.

10.

It is expected that the same activity of drying clothes could be designated in some language by an IN 'line', as this would serve to distinguish this type of putting from other types which do not involve this final destination for the thing moved.

11.

Harvey (1995: 145-146) suggests that this type of NI involves incorporation of the Range (as per Halliday 1985: 134). However, he fails to say anything about

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the role of the IN beyond the comment that "[t]he relationship between the incorporated noun and the verb appears to be one of modification". In as much as the Range is like a non-participant Medium, it would seem to be a good candidate for incorporation. 12.

Mithun (1984) refers to body part NI as Type II 'The manipulation of case', based on the idea that the incorporation of the body part N permits or licences possessor ascension. This view runs into difficulties, not just those inherited from the notion of possessor ascension, but also because in languages such as Warray NI requires the possessor participant construction, but the latter does not require NI (Harvey 1995: 141).

13.

It has been suggested to me that there is a good deal of overlap between the range of verbs which occur or do not occur in classificatory and textural NI, and therefore that there is indeed a link between the two types. Irrespective of the truth or falsity of this claim, no significant connection between the grammatical relationships necessarily follows. The grammatical roles of Agent ("transitive subject") and Goal ("transitive object"), in English, for example, show a consid­ erable deal of overlap, without this being taken to indicate any significant link between them.

14.

It has been pointed out to me that examples such as (47) also admit classifying interpretations, that the IN indicates a subtype of the general type specified by the lexical verb: the type of motion is that associated with a wounded animal. The classifying interpretation seems, however, less natural for example (48) — which does not (according to the gloss) designate a type of going — and for an IN construction such as -murnungu-rtij- (killer-return) 'to return (as a) killer' (McKay 1975: 291).

15.

According to McKay (1975: 296, footnote 16), unincorporated nguwal(na) means 'intestines, excrement'. Deposits of white ochre are regarded as the excrement of mythological beings; in (50), however, nguwal appears to be a suppletive form of the N meaning 'white ochre', since it apparently is not employed in reference to either intestines or excrement as an IN.

16.

Baker further proposes that the differences between incorporating polysynthetic languages and isolating languages lie in the way "surface" representations are related to the D[eep]-structures. On this point, of course, we disagree. Polysynthetic and isolating languages do differ significantly in terms of the types of textural relationships they typically manifest, much of the complexity of the verbal word in polysynthetic languages being attributable to an overloading of textural relationships within a single distributional word.

References Aikhenvald, A. 1994. Classifiers in Tariana. Anthropological 407-465.

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Aissen, J. 1991. Relational grammar. In F. Droste and J. Joseph (eds.) Linguistic Theory and Grammatical Description, Amsterdam: Benjamins. 63-102. Allen, ., D. Gardiner and D. Frantz. 1984. Noun incorporation in southern Tiwa. International Journal of American Linguistics 50: 292-311. Baker, M. 1988. Incorporation: A Theory of Grammatical Function Changing. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Baker, M. 1993. Noun incorporation and the nature of linguistic representation. In W. Foley (ed.) The Role of Theory in Language Description. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. 13-44. Bally, C. 1926/1995. L'expression des idées de sphère personnelle et de solidarité dans les langues indo-européennes. In F. Fankhauser and J. Jud (eds.) Festschrift Louis Gauchat. Aarau: Sauerlander. 68-78. Reprinted and translated by Christine Béal and Hilary Chappell, in H. Chappell and W. McGregor (eds.), 31-61. Bresnan, J. and L. Moshi. 1990. Object asymmetries in comparative Bantu syntax. Linguistic Inquiry 21: 147-168. Chappell, H. and W. McGregor. 1995. Prolegomena to a theory of inalienability. In H. Chappell and W. McGregor (eds.), 3-30. Chappell, H. and W. McGregor (eds.) 1995. The Grammar of Inalienability: A Typological Perspective on Body Part Terms and the Part-whole Relation. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Chung, S. 1978. Case Marking and Grammatical Relations in Polynesian. Austin: University of Texas Press. Churchwood,  M. 1953. Tongan Grammar. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Evans, N. 1991. A draft grammar of Mayali. Unpublished manuscript. Evans, N. 1995. The syntax and semantics of body part incorporation in Mayali. In H. Chappell and W. McGregor (eds.), 65-109. Evans, N. forthcoming. Role or cast? Noun incorporation and complex predi­ cates in Mayali. To appear in A. Alcina, J. Bresnan and P. Sels (eds.) Complex Predicates. Stanford: CLSI. Frantz, D. 1971. Toward a Generative Grammar of Blackfoot. Norman, Okla­ homa: Summer Institute of Linguistics. Haas, M. 1941. Noun incorporation in the Muskogean languages. Language 17: 311-315. Hagége, C. 1978. Lexical suffixes and incorporation in Mainland Comox. Forum Linguisticum 3: 57-71. Halliday, M. A. K. 1985. An Introduction to Functional Grammar. London: Arnold. Halliday, M. A. K. and R. Hasan. 1976. Cohesion in English. London: Longman. Harrington, J. 1910. An introductory paper on the Tiwa language, dialect of Taos, New Mexico. American Anthropologist 12: 11-48.

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Harrison, S. 1976. Mokilese Reference Grammar, Honolulu: University Press of Hawaii. Harvey, M. 1992. The noun phrase in Australian languages: A comment. Aus­ tralian Journal of Linguistics 12: 307-319. Harvey, M. 1995. Body parts in Warray. In H. Chappell and W. McGregor (eds.), 111-153. Hopper, P. and S. Thompson. 1984. The discourse basis for lexical categories in universal grammar. Language 60: 703-752. Hopper, P. and E. Traugott. 1993. Grammaticalization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Matisoff, J. 1981. The Grammar of Lahu. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. McGregor, W. 1985. Body parts in Kuniyanti clause grammar. Australian Journal of Linguistics 5: 209-232. McGregor, W. 1990a. A Functional Grammar of Gooniyandi. Amsterdam: Benjamins. McGregor, W. 1990b. The metafunctional hypothesis and syntagmatic relations. Occasional Papers in Systemic Linguistics 4: 5-50. McGregor, W. 1992. The noun phrase as a grammatical category in (some) Australian languages: A reply to Mark Harvey. Australian Journal of Lin­ guistics 12: 315-319. McGregor, W. 1993. Verb classification in Nyulnyul. Unpublished manuscript. McGregor, W. 1994. Warrwa. Munich: Lincom Europa. McGregor, W. in press. Semiotic Grammar. Oxford: Oxford University Press. McKay, G. 1975. Rembarnga: A language of Central Arnhem Land. PhD thesis, ANU. Merlan, F. 1976. Noun incorporation and discourse reference in modern Nahuatl. International Journal of American Linguistics 42: 177-191. Mithun, M. 1984. The evolution of noun incorporation. Language 60: 847-894. Mithun, M. 1986a. On the nature of noun incorporation. Language 62: 32-37. Mithun, M. 1986b. The convergence of noun classification systems. In C. Craig (ed.) Noun Classes and Categorization. Amsterdam: Benjamins. 379-397. Mithun, M. 1995. Multiple reflections of inalienability in Mohawk. In H. Chappell and W. McGregor (eds.), 633-649. Mithun, M. and H. Woodbury. 1980. Northern Iroquoian Texts. (=IJAL Native American Texts Series, 4.) Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Myhill, J. 1992. Typological Discourse Analysis: Quantitative Approaches to the Study of Linguistic Function. Oxford: Blackwell. Payne, T. 1995. Object incorporation in Panare. International Journal of Ameri­ can Linguistics 61: 295-311. Nichols, J. 1978. Secondary predicates. Berkeley Linguistics Society 4: 114-127.

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Rosen, C. 1990. Rethinking Southern Tiwa: The geometry of a triple-agreement language. Language 66: 669-713. Rosen, S. 1989. Two types of noun incorporation: a lexical analysis. Language 65: 294-317. Sadock, J. 1986. Some notes on noun incorporation. Language 62: 19-31. Sadock, J. 1991. Autolexical Syntax: A Theory of Parallel Grammatical Repre­ sentations. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Sapir, E. 1911. The problem of noun incorporation in American languages. American Anthropologist n.s. 13: 250-282. Sebeok, T. A. 1994. An Introduction to Semiotics. London: Pinter. Silverstein, M. 1986. Classifiers, verb classifiers and verbal categories. Pro­ ceedings of the Twelfth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society. 497-514. Talmy, L. 1985. Lexicalization patterns: Semantic structure in lexical forms. In T. Shopen (ed.) Language Typology and Syntactic Description. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 57-149. Velazquez-Castillo, M. 1993. The Grammar of Inalienability: Possession and Noun Incorporation in Paraguayan Guaraní. PhD thesis, University of Cali­ fornia, San Diego.

The formal realization of case and agreement marking A functional perspective Anna Siewierska Lancaster

University

1. Introduction To date most discussions of the formal realizations of case and agreement marking have focused on the nature of the verbal arguments that manifest the two forms of marking. The basic observation that has been made in this regard is that there is a certain degree of complementarity in the nature of the arguments that display case as compared to agreement marking, i.e. that arguments that tend to favour case marking tend not to display agreement and vice versa. While considerable evidence has been cited in the linguistic literature in support of this difference in the formal realiza­ tion of case and agreement marking, to the best of my knowledge the posited difference has not been subjected to wide scale cross-linguistic scrutiny. Consequently several questions remain to be answered. First of all, to what extent is this tendency indeed cross-linguistically valid? Secondly, does it apply both across and within languages? Thirdly, does it hold for all the typological forms of case and agreement marking as reflected in the accusative, ergative, active, tripartite and hierarchical typology. And finally, how does the difference in the type of arguments that manifest the two forms of marking relate to the functions of case and agreement marking? The present paper seeks to shed some light on these issues by examining the formal realization of case and agreement marking

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in accusative, ergative, active, tripartite and hierarchical alignments as manifested in a genetically and aerially stratified sample of 237 lan­ guages. The paper is organized as follows. Section 2 presents the five alignments of case and agreement marking, found among the 237 lan­ guages in the sample and explains the way the alignment systems were established. Section 3 outlines the postulated tendency for complementa­ rity in case and agreement marking in the context of the logically possible realizations of each alignment type. Section 4 documents the patterns of overt and zero marking manifested by the languages with case and agree­ ment marking in the sample both across and within languages and consid­ ers the findings in the light of complementarity in marking hypothesis. And finally in section 5 the observed differences in the formal realization of case and agreement marking are related to the function of case and agreement marking. 2. Morphological alignment The term 'alignment', which is used here as in Harris (1985) and Nichols (1992), among others, may be intuitively understood as reflecting how the two arguments of the transitive verb align with the sole argument of the intransitive verb. The existing possibilities can be most conveniently illustrated using the labels S, A and Ρ introduced by Dixon (1972) and Comrie (1978), where S denotes the sole argument of an intransitive clause, A the agentive argument of a transitive clause and Ρ the patient argument of a transitive clause. The relevant alignment types are shown graphically in Figure 1. In neutral alignment there is no morphological marking of the S, A or P; the three arguments are not distinguished from each other morpho­ logically, hence the term neutral. English may serve as an example of a language with neutral alignment of both nouns and agreement (in other than in the third person present). Note the constant form of the baby and the absence of agreement marking on the verb in (1). (1)

a. b. 

The baby cried. The baby patted the dog. The man fed the baby.

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In accusative alignment the S and A are treated alike, while the Ρ is distinct. Such a system of case marking is to be found in Kannada, for example, as shown in (2); the S and A take the nominative case and the Ρ takes accusative marking. (2)

Kannada (Sridhar 1990: 159, 160) a. HuDuga-0 o:Diho:da boy-nom1 run:pp:go:past:3sg:m 'The boy ran away.' b. HuDuga-0 vis'ala:kSiy-annu maduveya:danu boy:nom Vishalakshi-acc mary:past:3sg:m 'The boy married Vishalakshi.'

Figure 1: Morphological alignment

types

Ergative alignment identifies the S and Ρ in opposition to the A. This is illustrated on the basis of the case marking in the Australian language

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Watjarri where the S and Ρ are marked by the absolutive case and the A by the ergative. (3)

Watjarri (Douglas 1981: 217, 214) a. Mayu-0 yanatjimanja kurl-tjanu child-abs come:pres school-abl 'The child is coming from school.' b. Mayu-ng(k)u tjutju-0 pinja child-erg dog-abs hit:past 'The child hit the dog/

In tripartite alignment each argument is treated differently. In Wangkumara, which is the only language currently attested with tripartite case marking of all nouns, the S occurs in the nominative case, the A in the ergative and the Ρ in the accusative. This is illustrated in (4) (4)

Wangkumara (Breen 1976: 337-338) a. karn-ia yanhthagaria makurr-anrru man-nom walk:pres stick-instr 'The man walks with a stick/ b. karna-ulu kalkanga thithi-nhanha man-erg hif.past dog-acc:nonm:sg 'The man hit the bitch/

Active alignment has two patterns of identification of the S; sometimes it is treated like the A, which in the example in (5) from Laz takes the so-called narrative case, and sometimes like the P, which takes no overt marking. (5)

Laz (Harris 1985: 52) a. koci-k qvilups yeji-0 man-narr kills pig-nom 'The man kills a pig/ b. aya koco-k kai ibirs this man-narr well sings 'This man sings well/  koci-0 yurun man-nom die 'The man dies/

The final alignment type, hierarchical, unlike accusative, ergative, tripar­ tite or active, occurs only with agreement and not with nominal case

THE REALIZATION OF CASE AND AGREEMENT MARKING

185

marking. In hierarchical alignment the treatment of the A and Ρ is dependent on their relative ranking on the referential and/or ontological hierarchies. Whichever is the higher ranking receives special treatment the details of which vary from language to language. The higher ranking argument may be the only one to be overtly marked, or its markers may belong to a special set or occupy a special location. The following example is from Nocte in which the transitive verb may agree with the A as in (6a) or the Ρ as in (6b, c) depending on which is higher on the hierarchy: 1stp > 2ndp > 3rdp. (6)

Nocte (DeLancey 1981: 641) a. nga-ma ate hetho-ang I-erg he:acc teach-1sg 'I will teach him/ b. ate-ma nga-nang hetho-h-ang he-erg I- ace teach-inv-1sg 'He will teach me.'  nang-ma nga hetho-h-ang you-erg I teach-inv-lsg 'You will teach me.'

In Nocte, as in many other languages which have hierarchical agreement, if the higher ranking argument is a P rather than an A, an additional inverse marker occurs on the verb, h, in (6b, c). The recognition of a given alignment type is not uncontroversial, being to a large extent dependent on the type of morphological markers that are taken into account. Accordingly, before we proceed, a few remarks on how alignment types have been established in this study are in order. First of all, in considering case marking I took into account only the case marking of nouns as opposed to pronouns. Secondly I took as a realization of case marking not only affixes but also adpositional and suprasegmental marking. Thirdly in establishing the alignment of verbal agreement I considered person/number/gender affixes, clitics and parti­ cles including forms which are not necessarily adjacent to the verb such as second position clitics. In languages in which the alignment of the person markers differs from that of the number or gender markers, I took into account the alignment of the person markers. I considered a person marker to be an agreement marker only if it was not in complementary distribution

186

ANNA SIEWIERSKA

with a nominal and/or pronominal argument. This means that not all forms of verbal person marking have been encompassed by the investigation. 2 Contrary to what is sometimes suggested, a given alignment is not a characteristic of a language as a whole but rather of specific instantiations of grammatical categories (or rules). Thus not only may the morphological alignment of nominal case marking differ from that of agreement, but there may also be splits in the alignment of nominal case marking or of agreement. These splits are dependent on a range of semantic and prag­ matic factors such as tense/aspect, mood and polarity, humanness/animacy and/or definiteness, person and/or number/gender, main vs. subordinate clause and word order (basic vs. alternative) most of which bear on the relative saliency of discourse referents and/or the obviousness of the semantic relations that they express (Croft 1988). Owing to the existence of various splits in alignment within lan­ guages, in the interest of transparency, in the tables in section 3 I have somewhat simplified the actual combinations of alignment types found among the languages in the sample. First of all, I have taken into account only the alignments found in main, positive, indicative clauses manifest­ ing what is considered to be the basic word order of a language. Secondly, the internal splits in the alignment of case marking or agreement involving combinations of neutral and non-neutral alignment have been reduced to the non-neutral category. Thus, combinations of accusative and neutral, for example, accusative alignment with 1st and 2nd person and neutral with 3rd or accusative alignment with definite arguments and neutral with indefinite are here treated as an instance of accusative alignment. And analogously with respect to ergative and neutral, active and neutral etc. And thirdly, in order to increase the instances of the less frequently occurring alignments, i.e. active, tripartite and hierarchical, in the cases of split alignment involving accusative or ergative and another alignment type, I have taken into account the marking occurring in the non-accusa­ tive and non-ergative alignments. Thus an accusative/tripartite split has been grouped together with tripartite, an ergative/active with active, etc. The accusative/ergative splits are labelled split. 3. The complementarity in marking hypothesis In principle the identification or non-identification of the S with the A and/ or Ρ in each alignment type can be instantiated by several different

THE REALIZATION OF CASE AND AGREEMENT MARKING

187

patterns of overt and zero marking. Beginning with accusative alignment, the common treatment of the S and A as opposed to the Ρ may involve: a. b. c.

zero marking of the S and A and overt marking of the P; overt marking of the S and A and zero marking of the P; one type of overt marking of the S and A and another type of overt marking of the P.

Analogous patterns of marking can be used to identify the S and Ρ as opposed to the A in ergative alignment: a. b. c.

zero marking of the S and Ρ and overt marking of the A; overt marking of the S and Ρ and zero marking of the A; one type of overt marking of the S and Ρ and another type of overt marking of the A.

In active alignment the two forms of marking of the S, one corresponding to the marking of the A and the other to the marking of the P, may be both overt or one may be zero. In the latter case whether the zero marking corresponds to the marking of the A or the Ρ is basically immaterial, though note that in the former case one could say that the active marking is accusatively based, while in the latter ergatively. Thus again there are three possibilities: a. b. c.

overt marking of the A and the Ρ and two forms of overt marking of the S; overt marking of the A and zero marking of the Ρ and correspond­ ing overt and zero marking of the S; zero marking of the A and overt marking of the Ρ and correspond­ ing zero and overt marking of the S.3

In tripartite alignment, the S, A and Ρ may all be overtly marked, or one of the three may have zero marking. There are thus four possibilities: a. b. c. d.

distinct distinct distinct distinct

overt overt overt overt

marking of the S, A and P; marking of the A and Ρ and zero marking of the S; marking of the A and S and zero marking of the P; marking of the S and Ρ and zero marking of the A.

Hierarchical alignment may have an array of formal realizations. Typi­ cally when first or second person interact with third, only the former are

ANNA SIEWIERSKA

188

overtly marked. 4 The overt markers may be the same as those used for S, or there may be special markers for either A or Ρ or both. 5 When both participants are first and second person, both may manifest agreement, or the agreement may be governed by a hierarchy of A > Ρ or Ρ > A or a person hierarchy of 1 > 2 or 2 > 1 or some combination of the two. 6 And when both participants are third person again there are several possibilities: no overt agreement at all, as in Chepang (Caughley 1982) and Tangut (Ebert 1987); agreement with both, as in Galibi (Franchetto 1990) and Cree (Wolfart and Caroll 1981); agreement with the A, as in Kamaiurá (Seki 1990) or agreement with the P. While all the above instantiations of the different alignments are logically possible, only some are claimed to occur. It has been pointed out by several linguists, most notably Moravcsik (1974), Lehmann (1988), Croft (1988) and Primus (1991), that in accusative and ergative align­ ments, which are the only alignments which have been investigated in this respect, agreement is associated with the arguments to the left of > in the hierarchies in (7) and (8) while case marking with the arguments to the right of >. (7) (8)

S/A > Ρ > other S/P > A > other

The hierarchy in (7) is to be understood as specifying that if a language displays accusative case marking, the Ρ will always be overtly marked and if it displays accusative agreement, the agreement will always involve at least the S and A. And analogously with respect to the ergative alignment in (8). Ergative case marking will involve at least the marking of the A, and ergative agreement at least the marking of the S and P. The above hierarchies do not exclude the existence of languages which employ scenario c) for case or agreement marking, i.e. the use of different markers for the SA and Ρ or SP and A respectively. They do, however, exclude languages with employ scenario a) with case marking, i.e. just the overt marking of the SA or SP and languages which utilize scenario b) with agreement, i.e. the overt marking of just the Ρ or just the A. The hierarchies in (7) and (8) also lead one to expect that accusative and ergative case marking of just the Ρ and just the A respectively should be more common than the marking of all three participants. And by the same token accusative and ergative agreement with just the S and A or just the S and Ρ should be more frequent than agreement with all three. What

THE REALIZATION OF CASE AND AGREEMENT MARKING

189

is not clear though, is whether the preferences predicted by the hierarchies should only hold across languages or also within languages. Note that there are languages which have agreement but no case marking, languages which have case but no agreement marking and languages which have both. If the hierarchies in (7) and (8) are assumed to cover also this last set of languages, we would expect there to be more languages in which the arguments manifesting case marking are in complementary distribution with those displaying agreement than languages in which arguments display an overlap in case and agreement marking. Needless to say the hierarchies in (7) and (8) do not cover the marking of arguments in active and tripartite alignments. By definition both these alignments must involve overt marking of at least two participants. None­ theless given the claims that have been made in regard to case and agree­ ment marking in accusative and ergative alignments, the possibility exists that there may be a comparable difference with respect to case and agree­ ment marking of one of the arguments in active and tripartite alignments. Having presented the logically possible realizations of each align­ ment type and the set of formal realizations consistent with and specified as preferred by the complementarity in marking hypothesis, we now turn to an investigation of the formal realization of case and agreement marking in the 237 language sample (see appendix). 4. The cross-linguistic data Among the languages in the sample the distribution of case marking is considerably less frequent than that of agreement. Whereas just over half (51%) of the 237 language have case marking of the nominal S, A or P, agreement is manifested by 77% of the languages. As previous investiga­ tions, most notably that of Nichols (1992), would lead one to expect, accusative alignment is the most common alignment with both case (27%) and agreement (55%) marking. As for the other alignment types, ergative and tripartite alignments are more common with case marking than with agreement, while the converse holds for active alignment. The relevant data are presented in Table 1 on the following page. Keeping these distributional differences in mind, let us now examine the patterns of overt and zero marking of the S, A and Ρ in the languages which have case marking and/or agreement marking of any of these three arguments.

