Morphologie: Ein internationales Handbuch zur Flexion und Wortbildung Morphology: an international handbook on inflection and word-formation (Handbücher zur Sprach- und Kommunikationswissenschaft Handbooks of Linguistics and communication science, Ban

Morphologie / Morphology HSK 17.1

≥

Handbücher zur Sprach- und Kommunikationswissenschaft Handbooks of Linguistics and Communication Science Manuels de linguistique et des sciences de communication Mitbegründet von Gerold Ungeheuer

Herausgegeben von / Edited by / Edite´s par Armin Burkhardt Hugo Steger Herbert Ernst Wiegand Band 17.1

Walter de Gruyter · Berlin · New York 2000

Morphologie Morphology Ein internationales Handbuch zur Flexion und Wortbildung An International Handbook on Inflection and Word-Formation

Herausgegeben von / Edited by Geert Booij · Christian Lehmann · Joachim Mugdan in collaboration with Wolfgang Kesselheim · Stavros Skopeteas 1. Halbband / Volume 1

Walter de Gruyter · Berlin · New York 2000

앝 Gedruckt auf säurefreiem Papier, das die 앪

US-ANSI-Norm über Haltbarkeit erfüllt.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Morphologie : ein internationales Handbuch zur Flexion und Wortbildung / herausgegeben von Geert Booij, Christian Lehmann, Joachim Mugdan, unter Mitarbeit von Wolfgang Kesselheim und Stavros Skopeteas ⫽ Morphology : an international handbook on inflection and wordformation / edited by Geert Booij, Christian Lehmann, Joachim Mugdan in collaboration with Wolfgang Kesselheim, Stavros Skopeteas. p. cm. ⫺ (Handbücher zur Sprach- und Kommunikationswissenschaft ⫺ Handbooks of Linguistics and communication science ; Bd. 17-1) German, English, and French. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 3-11-011128-4 1. Grammar, Comparative and general⫺Morphology⫺Handbooks, manuals, etc. I. Title: Morphology. II. Title: Internationales Handbuch zur Flexion und Wortbildung. III. Title: International handbook on inflection and word-formation. IV. Booij, G. E. V. Lehmann, Christian. VI. Mugdan, Joachim. VII. Handbücher zur Sprach- und Kommunikationswissenschaft ; Bd. 17-1 p241 M599 2000 415⫺dc21 00-063804

Die Deutsche Bibliothek ⫺ CIP-Einheitsaufnahme Morphologie : ein internationales Handbuch zur Flexion und Wortbildung ⫽ Morphology / hrsg. von Geert Booij …. ⫺ Berlin ; New York : de Gruyter (Handbücher zur Sprach- und Kommunikationswissenschaft ; Bd. 17) Halbbd. 1. ⫺ (2000) ISBN 3-11-011128-4

쑔 Copyright 2000 by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, D-10785 Berlin Dieses Werk einschließlich aller seiner Teile ist urheberrechtlich geschützt. Jede Verwertung außerhalb der engen Grenzen des Urheberrechtsgesetzes ist ohne Zustimmung des Verlages unzulässig und strafbar. Das gilt insbesondere für Vervielfältigungen, Übersetzungen, Mikroverfilmungen und die Einspeicherung und Verarbeitung in elektronischen Systemen. Printed in Germany Satz: Arthur Collignon GmbH, Berlin Druck: Hubert & Co, Göttingen Buchbinderische Verarbeitung: Lüderitz & Bauer-GmbH, Berlin Einbandgestaltung und Schutzumschlag: Rudolf Hübler, Berlin

Inhalt / Contents 1. Teilband / Volume 1 Vorwort . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Preface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

I. 1. 2. 3.

Morphologie als Disziplin Morphology as a discipline Wolfgang U. Wurzel, Der Gegenstand der Morphologie . . . . . . Paul Salmon, The term morphology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Vladimir A. Plungian, Die Stellung der Morphologie im Sprachsystem (Übersetzung: Robert Hammel) . . . . . . . . . . . .

II.

Geschichte der morphologischen Forschung I: von der Antike bis zum 19. Jahrhundert History of morphological research I: From antiquity to the 19th century

4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

Jeremy Black, The Ancient Near East . . . . . . George Cardona, Old Indic grammar . . . . . . Robert H. Robins, Classical Antiquity . . . . . Jonathan Owens, Traditional Arabic grammar Vivien Law, The Middle Ages . . . . . . . . . . . Von der Renaissance bis ca. 1800 . . . . . . . . . Sabine Ziegler, Das 19. Jahrhundert . . . . . . .

III.

Geschichte der morphologischen Forschung II: Forschungstraditionen im 20. Jahrhundert History of morphological research II: Research traditions in the 20th century

11.

Clemens Knobloch, Schulgrammatik als Modell linguistischer Beschreibung . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Henry M. Hoenigswald, Historical-comparative grammar . . . Überblick: die europäische Tradition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Sebastian Kempgen, Osteuropa . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Franc¸oise Kerleroux, France and Switzerland (Translation: Rachel Pankhurst) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Even Hovdhaugen, Scandinavia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Francis Katamba, Britain . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

XIII XXI

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1 15 22

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35 41 52 67 76 90 91

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104 117 124 125

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138 145 149

VI

Inhalt / Contents

18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

Wolfgang Motsch, Germany . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Henk Schultink, The Netherlands (Translation: Geert Booij) John Fought, American Structuralism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Ruth M. Brend, Tagmemics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Mark Aronoff, Generative grammar . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

IV.

Grundbegriffe Basic concepts

23. 24. 25.

Pierre Swiggers, Linguistic sign . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Jaap van Marle, Paradigmatic and syntagmatic relations . . . Jose´ Luis Iturrioz Leza & Stavros Skopeteas, Variation und Invarianz . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Laurie Bauer, Word . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . William Croft, Lexical and grammatical meaning . . . . . . . Andrew Carstairs-McCarthy, Category and feature . . . . . . Linda R. Waugh & Barbara A. Lafford, Markedness . . . . . John Haiman, Iconicity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Wolfgang U. Dressler, Naturalness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Ferenc Kiefer, Regularity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Geert Koefoed & Jaap van Marle, Productivity . . . . . . . .

26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33.

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157 162 170 191 194

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210 225

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234 247 257 264 272 281 288 296 303

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312 335 344 349 360

370 377 388 404

V.

Die Rolle der Morphologie in Grammatik und Lexikon The role of morphology in grammar and lexicon

34. 35. 36. 37. 38.

Andrew Spencer, Morphology and syntax . . . . . . . . . . . Geert Booij, Morphology and phonology . . . . . . . . . . . Mark Aronoff, Morphology between lexicon and grammar Pius ten Hacken, Derivation and compounding . . . . . . . Geert Booij, Inflection and derivation . . . . . . . . . . . . .

VI.

Einheiten der morphologischen Struktur Units of morphological structure

39. 40. 41. 42. 43.

Joan Bybee, Lexical, morphological and syntactic symbolization Hans Basbøll, Word boundaries . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Joel A. Nevis, Clitics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Rochelle Lieber & Joachim Mugdan, Internal structure of words Elena S. Kubrjakova, Submorphemische Einheiten (Übersetzung und Bearbeitung: Joachim Mugdan) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Edmund Gussmann & Bogdan Szymanek, Phonotactic properties of morphological units . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Henning Bergenholtz & Joachim Mugdan, Nullelemente in der Morphologie . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

44. 45.

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417 427 435

VII

Inhalt / Contents

VII.

Allomorphie Allomorphy

46. 47. 48. 49.

Hans Christian Luschützky, Morphem, Morph und Allomorph . Martin Neef, Phonologische Konditionierung . . . . . . . . . . . . . Martin Neef, Morphologische und syntaktische Konditionierung Henriette Walter, Fluctuation and free variation (Translation: Marie Landick) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Tsutomu Akamatsu, Generalized representations . . . . . . . . . . . Edmund Gussmann, Underlying forms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Igor Mel’cˇuk, Suppletion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

50. 51. 52.

VIII.

Formale Prozesse Formal processes

53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61.

Igor Mel’cˇuk, Morphological Processes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Christopher J. Hall, Prefixation, suffixation and circumfixation Edith A. Moravcsik, Infixation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Ellen Broselow, Transfixation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Caroline Wiltshire & Alec Marantz, Reduplication . . . . . . . . Rochelle Lieber, Substitution of segments and features . . . . . . Thomas Becker, Metathesis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Wolfgang U. Dressler, Subtraction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Larry M. Hyman & William R. Leben, Suprasegmental processes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

523 535 545 552 557 567 576 581

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587

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595 607 616 630 638 647 654

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665

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674 693 708 732 757

Flexion Inflection

62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68.

Andrew Carstairs-McCarthy, Lexeme, word-form, paradigm . Aleksandr V. Bondarko, Meaning vs. use in inflection . . . . . Richard Coates, Exponence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Andrew Carstairs-McCarthy, Inflection classes . . . . . . . . . . Silvia Luraghi, Synkretismus (Übersetzung: Simona Fabellini) Fred Karlsson, Defectivity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Martin Haspelmath, Periphrasis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

X.

Wortarten Word classes

69.

˚ ke Forsgren, Wortart, syntaktische Funktion, Kjell-A syntaktische Kategorie . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Clemens Knobloch & Burkhard Schaeder, Kriterien für die Definition von Wortarten . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Barbara Kaltz, Wortartensysteme in der Linguistik . . . . . Nicholas Evans, Word classes in the world’s languages . . . Christian Lehmann & Edith Moravcsik, Noun . . . . . . . . D. N. S. Bhat & Regina Pustet, Adjective . . . . . . . . . . .

71. 72. 73. 74.

484 489 499 510

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IX.

70.

451 463 473

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VIII

Inhalt / Contents

75. 76. 77. 78. 79.

Joseph H. Greenberg, Numeral . . . . . Linda Schwartz, Pronoun and article . Joan Bybee, Verb . . . . . . . . . . . . . . John M. Anderson, Auxiliary . . . . . . Casper de Groot, Minor word classes .

XI.

Wortbildung I: Grundprobleme Word formation I: Fundamental problems

80. 81.

Laurie Bauer, System vs. norm: coinage and institutionalization Wiecher Zwanenburg, Correspondence between formal and semantic relations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Jacob Hoeksema, Compositionality of meaning . . . . . . . . . . Geert Booij, Inheritance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Claudio Iacobini, Base and direction of derivation . . . . . . . . Franz Rainer, Produktivitätsbeschränkungen . . . . . . . . . . . .

82. 83. 84. 85.

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XII.

Wortbildung II: Prozesse Word formation II: Processes

86.

Wolfgang Fleischer, Die Klassifikation von Wortbildungsprozessen . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Susan Olsen, Composition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Marianne Mithun, Incorporation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Bernd Naumann & Petra M. Vogel, Derivation . . . . . . . . . . Jan Don & Mieke Trommelen & Wim Zonneveld, Conversion and category indeterminacy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Garland Cannon, Blending . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Charles W. Kreidler, Clipping and acronymy . . . . . . . . . . . Philip Baldi & Chantal Dawar, Creative processes . . . . . . . .

87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93.

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832 . . . . .

840 851 857 865 877

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886 897 916 929

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943 952 956 963

2. Teilband (Vorgesehener Inhalt) / Volume 2 (Prospective Contents) XIII.

94. 95. 96. 97. 98. 99.

Semantische Kategorien und Operationen in der Morphologie I: Entitätsbegriffe Semantic categories and operations in morphology I: Entity concepts Entity concepts Deixis and reference Person Classifiers Gender and noun class Diminution and augmentation

770 783 794 808 820

IX

Inhalt / Contents

100. 101. 102. 103.

Numerus Mass and collection Case Possession

XIV.

Semantische Kategorien und Operationen in der Morphologie II: Sachverhalts-, Eigenschafts- und verwandte Begriffe Semantic categories and operations in morphology II: State-of-affairs, property and related concepts

104. 105. 106. 107. 108. 109. 110. 111. 112. 113. 114.

State-of-affairs concepts Property concepts Circumstance concepts Valency change Voice Aspect and aktionsart Tense Mood and modality Interclausal relations Negation Comparison and gradation

XV.

Morphologische Typologie und Universalien Morphological typology and universals

115. 116. 117. 118.

Approaches to morphological typology Types of morphological structure Quantitative Typologie Cross-linguistic generalizations and their explanation

XVI.

Systeme morphologischer Struktur: Sprachskizzen Systems of morphological structure: Illustrative sketches

119. 120. 121. 122. 123. 124. 125. 126. 127. 128. 129. 130. 131.

English (Indo-European: Germanic) Deutsch (Indogermanisch: Germanisch) French (Indo-European: Romance) Russisch (Indogermanisch: Slavisch) Altgriechisch (Indogermanisch) Finnish (Finno-Ugric) Hebrew (Semitic) Türkisch (Turk) Hunzib (North-East Caucasian) Ketisch (Jenisseisch) West Greenlandic (Eskimo) Koyukon (Athapaskan) Montagnais (Algonquian)

X

Inhalt / Contents

132. 133. 134. 135. 136. 137. 138. 139. 140. 141. 142. 143. 144.

Guaranı´ (Tupı´-Guaranı´) Nahuatl (Uto-Aztecan) Quechua (Quechua) Yagua (Peba-Yaguan) Tagalog (Austronesian) Diyari (Pama-Nyungan) Wambon (Awyu) Turkana (Cushitic) Twi (Kwa) Rwanda (Bantu) Vietnamesisch (Viet-Muong) Deutsche Gebärdensprache Plansprachen

XVII.

Morphologischer Wandel I: Theoretische Probleme Morphological Change I: Fundamental Issues

145. 146. 147. 148. 149. 150. 151. 152. 153. 154.

Fundamental concepts Grammaticalization: from syntax to morphology Morphologisierung: von der Phonologie zur Morphologie Analogical change Remotivation and reinterpretation Lexicalization and demotivation Change in productivity Morphologische Entlehnung und Lehnübersetzung Pidginization, creolization and language death Morphological reconstruction

XVIII.

Morphologischer Wandel II: Fallstudien Morphological Change II: Case studies

155. 156. 157. 158. 159. 160. 161.

From Old English to Modern English Vom Althochdeutschen zum Neuhochdeutschen From Latin to French From Vedic to modern Indic languages From Archaic Chinese to Mandarin From Classical Arabic to the modern Arabic vernaculars Tok Pisin

XIX.

Psycholinguistische Perspektiven Psycholinguistic perspectives

162. 163. 164. 165. 166. 167.

Mentale Repräsentation morphologischer Strukturen Speech production and perception Speech errors First language acquisition Second language acquisition Sprachstörungen

XI

Inhalt / Contents

XX.

Morphologie in der Praxis Morphology in practice

168. 169. 170. 171. 172.

Field work Interlinear morphemic glossing Grammaticography Lexicography Computational linguistics

XXI.

Morphologie und Nachbardisziplinen Morphology and related fields

173. 174. 175. 176.

Etymologie Schriftsysteme Terminology in Special Languages Sprachunterricht

I. Morphologie als Disziplin Morphology as a discipline 1. Der Gegenstand der Morphologie 1. 2. 3. 4.

Allgemeine Morphologie Morphologie in der Linguistik Morphologische Form in der Sprache Zitierte Literatur

1.

Allgemeine Morphologie

1.1. Form Auf den Begriff der Form trifft man allenthalben, nicht nur im Bereich der Wissenschaft, sondern auch im Sprachgebrauch des Alltags. In der Alltagssprache bezeichnet Form bekanntermaßen die sichtbare, äußere Gestalt oder Ausprägung von Dingen; man vergleiche etwa die Form eines Baums oder die Form eines Tisches. Diese Verwendungsweise bildet auch den Ausgangspunkt für den Gebrauch des Begriffs in der Wissenschaft. Doch in der Wissenschaft, genauer in den Wissenschaften, wird der Terminus Form (wie ja auch viele andere Termini) nicht in einheitlicher Weise benutzt. Vielmehr tritt Form, in Abhängigkeit vom Faktenbereich und von der Spezifik der jeweiligen Wissenschaft, aber auch von der jeweils zugrunde gelegten Theorie, in einer Vielzahl unterschiedlicher Bedeutungen auf; man denke hier nur an die Linguistik! Bei all ihrer Unterschiedlichkeit lassen sich diese Bedeutungen jedoch (zumindest im Prinzip) auf drei Hauptbedeutungen zurückführen, die ihrerseits nicht unverbunden nebeneinanderstehen, sondern als drei Stufen eines einheitlichen Abstraktions- und Generalisierungsprozesses auszumachen sind: Erstens bezeichnet Form (noch in starker Anlehnung an die Alltagssprache) die sinnlich zugängliche, d. h. in den meisten Fällen sichtbare, in bestimmten Fällen auch hörbare Gestalt von Objekten, ihre “äußere Seite”. In diesem Sinne spricht man beispielsweise in der Botanik von der Form von Blüten, in der Geologie von der Form von Bergen und in der Linguistik von der lautlichen oder gra-

phischen Form sprachlicher Zeichen. So haben z. B. die sprachlichen Zeichen bunt und Bund die gemeinsame lautliche Form [bwnt]. Zweitens bezeichnet Form die Gesamtheit der Relationen, die zwischen den Einheiten oder Elementen eines Systems existieren. Der Terminus steht damit für die nicht unmittelbar beobachtbare innere Organisation eines Systems und die Wechselwirkung seiner Elemente, mit anderen Worten für die Struktur des Systems. In diesem Sinne kann man z. B. von der Form von Sternensystemen, Wirtschaftssystemen oder eben auch von Flexionssystemen sprechen. Auf dieser Stufe der Abstraktion (und nicht auf der vorangehenden) ist auch die Anwendung des Terminus Form auf solche Einheiten anzusiedeln, denen ihre relevanten Eigenschaften nicht per se, sondern durch ihre Stellung in einem System zukommen. Hier ist damit faktisch der auf dem System beruhende Formbegriff auf das vom System geprägte Element projiziert. Diese Verwendungsweise ist typisch für die Linguistik, wo der Begriff der Flexionsform für ein Element des Flexionssystems mit all seinen “formalen” und “inhaltlichen” Eigenschaften steht, so daß z. B. Hund als Nominativ und Hund als Akkusativ Singular trotz gleicher phonologischer Struktur zwei unterschiedliche Flexionsformen darstellen. Auf dieser Ebene ist es wichtig, im Rahmen welches Systems eine Form betrachtet wird. So kann man beispielsweise eine Form wie (den) Hund als Element des entsprechenden Flexionsparadigmas, im Rahmen sämtlicher substantivischer Akkusativformen, im Rahmen des substantivischen Deklinationssystems oder im Rahmen des gesamten Flexionssystems des Deutschen betrachten, wobei sich relational zum zugrunde gelegten System jeweils unterschiedliche Eigenschaften “ein und derselben Form” ergeben. Drittens schließlich bezeichnet Form eine Struktur, ein Relationsgefüge, die bzw. das

2 eine andere Struktur abbildet, widerspiegelt. In diesem Sinne spiegeln Denkformen, also Begriffe, Aussagen, Theorien usw., Erscheinungen der existierenden oder vorgestellten Welt wider. Das gilt speziell für wissenschaftliche Gesetze und Theorien, wobei (was ebenso trivial wie wichtig ist) ein und dasselbe Faktensystem einer gegebenen Form durch Theorien sehr unterschiedlicher Ausprägung abgebildet werden kann, ganz gleich, ob es sich um ein Sternsystem, ein Wirtschaftssystem oder ein Sprachsystem handelt (vgl. dazu auch Kröber & Warnke 1974: 409ff.). Ein Blick auf die höchst verschiedenen Theorien, die grammatische Systeme in höchst unterschiedlicher Weise widerspiegeln, belegt das deutlich. Der Begriff der Form, in welcher spezifischen Bedeutung auch immer, macht eigentlich nur dann Sinn, wenn er sich auf eine andere Größe bezieht, der die Form zukommt. Diese Größe wird im allgemeinen als Inhalt (bzw. Gehalt) oder als Stoff (bzw. Substanz) bezeichnet. Den Inhalt kann man kurz als die “Gesamtheit der einem Ding innerlich zukommenden Eigenschaften im Gegensatz zu dessen äußerer Gestalt” (Warnke 1974: 524) fassen. Form und Inhalt (im folgenden sei einfachheitshalber dieser Terminus benutzt) setzen sich gegenseitig voraus; sie bilden eine dialektisch-widersprüchliche Einheit im Sinne von Hegel und Marx: Form ist immer Form eines Inhalts, und Inhalt existiert immer in einer bestimmten Form. Es gibt, worauf bereits Aristoteles hinweist, weder Form ohne Inhalt noch Inhalt ohne Form. Zugleich stehen sich Form und Inhalt nicht beziehungslos gegenüber, sondern beeinflussen sich gegenseitig. Eine gegebene Form kann nicht durch jeden beliebigen Inhalt ausgefüllt werden, und ein gegebener Inhalt kann nicht jede beliebige Form ausfüllen. Primär ist die Form durch den Inhalt bestimmt, aber die Form kann auch auf den Inhalt zurückwirken. Doch muß festgehalten werden, daß die gegenseitige Zuordnung von Form und Inhalt nicht absolut und unveränderlich ist. Man kann also durchaus von einer relativen Autonomie der Form gegenüber dem Inhalt sprechen, was vor allem Konsequenzen für den Verlauf von Veränderungsprozessen hat. Unter entsprechenden Umweltbedingungen können sich Form und Inhalt relativ unabhängig voneinander verändern, so daß sich neue Formen mit alten Inhalten und neue Inhalte mit alten Formen ergeben können. Für komplexere Systeme ist dabei charakteri-

I. Morphologie als Disziplin

stisch, daß sich bei Veränderungen nicht die Gesamtform oder der Gesamtinhalt des Systems wandelt, sondern jeweils nur Elemente der Form oder des Inhalts. Wenn in einem System Veränderungen eingetreten sind, die Form und Inhalt über ein gewisses Maß hinaus voneinander entfernen, dann setzen im allgemeinen Veränderungen ein, die nicht extern durch die Umwelt, sondern intern durch die solcherart entstandenen Widersprüche zwischen den beiden Seiten bedingt sind und die diese Widersprüche wieder beseitigen. Beispiele für das Verhältnis von Form und Inhalt im Wandel lassen sich aus den verschiedensten Wissenschaftsbereichen beibringen: Wenn sich in einem Wirtschaftssystem die Produktion als sein Inhalt in einer Weise entwickelt hat, daß seine Form zum Hindernis für die Produktion geworden ist, dann muß die Form des Wirtschaftssystems wieder an den Stand der Produktion angepaßt werden; wenn sich in einem Sprachsystem (etwa durch phonologische Veränderungen) Form und Semantik von Flexionsformen (!) in einem bestimmten Maße auseinanderentwikkelt haben, dann treten in der Regel kompensatorische Anpassungen der Form an die Semantik ein usw. usf. Im Verhältnis von Form und Inhalt ist zu beachten, daß die Entgegensetzung beider Seiten keine absolute, sondern eine relative ist. Was unter einem Gesichtspunkt Form ist, kann unter einem anderen Gesichtspunkt durchaus Inhalt sein und umgekehrt. Das ergibt sich zum einen aus den unterschiedlichen Abstraktionsstufen bei der Verwendung des Terminus Form. So erfaßt der Terminus in der ersten Bedeutung wie gesagt nur die sinnlich wahrnehmbare, äußere Gestalt von Objekten, also z. B. einer Blüte; alles andere, so auch die nicht sichtbaren Elemente ihrer Struktur, ist Substanz (um den hier angemessensten Begriff zu wählen). Dagegen bezieht sich Form in der zweiten Bedeutung auf die Struktur der Blüte insgesamt, also ihre äußere und innere Struktur. Zum anderen resultiert die Relativität der Entgegensetzung daraus, daß die Bedeutung der zweiten Stufe recht unterschiedlich große Systeme (bzw. Teilsysteme) betreffen kann. So werden bekanntlich in verschiedenen traditionellen grammatischen Konzepten innerhalb des Sprachsystems phonologische, morphologische und syntaktische Form als “Ausdrucksebene” und Bedeutung als “Inhaltsebene” einander gegenübergestellt. Dagegen unterscheidet die strukturalistische Richtung der

1. Gegenstand der Morphologie

Glossematik auf beiden genannten Ebenen zwischen Form und Substanz. Die Substanz der Ausdrucksebene bilden die Laute als phonetische Ereignisse, die Form das sprachspezifische phonologische System. Die Substanz der Inhaltsebene wird von der ungeordneten Menge von Gedanken und Vorstellungen gebildet, ihre Form vom sprachspezifischen System der abstrakten Bedeutungsrelationen, die die Bedeutungssubstanz ordnen (Hjelmslev 1943). Die Form steht nicht nur im Gegensatz zum Inhalt, sondern auch zur Funktion. Unter Funktion versteht man zunächst ganz allgemein die “Fähigkeit eines dynamischen Systems, bestimmte Verhaltensweisen hervorzubringen” (Klaus 101974: 437). Diese Fähigkeit wird durch die Struktur des Systems (also seine Form in der zweiten Bedeutung des Terminus), d. h. durch die Relationen zwischen seinen Elementen bestimmt. Dabei werden in komplexeren Systemen Teilfunktionen von ihren Elementen wahrgenommen; man denke an die Organe höherer Lebewesen oder an die verschiedenen Institutionen in einem Staat. In genau diesem Sinne kommen auch den verschiedenen Einheiten des Sprachsystems, seinen Formen, unterschiedliche Funktionen zu. Funktion meint dann Aufgabe oder Leistung im Rahmen des gegebenen Sprachsystems. So hat beispielsweise das Formativ /st/ im Rahmen des deutschen Flexionssystems die Funktionen der Symbolisierung der 2. Person Singular. Ganz wie es generell der Fall ist, gibt es auch in der Sprache keine eineindeutige Zuordnung von Form (Struktur) und Funktion. Gleiche Formen können unterschiedliche Funktionen haben, denn das Formativ /st/ symbolisiert auch den Superlativ, und gleiche Funktionen können durch unterschiedliche Formen wahrgenommen werden, wie die verschiedenen Pluralformen des deutschen Substantivs zeigen. 1.2. In welchen Faktenbereichen existiert Form? In welchen Bereichen gibt es eine Morphologie? Die Beantwortung der Frage, wo überall Form existiert, ergibt sich plausiblerweise aus der Bestimmung dessen, was Form ist. Deshalb ist hier auf die eben explizierten unterschiedlichen Bedeutungen von Form zurückzukommen. In seiner ersten, noch sehr konkreten Bedeutung bezieht sich Form auf sichtbare bzw. hörbare, also materielle Objekte. Es ist evident, daß solchen Objekten eine Form zu-

3 kommt. So gesehen ist die uns umgebene materielle Welt eine Welt der Formen. Die entsprechenden Objekte gehören in den Bereich von Natur, Technik und Sprache. Doch Form in diesem Sinne ist (zumindest heute) für die Wissenschaft nur von eingeschränktem Interesse, da der Begriff hier nur die äußere Gestalt der Dinge erfaßt. In seiner zweiten, demgegenüber stärker abstrahierenden Bedeutung bezieht sich Form auf objektiv, d. h. unabhängig von ihrer wissenschaftlichen Untersuchung existierende Systeme wie organische Systeme, Sternsysteme, Wirtschaftssysteme, soziale Systeme und Sprachsysteme. Form in diesem Sinne gehört in die Domäne von Naturwissenschaften, technischen Wissenschaften, Sozialwissenschaften bis hin zu Geisteswissenschaften wie der Linguistik, denn sie alle haben es mit der Struktur solcher Systeme zu tun. In seiner dritten, am stärksten abstrahierenden Bedeutung schließlich bezieht sich Form auf Systeme, die andere Systeme widerspiegeln. Das sind Systeme, die von allgemeinen Strukturwissenschaften wie Mathematik, Logik und Systemtheorie untersucht werden. Wenn man alle Bedeutungen einbezieht, die der Formbegriff abdeckt, so läßt sich sagen, daß Form in der gesamten materiellen und ideellen Erfahrungswelt des Menschen existiert; es gibt keinen Bereich, der sich der Geformtheit grundsätzlich entzieht. Daraus kann man schlußfolgern, daß alle Wissenschaften, wollen sie ein angemessenes Bild ihres jeweiligen Faktenbereichs vermitteln, sich auch mit Form befassen müssen. Dem kommen sie auch nach, aber doch in recht unterschiedlicher Weise. Überprüft man, wie es die Wissenschaften im einzelnen mit der Form halten, so stellt man fest, daß der Terminus Form in den modernen Wissenschaften außerhalb der Linguistik nicht allzu häufig auftritt; vgl. etwa Formen der Erdoberfläche in der Geologie und Geographie, Kristallformen in der Kristallographie, Staatsformen in den politischen Wissenschaften, Formen der Produktionsweise in der Ökonomie und soziale Form in der Soziologie (hier geht der Terminus auf Simmel zurück, der Form und Inhalt der Gesellschaft gegenüberstellt; vgl. Simmel 41958 passim). Im allgemeinen erscheint in der ersten Bedeutung von Form der Terminus Gestalt, so etwa in der Biologie. In der zweiten Bedeutung treten normalerweise die Termini Struktur oder Aufbau auf, so wiederum in der Biologie (wo daneben

4 auch der Terminus Anatomie zu finden ist), in der Physik und in der Chemie. Auch in der dritten Bedeutung von Form tritt heute gemeinhin Struktur auf, so (natürlich) in den allgemeinen Strukturwissenschaften. Die “Wissenschaft von der Form” ist die Morphologie. Sie wurde vor annähernd zweihundert Jahren von J. W. von Goethe, der auch den Terminus Morphologie prägte (vgl. Art. 2), als eine Wissenschaft begründet, die sowohl die speziellen als auch die allgemeinen Strukturgesetzmäßigkeiten der von den anderen Wissenschaften behandelten Gegenstände erfassen sollte (vgl. Wildgen 1984: 3f.). Die moderne Wissenschaft folgt dem bekanntlich nur sehr bedingt. Eine allgemeine Morphologie, so wie Goethe sie konzipierte, gibt es im heutigen System der Wissenschaften nicht. An ihre Stelle sind die eben erwähnten allgemeinen Strukturwissenschaften getreten, Disziplinen, die sich von Goethes allgemeiner Morphologie durch ihre konsequente Mathematisierung unterscheiden. Aber auch die Anzahl der modernen Wissenschaften, die als Teildisziplin eine spezielle Morphologie aufweisen, ist recht gering. Es sind im wesentlichen nur die Biologie (Zoologie und Botanik), die Geologie/Geographie, die Kristallographie und die Linguistik. In der Biologie ist die Morphologie die Lehre vom inneren und äußeren Bau der Organismen, in der Geologie/Geographie ist sie die Lehre von den Formen der Erdoberfläche und in der Kristallographie die Lehre von den geometrischen Formen der Kristalle. (In der moderneren Soziologie nicht durchgesetzt hat sich Durkheims Terminus “soziale Morphologie”, den er z. B. für die Demographie verwendet.) Diese Gruppe von Wissenschaften erscheint sehr heterogen. Sie haben aber zumindest gemeinsam, daß sich erstens in allen Fällen die jeweiligen Strukturaspekte als Gegenstand der Morphologie relativ gut aus dem Gesamtgegenstand der Wissenschaft ausgliedern lassen (z. B. in der Physik, deren Gesamtgegenstand ja die Struktur der unbelebten Materie ist, wäre das nicht möglich) und daß zweitens die jeweiligen Strukturen in relativ starkem Maße geordnet und überschaubar sind (was z. B. nicht für die Ökonomie gilt). Weiterreichende Gemeinsamkeiten hinsichtlich von Stellung und Aufgaben der Morphologie in den unterschiedlichen Wissenschaften lassen sich am ehesten für die Biologie und die Linguistik finden: Sowohl die biologische als auch die linguistische Morphologie untersucht die Struktur, nicht einfach die äußere Gestalt (die ältere Biologie unterschied hier

I. Morphologie als Disziplin

noch zwischen Morphologie als der Lehre vom äußeren Bau und der Anatomie als der Lehre vom inneren Bau), von komplexen, hochgradig organisierten und integrierten sowie sich verändernden Systemen, d. h. von Organismen bzw. Sprachen. Sie setzen die Teilsysteme oder Elemente der Systeme mit deren Funktion in Beziehung, sie führen die scheinbar uneingeschränkte Vielzahl der unterschiedlichen vorkommenden Strukturen auf durch Abstraktion gewonnene morphologische Bauplantypen zurück (für die Biologie vgl. Voigt 1978: 320), und sie erforschen die Bedingungen der Veränderung der von ihnen betrachteten Objekte.

2.

Morphologie in der Linguistik

2.1. In welchem Sinne befaßt sich die linguistische Morphologie mit Form? Die Linguistik betrachtet ihren Gegenstand, die natürliche Sprache, bekanntlich unter verschiedenen Aspekten. Der zentrale, weil auf das Wesen der Sprache gerichtete Aspekt ist der grammatische. Die Betrachtung der Sprache unter dem grammatischen Aspekt konstituiert die linguistische Disziplin der Grammatik im weiteren Sinne als die Wissenschaft vom Sprachsystem. Ihr Gegenstand ist damit die gegenseitige Zuordnung von Bedeutungseinheiten und Lauteinheiten in den natürlichen Sprachen. Daß es die Grammatik immer mit Form bzw. mit Formen zu tun hat, ist unbestritten. Wie aber soll der Formbegriff in der Grammatik genauer gefaßt werden, und auf welche Gegebenheiten ist er zu beziehen? Ganz offensichtlich dem Gegenstand nicht angemessen sind doch recht verbreitete Auffassungen, in deren Rahmen der Bedeutung sprachlicher Zeichen als ihrem “Inhalt” eine einheitliche, vorgeblich rein sinnlich erfaßbare Form gegenübergestellt wird, in der phonetische, phonologische, morphologische und syntaktische Charakteristika undifferenziert zusammengefaßt sind (so u. a. Meier 1961: 15f.). Hier wird erstens Form im Sinne von ‘äußerer Form von Objekten’ auf ein komplexes System bezogen, dem eine Form im Sinne von ‘Struktur’ zukommt. Zweitens ist dieser Formbegriff nicht geeignet, die unterschiedlichen Strukturschichten sprachlicher Formbildung in ihrer relativen Eigengesetzlichkeit und ihrer Interaktion zu erfassen. Drittens schließlich wird vernachlässigt, daß ja auch semantische Formen oder Strukturen existieren.

1. Gegenstand der Morphologie

Alle Teildisziplinen der Grammatik untersuchen die Form ⫺ die Struktur ⫺ sprachlicher Äußerungen, nur jeweils unter spezifischen Gesichtspunkten; die Phonologie untersucht die Lautstruktur, die Morphologie die Wortstruktur, die Syntax die Satzstruktur und die Semantik die Bedeutungsstruktur. Doch wenn damit faktisch alle grammatischen Teildisziplinen “Formenlehren” sind, in welchem Sinne befaßt sich dann die Morphologie mit sprachlicher Form? Die Morphologie untersucht die Form des Wortes, wodurch sie sich klar von der Syntax unterscheidet, deren Domäne die Form des Satzes ist. Doch eine solche Bestimmung reicht ganz offensichtlich noch nicht aus, wenn man die anderen beiden grammatischen Teildisziplinen, die Phonologie und die Semantik, in die Betrachtung einbezieht. Auch die Phonologie untersucht ja, wenn auch nicht ausschließlich, die Form des Wortes; es gibt eine spezielle Wortphonologie, deren Gegenstand die Lautstruktur des Wortes ist. Ebenso hat es die Semantik u. a. auch mit der semantischen Form des Wortes zu tun, die den Gegenstand der Wortsemantik konstituiert. Diese beiden grammatischen Teildisziplinen untersuchen die Wörter ohne Berücksichtigung der jeweils anderen Seite. Hieraus ergibt sich ein weiteres Abgrenzungskriterium für die Morphologie, denn deren Spezifik besteht gerade darin, daß sie die Bedeutungsstruktur und die Lautstruktur des Wortes in ihrer Interrelation betrachtet. Sie befaßt sich mit der Form des Wortes unter dem Gesichtspunkt der gegenseitigen Zuordnung von Bedeutungs- und Lauteinheiten. Anders gesagt, sie betrachtet das Wort als ein sprachliches Zeichen, das eine Bedeutung und einen Ausdruck hat. Gegenstand der Morphologie ist damit nicht (wie soeben vereinfachend konstatiert) die Form des Wortes schlechthin, sondern die semiotische Form des Wortes. Genau das ist gemeint, wenn ⫺ scheinbar pleonastisch ⫺ von “morphologischer Form” gesprochen wird. Mit dieser Einordnung der Morphologie wird zugleich auch deutlich, wo sich Probleme der Abgrenzung zu ihren Nachbardisziplinen ergeben können. Das betrifft erstens den Übergangsbereich zur Syntax. Hier ist die Abgrenzung der Morphologie von der Entscheidung darüber abhängig, ob eine gegebene grammatische Einheit (schon) als ein Wort oder aber (noch) als eine syntaktische Konstruktion zu werten ist. Als relevante Fälle können etwa Klitisierungen wie engl.

5 I’ve (been) und (the man of) yesterday’s (mother in law) genannt werden. Zweitens betrifft das den Übergangsbereich zur Phonologie, wo die Abgrenzung davon abhängt, ob eine Lautalternation (schon) eine Bedeutung symbolisiert, also Zeichencharakter hat, oder aber (noch) durch die phonologische Umgebung bedingt ist. Einschlägige Fälle, die in dieser Hinsicht kaum eindeutig klassifiziert werden können, sind viele Umlauterscheinungen in den älteren germanischen Sprachen. Man vergleiche dazu den für diesen Übergangsbereich geprägten Terminus Morphonologie (vgl. Art. 3 und 35). Die Vorstellungen darüber, wie die Morphologie zu definieren oder einzugrenzen ist, sind in der Linguistik durchaus nicht einheitlich. Es gibt eine große Anzahl unterschiedlicher Definitionen von Morphologie, die sich teils auf die Wissenschaftsdisziplin, teils auf ihre Faktendomäne beziehen. Dabei wird die wichtige Gegebenheit, daß es in der Morphologie um die Form (des Wortes) unter dem spezifischen Gesichtspunkt des Zusammenhangs von Bedeutung und Ausdruck geht, in vielen Fällen vorausgesetzt und nur partiell expliziert. Doch die eigentlichen sachlichen Unterschiede zwischen den Definitionen liegen woanders. Es ist evident, daß man faktisch nicht bestimmen kann, was Morphologie ist, ohne auf den Wortbegriff Bezug zu nehmen, was auch alle vorliegenden Definitionen von Morphologie und Eingrenzungen ihrer Domäne zeigen. Doch die Bezugnahme auf das Wort erfolgt in recht unterschiedlicher Weise. Die meisten der einschlägigen Arbeiten betrachten das Wort (vgl. Art. 26) als die Basiseinheit der Morphologie und bauen ihre Definitionen von Morphologie unmittelbar auf dem Wortbegriff auf. Dafür nur wenige Beispiele. So wird die Morphologie gefaßt als “knowledge of word structure” (Spencer 1993: 7) oder als der Bereich der “‘forms of words’ in different uses and constructions” (Matthews 1992: 3). Die etwas detaillierten Definitionen unterscheiden sich im wesentlichen nur darin, daß sie unterschiedliche Aspekte des Wortbegriffs hervorheben. Das ist zum einen die Unterscheidung der morphologischen von der phonologischen Form des Wortes. Morphologie ist dann “the study of the shapes of words; not the phonological shape (which can be assumed to be fairly arbitrary) but rather the systematic changes in shape related to changes in meaning.” (Bauer 1988: 4)

6 Zum zweiten werden die syntagmatischen und paradigmatischen Bezüge der Wörter als wesentlich für die Morphologie hervorgehoben: “The object of study in morphology is the structure of words, and the ways in which their structure reflects their relation to other words ⫺ relations both within some larger construction such as a sentence and across the total vocabulary of the language.” (Anderson 1992: 7)

Zum dritten wird die Abgrenzung der Morphologie zur Syntax betont: “Die Morphologie einer Sprache wird durch die Fakten und Zusammenhänge konstituiert, die die Struktur der Wörter und Wortformen betreffen. Die Domäne der Morphologie ist das Wort; grammatische Erscheinungen, die die Grenzen des Wortes überschreiten, gehören in den Bereich der Syntax. Eine morphologische Theorie ist eine Theorie der Prinzipien der Wortstruktur.” (Wurzel 1984: 35)

Anders verfahren Arbeiten, die in der Tradition des amerikanischen Strukturalismus stehen, für den in seiner konsequentesten Ausprägung überhaupt keine Wörter, sondern nur Morpheme (vgl. Art. 46) und Morphemkombinationen existieren, wobei nicht unterschieden wird, ob letztere Wörter oder syntaktische Konstruktionen darstellen (u. a. Harris 1946). Wenn solche Arbeiten natürlich auch nicht ohne Rückgriff auf das Wort als “Obergrenze” des Bereichs der Morphologie auskommen, so gehen sie doch in ihren Definitionen vom Morphem als der morphologischen Basiseinheit aus. So etwa, wenn Morphologie als “the study of morphemes and their arrangement in forming words” gefaßt wird (Nida 1949: 1) oder wenn sie als Beschreibung von “morphemes and their patterns of occurrence within the word” charakterisiert wird (Alerten 1979: 47). Die einzelnen Definitionen, so unterschiedlich sie auch sind, zeigen, daß man Morphologie ohne jegliche Bezugnahme auf den Wortbegriff nicht bestimmen kann. 2.2. Zur Geschichte des Formbegriffs in der Sprachwissenschaft Der Begriff der Form spielt in der Linguistik seit der Antike eine wichtige Rolle. In ganz besonderem Maße gilt das für die deutsche Sprachwissenschaft des 19. Jahrhunderts, in der sich aufgrund von sprachwissenschaftlichen, aber auch von weitergehenden geisteswissenschaftlichen Entwicklungen Fragen nach der Form in der Sprache und von Spra-

I. Morphologie als Disziplin

che gleichsam bündeln. Da es nicht möglich ist, hier eine umfassendere Geschichte des Formbegriffs in der Sprachwissenschaft zu geben, soll wenigstens auf diesen Zeitraum etwas detaillierter eingegangen werden. Das Interesse der Sprachwissenschaft an der sprachlichen Form nimmt bereits zu Anfang des 19. Jahrhunderts stark zu. Dafür sind im wesentlichen drei Gründe zu nennen. Zum ersten entwickelt sich in dieser Zeit in Deutschland mit der Stärkung des bürgerlichen Selbstbewußtseins auch das Interesse an der eigenen Geschichte, speziell am “deutschen Altertum” bis zurück zur indoeuropäischen Periode. In der Sprachwissenschaft äußert sich das in der Erarbeitung umfangreicher Kompendien der germanischen (vgl. J. Grimm 1818⫺1837) und der indoeuropäischen Sprachen (vgl. Bopp 1833). Die Verfasser dieser Kompendien betrachteten unter dem weiterwirkenden Einfluß der scholastischen Traditionen des Mittelalters die Beschäftigung mit dem Wort als entscheidend für das Verständnis des Funktionierens von Sprache überhaupt. So rückt die Form des Wortes ins Zentrum des grammatischen Interesses, wobei im übrigen die damit verbundenen Fragestellungen den heute als Morphologie verstandenen Bereich der Grammatik weit überschreiten und auch syntaktische und phonologische Phänomene umfassen (Anderson 1992: 7). Zum zweiten werden aufgrund der Kolonialisierung und des zunehmenden Welthandels bisher unbekannte, “exotische” Sprachen ferner Länder mit vom europäischen Muster stark abweichenden Strukturen auch in Deutschland bekannt. Das fördert auch die wissenschaftliche Beschäftigung mit solchen Sprachen, mit ihren Formen und ihrer Form insgesamt. Zum dritten wächst mit der Entwicklung der einzelnen Wissenschaften das Interesse, diese Wissenschaften in einen theoretischen Zusammenhang zu bringen, ihre Gemeinsamkeiten und Unterschiede herauszuarbeiten. In diesen Kontext gehört nicht zuletzt auch der bereits erwähnte Versuch Goethes, eine Hierarchie der Naturwissenschaften zu schaffen, in der der von ihm konzipierten allgemeinen Morphologie eine übergreifende, generalisierende Funktion zukommt. Ihr Objektbereich ist “Gestalt in ihren Teilen und in ihrem Ganzen, Übereinstimmungen, Abweichungen” (Goethe 1955: 122f.). Dieses Konzept einer Morphologie als allgemeiner Formenlehre stimulierte in besonderem Maße die

1. Gegenstand der Morphologie

Beschäftigung mit der Form, nicht nur mit Formen in der Sprache. Die führenden Vertreter der historisch-vergleichenden Sprachwissenschaft des beginnenden 19. Jahrhunderts wie J. Grimm, R. Rask und F. Bopp stehen, was ihren Begriff von Form betrifft, noch weitgehend in den Traditionen der mittelalterlichen Grammatik. Form ist bei ihnen Bezeichnung für ein einzelnes grammatisches Wort; die Auffassung von Form als Element eines Sprachsystems, die die Grundlage für eine sprachtypologische Klassifizierung bildet (wie später bei A. W. von Schlegel und Humboldt), ist bei Grimm noch nicht zu finden. Formen sind für Grimm immer nur “Formen von etwas”, in erster Linie die Abwandlungen, die ein Stamm oder ein Wort aufgrund der “Wortbiegung” (partiell auch aufgrund der Derivation, vgl. die “Verkleinerungsform”) annehmen kann. Hier zeigt sich ein vierter Begriff von Form, der ähnlich dem oben explizierten ersten Formbegriff dem alltagssprachlichen Gebrauch recht nahe steht (vgl. 1.1). Er unterscheidet sich von diesem allerdings darin, daß er sich nicht nur auf die äußere Gestalt von sprachlichen Einheiten bezieht, sondern auch ihren Inhalt ⫺ d. h. die jeweiligen Kategorien ⫺ berücksichtigt. Damit sind beispielsweise gleichlautende Nominativ- und Akkusativformen eines Wortes für Grimm verschiedene Formen. Sein Formbegriff entspricht im wesentlichen der Terminologie der scholastischen Sprachbetrachtung; so verwendet z. B. Thomas von Erfurt (Anfang des 14. Jahrhunderts) im gleichen Sinne den lateinischen Terminus figurationes vocum ‘Abwandlungen/Formen der Wörter’ (vgl. Arens 1969: 48). Grimm erweitert allerdings diesen Gebrauch von Form, indem er z. B. auch von den Formen eines Kasus ⫺ also einer Kategorie ⫺ spricht, was meint ‘Formen, in denen ein Kasus erscheinen kann’. Den wichtigen Schritt, den Terminus Form ohne Bezug auf ein Wort/einen Stamm oder eine Kategorie anzuwenden, hat dann (offenbar als einer der ersten) Bopp (1816) getan, der gemäß dem heutigen diesbezüglichen Sprachgebrauch verallgemeinernd alle Wortformen als “grammatische Formen” der Sprache bezeichnet. Ein weiterer wichtiger Punkt verdient Erwähnung: Bei den Begründern der historischvergleichenden Sprachwissenschaft bleibt der Formbegriff strikt auf morphologische Einheiten eingeschränkt. Die Formen sind immer grammatische Wortformen. So bezeich-

7 net z. B. Grimm die Lautform der Wörter als deren “Aussprache” und die Form der Buchstaben als deren “Gestalt”. Ein wesentlich weiterer und zugleich komplexerer Begriff von Form in der Sprache findet sich demgegenüber bei W. von Humboldt. Zwar sind Humboldt die Traditionen, in denen die historisch-vergleichenden Sprachwissenschaftler stehen, keineswegs fremd, doch prägend für seinen Formbegriff wird Goethes (in 1.2) erwähntes Konzept einer allgemeinen Morphologie sowie auch dessen (leider nie systematisch dargestellte) Sprachauffassung, die ihrerseits stark von Herder geprägt ist (vgl. dazu Wildgen 1984). Vor allem auf dieser Grundlage entwickelt er seine durchaus als bahnbrechend zu charakterisierenden Auffassungen von der Form der Sprache (vgl. Coseriu 1972). Entscheidend ist, daß für Humboldt eine Sprache nicht nur einzelne Formen, von ihm verstanden als geformte Elemente, aufweist, sondern daß sie auch selbst als Ganzes eine Form hat. Dieser Begriff von Form entspricht im wesentlichen dem modernen Systembegriff und insofern auch dem oben (in 1.1) darstellten zweiten Formbegriff. Die Form einer Sprache steht nicht beziehungslos neben der Form anderer Sprachen. Humboldt unterscheidet zwischen der Form der einzelnen Sprache, der “allgemeineren Form”, die mehrere Sprachen gemeinsam haben können (von ihm auch “Sprachform” genannt) und der “allgemeinsten Form”, die allen Sprachen gemeinsam ist (Herders und Goethes “allgemeiner Sprache” entsprechend). Damit wird zwischen drei Schichten sprachlicher Struktur differenziert, die die Einzelsprache, den Sprachtyp und die sprachlichen Universalien reflektieren. An dieser Stelle soll wenigstens erwähnt werden, daß Humboldts linguistisches Interesse nicht zuletzt auch der “allgemeineren Form” der Sprachen, d. h. ihrer typologischen Klassifizierung galt, wobei er speziell die Ansätze von F. von Schlegel, dem eigentlichen Begründer der Sprachtypologie, und dessen Bruder A. W. von Schlegel weiterführte (vgl. u. a. Schlegel 1818). Die Form der Sprache ist in ganz entscheidendem Maße durch die für sie charakteristische “innere Sprachform” bestimmt: “Dieser ihr ganz innerer und rein intellectueller Theil macht eigentlich die Sprache aus” (Humboldt 1836: 107). Die “innere Sprachform” äußert sich sowohl in der “Bildung der einzelnen Begriffe” und in dem “verhältnismäßig verschiedenen Reichthum der Sprache in Be-

8 griffen gewisser Gattung” (114), also grob gesagt in der jeweiligen spezifischen Ausgestaltung des Lexikons, als auch in ihrer “intellectuellen Technik”, ihrer spezifischen Grammatik: “Die intellectuelle Technik begreift dagegen das in der Sprache zu Bezeichnende und zu Unterscheidende. Zu ihr gehört es also z. B., wenn eine Sprache Bezeichnung des Genus, des Dualis, der Tempora durch alle Möglichkeiten der Verbindung des Begriffs der Zeit mit dem des Verlaufs der Handlung u. s. f. besitzt.” (105)

Außer der “inneren Sprachform” besitzt jede Sprache ihre eigene Lautform. “Die Lautform ist der Ausdruck, welchen die Sprache dem Gedanken schafft” (100). Aus der Verbindung von “innerer Sprachform” und Lautform ergibt sich die Form der Sprache. Dabei ist wichtig, daß die Lautform der Sprache für Humboldt nicht einfach eine der “inneren Sprachform” zugeordnete äußere Hülle darstellt. Sie ist im Gegenteil wesentlich verantwortlich für die jeweilige Ausprägung der “inneren Sprachform”, was im Sprachwandel deutlich zum Ausdruck kommt (102f.). Das bedeutet, daß die “innere Sprachform” einer Sprache historisch veränderlich ist. Die Bedeutung der Lautform für die Form der Sprache ergibt sich auch daraus, daß sie “hauptsächlich dasjenige ist, wodurch der Unterschied der Sprachen begründet wird” (102). Damit ist Humboldts komplexer Formbegriff noch nicht erschöpft. Zusätzlich zu den dargestellten verschiedenen Aspekten sprachlicher Form, die die Sprache als Ganzes betreffen, sind für ihn auch die einzelnen Elemente der Sprache Formen. Dabei unterscheidet er zwischen grammatischen Formen und Lautformen. Doch die einzelnen Formen haben bei ihm einen grundlegend anderen Status als bei Grimm oder Bopp. Sie sind für ihn Formen einer Sprache, die ganz im Sinne von Goethes allgemeiner Morphologie von der Form der Sprache insgesamt geprägt sind: “Die charakteristische Form der Sprachen hängt an jedem einzelnen ihrer kleinsten Elemente; jedes wird durch sie, wie unerklärlich es im Einzelnen sei, auf irgend eine Weise bestimmt.” (59)

So ist bei Humboldt auch der strukturalistische Begriff der einzelnen grammatischen Form als ‘Form eines Systems’ faktisch vorweggenommen. Der Form stellt Humboldt den Stoff gegenüber. Sein Verständnis des Verhältnisses von Form und Stoff mutet ebenfalls sehr mo-

I. Morphologie als Disziplin

dern an (und wird in diesem Jahrhundert von der Glossematik wieder aufgegriffen; vgl. 1.1): Innerhalb der Sprache “läßt sich etwas nur beziehungsweise gegen etwas anderes als Stoff betrachten, z. B. die Grundwörter in Beziehung auf die Declination. In anderer Beziehung aber wird, was hier Stoff ist, wieder als Form erkannt […]. Absolut betrachtet, kann es innerhalb der Sprache keinen ungeformten Stoff geben, da alles in ihr auf einen bestimmten Zweck, den Gedankenausdruck, gerichtet ist, und diese Arbeit schon bei ihrem ersten Element, dem articulierten Laute, beginnt, der ja eben durch Formung zum articulierten wird. Der wirkliche Stoff der Sprache ist auf der einen Seite der Laut überhaupt, auf der anderen die Gesamtheit der sinnlichen Eindrücke und selbstthätigen Geistesbewegungen, welche der Bildung des Begriffs mit Hülfe der Sprache vorausgehen.” (61)

Während in der deutschen Sprachwissenschaft nach Humboldt wieder ein Formbegriff dominiert, der sich im Anschluß an die Vertreter der historisch-vergleichenden Schule nur auf die einzelnen morphologischen Formen bezieht, findet der umfassendere Begriff von sprachlicher Form in A. Schleicher einen wichtigen Proponenten. Schleichers Formbegriff ist nicht nur durch die sprachwissenschaftlichen Traditionen, sondern vor allem auch durch die zeitgenössische Naturwissenschaft und speziell durch Darwin geprägt. Für Schleicher ist die Sprache wie ein Kristall, eine Pflanze und ein Tier ein “natürlicher Organismus”; die Wissenschaft von der Sprache, die Linguistik oder “Glottik”, stellt (anders als die geisteswissenschaftliche Philologie) entsprechend eine Naturwissenschaft dar. Entscheidend für das Verständnis von Sprache ist ihr Wesen, das sich aus dem Wesen des Wortes als ihrer Grundeinheit ergibt: “das Wesen des Wortes und damit das Wesen der Sprache” beruht “im lautlichen Ausdrucke von Bedeutung und Beziehung; das Wesen einer jeden einzelnen Sprache wird bestimmt durch die Art und Weise, wie in ihr Bedeutung und Beziehung lautlich ausgedrückt wird.” (Schleicher 1869: 9f.)

“Bedeutung und Beziehung”, d. h. konzeptuelle und relationale Bedeutungen, bilden zusammen die “Function”. “Function” und “Laut” (die lautliche Struktur) sind nicht direkt aufeinander bezogen, sondern vermittelt durch die “Form”. Eine Form in Schleichers Sinne haben sowohl die Sprachen insgesamt als auch die einzelnen Wörter. Interessant ist, daß dabei “Form” bezogen auf das einzelne Wort nicht dessen konkrete morphologische Struktur einschließlich deren phonologischer

1. Gegenstand der Morphologie

Ausprägung meint, sondern deren abstraktere morphologisch-typologische Struktur. Gleich strukturierte Wortformen (im modernen Sprachgebrauch) unterschiedlicher Wörter haben also die gleiche “Form”, Schleichers morphologische “Form” ist also der Formtyp. Die konkreteren Formaspekte werden durch den “Laut”, genauer durch den “Bedeutungslaut” und den “Beziehungslaut” (1869: 7), reflektiert. “Form” bezieht sich hier immer auf die morphologische Form der Wörter; für ihre phonologische Form verwendet Schleicher den Begriff der “lautlichen Wortform” (1859: 2). Die Wissenschaft, die sich mit der “Form” der Sprache und in der Sprache befaßt, ist die Morphologie, wobei die “allgemeine Morphologie” zu ermitteln hat, welche Sprachformen überhaupt möglich sind, und die “specielle Morphologie” die Formen der gegebenen Sprache darzustellen hat (127). Mit der Wahl von Goethes Terminus Morphologie, den Schleicher aus den Naturwissenschaften übernimmt, grenzt er sich ganz bewußt von der “Formenlehre” der historischen und beschreibenden Grammatik seiner Zeit ab: “Für die lere von der wortform wäle ich das wort ‘morphologie’, nach dem vorgange der naturwissenschaften, weil ‘formenlere’ für specielle morphologie verbunden mit functionslere der beziehungslaute bereits im gebrauche ist.” (1859: 35)

Die Unterschiede in der Form der einzelnen Sprachen beruhen für Schleicher in ganz entscheidendem Maße “auf dem Fehlen und Vorhandensein der Beziehungsausdrücke und auf der Stellung, welche Bedeutungs- und Beziehungsausdruck zu einander einnehmen” (1869: 9). Das heißt, sie ergeben sich aus der Form der Wörter in den einzelnen Sprachen, die Schleicher durch entsprechende Strukturformeln repräsentiert. Aufgrund der in den Einzelsprachen vorliegenden Formen der Wörter lassen sich diese zu “Classen”, d. h. Sprachtypen, zusammenfassen. Ganz im Sinne seines Jahrhunderts ist für Schleicher das Wort und nicht der Satz die prägende linguistische Einheit. Die Form des Wortes und die Form der Sprache stehen in einem engen Wechselverhältnis. Schleichers Konzept von sprachlicher Form ist (wie das Humboldts) dem in 1.1 aufgeführten zweiten Formbegriff zuzuordnen. Schleichers Komplementärbegriff zur Form ist nicht wie bei Humboldt der des Stoffs, sondern der des Inhalts. In seinem wissenschaftlichen Denken steht eine Form immer für

9 einen Inhalt. Form und Inhalt sind “untrennbar und stets zugleich vorhanden” (1869: 6). Das gilt natürlich auch für die Sprache. Der Inhalt der Sprache ist die “Function”, also die Semantik. Dieser wird eine “Form” im umfassenderen, morphonologischen Sinne, ein “Ausdruck” entgegengesetzt, der aus der (morphologischen) “Form” und dem “Laut” besteht (1869: 127f.). Doch auch Humboldts Konzept der “inneren Form” wirkt in der deutschen Sprachwissenschaft des 19. Jahrhunderts fort. Hier sind besonders A. F. Pott, H. Steinthal und G. von der Gabelentz zu nennen. Besonders bemerkenswert ist, daß für Gabelentz zu einer Zeit, wo die Junggrammatiker mit ihrem atomistischen Formbegriff längst die linguistische Szene beherrschen, der “Begriff der inneren Sprachformen […] zugleich einer der schwierigsten und der fruchtbarsten” ist (Gabelentz 21901: 327). Die “innere Sprachform” ist bei Gabelentz klar bestimmt; auf ihrer Grundlage wird festgelegt, was Grammatik ist: “Sprache ist gegliederter Ausdruck des Gedankens, und Gedanke ist Verbindung von Begriffen. Die menschliche Sprache will aber nicht nur die zu verbindenden Begriffe und die Art ihrer logischen Beziehungen ausdrücken, sondern auch das Verhältnis des Redenden zur Rede; ich will nicht nur etwas aussprechen, sondern auch mich aussprechen, und so tritt zum logischen Faktor, diesen vielfältig durchdringend, ein psychologischer. Ein dritter Faktor kann hinzukommen: die räumlichen und zeitlichen Anschauungsformen. Die innere Sprachform ist in ihrem grammatischen Theile nichts weiter als die Auffassung dieser drei Beziehungsarten: der logischen, der psychologischen und der raumzeitlichen. Die Art und Weise, wie diese drei zum Ausdrucke gebracht werden, nennen wir den Sprachbau. Grammatik ist nun die Lehre vom Sprachbau, mithin von der Sprachform, der äusseren, das heisst der Ausdrucksform für jene Beziehungen, und also mittelbar insoweit zugleich der inneren Form, das heisst der dem Sprachbaue zu Grunde liegenden Weltanschauung.” (81)

Auch bei Gabelentz gibt es einen Gegenpol zur Form der Sprache, gefaßt als Einheit von innerer und äußerer Form. Das ist (wie bei Humboldt) der Stoff. Der Stoff der Sprache besteht kurz gesagt “in Allem was des Menschen Denken erregt” (324). Die einzelnen Sprachen unterscheiden sich darin, auf welche spezifische Weise sie den sprachlichen Stoff formen, Sprachen, die “gänzlich formlos” sind, kann es nicht geben (327). Doch ein solch umfassender Begriff der sprachlichen Form ist für diese Zeit unty-

10 pisch. Für die bereits erwähnten Junggrammatiker, darunter auch solche führenden Sprachwissenschaftler wie K. Brugmann, H. Osthoff und H. Paul, gibt es, voll im Einklang mit ihrem empiristischen Verständnis von Wissenschaft, keine Form der Sprache mehr, sondern nur noch Formen in der Sprache (vgl. dazu etwa Paul 1880). Der Begriff Form wird ausschließlich für morphologische Wortformen, primär für Flexionsformen, verwendet. Diesen Formen kommt dann jeweils auch eine Lautform zu. Die einzelne Form steht dabei in bestimmten Zusammenhängen; sie ist vor allem Form eines Paradigmas, doch zugleich auch Form einer bestimmten Kategorie (z. B. Pluralform), was das Auftreten von Analogien zwischen den Formen möglich macht, die ja entweder zwischen den Formen eines Paradigmas oder zwischen den Formen einer Kategorie wirken. Der darüber hinausgehende Zusammenhang der einzelnen Form mit dem Gesamtsystem der Sprache, wie er von Humboldt und Schleicher thematisiert wird, findet kaum Beachtung. Eine Ausnahme dazu bildet eigentlich nur der bei den Junggrammatikern vereinzelt auftretende, nicht genauer ausgearbeitete Begriff des “Systemzwangs” (Paul 1879: 128ff.), der sich zumindest partiell auf Eigenschaften des morphologischen Systems bezieht. Im großen und ganzen aber drückt sich in der Einengung des Formbegriffs auf die einzelne morphologische Form nicht nur eine veränderte Terminologie aus; diese geht Hand in Hand mit einer Einengung des sprachwissenschaftlichen Interesses. Die Sicht auf die Sprache als Gesamtheit, als “Organismus”, als System wird ersetzt durch die Sicht auf die einzelnen morphologischen Formen und Paradigmen. Gegen Ende des Jahrhunderts hat damit die junggrammatische “Formenlehre” die Morphologie im Sinne von Goethe und Schleicher (und faktisch auch von Humboldt) aus dem Feld geschlagen. Im 20. Jahrhundert wird von der Linguistik der umfassende Formbegriff, wie er im 19. Jahrhundert ausgearbeitet wurde, in zweifacher Weise wieder aufgenommen und weitergeführt, erstens von der strukturalistischen Grammatik, die die einzelnen Formen (nicht nur die morphologischen) in ihrer Relation zum gesamten Sprachsystem untersucht, und zweitens von der Sprachtypologie, die sich mit der Form der unterschiedlichen Sprachsysteme und ihrer Elemente befaßt.

I. Morphologie als Disziplin

2.3. Form und Funktion in der Sprache Wie im Zusammenhang mit der Bestimmung von Morphologie festgestellt, weisen sämtliche Komponenten des Sprachsystems ihre spezifische Form auf. Im folgenden wird der Begriff der sprachlichen Form jedoch im Einklang mit den kurz skizzierten sprachwissenschaftlichen Traditionen ausschließlich als morphologische Form verstanden. Das Verhältnis von morphologischer Form und Funktion soll am Beispiel der Flexionsmorphologie dargestellt werden. Die flexionsmorphologische Form der Sprache insgesamt manifestiert sich in der Struktur des Flexionssystems. Hier liegt damit eine Form im Sinne des in 1.1 explizierten zweiten Formbegriffs vor. Die Elemente des Flexionssystems sind die einzelnen Flexionsformen mit ihren durch ihre Stellung im System geprägten formalen (ausdrucksseitigen) und inhaltlichen Eigenschaften. Doch will man der Form die Funktion gegenüberstellen, so ist eine solche Gegenüberstellung nur sinnvoll, wenn man sie auf die Form im engeren Sinne, d. h. auf die Ausdrucksseite des morphologischen Systems bzw. der einzelnen morphologischen Einheiten, bezieht. Die Funktion der Flexionsmorphologie im Sprachsystem, also ihre “Leistung”, besteht in der Symbolisierung von grammatischen Kategorien wie Numerus, Kasus, Tempus, Modus und Person usw. am Wort durch dessen formale Modifizierung. Die Funktion des einzelnen morphologischen Markers (oder Flexivs) als Formelement besteht entsprechend in der Symbolisierung wenigstens einer grammatischen Teilkategorie wie Plural, Genitiv, Präteritum, Konjunktiv und 1. Person. In der Flexionsmorphologie schlägt sich das Verhältnis von Form und Funktion im Zeichenverhältnis von Marker (Ausdruck) und Kategorie (Inhalt) innerhalb der Grenzen des Wortes nieder (vgl. Art. 64⫺66). Zunächst ist klarzustellen, in welchem Sinne die morphologischen Marker Form sind oder Form aufweisen. Es gibt sehr unterschiedliche Marker, die sich jedoch drei Haupttypen zuordnen lassen. Additive Marker resultieren aus der Hinzufügung phonologischer Substanz an das Wort (Affixe aller Art, Reduplikation), modifikatorische Marker aus der qualitativen Veränderung der phonologischen Substanz des Wortes (alle Alternationen) und subtraktive Marker aus der Tilgung phonologischer Substanz des Wortes (“Alternationen mit null”); vgl. dazu jeweils dt. Schwester ⫺ Plural Schwestern, dt.

11

1. Gegenstand der Morphologie

Mutter ⫺ Plural Mütter und isl. sonur ⫺ Akkusativ Singular son. Additive Marker sind innerhalb des Wortes segmental abtrennbar, bilden Morpheme, die die grammatischen Kategorien direkt symbolisieren. Modifikatorische Marker symbolisieren die Kategorien dagegen indirekt durch eine formale Veränderung des Basismorphems, und dieses Morphem steht dann sowohl für die lexikalische Bedeutung als auch für die entsprechenden Kategorien. Subtraktive Marker schließlich symbolisieren die Kategorien ebenfalls indirekt, durch das Fehlen eines Morphems, das in der Grundform des Wortes vorhanden ist; es existiert überhaupt kein abtrennbarer Teil des Wortes, der für die Kategorien steht. Für zwei der Markertypen gilt also, daß sie keine eigene segmentale Form haben, sondern sich lediglich in der Form des Wortes ausdrücken. Sie haben keinen Morphem-, sondern Prozeßcharakter. Dennoch sind sie natürlich formale Einheiten der Morphologie, Ausdruckselemente. Auch in diesem Sinne ist also die Form der Wörter mehr als deren äußere Gestalt, denn sie reflektiert zugleich auch das formale Verhältnis zur jeweiligen paradigmatischen Grundform (vgl. Kap.VII). Das Verhältnis von Form und Funktion in der Flexionsmorphologie stellt sich keinesfalls als trivial dar. Die Flexionssysteme der meisten Sprachen (aller nicht strikt agglutinierenden) sind nicht nach dem Prinzip der Eineindeutigkeit von Marker und grammatischer Kategorie aufgebaut. Erstens repräsentieren formal identische Marker oft unterschiedliche Kategorien, und identische Kategorien werden oft durch unterschiedliche Marker repräsentiert. So symbolisiert einerseits der Marker -i in der russischen Form knig-i entweder den Genitiv Singular oder den Nominativ Plural, und andererseits wird der russische Genitiv Singular in der Form knig-i durch den Marker -i und in der Form stol-a durch den Marker -a symbolisiert. (Nicht so im Türkischen: hier symbolisiert z. B. der Marker -lar/-ler stets den Plural, und der Plural wird stets durch -lar/-ler symbolisiert.) Zweitens repräsentiert ein Marker oft mehrere Kategorien zugleich, und eine Kategorie wird durch mehrere Marker zugleich repräsentiert. Vgl. einerseits die lateinische Verbform put-o, wo der Marker -o die Kategorien 1. Person, Singular, Präsens, Indikativ und Aktiv zugleich symbolisiert, und andererseits die deutsche Verbform ge-sung-en, wo die Kategorie Partizip Perfekt durch das Präfix ge-, das Suffix -en und den Ablaut zu-

gleich symbolisiert wird. (Demgegenüber symbolisiert im Türkischen ein Marker stets genau eine Kategorie, und eine Kategorie wird stets durch genau einen Marker symbolisiert.) In einzelnen Sprachen finden sich mitunter sehr komplexe Ausprägungen des Verhältnisses von Marker und Kategorien; vgl. die Symbolisierungsverhältnisse in den deutschen (starken) Verbformen: er

3. PERS

wirf

SG

-t

PRÄS

IND

Abb. 1.1: Er wirft

Noch komplexer stellt sich das Verhältnis von Markern und Kategorien in den analytischen Verbformen dar, wo nach dem Tempus flektierte Verbstämme zusammen mit den morphologischen Markern eines zweiten (infiniten) Verbs syntaktische Tempusmarker bilden: er

3. PERS

wird

(-t)

werf

-en

IND

SG

PRÄS

INF

FUT

Abb. 1.2: Er wird werfen

Das Verhältnis von Form und Funktion in der Flexionsmorphologie (und in der Morphosyntax), das sich im Verhältnis zwischen den Markern und den grammatischen Kategorien ausdrückt, zeigt auf diese Weise deutlich die Spezifik der natürlichen Sprache gegenüber allen anderen semiotischen Systemen.

3.

Morphologische Form in der Sprache

Wie eben festgestellt, sind die natürlichen Sprachen semiotische Systeme einer besonderen Spezifik. Sie beruhen auf der dem Menschen eigenen, angeborenen Sprachfähigkeit.

12 Ihr Wesen besteht in der gegenseitigen Zuordnung von Bedeutungsstrukturen und Lautstrukturen, die jeweils nach grundlegend unterschiedlichen Prinzipien aufgebaut sind. Die Bedeutungsstrukturen stellen vieldimensionale, nichtlinear organisierte Komplexe von Konzepten mit logischen Verknüpfungen dar, die eng an das Denken gebunden sind. Ihr Aufbau ist determiniert durch die Bedingungen der menschlichen Kognition. Die Lautstrukturen bilden demgegenüber zeitlichlinear gegliederte Abfolgen von zu Silben zusammengefaßten Lauten mit entsprechenden suprasegmentalen Eigenschaften. Ihr Aufbau ist determiniert durch die Bedingungen der menschlichen Artikulation und Perzeption. Zwischen den Einheiten der beiden Ebenen der natürlichen Sprache gibt es (anders als in allen künstlichen Zeichensystemen) keine unmittelbare Zuordnung; die Zuordnung geschieht durch einen komplexen Umkodierungsmechanismus, das Sprachsystem. Ein wesentlicher Schritt der Umkodierung besteht dabei darin, daß semantischen Konzepten Wortschatzeinheiten, lexikalische Wörter, zugewiesen werden, die das Lexikon der jeweiligen Sprache bereitstellt. Wörter sind die kleinsten relativ selbständigen sprachlichen Einheiten, in deren Rahmen eine Bedeutung und eine Lautform einander zugeordnet sind, d. h. die kleinsten relativ selbständigen sprachlichen Zeichen. Hier liegt dann eine lexikalische Kodierung von Bedeutungseinheiten vor. Die Wörter werden nach den Regeln der Syntax zu Sätzen zusammengefaßt, die ihrerseits die größten grammatisch einheitlich strukturierten sprachlichen Zeichen darstellen, in deren Rahmen eine Bedeutung und eine Lautform einander zugeordnet sind. Das (lexikalische) Wort und der Satz sind die Grundeinheiten der Grammatik. Nicht alle semantischen Konzepte werden in der Form von lexikalischen Wörtern kodiert. Es existiert eine spezielle Klasse von Konzepten, die sich beziehen: ⫺ auf bestimmte allgemeine Eigenschaften und Sachverhalte der in den Äußerungen widergespiegelten objektiven Realität, die in der menschlichen Perzeption eine ausgezeichnete Rolle spielen und darüber hinaus für die gesamte kognitive und praktische Auseinandersetzung des Menschen mit seiner Umwelt von Bedeutung sind (z. B. die Zahligkeit von Objekten und die Aktantenrollen); ⫺ auf die allgemeinsten Faktoren der sprachlichen Kommunikation wie die Kommuni-

I. Morphologie als Disziplin

kationspartner, die Kommunikationssituation, die Kommunikationsintention usw. (z. B. die Personen der Rede und die zeitliche Fixierung von Handlungen bezogen auf die Zeit der Äußerung). Solche Konzepte tendieren aufgrund ihrer Generalität zur nichtlexikalischen, d. h. zur grammatischen Kodierung. Die grammatische Kodierung basiert auf den beiden grammatischen Grundeinheiten. So ergeben sich zwei Möglichkeiten: Die Konzepte können entweder im Satz, d. h. als syntaktische Kategorien, oder aber im Wort, d. h. als morphologische Kategorien, kodiert werden. Die syntaktische Kodierung erfolgt durch die Reihenfolge der syntaktischen Konstituenten oder durch die Verwendung von “grammatischen Wörtern”, die morphologische Kodierung durch formale Veränderungen am Wort. Man spricht hier auch vom “analytischen” bzw. vom “synthetischen Verfahren” in der Grammatik. Beide Verfahren leisten das gleiche, nur mit unterschiedlichen Mitteln (Humboldt 1836). Während alle Sprachen das analytische Verfahren zur Kodierung grammatischer Kategorien verwenden (auch die mit den am stärksten ausgeprägten Flexionssystemen), findet sich das synthetische Verfahren nur in einer Teilklasse der Sprachen, den Sprachen mit fusionierender (flektierender) und agglutinierender Strukturbildung. Anders gesagt, nur ein Teil der Sprachen hat eine “grammatische Morphologie”, eine Flexionsmorphologie. Diese “Bevorzugung” des analytischen Verfahrens resultiert aus der spezifischen Weise der Herausbildung grammatischer Einheiten im Laufe der Sprachgeschichte in den einzelnen Sprachen, der Grammatikalisierung: Wörter mit einer ursprünglichen lexikalischen Bedeutung entwickeln sich in einem ersten Schritt zunächst zu “grammatischen Wörtern”, also zu syntaktischen Kategorienmarkern. Diese tendieren dann längerfristig dazu, sich unter entsprechenden Bedingungen in einem zweiten Schritt mit ihrem jeweiligen Träger formal zu einem einheitlichen Wort zu verbinden, sich also zu morphologischen Markern weiterzuentwickeln (Lehmann 1995; Art. 145). Wenn man berücksichtigt, daß es aufgrund des unterschiedlichen Alters der syntaktischen Marker faktisch nicht möglich ist, daß zu einem bestimmten Zeitpunkt alle syntaktischen Marker einer Sprache zugleich in morphologische Marker übergehen, so ergibt sich, daß das Vorhan-

1. Gegenstand der Morphologie

densein morphologischer Kategorienmarker in einer Sprache immer auch das Vorhandensein syntaktischer Kategorienmarker voraussetzt. Synchron gesehen läßt sich sagen, daß immer dann in einer Sprache Flexionsmorphologie existiert, wenn lexikalische und grammatische Kodierung innerhalb des Wortes miteinander kombiniert auftreten. Das Vorkommen bzw. Fehlen von morphologischen Kategorienmarkern bildet die Grundlage für die typologische Klassifizierung der Sprachen in fusionierende und agglutinierende Sprachen (flektierende im allgemeineren Sinne von ‘Flexion aufweisend’) einerseits und isolierende Sprachen andrerseits. Doch auch die Sprachen, die über eine Flexionsmorphologie verfügen, differieren beträchtlich darin, in welchem Maße sie von ihr “Gebrauch machen”, welche Rolle die Morphologie im Vergleich zur Syntax im Rahmen der grammatischen Strukturbildung jeweils spielt. So unterscheidet man unter ihnen häufig zwischen “synthetischen” Sprachen wie Latein bzw. Ungarisch und “analytischen” Sprachen wie Englisch bzw. den (meisten) Kreolsprachen. Das reicht jedoch nicht aus, um die wirklichen Verhältnisse adäquat zu erfassen, denn tatsächlich unterscheiden sich die existierenden Sprachen in der Ausprägung ihrer Flexionsmorphologie nicht binär, sondern graduell. Beispielsweise weisen die normalerweise gleichermaßen als fusionierend klassifizierten modernen germanischen Sprachen von Isländisch über Deutsch, Festlandsskandinavisch/Niederländisch und Englisch bis hin zum Afrikaans eine graduell abnehmende Ausprägung der Flexionsmorphologie auf. Will man erklären, weshalb die Sprachen die Flexionsmorphologie in so unterschiedlichem Maße zur Kodierung von grammatischen Kategorien nutzen, so muß man sich wiederum auf die Grammatikalisierung und damit auf die diachronen Verhältnisse beziehen. Die quantitative Ausprägung der Flexionsmorphologie in einer Sprache ergibt sich aus dem Entwicklungsstand der in ihr sich vollziehenden Grammatikalisierungsprozesse. Diese verlaufen in der Regel so, daß lexikalische Wörter zunächst zu analytischisolierenden Kategorienmarkern grammatikalisiert werden und sich im Laufe der Sprachgeschichte dann zu synthetisch-agglutinierenden und synthetisch-fusionierenden Markern weiterentwickeln, um schließlich wieder abgebaut zu werden. Sie werden dann in der Regel durch neu herausgebildete analy-

13 tisch-isolierende Marker ersetzt usw. (vgl. Lehmann 1995: 12⫺16). Bleiben wir beim genannten Beispiel. Das Isländische ist eine nahezu klassische fusionierende Sprache. Seit dem Beginn seiner Überlieferung hat es nicht nur keine Flexionsmorphologie abgebaut, sondern durch Morphologisierung (Art. 146), d. h. durch die Entwicklung von syntaktischen Fügungen zu morphologischen Formen, neue Morphologie herausgebildet. Beispiele dafür sind die Herausbildung der bestimmten Substantivformen (mit Schlußartikel), vgl. hinn hundr ‘jener Hund’ > ‘der Hund’ > hundr hinn > aisl. hundr-inn > nisl. hundur-inn, der medialen Verben, vgl. kalla sik ‘sich nennen, genannt werden’ (zu kalla ‘rufen’) > aisl. kallask > nisl. kallast ‘heißen’, und der Imperative mit inkorporiertem Pronomen, vgl. aisl. kalla ‘ruf’ > kalla pu´ ‘ruf (du)’ > nisl. kalla-du. Dagegen hat das Deutsche seit dem Althochdeutschen viel Morphologie eingebüßt, speziell im Bereich der substantivischen Kasusflexion und in der Konjunktivbildung (Art. 155). Die festlandsskandinavischen Sprachen haben zwar wie das Isländische bestimmte Substantivformen und mediale Verben herausgebildet, aber nahezu die gesamte Kasusmorphologie der Substantive und Adjektive sowie die gesamte Personalmorphologie der Verben verloren. Diese Entwicklung ist im Englischen bekanntlich noch wesentlich weiter vorangeschritten; es existiert nur noch eine rudimentäre Flexionsmorphologie. Im Afrikaans schließlich ist die Flexion noch in stärkerem Maße abgebaut worden als im Englischen, speziell im verbalen Bereich. So gibt es überhaupt keine Personalflexion und nicht einmal mehr ein synthetisches Präteritum (hy het gewerk ‘er arbeitete’). Die vorhandenen grammatischen Kategorien werden fast ausschließlich syntaktisch symbolisiert. Abgesehen von seiner recht komplexen Pluralbildung der Substantive tendiert das Afrikaans stark zu einer isolierenden Sprache. Synchronische Erklärungen dafür, weshalb bestimmte Sprachen viel, andere dagegen nur wenig oder überhaupt keine Flexionsmorphologie aufweisen, gibt es nicht. Natürlich existieren offensichtliche und plausible Zusammenhänge zwischen dem Auftreten von morphologischen und dem Nichtauftreten von syntaktischen Kategorienmarkern sowie umgekehrt; man vgl. etwa die morphologische Kodierung der Aktanten im Lateinischen und ihre syntaktische Kodierung im

14 Englischen. Doch das ist eine Faktenbeschreibung und keine Erklärung, mit welchen theoretischen Mitteln man solche Zusammenhänge auch zu erfassen trachtet. Außerdem ist zu berücksichtigen, daß die einzelnen Sprachen unterschiedlich viele grammatische Kategorien, unabhängig davon, ob morphologisch oder syntaktisch realisiert, aufweisen, so daß das Vorhandensein vieler morphologischer Marker nicht automatisch auch das Vorhandensein weniger oder gar keiner syntaktischer Marker bedeutet und umgekehrt. Des weiteren zeigt sich bei näherer Betrachtung, daß aus dem Auftreten morphologischer bzw. syntaktischer Marker für eine Kategorie keine strikten Schlußfolgerungen über das Auftreten von Markern des jeweils anderen Typs gezogen werden können. So läßt sich beispielsweise die häufig postulierte Annahme nicht halten, daß die Kategorien der Person und des Numerus in Sprachen mit einer ausgeprägten verbalen Personalmorphologie nicht durch obligatorische Personalpronomen symbolisiert werden, während sie in Sprachen mit einer wenig ausgeprägten oder ganz fehlenden verbalen Personalmorphologie durch Personalpronomen symbolisiert werden müssen. Zwar weisen erwartungsgemäß viele Sprachen mit einer ausgeprägten Personalmorphologie wie Lateinisch und Italienisch in ihren Verbparadigmen keine obligatorischen Personalpronomen auf, während viele Sprachen mit schwach ausgeprägter bzw. ohne Personalmorphologie wie Englisch und Schwedisch obligatorische Personalpronomen haben. Doch andererseits existieren entgegen dieser Annahme nicht nur Sprachen mit einer ausgeprägten Personalmorphologie und obligatorischen Personalpronomen wie Russisch und Deutsch, sondern sogar auch Sprachen ohne jede Personalmorphologie und ohne obligatorische Personalpronomen wie Japanisch (Comrie 1990: 141f.). Welche morphologischen Kategorien eine Sprache im Rahmen der universell gegebenen Möglichkeiten “auswählt”, resultiert aus dem Verlauf ihrer Geschichte. Das alles bedeutet jedoch nicht, daß die Sprachen mit ausschließlich isolierender grammatischer Strukturbildung überhaupt keine Morphologie aufweisen. Alle Sprachen sind aufgrund der gesellschaftlichen Weiterentwicklung mit der Notwendigkeit einer Erweiterung ihres Lexikons konfrontiert, um neue Begriffe ausdrücken zu können. Abgesehen von der (nicht immer gegebenen) Möglichkeit der Entlehnung kann das nur da-

I. Morphologie als Disziplin

durch geschehen, daß aus bereits vorhandenen Wörtern (oder Stämmen) neue Wörter gebildet werden. Hier liegt ein der Grammatikalisierung paralleler Prozeß vor, den man als Komposition bezeichnen kann. Zunächst werden zwei Wörter zu einem Kompositum zusammengefaßt. Unter entsprechenden Bedingungen kann sich eines der Glieder des Kompositums dann im Laufe der Sprachgeschichte zum Derivativ weiterentwickeln. Das Vorkommen von Derivation in einer Sprache setzt das Vorkommen von Komposition voraus. Da alle Sprachen zur Aufrechterhaltung einer effektiven Kommunikation ihr Lexikon erweitern müssen (wenn auch in unterschiedlichem Ausmaß), weisen auch alle Sprachen eine Wortbildungsmorphologie, eine “lexikalische Morphologie” auf. Das gilt für Sprachen jeder grammatischen Struktur, so auch für solche mit strikt isolierender grammatischer Strukturbildung wie beispielsweise Vietnamesisch. Sprachen ohne jede Morphologie, also ohne Wörter mit innerer Struktur, gibt es demzufolge nicht.

4.

Zitierte Literatur

Alerten, D. J. (1979), Essentials of Grammar Theory: A Consense View of Syntax and Morphology. London: Routledge & Keegan Paul Anderson, Steven (1992), A-morphous Morphology. Cambridge: University Press Arens, Hans (1969), Sprachwissenschaft: Der Gang ihrer Entwicklung von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart, Bd. 1⫺2 Frankfurt/M.: Fischer Bauer, Laurie (1988), Introducing Linguistic Morphology. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press Bopp, Franz (1816), Über das Conjugationssystem der Sanskritsprache in Vergleichung mit jenem der griechischen, lateinischen, persischen und germanischen Sprache. Frankfurt/M.: Andraeische Buchhandlung Bopp, Franz (1833), Vergleichende Grammatik des Sanskrit, Zend, Griechischen, Lateinischen, Litauischen, Altslawischen, Gothischen und Deutschen. Berlin: Dümmler Comrie, Bernard (1990), “Holistic Versus Partial Typology”. In: Bahner, Werner & Schildt, Joachim & Viehweger, Dieter (eds.), Proceedings of the Fourteenth International Congress of Linguists. Berlin/GDR, August 10 ⫺ August 15, 1987, Bd. I. Berlin/DDR: Akademie Verlag, 139⫺148 Coseriu, Eugeniu (1972), “Über die Sprachtypologie Wilhelm von Humboldts”. In: Hösle, Johannes & Eitel, Wolfgang (Hrsg.), Beiträge zur vergleichenden Literaturgeschichte. Festschrift für Kurt Wais zum 65. Geburtstag. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 107⫺135

2. The term morphology Gabelentz, Georg von der (21901), Die Sprachwissenschaft, ihre Aufgaben, Methoden und bisherigen Ergebnisse. Leipzig: Tauchnitz [11891] Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von (1955), Werke. Hamburger Ausgabe, Bd. XIII: Naturwissenschaftliche Schriften. Hamburg: Wegner Grimm, Jacob (1818⫺1837), Deutsche Grammatik, Bd. 1⫺4. Göttingen: Dietrich Harris, Zellig S. (1946), “From Morpheme to Utterance”. Language 18, 169⫺183 Hjelmslev, Louis (1943), Omkring sprogteoriens grundlæggelse. Festskrift udgivet af Københavns Universitet i anledning af Universitetets Aarsfest. Copenhagen: Bianco Lumo Bogtrykkeri Humboldt, Alexander von (1836), Über die Verschiedenheit des menschlichen Sprachbaues und ihren Einfluß auf die geistige Entwicklung des Menschengeschlechts. Berlin: Dümmler Klaus, Georg (101974), “Funktion”. In: Klaus & Buhr (Hrsg.), 437⫺438 Klaus, Georg & Buhr, Manfred (101974, Hrsg.), Philosophisches Wörterbuch. Leipzig: Bibliographisches Institut [11964] Kröber, Günter & Warnke, Camilla (1974), “Form”. In: Klaus & Buhr (Hrsg.), 409⫺412 Lehmann, Christian (1995), Thoughts on Grammaticalization: A Programmatic Sketch. München: Lincom Europa Matthews, P[eter] H[ugo] (21992), Morphology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press [11974] Meier, Georg Friedrich (1961), Das Ze´ro-Problem in der Linguistik: Kritische Untersuchungen zur strukturalistischen Analyse der Relevanz sprachlicher Form. Berlin/DDR: Akademie Verlag (Schriften zur Phonetik, Sprachwissenschaft und Kommunikationsforschung 2)

15 Nida, Eugene (21949), Morphology: The Descriptive Analysis of Words. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press [11946] Paul, Hermann (1879), “Zur geschichte des germanischen vocalismus”. Halle: Niemeyer (Beiträge zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache und Literatur 6) Paul, Hermann (1880), Principien der Sprachgeschichte. Halle: Niemeyer Schlegel, August Wilhelm (1818), Observations sur la Langue et la Litte´rature Provenc˛ales. Paris [Nachdruck: 1971], Tübingen: Narr (Tübinger Beiträge zur Linguistik 7)] Schleicher, August (1859), Die deutsche Sprache. Leipzig: Cotta Schleicher, August (1869), Morphologie der Sprache. St. Petersburg: Kaiserliche Akademie der Wissenschaften Simmel, Georg (41958), Soziologie. Berlin [11908] Spencer, Andrew (1993), Morphological Theory: An Introduction to Word Structure in Generative Grammar. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Voigt, Wolfram (1978), “Gestalt”. In: Hörz, Herbert & Löther, Rolf (Hrsg.), Philosophie und Naturwissenschaften. Berlin: Dietz, 320⫺321 Warnke, Camilla (1974), “Inhalt”. In: Klaus & Buhr (Hrsg.), 574⫺576 Wildgen, Wolfgang (1984), Goethe als Wegbereiter einer universalen Morphologie. Trier: Linguistic Agency University of Trier (L. A. U. T. Series A 125) [urspr. Abdruck aus dem Jahresbericht des Präsidenten 1982, Universität Bayreuth] Wurzel, Wolfgang Ullrich (1984), Flexionsmorphologie und Natürlichkeit: Ein Beitrag zur morphologischen Theoriebildung. Berlin/DDR: Akademie Verlag (Studia grammatica 21)

Wolfgang Ullrich Wurzel, Berlin (Deutschland)

2. The term morphology 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

Introduction Morphology in German biology Morphology in French biology Early use of the term morphology in linguistics Some linguistic acceptations of morphology Conclusion References

1.

Introduction

The term morphology has been used in linguistics for well over a hundred years as a general description for the phenomena of ac-

cidence and word-formation. The term was borrowed from the biological sciences, and reflects, consciously or unconsciously, the view of language as an organism characterized by systems susceptible to synchronic and diachronic analysis. It was in German that the term was first used, and it is in a German work of reference that it is first glossed, with no details of source or date, as the “umfassende Lehre von Naturformen”, and the equivalent of Anatomie (Pierer 1835: 152). The Deutsches Wörterbuch, however, has no entry for the word

16 (Grimm & Grimm 1859⫺1960), which is also absent from many 19th- and 20th-century German dictionaries; but a recent Etymologisches Wörterbuch des Deutschen defines it as being concerned with forms and their development (Pfeifer 1989: 128). The first French dictionary definition of morphologie is that by Barre´ (1842: 806) as “Histoire des formes que peut reveˆtir la matie`re”, wording repeated verbatim by Littre´ (1863: 630 c), with further definitions, including one in which it is described as “l’organographie explique´e par les transformations auxquelles sont soumises les parties des ve´ge´taux” (St.-Hilaire 1841: 17). Littre´’s entry continues with a note of the use of morphologie in linguistics, and glosses it as “doctrine de la forme des mots et de leurs transformations”. A further entry under morphologique notes morphological classification as the distinction of languages into isolative, agglutinative and inflective types. St.-Hilaire was not, however, the first French biologist to use the term; it had been used some twenty years earlier by Blainville (1822: 25, also titlepage). This is noted by the Grand Larousse de la langue franc¸aise, which also gives a useful survey of the use of the term in linguistics (1975: 3645⫺3648). In English, morphology is glossed by the OED as “the science of form”, which gives acceptations in biology and philology. The definition of biological usage is comprehensive, covering structures, homologies and metamorphoses in animals and plants. The earliest citation, dated 1830, ascribed to “R. Knox, Cloquet’s Anat[omy]”, derives from a French work (see below, 3). After further instances of the use of the term in biology, indicating a rather varied usage in the 19th century, there follow three citations for the use of morphology in English linguistic contexts. The earliest is a footnote stating that “By the morphology of a language we mean the general laws of its grammatical structure” (Farrar 1870: 160 n). The next citation, only a year later, divides morphology into flexion, derivation and composition, offering the alternative term Wordlore, derived perhaps from the relatively infrequent Wortlehre (Kennedy 1871: 21). A third entry, from a London literary magazine, previews Joseph Wright’s Historical German Grammar (Wright 1907), the first volume of which was to deal with phonology, morphology and in-

I. Morphologie als Disziplin

flections, so that morphology implicitly excludes accidence; in the published work, Wright uses the terms phonology, word-formation and accidence.

2.

Morphology in German biology

The word Morphologie was unrecorded before Goethe used it in a diary entry for 25 September 1796; it occurs again a few weeks later (12 November) in a letter he wrote to Schiller, and in Schiller’s reply the following day. Goethe also used it as the heading of a loose-leaf fragment of about the same date (Matthaei & Troll & Wolf 1964, eds.: 128; Kuhn & Engelhardt 1986, eds.: 418⫺420). The conclusion of this fragment indicates clearly what Goethe understood by the term: “Die Gestalt ist ein bewegliches, ein vergehendes, Gestaltenlehre ist Verwandlungslehre. Die Lehre der Metamorphose ist der Schlüssel zu allen Zeichen der Natur” (Matthaei & Troll & Wolf 1964, eds.: 128). Goethe’s interest in metamorphosis found practical expression as early as 1790 in his Versuch die Metamorphose der Pflanzen zu erklären, first published in 1817 in a collection of papers entitled Zur Morphologie. In an introductory essay he speaks of a new discipline, “welche wir die Morphologie nennen möchten”, and makes it clear in his ensuing remarks that he was ever conscious of the mutability of natural phenomena (Matthaei & Troll & Wolf 1954, eds: 7). In the later 19th century this insight was perhaps too readily interpreted as an anticipation of evolutionism, but it is also consistent with ontogenetic development. However Goethe’s views are interpreted, it is clear that he saw the underlying principle of morphology as dynamic rather than static. (On Goethe’s use of morphology see, for example, Altner 1986; Brady 1987; Kuhn 1987). While the date 1796 gives Goethe a strong claim to have coined the term, his first use of it in print (1817) has been shown, in a fully documented study (Schmid 1935), to have been antedated by the craniologist Karl Friedrich Burdach. Burdach used it as early as 1800, in a footnote in his Propädeutik zum Studium der gesammten Heilkunst, and several more times in other writings, before it appeared in the title of Ueber die Aufgabe der Morphologie, an address he gave on the occasion of the opening of the Anatomical Insti-

2. The term morphology

tute of the University of Königsberg in 1817, shortly after Goethe’s Zur Morphologie appeared. He sent a copy of the work to Goethe, who acknowledged it with gratitude, “da ich es durchaus mit meiner Sinnesweise stimmend fand” (Schmid 1935: 601, 603 f., 609). Burdach described morphology as the study not so much of product (Gewordenes) as of process (Werden); his conception of morphology may therefore, like Goethe’s, be considered to imply development. While Burdach’s priority in print is assured, it is likely that Goethe’s use of the word Morphologie was far more influential in giving it currency. This is particularly noticeable in the writings of such a prominent evolutionist as Ernst Haeckel, who devoted a whole book to a comparison of Darwin, Goethe and Lamarck (Haeckel 1882). But Burdach was not entirely forgotten in his own day: two years after his 1817 paper his name appears conjointly with Goethe’s as a source, in which the subject, histology, is described as running “parallel der Lehre von dem räumlichen Verhältniß, von der Form und Lage der Organe, welche man nicht umfassend, doch bezeichnend mit Gˆthe und Burdach […] Morphologie nennen kann” (Mayer 1819: 7). It is clear from earlier remarks that Mayer sees histology and morphology alike as two branches of anatomy. Goethe, however, distinguished morphology from anatomy, for in the latter “[d]as Lebendige ist zwar in Elemente zerlegt, aber man kann es aus diesen nicht wieder zustellen und beleben” (Matthaei & Troll & Wolf 1954, eds.: 6 f.). There seems to be little trace of Goethe’s or Burdach’s vitalism in Mayer’s use of the term.

3.

Morphology in French biology

It is perhaps significant that the earliest French instances of the term morphology occur a few years after Goethe’s work, but they are not necessarily dependent on it. Blainville devotes De l’organisation des animaux, ou principes d’anatomie compare´e (Blainville 1822) to “la Morphologie et l’Aiste´siologie”, the latter being approximately the functions of the senses. An early chapter makes it clear that morphology is understood as the study of exterior shapes, and sets out what may be broadly considered a programme for the systematic description of organisms; they are distinguished, for example, according to

17 whether the parts radiate from a central point or are arranged along a spine (Blainville 1822: 25⫺31). In this respect, Blainville’s remarks suggest an approach to anatomical typology. While his treatise is primarily concerned with static considerations, he also notes, inter alia, that the anatomist should observe such matters as the interaction of parts, the way in which one part may help to perfect another, and even the sequence of developments in the various parts (Blainville 1822: lvi). The next instances of the use of the term in French may be traced through the OED quotation, which proves to derive from a translation, not of Cloquet, but of P. A. Be´clard’s E´le´mens d’anatomie ge´ne´rale (21827). Be´clard notes that physical bodies may be investigated either at rest or in motion, the former study being anatomy, which some have designated as “morphology” (Be´clard 21827: 2; English translation: Knox 1830: 2). Be´clard’s wording is unchanged from his first edition (Be´clard 11823: 2). The work by Cloquet which Knox translated was the Traite´ d’anatomie descriptive (Cloquet 41824) which became A system of human Anatomy (Knox 1828). A footnote in this work lists, as rival terms for Anatomy, “Morphology, Physiography, Organography, and Organology, which, however, have by no means been generally adopted” (Knox 1828: 1; cf. Cloquet 61836: 1). (The possible presence of this note in Cloquet’s first edition (1816) would make him the first French scholar to speak of morphologie). In the prolegomena of another work Cloquet recommends the term Anatomie descriptive in preference to a suggestion by “M. Mayer” (i.e. Mayer 1819) of Morphologie. His reason, that the latter has more to do with the internal structure of organs than with their position and relationship (Cloquet 1826: 4), suggests Mayer’s description of histology, his main topic, rather than that of anatomy; it therefore matches the description of morphology in Cloquet 1824 and the other French scholars considered so far, and contrasts with the distinction Goethe drew between morphology and anatomy. It is not until St.-Hilaire (1841) that dependence on Goethe is explicit in French scholarship, and the concept of metamorphosis central to it. The Larousse du XIXe sie`cle (1874: 579) even gives St.-Hilaire the credit for introducing the term to the French language, and goes on to explain that morphol-

18

I. Morphologie als Disziplin

ogy is based on the underlying principle of metamorphosis, which is explicitly defined as the transformation of the embryo into the mature plant. Goethe, it notes, is generally considered to be the pioneer of plant morphology. In general, the term morphology seems to imply a concern for the living organism in botanical and biological sources, but to be coterminous with anatomy or dissection in medical texts. Burdach is an apparent exception here; his thought had known affinities with Naturphilosophie (see Schmid 1935: 617; Picard 1951).

4.

Early use of the term morphology in linguistics

4.1. August Schleicher In linguistics, as in biology, it was a German, August Schleicher, a friend of Haeckel and an avowed evolutionist, who introduced the term. He first used it in 1859 in the title of a paper which deals, initially at least, with the study of the structure of individual words, establishing on purely theoretical grounds that there are four possible structural classes, according to the relationship between the semantic and syntactic components (“bedeutung und beziehung”) of words. This may be absent, expressed by coalescence of words, by inflection, or by a combination of these features. The first three classes are then related to what are now known as isolative, agglutinative and inflective languages; corresponding to the fourth class of word-structures are languages which show both agglutinative and inflective features (Schleicher 1859: 2⫺5). Schleicher does not explicitly distinguish inflection and word-formation, though by implication inflection seems to be regarded as a subset of word-formation. On the whole, the paper is more interesting as an exercise in linguistic typology than as a study of morphology itself, but it is the first instance of the use of the term in a linguistic context. Schleicher discussed the term briefly the following year in Die deutsche Sprache, where he divided the study of language up into phonology, morphology, Functionslehre and syntax. Morphology apparently includes both accidence and word-formation, for Functionslehre is something like an inverse study of morphology, starting from the effects produced by affixes as well as inflections (Schleicher 1860: 122, 126). In this view,

Schleicher appears to anticipate Jespersen, who notes two ways of looking at language, to “take a form as given and then inquire into its meaning and function”, and to “take the meaning or function and ask how that is expressed in form” (Jespersen 1914: 39⫺44, esp. 40). Although Schleicher introduced the term into linguistics, he did not use the term exclusively; for while the text of Vol. II of his Compendium der vergleichenden Grammatik der indogermanischen Sprachen (Schleicher 1861⫺ 1862) is headed “Morphologie”, the titlepage describes the work as a “Kurzer Abriß einer Formenlehre der indogermanischen Ursprache”. However, the early date of the entry in Littre´ (1863) suggests that the term morphologie was rapidly gaining currency; and two years later the Revue des cours litte´raires for 1865 presented an account of a series of lectures on “Morphologie des langues” given by Schleicher at Jena, in which he again discusses typology, and speaks of the emergence of inflective languages as the third and culminating stage in the development of languages, in which language is “organized” (Schleicher 1865: 802). 4.2. Anticipations of Schleicher For a first statement of the evolution of linguistic types we may go back to Friedrich Schlegel’s Ueber die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier (1808), which postulates a progression from isolative through agglutinative to inflectional languages. It does, however, also note a tendency in more recent languages towards analytical structure (Schlegel 1808: 49 f.). It is comparative grammar, i.e. the resemblance of the inflectional systems of the Indo-European languages, which allows us to postulate their relationship, rather than etymological sleight of hand (1808: 28). Inflections themselves are unanalysable (1808: 41), while affixes in agglutinative languages are themselves independent words. In determining the relationship of languages from their grammatical structure, though not in a preference for highly-inflected languages, Schlegel was anticipated by Sir William Jones. His celebrated statement that no “philologer” could compare Latin, Greek and Sanskrit without being convinced that they had a common origin (Jones 1788: 422⫺423) is also based on what may anachronistically be called morphological homologies.

19

2. The term morphology

Though these diachronic implications were new, accidence had long been familiar in the paradigms of teaching grammars; traces of the appreciation of word-formation, however, are rather more tenuous. Interest in compound words seems to have been semantic, and the relation between the parts of compound words was the subject of (largely fanciful) etymologies; derivational affixes might be treated alongside inflections (for Priscian see Robins 1993: 89), or examined under the heading of “etymology”, as in John Wallis’s Grammatica Linguae Anglicanae. There were numerous editions of this work, the earliest in 1653 (editor’s introduction to Wallis 1972: 28 f.). Schottelius, too, dealt exhaustively with both derivation and composition in Book II of the Ausführliche Arbeit von der teutschen HaubtSprache (Schottelius 1663; see Brekle & Kastovsky 1977: 9). Schleicher’s view of the morphological development of languages enabled him to suggest, in an open letter to Haeckel, that the positive results of linguistic comparison in tracing the affiliation of languages lent support to evolutionary theory in biology. The assertion also accords with his view that languages are natural organisms which have come into being involuntarily and grow in accordance with rigid laws (Schleicher 1860: 118⫺121; 1863: 6). A similar view had already been expressed by W. v. Humboldt, who begins a substantial passage in his Vergleichendes Sprachstudium (1820 [1905]) with a forthright declaration to this effect, and continues with the suggestion that languages should be classified according to their inner structures, as are the various families of plants (1905: 12 f.). A few years later, in 1827, Karl Ferdinand Becker began the preface to his Organism der Sprache with the bold claim that language, as an organic product of human nature, is itself in all its parts and relationships an organic whole. He goes on to note that he will apply the principle of the organism to the investigation of one special area of language ⫺ derivation (Becker 21841: vi). Later passages show an appreciation of language as an organism characterized throughout by the consistency of its structures, and observe, in the spirit of Goethe, that the naturalist will recognize from the structure (Bau) of the individual organ the nature of the whole creature (1841: 10).

5.

Some linguistic acceptations of morphology Ten years passed between Schleicher’s first use of the term Morphologie in a linguistic context and Farrar’s footnote of 1869. It is not, however, Schleicher whom Farrar quotes as his authority on the comparative grammar of the Indo-European languages, but Bopp, whose Vergleichende Grammatik had first appeared in 1833. Farrar cites this work from the French translation by Bre´al (1868), but neither the original nor the translation, in fact, speaks of “morphology”. Bre´al does, however, use the term explicitly after Schleicher in another work, which appeared in 1866 in the Revue des cours litte´raires (Bre´al 1866: 65). This antedates the first use of the term morphology in English, and may conceivably be its source, though such dependence can be no more than conjectural. Derivation and composition formed an integral part of the systematic analysis of languages as developed in the 19th century and afterwards, but while the methods used may be described as morphological, the study usually goes under another name; thus German scholars like Grimm, Wilmanns or Paul speak of Wortbildung, and differ in the place they accord it in their grammars. All deal first with phonology, but Grimm (1822) examines word-formation after accidence and before syntax; Wilmanns (1893⫺1909) deals with word-formation before accidence, and does not produce a syntax; Paul (1920) places word-formation after accidence and syntax. As Henzen (1965: 3) remarks, all these arrangements have their justification. Even for those who use the term morphology its demarcation from syntax is also rather indefinite. The extensive section on morphology in Meillet’s Caracte`res ge´ne´raux des langues germaniques (41930), concerned almost exclusively with accidence, concludes with a brief chapter on word-order, which in English has become something of a substitute for inflection, by inference changing the nature of the language from synthetic to analytic. Earlier in the century, Baudouin de Courtenay had challenged the traditional notions of typology more fundamentally: he pointed out the difficulty of distinguishing between inflective and agglutinative languages once it is accepted that derivational affixes have an etymology. He proposes the extension of its terms of reference to the sentence (Baudouin de Courtenay 1910: 51⫺58). Earlier writings of his seem to suggest that

20

I. Morphologie als Disziplin

the boundary between morphology and syntax is fluid (see Mugdan 1984: 49 f.). Bloomfield, unlike Baudouin de Courtenay, distinguishes morphology, as the study of the construction of words and parts of words, from syntax, the construction of phrases. Morphology comes into play when bound forms appear among the constituents. “[L]anguages differ more in morphology than in syntax”; and it is syntax which distinguishes classes of languages as analytic or synthetic, or, alternatively, as isolative, agglutinative, polysynthetic, and inflecting (Bloomfield 1935: 207). In the two editions of his textbook, Morphology, on the techniques of charting previously unrecorded languages, Nida admits both bound and free morphemes, making derivation and composition alike parts of morphology. He is also sceptical of any attempt to divide morphology too rigidly from syntax (1946: 1), as a result, perhaps, of experience with polysynthetic Amerindian languages. The structural approach to morphology, like all its predecessors, was essentially an analysis of pre-existent linguistic phenomena, but it gives no guidance on how to create new derivatives and compounds. Generative grammar brought fresh problems for the status of morphology, since the components of compounds were subject to syntactical analysis, while derivational syllables could be dealt with under morphophonemic rules. The position is still fluid (cf. Anderson 1988; Hammond & Noonan 1988; Jensen 1990 and Art. 3).

6.

Conclusion

The connotations of morphology prove, on examination, to be very diverse. In biology, there is an uneasy relationship between anatomy, physiology and morphology, where morphology is sometimes less dynamic than physiology and less intrusive than anatomy; but its early use by Goethe implied ordered change. It is hard to see such ordered change in language, in that accidence consists in the addition of predetermined inflections to roots which may vary only in accordance with rule. Derivation, again, involves the use of pre-existent affixes, though there is room for innovation to the extent that suffixes may be productive. Composition is open-ended, though subject to rules which are known to the com-

petent native speaker. The term morphology is not precise, as it borders on both syntax and typology, but it remains useful for general reference to the associated, but distinctive areas of accidence and word-formation.

7.

References

Altner, Günter (1986), “Gestaltwandel der Welt: zur Morphologie Goethes”. In: Glaser, Horst Albert (ed.), Goethe und die Natur. Referate des Triestiner Kongresses. Frankfurt/Main etc.: Lang, 69⫺82 Amrine, Frederick & Zucker, Francis J. & Wheeler, Harvey (1987, eds.), Goethe and the Sciences. Dordrecht etc.: Reidel, 257⫺300 (Boston Studies in the History of Science 97) Anderson, Stephen R. (1988), “Morphological Theory”. In: Newmeyer, Frederick J. (ed.), Linguistics: The Cambridge Survey, Vol. I: Linguistic Theory: Foundations. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 146⫺191 Barre´, Louis (1842), Comple´ment du Dictionnaire de l’Acade´mie Franc¸aise. Paris: Didot Baudouin de Courtenay, Jan (1910), “Bericht über die Grazer 50. Versammlung deutscher Philologen und Schulmänner”. Beiblatt zu den Indogermanischen Forschungen 26, 51-58 [reprinted as: “Klassifikation der Sprachen”. In: Mugdan, Joachim (1984), Baudouin de Courtenay: Ausgewählte Werke in deutscher Sprache. München: Fink, 190⫺197] Becker, Karl Ferdinand (21841), Organism der Sprache. Frankfurt/Main: Kettembeil [With preface to 11827] Be´clard, Pierre Augustin (11823, 21827), E´le´mens de l’anatomie ge´ne´rale. Paris: Be´chet Jeune Blainville, Henri Marie Ducrotay de (1822), De l’organisation des animaux, ou principes d’anatomie compare´e, Vol. I. Paris, Strasbourg: Levrault Bloomfield, Leonard (1935), Language. London: Allen & Unwin Bopp, Franz (1833), Vergleichende Grammatik des Sanskrit, Zend, Griechischen, Lateinischen, Litthauischen, Gothischen und Deutschen. Berlin: Dümmler [21857-1863; 31868⫺1871] Bopp, Franz (1868), Grammaire compare´e des langues indo-europe´ennes […] par M. Franc¸ois Bopp, traduite sur la deuxie`me e´dition et pre´ce´de´e d’introductions par M. Michel Bre´al. Paris: Imprimerie Impe´riale Brady, Ronald H. (1987), “Form and Cause in Goethe’s Morphology”. In: Amrine et al. (eds.), 257⫺300 Bre´al, Michel (1866), “Grammaire compare´e”. Revue des cours litte´raires 4, 65⫺71 Brekle, Herbert E. & Kastovsky, Dieter (1977), “Wortbildungsforschung: Entwicklung und Positionen”. In: Brekle, Herbert E. & Kastovsky, Dieter

2. The term morphology (eds.), Perspektiven der Wortbildungsforschung. Bonn: Bouvier, 7⫺17 Cloquet, Hippolyte (41824; 61836), Traite´ d’anatomie descriptive. Paris: Crochard Cloquet, Hippolyte (1826), Traite´ complet de l’anatomie de l’homme. Paris: Bre´geaut Farrar, Frederic W. (1870), Families of Speech: Four Lectures Delivered before the Royal Institution of Great Britain in March 1869. London: Longmans, Green & Co. Grimm, Jacob (21822), Deutsche Grammatik. Göttingen: Dieterich Grimm, Jacob & Grimm, Wilhelm [et al.] (1854⫺ 1960), Deutsches Wörterbuch, Vol. VI [bearbeitet von Moritz Heyne 1885]. Leipzig: Hirzel Grand Larousse de la langue franc¸aise, Vol. IV (1971⫺1978). Paris: Larousse Haeckel, Ernst (1882), Die Naturwissenschaft von Darwin, Goethe und Lamarck. Jena: Fischer Hammond, Michael & Noonan, Michael (1988), “Morphology and the Generative Paradigm”. In: Hammond, Michael & Noonan, Michael (eds.), Theoretical Morphology: Approaches in Modern Linguistics. San Diego etc.: Academic Press, 1⫺29 Henzen, Walter (31965), Deutsche Wortbildung. Tübingen: Niemeyer [11947] Humboldt, Wilhelm von (1820), Ueber das vergleichende Sprachstudium in Beziehung auf die verschiedenen Epochen der Sprachentwicklung. In: Humboldt, Wilhelm von (1903⫺1936), Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. IV, ed. Leitzmann, A. Berlin: Behr, 1⫺34 Jensen, John T. (1990), Morphology: Word Structure in Generative Grammar. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: Benjamins Jespersen, Otto (1914), The Philosophy of Grammar. London: Allen & Unwin Jones, William (1788), “The Third Annual Discourse; Delivered 2 February 1786, by the President of the [Asiatic] Society [of Bengal] … [‘On the Hindus’]”. Asiatick Researches 1, 415⫺31

21 von 1796 bis 1815, Ergänzungen und Erläuterungen [bearbeitet von Dorothea Kuhn]. Weimar: Böhlau Littre´, E´mile (1863), Dictionnaire de la langue franc¸aise. Paris: Hachette Matthei, Rupprecht & Troll, Wilhelm & Wolf, Lothar (1954, eds.), Goethe: Die Schriften zur Naturwissenschaft. Erste Abteilung, Bd. 9: Morphologische Hefte. Weimar: Böhlau Matthei, Rupprecht & Troll, Wilhelm & Wolf, Lothar (1964, eds.), Goethe: Die Schriften zur Naturwissenschaft. Erste Abteilung, Bd. 10: Aufsätze, Fragmente, Studien zur Morphologie. Weimar: Böhlau Mayer, [Franz Joseph] C[arl] (1819), Ueber Histologie und eine neue Eintheilung der Gewebe des menschlichen Körpers. Bonn: Marcus Meillet, Andre´ (41930), Caracte`res ge´ne´raux des langues germaniques. Paris: Hachette [11916] Mugdan, Joachim (1984), Jan Baudouin de Courtenay (1845⫺1929): Leben und Werk. München: Fink Nida, Eugene A. (21949), Morphology: The Descriptive Analysis of Words. Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press (Univ. of Michigan Publications: Linguistics 2) [11946] OED ⫽ The Oxford English Dictionary (21989), ed. Simpson, J. A. & Weiner, E. S. C. Oxford: Clarendon Press Paul, Hermann (1920): Deutsche Grammatik, Vol. V: Wortbildungslehre. Halle/Saale: Niemeyer Pfeifer, Wolfgang (1989), Etymologisches Wörterbuch des Deutschen. Berlin: Akademie Picard, H. B. (1951), “Philosophie und Forschung bei K. F. Burdach”. Medizinische Monatsschrift 5, 125⫺128 Pierer, H[einrich] A[ugust] (1835⫺1836), UniversalLexikon oder vollständiges encyclopädisches Wörterbuch. Altenburg: Literatur-Comptoir Robins, Robert H. (1993), The Byzantine Grammarians. Berlin, New York: Mouton de Gruyter

[Kennedy, Benjamin Hall] (1871), The Public School Latin Grammar. London: Longmans, Green & Co.

Saint-Hilaire, Auguste Prouvensal de (1841), Lec¸ons de botanique compare´e comprenant principalement la morphologie ve´ge´tale. Paris: Loss

Knox, Robert (1828), A System of Human Anatomy, Translated from the Fourth Edition of the French of H. Cloquet. Edinburgh: Maclachlan & Stewart

Schlegel, [Carl Wilhelm] Friedrich von (1808), Ueber die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier. Heidelberg: Mohr und Zimmer

Knox, Robert (1830), Elements of General Anatomy, Translated from the Last Edition of the French of P. A. Be´clard. Edinburgh: Maclachlan & Stewart Kuhn, Dorothea (1987), “Goethe’s Relationship to the Theories of Development of his Time”. In: Amrine et al. (eds.), 3⫺15 Kuhn, Dorothea & Engelhardt, Wolf von (1986, eds.), Goethe: Die Schriften zur Naturwissenschaft. Zweite Abteilung, Band 9, Teil B: Zur Morphologie,

Schleicher, August (1859), Zur Morphologie der Sprache. St. Petersburg: Kaiserl. Akademie der Wissenschaften (Me´moires de l’Acade´mie Impe´riale des Sciences de St.-Pe´tersbourg, VIIe se´rie, tome I, No 7) Schleicher, August (1860), Die deutsche Sprache. Stuttgart: Cotta Schleicher, August (1861⫺1862), Compendium der vergleichenden Grammatik der indogermanischen Sprachen. Weimar: Böhlau

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I. Morphologie als Disziplin

Schleicher, August (1863), Die Darwinsche Theorie und die Sprachwissenschaft. Offenes Sendschreiben an Herrn Dr. Ernst Haeckel. Weimar: Böhlau Schleicher, August (1865), “Morphologie des langues”. Revue des cours litte´raires 2, 763⫺805 [Course on comparative grammar given at Jena; approved re´sume´ by Louis Koch] Schmid, Günter (1935), Über die Herkunft der Ausdrücke Morphologie und Biologie: Geschichtliche Zusammenhänge. Halle/Saale: Kaiserl. Leopoldinisch-Carolinisch Deutsche Akademie der Naturforscher, (Nova Acta Leopoldina, Neue Folge, Band 2, Heft 3/4, Nr. 8)

Schottelius, Justus Georg (1663), Ausführliche Arbeit von der teutschen HaubtSprache. Braunschweig: Zillinger Wallis, John (1972), Grammar of the English Language, a new ed., with Translation and Commentary by J. A[lan] Kemp. London: Longmans [11653; 61765] Wilmanns, Wilhelm (1893⫺1909), Deutsche Grammatik. Berlin: de Gruyter Wright, Joseph (1907), Historical German Grammar. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press [reprint 1966]

Paul Salmon, Oxford (Great Britain)

3. Die Stellung der Morphologie im Sprachsystem 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

1.

Ausgangsvorstellungen vom Sprachsystem Die Morphologie als Teil des Sprachsystems Die Morphologie als sprachwissenschaftliche Disziplin Die innere Struktur der Morphologie Zitierte Literatur

Ausgangsvorstellungen vom Sprachsystem

In der zeitgenössischen Sprachwissenschaft ist im ganzen die Vorstellung von einer natürlichen Sprache als einem System von Regeln üblich, die es erlauben, mit dem menschlichen Denken (der “Inhaltsseite”) bestimmte materielle Träger (die “Ausdrucksseite”) in Übereinstimmung zu bringen. Die Einheiten der Ausdrucksseite können im Prinzip eine unterschiedliche materielle (akustische, graphische etc.) Substanz haben und bilden in ihrer Gesamtheit Texte in der einen oder anderen Sprache. Eine der wichtigsten Aufgaben der Linguistik ist es zu analysieren, wie Texte aufgebaut sind, und ein Modell der menschlichen Fähigkeit zu ihrer Erzeugung und ihrem Verständnis zu entwerfen. Bekanntlich sind Texte im allgemeinen nicht elementar und nicht homogen, sondern bestehen aus Einheiten verschiedener Ordnung, die fähig sind, sich gemäß bestimmter Regeln zu komplexeren Einheiten zusammenzufügen. Diese Besonderheit des Sprachbaus erlaubt es, von Sprachebenen zu sprechen, wobei jede Ebene durch einen Bestand an gleichartigen Einheiten mit identischen Eigenschaften gekennzeichnet ist, aus denen ihrerseits komplexere Einheiten gebil-

det werden, die hierarchisch höhere Ebenen formen. Die Anzahl von Texten in einer beliebigen natürlichen Sprache ist im Prinzip unendlich, die Anzahl der Einheiten der niedrigeren Ebenen hingegen endlich und noch nicht einmal sehr groß. Eine ökonomische Sprachbeschreibung, die diese Besonderheit des Sprachsystems berücksichtigt, beruht in der Mehrzahl der Fälle auf einer im theoretischen Modell vorgenommenen Abtrennung der “lexikalischen” Information über das Inventar konstruktiver Einheiten von der “grammatischen” Information über die Regeln ihrer Kombination untereinander. Zu solchen “sich ineinanderfügenden” konstruktiven Texteinheiten, die jeweils besondere Subsysteme bilden, werden üblicherweise zumindest folgende gezählt: ⫺ Phoneme oder minimale bedeutungsunterscheidende Einheiten eines Textes, die fähig sind, verschiedene sprachliche Ausdrücke gegenüberzustellen, aber selbst keine Bedeutung besitzen; ⫺ Morpheme oder minimale bedeutungstragende Einheiten; das prototypische Morphem ist eine Phonemfolge (obwohl dies nicht immer der Fall ist; man kann auch von Morphemoperationen oder Nullmorphemen sprechen; s. 2.2), welche im Unterschied zu den Phonemen über eine eigene Inhaltsseite verfügt; ⫺ Wortformen (slovoformy) oder minimale autonome Einheiten eines Textes: im allgemeinen Fall besteht eine Wortform (slovoforma) aus mehreren Morphemen; ein universelles Unterscheidungsmerkmal des Morphems von der Wortform kann man

3. Die Stellung der Morphologie im Sprachsystem

23

nur sehr allgemein formulieren: Innerhalb einer Wortform sind Morpheme erheblich starrer miteinander verbunden, als es Wortformen untereinander sind; ⫺ Sätze oder minimale Texte, d. h. sprachliche Strukturen, die Äußerungen darstellen und insbesondere fähig sind, eine kommunikative Funktion (eine der grundlegenden Sprachfunktionen) zu erfüllen.

bestehen, anzutreffen wären. Ein klassisches Beispiel, das in vielen Handbüchern zur Sprachwissenschaft angeführt wird, ist Lat. ¯ı ‘geh’, das den Imperativ Präsens der zweiten Person des Verbs eo darstellt und das formale Zusammenfallen aller angeführten Einheiten demonstriert. Gegenstand der Morphologie sind Wortformen und deren Struktur, d. h. die eine Wortform bildenden Morpheme und die Beziehungen zwischen diesen. Es ist dabei wichtig anzumerken, daß dem Forscher für die unmittelbare Betrachtung nur Texte zugänglich sind (genauer gesagt, die Ausdrucksseite der Texte); alle übrigen Einheiten sind das Resultat einer theoretischen Abstraktion des Forschers (obschon sie vermutlich bis zu einem gewissen Grade auch eine psychologische Realität beanspruchen können). Mehr noch, selbst in ihrer Eigenschaft als Ergebnisse theoretischer Abstraktion können nicht alle Einheiten den Status von Universalien beanspruchen. Insbesondere betrifft dies die Wortformen und folglich auch die Morphologie, da die Existenz dieser Disziplin in bedeutendem Maße dadurch gerechtfertigt ist, daß in Sprachen nichtelementare Morphemkombinationen bezeugt sind, die sich von den Einheiten der syntaktischen Ebene unterscheiden. Morpheme existieren in allen Sprachen (dabei anscheinend in ungefähr der gleichen Menge); nichtsdestotrotz spielt bei weitem nicht in allen Sprachen die Morphologie (als Sprachebene und folglich als sprachwissenschaftliche Disziplin) eine wichtige Rolle. Das hängt damit zusammen, daß, wie gerade gesagt wurde, der zentrale Gegenstand der Morphologie nicht Morpheme, sondern Wortformen sind. Sprachen “ohne Morphologie” (genauer, Sprachen mit einer minimalen Morphologie wie z. B. das Vietnamesische) sind selbstverständlich nicht Sprachen ohne Morpheme, sondern Sprachen ohne Wortformen (genauer: Sprachen mit einer minimalen Anzahl solcher).

Unter den angeführten Termini bedarf v. a. derjenige der Wortform eines besonderen Kommentars, da er am wenigsten bekannt ist und zugleich über die größte Bedeutung für die Morphologie verfügt. Dieser Terminus (der in Rußland zuerst wahrscheinlich von dem Anglisten und Theoretiker A. I. Smirnickij vorgeschlagen wurde und später Verbreitung in der russischen und anderen Schulen erlangte; vgl. Smirnickij 1955; Mel’cˇuk 1982; 1994; Spencer 1991: 45) ist das sprachwissenschaftliche Analogon zum naiven Konzept des Wortes. Während allerdings in der alltäglichen Sprache dem Wort Wort überaus verschiedene Begriffe entsprechen, deckt der Terminus Wortform v. a. den “linearen”, syntagmatischen Aspekt des Wortes ab: Gemeint ist das Wort als gesonderte Texteinheit, die über eine eigene Ausdrucks- und Inhaltsseite verfügt. Als Element des linearen Textes steht die Wortform einerseits dem Morphem (d. h. der syntagmatisch kleineren Einheit) und andererseits dem Syntagma (der Verbindung mehrerer Wortformen, d. h. der syntagmatisch größeren Einheit) gegenüber. Natürlich kann auch die Wortform (besonders die morphologisch nichtelementare Wortform, die zugleich lexikalische und grammatische Bedeutungen ausdrückt) wie jede sprachliche Einheit unter paradigmatischem Aspekt betrachtet werden. In diesem Falle kann von der Wortform als einem Element eines bestimmten Flexionsparadigmas gesprochen werden. Wortformen, welche eine gemeinsame lexikalische Bedeutung haben und sich voneinander nur durch ihre grammatische (flexivische) Bedeutung unterscheiden, bilden ein Lexem, d. h. ein “paradigmatisches” Wort (zu einer anderen Konzeption des Begriffs Wortform s. Art. 62). Im allgemeinen Fall besteht jede Einheit einer höheren Ebene aus mehr als einem Element der vorangehenden. Das bedeutet natürlich nicht, daß nicht Morpheme, die nur aus einem einzigen Phonem, Wortformen, die nur aus einem einzigen Morphem, oder Sätze, die nur aus einer einzigen Wortform

2.

Die Morphologie als Teil des Sprachsystems

2.1. Das Postulat von der “ersten Gliederung” Es ist folglich üblich, von der Morphologie einer gegebenen Sprache (und natürlicher Sprachen im allgemeinen) insofern zu sprechen, als zumindest in einigen Sprachen Klassen von Morphemen und Klassen von Wort-

24 formen nach ihrem Umfang nicht gänzlich zusammenfallen ⫺ mit anderen Worten, formal nichtelementare Wortformen funktionieren als gesonderte Einheiten. Man kann in diesem Sinne annehmen, daß die Morphologie in ihrer allgemeinsten Form auf die Struktur der “Wörter” einer Sprache bezogen ist, was mit gewisser Einschränkung der klassischen Auffassung von diesem Terminus (als “Lehre von den Formen des Wortes”; vgl. Art. 1) entspricht. Man kann auch sagen, daß die Morphologie im Raum zwischen Morphem und Wortform angesiedelt ist: Die Morphologie beginnt dort, wo die einseitigen, d. h. bedeutungslosen Einheiten der Phonologie (Figuren im Sinne Hjelmslevs; vgl. Hjelmslev 1971: 58⫺64) durch zweiseitige, d. h. bedeutungstragende Einheiten (Zeichen) abgelöst werden, und endet dort, wo die Regeln der starren Verbindung von Morphemen gegenüber den Regeln der relativ freieren syntaktischen Kombination von Morphemkomplexen ⫺ den Wortformen ⫺ zurücktreten. Auf diese Weise sind die Bildungselemente der Morpheme Gegenstand der Phonologie, die Morpheme selbst und ihre “starren” Verbindungen (Wortformen) hingegen der Gegenstand der Morphologie, die Verbindungen von Wortformen schließlich Gegenstand der Syntax. Bedingung für die Existenz einer Morphologie ist die Gliederbarkeit eines Textes im allgemeinen und die Gliederbarkeit von Wortformen im besonderen, d. h. die Möglichkeit innerhalb von Wortformen elementarere Segmente zu bestimmen und diesen elementarere Bedeutungen zuzuschreiben. Dieses Phänomen der Gliederbarkeit von Zeichen in kleinere Zeichen (d. h. die gleichzeitige Gliederung sowohl auf der Ausdrucksals auch auf der Inhaltsseite) ist in strukturalistischen Sprachtheorien ausführlich im Zusammenhang mit der sog. “zweifachen Gliederung” diskutiert worden (s. beispielsweise Martinet 1970: 13⫺15). Nach der Terminologie Andre´ Martinets ist die Gliederung sprachlicher Zeichen in kleinere Zeichen die “erste Gliederung” des Textes, die Gliederung signifikativer Einheiten in nichtsignifikative, d. h. in Phoneme, die zweite Gliederung des Textes. Die Möglichkeit der “ersten Gliederung” ⫺ d. h. der Parallelismus zwischen größerer formaler und größerer sematischer Komplexität sprachlicher Einheiten ⫺ liegt in der Tat dem gesamten Aufbau der Sprache in Ebenen zugrunde.

I. Morphologie als Disziplin

Dennoch ist die Möglichkeit einer solchen Gliederung bei weitem nicht in allen Fällen offensichtlich, und ihre Ergebnisse erweisen sich bei weitem nicht immer als eindeutig. Gerade in diesem Umstand sind viele Schwierigkeiten bei der Bestimmung der Grenzen der Morphologie und ihres Status im Sprachmodell begründet. Die gerade erläuterte Vorstellung von einem Text als einer additiven Gesamtheit von Einheiten verschiedener Ebenen spiegelt also ein etwas idealisiertes Bild wider. In natürlichen Sprachen sind mehr oder minder merkliche Abweichungen von diesem Idealzustand anzutreffen. Für uns sind zwei Typen solcher Abweichungen von größtem Interesse, welche man als Fälle zu enger bzw. zu freier Bindung zwischen Morphemen definieren kann. Im ersten Falle haben wir es mit inhaltlich nichtelementaren Wortformen zu tun, deren Segmentierung in bestimmte, der inhaltlichen Struktur entsprechende formale Elemente unmöglich oder problematisch ist. Im zweiten Falle haben wir es im Gegensatz dazu mit solchen Morphemen zu tun, welche in erheblichem Maße über die Eigenschaften autonomer Wortformen verfügen. Betrachten wir diese beiden Fälle der Reihe nach. 2.2. “Nichtgliederbare Wortformen” Die Vorstellung von einer Wortform als einer linearen Abfolge einzelner Morpheme stellt eine Vereinfachung dar. In einer ganzen Reihe von Fällen ist die lineare Segmentierung einer Wortform in Einheiten niedrigerer Ordnung erschwert oder sogar unmöglich. Die entsprechenden Phänomene werden eingehend in anderen Teilen des vorliegenden Werks betrachtet (vgl. v. a. Kap. VI und VII); wir beschränken uns hier auf ihre kurze Aufzählung. Der unmittelbare (oder sogar mittelbare) Kontakt zwischen Morphemen kann zu einer Veränderung ihrer äußeren Gestalt unter kontextuellem Einfluß führen (sog. “allomorphische Varianz”, bei der ein Morphem mit ein und derselben Bedeutung in einem Text durch eine Reihe komplementär verteilter kontextueller Varianten, “Allomorphe”, vertreten ist; vgl. Art. 46 und 47). Einen Grenzfall solcher Varianz bildet das Verschwinden der Grenze zwischen Morphemen in einem Text (“Morphemjunktur”), bei dem eines der Morpheme völlig von einem anderen verschluckt wird und wir nicht mehr von einem segmentalen signifiant des Morphems sprechen können. Als einfaches Beispiel betrach-

3. Die Stellung der Morphologie im Sprachsystem

25

ten wir die Bildung des Partizip Perfekt Passiv im Lateinischen:

genannt. Die Beschreibung der Fusion setzt eine enge Wechselbeziehung zwischen Morphologie und Phonologie voraus und stellt eines der schwierigsten Probleme bei der Erstellung eines formalen Sprachmodells dar. Außer allomorphischer Varianz, die zu Fusion führt, existieren auch andere Abweichungen vom “agglutinativen Eichmaß”, welche sich ebenfalls darin äußern, daß wir mit einer bestimmten morphologischen Bedeutung keinen bestimmten segmentalen Marker in Übereinstimmung bringen können, da diese Bedeutung selbst durch nichtsegmentale Mittel ausgedrückt wird, d. h. nicht durch Hinzufügung irgendeiner Phonemkette zu einer Ausgangskette, sondern durch eine bestimmte bedeutungstragende Umformung dieser Kette, in anderen Worten: durch morphologische Operationen (vgl. Kap. VIII). Grundlegende Formen solcher Operationen sind Reduplikationen verschiedener Art und Alternationen, d. h. Austausch von Phonemen einer Klasse durch Phoneme einer anderen Klasse. Vergleiche die Bildung von Perfektformen im Lateinischen, bei der sowohl Suffigierung (Tab. 3.2(a)) als auch partielle Reduplikation (Tab. 3.2(b)) als auch Alternationen (Tab. 3.2(c)) verwendet werden:

(a) (b) (c)

Bedeutung

Infinitiv

Partizip (Nom. Sg. M.)

‘loben’ ‘singen’ ‘tragen’ ‘treiben’ ‘weggehen’ ‘spielen’

lauda¯-re can-ere ger-ere ag-ere ce¯d-ere lu¯d-ere

‘schicken’

mitt-ere

‘stoßen’

tund-ere

lauda¯-t-us can-t-us ges-t-us a¯c-t-us ces-s-us lu¯-s-us oder lu¯s-us? mis-s-us oder miss-us? tu¯n-s-us oder tu¯ns-us

Tab. 3.1: Bildung des Partizip Perfekt Passiv im Lateinischen

In der Gruppe (a) sind Fälle einer “agglutinierenden” (s. Art. 116) Anfügung des Partizipialsuffixes (-t-) an den Verbstamm aufgeführt, welche durch keinerlei phonologische Effekte begleitet wird und weder am Verbstamm noch am Suffix eine Varianz erzeugt. In der Gruppe (b) sind schwierigere Fälle aufgeführt, bei denen das Anfügen des Partizipialsuffixes verschiedene Veränderungen der äußeren Gestalt sowohl des Verbstammes als auch des Suffixes selbst hervorruft: assimilative Alternationen des Konsonanten im Stammauslaut (Stimmtonneutralisation, Assibilierung), Alternationen des Stammvokals (Längung, Kürzung); schließlich eine Assibilierung des suffixalen Konsonanten (-t- > -s-). All diese Alternationen erzeugen eine reiche kontextuelle Allomorphie, doch schränken sie nicht die Möglichkeit einer linearen Segmentierung selbst ein: In allen Beispielen der betreffenden Gruppe kann man noch verhältnismäßig leicht das Suffix vom Stamm trennen. Anders ist es um die Formen bestellt, die in Gruppe (c) aufgeführt sind: Ihre Segmentierung ist in unterschiedlichem Maße problematisch und in jedem Falle mehrdeutig, da wir auf das Phänomen des “Verschluckens” von Phonemen im Verlauf des Aneinanderfügens der Morpheme treffen. Doch wenn, wie in Formen des Typs lu¯sus, das Verschlucken eines einphonemigen Suffixes eintritt, so bedeutet dies faktisch, daß diesem im sprachlichen Ausdruck nichts entspricht (außer natürlich einem veränderten Stammallomorph). Ein solches Verschwinden der Morphemgrenze bei der Verbindung von Morphemen zu einer Wortform wird üblicherweise Fusion

(a) (b) (c)

Bedeutung

1. Pl. Präsens

1. Pl. Perfekt

‘loben’ ‘nehmen’ ‘verwunden’ ‘rennen’ ‘täuschen’ ‘schlagen’ ‘waschen’ ‘treiben’

lauda¯-mus su¯m-imus laed-imus curr-imus fall-imus caed-imus lav-imus ag-imus

lauda¯-v-imus su¯mp-s-imus lae(-)s-imus cucurr-imus fefell-imus cecı¯d-imus la¯v-imus e¯g-imus

Tab. 3.2: Das lateinische Perfekt

Es ist anzumerken, daß sowohl die Suffigierung (in der Eigenschaft eines Suffixes tritt der Präteritalmarker -v- oder -s- auf) als auch die Reduplikation zusätzlich von allomorphischer Varianz oder sogar Fusion begleitet werden kann, wofür Beispiele in Tab. 3.1(b) und (c) angeführt wurden. Die lateinische Sprache ist natürlich nicht die einzige Sprache, welche stark zu nichtsegmentalen Techniken beim Ausdruck grammatischer Bedeutungen greift. Zu den bekanntesten Beispielen gehört die Verwendung von Alternationen zur Bildung der Präteritalformen von Verben in den germanischen Sprachen (Ablaut), der Pluralformen von

26 Substantiven im Deutschen oder Rumänischen, der Diminutiv- und Pluralformen von Substantiven in afrikanischen Sprachen der westatlantischen Gruppe (Ful, Serer u. a.), der Kasusformen von Substantiven in den modernen keltischen Sprachen usw. Nach Ansicht vieler Theoretiker stellen sowohl nichtfusionale als auch (insbesondere) fusionale Alternationen letztendlich den Morphembegriff in Frage: In Sprachen mit überwiegend nichtsegmentaler Technik haben wir es faktisch mit Phonemen zu tun, welche (semantisch nichtelementare) Wortformen bilden, d. h. das Postulat von der “ersten Gliederung” erweist sich als auf der Ausdrucksseite verletzt. In den existierenden formalen Sprachmodellen wirken sich diese Besonderheiten der morphologischen Ebene verschieden aus: Die Modelle unterscheiden sich voneinander v. a. gerade dadurch, daß sie vorrangig an verschiedenen Gruppen morphologischer Erscheinungen orientiert sind. Es ist üblich, nach Hockett (1954) drei grundlegende Typen solcher morphologischer Modelle zu unterscheiden: das Item and Arrangement-Modell, das Item and Process-Modell und das Word and Paradigm-Modell. Item and Arrangement-Modelle sind am “durchsichtigsten” strukturiert und wurden bereits in der Blütezeit des Strukturalismus erarbeitet. Sie sind an der “agglutinierenden Idealwortform” orientiert und setzen ihre eindeutige Segmentierbarkeit in Übereinstimmung mit dem Prinzip der “ersten Gliederung” voraus. Wo es möglich ist, werden Allomorphe postuliert und Regeln ihrer Verteilung angeführt. Beispielsweise entsprächen dem Stamm des lateinischen Verbs ‘tragen’ in Tab. 3.1(b) zwei Allomorphe: ges- in der Position vor einem darauffolgenden Konsonanten, ger- in den übrigen Fällen. Fälle des Typs lu¯sus stellen für solche Modelle die größte Schwierigkeit dar, und für ihre Analyse werden verschiedene Lösungen vorgeschlagen: eine Segmentierung der Art lu¯-s- (mit einem verkürzten Verbstamm und einer unmotivierten frikativen Variante des Partizipialsuffixes) oder der Verzicht auf eine Segmentierung bei gleichzeitiger Postulierung einer besonderen Einheit ⫺ eines inhaltlich nichtelementaren, aber formal elementaren (d. h. nichtgliederbaren) Morphs lu¯s-, für dessen Bezeichnung Hockett den Terminus Portmanteau-Morph vorgeschlagen hat. Unter den zeitgenösischen Theorien ist den Modellen des Item and Arrangement-Typs die morphologische Konzep-

I. Morphologie als Disziplin

tion Mel’cˇuks (1982; 1994) am nächsten; für die Bezeichnung von (auf der Ausdrucksseite) nichtgliederbaren Einheiten bedient sich Mel’cˇuk des Terminus Megamorphe. Eine Alternative zum Item and Arrangement-Ansatz, der auf derselben Arbeit Hocketts beruht, ist der Item and ProcessAnsatz. Im Unterschied zu ersterem ist dieser Ansatz nicht statisch, sondern dynamisch. Er ist stärker an der Erklärung allomorphischer Varianz orientiert, verlangt aber die Einführung eines komplexeren und nicht immer unmittelbar einleuchtenden formalen Apparats. Dieser Ansatz beruht darauf, daß eine oder mehrere zusätzliche Ebenen der Darstellung von Wortformen eingeführt werden. Auf einer “tieferen” Ebene wird jede allomorphische Varianz beseitigt (jedes Morphem hat eine einzige Darstellung) und es werden Regeln für den Übergang zu einer “oberflächlicheren” Ebene aufgestellt, welche die äußere Gestalt des Tiefenmorphems in Abhängigkeit vom Kontext verändern (im Einzelfalle können selbstverständlich auch überhaupt keine Veränderungen eintreten). So würde in entsprechenden Modellen der Form gestus eine Tiefenrepräsentation des Typs ger ⫹ t ⫹ us, der Form lu¯sus eine Tiefenrepräsentation des Typs lu:d ⫹ t ⫹ us gegenübergestellt und daraufhin entsprechende Assimilationsregeln eingeführt (regressive konsonantische Stimmtonneutralisation, Assibilierung der Verschlußlaute, Vereinfachung von Konsonantengruppen etc.). Bei einem solchen Ansatz wird, obschon mit Hilfe etwas künstlicher Verfahren, die Erweiterung des “agglutinativen Ideals” auf ganze Klassen von Fällen erzielt, die zuvor von diesem nicht erfaßt wurden. Er sichert die Einheit des Morphems, erleichert in einer ganzen Reihe von Fällen die Beschreibung und außerdem (was nicht unwichtig ist) weisen die Regeln des Übergangs von der Tiefen- zur Oberflächenebene oftmals Parallelen zu realen Prozessen der historischen Sprachentwicklung auf, welche zur Herausbildung von Fusion geführt haben. Der Item and Process-Ansatz (oft auch als “morphonologische” oder “tiefen-morphonologische” Beschreibung bezeichnet) hat viele Befürworter: Seine Grundlagen wurden in den klassischen Arbeiten Bloomfields (1939) und Jakobsons (1948) erarbeitet, ähnliche Ideen wurden später sowohl im Rahmen generativer Paradigmen (Chomsky & Halle 1968; Kiparsky 1982) als auch anderer zeitgenössischer Theorien verwendet (vgl. speziell Bulygina 1977; Dressler 1985). Die grund-

3. Die Stellung der Morphologie im Sprachsystem

27

legenden Argumente der Kritiker dieses Ansatzes laufen darauf hinaus, daß sich die Tiefenrepräsentation der Morpheme oft als zu willkürlich erweist und außerdem nicht alle Alternationen beim Übergang zur Tiefenrepräsentation beseitigt werden können. So ist die vokalische Alternation (Ablaut) in englischen Wortformen des Typs sing ⬃ sang nicht durch bloßen Bezug auf den phonologischen Kontext beschreibbar: Sie ist nur in gewissem Sinne ein Morphem und kann nicht auf natürliche Weise zugunsten der Postulierung irgendeines segmentalen Trägers der betreffenden Bedeutung (‘Präteritum ⫹ Perfektiv’) beseitigt werden. Dennoch sind beim Item and Process-Ansatz nichtsegmentale Morpheme dieser Art grundsätzlich nicht vorgesehen. Von ganz anderen Voraussetzungen geht das Word and Paradigm-Modell aus, das am stärksten an fusionierenden Sprachen mit einer entwickelten Morphologie und einer reichhaltigen allomorphischen Varianz orientiert ist. Eine frühe Etappe in der Entwicklung dieses Modells (welches sich auf eine lange, bis in die Antike reichende Tradition stützt) ist am vollständigsten bei Matthews (1972) wiedergegeben. Im weiteren Verlauf sind viele Annahmen dieses Ansatzes in der morphologischen Theorie Steven Andersons (1982; 1992) aufgegriffen worden. Beim Word and Paradigm-Ansatz sind zentraler Gegenstand der Analyse Fälle einer Störung der “ersten Gliederung”. Unter Berufung auf solche Fälle schlagen die Anhänger dieses Ansatzes vor, völlig auf den Morphembegriff zu verzichten (zumindest auf den Begriff des Flexionsmorphems!) und den Ausdruck grammatischer Bedeutungen unmittelbar durch eine Aufstellung von Wortformen des betreffenden Lexems zu beschreiben. So wird der Form lu¯sus ein Satz “morphosyntaktischer Merkmale” gegenübergestellt (lu:dere ⫹ Part. Pass. ⫹ Nom. Sg. Mask.) und die Form selbst als ganze im Lexikon gespeichert und nicht durch irgendwelche “analytische” Regeln generiert. Alle Wortformen des betreffenden Lexems bilden dann ein geschlossenes System ⫺ ein Paradigma (vgl. Art. 62). Das Paradigma wird zu einem besonderen Objekt mit einer Reihe nur ihm eigener Eigenschaften erhoben. Gemeint sind z. B. der systematische Ausdruck mehrerer flektivischer Bedeutungen innerhalb eines nichtgliederbaren Morphems, eine hochentwickelte Varianz, die besondere Rolle von Nullelementen etc. (zu Einzelheiten s. auch Carstairs 1987). Die Stärke des Word and Paradigm-Ansatzes

liegt in der Betonung des Paradigmas als eines selbständigen Forschungsgegenstandes (welcher in den “segmentierenden” Modellen des Item and Arrangement- und Item and Process-Typs fehlt) und in der Entdeckung einer Reihe interessanter universeller Gesetzmäßigkeiten des Aufbaus von Paradigmen. Besonders wichtig ist die Feststellung der Asymmetrie von Wortformen innerhalb eines Paradigmas, nach der die einen in gewissem Sinne “Basiswortformen” darstellen, die anderen dagegen marginaler (oder nach einer anderen Terminologie: markierter) sind. Allerdings erscheinen die extremen Spielarten solcher Beschreibungen, die eine morphematische Gliederung völlig ausschließen, unökonomisch und in einer Reihe von Fällen auch kontraintuitiv. Zum anderen sind Modelle des Word and Paradigm-Typs auf agglutinierende Sprachen gar nicht anwendbar, da deren Wortformen natürlich nicht in fertiger Form gespeichert sind, sondern nach ziemlich expliziten Regeln erzeugt werden. (Eine eingehendere vergleichende Analyse der drei Modelle sowie angrenzender Probleme bietet Bulygina 1977; Bybee 1988 und Spencer 1991: 49⫺57, 214⫺230 et passim.) Wir haben die grundlegenden Prinzipien einer Verletzung der Gliederung von Wortformen auf der Audrucksseite betrachtet. Die “Paradoxa der Gliederung” sind allerdings mit diesen Fällen noch nicht ausgeschöpft. Ein extrem wichtiges Problem für die Morphologie einer natürlichen Sprache bilden Fälle des Nullausdrucks einer Bedeutung (einem Element der Inhaltsseite entspricht nichts auf der Ausdrucksseite), aber auch Fälle sogenannter Konversion. Nach der Mehrzahl der Theorien ist die Bestimmung von Nullmarkern (vgl. Art. 45) nur im Rahmen der Flexionsmorphologie gerechtfertigt und eng mit anderen Gesetzmäßigkeiten der Struktur des Flexionsparadigmas verbunden: Das Fehlen eines Markers innerhalb der Wortform wird nur dann als Träger einer Bedeutung aufgefaßt, wenn der Sprecher erwartet, daß bei der betreffenden Wortform die betreffende Bedeutung ausgedrückt sein muß. Diese Eigenschaft der Obligatorietät sollte ihrerseits zweckmäßigerweise nur mit Flexionsmarkern verbunden werden (s. u., 4). Unter Konversion versteht man für gewöhnlich Fälle des Typs französisch Sg. (la) vis ‘Schraube’ ⬃ Pl. (les) vis ‘Schrauben’, spanisch manzan-a (F.) ‘Apfel’ ⬃ manzan-o (M.) ‘Apfelbaum’, englisch (a) cook ‘Koch’

28 ⬃ (to) cook ‘kochen’. In allen angeführten Paaren unterscheiden sich die Wörter auf der Inhaltsebene, ein segmentaler Bedeutungsträger, der für diesen Unterschied verantwortlich wäre, kann jedoch nicht ausgemacht werden (im spanischen Beispiel ist der auslautende Vokal im allgemeinen Genusmarker, nicht aber Träger des Gegensatzes ‘Frucht’ vs. ‘früchtetragender Baum’). Zugleich geht es hier nicht um einfache Homonymie, da die Bedeutungsunterschiede innerhalb der Wortpaare in den betreffenden Sprachen regulär sind und z. B. in anderen Wortformen durch segmentale Mittel ausgedrückt werden können. Zwischen den Elementen aller angeführten Paare besteht zwar ein regulärer Bedeutungsunterschied, doch kann man von einem morphologischen Mittel sprechen, das dem Ausdruck dieses Unterschiedes dient? Es erscheint zweckmäßig, als Träger der betreffenden Bedeutung auf der Ausdrucksebene eine Änderung der kombinatorischen Eigenschaften des Stammes zu betrachten, also z. B. die Fähigkeit zur Verbindung mit einem Artikel im Singular vs. Plural, mit einer Endung des maskulinen vs. femininen Genus oder mit der grammatischen Umgebung des Nomens vs. des Verbums im ganzen. Dies ist ein besonderer Typ von Morphemen, welche ebenso wie Alternationen des Typs sing ⬃ sang als Operationen betrachtet werden können, jedoch nicht als Operationen an einer Phonemkette, sondern am grammatischen Kontext bzw. an der Kombinierbarkeit des betreffenden Stammes (also als das, was Mel’cˇuk 1982; 1995 als eine Veränderung der Syntaktik des Zeichens zu bezeichnen vorschlägt; die Bezeichnung Nullaffigierung, welche in anderen Theorien geläufig ist, erscheint im Zusammenhang mit dem hier Gesagten erheblich weniger glücklich; vgl. Lyons 1977: 523). 2.3. “Ungebundene Morpheme” Im vorangehenden Abschnitt wurden Fakten aufgeführt, welche die Realität des Morphems als eines materiellen Segments innerhalb der Wortform bestätigen bzw. widerlegen. Nun wollen wir dagegen Fakten betrachten, die die Realität der Wortform als eines “starren” Morphemkomplexes bestätigen oder widerlegen. Um Unterschiede zwischen Morphem und Morphemkomplex (Wortform) aufzuzeigen, appelliert man für gewöhnlich an Fakten der nächsthöheren Ebene, d. h. an Fakten der Syntax. Gerade das unterschiedliche Ver-

I. Morphologie als Disziplin

halten in bezug auf syntaktische Regeln stellt die Wortform ihren Bestandteilen gegenüber, und gerade die Wortform kann als minimale syntaktische Einheit gelten, da sie, wie üblicherweise gesagt wird, für die Syntax “opak” ist (vgl. Chomsky 1970). Mit anderen Worten, es existiert eine genügend große Anzahl syntaktischer Regeln, welche auf Wortformen anwendbar sind, welche aber nicht auf die einzelnen Morpheme in ihnen anwendbar sind. Es sind dies v. a. Regeln der linearen Anordnung von Satzkomponenten (Wortformen werden innerhalb eines Satzes relativ frei zueinander angeordnet, während Morpheme innerhalb einer Wortform eine fest bestimmte Position innehaben), aber auch beispielsweise Regeln der anaphorischen Pronominalisierung (nur eine Wortform, nicht jedoch einer ihrer Bestandteile kann durch anaphorische Pronomina ersetzt werden), der Koordinationsreduktion, der Ellipse und vieles andere mehr. Das Problem besteht allerdings darin, daß auch diese Kriterien keinen universellen Charakter haben und in einer Reihe von Sprachen verletzt werden können. Die größte Aussagekraft besitzen sie natürlich für stark fusionierende Sprachen wie das Lateinische. Hier erscheint schon die lineare Segmentierung in Morpheme teilweise problematisch, von einer syntaktischen Selbständigkeit der Morpheme ganz zu schweigen. Fusionierende Sprachen sind mit Einschränkungen Sprachen mit “schwachen” Morphemen und “starken” Wortformen. Am anderen Ende der Skala befinden sich die agglutinierenden Sprachen, d. h. Sprachen mit “starken” Morphemen und “schwachen” Wortformen. Hier besitzen die Morpheme eine wesentlich stärkere syntaktische Selbständigkeit, was bisweilen dazu zwingt, die Rechtfertigung des Begriffs der Wortform (und damit die Rechtfertigung der Formulierung einer morphologischen Repräsentationsebene) in diesen Sprachen überhaupt in Frage zu stellen. Es genügt der Hinweis, daß in agglutinierenden Sprachen die syntaktische Ellipse von Morphemen (die sog. “Gruppenflexion”) weit verbreitet ist; vgl. das folgende Beispiel einer koordinierten Nominalgruppe mit ausgelassenem Pluralmorphem im Türkischen: (1) bayan ve bay-lar Dame und Herr-pl ‘Damen und Herren’ Auf analoge Weise können sich im Türkischen auch die Kasusmarker von Substantiven verhalten.

3. Die Stellung der Morphologie im Sprachsystem

29

Vereinzelte Beispiele für die syntaktische Selbständigkeit von Morphemen sind in der einen oder anderen Form nicht nur in agglutinierenden, sondern sogar in fusionierenden Sprachen bezeugt. In diesem Zusammenhang wird häufig das Verhalten des Adverbsuffixes -mente im Spanischen besprochen, das ähnlich dem türkischen Pluralmarker in Beispiel (1) mit einer koordinierten Gruppe kombiniert werden kann:

Bei der Komposition (vgl. Art. 87) werden syntaktische Beziehungen, die für gewöhnlich durch die lineare Anordnung syntaktisch selbständiger Wortformen (oder durch Affixe) ausgedrückt werden, durch Komplexe aus mehreren, der Selbständigkeit entbehrenden Stämmen wiedergegeben, die Objekte bilden, die bezüglich ihrer Eigenschaften kanonischen Wortformen nahestehen. So werden syntaktische Beziehungen des “genitivischen Typs” zwischen einem Substantiv X und einem Substantiv Y in der einen Sprache mit Hilfe von Komplexen zweier Wortformen, X und Y wiedergegeben (vgl. russ. sposob upotreblenija, frz. mode d’emploi ‘Gebrauchsanweisung’), in der anderen hingegen mit Hilfe eines einzigen morphologischen Objekts ⫺ durch ein Kompositum (vgl. ndl. bereiding-swijze). Einerseits gehören solche Bildungen zur Morphologie, da es sich um einzelne Wortformen und nicht um Verbindungen von Wortformen handelt. Andererseits gehören sie aber zur Syntax, da sie genauso frei gebildet werden wie syntaktische Fügungen und deren funktionales Äquivalent darstellen. Außerdem ist die syntaktische Selbständigkeit der die Komposita bildenden Stämme oftmals größer als bei “gewöhnlichen” Morphemen; vgl. die Möglichkeit der syntaktischen Ellipse in ndl. bereidings- en behandelingswijze ‘Bearbeitungs- und Behandlungsweise’, die der Ellipse affixaler Morpheme im Türkischen und Spanischen analog ist (s. Beispiele (1) und (2)). Einen wichtigen Sonderfall syntaktischer Komposition stellt die sog. “Inkorporation” dar, d. h. die Bildung von Verbformen, die eine nominale Wurzel enthalten (s. Art. 88). In der Eigenschaft von Substantiven, die in die Verbformen inkorporiert werden, treten üblicherweise das syntaktische Objekt oder das Subjekt des Verbs auf. Auf ähnliche Weise verfügen Klitika (vgl. Art. 41), die nicht die phonetische Selbständigkeit einer vollwertigen Wortform besitzen (was sie Affixen annähert), über viele (oder alle) übrigen Eigenschaften kanonischer Wortformen. Ein markantes Beispiel für Klitika sind die sogenannten “unbetonten” Personalpronomina in den romanischen Sprachen oder der postpositive Artikel im Bulgarischen und Makedonischen. Sowohl synchron als auch diachron sind Klitika den Morphemen agglutinierender Sprachen näher (und oft in diesen Sprachen nur schwer von ihnen zu unterscheiden) als den Morphemen fusionierender Sprachen. Andererseits sind für Sprachen, die traditionell als analytisch (Hausa oder Maori)

(2) clara y precisa-mente klar und präzis-adv ‘klar und präzis’ Ein schwierigerer Fall ist mit der Fähigkeit von Substantivstämmen (nicht Wortformen!) sogenannter “possessiver Adjektive” in den slavischen Sprachen verbunden, eine Reihe syntaktischer Prozesse zu steuern, wie im folgenden Beispiel aus dem Makedonischen (Corbett 1987): (3) Pred nas e vor uns sein:pr‰s. 3.sg majcˇ-in-i-ot Mutter-poss-m.sg-det.sg stan Appartement(m.sg) koja sˇto saka welche (f.sg) daß wollen(pr‰s. 3.sg) da go prodad-e kon ihn verkaufen-pr‰s. 3.sg ‘Vor uns ist das Appartement der Mutter, die es verkaufen will.‘ Hier verhält sich der Stamm des Adjektivs majcˇini ’mütterlich, der Mutter gehörend’ (maskulines Genus!), welches von dem Substantiv majka ‘Mutter’ (feminines Genus) abgeleitet ist, wie eine selbständige substantivische Wortform: Er kontrolliert das Genus des anaphorischen Relativpronomens mit femininem Genus koja. Mit anderen Worten, die betreffende Wortform ist syntaktisch einer analytischen Konstruktion des Typs (stan) na majka ‘Wohnung der Mutter’ gleichwertig. Das wiederum bedeutet aber, daß sich der gebundene Stamm in syntaktischer Hinsicht wie eine autonome Wortform verhält, das heißt, daß im betreffenden makedonischen Beispiel die Morphologie eben “transparent” für die Syntax ist. Außer syntaktisch selbständigen Morphemen innerhalb einer Wortform stellen für die Abgrenzung der Morphologie von der Syntax auch Phänomene syntaktischer Komposition einerseits und Klitika andererseits ein nicht geringes Problem dar.

