30 November, 2023, 18:30 CET
We welcome JÜRGEN BOHNEMEYER, Professor of linguistics at the State University of New York at Buffalo with the guest lecture
“An evolutionary approach to the typology of functional expressions”
This talk explores a typological puzzle: some functional expressions – e.g., expressions of negation, demonstratives, pro-forms, quantificational and modal expressions – are near-universally present in the languages of the world, whereas others, including definite articles and the traditional inflectional categories of tense, gender, case, and so on – vary drastically in their presence, each type occurring very roughly in between one third and two thirds of human languages only. Bohnemeyer discusses several approaches to studying these distributions. But what causes such distributional disparities? He argues that the answer lies in distinct communicative functions: the near-universally available expressions serve to encode parts of the speaker’s intended message, whereas the more variably distributed expressions have an ancillary function in facilitating the hearer’s inferences about the speaker’s communicative intent. Empirical evidence that the typological distribution of functional expressions is shaped by functional pressures comes from Evers (2021). Bohnemeyer proposes a classification of functional expressions that takes into account discourse prominence (Boye & Harder 2012) and semantic type. He then sketches an evolutionary model of grammaticalization that includes a selective process sensitive to communicative fitness, contra Croft (2000).
References
Boye, K. & P. Harder. (2012). A usage-based theory of grammaticalization and grammatical status. Language 88(1): 1-44.
Croft, W. (2000). Explaining language change: An evolutionary approach. Harlow: Pearson Education Limited.
Evers, S. (2021). To ‘the’ or not to ‘the’: Cross-linguistic correlations between existing morphosyntax and the emergence of definite articles. Doctoral dissertation, University at Buffalo.
JÜRGEN BOHNEMEYER (PhD 1998) specializes in semantic typology, the study of variation in how languages represent the world. An overarching theme in his research has been the role of culture in cognition. Bohnemeyer has conducted extensive research on the semantic typology of representations of space, time, events, and causality and on the Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis. Since 2007, he has been directing three large-scale collaborative research projects on these topics with the support of the National Science Foundation of the U.S.A. Cumulatively, these projects have brought together some 60 collaborating researchers from around the world. Another line of inquiry focuses on the evolution of grammar and the distribution of functional categories such as tense and gender across languages. Bohnemeyer is a Mesoamericanist and has been conducting field research on Yucatec Maya since 1991.
Venue: Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften / Austrian Academy of Sciences
Postsparkasse, 3. Stock
Georg-Coch-Platz 2
1010 Wien
and online via ZOOM
Meeting ID: 615 7578 5102
Passcode: 4PLg2M
