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).
Jürgen Bohnemeyer (PhD 1998) specializes in semantic typology, the study of variation in how languages represent the world.
The "Language – Culture – Cognition Lab (LCCL)" is located at the IHB and cooperates with the Austrian Center for Digital Humanities and Cultural Heritage - ACDH-CH of the Austrian Academy of Sciences.