#grammaticalisation

[lingthusiasm]

Bonus 90: Don't you love to do a "do" episode? | Lingthusiasm

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Bonus 90: Don't you love to do a "do" episode?

We do love the word "do", and we hope you do too. Don't you want to know what the word "do" can do?  

In this bonus episode, Gretchen and Lauren get enthusiastic about the word "do"! We talk about the various functions of "do" as illustrated by lyrics from ABBA and other pop songs, what makes the word "do" so unique in English compared to other languages, and the drama of how "do" caught on and then almost got driven out again. Listen to this episode about do, and get access to many more bonus episodes by supporting Lingthusiasm on Patreon.

[aeniith]

Origins of formal forms of address in several Romance languages. Credit to Yoïn van Spijk. @yvanspijk Thanks for this beautiful chart.

[yvanspijk]

In older varieties of Italian you might stumble upon the demonstrative pronoun codesto. It means 'that (near you)', as opposed to questo 'this' and quello 'that'. Codesto's etymology is interesting: it arose as some kind of short sentence.

[yvanspijk]

Own very self. That would be the literal meaning of metipsimum, the Latin ancestor of French même, Spanish mismo, Portuguese mesmo and Italian medesimo. It originated as a rather curious compound and supplanted the Latin words for both 'same' and 'self'.

[themerch]

Origin of Vougerå’s imperative

The imperative in Vougerå is quite different from that of the other Tuuric languages. While Tjȁr has -ji, -ci, -ī, -či and Miõrra has -ggje, -že, -je, -jaì both from Old Tuura -je and in turn Proto-Sumric -ję (compare Old Sumrë -je). Vougerå has the imperative prefix smou- which attaches to the supine form of the verb unlike any of it’s relatives. The reason is due to grammaticalisation in Soyra (the mother of Vougerå and daughter of Old Tuura). 

Soyra in general was pretty innovative, shedding many of it’s Old Tuura feathers and gaining new ones, such as a total pronoun reform and a wave of grammaticalisation bringing many new derivational morphemes into the language. The Old Tuura imperative -je was dropped and was replaced by a construction meaning “you allow there to be X-ing” where the supine form of the verb was used alongside an existential construction. For example “soothe!” was dar rotys må emti kvjes (you allow-2S it.INAN be-INF SUP-soothe) “you allow there to be soothing”. The verb “to be” was optionally dropped giving the more common construction dar rotys må kvjes. If the imperative had a subject and another verb such as “let the frog hop” then the construction would be “you allow there to be hopping from the frog” where the object would have the postposition jån “from” e.g dar rotys må kmarågg lamg jån “let the frog hop” (you allow-2S it.INAN SUP-hop DEF/frog from). Eventually the verb rotys “you allow” (second person present of the verb rosi “to allow”) became cliticised as s- onto må (third person singular inanimate pronoun) which was itself cliticised onto the supine verb giving småkvjes “soothe!” (compare with the infinitve vjessi “to soothe”)

However since these clitics were still identifyable as contractions of rotys “you allow” and må (3S inanimate pronoun) because the uncontracted forms were still attested. It wasn’t until Late Soyra that små- could be anaysed as a new imperative prefix. This is because of a major pronoun reform where older pronouns were dropped and new pronouns were derived from verbs meaning “to be self”, for example the pronouns dar and må fell out of speech as the second person singular and third person singular inanimate pronouns and were replaced by ječjyhså (literally meaning “you who are yourself) and jemåråsådå (literally meaning “I’ve never heard of a functioning pronoun”…just kidding it means “that which is itself”). Then verb inflections were eroded by sound changes which left the s- from rotys (-ys being the second person singular present suffix) also as being unanalysable. With these reanalysations the construction was no longer identifyable as “you allow there to be X-ing” and so the construction “you allow there to beX-ing from Y” when the imperative verb had an object no longer made any sense. So a sentence like “let the frog hop” was then structured as småkrot kmarågg lamg jån (IMP-allow SUP-hop DEF/frog from) or “allow hopping from the frog”. Notice that in this case the imperative suffix attaches to the very same verb from which it was (partially) derived from!

