Pragmatics of Word Order Flexibility

329 Pages·1992·24.784 MB·Typological Studies in Language 22

by  Doris L. Payne (Ed.)

PRAGMATICS OF WORD ORDER FLEXIBILITY
TYPOLOGICAL STUDIES IN LANGUAGE (TSL)
A companion series to the journal "STUDIES IN LANGUAGE"
Honorary Editor: Joseph H. Greenberg
General Editor: T. Givón
Editorial Board:
Wallace Chafe (Santa Barbara) Charles Li (Santa Barbara)
Bernard Comrie (Los Angeles) Johanna Nichols (Berkeley)
R.M.W. Dixon (Canberra) Andrew Pawley (Canberra)
John Haiman (St Paul) Doris Payne (Oregon)
Kenneth Hale (Cambridge, Mass.) Frans Plank (Konstanz)
Bernd Heine (Köln) Jerrold Sadock (Chicago)
Paul Hopper (Pittsburgh) Gillian Sankoff (Philadelphia)
Margaret Langdon (San Diego) Dan Slobin (Berkeley)
Sandra Thompson (Santa Barbara)
Volumes in this series will be functionally and typologically oriented, cove
ring specific topics in language by collecting together data from a wide vari
ety of languages and language typologies. The orientation of the volumes
will be substantive rather than formal, with the aim of investigating univer
sal of human language via as broadly defined a data base as possible, lean
ing toward cross-linguistic, diachronic, developmental and live-discourse
data. The series is, in spirit as well as in fact, a continuation of the tradition
initiated by C. Li (Word Order and Word Order Change, Subject and Topic,
Mechanisms for Syntactic Change) and continued by T. Givón (Discourse
and Syntax) and P. Hopper (Tense-Aspect: Between Semantics and Pragma­
tics),
Volume 22
Doris L. Payne (ed.)
PRAGMATICS OF WORD ORDER FLEXIBILITY
PRAGMATICS OF
WORD ORDER
FLEXIBILITY
edited by
DORIS L. PAYNE
University of Oregon
JOHN BENJAMINS PUBLISHING COMPANY
Amsterdam/Philadelphia
1992
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Pragmatics of word order flexibility / edited by Doris L. Payne.
p. cm. -- (Typological studies in language, ISSN 0167-7373; v. 22)
Includes bibliographical references.
1. Grammar, Comparative and general--Word order. 2. Pragmatics. I. Payne, Doris L.,
1952- . II. Series.
P295.P64 1992
415--dc20 92-5354
ISBN 90 272 2905 8 (hb.) / 90 272 2906 6 (pb.) (European; alk. paper) CIP
ISBN 1-55619-408-0 (hb.) /1-55619-409-9 (pb.) (U.S.; alk. paper)
© Copyright 1992 - 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
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Table of Contents
Introduction 1
Doris L. Payne
Is basic word order universal? 15
Marianne Mithun
Basic word order in two "free word order" languages 63
Ken Hale
The privilege of primacy: experimental data and cognitive explana
tions 83
Morton Ann Gernsbacher & David Hargreaves
Information distribution in Ojibwa 117
Russell S. Tomlin & Richard Rhodes
Nonidentifiable information and pragmatic order rules in 'O'odham 137
Doris L. Payne
Word order in Klamath 167
Karen Sundberg Meyer
Word order and topicality in Nez Perce 193
Noel Rude
Verb-subject order in Polish 209
Barbara Jacennik & Matthew S. Dryer
The pragmatics of word order variation in Chamorro narrative text 243
Ann Cooreman
Word order and temporal sequencing 265
John Myhill
Word order and discourse type: an Austronesian example 279
J. Stephen Quakenbush
On interpreting text-distributional correlations: some methodologi
cal issues 305
T. Givón
Abbreviations
ABS absolutive INSTR instrumental
ACC accusative INV inverted word order
ADJ adjective IRR irrealis
AF actor focus LINK linking particle
AP antipassive LOC locative
ALL allative MASC masculine
ASP aspect NEG negative
AUG augmentative NOM nominative
AUX auxiliary NONFIN nonfinite
BEN benefactive NONPAST nonpast
CAUS causative NON-TOP non-topic
COMP comparative OBJ object
COMPL complementizer OBL oblique
CONT continuous PASS passive
CONTR contrastive PAST past
COP copula PERF perfect
D determiner PFV perfective
DAT dative PL plural
DEC declarative POSS possessive
DEF definite PP past participle
DUR durative PR possessor
EMPH emphatic (pronoun) PREP preposition
ERG ergative PRES present
EXCL exclusive Q interrogative
FEM feminine RED reduplicative
FUT future REL relative
GEN genitive REFL reflexive
GF goal focus SG singular
HAB habitual SPEC specifier
IMP imperative SS same subject
IMPERF imperfect SUB subordinate
IMPFV imperfective TOP topic
INF infinitive UNM unmarked (case)
Introduction
Doris L. Payne
University of Oregon & Summer Institute of Linguistics
For some time now in linguistics, the assumption has been widely held that
for a majority of the world's languages, one can identify a "basic" order of
subject and object relative to the verb, and that when combined with other
facts of the language, this "basic" order constitutes a useful way of
typologizing languages. This tradition began in earnest with the work of
Joseph Greenberg (1963), and has been continued by numerous scholars,
notably including Lehmann (1973), Vennemann and Harlow (1977), Mal-
linson and Blake (1981), Hawkins (1983), Nichols (1986), and Dryer
(1988).
As debate has continued over varying definitions of "basic", and as an
increasing number of investigators encounter languages for which they
believe it is not particularly insightful to brand a particular order of gram
matical relations as basic, it has seemed of increasing value to some of us to
start asking new questions. First, a different twist on the typological ques
tion was taken by Thompson (1978) (see also Payne 1990 and Doris Payne,
this volume), who suggested that the first typological division should be
made between those languages in which main clause word order primarily
correlates with pragmatic factors, and those in which order primarily corre
lates with grammatical relations or other syntactic factors. It remains an
open research question as to what extent the Greenbergian typology is