ANNA SIEWIERSKA

190

Alignment

Agreement N=237

Case N=232 No

%

No

%

neut

113

49

55

23

acc

63

27

131

55

erg

41

18

15

6

tri

4

2

2

0.8

act

1

0.4

18

8

hier

-

-

5

2

split

4

2

11

5

Table 1: Frequency of occurrence of alignment of nominal case marking and agreement 4.1.

Case marking

The distribution of the overt case marking on nouns relative to alignment type is shown in Table 2. 7 A No

Ρ

%

accN=60 erg N=41

35

AS

PS

No

%

No

%

38

63

9

16

85

No

2

AP

%

No

ASP

%

5

actN=l

tri N=10 splN=4

1

16

N=116

36

31

38

33

1

16

10

9

2

2

8

80

2

66

10

9

No

%

13

21

4

10

1

100

2

20

21

18

Table 2: Patterns of overt marking relative to alignment type with nouns

THE REALIZATION OF CASE AND AGREEMENT MARKING

191

In line with the hierarchies in (7) and (8), the dominant realization of accusative case marking takes the form of overt marking of just the Ρ (63%) and of ergative case marking of just the A (83%) as in the examples from Kannada (2) and Watjarri in (3) given in section 1. Moreover, if we take into consideration also the languages which overtly mark all three arguments, then 85% (51/60) of the languages with accusative alignment have overt marking of the P, and 95% (39/41) of the ergative languages have overt marking of the A. Thus the overt marking of the Ρ and the A respectively in the two alignment types is clearly the cross-linguistic norm. Nonetheless, contrary to the hierarchies in (7) and (8) there are nine languages with accusative case marking in the sample (e.g. Choctaw, Mohave, Oromo, Murle) which overtly mark the S and A but not the Ρ and two languages (Chacobo and Mono-Alu) with ergative case marking which overtly mark the S and Ρ but not the A. In all 11% (11/101) of the accusative and ergative languages in the sample display a pattern of marking excluded by the two hierarchies. It is worth noting that the overt marking of the S and A either in preference to or in addition to the Ρ in accusative alignment is more common that the overt marking of the S and Ρ in ergative alignment. In all, over a third (37%) of the languages with accusative alignment display overt marking of the S and A. The corresponding figure for overt marking of the S and Ρ in ergative alignment is only 15%. Furthermore the overt marking of the S and Ρ in ergative languages tends to be non-suffixal. In fact the only languages that I know of that mark the S and Ρ by suffixes are Maidu, Greenlandic Eskimo, Limbu and Watjarri (all in addition to the A). In Chacobo (Prost 1962) the S and Ρ in contrast to the A are signalled by the deletion of the final consonant and vowel sequence.8 In Kuikúro (Franchetto 1990) the A takes an ergative suffix while the S and Ρ are indicated by stress shift from the penultimate to the ultimate syllable of the S and P. In Kantiana (Everett 1985) the S and Ρ and also the A are marked by particles. And in Mono-Alu (Fagan 1986) and Tagalog (Schachter and Otanes 1972) the S and Ρ are adpositionally marked, in preference to the A (Mono-Alu) and in addition to the A (Tagalog).9 This last type of marking, i.e. adpositional marking, is particularly common among the ergative Oceanic languages (e.g. Tongan, Niuean and Futunan), none of which are in the sample. If, as is generally assumed, adpositions, particles and suprasegmental markers represent a less grammaticalized form of encoding than affixes, the fact that overt marking of the S and Ρ in nominal ergative alignment is virtually always non-affixal underscores the atypi-

ANNA SIEWIERSKA

192

cality of the overt marking of these two participants in this alignment. By contrast, of the 22 instances in which the S and A are overtly marked in addition to or in preference to the Ρ in accusative alignment, only 7 are realized by adpositions or suprasegmentally. This suggests that overt marking of the S and A is more in tune with accusative alignment than overt marking of the S and Ρ is with ergative. Turning to the other alignments, the only language with active nominal alignment in the sample is Georgian which is, in fact, split accusative/active; accusative alignment occurs in aspects and tenses known as series I and III and active with series II (Harris 1985; Hewitt 1995). The only other languages that I know of which also manifest active alignment with nouns are Svan and Laz — both of which, like Georgian, are Kartvelian languages — and Lhasa Tibetan (DeLancey 1981).10 In all three of these languages, unlike in Georgian, only the A and one of the two sub-types of S are overtly marked. Thus whereas the Ρ need not be overtly marked in active alignment, the A apparently must take overt marking. Tripartite alignment, on the other hand, favours the overt marking of the A and Ρ over that of all three participants as in Hindi which displays tripartite alignment in perfective tenses with animate and definite Ps and sometimes also with inanimate and definite ones, as in (9b). (9)

Hindi (Saksena 1978: 341) a. Raam sooyaa Raam slept 'Ram slept.' b. LaRkiyoo nee rootii-koo khaayaa girls erg bread- ate:m:sg 'The girls ate the bread.'

The patterns of case marking in both active and tripartite alignments are reminiscent of ergative alignment in that the A is always overtly marked while the Ρ (active) or S (tripartite) need not be. Recall that not only the Ρ but also the S receives overt case marking in accusative alignment much more frequently than in ergative (37% vs. 15%). If we sum up all the instances of overt S, A and Ρ marking, as in Table 3, we see that globally case alignments exhibit no strong preference for the overt marking of the A (66%) as opposed to the Ρ (60%). There is, however, an evident dispreference for the overt marking of the S which displays such marking only in 28% of the cases.

THE REALIZATION OF CASE AND AGREEMENT MARKING

A

Ρ

193

S

No

%

No

%

No

%

acc N=60

22

37

51

85

22

37

erg N=41

39

95

6

15

6

15

actN=l

1

100

1

100

1

100

tri N=10

10

100

10

100

2

20

spl N=4

4

100

2

50

1

25

N=116

76

66

70

60

32

28

Table 3: Global instances of overt nominal marking of S, A and Ρ with nouns 4.2,

Agreement

As the hierarchies in (7) and (8) would lead one to expect, the overt marking of agreement differs considerably from that of case. This is documented in Table 4. A No

Ρ

%

AS

ASP

PS

No

%

No

%

2

52

40

No

No

%

-

77

59

27

11

73

%

acc N=131

-

-

2

erg N=15

-

-

-

-

-

-

act N=18

"

-

-

-

2

11

-

-

16

89

tri N=2

-

-

-

-

-

-

-

-

2

100

hier N=5

-

-

-

-

-

-

-

-

5

100

spl N=11

-

-

-

-

-

-

-

-

11

100

2

1

54

30

2

122

67

N=182

4

4

Table 4: Patterns of agreement marking relative to alignment

type

194

ANNA SIEWIERSKA

The dominant accusative pattern of case marking, i.e. solely of the Ρ is manifest by agreement only in two languages, Ani (Vossen 1985) and Barai (Olson 1975).11 12 And there are no languages in the sample which code ergative agreement via the overt marking of just the A.13 The hierarchies in (7) and (8) therefore fare better with respect to agreement than with respect to case marking in that only 2% of the accusative and ergative languages exhibit a prohibited agreement pattern. However, the dominant pattern of overt marking neither for accusative nor for ergative alignment is the one predicted by the hierarchies in (7) and (8). The prevailing pattern is of overt marking of the S, A and P, as in (10) and (11), not of just the S and A or just the S and Ρ respectively. (10) Tauya (MacDonald 1990: 120, 118) a. ?e fena?a-0 mei fofe-a-?a that woman-abs here come-3sg(nom)-ind 'That woman came here/ b. fena?-ni fanu-0 nen-yau-a-?a woman-erg man-abs 3pl(acc)-see-3sg(nom)-ind 'The woman saw the men/ (11) Basque (Saltarelli 1988: 65, 205) a. Jon-0 kil d-a John-abs die:perf 3sg(abs)-aux 'John has died/ b. (Nik) (zu) kalean ikus z-a-it-u-t I:erg you:abs street:loc see:prf 2sg(ab)-pres-pl-aux-lsg 'I have seen you in the street/ This holds not only for accusative and ergative alignments but for all the alignment types. Observe that 67% of the languages with agreement have overt marking with the S, A and P. Agreement with all three participants in accusative alignment is somewhat less common than in ergative (59% vs. 73%), which is the converse of the nominal marking pattern (21% vs. 10%). By the same token accusative agreement with the Ρ occurs less frequently than ergative agreement with the A. This can be more readily appreciated from the data in Table 5, in which the instances of agreement with each of the three participants are shown. Note that the difference in the frequency of Ρ agreement in accusa­ tive alignment as opposed to the A agreement in ergative alignment basically echoes that of the case marking pattern. Thus in terms of both agreement and case marking, ergative alignment is more likely to mark the

THE REALIZATION OF CASE AND AGREEMENT MARKING

195

A than accusative alignment the P. By contrast 99% of the instances of accusative alignment and 100% of the ergative display agreement with the S and A and S and Ρ respectively. A

Ρ

S

No

%

No

%

No

%

acc N=131

129

99

79

60

129

99

erg N=15

11

73

15

100

15

100

act N=18

18

100

16

89

18

100

tri N=2

2

100

2

100

2

100

hier N=5

5

100

5

100

5

100

spl N=11

11

100

11

100

11

100

N=182

176

97

128

70

180

99

Table 5: Instances of S, A and Ρ agreement As for the global characterization of agreement marking, the figures at the bottom of Table 9 indicate that agreement, unlike case marking, favours the S. Also in contrast to case marking, agreement favours the A over the P. Though both are more likely to display agreement than either one or the other, A agreement is overall more common than Ρ agreement. Of the languages in the sample which display agreement, only six have no Aagr, namely the previously mentioned Ani and Barai and also Hittite (Friedrich 1974), Cavineña (Camp 1985), Chavante (McLeod and Mitchell 1978) and Savu (Walker 1982). 14 There is, however, no actual dispreference for Ρ agreement comparable to that for the case marking of the S. Observe that 70% of the languages with non-neutral agreement have Pagr whereas the corresponding figure for S nominal marking was only 28%.

ANNA SIEWIERSKA

196 4.3. Interim

summary

The data in Tables 2 and 4 reveal that though in ergative alignment and to a lesser extent in accusative alignment, agreement tends to be manifested by the arguments which do not display case marking, neither case nor agreement marking strictly conforms to the hierarchies in (7) and (8). The case marking of the SA or SP does not always entail overt marking of Ρ and A respectively, nor does overt agreement of the Ρ or A always entail overt agreement of the SA or SP. Moreover in terms of the number of arguments that tend to be overtly marked, case and agreement marking define the mirror image hierarchies in (12) and (13) respectively. (12) 1 (64%) > 2 (19%) > 3 (18%) (13) 3 (67%) > 2 (32%) > 1 (1%) The tendency for case marking of only one argument is predictable from the hierarchies in (7) and (8), but the preference for agreement with all three arguments is not. The hierarchy in (13) holds for agreement not only globally but for each alignment type. The hierarchy in (12) does not hold for case marking in accusative and ergative alignments in which case marking of two participants is less common than of three. What is of interest though is that both hierarchies hold for active and tripartite alignments which by definition must display overt marking with at least two arguments; case marking is more common with two arguments than with three and conversely for agreement. And finally in regard to the nature of the verbal arguments that tend to display case and agreement marking, S is the least likely argument to receive case marking and the most likely argument to be marked by agreement. So far we have considered how the complementarity in marking hypothesis fares with respect to the formal realization of case and agree­ ment marking across languages. Let us now examine to what extent it is reflected within languages. 4.4. Complementarity

in marking within

languages

Given that there are languages which have agreement but no case marking and languages which have case marking but no agreement, neither the hierarchies in (7) and (8) nor those in (12) and (13) provide any clear

THE REALIZATION OF CASE AND AGREEMENT MARKING

197

indication of the degree of complementarity or alternatively overlap in the arguments manifesting overt marking in languages which have both types of marking. The issue is of interest particularly for linguists who consider agreement to be just another exponent of case marking. Under this view, sheer economy would argue against marking the same relation twice. Therefore if this view were to be correct, we should expect a high degree of complementarity in the arguments manifesting case and agreement marking. Let us therefore consider whether this is indeed so. There are 91 languages in the sample which have both case and agreement marking. In three of these there is no agreement with any third person participant which leaves us with 88 languages. After weeding out the instances of zero marking for individual third person participants, I counted the instances of overlap in overt marking for the various combi­ nations of S, A and P. The results are shown in Table 6.

overlapping participant

No

%

none

23

26

A only

23

26

Ρ only

12

14

S only

1

1

16

18

AP

9

10

SAP

4

5

total

88

100

SA

Table 6: Overlapping in overt nominal and agreement

marking

We see that the complementarity-in-marking hypothesis is not borne out. Only a quarter (26%) of the 88 languages manifest no overlap in the overt marking of any of the participants. If we take into account the 51 lan­ guages of the 88 which exhibit the same alignment type with nouns and agreement (42 accusative and 9 ergative), the instances in no overlap in

198

ANNA SIEWIERSKA

marking rise to 35%. But this higher figure is equally damaging for the complementarity in marking hypothesis. The above notwithstanding, a tendency to limit the amount of double marking can be discerned from the fact that the instances of double marking of three participants are considerably lower than that of two, and these are lower than that of one, the relevant figures being 5% < 28% < 4 1 % . These figures simultaneously highlight the difference in the nature of the participants that are overtly marked on nouns and by agreement. Note that some difference in marking occurs in 95% of the 88 languages. The explanation for why this is so lies in the distinct functions of case and agreement marking to be discussed directly below. 5. The function of case vs. agreement marking Case marking is primarily associated not with the marking of verbal arguments but with the marking of adjuncts. Recall from Table 1 that nearly half of the languages in the sample have neutral alignment with nouns. By contrast, all languages have some morphological means at their disposal for the marking of at least some adjuncts. Since, by definition, arguments are more closely tied to the verb than adjuncts, and the semantic roles of arguments are to a large extent predictable from the semantic properties of the verb while those of adjuncts are not, the primary function of case marking may be taken to be the marking of less frequent, less predictable nominal statuses and semantic roles (see especially Comrie 1979 and Croft 1988). Assuming that this is so, we would expect case marking of arguments to favour the less frequent, less predictable argu­ ments. And this is what has been documented in section 4.1. Intransitive verbs are more common than transitive, and the semantic role of the S is predictable form the meaning of the predicate in conjunction with the semantic features of the nominal argument. Thus the S is the least likely argument to display case marking. In transitive clauses, on the other hand, the semantic roles of the two arguments are less predictable, particularly if both designate humans, and thus the arguments need to be distinguished from each other. This can be most economically achieved by marking the A or the Ρ rather than by marking both. Hence the tendency for marking only one of the transitive arguments. In contrast to case marking, agreement is bound to arguments. Arguments differ from adjuncts not only in terms of frequency and

THE REALIZATION OF CASE AND AGREEMENT MARKING

199

predictability but also in terms of the discourse saliency of the referents that they denote. And it is this discourse saliency of arguments which is reflected in agreement. The S as the sole argument of an intransitive verb is inherently salient. Its favoured status in regard to agreement is in tune with the claims of linguistics such as Lehmann (1982, 1988) and Givón (1984: chapter 10) who consider agreement to be primarily an anaphoric, referent tracking device. Under this view of agreement, the primary function of agreement is carried not by the agreement markers in the clause containing their corresponding nominal arguments but rather by the agreement markers that occur in subsequent clauses where the nominal arguments are absent. The claim that agreement is primarily a referent tracking device finds strong support in the fact that in the overwhelming majority of languages which have clause-level agreement, nominal arguments need not co-occur with their corresponding agreement markers. To the best of my knowledge, only in English and a handful of other Indo-European languages (e.g. Dutch, German, Standard French) is this not generally possible. Moreover, there is a considerable body of data revealing that in languages with agreement markers, overt nominais are used only to introduce and reintroduce discourse referents, in cases of ambiguity or for purposes of contrast or emphasis (e.g. Givón 1983 and papers therein). Otherwise, the agreement markers serve as the sole expression of the verbal arguments. For instance, in Sacapultec Maya, among 180 transitive clauses, Du Bois (1987b) found only 11 (6%) with a nominal subject. Payne's (1990b: 229) analysis of 1981 Yagua clauses revealed only 379 (19%) nominal subjects. And Derbyshire's (1986: 252) text counts of Hixkaryana evinced among 440 clauses 133 (30%) nominal subjects. 15 If statistical dominance is viewed as an indication of the primary function of a linguistic device, then the above figures suggest that the anaphoric, referent tracking function of agreement is its basic one. The assumption that the primary function of case marking is to distinguish the A from the Ρ while that of agreement is to be able to refer back to the verbal arguments provides a natural explanation for the major differences in the patterns of overt and zero marking of the two. First of all, assuming the common view that agreement arises from unstressed pronouns occurring in extraposed topic constructions (Givón 1976) such as (14), there is absolutely no reason for why such a topicalization process should favour a transitive argument over an intransitive one.

ANNA SIEWIERSKA

200 (14) a. b.

John, he really wrecked the car. John, he rides.

In fact since intransitive clauses are more common than transitive, the S agreement is the most likely to evolve first. Accordingly, agreement, unlike case marking, virtually never occurs with just the A or just the P, or alternatively it virtually always includes the S. Secondly, extraposed topic constructions are typically not restricted to specific verbal arguments. Though in view of the fact that in most languages topicality is primarily associated with the S and A, extraposed topic constructions may be seen to favour the S and A, they may be expected to also include the P, as in (15). (15) The car, John really wrecked it. The high incidence of agreement with all three participants as compared to the case marking of all three (67% vs. 18%) is thus another correlate of the anaphoric and referent tracking function of agreement. Thirdly, assuming that referent tracking via agreement should fa­ vour highly topical referents, accusative agreement with the A should be more common than with the P. This is fully in line with the data in Table 4. Recall that 98% of the languages with accusative agreement have Aagr, but only 60% have Pagr. The relative topicality of the A and the Ρ in languages with ergative alignment is still under dispute. Some linguists hold that in ergative languages, unlike in accusative, more topical refer­ ents tend to be encoded via the Ρ rather than via the A. Others maintain that it is the A not the Ρ which is the more topical, just as in languages with accusative alignment. 16 Since most languages with ergative alignment are split ergative, the latter view seems to be the more viable. Though there are languages with ergative agreement which have overt agreement marking of the Ρ (and S) but not of the A, they are significantly less frequent than those that mark the A in addition to the Ρ and S (27% vs. 73%). Moreover, as shown in Table 1, ergative agreement is in itself quite uncommon (6%), three times less common than ergative case marking (18%). Fourthly, if agreement performs an anaphoric and referent tracking function, the participants which it marks may be expected to be not only salient from the point of view of the speaker but also ontologically salient, i.e. there should be a preference for agreement with speech act participants or at least human or animate participants. And indeed in active alignment

THE REALIZATION OF CASE AND AGREEMENT MARKING

201

overt agreement is typically restricted to first and second person or to humans, and in hierarchical alignment the first and second person receive overt agreement marking in preference to the third. Also attributable to the fact that the A is more often human and animate than the Ρ is the higher incidence of Aagr in ergative alignment than of Pagr in accusative, cited above. Fifthly, if agreement and case marking perform distinct primary functions, it follows that there should be no clear relationship either of complementarity or overlapping between the case marking of nouns and agreement marking. This is essentially correct. Consider the data in Table 7, which show the patterns of overt nominal and agreement marking among the 42 languages in the sample with accusative nominal alignment and accusative agreement.

No

%

Nom

Agr

15

36

Ρ

SA

10

24

Ρ

SAP

8

19

SAP

SA

4

10

SA

SAP

2

5

SAP

SAP

1

2

SA

SA

Table 7: Overt nominal marking and agreement marking in with accusative nominal marking and agreement (N=42)

languages

Note that Pagr is independent of whether Ρ is or is not overtly marked on nouns and vice versa. 17 And though accusative agreement is always at least with the SA, case marking of the SA is compatible with both the presence and the absence of additional Pagr. There is also no evident relationship between the presence of case marking per se and agreement marking. This is documented in Table 8.

ANNA SIEWIERSKA

202

No

%

Nom alignment

Agr alignment

86

38

neut

non-neut

29

13

non-neut

neut

88

38

non-neut

non-neut

27

12

neut

neut

Table 8: Relationship between nominal alignments and agreement ments (N=230)

align­

Since agreement is more common than case marking, languages with agreement may (88/176) or may not (86/176) have case marking, whereas languages with case marking are likely to display agreement (88/117 vs. 29/117). But the presence or absence of one does not have a conditioning effect on the presence or absence of the other. And finally, given that word order, like case marking, may fulfil a differentiating function, we would expect there to be differences in the way that the case marking and agreement interact with word order. That this is indeed so is shown in Table 9 which presents the percentages of case marking and agreement marking according to word order type; V3 stands for basic APV or PSV order, V2 for basic AVP or PVA, V1 for basic VAP or VPA, 'free' for languages with no clear basic order and 'split' for languages which manifest some indeterminacy in regard to verb position (e.g. AVP and APV). The data suggest that the presence of case marking is more dependent on word order type than the presence of agreement. Case marking is considerably less frequent in V2 and V1 languages than in split, free and V3 languages. Agreement, on the other hand, though less common in V2 languages than in the other word order types, even in V2 occurs in nearly two thirds of the instances.

