Mittwoch, 6. März 2019, 09:30–10:30
The distinction between explicitness and economy is well established in various approaches to linguistics (e.g. iconicity vs. economy as competing motivations in Haiman 1983, faithfulness vs. markedness constraints in Optimality Theory, etc.). In my presentation, I will apply explicitness and economy to the notion of linguistic complexity, a topic that is currently discussed from various perspectives. Psycho-linguists and specialists of language acquisition focus on cognitive costs and difficulty of acquisition, typologists look at the properties of the form by which grammatical distinctions are marked and theoretical linguists argue in terms of recursion and merge.
What is common to these approaches is their concentration on linguistic form. In my presentation, I argue that form is only one side of complexity. If one looks at complexity from the perspective of the two competing motivations of explicitness vs. economy the form side can be seen as the result of explicitness, while there is a second side which is based on economy and the pragmatic inference of grammatical information which is available in the grammar of individual languages. The former type of complexity will be called overt complexity, the latter economy-based type will be called hidden complexity (Bisang 2009, 2014, 2015). Hidden complexity manifests itself in the omission of contextually inferable grammatical information and the multifunctionality of individual grammatical markers. In extreme cases in which these properties are recurrent in many grammatical domains, the grammar of a language may allow simple-looking surface struc-tures on the form side which leave a lot of grammatical information to pragmatic inference.
More concretely, it will be shown in my paper that
- hidden complexity as a property of individual grammars is particularly dominant in East and mainland Southeast Asian languages (EM-SEA),
- even highly grammaticalized markers still express important discourse functions in these languages,
- hidden complexity often comes with a different division of labor between grammar and the lexicon,
- the notions of contrast and opposition get a different status in an environment of dominant hidden complexity.
Since there is a large number of examples, my presentation will be limited to a few phenomena like (i) radical pro-drop, (ii) the tense-aspect marker -le in Chinese, (iii) numeral classifiers as markers of definiteness and indefiniteness and (iv) the specifics of grammaticalization and multifunctionality.
References: • Bisang, W. 2009. On the evolution of complexity – sometimes less is more in East and mainland Southeast Asia. In G. Sampson, D. Gil & P. Trudgill (eds.), Language complexity as an evolving variable, 34–49. Oxford: Oxford University Press. • Bisang, W. 2014. On the strength of morphological paradigms – a historical account of radical pro-drop. In M. Robbeets & W. Bisang (eds.), Paradigm change in historical reconstruction, 23–60. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: Benjamins.• Bisang, W. 2015. Hidden complexity – the neglected side of complexity and its consequences. Linguistics Vanguard 1(1). 177–187. • Haiman, J. 1983. Iconic and economic motivation. Language 59. 781–819.