properly applied to pragmatic order languages. Second, instead of just ask
ing "What is the basic order in Language L (if any)?", attention has been
turning to the question of "When there are several possible order patterns
in a language, what is the communicative function of one, rather than
another, order?" A third crucial research question (which is not explored in
2 DORIS L. PAYNE
this volume) concerns "What historical reanalyses give rise to observed
order patterns?"
Explanatory factors behind word order variation are to be found in
studies of how the mind grammaticizes forms, processes information, and
speech act theory considerations of speakers' attempts to get their hearers
to build one, rather than another, mental representation of incoming infor
mation. Thus, three domains must be distinguished: syntactic, cognitive,
and pragmatic. In understanding order variation, it is unhelpfully reduc
tionist to seek an explanation in terms of only one domain. In all languages
each domain likely makes some contribution to determining the surface
order of sentence elements (though the relative contribution from each
domain may vary from one language to another). One might think of this as
a "modular" approach to the question of word order variation, though from
at least a diachronic perspective (if not from a synchronic one as well) it is
surely a fiction to suppose that such modules are autonomous from each
other. Nevertheless, in terms of research methodology it is helpful, if not
crucial, to tease them apart.
A full definition of syntactic, cognitive, and pragmatic domains cannot
be developed here. Briefly, however, a description of order phenomena in
terms of syntactic categories, particular morphosyntactic constructions,
hierarchical structures and head-dependent relations, and grammatical rela
tions would traditionally be termed syntactic. (To my mind, however, syn
tactic categories and grammatical relations are different in essence and it is
questionable that they should be termed "syntactic" in the same sense of
the word; cf. Payne, this volume).
A cognitive account would explore the relationship between order and
mental processes or constraints. Among other things, such an account
would consider the relevance of limited focal attention, the current status of
certain information in the mind of the speaker (e.g. is it in the active focus
of attention/memory, or not), and operations concerned with comprehen
sion and integration of information into the already-existing knowledge net
work or developing mental representation.
A pragmatic account would explore the relationship between order
and speaker-hearer interactions. Choice of one order rather than another
(just as choice of one construction rather than another) can constitute a
speech act of "instruction" on the speaker's part, relative to how the hearer
should integrate information into a mental, cognitive representation. In
'O'odham, for instance, placement of nonidentifiable information before the
INTRODUCTION 3
verb essentially constitutes the following speech act: "I as speaker hereby
instruct you as hearer to integrate the preverbal NP information into the
mental representation you are building as a new major participant about
which other incoming information will be relevant." In contrast, placement
of nonidentifiable information after the verb essentially constitutes the fol
lowing speech act: "I as speaker hereby instruct you as hearer to integrate
the postverbal NP information into the mental representation you are
building as an incidental fact about a major participant or event that you
already have in mind." In no way can a pragmatic account be usefully sepa
rated from a cognitive one, because the pragmatic acts are centrally con
cerned with what the speaker assumes is the current cognitive status of
information in the mind of the hearer, and with how the speaker wants the
hearer to mentally comprehend and integrate the information.
Finally, in some languages the relationship between surface order and
cognitive-pragmatic statuses is just as strong and rule governed, as is the
relationship in others between order and grammatical relations. If a gram
mar in the theoretical sense should account for the rule-governed
phenomena of language, then there is absolutely no reason to a-priori
exclude cognitive-pragmatic phenomena and try to arbitrarily restrict gram
mar just to "syntactic" phenomena.
So far we have not mentioned any possible connection between seman
tic status (e.g. agent vs. patient, animate vs. inanimate) and order. The
silence here reflects a general silence in the literature on this point (but cf.
Tomlin 1986). I would, in fact, venture to guess that there will be no lan
guage where an essentially semantic principle governs the majority of order
facts for major constituents of the clause. This is because language is ulti
mately a pragmatic tool in the hands of creatures who are nevertheless built
to automate or grammaticize — "syntacticize", if you will — particularly
frequent patterns. Human beings are not primarily interested in describing
the semantic facts more or less "as they are" (philosophical issues con
cerned with the impossibility of objective observation notwithstanding).
They are interested in interpreting perceived facts as they fit their own
goals vis-a-vis their hearers — a supremely pragmatic task. Thus, if a lan
guage should be discovered where some order facts appear to be describ-
able in semantic terms, but in a given context a certain pragmatic principle
would predict an alternative order, the pragmatic principle will most surely
win out. The overall governing principles would thus be pragmatic, and
order would only appear to be semantically based in the norm because of