THE REALIZATION OF CASE AND AGREEMENT MARKING

Nom marking

Agr

Either

Both

V3=108

63%

88%

44%

52%

V2=74

31%

59%

49%

23%

Vl=33

44%

86%

64%

33%

free=8

63%

100%

37%

63%

split=9

67%

60%

56%

33%

w/o

Table 9: Relationship order (N=232)

between nominal marking, agreement

203

and word

6. Final remarks The investigation of the formal realization of case and agreement marking of the S, A and Ρ has shown that while the arguments that exhibit case and agreement marking cannot be directly captured in the form of strict hierarchies such as those previously suggested for accusative and ergative alignment, the two forms of morphological marking do tend to differ in regard to both the number of arguments which manifest overt marking and the identity of the arguments. There is a cross-linguistic preference for economy with respect to case marking and the converse preference for agreement. This can be observed in all the alignment types. When we look at the identity of the arguments that favour case as compared to agreement marking across-languages, it is indeed possible to discern a considerable amount of complementarity, at least in regard to the marking of the S which is strongly disfavoured by case and favoured by agreement. Within the context of the two dominant alignment types, this is most obvious in ergative alignment, less so in accusative. By contrast, there is little complementarity in the arguments bearing overt case and agreement marking within languages. I have argued that the difference both in the number and nature of the arguments favoured by case and agreement marking is compatible with the assumption that the two forms of marking

204

ANNA SIEWIERSKA

perform distinct primary functions, a distinguishing and a referent track­ ing one respectively. This difference in the function of case and agreement marking also underlies the greater cross-linguistic frequency of the latter as compared to the former, which was documented in Table 1. The A and the Ρ may be distinguished from each other by word order, while referent tracking via zero anaphora is a much less reliable and more constrained anaphoric device than verbal marking. In closing, I would like to mention that I have deliberately avoided the question of the factors underlying the difference in the distribution of the various alignment types with case and agreement marking. As docu­ mented in Tables 1, 2 and 3, ergative and tripartite alignments are much more common with case marking than with agreement and conversely active alignment evidently favours agreement over case marking. Nichols (1992: 103) proposes a functional explanation for these differences based on what she takes to be the underlying semantics of the various alignment types. She suggests that alignments that favour nominals grammaticalize nominal semantic functions while those that favour agreement gramma­ ticalize verbal semantics and/or the semantics of the whole clause. While I concur with the spirit of Nichols' explanation, I strongly doubt that the various alignments are open to unique semantic descriptions. I am also inclined to believe that the differences in the frequency of occurrence of ergative, tripartite and active alignments with case as compared to agree­ ment are related to the patterns of overt and zero marking that they display and the distinct functions of case and agreement marking which have been outlined above. Some speculations along these lines are offered in Siewierska (1995). Appendix Sample Languages (N=237) AFRICA: Afro-Asiatic (Amharic, Beja, Bilin, Coptic, Dizi, Gude, Hamar, Kera, Masa, Oromo, Tamazight, Tigrinya) Khoisan (Ani, Sandawe) Niger-Kordofanian (Bua, Busa, Dogon, Ewe, Fali, Fula, Godie, Gola, Igbo, Kalahari, Katla, Koma, Krongo, Kusaal, Lakka, Loma, Sango, Shona, Swahili, Tikar, Vute, Yoruba) Nilo-Saharan (Berta, Bagirmi, Fur, Kanuri, Kunama, Lango, Mesalit, Murle, Pari, Songhai, Turkana) Pidgins & Creols (Kriol) AUST-NG: Australian (Alawa, Bandjalang, Djingili, Garawa, GuguYimidhirr, MalakMalak, Maung, Muruwari, Ngandi, Ngarluma, Nungali, Pitta-Pitta, Tiwi, Wangkumara,

THE REALIZATION OF CASE AND AGREEMENT MARKING

205

Wunambal, Yalarnnga, Yukulta) Indo-Pacific (Alamblak, Ama, Au, Barai, Baruya, Daga, Ekagi, Gahuku, Gapun, Grand-Valley-Dani, Kewa, Meax, Mountain-Arapesh, Nabak, Nasioi, Podopa, Salt-Yui, Sentani, Tabaru, Tauya, Tehit, Usan, Vanimo, Wambon, Waskia, Yava, Yele, Yimas) Pidgins & Creoles (Broken) EURASIA: Altaic (Evenki, Japanese, Karachay, Turkish) Northwest Caucasian (Abkhaz) Kartvelian (Georgian) Chukchi-Kamchatkan (Chukchi) Elamo-Dravidian (Kannada, Elamite) Austric (Santali), Indo-Hittite (Albanian, Armenian, Dutch, Greek, Hindi, Hittite, Italian, Kashmiri, Polish, Shughni, Welsh) Language Isolates (Basque, Burushaski, Gilyak, Hurdan, Ket, Nahali, Sumerian) Uralic-Yukaghir (Finn­ ish, Hungarian, Yukaghir) N-AMER: Amerind (Chocho, Classical-Nahuatl, Choctaw, Chontal, Dakota, EasternPomo, Halkomelem, Huave, Huichol, Ixil, Karok, Kutenai, Luiseno, Mixtec, Mohave, Mountain-Maidu, Nez-Perce, Nootka, Ojibwa, Quileute, SS-Miwok, Seri, Takelma, Tepehuan, Tewa, Coast Tsimshian, Tunica, Tarascan, Tuyuca, Tuscarora, UpperChinook, Valley-Yokuts, Wappo, Washo, Wichita, Yuchi, Yurok, Zapotec, Zuni) Es­ kimo-Aleut (Greenlandic Eskimo) Na-Dene (Navajo, Haida, Tlingit) S-AMER: Amerind (Amuesha, Arawak, Auca, Aymara, Bororo, Candoshi, Cavinena, Chacobo, Chavante, Guajajara, Hishkaryana, Iea, Karitiana, Makushi, Mapuche, Miskito, Nambiquara, Paumari, Piraha, Quechua, Rama, Saija, Sanuma, Sarare, Southern-Barasano, Teribe, Tucano, Waura, Xokleng, Yagua) Pidgins and Creoles (Saramaccan) SEA&OC: Sino-Tibetan (Angami, Burmese, Chepang, Khaling, Kham, Mandarin, Newari, Nocte, Rawang, Sgaw) Austric (Achínese, Atayal, Bunun, Chamorro, Chrau, Fijian, Indonesian, Khasi, Khmer, Kali-Kove, Malagasy, Maori, Mono-Alu, Muna, Palauan, Ponapean, Rukai, Savu, Sre, Sikka, Tagalog, Temiar, Thai, Tigak, To'abaita, Vietnamese, Yao, Yapese).

Notes 1.

The following abbreviations are used in this paper: abl - ablative; abs - absolutive; acc - accusative; aux - auxiliary; erg - ergative; ind - indicative; instr -instrumen­ tal; inv - inverse; m - masculine; nonm - nonmasculine; pp - past participle; perf - perfect; pl - plural; pres - present; sg - singular; 1 - first person; 2 - second person; 3 third person.

2.

My approach to agreement is based on the traditional definitions as presented in Moravcsik (1978) or Lehmann (1982, 1990). It excludes bound pronominal markers which are in complementary distribution with full NPs such as those found in Makushi or Irish, Scots Gaelic and Manx in the case of subject pronouns and Ponapean, Yapese, Kera, Nama and many Bantu languages in the case of object pronouns. It must be mentioned though, that languages in which bound pronominal markers are thus restricted are rather uncommon.

206

ANNA SIEWIERSKA

3.

It is also possible that one of the two forms of the marking of the S does not occur on the A or the P. In Kamaiurá (Seki 1990: 386), for example, third person A agreement is rendered by an o- prefix, third person Ρ agreement is not overt, while third person S agreement is either via an o-prefix or an /-prefix.

4.

Cree (Wolfart and Carroll 1981: 69), however, manifests agreement with both first or second person and with third, though if the latter is a P, only if it is animate. The actual forms of the markers are not sensitive to which is the A or the P. But special direct and inverse affixes are used to signal whether the A outranks the P, or vice versa.

5.

For instance, in several Carib languages, Waiwai, Galib and Apalai (Franchetto 1991) the overt marking of first and second person As is the same as that of first and second person Ss, but first and second person Ps have distinct markers.

6.

For instance in Limbu (van Driem 1987) and Cree (Wolf art and Carroll 1981) both the A and Ρ display agreement. In Waiwai (Franchetto 1990) agreement is with the A and in Galib (Franchetto 1990) with the first person. In Tangut (Ebert 1987) agreement is with the P, while in Kamaiurá (Seki 1990) this is the case only when the Ρ is first person; when the A is first person agreement is with both the A and the P.

7.

I was not able to determine the formal realization of the accusative alignments in Quileute, Sentani and Tucano.

8.

It is debatable whether this should be treated as an instance of overt marking of the S and P. I have done so, since the absolutive forms differ from the citation forms.

9.

An ergative analysis of nominal alignment in Tagalog (and some other Philippine languages) is rather controversial. It involves treating the patient focus clauses as active and the actor focus ones as detransitivized antipassive. Such an analysis is adopted among others by: Payne (1982), Cooreman, Fox and Givón (1984), Starosta (1988) and Blake (1990).

10.

Active alignment with free pronouns appears to be more common. There are three languages in the sample, Eastern Porno (McLendon 1978), Haida (Swanton 1911; Leer 1991) and Loma (Rude 1983) which fall into this category. Another language in question is Batsbi (Holisky 1987), a North-Central Caucasian language, which is not in the sample. It displays active alignment with first and second person free pronouns, though not with third person or with nouns which are ergative. Of the above mentioned languages which display active alignment with nouns only Lhasa Tibetan has active alignment with independent pronouns.

11.

My information on the Khoisan language Ani is based solely on Vossen's (1985) short article in which he argues that there are special suffixal concordial markers on the verb for pronominal objects but not for subjects. With nominal objects the presence of the number/gender markers appears to be dependent on whether the nominal object is or is not explicitly marked for gender; if it is the verb exhibits

THE REALIZATION OF CASE AND AGREEMENT MARKING

207

object concord, otherwise it does not. 12.

According to Olson (1975: 475-476) Barai does actually have S agreement in number with some verbs. This agreement takes the form of alternations of the stem. The Ρ agreement is in person and number. It too does not occur with all verbs. With some there is also only number agreement via alternations of the stem. The Ρ person agreement is via a suffix.

13.

Overt agreement with only the A in ergative alignment is, however, found in the case of non-plural third person referents in Mayan languages; see particularly Du Bois (1987a, b) for some discussion of the use of absolutive zero marking in Sacapultec.

14.

Agreement in number and gender, though not person, with just the S and Ρ is found in perfect tenses in a number of Indo-Aryan languages such as Gujarati, Hindi, Lahnda, Marwari, Marathi, Punjabi and Sindhi (Klaiman 1987). And in Klamath (Barker 1964) agreement in number of the S and P, indicated by the use of different verbal stems, is independent of tense.

15.

The existence of a patient rather than of an agent orientation in (some) languages with ergative alignment advocated by linguists such as Klimov (1977), Comrie (1981: 114), Foley and Van Valin (1984: 111-115) and Verhaar (1985) has been contested by other linguists such Heath (1976), Cooreman et al. (1984) and especially Tsunoda (1988), who gives a convenient summary of the arguments for and against this view.

16.

My own investigation (Siewierska 1993) of 2247 clauses of written Polish shows a much higher incidence of nominal subjects, 1383 (62%), but I presume that this is due to the fact that I considered written as opposed to spoken texts and that more than half of the clauses originate from expository texts. I presume that for spoken texts this figure is likely to be considerably lower.

17.

This should not be interpreted as implying that we should never find languages in which there is a relationship between the presence of overt marking and agree­ ment. Such a relationship is quite evident in the Indo-Aryan languages, Hindi, Bundeli, Lahnda, Sindhi, Baluchi and Marathi (Klaiman 1987: 79) in which verbs cannot show agreement with a marked nominal.

References Barlow, M. and C. A. Ferguson (eds.) 1988. Agreement in Natural Language. Stanford: Centre for the Study of Language and Information. Barker, M. A. R. 1964. Klamath Grammar. Berkeley: University of California Press. Blake, B. 1990. Relational Grammar. London: Routledge. Breen, G. 1976. Ergative, locative and instrumental case inflections in Wangkumara. In R. M. W. Dixon (ed.), 336-339.

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Camp, E. L. 1985. Split ergativity in Cavineña. Internationaljournal of Ameri­ can Linguistics 51: 38-58. Caughley, R. C. 1982. The Syntax and Morphology of the Verb in Chepang. Canberra: The Australian National University. Comrie, B. 1978. Ergativity. In W. P. Lehmann (ed.) Syntactic Typology: Studies in the Phenomenology of Language. Austin: University of Texas Press. 329394. Comrie, B. 1979. Definite and animate direct objects: A natural class. Linguistica Silesiana 3: 13-21. Comrie, B. 1981. Language Universals and Linguistic Typology. Oxford: Blackwell. Cooreman, Α., . Fox and T. Givón. 1984. The discourse definition of ergativity. Studies in Language 8: 1-34. Croft, W. 1988. Agreement vs. case marking and direct objects. In M. Barlow and  A. Ferguson (eds.), 159-179. DeLancey, S. 1981. An interpretation of split ergativity and related patterns. Language 57: 627-657. Derbyshire, D. C. 1986. Topic continuity and OVS order in Hixkaryana. In J. Sherzer and G. Urban (eds.) Native South American Discourse. Berlin: Mouton. 237-306. Dixon, R. M. W. 1972. The Dyirbal Language of North Queensland. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Languages. Dixon, R. M. W. (ed.) 1976. Grammatical Categories in Australian Canberra: Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies. Dixon, R. M. W. 1979. Ergativity. Language 55: 59-138. Driem, G. van. 1987. A Grammar of Limb. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Douglas, W. H. 1981. Watjarri. In R. M. W. Dixon and B. Blake (eds.) Handbook of Australian Languages. Vol.2. Amsterdam: Benjamins. 196-272. Du Bois, J. W. 1987a. Absolutive zero: Paradigm adaptivity in Sacapultec Maya. Lingua 7 1 : 203-222. Du Bois, J. W. 1987b. The discourse basis of ergativity. Language 63, 4: 805855. Ebert, K. H. 1987. Grammatical marking of speech act participants in TibetoBurman. Journal of Pragmatics 11: 473-482. Everett, D. 1985. A note on ergativity, S' and S" in Karitiana. Work Papers of the Summer Institute of Linguistics University of North Dakota 29: 69-81. Fagan, J. L. 1986. A Grammatical Analysis of Mono-Alu. Pacific Linguistic Series B. No 96. Canberra: Australian National University. Foley, W. A. and R. D. Van Valin. 1984. Functional Syntax and Universal Grammar. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Franchetto, B. 1990. Ergativity and nominativity in Kuikúro and other Carib languages. In D. Payne (ed.), 407-428.

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Friedrich, J. 1974. Hethitisches Elementarbuch. Heidelberg: Carl Winter. Givón, T. 1976. Topic, pronoun and grammatical agreement. In  Li (ed.) Subject and Topic. New York: Academic Press. 151-188. Givón, T. (ed.) 1983. Topic Continuity in Discourse. Amsterdam: Benjamins. Givón, T. 1984. Syntax: A Functional Typological Introduction. Vol.1 Amster­ dam: Benjamins. Harris, A. C. 1985. Syntax and Semantics 18. Diachronic Syntax: The Kartvelian Case. New York: Academic Press. Heath, J. 1976. Ergative/accusative typologies in morphology and syntax. In R. M. W. Dixon (ed.), 599-611. Hewitt, B. G. 1995. Georgian: A Structural Reference Grammar. Amsterdam: Benjamins. Holisky, D. A. 1987. The case of the intransitive subject in Tsova-Tush (Batsbi). Lingua 7 1 : 103-132. Klaiman, M. H. 1987. Mechanisms of ergativity in South Asia. Lingua 7 1 : 6 1 102. Klimov, G. A. 1977. Tipologija Jazykov Aktivnogo Stroja. Moskva: Nauka. Leer, J. 1991. Evidence for a northern northwest coast language area: Promiscu­ ous number marking and periphrastic possessive constructions in Haida, Eyak and Aleut. International Journal of American Linguistics 57: 158-193. Lehmann, . 1982. Universal and typological aspects of agreement. In H. Seiler and J. Stachowiak (eds.) Apprehension: Das sprachliche Erfassen von Gegenständen. Vol. 2. Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag. 201-267. Lehmann, C. 1988. On the function of agreement. In M. Barlow and C. A. Ferguson (eds.) 55-65. MacDonald, L. 1990. A Grammar of Tauya. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. McLeod, R. and V. Mitchell. 1978. Aspectos da Lingua Xavante, trans. M. I. Daniel. Brasil: Summer Institute of Linguistics. McLendon, S. 1978. Ergativity, case and transitivity in Eastern Porno. International Journal of American Linguistics 44: 1-9. Moravcsik, E. A. 1974. Object-verb agreement. Working Papers in Language Universals 15: 25-40. Stanford: Department of Linguistics, Stanford Univer­ sity. Moravcsik, E. A. 1978. Agreement, In J. Greenberg (ed.) Universals of Human Language, vol. 4: Syntax. Stanford: Stanford University Press. 331-374. Nichols, J. 1992. Linguistic Diversity in Space and Time. Chicago: The Univer­ sity of Chicago Press. Olson, M. 1975. Barai grammar: Highlights. In T. E. Dutton (ed.) Studies in Languages of Central and South-East Papua. Pacific Linguistic Series C. No. 29, Canberra: Department of Linguistic Research School and Pacific Studies. Australian National University. 471-512.

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Part IV Case and semantic roles in discourse

Functions of case-marking vs. non-marking in Finnish discourse Marja-Liisa Helasvuo Academy of Finland / University of California Santa Barbara

1. Introduction To code syntactic functions, languages employ different strategies, such as case marking, word order, and agreement. Finnish makes use of all three strategies: agreement morphology is used to code syntactic subjects, word order to distinguish, for example, between subjects and predicate nomi­ nais, and case marking to code syntactic functions, inter alia to distinguish oblique NPs from core arguments. This paper focuses on the functions of case-marking. The Finnish case system has been discussed extensively in the literature, especially in terms of the structural oppositions that the gram­ matical cases take part in (see e.g. Siro 1964, Itkonen 1979, Heinämäki 1983, Leino 1990a). In this paper, I seek to discuss the case system not so much as a system of structural oppositions, but as a discourse construct. Text tokens, instead of types, form a central focus of interest. From a functional point of view, the observed patternings in the token aggregate provide a way of understanding how grammar works and why it is the way it is. Since case marking is characteristically a nominal coding property, I will concentrate on the use of noun phrases (NPs) in discourse. First, I will discuss what kinds of referents the NPs bring into the discourse. Secondly, there will be a discussion of the role of the nominative as the

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unmarked member of the case marking system. Before discussing these issues, I will describe my data and the terminology I am using. 2. Data and coding The data for this study come from 6 excerpts of conversations between 26 speakers of Finnish. These excerpts amount to 35 minutes of audiotapes which I have transcribed and coded both morphologically and syntactically. All NPs were coded for case, syntactic function, and structure of NP. A difference was made between pronominal and full NPs, i.e. NPs with a lexical head. NPs were also coded for several features of information flow which were designed to capture relevant features of the referents the NPs bring into the discourse. These features included the following: • activation cost : An NP was coded as new if it referred to a referent which had not been mentioned in the discourse and which was not present in the situation. • identifiability: An NP was coded as identifiable if the speaker presented it as if the listener could identify the referent (cf. Chafe 1994: 93 who defines an identifiable referent as one "the speaker assumes that the listener will be able to identify"). • tracking: This was coded on the basis of whether the referent was being tracked in the discourse, i.e. whether it was being referred to several times during the discourse (cf. Durie 1994 who uses the term trackable for referents which could be referred to several times). 3. The Finnish case system: some questions of terminology In Finnish linguistics, there is some terminological confusion with regard to the grammatical cases. Therefore, I consider it necessary to state what I mean by the terminology employed in this paper. I will first give an overview of the case system and then I will discuss the grammatical cases. Finnish is well known for its rich case system. Table 1 gives an overview of the system with examples of the singular forms; most of these cases also inflect in the plural (the accusative is an exception since there is no accusative form in the plural, except for personal pronouns). Note that personal pronouns have a special accusative form (ending -t). Only the most productive cases are included in the table.

FUNCTIONS OF CASE-MARKING VS. NON-MARKING

I

II

Case form Nominative Accusative (Acc of pers. pronouns Partitive Genitive Essive Translative Inessive Elative Illative Adessive Ablative Allative

Case ending -n -t -(t)A, -ttA -n -nA -ksI -ssA -stA -Vn, -hVn, -seen -IlA -ItA -He

215

Singular ex translation talo a/the house talon a/the house minut me) taloa (of) a/the house talon of a/the house as/for a/the house talona into (a/the) house taloksi talossa in(side) the house from in (side) the house talosta into (a/the) house taloon by/on/near a/the house talolla talolta from the house to the house talolle

Table 1: The Finnish case system. As can be seen from Table 1, Finnish has 8 locative cases (given under Roman numeral II), and 3-4 cases that have been grammaticized to a greater extent (I; the genitive is somewhat problematic here; for discus­ sion, see Helasvuo 1995). While the locative cases have more independent semantic meaning potential and are constrained by semantic factors in their use, the other cases have become more grammatical, i.e. constrained by syntactic factors (e.g. negative polarity, aspect) in their use. Traditionally, the Finnish cases have been defined on morphological grounds, except for the nominative and the accusative, which have been defined on the basis of syntactic as well as morphological analysis. The accusative is often described as a "syntactic case" (see Setälä 1908 [1898]: 51-52; the literature thereafter has followed this tradition; see e.g. Penttilä 1963, Hakulinen and Karlsson 1979) which is in opposition to the partitive in the object role (for an opposing view, see Shore 1992 and Nemvalts 1994, who reject the term accusative altogether and use genitive for all -n-marked cases). Two kinds of accusative markings are distinguished, namely the so-called "genitive-accusa­ tive" with the ending -n, and the so-called "nominative-accusative" that has no ending. What is called the nominative in this view is a residue: it is a case with zero ending which marks NPs that are not in the object role.

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I find this usage confusing and will not adopt it here. I prefer to use the term nominative for zero marking irrespective of what the syntactic function of the NP is. In the nominative plural, there is a zero ending for the nominative and a -t-ending to mark plurality. Accordingly, I reserve the term accusative for -n-marked NPs (the personal pronouns are marked with a -t in the accusative). The accusative is a syncretic case, since the genitive has the same ending. The two were historically distinct: the accusative was marked with -m and the genitive with -n, but in ProtoFinnic, the wordfinal -m changed into -n. Although synchronically the two cases have identical marking in the singular, they are easily distinguish­ able because they are used in different syntactic contexts and because they differ in the discourse functions they serve (see Helasvuo forthcoming b). By viewing the nominative and the accusative as morphological cases I hope to be able to give a more unified account of the Finnish case marking system. I also hope to avoid the confusion which terms like "nominative-accusative" and "genitive-accusative" may cause. 4. Case marking in discourse In the classical structuralist tradition, it is maintained that cases can be divided into two sets, those that are more abstract marking syntactic relations (core cases or direct cases) and those that are more semantic (obliques; see e.g. Jakobson 1984 [1958], Nichols 1983). This usage has also been adopted in the literature on the Finnish case system (see above table 1, and e.g. Siro 1964, Leino 1990b). From a discourse point of view we could say that the use of some cases has become grammaticized to a greater extent, i.e. it has become governed mostly by grammatical factors, such as negative polarity or the presence or absence of an NP subject. My questions are: Why is this so? Do the NPs that are marked with the grammatical or core cases function somehow differently from the other NPs? In what follows, I will discuss these questions in the light of an analysis of some referential practices in the use of NPs in discourse. I will first discuss referent introduction and then referent tracking. 4.1. Referent

introduction

In their article on the discourse basis for lexical categories, Hopper and Thompson (1984: 708) claim that the prototypical function of nouns is to introduce a participant into discourse, whereas verbs prototypically serve

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to report an event. According to Hopper and Thompson (1984: 747), the closer a linguistic element is to either of these prototypes, the more likely it is to have the categorial features of the respective category, e.g. case inflection or tense. Table 2 shows how introduction of new referents relates to case marking of full NPs.

