Loengusari TÜling

In language typology it has been uncommon to hypothesize that cross-linguistic variation could depend on sociolinguistic factors. This is very different compared to, for instance, variationist corpus research where it has been common to compare the effects of “language internal” and “language external” factors on language structures. Things have started to slowly change during the past decade in language typology, too. Initial research has suggested that sociolinguistic (or perhaps more rightly demographic/sociological factors) may affect linguistic structures across languages, including morphological and phonological complexity (Sinnemäki 2009; Lupyan & Dale 2010; Moran & Blasi 2012; Bentz & Winter 2013; Sinnemäki & Di Garbo 2018). Here I report on a new study (Sinnemäki 2020) which proposes that the effect of “language internal” and “external factors” should be compared in typology in a similar spirit as is done in variationist research. Results based on a sample of roughly 250 languages suggest a complex interplay between grammatical and sociolinguistic factors such that the correlation between case marking and word order is conditioned by population size. I will also briefly discuss how comparative sociolinguistic research could be feasibly approached from a typological perspective to further enable bridging research on sociolinguistic and typological research.

In English and many other languages, third person possessives may take a local or nonlocal antecedent (1).
(1)    Peteri lead Johnj to hisi/j parents’ place.
Some languages have reflexive possessive forms (RPs), typically used to refer to the local subject; compare the distribution of oma vs. the ordinary possessive tema in Estonian (2). Note that possessors can also stay unexpressed.
(2)        Peeteri    vii-s    Jaanij    omai/*jtema*i/j/øi/j    vanema-te    juurde.
    Peeter.NOM    lead-PST    Jaan.GEN    POSS    parent-PL.GEN    at
    Peeteri led Jaanj to his parents’ place.    

Reflexive possessives are seldom discussed in the literature, and usually assumed to obey the same binding constraints as ordinary reflexive pronouns (Kiparsky 2002). Preliminary observations suggest however that binding constraints on reflexive possessives are looser, and non-categorical. We hence predict that speakers will entertain the possibility that oma be bound by a nonlocal subject (3).
(3)        Peeteri    veen-is    Jaanij    [omai/j    ema-st]    / [enda-st]    rääki-ma.
    Peeter.NOM    convince-PST    Jaan.PART    POSS.REFL    mother-ELA    REFL-ELA    talk-INF
    Peeterj convinced Jaani to talk about hisi/j mother/himselfi/*j

English and other languages also possess emphatic possessive forms such as French son propre (Charnavel 2012) or English his own. Such forms are comparable to RPs in being biased for reference to a local argument. However, restricting reference is not the main function of such pseudo-RPs. Hence we expect that binding constraints on pseudo-RPs are less tight than on RPs.
To test our hypotheses, we ran parallel crosslinguistic web-based experiments comparing two languages with pseudo-reflexives (English: his own, French: son propre) and one with reflexive possessives (Estonian: oma). A fourth experiment on Czech, another language with true RPs, is underway. In all our items, there are two possible antecedents for a possessive form: a local subject or some more distant expression.
We manipulated Type of clause embedding the possessive (independent and infinitive clause) and Type of possessive (with non-reflexive and pseudo-RPs in English and French, RP, simple possessive and covert possessive in Estonian). The items (20 for English and French and 24 for Estonian) and fillers (36) were translation equivalents (as far as possible) in all languages. 244 participants took part in this experiment (79 for English, 99 for French and 66 for Estonian). Sentences as in (4) were shown to native speakers who had to fill a gap as in (5).
(1)    ENG :    John allowed Donald to leave his (own) documents at the reception.
John made arrangements. Donald will leave his (own) documents at the reception.
FR:    Jean a autorisé Paul à laisser ses (propres) papiers à l’accueil.
Jean s’est arrangé. Paul laissera ses documents à l’accueil.
EST:    Peeter laseb Triinul ø/oma/tema dokumendid registratuuri jätta.
Peeter on kõik läbi mõelnud. Triinu jätab ø/oma/tema dokumendid registratuuri.
(2)    _____________'s documents will be at the reception.
Les documents de __________ seront déposés à l’accueil.
_____________dokumendid jäetakse registratuuri.
In the infinitive condition, the possible antecedents were the matrix subject (John) and the local subject, i.e. the infinitive controller (Donald). In the independent condition, the possible antecedents were the local subject (Donald) and the subject of the first sentence (John).
Across languages, RPs (in Estonian) and pseudo-RPs (English and French) have a stronger bias for the local subject for independent sentences. As predicted, this preference is stronger for Estonian where the reflexive is grammaticalized, leading to a significant Type of clause * Type of reflexive form (pseudo-RP vs. RP) interaction.
Overall these crosslinguistic experiments give a gradient perspective on binding constraints with constraints for the RPs in Estonian less strong than what is assumed for reflexives but considerably stronger than what we found for pseudo-RPs in English and French.