30 oder isolierend (Vietnamesisch oder Ewe) bezeichnet werden, Probleme anderer Art charakteristisch: Hier handelt es sich um Sprachen, in denen Wortformen meist elementar sind, das heißt, ein bedeutender Teil der Wortformen fällt einfach mit Morphemen zusammen. Auch für solche Sprachen kann sich, ebenso wie für agglutinierende, der Begriff einer selbständigen morphologischen Ebene als problematisch erweisen, da auf dieser Ebene auch keine (oder zu wenig) Elemente mit besonderen strukturellen Eigenschaften auftreten können. 2.4. Morphologie und angrenzende Ebenen Aus dem oben Gesagten wird deutlich, daß die Morphologie einer Sprache mit anderen Teilen des Sprachsystems in Wechselbeziehung steht. Eine enge Verbindung zwischen der Morphologie und der Phonologie beruht sowohl darauf, daß Phonemketten (und Operationen an ihnen) als signifiants von Morphemen auftreten (das heißt, phonologische Oppositionen werden für die Unterscheidung von Morphemen genutzt) als auch darauf, daß phonologische Effekte die Folge allomorphischer Varianz sein können (d. h. phonologische Oppositionen werden lediglich für die Unterscheidung von Allomorphen eines Morphems genutzt). Die Grenze zwischen der Phonologie und der Morphologie verläuft gerade in diesem Bereich: Eine “bedeutungsfreie” Varianz gehört eher zum Verhalten der Phonologie (oder einer besonderen intermediären Disziplin ⫺ der Morphonologie), während die “bedeutungstragende” eher zum Verhalten der Morphologie gehört. Im übrigen waren in der Geschichte der Sprachwissenschaft auch andere Unterscheidungen verbreitet, die den Geltungsbereich der Morphologie sowohl erweitert als auch eingeengt haben (vgl. 3). Die Verbindung zwischen Morphologie und Syntax wird durch zwei Gruppen von Fakten bestimmt. Erstens kann in einer Sprache eine scharfe Trennung zwischen Morphem und Wortform auch fehlen, und eine ganze Reihe von syntaktischen Regeln im eigentlichen Sinne kann auch im Innern von Wörtern wirken, indem sie die sog. “Morphosyntax” der betreffenden Sprache bilden. Zweitens kann in Sprachen beliebigen Typs (darunter auch in Sprachen mit scharf bestimmbaren Wortformen) eine ganze Reihe von affixalen Morphemen syntaktische Beziehungen ausdrücken: In solchen Fällen doubelt die Morphologie mit ihren Mitteln

I. Morphologie als Disziplin

gleichsam die Syntax, wodurch sie die Bereitstellung syntaktischer Mittel im eigentlichen Sinne (wie der Wortfolge) zum Ausdruck nicht grammatischer, sondern kommunikativ-pragmatischer Oppositionen erlaubt. Die Rede ist v. a. von solchen grammatischen Kategorien wie dem Kasus oder dem Isafet bei Substantiven oder dem Genus verbi bei Verben, die mit morphologischen Mitteln Beziehungen syntaktischer Subordination oder Aktant-Prädikat-Bindungen ausdrücken. Natürlich gehört hierzu auch der morphologische Ausdruck von Kongruenzbeziehungen verschiedener Art, sei es eine Kongruenz bezüglich einer einzelnen grammatischen Kategorie (eines Adjektivs mit einem Substantiv bezüglich Kasus und/oder Numerus, eines Verbs mit einem Substantiv bezüglich Person, Numerus und/oder Determination etc.) oder eine Kongruenz, die mittelbar eine Kategorisierung der nominalen Lexik ausdrückt (die grammatische Kategorie des Genus und der Nominalklasse bei den Substantiven). Solche Kategorien weisen insofern Beziehungen zur Morphologie auf, als sie formal innerhalb der Wortform ausgedrückt sind, sowie zur Syntax insofern, als sie inhaltlich Beziehungen zwischen Wortformen im Satz und Text ausdrücken. Morphologie und Syntax (unabhängig davon, wie scharf man die Grenze zwischen ihnen zieht) werden häufig als Bestandteile der ”Grammatik” einer Sprache angesehen, wodurch sie der “Lexik” bzw. der lexikalischen Komponente der Sprachbeschreibung gegenübergestellt werden. Diese Trennung beruht auf der für die Linguistik überaus wichtigen Unterscheidung zwischen regulärer Information (die in Form von Regeln gespeichert ist, die mit Klassen von Einheiten operieren) und irregulärer, idiosynkratischer Information (die unmittelbar zu jeder Einheit im Lexikon gespeichert ist; vgl. Art. 32). Auch in dieser Hinsicht nimmt die Morphologie eine intermediäre Stellung ein. Erstens bedient sie die Grammatik in den Fällen, in denen mit morphologischen Mitteln Formenbildungs- und reguläre Wortbildungsbedeutungen ausgedrückt werden. Zweitens bedient sie die Lexik, v. a. in Fällen, in denen irreguläre, idiomatische Wortbildung als Mittel der Vervollständigung des Lexikons auftritt und nicht in der Grammatik beschrieben werden kann; Suppletivismus und irreguläre Formen in der Formenbildung betreffen üblicherweise ebenfalls die Lexikoninformation. Dieses Problem

3. Die Stellung der Morphologie im Sprachsystem

31

ist eng mit der Möglichkeit einer Grenzziehung zwischen Wort- und Formenbildung verbunden, die wir in 4 berühren werden.

taren Wortformen (die in der lexikalischen Komponente des Modells bearbeitet und gespeichert werden) und Verbindungen von Wortformen, die in der syntaktischen Komponente des Modells bearbeitet werden, angeführt wurden. Dadurch wurde die Morphologie ⫺ wohlgemerkt, gemeint ist hier v. a. die Wortbildungsmorphologie ⫺ von der Syntax abgetrennt (die Flexionsmorphologie schlug man vor, grundsätzlich in die syntaktische Komponente aufzunehmen), doch noch nicht von der Lexikologie, da Verbindungen (wortbildender) Morpheme in Wortformen als idiomatisch angenommen wurden. Dies ist die sog. “lexikalistische Morphologiekonzeption”. Etwa zur gleichen Zeit trat eine schärfere Abgrenzung morphologischer Erscheinungen von phonologischen im eigentlichen Sinne ein. In den Arbeiten Aronoffs (1976), Kiparskys (1982), Dresslers (1985) u. a. wurde überzeugend dargelegt, daß die Varianz der äußerlichen Seite des Morphems grundsätzlich verschiedenartiger Natur ist: Wenn auch ein Teil dieser Art von Veränderungen tatsächlich dem (phonologischen) Kontext zugeordnet und mit Hilfe phonologischer Regeln widerspruchsfrei beschrieben werden kann, so verlangt die Beschreibung anderer Erscheinungen einen Rekurs auf die Bedeutung der entsprechenden Einheiten, und solche Alternationen müssen dann Gegenstand der Morphologie und nicht der Phonologie sein. Auf diese Weise erhielt die “Wiederbelebung” der Morphologie als eigenständiger Disziplin in den siebziger Jahren Unterstützung sowohl seitens phonologischer als auch seitens syntaktischer Untersuchungen. Das lexikalistische Morphologiemodell ist in der einen oder anderen Spielart bis heute eines der populärsten im Rahmen der generativen Theorie geblieben. Es beschreibt gut idiomatische, nichtadditive Morphemkomplexe, die in fusionierenden Sprachen in der Regel Wortformen sind. Dabei wird in einer Reihe von Varianten dieses Modells nicht einmal eine Grenze zwischen verschiedenen Morphemtypen gezogen: Sowohl Wurzeln als auch Affixe werden als gleichartige Objekte behandelt und die Beziehungen zwischen Morphemen denen zwischen Wortformen gleichgesetzt. Eine solche Auffassung von Morphologie kann man als “radikal-syntagmatisch” bezeichnen. Sie wird z. B. in den Arbeiten von Lieber (1981), Selkirk (1982), in vielem auch Di Sciullo & Williams (1987) vertreten.

3.

Die Morphologie als sprachwissenschaftliche Disziplin

Der intermediäre Charakter der Morphologie und die enge Bindung der morphologischen Spezifik einer Sprache an deren typologische Charakteristiken hat eine unterschiedliche Haltung zur Morphologie in den modernen sprachwissenschaftlichen Theorien bedingt ⫺ von der Zuweisung einer zentralen Stellung bei der Sprachbeschreibung bis hin zu einer praktisch völligen Negierung ihrer Selbständigkeit. In der traditionellen Sprachwissenschaft, die an Sprachen des fusionierenden Typs orientiert war, wurde die Morphologie (vgl. den deutschen Terminus Formenlehre) als Disziplin verstanden, die lediglich die Ausdrucksseite von Wortformen zu beschreiben hatte, welche zweifellos in diesen Sprachen eine Realität sind. Sowohl die Inhaltsseite der Wortformen als auch die Beziehungen zwischen diesen wurden dabei als Gegenstand der Syntax betrachtet (so wurde in der traditionellen Grammatik im Abschnitt “die Syntax des Verbums” nicht nur die Bildung von Nebensätzen, sondern auch die Bedeutung sämtlicher grammatischer Marker des Verbs behandelt). Der Strukturalismus ererbte in bedeutendem Maße eine solche Auffassung von Morphologie, allerdings bildete sich im Zusammenhang mit der Entwicklung der Technik der Beschreibung von allomorphischer Varianz und Alternationen (vgl. 2.2) eine Tendenz heraus, diese Problematik vollständig dem Geltungsbereich der Phonologie zu übertragen. Damit übernehmen die strukturalistische und die frühe generative “Phonologie” (wie z. B. im Modell von Chomsky & Halle 1968) faktisch den gesamten mit der Ausdrucksseite der Wortform verbundenen Problemkreis, wobei sie oftmals der Morphologie in ihrem traditionellen Verständnis nichts mehr übrig lassen. Ein Text wird lediglich auf der phonologischen und der syntaktischen Repräsentationsebene betrachtet. Im Rahmen des generativen Paradigmas setzte eine gewisse Wiederherstellung der Rechte der Morphologie nach dem Erscheinen des bekannten Artikels von Chomsky (1970) ein, in welchem Argumente für eine Abgrenzung von morphologisch nichtelemen-

32 Da aber bei weitem nicht alle Morphemverbindungen idiomatisch sind (selbst in fusionierenden Sprachen nicht), wurde der Vorschlag gemacht, verschiedene morphologische Erscheinungen unterschiedlich zu behandeln und sie in verschiedenen Komponenten des Sprachmodells unterzubringen, d. h. die nichtidiomatische Flexionsmorphologie wie bisher in der syntaktischen (oder phonologischen) Komponente zu beschreiben und die idiomatische Wortbildungsmorphologie in der lexikalischen Komponente des Modells. Das bekannteste Modell dieser Art ist das Modell einer “gespaltenen Morphologie” (split morphology; Anderson 1982; 1992), das auch eine modifizierte Variante des Word and Paradigm-Ansatzes bei der Formenbildung verwendet. Andersons Modell ist eines der wenigen formalen Modelle, in welchem der Abgrenzung der Flexions- von der Wortbildungsmorphologie eine prinzipielle theoretische Bedeutung beigemessen wird. Nach Auffassung Andersons sind Flexionsmarker solche, die “für die Syntax relevant sind”, das heißt: die am Ausdruck syntaktischer Beziehungen teilnehmen. Flexionsmarker sind infolgedessen regulär, Wortbildungsmarker dagegen irregulär, und ihre Bedeutung hängt in hohem Maße von der Bedeutung des Lexems ab, das sie modifizieren. Ungeachtet der Tatsache, daß das Modell Andersons einen unbedingten Fortschritt bedeutete (besonders im Hinblick auf die Erstellung eines formalen Modells des Paradigmas als eines besonderen sprachlichen Objekts), haben die von Anderson verwendeten Kriterien für die Abgrenzung von Wort- und Formenbildung keine universelle Bedeutung und sind nicht intuitiv einleuchtend. Tatsächlich ist es schwierig zu erklären, in welcher Weise die Marker solcher Kategorien wie des Numerus der Substantive oder des Verbalaspekts in demselben Sinne “relevant für die Syntax” sein sollen wie beispielsweise Kasusund Modusmarker. Andererseits wird die Vorstellung vom “irregulären” Charakter der Wortbildung nicht dem Material agglutinierender Sprachen gerecht, in denen das Anfügen vieler Wortbildungsmorpheme an den Stamm mit derselben (oder sogar größerer) Regularität vonstatten geht, wie das von Flexionsmorphemen. Darüber hinaus findet sich unter den Wortbildungsmarkern eine genügend große Zahl solcher, die unbestritten “relevant für die Syntax” sind, da sie die syntaktische Klasse des Derivats ändern (vgl. die

I. Morphologie als Disziplin

Bildung von Adverbien aus Adjektiven oder von deverbalen Substantiven mit der Bedeutung eines Nomen agentis). Weder extreme Varianten “syntagmatischer” noch extreme Varianten “paradigmatischer” Modelle geben also offensichtlich die ganze Kompliziertheit des realen Aufbaus jenes Komplexes von Erscheinungen wieder, der für gewöhnlich mit der Morphologie natürlicher Sprachen verbunden ist. In letzter Zeit haben daher einige um einen Kompromiß bemühte Ansätze Verbreitung gefunden, nach denen in einem formalen Modell der Zugriff auf morphologische Regeln nicht nur ein einziges Mal, sondern in verschiedenen Komponenten erfolgen kann, da diese Regeln unterschiedlichen Charakter haben: Man kann davon sprechen, daß es eine lexikalische Morphologie (irreguläre Wortbildung), eine syntaktische und postsyntaktische Morphologie gibt, ja in gewissem Sinne sogar eine phonologische Morphologie (Klitika, automatische Alternationen). Im ganzen sind diese Vorstellungen in der Theorie von der “modularen Organisation der Sprache” festgeschrieben, die für die zeitgenössische Etappe des Generativismus charakteristisch ist (s. Booij & van Marle 1986; Hammond & Noonan 1988 a; Spencer 1991: 423⫺459). Im Unterschied zu traditionellen und in bedeutendem Maße auch generativen “formalen” Morphologiekonzeptionen ist für moderne “funktionalistische” Untersuchungen eine der wichtigsten Aufgaben der Morphologie die Beschreibung der Inhaltsseite (affixaler) morphologischer Einheiten. Damit bildet sich ein neues Gebiet linguistischer Untersuchungen heraus, die in die Morphologie die grammatische Semantik integrieren. Ihr Gegenstand sind v. a. die grammatischen Kategorien der Sprachen der Welt. Die Grundlagen der grammatischen Semantik wurden ebenfalls von Linguisten strukturalistischer Ausprägung geschaffen (vgl. besonders Jakobson 1957 und Kuryłowicz 1964). Zeitgenössische Untersuchungen auf diesem Gebiet werden von der Warte der theoretischen Semantik (Lyons 1977; Wierzbicka 1988), der synchronen taxonometrischen Typologie (Dahl 1985; Mel’cˇuk 1994) und der diachronen Typologie (Lehmann 1995; Bybee 1985; Heine et al. 1991; Bybee et al. 1994) durchgeführt. In den Arbeiten der letzteren Ausrichtung wird Prozessen der Grammatikalisierung und Morphologisierung, also der Umwandlung nichtgrammatischer Elemente in grammatische und/oder nichtmorphologischer

3. Die Stellung der Morphologie im Sprachsystem

33

in morphologische, besondere Aufmerksamkeit gewidmet (vgl. Art. 145 und 146). Eine Bestandsaufnahme solcher Prozesse erlaubt eine adäquatere Deutung der Struktur grammatischer Systeme natürlicher Sprachen und der tiefen inneren Zusammenhänge zwischen der Ausdrucks- und Inhaltsseite von Wortformen. Dadurch erscheint auch die rigide strukturalistische Dichotomie von Synchronie und Diachronie überwunden und das Prinzip der arbiträren Beziehungen zwischen signifiant und signifie´ wesentlich präzisiert. Die polare Gegenüberstellung von Wort- und Formenbildung, die in Modellen der “gespaltenen Morphologie” üblich ist, entspricht ebenfalls nicht den genannten Konzeptionen, die auf dem graduellen Charakter dieser Opposition bestehen (vgl. besonders Bybee 1988).

und der Klitika für gewöhnlich zu den Aufgaben der Morphologie (hier sind die Interessen der Morphologie und der Syntax am engsten miteinander verknüpft). Der Unterschied zwischen verschiedenen Affixtypen bestimmt eine andere sehr wichtige Trennung ⫺ zwischen Flexions- und Wortbildungsmorphologie (vgl. Art. 38). Auf diesem Gebiet weisen die Anschauungen der zeitgenössischen Forscher wohl die geringste Übereinstimmung auf. Die einen ⫺ wie Halle (1973) oder Selkirk (1982) ⫺ leugnen überhaupt die theoretische Bedeutung dieser begrifflichen Trennung, andere ⫺ wie Dressler (1989) oder Bybee (1985; 1988) ⫺ nehmen den Unterschied zwischen Wort- und Formenbildung als kontinuierlich mit einigen wenigen Übergangsfällen an, wieder andere ⫺ wie Anderson (1982; 1992) oder Mel’cˇuk (1982; 1994) ⫺ bevorzugen es, eine scharfe Grenze zwischen Flexions- und Wortbildungsmorphologie zu ziehen. Im Rahmen von Theorien, die einen solchen Unterschied akzeptieren, wird der flexivische Status eines Affixes üblicherweise entweder mit seiner Regularität und Produktivität oder mit seiner Prädestinierung für den Ausdruck syntaktischer Beziehungen oder (nach Jakobson 1959) mit seinem obligatorischen Charakter verbunden (in dem Sinne, daß jeder Flexionsmarker zu einer Reihe sich gegenseitig ausschließender Elemente gehört, von denen eines immer bei einer Wortform aus einer bestimmten Klasse ausgedrückt ist). Gerade die letztere Eigenschaft erklärt am besten die Tatsache, daß sich flektivische Bedeutungen im Gegensatz zu allen anderen in grammatischen Kategorien vereinigen, deren formaler Ausdruck in Flexionsparadigmen realisiert wird. In den verschiedenen Sprachen unterscheidet sich der Umfang der Flexionselemente und der Grad ihrer Gegenüberstellung zu den Wurzeln. In flektierenden Sprachen (“morphemlosen” und “paradigmatischen”) ist diese Grenze schärfer als in agglutinierenden und analytischen Sprachen (“wortformlosen” und “syntagmatischen”).

4.

Die innere Struktur der Morphologie

Wenn der Gegenstand der Morphologie Wortformen und ihre bedeutungstragenden Elemente sind, so wird die innere Struktur der Morphologie durch die Klassifikation dieser Elemente bestimmt. Die wichtigste dieser Trennungen ist die zwischen Wurzel- und affixalen Elementen, die sich, da sie in der Mehrzahl der Fälle intuitiv einleuchtet, nur schwer einer Formalisierung unterwirft. Versuche, den Unterschied zwischen Wurzel und Affix mit Hilfe semantischer, phonologischer, distributiver und anderer Kriterien zu begründen, haben keine universelle Gültigkeit und können leicht falsifiziert werden, obwohl in einzelnen Sprachen die Anwendung dieser Kriterien annehmbare Resultate zu liefern vermag. So kann z. B. die Wurzel im allgemeinen nicht als “ungebundenes Morphem” definiert werden, da in vielen Sprachen Wurzelmorpheme nicht isoliert auftreten können, sondern obligatorisch von wenigstens einem affixalen Element begleitet werden. Es gelingt auch nicht, universal gültige semantische Unterschiede zwischen Wurzel- und Nichtwurzelelementen festzustellen etc. (vgl. Art. 27). Gegenstand der Morphologie sind in größerem Maße Bedeutung und Eigenschaften affixaler Marker, während Bedeutung und Eigenschaften von Wurzelmorphemen traditionell durch die Lexikologie beschrieben werden. Dennoch gehört auch, wie aus dem oben Gesagten folgt, die Beschreibung der Komposition (speziell der Inkorporierung)

5.

Zitierte Literatur

Anderson, Steven R. (1982), “Where’s Morphology?”. Linguistic Inquiry 13.4, 571⫺612 Anderson, Steven R. (1992), A-morphous Morphology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Aronoff, Mark (1976), Word Formation in Generative Grammar. Cambridge/MA: MIT Press

34

I. Morphologie als Disziplin

Hammond, Michael & Noonan, Michael (1988), “Morphology in the Generative Paradigm”. In: Hammond & Noonan (Hrsg.), 1⫺19

Hjelmslev, Louis (1971), Prole´gome`nes a` une the´orie du langage. Paris: Minuit Hockett, Charles (1954), “Two Models of Grammatical Description”. Word 10, 210⫺231 [Nachdruck in: Joos, Martin (41966, Hrsg.), Readings in Linguistics, Bd. I. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 386⫺400] Jakobson, Roman (1948), “Russian Conjugation”. Word 4, 155⫺167 [Nachdruck in: Jakobson (1971), 119⫺129] Jakobson, Roman (1957), Shifters, Verbal Categories and the Russian Verb. Harvard [Nachdruck in: Jakobson (1971), 130⫺147] Jakobson, Roman (1959), “Boas’ View on Grammatical Meaning”. American Anthropologist, 61.2, 139⫺145 [Nachdruck in: Jakobson (1971), 489⫺ 496] Jakobson, Roman (1971), Selected Writings, Bd. II. The Hague usw.: Mouton Kiparsky, Paul (1982), Explanation in Phonology. Dordrecht: Foris Kuryłowicz, Jerzy (1964), The Inflexional Categories of Indo-European. Heidelberg: Winter Lehmann, Christian (21995), Thoughts on Grammaticalization. Unterschleissheim, Newcastle: LINCOM Europa (LINCOM Studies in Theoretical Linguistics 1) Lieber, Rochelle (1981), The Organization of the Lexicon. Bloomington: Indiana University Linguistics Club Lyons, John (1977), Semantics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Martinet, Andre´ (1970), Ele´ments de la linguistique ge´ne´rale. Paris: Colin Matthews, Peter H. (1972), Inflectional Morphology: A Theoretical Study Based on Aspects of Latin Verb Conjugation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Mel’cˇuk, Igor A. (1982), Towards a Language of Linguistics: A System of Formal Notions for Theoretical Morphology. München: Fink Mel’cˇuk, Igor A. (1994), Cours de morphologie ge´ne´rale, Bd. I. Montre´al: Les Presses de l’Universite´ de Montre´al/CNRS Selkirk, Elizabeth (1982), The Syntax of Words. Cambridge/MA: MIT Press Smirnickij, Aleksandr I. (1955), Morfologija anglijskogo jazyka [Morphology of English]. Moscow: MGU Spencer, Andrew (1991), Morphological Theory: An Introduction to Word Structure in Generative Grammar. Oxford: Blackwell Wierzbicka, Anna (1988), The Semantics of Grammar. Amsterdam: Benjamins

Heine, Bernd & Claudi, Ulrike & Hünnemeyer, Friederike (1991), Grammaticalization: A Conceptual Framework. Chicago: University of Chicago Press

Vladimir A. Plungian, Moskau (Rußland) Übersetzung: Robert Hammel, Göttingen (Deutschland)

Bloomfield, Leonard (1939), “Menomini Morphophonemics”. Travaux du Cercle Linguistique de Prague 8, 105⫺115 Booij, Geert E. & Marle, Jaap van (1986), “Modular Approaches to Morphology: Introduction”. Linguistics 24, 487⫺491 Bulygina, Tat’jana V. (1977), Problemy teorii morfologicˇeskich modelej [Issues in the Theory of Morphological Models]. Moscow: Nauka Bybee, Joan L. (1985), Morphology: A Study of the Relation between Meaning and Form. Amsterdam: Benjamins Bybee, Joan L. (1988), “Morphology and Lexical Organization”. In: Hammond & Noonan (Hrsg.), 119⫺141 Bybee, Joan L. & Perkins, Revere & Pagliuca, William (1994), The Evolution of Grammar: Tense, Aspect and Modality in the Languages of the World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press Carstairs, Andrew (1987), Allomorphy in Inflexion. London: Croom Helm Chomsky, Noam (1970), “Remarks on Nominalization”. In: Jacobs, Roderick A. & Rosenbaum, Peter S. (Hrsg.), Readings in English Transformational Grammar. Waltham/MA: Ginn, 181⫺221 [Nachdruck in: Chomsky, Noam (1972), Studies on Semantics in Generative Grammar. The Hague: Mouton, 11⫺61] Chomsky, Noam & Halle, Morris (1968), The Sound Pattern of English. New York: Harper & Row Corbett, Greville G. (1987), “The Morphology/ Syntax Interface”. Language 63, 299⫺345 Dahl, Östen (1985), Tense and Aspect Systems. Oxford: Blackwell Di Sciullo, Anna-Maria & Williams, Edwin (1987), On the Definition of Word. Cambridge/MA: MIT Press Dressler, Wolfgang U. (1985), Morphonology: The Dynamics of Derivation. Ann Arbor: Karoma Dressler, Wolfgang U. (1989), “Prototypical Differences between Inflection and Derivation”. Zeitschrift für Phonetik, Sprachwissenschaft und Kommunikationsforschung 42.1, 3⫺11 Halle, Morris (1973), “Prolegomena to a Theory of Word-formation”. Linguistic Inquiry 4, 3⫺16 Hammond, Michael & Noonan, Michael (1988, Hrsg.), Theoretical Morphology: Approaches in Modern Linguistics. San Diego: Academic Press

II. Geschichte der morphologischen Forschung I: von der Antike bis zum 19. Jahrhundert History of morphological research I: From antiquity to the 19th century 4. The Ancient Near East 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

Background Genres of texts and formal devices used Areas of morphology considered Parts of speech and grammatical categories Theoretical concepts Technical terminology Reflection of pedagogical aims in theoretical notions and formal devices used 8. Influence from the structures of the languages on the theoretical framework 9. Ancient Egypt 10. References

1.

Background

1.1. Outline chronology of the Ancient Near East c. 2500 BC Shuruppag (in southern Mesopotamia) c. 2300 BC Ebla (in western Syria) c. 2100⫺1700 BC Old Babylonian Period in southern Mesopotamia 1600⫺1100 BC New Kingdom in Egypt c. 1450⫺1400 BC Amarna Period 1307⫺1070 BC Ramesside Period in Egypt before 1200 BC Hattusas (in central Anatolia) c. 1200 BC Ugarit (on the coast of Syria) c. 800⫺612 BC Neo-Assyrian Empire (in northern Mesopotamia) c. 1000⫺500 BC Neo-Babylonian Period (in southern Mesopotamia) from 302 BC Ptolemaic (Hellenistic) Period in Egypt 1.2. Syro-Mesopotamia: description of the languages involved Study of morphology in the Ancient Near East principally concerned two languages, both native to ancient Mesopotamia (modern

Iraq): as target language, Sumerian, an agglutinative, partially ergative, language isolate, first attested in writing in c. 3400 BC and probably extinct by 1800 BC, but surviving as a classical language until the 1st century BC; and, as the receptor language, Akkadian, forming on its own the East branch of the Semitic languages, attested in writing from c. 2500 BC to the first century AD (Black 1989; 1991; Reiner 1994; Civil 1994). The form of Sumerian studied in the majority of the texts was that called Emegi (‘normal dialect’). One vocabulary collects together forms in both Emegi and Emesal (the women’s language of Sumerian; see Landsberger et al. 1956; Schretter 1990; Black 1992). The forms of Akkadian used are the dialect called Old Bablyonian and (in texts of the first millennium BC) the literary dialect Standard Babylonian. In the very early monoglot Sumerian verbal paradigms from Ebla in western Syria, the language is an earlier form of Sumerian, but the students were native speakers of Eblan; the students of the earliest paradigms, from Shuruppag, may have been speakers of Old Akkadian. Sumerian-Akkadian lexical (but not grammatical) texts copied at Hattusas in central Anatolia were amplified with a translation into Hittite in a third column; a few Sumerian-Akkadian ‘grammatical vocabularies’ (see 2 below) were copied at Hattusas also. A group of ‘grammatical vocabularies’ from Ugarit on the Syrian coast, dating from c. 1200 BC, were re-edited there to incorporate some words characteristic of western peripheral dialects of Akkadian. Kassite, which is an isolated language about which little is known, and which was used by a ruling dynasty in Babylonia during the second half of the second millennium BC,

36

II. Geschichte der morphologischen Forschung I: von der Antike bis zum 19. Jahrhundert

is represented by a Kassite-Akkadian vocabulary, mentioned below. All the above texts are preserved on clay tablets in cuneiform writing (a mixed syllabic and logographic script, with additional determinative signs). 1.3. Cultural situation and motivation for morphological studies For southern Mesopotamia during the Old Babylonian Period ⫺ a culture where Sumerian as a vernacular was dying out and where scribal training and higher culture were bilingual in Sumerian and Akkadian ⫺ it is easy enough to ascribe motives to the linguistic studies of scribes whose mother tongue was Akkadian. In the first place, the literate few sought access to traditional, older texts, in practice those written in Sumerian, representing their cultural heritage. First-millennium BC Sumerian literary manuscripts often include an interlinear translation into Akkadian. Elements of Sumerian writing are also (as logograms) an essential element of the writing of Akkadian, especially in more technical language, so that some knowledge of Sumerian was also necessary for all advanced scribes. For these practical reasons, they needed to study the dying (and, in the later stages of the tradition, dead) language. It is not unreasonable also to hypothesize an element of intellectual curiosity, evidenced perhaps in the creation of non-idiomatic forms generated by the complexity of paradigms. While interpreters for living foreign languages were clearly needed also, there is no evidence that the teaching of these languages led to any scientific linguistic study. 1.4. Intellectual context The study of morphology should be seen in the broader context of Mesopotamian intellectual endeavour. Other disciplines such as lexical studies, literary commentaries, mathematics and, to some extent, astronomy also relied on or employed the list format (see 2) as a formal device. Consequently they share with Mesopotamian morphological studies the absence of explicit discussion, appearing to restrict themselves to observation or collection of information, without reflection. They are not systematically ‘descriptive’ in the modern sense, tending always to the encyclopedic amassing of data. However, Mesopotamian grammatical studies, like their mathematics (and unlike their lexical studies), are paradigmatic in strategy as well as ency-

clopedic, i.e. data are presented because from them the behaviour of other data can be predicted. There is no real basis to argue for a major theoretical (as opposed to formal) development from paradigmatic to analytic linguistics during the millennium from c. 1600 BC to c. 600 BC; analytic linguistics can be hypothesized already for the 17th century BC, since the principles underlying the ‘grammatical analysis’ texts, which are preserved only from the first millennium BC, are already implicit in the paradigms of the Old Babylonian Period, even though the latter present only complete grammatical complexes. Some evidence of morphological study exists also in texts outside the strictly grammatical sphere, for instance where nominal affixes or single syllabic elements of Sumerian verbal complexes are listed alongside syllabic values of graphemes, in thematically organised lists of the elements of the cuneiform writing system. It is clear that (now unrecoverable) oral explanation played an important role in the tradition of Mesopotamian linguistics, as in other elements of their intellectual culture. In Late Babylonian commentaries of the first millennium BC, such oral tradition is occasionally recorded as ‘… as they say’ or ‘… is said thereof’.

2.

Genres of texts and formal devices used

All Mesopotamian grammatical material is preserved in the form of lists of equivalences set out in two (very occasionally three) parallel columns, with Sumerian (the target language) in the left-hand and Akkadian in the right-hand column. However, the very earliest texts including brief verbal paradigms, from Shuruppag and Ebla, are one-column lists in Old Sumerian only. The bicolumnar lists are effectively tabular, read both across and down. Three genres of morphological analysis texts are preserved. These are (a) the ‘grammatical vocabulary’, a list usually of what in Akkadian are pronominal, prepositional and adverbial phrasal expressions arranged in paradigmatic groups in which one or more elements are systematically varied; (b) the ‘verbal paradigm’, a list of multiple forms of a given verb or verbs arranged

37

4. The Ancient Near East

according to various grammatically determined patterns; and (c) the ‘grammatical analysis’, a presentation in analytic form of the morphs which appear in the verbal paradigms and grammatical vocabularies. Mention should also be made of the extensive literature of lexical vocabularies (an estimated 50,000 entries are preserved), recording Sumerian-Akkadian equivalences and organised thematically (e.g. in categories such as objects made of wood; birds; fishes; human occupations; parts of the body). These also include a short Kassite-Akkadian vocabulary (cf. also Jacobsen 1974). The most characteristic formal devices used are paradigms, in which complex structural arrangement is crucial. Through manipulation of the order of presentation up to fifteen variables are conveyed. In the verbal paradigms, the indicative forms are always listed in the order 3rd, 1st, 2nd person singular, with non-indicative forms demarcated from them by being listed in the reverse order 2nd, 1st, 3rd person singular. Non-indicative is identified elsewhere by the technical term sˇushurtu ‘reversed’, which describes the physical arrangement of the paradigms. Pronominal complements are added in the order 1st, 2nd, 3rd person singular, which is the order generally observed for pronominal elements (both nominal and verbal) in the analysis texts. Tab. 4.1 is a passage extracted from a paradigm of 318 forms using the Sumerian verbal bases nen and du, Akkadian ala¯kum ‘to go’ (from Landsberger et al. 1956: 97; a third column with Eng. translations has been added), listing non-indicative (imperative and optative) forms in the order 2rd, 1st, 3rd, and indicative forms in the order 3rd, 1st, 2nd person singular.

3.

Areas of morphology considered

Mesopotamian grammatical study (cf. also Cavigneaux 1989) is almost exclusively limited to word inflection, and within that to verbal morphology. There is also limited attention to nominal and pronominal morphology, and to the morphology of adverbial phrases. Word formation was apparently hardly studied at all, apart from occasional documentation of the use of the Sumerian prefixes which form abstract nouns (nam-, nig-). However, the first-millennium lexical text known as Nabnı¯tu does exhibit some awareness of the relationship between Akkadian (not Sumerian!) nominal forms and their associated verbal roots. The object of Mesopotamian morphological study is a form of Sumerian which was current in the Old Babylonian Period when the majority of the texts were composed, and which was effectively frozen thereafter, since Sumerian became extinct as a vernacular (although Akkadian continued to develop); however, the very early paradigms from Shuruppag and Ebla date from the Old Sumerian phase of the language. The only evidence for an awareness of the diachronic development of language is to be found in the extensive lexical vocabulary murgu ⫽ imruˆ ⫽ ballu, formally a commentary on a SumerianAkkadian vocabulary which had its origins in the Old Babylonian Period. Composed probably in the first half of the first millennium BC, it adds a third column to the original Sumerian-Akkadian equivalences, giving more modern Akkadian equivalents. Clearly the original Akkadian (dating from about a millennium earlier) had become opaque in many places. Palaeographic lists of cuneiform signs were also compiled which sought to correlate ancient sign-forms with those of the first millennium BC.

Sumerian

Akkadian

Eng. translation

nenbanea gabanenen habanenen annedu annedun annedun

atlaksˇunu¯sˇi luttalaksˇunu¯sˇi littalaksˇunu¯sˇi illaksˇunu¯sˇi allaksˇunu¯sˇi tallaksˇunu¯sˇi

‘go (imperative) away to them!’ ‘let me go away to them’ ‘let him go away to them’ ‘he goes to them’ ‘I go to them’ ‘you go to them’

Tab. 4.1: Excerpt from a Sumerian-Akkadian verbal paradigm

38

4.

II. Geschichte der morphologischen Forschung I: von der Antike bis zum 19. Jahrhundert

Parts of speech and grammatical categories

Evidence of recognition of different parts of speech is found only insofar as different genres of text typically deal with different parts. Thus the paradigms are restricted exclusively to finite verbal forms. ‘Grammatical vocabularies’ typically deal with prepositional and adverbial phrases. The majority of (lexical) vocabularies list nominals, sometimes including Sumerian verbal bases (typically equated with Akkadian verbal infinitives). Of the grammatical terms, that for ‘suffix’ applies equally to nominal and verbal suffixes. Among the grammatical categories recognised are case, number, ‘tense’ (conventionally so rendered), mood and causativity. A major binary opposition in the Sumerian verb is characterised by (in construction A) use of standard verbal base and (in construction B) use in some verbs of an alternative or reduplicated base; and (in construction A) marking of ergative in the slot before the base and (in construction B) marking of ergative in suffix position. However, these two sets of variables are not precisely coordinated. In the paradigms, construction A is equated in indicative forms with Akkadian preterite and construction B with Akkadian present-future; in non-indicative forms the situation is more complex. A major discussion still continues as to whether the grammatical terms in the Akkadian columns (respectively hamtøu, lit. ‘quick’ and maruˆ, lit. ‘slow’), refer to the Sumerian constructions or are simply the Akkadian for ‘preterite’ and ‘present-future’. A result of this has been the practice by many scholars of using the terms hamtøu and maruˆ to designate the Sumerian constructions in English, as an alternative to the terminology of tense, aspect or Aktionsart.

5.

Theoretical concepts

The theoretical concepts known include phrase, and the free forms word and verbal base, as well as bound forms such as affixes (prefix/infix/suffix). For some of these there is an explicit terminology (prefix/infix/suffix; singular/pluralic [verbal bases]; hamtøu ‘quick’/ maruˆ ‘slow’; see 4). Some concepts are identified explicitly by being contrasted in the arrangement (e.g. indicative/non-indicative in the verbal paradigms), others implicitly by

content (e.g. verbal/nominal, separated in different text genres). In more detail, the following categories are known: (a) nominals (a1) case and number suffixes (nouns, adjectives) (a2) case and number forms (pronominals) (a3) circumfixed adverbial relaters (used with any nominal) (b) verbals (b1) prefixes (four ranks; in Sumerian every finite verbal form must have a prefix; prefixes indicate modality, status, definiteness, intentionality and illocutionary force), (b2) ‘infixes’, i.e. following prefixes and preceding the verbal base (probably five ranks; infixes, which typically mark local, adverbial and pronominal rection, cannot stand in initial position), (b3) base, (b4) suffixes (three ranks). The native terms ‘empty’ and ‘full’, used of verbal affixes, convey a concept not unlike ‘zero form’. They both refer to two verbal affixes, deletable in certain circumstances, which in their ‘full’ forms are: (a) the 3rd person singular verbal infix -n-, (b) the 1st/2nd person singular verbal suffix -en (with variant forms -an, -in, -un). Because of the syllabic nature of cuneiform writing, which means that affixes consisting of a consonant only must always be written with a sign which includes the vowel preceding or following them, these affixes are, in their ‘full’ forms, always written with the syllabic graphemes *an+ *en+ *in+ or *un+. The corresponding ‘empty’ forms are: (a) -aπ-, -eπ-, -iπ-, -uπ-, representing the zero form of the infix preceded by any vowel, and (b) -aπ, -eπ, -iπ, -uπ, representing the form of the suffix with final consonant -n deleted and vowel -e- either present, or deleted in favour of or assimilated to a preceding vowel. It can be seen that this approaches the notion of morphological ‘zero’, although it is inescapably bound up with graphemic considerations. In the lists a structural principle is observed whereby entries are assumed to be

39

4. The Ancient Near East

‘carried down’ where blanks occur in one column, i.e. to apply successively to all forms in the opposite column until ‘cancelled’ by a new entry. However, sometimes it is necessary in advance to be familiar with the structure of the paradigm in order to fill in the blanks, e.g. an Akkadian 2nd person singular imperative with 1st singular pronominal complement (e.g. ‘come to me’ or ‘reach me’) followed by two blanks must be completed, in some paradigms, with respectively a 1st and 3rd person singular optative each with 2nd person singular pronominal complements. Forms thrown up by the structure of the paradigms are sometimes demonstrably impossible on semantic grounds but nevertheless serve to demonstrate the analysis of certain sequences of morphs.

6.

Technical terminology

So far about two dozen technical terms have been identified. These are a characteristic development of the analytic grammatical texts preserved from the first millennium BC. The terms for ‘prefix’, ‘infix’ and ‘suffix’ derive from a metaphorical designation of the beginning and end of an utterance as the ‘top’ and ‘bottom‘, reflecting a similar mathematical usage, equivalent (in mathematical terms) to ‘to the left of’ and ‘to the right of’ a numeric expression. The following are examples of the terms (literal translations of the Akkadian are given, followed by their usage): eluˆ ‘upper’: verbal prefix; or bound form occurring at the beginning of a nominal syntagm; qabluˆ or eluˆ-qabluˆ ‘middle’/‘upper-middle’: verbal ‘infix’ (designating the five ranks of non-initial affixes standing immediately before the verbal base, i.e. infixed, but towards the front of the verbal complex); *sˇapluˆ ‘lower’: nominal/verbal suffix; rı¯qu ‘empty’; maluˆ ‘full’ (see 5); sˇushurtu ‘reversed’: non-indicative verbal form; gamartu ‘completed’: Sumerian verbal affix ba-/ -ma- (separative with verbs of motion); ria¯tum: Sumerian verbal affix ma-/mu-/-m-: Akkadian ‘ventive’ (movement towards the speaker); muˆ: participle (?) (many Akkadian participles begin with mu-); luˆ: Sumerian form equated with Akkadian verbal forms with particle lu (asseverative or optative) or prefix lu- (optative); sˇua¯ti ‘him’: non-causative verbal form; sˇua¯ti sˇua¯ti ‘him him’: causative; eterrubu ‘to occur (grammatically)’, lit. ‘to enter regularly’: iterative form; sˇa isˇte¯n ‘of one’: singular (verbal base); sˇa ma¯du¯ti ‘of many’: pluralic (verbal base); hamtøu ‘quick’; maruˆ ‘slow’.

Occasional instances are found of the use of utterances as metalinguistic indicators, e.g. sˇua¯ti sˇua¯ti, ‘him him’ to refer to a causative verbal form (which typically has two accusative objects), contrasted with sˇua¯ti ‘him’, i.e. non-causative; also muˆ and luˆ. There are no explicit generalised statements on the distribution or usage of grammatical elements, except perhaps for the remark in one text, TA ⫽ ana ina KI.TA sˇa kı¯ma A ¯ıtennerubu ‘the [normally ablative] suffix -ta can be translated by Akkadian ana ‘to’ or ina ‘in’ when it occurs in its locative sense’. (Cf. also Auroux 1989, ed.)

7.

Reflection of pedagogical aims in theoretical notions and formal devices used

Can the concepts used be attributed to pedagogical considerations? As far as the overall presentation of material is concerned, Akkadian is the dominant determinant, reflecting the pedagogical motivation inasmuch as the texts are arranged from the point of view of the speaker of Akkadian and learner of Sumerian. For example, three Sumerian nonindicative forms are selected (from many modal forms) and in the paradigms set against Akkadian 1st and 3rd person optatives and 2nd person imperative, neatly creating, as it were, the three persons of a single mood, which conveniently fits the explicit morphology of Akkadian. Within such categories, it is often Sumerian which determines the arrangement, probably because of the greater number of its morphs. Because of the paradigmatic presentation, forms and functions are treated together, except where they are explicitly disambiguated by technical terms. The need for technical terms arises partly from the need to disambiguate identically written syllables (the cuneiform script being essentially a syllabic writing system). As there is no way of indicating positional considerations in cuneiform writing ⫺ whether a lemma ‘mu’ refers to the prefix mu-, the infix -mu- or the suffix -mu ⫺ terms are created to distinguish them in the analysis texts in which individual morphs are listed. The inability of the syllabic writing system to notate morphs consisting of less than a syllable (i.e. consisting of a single consonant) means that the morph must be listed in each of the syllabographic contexts in which it

40

II. Geschichte der morphologischen Forschung I: von der Antike bis zum 19. Jahrhundert

might appear. Thus the suffix -n must be listed as *an+/*in+/*en+/*un+ every time it occurs. Similarly, written *ba+ might refer to two identical verbal prefixes distinguished by function, and the term gamartu was created to identify the ‘separative’ ba- as opposed to the ‘passive’ ba-. The pedagogical aims also resulted in a lack of completeness in the description and identification of features and concepts, since only those were labelled which it was necessary to disambiguate for practical purposes.

8.

Influence from the structures of the languages on the theoretical framework

Sumerian is an agglutinative, ergative language isolate completely different in structure from the receptor language Akkadian, a typical Semitic language. The agglutinative structure of Sumerian lends itself well to what is called here grammatical analysis, i.e. sequential analysis of extended chains into their constituent morphs. Paradigmatic analysis, on the other hand, is hampered by the divergence between the structures of the two languages, leading to the need to create non-idiomatic forms in one or the other language in order to complete the paradigms. The large number of Sumerian verbal morphs generates a potentially much greater number of forms than exist in the Akkadian verbal system. Sometimes separate Sumerian forms are given the same Akkadian translation because the nuance of difference could not be captured. In contrast, Akkadian has a regular and productive causative system within its verbal structure, including passive, reflexive and iterative causatives. Sumerian has no regular formalised way of expressing causativity. While it can use locative rection to mark the causee, it does not possess the range of affixes necessary to systematise this type of expression throughout all possible ramifications. Consequently the paradigms are filled out with numerous certainly unidiomatic forms to correspond to the Akkadian structures.

9.

Ancient Egypt

Mention should also be made of morphological study in ancient Egypt, where it was always monolingual (cf. Reiner 1994; Johnson 1994). A few examples of verbal paradigms

from the New Kingdom are preserved, including one (dating from the Ramesside Period) which lists verbal auxiliary subject pronouns in the order 1. sg. ⫺ 3. masc. sg. ⫺ 2. masc. sg. ⫺ 1. pl. ⫺ 3. pl. (current) ⫺ 3. pl. (archaic) ⫺ 2. fem. sg. […]. Without appropriate infinitives, these are grammatically incomplete forms, which may indicate a simple level of abstraction. Its date (after the Amarna Period, when a western dialect of Akkadian written in Mesopotamian cuneiform was used as an international lingua franca for documents including state letters written from the Egyptian court) does not rule out the possibility of influence from the Mesopotamian tradition as practised in Syria. Much later, in the Ptolemaic (Hellenistic) Period, there are texts with verbal paradigms and complete phrases in Demotic, also in a standardised order 1. sg. ⫺ 2. masc. sg. ⫺ 3. masc. sg. ⫺ 3. fem. sg. ⫺ 3. pl. ⫺ 1. pl. ⫺ 2. pl., as well as word lists some of which are grouped by their initial letter (‘alphabetically’, although this is not necessarily due to Greek influence).

10. References Auroux, Sylvain (1989, ed.), Histoire des ide´es linguistiques, Vol. I: La naissance des me´talangages en Orient et en Occident. Lie`ge, Bruxelles: Mardaga Black, Jeremy (1989), “The Babylonian Grammatical Tradition: The First Grammars of Sumerian”. Transactions of the Philological Society 87, 75⫺99 Black, Jeremy (21991), Sumerian Grammar in Babylonian Theory. Roma: Pontificio Istituto Biblico (Studia Pohl Series maior 12) [11984] Black, Jeremy (1992), Review of: Schretter (1990). Orientalistische Literaturzeitung 87, 382⫺385 Cavigneaux, Antoine (1989), “L’e´criture et la re´flexion linguistique en Me´sopotamie”. In: Auroux (ed.), 99⫺118 Civil, Miguel (1994), “Sumerian”. In: Lepschy (ed.), 76⫺87 Civil, Miguel & Gurney, Oliver & Kennedy, Douglas A. (1986), Materials for the Sumerian Lexicon, Supplementary Series, Vol. I. Roma: Pontificio Istituto Biblico Jacobsen, Thorkild (1974), “Very Ancient Linguistics: Babylonian Grammatical Texts”. In: Hymes, Dell (ed.), Studies in the History of Linguistics: Traditions and Paradigms. Bloomington/IN: Indiana Univ. Press, 41⫺62

41

5. Old Indic grammar Johnson, Janet H. (1994), “Ancient Egyptian Linguistics”. In: Lepschy (ed.), 63–76 Landsberger, Benno & Hallock, Richard T. & Jacobsen, Thorkild & Falkenstein, Adam (1956), Materials for the Sumerian Lexicon, Vol. IV. Roma: Pontificio Istituto Biblico Lepschy, Giulio (1994, ed.), History of Linguistics, Vol. I: The Eastern Traditions of Linguistics. London, New York: Longman [orig. 1990: Storia della Linguistica, Vol. I. Bologna: Il Mulino]

Reiner, Erica (1994), “Akkadian”. In: Lepschy (ed.), 87–96 Schretter, M[anfred] K. (1990), Emesal-Studien: Sprach- und literaturgeschichtliche Untersuchungen zur sogenannten Frauensprache des Sumerischen. Innsbruck: Institut für Sprachwissenschaft der Universität Innsbruck (Innsbrucker Beiträge zur Kulturwissenschaft, Sonderheft 69)

Jeremy Black, Oxford (Great Britain)

5. Old Indic grammar 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

Introduction General principles Background P¾‫ڲ‬ini Other grammarians Influence of Indian grammarians References

In this article the scheme of transliteration that is standard among Sanskritists has been used. The approximate IPA equivalents (shown after colons) are as follows: a : [Ř], ¾ : [༭], i : [i], è : [്], u : [u], Ĩ: [Ĩ], ‫ ۆ‬: [ŘrŘ] (modern pronunciation is usually [ri] in the north-central part of India), ࿺ : ŘlŘ (modern pronunciation is usually [lri], [li] in the northcentral part of India), e : [e], ai : [Řy]/[༭y], o : [o], au : [Řw]/[༭w], k : [k], kh : [kh], g : [g], gh : [gh], ‫ ڰ‬: [Ĉ], c : [c], ch : [ch], j : [ጆ], jh : [ጆh], ñ : [ಚ], ۘ : [၈], ṭh : [၈h], ḍ : [၉], ḍh : [၉h], ṇ : [ฃ], t : [t], th : [th], d : [d], dh : [dh], n : [n], p : [p], ph : [ph], b : [b], bh : [bh], m : [m], y : [j], r : [r]/[ဂ] (some ancient phonetic texts describe this as alveolar, others as retroflex), l : [l], v : [v], ś : [‫]ێ‬, ṣ : [ಆ], (modern pronunciation generally does not distinguish between the palatal and retroflex spirants; the usual pronunciation of both closely approximates [ಆ]), s : [s], h : [โ], ḥ : [h] (ancient phonetic texts describe this sound, called visarjanīya, which replaces -r or -s, as voiceless and produced in the throat or at the point of production of the preceding vowel; in modern pronunciations, it can be voiced and is generally followed by an echo vowel with the same features as the vowel that precedes), ṁ : a nasal offglide (called anusvāra) following a vowel, e. g., aṁ = [Ř/], this accords with what ancient phonetic texts say (modern realizations of ‫ ڬ‬vary according to phonological contexts and languages; they include a nasalized bilabial [ጇ], [Ĉ], a nasal homorganic with a following consonant, and nasalization of a preceding vowel). – Metalinguistic markers attached to items in P¾‫ڲ‬ini’s system to show that such items belong to certain classes or are subject to or condi-

tion particular operations are shown in bold face; e. g., kvip is the affix v with the markers k, i, and p. All markers are unconditionally deleted.

1.

Introduction

India has what is acknowledged to be the richest grammatical tradition in the ancient world. Vedic texts show evidence of grammatical thought, and the analyzed versions of the Vedas reflect an analysis based on discernible principles (see 3.2). A high point of ancient Indian grammar is P¾‫ڲ‬ini’s Aṣṭādhyāyī (ca. 5th century BC), which for centuries held the attention of some of India’s greatest thinkers. The methods observed in the Aṣṭādhyāyī held sway, so that later grammarians, both of Sanskrit and of Middle Indic languages, couched their descriptions in generally P¾‫ڲ‬inian ways. The commentatorial traditions remained active for a long time; one of the greatest P¾ninèyas, N¾geĘabhaۘۘa, lived in the late 17th to early 18th centuries of the current era, and commentatorial works continue to be produced even now. In the works of Indian grammarians, one finds a sophistication and awareness of vital issues concerning methods of grammatical description and general theoretical issues about language that is hard to match elsewhere, to this day. For a conspectus of major grammars dealing with Sanskrit, see Belvalkar (1915), on other histories and bibliographies of the subject see Cardona (1976: 139–141). Cardona (1976) deals with research done up to 1975 and Cardona (1989) considers some more recent work in the field. On grammarians of Prakrits, see

42

II. Geschichte der morphologischen Forschung I: von der Antike bis zum 19. Jahrhundert

Nitti-Dolci (1938) and Banerjee (1977). A survey of more philosophical work done by Indian grammarians is provided in Coward & Raja (1990).

2.

General principles

A basic tenet of Indian grammarians, explicitly set down by Bhart‫ۆ‬hari (ca. 4th century AD) but implicitly held earlier also, is that the true unit of communication is the utterance (vākya), and that smaller units are recognized for the sake of description. Indian grammarians also agree in couching their descriptions as derivational systems in which words (pada) are syntactically related to each other and formed through introducing affixes (pratyaya) to bases (prakṛti ‘original stuff’). Four word classes are generally recognized: nominal forms (nāman), verb forms (ākhyata), preverbs (upasarga), and particles (nipāta). Bases are of two general types: verbal (dhātu ‘root’) and nominal (prātipadika); and both of these are either primitive or derived. Derived verbal bases are either deverbative or denominative: causatives, desideratives, and intensives such as kāri- ‘have ... do, make ...’, cikırṣa- ‘wish to do, to make’, cekrīya- ‘do, make intently, repeatedly’ – all derived from the base ḳr – are deverbative; denominative verbs such as putrīya- ‘wish a son, treat as a son’ or vṛṣāya- ‘act like a bull’ are derived by adding affixes to nominal forms. Derived nominals also are deverbative or denominative. The former include participles such as kṛ-ta- ‘done, made’, ga-ta‘gone’, agent nouns like kar-tṛ- ‘one who does, makes, agent’, and infinitives like kartum ‘to do, make’. The latter are either compounds (samāsa) such as rāja-puruṣa- ‘king’s servant’ or are derived from nominal forms through the addition of affixes called taddhitaj; aupagava- ‘offspring, descendant of Upagu’, tatas ‘from that, thence’, and tatra ‘in that ..., there‘ are examples of this type. Although units comparable to what Western linguists call morphemes are recognized, there is no strict demarcation such that morphology could not presuppose syntax. Indian grammarians recognize that some morphological derivations depend on syntax.

3. 3.1

Background

Preservation of sacred texts and Sanskrit Sanskrit speakers were aware from earliest known times not only of their identity as a people who referred to themselves as ārya

but also of their language as a vehicle of culture that set them apart from non-½ryas they encountered in the subcontinent. The ½ryas used this language in ritual contexts and this was the ritually pure (saṁskṛta) language in which the sacred texts of their culture were composed, a language also used in other elevated contexts. In order to perform their rites efficaciously, the ½ryas had to recite hymns of sacred works faultlessly. At the same time, from early on the ½ryas spoke vernaculars in their everyday life. Accordingly, texts concerning phonetics (śikṣā) were composed, giving instruction in the pronunciation required to recite the Vedic texts properly. Sikṣā and grammar (vyākaraṇa) are ancillaries associated with Vedic texts. There can be no doubt that the preservation of and proper ritual application of these texts played a major role in prompting the attention Indian scholars paid to language. The execution of rites accompanied by the recitation of appropriate texts resulted in the acquisition of merit. The same property was attributed to the correct use of Sanskrit: this too produced merit. P¾ninèyas not only supply evidence for this situation but also bring out the relative status of vernaculars and Sanskrit. In the first of his comments (called vārttika) on P¾‫ڲ‬ini’s work, K¾ty¾yana says: It is given that the relation between speech units and meanings is established and perennial (siddhe śabdārthasambandhe) and that according to usage in the everyday world the use of a speech element is prompted by the need to express a meaning (lokato’ rthaprayukte śabdaprayoge); this being so, the grammar serves to establish a restriction intended to procure merit (śāstreṇa dharmaniyamaḥ; Mahābhāṣya I.6.16, 8.3). That is, to obtain merit, one should use proper Sanskrit forms like gauḥ ‘cow (nom. sg.)’ instead of vernacular forms like gāvī. Now, as the use of correct Sanskrit speech in accordance with what a grammar like P¾‫ڲ‬ini’s describes leads to merit, so should the use of vernacular forms result in demerit. If, then, one used vernaculars instead of Sanskrit in everyday situations, one would be accruing demerit constantly, an obviously undesireable situation. Patañjali emphasizes that this is not the case. Demerit results from improper usage in a ritual context. He illustrates this with the parallel of learned men referred to as yarvāṇas tarvāṇas because they said this instead of the Sanskritic yad vā nas tad vā nas. Although these sages did indeed use such forms, however, they did not use improper speech forms

43

5. Old Indic grammar

in the course of rituals (Mahābhāsya I.11.10– 14; see Cardona 1988: 637–639, 1997: 549– 550). Thus, grammar was viewed as a vehicle for preserving the language of a Sanskritic élite (śiṣṭa), characterized by certain features of behavior and whose speech was to be imitated. In this sense, grammar in India had a prescriptive aim. Nevertheless, P¾‫ڲ‬inian grammarians accept that the immediate purpose of a work like P¾‫ڲ‬ini’s Aṣṭādhyāyī is to account for correct speech forms. In this context, a grammar describes usage that is given. And in this context, grammarians concerned themselves with the formal aspects of grammars. Moreover, the very same techniques that were developed to describe Sanskrit were used to describe Middle Indic vernaculars. 3.2

Pre-P¾‫ڲ‬inian analysis and rules of derivation

Also closely linked to the preservation of Vedic hymns are the analyzed texts (padapāṭha) associated with continuously recited texts (saṁhitāpāṭha). In general, a padap¾ۘha is recited with breaks between constituents which show phonological properties appropriate to word boundaries. For example, the padap¾ۘha corresponding to Ṛgveda 1.1.1: agním īe puróhitaỹ yajñásya devám ṛtvíjam / hótāraṁ ratnadhtamam is: agním ⏐ īe ⏐ puráḥ-hitam ⏐ yajñásya devám ⏐ ṛtvíjam ⏐ hótāram ⏐ ratna-dhtamam, and the analyzed text for Ṛgveda 2.18.4b:  catúrbhir  ṣaḍbhír hūyámānaḥ is:  ⏐ catúḥ-bhiḥ ⏐  ⏐ ṣaṭ-bhíḥ ⏐ hūyámānaḥ. In the sa‫ڬ‬hit¾p¾ۘha, words appear in forms reflecting morphophonemic rules; e. g., puróhitaỹ, hótāraṁ with nasalized y and -ṁ instead of -m before r-, and ṣaḍbhír with -r before the voiced segment h-. The analyzed text has hótāram and ṣaḍ-bhíḥ, with -m and -ḥ, which occur before pause. There are pauses not only between syntactically separate words such as hótāram, ṣaḍbhíḥ and hūyámānaḥ but also between members of compounds (puráḥ-hitam) and between certain endings, such as bhiḥ, and preceding stems, as in ṣaḍ-bhíḥ. Padap¾ۘhas presuppose a principled analysis of strings into constituents. In accordance with the fact that constituents are separated essentially on the basis of word-boundary phonological features, syntactic words such as ṣaḍbhíḥ are divided; ṣaḍ- has -ḍ instead of -ṣ (as in ṣaṣṭi- ‘sixty’), a variant appropriate to word-final position before a voiced element. In addition, the analysis of terms like

gó-mat- ‘rich in cattle’ and of compounds also reflects a knowledge of derivational procedures. No word is split, however, into more than two constituents. In polymorphemic items the place at which a split is recognized reflects grammatical hierarchy. Thus, pra-j ‘creature, progeny’, praj-vat ‘rich in progeny’, praj-patiḥ ‘Praj¾pati (master of creatures)’ and prajpati-gṛhītayā ‘seized by Praj¾pati (instr. sg. fem.)’ are divided as shown. The padap¾ۘha analysis also reflects an awareness of other grammatical relations, including syntactic constructions. The Rgveda padap¾tha has vṛṣa-yáte corresponding to vṛṣāyáte ‘acts like a bull’. This recognizes that the verb in question is a denominative in which the affix -ya- follows a stem (vṛṣan-) whose final consonant is dropped in the nominative singular (vrṣā). Corresponding to ratnadhtamam in the sa‫ڬ‬hit¾p¾tha of Ṛgveda 1.1.1, the padap¾ۘha has ratna-dhtamam, with a break between ratna- ‘treasure’ and dhtamam ‘who best creates’, instead of ratnadh-tamam, with the usual break before the superlative affix. This is best explained as reflecting a relation between ratnadhtamaand a corresponding syntagma in which the intensive dhéṣṭha- ‘who best creates’ is construed with an accusative of rátna-. Positing such divided texts in association with continuously recited texts recognizes that the two are related systematically. In fact, there are corpora of rules – in treatises called prātiśākhya – which serve to derive sa‫ڬ‬hit¾p¾ۘhas from padap¾ۘha through phonological operations. These rules are of the type (1) a → b / ... An original element a is said to change to b, a modification (vikāra) of a, in a context involving a following segment.

4.

P¾‫ڲ‬ini

4.1. Background ė¾kalya, the author of the analyzed text for the Ṛgveda, was a predecessor of P¾‫ڲ‬ini, who refers to him. P¾‫ڲ‬ini assumes the analysis of utterances into constituent words and of words into bases and elements that occur with bases. He operates with atomic units, without demonstrating how they were abstracted. P¾‫ڲ‬inèyas – students of P¾‫ڲ‬ini’s work – like K¾ty¾yana (ca. 3rd century BC) and Patañjali (mid 2nd century BC) set forth the

44

II. Geschichte der morphologischen Forschung I: von der Antike bis zum 19. Jahrhundert

procedures for such abstraction. These involve substitutions in contexts to arrive at meaningful units based on reasoning from the presence and absence of entities and meanings. Two conditions are considered: (2) (a) If A occurs, B occurs. (b) If A is absent, B is absent. If both hold, then A is considered the cause of B. Accordingly, if (2a, b) hold with respect to a given speech element or set of speech elements and the understanding of a meaning, the meaning in question is attributed to the speech unit or set. For example, given i-tas ‘they two are going’, i-thas ‘you two are going’, at-tas ‘... are eating’, at-thas, it is possible to abstract the verbal bases i, ad (3rd pl. ad-anti) and the endings tas, thas. The meanings ‘go’ and ‘eat’ are attributed to the respective bases, and the meaning ‘agent (kartṛ)’ is attributed to a set of verb endings including tas and thas. Through such analysis the following major units were abstracted: words (pada), not only as syntactic units with verbal and nominal endings but also as phonological units; verbal bases (roots), nominal bases, and affixes (see 2). The reasoning in question led to recognizing not only elements considered signifiers (vācaka) of particular meanings (artha) but also elements said to be cosignifiers (dyotaka) of meanings in that they do not themselves signify these meanings but accompany signifiers whose meanings they serve to bring out (dyotayati ‘illuminates’). For example, a verb ending such as ti is considered to signify an agent; it does so by itself in a form like at-ti (← ad-ti) ‘eats’, as-ti ‘is’, which consist only of this ending and different verbal bases. A form like pac-a-ti ‘cooks’, on the other hand, contains not only a verbal base (also found in pac-a-tas [3rd du. pres.], pac-a-si [2nd sg. pres.], etc.) and an ending but also a third element. It is not proper to conclude that the -a- of pac-a-ti itself signifies agent, since this meaning is understood without such an affix in forms like atti, asti. On the other hand, a form like pakti equivalent to a 3rd person singular present like asti is not used, so that some meaningful status has to be granted to the affix in question: it is considered to cosignify agent together with endings like ti when these occur with verbal bases of particular classes. The same principles of analysis led to recognizing elements – comparable to empty morphs – that are absolutely redundant in that they neither signify nor cosignify any

meaning. For example, avika- has the same meaning as avi- ‘sheep’ (e. g., nom. sg. avi-s). Since avi- has to be segregated as a signifying element, avi-ka- is appropriately divided as shown. On the other hand, it is not possible to attribute to the ka of this item any meaning such as that of putra-ka- ‘little child, poor child’ (cf. putra- ‘son’). Moreover, this analysis entails zero as a “place holder”. That is, Indian grammarians recognized that meanings ascribable to particular units could be found expressed in the absence of such units. For example, the verb forms apacat ‘cooked (3rd. sg. impfct.)’ and ahan ‘killed’ correspond to the present forms pacati, hanti. Accordingly, an ending is introduced after han and then dropped: han-t → ... ahan. The agent noun han-tr- ‘slayer’ contains the verbal vase han, found also in forms like han-ti ‘kills’, and the agent affix tṛ. The compound vṛtra-han- ‘one who has slain Vṛtra’ also refers to an agent of killing, but this has merely the verb -han, without any overt affix. The meaning ‘agent’ here is ascribed to an affix (in P¾‫ڲ‬ini’s system, kvip: affix v with metalinguistic markers k, i, p) which is introduced (Aṣṭādhyāyī 3.2.87: brahmabhrūṇavṛtreṣu kvip) and then dropped (6.1.67: ver apṛktasya): -han-v (→ -han-ø) has the structure of han-tṛ. The requirements of a derivational system led P¾‫ڲ‬ini to posit other abstract elements. In particular, he operates with ten abstract elements that consist of the sound l with appended markers, L-affixes such as laṭ. These are associated with particular meanings and are also replaced by endings and participial affixes (see 4.2.1 and Cardona 1988: 173– 181, 554–579; 1997: 148–154, 475–498). It is noteworthy that P¾‫ڲ‬inian commentators know of systems where instead of positing such L-affixes, grammarians operated directly with endings and referred to these by means of terms such as bhavantī (‘present’). There is also evidence that pre-P¾‫ڲ‬inian grammarians classified compounds on the basis of their meanings alone, so that, compounds like upāgni- ‘near the fire’ and rājapuruṣa- ‘king’s servant’ were respectively assigned to the compound classes called avyayībhāva and tatpuruṣa – which Westerners call adverbial and dependent compounds – because their primary meanings were those of the first and second components (see Cardona 1976: 212–214). Similarly, it is probable that the terms parasmaipada and ātmanepada, which P¾‫ڲ‬ini uses as class names for sets of verb endings (see (7)), were used by

45

5. Old Indic grammar

pre-P¾‫ڲ‬inian grammarians because the verb forms with such endings respectively could be used of actions the results of which were intended for someone other than the agent (parasmai: dat. sg. of para- ‘someone else’) and for the agent (ātmane: dat. sg. of ātman- ‘self’). In contrast with such systems, P¾‫ڲ‬ini represents a step towards formalism with a strict delineation between forms and the meanings with which these are associated. P¾‫ڲ‬ini’s system also involves formal relations among operations and rules – called sūtra – which provide for these. For example, there is a general rule of semivowel replacement which accounts for y v r l instead of i- u- ṛ-  before vowels; e. g., dadhi atra → dadhy atra ‘yogurt here (there is yogurt here)’ has dadhy instead of dadhi. There is a more particular rule providing for -iy and -uv to replace i- and uvowels which are the final sounds of particular stems before vowel-initial affixes, as in kṣiy-a-ti ‘dwells (3rd sg. pres.)’ and āp-nuvanti ‘they reach, obtain (3rd pl. pres.)’, derived from kṣi-a-ti, āp-nu-anti. The domain of the specific operation is included in that of the more general related operation, whose application it blocks within its domain. As can be seen, this is similar to what is now called the elsewhere convention. In addition, P¾‫ڲ‬ini operates with a bracketing principle. A form like (((kṣi-)a-)ti) is bracketed as shown, and operations conditioned by inner elements take precedence over operations conditioned by outer elements. On such principles, see Cardona (1988: 469–498; 1997: xvii–xxiii, 401–427).

Starting with semantics, affixes are added to bases under meaning and cooccurrence conditions. In this manner, utterances such as (3) devadatta odanam pacati ‘Devadatta is cooking rice.’ (4) devadattenaudanaḥ pacyate ‘Rice is being cooked by Devadatta.’ are derived from initial abstract strings like (5) ([devadatta-] s1) ([odana-] am2) ([pac-] laۘ) (6) ([devadatta-] ā3) ([odana-] s1) ([pac-] laۘ) through a series of steps, including a stage at which one has ([odana-] am1) (5ࡀ) ([devadatta-] s1) ACC.SG Devadatta NOM.SG rice ([pac-] ti) cook 3.SG.ACT (6ࡀ) ([devadatta-] ā3) ([odana-] s1) NOM.SG Devadatta INSTR.SG rice ([pac-] te) cook 3.SG.MEDPASS Such strings are made up of related units that consist of nominal and verbal elements (surrounded by square brackets) and their affixes, including verb endings like te and members of triplets of nominal endings (see (8)). P¾‫ڲ‬ini posits eighteen basic verb endings divided into two major groups – called parasmaipada and ātmanepada – each of which consists of three triplets: (7) 3rd pers. 2nd pers. 1st pers.

4.2. P¾‫ڲ‬ini’s system 3rd pers. 2nd pers. 1st pers.

4.2.1. General P¾‫ڲ‬ini’s aim is more general than that of an author of a padap¾ۘha (see 3.2). He accounts for utterances of a language in general, not merely for a particular text. In accordance with his predecessors, P¾‫ڲ‬ini describes Sanskrit by means of a derivational system, from a speaker’s point of view. On P¾‫ڲ‬ini’s derivational system, see most recently Sharma (1987: 165–211), Cardona (1988: 159–468; 1997: 136–400). In what follows, rules of the Aṣṭādhyāyī (abbreviated ‘A’) are cited in parentheses, without showing elements understood to recur from other rules and without translation (see Katre 1987; Cardona 1988, 1997; Sharma 1990, 1995, for translations and paraphrases).

Parasmaipada sg. du. tas tip thas sip vas mip ½tmanepada ta ātām thās athām iṭ vahi

pl. jhi tha mas jha dhvam mahiṅ

He also recognizes twenty-one basic nominal endings: (8) 1. nom. 2. acc. 3. instr. 4. dat. 5. abl. 6. gen. 7. loc.

sg. su am ṭā ṅe ṅasi ṅas ṅi

du. au auṭ bhyām bhyām bhyām os os

pl. jas śas bhis bhyas bhyas ām sup

As shown, these are divided into seven triplets (trika). Accordingly, the endings s, am, ā (5)–(6) appear with subscripts showing the triplets to which these belong.

46

II. Geschichte der morphologischen Forschung I: von der Antike bis zum 19. Jahrhundert

In general, affixes have forms which are found in actual speech; for example, -s (nom. sg.), -am (acc. sg.), and -ā (instr. sg.) occur in forms like devadattas ‘Devadatta’ – followed by a voiceless dental stop, as in devadattas tatra ‘Devadatta is there’ – vāc-am ‘voice, speech’, vāc-ā. As noted earlier, P¾‫ڲ‬ini also operates with abstract affixes. For example, laṭ is one of ten L-affixes, which are introduced after verbal bases if an agent or an object is to be signifed (A 3.4.69: laḥ karmaṇi ca bhāve cākarmakebhyaḥ) and under conditions of time reference and modality. laṭ in (5)–(6) is introduced on condition that the action in question is referred to the present, is currently taking place (A 3.2.123: vartamāne laṭ); in (5), the L-affix signifies an unspecified agent, in (6) an unspecified object. The L-affixes in question are thus coreferential (samānādhikaraṇa) with nominal bases: with devadatta- in (5) and odana- ‘rice’ in (6). All Laffixes are subject to replacement, by verb endings and participial affixes. Nominal endings also are coreferential with nominals: in (5) -am has been introduced on condition that an unspecified object is to be signified, so that it is coreferential with odana-, which refers to the particular object being cooked, and in (4) -ā has been introduced on condition that an unspecified agent is to be signified, so that it is coreferential with devadatta-.

To illustrate further, let us consider how he accounts for case forms of vāc- ‘speech, voice’, deva- ‘god’, and the present indicative active and middle of kṛ ‘do, make’, pac ‘cook, bake.’ In accordance with P¾‫ڲ‬ini’s system, case forms are labeled as follows: 1. nominative, la. vocative, 2. accusative, 3. instrumental, 4. dative, 5. ablative, 6. genitive, 7. locative. For details concerning the underlying forms P¾‫ڲ‬ini posits, see Cardona (1988: 525–628; 1997: 449–542).

(9) Sg. 1–1a. vāk, 2. vācam, 3. vācā, 4. vāce, 5–6. vācas, 7. vāci; Du. 1–2. vācau, 3–5. vāgbhyām, 6–7. vācos; Pl. 1–2. vācas, 3. vāghbis, 4–5. vāgbhyas, 6. vācām, 7. vākṣu (10) Sg. 1. devas, la. deva, 2. devam, 3. devena, 4. devāya, 5. devāt, 6. devasya, 7. deve; Du. 1–2. devau, 3–5. devābhyām, 6–7. devayos; Pl. 1–1a. devās, 2. devān, 3. devais, 4–5. devebhyas, 6. devānām, 7. deveṣu (11) 3rd pers. 2nd pers. 1st pers.

(12)

3rd pers. 2nd pers. 1st pers.

4.2.2. Derivation from underlying forms Padas, bases and affixes are subject to additional affixation, to substitution – including deletion – and to augmenting. (5)–(6) are the initial strings from which are derived the final utterances (3)–(4). In deriving devadattena from devadatta-ā, two replacements are carried out. First, the ending -ā is replaced by -ina following a stem in -a, then -e- replaces -a- and the following -i- : devadatta-ā → devadatta-ina → devadattena (see (18)); devadattena odanaḥ → devadattenaudanaḥ. Instead of operating with two allomorphs ¾ and ina of equal status, P¾‫ڲ‬ini operates with a basic element ¾, subject to replacement in given contexts. P¾‫ڲ‬ini’s procedure of positing single basic elements and accounting for variants through such operations in justified by his derivational procedure, in which final utterances are derived from posited initial strings such as (5)–(6). Accordingly, P¾‫ڲ‬ini’s is what has been called an item-and-process system.

3rd pers. 2nd pers. 1st pers. 3rd pers. 2nd pers. 1st pers.

Active sg. du. karoti kurutas karoṣi kuruthas karomi kurvas Middle kurute kurvāte kuruṣe kurvāthe kurve kurvahe Active sg. du. pacati pacatas pacasi pacathas pacāmi pacāvas Middle pacate pacete pacase pacethe pace pacāvahe

pl. kurvanti kurutha kurmas kurvate kurudhve kurmahe pl. pacanti pacatha pacāmas pacante pacadhve pacāmahe

On the basis of sets like (9), a group of basic nominal endings is abstracted, that consists of seven triplets (see (8)). A distinct triplet is not set up for the vocative: endings of the first triplet are introduced on condition that a nominal is used in addressing someone (see also (17)). Endings are introduced under meaning conditions: if a given meaning is to be signified or cosignified. In accordance with this system, P¾‫ڲ‬ini refers to the triplets simply by number: first (prathamā), second (divitīyā), third (tṛtrīyā), fourth (caturthī), fifth (pañcamī), sixth (ṣaṣṭhī), seventh (saptamī). This is different from the practice –

5. Old Indic grammar

well known from Graeco-Roman grammars and those indebted to them – of selecting a particular function as typical and labelling an ending accordingly (casus nominativus, casus dandi and so on). Moreover, the P¾‫ڲ‬inian system requires operating with separate endings even where the units in question are homophonous. The basic endings in question are introduced after nominal bases of all sorts, so that P¾‫ڲ‬ini operates with the following underlying forms: (13) Sg. 1–1a. vāc-s, 2. vāc-am, 3. vāc-ā, 4. vāc-e, 5–6. vāc-as, 7. vāc-i; Du. 1–2. vāc-au, 3–5. vāc-bhyām, 6–7. vāc-os; Pl. 1–2. vāc-as, 3. vāc-bhis, 4–5. vācbhyas, 6. vāc-ām, 7. vāc-su (14) Sg. 1–1a. deva-s, 2. deva-am, 3. deva-ā, 4. deva-e, 5–6. deva-as, 7. deva-i; Du. 1–2. deva-au, 3–5. deva-bhyām, 6–7. deva-os; Pl. 1–2. deva-as, 3. deva-bhis, 4–5. deva-bhyas, 6. deva-ām, 7. deva-su Some underlying forms are identical with possible forms of actual usage, so that they require no replacement. Substitution rules apply to account for other forms. For example: (15) vāc-s → vāc → vāg → vāk: After a consonant, su is deleted (A 6.1.68: halṅyābbhyo dīrghāt sutisi apṛktaṁ hal); velars replace word-final palatals (A 8.2.30: coḥ kuḥ); voiced unaspirated stops replace word-final nonnasal stops and spirants (A 8.2.39: jhalāṁ jaśo’nte); before a pause, such a voiced stop is optionally replaced by a voiceless one (A 8.4.56: vāvasāne). The vocative vāk is derived similarly. On the other hand, a special rule is required to account for a vocative like deva; see (17). (16) vāc-bhyām → vāgbhyām, vāc-bhis → vāgbhis, vāc-bhyas → vāgbhyas: A word boundary is recognized between stems and consonant-initial endings other than su (cf. 3.2), so that substitutions applicable to word-final consonants apply (see (15)). (17) deva-s → deva: The ending su used as a vocative (sambuddhi) is dropped if it follows a short vowel as well as e, o (A 6.1.69: eṅhrasvāt sambuddheḥ). (18) deva-ā → deva-ina: After stems in -a, the endings ṭā, ṅasi, and ṅas are respectively replaced by ina, āt, and sya (A 7.1.12: ṭāṅasiṅasām inātsyāḥ). A phonological rule lets a vowel of the set called guṇa (a e o, in this instance e) replace

47 an a-vowel and a following vowel (A 6.1.87: ād guṇaḥ): deva-ina → devena. The same rule applies to derive the locative singular: deva-i → deve. The forms in (9)–(10) are derived from kr-l and pac-l, with the agentive L-affix laṭ. This is subject to replacement by finite endings (see 4.2.1), which are divided into two major groups: parasmaipada and ¾tmanepada endings; see (7). These basic endings are subject to operations that depend on the L-affixes from which they derive. For example: (19) In ¾tmanepada endings from an L-affix marked with ṭ the segment beginning with the last vowel is replaced by e, but se replaces thās (A 3.4.79–80: ṭita ātmanepadānām ṭer e, thāsaḥ se): ta → te, jha → jhe, ātām → āte, thās → se, āthām → āthe, dhvam → dhve, vahi → vahe, mahi → mahe. (20) In general, ant- substitutes for jh- of an ending, but at- replaces jh- in ¾tmanepada endings except after stems in -a (A 7.1.3, 5: jho’ntaḥ, ātmanepadeṣv anataḥ): jhi → anti, jha → jhe → antelate. Verb affixes of the class called sārvadhātuka – which includes endings in most finite forms – condition the introduction of other affixes. In general, if the affix in question signifies an agent, śap is introduced (A 3.1.68: kartari śap), but after a verb of a particular group, including kṛ, the affix u is introduced under the same conditions (A 3.1.79: tanādikṛñbhya uḥ). In this way, P¾‫ڲ‬ini provides for complexes that consist of verb bases followed by affixes and endings, as in (21)– (22): (21) Act. 3rd sg. kṛ-u-ti, du. kṛ-u-tas, pl. kṛ-uanti; 2nd sg. kṛ-u-si, du. kṛ-u-thas, pl. kṛ-u-tha; 1st sg. kṛ-u-mi, du. kṛ-u-vas, pl. kṛ-u-mas Mid. 3rd sg. kṛ-u-te, du. kṛ-u-āte, pl. kṛ-u-ante; 2nd sg. kṛ-u-se, du. kṛ-u-āthe, pl. kṛ-u-dhve; 1st sg. kṛ-u-e, du. kṛ-uvahe, pl. kṛ-u-mahe (22) Act. pac-a-ti, pac-a-tas, pac-a-anti; paca-si, pac-a-thas, pac-a-tha; pac-a-mi, pac-a-vas, pac-a-mas Mid. pac-a-te, pac-a-āte, pac-a-ante; pac-a-se, pac-a-āthe, pac-a-dhve; pac-ae, pac-a-vahe, pac-a-mahe Again, substitution rules apply to derive the final forms: (23) Stem-final vowels i, u, ṛ undergo substitution by e o a (this last automatically followed by r) before verb affixes, unless the affix is given a particular marker

48

II. Geschichte der morphologischen Forschung I: von der Antike bis zum 19. Jahrhundert

(A 7.3.84: sārvadhātukārdhadhātukayoḥ); accordingly, kṛ-u → kar-u-; kar-u-ti → karoti, kar-u-si → kar-o-si → karoṣi, karu-mi → karomi. Endings not marked with p are treated as marked with n (A 1.2.4: sārvadhātukam apit), to show that they do not condition this substitution. (24) kar-u-tas → kurutas, kar-u-thas → kuruthas: -a- of the stem kar-u- is replaced by -u- if an appropriately marked s¾rvadh¾tuka affix follows (A 6.4.110: ata ut sārvadhātuke); similarly: kṛ-u-anti → kar-u-anti → kur-u-anti, kṛ-u-te → ... kurute. A semivowel replacement rule (6.1.77: iko yaṇ aci) applies to replace -u- with -v- before a vowel: kur-u-anti → kurvanti. (25) kur-u-vas → kurvas, kur-u-mas → kurmas: the affix -u- following kṛ is obligatorily deleted before an ending that begins with v or m (A 6.4.108: nityam karoteḥ). (26) pac-a-anti → pacanti, pac-a-ante → pacante: a and a following guna vowel (a e o) within a word are both replaced by the latter (A 6.1.97: ato guṇe): similarly: pac-a-e → pace. (27) pac-a-mi → pacāmi, pac-a-vas → pacāvas, pac-a-mas → pacāmas, pac-a-vahe → pacāvahe, pac-a-mahe → pacāmahe: stemfinal -a is replaced by the corresponding long vowel before a s¾rvadh¾tuka affix that begins with one of a set of sounds, including m, v (7.3.101: ato dīrgho yañi). (28) pac-a-āte → pac-a-iyte, pac-a-āthe → pac-a-iythe: The endings in question are marked with ṅ (see (23)), so that their initial ¾ is replaced by iy after a stem in -a (A 7.3.81: āto ṅitaḥ). This sets up sequences subject to two phonological rules: guna substitution (see (18)) and the deletion of y before a consonant other than y (A 6.1.66: lopo vyor vali): pac-a-iy-te → pac-a-ite → pacete. P¾‫ڲ‬ini is consistent in his practice of operating with basic underlying elements subject to operations. As an extreme example of this procedure, consider how P¾‫ڲ‬ini accounts for the personal pronoun forms given in (29)– (30). (29) Sg. 1. tvam, 2. tvām, 3. tvayā, 4. tubhyam, 5. tvat, 6. tava, 7. tvayi; Du. 1–2. yuvām, 3–5. yuvābhyām, 6–7. yuvayos; Pl. 1. yūyam, 2. yuṣmān, 3. yuṣmābhis, 4. yuṣmabhyam, 5. yuṣmat, 6. yuṣmākam, 7. yuṣmāsu

(30) Sg. 1. aham, 2. mām, 3. mayā, 4. mahyam, 5. mat, 6. mama, 7. mayi; Du. 1–2. āvām, 3–5. āvābhyām, 6–7. āvayos; Pl. 1. vayam, 2. asmān, 3. asmābhis, 4. asmabhyam, 5. asmat, 6. asmākam, 7. asmāsu The underlying bases for the pronouns are yuṣmad-, asmad-, and all the forms of (29)– (30) are derived from these with the nominal endings given in (7). Some of the endings undergo substitutions after the pronouns, and the stems yuṣmad-, asmad- are subject to replacements before endings; see Cardona (1988: 368–371, 379–380; 1997: 314–315, 323–324) for details. Some forms have orthotonic and enclitic alternants: 2: sg. tvā mā, du. vām nau, pl. vas nas; 4, 6: sg. te me, du. vām nau, pl. vas mas. To account for these, P¾‫ڲ‬ini has a series of substitutions for whole padas consisting of the pronominal bases and endings, provided such a pada follows another pada (A 8.1.16– 17: padasya, padāt). Each replacement lacks a high-pitched vowel (A 8.1.18: anudāttam sarvam apādādau). The substitutions in question apply to yusmad- and asmad- with endings of the sixth, fourth and second triplets (Cardona 1988: 386–388; 1997: 329–330). 4.2.3 Morphology and syntax Neither P¾‫ڲ‬ini nor any other ancient Indian grammarian treats morphology and syntax as unrelated domains. What is traditionally called inflectional morphology is fully integrated with syntactic procedures involved in setting up strings of the type (5)–(6) (see 4.2.1). P¾‫ڲ‬ini does not describe any paradigm of either verbal or nominal forms and separately consider how these are used in utterances. The endings of verb forms like pacati and nominal case forms like odanam, devadattena are introduced under conditions which serve to account for utterances and the relations among forms with such endings are taken into account from the very beginning of any derivation. A great part of derivational morphology also is integrated with syntactic procedures. As (3)–(4) are related utterances, so also are (31) indro vṛtram ahan ‘Indra slew V‫ۆ‬tra. ’ (← indra-s1 v‫ۆ‬tra-am2 han-la‫)ڰ‬ (32) indro vṛtrasya hantā ‘Indra (is) the slayer of V‫ۆ‬tra.’ (← indra-s1 v‫ۆ‬tra-as6 han-t‫ۆ‬-s1) In the P¾‫ڲ‬inian system, the genitive ending of vṛtra-as (→ v‫ۆ‬tra-sya) is introduced to sig-

49

5. Old Indic grammar

nify an object (karman) and the occurrence of this ending is determined by the fact that the nominal in question is syntactically linked to a derivate han-tṛ-, with the agentive affix tṛ (tṛc). In (33) indro dātā vasūni ‘Indra gives treasure.’ (← indra-s1 d¾-t‫ۆ‬-s1 vasu-i2) on the other hand, the derivate dā-tṛ- (root accented d-tṛ- as opposed to oxytone hant) governs the accusative vasūni ([acc. pl. nt.] ← vasu-i). In P¾‫ڲ‬ini’s system, a rule provides that genitive endings are not introduced after nominals to signify objects if these are linked with particular agentive derivates, including those with the affix tṛ (tṛn) of d-tṛ. Moreover, major derivates are formed on the basis of syntactic strings. Consider (34) rājñaḥ puruṣo nagaraṁ gacchati (← r¾jan-as6 puru‫ێ‬a-s1 nagara-am2 gamlaͶ) (35) r ā j a p u r u ṣ o n a g a r a ṁ g a c c h a t i (← r¾japuru‫ێ‬a-s1 nagara-am2 gam-laͶ) Both sentences mean ‘The servant of the king is going to the city.’ They differ in that (35) contains a form of the compound rājapuruṣa‘servant of the king’ and (34) has the analytic sequence rājñaḥ puruṣaḥ, consisting of the genitive singular rājñaḥ (rājan- ‘king’) and the nominative singular puruṣaḥ (puruṣa ‘man, servant’). In view of such alternation, P¾‫ڲ‬ini derives the compound by allowing a sequence

meaning of a lexical item used in an alternative syntagma. For example, the affix -a of (37) has the meaning of a term such as apatya- ‘descendant, offspring’. A form of aupagava- can alternate with a string including such a term; e. g., aupagavaḥ (nom. sg.) = upagor apatyam ‘descendant of Upagu’, in which upagor (gen. sg.) and apatyam (nom. sg.) respectively derive from upagu-as and apatya-s. Derived verbal bases also presuppose syntactic strings. Consider, for example, the verb putrīya- ‘wish for a son’. A P¾‫ڲ‬inian rule (A 3.1.8: supa ātmanaḥ kyac) provides for introducing the affix kyac after a term that terminates in a nominal ending (supaḥ) referring to an object of desiring, the result being a derived verb meaning ‘wish something for oneself.’ The affix is introduced after the complex putra-am, with the second-triplet ending am signifying an object. The derivate {putra-am-ya} thus gotten is a verbal base, any ending in which is deleted: putra-am-ya → putra-ya-, whence putrīya- (3rd sg. pres. indic. putrīyati), with substitution of -ī for the -a of putra. It is clear that in P¾‫ڲ‬ini’s derivational system, aspects of morphology depend on syntax. The derivation of compounds, derivates with taddhita affixes, and denominative verbs illustrates this point, which is also illustrated by how P¾‫ڲ‬ini accounts for enclitic pronouns like mā (see 4.2.2).

(36) {([r¾jan-]as) ([puru‫ێ‬a-]s)}

5.

optionally to be bracketed as a new unit, labelled samāsa ‘compound’. Any compound is a derived nominal base, and a rule provides for omitting endings in included within nominal and verbal bases (A 2.4.71: supo dhātuprātipadikayoḥ). Accordingly, the endings of (36) are dropped: ([r¾jan-]as) ([puru‫ێ‬a-]s) → {r¾jan-puru‫ێ‬a-}. By a convention established in the grammar, rājan- in rājan-puruṣa- thus derived is still treated as a word (pada), so that its -n is dropped, just as the -n of the base rājan- is dropped in the nominative singular rājā (← rajan-s), which is also a word. A derivate like aupagava- ‘descendant of Upagu’ is comparably derived from a sequence that includes a nominal ending:

5.1. Sanskrit grammars

(37) {(([upagu-]as6)-a)} In P¾‫ڲ‬ini’s system, a syntactic item such as upagu-as6 is optionally followed by an affix (of the set called taddhita) which has the

Other grammarians

Many grammarians after P¾‫ڲ‬ini also composed grammars of Sanskrit for various purposes. One of these, Candragomin, is traditionally said to have revived the study of grammar after it had fallen on hard times. The methods of later grammarians are generally in harmony with P¾‫ڲ‬ini, although they do not agree in all details. For example, Panini and most others operate with a verb base as ‘be’ (as in 3rd sg. pres. asti), the vowel of which is dropped in order to account for forms like stas ‘they two are (3rd du.)’ and santi ‘they are (3rd pl.)’. Commentators mention that some grammarians operated with a base s, to which augments were added in deriving forms like asti. One interesting feature with respect to which later grammarians differ from P¾‫ڲ‬ini concerns abstract affixes. As shown, P¾‫ڲ‬ini operates with ten L-affixes, which are replaced by verb endings and par-

50

II. Geschichte der morphologischen Forschung I: von der Antike bis zum 19. Jahrhundert

ticipial affixes. Some grammarians do not posit abstract L-affixes. Instead, they operate directly with sets of endings. Moreover, they refer to these sets by names which are related to the semantics associated with the endings. For example, in the system of Hemacandra (late 11th to 12th century), the set of endings tiv tas anti, siv thas tha, miv vas mas; te āte ante, se āthe dhve, e vahe mahe is called vartamānā, just as traditional Western grammars speak of present endings. This procedure antedates Hemacandra (see Cardona 1988: 576–579; 1997: 496–498). We have here an instance of post-P¾‫ڲ‬inian grammarians reverting to a methodology that P¾‫ڲ‬ini himself had surpassed. 5.2. Middle Indic grammars Indian scholars also produced grammars describing Middle Indic vernaculars, Prakrits (Skt. prākṛta). One noteworthy feature of these is that they assume Sanskrit forms as sources and derive Middle Indic forms from them through substitution rules, the closest analog in ancient and mediaeval India to historical linguistics. As an illustration of how these grammarians proceed, consider how an early grammar describing a major literary Prakrit, the Prākṛtaprakāśa, accounts for the forms in (38), comparable to the Sanskrit forms of (10). (References given in parentheses are to chapter and rule of the Prākṛtaprakāśa [Upadhy¾ya 1972].) (38) Sg. 1. devo, 1a. deva, 2. devaṁ, 3. deveṇa, 5. devā/devāo/devāu/devāhi, 6. devassa, 7. deve/devammi; Pl. 1–1a. devā, 2. devā/ deve, 3. devehiṁ, 5. devāhiṁto/devāsuṁto, 6. devāṇa, 7. devesu These are derived from the underlying forms (39) Sg. 1–1a. deva-s, 2. deva-am, 3. deva-ā, 5–6. deva-as, 7. deva-i; Pl. 1–2. devaas, 3. deva-bhis, 5. deva-bhyas, 6. devaām, 7. deva-su Both the endings and the stem-vowel are subject to substitution. For example: (40) After a stem in -a, su → o (5.1: ata ot soḥ), jas/śas → Ø (5.2: jaśśasor lopaḥ). (41) The stem-vowel -a undergoes the following substitutions before particular endings; for example, -a → -ā / – jas/ ṅasi/ām (5.11: jasṅasyāṁsu dīrghaḥ): deva-as → deva → devā, deva-as → devao/u/hi → devāo devāu devāhi, deva-ām → deva-ṇa → devāṇa.

Moreover, in Prakrits plural endings occur instead of dual endings (5.109: dvivacanasya bahuvacanam) and the genitive occurs instead of the dative except for dative endings used in expressing a purpose (5.110–111: caturthyāḥ ṣaṣṭhī, kvacin na tādarthye). As shown, to account for the forms in (38), the Pr¾k‫ۆ‬taprak¾sa has operations apply to elements in underlying complexes of a base and endings identical with those that P¾‫ڲ‬ini posits. Other grammarians proceed in essentially the same manner. A different procedure is adopted to account for Prakrit pronoun forms comparable to those in (29)–(30). For example, the nominative singular forms taṁ, tumaṁ are described as substitutes for the entire pada consisting of the pronominal base yuṣmad and the ending s (5.71–2: padasya, yuṣmadas taṁ tumaṁ). This is comparable to P¾‫ڲ‬ini’s way of deriving enclitic tvā and so on.

6.

Influence of Indian grammarians

6.1. Influence within India In India, grammar was without any doubt the earliest learned pursuit in which formal relations among entities were investigated and described in terms of rules, and it remained the acknowledged queen of the sciences. The status that grammar held is evident from the influence it exerted on other areas of Indian learning. P¾‫ڲ‬ini’s Aṣṭādhyāyī in particular achieved preeminent status. As concerns morphology and syntax in particular, it is noteworthy that ritual exegetes (mīmāṁsaka) and logicians (naiyāyika) of particular schools adopted P¾‫ڲ‬inian rules but reinterpreted them in accordance with their own views. Consider (42) devadattaḥ pacati ‘Devadatta is cooking.’ (cf. (3)) In P¾‫ڲ‬ini’s scheme, the verb ending ti signifies an agent with respect to the action denoted by the verb pac. In accordance with this, P¾‫ڲ‬inèyas consider the principal meaning of such a sentence to be the action (kriyā) that is brought to accomplishment by direct participants (kāraka). According to a certain group of logicians, on the other hand, a sentence like (42) is considered to predicate of Devadatta that he is qualified by the conscious effort (kṛti) that leads to cooking (pākānukūlakṛtimān). In this scheme, the ending ti is considered to signify conscious effort, not an unspecified agent, and agents are in-

5. Old Indic grammar

telligent beings capable of such effort. A school of ritualists holds that a sentence like (43) jyotiṣṭomena svargakāmo yajeta ‘One who wishes for heaven should perform the Jyoti‫ۘێ‬oma.’ enjoins one who wishes to attain heaven (svargakāma) to bring this about through performing the Jyotiṣṭoma rite. In this scheme, the verb ending ta is considered to signify an activity (vyāpāra), namely exerting oneself in such a way as to bring about a result (bhāvanā ‘causing to be’). Although the logician and the ritual exegete are not primarily interested in grammatical analysis per se, they do accept verbal transmission (āgama, śabda) as one of the valid means of acquiring and transmitting knowledge. And in this connection, they interact with grammarians, principally with P¾‫ڲ‬ini and his successors, so that they present and defend their views along with arguments against the views of such grammarians. (See Cardona 1976: 230–232 for additional literature.) 6.2.

Influence outside India

As is well known, the discovery of Sanskrit and its grammars served as a major stimulus to Indo-European studies in Europe. It is fair to say, nevertheless, that the methodology of P¾‫ڲ‬ini and other Indian grammarians has not had deep effect on the study of grammar in the West. To be sure, terms like guṇa, cṛddhi, samprasāraṇa parasmaipada, ātmanepada have gained currency, and the descriptions of vowel gradation for Indo-European could be said to owe something to Indian concepts. Still, there is no deep influence. Earlier, Indian models had some influence in studies of languages of areas where Indian culture and religions extended, as in Tibet. Here too, however, one does not see a deep penetration of Indian grammarians’ views – certainly not of P¾‫ڲ‬ini’s (Miller 1976: 120).

7.

References

Abhyankar, Kahinatha Vasudev (1962–1972), The Vyākaraṇa-Mahābhāṣya of Patañjali, ed. by F. Kielhorn, 3rd ed., rev. and furnished with additional readings, references and select critical notes. Poona: Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute

51 Bannerjee, Satya Ranjan (1977), The Eastern School of Prakrit Grammarians. Calcutta: Vidyasagar Pustak Mandir Belvalkar, Shripad Krishna (1915), An Account of the Different Existing Systems of Sanskrit Grammar. Poona: the author Cardona, George (1976), Pāṇini, a Survey of Research. The Hague: Mouton (Trends in Linguistics, State of the Art Reports 6) [reprinted 1980, 1997: Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass] Cardona, George (1988), Pāṇini: His Work and Its Traditions, Vol. I: General Introduction and Background. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass Cardona, George (1989), “P¾‫ڲ‬inian Studies”. In: Jha, V. N. (ed.), New Horizons of Research in Indology. Pune: University of Poona, 49–84 Cardona, George (1997), Pāṇini: His Work and Its Tradition, Vol. I: General Introduction and Background [second edition, revised and enlarged]. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass Cardona, George (1999), Recent Research in Pāṇinian Studies. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass Coward, Harold G. & Raja, K. Kunjunni (1990), Encyclopedia of Indian Philosophies: The Philosophy of the Grammarians. Princeton; NJ: Princeton University Press Katre, Sumitra Mangesh (1987), Astādhyāyī of Pāṇini. Austin; TX: University of Texas Press Mahābhāṣya = Abhyankar (1962–72) Miller, Roy Andrew (1976), Studies in the Grammatical Tradition in Tibet. Amsterdam: Benjamins (Studies in the History of Language Sciences 6) Nitti-Dolci, Luigia (1938), Les grammairiens prakrits. Paris: Adrien-Maisonneuve Prākṛtaprakāśa = Up¾dhy¾ya (1972) Sharma, Rama Nath (1987), The Aṣṭādhyāyī of Pāṇini, Vol. I: Introduction to the Aṣṭādhyāyī as a Grammatical Device. Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal Sharma, Rama Nath (1990), The Aṣṭādhyāyī of Pāṇini, Vol. II: English Translation of Adhyāya One with Sanskrit Text, Transliteration, Word-boundary, Anuvrtti, Vrtti, Explanatory Notes, Derivational History of Examples, and Indices. Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal Sharma, Rama Nath (1995), The Aṣṭādhyāyī of Pāṇini, Vol. III: English Translation of Adhyāya Two and Three with Sanskrit Text, Transliteration, Word-boundary, Anuvrtti, Vrtti, Explanatory Notes, Derivational History of Examples, and Indices. Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal Up¾dhy¾ya, Baladeva (1972), Prākṛtaprakāśa of Vararuci with the Sañjīvani, Subodhinī, Manoramā and Prākṛtamañjarī Commentaries and Hindi Translation. Varanasi: Varanaseya Sanskrit Vishvavidyalaya (Sarasvatèbhavana-Grantham¾l¾ 102)

George Cardona, Philadelphia (U. S. A.)

52

II. Geschichte der morphologischen Forschung I: von der Antike bis zum 19. Jahrhundert

6. Classical Antiquity 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

Introduction Classical Antiqutiy: Greece The Byzantine age (330⫺1453) The Latin world Conclusion References

1.

Introduction

This article is intended to give an account of the origin and development of morphology in the classical world of Ancient Greece and Rome. After this general introduction (1) the article comprises five sections: Greece (2), the Byzantine Empire (3), Rome (4), Conclusion (5), and bibliographical references (6). The article is serially organized in this way for clarity and ease of reference, but it must be borne in mind that the three central sections do not relate a chronological sequence. Certainly morphology, like the rest of linguistics as we know it today, was first conceived and initially developed by the Ancient Greeks, and practised in Rome under Greek teachers and followed Greek concepts. But from the second century BC Greek and Latin scholars were working simultaneously, maintaining contact with each other’s writings, until the separation of the Greek Eastern Empire and the Latin Western Empire that began in the fourth century AD. In the Middle Ages the western Latin tradition developed on somewhat different lines to the Greek eastern tradition, but significant contacts were renewed between them towards the end of the Middle Ages, and especially after the fall of Byzantium, Constantinople, to the Turks in 1453. The western tradition in the Middle Ages is covered in Art. 8; the continuation of the Greek tradition in Byzantine times is the subject of section 3 of the present article. Morphology concerns itself with grammatically and semantically significant differences in word forms and word structures, such as are found in all European languages and in most languages in the world. The relationship of morphology to other levels of language description, principally phonology and syntax has been, and is, a matter of debate and controversy. This is discussed in various books on the subject, for example Matthews (1974); cf. also Art. 34, 35. However, there is no doubt about the central place of morphology in the linguistics

of the world of European Antiquity, although, interestingly, the classical Greek equivalent of English morphology, *morphologia, is not recorded in any Greek writings known today.

2.

Classical Antiquity: Greece

Linguistic studies in western Antiquity should be surveyed in the varying contexts of their times and circumstances. Very broadly, Antiquity covers the creation and flowering of Greek civilization in mainland Greece and the subsequent Roman rule in the high period of their Empire over western Europe south of the Rhine and the Danube, North Africa, and the Near East. In this period, lasting some thousand years, achievements in literature, art, science, and of moral, political, and general philosophy, reached standards never attained before and seldom equalled since. The modern world is almost wholly in their debt, and in the words of one historian, “We Europeans are the children of Hellas” (Fisher 1936: 1). If the Greeks were innovative, intellectual and artistic, the Romans were practical, disciplined and efficient. It was their relatively beneficent rule from around 100 BC to 200 AD that permitted and encouraged the consolidation and diffusion of Greek achievements over the whole Mediterranean and Near-Eastern world, the Greek-speaking East, and the Latin-speaking West. These two centuries included the period, roughly from 100 to 200 AD, which Gibbon, writing at the end of the eighteenth century, declared was the time when “the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous” (Gibbon 1776 [1960: 1]). Not only chronologically, but more important, theoretically, we should consider the Greek creative achievement in linguistic studies first, and then the successful and vitally important translation and transmission of Greek doctrine by the Latin grammarians. Although the Greek and Latin linguistic scholars overlapped from the second century BC, the Greeks were in general the teachers and the Latins the pupils and followers. Horace’s assertion “Graecia capta ferum victorem cepit”, (‘captive Greece took captive her rude captor’) was never better exemplified than in the field of linguistic studies.

4. The Ancient Near East

In Greece linguistic investigations had two sources. Firstly, a philosophical interest in the nature and uses of language, and secondly at a later period the requirement to teach Greek and Greek literature among speakers of other languages and to maintain standards of correctness in the much wider diffusion of the Greek-speaking community after the Macedonian conquest of the Near and Middle East in the fourth century BC. Among philosophers the pre-Socratics (about whom less is known than about their successors), Socrates himself, Plato, his disciple and expositor, Aristotle, and the Stoics all examined the nature and the structure of language, with almost exclusive reference to the Greek language. Early links had been recognized between the different tense inflections and actual temporal relationships. A contemporary comedian, Aristophanes, makes fun of Socrates for discussing formal noun gender in relation to sex differences with his pupils (Nubes, 658⫺699). Such a jibe would not have been appreciated if such interests were not, in fact, part of the informal teaching of Socrates. He, as is well known, wrote nothing, but Plato records a dialogue, the Cratylus, in which various linguistic questions are discussed, though not primarily on problems of grammar. Elsewhere, however, Plato makes a first step in sentence analysis by distinguishing onoma, ‘name’, from what is said about it, rhe¯ma (e.g. Cratylus 399 B, 425 A; Sophistes 262 A⫺ 263 D). This primary division was taken further in several of his works by Aristotle, who introduces a third component of sentence structure, sundesmos ‘binder’, a loosely knit set of what might today be called function words, including conjunctions, prepositions, and personal pronouns (Rhetorica 3.5, 3.12; see also Art. 71). Greek, as is well known, was, like Latin, a highly inflected language, in which grammatical relations were in the main signalled by morphological differences in word forms, and the sequential ordering of words themselves in sentences and clauses was mainly a matter of style and emphasis. Not surprisingly, therefore, after the first Platonic division of the sentence into its two components, subsequent grammatical analysis concentrated on the different forms of words. In this Aristotle was the originator of morphological description. He made use of the ordinary language word pto¯sis ‘fall’ (as in pto¯sis Iliou ‘the fall of Troy’), to designate all the various

53 morphological differences in word forms having grammatical or semantic distinctiveness. The reason for his choice of this word is obscure, but for practical purposes it is not of prime importance. What matters is that for several generations of investigators morphology held the key to grammatical studies (Aristotle, De interpretatione 2⫺3; Topica 1.15, 5.7). In considering the development of Greek grammatical theory, grammatical analyses of Greek, and ultimately the writing of Greek grammar books, it is important historically to remember that the Greeks had to devise a technical metalanguage of grammar from its beginnings. There were no grammars of the language in existence, nor of any other language known to them. All they could do was to take words from ordinary object language and forge them into technical usage. The Latin grammarians had an easier task, that of translating these Greek terms into Latin; Greek pto¯sis became Latin casus, and hence English case. It must be understood that the Greek grammarians’ morphological analyses were “word and paradigm” (Hockett 1954: 210), not based on the modern concept of the morpheme. Throughout Antiquity, and for many years beyond, morphology was envisaged as the formal modification of a presumed primary or basic word form, for example, the nominative singular of nouns. The Stoic replacement of Aristotle’s pto¯sis by klisis ‘bending’ (Latin declinatio, English declension) brought out this conception more explicitly. Words were distinguished by their “endings”, not as individual suffixes, but as ways of formally ending the word; the expressions like “verbs ending in -mi” and “nouns ending in -os” are typical. The word used technically in this context was the verb le¯go¯, which otherwise just meant ‘end, cease’, for example le¯go¯ eridos ‘cease from strife’. The fact that grammatical differences in Greek word forms very largely concerned morphemic substitutions following the root form (wholly so in nouns) made this mode of description clear enough. Notably such derivational prefixes as were found in words like sunteino ‘draw together’, and metoikos ‘resident foreigner’, were referred to as “composite”, just because the prefixes could be formally matched with independent prepositions. This could lead to such mistaken analyses as Priscian’s identification of in- ‘negative’ with the preposition in ‘in’ (Keil 1859: 9⫺12), despite the homo-

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phonous invisus ‘unseen’ and invisus ‘looked at askance’. In fact, the nearest conception to the modern bound morpheme comes in the analysis of some compound words as being formed from “incomplete roots”, e.g. philanthro¯pos ‘benevolent’ (phil- ‘love’ ⫹ anthro¯pos ‘man’). The Stoics made considerable advances and developments in grammatical theory as a whole and particularly in morphology. Their introduction of klisis for morphological variation in general followed from their identification of pto¯sis in roughly its subsequent and modern meaning of ‘nominal case’, morphological differences in nominal words carrying grammatical distinctions. It was the Stoics who made pto¯sis the fundamentum divisionis between nominal and verbal words and gave rise to a long period of theorizing about case meanings that persisted through Greek and Latin grammatical work, culminating in the late Byzantine grammarian Maximus Planudes’s approach to a localist theory of case (Maximus Planudes 1828: 121⫺123). To the Stoics also we owe the distinction between the nominative and the oblique cases. For them the nominative was the “upright” (orthe¯ or eutheia) case, because it represented the subject or actor in relation to a verb, while the genitive, dative, and accusative cases were “oblique” (‘sideways’, plagiai), because they represented the designation of the noun in a specific relation to the action or process designated by the (transitive) verb. The vocative was included in the case paradigm later on morphological grounds. Its relations with the rest of the sentence were syntactically and semantically different, and later Byzantine grammarians queried its status as a case in the proper sense of the term (e.g. Hilgard 1889: 111.1). Stoic inflectional theory led them to expand the system of three sentence components left by Aristotle. Noun and verb were now firmly distinguished by case and by tense respectively. Additionally, the Aristotelian class of binders was separated into two, those that were inflected for case, the personal pronouns and the (Greek) definite article, and those that were not, prepositions and conjuctions. What had been in Plato’s analysis sentence components, of any length, had now emerged as classes of words, morphologically distinguished. But the original term meros logou ‘part of a sentence’ persisted and was subsequently translated into Latin as pars ora-

tionis. But oratio had two principal meanings, ‘sentence’, corresponding to the Greek logos and ‘spoken utterance, speech’, giving rise to the subsequent traditional term part of speech. Stoic philosophy continued through the Greek and Roman world until after the recognition of Christianity as the official religion of the Roman Empire (fourth century AD), when pagan philosophy in general was disfavoured. But later in the western Middle Ages Aristotelianism was revived with the view of many Catholic theologians, in particular St. Thomas Aquinas, that in Aristotle’s teaching there was nothing irreconcilable with revealed Christian doctrine. What distinguished Stoic philosophy from Aristotelian was that the Stoics explicitly treated grammar as a part of dialectic and a vital key to the study of the human mind. This is made clear in the sentence “Most people are agreed that it is proper to begin the study of dialectic from that part of it that deals with speech” (Diogenes Leartius 7.55). In consequence, for the first time in Greece, so far as is known, grammar was assigned specific treatises with the Stoic bibliography, rather than mere mentions in more general logical, metaphysical, and literary writings, as was the case with Aristotle. Most unfortunately none of these books survive; they are known through book lists appended to such accounts of Stoic philosophers as appear in the encyclopaedic Lives of the philosophers by Diogenes Laertius (c. third century AD). Titles such as the following appear in these lists (Diogenes Laertius 7.192): On nominatives and oblique cases, On singular and plural forms, On the arrangement of sentences, and many others. Because of the loss of the primary sources, it is not easy to reconstruct the Stoic theory, or theories, of language, though an articulated theory covering phonetics, morphology, syntax, and semantics does appear to have been presented (cf. von Arnim 1905⫺1924: 206a; Mates 1953; Long 1971; Frede 1978; Versteegh 1980; Dinneen 1985; Brekle 1985: 44⫺67). Stoic linguistics contributed significantly to the linguistic thinking in Antiquity, but it is clear that it did not constitute the main body of traditional Greek and Latin grammar contained in the didactic syllabus of later Greek and Latin grammatical education. The Stoics continued the treatment of grammar and of linguistics as a whole within

4. The Ancient Near East

philosophy. Their aims were in line with much of our contemporary thought about language as a key to unlock some of the secrets of the human brain. In a sense therefore they were primarily concerned with syntax and morphology from the viewpoint of “the philosopher, not that of the literary critic” (cf. von Arnim 1909⫺1924: 206a). So far we have been considering one of the sources of Greek grammar, the intellectual and philosophical interest in language as a human capability and activity. This is well expressed in the dictum “The ancient Greeks had the gift of wondering at things that other people take for granted” (Bloomfield 1935: 4). Stoic philosophical interest in language and in grammatical theory went on into the Christian era, but more or less contemporaneously with the early Stoics a political change in the eastern Mediterranean and in Asia Minor was steadily transforming the linguistic situation and bringing with it profound consequences in grammatical studies. These events flowed from the Macedonian conquest of the Greek world, the East, and much of the Levant; and their incorporation into the Macedonian empire under Alexander and his successors was effectively completed by the end of the fourth century BC. Two centuries later this whole area was taken into the Roman Empire and administered from Rome, though the linguistic situation was not significantly altered by this later transference of power. Alexander and his successors believed, or outwardly affected the belief, that their conquests and consequent power were justified by their bringing Greek civilization and Greek culture to the former Persian Empire and to Egypt, superior to anything these people had known hitherto. As in the case of Latin in the western Roman Empire, Greek became the public language of educated life, the language of administration, and the language of social advancement. The Greek that was spread over this whole vast area was a kind of non-dialectal form of the language derived from classical Athenian (Attic) Greek and for obvious reasons designated the koine¯ (dialektos) ‘the common (dialect)’. It may be easily read and compared with classical Greek in the Greek “New Testament”. All this created a new and a quite different factor in grammatical studies. Hitherto grammar teaching had been concerned with the education and enlightenment of speakers of Greek. After the Macedonian conquests

55 Greek as a foreign language for the first time became a subject of great importance and required staff and resources for the teaching of Greek grammar and Greek literature at all levels. Hence the term Hellenistic (‘making Greek’) is often used of the last three centuries before the Christian era. Schools, academies, and universities were established, often under the patronage of the Macedonian rulers, with scholars and libraries funded by state finances. One such place was Alexandria, named after its founder, Alexander, where something like a modern university and university library was renowned throughout the Greek world. The establishment of authentic texts of the Homeric poems, something that had long been pursued in Greece itself, was now a major concern of the Alexandrian school, as Homer came to be regarded as Greek literature par excellence and was widely studied. All this activity required a new conception of grammar, and especially of morphology. It was no longer part of a philosophical and scholarly investigation of the Greek language by speakers of Greek as a matter of intellectual interest. Teachers and pupils now needed explicit grammar books which would set out the morphology of the language in a comprehensive form that could be dictated to listeners and learned by heart. The best known and first surviving such grammar book, the Techne¯ grammatike¯ ‘Science of grammar’, was a brief and concise summary of the orthographic phonetics of the language (“the pronunciation of the letters”), followed by a list of the now eight word classes with their definitions and their inflectional and derivational categories, and their subclasses (proper noun, etc.), all exemplified. In modern print this little book numbers about fifteen pages. It became the basis for the teaching of morphology throughout the Greek world and the later Byzantine Greek world as well, being the basis for later syntactic studies of the language, as, for example, the voluminous works of Apollonius Dyscolus (c. 200 AD). There is some uncertainty about the text as we have it. It was ascribed to Dionysius Thrax, a teacher who lived and worked around 100 BC. He was a pupil of the famous Alexandrian scholar Aristarchus, a renowned Homeric critic and himself a grammarian. Indeed it may well be that the system of morphology set out in the Techne¯ was itself first formulated by Aristarchus. For various

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reasons, cited both in Byzantine times and in modern studies, it is difficult to accept all the text as we have it as genuinely Dionysius’s work, and what we have may be the last of several subsequent “editions”, attributed to Dionysius and maintaining his conception and exposition of Greek morphology, with various changes in the course of years, the final version being perhaps established by the fourth century AD. Ultimately the theory and method originally employed by Dionysius, along with the later additions and alterations, were accepted as definitive by the Byzantine grammarians, especially in regard to the eight word classes. There is a reference to “Dionysius who taught us the eight parts of speech” (Hilgard 1901: 128.28⫺29). The Latin scholar Terentius Varro (first century BC) was clearly aware of an earlier version, and its mode of presenting and describing the grammar of Greek has now been attested in some grammatical papyri from the early Christian era in Egypt (cf. Wouters 1975; Robins 1997: 37⫺38). The details of the controversy over the text of the Techne¯ do not concern this article, but the first section of the book is of considerable importance and it is certainly the genuine work of Dionysius Thrax, because it is cited under his name by a writer of the second century AD (Sextus, Adversus grammaticos § 57, 72, 250), and his initial definition of the term grammar is quoted in an almost word for word translation by the later contemporary Latin writer Varro (Funaioli 1907: 265). In the initial section of the Techne¯ grammatike¯ Dionysius lays down in some detail the context of grammatical studies, and this context includes the prime objective of grammatical studies as a propaedeutic to the critical appreciation of classical literature. The central component of grammar is morphology, the establishment of the formal regularities of the language (the “analogies”). The word, conformably with all grammar writing in Antiquity, is the basic unit, the minimal segment of syntactic structure; but nothing further is said in this little book about syntax. The Techne¯ recognizes eight word classes, and these soon became standard (though not unique): noun, verb, participle, pronoun, and definite article, all inflected, and preposition, adverb, and conjunction, all uninflected. This system will be seen as a further articulation of the Stoic system, and Stoic terminology, especially case as the formal criterion

of nominal words, is apparent in the definitions of the classes and their subdivisions. Morphology and morphological categories (parepomena, accidentia ‘accidents’) are the keys to the definitions of the inflected classes, along with a subsequent semantic gloss. Typical are the definitions of the noun and the verb: “Noun, a case-inflected class of words, signifying a concrete or an abstract entity”; “verb, a word not inflected for case, but inflected for tense, person, and number, signifying an action or an experience”. The status of participles, which in Greek constituted richer morphological paradigms than in Latin (and in modern European languages), was entirely the consequence of their “participating” in both the nominal category of case and the verbal category of tense; the Greek term metoche¯ ‘participle’ came from the verb metechein ‘share’. The grammar set out in the Techne¯ is orientated towards the reader or hearer; there is no mention of the mental or philosophical status of the faculty of speech, and the definition of the subject is entirely clear. This caused some resentment among those concerned with linguistic studies, and the lines of the resultant controversy are preserved in the Byzantine commentaries (e.g. Hilgard 1901: 166.25⫺167.4). There was no objection, in fact there was general agreement, as regards the primarily literary objectives of grammatical study. What was found unacceptable was the alleged down-grading of the subject. Dionysius defined the techne¯ grammatike¯ ‘science of grammar’ as empeiria ‘practical knowledge’ of the usage of poets and prose writers (Uhlig 1883: 5.2⫺3). The distinction between techne¯ as a principled explanatory science and empeiria ‘successful practice from long experience’ had been long established in Greek thought (cf. Plato, Gorgias 465 a). The contrast was between the two conceptions of grammar, and therefore of morphology: the account of what the speaker knows and has in him whereby he is a fluent speaker, and a careful record of the forms used by accepted authors, their systematic presentation for students of the language, and the compiling of grammar books for this purpose, i.e. grammar for the hearer and the reader. Such rivalry over scientific prestige is perhaps inevitable, but the real contrast is not one of relative merit, but concerns the purposes intended and served and the choice of methods appropriate to each. In modern times there is a similar contrast between grammar as an

4. The Ancient Near East

investigation of the processes and faculties of the human brain, and as the systematic compilation and classification of the data. Analogy, regularity, was the key to the description of morphology as presented in the Techne¯, and this requires some comment. In Greece an early and persisting debate characterized the initial phase of grammatical thinking. Greek morphology is full of exceptions or irregularities in noun case forms and verb tense forms. Grammarians seized on the regularity (analogia), of paradigmatically associated forms and of grammatical forms and their meanings, such as plural forms denoting more than one object. In contrast, others would point out the inevitable exceptions (ano¯maliai) in the paradigms, such as Ze¯nos as the genitive of Zeus and the formal plural Athe¯nai to designate the single city of Athens (whatever may have been its historical origin). It must be kept in mind that this sort of discussion took place before any grammar of Greek had been written and could be consulted. Essentially, the discussion was part of the process of creating a descriptive grammar of the language. By the time of Dionysius the analogists had sufficiently demonstrated that morphological regularities and “analogous” paradigms of forms could be established, with the admission that exceptions must be recognized and accepted when justified by literary usage. In the descriptive morphology of Greek and in the intended interest of the teaching of Greek, later on efforts were made to set out the full paradigmatic possibilities of verbs. In this the transitive verb tupto¯ ‘beat, strike’ was chosen and in a famous publication all the rules and subrules that could give rise to well formed words within the whole verbal system were together applied to this one verb, producing a immense array of possible forms, regardless of the fact that only a subset of such formations were actually attested in use by the classical authors. The resultant list may nonetheless have been of use in showing very clearly the total potentiality of Greek verb morphology, illustrated from a single verb root. The author of this work was Theodosius, a fourth century Alexandrian scholar. His Kanones ‘Rules’, as his work was called, was the subject of much commentary and explanation on the part of Byzantine grammarians (Hilgard 1889; 1894). Verb forms in Greek, as in other highly inflected languages, expressed in their mor-

57 phology many of the temporal, modal, and aspectual distinctions that are carried in many modern European languages by verbal phrases making use of auxiliary verbs, adverbs, and the like. In fact, the morphological structure of the Greek verb could indicate within a single word form the categories of tense, person, number, voice, and mood. Plato had identified nouns and nominal phrases as logical subjects of declarative sentences, and verbs and verbal phrases as their predicates. Aristotle had further identified the category of time as a distinctive semantic feature of verbs. But it was the Stoics who demonstrated a unique insight in showing that time reference alone did not account for the semantic content of the tense inflections of the Greek verb (cf. Hilgard 1901: 250.26⫺ 251.25; Versteegh 1980), and though they did not use the term explicitly, they showed how the aspectual distinction between completeat-the-time-spoken-of and incomplete-orcontinuing was a separate dimension. Some indication of this may be seen in comparing gegrapha ‘I have written’ with egraphon ‘I was writing’, where the distinction lies between an activity completed at the present time or time of speaking and one that was still going on during that time of reference. Likewise the pluperfect egegraphein ‘I had written’ refers to activity already completed before a past time of reference. Traces of Stoic doctrine are apparent in the Techne¯ and in the grammar books that followed it, especially in the terminology used. The names of the tenses used by all the Greek grammarians show the effects of Stoic thinking. The names of the four tenses that make reference to time past are paratatikos ‘continuing’ (Latin imperfectum ‘incomplete’), parakeimenos ‘lying before us’ (Latin perfectum ‘completed’), hupersuntelikon ‘beyond completion’ (Latin plusquamperfectum ‘pluperfect’), and aoriston ‘(indeterminate) past’ (a tense not formally distinguished in Latin). But the Techne¯ and subsequent grammars tended to ignore or to misrepresent the Stoic insights into this part of the semantics of the Greek verb. Their scheme was to group all these four tenses, imperfect, perfect, pluperfect, and aorist (unmarked past), together as representing only subdivisions of past time, glossed and further specified by adverbs of time, such as arti ‘lately’, palai ‘a long time ago’, and propalai ‘a very long time ago’, which are strictly irrelevant. Consider the

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English sentences Northern Europe has been temperate since the last Ice Age (an era long past) and Just after he had spoken he fell down dead. A Greek example of the pluperfect properly used of the very near past is seen in Homer’s Iliad (5: 660⫺661), where two sequential events occur almost simultaneously: Tle¯polemos d’ara me¯ron aristeron enchei makro¯i beble¯kein, aichme¯ de diessuto maimaio¯sa ‘Tlepolemos had hit (pluperfect) his left thigh with a long lance, and its tip ran through him (past aorist) with alacrity’.

3.

The Byzantine age (330⫺1453)

Reference has been made already in several places to Byzantine grammarians. In fact, so far as linguistic scholarship is concerned, no sharp break can be seen while the Greek parts of the Roman Empire became the Eastern or Byzantine Empire. The Byzantine age may be said to start in 330, with the official refounding of Byzantium as Constantinople, Constantine’s City, or “the New Rome”. The division of the old unitary Empire into two halves had already been effective since the end of the third century AD, and with the collapse of the Western Empire in 450 Byzantium took on the role of preserving and continuing the civilization and scholarship that it inherited. Scholars tended to congregate in Constantinople rather than in Alexandria, and linguistic scholars were deeply concerned with the preservation of standards of correctness in the face of dialectal changes among speakers and among some writers of Greek, accompanying its movement towards what ultimately became Modern Greek. It is no part of this article to follow the political fortunes and misfortunes of the Eastern Empire up to 1453, when Constantinople fell to the invading Turks, but the context of linguistic studies clearly affected the work done by linguistic scholars. Didactic requirements were paramount. A contemporary historian of the twelfth century writes of a school where together Greek speakers improve their knowledge of the classical language, Latins learn Greek, and barbarians are introduced to the language and the culture of the Greeks (cl. Reifferscheid 1884: 293). Naturally the bulk of the grammar books were written in Greek about Greek. One major exception was Priscian, whose massive Institutiones grammaticae was written about

500. It was designed to serve the needs of those who (vainly) intended that Constantine’s City, as the “New Rome”, should be at least in the upper levels of society a Latin speaking city. Priscian’s Latin grammar was, in fact, more successful and became historically more important in the western Middle Ages in the teaching of Latin and in the development of a distinctive theoretical grammar (see Art. 8). Priscian expressly commits himself to following his Greek masters and predecessors as far as he possibly can (for his work on Latin cf. 4). As a writer of Latin grammar for a largely Greek speaking class of pupils, he is liberal with morphological and syntactic examples from both languages, and there is some evidence that certain Byzantine Greek grammarians used his work directly as their source of existing grammatical scholarship. In Byzantine studies of morphology the Techne¯ ascribed to Dionysius Thrax, which had reached its present and accepted version by the fourth century, was the source and the authority for further writing. Extensive commentaries on it by scholiasts of several generations are extant, occupying very many more pages than the origianal booklet itself (cf. Hilgard 1901). Subsequent independent writings on morphology comprised elaborations and explications of what the Techne¯ had set out so succinctly, and rules for the formation of the paradigms of regularly inflected words. At least two Byzantine grammarians, Charax (sixth century) and Choeroboscus (c. 800) wrote extensive commentaries on the Kanones of Theodosius (cf. Bühler & Theodoridis 1976; Kaster 1988: 394 f.). Charax’s commentary is known today through the excerpts from it of the ninth century Sophronius. On Theodosius’ maximal paradigms Choeroboscus admits that a few of his well formed examples are not actually found in use, e.g. ethe¯n ‘I placed’ and edo¯n ‘I gave’ as singular aorist forms of the -mi verbs tithe¯mi and dido¯mi (Hilgard 1894: 345.27⫺28, 31⫺ 32); and even Theodosius himself had to admit, almost reproachfully, that the¯ko¯ as an aorist subjunctive of tithe¯mi “ought to have existed but was not used” (Hilgard 1889: 96.6: edei men ean the¯ko¯, all’arrhe¯ton emeinen). The formal analysis of Greek morphology was left as it had been set down by the classical grammarians, but it was amplified with additional examples and reduced where possible to rules, with the choice of basic forms

4. The Ancient Near East

being governed by greatest economy in the statement of the rules. Several books that set out Greek morphology were in great part expressed in question and answer terms, most notably in Manuel Chrysoloras’s Ero¯te¯mata ‘Questions’, which was one of the most important grammars in use in the Italian phase of the Renaissance revival of Greek studies. Generally speaking, contact was lost, as far as Byzantine Greek scholarship was concerned, with the Latin west during much of the Middle Ages; for late mediaeval developments in philosophical grammar based on the Latin grammar of Priscian cf. Art. 8. As was their wont, and almost their intention, the Latins made very few innovations in the methodology of grammar writing, though, of course, they had to take into account the six-case paradigm of Latin as compared with the five cases of Greek. But there was one Latin innovation which escaped Greek morphology until the beginning of the end of the Middle Ages, when diplomatic and scholarly relations were becoming more frequent and intense. Since the time of Varro (first century BC) Latin nouns had been grouped into declensions, subclasses of nouns that exhibited similar endings in their case paradigms. In Greece the verbs had been grouped into suzugiai ‘conjugations’ on the basis of inflectional similarities since the Techne¯ (Uhlig 1883: 53⫺59): six in -o¯ (the so-called barytone verbs), depending on the sets of consonants appearing as root finals in their present tense forms, including one set with root-final vowels, e.g. grapho¯ ‘write’, nemo¯ ‘distribute’, hippeuo¯ ‘ride’, as some of their other tense forms depended on this formal feature; three sets of “contracted” (perispo¯menon), verbs such as no(e`)o¯ ‘think’, bo(a)o¯ ‘shout’, and chrus(o)o¯ ‘make golden’; and four sets of verbs ending in -mi in the first person singular active indicative forms: e.g. tithe¯mi ‘place’, histe¯mi ‘set up’, dido¯mi ‘give’, and pe¯gnumi ‘fix’. Theodosius and his Byzantine commentators used these conjugational sets of verbs in the same way, but in the nominal paradigms Theodosius lists nouns in order simply according to their nominative singulars, thus putting kochleas, kochleou ‘snail’ next to Aias, Aiantos ‘Ajax’ (Hilgard 1889: 3.1, 4.19). However, towards the end of the Byzantine age, Chrysoloras and Theodorus of Gaza, while continuing to use klisis ‘inflection’ as a general term, also apply it specifically to the

59 taxonomy of nouns in declensions, five in number. This must have been a back translation of the five Latin declinationes. This subclassification of Latin nouns goes back as far as Varro (cf. De lingua Latina 8.62), and the five declensions as used in current teaching of Latin have been stable since Priscian’s grammar, but among the later Greek grammarians there are considerable differences in their assignment of particular sets of nouns to their five kliseis, or declensions. It is an ide´e rec¸ue that Byzantine linguistic scholarship exhibited no originality whatsoever. This is scarcely fair. In their analysis of prepositional meanings and of the meanings of the oblique cases in relation to verbs and to prepositions a good amount of precise semantic distinctiveness was worked out, even if in some respects their attempted explanation of these distinctions was rather fanciful. The most original of all the Byzantine grammarians was Maximus Planudes (c. 1260⫺ 1310), who has been justifiably credited with a formulation of the localist theory of case meanings as this came to be known in the nineteenth century, wherein the meanings of the three Greek oblique cases are referred back first to the three locative relations, towards, in or at, and away from, and their three temporal counterparts, future, present, and past (cf. Wüllner 1827; Bopp 1833: 136; Hjelmslev 1935: 12; Murru 1979). It would appear that a localist conception of case meanings had been already growing in the Byzantine age, and an earlier version is found in the sixth century Syncellus (Donnet 1982: 438). Maximus Planudes also came nearer than any other grammarian outside the former Stoic school in accommodating the statement the meanings of the Greek tenses in their aspectual as well as their temporal dimension. There was also important work on syntax, and a number of treatises on syntax appeared throughout the Byzantine period. All this, however, though of credit to Byzantine scholarship, falls outside the scope of this article. (An assessment of the Byzantine grammarians may be seen in Robins 1993.) The Techne¯ has already been cited as the morphological starting point for Byzantine grammar in general. Its reputation and influence were not confined to the Greek world; it was translated into Armenian (cf. Adontz 1962) some time after the end of the fifth century, and into Syriac (cf. Merx 1889). It has been claimed either directly or indirectly as a

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factor in the development of Arabic grammatical studies after the expansion of Arab power in the first millennium (cf. Versteegh 1977). The Techne¯, though of modest size, has, in the form known today, been of exemplary importance in the further development of Greek grammar in later Antiquity and then in the Byzantine Empire, and consequently in the revival of Greek scholarship in the western Renaissance (cf. Law & Sluiter 1995, eds.).

4.

The Latin world

Greek linguistics was influential in the development of linguistic thought in Rome from the second century B.C. Of course, such work continued contemporaneously and cooperatively until the separation of the Greeks and the Latins at the end of Antiquity, the Latins for the most part, but not entirely, following the models set down by the Greeks. It was a Stoic emissary Crates who first introduced the study of grammar into Rome, and Stoic influence is clearly to be seen in the work of Varro (first century BC) in his linguistic observations in his major work De lingua latina. Varro did not write a grammar of Latin, but he was responsible for the first treatise in Latin on the Latin language. He was a polymath, enjoying the reputation of having written in his lifetime more books (1) incomplete complete

past discebam ‘I was learning’ didiceram ‘I had learned’

This arrangement will be seen, as was pointed out by Varro, not only to satisfy the actual meanings to the tense inflections, but to accord with the morphology of the word forms, in that one root, disc-, occurs with the incomplete aspect, and the other didic-, with the complete aspect. This is equally true of the passive tense inflections. In one sense the Latin verbal system favoured this analysis to a greater extent than the Greek system. The Latin future perfect didicero ‘I shall have learned’ was in regular use with all verbs, whereas the corresponding forms in Greek were confined to the middle voice and not greatly used (e.g. lelusomai ‘I shall have released for myself’). But Latin

than most people had read in theirs. His De lingua latina, only part of which is extant today, is a general investigation into the origin and nature of language as such and of Latin in particular, with as much of its earlier history as could be gathered from texts available to him. In his study of Latin morphology Varro is important in a number of respects: his (Stoic inspired) analysis of the Latin tense system, his discussion of the Latin case system as contrasted with the Greek one, his identification of word classes for Latin, and his treatment of word form variation (declinatio). In all of these topics one must remember the context of his writing. He knew Greek and like most educated Romans he greatly admired Greek scholarship; though influenced by Stoic doctrine, he almost certainly had an early version of the Techne¯ available to him (cf. 2). While he was engaged on his research and writing there were no other linguistic works on Latin published, nor, so far as is known, in preparation. In his analysis of the tense system of Latin verbs Varro’s insights enabled him to exploit the two-dimensional distinction of tense and aspect that the Stoics had made for the Greek verb. In some respects the morphology and semantics of the Latin verb can be shown to be more systematic than is the case in Greek. From his text one can set out a diagram of the Latin tenses in the following form (De lingua latina 9.96⫺97, 10.48): present disco ‘I am learning’ didici ‘I have learned’

future discam ‘I shall learn’ didicero ‘I shall have learned’

syncretized the unmarked past (aorist) and the perfect tense, didici meaning both ‘I learned’ and ‘I have learned’, which were formally distinguished in Greek. Varro appears to have ignored this syncretism, though it was duly noted by the later Priscian in his long and comprehensive Latin grammar (Keil 1855: 15.23⫺416.20). Along with this difference in the morphology of its tenses, Latin differed from Greek by having six morphologically distinct noun case forms in the singular, against the Greek five. The extra case is now known as the ablative, from its use to designate motion from a place (e.g. discessit ab urbe ‘he went away from the city’); Varro simply noticed it as the

4. The Ancient Near East

“sixth” or the “Latin” case, specifying some of its functions (de lingua latina 8.16; 10.62). In a rather different set of word classes Varro followed the Greek practice of identifying morphologically the various inflected words, and he made the same basic distinction of case-inflected nouns and tense-inflected verbs, but from a different point of view. As we have said, he was not a teacher of Latin, nor was he writing a grammar of Latin. He was, however, greatly interested in the history of the language and he saw inflectional variations as one of the means by which the limited vocabulary of a primitive language could be expanded to express more differences of meaning. Like Greek, Latin had invariant words and inflected words; these Varro distinguished as sterile ‘sterile’ and fecundum ‘productive’. It was this latter set that interested him; exploiting the primary distinction of case and tense he set up four classes of productive words in Latin: (2) ⫹case ⫺tense (noun), lector ‘reader’ ⫺case ⫹tense (verb), lego ‘read’ ⫹case ⫹tense (participle), legens ‘reading’ ⫺case ⫺tense (adverb), lecte ‘choicely’ He included the class of adverbs to take account of paradigms like lecte ‘choicely’, lectius ‘more choicely’, lectissime ‘most, very choicely’. Invariant adverbs like mox ‘soon’ interested him less. Basing his classification on the two primary morphological categories of case and tense, Varro goes on to show how each of the four classes has its own sentential function: The noun names, the verb makes statements, the participle joins (i.e. embeds a clause within a matrix clause), and the adverb supports (the verb with which it is endocentrically linked); it is unable to function independently (De lingua latina 6.36, 8.9⫺10; 8.44, 10.17). Varro’s classification is, as far as one can tell, original with him. It is much more insightful than the traditional subsequent Latin classification, which followed as closely as possible the classification set out in the Techne¯. But what is no less significant is that it is based on prior Greek grammatical categories and that, as in Greece, morphological form was the primary definiens, with syntax and semantics following the classes so defined. Varro was not, and scarcely could have been, a historical linguist in the modern

61 sense. In so far as he was able through earlier written evidence he took note of certain fairly recent phonetic and semantic changes, such as bellum ‘war’ from duellum and the earlier meaning of hostis ‘enemy’ as no more than ‘stranger’ (kindred with German Gast, English guest, etc., of which, of course, he could not have been aware). Neither the theory of linguistic change and lexical correspondences, nor the evidence and the techniques evolved during the nineteenth century were available or indeed conceivable. Man’s age in the mortal world was short; a few centuries ago men went back to gods or heroes or to divine origin. The problem facing linguistic scholars like Varro was to explain reasonably the way in which assumed thin and undeveloped languages could transform themselves to match the much greater requirements of civilization. This was the question that lay behind his distinction between sterile and productive words, but he went further, in both lexical and inflectional morphology. Noting that animals and birds of use and interest to men had separate forms for males and females of the species (equus ‘stallion’, equa ‘mare’), whereas no such formal distinction was maintained for useless creatures (corvus ‘raven’, masculine; aquila ‘eagle’, feminine), he drew attention to social change and concomitant lexical change (De lingua latina 9.56): in recent times fashionable Roman ladies had taken to keeping and breeding doves as decorative house pets; the earlier single word columba, feminine, which had done duty for both sexes, was restricted to female doves, with a new masculine form columbus to designate male doves. It was the morphological changes in words, declinatio, that bore the main burden of language development. From original or from earlier words further words could be and had been created. This creation took two forms, and here Varro gave us an insight into the morphology of Latin (as of Greek and many other languages) that was lacking in the treatment of klisis and declinatio by Greek grammarians and by subsequent Latin grammarians, until it was reformulated on different criteria in the later Middle Ages (see Art. 8). This distinction falls in very largely with the modern distinction of synchronic derivation (Wortbildung) and inflection. Taking words like Roma ‘Rome’, Romanus ‘Roman’, equus ‘horse’, equites ‘horseman’, and equitatus ‘cavalry’, he noted that such

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derived words could be created almost at will, and that considerable variation was found between words of similar form and meaning: thus we have Thebai, Thebanus ‘Theban’, but Athenai, Athenaeus or Atheniensis ‘Athenian’, sus ‘pig’, suile ‘pigsty’, ovis ‘sheep’, ovile ‘sheepfold’, but bos ‘ox’, bubile ‘ox stall’; Varro declares that the form bovile is ill formed, though, typically, it was used by some others (cf. Keil 1857: 104.28), and there is no attested single word formed from canis ‘dog’ to refer to a dog kennel. Such derivational forms, which have to be learned lexically and are subject to much irregularity and even personal variation, he named declinatio voluntaria ‘formation at will’ (we may notice similar examples in English: hot, heat, but cold, coldness; an inhabitant of London is called a Londoner, but an inhabitant of a neighbouring town Croydon, would be called (if by any derivative noun) a Croydonian; and linguists differ in their preferences between grammaticalness and grammaticality). On the other hand, once such words have been accepted, there is no problem about their inflections; these follow “naturally”, and were called declinatio naturalis by Varro. Given Atheniensis we have no doubt that its plural will be Athenienses and that the plural of suile will be suilia, and that those who accept bovile will “naturally” accept bovilia. The same, of course, applies to English Londoner, Londoners, and to Croydonian, Croydonians. The Latin data and the theory behind them are discussed by Varro (De lingua latina 8.21, 8.54, 9.35, 10.16). Varro was very well read and well educated, and he was probably the most original Latin mind devoted to grammatical studies. But he wrote no grammar of the language; like his Stoic models his concern was the genesis and the operation of language in the brains and mouths of speakers of Latin. The Latin grammarians, the writers of Latin grammar books, are less interesting intellectually, but historically they are of the greatest significance. Didymus, a writer of the later first century BC, encapsulated the accepted view of Latin grammar, not merely that Greek grammatical terms and categories were applicable to Latin (as Varro had demonstrated), but that the two languages were essentially the same in grammatical typology and format. Didymus appears to have been a voluminous writer of the Alexandrian school. According to a reference to him by Priscian (Keil

1855: 445.14⫺16; 1859: 408.6⫺8), Latin had every grammatical entity and feature that Greek had, and their word classes and grammatical patterns were the same. Of course this was not true in every detail, as Priscian himself went on to point out and exemplify; but broadly, as compared with a language such as Hebrew, this statement was justified, and it gave just the sanction required for the Latins to follow, in linguistics, their regular cultural reliance on the Greeks in matters of the intellect. The first known author of an Ars grammatica, a didactic grammar of Latin was Remmius Palaemon, who worked in the first century AD. He is known for one innovation, the recognition of the interjection as a separate world class; in Greek grammars it had been and continued to be just one subclass of adverbs. The interjection was distinguished by him on the ground that it had no statable meaning other than the expression of emotion (Keil 1857: 238.23⫺25). Though this was a taxonomic innovation, in a more catholic sense it was conservative, in that it kept the number of word classes to eight, in the absence of an article class in Latin. Palaemon was followed by a very considerable number of grammarians; those whose works survive are collectively known as “the late Latin grammarians”. They span the period of late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages. While their conception of Latin grammar remained broadly the same, their method of writing varied according to the perceived needs of students and of teachers. With the expansion of the Roman Empire to include all western Europe south of the Rhine-Danube frontier and some areas beyond it, and the split into a Western (Latin) Empire and an Eastern (Greek) Empire, three requirements in Latin grammar writing resulted, and the Christianizing of western Europe under the authority of the Pope in Rome simply intensified them. Firstly there was the duty placed upon teachers to present and preserve the standards of classical Latin “correctness” in the face of changes considered decadent or corrupt in the written and spoken language of the Latin speaking areas. Secondly, following the Germanic invasions and their absorption into the Christian community, Latin was the language of religious and civic usage for all persons claiming the status of being educated. For these there was the need to provide grammars not just to maintain classical

4. The Ancient Near East

standards but to teach Latin ab initio as a foreign or second language. Thirdly, a variety of this requirement arose at first in the Eastern Empire, where, as has already been noted, there was an effort, that ultimately failed, to maintain Latin as the language of government and of senior administrators in a Greek speaking community. There was therefore a contrast between taxonomic grammar books written for pupils and their teachers whose native language was Latin, though probably not an approved variety, and grammar books that had to give the rules for morphological paradigms and lists of the forms in the paradigms themselves. As with Theodosius’s Kanones (see 3) the Latin term regulae referred both to the formation rules themselves and to the paradigms generated by these rules (cf. Law 1986 a; 1986 b). Much of this dual interest in the presentation of grammar belongs to the Middle Ages (cf. Art. 8) rather than to Antiquity, but we may compare the material given in Donatus’s short grammar Ars minor (fourth century; cf. Keil 1864: 355⫺366) and, though at much greater length, Priscian’s Institutiones grammaticae (c. 500; Keil 1855: 1⫺ 597; 1859: 1⫺377) with the systematically set out paradigms of inflected forms in the longer Ars maior (cf. Keil 1864: 367⫺402; Holtz 1981), and far more in Probus (late first century; cf. Keil 1864: 47⫺192), Phocas (fifth century; cf. Keil 1868: 410⫺439), and in the brief text of Priscian’s Institutio de nomine et pronomine et verbo (cf. Keil 1859: 443⫺ 456), which was so different in its extent and style to his Institutiones grammaticae. Donatus’s Ars minor was a typical textbook for pupils already knowing some Latin, written in question and answer form like some of the Kanones of Theodosius. Priscian’s Institutiones was clearly more of a teacher’s resource or reference grammar, being far too long to students’ use unaided. It was effectively set out, with both Greek and Latin examples, for reasons already given, and it presented virtually all that was known of Latin grammar in the mainline tradition of language teaching. After the Carolingian age it joined Donatus’s two grammars as a standard text in mediaeval schools. For didactic reasons during the early Middle Ages a different but related style of grammar writing came into being, grammatical commentaries on earlier grammars (cf. Law 1986 a: 368⫺375). Donatus and Priscian were particularly subject to this treatment, but for

63 opposite reasons: Donatus because he was too short for use by foreign learners of Latin, and Priscian because of his great length (see further Art. 8). These commentaries led to rather different historical developments; those on Donatus remained essentially teaching grammars, but Priscian’s commentators moved steadily in the direction of a philosophical explanation of Priscian’s purely descriptive grammar of Latin, flowering ultimately in the speculative grammars of the scholastic grammarians (the Modistae, cf. Art. 8). For all their differences in length and style, Donatus and Priscian both followed the Greek model of grammar set out in the Techne¯, with a few adaptions to take into account the differences between the two languages, for example in the separate recognition of the interjection as a part of speech in its own right, balancing the absence in Latin of a word corresponding to the Greek definite article. The Greek tradition included and continued to include the relative pronoun hos, he¯, ho ‘who, which’ within the class of articles as a “postposed article” (Uhlig 1983: 61.1⫺3); morphologically it was very similar to the definite “preposed” article, ho, he¯, to ‘the’. Priscian like most, but not all Latin grammarians, put it within the noun class (e.g. Keil 1855: 13⫺16; Probus regarded it as a pronoun: cf. Keil 1864: 133.18). Priscian was a clear example of the third type of Latin grammar writing, having the specific needs of Greek students in the forefront. As regards the Latinity of the Byzantine Empire he was serving a doomed cause. Justinian was among the last of the Latinspeaking Eastern Emperors (527⫺565), and by the eighth century it has been reckoned that Latin was all but extinct save in certain learned circles and in some diplomatic exchanges between the Eastern and Western Churches (cf. Runciman 1933: 232). Priscian did not explicitly define what he meant by grammar, but it is clear that he envisaged the subject in the same way as the Techne¯, as a propaedeutic to the critical appreciation of classical literature; there is a wealth of classical quotations as grammatical examples, and a minimum of philosophical theory building, despite the use made of his Institutiones by the later scholastic philosophical grammarians. In the works of the Late Latin Grammarians morphology came first, and most of them, after designating the word as the mini-

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mal unit of syntactic structure, as the Techne¯ had done, confined themselves to Latin morphology; Priscian added two final books on syntax to his Institutiones, but we know of no specific books directed at syntax, such as we see in Byzantine writings, before the later Middle Ages in the Latin West. Priscian’s Institutio de nomine has already been mentioned. His Partitiones confine themselves to morphological instruction (Keil 1859: 459⫺ 515); these were parsing analyses of the first lines of the twelve books of the Aeneid, to which were attached collections of grammatical details, in one way or another related to each of the words of the first lines (cf. Glück 1967). The Latin grammarians’ descriptive procedures followed their Greek counterparts in being framed in “word and paradigm” terms. Inflection was seen as the change of basic forms of words to give rise to the rest of the paradigms of forms. Like Greek, Latin inflectional and derivational morphology was primarily a matter of suffixation, and the words used to decribe it were simply translations from the Greek terms. Greek le¯go¯ ‘end’ was translated into Latin desinere, and Greek parepomena ‘grammatical categories’ became Latin accidentia, English accidence. The effect of all this manifest in the standard teaching of Latin and Greek grammar in modern Europe. To illustrate this modelling of Latin grammar on Greek we may compare the definitions of noun and verb given by Donatus (Keil 1864: 373.2⫺3, 381.14⫺15) with those already seen in the Techne¯ (see 2): “nomen est pars orationis cum casu corpus aut rem proprie communiterve significans, proprie ut Roma Tiberus, communiter ut urbs flumen” (‘a noun is a part of speech inflected for case and signifying a body or a thing either individually or commonly, individually as in Rome or the Tiber, commonly as in city or river’); “verbum, pars orationis cum tempore et persona sine casus aut agere aliquid aut pati aut neutrum significans” (‘a verb is a part of speech inflected for tense and person but not for case and signifying doing something or experiencing something or neither of these’) ⫺ the three subclasses of verb are active transitive, passive, and intransitive. It will be seen how closely these definitions copy those given in the Techne¯. The centrality of morphology in determining grammatical description is illustrated in Priscian’s comment on a suggestion of Quin-

tilian (Institutio oratoria 1.4.2⫺3, 1.4.26) that seven cases might be posited for Latin nouns, since the main functions of the ablative ‘movement from’ and instrumentality or agency, were so far apart in their meanings. Priscian rejects this idea as creating an irrelevant (supervacuum) case, because at no point in the nominal case paradigms is a formal distinction made between the expression of these two meanings (Keil 1855: 190.14⫺16). This did not, however, prevent him from distinguishing a Latin optative mood separate from the subjunctive mood, depending on whether the forms now referred to as subjunctive were used with or without a subordinating conjunction: cum faciam ‘when I make’ is subjunctive, but faciam ‘would that I made’ is optative (Keil 1855: 424.8⫺15). Nowhere is this distinction of mood maintained formally in Latin; presumably Priscian retains it to follow the Greek distinction of the two moods in such verb forms as (ean) nikais ‘(if) you win’ and niko¯ie¯s ‘may you win’, subjunctive and optative, respectively. The one book by a Latin grammarian intended to set out the typological differences between the two languages, Macrobius’s De differentiis et societatibus graeci latinique verbi ‘On the differences and similarities of the Greek and the Latin verb’, written about 400 AD (Keil 1868: 595⫺655), comprises little more than a display of the morphologically distinct categories in the verbs of the two languages.

5.

Conclusion

Morphology lay at the heart of ancient grammatical theory, and the Techne¯, whatever the authorship of the final text may have been, formed the terminological and categorial framework for morphology in Greek and in Latin grammatical studies. It was the Techne¯ that first set out the classification and the categories assumed and used by Donatus and Priscian in their morphology; it was the Techne¯ that provided the classes and categories that Apollonius used in his syntactic books, some three hundred years after the first version of the Techne¯. Apollonius declares that syntax follows from morphology in the order of grammatical description and analysis (Uhlig 1910: 1.2⫺2.2), and his words are echoed by Priscian in his last two books, when he turns from his extensive morphological exposition to an account of Latin syntax

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(Keil 1859: 107⫺402), and he too follows the same order in grammatical description; the morphological forms and rules must come first: “In supra dictis igitur de singulis vocibus dictionum, ut poscebat earum ratio, tractavimus; nunc autem dicemus de ordinatione earum” (‘in our previous books we have dealt with the individual forms of words, as our account of them required; and now we will treat their ordering in sentences’) (Keil 1859: 108.5⫺6). It has been pointed out that an independent syntax never established itself in the grammar of Antiquity, nor in Byzantium, nor in the West before the philosophical commentaries on Priscian (cf. Donnet 1967). Specifically syntactic elements like subject, complement, and dependency, did not appear; syntactic structure was built around the cases, nominative and oblique, and cases had been set up on the basis of morphological differences. The notion of syntactic government, or rection, that plays so great a part in scholastic grammar, was only tentatively indicated in Apollonius and Priscian, and with a variety of words pressed into service from object language. This is no reproach to the ancient grammarians and their Byzantine successors in the Greek East. Much important and revealing work was done by them; from the Byzantines the western Renaissance recovered the Greek language and Greek literature, and from the grammarians of late Antiquity the pattern was set for the teaching of the classical languages in Europe for centuries. Donatus and Priscian have been called “the schoolmasters of Europe for a thousand years” (Waddell 1949: xxix). To ask when Antiquity ended and the Middle Ages began is to ask in vain; the passage from one era to another can be viewed from many different positions. But in linguistic studies Priscian’s Institutiones grammaticae may be taken as the dividing line, or better as the bridge between the two ages. Priscian stands like Janus in his summation of the work of Antiquity and as the foundation of mediaeval Latin teaching and, later, of speculative grammar.

6.

References

6.1. Primary sources In the listing of primary sources, where there are more than one printed editions all of which carry the same section numbering or pagination only these figures are given.