Case of full NP Nominative Accusative Partitive Genitive Other cases Total

New Total N % N 189 53,8 351 59,2 29 49 92 69,2 133 22 71,0 31 156 61,7 253 817 488 59,7

Table 2: Case marking of full NPs and mention of new

referents.

In Table 2 we can see that new mentions can be made using any case ending. There is no case ending that would be favored when making reference to a new referent. We can also note that only somewhat over half of all full NPs (approx. 60 %) refer to new referents. Thus, the Finnish data show that the majority of full NPs refer to new referents. However, the frequencies found in the Finnish data do not lend any strong support to Hopper and Thompson's claim that introducing new referents would be a prototypical noun function. If we look at pronouns, introducing new referents seems even less typical. Table 3 includes both full NPs and pronouns.

Case of NP Nominative Accusative Partitive Genitive Other cases Total

New Total N N % 26,2 258 986 69 33 47,8 129 48,5 266 22 45,8 48 427 186 43,6 628 35,0 1796

Table 3: Case marking and mention of new referents. All NPs.

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If we compare Table 3 with Table 2 we can see that in conversational discourse most NPs are pronominal. Table 3 shows a lower proportion of new mentions — the percentages range from 43 to 48, except for NPs in the nominative for which the percentage is only 26. Thus, there is no difference between the so-called grammatical cases and others, but rather, the dividing line seems to lie between the nominative and the other cases, with the nominative having the least new mentions (see also discussion below in section 5). Originally, prototypicality was studied in relation to categorization of basic level categories (Rosch 1975), but since then the theory has been applied to grammatical organization as well (see e.g. Lakoff 1977, Bybee and Slobin 1982, Hopper and Thompson 1984). In some approaches (see e.g. Bybee's work, e.g. Bybee and Slobin 1982; Karlsson 1983), proto­ typicality is related to frequency of occurrence so that if something is infrequent it is less likely to serve as a model for a prototype. Taking frequency as a criterion for prototypicality we could claim that the introduction of new referents is not a prototypical noun function. As we can see from Tables 2 and 3, it is not very frequently that the speakers introduce a new referent. In the data from both full NPs and pronouns, only 35 % of the NPs referred to new referents. 4.2. Participant

tracking

Equally vital to human communication is the possibility of tracking a participant, of speaking about an entity as having continuous identity (see Du Bois 1980). This is important discourse work that is carried out by nouns. When speakers introduce a new referent into the discourse, they use an NP as a linguistic index of the referent. Languages have elaborate systems for expressing anaphoric relations which enable speakers to maintain the reference and to keep track of the referent. Through this activity the image of the referent becomes more and more clearly articu­ lated: each further mention of the referent and predication about it adds something to the cognitive inventory that speakers have of that referent. Thus, introduction of new referents and tracking of referents are inti­ mately interrelated. Table 4 illustrates how the tracking function relates to case marking. We can see that for all grammatical cases the percentage of tracking NPs is around 50 or more, whereas in other cases it is only 26 %. In other words, the grammatical cases are primarily used to track participants. This is, of

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course, linked to syntax as well: NPs in the grammatical cases have access to the syntactic functions in the clause core, i.e. they can function as subjects and objects. Case of NP Nominative Accusative Partitive Genitive Other Total

Tracking Total N N % 787 79,8 986 56 81,2 69 133 50,0 266 30 62,5 48 427 113 26,5 1119 62,3 1796

Table 4: Case marking and tracking. Interestingly enough, the partitive shares information flow features with both grammatical and oblique cases. For example, only half of the partitive NPs are tracking, whereas for the nominative and the accusative, the percentages are around 80. This is not surprising in the light of the history of the partitive: it used to be a locative case (the so-called separative) indicating movement away from something, and only later was it grammaticized as a grammatical case (see Helasvuo 1995). There is an interesting pattern that has arisen from discourse data: new referents may be introduced using any case ending, but those referents that are introduced with a locative case are less likely to be mentioned again (see also Laury 1992). As Table 3 shows there were 186 new mentions in the locative cases. If we study further mentions of the same referents, it turns out that only 18 (10%) of the referents were ever mentioned again. This pattern is illustrated in the following example: (1)

1 Noora: on meiän äiti pudottanu kerran amppeli-n, has our mother dropped once hangingflowerpot-ACC 'my mother has once dropped a hanging flower pot' 2 suoraan kissa-n maito[,kuppi-in.] directly cat-GEN milk plate-ILL 'directly onto our cat's milk plate/ 3 Sanna: [1ehh J heh heh 4 Noora: semmose .. paksu-n posliinikipo-n viel heh heh a kind of thick-ACC porcelain pot-ACC moreover '(It was) a kind of a heavy porcelain pot/

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220 5

se yritti tähdätä si-tä.. koukku-un kato-ssa [2JaJ it tried aim it-PTV hook-ILL ceiling-INE and 'She tried to hang it from a hook on the ceiling but* 6 Sanna: [Joo, J yeah 7 Noora: meniki [3 hutiks. 2 was missed 'she missed it/ 8 Henna: [3Joo. 3] yeah In the example we have a cluster of NPs introducing new referents: amppeli-n 'hanging flower pot-ACCUSATIVE' (line 1), kissan maitokuppi-in 'cat's milk plate-ILLATIVE' (line 2), koukku-un 'hookILLATIVE' (line 5), kato-ssa 'ceiling-INESSIVE' (line 5). As regards further mentions of these referents, we note that amppeli 'hanging flower pot' is introduced on line 1 using the accusative case, and it is referred to again on line 5 (sitä '3SGpronoun-PARTITIVE'), whereas koukku 'hook' and katto 'ceiling', which are introduced using locative cases on line 5, never become tracked in the discourse but remain orienting. We can also note that the tracked participants are expressed syntactically in the core roles, as subjects and objects (meiän äiti 'our mother' 1. 1 and se 'she' 1. 5, amppelin 'hanging flowerpot' 1. 1 andsitä' 'it' 1. 5). To sum up, those participants that are central to the discourse, i.e. the ones that are being tracked in discourse, are also central in the clause: they function as the core arguments in the clause. 5. Nominative When we look at discourse data, the illusion of Finnish as a rich case marking language starts to fall apart: if we study the use of the different case endings, it turns out to cluster around only a few cases. Moreover, the nominative outnumbers all other case endings. In my spoken data, about 55 % of the NPs are in the nominative. The nominative is the most frequent case in written discourse also, although the difference is not so striking (in the written corpus of the Finnish syntax archive, a little less than 30 % of nouns were in the nominative; Karlsson 1982: 308). The high frequency of the nominative is understandable if we con­ sider the syntactic functions it can accommodate: unlike many other cases,

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it can be used for almost any syntactic function (although there are quite strict semantic restrictions for its use as an adverbial). However, it is primarily used for arguments in the clause core, i.e. subjects and objects. As is well known, clauses are shorter in the spoken language, especially in quick conversational exchanges. Thus, spoken clauses do not accom­ modate as many oblique arguments as in written discourse, which is why nominative NPs are so frequent in the spoken data. Apart from that, the nominative occupies an interesting position in the case marking system, since it is the only case that has no ending. In other words, it is unmarked phonologically and morphologically, and therefore offers the most economical coding alternative in the case sys­ tem. However, together with economy, there is another, competing moti­ vation at work, namely iconicity (Haiman 1983). The coding should be able to distinguish between different syntactic functions: according to the iconicity principle, the different functions are indicated through different codings. A clear example of this is object marking in Finnish: the object is marked with the accusative or the partitive in order to distinguish it from the subject. But if there is no nominative NP subject in the clause, the object can be in the nominative. There are counter examples to the principle of iconicity in case assignment, such as clauses where both the subject and the object are in the plural in which case both the subject and the object are in the nominative, but here word order helps to determine syntactic functions (see Palander 1991). The extensive use of the nominative in Finnish would indeed not be possible if case marking were to work in a vacuum. The reverse is true, however: it works together with word order and agreement (see Helasvuo forthcoming a). Interestingly enough, crosslinguistic studies have shown that there is a clear tendency in spoken discourse not to have more than one full NP argument per clause (see e.g. Du Bois 1985 on Sacapultec, Durie 1987 on Acehnese, Lambrecht 1987 on French, Ochs 1988 on Samoan, Helasvuo forthcoming b on Finnish). This full NP argument tends to function as the object or intransitive subject but is rarely the transitive subject (Du Bois 1985). Thus, the need to distinguish between a full NP subject and a full NP object does not arise very often. This, of course, increases the range of possibilities of using the nominative to mark both subjects and objects. In addition, discourse studies have shown that the unmarked cat­ egory often has a special relation to preferred patterns of language use (see especially Du Bois 1985,1987). This is true of the nominative in Finnish:

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those features that are typical of nominative NPs are features that charac­ terize the most prevalent patterns of language use. As we have already seen in Table 3, the nominative carried the least new mentions (only 26 % of nominative NPs referred to new participants). Table 4 showed that nominative NPs most often referred to participants that were being tracked in the discourse (almost 80 % of nominative NPs were tracking). Table 5 illustrates how case marking and identifiability of the referent relate to each other: nominative NPs most often referred to participants that were identifiable.

Case of NP Nominative Accusative Partitive Genitive Other cases Total

Total Identifiable N N % 735 74,5 986 42 60,9 69 92 34,6 266 32 66,7 48 427 291 68,1 1192 66,4 1796

Table 5: Case marking and

identifiability.

In sum, the nominative in Finnish is a good example of the fact that the unmarked category usually provides the most economical coding alternative (see Haiman 1983, Du Bois 1987). It also illustrates how prevalent patterns of language use are related to unmarked coding in grammar. 6. Conclusions To say that something forms a system usually implies that there is some internal organization, i.e. structure, in it. In formal linguistics, grammati­ cal systems are often seen as self-contained: only internal forces can cause changes in the system. In this paper, I have promoted an alternative view: linguistic systems are adaptive; they are only partially autonomous, and partially responsive to system-external pressures (Du Bois 1985: 344). I hope to have shown that the Finnish cases form a system in which the members are interrelated. However, this system has to respond to all kinds of system-external pressures, such as the discourse need to track partici-

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pants. Both internal and external pressures form the basis for the emer­ gence of grammatical patterns, inter alia the distinction between gram­ matical and locative cases. Looking at the Finnish case system as it is used in discourse sheds new light on how the system works and why it has emerged. I have shown that despite the rich set of options in case marking in Finnish, the use of the cases clusters around only a few cases. Over half of all NPs are in the nominative, which is the only case with no ending. Non-marking is of course an economical coding alternative; it is sufficient, because it always carries with it a contrast to all the other coding possibilities, both within the case-marking system and outside it with the help of agreement and word order. But the nominative is also unmarked from an information flow perspective, as it usually encodes the most prevalent kinds of NPs, i.e. those that are identifiable and not new in the discourse, and those that are tracking. Thus, the nominative shows how unmarked coding in grammar is related to unmarked patterning in discourse. Appendix: Transcription symbols and abbreviations used in the glosses

[ ]

continuing intonation (slightly falling) final intonation (falling) short pause beginning of overlap end of overlap

ACC GEN ILL INE PTV

accusative genitive illative inessive partitive

Acknowledgments I would like to thank Auli Hakulinen, Fred Karlsson, Ritva Laury, Bill McGregor, Susanna Shore, and Sandy Thompson for insightful comments and criticism. I am especially grateful to Dirk Noël for carefully editing my text and making me say what I really think.

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References Bybee, J. and D. Slobin. 1982. Rules and schemas in the development and use of the English past tense. Language 58: 265-289. Chafe, W. L. 1976. Givenness, contrastiveness, definiteness, subjects, topics, and point of view. In C. N. Li (ed.) Subject and Topic, New York: Academic Press. 25-55. Chafe, W. L. 1994. Discourse, Consciousness, and Time: The Flow and Dis­ placement of Conscious Experience in Speaking and Writing. Chicago: Uni­ versity of Chicago Press. Du Bois, J. W. 1980. Beyond definiteness: The trace of identity in discourse. In W. Chafe (ed.) The Pear Stories: Cognitive, Cultural, and Linguistic Aspects of Narrative Production. Norwood, NJ: Ablex. 203-274. Du Bois, J. W. 1985. Competing motivations. In J. Haiman (ed.) Iconicity in Syntax. Amsterdam: Benjamins. 343-365. Du Bois, J. W. 1987. Absolutive zero: Paradigm adaptivity in Sacapultec Maya. Lingua 7 1 : 203-222. Durie, M. 1987. Preferred Argument Structure in an active language: Arguments against the category 'intransitive subject'. Lingua 74: 1-25. Durie, M. 1994. A case study of pragmatic linking. Text 14, 4: 495-529. Haiman, J. 1983. Iconic and economic motivation. Language 59: 781-819. Hakulinen, A. and F. Karlsson. 1979. Nykysuomen lauseoppia. Helsinki: Finnish Literature Society. Heinämäki, O. 1983. Aspect in Finnish. In C. de Groot and H. Tommola (eds.) Aspect bound: A voyage into the realm of Germanic, Slavonic and FinnoUgrian aspectology. Dordrecht: Foris. 153-177. Helasvuo, M.-L. 1995. Grammaticization of the Partitive Case in Finnish. Ms. University of Helsinki. Helasvuo, M.-L. forthcoming a. The category of person in the coding of argu­ ment relations. In W. Ashby, J. Du Bois and L. Kumpf (eds.) Preferred Argument Structure: Grammar as Architecture for Function. Amsterdam: Benjamins. Helasvuo, M.-L. forthcoming b. Clauses and NPs as Syntacticized Units in Finnish Conversational Discourse. Ph.D. dissertation. University of Califor­ nia, Santa Barbara. Hopper, P. J. and S. A. Thompson. 1984. The discourse basis for lexical categories in universal grammar. Language 60: 703-752. Itkonen, T. 1979. Subject and object marking in Finnish: An inverted ergative system and "ideal" ergative sub-system. In F. Plank (ed.) Ergativity. New York: Academic Press. 79-101.

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Jakobson, R. 1984 [1958]. Morphological observations on Slavic declension: The structure of Russian case forms. [Morfologiceskie nabljudenija nad slavjanskim skloneniem: Sostav russkix padeznyx form.] In L. R. Waugh and M. Halle (eds.) Russian and Slavic Grammar: Studies 1931-1981. The Hague: Mouton. 105-133. Karlsson, F. 1982. Suomen kielen äänne-ja muotorakenne. Porvoo: WSOY. Karlsson, F. 1983. Prototypes as models for linguistic structure. In F. Karlsson (ed.) Papers from the Seventh Scandinavian Conference of'Linguistics. Vol. II. Helsinki: University of Helsinki. Lakoff, G. 1977. Linguistic Gestalts. In W. A. Beach et al (eds.) Papers from the Thirteenth Regional Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society. Chicago: Chicago Linguistic Society. 236-287. Lambrecht, K. 1987. On the status of SVO sentences in French discourse. In R. Tomlin (ed.) Coherence and Grounding in Grammar and Discourse. Amster­ dam: Benjamins. 217-262. Laury, R. 1992. Oblique tracking: Use of the demonstrative article se with oblique noun phrases in spoken Finnish. Paper given at the Georgetown University Round Table. Leino, P. 1990a. Spatial relations in Finnish: A cognitive perspective. In I. Almqvist, P.-E. Cederholm and J. Lainio (eds.) Från Pohjolas pörten till kognitiv kontakt: Vänskrift till Erling Wande den 9 maj 1990. Stockholm: Stockholm University, Department of Finnish. 117-152. Leino, P. 1990b. Strukturaalinen syntaksi ja konseptuaalinen semantiikka. In P. Leino, M.-L. Helasvuo, P. Lauerma, U. Nikanne and T. Onikki (eds.) Suomen kielen paikallissijat konseptuaalisessa semantiikassa. Kieli 5. Helsinki: Uni­ versity of Helsinki, Department of Finnish. 282-309. Nemvalts, P. 1994. Mittatilaustyökalu vai Prokrusteen vuode? Lingvistiikan terminologiaa pohtien. Paper given at the 1st Scandinavian Conference in Finnish linguistics May 26-28 1994. University of Stockholm, Stockholm. Nichols, J. 1983. On direct and oblique cases. In Proceedings of the ninth annual meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society. 170-192. Ochs, E. 1988. Culture and Language Development: Language Acquisition and Language Socialization in a Samoan Village. Cambridge: Cambridge Univer­ sity Press. Palander, M. 1991. Puhe- ja kirjakielen sanajärjestyseroja. (Summary: Wordorder differences in spoken and written language.) Virittäjä 95: 235-254. Penttilä, Α. 1963. Suomen kielioppi. Porvoo: WSOY. Rosch, E. 1975. Cognitive representations of semantic categories. Journal of Experimental Psychology 104: 192-233. Setälä, Ε. Ν. 1908 [1898]. Suomen kielioppi. Fifth edition. Helsinki: Otava. Shore, S. 1992. Aspects of a Grammar of Finnish. Unpublished Ph.D. Thesis. Sydney: Macquarie University. Siro, P. 1964. Suomen kielen lauseoppi. Helsinki: Tietosanakirja.

The interaction of Russian word order, agreement and case marking K a r e n E. R o b b l e e The Pennsylvania State University

1. Introduction Studies of syntactic variation usually examine the relation of structures that fail to occur in the same clause. For instance, they examine mutually exclusive voice constructions such as inverse and passive (e.g. Givón 1994), or the relation of two or more functions of a particular morphologi­ cal case (e.g. Timberlake 1975). The purpose of this paper is to examine the interaction of three rules of Russian grammar that operate in the same clause: one of agreement, another of case marking, and the third of word order. The study is functional in that it is text-based, examining the relation of linguistic usage (performance) to function. Section 2 presents preliminaries pertaining to the operation and function of each of the rules discussed. Section 3 treats their degree of correspondence, and Section 4 discusses cases of apparent conflict. 2. Preliminaries I will begin by introducing the rules of Russian word order, agreement and case marking.

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2.1. Word order Frequency studies (Sirotinina 1965) and experimental data on word order preferences (Holden and Krupp 1987) indicate that basic word order in Russian is SV(O). But basic word order is only characteristic of contextually independent sentences with transitive verbs and full nominal ex­ pressions (Siewierska 1988; Dryer 1995). Although it a useful notion in cross-linguistic discussions concerning language typology, it is of more limited value in studies that treat an individual language. In fact, in Russian all possible configurations of the subject (S), verb (V) and verbal complement (O) are found (Adamec 1966; Robblee 1994). According to Adamec (1966: 9-10), the primary function of Russian word order is to express the communicative function of the sentence's components. In the absence of marked intonation, ref erentially established old information is placed to the left of new information. This description is based on Mathesius' theory of Functional Sentence Perspective. Similar descriptions of Russian are found in Kovtunova (1976), and the Academy Grammar (=Svedova et al. (eds.) 1980), where the terms 'theme' and 'rheme' refer to old vs. new information. The theme represents the utter­ ance's point of departure, and the rheme its communicative goal. More recent work suggests that Russian word order is conditioned primarily by pragmatic, rather than any referential function. Yokoyama describes word order in terms of knowledge sets and sets of concern that are associated with the speech act's participants. These sets are defined extralinguistically and thus independent of the text. She demonstrates that word order in sentences with neutral intonation proceeds 'from the ad­ dressee's knowledge set to the matters of shared current concern, to the shared knowledge in general, and finally to the speaker's knowledge set' (1986: 235). Other studies have examined the interaction of grammatical rela­ tions with word order, focussing on the distribution of SV and VS word order. Maslova (1995) provides additional evidence that pragmatic func­ tion outweighs referential function. She bases her analysis on sentences such as the newspaper headline in (1). In this sentence, the referent of S was known to the reading public as one of the leaders of the coup attempted in Moscow in October 1993. VS inversion is found not because the referent is 'new', but because the event of his arrest was not presup­ posed.

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Zaderzan Anpilov. detained Anpilov 'Anpilov is detained.' (Maslova 1995: 113)

Sentence (1) is thus characterized by the 'existential' function of VS word order described in Robblee (1994). This function is used to report the occurrence of events that are not presupposed. It occurs discourse-inter­ nally as well as discourse-initially, and is subject to minimal lexical constraints. Because of these minimal constraints and its high frequency, I consider the existential function the primary function of VS word order. 2.2.

Agreement

Russian has several types of subjects that may occur with either singular or plural predicate forms. One of these types consists of a quantifier plus a noun marked genitive, for instance the subjects in (2)-(5). 1 1 will refer to such subjects as 'quantified NPs.' Note that in (2) and (3), the quantified NPs occur with singular predicate forms, while in (4) and (5) they occur with plural forms. (2)

(3)

(4)

(5)

U vas, kazetsja, bylo dva syna? by you seems was two son (sg.) 'You had two sons, didn't you?' (SB 344)2 U vxoda v blindai stojalo neskol'ko celovek. by entrance to dug-out stood several people (sg.) 'By the entrance into the dug-out stood several people.' (KS 275) Znal Kurilov, cto rastutu Aleksandra dva syna knew Kurilov that grow by Aleksandr two son (pl.) 'Kurilov knew that Aleksandr had two growing sons.' (SB 343) Neskol'ko celovek rasskazyvajut ob odnom i tom several people narrate about one and that (pl.) ze sobytii (emphatic particle) event 'Several people recount one and the same event.' (NM 479)

Corbett (1979: 58-70) views both types of agreement as structural. He argues that in these constructions the subject is headed by the quanti-

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fier which is not marked for number. Underspecification of the head may trigger singular agreement as the default. But he points out that plural agreement is also structural since it is conditioned by the morphology of a constituent of the underspecified subject. In (6) the quantified noun is plural and plural agreement is grammatical, but in (7) the quantified noun is singular and plural agreement is not possible. (6)

(7)

Bol'sinstvo priglasennyx ne javilis'. majority invited not appeared (gen. pl.) 'The majority of the invited did not appear.' (Academy Grammar, cited by Corbett; Corbett's translation) *Bol'sinstvo naselenija ne sobralis'. majority population not gathered (gen. sg.) 'The majority of the population gathered.' (Corbett's transla­ tion.)