This rendered the clitic cluster små- unanalysable as as contracted pronouns for those pronouns no longer existed, and so it is then reasonable to analyse it instead as an imperative prefix which attaches to supine verbs. Then sound changes from Vougerå caused the prefix to become smou- ([ɑ] had been raised by Ungeish Raising, the presence of [u] being due to the sound change where [o] broke into [o̯u] before velars which was triggered by the supine prefix k- which always occures after the imperative suffix). If I derive further daughters from Vouregå then I may analyse the g- (a consonant shift caused [k] to become [g])as part of the prefix resulting in smoug- if I switch the supine verb with an infinite one which would leave the g- to attach to the prefix before it. 

Vougerå had some more fun with grammaticalisation in imperatives when it derived new imperative prefixes which mean “to allow” and “to make, to cause” such as “let the frog hop” or “make the frog hop”. These derive from the Soyra imperatives småkrot “allow!” and småkiss “cause!,  make!”. In Vougerå these became smougrut and smougess. These two words then became the prefixes grut-  and gess- which attached to verbs. Since a later sound change in Vougerå deleted word final consonants the supine verbs from which the prefixes derive from became gru and ge (as supine forms of rusi and esi). As the final consonants in the prefixes were preserved it’s reasonable to analyse them as prefixes. More grammaticalisation occured when the postposition jån “from” (now jo) attached itself to the object of the imperative verb, causing it to become a suffix for objects of imperative clauses. As such I name it the imperative accusative.  The prefixes attach to infintive verbs instead of the supine. So “let the frop hop” is now gessmarrogse lajo (CAUS.IMP-hop-INF frog-ACC)

An example of the imperative in Proto-Sumric, the Tuuric languages, Hajec and Old Sumrë

“Make the frog eat the mushroom”

Proto-Sumric: Tar istję bəlmkə́ njak atyókəw   ( you cause-IMP DEF/frog-ACC.ANIM eat DEF/mushroom-ACC.INAN

Hajec: Tar ist bilmké njak atiokō (you cause DEF/frog eat DEF/mushroom)

Old Sumrë: Tar ñacisče bálmcü aduócû (you eat-CAUS-IMP DEF/frog-ACC.DEER DEF/mushroom)

Old Tuura: Dar ihhtje bålmkå njakti adyogüü (you cause-IMP frog-ACC.ANIM eat-INF DEF/mushroom-ACC.INAN)

Tjȁr: Dra uči bòlmkò jnaktu aduòg (you cause-IMP frog-ACC eat-INF mushroom-ACC)

Miõrra: Tar išče pežkmaì oñakči ačoaaìkuà (you cause-IMP DEF/frog-AC.ANIM eat-INF DEF/mushroon-ACC-INAN)

Vougerå: Gessjågse lajo ådiougöü    (CAUS.IMP-eat frog-ACC mushroo-ACC.INAN)

[house-carpenter]

Case-marking suffixes often develop from postpositions. It’s easy to see how this can happen: all it requires is a reinterpretation of the postposition as bound to its object noun rather than as a separate word. In English we have the postposition ago, and we know it’s a postposition and not a suffix because you can put things like... hmmm, actually, I don’t think there is anything you can put in between ago and its object noun (as far as I can tell, putting a relative clause there is impossible), so maybe it would in fact be possible to analyse ago as a case suffix and write one yearago instead of one year ago. But for a better example, there’s the Tocharian B locative suffix -ne which is cognate not to the Proto-Indo-European locative suffix *-ey[1] but rather to the Proto-Slavic preposition *na 'on' (which might be related to English on as well). Anyway, by the same reasoning it seems just as possible for prepositions to become case-marking prefixes. Perhaps not in languages like English with mandatory articles that would get in the way, but in a language like Russian, why not? But attested cases of this development are much rarer, at least according to Kulikov (2009). It's not entirely clear why, but in a footnote Kulikov points to an observation by Stampe (1994) that unaccented syllables tend to attach to preceding accented syllables rather than following ones. Therefore, if prepositions do develop into case markers, it will usually be as markers on the verb, rather than the noun. The resulting structures will be head-marking, rather than dependent-marking. But why do unaccented syllables tend to attach to preceding accented syllables rather than following ones? Unfortunately I can't find Stampe (1994) (Kulikov 2009 is a chapter of a book called The Oxford Handbook of Case, eds. Malchukov, A. & Spencer, A.; I can only find that one chapter online, and the bibliography seems to be elsewhere in the book, not at the end of the chapter, so I can't track down the reference to Stampe 1994), and I have no idea why they would myself. [1] This is the thematic suffix (the *-e- part is the thematic vowel, the *-y part is the suffix proper); the athematic suffix was originally endingless (though it did attract the accent to the last syllable of the stem), but later it became *-í, at least according to Don Ringe. Clearly, though, both suffixes have nothing to do with *-ne.