Apollonius Dyscolus, De constructione [reprinted in: Uhlig (1910, ed.), 1⫺497; English transl. by Fred Householder, The Syntax of Apollonius Dyscolus. Amsterdam: Benjamins, 1981] Aristophanes, Nubes Aristotle, De interpretatione Aristotle, Rhetorica Aristotle, Topica Arnim, Ioannes von (1905⫺1924, ed.), Stoicorum veterum fragmenta, Vol. II. Leipzig: Teubner Charax, see Sophronius Choeroboscus, Scholia in Kanones Theodosii [reprinted in: Hilgard (1889, ed.), 103⫺407; Hilgard (1894, ed.), 1⫺371] Chrysoloras, Manuel, Ero¯te¯mata [Venice: Aldus Manutius, 1512] Diogenes Laertius, Vitae philosophorum Dionysius Thrax, Te´chne¯ grammatike˘ [reprinted in: Uhlig (1883, ed.), 3⫺101] Donatus Ars grammatica [reprinted in: Keil (1864, ed.), 355⫺402] Donnet, Daniel (1982, ed.), Le traite´ de la construction de la phrase de Michel le Syncelle de Je´rusalem. Bruxelles: Institut Historique Belge de Rome (E´tudes de Philologie, d’Arche´ologie et d’Histoire 22) Funaioli, Hyginus (1907, ed.), Grammaticorum Romanorum fragmenta. Leipzig: Teubner Hilgard, Alfred (1889, ed.), Grammatici Graeci, Vol. IV.1. Leipzig: Teubner [reprinted in: Grammatici Graeci. Hildesheim: Olms, 1965] Hilgard, Alfred (1894, ed.), Grammatici Graeci, Vol. IV.2. Leipzig: Teubner [reprinted in: Grammatici Graeci. Hildesheim: Olms, 1965] Hilgard, Alfred (1901, ed.), Grammatici Graeci, Vol. I.3. Leipzig: Teubner [reprinted in: Grammatici Graeci. Hildesheim: Olms, 1965] Keil, Heinrich (1855, ed.), Grammatici Latini, Vol. II. Leipzig: Teubner [reprinted in: Grammatici Latini. Hildesheim: Olms, 1961] Keil, Heinrich (1857, ed.), Grammatici Latini, Vol. I. Leipzig: Teubner [reprinted in: Grammatici Latini. Hildesheim: Olms, 1961] Keil, Heinrich (1859, ed.), Grammatici Latini, Vol. III. Leipzig: Teubner [reprinted in: Grammatici Latini. Hildesheim: Olms, 1961] Keil, Heinrich (1864, ed.), Grammatici Latini, Vol. IV. Leipzig: Teubner [reprinted in: Grammatici Latini. Hildesheim: Olms, 1961] Keil, Heinrich (1868, ed.), Grammatici Latini, Vol. V. Leipzig: Teubner [reprinted in: Grammatici Latini. Hildesheim: Olms, 1961] Lallot, Jean (1989, ed.), La grammaire de De´nys le Thrace. Paris: Centre National de Recherche Scientifique

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Macrobius, De differentiis et societatibus Graeci Latinique verbi. In: Keil (1868, ed.), 595⫺655 Maximus Planudes, Dialogos de grammatica; De constructione [reprinted in: Bachmann, Ludwig (1828, ed.), Anecdota Graeca. Leipzig: Hinrichs, 3⫺101, 106⫺166] Merx, Adalbert (1889, ed.), Historia Artis Grammaticae apud Syros. Leipzig: Brockhaus (Abhandlungen für die Kunde des Morgenlandes 9.2) Pecorella, Giovan B. (1962, ed.), Dionisio Trace Techne¯. Florence: Cappelli Phocas, Ars de nomine et verbi [reprinted in: Keil (1868, ed.), 410⫺439] Priscian(us), Institutiones grammaticae; Institutio de nomine et verbo [reprinted in: Keil (1855, ed.), 1⫺597; Keil (1859, ed.), 1⫺377; 443⫺456] Probus, Institutio artium [reprinted in: Keil (1864, ed.)] Quintilian, Institutio oratoria Scholia in Dionysii Thracis Artem grammaticam [reprinted in: Hilgard (1901, ed.), 1⫺586] Servius, Commentarius in Artem Donati [reprinted in: Keil (1864, ed.), 405⫺448] Sextus Empiricus, Adversus grammaticos Sophronius, Excerpta de Ioannis Characis commentariis in Theodosii Alexandrini Canones [reprinted in: Hilgard (1894, ed.), 375⫺434] Syncellus, see Donnet (1982) Theodorus Gazae, Grammaticae Eisagoges Biblia, Vol. IV [Venice: Aldus Manutius, 1525] Theodosius, Kanones [reprinted in: Hilgard (1889, ed.), 3⫺99] Uhlig, Gustav (1883, ed.), Grammatici Graeci, Vol. I.1. Leipzig: Teubner [reprinted in: Grammatici Graeci, Hildesheim: Olms, 1965] Uhlig, Gustav (1910, ed.), Grammatici Graeci, Vol. II.2. Leipzig: Teubner [reprinted in: Grammatici Graeci, Hildesheim: Olms, 1965] Varro, De Lingua Latina

6.2. Secondary references Adontz, Nicolaus (1962, ed.), De´nys le Thrace et les commentaires arme´niens. Louvain: Imprime´rie Orientaliste [translated from the Russian text of 1915] Bloomfield, Leonard (1935), Language. London: Allen and Unwin Bopp, Franz (1833), Vergleichende Grammatik des Sanskrit, Zend, Griechischen, Lateinischen, Lithauischen, Gotischen und Deutschen. Berlin: Dümmler Brekle, Herbert E. (1985), Einführung in die Geschichte der Sprachwissenschaft. Tübingen: Narr Bühler W. & Theodorides, Chr. (1976), “Johannes von Damaskos, Terminus post quem für Choeroboscus”. Byzantinische Zeitschrift 69, 397⫺401

Dinneen, Francis P. (1985), “On the Stoic Contribution to Grammatical Theory”. Historiographia Linguistica 12, 149⫺164 Donnet, Daniel (1967), “La place de la syntaxe dans les traite´s de grammaire grecque des origines au XIIe sie`cle”. Antiquite´ Classique 36, 22⫺46 Fisher, Herbert A. L. (1936), A History of Europe. London: Arnold Frede, Michael (1978), “Principles of Stoic Grammar”. In: Rist, John M. (ed.), The Stoics. Berkeley: University of California Press, 27⫺75 Gibbon, Edward (1960 [1776]), The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, ed. and abr. by D. M. Low. London: Chatto and Windus Glück, Manfred (1967), Priscianus Partitiones und ihre Stellung in der spätantiken Schule. Hildesheim: Olms Hjelmslev, Louis (1935), La cate´gorie des cas. Aarhus: Universitetsforlaget Hockett, Charles F. (1954), “Two Models of Grammatical Description”. Word 10, 210⫺234 Holtz, Louis (1981), Donat et la tradition de l’Enseignement Grammatical. Paris: Centre National pour la Recherche scientifique Kaster, Robert A. (1988), Guardians of Language: The Grammarians and Society in Late Antiquity. Berkeley: University of California Press Law, Vivien A. (1986 a), “Late Latin Grammarians in the Early Middle Ages: A Typological History”. Historiographia linguistica 13, 363⫺380 [reprinted in: Tylor, D. (1987, ed.), The History of Linguistics in the Classical Period. Amsterdam: Benjamins, 191⫺206] Law, Vivien A. (1986 b), “Originality in the Medieval normative tradition”. In: Bynon, T. T. & Palmer, F. R. (1986, eds.), Studies in the History of Western Linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 43⫺55 Law, Vivien A. & Sluiter, Ivoke (1995, eds.), Dionysius Thrax and the Techne¯ Grammatike¯. Münster: Nodus Publikationen Long, Antony A. (1971), Problems in Stoicism. London: Athlone Press Mates, Benson (1953), Stoic Logic. Berkeley: University of California Press Matthews, Peter H. (1974), Morphology: An Introduction to the Study of Word Structure. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Murru, Furio (1979), “Sull’origine della teoria localistica di Massimo Planude”. L’Antiquite´ Classique 48, 82⫺97 Reifferscheid, Augustus (1884, ed.), Alexias Annae Comnenae. Leipzig: Teubner Robins, Robert H. (1993), The Byzantine grammarians: Their Place in History. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter Robins, Robert H. (41997), A Short History of Linguistics. London: Longman [11967]

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7. Traditional Arabic grammar Runciman, Sir Steven (1933), Byzantine Civilization. London: Arnold Sebeok, Thomas A. (1975, ed.), Historiography of Linguistics. The Hague: Mouton (Current Trends in Linguistics 13) Versteegh, Cornelis H. M. (1977), Greek Elements in Arabic Linguistic Thinking. Leiden: Brill Versteegh, Cornelis H. M. (1980), “The Stoic Verbal System”. Hermes 108, 338–355

Waddell, Helen (71949), The Wandering Scholars. London: Constable [11927] Wouters, Alphonse (1979), The Grammatical Papyri from Graeco-Roman Egypt. Brussels: Royal Academy of Science Wüllner, Franz (1827), Die Bedeutung der sprachlichen Kasus und Modi. Münster: Coppenrath Robert H. Robins, London (Great Britain)

7. Traditional Arabic grammar 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

1.

Introduction The Arabic system of morphological description Upper and lower levels of analysis: word classes and morphophonology Relations between morphology and syntax Minimal morphological units Historical and cultural perspectives References

Introduction

Medieval Arabic grammatical treatises have such a high degree of systematization that it is tempting, when summarizing them for the modern audience, to reproduce them as faithfully as possible and with little further interpretation. On the other hand, because of their methodological affinities with modern linguistic practice – structure, class, substitution, marked and unmarked structures, etc. (cf. Owens 1988; 1993 for summary) – it is equally tempting to explain the Arabic tradition through parallels with modern linguistics. Here both approaches will be employed, beginning with a summary of what arf is, the closest Arabic term to morphology, and ending with a look at the extent to which key Arabic morphological concepts correspond to ideas in western linguistics. Relations between arf and other aspects of Arabic grammatical tradition will also be looked at, as well as relations to the Hebrew tradition. Orthographic conventions: Long vowels /ii/ and /uu/ are represented as sequences of short vowel + consonant (semivowels /y/ or /w/). Long /aa/ is here represented as a long vowel, though for reasons too complicated to be explained in this short article, in Arabic morphological theory long /aa/ generally is regarded as a consonant. In Arabic orthography the representation of short vowels came rela-

tively late, and they conventionally are not represented at all in most texts. ༉ = emphatic sound. Titles of books are left untranslated, as they only irregularly have a direct connection to the material they describe – the title of Sibawayhi’s alKitaab, literally ‘The Book’, for example, betrays little of its contents.

2.

The Arabic system of morphological description

The study of arf begins, so far as records go, with Sibawayhi’s al-Kitaab (see bibliography for dates of authors), and continues into the present. Volume 2 of Sibawayhi’s work, circa 480 pages, is devoted to the study of words. Thereafter all reference grammars (Zajjaji Jumal; Jurjani Muqtaid; Astarabadhi Shar, etc.) devoted a similar proportion to morphology, and a good number of works were devoted exclusively to morphology in general (Mumti; Shar al-Muluwkiy) or to particular morphological problems (Farra? Al-Muðakkar wa l-MuannaӨ). The most important morphologist was doubtlessly Ibn Jinni. He produced two masterly works, each over 800 pages long, on Arabic morphology, al-Munif and Sirr inaaat al-Iraab. The latter gave a phonetic description of Arabic phonemes and summarized the morphophonological processes they underwent. In addition, his Xaaai (cf. 6.2) relies heavily on examples from morphology. Arabic morphological theory has a strong formal bias, the basis of arf being the identification of root (al/jiðr), usually consonantal, and non-root or ‘added’ (zaaid) elements. The root consonants are represented by the template fེl (< faala ‘do, make’), the added consonants by their own form. For example, the verb taqsimu ‘you divide’ would

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have the canonical form tfl, where t- is a non-basic prefix, -qsm- the basic root (Muwjaz: 27). Short vowels generally do not have a status in the root/added dichotomy. However, in addition to the identification of root and non-root consonants, a total morphological form (wazn ‘measure’ or binaa ‘to build, construction, structure’) is recognized, and in this the short vowels are represented. The wazn of taqsimu, for example, would be represented as tafilu. The discrete morphemic value of short vowels, moreover, is sometimes recognized (see 2.3). In principle the distinction between root and non-root elements is intuitively obvious. qism ‘division’ consists of the basic root consonants relating to ‘dividing’ = qsm. In qassama ‘divide s. t.’ the root consonants are apparent, as well as the addition of a doubled medial /s/. qassama can therefore be divided into two parts, the basic root consonants qsm plus the added (zaaid) consonant represented in the medial gemination. 2.1. Basic and added consonants: distinguishing criteria Not all cases are as clear as this, however, and a number of methods were used to distinguish basic and added consonants (see e. g. Sarraj Muwjaz: 144; Ibn Jinni Munif: I.13–17 for typologies). Meaning is the most obvious criterion. In qassama the addition of the /s/ may correlate with a meaning difference vis a vis the basic form, causation or intensity. More generally, verbs of the form C1aC2C2aC3 with geminate C2 have a meaning of ‘intensification, transitivization’ (Sibawayhi Kitaab: II.247 f., Mubarrad Muqtaab: II.102 f., Ibn Jinni Xaaai: II.153 f. etc.). A number of correlations between form classes and meanings were developed, where the distinctive semantic feature of each class could be correlated with the presence of non-basic sounds. Meaning was only one criterion, however. One further one can be cited here. In the pair qasama ‘he divided’, qasaam ‘beauty’ (probably related through the notion of division, partition = features, distinctive feature) it is apparent that the root consonants are qsm. The long /aa/ (which in Arabic morphological theory counts as a consonant – see 1) in qasaam must therefore be non-basic. This means that qasaam has the canonical shape faaal, with the non-basic long “consonantal” vowel -aa- intercalated among the root consonants. There are other such nouns,

qaraar ‘sedentarism’, samaa ‘sky’, etc. Although it is clear that the -aa- is not part of the root, no discrete or class meaning can be associated with it. The -aa- nonetheless is considered non-basic by elimination, as it were, an element left over after the root consonants have been exhaustively identified. In all 10 different sounds were identified which could serve as non-root consonants (Zajjaji Jumal: 399; Ibn Jinni Munif: I.98, 153). 2.2. Derivation The distinction between root and non-root consonants serves as the basis for the classification of morphological forms. Arabic has a rich derivational system, forms falling into more or less general form classes: qasama ‘he divided’, qassama ‘he divided, he divided much’, taqassama ‘it was divided’, qism ‘division, department’, aqsaam ‘divisions’, qasaam ‘beauty’, maqsuwm ‘divided’ etc. Each of these forms is potentially paralleled by similar ones based on other roots. Like qasama template faala are kataba ‘he wrote’, rajaa ‘he returned’, and many other verbs, like taqassama template tafaala are taarrafa ‘behave’, tamaӨӨala ‘be represented’, like maqsuwm template mafuwl are maktuwb ‘written’, like aqsaam template afaal are awlaad ‘children’, and so on. The word arf literally means ‘divert, turn’. A related term is tariyf, literally ‘drainage, change, distribution’, in linguistic terminology ‘morphologization’, as it were. To speak of the tariyf of a root is to identify which of the hundred or so potential morphological patterns, both basic and derived, the root can be distributed into. As with derivational systems in general, no root realized the total possible range of morphological forms. arf or tariyf refers to the total range of morphological forms in their constituent basic and non-basic consonants, and also to the process by which the various forms are derived. In addition, a second term emerged to describe the actual derivation of one form from another, namely ishtiqaaq. Unlike tariyf, ishtiqaaq generally implies a directed derivational process. For instance, in ishtiqaaq a less basic form can be derived from a more basic one. Here, it should be noted, basic/less basic refers to a hierarchy of categories within lexical forms (wazn or binaa), not to the relation between root and nonroot consonants. Thus, Ibn ེU၁fur (Shar: I.53 f.) says that an adjective can be derived from a noun, but not vice versa, because an

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adjective is less basic (marked, see 6.2) relative to a noun. For many linguists there was no term to describe the formation of a lexical form from a consonantal root, for example, qasama ‘he divided’ from the root consonants qsm, though Ibn ེU၁fur (Mumti: I.31) did propose extending the term tariyf to mean ‘stem formation’, including the positioning of vowels. Rather, the operation of ishtiqaaq assumes as its input the various lexical stems. For example, one of the classic debates among the grammarians, whether a noun is derived from the verb or vice versa (Anbari Inaaf: 235 f.), assumes the fully-vocalized nominal/verbal stems. 2.3. Compounding One final aspect of arf pertains to compounding, tarkiyb. This is generally an unproductive process in Arabic, though it does occur enough to merit special attention. Compounding involves changing the status (ukm) of individual parts of the compound. From xamsata ‘five’ + ashara ‘ten’ is formed the compound xamsataashara ‘fifteen’, in which the first member of the compound xamsat ends invariably in -a, whereas as a free-standing word it varies for case (nominative/genitive/accusative).

3.

Upper and lower levels of analysis: word classes and morphophonology

Morphological elements were closely integrated into the overall grammatical theory, at both the syntactic and phonological interfaces. Syntax operated with three word classes, (a) nominals, including nouns, adjectives, demonstratives and other substantive elements, (b) verbs and (c) particles. Each of these classes was defined by a complex of phonological, morphological, syntactic and semantic criteria (Owens 1989). Nouns, for instance, are words which take the definite article prefix al-, and can serve as agent and object, while verbs occur with the negative markers lam ‘negative past’, and lan ‘negative future’ and cannot be pronominalized (Sarraj Uuwl: I.36 f.). Further, sub-classes of nominals, verbs and particles were distinguished according to the general semantic, syntactic, and morphophonological categories used in the grammar as a whole – transitive vs. intransitive verbs, for instance, or verbs that undergo morphophonological changes because they contain a semivowel (weak verbs),

vs. those that do not (strong verbs). The question of the division between morphology and syntax will be taken up in 4. In Arabic theory arf includes both morphology and morphophonology. Nor is a distinction made between phonology and morphophonology, which is to say that no independent phonological level was postulated. Even phonetic description, though detailed (cf. Ibn Sina), was typically introduced only when morphophonological assimilation processes were treated (e. g. Sibawayhi Kitaab: II.452 and virtually all subsequent manuals; Ibn Jinni’s Sirr is exceptional). Morphophonological processes are a pervasive feature of Arabic, and they were described in exhaustive detial. Typically in a reference grammar up to a quarter of the morphology section was devoted to this topic, and in the manuals on morphology (e. g. Ibn ེU၁fur Mumti) more than half. For example, the root qwl ‘to say’ appears, inter alia, in the following shapes: (1) (a) qaala ‘he said’ (b) qul-tu ‘I said’ (c) yaquwlu ‘he says’ (d) yaqul ‘he say (jussive form)’ (e) qaail ‘having said’ (f) maqaala ‘article’ (g) qawl ‘saying’ Only in (1c) and (1g) does the medial w appear, and it was one goal of arf to systematically account for the differing surface forms of the root. For instance, in (1a) the underlying form qawala was assumed (cf. the canonical perfective verb form faala as in qasama ‘he divided’), and the following general rule postulated (2) aw’V → aa (qawala → qaala) This rule also applies in other contexts, e. g. finally as in daawa → daaa ‘he called’, in nouns, bawab → baab ‘door’, etc. Schematically, Arabic morphophonology can be represented as follows: (3) abstract underlying form ↓ via morphophonological rules surface form The rules themselves are of great complexity. There is too little space here to do anything but list the most important governing principles. A basic assumption is that an underlying (al) and surface form can (though need not) be different, provided a rule can be motivated explaining the difference (see e. g.

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(2)). The rules themselves are familiar phonological ones (inter alia, aðf ‘deletion’, idǥaam ‘assimilation’, qalb ‘deletion or assimilation of a semivowel‘, naql ‘metathesis’ (see Bohas & Guillaume 1984: 199 f.). However, the phonological contexts of the rules are subject to a number of constraints, many of them morphological in scope. The constraints include the following (for Mubarrad page references are to his Muqtaab; similar, often identical principles could be cited from other works on morphology). A rule can behave differently according to whether it applies: (a) to a noun, verb or particle (e. g. Mubarrad Muqtaab: I.108.11, 151, II.230), (b) initially, medially, or finally in a word (Mubarrad I.153, 188–9), (c) to a basic sound, or an added sound (Mubarrad II.249–56), (d) to one class of sound or another, some sounds being more susceptible to morphophonological processes than others (Mubarrad I.117, 209 f.), (e) next to one type of sound or another (Mubarrad Í 115, 138, 151, 153). In addition, the following notions were invoked in one place or another to explain a morphophonological change: (a) paradigmatic regularity (Mubarrad I.88), (b) avoidance of ambiguity (Mubarrad I.109, Ibn Jinni Munif: I.192), (c) compensation, one sound compensating for the loss of another (Mubarrad I.105), (d) a freezing principle, the operation of one rule precluding the operation of another otherwise relevant one (Ibn Jinni Munif: II.25,26), (e) frequency of use (Sibawaihi Kitaab: II.47, Ibn Jinni Munif: I.61, 63). In one context or another the Arabic grammarians appeal to these principles to explain the appearance of a particular form. The most detailed treatment is found in Ibn Jinni’s Munif, most of its 880 pages devoted to morphophonological problems. The Arabic grammarians developed a powerful explanatory apparatus which, looked at in terms of individual principles, is highly plausible (i. e. looked at in terms of modern morphophonological theory). To what extent the Arabic grammarians had an internally coherent theory is a problem that has not yet been addressed by modern scholars (cf. Versteegh 1989).

4.

Relations between morphology and syntax

In its internal dimensions arf covered all aspects of morphological analysis. An explicit (definitional) recognition of arf, however, came relatively late in the history of Arabic grammar, long after its methods and procedures had been fixed. It was Ibn Jinni who first made explicit the division between morphology (arf/tariyf) and syntax (naw): “Morphology [tariyf] deals with the fixed form of words [kalim], while syntax [naw] studies words in their different contexts.” (Ibn Jinni Munif: I.4)

As Ibn Jinni’s quote makes clear, the word is the level of morphological analysis. What, however, is understood by the notion of word? Two approaches to this problem can be sketched here. The first is to follow the implicit logic of Ibn Jinni’s definition to seek for the limits of word; the second is to look for explicit definitions of word. Both of these treatments will be followed in turn. In Ibn Jinni’s quote above, the unit word (kalima) is defined relative to the levels of grammatical analysis it partakes of, syntax and morphology. A word’s syntactic relevance lies expecially in the fact that a noun’s differing case endings signal its syntactic status (Owens 1988: § 2), as in the following example, where nominative signals the grammatical agent and accusative the object. (4) raaa zayd-u-n saw Zayd-NOM-INDEF ‘Zayd saw the man’.

al-rajul-a DEF-man-ACC

A word’s morphological relevance relates to the range of derivational processes definable relative to the word, as was illustrated above. The word, in Ibn Jinni’s characterization of syntax and morphology, thus plays a mediating role between the two levels, belonging exclusively to neither of them. In the logic of this characterization, those aspects of a word’s structure which relate to syntax do not belong to morphology, as indeed is the case in Arabic theory (Fleisch 1960: 1248). In particular, case markers (e. g. -u, -a in (4)) are controlled by word external governors (in (4), by the verb), so that these are treated in sections on syntax, not morphology. One does not find in one place, in Arabic grammatical treatises, the exhaustive listing of all morphological attributes of, e. g. a noun, since case markers are syntactic exponents.

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Nonetheless, this neat bifurcated conceptualization of word runs into problems of two types. First, there are phonological phenomena which refer to the notion of “end of word”, where the end can be either a case marking (a syntactic element) or an invariable vowel, such as occurs on the perfect verb. For instance, there exists in Arabic an opposition between non-pausal (wal) and pausal (waqf) pronunciation of words (Sibawayhi Kitaab: II.302 f.; Sarraj Uuwl: II.367 f.; etc.) (5) Non-pausal forms (a) kataba ‘he wrote’ (b) rajul-un ‘man-NOM.INDEF’ Pausal forms (c) katab ‘he wrote’ (d) rajul ‘man(NOM.INDEF)’ In the pausal form, any final vowel, and the indefinite marker -n (see 6.1), are deleted. The rule applies regardless of the grammatical status of the final vowel, so in (5d) it is the case marker that is deleted in pausal position. What this phenomenon shows is that phonological rules have to refer to the notion of word as a morphological unity, which is not implied in Ibn Jinni’s characterization of the difference between morphology and syntax. A second problem concerns the status of elements with relations to both syntax and morphology, as in the following. (6) (a) ðahab-ta go:PERF-2.SG.MASC ‘you went’ (b) ta-ðhabu 2.SG.MASC-go:IMPF ‘you go’

anta you(SG.MASC) anta you(SG.MASC)

Both (6a) and (6b) are self-standing sentences, the subject (‘you’) being expressed in the verb. In Arabic theory the sentences have very different analyses: the suffix for ‘you’ -ta in (6a) has, effectively, the status of an independent nominal subject and is treated under the general topic of pronouns (e. g.) Ibn Yaེish Shar al-Mufaal: III.86). The prefix ta-, on the other hand, is treated as a marker of second person, but not as a pronoun in its own right, and the form of this and other imperfective verbs are treated within the domain of morphology (Zajjaji Jumal: 404). Within the context of Ibn Jinni’s characterization of the relation between morphology

and syntax there are then questions raised as to which level certain elements would belong to, and the suspicion in some instances is that inconsistencies would emerge.

5.

Minimal morphological units

One way, then, to understand the domain of morphology in Arabic theory is to ask to which range of phenomena it applies, even if in some instances answers are not completely clear-cut. A second method is to look for defined morphological units. Here there is only one relevant unit, namely kalima. Zamaxshari (Mufaal: 6), Astarabadhi (Sharħ: I.24) and others define kalima as a correspondence between sound (laf) and meaning (manaa), contrasts being explicitly drawn between sequences of sounds (laf), and sequences of sounds which have a meaning (kalima, e. g. Ibn Faris aaħibi: 87). The question remains, however, what sort of unit a kalima, soundmeaning correspondence, is (cf. Levin 1987 for general discussion). In some cases the domain of a kalima is clear, corresponding to a morpheme. Ibn Yaེish (Sharħ al-Mufaal: I.19), for example, explains that the combination definite article + nominal, al-rajulu ‘DEF-man’ consists of ‘two kalima’, i. e. two morphemes. Ibn Yaེish goes on to define an upper and lower limit to kalima: the final /l/ in rajulu would not be one because it has no meaning. If, on the other hand, a person were to be named ‘alrajulu’, al- would no longer be a kalima, because it would have lost its discrete meaning. This example is reminiscent of the definition of a morpheme as “[...] a recurrent (meaningful) form which cannot in turn be analyzed into smaller recurrent (meaningful) forms” (Bloomfield 1926: 27). While this interpretation of kalima works in many cases, it does not work in all. First of all, one frequently finds kalima as ‘orthographic word’ (e. g. Zajjaji Iyaa: 5). This use of kalima was rarely, if at all, given explicit recognition in the definitions of the Arabic grammarians, even if it was implicitly assumed in much of the discussion (see e. g. Ibn Jinni’s quote above in 4). More interesting is a problem addressed directly by Astarabadhi (Sharħ: I.5) in a passage which shows very clearly that Arabic grammarians were dealing with abstract categories which are defined or redefined against the data to be described. “The perfect verb, like araba ‘he hit’, is similar [to bi-morphemic words like al-rajulu] because it also

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is a word whose consonantal sounds [rb] signify the action while the overall pattern added to this, including consonants and short vowels or lack of short vowels placed in a particular pattern constitute a compound word consisting of two parts, each with its own meaning. Similarly [...] examples like rijaal ‘men’ [...] because [...] there is something which signifies [...] plural [= -aa ...] However, it would not be correct to call these kalima in the way we did above. The reason for this is obvious: we say a word is composed (murakkab) of two kalima when one follows another sequentially, each with its own discrete meaning, whereas in the case under discussion both parts are heard and understood together.” (I:5–6, transl. J. O.)

The term kalima for Astarabadhi can apply only to segmentally continuous morphemes. The implication of Astarabadhi’s analysis is that two types of morphemic analysis need recognition, one defined in terms of discrete morphemes, kalima, the other in terms of overall patterns, with multiple meanings represented in one and the same phonological sequence. This multivalent morphemic analysis can be compared with the different models of morphemic description developed in the 1950’s, the “Word and Paradigm” and the “Item and arrangement” (cf. Matthews 1993: 21 f.). It shows that the theoretical basis of morphological description was strongly influenced by the structure of Arabic itself, different aspects of the language suggesting employment of different descriptive techniques.

6.

Historical and cultural perspectives

In the remainder of this summary three questions will briefly be addressed: the internal development of Arabic morphological theory, the relevance of morphology to other aspects of Arabic linguistics, and relations to the Hebrew tradition. 6.1. Sibawayhi vs. later grammarians There were two fundamental motivating factors behind the establishment of the Arabic tradition. One was religious. Classical Arabic, as the language of the Quran, had to be learned by all Muslims. The other was practical. Arabic, as the language of a new ruling elite in the Middle East and North Africa, had to be propagated as the language of administration. These two orientations are evident in the two earliest detailed works on the Arabic language, the religious in Farra’s (d. 824) Maaaniy l-Quraan, ‘Meaning of the Qurเan’ (Owens 1990: § 6–8), the practi-

cal in Sibawayhi’s ‘al-Kitaab’, ‘The Book’. Because of its comprehensive nature, it was the latter which was most suitable to the growing need to produce pedagogically orientated grammars, and it serves directly or indirectly as the basis of later grammatical theory and description. Nonetheless, there were differences between Sibawayhi and later descriptions, probably more in syntax than in morphology. The main one was the way the material was organized, later grammars having a more pedagogically concise presentation, as will presently be seen. It should be noted, in this context, that Arabic grammars were concerned almost exclusively with the form of Arabic used between c. 500–800, i. e. with Classical Arabic, and that their basis was rigidly synchronic, describing an unalterable language. In Arabic nouns are generally inflected as nominative -u, accusative -a and genitive -i and take the indefinite -n marker, rajul-u-n ‘man-NOM-INDEFINITE’. Such nouns are said to be munarif, fully declinable. Others, however, do not take indefinite -n, and do not have distinct genitive and accusative forms, akbar-a ‘bigger(DEF)-ACC’, ‘bigger (DEF)-GEN’. These nouns are termed ayr munarif, partially declinable. Sibawayhi summarizes this latter class in great detail (Kitaab: II.1–52), the various sub-classes of partially declined nouns being distinguished first formally – nouns that resemble verbs, nouns with the feminine suffix -aa, with the feminine suffix -aa, etc., then notionally (e. g. loan words, place, tribal names), then derivationally (adl, compounds). In his description particular use is made of analogy (qiyaas). A basic analogy, for instance, is that whatever resembles a verb is not fully inflected because verbs lack the indefinite -n and lack genitive case. akbara, for instance, formally resembles the verb asana ‘act well’ in its CVCCVC structure, and this resemblance is said to account for the lack of full inflection in nominals of this type (see (8)). Throughout Sibawayhi’s exposé the presence or lack of full inflection in individual forms is explained by their resemblance to other forms which are/are not fully inflected. Over a century later Sarraj accounts for the same facts more concisely (Uuwl: II.79 f.). He begins by identifying nine marked features: formal resemblance to verbs, adjective, feminine, definiteness, irreg-

73

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ular derivation, plurality, loan word, compound, the suffix -aan. The presence in a nominal of the marked features are said to cause the lack of full inflection (see Zajjaj: Maa Yanarif: 5, for earlier and slightly different formulation). After outlining the general conditions under which a word is not fully inflected, Sarraj discusses each of the nine instances in detail. Nonetheless, this treatment is not without problems. Names of cities, for example, are often not fully inflected (e. g. makkatu ‘Mecca’), yet they are not accounted for by the nine marked characteristics. Sarraj is forced to add a rather long appendix to his summary of partially, inflected nominals, dealing with nominals which are not accounted for by the other rules. Thus while Sarraj’s generalization accounts for the majority of cases, it is not general enough to account for all, and for some sub-classes he must resort to Sibawayhi’s method of listing the cases one by one. Sibawayhi’s basic principle of organization is a list of cases arranged first formally, then notionally, as summarized above. Significantly, however, he begins with a basic case (resemblance to verb prevents full inflection), thus introducing a causal dimension for the lack of full inflection. This causal dimension is not always clear, however, in Sibawayhi’s class-by-class presentation. Sarraj, on the other hand, effectively takes the crucial identifying features of Sibawayhi’s sub-classes, identifies these characteristics as marked ones, and generalizes a causal dimension: the presence of these features prevents full inflection. Sarraj uses principles implicit in Sibawayhi’s account to order the data on partial inflection. Sarraj’s treatment serves two purposes. It presents a more theoretically compact account of partial verb inflection than Sibawayhi’s, and it does so in a pedagogically convenient way, ordering a rather disparate array of facts into one ordered set. 6.2. The uuwl, explanatory principles The differences between Sibawayhi and later grammarians in their morphological analysis, both the general framework and the detailed analysis, were not great. Differences between Sarraj and grammarians after him were even smaller and the treatment of morphology in both the general grammatical manuals like those of Zajjaji (Jumal), Jurjani, Zamaxhari, and Ibn Yaེish (Shark), and the specialized works on morphology, like Ibn ེUfur’s

(Mumtt) and Ibn Yaེish’s (Shar al-Muluwki) differed mainly in the detail in which they described the data. Morphology did, however, come to play a crucial role in other aspects of grammatical theory, most especially in the theory of the uuwl, ‘origins, causes, principles’ (sg. al). The search for a basic set of uuwl is common to a number of Islamic disciplines, among them theology and jurisprudence. Their explicit application to language is found first in the 10th century. Sarraj distinguished two goals of linguistic descriptions, one an account of the grammatical facts, phrased in terms of grammatical categories, the other an explanation for why the facts are as they are (Uuwl: I.35). This second task found its most sophisticated demonstration in Ibn Jinni’s Xaaai, though other authors contributed to it as well (e. g, Zajjaji’s Iyaa; SuyuĤi’s Iqtiraa). Morphology provided one of the richest sources of data. The principle behind the uuwl in linguistic theory is simple. It is assumed that certain grammatical forms and structures are basic and regular ones (al, pl. uuwl). For example, in the following sets, the first member is the basic one, SG/PL, M/F, N/ADJ, N/VERB, native word/loanword. If there are structures which deviate from them (called far ‘branch, secondary’, pl. furuw), a reason (illa) is sought to explain the deviation from the norm. The basic assumptions invite comparison with markedness theory of modern grammar (cf. Art. 29). The 12th century linguist Al-Anbari (Luma: 93) summarized the procedure schematically. → far illa basic state for a reason is not basic

(7) al

Rephrasing the facts of partially inflected nouns (cf. 6.1) in the schema of (7), one would have: (8) al – illa → nominal has resemblance 3 cases, takes to verb indefinite -n

far partially inflected nominal loses a nominal feature *akbar-a-n cf. asana akbar-a

Nominals are basically fully inflected; some are not because of their formal resemblance to verbs. Note that the starred form is logically postulated and does not constitute a distinct grammatical level.

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Through the uuwl theory, Arabic grammarians explained a vast array of linguistic features, with varying degrees of plausibility, which were irregular according to the logic of the grammatical theory they worked with. They also used the dichotomization of linguistic categories into al/far to organize the presentation of their material. In Ibn ེUfur’s Mumti, for example, the basic morphological patterns are presented first, in the order: nouns – verbs (note, unmarked category first). Then the non-basic sounds (zaaid) are discussed, and finally the morphophonological rules. 6.3. Relations to other traditions The relations of Arabic grammatical theory to other traditions remain at one and the same time an under-researched, yet controversial domain. Some authors downplay the influence of Greek grammar on the Arabic tradition (e. g. Weiß 1910; Carter 1972), while others demonstrate that some influence was present (e. g. Rundgren 1976; Versteegh 1977). The situation for morphology is essentially like that for syntax. Versteegh’s application of the notion voie diffuse is relevant. This explains outside influences on Arabic thinking not through the translation of Greek or Syriac words into Arabic – this came too late to decisively influence the grammatical tradition (Weiß 1910) – but through a practical pedagogical tradition long in place in the regions conquered by the Arabs. In these terms the suggestion that the system of explaining morphophonological changes – one of the bases of arf (cf. (1)–(2) above) – was influenced by the Greek notion of declension (klisis; see Art. 6) has a good deal of plausibility, as do other suggestions along this line (cf. Versteegh 1977: 24, 64). In the other direction, Arabic influence on the Hebraic tradition was decisive (Hirshfeld 1926: 7; Bacher 1895: 23), most importantly, perhaps, in suggesting to the early 10th century grammarians Ben Asher and Saེadya the adoption of the root principle in morphological analysis (Bacher 1895: 25, 35, 48). In this context it may be observed that the reliance on Arabic models contributed to a comparative philological perspective, particularly Ibn Qureish (c. 1000; Bacher 1895: 66), quite lacking in the Arabic tradition. The Hebrew tradition was not without its innovations in other ways. Bacher (1895: 52) suggests, for instance, that Saེadya set out verb paradigms in tabular form, a practice not used (so far as

I know) in the Arabic tradition. Arabic influence on the medieval European tradition unfortunately remains an unresearched field.

7.

References

7.1. Primary literature (cf. Owens 1990 for transcription conventions; year of death of Arabic linguists in square brackets; the definite article al- and Ibn ‘son’ are ignored for purposes of alphabetical ordering.) Ibn al-เAnbari, Abu l-Barakat [1187], Kitaab l-Inaaf fiy Masaa il l-Xilaaf bayna l-Nawiyyiyna lBariyyiyna wa l-Kuwfiyyiyna, Vol. 1–2, ed. by M. ེAbd al-Ħamid. Beirut: Dar al-Fikr n. d. Ibn al-เAnbari, Abu l-Barakat, Al-Iraab fiy Jadal l-Iraab wa Luma l-Adilla fiy Uuwl ilNaw, ed. by Saེid al-Afghani. Beirut: Dar alFikr 1971 Al-Astarabadhi, Raቩi l-Din [1286], Shar Kitaab l-Kaafiya, Vol. 1–2. Beirut: Dar al-Kutub al-ེIlmiyya n. d. Ibn Faris, Ahmad [1004], al-aaibi fiy Fiqh alLua, ed. by A၂mad Saqr. Cairo: Maktabat ེIsa Bab al-ãalabi n. d. Al-Farraเ, Abu Zakariyya [822], Maaaniy lQuraan, Vol. 1–3, ed. by ེAli l-Najjar & A. Yusuf Najati. Beirut: ེAlam al-Kutub 1983 Al-Farraเ, Abu Zakariyya, Kitaab al-Muðakkar wa l-MuannaӨ, ed. by Ramaቩan al-Tawwab. Cairo: Dar al-Turath 1975 Ibn Jinni, Abu l-Fath [1002], Al-Xaaai, Vol. 1–3, ed. by Mo၂ammad ེAli l-Najjar. Cairo 1952–56 [reprinted in Beirut: Dar al-Kitab al-ེArabi, n. d.] Ibn Jinni, Abu l-Fath, Al-Munif, Vol. 1–3, ed. by Ibrahim Mu၁tafa & เA၂mad เAmin. Cairo: เIdarat เI၂yaเ al-Turath al-Qadim 1954 Ibn Jinni, Abu l-Fath, Sirr inaaat al-Iraab, Vol. 1–2, ed. by ãasan Hindawi. Damascus: Dar al-Qalam 1985 Jurjani, ེAbd al-Qahir [1078], Al-Muqtaid fiy Shar al-Iyaa, Vol. 1–2, ed. by K. B. Murjan. Baghdad: Ministry of Culture and Information 1982 Al-Mubarrad, Ibn Yazid [898], al-Muqtaab, ed. by M. ེAbd al-Xaliq ེUቩayma. Beirut: ེAlam al-Kutub n. d. Ibn al-Sarraj, Abu Bakr [928], Al-Uuwl fiy lNaw, Vol. 1–3, ed. by ེAbd al-Husayn al-Fatli. Beirut: Muเassasat al-Risala 1985 Ibn al-Sarraj, Abu Bakr Al-Muwjaz fi l-Naw, ed. by Mustafa el-Chouémi & Salim Damerdji. Beirut: Muเassasat Badran 1965 Sibawayhi, Ibn ེUthman [793], Al-Kitaab, Vol. 1–2, ed. by Hartwig Derenbourg. Hildesheim/New York: Olms 1970

7. Traditional Arabic grammar Ibn Sina, Abdallah [1036], Asbaab ĦuduwӨ l-Ħuruwf, ed. by Mohammad l-ģayyan & Yi၂ya ེAlam. Damascus: Majmaེ al-Lugha l-ེArabiyya bi Dimashq 1983 SuyuĤi, Jalal al-Din [1505], Kitaab al-Iqtiraa, ed. by A၂mad Qasim. Cairo: Maktabat al-Saེada 1976 Suyuti, Jalal al-Din, Ham al-Hawaami Shar Jam al-Jawaami, ed. by Mohammad al-Naེsani. Beirut: Dar al-Maེrifa n. d. Ibn ེU၁fur (al-เAshbili) [1270], Al-Mumti fiy l-Tariyf, Vol. 1–2, ed. by Mohammad ེAbd al-ãamid. Beirut: Dar al-Kitab al-ེArabi 1955 Ibn ེUsfur (al-เAshbili), Sharħ Jumal al-Zajjaajiy, Vol. 1–2, ed. by Abu l-Janah. Baghdad: Wizarat al-เAwqaf, 1980 Ibn Yaེish, Ibn ེAli [1245], Shar l-Muluwkiy, ed. by Fahd Fawih. Aleppo: Maktabat al-ེarabi 1973 Ibn Yaེish, Ibn ེAli, Sharħ al-Mufaal, Vol. 1–10. Cairo: Maktabat al-Mutanabbi and Beirut: ེAlam al-Kutub n. d. Zajjaji, Ibn เIs၂aq [923], Maa Yanarif wa maa laa Yanarif. Cairo: Lajnat เI၂yaེ al-Turath al-เIslami 1970 Zajjaji, Abu l-Qasim [945], Al-Jumal fiy l-Naw, ed. by ེAli l-ãamad. Irbid: Dar al-เAmal and Beirut: Muเassasat al-Risaala 1984 Zajjaji, Abu l-Qasim, Al-Iyaa fiy ེIlal al-Naw, ed. by Mazin al-Mubararak. Beirut: Dar al-Nafaเis 1979 Zamaxshari, Abu l-Qasim [1154], Al-Mufaal fiy lIlm al-Arabi. Beirut: Dar al-Jil, n. d.

7.2. Secondary literature Bacher, Wilhelm (1895), Die Anfänge der hebräischen Grammatik. Leipzig: Brockhaus [reprinted in: Bacher, Wilhelm (1974), Die Anfänge der hebräischen Grammatik and Die hebräische Sprachwissenschaft vom 10. bis zum 16. Jahrhundert. Amsterdam: Benjamins] Bloomfield, Leonard (1926), “A Set of Postulates for the Study of Language”. Language 2, 153–164 Bohas, Georges & Guillaume, Jean-Patrick (1984), Etudes des théories des grammairiens arabes. Damascus: Institut Français de Damas

75 Carter, Michael (1972), “Les origines de la grammaire Arabe”. Revue des Etudes Islamiques 40, 69–97 Fleisch, Henri (1960), “เIེraab”. In: Lewis, B. & Ménage, V. L. & Pellat, Ch. & Schacht, J. (eds.), Encyclopedia of Islam, New Edition, Leiden: Brill, 1248–1250 Hirshfeld, H. (1926), Literary History of Hebrew Grammarians and Lexicographers. London: Oxford University Press Levin, Aryeh (1987), “The Views of the Arab Grammarians on the Classification and Syntactic Function of Prepositions”. Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam 10, 342–367 Matthews, Peter H. (21993), Morphology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press [11974] Owens, Jonathan (1988), The Foundations of Grammar: An Introduction to Medieval Arabic Grammatical Theory. Amsterdam: Benjamins (Studies in the History of the Language Sciences 45) Owens, Jonathan (1989), “The Syntactic Basis of Arabic Word Classification”. Arabica 36, 211– 234 Owens, Jonathan (1990), Early Arabic Grammatical Theory: Heterogeneity and Standardization. Amsterdam: Benjamins (Studies in the History of the Language Sciences 53) Owens, Jonathan (1993), “The Arabic Syntactic Tradition”. In: Jacobs, Joachim & Sternfeld, Wolfgang & Vennemann, Theo & von Stechow, Arnim (eds.), Syntax: An International Handbook of Contemporary Research. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 208–215 Rundgren, Frithiof (1976), “Über den griechischen Einfluß auf die arabische Nationalgrammatik”. Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis 2, 119–144 Versteegh, Kees (1977), Greek Elements in Arabic Linguistic Thinking. Leiden: Brill Versteegh, Kees (1989), “‘Early’ and ‘Late’ Grammarians in the Arabic Tradition: The Morphophonology of the Hollow Verb”. Zeitschrift für arabische Linguistik 20, 9–22 Weiß, Joseph (1910), “Die arabische Nationalgrammatik und die Lateiner”. Zeitschrift der deutschen morgenländischen Gesellschaft 64, 349–396

Jonathan Owens, Bayreuth (Germany)

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8. The Middle Ages 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

Language study in the Middle Ages Analytical concepts and terminology Word classes and their properties Morphology in medieval European vernacular grammars References

1.

Language study in the Middle Ages

The arrival of Christianity in western Europe brought with it quite new pedagogical challenges. Whereas in eastern Europe the adoption of Christianity involved no major linguistic changes for the literate population, since the Byzantine policy was to translate essential texts into the language of the newlyconverted peoples, the Church of Rome insisted on the retention of Latin. Everything vital for the life of the Church ⫺ the liturgy, hymns and prayers, the Bible, works of exegesis and moral instruction ⫺ all had to be studied in Latin. As long as Roman Christianity was confined to Latin-speaking parts of the Empire this posed no special difficulties. Once it penetrated north of the Alps into areas connected tenuously or not at all with the Roman cultural sphere ⫺ Ireland, England, Germany, Scandinavia, Poland and Hungary ⫺ a new problem emerged. These non-Latin-speaking peoples were obliged to undertake the teaching of a language with whose speakers they had little contact, to children who in most of these regions were not literate even in their native tongue. This challenge was not one which could be satisfied by sustained effort over a few generations, as was the case with the labour of translation in the Greek East; instead, each generation had to undergo the hard discipline of language study afresh, from the time of the conversion up until the Reformation. Paradoxically, the kind of analysis required to teach a heavily-inflected language like Latin to non-native-speakers was not something which medieval westerners found congenial. In a widely-quoted passage St Augustine likened the form of a word to the body and its meaning to the soul, and medieval Christian attitudes to the body ⫺ disparagement and loathing for the “tomb” or “prison” of the soul ⫺ were reflected in longstanding reluctance to engage in the thoroughgoing empirical study of the more physi-

cal side of speech. Had the Church not insisted upon the use of Latin, it is unlikely that morphology would have developed even to the limited extent that it did during the western Middle Ages. A further essential condition for the emergence of an analytical approach to morphology was the transition from a primarily aural/oral mode of study to a predominantly visual one, a change for which there is evidence in manuscript material of the eighth and ninth centuries. 1.1. The context of morphological study Morphology was studied within the framework of grammar, the first and foremost of the Seven Liberal Arts, which provided, in theory if not always in practice, the core of the curriculum in the monastic schools of the first half of the Middle Ages. Monasteries such as Reichenau, Lorsch, Corbie, Fleury and Bobbio possessed large collections of grammars, both ancient and medieval. The content of the discipline of grammar varied through time and from one centre to another. At times its goal was the appreciation of ancient texts, or more frequently the accurate interpretation of the Bible; but its widespread definition as “the art of speaking and writing correctly” indicates its usual scope, and often it seems to have been synonymous with elementary language teaching. Such grammars of Latin as have come down to us from the early Middle Ages fall into two groups: descriptive grammars setting out a comprehensive account of the forms of Latin, and commentaries upon the grammars of late Antiquity. Although the goal of the descriptive grammars was in most cases to serve as a guide to the type of Latin used by the Church ⫺ notably Jerome’s Vulgate translation of the Bible, dating from the fourth century, and other ecclesiastical writings of the same era ⫺ they were based on the grammars of the fourth and fifth centuries, which took as their model the language of classical authors, principally Vergil, Terence, Cicero and Sallust. Consequently, medieval grammars are often ambivalent as to which variety of Latin they are attempting to teach. Nonetheless, although a more methodologically explicit writer like Boniface, writing before 716, systematically tells his readers whether a given form is to be found in the writings of

4. The Ancient Near East

the “ecclesiastical dogmatists” or is limited to earlier usage, no medieval grammarian attempted to compile a historical grammar of Latin. Their works present a purely synchronic account of the language as they found it described in earlier sources, with archaic, classical and ecclesiastical forms side by side. During the twelfth century, with the growing importance of urban centres, cathedral schools such as those at Salisbury, Chartres and Notre Dame became major centres of learning alongside the monastic schools, and at the end of the century the first universities began to emerge ⫺ Paris, Oxford, Cambridge, Bologna. The formerly integrated curriculum in which the Seven Liberal Arts led to close study of the Bible was divided between the Faculty of Arts and the Faculty of Theology with consequent specialisation. Indeed, the widespread interest in newlytranslated works by Aristotle and commentaries upon them by Muslim scholars such as Averroes and Avicenna led to a crisis as it came to appear that Christianity was in danger of being swamped by far from Christian ideas. The painstaking work of the Scholastic philosophers as they gradually digested the new teaching gave rise to a synthesis of Aristotelianism and Christianity. Grammar too was penetrated by the new ideas, and a new approach emerged, speculative (or theoretical) grammar, parallel to the old grammatica positiva (practical grammar). Speculative grammar reached its best-known development at the hands of the modistae, a group of scholars active at the university of Paris in the last quarter of the thirteenth century. 1.2. The structure of Latin morphological doctrine The works of the Late Latin grammarians (cf. Art. 6) provided a framework which at first was followed very closely. Donatus’s Ars minor and Ars maior offered a model which, whatever its shortcomings, possessed the merit of being systematic and easy to follow. Thus, a grammar based on the Ars minor typically consisted of eight chapters, one for each of the parts of speech, in a standard sequence. A grammar based on the longer Ars maior consisted of three books: one dealing with units below the level of the word, one on the parts of speech, and one on style ⫺ barbarisms, solecisms, tropes and so forth. Within each chapter the structure again

77 tended to conform to Donatus’s: definition of the part of speech, list of its properties, discussion of each property with examples, miscellaneous remarks and exceptions. From the twelfth century on, a four-part division based on the four linguistic levels recognised became widespread: orthography (based on the minimal unit littera [phoneme/grapheme]); prosody (based on the syllable), etymology (not in the modern sense, but rather the study of the eight word classes, including morphology); and syntax (based on the complete utterance). Form sat uneasily within Donatus’s grammar, and indeed within the ancient grammar in general, on account of the semantic preoccupations of ancient grammarians. Because the Greek or Roman teacher could take native-speaker competence for granted, there was no need to provide an exhaustive description of inflectional morphology, a fact vividly demonstrated both in the Te´khne¯ ascribed to Dionysius Thrax and in Donatus’s Ars minor. This latter work offers paradigms of three of the five Latin noun declensions, and one verb paradigm only. Only in Latin grammars compiled for use in the Greek East, notably those by Phocas, Eutyches and Priscian, was there a serious attempt to describe some aspects of Latin morphology. It was from these fifth- and sixth-century grammars that early medieval scholars derived their terminological and conceptual repertoire of morphological notions. They worked with the traditional list of eight parts of speech, usually listed in Donatus’s order: noun, pronoun, verb, adverb, participle, conjunction, preposition, interjection. Although some authors made passing reference to disagreement in Antiquity over the number of the parts of speech, no early medieval grammarian attempted to deviate from the standard list. Each of these word classes was usually defined at the head of the relevant chapter in terms borrowed from Antiquity, and reflecting the same mix of formal, functional and semantic criteria. The properties were then listed and discussed. Although most of these properties were morphologically relevant (qualitas [i.e. the proper/common distinction], comparison, gender, number, figura [i.e. compounding], case, mood, conjugation, tense, person), their association with a particular set of morphemes was rarely singled out, as is also the case with their ancient models (cf. Art. 6).

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Where early medieval grammarians differed significantly from their predecessors was in their attempt to achieve a comprehensive and systematic, but not overwhelming, description of Latin inflectional morphology. Their chief tool was the paradigm (cf. Art. 62), accompanied by often lengthy lists of examples. This seemingly straightforward device brought its own problems, largely ones of selection. How many paradigms were necessary to ensure comprehensiveness? What criteria should be used in the choice of types for exemplification? Over a period of about two centuries, from somewhere around 600 to around 850, we can observe a process of lively experimentation at work. The grammarian Asporius (Asperius, Asper), active around 600, is a particularly interesting case. Taking Donatus’s Ars minor as his basis, he began to copy it out, “converting” it to Christianity as he went along by substituting examples from ecclesiastical vocabulary for Donatus’s pagan ones: Roma Tiberis becomes Hierusalem Iordanis Sion, doctus ‘learned’ becomes sanctus ‘holy’, and the examples of the genders ⫺ magister ‘teacher’, musa ‘muse’, scamnum ‘bench’ ⫺ become iustus ‘just’, ecclesia ‘church’, ieiunium ‘a fast’. On arriving at Donatus’s paradigms Asporius realised that more extensive revision was required. Donatus had declined one model noun of each of the five genders ⫺ magister (masc.), musa (fem.), scamnum (neut.), sacerdos ‘priest(ess)’ (common of two genders), felix ‘happy’ (common of three genders). These five words between them represent three of the five Latin noun declensions, the first (musa), second (magister, scamnum) and third (sacerdos, felix). Donatus nowhere declines a fourth- or fifth-declension noun, let alone irregular or anomalous types. On reaching the end of his generous list of neuter nouns in -um (110 examples!) Asporius added paradigms of several more neuter types, thereby covering neuters of the second, third and fourth declensions. Paradigms of nouns of various genders follow, including cultus ‘worship’ (fourth declension) and facies ‘face’ (fifth declension). In this way Asporius achieves reasonably complete coverage, although in a haphazard fashion. His metalanguage is revealing: the paradigms are introduced with the formula “item nomen neutrum quod in r litteram desinit” (‘similarly a neuter noun ending in the letter r’); terms such as ordo and declinatio ‘inflectional class,

declension’, are conspicuous by their absence, and his working method makes it plain that this fundamental concept was unknown to him. Lacking in Donatus’s grammars, it is however a central notion in the works of Priscian (ca. 500), notably the Institutiones grammaticae and the Institutio de nomine, pronomine et verbo. This latter work, a brief text which succinctly sets out a framework for the morphological description of Latin (but supplies only a few of the details), was widely studied north of the Alps in the seventh and eighth centuries. In the opening paragraph Priscian sets out a basis for the classification of the declensions: “All the nouns which Latin eloquence employs are inflected according to five declensions which are ordered according to the sequence of the vowels which form the genitive […]. The nominative of the first declension has two final letters [litterae terminales], -a and -s, and three terminations [terminationes], -a, -as and -e¯s […]. Nouns ending in -a, whether Greek or Latin, masculine, feminine or common in gender, belong to the first declension.” (Priscian 1860: 443)

This summarises the morphological features with which early medieval teachers were to work, as we shall see below. It also offered a coherent and systematic basis for the discussion of declension, the most problematic area of Latin morphology. In most seventh- and eighth-century grammars declension is made the basis of classification. Within each declension, however, there was still considerable scope for variation in the classification of subtypes. This process is seen at work most clearly in the little texts known as Declinationes nominum, which consist entirely of paradigms and examples, with almost no running text to constrain the adventurous teacher. No two versions are the same: virtually every teacher-scribe experimented with the order of the paradigms. Similarly, the authors of the Insular elementary grammars, works modelled on Donatus’s grammars supplemented with a paradigm section based (directly or indirectly) on Priscian’s Institutio de nomine, allowed themselves considerable latitude in the ordering of paradigms. Thus, the Anglo-Saxon writer Tatwine (†734) divides up nouns of each declension by termination, each of which is then subdivided by gender. The anonymous Ars Ambianensis also adopts termination as the primary ordering criterion within each declension, but within that organises according to language

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of origin (Latin, Greek, Hebrew) and the proper/common distinction as well as gender. Such a system tended to overgenerate very heavily, for each subtype was given its own paradigm and list of examples (when not curtailed by weary scribes). Thus, the first declension is exemplified by five paradigms in the Declinationes nominum, and Tatwine recognises some twenty distinct types. Boniface, writing before 716, on the other hand, gives just one paradigm of each declension. By the central Middle Ages the situation had stabilised somewhat. Commentators on Donatus such as Murethach, Sedulius Scottus and Remigius gave no paradigms, assuming that they would already have been mastered from the Ars minor or from collections of paradigms jotted on flyleaves or blank half-pages in manuscripts containing grammars. From some as yet uncertain date ⫺ early in the eleventh century? ⫺ interpolated versions of the Ars minor expanded to include a full set of noun paradigms and (usually) a comprehensive set of verb paradigms were in widespread circulation. They often included a description of the endings characteristic of each declension set out along similar lines to information found in Priscian’s Institutio de nomine, as in this passage: “The genitive [singular] of the fourth declension ends in -u¯s, e.g. hic senatus, huius senatus, the dative in -ui, e.g. huic senatui, the accusative in -um, e.g. hunc senatum, the vocative is similar to the nominative, e.g. o senatus, and the ablative ends in -u¯, e.g. ab hoc senatu.” (Priscian 1860: 448)

A versified version of this doctrine was presented by Alexander of Villa Dei in his popular Doctrinale (1199), and was later incorporated into the vernacular grammars of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries (cf. 2.1.1; 4.1.2). This together with substitution rules (cf. 2.1.2) constituted the core of the later medieval scholar’s working knowledge of morphological analysis.

2.

Analytical concepts and terminology

The morphological units in use in the early Middle Ages were the same as those known to late Antiquity, and are neatly summarised by Murethach (after 844): “Philosophi […] ita de littera sentiunt, quod uolumen diuiditur in sententias, sententiae in uersus, uersus in partes, partes in syllabas, syllabae in lit-

79 teras.” (‘Philosophers say of the letter/speechsound that a book is divided into sentences, the sentences into verses, the verses into words, the words into syllables, and the syllables into letters/ speech-sounds’; Murethach 1977: 7)

Words, syllables and letters/speech-sounds (littera includes both) were the principal units used in morphological analysis. The perceived parallelism of these units, already pointed out by Priscian, was reasserted throughout the Middle Ages. The anonymous thirteenthcentury grammar probably written by a member of Robert Grosseteste’s circle, for example, said of case: “It is the chief function of this property to coordinate one word with another in a sentence, even as the letter/speech-sound may be arranged in a syllable according to its value, and the syllable according to its value, and the syllable in the word according to the number of its letters.” (Anonymous 1976: 41)

Several terms for ‘word’ were available. Dictio denotes ‘word’ as a semantic and formal unit. Vox ‘voice, vocal utterance’ denotes a word-form. Interestingly, the aural/oral aspect of ‘word’ implied by this term is echoed by the frequent use in late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages of sonus ‘sound’ in contexts where it is clearly equivalent to ‘wordform’. From about the middle of the ninth century sonus was replaced by superficies ‘surface, appearance’ and litteratura ‘graphemic form’, reflecting a growing awareness of the written nature of grammatical studies. Verbum ‘word’ denotes the word as a semantic unit; however, it was seldom used in this sense in grammars, largely in order to avoid confusion with its far commoner sense of ‘verb’. ‘Word’ as a syntactic unit was pars orationis ‘part of the utterance’ or simply pars or oratio. As pars orationis increasingly came to mean ‘word class’ (cf. Art. 71) rather than ‘syntactic unit’; the need for a term with the latter sense gave rise, in the later Middle Ages, to the new term constructibile. The structure of grammatical descriptions meant that morphological processes were generally described in relation to a specific word class rather than with reference to words in general. Morphological units below the level of the word were with one or two exceptions not recognised. Throughout the Middle Ages there is no terminology corresponding to ‘root’, ‘stem’, ‘affix’, ‘marker’, ‘morpheme’

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and so forth. These elements are abstractions which presuppose a “building-blocks” mentality, one which views the world as made up out of readily identifiable discrete minimal units ⫺ atoms, cells, particles. The medieval mind was inclined to work in the opposite direction, to break the whole into ever smaller parts, as is apparent from the quotation from Murethach above. Because attention was focussed upon the whole, its essential nature remained uppermost in their minds. In the case of the word, the importance attached to its semantic aspect precluded recognition of subsemantic units other than those inherited from Antiquity, which were phonological rather than morphological in nature ⫺ the syllable and the littera. Certain terms corresponding roughly to ‘bound morph’ (cf. 2.2.2) constitute a partial exception to what has been said above; they represent a transitional phase on the path to the high degree of abstraction which characterises modern analysis. 2.1. Latin inflectional morphology Although nothing corresponding to ‘suffix’ was in use, the word terminatio is widely found. At first sight equivalent to ‘termination’ or ‘ending’, terminatio is in fact defined in the anonymous Ars Bernensis (eighth or early ninth century) as the final syllable: “What is the difference between a final letter [terminalis] and an ending [terminatio] in nouns ending in -a? We know that a final letter is a single letter, whether a vowel or a consonant, whereas an ending is either a vowel in isolation or a vowel with a consonant. This is therefore the difference between the final letter and the ending in nouns ending in -a: when your attention is focussed on the sound value, i.e. on the syllable, it is an ending; when [it is focussed on] the written form, i.e. whether the end of the word ends in a vowel or a consonant, then it is a final letter.” (Ars Bernensis 91, 27⫺35)

The equation of terminatio with final syllable corresponds to scribal usage in many eighthand ninth-century manuscripts. For instance, the paradigm of third-declension nouns is given in this form in one early-ninth-century manuscript: “hoc onus, huius oneris, ri, nus, nus, re, et pluraliter onera, rum, bus, ra, ra, bus”. The modern form of this paradigm would be onus, oneris, oneri, onus, onus, onere; onera, onerum, oneribus, onera, onera, oneribus. In each case the endings are identified with the final syllable, even when incompatible stems result: o-nus, one-ri, oneri-

bus. This results from the absence of the notion of ‘stem’. The word is perceived as a whole, one region of which is briefly the focus of attention, namely the final segment. Attention is never focussed upon the rest of the word without the ending, and for this reason there is no need for a notion of root. In practice inconsistent segmentation ⫺ carried out as a time- and parchment-saving device ⫺ seems to have caused no difficulties. (Interestingly, although the distinction made by the late antique grammarian Eutyches between finalitas ‘final syllable’, and indicium finalitatis ‘vowel preceding the final syllable’, corresponding to the thematic vowel of traditional modern analysis, was commented upon in the ninth century by Sedulius Scottus, it was not taken up by medieval grammarians.) The absence of the concepts stem, root and suffix resulted in a kind of morphological analysis which strikes us as inefficient and strangely blind to what now seems obvious. The way in which Smaragdus (ca. 810) handles verbs is a case in point. This is how he describes the imperfect tense: “The imperfect tense […] is recognised from only five patterns, i.e. in abam, in ebam, in ibam, in iebam, and in uebam. In abam: amabam clamabam laudabam […]. In ebam: docebam sedebam iacebam ludebam currebam […]. In ibam: praeibam circumibam […]. In iebam: audiebam aperiebam ueniebam […]. In uebam: arguebam fluebam confluebam […].” (Smaragdus 1986: 139)

Because he identifies the endings characteristic of the tense as abam, ebam, ibam, iebam, uebam, he lumps together two morphologically distinct conjugations (the second and third, both ending in -ebam), while on the other hand granting independent status to verbs in -uebam (third conjugation). Nevertheless, from the point of view of the student seeking to recognise the imperfect tense this rule will be as effective as a more economical one instructing us to look for the suffix -bam or the infix -ba-. 2.1.1. Paradigms and tables Such analytical recognition rules played a relatively minor part in grammatical pedagogy at this date; paradigms were the principal tool, as tends to be the case when the semantic aspect of the word is uppermost. During the seventh and eighth centuries paradigms were normally set out in running text and ab-

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breviated where possible. Visually, they were not distinguished at all from the surrounding text. This mode of presentation implies a type of study which relied on aural/oral communication, whether of a scholar reading the text aloud to himself or of a teacher reading to a class. In the course of the eighth century the first tentative experiments with a more visually-oriented method of presentation began. Some are remarkably successful, like the tables of verbs in the copy of the Ars Bonifacii in the Vatican Library, Pal. Lat. 1746, an early-ninth-century manuscript from Lorsch. Active and passive are set out in parallel, each with its own heading, and the scribe consistently reverts to running text for all material not connected with the paradigms.

Fig. 8.2: Participle paradigm in Amiens, Bibl. Mun. 426

Fig. 8.1: Verb paradigm in Vat. Pal. Lat. 1746

A quite different picture is presented by the copy of the Ars Ambianensis in Amiens, Bibliothe`que Municipale 426, copied at Corbie in the first half of the ninth century. In the noun chapter the lists of examples are in columns, but the paradigms are in running text. The explanatory text interspersed amidst the examples is squeezed into the columns a couple of words at a time. In the verb chapter more extensive use (but no better controlled) is made of column format: paradigms, lists, and associated text are all squeezed into columns. Nor does a form necessarily occupy a line in its own right. For example, the plural of the present participle is set out thus. By the end of the first conjugation the scribe had grasped ⫺ more or less ⫺ how col-

umn format was meant to work. But such an example vividly displays the difficulty which early medieval teacher-scribes experienced in making the transition from aural to visual presentation. This transition appears to have been completed by the eleventh century, as can be seen from this table of Latin noun endings from an eleventh-century manuscript:

Fig. 8.3: Table of noun endings from Oxford, St John’s College 17

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Implicit in this table is the notion of stem, for the endings are segmented off in a way which leaves a consistent stem throughout the paradigm. It is noteworthy too that the compiler of the table begins with the genitive singular rather than with the traditional nominative, for, as a fifteenth-century commentator on the Ars minor explained, the nominative is an unreliable guide to Latin inflection “for because of the multitude of its terminations it is highly irregular” (Cambridge, Gonville and Caius College, MS 341/537, f. 170vb). The consistent segmentation of this table is characteristic of Latin inflectional morphology from the eleventh century on. The practice passed into the vernacular tradition by way of the late medieval vernacular translations and adaptions of interpolated versions of the Ars minor, as in this example from a mid-fifteenth-century English grammar: “Qwerby knowyst Ìe fourt declenson? For Ìe nominatyf, genityf and vocatyf singuler endyn in -vs; Ìe datyf in -vi; Ìe accusatyf in -vm; and Ìe ablatyf in -v; Ìe nominatyf, Ìe accusatyf and Ìe vocatyf plurer in -vs; Ìe genityf in -vum; Ìe datyf and Ìe ablatyf in -bus.” (Thomson 1984: 19, 134⫺138)

Some of these grammars incorporated a full set of paradigms into their text; more commonly paradigms were copied out separately. 2.1.2. Substitution rules Inflectional morphology was from late Antiquity onwards occasionally described in a manner more akin to the Item-and-Process model. By applying a series of substitution rules the student could convert one form into another. The anonymous grammar Magnus quae vox, preserved in a tenth-century manuscript, demonstrates this method: “Lego ‘I am reading’ is not derived, that is, it is a first-person form. The second person is formed by changing the o into is: legis; and by changing the s into t, legit [is formed]. In the plural legimus is formed by interposing mu in the second-person form; by interposing ti, legitis; and by changing the o of the first person legunt results. In the imperfect of the same mood the i [of legis] is changed to e and the s is dropped and bam is added: legebam. Changing the m to s: legebas; changing the s to t: legebat […].” (Magnus quae vox: f. 174v)

The complete word, lego, is the startingpoint. It is “transformed” into each successive form by the operation of certain processes described by Donatus: adiectio, detractio, inmutatio, transmutatio. These processes may affect a letter only or a syllable. Thus,

although these rules may at first glance resemble school grammar formulae like “to form the present tense, drop the ending of the infinitive and add the personal endings to the stem”, they are conceptually very far removed. The units of analysis implied by the procedure are those of word, syllable and letter; the concepts of stem and personal ending ⫺ even terminatio ⫺ are absent. 2.2. Latin derivational morphology Although Varro had made a clear distinction between inflectional and derivational morphology (cf. Art. 6), Late Latin grammarians did not introduce it into their grammars, but instead dealt with derivational morphology in an ad hoc manner under many different headings. Priscian was the only exception: in his Institutiones grammaticae he included species, the property of being primitive or derived, as a feature of each relevant part of speech. Because the Institutiones grammaticae was not widely studied until well into the ninth century, however, grammarians of the early and central Middle Ages for the most part worked with Donatus’s far less consistent treatment. Thus, the compounding of nouns was classified as one of the properties of the noun, figura, while the four derivational states of the verb were viewed as a property of the verb, forma. Consequently, forms that we regard as distinct lexemes were occasionally slotted into inflectional paradigms. For example, Boniface, writing before 716, includes the appellatio, e.g. laudatio ‘praise’, and the nomen verbiale, e.g. laudator ‘one who praises’, in his verb paradigms. The ambivalence over the phenomena at work in derivational morphology is revealed at many points. One of the most telling ⫺ and it is by no means unique ⫺ is the account by the late-ninth-century grammarian Remigius of Auxerre of the ways in which adverbs may be derived from nouns: “One should know that adverbs come from nouns in three ways: in form and meaning, in form and not in meaning, and in meaning and not in form. In both meaning and form, e.g. ter ‘thrice’ from tres ‘three’, quater ‘four times’ from quattuor ‘four’; in form and not in meaning, e.g. modo ‘now’ from the noun modus i.e. ‘measure’, and modo is an adverb of time; in meaning and not in form, e.g. semel ‘once’ from unus ‘one’, bis ‘twice’ from duo ‘two’.” (Remigius 1902: 62)

As is plain from this example and countless others, medieval scholars thought of derivation as much in terms of meaning as of form.

4. The Ancient Near East

A discipline of morphology divorced from semantics was alien to their mentality. During the later Middle Ages derivational morphology was studied, after a fashion, under the heading of derivatio, and dictionaries based on this principle were compiled by such writers as Papias, Hugutio of Pisa and Osbern of Gloucester. This example, from the Elementarium of Papias (ca. 1050) is typical: “Amo -as -at. From it come amator amatrix amatio amarius -a -um amasius -sii amabilis -bilior -bilissimus amabiliter amus -i amor -ris. Amicus is compounded from it, and from amicus come amicitia and amicor -aris. Other compounds include adamo -as adamans -tis adamantinus -a -um and deamo deamas and redamo -as. Amo -as, and from it the defective verbs amasco and amaturio.” (Papias 1977⫺1978: 222)

While some authorities agreed that the entire vocabulary of Latin could be traced back to a mere twenty-four nomina primitiva using such derivational procedures, most were more generous. Not all lexicographers adopted the derivatio principle, which was analogous to the method adopted by medieval lexicographers of the Semitic languages. By the end of the Middle Ages derivatio had largely fallen out of favour as a lexicographical ordering criterion. 2.2.1. The formae of the verb Verbal derivational morphology posed commentators a particular problem. Donatus identified four derivational formations (formae) and listed them in the order perfecta, e.g. lego ‘I am reading’; meditativa, e.g. lecturio ‘I intend to read’; frequentativa, e.g. lectito ‘I read again and again’; inchoativa, e.g. calesco ‘I become hot’. Priscian, on the other hand, working in terms of species primitiva et derivativa ‘primitive and derivative form’, grouped together all derivational formations under this heading (including forms such as sorbillo ‘I sip often’, patrisso ‘I take after my father’) and not just the four named by Donatus. (An anonymous commentary on the Ars minor in a fifteenth-century manuscript attempts to reconcile Donatus’s and Priscian’s divergent lists by claiming that Priscian’s additions were irregular. In what sense Donatus’s could be claimed to be more regular than Priscian’s is not explained.) Early medieval commentators had access only to Donatus’s account, and so did not have to face the problem of reconciling the two. Their sources, late antique commentators, insisted that the distinction was one of mean-

83 ing, and reordered the list to correspond to extra-linguistic reality: first we plan to do something (meditativa), then we begin it (inchoativa), then we complete it (perfecta), and finally we repeat it (frequentativa). Medieval scholars asked why it was that Donatus’s order did not correspond to that of experience. Smaragdus (ca. 810), ever morphologically conscious and conversant with Priscian’s teaching, applies the primitivum-derivativum distinction, pointing out that the perfecta forma is the primitivum from which the other forms are derived. But this kind of reasoning did not find immediate favour. A generation later Sedulius, and later still Remigius of Auxerre, invoked a biblical parallel instead: “Note that Donatus imitated nature, for nature began with perfected things. Donatus in the same way did well to start from the perfect form. God, after all, created everything in a perfected state: when he made man, he created him full-grown (perfectum) at the age of thirty, not a boy. Similarly, he created trees, not fruit, and birds, not eggs. Bearing all this in mind, Donatus always started from perfected things.” (Remigius 1902: 47⫺48)

By the thirteenth century Priscian’s Institutiones grammaticae had long been incorporated into the curriculum, and Priscian’s form-based explanation was generally accepted. Nonetheless, the new intellectual currents brought different points of view to bear upon familiar phenomena. John of Garland, for instance, in his Clavis compendii (written by 1234), assigned each type to one of the four Aristotelian causes. An unknown grammarian in the circle of Robert Grosseteste saw the formae in terms of the three basic elements of all actions: ability, knowledge and will. The modistic grammarian Martin of Dacia, writing before 1288, identified Donatus’s formae with Priscian’s species, and explained: “The mode of signifying which makes form [species] is the mode of signifying the thing as it is or is understood to be subject to the prior or posterior mode of being, or as it is imposed under the primitive or derivative mode of being, which is the same. Hence, species is divided into primitive and derivative as if they were opposites, as living beings are divided into rational and irrational […]. Just as the different types of living beings make up various species, so the different types of species, primitive and derivative, constitute the various species.“ (Martin of Dacia 1961: 33⫺34)

2.2.2. Bound morphs Bound morphs posed a different sort of problem. In words such as produco both elements retained their full “uncorrupt” form

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and each was known to exist as a lexeme in its own right. In retineo and amplector the situation was different: re- and am- are bound morphs. The solution inherited by early medieval grammarians was to regard all such affixes as prepositions, and hence to divide prepositions into two classes: those which are followed by appropriately inflecting word classes (casus) and those which are followed by a word lacking the appropriate inflection (loquella). A preposition used in this latter context was called a praepositio loquellaris. In the absence of a term corresponding to ‘bound morph’ a circumlocution had to be resorted to, as in this passage from Tatwine’s grammar (before 734): “Some [verbs] are composite forms, as it were, in which the full form of one element cannot be found, e.g. impleo, impero, repleo, expleo. In these words in, re and ex are prepositions, but pleo and pero, the simple forms, are not attested.” (Tatwine 1968: 61)

John of Genoa (1286) resorted to an image from the natural world: “Just as when natural things are combined, some lose their nature [corrumpuntur], like flour and water in bread-making, while others remain whole, like the foundation, roof and walls in the construction of a house, so too it happens in grammatical elements that compounding sometimes take place from whole elements, sometimes from corrupt [our ‘bound’] ones.”

The modist Martin of Dacia, writing before 1288, argued that the praepositiones inseparabiles, as he called them, were not true prepositions because they lacked their own mode of signifying, the defining mark of a word class. Consequently their status was that of a syllabica adiectio ‘syllabic addition’ such as -met ‘-self’. This term had been described by John of Genoa, following Priscian, as altering the species (primitive/derivative) but not the figura ‘compositional status’; that is, a syllabic addition had no semantic content of its own. Although John restricted it to wordfinal position, Martin worked with a more flexible concept which foreshadows the modern ‘bound morph’.

3.

Word classes and their properties

3.1. Word classes Medieval grammarians retained unchanged the eight parts of speech of Antiquity ⫺ nomen, pronomen, verbum, adverbium, participium, coniunctio, praepositio, interiectio in

Donatus’s order, nomen, verbum, participium, pronomen, praepositio, adverbium, interiectio, coniunctio in Priscian’s. No scholar attempted to argue that the number of classes should be altered; the number eight was regarded as immutable, and was indeed justified by invoking biblical parallels (Smaragdus, ca. 810). The instinct of medieval scholars was to accomodate discrepant phenomena within the existing structure rather than to start tinkering with the structure itself. The adjective continued to be regarded as a class of noun (nomen adiectivum), although in the later Middle Ages it was given increasing autonomy, often being contrasted with the substantive (nomen substantivum). The careful distinction between adiectivum voce ‘adjective in form’ and adiectivum significatione ‘adjective in meaning’ drawn by Petrus Helias around 1150 (Rosier 1992) gave rise to extensive discussion among thirteenth-century semanticists, paving the way for the early modern recognition of the adjective as an independent word class. Similarly, the article, given the status of a part of speech by the Greeks, was treated as a type of pronoun, pronomen articulare. 3.2.

Properties of the word classes

3.2.1. Properties of the noun and pronoun The properties (accidentia) of the word classes were inherited from Antiquity. Those of the noun and pronoun were six in number. Qualitas denoted the distinction between proper and common nouns. Conparatio ‘comparison’ was included here both because of the adjective’s status as a type of noun and because of the lack of a distinction between inflectional and derivational morphology. Genus ‘gender’ (cf. 3.2.2) included not only the masculine, feminine and neuter, but also common of two genders, e.g. sacerdos ‘priest’ or ‘priestess’, common of three genders, e.g. felix ‘happy’ ⫺ according to our analysis an adjective ⫺ and epicene or promiscuous, e.g. corvus ‘crow’, masculine regardless of the sex of the bird in question. Numerus ‘number’ gave rise to reflections upon nouns which were grammatically singular but plural in meaning, such as populus ‘people’, sinodus ‘synod’, and the reverse, like scalae ‘ladder’. Figura denoted the property of being simple, e.g. territus, compound, e.g. perterritus, or doubly compound, e.g. inperterritus. In late antique works and sources of the early and central Middle Ages case was defined in

4. The Ancient Near East

purely formal terms: “a change of final syllable” (Consentius), “inflection of nouns […] which takes place principally in final position” (Priscian). Twelfth- and thirteenth-century sources distinguished between casus vocalis and casus realis, a distinction developed by the modistae within the theoretical framework of medieval syntax. Guilhem Molinier was to elaborate this still further in his description of medieval Occitan (cf. 4.2.2). 3.2.2. Gender The medieval way of conceptualising gender differs radically from our own. Whereas according to our traditional analysis sacerdos ‘priest, priestess’ is considered to be either masculine or feminine, depending upon the sex of the referent, the ancient and medieval analysis perceived such a noun as simultaneously masculine and feminine; in other words, common gender was regarded as inhering in the word itself and not as contingent upon the referent. How gender was to be recognised was a major practical question for medieval scholars, who had no dictionaries that might provide such information. An anonymous grammar in a tenth-century manuscript summarises the possibilities thus: “How many ways are there of identifying noun gender? Four: by nature, from the article, from the ending, and from authors’ usage. By nature: vir ‘man’, mulier ‘woman’; by the article: masculine hic, feminine haec, neuter hoc; by the ending: masculine -us, feminine -a, neuter -um (in most cases); from authors’ usage: fustis ‘cudgel’, paries ‘wall’, and so on.” (Paris, Bibliothe`que Nationale, lat. 7570, f. 75r)

Explaining on what basis gender had been assigned in the first place was (and is) a perennial puzzle. Why, for example, were the three Latin words for ‘stone’ of different genders? John of Genoa, who explored possible realworld correlations with grammatical gender at some length in his Catholicon (1286), used etymology to guide him to what he saw as a real-world explanation: “Lapis (m.) is, as it were, laedens pedem ‘injuring the foot’, and in this respect it imitates the male, for the male is more prone to cause injury than the female and for this reason it is masculine in gender; petra (f.) is, as it were, pedibus trita ‘trodden upon by the feet’, and in this way apparently suffers, and for this reason is feminine in gender; saxum (n.) was so called from sauciendo ‘wounding’, i.e. ‘standing fast’ [sic!] for because of its size it stands fast and is immoveable, and in this it differs from the masculine and feminine sex, and is therefore appropriately neuter in gender.”

85 His modist contemporaries worked within the same basic explanatory framework, but phrased their explanations in terms of active and passive modes of signifying: active for the masculine, passive for the feminine, negation of both for the neuter, and so on. Martin of Dacia, writing before 1288, accounts for the masculine gender of lapis as justified by its traditional etymology per similitudinem agentis ‘through its similarity to an active agent’, and likewise petra is feminine because it has the proprietas patientis ‘the quality of something that undergoes action’. 3.2.3. Properties of the verb The verb had seven properties. Genus (or significatio) corresponds roughly to ‘voice’ ⫺ activum, passivum, neutrum (basically intransitive verbs, defined as being those which cannot take the -r of the passive), deponens, commune (those which are passive in form but may be followed by the accusative with active meaning, e.g. consulor fratrem, or by the ablative with passive meaning, e.g. consulor a fratre). Qualitas, literally ‘quality’, denotes the property of being finite, including the indicative, imperative, optative and conjunctive (⫽ subjunctive) moods, or of being infinit(iv)e. Tempus ‘tense’, numerus ‘number’, and persona ‘person’ require no comment. Around 900 Remigius of Auxerre remarks on the inseparability of tense and person in the verb, pointing out that if person is absent, the verb becomes a participle, while if tense is absent, it becomes a noun. As for coniugatio, only three conjugations were initially recognised, using the vowel of the ending of the second person singular present indicative active as the distinguishing criterion, but by the eighth century the third (i) conjugation was routinely being divided into a short i and a long i conjugation. Significatio was used in two senses: as a property of the adverb and interjection it denoted ‘meaning’ (included as a property here only!), whereas as a property of the verb it denoted ‘voice’. The conjunction had two properties not shared with any other part of speech: potestas, which denoted the categories copulative, disjunctive, expletive (our ‘concessive’), causal and rational; and ordo, relating to the position of the conjunction in the sentence. The compartmentalisation of the medieval grammar meant that in the early and central Middle Ages each part of speech was discussed in isolation with infrequent reference to the others. Consequently most grammari-

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ans felt no need to comment upon the apparently contradictory senses in which terms such as qualitas, genus and commune were used. One noteworthy exception is Sedulius Scottus, who in the middle of the ninth century distinguished carefully between various uses of qualitas: “The difference between qualitas in the noun, in the pronoun and in the verb is as follows. The qualitas of nouns is a semantic marker [significatiua notitio] by which proper and common nouns are distinguished from one another. The qualitas of pronouns is a semantic recognition device [significatiua agnitio] by which finite pronouns are separated from infinite ones. The qualitas of verbs is a semantic concept in the mind [significatiua mentis conceptio] by which moods and [derivational] forms are recognised as distinct.” (Sedulius Scottus 1977: 36, 53⫺59)

Later medieval grammarians ⫺ Thomas of Erfurt for one ⫺ tended to be more aware of categories which overlapped word-class boundaries, and frequently commented on them.

4.

Morphology in medieval European vernacular grammars

The term “medieval vernacular grammars” covers three distinct genres: grammars of a vernacular in the vernacular, e.g. the Old Irish Auraicept na nE´ces or the Occitan Leys d’amors; grammars in the vernacular which teach grammatical concepts largely divorced from the forms of a particular language, notably the Old Icelandic Third and Fourth Grammatical Treatises (which, since they contain no material relevant to morphology, will not be considered here); and grammars of Latin in the vernacular, such as Ælfric’s Excerptiones de arte grammatica anglice or the majority of the Middle English and Old French grammatical treatises. Only grammars of the first type will show us medieval teachers grappling with morphological phenomena independently of the Latin language and of the concepts developed within the Latin tradition (to a greater or lesser extent). The interest of the other two types lies in their attempts to create a vernacular terminology for those morphological concepts used in their Latin sources, and in the occasional remarks they make on differences between Latin and the vernacular.

4.1. Vernacular-medium grammars focussing upon Latin or Greek By far the majority of grammars in the medieval vernaculars are modelled closely upon Latin or Greek originals, and the problems are largely ones of translation, whether of technical terms or of notions. Three examples will suffice. 4.1.1. Ælfric’s Excerptiones de arte grammatica anglice Ælfric’s grammar, written around 1000, is an Old English adaptation of an abbreviated version of Priscian’s Institutiones grammaticae. Since its intended audience is “ignorant children, not greybeards”, considerable care is given to exemplifying the function of the cases by means of phrases or short sentences which provide a context, e.g. hic homo equitat ‘Ìes man rit’, huius hominis equus ‘Îises mannes hors’. Each declension and conjugation is exemplified by means of a complete paradigm, most of which are translated into Old English. The purpose of the translation is to provide a guide to the meaning of the Latin, and not, as is sometimes assumed, to set out a parallel description of Old English. The verb paradigms posed a particular challenge, for Old English possessed only two synthetic tenses, ic lufige ‘I love’ and ic lufode ‘I loved’. Although periphrastic tenses such as ic hæbbe gelufod ‘I have loved’ and ic hæfde gelufod ‘I had loved’ had already emerged (and are used by Ælfric himself in other contexts), Ælfric instead employed adverbs to render the distinction between the Latin tenses: ic lufode fulfremedlice ‘I loved perfectly (pf.)’, ic lufode gefyrn ‘I loved long ago (plpf.)’. Explicit comparisons between the morphological characteristics of the two languages are few, limited to the commonplace remarks that the eight parts of speech of Latin are also to be found in English; that the genders of Latin and Old English nouns do not always correspond; and that the impersonal mood is rare in both languages. Particular attention is given to the possessive adjective (meus etc.), for it posed special problems to speakers of Old English, in which agreement takes place only with the possessor and not, as in Latin, with the thing possessed. Of his technical terms, a number are used independently of their Latin translations and can therefore be assumed to have been in common use (Williams 1958; Law 1987: 62⫺63): nama ‘name’, word ‘verb’, dæl ‘part of speech’, cynn ‘gender’, had ‘person’, getel

4. The Ancient Near East

‘number’, tid ‘tense’, anfeald ‘singular’, menigfeald ‘plural’, geendung ‘ending’, getacnung ‘meaning’, declinung ‘declension’. Others are found only in conjunction with the Latin terms of which they are literal renderings, indicating that their status is tantamount to that of a gloss on the Latin term rather than an integral part of Old English vocabulary. This applies, for instance, to gelimplice Îing ‘accidens’, unfulfremed forÎgewiten ‘praeteritum imperfectum’, betwuxaworpennyss ‘interjection’. 4.1.2. Late medieval vernacular grammars of Latin The fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Middle English grammars, like their Old French counterparts (Heinimann 1963; Städtler 1988), follow their Latin models fairly closely, taking over the Latin technical terminology as loanwords (e.g. nown, verbe, gendyr, nowmbyr, person, but note the native tyme ‘tense’) and adding nothing to the existing stock of morphological notions. They draw heavily (much more so than French grammars) upon the vernacular to clarify Latin forms and grammatical concepts. Thus the conjunctive (subjunctive) mood is explained in this way: “How knos Ìu Ìe coniunctiue mod? For he ioynus ij resons togedyr in on mater; and by Ìes viij Englysch wordys ‘yf’, ‘but’, ‘wen’, ‘wosumevyr’, ‘thagh’, ‘tyl’ or ‘aftyr’ or ‘euyr’ wyll serve to Ìe coniunctyue mode.” (Thomson 1984: 4 f.)

Such a rule helps the pupil to identify which English verb forms should be rendered by a Latin subjunctive. Thus too: “How know ye a participill off Ìe presentens? For his Englissh endith in ‘-yng’, as ‘louyng’, and his Laten shall ende in -ens or in -ans, as legens, amans.” (Thomson 1984: 48)

Such recognition rules served naturally as the prelude to the analysis of English in its own right; but the next step, to identify the English forms which were to be translated as a Latin subjunctive as an English subjunctive, was not taken until the sixteenth century. 4.1.3. The Old Georgian Discourse on articles The energetic eleventh- and twelfth-century Georgian translators of Greek patristic texts occasionally remarked on differences between their language and Greek (Sardzˇveladze 1983), in particular on the absence of grammatical gender in Georgian (Ephrem

87 Mcire went so far as to attempt to create distinct feminine forms for Georgian). The only extant medieval Georgian grammatical treatise, Sit’quaj artrontatws ‘Discourse on articles’, takes up another contrastive point, the question of the nature of the Greek definite article, which has no Georgian counterpart. The anonymous author explains that Greek nouns are divided into three genders, but that any one noun can belong only to one gender, and lists the forms of the article. The terminology is for the most part calqued upon the standard Greek terms, but a couple deserve comment: the correct translation of Gk. aitiatike˘ as mizezobiti ‘causal, accusative’ (cf. the Latin mistranslation accusativus); drek’a ‘bend, curve, case’, for ptoˆsis ‘falling, case’, suggesting either confusion with Gk. ptu´sso¯ ‘bend, crook, curve’, or influence of Latin (in)flexio; and sˇua ‘middle, neuter’ for Gk. oude´teron ‘neither, neuter’, which some Georgian glossators render araromeli ‘neither’, a solution also adopted by the Armenian translator of the Te´khne¯ attributed to Dionysius Thrax. In Old Church Slavonic, too, srednee ‘middle’ was adopted for ‘neuter’ (Worth 1983: 14), reflecting alternative Greek terminology. 4.2. Vernacular-medium grammars of a vernacular Such grammars are relatively few, but their independence of Latin, often explicitly stated (indeed vaunted) is striking. Since they each raise specific problems, three of the betterknown ones will be discussed. 4.2.1. The Old Irish Auraicept na nE´ces This Old Irish grammar has relatively little on morphology in its earliest portions, which are thought to date from the seventh century. It does, however, discuss gender. It lists the seven ‘distinctions’: distinction of meaning in [one] person, e.g. ‘I see’; distinction of meaning of person, e.g. ‘I myself’; distinction of person in the active, e.g. ‘I have made’; distinction of person in the passive, e.g. ‘I am loved’; distinction of difference in differentiating, e.g. ‘good, better, truly better’; distinction of magnitude in magnifying, e.g. ‘big, bigger, truly bigger’; distinction of diminution in diminishing, e.g. ‘small, smaller, truly smaller’. The paradigms are remarkable for their inclusion of a vast number of forms inspired by the usual citation form of the Latin ablative, ab hoc magistro ‘from the teacher’, i.e. preposition plus noun written as a single

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word (in accordance with early medieval scribal practice); each of these newly created cases is given its own name. The bardic grammars of the later Middle Ages adopted a tripartite word class system, which has been compared to that of Japanese: ainm, substantial in form with substantial meaning, including many elements which would be assigned by traditional grammarians to the noun, pronoun and adverb classes; pearsa, substantial in form but insubstantial in meaning, including traditional abstract nouns, verbs and adjectives; iairmbe´arla, insubstantial in form and meaning, including particles and the ´ Cuı´v 1965; Adams 1970; Ahlquist copula (O 1979/1980), but for the most part concentrated on providing a standard for the use of poets. A treatise on noun declension classifies nouns into a much wider range of types than ´ Cuı´v 1956; 1973). are recognised today (O Irish vernacular grammarians were considerably less dependent upon Latin models than their Welsh counterparts (Matonis 1981). 4.2.2. The medieval Occitan Leys d’amors This grammar of Occitan, compiled by Guilhem Molinier for the use of troubadors, reached its final form in 1356. It offers the longest and most detailed description of a medieval vernacular to survive. The author insists on the independence of romans from Latin, declaring that only the usage of romans can be definitive for that language, nonetheless, the concepts and terminology of Latin provide the starting-point. Case was an ever-problematic area for grammarians of the Romance languages. Molinier worked with a functional-semantic notion rather than a purely morphological one. He defined case as follows: “Case is variation or change in a word ⫺ a noun, pronoun or participle ⫺ by means of the article, the word-form itself, or its mode of signifying” (Molinier 1842: 102f.). The article was frequently defined as a case marker in grammars of Occitan and French (e.g. Barton’s, see 4.2.3 below) in view of the severely reduced inflectional case system in both languages. The maniera de significar ‘mode of signifying’ (a term imported from speculative grammar) denoted the function of the word in the sentence. Earlier in the work (1842: 10) Molinier had invoked word order as a means of distinguishing nominative from accusative. He expressly notes the lack of distinct declensions as a point of contrast with Latin (1842: 110f.).

The article is discussed at length. Two types are identified: common and proper, corresponding to common and proper nouns. Because Molinier discusses the forms of the common (our ‘definite’) article case by case without trying to set up a single paradigm he presents a wide range of forms. The masculine ablative articles, for example, include per, ab, am, ablo, amlo, en, enlo, siquel, and lo. Molinier is thus working in a manner not dissimilar to that of the Middle English grammarians (4.1.2 above): any form which would be rendered by a Latin ablative is here identified as being a romans ablative. He also provides a list of contexts in which the article is not used, which would have been particularly helpful to the non-native speakers to whom the grammar was in part addressed. The proper article is the title En ‘Mr’, Na ‘Mrs’. Molinier’s insistence upon the independence of romans from Latin got him into trouble more than once. Having rejected the idea that romans might have distinct declensions on the grounds that most cases do not change their endings and that the genitive and dative cases are not distinguished by their endings, he sets upone regular inflectional pattern: -s (sg.), - (pl.), and is then obliged to handle common types like dona donas as exceptions. His refusal to recognise distinct conjugations leads him into a similar impasse. He identifies only three voices ⫺ active, passive and neuter ⫺ and even goes so far as to say that in fact the passive, considered purely from the point of view of form, is absent too, for it is composed of the verb to be or to have with a participle, but since this is the case in Latin too one should continue to recognise it. A large number of rules on the sequence of tenses and moods are given. 4.2.3. John Barton’s Donait franc¸ois John Barton’s French grammar was written for the English early in the fifteenth century. It deals in some detail with French morphology. The substrate of French-medium exposition of Latin grammar is visible in the identification of cases by their signes, le, du, au. Barton warns his readers against using a verb in the wrong person “si come font les sottez gens” and against substituting one gender or mood or tense for another. His use of the widely current definition of ‘inflection’ led him into trouble, however: “Quelle chose est decliner? Tenier le comencement du mot et changer le fyn. Baillez moy exemple! Si

4. The Ancient Near East

89

come ay, as, a, avons, avez, ont et aussi des aultres.” (Städtler 1988: 132)

Irish Grammatical Tracts (1916⫺1955), ed. by Osborn Bergin [supplement to E´riu 8⫺10, 14, 17]

The longest discussion is lavished upon the inflection of pronouns, a major source of trouble for non-native speakers. French verbs are slotted into the Latin system.

Jagic´, V. (1896), Codex Slovenicus rerum grammaticarum. Berlin [reprinted 1968, Munich: Fink]

5.

5.1. Primary Texts

John of Genoa [⫽ Joannes Balbus] (1971), Catholicon. Westmead: Gregg International [reprint of 1460 ed.]

Adontz, Nicolas (1970), Denys de Thrace et les commentateurs arme´niens. Louvain: Imprimerie Orientaliste [orig. Russian, 1915]

Magnus quae vox, unprinted grammar quoted from Munich: Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Clm 14737, ff. 157v⫺183v

Ælfric (1966), Grammatik und Glossar, ed. by Julius Zupitza. Berlin: Weidmann [reprint of 1880 ed.] Auraicept na nE´ces (1917), ed. and transl. by George Calder. Edinburgh: John Grant [Canonical portion ed. and transl. by Anders Ahlqvist (1983), The Early Irish Linguist: An Edition of the Canonical Part of the Auraicept na nE´ces. Helsinki: Societas Scientiarum Fennica (Commentationes Humanarum Litterarum 73)]

Martin of Dacia (1961), De modis significandi, ed. by Henricus Roos. In: Martini de Dacia Opera. Hauniae: Gad, 3⫺118

References

Alexander of Villa Dei (1893), Das Doctrinale des Alexander de Villa-Dei, ed. by Dietrich Reichling. Berlin: Hofmann Anonymous (1976), “Tractatus de grammatica”: Eine fälschlich Robert Grosseteste zugeschriebene spekulative Grammatik, ed. by Karl Reichl. Munich: Schöningh Anonymous (1990), Discourse on Articles: An Old Georgian Grammatical Treatise, ed. by Mzekala A. Shanidze. Tbilisi: Tbilisi University Press Ars Ambianensis, unedited grammar quoted from Amiens, Bibliothe`que Municipale, MS 426, ff. 48r⫺ 71v Ars Bernensis (1870), ed. by Hermann Hagen. In: Grammatici Latini, Vol. VIII. Leipzig: Teubner, 62⫺142 [reprinted 1961/1981, Hildesheim: Olms] Asporius (1870), Ars Asperi grammatici, ed. by Hermann Hagen. In: Grammatici Latini, Vol. VIII. Leipzig: Teubner, 39⫺61 [reprinted 1961/1981, Hildesheim: Olms] Boniface (1980), Bonifatii (Vynfreth) Ars grammatica, ed. by George John Gebauer and Bengt Löfstedt. Turnhout: Brepols (Corpus Christianorum Series Latina 133B) Declinationes nominum, unedited grammar quoted from Paris: Bibliothe`que Nationale, lat. 13025, ff. 40r⫺42v Donatus (1981), Ars minor and Ars maior, ed. by Louis Holtz, Donat et la tradition de l’enseignement grammatical. Paris: CNRS Eutyches (1868), Ars de verbo, ed. by Heinrich Keil. In: Grammatici Latini, Vol. V. Leipzig: Teubner, 447⫺489 [reprinted 1961/1981, Hildesheim: Olms]

John of Garland [⫽ Johannes de Garlandia], Clavis compendii, unprinted grammar quoted from Cambridge: Gonville and Caius College MS 136/ 76, pp. 163⫺227

Molinier, Guilhem (1842), Las Leys d’amors, tersa pars, ed. M. Gatien-Arnoult. Toulouse: Paya Murethach (1977), In Donati Artem maiorem, ed. by Louis Holtz. Turnhout: Brepols (Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Mediaevalis 40) Papias (1977⫺1978), Elementarium, ed. by V. de Angelis. Milan: Cisalpino-Goliardica Priscian (1855, 1859), Institutiones grammaticae, ed. by Martin Hertz. Grammatici Latini, Vol. II⫺ III. Leipzig: Teubner [reprinted 1961/1981, Hildesheim: Olms] Priscian (1860), Institutio de nomine et pronomine et verbo, ed. by Heinrich Keil. In: Grammatici Latini, Vol. III. Leipzig: Teubner, 443⫺456 [reprinted 1961/1981, Hildesheim: Olms] Remigius (1902), In artem Donati minorem commentum, ed. by W. Fox. Leipzig: Teubner Rosier, I[re`ne] (1992), “L’adjectif dans la tradition latine: la grammaire me´die´vale. Textes choisis et traduits”. Archives et Documents 2nd series 6, 23⫺39 Sedulius Scottus (1977), In Donati Artem minorem, ed. by Bengt Löfstedt. Turnhout: Brepols (Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Mediaevalis 40C), 1⫺54 Smaragdus (1986), Liber in partibus Donati, ed. B[engt] Löfstedt, L[ouis] Holtz, A[dele] Kibre. Turnhout: Brepols (Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Mediaevalis 68) Städtler, Thomas (1988), Zu den Anfängen der französischen Grammatiksprache: Textausgaben und Wortschatzstudien. Tübingen: Niemeyer Tatwine (1968), Ars Tatuini, ed. by Maria De Marco. Turnhout: Brepols (Corpus Christianorum Series Latina 133) Thomas of Erfurt (1972), Grammatica Speculativa of Thomas of Erfurt, ed. and transl. G[eoffrey] L. Bursill-Hall. London: Longman Thomson, David (1984), An Edition of the Middle English Grammatical Texts. New York: Garland

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Williams, G. J. & Jones, E. J. (1934), Gramadegau’r Penceirddiad. Cardiff: Gwasg Prifysgol Cymru [contains editions of medieval Welsh grammars]

5.2. Secondary Works Adams, G. B[rendan] (1970), “Grammatical Analysis and Terminology in the Irish Bardic Schools”. Folia Linguistica 4, 157⫺166 Ahlqvist, Anders (1979/1980), “The Three Parts of Speech of Bardic Grammar”. Studia Celtica 14/ 15, 11⫺17 Heinimann, S. (1963), “Zur Geschichte der grammatischen Terminologie im Mittelalter”. Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie 79, 23⫺37 Law, Vivien (1987), “Anglo-Saxon England: Aelfric’s Excerptiones de arte grammatica anglice”. Histoire E´piste´mologie Langage 9, 47⫺71 Matonis, A[nn] T. E. (1981), “The Welsh Bardic Grammars and the Western Grammatical Tradition”. Modern Philology 79, 121⫺145 ´ Cuı´v, Brian (1956), “Grammatical Analysis and O the Declension of the Noun in Irish”. Celtica 3, 86⫺125

´ Cuı´v, Brian (1965), “Linguistic Terminology in O the Mediaeval Irish Bardic Tracts”. Transactions of the Philological Society 1965, 141⫺164 ´ Cuı´v, Brian (1973), “The Linguistic Training of O the Mediaeval Irish Poet”. Celtica 10, 114⫺140 Pa`roli, Teresa (1968), “Indice della terminologia grammaticale di Aelfric”. Annali dell’Istituto Orientale di Napoli sez. linguistica 8, 113⫺138 Rosier, Ire`ne (1992), “Quelques aspects de la diversite´ des discussions me´die´vales sur l’adjectif”. Histoire E´piste´mologie Langage 14, 75⫺100 Sardzˇveladze, Z. A. (1983), “U istokov gruzinskoj lingvisticˇeskoj mysli”. Voprosy jazykoznanija 1, 113⫺121 Thurot, Ch[arles] (1868), Extraits de divers manuscrits latins pour servir a` l’histoire des doctrines grammaticales au moyen aˆge. Paris [reprinted 1964, Frankfurt/M: Minerva] Williams, Edna R. (1958), “Ælfric’s Grammatical Terminology”. Publications of the Modern Languages Association 73, 453⫺462 Worth, Dean S. (1983), The Origins of Russian Grammar. Columbus/OH: Slavica

Vivien Law, Cambridge (Great Britain)

9. Von der Renaissance bis ca. 1800 Redaktioneller Hinweis: Aus terminlich-technischen Gründen erscheint Art. 9 nicht. Der an dieser Stelle vorgesehene Artikel sollte die theoretischen und deskriptiven Abhandlungen zur Morphologie im Zeitraum von der Renaissance bis ca. 1800 berücksichtigen; insbesondere wären die folgenden Themen behandelt worden: ⫺ die morphologische Analyse im Rahmen der Universalen Grammatik in verschiedenen europäischen Ländern; ⫺ die Abfassung von Grammatiken der europäischen Sprachen in der jeweiligen Volkssprache (einschließlich nationaler Unterschiede in der Terminologie und Begrifflichkeit sowie Abweichungen vom lateinischen Modell, z. B. bezüglich des Kasus- oder des Tempussystems); ⫺ die morphologische Beschreibung von nicht-europäischen Sprachen im Zeitalter des Kolonialismus.

9. From the Renaissance to ca. 1800 Editorial note: Article 9 had to be left out due to time-related and technical constraints. This article was supposed to consider the theoretical and descriptive approaches to morphology from the Renaissance to ca. 1800, with particular reference to the following topics: ⫺ morphological analysis in the framework of Universal grammar in different European countries; ⫺ grammars of European languages in the vernaculars (including national differences in terms or concepts and deviations from the Latin model, e. g. as regards case and tense systems); ⫺ morphological descriptions of non-European languages in the colonial age.

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10. Das 19. Jahrhundert 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

1.

Einleitung Voraussetzungen: Erfassung sprachlicher Daten im 18. und 19. Jh. Sprachwissenschaftliche Forschungen bis zum Beginn des 19. Jhs. Die Ausbreitung und Institutionalisierung von Sprachwissenschaft im 19. Jh. Morphologische Forschungen im 19. Jh. Zitierte Literatur

Einleitung

Über die Geschichte der Sprachwissenschaft und ihrer Teildisziplinen gibt es reichhaltige Literatur (zum 19. Jh. s. besonders: MorpurgoDavies 1998; Schmitter 1996; Arens 2 1969; Robins 1973; Sebeok 1975; alle mit weiteren Literaturangaben). Eine Einschränkung auf ausgewählte Teilgebiete der Morphologie in diesem Beitrag erscheint sinnvoll. Im folgenden soll der Schwerpunkt auf Morphophonologie und vor allem Sprachtypologie gelegt werden, weil (a) sich im 19. Jh. in der Forschung neue Ansätze gerade dieser Themen herausgebildet haben (weniger Neues gibt es z. B. in der Wortbildung; dazu Brekle 1975) und (b) gerade die Sprachtypologie eine sehr lebendige und aktuelle Forschungsrichtung ist, die auch im 19. Jh. lebhaft diskutiert wurde und in erster Linie als morphologische Typologie bzw. Sprachklassifikation verstanden wurde (Meier 1996: 459 f.). Ausdrücklich muß gesagt werden, daß im 19. Jh. die heutigen linguistischen Disziplinen “Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft” einerseits und “Historische und Vergleichende Sprachwissenschaften” andererseits nicht leicht zu trennen sind. Eine Geschichte der morphologischen Forschungen im 19. Jh. ist fast immer eine Geschichte der historisch-vergleichenden und der allgemein-typologischen Sprachbetrachtung (Robins 1973: 4). Die Begriffe ‘Morphologie’ und ‘Morphem’ verdanken wir ebenfalls dem 19. Jh. (s. Art. 46). ‘Morphologie’ wurde aus der Biologie (Salmon 1974: 333 und Art. 2) in die Sprachwissenschaft eingeführt von August Schleicher (Schleicher 1859; erste Verwendung aber bei Max Müller im Jahre 1854, s. Morpurgo-Davies 1998: 221 Fn. 19), der eine Annäherung der Sprachwissenschaften an die

empirischen und exakten Naturwissenschaften anstrebte (s. 5.8). ‘Morphem’ wurde geprägt von Jan Baudouin de Courtenay (ab 1880; Definition des Begriffs in Baudouin de Courtenay [1895] 1972: 153) nach dem Vorbild von ‘Phonem’ (dies zuerst bei Ferdinand de Saussure 1879). Einen kurzgefaßten, guten Überblick über die Prinzipien und Methoden der historischen Morphologie, die in der morphologischen Forschung des 19. Jhs. einen weiten Raum einnimmt, bietet Werner anhand des Deutschen (s. Werner 1984: 535 ff.).

2.

Voraussetzungen: Erfassung sprachlicher Daten im 18. und 19. Jh.

In der Epoche der großen geographischen Entdeckungsfahrten und der Kolonialisierung fremder Länder wurden Europäer und Amerikaner mit Völkern und Sprachen bekannt, die zunächst nur sporadisch in einzelnen Grammatiken erfaßt und beschrieben wurden. Das Projekt der Zarin Kartharina II. zur Erstellung eines universalen Wörterbuchs führte erstmals zu einer groß angelegten Feldforschung, bei der 12 Zahlen und 273 andere Wörter in 200 Sprachen Europas und Asiens abgefragt und aufgelistet wurden. Es wurde von Peter Simon Pallas 1787–9 in St. Petersburg veröffentlicht (Haarmann 1979). 1790–1 erschien eine erweiterte, vierbändige Fassung, die zusätzlich 30 afrikanische und 23 amerikanische Sprachen brachte. Weitere ähnliche Werke folgten: Lorenzo Hervás y Panduro stellte in den letzten 5 Bänden seiner 21-bändigen Idea dell’Universo (1778–1787) sein Wissen über Sprachen zusammen (Tovar 1986). Johann Christoph Adelungs Mithridates oder allgemeine Sprachenkunde mit dem Vater Unser als Sprachprobe in bey nahe fünfhundert Sprachen und Mundarten wurde nach seinem Tod (1806) von J. S. Vater fortgeführt und veröffentlicht (1806–1817). Adriano Balbi darf wohl als der Erste gelten, der Sprachen aller Kontinente zusammengestellt hat (Balbi 1826). Unter anderem bietet er eine Liste von allerdings nur 26 Wörtern in allen von ihm aufgenommenen Sprachen. Eine Reihe von Untersuchungen und Grammatiken aus dem 18. und 19. Jh., die hier nicht im einzelnen genannt werden können, tragen zu

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einer guten Kenntnis verschiedener Sprachen bei und bilden die Grundlage weiterer Untersuchungen (Morpurgo-Davies 1998: 37–58 mit weiteren Literaturangaben; s. 5.7).

3.

Sprachwissenschaftliche Forschungen bis zum Beginn des 19. Jhs.

3.1. Rationalistische und empiristische Grammatik Ab dem Mittelalter taucht die Frage nach sprachlichen Universalien auf. Die scholastischen Grammatiker versuchten, eine Antwort darauf zu finden, ob ihr grammatisches System universal anwendbar sei. Roger Bacon hielt die Grammatik aller Sprachen in ihrer Substanz für dieselbe, offensichtliche Unterschiede seien nur akzidentiell, da die Dinge überall dieselben seien und der menschliche Geist für alle Menschen gleich (“rationalistische”, “philosophische” oder “universalistische” Sprachbetrachtung, dazu Dominicy 1996; Naumann 1996; Schreyer 1996; Arens 2 1969: 80–154). In der Renaissance beobachten wir einen eher empirischen und datenorientierten Zugang zu Sprache und Sprachen (“empiristische”, “beobachtende” oder “partikularistische” Sprachbetrachtung). Durch das Bekanntwerden des Chinesischen wird vereinzelt schon im 16. und 17. Jh. die allgemeingültige Anwendbarkeit der antiken grammatischen Kategorien auf solche Sprachen in Frage gestellt (Robins 1973: 18 f., 21 f.). Rationalistischer Zugang einerseits und empiristischer Zugang zur Sprache andererseits begegnen uns durch die Jahrhunderte bis heute. Ein wichtiger Vertreter des Rationalismus war John Horne Tooke Ende des 18. Jhs.: Sprache ist Gedanke; ihre Elemente sind Nomina und Verben, die nur die Bezeichnungen für Ideen sind, alle anderen sprachlichen Elemente sind aus ihnen durch “Abkürzung” entstanden. Seine sprachwissenschaftlichen und sehr gewagten etymologischen Thesen werden von John Fearn widerlegt (Brekle 1985). 3.2. Vergleichende und genetische Grammatik, Sprachklassifikation Schon seit dem Mittelalter wurden Versuche unternommen, Sprachen in Gruppen zusammenzufassen. Die Bezeichnungen “Sprachfamilie”, “Muttersprache”, “Tochtersprache”, “Sprachverwandtschaft” werden teilweise schon vor dem 19. Jh. verwendet (Metcalf

1974: 236). Um zu einer genetischen Klassifikation von Sprachen und Sprachfamilien zu kommen, mußte man sich mit dem Bau der Sprachen und ihrem Wortschatz befassen. Schon Gabriel Girard unterschied (1747) “langues transpositives”, “langues analogues” und “langues mixtes” oder “amphilogiques”. Bei “langues transpositives” ist die Wortstellung willkürlich, es gibt Flexion. Bei den “langues analogues” erscheinen die Wörter nach ihrer logischen oder natürlichen Abfolge, weil diesen Sprachen die Eindeutigkeit der Beziehungen durch Flexion fehlt. Die “langues mixtes” (unter die Girard z. B. auch Griechisch und Deutsch zählt) sind flektierend, doch gibt es auch Charakteristika der “langues analogues”, z. B. den Artikel. Eine ähnliche Einteilung hat Adam Smith (1761), indem er “compounded languages” – mit mehr oder weniger freier Wortstellung, Flexion – und “original languages” – mit fester Wortstellung, ohne Flexion, dafür mit analytischen Konstruktionen, etwa Hilfsverb + Partizip – unterscheidet (Meier 1996: 465 ff.). All diesen typologischen Einteilungen ist gemeinsam, daß sie zwei (evtl. drei) Typen von Sprachen unterscheiden und daß Flexion als Hauptargument für die Klassifikation verwendet wird. Auffallend ist, daß die Sprachklassifikation gleichzeitig eine Wertung der Sprachen enthält: Flektierende Sprachen gelten als hochstehend, isolierende Sprachen als primitiv. Diese Wertung ist – ausdrücklich oder auch nur latent vorhanden – auch bei so namhaften Forschern wie Humboldt, Schleicher oder Steinthal anzutreffen (z. B. vergleicht Steinthal 21858: 330 die hinterindischen Sprachen, z. B. Thai, in ihrer Komplexität mit Zoophyten). Einige Untersuchungsprinzipien finden sich schon in älterer Zeit, z. B. bei Martin Fogel (1634–1675), der seine Theorie der Verwandtschaft der finno-ugrischen Sprachen (er zählte allerdings auch das Lettische dazu) nicht nur auf lexikalischen, sondern auch auf strukturellen Vergleichen aufbaute (Stehr 1957: 7–23). Samuel Gyarmathi in seiner 1799 publizierten Affinitas linguae hungaricae cum linguis fennicae originis grammatice demonstrata überzeugt durch systematische Untersuchung von lexikalischen und grammatischen Formen (Endungen, Affixe, Wortarten etc.); die Verwandtschaft der finnougrischen Sprachen beweist er hauptsächlich durch strukturalistischen Vergleich (Gulya 1974: 266 ff.). Die am wenigsten wichtigen Kriterien für Sprachverwandtschaft seien le-

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xikalische Entsprechungen (Gyarmathi 1799: XIII). Letztendlich jedoch galt den meisten Forschern auch im 18. Jh. als wesentlicher Vergleichspunkt der Wortschatz: Wenn einige Sprachen Wörter mit ähnlicher Bedeutung und ähnlicher Form hatten, dann konnten sie als verwandt eingestuft werden. Erst im Laufe der Zeit setzte sich die Erkenntnis durch, daß lexikalische Ähnlichkeiten durch Bedeutungswandel, Lautmalerei oder Entlehnungen zustandekommen konnten. Um dies zu umgehen, versuchte man, einen typischen, wenig entlehnungs- oder bedeutungswandelanfälligen “Grundwortschatz” zu erstellen, der als Grundlage für Wortlisten verwendet wurde (z. B. bei Balbi, dazu Metcalf 1974: 246 ff.). Auch Sir William Jones klammerte bei lexikalischen Vergleichen Wörter aus dem kulturellen, politischen, sozialen oder landwirtschaftlichen Bereich aus, da diese der Entlehnung sehr anfällig seien. Neben der Entdeckung, daß phonetische Entsprechungen (“literae cognatae”) und ihre Gesetzmäßigkeiten bei sprachhistorischen Untersuchungen berücksichtigt werden müssen, breitete sich am Ende des 18. Jhs. zunehmend die Erkenntnis aus, daß der Sprachbau (also die Syntax) und die Grammatik (d. i. die Wortbildung und Formenlehre) für die Annahme einer Sprachverwandtschaft untersucht werden müssen (Droixhe 1978: 72 f.). Über die Gewichtung der Bereiche Syntax und Grammatik herrschte Uneinigkeit. So hielt man eine Sprache mit einer anderen verwandt aufgrund ähnlicher Wortstellung. Andererseits verglich man aber auch einzelne Wortformen, Affixe, Wortarten usw. miteinander oder versuchte, Sprachen nach dem Grad der Komplexität ihres Verbalparadigmas zu unterscheiden (Swiggers 1993).

4.

Die Ausbreitung und Institutionalisierung der Sprachwissenschaft im 19. Jh.

4.1. Die Ausbreitung der Sprachwissenschaft Die Abkehr von der universalgrammatischen, philosophischen Sprachbetrachtung hin zur datenorientierten Sprachbetrachtung vollzieht sich Anfang des 19. Jhs. Einen wesentlichen Anstoß dafür bildete das zunehmende Interesse am Sanskrit (s. Art. 5). Durch Missionare und Kaufleute wurde das Sanskrit schon im 16. Jh. Europas gelehrten Kreisen bekannt. Aber erst durch Sir William Jones

erlangte es die Verbreitung, die schließlich den Erfolg des Sanskrit in Europa auslöste. Zwischen dem Ende des 18. Jhs. und dem Beginn des 19. Jhs. erschienen einige Grammatiken des Sanskrit sowie englische Übersetzungen einiger indischer Texte (z. B. Śakuntalā 1789, Hitopadeṣa 1787, Bhagavadgītā 1785), die später auch in andere Sprachen (deutsch, französisch) übertragen wurden. Die bekannte Äußerung Sir William Jones’ über die Verwandtschaft des Sanskrit mit Griechisch, Latein, Persisch, Gotisch und Keltisch (1786; Arens 21969: 147; MorpurgoDavies 1998: 65) führte zu einem stark ansteigenden Interesse an vergleichender Sprachwissenschaft und Sprachwissenschaft schlechthin. Nicht zu unterschätzen ist auch der Einfluß, den die sehr formalistischen indischen Sanskrit-Grammatiker (v. a. P¾‫ڲ‬ini) im Bereich sprachlicher Beobachtungen und deskriptiver Methoden in der Phonetik und anderen Zweigen der Sprachwissenschaft auf die europäischen Wissenschaftler ausübten (der Begriff des Null-Morphems war wohl schon P¾‫ڲ‬ini bekannt: Allen 1955; s. auch Art. 5). 4.2. Die Institutionalisierung der Sprachwissenschaft Erst ab dem Anfang des 19. Jhs. wurde Sprachwissenschaft als eigenes Fach nach und nach an den Universitäten zuerst in Deutschland, dann in weiteren europäischen Ländern und Amerika eingerichtet. Häufig wurden ursprünglich orientalistische oder Sanskrit-Lehrstühle im Laufe der Zeit zu Professuren für Sprachwissenschaft umgewidmet. Der erste Lehrstuhl war der Franz Bopps (“Orientalische Literatur und allgemeine Sprachkunde”, ab 1821) an der heutigen Humboldt-Universität Berlin. Am Ende des 19. Jhs. hatten fast alle deutschen Universitäten einen Lehrstuhl für Sprachwissenschaft bzw. Indogermanistik. Andere europäische Länder folgten dieser Entwicklung etwas langsamer (erster Lehrstuhl in England 1828, Frankreich 1832, Italien 1861; dazu Morpurgo-Davies 1998: 7 ff., 154 ff.). Die Benennungen waren vielfältig: “Vergleichende Sprachwissenschaft”, “Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft”, “Grammaire Comparée”, “Anthropologie Linguistique”, “Linguistique générale et histoire”, “Comparative Philology”, “Filologia indogermanica” usw. Obwohl in einigen wenigen Fällen Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft als eigenes Fach gelehrt wurde, wurden Sprachwissenschaft und ihre

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Theorie hauptsächlich an den Historisch-vergleichenden Lehrstühlen mitunterrichtet. Die Institutionalisierung und damit einhergehend die staatliche Unterstützung gewährleisteten im übrigen erst die zügige systematische und wissenschaftliche Forschung in den diversen linguistischen Disziplinen gegenüber den auf der Initiative und dem Interesse Einzelner gegründeten Forschungen der vergangenen Jahrhunderte.

5.

Morphologische Forschungen im 19. Jh.

5.1. Friedrich von Schlegel Als einflußreiches Werk darf Friedrich von Schlegels Über die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier (1808) gelten. Durch die Lektüre von Sir William Jones’ Ausführungen über die Verwandtschaft des Sanskrit mit einigen europäischen Sprachen angeregt, beschäftigte sich Schlegel mit diesen Fragen und kommt in seinem ersten Kapitel über Sprache und Sprachen zu dem Schluß, daß Sanskrit vor allem mit Persisch, Griechisch, Latein und germanischen Sprachen, aber auch (entfernter) mit Armenisch, Slawisch und Keltisch verwandt sei. Schlegel ist der Erste, der Sanskrit als die Muttersprache ansieht, von der die genannten Sprachen abstammen (eine Ansicht, die sich bis in die Mitte des 19. Jhs. halten konnte). Er beweist seine Schlußfolgerungen durch Vergleiche im Wortschatz, aber vor allem durch Vergleiche der Morphologie (“Formenlehre”) und des Satzbaus (1808: 28). Weil flektierende Sprachen auch ihm (1808: 63) als höherwertig galten (s. 3.2), mußte Sanskrit wegen seiner komplexeren und reguläreren Flexion gegenüber dem Griechischen und Lateinischen, noch viel mehr aber gegenüber dem Keltischen, Germanischen, Slawischen und Armenischen als überlegen beurteilt werden. Diese anderen, minderen Sprachen zeigen einen Verfall der sprachlichen Komplexität. Die Untersuchungen führten Schlegel zu einer Einteilung in zwei grundlegende Sprachtypen: Der eine zeichnet sich durch Flexion aus – im Verlaufe der Sprachgeschichte konnte sich dieser Typ durch Verfall in Richtung auf den zweiten Sprachtyp entwickeln, war allerdings wegen der historischen Grundlage immer noch höherwertig –, der andere markiert grammatische Beziehungen durch Wortstellung oder zusätzliche Partikeln – durch Agglutinierung

konnte dieser wiederum eine dem flektierenden Sprachtyp ähnliche, aber nicht so vollkommene Sprache ergeben (1808: 63). 5.2. August Wilhelm Schlegel August Wilhelm Schlegel in Observations sur la langue et la littérature provençales ([1818] 1846–47, II: 158 ff.) ersetzt die übliche Zweiteilung durch eine Einteilung in drei Sprachtypen: “langues sans aucune structure grammaticale”, affigierende Sprachen und flektierende Sprachen. Letztere können sich von synthetischen zu analytischen Sprachen entwickeln. Echte Flexionselemente haben keine eigene (d. h. lexikalische) Bedeutung. 5.3. Wilhelm von Humboldt Von Wilhelm von Humboldts umfangreichem Werk wurde einiges erst postum veröffentlicht, so die berühmte “Einleitung über die Verschiedenheit des menschlichen Sprachbaues und ihren Einfluß auf die geistige Entwickelung des Menschengeschlechtes” (1836) zu Über die Kawi Sprache auf der Insel Java (1836–39). Humboldt beschäftigte sich neben den indogermanischen Sprachen mit so verschiedenen Sprachen wie Baskisch, nordund südamerikanischen Sprachen, indonesischen und polynesischen Sprachen, Chinesisch (einiges davon ist leider unpubliziert geblieben, s. dazu Mueller-Vollmer 1993). 1827 erschien die erste detaillierte typologische Arbeit “Über den Dualis”, die die Verwendung und die Funktion des Duals in den Sprachen der Welt untersucht. Sie beginnt mit einem Überblick über die verschiedenen Typen des Duals und den Sprachgruppen, in denen ein Dual überhaupt vorkommt, wobei die indonesischen Sprachen ausführlich behandelt werden (Plank 1989). In den 20er und 30er Jahren des 19. Jhs. beschäftigte sich Humboldt vor allem mit dem Studium der Sprachtypen und ihren Verschiedenheiten und Gemeinsamkeiten. Die typologische Klassifikation in drei Sprachtypen wird häufig Humboldt zugeschrieben, obwohl sie schon von A. W. von Schlegel verwendet wird (s. 5.2). Aber Humboldt selbst schwankte zwischen der Dreiteilung und einer Vierteilung unter Hinzufügung des inkorporierenden Sprachtyps, dem er die Sprachen Amerikas zurechnet (1836: 114, 124 f., 151–165, 272). Zwar übernimmt auch Humboldt die Vorstellung, daß flektierende Sprachen vollkommener seien als isolierende, aber er rechnet mit einem immer wiederkehrenden Zyklus der Ab-

10. Das 19. Jahrhundert

und Zunahme ihrer Struktur (eine Annahme, die sich auch bei von der Gabelentz findet, s. 5.11) – bisher war die Veränderung immer eingleisig entweder in Richtung auf einen sprachlichen Verfall oder in Richtung auf sprachliche Vollkommenheit. Humboldt erstellte für sich selbst ein Arbeitsprogramm: Man brauche (a) Einzelgrammatiken aller bekannten Sprachen (auch, wo möglich, aller früheren Sprachstufen), (b) Einzeluntersuchungen aller sprachlichen Kategorien (z. B. das Verb) in allen Sprachen. Erst dann könne man daran denken, eine Klassifizierung der Sprachen der Welt zu erstellen und Sprachfamilien einzuteilen (1903–36, IV: 10 f.). Humboldt sah auch klar die Gefahren, wenn man sich mit einer fremden Sprache beschäftigte: Man müsse sich davor hüten, sozusagen automatisch die in der eigenen Sprache vorhandenen Kategorien zu übertragen. Dies ließe sich bewerkstelligen, indem man jede Sprache in ihren Eigenheiten sorgfältig studiere, ihre Elemente segmentiere und somit zu einer klaren Vorstellung über Funktionen der spracheigenen Elemente und Formen gelange (1903–36, IV: 288–9). In seiner Darstellung der KawiSprache (1836–39, II: 86 ff.) zeigt Humboldt, daß die Wortstämme dieser javanesischen Sprache ursprünglich nominal waren und Verben durch Präfigierung entstehen konnten. Diese Präfixe sind aber teilweise durch Lautveränderungen verschwunden und hinterließen oftmals nur typische morphophonemische Varianten, die dazu führten, daß man (fälschlicherweise) das Nomen vom Verb abgeleitet dachte und nicht umgekehrt. Auch hier zeigt sich die unterschiedliche Betrachtungsweise: Synchronisch und rein deskriptiv mag eine solche Aussage gerechtfertigt sein, um dem Benutzer einer Grammatik Regeln an die Hand zu geben, mit denen er fähig ist, eine Sprache zu lernen. Nach Humboldts Anschauung und Interessenlage mußte man aber darüber hinausgehen und nach der ursprünglichen und wirklichen Bedeutung grammatischer Formen und ihrer Verbindung mit anderen sprachlichen Elementen fragen oder eben, woher solche Formen stammten (also ein eher diachronischer Zugang). Dabei verwendet Humboldt sowohl interne Rekonstruktion (die morphophonemischen Regeln lassen sich nur verstehen, wenn das Verb vom Nomen abgeleitet ist und nicht umgekehrt) als auch die historisch-vergleichende, also ex-

95 terne Rekonstruktion, indem er mit dem Javanischen verwandte Sprachen und aus dem Sanskrit entlehnte Nomina, deren ursprüngliche Lautform man genau kennt, heranzieht. Diese zeigen deutlich, daß die Nomina ihre ursprüngliche Form beibehalten, die Verben aber lautlichen Veränderungen unterworfen waren. 5.4. Rasmus Rask Rasmus Rasks wichtigste Publikationen zur Sprachwissenschaft sind präzise, knappe Grammatiken diverser moderner und alter Sprachen, z. B. 1811 Altnordisch; 1817 Angelsächsisch; 1824 Spanisch; 1825 Friesisch; 1827 Italienisch; 1839 Dänisch (seine Muttersprache); 1832 Lappisch, Englisch; ferner grammatische Kurzbeschreibungen afrikanischer Sprachen (dazu Gipper & Schmitter 1979: 28–32). Seine Grammatiken sind vorwiegend deskriptiv: Nach einer Darstellung von Schreibung und Phonologie folgen Kapitel über Morphologie, Wortbildung und Syntax. Auch bei ihm findet sich die im 19. Jh. fast überall anzutreffende Einstellung, daß man eine Sprache nur dann richtig und vollständig verstehen könne, wenn man auch ihre früheren Sprachstufen kenne, da man nur so manche Erscheinungen einer Sprache erklären könne (z. B. in Rask: 1811, Vorwort). Nach Hjelmslev (1966), der auch Rasks Schriften herausgab (Rask 1932–37), soll Rask nicht als Begründer der vergleichenden Sprachwissenschaft, sondern tatsächlich eher als Begründer der allgemeinen Sprachwissenschaft und des Strukturalismus gelten, da sein Hauptinteresse in der empirischen allgemeinen Sprachwissenschaft und der Typologie gelegen habe (dazu aber Schmitter 1982: 137 ff.). Trotzdem darf Rask aber doch als einer der Begründer der vergleichenden Sprachwissenschaft gelten; unter anderem ist ihm das Prinzip der heute so genannten “forma difficilior” zu verdanken (Rask 1818 am Beispiel der griechischen Komparative mit Suffix -iōn gegenüber denen mit Suffix -teros; Morpurgo-Davies 1998: 128). 5.5. Franz Bopp In Franz Bopps Arbeiten zeigt sich der Trend zu einer “technisierten”, “mathematisierten” bzw. “positivistischen” Sprachwissenschaft. In dem 1816 erschienenen Buch Über das Conjugationssystem der Sanskritsprache in Vergleichung mit jenem der griechischen, lateinischen, persischen und germanischen Sprache wird die These der Sprachverwandtschaft der indogermanischen Sprachen als Vorausset-

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zung genommen und eine detaillierte vergleichende und allgemeine Analyse der verbalen Morphologie erstellt. “Unter Zeitwort oder Verbum im engsten Sinne ist derjenige Redetheil zu verstehen, welcher die Verbindung eines Gegenstandes mit einer Eigenschaft, und deren Verhältnisse zu einander ausdrückt. Das Verbum, nach dieser Bestimmung, hat für sich gar keine reelle Bedeutung, sondern ist blos das grammatische Band zwischen Subjekt und Prädikat, [...]. Es giebt unter diesem Begriffe nur ein einziges Verbum, nämlich das sogenannte Verbum abstractum, Seyn, esse.” (Bopp 1816: 2)

Diese Ansicht findet sich übrigens schon in der Grammaire de Port-Royal (Dominicy 1996: 13 f.). Bopp verband diese Behauptung mit dem Versuch, die formalen Reflexe einer solchen Kopula in der flexivischen Morphologie der Zeitformen anderer Verben wiederzufinden. Er deutet lat. potest als pot- ‘fähig’, -es- ‘ist’ und -t ‘er’, und sieht den Ursprung des indogermanischen Verbalsystems in einer Zusammentückung (d. i.: Agglutination) von bedeutungstragenden Wurzeln mit selbständigen Elementen (z. B. Formen der Kopula, Pronomina), die dann die grammatische Form anzeigen. Ähnlich erklärt er auch die Herkunft des germanischen schwachen Präteritums aus der Verbindung einer Wurzel mit dem Verbum tun: got. sokidedun “ohngefähr wie, wenn man im Deutschen sagte: suchethaten” (1816: 151). In seiner Vergleichenden Grammatik des Sanskrit, Zend, Griechischen, Lateinischen, Litthauischen, Gothischen und Deutschen (1833–52) beabsichtigt Bopp anhand der genannten Sprachen eine allgemeine Beschreibung des Organismus “Sprache”. Hauptteil ist eine morphologische Untersuchung in üblicher Reihenfolge: Nomina und ihre Kasus; Komparation; Pronomina; Verben; Wortbildung. Jedes Morphem jeder Sprache wird einer gründlichen Analyse unterzogen. Der erste Schritt dazu ist die morphologische Segmentation (“Zergliederung”), bei der die Wurzel von Affixen, Endungen usw. getrennt wird. Dies geschieht pro Einzelsprache und Zeitstufe der jeweiligen Sprache, also zuerst rein synchronisch. Erst dann erfolgt der nächste Schritt zur Vergleichung und diachronischen Erklärung der (synchron herausgelösten) Morpheme als entweder ererbt (alt) oder einzelsprachlich geneuert. Ein Problem liegt allerdings teilweise in Bopps Versuchen, Morpheme zu identifizieren: Das “Augment”, das im Griechischen und im Altindischen zur Markierung von Vergangenheit verwendet wird, ist im Indischen lautlich identisch mit dem negierenden

“a privativum”, z. B. a-bharam ‘ich trug’ (zu bhar- ‘tragen’) und a-jñāta ‘unbekannt’ (zu jñā- ‘wissen’). Er schließt aus diesem Befund, daß das Präteritum als “Nicht-Präsens” verstanden wurde, auch wenn er den semantischen Wandel von ‘nicht-tragen’ zu ‘trug’ nicht erklären kann. Der Unterschied zwischen beiden Morphemen, der sich im Griechischen deutlich zeigt (“Augment”: e-; “a privativum”: a-), bleibt unberücksichtigt. Auch wenn einige Thesen (v. a. die Agglutinierungsthese und seine teilweise erzwungenen Morphemidentifizierungen) von späteren Wissenschaftlern abgelehnt werden, wird doch Bopps gründliche Segmentierung von Morphemen als methodische Grundlage allgemein akzeptiert. 5.6. Jacob Grimm Jacob Grimms Arbeiten, obwohl in der Germanistik angesiedelt, hatten einen nicht zu unterschätzenden Einfluß auf die Methodik seiner Zeitgenossen. Vor allem wurde Grimm bekannt für seine strenge Durchführung von Lautgesetzen (u. a. demonstrierte er die Regelmäßigkeit der germanischen Lautverschiebung: “Grimm’s law”) und für seine Abgrenzung von “Umlaut” als rein umgebungsbedingtem Lautwandel (z. B. ahd. wari zu nhd. wäre) gegenüber dem “Ablaut” als einer morphophonologischen Erscheinung (z. B. bei den starken Verben, ahd. Präsens niman ‘nehm:PRS.INF’ gegenüber Präteritum nam ‘nehm:PRÄT.3SG’, wo der Vokalwechsel direkte Auswirkungen auf die Bedeutung hat) – obwohl schon Bopp den Ablaut als “organisch” und funktionsunterscheidend erkannte (Bopp 1833–1852: 108 ff.). 5.7. Grammatische Beschreibung von Einzelsprachen Die Einteilung von Sprachen in genetisch verwandte Sprachfamilien wird nun allgemein als richtig akzeptiert. Die synchronische Erforschung der indogermanischen Einzelsprachen und ihre historisch-diachronische Zusammenfassung in eine Sprachfamilie war methodisches Vorbild für die Erforschung anderer Sprachfamilien, z. B. der finnougrischen, semitischen usw. Infolge des Bedarfs an Beschreibungen weiterer Sprachen entstanden in dieser Zeit viele Grammatiken von Einzelsprachen: Bantusprachen vor allem von W. H. I. Bleek (1862–69); Altaische Sprachen von W. Schott (1849) und M. A. Castrén (1850); Dravidische Sprachen von R. Caldwell (1856); Chinesisch und Tibetisch von R. Lepsius (1861); die Sprachen

10. Das 19. Jahrhundert

Melanesiens von Hans Georg Conon von der Gabelentz (1861–1873). Diese Zeit darf auch als eine Blütezeit der Feldforschung betrachtet werden. Hier beginnen sich die Wege der historisch orientierten Grammatiken von den Wegen der synchron-deskriptiven Grammatiken zu scheiden. Bei Sprachen mit literarischer Tradition (z. B. indogermanischen, semitischen, chinesischen, finno-ugrischen Sprachen) wird weiterhin sehr viel Gewicht auf eine historisch-diachronische Erklärung von sprachlichen Fakten gelegt, und zwar nicht nur bei den “typischen” Indogermanisten wie Bopp u. a., sondern auch bei eher allgemein-sprachwissenschaftlich orientierten Forschern. Durch die Bemühungen um eine einheitliche Schreibweise fremder Sprachen und ihrer Laute (Abercrombie 1981; Gessinger 1994), die schließlich in einem (immer wieder modifizierten) allgemeinen internationalen phonetischen Alphabet mündeten, hatte man nun die adäquaten Mittel, Sprachen phonetisch richtig wiederzugeben, was die Qualität der Grammatiken deutlich verbesserte. 5.8. August Schleicher August Schleicher gebührt die Idee von der Rekonstruierbarkeit von Ursprachen, ferner das Modell von Sprach-Stammbäumen und die nachdrückliche Forderung nach regelmäßigen Lautgesetzen. Die Rekonstruktion vergangener Sprachstufen fordert natürlich eine genaue Kenntnis der lautlichen Entwicklung; daher nimmt bei Schleichers Compendium (1861–1862) die Beschreibung der Phonologie weiten Platz ein. Er darf hier aber nicht fehlen, da er versuchte, bei der Beschreibung der Formenlehre eine abstrahierte Formelsprache zu verwenden (Schleicher 1859). Sein Ziel ist, eine angemessene Basis für die Beschreibung und typologische Klassifikation von Sprachen zu finden (dazu Bynon 1986). Alle Sprachen unterscheiden zwischen Elementen mit (lexikalischer) Bedeutung (z. B. sagen, rot) und Beziehungselementen (Relationen, z. B. Objekt, Plural), jede Untersuchung müsse also zwischen diesen beiden verschiedenen Typen unterscheiden (Schleicher 1859: 1). Die sprachlichen Elemente werden bei Schleicher mit einem Symbol angezeigt: A, B = Wurzeln mit (lexikalischer) Bedeutung, z. B. sag-, da aber z. B. im Chinesischen eine andere Betonung derselben Wurzel eine neue Bedeutung gibt, werden diese gleichlautenden Wurzeln genauer mit A 1, A 2 usw. umschrieben (z. B. haò ‘gut’: A1; hào ‘lieben’: A2);

97 Aࡀ, Bࡀ = “lose antretende, die beziehung umschreibende hilfswurzeln” (mit eigener lexikalischer Bedeutung); a, b = stammbildende Elemente; Ȭ, ȭ = flexivische Elemente; AA = Wurzel mit Ablaut, z. B. gab (Beneš 1958: 112 f.). Die Formel AAaȬ gilt also für eine thematische Verbalform (Wurzel mit evtl. Ablaut, stammbildendem Formans und Personalendung) oder eine nominale Form (Wurzel mit evtl. Ablaut, stammbildendem Formans und Kasus/Numerus-Endung); AAȬ für eine athematische Verbalform; AAa kommt nur ausnahmsweise im Imperativ oder Vokativ vor. Der chinesische Sprachtypus z. B. läßt sich in seiner morphologischen Form als A + Aࡀ oder Aࡀ + A beschreiben. Mit dieser formelhaften Darstellung – die im übrigen oft belächelt wurde, z. B. von Steinthal (Zeitschrift für Völkerpsychologie und Sprachwissenschaft I: 435) – rückt Schleicher die Sprachwissenschaft in die Nähe der empirischen und exakten Naturwissenschaften. In Die Unterscheidung von Nomen und Verbum in der lautlichen Form (1865) versucht er zu zeigen, daß eine solche Unterscheidung zwischen Nomen und Verb typologisch selten ist und nur in indogermanischen Sprachen existiere (s. Percival 1969). “Es frägt sich nämlich, ob die lautliche form, ob die morphologische beschaffenheit für das innere wesen der sprache, für die funktion massgebend ist oder nicht. [...] Mit andern worten: deckt sich funktion und laut, inhalt und form in der sprache, oder gibt es funktionen ohne lautlichen ausdruck?” (Schleicher 1865: 501)

Schleicher fragt sich weiter nach der angemessenen Beschreibung grammatischer Kategorien: Soll man Sprachen, die phonologisch (und morphologisch) nicht zwischen Verben und Nomina unterscheiden, denn überhaupt einen solchen Unterschied zubilligen? Oder anders: Gibt es in der Inhaltsseite grammatische Kategorien bzw. Beziehungen, die auf der Ausdrucksseite keine konkrete Form haben? Diese Frage wird von Schleicher verneint: “Nach meiner überzeugung ist dies nicht der fall. [...] Die lautliche form der sprache ist der körper, die erscheinung der funktion, des inhaltes der sprache. Beide kommen nicht voneinander getrennt vor. [...] Wir haben kein recht, funktionen da vorauszusetzen, wo keine lautform ihr vorhandensein anzeigt.” (Schleicher 1865: 501)

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II. Geschichte der morphologischen Forschung I: von der Antike bis zum 19. Jahrhundert

Schleicher folgt somit Humboldt und stellt die traditionelle Grammatikbetrachtung mit ihrer für alle Sprachen geltenden, bisher kaum angefochtenen Unterteilung in Nomina, Pronomina, Verben usw. ausdrücklich in Frage. 5.9. Heymann Steinthal Heymann Steinthal (s. Bumann 1965) gilt als Kritiker der rein historischen Methode (s. Morpurgo-Davies 1998: 191; 201 ff.). Seine Forschungsschwerpunkte liegen eher auf der Beschreibung “exotischer” Sprachen und der Sprachtypologie und -psychologie als auf der detaillierten (historischen) Phonologie und Morphologie. Sprache dürfe nicht losgelöst von ihren Sprechern betrachtet werden, sondern man müsse auch psychologische Eigenheiten ihrer Sprecher berücksichtigen (“Volksgeist”), die die Wiedergabe von Vorstellungen in konkreter Sprache beeinflussen. Seine genauen Untersuchungen zu verschiedenen Sprachen unter Einbeziehung ihrer Idiomatik bieten eine Fülle wertvoller sprachlicher Erkenntnisse und auch eine gute Einführung in die Denkweise verschiedener Völker. Ein Wort ist die phonetische Wiedergabe einer Vorstellung, aber ein ganzer Satz ist wesentlich komplizierter als die bloße Aneinanderreihung von Wörtern; in der Syntax (und nicht in der Morphologie) zeigt sich die Verschiedenheit der Völker und ihrer Sprachen (Steinthal 1871: 419). 5.10. Sprachklassifikation Es blieb aber trotz aller Einzelerkenntnisse immer noch das Problem, wie man in die Menge sprachlicher Fakten eine vernünftige Ordnung bekommen könne. Sprachen wurden eingeteilt nach ihrer genetischen Verwandtschaft oder nach strukturellen bzw. typologischen Kriterien. Man erkannte, daß genetische Verwandtschaft vor allem an etymologischer Verwandtschaft (im Wortschatz und der Morphologie) und gesetzmäßigen Lautentsprechungen zu erproben, strukturelle Ähnlichkeit hingegen eher mit morphologischen oder syntaktischen Kriterien festzustellen sei. Die morphologische Klassifizierung ist von diesen sicherlich die bekannteste und auch am leichtesten nachvollziehbare. Whitney ließ im übrigen nur diese als wirklich sinnvoll gelten (1867: 360 ff.). Die übliche (Humboldt, Schleicher, Max Müller 1862: 287 ff.) dreiteilige Typologie unterscheidet zwischen isolierenden Sprachen wie etwa dem Chinesischen

(alle Formen haben auch eine lexikalische Bedeutung, also nur – nach Schleichers Formelsprache – A + Aࡀ, B + Bࡀ), zusammenfügenden oder agglutinierenden Sprachen wie dem Türkischen (sprachliche Elemente werden ohne morphophonologische Verknüpfung aneinandergefügt, also AaȬ), und flektierenden Sprachen, in denen die bedeutungstragenden Wurzeln und die grammatischen Elemente enge Verbindungen eingehen, die sich in morphophonologischen Alternationen zeigen können, also AAaȬ. Humboldt (s. 5.3) fügte – allerdings nicht regelmäßig – noch die inkorporierenden oder polysynthetischen Sprachen hinzu, obwohl man diese auch unter die agglutinierenden Sprachen rechnen konnte. Meist herrscht die Ansicht vor, daß alle Sprachen ursprünglich isolierend gewesen seien, da dies der einfachste Typus sei. Im “Verlaufe der Sprachentwicklung” (schon diese Wortwahl zeigt den zugrunde liegenden Darwinismus) seien die agglutinierenden Sprachen daraus entstanden, danach die flektierenden (s. Bopp, 5.5). Humboldt (s. 5.3) vermutet ein immerwährendes Auf und Ab im Leben der Sprachen. Alle diese Veränderungen werden aber in prähistorischer Zeit angesiedelt und nicht an bekannten Sprachstufen belegt: Steinthal (1860: 277) z. B. vermutet, daß das Sanskrit um 4000 oder 5000 vor Chr. eine dem Chinesischen Sprachtyp ähnliche Vorstufe gehabt haben könne. Noch 1870 konstatierte Baudouin de Courtenay (1972: 65), daß morphologisch verschiedene Sprachen nicht genetisch verwandt sein könnten. Später änderte er seine Meinung. Sprachen könnten im Verlaufe ihrer Entwicklung ihre morphologische Struktur sehr wohl ändern (1972: 137 f.), und er reihte das Englische, obwohl eine indogermanische Sprache, in die Gruppe der isolierenden Sprachen wie das Chinesische ein (1910: 53). Max Müller konstatierte, daß “there is hardly any language which is not at the same time isolating, combinatory (d. i. agglutinierend) and inflectional“ (1868–75, IV: 121). Die Frage, ob genetisch verwandte Sprachen strukturell verschiedenen Sprachtypen angehören konnten, wird also erst in der zweiten Hälfte des 19. Jhs. positiv beantwortet (Morpurgo-Davies 1998: 217 ff.). Die Vertreter der psychologischen Klassifizierung, v. a. Steinthal, lehnen allgemeingültige grammatische (d. h. in der Regel die aus der traditionellen antiken Grammatik stammenden) Kategorien ab. Humboldts Versuch herauszufinden, wie Sprachen die verschiede-

10. Das 19. Jahrhundert

nen grammatischen Formen ausdrückten, ist für Steinthal ein Fehler in sich (1860: 104 ff.), weil dadurch diesen Kategorien ein absoluter Wert zugestanden wird, den sie jedoch nicht haben (doch auch Humboldt war sich ja dieser Gefahr bewußt, s. 5.3). Steinthal fordert, daß jede Sprache nach ihren eigenen Kategorien beschrieben werde, da jeder individuelle “Volksgeist” für die sprachlichen Ausdrucksformen bzw. die “innere Sprachform” verantwortlich sei. Wenn dies geschehen sei, könne man sich anhand von Vorhandensein oder Fehlen bestimmter grammatischer Kategorien an die Arbeit der Klassifizierung der Sprachen der Welt machen. Im Vordergrund steht bei ihm aber die Einteilung nach Konstruktionsmöglichkeiten von z. B. Prädikation, Apposition u. dgl. (1860: 318). Isolierende (Steinthal: “nebensetzende”) Sprachen (Schleichersche morphologische Form A, bzw. A + Aࡀ) sind in der sprachlichen Form nicht eindeutig. Berg + hoch kann eben bedeuten: der Berg ist hoch oder der hohe Berg (1860: 325); es besteht also kein ausdrucksseitiger Unterschied zwischen Prädikation und Attribution, weder in der Wortstellung noch in der Verwendung von relationalen Elementen (Steinthal: “formlose” Sprachen). In agglutinierenden (Schleicher: AaȬ) und flektierenden (Steinthal: “abwandelnden”) Sprachen (AAaȬ), die ausdrucksseitig grammatische Beziehungen (“Formen”, z. B. Kasus) ausdrückten und zwischen Verb und Nomen unterschieden, könnten solche Relationen eindeutig bestimmt werden (1860: 325). Es gibt nach Steinthal also zwei Einteilungskriterien: einerseits das A: Fehlen (bei “formlosen Sprachen”) oder B: Vorhandensein von ausdrucksseitigen formalen Elementen wie Kasus-, Numeruszeichen (bei “Formsprachen”), andererseits die Unterscheidung von 1: “nebensetzenden” oder 2: “abwandelnden” Sprachen. Diese werden noch genauer untergliedert: “abwandelnde, formlose” Sprachen in Typ a: Reduplikation, Präfixe; Typ b: Suffixe; Typ c: Einverleibung, und “abwandelnde Formsprachen” in Typ a: lose Anfügung grammatischer Elemente; Typ b: Ablaut vorhanden; Typ c: echte Suffixe.

99 Diese Kriterien lassen sich miteinander kombinieren, so daß Steinthal zu acht Hauptklassen kommt: A1: hinterindische Sprachen; A2a: polynesische Sprachen; A2b: ural-altaische Sprachen; A2c: amerikanische Sprachen; B1: Chinesisch; B2a: (Alt-) Ägyptisch; B2b: Semitisch; B2c: Sanskritisch (= Indogermanisch) (Arens 21969: 242 ff.; Steinthal 1860: 327). 5.11. Hans Georg Conon von der Gabelentz Hans Georg Conon von der Gabelentz wird in den meisten sprachwissenschaftshistorischen Arbeiten eher am Rande erwähnt. Der von Humboldt vermutete Zyklus einer Zuund Abnahme der Vollkommenheit des Sprachorganismus (s. 5.3) wird auch von von der Gabelentz vertreten (zuerst 11891, dann 2 1901: 255–258). Sprachen müssen aus sich selbst heraus, also aus ihrer “inneren Form” verstanden werden (21901: 83 f.). Auch von der Gabelentz kritisiert wie Steinthal die rein phonologisch-morphologische Betrachtung von Sprache: “Eine Grammatik ohne Syntax ist, streng genommen, ein Unding, jedenfalls nur etwas halbes; denn sie sagt der Sprache gerade auf dem Punkte Ade, wo die Sprache als lebendige Rede in’s Leben treten will.” (von der Gabelentz 21901: 84)

Der Gegensatz zwischen “langue” und “parole” begegnet schon bei von der Gabelentz, der zwischen Einzelsprache als dem “System, dessen sämmtliche Theile organisch zusammenhängen und zusammenwirken”, und Rede unterscheidet (21901: 481). Die Forderung einer Sprachwissenschaft, die Wort- und Satzbau und das Vorhandensein oder Fehlen bestimmter grammatischer Kategorien gleichermaßen untersucht, wird “Typologie” genannt (“dürfte man ein ungeborenes Kind taufen, ich würde den Namen Typologie wählen”, 21901: 481). Bei seiner Darstellung von Einzelsprachen und ihrem synthetischen System (zu den Begriffen “analytisch” und “synthetisch” s. von der Gabelentz 21901: 85 f.) beobachtet von der Gabelentz auch den ergativischen Bau mancher Sprachen im Kontrast zu Sprachen mit Nominativ/Akkusativ-System: “Es giebt ja auch Sprachen, die [...] geradezu einen Casus Activus und einen Neutro-Passivus haben.

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[...] Auch das Baskische unterscheidet zwischen activem und nicht activem Subjecte; das Suffix des Ersteren, -k, bezeichnet auch den Urheber eines passiven Verbums.” (von der Gabelentz 21901: 102)

5.12. Die Junggrammatiker Zu diesem Kreis gehörten (s. Einhauser 1989): Karl Brugmann, Hermann Osthoff, Berthold Delbrück, Hermann Paul, Eduard Sievers, Wilhelm Braune, Karl Verner, J. H. Hübschmann, und evtl. Ferdinand de Saussure, der allerdings ein Stück jünger war. Was verbindet diese Wissenschaftler so stark miteinander? Sie waren davon überzeugt, daß (a) Lautgesetze ausnahmslos seien und (b) Lautgesetze nur durch Analogien (im weitesten Sinne) durchbrochen werden könnten. Brugmanns Artikel (1876) über die Existenz sonantischer Nasale im rekonstruierten Indogermanischen erregte die Gemüter, da es gegen die bisherigen Rekonstruktionen verstieß und zu einem anderen Stammbaum der Ausgliederung der indogermanischen Sprachen führte. Außerdem wurde durch die fast mathematisch anmutende Methodik (ausnahmslose und “berechenbare” Lautgesetze, davon abhängig auch die historische Morphologie) die bisher geleistete Arbeit in diesem Gebiet in Frage gestellt. Die bisher übliche Wertung verschiedener Sprachtypen (isolierend = primitiv; flektierend = hochstehend) wurde von ihnen aufgegeben. Entgegen der landläufigen Meinung werteten die Junggrammatiker moderne und alte Sprachen gleich (zwei Hauptvertreter der strukturalistischen Linguistik, Leonard Bloomfield und de Saussure, waren als Schüler der Junggrammatiker in diesem Sinne ausgebildet worden und standen der historisch-vergleichenden Sprachwissenschaft auch durchaus wohlwollend gegenüber; Robins 1973: 57). In Brugmanns fünfbändigem Grundriß (1886–1893) wird eine detaillierte Analyse der Phonologie und Morphologie der indogermanischen Sprachen samt des rekonstruierten Urindogermanischen gegeben. Wichtige Impulse setzten die Junggrammatiker auf dem Gebiet der Phonologie, Morphologie und der Morphophonologie; vor allem ist die genaue Ausarbeitung des Ablaut-Systems der indogermanischen Sprachen und des Urindogermanischen zu nennen, die Ferdinand de Saussure 1879 (s. 5.13) veröffentlichte. Analogie als Grund für morphologische Veränderungen wurde von den Jung-

grammatikern neben lautgesetzlichen Veränderungen als zweite Ursache für lautlichen und morphologischen Wandel angesehen. Paul (1880) ging von der Assoziationsfähigkeit der Sprecher aus, die nach vorgegebenen “Proportionen” neue Flexionsformen schaffen konnten. Flexionsmorpheme breiteten sich aus; z. B. wird der ahd. Plural kint zu Singular kint nach Vorbild von rint – rinder zu kinder umgestaltet und somit eine eindeutige Pluralmarkierung erzielt. Jedoch konnte analogischem Wandel keine Gesetzmäßigkeit nachgewiesen werden: der alte Plural von engl. cliff ist clives, wie knives zu knife. Warum aber wird der Singular cliff nicht umgestaltet nach dem Vorbild von knive : knives zu clive oder clife, sondern der Plural zu cliffs (s. Hoenigswald 1978; Anttila 1977; Art. 18)? 5.13. Ferdinand de Saussure Ferdinand de Saussures bekannte Mémoire sur le système primitif des voyelles dans les langues indo-européennes (1879) ist eine Untersuchung des morphophonologischen Ablautsystems des Urindogermanischen. Außerdem wird hierin die Basis für die heute sogenannte Laryngaltheorie gelegt: die “coefficients sonantiques” A und O werden von de Saussure aus morphologischen Gründen postuliert, auch wenn sie in keiner Sprache bezeugt sind. Altindische Formen wie yu-na-kti ‘er/sie schirrt an’ (na-Infix als regelmäßiges Wortbildungsmorphem zwischen zweitem und dritten Radikal der Wurzel yug/yuj-; Endung -ti) mit Partizip Perfekt Passiv yuk-ta‘angeschirrt’, śṇoti (aus älterem ś-ṇa-u-ti) ‘er hört’ mit Partizip śruta- ‘gehört, berühmt’ gegenüber puṇāti ‘er reinigt’ mit Partizip putā- ‘gereinigt’ führten ihn zu der Frage, wo hier der dritte Radikal geblieben sei. Aus morphologisch-systematischen Gründen argumentierte er, daß hier ein Laut (“A”) mit dem vorhergehenden Vokal verschmolzen sei, aber ursprünglich vorhanden gewesen sei. Dadurch bekommt er ein morphologisch eindeutiges System in die rekonstruierten Formen: yu-ne-k-ti : yuk-to- wie >I-ne-u-ti : >Iuto- und wie pu-ne-A-ti : puA-to-. 5.14. Die Herkunft von Flexion und Wurzeln Die Frage nach der Herkunft von Flexion blieb aber bestehen. Hatte Bopp prinzipiell recht, daß Flexion aus Agglutination und diese aus Nebeneinandersetzen von selbständigen Wortformen hervorging? Brugmann, der als repräsentativ für die Junggrammati-

10. Das 19. Jahrhundert

ker gelten kann, hat diese Thesen zurückgewiesen, weil (a) die phonologische Entwicklung nicht nachvollziehbar sei, (b) die semantische Entwicklung dieser “Nebeneinandersetzungen” nicht erklärbar sei und (c) alle modernen Sprachen verschiedene Möglichkeiten morphologischer Markierung zeigten und daher auch die indogermanischen Sprachen so verfahren haben sollten (dazu Delbrück 1880: 100). Der Begriff der Wurzel war auch ein Streitpunkt, über den die Junggrammatiker versuchten, Klarheit zu gewinnen. Man dachte bisher, daß Wurzeln in agglutinierenden oder flektierenden Sprachen ursprünglich selbständige Wörter gewesen seien (z. B. Max Müller 1868–75, IV: 126; so auch noch Delbrück 1880: 73 ff.). Brugmann erst sprach den Wurzeln den Status selbständiger Wörter ab, sie seien vielmehr etymologische bzw. morphologische Einheiten, die man durch Segmentation gewinnen kann, und daher nur sprachwissenschaftliche Konstrukte (Brugmann & Delbrück 1897–1916: I, I, 32 ff.; II.5.). Dies führte zu einer “abstrakten” Betrachtung und Systematisierung von Morphemen. Die junggrammatische Tradition hat im Bereich der Morphologie viele neue Einzeluntersuchungen und Forschungsbeiträge geliefert. Ende des 19. Jhs. und im 20. Jh. haben vor allem synchronische, semantisch-funktionale Überlegungen zu einer Ausarbeitung der Morphologie als sprachwissenschaftlicher Disziplin beigetragen.

6.