References:
Charnavel, I. (2012). On her own: Probing syntax and semantics with French propre (PhD Thesis). Doctoral dissertation, UCLA, Los Angeles, CA.
Kiparsky, P. (2002). Disjoint reference and the typology of pronouns. na.

This study examines investigates a new discourse-pragmatic use of the word wait in a 10-million-word multi-community corpus of spoken vernacular North American English. This function is an extension from an original lexical meaning of pausing or lingering which as extended to indicate a pause in discourse as the speaker reflects on or corrects an earlier topic. Over 300 examples permit comparative sociolinguistic methods and statistical modelling in order to offer an early assessment of the variation among alternates of this innovative use and to test for broad social and linguistic factors in order to understand the underlying processes. The results expose notable recent developments: older people use longer, more temporally specified variants, wait a minute/wait a second, while wait alone is increasing in apparent time with women leading its advance. The robust increase in use of wait alone, e.g. “I haven’t seen her yet. No wait. Yes, I have”, co-occurrence with other markers, e.g. no, and the function of reflection and/or self-correction can be pinpointed to the generation of speakers born after 1970. Further, the unique contribution of the sociolinguistically stratified corpora under investigation also demonstrates that this development is proceeding according to well-known principles of linguistic change as wait develops from a verb with temporal specification to a full-fledged discourse-pragmatic marker on the left periphery of the main clause.

Word frequency  has repeatedly been shown to be associated with changes in fine phonetic detail of identical phones. A widely accepted interpretation of this effect is that these systematic changes are a result of local differences in information density. In the present talk, I will present an alternative explanation -- one that is rooted in the kinematic nature of speech production. I will present the results of production studies using electro-magnetic articulography, which show that changes in articulation associated with word frequency very much mirror changes in kinematic behavior such as hand movements associated with practice. I will argue that word frequency can be regarded as a measure of kinematic practice with individual phones and words, and changes in fine phonetic detail are a result of kinematic practice of individual articulatory movements.

This talk reports on a book project in which I try to develop an updated functionalist perspective on grammatical categories and on the relation between grammar and communication. Drawing on fundamental insights from Mikhail Bakhtin, Erving Goffman, Roman Jakobson and Charles Peirce I outline a an approach to grammar that characterises and classifies grammatical categories as abstract representations of dialogue. The approach and its associated rudimentary formalism that the talk will also introduce I label Participation Grammar. Reported speech, as a grammatical phenomenon that exists in the twilight area between ad-hoc communication and syntactic convention, straddling grammar and social interaction (Spronck & Nikitina 2019a; Spronck & Nikitina 2019b) will serve as illustration for various aspects of the model.
I start with two premises: first, the idea that linguists generally tend to classify grammatical categories and unit types into common and more peripheral units/categories (or more and less ‘marked’), which I’ll call the ‘grammatical discrimination premise’. I suggest that, while this premise is commonly held in linguistics it has very few principled explanations.
The second premise that, I would suggest, is fundamental to contemporary linguistics, is the idea that language does not equal communication (the ‘language ≠ communication premise’). While the boundaries between language (= grammar?) and communication are actively debated, few linguists would deny that a meaningful distinction can be made between the two (although this position is not as uncontroversial as it once was).
After introducing and contextualising these two premises, I turn to a topic in the cross-section of debates around them, which I will refer to as ‘social grammar’. This, admittedly rather heterogeneous, collection of grammatical categories and units includes difficult-to-characterise word classes like interjections, mimetic expressions, and ‘expressives’; epistemic grammatical categories like egophoricity/conjunct-disjunct systems, epistemic modality and evidentiality, but also (in)definiteness, various types of expression of speaker perspective, prominence distinctions and information structuring devices.
Elements of social grammar have two properties: their semantics are somehow ‘incomplete’ in the sense that they require understanding of some pragmatic context for their proper interpretation and their syntactic status, i.e. the way in which they integrate with other units in an expression, is rather indeterminate. In addition, they also often raise profound descriptive problems for pinning down their language-specific meaning on the basis of corpus studies or in conversation with language consultants in the field.
I propose that there are three reasons for why social grammar raises so many issues: first, these elements are afterthoughts in the grammatical models that we work with, which, even if we do not adhere to a specific theory of grammar, still have shaped the terminology and descriptive variables that we can use. Second, they require a view of grammar that is more diverse than the symbolic definition of grammar most of us work with. And third: we have no principled model for connecting ‘core’ grammatical description to the sociality of the speech situation, which makes it impossible to describe categories that can only be properly understood in context.
Participation Grammar, I suggest, can address these issues in an integrated way. I illustrate the model using various examples of social and ‘regular’ grammar, with a specific mention of reported speech, which, using the model can be shown to operate at the boundaries between grammar and the dynamics of ad-hoc communication. Given this position, I suggest that reported speech provides a strong motivation for the model and, speculatively, that this reflects a much more fundamental role that reported speech has played in the emergence and evolution of language.