Note, however, that Robblee (1993: 439fn) provides (8) as an example of plural agreement in a sentence with a quantified noun that is a singular collective noun, and Rozental' (1974: 220) cites other examples such as (9) in which there is no overt quantified noun. (8)

(9)

bol'sinstvo narodu prixodilik nam obeim majority people came to us both (gen. sg.) (pl.) 'the majority of people came to [to see] both of us' (NM 508) Procenko vpolne otcetlivo predstavljal sebe, cto bol'sinstvo, Procenko fully clearly presented self that majority ocevidno, umrut zdes'... obviously will die here (pl.) 'Procenko quite clearly imagined that the majority would obvi­ ously die here.' (Simonov; cited by Rozental' 1974: 220)

While Corbett views both types of agreement as structural, other studies regard both types of agreement as semantic. According to Skoblikova (1959: 91-92), agreement is conditioned by the utterance's communicative purpose. The singular is used to focus on quantity, while the plural is used to focus either on the action denoted by the verb, or on properties of the subject. Singular agreement is therefore characteristic of

WORD ORDER, AGREEMENT AND CASE MARKING

231

statistical descriptions, while the plural is characteristic of other types of narrative. (10) On ne mog [...] primirit'sja s tem, cto segodnja he not could reconcile with that COMP today v odnom iz dnem [...]  nego sgorelo dva tanka i afternoon by him burned two tanks and in one from (sg.) nix —ves' èkipaz. them all crew 'He was unable [...] to reconcile himself with the fact that this afternoon [...] two of his tanks had burned, and in one of them the whole crew/ (KS 208) (11) on naxodilsja na toi'ko cto vzjatom barxane, gde segodnja it located on only just taken dune where today sgoreli dva tanka Klimovica: odin, zadrav k nebu burned two tank Klimovic one thrusting toward sky (pl.) pusku, majacil na samoj versine barxana, a drugoj, canon loomed on self summit dune and other zaryvsis' puskoj v pesok, stojal  pod "erna. digging canon in sand stood by upgrade 'It [the observation point] was located on the dune that had just been taken, where two tanks of Klimovic had burned today: one thrusting a gun towards the sky, loomed at the very top of the dune, and the other, digging its gun into the sand, stood at the bottom.' (KS 208) Robblee (1993a) claims that agreement expresses the speakers view of an event as existentialized or individuated, suggesting that singular agree­ ment is found in (10) because the speaker views the losses as a whole event that is not presupposed, but that in (11), the plural is used because the speaker is focussing on the same event's individual participants. Example (10) is found at the beginning of a passage asserting the destruction of indefinite *tanks'. Example (11) is found later in the same passage and followed by a description of each of the individuals that constitute the quantified NP. 2.3. Genitive of negation Under negation, the argument of a Russian intransitive predicate may be marked nominative or genitive. For instance, the arguments in (12) and

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232

(13) are marked nominative, while those in (14) and (15) are marked genitive. (12) Batal'on es ce ne byl v boj. battalion still not was in battle (nom.) 'The battalion had not yet been in battle/ (KS 143) (13) dlja nix ponjatie licnosti ne suscestovalo nikogda for them notion individual not existed never (nom.) 'for them the notion of the individual never existed' (NM 10) (14) Stalingrada ese ne bylo, Stalingrad still not was (gen.) 'Stalingrad had not yet been/ (AR 284) (15) pansiona Zajceva uze ne suscestvovalo boarding-house Zajcev's already not existed (gen.) 'Zajcev's boarding house no longer existed' (NM 251) Sentences such as (14) and (15) are generally regarded as existential constructions (cf. Chvany 1975; Babby 1980; Paduceva 1992; Robblee 1993b). According to Babby, the genitive case is used to mark the NP as falling within the scope of negation. He defines the scope of negation as the asserted part of the negative construction. But NPs outside the scope of assertion may also be marked genitive. For instance, in (16) and (17) the scope of assertion is the polarity of the predicate, but the NPs are nevertheless marked genitive. (16) No mamina but mother's drugoj zizni other life

zizn' ostanovilas',  zizn'ju byl otec, life stopped her life was father  nee ne bylo by her not was

'But mother's life had ended, her life had been father, she had no other life/ (AR 115) (17) No ètogo  ne slucilos' but this for the time being not happened (gen.) 'But this had not yet happened/ (KS 112)

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233

Robblee (1993b) suggests that case marking reflects the attributive or referential properties of noun phrases described by Donnellan (1966) and Partee (1972). In existential constructions NPs have an attributive func­ tion and are marked genitive, but in nonexistential constructions they function as referentially autonomous individuals and are marked nomina­ tive. The attributive function of genitive case marking is illustrated by (14) in which the proper noun Stalingrad expresses a property of Stalingrad-fless (the property of being the place where the Germans suffered their first major defeat during the World War II), rather than a referential entity. This description is consistent with the observations of Babby (1980) and Paduceva (1992) that nonreferential nouns are usually marked genitive, but it also accounts for genitive case marking of expres­ sions such as proper nouns and demonstratives. 3. Degree of correspondence In this section I discuss the degree to which the reflexes of these three rules correspond. The analyses are based on subsets on the sources listed at the end of the article. These sources include seven volumes of belletristic prose (VB, SB, VGr, AK, VP, AR, KS) and five volumes of memoirs (VGa, EG, AJ, GK, NM). All sources were written and published after 1950. First I will discuss word order and agreement, then word order and case marking, and, finally, agreement and case marking. 3.1. Word order and agreement The study of the interaction of word order and agreement is based on the sample used in Robblee (1993a). It consists of 373 sentences with quan­ tified NPs produced by performing text counts on the sources SB, EG, VGr, AK, GK, NM, AR, KS (approximately 3900 pages). Table 1 depicts the interaction of word order and agreement in this sample. 3 It shows that singular agreement is two and a half times more frequent among sentences with VS word order than among those with SV word order. These data are consistent with those of Corbett (1983: 151). 4 Robblee (1993a) investigates the correlation between agreement and predicate type, examining three types of predicates. 'Inversion' verbs are a subset of unaccusatives that fail to lexicalize a manner constituent; 'intransitive' verbs include other statives, as well as verbs of motion and

234

KAREN E. ROBBLEE

position; 'agentive' predicates include those that are unergative or transi­ tive. 5 Examples of each of the predicate types are presented in Table 2. No. Singular

No. Plural

TOTAL

Singular

SV

29

82

111

26.1%

vs

178

84

262

67.9%

TOTAL

207

166

373

58.2%

Word Order

Table 1: Singular agreement and word order

Predicate type

Examples

Inversion

byt' vozniknut' naxodit'sja nuzno

'be' 'emerge' 'be located' 'necessary'

Intransitive

stojat' priexat' krasnet' nravit'sja

'stand' 'arrive' 'redden, blush' 'appeal to, please'

Agentive

rabotat' upravljat' udarit' dat'

'work' 'govern' 'hit' 'give'

Table 2: Classification of predicates Inversion verbs occur with singular agreement with the greatest degree of frequency, while agentive verbs are usually found with the plural. Table 3 shows that word order has an effect on agreement with all three types of predicates, but that the degree of the effect varies.

WORD ORDER, AGREEMENT AND CASE MARKING

Predicate Type

SV Word Order

VS Word Order

TOTAL

235

VS/SV

Inversion

11/13

84.6%

102/110

92.7%

113/123

91.9%

1.1

Intransitive

16/43

37.2%

66/117

56.4%

82/160

51.3%

1.5

2/55

3.6%

10/35

28.6%

12/90

13.3%

7.9

Agentive

Table 3: Singular agreement according to word order and predicate

type

For inversion predicates singular agreement in sentences with VS word order is 1.1 times more frequent than singular agreement in sentences with SV word order; for intransitive predicates it is 1.5 more frequent, and for agentive predicates 7.9. The relatively small effect of word order on agreement in sentences with inversion predicates may be attributed to their very high tendency to occur with singular agreement even in sentences with SV word order. Conversely, the dramatic effect of word order on agreement in sentences with agentive predicates is possible because of the extremely low frequency of singular agreement in sentences with SV word order. 6 Table 1 suggests that sentences with quantified NPs favor VS word order. This is confirmed by Table 4 which compares word order in this sample to a more general sample reported in Robblee (1994). Two factors account for the high frequency of VS word order in the sample of sentences with quantified NPs. No. SV

No. V S

TOTAL

VS

Quantified NPs

111

262

373

70.2%

Overall

586

272

858

31.7%

TOTAL

697

534

1231

43.4%

Table 4: Word order in different

samples

Robblee (1994) points out that SV(O) word order is characteristic only of Russian sentences with agentive verbs. In sentences with inversion

KAREN E. ROBBLEE

236

verbs VS is more frequent and appears to be unmarked. Maslova (1995) makes a similar observation, suggesting that the correlation between word order and predicate type is a manifestation of split-transitivity in Russian. Inversion Predicates

Intransitive Predicates

Agentive Predicates

Quantified NPs

33.0%

42.9%

24.1%

Overall

10.4%

34.7%

54.9%

Table 5: Predicate type, quantified subjects vs. overall Table 5 shows that although agentive predicates occur in a majority of Russian sentences overall, they occur in just a quarter of the sentences that have quantified NPs as subjects. In contrast, inversion predicates are found three times more frequently in the sample with quantified NPs. In other words, quantified NPs tend to occur with the types of verbs that favor VS word order. Robblee (1993a, 1994b) notes that inversion verbs are generally found with adverbials that quantify rather than those that qualify, and that they are used to distribute or quantify a property without expressing manner. The high representation of inversion predicates in sentences with quantified noun subjects is consistent with these lexical semantic properties. In contrast, agentive predicates seem to be relatively incompatible with quantification. Note, however, that VS word order is relatively more frequent in sentences with quantified subjects for all predicate types. This is shown in Table 6. The second factor motivating the high frequency of VS word order in sentences with quantified NPs relates to presuppositions. VS inversion usually reports events that are not presupposed. Although the subjects of such sentences may be referentially autonomous, they typically are not. Instead they tend to report new information. When speakers mention an entity for the first time, they need to provide information that specifies the particular entity they have in mind. Quantification is one type of specifi­ cation. VS word order and quantified subjects are therefore likely to occur together.

WORD ORDER, AGREEMENT AND CASE MARKING

Predicate Type

Quantified Subject

237

Quantified NPs/Overall

Overall

Inversion

13/123

10.6%

44/109

40.4%

0.26

Intransitive

43/160

26.9%

200/343

58.3%

0.46

Agentive

55/90

61.1%

342/406

84.2%

0.73

TOTAL

111/373

29.8%

586/858

68.3%

0.44

Table 6: SV word order, quantified subject vs. overall Agreement is affected by the lexical quantifier, as well as the lexical predicate. In particular, the paucals 2, 3 and 4 are said to favor plural agreement, while larger numerals ('5+') favor the plural. According to Corbett (1979), this is because quantifiers of greater numerical value are more noun-like, while those of smaller numerical value are more adjec­ tive-like. Non-numeric quantifiers such as malo 'few' and nemalo 'not a few, a good deal' condition singular agreement in the vast majority of cases, while neskol'ko 'several' is characterized by greater variation (Rozental' 1974: 227-228).

Quantifier

SV Word Order

VS Word Order

TOTAL

VS/SV

10/53

18.9%

32/92

34.8%

42/145

31.1%

1.8

neskol'ko 'several'

7/26

26.9%

53/67

79.1%

60/93

64.5%

2.9

5+

9/27

33.3%

84/94

89.4%

93/121

76.9%

2.7

100.0%

12/14

85.7%

1.7

2-4

(ne) malo '(notifew'

3/5

60%

9/9

Table 7: Singular agreement according to word order and quantifier

type

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KAREN E. ROBBLEE

Table 7 shows that the effect of lexical quantifier in this sample is consistent with earlier descriptions. It further reveals that word order has a much greater effect on predicate agreement in sentences with the quantifiers neskol'ko or 5+ than it does in sentences other quantifiers. The data also comport with Corbett's (1979: 71-76) hypothesis that the quan­ tifier neskol'ko falls between that of cetyre and pjat' in terms of agree­ ment. 7 3.2. Word order and the genitive of negation Since the genitive of negation and VS inversion both have existential functions, the genitive of negation should correlate with noun phrases found after the verb. Indeed, Babby (1980) and Paduceva (1992) imply that under neutral conditions (i.e. in the absence of marked intonation) arguments to the right of the verb are invariably marked genitive, and that only those to the left are characterized by variation. The sample for the study of word order and case marking is based on text counts of all sources listed at the end of the article (approximately 5500 pages). It includes negative constructions with the verbs listed in Table 8. These inversion verbs occur with the genitive of negation with a fair degree of regularity (Robblee 1993b). 8 byt' (po)byvat' ostat'sja, ostavat'sja proizojti, proisxodit' slucit'sja, slucat'sja stat', stanovit'sja suscestvovat' vozniknut', voznikat'

'be' 'be [iterative] 'remain' 'occur' 'happen' 'become' 'exist' 'emerge'

Table 8: Inversion verbs included in the sample Table 9 depicts the correspondence between case marking and word order in the sample. 9 The genitive is found in 87.8% of the sentences with SV word order, but 97.8% of those with VS word order. Although the genitive of negation is more frequent with byt' than with other inversion verbs, the effect of word order on these two groups is not significantly different.

WORD ORDER, AGREEMENT AND CASE MARKING

Predicate

SV Word Order

VS Word Order

byt'

379/410 92.5%

341/341

Other inversion verbs

109/146 74.7%

TOTAL

488/556 87.8%

239

TOTAL

VS/SV

100.0%

720/751 95.6%

1.08

58/67

86.6%

167/213 78.4%

1.16

399/408

97.8%

887/964 92.0%

1.14

Table 9: Word order and genitive case marking Recall that quantified noun phrases are more likely than other subjects to be found after the verb. In the sample of negative sentences with inversion predicates, we find the opposite situation. Although VS word order is usual for sentences with inversion verbs, under negation SV word order is more frequent. This is illustrated by Table 10 which compares word order in the sample of sentences with negative inversion verbs to the more general sample described in Robblee (1994).

Predicate

Under Negation

Overall

Under Negation/ Overall

byt'

410/751

54.6%

21/55

38.2%

1.43

other

146/213

68.5%

23/54

42.6%

1.61

TOTAL

556/964

57.7%

44/109

40.4%

1.43

Table 10: SV word order, under negation vs. overall Negative sentences usually occur in marked contexts in which corre­ sponding affirmative events are presupposed (Givón 1975). The new information that they provide is usually the polarity of the event. Since they report events that are presupposed, they are more likely to occur with SV word order than with existential VS word order.

240

KAREN E. ROBBLEE

3.3. Agreement and the genitive of negation Sentential negation and quantified subjects are generally associated with different types of presuppositions. Negative sentences provide informa­ tion about presupposed events, while sentences with quantified subjects usually report events that are not presupposed. Targets of the genitive of negation with intransitive verbs and agreement with quantified NPs are generally found in complementary distribution, with the former before the verb and the latter after it. As a result these two rules rarely operate within the same sentences. It is nevertheless possible for them to operate in the same domain as demonstrated by (18)-(21). (18) Do ¡costra ne bylo i sta sagov until fire not was even hundred steps (sg.) (gen.) 'The fire wasn't even a hundred steps away.' (KS 252) (19) Mne esce ne bylo trinadcati let me still not was thirteen years (sg.) (gen.) 'I wasn't yet thirteen years old.' (AR 53) (20) Dvux starsix detej ne bylo, oni uze usli v skolu. two older children not was they already left to school (gen.) (sg.) 'The two older children were not there, they had already gone to school.' (KS 98) (21) Dva processa—pisanie stixov i prozy— nikogda ne two process writing poetry and prose never not (nom.) proisxodili odnovremenno. occurred simultaneously (pl.) 'The two processes—writing of poetry and prose—never oc­ curred at the same time.' (NM 532) The sample contained eleven sentences like those in (18)-(21). In ten of them, the genitive is found, triggering singular (default) agreement. Eight have noun phrases that express a temporal or spatial distance. Example (21) is the only sentence in which the genitive of negation fails to occur. Native speakers indicate that when the genitive of negation fails to operate, the verb in this sentence must be plural. They further indicate

WORD ORDER, AGREEMENT AND CASE MARKING

241

that genitive case marking is possible, especially if the noun phrase in apposition is deleted. This is shown in (22)-(24). (22) Dvux processov two process (gen.) (23) Dva processa (nom.) (24) *Dva processa (nom.)

nikogda ne proisxodilo never not occurred (sg.) nikogda ne proisxodili (pl.) nikogda ne proisxodilo (sg.)

odnovremenno simultaneously odnovremenno odnovremenno

The data, though scant, suggest that singular agreement correlates with the genitive, and plural agreement with the nominative. 4. Cases of conflict Despite the relatively high correspondence between word order and agree­ ment as well as word order and case marking, it is not at all uncommon for these rules to conflict with each other. This is primarily because agree­ ment and case marking operate on a different level from word order. Agreement and case marking are conditioned by the structure of propositional information, while word order is used to integrate that propositional information into the broader context. VS word order with plural agreement is used to signal that S is not 'a matter of current concern' (Yokoyama 1986), but is of further relevance to the narrative. It is followed by a description of S or an event in which S is an active participant. This is illustrated by (25) and (26). (25) delo obst ojalo matter get on

sloznee; tem bolee čto tam zili more complicated the more so that there lived (pl.) nasa sem'ja dve sem'i: deduskina semja i two families grandfather's family and our family 'the situation was even more complicated, especially since there were two families living there, grandfather's family and our family/ (AR 50) (26) Nad pis'mennym stolom viseli dve fotografii; na odnoj above writing table hung two photographs on one (pl.)

242

KAREN E. ROBBLEE staroj [...] byl snjat pokojnyj otec Sincova [....] old was photographed deceased father of Sincov Drugaja fotografi] a byla Masina [...]. other photograph was Masa's 'Above the desk were hanging two photographs; on an old one was a picture of Sincov's deceased father [....] The other photo­ graph was Masa's [...]' (KS 172)

Nonexistential SV word order occurs with existential singular agree­ ment when S is presupposed and somehow contrasted with other entities. In (27), the quantifier provides new information, but the quantified noun represents entities that the speaker presumes the addressee knows to exist. This sentence occurs in a context in which the addressee has come across the speaker in one of several seemingly abandoned houses. His world knowledge would provide him with the information that some quantity of people or 'families' had previously been associated with these houses. The function of the sentence is essentially contrastive. It contrasts 'three families' with the following 'I alone'. But it has singular agreement because it reports an event that is viewed as homogeneous, in which all subevents are the same. The quantified noun phrase 'three families' functions as a collective noun, in which the individual entities denoted by the expression are not differenti­ ated. Within the context of the sentence the subject of (27) is a nonindividuated property of a time and place in a world. But by contrasting the subject of (27) with the following entity, the narrative treats it as an individual. This same contrastive function is found in (28). (27) Dlja nix nas celovek sam ρ o sebe vrag... Potomu cto for them our person self on self enemy because on russkij... Tri sem'i tut zilo. Do vojny. er' he Russian three families here lived before war now (sg.) vot ja odin ostalsja. (emphatic particle) I alone remain 'For them one of our people is an enemy in and of himself... Because he's Russian... Three families lived here. Before the war. Now I alone remain/ (SB 101) (28) Kogda Sincov vernulsja, na odnoj polovine stola bylo nakryto when Sincov returned on one half table was covered  uzinu, a na drugoj Masa doglazivala emu rubaski[...]. for supper and on other Masha finished ironing him shirts

WORD ORDER, AGREEMENT AND CASE MARKING

243

— Esce dve rubaski ostalos', vse ostal'noe jauze pogladila, still two shirt remained all other I already ironed (sg.) — kivnula ona na krovat', gde lezalo vyglazennoe i nodded she at bed where lay pressed and slozennoe natel'noe bel'e. folded body linen 'When Sincov returned, one half of the table was set for supper, and on the other Masa was finishing ironing his shirts [...] "Two more shirts are left, everything else Tve already ironed," she nodded towards the bed where ironed and folded underclothes lay/ (KS 284) Apparent conflicts are also found for word order and case marking under negation. Although VS word order usually patterns with the geni­ tive, in (29) and (30) it is found with the nominative case. The subjects of these sentences are highly specific illnesses that are viewed as unique entities rather than properties. They therefore occur with nominative case marking. But (29) and (30) deny the occurrence of a situation that is not in any way presupposed, thus conditioning VS word order. (29) Ctoby ne proizosel otek legkix, prekratit'kapel'noe in order not occurred edema lungs cease droplet (nom.) vlivanie rastvora edva pul's pridet ν normu. infusion solution barely pulse will come to norm 'So that emphysema ['edema of the lungs'] doesn't occur, stop administering the IV as soon as the pulse returns to normal.' (AK 132) (30) Prosto cudo, cto ne voznikla cuma. simply miracle that not emerged plague (nom.) 'It's just a miracle that the plague didn't arise.' (AK 529) Example (31), in contrast, has SV word order but genitive case marking. It does not assert the occurrence of a previously unknown situation. Instead it is an affirmational sentence, the main function of which is to assert the polarity of the predicate. Affirmational sentences generally have SV word order. The genitive of negation operates, how­ ever, because the target noun phrase is viewed as a property of a time and place in a world.