Zitierte Literatur

Abercrombie David (1981), “Extending the Roman Alphabet: Some Orthographic Experiments of the Past Four Centuries”. In: Asher, R. E. & Henderson, E. J. A. (Hrsg.), Towards a History of Phonetics: Papers contributed in Honour of David Abercrombie. Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univ. Press, 206–224 Adelung, Johann Christoph (1806–1817), Mithridates oder allgemeine Sprachenkunde mit dem Vater Unser als Sprachprobe in bey nahe fünfhundert Sprachen und Mundarten (fortgesetzt und bearbeitet von J. S. Vater), Bd. 1–4. Berlin: Vossische Buchhandlung Allen, W. Sidney (1955), “Zero and Panini”. Indian linguistics 16, 106–113 Anttila, Raimo (1977), Analogy: A Basic Bibliography. The Hague/Amsterdam: J. Benjamins

101 Arens, Hans (21969), Sprachwissenschaft. Der Gang ihrer Entwicklung von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart. Freiburg/München: Alber Balbi, Adriano (1826), Atlas ethnografique du globe ou classification des peuples anciens et modernes d’après leur langues. Paris: Rey et Gravier Baudouin de Courtenay, Jan (1910), “Klassification der Sprachen”. IF Anzeiger 26, 51–58 Baudouin de Courtenay, Jan (1972), A Baudouin de Courtenay Anthology: The Beginnings of Structural Linguistics, transl. and ed. with an introduction by Edward Stankiewicz. Indiana, Bloomington/London: Indiana University Press Beneš, Brigit (1958), Wilhelm von Humboldt, Jacob Grimm, August Schleicher: Ein Vergleich ihrer Sprachauffassungen. Winterthur: Keller Bleek, W. H. I. (1862–1869), A Comparative Grammar of South African Languages, Bd. 1–2. London: Trübner & Co. Bopp, Franz (1816), Über das Conjugationssystem der Sanskritsprache in Vergleichung mit jenem der griechischen, lateinischen, persischen und germanischen Sprache, hrsg. von K. J. Windischmann. Frankfurt/M.: Andreae [Nachdruck 1975, Hildesheim: Olms] Bopp, Franz (1833–52), Vergleichende Grammatik des Sanskrit, Zend, Griechischen, Lateinischen, Litthauischen, Gothischen und Deutschen. Abtheilungen 1–6. Berlin: Dümmler Brekle, Herbert E. (1975), “Zur Stellung der Wortbildung in der Grammatik”. In: Helmut Rix (Hrsg.), Flexion und Wortbildung: Akten der V. Fachtagung der Indogermanischen Gesellschaft. Wiesbaden: Reichert, 26–39 Brekle, Herbert E. (1985), Einführung in die Geschichte der Sprachwissenschaft. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft Brugmann, Karl (1876), “Nasalis sonans in der indogermanischen Grundsprache”. Studien zur griechischen und lateinischen Grammatik 9, 285–338 Brugmann, Karl (1886–1893), Grundriß der vergleichenden Grammatik der indogermanischen Sprachen, Bd. 1–5. Strassburg/London: Trübner Brugmann, Karl & Delbrück, Berthold (1897– 1916), Grundriß der vergleichenden Grammatik der indogermanischen Sprachen, Bd. 1–9. Strassburg: Trübner Bumann, Waltraud (1965), Die Sprachtheorie Heymann Steinthals: dargestellt im Zusammenhang mit seiner Theorie der Geisteswissenschaft. Meisenheim am Glan: Anton Hain Bynon, Theodora (1986), “August Schleicher: Indo-Europeanist and General Linguist”. In: Bynon, Th. & Palmer, F. R. (Hrsg.), Studies in the History of Western Linguistics in Honour of R. H. Robins. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 129–49

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Caldwell, Robert (1856), A Comparative Grammar of the Dravidian or South-Indian Family of Languages. London: Harrison Castrén, M. Alexander (1850), De affixis personalibus linguarum altaicarum. Helsingfors: Litteris Frenckellianis Delbrück, Berthold (1880), Einleitung in das Sprachstudium. Leipzig: Breitkopf und Härtel [61919] Dominicy, Marc (1996), “La grammaire générale et la survie dans les traditions de langues romanes: Une esquisse méthodologique”. In: Schmitter (Hrsg.), 3–23 Droixhe, Daniel (1978), La linguistique et l’appel de l’histoire (1600–1800). Genf: Droz Droixhe, Daniel & Grell, C. (1993, Hrsg.), La linguistique entre mythe et histoire: Actes des journées d’étude organisées les 4 et 5 juin à la Sorbonne en l’honneur de Hans Aarsleff. Münster: Nodus Einhauser, Eveline (1989), Die Junggrammatiker: Ein Problem für die Sprachwissenschaftsgeschichtsschreibung. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier Gabelentz, Hans Georg Conon von der (1861– 1873), “Die melanesischen Sprachen nach ihrem grammatischen Bau und ihrer Verwandtschaft unter sich und mit den malaiisch-polynesischen Sprachen untersucht”. Abh. der Königl. Sächs. Akad. der Wiss., Phil.-Hist. Classe 3: 1861, 1–266; 7: 1873, 1–186 Gabelentz, Hans Georg Conon von der (21901), Die Sprachwissenschaft, ihre Aufgaben, Methoden und bisherigen Ergebnisse. Leipzig: Tauchnitz [zweite, vermehrte und verb. Aufl. der ersten Ausg. 1891] Gessinger Joachim (1994), Auge & Ohr: Studien zur Erforschung der Sprache am Menschen 1709–1850. Berlin: De Gruyter Gipper, Helmut & Schmitter, Peter (1979), Sprachwissenschaft und Sprachphilosophie im Zeitalter der Romantik: Ein Beitrag zur Historiographie der Linguistik. Tübingen: Narr (Tübinger Beiträge zur Linguistik 121) Girard, Gabriel Abbé (1747), Les vrais principes de la langue francoise ou La parole reduite en méthode, conformément aux Lois de l’Usage, en seize discours. Paris [Neue Ausgabe von P. Swiggers (1982), Genf/Paris: Droz] Gulya, János (1974), “Some Eighteenth Century Antecedents of Nineteenth Century Linguistics: The Discovery of Finno-Ugrian”. In: Hymes (Hrsg.), 258–276 Gyarmathi, Samual (1799), Affinitas linguae Hungaricae cum linguis fennicae originis grammatice demonstrata nec non vocabularia dialectorum tataricum et slavicarum cum hungarica comparata. Göttingen [Evangelische Übersetzung mit Einleitung und Kommentar von Victor E. Henzeli (1983), Amsterdam: J. Benjamins (Amsterdam Classics in Linguistics 15)]

Haarmann, Harald (1979, Hrsg.), Wissenschaftsgeschichtliche Beiträge zur Erforschung indogermanischer, finno-ugrischer und kaukasischer Sprachen bei Pallas (Kommentare zu Peter Simon Pallas, Linguarum totius orbis vocabularia comparativa, 2) Hamburg: Buske Hjelmslev, Louis (1966), “Commentaires sur la vie et l’œuvre de Rasmus Rask”. In: Sebeok (Hrsg.), I, 179–99 Hoenigswald, Henry M. (1978), “The annus mirabilis 1876 and Posterity”. TPhS, 17–35 Humboldt, Wilhelm von (1836–39), Über die Kawi-Sprache auf der Insel Java nebst einer Einleitung über die Verschiedenheit des menschlichen Sprachbaues und ihren Einfluß auf die geistige Entwickelung des Menschengeschlechts, Bd. 1–3. Berlin: Dümmler Humboldt, Wilhelm von (1903–1936), Gesammelte Schriften, im Auftrag der Königlichen Preußischen Akademie der Wiss., hrsg. v. A. Lietzmann et al., Bd. 1–17. Berlin [Nachdruck 1968, Berlin: De Gruyter] Hymes, Dell (1974, Hrsg.), Studies in the History of Linguistics: Traditions and Paradigms. Indiana, Bloomington: Indiana University Press Lepsius, Richard (1861), “Über die Umschrift und Lautverhältnisse einiger hinterasiatischer Sprachen, namentlich der Chinesischen und der Tibetischen”. Abh. d. Königl. Akad. d. Wiss. zu Berlin 1860, 449–496 Metcalf, G. J. (1974), “The Indo-European Hypothesis in the 16th and 17th Centuries”. In: Hymes (Hrsg.), 233–257 Meier, Georg F. (1996), “Sprachtypologie vor W. V. Humboldt”. In: Schmitter (Hrsg.), 459–477 Morpurgo Davies, Anna (1998), Nineteenth-Century Linguistics. London: Longman (History of Linguistics, ed. by Giulio Lepschy, 4) Mueller-Vollmer, Kurt (1993), Wilhelm von Humboldts Sprachwissenschaft: Ein kommentiertes Verzeichnis des sprachwissenschaftlichen Nachlasses. Paderborn: Schöningh Müller, Max (1862), Lectures on the Science of Language Delivered at the Royal Institution of Great Britain. London: Longman, Green, Longman & Roberts Müller, Max (1868–75), Chips from a German Workshop, Bd. 1–4. London: Longmans, Green & Co. Naumann, Bernd (1996), “Die Tradition der Philosophischen Grammatik in Deutschland”. In: Schmitter (Hrsg.), 24–43 Paul, Hermann (1880), Principien der Sprachgeschichte. Halle/Saale: Niemeyer [51920] Percival, W. K. (1969), “Nineteenth Century Origins of Twentieth Century Structuralism”. Papers from the 5th Regional Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society 5, 416–420

10. Das 19. Jahrhundert Percival, W. K. (1974), “Humboldt’s Description of the Javanese verb”. In: Hymes (Hrsg.), 380–389 Plank, Frans (1989), “On Humboldt On the Dual”. In: Corrigan, R. & Eckman, F. & Noonan, M. (Hrsg.), Linguistic Categorization. Amsterdam: J. Benjamins (Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 61), 293–333 Rask, Rasmus K. (1932–37), Ausgewählte Abhandlungen, hrsg. v. Louis Hjelmslev, mit einer Einleitung v. Holger Pedersen, Bd. 1–3. Kopenhagen: Munksgaard Robins, Robert H. (1973), Ideen- und Problemgeschichte der Sprachwissenschaft. Frankfurt/M: Athenäum Salmon P. B. (1974), “The Beginnings of Morphology: Linguistic Botanizing in the 18. Century”. Historiographia Linguistica 1, 313–339 Saussure, Ferdinand de (1879), Mémoire sur le système primitif des voyelles dans les langues indo-européennes. Leipzig: Teubner Schlegel, August Wilhelm von (1846–1847), “Observations sur la langue et la littérature provencale”. In: Eduard Bocking (Hrsg.), August Wilhelm von Schlegel’s Sämmtliche Werke, Bd. 1–12. Leipzig: Weidmann, Bd. II: 158 ff. Schlegel, Friedrich von (1808), Über die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier. Heidelberg [Neue Ausgabe 1975) in: Kritische Friedrich-Schlegel-Ausgabe. München/Wien: Schöningh/Thomas, Bd. VIII: 105–433] Schleicher, August (1859), “Zur Morphologie der Sprache”. Mémoires de l’Académie des Sciences de St-Pétersbourg I, 1–38 Schleicher, August (1861–1), Compendium der vergleichenden Grammatik der indogermanischen Sprachen. Weimar: Böhlau Schleicher, August (1865), “Die Unterscheidung von Nomen und Verbum in der lautlichen Form”. Abh. der phil.-hist. Classe der Königl. Sächs. Akad. der Wiss. 4, 495–587 Schmitter, Peter (1982), Untersuchungen zur Historiographie der Linguistik: Struktur – Methodik – theoretische Fundierung. Tübingen: Narr (Tübinger Beiträge zur Linguistik 181) Schmitter, Peter (1996, Hrsg.), Sprachtheorien der Neuzeit II: Von der Grammaire de Port-Royal (1660) zur Konstitution moderner linguistischer Disziplinen. Tübingen: Narr Schott, Wilhelm (1849), Über das Altaische oder Finnisch-Tatarische Sprachengeschlecht. Berlin: Reimer

103 Schreyer, Rüdiger (1996), “Die Tradition der Philosophischen Grammatik in England”. In: Schmitter (Hrsg.), 44–93 Sebeok, Thomas A. (1966, Hrsg.), Portraits of Linguists: A Biographical Source Book for the History of Western Linguistics, 1746–1963, Bd. 1–2. Indiana, Bloomington/London: Indiana University Press Sebeok, Thomas A. (1975, Hrsg.), Current Trends in Linguistics, 13: Historiography of Linguistics, Bd. 1–2. The Hague/Paris: Mouton Smith, Adam (1761), “A Dissertation on the Origin of Languages, or Considerations Concerning the First Formation of Languages and the Different Genius of Original and Compounded Languages”. In: The Philological Miscellany (London) 440– 479; Nachdruck einer 1812 erschienenen, von D. Stewart besorgten Ausgabe von The Theory of Moral Sentiments (London), hrsg. v. G. Narr. Tübingen: Narr 1970 Stehr, A. (1957), Die Anfänge der finnisch-ugrischen Sprachvergleichung, 1669–1771. unpubl. Diss. Göttingen Steinthal, Heymann (21858), Der Ursprung der Sprache im Zusammenhange mit den letzten Fragen alles Wissens: Eine Darstellung, Kritik und Fortentwicklung der vorzüglichsten Ansichten [2., umgearb. u. erw. Aufl.]. Berlin: Dümmler Steinthal, Heymann (1860), Charakteristik der hauptsächlichsten Typen des Sprachbaues. Berlin: Dümmler Steinthal, Heymann (1871), Einleitung in die Psychologie und Sprachwissenschaft (Abriß der Sprachwissenschaft. 1. Teil: Die Sprache im allgemeinen). Berlin: Dümmler [21881] Swiggers, Pierre (1993), “L’étude comparative des langues vers 1830: Humboldt, Du Ponceau, Klaproth et le baron de Mérian”. In: Droixhe & Grell (Hrsg.), 275–295 Tovar, Antonio (1986), El lingüista espanol Lorenzo Hervás: Estudio y selección de obras básicas. Madrid: Alcobendas Werner, Otmar (1984), “Prinzipien und Methoden historischer Morphologie”. In: Besch, Werner & Reichmann, Oskar & Sonderegger, Stefan (Hrsg.), Sprachgeschichte: Ein Handbuch zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache und ihrer Erforschung. Berlin: De Gruyter, 535–545 Whitney, William Dwight (1867), Language and the Study of Language: Twelve Lectures on the Principles of Linguistic Science. New York [dt. Übersetzung (1874) v. Julius Jolly, München: Ackermann]

Sabine Ziegler, Würzburg (Deutschland)

III. Geschichte der morphologischen Forschung II: Forschungstraditionen im 20. Jahrhundert History of morphological research II: Research traditions in the 20th century 11. Schulgrammatik als Modell linguistischer Beschreibung 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

Allgemeines Wechselwirkung Tendenzen der deutschen Schulgrammatik im 20. Jahrhundert Ludwig Sütterlin Hans Glinz Fazit Zitierte Literatur

1.

Allgemeines

Während die “wissenschaftliche” Grammatik des 19. Jahrhunderts historische Laut- und Formenlehre ist, entwickelt die Schulgrammatik zuerst eine tragfähige Satzlehre. Deren Entwicklung ist in den Einzelheiten rekonstruiert bei Forsgren (1985; 1991). Um 1900 findet man in der deutschen Schulgrammatik neben Resten der Beckerschen und der Heyseschen Richtung (vgl. Vesper 1980; Erlinger et al. 1989) vorwiegend Mischgrammatiken. Sie verbinden die satz- und syntaxzentrierten Ansätze der ersten Jahrhunderthälfte mit der seit etwa 1850 langsam auch in die Gymnasien einsickernden historischen Laut- und Formenlehre. Mit dieser letzteren tut sich die Schule freilich notorisch schwer, weil sie weder didaktisiert und methodisiert noch mit anerkannten schulischen Lernzielen ohne weiteres verbunden werden kann. Anschließen läßt sie sich bestenfalls an allgemeinnationalistische Lernziele, die nach den allgemeinen Bildungszielen der Reformzeit, als die Muttersprache mit den alten Sprachen um den “höheren Bildungswert” konkurrierte, in der zweiten Jahrhunderthälfte nach vorn drängen (vgl. für einen Überblick Bahner & Neumann 1985; Erlinger & Knobloch 1991). Den Diskussionsstand um 1870 kann man etwa bei Wilmanns (1869) nachlesen, der für einen vorsichtigen, am Verständnis der klassi-

schen Literatur orientierten Unterricht in der Grammatik der Gegenwartssprache eintritt, aber gotisch und althochdeutsch für das Gymnasium ablehnt. Es ist nur auf den ersten Blick paradox, daß die historische Laut- und Formenlehre gerade in den Jahren, da ihre wissenschaftliche Vorherrschaft definitiv zu Ende ging, mit aller Macht in die Schulen drängte. Noch gegen Ende des 1. Weltkriegs werden sprachhistorische Kenntnisse verbindlich in den Prüfungsordnungen für Lehrer verankert (vgl. Hermann 1923). Wie weit freilich die Wortführer der junggrammatischen Bewegung von den Bedürfnissen der Schule entfernt waren, das läßt sich an Delbrück (1920) ablesen. Das Buch wirbt mit dem Titel: “Grundlagen der neuhochdeutschen Satzlehre: Ein Schulbuch für Lehrer”, aber es enthält durchaus keine Satzlehre im schulisch üblichen Sinne, sondern einen syntaktisch eingefärbten Auszug aus der historischen Formenlehre. Wie Delbrück es mit aller Kraft vermeidet, im Kapitel zu den “Grundbestandteilen des Satzes” über Subjekt, Prädikat, Objekt etc. zu reden, ist beinahe heiter. Stattdessen handelt er von der “Zusammensetzung des Verbums mit sein und haben” und von der “mehrfachen Form des Adjektivs”. Das Buch ist ein letzter verzweifelter Versuch, das an den Schulen zurückzudrängen, was auch außerhalb derselben schon beinahe selbstverständlich geworden war: eine synchronische Satzsyntax. Die “wissenschaftliche” Grammatik des 19. Jahrhunderts hatte ihre Laut- und Formenlehre ausschließlich und durchaus unkritisch auf der Basis der antiken Wortartenlehre betrieben. Ihr galt die Schulgrammatik des Zeitraums insgesamt (nicht nur die Bekkersche Satzgliedlehre, vgl. Becker 1827) für

11. Schulgrammatik als Modell linguistischer Beschreibung

unwissenschaftlich, schon darum, weil das Interesse der Schulgrammatiker auf Satzlehre, Systembildung, synchrone Deskription und deskriptiven Fortschritt gerichtet war, und nicht auf historisch-philologische Detailarbeit. Mit der allein konnte aber Reputation im Wissenschaftsbetrieb erworben werden. Daraus folgt, daß es begrifflich-deskriptiven und theoretischen Fortschritt in den Kategorien der grammatischen Beschreibung bei den “wissenschaftlichen” Grammatikern des 19. Jahrhunderts kaum gibt, sehr wohl aber bei den Schulgrammatikern, gegen die sich die historisch-vergleichende Sprachwissenschaft fast völlig abgeschottet hatte. Auffällig ist die kontinuierliche Theorieentwicklung besonders im Bereich der Wortarten und Satzglieder (vgl. Forsgren 1985; 1991; Knobloch 1988; Erlinger et al. 1989; vgl. auch Art. 70 und 71). Mit der Spaltung von wissenschaftlicher Grammatik und Schulgrammatik zu Anfang des 19. Jahrhunderts geraten beide Zweige in eine mißliche Lage. Die Schulgrammatik möchte auch streng wissenschaftlich sein, wird aber als solche nicht anerkannt, und die wissenschaftliche Grammatik muß sich nach “höheren”, oft auch phantastischen Legitimationen für ihr Tun umschauen, weil sie zwar reputierlich ist, aber eigentlich keinen erkennbaren gesellschaftlichen Zweck hat. Prekär wird dieses Problem freilich erst gegen Ende der junggrammatischen Periode, da der Historismus so dürr und positivistisch geworden ist, daß z. B. ein “nationaler” bzw. “kultureller” Anschluß kaum noch möglich ist und die Vertreter der Richtung sich bisweilen “Lautschieber” schimpfen lassen müssen. Obwohl also die Theorie- und Beschreibungsdebatten der Schulgrammatiker außerhalb ihres Umkreises nicht rezipiert worden sind, hat sich einiges doch stillschweigend durchgesetzt. Daß selbst Heyman Steinthal, der maßloseste aller Beckerkritiker, von “Objekten” und “Attributen” spricht (bzw. von den so bezeichneten Verhältnissen) deutet an, warum: Bei der Beschreibung exotischer Sprachen (Steinthal z. B. hat über die Mande-Sprachen publiziert) versagt die formbezogene Begrifflichkeit der lateinisch-griechischen Tradition, während die funktionsbezogene Sprache der schulgrammatischen Syntax allein Vergleich und Verständnis erlaubt. Pur konnte sich der Konservatismus in der Kategorienlehre (für den Delbrück oben ein Beispiel gibt) daher allein in der Indogermanistik halten. Wer etwa Gabelentz (1891) mit seiner reichen sinologi-

105

schen Erfahrung aufschlägt, der sieht rasch, daß diesem die syntaktischen Funktionsbegriffe der Schulgrammatik ganz unentbehrlich sind, sowohl die der verbozentrischen, auf syntaktischer Spezifizierung der Wortarten beruhende Tradition (Herling, Götzinger, Kern) als auch die Satzgliedlehre der Beckerschen Richtung. Und als Wundt in seiner psychologischen Satzlehre 1900 die Beckersche Analyse zeitgemäß psychologisch einkleidet, da wird gerade diese, ein halbes Jahrhundert “unwissenschaftlich” geschimpfte Satzlehre der eigentliche Renner. Gegen Ende des Jahrhunderts sind also einige Errungenschaften der Schulgrammatik in anonymisierter und psychologisierter Form zu fraglosen Beständen des linguistischen Diskurses geworden, obwohl die offizielle Abneigung gegen die Schulgrammatik anhält (zur Psychologisierung der Satzgliedlehre vgl. Elffers-van Ketel 1991). Manches andere ist wiedergekehrt oder neu gefunden geworden in der synchronen Sprachwissenschaft des 20. Jahrhunderts: die Stemma-Darstellung des Satzes, die operationalen Methoden der Satzanalyse, die Syntax auf der Basis einer Fügungstheorie der Wortarten und der Versuch, den synkretischen Charakter der tradierten Kategorien zu entmischen. Und damit zurück zu den “Mischgrammatiken” der Jahrhundertwende, in denen sich die Annäherung von Schulgrammatik und “wissenschaftlicher” Grammatik in den Schulen andeutet. Man sollte sich nicht darüber täuschen, daß diese Annäherung überwiegend in der Form öder und fauler Kompromisse vonstatten ging, die keinen auf Dauer befriedigen konnten: Dem sprachhistorischen Auszug haftete notwendig das Stigma des Zufälligen an, und mit den Resten der methodisch-systematischen Satzsyntax ließ er sich kaum sinnvoll verbinden. Als Beispiel mag Lyon (1904) dienen. Otto Lyon war ein einflußreicher Mann. Er hat Heyses Grammatik für die Schule bearbeitet und Beckers Stilbuch ebenfalls. In seiner (offenbar recht verbreiteten) Grammatik geht es drunter und drüber: Nach Subjekt und Prädikat folgen die Satzarten, dann ein Auszug aus der Kasuslehre (Subjektskasus) und ein Stück vom Attribut. Am umfangreichsten sind die Deklinations- und Konjugationstabellen, und der gerade 15 Seiten lange Anhang über die Geschichte des Deutschen bringt ein winziges Stückchen Lautlehre, je ein paar Worte über althochdeutsch, mittelhochdeutsch und die barocke Kanzleisprache. Kurz: ein jämmerliches Machwerk.

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Erst die deutliche und konsequente Wendung zur Grammatik der Gegenwartssprache, verbunden mit einem erneuerten Interesse an systematischen Darstellungsformen, ändert die Lage. Die besten Werke dieses Umschwungs (Blatz 1895/96; Sütterlin 1900) geben ihren Schwerpunkt schon im Titel zu erkennen und ordnen den (bei Sütterlin stark reduzierten) historischen Teil der beschreibenden Systematik deutlich unter. Welche Anforderungen an Aufbau und Darstellung einer Syntax gestellt werden müssen (und daß keine Grammatik ihnen genügt), macht Ries (1894) deutlich, und es ist gewiß auch kein Zufall, daß die Protagonisten dieser Wende Außenseiter waren, weder der schulgrammatischen noch der historisch-vergleichenden Seite ganz zuzuordnen (Sütterlin z. B. lehrte an der Heidelberger Universität, an einem Mädchengymnasium und in der Lehrerausbildung; Ries war Schullehrer, aber mit wissenschaftlichen Ambitionen, was ja durchaus nicht selten war).

2.

Wechselwirkung

Es gibt Berge von Literatur über den Einfluß der “wissenschaftlichen” Grammatik auf die Schulgrammatik (Wilmanns 1869; Jolly 1874; Hermann 1923, um nur ein paar ältere Titel zu nennen). Die “Wissenschaft” adelt den Schulmann, während umgekehrt (wenigstens reputativ) die schulische Tradition den Wissenschaftlern wie Blei an den Füßen hängt. Über den zweifellos sehr nachhaltigen Einfluß der schulischen und der traditionellen Begriffsbildung (die keineswegs so klar in gut und böse zu trennen sind, wie Friend 1976 das zu glauben scheint) auf die linguistische Theorie gibt es nur sehr wenig Arbeiten. Das ist auch naheliegend. Denn häufig handelt es sich um anonymisierte, unauffällige, gleichermaßen unbewußt und selbstverständlich gewordene Bestände, deren Veränderung sehr langsam vor sich geht und deren Wirkung kaum zu beobachten ist. Das schulgrammatische Wissen beherrscht zuerst (kraft seiner engen Verbindung mit der Basisterminologie von Wort, Satz, den Wortarten und Satzgliedern) die Erkennungsprozeduren für elementare sprachliche Einheiten. Theoretische Neuerungen setzten dagegen meist bei der explanativen Einbettung und Ausgestaltung der Traditionsbegriffe ein. Aber auch die “modernste” Linguistik identifiziert einen Satz, ein Verb oder ein Substantiv ganz ebenso, wie es die Tradition immer

getan hat. Die schulgrammatische Herrschaft über die und vermittels der Terminologie wirkt ausgesprochen konservativ. Jeder theoretische oder deskriptive Fortschritt, der sich im Rahmen der überlieferten Terminologie hält, hat alsbald wieder deren synkretische Rekognitionsprozeduren an den Füßen und fällt leicht ganz in die Schulgrammatik zurück. Jede theoretische oder deskriptive Neuerung, die mit neuen Termini einhergeht, hat es mit der internationalen Verbreitung und der hohen Resistenz der schulgrammatischen (und der damit sich teilweise deckenden traditionellen) Terminologie zu tun. Wer sich von der schulgrammatischen “Kirche” entfernt, bleibt Ketzer oder Esoteriker. Die Schule als notorisch konservative Institution verbürgt die Dauer der Schulgrammatik. Neben dieser weitgehend “stummen” Wirkung schulgrammatischer Bestände auf die Linguistik gibt es aber auch noch andere, besser zu beobachtende Wirkungen. Oft sind es gerade schulgrammatische Motive wie Übersichtlichkeit, Systematik, Methodisierbarkeit, die auch fachwissenschaftlich erwünschte Ergebnisse zeitigen. So ist ja beinahe der gesamte grammatische Traditionsbestand, trotz aller logisch-erkenntnistheoretischer Weiterungen, mit denen er von Anfang an befrachtet war (und von Zeit zu Zeit wieder befrachtet wird; z. B. von den modistae des späten Mittelalters, von den rationalistischen Universalgrammatikern des 17. und 18. Jahrhunderts, von den generativen Grammatikern der Gegenwart) im wesentlichen als eine Unterrichtstradition entstanden und befestigt worden. Das Bestimmen der partes orationis, der Flexionsformen, Paradigmen und sekundären Kategorien, bildet über Jahrhunderte den Kern dieser Praxis, bei der Erlernung der alten Sprachen wie auch im muttersprachlichen Unterricht. Es handelt sich um ein geschlossenes Lehr- und Lernsystem, das zwischen einer “richtigen Beschreibung” der Sprache und ihrer “erfolgreichen Vermittlung” nicht unterscheidet. Das System ist mit diversen Erklärungsansprüchen vereinbar und hat deren beständigen Wandel fast ohne Schaden überstanden: Ob man im System der Wortarten und Satzglieder das Denken, den Aufbau der Wirklichkeit, ein sprachliches Weltbild oder unseren Vorstellungsverlauf gespiegelt sieht, ist offenbar gar nicht weiter von Belang. Es handelt sich nur um ideologische Girlanden, die das System von Zeit zu Zeit neu legitimieren, wenn es nicht mehr selbstverständlich ist. Immer wieder sind es die synkretischen, aber er-

11. Schulgrammatik als Modell linguistischer Beschreibung

fahrungsnahen Begriffsbildungen der Schulgrammatik, die einmal von den Formen, dann wieder von den dargestellten Sachen und schließlich von beiden zusammen ausgehen und sich kraft ihres Synkretismus in der Lernpraxis bewähren, aber den strengeren Sinn der linguistischen Theoriebildung zum Widerspruch reizen. Was ist nicht alles geschrieben worden mit dem Motiv, die grammatischen Traditionsbegriffe zu verbessern oder zu erneuern! Umgekehrt erweisen sich aber die strengeren Konzeptualisierungen der Linguisten für den Lerner oft als nutzlos, unzugänglich und erfahrungsfern. Dieser Widerspruch macht sich von Zeit zu selbst als Bedürfnis nach Ausgleich beider Seiten bemerkbar. In einigen der einflußreichsten Theorien des 20. Jahrhunderts verbinden sich Unterrichtserfahrungen und -bedürfnisse mit klaren Kriterien und strenger Systematik (Sütterlin, Tesnie`re, Fries, Glinz). Neben dem blind-anonymen Fortwirken der schulgrammatischen Traditionen in den elementaren Rekognitionsprozeduren, dem Fortwirken als Anreiz und Folie für Gegenentwürfe und Verbesserungen, gibt es also auch das positive schulgrammatische Bedürfnis nach erfahrungsnaher Begrifflichkeit und lehrbarer Systematik. Es hat freilich immer Konjunktur, die Unzulänglichkeiten der schulgrammatischen Begriffe und Theorien zu beklagen. Zu erklären bleibt aber der schier unglaubliche Erfolg dieser Konzeptualisierungen, ohne die auch ihre schärfsten Kritiker nicht recht bestehen können. Natürlich gibt der Erfolg einer Theorie nicht recht, aber der Umstand, daß wir ohne die Traditionsbegriffe kaum über natürliche Sprachen sprechen können, nährt die Vermutung, daß der Unklarheit im Detail eine Adäquatheit im Ganzen entsprechen und daß es sich eher um Überschüsse und produktive Unklarheiten handeln könnte. Ein prototypischer Fall produktiver Unklarheit ist das traditionelle Wortartensystem (vgl. Art. 70). Mit seinem Schwanken zwischen Lexem und Wortform als Bezugsgröße, zwischen grammatisch-semantischen, morphologischen und syntaktischen Einteilungskriterien hat es die wissenschaftliche Grammatik immer wieder gereizt: zu neuen, kriterienreinen Einteilungen auf der einen, zu alternativen Begriffsexplikationen auf der anderen Seite. Beides ist wohl zu unterscheiden, auch wenn es meistens nicht unterschieden wird: Die tradierte Einteilung kann (in vielen Hinsichten) unangemessen sein und durch eine angemessenere ersetzt werden, unange-

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messen kann aber auch unser begriffliches Verständnis von dem sein, was in den tradierten Kategorien steckt. Vielleicht lösen die einfach ein anderes Problem als das, das wir heute mit unserer Theorielage durch die Einteilung der Wortarten lösen wollen. Dafür spricht einiges, nicht allein die Tatsache, daß die klassifikatorische Praxis primär auf Redeteile ging, d.h. sie bezog sich auf Wortformen im laufenden Text, nicht primär auf den Lexembestand, und mußte diese erschöpfend beschreiben, ohne daß ihr eine entwickelte Satzlehre, Morphologie oder Topologie der Wortformen zur Seite gestanden hätte. Die Wortartenlehre war der Angelpunkt aller grammatischen Fragen, und darum war sie aus Notwendigkeit synkretisch, nicht wegen einer defizitären Theorie. Eine andere, sprachpsychologisch ebenso interessante Frage ist, ob nicht der Synkretismus der Traditionsbegriffe auch darum Vorzüge hat, weil er den Synkretismus in der psychischen Organisation der Verfügung über natürliche Sprachen angemessener widerspiegelt als kriterienreine Begriffe. Das darf natürlich keine Lizenz für unklare Begriffe in der wissenschaftlichen Beschreibung und Erklärung sein. Auch über “unscharf” organisierte Gegenstände lassen sich präzise Begriffe bilden. Aber möglicherweise fehlt uns einfach die reflexive Ebene der Theoriebildung, von der aus wir den sachlichen Gehalt und die “Zweckmäßigkeit” synkretischer Verfügungsbegriffe würdigen können. Daß sie nur einfach “falsch” sind, ist jedenfalls unwahrscheinlich.

3.

Tendenzen der deutschen Schulgrammatik im 20. Jahrhundert

Die Satzlehre ist und bleibt das Merkzeichen schulgrammatischer Neuerungen. Mit der Beckerschen Satzlehre beginnt die eigenständige Entwicklung der Schulgrammatik im 19. Jahrhundert. Nachhaltige Reformen betreffen (neben dem Einsickern der Sprachgeschichte) den schulspezifischen Gegenstand, die Satzlehre. So z. B. Kerns (1888) radikale Abkehr von der logischen Tradition der Becker-Schule und seine Hinwendung zum verbum finitum als dem satzkonstitutiven Element: “Das finite Verbum ist keine Wortart, wie Substantiv und Adjektiv, auch kein Satzteil, wie Subjektswort und Objekt, sondern es ist der Satzkeim, die Satzwurzel, ohne welche der Baum des Satzes gar nicht bestehen kann.” (Kern 1888: 5f.)

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III. Geschichte der morphologischen Forschung II: Forschungstraditionen im 20. Jahrhundert

Noch einmal schafft Sütterlin (1900) eine neue Lage, indem er versucht, die traditionelle Stoffzuweisung und -anordnung der Syntax (Satzlehre nämlich und/oder Verwendung der Wortarten und Wortformen) nach Ries’ (1894) radikaler Kritik zu revidieren (Syntax ⫽ Lehre von der Form und Bedeutung aller Wortverbindungen bis hin zum Satzgefüge). Das schafft stärkere Autonomie gegenüber den Wechselfällen der einzelsprachlichen Morphologie, an denen die historisch-vergleichende Syntax haftet. Den Schritt zu den einzelsprachlichen Besonderheiten des deutschen Satzes tut dann (freilich nach langem, weniger wirkungsmächtigem Vorlauf im 19. Jahrhundert) Drach (1937). Mit ihm kommen die topologischen Eigenheiten des deutschen Satzes, kommen Satzklammer, Vorfeld, Mitte und Nachfeld, kommen die Satzbaupläne in den Unterricht. Auch er führt noch den Spruch im Munde, mit dem Revisionen der muttersprachlichen Schulgrammatik fast immer flankiert werden: Die muttersprachliche Grammatik müsse sich endlich vom Vorbild der lateinischen lösen und den Eigenheiten des Deutschen Rechnung tragen. Drach war nicht unbedingt ein Parteigänger der Sprachinhaltsforschung (und schon gar nicht ihrer nationalistischen Entgleisungen), gleichwohl hat diese Richtung seine Satzanalyse aufgenommen und in das eigene “muttersprachliche Weltbild” integriert. Nach den Mischgrammatiken des Jahrhundertbeginns drängt die national getönte Sprachinhaltsforschung in die Schulen, kann sich dort während der Nazizeit fest etablieren und behält einen beachtlichen Einfluß im (westlichen) Nachkriegsdeutschland, bis dann in den 60er Jahren sprunghaft und nachholend die Rezeption der modernen strukturalistischen Linguistik einsetzt. Im Werk von Hans Glinz bleibt eine strukturalistisch modernisierte Sprachinhaltsforschung auch weiterhin wirksam, während die überhastig adaptierten formalisierten Syntaxmodelle ebenso rasch wieder aus den Schulbüchern verschwunden sind, wie sie zunächst darin aufgetaucht waren (aus dem Wust der diesbezüglichen Literatur ragt Eisenberg 1976 hervor). Eine durchaus andere Geschichte hat die Morphologie als Thema der Schulgrammatik. Da gilt es zu berücksichtigen, daß die Verabschiedung der Deklinations- und Konjugationstabellen, die nach dem lateinischgriechischen Vorbild einen wesentlichen Teil des muttersprachlichen Unterrichts bildeten,

gegen Ende des 18. Jahrhunderts einen der ersten Emanzipationsschritte des Deutschunterrichts bildete. Gerade der Teil der Grammatik, den die Schule abstößt (die “materielle” Formenlehre), wird wissenschaftlich zentral. Die Sprachlehre von Heynatz (1803) etwa, die vor Adelung eine der verbreitetsten war, bestand noch ganz überwiegend aus Formen und Paradigmen, die ganz wie eine fremde Sprache zu lernen waren (während die Syntax auf wenigen Seiten Platz fand). Von diesem Teil der Formenlehre blieb an den Schulen lediglich die Arbeit an Regionalismen (Karl Philipp Moritz hat z. B. den Berlinern eine Abhandlung über mir und mich, Dativ und Akkusativ geschrieben), während sich als bevorzugter morphologischer Gegenstand (neben der Syntax) die Wortbildung an den Schulen etablierte. Damit hat es folgende Bewandtnis: Die Wortbildung war ein gemeinsamer, alle gleichermaßen faszinierender Gegenstand für die historische Grammatik, für die spekultativphilosophische und für die pädagogische. Die Wortführer der Bildungsreform (Bernhardi, Schleiermacher, Humboldt) maßen ihr einen außerordentlich hohen Bildungswert bei, die romantisch-nationalistischen Schwärmer wollten alte Wortbildungen (oft auch vermeintlich alte) wiederbeleben, und die Spekulation sah den gesamten Bestand des Lexikons aus wenigen Urwurzeln durch Ableitung, Zusammensetzung und Lautwandel entstanden. Der pädagogische Gedankengang dabei ist ungefähr der folgende: Das System der Wortarten ist, insofern es ein notwendiges System bildet, Darstellung des Verstandes und der Imagination. Die Derivation hingegen, die Überführung der Wörter von einer Wortart in die andere, steht der notwendigen Auffassung als Freiheit der Darstellung gegenüber. Sie erlaubt es, die einfachen Einheiten des Verstandes und der Imagination zu überschreiten, hin zu Phantasie, Spekulation, Irrtum und tieferer Erkenntnis. Bernhardi formuliert das so: “Bis jezt konnte nehmlich die Sprache sich nie ganz von der sinnlichen Natur, der Anschauung, aus der sie entsprang, losreissen; was ihr in dieser als Substanz erschien, mußte sie auch so aufstellen; was sich als Accidenz zeigte, mußte sie auch so darstellen. Allein durch Ableitung und Verwandelung des einen in das andere, ist, so bald die Vernunft diese Verwandlung als Bedürfniß fordert, aller Zusammenhang der Sprache mit der Sinnlichkeit abgebrochen; und die Sprache kann unabhängig von allen Gegebenen, dies der Vorstellung gemäß, welche die Vernunft sich davon erwirbt, darstellen.” (Bernhardi 1801 I: 302f.)

11. Schulgrammatik als Modell linguistischer Beschreibung

Das durchlaufende Interesse der deutschen Schulgrammatiken an der Ableitungs- und Derivationsmorphologie im 19. Jahrhundert wird von äußerst spekulativen Ansichten über den Erkenntnis- und Erziehungswert der Wortbildung gespeist. Das nüchterne Interesse an der Derivationsmorphologie muß sich aus dieser Motivkonstellation erst lösen und gleichsam säkularisiert werden. Auch in den Sprachlehren der Elementarschulen taucht die Wortbildung als Mittel der Verstandesbildung auf, z. B. bei Diesterweg. Aber auch diese überschwängliche Auffassung der Wortbildung führt zurück auf nüchterne Quellen im 18. Jahrhundert. Heinrich Bauer verweist in seiner großen Vollständigen Grammatik der neuhochdeutschen Sprache, die freilich in Schulen kaum verwendet worden sein dürfte, weil sie viel zu umständlich, umfassend und durchaus nicht methodisiert ist, auf Lambert: “Da indessen unsre Sprache eine lebende ist, und zugleich eine wahrhaft vollkommne, insofern Lamberts Ausspruch sich nicht bestreiten läßt, daß jede Sprache desto vollkommner ist, je mehrere Möglichkeiten sie enthält, aus ihren Wurzeln (und Ableitungen) neue Wörter mit jeder beliebigen Bedeutung abzuleiten und zusammenzusetzen, so daß man aus der Structur der neuen Wörter ihre Bedeutung verstehen kann: so muß es erlaubt sein, nicht nur solche guten alten Wörter wieder hervorzusuchen, sondern auch, nach der Analogie der ältern, ganz neue zu bilden, und sie in Umlauf zu setzen.” (Bauer 1827 I: 271)

Hier denkt Bauer offenbar an den launigen Streit zwischen Jean Paul und Jacob Grimm über die Komposition. Es gilt jedenfalls für das 19. Jahrhundert: keine Schulgrammatik ohne ausführliche Wortbildung. Bei Becker sind dann die Theoreme schon spekulativ historisiert, d. h. er geht in seiner “organischen Wortbildung” davon aus, daß sich auch historisch der Wort- und Begriffsvorrat einer Sprache durch Derivations- und Kompositionsprozesse aus wenigen einfachen Urwurzeln herausgebildet hat. Die Schule interessiert sich bestenfalls für die (oft spekulative) Innenseite der Morphologie. Darin steckt aber auch schon eine Entwertung der manifesten Morphologie zugunsten spekulativer Begriffsverhältnisse, wie sie auch in der Beckerschen Satzsyntax beobachtet werden kann, obwohl deren Setzungen den funktionalen Synonymien (vgl. Forsgren 1991) des Deutschen weit besser entsprechen als die früheren Satzlehren. Beckers Theorie zentriert das, was Glinz später “Nomosyntax” nennt: die Innen- oder Bedeutungsseite

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der morphosyntaktischen Verhältnisse, während die historisch-vergleichenden Grammatiker im Umfeld der “Phonomorphie” verbleiben. Die Mischgrammatiken der Jahrhundertwende bringen eine partielle “Remorphologisierung” der Verhältnisse. Besonders reflektiert ist diese Tendenz bei Sütterlin (1900), wovon gleich mehr. Die Sprachinhaltsforschung der Weisgerber-Schule geht dann wieder mehr auf das Innere, und Glinzens Modernisierung besteht vor allem darin, daß er die intuitiv-spekulativen Erkenntnisse der Sprachinhaltsforschung auf eine solide operationale und morphosyntaktische Basis stellt. Was es an morphologisch relevanten schulgrammatischen Neuerungen im 20. Jahrhundert gegeben hat, läßt sich freilich nur exemplarisch darstellen. Ich habe Autoren gewählt, in deren Arbeit sich jeweils die Gesamtheit der linguistisch und schulpraktisch relevanten Strömungen spiegelt: für den Beginn des Jahrhunderts Ludwig Sütterlin (1863⫺1934) und für die Zeit nach 1950 Hans Glinz. Darin liegt eine ärgerliche Beschränkung auf die muttersprachliche Schulgrammatik des Deutschen. Entschuldigen läßt sich diese Beschränkung nicht von der Sache her, sondern allein durch die Unkenntnis des Autors. Zu ergänzen wäre für die angelsächsischen Länder der beträchtliche Einfluß der behavioristischen und kontextualistischen Schulen des Strukturalismus auf die pädagogische Grammatik. Die “Metaphysik” der Bloomfield-Schule war ja nicht mehr und nicht weniger als eine (simplistische) Lerntheorie. Notorisch ist die Bedeutung von Fries für einen effektiveren, an der Einübung generalisierbarer Muster orientierten Fremdsprachenunterricht (vgl. Helbig 1974). Damit ist dann die Verschiebung vom “Kennen” zum “Können” der Fremdsprachen vollständig. Denn im 19. Jahrhundert hatten ja die Neuphilologien im Banne der alten Sprachen begonnen und nach deren Vorbild auf philologische Kenntnisse viel größeren Wert gelegt als auf vollendete Sprechfertigkeit (vgl. Christmann 1976). Zu ergänzen wäre auch, namentlich für den französischsprachigen Raum, die Valenzgrammatik in der Tradition Tesnie`res, die freilich primär syntaktisch bleibt, obwohl auch sie wichtige Neuerungen in traditionell morphologische Domänen einführt (Reinterpretation des Wortartensystems, Translation etc.). Sütterlin habe ich gewählt, weil in seinen Schulgrammatiken die radikale Hinwendung

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III. Geschichte der morphologischen Forschung II: Forschungstraditionen im 20. Jahrhundert

zur Gegenwartssprache, das Interesse an syntaktischer Systematik (Ries) und eine Neubestimmung des Verhältnisses von formalen, morphosyntaktischen Klassen und “Bedeutungsklassen” wirksam ist. Für Glinz gilt ebenfalls, daß er die text- und korpusorientierten Analyseverfahren des Deskriptivismus mit den Traditionen der Sprachinhaltsforschung und dem “modernen” (namentlich generativen) Interesse an “Nomosyntax” und “Tiefenstrukturen” verbindet.

4.

Ludwig Sütterlin

Ludwig Sütterlin wird von den Historiographen der Zunft mit Ehren nicht eben überhäuft. Dabei hat er, anders als im schulgrammatischen Gewerbe weithin üblich, nicht einfach seine Vorgänger kompiliert, sondern ein eigenständiges, z. T. eigensinniges Buch verfaßt (Sütterlin 1900). Die deutsche Sprache der Gegenwart, bis 1923 in fünf Auflagen erschienen, liefert die Grundlage für die Sprachlehre (Sütterlin & Waag 1905, neun Auflagen bis 1930). 1924 kommt noch eine Neuhochdeutsche Grammatik dazu, die ich aber außer Acht lasse. Linguistisch sozialisiert im Geiste der Junggrammatiker war Sütterlin gleichwohl offen für alle theoretischen Neuerungen, in denen die junggrammatischen “Stoffhuber” (Bühler) nicht selten bloße Spekulationen zu sehen geneigt waren. Er adaptiert den Stoffund Darstellungsplan, den Ries (1894) für die Syntax vorschlägt und begründet, ganz gegen die herrschende Praxis, die sich gegen Ries sehr spröde verhielt. Er würdigt früh die Arbeiten von Noreen und Jespersen, und auf Wundts Sprachpsychologie reagiert er schon 1902 mit einem kleinen Büchlein, in dem sich mäßige Kritik und vorsichtige Anerkennung die Waage halten. Auf den ersten Blick scheint Sütterlins Deutsche Sprache der Gegenwart nicht anders aufgebaut zu sein als andere Grammatiken auch. Der Lautlehre folgt die Wortlehre, und dann steht, statt der zu erwartenden Satzlehre, eine “Wortgruppenlehre”, die mit den “offenen Gruppen” des Substantivs, des Adjektivs, des Verbs, des Adverbs beginnt (und damit eine eigenständige Phrasensyntax praktiziert, lange bevor das üblich wird) und dann zu den “geschlossenen Gruppen”, namentlich zum Satz übergeht. Doch ist das keineswegs die einzige ungewöhnliche Neuerung, mit der Sütterlin aufwartet. In allen Abteilungen der Wort- und der Wortgrup-

penlehre stehen jeweils morphologische (bzw. morphosyntaktische) Einteilungen neben Einteilungen nach der Bedeutung der Bildungen und Fügungen (zum Verhältnis von systematischer und schulischer Stoffabfolge bei Sütterlin vgl. jedoch Erlinger 1969). In der Wortlehre wird zunächst ganz allgemein zwischen Bedeutung, Form und Verwendung der Wörter im Satz unterschieden (Sütterlin 1900: 68). Alle Eigenschaften der Wörter werden bezogen auf ihre Funktion, Sätze zu bilden. Abgesehen von der reinen Reihung oder Nebeneinanderordnung (du und ich; Schüler, Studenten, Behinderte) gibt es in jeder Wortgruppe, unbeschadet der äußeren Form der Wörter, Abhängigkeit und Unterordnung (der kleine Knabe, König Wilhelm, sehr stark, Frankfurt am Main, Wein trinken; 1900: 70). Daraus folgt, daß Sütterlin die strukturbildenden Potenzen in der Verschiedenheit der Wortarten in praxi anerkennt (wie sie schon Kern 1888 vor ihm beschrieben hat), wenn er auch darüber kein weiteres Wort verliert bei der Aufzählung der Ausdrucksmöglichkeiten für die Verhältnisse der Wörter (Betonung, Wortstellung, Endungen, Formwörter). Nach der Verwendung im Satz scheidet Sütterlin dann noch Vollwörter und Formwörter (in der Sache ungefähr so, wie Becker Begriffswörter und Formwörter unterscheidet). Im allgemeinen Abschnitt über die Betonung der (zusammengesetzten) Wörter notiert er u. a., daß oft der Distinktor den Ton an sich zieht: Oster⬘sonntag, Oster⬘montag etc., aber ⬘Pfingstsonntag, ⬘Ostersonntag, ⬘Palmsonntag. Bei den Flexionsformen der Wörter unterscheidet Sütterlin deutlich zwischen Reihen von Veränderungen, die allein fügerelevant sind, ausschließlich syntaktische Funktionen haben (Kasus, Person) und solchen, die auch Bedeutungs- oder Begriffsunterschiede indizieren (Numerus, Tempus, Modus). Die letzteren will er eher als “verschiedene Wortbildungen” aufgefaßt wissen (1900: 76), konzediert aber, daß die Grenze schwer zu ziehen ist. Bühler (1934) unterscheidet später in seiner semiotischen Interpretation der grammatischen Morphologie ganz ähnlich zwischen (syntaktischen “Feldzeichen” und “formalisierten Symbolwerten” ohne eigentlichen Einfluß auf aktuelle syntaktische Feldbeziehungen im Satz oder in der Wortgruppe. Im Abschnitt über die Wortarten zieht Sütterlin die Konsequenzen aus Pauls Kritik an

11. Schulgrammatik als Modell linguistischer Beschreibung

der Inkonsequenz der hergebrachten Lehre. Statt einer Einteilung gibt er deren drei: (a) Nach der Formveränderlichkeit gibt es zwei große Klassen im Deutschen, deren erste (die formveränderlichen) wieder in zwei Unterklassen (deklinierbare und konjugierbare) zerfällt. Zu den deklinierbaren gehören gleichermaßen die Substantive, Adjektive, substantivische und adjektivische Pronomina. Die nominalen Flexionskategorien Genus, Kasus, Numerus werden ohne Ansehen ihrer distributiven und lautlichen Verschiedenheit als einheitsstiftend für diese Klasse angesehen. (b) Nach der Bedeutung gibt es ebenfalls zwei Großgruppen: Erscheinungsbezeichnungen und Beziehungsbezeichnungen. In die erste Gruppe rechnet Sütterlin nicht nur die traditionellen Substantive, sondern auch Adjektive und Verben als Bezeichnungen “dauernder” bzw. “vorübergehender” Eigenschaften. Zu den Beziehungsbezeichnungen rechnet er Quantoren, Deutewörter, Adverbien, Präpositionen. Die substantivischen Pronomina gelten als zu beiden Klassen gehörig: sie sind Verhältnisbezeichnungen und allgemeine Dingbezeichnungen. Das pseudosemantische an dieser Einteilung ist leicht zu erkennen. Sie ist mit allen Problemen behaftet, die in der Opposition “autosemantisch” vs. “synsemantisch” stecken, wenn man sie auf den Lexemvorrat einer Sprache anwenden will und doch die Funktion der Lexeme in der verbundenen Rede im Auge hat. (c) Nach der Verwendung im Satz unterscheidet Sütterlin schließlich zwischen satzbildenden und satzgliedbildenden “Vollwörtern” auf der einen, “Formwörtern” auf der anderen Seite. Diese Einteilung ist in der Sache (nicht in der Terminologie) von Kern (1888) genommen, der ja auch eine konsequent satzsyntaktische, am Fügewert der Wörter orientierte Wortartenlehre vorlegen möchte. An den Beispielen, die Sütterlin für seine syntaktischen Klassen gibt, wird deutlich, daß er (natürlicherweise) nach der aktuellen satzsyntaktischen Funktion einteilt, nicht nach dem primären syntaktischen Wert des Lexems: als “Aussagewörter” tauchen finite Verbformen, aber auch prädikative Adjektive und Substantive auf. Die Folge der satzgliedbildenden Vollwörter erinnert gleichwohl sehr an Jespersens “Ränge” und hat auch deren Ungereimtheit, daß nämlich das (satzsyntaktische) Objekt zwischen dem dritten Rang (⫽ Beifügung zum Aussagewort) und dem ersten Rang (⫽ Gegensubjekt; vgl. Sütterlin 1900: 331f.) schwankt. Die Form-

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wörter zerfallen in beiordnende und unterordnende. Sütterlin lobt die Klarheit der Einteilung nach der Formveränderlichkeit, ist aber klug genug, sie als eine bloß scheinbare Klarheit zu erkennen: wohin soll man z. B. mit den Formen des Verbs, die wie Substantive oder Adjektive gebraucht werden (mit Partizipien, Infinitiven)? Trotz einer Fülle von Unklarheiten im Detail ist doch damit der Weg gebahnt zu einer Satz- und Wortgruppenlehre, die zwischen Bedeutung, Form und Funktion der beteiligten Ausdrücke deutlich zu unterscheiden weiß, ohne doch einer der Ebenen prima facie den Vorzug über die anderen einzuräumen. Im Wortbildungskapitel heißt es zunächst, daß alle Wörter ihrer Form nach einfache Stammwörter (Sütterlin berücksichtigt hier allein ganz ausdrücklich nur den synchronen Status, so daß auch diachronisch abgeleitete Stämme als “einfach” erscheinen), Ableitungen (Stamm ⫹ Prä- oder Suffix(e)) oder Zusammensetzungen sind (Sütterlin 1900: 86f.). In der Durchführung der substantivischen Wortbildung beginnt Sütterlin dann nicht mit den Suffixen, sondern mit den grammatischsemantischen Subklassen der Substantive (Konkreta, belebt vs. unbelebt, Abstrakta, Kollektiva etc.) und schließt an diese die Wortbildungen mit ihren Bedeutungsklassen an: Teils treten sie den ohnehin vorhandenen Nominalklassen bei (Abstrakta, Kollektiva etc.), teils bilden sie eigene, zusätzliche Klassen (Diminutiva, Motionen, Negationen, verschiedene Klassen der deverbativen Substantive etc.). Diese Darstellung und Anordnung der Wortbildung (die dann ganz ähnlich auch für die anderen Wortarten durchgeführt wird) hat überraschend viele Vorteile: Der (in vieler Hinsicht problematische) Riß zwischen einer prozessual gedachten Wortbildung und der “Gebildeheit” fertiger Wörter nach bestimmten grammatisch-semantischen Schemata entsteht gar nicht erst. Die einzelnen Prä- und Suffixe tauchen dann natürlich z. T. mehrfach in den Bedeutungsklassen der Substantive auf. Bei den Sammelnamen und Kollektiva etwa steht die kleine Gruppe der Bildungen auf -icht neben dem Muster Ge (e), den Kompositionselementen -werk und -zeug, ein paar Gruppen auf -ei, -ung, -tum, -schaft und alle zusammen mit den einfachen Kollektiva ohne derivative oder kompositionelle Wortstruktur. In der Darstellung der anderen Wortarten verfährt Sütterlin ähnlich: Einteilungen nach Form- und Bedeutungsklassen werden so ne-

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III. Geschichte der morphologischen Forschung II: Forschungstraditionen im 20. Jahrhundert

beneinander gegeben, daß zwischen Binnenklassifizierung der einzelnen Wortarten und einschlägiger Wortbildung ein fließender Übergang entsteht. Auch sonst werden die scharfen Grenzen zwischen Wortbildung und grammatischer Lexemklassifikation bei Sütterlin verwischt. So erwähnt der z. B. den Umstand, daß Durchsichtigkeit und relative Motivierung qua Beziehung auf stammverwandte Wörter nicht allein ein Problem von derivierten und komponierten Bildungen ist, sondern synchron ebenso die einfachen Stammwörter betrifft, deren Stämme vielfach in komplexen Bildungen vorkommen: Personenbezeichnungen wie Schmied oder Hirt(e) sind kraft ihrer Beziehung zu anderen Bildungen wie Schmiede, schmieden bzw. Herde durchsichtiger etwa als Tierbezeichnungen wie Bär, Hirsch, Wolf. Die formale Inhomogenität von Inhalten und Funktionen ist für Sütterlin eine Selbstverständlichkeit, die sofort ins Auge fällt, wenn man eine syntaktische Funktion oder ein Bedeutungsverhältnis konstant setzt. Aber sie ist kein Grund, die Ausdrucksseite als kontingent abzutun oder geringzuschätzen, wie es der schulgrammatischen Tradition bisweilen unterstellt wird und wie es ihr auch nahelag, des Interesses an den “gedanklichen” Verhältnissen wegen. Ob man die grammatische Darstellung sinnvollerweise mit der Form- oder mit der Bedeutungsgliederung des jeweiligen Bereiches beginnt, “wird im besonderen Falle oft von der ganzen Beschaffenheit des Stoffes abhängen” (Sütterlin 1900: 12). Deutlich wird schließlich an der ganzen Anlage des Buches, daß die traditionelle Formenlehre (und modern gesagt: die Morphologie) ein äußerst heterogenes Gebiet aus lexikalischen, grammatisch-semantischen und syntaktischen umfaßt und daß eine deutliche Grenze zwischen diesen Relevanzen nicht zu ziehen ist. Genau das hatte im übrigen der Schulmann John Ries (1894) seinen Kollegen von der “wissenschaftlichen” Grammatik mit sichtlich geringem Erfolg zu vermitteln versucht. Die großen Werke von Brugmann, Delbrück, Paul, und Behaghel zeigen wenig Neigung, auf Ries’ Vorschläge einzugehen. Nach der Wortbildung folgt die Wortbiegung (Flexion), die Sütterlin, wie bereits erwähnt, in zwei “verschiedene Zwecke” aufteilt: Plural und Genus bei Nomina, Tempus und Modus bei Verben geben “Färbungen des Grundbegriffs” (Sütterlin 1900: 139) und haben also eine unscharfe Grenze zur Wort-

bildung (wie auch die Steigerung der Adjektive). Ihre syntaktische Ausnutzung ist indirekt, qua Kongruenz. Kasus bei Substantiven und Personen bei Verben (letzteres mit einiger Reserve) geben die “eigentliche Beugung” im Dienste der syntaktischen Beziehungen. Die Schwierigkeiten, die Sütterlin mit der verbalen Kategorie Person hat, werden nicht ausgeführt. Möglicherweise schwebt ihm der Unterschied zwischen den teilweise “außensyntaktischen” Funktionen dieser Kategorie vor, im Unterschied zum syntaktischen “Innendienst” der Kasus (mit Ausnahme des lateinischen Vokativ, der ebenfalls “außensyntaktisch” ist). Nach dem Riesschen Plan gibt Sütterlin in der Flexion ebenfalls jeweils Formen und Bedeutungen der Bildungen (neben dem historischen Abriß), was zu gewissen Härten führt, weil man die rein syntaktischen “Bedeutungen” außerhalb der Fügung bloß als Potentiale beschreiben kann. Hier liegt ja der Keimpunkt für die Unübersichtlichkeit der formenbasierten Syntax, die syntaktische Phänomene immer nur von der jeweils einzelnen Form her, als deren Umgebung gleichsam, beschreiben kann und niemals als Gebilde eigenen Rechtes. Bei den Wortgruppen (soweit sie hierarchisch und nicht bloß nebengeordnet sind) geht Sütterlin ohne große Diskussion davon aus, daß die morphosyntaktisch abhängige, untergeordnete Größe inhaltlich die “bestimmende”, die morphosyntaktisch leitende Größe inhaltlich die “bestimmte” ist. Der Zusammenhang der Wortgruppe wird gestiftet durch äußere Mittel (Endungen, Formwörter, Stellung, Betonung) und durch innere Mittel. Zu diesen letzteren gehören namentlich unvollständige, nicht in sich geschlossene Bedeutungen, die der Verbindung mit anderen Wortformen “von sich aus” bedürfen. Was Sütterlin hier als Beispiele anführt, belegt, daß er nicht allein an die semantische Fügepotenz “relativer Begriffe” wie Kopf, Boden, Pfund, beginnen, an die von weitgehend “leeren” Begriffen, wie beschaffen, sich betragen denkt, sondern auch an oblique Kasusformen, an denominale Adjektive wie königlich, städtisch (Sütterlin 1900: 236). Über die letzteren notiert er: “Insofern sie mit einer Endung von einer Grundform abgeleitet sind, wird bei ihnen die Beziehung durch ein äußeres Mittel ausgedrückt; als fertige Einzelformen dagegen bezeichnen sie ihre Beziehung innerlich durch ihre Bedeutung.” (Sütterlin 1900: 236)

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Häufung der Beziehungsmittel ist charakteristisch, schreibt Sütterlin, doch an dieser für den Zusammenhang von Morphologie und Syntax so wichtigen Stelle ordnet er die Erscheinungen nicht weiter. Alles scheint vorbereitet für eine genuine syntaktische Theorie der Wortarten und -formen, die Flexion und syntaktische Derivation als die Mittel erkennt, mit deren Hilfe die syntaktischen Variablen der einzelnen Wortarten elaboriert und fallweise fixiert werden: vom Mitspieler implizierenden, satzkonstitutiven finiten Verb bis zu dem syntaktisch nichts Bestimmtes implizierenden, eben darum in allen syntaktischen Funktionen (außer der satzbildenden) heimischen Substantiv. Insgesamt werden die semantischen Beziehungen in der Wortgruppe des Substantivs geregelt durch die Bedeutung der verknüpften Ausdrücke, besonders durch die Bedeutung des leitenden Substantivs. Wenn dieses von sich aus ergänzungsbedürftig ist, dann verweist der zweite Ausdruck in der Regel auf diese Ergänzungsbedürftigkeit und füllt sie, wenn nicht, “entsteht eine endlose Mannigfaltigkeit der Beziehungen” (1900: 252). Was beim Verb qua Wortart vorgesehen ist: die Ergänzungsbedürftigkeit, das findet man in der Klasse der Substantive nur bei einem Teil der Mitglieder. Bei der Darstellung der Nominalgruppe gebraucht Sütterlin ganz selbstverständlich den Attributsbegriff, wie er aus der Becker-Tradition auf ihn gekommen ist. Für Details ist kein Raum. Erwähnt sei nur noch, weil charakteristisch für Sütterlins synchronische Denkweise, daß er auch bei den attributiven Genitiven alle diejenigen Typen zusammenordnet, bei denen der Nukleus (modern gesprochen) ergänzungsbedürftig ist, so daß traditionell so disparate Gruppen wie partitivus, objectivus, subjectivus, possessivus mit einem “Teil” als Nukleus (Fuß, Schneide, Ast, Blatt etc.), Definitionsgenitiv (der Fehler der Unwissenheit, das Laster der Trunksucht) Mitglieder einer großen Gruppe werden. In der Gruppe des Verbs kann Sütterlin dann im Grundsatz ähnlich verfahren, zwischen Ergänzungen und Veränderungen des Verbalbegriffs unterscheiden etc. Der Satz wird durch seinen “abgeschlossenen” Charakter nicht sehr überzeugend von den Wortgruppen unterschieden. Auf die Ungereimtheit, die darin liegt, daß er auch einwortige abgeschlossene Äußerungen zu den Sätzen rechnet, die dann aber nach dem Riesschen Konzept erst nach den Wortgruppen und als deren logische Fortsetzung auftau-

chen, hat Sütterlin später selbst hingewiesen (Sütterlin 1916: 16). Auch hat er in den späteren Auflagen die Anordnung verändert und die Syntax mit dem Satz angefangen. Mit Ries’ Konzeption ist aber der junggrammatische Satzbegriff, der ein psychologischer Äußerungsbegriff ist (ohne Rücksicht auf grammatische Gebildeeigenschaften), eben darum unvereinbar, wie Ries selbst später in seinem Satzbuch herausstellt (Ries 1931). Mit der klaren Trennung von Form, syntaktischer Funktion und Bedeutung, mit der präzisen funktionalen Analyse grammatischer Formen, mit der klaren Trennung von Synchronie und Diachronie, der doppelten Darbietung des Stoffes nach Form- und Bedeutungsklassen ist der Schulgrammatiker Sütterlin vielleicht näher als irgendeiner seiner “wissenschaftlichen” Kollegen an den Tendenzen der Sprachbeschreibung, die das 20. Jahrhundert prägen werden. Aber einmal mehr verhält es sich so, wie schon mit der schulgrammatischen Satzlehre des 19. Jahrhunderts: ihre Wirkungen sind stumm, umfassend und werden nicht auf Personen zugerechnet.

5.

Hans Glinz

Hans Glinz betritt die wissenschaftliche Bühne mit einer umfassenden Geschichte und Kritik der Lehre von den Satzgliedern in der deutschen Grammatik (Glinz 1947). Von dieser Arbeit an datiert das wiedererwachte Interesse an den Theorie- und Beschreibungstraditionen der Schulgrammatik im 19. Jahrhundert. Seit Engelien (1889), der sich auf die muttersprachlichen Grammatiken für den Volksschulunterricht konzentriert, und Jellinek (1913/14), der bei Adelung aufhört, war zu diesem Thema keine wesentliche Arbeit geschrieben worden. Zweifellos geht Glinz zu weit, wenn er in den Fußstapfen der älteren Becker-Kritik dessen schulgrammatische Satzlehre pauschal als “unwissenschaftlich” ablehnt (vgl. Forsgren 1985; 1991). Daß ihr die Resonanz in den “wissenschaftlichen” Grammatiken des 19. und des 20. Jahrhunderts versagt blieb, hat andere, kontingente Gründe: Eine historische Satzlehre scheint den Protagonisten damals weder machbar noch interessant, und mit Recht vernichtet die Kritik allein die philosophische Einkleidung der Beckerschen Satzlehre, nicht deren deskriptive Meriten. Klar ist jedoch von Anfang an Glinzs Anspruch: Ausgehend von der Satzlehre ist das

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Ziel eine wissenschaftliche Grammatik für die Schule. Denn Beckers Satzlehre, so Glinz, konnte sich nur an den Schulen halten, weil die Wissenschaft keine bessere Satzlehre liefern konnte (vgl. Helbig 1974: 219). Was Glinz (1952) als eigenen Entwurf einer Satzlehre vorlegt, ist schulisch erprobt und erhebt doch auch einen wissenschaftlichen Anspruch. Die innere Form des Deutschen stellt sich auf den Standpunkt des Strukturalismus, reklamiert präzise empirische Entdeckungsverfahren ⫺ und besetzt mit dem Titelstichwort innere Form zugleich geschickt das Terrain der neuhumboldtianischen Sprachinhaltsforschung. Der erfahrene Schulmann nutzt auch den Umstand, daß man mithilfe der “inhaltlichen” Begrifflichkeit und der textgebundenen Verfahren an die literaturwissenschaftliche Interpretationspraxis der Schulen anschließen kann, was angesichts der dürren und unbeliebten konventionellen Grammatik allemal ein Vorzug ist. In den Experimenten (Klangprobe, Umstellprobe, Ersatzprobe, Weglaßprobe) wird alles vorgängige Wissen über Satzgliederung eingeklammert. Statt der fatalen Doppelfrage: “Wie wird eine Form verwendet?” bzw. “Wie wird ein vorgegebener Inhalt/Funktion sprachlich ausgedrückt?” führt das System der Proben zunächst auf nicht weiter qualifizierte satzsyntaktische Schemapositionen. Im zweiten Schritt erprobt die Interpretation, ob sich diesen Positionen feste Inhalte oder Funktionen zuordnen lassen (Glinz 1953: 44⫺59). Damit ist die Fixierung von “Inhalten” auf den festen Grund von Experimenten und intersubjektiv nachprüfbaren Deutungen gestellt. So lautet zumindest der Anspruch. Die Experimente ihrerseits sind so angelegt, daß sie weder die Laut- und Formseite allein noch das Bezeichnete allein tangieren (zu den Grenzen der operationalen Methoden vgl. Brinker 1972), sondern den Zusammenhang beider in den bilateralen Zeicheneinheiten der Satzsyntax. Die Ergebnisse (darauf weist Helbig 1974: 223f. hin, Glinz notiert es aber auch selbst) ähneln in vielem den “structural meanings” der Fries-Schule, auch darin, daß sie im herkömmlichen System der grammatischen Beschreibung schwer unterzubringen sind: Nimmt man sie einfach als Strukturstellen eines analogiefähigen Schemas, so stehen sie einfach für sich und dulden eben darum keinerlei inhaltliche Festlegung. Nur durch (relative) Indifferenz gegen “inhaltliche” Füllung wird eine Schemaposition als solche erkennbar. Gibt man ihnen aber einen “Inhalt”, so wird die Sache entweder tautolo-

gisch oder falsch. Helbig (1974: 224) erläutert das am “Gleichsetzungssatz”, der durchaus als Name für das satzsyntaktische Schema NP[Nom] ⫺ sein ⫺ NP[Nom] taugt, das aber eben nicht nur und noch nicht einmal in erster Linie tatsächliche Gleichsetzungen transportiert, sondern auch ganz andere Sachverhältnisse. Glinz hat sich immer dagegen gewehrt, daß seine terminologischen Vorschläge als Deutungen oder Begriffe der Sache mißverstanden wurden (vgl. Glinz 1972: 10f.). Er versteht sie als bloße Hinweise ohne definitorischen Sinn. Auf der anderen Seite haben ihm solche vermeintlichen “Inhalte” (Dativ als “Zuwendgröße” etc.) bei den Sprachinhaltsforschern Freunde gemacht, denn diesen ist die schwärmerische Überhöhung prosaischer Schemata und Positionen im Satz zu “wirkenden Inhalten” ja nicht ganz fremd. Doch werfen wir zunächst einen Blick auf das Ebenenmodell, das Glinz für die Sprachanalyse generell und für die Satzanalyse vorschlägt: Die mittlere oder “funktionierende” Schicht besteht aus der Morphosyntax und ihren Schemata und aus dem Morpholexikon. Sie gibt eine Art von Oberflächengrammatik, in der auch die lexikalischen Einheiten (nach der Seite ihres Systemwertes, nicht nach ihrem gemeinten Sinn) spezifiziert sind. Davon unterschieden ist zur Oberfläche der Rede hin die Ebene der Phonomorphie. Auf dieser geht es etwa darum, mithilfe welcher Lautsignale die funktionierenden Einheiten und Strukturen (z. B. Genitiv, Plural etc.) angezeigt werden. Mit der Phonomorphie und ihren Wandlungen befaßt sich in erster Linie die historische Grammatik, die aber natürlich auch nicht umhin kann, ihren lautlichen Stoff funktionierenden Einheiten zuzuordnen. Nach der anderen oder “tiefen” Seite geltender (im Unterschied zu funktionierenden) Inhalte und Strukturen ist von der Morphosphäre die Nomosphäre unterschieden (vgl. etwa Glinz 1968 für eine kurze Darstellung). Hier geht es um die Definition und Auffindung der Werte, mit denen die Einheiten und Schemata der Morphosphäre in die Satz- und Textbildung eingehen (Nomosyntax und Nomolexikon). Glinz vergleicht seine Nomosphäre oft mit der Tiefenstruktur der frühen generativen Grammatik, mit der sie in der Tat einige Ähnlichkeit hat. Von dieser Ebene der geltenden Einheiten und Strukturen unterscheidet Glinz das jeweils ad hoc Gemeinte als nicht direkt zur Sprache gehörig. Damit vermeidet er jedenfalls die implizite Gleichsetzung von Seman-

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tik, Tiefenstruktur und potentiell gleichem Gemeinten, die das Verhältnis der generativen Grammatik zur Semantik so lange problematisch gestaltet hat (vgl. Ungeheuer 1969; Coseriu 1975). Die Nomosphäre versteht Glinz als Ziel der Theorie- und Begriffsbildung, den Ausgangspunkt bilden die experimentell geprüften Regularitäten der Morphosphäre. Die Verschiedenheit der Sprachen besteht keineswegs allein in den Morphostrukturen, sie erstreckt sich auch auf die Nomosphäre. Man kann jedoch das gleiche Gemeinte mit allen Sprachen erreichen (Problem des Übersetzens). Hier sind wir aber auch schon an dem Punkt, wo Glinz nicht ganz unschuldig ist an den Mißverständnissen, die seine terminologischen Neuprägungen hervorgerufen haben: Sie sind als Bezeichnungen für Einheiten der Nomosphäre aufgefaßt worden, lassen sich aber nur als Namen für Einheiten der Morphosphäre rechtfertigen ⫺ und für die gibt es weitgehend extensionsgleiche traditionelle Bezeichnungen. Daß die traditionelle Grammatik jedoch Morphostruktur und Nomostruktur “an vielen Stellen durcheinandermengte” (Glinz 1972: 12), ist sicher richtig. Glinz will also zunächst eine reine Beschreibung der Morphosyntax, um sich dann auf dieser Grundlage der Nomosyntax zuzuwenden. Das ist ein genuin strukturalistisches Motiv ⫺ und es ist ganz das gleiche Motiv, das auch Sütterlin bewegte: die klare Auftrennung der syntaktischen und morphologischen Traditionsbegriffe in distinkte Ebenen mit einer je eigenen Binnenordnung. Man darf sich getrost darüber wundern, daß es 1900 und 1950 von Schulmännern gegen die herrschende “wissenschaftliche” Grammatik geltend gemacht werden mußte. Die herrschende “wissenschaftliche” Richtung, das ist im Falle von Glinz die Sprachinhaltsforschung, die er behutsam modernisieren wollte, die aber dann durch die rasche Rezeption der radikaleren und nüchterneren strukturalistischen Richtungen einfach weggeschwemmt wurde. Was 1952 vielleicht zu radikal schien, das war 1965 nicht mehr radikal genug, zumal sich Glinz in der Zwischenzeit nicht von der Weisgerberschule weg-, sondern auf sie hinbewegt hatte. Dennoch hat Glinz auch seine eigene “Modernisierungsfähigkeit” unter Beweis gestellt in der Folgezeit. Er hat sein Schichtenmodell mehrfach modifiziert und textlinguistische Motive aufgenommen (vgl. Glinz 1973). Insgesamt steht er für einen Strukturalismus, der erkannt hat, daß Phonologie, Morphologie,

Syntax, Semantik als (relativ) autonome Teilsysteme nicht das letzte Wort sein können und daß die Teilsysteme natürlicher Sprachen zusammengenommen, eben wegen der unbegrenzten Darstellungsaufgaben der Sprachen, kein schlüssig durchkonstruiertes Gesamtsystem mit klarer Konturierung gegen das “Nichtsprachliche” ergeben. Überhaupt ist ja das strukturalistische Axiom vom Systemcharakter der sprachlichen Mittel auf allen Ebenen nicht einfach eine Tatsachenfeststellung; weit mehr wirkt es als ein mächtiges Motiv der Modellbildung für all die Ebenen, die sich partiell oder ganz als Systeme darstellen lassen. Es ist ja kein Zufall, daß diese Möglichkeit auf dem Weg von der Phonologie zur Semantik spürbar abnimmt.

6.

Fazit

Im 19. Jahrhundert war es allein die Schulgrammatik, die das Interesse an synchroner Deskription, grammatischer Theorie, Erprobung und Verbesserung des grammatischen Kategoriensystems aufrecht erhielt (Vesper 1980; Forsgren 1985; Naumann 1986; Erlinger et al. 1989). Aus der Perspektive des 20. Jahrhunderts erscheint die Schulgrammatik in gewissem Sinne als Wegbereiter. Im 20. Jahrhundert verliert sie jedoch die weitgehend eigenständige Tradition der Theoriebildung und wird mit ihren Interessen und Motiven im günstigen Falle zum Korrektiv der “wissenschaftlichen” Grammatik. Vielfach verhält sie sich aber auch einfach selegierend und adaptierend gegenüber den zahlreichen “Angeboten” der wissenschaftlichen Grammatik. Es ist vor allem die zunehmende Verwissenschaftlichung des schulischen Anspruchs, die hochentwickelte Synthesen aus traditioneller Grammatik, psychologischer Lerntheorie, linguistischen Modellen und methodischen Erwägungen erzwingt. Aus dem Zeitalter der Junggrammatiker hat sich beinahe nichts in den Schulgrammatiken der jüngeren Zeit gehalten (vgl. Erlinger 1969). Der junggrammatische Faktenpositivismus bietet keinen Anhalt für Methodisierung, die Laut- und Formengeschichte blieb insgesamt ein Intermezzo an den Schulen. Die Sprachinhaltsforschung (mit ihrer stark nationalisierten Völkerpsychologie) bleibt eine deutsche Sonderentwicklung, deren Spuren sich an den Schulen erstaunlich lange halten. Für Strukturalisten der strengeren Provenienz sind die Arbeiten von Weisgerber und

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Brinkmann (in geringerem Maße auch die von Porzig und Trier) wenig systematisch und spekulativ überhöht. Dennoch sind zahlreiche Detailbeobachtungen aus den Arbeiten der Genannten immer wieder zum Anlaß für genauere Untersuchungen geworden. Dem Schlagwort von der “inneren Form” des Deutschen, die es aufzufinden gelte, entspricht keine strenge Methode, und als Methode reüssierte der Strukturalismus. Die “innere Form” suggeriert zwar den Zusammenhang aller strukturellen Ebenen und Details in einer imaginären Instanz (der “inneren Form” eben), aber diese Instanz bleibt anregend und dunkel. Das ist sie seit Humboldt immer gewesen. Die Rückwirkung der (im engeren Sinne) strukturalistischen Schulen auf die pädagogische Grammatik sind im wesentlichen auf zwei Bereiche beschränkt: die operationalen Analysen, die Glinz für die Schule adaptiert hat (mit einflußreichem Pendant im USamerikanischen Deskriptivismus) und die behavioristisch inspirierten Trainingsverfahren (pattern drill) im Fremdsprachenunterricht. Der Einfluß der generativen Grammatik (in ihrer ersten Phase) auf die Schulen ist eine Episode geblieben, für die es (wissenschafts-) soziologische, aber kaum fachliche Ursachen gibt.

7.

Zitierte Literatur

Bahner, Werner & Neumann, Werner (1985, Hrsg.), Sprachwissenschaftliche Germanistik, ihre Herausbildung und Begründung. Berlin/DDR: Akademie-Verlag Bauer, Heinrich (1827⫺1832), Vollständige Grammatik der neuhochdeutschen Sprache, Bd. 1⫺5. Berlin: Reimer [Nachdruck: 21967, Berlin: de Gruyter] Becker, Karl Ferdinand (1824), Die deutsche Wortbildung oder die organische Entwicklung der deutschen Sprache in der Ableitung. Frankfurt/M.: Hermannsche Buchhandlung [Nachdruck: 1990, Hildesheim: Olms] Becker, Karl Ferdinand (1827), Organism der Sprache, als Einleitung zur deutschen Grammatik. Frankfurt/M.: Kettembeil [21841] Bernhardi, A. F. (1801⫺1803), Sprachlehre, Bd. 1⫺2. Berlin: Frölich [Nachdruck: 1973, Hildesheim, New York: Olms] Blatz, Friedrich (1895⫺96), Neuhochdeutsche Grammatik, mit Berücksichtigung der historischen Entwicklung der deutschen Sprache, Bd. 1⫺2. Karlsruhe: Lang

Brinker, Klaus (1972), Konstituentenstrukturgrammatik und operationale Satzgliedanalyse. Frankfurt/ M.: Athenäum Bühler, Karl (1934), Sprachtheorie: Die Darstellungsfunktion der Sprache. Jena: Fischer [Nachdruck: 1965, Stuttgart: Fischer] Christmann, Hans Helmut (1976), “Sprachwissenschaft und Sprachlehre: Zu ihrem Verhältnis im 18., 19. und 20. Jahrhundert”. Die neueren Sprachen 75, 423⫺437 Coseriu, Eugenio (1975), Leistungen und Grenzen der transformationellen Grammatik. Tübingen: Narr Delbrück, Berthold (1920), Grundlagen der neuhochdeutschen Satzlehre: Ein Schulbuch für Lehrer. Berlin: de Gruyter Drach, Erich (1937), Grundgedanken der deutschen Satzlehre. Frankfurt/M.: Diesterweg Engelien, August (21889), “Geschichte der neuhochdeutschen Grammatik sowie der Methodik des grammatischen Unterrichts”. In: Kehr, C. (Hrsg.), Geschichte der Methodik des Volksschulunterrichts, Bd. I. Gotha: Thienemanns Hofbuchhandlung, 252⫺417 Eisenberg, Peter (1976), “Wissenschaftliche Grammatik in der Sprachlehre”. Das Argument 95, 9⫺23 Elffers-van Ketel, Els (1991), The Historiography of Grammatical Concepts: 19th and 20th-Century Changes in the Subject-Predicate Conception and the Problem of Their Historical Reconstruction. Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi Erlinger, Hans Dieter (1969), Sprachwissenschaft und Schulgrammatik: Strukturen und Ergebnisse von 1900 bis zur Gegenwart. Düsseldorf: Schwann Erlinger, Hans Dieter & Knobloch, Clemens & Meyer, Hartmut (1989), Satzlehre ⫺ Denkschulung ⫺ Nationalsprache: Deutsche Schulgrammatik zwischen 1800 und 1850. Münster: Nodus Erlinger, Hans Dieter & Knobloch, Clemens (1991), Muttersprachlicher Unterricht im 19. Jahrhundert: Untersuchungen zu seiner Genese und Institutionalisierung. Tübingen: Niemeyer ˚ ke (1985), Die deutsche SatzgliedForsgren, Kjell-A lehre 1780 bis 1830. Göteborg: Göteborg University Press (Göteborger germanistische Forschungen 29) ˚ ke (1991), Satz, Satzarten, SatzForsgren, Kjell-A glieder: Zur Gestaltung der deutschen traditionellen Grammatik von Karl Ferdinand Becker bis Konrad Duden 1830⫺1880. Münster: Nodus Friend, Jewell A. (21976), Traditional Grammar: A Short Summary. Carbondale: Southern Illinois Univ. Press Gabelentz, Georg von der (1891), Die Sprachwissenschaft, ihre Aufgaben, Methoden und bisherigen Ergebnisse. Leipzig: Weigel Nachfolger Glinz, Hans (1947), Geschichte und Kritik der Lehre von den Satzgliedern in der deutschen Grammatik. Diss., Bern

12. Historical-comparative grammar Glinz, Hans (1952), Die innere Form des Deutschen: Eine neue deutsche Grammatik. Bern, München: Francke [21961] Glinz, Hans (1968), “Sprachwissenschaftliche Voraussetzungen für die Arbeit des Didaktikers und Pädagogen”. Zeitschrift für Pädagogik Beiheft 7, 189⫺212 Glinz, Hans (71972), Der deutsche Satz: Wortarten und Satzglieder wissenschaftlich gefaßt und dichterisch gedeutet. Düsseldorf: Schwann Glinz, Hans (1973), Textanalyse und Verstehenstheorie, Bd. I. Frankfurt/M.: Athenäum Helbig, Gerhard (1974), Geschichte der neueren Sprachwissenschaft. Reinbek: Rowohlt [11970, Leipzig: Bibliographisches Institut] Hermann, Eduard (1923), Die Sprachwissenschaft in der Schule. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht Heynatz, Johann Friedrich (51803), Deutsche Sprachlehre zum Gebrauch der Schulen. Berlin: Mylius [11770] Jellinek, Max Hermann (1913⫺14), Geschichte der neuhochdeutschen Grammatik von den Anfängen bis auf Adelung, Bd. 1⫺2. Heidelberg: Winter Jolly, Julius (1874), Schulgrammatik und Sprachwissenschaft: Studien über die Neugestaltung des grammatischen Unterrichts nach den Ergebnissen und der Methode der vergleichenden Sprachwissenschaft. München: Ackermann Kern, Franz (21888), Die deutsche Satzlehre: Eine Untersuchung ihrer Grundlagen. Berlin: Nicolai [11883]

117 Knobloch, Clemens (1988), “Wortarten und Satzglieder in der deutschen Grammatik zwischen Adelung und Becker”. In: Knobloch, Clemens, Sprache als Technik der Rede: Beiträge zu einer Linguistik des Sprechens. Frankfurt/M.: Lang, 89⫺130 Lyon, Otto (41904), Deutsche Grammatik und Geschichte der deutschen Sprache. Leipzig: Göschen Naumann, Bernd (1986), Grammatik der deutschen Sprache zwischen 1781 und 1856. Berlin: Schmidt Ries, John (1894), Was ist Syntax? Ein kritischer Versuch. Marburg [Nachdruck: 1967, Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft] Ries, John (1931), Was ist ein Satz? Prag: Taussig & Taussig Sütterlin, Ludwig (1900), Die deutsche Sprache der Gegenwart. Leipzig: Voigtländer [21907, 31910, 4 1918, 51923] Sütterlin, Ludwig & Waag, Albert (1905), Deutsche Sprachlehre für höhere Lehranstalten. Leipzig: Engelmann [9 Aufl. bis 1930] Sütterlin, Ludwig (1916), Die neuere Sprachwissenschaft und der deutsche Unterricht. Berlin: Mittler Ungeheuer, Gerold (1969), “Paraphrase und syntaktische Tiefenstruktur”. Folia Linguistica 3, 178⫺27 Vesper, Wilhelm (1980), Deutsche Schulgrammatik im 19. Jahrhundert. Tübingen: Niemeyer Wilmanns, Wilhelm (1869), “Die deutsche Grammatik, Teil 2: Die grammatische Behandlung der deutschen Sprache auf dem Gymnasium”. Zeitschrift für das Gymnasialwesen 23, 801⫺827

Clemens Knobloch, Siegen (Deutschland)

12. Historical-comparative grammar 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

Introduction Reconstruction Doublets of two kinds Methodological innovations: suppletion and syncretism Substantive work Strictures Heritage Structuralism, Generative Grammar, etc. References

1.

Introduction

Among the many deep insights of nineteenthcentury ‘historical-comparative’ linguistics a few stand out in particular: (a) the commitment to a uniformitarianism which recognizes no properties and pro-

cesses for past stages of language other than those which are observable in the present; (b) the understanding of the role of contrast, and of loss of contrast as a criterion of innovation, descent, and family relationship; and (c) an appreciation of the double articulation of language into sound structure on the one hand, and morphemics (that is, vocabulary, semantics, syntax, and indeed morphology) on the other. Generally these virtues were more visible in the execution than in theoretical formulation; hence the constant need to scrutinize the former before judging the latter.

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2.

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Reconstruction

It was seen that sound-correspondences which recur in pairs of words taken from two ‘related’ languages may be projected back into the shared past where they function as phonological entities of the common ancestor language ⫺ an operation known as reconstruction by the ‘comparative’ method (in the technically restricted sense of that term). In roughly the same syllabic environment ⫺ in other words: in ‘contrast’ with one another ⫺ an English /d/ answers a German /d/ in Bruder ‘brother’, weder ‘whether (> neither …)’ etc., but a German /t/ in Mutter ‘mother’, Wetter ‘weather’ etc. ‘Sound-changes’ ⫺ i.e. replacements along a line of descent such that they can be stated in purely phonological terms without recourse to morph boundaries ⫺ can merge phonemes but cannot split them (except insofar as some mergers will entail a concurrent split) as this would violate the ‘regularity’ principle implied in their definition. It is therefore agreed that the common (‘West-Germanic’) ancestor of English and German was in this detail like German, having some kind of distinction which in English was merged out of existence. If of two languages thus ‘compared’ one is found never to merge a contrast it is itself the ancestor, or earlier stage, of the other. Predictably, its texts will belong to an earlier period in time than those of its descendant. If Latin and Italian, or Old English and Modern English, were matched in this way, Latin and Old English would turn out to be, or nearly to be, the respective ancestors.

3.

Doublets of two kinds

However, beyond the obvious requirement that they be taken from words that have identical or relatable meanings from language to language, sound-correspondences need an additional control: to enter into the calculus just sketched, they must be specified by their very recurrence and by nothing else. The two West Germanic dentals are a case in point, since Bruder and weder, Mutter and Wetter are semantically, i.e., morphemically unrelated (the homonymy, in some forms of modern English, between whether and weather being accidental). Likewise, the substitutions of /r/ for Old English /hr/ as in hring ‘ring’, as well as for /r/ and for /wr/ [cp. wring] being phonologically statable, are all three true ‘sound-changes’ and thus consti-

tute, in the end, a threefold merger. At the other, equally pure extreme, (wash)ed for the older (wash)en, say (which changed its meaning) for the archaic queath (cp. quoth), uncle (a loanword from French which replaced the older and now obsolete eme) have no recurrent phonological relationship with the forms they replace. Other examples, however, occupy an intermediate position: in the history of English /f/ > /f/ recurs in hoofs, oafs, and wharfs, /rs/ > /ss/ in bass (the fish) and ass ‘buttocks’. These replacements do contrast with /f/ > /v/ (wives) and /rs/ > /rs/ (worse). But there are also doublets like wharfs/ wharves and ass/arse, with both replacements existing side by side; their presence leads us to classify, by extension, oafs as an analogic generalization (inasmuch as wharfs and wharves differ in the same way as allomorphs do: wife and wive- [in wive-s]), and bass as the result of a multiplicity of channels of transmission ⫺ that is, as a dialect borrowing in either one of two directions (inasmuch as ass and arse differ in a way not duplicated in any pairs of allomorphs). But for these doublets there would be a temptation to reconstruct two different ancestral consonantal entities to account for hoofs against wives, or for bass against coarse, along the lines of brother/ Bruder vs. weather/Wetter or hring vs. wring (see Hoenigswald 1983). This supplements a state of affairs marked by a curiously restricted historical-comparative view of morphology which prevailed at the turn of the twentieth century and which still persists by and large because it has a foundation of sorts. It is fair to say that the practitioners’ interest had been riveted on reconstruction. Since this made ‘sound-change’ paramount, it was natural, when it came to morphemics, to concentrate on those processes which, precisely because they have a background of sound-change in their own prehistory, carry certain phonological properties as well and therefore need delimitation. They were the exchanges of alternating (‘morphophonemic’) allomorphs also known as analogic change (see also Art. 147); and the competition between channels of transmission ⫺ that is, dialect borrowing in whichever direction. With luck, and in principle, both are accessible through the analysis of doublets. Whatever is true of the latter, the first, analogic change, has been a major topic in morphology since the ‘irregularities’ dear to school grammar. Even some modern textbooks on historical linguistics treat little else

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under the head of ‘morphological change’. They will point out, as an interesting typological consequence, isolating languages ‘without a morphology’ are unpromising candidates for the comparative method ⫺ not because the power of the latter is mysteriously restricted to other structural types but because they fail to offer the kind of evidence which makes for interesting results. Aside from those processes in which phonological matters are involved in one way or another, the retrieval of morphological structures by something resembling the comparative method or by an extension of the comparative method is not possible. ‘Reconstruction’ of morphemes and their morphs, and of the semantic and syntactic constructs they form is not the triangulation and inference that characterizes the comparative method. It is much closer to ‘comparison’ in the common-sense acceptation of this term where the collection of data and their examination for similarities and differences is the aim.

4.

Methodological innovations: suppletion and syncretism

Not unlike the discovery of doublets to determine the multiplicity of channels of transmission which serves to give bass and barse their proper place in the comparative procedure (see 2), a second formal relation was found which has the specious appearance of a ‘comparative’ procedure functioning on the morphemic level. It consists in suppletion (cf. Art. 52), that is in the kind of allomorphic diversification where co-allomorphs are not characterized by recurrent phonemic differences or morphophonemes (as they are in loaf, loav-; wolf, wolv-; shelf, shelv- etc.) but are unique (go, wen-), and exclusively identified by their morphemically complementary distribution. In general, while recurrent morphophonemes allow the internal reconstruction of sound changes (/f/ > /v/), suppletive allomorphs are sometimes due to syncretism or the merging of semantic categories that have a morphologically defined place in paradigms (see Art. 66). Thus, the number of Indo-European cases was reduced in some descendant languages. In simplified formulation, what happened is that some case endings which had been in contrast survived but developed a complementary distribution conditioned by the stem classes (‘declensions’) to which they were added. Thus, the locative

merged with the dative into the Greek ‘dative’ and with the ablative into the Latin ‘ablative’ (the confusing use of the same labels for entities differing in time, language, and function should not deceive anyone). Greek ‘datives’ had former locative endings in some declensions and former dative endings in others, while Latin ‘ablatives’ had earlier locative endings in some declensions and earlier ablative endings in others. This makes for an algorithm of morphemic reconstruction superficially reminiscent of the application of the comparative method to the phonological reconstruction of morph shapes (see 2): the Latin/Greek correspondences examined here for complementarity are, as it were, ‘Ablative’/‘Dative’ and ‘Dative’/‘Dative’. Since they occur in contrasting surroundings, they testify to two separate cases, their distinctness preserved in Latin whereas Greek has merged it. Semantic discrimination between different ‘datives’ which survive in traditional Greek case syntax are needed to clinch the argument, since not all suppletive allomorphy has by any means a background of syncretism. Aside from its function as a requirement for reconstruction, this link between inflectional morphology and syntactic semantics has, however, not been adequately explored. Of these phenomena, doublets pointing either to analogical replacement or to borrowing, and suppletivity ties to syncretism, the latter is more strictly ‘morphological’ in the sense that it concerns paradigms more directly. Both build on anomalies which remain precarious because they are far from being universally present in paradigms. Neither one may be said to rival, however remotely, the power and penetration of the comparative method as it operates in phonology. The socalled ‘comparative method’ (which is really a phonology-based technique to tell innovation from retention) infers, whereas morphemic ‘comparison’, in keeping with ordinary usage, essentially collects and classifies.

5.

Substantive work

Doublets (of two kinds) and syncretistic suppletion are new concepts only insofar as they are newly discussed ⫺ a gain, perhaps, but not at all an indication that their execution had to await their formulation. True progress, refinement, and even invention happen as substantive work is done and as the habits

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that such work generates become second nature. Only then systematization follows, necessary as it is both in itself and as a source of guidance through the phenomena.

6.

Strictures

Here two warnings must be sounded. First, as more and more languages from all over the world have become known, the very concept of morphology has begun to look typologically parochial. In contrast to the truly universal characteristic of double articulation, morphology is not as sharply set off from syntax (and semantics) as is phonology from everything outside phonology, including syntax (and semantics). To some observers its traditional claim to autonomy smacks of simple glottocentrism. Secondly, almost all morphological concerns have suffered from a fatal flaw in their phonological underpinnings, synchronic as well as diachronic: stress morphemes (like those of English) and intonations, and their morphological attributes have practically gone unexplored though they are known to constitute the very nucleus of speech utterance. The inkhorn habit of ignoring everything not visible on the written page even when its role is paramount has assuredly cast a pall over the entire linguistic enterprise, historical-comparative morphology not excluded.

7.

Heritage

These and other uncertainties have not been able to interfere with the active and productive (if unevenly balanced) pursuit of substantive work. We shall therefore proceed with a selective survey of such historicalcomparative studies of systematic standing and dimensions as deal specifically with derivational or inflectional morphology, as these terms are still commonly understood. Where theoretical issues of any depth have come to the fore we shall not hesitate to digress and to attempt to sketch them briefly. Characteristically, the twentieth century opened with Ferdinand Sommer’s Latin Phonology and Morphology of 1902 (second edition of 1913/14, accompanied by a small volume of Critical Notes). The work could not have been more instructive: it is traditional in attitude but materially critical and independent. There is an expository advantage in

the presentation: linguistic history, even where it is in fact reconstructed rather than observed, is presented as narrative (‘A went to B’) and not as inference (‘we conclude from the data that A went to B’). To be sure, the data are supplied, and with the greatest mastery at that; but the reasoning remains hidden, at least as long as no polemical necessity pushes author and reader toward methodology. Once introduced to the Formenlehre (morphology) part, we are struck by the absence of stem-formation. A brief and unavoidable, hence impatient, introductory disquisition refers to derivation and inflection but does not systematically discuss the distinction. Compounds (not, to be sure, very important in Latin) are not even mentioned. Thus, except for tradition-sanctioned oddities like adjective gradation, gender, and nonfinite verb forms, for the derivational aspects of the stems that underlie the various ‘declensions’ and ‘conjugations’, and for histories where derivations have changed their status and turned into something like inflections (e.g. collectives and neuters plural), the field of morphology remains limited to an enumeration of inflectional paradigms for nouns, pronouns, and verbs, and the ‘comparative’ and even more the ‘internal’ reconstruction of the inflectional suffixes the lucidity of which forces like syncretism and conditioned sound-change had obscured. Not surprisingly, there are constant cross-references to the phonological section. To stay with Latin (an area both abundantly documented and representative), Sommer’s work was followed by others, among which Ernout’s Historical Morphology of Latin (31974) and Kent’s Forms of Latin (1946), both entirely devoted to morphology. It is significant that the latter, while adhering to the pattern just described in even more outspoken form, notes that the “stem formation of nouns and adjectives has been excluded; this topic would have occupied more space than can be […] apportioned to it, and has already been treated in admirable detail by Manu Leumann […]”. In fact, Leumann’s role in this century was crucial. To do justice to it it is necessary to take a giant step back in history and consider the influence of the Indian grammarians. Known only to the Sanskritists among nineteenth century linguists, and not appreciated by all, their approach to morphology involved no slight to stem-formation; on the contrary, its consistency, explicitness, and

12. Historical-comparative grammar

completeness left nothing to be desired as concerns derivation as well as inflection (and allomorphy in both). While historical-comparative linguists made it their business to interpret the synchronically conceived Indian grammar from a quite different point of view ⫺ namely the historical-comparative one ⫺ there was no uncertainty about the extent and the limits of coverage as there was in the European tradition. While the details of scholarly history are not clear, it was, therefore, probably no accident that Albert Debrunner, the author of the thousand-page volume of Jacob Wackernagel’s Sanskrit Grammar which dealt with derivational noun suffixation (Debrunner 1954; Wackernagel’s own treatment of noun composition had appeared in 1905; of noun inflection [with A. Debrunner] in 1929⫺1930) was the very scholar who had published a book on Greek Word Formation (which included a treatment of compounds) in 1917. The brief preface to that work well expresses the author’s sense of mission at an interesting juncture in the history of research. In 1933 Pierre Chantraine’s rich Noun formation in Ancient Greek including compounds) followed, and there were at that time other works in the same, semi-taxonomic vein, such as Kluge’s Formation of Noun Stems in the Old Germanic Dialects (1926). The originality of Leumann and his school (notably E. Risch, see 8) lay in their thoroughly historical view of the ‘mechanics’ (so called by Leumann in the title of a famous article, Leumann 1927) of linguistic change as it can be studied with particular profit in semantics and in word-formation (perhaps because of the particular aspect which the productivity of neologisms assumes in languages that are built like the more anciently attested forms of Indo-European).

8.

Structuralism, Generative Grammar etc.

Some of the more recent activity has had a twofold aspect. There has been (1) great activity of the kind that justifies itself by the quality and coherence of its results but shuns methodological discussion. New grammars have either offered instructive restatement in the light of shifted interests or opened up entirely new fields as data have increased spectacularly and a wealth of hitherto unknown or untreated evidence is now accessible. At

121 the same time, principles (2) have by no means been neglected. In the earlier part of the century, theoretical disquisitions had a definitely ‘structuralist’ cast ⫺ something that is not surprising if it is realized that the structuralist temper was little more than the consequence of the shift of research interest away from diachronic and toward synchronic thinking, and that diachronic linguistics had always had a distinct, if hidden ‘structuralist’ foundation which needed only spelling out. The disavowal of the structuralist orthodoxy in more recent years has been more drastic, however. It is not easy to characterize the nature of the current debate. Except for what is latent in the transformational and generative tradition inaugurated by Zellig S. Harris and Noam A. Chomsky, emphasis has, for instance, been rather remote from the question of what phenomena are likely to represent special cases of other, wider phenomena, their relationship often being disguised by a merely qualitative and insufficiently severe approach. It is, therefore, difficult to justify the preference accorded to certain topics but withheld from others. A few of the favored ones in this eclectic accumulation have indeed had a marked bearing on morphology. The recognition of language universals and of typological identities has relied heavily on morphological criteria, with the possibility of recognizing universals of morphological history never far away. ‘Analogy’, a strongly morphological concept with ramifications in diachronic phonology and semantics, has had the attention first of Jerzy Kuryłowicz (1949) and Witold Man´czak (1958), and then of Paul Kiparsky (1971), K.-H. Best (1973), and of Raimo Anttila (1977) ⫺ not so much in terms of a taxonomy of allomorph exchanges, the essence of ‘analogic change’, as rather with an eye on predictability. (As always and everywhere, it should be kept in mind that comprehensive textbooks and handbooks like Sturtevant 1947; Bloomfield 1933; Lehmann 1973; Anttila 1972; Bynon 1977; Hock 1986 and 1996; and Szemere´nyi 1989 have made their often weighty, if sometimes controversial contributions). Those scholars championing superfamilies of languages (Nostratic, Amerind, etc.) ⫺ Joseph H. Greenberg (especially Greenberg 1987) and others ⫺ have also consistently operated with arguments from morphological typology, partly in order to make up for the limitations inherent in the phonologically based comparative method at

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the traditional center of the creation of filiations. More recently, ‘grammaticalization’ has attracted interest (cf. also Art. 145). This concept has its roots in Antoine Meillet’s early 20th-century informal but acute observation on the typical provenience of (bound) morphemes with grammatical meanings from morphs with lexically full-fledged semantics. On the substantive side, mid-century opens with Benveniste (1948) ⫺ ostensibly the sequel to Benveniste (1935) ⫺, Kuryłowicz (1964) and Watkins (1969) which mark the new departure whereby the Anatolian discoveries and much else that was new became boldly and authoritatively synthesized (see also Adrados 1963). An important event took place in 1975 as the papers read at the 5. Fachtagung der Indogermanischen Gesellschaft, devoted to inflection and word-formation were published (Rix 1975, ed.). Jarceva (1977, ed.) acquainted an incompletely informed scholarly community with Soviet scholarship. In 1978, Gernot Schmidt’s work on stem formation and inflection of the indoEuropean personal pronouns appeared, a monograph conspicuous for its methodological concerns, and in 1979 Wolfram Euler explored Indoiranian-Greek isoglosses in the domain of noun derivation. Perhaps this is the place to mention with the emphasis it deserves the section on Wortlehre in the second volume of the Bibliography of Uralian Linguistics, edited by Wolfgang Schlachter and Gerhard Ganschow (1979⫺). Norbert Oettinger devoted a signal effort to the Stem formation of the Hittite verb (Oettinger 1979). Gert Klingenschmitt’s work on the Old Armenian verb (Klingenschmitt 1982) is a contribution to Indo-European verb morphology. Hans von Kamptz had his earlier dissertation on personal names in Homer published in 1982; this is a work which belongs with Ernst Risch’s book on word formation of the Homeric language which had appeared in 1973 in a greatly revised second edition (Risch 21974 [11937]). Lipka & Günther (1981, eds.) is a useful collection of articles which extends from 1896 to 1970. In 1982 J. Haudry presented his ideas on the prehistory of Indo-European noun inflection. Wolfgang U. Wurzel wrote on inflectional morphology and naturalness in 1984, and the year 1985 saw the publication of Joan Bybee’s Morphology ⫺ with Peter H. Matthews’s Morphology of 1974, all works of high (if indirect) relevance for the historical concept of producti-

vity (see also Art. 33). Leitmotifs in Natural Morphology (Dressler et al. 1987) contains four articles by Wolfgang U. Dressler, Willi Mayerthaler, Oswald Panagl, and Wolfgang U. Wurzel, with considerable emphasis on inflection and markedness (especially under Mayerthaler’s hands) and their diachrony. Among the monographs ⫺ regrettably few in number ⫺ Roger D. Woodard’s study, entitled On Interpreting Morphological Change the Greek Reflexive Pronoun of 1990 stands out. A major achievement is Y. Duhoux’s work on the Ancient Greek verb (Duhoux 1992) which aims to combine synchronic and diachronic description. Rolf Bergmann’s reverse morphological dictionary of Old High German (1991) is an intriguing undertaking following an innovative plan. Wolfram Euler deals with the intersection of mood and tense in his book on modal aorist formations and their relics in the old European languages (Euler 1992). The articles assembled in Language Typology 1988, subtitled Typological Models in Reconstruction (Lehmann & Hewitt 1991, eds.) touch the problem of reconstruction of morphology more than once.

9.

References

Adrados, Francisco Rodriguez (1963), Evolucio´n y estructura del verbo indoeuropeo. Madrid: Instituto Antonio de Nebrija Anttila, Raimo (1972), An Introduction to Historical and Comparative Linguistics. New York: Macmillan; Toronto: Coller-Macmillan Anttila, Raimo (1977), Analogy. The Hague, Paris, New York: Mouton (State-of-the-Art Reports 10) Benveniste, E´mile (1935), Origines de la formation des noms en indo-europe´en. Paris: Adrien-Maisonneuve Benveniste, E´mile (1948), Noms d’agent et noms d’action en indo-europe´en. Paris: Adrien-Maisonneuve Bergmann, Rolf (1991), Rückläufiges morphologisches Wörterbuch des Althochdeutschen: Auf der Grundlage des “Althochdeutschen Wörterbuchs” von Rudolf Schützeichel. Tübingen: Niemeyer Best, K[arl]-H[einz] (1973), Probleme der Analogieforschung. München: Hueber (Commentationes Societatis Linguisticae Europaeae 6) Bloomfield, Leonard (1933), Language. New York: Holt Bybee, Joan L. (1985), Morphology: A Study of the Relation between Meaning and Form. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: Benjamins (Typological Studies in Language 9)

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123

Bynon, Theodora (1977), Historical Linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Kamptz, Hans von (1982), Homerische Personennamen. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht.

Chantraine, Pierre (1933), Formation des noms en grec ancien. Paris: Champion

Kent, Roland G. (1946), The Forms of Latin. Baltimore: Linguistic Society of America

Debrunner, Albert (1917), Griechische Wortbildungslehre. Heidelberg: Winter

Kiparsky, Paul (1971), “Historical Linguistics”. In: Dingwall, William O. (ed.), A Survey of Linguistic Science. College Park: University of Maryland Linguistics Program, 576⫺649

Debrunner, Albert (1954), Die Nominalsuffixe. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht [In: Jacob Wackernagel (ed.), Altindische Grammatik, Vol. II.2] Debrunner, Albert & Wackernagel, Jacob (1929⫺ 1930), Nominalflexion ⫺ Zahlwort ⫺ Pronomen. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht [In: Jacob Wackernagel (ed.), Altindische Grammatik, Vol. III] Dressler, Wolfgang U. & Mayerthaler, Willi & Panagl, Oswald & Wurzel, Wolfgang U. (1987), Leitmotifs in Natural Morphology. Amsterdam, New York: Benjamins (Studies in Language, Companion Series 10) Duhoux, Yves (1992), Le verbe grec ancien: E´le´ments de morphologie et de syntaxe historiques: Louvain-La-Neuve: Peeters (Bibliothe`que des Cahiers de l’Institut de Linguistique de Louvain 61) Ernout, Alfred (31974), Morphologie historique du latin. Paris: Klincksieck [11914] Euler, Wolfram (1979), Indoiranisch-griechische Gemeinsamkeiten der Nominalbildung und deren indogermanische Grundlagen. Innsbruck: Institut für Sprachwissenschaft der Universität (Innsbrucker Beiträge zur Sprachwissenschaft 30) Euler, Wolfram (1992), Modale Aoristbildungen und ihre Relikte in den alteuropäischen Sprachen. Innsbruck: Institut für Sprachwissenschaft der Universität Innsbruck (Vorträge und Kleinere Schriften 55) Greenberg, Joseph H. (1987), Language in the Americas. Stanford: Stanford University Press Haudry, Jean (1982), Pre´histoire de la flexion nominale indo-europe´enne. Lyon: Institut d’e´tudes indoeurope´ennes de l’universite´ Jean Moulin [Lyon III] Hock, Hans Henrich (1986), Principles of Historical Linguistics. Berlin, New York, Amsterdam: Mouton de Gruyter (Trends in Linguistics, Studies and Monographs 34) Hock, Hans Henrich & Joseph, Brian (1996), Language History, Language Change, and Language Relationship: An Introduction to Historical and Comparative Linguistics. Berlin, New York: Mouton de Gruyter (Trends in Linguistics, Studies and Monographs 33) Hoenigswald, Henry M. (1983), “Doublets”. In: Agard, F. et al. (ed.), Essays in Honor of Charles F. Hockett. Leiden: Brill (Cornell Linguistic Contributions 4), 167⫺171 Jarceva, Viktoria N. (1977, ed.), Istorikotipologicˇeskaja morfologija germanskich jazykov: Kategoria glagola. Moskva: Nauka

Klingenschmitt, Gert (1982), Das altarmenische Verbum. Wiesbaden: Reichert Kluge, Friedrich (1926), Nominale Stammbildungslehre der altgermanischen Dialekte, bearbeitet von L. Sütterlin und Ernst Ochs. Halle: Francke Kuryłowicz, Jerzy (1949), “La nature des proce`s dits ‘analogiques’”. Acta Linguistica 5, 15⫺37 [reprinted in: Kuryłowicz, Jerzy (1960), Esquisses linguistiques. Wrocław, Krako´w: Zaklad Narodowy Imienia Ossolin´skich, Wydawnictwo Polskiej Akademii Nauk [⫽ Prace Je˛zykoznawcze 19], 66⫺86] Kuryłowicz, Jerzy (1964), The Inflectional Categories of Indo-European. Heidelberg: Winter Lehmann, Winfred P. (21973), Historical Linguistics: An Introduction. New York etc.: Holt, Rinehart and Winston [11966] Lehmann, Winfred P. & Hewitt, Helen-Jo Jakusz (1991, eds.), Language Typology 1968: Typological Models in Reconstruction. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: Benjamins Leumann, Manu (1927), “Zum Mechanismus des Bedeutungswandels”. Indogermanische Forschungen 14, 105⫺118 [reprinted in (1959) Kleine Schriften. Zürich, Stuttgart: Artemis, 286⫺295] Leumann, Manu (1977), Lateinische Laut- und Formenlehre [reprint of the 5th ed., 1926⫺1928]. München: Beck Lipka, Leonhard & Günther, Hartmut (1981, eds.), Wortbildung. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft (Wege der Forschung 564) Man´czak, Witold (1958), “Tendences ge´ne´rales des changements analogiques”. Lingua 7, 298⫺325, 387⫺420 Matthews, Peter H. (1974), Morphology. Cambridge etc.: Cambridge University Press Oettinger, Norbert (1979), Stammbildung des hethitischen Verbums. Nürnberg: Hans-Carl Verlag (Erlanger Beiträge zur Sprach- und Kunstwissenschaft 64) Risch, Ernst (21974), Wortbildung der homerischen Sprache. Berlin, New York: de Gruyter [11937] Rix, Helmut (1975, ed.), Flexion und Wortbildung: Akten der 5. Fachtagung der Indogermanischen Gesellschaft. Wiesbaden: Reichert Schlachter, Wolfgang & Ganschow, Gerhard, (1979⫺, eds.), “Wortlehre”. In: Bibliographie der uralischen Sprachwissenschaft, Vol. II. München: Fink

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Schmidt, Gernot (1978), Stammbildung und Flexion der indogermanischen Personalpronomina. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Sommer, Ferdinand (1902), Handbuch der lateinischen Laut- und Formenlehre. Heidelberg: Winter [2nd ed. (1913/14) accompanied by Kritische Erläuterungen (1977), Vol. I, ed. by Raimund Pfister; 4th rev. ed.] Sturtevant, Edgar H. (1947), An Introduction to Linguistic Science. New Haven: Yale Szemere´nyi, Oswald (31989), Einführung in die Sprachwissenschaft. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft Wackernagel, Jacob (1905), Einleitung zur Wortlehre: Nominalkomposition. Göttingen: Van-

denhoeck & Ruprecht [In: Wackernagel, Jacob (21957, ed.), Altindische Grammatik, Vol. II.1] Watkins, Calvert (1969), Geschichte der indogermanischen Verbalflexion. Heidelberg: Winter (Indogermanische Grammatik III,1) Woodard, Roger D. (1990), On Interpreting Morphological Change: the Greek Reflexive Pronoun. Amsterdam: Gieben Wurzel, Wolfgang Ullrich (1984), Flexionsmorphologie und Natürlichkeit. Berlin/DDR: AkademieVerlag (Studia Grammatica 21)

Henry M. Hoenigswald, Swarthmore/PA (U.S.A.)

13. Überblick: die europäische Tradition Redaktioneller Hinweis: Aus terminlich-technischen Gründen erscheint Art. 13 nicht. Dieser Artikel war als Einführung zu den Art. 14⫺18 vorgesehen. Er sollte einen Abriß der europäischen Abhandlungen zur Morphologie im 20. Jh. bieten, einschließlich des Einflusses der europäischen Ideen in den USA, z. B. durch das Werk von Roman Jakobson. Behandelt werden sollten die allgemeinen Tendenzen der morphologischen Studien in verschiedenen Regionen Europas, parallele Entwicklungen und Einflüsse zwischen den verschiedenen Regionen und Denkschulen, sowie deren politischer Hintergrund (z. B. die Entstehung neuer Nationalstaaten) und kultureller Kontext (z. B. die Rolle der Akademien, Universitäten, intellektuellen Kreise usw.). Die in Art. 14 (Osteuropa), 15 (Frankreich und Schweiz), 16 (Skandinavien), 17 (Großbritannien), 18 (Deutschland), und 19 (Niederlande) nicht behandelten Regionen Europas sollten in Art. 13 ausführlicher berücksichtigt werden, z. B. die Mittelmeerländer.

13. Survey: the European tradition Editorial note: Article 13 had to be left out due to time-related and technical constraints. This article was supposed to serve as an introduction to Art. 14⫺18, providing an overall picture of 20th century European work in morphology, as well as an outline of the influence of European ideas in the USA (e. g. Roman Jakobson’s work). Topics to be considered included general tendencies in morphological studies in different areas, and parallel developments and influences between the various regions and schools of thought. In addition, a sketch of the political background (e. g. the emergence of new nation states) and the cultural context (e. g. the role of academies, universities, learned societies etc.) of these approaches was supposed to be included. The regions not covered in Art. 14 (East Europe), 15 (France and Switzerland), 16 (Scandinavia), 17 (Britain), 18 (Germany), and 19 (The Netherlands) were supposed to be considered in Art. 13 in greater detail, e. g. the Mediterranean countries.

14. Osteuropa

125

14. Osteuropa 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

Einleitung Rußland und Sowjetunion Prager Schule Polen Weiterführende Literaturhinweise Zitierte Literatur

1.

Einleitung

Gegenstand der vorliegenden Darstellung sind wichtige Etappen, Personen, Werke und Schulen, die für die Entwicklung der Morphologie in Osteuropa in den letzten einhundert Jahren bestimmend gewesen sind. Es versteht sich, daß im Rahmen eines begrenzten Überblickes kein Versuch unternommen werden kann, irgendeine Art von Vollständigkeit zu erreichen. Weder können alle Beiträge mit allgemeineren Ausführungen zur Morphologie behandelt werden, noch können alle Länder Osteuropas gleichermaßen berücksichtigt werden. Eine weitere Einschränkung ist spezifischer Natur: von Autoren, die aus dem Ostblock in den Westen emigriert sind und ihre Tätigkeit in Europa oder Amerika fortgesetzt haben, werden die in der Emigration erschienenen Werke in dem vorliegenden Artikel nicht behandelt, um das geographische Ordnungsprinzip nicht zu unterlaufen. ⫺ Die Namen russischer Autoren wurden im vorliegenden Artikel bei der ersten Nennung mit einem Betonungszeichen versehen.

2.

Rußland und Sowjetunion

Den Beginn der russischen Grammatikschreibung markiert traditionell Michail Lomono´sovs Reußische Grammatik von 1755. Für diese Zeit ist noch die Orientierung an dem grammatischen Modell der antiken Sprachen charakteristisch, einem Vorbild, das nur langsam zugunsten einer der Gegenwartssprache enger angepaßten Beschreibung überwunden wird (zu einem wichtigen Teilgebiet vgl. Biedermann 1978). Die erste große historische Grammatik des Russischen wird von Fe¨dor Busla´ev (1858) verfaßt. Ihm gebührt das Verdienst, die Grenze zwischen Morphologie ⫺ mit Formenbildung und Wortbildung ⫺ und Syntax ⫺ mit Bedeutung und Gebrauch der Wortformen ⫺ genauer gezogen zu haben als bislang üblich. Die Kategorien der Grammatik identifiziert er freilich noch mit Katego-

rien der Logik, besonders im Bereich der Syntax. Die Tradition der ausdrucksorientierten Sprachwissenschaft setzt N. P. Nekra´sov (1865) fort, den Van Schooneveld (1963: 25) einen “Vorläufer der Prager Schule” nennt. Seine Behandlung der Flexionsformen zeigt, daß es ihm darum geht, Korrelationen zwischen Ausdruck und Inhalt herzustellen: Sind die Ausdrucksmittel verschieden, so signalisieren sie das Vorliegen einer anderen Bedeutung. Fälle wie die komplementäre Distribution von Allomorphen werden eher intuitiv gehandhabt und noch nicht expliziert. Allen Wörtern werden in dieser Analyse gleich viele grammatische Bedeutungen zugeschrieben, auch wenn sich jeweils ein Teil homophoner Endungen bedient. Für eine zweite, stärker semantisch orientierte Richtung steht vor allem A. A. Potebnja´ (1874⫺1941), der auch als der eigentliche Vertreter des sprachwissenschaftlichen Psychologismus in Rußland gilt. Da er von dem aktuellen Gebrauch der Wortformen in Texten ausgeht, sieht er sich außerstande, überhaupt ein einheitliches Formensystem für alle Wörter zu postulieren: Wörter haben danach ⫺ je nach Deklinationsklasse ⫺ eine verschiedene Zahl von Kasus. Potebnja hat auf die Entwicklung der russischen Sprachwissenschaft einen großen Einfluß gehabt, mit seiner Zeichentheorie unter anderem auf die russischen Formalisten und Theoretiker der Poetischen Sprache Anfang des 20. Jahrhunderts. In methodischer Hinsicht ist mit dieser Richtung im Bereich der Morphologie aber kein Fortschritt verknüpft. Die erste Strömung, die als Schule bezeichnet werden darf, die auch über die Grenzen des Landes hinaus wirkte, entstand am Ende des 19. Jahrhunderts durch das Wirken von Jan Baudouin de Courtenay (russ. Ivan Aleksandrovicˇ Bodue˙n de Kurtene˙), eines gebürtigen Polen, der nacheinander in Kazan’, Jur’ev (Tartu), Krakau und Petersburg lehrte, bevor er nach der Oktoberrevolution für seine letzten Lebensjahre nach Polen (Warschau) zurückkehrte. Baudouin gilt als Begründer der sog. “Kazaner Schule”, die in der Petersburger (Leningrader) Schule ihre Fortsetzung fand. Baudouin prägte 1881 den Begriff Morphem als Abstraktion von Stamm und Affix. Die Sprache betrachtete er ⫺ in deutlicher Kritik an junggrammatischen An-

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sätzen ⫺ als psychosoziale Erscheinung und entwickelte eine erste Vorstellung davon, daß sie ein System von Relationen darstelle und Synchronie und Diachronie zu trennen seien (ohne diese Termini schon benutzt zu haben). Bekannt geworden ist er vornehmlich mit seinen Arbeiten auf dem Gebiet der morphonologischen Alternationen, den sog. “beweglichen Elementen” des Morphems, einem für die slawischen Sprachen besonders charakteristischen Bereich. Mit seinen Auffassungen hat er die Grundlage für die spätere Ausarbeitung der Morphonologie in der Prager Schule gelegt, deren Vertreter ja bekanntlich z. T. aus Petersburg stammten. Die Frage, wie man Alternationen behandelt, hat natürlich einen ummittelbaren Bezug zur morphologischen Ebene: Alternationen sind ja nichts anderes als eine Systematisierung des Verhältnisses von Allomorphen zueinander, eben von einem anderen Gesichtspunkt aus. Bis heute unterscheiden sich die phonologischen Schulen in Rußland in diesem Punkte: die Leningrader Schule notiert Morphe lautnah, woraus sich auf morphonologischer Ebene automatisch die Existenz von Alternationen ergibt; die Moskauer phonologische Schule notiert Morphe abstrakter und behandelt damit die Alternationen als subphonematische Erscheinungen (eine wichtige neuere Arbeit ist z. B. der Aufsatz von Gvo´zdev (1960). Der vielleicht bekannteste Schüler Baudouins ist L. V. Sˇcˇerba, der in der ersten Hälfte des 20. Jahrhunderts in Petersburg wirkte. Seine Interessen lagen primär in der Phonologie (er ist der Gründer der Leningrader Phonologischen Schule) und in der Lexikologie, auch wenn seine Arbeit zu den Wortarten (Sˇcˇe´rba 1928) als Klassiker gilt ⫺ ein Ruf, den sie bei genauerer Betrachtung nicht verdient; verfaßt wurde sie in ausdrücklicher Auseinandersetzung mit der Moskauer Formalen Schule. Morphologisch interessiert war hingegen V. A. Bogoro´dickij, ein Kazaner Schüler Baudouins. Er zeigte u. a. die vielfältigen Möglichkeiten auf, wie sich die Morphemgrenzen in einem Wort durch Analogien, Umdeutungen und Vereinfachungen im Laufe der Zeit verändern können (vgl. Bogorodickij 1901). Diesen Prozeß nannte er pererazlozˇenie ‘Umgliederung’. Die Morphologie stand jedoch in der Kazaner Schule nicht wirklich im Vordergrund des Interesses, und wenn, dann wurde sie eher historisch betrieben. Zu einer bedeutenden methodenorientierten Weiterentwicklung der Morphologie kommt es in dieser Schule

nicht, auch wenn N. V. Krusˇe´vskij, einer der Schüler Baudouins in Kazan’, die de Saussuresche Einteilung in paradigmatische und syntagmatische Relationen vorwegnimmt. Gleichzeitig mit Baudouin bildete sich in Moskau durch das Wirken des berühmten Indogermanisten F. F. Fortuna´tov die sog. Moskauer oder Formale Schule der Linguistik heraus. Sie war, wie ihr Name schon andeutet, viel stärker an der Ausdrucksseite der Sprache und entsprechenden Methoden ihrer Analyse interessiert (und darf nicht mit der Moskauer Phonologischen Schule verwechselt werden). Mit dieser Position richtete sie sich ausdrücklich gegen den Psychologismus der damaligen Junggrammatiker. Fortunatov, der bei einem längeren Auslandsaufenthalt in Deutschland, England und Frankreich gewesen war, entwickelte in seinen Vorlesungen, u. a. zur historisch-vergleichenden und indogermanischen Sprachwissenschaft (die z. T. erst viel später, 1956, erstmals im Druck erschienen) wesentliche Vorstellungen und Methoden der Sprachwissenschaft weiter. Die Grammatik einer Sprache gliedert sich nach Fortunatov in “Morphologie (oder Etymologie) und Syntax” (Fortunatov 1956: 192). Den Morphembegriff selbst benutzt er noch nicht. Er unterscheidet einen beschreibenden von einem historischen Zugang zur Sprache (d. h. Synchronie und Diachronie), sieht die Sprache als ein System, kennt den Zeichenbegriff, trennt Wortformen in Stamm und Affixe (Fortunatov 1956: 140), spricht hinsichtlich der Stämme von abgeleiteten und nichtabgeleiteten, entwickelt den Begriff des Nullmorphems (Fortunatov 1956: 146), erkennt analytische Wortformen als “deskriptive Formen” eines Wortes an (Fortunatov 1956: 179) und führt die Unterscheidung von Formenbildung und Wortbildung ein (Fortunatov 1956: 155), wenn auch noch nicht mit der gleichen Grenzziehung wie heute ⫺ den Plural der Substantive z. B. zählt er wegen seiner nominativen Bedeutung zur Wortbildung. Wörter werden auf der Grundlage ihrer Ausdrucksmittel in grammatische Klassen eingeteilt und die Kategorien der Grammatik ausdrücklich gegen logische Kategorien abgesetzt. Eine “Form” zu haben, bedeutet bei Fortunatov u. a., daß ein Wort grammatische Kategorien ausdrückt, seine Ausdrucksseite also segmentierbar ist in einem Stamm und in Affixe. Wenn er Wörter “formal” klassifiziert, dann ist dies eine Klassifikation auf der Grundlage der jeweils ausgedrückten gram-

14. Osteuropa

matischen Kategorien. Erst in der z. T. weniger wohlmeinenden Sekundärliteratur ist Fortunatovs Vorgehen in einem negativen Sinne als “formalistisch” abqualifiziert worden, was sie in Wirklichkeit nicht ist (zu einer kritischen Betrachtung der Moskauer Schule vgl. jedoch Gasparov 1970, zu seinem eigenen Ansatz Gasparov 1975). Auf Fortunatovs Vorlesung zur Vergleichenden Sprachwissenschaft von 1891/92 geht seine bekannte Wortdefinition zurück: „Jeder Sprachlaut, der in der Sprache eine Bedeutung hat, die von anderen Lauten, die Wörter sind, abgegrenzt ist, ist (auch) ein Wort” (Fortunatov 1956: 132). Dies scheint zunächst etwas unklar formuliert, doch das erläuternde Beispiel ist die russ. Konjunktion a ‘aber, und’, bevor Fortunatov zu längeren Wörtern übergeht. Bei ihnen weist er als Kriterium darauf hin, daß sie nicht oder nur unter Verlust ihrer Bedeutungen zerlegbar seien (Fortunatov 1956: 132). Die wesentlichen Elemente der üblichen Morphemdefinitionen sind hier bereits erkennbar, ebenso der Gedanke des Kontrastes mit anderen, gleichartigen Elementen des Systems. Zu den Schülern Fortunatovs gehörten u. a. A. A. Sˇa´chmatov, D. N. Usˇako´v, N. N. Durnovo´, A. M. Pesˇko´vskij, M. N. Peterso´n, G. O. Vinoku´r u. a. ⫺ diese Schule dominierte die russische Sprachwissenschaft in den 20er Jahren eindeutig, wobei die Spannbreite der Interessen auch die Syntax und die Lexikologie mit einschloß. Mit ihren Ideen wirkte sie auf die Prager Schule, auf die Kopenhagener Schule und auf Vertreter des amerikanischen Strukturalismus (z. B. in der Person Roman Jakobsons). In der Zeit des Stalinismus wurden die Vertreter der Moskauer formalen Schule regelrecht verfolgt ⫺ “Formalist” zu sein, war zu einem gefährlichen Etikett und Schimpfwort geworden. Erst nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg konnte diese Schule wiederaufleben, und die Blüte der russischen Morphologie in den 60er Jahren geht eben auf diese Fortunatovsche Schule zurück. Die Zeit des Marrismus (nach ihrem Hauptproponenten, N. Ja. Marr, einem Kaukasiologen) brachte für die morphologische Forschung keinen Fortschritt. Van Schooneveld charakterisiert die sowjetische Linguistik, und namentlich die Morphologie unter und direkt nach Stalin, als “junggrammatisch”, wobei er darunter die Auffassung versteht, daß sich das System einer Sprache in seiner Entwicklungsgeschichte zeige, wohingegen sie keine Methodik liefere,

127 eine Sprache synchron stringent zu analysieren. Van Schooneveld (1963: 23) spricht von einer “fortschreitenden Entprovinzialisierung” und charakterisiert gerade die Morphologie als eine “relativ unbewegliche” Disziplin (Van Schooneveld 1963: 22). V. V. Vinogra´dov und N. S. Pospe¨lov (vgl. Pospelov 1955) sind dabei die wichtigsten Vertreter dieser Zeit, wobei auf Vinogradov auch die Grundpositionen der offiziösen Akademiegrammatik der fünfziger Jahre zurückgehen. Mit seiner zweibändigen Darstellung des Russischen von 1938 und nachfolgenden Werken nutzte er den Freiraum, den die Unterdrückung der Formalen Schule bot, um schon unter Stalin seinen Aufstieg zum wichtigsten sowjetischen Sprachwissenschaftler der folgenden Jahrzehnte zu beginnen. In der umfangreichen Monographie Vinogradovs zum grammatischen Bau des Russischen (Vinogradov 1947) kommt die Morphologie im Inhaltsverzeichnis nicht einmal als Begriff vor, und zum Status dieser Disziplin äußert sich der Verfasser distanziert: “Die Lage der Morphologie als Wissenschaft vom Bau und der Bildung der Wörter ist also unsicher” (Vinogradov 1947: 4) ⫺ dies deshalb, weil die Abgrenzung zu syntaktischen Phänomenen und zur Lexikologie andererseits unklar sei. De Saussure wird immerhin rezipiert, wenn auch meist mit kritischen Äußerungen zu bestimmten Problemen, vor allem aber wird des öfteren Humboldt zur Stützung der eigenen Position herangezogen. Fortunatov hingegen wirft er seine “wohlbekannte Einseitigkeit” vor (Vinogradov 1947: 32). Grundeinheiten der Beschreibung sind für Vinogradov das Wort und der Satz (Vinogradov 1947: 7), auch wenn er sich außerstande sieht, Merkmale anzugeben, die für alle Wörter zuträfen (Vinogradov 1947: 10), weder morphologische, etwa die “Ganzheit des Wortes” ⫺ vgl. Nom. nikto ‘niemand’, jedoch Gen. ni u kogo ‘bei niemandem’, wörtlich ‘nicht bei jemandem’ ⫺ noch syntaktische, z. B. Satzglied sein zu können. Die nominative Funktion ist für ihn die Grundfunktion des Wortes (Vinogradov 1947: 12), das als “System von Formen und Bedeutungen” verstanden wird. “Form” ist bei Vinogradov aber nicht die Ausdrucksseite als solche, sondern meint Affixe und deren Abfolge innerhalb des Wortes, Alternationen, innere Flexion, Akzent, Ton, Nullmorpheme, sogar die Wortfolge (vgl. Vinogradov 1947: 32). Daraus folgt die Festlegung: “Wörter, die eine Form haben, sind grammatisch […]. Alle üb-

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rigen Wörter, die keine Form haben, sind nichtgrammatisch” (Vinogradov 1947: 31). Es ist offensichtlich, daß mit diesem weiten Verständnis von Form sehr disparate Phänomene unter einen Hut gebracht werden sollen, die vielleicht doch besser getrennt beschrieben (und benannt) würden. Die Grundfrage, ob Morphologie Formenbildung und Wortbildung umfasse, ist auch einige Jahre später noch Gegenstand ausführlicher Diskussion (Vinogradov 1952, Hrsg.). Interessanterweise engt Vinogradov die Formenbildung nicht auf die Verwendung der Endungen ein, sondern läßt auch Präfixe und Suffixe gelten ⫺ damit gehören dann die Aspektbildung und die Steigerungsformen der Adjektive im Russischen eindeutig zur Formenbildung (vgl. Vinogradov 1952: 110), während sie früher zur Wortbildung gerechnet wurden. Als Aufgabe der Morphologie bestimmt er “die Untersuchung der Regeln, Typen und Normen der Formenbildung im System der gegebenen Sprache” (Vinogradov 1952: 111). Charakteristisch für Vinogradov ist u. a. seine Beschäftigung mit den Wortarten, die er “lexikalisch-grammatische Kategorien von Wörtern” nennt, die über eine nebulöse “Gesamtbedeutung” verfügten (vgl. Vinogradov 1952, Hrsg.: 39), bei den Substantiven z. B. predmetnost’ ‘Gegenständlichkeit’. Diese Pseudo-Definition der Wortarten hat sich in der russischen Linguistik z. T. bis heute gehalten. Sie hat zur Folge, daß es in den entsprechenden Darstellungen weiterhin keine einheitliche Klassifikationsgrundlage, z. B. aufgrund morphologischer Merkmale, wie den jeweils vertretenen grammatischen Kategorien gibt, sondern mal dieses, mal jenes Kriterium verwendet wird (maskuline Substantive lassen sich z. B. morphologisch bestimmen, morphologisch inhomogen sind aber die nur semantisch zusammengehaltenen Zahlwörter, Präpositionen und Konjunktionen sind nur syntaktisch und semantisch zu bestimmen usw.). Auf Vinogradov geht die “Entdeckung” einer neuen Wortart des Russischen, nämlich der sog. kategorija sostojanija ‘Zustandskategorie’ zurück, in der bestimmte Wortformen, die in gleicher Funktion als gebundenes Prädikat auftreten, versammelt werden. Dazu gehören etwa mozˇno ‘es ist möglich, man darf [das und das tun]’, stydno ‘es ist schändlich [das und das zu tun]’ und ähnliche. Die Vinogradovsche Schule kann ohne Zweifel als etwas hausbacken und anti-for-

mal(istisch) charakterisiert werden, als Fortsetzer der vorstrukturalistischen, traditionellen Sprachwissenschaft, ohne sonderliches Interesse an Methoden, heuristischen Problemen oder klaren Definitionen. Charakteristischerweise findet man bei Vinogradov immer wieder Zitate von Klassikern der russischen Literatur, auch bei synchronen Argumenten schwenkt der Blick sofort immer wieder ab auf die Sprachgeschichte. In der Periode des “Tauwetters” kam es nach Stalin auch in der sowjetischen Sprachwissenschaft zu einem großen Umbruch, zu einer Neubestimmung der eigenen Position. Die Diskussion drehte sich ⫺ mit heftigem Pro und Contra ⫺ in der sog. “Strukturalismus-Debatte” um die Möglichkeit, die Ansätze des amerikanischen deskriptivistischen Strukturalismus, und damit Grundpositionen des Klassenfeindes, in die sowjetische Sprachwissenschaft übernehmen zu können. Diese Auseinandersetzung wurde vorwiegend in Form von Artikeln in der Zeitschrift Voprosy jazykoznanija [Fragen der Sprachwissenschaft] geführt, dem Zentralorgan der sowjetischen Sprachwissenschaft. Von den vielen Beiträgen sei hier nur auf A. A. Reforma´tskij (1957) verwiesen. Die Debatte endete mit einem pragmatischen Koexistenzmodell ⫺ in Rußland konnte wieder ohne Gefahr strukturalistisch (und später generativ) gearbeitet werden, aber natürlich wurde niemand verpflichtet, sich dieser Richtung anzuschließen. Nunmehr konnten folglich auch die Ideen und Ansätze der formalen Schule Fortunatovs wieder aufgegriffen werden ⫺ 1956 erschienen grundlegende Werke Fortunatovs erstmals im Druck. Zum Teil spricht man in diesem Zusammenhang auch von einer “Neuen Moskauer Schule”, deren wichtigster Vertreter Reformatskij (vgl. Reformatskij 1955; 1979) ist, P. S. Kuzneco´v ein weiteres bekanntes Mitglied, jedoch zunächst mit vorwiegend historischem Interesse (Kuznecov 1953; 1957; 1961; 1964). Reformatskijs Einführung in die Sprachwissenschaft wird auch heute noch mit Gewinn benutzt, zumal die späteren Auflagen dem Stand der linguistischen Diskussion immer wieder angepaßt wurden. Unbedingt richtig ist Van Schoonevelds Feststellung, daß nach der Neubestimmung der eigenen Position in den 50er Jahren erst mit den 60er Jahren russische Arbeiten erschienen sind, die internationale Bedeutung hatten und zur Entwicklung der Linguistik insgesamt beigetragen haben.

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Zu den Autoren, die mit ihren Beiträgen den Aufschwung der 60er Jahre vorbereitet haben, gehört u. a. A. S. Smirnı´ckij, der früh Fortunatovs Gedankengut wieder aufgegriffen hat. Zu seinen Leistungen gehört es, konsequent zwischen Wort (slovo) und Wortform (slovoforma) zu unterscheiden als der abstrakten Einheit des Lexikons und den konkreten Vorkommen im Text. Bei der Bestimmung des Wortes legt er auf seine Abgrenzbarkeit (vydelimost’), Ganzheitlichkeit (cel’nost’) und Geformtheit (oformlennost’) Wert ⫺ im Unterschied zu gebundenen Morphemen und zu Wortverbindungen, die über diese Merkmale nicht verfügten. Phonetische und semantische Kriterien zur Bestimmung eines Wortes gelten ihm hingegen als nicht hinreichend (Smirnickij 1952: 189f.; vgl. auch 1955; 1956). Ein weiterer erwähnenswerter Beitrag ist derjenige von V. M. Zˇirmu´nskij (1961), der sich mit der Bestimmung der Wortgrenzen beschäftigt, wobei er von der bekannten Schwierigkeit ausgeht, “das Wort” linguistisch zu definieren. Zˇirmunskij, der sich in der Tradition der Leningrader Schule Sˇcˇerbas sieht, formuliert folgende Arbeitshypothese: “Das Wort ist die kürzeste, nach ihrer Bedeutung und Form selbständige Einheit der Sprache” (Zˇirmunskij 1961: 4). Mit diesen beiden Kriterien will der das Wort einerseits gegen Wortverbindungen wie Krasnaja armija ‘Rote Armee’ abgrenzen, andererseits gegen Morpheme, für das “Minimum an formaler Selbständigkeit” (Zˇirmunskij 1961: 4), nämlich die Absonderbarkeit (vydeljaemost’), nicht gelte. Die Abgegrenztheit (otdel’nost’) und Ganzheitlichkeit (cel’nost’) des Wortes unterscheide es ebenfalls von Morphemen: Morpheme, Suffixe beispielsweise, können ja, etwa bei der Wortbildung, zwischen andere Morpheme gesetzt werden, Wörter nicht zwischen andere Wörter. Die trennbaren Präfixe des Deutschen, vgl. stehe auf, bleiben aber auch nach diesen Kriterien ein Grenzphänomen (Zˇirmunskij 1961: 6). Grundlegend ist für ihn freilich die semantische Einheit des Wortes, während die phonetische und morphologische Einheit des Wortes sprachabhängig als weitere Kriterien hinzukommen können (Zˇirmunskij 1961: 21). Analog zu den Segmentierungsproblemen von dt. Brombeere, engl. cranberry usw. ist auch in Rußland eine Auseinandersetzung um die Frage entstanden, ob und wie man derartige Wörter segmentieren dürfe. Diese Diskussion ist als “Schweinefleisch-Streit”

129 (spor o buzˇenine) bekanntgeworden (buzˇenina ‘Schweinefleisch’ ist eines der betreffenden Wörter). Einige Autoren sprechen in diesem Zusammenhang von “defekten Segmentierungen”, nennen die gebundenen unikalen Morpheme “Quasi-Morpheme” usw. Zu einigen Definitionsproblemen vgl. Ma´slov (1961). Mit der Übertragung phonologischer Deskriptionsmethoden auf die Morphologie hat sich A. V. Isacˇenko (1961; 1963) beschäftigt. Er ist von Herkunft und Ansatz eigentlich dem Umfeld der Prager Schule zuzurechnen, tritt mit den genannten Arbeiten zum Zeitpunkt ihres Erscheinens aber innerhalb der russischen sprachwissenschaftlichen Diskussion auf, weshalb sie auch an dieser Stelle erwähnt seien. Insbesondere geht es Isacˇenko um den Gegensatz merkmalhaft/merkmallos bzw. stark/schwach, den er auf die Analyse der Bedeutungen grammatischer Kategorien überträgt. So gilt ihm der Plural gegenüber dem Singular, das Präteritum gegenüber dem Präsens und der vollendete Aspekt gegenüber dem unvollendeten jeweils als merkmalhaft, weil mit diesen Bedeutungen positiv etwas ausgedrückt werde, während die unmarkierten Formen die entsprechenden Beziehungen einfach nur “unausgedrückt” ließen, also nicht etwa das Gegenteil behaupteten. Mit diesem Ansatz greift er Gedanken von Jakobson aus den 30Jahren wieder auf. Isacˇenkos Ausführungen provozieren und polarisieren bewußt. Unbestritten aber ist sein Verdienst, für selbstverständlich gehaltene Dinge infrage zu stellen und diffizile Beispiele aus dem Russischen zu finden, mit denen jede Beschreibung in irgendeiner Form zurechtkommen muß. Von dem großen Interesse an der Morphologie, das die 60er Jahre zweifellos geprägt hat, zeugen u. a. auch die Sammelbände Zˇirmunskij & Sunik (1963, Hrsg.) und Serebrennikov & Sunik (1965, Hrsg.), in denen einige klassische Arbeiten abgedruckt sind. Die häufigsten Themen, die an immer wieder anderen Sprachen diskutiert werden, sind dabei die Probleme der Bestimmung des Wortes und die Analyse agglutinierender Sprachen. Auf dem Gebiet der morphologischen Begriffsbildung und Theorie hat vor allem I. A. Mel’cˇu´k Bahnbrechendes geleistet, in der Stringenz seines morphologischen Beschreibungsansatzes sind die Arbeiten A. A. Zaliznja´ks zum Russischen zu einem paradigmatischen Vorbild geworden, an das bislang keine andere Arbeit heranreicht. Beide stehen

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in der Tradition, die über Reformatskij bis zu Fortunatov zurückreicht. Mel’cˇuk hat sich in zahlreichen Arbeiten damit beschäftigt, wichtige Bereiche der Morphologie begrifflich sauber zu konstruieren (vgl. Mel’cˇuk 1961; 1974; 1975; 1977; 1978). (Die nach seiner Emigration nach Kanada im Westen erschienenen Arbeiten gehören definitionsgemäß nicht mehr zum Gegenstand unserer Übersicht.) Von zentraler Bedeutung ist dabei sein Versuch, grammatische Kategorien zu definieren, denn eine genaue Definition dieses Bereiches schafft ja die Grundlage für die gesamte grammatische Beschreibung einer Sprache. Zwei logisch unabhängige Begriffspaare schaffen bei ihm die grundlegenden Klärungen. (a) Nach der Richtung ihres Verweises unterscheidet Mel’cˇuk (vgl. Mel’cˇuk 1963: 36f.) lexikalische und syntaktische Bedeutungskomponenten: syntaktische Bedeutungen verweisen ausschließlich auf andere Elemente der Rede im Sinne einer Decodierungssteuerung (vgl. Mel’cˇuk 1974: 97f.), lexikalische auch auf Objekte oder Sachverhalte außerhalb der Sprache. Andere Autoren nennen dieses Begriffspaar “nominative” und “syntaktische” Bedeutungen (Zaliznjak), eindeutiger wäre es, sie “syntaktische” und “nichtsyntaktische” Bedeutungen zu nennen. (b) Nach ihrem Status in der Grammatik unterscheidet Mel’cˇuk grammatische und nichtgrammatische Bedeutungen. Grammatische Bedeutungen sind diejenigen, die obligatorisch ausgedrückt werden müssen ⫺ hiermit greift Mel’cˇuk auf Gedankengut von Reformatskij zurück (vgl. Reformatskij 1947: 101). Wichtig ist dabei der relationale Bezug: grammatische Bedeutungen sind obligatorisch für eine bestimmte Wortart einer gegebenen Sprache, nicht in irgendeinem absoluten Sinne. Eine von den vier denkbaren Merkmalskombinationen, nämlich die nichtgrammatisch-nichtsyntaktische Bedeutung, wird oft auch “lexikalische” Bedeutung genannt (weshalb es besser ist, diesen Terminus hierfür zu reservieren). Auf dieser Grundlage lassen sich nunmehr grammatische Kategorien definieren: “Let us call a set of mutually exclusive (alternative) meanings a category. Then the category (‘mi’) will be grammatical in language L for the class K of linguistic elements if it meets simultaneously the three following requirements: 1/ Every element of K is always accompanied by an exponent of some ‘mi’. This takes care of the obligatory nature of (‘mi’).

2/ Class K is large enough ⫺ or, at least, it consists of very abstract and important words which can be described as ‘structural words’. This concerns universality, ‘over-allness’ of grammatical meanings. 3/ All ‘mi’ have standard, i.e. sufficiently regular, means of expression. This requirement reflects the ‘regularity’ of grammar.” (Mel’cˇuk 1974: 98 f.)

Diese Definition enthält zwar noch einigen Interpretationsspielraum, insbesondere bei den Bedingungen 2 und 3, und Details können noch weiter präzisiert werden, aber dies sind keine prinzipiellen Fragen mehr. Wichtig ist, daß grammatische Kategorien im Sinne dieser Definition nicht identisch mit Kategorien der Grammatik sind, unter denen alles mögliche verstanden werden kann. Auch bei allen typologischen Untersuchungen ist zu bedenken, daß grammatische Kategorien eben einzelsprachlich definiert sind und nicht vorschnell als universell reklamiert werden dürfen. Zudem müssen sich gleich benannte grammatische Kategorien zweier Sprachen weder von ihrem Inhalt noch von ihrer Struktur her decken. Mit seinen späteren Arbeiten hat Mel’cˇuk sein Ziel eines präzisen Begriffsapparats für die Morphologie konsequent weiter verfolgt. Sein Beitrag zum Verständnis des Suppletivismus (Mel’cˇuk 1972) wird an anderer Stelle dieses Handbuches behandelt, so daß an dieser Stelle ein entsprechender Verweis genügt (vgl. Art. 52). Sowohl in theoretischer wie in praktischer Hinsicht hat Zaliznjak die Methoden der Morphologie nachhaltig weiterentwickelt. Sowohl in verschiedenen Aufsätzen (Zaliznjak 1964b) wie in einer Monographie (Zaliznjak 1967) wird ⫺ vor der eigentlichen Beschreibung des Russischen ⫺ das grundlegende heuristische Problem behandelt, wie man Wortformen eine bestimmte grammatische Bedeutung zuschreiben kann. Zaliznjak verwendet dazu ein strenges, objektives Kriterium: Alle Wortformen, die in einen gegebenen diagnostischen Kontext, d. h. ein bestimmtes syntaktisches Schema passen, gehören zu einer Klasse. Bei einem solchen Vorgehen wäre es z. B. konsequent, die traditionelle Kategorie des Genus und die neue Kategorie der Belebtheit im Russischen zu sieben “Kongruenzklassen” zusammenzufassen. Bei der Segmentation in Stamm und Endungen sowie bei allen übrigen morphologischen Operationen gilt, daß Zaliznjaks Vorgehen von algorithmischer Präzision ist: Seine Sprachbeschreibung würde sich bei entsprechender Umformulierung ohne weiteres für die automatische Sprachverarbeitung eignen.

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Als weitere Besonderheit seines Ansatzes kann gelten, daß sich Zaliznjak ausdrücklich mit der Frage beschäftigt hat, wie man die verschiedenen Flexionsklassen, deren Bestand an Endungen (im Russischen) jeweils anders ist, eigentlich miteinander vergleichen kann, welches also das tertium comparationis ist. Zaliznjak setzt dazu ein “Etalon” an, ein ideales Muster mit maximalem Formenbestand und Formendifferenziertheit, mit dem dann alle konkret auftretenden Paradigmen verglichen werden können, etwa defektive Paradigmen, Singularia und Pluralia tantum, Wortformvarianten, überdifferenzierte Paradigmen usw. Mit seinem Grammatischen Wörterbuch des Russischen hat Zaliznjak (1977) Maßstäbe in der morphologischen Deskription gesetzt. Dieser neuartige Typus eines Wörterbuches ist in seinem Hauptteil ein rückläufiges Wörterbuch, bei dem zu jedem Eintrag nur einige grammatische Kürzel angegeben sind. Diese Kürzel verweisen, sofern sie nicht selbsterklärend sind, wie z. B. die Hinweise auf die Wortartzugehörigkeit, auf den Grammatikteil des Wörterbuches, der die ersten 140 Seiten umfaßt. Mit diesen beiden Komponenten ist die Grundlage für eine algorithmische Beschreibung der Flexionsmorphologie des Russischen gelegt, denn der Grammatikteil ist als Instruktion an den Nutzer formuliert, wie er bei einem beliebigen gegebenen Wort nach den angegebenen Kürzeln sämtliche Wortformen dieses Lexems bilden kann. Dabei werden sowohl die Flexionsendungen wie die morphonologischen Alternationen wie die Akzentparadigmen vollständig und eindeutig beschrieben. Die ungeheure Leistung dieses Wörterbuches, das etwa 100 000 Lexeme berücksichtigt, ist im slawischen Raum bisher nicht wieder erreicht. In den 60er Jahren hat sich ⫺ ebenfalls unter maßgeblicher Beteiligung Zaliznjaks ⫺ die sog. “Morphologische Akzentologiekonzeption” entwickelt, die sich in der Folgezeit zum Beschreibungsstandard in Lehr- und Handbüchern und den Akademiegrammatiken des Russischen durchsetzen konnte. In dieser Konzeption geht es darum, den Flexionsakzent zu beschreiben, der ja dann ein Problem darstellt, wenn der Akzent generell frei und dazu beweglich ist, wie dies eben im Russischen der Fall ist. Wie sich zeigen läßt, bieten die morphologischen Komponenten Stamm und Endung die besten Bezugspunkte, um die Wortposition des Akzentes zu bestimmen; er ruht entweder auf diesem oder auf jenem Bestandteil. Vergleicht man dann

131 die Wortformen eines gegebenen Paradigmas hinsichtlich der Akzentposition, so ergibt sich aus diesem Ansatz rein deduktiv die Existenz dreier Grundmuster: feste Stammbetonung, feste Endungsbetonung und die Wechselbetonung (die theoretisch alle möglichen konkreten Ausprägungen annehmen kann). Zusätzlich zur morphologischen Position des Akzentes erweist es sich gelegentlich als nötig, auch auf die Silbenebene als sekundäres Merkmal zurückzugreifen, und zwar dann, wenn sich der Akzent innerhalb des Stammes von einer Silbe auf eine andere verlagert, vgl. etwa o´zero-o ‘See-nom.sg’, oze¨r-a ‘Seenom.pl’. Auf Zaliznjak (1964 a) geht der Begriff der “bedingten Betonung” zurück, die aus zwei Gründen eingeführt wird, erstens, um die Zahl der Akzentmuster zu reduzieren, zweitens, um bei der Beschreibung der Akzentmuster von konkreten Morphen zu abstrahieren. Eine bedingte Betonung kann immer dann vorliegen, wenn der Gegensatz zwischen Stamm- und Endungsbetonung aufgehoben ist, weil eine der beiden Komponenten unsilbisch ist. Wandert z. B. bei Nullendung der Akzent (im Vergleich mit den anderen Formen des Paradigmas) auf den Stamm, so kann dem Wort dennoch bedingt eine Endungsbetonung zugeschrieben werden, wenn es ein entsprechendes Muster unter anderen morphologischen Bedingungen gibt. Vgl. etwa russ. ko´n-i, kon-e´j, kon-ja´m ‘Pferde’ (Nom., Gen. und Dat. Pl.), wo Stamm und Endung silbisch sind, mit gu´b-y, gub-Ø, gub-a´m ‘Lippen’ (Nom., Gen. und Dat. Pl.), wo im Genitiv eine Nullendung vorliegt. Unter Zuhilfenahme des Begriffes der bedingten Betonung wird beiden Lexeme das gleiche Akzentmuster zugeschrieben, da die Abweichung im Genitiv gub automatisch, allomorphisch, bedingt ist. Dieser morphologische Ansatz bei der Beschreibung des Flexionsakzentes hat sich für die Russistik als sehr fruchtbar erwiesen und ist in die Lehrbücher eingegangen; an anderen Sprachen ist sie noch nicht erprobt worden. Mit ihrem Russischen Morphemwörterbuch haben die Autoren Kuzneco´va & Efre´mova (1986) erstmals eine vollständige morphologische Beschreibung einer slawischen Sprache vorgelegt. Dieses umfangreiche Lexikon stellt den russischen Wortschatz nach insgesamt 5000 Wurzeln, Präfixen und Suffixen getrennt dar. Im Hauptteil enthält das Wörterbuch die Wurzeln des Russischen in allomorphischer Gestalt, wobei zu jeder Wurzel die Lexeme genannt werden, in denen

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sie auftritt. Mit anderen Worten: hier ist exemplarisch die strukturalistische Forderung nach einer Inventarisierung aller Spracheinheiten der grundlegenden Ebenen erfüllt. Alle Lexeme werden vollständig linear in Morphe zerlegt. In der ausführlichen Einleitung wird die Segmentierung in Morphe(me) ausdrücklich gegen eine Wortbildungsanalyse abgegrenzt. Zu einem etwas früheren Ansatz vgl. Oliverius (1976). Einen besonderen Interessens- und Arbeitsschwerpunkt stellt für russische Sprachwissenschaftler in den 60er und 70er Jahren die Erarbeitung eines Begriffs- und Methodeninventars für die Wortbildungsanalyse dar, nachdem sich diese in der Diskussion seit den 20er Jahren immer mehr als eigene Disziplin etabliert hatte. Als grundlegende Arbeit sei etwa Lopa´tin (1977) genannt. Auf russische Linguisten (namentlich A. M. Sucho´tin und M. V. Pano´v) geht dabei offenbar der Begriff Interfix zurück, der die terminologische Reihe von Präfix, Suffix und Postfix um ein weiteres Element ergänzen soll (vgl. Ze´mskaja 1964). Dieser Begriff ist jedoch umstritten, da die fraglichen Elemente nicht über den üblicherweise geforderten Zeichencharakter verfügen ⫺ gemeint sind damit nämlich u. a. die Elemente, die in der deutschen Grammatik schlicht “Bindevokal” heißen, desweiteren suffixähnliche Elemente, die bei der Wortbildung auftauchen, ohne phonologisch bedingt zu sein, ohne aber auch eine spezielle Bedeutung zu besitzen (“Verbindungsmorpheme” heißen sie bei Trubetzkoy). Als Beispiele mögen vodopad ‘Wasserfall’ (erste Wurzel vod- ‘Wasser’, Bindevokal -o-, zweite Wurzel -pad ‘Fall’) und vuz-ovsk-ij ‘Hochschul-’ dienen ⫺ bei letzterem ist das Segment -ov- aus euphonischen Gründen hinzugefügt, ohne selbst eine Bedeutung zu tragen (-sk- ist das Adjektivsuffix, -ij die Endung des Nom. Sg. Mask.). Andere Autoren sprechen hier auch von “leeren” Segmenten oder “Struktemen”. N. I. Sˇa´nskij (1968) hat in die Wortbildungsanalyse mehrere neue Begriffe eingeführt, bzw. sie systematisiert. Ausführlich behandelt er die uslozˇnenie (‘Komplexitätssteigerung’), d.i. die Verwandlung eines vorher nicht produktiven Stammes in einen produktiven, umgekehrt dazu die oprosˇcˇenie (‘Vereinfachung’), die diffuzija (‘Diffusion’), d.i. die wechselseitige Durchdringung von Morphemen und anderes mehr. Alle diese Phänomene, die man auch unter dem Rubrum ReAnalyse zusammenfassen kann, bekommt

man freilich vor allem bei einer diachronen Betrachtung in den Blick. In Leningrad hat sich in den letzten Jahrzehnten unter A. V. Bonda´rko eine “funktionale Grammatik” etabliert (vgl. Bondarko 1976), z. T. auch als “grammatische Semantik” bezeichnet. Sie betrachtet Sprache ähnlich wie die Prager Schule danach, welche Funktion sprachliche Mittel für das eigentliche kommunikative Ziel, nämlich die Übertragung einer bestimmten Information haben. Diesem eigentlich vielversprechenden Ansatz zum Trotz bieten die konkreten Analysen in morphologischer Hinsicht wenig Neues und hinterlassen insofern einen unbefriedigenden Eindruck. Ebenfalls in Leningrad (St. Petersburg) ist in den letzten Jahrzehnten um A. A. Cholodo´vicˇ (vgl. Cholodovicˇ (1969, Hrsg.); Cholodovicˇ 1979) und V. S. Chrako´vskij (vgl. Chrakovskij (1978, Hrsg.; 1992) eine Gruppe von Forschern entstanden, die sich vor allem mit typologischen Untersuchungen zu bestimmten grammatischen Kategorien hervorgetan haben. Neu ist an diesen Arbeiten vor allem die Untersuchungsperspektive, indem ausgehend von semantischen Größen (z. B. Kausativ, Resultativ, Iterativ, Imperativ) danach gefragt wird, welche Ausdrucksmittel eine gegebene Sprache besitzt, um den betreffenden Inhalt zu transportieren. Auf diese Weise lassen sich grammatische Kategorien bzw. Bedeutungen in einen größeren Kontent einbetten, denn gewöhnlich stehen den Sprechern einer Sprache außer grammatischen Mitteln (z. B. Tempus des Verbs) ja auch noch lexikalische Mittel (wie Temporaladverbien) oder syntaktische Mittel zur Verfügung. Zu einer guten Darstellung der Leningrader Typologieschule vgl. Hansen (1994). Weitere, insgesamt eher periphere Ansätze in der morphologischen Forschung bedienen sich mathematischer Methoden, entweder mengentheoretisch-logischer oder statistischer. In bezug auf den ersten Bereich ist in erster Linie an Arbeiten von A. V. Gla´dkij zu denken (Gladkij 1969; 1973), der sich mit der Definition von Kasus und Genus bei den Substantiven beschäftigt hat. Er definiert diese grammatische Kategorien als bestimmte minimale nichtleere Umgebungsmengen. Über das Arbeiten mit Kongruenzklassen hat dieser Ansatz eine gewisse Verwandtschaft zu Arbeiten von Zaliznjak (1964 a; 1964 b; 1967) und zu den Arbeiten von I. I. Re´vzin (1960; 1977). Die Entwicklung sprachstatistischer Verfahren, die in Rußland eine lange Tradition ha-

14. Osteuropa

ben, wurde nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg zusätzlich durch das aufkommende Interesse an der automatischen Sprachverarbeitung, insbesondere der automatischen Übersetzung, gefördert. In den 60er Jahren entwickelte die Leningrader Gruppe um N. D. Andre´ev spezielle algorithmische Methoden, mit denen die Flexionsmorphologie einer Sprache modelliert werden sollte, wobei Textkorpora als Ausgangsmaterial dienen (vgl. auch Nikola´eva 1962). Diese recht komplexen Methoden, die sich nur auf die Regelmäßigkeiten der Ausdrucksebene (z. B. auf Übergangswahrscheinlichkeiten auf der Ebene von Graphemen und Graphemfolgen) stützen, können hier nicht im einzelnen referiert werden. Es möge der Hinweis genügen, daß mit diesen Methoden, die auf eine ganze Reihe von Sprachen angewendet wurden (vgl. Andreev 1965, Hrsg.), die “normale” Segmentierung eines Wortes in Morpheme in der Regel bestätigt wird (Andreev 1967: 8), weil sich die Flexionsendungen sehr schnell als immer wiederkehrende Sequenzen erkennen lassen. Auch die Flexionstypen einzelner Test-Sprachen wurden mit diesem Algorithmus ermittelt (Russisch, Englisch). Rückblickend läßt sich feststellen, daß in den 60er Jahren die Morphologie in Rußland eine Blütezeit erlebte: Ihre wichtigsten theoretischen Beiträge stammen aus dieser Zeit, und in dieser Zeit dominierte sie auch die linguistische Diskussion insgesamt. Auf dieser Grundlage aufbauend, konnten in den 70er Jahren wegweisende deskriptive Arbeiten veröffentlicht werden ⫺ die Zeit war reif für morphologisch orientierte Lexika und zusammenfassende, resümierende Darstellungen (vgl. etwa Achma´nova 1966; Buly´gina 1977; Kubrja´kova 1974). Nachdem das Arsenal an Analysemethoden und Deskriptionsbegriffen für die Ausdrucksseite nun mehr oder weniger als gegeben betrachtet werden kann, scheint sich die Diskussion in jüngster Zeit mehr auf die semantischen Aspekte der Morphologie verlagert zu haben.

