Contrastive Studies in Morphology and Syntax

Michalis Georgiafentis, Giannoula Giannoulopoulou, Maria Koliopoulou, Angeliki Tsokoglou, Michalis Georgiafentis, Giannoula Giannoulopoulou, Maria Koliopoulou, Angeliki Tsokoglou

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781350079205
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filología
• Subtopic: Sintaxis en lingüística

Using different theoretical approaches and frameworks, this book addresses a broad range of themes in contrastive linguistics, including inflection, derivation and compounding, tense, wh-questions, post-verbal subjects, focus and clitics, among others. Comparing English, German, Greek, Romance, Slavic and South Pacific languages, the book highlights the significance of the contrastive perspective for language-specific description and general interface issues, casting light on contrasts between languages at the levels of morphology and syntax. In this respect, it makes a valuable contribution to our understanding of language typology and language universals.

Part One

Theoretical issues in contrastive linguistics

1

Heuristic dimensions of contrastive linguistics

Paul J. Hopper

In comparing and contrasting the members of a set of languages, the linguist must at the outset judge the intrinsic comparability of the features that are chosen. Often the standard structural divisions, such as ‘vowel system’, ‘verb morphology’ and ‘interrogative structures’, fall short because the features in question may be relevant at different levels or in different genres across the members of the set. In this chapter, a heuristic approach is suggested in which the starting point is the linguist’s initial assessment of the prior discourse and cognitive principles, rather than the objective linguistic structures, that frame the data sets to be compared. The chapter postulates three heuristic levels: mental-representational, where examples are made up or checked from a priori sources; textual, where monologic discourse (primarily written) texts are analysed; and social-interactive, whose source is spontaneous dialogues. The heuristics are illustrated with examples from lexicon, morphosyntax, narrative and conversation.

1 Introduction

In an article from 1948, Richard Pittman (1957)¹ described some of the analytic practices of descriptive linguists when confronted with the problem of the ranking of constituent pairs or multiples. These practices were not envisaged as procedural rules but rather as rules of thumb based on observation of practice; that is, they sought to describe what linguists actually did. Pittman noted, for example, that, given a longer form and a shorter form in association, ‘it is very likely that the longer [form] will be classified as nuclear and the shorter form as a satellite’ (Pittman 1957: 270). Also: ‘Substantival and verbal concepts are very strongly associated in the minds of most of us with linguistic nuclei’ (Pittman 1957: 277). That is to say, a concept that is noun-like or verb-like is very likely to be analysed linguistically as a nucleus. In his article, Pittman was not concerned with logical definitions. Rather, his method was a probabilistic one that relied on judgement and experience enshrined in a familiarity with a variety of languages, the relevant scientific literature and the possible contributions of adjacent disciplines. In assessing the relative ranking of constituents (a significant issue in linguistics at that time), his goal was ‘to codify the criteria which probably serve as the basis for most judgements of relative rank that have been tacitly invoked in linguistic analysis’ (Pittman 1957: 278; my italics). Seventy years on, we might characterize his approach as a heuristic one; heuristic, in the general sense of a preliminary approach to data, is perceived not as conforming to an exact definition, but as approximating a profile established on the basis of experience. Martin Joos, in an editorial comment on Pittman’s article, wrote: ‘This admirable paper has been much misunderstood; hasty readers have thought that Pittman was advocating or proposing what he was simply describing’ (Joos 1957: 278).

In the present chapter, I wish to suggest that Pittman’s heuristic approach may be extended as a preliminary method that is relevant to the goals of contrastive linguistics. These goals include identifying, explaining and correcting errors made in learning a second language; the discovery of common features such as area or Sprachbund phenomena; the exploration of language universals and linguistic typology. In all of these enterprises, a direct isomorphism between the target structures is the exception, and in fact is of limited interest compared to the recognition of contrastive differences. More often, the correspondences between (or among) the data sets are indistinct, for example, when a syntactic construction is matched beside a pragmatic expression (Fillmore 1984).

Viewed from the perspective of Pittman’s description, heuristics offers a principled starting point in the enterprise of comparing and contrasting features in a set of target languages. It is a first-order approximation. Heuristics does not proceed directly from data to a hypothesis, but is a preliminary hunch, based on what we suspect might be there. Heuristics does not look for definite results, but rather for promising leads. As much as anything, heuristic methods work to exclude possibilities, some of which might be pursued at a later date. This search is not normally a random one, but is guided by the knowledge and experience brought to the enterprise by the investigator. Heuristics aims to simplify an investigation, beginning by making an initial ‘educated guess’, or dividing up the territory in intuitive ways. It favours enthymemic rather than syllogistic thinking.

Yet there is nothing unscientific about heuristics in this sense. Indeed, one of the most fundamental discoveries of the modern era, Einstein’s quantum theory of the propagation of light, is owed methodologically to heuristics, as Einstein himself noted in the title of his article ‘On a Heuristic Point of View about the Creation and Conversion of Light’ (Einstein 1905). Einstein’s heuristic procedure is to set up hypothetical situations and explore the consequences of assuming them, couching statements in a preliminary, perhaps even tentative, form. Some of the characteristic expressions that he uses are: ‘in folgenden Fällen denkbar’ (can be imagined in the following cases), ‘lässt sich folgendermassen … auffassen’ (can be understood in the following way), ‘nicht ausgeschlossen, daß’ (not excluded that) and ‘wird anzunehman sein, daß’ (it is to be assumed that). Often, a German subjunctive creates a suppositional frame for an assumption: ‘Nach der Auffassung, dass das erregende Licht aus Energiequanten … bestehe’ (Assuming that the stimulating light consists [subjunctive] of energy quanta) or ‘wir wollen annehmen, daß dies vorkomme’ (we will assume that this occurs [subjunctive]). Manjit Kumar comments (2014: 73): ‘What [Einstein] was offering physicists was a way to explain the unexplained when it came to light, not a fully worked out theory derived from first principles. His paper was a signpost towards such a theory.’

2 Heuristic levels

Out of the mass of linguistic data, we can establish heuristic divisions that represent starting points for a contrastive comparison of a set of languages. The divisions go from the single isolated speaker’s intuiti ons, to forms in a textual environment, to social space and usage among groups of speakers. They are not self-contained structural modules, but represent the linguist’s first-order simplification of undifferentiated data, viewed from the perspective of the source of the judgements being made. The proposed divisions are as follows:

1. mental-representational

2. textual

3. social-interactive

The basic division sets off 1–2, which are monologic, against 3, which is dialogic. Within the first pair, that is, 1 and 2, the first or mental-representational group consists of forms that we can think up as native speakers, or that can be elicited directly from a native speaker, or that can be thought up as a line of inquiry by a linguist familiar with the language. These forms are divorced from performance, and reflect what is commonly called intuition, or introspection. They are linguistic forms that can be adjudged as correct or incorrect without a context. Problematic forms in this group can be marked with an asterisk or a question mark. The second group, the textual, consists of longer discourses in which targeted forms occur within a context, such as in a corpus. The textual heuristic looks for fixed forms presupposing the absence of a listener. Usually, textual means a written text, but there are exceptions, such as lectures and sermons. This second group can be studied with a bird’s-eye-view perspective that assumes the text is fully and simultaneously present. The third heuristic looks for a conversation in a casual or informal register or for monologues that are interactive, in that the speaker may be prompted or encouraged to continue by an interlocutor. Structure in these circumstances is volatile and emergent. It moves forward along with the interaction ...