244

KAREN E. ROBBLEE (31) Nas snjali, a potom okazalos', cto vse kartocki us photographed but then turned out that all cards nakleili na pasportu i nuzno za nix zaplatit'po glued on passport and necessary for them to pay each tri rublja. U menja ne bylo, mama ne dala. A potom three rubles by me not was mom not gave but then ja vse-taki dos tala deη'gi, no fotografii uze ne bylo. I nevertheless obtain money but photograph already not was (gen.) * We were photographed, and then it turned out that they put all the photos on matting, and we had to pay three rubles each for them. I didn't have it, mom didn't give it to me. And then I managed to get the money anyway, but there were no longer any photo­ graphs/ (KS 10-11)

Affirmational sentences contrast a situation in one world with a situation in another, and, thus, necessarily contrast S with some entity in that other world. The entity with which the preverbal S of an affirmational sentence is contrasted may or may not be provided overtly by the text. Example (31) contrasts the absence of a certain type of photograph in the present world with the presence of similar photographs in an earlier world; this conditions SV word order. The entity with which the photograph of (31) is contrasted is overtly expressed in the preceding sentence ('cards'). Example (32) contrasts the absence of a 'protocol' and 'clarity' in the world of 1941 with their presence in a later world. In (32), however, the entities, with which the preverbal noun phrases are contrasted, are not mentioned in the narrative itself. Instead they are treated as shared (common) knowledge of the speaker and addressee. (32) Proizoslo eto v nojabre sorok pervogo goda, protokola happened this in November forty first year protocol (gen.) "Vanzee"esce ne suscestvovalo, jasnosti s polukrovkami Wanzee still not existed clarity with half-breeds (gen.) ne bylo, a tut ne prosto polukrovka, skazem, not was but here not simply half-breed we will say napolovinu russkij ili ukrainec, a v ego zilax tecet half Russian or Ukrainian but in his veins flows nemeckaja krov', i po vnesnosti cistyj nemec, urozdennyj German blood and in appearance pure German born

WORD ORDER, AGREEMENT AND CASE MARKING

245

xristianin -ljuteranin Christian-Lutheran 'This occurred in November 1941, the Wansee Protocol did not yet exist, there was still no clear policy concerning half-breeds, and this was not simply a half-breed, let's say, half Russian or Ukrainian, but in his veins flowed German blood, and in appear­ ance he was a pure German, born a Lutheran Christian' (AR 219) SV word order individuates the argument of an intransitive proposi­ tion with singular agreement by contrasting it with some other entity. It individuates a genitive marked argument in an intransitive proposition with negation by contrasting the entire event with other potential events, and hence the participant in the event with other potential participants. 5. Conclusions This study demonstrates that a syntactic process such as agreement may have an existentializing discourse function that is affected by the lexicon (i.e. predicate type, and lexical quantifier), morphology (i.e. case marking under negation), as well as another syntactic process (i.e. word order). Such evidence argues against a modular approach to grammar. The study further suggests that Russian agreement with quantified NPs and case marking under negation are not independent processes. Quantified NPs are typically found with VS word order, and sentential negation with SV word order. The environments they favor are thus complementary. This complementary distribution is motivated by differ­ ent presuppositions of quantification and negation. When quantified NPs and sentential negation do occur in the same domain, there is a direct correlation in reflexes of agreement and case marking. Singular agreement is found with the genitive, and plural agreement with the nominative. Reflexes of agreement and case marking are less consistent with those of word order. Existentializing agreement and case marking are found with individuating word order and vice versa. When we consider the different domains in which processes operate, conflicting cases are re­ solved. Sentence-level information may be existentialized, and yet have an individuating function at the narrative level, and conversely, may be individuated and have an existential discourse function.

KAREN E. ROBBLEE

246

Notes 1.

The syntax of Russian numerals is quite complex. According to traditional descriptions, the non-oblique cases of the numerals 'five' through 'twenty' (as well as larger numerals ending in 'five' through 'zero') govern the genitive plural, while the same cases of the numerals 'two', 'three' and 'four' (as well as numerals larger than twenty that end in 'two' through 'four') govern the genitive singular. Numerals ending in 'one' function as adjectives.

2.

Sources and their abbreviations are provided at the end of the article. They are described in Section 3.

3.

The sample excludes syntactic structures that are not characterized by variation as well as sentences with verbs that are synchronically derived by means of the intransitivizing verbal suffix -sja (Robblee 1993a).

4.

In Corbett's (1983: 151) sample singular agreement is found in 32% of the sentences with SV word order and 69.6% of the sentences with VS word order.

5.

See Robblee (1993b) for a more detailed description of this classification of predicates.

6.

Even if inversion predicates occurred with singular agreement in 100% of the sentences with VS word order, singular agreement in VS sentences would be only 1.2 more frequent than singular agreement in sentences with SV word order.

7.

Corbett (1979) points out that the syntactic behavior of nes kol 'ko is less noun-like than pjat', but more noun-like than cetyre. (This is based primarily on whether they agree with the quantified noun with respect to animacy. The numeral cetyre generally agrees, while pjat' does not; neskol'ko is more variable.) He associates noun-like behavior with singular agreement, therefore asserting that neskol'ko is less likely than pjat' to correlate with singular agreement, but more likely than cetyre. The data in this study support his analysis.

8.

Syntactic structures that never allow the genitive of negation were excluded from the study (e.g. sentences with predicate nominais).

9.

In this section, 'S' refers to the argument that would be the nominative subject of an affirmative sentence; under negation it may be marked nominative or genitive.

Sources VB SB

= =

VGa =

Bogomolov, V. O. 1981. Moment Istiny. Omsk: Altajskoe knižnoe izd. Borzunov, S. M. and Ja. A. Ersov. 1976. Vsego odna Zizn'. Moscow: Sovetskaja Rossija. Galitskij, V. A. 1984. Teatr Moej Junosti. Leningrad: Iskusstvo.

WORD ORDER, AGREEMENT AND CASE MARKING

EG

=

VGr = AJ = AK = GK = NM VP AR KS

= = = =

247

Ginzburg, E. S. 1985. Krutoj Marsrut. Kniga pervaja, 2nd ed. New York: Possev-USA. Grossman, V. S. 1988. Zizn' i Sud'ba. Moscow: Kniznaja palata. Jablockina, A. A. 1953. Zizn' ν Teatre. Moscow: Iskusstvo. Koptjaeva, A. D. 1973. Druzba. Sobranie socinenij, t. 3. Moscow: Xudozestvennaja literatura. Kryzickij, G. K. 1976. Dorogi Teatral'nye. Moscow: Vserossijskoe teatral'noe obscestvo. Mandel'stam, N. 1982. Vtoraja Kniga, 3rd ed. Paris: YMCA Press. Pikul', V. S. 1973. Moonzund. Leningrad: Sovetskij pisatel'. Rybakov, A. N. 1979. Tjazelyj Pesok. Moscow: Sovetskij pisatel'. Simonov, K. M. 1965. Tovarisci ρο Oruziju. Moscow: Sovetskij pisatel'.

References Adamec, P. 1966. Porjadok Slov v Sovremennom Russkom Jazyke. Rozpravy Ceskoslovenské Akademie Věd. Rada spolecenskych věd, 76.15. Prague: Ceskoslovenské Akademie Věd. Babby, L. 1980. Existential Sentences and Negation in Russian. (=Linguistica Extranea, Studia 8.) Ann Arbor: Karoma. Chvany, C. V. 1975. On the Syntax of BE-Sentences in Russian. Cambridge, MA: Slavica. Corbett, G. G. 1979. Predicate Agreement in Russian. (=Birmingham Slavonic Monographs, 7.) Birmingham: Department of Russian Language and Litera­ ture, University of Birmingham. Corbett, G. G. 1983. Hierarchies, Targets and Controllers: Agreement Patterns in Slavic. London: Croom Helm. Donnellan, K. 1966. Reference and Definite Descriptions. The Philosophical Review 75: 281-304. Dryer, M. 1995. Frequency and pragmatically unmarked word order. In P. Downing and M. Noonan (eds.) Word Order in Discourse. Amsterdam: Benjamins. 105-135. Givón, T. 1975. Negation in language: Pragmatics, function, ontology. Working Papers on Language Universals 18: 59-116. Givón, T. (ed.) 1994. Voice and Inversion. Amsterdam: Benjamins. Holden, . . and M. Krupp. 1987. Word order in Russian transitive sentences. Folia Slavica 8: 254-271. Kovtunova, I. I. 1976. Sovremennyj Russkij Jazyk: Porjadok slov i aktual'noe clenenie prediozenija. Moscow: Prosvescenie. Maslova, E. 1995. VS/SV opposition in Russian and the thetic/categorial dis­ tinction. Sprachtypologie und Universalienforschung 48: 106-124.

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Nichols, J., G. Rappaport and A. Timberlake. 1980. Subject, topic and control in Russian. In B. Carson, M. A. B. Hoffman, M. Silva, J. Van Oosten, D. K. Alford, K. A. Hunoid, M. Macaulay and J. Manley-Buser (eds.) Proceedings of the Sixth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society. Berkeley: University of California, Berkeley. 372-86. Paduceva, E. V. 1992. O semanticeskom podxode k sintaksisu i genitivnom sub"ekte glagola byt'. Russian Linguistics 16: 53-63. Partee, . 1972. Opacity, coreference, and pronouns. In D. Davidson and G. Harman (eds.) Semantics of Natural Language. Dordrecht: Reidel. 415-441. Robblee, . . 1993a. Individuation and Russian agreement. Slavic and East European Journal 37: 423-441. Robblee, . . 1993b. Predicate lexicosemantics and case marking under nega­ tion in Russian. Russian Linguistics 17: 209-236. Robblee, . . 1994. Russian word order and the lexicon. Journal of Slavic Linguistics 2: 238-267. Rozental', D. E. 1974. Prakticeskaja Stilistika Russkogo Jazyka. 3rd edition. Moscow: Vyssaja skola. Siewierska, A. 1988. Word Order Rules. London: Croom Helm. Sirotinina, O. B. 1965. Porjadok Slov v Russkom Jazyke. Saratov: Saratov Univ. Skoblikova, E. S. 1959. Forma skazuemogo pri podlezascem, vyrazennom kolicestvenno-imennym socetaniem. Voprosy Kul'tury Reci 2: 91-116. Svedova, N. Ju., N. D. Arutjunova, A. V. Bondarko, Val. Vas. Ivanov, V. V. Lopatin, I. S. Uluxanov, F. P. Filin (eds.) 1980. Russkaja Grammatika. Moscow: Nauka. Timberlake, A. 1975. Hierarchies in the genitive of negation. Slavic and East European Journal 19: 123-138. Yokoyama, O. 1986. Discourse and Word Order. Amsterdam: Benjamins.

Models of transitivity in French A systemic-functional interpretation Alice Caffarel University of Sydney

1. Introduction 1 Within the systemic functional (SF) framework, a clause is interpreted as the simultaneous representation of three types of meaning or 'metafunc­ tion' (Halliday 1985, 1994; Matthiessen 1995): experiential (for repre­ senting the world around us and inside us), interpersonal (for establishing and maintaining social relations) and textual (for presenting ideational and interpersonal meaning as information organized into text in context). Here, I will be approaching the French clause from the point of view of the experiential metafunction, which Halliday (1979: 48) defines as the 'content' function of language; it is the language as the expres­ sion of the processes and other phenomena of the external world, including the world of the speakers own consciousness, the worlds of thoughts, feelings and so on. From the viewpoint of SF theory, the clause construes experiential (representational) phenomena as configurations of a nuclear process, participants involved in the process and attendant circumstances, lexicogrammatically realised by TRANSITIVITY systems, as shown in Figure 1.

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Figure 1: Relating features from the transitivity system to functions in tne transitivity structure The system network in Figure 1 is a very general representation of French experiential clause grammar. It shows that when a clause makes experiential choices, it selects from three simultaneous systems, the AGENCY system and the PROCESS TYPE system, which realise 'nuclear TRANSITIVITY' and the CIRCUMSTANCE TYPE system which real­ ises 'circumstantial TRANSITIVITY' (See Matthiessen 1995: 205-206). In this description of French experiential grammar, I will focus essentially on the 'nuclear' systems, that is, the AGENCY and PROCESS TYPE systems. The interpretation of nuclear TRANSITIVITY as having two simultaneous systems originates from Halliday's (1985: 149) transitivity models hypothesis that "probably all transitivity systems, in all languages, are some blend of [...] two semantic models of processes, the transitive and the ergative", models which are then related in the grammar to the PROCESS TYPE and AGENCY systems respectively: The root of the grammar of the nuclear transitivity of processes and participants are two simultaneous systems, AGENCY and PROC­ ESS TYPE. They reflect two models of transitivity. (i) The first is highly generalized and cuts across the various process types. It is concerned with the variable of external cause or not (i.e., external to the combination of Process + Medium) — effective or middle. This is the ergative model...

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(ii) The second is process-type specific; the traditional representa­ tive is the material clause: the basic question is whether the combi­ nation of Actor + Process extends (transcends to another participants (Goal) or not. This is the transitive model. (Matthiessen 1995: 206) Thus, following the Halliday-Matthiessen hypothesis on transitiv­ ity, we can interpret the experiential organisation of the example in Figure 1, ils avaient ligoté l'ours comme un vulgaire paquet, both from a transitive and an ergative perspective: (i) Transitive perspective : (la) Ils avaient ligoté Actor Process (ii) Ergative perspective: (lb) Ils avaient ligoté Agent Process

l'ours Goal

comme un vulgaire paquet Manner

l'ours comme un vulgaire paquet Medium Manner

The transitive analysis in (i) foregrounds that the action performed by participant 1, namely the Actor, extends to/impacts upon participant 2, namely the Goal. The ergative analysis in (ii) foregrounds that 'the action' which is actualized through participant 2, the Medium, is caused by an external participant, namely the Agent. The Halliday-Matthiessen hypothesis on transitivity is thus different from typological work on ergative and nominative case languages (See e.g. Plank 1979; Dixon 1979,1994). Here, we are not concerned in the first instance with whether or not French has a nominative-accusative or ergative-absolutive or even a split ergative system based on whether the Subject (S) of an intransitive clause is marked the same as the object (O) [ergative system] or as the subject (A) [transitive system] of a transitive clause. 'Case marking' is part of the overall picture, but only a small part: it is a realizational resource, along with other realizational resources. The term case marking itself is nowadays often used as a general term for realizational categories (see Figure 2 below), which include case marking, but also word-order and adpositions (See e.g. Givón 1982). Furthermore, the structural construal of participant-process interac­ tion may be explicitly realised by case marking, as in Finnish (see Shore 1992), but not necessarily so, as in French. In addition, the metafunctional layering of clause grammar in the SF model means that case marking, word order and so on are not limited to the realisation of experiential grammar but can contribute to the realisation of all or either types of meaning,

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experiential, interpersonal and/or textual, as shown in Figure 2 above. In French, for example, the pronominal case marking system serves to realise a combination of functions within the different metafunctions: the mark­ ing of French pronominals serves on the one hand to distinguish textually prominent pronominals from textually non-prominent ones, such as moi from je in moi, je le veux (me I want it) and on the other hand, within nonprominent pronominals it serves to simultaneously mark interpersonal and experiential functions. For example, interpersonally, the Subject// (nomi­ native case) is distinguished from the complement le (accusative case) in il le veux (he wants it) and experientially, Medium le (accusative case) is distinguished from Beneficiary lui (dative case) in il le lui donne (he it to him gives) (See Caffarel 1996).

Figure 2: Case marking, both a general term for referring to various realisational categories and a specific realisational category Thus, the aim of this paper is neither to establish whether the French language is ergative or transitive on the basis of the realisation of its core grammatical functions as does Dixon (1979, 1994) for example , nor to establish whether processes pertain to different paradigms, one ergative, the other transitive on the basis of grammatical 'reactances', as does Davidse (1992) when she interprets the grammar of material transitivity

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('action verbs') as having two distinct (but not complementary) systems of transitivity. The aim of this paper is to show that Halliday's notions of ergative and transitive can be related as complementarities in the descrip­ tion of French transitivity and that such a complementarity gives us a powerful model for interpreting participants-process patterns in texts. In Section 2, I discuss in some detail the two semantic models of processes presented here, the ergative and the transitive. In Section 3, I overview two other functional approaches to the interpretation of partici­ pant-process relations , that of Foley and Van Valin (1984) and that of Starosta (1988). In Section 4, I illustrate the discourse significance of operating with complementary models of transitivity, namely the ergative and the transitive. In Section 5,1 propose a systemic-functional account of French transitivity systems, first of the PROCESS TYPE system and then of the AGENCY system. Finally, in Section 6, I explore patterns of transitivity selections in two different text types (e.g. a geological text and a narrative text) or registers and suggest that different text types make different demands on the transitivity system, thus foregrounding one or the other of the transitivity models. 2. Models of transitivity: a systemic-functional approach Following the Halliday-Matthiessen hypothesis, the semantic relationship that is construed among processes and their participants may be ap­ proached from two perspectives, from left to right (transitive perspective) and from right to left (ergative perspective), as shown in Figure 3 below. The meanings embodied in the transitive and ergative models are 'exten­ sion' and 'causation' respectively (See Halliday 1994:163; Davidse 1992: 108-109). Martin (1996: 361) schematises the differences between the two perspectives as in Figure 3. In Section 1,I mentioned that the transitive and ergative perspectives were related in the grammar of French to the PROCESS TYPE and AGENCY systems. The relationship between the two transitivity models and the two nuclear transitivity systems (see Section 1) is illustrated in Figure 4. While the transitive perspective projects a classif icatory view of the world which reflects different domains of experience, such as, doing & happening (doing), sensing & saying (projecting) and being & having

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(being), the ergative perspective projects a generalizing view of the world which does not discriminate between processes.

Figure 3: Transitive and ergative perspectives: encoding different partici­ pant-process relations (taken from Martin 1996: 361) The different domains of experience, such as doing & happening, sensing & saying and being & having differentiated by the French PROC­ ESS TYPE system are based on covert evidence which is discussed in Section 5. The French PROCESS TYPE system distinguishes between three main domains of experience, DOING, PROJECTING and BEING. We may simply act or act upon things, as represented by material grammar (see Figure 5), but also reflect on our experience of the world. The category of mental process serves to represent our consciousness; it embodies the resources that allow us to reflect and to project our inner thoughts. Further­ more, we use experiential grammar to represent the relations that exists among phenomena. The grammar of relational processes gives us the resources for relating fragments of experience, through identification and attribution. On the other hand, the AGENCY system, distinguishes between phenomena that are brought about (effective) or not (middle) by some cause external to the Process + Medium nucleus. The most general features of the PROCESS TYPE and AGENCY system are represented in Figure 5 below.

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255

Figure 4: Relationship between the complementary transitivity models and the simultaneous transitivity systems

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ALICE CAFFAREL

Figure 5: Least delicate TRANSITIVITY

systems

The curly bracket in Figure 5 indicates that the two systems AGENCY and PROCESS TYPE are simultaneous. This simultaneity represents the complementarity of the ergative and transitive perspec­ tives. Thus, any clause may be analysed in terms of both ergative and transitive functions. The latter are process specific, and are indicated on the left of the system network in Figure 5. On the other hand, ergative

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257

functions such as Medium, Agent, Range and Beneficiary can be general­ ized to all major process types (see Section 3.2). The ergative/transitive correspondencies are tabulated in Figure 6.

Figure 6: Illustration of the complementarity of the ergative and transitive models Each participant in the examples in Figure 6 are analysed in terms of both the transitive and ergative functions to highlight the simultaneity of the PROCESS TYPE and AGENCY systems and the complementarity of the transitive and ergative models. For example, la porte in la porte s'ouvre, is both Actor and Medium.