3.

Prager Schule

Die Prager Schule hat sich der Morphologie nicht in gleicher Weise wie der Phonologie und der Morphonologie gewidmet, was man u. a. aus der Tatsache ersehen kann, daß Vachek (1964, Hrsg.) die Phonologie der Prager Schule auf 39 Seiten darstellt, sich für Morphonologie und Morphologie zusammen je-

133 doch mit neun Seiten begnügt. Der Abschnitt “Morphologie” in seiner Auswahlbibliographie (Vachek 1966: 173f.) verzeichnet in erster Linie einzelsprachliche Studien und Beschreibungen, in denen es vorwiegend um ausgewählte Probleme der Flexion in einigen slawischen Sprachen (Tschechisch, Slowakisch, Russisch) geht. Dennoch gibt es selbstverständlich auch einige Beiträge allgemeinerer Natur, die hier berücksichtigt werden sollen. V. Skalicˇkas Büchlein Zur ungarischen Grammatik (Skalicˇka 1935) trägt einen Titel, der über den wahren Inhalt nicht gut Auskunft gibt, denn es beinhaltet über weite Strecken allgemeine Überlegungen zum Stand der Typologie und zu Gegenstand und Grundeinheiten der Grammatik, insbesondere zur fraglichen Rolle des Morphems. Diese Passagen sind unter dem Titel “Morphem und Sema” später separat abgedruckt worden (vgl. Skalicˇka 1964). Skalicˇka problematisiert in seiner Abhandlung die Verwendung des Morphems als Grundeinheit der Grammatik, wenn es nach Baudouin als kleinste, nicht weiter in morphologische Einheiten zerlegbare Einheit definiert werde: “Für die Grammatik kann das Morphem als unteilbares Ganzes nicht gelten” (Skalicˇka 1935: 13). Als Beispiel dienen ihm Formenpaare wie foot⫺feet, tooth⫺ teeth, die auf der Inhaltsebene zwei Komponenten aufwiesen (lexikalische Bedeutung und Numerus), die jedoch auf der Ausdrucksseite nicht weiter linear segmentiert seien. Die Elemente der Inhaltsseite nennt Skalicˇka Sema (Pl. Semen) und sagt: “Das Sema ist meistens, doch nicht immer, durch eine ununterbrochene Phonemreihe charakterisiert, d. h. es ist gewöhnlich das, was man als ‘Morphem’ bezeichnet” (Skalicˇka 1935: 13). Das Morphem im klassischen Verständnis wäre danach nur ein Spezialfall aus einer größeren Menge von Möglichkeiten, wie sich Inhalts- und Ausdrucksseite zueinander verhalten können. Semen dürfen jedoch nicht als bloßes Konzept mißverstanden werden: “Jedoch kein Sema kann ohne seine Form existieren. Es ist mit immer demselben formalen Ausdruck oder mit mehreren, nach bestimmten Regeln wechselnden Ausdrücken verbunden” (Skalicˇka 1935: 5). Ferner zeigt Skalicˇka an slawischen Beispielen, daß ⫺ wegen der vielfältigen Konsonantenalternationen im Stammauslaut ⫺ der zu erwartende Kasus und Numerus oft schon am Stamm zu “erkennen” (Skalicˇka 1935: 14) seien, die Morphemgrenze also auch hierbei überschritten werde. Nach der Zahl

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der ausgedrückten grammatischen Bedeutungen spricht der Autor von “einsematischen” bzw. “zweisematischen Morphemen” (Skalicˇka 1935: 14), was u. a. den in agglutinierenden bzw. flektierenden Sprachen üblichen Endungen entspricht. Am Beispiel des Ungarischen demonstriert er ferner die Schwierigkeit, Nullmorpheme eindeutig zu bestimmen. ⫺ Skalicˇkas terminologische Beschränkung von Morphem auf die Ausdrucksseite und die Verwendung von Sem für die Inhaltsseite hat sich nicht allgemein durchgesetzt; für letztere findet man häufiger die Bezeichnung Grammeme. Zu den Klassikern gehört auch R. Jakobsons Aufsatz zu den Kasus (Jakobson 1936), in dem er den funktionalen Ansatz der Prager Schule auf die Untersuchung dieser grammatischen Kategorie anwendet, bei der die Analyse der nichtsyntaktischen Bedeutungsanteile ja besonders schwierig ist. B. Trnka (1932) versucht in seinem Aufsatz, das Spektrum der morphologischen Untersuchungsansätze von der vom Wort geprägten üblichen Ausgangsbasis auf die Satzperspektive zu erweitern. Immer wenn formale Sprachmittel eine morphologische Funktion ausdrücken, spricht er von “morphologischen Exponenten”. Was dabei als morphologisch zu verstehen ist, faßt er getreu seiner Zielsetzung weit auf, denn sein erstes Beispiel betrifft die Wortstellung im Englischen (die erkennen lasse, welches Wort z. B. ein direktes Objekt sei), während andere, stärker flektierende Sprachen dies nicht über die Wortstellung ausdrückten (sondern diese für andere Zwecke, z. B. stilistische Unterschiede, ausnützten). Zu den möglichen morphologischen Exponenten rechnet er konsequent neben den synthetischen Morphemen außerdem phonologische Mittel (Umlaut), analytische Mittel (Wortstellung, Hilfswörter, Kongruenz) und komplexe Wörter. Er betont, daß ein einzelnes alternierendes Glied für sich betrachtet keinen morphologischen Wert besitze, sondern erst die gesamte Alternationsreihe diesen Wert gewinne. Auch wenn er diesen Begriff hier nicht nennt, ist dabei natürlich an die Morphonologie der Prager Schule zu denken. Nach den für die betreffenden Sprachen typischen morphologischen Exponenten klassifiziert Trnka sie als analytische oder isolierende Sprachen (Chinesisch), alternierende Sprachen (Semitisch), synthetische Sprachen ohne Alternationen (Bantu, Ural-Altaisch) und Sprachen mit

kombinierten morphologischen Exponenten (indogermanische Sprachen). Zur weiteren Entwicklung der morphologischen Sprachklassifikation (die in die quantitative Typologie einmündet) vgl. Art. 117. Auf diesem Gebiet ⫺ das heute im übrigen nicht mehr einer geographisch bestimmbaren Schule zugeordnet werden kann ⫺liegt sicher der nachhaltigste Einfluß der Prager Schule im Bereich der Morphologie. Von den jüngeren Mitgliedern bzw. Nachfahren der Prager Schule hat sich v. a. Isacˇenko mit morphologischen Problemen beschäftigt ⫺ er wurde schon oben (s. 2) in anderem Zusammenhang behandelt.

4.

Polen

Mit einem gewissen Recht kann natürlich Baudouin de Courtenay (s. 2) auch der Geschichte der polnischen Sprachwissenschaft zugerechnet werden. Im vorliegenden Beitrag wurde er unter Rußland behandelt, da er lange in Rußland gelehrt hat und eine der wichtigen Schulen der russischen Sprachwissenschaft auf ihn zurückgeht. Manchmal wird Baudouin auch als Wegbereiter einer “Warschauer Schule” der Sprachwissenschaft bezeichnet, zu der H. Ułaszyn und St. Szober als wichtigste Mitglieder gezählt werden. Ułaszyn wiederum hat ja auch Verbindungen zur Prager Schule, in deren Publikationen er seinen bekannten Artikel zum Morphonem veröffentlicht hat. Von den neueren Beiträgen polnischer Sprachwissenschaftler seien an dieser Stelle die Arbeiten von T. Milewski erwähnt, die Fragen der allgemeinen Sprachwissenschaft und Typologie gewidmet sind. Milewski (1972; 1973) baut sein Sprachmodell von unten her, d. h. von den Phonemen her, schichtweise auf, wobei jedoch die Morphemebene in der Reihe phonologisches System-semantisches System-syntaktisches System-stilistisches System fehlt. Morpheme werden (als bedeutungstragende Einheiten) beim semantischen Subsystem behandelt und folgendermaßen bestimmt: “We will define the morpheme as the smallest set of alternating series (morphonemes) possessing a distinct constant function in language communication; the alternating forms of the morpheme will be called its variants.” (Milewski 1973: 64)

Mit dieser Definition versucht er den speziellen slawischen Verhältnissen gerecht zu werden, die durch eine große Zahl konsonanti-

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14. Osteuropa

scher wie vokalischer Stammalternationen gekennzeichnet sind. An anderer Stelle heißt es: “As we see, the morpheme is characterized, not by phonemes, for they may change, but by an alternating series, or morphonemes.” (Milewski 1973: 63)

Ob es wirklich notwendig ist, von derart wenig phonematischer Konstanz bei Morphen auszugehen, mag bezweifelt werden, denn der Unterschied zwischen Allomorphen und suppletiven Elementen ist ja gerade so definiert, daß bei Allomorphen bestimmte Phonemfolgen gleich bleiben. Auf Morphemen aufbauend, werden Wörter definiert, und zwar als Einheiten der Syntax: “A syntactic member is a set of morphemes which, as a whole, function as the sign for a certain phenomenon, at the same time defining its own position within the sentence […]. A syntactic member is a word when it is delimited by means of certain generally applied delimiting signals.” (Milewski 1973: 64)

Auch diese Definition kann nicht unbesehen übernommen werden, denn als Wörter gelten nach Milewski nur Einheiten, die in Stamm und Endung gegliedert werden können. Präpositionen, Konjunktionen und Partikel nennt er hingegen ausdrücklich “free morphemes which are neither independent words nor parts of other words” (Milewski 1973: 65). Denkt man an Mel’cˇuks Begriffsklärung zu grammatischen und nichtgrammatischen, syntaktischen und nichtsyntaktischen Bedeutungen, so reserviert Milewski den Wortbegriff für Elemente mit nichtgrammatischer, nichtsyntaktischer Bedeutung ⫺ unserer Meinung nach eine unnötige Einengung.

5.

Weiterführende Literaturhinweise

Über die Geschichte der linguistischen, nicht nur der morphologischen Forschung in Rußland bzw. in Osteuropa informieren mehrere Quellen in der einen oder anderen Weise; einige sollen hier kurz genannt werden. Die Geschichte der Sprachwissenschaft in Rußland stellt Bere¨zin (1975; 1976) dar, der jedoch kein Anhänger der Moskauer oder Formalen Schule ist. Über die erste Hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts informiert Smirno´v (1971). Etliche ausgewählte biographische Hinweise findet man bei Fı´lin (Filin 1979, Hrsg.), die linguistischen Gegenstände werden bei Karau´lov (1997, Hrsg.) ausführlicher dargestellt. Ein bibliographisches Lexikon ostslawischer

Sprachwissenschaftler hat Bulacho´v (1976) vorgelegt. Wichtige Schulen, Personen und die Zeit des Marrismus werden von BrucheSchulz (1984) behandelt. Ein großes russischsprachiges linguistisches Lexikon ⫺ und auch das einzige seiner Art ⫺ ist Ja´rceva Hrsg. (1990). Die slavische linguistische Terminologie listet Jedlicˇka (1977⫺1979, Hrsg.) mit englischen, französischen und deutschen Äquivalenten auf; die Herausbildung der älteren russischen grammatischen Terminologie behandelt Biedermann (1978). Geschichte, aktuelle Tendenzen und landesspezifische Besonderheiten der linguistischen Forschung Osteuropas behandelt Sebeok (Sebeok 1963, Hrsg.), einen Teilaspekt der Linguistik Papp (1966).

6.

Zitierte Literatur

Achmanova, Ol’ga S. (1966), Fonologija, morfonologija, morfologija. Moskva: Izd. Mosk. un-ta. [engl. Übers. (1971), Phonology, Morphonology, Morphology. The Hague: Mouton] Andreev, Nikolaj D. (1965, Hrsg.), Statistiko-kombinatornoe modelirovanie jazykov [Statistisch-kombinatorische Modellierung von Sprachen]. Moskva, Leningrad: Nauka Andreev, Nikolaj D. (1967), Statistiko-kombinatornye metody v teoreticˇeskom i prikladnom jazykovedenii [Statistisch-kombinatorische Methoden in der theoretischen und angewandten Sprachwissenschaft]. Leningrad: Nauka Baudouin de Courtenay, Jan (1974⫺76), Dzieła wybrane, Bd. 1⫺2 [Ausgewählte Werke]. Warszawa: Pan´stwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe Berezin, Fedor M. (1975), Istorija lingvisticˇeskich ucˇenij. Moskva: Vyssˇaja sˇkola [dt. Übers. (1980), Geschichte der sprachwissenschaftlichen Theorien. Übers. und hrsg. v. Hans Zikmund. Leipzig: Bibliographisches Institut] Berezin, Fedor M. (1976), Russkoe jazykoznanie konca XIX-nacˇala XX veka [Die russische Sprachwissenschaft am Ende des 19. und zu Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts]. Moskva: Nauka Biedermann, Johann (1978), “Zur Entwicklung der russischen grammatischen Terminologie (Wortarten und Kategorien)”. Zeitschrift für Slavische Philologie 40.1, 77⫺128 Bogorodickij, Vasilij A. (1901), Ocˇerki po jazykovedeniju i russkomu jazyku [Studien zur Sprachwissenschaft und zum Russischen]. Kazan’: Izd. un-ta. [41939 Moskva] Bondarko, Aleksandr V. (1976), Teorija morfologicˇeskich kategorij [Theorie der morphologischen Kategorien]. Leningrad: Nauka Bruche-Schulz, Gisela (1984), Russische Sprachwissenschaft: Wissenschaft im historisch-politischen

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Prozeß des vorsowjetischen und sowjetischen Rußland. Tübingen: Narr (Linguistische Arbeiten 151) Bulachov, Michail G. (1976), Vostocˇnoslavjanskie jazykovedy: Biobibliograficˇeskij slovar’, Bd. I [Ostslawische Sprachwissenschaftler: Ein biobliographisches Wörterbuch]. Minsk: BGU Bulygina, Tat’jana V. (1977), Problemy teorii morfologicˇeskich modelej [Probleme der Theorie morphologischer Modelle]. Moskva: Nauka

Hansen, Björn (1994), Typologie: Ein Forschungsbericht für Slavisten. München: Sagner (Specimina Philologiae Slavicae 103) Isacˇenko, Aleksandr V. (1961), “O grammaticˇeskom znacˇenii” [Zur grammatischen Bedeutung]. Voprosy jazykoznanija 1, 28⫺43 Isacˇenko, Aleksandr V. (1963), “Binarnost’, privativnye oppozicii i grammaticˇeskie znacˇenija” [Binarität, privative Oppositionen und grammatische Bedeutungen]. Voprosy jazykoznanija 2, 39⫺56

Buslaev, Fedor I. (1858), Opyt istoricˇeskoj grammatiki russkogo jazyka [Versuch einer historischen Grammatik der russischen Sprache]. Moskva: Gos. ucˇ.-ped. izd. Min. prosvesˇcˇenija RSFSR

Jakobson, Roman (1936), “Beitrag zur allgemeinen Kasuslehre”. Travaux du Cercle Linguistique de Prague 6, 240⫺288

Cholodovicˇ, Aleksandr A. (1969, Hrsg.), Tipologija kauzativnych konstrukcij: Morfologicˇeskij kauzativ [Typologie kausativer Konstruktionen: Der morphologische Kausativ]. Leningrad: Nauka

Jarceva, Viktoria N. (1990, Hrsg.), Lingvisticˇeskij e˙nciklopedicˇeskij slovar’ [Linguistisches enyklopädisches Wörterbuch]. Moskva: Sovetskaja E˙nciklopedija

Cholodovicˇ, Aleksandr A. (1979), Problemy grammaticˇeskoj teorii [Probleme einer Theorie der Grammatik]. Leningrad: Nauka Chrakovskij, Viktor S. (1978, Hrsg.), Problemy teorii grammaticˇeskogo zaloga [Probleme einer Theorie der grammatischen Diathese]. Leningrad: Nauka

Jedlicˇka, Alois (1977⫺79, Hrsg.), Slovnı´k slovanske´ lingvisticke´ terminologie. Dictionary of Slavonic Linguistics Terminology, Bd. 1⫺2. Praha: Academia Karaulov, Jurij N. (1997, Hrsg.), Russkij jazyk: E˙nciklopedija [Die Russische Sprache: Enzyklopädie], 2., überarb. und erg. Aufl. Moskva: Bol’sˇaja Rossijskaja E˙nciklopedija

Chrakovskij, Viktor S. (1992, Hrsg.), Tipologija imperativnych konstrukcij [Typologie der Imperativkonstruktionen]. St. Petersburg: Nauka Filin, Fedot P. (1979, Hrsg.), Russkij jazyk: E˙nciklopedija [Die Russische Sprache: Enzyklopädie]. Moskva: Sovetskaja E˙nciklopedija

Krusˇevskij, Nikolaj V. [Kruszewski, Nikołaj] (1883), Ocˇerk nauki o jazyke [Abriß der Wissenschaft von der Sprache]. [Nachdruck in: Kruszewski, Nikołaj (1995), Writings in General Linguistics, hrsg. mit e. Einl. v. Konrad Koerner. Amsterdam: Benjamins]

Fortunatov, Filipp F. (1956⫺57), Izbrannye trudy, Bd. 1⫺2 [Ausgewählte Werke]. Moskva: Gos. ucˇ.ped. izd. Min. prosvesˇcˇenija RSFSR

Kubrjakova, Elena S. (1974), Osnovy morfologicˇeskogo analiza [Grundlagen der morphologischen Analyse]. Moskva: Nauka

Gasparov, Boris M. (1970), “Lingvisticˇeskaja koncepcija Moskovskoj sˇkoly i problema strukturnogo opisanija jazyka” [Die linguistische Konzeption der Moskauer Schule und das Problem der strukturellen Sprachbeschreibung]. In: Trudy po russkoj i slavjanskoj filologii 16, Serija lingvisticˇeskaja. Tartu: o. V., 173⫺207

Kuznecov, Petr S. (1953), Istoricˇeskaja grammatika russkogo jazyka: Morfologija [Historische Grammatik des Russischen: Morphologie]. Moskva: Gos. un-t.

Gasparov, Boris M. (1975), “Principy postroenija morfologicˇeskoj klassifikacii slov” [Prinzipien der Konstruktion morphologischer Wortklassifikationen]. In: Trudy po russkoj i slavjanskoj filologii 23, Serija lingvisticˇeskaja. Tartu: o. V., 64⫺93

Kuznecov, Petr S. (1961), O principach izucˇenija grammatiki [Zu den Prinzipien grammatischer Untersuchungen]. Moskva: Izd. Mosk. un-ta.

Gladkij, Aleksandr V. (1969), “K opredeleniju ponjatija padezˇa i roda susˇcˇestvitel’nogo” [Zur Definition des Kasus- und des Genusbegriffs beim Substantiv]. Voprosy jazykoznanija 2, 110⫺123 Gladkij, Aleksandr V. (1973), “Popytka formal’nogo opredelenija ponjatija padezˇa i roda susˇcˇestvitel’nogo” [Versuch der formalen Definition des Kasus- und des Genusbegriffs beim Substantiv]. In: Zaliznjak, Andrej A. (Hrsg.), Problemy grammaticˇeskogo modelirovanija. Moskva: Nauka, 24⫺53 Gvozdev, Aleksandr N. (1960), “O zvukovom sostave morfem” [Über den Lautbestand der Morpheme]. Voprosy jazykoznanija 3, 28⫺41

Kuznecov, Petr S. (1957), Ocˇerki istoricˇeskoj morfologii russkogo jazyka [Studien zur historischen Morphologie des Russischen]. Moskva: Nauka

Kuznecov, Petr S. (1964), “Opyt formal’nogo opredelenija slova” [Versuch einer formalen WortDefinition]. Voprosy jazykoznanija 5, 75⫺77 Kuznecova, Ariadna I. & Efremova, Tat’jana F. (1986), Slovar’ morfem russkogo jazyka: Okolo 52 000 slov [Morphemwörterbuch des Russischen: ca. 52 000 Wörter]. Moskva: Russkij jazyk Lomonosov, Michail V. (1755), Rossijskaja grammatika [Reußische Grammatik]. Moskva: Imperatorska Akad. Nauk. Lopatin, Vladimir V. (1977), Russkaja slovoobrazovatel’naja morfemika: Problemy i principy opisanija [Derivationsmorphemik des Russischen: Probleme und Analyseprinzipien]. Moskva: Nauka

14. Osteuropa Maslov, Jurij S. (1961), “O nekotorych raschozˇdenijach v ponimanii termina ‘morfema’ ” [Über einige Differenzen im Verständnis des Terminus Morphem]. Ucˇenye zapiski LGU, No. 301, serija filol. nauk, vyp. 60, Leningrad, 140⫺152 Mel’cˇuk, Igor’ A. (1961), “O nekotorych tipach znacˇenij”. In: Achmanova, O. S. & Mel’cˇuk, I. A. & Paducˇeva, E. V. & Frumkina, R. M.: O tocˇnych metodach issledovanija jazyka. Moskva: Izd. un-ta., 33⫺39 [engl. Übers. (1963)] Mel’cˇuk, Igor’ A. (1963), “Several Types of Linguistic Meanings”. In: Akhmanova, O. S. & Mel’cˇuk, I. A. & Paducˇeva, E. V. & Frumkina, R. M.: Exact Methods in Linguistic Research. Berkeley, Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 36⫺43 Mel’cˇuk, Igor’ A. (1972), “O suppletivizme” [Über den Suppletivismus]. In: Grigor’ev, Viktor P. (Hrsg.), Problemy strukturnoj lingvistiki 1971, Moskva: Nauka, 396⫺438 Mel’cˇuk, Igor’ A. (1974), “Grammatical Meanings in Interlinguas for Automatic Translation and the Concept of Grammatical Meaning”. In: Rozencvejg, Viktor Ju. (Hrsg.), Machine Translation and Applied Linguistics, Bd. I, Frankfurt/M.: Athenaion, 95⫺113 Mel’cˇuk, Igor’ A. (1975), “Opyt razrabotki fragmenta sistemy ponjatij i terminov dlja morfologii (k formalizacii jazyka lingvistiki)” [Versuch der Erarbeitung eines Fragments eines Systems von Begriffen und Termini für die Morphologie]. Semiotika i informatika 6, 5⫺50 Mel’cˇuk, Igor’ A. (1977), “Le cas”. Revue des E´tudes Slaves 50, 5⫺36 Mel’cˇuk, Igor’ A. (1978), “K postroeniju sistemy ponjatij dlja morfologii” [Zum Aufbau eines Begriffssystems für die Morphologie]. In: Birnbaum, Henrik (Hrsg.), Studia linguistica Alexandro Vasilii filio Issatschenko a collegis amicisque oblata, Lisse: de Ridder, 267⫺287 Milewski, Tadeusz (1972), Je˛zykoznawstwo [Sprachwissenschaft]. Warszawa: PWN Milewski, Tadeusz (1973), Introduction to the Study of Language. The Hague: Paris, Warszawa: Mouton (Janua Linguarum Series Didactica 7) Nekrasov, Nikolaj P. (1865), O znacˇenii form russkogo glagola [Zur Bedeutung der Formen des russischen Verbs]. St. Petersburg: Paul’son [Nachdruck (1984), Leipzig: Zentralantiquariat der DDR] Nikolaeva, Tat’jana M. (1962), “Opyt algoritmicˇeskoj morfologii russkogo jazyka” [Versuch einer algorithmischen Morphologie des Russischen]. In: Molosˇkaja, Tatjana N. (Hrsg.), Strukturno-tipologicˇeskie issledovanija. Moskva: Nauka, 25⫺45 Oliverius, Zdeneˇk F. (1976), Morfemy russkogo jazyka [Die Morpheme des Russischen]. Praha: Univ. Karlova´ Papp, Ferenc (1966), Mathematical Linguistics in the Soviet Union. The Hague: Mouton (Janua Linguarum Series Minor 40)

137 Pospelov, Nikolaj S. (1955), “Sootnosˇenie mezˇdu grammaticˇeskimi kategorijami i cˇastjami recˇi” [Das Verhältnis von grammatischen Kategorien und Wortarten]. In: Vinogradov, Viktor V. (Hrsg.), Voprosy grammaticˇeskogo stroja. Moskva: Nauka, AN SSSR, 74⫺91 Potebnja, Aleksandr A. (1874⫺1941), Iz zapisok po russkoj grammatike [Aus den Aufzeichnungen zur russischen Grammatik], Bd. 1⫺4, Moskva: Prosvesˇcˇenie Reformatskij, Aleksandr A. (1947), Vvedenie v jazykovedenie [Einführung in die Sprachwissenschaft]. Moskva: Prosvesˇcˇenie [41967; 51996] Reformatskij, Aleksandr A. (1955), “O sootnosˇenii fonetiki i grammatiki (morfologii)” [Zum Verhältnis von Phonetik und Grammatik (Morphologie]). In: Vinogradov, Viktor V. (Hrsg.), Voprosy grammaticˇeskogo stroja. Moskva: AN SSSR, 92⫺112 ˇ to takoe Reformatskij, Aleksandr A. (1957), “C strukturalizm?” [Was ist Strukturalismus?]. Voprosy jazykoznanija 6, 25⫺37 Reformatskij, Aleksandr A. (1979), Ocˇerki po fonologii, morfonologii i morfologii [Studien zur Phonologie, Morphonologie und Morphologie]. Moskva: Nauka Revzin, Isaak I. (1960), “O logicˇeskoj forme lingvisticˇeskich opredelenij (na primere opredelenija morfemy)” [Über die logische Form linguistischer Definitionen (am Beispiel der Morphem-Definition)]. In: Primenenie logiki v nauke i technike. Moskva: o. V., 140⫺148 Revzin, Isaak I. (1977), Sovremennaja strukturnaja lingvistika: Problemy i metody [Moderne strukturalistische Sprachwissenschaft: Probleme und Methoden]. Moskva: Nauka Sˇanskij, Nikolaj M. (1968), Ocˇerki po russkomu slovoobrazovaniju [Studien zur russischen Wortbildung]. Moskva: Gos. un-t. Sˇcˇerba, Lev V. (1928), “O cˇastjach recˇi v russkom jazyke” [Über die Wortarten im Russischen]. Russkaja recˇ’, Novaja serija 2, 5⫺27 Schooneveld, Cornelis H. van (1963), “Morphemics”. In: Sebeok (Hrsg.), 22⫺34 Sebeok, Thomas A. (1963, Hrsg.), Current Trends in Linguistics, Bd. I: Soviet and East European Linguistics. The Hague: Mouton [21980] Serebrennikov, Boris A. & Sunik, Orest P. (1965, Hrsg.), Morfologicˇeskaja tipologija i problema klassifikacii jazykov [Die morphologische Typologie und das Problem der Sprachklassifikation]. Moskva, Leningrad: Nauka Skalicˇka, Vladimir (1935), Zur ungarischen Grammatik. Praha: Filosoficˇka fakulta Univ. Karlova´ Skalicˇka, Vladimir (1964), “Morphem und Sema”. In: Vachek (Hrsg.), 320⫺328 Smirnickij, Aleksandr I. (1952), “K voprosu o slove (Problema ‘otdel’nosti slova’)” [Zum Problem des Wortes (Das Problem der “Abgegrenzt-

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heit des Wortes”)]. In: Aleksandrov, Georgij F. (Hrsg.) Voprosy teorii i istorii jazyka v svete trudov I. V. Stalina po jazykoznaniju. Moskva: AN SSSR, 182⫺203 Smirnickij, Aleksandr I. (1955), “Leksicˇeskoe i grammaticˇeskoe v slove” [Das Lexikalische und das Grammatische am Wort]. In: Vinogradov, Viktor V. (Hrsg.), Voprosy grammaticˇeskogo stroja. Moskva: AN SSSR, 11⫺53 Smirnickij, Aleksandr I. (1956), “Analiticˇeskie formy” [Analytische Formen]. Voprosy jazykoznanija 2, 41⫺52 Smirnov, S. (1971), “F. I. Buslaev i russkoe jazykoznanie pervoj poloviny XIX veka” [F. I. Buslaev und die russische Sprachwissenschaft der ersten Hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts]. Trudy po russkoj i slavjanskoj filologii 20, Serija lingivisticˇeskaja. Tartu: o. V., 3⫺203 Trnka, Bohumil (1932), “Some Thoughts on Structural Morphology”. In: Charisteria Guil. Mathesio … oblata. Prag: Prazˇky´ linguisticky´ krouzˇek, 57⫺ 61 [Nachdruck in: Vachek (1964, Hrsg.), 329⫺334] Vachek, Josef (1964, Hrsg.), A Prague School Reader in Linguistics. Bloomington, London: Indiana Univ. Press [21966] Vachek, Josef (1966), The Linguistic School of Prague: An Introduction to its Theory and Practice. Bloomington, London: Indiana Univ. Press Vinogradov, Viktor V. (1938), Sovremennyj russkij jazyk [Die moderne russische Sprache], Bd. 1⫺2. Moskva: Ucˇ.-ped. izd. Vinogradov, Viktor V. (1947), Russkij jazyk: Grammaticˇeskoe ucˇenie o slove [Die russische Sprache: Die grammatische Lehre vom Wort]. Moskva, Leningrad: Gos. ucˇ-ped. izd. Min. Prosv. RSFSR Vinogradov, Viktor V. (1952), “Slovoobrazovanie v ego otnosˇenii k grammatike russkogo i rodstvennych jazykov)” [Die Wortbildung in ihrem Verhältnis zu Grammatik und Lexikologie (am Beispiel

des Russischen und verwandter Sprachen)]. In: Aleksandrov, Georgij F. (Hrsg.), Voprosy teorii i istorii jazyka v svete trudov I. V. Stalina po jazykoznaniju. Moskva: AN SSSR, 99⫺152 Vinogradov, Viktor V. (1952, Hrsg.), Sovremennyi russkij jazyk: morfologija (Kurs lekcij) [Das heutige Russisch: Morphologie (Eine Vorlesungsreihe)]. Moskva: Izd. Mosk. un-ta. Zaliznjak, Andrej A. (1964 a), “ ‘Uslovnoe udarenie’ v russkom slovoizmenenii” [Die “bedingte Betonung” in der russischen Flexion]. Voprosy jazykoznanija 1, 14⫺29 Zaliznjak, Andrej A. (1964 b), “K voprosu o grammaticˇeskich kategorijach roda i odusˇevlennosti v sovremennom russkom jazyke” [Zur Frage der Kategorien Genus und Belebtheit im modernen Russisch]. Voprosy jazykoznanija 4, 25⫺40 Zaliznjak, Andrej A. (1967), Russkoe imennoe slovoizmenenie [Die russische Nominalflexion]. Moskva: Nauka Zaliznjak, Andrej A. (1977), Grammaticˇeskij slovar’ russkogo jazyka: Slovoizmenenie [Grammatisches Wörterbuch der russischen Sprache: Formenbildung]. Moskva: Russkij jazyk [21980] Zemskaja, Elena A. (1964), “Interfiksacija v sovremennom russkom slovoobrazovanii” [Interfigierung in der Wortbildung des heutigen Russisch]. In: Mucˇnik, Iosif P. (Hrsg.), Razvitie grammatiki i leksiki sovremennogo russkogo jazyka. Moskva: Nauka, 36⫺62 Zˇirmunskij, Viktor M. (1961), “O granicach slova” [Über die Wortgrenzen]. Voprosy jazykoznanija 3, 4⫺21 Zˇirmunskij, Viktor M. & Sunik, Orest P. (1963, Hrsg.), Morfologicˇeskaja struktura slova v jazykach razlicˇnych tipov [Die morphologische Wortstruktur in Sprachen verschiedener Typen]. Moskva, Leningrad: Izd. AN SSSR

Sebastian Kempgen, Bamberg (Deutschland)

15. France and Switzerland 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

Introduction Historical morphology of Arse`ne Darmesteter Structuralist morphosyntax Transformationalist attempts Contemporary work References

1.

Introduction

In order to provide an overall view of research concerning morphology in the 20th century in French speaking countries, one

must mention the work of the 19th century French linguist, Arse`ne Darmesteter (1846⫺ 88). He published two books which still remain essential today: Traite´ de la formation des mots compose´s dans la langue franc¸aise (1875) and De la cre´ation actuelle des mots nouveaux dans la langue franc¸aise et des lois qui la re´gissent (1877). These works of historical morphology played a crucial part, since they were widely disseminated, on the one hand as an introduction to the Dictionnaire ge´ne´ral under the title of Traite´ de la for-

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mation de la langue franc¸aise (Darmesteter 1890), and on the other hand, through the lectures given by Darmesteter to the first young women trainee teachers at the E´cole Normale de Se`vres (1895). This masterly work set the pace for 20th century research which is marked by a series of revivals (e.g. Nyrop’s historical grammar; Nyrop 1936), apparent innovations (the transformationalist attempts of the 1970s) and current post-generativist inspired research, in particular D. Corbin’s monumental construction, in which she develops an overall theory of word formation in French (see 5). Indeed, it seems illusory to characterise a structuralist trend as such between Darmesteter and the defenders of transformationalist theses, as, in spite of Saussure’s sharp distinction between diachrony and synchrony, the historical preoccupations have remained. Apart from Pichon (1942) and Dubois (1962) who devoted a thesis to suffixation, linguists have only proposed peripheral modifications or selective discussions of the initial model. The actual name of the discipline seldom appears in specialised linguistic bibliographies, but this disappearance from the general cartography is not peculiar to French tradition. It arose from the various ways in which linguistic territories were divided up according to structuralist and generativist programmes. Inflectional morphology has been neglected in this presentation of works which focuses on derivational morphology, as this domain was initially circumscribed by Darmesteter, but also because the problems which then arose in defining the formal, categorial and semantic relations between two lexical items (base and derived or compound) seemed the most interesting from a theoretical point of view.

2.

Historical morphology of Arse`ne Darmesteter

The works of Darmesteter are directly related to those of the mid-century Romanists, Raynouard and Diez (cf. Diez 1836⫺44). They were original in choosing to study, not some event of “past life” of French, but rather contemporary language. “Does modern language renew its vocabulary […] to express new ideas, new facts and, if so, using which processes?” (Darmesteter 1877: 7). This manner of putting the question contradicts the classical thesis of a complete and closed

139 French language, and also disputes a finding of comparatists, which credits Germanic languages with the power of derivation, and above all of composition, definitely more so than is apparent in Romance languages. Darmesteter’s treatment of data and construction of concepts relies on two fundamental propositions, resulting from comparative grammar: (a) There are two origins of the French lexicon, the “French formation” (often incorrectly called “popular”; Darmesteter 1877: 38) and the “learned formation”; (b) composition in French is syntactic as it contains elements which are “already existing words”. The overall schematisation of the description follows from the former proposal, and appears in the organisation of the sections (“I. French formation”, “II. Latin and Greek learned formation”). From the second part one can infer the divisions, retraced back to Diez, which influenced the whole century: derivational morphology is reduced to proper derivation phenomena (suffixation) and improper derivation (unmarked categorial change). Prefixation, which is part of composition, builds series of words according to syntactical rules; one may distinguish between “real” and juxtaposed compounds, depending on whether the ellipsis has modified the initial syntactic sequences or not. 2.1. “French” and “learned” formations Having formulated phonetic laws, the linguist can and must then classify two subsets of the French lexicon: inherited words which result from phonetic oral change, and words initially borrowed from Latin in written form. Borrowed words are identifiable as they have not undergone phonetic change, but rather a straightforward, minimal “francisation” (corporalis > corporel, tangibilis > tangibile). The French formation is therefore a natural oral exercise. The “learned formation”, i.e. “all of those Latin words artificially reintroduced into the language” (Darmesteter 1877: 268) is an artificial phenomenon, resulting from the actions of clerks, who, through writing or translating techniques, directly imported various Latin forms or who constructed derived or compound forms based on francised Latin radicals and affixes (cauda > *caudalis > caudal). In fact, on the one hand, the modifications which result from established laws lead to disparate

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ones, since phonetic change operates indiscriminately on all of the sounds present in the same context, without taking into account the way in which words belong to a grammatical paradigm. Thus, the theme of the alteration of forms, the destruction of the grammatical bind and the loss of analysability arises. On the other hand, the artificial means of borrowing competes with the natural fact of “phonetic alteration”. For instance, the Latin words containing -atio (-ationem) led to French words with endings such as -aison (fauchaison, fenaison, pendaison). However, “this derivation is completely extinct. It disappeared in the face of the derivation -ation; a regrettable loss, like others resulting from the disastrous action of learned derivation” (Darmesteter 1877: 85). Therefore, at another level, the theme of alteration, destruction and loss. These analyses show that “the very alive energy of our language” is in part strongly due to artificial means, which do not belong to “the French of the origins”, even though one may perceive certain effects “almost at the genesis of our idiom” (Darmesteter 1877: 271). The vitality of the language has to pay the price of impurity. Historians specify that this double formation results in a “division of the language in two foreign idioms” and a split in the linguistic community under observation: “Vis-a`-vis the large French-speaking majority, a minute minority speaks a mix of Latin and French” (Darmesteter 1877: 269). In this context, linguistics is historical, and not evolutionary, since it is event-driven: any element is defined by its historical origin, which in itself provides the sole fixed identity. For this reason -ation is classified as a “Latin suffix”, even though the numerous borrowings of this sort were rendered analysable by the borrowing language itself, which then uses them for its “organic derivations”, i.e. for words directly derived from “French” words such as ae´r-ation, re´glement-ation. In French, the double opacification theme of ideal morphological transparency, which was supposedly Latin, owing, on the one hand, to the indiscriminate action of phonetic laws, and on the other hand, to the borrowing of forms that remain unfiltered through the sieve of the same laws, has been taken up again and again (Meillet 1938; Dauzat 1937; Marouzeau 1951).

2.2. Compound form words as elliptical syntactical sequences Since concrete forms such as chou-fleur, porte-feuille, and rendez-vous were initially brought together under their immediately observable nature as compound words, studying laws of French composition means “seeking […] the processes the language uses when it borrows already existing words to combine them in new creations” (Darmesteter 1875: 1). Within this preliminary formulation, the “already existing word” is a minimal element likely to be observed in a syntactic context, i.e. a “grammatical word” actualised in discourse, such as that indicated by the inflected form of rendez in rendez-vous, or the presence of the pronoun. Thus, whereas the ancient composition combines themes (bare radicals, divested of inflection), the Roman composition combines “words”, and therefore belongs to syntactic order. “The relation linking composition to syntax is too obvious for one to insist. A compound word is a shortened clause” (Darmesteter 1875: 4). It is thus by generalisation (according to certain types of examples) and by homogenisation (between “juxtaposed” compounds (or “mere combinations of terms reunited through usage”), and “true” elliptical compounds) that Darmesteter moves composition phenomena within the realm of syntactic order. The explanation of the inflected form in rendez-vous, also provides an analysis for compound words like porte-plume, for which Diez had already invented the category of “clause composition”. Instead of dividing the compound words into two subsets, one belonging to a morphological mode and the other to a syntactical mode, Darmesteter places the borderline elsewhere: somewhere between derivation, practically reduced to suffixation, and composition. Indeed, derivation introduces elements which are not (necessarily) “already existing words”: firstly, suffixes, deprived of autonomy, as they are, and secondly the base-element which can be identified as a theme, at least when the data allow this, i.e. when the base is verbal: the derived term gratt-oir is obtained by suffixation of -oir on the theme of the verb gratt-er, the adjective fais-able from the theme of the present participle fais-ant, etc. On the other hand, if composition is defined by the “already existing words” status of its elements, porte in porte-plume ‘penholder’ must then constitute a grammatical form specified by the verb porter. An impor-

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tant discussion arose on the matter (Darmesteter 1875: 146⫺206) concerning the 3rd person singular indicative present vs. an imperative form: if the lexical item *porte-plume should be interpreted as designating ‘[ce(lui) qui] porte [la] plume ([this(he) who/which] holds/carries [the] pen)’ or ‘[ce(lui) a` qui on dit:] “Porte [la] plume!” ([this(he) to whom one says:] “Hold [the] pen!”)’ (Darmesteter 1875: 146). If the amount of terms which Darmesteter inserts in brackets are any indication, then one may conclude that composition in Romance languages relies on ellipsis. The criterion of the “already existing word”, as long as it has an historical character, is used to define prefixed words as compounds: indeed, their initial element, the “particle”, is always identifiable either as a preposition (sur, sous, pour, en, avant) or as an adverb (arrie`re, bien, mal). This identity, established on the basis of similarity, is only possible in etymological terms (thus the French pre´- can only be connected to the Latin preposition prae). Nevertheless, through this historical procedure, all prefixes obtain the status of compounded word elements. Finally, this criterion brought about the “parasynthetic” notion for explaining complex words such as embarquer, or encablure. Since they are prefixed, then they are compound. However, neither *barquer nor *cablure is already an existing word; barque or caˆble alone hold this status; one thus acknowledges “the remarkable character of being the result of composition and derivation both influencing the same radical” (Darmesteter 1875: 79⫺85), which provides the status of derivational suffix for the infinitive desinence, e.g. embarquer (Darmesteter 1877: 115). The definition of formal and semantic identity of these primitive elements brought into play by suffixation, prefixation and composition is the crux of the issue. Darmesteter only has the traditional notions of sentence, word and theme at his disposal, the notion of theme being for ancient inflected languages. Word includes both lexeme and the “grammatical word” in this context, which means there is no theoretical demarcation between inflection and derivation. According to this disposition of data, “word formation” and “morphology” no longer coincide. Compounds are the product of syntax, either by clustering (“juxtaposed” compounds), or by ellipsis (“true compounds”, including prefixed terms).

3.

Structuralist morphosyntax

The iconoclastic Saussurian gesture consisted of “wiping the slate clean” in relation to past events in order to gain access to the viewpoint of speakers on language. Indeed, “the first striking aspect which appears when one studies language phenomena is that for the speaker their succession in time is non-existent: (s)he is confronted with a state. So, the linguist who wants to understand this state must wipe the slate clean in terms of what has produced the state and ignore diachrony. (S)he can only penetrate the consciousness of the speakers by suppressing the past. Intervening through history would only distort judgement” (Saussure 1916: 117). Grammar, as a “description of a complex and systematic object, making coexisting values coincide” (Saussure 1916: 185) can therefore only be synchronic. But the entire linguistic mechanism lies in the fact that language never ceases to interpret and divide up the units it analyses: “Everything that makes up a state of language must lead back to a theory of phrases and associations” (Saussure 1916: 188). Both of these combined processes of analysis make it possible, in a similar way, to “distinguish” and identify a formative element of a complex word or a constitutive element of a syntactic phrase. Thus: “linguistically, morphology has no real and autonomous object” (Saussure 1916: 186). “Any word which is not a simple and irreducible unit cannot be essentially differentiated from a member of a phrase, or from a syntactic fact; the organisation of sub-units which make it up follows the same fundamental principles as the formation of word groups” (Saussure 1916: 187). Morphology is indistinguishable from syntax. The denomination of morphosyntax follows from this (Pottier 1962; Pinchon 1986). Therefore, branching out from the two bifurcations introduced by Saussure, between language and speech, synchrony and diachrony, the entire properties of language were considered to be constituently unitary. And the unicity of procedures allowing one to distinguish and identify units of different levels also leads to the unification of units of a single level: since one extricates and identifies the suffix eux and the verbal base boıˆt(er) from the derived form boıˆteux by the same means, then one can base morphosyntax on a single type of unit, the morpheme, which subsumes the different types (affix, radical) which were differentiated in historical linguistics.

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According to this perspective Saussure attached little importance to new words and a great deal of importance to regularities which account for them. Indeed, “any creation must be preceded by any unconscious comparison of material deposited in the treasure chest of language where generating forms are arranged according to their syntagmatic and associative links. Thus a whole part of the phenomenon is achieved before one notices the new form appearing. […] A word which I improvise already exists potentially in language and its realisation in speech is an insignificant fact in comparison with the possibility of the form” (Saussure 1916: 228). Thus derived forms and compounds are analogical creations and the analogy is totally grammatical and synchronical. As is widely known, the Saussurian rupture was not immediately registered. Linguists of the 1920s, preoccupied with the analysis of constructed words, did not have equivalent access to works of the historian on the one hand, swarming with statements and concrete descriptions, and to those of the theorist of descriptive linguistics on the other hand, which only provided a few crucial examples. Historical linguistics defined the programme of normal science for half a century, as appeared in Meillet’s collection Linguistique historique et linguistique ge´ne´rale. One thus perceives the discussions, and detailed developments and extensions which define this mode of scientific work. For instance, Marouzeau (1952 a, b) disputes the identification of the former element appearing in compounds like porte-plume as an imperative form, and analyses it instead as a verbal theme, without using this contradictory result as an opportunity to revive the principle which turns compound words into elliptical sentential sequences. A more extensive debate concerns the exact question Darmesteter had proposed to answer: the vitality of language in its derivational formation. Amongst others, Meillet (1938), Pichon (1935; 1942), Dauzat (1937), Marouzeau (1951), argued in turn in favour of the lexical “enrichment” or “impoverishment” in French, confirming or disputing the inevitable role of the learned formation. The Saussurian “sharp distinctions” are evident in two debates: one concerning the delimitation or the unification of the two fields of morphology and syntax, which provoked a question in the 6th International Congress of Linguists in 1949 (cf. also Perrot 1953; Martinet 1969), and the other related

on the status of the word. If, in its identification procedures, morphology cannot be distinguished from syntax, then words no longer constitute a specific order of linguistic entities (Martinet 1966; 1967; 1969).

4.

Transformationalist attempts

On the scientific scene of the 1960s, models were abundant and coexisted: comparative grammar and historical linguistics, Martinet’s functionalist version of structuralism, Guillaumism, American distributionalism and generative transformational grammar. In certain works, the authors strove to relate two theoretical perspectives. For example, in a stimulating book, P. Guiraud tried to reconcile historical lexicology and structural lexicology, “as etymology is dependent on both these types of analysis, [although] they answer distinct and, in fact, opposing thought processes” (Guiraud 1970: 5). The works of Dubois (1967; 1969), Guilbert (1975), Peytard (1975) implement another conjunction, of concepts of creativity, competence, and tools for rule representation, including transformations, derived from generative grammar, and from a sociological perspective, the aim of establishing a causal relationship between language and society. The regularities which account for the meaning and form of constructed lexical items are not the main issue at stake in their research, as the lexicon cannot be isolated from the world it designates, nor the lexical rules from social functioning. The pivot of this construction which associates a sociological view of language (whose roots trace back to Cohen 1956 for a Marxist version, and to Meillet for the initial Durkheimian version) with a transformationalist toolkit, is the term neologism itself, which labels two concepts: if a new word is “formed”, it responds to a formal and semantic schema, which is available in the language and identifiable by its speakers. But a neologism is also an event, and in this way it summons the customary dimensions of historical reasoning: attested dates, chronology, causality and social agents. The syntactic base of compound words is not a novel idea in Europe (even if it was asserted by Benveniste 1974, and discussed by Wagner 1980: 103⫺122). The transformationalist analyses which were produced were parallel to Darmesteter’s, the transformation acting as an ellipsis. But there are two differences: the enterprise is not confined to compound words, but is extended to affixed

15. France and Switzerland

words. Transformation is a more constraining means than ellipsis. Thus, the fact that a transformation is not supposed to modify the meaning of the structure it applies to, leads one to postulate barely grammatical underlying sentences, e.g. Paul a la qualite´ fie`re > la fierte´ de Paul, la route a la qualite´ refaite > la re´fection de la route (Dubois 1969: 53). These transformationalists strictly applied the definition according to which only syntax is creative. Since facts of creativity are observed in the lexical domain, then this creativity must be of a syntactic nature. “Derivation [is] a step in a transformational process leading from base clauses to real sentences” (Dubois 1969: 50). Nevertheless this treatment supports various assertions of historical linguistics (the non-categorising nature of prefixes, the derivational status of infinitive endings, parasynthesis, etc.). Morphology has totally disappeared off the map, by fragmentation: categorial and semantic phenomena are attributed to the properties of sentences subjected to transformation, and the detail of the achievement of forms is due to morphophonological rules. The fact that morphology is absorbed by syntax is based on the dissociation between calculation of the meaning of complex lexical items and that of their form.

5.

Contemporary work

In a seminal text, Dell (1979) put forward the conditions for a general theory on derivational morphology, following his PhD dissertation (Dell 1970) and the Chomskyan lexicalist hypothesis. The definition of goals, the synchronic point of view, the identification of units as individualised “lexical items” by three sets of phonological, categorial and semantic features, the definition of “grouping” relations between lexical items as a predictable result of an operation verifying a triple relation, all clearly delimited the issue. Several contemporary works (Corbin 1987; Ple´nat 1995; and also Fradin 1992; Kerleroux 1996) were inspired by this framework. This route has been explored by Danielle Corbin and the SILEX team and has led to important results both on the empirical and theoretical fronts. One now has access to detailed descriptions, based on extensive corpora (monographs based on the properties of the suffix -ier (D. Corbin & P. Corbin 1991), the suffix -et(te) (Dal 1997), the suffix -erie

143 (Temple 1996)), which test hypotheses of an overall model (Corbin 1987; 1991; 1992; 1997, and the presentation herein; Art. 120) and in turn help it evolve. Corbin’s work, at the end of this century, which stands out and challenges Darmesteter’s own work before the turn of the century, hinges on two fundamental proposals, belonging to the central methological core of the generative programme: (a) The aim of linguistics is to highlight regularities, related to lexical and other matters; (b) “Neither similarities and linguistic differences, nor regularities and irregularities constitute immediate data” (Corbin 1991: 25). The first point leads to the hypothesis which justifies this associative morphology, according to which the meaning of an affixed or compound word is constructed at the same time as the morphological structure, and compositionally in relation to it. “The grammatical representation should reflect this simultaneous construction of structure and meaning (Corbin 1991: 9). From the second point one can infer various distinctions, in relation to the aim of accounting for the distortions observed between immediate data and predictions of the hypothesis, which multiply and stratify the levels of analysis. “It is a question of accepting abstraction in this domain, as one does naturally elsewhere” (Corbin 1991: 10). Hence, the distinctions between attested and predictable meaning, observable and constructed form, and between superficial irregularities and partially predictable formal or semantic subregularities (Corbin 1987: 171⫺385), between differing resources of semantic calculation associated with rules (Corbin 1991), between the status of the semantic affix operator and the referential status of elements of the compound word (Corbin 1992). The extent of the empirical basis, the two aspects of associativity and stratification of the model, and thus the equivalent weight attributed to the semantic and the structural analyses form the means for “attempting to break away from the atheoretical traditional empiricism and from the theorising with inadequate empirical support of most generative models of the lexicon” (Corbin 1991: 24). In line with this, several studies conducted by Marc Ple´nat, which are related to the “prosodic morphology” trend and, more re-

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cently, to Optimality Theory, have focused on the non-concatenative part of morphology, i.e. on the modes of formation which can be analysed as the association of phonic material of a base form with a prosodic schema. French includes the following distribution: only concatenative processes build lexical items, whereas the non-concatenative processes are only brought into play in order to build denominations of reduplicated hypocorisms (Ple´nat 1984), secret languages (Ple´nat 1985; 1991; 1995) and spoken acronyms (Ple´nat 1993). A new phase consists of putting forward the hypothesis that those forms which are derived by concatenation, in particular by suffixation, are also subjected to major constraints, recalling prosodic schemas (Corbin & Ple´nat 1992).

6.

References

Benveniste, Emile (1974), Proble`mes de linguistique ge´ne´rale, Vol. II, Paris: Gallimard Cohen, Marcel (1956), Pour une sociologie du langage. Paris: Albin-Michel Corbin, Danielle (1987), Morphologie de´rivationnelle et structuration du lexique, Vol. 1⫺2. Tübingen: Niemeyer Corbin, Danielle (1991), “La formation des mots: structure et interpre´tation”. Lexique 10, 7⫺30 Corbin, Danielle (1992), “Hypothe`ses sur les frontie`res de la composition nominale”. Cahiers de grammaire 17, 25⫺55 Corbin, Danielle (1999), La construction des unite´s lexicales en franc¸ais: Introduction me´thodique a` la morphologie de´rivationnelle. Paris: Colin Corbin, Danielle & Corbin, Pierre (1991), “Un traitement unifie´ du suffixe -ier(e)”. Lexique 10, 61⫺146 Corbin, Danielle & Ple´nat, Marc (1992), “Note sur l’haplologie des mots construits”. Langue franc¸aise 96, 101⫺112 Dal, Georgette (1997), Grammaire du suffixe -et(te). Paris: Didier Erudition (Etudes de se´mantique lexicale) Darmesteter, Arse`ne (1875), Traite´ de la formation des mots compose´s dans la langue franc¸aise. Paris: Vieweg [2nd ed. 1894, Paris: Champion] Darmesteter, Arse`ne (1877), De la cre´ation actuelle des mots nouveaux dans la langue franc¸aise et des lois qui la re´gissent. Paris: Vieweg [reprint 1972, Gene`ve: Slatkine Reprints] Darmesteter, Arse`ne (1890), “Traite´ de la formation de la langue franc¸aise”. In: Hatzfeld, A. & Darmesteter, A. & Thomas, A. (eds.), Dictionnaire ge´ne´ral de la langue franc¸aise du commencement du XVII o sie`cle jusqu’a` nos jours. Paris: Delagrave, 1⫺300

Darmesteter, Arse`ne (1895), Cours de grammaire historique de la langue franc¸aise, Vol. III: Formation des mots et vie des mots. Paris: Delagrave Dauzat, Albert (1937), “L’appauvrissement de la de´rivation en franc¸ais: ses causes”. Le Franc¸ais Moderne 4, 289⫺299 Dell, Franc¸ois (1970), Les re`gles phonologiques tardives et la morphologie de´rivationnelle du franc¸ais. PhD dissertation Massachusets Institute of Technology Dell, Franc¸ois (1979), “La morphologie de´rivationnelle du franc¸ais et l’organisation de la composante lexicale en grammaire ge´ne´rative”. Revue romane 24.2, 185⫺216 Diez, Friedrich (1836⫺44), Grammaire des langues romanes [French translation by de A. Brachet, G. Paris and A. Morel-Fatio]. Paris: Franck Dubois, Jean (1962), Etude sur la de´rivation suffixale en franc¸ais moderne et contemporain. Paris: Larousse Dubois, Jean (1967), Grammaire structurale du franc¸ais: le verbe. Paris: Larousse Dubois, Jean (1969), Grammaire structurale du franc¸ais: la phrase et les transformations. Paris: Larousse Fradin, Bernard (1992), “Pourquoi la morphologie n’est pas configurationnelle”. In: Tasmowski, Liliane & Zribi-Hertz, Anne (eds.), Hommage a` Nicolas Ruwet. Ghent: Communication and Cognition, 229⫺243 Guilbert, Louis (1975), La cre´ativite´ lexicale. Paris: Larousse Guiraud, Pierre (1970), Structures e´tymologiques du lexique franc¸ais. Paris: Larousse Kerleroux, Franc¸oise (1996), La coupure invisible: Etudes de syntaxe et de morphologie. Villeneuve d’Ascq: Presses universitaires du Septentrion Marouzeau, Jules (1951), “Les de´ficiences de la de´rivation franc¸aise”. Le Franc¸ais Moderne 1, 1⫺8 Marouzeau, Jules (1952 a), “Compose´s a` the`me verbal”. Le Franc¸ais moderne 2, 81⫺86 Marouzeau, Jules (1952 b), “The`mes verbaux en franc¸ais”. Le Franc¸ais moderne 2, 161⫺164 Martinet, Andre´ (1960), Ele´ments de linguistique ge´ne´rale. Paris: Colin Martinet, Andre´ (1966), “Le mot”. In: Proble`mes du langage. Paris: Gallimard, 39⫺53 Martinet, Andre´ (1967), “Syntagme et synthe`me”. La linguistique 2, 1⫺14 Martinet, Andre´ (1969), “Qu’est-ce que la morphologie?”. Cahiers Ferdinand de Saussure 26, 85⫺90 Meillet, Antoine (1938), “La notion de radical en franc¸ais”. In: Meillet, Antoine, Linguistique historique et linguistique ge´ne´rale, Vol. II. Paris: Klincksieck, 123⫺127 Nyrop, Krystof (1936), Grammaire historique de la langue franc¸aise. Paris: Picard

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16. Scandinavia Perrot, Jean (1953), “Morphologie, syntaxe, lexique: Contribution a` la discussion sur les divisions de la langue”. Confe´rences de l’institut de linguistique de l’universite´ de Paris 9, 33⫺74 Peytard, Jean (1975), Recherches sur la pre´fixation en franc¸ais contemporain. Paris: Champion Pichon, Edouard (1935), “L’enrichissement lexical dans le franc¸ais d’aujourd’hui”. Le Franc¸ais moderne 3, 209⫺222 Pichon, Edouard (1942), L’enrichissement lexical dans le franc¸ais d’aujourd’hui. Les principes de la suffixation en franc¸ais. Paris: D’Artrey Pinchon, Jacqueline (1986), Morphosyntaxe du franc¸ais. Paris: Hachette Universite´ Ple´nat, Marc (1984), “Toto, Fanfa, Totor et meˆme Guiguitte sont des ANARs”. In: Dell, Franc¸ois & Hirst, Daniel & Vergnaud, Jean-Roger (eds.), Forme sonore du langage. Paris: Hermann, 161⫺ 182 Ple´nat, Marc (1985), “Morphologie du largonji des loucherbems”. Langages 78, 73⫺122 Ple´nat, Marc (1991), “Le javanais: concurrence et haplologie”. Langages 101, 95⫺117

Ple´nat, Marc (1993), “Observations sur le mot minimal franc¸ais”. In: Laks, Bernard & Ple´nat, Marc (eds.), De natura sonorum. Paris: Presses universitaires de Vincennes, 143⫺172 Ple´nat, Marc (1995), “Une approche prosodique de la morphologie du verlan”. Lingua 95, 97⫺129 Pottier, Bernard (1962), Syste´matique des e´le´ments de relation: Etude de morphosyntaxe structurale romane. Paris: Klincksieck Saussure, Ferdinand de (1916), Cours de linguistique ge´ne´rale. Paris: Payot Temple, Martine (1996), Le sens des mots construits: pour un traitement de´rivationnel associatif. Villeneuve d’Ascq: Presses universitaires du Septentrion Wagner, Robert-Le´on (1980), Essais de linguistique franc¸aise. Paris: Nathan

Franc¸oise Kerleroux, Paris (France) Translation: Rachel Pankhurst, Montpellier (France)

16. Scandinavia 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

Introduction Denmark Norway Sweden References

1.

Introduction

The three Scandinavian countries Denmark, Norway, and Sweden form a linguistic area in which dialects and standard languages are mutually intelligible. The majority of morphological studies in the three countries consist of the morphological parts of descriptive analyses of various languages or dialects. In Norway and Sweden, morphological studies of Scandinavian languages and dialects have, with few exceptions, been without any explicit theoretical foundation until quite recently. Few linguists explicitly stated their theoretical and methodological framework or gave a precise definition of the metalanguage they used. In morphological studies from the past 40 years, one finds a certain influence from structuralism and generative theories. In Denmark, the descriptions of Danish show a greater awareness of their theoretical and methodological basis.

2.

Denmark

The famous Danish linguists of the 19th and early 20th century like Rasmus Kristian Rask (1787⫺1832), Karl Verner (1846⫺96), Vilhelm Thomsen (1842⫺1927), and Holger Pedersen (1867⫺1953) did not contribute much to morphology. They knew their wordand-paradigm method by heart and used it in an elegant and consistent way, but none of them were preoccupied with the study of the metalanguage and theoretical foundations of morphology. However, in his numerous short grammars of both Indo-European and nonIndo-European languages, Rask included a section on word formation treating both compounding and derivational morphology. He stressed the importance of this component of the language in a grammatical description, thereby creating a pattern to be followed in most subsequent studies of Scandinavian languages and dialects. The first Danish linguist of the 20th century who made a name in theoretical linguistics was Otto Jespersen (1860⫺1943). In spite of his important and influential contributions to many fields of modern linguistics (phonetics, syntax, applied linguistics, etc.), however,

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Jespersen’s interest in morphology was marginal. The situation is quite different when we come to Viggo Brøndal (1887⫺1942). His main interest was the classification of word classes and morpheme classes (Bløndal 1928; 1940; 1943). In many respects, he worked within the same structuralist European tradition as Hjelmslev. There are more similarities between the two in their approach to morphology than probably either of them would have liked to admit. Brøndal’s point of departure was a semantic classification as he organized his division of word classes and morpheme classes by searching for their semantic correlates. The problems of morphological segmentation were unimportant to him. Louis Trolle Hjelmslev (1899⫺1965) is the leading theoretician in Scandinavian linguistics in this century with morphology as a central component in his works and in his glossematic theory. As early as in his studies on case grammar (Hjelmslev 1935⫺37), Hjelmslev takes up fundamental problems of morphology trying to establish a basic set of local semantic features to account for the structure of the case system in all human languages. Throughout all his glossematic works (cf. Hjelmslev 1959 and especially Hjelmslev 1938), he struggles with the idea of an exhaustive system for describing morphological oppositions. A terminology is established for dealing with all possible combinations of morphemes and their paradigmatic and syntagmatic relations. Grammatical morphemes, not stems and words, are the fundamental entities in Hjelmslev’s morphology. How the linguist arrives at these morphemes through morphological segmentation is never treated by Hjelmslev to any extent and was probably of no interest to him. The form of the language is given to the linguist a priori and Hjelmslev’s approach, which is sometimes more semantic than morphological, seeks to describe the parallelism between content and expression. Accordingly, morphological syncretism is a fundamental theoretical problem in his morphological theory. Hjelmslev’s morphological theory is very abstract and complicated, and based on an elaborate terminology which is usually not exemplified by any linguistic data. But while most of Hjelmslev’s theories were not applied in the description of natural languages by himself or others, his morphological theories had a certain vogue not only in some studies

of Danish dialects but especially in the works of the Norwegian linguists Vogt, Bergsland, and Flydal (cf. 3). Paul Diderichsen (1904⫺64) was well trained in philology through his studies of Old Danish texts. Although much more pedagogical and less dogmatic than Hjelmslev, the morphological part of his successful Danish grammar (Diderichsen 1946) and his illuminating study of morpheme categories in Danish (Diderichsen 1949) are based on an approach very close to Hjelmslev’s. The semantic aspects of grammatical morphemes and their syntagmatic and paradigmatic oppositions are central aspects of Diderichsen’s morphological analysis.

3.

Norway

When Ivar Aasen (1813⫺96) established a new Norwegian written language to replace Danish, morphology was a significant part of the identity of the new language. The phonological and syntactic differences between the two languages were not great and, besides the lexicon, morphology became the basic distinction between the two variants of Norwegian (riksma˚l, later bokma˚l, and landsma˚l, later nynorsk). For almost 150 years, discussion about language norms and language change in Norway has largely been a discussion about morphology, for example, the question of two vs. three genders, the tense inflection of verbs etc.; cf. examples (1) to (4) illustrating some aspects of Norwegian gender morphology: (1) Traditional riksma˚l common ma˚ne-n sol-en ‘moon-the’ ‘sun-the’ Pronominal form: den (2) Modern bokma˚l masculine feminine ma˚ne-n sol-a ‘moon-the’ ‘sun-the’ Pronominal form: den den (3) Traditional landsma˚l masculine feminine ma˚ne-n sol-i ‘moon-the’ ‘sun-the’ Pronominal form: han ho

neuter hus-et ‘house-the’ det neuter hus-et ‘house-the’ det neuter hus-et ‘house-the’ det

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(4) Modern nynorsk masculine feminine ma˚ne-n sol-a ‘moon-the’ ‘sun-the’ Pronominal form: han ho

neuter hus-et ‘house-the’ det

The discussion, however, has been political and normative and it is indeed quite surprising how little theoretical interest it has created. Moreover, the methods used were mainly traditional neogrammarian and/or dialectological methods from the 19th century. Nevertheless, the nynorsk linguistic tradition has led to interesting morphological research due to the intensive collection of data on inflection, derivation and word compounding which was regarded as a necessary basis for language standardization; cf. Beito (1942; 1970) for some typical examples. Structuralism, or for that matter other modern linguistic methods, were not used to any extent in the study of Norwegian and Norwegian dialects until the 1960s. An exception is the Hjelmslev-influenced Leif Flydal (1904⫺83) who in a number of studies treated aspects of Norwegian morphology (Flydal 1954; 1989) and especially the correspondence between the gender system and the pronominal system in various dialects and sociolects of Norwegian (Flydal 1975). Curiously enough, none of Flydal’s works are included in the otherwise excellent collection of Norwegian morphological studies edited by Jahr and Lorentz (Jahr & Lorentz 1985, eds.). There has never been a Norwegian school of linguistics and we find a high degree of theoretical heterogeneity among Norwegian linguists in this century. The leading Norwegian linguist of the first part of this century, Alf Sommerfelt (1892⫺1965), had a very wide range of interests, but morphology was not one of them. It is significant that in the collection of his main articles (Sommerfelt 1962), there is not a single article on morphology. The few descriptive studies of non-IndoEuropean languages based on Hjelmslev’s theory were mostly carried out by Norwegian linguists, for example, Hans Vogt’s (1903⫺ 86) study of the case system in Ossetic (Vogt 1944) and Knut Bergsland’s (1914⫺98) description of the South-Sa´mi language of Røros (Bergsland 1946). Bergsland’s book is interesting because it is an attempt at a full-scale grammar and, ac-

cordingly, reveals both the weaknesses and the strengths of the theory. The main bulk of the grammar is devoted to morphology (both inflectional and derivational). The morphological description is based on systematic semantico-logical symmetrical patterns to be filled with linguistic data. While the description becomes very consistent, sometimes one has the feeling that the language is forced into a structure or pattern that does not fit. The effort at applying glossematics in descriptive studies was, however, soon abandoned in favour of an unorthodox version of American structuralism. This approach is prominent in the works of Bergsland and Vogt after (and in the case of Vogt also before) their glossematic period (cf. Vogt 1988). The theoretically most interesting and original Norwegian linguist in the field of morphology in this century was Carl Hjalmar Borgstrøm (1909⫺86), professor of comparative Indo-European philology at the University of Oslo. In a number of studies on ProtoIndo-European morphology (cf. Borgstrøm 1954 for a survey) he contributed significantly to the typology of comparative IndoEuropean morphology, and in his textbook in general linguistics (Borgstrøm 1958), which for a long time was also used in Denmark and Sweden, he describes a very strict method for morphological analysis based on a blend of American structuralism and glossematic ideas. In contrast to the Danish linguists, Borgstrøm was mainly preoccupied with morphological segmentation and identification, while semantics played a more marginal role. But although his book was for a long time compulsory reading for most Scandinavian linguists, his method for morphological analysis was not used to any extent by other Scandinavian linguists.

4.

Sweden

Today Sweden is probably the Scandinavian country with the most versatile and internationally most recognized linguistic milieu. A number of Swedish linguists have also throughout the past years made significant theoretical contributions to modern linguistics; however, thirty years ago the situation was quite different. With the exception of Alfred Noreen (1854⫺1925) and Bertil Malmberg (1913⫺95), there is hardly any Swedish linguist from the period 1860⫺1960 who has any international reputation in general lin-

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guistics. Both in synchronic and diachronic linguistics, Swedish linguists were rather oldfashioned and kept to prestructuralist theories well into the 1960s. Volume 7 of Noreen’s monumental and unfinished grammar of Swedish (Noreen 1906) is a description of Swedish morphology which in terminology of theoretical presentation was far ahead of his time and in many respects very similar to European und American structuralism of the 30s and 40s. Noreen treats both inflection, derivation, and compounding, and bases his analysis of the morpheme (he is probably the first one to use this term in Scandinavia) instead of the word. To him a morpheme is a combination of expression (sound) and a semem (a basic semantic concept). Furthermore, he presented a classification of various types of morphemes (prefixes, suffixes, vowel alternation, toneme alternation, etc.) and established a typology of morphemes. Noreen discussed extensively the problems of morphemic identification while he was much less preoccupied with the problems of morphological segmentation. Noreen also stressed the importance of the paradigm in morphological description. Structuralism played a rather insignificant role in Sweden compared to Denmark and Norway, and it is not far from the truth (pace Malmberg) to say that structuralism and generative grammar arrived hand in hand in Sweden. And the theoretical revival of morphological studies of Swedish in the 1960s, which would later also stimulate similar studies in Norway, was based on a successful combination of structuralist and generative ideas. As the most influential of these works, some early studies on Swedish noun inflection by Ulf Teleman (1934⫺) should be mentioned (cf. Teleman 1965; 1969 a; 1969 b).

5.

References

Beito, Olav Toreson (1942), R-bøygning. Oslo: Aschehoug Beito, Olav Toreson (1970), Nynorsk grammatikk: Lyd- og ordlære. Oslo: Det Norske Samlaget Bergsland, Knut (1946), Røros-lappisk grammatikk: Et forsøk pa˚ en strukturell spra˚kbeskrivelse. Oslo: Aschehoug (Instituttet for sammenlignende kulturforskning, Serie B: Skrifter 43) Borgstrøm, Carl Hjalmar (1954), “Internal Reconstruction of Pre-Indo-European Word-Forms”. Word 10, 275⫺287 Borgstrøm, Carl Hjalmar (1958), Innføring i sprogvidenskap. Oslo: Universitetsforlaget

Brøndal, Viggo (1928), Ordklassene. Partes Orationes: Studier over de sproglige Kategorier. København: Gad Brøndal, Viggo (1940), Præpositionernes theori: Indledning til en rationel betydningslære. København: Munksgaard Brøndal, Viggo (1943), Essais de linguistique ge´ne´rale. Copenhague: Munksgaard Diderichsen, Paul (1946), Elementær Dansk grammatik. København: Gyldendal Diderichsen, Paul (1949), “Morpheme Categories in Modern Danish”. In: Recherches Structurales 1949: Interventions dans le de´bat glossematique, publie´es a` l’occasion du cinquantenaire de M. Louis Hjelmslev. Copenhague: Nordisk Sprog- og Kulturforlag (Travaux du Cercle Linguistique de Copenhague 5), 134⫺155 Flydal, Leiv (1954), En spra˚klig analyse av norske boktitler 1952: Morfemer i reklamens tjeneste. Bergen: Grieg (Skrifter fra Norges Handelshøyskole, Spra˚klige avhandlinger 6) Flydal, Leiv (1975), “Un proble`me social: le conflit des genres en dano-norve´gien”. La Linguistique 11, 17⫺29 Flydal, Leiv (1989), Spra˚ket: Struktur og samfunn, Vol 1⫺2, ed. by Arne Halvorsen and Geirr Wiggen. Oslo: Novus (Oslo-studier i spra˚kvitenskap 5) Hjelmslev, Louis (1935⫺37) La cate´gorie des cas, Vol. 1⫺2. Aarhus: Universitetsforlaget Hjelmslev, Louis (1938), “Essai d’une the´orie des morphe`mes”. Actes du IVe Congre`s international de linguistes 1936, Copenhague 140⫺151 [reprinted in: Hjelmslev (1959), 152⫺164] Hjelmslev, Louis (1959), Essais Linguistiques. Copenhague: Nordisk Sprog- og Kulturforlag (Travaux du cercle linguistique de Copenhague 12) Jahr, Ernst Ha˚kon & Lorentz, Ove (1985, eds.), Morfologi/Morphology. Oslo: Novus (Studies in Norwegian linguistics 3) Noreen, Adolf (1906), Va˚rt spra˚k: Ny svensk grammatik i utförlig framställning, Vol. VII: Formlära (Morfologi). Lund: Gleerups Sommerfelt, Alf (1962), Diachronic and Synchronic Aspects of Language. ’s-Gravenhage: Mouton (Janua Linguarum, Series Major 7) Teleman, Ulf (1965), “Svenskans genusmorfem”. Arkiv för nordisk filologi 80, 217⫺230 Teleman, Ulf (1969 a), Definita och indefinita attribut i nusvenskan. Lund: Studentliteratur (Lundastudier i nordisk spra˚kventenskap, Serie B 7) Teleman, Ulf (1969 b), “Böjningssuffixens form i nusvenskan.” Arkiv för nordisk filologi 84, 163⫺208 Vogt, Hans (1944), “Le syste`me des cas en osse`te”. Acta Linguistica Hafniensia 4, 17⫺41 Vogt, Hans (1988), Linguistique caucasienne et arme´nienne. Oslo: Norwegian University Press

Even Hovdhaugen, Oslo (Norway)

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17. Britain

17. Britain 1. 2. 3. 4.

Early linguistics in Britain The London School Conclusion References

1.

Early linguistics in Britain

Whereas in Germany morphology had figured prominently in the philological investigations of Indo-European in the nineteenth century, studies of morphology per se did not start in Britain till this century. What were the reasons for this tardiness? The answer is to be found in this quotation form Sweet which is cited approvingly by Firth (1957: 218): “Our tendency is not so much towards the antiquarian philology and text-criticism in which German scholars have done so much, as towards the observation of the phenomena of living languages […], the real strength and originality of English work lies […] in phonology and dialectology.”

So, the strength of British linguistics initially lay in synchronic phonetics that had a significant practical dimension. The reasons for this were varied. There was a need for linguists to grapple with innumerable unwritten languages which were found in Britain’s vast empire. It was for the purpose of the study of the languages and cultures of Britain’s Asian and African colonies that the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), which soon became the first major national centre for the study of linguistics, was established in 1916. The languages of the colonies provided a challenge of devising descriptions, with an emphasis on developing practical orthographies. This challenge was believed to call for expertise in phonetics above all else. In fact, even before the days of Empire, in Britain there had been a long tradition of doing practical linguistics, with a strong phonetic bias. To illustrate, for centuries, orthoepists such as John Wallis (1616⫺1703) had studied and codified correct pronunciation for teaching purposes; for centuries, spelling reformers had campaigned for the reform of the English orthography to make it correspond more closely to pronunciation; in 1837, the spelling reformer and student of speech, Isaac Pitman had developed the practical tool of shorthand. Therefore it is not surprising that, given this historically strong bias towards the

sound system of language, when the modern linguistics era dawned, there was an almost exclusive orientation towards phonetics. The two major early British linguists, Henry Sweet (1845⫺1912) and his intellectual heir, Daniel Jones (1881⫺1967) were primarily phoneticians. They did not deal with morphological questions. Nor did they encourage their followers to do so.

2.

The London School

The first important scholar whose concerns extended beyond phonetics was John R. Firth who was the first Professor of General Linguistics in Britain. He was appointed to the linguistics chair at the School of Oriental and African Studies in 1944. Until the early 1970s, virtually all British linguists were direct students of Firth at London Univerity, or were taught by former students of his who had posts at other British universities. Hence, Firthian linguistics is also referred to as the London School. The fact that the London school had its roots in the School of Oriental and African Studies was important for the development of the British linguistics. As mentioned already, its mission was (and remains) to study the languages and cultures of Asia and Africa. So, Firth and his students built up their theory not through armchair speculation about language or through the reanalysis of familiar European languages, but through encounter with unfamiliar data from numerous Asian and African languages. 2.1. Firthian morphology Firth’s own writings were concerned mainly with phonology and meaning (cf. Firth 1957; Lyons 1966). He did not have much to say about morphology. What makes his work morphologically interesting is that in his theory of phonology he introduced a number of notions which were taken up by his students which, as it turned out, led to genuine morphological insights. Two key concepts of Firthian phonology namely, phonematic units and prosodies had far reaching morphological implications. According to Firth, the phonologist should extract prosodies from phonological representations and consider their functioning sepa-

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rately from the rest of the phonological string. By prosodies he meant any aspects of phonological representations whose domain is greater than the phonematic unit, the latter being a label for segment-sized chunks, corresponding, very roughly, to individual consonants and vowels. Prosodies are not to be equated with the suprasegmentals of American phonemics which were limited to stress, tone, and length. The Firthian prosody could be any phonetic property (e.g. nasalization, palatalization, labialisation, voicing, pharyngealization etc.) that can be correlated with distinct articulatory gestures and extends over a number of phonematic units. In this regard, prosodic analysis can be viewed as a precursor to today’s multi-tiered autosegmental phonology which places such phonetic features on separate tiers of their own (cf. Goldsmith 1990). The morphological repercussions of this insight will be made clear in a moment. Another aspect of the theory that was important for morphology is the notion that linguistic systems, at all levels of structure, are polysystemic. Polysystemicity was an antidote to an overzealous quest for one all-encompassing analytical statement that covers all aspects of the phonological or grammatical structure of a language which creates the illusion of capturing generalizations even in situations where no generalizations exist. Polysystemicity would allow the linguist to set up a number of separate subsystems operating in different places in the grammar. No attempt was made to impose one overarching statement which covered the entire language. For instance, in phonology it was thought to be reasonable to assume that sounds could have different properties when they appeared in different grammatical contexts; different phonological patterns could be expected to occur in words belonging to different wordclasses, etc. (cf. Firth 1948: 123). Polysystemicity had the virtue of avoiding placing one’s analysis in a theoretical straitjacket. But it also had a downside. No principled criteria for recognising valid subsystems in a grammar were proposed. So, there was always a risk of allowing unconstrained proliferation of subsystems. I think that criticism could be laid at the door of Waterson (1956) whose study of Turkish nominals recognises not only a “y prosody” characterising palatalization, a “w prosody” characterising backness, an “o prosody” characterising labialization, but also an “H prosody”, a “p system”, an “f system”, a “k system”, an “s

prosody”, an “e prosody”, etc. Today the case for a polysystemic approach has been conceded by most current theories and the challenge of finding criteria to justify the recognition of a subsystem has been faced up to (see, for example, Inkelas et al. 1996). The London School has been criticised for not attempting to develop a coherent model of language (Langendoen 1968). They were concerned more with providing a pragmatic account of the facts of languages and less with the creation of a coherent, general theory of language. Being ad hoc was not seen as a fault as this quotation illustrates: “Moreover, in emphasizing the systemic nature of language, I do not propose an a priori system of general categories by means of which the facts of all languages may be stated.” (Firth 1948: 144)

Even at the level of notation a very low priority was given to consistency, which makes the task of reading the writings of the Firthians very challenging since often each writer uses their own do-it-yourself notation. (See also Firth 1948: 131.) As a consequence of this lack of interest in language universals, the London School was not vexed by issues of general theory which exercised contemporary American structuralists like Hockett (1954) who was concerted with the merits of alternative morphological models. In the London School the important thing was to describe each language on its own terms. If morphemes were useful for the description of aspects of certain languages, they could be used. But there was no presumption that a universal definition of morphological primes could and should be devised. While American linguists like Harris (1951), who were contemporaries of Firth, were keen to develop a concept of the morpheme as a basic unit of morphological structure in all languages, such a project held no attraction for the London School. Indeed, some in Britain were expressing doubts about the basic notions of morpheme theory such as the idea that morphemes were made up of allomorphs. Haas (1954) pointed out that there are cases where any attempt to match each morpheme with an allomorph is futile. For instance, in a word like lice there are two morphemes, but not two allomorphs. Whereas in American linguistics at that time the common assumption was that the relationship between morphemes and their allomorphs was one of composition, in British linguistics the relationship between phonological material and the grammatical/seman-

17. Britain

tic information that it represented was gradually seen as a relation of exponence or realisation rather than composition. In 2.2 we will explore this further. How did the Firthians start investigating morphology? As Palmer (1970: xiii) observes, since the polysystemic principle allowed the linguist to make different phonological statements for different grammatical elements, it was a natural extension of the theory to assign some prosodies a morphophonological value. Firth (1934) had already encouraged this. He had argued that “the phonetico-grammatical” study of language was of great importance and in Firth (1948) he showed how a phonological analysis of Cairo Colloquial Arabic could be carried out using a theory where, on the one hand, a prosody such as vowel length and phonematic units on the other, were matched with C and V syllable positions. The essentials of his analysis foreshadow the kind of prosodic analysis put forward years later by McCarthy (1979) in the generative framework. Among Firth’s followers, it was Robins (1953), in his paper on the nasalized verbal forms of Sundanese, who first presented a fairly detailed morphological analysis in the London School framework. His paper provided an alternative to morpheme-based approaches espoused on the other side of the Atlantic. He extracted nasalisation as a prosody which has an inflectional role as an exponent of verbalisation (e.g., pake ⬃ make ‘to use’, kirim ⬃ nirim ‘to send’). The domain of this prosody is the word. Once nasalisation has been initiated, it continues until it is blocked by a word boundary or a supralaryngeal consonant. Such data, in which grammatical signalling occurs at several places in a word, would defy theories like Item-and-arrangement which require words to be segmented into allomorphs each of which is attributed to a particular morpheme (see 2.2). But since exponence in Firthian linguistics is not subject to that requirement, such difficulties do not arise. Soon afterwards, Palmer (1955) appeared. This paper tackled the complex issues raised by the nonconcatenative morphology of Tigrinya, a Semitic language whose inflectional morphology often involves infixing and internal change in stems rather than linear affixation. Palmer argued that number in Tigrinya is marked using the prosodies of labiovelarity and laryngeality. These prosodies can

151 be scattered across the entire word. There are no unambiguously identifiable allomorphs with which certain morphological properties are uniquely associated. 2.2. Word and Paradigm morphology We have already mentioned doubts about the morpheme in British linguistics (cf. Haas 1954). We are now going to see how these doubts were translated into ideas that led to a research programme that offered an alternative to morpheme-based morphology. This programme was initiated by Robins (1959). Robins cites Hockett’s (1954) classic article “Two models of grammatical description” in which Hockett contracts two major approaches to morphological analysis that were common in the United States at the time, namely Item-and-Arrangement (IA) and Item-and-Process (IP). The former model assumed that the study of polymorphemic word structure is essentially the study of morphemes and their arrangements in words. As such, IA was ideal for the analysis of agglutinating languages like Turkish in which most words can be segmented, isolating each one of their constituent morphemes and matching them with their allomorphs in a one-to-one manner. Thus a word like iplerin ‘of the ropes’ can be segmented as ip ‘rope’, -in ‘genitive’ and -ler ‘plural’. By contrast, IP was better suited to the task of describing languages with a degree of morphophonemic alternation where derivational process statements convert items, in the shape of base forms, into surface forms. IP was the fledgling model in the early 1950s. It did not reach maturity till the advent of generative grammar some years later. For instance, in Yoruba, the progressive aspect morpheme can have the forms [m], [n] or [n] as in mba ‘is hiding’, nsun ‘is sleeping’ and ngun ‘is climbing’. If we posit one underspecified nasal consonant (symbolised here as /N/) that has no place of articulation as the base form of this morpheme, we can account for the various shapes that represent it in terms of a process of homorganic nasal assimilation. Our rule would say that /N/ becomes [m], [n] or [n], assimilating to the place of articulation of the stem consonant to which it is prefixed. Hockett, also makes a few passing remarks about a third approach to the study of wordstructure which is of much greater antiquity, with roots in the work of Greek and Roman grammarians, and underlying the European grammatical tradition that had existed until

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the 20th century. Hockett calls this model Word-and-Paradigm (WP). He points out that though long established, WP had never been explicitly articulated, nor had any one seen the need to justifying its existence. It is these two shortcomings that Robins (1959) sets out to remedy. If modern linguists had rejected traditional approaches to morphology, which were almost all couched in WP terms, for their lack of rigour and explicitness, Robins was going to show that this was not an inherent defect of WP that could not be removed. He also wanted to show that, for some languages, WP provides a more satisfactory framework for the analysis of word-structure than IA or IP. Robins points out that the crucial difference between WP on the one hand, and IA and IP on the other, is the pivotal role the former gives to the word as the basic unit of word structure as well as sentence structure, a role which is assigned to the morpheme in the latter two models. In IA with the spotlight on morphemes and their arrangement in words and sentences, and in IP with the spotlight on morphemes and the processes that they undergo be it in the formation of words or sentences, the distinction between morphology and syntax gets blurred. By contrast, WP retains a clear boundary between morphology and syntax: morphology studies the internal structure of words while syntax investigates the behaviour of words and word groups in the formation of phrases and sentences. Also important is the paradigm: words that undergo morphologically induced alternation are “grouped into paradigms for the statement of their morphological forms and the listing of their various syntactic functions” (Robins 1959: 127). Robins concedes that it was a weakness in traditional WP not to recognise the morpheme as a basic grammatical unit in some languages. He willingly finds a place for it in his revamped WP model, but he reverts to the traditional view that syntagmatic and paradigmatic associations should be stated in terms of the word as a whole rather than the morpheme. Like Haas, Robins was concerned that the American structuralist assumption that the morpheme was the only unit in terms of which all aspects of word-structure must be stated was leading linguists into a blind alley. For instance, in a morphological analysis of English plural nouns, the assumption that there were allomorphs that were linearly arranged, which corresponded to the root and the plural suffix morphemes in the case of

feet ⬃ foot or sheep ⬃ sheep⫹ø [⫹plural], could only be sustained by resorting to subterfuge by positing a replacive morph in the former and a zero morph in the latter (Robins 1959: 133f.). If, however, the word as a whole were seen as the exponent of both the noun stem and the notion of plurarity, the problem evaporated. Robins (1959) only presented a brief programmatic sketch of WP. The challenge of developing a fully-worked out model of the theory was taken up subsequently by Matthews (see Matthews 1965 a; 1965 b; 1972; 1974). If the word is to play a pivotal role, clarifying its nature is important. Matthews distinguishes between three different senses in which the term is used. The lexeme is the word in the sense of a vocabulary item. This is conventionally written in upper case letter. Thus in seeing, saw and seen are all forms of the lexeme see. A second sense of the term word is the grammatical word, i.e. the word as a grammatical unit, with specified morphosyntactic properties. In this sense we can distinguish between seeing, saw and seen as being respectively the progressive form, the past tense form and the past participle form of the verb see. A third sense in which the term word is used is the word-form i.e. a physical form made up of a sequence of letters or sounds. We can say that the word-form seen has three phonemes and four letters. The key unit for WP is the word in the sense of grammatical word. Morphologically associated words are grouped together into paradigms. Morphology tries to explain patterns found in different paradigms. Hockett (1954) criticises WP for being incapable of describing isolating languages like Chinese where words are morphologically simple and have no paradigms. Both Robins and Matthews readily admit that if words in a particular language do not belong to paradigms, WP is a less suitable model for their analysis than IA. However, since it is not claimed that WP is universally suitable, this would not be a source of embarrassment. What are the advantages of WP? By taking the word and not the morpheme as the basic morphological and grammatical unit, it enables the linguist to treat in a simple way cases where the same morphological form has a variety of values depending on the word of which it is a part. For instance, in English -er serves as both a comparative adjective marker (as in taller) and a deverbal noun formative (as in worker), its value in a

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specific case can only be ascertained by examining the entire word of which it is a part. In both IA and IP the morphological prime is the morpheme as we have already noted. It is supposed to be the minimal unit of both meaning and grammatical function. That is not the view in WP. Although some morphemes might mean on their own, the signalling unit that must always convey semantic contrasts is the word, not the morpheme. This avoids letting morphological analysis getting driven off course when notorious cases such as suppletion (as in be, am, is) or internal change (as in goose ⬃ geese) are encountered. Matthews has articulated, refined, and formalised WP. He has shown how it works, especially with respect to Latin inflection, and to a lesser extent with respect to derivation. Initially, Matthews’ writings had little impact. But with the passage of time their influence has grown, especially in America where WP inspired approaches to morphology have been refined further and applied to a wide range of languages from various language families. (See Anderson’s Extended Wordand-Paradigm model (Anderson 1982; 1992); Stump 1991; Beard 1988; 1995 among others.) What is Matthews’s WP like? It is pragmatic. While not dismissing the possibility of formulating a universal theory that accounts for the idiosyncracies of individual languages, he warns against half-baked universalist pretentions (Matthews 1972: 147⫺ 156). This echoes the writings of Firth who

placed a much higher premium on describing appropriately the facts of individual languages than on the discovery of putative universals. How does mature WP compare with morpheme based models? As seen, IA is concerned with the arrangement of items where the items are morphemes. IP is concerned with the processes that items (morphemes) undergo. By contrast, WP is concerned with words and the processes affecting them. As Hoeksema & Janda (1988) point out, there is a number of theoretical properties shared by IP and WP beyond the assumption that process statements are needed. In both theories, morphological rules may alter the form of a word in order to indicate its function. The starting point of both IP and WP is that morphemes are abstract entities which are mapped onto phonetic representations. The difference is that in IP the abstract morphemes are assumed to be strung out linearly while in WP they are all thrown in one bag and in their mapping onto phonetic representations of words no unscrambling into a linear sequence is necessarily envisaged. This insight is useful in describing inflecting languages like Latin where any attempt to find a one-to-one mapping of morphemes onto phonemes is bound to fail. This insight is especially valuable in cases of one-to-many exponence which baffle morpheme-based theories. Consider Fig. 17.1 (from Matthews 1972: 132) which shows two alternative unordered representations of Latin re:ksisti: ‘you have ruled’.

Grammatical Representation:

REG- + Perfective + 2nd

+ Singular

Phonological Representation:

re:k

ti

Grammatical Representation:

Phonological Representation:

+

is

REG- +

2nd

+

re:k

s

Fig. 17.1: Unordered representations of lat. re:ksisti:

+

+

s

+

+

Singular + Perfective

is

+

ti

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The essential idea is that the paradigm of each word is seen in an abstract sense as a matrix in which word-forms like re:ksisti: are matched with a lexeme and its associated morphosyntactic properties. We can illustrate, using Latin, how paradigms are central to an understanding of how inflection works: (a) One paradigm provides an analogy for others. Traditional pedagogical practice tells students that the paradigm for ama:re ‘to love’ is analogous to that of ambula:re ‘to walk’. (b) Forms may be related by rule. A form that corresponds to mone:bo: ‘I shall advise’ can be derived by replacing the future simple -bo: with -bam in the imperfect as in mone:bam ‘I was advising’. (c) Grammatical words belonging to the same lexeme may be derived step-wise by rule as shown in (1) below. (1) audi- audi:-v-(i:) audi:-v er-(o) ‘hear’ ‘I have heard’ ‘I shall have heard’ perfect future perfect Another important work in this tradition is Carstairs (1987). Carstairs’ main purpose is to determine the nature of constraints on allomorphy in inflectional morphology. Whereas the Saussurean theory of the linguistic sign predicts a one-to-one correlation between linguistic signs and signifiers, in inflectional morphology a one-to-many correlation is commonly found. On the one hand, one inflectional affix may have several values, e.g. in a verb like jumps, the suffix -s simultaneously marks third person, singular and present tense; on the other hand, the same grammatical information may be signalled by a variety of affixes, e.g. verbs belonging to different conjugations may have distinct markings for the same categories as in Latin where the first person singular subjunctive suffix is -em in amem, in the case of the verb ama:re ‘to love’, but -am in audiam, in the case of audi:re ‘to hear’. Carstairs poses this question: In inflectional morphology, is there unprincipled divergence from the principle of one-to-one matching of signifier and signified? He hypothesises that the exponents of the same morpheme are subject to certain constraints on allomorphic variation. He proposes the following four limitations on the deviation from one-to-one signifier-tosignified correlations: (a) One-to-many syntagmatic deviation where one inflectional category may be signalled

in several places in the same word as in Latin re:ksisti: (see Fig. 17.1; this is a case of what Matthews 1972 calls extended exponence); (b) one-to-many paradigmatic deviation: the same property may have diverse manifestations in different words (e.g., the English past tense is marked by /t/ in walked and by /d/ in moved); (c) many-to-one syntagmatic deviation: cases where several distinct morphemes have a single phonological manifestation. Matthews (1972) calls this cumulative exponence (e.g., the -s verbal inflection in English which simultaneously marks present tense, third person as well as singular number in walks); (d) many-to-one paradigmatic deviation: more than one inflectional property is signalled by an identical phonetic form (e.g., in English verbs, -ed marks both past tense and past participle). Carstairs points out that although all four possibilities are encountered, their distribution is skewed. There are dependencies such that the appearance of a given form in particular word may encourage or forestall the occurrence of certain other marking in another word. One of the principles that he proposes to account for this is the Systematic Homonymy Claim. This states that systematic homonymy must be either: cumulative, or if noncumulative, the realisation of the homonymous property is very likely to be the usual exponent of at least one of the properties in question, or at least one of the properties is less relevant than the homonymous ones. Another of Carstairs’ constraints which we will mention is the Inflectional Parsimony Principle. This states that where many inflectional exponents of the same morphosyntactic property are available, there is blocking: each form is restricted to selecting just one of these. So, if a language L has, say 4 conjugations and 4 affixes that mark the simple past tense, any given verb stem will be allowed to select just one of these affixes (Carstairs 1987: 31f.). This line of enquiry has improved our understanding of the nature of inflectional paradigms, a theme that is taken up from a somewhat different stance by another team of researchers. 2.3. Network morphology More recently, network morphology, another paradigm-driven model of morphology, has been put forward by a group of British lin-

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guists (Corbett & Fraser 1993; Fraser & Corbett 1994). The claim made by proponents of this theory is that it allows a more sophisticated understanding of the nature of paradigms than was hitherto available. This is because it facilitates the combination of the prosody, phonology and morphology strands that may play a role in a paradigm. It does so by using the basic connectionist principle that a language is a network of linguistic information. By network is meant an array of interconnected nodes. The connectivity of the network determines the nature of the information about a word belonging to a given paradigm that is accessible to a given node. The theory has been exemplified in Brown et al. (1996) using Russian. The paper shows the importance of various kinds of morphological paradigm information in determining stress placement in Russian. The paper includes a computer implementation of this model using the lexical knowledge representation language DATR. Ritchie et al. (1992) is an earlier contribution to computational morphology. This book gives an explicit formalisation of the main rules of word-formation that have been proposed for English. It amounts to a computational dictionary of a fragment of the English lexicon.

3.

Conclusion

In Britain, interest in morphology developed late because of the preoccupation with phonetics. Over the last 50 years, the study of morphology has gradually taken root and the influence of British morphologists has gradually grown in importance, especially in the last 15 years. Word-based rather than morpheme-based morphology has been the preferred approach. A number of strands run through the British approach to morphology during this period: a tendency to be pragmatic; a healthy scepticism about the idea that the morpheme is the only appropriate unit of morphological analysis; awareness of the danger of imposing a single model (like IA or IP) on languages with words whose structure is typologically very different; and above all, the recognition that a revitalised WP holds out many possibilities. Hockett’s challenge has been satisfactorily answered. It has been shown that WP can be formalised, can be made explicit and can account for the word structure of diverse

languages with very complex inflectional morphology. The hegemony on morphemebased theories has been broken. Today the word is back in fashion as a morphological prime. We should not overlook a number of morphology textbooks that have also contributed to the development of the discipline. Matthews (1974) has already been mentioned as a landmark publication on morphology in general and WP in particular. The first edition which was published in 1974 sought a rapprochement with Chomskyan linguistics and tried to show how WP could be positioned vis-a`-vis the Chomskyan paradigm. In the second edition, which appeared in 1991, no such reconciliation of WP with the Chomskyan mainstream is attempted. Bauer (1988) is a beginners introduction to morphology and Carstairs-McCarthy (1992) is a more advanced broad survey of not only British but also continental European and American theories of morphology of the last 25 years. Two other books which are squarely in the generativist camp are Spencer (1991) and Katamba (1993). Spencer’s book is a comprehensive presentation of the most significant morphological approaches within the generative paradigm. It is aimed at the advanced student. Katamba (1993) is also written within the same model but is aimed at a somewhat less advanced reader. As well, there are two books, Adams (1973) and Bauer (1988) whose focus is English morphology. The former is a study in English compounding while the latter is a wide-ranging discussion of issues in English as well as general morphological theory within a broadly Chomskyan framework.

4.

References

Adams, Valerie (1973), An Introduction to Modern English Word-formation. London: Longman Anderson, Stephen R. (1982), “Where is morphology?”. Linguistic Inquiry 13, 571⫺612 Anderson, Stephen R. (1992), A-morphous Morphology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Bauer, Laurie (1983), English Word-formation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Bauer, Laurie (1988), Introducing Linguistic Morphology. Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univerity Press Beard, Robert (1988), “On the Separation of Derivation form Morphology: Toward a Lexeme-morpheme-based morphology”. Quaderni di Semantica 9, 3⫺59 Beard, Robert (1995), Lexeme-morpheme-base Morphology. Albany/NY: SUNY Press

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Langendoen, Donald Terence (1968), The London School of Linguistics. Cambridge/MA: MIT Press

A. K. & Robins, R. H. (eds.), In Memory of J. R. Firth. London: Longman Matthews, Peter H. (1965 a), “The Inflectional Component of a Word-and-paradigm Grammar”. Journal of Linguistics 1, 139⫺171 Matthews, Peter H. (1965 b), “Some Concepts in Word-and-paradigm Morphology”. Foundations of Language 1, 268⫺289 Matthews, Peter H. (1972), Inflectional Morphology: A Theoretical Study Based on Aspects of Latin Verb Conjugation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Matthews, Peter H. (1974), Morphology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press [1991] McCarthy, John J. (1979), Formal Problems in semitic Phonology and Morphology. Ph. D. dissertation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology [published 1982. New York, London: Garland Publishing] Palmer, Frank R. (1955), “The broken plurals of Tigrinya”. Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 17, 548⫺566 [reprinted in: Palmer (1970, ed.), 132⫺151 Palmer, Frank R. (1970, ed.), Prosodic Analysis. Oxford: Oxford University Press Palmer, Frank R. (1970), “Introduction”. In: Palmer (1970, ed.), ix⫺xvi Ritchie, Graeme D. & Black, A. & Russell, G. & Pulman, S. (1992), Computational Morphology: Practical Mechanisms for the English Lexicon. Cambridge/MA: MIT Press Robins, Robert H. (1953), “The Phonology of the Nasalised Verb Forms in Sundanese”. Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 15, 138⫺145 [reprinted in: Palmer (1970, ed.), 104⫺111] Robins, Robert (1959), “In defence of WP”. Transactions of the Philological Society. 116⫺144 Spencer, Andrew (1991), Morphological Theory. Oxford: Blackwell Stump, Gregory T. (1991), “On the Theoretical Status of Position Class Restrictions on Inflectional Affixes”. Yearbook of Morphology 4, 211⫺241 Waterson, Natalie (1956), “Some Aspects of the Phonology of Nominal Forms of the Turkish Word”. Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 18, 578⫺591 [reprinted in: Palmer (1970, ed.), 174⫺187]

Lyons, John (1966), “Firth’s theory of ‘meaning’ ”. In: Bazell, C. E. & Catford, J. C. & Halliday, M.

Francis Katamba, Lancaster (Great Britain)

Brown, Dunstan & Corbett, Greville & Fraser, Normann & Hippisley, Andrew & Timbereake, Alan (1996), “Russian Noun Stress and Network Morphology”. Linguistics 34.1, 53⫺107 Carstairs, Andrew (1987), Allomorphy in Inflexion. London: Croom Helm Carstairs-McCarthy, Andrew (1992), Current Morphology. London: Routledge Corbett, Greville & Fraser, Norman (1993), “Network Morphology: A DATR Account of Russian Inflectional Morphology”. Journal of Linguistics 29, 113⫺142 Firth, John R. (1934), “The Principles of Phonetic Notation in Descriptive Grammar”. Congre`s International des Sciences Anthropologiques et Ethnologiques [reprinted in Firth, J. R. (1957), 3⫺6] Firth, John R. (1948), “Sounds and prosodies”. Transactions of the Philological Society, 127⫺152 [reprinted in Firth (1957), 121⫺138] Firth, John R. (1957), Papers in Linguistics. 1934⫺1951. London etc.: Oxford University Press Fraser, Norman M. & Corbett, Greville G. (1994), “Gender, Animacy, and Declension Class Assignment: A Unified Account for Russian”. Yearbook of Morphology 7, 123⫺150 Goldsmith, John A. (1990), Autosegmental and Metrical Phonology. Oxford: Blackwell Haas, W. (1954), “On Defining Linguistic Units”. Transactions of the Philological Society, 54⫺84 Harris, Zellig S. (1951), Methods in Structural Linguistics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press Hoeksema, Jack & Janda, Richard D. (1988), “Implications of Process-Morphology for Categorial Grammar”. In: Oehrle, Richard T. & Bach, Emmon & Wheeler, Deindre (eds.), Categorial Grammars and Natural Language Structures. Dordrecht: Reidel, 199⫺247 Hockett, Charles F. (1954), “Two Models of Grammatical Description”. Word 10, 210⫺231 Inkelas, S. & Orgun, O. & Zoll, C. (1996), “Exceptions and Static Phonological Patterns: Cophonologies vs. Prespecification”. Rutgers Optimality Archive Katamba, Francis (1993), Morphology. London: Macmillan

18. Germany

157

18. Germany 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

The 19th century Jacob Grimm The Junggrammatiker The 20th century Generative approaches References

1.

The 19th century

The structure of words has been a favourite topic of linguistic research in the German speaking countries since the beginning of the scientific study of language. The history of morphological research is, therefore, the history of changing linguistic theories and methodological prerequisites. For a long period knowledge about words has been the main empirical fundament of statements about structure, history and relatedness of languages. Jacob Grimm, one of the outstanding German linguists in the beginning of the historical grammar period, dedicated two volumes with 1700 pages in his Deutsche Grammatik to morphological properties of German and related Germanic languages. In this article we can only sketch the most influential approaches to and works on morphology in the German speaking countries. The study of word formation will be given prominence in this survey. The presumably first extended description of derivatives and compounds in the German language is provided in the Ausführliche Arbeit von der Teutschen Haupt Sprache by Schottelius, published in 1663 (Faust 1981). His analysis of compounds as constructions, consisting of a Haubt Glied (‘main constituent’) and a Beygefügtes (‘added constituent’) includes many observations on semantic, syntactic, morphological and phonetic properties of German compounds. In the 19th century two competing schools of linguistic research can be distinguised. One of them is based on the tradition of rationalist grammar that goes back to the corresponding philosophy of the 16th and 17th century and takes up ideas of the German idealistic philosophy. The works of Von Humboldt (1836), Richter (1923 [1820]), Becker (1824) and Schmitthenner (1826) must be mentioned here. In particular, the grammar of Becker played an important role in German school grammar. The second school is that of the historical grammar

which claimed to be the genuine scientific approach to the study of language. The main postulate of this school was: grammatical facts of a given language can only be explained if their historical roots and their evolution along several language stages have been discovered. The search for historical sources of linguistic forms led to an extended study and comparison of language stages and related languages. This is the reason why this approach is also called historical comparative grammar. Historical grammar introduced new standards for linguistic research, i.e. more precise empirical methods and criteria. Claims on the relatedness of Indo-Germanic languages and on stages in the development of a certain language are based on a huge amount of data, especially from phonetics and morphology. In order to realize the vastness of the work done by linguists of the 19th century, one has to keep in mind, that all these data had to be discovered first. Of course, historical grammar did not remain a monolithic block, and was changed considerably from Grimm at the beginning to Paul at the end of the period. While Grimm is strongly motivated by ideas of German romanticism, ⫺ the language of earlier times appeared as the true indicator of the Volksgeist of a nation ⫺ the exactness of the natural sciences became more and more the yardstick of linguistic research. This tendency reached its summit with the Junggrammatiker (‘Neo-grammarians’) who considered phonetic changes as sound laws, i.e. laws in a strict sense, and proposed the theoretically interesting concept of analogy for the description of linguistic regularities. In the beginning of this period word structure was compared with living organisms. Words grow out of a root, are branchings of roots which can be grasped by word formation devices. More or less expanded word families are the outspring of such processes of growth, patterns of word formation create stems to which inflectional suffixes can be added if that is required by the word class to which the stem belongs. Rules of word formation as well as inflectional endings are related to certain aspects of syntax. Therefore, the study of morphology has always been linked to the study of the corresponding syntactic properties. All detailed grammars, e.g.,

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the grammars of Grimm (1826), Dietz (1870), Brugmann (1889), Wilmanns (1896) and Paul (1880), draw a borderline between word formation and flexion, i.e. there is no common component of morphology. The separation of syntax and word formation on the one hand and compounding and derivation on the other hand is determined by the historical perspective of this period. It was in general supposed that certain syntactic constructions can be transformed into compounds by historical processes. Furthermore, the second constituent of compounds can become a suffix under appropriate circumstances. The transition from syntactic constructions to compounds as well as the transition of constituents of compounds to suffixes, however, is seen as a semantic and functional change. Thus, it is not tantamount to a structural reduction of compounds to syntactic constructions or of derivatives to compounds.

2.

Jacob Grimm

Grimm, the father of scientific research of word formation, made a distinction between Wortbildung durch innere Veränderung (‘word formation by internal change’) and Wortbildung durch äußere Veränderung (‘word formation by external change’). In Germanic languages, internal change comes about by Umlaut and by Ablaut, external change by enrichment of roots. Enrichment of roots takes place by derivation with suffixes and by compounding. Derivation in Grimms terminology is “die zwischen wurzel und flexion eingeschaltete, an sich selbst dunkele mehrung des worts, kraft welcher der begriff der wurzel weiter geleitet und bestimmt wird” (‘the, as such, dark enrichment of words, included between root and inflection, by which the concept of the root is transferred and determined’; Grimm 1826: II, 85). The enrichment of a word comes about by a suffix which as such is not meaning-bearing, but participates only in the meaning of the whole derived word. This seems to be the correct interpretation of “an sich dunkele mehrung des worts”. The concept associated with the root is modified by the derivation type in toto. One can understand the suffix as an indicator of the derivation type. The idea of Grimm and his followers is, that a linguistic form loses its status of a separate sign in the course of a process of change and becomes a suffix, i.e. an other category of linguistic forms.

As far as compounds are concerned, Grimm (1826: II, 86) states, that “zwei lebendige oder doch deutliche wurzeln” (‘two living or at least transparent roots’) are linked to each other. This analysis is the fundament of the distinction between derivation and compounding accepted by many linguists up to our times. Compounds are considered to be junctions of separate words while derivatives are modifications of words indicated by affixes (cf. Art. 37). In his analysis of compound words Grimm distinguished between genuine and non-genuine composition. Genuine composition has no syntactic construction as a predecessor. Thus the history of coinings like Weinrebe ‘vine’ and Weinbeere ‘grape’ cannot be related to any syntactic construction. This means that there are already compounds in the earliest stages of Indo-Germanic languages. Non-genuine compounds, on the other hand, have syntactic constructions as their genetic source. Examples are stundenlang ‘for hours’, hinunter ‘down under’, Vergißmeinnicht ‘forget-me-not’, Sauerkraut ‘id.’, and Kindergarten ‘infant school’.

3.

The Junggrammatiker

The main ideas of Grimm’s analysis of word structure have been adopted by the next generations of historical linguists. However, this analysis has been expanded and deepened considerably, especially in the work of linguists at the end of the 19th century and in the beginning of the 20th century. Hermann Paul, the leading Junggrammatiker, gave an account of compounding and derivation which shows the progress made since Grimm (Paul 1880; 1920). In particular, there is a clear increase of knowledge about the evolution of genuine and non-genuine compounds. Paul agreed that genuine compounds are already present in Proto-Indo-European. He, furthermore, states that in the beginning there were only constructions of the form noun ⫹ noun, noun ⫹ adjective, stem ⫹ noun and stem ⫹ adjective. All other types of composition are later developments in the history of the Germanic languages. Non-genuine compounds, which are a favourite topic of historical research, were considered a typical outcome of the more recent history of Germanic languages. The genesis of this type of compounds is described as follows: a phrase, consisting among others of

18. Germany

a noun and a preposed genitive attribute freezes, i.e. undergoes semantic, morphological and phonetic changes. This process results in a new type of word formation, a new pattern of coining compounds. The genitive ending becomes opaque. Similarly, new types of compounds with adjectives as the first constituent arose from syntactic adjective ⫹ noun combinations. Compounds containing a verb stem as first constituent are not found earlier than in Old High German texts. They go back, it is assumed, to former nomina actionis, i.e. to verbal nouns which can be interpreted as verb stems, as in Raubvogel ‘bird of prey’ and Schlafzimmer ‘bed room’. Types of derivation are not listed according to the phonetic shape of suffixes, but according to semantic categories such as diminutives and feminine nouns, which shows Paul’s interest in semantics. The rule-governed character of word formation is involved in the concept of Proportionalanalogie (‘proportional analogy‘) which plays an important role in Paul’s linguistic theory. In the case of systematic phonetic changes he speaks of sound laws. Proportional analogies are represented as follows: (1) Wirt : Wirtin ⫽ Gatte : Gattin ⫽ Gast : X X ⫽ Gästin A more formal representation is: (2) A : A ⫹ suffixi ⫽ B : B ⫹ suffixi, ⫽ C : X If A, B, C … are nouns and suffixi is the suffix -in we can also write a generative rule like (3) N J N ⫹ in However, there is an important difference between the concept of proportional analogy and rewriting rules: proportional analogies are statements about relations between lexical entries, i.e. between words belonging to the lexicon of a language. They do not primarily predict new possible words, albeit they can be used as models for new coining. Proportional analogies have the advantage that different kinds of restrictions can be grasped. Paul shows, for example, that feminine nouns are first coined from nouns designating male human persons (Wirt : Wirtin ‘host ⫺ hostess’), later from nouns that function as both male animals and generic animal terms (Wolf : Wölfin ‘wolf ⫺ she-wolf’), and finally purely generic terms can form the base of a derivation with -in (Katze : Kätzin ‘cat ⫺ female cat’, Spatz : Spätzin ‘sparrow ⫺ female sparrow’).

159 As already pointed out, historical processes and models of new coining have to be kept apart. Historical processes lead to new types of complex words which can form the basis for analogically created words, i.e. historical changes can bring about new types of word formation patterns. This is true for compounds as well as for derivatives. Thus, an individual word like New High German Gottheit ‘deity’ has its particular history. The suffix -heit ‘-hood’ goes back to a Germanic stem which is Gothic haidus ‘property’. A possible genuine Gothic compound would be gudahaidus ‘deity’ which corresponds to the Old High German word gott(e)heit. There are many new coined derivatives in Old High German which can be analysed in analogy to gott(e)heit: biscopheit ‘episcopate’, magadheit ‘virginity’, deganheit ‘heroism’ among others. The evolution of suffixes is analysed by Paul along the following lines. In words entering frequently as second constituent into compounds a change of meaning may occur. This meaning then becomes more and more different from the meaning of the independent word. Semantic changes can be accompanied by phonetic diversification which finally leads to opaqueness of the relationship with the independent word. Inflectional suffixes may also have independent words as predecessors. The evolution of Latin verb forms in Romance languages gives evidence for this hypothesis. For instance, the Latin verb form amare habeo became French j’aimerai ‘I will love’. However, the structural and functional differences between derivation and inflection have never been neglected. All historical grammars contain two separate levels of morphological structure: inflection and word formation (cf. Art. 38). It remained an open question whether the notion of derivation should be applied to prefixation. Grimm held the view that derivation takes only place at the end of a word. Complex words such as Urlaub ‘holiday’, unreif ‘immature’ and entfliehen ‘to flee’ are called compounds. Although Behagel (1898), Wilmanns (1896) and Paul emphasize the similarities between prefixation and suffixation they nevertheless treat prefixed words as compounds. Historical grammarians have been predominantly occupied with the description of formal aspects of languages. The important role of a corresponding semantic description, however, has always been kept in mind, in

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particular the idea that semantic changes are the genuine source of genetic processes in morphology. Paul, for instance, was convinced that a proper analysis of derivational patterns has to include both the form and the contents of these patterns. Historical grammar has provided us with a reliable stock of data, in particular, with respect to morphology. All modern directions of research in German grammar make use of this heritage. A competent survey about word formation in historical grammar is given in Henzen (1947).

4.

The 20th century

Until the end of World War II, linguistic research in Germany and other German speaking countries was dominated by historical grammar. Structuralism in America and France as well as the Prague School had only a marginal influence on main stream linguistics in Germany. It seems to be a distinguishing feature of German linguistics that many linguists did not notice structuralism. After World War II, however, the structuralistic emphasis on synchronic description was partially accepted, for instance in Marchand (1969). After World War II, two trends can be distinguished. One is to lay more stress on formalized theories, the other is to deny the appropriateness of such formal theories, or to take at least a sceptic stand against them. In this survey we want to draw attention to some influential works on morphology that exemplify these trends. The main difference between these two trends seems to be, that formalist approaches presuppose more or less complex grammatical theories. This means, that the description of phenomena of a particular component of the grammar demands theoretical prerequisites that fit to the global theory of grammar. More traditional approaches, on the other hand, emphasize the collection of empirical data. The discussion of theoretical foundations is, as a rule, restricted to separate aspects or classes of data. This is the reason, why followers of this trend are open for specific questions and results of structuralist and generativist approaches. The more traditional trend is represented by works on word formation such as Fleischer (1969), Erben (1975) and Deutsche Wortbildung written by a team of the Institut für Deutsche Sprache (Mannheim) at the Uni-

versity of Innsbruck. Pioneers of the more structuralist and formalist movement are Marchand and linguists working in the framework of generative grammar at the Arbeitsstelle Strukturelle Grammatik of the Academy of Sciences in Berlin (GDR). In many respects, Fleischer (1969) continues the tradition of description of word formation in historical grammar, but at the same time, he is partially open for results of structuralist and generative linguistics. This work on German word formation is the most frequently used handbook in this field. Erben tried to supersede those descriptions that focus on the form side, and deal with derivation in terms of an alphabetic list of affixes (Erben 1975). Erben followed Paul and, in particular, Weisgerber (1964), who postulated four levels of linguistic description, among them a formbezogene Betrachtung (‘form-related description’) and a inhaltsbezogene Betrachtung (‘content-related description’). Erben gives examples of typical semantically motivated patterns of compounding, and proposes an analysis of derivation in terms of Funktionsstände ‘functional classes’. A Funktionsstand contains all means of word formation conveying the same meaning or function. Erben’s approach to word formation plays an important role in the Deutsche Wortbildung mentioned above. In particular, the semantic foundations of word formation have been studied in a detailed way. This work, consisting of five volumes, is the most detailed description of the morphological, phonetic, semantic and syntactic properties of German word formation. It also gives reliable information about the degree of productivity of each word formation pattern.

5.

Generative approaches

Already in the beginning of the sixties morphological studies in the framework of Chomsky’s first version of generative grammar were done by a group of young linguists at the Academy of Sciences in Berlin (GDR). Among the grammatical studies of this group works on the concept of the morpheme by Bierwisch (Bierwisch 1962), on inflection by Wurzel (Wurzel 1970), and on word formation by Motsch (Motsch 1962; 1970) should be mentioned here. A transformationalist analysis of word formation was given in Kürschner (1974). After Chomsky’s funda-

18. Germany

mental criticism of this transformationalist position, a variety of lexicalist analyses has been proposed, for instance, in Höhle (1982), Toman (1983), Olsen (1986), and Motsch (1988). Whereas Motsch defends an analysis in the framework proposed by Jackendoff (1975), Toman, Höhle and Olsen are followers of word syntax theories. A paradigmatic approach to word formation in which morphology is not seen as the syntax of morphemes, is defended in Becker (1990). Characteristic of these approaches is that the selection of the facts to be analysed is governed by theoretical questions such as: can complex words be analysed as reduced sentences or do they demand a separate rule component; which principles govern the inheritance of arguments observable in certain types of word formation? Influenced by generative grammar but founded on logical semantics are two important contributions to the description of compounds: Brekle (1970) and Fanselow (1981). Brekle proposed a detailed semantic description of compounds in terms of predicate calculus formulas. Fanselow enriched the discussion by analysing the semantic principles underlying the coining and interpretation of compounds. We finally want to draw the attention to an approach to morphology called Natural Morphology (cf. Art. 31). This approach was initiated by the Austrian linguists Mayerthaler and Dressler and by the German linguist Wurzel who started his scientific carreer in the framework of generative grammar (Mayerthaler 1981; Dressler 1987; Wurzel 1977; 1984). Natural morphology takes historical and comparative data into account and thus draws again attention to the results of historical grammar.

6.

References

Becker, Karl Ferdinand (1824), Deutsche Wortbildung, Abhandlungen des Frankfurter Gelehrtenvereins. Frankfurt/M.: Verlag der Hermannschen Buchhandlung

161 Brekle, Herbert E. (1970), Generative Satzsemantik und transformationelle Syntax im System der englischen Nominalkomposition. München: Fink Brugmann, Karl (1889), Grundriß der vergleichenden Grammatik der indogermanischen Sprachen. Straßburg: Trübner Dietz, Friedrich (1870), Grammatik der romanischen Sprachen. Bonn: Marvus Deutsche Wortbildung: Typen und Tendenzen in der Gegenwartssprache [1. Hauptteil: Kühnhold, Ingeburg & Wellmann, Hans (1973), Das Verb. Düsseldorf: Pädagogischer Verlag Schwann; 2. Hauptteil: Wellmann, Hans (1975), Das Substantiv. Düsseldorf: Pädagogischer Verlag Schwann; 3. Hauptteil: Kühnhold, Ingeburg & Putzer, Oskar & Wellmann, Hans (1978), Das Adjektiv. Düsseldorf: Pädagogischer Verlag Schwann; 4. Hauptteil: Ortner, Lorelies & Müller-Bollhagen, Elgin & Ortner, Hanspeter & Willmann, Hans & Pümpel-Mader, Maria & Gärtner, Hildegard (1991), Substantivkomposita. Berlin: de Gruyter; 5. Hauptteil: Pümpel-Mader, Maria & Gassner-Koch, Elsbeth & Willmann, Hans & Ortner, Lorelies (1993), Adjektivkomposita und Partizipialbildungen. Berlin: de Gruyter] Dressler, Wolfgang U. (1987), “Word Formation as Part of Natural Morphology”. In: Dressler, Wolfgang U. & Mayerthaler, Willy & Panagl, Oswald & Wurzel, Wolfgang U. (eds.), Leitmotifs in Natural Morphology. Amsterdam: Benjamins, 99⫺126 Erben, Johannes (1975), Einführung in die Wortbildungslehre. Berlin: Schmidt Fanselow, Gisbert (1981), Zur Syntax und Semantik der deutschen Nominalkomposition. Tübingen: Niemeyer Faust, Manfred (1981), “Schottelius’ Concept of Word Formation”. In: Trabant, Jürgen (ed.), Logos semantikos: Geschichte der Sprachphilosophie und der Sprachwissenschaft. Berlin: de Gruyter, 359⫺ 370 Fleischer, Wolfgang (1969), Wortbildung der Deutschen Gegenwartssprache. Leipzig: VEB Bibliographisches Institut Grimm, Jacob (1826), Deutsche Grammatik. Göttingen Henzen, Walter (1947), Deutsche Wortbildung. Halle: Niemeyer

Becker, Thomas (1990), Analogie und morphologische Theorie. München: Fink

Höhle, Tilman (1982), “Über Komposition und Derivation: Zur Konstituentenstruktur von Wortbildungsprodukten”. Zeitschrift für Sprachwissenschaft 1, 76⫺112

Behaghel, Otto (1898), “Zur Lehre von der deutschen Wortbildung”. Wissenschaftliche Beihefte zur Zeitschrift des allgemeinen deutschen Sprachvereins 14f.

Humboldt, Wilhelm von (1836), Über die Verschiedenheit des menschlichen Spachbaues und ihren Einfluß auf die geistige Entwickelung des Menschengeschlechts. Berlin: Dümmler

Bierwisch, Manfred (1962), Über den theoretischen Status des Morphems. Berlin/DDR: Akademieverlag (Studia Grammatica 2) 51⫺89

Jackendoff, Ray S. (1975), “Morphological and Semantic Regularities in the Lexikon”. Language 51, 639⫺671

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Kürschner, Wilfied (1974), Zur syntaktischen Beschreibung deutscher Nominalkomposita. Tübingen: Niemeyer

Olsen, Susan (1986), Wortbildung im Deutschen: Eine Einführung in die Theorie der Wortstruktur. Stuttgart: Kröner

Paul, Hermann (1920), Deutsche Grammatik. Halle: Niemeyer Richter, Jean Paul (1923 [1820]), “Über die deutschen Doppelwörter”. In: Berind, Eduard (ed.), Jean Pauls Sämtliche Werke. Berlin: Propyläenverlag, 169⫺264 [orig. 1820] Schmitthenner, F. (1826), Ursprachlehre [faksimile reprint 1976, Stuttgart: Frommann] Schottelius, Johann G. (1663), Ausführliche Arbeit von der Teutschen HaubtSprache [reprint 1995, Tübingen: Niemeyer] Toman, Jindrich (1983), Wortsyntax. Tübingen: Niemeyer Weisgerber, Leo (1964), “Vierstufige Wortbildungslehre”. Muttersprache 74, 33⫺43 Wilmanns, Wilhelm (1896), Deutsche Grammatik. Straßburg: Trübner Wurzel, Wolfgang U. (1970), Studien zur deutschen Lautstruktur. Berlin/DDR: Akademieverlag (Studia Grammatica 8) Wurzel, Wolfgang U. (1977), “Zur Stellung der Morphologie im Sprachsystem”. Linguistische Studien des Zentralinstituts für Sprachwissenschaft der Akademie der Wissenschaften der DDR 35, 86⫺130 Wurzel, Wolfgang U. (1984), Flexionsmorphologie und Natürlichkeit. Berlin/DDR: Akademieverlag (Studia Grammatica 21)

Paul, Hermann (1880), Principien der Sprachgeschichte. Halle: Niemeyer

Wolfgang Motsch, Mannheim (Germany)

Marchand, Hans (21969), The Categories and Types of Present-day English Word-formation. München: Becksche Verlagsbuchhandlung [11960] Mayerthaler, Willy (1981), Morphologische Natürlichkeit. Wiesbaden: Athenaion Motsch, Wolfgang (1962), Zur Stellung der ‘Wortbildung’ in einem formalen Sprachmodell. Berlin/ DDR: Akademieverlag (Studia Grammatica 1), 31⫺50 Motsch, Wolfgang (1970), “Analyse von Komposita mit zwei nominalen Elementen”. In: Bierwisch, Manfred & Heidolph Karl-Erich (eds.), Progress in Linguistics. The Hague: Mouton, 208⫺223 Motsch, Wolfgang (1988), “On Activity, Productivity and Analogy in Derivational Processes”. In: Motsch, Wolfgang (ed.), The Contribution of Word Structure Theories to the Study of Word Formation. (Linguistische Studien des Zentralinstituts für Sprachwissenschaft der Akademie der Wissenschaften der DDR 179), 1⫺30

19. The Netherlands 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

From 1890 to the First World War The years until 1945 Structuralist approaches Generative approaches Functionalist approaches Surveys of the work of Dutch morphologists References

1.

From 1890 to the First World War

In the 19th century, the scientific study of Dutch had a predominantly diachronic orientation. It is only in the Woordenboek der Nederlandsche Taal that one finds treatments of the contemporary morphology of Dutch, in the entries for the prefixes and suffixes. This dictionary has been set up in the historical-philological tradition of the Deutsches Wörterbuch of the Grimm brothers, and will be completed in 1998. After 1890, we find treatments of inflection and word formation of Dutch in one of

Den Hertog’s grammars of Dutch (Den Hertog 1897/98). In this work, the grammatical insights of German linguists such as Becker, Kern, Müller, Paul and Wundt are applied to Dutch. Den Hertog’s work was criticised by a number of contemporary Dutch linguists who published in the journal Taal en Letteren. Characteristic of the approach advocated by the linguists of Taal en Letteren is the analysis of the ablauting verbs of Dutch in Talen (1894). In his purely synchronic analysis, Talen distinguished eight classes based on the vowel of the past tense singular, whereas Den Hertog (1897: 173⫺178) still adhered to the traditional historical classification with seven classes. Van Wijk, who later became famous as a Slavicist and phonologist, felt affinity with the insights of the Taal en Letteren group. In the second printing of his De Nederlandsche Taal (1909) he added a chapter on word formation in which he discussed the productive

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types of compounding, suffixation and prefixation of Dutch. He was the first Dutch morphologist to use productivity as a descriptive criterion of classification. This focus on productivity and “its role in morphological theory is a persistent and perhaps unique characteristic of Dutch morphology” (Booij 1990a: 43f.; cf. Al et al. 1981 and Schultink 1992: 193⫺196).

2.

The years until 1945

In the period 1914⫺1945 the study of Dutch morphology did not grow very much. In De Vries (1921/22) an impressive number of observations on the morphology of Dutch and its dialects can be found, but his observations and analyses have a rather unsystematic character. Yet, he sometimes discusses more general morphological mechanisms. A study of nominal compounding, with both historical and contemporary data, is Van Lessen (1928), which for decades functioned as a standard work with respect to Dutch compounds and synthetic compounds. Another book from this period that deserves being mentioned is Reichling’s dissertation Het Woord (Reichling 1935). Although this book is not a morphological study, his linguistic theory clearly influenced the work of a number of Dutch morphologists. Reichling stressed the autonomy of language, its significatory function and actional nature, and the inseparability of language and language use. Both the form and the meaning of a word are cognitive units. Reichling considered Bühler, Sapir, and Delacroix as his great examples. In this interbellum period, dialectgeography flourished, both in the Netherlands and in Flanders. Morphology also got some attention, in particular diminutive formation. Kloeke, who built his analysis on Wrede (1908), assumed that the diminutive suffix -tje of present-day Dutch is the result of palatalization of the suffix -kin, and spread from the province of North-Holland to a much larger area (Kloeke 1923). The Fleming Pe´e made a dialectical survey of the diminutives in all Dutch dialects, and argued also that the different forms of the diminutive suffix all derive from the suffix -kin (Pe´e 1936⫺1938). Attention to the allomorphy of the standard Dutch diminutive suffix, in particular the choice between -tje and -etje, was given by the Anglicist Kruisinga (1924: 120⫺124; 1938: 72⫺76). He argued that this choice is

determined by the stress pattern and the last segments of the base word. Kruisinga also published a comparative study of diminutives in English, German and Dutch, in which he analysed both their formal and their affective meaning aspects (Kruisinga 1942). After the First International Congress of Linguists held in The Hague in 1928, the influence of Prague structuralism became rather strong in the Netherlands, in particular in the field of phonology and morphonology. Van Wijk wrote an article in favour of the inflection-derivation distinction (Van Wijk 1934) based on Sapir (1921). A. W. de Groot (1939 a; 1939 b; 1939 c) presented his own essentially deductive approach to language, and gave a clear exposition of his view on the position of morphology in the language system, inspired by the work of the Prague structuralists.

3.

Structuralist approaches

In 1947 the Nederlandse Spraakkunst by De Vooys appeared. This often reprinted work, written in a mainly historicising, neogrammarian style, presented a 80 pages survey of what had been said so far about the morphology of Dutch, supplemented by the author’s own observations (De Vooys 1947). More innovating was the work of Royen (1947⫺54) and Van Haeringen (1949; 1962), originally both historical linguists who wrote their dissertations under the supervision of the famous Dutch Indo-Europeanist C. C. Uhlenbeck. Royen concentrated as far as morphology is concerned on nominal and pronominal inflection, and based himself on actual (written) language use (Royen 1947⫺ 1954). Although this work is a rich source of data, the author did not present a clear analysis of the underlying systematics of these inflectional phenomena, and did not relate his analyses to contemporary linguistic theories. Van Haeringen is also well known for his acute observations of both written and spoken language. More than Royen, he tried to classify his data, and to discover synchronic regularities, for instance in his study of Dutch pluralisation (Van Haeringen 1947), in which he argued that the choice between -s and -en as plural suffixes for nouns is determined by rhythm: -en after a stressed syllable, -s after an unstressed one. Royen and Van Haeringen cannot be considered real structuralists. Of the pre-war

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structuralist morphologists, it was only A. W. de Groot who remained active, and published in the journal Lingua, founded by him together with Reichling. De Groot’s leading idea was that each language has its own system of logically structured word classes. These word classes are distinguished on the basis of the meaning of the word stems. For De Groot, the study of word classes starts with the study of morphological valence, supplemented by the study of the syntactic valence of the words in which these stems occur. This is illustrated by the word class systems of Chinese, Latin, and Dutch (De Groot 1948). Later articles of this classicist (De Groot 1956 a; 1956 b) dealt with the Latin cases. De Groot also worked on an extensive structuralist grammar (including morphology) of Dutch, but this work was never finished due to his death in 1963. Within the structuralist tradition the Anglicist Cohen wrote an article on the diminutive suffix with its five allomorphs -tje, -etje, -je, -kje, and -pje (Cohen 1958). The structuralist and Slavicist Ebeling gave an analysis of the Dutch tense system in the spirit of Jakobson, in which both the paradigmatic and syntagmatic axis play a role (Ebeling 1962). Later, Ebeling published a theoretical monograph in which he “proposes semantic structures for which the ‘abstract processes’ of their formation and the corresponding part of the performance model are one and the same thing” (Ebeling 1978: 510). In this work, he also deals with morphology (Ebeling 1978: 413⫺491). Influential was the work of the linguist and Javanist E. M. Uhlenbeck (Uhlenbeck 1978). In 1953, he definitively parted with morphemic analyses a` la Harris: “The facts force us to the opinion that the morpheme, in contradistinction to the word, is not a linguistic unit. It is merely a moment in a word. The morpheme only has a meaning via a word. Reichling had already reached this conclusion almost twenty years ago.” (Uhlenbeck 1978: 43 [⫽ 1953: 326])

A consequence of this view is that “the object of an enquiry into word-classes is to determine 1o the correspondences existing between features of form and features of meaning, with or without differences in valence; 2o if there is no difference in phonemic form, the correspondences between phenomena of valence and features of meaning.” (Uhlenbeck 1978: 45⫺46 [⫽ 1953: 330])

With this Uhlenbeck distantiated himself from the meaning-based distinction of word classes of De Groot. “A third consideration […] follows from the fact that every language is always the result of a historical development and therefore always to some extent contains the remains of an earlier system, now no longer valid. This renders imperative a distinction between productive and non-productive proce´de´’s.” (Uhlenbeck 1978: 51 [⫽ 1953: 336])

A detailed study of Dutch morphology within the Uhlenbeckian framework of paradigmatic morphology is Schultink (1962), a dissertation written under the supervision of Uhlenbeck. The characteristics of his approach, in which the morpheme does not play a role, are the following. First, some words exhibit a clear correspondence between “moments” of form and “moments” of meaning. These correspondences can only be observed when there is a series of words with this type of form-meaning correspondence. It is only then that one may speak of complex words. Second, the notion of productivity plays a central role. This notion is defined as follows: “Productivity is the possibility for language users to form an in principle uncountable number of new words unintentionally, by means of a morphological process which is the basis of the form-meaning correspondence of some words they know” (Schultink 1961; 1962: 38). A third characteristic of Schultink’s morphology is that there is no principled distinction between inflection and derivation. Uhlenbeck’s ideas can not only be found in Schultink’s work, and that of Anceaux (e.g. Anceaux 1965), but also in a number of dissertations supervised by Uhlenbeck that contain detailed morphological descriptions of particular languages: Voorhoeve (1965), Hoff (1968), Mussies (1971), De Vries (1975), and in Adelaar (1977). The Schultinkian notion of productivity also forms the point of departure of more recent dissertations such as Van Marle (1985), Baayen (1989), and Van Santen (1992) that discuss the role of this notion in generative morphology. In the work of Van Marle, morphological creativity (wich includes productivity) plays a central role. Van Marle argued that new words are often created on the basis of paradigmatic relations between words, i.e. morphological networks of words with the same base. In this way, not only regular affixation

19. The Netherlands

can be captured, but also phenomena like analogical coining and affix substitution. The competition between synonymous affixes is another phenomenon that can be analysed straigthforwardly in the paradigmatic approach to morphology (Van Marle 1985; 1988; 1992). According to Van Marle (1985), the notion productivity only pertains to competence, not to performance. Van Santen, on the other hand, argued that “the idea of studying language without at the same time studying language as it is used is misdirected”. “[T]he principal task of the morphologist is taken to be the specification of the likelihood of the possible words of a language” (Van Santen 1992: 251). In Baayen (1989) it is investigated how a quantitative measure of productivity can be given. As a measure of the degree of productivity of a morphological rule, Baayen uses “the ratio of hapax legomena to the total number of occurrences of the words covered by this rule, which is an estimate of the probability of sampling new types, and as such a measure of the degree of productivity of a word formation rule” (Baayen 1989: 2). Sassen published morphological studies with a paradigmatic orientation, such as Sassen (1968; 1979; 1981). Van den Toorn wrote a number of descriptive contributions to Dutch morphology, in particular compounding and suffixation (Van den Toorn 1982 a; 1982 b, 1983 a; 1983 b). Link phonemes and related morphological problems are discussed in Mattens (1970; 1984; 1990). Descriptive contributions with a sociolinguistic or dialectgeographical dimension can be found in the work of the Flemish linguists Smedts and Taeldeman (Taeldeman 1980; 1985; Smedts 1972; 1979; 1986).

4.

Generative approaches

As is well known, morphology did not play an important role in the first years of generative grammar (cf. Art. 22). The first generative analyses of morphology, in particular the transformationalist analysis of compounds, were criticised as early as 1967 by Dik (1967). Positive, on the other hand, were the reactions in Van Katwijk (1965), in Staal (1966), and in two dissertations defended in the Netherlands by South-Africans, Botha (1968) and Wissing (1971). Botha published a methodologically oriented analysis of Afrikaans nominal compounding in the generative

165 framework, and concluded that the idea that the lexicon of a generative grammar can be equated with “the full set of irregularities of the language”, as Bloomfield would have it, requires modification (Botha 1968). Since Chomsky (1970), a paper that introduced the lexicalist hypothesis, the generative morphology of Dutch has had a lexicalist orientation. In Booij (1977), an attempt was made to integrate the insights of structuralist morphology into a model of generative grammar with a separate morphological component as advocated in Aronoff (1976). The main object of description of this dissertation is formed by the formal properties of complex words such as the order of affixes, and stress- and syllabification patterns in Dutch. Schultink (1980 a; 1980 b) too dealt with stress patterns and affix order. The dissertation of the Anglicist Meys (Meys 1975) has been written in the spirit of Gruber’s Generative Semantics. The allomorphy of the diminutive suffix discussed above has also been studied by generative linguists, in particular by Trommelen, who made use of metrical phonology in accounting for the distribution of the different allomorphs (Trommelen 1984). Alternative analyses were given in Van Zonneveld (1983) and Van der Hulst (1984). The formal properties of Dutch complex words have also been studied within a particular variant of generative morphology, the theory of Lexical Morphology, which assumes the possibility of level ordering, i.e. of ordering of strata in the morphological component of a grammar (cf. Kiparsky 1982; Van Beurden 1987; Paulissen & Zonneveld 1988; Trommelen & Zonneveld 1990; 1992). Arguments against the level ordering hypothesis have been given in Booij (1989). Since generative morphology is predominantly syntagmatically oriented, it will come as no surprise that the notion morphological head played a role in a number of analyses of Dutch morphology (Moortgart 1981; Muysken 1982; Trommelen & Zonneveld 1986; Hoeksema 1988; 1992). The treatment of conversion in generative morphology is the topic of Neeleman & Schipper (1993) and Don’s dissertation (Don 1993). Don argued for a theory of word formation in which the morphological structure of a word consists of a morphosyntactic and a morphophonological representation. His theory is a synthesis between a so-called separationist approach and more standard affix-

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based theories. In the case of conversion, there is a morphosyntactic derivation without a corresponding morphophonological affix. Recently, a lot of attention has been given to the syntax-morphology interface, in particular in relation to the particle verbs (“samenkoppelingen”) which behave as lexical units but whose particles are nevertheless separated from the finite verb in main clauses (Booij 1990 b; Neeleman & Weerman 1993). The relation between syntax and morphology also played a role in the Dutch discussion on the proper analysis of synthetic compounds such as blauwogig ‘blue-eyed’. The analytical problem ist that ogig does not exist independently, so the issue is whether such complex words are derived from phrases such as blauw oog ‘blue eye’ (phrasal compounds), compounds of which the head is a possible but non-existing word, or morphological constructs sui generis in which two lexemes and an affix are combined. These issues are discussed in Meys (1980), Botha (1984), Hoeksema (1984), and in Van Santen (1992). Hoeksema’s analysis makes use of a categorial grammar framework and model-theoretical semantics. Finally, the interaction between syntax and semantics is also at stake in the discussion of inheritance phenomena (cf. Art. 83). In this discussion Dutch linguists played an important role (Moortgat 1981; 1985; Hoekstra & Van der Putten 1988; Booij 1992). In the context of Natural Language Processing Ten Hacken’s dissertation discusses the problem “How can it be determined whether an expression belongs to inflection, derivation, compounding or outside morphology?” (Ten Hacken 1994: 1; cf. also Art. 37).

5.

Functionalist approaches

The functionalist studies of Dik influenced the work of a number of Dutch linguists. The most detailed exposition of Dik’s ideas about morphology can be found in Dik (1989; 1992). Morphology is separated into two domains: predicate formation rules (⫽ derivation) and expression rules (⫽ inflection). Irregular complex forms are accounted for in the lexicon. Dik’s morphological ideas are amended and applied to Hungarian by his disciple C. de Groot (De Groot 1986; 1990). The term functionalist morphology is sometimes also taken to refer to morphology with

a strong focus on the semantic side of word formation, including compounding. In De Caluwe’s Ghentian dissertation the semantic framework used is that of cognitive grammar (De Caluwe 1991).

6.

Surveys of the work of Dutch morphologists

A survey of the morphological phenomena of Dutch is given in De Haas & Trommelen (1993). This Morfologisch Handboek van het Nederlands contains an extensive bibliography of detailed studies of Dutch morphology. Another source that may be used is de Algemene Nederlandse Spraakkunst (Geerts et al. 1984). Morphological handbooks for the related language Afrikaans are Kempen (21969) and Combrink (1990). Booij (1990 a) and Schultink (1994) are surveys of the history of Dutch morphology. Dutch introductions to the study of morphology are Van Santen (1984), Don et al. (1994), and Booij & Van Santen (1995). It will come as no surprise that morphology in The Netherlands also comprises the morphology of Frisian, its second official language (cf. Tiersma 1985: 47⫺101). The historical relations between The Netherlands and its former colonies, Indonesia and Surinam, led to morphological research of Dutch linguists, who were already mentioned above (E. M. Uhlenbeck, Anceaux, Voorhoeve, Hoff). For the same reason Belgian and South-African linguists contributed to the study of African languages, for instance the Belgian Meeussen.

7.

References

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19. The Netherlands Analysis and Psycholinguistic Interpretation. Amsterdam: Centrum voor Wiskunde en Informatica Beurden, Lisan van (1987), “Playing Level with Dutch Morphology”. In: Beukema, Frits & Coopmans, Peter (eds.), Linguistics in the Netherlands 1987. Dordrecht, Providence/RI: Foris, 21⫺30 Booij, Geert E. (1977), Dutch Morphology: A Study of Word Formation in Generative Grammar. Lisse: De Ridder Booij, Geert E. (1979, ed.), Morfologie van het Nederlands. Amsterdam: Huis aan de drie grachten Booij, Geert E. (1989), “Complex Verbs and the Theory of Level Ordering”. In: Booij, Geert & Van Marle, Jaap (eds.), Yearbook of Morphology 2. Dordrecht: Foris, 21⫺30 Booij, Geert E. (1990 a), “Phonology and Morphology: The Dutch Contribution”. In: Aarts, Flor & Els, Theo van (eds.), Contemporary Dutch Linguistics. Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 38⫺49 Booij, Geert E. (1990 b), “The Boundary between Morphology and Syntax: Separable Complex Verbs in Dutch”. In: Booij, Geert & Van Marle, Jaap (eds.), Yearbook of Morphology 3. Dordrecht: Foris, 45⫺64 Booij, Geert E. (1992), “Morphology, Semantics and Argument Structure”. In: Roca, Iggy M. (ed.), Thematic Structure: Its Role in Grammar. Berlin, New York: Foris (Linguistic Models 16), 47⫺63 Booij, Geert & Van Marle, Jaap (1988, eds.), Yearbook of Morphology. Dordrecht, Providence/RI: Foris Booij, Geert & Santen, Ariane van (1995), Morfologie: de woordstructuur van het Nederlands. Amsterdam: University Press Botha, Rudolf P. (1968), The Function of the Lexicon in Transformational-generative Grammar. The Hague, Paris: Mouton Botha, Rudolf P. (1984), Morphological Mechanisms: Lexicalist Analyses of Synthetic Compounding. Oxford etc.: Pergamon Press Caluwe, Johan de (1991), Nederlandse nominale composita in functionalistisch perspectief. ’s-Gravenhage: SDU Chomsky, Noam (1970), “Remarks on Nominalization”. In: Jacobs, Roderick A. & Rosenbaum, Peter S. (eds.), Readings in English Transformational Grammar. Waltham/MA etc.: Ginn, 184⫺ 221 Cohen, Antonie (1958), “Het Nederlands diminutiefsuffix: een morfonologische proeve”. De Nieuwe Taalgids 51, 40⫺45 [reprinted in: Booij (1979, ed.), 39⫺45] Combrink, Johan G. H. (1990), Afrikaanse morfologie: Capita exemplaria. Pretoria: Academica Dik, Simon C. (1967), “Some Critical Remarks on the Treatment of Morphological Structure in

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Kloeke, Gesinus G. (1923), “Die Entstehung der niederländischen Diminutivendung -tje”. Zeitschrift für deutsche Mundarten 18, 217⫺231 Kruisinga, Etsko (1924), A Grammar of Modern Dutch. London: Allen & Unwin Kruisinga, Etsko (1938), Het Nederlands van nu. Amsterdam: Wereldbibliotheek Kruisinga, Etsko (1942), Diminutieve en affektieve suffixen in de Germaanse talen. Amsterdam: Noord-Hollandsche Uitgeversmaatschappij (Mededeelingen der Nederlandsche Akademie van Wetenschappen, Afdeeling Letterkunde, Nieuwe Reeks dl. 5, 9) Lessen, Jacoba H. van (1928), Samengestelde naamwoorden in het Nederlandsch. Groningen, Den Haag: Wolters Marle, Jaap van (1985), On the Paradigmatic Dimension of Morphological Creativity. Dordrecht: Foris Marle, Jaap van (1988), “On the Role of Semantics in Productivity Change”. In: Booij & Van Marle (eds.), 139⫺154 Marle, Jaap van (1992), “De studie van de paradigmatiek: een poging tot reconstructie”. Forum der Letteren 33, 18⫺28 Mattens, Willy H. M. (1970), De indifferentialis: Een onderzoek naar het anumerieke gebruik van het substantief in het Algemeen Bruikbaar Nederlands. Assen: Van Gorcum, Prakke & Prakke Mattens, Willy H. M. (1984), “De voorspelbaarheid van tussenklanken in nominale samenstellingen”. De Nieuwe Taalgids 77, 333⫺343 Mattens, Willy H. M. (1990), “De spelling van de tussenklanken”. De Nieuwe Taalgids 83, 540⫺552 Meys, Willem J. (1975), Compound Adjectives in English and the Ideal Speaker-listener: A Study of Compounding in a Transformational-generative Framework. Amsterdam, Oxford: North-Holland Publishing Company; New York: American Elsevier (North-Holland Linguistic Series 18) Meys, Willem J. (1980), “Synthetische composita: Voer voor morfologen”. Spektator 10, 250⫺290 Moortgat, Michael (1981), “Subcategorization and the Notion ‘Lexical Head’”. In: Daalder, Saskia & Gerritsen, Marinel (eds.), Linguistics in the Netherlands 1981. Amsterdam etc.: North-Holland Publishing Company, 45⫺54 Moortgat, Michael (1985), “Functional Composition and Complement Inheritance”. In: Hoppenbrouwers, Geer A. J. & Seuren, Pieter A. M. & Weijters, Ton [⫽ A.] J. M. M. (1985, eds.), Meaning and the Lexicon. Dordrecht, Cinnaminson/NJ: Foris, 39⫺48 Mussies, Gerard (1971), The Morphology of Koine Greek as Used in the Apocalypse of St. John: A Study in Bilingualism. Leiden: Brill Muysken, Pieter C. (1982), “Parametrizing the Notion ‘Head’”. Journal of Linguistic Research 2, 57⫺75.

19. The Netherlands Neeleman, Ad & Schipper, Joleen (1993), “Verbal Prefixation in Dutch: Thematic Evidence for Conversion”. In Booij, Geert & Van Marle, Jaap (eds.), Yearbook of Morphology 1992. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 57⫺92 Neeleman, Ad & Weerman, Fred (1993), “The Balance between Syntax and Morphology”. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 11, 433⫺476 Paulissen, Det & Zonneveld, Wim (1988), “Compound Verbs and the Adequacy of Lexical Morphology”. In: Everaert et al. (eds.), 281⫺302 Pe´e, Willem (1936⫺1938), Dialectgeographie der Nederlandsche diminutiva, Vol. 1⫺2. Gent: Seminarie voor Vlaamsche Dialectologie van de Universiteit te Gent (Uitgaven der Koninklijke Vlaamsche Academie voor Taal- en Letterkunde 4) Reichling, Anton J. B. N. (1935), Het woord: Een studie omtrent de grondslag van taal en taalgebruik. Nijmegen: Berkhout Royen, Gerlach (1947⫺1954), Buigingsverschijnselen in het Nederlands, Vol. 1⫺4. Amsterdam: Noord-Hollandsche Uitgeversmaatschappij (Verhandelingen der Koninklijke Nederlands(ch)e Akademie van Wetenschappen, Afdeling Letterkunde, Nieuwe Reeks dl. 50, 1; dl. 52; dl. 58, 1; 58, 2; dl. 59, 3) Santen, Ariane J. van (1984), De morfologie van het Nederlands. Dordrecht, Cinnaminson/NJ: Foris Santen, Ariane J. van (1992), Produktiviteit in taal en taalgebruik: Een studie op het gebied van de Nederlandse woordvorming. Ph.D. dissertation, Rijksuniversiteit Leiden Sapir, Edward (1921), An Introduction to the Study of Speech. New York: Harcourt, Brace Sassen, Albert (1968), “Problems of Pre-, Post-, and Co-existence and the Word-class of Past Participles in Dutch”. Lingua 21, 400⫺416 Sassen, Albert (1979), “Over het bestaan en ontstaan van Nederlandse woorden”. In: Booij (1979, ed.), 63⫺76 Sassen, Albert (1981), “Morfologische produktiviteit in het licht van niet-additieve woordafleiding”. Forum der Letteren 22, 126⫺142 Schultink, Hendrik (1961), “Produktiviteit als morfologisch fenomeen”. Forum der Letteren 2, 110⫺ 125 [reprinted in: Booij (1979, ed.), 47⫺62] Schultink, Hendrik (1962), De morfologische valentie van het ongelede adjectief in modern Nederlands. Den Haag: Van Goor [21980 Utrecht: Hes] Schultink, Hendrik (1980 a), “On Stacking up Affixes, Mainly in Dutch Words”. In: Alkemade, Dick J. van & Feitsma, Anthonia & Meys, Willem J. & Reenen, Pieter van & Spa, Jacob J. (eds.), Linguistic Studies Offered to Berthe Siertsema. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 229⫺242 Schultink, Hendrik (1980 b), “Boundaries, Wordclasses and the Accentuation of Derived Words in Dutch”. In: Zonneveld, Wim & Coetsem, Frans

169 van & Robinson, Orrin W. (eds.), Studies in Dutch Phonology. The Hague: Nijhoff (Dutch Studies 4), 205⫺222 Schultink, Hendrik (1992), “Herkomst en groei van het begrip ‘produktiviteit’ als morfologisch fenomeen”. In: Klein, Maarten (ed.), Nieuwe eskapades in de neerlandistiek. Opstellen van vrienden voor M. C. van den Toorn bij zijn afscheid als hoogleraar Nederlandse taalkunde aan de Katholieke Universiteit te Nijmegen. Groningen: WoltersNoordhoff, 187⫺201 Schultink, Hendrik (1994), “Een eeuw Nederlandse morfologie: De ontwikkelingsgang van een discipline”. Spektator 23, 45⫺77 Smedts, Willy A. J. (1972), Adjectivering en appellativering van toponiemen: Een synchronischdescriptieve studie. Naamkunde: Bijlage LXIII Smedts, Willy A. J. (1979), Lexicale morfologie: De beheersing van de woordvorming door Vlaamse ‘brugklassers’. Herent: Ph.D. dissertation, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven Smedts, Willy A. J. (1986), De beheersing van de woordvorming: Een sociolinguı¨stisch onderzoek bij Vlaamse dertienjarigen. Leuven: Universitaire Pers Staal, J. Frits (1966), “Room at the Top in Sanskrit: Ancient and Modern Descriptions of Nominal Composition”. Indo-Iranian Journal 9, 165⫺ 198 Taeldeman, Johan (1980), “Pluralisation in the Flemish (and the Brabantish) Dialects: A Diatopical Survey and a Sociolinguistic Close-up of Morphological Change”. In: Daalder, Saskia & Gerritsen, Marinel (eds.), Linguistics in the Netherlands 1980. Amsterdam etc.: North-Holland Publishing Company, 29⫺46 Taeldeman, Johan (1985), “‘De soep is wel eetbaar maar niet etelijk’: Over deverbatieven op -(e)lijk in de Vlaamse dialecten en het A.N.”. Spektator 15, 94⫺103 Talen, Jan G. (1894), “Over vorm en indeeling der werkwoorden: Wat toegepaste methodologie”. Taal en Letteren 4, 83⫺104 Tiersma, Pieter Meijes (1985), Frisian Reference Grammar. Dordrecht, Cinnaminson/NJ: Foris Toorn, Maarten C. van den (1982 a), “Tendenzen bij de beregeling van de verbindingsklank in nominale samenstellingen I & II”. De Nieuwe Taalgids 75, 24⫺33 & 153⫺160 Toorn, Maarten C. van den (1982 b), “Het onderzoek van samenstellingen”. Tijdschrift voor Nederlandse Taal- en Letterkunde 98, 33⫺52 Toorn, Maarten C. van den (1983 a), “Halfsuffixen”. De Nieuwe Taalgids 76, 335⫺341 Toorn, Maarten C. van den (1983 b), “Enkele types van samengestelde adjectieven”. Leuvense Bijdragen 72, 257⫺271 Trommelen, Mieke (1984), The Syllable in Dutch: With Special Reference to Diminutive Formation.