[linguismstics]

Effects of Usage and Culture on Grammar

The Chomskyan idea of Universal Grammar (a set of innate principles specific to language which is manifest in every human language and which a child may bring to the task of language acquisition) does not sit easily with the idea that a language’s grammar may be the result of cultural constraints. However, the major bone of contention with Chomskyan UG is its language-specificity and separateness from other areas of cognition, rather than innateness per se. Consider a usage-based conception of grammar, i.e. one which says the grammar of a language develops in response to the norms/pressures of communication found in the community of speakers. Grammaticalisation most often involves content words (i.e. nouns and verbs) assuming increasingly ‘grammatical’ functions, e.g. prepositions, markers of tense/aspect etc. The content words which undergo grammaticalisation are not random but tend strongly to be drawn from certain semantic fields. For example, parts of the body may take on prepositional/locative/spatial functions which in turn may take on temporal/aspectual functions, such as ‘back’ as in ‘my back hurts’, ‘stay well back’ and ‘three weeks back’ etc. These tendencies are probably based on ‘universal’ traits of perception.

But cultural practice may affect which parts of our perception we choose to talk about. For example, if your cultural practice means that you give locational/positional information in terms of geographical features rather than in terms of your own position, it is conceivable that your language will not develop adpositions in the same way as other languages. Another example might concern more epistemological issues – if your cultural practice is such that knowledge is based on immediate perception, your language might develop grammatical features that express how you came by the knowledge that you are talking about (i.e. did you see it with your own eyes? Can you still see it? Did someone else report it to you? Etc.). In this way, a language’s grammar will result from speakers grammaticalising those parts of their language which are most often talked about in relation to their cultural perception of the world. What is universal to human languages would be the choice of linguistic resources exploited for such purposes as and when communication demands it.

[linguismstics]

Linguistics: Chinese classifiers

Classifiers are an important part of Chinese grammar – virtually every noun is associated with (at least) one and, if you want to specify the number of a noun or point to ‘this’ and ‘that’ one etc., you need to know its classifier, for example, sì běn shū ‘four [classifier] book’ or zhè tiáo yú ‘this [classifier] fish’. The noun phrase would be ungrammatical without the classifier. (Note, I am using 'Chinese' to mean 'Mandarin Chinese' - other Chinese dialects/languages also have classifiers, it's just that I'm not so familiar with these as I am with Mandarin!).

There are some generalisations (note they are not hard and fast rules) about which classifier to use, for example, zhī is used for many animals and wèi is used (politely) for people etc. Whilst this may seem to be a complicated aspect of Chinese grammar, such aspects are found closer to home as well.

In English, if we want to talk about groups of animals for example there are often specific (collocational) terms which go with some animals but not others. For example, consider the words we would use to describe a group of…

Lions (pride)

Wolves (pack)

Sheep (flock)

Birds (flock)

Whales (Pod, school)

People (group, crowd)

Fish (school)

Cattle (herd)

It would be strange (or perhaps just ‘wrong’) to speak of ‘a pride of wolves’ or ‘a school of cattle’ or ‘a herd of fish’. Therefore, certain terms ‘go together’ more than others even if those terms all effectively ‘mean the same thing’. In English, the terms above have a very strong connection to particular animals when talking about a group of that animal. In Chinese, classifiers have a connection which has become ‘grammaticalised’ (i.e. part of the grammar itself) not just when talking about an animal but also when talking about virtually every noun in the language.