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Specific transitivity functions which reflect the meaning of exten­ sion in the transitivity model do not serve to subclassify the general ergative functions which reflect the meaning of causation in the ergative model. They are different, as is made explicit in Figure 3 above, and function together to subclassify the clause (See Martin 1996). In the next Section, I compare Halliday's ergative and transitive functions to Foley and Van Valin's (1984) and Starosta's (1988) participant roles. 3. Participant roles in functional models other than SF Functional approaches other than the systemic functional model propose different sets of functions to account for participant roles in the clause. In the next two sections, I will review and compare two of these approaches, that of Foley and Van Valin (1984) and that of Starosta (1988). 3.1. Macro-functions and verb-specific functions versus ergative func­ tions and transitive functions: comparing Foley and Van Valin (1984) to Halliday (1985) Halliday's (1967/8, 1985) complementary sets of experiential functions, ergative and transitive, differ from Foley and Van Valin's (1984) macrofunctions, Actor and Undergoer, which in addition to their general mean­ ing take on specific meanings depending on the verb with which they co-occur. Actor and Undergoer are general functions of any clause, while e.g. Agent, Patient or Instrument are "token-specific" functions attached to the lexical verb. More appropriately, the so-called "token-specific" functions are more like subtypes — they subclassify the macro-roles: Interpreted in systemic terms, the relationship between the two sets of roles, macro-roles and token-specific semantic relations, is one of delicacy. This does not capture the systemic insight that a transitiv­ ity system in one language may embody complementary perspec­ tives (e.g. ergative+transitive) (Halliday and Matthiessen in press) Why are complementary perspectives more insightful than a relation of delicacy? Complementary perspectives, which imply a polysystemic rather than monosystemic approach to transitivity, give us the means of interpreting different patterns of experiential meaning in text. Such pat­ terns may serve to realise higher order meanings in texts. Thus, the analysis of process types used in a particular text (see Section 4), may

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highlight the kind of world view, whether dynamic (construed by non­ relational processes) or static (construed by relational processes), the text is projecting towards the reader. On the other hand, the analysis of agency in news items, for example, can foreground the ideology of the journalist: who is assigned the Agent function, i.e., who is portrayed as responsible? Is Agency omitted? (See Fowler et al. 1979). On the other hand, a delicacy and monosystemic approach to case relations such as that proposed by Foley and Van Valin (1984), although an improvement over Fillmore's (1968) general inventory of deep cases in that it makes explicit that case relations are not invariant but that the "token-specific" meanings of Actor and Undergoer change in accordance with the predicate with which they co-occur and the argument position in which they occur, it is still essentially lexically-based; it tells us about the experiential meanings of particular segments in the clause but does not provide insights into the general experiential semantics of clauses or texts, as the model presented here does (see Section 4 for an illustration of the discourse significance of operating with two models of transitivity). In addition, the delicacy relationship between the macro-roles and the "to­ ken-specific" function means that the two types of functions, rather than reflecting two different modes of participating in the process, emphasise different facets of the same thing. I will now turn to Starosta's (1988) lexicon-based approach to case. Unlike Halliday and Foley and Van Valin, Starosta recognises two sets of generalised case relations, Agent & Patient and Actor & Undergoer. 3.2. Starosta's generalised case relations and

macro-roles

Starosta's (1988) lexicase approach to case relations, is as the name 'lexicase' implies lexically-based. Case relations are identified from the viewpoint of the verb, they represent 'the syntactic environments of verbs' (Starosta 1988: 120). Starosta identifies a first set of roles, Agent and Patient and 'assumes that there is a Patient in the case frame of every verb, where 'Patient' corresponds to Halliday's MEDIUM' (Starosta 1988: 128). In addition he identifies a set of macro-roles, Actor and Undergoer, which are more general than his Agent-Patient. These macro-functions are defined as follows: The Actor of a clause in the lexicase sense corresponds fairly closely to what has been termed the 'logical subject' in Chomskyan gram­ mar. It should however be pointed out that this term has nothing to

260

ALICE CAFFAREL do with logic; according to Halliday, 'Logical Subject meant "doer of the action ". It was called "logical " in the sense that this term had from the seventeenth century, that of "having to do with relations between things ", as opposed to "grammatical" relations which were relations between symbols (Halliday 1985: 34)' The logical complement to the Actor is the Undergoer, or in Halliday's terms the Goal (or Patient, but not in the lexicase sense). He defines the term Goal as 'one to which the process is extended' (Halliday 1985:103), which seems to work well enough for the cases observed so far. (Starosta 1988: 147)

Starosta (1988: 146) suggests that ' Actor, like Patient is present in every clause'. This implies that in 'intransitive' clauses, Patient and Actor always correspond, similarly to Actor and Medium in middle material clauses in SF. Starosta (1988: 146) points out that: The analysis of the subject of all intransitives as simultaneously Actor and Patient follows from the assumptions that both are obliga­ tory categories, and from the subject choice hierarchy. Starosta also points out that his macro-functions differ from Foley and Van Valin's actor and undergoer: Foley and Van Valin provisionally define their 'actor' as 'the argu­ ment of a predicate which expresses the participant which performs, effects, instigates, or controls the situation denoted by the predi­ cate', and the undergoer as 'the argument which does not perform, initiate, or control any situation but rather is affected by it in some way' (Foley and Van Valin 1984: 29). They characterize their categories as having syntactic as well as semantic implications (op. cit., p. 31), and not surprisingly there is a higher degree of correla­ tion between the Role and Reference actor and undergoer and lexicase Agent and Patient respectively than there is in lexicase Actor and Undergoer (Starosta 1988: 147-148). Starosta's Agent-Patient roles and Actor-Undergoer micro-roles allow us to make different semantic generalizations about the case frame of verbs, but do not provide a model for interpreting participants-process interac­ tion patterns in text, as does the systemic-functional model presented here to which I now return. The following section will illustrate the discourse relevance of operating with the two complementary models of transitivity and

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261

ergativity, by analysing a text in terms of both the ergative and transitive functions. 4. Text illustration of the complementarity of the ergative and transi­ tive models in the construal of experiential meaning. The complementarity of the transitive and ergative models of transitivity, as we have seen, imply that both perspectives are simultaneously con­ structed by the experiential grammar. This was formalised systemically in Figure 3 and is now illustrated by the structural analysis of a text segment both in terms of the transitive and ergative functions. In Text 1 below, which belongs to the literary genre of the 'New Novel', clauses are essentially middle (material&relational) with inani­ mate participants. What this text does is to represent the ongoing move­ ment of a wave in contrast with the stillness of the weather, as well as the non-agentive aspect of natural phenomena. A transitive perspective on Text 1 foregrounds a shift from the static construal of the 'weather' by relational processes to the dynamic construal of the 'wave' by material clauses. For example, the stillness of the weather, lack of wind, cloud, blueness of the sky is constructed by relational clauses; the wave's ongoing movements by material processes. Note also the choice of cir­ cumstances of Manner in material clauses as a means of further specifying the movement of the wave. In contrast, an ergative perspective on Text 1 projects a view of the world made up mostly of causeless happenings, or if an effect is produced, it is brought about by a natural force, as in clause (2). Text 1: Segment from La plage Barbara Wright) (1)

(2)

(Robbe-Grillet 1966; translated by

relational&middle // fait très beau. Carrier/Medium Process Attribute/Range 'It is a very fine day.' material&effective Le soleil éclaire le sable jaune d'une lumière violente, verticale. Actor/Agent Process Goal/Medium Manner 'The sun illuminates the yellow sand with a violent, vertical light/

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262 (3)

existential&middle II2 n'y a pas un nuage dans le ciel. Process Existent/Medium Place 'There is not a cloud in the sky.' (4) existential&middle Il n'y a pas, non plus, de vent. Process Existent 'Neither is there any wind.' (5a) relational&middle L'eau est bleue, calme, sans la moindre ondulation [[venant du large]], Carrier/Medium Process Attribute/Range 'The water is blue and calm, without the faintest swell from the open sea/ (5b) relational&middle bien que la plage soit ouverte sur la mer libre, jusqu'à l'horizon, Carrier/Medium Process Attribute/Range Place 'although the beach is completely exposed onto the open sea as far as the horizon' (6a) material&middle

Manner Actor/Medium Process Manner 'But, at regular intervals, a sudden wave, always the same, originat­ ing a few yards away from the shore, suddenly rises' (6b) material&middle et déferle aussitôt, toujours sur la même ligne Process Manner 'and then immediately breaks, always in the same line/ (7) relational&middle On η 'a pas a lors l' impression [[que l'eau avance, puis se retire.]]; Carrier/Medium relational:attributive:possessive Attribute/Range 'And one does not have the impression that the water is flowing and then ebbing/

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263

relational&middle ' est,

au contraire, comme si tout ce mouvement s'exécutait sur place. Carrier/Medium Process Attribute:  ir/Range 'On the contrary, it is as if the whole movement were being accom­ plished in the same place/ (9a) material&effective

'The swelling of the water at first produces a slight depression on the shore side' (9b) material&middle&ranged et la vague prend un peu de recul, dans un bruissement de graviers roulés; Actor/Medium Process Range Manner 'and the wave recedes a little, with a murmur of rolling gravel;' (10a) material&middle puis elle éclate et se répand, laiteuse, sur la pente, Actor/Medium Process Manner Place 'then it bursts and spreads milkily over the slope,' (10b) material&effective mais pour regagner seulement le terrain perdu. Process Range 'but it is merely regaining the ground it has lost/ There are a number of processes of movement which are embedded as constituents of relational clauses, as in (5a), (7) and (8). These proc­ esses have not been analysed but they are significant in that they are all middle and material, thus foregrounding the self-engendering character of natural phenomena such as waves. The transitivity selections of Text 1 are tabulated in Table 1. Table 2 displays frequency patterns. This highlights the prominence of middle clauses in Text 1, both material and relational. As previously mentioned, the relational processes construe the stillness of the weather as opposed to the ongoing movement of the wave construed by the material processes. Material middle clauses foreground the selfengendering nature of natural phenomena by representing processes as resulting from no external cause. Some of the material middle clauses in this text would traditionally be interpreted as transitive in the sense that they have two participants, referred to as Actor and Range in the SF

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framework. "The Range is the element that specifies the range or scope of the process" (Halliday 1985: 134). Contrary to a Goal-oriented effective clause, a middle&ranged clause cannot be probed by arriver. Thus using the example in clause (9a), one cannot say *qu'est ce qui est arrivé à la légère dépression? (What happened to the slight depression?).

Clause No

Process

transitivity functions

ergative functions

(1)

relational&middle

Carrier, Attribute

Medium, Range

(2)

material&effective

Actor, Goal

Agent, Medium

(3)

existential&middle

Existent

Medium

(4)

existential&middle

Existent

Medium

(5a)

relational&middle

Carrier, Attribute

Medium, Range

(5b)

relational&middle

Attribute

Range

(6a)

material&middle

Actor

Medium

(6b)

material&middle

(Actor)

(Medium)

(7)

relational&middle

Carrier, Attribute

Medium, Range

(8)

relational&middle

Carrier, Attribute

Medium, Range

(9a)

material&middle

Actor, Range

Medium,Range

(9b)

material&middle

Actor, Range

Medium, Range

(10a)

material&middle

Actor

Medium

(10b)

material&middle

(Actor), Range

(Medium), Range

Table 1: Transitivity patterns in Text 1

MODELS OF TRANSITIVITY IN FRENCH

material

relational

middle

6

7 (existential:2; attributive: 5)

effective

1

265

Table 2: Quantitative patterns in the transitivity selections of Text 1 A simultaneous reading of the representation of experience in terms of the ergative and transitive perspectives brings out the two levels of ideational meaning that are embodied in the text. On one level the text is about the movements of a phenomenon, the wave (construed as material clauses) in contrast with the stillness of the weather (construed as rela­ tional clauses). On another level, it is about how we perceive natural phenomena, as causeless happenings (construed as middle clauses). The participant roles patterns found in Text 1 are summarized in Table 3 below. This brings out the way in which Robbe-Grillet uses the grammar to construe a fragment of a model of the world. Following this general discussion of transitivity models, I will move on to discuss the most general features of the French PROCESS TYPE system. 5. A systemic-functional interpretation of French transitivity In the introductory sections to this paper, I suggested that the transitivity system of French comprises two simultaneous systems, AGENCY and PROCESS TYPE, which reflect two models of transitivity, the ergative and the transitive respectively. I will focus first in Section 5.1 on the PROCESS TYPE potential, and then in Section 5.2, I will explore the AGENCY potential and how it generalises across process types.

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Table 3: Summary of participant roles patterns in Text 1 5.1. The PROCESS TYPE system: a transitive perspective The various process types construe different domains of experience. The labels [doing], [projecting] and [being], which are used to refer to the least

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267

delicate features of the system (see Figure 5 above), reflect three main domains of experience, doing & happening, thinking & saying, and being & having. The labels also reflect some of the grammatical characteristics of the processes that are used to differentiate them. These characteristics are based on criteria proposed by Halliday (1985) for English. These criteria are summarized in Martin (1996: 365) by the terms in bold below, as: (i) aspect: does the process typically construe activities as ongoing or not? (îi) directionality: is the construal of the activity bidirectional as pleasellike type verbs in English? (iii) phenomenality : can the participants associated with the process be metaphenomenal ('pre-project fact' or projected idea) or macrophenomenal rather than just a phenomenon (a 'thing')? (iv) consciousness: must one participant be conscious or not? (v) participation: is there a general verb that can be used to probe the process, such as 'do (to/with)' for English material clauses? The French counterparts of the tests proposed by Halliday to distin­ guish process types will be introduced as we explore the systemic gram­ mar of each process type one by one, starting with DOING processes, then moving on to PROJECTING processes and finally BEING processes. 5,1.1. The DOING

potential

'Doing' processes cover material processes, behavioural processes (i.e., physiological phenomena such as éternuer ('to sneeze') and mental and verbal activities such as regarder ('to watch') zndbavarder ('to chat') and meteorological processes such as pleuvoir ('to rain'). Doing clauses can be probed with the general processe faire ('to do'). As we will see in 5.1.2 and 5.1.3, this is not the case for projecting and being clauses. Consider the following examples taken from Henri Thomas' The Offensive (1966): (2a)

[doing:material&effective] Claude enleva son sac Claude took down the bag Actor Proc:material Goal TENSE: simple past

de ses épaules from his shoulders Place

ALICE CAFFAREL

268 (2b)

[doingrmaterial&effective] le fourra dans l'un de ces renforcements it shoved into a recess Goal Proc:material Place TENSE: simple past (2c) [doing:material&middle] où il s'allongea ensuite // la tête sur le sac, son fusil contre lui where he lay down then his head on the kit bag, his rifle by his side Time Hypotactically expanding Actor Proc: material: middle clause (relational Process TENSE: implicit) simple past

One may probe Claude enleva son sac, le fourra dans un renforcement, etc., by qu'est-ce que Claude fit ? (what did Claude do ?) This is not the case for examples (3a) and (3b), which are relational and mental respectively. (3a) Le jour, dans le était gris comme un crépuscule fond du ravin, Day at the bottom was a grey twilight of the ravine Carrier Proc: relational attributive TENSE: Attribute Comparison imperfect past Claude ne voyait plus le ciel (3b) et and Claude could no longer see the sky Senser Proc:mental: perception TENSE: imperfect past Phenomenon One could not probe le jour était gris by qu 'est-ce que le jour faisait (What did the day do?) or Claude voyait le ciel by qu'est-ce que Claude faisait? (What did Claude do?). Another kind of 'doing', which Halliday (1985) labels behavioural, such as regarder in je regarde la télévision (I am watching television) represents a mental action. This mental activity can be probed with faire (Qu'est-ce qu'il fait? Il regarde la télévision) but cannot have an hyper-

MODELS OF TRANSITIVITY IN FRENCH

269

phenomenon, that is, a metaphenomenon (projected idea or embedded fact) or a macrophenomenon (act: non-finite clause) (see Matthiessen 1995: 261). Thus, one cannot say *je regarde que Pierre arrive, (I am watching that Pierre is arriving) but one can say je vois que Pierre arrive (I see that Pierre is arriving). Accordingly, behavioural processes are interpreted here as a subtype of 'doing' processes rather than of 'project­ ing' processes (see Figure 5). For more examples of hyperphenomena, see Section 5.1.2 below. Material processes represent the major type of doing processes. This is determined on the basis that they are not restricted in AGENCY, i.e., they can be either middle or effective in contrast with behavioural and meteorological processes which can only be middle. This is because behavioural and meteorological processes represent happenings rather than doings. In addition, material processes are realised by a fairly extended set of verbs. On the other hand, both behavioural and meteoro­ logical processes are realised by a restricted set of verbs. A basic systemic representation of the grammar of 'doing' processes follows:

Figure 7: A systemic display of some of the less delicate material

options

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270

The system network reads as follows: one may choose between three types of 'doing' processes, material, behavioural or meteorological. If the option [material] is chosen, then the clause may be either [middle] or [effective]. If the option [middle] is chosen, then one may chose between [ranged] or [non-ranged]. A Range is typically an extension or an elabo­ ration of the process, as in (4) below. Features from the network are illustrated below: (i) Material (4)

(5)

(6)

clauses

material&middle&ranged Il enfila son short de velours Actor/Medium Process Range 'He pulled on his corduroy shorts' material&middle&non-ranged Les volets s'entrebâillaient Actor/Medium Process 'The shutters opened slightly/the shutters were slightly ajar' (taken from Sainte-Soline 1972: 14) material&effective Une grenade avait démoli une de ses chenilles Actor/Agent Process Goal 'A grenade had smashed one of its tracks' (taken from Vian 1972: 58)

(ii) Behavioural

clauses

Behavioural clauses represent physiological processes as well as mental, or verbal activities. They differ from mental and verbal processes in that they cannot project, but are similar to mental ones in that their one participant is always endowed with consciousness. (7)

(8)

Behavioural :physiological Yannick a éternué Behaver/Medium Process 'Yannick sneezed' Behavioural:verbal action Yannick parle sans arrêt Behaver/Medium Process Manner 'Yannick speaks non stop'

MODELS OF TRANSITIVITY IN FRENCH (9)

Behavioural:mental action Elle écoute Behaver/Medium Process 'She is listening to the radio'

(iii) Meteorological

271

la radio Range

clauses

Meteorological grammar in the field of doing is realised by conflating Medium and Process. The element il is not interpreted as a participant, as it is not representational. One cannot replace il by a nominal group like le temps ('the weather'), for example. (10) Doing:meteorological:middle Il vente Proc/Medium 'It is windy' Experience of the weather can also be construed as 'being' clauses of the existential type, in which case Medium and Process are separated, as in: (11) Being:existential:middle Il y a du vent there Process Existent/Medium '(There) there is wind' (12) Being:existential // fait du vent Process Existent/Medium 'It is (makes) windy' 5.1.2. The PROJECTING

potential

Projecting clauses include mental (internal semiosis) and verbal clauses (external semiosis). Projecting clauses construe semiosis as symbolic processing capable of creating symbolic content construed by a separate clause. Projecting clauses, as their term implies, may project. The projection may be done 'paratactically', by quoting, or 'hypotactically', by report­ ing. This characteristic of mental and verbal processes is one of the criteria that sets them apart from all other process types. This is illustrated with example (13b) which projects (13a) paratactically (from Henri Thomas' The Offensive (1966)):

272

ALICE CAFFAREL (13a) Ils n'ont qu' une trentaine de canons, en face Carrier Proc:rel:poss Attribute Place 'They've only got thirty guns over there' Fremigacci (13b) dit Proc:verbal:projecting:quote Sayer 'said Fremigacci'

Verbal clauses, like mental clauses, need not always project, bu' they have the potential to do so. While mental clauses project ideas, verbal clauses project locutions (referred to as 'direct' and 'indirect' speech in traditional grammars). If they do not project a locution, verbal clauses are ranged, i.e., they have a participant which specifies the name of the verbalisation—a Verbiage as in example (14), which also shows that verbal clauses may have an additional participant, the Receiver (transitive function)/Beneficiary (ergative term) of the verbalisation. (14) // a demandé un renseignement Sayer Process Verbiage He asked an advice 'He asked his neighbour for a piece of

à son voisin Addressee to his neighbour advice.'

In example (15a) below, the phenomenon is a macrophenomenon, more precisely, an embedded non-finite clause. Unlike clauses projecting an idea or a locution, embedded clauses function as participants. As such they can be thematized as shown in (15b) (15a) Il aurait tellement aimé rester avec eux Senser Proc:mental: Phenomenon: metamiddle phenomenon 'He would so much have loved to stay with them.' (15b) Rester avec eux, il l' aurait tellement aimé Theme Rheme Senser phenomenon Process To stay with them he this would have really liked 'To stay with them, this he would have liked to do very much.' Example (15) illustrates another characteristic of mental clauses, already introduced in Section 5.1, which concerns the nature of the Phenomenon. It may not just be phenomenal (things) as are participants in material clauses, but it may also be macro-phenomenal (non-finite

273

MODELS OF TRANSITIVITY IN FRENCH

clauses) as in (15), and meta-phenomenal (facts or projected ideas), as in (16). Example (16) illustrates a phenomenon as fact: (16) Il s'inquiétait du fait que son coeur battait trop vite Senser Process Phenomenon: fact 'He was worried (by the fact) that his heart was beating too fast/ The meta-phenomenon in (16) also functions as a participant and as such can be thematized as in: (17) Le fait que son coeur battait trop vite Phenomenon The fact that his heart was beating too fast 'The fact that his heart was beating too fast

l' Senser him worried

inquiétait Process worried him/

Examples (16) and (17) illustrate another characteristic of mental clauses, and in particular of emotive mental clauses: the fact that they can be bi-directional. More precisely, the sensing is construed as the Senser having an emotion 'ranging' over the phenomenon as in (16) or as the Phenomenon causing the emotion as in (17). We will see in Section 5.2 that emotive clauses that construe the sensing from Senser to Phenomenon are middle, while clauses that construe the sensing from Phenomenon to Senser are effective. Further examples illustrating the bidirectionality of mental processes follow: (18) Il aime la musique Senser/Medium Proc: mental:reaction:middle Phenomenon/Range 'He likes music/ (19) La musique passionne Henri Phenomenon/Agent Proc:mental:reaction:effective Senser/Medium 'Music fascinates Henri/ An additional characteristic of mental processes concerns the nature of the Senser, which unlike the Actor of material clauses, must always be endowed with consciousness. If a normally non-conscious thing is con­ strued as Senser, it is personified. The sayer of a verbal clause, in contrast, can sometimes be a non-conscious participant, as le journal (the newspa­ per) in: (20) Le journal rapporte que les affaires de Bond vont mal 'The newspaper reports that Bond's businesses are not doing well/

274

ALICE CAFFAREL

However, in such cases, the Sayer typically stands in a metonymie relation with a conscious being, in this case the 'journalist'. The system network of French projecting processes is represented in Figure 8 below.

Figure 8: A systemic representation

of projecting

processes

The system network reads as follows: one may choose between two types of 'projecting' processes, mental or verbal. If the option [mental] is chosen, then we enter simultaneous systems: we may chose between either mental process, [perceptive], [emotive], [cognitive] or [intentional] and between having or not having a phenomenon. If the feature [phenomenalization] is chosen, then we may select either the option [hyperphenomenal] or the option [phenomenal], and so on.

MODELS OF TRANSITIVITY IN FRENCH

275

If the option [verbal] is chosen, we also enter simultaneous systems: we may chose between [no verbalization] and [verbalization], as well as between [addressee] or no [addressee]. If [verbalization] is chosen, then we may either verbalize it as [name] or [locution]. Having overviewed the grammar of 'projecting' processes, I will now turn to the grammar of 'being' processes. 5.1.3. The BEING

potential

Being clauses represent (i) a relation between two participants (relational processes), through identification as Token and Value or attribution as Carrier and Attribute; (ii) being clauses express that one participant exists (existential processes). 'Being' clauses cannot be probed by faire and cannot project. Another criterion that separates being clauses from doing and projecting ones is their unmarked past tense. Being clauses typically select for the 'imperfect past' while 'doing' and 'projecting' clauses select for the 'simple past' or 'compound past' (see Caffarel 1992 on TENSE). What distinguishes simple past/compound past and imperfect past is aspect. The imperfect presents the situation from within, "since it can both look backwards towards the start of the situation, and look forwards to the end of the situation" (Comrie 1976: 4), while the simple past/compound past present the situation from the outside. While relations are typically extended in time, 3 actions or thoughts are typically transient, which explains their respective choice of unmarked past tense: (21) Being:relational:attributive:intensive Son manteau était d'une étoffe mince Carrier/Medium Proc:relational/attributive Attribute/Range imperfect past 'Her coat was of a thin material/ (22) Doing:behavioural:material // parla et dansa pendant des heures Behaviour&Actor/Medium Proc: simple past Time 'He spoke and danced for hours/ The two main types of relational clauses are distinguished by the fact that the order of Token and Value in identifying clauses can be reversed. Thus either the Token or the Value may be Subject. In contrast, in an attributive clause only the Carrier can map onto the Subject:

ALICE CAFFAREL

276

(23) Attributive (from Leeman-Bouix 1994: 33) La réalité de la langue est inaccessible, inobservable Carrier/Medium Proc:attributive Attribute/Range 'The reality of language is inaccessible, unobservable' One cannot say: (24) *Inaccessible est la réalité de la langue 'Inacccessible is the reality of language.' On the other hand, in a Token-Value relationship, the Subject may either be the Value as in (25) or the Token as in (26). In other words, the identifying clause in example (25) — (25) Identifying (from Leeman-Bouix 1994: 59) L'objet [[que se donne le grammairien]] est la langue Value Token 'The object to which the grammarian devotes herself is language/ — has an agnate reversed version, as shown in example (26): (26) La langue est l'objet [[que se donne le grammairien]] Token Value 'Language is the object to which the grammarian devotes herself/ A summary of the criteria that distinguish the three major subtypes of doing, projecting and being processes, i.e., material, mental and rela­ tional processes is tabulated in Table 4 below. Let us now examine 'being' processes in some more detail. (i) existential

clauses

As was mentioned above, existential clauses in contrast with other rela­ tional clauses are always middle. The sole participant, the Existent conflates with the Medium. Such clause types do not necessarily have a process, but simply what is traditionally called a "presentative", i.e., an item which presents the existent. Such an item will be referred to here as an 'existential particle'. Pottier (1992) identifies four means of realising existential clauses, which he illustrates with the following examples:

277

MODELS OF TRANSITIVITY IN FRENCH

material

mental

relational

pro-verb'faire, arriver'

YES Ils ont ligoté Tours. Qu'est-ce qu'il lui ont fait? Ils l'ont ligoté. 'What did they do to him? They tied him up.'