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Dordrecht, Cinnaminson/NJ: Foris (Publications in Language Sciences 15) Trommelen, Mieke & Zonneveld, Wim (1986), “Dutch Morphology: Evidence for the Right-hand Head Rule”. Linguistic Inquiry 17, 147⫺169 Trommelen, Mieke & Zonneveld, Wim (1990), “Klemtoonaantrekking bestaat niet”. Spektator 19, 265⫺293 Trommelen, Mieke & Zonneveld, Wim (1992), “Schappelijke woorden”. De Nieuwe Taalgids 85, 112⫺143 Uhlenbeck, Eugenius M. (1953), “The Study of Word-classes in Javanese”. Lingua 3, 322⫺354 [reprinted in: Uhlenbeck (1978), 10⫺39] Uhlenbeck, Eugenius M. (1978), Studies in Javanese Morphology. The Hague: Nijhoff (Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde, Translation Series 19) Voorhoeve, Clemens L. (1965), The Flamingo Bay Dialect of the Asmat Language. ’s-Gravenhage: Smits Vooys, Cornelis G. N. de (1947), Nederlandse spraakkunst. Groningen, Batavia: Wolters Vries, Jan W. de (1975), Lexicale morfologie van het werkwoord in modern Nederlands. Leiden: Universitaire Pers Vries, Wobbe de (1921/22), Iets over woordvorming. Groningen: De Waal (Verhandelingen behoorende

bij het programma van het gymnasium der gemeente Groningen voor de jaren 1920⫺1921 & 1921⫺1922) [2n.d. (1972), Iets over woordvorming: Opnieuw uitgegeven door Kruyskamp, Cornelis H. A. Zutphen: Thieme] Wijk, Nicolaas van (21909), De Nederlandsche taal: Handboek voor gymnasia en hoogere burgerscholen. Zwolle: Tjeenk Willink [11906] Wijk, Nicolaas van (1934), “Grammatika en woordvorming”. De Nieuwe Taalgids 28, 362⫺374 Wissing, Daniel P. (1971), Fonologie en morfologie van die simplekse selfstandige naamwoord in Afrikaans: ’n Transformasioneel-generatiewe beskrywing. Amsterdam: Buijten & Schipperheijn Woordenboek der Nederlandsche Taal (1882⫺1998). ’s-Gravenhage, Leiden: Nijhoff & Sijthoff (& Stemberg); ’s-Gravenhage: SDU Wrede, Ferdinand (1908), “Die Diminutiva im Deutschen”. In: Deutsche Dialektgeographie 1, 73⫺144 Zonneveld, Ronaldus M. van (1983), Affix-grammatika: Een onderzoek naar woordvorming in het Nederlands. Meppel: Krips

Henk Schultink, Bilthoven (The Netherlands) Translation: Geert Booij, Amsterdam (The Netherlands)

20. American Structuralism 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

Introduction Early American Structuralism Segmentation criteria Distributionalism Morphophonemic alternation Generative morphology References

1.

Introduction

American structuralist morphology in its early phases of development was closely modeled after its predecessor, the system of conventions for describing word formation now known as traditional grammar. Structuralist descriptive morphology changed over time and diversified in the work of the principal scholars and schools then active in the discipline. For most linguists, the descriptive treatment of meaning continued for decades essentially unchanged from the earlier approach, however, leading to increasing imbalance between traditional semantics and the

finer-grained structuralist treatments of form. The effort to compensate for the perceived difficulties of semantic description by substituting increasingly elaborate distributional criteria applied to forms in place of contrastive analysis of semantics was ultimately unsatisfactory. Morphology in the early model of generative grammar introduced by Chomsky (1957; 1965) rejected the distributionalist position, reviving in its place some elements of transitional systems established by Edward Sapir and Leonard Bloomfield. The nature of morphological data and the imperatives of basic structural description regardless of the wider theoretical context have led to a rediscovery of some of the classic problems of morphology within later generative models and to a revival of interest in theories of morphology within generative grammar. This article presents the development of morphology in American structural linguistics in four phases: traditional grammar,

20. American Structuralism

early structuralist works, distributionalism, and generative grammar. The phases overlap in time, and diverse positions were taken on some key points within each. Leonard Bloomfield’s Language (1933) was a pivotal work, examined here at some length. It was widely and properly regarded from the time it appeared as the point of departure for all that followed, including generative treatments of morphology. The evolution of American structuralist morphology after 1933 will be sketched here against the unchanging background of the method of contrastive comparison of forms, and through the diversification of criteria for segmenting discourse by placing morphological boundaries in phonological representations, criteria for grouping phonologically different form segments together in the same morphological unit, and morphophonemics, the methods for specifying alternations or variations in the pronunciation of morphological elements. 1.1. Traditional grammar What was treated under morphology in structuralist descriptive linguistics had traditionally been called grammar, an account of word formation and inflection; traditional syntax focused on the sentence and the interrelations of the words that were its parts. Traditional grammar developed into its final form as a tool and a reflection of nineteenth century historical and comparative philology. Since the morphological systems at the focus of its attention, those of the ancient languages of Europe and India and their later descendants, all displayed notable patterns of root and stem compounding as well as numerous derivational and inflectional markers, the study of word structure had become a kind of syntax on a small scale, covering the use of lexical roots singly and in compounds, the assignment of words to major syntactic categories, shifts from one major category to another by means of derivational affixes, and relations of agreement or government marked by inflectional affixes. Syntax itself was an account of sentence formation presented in terms of these same categories, often quite briefly, with words as elements rather than as constructs. In organizing descriptive morphological statements within such a grammar, the convention was to present the most inclusive statements on each point first, and to group under each generalization its special cases and exceptions.

171 Traditional grammars often displayed examples as paradigms in which exemplary words were shown in all their forms, basic and inflected. The architecture of traditional grammar as well as much of its terminology, and in particular, its system of fundamental morphological and syntactic categories, have continued to stand in the background of western linguistics to this day. Another department of grammar in the traditional sense was concerned with the use of letters. Stipulating the written forms of words, and thus indirectly their pronunciation, was a part of grammar both etymologically and in practice. Words had base or citation forms, and in many instances, other variant spellings with environmentally determined differences. The conditioning elements for these spelling alternations might be letters or forms, and might be found either in the same word or in another nearby word. As the composition of words from roots and affixes produced certain sequences of letters, these sequences were subject to change, sometimes as instances of commonly recurring patterns, as in the canonical example of regular English plurals, third person possessives, and third person verb inflection. Sometimes the alternations were instead idiosyncratic, as in man, men. To the considerable extent that discussions of orthography in traditional grammars dealt with both orthography and pronunciation, they were comparable to structuralist treatments of alternation or morphophonemics, the account of variable phonological realizations of morphological units. In traditional grammar, then, the word was the element of syntactic constructions, it had a meaning, and was in almost every instance a set of one or more orthographic forms, each of which was partly like the others and partly different both in spelling and in grammatical function and distribution. The word was in all of these respects a prototype for the morpheme in structuralist linguistics. 1.2. Contrastive comparison Implicit in the familiar method of exposition of morphology by displaying and commenting on paradigmatic sets of forms is the notion of the linguistic sign (cf. Art. 23), with an aspect of content and an aspect of form, famously at the center of Saussure’s approach to general linguistics, but just as central to many others before and after him. Indeed, the method of contrastive compari-

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son of forms is at the foundation of all linguistic analysis, whether phonological, morphological, syntactic, or semantic. In all of these applications, a group of two or more forms displaying some feature or fraction common to all and some other elements unique to each, is used as a pretext and justification for analysis. Some of these sets of items have taken on a lasting identity within American linguistics: pin and bin; writer and rider; knife and knives; John is easy to please and John is eager to please. Contrastive comparison provides a warrant for analysis, but it does not determine the outcome. In particular, it does not determine how far the analysis should go. In Bloomfield’s Introduction (1914: 131⫺135), for instance, he discussed a number of sets of English words forming what he called phonetic-semantic classes. The intersecting sets of forms include flame, flare, flash, flimmer, flicker, and flimmer, glimmer, shimmer, simmer as well as flash, clash, crash, dash, gash, gnash, hash, etc. Another group of intersecting sets of forms listed just after these are thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, etc., and thirteen, thirty, third, and three. As objects of description the two groups of intersecting classes are comparable, but on the former, of whose flwords he noted that “all of them express phenomena of fire with especial reference to its peculiar moving light” he added, “This class is of interest in the present connection, because it illustrates the emotional rather than perceptual value and the ill-defined rather than clearcut extent of many of these classes. For there can be no doubt that, in the feeling of many speakers, flicker again associates itself with such words as flutter, fly, and even, further, with flit, flip, flop, flap, and so on. All these words share the initial fland are more or less vaguely related in meaning; indeed the feeling for the semantic connection may vary in the same speaker under different circumstances. In short, the extent or the existence of a phonetic-semantic word class may be very doubtful, and could be determined with accuracy only for a given person at a given time, and here only if a full insight into his associative disposition at the moment were attainable.” (Bloomfield 1914: 133)

Note the sensitivity to evanescent details of semantic and phonetic relationships that Bloomfield showed here at age 27, before beginning to do field work, and also the style of the passage, which might easily be mistaken for one by Edward Sapir, even in its willingness to leave some issues undecided. These two sets of forms have received different treatment from most structuralist lin-

guists: the basis for segmenting the fl- in these forms as a morpheme has generally been perceived as inadequate or totally absent, but just as clearly, the root and affix elements of the number words call for segmentation (cf. Matthews 1992: 127). Bloomfield’s purpose was not to make such a distinction about the linguistic forms, however, but was instead to comment on the relative strength and clarity of their psychological associations. In the Introduction, Bloomfield not only treated the sets of fl- and number words alike, but did so by leaving all of the bound forms undisturbed in both sets, as portions of integral, unsegmented words, using what he then called their formative elements only as anchors for phonetic-semantic associations. Later, in Language (Bloomfield 1933: 244f.), he once again treated both types alike, but this time as made up of separate, bound morphemes, noting that there are “clearly-marked phonetic-semantic resemblances between elements which we view as different roots.” The point to be considered here is not the relative merit of any of these solutions, but rather the distinction between the familiar and analytically neutral operation of contrastive comparison of linguistic forms on the one hand, and on the other, the different systems of analytical criteria leading to distinct segmentations of the linguistic material organized by the comparisons.

2.

Early American Structuralism

What was the defining difference between the traditional and the structuralist approaches to morphology? What was “structural” about early structuralist morphology? The structuralist perspective is found not in the linguistic content of the gramamtical description, but in the nature and prominence given to the structural relationships among its elements and constructions. Between the traditional type of morphology expounded in Bloomfield (1914) and in Sapir (1921), and the works by both that followed in the 1930’s, there was a transition from the older view of the word as the fundamental and indissoluble element of syntactic constructions to the later American structuralist view of the morpheme as just such a primary unit. And the more elements there are to arrange, the more structural relations there are to describe. In an utterance, there will be at least as many morphemes as there are words. In most utter-

20. American Structuralism

ances, there will be considerably more, and these more numerous elementary forms participate in a more complex web of relationships. As there are more morphological elements, so there are more constructions, that is, significant combinations of grammatical elements which themselves may be treated as elements of a higher order. This transition from word to morpheme brought a consequent increase in the depth and complexity of the model of grammatical structure, and influenced a shift of the focus of attention toward synchronic structural relations and away from traditional general or universal grammatical categories whose manifesting overt linguistic forms were traced through historical changes or compared across languages. These categories generally remained in the background, however. In several key publications appearing between 1911 and 1925 the notion of structure appeared first as a trait of languages as a whole, each one having a structure in much the same way a house or a machine does, as an aggregate of functionally and dimensionally organized parts. The terms configuration and pattern were often used in this sense, especially by Boas and Sapir (cf. especially Sapir 1921; 1925); system and form were used in closely related ways. Languages also came to be described more and more during this period as having structure in a modular sense, in which a subset of abstract functional and distributional relationships are manifested repeatedly by combinations of linguistic structures and elements. This second kind of structure, emphasizing hierarchical relationships, became more and more prominent in structuralist theory and description through the generalization of the phoneme idea to morphology, and at least in principle, to other kinds of linguistic form as well. To a limited extent Boas (1911), Bloomfield (1914), and, much more explicitly, Sapir (1921) deal with language structure in the first of these ways, especially in treating morphology. The perspective of Boas and Sapir is pointedly comparative and typological rather than evolutionary or historical (cf. Stocking 1974; Hymes & Fought 1981: 79⫺97). Bloomfield (1926; 1933) systematized structure in the second way for his newly structuralist grammar (shifting into it parts of the old morphology), but still dealt with phonology mainly in the first way, by mapping only the phonological distinctions and patterns with grammatical relevance. Matthews (1992; 1993) has pro-

173 vided a deeply insightful comparison of Bloomfield’s treatment of morphology in the period from 1914 to 1939, and its later recasting by the next generation of structuralists. In their hands, the modular and hierarchical type of structure came to be a focus in itself, as the notion of levels of structure and of analysis. 2.1. Boas, Sapir, and Bloomfield The linguistic work of Franz Boas (1858⫺ 1942) and of his brilliant student Edward Sapir (1884⫺1939) are closely linked. Boas’s academic training in Germany was in psychophysics; he had little contact with the neogrammarians and never formally studied philology (Stocking 1974). One of his papers, “On alternating sounds” (Boas 1889) must be regarded as an independent source of linguistic structuralism, owing little or nothing to European work of the same period, but exerting great influence through its author’s singular effectiveness as an organizer and disciplinary leader. The perspective laid out in this paper shaped his and his students’ work in linguistics and in anthropology for decades (Stocking 1968; Wells 1963). Leonard Bloomfield (1887⫺1949), who was Boas’s friend, though never his student, wrote of him in his deeply felt obituary notice (1943), “perhaps his greatest contribution to science was the development of descriptive language study”, adding in conclusion that he had “forged almost single-handed, the tools of phonetic and structural description”. These tools included the technique of systematic elicitation of paraphrases and alternations in transcribed texts as a foundation for the systematic application of contrastive comparison, with this in turn revealing the boundaries of formal elements in the text. Combining these ancillary materials with the original text allows the linguist to develop a focused corpus, to go beyond exploiting a static archive by extending it, filling gaps and actively exploring structural features as they appear. The resulting body of data can be profoundly revealing. Boas apparently held his students to high standards in practicing this kind of analysis both in class and in the field, and well beyond the days of their apprenticeship (Hymes & Fought 1981). Thus, although Boas’s descriptive statements did not emphasize explicit accounts of structural relations among minimal linguistic elements, and the associated theoretical generalizations, his method of analysis was nevertheless

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structuralist through and through, and its procedures have suffused the gathering and analysis of data in the field by American linguists from his day to ours. These three scholars, each in touch with the others, and each wielding great influence on the emerging discipline of structural linguistics, all advocated and practiced a relativistic approach to language data, but they made use of a standard category system as a starting point for defining the elements, categories, and structural relations required for the description of each language in its own terms. Although there can be a conflict between the use of a universal category system and the relativist theoretical stance, there is no necessary contradiction: the relationship was expected to be much the same as that between a universal system of phonetic categories, intended to be both comprehensive and standardized, and the phonological elements, categories, and relations established in describing the phonology of a particular language as it exploits some of the available articulatory resources in a pattern of its own. Nor is this parallel between phonological and grammatical structural description an accidental one. It is but one of many consequences of the deliberate generalization and projection of the phoneme idea into other aspects of language description that was just beginning to shape their publications and to constitute the structuralist view of language (cf. Matthews 1992: 152f.). The theoretical distinction between the universal grid of content categories (presented as a typology of grammatical concepts) and the equally general system of grammatical processes or methods of composing or modifying phonetic form, much of it also borrowed from traditional grammar, is made clearest in the central chapters (IV⫺VI) expounding the morphological underpinnings and the outline of Sapir’s revitalized language typology (1921). This typology attempts to show not just the relative complexity of word formation in one language versus another, but instead to show the different ways information content and organization is divided or joined and packaged for verbal transmission. Woven through these chapters is a sustained argument against prejudicial, evolutionary uses of grammar and typology. Sapir’s preferred target was the exalting of root vowel alternations found in Greek, Latin, German, and Sanskrit (inflec-

tion or ablaut) as a special mark of good breeding among languages: “A linguist that insists on talking about the Latin type of morphology as though it were necessarily the high water mark of linguistic development is like the zoologist that sees in the organic world a huge conspiracy to evolve the race horse or the Jersey cow.” (Sapir 1921: 124)

2.2. Bloomfield (1926; 1933) Bloomfield continued to follow the traditional model of word formation in its main outlines, but he made a new division of the descriptive tasks between grammar and the lexicon. The model underlying these two publications is the same: it defines morphemes as minimum forms, and sets up hierarchies of elements and combinations of elements of form and of meaning, as well as parallel classifications of formal patterns of word and sentence formation. In the Postulates (Bloomfield 1926: 155⫺157) a simple morphological model is laid out in the following assumptions and definitions: “6. The vocal features common to same or partly same utterances are forms; the corresponding stimulus-reaction features are meanings. 7. Every utterance is made up wholly of forms. […] 9. A minimum form is a morpheme; its meaning a sememe. […] 11. A minimum free form is a word. […] 16. A minimum same of vocal feature is a phoneme or distinctive sound. […] 18. Every form is made up wholly of phonemes.”

Postulates 6, 9, and 18 make it clear that Bloomfield’s morpheme was defined as a string of phonemes, without alternations. This system was continued and elaborated in Language (1933) and remained in place as a foundation for another decade or more after that (cf. Harris (1942: 169): “[…] different sequences of phonemes constitute different morphemes […]”). Such an approach to morphology leads to many questions: there are sets of forms with the same or very similar meanings but partly different phonemic shapes. Linguists wish to group some of them together: how and when is this to be done? Bloomfield’s answer, substantially the same in 1926 and 1933, was ingenious but austere. The variants of the citation or base form of a morpheme (i.e., of its single shape in primary phonemes) were produced by combinations of elements of grammatical form, not of morphological form. Constructions with constructional meanings (Bloomfield 1926), later tagmemes with episememes

20. American Structuralism

(Bloomfield 1933), were “recurring sames of order” and of meaning (“stimulus-reaction features”). Bloomfield (1926) then organized phonological alternations in morphemes as either phonetic (phonemically conditioned, i.e., phonotactic, such as voicing assimilation), automatic (such as the alternation of the forms of the English regular plural suffix, conditioned by the final consonant of the stem), or grammatical (conditioned in any other way). But since all of these alternations occur in constructions, all are treated as grammatical in nature rather than morphological. Moreover, since his examples include what would later be considered phonotactic constraints, patterned morphophonemic alternations of many kinds, including zero, and even suppletions, it is clear that the postulated restriction to a single phonological shape for the base form of a morpheme imposed few descriptive constraints. In practice, Bloomfield’s morpheme showed as much alternation in shape as Sapir’s, or as those of many later structuralists (cf. Bloomfield 1933: 210⫺22). His system does not gather the morphemes and their alternants together into one compartment of the grammar, however, but instead uses a single string of phonemes as a base form to represent the morpheme in the lexicon, and scatters the treatment of the alternations among the phonology, where phonotactic and automatic alternations were covered, and among the taxemes of selection, order, phonetic modification, modulation, and substitution, the counterparts in Bloomfield’s newly developed item and arrangement style of description to the processes or methods used in the traditional and Sapirian style as well as his own Introduction (Bloomfield 1914). At least in a general way, his organization of morphological and lexical material into descriptive statements was influenced strongly by the tradition of classical Indian grammar, with which Bloomfield was very familiar (Rogers 1987). His sketch of French morphology (Bloomfield 1945) is a conveniently short though incomplete example of the style applied to a familiar language. Bloomfield’s morphology is essentially a list of components of lexical items, each in citation form, ready for combinations and alternations governed by specific pattern statements related to grammatical constructions. Although the approach employs the same descriptive strategies as the older morphology, in which processes are applied to base forms

175 to yield derived forms (including morphophonemic alternants), Bloomfield’s grammatical model is presented in a rhetoric of sequential, additive, subtractive, and hierarchical arrangements. Thus, in Bloomfield (1926), the formatives in the construction of ox-en and the free forms of Richard saw John occur in what are equally constructions, that is, recurrent sames of order (cf. Matthews 1992: 139). Moreover, he uses devices borrowed directly from the Indian tradition, such as zero and certain markers or morphophonemic operators, which will be discussed below. Bloomfield’s linguistics was based on the analysis and description of overtly occurring meaningful forms. He summed up his method of analysis in a letter written in 1919 (cited in Hymes & Fought 1981: 109): “No preconceptions; find out which sound variations are distinctive (as to meaning) and then analyze morphology and syntax by putting together everything that is alike”. This extreme concision, compressing linguistic description into the last six delphic words, came soon after he had published his innovative study of Tagalog (Bloomfield 1917), a first but fully mature exercise in method. Bloomfield appealed directly and skillfully to similarities and differences of meaning as a practical necessity in morphology. This informal reliance on meaning distinctions was made all the more imperative by his conviction that a “scientific” linguistic semantics was impossibly difficult. His morphemes therefore were sets of similar forms whose phonological differences were instances of productive patterns and whose meanings were as close to identical as could be determined. Since his morpheme had a single base form from which its alternants were derived by specified taxemes embodying the alternation patterns, there was no visible grouping problem, nor were there complex distributional criteria to be satisfied. Despite the latitude in phonological relationships allowed by the use of taxemes of selection and phonetic modification, Bloomfield’s description was restrained, apparently more by convention than by explicit theoretical statement, within conservative functional and distributional limits that minimized the amount of variability within each morpheme. Suppletion, in which there is no phonetic similarity among the alternants, was carefully presented as an exceptional case, but which for overriding reasons of functional and semantic similarity and complementary distri-

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bution running parallel to clear cases with strong formal similarity should nevertheless be handled as if the suppletive alternants were phonologically related. In Bloomfield’s very influential Menomini morphophonemics (1939), forms related by function and complementary distribution to a basic alternant, but phonologically different from each other in irregular ways, were called morpholexical alternants, a status intermediate between distinct morphemes and ordinary morpheme alternants. The strength of the requirement of formal similarity and distributional parallelism was largely implicit in the structure of these arguments allowing exceptions only under limited and special conditions. Apart from some differences of terminology, and of course the absence of transformational syntactic and phonological rules themselves, processes par excellence, in Bloomfield’s arrangement model, his treatment of morphology has the same overall architecture found in early generative grammar (e.g. Chomsky 1957), where the base forms of lexical items are acted upon by the grammar to produce both syntactic arrangements and morphophonemic adjustments, and a parallel hierarchy of semantic elements is left largely empty or uninterpreted (cf. Matthews 1992: 161).

3.

Segmentation criteria

3.1. Phonological boundaries The languages most commonly studied by European and American scholars in the last century already had well-established orthographies and abundant published text material with conventional word boundaries as well as dictionaries in which words were listed and defined. Word divisions in text were taken for granted; the only issue of segmentation in this linguistic milieu was the segmentation of words into smaller elements. Descriptions of Native American languages and of others not commonly written, on the other hand, were based on phonetically transcribed contemporary texts. Nothing about the segmentation of this material into phonological and morphological elements could safely be taken for granted. Explicit and general criteria for segmentation were therefore developed and incorporated into morphological procedures and theory. Over time, in part because of this difference in the character of primary data, European and Ameri-

can traditions of structuralist morphology developed in significantly different ways from the same traditional foundations. There are important issues of segmentation whose history and implications can only be mentioned here. Policies of segmentation of text into more or less word-sized strings of forms have a powerful effect on the immediate structural impression made by language material, and also on more deliberate typological judgments placing languages along a dimension called synthesis in the typology of the past century, brilliantly refurbished in Sapir (1921). They also exert major influences on the organization of descriptive grammars. When French is written and described conventionally, utterances like Il ne me l’a pas donne´ ‘He didn’t give it to me’ are much less likely to seem “polysynthetic” than if one hears and thinks of them as [ilnemelapadcne], even though the constraints on the selection and ordering of the preverbal elements are strong enough to bear comparison with those of Navaho, in which, incidentally, the verb roots also come last in the string. The shock produced by such gambits, whether they are seriously offered or not, is in part a relic of the grammatical tradition and evolutionary typological perspective of past centuries, still strong enough in our day to govern the reactions even of language professionals when “civilized languages” are handled like “primitive languages”. Certainly Boas and Sapir campaigned against these views as they prepared the scholarly audience of their day to understand their work on American languages and cultures (cf. Hymes & Fought 1981: 59⫺62). Sapir’s recasting of the old word-based typology into two analytical dimensions, synthesis and fusion, was a move in this campaign. Besides giving the typology more resolving power by adding a dimension, it allowed him to argue that the morphology of a given language usually occupied more than one zone in the typological system (Sapir 1921: Ch. VI). Harris (1951: 160⫺163) and Lounsbury (1953) discuss the application of contrastive comparison in texts. Text segments of arbitrary length are first isolated by eliciting (or retrieving) a comparable segment whose form and meaning are different from the first by some feature, and then further analyzed by repeating the process until no further segmentation is justified. In this way, a stock of elements and combinatory patterns accumu-

20. American Structuralism

lates and the residue of unanalyzed material is depleted. Harris often presented the method with fairly long contexts for the focal elements. The method is most often presented with words or other short strings as the target, however. In its simplest morphological application, it involves four terms: (1) walked : walking reached : reaching in each term, there are two elements of form; these forms and their meanings covary. Moreover, the set can easily be extended by adding other rows and columns of words with covarying formal and semantic differences. There were debates on the propriety of segmenting forms when the set was defective because one pair of forms lacked an element, or when one form contained a unique element, so that no square could be constructed. The form which gave its name to this latter problem was cranberry. Although there are many other words containing the element berry, such as gooseberry, huckleberry, strawberry, and elderberry, there were no other words containing the cran element. Bloomfield (1933: 276) notes that this method of morphological segmentation is closely akin to the classical formulation of proportional analogy, ay:az::by:x. Pedersen (1931: 291) dates recognition of the parallel to 1868. Harris (1951: 178) added an identity convention to allow for the recognition as morphemes of elements like huckle, which can’t be placed within a matrix of two-part forms, but are instead left as residues after more widely distributed forms are accounted for. Harris adds that the fl-, gl- type of putative morpheme can also be segmented in this way, but is usually rejected by a test of distributional similarity to other forms. The fl- set comes up in textbooks and articles over the decades after Harris’s work, and figures again in Matthews (1992), where it is carefully connected with related issues of semantics and segmentation. The persistent use of this set of forms to mark an analytical threshold in almost eighty years of discussions on morphology suggests that the issues touching on the localization of meaning within complex forms, and beyond that, of the representation of meaning in general, were and are still unresolved. 3.2. The problem of meaning During the development of methods of analysis of linguistic form within American structuralism, little was done to approach the

177 study of meaning in the same ways. Instead, in Bloomfield’s system, a hierarchy of elements matching the form elements was established to hold meanings when they were someday worked out; these containers were however left empty. Since the number of these semantic container elements was equal to the form elements they matched, the “size” or capacity of each was also vaguely determined by the forms, to the extent that it was determined at all. Since little attention was given to these semantic units, the traditional terminology for grammatical categories was often used to label the various grammatical forms, or more precisely, traditional labels were used as if there were grammatical forms to correspond to them. In this way, lexical meaning was left for informal specification as a working expedient, and grammatical meaning was left in its traditional terms and categories. The Postulates contain a frequently cited version of Bloomfield’s rejection of the study of meaning by linguistic methods: “The morphemes of a language can thus be analyzed into a small number of meaningless phonemes. The sememes, on the other hand, which stand in one-to-one correspondence with the morphemes, cannot be further analyzed by linguistic methods. This is no doubt why linguists, confronted with the parallelism of form and meaning, choose form as the basis of classification.” (Bloomfield 1926: 157)

Bloomfield diverged most on this point from the Boas and Sapir models, which gave form and meaning an equal priority. The injunction to base classification on overt form rather than on more abstract foundations was not often accepted by others, and not always applied completely by Bloomfield. But the assumption that the meaning of each morpheme corresponds one-to-one with the morpheme, which stood not just unchallenged but almost unexamined for decades, still remains a source of serious difficulties in linguistic description. Yet few were as adept or as conscientious as Bloomfield in using similarities and differences of meaning in the analysis and description of form. At times the arrangement of examples is such as to bring the semantic relation to the very surface of the text. For example, here is a part of his discussion of derivation, dealing with forms like duke:duchess, and master:mistress: “Once we have established a construction of this kind, we may be able to set up a typical meaning

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and then, as in the case of inflection, to look for parallels. Our suffix -ess, for instance, has a definable linguistic meaning, not only because of the parallel character of all the sets like count:countess, lion:lioness, but also because English grammar, by the distinction of he:she recognizes the meaning of the -ess derivatives. Accordingly, we are able to decide, much as we are in the case of inflection, whether a given pair of forms, such as man:woman, does or does not show the same relation. This enables us to draw up supplementary statements, resembling our description of paradigms, which show the various formal aspects of some grammatically determined semantic unit. Thus, we find the sememe ‘female of such-and-such male’ expressed not only by the suffix -ess, but also by composition, as in elephant-cow, she-elephant, nanny-goat, and by suppletion, as in ram:ewe, boar:sow; some such pairs show inverse derivation, the male derived from the female, as goose:gander, duck:drake.” (Bloomfield 1933: 238)

Here his system make the data fit awkwardly, since the sememe matched with -ess must become an episememe when matched with grammatical forms, and what even he treats as a linguistic generalization about meaning is thus broken into separate parts. Not even an additional analytic step would have been needed to demonstrate a componential analysis of meaning comparable to the analysis of sound, and guided by the same principle of relevance in distinguishing between linguistic signs. What was needed but unaccountably missing was just a recognition of the opportunity suggested by this parallelism. But his insistence on leaving meaning itself outside linguistic analysis was not only damaging to his own work. Backed by Bloomfield’s great prestige and perhaps further strengthened by the convenience of its warrant for suspending the challenging structural analysis of meaning, this aspect of structuralist morphology has been the most durable of all. It was to be thirty years before the analysis of meaning by linguistic methods was shown to be approachable along these very lines, and was introduced into American structural linguistics (Conklin 1955; Goodenough 1956; Lounsbury 1956; 1964a; 1964b; Bendix 1966; Wallace & Atkins 1960; and especially Weinreich 1966). The innovation came first from linguistic anthropology in the form of componential (semantic) analysis and ethnoscience, whose line of development ran from Boas through Sapir and his students. By then, in the late 1950’s, the separation of (linguistic) anthropology and linguistics into different university departments, the

long absence of a leader comparable to Boas or Sapir, the relative decline in influence of linguistics among the four fields of anthropology, and the rise of formal syntax as the focus of attention in linguistics, all combined to deprive this innovation of much of its potential force, and to cut off an interesting reintegration of several strands of theory and practice. Instead, Bloomfield’s morpheme, a unit of form whose expression side is elegantly analyzed into distinctive phonological units and grammatically relevant category memberships but whose content side is a unitary and fixed but barely specified meaning, is still very much with us.

4.

Distributionalism

The ten years following 1933 were marked by a number of important papers on phonology by the younger American structuralists (e.g., Swadesh 1934; Twaddell 1935; Swadesh & Voegelin 1939; Bloch 1941; Hockett 1942; Harris 1944). In these and other papers, American structuralism consolidated an approach to phonology based on contrast or complementation in sets of linguistic signs distinguished by difference in form and meaning without regard to positive characterization of meanings. The importance of complementary distribution in phonology had been recognized since the formation of neogrammarian doctrine through its intimate connection with conditioned sound change. During this period, then, a treatment of phonology that emphasized distributional properties as well as phonetic substance came to be well understood, together with the handling of alternants (allophones). The nucleus of distributionalism was in the canonical morpheme of Bloomfield (1933) and Harris (1942), a unit with either a single, constant phonological shape in all environments or a set of phonemically similar alternants whose members are in complementary distribution with each other, and whose phonemic differences conform to and are conditioned by the combinatory pattern of the phonology of the language. That is to say, they are at least a loosely defined type of automatic alternation. Within the pattern of distribution established by these uncontroversial elements, other groupings of forms with similar meaning and morphologically conditioned alternations, some irregular and even suppletive, were then established. The development of distribu-

20. American Structuralism

tionalism as a doctrine took the form of proposals for further relaxing the use of uncontroversial single-alternant morphemes and their distributions as models for the rest, thereby extending the allowable limits of variation in phonological form as a by-product of the relaxation of distributional limits. This relaxation also permitted the adjustment of distributional patterns overall. Usually these proposals featured analytical results viewed as desirable but unattainable under the old rules. Hockett and others remarked that Bloomfield’s system of taxemes and tagmemes was difficult to understand and use (Matthews 1992: 138). Bloomfield did not explain the procedures leading through contrastive analysis to this kind of description of grammatical form. At best he showed only selected outcomes as a model for more detailed treatments. Moreover, his Paninian style of presentation of lexical and grammatical forms scattered alternations through a complex web of statements from which it was difficult to extract intermediate stages of derivation. The same complaint was made about Pa¯nø ini’s original use of the technique, and also about the similarly complex representations embedded in the rule systems of generative phonology (Ferguson 1962). With little direct guidance from Bloomfield, the younger generation of descriptivists developed a family of closely related approaches to morphology based partly on Bloomfield’s terms and system, but more directly and explicitly on the model of the successful approaches to phonological structure found in the papers mentioned above. Beginning in the early 1940s, a series of papers on morphology appeared that defined a variety of structuralism in which morphology was the foundation of grammar, and distributional criteria played a central part. The papers were by Harris (1942; 1946; 1948), Bloch (1947), Hockett (1947; 1954), Nida (1948), and Lounsbury (1953). All of them, like the phonology papers already listed, were reprinted in Joos (1957, ed.), a collection that was often criticized for its omissions, partly because it was seen by so many from its first appearance as a semi-official statement of this theoretical tendency in the discipline. The basis for grouping morpheme alternants continued to change during this period of development, coming to be defined as identity or some specified degree of similarity not in phonological form but in meaning. However, be-

179 cause of the settled opinion shared by these scholars and Bloomfield that determinations of sameness or difference of meaning were too imprecise to be scientifically reliable, these grouping decisions were generally stated in distributional terms. It should be remembered in what follows that the goal of the distributionalist program was to replace imprecise semantic criteria in contrastive analysis with precise distributional criteria. A major transformation of theory began in 1957, of course, when Chomsky’s Syntactic Structures appeared, and became decisive in the mid 1960’s, by which time most students, junior faculty, and senior faculty in American linguistics programs in elite institutions had either been taught the generative perspective from the beginning or had converted to it. One group did remain partly outside the distributionalist group and mostly outside the transformationalist movement, however, and it was numerically larger through much of this period than the distributionalist group in the United States: the missionary organization known as the Summer Institute of Linguistics, led by Kenneth Pike (1958; 1967) and Robert Longacre (1960; 1964; 1965). Their eclectic doctrine, which Pike first worked out in the late 1940s, came to be known as tagmemics (cf. Art. 21); it developed in such a way as to integrate morphology very closely into a type of structuralist syntax strongly dominated by criterial patterning considerations and by string analysis (applied to morphemes and many levels of constructions labeled for grammatical function as well as form) rather than immediate constituent analysis. Its morphology, however, stayed close in most respects to the earliest type of structuralist distributionalism. 4.1. The denial of synonymy Bloch, Hockett, Harris, and a number of others accepted Bloomfield’s (1933: 145) proposition that “there are no actual synonyms” ⫺ that two distinct forms with exactly the same meaning would necessarily have exactly the same distribution: they would be mutually substitutable in all environments and actually distributed in this way in a suitably large corpus. They contended that there were no such forms. This proposition, and the contention that no such forms occur, form half of the foundation of distributionalism. If differences in the phonological shape of forms always correlate with differences in their mean-

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ings, and therefore in their distributions, then differences in the distribution of forms imply differences in their meanings, and tests of distribution may be substituted for considerations of meaning in analysis. Curiously, in view of its motivation and consequences, this proposition amounts to a denial of any nonsemantic influences on the distribution of forms. Distributional effects due to syntax, phonotactics, and the vagaries of lexical history are all set aside. This view, which later became known as distributionalism, dominated the scholarly side of American structuralism until it was effectively transformed into generative grammar. I must emphasize, based on personal knowledge, that the authors of these papers disagreed on many important points, had relatively little personal contact, and did not see themselves as forming a unified school of thought within linguistics. The distributionalist axioms were thought to support reliance on the analysis of differences of distribution, which was in principle a precise tool, in place of the analysis of differences of meaning, which was imprecise. In practice, however, distributionalists upheld these methods only in principle, relying for their actual analyses on meaning as a ‘shortcut’. There was a compelling reason for the disparity between theory and practice. To analyze exhaustively the distribution of more than a few items in a corpus of any size using the very laborious methods of concordance building then available was not often treated as a practical plan for a teaching scholar. Few corpora of spoken material of sufficient size for more than rudimentary distributional analysis of morphological or syntactic structure existed in any event, and most of those few were printed collections of Native American texts in phonetic transcription supplemented by grammatical sketches. So, then as now, most linguists drew examples from reference works, their own knowledge, and exchanges with others, and a few experimental tabulations. The methods of distributionalism called for the technology of electronic data processing, which did not then exist, and so this approach went into eclipse. When the electronic technology did reach the hands of linguists, distributional analysis soon began to appear again. It is evident that the allomorphs of a morpheme are different in phonological shape, and therefore must be, by these axioms, different in meaning, although their member-

ship in the same morpheme should guarantee their sameness of meaning. Reactions to this dilemma varied. For Bloomfield and for Nida, morphemes shared a common phonetic-semantic distinctiveness, that is, each was semantically different from all other morphemes. Most other linguists did not formally comment on this dilemma, nor on the implications of doublets like /ruf/ and /ruwf/ for ‘roof’. Characteristically, Nida (1948: 430f.) faced the issue squarely, and tried to resolve it. By means of his first three principles, he stipulates that allomorphs differing either not at all or only by automatic phonological alternations, and in complementary distribution with each other, will be assigned to the same morpheme, as did Bloomfield, Bloch, Harris, and Hockett. To resolve the more noticeable inconsistency of grouping other kinds of allomorphs together, he offered his principles 5 “The meaning of any form is definable in terms of the feature or features common to the situations in which the form occurs”, and 6 “Morpheme alternants whose distribution is not phonologically definable exhibit sub-morphemic differences of meaning”. That is to say, by principle 5, that differences of distribution involve occurrence in constructions with different grammatical meanings, and thus, the alternants have meaning differences conditioned by their environments alone, and, by principle 6, that a “sub-morphemic” level of difference in meaning is not enough to disqualify alternants from allomorph status. Finally, he falls back on the assumption itself: “It is often extremely hard to define the differences of meaning between allomorphs, since it depends solely on a difference of distribution. But our inability to correlate this difference with biosocial contrasts does not invalidate the principle (especially Principle 5, which underlies Principle 6), nor the basic assumption that we adopt as a premise for all descriptive analysis: that there are no actual synonyms.” (Nida 1948: 431)

Since the distributionalist program stands or falls on the denial of synonymy, it is especially interesting to consider the problem posed by free variation (cf. Art. 49). The notion is borrowed from phonology, where it was used to cover cases where perceptible articulatory differences, such as the aspirated release or unaspirated nonrelease of final voiceless stops in American English, were not correlated with semantic differences. Note that in its phonological application, free variation affects outcomes in particular environ-

20. American Structuralism

ments across the board, as in the English example just mentioned, not only in certain lexical items. In its morphological application (Hockett 1947), the idea of free variation is more restricted. It covers allomorphs in free variation, that is, phonemically different forms occurring in the same environments. But this is a definition of synonyms. Lounsbury (1953: 573, note 2) declined to accept Hockett’s free variation option, citing the practical difficulty of recognizing synonyms. The denial of synonymy, if its implications had been accepted fully and consistently in morphological analysis, would have threatened many analytical decisions that were reached via the well-worn shortcut of informal reliance on judgments of meaning. Exceptions to the consistent application of the distributional difference test were proposed and adopted in various combinations apparently in order to secure descriptions with desired outcomes. Meanwhile, the distributional test was always available for use in rejecting undesirable groupings of elements. It can be argued with considerable justification that the practice of defining theoretical terms and analytical methods so as to reach desired outcomes was and is the ordinary method of theory development in linguistics. There is however an alternative method, favored by Bloomfield and also by Harris, which consists of defining a simple and internally consistent set of terms and procedures, and then accepting the outcome of the analysis, however different it may be from what has been done before. But if one principle, the distributionalist foundation of analysis, is held up as basic, but used less often than the so-called short-cut, there is reason to question the soundness of the foundation. There was informal discussion of the propriety of always using meaning as a short-cut (the clearest published statement is Hockett 1961: 46f.). There was also publication of critiques aimed at centrist compromise in morphological theory and practice. Nida’s work represents this centrist tendency at its best, and it was all the more effective for being expounded in distributionalist terms. The best evidence for the existence of a kind of double standard in distributionalism is circumstantial: it can be seen in the outcome of the analyses that were widely accepted or rejected. For example, in English, the pattern of alternation among (Èz, z, s) is found in the regular s-plural, the third person singular present -s of verbs, the reduced (and commonest) forms of be in the

181 third person singular present, and the possessive. All these morphemes are in complementary distribution and each has the same phonologically conditioned pattern of distribution of their alternants. Nida commented in this connection on Hockett’s dangerous reliance on complementary distribution: “Not only would it be possible to combine all the plural affixes of nouns in one morpheme (a step which we should all agree to), but one could say that these are in complementary distribution with the partly homophonous third-singular suffix of verbs. A single morpheme could then be set up with the meaning ‘number distinctiveness’ and with the additional distributional characteristic that if an alternant occurs after the noun it does not occur after the verb, and vice versa […]. By slight extensions it might be possible to construct a descriptive system by which practically all the features of concord, government and cross-reference could be treated on a submorphemic level. If this were done, we should only have succeeded in changing the meaning of the word ‘morpheme’ to apply to certain distributionally related forms.” (Nida 1948: 418)

Of course, throughout Nida’s article, and in the related literature of the time generally, the term morpheme was applied to “certain distributionally related forms”. The question was just which ones in any given case. Here, Nida takes for granted the acceptability of combining with the plural forms fitting this sibilant alternation pattern a large number of other suppletive formations, while rejecting even the possibility of combining any of the other sibilant suffixes with the plural. Not only do all of the inherited forms and their analogic progeny belong (mice, teeth, oxen, vaxen competing with vaxes), but presumably the borrowed foreign plurals as well: aquaria, alumni, indices competing with indexes, haiku, graffiti, rotini, and so on and on. Since these irregular forms, like all but the sibilant plurals, require the listing of the stem forms associated with each, nothing practical is gained by combining the alternants in a single morpheme rather than making a set of homonymous plural suffixes. There is only a doctrinal precept at stake, namely that every noun (except proper and mass nouns?) takes the (not a) plural suffix. Clearly, Nida’s morphemes are groupings based on meaning masquerading as distributionally defined units. Moreover, procedures outlined a few years later by Harris, which were not generally accepted, were intended to provide a distributional foundation for just the kind of

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analysis Nida viewed here as unthinkable. For instance, Harris (1951: 182f.) outlines an innovative treatment of the many prefixes of the Bantu concord system using just a few morphemes represented as discountinuous morphs, taking the fullest advantage of complementation in the syntagmatic dimension as well as the paradigmatic. Many similarly radical applications of distributionalism can be found in Harris’s work. He notes, for instance (Harris 1951: 189) that morphemes established by applying a criterion of meaning and those based on his distributional procedures will not necessarily coincide, and that the semantic variability of distributionally identified morphemes may be noticeable. He recommended adjusting preliminary results achieved by the use of meaning short-cuts by the use of distributional techniques, instead of the prevailing tendency in the opposite direction. I suggest that it was in part because his distributionalism was so uncompromising and far-reaching that the methods he developed after the 1942 paper were not more influential. 4.2. Pattern properties as criteria The other foundation of distributionalism is its use of notions of patterning. The distributions of two main types of elements are crucially involved. One is the distribution of overt morphological elements; the other is the distribution of grammatical forms, especially of form classes, viewed as covert morphological elements. In describing the distribution of elements, reference may be made to the absolute distribution of a form, that is, to the sum of the environments where it occurs. This is what Bloomfield meant by the selection of a form. Element distribution is however most often discussed as the relative distribution of two or more forms. Complementary distribution, such that neither element occurs in any environments where the other occurs, is but one of four types of relative distribution possible for any two linguistic elements. In the other three types there are environments shared by the two elements. These types are coincident distribution (both elements occur in exactly the same environments), overlapping distribution (both occur in some environments, and each has environments of its own), and including distribution (both occur in some environments, and just one has environments of its own). In general, two linguistic forms in complementary distribution may different in sound and meaning,

and thus be different linguistic signs, but so long as they are in complementary distribution, they do not lend themselves to direct contrastive comparison. Complementary distribution owes its central role in the development of American linguistics to this property. It offers a warrant for combining elements so distributed as alternants of a unit on a higher level. It was never used as the sole criterion for such grouping decisions, however. There was either an additional requirement of similarity or identity of substance (phonetic similarity in phonology, and phonemic similarity in morphology) or of some other identity criterion, such as meaning or some formal parallelism. This parallelism is in effect a second type or layer of distribution, a more abstract pattern of parallelism among the absolute distributions of classes of elements. In an obvious way, this parallelism or pattern, such as it may be, arises naturally and directly from the combination of the absolute distributions of the elements established, assigned to classes, and otherwise described in the grammar. Viewed in this way, a form, established by other criteria, such as similarity of form and meaning, simply has a distribution, and any parallelisms with the distributions of other forms are a consequence of the body of analytical decisions made. Another approach is to maximize (or conceivably, to minimize) the parallelism by making decison with reference to the distributional pattern. To some extent, accepting patterning as a guide to analytical decisions was a widespread practice. Bloomfield’s grouping standard, taken up by Harris, using the distribution of members of a form class having but a single alternant as a model for the range allowed for groups of alternants, is a conservative example of criterial patterning. What sets distributionalism apart from other approaches before it is the degree of commitment of its advocates to adjusting the distributions of elements so as to maximize the parallelism and regularity of the abstract pattern, and the methods used to reach this goal. It should be noted in passing that distributionalists differed considerably in their choice of means and in how far they would go in pursuing their goals. But all had certain practices in common, revealed by the choices of exemplary problems in their writings, and the solutions they advocated. 4.3. Portmanteaux and zeros Lounsbury (1953: 380) organized the issues in the background of segmentation into four policy options, stated according to the map-

20. American Structuralism

ping of phonemes to morphemes within a model of morphemes having phonemic strings as alternants. The principle of total accountability, as Hockett (1947: 332) called it, was generally accepted. It stipulates that all phonemic material in the data must be accounted for in relation to the morphological elements in the same data. Following his wording closely, the options are as follows: (a) every phoneme belongs to an allomorph of one and only one morpheme; (b) every phoneme belongs to an allomorph of at least one morpheme; (c) every phoneme belongs to an allomorph of not more than one morpheme; (d) every phoneme belongs to an allomorph of zero or one or more than one morpheme All four options allow for agglutinative sequential morphs; this is the only kind allowed by the first. The last option combines the possibilites of the other three. The second option (but not the first) allows for coincident, including, or overlapping morphs, that is, for the sharing of particular phonemes by two or more allomorphs, as in the often proposed analysis of French au /o/ as {a´} ⫹ {le} mentioned below. The third option (but not the first or second) allows for what were variously called empty morphs, links, or morphemically irrelevant material. Lounsbury (1953: 380) presents as a feature of the first policy the option of using zero: “Segmentation is carried as far as possible, and such morphemes (present in meaning) as have not been accounted for in the resulting segments are said to be represented by zero allomorphs”. Since allomorphs are strings of phonemes, one possible interpretation of this passage is that there is a token of a zero phoneme in the relevant position. This is an unlikely interpretation of most such passages, however, including this one, since phonemes in most descriptive work were defined as having phonetic features. It was this definite and constant phonetic substance, partially lacking in particular process formulations of affix replacement, deletion, or substitution, that was often cited as the advantage of item and arrangement morphology. One could and should deal instead in arrangements of observables, that is, of phonemes composing allomorphs. The semantics of zero in descriptive linguistics is nevertheless unclear, both in general and in most specific sources. Its use as anything but a pho-

183 neme is definitely unconnected with the policies distinguished by Lounsbury, in any event, since these have to do with mapping phonemes. At best, Lounsbury shows that it is not in conflict with them. Morphemes whose identifying and defining characteristic is the occurrence, in some sense, of an inflectional category, such as first person singular or present indicative, must however be mapped somehow onto the string of phonemes which manifest an utterance. We can see the uses made of the descriptive devices whose interrelations Lounsbury later clarified. Spanish /amo/ and French /im/, in standard distributionalist analyses, both manifest these grammatical features. But how? Answers differed in important ways. Bloomfield (1945: 10), not a distributionalist, treated the comparable French form /don/ as being present (not indicative!) or subjunctive (not present subjunctive). Its number-person ending, marked grammatically as S1, is morphologically zero, that is, nothing at all, not even /0/ or {0}. His analysis is parsimonious, built directly on the overt forms, and includes no abstract elements except those represented somewhere in the system by overt forms. His use of zero is apparently the classic use found in Sanskrit grammar, namely replacement by nothing (cf. Art. 5). The P2 form, /done/, formally parallel to the Spanish /am-o/, is segmented as /don-e/. For Hockett (1947: 338), however, the Spanish form was am-o and the /o/ was what he called a portmanteau morph, which belonged to two morphemes at once, {present indicative} and {first person singular}, in parallel to such other forms as /amas/, in which is segmentation was /am-a-s/, with the two suffixes {present indicative} and {second person singular}. Infinitive forms, represented in this set by /amar/, do not seem to have this structure, since the infinitive is neither a tense nor a mode in traditional grammar. Hockett treats the form as /am-a-r/, with the -/r/ as the infinitive morpheme and the -/a/ suffix defined as an empty morph. Bloomfield also introduced something apparently like this device, without comment or explanation, in his French description (Bloomfield 1945: 10): “Before these two endings, imperfect, subjunctive, and conditional have [-i-]: [vu donie´] vous donniez”. Hockett wrote, “this treatment, combined with the empty-morph interpretation of conjugation vowels, reduces all finite Spanish verb forms to a uniform structure: stem ⫹ tense-mode morpheme ⫹ person-

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number morpheme” (Hockett 1947: 338). Although Nida was sympathetic to the leveling of distribution thus achieved, he was concerned about other aspects of the solution: “In handling inflexional endings like the -o in Spanish amo ‘I love’, Hockett [1947: 338] says that this is a morph which belongs to two morphemes: a tense-mode morpheme and a person-number morpheme. In this instance, however, he does not provide any overt form for the separate morphemes. Only the morph has overt form; the morphemes are merely structural parallelisms as indicated by such related paradigmatic forms as ama´bamos ‘we loved’ and amare´is ‘you (pl.) will love’, in which the tense-mode morpheme precedes the person-number morpheme. In the instance of French au ‘to the’ occurring in place of the analogically demonstrable but non-occurring a` le, there is more basis for speaking of a single morph belonging to two morphemes, since these morphemes may be identified as occurring elsewhere in the language. But in this case of Spanish -o, Hockett’s morphemes are only statements of sequence evidenced at other points in the paradigmatic series; there are no overt forms to which this particular morph may be referred.” (Nida 1948: 417f.)

The outcome of a number of such distributional levelings was of course a more regular pattern of distribution, in both senses of regularity: more widespread and more homogeneous distributions of forms. Parallelism in the distribution of morphemes in the same form class was an important desideratum for all of the structuralists. It was a key component of the notion of pattern, of structure itself. For Harris in particular, however, the regularization of distributions was an explicit goal with a very high theoretical priority. In Harris’ view, grammar in general could profitably be regarded as a set of restrictions on distribution, of prohibitions of co-occurrence, a mirror image of the more common view of grammar as a set of statements of allowable combinations. To reduce the number and scope of these distributional prohibitions (by homogenizing and broadening the distribution of a consequently smaller number of distinct elements) was to simplify grammar (Wells 1963: 43). Harris’ presentation emphasized analytical (not discovery) procedures, unlike Bloomfield’s concise presentation of criteria for good solutions illustrated with some examples, but not accompanied by much procedural guidance. Far-reaching changes in Bloomfield’s model were foreshadowed by the simplification of the types of grammatical forms allowed to just one: order, whether se-

quential, simultaneous, or overlapping. With the disappearance of Bloomfield’s taxemes of phonetic modification, the morpheme alternant, as a string of phonemes, moved out of grammar and back into the lexicon. Since portmanteau and zero solutions of these pattern-related problems are equivalent, some explanation is needed for the overwhelming preference for zero solutions displayed in the period. Wells (1963: 41) was undoubtedly right to associate this preference with the preference for concatenative or sequential order (instead of simultaneous, subtractive, and other possibilities still offered in Harris 1942). 4.4. Element distributions as criteria Concern with explicit demonstrations that grouping and distributional standards had been met in a particular descriptive work, or that the standards advocated in a theoretical work would result in acceptable descriptions, was not a prominent feature of Bloomfield’s writings. His descriptive works were extremely concise, made up mostly of listings of lexical and grammatical elements arranged in form classes. Forms, including grammatical forms, were kept in the foreground throughout. Bloomfield’s account of French morphology (Bloomfield 1945), though only meant as a sketch offered in somewhat exasperated response to Trager (1944), is typical of this style: it is only 6 pages in length, compared with 12 for Trager’s first paper and the 29 pages of Trager (1955) on the same topic. It was rather in the morphological writings of younger linguists using the distributionalist version of the “item and arrangement” style of morphological description that segmentation, grouping, and distributional concerns came to the fore. Publications reflecting this second major phase of development began to appear in the 1940’s. Zellig Harris (1942) began the relaxation of the substantive constraints of Bloomfield’s morphology in his paper on morpheme alternants. He introduced the criterion of complementary distribution among alternants with the same meaning as a basis for establishing morpheme units whose morpheme alternants were in complementary distribution. In this way he hoped to solve the problem of synonymy, since synonyms occur in the same environments. Harris understood well the system he was proposing to alter. Aggressive, repeated use of the criterion of complementary distribution could and eventually did radi-

20. American Structuralism

cally extend the notion of the morpheme. But Harris stipulated a range restriction on the newly defined alternating morpheme: alternants could only be grouped if the resulting unit had a combined distribution equal to that of some morpheme with a single shape. He also provided for an expanded notion of “phoneme sequence” (now characterizing his morpheme alternant) to include not only the normal, additive sequences of phonemes but also zero sequence (“the addition of no phoneme”), negative sequence (“the dropping of a phoneme”), and phonemic component sequence (“the addition of a physiological feature of phonemes”). In this way, the taxemes Bloomfield used were translated into a single arrangement type stipulated to be sequential order. Harris’ relatively modest revision, really little more than an explication of Bloomfield’s position, was offered deferentially: “A morpheme unit is thus a group of one or more alternants which have the same meaning and complementary distribution. To make these units more similar to our present morphemes, and more serviceable for grammatical structure, we now add a further condition: In units consisting of more than one alternant, the total distribution of all the alternants (i.e. the combined range of environments in which each of them occurs) must equal the range of environments in which some unit with but a single alternant occurs.” (Harris 1942: 171)

Harris’s position should be seen as a translation of Bloomfield’s analytical standards into the idiom of distributionalism. The importance of the range restriction, based as it is on the occurrence of an overt form with a single alternant, cannot be overemphasized. It limits analytical initiatives in just the way Nida (1948) suggested in his critique of Hockett (1947) as quoted above. Hockett (1947) relaxed the range restriction in two ways: first, he allowed for grouping alternants whose resulting range was not equal to some unique alternant, that is, it allowed establishing morphemes with groups of alternants whose joint distribution was matched either by a morpheme with a single alternant or by another one with a group of alternants. Nida (1948) pointed out the possibility this opened up of bootstrapping whole classes of complex morphemes into existence using any one as the required model for all of the others. Second, Hockett also proposed replacing complementation with a criterion of noncontrastive distribution, that is, any combination of complementary distribution and free variation, thus allowing for the oc-

185 currence of phonologically distinct alternants in the same environments, provided they were free variants, and thus, semantically identical. This step brought with it the difficult problem of distinguishing between homonymous and synonymous forms in those portions of the distribution of a morpheme where more than one phonemically distinct alternant was to be found. For instance, in Bloch’s distributionalist treatment of English verb inflection (1947), he treated -/n/ and -/d/ suffixes as alternants of the same {participle} morpheme (his suffix 3), and consequently, the same in meaning. Suffix 3 had three groups of allomorphs: the first consisted of /ed/ after apical stop or /d/ after voiced sounds other than apical stops, or /t/ after voiceless sounds; the second was made up of /n/ after a syllabic and /en/ after a nonsyllabic, and the third was /0/, that is, zero. Each of the three necessary lists would include lift, live, and pass; show and fall; and put, respectively. Note that although there is phonological complementation among the environments within the first two groups, that among the three groups, there is no phonological pattern of conditioning. Instead, a list of verb bases must be established to account for the distribution of each group of alternants. Nevertheless, these two suffix alternants, though different in form and occurring in forms different in connotations of elegance (for Bloch and Nida a kind of meaning difference), are nevertheless assigned to the same morpheme. The reasons for this are distributional: in the participle occurrences of most verbs, there is either just one suffix form occupying the total range, or two suffix forms in free variation, such as burned and burnt, because they are not different in meaning. Bloch established one participle suffix morpheme rather than two with a difference of meaning between them. Since he did consider that shown and showed, because they occurred in the same environments with different shapes, could not be synonyms, the difference of meaning had to be located in the verb base, thus leading to the establishment of show1 and show2. Nida (1948) did object to this aspect of Bloch’s analysis, however, noting that it attributed a difference of meaning to formally identical items and ignored an overt difference of form between two items distributed in the same pattern as the meaning difference (the two suffix elements). It is worth noting that Nida’s argument convinced Bloch, who taught the whole

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discussion in his classes thereafter, quoting the relevant passages. As Hockett later realized, in a “morphology” based on semantic identity and noncontrastive distribution, morphemes in practice as well as in theory are not composed of but only partly attested by phonological representations. Consider these two sentences from Hockett (1961: 51f.), which he offered as an extreme, perhaps even frivolous example of what was allowed in such a system: (2) (a) A troop of boy scouts found the body. (b) The body was found by a troop of boy scouts. He noted that they might be related as follows, with {passive} as the second immediate constituent in the second sentence: (3) {A} {troop} {of} {boy} {scout}{s} {find}{d} {the} {body} {A} {troop} {of} {boy} {scout}{s} {find}{d} {the} {body} {passive} That is, the {passive} morpheme could just as well be given, as its realization, the rearrangement of grammatical forms then known as the passive transformation. This represents, as it was meant to, the apogee of morphophonemic complexity. The shift from primarily formal criteria for grouping to semantic criteria alone brought about greater diversity among the phonological shapes of the alternants grouped within a single morphological unit. What had begun as a single, constant basic phonological shape in every occurrence of a morpheme, either manifested unchanged or altered in specific, productive ways, became instead an increasingly diverse collection of different phonological shapes requiring more and more elaborate (and less and less elegant) techniques to deal with the increasingly complex and eventually quite arbitrary phonological relationships among the alternants of these newly redefined morphemes.

5.

Morphophonemic alternation

Morphophonemics is the account of alternation or variation in the phonological shapes of morphological elements. In the descriptive works of Boas and his students, alternations were often stated much as if they were sound changes in the historical development of the language being described. Indeed, some of them undoubtedly were. The more regular

patterns of alternation were grouped together; sometimes these were called euphonic laws, following a still older practice. In the favored process-based model of description of the time, there was no clear and consistent separation between phonetic and phonemic representations of pronunciation differences, and no hesitation in using a metaphor of change or substitution in building derived forms from combinations of basic forms and processes. The Boas-Sapir tradition distinguished between a patent and non-patent layer of phonology (Swadesh & Voegelin 1939), or as we would now say, an underlying and a surface level. This distinction was made in order to overcome descriptive difficulties in segmentation by creating what Lounsbury (1953) was to call a “fictitious agglutinating analog” of the language being described, and to segment that instead of the phomemic strings themselves. The analog of the actual language was related to it by rules of interpretation of the pseudo-phonemic symbols making up its forms. This method was especially convenient for dealing with indeterminacies of segmentation arising from fusion and for overlaying frequent automatic alternations with symbols yielding consistent representations of the sets of morpheme alternants. Bloomfield’s later textbook treatment of 1933, which called for distributing information about alternants through the grammar as the content of meaningless taxemes which combined to form meaningful tagmemes was apparently not applied in any actual descriptions. Instead, Bloomfield himself followed his older descriptive practice, which particularly resembled the classical Paninian tradition in its handling of morphophonemic alternation (cf. Bloomfield 1945), and the distributionalists developed a system modeled on phonemics in which the morphological elements were sets of one or more allomorphs or morpheme alternants, phoneme sequences which in turn combined sequentially to form constructions. Morphophonemics in this system was described wholly in terms of phonemes and morphological boundaries. Wells (1949), Harris (1951), Lounsbury (1953), and Hockett (1954; 1961) are the most general statements of the stock of methods recognized and used in structuralist morphophonemics. Harris (1942; 1951) provided for the gathering and classification of alternations, reduced to their minimal terms, in a section comparable in scope and function to the col-

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lections of rules and processes in the older tradition. Thus, although one might list {knife} in the lexicon with /nayf/ and /nayv/ as its alternants, and {leaf} with its alternants /liyf/ and /liyv/, one might instead list only /nayf/ and /liyf/, and assign each to the /f/ ⬃ /v/ alternation class, or more generally, as an alternation of final voiceless and voiced consonants. Although it has often seemed to critics that the allomorph method of morphophonemics called for the repetitious listing of every alternant of every morpheme, thus repeating the same regular alternations over and over in the lexicon, this impression may stem from the demands of solving classroom workbook problems where there was no need or opportunity to build a realistic lexicon with a compact representation of the automatic alternations as envisaged by Harris and as practiced by others. Lounsbury’s theoretical statement introduced his descriptive treatment of the polysynthetic and fusional morphology of Oneida, a severe test of the conservative morphological descriptive model he chose. It is understandably focused on the question of segmentation, especially vexing in fusional languages. Wells (1949), on the other hand, is a lucid and well-illustrated treatment of automatic alternation, beginning with the early definition of it as conditioned by the phonemic environments of the alternating forms, and presenting a typology and explication of the phenomena. Because it too is cast in exclusively phonemic terms, it is a natural complement of Lounsbury’s work. Wells (1949) established a number of useful definitions and distinctions. First, he distinguished between phoneme sequences and partitioned phoneme sequences the latter including a symbol marking each morphological boundary. Thus, deyz and dey-z are the same phoneme sequence but are different partitioned phoneme sequence. Using this distinction, Wells then defined two types of automatic alternation, wide and narrow. His exposition is cast in terms of basic and derived or occurring sequences of phonemes. In wide automatic alternation, the basic partitioned phoneme sequence does not occur, although the corresponding phoneme sequence may; in narrow automatic alternation, neither the basic partitioned phoneme sequence nor the corresponding phoneme sequence occurs. In a typically elegant insight related to his exposition, Wells noted that the automatic morpheme alternants of a morpheme form a par-

187 adigm of their own, within the larger paradigmatic sets of forms the morpheme occurs in, since each member of the set of alternants has a portion in common with the others, which he called the (pars) communis, and each has a portion unique to itself, consisting of the part that manifests the automatic alternation or alternations. This is the (pars) propria of the alternant. In cases where the communis is absent, the alternation is suppletive. The two types of automatic alternation, as Wells was the first to show, are not equivalent in the predictions they imply about phonotactics, and these differences are crucial in the case of reciprocal or mutual conditioning of morphemes, as in the example of pat ⫹ tus ⫽ passus above. Under wide alternation, the existence of a form mitt- is not an exception, since there is no t ⫹ t partitioned phoneme sequence, but under the narrow condition, it is a falsifying exception. Finally, Wells distinguished between static and dynamic formulations of the alternations. In static automatic alternation, the alternation is stated in terms of the derived or surface alternants; in the dynamic formulation, the statement is in terms of the underlying representations. Thus, his Latin participial example is underlying pat ⫹ tus, derived pas ⫹ sus. In static terms, the alternation is stated as ‘s after s’ and ‘s before s’, or ‘s adjacent to s’. The dynamic statement is t ⫹ t ⫽ s ⫹ s. Although the dynamic formulation is appealing, especially nowadays, it is not any more powerful than the static one. The discussion in Wells (1949) on this choice overlaps in a confusing way with Hockett’s much better known paper of 1954 in which he compares the item and arrangement (IA) and item and process (IP) models of description, and mentions in passing the older word and paradigm (WP) model, which was in turn taken up by Matthews and powerfully advocated in the very sophisticated form given it in his textbooks (1972; 1974). Although Hockett’s paper has been cited as a defense of the item and arrangement model, he has insisted that he meant to show them to be equivalent in power and scope. Because processes are perceived as dynamic, it is tempting to associate the dynamic formulation of automatic alternations with an item and process style of description, and indeed, the old item and process style works did often resort to dynamic statements couched in terms of basic alternants. This is not a necessary association, however. Bloomfield’s

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treatments of automatic alternation are dynamic in Wells’s terms, but are styled in arrangement form (by way of taxemes, which form constructions, not rule chains). And as Wells pointed out in the 1949 paper, the formulation of automatic alternations is to be distinguished from the notations devised to represent them. There is, however, a strong tendency to assume that representations using morphophonemes necessarily represent dynamic statements, presumably because of their association with the older IP grammars in which they were mainly used. Once again, there is no necessary association of this nature. And again, it is Hockett (1961) who clarifies the relationship. His memorable aphorism makes the two types of description easy to understand and distinguish: an allomorph is a morpheme-sized string of phonemes; a morphophoneme is a phonemesized piece of a morpheme. Thus, in describing the sibilant plural and an irregular noun stem, a morphophonemic representation of this suffix as morphophonemically 兩Z兩 merely gives a name to an alternation pattern, in the same way that 兩nayF兩 does. In combination, the 兩F兩 and 兩Z兩 select each other’s appropriate alternants, but the selection is not necessarily viewed as a sequential process instead of a defined arrangement. Hockett decomposed the relation between morphemes and phonemes into two constituents, composition and representation. Phonemes compose allomorphs; allomorphs represent morphemes. Alternatively, morphophonemes compose morphemes; phonemes represent morphophonemes. The composition relation holds between elements on the same linguistic level (phonology or morphology); the representation relation holds between elements on different levels.

6.

Generative morphology

In the midst of this evolutionary branching of item and arrangement morphology, the advent of generative transformational syntax and phonology brought about a return to the architecture of Bloomfield’s morphology (cf. Matthews 1992: 164⫺169). In tracking some of the descriptive issues through this more recent period, I rely on the excellent treatment in Spencer (1991) for the organization of the issues; my role is merely to identify some of the reappearances of problems and their solutions that can be traced from an earlier time.

The lexicon in the early Chomskyan model was the repository of basic or underlying forms; phonological rules derived alternants appropriate to the morphological environments created by syntactic juxtapositions. These rules were ordered, though extrinsically, in a partially ordered relation, rather than descriptively, in a looser way as they were in Bloomfield’s system. For some years, lexical morphology received little fresh attention from theorists, while generative phonology confronted the tasks formerly divided between phonemics and morphophonemics. By the time of the Aspects model (Chomsky 1965), the role of the inflectional categories in descriptive and traditional grammar had been assumed by syntactic features whose pronunciation was generated by the phonological component, and grammatical constraints handled by the higher order constructions of descriptive syntax were taken over by subcategorization. Despite the drastic changes in implementation, much of the old category system was implemented once more with little change from the days of traditional and descriptive linguistics. Consequently, many of the theoretical and descriptive problems confronted then have had to be confronted again. Within the generative semantics movement, which substituted an underlying semantics for the syntactic deep structure of the evolving Standard Theory, the use of lexical decomposition echoed the analytical strategy of componential semantics in such proposals as deriving surface kill from a structure like cause ⫹ become ⫹ neg ⫹ live. In response, Chomsky (1970) introduced an argument for theoretical restrictions on transformational applications which in effect revived much of traditional derivational morphology by placing it outside syntax in the form of lexical redundancy rules. Jackendoff (1972) introduced the lexicalist hypothesis, whereby transformations operate only on syntactic structures, not on structures made up of parts of words. A stronger version excluded inflectional material from transformational analysis also. Further developments led in several directions, one of them toward the development of lexical functional grammar. Much of the argumentation brought to bear in these debates involved nominalizations, one of the early targets of transformational analysis (Lees 1960). The passive, another early focus in transformational theory, was also put forward for restatement in lexi-

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cal rather than transformational terms, in a serious but doubtless unwitting sequel to Hockett’s jeu d’esprit mentioned above. In the wake of a short programmatic paper by Halle (1973), a number of fundamental morphological issues were taken up for discussion. In the developments that followed, one can see the texture of morphological data reasserting itself, and the gradual reappearance of old distinctions; many of the morphological descriptive devices worked out by past generations of linguists were rediscovered, reinvented, or simply reused. The levels idea, whose full exploitation Wells (1963) had characterized as a lost opportunity in descriptive linguistics, reappeared in the new context as the single extrinsic cyclical ordering of phonological rules of the Standard Theory was broken up into components, called levels and then strata, according to their effects on different groups of affixes and stems: inflections, compounds, and inner and outer derivational affixes (Allen 1978; Siegel 1979; Selkirk 1982). An important branching begins with Aronoff (1976), whose morphology is word based rather than stem based. Moreover, in its rejection of inflectional morphology from the lexical base, it further resembles Bloomfield’s approach, which treated inflection as properly a part of sentence structure. Aronoff revives the discussion of cranberry forms, contending that the cran element is meaningless. Other challenges to portions of the Standard Theory model were based on morphological and morphophonemic considerations. The extreme depth and abstractness of phonological derivations built into the standard theory led to one line of development beginning in this period known as Natural Generative Phonology (Hooper 1976), which contends among other things that all allomorphs of a morpheme must be surface forms. A different line of argument taken by Kiparsky (1968) led him to reject absolute neutralization, so that derivations of allomorphs from an underlying representation will not be opaque but rather can be recovered from surface forms. Like Goldsmith’s autosegmental approach to phonology (Goldsmith 1979), which acknowledges its conceptual similarity to Harris’s simultaneous components approach (Harris 1944), which deploys structural elements in simultaneous tiers rather than in a single layer, McCarthy (1982) applies a multitiered structural model to morphology.

Again, Harris had developed conceptually comparable techniques for dealing with discontinuous and interdigitating morphological elements (Harris 1951: 165; see Matthews 1992: 182) and also some interesting and still unexploited possibilities of what he called long components (Harris 1951: 295⫺324). Following a long established rhetorical practice, the version of structural morphology set up as the point of departure for new solutions by generative linguists appears to be a remarkably impoverished version of item and arrangement morphology that is helpless when confronted with any structures other than sequential agglutinative morphs (Spencer 1991: 178; Matthews 1992: 178). It is especially unfortunate that Harris’s compendium of distributionalist methods (Harris 1951) was in effect made taboo by Chomsky’s reaction against it and its author, since Harris developed and explained a number of mutually compatible and ingenious ways of handling complex morphological data. Spencer’s (1991) textbook lists among the open issues at that time virtually the full range of morphological phenomena attacked by descriptive linguistics, from compounding to inflection, the status of the word, zero elements, the architecture of a morphological component, and its interactions with phonology and syntax. It would be not only scholarly but useful for active researchers to look with more understanding and respect at the theories, not just the data, developed over two generations by the extraordinary figures who founded their discipline.

7.

References

Allen, Margaret (1978), Morphological Investigations. PhD. dissertation, University of Connecticut Aronoff, Mark (1976), Word Formation in Generative Grammar. Cambridge/MA: MIT Press Bendix, Edward (1966), Componential Analysis of General Vocabulary: The Semantic Structure of a Set of Verbs in English, Hindi, and Japanese. Bloomington: Indiana University Press Bloch, Bernard (1941), “Phonemic Overlapping” American Speech 16, 278⫺84 [reprinted in Joos 1957, ed.] Bloch, Bernard (1947), “English Verb Inflection”. Language 23, 399⫺418 [reprinted in: Joos 1957, ed.] Bloomfield, Leonard (1914), Introduction to the Study of Language. New York: Holt Bloomfield, Leonard (1917), Tagalog Texts with Grammatical Analysis. Chicago: University of Illi-

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nois (University of Illinois Studies in Language and Literature, 3, 2⫺4) Bloomfield, Leonard (1926), “A Set of Postulates for the Science of Language”. Language 2, 153⫺64 [reprinted in Joos 1957, ed.] Bloomfield, Leonard (1933), Language. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston Bloomfield, Leonard (1939), “Menomini Morphophonemics”. Travaux du Cercle Linguistique de Prague 8, 105⫺115 Bloomfield, Leonard (1943), “Franz Boas”. Language 19, 198 Bloomfield, Leonard (1945), “On Describing Inflection”. Monatshefte für deutschen Unterricht 37, 4⫺5 Boas, Franz (1889), “On Alternating Sounds”. American Anthropologist 2, 47⫺53 Boas, Franz (1911), “Introduction”. Handbook of American Indian Languages. Washington/DC: Bureau of American Ethnology (Bulletin 40, Part 1), 1⫺83 Chomsky, Noam (1957), Syntactic Structures. The Hague: Mouton Chomsky, Noam (1965), Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. Cambridge/MA: MIT Press Chomsky, Noam (1970), “Remarks on Nominalization”. In: Jacobs, Roderick & Rosenbaum, Peter (eds.), Readings in English Transformational Grammar. Waltham/MA: Blaisdell, 184⫺221 Conklin, Harold (1955), “Hanunoo Color Categories”. South Western Journal of Anthropology 11, 339⫺344 Ferguson, Charles (1962), Review of Morris Halle, The Sound Pattern of Russian. Language 38, 284⫺294 Goldsmith, John (1979), Autosegmental Phonology. New York: Garland Goodenough, Ward (1956), “Componential Analysis and the Study of Meaning”. Language 32, 195⫺216 Halle, Morris (1973), “Prolegomena to a Theory of Word Formation”. Linguistic Inquiry 4, 3⫺16 Harris, Zellig (1942), “Morpheme Alternants in Linguistic Analysis”. Language 18, 169⫺180 [reprinted in Joos 1957, ed.] Harris, Zellig (1944), “Simultaneous Components in Phonology”. Language 20, 181⫺205 [reprinted in Joos 1957, ed.] Harris, Zellig (1946), “From Morpheme to Utterance”. Language 22, 161⫺183 Harris, Zellig (1948), “Componential Analysis of a Hebrew Paradigm”. Language 24, 87⫺91 Harris, Zellig (1951), Methods in Structural Linguistics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press Hockett, Charles (1942), “A System of Descriptive Phonology”. Language 18, 3⫺21 [reprinted in Joos 1957, ed.]

Hockett, Charles (1947), “Problems of Morphemic Analysis”. Language 23, 321⫺343 [reprinted in Joos 1957, ed.] Hockett, Charles (1954), “Two models of Grammatical Description”. Word 10, 210⫺233 [reprinted in Joos 1957, ed.] Hockett, Charles (1961), “Linguistic Elements and their Relations”. Language 37, 29⫺53 Hockett, Charles (1970, ed.) A Leonard Bloomfield Anthology. Bloomington, London: Indiana University Press Hooper, Joan B. (1976), Introduction to Natural Generative Phonology. New York: Academic Press Hymes, Dell, & Fought, John (1981), American Structuralism. The Hague: Mouton (Janua Linguarum, Series Maior 102) Jackendoff, Ray (1972), Semantic Interpretation in Generative Grammar. Cambridge/MA: MIT Press Joos, Martin (1957, ed.), Readings in Linguistics. Washington/DC: American Council of Learned Societies Kiparsky, Paul (1968), How Abstract is Phonology? Bloomington/IN: Indiana University Linguistics Club Lees, Robert (1960), The Grammar of English Nominalizations. The Hague: Mouton Longacre, Robert (1960), “String Constituent Analysis”. Language 36, 63⫺88 Longacre, Robert (1964), Grammar Discovery Procedures. The Hague: Mouton Longacre, Robert (1965), “Some Fundamental Insights of Tagmemics”. Language 41, 65⫺76 Lounsbury, Floyd (1953), “The Method of Descriptive Morphology”. Oneida Verb Morphology. Ph.D. dissertation, Yale University [reprinted in: Joos 1957, ed., 11⫺24] Lounsbury, Floyd (1956), “A Semantic Analysis of Pawnee Kinship Usage”. Language 32, 158⫺164 Lounsbury, Floyd (1964a) “A Formal Account of the Crow- and Omaha-type Kinship Terminologies”. In: Goodenough, Ward (ed.), Explorations in Cultural Anthropology. New York: McGraw-Hill, 351⫺393 Lounsbury, Floyd (1964b), “The Structural Analysis of Kinship Semantics”. In: Lunt, Horace G. (ed.), Proceedings of the Ninth International Congress of Linguistics, Cambridge/MA, 1962. The Hague: Mouton, 1073⫺1090 McCarthy, John (1982), Formal Problems in Semitic Phonology and Morphology. New York: Garland Matthews, Peter (1972), Inflectional Morphology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Matthews, Peter (1974), Morphology: An Introduction to the Theory of Word-structure. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

21. Tagmemics Matthews, Peter (1992), “Bloomfield’s Morphology and its Successors”. Transactions of the Philological Society 90, 121⫺186 Matthews, Peter (1993), Grammatical Theory in the United States from Bloomfield to Chomsky. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Nida, Eugene (1948), “The Identification of Morphemes”. Language 24, 414⫺441 [reprinted in: Joos 1957, ed.] Pedersen, Holger (1931), The Discovery of Language: Linguistic Science in the Nineteenth Century. Bloomington/IN: Indiana University Press [21962] Pike, Kenneth (1958), “On Tagmemes Nee Gramemes”. International Journal of American Linguistics 24, 273⫺278 Pike, Kenneth (1967), Language in Relation to a Unified Theory of the Structure of Human Behavior. The Hague: Mouton [first issued Santa Ana/CA in 3 parts: 1954, 1955, 1960] Rogers, David (1987), “The Influence of Panini on Leonard Bloomfield”. In: Hall, Robert (ed.), Leonard Bloomfield: Essays on His Life and Work. Amsterdam: Benjamins 89⫺138 Sapir, Edward (1921), Language. New York: Harcourt, Brace Sapir, Edward (1925), “Sound Patterns in Language”. Language 1, 37⫺51 [reprinted in: Joos 1957, ed.] Selkirk, Elizabeth (1982), The Syntax of Words. Cambridge/MA: MIT Press Siegel, Dorothy (1979), Topics in English Morphology. New York: Garland Spencer, Andrew (1991), Morphological Theory: An Introduction to Word Formation in Generative Grammar. Oxford: Blackwell

191 Stocking, George (1968), Race, Culture, and Evolution: Essays in the History of Anthropology. New York: Free Press Stocking, George (1974), “The Boas Plan for the Study of American Indian Languages”. In: Dell Hymes (ed.), Studies in the History of Linguistics. Bloomington/IN: Indiana University Press, 454⫺ 484 Swadesh, Morris (1934), “The Phomemic Principle”. Language 10, 117⫺125 Swadesh, Morris & Voegelin, Carl (1939), “A Problem in Phonological Alternation”. Language 15, 1⫺10 Trager, George (1944), “The Verb Morphology of Spoken French”. Language 20, 131⫺141 Trager, George (1955), “French Morphology: Verb Inflection”. Language 31, 511⫺529 Twaddell, W. Freeman (1935), On Defining the Phoneme. Baltimore: Waverley (Language monographs 16) Wallace, Anthony & Atkins, John (1960), “The Meaning of Kinship Terms”, American Anthropologist 62, 458⫺464 Weinreich, Uriel (1966), “On the Semantic Structure of Language”. In: Greenberg, Joseph (ed.), Universals of Language. Cambridge/MA: MIT Press, 114⫺171 Wells, Rulon (1949), “Automatic Alternation”. Language 25, 99⫺116 Wells, Rulon (1963), “Some Neglected Opportunities in Descriptive Linguistics”. Anthropological Linguistics 5, 38⫺49

John Fought, Phillips Ranch/CA (U.S.A.)

21. Tagmemics 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

Introduction Definition History The morphophoneme Morphology-syntax division Morpheme formatives Bibliographical comments References

1.

Introduction

Although the traditional “post-Bloomfieldian” morpheme has in general, been adopted into its descriptions, tagmemics has made some significant changes in its definition and functions. When the theory was in

its early formative years, the place of the morpheme within its descriptive apparatus was unsteady (varying from being a unit on the lowest level of the lexical hierarchy to one on the lowest level of the grammatical hierarchy). Since then, however, it has been firmly escounced as a unit (indeed the only unit) of the lowest level of the grammatical hierarchy. The author of the theory early stated that units should be described as to their contrastive-identificational features, range of variation, and distribution in class, sequence and matrix (or field) (see [K.] Pike 21967). Most tagmemicists have followed this practice. Thus, in typical tagmemic descriptions,

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morphemes always have both form and function as obligatory components. Tagmemic theory as a whole was intended primarily to be of aid to the members of the Summer Institute of Linguistics in their task of reducing many of the unwritten indigenous languages of the world to writing. Thus, the theory is especially useful for analysts wishing to analyze a language other than their own native one. The originator of the theory (Kenneth L. Pike) during its formative years, oscillated from a teaching and research position at the University of Michigan and numerous field assignments with the Summer Institute of Linguistics, thus bringing to the theory a unique double-input of theoretical study and practical fieldwork.

2.

Definition

A widely-accepted working definition of the tagmemic morpheme is “the lowest grammatical filler unit, with no grammatical parts within it” ( [Kenneth L.] Pike & [Evelyn G.] Pike 21982: 450). Since all filler units fill slots (i.e., have functions), this definition of the morpheme includes both form and function, in accord with the guidelines earlier proposed by Pike. It is this requirement that morphemes obligatorily carry a functional component that adds some clarity and order to morpheme definition. By definition, also, all units include various types of distributional restrictions ⫺ in addition to distribution in sequence (i.e., filling particular slots) ⫺ they are members of classes, and are also in fieldtype relationships with other similar units (for details of the latter components, see Pike & Pike 21982). Strings of phonemes which do not fill grammatical slots are not considered to be morphemes, but components (at times formatives; see 6) of morphemes. In addition, all texts will divide into morphemes, with nothing left over. (This restriction does not hold for larger units of grammar, however.)

3.

History

Because tagmemics has been so widely used in the analyses of many languages of the world (see, for example, [K.] Pike 1966; Brend 1970; 1972) the usefulness of this type of morpheme description has had wide testing and, indeed, it has been found to be extremely effective. Significant changes in the

description of morphology have not occurred within tagmemics for some time (though some additions have been made; see especially 6). Members of the Summer Institute of Linguistics in their analyses of literally hundreds of unwritten indigenous languages have produced the majority of tagmemic descriptions. The major theoretical contributor to tagmemics, apart from Pike himself, has been Robert E. Longacre. For further details on the history of tagmemic theory see Waterhouse (1974).

4.

The morphophoneme

Because the morpheme is an indivisible unit of the grammatical hierarchy, and all units in the phonological hierarchy (not discussed here) must be phonologically defined (with grammatical concomitant features where appropriate), tagmemics does not posit any unit comparable to the traditional morphophoneme. (However, many morphological variants ⫺ i.e., allomorphs ⫺ will, of course, be described as being phonologically conditioned.) [K.] Pike early insisted that units in the three hierarchies (phonological, grammatical and lexical ⫺ later referential) are often conditioned by or determined by a hierarchy other than their own, and that one has not completed a tagmemic description until all relationships between the hierarchies have been stated. Thus, phonological variants of morphemes (i.e., phonologically-alternating allomorphs) are considered to be the result of an interlocking of the phonological and grammatical hierarchies. That is, allomorphs as a whole would be described as having phonological variants (even though such variation may take place only at a boundary or be limited to only one or two phonemes within the allomorph). In addition, units in the phonological hierarchy which are conditioned by position in grammatical units would be similarly described. That is, for example, two phonemes which occur predictably in particular grammatical environments would still be described as phonemes, and the grammatical predictability would be included in their description.

5.

Morphology⫺syntax division

In tagmemic descriptions, it has been the prevailing practice to consider function as having priority to form whenever there is not a

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one-to-one correspondence between form and function. This makes it possible to analyze as one string all units which function (i.e., which are constituents) within one grammatical span, whether or not all are bound. This is especially useful where some constituents are bound and others are free. Both bound and free morphemes, for example, may be fillers of clause-level slots. For instance, subject pronouns may be bound to verbs, but morphemes functioning as objects may be free words, e.g. as in the Spanish clause Veo a Juan ‘I see Juan’ where the -o of veo is, in part, a marker of first-personsingular. Another similar example is the Mixteco clause (data from Pike & Pike 21982: 115) cisa’i-na ’bilu kwihin ‘will:hide-I white cat’ where the -na indicates first person singular, and functions as the subject of the sentence. A tagmemic analysis of this clause would be ⫹ Predicate: verb phrase ⫹ Subject: - pronoun ⫹ Object: noun phrase (i.e., a Predicate, filled by a verb phrase, followed by a subject filled by a bound pronoun, followed by an Object, filled by a noun phrase). Also, many languages have post-positions which function as constituents of the unit preceding them. Often such a unit is a noun phrase ⫺ not just a noun ⫺ to which a postposition is bound (that is, e.g., an adjective, plus a noun suffixed by a postposition). In this case, one would have an Axis, filled by a noun phrase, followed by a Relator filled by a bound postposition. Here again, function rather than form is primary in the description. These are but two of the many common language situations in which form and function do not coincide where tagmemics allows the analysis to include in one construction all units which are constituents of one span.

6.

Morpheme formatives

One further contribution by Kenneth Pike to morphemic discussion is his postulation of ‘morpheme formatives’ ⫺ e.g. the sl- of slip, slurp, slop. As previously mentioned, Pike decided (as Eugene Nida had previously) that such units were not morphemes. However, Pike went further by showing that such submorphemic components do indeed show pattern and system, ⫺ i.e., the sl- would be a morpheme formative ⫺ and he provided useful insights into their analysis and presentation, primarily via labelled matrices.

This analysis has also proved insightful in the description of so-called “portmanteau morphemes”. An interesting example of Pike’s analysis of this type of data is seen in the following display ⫺ in this case used for the analysis of complicated morphemes (from Pike & Pike 21982: 210): undergoer actor 2 2p 2,1 1p 1 3 3p 4

2

k k k k k

2p 2,1 1p 1

k k k k k

k k k

k k

k k

n n n

n n n

3

3p 4

k k k n n

k k k n n

k k k n n w w

w w

Fig. 21.1: Matrix analysis from Pike & Pike 21982

This Potawatomi display shows clearly the functions of the morphemes: [k] ‘second person is involved’, [n] ‘first person but no second person is involved; and [w] ‘only other ⫺ third and fourth ⫺ persons are involved’. All previous analyses of these data had indicated that no patterning was discernable and that only a listing of the meanings of each of these forms was possible. For other discussion of this type of matrix analysis see Pike & Pike (21982: 167⫺170, 209⫺211).

7.

Bibliographical comments

The most concise information on a tagmemic view of morphology is found in Pike & Pike (21982: Chapters 5, 8 and 9). That volume also gives an overall view of tagmemic grammar. (For a different view of grammar, utilizing, however, a good many tagmemic concepts, see Longacre 1964; 1983). Some publications utilizing Pike’s morpheme formative approach are Pike & Erickson (1964) (Potawatomi), Pike (1963) (Fore). A large number of studies on the grammars of indigenous languages have appeared. Many of the publications on those grammars include morphological analyses. Separate listings and bibliographical articles may be found in Pike (1966), Brend (1970; 1972), Brend & Pike (1976, eds.), Wares (1979), and Harris & Daly (1985). (Other listings of

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studies of languages in particular countries can be obtained from branches of the Summer Institute of Linguistics in those countries ⫺ addresses of which can be obtained from the Publications Office, S. I. L., 7500 West Camp Wisdom Road, Dallas/TX, 75236, U.S.A.). For tagmemic theory in general, see [K.] Pike (1967; 1982), Pike & Pike (1974; 2 1982; 1983), Brend & Pike (1976, eds.), a selection of Pike’s writings edited by Brend (Brend 1972, ed.), and Pike’s bibliography, Brend (1987).

8.

References

Brend, Ruth (1970), “Tagmemic Theory: An Annotated Bibliography”. Journal of English Linguistics 4, 7⫺45 Brend, Ruth (1972), “Tagmemic Theory: An Annotated Bibliography, Appendix 1”. Journal of English Linguistics 6, 1⫺16 Brend, Ruth (1972, ed.), Kenneth L. Pike: Selected Writings. The Hague, Paris: Mouton Brend, Ruth (1974, ed.), Advances in Tagmemics. Amsterdam, London: North-Holland; New York: Elsevier (North-Holland Linguistic Series 9) Brend, Ruth M. (1987), Kenneth Lee Pike: Bibliography. Bloomington/IN: Eurolingua Brend, Ruth M. & Pike, Kenneth L. (1976, eds.), Tagmemics, Vol. 1⫺2. The Hague, Paris: Mouton (Trends in Linguistics 2) [Vol. I: Aspects of the Field; Vol. II: Theoretical Discussion] Harris, Maria De Boe & Daly, Margarita H. (1995), Bibliografı´a del Instituto Lingüı´stico de Verano en Me´xico, 1935⫺1984. Mexico/D. F.: Instituto Lingüı´stico de Verano

Longacre, Robert E. (1964), Grammar Discovery Procedures: A Field Manual. The Hague: Mouton (Janua Linguarum Series Minor 33) Longacre, Robert E. (1983), The Grammar of Discourse. New York, London: Plenum Press Pike, Kenneth L. (1963), “Theoretical Implications of Matrix Permutation in Fore (New Guinea)”. Anthropological Linguistics 5.8, 1⫺23 Pike, Kenneth L. (1966), “A Guide to Publications Related to Tagmemic Theory”. In: Sebeok, Thomas A. (ed.), Current Trends in Linguistics, Vol. III: Theoretical Foundations. The Hague, Paris: Mouton, 365⫺394 Pike, Kenneth L. (1967), Language in Relation to a Unified Theory of the Structure of Human Behavior. The Hague, Paris: Mouton (Janua Linguarum Series Maior 24) [preliminary ed. in 3 parts 1954, 1955, 1960 Glendale/CA: Summer Institute of Linguistics] Pike, Kenneth L. & Erickson, Barbara (1964), “Conflated Field Structures in Potawatomi and in Arabic”. International Journal of American Linguistics 30, 201⫺212 Pike, Kenneth L. & Pike, Evelyn G. (1974), “Rules as Components of Tagmemes in the English Verb Phrase”. In: Brend, Ruth M. (ed.), 155⫺166 Pike, Kenneth L. & Pike, Evelyn G. (1982), Grammatical Analysis. Dallas/TX: Summer Institute of Linguistics (Publications in Linguistics 53) [11977; accompanied by changes and additions 1984] Pike, Kenneth L. & Pike, Evelyn G. (1983), Text and Tagmeme. Norwood/NJ: Ablex Wares, Alan C. (1979), Bibliography of the Summer Institute of Linguistics, 1935⫺1975. Dallas/TX: Summer Institute of Linguistics Waterhouse, Viola G. (1974), The History and Development of Tagmemics. The Hague, Paris: Mouton (Janua Linguarum Series Critica 26)

Ruth M. Brend, Ann Arbor/MI (U.S.A.)

22. Generative grammar 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

The transformational period Other early work The lexicalist hypothesis Early lexicalist morphology Word formation in generative grammar Lexical integrity Inflection Item and arrangement morphology Montague and categorial morphology Affix ordering Morphosyntax Nonlinear morphology Morphology across disciplines References

1.

The transformational period

Noam Chomsky, the founder of Generative Grammar, was introduced to linguistics as a teenager through his assistance with the manuscript of Harris (1951). Generative Grammar must be therefore understood against the historical background of Harris’s work of that period. Most centrally for our purposes, Harris erased the traditional distinction between morphology and syntax. In Harris’s words: “The syntactic and morpho-

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logical results are obtained by the same procedure, so that no distinction is drawn between them” (Harris 1960: 262). Generative Grammar up to 1965 adopted this view. For example, the famous phrase structure cum affix-hopping analysis of English verbs and auxiliaries (Chomsky 1957: 38⫺40) cuts dramatically across syntax and morphology. The analysis consists of four context-free rewrite rules, one context-sensitive rewrite rule, and two transformations. The context-free rewrite rules are given in (1) below: (1) (a) Verb J Aux ⫹ V (b) V J hit, take, walk, read, etc. (c) Aux J C(M) (have⫹en) (be⫹ing) (be⫹en) (d) M J will, can, may, shall, must C is spelled out context-sensitively as S (“the morpheme which is singular for verbs and plural for nouns” (Chomsky 1957: 29)) in the context of a third person singular subject, 0 (“the morpheme which is singular for nouns and plural for verbs” (Chomsky 1957: 29)) with other subjects, or past. This leaves the affix-hopping transformation, which is formulated as follows: (2) Let Af stand for any of the affixes past, S, 0, en, ing. Let v stand for any M or V or have or be (i.e., for any non-affix in the phrase Verb). Then: Af ⫹ v J v ⫹ Af#, where # is interpreted as word boundary. Finally, words are established by the insertion of word boundaries everywhere except between a v and a following Af. Thus, one system of rules is responsible for introducing and ordering both the auxiliary verbs and all the affixes (at least abstractly; the actual forms are provided by later morphophonemic rules), with no central distinction between morphology and syntax. Aside from Chomsky’s work on English verbs, the most celebrated of the early transformationalist treatments of morphology was that of Lees (1963), which is largely devoted to word-internal constructions. Although it is little read nowadays, this book was as popular in its time as Syntactic Structures: between 1963 and 1966 it went through four printings, the same number as Chomsky’s book in the same four years. The category of nominalizations that is treated in Lees includes all “noun-like versions of sentences” (Lees 1963: 54), from embedded clauses to compounds to nominal derivatives. All, words and phrases alike, are treated by means of transforma-

tions from kernel sentences, with little regard for the niceties of affixation. Lees quickly acknowledged (in the preface to the second printing) that his treatment of nominals suffered from “the inclusion of non-productive or only dubiously productive expression-types among the truly living” (Lees 1963: xxviii). Not acknowledged, but equally clear, was the fact that this early transformational work made no distinction between words and phrases. Several years later, these shortcomings were addressed, albeit programmatically, in the two works that represent the watershed between early and later Generative Grammar (Chomsky 1965 (henceforth Aspects); 1970). These works introduced into the theory the possibility that morphologically complex items, mostly words but also idioms, might sometimes be introduced into the syntax as wholes. Two factors lay behind this move. One was the desire to curb the power of transformations; the other was the recognition that word formation was not always as regular as syntax. Thus was born the lexicalist hypothesis (Chomsky 1970) that signalled the end of the transformational treatment of morphology and other lexical matters.

2.

Other early work

It is easy to believe that, aside from the last section of Aspects, no attention was paid to morphology in generative grammar until 1970. But not everyone was comfortable with the Harrisian erasure of the boundary between syntax and morphology. Especially in Europe, where American Structuralism had never had much influence, important work emerged in the 1960’s. Some of this work, such as Schultink (1961; 1962) and Marchand (1969) originated quite outside the generative school, but became influential during the lexicalist period, when their students (Kastovsky 1977; Booij 1977) showed how their results and ideas could be incorporated into a generative framework. A number of works on inflection (Kiefer 1970; Matthews 1972; Wurzel 1970) were more explicitly within the generative paradigm and received attention at the time of their publication. Other pioneering works that anticipated some of the most important ideas of lexicalist morphology, notably Zimmer (1964) and Botha (1968), unfortunately received much less attention. Even less attention was paid to those outsiders,

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again largely European, who ventured to criticize the transformational treatment of morphology (Dik 1967).

3.

The lexicalist hypothesis

Aspects is sometimes seen as the culminating work of the early period of generative grammar. In fact, the standard theory that is presented in Aspects put syntax on a new foundation that has not been changed much in the intervening twenty-five years. One of the hallmarks of the new theory was the separation of the rules introducing what Chomsky called lexical formatives (basically nouns, verbs and adjectives, what later came to be called major lexical categories) from the syntax. Previously, lexical formatives had been introduced by the same sorts of rewrite rules that were used for phrase structure. In Aspects, Chomsky abandoned the use of rewrite rules for lexical formatives. In their stead he proposed a lexicon, “an unordered list of all lexical formatives” or “a set of lexical entries, each lexical entry being a pair (D, C), where D is a phonological distinctive feature matrix ‘spelling’ a certain lexical formative and C is a collection of specified syntactic features (a complex symbol)” (Chomsky 1965: 84). Along with this lexicon came a general rule of lexical insertion, by means of which lexical formatives could be inserted into syntactic structures. This framework provided a place in grammatical theory for the idiosyncratic properties of lexical formatives, and thus hearkened back to Bloomfield’s ideas. Even the use of the term lexicon is strikingly Bloomfieldian, for in his major general work, Bloomfield used the term lexicon only in a technical theoretical sense (“The lexicon is really an appendix of the grammar, a list of basic irregularities” (Bloomfield 1933: 274). He used the term dictionary, by contrast, for actual dictionaries. Also reminiscent of Bloomfield was the treatment of the lexicon as a list of idiosyncracies. For Bloomfield, this follows by definition from the fact that the items in the lexicon were morphemes, which he defined as unanalyzeable. But Chomsky’s lexicon was meant to contain all lexical formatives and in the last section of the last chapter of this work, he allowed that “it may be necessary to extend the theory of the lexicon to permit some ‘internal computation’” (Chomsky 1965: 187). This is accompanied by a footnote to Lees and to Zimmer.

But Zimmer’s work was very different from Lees’s. Zimmer allowed and indeed argued for internal computation in the lexicon, while Lees did not make any distinction between lexical and syntactic structures. Chomsky did not follow up his conjecture about internally complex lexical formatives until it became politically necessary to use it in the war against Generative Semantics. In an article published in 1970, but written somewhat earlier, Chomsky set out to counter the exuberant use of transformations and phrase structure in representing the internal structure of individual lexemes that lay at the heart of Generative Semantics. He raised the possibility that, instead of using transformations for this purpose, one might “extend the base rules” (Chomsky 1970: 188) to accommodate certain morphologically complex words. He calls this extension of the base rules “the lexicalist position” as opposed to the “transformationalist position” that all complex constructions be treated by means of the “transformational apparatus”, as Lees and others, most recently the Generative Semanticists, had assumed, even for lexeme-internal phenomena. Chomsky emphasized that the choice between a lexicalist and a transformationalist analysis of a given phenomenon is an empirical question: “It is furthermore quite possible to imagine a compromise solution that adopts the lexicalist position for certain items and the transformational position for others” (Chomsky 1970: 188). Later in the same article, Chomsky adopted the term “the lexicalist hypothesis” for the idea that “a great many items appear in the lexicon with fixed selectional and strict subcategorization features, but with a choice as to the features associated with lexical categories noun, verb, adjective” (Chomsky 1970: 190). The bulk of the rest of the article is devoted to the analysis of two types of nominal constructions in English, which Chomsky calls derived nominal and gerundive nominal. The conclusion is that the lexicalist hypothesis is correct for derived nominal and the transformationalist hypothesis for gerundive nominal. The original lexicalist hypothesis is quite different from what we usually assume it to be. For example, Aronoff (1976: 5) says that Chomsky presented “a new theory of syntax, in which all of derivational morphology is isolated and removed from the syntax”. Chomsky did no such thing, but nonetheless, it is in formulations like these that the lexi-

22. Generative grammar

calist hypothesis has come down to us. It is easy to see why this misinterpretation has met with greater favor than the original, for it is bold and decisive where the original was tentative and conditional. The formulation of the lexicalist hypothesis as applying to “a great many items” and being an empirical matter that might be decided differently in each case left theorists in the uncomfortable position of having no apparent general ground for distinguishing lexically from transformationally derived complex words. Aronoff’s misinterpretation, though, reconstructs the traditional distinction between syntax and word formation, and allows us to see it as a distinction of domains. Word formation operates within lexemes and provides morphologically complex members of the major lexical categories, just as Chomsky suggests, but it provides all of them, leaving us with a sharp theoretical distinction between lexical and syntactic constructs that Chomsky had not originally made. Chomsky’s original lexicalist hypothesis was never pursued. However, the absence of a good terminological distinction between lexemes and words soon led to two very different lexicalist hypotheses that differed over whether the claim of internal syntactic autonomy applies to lexemes (and is thus confined to word formation) or to morphological words (and therefore embraces all of morphology). The strong lexicalist hypothesis of Lapointe (1980) and others says that all grammatical words are syntactically inaccessible, and conversely that all morphology is totally divorced from syntactic structure, while the weak lexicalist hypothesis of Aronoff (1976) or Anderson (1982) says that lexemes are syntactic atoms, but that there are instances of syntactically sensitive morphology, that is to say morphology whose conditions extend beyond the lexeme’s domain, mainly inflectional morphology, whose role is the realization of grammatical words. Because this so-called weak hypothesis is in fact a hypothesis about syntactic domains rather than about morphology, it may be better to call it the lexemic domain hypothesis. It is also sometimes known as the lexical integrity hypothesis.

4.

Early lexicalist morphology

The first two influential works following the advent of lexicalist morphology are Halle (1973) and Jackendoff (1975). To them can

197 also be traced a fundamental distinction between morpheme-based and lexeme-based (or word-based) theories of morphology. Halle’s contribution was self-declaredly programmatic. His general theory of the morphology of a language incorporated the traditional structuralist list of morphemes (with each morpheme being a minimal sign in Bloomfieldian fashion) and a set of morphological rules (also called rules of word formation) for combining these morphemes into words. Halle does not discuss the nature of these rules in any detail, but those that he uses as examples are binary concatenative phrase structure rules of a simple sort (Halle calls the rules that he uses templates). Together, the list of morphemes and the rules define the set of potential words of a language. However, since many of these potential words are not used, Halle posited another list, which he called the dictionary, containing the set of actual words. This list was meant to account for the idiosyncrasy of words rather than morphemes (the major original motivation for the lexicalist hypothesis) and it was produced by means of a filter on the output of the word formation rules. Halle’s word formation rules encompassed both inflectional and derivational morphology and his dictionary listed all the members of any given lexeme’s paradigm. Jackendoff’s work is less centrally concerned with accounting for morphology than with “the partial relations and idiosyncrasy characteristic of the lexicon” (Jackendoff 1975: 639) that had preoccupied Chomsky in the last chapter of Aspects. He developed a system of redundancy rules, which together with fully specified entries for all lexical items, is used to account for the relations among theses entries. The same rules can also be used creatively to form new lexical items. Jackendoff separated morphological and semantic redundancy rules, but he stipulated that “a semantic relation between two words without a morphological relationship cannot be counted as redundancy” (Jackendoff 1975: 651), although a purely morphological relation is counted. His system is therefore essentially morphological. Furthermore, although Jackendoff never says as much, the framework that he adopts is word-based or lexeme-based: there is no list of morphemes, as there is in Halle’s framework. Instead, all morphology is accounted for in terms of rules relating one word to another. This conflict between morpheme-based and lexeme-based theories has haunted generative grammar

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ever since. At heart, it lies in whether one accepts the original structuralist postulation of the morpheme as the basic meaningful unit of language. A related issue that has remained contentious is whether Halle’s templates (or similar concatenations) are sufficient to deal with morphology or whether more powerful devices are needed. Those theorists who cling to the traditional morpheme by and large also adopt a traditional itemand-arrangement view of morphology (sometimes with concomitant arguments about the mathematical simplicity of item-and-arrangement grammars). Conversely, those who reject the traditional morpheme also allow less restricted types of morphological rules (though largely of the classic item-and-process sort).

5.

Word formation in generative grammar

Two dissertations written simultaneously under Halle’s direction in 1974 provided the ground for much subsequent work in generative morphology. Siegel (1974) laid the foundation for Lexical Phonology and Morphology and was generally more influential on work dealing with the interaction of morphology and phonology. Aronoff’s dissertation, revised as Aronoff (1976), dealt more directly with purely morphological matters. It was an explicit attempt to weld to the lexicalist hypothesis work on English word formation within the European tradition (especially Marchand (1969)). This work assumes not only the separation of morphology from syntax, but also an equally traditional division of morphology into word-formation (Wortbildungslehre) or derivation and inflection (Formenlehre) that was disregarded or discounted by post-Bloomfieldian American linguistics, including pre-lexicalist generative grammar (to this day, many generative linguists use the term word formation indiscriminately to cover both inflection and derivation). This latter division could be expressed within the new X-bar phrase structure notation of lexicalist syntax as that between structures within and above the X0 level. The general framework of Aronoff (1976) is word-based, like that of Jackendoff, but the emphasis is on the production of new words, rather than on redundancy among existing words, which is treated derivatively. Also, unlike Jackendoff, who adopted a word-based

framework without discussion, Aronoff devoted a great deal of attention to distinguishing word-based from morpheme-based theories and rejected the structuralist postulate that the morpheme was the minimal meaningful unit of language. In particular, he allowed for existing words (such as cranberry or understand) to be morphologically complex without being semantically compositional. The greater part of Aronoff (1976) is devoted to developing an explicit account of Word Formation Rules, which are treated as complex operations, forming one word from another on three separate dimensions: phonological form, syntax and semantics. Much space was devoted to analyses of specific phenomena, with the goal of determining just what sorts of phonological, syntactic and semantic information a Word Formation Rule could refer to and to specific mechanisms that had to be posited in order to accommodate the facts of English. The work thus provided a frame on which subsequent analyses could be constructed and it was followed by similar treatments of Word Formation Rules in other languages (e.g. Booij 1977 for Dutch and Scalise 1983 for Italian). It was also criticized for its shortcomings, the most telling of which was the author’s declared refusal to distinguish words from lexemes terminologically, with a resulting confusion (sometimes on the part of the author) about whether the term word-based should mean ‘lexeme-based’ or ‘word(-form) based’. On the phonological side, in addition to arguing for a transformational treatment of certain “exotic” phenomena (most notably reduplication), which was consonant with the processual view of morphology that he adopted, Aronoff proposed a separate set of morphophonemic rules, which he called adjustment rules and which were very similar in function to the readjustment rules of Chomsky & Halle (1968). These adjustment rules were criticized by some as undesirable consequences of the word-based approach and they have been less influential on subsequent work than the basic framework that Aronoff proposed. In seeking to integrate traditional ideas about the basic nature of word formation into the generative enterprise, Aronoff raised other non-formal issues that had been current in traditional discussions of morphology and word formation. Two of these, productivity and the interaction between coinages and items already listed in the lexicon (blocking), have become major topics in the generative literature. Pro-

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ductivity is discussed in Art. 33; blocking is covered in Art. 36 and 85. It is tempting to see generative work on morphology in the mid 1970’s as being divorced from syntax, given the obvious fact that this work was legitimized by the establishment of a distinction between the two. However, many important ideas from syntax played equally important roles in morphological research. The best example of this kind of interaction is probably the application of subjacency to morphological analysis. Subjacency was proposed by Chomsky early in the 1970’s as a condition on movements. It was later generalized to include most syntactic operations. Within morphology, Siegel (1978) and Allen (1978) proposed almost simultaneously a version of subjacency known as the adjacency condition, according to which interaction is only possible between structurally or cyclically adjacent elements. Siegel states the condition as follows: “No W[ord] F[ormation] R[ule] can involve X and Y, where X is an affix, unless Y is uniquely contained in the cycle adjacent to X.” (Siegel 1978: 190)

A nice example of this condition at work comes from Scalise (1984). Scalise points out that the Italian noun cenere ‘ashes’ is a mass noun and hence does not have a plural. However, the compound portacenere ‘ashtray’ is a count noun and hence can be pluralized as portaceneri ‘ashtrays’ because the adjacency condition assures that the mass noun status of cenere is invisible at the point where pluralization applies to the whole word. Note that structurally adjacent is not always equivalent to linearly adjacent. This can easily be seen in the case of a prefix that is sensitive to a suffix, or vice versa. Again, Scalise provides a good example: Italian negative prefixes are sensitive to certain suffixes; adjectives formed with the suffix -ito can be negated with either in- or dis-, but adjectives formed with the suffix -abile are never found with the prefix dis-. The prefix thus depends on the suffix, which is not linearly adjacent, but is structurally adjacent. More recently, there has been a general movement towards reintegrating morphology and other word-internal phenomena into syntax, especially Government and Binding syntax. The best known example of this movement is the work of Baker (1988) on incorporation. In addition, Lieber (1984) and Sproat (1988) have argued that independently motivated syntactic principles can ac-

count for the anaphoric island phenomena discovered by Postal (1969), without having to make reference to the fact that these anaphoric islands are inside lexemes, which had previously been accepted as the explanation of the phenomenon. This work is somewhat controversial, however, since it abandons one of the central ideas of many lexicalist theories of syntax and morphology, lexical integrity.

6.

Lexical integrity

The idea that word-internal and word-external phenomena are different, which is at the heart of the lexicalist hypothesis, may be termed lexical integrity. While lexical integrity permitted morphologists to integrate their work into generative grammar, it also permitted syntacticians to look at word-internal phenomena in new ways. In particular, it led to a number of theories of lexical grammar, which sought to treat by means of lexical rules word-internal phenomena that lay outside the purview to traditional treatments of word formation. Best known among these is Bresnan’s (1978) theory of lexical-functional grammar, which places in the lexical component along with word formation and compounding all phenomena that had previously been treated by means of structurepreserving transformations, including for example, all passives, causatives and the English dative alternation. On the morphological side of the coin, lexical integrity leads naturally to what Lapointe (1980) calls the generalized lexical hypothesis, also known as the strong lexical hypothesis, according to which all morphology, including inflection, is independent of the syntax and no syntactic rules are permitted to modify or even refer to the internal morphological structure of words. This hypothesis rules out, for example, the classic treatment of English auxiliaries, which, as we saw in 1, manipulates affixes in the syntax. Others, most notably Anderson, have adopted a position, sometimes known as the weak lexical hypothesis, according to which the strong lexicalist hypothesis must be relaxed precisely in the case of inflection, where syntax and morphology must be allowed to interact. Related to Anderson’s position is the idea that morphology in the very restricted sense of ‘the realization of forms’ is an entirely different enterprise from what the syntactician is engaged in, which is the arrangement of abstract categories. On this

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view, syntax accounts for the syntactic side of both word formation (in the narrow sense of that term, which restricts its scope to lexeme-internal matters) and inflection. What we call weak lexicalism merely draws a line in this abstract syntax at the lexeme, which is the traditional line between syntax and derivation. Morphology has nothing to do with this question, but is simply responsible for the realization of any abstract syntactic information that has a reflex in phonological form, both inflection (which is sensitive to supra-lexical categories) and derivation (the realization of lexeme-internal categories), as well as clitics, which are not normally included in morphology. This view is similar to that expressed in the important work of Beard (1976; 1981), which advocates a conceptual separation between affixation (which is morphology) and abstract lexical derivation, which is closer to syntax, while still distinguishing lexical from syntactic domains.

7.

Inflection

The most important work on inflectional morphology within generative grammar was Matthews (1972), which had antecedents in earlier work (Matthews 1965; 1967). Unfortunately, Matthews’s location in England, outside the geographical and social mainstream of the generative world, allowed his work to receive less attention than it deserved. Matthews’s formalized Word and Paradigm treatment of inflection was defended and elaborated by Anderson (1982; 1985; 1986), within a general approach to morphology similar to that of Aronoff. Anderson’s work incorporates a level of morphosyntactic representation, which is visible to both syntax and inflectional morphology. The morphosyntactic representation contains all the information necessary to allow the construction of correctly inflected forms of lexemes according to the position of the lexeme in a sentence. The actual means by which the inflected forms are constructed within such a framework, what Matthews calls morphological realization, has been the subject of a good deal of research in recent years (e.g. Zwicky 1986; [J.] Harris 1991). Matthews’s general approach also permitted the study within generative grammar of inflectional classes and paradigms as organizing alternative markers or exponents of morphosyntactic properties (cf. Art. 65). Here the work of Carstairs (1987) and Wurzel (1984; 1989) is especially important.

8.

Item and arrangement morphology

In explicitly arguing for processual wordbased theories of word-formation and inflection and arguing against the conventional conception of morphemes, Aronoff and Matthews broke with the morpheme-based itemand-arrangement treatments of morphology that had been standard in American linguistics since at least Harris’s time. Nonetheless, the morpheme-based item-and-arrangement framework remained attractive to many researchers, in part because it demanded less of a bifurcation between syntax and morphology, at least within syntactic frameworks that incorporated concatenative phrase structure rules, as Chomsky’s Aspects theory did. With the emphasis on phrase structure in syntax that grew out of Chomsky’s X-bar notation and flourished in the early 1980’s, a number of influential works appeared that proposed morpheme-based phrase-structural theories of morphology. The first work along these lines was done by Selkirk in 1978, although it was not published until after the others (Selkirk 1982; Lieber 1980; Williams 1981). Lieber (1980) was explicitly morpheme-based and similar in general outlook to Halle (1973). Lieber down-played the distinction between affixes and lexemic stems, or bound and free morphemes, treating the former as context-sensitive or subcategorized lexical elements. She similarly deemphasized the distinction between inflection and derivation and divorced compositional semantics from morphology. Perhaps the most influential of Lieber’s ideas was her treatment of feature percolation, the mechanism by which features of a constituent are passed on to its constitute. Lieber proposed a set of what she called feature percolation conventions for morphologically complex words, which pass information from constituents to constitutes. Most importantly, these “conventions” (they are really not meant to be conventions, but rather universally valid laws) assure that all the features of an affix percolate to the node immediately dominating it, while those of a stem percolate up just in case the property specified by a given feature does not conflict with a previously specified feature value. The latter accounts for instances (as for example with prefixation in English) where an affix is syncategorematic, so that the category of the derived word is that of the base lexeme: (e.g. preexistv , preconditionn, prenatala). It can also be invoked with inflectional affixes. Williams

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added the idea that words, like phrases, have heads and that heads are dominant in percolation. Normally, an affix will be the head, but there are exceptions. Thus, in a compound, neither of whose immediate constituents is an affix (by definition), it is the head member that passes its category and other features up to the compound. Williams proposed further that the head of a word is always its righthand constituent and called this observation, which dates at least to Jespersen (1905), the Righthand Head Rule. This accounts for most English compounds, which are right-headed, as well as for most affixed words in English, since English suffixes normally determine the category of their derivative, but English prefixes, by contrast, are usually syncategorematic. Williams’s rule has been criticized on many grounds (Scalise 1989; Schultink 1989) and Williams himself has relaxed it (DiSciullo & Williams 1987), at least for inflection. There are many languages whose word-internal head is not always on the right. Especially in compounds, many languages have both right-headed and leftheaded types (e.g. Italian and Vietnamese). Nonetheless, the importance of the notion head for morphology, especially morphosyntax, can not be denied (Hoeksema 1989; Trommelen & Zonneveld 1986). Even in derivation, the idea that affixes are heads accounts, for example for morphological adjacency: an affix may be sensitive to the head of the word that it attaches to. On the other hand, in theories that are not so firmly grounded in phrase structure, where affixation at least can be profitably viewed as a kind of function or operation mathematically, the need to stipulate what is a head is less crucial: the fact that affixes are usually heads follows quite automatically from the nature of the functions. We will now look briefly at some of these theories.

9.

Montague and categorial morphology

The work of Richard Montague was a major new influence on syntactic and semantic theory in the 1970’s. Montague applied notions of mathematical logic to language, working within a tradition that had had sporadic contact with linguistics over the course of the twentieth century. As linguists became more interested in formal semantics, the two traditions inevitably drew closer together. This

201 melding of linguistics and logic that began with an interest in Montague’s work has come to be focussed, in morphology at least, on Categorial Grammar. The first work to deal with the internal structure of words from this general formal perspective was Dowty (1979), which dealt mostly with semantics, though it touched on morphology. Bach (1983) focussed directly on morphology. This work is especially concerned with developing a formal categorial system that can simultaneously account for the similarities and differences between what Bach calls word-grammar and phrase-grammar. He therefore focussed on inflectional morphology, especially the relation between the syntactic distribution and the morphological realization of morphosyntactic features. In an inflected language, on Bach’s account, each individual inflected form of a lexeme’s paradigm will be realized phonologically by a morphological operation on the lexeme that is defined by a set of morphosyntactic feature values rather than by single feature values. This is similar to what both Anderson and Matthews had said, but Bach shows how this can be done within a categorial framework. Work of this sort has been continued by Moortgat (1987). Hoeksema (1985) applies categorial grammar to productive word formation, within a linguistic framework similar to that of Aronoff (1976). He formalizes the notion of a lexical rule (of word formation) as a function or operation (or a combination of functions: morphophonological, categorial and semantic). The morphophonological operations that he is most concerned with are two-place rules of affixation (prefixation and suffixation) and compounding. Hoeksema also introduces a novel type of morphological rule, which he calls a head operation and which has proved to be very useful even outside a categorial framework. A head operation is said to have occurred when a morphological operation applies to the head of a construction rather than to the entire construction. For example, the plural of grandchild is grandchildren, a form that includes the (irregular) plural form of child, the head of the compound. Since the head is not structurally adjacent to the abstract plural feature, we would otherwise, within all theories of structural adjacency, expect the plural of grandchild to be *grandchilds. Hoeksema showed how viewing these cases as arising through a head operation was superior to other accounts of such “paradoxical” cases

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(Williams 1981; Lieber 1980), in which morphological relatedness was divorced from compositionality. However, head operations have subsequently proved useful in other case as well. For example, there are some wellknown examples of reduplication applying to the stem of a word, skipping over intervening material and these can readily be accounted for as head operations, provided that we view the stem as the morphological head of the word (Aronoff 1989). Still, the question of why head operations of this type arise remains open.

10. Affix ordering A topic that has engendered more interest than almost any other in generative morphology is affix ordering. It is especially intriguing in that it involves simultaneously the two articulations of language; this has also made progress especially difficult, since phonologically and syntactically motivated proposals often conflict, and what may be worse, these conflicts are often ignored by enthusiasts on one or the other side. Yet it is precisely in dealing with questions of this sort that the role of morphology, between syntax and phonology, becomes crucial. The question of affix ordering is simple, at least on its face: what determines the ordering of affixes? Bloomfield, in his treatment of morphology, made some very specific claims. He noted first the general fact that “in languages of complex morphology we can thus observe a ranking of constructions: a complex word can be described only as though the various compoundings, affixations, modifications, and so on, were added in a certain order to the basic form. … In languages of this type, then, we can distinguish several ranks of morphologic structure.” (Bloomfield 1933: 222)

In general, Bloomfield claimed, there is “an outer layer of inflectional constructions, and then an inner layer of constructions of wordformation” (Bloomfield 1933: 222). This claim has been accepted by almost everyone since (it constitutes Greenberg’s Universal 28 (Greenberg 1963: 93)) and it certainly fits the weak lexicalist hypothesis very well. Indeed, Anderson (1988 a) has argued that it follows from it as a theorem and takes this putative universal as evidence against strong lexicalism. In fact, there is some doubt as to whether this layering effect always holds;

Bloomfield, at least, probably did not mean his observation to apply strictly to the linear order of morphs, but rather to the abstract ordering that results from what he called “the principle of immediate constituents” (Bloomfield 1933: 221), what we would now call compositionality. Greenberg’s universal (which, he says, “appears plausible”) is therefore a claim about the correlation between phonological and syntactic structure (or first and second articulation). This claim, essentially a claim of isomorphism, lies at the heart of the discussion about affix ordering, and we will return to it shortly. First, however, we must discuss a separate claim, the affix ordering generalization, that is more purely phonological in origin, but that has become intertwined with the issue of isomorphism. The affix ordering generalization (so dubbed by Selkirk (1982)) is due to Siegel (1974). American linguists since Sapir (1925) had noticed the existence of two junctural types of affixes in English. These two types, sometimes called non-neutral and neutral because of their different interactions with stress, were institutionalized in Chomsky & Halle (1968) by means of distinct boundaries that they carried, the formative boundary ⫹ and the word boundary #. Siegel observed that formative boundary affixes (which she called Class I) did not appear outside word boundary affixes (which she called Class II) in a word and she developed a framework for expressing this observation within which affixes were grouped into what later became known as strata. Each affixal stratum had associated with it a set of phonological rules and these affix-cum-rule strata were linearly ordered. Within the earlier theory of Chomsky & Halle (1968), the complete morphological structure of a word was given prior to its phonological structure, although, as Aronoff (1976) and others had noted, the cyclical operation of the phonology outward from the lexical center of a word was determined by its morphological structure. Within Siegel’s new theory, by contrast, the morphology and the phonology were closely intertwined and the machinery that generated the two operated in lock step: each affixation would be followed by its accompanying block of phonological rules; first the affixes of stratum 1 would be adjoined to a base; these affixes would each be subjected to the phonological rule-block of that stratum; then the affixes of stratum 2

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would be added, each followed by its block of phonological rules. This architecture was incorporated into the theory of lexical phonology and morphology as expounded by Kiparsky (1982) and Mohanan (1986), one of the most popular and influential phonological theories of the 1980’s, with various versions of the theory differing on the number of strata, from the minimum two of the classic version up to five strata, or in some versions, theoretically any number. Other morphological theories that build on the affix ordering generalization are those of Williams, Selkirk and Pesetsky (1985, but originally written in 1979). Selkirk constructed a context-free phrase structure grammar for affixation that incorporated Siegel’s generalization, so that the phrase-structure rules built a hierarchical structure, using the categories root and word, that reflected the order of the two categories of affixes. Both Williams and Pesetsky recognized the existence of counterexemples to the affix ordering generalization and developed theories to account for these examples. Similarly for Strauss (1982 a; 1982 b). Others, most notably Booij (1985) & Aronoff and Sridhar (1987) have argued that the affix ordering generalization is spurious, or at least accidental, not only for English, but for other languages as well. According to these authors, the counterexamples, cases where a Class I affix falls outside a Class II affix (e.g. compart#ment⫹al#iz⫹ation or govern#ment⫹al) are not to be explained away, but are rather evidence for the claim that the hierarchical morphosyntactic structure of words may differ from their prosodic structure. They therefore reject theories like those of Pesetsky, Williams and Selkirk that depend on the affix ordering generalization. Booij & Rubach (1984) show how the prosodic account can be incorporated into a theory of lexical phonology that rejects the ordering generalization. It is important to realize that, in separating prosodic from hierarchical morphosyntactic aspects of morphology, these authors abandoned the isomorphism between the two articulations that was assumed in earlier work. Thus, Aronoff and Sridhar claimed that the single syntactic lexeme compartmentalization consists of a sequence of three prosodic words: compart mental ization. Halle & Vergnaud (1987) argued instead for a return to a theory in which all morphology precedes the phonology, but which preserves the isomorphism while abandoning claims about affix ordering.

203 On the syntactic side, Baker proposed what he called the mirror principle, according to which “morphological derivations must directly reflect syntactic derivations (and vice versa)” (Baker 1985: 375). Baker derives this principle from a theory in which morphology and syntax are part of the same component of the grammar, the syntax. This type of theory, which has been very influential in generative syntactic circles in the last decade, is reminiscent of pre-lexicalist syntax, which similarly drew no line between morphology and syntax. The difference, though, is that the mirror claims not so much that syntax and morphology are the same, but rather that they operate in conjunction, in the same way that Siegel and followers clammed morphology and phonology operated. Together, the two give us a grand theory of syntax, morphology and phonology all marching in step. Baker excepts one type of morphology from the scope of his principle: non-affixational morphology. Others, however, were working on other fronts towards a reduction of these operations to affixation, work to which we will return in the next section. Baker’s principle, though was not unopposed. Grimshaw (1986) argued that the principle did not indeed follow from Baker’s theory of syntax. Instead, she argued that it followed from head theory, inasmuch as an affix could only trigger a particular morphosyntactic operation at that point in a derivation where it was indeed the head. This account allows affixation and syntax to act together without being part of the same component. Alternatively, one may say that the mirror principle follows directly from the principle of semantic compositionality, once we view the head as a functor. In other words, what modern morphologists are concerned with is to great extent what Bloomfield was concerned with: the relation between morphology and constituent structure. What the literature on affix order has shown is that the order of morphemes and their phonological interaction largely reflect constituent structure. But the recent literature has also shown that there are notable exceptions to this observation that still remain unexplained. Before leaving the question of affix order, one important work should be mentioned that falls somewhat outside the generative mainstream: Bybee (1985). In this book, the pragmatic notion of relevance is used to make

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universal predictions about the order of affixes. Bybee defines relevance as follows: “A meaning element is relevant to another meaning element if the semantic content of the first directly affects or modifies the semantic content of the second.” (Bybee 1985)

Based on this principle, she derives a hierarchy of inflectional categories for verbs and predicts the following order for the affixal expression of these categories, with the first being closest to the verb stem, because of relevance: valence, voice, aspect, tense, mood, agreement. Bybee tested these claims against a sample of 50 languages, selected for proper geographic and genetic distribution, with good results. Unfortunately, morphosyntacticians have paid scant attention to these findings, so it is not clear how the two observations about affix order mesh, one based on semantic compositionality, the other on pragmatic relevance.

11. Morphosyntax We may define morphosyntax as the intersection between morphology and syntax. Unfortunately, this definition depends on the prior definition of both syntax and morphology and since there is little agreement on the scope of the two, the definition of morphosyntax has never been clear. The result is that, though there has been a good deal of literature on morphosyntax within generative grammar, much of it has been at crosspurposes. Nonetheless, a few central issues have emerged in the literature. Most prominent is the treatment of syntactically independent but morphophonologically dependent items. Discussion of such items has been concentrated on clitics (cf. Art. 41) and incorporation, broadly defined (cf. Art. 88). Again, one’s view of where the boundary is between syntactic and lexical domains will color one’s definition of what is morphosyntax. For example, some view noun incorporation in Greenlandic Eskimo as syntactic (Sadock 1980; Baker 1988), while others regard it as lexical (Mithun 1984; Rosen 1989). At least one theory, that of autolexical syntax (Sadock 1985), has been developed explicitly to deal with mismatches between morphology and syntax. The basic idea behind autolexical syntax is that morphology and syntax are completely autonomous, but that there are principles governing pairings between mor-

phological and syntactic analyses of the same utterance. A similar view is expressed by Marantz (1988).

12. Nonlinear mophology An area in which there has been a great deal of activity and real progress is in the understanding of nonlinear morphological phenomena. Many of these phenomena are discussed in detail in other articles (Art. 53⫺61), however, the specific history of how these phenomena have been treated within generative grammar can best be understood only in reference to general developments in the field. For the most part, the classic generative view of morphology paralleled the classic treatment of syntax: a “deep” level on which elements are related to one another by means of hierarchically structured item-and-arrangement in such a way as to be amenable to semantic interpretation, accompanied by a fairly unrestricted transformational and morphophonemic apparatus. Lees is the classic work of this type, but the liberal use of highly restricted morphophonemic rules in Chomsky & Halle (1968) is rooted in the same aesthetic. There is a sense in all this work that item-and-arrangement is mathematically simpler than item-and-process and hence to be preferred, all else being equal. This is made quite explicit in Hockett’s original comparison of the two approaches (which is rooted in morphology) and in Chomsky (1957) (which is more syntactic in its emphasis), though in slightly different mathematical terms. In any case, the underlying representations of classic generative grammar, for both syntax and morphology, are in item-and-arrangement format. In the realm of morphology, item-and-arrangement works well for affixation, but it encounters difficulties in dealing with other types of morphological realization that are characterized quite naturally as operations in the mathematical sense of item-and-process morphology, as Hockett noted. Thus, the fact that the past tense of take is took, while it can be expressed only tortuously and counterintuitively in item-and-arrangement terms, is a simple operation in item-and-process terms. Generative phonology was committed to the Jakobsonian program of reducing the variance of linguistic forms. Together with the abolition of the phoneme, this committed

22. Generative grammar

generative phonology to the acceptance of highly abstract underlying phonological representations (expressed, however, by means of concretely-based phonetic features). One advantage of such a system was its ability to handle certain phenomena that were otherwise not obviously amenable to an item-andarrangement account. For example, the wellknown stress shift between pairs of nouns and verbs in English (suspe´ctv vs. su´spectN) could be represented by means of the phonological transformational cycle, while the relation between take and took was handled by means of “a precyclic readjustment rule switching backness in certain lexical items in certain contexts” (Chomsky & Halle 1968: 209). Even Semitic verb morphology could be handled by means of judicious rule ordering within such a framework, as Chomsky had shown in his earliest work (Chomsky 1951). However, with the historical movement against phonological representations divergent from surface forms that peaked in the early 1970’s, devices such as these fell out of favor and the problem of integrating processes into an item-and-arrangement morphological framework resurfaced. Aronoff faced this problem head-on, and declared that certain base-dependent processes were “transformational”. He specifically pointed to four types of nonconcatenative morphological phenomena ⫺ reduplication, deletion, infixation, and conversion ⫺ as evidence that all morphological realizations (which he termed phonological operations) should be regarded formally as operations or processes, a category which subsumes both affixes with constant form and positions and nonconcatenative phenomena. He also suggested that the intercalative morphology of Semitic languages might be more appropriately treated within a process framework. He argued that the existence of nonconcatenative morphology gave prima facie support to an overall item-and-process approach to word formation and morphology that distinguishes affixes (which are introduced via phonological operations and may therefore have less than fully specified forms) from lexemic stems (which form the domain of the phonological operations and must therefore have forms of their own). Most generally, he viewed the existence of clearly nonconcatenative phonological operations as evidence for a bifurcation between lexemes and other formatives, what Beard (1987) has called a “lexeme/morpheme base morphology”. This bifurcation

205 between lexemic stems and what had traditionally been called formatives runs counter to the structural tradition of Baudouin de Courtenay, the inventor of the term morpheme, and Bloomfield, which lumped lexemes and formatives together under the single sign category morpheme. Thus, the itemand-process framework of Aronoff, as well as the related frameworks of Anderson, Beard and Matthews, stand in opposition not simply to item-and-arrangement morphology, but to all morpheme-based modern structural morphology. The challenge to provide an item-and-arrangement account of Semitic morphology was taken up by McCarthy (1981). McCarthy joined the traditional root-and-pattern analysis of Semitic verb morphology and Harris’s formal reconstruction of this analysis (1960: 302) in terms of long components to the machinery of autosegmental phonology. This combination allowed him to treat the intercalation of root and vocalism within a prosodic template as an autosegmental mapping or association. The Semitic roots and vocalisms, according to McCarthy, are fully specified morphemes, but their arrangement with respect to one another is three-dimensional rather than two-dimensional, as with typical concatenation. The prosodic templates are morphemes too, albeit not fully specified and semantically also somewhat difficult to pin down. McCarthy extends his prosodic model to reduplication, showing thus that a prosodic approach is able to handle a variety of phenomena that were previously thought to demand the use of morphological transformations or at least of mechanisms that lay beyond the reach of item-and-arrangement morphology. McCarthy’s treatment of reduplication was taken up and extended by Marantz (1982). Marantz’s technique is to assume, following Moravcsik (1978), that a reduplicative affix consists essentially of a CV skeleton. The actual form that the affix takes on in any particular instance is given by a mechanism that has two parts: first, a universal rule that copies the entire melody of the stem and second an autosegmental association of the skeleton of the reduplicative affix with as much of the copied melody as is necessary to fill the skeleton. In this manner, many difficult types of nonconcatenative morphological phenomena may be reduced to concatenation by the adoption of a more complex view of phono-

206

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logical representations. This program is not, however, without cost. For one, although it reduces nonconcatenative morphs to the status of affixes, these affixes are still phonologically different from the run-of-the-mill prefix or suffix in that they are largely unspecified. Reduplicated affixes consist partly or more often entirely of skeleta; in the case of complete reduplication, where an entire morphological word is repeated, it is not clear whether the reduplicative affix has any phonological form at all. Other “affixes” may be single floating features. The same can not be said of lexemes. There is thus still a difference in form between lexemes and formatives. The early work in prosodic morphology relied on templates consisting of strings of consonants and vowels or segmental slots. Most recently, McCarthy & Prince (1990) have developed a theory of prosodic morphology in which templates are represented in terms of purely prosodic units: syllable, mora, foot, etc. This framework has produced dramatic results in the analysis of a wide variety of recalcitrant nonconcatenative phenomena. Concomitantly, however, it sacrifices item-and-arrangement in favor of a system of morphophonological operations that draws on Hoeksema (1985). Empirically, McCarthy and Prince, as well as Broselow & McCarthy (1984) have discovered a number of phenomena that rely on prosodic specification of the morphological base. Internal reduplication, for example, turns out to be a case where the reduplicated affix is attached to a minimal prosodic word inside the morphological stem. In the case of Arabic broken noun plurals, on the other hand, the plural is formed from the singular by breaking off the first two moras of the singular, mapping this onto an iambic prosodic template, overwriting the vowel melody of this iamb, reattaching the residue of the singular, and finally overwriting its vowel melody. This sort of morphology goes far beyond item-and-arrangement. Whether a coherent alternative analysis of these phenomena can be developed within a strict item-and-arrangement framework remains to be seen.

13. Morphology across disciplines Generative morphology, like other aspects of generative linguistics, has benefitted from interdisciplinary work. Two such areas have

proven to be especially fruitful and hold greater promise for the future: psycholinguistics and computational linguistics. Most psycholinguistic work in morphology has focussed on two related issues: productivity and lexical storage. Psychologists have long been interested in word retrieval and storage, or the mental lexicon (Aitchison 1987). Morphologically informed psycholinguists have asked whether complex words are stored with their morphological structure or as unanalyzed wholes and whether some morphologically complex words are not stored at all, but are rather created as needed. Work using Serbo-Croatian (Lukatela et al. 1980; Feldman & Fowler 1987) supports the notion that inflected forms are at least stored as satellite entries to their lexemes and not independently. When, however, we distinguish high-frequency from low-frequency inflected forms (Stemberger & McWhinney 1988), it appears that the latter are not stored at all, but rather constructed as needed. Similar conclusions have been made for highly productive derived words (Anshen & Aronoff 1988). Among the theories devised to account for the difference between stored and constructed morphologically complex words, the most common type uses a horse-race model, in which the processes of searching for and building words operate simultaneously, but at different speeds, but both are sensitive to word frequency. The result is a race, in which the stored form will win if it is frequent enough. This psychological model also accounts for the historical fact that more frequent morphologically irregular forms are more persistent. Computational morphology falls into two distinct types. On the one hand, computation has been used as a tool in morphological analysis. Thus, rather than searching through dictionaries by hand for words in a certain morphological class, linguists with access to computerized dictionaries can do such counts and the accompanying statistical analysis automatically (Byrd et al. 1986). Similarly for corpus-based studies of morphological productivity (Baayen 1989). On the other hand, morphology is a necessary part of the computational analysis of almost any language. Early work in computational morphology mostly involved affix stripping, in which affixes were successively stripped off morphologically complex words, with the output of each stripping process checked against a lexicon until a match was found. For example, if

22. Generative grammar

we submit the word realizational to such a system, it will first strip off the suffix -al and search its lexicon for realization. If it does not find this word, it will then strip off -ation, restore the ⬍e⬎ because of a spelling rule, and search for realize, which it will recognize. Stripping, however, is cumbersome. This entire procedure is the machine’s way of recognizing this word. In recent years, more success has been gained by means of finite-state methods. The best known treatment of finitestate morphology is the work of Koskonniemi (1983). One mark of the success of this technique is the fact that most subsequent work has not consisted of publications, but rather of actual implementations. Some linguists, though (Anderson 1988 b), have questioned whether finite-state morphology is applicable to a wider array of types of morphological systems.

14. References Aitchison, Jean (1987), Words in the Mind: An Introduction to the Mental Lexicon. Oxford: Blackwell Allen, Margaret R. (1978), Morphological Investigations. Ph. D. dissertation, University of Connecticut Anderson, Stephen R. (1982), “Where’s Morphology ?”. Linguistic Inquiry, 13, 571⫺612 Anderson, Stephen R. (1985), “Inflectional Morphology”. In: Shopen, Timothy (ed.), Language Typology and Syntactic Description, Vol. III. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 150⫺201 Anderson, Stephen R. (1986), “Disjunctive Order in Inflectional Morphology”. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 4, 1⫺32 Anderson, Stephen R. (1988 a), “Inflection”. In Hammond & Noonan (eds.), 23⫺43 Anderson, Stephen R. (1988 b), “Morphology as a Parsing Problem”. Linguistics 26, 521⫺544 Anshen, Frank & Aronoff, Mark (1988), “Producing Morphologically Complex Words”. Linguistics 26, 641⫺655 Aronoff, Mark (1976), Word Formation in Generative Grammar. Cambridge/MA: MIT Press (Linguistic Inquiry Monograph 1) Aronoff, Mark (1989), “Head Operations and Strata in Reduplication”. In Booij & van Marle (eds.), 1⫺15 Aronoff, Mark & Sridhar, S. N. (1987), “Morphological Levels in English and Kannada”. In: Gussmann, Edmund (ed.), Rules and the Lexicon. Lublin: Redakcja Wydawnictw Katolickiego Uniwersytetu Lubelskiego, 9⫺22

207 Baayen, Harald (1989), A Corpus-based Approach to Morphological Productivity. Ph. D. dissertation, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam Bach, Emmon (1983), “On the Relationship between Word-grammar and Phrase-grammar”. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 1, 65⫺89 Baker, Mark (1985), “The Mirror Principle and Morphosyntactic Explanation”. Linguistic Inquiry 16, 373⫺415 Baker, Mark C. (1988), Incorporation: A Theory of Grammatical Function Changing. Chicago: University of Chicago Press Beard, Robert (1976), “A Semantically Based Model of a Generative Lexical Word Formation Rule for Russian”. Language 52, 108⫺120 Beard, Robert (1981), The Indo-European Lexicon: A Full Synchronic Theory. Amsterdam: North-Holland (North-Holland Linguistics Series 44) Beard, Robert (1987), “Morpheme Order in a Lexeme/Morpheme Based Morphology”. Lingua 72, 73⫺116 Bloomfield, Leonhard (1933), Language. New York: Holt Booij, Geert E. (1977), Dutch Morphology: A Study of Word Formation in Generative Grammar. Lisse: The Peter de Ridder Press; Dordrecht: Foris Booij, Geert E. (1985), “The Interaction of Phonology and Morphology in Prosodic Phonology”. In: Gussmann, Edmund (ed.), Phonomorphology: Studies in the Interaction of Phonology and Morphology. Lublin: Redakcja Wydawnictw Katolickiego Uniwersytetu Lubelskiego, 23⫺34 Booij, Geert & van Marle, Jaap (1989, eds.), Yearbook of Morphology 1988, Dordrecht: Foris Booij, Geert E. & Rubach, Jerzy (1984), “Morphological and Prosodic Domains in Lexical Phonology”. Phonology Yearbook 1, 1⫺27 Botha, Rudolf P. (1968), The Function of the Lexicon in Transformational Generative Grammar. (Janua Linguarum, Series Maior 38), The Hague: Mouton Bresnan, Joan (1978), “A Realistic Transformational Grammar”. In: Halle, Morris & Bresnan, Joan & Miller, George (eds.), Linguistic Theory and Psychological Reality. Cambridge/MA: MIT Press, 1⫺59 Broselow, Ellen & McCarthy, John (1984), “A Theory of Internal Reduplication”. The Linguistic Review 3, 25⫺88 Bybee, Joan L. (1985), Morphology. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Byrd, Roy J. & Klavans, Judith L. & Anshen, Frank & Aronoff, Mark (1986), “Computer Methods for Morphological Analysis”. Proceedings of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 120⫺127 Carstairs, Andrew (1987), Allomorphy in Inflexion. London: Croom Helm

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Chomsky, Noam (1951) “The Morphophonemics of Modern Hebrew”. Unpublished MA Thesis, Univ. of Pennsylvania

Jespersen, Otto (1905), Growth and Structure of the English Language. Chicago: University of Chicago Press [reprint 1982]

Chomsky, Noam (1957), Syntactic Structures. The Hague: Mouton

Kastovsky, Dieter (1977), “Word-formation: or at the Crossroads of Morphology, Syntax, Semantics, and the Lexicon”. Folia Linguistica 1, 1⫺33

Chomsky, Noam (1965), Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. Cambridge/MA: MIT Press Chomsky, Noam (1970), “Remarks on Nominalization”. In: Jacobs, Roderick A. & Rosenbaum, Peter S. (eds.), Readings in English Transformational Grammar. Waltham/MA: Ginn, 184⫺221 Chomsky, Noam & Halle, Morris (1968), The Sound Pattern of English. New York: Harper and Row Dik, Simon (1967), “Some Critical Remarks on the Treatment of Morphological Structure in Transformational Generative Grammar”. Lingua 18, 352⫺381 DiSciullo, Anna-Maria & Williams, Edwin S. (1987), On the Definition of Word. Cambridge/MA: MIT Press Dowty, David (1979), Word Meaning and Montague Grammar. Dordrecht: Reidel Feldman, L. B. & Fowler, C. A. (1987), “The Inflected Noun System in Serbo-Croatian: Lexical Representations of Morphological Structure”. Memory and Cognition 15, 1⫺12 Greenberg, Joseph H. (1963), “Some Universals of Grammar with Particular Reference to the Order of Meaningful Elements”. In: Greenberg, Joseph H. (ed.), Universals of Language. Cambridge/MA: MIT Press, 73⫺113 Grimshaw, Jane (1986), “A Morphosyntactic Explanation for the Mirror Principle”. Linguistic Inquiry 17, 745⫺749 Halle, Morris (1973), “Prolegomena to a Theory of Word Formation”. Linguistic Inquiry 4, 3⫺16 Halle, Morris & Vergnaud, Jean-Roger (1987), “Stress and the Cycle”. Linguistic Inquiry 18, 45⫺84 Hammond, Michael & Noonan, Michael (1988, eds.), Theoretical Morphology. San Diego etc.: Academic Press Harris, James W. (1991), “The Exponence of Gender in Spanish”. Linguistic Inquiry 22, 27⫺62 Harris, Zellig S. (1951), Methods in Structural Linguistics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press Harris, Zellig S. (1960), Structural Linguistics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press Hoeksema, Jacob (1985), Categorial Morphology. Ph. D. dissertation, University of Groningen Hoeksema, Jacob (1989), “Head-Types in Morphosyntax”. In: Booij & van Marle (eds.), 123⫺137 Jackendoff, Ray (1975), “Morphological and Semantic Regularities in the Lexicon”. Language 51, 639⫺671

Kiefer, Ferenc (1970), Swedish Morphology. Stockholm: Scriptor Kiparsky, Paul (1982), “Lexical Morphology and Phonology”. In: Yang, I.-S. (ed.), Linguistics in the Morning Calm. Seoul: Hanshin Publishing Company, 3⫺91 Koskonniemi, Kimmo (1983), Two-level Morphology: A General Computational Model for Wordform Recognition and Production. Ph. D. dissertation, University of Helsinki Lapointe, Steven (1980), “A Lexical Analysis of the English Auxiliary Verb System”. In: Hoekstra, Teun & van der Hulst, Harry & Moortgat, Michael (eds.), Lexical Grammar. Dordrecht: Foris, 215⫺ 254 (Publications in Language Sciences 3) Lees, Robert B. (41966), The Grammar of English Nominalizations. The Hague: Mouton (Indiana University Research Center in Anthropology, Folklore, and Linguistics Publication 12) [11963] Lieber, Rochelle (1980), On the Organization of the Lexicon. Ph. D. dissertation, MIT Lieber, Rochelle (1984), “Grammatical Rules and Sublexical Elements”. Papers from the Regional Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society, 187⫺199 Lukatela, G. & Gligorijevic, B. & Kostic, A. & Turvey M. T. (1980), “Representation of Inflected Nouns in the Internal Lexicon”. Memory and Cognition 8, 415⫺423 Marantz, Alec (1982), “Re Reduplication”. Linguistic Inquiry 13, 435⫺482 Marantz, Alec (1988), “Clitics, Morphological Merger, and the Mapping to Phonological Structure”. In: Hammond & Noonan (eds.), 253⫺270 Marchand, Hans (1969), The Categories and Types of Present-day English Word-formation: A synchronic-diachronic approach. München: Beck Matthews, Peter H. (1965), “The Inflectional Component of a Word-and-Paradigm Grammar”. Journal of Linguistics 1, 139⫺171 Matthews, P[eter] H. (1967), “Latin”. Lingua 17, 163⫺181 Matthews, P[eter] H. (1972), Inflectional Morphology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Matthews, Peter H. (1974), Morphology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press [2nd rev. ed., 1991] McCarthy, John J. (1981), “A Prosodic Theory of Nonconcatenative Morphology”. Linguistic Inquiry 12, 373⫺418 McCarthy, John & Prince, Alan (1990), “Foot and Word in Prosodic Morphology: The Arabic Broken

22. Generative grammar Plural”. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 8, 209⫺283 Mithun, Marianne (1984), “The Evolution of Noun Incorporation”. Language 60, 847⫺893 Mohanan, K. P. (1986), The Theory of Lexical Phonology. Dordrecht: Reidel Moortgat, Michael (1987), “Compositionality and the Syntax of Words”. In: Groenendijk, Jeroen & de Jongh, Dick & Stokhof, Martin (eds.), Foundations of Pragmatics and Lexical Semantics. Dordrecht: Foris, 41⫺62 Moravcsik, Edith (1978), “Reduplicative Constructions”. In: Greenberg, Joseph H. (ed.), Universals of Human Language. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 294⫺334 Pesetsky, David (1985), “Morphology and Logical Form”. Linguistic Inquiry 16, 193⫺246 Postal, Paul (1969), “Anaphoric Islands”. Papers from the Annual Regional Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society 5, 205⫺239 Rosen, Sarah Thomas (1989), “Two Types of Noun Incorporation: A Lexical Analysis”. Language 65, 294⫺317 Sadock, Jerrold M. (1980), “Noun Incorporation in Greenlandic; A Case of Syntactic Word Formation”. Language 56, 300⫺319 Sadock, Jerrold M. (1985), “Autolexical Syntax: A Proposal for the Treatment of Noun Incorporation and Similar Phenomena”. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 3, 379⫺439 Sapir, Edward (1925), “Sound Patterns in Language”. Language 1, 37⫺51 Scalise, Sergio (1983), Morfologia Lessicale. Padova: Clesp Scalise, Sergio (1984), Generative Morphology. Dordrecht: Foris (Studies in Generative Grammar 18) Scalise, Sergio (1989), “The Notion of ‘Head’ in Morphology”. In: Booij & van Marle (eds.), 229⫺ 245 Schultink, Henk (1961), “Produktiviteit als een morfologisch fenomeen”. Forum der Letteren 2, 110⫺125 Schultink, Henk (1962), De morfologische valentie van het ongelede adjectief in modern Nederlands. Den Haag: Van Goor

209 Schultink, Henk (1989), “Morphological Heads: Evidence from Swahili”. In: Booij & van Marle (eds.), 247⫺258 Selkirk, Elisabeth O. (1982), The Syntax of Words. Cambridge/MA: MIT Press (Linguistic Inquiry Monograph 7) Siegel, Dorothy L. (1974), Topics in English Morphology. Ph. D. dissertation, MIT Siegel, Dorothy L. (1978), “The Adjacency Constraint and the Theory of Morphology”. Proceedings of the North Eastern Linguistics Society 8, 189⫺197 Sproat, Richard (1988), “On Anaphoric Islandhood”. In: Hammond & Noonan (eds.), 291⫺301 Stemberger, Joseph P. & MacWhinney, Brian (1988), “Are Inflected Forms Stored in the Lexicon ?” In: Hammond & Noonan (eds.), 101⫺116 Strauss, Steven L. (1982 a), Lexicalist Phonology of English and German. Dordrecht: Foris Strauss, Steven L. (1982 b), “On ‘Relatedness Paradoxes’ and Related Paradoxes”. Linguistic Inquiry 13, 694⫺700 Trommelen, Mieke & Zonneveld, Wim (1986), “Dutch Morphology: Evidence for the Right-hand Head Rule”. Linguistic Inquiry 17, 147⫺169 Williams, Edwin S. (1981), “On the Notions ‘Lexically Related’ and ‘Head of a Word’ ”. Linguistic Inquiry 12, 245⫺274 Wurzel, Wolfgang U. (1970), Studien zur deutschen Lautstruktur. Berlin/DDR: Akademie-Verlag (Studia Grammatica 8) Wurzel, Wolfgang U. (1984), Flexionsmorphologie und Natürlichkeit. Berlin/DDR: Akademie-Verlag (Studia Grammatica 21) Wurzel, Wolfgang U. (1989), Inflectional Morphology and Naturalness. Dordrecht: Kluwer Zimmer, Karl (1964), Affixal Negation in English and Other Languages: An Investigation of Restricted Productivity (Supplement to Word, Monograph 5). New York: Linguistic Circle Zwicky, Arnold (1986), “The General Case: Basic Form vs. Default Form”. Berkeley Linguistics Society: Proceedings of the Annual Meeting 12, 305⫺314

Mark Aronoff, Stony Brook/NY (U.S.A.)

IV. Grundbegriffe Basic concepts 23. Linguistic sign 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

Terminological introduction Sign models Types of signs A characterization of linguistic signs The linguistic sign as the central object in Saussure’s theory of linguistics Morphology and the linguistic sign References

1.

Terminological introduction

In order to facilitate the reading of this article a brief definition of some semiotic key terms used further on will be given at the outset: ⫺ signal: this term refers to the sign (linguistic or other) insofar as it is considered in its “triggering” function, i.e. as something which brings about a semiotic process, based on the relationship between a sign and what it stands for (in relation to a class of users); ⫺ sign vehicle: this term will be taken here to refer to the material object through which the semiotic process is mediated, i.e. the perceptible support of the semiotic process; ⫺ source: this term refers to the instance from which the semiotic process, defined as communication or transmission of a sign content, starts out; the semiotic process links the source to the “target” (or receiving instance); ⫺ signifier: the signifier (Fr. signifiant) is the expressive, externalized component or aspect of a linguistic sign, as opposed to the signified (Fr. signifie´), which is the meaning or content of the sign. The signifier can be vocal (phonic) or graphical. In Saussure’s terms the signifier is defined as the acoustic image which the participants in a semiotic situation have in mind, through its association with a stretch of

phonic substance, mainly insofar as this coincides with a word; ⫺ expression and content are used as general semiotic terms in order to distinguish between the external and the internal aspects of signs (or of the semiotic process). The external aspect corresponds to the form in which something is communicated, the internal aspect to what is communicated. In Hjelmslev’s theory expression and content are used as technical terms, referring to the phonetic or graphemic signifier and the mental signified; each of the two planes has, in Hjelmslev’s view, form and substance. The above concepts are of crucial importance to any theory of the linguistic sign.

2.

Sign models

The notion of linguistic sign cannot be dissociated from the hyperonymic term sign, the key-concept of the field of study designated by the terms semiotics (also semeiotics) or semiology (for encyclopedic surveys of the field, see Greimas & Courte´s 1982; Sebeok 1986, ed.; Nöth 1990). This field of study is a very comprehensive one since it subsumes all disciplines which deal with significant relationships, involving the reception of meaning conveyed by a source. Such reception ⫺ even when it is not faithful to the intended message ⫺ can be referred to as “communication”; communication is realized through signs of various types, such as gestures and other body movements, ritual performances, vocal emissions, objects used as “pointers” or as symbols, etc. The notion of sign can be taken to stand for the process of conveying signification (thus even including its reception), or it can stand for the sign vehicle and the meaning it has (or can have), or it can simply stand for the sign vehicle as such. For

23. Linguistic sign

instance, the notion of sign can be applied to smoke in three ways: (a) as referring to the processual relationship between smoke as a perceptible signal, the fire of which it is a sign, and the interpretation of (and reactions to) the signal perceived by semiotic subjects; (b) as referring to the relationship between smoke and its function of signaling fire (this function being the “meaning” of the smoke); (c) as referring to the smoke as the material (perceptible) object, to be described objectively as a vapor with a particular chemical composition. Even among semioticians there is no established consensus on how to use the term sign (for general discussions of the notion of sign, see Bally 1939; Buyssens 1943; Morris 1946; Eco 1973; Koch 1971). An adequate starting-point for arriving at a consensus would consist in the following distinctions: (a) Sign vehicle vs. the sign: the former is a constituent (and an essential condition) of the latter. E.g., the linguistic form of a word or an utterance is the sign vehicle; the sign is the relationship between form (of word/utterance) and its meaning, as well as the interpretation of this relationship. (b) Signal, as a physical entity, vs. sign, as the semiotic entity (i.e. the unit by which communication is realized): A map or maquette (in paper, in wood, etc.) is, taken on itself, a physical entity; it becomes a semiotic entity when it is interpreted as referring to something else (e.g. a landscape, a building, etc.). (c) Sign elements (or sign parcels) vs. signs as complete entities: This distinction is relevant for linguistics since it allows us to treat phones, graphetic elements, phonemes and graphemes as sign elements, as distinct from words and sentences as signs (see also 5). Signs function by establishing a relation, and semiotic theories differ in their analysis of this relation. The most simple model adopts a dyadic view: a sign stands for something in reality (or: a sign refers to something outside the sign itself). Dyadic models are often elliptical versions of more complex models (see 4 on Saussure’s sign theory). In case the sign is taken as that part of reality which manifests itself in the sign, we are in fact abandoning a relational interpretation: a monadic view of the sign (in which something

211 would be a sign of itself) would be a nonsemiotic approach of reality. Triadic views of the sign are extremely current: they involve a distinction between (a) the sign vehicle (the source), (b) its meaning (conventional) or its interpretation (more subjective), and (c) what it stands for in reality (object, or referent), or in some cases the class of objects it can stand for (reference range). Triadic models are extremely current in non-sophisticated forms of linguistics, and they probably correspond to a wide-spread insight that words stand for “something in the mind” (ideas, representations), and that these in turn refer to “something in the world”. This is, in fact, the general view outlined in Aristotle’s Perı´ herme¯neı´as, in a passage which had a lasting influence on Western philosophy of language. “Spoken sounds are symbols of affections in the soul, and written marks symbols of spoken sounds. And just as written marks are not the same for all men, neither are spoken sounds. But what these are in the first place signs of ⫺ affections of the soul ⫺ are the same for all; and what these affections are likenesses of ⫺ actual things ⫺ are also the same” (Peri Herme¯neias 16 a; transl. Ackrill 1963: 43).

Triadic models can easily be extended to tetradic models, and this in at least two ways: (a) Either one may split up the “mental representation” into a representation oriented towards the content of the sign-vehicle, and a representation oriented towards reality. This step was taken by the authors of the very influential PortRoyal Grammar and Logic (cf. Swiggers 1981 and Dominicy 1984). It has been applied to the linguistic sign by Hockett (1977: 82). (b) Or one may leave out mental representation, while at the same time introducing a distinction between form and substance in either of the two remaining components (see 5, concerning Hjelmslev’s views). Some authors have proposed a more complicated model, e.g. Heger (1972), who distinguishes between six stages: (a) phonic materiality; (b) the moneme; (c) the range of meaning; (d) the sememe (the meaning at stake); (e) the concept (which in his view is languageindependent); (f) reality (extralinguistic). For surveys of sign models and their history, see Eco (1973), Nattiez (1979), Deely (1982), Nöth (1990).

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IV. Grundbegriffe

If a sign can be defined as something which stands for something else (with respect to a class of sign interpreters) it is clearly (a) something relational, (b) something characterized by this relation to something else, to which reference is made. Both insights underlie the theory of signs as developed by Charles Sanders Peirce and by his followers. It should be observed, however, that such a general definition leaves open several problems, which all affect the status that has to be assigned to linguistic signs (see 3). In fact, the difficulty of defining the status of linguistic elements has its first manifestation in Aristotle’s writings: although in his Peri Herme¯neias 16 a he calls words “symbols” (su´mbola), he does not seem to include them under one of his two classes of signs in his Art of Rhetoric 1357 b (where signs are defined by their relation to a consequence). There Aristotle distinguishes between necessary signs (involving a necessary relationship between antecedent and consequent, i.e. a relation of strict implication), and a “weaker” type of signs (involving a possible causal relationship: i.e. a relation of suggested implication). The problems left open by the general definition of sign given above are the following: (a) Are sign-relationships “natural” events or are they artificial? (b) Is signification a relationship which presupposes an intention (of communicating/signifying)? (c) Are signs motivated in themselves or are they endowed with significance (and if the latter is the case, how did signs receive this significance)? These are questions which pose formidable challenges to the theory of semiotics as well as to the philosophy of language and to epistemology in general. Answers to these questions involve, apart from a comprehensive theory of sign systems and of sign interpretation, a wide-ranging reflection on the origin of (types of) signs and of sign use, and on the possible diversification of sign systems (see 4).

3.

Types of signs

There is no generally accepted typology of signs, neither among linguists nor among semioticians. However, a number of basic typological parameters can be mentioned; some of these have a history reaching back to Antiquity or to the Middle Ages (see Schaff

1960: 145⫺180; Lyons 1977; Nattiez 1979). A useful meta-typology of sign classifications can be found in Eco (1973: 37⫺77), who discusses the relevant criteria and dimensions for classification. These include, inter alia, the source and the channel of (sign-) communication (from what type of instance does the semiotic process start and through which medium is it realized?); the replicability of the signifier (is the signifier unique or can it be repeated?); the relative intentionality on the part of the speaker and the hearer (to what extent do speaker and hearer intend to communicate effectively?); the behavior of the receiver; the semiotic exclusiveness or non-exclusiveness of signs (are we dealing with objects which have only semiotic functions or with objects fulfilling various functions?); the relation between signifier, signified, and referent (the object referred to); the modality of sign production (e.g., the distinction between ostension, mental suggestion, imitation, etc.). Throughout the history of semiotics, attention has focused on a few classificatory dimensions, and these will be briefly discussed here. Signs can be classified according to the nature of the connection with what they stand for. The basic dichotomy here is that between natural signs and conventional signs: natural signs are those which occur, together with what they are an indication of (e.g. smoke indicating fire; fever indicating illness; red spots indicating measles) without (personal) intentionality being involved; conventional signs are signs which in virtue of an agreement (and thus involving an intention to signify) stand for something else (e.g. a flag indicating a territory; an arrow indicating a direction). This distinction corresponds, basically, to Cassirer’s (1957) division into signals (which are operators-in-the-world, i.e. indications which are identified by users as pointing to a fact/event in the external world) and symbols (which are functional designators, i.e. classes of signs which have the systematic function of referring to a content, which can be defined as an object of knowledge). This dichotomy is useful, although not sufficiently distinctive: some signs are both conventional and natural (e.g. onomatopoeia). Moreover, signs are only signs when they are recognized as such, and this recognition involves interpretation, and thus presupposes some kind of “initiation” in societal conventions. Signs can be classified according to their functioning (as signifiers of a particular signi-

213

23. Linguistic sign

fied). In such classifications, both production and reception of signs are usually taken into account. The most detailed classification proposed along these lines is that of Sebeok (1975), who posits six species of signs: ⫺ signals: sign tokens which mechanically or conventionally trigger some reaction on the part of the receiver; ⫺ symptoms: compulsive, automatic, nonarbitrary signs, involving a natural link between signifier and signified; ⫺ icons: signs characterized by a topological similarity between a signifier and its denotata; ⫺ indices: signs whose signifier is contiguous with its signified; ⫺ symbols: non-iconic or non-indexical signs, characterized by a conventional link between the signifier and the denotata, and having an intensional class as its designatum; ⫺ names: signs having an extensional class as their designatum. Signs can be classified in terms of their “content” for the interpreter. Given that we deal here with a semantic (and pragmatic) type of classification, one should not expect an exhaustive typology. Charles Morris’s typology of signs is based on a combination of pragmatic and semantic criteria: some of his sign types correspond to situations of use, whereas other refer to the signification of signs. We thus find pragmatic and semantic subtypes (all of a binary nature), such as plurisituational vs. unisituational signs, interpersonal vs. personal signs, reliable vs. unreliable signs, vague vs. precise signs, unambiguous vs. ambiguous signs, singular vs. general signs (Morris 1946). Signs can be classified according to their structure. Here signs are usually considered in relation to the larger code within which they function (cf. Mulder & Hervey 1972; 1980; Hervey 1982): e.g. the code of human language, the code of traffic signs, the code of odours, etc. Codes are (not exclusively) characterized by the structural properties that underlie them as semiotic systems: as a matter of fact, the code of traffic signs is characterized by the placement of specific objects (with specific shapes and colours) on public roads, but the code is not exclusively characterized by its structural properties (the placement of the signs can be above or on the side of the road).

Signs can be classified according to a combination of classificatory dimensions. The most elaborate classification here is that of Charles S. Peirce, who took a life-long interest in the study of signs, as can be seen from his collected works (1931⫺1958). Peirce started from a triadic classification of the sign correlates (“representamen” or sign vehicle, “object” or referent, “interpretant” ⫺ i.e. another sign which represents to an interpreter the relationship between the sign vehicle and its object; 1931⫺1958: § 2.228), combined with the categories of firstness (“being on itself”), secondness (“being relative to something else”), and thirdness (“being something, by mediation, for a third thing”). This classification can be exponentially increased through the integration of semantic and pragmatic dimensions; Peirce at one time postulated 59 049 classes of signs. Perhaps the best known distinction within Peirce’s comprehensive classification is that between iconic, indexical, and symbolic signs (1931⫺ 1958: § 2.275): iconic signs are those in which the representamen is linked to its object by virtue of physical or material similarity; indexical signs are signs in which a representamen is linked to its object by contiguity in space and/or time; symbolic signs are signs in which the representamen is linked to its object by virtue of a rule or convention. Linguistic signs are, in principle, always symbolic signs, although some of them can have outspoken iconic properties (e.g., onomatopoeic words) or indexical properties (e.g., deictic elements).

4.

A characterization of linguistic signs

Linguistic signs can be defined as: (a) conventional: they exist in virtue of a convention; (b) code-integrated: they belong to a particular natural language, defined by a phonological, morphological, syntactic and semantic structure, in which the signs function according to sets of rules or conventions, and in which the signs occupy a specific position or value relative to each other. Code-integration and conventionality are historically linked: linguistic signs are elements of an orally transmitted system of communication between persons who, in terms of communicative behavior, belong to the social group which makes use of that system, and

214 whose functioning is dependent upon conventions proper to that language; (c) historically fluctuating: the various codes which human languages constitute are all subject to change through time; these changes affect, structurally, the rule system of the language, and they affect, both structurally and discretely, the material aspect and the content of the signs; (d) units of expression ⫹ content: signs involve a dimension of expression (or: vocal c.q. graphical manifestation), and a dimension of content, or communicative meaning. (For a survey of views on the nature of the linguistic sign up to 1954, see Spang-Hanssen 1954; for later contributions, see Fo´nagy 1956⫺1957 and Buyssens 1960; the views of Micla˘u 1970 are discussed below in 5; for an axiomatically based theory, see Mulder & Hervey 1972.) A more interesting perspective is provided by the characterization of linguistic signs in terms of distinctive properties which mark their status as expression ⫹ content-units. In general terms, linguistic signs can be defined, as to their content, as being (potentially) universal and multimodal (Hockett 1960): linguistic signs (can) cover the whole range of (human) experience, and can be used to refer to everything in the “outside” world; in addition, they cover the whole range of modalities, ranging from assertion, over command and questioning, to exclamation, exhortation, injunction, doubting, and all varieties of emotive and cognitive states. The combination of these two semantic (and pragmatic) properties does not occur in other types of semiotic systems (some of which are usually also called “languages” by analogy with human language). Linguistic signs are characterized by “double articulation” (Martinet 1949): they are units of form and meaning, and they can be segmented into smaller units which have form, but not meaning in themselves (while being meaning-distinctive). This distinction corresponds to the division of speech forms into morphemes (e.g. but, table, read, under, in English) and phonemes (e.g. /b/, /u/, /t/, etc.; the meaning-distinctiveness of, e.g., /b/ and /t/ in English appears from the opposition between lob, lot or cub, cut). This “double articulation” or “duality of patterning” (Hockett 1960) shows that language

IV. Grundbegriffe

is a system of subsystems (or systemic levels): units are defined with respect to each other on the level of the system; on each of the systemic levels there are different units, and analysis can be done from any higher level to its subordinate level. Thus, on the level of morphology, morphemes are the smallest, irreducible elements; however, they can be decomposed into phonemes (and morphophonemes). In the opposite direction, one can speak of synthesis: phonemes constitute morphemes, and morphemes constitute words, words combine into sentences, and sentences combine into texts. Some authors (e.g. Koch 1971) distinguish up to five levels of language “articulation”: the phoneme, the morpheme, the word, the sentence, the text. Given that the linguistic sign is generally defined as a language unit combining form and meaning, the delimitation between phonology and morphology corresponds to the distinction between the study of minimal units of form, and the study of minimal units of form and meaning, the latter type of units being decomposable into the purely formal units of the former type.

5.

The linguistic sign as the central object in Saussure’s theory of linguistics

Linguistics took a very long time before discovering its proper object: the linguistic sign. It was Ferdinand de Saussure who in his lectures on general linguistics at the University of Geneva (1906⫺7, 1908⫺9, 1910⫺11; published as Saussure 1916) made the linguistic sign (Fr. signe linguistique) the corner-stone of his theory of linguistics. (The most recent comprehensive study of Saussure’s sign theory is Holdcroft 1991.) Saussure’s aim was to provide for a solid foundation of (general) linguistics: “Mais je suis bien de´gouˆte´ de tout cela et de la difficulte´ qu’il y a en ge´ne´ral a` e´crire seulement dix lignes ayant le sens commun en matie`re de faits de langage. Pre´occupe´ surtout depuis longtemps de la classification logique de ces faits, de la classification des points de vue sous lesquels nous les traitons, je vois de plus en plus a` la fois l’immensite´ du travail qu’il faudrait pour montrer au linguiste ce qu’il fait, en re´duisant chaque ope´ration a` sa cate´gorie pre´vue, et en meˆme temps l’assez grande varie´te´ de tout ce qu’on peut faire finalement en linguistique.” (Letter to Antoine Meillet, January 4, 1894)

23. Linguistic sign

In his attempt to define an autonomous study-object for linguistics ⫺ a discipline which had too long been subordinated to philosophy, history, anthropology or psychology, Saussure proceeded to answer three questions: What type of science is linguistics? What is its object? What are the manifestations of this object? Saussure’s answer to the first question is that linguistics belongs to the “theorematic” sciences, which include nomology, mathematics, physics and psychology. Psychology itself includes sociology, and this science, involving the study of the laws governing the life of conscious beings, has to deal with signs. In his classification of the sciences Adrien Naville ⫺ a Geneva colleague of Saussure ⫺ explicitly assigned linguistics to semiology: “La sociologie est la science des lois de la vie des eˆtres conscients ⫺ spe´cialement des hommes ⫺ en socie´te´. […] Une des plus apparentes [sc. conditions de cette science], c’est l’existence de signes par lesquels les eˆtres associe´s se font connaıˆtre les uns aux autres leurs sentiments, leurs pense´es, leurs volonte´s. M. Ferdinand de Saussure insiste sur l’importance d’une science tre`s ge´ne´rale, qu’il appelle se´miologie et dont l’objet serait les lois de la cre´ation et de la transformation des signes et de leurs sens. La se´miologie est une partie essentielle de la sociologie. […] la science se´miologique la plus avance´e c’est la linguistique ou science des lois de la vie du langage […] La linguistique est, ou du moins tend a` devenir de plus en plus une science de lois; elle se distingue toujours plus nettement de l’histoire du langage et de la grammaire.” (Naville 1901: 103f.)

Saussure himself assigned linguistics to (the still to be developed science of) semiology, and he stresses that in this way linguistics is neither a historical nor a natural science, but a very specific semiological science, which crucially hinges on the temporal dimension. The answer to the second question follows then straightforwardly: the object of linguistics is the linguistic sign. Saussure’s central passages on the linguistic sign have been foundational for the establishing of an autonomous general linguistics: “Le signe linguistique unit non une chose et un nom, mais un concept et une image acoustique. Cette dernie`re n’est pas le son mate´riel, chose purement physique, mais l’empreinte psychique de ce son, la repre´sentation que nous en donne le te´moignage de nos sens; elle est sensorielle, et s’il nous arrive de l’appeler “mate´rielle”, c’est seulement dans ce sens, et par opposition a` l’autre terme de

215 l’association, le concept, ge´ne´ralement plus abstrait […]. Le signe linguistique est donc une entite´ psychique a` deux faces […]. Nous appelons signe la combinaison du concept et de l’image acoustique: mais dans l’usage courant ce terme de´signe ge´ne´ralement l’image acoustique seule, par exemple un mot (arbor, etc.). On oublie que si arbor est appele´ signe, ce n’est qu’en tant qu’il porte le concept “arbre”, de telle sorte que l’ide´e de la partie sensorielle implique celle du total. L’ambiguı¨te´ disparaıˆtrait si l’on de´signait les trois notions ici en pre´sence par des noms qui s’appellent les uns les autres tout en s’opposant. Nous proposons de conserver le mot signe pour de´signer le total, et de remplacer concept et image acoustique respectivement par signifie´ et signifiant; ces derniers termes ont l’avantage de marquer l’opposition qui les se´pare soit entre eux, soit du total dont ils font partie. Quant a` signe, si nous nous en contentons, c’est que nous ne savons par quoi le remplacer, la langue usuelle n’en sugge´rant aucun autre.” (Saussure 1916: 100 [critical edition with variants, 1968⫺1974: I, 149]).

From this passage it is clear that Saussure defines the linguistic sign as the combination of an acoustic image (Fr. signifiant; Engl. signifier) and a concept (Fr. signifie´; Engl. signified). The linguistic sign is the union of an acoustic image (the physico-psychical representation of the word as a vocal emission), and a concept (the objective content associated with the acoustic image). This dyadic sign model is in fact cut out from a tetradic one, since Saussure of course recognizes that signs have to be realized as oral (or written) sequences, and that interpretation takes place with reference to the real world. However, only the two fundamental components of the process of linguistic symbolization are considered to be constitutive of the sign. Linguistic signs function within languages, which are historical products based on transmitted sets of conventions. From this it follows that linguistic signs are characterized, in Saussure’s views, by two properties: (a) arbitrariness (Fr. arbitraire [du signe]); (b) differentiality or (respective) value (Fr. valeur). Arbitrariness is defined by Saussure as the unmotivated nature of the link between both components of the sign: “Le lien unissant le signifiant au signifie´ est arbitraire, ou encore, puisque nous entendons par signe le total re´sultant de l’association d’un signifiant a` un signifie´, nous pouvons dire plus simplement: le signe linguistique est arbitraire […]. Le mot arbitraire appelle aussi une remarque. Il ne doit pas donner l’ide´e que le signifiant de´pend du libre choix du sujet parlant […] nous voulons dire qu’il est immotive´, c’est-a`-dire arbitraire par rapport au

216 signifie´, avec lequel il n’a aucune attache naturelle dans la re´alite´” (Saussure 1916: 102, 103 [critical edition with variants, 1968⫺1974: I, 152, 155]).

Arbitrariness is thus, at first sight, a negative property of the constitution of signs; it is, however, precisely because signs are conventional that they are arbitrary, and in fact arbitrary signs reflect the true nature of the semiological process, in that they refer to something outside themselves, and thus are minimally dyadic. (For the various interpretations given of Saussure’s concept of arbitraire du signe, see Engler 1962; 1964; for an epistemological assessment, see Swiggers 1984; on the link between arbitrariness and value, see Bally 1940; 1941; Buyssens 1940⫺41 and Gardiner 1944.) Value is another negatively defined property of signs, but it is the indispensable foundation for the distinction between signs, the construction of a system of signs, the functioning of signs, through combination, in communication. The notion of value, applied to the linguistic sign, implies (a) a non-identity relationship; (b) a relationship of comparability; (c) the possibility of mutual substitution; (d) the establishing, after substitution, of the respective degree of identity and difference. “Ainsi pour de´terminer ce que vaut une pie`ce de cinq francs, il faut savoir: 1⬚ qu’on peut l’e´changer contre une quantite´ de´termine´e d’une chose diffe´rente, par exemple du pain; 2⬚ qu’on peut la comparer avec une valeur similaire du meˆme syste`me, par exemple une pie`ce d’un franc, ou avec une monnaie d’un autre syste`me (une livre sterling, etc.). De meˆme un mot peut eˆtre e´change´ contre quelque chose de dissemblable: une ide´e; en outre, il peut eˆtre compare´ avec quelque chose de meˆme nature: un autre mot. Sa valeur n’est donc pas fixe´e tant qu’on se borne a` constater qu’il peut-eˆtre “e´change´” contre tel ou tel concept, c’est-a`-dire qu’il a telle ou telle signification; il faut encore le comparer avec les valeurs similaires, avec les autres mots qui lui sont opposables. Son contenu n’est vraiment de´termine´ que par le concours de ce qui existe en dehors de lui. Faisant partie d’un syste`me, il est reveˆtu, non seulement d’une signification, mais aussi et surtout d’une valeur, et c’est tout autre chose.” (Saussure 1916: 166 [critical edition with variants, 1968⫺1974: I, 260]).

Whereas arbitrariness applies to the internal constitution of the sign, value operates within a language and is important in contrasting one language with another. Within a language, the principle applies to words (valuerelationships, or value-differentiations, ap-

IV. Grundbegriffe

pear from various types of semantic relations, such as near-synonymy, antonymy, hyperonymy, graduality, converse relation, etc.), and to grammatical forms (e.g. the value of a particular case in a case system or of affixes expressing temporal relationships, etc.). In the comparison of languages valuerelationships appear from the fact that languages do not divide the world (of contents) into strictly equivalent segments of forms (Saussure gives the example of mouton in French, where the word designates both the animal and the meat prepared from it, whereas English has sheep for the first and mutton for the second; another case is French louer for German mieten and vermieten). It is important to realize that the properties of arbitrariness and “valuedness” are the foundational conditions for the proper and efficient functioning of linguistic signs: they function on the basis of conventions, which link a signifier and a signified, and the function of each sign is defined by its value within the whole system of signs (and, eventually, of conventions). The two properties are closely tied up with two of Saussure’s dichotomies, viz. the distinction between langue and parole, and that between synchrony and diachrony. It is because language is conventional that signs are arbitrary, and a langue is precisely the result of the transmission, over generations, of this set of conventions as embodied in the system of arbitrary signs: as such, the linguistic sign can be said to be “immutable” (Fr. immuable). The existence of values underlies the parole, the in situ functioning of the linguistic system, in which signification can only be produced because values are being exploited. This is what characterizes the langue and its exploitation (parole) in synchrony. On the other hand, linguistic changes are devoid of signification, in Saussure’s view, and there can be no talk of values when we study a language in a diachronic perspective. Saussure also stressed another property of the linguistic sign which does not follow from the fact that languages are historically transmitted, viz. its linearity. “Le signifiant, e´tant de nature auditive, se de´roule dans le temps seul et a les caracte`res qu’il emprunte au temps: a) il repre´sente une e´tendue, et b) cette e´tendue est mesurable dans une seule dimension: c’est une ligne […] les signifiants acoustiques ne disposent que de la ligne du temps; leurs e´le´ments

23. Linguistic sign

217

se pre´sentent l’un apre`s l’autre; ils forment une chaıˆne.” (Saussure 1916: 105 [critical edition with variants, 1968⫺1974: I, 157⫺158]).

(taken from the chapter “Rapports syntagmatiques et rapports associatifs”) is revealing in this respect:

This principle has been largely misunderstood as involving a reference to the succession of phonematic units (cf. Jakobson 1956; Martinet 1960). As a consequence, Saussure’s principle has been criticized because it conflicts with the existence of “simultaneous” components (e.g. tones, intonation), and the fact that phonemes consist of bundles of distinctive features. However, Saussure’s principle is about the organization of acoustic substance and simply refers to the fact that speech production occurs over time and that discourse is a sound stretch (or a wave) which extends over a linear axis (to be cut up into segments).

“Ainsi dans enseignement, enseigner, enseignons, etc., il y a un e´le´ment commun a` tous les termes, le radical; mais le mot enseignement peut se trouver implique´ dans une se´rie base´e sur un autre e´le´ment commun, le suffixe (cf. enseignement, armement, changement, etc.); l’association peut reposer aussi sur la seule analogie des signifie´s (enseignement, instruction, apprentissage, e´ducation, etc.), ou au contraire, sur la simple communaute´ des images acoustiques (par exemple enseignement et justement). Donc il y a tantoˆt communaute´ double du sens et de la forme, tantoˆt communaute´ de forme ou de sens seulement” (Saussure 1916: 179 [critical edition with variants, 1968⫺1974: I, 287f.]).

6.

Morphology and the linguistic sign

At first sight, morphological analysis and the theory of morphology hardly appeal to the notion of linguistic sign (as shown by standard textbooks such as Nida 21949; Matthews 1974; Jensen 1990). This holds not only for morphological analysis as elaborated, from a historical-comparative and typological perspective, in the 19th century (with Schleicher 1859 as the ground-breaking work), but also for 20th-century morphological description, incorporating a “synchronic” approach. The history of synchronic morphological analysis (in the West) shows that the introduction of the linguistic sign as the basic unit of a language system was not coupled with a theory of morphology in European structuralism, and American structuralism coined an operational concept of the morpheme without making use of a theory of the sign. 6.1. Structuralism Saussure in his Cours de linguistique ge´ne´rale speaks of morphology only in relation to syntax (the two together constitute “grammar”); in his analysis of the linguistic sign Saussure mainly uses morphologically simple units as examples (e.g. arbor, bœuf, Ochse, homme, chien). Although Saussure was well aware of morphological segmentation (which he practised in his Indo-Europeanist work), there are only a few passages in the Cours in which morphological analysis is dealt with, but then one notes that in these passages the notion of sign is not at stake. The following passage

The most interesting passages in the Cours are those about the signe ze´ro (Saussure 1916: 123, 169, 260 [critical edition with variants, 1968⫺1974: I, 192, 266, 420]; cf. Godel 1953 and Art. 45), a linguistic value (and here Saussure sometimes uses the term signe) which has no material expression. From the examples given it is clear that the linguistic zero sign is a morpheme here: Cz. gen. pl. zˇen ‘of (the) women’ (i.e. zˇen-ø, lexical morpheme zˇen ‘woman’ ⫹ ending -ø ‘genitive plural’); Gk. zeugnu ‘put in (sc. the horse)!’ (i.e. zeugnu-ø, lexical morpheme zeug ‘join’ ⫹ root-extensional suffix -nu ⫹ ending -ø for the imperative present singular), Fr. marche ‘go/walk!’ (i.e. marche-ø, lexical morpheme marche ‘go/walk’ ⫹ ending -ø for the imperative present singular). The zero sign is defined by Saussure as a sign whose (morphemic) value is defined by its contrast with other endings. (“Le ge´nitif pluriel tche`que zˇen n’est caracte´rise´ par aucun signe positif […] pourtant le groupe de formes zˇena : zˇen fonctionne aussi bien que zˇena ⫽ zˇenъ qui l’a pre´ce´de´; c’est que la diffe´rence des signes est seule en jeu: zˇena ne vaut que parce qu’il est diffe´rent”, Saussure 1916: 169 [critical edition with variants, 1968⫺1974: I, 266]). A zero element, the nonformally expressed realization of a content, is thus postulated on account of a contrast between a structural content A coupled with form (formal expression) and the same content coupled with the absence of form (formal expression) within a slot X. Zero is therefore always postulated on grounds of parallelism (otherwise one could set up a zero element everywhere, since one can always point to a contrast between any element and its absence). An example would be English

218 (I) put, identical for present and past tense, contrasted with e.g. look ⫺ looked, lead ⫺ led. The postulation of a zero element in this case raises, however, three problems: (a) Should the zero element in put (past tense), be set up as the absence of an affixation or as the absence of an internal change (or as both?); (b) Should the zero element be assigned the status of an allomorph or of a morpheme? The first option would require a complicated rule of allomorphy, the second would require a complicated representation of the morpheme (since it would no longer be slot-specific); (c) In how far can zero be said to be a linguistic sign (defined as the combination of a form and meaning): is it a null object with a meaning, or is it the absence of a signifier coupled with a meaning postulated on grounds of parallelism? (On the historical background of positing zero elements, see Allen 1955; for arguments in favor or against setting up zero morphemes, see Jakobson 1939; Bloch 1947 and Haas 1957; Meier 1961 offers a discussion of zero as a descriptive unit within linguistic analysis in general.) Whereas in the Cours the notion of linguistic sign is applied to both words and morphemes, without any clear differentiation and without any definition of the morphemic extension (or delimitation) of linguistic signs, the American structuralist tradition defines the morpheme, but eschews any association with the concept of linguistic sign. Edward Sapir (1921) makes use of the concept of symbol in his definition of language as “a purely human and non-instinctive method of communicating ideas, emotions, and desires by means of a system of voluntarily produced symbols” (1921: 7). This notion is, however, not used to ground a theory of morphology; in fact, although Sapir operates with the notion of form (“inner form”, “pure and simple formal elements”, “formless” etc.; cf. Swiggers 1994), he does not elaborate a theory of morphological analysis. His interest was in establishing morphological types of languages, and when he uses in that context the term symbolic (cf. Sapir 1921: 133f., 138⫺140) he is referring to internal changes of the radical element (cases like Engl. goose ⫺ geese, drink ⫺ drank). Leonard Bloomfield (1926) defines the morpheme as a minimum form, whose mean-

IV. Grundbegriffe

ing is a sememe; more precisely, the morpheme is defined by Bloomfield as a recurrent form which cannot in turn be analyzed into smaller forms. The classic Postulates (1926) do not contain any mention at all of the linguistic sign. In his Language (1933) ⫺ where the notion of language is no longer defined as a derivative notion within a section on historical linguistics (as in Bloomfield 1926) ⫺, Bloomfield focuses much more on language use. Language is defined here as a (complicated) signaling-system functioning within a speech community (1933: 281). In chapter 2 “The Use of Language” (1933: 21⫺41) Bloomfield describes this signaling, using the well-known story of Jack and Jill: Jack and Jill are walking down a line; Jill, who is hungry, sees an apple in a tree, and asks Jack to pick the apple and give it to her. She then eats the apple. This story is described by Bloomfield in terms of stimuli and reactions; the portions of the story involving the use (and comprehension) of speech are described as involving substitute stimuli and substitute reactions, viz. stimuli and reactions mediated by speech (1933: 25f.). Linguistics is the study of the coordination of speech signals with “certain meanings”. In conformity with his mechanistic approach (1933: 33), Bloomfield uses the term signal (and not sign) ⫺ or, for derivative types, mark. In his definition of the morpheme Bloomfield does not make reference to any signaling function (although linguistic forms are said to be “signals”, 1933: 158). The identification of morphemes is based on (partial) resemblance in form and meaning (but, as Bloomfield rightly notes, it is difficult to tell whether and when meanings are “the same”); it is moreover based on the (im)possibility of decomposing a form: the identification of morphemes starts from linguistic forms (the common part of any, two or more, complex forms). Morphemes, as linguistic signs, are defined by the minimal association of a phonic substance and a meaning, which does not (systematically) recur in other units. In Bloomfield’s definition of the morpheme, this negative criterion for identification is formulated as follows: “A linguistic form which bears no partial phoneticsemantic resemblance to any other form, is a simple form or morpheme. Thus, bird, play, dance, cran-, -y, -ing, are morphemes. Morphemes may show partial phonetic resemblances, as do, for instance, bird and burr, or even homonymy, as do

219

23. Linguistic sign pear, pair, pare, but this resemblance is purely phonetic and is not paralleled by the meanings.” (Bloomfield 1933: 161)

In the study of morphology, the analysis of form has precedence over the analysis of meaning; this automatically implies that the (Saussurean) concept of sign is hardly useful for morphological analysis. Bloomfield does not make use of the concept of sign (nor of signal) in his discussion of morphological segmentation, but on one occasion, in a general statement, he speaks of both signals and morphemes (although it appears from the passage that “signal” has a much wider extension than “morpheme”): “A workable system of signals, such as a language, can contain only a small number of signaling-units, but the things signaled about ⫺ in our case, the entire content of the practical world ⫺ may be infinitely varied. Accordingly, the signals (linguistic forms, with morphemes as the smallest signals) consist of different combinations of signaling-units (phonemes), and each such combination is arbitrarily assigned to some feature of the practical world (sememe). The signals can be analyzed, but not the things signaled about.” (Bloomfield 1933: 162)

Following Bloomfield’s lead Bloch & Trager (1942: 54) define the morpheme as a (free or bound) form which cannot be divided into smaller meaningful parts, and the word as a minimum free form which cannot be divided entirely into smaller free forms. The discussion of meaningful constructions (i.e. the ways in which morphemes are combined to form complex words or compounds) does not mention the linguistic sign. The notion of sign, or more precisely symbol, is used only in the definition of language (1942: 5f.): language is defined as a system (not directly observable) of arbitrary (conventional) vocal symbols. Bloomfield’s morphological approach set the tone for later structuralist work in the United States: attention largely focused on the identification of morphemes, on the notation of morphemes, and on the distinction of various types of allomorphic variations. This can easily be seen in the standard structuralist textbook on morphology by Eugene A. Nida (21949), who starts out from Bloomfield’s definition and briefly comments on the negative formulation it contains: “It means that forms belonging to the same morpheme may not consist of identically the same phonemes and they may not have precisely equivalent meanings, but if these varying forms with corre-

spondingly different meanings still do not overlap on other sets of forms with their respective meanings, then they may be regarded as constituting a single morpheme.” (Nida 21949: 7)

The remainder of Nida’s work is mainly devoted to (a) principles which allow the linguist to isolate and to identify morphemes (cf. Nida 1948); (b) a classification into types of morphemes, in terms of their composition (segmental, suprasegmental or both), in terms of their distribution (bound vs. free; root vs. non-root; root vs. stem; nuclei vs. nonnuclei; nuclear vs. peripheral; same order vs. different order morphemes; mutually exclusive; mutually obligatory; obligatory vs. non obligatory; closing vs. nonclosing morphemes); (c) a discussion of structural classes (form classes; sequence classes; distribution classes). Nida’s work and subsequent handbooks (e.g. Gleason 1955; Hockett 1958) thus focus on morpheme identification and on the establishing of allomorphic variation in terms of phonic or structural conditioning. The morpheme is then defined in terms of conformity (in distribution/meaning) between the allomorphic shapes it assumes (Gleason 1955: 51⫺64), stretching over a minimally meaningful segment (Hockett 1958: 123⫺129). The relationship between morpheme structure and phonic realization constitutes the object, in structuralist models, of morphophonemics or morpho(pho)nology. (See Dressler 1985; on the notion of the morphophoneme, see Swiggers 1982.) 6.2.

Post-structuralist treatments of morphology

6.2.1. Main trends Post-structuralist work in morphology has mainly taken two directions: either it has tended to integrate morphology within phonology (as is the case for generative phonology and lexical phonology), while focusing on morpheme-structure constraints or on the derivational history of morphemic sequences; or it has moved toward the study of morphology as part of the larger study of language acquisition and language use. In the latter orientation the study of morphemes has been brought nearer to the concept of the sign, since the relation between meaning and

220 form had become prominent (see Bybee 1985); the integration of the user’s perspective has given way to “morphopragmatics” (see Dressler & Merlini Barbaresi 1987). Some linguists are inclined to treat morphology and syntax as a single level. (For presentations and surveys of recent models in morphology, see Scalise 1984; Hammond & Noonan 1987, eds.; Bauer 1988.) It is especially within “Natural Morphology” that the notion of sign has been rediscovered: natural morphology is interested in the build-up of morphemes from a functional point of view and appeals to Peirce’s theory of signs in order to state a number of (universal) principles, such as iconicity (cf. Swiggers 1993 and Art. 30), transparency, symmetry, parallelism (already stressed by Jakobson 1966), or (abductive) efficiency. (For introductions to Natural Morphology, see Mayerthaler 1981; Kilani-Schoch 1988; and Art. 31.) Natural Morphology integrates the study of morphology within a theory of language history, and of linguistic performance (acquisition; pathology). 6.2.2. The integration of the concepts sign and morpheme None of these models, however, provides an integrated theory of the linguistic sign and the morpheme as a unit. This is due to the fact that in the best case such models only hit upon the notion of sign at an advanced stage in their elaboration. Integration of the two concepts of sign and morpheme can only be successful if from the very outset the notion of sign is considered from the point of view of its descriptive usefulness and implementation on the level of morphology. Here two possible paths can be followed, and have indeed been explored, albeit in rather isolated attempts. One option consists in taking up Hjelmslev’s theory of the linguistic sign, as formulated in Hjelmslev (1943; 1954), rather than in Hjelmslev (1938; 1939), although precisely the latter two articles are specifically about morphology. (On morphology in Hjelmslev’s project of general linguistics, see Swiggers 1995.) In his glossematic theory (intended as a general semiotic project) Hjelmslev distinguishes between two planes: expression and content. Each of these planes has form and substance. There are then four strata: content-substance, content-form, expressionform, and expression-substance. The sign is

IV. Grundbegriffe

no longer defined as something standing for something else, but as a bilateral unit of content-form and expression-form; both dimensions are interdependent (or “solidary”). Substance is always formed, according to Hjelmslev: form is a necessary presupposition for substance. Given that the sign is defined as a formal unit, linguistics should focus, in Hjelmslev’s view, on the abstract formal system of functional relations; Hjelmslev elaborated a comprehensive frame for the study of these relations. The interesting application for linguistics lies in Hjelmslev’s distinction of components (or “figurae”) of the sign: the minimal constituents of expression-form are called “cenemes” (“empty elements”), and the corresponding ones of the content-form are called “pleremes” (in structural semantics these were later called “semes”). (In 1938 Hjelmslev spoke of “cenematemes” and “plerematemes”; in 1939 he still made a distinction between pleremes and morphemes: the latter are basically elements which “characterize” bases, and they are expressed by cenemic units.) Hjelmslev’s glossematics thus provides a grid for the study of morphemes as sign-units; however, Hjelmslev never offered an example of a more or less detailed morphological analysis along these lines. It was Micla˘u (1970) who took up Hjelmslev’s suggestions, combining them with Martinet’s functionalism and with some ideas of the Geneva school. He defines the morpheme as a “morphological sign”: “Nous appelons morphe`me l’ensemble de traits distinctifs de morphes ⫹ le trait se´mantique ge´ne´ral, exprime´s par les formants correspondants […]. Le morphe`me repre´sente donc le signe morphologique.” (Micla˘u 1970: 20)

Although Micla˘u’s study is mainly about classes of signifiers, discursive processes and about the motivation of signs (onomatopoeic words; interjections; semantically motivated words), one can reconstruct from his study a complex sign-model, involving the basic distinction between signified (Fr. signifie´) and signifier (Fr. signifiant). This distinction runs through four levels, the first of which is that of the mone`me, i.e. a minimal sign. All the other levels involve complex signs: the lexe`me, the morphe`me, and the syntaxe`me. On the signifier-side these all involve what Micla˘u calls (after Hjelmslev 1954) formants (“formatives”): lexical and grammatical building-blocks. The signified-side consists

23. Linguistic sign

of semantically distinctive pleremes and “morphs”. “Le signe dans la structure de la langue se pre´sente comme un e´le´ment constitutif. Il se place a` un certain point dans la hie´rarchie linguistique organise´e selon le principe de la stratification. Le signe apparaıˆt au niveau des unite´s significatives minimales ⫺ les mone`mes, puis au niveau des mots comme unite´s complexes lexico-grammaticales. Il faut distinguer donc entre signes e´le´mentaires et signes complexes […]. Le deuxie`me niveau ⫺ le mot ⫺ est constitue´ des e´le´ments du niveau infe´rieur (mone`mes), tant dans le signifie´ que dans le signifiant. Comme le niveau des mone`mes comprend deux se´ries bien distinctes d’unite´s (lexicales et grammaticales), c’est par la dialectique de leur rapport que le niveau du mot s’organise en trois sous-niveaux. Le premier de ces sous-niveaux ⫺ le lexe`me ⫺ repre´sente les signes les plus concrets, inde´pendants. C’est qu’il garde l’unite´ du ple´re`me et ne re´duit au statut de traits distinctifs que les morphes. Le deuxie`me sous-niveau ⫺ le morphe`me ⫺ est plus abstrait; il re´duit les ple´re`mes au comportement des traits distinctifs et les morphe`mes qu’il garde comme unite´s ne jouissent pas d’inde´pendance. Le troisie`me sous-niveau est encore plus abstrait, car il re´duit les deux se´ries ⫺ lexe`mes et morphe`mes ⫺ au statut de traits distinctifs.” (Micla˘u 1970: 13, 24; see also 22f., 46f., 56)

Micla˘u’s work is an attempt to reintegrate the notion of sign within the study of language levels. The view he adopts consists in using the notion of sign for both minimal units and complex ones. “Elementary signs” (Fr. signes e´le´mentaires) contain, on the signified-side, a plereme (roots and lexical affixes) or a morph (grammatical affixes); on the signifier-side they are a totality of phonemes and prosodemes. Among the complex signs, one level is reserved for the morphemes or morphological signs: these contain a signified, which is the collection of distinctive features of the morphs (e.g. lexical meaning of the stem ⫹ future ⫹ first person singular) and a general semantic feature (e.g. “verb-ness”), and a signifier, which includes the lexical formant and the grammatical formants. Rather than stressing the bilateral nature of the sign, Micla˘u points to the two semiotic components of the sign: “Dans le plan de l’existence psychique, le signe apparaıˆt comme une structure forme´e de la re´union des deux e´le´ments se´miotiques: le signifiant comme image acoustique et le substrat neurophysiologique de l’invariant psychique, qui comprend certains signaux codifie´s au niveau ce´re´bral. Le signe n’est donc pas a` proprement parler une unite´ bilate´rale, mais bien la re´union de deux e´le´ments se´miotiques.” (Micla˘u 1970: 209)

221 Whereas the “Hjelmslevian” option tries to preserve the notion of sign as involving a signifier and a signified, the other alternative is to dissociate the levels of content and expression, and to pursue a separate analysis for the signified and the signifier. In such a view one can define morphology as the study of forms (in conformity with the etymology of the term), taking into account for morphological analysis only formal relationships, and not significata. The sign will then be narrowly defined as the signifier (signifiant). There is both a more specific and a more general advantage to this. The specific advantage is that such a position allows one not to uncritically accept the view that some signs would have no meaning at all (cf. Saussure 1916: 187 [critical edition with variants, 1968⫺1974: I, 299]: “S’il y a des e´le´ments formatifs transparents, comme -ier dans poir-ier, vis-a`-vis de ceris-ier, pomm-ier, etc., il en est d’autres dont la signification est trouble ou tout a` fait nulle”). The problem is resolved if one redefines the sign as the signifier, since it is clear that some signifiers will have no meaning at all (e.g. thematic vowels in IndoEuropean; stem extensions in Bantu languages). “Un e´le´ment formatif dont la signification est tout a` fait nulle ne saurait eˆtre un signe au sens saussurien. […] Il en re´sulte e´videmment qu’il est impossible de se re´fe´rer a` l’association d’un signifiant et d’un signifie´ pour de´finir soit le morphe`me, soit le mone`me, a` moins de diluer a` tel point la notion de ‘signifie´’ qu’elle n’a plus aucun rapport avec ce que Saussure avait en vue.” (Larochette 1969: 66f.)

The more general advantage is that in such a view morphemic signs can be assigned functions in a way parallel to the one in which phonemic units are assigned functions: there are “integrative” morphemes (e.g. stem-enlarging elements), “distinctive” morphemes (e.g. class markers), “demarcative” morphemes (marking, e.g. the boundaries of a compound), “redundant” morphemes (e.g. concord morphemes). This of course implies that, contrary to the Hjelmslevian point of view, there is no parallel analysis on the level of expression and on the level of content. The non-viability of such a parallel analysis has important consequences for the study of the compositionality of the linguistic sign (see Art. 82): composition of morphemes is not always, neither on the form side nor on the content side, equivalent to the sum of the constitutive morphemes (as is clearly shown by the case of idioms).

222 If one defines the sign as a formal element, i.e. as the signifier, one can dissociate it from the concept of “signified”, and refer to the content in terms of values” or “functions”: “Le morphe`me /er/ dans ils chante`rent marque a` la fois l’appartenance du signe a` la classe de valence virtuelle du verbe conjugue´ […] et l’appartenance du signe aux classes se´mantiques que les grammairiens appellent ‘indicatif’, ‘passe´ simple’, ‘troisie`me personne’, ‘pluriel’ […]. De`s lors, si l’on reconnaıˆt quatre ‘mone`mes’ dans /er/ parce que cette forme marque a` la fois l’indicatif, le passe´ simple, la troisie`me personne et le pluriel, on conside`re qu’il y a autant de mone`mes que de ‘valeurs’, mais non qu’il y a autant de ‘mone`mes’ que de signifie´s.” (Larochette 1969: 71)

As yet, there is no definitive sign-based theory of the morpheme, although currently various semiotic aspects of linguistic elements (including the morpheme) are being explored. It appears that linguistic models in morphology may focus on different properties of the linguistic sign: whereas structural morphology is interested in the patterning and distribution of signs as arbitrary combinations of forms and meanings, natural morphology studies cases of (partial) motivation of signs, thus identifying in linguistic signs both symbolic and iconic aspects, and weakening the distinction between the two levels of articulation (“double articulation”). The mutual integration of the concepts of “sign” and “morpheme” is not an easy task. It should be clear, however, that morphology, as the study of formal properties of the linguistic sign, must appeal to the concept of sign. The sign concept used, implicitly or explicitly, in morphology can be defined as follows (with reference to the sign models discussed above): the object of morphology is linguistic signs, i.e. signs taken to be vocal/graphical symbols with a (mental) content, the relationship between form (⫽ signifier) and meaning (⫽ signified) being arbitrary or conventional (with some cases of partial motivation), and historically fluctuating. Linguistic signs are studied in morphology as units of expression and content, which belong to a “code”, viz. the linguistic system of a natural language. A rigid articulation of the morpheme as a linguistic sign will require (a) a comprehensive theory of semantic distinctions on the signified-side (involving, e.g., the definition of “seme”, “sememe”, “classeme”, “virtueme”; cf. Heger 1972; Larochette 1967; Swiggers 1997);

IV. Grundbegriffe

(b) the application of the langue/parole dichotomy (enriched with the concept of norm as developed by Coseriu 1952) to a semiotically based theory of the morpheme, stressing the systemic, functional and (historically) conventional nature of morphemic units; (c) a reflection on what the “semiotic unity” is of morphemes comprising various (phonically or structurally conditioned) allomorphs, or alternating morphemes (Swiggers & Van den Eynde 1988); (d) an additional “sociolinguistic” component which studies the “use-in-context” of morphemic signs, i.e. their “connotative value(s)”: through the use of morphemic signs, information is also given about gender, social class, profession of the speaker (and of the hearer), about the relation of the speaker to the hearer, and about the context of communication. (For a comprehensive model of semiotic analysis of language in its social context, see Halliday 1978.) A sign-based theory of the morpheme should then do justice to all three dimensions of the sign process: the syntactic, the semantic and the pragmatic dimension.

7.

References

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Buyssens, Eric (1940⫺41), “La nature du signe linguistique”. Acta Linguistica 2, 83⫺86

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225

24. Paradigmatic and syntagmatic relations

24. Paradigmatic and syntagmatic relations 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

Introduction Linguistic relatedness Syntagmatics vs. paradigmatics Paradigmatics / syntagmatics and typology Paradigmatic forces in morphology Concluding remarks References

1.

Introduction

The well-known distinction between the paradigmatic and the syntagmatic axis of language is no doubt rooted in Saussure’s Cours de linguistique ge´ne´rale (de Saussure 1916). In the Cours a distinction is made between “syntagmatic relationships” and “associative relationships”, which later came to be known as paradigmatic relationships. Typical of the syntagmatic relationships is, that they are in force within “la chaine de la parole”. That is, syntagmatic relationships bear upon elements constituting a given linguistic configuration, i.e. they relate to elements in praesentia. In contrast to the syntagmatic relationships, the scope of the paradigmatic relationships is considerably less clear. As a matter of fact, given their characterization in the Cours, it is tempting to define the paradigmatic relationships in a negative way, i.e. as those relationships which do not relate to the linear character of language. According to the Cours, the paradigmatic axis of language bears upon elements in absentia, meaning that the paradigmatic relationships are considered to bring these elements together in “mnemonic series”. The above cannot but lead to the conclusion that the conceptual status of the syntagmatic relationships was relatively clear (which is not to say, of course, that the systematic properties of these relationships were clear as well). Syntagmatic relationships hold between the constituent elements of a given linguistic unit (word, phrase, sentence). In contrast to the syntagmatic axis of language, the nature of the paradigmatic axis was far less clear. In consequence of the fact that in the Cours the paradigmatic relationships lacked a general characterization, their conceptual status was not made clear at all. This may be connected to the fact that the paradigmatic axis seems to be less manifest than its syntagmatic counterpart (cf. 2). In addition, the paradigmatic relationships were characterized in psychological rather than in

linguistic terms: as we have seen, they were called “associative” while they were considered to bear upon “mnemonic series”. In a way, the rather unclear status of the paradigmatic relationships is quite surprising. There seems to be no doubt that the paradigmatic axis of language bears upon the phenomenon of “linguistic relatedness” (Van Marle 1992). In other words, paradigmatic relationships deal with the ways in which linguistic entities may be mutually connected, both formally and/or semantically (cf. 2). Evidently, there is no necessity to define this phenomenon in predominantly psychological terms, just as the syntagmatic relationships must not be exclusively defined in terms of e.g. speech production. That is, the paradigmatic axis of language, like its syntagmatic counterpart, can and must be characterized in purely linguistic terms.

2.

Linguistic relatedness

In addition to the little transparent way in which the paradigmatic axis of language was introduced in the Cours, the actual treatment of the paradigmatic relationships has caused confusion as well. In the Cours the paradigmatic axis of language is illustrated with the help of the ramifications of enseignement, compare Fig. 24.1. enseignement enseigner enseignons etc. etc. A

apprentisage éducation etc. etc. B

clément justement etc. etc. changement armement etc. etc. C

D

Fig. 24.1: Saussure’s illustration of paradigmatic relationships (cf. de Saussure 1916: 175)

This example makes clear that in Saussure’s view the paradigmatic relationships constitute a rather heterogeneous set. They may be based either on form alone (D), or exclusively on meaning (B). In addition, paradigmatic relationships may focus on a common base (essentially A), or a common morphological structure (reflected by an identical affix) as in C. The lack of homogeneity is striking, and this has certainly contributed to the fact that

226 the paradigmatic axis of language has often been neglected. Moreover, Saussure has also refrained from differentiating between the diverse types of relationships within one and the same kind of paradigmatic arrangement. For instance, it is evident that the relationship between enseignement and enseigner ⫺ a typical case of derivation ⫺ is fundamentally different from the one between enseigner and enseignons which belongs to inflection (cf. Art. 38). Yet, in the Cours both types of paradigmatic relationships can be found in A. The way in which the paradigmatic axis of language is presented in the Cours is no doubt directly connected with Saussure’s idea that this dimension of language is simply highly unstructured. This is also reflected by his remark that the members of an “associative family” are characterized neither by fixed number, nor by fixed order. On the basis of the above it is clear that the Cours does not contain a well-defined theory concerning the paradigmatic axis of language. Both conceptually and as regards elaboration, the treatment of the paradigmatic relationships is far from optimal, and it is by no means surprising that this part of the Cours has been strongly criticized (Wells 1948). However, it seems that it has not always been sufficiently appreciated that the paradigmatic relationships cover the field of linguistic relatedness and that, in consequence of its very nature, linguistic relatedness displays a heterogeneous character by definition. The fact is, that some relationships are much more intimate than others, in that they are rooted in more and/or other kinds of shared properties. The members of an inflectional paradigm (cf. Art. 62 and 65), for instance, share a number of properties by definition, whereas in the case of derivational forms ⫺ even if they have the same base ⫺ this is not so. Cf. (I/you) enjoy and (he/she) enjoys which, apart form their identical lexical meaning, share properties relating to (among other things) aspect, tense and number. Evidently, the common characteristics of e.g. enjoyable and enjoyment are much more marginal. In contrast to the paradigm members enjoy/enjoys, enjoyable and enjoyment do not even belong to the same word class. Consequently, one cannot close one’s eyes to the fact that the paradigmatic axis of language displays a more heterogeneous and a less transparently structured character than some, apparently, would like to have it. Crucial to the linguistic characterization of the phenomenon of linguistic relatedness is

IV. Grundbegriffe

the setting-up of different types of classes and categories on the basis of similarities and/or differences in behaviour (valency) and/or shared formal and semantic properties (Van Marle 1994). Put differently, a theory of linguistic relatedness should be based on the investigation of the way in which linguistic entities display similarities in their behaviour and/or in their direct formal and semantic characteristics.

3.

Syntagmatics versus paradigmatics

Remarkable about linguistic theories is, that in general they concentrate on either the syntagmatic or the paradigmatic axis of language. This practice may have different origins. First, it may well be that paradigmatic and syntagmatic forces are not equally important in each sub-domain of a language. For instance, as its name already suggests, in syntax syntagmatic forces seem to be much more prominent than their paradigmatic counterparts. This is not to say, of course, that in syntax paradigmatic forces are completely absent but they may be relatively marginal. The relationship between an active sentence and its passive counterpart, for instance, is paradigmatic in nature, but there can be no doubt that many syntactic phenomena display a predominantly syntagmatic character. Issues relating to word order, for instance, and phenomena such as government and binding are typically syntagmatic in nature. Second, in morphology one is faced with the problem that the relative importance attached to either the syntagmatic or the paradigmatic relationships is to a large extent determined by the fact whether it is the morpheme or the word that is considered the basic unit of language (cf. Art. 26). As soon as it is the morpheme that is chosen ⫺ as is the case in American Structuralism (cf. Art. 19) as well as in many morphological studies with a generative orientation ⫺ one can hardly avoid to primarily concentrate on syntagmatic issues, such as the slots that morphemes may occupy within a given template. In contrast to such morpheme-based approaches, in linguistic traditions in which the word is considered the basic unit, it is only natural to consider the paradigmatic axis to be of primary importance. In order to come to grips with the above, consider the following example. In a morpheme-based theory, a form such as girls is split up into

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24. Paradigmatic and syntagmatic relations

two morphemes (girl- and -s), and the theory aims at uncovering the distribution of both elements. In a word-based theory, however, the inclination to split up girls into smaller entities is little prominent at best (while in some theories it is even completely refrained from). In such a theory, morphology concentrates on the characterization of the relationship between the word girls and the word girl and the relationship between girls and other plural forms such as boys, cats etc. Within the realm of morphology, to put it differently, the value attached to paradigmatics or syntagmatics is to a large extent dependent on whether one opts for the word or for the morpheme as basic unit of morphological structure. Third, another element contributing to the fact that linguistic theories generally concentrate on either the paradigmatic or on the syntagmatic axis is the orientation of these theories themselves. In Prague Structuralism, for instance, focus was on phoneme systems, the internal structure of which was defined in terms of different kinds of oppositions, and note, by the way, that the concept of opposition is paradigmatic par excellence. Clearly, the extrapolation of these views to grammar leads to the setting-up of paradigmatically determined classes of grammatical entities. Evidently, this practice underlies the Prague School’s interest in case systems and tense/ aspect systems. Similarly, in generative grammar focus is still by and large on syntax. In this case, too, there is a strong tendency to extrapolate the mechanisms used in syntax to morphology. Evidently, this leads to a syntagmatic conception of word structure, because of the fact that in syntax the part played by syntagmatic relationships is so prominent. This does also explain why in generative grammar the trend is dominant to opt for morphological theories which have the morpheme as basic unit of word structure. The fact is, that only by adopting the morpheme as basic unit, morphology can be approached in a predominantly syntagmatic way. It is this approach which leads to monographs with titles such as The Syntax of Words or Syntax below Zero. It is important to see that the general orientation of a particular theory has all kinds of consequences in relation to the question what are considered to be the basic issues of morphological investigation. In theories with a paradigmatic orientation affix order, for example, is not a topic of special interest. In such theories, affix order is considered noth-

ing but the direct result of properties of the relevant derivational patterns and the way in which these patterns may interact. Similarly, in paradigmatically oriented theories the interaction between word structure and phonology is likewise considered not to be of prime importance either. The relevance, for instance, of the distinction between stressneutral versus stress-bearing (versus stressattracting) affixes is discussed in a syntagmatic theory much more naturally than in a paradigmatically oriented one. However, other topics are much more easily broached within theories with a paradigmatic orientation, which, as we have seen, often opt for the word as basic unit. The distinction between existing and ‘potential’ words, for instance, is hard to come to grips with within a theory with a syntagmatic, morpheme-based orientation. The same holds for the related topic of morphological productivity. The fact is, that in theories which focus on the internal syntagmatic structure of complex words, the question whether a given type of morpheme combination can be extended or not, is largely irrelevant.

4.

Paradigmatics / syntagmatics and typology

In general, the efficacy of paradigmatic forces is most prominent in relation to words, which means that these forces are most prominent in the lexicon and in morphology. Before going into the diverse manifestations of the paradigmatic axis in the two linguistic domains in question (cf. 5), one other point should be stressed. As is well-known, languages may belong to different types (cf. Art. 115). On the basis of the way their morphological systems are structured, languages are often characterized as isolating (e.g. Chinese), agglutinating (e.g. Turkish), or fusional/inflecting (e.g. Latin). In isolating languages words are ‘invariable’, i.e. such languages are without morphology. In agglutinating languages words typically consist of long sequences of affixes. A second characteristic of these languages is that their morphological systems come fairly close to the optimal situation according to which there is question of one-to-one correspondences between form and meaning. That is, in such languages every affix tends to be uniquely linked to a specific grammatical or semantic property and vice versa. In fusional languages, finally, words cannot readily be

228

IV. Grundbegriffe

segmented at all, irrespective of the fact that in these languages words are ‘variable’. In Lyons (1968: 189) this is put into words as follows: “Generally speaking, Latin words cannot be segmented into morphs; rather, they can only be segmented into morphs at the price of arbitrariness, inconsistency and the proliferation of allomorphs.” In addition, in fusional languages grammatical ‘endings’ ⫺ if they can be isolated at all ⫺ express a whole series of grammatical information. In a Latin form such as puell-arum ‘girlgen.pl.f’, for instance, -arum expresses both gender, case and number. Moreover, if one wishes to isolate a suffix -us in e.g. domin-us ‘master-nom.sg.m’ and consider it the ending of the nominative singular of the second declension, one is faced with the problem that a form such as vir ‘man(nom.sg.m)’ has exactly the same status (also nominative, singular, second declension). In this case, however, these properties cannot be linked to any potential ending whatsoever. From these brief remarks on language types it follows that the relevance of the syntagmatic and the paradigmatic dimension of word structure may vary from language to language, depending on the type of language we are dealing with. In fusional languages ⫺ i.e. languages in which words can only be segmented with great difficulty ⫺ the syntagmatic dimension of morphological structure seems to be little developed by definition. Put differently, the more fusional a language is, the more it relies on paradigmatic relationships. Consider, for instance, the nominal paradigm in Scottish Gaelic (cf. Tab. 24.1). In the so-called first declension, nearly all grammatical distinctions are completely based on differences in both the vowels and the consonants that the words in question consist of (Calder 1923: 81): Sing. Nom. bard Gen. ba`ird Dat. ba`rd Voc.

Plur. Dual ba`ird (da`) bha`rd bha`rd (da`) bha`ird ba`ird, bardaibh (a) bha`ird (a) bha`rda

Tab. 24.1: paradigm of bard ‘bard’ in Scottish Gaelic

Evidently, in a system such as the above syntagmatic relationships are of little help if one wishes to define the characteristic properties of the forms in question. In consequence of the fact that the paradigm of bard hardly in-

volves any endings, the forms in question simply lack an internal syntagmatic dimension on the morphological level. Put differently, in cases like these the morphological system depends on paradigmatic forces nearly completely. In contrast to this, in agglutinating languages the syntagmatic dimension of word structure is much more important. That is, the more agglutinating a language is, the more it relies on the syntagmatic axis of language. Some aspects of the internal systematics of the Turkish word make this clear. In the Turkish verb various sets of affixes may be combined. In forms such as ver-iyor-du-m (‘I gave, I was giving’), ver-iyor-mus¸-um (‘I am/was, as they say, giving’) and ver-iyor-sam (‘if I give’), we have to do with a verb stem (ver-), followed by a so-called base ending (-iyor), a so-called projection ending (-du, -mus¸ and -sa respectively), and a personal ending (-m, -um; 1.sg). Except third person plural, all persons follow this pattern, as can be deduced from the following paradigms in Tab. 24.2 (cf. Nauta 1973: 55f.): 1. sg. 2. sg. 3. sg. 1. pl. 2. pl. 3. pl.

ver-iyor-du-m ver-iyor-du-n ver-iyor-du ver-iyor-du-k ver-iyor-du-nuz ver-iyor-lar-dı¨ (*ver-iyor-du-lar)

1. sg. 2. sg. 3. sg. 1. pl. 2. pl. 3. pl.

ver-iyor-mus¸-um ver-iyor-mus¸-sun ver-iyor-mus¸ ver-iyor-mus¸-uz ver-iyor-mus¸-sunuz ver-iyor-lar-mı¨s¸ (*ver-iyor-mus¸-lar)

1. sg. 2. sg. 3. sg. 1. pl. 2. pl. 3. pl.

ver-iyor-sa-m ver-iyor-sa-n ver-iyor-sa ver-iyor-sa-k ver-iyor-sa-nı¨z ver-iyor-lar-sa (*ver-iyor-sa-lar)

Tab. 24.2

Evidently, what is going on here is, that in the third person plural the order of the personal ending and the projection ending is inverted. In the third person plural the personal ending (-lar) directly follows after the base ending, whereas the projection ending (-dı¨,

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24. Paradigmatic and syntagmatic relations

-mı¨s and -sa respectively) follows after the personal ending. Note that this pattern is repetitive in the sense that the other ‘base endings’ ⫺ -iyor is only one out of a class of eight ⫺ display exactly the same pattern: in all persons the personal ending follows after the projection ending, except for third person plural where the projection ending follows after the personal ending. To give just one example with the base ending -ir and with the projection ending -di (Tab. 24.3): 1. sg. 2. sg. 3. sg. 1. pl. 2. pl. 3. pl.

ver-ir-di-m ver-ir-di-n ver-ir-di ver-ir-di-k ver-ir-di-niz ver-ir-ler-di (*ver-ir-di-ler)

Tab. 24.3

It is clear that we are faced here with a purely syntagmatic phenomenon. In the case of third person plural (-ler/-lar) the order of the projection ending and the personal ending is crucially different from all other persons, which means that both suffixes do not show up in their regular slots. Since the issue of affix order exclusively relates to the internal make-up of words ⫺ all suffixes in question, so to say, are elements in praesentia ⫺, the Turkish example illustrates nicely the independent nature of syntagmatic forces in an agglutinating language. Another indication of the dominant part played by syntagmatic forces in agglutinating languages can be found in Turkish as well. A well-known construction in Turkish is the so-called izafet group (izafet means ‘annexation’), in which the possessive suffix of the third person singular (-I after consonants, -sI after vowels) plays a crucial role. Consider e.g. hafta son-u ‘weekend’ (lit. ‘week endposs.3.sg’), sokak kapı¨-sı¨ ‘house-door’ (lit. ‘street door-poss.3.sg’) etc. Interesting about these constructions in this connection is the behaviour of the possessive suffix. This suffix is retained before case endings (sokak kapı¨sı¨n-da, lit. ‘street door-poss.3.sg-loc’), but in a number of other cases it is dropped. First, the possessive suffix is dropped before other possessive suffixes, just as this suffix is not repeated in the case a third person possessor is indicated. Cf. sokak-kapı¨-sı¨, ‘house door’ vs. sokak kapı¨-m ‘my house door’ (*sokak

kapı¨-sı¨-m), and hafta son-u ‘weekend’ vs. hafta son-u ‘his weekend’ (*hafta son-u-su). Second, the element in question also gives way to the suffixes -lI ‘(provided) with’ and -cI (suffix forming personal names). Cf. Gece ad-ı¨ ‘the name Night’ (name of a poem) vs. Gece ad-lı¨ ‘with the name Night’ (*Gece ad-ı¨lı¨ ), su yol-u ‘water-conduit’ vs. su yol-cu ‘man responsible for water conduits’ (*su yol-u-cu). What this latter example makes clear is that in an agglutinating language like Turkish, affixes have a fixed position within the word. If the position in question is already taken, the suffix which occupies this position must be replaced if a rival suffix is introduced by a later morphological operation. Evidently, this directly points to the relevance of the syntagmatic dimension of word structure: in cases such as the above affixes appear to be linked to specific positions within the word, which means that these positions are defined with respect to other entities within the word. As said, this implies that these positions are defined in a syntagmatic way. Note that this kind of observations can also be made with respect to non-agglutinating languages, which is to say that in the morphological system of non-agglutinating languages syntagmatic forces play a role, too. Consider the past participle in Dutch. Dutch verbs have past participles formed by a combination of the prefix ge- and an ending -t, -d or -en. As far as the prefix is concerned, the following rule is in force: the prefix ge- does not show up if the verb has a prefix itself. That is, prefix verbs such as be-hangen ‘to paper, to hang’, ont-wikkelen ‘to develop’ and ver-mageren ‘to lose weight’ and also ‘inseparable’ verbs (with main stress on the verb stem) such as door-lopen ‘to pass through’, om-vatten ‘to enclose, to contain’ and overheersen ‘to rule over’ have past participles without ge-. Compare the past participles in Tab. 24.4: behangen ontwikkeld vermagerd door-lopen om-vat over-heerst

(*ge-behangen) (*ge-ontwikkeld) (*ge-vermagerd) (*ge-doorlopen) (*ge-omvat) (*ge-overheerst)

Tab. 24.4

The above data make clear that, also in nonagglutinating languages like modern Dutch, regularities of a syntagmatic nature exist. In

230

IV. Grundbegriffe

the Dutch verb there is only one position for prefixes; if this position is taken, the prefix of the past participle is omitted. Just as syntagmatic forces appear to play a part in the morphological system of non-agglutinating languages, paradigmatic forces may be operative in agglutinating languages (cf. 5 for an example of the latter). To conclude, in discussing the relative importance of paradigmatic and syntagmatic forces in word structure it should be taken into account that this may to a large extent be determined by the kind of language that one studies.

5.

Paradigmatic forces in morphology

As was indicated above, the level at which paradigmatic relationships seem to be preeminently operative is that of the word, either simplex or complex. However different words may be structured in various languages, it is the word which seems to be the basic building block of the paradigmatic axis (although, as we have seen, the role of the paradigmatic relationships may be considerably less prominent in agglutinating languages). In this section some phenomena will be discussed in order to illustrate the prominence of paradigmatic relationships on the level of the word. 5.1. Rival morphological categories The relationship between rival morphological categories is often paradigmatically determined in the sense that the so-called general case is operative in all cases where the related special cases are not. In other words, the morphological domains of the special cases constitute the paradigmatic impediments to which the general case is subjected (Van Marle 1985; 1986). Consider the following example taken from Dutch. In modern Dutch there are two productive plural categories, the special case in -s and the general case in -en. The domain of the special case is constituted by nouns whose final syllable contains a schwa which may be followed by l, r, m or n. In addition, nouns that are nonnative often pluralize in -s, too. As said, the main reason why these words are not within the reach of the general case in -en is, that they constitute the domain of the rival special case in -s. In other words, the special case in -s constitutes a paradigmatically determined curtailment of the related general case in -en. The efficacy of the general case ⫺ which we

expect to be operative in all cases where the related special cases are not ⫺ can nicely be illustrated with the help of non-native abstract nouns in -isme ‘-ism’. Contrary to what we expect, in modern Dutch nouns in -isme do not pluralize in -s, irrespective of their non-native character and the fact that their final syllable contains a schwa. Automatically, then, they come within the reach of the general case, meaning that modern Dutch nouns in -isme systematically pluralize in -(e)n, notwithstanding the fact that their segmental make-up is that of nouns with a plural in -s and irrespective of the fact that they display a distinctly non-native character. Evidently, this example illustrates the paradigmatically determined character of the efficacy of special cases with respect to their related general case. The main reason why Dutch words in -isme pluralize in -en is that they ⫺ unexpectedly ⫺ do not form part of the domain of the special case in -s. In its turn, this sheds light on the issue why words may be outside the reach of the general case. In many cases this seems to be the mere outcome of the fact that they are part of the domain of a paradigmatically related rival special case (cf. Van Marle 1986 for further details). 5.2. Allomorphy Another phenomenon where paradigmatic forces play an important role is allomorphy. As was pointed out in Van Marle (1985), certain types of allomorphy are clearly paradigmatically determined. A classic example is the behaviour of the Dutch nouns which have an irregular plural in -eren (ei ‘egg’ -eieren ‘eggs’; kalf ‘calf’ ⫺ kalv-eren ‘calves’; rund ‘cow’ ⫺ rund-eren ‘cows, cattle’; etc.). These nouns may have an irregular, augmented stem: eier-, kalver-, runder- etc. These irregular stems show up in both compounding and derivation, cf. eier-koek ‘sponge cake’, kalverliefde ‘calf love’, runder-gehakt ‘minced beef’ etc., and kalver-achtig ‘like a calf, playful’ kalver-ig ‘silly’ etc., respectively. Similarly, the occurrence of the linking vowel -e in Dutch compounds is paradigmatically determined, too. Only words which have a plural in -en may have a linking vowel in -e, meaning that in compounds words with a plural in -s never show up with this linking element. Recently, the phenomenon of allomorphy has been taken up again by Aronoff (1994) and Booij (1997) in order to emphasize the independent ⫺ ‘autonomous’ ⫺ char-

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24. Paradigmatic and syntagmatic relations

acter of morphological structure. Particularly Booij (1997) emphasizes that many patterns of stem allomorphy display a paradigmatically determined character. A particularly striking example is constituted by the socalled toponymic derivations in Dutch, formations which also make clear that the phenomenon of paradigmatically determined allomorphy is not restricted to a handful of irregular forms. Cf. the following examples: (1) (a) Amerika Chili etc. (b) Monaco Israel etc.

Amerikaan Amerikaan-s Chileen Chileen-s Monegask Israel-iet

Monegask-isch Israe¨lit-isch

In example (1) the toponyms are listed in the first row, the inhabitatives in the second, and the toponymic adjectives in the third. The analysis presented by Booij (1997: 11⫺14) runs as follows. The toponymic adjectives in -s or -isch are derived from a stem allomorph of the related toponym which is formally identical to the corresponding inhabitative. Put differently, each toponym has a stem that can be predicted on the basis of the corresponding inhabitative (to which it is formally identical). Evidently, this implies that the stem allomorphy of Dutch toponyms is paradigmatically determined. 5.3. The inflectional paradigm Another phenomenon which can only be appreciated within a framework in which the paradigmatic dimension of morphological structure is taken into account, is that of the inflectional paradigm (cf. Art. 62). The theoretical status of inflectional paradigms has been rather unclear for a relatively long period, irrespective of its time-honoured position in the study of the classical languages. Recently, the theoretical status of the inflectional paradigm is taken up in, among others, Bybee (1985), Carstairs (1987) and Wurzel (1984). The ‘reality’ of the inflectional paradigm, however, has always been part and parcel of historical linguistics. The fact is, that in many cases the inflectional paradigm is the locus of certain types of analogical change (particularly levelling; hence its name paradigm levelling). (Cf. 5.5 for other types of paradigmatically determined morphological change.) An example is the following. The preterite of the (irregular) Dutch verb binden ‘to bind’ is bond (singular), bonden (plural). The iden-

tity of the stem vowel in the preterite is the result of paradigm levelling as there can be no doubt that in an earlier stage the singular had a. Note that there is no question of a general, phonological change of a into o. That is, the change in question is restricted to the preterite of a specific set of strong verbs. Consequently, the only correct characterization of the above change is that a new singular is formed on the basis of the plural (and that, subsequently, the old preterite with a was ousted by its newly coined counterpart with o). Crucial to this levelling process is, then, that its scope can only be determined in terms of the inflectional paradigm. 5.4. Morphological creativity Another phenomenon which stresses the relevance of paradigmatic relationships is morphological creativity. As has been stressed in, among others, Sassen (1981), Van Marle (1985) and Becker (1990), the coining of new words is by no means limited to the addition of affixes. New words may also be paradigmatically coined by means of affix subtraction and affix substitution. Particularly substitution patterns may be prominent in the synchronic process of coining new words. In Booij (1989) it is pointed out that Dutch verbal compounds such as in Tab. 24.5: stofzuigen beeldhouwen bloemlezen buikspreken dwarsdrijven

‘to ‘to ‘to ‘to ‘to

vacuum’ sculpture’ compose an anthology’ ventriloquize’ be obstructive’

Tab. 24.5

are ‘analogically’ coined on the basis of the related compounds in -er or -ing. Cf. respectively stofzuiger ‘vacuum cleaner’, beeldhouwer ‘sculptor’, bloemlezing ‘anthology’, buikspreker ‘ventriloquist’, and dwarsdrijver ‘obstructionist’. This analogical pattern is still reflected by their semantics: the meaning of e.g. bloemlezen reads ‘to compose a bloemlezing (anthology)’. In addition, Booij claims, only in this way can it be accounted for that the verbal compounds are weak (but note that these verbs cannot always readily be inflected). However this may be, the related simplex verbs, i.e. zuigen, houwen, lezen, spreken and drijven, are strong. Another prominent pattern of affix substitution is discussed in Van Marle (1985: 264⫺ 285). Modern Dutch has two categories of

232 deverbal personal names: the neutral one in -er and the one of female personal names in -ster. The intimate relationship between both categories is illustrated by the fact that quite some formations in -ster can only be considered ‘remodellings’ of their neutral counterparts in -er, as a verbal base is simply lacking. Consider e.g. betweet-ster, kwakzalf-ster and reizig-ster, the female counterparts of betweter ‘know-all’, kwakzalv-er ‘quack’ and reiziger ‘traveller’. Since there are no verbs betweten, kwakzalv-en or reizig-en, the only potential bases for betweet-ster, kwakzalf-ster and reizig-ster are their related neutral counterparts in -er. Evidently, the fact that renders the above examples of affix substitution a paradigmatic character is, that they involve relationships between related morphological categories. These relationships indicate the paradigmatically determined character of morphological systems. 5.5. Morphological change A field, finally, where paradigmatic forces are particularly prominent is that of morphological change. As a matter of fact, all types of change that somehow or other exhibit an ‘analogical’ character involve a paradigmatic dimension. This can briefly be illustrated with the help of three examples, illustrating the well-known phenomena of back formation, adaptation and reinterpretation. Examples illustrating back formation are English cherry (from older cheris), Afrikaans vark ‘pig’ (cf. Dutch varken) and American Dutch mool ‘mill’ (cf. Dutch molen). The final s of cheris and the final en of varken and molen came to be associated with the respective plural endings -s and -en. Evidently, the change in question involves the association of the final element/elements of originally simplex cheris, varken and molen with the plural ending. This association supposes a paradigmatic relationship based on ‘identity of form’. Words that have the form of a plural, are interpreted accordingly, i.e. they are considered plurals. In many respects, morphological adaptation is a similar process, on the understanding that morphological adaptation involves a paradigmatic mapping which is based on ‘identity of meaning’. In Hindi English pickpocket has become pickpocketer, while French dragon ‘dragoon’ has become dragonder in Dutch. What has happened in these cases is that original pickpocket and dragon have been assigned the formal characteristics that

IV. Grundbegriffe

are typical of words with a similar meaning. Many personal names in English end in -er, and so do many Dutch personal names (-der being a phonologically determined variant). That is, the adaptation of pickpocket and dragon involves a relationship with other personal names in the system. Again, this relationship is paradigmatic in nature: in the case of adaptation it is based on semantic identity, and not on formal identity as is the case with back formation. In Van Marle (1978) attention has been drawn to instances of morphological adaptation with a slightly different character. In modern Turkish, the passive may be formed by means of either -Il, -In or -n. The distribution of these three suffixes is as follows: (a) all verbs take -Il, except for those that end in l or in a vowel, (b) verbs ending in l take -In, while (c) verbs that are vowel-final opt for -n. In Lewis (1967: 150) it is noted that “Just as some verbs take a doubly causative suffix for no obvious reason, so some take a doubly passive suffix”. All double passives involve a combination of -n and -Il. Evidently, what happened is, that the forms in -n are adapted to the general case in -Il, which resulted in double passives with -n-Il. It hardly needs explanation that the adaptation in the direction of the general case is paradigmatically determined, too. Moreover, this example makes also clear that paradigmatic forces may also be operative in agglutinating languages (cf. 4), irrespective of the fact that in truly agglutinating languages word structure may largely be determined by syntagmatics. Reinterpretation, finally, is a phenomenon which may adopt various forms. In the following, focus will be on the type of reinterpretation that is known as suffix telescoping. The tendency exists to reinterpret derivatives involving complex affixation as derivatives of a one degree less complex character. Consider Dutch danseres ‘female dancer’, which is usually considered the derivative in -es of neutral danser ‘dancer’, which in its turn is a derivate in -er of the verb dans-en ‘to dance’. However, there are facts which suggest that there is a tendency to reinterpret danseres as directly derived from dans-en, meaning that original -er-es has been ‘telescoped’ into the new suffix -eres. One argument in favour of this reinterpretation is that there are newly coined words with -eres that cannot readily be considered to be derived from a related word in -er, an example being stripteas-eres

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‘female striptease dancer’ (mentioned in Sassen 1981). The paradigmatic dimension of this type of reinterpretation is clear. A word such as dans-er-es is linked to a new base ⫺ the verb dans-en ⫺, which involves the setting-up of a new paradigmatic relationship. In Koefoed & Van Marle (1980) this kind of phenomena were characterized as ‘short cuts’ in the morphological system, the essence of which is the creative, paradigmatically determined, ‘anchoring’ of complex words in the system.

6.

Concluding remarks

In many respects the relationship between the paradigmatic and the syntagmatic axis of language is unclear. This is not only due to the fact that for a long time the nature of the paradigmatic relationships as such has been rather obscure. Another factor which has no doubt contributed to the unclear status of both dimensions of grammatical structure is that linguists have failed to appreciate that the respective prominence of the syntagmatic and the paradigmatic forces is at least in part typologically determined. As was pointed out, agglutinating languages depend on syntagmatic relationships much more heavily than fusional languages. In addition, the study of the relationship between both axes of language is seriously hindered by the fact that linguistic theories tend to focus either on the paradigmatic dimension of language or on the syntagmatic dimension. That is, theories which are intended to be universally relevant, may have relevance to a specific typological species only. There have always been linguists, of course, who were fully aware of the ‘reality’ and the importance of the paradigmatic relationships. Many students of language change, for instance, have taken a keen interest in the relationships between elements in absentia, since any kind of analogical change involves, somehow or other, a paradigmatic relationship by definition. However, in the mainstream of synchronically oriented theoretical linguistics this diachronic insight has often been overlooked. On the other hand, linguists who concentrated on the paradigmatic relationships often neglected the syntagmatic dimension of language. In present-day morphological theory the discussion concerning the relative importance of both axes of language largely concentrates

on the question whether morphology is ‘amorphous’ (Anderson 1992), i.e. whether the notion of morpheme should be considered the basic building block of word structure or not. As was pointed out above, those linguists who consider the morpheme to be the basic element of word structure, opt for a syntagmatic approach, whereas those linguists who are not inclined to assign the morpheme such a central position generally favour a paradigmatic approach. There can be no doubt that this debate concerning the amorphous character of word structure is a crucial issue, indeed. As will have become clear, however, this issue is only one aspect of a much wider field of investigation: the precise relationship between the two axes of grammatical structure and their interaction with the typological characteristics of the languages under consideration.

7.

References

Anderson, Stephen R. (1992), A-morphous Morphology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Aronoff, Mark (1994), Morphology by Itself. Cambridge/Mass.: MIT Press Becker, Thomas (1990), Analogie und morphologische Theorie. München: Fink Booij, Geert E. (1989), “Complex Verbs and the Theory of Level Ordering”. In: Booij, Geert & Van Marle, Jaap (eds.), Yearbook of Morphology 1989. Dordrecht: Foris, 21⫺30 Booij, Geert E. (1997), “Autonomous Morphology and Paradigmatic Relations”. In: Booij, Geert & Van Marle, Jaap (eds.), Yearbook of Morphology 1996. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1⫺19 Bybee, Joan (1985), Morphology: A Study of the Relation between Meaning and Form. Amsterdam: Benjamins Calder, George (1923), A Gaelic Grammar. Glasgow: Gairm [reprint 1972] Carstairs, Andrew (1987), Allomorphy in Inflexion. London: Croom Helm Koefoed, G. A. T. & Marle, Jaap van (1980), “Humboldtiaanse taalveranderingen, morfologie en de creativiteit van taal”. Spektator 10, 111⫺147 Lewis, Geoffrey L. (1967), Turkish Grammar. Oxford: Oxford University Press Lyons, John (1968), Introduction to Theoretical Linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Marle, Jaap van (1978), “Veranderingen in woordstructuur”. In: Koefoed, Geert A. T. & Marle, Jaap van (eds.), Aspecten van taalverandering. Groningen: Wolters-Noordhoff, 127⫺176

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Marle, Jaap van (1985), On the Paradigmatic Dimension of Morphological Creativity. Dordrecht: Foris Marle, Jaap van (1986), “The Domain Hypothesis: The Study of Rival Morphological Processes”. Linguistics 24, 601⫺627 Marle, Jaap van (1992), “De studie van de paradigmatiek: een poging tot reconstructie”. Forum der Letteren 33, 18⫺28 Marle, Jaap van (1994), “Paradigms”. In: Asher, R. E. (ed.), Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, Vol. VI. Oxford, etc.: Pergamon, 2927⫺2930 Nauta, A. H. (1973), Turks voor Nederlanders. Deventer: Kluwer

Sassen, A. (1981), “Morfologische produktiviteit in het licht van niet-additieve woordafleiding”. Forum der Letteren 22, 126⫺142 Saussure, Ferdinand de (1916), Cours de linguistique ge´ne´rale. Paris: Payot [critical edition by Tullio de Mauro 1976] Wells, Rulon S. (1948), “De Saussure’s System of Linguistics”. Word 3, 1⫺31 Wurzel, Wolfgang U. (1984), Flexionsmorphologie und Natürlichkeit. Berlin: Akademie-Verlag

Jaap van Marle, Amsterdam (The Netherlands)

25. Variation und Invarianz 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

Einleitung Die Varianten Die Invariante Konditionierung Funktion der Variation im Sprachsystem Variation zwischen Sprachsystemen Zitierte Literatur

1.

Einleitung

Sprachliche Einheiten werden dadurch identifiziert, daß sie mit Einheiten auf unterschiedlichen Analyseebenen korreliert werden. Die Korrelation zwischen Einheiten verschiedener Ebene ist unterschiedlicher Art je nach den Ebenen, die zueinander in Beziehung gesetzt werden. Einheiten können in einer Beziehung ‘x bezeichnet y’ stehen, was für die Korrelation der semiotischen Ebenen, nämlich Ausdrucks- vs. Inhaltsebene, gilt. Einheiten können weiterhin in einer Beziehung ‘x ist eine Abstraktion von y’ stehen; eine solche Beziehung besteht z. B. zwischen einem Phonem und den ihm auf der phonetischen Ebene entsprechenden Phonen. Außerdem können Einheiten in einer Beziehung ‘x beinhaltet y’ stehen, vgl. die Beziehung zwischen einem Syntagma und den in ihm beinhalteten Morphemen. In diesem Fall korrelieren einfache Einheiten der einen Ebene mit komplexen Einheiten der anderen Ebene, hier eine einfache syntaktische Einheit mit einer Anzahl morphologischer Einheiten. Wenn nun, wie bei der Signifikations- bzw. Abstraktionsbeziehung, einfache Einheiten unterschiedlicher Ebenen miteinander korrelie-

ren, bestehen zwischen ihnen zweierlei Relationen: ⫺ unterschiedliche Einheiten derselben Ebene korrelieren mit unterschiedlichen Einheiten einer anderen Ebene; eine derartige Relation wird als Opposition bezeichnet, ⫺ unterschiedliche Einheiten derselben Ebene korrelieren mit einer einzigen Einheit einer anderen Ebene; eine derartige Relation heißt Variation. Variation ist dann die Relation zwischen sprachlichen Einheiten, die auf einer Ebene der linguistischen Analyse unterschiedlich sind, während sie auf einer anderen Ebene der Analyse als eine einzelne Einheit betrachtet werden. Die Variation ist also eine methodologische Größe. Sie ergibt sich aus der Korrelation zwischen unterschiedlichen Ebenen der linguistischen Analyse. Dementsprechend bezieht sich der Begriff der Variation also auf: (a) eine Menge von unterschiedlichen Einheiten derselben Ebene, nämlich die Varianten (s. 2), wie z. B. die lateinischen Morphe /re¯k-/ (in /re¯k-s/ ‘Könignom.sg.m’) und /re¯g-/ (in /re¯g-is/ ‘Königgen.sg.m’). (b) eine Einheit auf einer anderen Ebene, mit der alle Varianten korrelieren, nämlich die Invariante (s. 3), wie z. B. das Morphem {reg-} in Bezug auf die Morphe /re¯k-/ und /re¯g-/. Die Invariante wird in Bezug auf die Varianten als zugrundeliegend (s. Art. 51) betrachtet, da das Vor-

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kommen unterschiedlicher Einheiten auf sie zurückgeführt wird. Die Varianten werden als Realisationen der Invariante (vgl. Bauer 1988: 251⫺252; Trubetzkoy 2 1958: 36) in dem Sinne, daß sie unterschiedliche Erscheinungen einer konstanten Größe auf einer gegebenen sprachlichen Ebene sind, konzipiert. (c) Bedingungen (s. 4) bzw. Regeln, die das Vorkommen der einen oder der anderen Variante steuern; im lateinischen Beispiel ist das Vorkommen des Morphs /re¯k-/ phonologisch begründet, da es in der Umgebung vor stimmlosen Konsonanten (z. B. /re¯k-s/, /re¯k-t-um/ u. a.) auftritt. Die Beziehung der Varianten zur Invariante muß von der Beziehung des token zum type unterschieden werden. Während Variation ein Beziehungstyp zwischen Einheiten einer sprachlichen Ebene in Bezug auf Einheiten einer anderen Ebene ist, wird mit dem Begriffspaar token vs. type das einzelne Vorkommen einer Einheit vs. die Abstraktion aus allen ihren Vorkommen bezeichnet. Jedes einzelne Vorkommen eines gegebenen Lautes desselben oder unterschiedlicher Sprecher ist z. B. ein token, d. h. eine einmalige Erscheinung des Lautes, die a priori nicht vollkommen identisch mit den anderen Vorkommen sein kann, während unter type die phonetische Einheit an sich, unabhängig von den Eigentümlichkeiten ihrer einzelnen Erscheinungen verstanden wird.

2.

Die Varianten

Varianten sind Einheiten derselben Ebene, die eine Einheit einer anderen Ebene realisieren. Wegen ihrer Austauschbarkeit werden sie auf den verschiedenen Beschreibungsebenen als Allo-Einheiten (aus dem Griechischen a´llo ‘andere’) bezeichnet und ihre Beziehung ⫺ zumindest auf den formalen Ebenen ⫺ als Alternation (s. Hockett 1958: 272; aus dem lateinischen alter ‘der eine von zweien’). Verschiedene Typen von Variation lassen sich hinsichtlich der Art der Varianten unterscheiden; diesbezüglich sind ihr Status (s. 2.1) und ihre Beziehung zueinander relevant (s. 2.2). 2.1. Status der Varianten Varianten sind Elemente oder Paradigmen derselben Ebene. Die partiellen Synonyme de´fendu, interdit und prohibe´ ‘verbiet:part: perf’ im Französischen sind Elemente, die an derselben Stelle im Text auftreten (1a⫺c),

ohne daß sich die Bedeutung des sprachlichen Ausdrucks ändert. (1) (a) L’alcool est de´fendu. (b) L’alcool est interdit. (c) L’alcool est prohibe´. ‘Alkohol ist untersagt’. Außerdem können Paradigmen miteinander variieren, wie dies z. B. für die Subklassen der freien vs. klitischen Formen der Personalpronomina im Neugriechischen gilt. In Tab. 25.1 sind die beiden Paradigmen abgebildet; die entsprechende Invariante ist das Paradigma der Personen (hier im Singular/Akkusativ): Signifikatum ‘1.sg:akk’ ‘2.sg:akk’ ‘3.sg:akk’

Freie Form eme´na ese´na afto´n

Klitische Form me se ton

Tab. 25.1: Personalpronomina im Neugriechischen

Varianten können Elemente aller sprachlichen Ebenen und darüber hinaus überhaupt aller Beschreibungsebenen der linguistischen Analyse sein. Die Allophone sind Varianten auf der phonetischen Ebene, die Allomorphe sind Varianten auf der morphologischen Ebene, die Alloseme sind Varianten auf der semantischen Ebene, die Allographen sind Varianten in einem Schriftsystem u. a. (s. 3). Die Beziehungen der Allo-Einheiten auf den verschiedenen Beschreibungsebenen sind parallel; d. h. es bestehen grundsätzlich dieselben Typen von Variation (s. Anderson 1992: 13⫺ 14; Hjelmslev 1968: 98f.; Mel’cˇuk 1982: 121⫺ 122). 2.2. Beziehung der Varianten Die Varianten stehen in paradigmatischer Beziehung. Ihre einzige inhärente Eigenschaft ist ihre Beziehung zur Invariante (s. 3). Alle anderen Eigenschaften, die die Beziehung der Varianten in verschiedenen Fällen kennzeichnen, sind aufhebbar, aber dennoch relevant, insofern sich durch sie verschiedene Typen von Variation unterscheiden lassen. Die wichtigsten dieser Eigenschaften sind die Austauschbarkeit der Varianten (s. 2.2.1), ihre Ähnlichkeit (s. 2.2.2), ihre Selbständigkeit (s. 2.2.3), die Regelmäßigkeit ihrer Bildung (s. 2.2.4), ihre Graduierbarkeit (s. 2.2.5) sowie ihre Symmetrie (s. 2.2.6). 2.2.1. Austauschbarkeit Einheiten sind austauschbar, wenn sie in derselben Position vorkommen können. Austauschbar sind nicht nur Varianten, sondern

236 auch und par excellence die Einheiten, die in Opposition stehen. Eigentümlichkeit der Varianten ist jedoch, daß sie ohne Änderung der zugrundeliegenden Repräsentation (s. Art. 51) austauschbar sind. Die Liquiden [r] und [l] in der holländischen Kreolsprache Berbice (Guyana) sind in manchen Umgebungen distinktiv, z. B. [ruku] ‘riechen’ vs. [luku] ‘Kiefer’; in diesem Fall repräsentieren sie unterschiedliche phonologische Einheiten, sie stehen zueinander in Opposition. In anderen Umgebungen sind beide Laute ohne Änderung der Wortbedeutung austauschbar, z. B. [rupu] ⬃ [lupu] ‘rufen’; in diesem Fall stehen sie in freier Variation mit einer gemeinsamen zugrundeliegenden Repräsentation /Lupu/ (s. Kouwenberg 1994: 285). Vollkommen austauschbar sind Varianten, die in freier Variation stehen (s. 4.2.1). Bei der bedingten Variation (s. 4.2.2) ist die Austauschbarkeit beschränkt. Wenn die Variation semantisch, pragmatisch oder außersystemisch bedingt ist (s. 4.2.3), ist der Austausch in derselben strukturellen Umgebung möglich, wie dies z. B. für die französischen Synonyme mort ‘Tod’ und camarde ‘Tod’ (literarische Bezeichnung des Todes) gilt. Allerdings sind nicht beide Varianten in allen kommunikativen Situationen oder sozialen Subsystemen des Französischen gleichfalls verwendbar. In dem Fall, daß die Variation strukturell bedingt ist, ergeben sich aus dem Austausch der Varianten ungrammatische Einheiten, z. B. *[ix] statt [ic¸] im Deutschen. 2.2.2. Ähnlichkeit Im Prinzip müssen zwei Varianten keine Ähnlichkeit aufweisen. In einigen Fällen wird jedoch die Entscheidung, ob Variation vorliegt, nach dem Grad der Ähnlichkeit der Varianten, d. h. nach der Schnittmenge ihrer distinktiven Merkmale, getroffen. In Fällen komplementärer Verteilung (s. 4.2.2) werden Laute, die niemals in derselben phonologischen Umgebung auftreten, als Varianten desselben Phonems bewertet, unter der Bedingung, daß sie „akustisch, bzw. artikulatorisch miteinander verwandt“ sind (Trubetzkoy 21958: 44). Nach dem Kriterium der Ähnlichkeit werden die deutschen Laute [c¸] und [x] als Varianten desselben Phonems betrachtet, während andere Laute, wie z. B. [h] und [n], die gleichfalls im Deutschen niemals in der gleichen Umgebung vorkommen, jedoch keine phonetische Gemeinsamkeit aufweisen, als unterschiedliche Phoneme betrachtet werden. Auf der semantischen Ebene

IV. Grundbegriffe

ist die Unterscheidung zwischen Homonymie und Polysemie parallel. In beiden Fällen werden mehrere semantische Einheiten durch denselben Ausdruck bezeichnet. Aus synchroner Sicht werden sie nach dem Grad der Ähnlichkeit der semantischen Einheiten abgegrenzt. Diejenigen Einheiten, die über eine gewisse Menge von gemeinsamen distinktiven Merkmalen verfügen, wie Japanisch yama ‘Berg’ ⬃ ‘Höhepunkt’, werden als semantische Varianten desselben sprachlichen Zeichens (Polysemie) aufgefaßt, während semantische Einheiten, die als völlig unterschiedlich empfunden werden, wie Japanisch kaeru ‘Frosch’ und ‘wechseln’, als Signifikata unterschiedlicher Zeichen mit identischem Signifikans (Homonymie) analysiert werden. In der Morphologie wird die Ähnlichkeit der Varianten nicht im gleichen Sinne als Kriterium zur Identifizierung von Variation verwendet. So werden Suppletiva (s. Art. 52), die geringe oder gar keine Ähnlichkeit aufweisen, nicht als unterschiedliche Zeichen, sondern als morphologische Varianten desselben Zeichens aufgefaßt (s. Bloomfield 1933: 215; Nida 21976: 44; Mugdan 1986: 34; Art. 46). 2.2.3. Selbständigkeit Die Beziehung der Varianten ist selbständig, wenn ihre Variation nicht durch Gesetzmäßigkeiten des Sprachsystems vorgegeben ist. Ergibt sich die Variation aus allgemein gültigen Regeln, so ist sie nicht mehr selbständig, sondern automatisch (s. Hockett 1958: 279⫺ 280; Art. 47). Allomorphie kann z. B. durch die Anwendung phonologischer Regeln entstehen. Ein typischer Fall sind Allomorphe, die sich durch externe Sandhi ergeben, wie die durch Liaison entstehenden Allomorphe /li/ (in /li para˜ / ‘die Eltern’) ⬃ /liz/ (in /liz a˜ fa˜ / ‘die Kinder’) des bestimmten Artikels les im Französischen. 2.2.4. Regelmäßigkeit Die Beziehung der Varianten ist regelmäßig, wenn ihre Unterschiede durch eine bei einer Menge von Einheiten anwendbaren Regel voraussagbar sind. Regelmäßigkeit (s. Art. 32) ist ein gradueller Begriff; sie entspricht der Anzahl der Einheiten, die auf die gleiche Art und Weise variieren (s. Hockett 1958: 280⫺281). Vollkommen regelmäßig ist die automatische Variation. Bei der selbständigen Variation unterscheidet man verschiedene Grade von Regelmäßigkeit. Die spanischen Allomorphe duerm- (in duerm-o ‘schlaf-1.sg’) ⬃ dorm- (in dorm-ı´a ‘schlaf-pr‰t/imp:1.sg’) variieren nach

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einer bei einer Gruppe von spanischen Verben (vgl. absuelv- ⬃ absolv- ‘absolvier-’, oder muestr- ⬃ mostr- ‘zeig-’) anwendbaren Regel der Stammalternation. In diesem Sinne zeigen diese Allomorphe einen gewissen Grad an Regelmäßigkeit. Vollkommen unregelmäßig ist dagegen die suppletive Allomorphie (s. Mel’cˇuk 1982: 110; Mugdan 1986: 35); die Beziehung der Allomorphe des spanischen Verbs ir ‘gehen’ hat keine Entsprechungen in der spanischen Verbmorphologie: v- (in v-oy ‘geh-1.sg’) ⬃ i- (in i-ba ‘geh-pr‰t/imp:1.sg’) ⬃ fu- (in fu-i ‘geh-pr‰t/perf:1.sg’). 2.2.5. Graduierbarkeit Die Beziehung zwischen den Varianten ist graduell, wenn sie sich in einer Abfolge hinsichtlich eines gegebenen Parameters anordnen lassen. Varianten, die graduell aufeinander bezogen sind, befinden sich auf einem Kontinuum. Beispielsweise sind die Allophone [i] ⬃ [i] ⬃ [j] des lateinischen Phonems /i/ graduelle Varianten, da sie verschiedenen Positionen auf dem Kontinuum des Öffnungsgrades besetzen. Artikel, Numeralia und Adjektive, die als alternative Strategien in der Dimension der Determination im Deutschen betrachtet werden (s. Seiler 1985: 436⫺441), sind graduelle Varianten hinsichtlich ihrer stellungmäßigen Distanz vom Bezugsnomen: (2) die zwei roten Kugeln Adjektive werden dem Determinatum unmittelbar vorangestellt, Numeralia werden den Adjektiven vorangestellt, aber den Artikeln nachgestellt, und Artikel weisen die größte Entfernung zum Determinatum auf. 2.2.6. Symmetrie Bei der Beschreibung der Variation stellt sich die Frage, ob die Beziehung der Varianten asymmetrisch oder symmetrisch ist, d. h. ob sich eine der Varianten gegenüber der anderen als grundlegend identifizieren läßt oder nicht (s. Art. 50). Bei der asymmetrischen Variation wird eine Variante als Basisvariante und die anderen als sekundäre oder abgeleitete Varianten betrachtet (vgl. Bauer 1988: 15; Bloomfield 1933: 164; Hockett 1958: 281; Nida 21976: 45). Die Asymmetrie der Varianten hat sowohl diachrone als auch synchrone Aspekte. Aus diachroner Sicht ist eine Variante grundlegend, wenn die anderen als ihre Ableitungen aufgefaßt werden können. Im haitianischen Kreol ist von den Varianten /sˇeval/ ⬃

/sˇival/ ‘Pferd’ und /sˇemiz/ ⬃ /sˇimiz/ ‘Hemd’ die jeweils erste grundlegend, da sie dem Herkunftswort im Französischen am nächsten ist (s. Hall 1953: 23). Im Wardaman (Nordaustralien: Non-Pama Nyungan) gibt es eine Reihe Wortformvarianten, die durch die Alternation y ⬃ w unterschieden werden, z. B. yibiyan ⬃ yibiwan ‘Person’ oder yibiyi ⬃ yibiwi ‘Vater’. Die Formen mit y können als Fernassimilation zum Nominalklassenpräfix y- interpretiert werden, die über zwei Silben hinweg stattfindet. Da die Formen mit w nicht abgeleitet werden können, werden sie diachron gesehen als Basisformen aufgefaßt (s. Merlan 1994: 52). Synchron betrachtet ist eine Variante grundlegend, wenn ihr Vorkommen im Vergleich zu den anderen weniger bedingt ist. Bei den russischen Verben der ersten Konjugation werden Velare am Stammende vor e palatalisiert, vgl. mog-u´ ‘könn-1.sg’ ⬃ mo´zˇ-et ‘könn-3.sg’. Da die palatalisierten Varianten in ihrem Vorkommen beschränkt sind, werden die nicht palatalisierten als Basisformen angesehen. Ein weiteres Kriterium für die Identifikation der grundlegenden Variante in Fällen regelmäßiger Variation ist die Voraussagbarkeit. Durch die Anwendung einer Regel auf die grundlegende Variante kann man die abgeleitete Variante voraussagen, aber nicht vice versa. Bei den Varianten /re¯k-/ ⬃ /re¯g-/ im Lateinischen (s. 1) ist die Variante /re¯g-/ grundlegend, da es voraussagbar ist, daß das stimmhafte /g/ vor Stimmlosen assimiliert wird (vgl. /re¯k-s/, /re¯k-t-um/ u. a.). Umgekehrt ist es nicht möglich /re¯g-/ aus /re¯k-/ abzuleiten, da es im Lateinischen keine Regel für die Verstimmhaftung von /k/ vor Stimmhaften gibt (s. /re¯k-s/ ⬃ /re¯g-is/ aber /lu¯k-s/ ‘Licht-nom. sg.m/f’ ⬃ /lu¯k-is/ ‘Licht-gen.sg.m/f’). In mehreren Fällen werden keine Kriterien für das Herausragen der einen oder der anderen Variante als grundlegend erfüllt, wie z. B. bei den Deminutivsuffixen -chen und -lein im Deutschen. Dann ist die Variation symmetrisch.

3.

Die Invariante

Austauschbarkeit, Ähnlichkeit, Selbständigkeit, Regelmäßigkeit, Graduierbarkeit und Symmetrie sind zwar Eigenschaften, die für die Unterscheidung von Typen der Variation relevant sind, jedoch keine Kriterien für das Bestehen von Variation zwischen sprachli-

238

IV. Grundbegriffe

chen Einheiten. Die Invariante ist weiterhin nicht die Schnittmenge der Merkmale der Varianten. Erstens werden Einheiten mit kaum erkennbaren Gemeinsamkeiten wie die Suppletiva als Varianten aufgefaßt. Zweitens läßt sich die Variation nicht anhand der Gemeinsamkeiten der Einheiten voraussagen. Die Schnittmenge der Phone [›] und [h] ⫺ nämlich die Merkmale [frikativ] und [stimmlos] ⫺ sind nicht entscheidend für die Tatsache ihrer Variation im Japanischen, da auch Phone mit denselben gemeinsamen Merkmalen, wie [s] und [h] im Japanischen, in Opposition stehen können. Die Varianten werden dadurch identifiziert, daß sie dieselbe Einheit einer anderen Analyseebene realisieren. Dieses gemeinsame Korrelat der Varianten ist ihre Invariante. Die Invariante wird als X-em bezeichnet, z. B. Phonem, Morphem (s. Tab. 25.2), was eine Operation von Abstraktion auf Einheiten wie Phon, Morph u. a. angewandt andeutet (s. Iturrioz 1985; 1986; Mel’cˇuk 1982: 120⫺122). Demgegenüber werden die Varianten als Allo-X in dem Sinne, daß sie abwechselnd die Invariante realisieren, bezeichnet. Variante Allophon Allomorph Allolex Allosyntagma Allosem Allograph

Invariante Phonem Morphem Lexem Syntagmem Semem Graphem

Tab. 25.2: Varianten und Invariante

Varianten und Invariante sind Einheiten unterschiedlicher Ebenen. Je nach den korrelierten Ebenen unterscheiden sich zwei Typen von Beziehung zwischen Varianten und Invariante: die Invariante befindet sich entweder auf einer Ebene mit semiotischer Beziehung (s. 3.1) oder mit Abstraktionsbeziehung (s. 3.2) zur Ebene der Varianten. 3.1. Die semiotische Invariante Bei Ebenen, die zueinander in semiotischer Beziehung stehen, befinden sich die Varianten auf der einen und die Invariante auf der anderen Seite des semiotischen Zeichens. Wenn mehrere Signifikantia mit einem Signifikatum korrelieren, liegt Polymorphie vor. Synonyme wie die deutschen Wörter Samstag und Sonnabend bezeichnen dasselbe Signifikatum, in diesem Beispiel denselben Wochentag, und in diesem Sinne werden sie als

alternative Signifikantia des gleichen Signifikatums betrachtet. Allomorphe wie die Nominalsuffixe (-n ⬃ -s ⬃ -e u. a.) im Deutschen werden gleichfalls anhand ihres gemeinsamen Signifikatums als alternative Realisationen desselben Morphems {plural} betrachtet. Ein anderer Fall von Ausdrucksvariation in Bezug auf denselben Inhalt ist das Kontinuum von extremer Ellipse bis hin zur maximalen Explizitheit im Sinne von Jakobson (1973: 37⫺38). Wenn umgekehrt ein Signifikans für mehrere Signifikata steht, spricht man von Polysemie bzw. Polyfunktionalität, z. B. dt. Flügel in den Bedeutungen Körperteil eines Vogels bzw. Konzertklavier. Variation in Bezug auf eine semiotische Invariante weisen auch andere semiotische Systeme auf. Polymorphie besteht bei graphischen Zeichen z. B., wenn mehrere Schriftzeichen den gleichen Laut repräsentieren. In der arabischen Schrift werden die meisten Schriftzeichen durch vier graphische Varianten je nach ihrer Position im Wort (wortinitial, -intern, -final und isoliert) realisiert. Polyfunktionalität in graphischen Systemen besteht, wenn mehrere Laute durch dasselbe Schriftzeichen repräsentiert werden, z. B. steht das v im Deutschen für /f/ in von und für /v/ in Vulkan. 3.2. Die abstrakte Invariante Variation besteht weiterhin in Bezug auf Ebenen, die in Abstraktionsbeziehung stehen. Die abstraktere Ebene ergibt sich aus einer Auswahl von Einheiten der konkreteren Ebene anhand ebenenspezifischer Parameter. In diesem Fall ist die Invariante eine Einheit auf der abstrakteren Ebene und die Varianten sind Einheiten, die die Invariante auf der konkreteren Ebene realisieren. Phonologische Einheiten sind beispielsweise eine Abstraktion aus den phonetischen Einheiten eines Sprachsystems. Unterschiedliche Phone realisieren dieselbe phonologische Invariante, wenn sie im jeweiligen phonologischen System nicht distinktiv sind. Die Invariante der phonetischen Einheiten [p] ⬃ [ph] im Englischen ist beispielsweise die phonologische Einheit /p/. Da Aspiration kein distinktives Merkmal im Englischen ist, ist die Unterscheidung dieser phonetischen Einheiten auf der phonologischen Ebene nicht relevant, und sie lassen sich also auf eine abstrakte Einheit reduzieren. Das Lexem ist als Basiseinheit des Lexikons eine Abstraktion der Flexionsformen, die ein Wort aufweist. So werden die Wort-

239

25. Variation und Invarianz

formen nehme, nimmst, nahm, nimm usw. im Lexikon durch die abstrakte lexikalische Einheit nehmen repräsentiert. Die Invariante entspricht hier einer Klasse von lexikalischen Elementen, die über eine gemeinsame Eigenschaft verfügen, nämlich die Zugehörigkeit zu demselben Flexionsparadigma. Die Abstraktion aller syntaktischen Konstruktionen, die dieselbe syntaktische Relation einführen, wird von Mel’cˇuk (1982: 120⫺121)

als Syntagmen definiert. Das Syntagmem {Numeruskongruenz zwischen Subjekt und Prädikat} wird im attischen Dialekt des Griechischen mindestens durch die folgenden Allosyntagmen bzw. syntaktischen Konstruktionen realisiert: den prototypischen Fall der Übereinstimmung des Numerus bei Prädikat und Subjekt (s. 3 a), die constructio ad sensum mit Kollektiva (s. 3 b) und die attische Syntax (s. 3 c):

(3) (a) to` pse˘ phisma ege´neto def:nom.sg.n Beschluß:nom.sg.n werd:aor.3.sg ‘der Beschluß ist verabschiedet’ (Lys. 13.56) (b) he¯ po´lis heı´lonto def:nom.sg.f Stadt:nom.sg.f auswähl:aor.3.pl ‘die Stadt hat ausgewählt’ (Xen. Hell. 3.3.4) (c) kala` eˆ¯ n ta` spha´gia gut:nom.pl.n sein:pr‰t.3.sg def:nom.sg.n Opfer:nom.pl.n ‘die Opfer waren gut’ (Xen. Anab. 4.3.19) Alloseme sind unterschiedliche semantische Einheiten, die in verschiedenen Kontexten durch denselben sprachlichen Ausdruck bezeichnet werden. Ihre Abstraktion ist ein Semem oder laut Jakobson die “Gesamtbedeutung”. Nach Jakobson (1936) hat der russische Dativ die Gesamtbedeutung “peripherer Status und Involviertheit des Referenten in die Handlung”. Diese Gesamtbedeutung ist eine Abstraktion der unterschiedlichen Anwendungen des russischen Dativs, wie der Dativ des indirekten Objekts, der ethische Dativ, der Dativ des entfernten Objekts u. a., die als kontextuell bedingte Instantiierungen betrachtet werden. In abstrakteren Fällen können die semantischen Varianten Instanzen einer funktionalen Dimension sein. Beispielsweise wird das Affix -me in Huichol mit unterschiedlichen Funktionen wie ‘Attribution’ und ‘Adverbialisierung einer Proposition’ verwendet, die dennoch als in geordneter Abfolge stehende Instanzen des Kontinuums der Nominalisierung aufeinander bezogen sind (s. Iturrioz 1990). Die semantische Variation wird durch Abstraktion analysiert, insofern die Varianten als unterschiedliche Kontextualisierungen einer semantischen Einheit beschrieben werden. In Fällen von Polysemie, wie dt. Flügel (s. 3.1), die sich nicht auf den Kontext zurückführen lassen, werden die semantischen Varianten ihrer Forminvariante gegenübergestellt. In der Graphematik werden graphische Varianten als Allographe eines Graphems

aufgefaßt. Grapheme stehen in Abstraktionsbeziehung zu Allographen, z. B. *f+ zu f ⬃ F, während Laute in semiotischer Beziehung zu Graphemen stehen, z. B. /f/ zu *f+ ⬃ *v+ im Deutschen. Auf der Ebene des Sprachsystems stehen parole und langue zueinander in einer Beziehung von Abstraktion. Nach der Auffassung des Sprachsystems von de Saussure ist die langue das “mode`le collectif” bzw. die Zusammenfassung aller individuellen Sprachrealisationen (s. Saussure 1916: 38).

4.

Konditionierung

Die Konditionierung umfaßt die Bedingungen, die das Vorkommen der Varianten steuern. Es gibt verschiedene Typen von Bedingungen: eine Variante kann entweder obligatorisch, optional oder ausgeschlossen in einer Umgebung sein (s. 4.1). In Abhängigkeit von den Bedingungen werden die Varianten unterschiedlich verteilt, z. B. schließen sie einander aus oder variieren frei miteinander (s. 4.2). Entscheidend für die Unterscheidung von Typen der Variation ist die sprachliche Ebene, auf der sich die Bedingungen befinden bzw. die Variation konditioniert ist (s. 4.3). 4.1. Bedingungen Eine Bedingung kann das Vorkommen einer Variante erfordern, ermöglichen oder ausschließen. Im Mandarin (Chinesisch) gibt es zwei Varianten für den Ausdruck des indirekten Objekts, wenn es dem direkten Objekt

240

IV. Grundbegriffe

vorangestellt wird: entweder wird es mit dem Formativ geˇi ‘geben’ eingeführt, oder aber ohne offene Markierung. Verschiedene Verben stellen unterschiedliche Bedingungen für

die Markierung des indirekten Objekts durch geˇi (s. Li & Thomson 1981: 374). Verben wie da`i ‘bringen’ jı` ‘schicken’ und xieˇ ‘schreiben’ erfordern geˇi:

(4) (a) ta¯ da`i-le yi ba¯o ta´ng geˇi Zha¯ngsa¯n 3.sg bring-perf ein Beutel Süßigkeit dat Zhangsan ‘er/sie hat für Zhangsan einen Beutel Süßigkeiten gebracht’ (b) * ta¯ da`i-le Zha¯ngsa¯n yi ba¯o ta´ng 3.sg bring-perf Zhangsan ein Beutel Süßigkeit (Li & Thomson 1981: 374) Verben wie hua´n ‘zurückgeben’, jia¯o ‘lehren’ und fu` ‘bezahlen’ ermöglichen die Markie-

rung mit geˇi, können jedoch auch ein unmarkiertes indirektes Objekt regieren:

(5) (a) ta¯ hua´n-le yi wa˘n ro`u geˇi nı˘ 3.sg zurückbring-perf ein Schlüssel Fleisch dat 2.sg ‘er/sie hat dir eine Schüssel Fleisch zurückgegeben’ (b) ta¯ hua´n-le nı˘ yi wa˘n ro`u 3.sg zurückbring-perf 2.sg ein Schüssel Fleisch ‘er/sie hat dir eine Schüssel Fleisch zurückgegeben’ (Li & Thomson 1981: 376) Verben wie ga´osu ‘sagen’, we`n ‘fragen’, und qia˘ng ‘stehlen’ schließen geˇi aus: (6) (a) wo˘ we`n-le ta¯ jı˘-ge we`nti 1.sg frag-perf 3.sg verschieden-cl Problem ‘ich habe ihn zu verschiedenen Problemen befragt (⫽ ich habe ihm mehrere Fragen gestellt)’ (b) * wo˘ we`n-le jı˘-ge we`nti geˇi ta¯ 1.sg frag-perf verschieden-cl Problem dat 3.sg (Li & Thomson 1981: 378) 4.2. Verteilung der Varianten Hinsichtlich der Konditionierung unterscheiden sich verschiedene Typen von Variation. Wenn die Varianten nicht konditioniert sind und in allen möglichen Umgebungen in gleicher Verteilung stehen, spricht man von freier Variation (s. 4.2.1). Wenn die Varianten konditioniert sind, spricht man von bedingter Variation (s. 4.2.2), die sich weiter in verschiedene Subtypen nach der Art der Verteilung der Varianten unterteilen läßt. 4.2.1. Freie Variation Wenn zwei Einheiten vertauscht werden können und gleiche Verteilung aufweisen, wenn also keine Bedingungen das Vorkommen der einen oder der anderen steuern, so sind diese Einheiten freie oder fakultative Varianten (s. Art. 49). Sprachzeichen, die in freier Variation stehen, heißen synonym. Im Indonesischen sind z. B. die Synonyme bisa ‘können1’

und dapat ‘können2’ in allen Umgebungen austauschbar. In Abb. 25.1 ist die gleiche Verteilung beider Varianten abgebildet. Die Extension ihres Vorkommens dehnt sich über die gleiche Anzahl von Umgebungen aus. alle Umgebungen I I

bisa dapat

J J

Abb. 25.1: Gleiche Verteilung

In strukturalistischer Sicht wird von freier Variation in Bezug auf die Konditionierung innerhalb des Sprachsystems gesprochen. Freie Variation besteht z. B. zwischen Lauten, die genau in derselben Umgebung auftreten und miteinander vertauscht werden können, ohne einen Unterschied auf der semanti-

241

25. Variation und Invarianz

schen Ebene hervorzurufen (s. Trubetzkoy 2 1958: 42). Weiterhin unterscheidet Trubetzkoy zwischen allgemeingültigen und individuellen sowie zwischen stilistisch relevanten und irrelevanten fakultativen Varianten. Die Zunahme des Interesses an außersystemischen Faktoren, die den sprachlichen Ausdruck beeinflussen, hatte die Betrachtung der Variation nicht nur aus struktureller Sicht zur Folge. So ist in diesem Rahmen die freie Variation auf die Fälle beschränkt, wo keine inner- noch außersystemischen Bedingungen das Vorkommen der Varianten steuern. Wenn jegliche Konditionierung aus der Domäne der freien Variation ausgeschlossen werden muß, so bleiben als fakultative Varianten nur alternative Einheiten, die derselbe Sprecher in der gleichen kommunikativen Situation anwenden würde (Fluktuation, s. Clairis 1991; Art. 49; nach Hockett 1958 “sporadic alternation”; nach Labov 1969 “inherent variation”). In einer extremen Ausprägung dieser Tendenz, vertreten von Wolfram (1973), besteht gar keine freie Variation, und alle derartigen Fälle werden als “code-switching” zwischen ko-existierenden Subsystemen behandelt. Die Feststellung von fakultativen Varianten entstehe dadurch, daß es der Theorie an Kategorien mangele, die sie konditionieren würden (1973: 2). In der Tat ist die freie Variation sowie die Konditionierung immer bezüglich einer gegebenen sprachlichen Ebene zu verstehen. So sind die indonesischen Synonyme bisa und dapat bezüglich ihrer Bedeutung fakultative Varianten, aber bezüglich ihrer geographischen Distribution sind sie bedingt, da in Malaysia hauptsächlich dapat verwendet wird. Dort sind weiterhin beide Varianten auch pragmatisch bedingt, da bisa dort geradezu als unhöflich gilt. 4.2.2. Bedingte Variation Die bedingte Variation wird in weitere Unterarten je nach der Distribution der Varianten aufgeteilt. Die Beschreibung der Typen von Variation anhand mengentheoretischer Begriffe wie Inklusion, Überlappung u. a. stammt von Bloch (1948). Die 3 Person Singular wird im Deutschen mit dem Suffix -t im Präsens, aber mit dem Suffix -e im Präteritum kodiert. In diesem Beispiel ist das Vorkommen der Varianten derart bedingt, daß in der Umgebung, in der die eine vorkommt, die andere ausgeschlossen ist und vice versa (s. Abb. 25.2); die Varianten stehen also in komplementärer Vertei-

lung und werden kombinatorische Varianten genannt. Präsens

Präteritum

-t

I

-e

J I

J

Abb. 25.2. Komplementäre Verteilung

Die anderen Unterarten, nämlich die inklusive und die überlappende Verteilung, sind eigentlich komplexe Typen, die sich aus der Kombination gleicher und komplementärer Verteilung erzeugen lassen. Indonesische Personalpronomina verfügen über freie und affigierte Allomorphe. Die freien Formen treten in allen Umgebungen auf, während die gebundenen nur in den Funktionen des Verbobjekts und des Possessors vorkommen (s. Sneddon 1996: 165⫺6). Dieser Typ von Verteilung, bei dem eine Variante nur in einem Teil der Umgebungen, in denen die andere vorkommt, möglich ist, heißt inklusive Verteilung (s. Abb. 25.3). Subjekt

Objekt I

Possessor

affigierte Pronomina

freie Pronomina

I

J J

Abb. 25.3: Inklusive Verteilung

Chinesisch verfügt über zwei Varianten für die Kodierung des indirekten Objektes (s. 4.1). Es wird durch das Formativ geˇi markiert oder es bleibt unmarkiert. Die Verteilung beider Varianten ist durch das Verb bedingt; manche Verben erlauben das Vorkommen der einen Variante, manche das der anderen, und manche das beider. Dieser Typ von Verteilung, bei dem jede Variante in einer Umgebung obligatorisch ist, sie aber alle in einer anderen Umgebung möglich sind, heißt überlappende Verteilung (s. Abb. 25.4). jı` I I

we`n

jia¯o

unmarkiertes IO

markiertes IO

J

Abb. 25.4: Überlappende Verteilung

J

242

IV. Grundbegriffe

4.2.3. Kovariation Ein besonderer Typ von Verteilung der Varianten ist die Kovariation, nämlich die ikonische Korrelation zwischen variablen Größen auf unterschiedlichen Ebenen. Varianten, die mehrfach konditioniert sind, weisen Kovariation auf, wenn ihre Verteilungen hinsichtlich der verschiedenen Konditionierungen parallel sind. Die alternativen Strategien auf der Dimension der Determination im Beispiel die zehn roten Kugel (s. (2)) stehen in gradueller Beziehung hinsichtlich ihrer Distanz vom Bezugsnomen. Adjektive weisen die geringste und Artikel die maximale Distanz auf (s. 2.2.5). Parallel ist die Verteilung der Varianten hinsichtlich der Aussonderung der potentiell determinierten Bezugsnomina. So determinieren Adjektive eine spezifische Untermenge von Nomina (z. B. determiniert das Adjektiv rot nur Gegenstände, die eine Farbe haben können), Numeralia determinieren eine größere Untermenge von Nomina (alle Individualnomina) und Artikel eine noch größere Untermenge (alle Appelativa). So entsteht die folgende Analogie (s. Abb. 25.5): “Das Potential eines Determinators für die Aussonderung eines durch das Hauptnomen bezeichneten Gegenstandes wächst mit der potentiellen Distanz des Determinators von Hauptnomen” (Seiler 1985: 438; 1991: 441⫺447). minimale Distanz mittlere Distanz maximale Distanz potentiell farbige Gegenstände Individualnomina Appelativa I I I

zehn

die

rot

J J J

Abb. 25.5: Kovariation

Charakteristische Fälle von Kovariation sind die Grammatikalitätsskalen, bei denen unterschiedliche paradigmatische und syntagmatische Parameter parallel variieren (s. Leh-

mann 1995: 164; s. auch Iturrioz et al. 1988). Die englischen lokalen Relatoren in back of und behind stehen in gradueller Beziehung hinsichtlich ihrer syntagmatischen Kohäsion (in back of ist ein Syntagma, behind ein Wort) und hinsichtlich ihres Skopus (in back of wird vor allem mit Gegenständen, die eine orientierte Konfiguration aufweisen, verwendet, während behind mit allen Gegenständen auftritt). 4.3. Arten und Ebenen der Konditionierung Die Beziehungen zwischen Varianten und bedingenden Faktoren in den in 4.2.2 eingeführten Beispielen sind unterschiedlicher Art. In Abb. 25.4 ist die Beziehung der alternativen Markierungen des indirekten Objekts und der Verben, die ihr Vorkommen steuern, kontextuell, d. h. die Varianten stehen zu den Bedingungen in einer Beziehung ‘x in Kontext von y’. In Abb. 25.3 ist die Beziehung zwischen einerseits freien und affigierten Pronomina und andererseits den syntaktischen Funktionen Subjekt, Objekt und Possessor funktional, d. h. die Varianten stehen zu den Bedingungen in einer Beziehung ‘x in Funktion von y’. Die Bedingungen sind auf allen sprachlichen Ebenen zu identifizieren. Die Verteilung der Varianten kann strukturell, also phonologisch, morphologisch oder syntaktisch konditioniert sein. Strukturell konditionierte Variation besteht in der Bestimmung struktureller Umgebungen, in denen die jeweilige Variante möglich, obligatorisch oder ausgeschlossen ist (ausführlich über strukturell konditionierte Variation s. Art. 47⫺48). Auf der semantischen und pragmatischen Ebene besteht die Konditionierung in den Konnotationen, die das Vorkommen der Varianten begleiten. Im Huichol wird der Plural durch fünf alternative Techniken kodiert, die nach den semantischen Eigenschaften der Nomina verteilt werden (s. Iturrioz et al. 1986). Im Samoanischen verfügen ergative Verben über eine kurze und eine lange Form, die synonym und in den meisten Umgebungen austauschbar sind. Die lange Form wird jedoch vorgezogen, wenn der Actor prominent ist, während die kurze Form ausgewählt wird, wenn die Affektion des Patiens im Fokus der Äußerung steht (s. Mosel & Hovdhaugen 1992: 747⫺763). Die freien und klitischen Pronomina im Griechischen (s. Tab. 25.1) sind jeweils ohne Änderung der Satzbedeutung verwendbar. Die Auswahl der freien

243

25. Variation und Invarianz

Formen ist jedoch emphatisierend; ihr Vorkommen impliziert, daß die bezeichnete Person eine prominente pragmatische Funktion innehat, wie z. B. neues Topik, kontrastiver Fokus u. a. Die Varianten können weiterhin anhand von Faktoren außersystematischer Art, wie die kommunikative Situation und die soziale oder geographische Distribution der Sprachgemeinschaft, verteilt werden. Varianten, die von außersprachlichen Parametern konditioniert werden, lassen sich verschiedenen Subsystemen der Sprache zuordnen, d. h. sie gehören zu Paradigmen von Elementen, die Merkmale eines kommunikativen oder sozialen Verhaltens oder auch regionaler Ausdruckspräferenzen sind. Dadurch, daß Sprachsysteme von verschiedenen Sprachen in verschiedenen Situationen zu verschiedenen kommunikativen Zwecken verwendet werden, verzweigen sie sich in Allosysteme. Variation ergibt sich aus der Anwendung der Sprache in verschiedenen kommunikativen Situationen. Im Einklang mit den wechselnden Redekontexten entwickelt jeder Sprecher eine breite Palette von systematisch alternierenden Ausdrucksweisen. Aus diesem Grund hatte Labov (1966) für die Beschreibung phonologischer Variation vier Elizitationsumgebungen ausgewählt (a. spontaner Ausdruck, b. Interview, c. Rezitieren, d. isolierte Wörter lesen; s. 4). Labov kritisiert die Idealisierung einer homogenen Sprachgemeinschaft und einer die soziale Funktion ausklammernden Kompetenz und führt stattdessen ein pragmatisch orientiertes Modell ein, das der Fähigkeit der Sprecher zur Konstituierung von Redesituationen und zum situationsangemessenen Sprachhandeln Rechnung tragen soll (s. Labov 1969; Sankoff & Labov 1979). Die kommunikative Konditionierung kann Variation auf allen sprachlichen Ebenen steuern. Im Huichol weisen einige Lokativpräfixe zwei phonologisch konditionierte Varianten, nämlich mit Endvokal /u/ oder /È/ auf, wobei die Anteriorisierung in Assimilation zum ersten Stammvokal auftritt. Die Anwendung der phonologischen Regel ist weiterhin von Faktoren der kommunikativen Situation, wie Tempo u. a. abhängig (s. Go´mez 1997). Im Samoanischen wird ein Suffix, das lange Formen ergativer Verben markiert, in formalem Redestil als -ina und in spontaner Rede als -a realisiert (s. Mosel & Hovdhaugen 1992: 745). Im mexika-

nischen Spanisch sind alle Varianten der Kongruenz in (7) möglich: (7) (a) … esta mujer, uno de los miembros ma´s conocidos … (b) … esta mujer, una de los miembros ma´s conocidos … (Siglo XXI, 6. 12. 94) (c) … esta mujer, una de las miembros ma´s conocidas … (d) … esta mujer, una de las miembras ma´s conocidas … ‘… diese Frau, ein der bekanntesten Mitglieder …’ Keine dieser Varianten kann streng genommen als ungrammatisch angesehen werden. Unterschiedliche Sprechergruppen ziehen die genus- oder die sexusorientierte Kongruenz vor, was wiederum ihre Einstellung gegenüber den gesellschaftlichen Strukturen widerspiegelt. Variation kann weiterhin geographisch bedingt sein. Im Chicano-Spanischen (SüdUSA) werden auf -a auslautende Maskulina des Standard-Spanischen (s. Tab. 25.3) dem Paradigma der auf -a auslautenden Feminina angeglichen. Standard-Spanisch el programa el problema el dilema el drama el aroma

Chicano-Spanisch la programa la problema la dilema la drama la aroma

Tab. 25.3: Geographisch bedingte Genusvariation

Die Invariante bei der geographischen Konditionierung ist das im Rahmen der strukturellen Dialektologie als “Diasystem” bezeichnete tertium comparationis aller regionalen Varianten. Angenommen, zwei Sprecher verschiedener Dialekte kommen in Kontakt, z. B. ein Sprecher des Jiddischen, dessen Dialekt die Opposition /i/ und /i/ aufweist, und ein anderer, dessen Dialekt diese Opposition nicht aufweist und nur über ein einziges Phonem /i/ verfügt, dann müssen beide Sprecher auf das Diasystem zurückgreifen können, um festzustellen, welchen Einheiten des eigenen Subsystems die Einheiten des kontaktierten Subsystems entsprechen (s. Weinreich 1986: 22). Auf die Fälle außersystematisch konditionierter Variation richtet sich die sprachliche Normierung bzw. Standardisierung, die die Reduktion einer Menge von Varianten auf

244

IV. Grundbegriffe

eine einzige beabsichtigt. Die als Standard ausgewählte Variante ist oft die grundlegende, entweder in diachroner oder in synchroner Sicht, oder auch in Bezug auf die Sprachpräferenzen einer prominenten sozialen Gruppe. Typisches Beispiel ist der Gebrauch der unbetonten Formen der Personalpronomina der dritten Person im Spanischen. Die Real Academia Espan˜ola schlägt die folgenden Varietäten als Standard vor: lo ‘akk.m’, los ‘akk.pl.m’, la ‘akk.f’, las ‘akk.pl.f’, le ‘dat.m/f’ und ‘akk.m (belebt)’, les ‘dat.pl.m/f’ und ‘akk.pl.m (belebt)’. Diese Varianten seien grundlegend in Anbetracht der Etymologie und des Gebrauchs unter modernen Schriftstellern. Im tatsächlichen Sprachgebrauch kommen jedoch auch andere Varianten vor, die als Abweichungen von der Standard-Variante angesehen werden. So wird der Gebrauch von lo und los im Dativ (statt le und les) als loismo bezeichnet: (8) lo regale´ un disco ‘ich schenkte ihm eine Schallplatte’ Ähnlich wird der Gebrauch von la und las im Dativ (statt le und les) als laı´smo bezeichnet: (9) la regale´ un disco ‘ich schenkte ihr eine Schallplatte’ Schließlich wird der Gebrauch von le und les für das Femininum oder das unbelebte Maskulinum im Akkusativ (statt la und las sowie lo und los) als leı´smo bezeichnet: (10) yo le vi ayer en la calle ‘ich sah sie gestern auf der Straße’ Diese Variation im Sprachgebrauch ist durch mehrere Faktoren bedingt. Sie entsteht aus einer systemischen Motivation, nämlich die Disambiguierung des Dativs, der nur über eine Form für unterschiedliche Genera verfügt. Die Konditionierung ist außersystemisch, die Auswahl der entsprechenden Variante wird nämlich von der jeweiligen kommunikativen Situation und weiterhin von den Präferenzen in der jeweiligen sozialen oder geographischen Varietät des Spanischen beeinflußt.

5.

Funktion der Variation im Sprachsystem

Ideale kommunikative Systeme sind solche, die maximale Ökonomie aufweisen, bei denen nämlich jede strukturelle Einheit einen konstanten kommunikativen Beitrag leistet.

Programmiersprachen sind z. B. so konzipiert. Natürliche Sprache folgt diesem Prinzip nicht immer, da sie z. B. Variation aufweist. In Sprachauffassungen, die eine Idealisierung des Sprachsystems anstreben, wird Variation als redundantes Phänomen betrachtet. So zielen z. B. Planungssprachen auf die Standardisierung von idio- bzw. soziolektalen Varianten ab und in der Grammatikographie wird oft von außersystemisch konditionierter Variation abgesehen. Im Strukturalismus wird die Variation des sprachlichen Ausdrucks der parole zugewiesen, und als irrelevant für das Sprachsystem (langue) betrachtet (s. Saussure 1916: 36⫺39). Insofern es funktionale Korrelate der Variation zu identifizieren gibt, sind sie in ihrer Konditionierung festzustellen. Die Beziehung zwischen Varianten und Bedingungen ist dialektisch. Das Vorhandensein von Bedingungen steuert das Vorkommen der Varianten und das Vorkommen der Varianten impliziert umgekehrt das Vorhandensein von Bedingungen. In diesem Sinne ist es die Funktion der Variation, eine konditionierende Umgebung zu implizieren, sei es ihre strukturelle Umgebung, sei es der kommunikative oder soziale Rahmen, in den der sprachliche Ausdruck eingebettet ist. Die japanischen Allophone [ts] des Phonems /t/ und [›] des Phonems /h/ treten vor /u/ auf, und dementsprechend signalisiert das Vorkommen dieser Allophone das Vorhandensein eines nachfolgenden /u/; sollte das Phonem /u/ bei der Sprachperformanz nicht akustisch identifizierbar sein, würde man es durch die Realisation des vorhergehenden Phonems erraten können (s. Trubetzkoy 21958: 47). Entsprechend der bidirektionalen Beziehung zwischen Varianten und Bedingungen hat die Beschreibung der Variation zwei Herangehensweisen, die einander ergänzen (vgl. Lehmann 1989). Aus synthetischer Sicht werden zunächst die Bedingungen festgestellt und im zweiten Schritt wird die Variation des sprachlichen Ausdrucks bei Vorhandensein dieser Bedingungen beschrieben. So hat Labov (1966) unterschiedliche Sprechsituationen hinsichtlich des Kontinuums der Aufmerksamkeit (a. spontaner Ausdruck, b. Interview, c. Rezitieren, d. isolierte Wörter lesen) festgelegt und dann sprachliche Ausdrücke in diesen Situationen von Sprechern der Low East Side in New York elizitiert, um die phonetische Variation unter diesen Bedingungen zu beschreiben. Bei der analytischen

25. Variation und Invarianz

Herangehensweise wird zunächst die Variation des sprachlichen Ausdrucks festgestellt, und dann werden heuristisch die Bedingungen ihres Vorkommens aufgesucht. Sankoff et al. (1978) beschreiben mithilfe ethnosemantischer Methodologie die Anwendung der partiellen Synonyme rester ‘bleiben’, vivre ‘leben’, habiter ‘wohnen1’ und demeurer ‘wohnen2’ im kanadiscen Französisch. Auf der Basis der Postulierung distinktiver semantischer Merkmale und Kriterien für ihre Feststellung im Kontext wird die Rolle von sozialen Faktoren bei der Anwendung der Synonyme in Interviews von Sprechern aus verschiedenen sozialen Gruppen aufgezeigt. Die Variation ist ein dynamisches Merkmal des Sprachsystems. Nach Meillet ist die Variation eine inhärente Eigenschaft der parole, d. h. jeder Sprecher entwickelt seine eigene Fassung des Sprachsystems. Aufgrund dieser de facto Diskontinuität der Sprachgemeinschaft findet nun Sprachwandel statt. Jedes Individuum vermittelt die eigene Variante und durch die Verbreitung individueller Varianten wandelt sich das Sprachsystem (s. Meillet 1951: 72⫺73; vgl. Swiggers 1986; 1991: 190⫺193). Erhöhte Variation manifestiert sich im raschen Sprachwandel, z. B. bei Pidgin- und Kreolsprachen, wobei unterschiedliche Sprachvarianten auf einem Kontinuum mit Polen der Ausgangssprache und der Kreolsprache koexistieren (s. Rooij 1995). Variation ist außerdem ein dynamisches Merkmal der individuellen Sprachtätigkeit, wie es sich z. B. beim Spracherwerb und bei diversen Sprachstörungen feststellen läßt.

6.

Variation zwischen Sprachsystemen

Unterschiedliche Typen von Variation ergeben sich aus dem Vergleich sprachspezifischer und universaler Einheiten bzw. Kategorien. Pike (1967) unterscheidet in diesem Sinne den etischen und emischen Standpunkt. Der etische Standpunkt umfaßt die in den Sprachen der Welt verfügbaren Einheiten und Kategorien; er ist also universell bzw. systemextern. Demgegenüber steht der emische Standpunkt, der die innerhalb eines gegebenen Sprachsystems funktionalen Einheiten und Kategorien umfaßt; emisch ist dann sprachspezifisch und systemintern. Demnach lassen sich dann auf das Sprachsystem bezogen zwei Typen von Variation unterscheiden: (a) Einheiten, die in der systemexternen Perspektive unterschiedlich sind, z. B. die

245 Laute [p] und [ph], können in einem gegebenen Sprachsystem Varianten einer Invariante sein. Im Englischen sind [p] (in space) und [ph] (in pace) Allophone des Phonems /p/, d. h. sie werden im Sprachsystem nicht unterschieden. Hier liegt dann Variation zweier sprachexterner Varianten bezogen auf eine sprachinterne Invariante vor. In anderen Sprachen (z. B. Altgriechisch oder Hindi) sind diese Laute unterschiedliche Phoneme, d. h. sie sind zwei unterschiedliche Einheiten, sowohl systemextern als auch systemintern gesehen. In diesem Fall wäre nicht von Variation die Rede. (b) Einheiten, die in der systemexternen Perspektive invariant sind, sind systemintern betrachtet verschieden. Eine Erzählung, die in einer gegebenen Sprachgemeinschaft als humoristisch empfunden wird, kann in einer anderen Sprachgemeinschaft eine vollkommen unterschiedliche Reaktion erwecken. Systemextern betrachtet handelt es sich hier um dieselbe Erzählung, aber in systeminterner Perspektive erfüllt sie jeweils unterschiedliche kommunikative Funktionen (s. Pike 1967: 43). Beim Vergleich unterschiedlicher Sprachsysteme lassen sich universale und variierende Eigenschaften feststellen. Die variierenden Eigenschaften können gegebenenfalls auf eine Invariante in der Form eines implikativen Universals angeordnet werden. Keenan & Comrie (1977) haben beispielsweise gezeigt, daß die Sprachen der Welt hinsichtlich der syntaktischen Funktion des Bezugnomens eines Relativsatzes im Relativsatz variieren. Dieser Variation unterliegt die Abfolge der syntaktischen Funktionen, die in Abb. 25.6 dargestellt ist. Wenn eine Sprache die Relativisierung eines Bezugsnomens mit einer gegebenen Funktion ermöglicht, dann ist auch die Relativisierung bei allen Funktionen, die links von ihr in Abb. 25.6 stehen, möglich. Subjekt > Dir. Objekt > Indir. Objekt > Obliquus > Genitiv > Bezugsobjekt der Komparation Abb. 25.6: Hierarchie der syntaktischen Funktionen

Varianten sind hier die in jeder Sprache verfügbaren Möglichkeiten. Die Invariante ist die Abfolge in Abb. 25.6. Jede sprachspezi-

246

IV. Grundbegriffe

fische Variante ist ein kontinuierlicher Teil dieser Skala und insofern realisiert sie die universale Invariante.

Jakobson, Roman (1973), Main Trends in the Science of Language. London: Allen & Unwin (Main trends in the social sciences 6)

7.

Keenan, Edward L. & Comrie, Bernard (1977), “Noun phrase accessibility and universal grammar”. Linguistic Inquiry 8 (1): 63⫺99

Zitierte Literatur

Anderson, Stephen R. (1992), A-morphous Morphology. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press (Cambridge Studies in Linguistics 62) Bauer, Laurie (1988), Introducing Linguistic Morphology. Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univ. Press Bloch, Bernard (1948), “A set of postulates for phonemic analysis”. Language 24: 1, 3⫺46 Bloomfield, Leonard (1933), Language. New York etc.: Holt, Rinehart and Winston Clairis, Christos (1991), “Identification et typologie des fluctuations”. Bulletin de la Socie`te´ de Linguistique de Paris 86.1, 19⫺35 Go´mez Lopez, Paula (1997), La aplicacio´n de para´metros de gramaticalidad al ana´lisis de la polifuncionalidad de exponentes espaciales de clases cerradas. Thesis doctoral, El Colegio de Me´xico Hall, Robert A. (1953), Haitian Creole: Grammar⫺ Texts⫺Vocabulary. Philadelphia: American Folklore Society (Memoirs of the American Folklore Society 43) [reprinted (1979), Millwood: Kraus] Hjelmslev, Louis (1968), Prole´gome`nes a` une the´orie du langage. Paris: Minuit [orig. dänisch 1943] Hockett, Charles F. (1958), A Course in Modern Linguistics. New York: Macmillan Iturrioz-Leza, Jose´ Luis (1985), Tipos de abstractividad: Su manifestacio´n en la estructura de los lenguajes naturales. Universitat de Barcelona Iturrioz-Leza, Jose´ Luis (1986), “Lo´gica y ontologı´a. Tipos lo´gicos, grados de generalizacio´n y niveles lingüı´sticos”. In: Iturrioz-Leza, Jose´ Luis & Leal Carretero, Fernando (Hrsg.), Algunas Consecuencias Filoso´ficas de UNITYP. Univ. de Guadalajara, 129⫺154 Iturrioz-Leza, Jose´ Luis (1990), “Variation und Invarianz bei der formalen und semantischen Beschreibung von grammatischen Morphemen”. In: Akup 80. Köln: Universität zu Köln Iturrioz-Leza, Jose´ Luis & Go´mez Lopez, Paula & Ramı´rez de la Cruz, Julio & Leal Carretero, Silvia (1986), “Individuacio´n en huichol, I: Morfologı´a y sema´ntica de las clases nominales”. Funcion 1/2, 309⫺354 Iturrioz-Leza, Jose´ Luis & Go´mez Lopez, Paula & Ramı´rez de la Cruz, Julio (1988), “Localizacio´n en huichol: Jerarquı´as de paradigmas y series funcionales”. Funcion 8, 111⫺166 Jakobson, Roman (1936), “Beitrag zur allgemeinen Kasuslehre: Gesamtbedeutungen des russischen Kasus”. Travaux du cercle linguistique de Prague 6 [Nachdruck in: Jakobson, Roman (1971), Selected Writings II, 23⫺71]

Kouwenberg, Silvia (1994), A Grammar of Berbice Dutch Creole. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter Labov, W[illiam] (1966), The Social Stratification of English in New York City. Washington: Center for Applied Linguistics Labov, W[illiam] (1969), “Contraction, Deletion and Inherent Variability of the English Copula”. Language 45: 715⫺762 Lehmann, Christian (1989), “Language Description and General Comparative Grammar”. In: Graustein, Gottfried & Leitner, Gerhard (Hrsg.), Reference Grammars and Modern Linguistic Theory. Tübingen: Niemeyer (Linguistische Arbeiten 226), 133⫺162 Lehmann, Christian (1995), Thoughts on Grammaticalization. München, Newcastle: LINCOM (Studies in Theoretical Linguistics 01) Li, Charles N. & Thomson, Sandra A. (1981), Mandarin Chinese: A Functional Reference Grammar. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: Univ. of California Press Meillet, Antoine (1951), Linguistique historique et linguistique ge´ne´rale. Paris: Klincksieck Mel’cˇuk, I[gor] A. (1982), Towards a Language of Linguistics: A System of Formal Notions for Theoretical Morphology [revised and edited by Ph. Luelsdorff]. München: Fink (Internationale Bibliothek für allgemeine Linguistik 44) Merlan, Francesza C. (1994), A Grammar of Wardaman. Berlin, New York: Mouton de Gruyter (Mouton Grammar Library 11) Mosel, Ulrike & Hovdhaugen, Even (1992), Samoan Reference Grammar. Oslo: Universiteitsforlaget AS Mugdan, Joachim (1986), “Was ist eigentlich ein Morphem?”. Zeitschrift für Phonetik, Sprachwissenschaft und Kommunikationsforschung 39, 29⫺43 Nida, Eugene A. (21976), Morphology: The Descriptive Analysis of Words. Ann Arbor: The Univ. of Michigan Press [11946] Pike, Kenneth L. (1967), Language in Relation to a Unified Theory of the Structure of Human Behavior. The Hague, Paris: Mouton (Janua Linguarum Series Maior 24) Rooij, Vincent de (1995), “Variation”. In: Arens, Jacques & Muysken, Pieter & Smith, Norval (Hrsg.), Pidgins and Creoles. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: Benjamins, 53⫺64 Sankoff, David & Labov, William (1979), “On the Uses of Variable Rules”. Language and Society 8

247

26. Word Sankoff, David & Thibault Pierrette & Be´rube´ He´le`ne (1978), “Semantic Fields Variability”. In: Sankoff, David (Hrsg.), Linguistic Variation: Models and Methods. New York, San Francisco, London: Academic Press, 23⫺43 Saussure, Ferdidand de (1916), Cours de linguistique ge´ne´rale, publie´ par Charles Bally et Albert Sechehaye. Paris: Payot [1972] Seiler, Hansjakob (1985), “Kategorien als fokale Instanzen von Kontinua: gezeigt am Beispiel der nominalen Determination”. In: Schlerath, Bernfried (Hrsg.), Grammatische Kategorien: Funktion und Geschichte. Akten der VII. Fachtagung der Indogermanischen Gesellschaft, Berlin, 20.⫺25. Februar 1983. Tübingen: Gunter Narr, 435⫺448 Seiler, Hansjakob (1991), “Invariance and Variation: The Dimensional Model of Language Universals”. In: Waugh & Rudy (Hrsg.), 437⫺449 Sneddon, James Neil (1996), Indonesian: A Comprehensive Grammar. London & New York: Routledge Swiggers, Pierre (1986), “La linguistique historique devant la variation: le cas de Meillet”. Recherches sur le franc¸ais parle´ 7, 61⫺74

Swiggers, Pierre (1991), “Variation, Invariance, Hierarchy, and Integration as Grammatical Parameters”. In: Waugh & Rudy (Hrsg.), 185⫺220 Trubetzkoy, N[ikolaj] S. (21958), Grundzüge der Phonologie. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht [21939] Waugh, Linda R. & Rudy, Stephen (1991, Hrsg.), New Vistas in Grammar: Invariance and Variation. Amsterdam: Benjamins (Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 49) Weinreich, Uriel (1986), “Is Structural Dialectology Possible?” In: Allen, Harold B. & Linn, Michael D. (Hrsg.), Dialect and Language Variation. Orlando: Academic Press, 20⫺34 [reprinted from Word (1954) 10, 388⫺400] Wolfram, Walt (1973), “On What Basis Variable Rules?” In: Bailey, Charles-James N. & Shuy, Roger W. (Hrsg.), New Ways of Analysing Variation in English. Washington: Georgetown Univ. Press, 1⫺12

Jose´ Luis Iturrioz Leza, Guadalajara (Mexiko) Stavros Skopeteas, Erfurt (Deutschland)

26. Word 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

Introduction Some fundamental distinctions The word in semantics and lexicography Defining the word-form The psychological word The word cross-linguistically Conclusion References

1.

Introduction

The linguistic unit that is most easily used by non-linguists is the word. When Polonius asked Hamlet what he was reading, the answer was “Words, words, words”. We exchange a few words with an interlocutor, take people at their word; actors learn their words, punsters play with words, and we speak of first words or famous last words. No other linguistic unit is as widely referred to in ordinary speech, and no other stands for the whole of language in the same way. Some languages, such as Yucatec Maya, have a single word (t’aan) to designate ‘word’, ‘speech’ and ‘language’. Yet for many years linguists have appeared remarkably reluctant to use the term at all, preferring to discuss

linguistic structure in terms of morphemes, phrases and sentences. To cite one extreme, but not atypical view, “despite unrelenting efforts over several millennia, no one has successfully defined ‘word’ in any linguistically useful way” (Beard 1981: 39; see also Bolinger 1963: 113; Martinet 1985: 74; Seiler 1964: 767). In this article, the reasons for this disparity between ordinary usage and technical usage will be considered. In particular, it will be shown that word is too ambiguous a term for easy use in a technical literature.

2.

Some fundamental distinctions

2.1. Lexeme and word-form There are two answers to the question “How many different words are there in a sentence such as (1)?” (1) She sees truth where I see beauty. In the first sense, see and sees are separate words because they have different shapes. Computer-generated concordances typically treat these two as separate items, as different words. In the second sense, see and sees rep-

248 resent the same word, which we might call the verb to see, but they are different shapes of this single word. It is this sense of word we use when we ask how many words of English a particular speaker knows. There are two tokens of this particular type (see Art. 25) in (1), and so there are two answers to how many words (1) contains. In morphological works published since the 1970s, this distinction is usually drawn as a distinction between word-forms and lexemes: see and sees in (1) represent the same lexeme, but are distinct word-forms (see also Art. 62). The lexeme can be variously defined as the minimal unit of syntactic analysis (Lyons 1963: 12), the fundamental unit of the lexicon (Matthews 1974: 22) or perhaps more simply as a dictionary word or abstract unit of vocabulary (Bauer 1988: 246). Some refinement of this notion will be made in 3.2. What is crucial is that a lexeme may be represented by one or more than one word-form. This use of the term lexeme originates with Lyons (1963). The term has been used by others with a variety of meanings (for a selection of different meanings, see, e.g. Goodenough 1956: 208; Hockett 1958: 169⫺171; Martinet 1985: 28). A word-form, on the other hand, is the orthographic or phonological form which represents a lexeme. The term appears to have been used first by Matthews (1972: 41), although the notion was current much earlier. The usual notation is to mark word-forms in italics, and this will be followed here. Although Lyons himself uses at least three different notations for lexemes, that most frequently adopted in other works is the notation introduced in 1968, by which lexemes are indicated by the use of small capitals. Using this notation, it can be said of (1) above that it contains two occurrences of the lexeme see (or simply, two occurrences of see), one in the word-form sees and the other in the wordform see. If see in (1) is compared with papal see we find the same word-form see representing different lexemes on different occasions. One of the word-forms which represents the lexeme is traditionally used to name the lexeme. This form is called the citation form of the lexeme (see further Art. 62). This is the way in which these words are referred to in conventional dictionaries. What is important to realise is that this name is no more than a convenient label for the lexeme: the lexeme

IV. Grundbegriffe

should not be equated with the word-form which happens to be used as its citation form, a confusion which seems to have been made in some discussions in the early part of the twentieth century (see e.g. Sapir 1921: 25f.; Bally 31950: 288). 2.2. Grammatical or morphosyntactic word In (2) and (3) there is a word-form chanted which, in both cases, represents the lexeme chant. Yet chanted in (2) does not have the same function as chanted in (3), as can be seen by comparing (2) with (4) and (3) with (5), where sang and sung are different wordforms. (2) (3) (4) (5)

She She She She

chanted the psalm. has chanted the psalm. sang the psalm. has sung the psalm.

To make this distinction, we need to be able to distinguish between chanted which is ‘chant-past’ and chanted which is ‘chantpast.participle’. That is, there is a third notion of word, intermediate between the wordform and the lexeme and distinct from both. It is the word as a place in a morphological paradigm (see Art. 24). For some scholars whose particular interest is in inflection, this notion is termed word tout court (Matthews 1972: 163), but it seems preferable to retain the general term as a superordinate or less specific term. The terms grammatical word or (because of the ambiguity of “grammatical word”, which can also be opposed to “lexical” or “content word”, see 2.3 and Art. 27) morphosyntactic word are now widely used in this sense (Lyons 1968: 196; 1977: 73; Bauer 1988: 244). Some authorities use the term lexeme only when the set of word-forms which can represent the lexeme is greater than one (Huddleston 1984: 2). For such scholars there is no lexeme because. Such an approach is tempting in an isolating language (see 6 below) where the citation form of the lexeme is the only word-form to represent that lexeme, and where the lexeme/word-form distinction is less obviously useful. According to the definitions given here, however, the distinction remains formally applicable in these cases too, even where the word-forms belong to onemember sets. 2.3. Function and content words Another distinction between types of words is the distinction between grammatical or function words on the one hand, and lexical

26. Word

or content words on the other (or, equivalently, between closed-class words and openclass words or functors and contentives). According to this distinction because is a grammatical word in that its function is purely grammatical, while dog has lexical content (Hockett 1958: 264; Hall 1964: 15). Some scholars use the term lexeme in the sense of content word (Martinet 1967: 16), though this is no longer usual terminology in English. For further discussion see Art. 27.

3.

The word in semantics and lexicography

3.1. Words and ideas The word has been defined by many scholars as a form with a particular meaning, and there has been a certain amount of dispute as to whether or not a word can be said to “have” meaning (Meillet 1921: 30; Gray 1939: 146; Rosetti 1947: 24; Bolinger 1963: 134; Miller 1966; Kra´msky 1969: 67). Many attempts at a definition of the word have made appeal to some notion of a meaning or an idea. Consider the definition from the Encyclope´die ou Dictionnaire raisone´e des Sciences, des Arts et des Me´tiers (1751⫺80; cited in Swiggers 1986: 3): “une totalite´ de sons devenue par usage, pour ceux qui l’entendent, le signe d’une ide´e totale”. There are three major problems with this type of definition. Firstly, if Italian andiamo presents “une ide´e totale”, why should Let us go, which means the same thing, be the sign of three total ideas? The same question applies to German das Haus as opposed to Danish huset, German Postamt as opposed to French bureau de poste, and an indefinitely large number of similar examples. There is simply no non-circular definition of a single idea. Secondly, many authorities give definitions of the sentence which are virtually identical. Consider, for example, “Sa¨tze sind die (kleinsten selbsta¨ndigen) Sinneinheiten der Rede” (Bühler 1934: 359). Thirdly, it is not clear that a word like of can be said to indicate “a total idea”, while on the other side of the coin a formative such as form within a word such as formalizations might well be taken to indicate a total idea. While it is clear that words are carriers of meaning, they are neither the minimal carriers of meaning nor the largest meaning-bearing units. It thus seems to be the case that

249 without some more exact delimitation meaning cannot be used to give a precise definition to the term word. 3.2. Complex lexical structures For some authorities, idiomatic phrases such as red herring or take the biscuit are lexemes. This type of lexeme is sometimes called a phrasal lexeme (Lyons 1977: 23). Others, however, object to this usage. If take the biscuit is a different lexeme from take, why do we find the irregular form took in the past tense of take the biscuit as well as in the past tense of take? We must have the same element in take at some level. For some, that level would be a (redefined) morpheme (Aronoff 1976: 14f.); for others the lexeme, having an appropriate set of word-forms (Matthews 1974: 34). Supporting this second view is the fact that take the biscuit has a parallel syntactic structure to a phrase like take a holiday, but has a non-compositional semantic reading, and the fact that its representatives are inflected internally, which is otherwise not true of lexemes in English. A distinction in terminology for referring to take and the phrase take the biscuit is clearly desirable. An expression like take the biscuit, as well as a lexeme, has been variously termed an idiom, or a phraseme. More recent terminology includes such constructions under the heading of listeme (Di Sciullo & Williams 1987). A listeme may be defined as any unit whose meaning is not derivable by rule from the meanings of its parts, thus any meaningful unit which has to be memorized (Di Sciullo & Williams 1987: 3). While many lexemes are also listemes, not all of them are. For example, in the sentence The multiverse is full of little dimensionettes, playstreets of creation (Pratchett 1989: 233) there is a lexeme dimensionette, which can be represented by two distinct word-forms, dimensionette and dimensionettes, and whose meaning is totally predictable from the meanings of its parts. dimensionette is thus a lexeme, but not a listeme. Conversely, in the terminology adopted here, take the biscuit is not a lexeme, it is composed of three lexemes, but its meaning is not predictable, and it is thus a listeme. Lexeme and listeme define intersecting sets, although in prototypical cases lexeme and listeme coincide. Given this distinction, the definitions of a lexeme given earlier (2.1) cannot be maintained. A lexeme has to be defined as a unit of vocabulary which may be realized by a set of one or more grammatical words.

250 The term lexical item (Beard 1981: 45) or lexical unit (Zgusta 1971) may be used as a neutral term to refer to any lexeme or listeme. This definition of the lexeme, however, implies that compounds are lexemes. Corresponding to a lexeme boyfriend there are the inflectional forms boyfriend and boyfriends. Compounds provide problems for the notion of a word. Various scholars comment on the apparent inconsistency of having a word (in whatever sense) which is made up of words (Beard 1981: 42; Herbermann 1981: 124 n). Some authorities try to avoid such paradoxes by arguing that a lexeme like boyfriend is made up not of two words, but of two stems (see Art. 42), which is why a fully inflected word-form cannot occur in the modifier position (*boysfriends is not possible) and why in a language like Latin we find obligatorily bound stems in the equivalent position (liquefacio ‘melt-make:1.sg (dissolve)’ where liqueis a stem of liquesco ‘melt’). This is only a partial answer. Since stems are representative of lexemes without full specification of inflectional categories, there appear still to be lexemes which contain (however indirectly) other lexemes. There are also items such as Dutch huizenrij ‘houses row’, Italian portalettere ‘carry letters (postman)’, English suggestions box where internal inflections are found. These have sometimes been called Zusammenrückungen ‘squashing-togethers’ as opposed to Zusammensetzungen ‘compounds’ in German (Fox 1990: 140) in an attempt at a terminological solution to the problem. There is no equivalent English terminology, and even in German the terminology has been used to cover a range of disparate phenomena (Fleischer 1975: 61⫺63). There are three basic reasons for calling compounds words. Firstly, they have the same function as other words in referring to entities, so that the compound parson bird refers to that particular type of bird in the same way as does tui, which is synonymous with it. Secondly, their meaning is frequently specialized or non-compositional: blackmail, which appears formally to contain black and mail, does not clearly contain either of these elements semantically. That is, in the terminology that has been presented here, such items are listemes. Thirdly, they are lexemes because they are represented by a set of one or more word-forms. It is not clear why there should be any contradiction involved in finding lexemes which have representatives of other lexemes

IV. Grundbegriffe

in their make-up. The major problem comes with word-forms. Given the definition provided in 2.1, there is no reason why actual word-forms should not contain other potential word-forms. Other definitions, however, focus on the word-form as the smallest potentially independent unit (see below 4.3 and Art. 62), and against a background of such definitions there are indeed paradoxical implications. 3.3. Problems with word-lists For the lexicographer, the set containing lexemes and listemes provides the basis of a word-list. Since the set of lexemes is open, no dictionary can ever give a full listing of the lexical items (see Art. 80) of a given language, but must always provide a selection. A major problem for the lexicographer is provided by the distinction between homonymy and polysemy. We speak of homonymy when two lexemes share the same word-forms (this definition follows Lyons 1977: 22, but is also a definition which has value in lexicography). We speak of polysemy when a single lexeme has two (or more) distinguishable meanings. There is no generally agreed criterion for distinguishing between the two. ear ‘organ of hearing’ and ear ‘spike of corn’ may be treated as two distinct lexemes (ear1 and ear2), and usually are in real dictionaries on the basis of distinct etymologies, although diachronic information should not in principle be used to determine synchronic linguistic structure. On the other hand, many speakers feel that an ear of corn is called that because it resembles the ear on someone’s head, and implicitly treat ear as a single polysemous lexeme. In the writing of any dictionary, a decision has to be taken as to how to distinguish between these two. Although homonymy may be defined as the case where two lexemes have identical wordforms for all of their grammatical words (Lyons 1977: 22), homographic citation forms of the lexemes are all that is required to raise problems for the lexicographer. There seems, in practical terms, to be a cline from pairs like lead1 ‘the metal’ and lead2 ‘to take’, which almost everyone would take as distinct lexemes (except perhaps in a word-list for Scrabble players), through ear1 and ear2, to plateau1 ‘flat land’ and plateau2 ‘a stable stage in an upward progression’, which most people would treat as two aspects of the same lexeme. The distinction is as much practical

26. Word

as theoretical. For further discussion see Art. 171. The lexicographer, too, must decide whether or not to list derivatives and compounds as words separate from the bases from which they are derived. In essence this will be a practical decision based on the degree of institutionalization (see Art. 80) or lexicalization (see Art. 149) of the word concerned, rather than on any theoreticallybased notion of word. Correspondingly, the practice of lexicographers has no necessary implications for what the linguist wishes to define as a word (in any sense), or vice versa.