NO

NO

project

NO

YES Elle pense qu'elle réussira 'She thinks that she will go.'

NO

Hyperphenomenon

NO

YES Elle pense [[partir en France]] 'She is thinking of going to France.'

NO

+ Medium endowed with consciousness

NO Le train arriva en retard 'The train arrived late.'

YES Elle pensa arriver en retard 'She thought arriving late.'

NO

Unmarked past

simple past/compound past

simple past/compound past

Table 4: Criteria f or distinguishing

process

Le train était en panne 'The train was broken down.' imperfect past

types

(27) [Existential particle] Voici [Existent] un escargot 'Here is a snail.' (28) [Existential particle/Process] Soit [Existent] un triangle ABC 'Let ABC be a triangle/ (29) Il y [Process] a [Existent] du brouillard 'There is fog/

'I

ALICE CAFFAREL

278

(30) [Token] ' [Process] était [Value] l'hiver 'It was winter/ On the basis that (27) and (28) do not have any process, we could argue that such clause types are minor, and as such should not be inter­ preted as part of the system of the major clause. However, many languages do not have copular verbs. Furthermore, from an interpersonal view point, clauses such as (27) and (28) do not perform minor speech functions such as exclamations, calls or greetings, but participate in an exchange as propositions, either as a response statement accompanying an action, or as an initiating statement. Accordingly, such clause types whose function is to 'announce' a new participant will be interpreted as a subtype of existential clauses. Example (30), on the other hand, will be interpreted as a subtype of relational clauses, as it does not just present some entity but relates two entities. Thus, c' is not just a "dummy" Subject with no representational function like il in il y a, as it may be substituted by an entity such as la saison (the season), for example. Verbless existential clauses wiíl be referred to as [presentatiye] while existential clauses with a verb will be referred to as [stative]. (ii) Relational

clauses

While in existential clauses there is only one part to the 'being', "in relational clauses there are two parts to the 'being': something is being said to 'be' something else. In other words, a relation is being set up between two separate entities" (Halliday 1994). The French relational system consists of two main types of relational clauses, identifying and attributive. In an identifying clause, a Value is assigned to a Token or a Token is assigned to a Value. The two functions, Token and Value, can be reversed in the clause as we have already seen above. In contrast, the functions of an attributive clause, Carrier and Attribute cannot be reversed: an Attribute is assigned to a Carrier, but a Carrier cannot be assigned to an Attribute. An attributive clause may be either intensive, or non-intensive. The non-intensive system offers the choice between circumstantial and possessive. While in English, the possessive type of relation cross-classifies attributive and identifying clauses, in French possessives can only be of the attributive type and the possessor Attribute is realised as a prepositional phrase, as are the circum­ stantial attributes. Compare the following examples from English taken from Halliday (1994) and their French translations:

MODELS OF TRANSITIVITY IN FRENCH

English (31) The piano Token/ possessed

(32) Peter's Value (33) Peter Token

French

is Proc: intensive/ identifying: (active)

Peter's Value/ possessor

is (passive)

the piano Token

owns Proc: possessive/ identifying (active)

the piano Value

is owned by (passive)

Peter Token

(34) The piano Value

279

(35) Le piano Carrier/ Medium possessed

est Proc: intensive/ attributive

à Peter Attribute/ Beneficiary :possessor

(36) * À Peter

est

le piano

possède Proc: possesive/ attributive

un piano Attribute

est possédé

par Pierre

(37) Pierre Carrier

(38) *un piano

Table 5: A comparison of French and English possessive

clauses

We saw earlier in this section that identifying clauses are differen­ tiated from attributive clauses by the fact that they can be reversed, i.e., either the Token or the Value may conflate with the Subject. In contrast, the Attribute of an attributive clause cannot function as Subject. In French, possession can only be realised as an attributive type, either as a partici­ pant as in (35), or as a possessive process as in (37) or both as in (39) below: (39) Possessive: attributive clause Le piano appartient à Pierre Carrier/Medium process: Attribute/Beneficiary possessive/attributive 'The piano belongs to Pierre/

280

ALICE CAFFAREL

Clause (38), un piano est possédé par Pierre, does not mean that a piano belongs to Pierre, but that a piano is possessed by Pierre and thus expresses some kind of supernatural phenomenon. The systemic representation of French 'being' clauses is schema­ tised in Figure 9 and a table of realisation of relational clauses is then represented later in Table 6. Circumstantial attributive clauses are similar to possessive attributive clauses in that they can have the Attribute as Circumstance as in Jean est à Paris, or the Process as Circumstance as in (40): (40) La fête a duré toute la journée Carrier Process:circumstantial Attribute 'The party lasted all day/

Figure 9: A systemic representation

of French relational

processes

Having given an overview of the PROCESS TYPE system, I will now turn to its complementary transitivity system AGENCY, and illustrate the generalizing property of the latter.

MODELS OF TRANSITIVITY IN FRENCH

identifying intensive

attributive

non-intensive

intensive

extensive circumstantial

[Token] Paris [Proc] est [Value] la capitale dela France

281

[Token/Circ] Demain [Proc] est [Value/Cire] le 14 juillet

[carrier]Jean [Proc] est [Attribute] grand

[Carrier]Jean [Proc] est [Attribute/ Circ] à Paris

Table 6: Examples of relational 5.2. AGENCY: an ergative

possessive

[Carrier] Jean [Proc] a [Attribute] un piano

clauses

perspective

Agency embodies the meaning of causation which is most easily perceived in material clauses because only in the field of doing has the Agent the physical power to impact on things. However, I will argue that the Agent function is not restricted to doing clauses of the material type but is to be found in projecting clauses of the mental type and being clauses of the relational type. On the other hand, as suggested earlier on, process types such as behavioural, verbal and existential processes appear to be re­ stricted in agency and as such are interpreted as minor process types as opposed to material, mental and relational, which are the major process types on which the distinguishing criteria are based. In Figure 10 below the major process types are in bold type. The ergative model provides a general set of functions that can in principle be extended to all process types. Functions such as Actor and Goal are not adequate for the description of participants involved in mental, verbal or relational processes. The Medium function can, on the other hand, be generalised to all process types. "It is the nodal participant throughout: not the doer, not the causer, but the one that is critically involved, according to the particular nature of the Process" (Halliday 1985: 147). Thus, as we have seen, it is the Actor of a middle&material clause and the Goal in an effective&material clause. The second partici­ pant of an effective material clause has been referred to as the Agent in accordance with Halliday's ergative functions. In this section I will focus

282

ALICE CAFFAREL

on the Agent function across process types, beginning with mental, then moving to verbal and finishing with relational processes.

Figure 10: A partial systemic representation of the French potential

TRANSITIVITY

MODELS OF TRANSITIVITY IN FRENCH

283

The interaction of each major process type with the agency system is illustrated in Sections 5.2.1 to 5.2.3 below. 5.2.1. Middle and effective material

clauses

The interaction between the material system and the agency system is illustrated in Table 7 below. The table shows that middle material clauses may be reflexive or non-reflexive, and that effective material clauses may be synthetic or analytic. reflexive

non-reflexive

middle

la porte s'ouvre 'the door opens'

la pierre tombe 'the stone is falling'

effective

Pierre ouvre la porte 'Pierre opens the door'

Claire fait tomber la pierre ' Claire makes the stone fall'

synthetic

analytic

Table 7: Instantiations clauses.

of the AGENCY system in the context of material

The paradigm of clauses outlined in Table 7 defines the following grammatical proportionalities: la porte s'ouvre is related to Pierre ouvre la porte in the same way as la pierre tombe to Claire fait tomber la pierre. 5.2.2. Middle and effective mental clauses As we saw in Section 5.1.2, one characteristic of mental processes of emotion is their bidirectionality. The process may been coded from consciousness to phenomenon [middle] (e.g. 41), or from phenomenon to consciousness [effective] (e.g. 42), in which case the Phenomenon func­ tions as Agent rather than as Range, as in the following examples: (41) J' aime la musique Medium/Senser Proc:mental Range/Phenomenon 'I like music/

ALICE CAFFAREL

284

(42) Cette musique me Agent/Phenomenon Senser/Medium This music me 'I like this music/ (43) Cette musique le Agent/Phenomenon Senser/Medium This music him 'This music fascinates him/

plaît Proc:mental pleases passionne Proc:mental fascinates

What is interesting in French is that the 'plaire' type mental clause can also be middle by means of the se-clitic, in which case the Phenom­ enon functions as Range. In such a mental type clause the Range element takes a preposition (e.g. 44, 46 and 48). Halliday (1985: 149) points out: the choice of 'plus or minus a preposition' with Agent, Beneficiary and Range is not just random variation; it serves a textual function [...] The principle [in English] is as follows. If a participant other than the Medium is in a place of prominence [marked Theme of late News] in the message, it tends to take a preposition; otherwise it does not. (44)

(45) (46) (47) (48)

Il se passionne de musique Medium/Senser Proc:mental Range//Phenomenon 'He has a passion for music/ La situation alarme les voisins Agent/Phenomenon Proc:mental Medium/Senser 'The situation alarms the neighbours/ Ils s'alarment de la situation Medium/Senser Proc:mental Range/Phenomenon 'They are alarmed because of the situation/ La réponse étonne Pierre Agent/Phenomenon Procrmental Medium/Senser 'The answer surprises Pierre/ Pierre s'étonne de la réponse Medium/Senser Proc:mental Range/Phenomenon 'Pierre is surprised by the answer/

The Phenomenon/Range may also be absent as in (49): (49)

Il s'ennuie Medium/Sense Proc:mental 'He is bored'

MODELS OF TRANSITIVITY IN FRENCH

285

In other words, mental middle clauses may have a reflexive verbal group just like material clauses. Thus, the AGENCY system as presented in Figure 10 can be generalised to mental processes, with the exception of the feature analytic for effective clauses, which is a consequence of the nature of mental processes. Examples of mental clauses are tabulated below: reflexive

non-reflexive

middle

Il s'ennuie

Il aime la musique

effective

La musique le passionne

Table 8: Agency and mental process In contrast to mental clauses, verbal clauses tend always to be middle. However, in rare contexts, we may find effective verbal clauses realised analytically by means of the causative process faire: (50)

Il m' a fait dire des choses [[queje ne voulais pas dire]]. Agent Medium Proc:verbal Verbiage/Range 'He made me say things that I did not want to say.'

One could argue that 'processes of verbal impact which are on the borderline between the verbal domain and the material domain' (Matthiessen 1995: 285), such as for example réprimander ( repri­ mand'), féliciter ('to congratulate'), louer ( praise') and critiquer ( criticise') occur in effective type clauses. Matthiessen (1995: 285) points out that the participant addressed by the Sayer, that is the Target (Halliday 1985: 130), is construed more like a Goal than like a Beneficiary (Re­ ceiver) : it is not marked by a preposition as shown in (51) below. However, although the Target is like a Goal in appearance in example (51), if we unpack the process, which I interpret as a conflation of Process+Verbiage (or Range in ergative terms) then we can clearly see that the Target is a Beneficiary rather than a Goal-like participant, while the Sayer is the Medium through which the verbalisation is realised. This would suggest that such clause types are middle rather than effective. The process faire ' in example (52) is interpreted as a verbal process rather than a material

ALICE CAFFAREL

286

process. The use of 'faire' as a verbal process is not unusual and can also be used in projecting verbal clauses, as the example (53) shows. (51)

Il a réprimandé ses enfants Sayer Process/Verbiage Target 'He has reprimanded his children/ (52) Il a fait des réprimandes à ses enfants Verbiage/Range Target/Beneficiary Sayer/Medium Process He has made/said reprimands to his children (53) Plus ça va, plus t'arrives de bonne heureW fitil Projected locution Proc:verbal Sayer 'You are coming earlier every morning, he said/ (example taken from Sainte-Soline 1972: 16; translated by Peter Newmark) The majority of processes of verbal impact can be construed or conflated with the Verbiage or separated from it as the following paradigm exemplifies. As you will note in examples (57) and (59), the participant targeted by the verbalisation is not always construed as a Beneficiary but as an expansion of the Range/Verbiage. The fact that the Target in some of the clauses of verbal impact further elaborates on the Process/Range seems to support the interpretation of such clause types as middle rather than effective. As example (57) shows, a Beneficiary other than the Target can be found in such constructions, here à ses enfants. (54) Il félicite Pierre 'He congratulates Pierre/ (55) Il fait des félicitations à Pierre 'He offers congratulations to Pierre/ (56) Il loue Pierre 'He praises Pierre/ (57) Il' fait/chante les louanges [[de Pierre]] à ses enfants 'He sings Pierre's praises in front of his children/ (58) 77 critique Pierre 'He criticizes Pierre/ (59) Il fait la critique [[de Pierre]] 'He offers criticism of Pierre/ (60) Il adresse des critiques à Pierre 'He levels criticism at Pierre/

MODELS OF TRANSITIVITY IN FRENCH

287

I will now explore how the agency system generalises across rela­ tional processes. 5.2.3. Middle and effective relational

clauses

In attributive relational clauses, the Agent corresponds to the transitive function of Attributor (Halliday 1985: 149). In such clause types, the Attributor/Agent brings about a change of Attribute to the Carrier. Effec­ tive attributive clauses are either constructed with a process involving a change such as changer and transformer, as in examples (61) and (62) or analytically with a verbal complex in which the main process is conflated with the Attribute, as in (63): (61) La fée a changé le carrosse en citrouille. Agent/Attributor Process Medium/Carrier Range/Attribute 'The fairy changed the coach into a pumpkin.' (62) Le feu a transformé la glace eneau. Agent/Attributor Process Medium/Carrier Range/Attribute 'The fire turned the ice into water.' (63) Le soleil a fa it mûrir les fru its Agent/Attributor Process^Process/Attribute Medium/Carrier 'The sun made the fruit ripe.' All of the above clauses have 'middle' agnates, as shown below: (64) Le carrosse s'est changé en citrouille. Medium/Carrier Process Range/Attribute 'The coach changed into a pumpkin.' or (65) Le carrosse est devenu une cirouille Medium/Carrier Process Range/Attribute 'The coach became a pumpkin.' (66) La glace s'est transformée en eau. Medium/Carrier Process Range/Attribute 'The ice turned to water.' (67) Les fruits ont mûri Medium /Carrier Process/Attribute 'The fruit have ripened/are ripe.'

ALICE CAFFAREL

288

reflexive

non-reflexive

middle

Le carrosse s'est changé en citrouille

Les fruits ont mûri

effective

La fée a changé le carrosse en citouille Le soleil a fait mûrir les fruits

Table 9: Agency and relational attributive

process

Identifying clauses may also be middle or effective, as shown in the examples below: (68) Elle s'appelle Marie. (middle) Medium Range 'She is called Marie/ (69) Sa mère l' a appellée Marie. (effective) Agent Medium Range 'Her mother called her Marie/ (70) Ce livre s'intitule "L'homme de paroles", (middle) Medium Range 'This book is entitled" L'homme de paroles"/ (71) Claude Hagège a intitulé son livre "L'homme de paroles". Medium Range (effective) Agent 'Claude Hagège entitled his book "l'homme de paroles"/ (72) Mitterand est le président de la France, (middle) Medium Range 'Mitterand is the president of France/ (73) Les français ont élu Mitterand president, (effective) Agent Medium Range 'The French have elected Mitterand president/ Table 10 below illustrates the complementarity of the two systems PROCESS TYPE and AGENCY. It is interesting to note the use of Xheseclitic across clause types. Lexical patterns can give clues about the grammatical systems: here, the prominence of ergative patterns in French verbs (lexical end of the cline of delicacy), where a verb can be used in an effective clause and a middle clause through the affixation of these-clitic

MODELS OF TRANSITIVITY IN FRENCH

289

point to an ergative system in the grammar of transitivity (grammatical end of the cline of delicacy).

DOING

PROJECTING

BEING

Middle

La porte s'ouvre 'The door opens'

Il s'ennuie 'He is bored'

Elle s'appelle Marie 'She is called Marie'

Effective

Il ouvre la porte 'He opens the door'

La musique l'ennuie 'Music bores him'

Sa mère l'appelle Marie 'Her mother calls her Marie'

Table 10: Agency across process types Following this overview of the French experiential clause grammar potential and of its realisation in structure, I will now explore instantial patterns of transitivity in two texts of different registers. 6. Exploring patterns of transitivity across two registers This section explores how the different models of transitivity discussed above are deployed in two texts representative of two different registers, a geological text taken from a popular science magazine and a narrative text taken from a novel. The texts illustrating the discussion have been selected, not as token in themselves but as representative of texts of a similar type, or register. The prediction is that different varieties of language or registers tend to highlight or foreground different subpotentials from the overall transitivity potential (see Matthiessen 1993). This does not imply that in certain registers the two models of transitivity discussed here are not complementary. What I am suggesting is that one model tends to have more value in one register than in another. For example, geological expositions tend to construct experience as happenings coming into existence through an inanimate Medium, with possible external causes (Agent) and thus be more prone to an ergative analysis with [Process + Medium] +/- Agent. On the other hand, tradi­ tional narratives tend to construe experience as activities in which animate

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Actors have the power to impact on the world and thus are more likely to represent experience as [Actor + Process ] +/- Goal. Each text represents a pattern of instantiation of the general transitivity potential which gives value to particular features of the overall system. Again, it should be noted that one model does not exclude the other, and to underline this, all texts will be analysed simultaneously both in terms of the generalised ergative functions and the process specific transitive functions. Text 2: from an article in Geo (October 1984) entitled 'La Planète des hommes brûle-t-elle?' (Is man's planet burning?) (1) (2)

(3a)

(3b)

(4a)

(4b)

Le Galungung, volcan indonésien, s'est réveillé. Medium/Actor Process:material 'Galungung, an Indonesian volcano, has woken/ En pleine journée, le ciel s'obscurcit. Medium/Actor Process:material Location:time 'In the middle of the day, the sky darkens.' Les particules de roches solides projetées dans l'air jusqu'à quarante kilomètres d'altitude Agent/Actor cachent la vue du soleil pendant plusieurs jours, Process Medium/Goal Place Location:time 'The particles of solid rock projected in the air at a height of forty kilometres hide the sun from view for several days.' avant de se déposer en une couche blanchâtre, semblable à de la neige. Process:material Manner 'before settling in a whitish layer, similar to snow.' Cependant, nous savons, à partir des recherches effectuées pendant l'é­ ruption du mont SaintHelens (Etats-Unis) en 1980, Medium/Senser Process ¡mental Reason 'However, we know, from research carried out during the erup­ tion of Mount Saint-Helens (United States) in 1980' que des quantités impor- restenten altitudes, I tantes de poussières I Medium/Actor Proc:material Circumstancerplace 'that important quantities of dust stay at high altitude'

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(4c) absorbant une partie de l'énergie solaire Medium/goal 'absorbing part of the solar energy' (4d) et réduisant la transparence de l'atmosphère. Medium/Goal 'and reducing the transparency of the atmosphere/ cette fois, non un rechauffement, mais (5a) Il en resulterait, un refroidissement: Proc:existential Medium/Existent 'The result would be, this time, not an increase but a drop in temperature' (5b) ainsi, \l'activité volcanique, \pondèreraientwar des variations \mais aussi les pousclimatiques sières industrielles, I contraires Agent/Actor Proc:material circumstance:Means les effets de réchauffement [[dus à l' augmentation des rejets de gaz carbonique]]. Medium/Goal 'thus, not only the volcanic activity, but also industrial dust counterbalances by contrary climatic variations the warming effect due to the increase of carbon dioxide discharge/ Text 2 is typical of its genre in terms of its transitivity selections with a predominance of material processes representing happenings (rather than doings) involving inanimate actors. Either natural phenomena are presented as causeless happenings (see clauses 1, 2, 3b) or as being brought about by some external cause which is realised either as an inanimate Agent (3b, 5b). Clauses (4c) and (4d) are non-finite clauses where the Agent/Subject is retrievable from the preceding clause. The above text also contains a mental process of cognition (clause 4a) which requires a conscious participant, in this case researchers, and a relational/ existential process of result (clause 5a). An ergative analysis of text 2 is tabulated in Table 11. Text 2 is concerned with geological happenings, realised mostly as Medium + Process. When the processes extends to a Goal, they encode naturally occurring cause and effect phenomena rather than controlled actions. The Actors/Agent are not participating in actions, but uninten­ tionally causing them to happen. In narrative texts, on the other hand, where Actors are predominantly animate, it can be predicted that Actors will be presented as having control over their actions and the power to impact on 'things'.

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Clause no.

Process type

Medium

1

material/middle

le volcan

2

material/middle

le ciel

3

material/effective

la vue

3a

material/middle

4a

mental/middle

nous

4b

material/middle

poussière

4c

material/effective

énergie solaire

4d

material/effective

transparence..

5b

material effective

les effets...

Agent

les particules

l'activité volcanique

Table 11: A transitivity analysis of the ergative pattern in Text 2 This is exemplified by the following extract from Dino Buzzati's (1968) tale 'La fameuse invasion des ours en Sicile' (The famous invasion of Sicily by the bears). Text 3: (la) Bien des années auparavant,