4.

Defining the word-form

Given the definition of a lexeme above as a unit of vocabulary represented by a set of one or more word-forms, and the definition of a word-form as a form which represents a lexeme, there is clear danger of circularity in definitions. Alternative definitions of the lexeme have been cited in 2, but have their own problems associated with them. Unfortunately, there is no alternative clear definition of the word-form. Rather, we find a number of criteria of various kinds which do not always define precisely the same entities. The main criteria will be outlined briefly in 4. We can begin, however, by giving an introductory definition of the word-form as follows: the word-form is a constituent of a sentence to which special status is given (Seiler 1964: 767; Bauer 1988: 54). The special status will be illustrated in what follows. 4.1. The orthographic word An orthographic word is usually defined as a unit which, in writing, is bounded by spaces on both sides (thus Hall 1964: 134; Bauer 1988: 7). This oversimplifies, in a number of ways. Firstly, it omits references to punctuation marks and the like. It is usually taken to imply that apostrophes and hyphens do not break words, while dashes (even if not printed with a space before and after) do (Mugdan 1994). For a rigorous definition of the orthographic word, such matters would need to be spelled out. Secondly, and more importantly, it assumes an orthographic system which marks the word in this way, which is not true of all. For example, Classical Greek and modern Thai run all words together, and it can be argued that Chinese written in characters does not distinguish be-

251 tween the syllable and/or morpheme and the word (for further discussion see Art. 175). Any definition based on spaces is, of course, useless for the large number of languages that do not have a standardized spelling system. Nonetheless, it provides an operational definition of the word-form which has the benefit of simplicity. The main problem it gives rise to, at least among the literate (and this includes linguists), is a reification of the word-elements thus marked, and a consequent expectation (which is not always met) that other criteria will delimit precisely the same units. This seems to imply some kind of psychological reality for the orthographic word which may, but need not, derive from purely linguistic structure (see 5 below). Despite such weaknesses, some scholars fail to find any other reality to which to attach the term word (Hall 1964: 134; Martinet 1985: 84f.). 4.2. Phonological word The phonological word is the word-form defined by phonological criteria. Various criteria can define the word phonologically (see e.g. Ullmann 1957: 47⫺49; Bauer 1988: 46⫺ 48). The most obvious of these are word stress or accent, vowel harmony and various sandhi phenomena. The point is that phonologists frequently need to make reference to a unit which is intermediate between the minimal sign and the phrase as a domain for various phonological rules. For example, in some varieties of British English /r/-insertion after a number of vowels only takes place over word-boundaries, and not within the word. In these varieties, the word draw, for example, normally pronounced with no final /r/, gains an /r/ before a following vowel in draw /r/ in but not in drawing. In Russian, obstruents are devoiced in word-final position. In Nitinat, a word-final vowel is followed by aspiration (Swadesh 1934: 40). In English there is a host of allophonic rules which help delimit the word, including rules of aspiration, length and palatalization (Jones 1931). There is, however, no guarantee that these or other phonological criteria will delimit an item which is also isolated by non-phonological criteria, nor that various phonological criteria will delimit the same element. Some examples based on vowel harmony are presented below.

252 Vowel harmony is the agreement of phonological features of vowels within the boundaries of the word. For example, in Finnish there are two distinct series of vowels whose non-low vowels are rounded. In the front series there are /y, ø, æ/ and in the back series /u, o, a/. No vowel from the front series may occur in the same word as any vowel from the back series. The two extra vowels /i, e/ act as neutral vowels and may appear with either series. Thus we find words such as /auto-ssa/ ‘car-in (in the car)’ and /metsæssæ/ ‘forest-in’ (in the forest)’ where /-ssa/ and /-ssæ/ are allomorphs of the same morpheme conditioned by being in a back and front vowel domain respectively. Words such as */auto-ssæ/ are not possible. However, a single orthographic word such as kellonpera¨t /kellon-peræt/ ‘watch-chain’ counts as two phonological words in that the vowel harmony domain is each element of the compound, not the compound as a whole. In Chuckchee, on the other hand, compound words act as a single domain for vowel harmony, so that /pelvente-kopra-n/ ‘metal-netabs.sg’ contains an element meaning ‘net’ which in isolation would be /kupre-/ (Comrie 1981: 245). It is not clear that compound words in Finnish and Chuckchee differ in any aspect of their behaviour except this phonological one. In Finnish, the phonological word can be defined not only by vowel harmony but also by stress. The stress always falls on the first syllable of a phonological word. In compounds such as kellonpera¨t these two criteria agree that the compound is made up of two phonological words (though in equivalent Hungarian structures the two criteria would disagree, Szpyra 1989: 227). But in a sentence like Puhutko sina¨ englantia? ‘Do you speak English?’ the pronoun sina¨ ‘you:nom.sg’ does not receive a stress; it is only stressed if spoken in isolation. According to the stress criterion sina¨ is part of the previous phonological word; by the criterion of vowel harmony it is a separate phonological word. In brief, it is not clear that the phonological word necessarily corresponds to a morphological word, or that it can be defined coherently. There is also another sense in which the notion of the word is intimately linked with phonological structure. The notion of phonological contrast depends upon a prior notion of the word: Aspirated [th] and unaspirated [t] are not said to contrast in English, despite

IV. Grundbegriffe

the existence of pairs such as that’s tough [dætsthvf] and that stuff [dætstvf] because each of these is a phrase not a word (Rosetti 1947: 18; Bolinger 1963: 121f.). Many scholars are reluctant to give any unit which does not have phonemic structure the status of a word, whatever other criteria it may fulfil. Thus [?e?e?] signifying negation or [b] signifying coldness are not counted as words of English (Rosetti 1947: 24; Ullmann 1957: 52; Bolinger 1963: 122). Within Generative Phonology, the term phonological word has taken on a different, technical meaning (or, more precisely a range of such meanings). While such meanings are related to rules for the placing of accent, they do not necessarily coincide with what would be called a phonological word in other frameworks. Thus, in The book was in an unlikely place the phonological words are said to be the book, was in an unlikely and place (Chomsky & Halle 1968: 368). In a slightly different framework, compartmentalization is said to consist of three phonological words, parallel to combat mental elation (Aronoff & Sridhar 1987: 14). Phonological words in such frameworks are defined in terms of the constructs established within the theory, and the notions are not readily interpretable without the rest of the framework. 4.3. Morphosyntactic criteria Morphosyntactic criteria for the word-form are discussed in detail in Art. 40, to which the reader is referred. The most important of these are the criterion of a minimum free form (Bloomfield 1935: 178) and the criterion based on internal cohesion (for further discussion see Martinet 1949; Lyons 1968: 203f.; Kra´msky 1969: 17⫺40 and sources referred to there; Martinet 1985: 79⫺82; Bauer 1988: 50⫺53). Again, the criteria do not necessarily delimit precisely the same set of items. In general, criteria of internal cohesion, to the extent that they can be applied, delimit constituents, and the notion of a minimum free form delimits only those words which can occur isolated as phrases. Thus it is fairly easy to envisage situations when Lightbulbs might form a complete utterance, but much harder to envisage situations where Lightbulb might, although A lightbulb would be perfectly in order. Similarly, although most people would agree that puts is a word-form in She puts the meat on the table it is difficult to imagine a situation in which puts could form a complete

26. Word

utterance in actual language use as opposed to mention (Lyons 1977: 6). Thus we can conclude that the word-form is a constituent. More importantly, it is the minimal constituent that can be manipulated syntactically. While such a definition is helpful, it is not definitive, since it presupposes a definition of syntax in which words and not morphemes are the minimal units. Even if that problem can be circumvented, clitics (see Art. 41) provide a borderline phenomenon. In some languages, such as Greek and Sanskrit (Seiler 1964: 767) or Nkore-Kiga (Taylor 1985: 189), there are particles which have to occur after the first word-form in a sentence. These particles in effect give an operational definition of the word-form in these languages.

5.

The psychological word

Much is made in the literature of the fact that the word is a psychological unit, or a unit which has a certain psychological reality (Rosetti 1947: 17; Meeussen 1949: 295; Gudschinsky 1958; Kra´msky 1969: 71f.). This psychological reality (by which is meant that these constructs are involved in actual language processing by real speakers; see further Art. 162), is attributed both to lexemes and to word-forms, though the two need to be kept distinct. Where word-forms are concerned, one passage is often cited (Sapir 1921: 34) in which it is reported that illiterate North American Indians, totally unaccustomed to a writing system of any kind, could dictate a text “word by word”. This is superficially impressive, but appears to conflict with other evidence. One report (Havers 1931: 15) makes the point that semi-literates writing more familiar languages will frequently split words up apparently arbitrarily when writing. A French example is cited, Tu man verra du chaud cola for Tu m’enverras du chocolat. Children learning to write do not always put the word-breaks in the appropriate place (from the normative adult point of view), either. One five-year-old was heard to say that cartoon was a sequence of two words, for instance. Sam Goldwyn’s famous line: “In two words: im possible” comes inevitably to mind. But such cases are not the general rule, and children learning to write are, on the whole, good at knowing where words begin and end. Similarly, it is relatively easy to

253 show that the orthographic word does not always coincide with speakers intuitions about word-units. There are a number of cases even in highly codified languages like the European languages where native speakers are in doubt as to whether to write something as one or more words. Alright versus all right and insofaras versus insofar as versus in so far as provide simple examples from English, consider also Czech nadrobno ⫽ na drobno ‘in small pieces’ (Kra´msky 1969: 55) or Danish simpelt hen versus simpelthen ‘simply’. There are also isolated cases where the orthographic criterion gives rise to absurdities: consider the Los Angeles-San Francisco flight, which contains the orthographic word Angeles-San (Kucˇera & Francis 1967: xxi). For most adults in our society though, Kra´msky’s (1969: 71) comment needs to be borne firmly in mind: “The influence of the written language […] cannot be underestimated here”. Our notion of what is or is not a word is largely formed by our impression of the orthographic representations we see about us. These intuitions are not solely the result of our competence in speaking and understanding the language we use. The psychological reality of the lexeme can also be indicated by children’s behaviour. Every parent is familiar with questions of the form “What does X mean?” where “X” is a suitable citation form for a lexeme, or makes clear reference to a lexeme. To the extent that the citation form of the lexeme rather than any other word-form representing the lexeme is chosen in such questions (and specifically, to the extent that the word-form actually overheard in the utterance which gave rise to the question is avoided by the child) this appears to show a distinction between lexeme and word-form. Questions such as “What does -ation mean?” are exceedingly rare in comparison. That this is not simply a distinction between grammatical and lexical meaning is indicated by the fact that questions such as “What does to mean?”, where to is the infinitive marker, do occur. Where adult behaviour is concerned, we have the frequent observation that adult speakers recognize items as being or not being words (here meaning lexemes) of their language (see e.g. Aronoff 1983: 163). Presumably a better gloss would be lexemes of which they have experience in their language, but there is still an implicit notion that lexemes are somehow listed by the individual speaker. That in turn implies a certain psychological reality.

254

IV. Grundbegriffe

There clearly is not complete agreement among speakers about what constitutes a word of their language (either in terms of word-forms or in terms of lexemes), but the degree of agreement is striking. The likelihood that, in literate speakers, that agreement is imposed externally cannot be ignored, but there is sufficient evidence that it is not entirely imposed for it to seem likely that the word does have psychological status.

tion between the minimal sign and the word. If there were pure types, the answer might be negative, but there are no pure types and even the closest languages to the isolating “ideal” have compound words, that is lexemes which are made up of more than one morpheme. Many such compounds are listemes. For example, in Vietnamese, which is frequently taken to be a typical isolating language, we find compounds such as those in (6) (Thompson 1965: 129f.):

6.

(6) (a) daˆy wire (b) xe vehicle

The word cross-linguistically

Many scholars suggest that the word cannot be a linguistic universal (Lyons 1968: 181; Kra´msky 1969: 10; Matthews 1972: 147⫺ 156). But to consider this question properly, we need to distinguish between the various kinds of word, and various kinds of language. Firstly we need to foresee the discussion in Art. 115 and distinguish between isolating, agglutinating, fusional and polysynthetic languages. In an ideal isolating language every word would be invariable, and the word-form and the morph would be co-terminous. In an ideal agglutinating language there would be no need to distinguish between morpheme and morph, since there would only ever be one morph corresponding to any meaning, but the word-form might consist of several morphs. In an ideal fusional language, exponence of inflectional categories would be typically cumulative (see Art. 64), with the result that the morpheme-morph distinction would be of vital importance. For example, the suffix in the Russian word-form gazet-u indicates that the noun ‘newspaper’ is singular, accusative and feminine. The label “polysynthetic” is applied to a wide range of language types, all of which have in common that they have complex morphologies with large numbers of obligatorily bound forms which do much of the job done by syntax in the majority of the world’s languages (Fortescue 1994). There are no languages which have wordforms of only one of these various types. The question that needs to be asked for all of these types is whether there is a unit which is intermediate between the minimal sign and the phrase for that language type and, if so, whether distinctions between lexeme, wordform and grammatical word hold for that type. With the isolating type, questions have been raised as to whether there is a distinc-

the´p steel (‘telegram’) lw? ra fire (‘train’)

Such compounds show that there are lexemes in these languages which are distinct from minimal signs. Since the word-form is a representation of the lexeme, the word-form in such languages must also be distinct from the morph. The distinction between wordform and lexeme is not of any clear value in such a language, however, since every lexeme is represented by a single word-form. Within the agglutinating type, there are two potential problems for the notion of word. The first of these is whether there is a distinction to be made between word and phrase. The second is whether the distinction between word-form and lexeme is valid in such languages. The first of these problems arises perhaps even more clearly with polysynthetic languages (Uldall, cited in Gray 1939: 146f.; Wils 1949; Kra´msky 1969: 74), and the two types can be dealt with together in this respect. West Greenlandic, an Eskimo language, will be used as a language of exemplification, but the arguments are in principle generalizable. The problem here seems to be that what counts as a word in a polysynthetic language may look like a sentence when translated into a European language. For example, the West Greenlandic word in (7) could act as an entire sentence (Fortescue 1980: 261⫺2). (7) ungasin-niru-laatsia-ssa-qquu-q-aaq be:far-more-a:little-fut-undoubtedlyexcl-3. sg.indic ‘it will undoubtedly be somewhat further off’ Such a form is defined as a phonological word by complex processes of internal sandhi which do not apply over word-boundaries,

255

26. Word

and as a morphosyntactically-defined wordform by having an obligatory inflection closing it (Fortescue 1980: 260). While a word like that in (7) is a minimal free form and

also makes up a complete phrase, there are also instances where the phrase is made up of more than one such word (Fortescue 1984: 109f.):

(8) (a) inuit pikkursis-su-t people be:clever-intransitive-participle.pl ‘clever people’ (b) Nissi-p alla-nit ajuqirsussuti-sia-a name-relative other-abl.pl training-received-his ‘the training N. received from others’ Now, while it is clear that modifiers in phrases are themselves phrases (as is, indeed, necessary within the X-bar theory of syntax), at least inuit in (8) is a word that is not a phrase, and so a distinction must be drawn between the two constructs in West Greenlandic. The fact that a single word may take up a whole sentence is no more relevant to the description of West Greenlandic than the fact that parlo ‘I am speaking’ could be an entire sentence of Italian would be to our definition of the word in that language. The second problem concerned the distinction between lexeme and word-form in agglutinating languages. Typically, agglutinating languages have fairly productive morphology, with far fewer lexical gaps than would be expected in, say, English or German. If productivity is seen as a criterion for distinguishing derivation from inflection (see Art. 38), then it may not be possible to distinguish the two in these terms. If there is no distinction between derivation and inflection, then the definition of a word-form falls through, and we cannot necessarily distinguish lexemes from word-forms. In practice, productivity is far from being the only criterion which can be used to distinguish inflection from derivation (see Plank 1994 and references there; Art. 38), so that the extent of the problem has been exaggerated here. But if such a situation did occur, there would still be the most basic words (roots) and endings, and a lexeme/word-form distinction could be drawn in those terms. The distinction between the minimal sign, the word and the phrase is perhaps clearest in fusional languages (although not necessarily for all words in those languages). This is not surprising since the distinction was set up on the basis of such languages. However, as has been shown above, it does not only apply in such languages, but has application generally in language.

While the notion of grammatical word is in principle applicable to any language in which word-forms can be distinguished from lexemes, it is of clearest value in fusional languages where the morphological properties given exponence in the word-form are not clear from their form and/or the position of the morph in the word-form.

7.

Conclusion

The problems inherent in defining the word as a linguistic unit should not be minimized. A selection of them have been canvassed here. Nevertheless, it does seem to be the case that all languages have a unit which falls between the minimal sign and the phrase. That unit may not satisfy precisely the same criteria in all languages; it may be defined phonologically in some languages and grammatically or lexically in others. Distinct units may be isolable in terms of different sets of criteria. Distinctions between lexeme, wordform and grammatical word may be of greater practical value in some languages than in others. Nonetheless, there does seem to be such an intermediate unit which can fairly be called the word, and which can act as a domain for morphological statements. It is because of the fact that the criteria do not always overlap that linguists have been reluctant to use word as a technical term. If the word can be viewed as a prototype, this reluctance is not necessary.

8.

References

Aronoff, Mark (1976), Word Formation in Generative Grammar. Cambridge/MA, London: MIT Press (Linguistic Inquiry Monographs 1) Aronoff, Mark (1983), “Potential Words, Actual Words, Productivity and Frequency”. In: Hattori, Shiroˆ & Inoue, Kazuko (eds.), Proceedings of the

256 XIII International Congress of Linguists [Tokyo, 1982]. Tokyo: Tokyo Press, 163⫺171 Aronoff, Mark & Sridhar, S. N. (1987), “Morphological Levels in English and Kannada”. In: Gussmann, Edmund (ed.), Rules and the Lexicon: Studies in Word-Formation. Lublin: Redakcja Wydawnictw Katolickiego Uniwersytetu Lubelskiego, 9⫺22 Asher, R[onald] E. (1994, ed.), Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics. Oxford: Pergamon; Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press Bally, Charles, (31950), Linguistique ge´ne´rale et linguistique franc¸aise. Berne: Francke [1⫽1932] Bauer, Laurie (1988), Introducing Linguistic Morphology. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press Beard, Robert (1981), The Indo-European Lexicon: A Full Synchronic Theory. Amsterdam etc.: North Holland Bloomfield, Leonard (1935), Language. London: Allen & Unwin Bolinger, Dwight L. (1963), “The Uniqueness of the Word”. Lingua 12, 113⫺136 Bühler, Karl (1934), Sprachtheorie. Jena: Fischer Chomsky, Noam & Halle, Morris (1968), The Sound Pattern of English. New York: Harper & Row Comrie, Bernard (1981), The Languages of the Soviet Union. Cambridge etc.: Cambridge University Press Di Sciullo, Anna-Maria & Williams, Edwin (1987), On the Definition of the Word. Cambridge/MA, London: MIT Press (Linguistic Inquiry Monographs 14) Fleischer, Wolfgang (41975), Wortbildung der deutschen Gegenwartssprache. Tübingen: Niemeyer Fortescue, M[ichael] D. (1980), “Affix Ordering in West Greenlandic Derivational Processes”. International Journal of American Linguistics 46, 259⫺278 Fortescue, Michael (1984), West Greenlandic. London etc.: Croom Helm Fortescue, Michael (1994), “Polysynthetic Morphology”. In: Asher (ed.), 2600⫺2602 Fox, Anthony (1990), The Structure of German. Oxford: Oxford University Press Goodenough, Ward H. (1956), “Componential Analysis and the Study of Meaning”. Language 32, 195⫺216 Gray, Louis H. (1939), Foundations of Language. New York: Macmillan Gudschinsky, Sarah (1958), “Native Reactions to Tones and Words in Mazate”. Word 14, 338⫺345 Hall, Robert A., Jr. (1964), Introductory Linguistics. Philadelphia, New York: Chilton Havers, Wilhelm (1931), Handbuch der erkla¨renden Syntax. Heidelberg: Winter

IV. Grundbegriffe Herbermann, Clemens-Peter (1981), Wort, Basis, Lexem und die Grenze zwischen Lexikon und Grammatik: Eine Untersuchung am Beispiel der Bildung komplexer Substantive. München: Fink Hockett, Charles F. (1958), A Course in Modern Linguistics. New York: Macmillan Huddleston, Rodney (1984), Introduction to the Grammar of English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Jones, Daniel (1931), “The Word as a Phonetic Entity”. Maıˆtre phone´tique 36, 60⫺65 Kra´msky Jirˇ´ı (1969), The Word as a Linguistic Unit. The Hague, Paris: Mouton Kucˇera, Henry & Francis, W. Nelson (1967), Computational Analysis of Present-day American English. Providence/RI: Brown University Press Lejeune, Michel (1949, ed.), Proceedings of the Sixth International Congress of Linguists [Paris, 1948]. Paris: Klincksieck Lyons, John (1963), Structural Semantics. Oxford: Blackwell (Publications of the Philological Society 20) [reprinted 1972] Lyons, John (1968), Introduction to Theoretical Linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Lyons, John (1977), Semantics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Martinet, A[ndre´] (1949), “Communication e´crite”. In: Lejeune (ed.), 292⫺295 Martinet, A[ndre´] (1967), Ele´ments de linguistique ge´ne´rale. Paris: Colin Martinet, Andre´ (1985), Syntaxe ge´ne´rale. Paris: Armand Colin Matthews, P[eter] H. (1972), Inflectional Morphology. A Theoretical Study Based on Aspects of the Latin Verb Conjugation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Matthews, P[eter] H. (1974), Morphology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Meeussen, A. E. (1949), [communication e´crite]. In: Lejeune (ed.), 295f. Meillet, A[ntoine] 1921), Linguistique historique et linguistique ge´ne´rale. Paris: Champion Miller, Robert L. (1966), “The Word and Its Meaning”. Linguistics 28, 90⫺96 Mugdan, Joachim (1994), “Morphological Units”. In: Asher (ed.), 2543⫺2553 Plank, Frans (1994), “Inflection and Derivation”. In: Asher (ed.), 2600⫺2602 Pratchett, Terry (1989), Pyramids. London: Corgi Rosetti, A. (21947), Le mot, esquisse d’une the´orie ge´ne´rale, deuxie`me e´dition revue et augmente´e. Copenhague: Munksgaard; Bucures¸ti: Institutul de linguistica˘ romaˆna˘ Sapir, Edward (1921), Language. London: Harvest Seiler, Hansjakob (1964), “On Defining the Word”. In: Lunt, Horace G. (ed.), Proceedings of the IX

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27. Lexical and grammatical meaning International Congress of Linguists [Cambridge/ MA 1962], The Hague etc.: Mouton, 767⫺770 Swadesh, M. (1934), “The Phonemic Principle”. Language 10, 117⫺129 [reprinted in Fudge, Erik C. (1973, ed.), Phonology. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 35⫺46] Swiggers, P. (1986), “Le mot comme unite´ linguistique dans la the´orie grammaticale au dix-huitie`me sie`cle”. Indogermanische Forschungen 91, 1⫺26 Szpyra, Jolanta (1989), The Phonology-Morphology Interface: Cycles, Levels and Words. London, New York: Routledge

Taylor, Charles (1985), Nkore-Kiga. Beckenham: Croom Helm Thompson, Laurence C. (1965), A Vietnamese Grammar. Seattle: University of Washington Press Ullmann, Stephen (21957), The Principles of Semantics. Oxford: Blackwell; Glasgow: Jackson (Glasgow University Publications 84) [11951] Wils, J. (1949), [communication e´crite]. In: Lejeune (ed.), 302 Zgusta, Ladislav (1971), Manual of Lexicography. Prague: Academia; The Hague, Paris: Mouton (Janua Linguarum Series Maior 39)

Laurie Bauer, Wellington (New Zealand)

27. Lexical and grammatical meaning 1. 2.

6.

Introduction Formal correlates of the lexical-grammatical morpheme distinction Semantic structures distinguishing lexical and grammatical morphemes A general survey of grammatical meanings Grammaticalization and the lexicalgrammatical meaning distinction References

1.

Introduction

3. 4. 5.

The morpheme is the basic meaning-bearing unit of language (cf. Art. 46). In addition to categorizing morphemes by their formal properties, linguists have also attempted to categorize morphemes by their semantic properties, and to study correlations between formal and semantic categorizations of morphemes. The basic division that has been proposed for the semantic categorization of morphemes is the distinction between lexical meaning and grammatical meaning. A traditional morphological distinction, that between root and affix, is related though not identical to the semantic distinction. It has been assumed that the division between lexical meaning and grammatical meaning, and between root and affix, is clearcut. In fact it is not, and the chief reason for this fact is the diachronic process of grammaticalization, which causes root morphemes bearing lexical meaning to acquire grammatical meaning, generally becoming affixes in the process. Grammaticalization theorists have attempted to provide an overall characterization of the nature of the semantic change accompanying

grammaticalization (cf. Art. 145). The relevance of grammaticalization theory to the lexical-grammatical meaning distinction will be discussed in 5.

2.

Formal correlates of the lexicalgrammatical morpheme distinction

2.1. Affix vs. root as a formal correlate of the grammatical vs. lexical semantic division The distinction between lexical and grammatical meaning appears to be the semantic reflex of the formal morphological distinction between root and affix. A root is generally defined as the part of an independent word from which all its various morphological forms are derived, and an affix is defined as a morpheme that cannot occur except in combination with root (or stem; see Art. 53). For example, the Itza´ word t-in-wen-el ‘I was sleeping’ consists of a root wen ‘sleep’ and three affixes, t- durative, in- 1.singular and -el intransitive. Actually the term affix is too narrow. Apart from affixes there exist other processes which carry grammatical meaning, such as reduplication, ablaut, truncation, suprasegmentals and other nonconcatenative morphological combinations (cf. Ch. VIII). A useful term that includes all of these concatenative and nonconcatenative forms is dependent morpheme (Langacker 1987: 336, 488). This term captures the most plausible formal generalization covering nonroot morphemes,

258 namely that dependent morphemes can most perspicuously be described in terms of a process (in the simplest case, concatenation) applied to the root morpheme, and hence the form of a dependent morpheme is a function on the structure of the root or autonomous morpheme. However, this characterization of nonroot morphemes is not uncontroversial. 2.2. Problems in the correlation between root vs. affix and grammatical vs. lexical meaning Nevertheless, the correlation between form and meaning in this area, as in most other areas of grammar, is by no means exact. A purely semantic definition cannot be a sufficient definition, because there exist words that are generally agreed to indicate grammatical meaning but are instead independent words, not affixes. The term particle is used for such words (cf. Art. 40); the English article the is an example of a particle. Not all linguists would apply the term root to particles, because roots are generally thought of as forms to which inflections are applied, and many particles are uninflected. On the other hand, a purely morphological definition of the root-affix distinction may not be sufficient either. The distinction between compounding ⫺ the combination of two roots into a single word ⫺ and affixation ⫺ the combination of a root and an affix into a single word ⫺ rests on a distinction between root and affix that is not obviously defined in morphological or phonological terms (cf. Art. 37 and 38). There exist unclear cases from a morphological point of view; for example, is -man in postman, garbageman a root in a compound, or a derivational affix? Grammaticalization accounts for the problematic character of this example (see 5). The relationship between the lexical-grammatical meaning distinction and the root-affix distinction is not fully determined even in morphologically clear cases. Consider the meaning ‘to her’. In some languages, such as Djabugay, the root is the pronoun gulu ‘s/he’ to which is affixed a case suffix meaning ‘to’: gulu-nda [s/he-dat]. In other languages, such as Mam, the root is the preposition or relational noun ee meaning ‘to’, to which is attached a personal prefix meaning ‘s/he’: t-ee [3.sg-to]. Thus, given the meanings of two morphemes combined into a single word, one cannot always predict which meaning will be expressed as a root ⫺ i.e. is considered the lexical meaning ⫺ and which as an affix.

IV. Grundbegriffe

2.3. Closed class vs. open class as a formal correlate of the grammatical vs. lexical meaning distinction Another formal criterion is sometimes invoked to distinguish between lexical and grammatical morphemes, when the latter are not dependent morphemes. Words with lexical meaning, called content words, are said to belong to open syntactic classes, whereas particles or function words belong to closed classes. This is again only an inexact correlation to the semantic distinction. For example, in many African languages there is a closed syntactic class of adjectives, generally dimensional adjectives (e.g. short, long, big, small) or color terms, which few semanticists would describe as function words. Conversely, semantic role concepts are encoded as relational nouns in many Mesoamerican languages, and some linguists argue that these function words are actually part of the large open class of nouns, as a special subclass. However, this last example illustrates that it is not entirely clear what counts as a distinct (possibly closed class) syntactic category. A sufficiently fine-grained distributional analysis will distinguish a category of deictic motion verbs in English, for instance, which would be a closed class consisting of go and come; but this goes against intuition which would include these in the open class of verbs. This syntactic criterion is not usable without an independently justified set of criteria for defining syntactic categories.

3.

Semantic structures distinguishing lexical and grammatical morphemes

Having discussed the relationship between morphological form and lexical and grammatical meaning, the latter distinction itself can be discussed. This distinction itself has gone under several names. With respect to words or roots as opposed to affixes, the terms content word vs. function word, as mentioned in the preceding section, are found. In Chinese linguistics, where the language under study uses words to perform many of the functions carried out by affixes in European languages, the terms full roots (lexical) vs. empty roots (grammatical) are found. A number of semanticists have attempted to distinguish lexical and grammatical meaning (e.g. Talmy 1978; 1988 a; 1988 b; Morrow 1986; Croft 1990 a). In general, there is no agreement as to what semantic feature(s), if

259

27. Lexical and grammatical meaning

any, distinguishes lexical from grammatical meaning. The semantic structures or properties that distinguish lexical from grammatical semantics tend not to provide a sharp distinction between the two. Some, though by no means all, semanticists have proposed that lexical meanings are encyclopedic in character (Haiman 1980; Langacker 1987). The encyclopedic view of lexical meaning is that there is no sharp dividing line between that part of a word’s meaning which is “strictly linguistic” (the dictionary view of lexical meaning) and that part which is “nonlinguistic knowledge about the concept”. While this dividing line is difficult to maintain, it is clear that some semantic properties are more central to a word’s meaning than others, particularly those properties that apply to (almost) all and only the instances of the kind, which are intrinsic to the kind, and which are conventional knowledge of (almost) all of the speech community (Langacker 1987: 158⫺161). If one accepts that lexical meaning is encyclopedic, then grammatical meaning might be distinguished from lexical meaning by arguing that grammatical meaning is not encyclopedic: I may have encyclopedic knowledge of bananas that may influence my use of the word banana, but it appears that I do not have encyclopedic knowledge of nonunit cardinalities that influences my use of the plural suffix -s. Nevertheless, Wierzbicka (1986) has demonstrated that encyclopedic knowledge governs the use of singular/plural with nouns in various languages (that is, whether the noun is treated as count, mass, or pluralia tantum). For example, the ambivalence of hair (mass)/hairs (count) and chocolate (mass)/chocolates (count) can be explained through different encyclopedic aspects of the real-world occurrence of discrete individuals and aggregates or substances: hairs can be visually discriminated but usually occur in a mass on one’s head, while chocolate is a natural substance but is also culturally used to form discrete objects with non-chocolate fillings. Similar examples can be constructed. A second property of meaning that seems to distinguish lexical and grammatical meanings is the degree of generality of the meaning. Grammatical meanings are hypothesized to be more general than lexical meanings. For example, the pronouns he, she and it are more general in meaning than any particular noun; the plural suffix -s is more general than

any individual numeral, including the vague numerals some, a few and many; and the past tense is more general than lexical temporal deictics such as yesterday or long ago. Unfortunately, it is very difficult to measure generality precisely. In many cases lexical and grammatical meanings are incommensurable. The notion of generality must also be broadened. For example, the high degree of generality of grammatical meanings is often not due to a single general meaning (Gesamtbedeutung) for a grammatical morpheme such as on. Instead, it is due to the great range of polysemy (meanings derived at least etymologically from an original basic meaning or Grundbedeutung) found in grammatical morphemes in comparison to lexical morphemes (Hopper & Traugott 1993: 100). The formal semanticists’ extensional definition of generality as subsumption ⫺ the more general meaning covers the wider range of situations ⫺ appropriately includes both general meaning and high degree of polysemy. Nevertheless, there are many lexical roots whose meanings are quite general and/or polysemous, such as man, thing, go and have (in its nonauxiliary use). A third property that has been proposed to distinguish grammatical and lexical meaning is that grammatical meaning represents a conceptualization or construal of the content of experience which is represented by lexical meaning (see Talmy 1978; 1988 a; 1988 b; Langacker 1987). The conceptualization hypothesis is based on the observation that meanings do not simply reflect an objective reality, but view it or even shape it from a particular perspective. For example, the choice of the progressive or the simple present provides different conceptualizations of the engine’s condition in the following examples (Goldsmith & Woisetschlaeger 1982): (1) The engine isn’t running. (2) The engine doesn’t run. In (1), the engine’s state is construed as a contingent property currently holding of the engine; it may be due to a temporary malfunction, or it may be due to the engine simply being turned off. In (2), the engine’s state is construed as an inherent, basic property of the engine, from the point of the view of the speaker. In fact, the two sentences could be applied to the same situation by two different speakers, who conceptualize the nature of the engine’s state in opposite ways.

260 However, construal plays a significant role in lexical meaning as well. This is most obvious in politically-charged vocabulary. For example, when the American stock market lost almost 25 % of its value in one day in October 1987, some newspapers described it as a meltdown or a crash, while the U. S. government described it as a correction. As with the hypothetical grammatical example in the preceding paragraph, different speakers used different lexical items to describe the same event, providing different conceptualizations of that event. All linguistic meaning, not just grammatical meaning, involves conceptualization of the experience being represented. Hence the existence of conceptualization processes cannot form the basis of the grammatical vs. lexical meaning distinction. It appears that grammatical meanings consist of little more than conceptualization operations. A fourth property that may distinguish lexical and grammatical meanings is the nature of the semantic domain which provides the frame supporting the denotation of the concept (or, in Langacker’s terms, against which the concept is profiled). A domain (Langacker 1987) or frame (Fillmore 1982; 1985) is a coherent dimension of experience by means of which a group of morphemes may be defined. For instance the commercial transaction frame provides a complex structure from one dimension of human experience that can be used to define buy, sell, pay, cost, price, worth etc. (A semantic frame resembles a semantic field; but Fillmore argues that words are not defined solely by mutual contrast within a semantic field, as in semantic field theory.) A survey of grammatical meanings demonstrates that certain domains, such as quantity, time, space, causation, scales, units, and identity have an inordinate population of grammatical meanings, while other domains, such as commercial transactions, baseball, futures trading, and medieval musicology have no grammatical meanings profiled in them at all. The former domains are traditionally labelled abstract, while the latter are labelled concrete. Again, this is a dimension that is difficult to measure and in fact appears to be difficult to define except by enumeration. However, a plausible solution to this problem is to note that the abstract domains are themselves components of a very large number of concrete domains. For example, almost all

IV. Grundbegriffe

domains make some reference to time or scales in defining the concepts profiled in them (any domain involving events and gradable properties respectively), and an enormous number involve some reference to spatial concepts in their structure (any domain involving physical objects or motion). It is more precise to think of domains as being themselves multidimensional (Langacker 1987: 150⫺152). This provides a definition of abstractness: the “dimensions” that are found in the largest number of domains are the most abstract ones. Abstractness is a continuum just as generality is. As with generality, one can observe lexical meanings in abstract domains, for example the nouns front and back in the spatial domain and the word extremely in the scalar domain. We may summarize by suggesting that the distinction between lexical and grammatical meaning is best described as a continuum. Grammatical meanings are defined over domains that cut across large expanses of human experience, are extremely general in their extension, are largely defined in terms of a conceptualization of human experience, and require access to a lesser amount of encyclopedic knowledge than lexical meanings.

4.

A general survey of grammatical meanings

It is essentially impossible to provide a general survey of lexical meanings. These are considered to be open-ended, constrained only by the range of human experience. Grammatical meanings, on the contrary, represent a restricted overall inventory of semantic concepts, which have a remarkable degree of uniformity across languages, and various attempts have been made to taxonomize and systematize the range of grammatical meanings that are found. A descriptive inventory of such meanings will be presented briefly here (a more detailed exposition of each of these categories is found in Ch. XIII and XIV). The taxonomy used here is as follows (although traditional terminology referring to affixes is used here, it is intended to apply to particles as well): ⫺ Inflectional meaning ⫺ Inherent inflection ⫺ Relational inflection ⫺ Derivational meaning ⫺ Type-changing derivation ⫺ Function-indicating derivation

27. Lexical and grammatical meaning

The traditional division between inflectional and derivational meaning (cf. Art. 38) is followed here, though it has been argued that this is actually a continuum (Bybee 1985). Inflection is divided into inherent, which characterizes semantic properties of the entities denoted by the roots to which they are applied, and relational, which indicates relations between lexical meanings in phrases and clauses and between clauses (Anderson 1985: 172). Derivational meaning is in turn divided into type-changing derivation, which significantly alters the profiled concept in the frame presupposed by the lexical meaning specified by the root, and function-indicating derivation, which changes its syntactic category, but with much smaller semantic effects than are found in type-changing derivation (Croft 1991: 58). The categories of inherent inflection found in the world’s languages have been the focus of efforts to find a unified theme underlying grammatical meaning (Talmy 1978; 1988; Morrow 1986; Croft 1990 a; Langacker 1991). These efforts have focused on a set of similar schemes for organizing inherent inflectional meaning (Langacker 1991: 32⫺35; Croft 1990 a; in the exposition below, Langacker’s terms are in parentheses). In all cases, the assumption is that inherent inflections structure the experience encoded by the lexical meaning for communication. We can illustrate the scheme for grammatical semantic meanings with the Russian noun phrase e`ta travinka ‘this blade of grass’. The experience to be communicated must be categorized (assigned to a type). This function is largely one performed by lexical meanings, but nominal classification ⫺ including gender, such as the feminine -a in travink-a ⫺ appears to perform the same function. The existence of nominal classification poses difficulties for distinguishing lexical and grammatical semantic categorization; but the primary functions of grammatical categorization are actually reference tracking (anaphora) or relational (agreement; see the feminine form e`ta ‘this’). Next, the relevant instance of the type must be selected (instantiated). Selection involves instantiation, and hence grammatical meanings associated with generic/specific (determiners), individuation (unit terms), and verbal aspect. The Russian example includes a singulative suffix -in (plus diminutive -k) to indicate a blade of grass, rather than an expanse of grass. It also involves quantification, hence grammatical

261 number (for nouns ⫺ travinka is singular) and iteration (for verbs). Finally, the instantiated type must be situated, in space, time and in the discourse context of the speaker and hearer (critically involving their mutual beliefs). This situating function (grounding) usually involves direct reference to properties of the speech act situation, including the locations of the speaker and hearer ⫺ deictic expressions such as the proximal form e`ta ‘this’ in the Russian example ⫺ the time of the speech event (tense) and the beliefs and desires of the speaker and hearer (determiners and mood and modality). The semantics of relational inflectional meanings is easy to characterize in a general fashion, although the semantics of individual relational grammatical morphemes is often elusive. They simply encode the relation between lexical meanings in phrases, clauses and between clauses. This is found in grammatical agreement, linkers between heads and modifiers, case marking, and intersentential connectives. In general, one of the lexical meanings involved in the relation provides a semantic “slot” or “role” (usually an argument position) which the other meaning fills with a more specific description of the entity filling the role. Thus, the lexical items provide most of the semantic content of the relation, and the relational inflectional meaning is only a highly general construal of semantic relations between lexical meanings (either causal: Talmy 1988 a; 1988 b; Croft 1991; or Gestalt/spatial: Talmy 1983; Langacker 1991), and specification of the discourse or pragmatic status of that referent. The semantics of type-changing derivational morphemes can best be understood from a frame semantic perspective. A word such as run defines a profiled concept in a frame, in this case the central action of the frame. A derivational morpheme such as -er shifts the profile from that of the base to something else in the frame, in this case the actor performing the action. (Of course, other semantic shifts occur in derivation, which may involve a shift of frame; in this example, a runner is generally defined in a more specific frame of recreational activity, not just in the more general frame of human or animal locomotion.) The semantics of function-indicating derivation is more elusive. This grouping includes affixes and particles whose sole function appears to be a change of category. For example, the action nominalization suffix written

262

IV. Grundbegriffe

as -ion as in construction changes an verb to a noun without any major semantic change (such as the shift in denotation from action to agent with -er), and hence is a functionindicating derivational morpheme. There are subtle semantic changes effected by a shift in syntactic category (Bolinger 1967; Wierzbicka 1986; Croft 1991: 99⫺126) which are generally considered to be matters of conceptualization or construal. It has been argued that there is a change in what concept in a frame is profiled even for these derivational meanings (see for example Langacker 1987: 214⫺217). But the change is at most a subtle one, and in these cases it can be argued that the semantic content of function-indicating derivational meanings (if there indeed are such meanings, which is not widely accepted), then it is almost purely a shift in conceptualization.

5.

Grammaticalization and the lexicalgrammatical meaning distinction

Most of the research described in 2 to 4 assumes that the distinction between lexical and grammatical meaning is a sharp one. We have noted problems with this assumption in those sections. In fact, however, all grammatical meanings arise historically from lexical meanings. This semantic change is part of a more general linguistic process that is called grammaticalization (cf. Art. 145). Grammaticalization is a diachronic process by which lexical meanings shift to grammatical meanings, more or less along the continuum described at the end of 3. Grammaticalization, like all historical linguistic processes, is gradual, or at least incremental. In fact, the dynamic perspective on linguistic semantics provided by grammaticalization offers explanations for the empirical problems described in previous sections, in particular the “mismatches” between lexical and grammatical meaning and their formal correlates, and the fuzziness of the distinction between lexical and grammatical meaning. The “mismatches” frequently found between the formal distinctions described in 2 and the lexical-grammatical meaning distinction are a consequence of the nature of grammaticalization. In grammaticalization, lexical roots and their meanings evolve into grammatical particles or affixes with grammatical meanings. This process occurs more or less simultaneously at the semantic, phonological

and morphosyntactic levels. However, the parallel changes often are not perfectly synchronized (Croft 1990 b: 242⫺244). If phonological combination occurs before the semantic shift occurs, then compounding results. If the semantic shift occurs before phonological attachment does, then particles result. Likewise, the shift from open-class to closed-class morphosyntactic category is also a gradual one. As morphemes shift from lexical to grammatical meaning, they also organize themselves into a closed-class, paradigmatic set (Lehmann 1985). But the shift to grammatical meaning may also occur before the organization into paradigmatic sets, as with the relational nouns used for case meanings in Mesoamerican languages. In 3, we suggested that the distinction between lexical and grammatical meaning is actually a continuum along four dimensions, with the extreme points of the four dimensions providing prototypical lexical and grammatical meanings. From the perspective of grammaticalization, it can be seen that the continuum arises from the gradual process of semantic change. Lexical meanings are gradually extended to a wider range of uses (generalized); as a result they are used in a wider range of semantic domains (i.e. they become more abstract), they make less use of domain-specific encyclopedic knowledge, and as a result the conceptualization of experience they encode plays a larger and larger role in their definition. In other words, they become grammatical meanings. Some conceptual categories are intermediate in the semantic shift along these gradients. Personal deixis and semantic role relations are two such intermediate semantic categories. For this reason, cross-linguistically one finds variation as to which is encoded as the root and which as the affix, which depends also on their degree of grammaticalization at the phonological and morphosyntactic levels (cf. the Djabugay and Mam examples in 2). Not only does grammaticalization theory contribute to our understanding of lexical and grammatical meaning; the analysis of lexical and grammatical meaning can contribute to grammaticalization theory. Most grammaticalization theorists treat all specific grammaticalization processes (verb to mood marker, noun to case marker, noun to agentive affix, etc.) as instances of a single general process that is unidirectional. A central problem of grammaticalization the-

27. Lexical and grammatical meaning

ory, then, is a general characterization of the process of semantic change from lexical meaning to grammatical meaning. The analysis of the continuum from lexical to grammatical meaning in 3 demonstrates that the process of semantic change involves (at least) four different semantic dimensions. Two of these dimensions, generalization (in the extensional sense) and abstraction (that is, shift of meaning to more abstract domains, as defined in 3), are already found in grammaticalization studies, albeit defined slightly differently by some grammaticalization theorists. A third semantic grammaticalization process, subjectification, may be related to the role of construal in a morpheme’s meaning. Subjectification is the process by which a morpheme’s meaning comes to make greater reference to speaker’s point of view and/or properties of the text or discourse (Traugott 1989). This is clearest in cases such as epistemic modality, in which indicators of various “objective” properties such as physical ability ultimately come to indicate speaker’s degree of commitment to the truth of a proposition, as with must in This must have been a sad shock to the poor disconsolate parent from Old English *motan, a verb of permission (Traugott 1989: 42, 37). Since speaker’s point of view represents a perspective on the experience communicated, it represents a conceptualization of that experience, and so a highly subjective meaning is a more grammatical meaning on that semantic dimension.

6.

References

Anderson, Stephen R. (1985), “Inflectional Morphology”. In: Shopen, Timothy (ed.), Language Typology and Syntactic Description, Vol. III: Grammatical Categories and the Lexicon. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 150⫺201 Bolinger, Dwight (1967), “Adjectives in English: Attribution and Predication”. Lingua 18, 1⫺34 Bybee, Joan L. (1985), Morphology. Amsterdam: Benjamins Croft, William (1990 a), Typology and Universals. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Croft, William (1990 b), “A Conceptual Framework for Grammatical Categories”. Journal of Semantics 7, 245⫺79 Croft, William (1991), Syntactic Categories and Grammatical Relations. Chicago: University of Chicago Press Fillmore, Charles J. (1975), “An Alternative to Checklist Theories of Meaning”. Berkeley Linguis-

263 tics Society: Proceedings of the First Annual Meeting, 123⫺131 Fillmore, Charles J. (1982), “Frame Semantics”. In: The Linguistic Society of Korea (ed.), Linguistics in the Morning Calm. Seoul: Hanshin, 111⫺137 Fillmore, Charles J. (1985), “Frames and the Semantics of Understanding”. Quaderni di semantica 6, 222⫺54 Goldsmith, John & Woisetschlaeger, Eric (1982), “The Logic of the English Progressive”. Linguistic Inquiry 13, 79⫺89 Haiman, John (1980), “Dictionaries and Encyclopedias”. Lingua 50, 329⫺57 Heine, Bernd & Reh, Mechthild (1984), Grammaticalization and Reanalysis in African Languages. Hamburg: Buske Hopper, Paul & Traugott, Elizabeth Closs (1993), Grammaticalization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Langacker, Ronald W. (1987), Foundations of Cognitive Grammar, Vol. I: Theoretical Prerequisites. Stanford: Stanford University Press Langacker, Ronald. W. (1991), Foundations of Cognitive Grammar, Vol. II: Descriptive Application. Stanford: Stanford University Press Lehmann, Christian (1985), “Grammaticalization: Synchronic Variation and Diachronic Change”. Lingua e Stile 20, 303⫺318 Lindner, Susan (1981), A Lexico-Semantic Analysis of the English Verb Particle Constructions with out and Up. Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, San Diego Morrow, Daniel G. (1986), “Grammatical Morphemes and Conceptual Structure in Discourse Processing”. Cognitive Science 10, 423⫺455 Talmy, Leonard (1978), “The Relation of Grammar to Cognition”. In: Waltz, David (ed.), Proceedings of TINLAP-2. Urbana: University of Illinois Coordinated Science Laboratory Talmy, Leonard (1983), “How Language Structures Space”. In: Pick, Herbert L., Jr. & Acredolo, Linda P. (eds.), Spatial Orientation: Theory, Research and Application. New York: Plenum Press, 225⫺282 Talmy, Leonard (1988 a), “The Relation of Grammar to Cognition”. In: Rudzka-Ostyn, Brygida (ed.), Topics in Cognitive Linguistics. Amsterdam: Benjamins, 165⫺205 Talmy, Leonard (1988 b), “Force Dynamics in Language and Cognition”. Cognitive Science 12, 49⫺100 Traugott, Elizabeth Closs (1989), “On the Rise of Epistemic Meanings in English”. Language 65, 31⫺55 Wierzbicka, Anna (1986), “What’s in a Noun?”. Studies in Language 10, 353⫺389

William Croft, Manchester (Great Britain)

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28. Category and feature 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

Categories in morphology Syntactic categories in morphology Categories in word formation Morphosyntactic categories and features Motivation for binary approaches Markedness Underspecification and redundancy References

1.

Categories in morphology

Aristotle allocated ¤words uncombinedÅ to one or other of the following ten categories: substance, quantity, quality, relation, place, date, posture, possession, action and passivity (Ross 61995: 22). Aristotle was also the pioneer in western culture of classification in the modern biological sense: the assignment of every living creature to one of a range of mutually exclusive classes, these classes being assembled in turn into higher-level groupings. Classification of this clear-cut, nonoverlapping kind is often called Aristotelian. The beginnings of grammatical categorisation predate Aristotle, inasmuch as Plato already distinguishes between nominal and verbal elements (ono´mata and rhe˘ mata) (cf. Robins 31990 and Art. 6). In contemporary morphological theory, three kinds of classification or categorisation are especially important: (a) of words according to their syntactic function; (b) of words according to their formation; (c) of inflected word-forms according to their grammatical content and context. (In (a) and (b), word is to be interpreted in the technical sense of lexeme, whose definition and relationship to the term word-form are discussed in Art. 62.) Topics (a), (b) and (c) will be discussed in sections 2, 3 and 4 respectively, with particular attention to the numerous morphological applications of the terms category and feature. Sections 5, 6 and 7 discuss in more detail issues arising from section 4. Aristotelian classification operates on the basis that, when there is a range of possible classes to which an item might belong, it is in principle possible to arrive at a definite decision on the basis of necessary and sufficient conditions for membership of each class. In this respect Aristotelian classification differs from ¤fuzzyÅ classification in terms of proto-

typical and marginal membership (cf. Rosch & Mervis 1975). The difference can be illustrated by reference to the set consisting of sparrows, eagles, penguins and ostriches. In biological taxonomy, which is Aristotelian in spirit, these are all equally and unequivocally birds. In terms of the lay person’s folk biology, however, some are ¤betterÅ birds than others: sparrows are prototypical birds while eagles (in virtue of their large size) are less typical, and ostriches and penguins, being flightless, are marginal. Prototypical or gradient classification has also been applied in grammatical theory, for example by Ross (1972: 316). In morphology one might argue that prototypical classification is appropriate in circumstances where it is not clear on what side of the line, in Aristotelian terms, a phenomenon falls. For example, the possessive suffix -’s in English is caselike from the point of view of its meaning and syntactic functions, but is not case-like in that it attaches to the last word of a noun phrase, whatever that may be, rather than to nouns or pronouns in particular. Similarly, one might regard the English verb steal (past stole) as prototypically ¤strongÅ or ¤irregularÅ, while peel (past peeled) is prototypically ¤weakÅ or ¤regularÅ, thereby allowing feel (past felt) to be analysed as intermediate between these prototypes. Nevertheless, classification in morphology has generally been of the Aristotelian kind. Rightly or wrongly, most morphologists have handled borderline phenomena by refining the relevant criteria so as to place them unequivocally on one side of the line or the other. If this approach is correct, there is an important difference between morphological categories on the one hand and the concepts which underlie many lexical meanings on the other: the former are clear-cut whereas the latter are fuzzy. This implication raises questions which deserve to be further explored. In this article classification is to be generally understood in the Aristotelian sense; but that merely reflects the prevailing analytic fashion, and is not intended to prejudge the issue against prototypical classification.

2.

Syntactic categories in morphology

Syntactic categories (also known as lexical categories, word classes or parts of speech: cf. Art. 69) include traditional categories such

28. Category and feature

as noun and verb. The relationship of these to morphology in general is discussed in Art. 34. Here we are concerned only with their relationship to morphological categorisation. Because the membership of syntactic categories is based on syntactic criteria (cf. Art. 70), there is no logical necessity for a close fit between such categorisation and any kind of categorisation which morphology may require. Nevertheless, the classes into which words are divided for morphological purposes generally respect the basic categorisations imposed by syntax. The situation is somewhat different when it comes to subcategorisation. In English, for example, verbs can be subcategorised syntactically as transitive (such as introduce) or intransitive (such as disappear). Similarly, nouns can be subcategorised syntactically as count nouns (such as harbour) and mass nouns (such as water). But these syntactic subcategorisations need not correlate with morphological ones. For example, the morphological categorisation of verbs into inflection classes, such as the ¤weakÅ class illustrated by bake (past baked) and the ¤strongÅ class illustrated by take (past took) (cf. Art. 65) crosscuts the transitive-intransitive distinction. Similarly, the class of nouns for which a corresponding adjective in -less is in general use includes both count and mass nouns (e.g. harbour and water respectively) but excludes both count and mass nouns too (e.g. port and ice respectively). The apparent anomaly reflects the fact that morphological categorisation is driven by factors which overlap with syntax only partly (cf. Art. 34). In particular, morphological processes are much more widely implicated than syntactic ones in forming new lexical items, so it is not surprising that they should be more subject to arbitrary lexical restrictions (cf. Art. 36).

3.

Categories in word formation

Word formation is examined in detail in Ch. XI and XII. Here a summary is provided of the ways in which word formation processes can be categorised, as well as illustration of some of the terminology which has been used for this purpose. The formation of one lexeme from another has both a semantic and a formal side, either of which may be focused on independently

265 (cf. Art. 81). Consider for example the lexemes write and writer. One may be interested in their semantic relationship, that of a verb and the corresponding agent noun, and so compare them with other verb-noun pairs such as read and reader, type and typist, inform and informant, cookV and cookN, or steal and thief. Alternatively, one may be interested in their formal relationship via the suffix -er, and so compare them with other verb-noun pairs such as read and reader, cook and cooker, or stroll and stroller. Further afield, one may compare them with other lexeme pairs related via the suffix -er but of which neither is a verb, such as London and Londoner or teenage and teenager. Clearly there is a far from perfect correspondence between the formal and semantic sides of word formation. Even the pair read and reader, which appears in both the lists of verb-noun pairs above, illustrates this. Two of the senses of reader are ¤someone who readsÅ and ¤book of reading material for teaching purposesÅ. Reader appears in the first list because it has the first of these two senses, but it would be entitled to appear in the second list even if its only sense were ¤book of reading materialÅ. Various researchers have explored both the semantic side and the formal side of word formation. Their terminology is inconsistent, however. Let us distinguish the following: (a) meanings such as ¤agentÅ, considered independently of the formal processes (e.g. of suffixation) which express them; (b) formal processes such as the addition of the suffix -er, considered independently of what they may mean; (c) pairs consisting of a meaning and a process, such as: (c1) the formation of ¤agentÅ nouns by the suffixation of -er, e.g. writer; (c2) the formation of ¤agentÅ nouns by the suffixation of -ist, e.g. typist; (c3) the formation of ¤instrumentÅ nouns by the suffixation of -er, e.g. cooker; (c4) the formation of ¤inhabitantÅ nouns by the suffixation of -er, e.g. Londoner; etc. Affixes in the context of items of class (c), that is word-forming affixes with associated meanings, are derivational morphemes (or allomorphs of derivational morphemes). The term (derivational) category is applied to items of class (c) by van Marle (1985: 95f.)

266

IV. Grundbegriffe

but class (a) by Szymanek (1988: 22), whose term for class (c) items is derivational type (1988: 60). On the other hand, the term derivational type is used by Zwanenberg (1984 a: 138; 1984 b: 362) for class (a) items. Class (a) items loom large also in the morphological theory of Beard, but his term for them is lexical derivations or L-derivations (1995: 98); he contrasts them with MS-operations (or morphological spelling operations), which belong in class (b) (1995: 98). This complex terminological situation is summarised in Tab. 28.1: meaning Beard Szymanek Zwanenberg van Marle

form

LMSderivation operation category type

meaningform pair

type category

Tab. 28.1

The semantic categories relevant to word-formation (or L-derivations) could conceivably differ completely from one language to another. In practice, however, there is considerable overlap, and researchers such as Beard and Szymanek who focus on this aspect of morphology generally argue that there is a small finite inventory of such categories, perhaps grounded in more fundamental characteristics of lexical semantics or cognitive categorisation. Beard & Goddard (1997) argue independently that such lexical semantic categories have grammatical relevance too.

4.

Morphosyntactic categories and features

In word formation, the meanings which morphological processes can express (items of class (a), in terms of the discussion in section 3 above) are not generally regarded as forming a tightly knit structure. By contrast, the meanings or morphosyntactic functions expressed in inflectional morphology in any language constitute a more or less tightly knit structure or collection of structures. Some effects of this on morphological categorisation are discussed in 4.1. Section 4.2 discusses the view that morphological categorisation is binary (i.e. analysable in terms of categories with just two members).

4.1. Nonbinary approaches Consider the contrast between the English verb-forms walk and walked or sing and sang, as they are used in examples (1) and (2): (1) (a) (b) (2) (a) (b)

The children walk to school. They sing in the choir. The children walked to school. They sang in the choir.

Traditionally, the sentences in (2) would be described as the past-tense counterparts of those in (1), which belong to the present tense. But what is the relationship between the term tense and the terms past and present? And what is the relationship of past and present to each other? Analogous questions can be asked about some German facts illustrated in (3): (3) (a) Mein Vater las die Zeitung. (b) Meines Vaters Zeitung liegt auf dem Tisch. (c) Ich habe meinem Vater die Zeitung gegeben. (d) Die Nachricht hat meinen Vater sehr überrascht. Traditionally, these sentences would be described as containing variants of the noun phrase mein Vater differing in case: nominative, genitive, dative and accusative respectively. But what is the relationship between the term case and the terms nominative, genitive, dative and accusative? And what is the relationship of nominative, genitive, dative and accusative to each other? All four of these questions could in principle be of equal importance to morphological theorists. In practice, however, approaches differ according to the weight given to the first question in each pair (the questions about the superordinate terms, tense and case, and their relationship with their hyponyms such as past and genitive). Approaches which give particular weight to this issue will be considered first (cf. Matthews 1972; 21991; Wurzel 1984; Zwicky 1985; Bybee 1985; Mel’cˇuk 1993). In Matthews’s terminology, the superordinate terms tense and case are instances of (morphosyntactic) categories, while their hyponyms, such as past and genitive, denote (morphosyntactic) properties or features (1972: 162; 21991: 38⫺40). A morphosyntactic property can be thought of as a meaning or function which is syntactically as well as morphologically relevant and for which every

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28. Category and feature

lexeme in a given word-class has an expression in some word-form (e.g. past in verbs, genitive in nouns). A morphosyntactic category can be thought of as a set of morphosyntactic properties whose meanings are related but mutually exclusive. It is the fact that morphosyntactic properties can be readily grouped into sets in this way which distinguishes inflectional categorisation from categorisation in word formation. Both categories and properties, in the senses just introduced, belong on the meaning side of the meaning-form dichotomy. Inflectional morphology has no term for the counterpart of the kind of meaning-form pair which Szymanek calls a derivational type (see Tab. 28.1 above); that is, there is no conventional term for items such as (in German nouns) the formation of the genitive singular by the suffixation of -s. However, a set of such meaning-form pairs, corresponding to the set of all possible combinations of morphosyntactic properties belonging to all the morphosyntactic categories relevant to a word class, is essentially what defines an inflection class (Art. 65). In Wurzel’s usage (1984: 61), the term Kategorie or category corresponds to Matthews’s property, and Wurzel’s counterpart of Matthews’s category is Kategoriengefüge or complex of categories. Zwicky’s counterpart of Matthews’s category is feature, while for Matthews’s property or feature Zwicky uses value (1985: 372f.). Other scholars use other terms entirely. This confusing situation is summarised at Tab. 28.2: superordinate

hyponym

Matthews

category

Bybee

category

Wurzel

Kategoriengefüge feature category

property, feature (inflectional) meaning Kategorie

Zwicky Mel’cˇuk

value grammeme

Tab. 28.2

Zwicky’s use of the terms feature and value reflects his view that a feature such as case may have more than two values. A widely held alternative view is that morphosyntactic features, and features generally, have only two values, generally identified as plus and

minus. This view will be discussed in 4.2 and 5. Approaches which emphasise the contrast between categories and properties (in Matthews’s sense) facilitate discussion of the relationship of categories to one another. This has empirical significance, because it implies that there are interesting things to be said about that relationship. For example, concrete claims have been made about the relationship between verbal categories such as voice, aspect, tense and person, affecting how these are realised in verbal word-forms (Bybee 1985: 33⫺43). Such claims would be harder to express in a framework which did not give prominence to voice, aspect etc. as categories, but focused only on active and passive voices, perfective and imperfective aspects, and so on. 4.2. Binary approaches The notion of features as binary entities (i.e. entities with two values, or involving an opposition between two terms) was explored by phonologists belonging to the Prague School in the 1930s, particularly Roman Jakobson (e.g. Jakobson 1936). Through Jakobson’s later association with Morris Halle and Noam Chomsky in the United States, this aspect of his approach became extremely influential in generative grammar, not just in phonology but also in syntax and morphology. To show the effect of this influence, it is helpful to contrast Jakobson’s approach with that of another Prague School phonologist, N. S. Trubetzkoy. Trubetzkoy (31962: 60⫺75 [1939]) emphasised not so much phonological features as the oppositions between phonemes in phonological systems. The opposition between /t/ and /d/ is bilateral, because the properties which /t/ and /d/ share (being both alveolar plosive) are shared by no two other phonemes in English. This opposition is also proportional, because the relation between /t/ and /d/ (the former being voiced, the latter voiceless) is shared by other oppositions, such as between /p/ and /b/, or between /s/ and /z/. But Trubetzkoy also recognised multilateral oppositions, such as that between /p/, /t/ and /k/. This opposition is also proportional, because the relationship between /p/, /t/ and /k/ is the same as that between /b/, /d/ and /g/. Jakobson’s influence in phonology led to a concentration of attention on bilateral proportional oppositions such as that between

268

IV. Grundbegriffe

/d/, /b/ and /z/ respectively and /t/, /p/ and /s/ respectively, analysable in feature terms as [voiced] versus [voiceless] (or [⫹voiced] versus [⫺voiced]). Moreover, Jakobson argued that all apparently multilateral oppositions should be analysed in binary terms. For example, the opposition between labial, dental, palatal and velar places of articulation is not really multilateral but a composite of two binary oppositions, [compact/diffuse] (or [⫾compact]) and [grave/acute] (or [⫾grave]), as set out in Tab. 28.3 (based on Jakobson & Halle 1956: 29⫺31):

labials dentals palatals velars

⫹ ⫺ ⫺

⫺ ⫹ ⫺

Tab. 28.6

⫺ ⫺ ⫹ ⫹

⫹ ⫺ ⫺ ⫹

A common feature of all these analyses is that superordinate terms such as case and person are less prominent than in the approaches summarised in 4.1, even though those superordinate categories are often tacitly presupposed as constituting the domains within which binary features are relevant. To some extent this reflects a difference in priorities: in binary approaches, the emphasis is generally not so much on the relationship of morphosyntactic categories to other categories (in Matthews’s sense), but rather on the relationship to one another of properties within the same category. So how successful are binary approaches in expressing such relationships? Analysing any multilateral opposition in binary terms requires a set of features such that each member of the opposition (or each property in the category) is associated with a unique combination of values for the features in the set. If there are no constraints on the nature or number of the features which may be invoked and the ways in which values of them (such as plus and minus) may be combined, this is trivially easy to achieve. In practice, however, features are chosen in such a way as to reflect one or more of the following:

[⫾oblique]

[⫾governed]

⫺ ⫹ ⫹ ⫺

⫺ ⫺ ⫹ ⫹

Tab. 28.4

Independently, Williams (1981: 267f.) analyses the Latin case system (excluding the vocative and genitive) in terms of three features, as in Tab. 28.5:

Tab. 28.5

[⫾you]

[⫾grave]

In morphology, the German cases nominative, genitive, dative and accusative could be seen as constituting a multilateral opposition, which is also proportional in the sense that all nouns, pronouns and determiners manifest it. However, a morphologist who is impressed by Jakobson’s preference for binary features will be inclined to handle these four cases in binary terms too. Thus, Bierwisch (1967: 246) analyses the German case system in terms of two features, as in Tab. 28.4:

nominative dative ablative accusative

1st person (¤IÅ) 2nd person (¤youÅ) 3rd person (¤she/heÅ)

[⫾me]

[⫾compact]

Tab. 28.3

nominative genitive dative accusative

An example of a binary analysis for another apparently multilateral opposition is the use of the features [⫾me] and [⫾you] to express oppositions of person in the verbal system, thus (e.g. Anderson 1992: 147, 159, 177⫺179):

[⫾direct]

[⫾N]

⫹ ⫺ ⫺ ⫹

⫹ ⫺

[⫾D] ⫹ ⫺

⫺ feature economy; ⫺ shared semantic or syntactic characteristics; ⫺ morphological neutralisation. The more closely these factors coincide in the feature systems that they motivate, the more strongly a binary approach is supported. No judgement on the strength of this support will be reached here, but in section 5 the various factors are illustrated.

269

28. Category and feature

5.

Motivation for binary approaches

5.1. Feature economy Given n binary features, the maximum number of terms which can be distinguished is 2n. For example, with the two features [⫾oblique] or [⫾governed], four terms can be distinguished. These features in fact yield just the four possible combinations illustrated in Tab. 28.4, each of which is associated by Bierwisch (1967: 246) with one of the four cases in German. The analysis at Tab. 28.4 can therefore be described as maximally economical: no more features are used than is mathematically necessary, and all the combinatorial possibilities of these features and their values are exploited. If a linguist sees full exploitation of a feature system as desirable, he or she may seek morphosyntactic interpretations for combinations of feature values which at first sight lack them. Faced with the analysis of person at Tab. 28.6, such a linguist will seek an interpretation for the sole combination of values for [⫾me] and [⫾you] which does not appear there, namely [⫹me, ⫹you]. And such an interpretation is indeed available; this combination is a natural way of representing so-called inclusive first person plural forms, meaning ¤me and youÅ, which are morphologically or syntactically distinguished in languages such as Tagalog (cf. Art. 135). If the number of properties in any given morphosyntactic category were always a power of 2 (i.e. 2, 4, 8, 16 and so on), the binary approach would be strongly supported; for this fact would suggest that all categories were structured internally in terms of fully exploited binary features. However, although some categories do indeed have 2n members for some n (as the German and Tagalog facts illustrate), there seems to be no general tendency in this direction. 5.2. Semantic and syntactic motivations When Bierwisch introduces the binary feature analysis for German cases given as Tab. 28.4, he immediately qualifies it by suggesting that an extra feature [⫾genitive] may be needed, the genitive case being [⫹genitive] and all the other cases [⫺genitive] (1967: 247). This is not necessary in order to differentiate the genitive from the other cases, so it is superfluous from the point of view of feature economy. Bierwisch believes it may be justified, however, for a variety of reasons

including syntactic behaviour, in terms of which the genitive is set apart from the other three cases. He thus recognises that considerations of economy and syntax conflict when it comes to determining the number of binary features which the German case system needs. The case system of Russian, too, can plausibly be analysed as having a membership exactly equivalent to a power of 2, namely 23, or eight. An economical analysis would therefore be possible with just three features. However Jakobson (1966: 83f. [1936]) uses four features, as illustrated in Tab. 28.7:

nominative accusative genitive I genitive II instrumental dative locative I locative II

directional (Bezug)

scopal (Umfang)

peripheral (Rand)

shaping (Gestaltung)

⫺ ⫹ ⫺ ⫺ ⫺

⫺ ⫺ ⫹ ⫹ ⫺

⫺ ⫺ ⫺ ⫺ ⫹

⫺ ⫺ ⫺ ⫹ ⫺

⫹ ⫺ ⫺

⫺ ⫹ ⫹

⫹ ⫹ ⫹

⫺ ⫺ ⫹

Tab. 28.7

The features [⫾directional] and [⫾shaping] are used uneconomically inasmuch as for each of them there are only two cases which have plus values while the other six have minus values. Jakobson chooses this analysis because his central concern is not with formal economy but with semantics: the search for ¤general meaningsÅ (Gesamtbedeutungen), each of which is represented through a binary feature. Evidently he thought that the meanings associated with [⫾directional] and [⫾shaping] were too disparate to be combined under a single, even more general, meaning. 5.3. Morphological neutralisation Williams’s analysis of four of the Latin cases, illustrated at Tab. 28.5 (1981: 267), is uneconomical in that he uses three features rather than two. Moreover, his features are not all combinable with one another: the feature [⫾N] applies only to [⫹direct] forms, while [⫾D] applies only to [⫺direct] ones. This departure from economy has a morphological motivation. Among the neutralisations or syncretisms which occur in Latin nominal or pronominal word-forms, two common ones are that of nominative and accusative (the

270

IV. Grundbegriffe

[⫹direct] cases) and that of dative and ablative (the [⫺direct] cases). To differentiate the four cases economically by means of a single further feature (say, [⫾F], with nominative and dative being [⫹F] and accusative and ablative being [⫺F]) could be taken to imply that the actually occurring syncretisms are no more to be expected than syncretisms of nominative and dative or of accusative and ablative, which do not occur. Similarly, Bierwisch’s feature [⫹genitive] has morphological as well as syntactic motivation. As he puts it (1967: 247): “the genitive is the only case for which there is predominantly an overt marking in the singular of non-feminine nouns.”

6.

Markedness

One of the earliest preoccupations of Prague School linguists, particularly phonologists, was markedness: the notion that in phonological oppositions, especially binary ones, one term is marked in relation to the other (cf. Art. 29). Criteria for markedness could be substantive (e.g. the marked term would involve an extra articulatory gesture) or formal (e.g. the unmarked term would be the one which appears in contexts where the opposition is neutralised or suspended). From the point of view of categories and features, the main issue is whether or not markedness relationships favour binarity. There is no logical necessity for this. In a category with five properties as members (say), it could be that just one is clearly unmarked while the rest are equally marked in relation to it; or it could be that markedness is a matter of degree or gradience. On the other hand, if among the five there is evidence for a variety of binary groupings which cross-cut one another, such that one group is always in some sense more marked than the other, then markedness relationships support the assumption of binary features. On the whole, linguists who explore markedness relationships have tended to use binary features; but this may have more to do with a tendency to equate ¤markedÅ and ¤unmarkedÅ with ¤plusÅ and ¤minusÅ respectively than with solid evidence that markedness behaviour is inconsistent with nonbinary morphosyntactic categories. The expectation that the marked term in a binary opposition should correspond to the plus value in a corresponding binary feature seems natural. This is not consistently

so in phonology, however; for example, the unmarked value for the feature [⫾voiced] is generally agreed to be [⫹voiced] for sonorants (vowels, glides, liquids and nasals) but [⫺voiced] for obstruents (plosives, fricatives and affricates). An association of markedness with plus values for binary features is explicit in Jakobson’s analysis of Russian cases, discussed in 5.2; thus the least marked case overall is the nominative, with a minus value for all four features, while the most marked is the second locative, with a plus value for three of the four features. But, just as in phonology, the association between plus values and markedness cannot always be maintained. For example, it is reasonable to analyse the morphosyntactic distinction between singular and plural, found in many languages, in terms of a binary feature [⫾plural], with [⫹plural] as the marked term of the opposition; but there may be particular lexical items designating collectivities, or objects seldom encountered singly, for which [⫺plural] is more plausibly the marked term (see Art. 100). Similarly, it is reasonable to regard the second person (¤[⫹you]Å) as normally marked in relation to the first and third persons (¤[⫺you]Å), except in imperative contexts, where it is the plus value which is unmarked. Exploration of markedness relationships is especially prominent in the work of the Natural Morphology school (cf. Mayerthaler 1981; Dressler 1987, ed.; Art. 31).

7.

Underspecification and redundancy

Can a word-form to which some binary feature [⫾F] is normally relevant have no specified value at all for that feature, neither plus nor minus? Or, in terms of multimember morphosyntactic categories, can a word-form to which some category is normally relevant express no specified property at all within that category? Such a word-form could be said to be morphosyntactically underspecified, although this term is not so commonly used in morphology as in phonology. In principle, there is no reason why the answers to these two questions should be different, e.g. yes to the first and no to the second. In practice, however, the issue of morphosyntactic underspecification is most usually discussed within a binary feature framework. This practice is followed here, although what is said could equally be applied to multimember categories.

271

28. Category and feature

Circumstances in which underspecification may be invoked in morphology include the following: (a) where the value for some feature is the unmarked value; (b) where the value for some feature is predictable from the context, so that specification of it is redundant; (c) where a feature is altogether irrelevant in some context, so no value for it can be specified there. Circumstance (a) links underspecification to markedness, which was discussed in section 6. Circumstances (b) and (c) can be illustrated by reference to Williams’s feature matrix for four Latin cases, given at Tab. 28.5. Circumstance (b) is illustrated by the two cases which have values for the feature [⫾N] (namely nominative and accusative); these are both [⫹direct], so this feature value is predictable in the context of either value of [⫾N]. Similarly, the two cases which have values for [⫾D] (namely dative and ablative) are both [⫺direct]. It follows that no information would be lost if the matrix contained no specifications in the [⫾direct] column, leaving them to be filled in by redundancy rules such as the following: (4) [⫾N] J [⫹direct] (5) [⫾D] J [⫺direct] Circumstance (c) is illustrated by the fact that, as Tab. 28.5 shows, [⫾N] and [⫾D] are defined by Williams so as to be irrelevant to [⫺direct] and [⫹direct] cases respectively. The Latin verb system too can be used to illustrate circumstances (b) and (c). The two Latin moods, indicative and subjunctive, can be analysed in terms of a binary feature [⫾subjunctive]. In the present and past tenses both indicative and subjunctive forms appear, but in the future tense there are only indicative forms. Therefore future tense forms may plausibly be underspecified in respect of [⫾subjunctive], the value of this feature being filled in by a redundancy rule such as: (6) [⫹future] J [⫺subjunctive] Circumstance (c) is illustrated by the fact that in Latin (unlike, say, Portuguese), infinitives are never inflected for person and number, so that, in any feature matrix for a Latin infinitive, values for [⫾plural], [⫾me] and [⫾you] (or analogous features) will be absent.

8.

References

Anderson, Stephen R. (1992), A-morphous Morphology. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press Beard, Robert (1995), Lexeme-Morpheme Base Morphology: A General Theory of Inflection and Word Formation. Albany/NY: State Univ. of New York Press Bierwisch, Manfred (1967), “Syntactic Features in Morphology: General Problems of So-called Pronominal Inflection in German”. In: To Honor Roman Jakobson: Essays on the Occasion of his Seventieth Birthday, 11 Oct. 1966. The Hague: Mouton, 239⫺270 Bybee, Joan L. (1985), Morphology: A Study of the Relation Between Meaning and Form. Amsterdam: Benjamins Dressler, Wolfgang U. (1987, ed.), Leitmotifs in Natural Morphology. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: Benjamins Goddard, Cliff (1997), “Semantic Primes and Grammatical Categories”. Australian Journal of Linguistics 17, 1⫺41 Jakobson, Roman (1936), “Beitrag zur allgemeinen Kasuslehre: Gesamtbedeutungen der russischen Kasus”. Travaux du Cercle Linguistique de Prague 6, 240⫺288 [reprinted in: Hamp, Eric P. & Householder, Fred W. & Austerlitz, Robert (1966, eds.), Readings in Linguistics, Vol. II. Chicago, London: Univ. of Chicago Press, 51⫺89; English transl.: “Contribution to the General Theory of Case: General Meanings of the Russian Cases”. In: Jakobson, Roman (1984), Russian and Slavic Grammar: Studies 1931⫺1981, ed. by Linda R. Waugh and Morris Halle. Berlin etc.: Mouton, 59⫺103] Jakobson, Roman & Halle, Morris (1956), Fundamentals of Language. The Hague: Mouton Marle, Jaap van (1985), On the Paradigmatic Dimension of Morphological Creativity. Dordrecht, Cinnaminson/NJ: Foris Matthews, P[eter] H. (1972), Inflectional Morphology. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press Matthews, P[eter] H. (21991), Morphology. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press [11974] Mayerthaler, Willi (1981), Morphologische Natürlichkeit. Wiesbaden: Athenaion Mel’cˇuk, Igor (1993), Cours de morphologie ge´ne´rale, Vol. I: Introduction et premie`re partie: Le mot. Montre´al: Les Presses de l’Universite´ de Montre´al; Paris: CNRS E´ditions Robins, R. H. (31990), A Short History of Linguistics. London, New York: Longman Rosch, Eleanor & Mervis, Carolyn B. (1975), “Family Resemblances: Studies in the Internal Structure of Categories”. Cognitive Psychology 7, 573⫺605 Ross, Sir David (61995), Aristotle, with a new introduction by John L. Ackrill. London, New York: Routledge

272

IV. Grundbegriffe

Trubetzkoy, N[ikolaj] S. (31962), Grundzüge der Phonologie. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht [⫽ (1939), Travaux du Cercle Linguistique de Prague 7; English transl. 1969: Principles of Phonology. Berkeley, Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press]

Wurzel, Wolfgang Ullrich (1984), Flexionsmorphologie und Natürlichkeit. Berlin/DDR: AkademieVerlag (Studia grammatica 21) [English transl. 1989: Inflectional Morphology and Naturalness. Dordrecht etc.: Kluwer] Zwanenberg, Wiecher (1984 a), “Word Formation and Meaning”. Quaderni di Semantica 5, 130⫺142 Zwanenberg, Wiecher (1984 b), “Word Formation and Meaning: Derivation Types”. Quaderni di Semantica 5, 350⫺365 Zwicky, Arnold (1985), “How to Describe Inflection”. Berkeley Linguistic Society: Proceedings of the Annual Meeting 11, 372⫺386

Williams, Edwin (1981), “On the Notions ¤Lexically RelatedÅ and ¤Head of a WordÅ”. Linguistic Inquiry 12, 245⫺274

Andrew Carstairs-McCarthy, Christchurch (New Zealand)

Ross, John R. (1972), “The Category Squish: Endstation Hauptwort”. Papers from the Annual Regional Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society 8.1, 316⫺328 Szymanek, Bogdan (1988), Categories and Categorization in Morphology. Lublin: Katolicki Uniwersytet Lubelski

29. Markedness 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

Introduction Markedness in phonology Markedness in morphology Markedness and cross-linguistic comparison Controversies about markedness Range of application of markedness References

1.

Introduction

Many morphological phenomena tend to consist of polar opposed pairs, e.g., grammatical (inflectional) categories such as singular-plural, masculine-feminine, active-passive, present-past, and word-formative relations like English do-redo, host-hostess, accented-unaccented, etc. In such binary oppositions (contrasts), moreover, the poles are not usually mere opposites: typically there is an asymmetry, such that one pole may be more special(ized), more precise, more constrained, less general and more complex than the other. In such cases, the more general category is unmarked, the specialized one marked (in the examples given here, the order is unmarked-marked). This is related to observations such as the following: in Spanish dictionaries, adjectives are listed in masculine singular since the feminine and the plural are considered to be special uses; the active voice is more common in English than the passive; do and host are simpler in form and wider in range of meaning than redo and hostess. Markedness is correlated with the asymmetric relationship between two choices, and

is applicable to all areas of morphology (synchronic and diachronic, first and second language acquisition, typology and universals) as well as to all other domains of language structure (phonology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, sociolinguistics, etc.). For more details, see Waugh & Lafford (1994).

2.

Markedness in phonology

The general discussion of markedness originated in the 1930’s, in the writings of the Prague School structuralists, who applied it first to phonology (see Trubetzkoy 1931: 97f.; 1939; Jakobson & Pomorska 1980: 93⫺ 98; Jakobson & Waugh 21987: 92⫺95). The essential insight is that phonemes are differentiated by binary distinctive features, e.g., /p/-/b/ [⫺voiced]-[⫹voiced] and /b/-/m/ [⫺nasal]-[⫹nasal], in which the two poles are not on equal footing with each other: one is marked ([⫹voiced], [⫹nasal]), the other unmarked. The markedness of voicing and nasality is correlated with the addition of the acoustic characteristic which introduces a complexity; it is also correlated with various factors such as universals and child language acquisition (see 4.1 below). In addition, the unmarked value of a feature has wider distribution than the marked one: for example, there are usually more (unmarked) oral consonants than (marked) nasal ones in a language (e.g., English has voiceless and voiced stops /p/-/b/, /t/-/d/, /k/-/g/, but only voiced

29. Markedness

nasals /m/, /n/, /n/); the unmarked phoneme tends to have more allophones than the marked one, e.g., in English, voiceless stops have both aspirated and unaspirated allophones, whereas voiced ones are only unaspirated; unmarked categories tend to have a greater functional load (they distinguish and identify a greater number of words) and higher text (token) frequencies than marked ones. Moreover, some cases of neutralization tend to exhibit markedness: in those contexts where only one member of the pair can occur and the resulting neutralization is not determined by some feature of the context (internally conditioned neutralization), it is the unmarked member which appears (e.g., in German only the voiceless obstruents are found in word-final position, although in other positions both voiceless and voiced can occur). However, when the neutralization is externally conditioned by some feature of the context, markedness does not determine what appears (e.g., in Spanish, all syllablefinal nasals are homorganic with the place of articulation of the following consonant: so, the indefinite article spelled un is realized as [um] before beso ‘kiss’, [un] before saco ‘jacket’ and [un] before gato ‘cat’).

3.

Markedness in morphology

At the same time as markedness was being explored in phonology, it was also applied to morphology, where there are some obvious binary relations (Jakobson 1932; 1936; Hjelmslev 1971 [1933]; Brøndal 1940; 1943; see also Greenberg 1966; Andersen 1989; Gvozdanovic´ 1989). For example, in the Russian verb, there is a set of unmarked-marked pairs, such as singular-plural, imperfectiveperfective, present-past (Jakobson 1932). From the early 1930’s on, various criteria for markedness have been defined for morphology. 3.1. Markedness and isomorphism The criterion for markedness which is the most discussed for morphology is that of isomorphism (iconicity; cf. Art. 30) between form and content. Formal complexity generally corresponds to conceptual complexity (Jakobson 1939): in general, elements that are marked on one linguistic level (phonology) are used to express marked forms on another level (morphology). For example, an unmarked term will tend either to have zero

273 expression (a zero morpheme; cf. Art. 45) or to be simpler in form than the marked term. Some examples from English and German are: the singular of the noun has no overt expression (cat) but the plural has the marker -s (cats); words with derivational affixes are generally marked vs. their non-derived counterparts (e.g., hostess is marked vs. host); the phonologically marked front rounded vowels /y/ and /ø/ (indicated by an umlaut ⫺ {ü} and {ö} ⫺ which are marked because the combination of rounding and frontness is not frequent in the world’s languages) are associated with the morphologically marked categories of plural, comparative, superlative, and past subjunctive (e.g., Germ. BuchBücher, hart-härter-härteste, hatte-hätte); an English active sentence has a simpler verb form and lacks the by-phrase of the passive, and the verb do is used for (marked) negative, emphatic, and interrogative predicates, but not for the ummarked neutral predicate. These last examples show markedness assimilation: unmarked categories tend to occur in unmarked syntagmatic contexts, marked categories in marked syntagmatic contexts (cf. Battistella 1990: 69⫺116). Of course, there are exceptions to this isomorphic principle in various languages, but these are rarer. Moreover, they seem to be prone to instability since many types of morphological change may (re)introduce isomorphism. Thus, in those few cases where there is an overt morpheme for an unmarked category vs. a zero for a marked category, the tendency is to replace the zero with an overt morpheme in the marked category or to eliminate the overt morpheme in the unmarked category. The replacement of zero can be exemplified by Russian, where some of the marked genitive plurals have no overt suffix, but the unmarked nominative singular does, and where many dialects have created an overt genitive plural: nominative singular jablok-o ‘apple’ (-o is the nominative singular morpheme) vs. genitive plural jablok, but dialectal genitive plural form jablok-ov. The elimination of an overt morpheme can be exemplified by the fact that in some languages a suffix for the unmarked third singular has been reanalyzed either as part of the root of the verb or as a marker of some other category such as tense ⫺ e.g., substandard English I says, you says, he says, where the -s has become a marker of the present tense vs. the -d for the past (for the unmarkedness of the third singular see also 5 below). Such changes

274 have led to claims about the naturalness of the iconic relation between zero expression and unmarkedness, and theories of natural morphology have placed emphasis on the interrelation of markedness and iconicity (see Art. 30 and 31). It should, however, be noted that there has been some confusion in this area due to the closeness of the terms ⫺ being marked (markiert) and having a marker (merkmalhaft) ⫺ and to the fact that the terminology may sometimes overlap: a marked category may be said to have a mark or to carry a marking or to be marked for a given feature (e.g., woman is marked for [⫹female]), just as a marker can also be called a mark or a marking or a form can be said to be marked for a given category if that category is overtly expressed (e.g., cats is marked for the marked plural and hits is marked for the unmarked third person singular). Collocations such as “unmarkiertes Merkmal” (‘unmarked mark’, Jakobson 1974; see also Mayerthaler 1981: 4⫺11) have also arisen, attesting to the confusion when marked categories have no overt marker and unmarked categories do. 3.2. Markedness and morphophonemics Markedness has also been used in morphophonemics (cf. Art. 35), both implicitly and explicitly. Thus, the allomorphy represented by cat/cats has been characterized as unmarked vs. the marked foot/feet for the following reasons: non-alternation of the root (it remains cat), representation of the morphological relation by a segmentable, agglutinative morpheme (cat-s), and phonological (i.e., regular) conditioning of the allomorphy in the former vs. the latter (the plural is realized as [s] in cats, [z] in dogs, and [ez] in horses for reasons having to do with the phonological system of English, but the alternation between foot and feet is due to the morphology). In fact, there is a general assumption that regularity and phonological conditioning are unmarked and irregularity and non-phonological conditioning (e.g., morphological conditioning) are marked. Thus, if both the unmarked and marked terms of an opposition have allomorphy, there is more morphological regularity of the marked term (less allomorphy, fewer different forms); in German, for example, the marked dative plurals uniformly have -n or -en, while the dative singular varies with gender and declensional class. There is also diachronic and synchronic levelling in child language, pidgins and cre-

IV. Grundbegriffe

oles, dialects, and informal speech, leading to regularization (e.g., English foots rather than feet); regular forms have greater lexical (type) frequency (the vast majority of English nouns take the -s plural and only a small minority the irregular plurals); regular forms are often the productive ones (e.g., new nouns coming into English normally take -s as in sputniks); in language change, the regular formation provides the pivotal terms for analogical reformations (e.g., in English, the irregular plural brethren was replaced by regular brothers); after analogical reformation, the irregular form may take on special meanings or functions (brethren has taken on a new, specialized ⫺ marked ⫺ meaning); and in pidgins and creoles, irregular forms are often dropped. Considerations such as these have been incorporated in natural morphology in which naturalness is tied to markedness and regularity (see Art. 31, 32, 33, 47 and 48). 3.3. Markedness and distribution There is a general principle whereby the unmarked category is the one with wider paradigmatic and syntagmatic distribution and thus many of the asymmetries of morphological systems and usage can be explained by markedness. In terms of paradigms, there is a general principle whereby marked categories tend to have fewer subvarieties than unmarked ones. This is known as Brøndal’s principle of compensation or the tendency not to combine marked categories together (see Brøndal 1940; 1943). This is exemplified by the following: syncretism / syncretization (cf. Art. 66), in which the marked term totally lacks categories present in the unmarked term (e.g., in the English pronouns there are gender differences in the singular he, she, it but not in the plural they); defectivation (defective categories) in which the marked term has only some of the categories that the unmarked term has, i.e., there are gaps in the paradigm (e.g., French has present indicative, present subjunctive and future indicative but no future subjunctive), or, instead of a morphological category, there is a more complex periphrastic one, made up of two or more words (e.g., future tense and passive voice in English are periphrastic but present tense and active voice are not ⫺ will hit, is hit vs. hits). Furthermore, this can be used as evidence for defining hierarchical relations / ranking between categories: number dominates gender in English and thus gender is

275

29. Markedness

syncretized in the plural; past tense is higher than future tense in French and thus past tense has both an indicative and a subjunctive but future tense does not (see Croft 1990: 92f.). The unmarked term is also syntagmatically more diversified. One of the most striking results of this greater diversity ⫺ and one of the first to be noted (see Jakobson 1932; Hjelmslev 1971 [1933]) ⫺ is that of the distribution of meaning between marked and unmarked categories and in particular the more limited range of meaning of the marked term and wider range of the unmarked. Thus, while the marked term means the presence of a certain property A (e.g., the English past tense is marked and signals past time), the unmarked has two major types of meaning: (a) non-A in its basic (nuclear) meaning (e.g., the unmarked present may signal non-past as in John is here right now, John is coming tomorrow), and (b) no signal of A at all (the present is atemporal as in the earth is round). In addition, there is a minor type: (c) signalling A (the present is used for past time as in the historical present ⫺ see 5.4 below). Wordformation may also exhibit the same types of asymmetries, such as Fr. acteur meaning either ‘male actor’ (type a) or ‘actor’ (type b) vs. actrice meaning only ‘female actress‘; Eng. host can be used for both males and females, whereas hostess cannot (e.g., your hosts tonight are Mr. and Mrs. Smith). Such correlations are not unique to morphology but arise also in the semantic analysis of other levels of language. For example, in the lexicon, for antonyms such as accented-unaccented, accented is both the opposite of unaccented and the name for the entire parameter (accentedness) (Waugh 1982: 308), and so forth. This tendency to use the unmarked category to represent both the entire category and the opposite of the marked category is pervasive in human thinking, ⫺ e. g, in mathematical and logical symbolism, -5 is always negative, but 5 can mean both the absolute value of 5 and ⫹5 (Jakobson & Pomorska 1980; Greenberg 1966: 25). Directly correlated with the greater semantic diversity of the unmarked term is the fact that it also appears in a wider array of syntagmatic environments, that is, it has greater freedom of occurrence. The following types of correlations with markedness have been found for singular-plural: wider distribution of the unmarked term (in English the plural is used in fewer morphological and syntactic

contexts than the singular ⫺ e.g., in compounds typically the singular is used even if the meaning is plural, as in owner-occupied, language laboratory); facultative use of the marked term (in Korean, there is optional use of the plural form and thus the singular form is usually understood as singular unless the context demands a plural meaning, just as English host normally refers to men but can be used for women); contextual neutralization ⫺ only the unmarked term may appear in some contexts (in Turkish, the singular form of the noun is used when a cardinal number precedes it); dominance of the unmarked term over the marked (in Spanish the masculine gender of los padres can be used to mean both ‘the parents’ and ‘the fathers’ but las madres can only refer to ‘the mothers’); agreement a potiori (a French adjective agreeing with both a masculine and a feminine noun is put in the masculine plural). The greater distribution of the unmarked term is also to be correlated with its higher frequency (e.g., in text counts of French, the nominal singular is more frequent than the plural; but see Schwartz 1980, who shows that text frequency does not always correlate with markedness).

4.

Markedness and cross-linguistic comparison

Many linguists claim that there is a markedness connection between language structure, types of changes, the universal and implicational distribution of categories within and across languages, language typology, the order of acquisition by children and of loss by aphasics, and the facts of second language acquisition. 4.1. Language universals, child language, and universal grammar The connection between cross-linguistic comparison and markedness relations was shown originally for phonology by Trubetzkoy (1939) and Jakobson (1941; 1958). Such comparison leads to the recognition that certain markedness relations may tend to be universal (absolute universals): nasality, non-present tense, and passive voice tend always to be marked. In addition, there are types of linguistic systems which seem to occur with great frequency upon which principles of dependency can be formulated. The most important is asymmetric implication (implica-

276 tional universals): the presence of x implies the presence of y, but y does not imply x and therefore y is more basic (Jakobson 1958 ⫺ see also Art. 115 and 116). In many cases, y is unmarked and x is marked. For example, the presence of a gender distinction in the marked plural implies the presence of that same distinction in the unmarked singular, but not vice versa; the presence of a dual implies the presence of a plural but not vice versa. Such findings have also been crucial for predicting types and orders of morphological changes. In particular, the implicational universals mean that no language can acquire a marked category unless it acquires the unmarked one before (or concurrently); and no language can lose the unmarked category without losing the marked one. Universals and typological relations, especially implicational universals, also have explanatory power for first-language acquisition by the child and for aphasic dissolution (Jakobson 1941). For example, children tend to learn first the unmarked category and only later the marked one (they go from simpler to more complex systems, e.g., singular is learned before plural); in like fashion, aphasics lose first the marked category and only later the unmarked one. The association of marked terms with lesser universality and later learning by the child has also received renewed attention recently in generative grammar, particularly with respect to the relation between universal grammar, which is made up of those grammatical phenomena which are found in all languages, and core grammar (Battistella 1996). Universal grammar is assumed to determine a set of possible core grammars for languages by setting parameters, each with a finite number of values. These parameters may be connected through hierarchical relations of markedness or various implicational or preferential relations. Systems that fall within core grammar constitute the unmarked phenomena while more marked elements are found in the periphery (e.g., unmarked use of prepositions with an object, as in he came in the room vs. marked use of prepositions as adverb-like elements, as in he came in). In the acquisition of grammar in the child, universal grammar is assumed to be innate, with unmarked options for parameters being preferred and learned first, the marked periphery of the system being learned later (Chomsky 1981).

IV. Grundbegriffe

4.2. Second language acquisition Markedness has also led to various proposals for second language acquisition (see Rutherford 1982). From an interlinguistic viewpoint, for example, the Markedness Differential Hypothesis proposes that the degree of difficulty in second language acquisition may be attributed to the similarities and differences in typological markedness between the first and the second language and that relative areas of difficulty in the target language can be predicted for learners with a particular first language (Eckman 1985). The intralinguistic view of the role of markedness in second language acquisition is also based on linguistic universals, whereby unmarked structures are acquired early, and marked structures later. In this view, markedness serves as an explanation for the development of grammatical patterns in the interlanguage (intermediate stages in the acquisition of a second language) of adult learners. For instance, adult second language learners of Spanish acquire the present tense before the past and the indicative mood before the subjunctive. It is interesting to note that in interlanguage, just as for children, the unmarked forms often substitute for the marked categories before the latter are acquired. In addition, just as for aphasia, second language attrition studies have found a relation between order of acquisition and language loss: in learners of English, the last question forms learned (whose) are the first to be unlearned.

5.

Controversies about markedness

It must be pointed out that there have been some controversies about the various criteria for markedness discussed here. In particular, there is a cluster of issues on which there is no general agreement: Which criteria are necessary and/or sufficient to show markedness? Is one criterion all-important or is there more than one? If more than one, how do they interrelate? What if the criteria give conflicting results? Are the criteria weighted or causally linked? Are they absolute or probabilistic? Do the same criteria hold in all areas of language? For example, each of the following criteria has been claimed to be the one which defines markedness: wider semantic distribution; wider syntactic distribution; text (token) frequency; lexical (type) frequency; zero expression and formal complexity; order of first language acquisition; implicational relations;

29. Markedness

neutralization. Given this, there is no small confusion as to what the term markedness actually means. 5.1. Markedness and non-binary systems While the use of markedness is widespread for such obviously binary categories as singular-plural, its application to ternary and larger systems has led to more uncertainty (just as in phonology, where relations such as /p/-/t/-/k/ or /i/-/e/-/i/-/a/ have also led to doubts about the application of both binarism and markedness). Some linguists have claimed that all inflectional (and phonological) systems can be characterized in terms of binary relations of markedness (Jakobson & Pomorska 1980; van Schooneveld 1978) and that for ternary systems there are two markedness relations, creating hierarchies of markedness. They have discerned two types of structures. In some cases, there is one unmarked term opposed to two marked ones, each with a different mark. For example, tense systems with present-past-future oppose the unmarked present to the marked past and the marked future (each with a different mark). In other cases, there is one unmarked term opposed to two marked terms, which are then further differentiated into marked and unmarked. For example, unmarked present vs. marked past, itself split into unmarked imperfective vs. marked preterite (perfective). Person in the verb or the pronoun is a particularly interesting example. Third person is assumed to be unmarked for the following reasons: it is often the one with zero expression; it combines with other categories such as definiteness, proximity, gender; it is used for many different types of subjects (definite and indefinite, human, animate and inanimate, nominal and pronominal, personal and impersonal) as well as when there is no subject, and it can encompass first and second person referents in its general usage (e.g., where the subject is one, as in One should never tell lies). First and second person, on the other hand, are marked because they generally have an overt marker, do not combine as freely with other categories (although first can combine with inclusive/exclusive and second with formal/familiar), are used with definite, human, pronominal subjects (but not other types) and cannot encompass third person referents in their usage. Within first and second, first is marked because it inevitably refers to the speaker, whereas second person

277 may sometimes refer to the speaker, as when one talks to oneself, and, as well, it can have various generic uses (Jakobson 1957; Benveniste 1946; Lyons 1968: 276⫺278). For even larger systems, some linguists have assumed that there is a set of grammatical features and that one term of the system is unmarked (e.g., English simple present tense, Russian nominative case), the others singly marked (e.g., simple past, present progressive, instrumental, accusative), doubly marked (e.g., past progressive, dative), and so forth (Jakobson 1936; 1959: 490f.). 5.2. Markedness, hierarchies, prototypes Others linguists claim that a continuum of markedness from least to most marked is relevant for some (or all) non-binary relations, such that there are degrees of markedness (relative markedness) rather than numbers of marks (absolute markedness) (see Croft 1990: 95⫺123). The continua that have been proposed include: singular-plural-dual, positive-comparative-superlative, masculine-feminine-neuter, present-past-future. Person (cf. Art. 96) has proven to be quite controversial because of its great semantic and morphosyntactic complexity: some say the continuum is in the order third-second-first (as in the binary analysis discussed above), others that it is third-first-second (Croft 1990: 93), given the greater frequency of first person over second in dialogue and the fact that first person is dominant in agreement (if the subject is both first and second or first and third, then first plural is used). Still others claim that it should be correlated with the animacy/ agency hierarchy found in morphosyntax, defined as first/second person pronoun ⫺ third person pronoun ⫺ proper name ⫺ human common noun ⫺ non-human animate noun ⫺ inanimate noun, in descending order (Croft 1990: 111⫺117). This hierarchy (one of several, sometimes called functional syntactic markedness hierarchies) is used to explain various morphosyntactic facts. For example, first and second person pronouns and third person animate pronouns and animate nouns are more likely to occur as subjects of transitive verbs than inanimates. In addition, objects high in animacy have non-zero case markers or differentiate subject from object case while objects lower in animacy do not (e.g., in Latin neuters, -um is used for nominative and accusative but masculines and feminines have -us and -a for nominative and -um and -am for accusative).

278 In similar fashion, markedness and hierarchy patterns do not occur in isolation, but rather tend to be found in clusters, which then define unmarked, sometimes called prototypical, combinations. For example, the unmarked (prototypical) subject has been defined in terms of a bundle of categories, e.g., it is animate, topical, agentive, singular, definite (thus, in English, a sentence of the general pattern John hit some balls is more common than A ball was in the corner), whereas marked subjects may differ in various ways from this prototypical combination. In fact, the notion of prototype is based on some of the same insights as the notion of markedness, since with prototypicality there is a recognition of asymmetry among exemplars of a given category: like unmarked categories, prototypes are more basic, combine more freely and productively than do non-prototypes, are more frequent and more familiar, are more salient, have more autonomy, etc. That is, prototypes resemble unmarked terms in many respects. However, they are not strictly the same; for example, the unmarked singular in its prototypical (basic) usage refers to one exemplar, but in its non-prototypical usage it can be generic (e.g., one man vs. modern man or mankind). Hierarchies and prototypes are especially used in those areas which have fewer obvious binary relations, are less tightly organized than are either morphology or phonology (syntax, lexicon, discourse, pragmatics), and in which the application of markedness is most controversial (see Croft 1990: 95⫺154). 5.3. Invariance, markedness and markedness reversals In the decades since markedness was first formulated, the original insight that marked and unmarked values are imposed on properties has been combined with other closely allied phenomena by some linguists. For example, the plus (⫹) value of a feature has been assumed to be marked by definition and the minus (-) value unmarked, where plus means presence and minus means absence of the feature (this is probably linked to the original, phonological definition of markedness as the presence of an extra, complex property such as voicing, nasality). In other cases, features are treated as just formal diacritics, in which the plus and minus values are symmetrical and thus in principle interchangeable, e.g.,

IV. Grundbegriffe

present tense is characterized as [⫹present] and past is [-present], just as man as [⫹male] and woman as [-male]. Other linguists claim, however, that mark and feature must be differentiated and in particular that the minus value of a feature may be marked, that marks can vary according to the simultaneous and/or sequential context (markedness is context-sensitive, not contextfree), and that the presence of an entity is not the same as markedness (see Battistella 1990; 1996). Considerations such as these have led to some revisions in how markedness has been applied in morphology as well as in phonology, syntax, and so forth. One basic change has been to differentiate between mark and property/feature: a given feature (e.g., [-plural], [⫹feminine]) may be either marked or unmarked. If the markedness value is different in different contexts, there is a case of markedness reversal/shift, also called global vs. local markedness when the reversal seems to occur in only some minor or special environments. For example, in Frisian, singular is unmarked and plural marked for many nouns, but for a small class of nouns (e.g., body parts which come in pairs, domestic animals which usually occur in herds), plural is unmarked and thus has served as the basis for analogical reformation (Tiersma 1982). In addition, to use a crosslinguistic example, nominative was the unmarked case in Classical Latin (it is the dictionary form). However, in Old French, nominative was marked, being used only for subjects, whereas oblique was unmarked (but see Mayerthaler 1988: 50⫺65); thus, for example, the modern French nominal forms come from the old obliques, not the nominatives. In the case of the animacy hierarchy, the subject of a transitive verb is less marked the higher in animacy it is, while the object is more marked the higher in animacy it is. Markedness reversals are also prevalent in the lexicon. There are many examples showing that the unmarked sex reference in English is male (host is used for both generic usage and to refer to the male; hostess is used only for females). In contrast, sometimes the term of the opposition which is used for the female is also used for generic usage, e.g., generic and female cow vs. bull, used for the male only. Such claims of reversals have proven to be controversial. For some linguists, markedness values are invariant and by definition

279

29. Markedness

they cannot differ. Some associate markedness with naturalness or normality: marked values are assumed to be unnatural and thus more difficult to produce, comprehend, and acquire, more prone to instability and change, and less common intra- and interlinguistically (see Mayerthaler 1981; Wurzel 1984; and Art. 31). For some others, markedness values can differ across languages and through time, but are invariant in a given language at a given time. In such cases, the plus value of a feature is always marked and its opposite is not a minus value but a zero value (van Schooneveld 1978; Andrews 1990). This means that markedness is equated with both feature and invariance: woman is invariantly female, which is its feature and its mark; in such cases, no difference is made between being unmarked and syncretism or defectivation (e.g., both he and they are unmarked for [⫹female]). Others have insisted that mark, feature and invariance are three different, interrelated, concepts (Jakobson 1974; Newfield & Waugh 1991). Early work had assumed, for example, that there was a universal markedness relation within certain grammatical categories (see 4). However, more recent work has shown that the separation of mark and feature allows for either pole of an opposition to be marked, both across languages and within a language, thus allowing for markedness reversals. For example, across languages, masculine is the unmarked gender of nouns in familiar European languages, but feminine is the unmarked gender in some Iroquian languages. Within a language, singular is the unmarked number in nouns in English, but plural is the unmarked number in the pronominal opposition we ⫺ I, since the unmarked we can refer not only to more than one person but also to one person alone (the royal or editorial we), whereas the singular I can only refer to one person. The same is true for many, or perhaps all, inflectional categories. 5.4. Other uses of the term markedness Because markedness is correlated with issues of frequency, regularity, normality, and so forth, marked has also come to mean strange, deviant, unusual, unexpected in a given context, that is, stylistically marked, e.g., the use of the present to refer to the past as in the historical present (Eng. and just as I was about to cross the street, John comes up to me and says…) is a stylistically marked us-

age of the unmarked term. The use of an unmarked category may also be pragmatically marked. For example, in French, the pronoun vous is unmarked vs. tu (both mean ‘you’) because tu means that the speaker is in a close relation of solidarity with the addressee, whereas vous is used in all other cases. The use of vous is pragmatically unmarked when addressed to a stranger but unexpected (pragmatically marked ⫺ it may be ironic or pejorative or teasing) when used with a friend. In like fashion, categories may be sociolinguistically/socioculturally marked (e.g., English non-standard throwed is marked vs. standard threw).

6.

Range of application of markedness

These last examples take us far from the original insight with which we started. Indeed some linguists believe that markedness is a hallmark of human language precisely because it is a very simple idea which explains seemingly disparate facts in a variety of domains. They see simplicity and generality on the one hand, and objective and empirical specificity on the other. However, there are other linguists who feel that the original definition of markedness has been stretched so far as to be an unwieldy cover term for very different phenomena, especially since the definition and the critera for markedness tend to change across theoretical traditions and the various domains of language. Indeed, this last point alludes to another area of controversy: namely, the range of application of markedness. Some restrict its application to just morphology or phonology, or see its validity within individual languages but doubt its universal applicability, while for others it can be applied both within a language and across languages (see Battistella 1990; 1996). For some linguists it is a lowlevel theory needing explanation, whereas for others it is one of the major conceptual and explanatory achievements of contemporary linguistics. Finally, while some see it as strictly linguistic, others argue that it is a biological phenomenon; still others correlate it with the cognitive and perceptual domains of prototypicality and the figure vs. ground distinction, or point out the correlation between complexity of thought and complexity of expression, or claim that is reasonable to expect the more widely-used human artifacts to be simpler in structure and to have more sub-

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IV. Grundbegriffe

types in order to suit the wider range of uses to which they are put (Moravcsik & Wirth 1986). Still others point to its application to human culture more generally and to virtually all other symbolic/semiotic systems. For example, Jakobson & Pomorska (1980) point out that the custom of wearing clothes is unmarked for 20th century man, but is a marked state for Neolithic man. Indeed, for scholars like Jakobson, markedness is explanatory not just for language, but also for human behavior and thought in general. They claim that it is a characteristically human trait to conceive of phenomena as binary and asymmetrical, i.e., marked and unmarked.

Greenberg, Joseph H. (1966), Language Universals, with Special Reference to Feature Hierarchies. The Hague: Mouton

7.

Jakobson, Roman (1936), “Beitrag zur allgemeinen Kasuslehre: Gesamtbedeutungen der russischen Kasus”. Travaux du cercle linguistique de Prague 6, 240⫺288 [reprinted in Jakobson (1971 b):23⫺71; Eng. trans. in Jakobson, Roman (1984): 59⫺103]

References

Andersen, Henning (1989), “Markedness Theory: the First 150 Years”. In: Tomic´ (ed.), 11⫺46 Andrews, Edna (1990), Markedness Theory: The Union of Asymmetry and Semiosis in Language. Durham/NC: Duke University Press Battistella, Edwin (1990), Markedness: The Evaluative Superstructure of Language. Albany: State University of New York Press Battistella, Edwin (1996), The logic of Markedness. New York: Oxford University Press Benveniste, Emile (1946), “Structures des Relations de Personne dans le Verbe”. Bulletin de la Socie´te´ de Linguistique 43 [reprinted in: Benveniste, Emile (1966), Proble`mes de Linguistique Ge´ne´rale, Paris: Gallimard, 225⫺236; Eng. trans. in: Benveniste, Emile (1971), Problems in General Linguistics. Coral Gables/FL: University of Miami Press, 195⫺204] Brøndal, Viggo (1940), “Compensation et Variation, Deux Principes de Linguistique Ge´ne´rale”. Scientia [Bologna] 67, 101⫺109 [reprinted in: Brøndal, Viggo (1943), Essais de Linguistique Ge´ne´rale. Kopenhagen: Munksgaard, 105⫺116] Brøndal, Viggo (1943), “Structure et Variabilite´ des Syste`mes Morphologiques”. In: Brøndal, Viggo, Essais de Linguistique Ge´ne´rale. Kopenhagen: Munksgaard, 15⫺24 Chomsky, Noam (1981), “Markedness and Core Grammar”. In: Belletti, Adriana & Brandi, Luciana, & Rizzi, Luigi (eds.), Theory of Markedness in Generative Grammar. Pisa: Scuola Normale Superiore, 123⫺146 Croft, William (1990), Typology and Universals. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Eckman, Fred (1985), “Some Theoretical and Pedagogical Implications of the Markedness Differential Hypothesis”. Studies in Second Language Acquisition 7, 289⫺307

Gvozdanovic´, Jadranka (1989), “Defining Markedness”. In: Tomic´ (ed.), 47⫺66 Hjelmslev, Louis (1971), “Structure Ge´ne´rale des Corre´lations Linguistiques”. In: Hjelmslev, Louis, Essais Linguistiques, Vol. II, 57⫺98. Copenhagen: Nordisk Sprog- og Kulturforlag (Travaux du Cercle Linguistique de Copenhague 14) [written 1933] Jakobson, Roman (1932), “Zur Struktur des russischen Verbums”. In: Charisteria Gvilelmo Mathesio Quinquagenario a discipulis et Circuli Linguistici Pragensis sodalibus oblata. Prague: Cercle linguistique de Prague, 79⫺84 [reprinted in Jakobson, Roman (1971 b): 551⫺553; English transl. in: Jakobson (1984): 1⫺14]

Jakobson, Roman (1939), “Signe Ze´ro”. Me´langes de Linguistique Offerts a` Charles Bally, 143⫺152. Geneva: Librairie de l’Universite´ [reprinted in Jakobson, Roman (1971 b): 211⫺219; Eng. trans. in Jakobson (1984): 151⫺160] Jakobson, Roman (1941), Kindersprache, Aphasie und allgemeine Lautgesetze. Uppsala: Almqvist & Wiksells [reprinted in Jakobson, Roman (1971 a): 328⫺401; English transl. by Allan Keiler (1968), Child Language, Aphasia, and Phonological Universals. The Hague, Paris: Mouton] Jakobson, Roman (1957), Shifters, Verbal Categories, and the Russian Verb. Cambridge/MA: Russian Language Project, Harvard University [reprinted in Jakobson, Roman (1971 b): 130⫺147] Jakobson, Roman (1958), “Typological Studies and Their Contribution to Historical Comparative Linguistics”. In: Proceedings of the 8th International Congress of Linguists, 5⫺9 August, Oslo 1957, 17⫺25 and 33⫺35. Oslo: Oslo University Press [reprinted in Jakobson, Roman (1971 a): 523⫺532 and Jakobson, Roman (1990): 143⫺151] Jakobson, Roman (1959), “Boas’ View of Grammatical Meaning”. In: Goldschmidt, William (ed.), The Anthropology of Franz Boas: Essays on the Centennial of His Birth [American Anthropologist 61.5, part 2; Memoir 89], 139⫺145 [reprinted in Jakobson, Roman (1971 b): 489⫺496 and Jakobson, Roman (1990): 324⫺331] Jakobson, Roman (1971 a), Selected Writings, Vol. I: Phonological Studies. The Hague: Mouton Jakobson, Roman (1971 b), Selected Writings, Vol. II: Word and Language. The Hague: Mouton Jakobson, Roman (1974), “Mark and Feature”. In: World Papers in Phonetics: Festschrift for Dr. Onishi’s Kiju, 37⫺39. Tokyo: The Phonetic Society

30. Iconicity of Japan [reprinted in Jakobson, Roman (1985): 122⫺124] Jakobson, Roman (1984), Russian and Slavic Grammar: Studies, 1931⫺1981, edited by Linda Waugh & Morris Halle. Berlin, New York: Mouton Jakobson, Roman (1985), Selected Writings, Vol. VII, Contributions to Comparative Mythology. Studies in Linguistics and Philology, 1972⫺1982, edited by Stephen Rudy. The Hague: Mouton Jakobson, Roman (1990), On Language, edited by Linda Waugh & Monique Monville-Burston. Cambridge/MA: Harvard University Press Jakobson, Roman & Pomorska, Krystyna (1980), “The Concept of the Mark”. Chapter 10 of: Jakobson, Roman & Pomorska, Krystyna, Dialogues. Cambridge/MA: MIT Press [reprinted in Jakobson, Roman (1990): 134⫺140] Jakobson, Roman & Waugh, Linda R. (21987), The Sound Shape of Language. Berlin, New York: Mouton [11979, Bloomington: Indiana University Press] Lyons, John (1968), Introduction to Theoretical Linguistics. Cambridge: University Press Mayerthaler, Willi (1981), Morphologische Natürlichkeit. Wiesbaden: Athenaion (Linguistische Forschungen 18) [English transl. by Jeanice Seidler (1988), Morphological Naturalness. Ann Arbor: Karoma (Linguistica Extranea Studia 17)] Moravcsik, Edith & Wirth, Jessica (1986), “Markedness: An Overview”. In: Eckman, Fred & Moravcsik, Edith & Wirth, Jessica (eds.), Markedness. New York, London: Plenum, 1⫺11 Newfield, Madeleine & Waugh, Linda (1991), “Invariance and Markedness in Grammatical Categories”. In: Waugh, Linda & Rudy, Stephen (eds.), New Vistas in Grammar. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: Benjamins, 221⫺238

281 Rutherford, William (1982), “Markedness in Second Language Acquisition”. Language Learning 32.1, 85⫺108 Schooneveld, Cornelis H. van (1978), Semantic Transmutations. Prolegomena to a Calculus of Meaning. Vol. I: The Cardinal Semantic Structure of Prepositions, Cases, and Paratactic Conjunctions in Contemporary Standard Russian. Bloomington, Ind.: Physsardt Schwartz, Linda (1980), “Syntactic Markedness and Frequency of Occurrence”. In: Perry, Thomas (ed.), Evidence and Argumentation in Linguistics. Berlin, New York: Walter de Gruyter, 315⫺333 Tiersma, Peter M. (1982), “Local and General Markedness”. Language 58, 832⫺849 Tomic´, Olga M. (1989, ed.), Markedness in Synchrony and Diachrony. Berlin, New York: Mouton de Gruyter Trubetzkoy, Nikolai S. (1931), “Die phonologischen Systeme”. Travaux du cercle linguistique de Prague 4, 96⫺115 Trubetzkoy, Nikolai S. (1939), Grundzüge der Phonologie. Travaux du cercle linguistique de Prague 7 [English transl. by Christiane A. M. Baltaxe (1960), Principles of Phonology. Berkeley/CA: University of California Press] Waugh, Linda R. (1982), “Marked and Unmarked: A Choice between Unequals in Semiotic Structure”. Semiotica 38, 299⫺318 Waugh, Linda R. & Lafford, Barbara A. (1994), “Markedness”. In: The Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, Vol. V. Oxford: Pergamon Press, 2378⫺2383 Wurzel, Wolfgang U. (1984), Flexionsmorphologie und Natürlichkeit. Berlin/DDR: Akademie-Verlag (Studia grammatica 21)

Linda R. Waugh, Ithaca/New York (U.S.A.) Barbara A. Lafford, Tempe/Arizona (U.S.A.)

30. Iconicity 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

Introduction Morphological bulk Incorporation Productive contrasts Statistical universals Markedness and essence References

1.

Introduction

The fundamental principle of semiotics is that signs are symbolic (arbitrary or unmotivated) in most mature grammatical systems

(see Art. 23). This has been a mainstay of grammatical theory for well over two thousand years, and consequently a heuristic in many branches of the field of language study, notably comparative and historical linguistics. For example, the fact that there is nothing houndlike about the word hound is the reason that resemblances like Germ. Hund, Eng. hound are taken as a sign of the common origin of these words (Anttila 1972). Nevertheless, there is a clear distinction to be made between the inventory of actually occurring more or less arbitrary morphemes

282 in a language, and grammatical structure in the broadest sense. There are two reasons for regarding the complex signs created by grammatical structure as different from the individual signs which are collocated to produce them. First, given obvious biological constraints, the possible array of structures in which morphemes may be put together is small enough that mere coincidence may be an acceptable explanation for similarity at the syntactic level. (If two languages have SVO word order, this is clearly not an index of genetic affiliation.) Second, however, grammatical structure is very often motivated by the meanings to which it corresponds. It is for this reason that cross-linguistic similarities can often be attributed to universal semantics rather than common origin, human biology, or coincidence. (For example, all languages have grammatical categories we are comfortable in labelling as nouns and verbs; languages with SOV word order will almost always have Verb Auxiliary order as well; the marker of the protasis in conditional sentences will frequently be related to the marker for the sentence topic; and languages in which the lexemes for ¤manÅ, ¤womanÅ or ¤waterÅ are sesquipedalian are non-existent.) In his typology of signs, the philosopher C. S. Peirce distinguished between symbols (those signs where the connection between the sign and its referent is totally conventional and arbitrary) and icons (those signs where the connection is motivated by some resemblance between the sign and what it stands for). Moreover, among icons, he made a distinction between images and diagrams. In Haiman (1985) and other recent writings on the subject, a diagram is treated as an attenuated image: although the parts of a diagram do not resemble their referents, the relationship among these parts does resemble the relationship among their referents. A diagram is a stylized simplification of an image, in which presumably essential features of the original are preserved. Diagrammatic iconicity of the sort attested by the linear order of veni, vidi, vici will be our concern here, rather than the image iconicity attested by onomatopoetic words. Even granting the plausibility of diagrammatic iconicity in grammatical structure, however, it would seem that morphological structure would be a far less likely place to

IV. Grundbegriffe

find motivation than syntax. This is because morphological structures are frozen, essentially ritualized forms. Attempts to find motivation, or even a fixed invariant Gesamtbedeutung, for grammatical categories collide with the fact that such categories (from parts of speech and notions like subject, to the subjunctive, the plural, and the imperative mood) have become partially emancipated from whatever motivation they once had through the very process of becoming institutionalized as grammatical categories. Within the sound articulation of language, the process of emancipation is familiar as phonologization, while in morphosyntax it goes by the name of grammaticalization (cf. Art. 145). But the process is characteristic of human institutions in general, and is by no means restricted to language. Thus, even the most thoroughgoing functionalist account of such phenomena as the instrumental case in Russian or the preposition at in English, for example, must adopt a “family resemblances” or “prototype” model of their meanings. Even adopting this massive implicit retreat from essentialism, such accounts must recognize a residue of meanings for most grammatical forms which are only explainable, if at all, on a purely historical basis. (Like all rituals, the structures were originally motivated, but that does not mean they are motivated now. In fact, their absence of motivation is one of the things which identifies them as rituals.) In fact, it could be defined as almost the essential property of purely grammaticized morphological constructions (and one which opposes them to their at least partially motivated syntactic near-equivalents) that they “fail to mean what they are supposed to mean”. Take, for example, the familiar contrast between grammatical gender on the one hand, and terms like male and female on the other; between the plural number and explicit numeral quantifiers; or between grammatical tense and temporal adverbs like yesterday, today, and tomorrow. The graded nature of the contrast between pure (semantically or pragmatically motivated) syntax and pure (ritualized) morphology is beautifully exemplified in Comrie’s (1975) and Corbett’s (1979; 1983; 1991) careful studies of the phenomenon of grammatical agreement in Russian and other Slavic languages. As is well known, agreement be-

30. Iconicity

tween a controller and the agreeing target constituent may be purely formal (ad formam) or it may be semantically motivated (ad sensum). Given a “hybrid” controller ⫺ one whose formal features are distinct from its natural features (the stock example is Germ. Mädchen (neuter) ¤girlÅ) ⫺ and a target, the target will tend to agree with the controller on the basis of arbitrary, un-natural, purely grammatical features if the two are close together, but more and more it will tend to agree with its controller on the basis of motivated natural features as the distance between the controller and target increases (Corbett 1991: 240). In other words: the smaller the unit of analysis, the more arbitrariness rules within it. All in all, then, although iconicity may be positively rife at the discourse level, there are good reasons for becoming increasingly skeptical about the extent of iconicity or semantic motivation in general within the smaller domains of the sentence, the clause, and the phrase. And, within the realm of the morphological word, it may be that motivation yields to formalism completely. Nevertheless, the following survey will cover what seem to be well established cases of absolute iconicity at the level of morphological structure.

2.

Morphological bulk

2.1. The root/affix dichotomy The fundamental morphological distinction in most languages is between necessarily lexical word roots and word-forming inflectional and derivational affixes, which may be either lexical or derivational. The formal contrast is between free-standing words of arbitrary length and complexity on the one hand (like cat, sing, and heavy), and parasitic morphemes of reduced structure which are incapable of being uttered by themselves on the other (like -s, re- -ize, or -hood). The conceptual contrast is less clear (cf. Art. 27), but with overwhelming frequency the object language which labels concrete entities and events in the world consists of words (based on stems), rather than affixes. Affixes tend to mark relatively vague or abstract concepts (although words also can do this). While most languages exhibit analytic structures like CAT S and CHILD HOOD, agglutinative structures like CAT-s and CHILD-hood,

283 or synthetic structures like MeN and FeLL (¤make fallÅ), there are no languages known with structures that we could model as *catS or *child-HOOD (capital and lower-case letters roughly indicate roots and affixes, respectively. (There are apparently no languages with structures like *mEn. That is, for purposes of morphological ablaut, it is consonants rather than vowels which are identified as the relatively invariable “skeleton” of the morphological word. But this is a different issue which is not discussed here). The more abstract the concept, the more reduced its morphological expression will tend to be. Morphological bulk corresponds directly and iconically to conceptual intension. Alternatively: the larger the set of things defined, the less features are needed to define it. 2.2. The antecedent/anaphor dichotomy A related morphological distinction is manifested in the contrast between antecedents and conventional anaphors. The first relate directly to (ideas about) (classes of) things in the world. The latter, which are metalinguistic variables, merely assert that they have the same reference as the antecedents to which they directly refer. Their intrinsic intension is minimal: he, for example, denotes no more than that its referent is male, and zero anaphora of course has no intrinsic denotation at all. Typically, anaphors are formally reduced relative to antecedents: pronouns (if they are not in fact null) are often clitics, and may reduce to agreement affixes, while nouns are not. The anaphoric reduction may be one of acoustic amplitude, as well as one of segmental bulk. A productive example due in its original form to G. Lakoff (1976) is the minimal contrast pair: (1) First John called Max a Republican and then … (a) he INSULTED him. (b) HE insulted HIM. In (1a), it is clear that calling someone a Republican is not to insult him: the heavy stress on INSULTED indicates that the act of insult is novel. In (1b) it is understood that “calling someone a Republican” constitutes an insult: the reduced stress on the verb insult signals that the verb is being used anaphorically. Conversely, the heavy stress on the pro-

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IV. Grundbegriffe

nouns indicates that their coreference cannot be to what would otherwise be their default antecedents. 2.3. The predictable/unexpected dichotomy A major obstacle in recognizing the iconicity of grammatical structures is that all signs, including zero, are capable of great ambiguity. Non-representation of the speaker, for example, signals unself-conscious total participa-

tion in (2a), but pseudo-divine transcendence, omniscience and objectivity in (2b): (2) (a) It’s to the right (of me). (b) (I think) most men are bad. Use of the emphatic pronoun signalled unexpected coreference in Old and most Middle English. Predictable coreference was signalled by the appropriate oblique casemarked personal pronoun. Thus for example:

(3) (a) pa ætiwde se coccel hine then showed the tare him(self) ‘Then the tares appeared.’ (Matthew 13: 26) (b) Gap to pæm ciependum and bycgap eow ele. go to the sellers and buy you(rselves) oil ‘Go to them that sell oil and buy for yourselves.’ (Matthew 25: 9) Modern English still exhibits a trace of this in structures like (4) (a) He always kept a gun on him. (b) Have you got your student ID on you? On the other hand, the emphatic pronoun now signals routine coreference, and unexpected coreference is signalled by the unmarked oblique pronoun in sentences like: (5) I’m in charge of me. Given that the unmarked oblique pronoun signalled routine coreference in Old English, while it signals deviant or unexpected coreference in late Modern English, it may seem senseless to speak of invariant meanings of a single form, let alone whether such a form is motivated or not. The counter to this objection is twofold: first, the meaning of zero, like meaning in general, is always relative to a context; second (and in particular, because this second answer is a subcase of the first), grammatical forms may either become ritualized and partially emancipated from their original motivations through frequent use or, conversely, they may become “valorized” or acquire new significance if they are taken out of use. That is, frequency of use is itself a meaning-determining context. The two meanings of the reflexive pronoun are a clear example of emancipation. What was remarkable at first ceases to become remarkable ⫺ becomes routine ⫺ through constant repetition: but its form remains the same. Thus the reflexive pronoun remains the same as the emphatic pronoun in English and other languages long after the coreference

which it signals is understood as routine. Conversely, what was unremarkable at first may become remarkable once it ceases to be used, or becomes rare. The two meanings of the oblique pronoun are a case of valorization. From signalling routine coreference in Old English, it now marks unexpected coreference and thus indirectly signals the existence of a “divided self”. It is used ⫺ exactly like a non-anaphoric expression ⫺ wherever the speaker wishes to underline a difference between the observing and participating aspects of a character, or between a character as an individual and as an institution. The value of the oblique pronoun in sentence (5) above is therefore analogous to the self-referential use of one’s own name in utterances like Imelda Marcos’ campaign pledge (November 8, 1991): (6) As long as there is one poor Filipino, Imelda’s work will not be over. But to acquire this novel value, it was necessary for the oblique pronoun to be replaced by the reflexive pronoun as the index of coreference.

3.

Incorporation

Phonological reduction of a morpheme is usually associated with its incorporation into a derived word (cf. Art. 88 for a different concept of incorporation). Incorporation can also be identified by the degree to which a morpheme is assimilated into its host. It is a commonplace that many rules of phonetic assimilation apply only within words, and not across word boundaries. For example,

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the negative prefixes un- and in- (to different degrees) assimilate the place of articulation of the final consonant to the following consonant (in-edible and un-answerable, but impossible, un-mitigated, in-tolerable, un-tried, and in-complete, un-conquered), while the negative word not is subject to no such assimilation. By this criterion of incorporation, the articles in English are (their orthography notwithstanding) prefixes, assuming different forms before consonant and vowel-initial words. In a string xy, x is incorporated into y to the extent that its form is affected by y. Given such a definition, there is no reason in principle to restrict incorporation to cases of phonetic assimilation alone. On the morphosyntactic level, we may say that x is incorporated into the string including …y… if it agrees with y or is affected by y with respect to number, gender, case, or any other grammatical category. It is then notable that incorporation iconically reflects different kinds of conceptual closeness. 3.1. Quotation For example, not one may become no, but not in cases which have been characterized (e.g. Horn 1985) as “metalinguistic”: (7) (a) Not one voice broke the silence. (b) No voice broke the silence. (8) (a) Not one donor responded, but several. (b) *No donor responded, but several. In the same way, not happy is not too far in meaning from unhappy, unless negation is

metalinguistic, in which case incorporation is impossible: (9) (a) (b) (10) (a) (b)

I’m not happy. I’m unhappy. I’m not happy, I’m ecstatic. *I’m unhappy, I’m ecstatic.

Morphological incorporation is not different from syntactic incorporation. Metalinguistically negated words and phrases are in effect being quoted. In general, quoted material, as is well known, is not incorporated into the matrix in which it appears: not only does it not have to be linguistic at all (let alone material in the same language as the surrounding material), but, when it happens to be in the same language, it does not assume the case role that non-quoted material would have, it does not behave like an anaphor, it does not occasion agreement, and it does not occasion word order adaptations in the surrounding material. 3.2. Reflexives Where a language distinguishes between a separate reflexive morpheme and a bound affix, the bound affix will be subject to assimilation processes. For example, in Russian, the reflexive -sja appears in the cited form after consonants, and in the form -sj after vowels. The separate reflexive morpheme seb’a will not be subject to any phonetic assimilation processes. Moreover, where a language distinguishes between these two exponents of reflexive morphology, the extruded reflexive will signal a separate individual, or some kind of divided self:

(11) (a) On scˇitaet-sja xorosˇim lingvistom he consider-refl good linguist ‘he is (generally) considered a good linguist.’ (b) On scˇitaet seb’a xorosˇim lingvistom. he consider refl good linguist ‘He considers himself a good linguist (but his colleagues don’t).’ A similar contrast between the incorporated and extruded reflexive is apparent in Hungarian and in Turkish, two languages where the relative assimilation that the incorporated morpheme is subjected to, is vowel harmony. Other languages exhibiting the same distinction are discussed in Kemmer (1993: 25⫺28, 151⫺200). A somewhat different conceptual distinction is also reflected in this contrast: the more predictable a morpheme, the more likely it will appear in a reduced ⫺ often incorpo-

rated ⫺ form. For example shave and kill are both transitive verbs, but the former is an action that one is far more likely to perform upon oneself. Verbs of the shave class may be called typically introverted, while those of the kill class are more typically extroverted. Where a language distinguishes two reflexives, the verbs of the introverted class are far more likely to occur with the incorporated reflexive morpheme, while transitive verbs of the extroverted class are far more likely to occur with the extruded reflexive morpheme.

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IV. Grundbegriffe

Thus Russ. myl-sja ‘washed (self)¤ but ubil seb’a ‘killed selfÅ. The contrast can also be neatly illustrated with reciprocal verbs, where the issue of object individuation which was used to distinguish between utomil seb’a and utomil-sja is clearly entirely irrelevant. Where a language distinguishes two reciprocals, verbs which are logically or empirically more likely to be reciprocal are far more likely to use the reduced incorporated reciprocal, while verbs which are less inherently likely to be reciprocal are more likely to use the extruded reciprocal. Thus Russ. poznakomili-sj, ‘met (each other)’, contrasts with l’ubili drug druga ‘loved each otherÅ. Predictability, then, as well as lack of intrinsic content, may lead to reduced morphological expression. This point was made in a series of classic accounts by G. K. Zipf (e.g. Zipf 1935), and has never been either challenged nor sufficiently exploited. It is predictability (in the sense that the concept is a frequent one in human discourse) which leads to the non-existence of morphemes like *hrekwataklsfligbenj meaning “man” in any human language ⫺ although one might not be surprised to encounter such a term for humans among the learned residents of another galaxy. But it is also predictability which accounts for the reduced expression of the reflexive and the reciprocal in constructions like those just discussed above, and which accounts for T. Givon’s (1985) hierarchy of topic expressions: the less accessible the antecedent, the more morphologically marked the resumptive topic expression.

4.

Productive contrasts

The grammatical categories of a language are frequently ritualized, so that there is no nonex post facto way to predict whether a concept will be a member of one grammatical category or another. For example, it cannot be predicted that hair will surface as a mass or a count noun in a given language. Similarly, it cannot be predicted whether the causative form of the verb meaning ¤make cleanÅ will be analytic (¤cause to become cleanÅ) or agglutinative (¤clean-ifyÅ) or synthetic (¤cleanÅ) in any language. But, if in a given language, the concept can be expressed in several ways, then the formal contrast will be motivated. In English, hairs contrasts meaningfully with hair: the plural is used when the noun is

viewed as countable, the mass noun when it is not. (The definitive discussion of the motivations of even this highly ritualized mass/ count distinction is Wierzbicka 1985.) In the same way, kill contrasts with cause to die: the synthetic causative is used when cause and effect are closely linked in time and place, when there is physical contact between killer and victim, and so on. (Some discussions of this classic issue are Fodor 1972; Lakoff & Johnson 1980; Haiman 1985.)

5.

Statistical universals

5.1. The unmarked third person singular The non-expression of the third person singular in verbal and pronominal paradigms was first explained in functional terms by Benveniste (1946): nomenclature to the contrary, the third person was not just another person like first and second, but fundamentally distinguished from these two in that unlike first person (speaker) and second person (hearer), the third person was the person or people who were absent from the speech act (cf. Art. 96). Zero marking iconically signals the non-person. Watkins (1962) and subsequently other scholars demonstrated the dynamic power of this motivation by showing how a number of morphological changes in various languages had the effect of creating a correspondence between the morphological category third person singular and the null sign. Nevertheless, it had to be admitted that the third person singular is not everywhere and always morphologically unmarked, an example of a language where this correlation does not obtain being of course English. Yet in the overwhelming statistical majority of languages with person-number marking, the unmarked person/number is third person singular (see Art. 29). 5.2. The relative closeness of affixes to roots In an important study, Bybee (1985) has shown that the relative closeness of satellites (affixes or modifying constitutents) to the verbal or nominal root (or head of a phrase) is determined by the semantic relevance of the concept expressed by the satellites to the meaning of the verbal or nominal head itself. That is, conceptual closeness is reflected in formal closeness. The resulting patterns (aspect marked closer to the verb stem than mood, and so forth) are cross-linguistic ⫺

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but again, there are languages which fail to conform with the patterns without invalidating their reality.

6.

Markedness and essence

6.1. Prototypical parts of speech Skepticism regarding the notional motivation for the classic parts of speech is well known (cf. Ch. X). Rather than define a noun as the name of a “person, place, or thing”, it seems best to define it on purely formal and distributional criteria which are necessarily language-specific. Nevertheless, against the extreme relativism which is implied by the formalist approach, there remains the fundamental fact that the core membership of the major parts-of-speech categories like noun and verb is fairly constant in natural languages. Time-stable things will tend to be classified as nouns, while evanescent things will tend to be realized as verbs. Languages will predictably differ on the category to which they assign intermediate things like winds and flames. In a recent discussion, Hopper & Thompson (1985) have gone beyond this insight of Zipf. Noting that defining features like “temporal stability” and “individuation” are matters of degree, they have proposed the following correlation: the degree to which a nominal or verbal stem may appear with its category-specific “morphological trappings” covaries with the degree to which it approximates the prototypical meaning of the category. Incorporated nouns formally tend to lose their capacity to occur with nominal satellites, and conceptually lose their capacity to refer to individuated objects in the world. Verbs in the imperative mood formally tend to lose their capacity to occur with verbal satellites, and conceptually lose their capacity to denote single events that actually happen in the world. The predictive power of this principle is considerable, even though there are presumably exceptions to be found in many cases. 6.2. The marking of grammatical categories In a similar but probably misguided vein, one may look for examples of iconicity in the appropriateness of the grammatical device itself for signalling a given meaning. The pioneering discussion is Jakobson’s (1965) quest for motivation in categories like the comparative and superlative degrees of the adjective. Al-

though it is true that the comparative and superlative iconically signal semantic augmentation through morphological augmentation, most languages also signal diminution through morphological augmentation: there are no languages which in addition to big, big-ger, and big-gest also exhibit *bi ¤less bigÅ. The same argument can be made about the traditional exponence of plurality: although in the vast majority of cases, “more (form) is more (substance)”, there are systematic exceptions to this pattern which demonstrate that what is fundamentally at issue is markedness. Where plurality is the norm, it is the plural which is unmarked, and a derived marked singulative is employed to signal oneness: thus, essentially, wheat vs. grain of wheat (cf. Art. 100). The only morphological device which is even potentially iconically appropriate for the expression of its specialized meanings is that of reduplication, which, as has often been pointed out, often signals plurality in nouns, repetititve or habitual aspect in verbs, or, more subtly, is used to derive adjectives from nouns. As has also been noted, however, (e.g. Moravcsik 1978), reduplication signals not only augmentation but often, diminution; not only endearment, but often contempt; not only emphasis, but often disparagement and even sarcasm. There may be contextual principles (comparable to those invoked for determining the motivated meanings of unmarked forms, for example) which would allow one to predict which of two opposed meanings the device assumes in any given case. The existence and nature of such principles, however, is still an open question.

7.

References

Anttila, Raimo (1972), An Introduction to Comparative and Historical Linguistics. New York: MacMillan Benveniste, Emile (1946), “Relations de personne dans le verbe”. Bulletin de la socie´te´ linguistique 43, 1⫺12 Bybee, Joan (1985), “Diagrammatic Iconicity in Stem-Inflection Relations”. In: Haiman (ed.), 11⫺47 Comrie, Bernard (1975), “Polite Plurals and Predicate Agreement”. Language 51, 406⫺418 Corbett, Greville G. (1979), “The Agreement Hierarchy”. Journal of Linguistics 15, 203⫺224

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Corbett, Greville G. (1983), Hierarchies, Targets, and Controllers: Agreement Patterns in Slavic. London: Croom Helm Corbett, Greville G. (1991), Gender. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Fodor, Jerry A. (1970) “Three Reasons for Not Deriving ¤KillÅ from ¤Cause to DieÅ”. Linguistic Inquiry 1, 429⫺438 Givo´n, Talmy (1985), “Iconicity, Isomorphism, and Non-arbitrary Coding”. In: Haiman (ed.), 187⫺220 Haiman, J[ohn] (1985), Natural Syntax: Iconicity and Erosion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Haiman, John (1985, ed.), Iconicity in Syntax. Proceedings of a Symposium on Iconicity in Syntax, Stanford, June 24⫺6, 1983. Amsterdam: Benjamins (Typological Studies in Language 6) Hopper, Paul J. & Thompson, Sandra A. (1985), “The Non-arbitrariness of the Categories ¤NounÅ and ¤VerbÅ”. In: Haiman (ed.), 151⫺183 Horn, Laurence (1985), “Metalinguistic Negation and Pragmatic Ambiguity”. Language 61, 121⫺174

Jakobson, Roman (1965), “Quest for the Essence of Language”. Diogenes 51, 21⫺37 Kemmer, Suzanne (1993), The Middle Voice. Amsterdam: Benjamins Lakoff, George (1976), “Pronouns and Reference”. In: McCawley, James D. (ed.), Notes from the Linguistic Underground. New York: Academic Press, 273⫺335 Lakoff, George & Johnson, Mark (1980), Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: University of Chicago Press Moravcsik, Edith A. (1978), “Reduplicative Constructions”. In: Greenberg, Joseph (ed.), Universals of Human Language, Vol. III: Word Structure. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 297⫺334 Watkins, Calvert (1962), Indo-European Origins of the Celtic Verb, Part I: The Sigmatic Aorist. Dublin: Institute of Advanced Studies Wierzbicka, Anna (1985), “Wheat and Oats: The Fallacy of Arbitrariness”. In: Haiman (ed.), 311⫺ 342 Zipf, George K. (1935), The Psychobiology of Language. Boston: Houghton Mifflin

John Haiman, St. Paul (U.S.A.)

31. Naturalness 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

Introduction Development of Natural Morphology Universal, system-independent morphological naturalness Typological adequacy System-dependent naturalness References

1.

Introduction

1.1. Informal characterization of naturalness Natural has often been used by linguists in an inductive way as a synonym of intuitively plausible or of cross-linguistically frequent, in reference to both synchronic phenomena and diachronic change. In theoretically more elaborated views, it is often synonymous to cognitively simple or easily accessible (esp. to children), elementary and therefore universally preferred, i.e. derivable from human nature, or to unmarked/less marked (cf. Art. 29). Historically, concepts of morphological naturalness derive from two main sources: Jakobson’s (cf. Jakobson 1965) and, in general, Praguian concepts of markedness plus his

introduction of the Peircean, semiotic notion of iconicity (cf. Peirce 1965) into linguistics on the one hand (cf. Wurzel 1988 a), Stampe’s (e.g. 1973) model of Natural Phonology on the other. Naturalness is a relative, gradual concept: X is more or less natural than Y, e.g. within English plural formation, the type wife J wive-s is less natural than the type knife J knife-s but more natural than the type foot J feet. Thus many children tend to replace feet at some stage of language acquisition with foot-s or feet-s. A simplistic explanation of this gradation of naturalness is that the meaning of plural is ‘more’ and that this meaning is formally best reflected in a simple addition of form (i.e. in knife-s). Since such iconicity (cf. Art. 30) holds also for morphological categories with other meanings, a more sophisticated explanation refers to iconicity of markedness: plural is a morphosemantically more marked category than singular, the addition of morphosemantic markedness in the plural is iconically best reflected in the addition of morphotactic markedness. Mayerthaler (1981) has correctly pointed out

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31. Naturalness

an ambiguity of the term markedness in such reasoning: the relative morphosemantic markedness of the plural (vs. singular) refers to greater complexity, less accessibility, or less naturalness. The addition of a formal mark(er) is something else. In this way, (a) the plural knife-s has one mark(er) more than the plural sheep (identical with the singular), but (b) knife-s has a morphologically more natural (⫽ less marked) shape than the plural sheep. 1.2. Approaches to morphological naturalness The above-mentioned inductive conception of naturalness as intuitive plausibility and cross-linguistic (synchronic and diachronic) frequency is too trivial and too vague for having to be discussed here. The (already cited) more theoretically elaborated views share at least two basic tendencies: (A) they search for a motivation of morphological principles and preferences outside morphology, both (a) in other components of language such as syntax and phonology, and (b) outsides the linguistic system: (Aa) implies functional analysis or explanation (cf. Bates & MacWhinney 1982; Köpcke 1994, ed.; Dressler 1996 a), (Ab) (in addition) extralinguistic motivation ⫺ which is opposed to generative autonomy theses of grammar ⫺ where either cognitive and/or psychological and/or neurological motivation is sought (e.g. Bybee 1991; Köpcke 1993) or semiotic motivation (e.g. Laskowski 1985; Bybee 1985; Plank 1981). Examples for (Aa) are, e.g., the partial motivation of case morphology by case syntax (thus the classical dative is more marked than the accusative) or the phonology-based preference for bisyllabic and trisyllabic words (cf. 3.1 on the optimal shape). Examples for (Ab) will be given in 3.1. (B) they consider “external evidence” (particularly from diachronic change and language acquisition) as being of equal importance with internal evidence from corpus analysis (cf. Bates & MacWhinney 1982; Bybee 1991; Köpcke 1993; Laskowski 1985; Plank 1981). In both main areas of external evidence there is an often unclear transition from notions of naturalness to those of simplicity, i.e. to views that natural morphological change results in simplification, and that children learn simpler morphological structures before more complex ones. Within diachronic studies Bailey’s (1982) “developmen-

tal linguistics” deserves special mention here. Naturalness also plays a role in the work of some adherents of Langackerian Cognitive Grammar (e.g. Winters 1993). In partial overlap with these approaches to naturalness, there is an approach which stresses the importance of frequency and of resulting economy (cf. Carstairs-McCarthy 1992: 240⫺244). It may be seen as a revival of Zipf’s (1935) law on the inverse relationship between frequency and complexity, but in contemporary psycholinguistic terms (cf. Bates & MacWhinney 1982; Bybee 1991; Fenk-Oczlon 1990; Köpcke 1993; 1994, ed.; Werner 1989). For example, it is claimed that the more frequent an inflectional form is, the shorter and also the more irregular it may be, and that this may explain the adequacy of suppletion (cf. also Harnisch 1990 in terms of Natural Morphology). The following discussion will focus on the approach of Natural Morphology, because in this current trend, notions of naturalness have been elaborated in the most consistent and complex ways and in the greatest number of publications specifically devoted to naturalness.

2.

Development of Natural Morphology

The most complex, explicit and widely followed theory of morphological naturalness is the theory of Natural Morphology (cf. Kilani-Schoch 1988; Dressler et al. 1987; Luschützky 1991; Carstairs-McCarthy 1992: 215⫺240; Tonelli & Dressler 1993, eds.; Wurzel 1993). Omitting earlier predecessors (cf. Wurzel 1988 b), it originated with the integration of concepts of markedness and phonological naturalness (see 1.1; cf. Wurzel 1988 a) into the study of morphology and the conception of naturalness conflicts by Mayerthaler (1977) and Dressler (1977). They, together with Wurzel and Panagl, formulated a common platform at the 1977 LSA Summer Institute at Salzburg. This common platform was then extended to the publication of Dressler et al. (1987). Later, naturalness has become a cover term for a set of more specific terms to be defined in subtheories and to be derived from more general semiotic, cognitive and/or psychological concepts. These subtheories proposed in the course of time were and are, in chronological order: a universal markedness theory of system-in-

290

IV. Grundbegriffe

dependent morphological naturalness (cf. Mayerthaler 1981; see 3 below); a theory of system-dependent naturalness or system-adequacy (cf. Wurzel 1984; see 5 below); finally, mediating between the two, a theory of typological adequacy (cf. Dressler 1985 a; 1988 a; see 4 below). Subtheories for border areas of morphological naturalness were established for morphonology (cf. Dressler 1985 b) and morphopragmatics (cf. Dressler & Merlini Barbaresi 1994), and Mayerthaler is preparing one for morphosyntax, in conjunction with a fullfledged theory of natural syntax (cf. the volumes of Mayerthaler et al. 1994). Morphological naturalness has also been accounted for theoretically in specific areas of external evidence (cf. 1.2), particularly in diachronic change (cf. now Wurzel 1994; Boretzky et al. 1995, eds.), but also in first language acquisition (cf. now Dressler & Karpf 1995), second language acquisition (cf. now Schmid 1995; Karpf & Dringel-Techt 1995), language attrition and language pathology (cf. Dressler 1991).

3.

Universal, system-independent morphological naturalness

The respective subtheory of universal markedness (within the theory of Natural Morphology; see 2) is a preference theory (cf. Vennemann 1983). It establishes deductively degrees of universal preferences on a restricted number of naturalness parameters (translatable into, but more systematic than, and not ad hoc like, many operating principles of Slobin 1985). Here naturalness does not refer to any global or overall preference, but to what is universally preferred on one given parameter. Parameters and their preference degrees are deduced from the extralinguistic bases mentioned in 1 (cf. Dressler et al. 1987; Kilani-Schoch 1988). The following parameters are those established by Dressler (Dressler et al. 1987; Dressler 1988 b; 1989). Thus instead of using the term markedness in either a descriptive or inductive way (as in earlier schools of thought), markedness is a theoretical and parameterized notion, based on extralinguistic and semiotic notions of what is more basic or elementary, cognitively more accessible, more efficient in communication. Moreover markedness should be modelled according to general standards of preference theories (an ongoing project of Dressler).

3.1. Universal naturalness parameters The best-known semiotically-derived parameter is the parameter of iconicity (cf. Art. 30), especially its subparameter of constructional iconicity (cf. Mayerthaler 1981). According to Peirce’s (1965) classification of icons, the illustrative examples of plural formation in 1.1 can be classified as follows: knife-s as diagrammatic, feet as only metaphoric (i.e. with weaker iconicity), sheep as non-iconic, and the Franconian subtractive plural hon of singular hond ‘dog’ as anti-iconic, and naturalness decreases accordingly on this parameter. Another parameter derived from Peircean semiotics is the parameter of indexicality. On this parameter adjacency is preferred to distance. Thus affixation of a marker to an immediately adjacent base is preferred to having something between an affix and its base, as is the case with intermediate interfixes, e.g. in Span. pueblo ‘village’ J diminutive pueblito and, with interfixation, puebl-ec-ito (lit. ‘village-interfix-diminutive’; cf. Dressler & Merlini Barbaresi 1994). Another consequence of indexicality is the preference for fixed morpheme order within a morphological word, since the reliability of indexicality increases when a given position class of, e.g., suffixes always refers back to an identical position class or set of position classes of other suffixes. From the semiotic preference for transparency, the two parameters of morphosemantic and morphotactic transparency (or transparence) are derived: on the parameter of morphosemantic transparency, full transparency means fully compositional meaning, as is generally the case with inflectional meanings. For example, the meaning of knife-s equals the meanings of knife and of plurality. There is, however, morphosemantic opacity in cases of parasitic formation (cf. Aronoff 1994: 33), such as in the formation of the Polish conditional, e.g. czyta-ł-by ,he would read’ (readpast-conditional), formed via the past tense in -ł, whereas there is no meaning of past in the conditional; also in the Polish periphrastic future be˛de˛ czyta-ł ‘I’ll be reading’ (fut.aux:1sg read-past) there is no meaning of past, as the past tense suffix -ł would imply. In general, however, due to iconicity, there is a preference for a pairing of transparent meaning and form. On the parameter of morphotactic transparency, the most natural forms are those where there is no opacifying obstruction to ease of perception. Purely phonological pro-

31. Naturalness

cesses opacify very little, e.g. phonological surface palatalization in the Polish pejorative nom. pl. Polak-i [polak’i] of sg. Polak ‘Pole’. More morphotactic opacity occurs in the frequent intervention of morphonological rules, such as in Polish morphonological palatalization, e.g. normal (i.e. non-pejorative) nom. pl. Polac-y [polatsÈ]. Most opaque is suppletion, as in Eng. am vs. is vs. are vs. was, etc. Another aspect of the preference for morphotactic transparency is the preference for continuous (rather than discontinuous) morphs. Therefore suffixation and prefixation is preferred over infixation (discontinuous base) or circumfixation (discontinuous affix). Thus diminutive/hypocoristic suffixes are generally preferred to such infixes, such as in Span. Cesar-ito vs. Ces-ı´t-ar, hypocoristics of the name Ce´sar (cf. Me´ndez Dosuna & Pensado 1990). Another semiotically-based parameter has biuniqueness as its most natural option. Biuniqueness, which holds if one and the same form has always the same meaning (and viceversa), is most natural. For example in Turkish, plurality in nouns can be expressed only by the suffix -ler, and this suffix has no other meaning than plurality. Uniqueness is already less natural: for example in German, the category of superlative must be (uniquely) expressed by the suffix -st, but this suffix shape may also mean 2.sg. of verbs. Least natural is ambiguity, where there are many-to-many relations between form and meaning. For example in Latin case morphology, -i may express gen. sg., dat. sg., loc. sg., abl. sg., nom. pl., and all of these cases may also be expressed by other endings than -i. The most natural base of a morphological rule is a word (because this is, in semiotic terms, a primary sign). Smaller bases (stems, roots) or more complex bases (phrases, sentences) are dispreferred. This makes, among the two German plural variants of Pizza, word-based Pizza-s more natural than rootbased Pizz-en, and renders compounds like Eng. do-it-yourself movement (with a sentence as first member) less natural than eye movement (where the first member is a word). Although all of these parameters are based on semiotic concepts in the first place, there is also abundant psychological (incl. psycholinguistic) evidence as to their validity. The following two parameters have an exclusively psychological basis: Grammatical relations are preferentially binary (based on the binary nature of neuro-

291 logical information transmittance), and this both in paradigmatics and syntagmatics. As has been ascertained already within structural linguistics, even apparently ternary relations have to be usually split up into two binary relations. For example Slovenian and Ancient Greek have three number categories: singular, dual, plural. But the semantic and structural relations of the dual with the plural (e.g. in agreement) are much closer than those between dual and singular. This induces us to assume two binary relations or oppositions: singular vs. non-singular and, within non-singular: plural vs. dual. In syntagmatic relations, the preferred patterning consists in concatenating one element to one base, for example by prefixing or suffixing to only one base. In circumfixing, two elements are affixed to one base. Therefore circumfixing is more marked on this parameter than prefixing or suffixing. The same preference for binarity holds for compounding, both in subordinate and coordinate compounding. Thus, in coordinate compounding, there is a universal preference for two-member compounds, such as queen-mother or prince-consort ⫺ due to entirely extralinguistic reasons (e.g. the model of the French tricolore), many adjective compounds which refer to flags, are three-member compounds, e.g. redwhite-red referring to the Austrian and Peruvian flag. Superficial three-member compounds, among subordinate compounds, usually have to be grouped into two binary relations. For example [[three][star][general]] has to be analysed into a binary subordinate relation between the non-head three-star and its head general, and three-star, in its turn, into a binary relation between the non-head three and its head star. On the parameter of the optimal shape of morphological words, the most natural option is the equation of one morphological word with one prosodic foot. The most natural foot, and thus the most natural word shape, is binary (bisyllabic) rather than trisyllabic, polysyllabic or monosyllabic. Here prosodic phonology motivates morphological naturalness (cf. 1.2). 3.2. Alternative naturalness parameters The naturalness parameters of 3.1 differ partially from Mayerthaler’s (1981), which are essentially maintained by Wurzel (1984 and later). For example, instead of the parallel pair of morphotactic and morphosemantic transpar-

292 ency, Wurzel has one single parameter of “morpho-semantic transparency” with several subparameters. One of them is called “semantic transparency (compositionality)” and corresponds to the parameter of morphosemantic transparency of 3.1, whereas the subparameter of “morphological (formal) transparency” corresponds to morphotactic transparency of 3.1. Mayerthaler’s parameter of uniform symbolization corresponds, on the one hand, to the parameter of biuniqueness (3.1) with the preference for a biunique relation between form and meaning. On the other hand, it is partially covered by the parameter of the optimal base of a morphological rule (3.1). When comparing such alternative solutions, the following criteria are relevant: Which solution (set of solutions) is more consistent? (cf. above on transparency). Which has a more solid extralinguistic base, including psycholinguistic evidence? Which one is terminologically more transparent? (cf. again above on transparency). Which one is empirically more satisfactory (cf. 3.3)? Furthermore, which solution allows a better functional explanation (cf. Dressler 1995)? Thus morphological naturalness is connected to the main function of morphology which consists in word-internal morphosemantic and morphotactic motivation, which again vouches for a parallel treatment of morphosemantic and morphotactic transparency. Which solution allows better intercomponential comparisons, i.e. which concepts have wider application in natural phonology, natural syntax, natural textlinguistics (cf. Dressler 1985 b; 1989; 1996 a; 1996 b)? Thus preferences for iconicity, indexicality, transparency (including continuity), (bi)uniqueness, and binarity have been shown to hold in other components as well, whereas optimal shapes differ widely with the size of units of each component. Finally, there is the criterion of coverage: Mayerthaler’s (1981) three parameters of constructional iconicity, transparency and uniformity have much less explanatory coverage than the eight preferences of 3.1. This is in stark contrast to the great explanatory coverage of Mayerthaler’s (1981) semantic markedness claims. He has shown how virtually all contrasting categories can be brought into relations of more vs. less marked. For example, plural is more marked than singular, dual more marked than plural (cf. Art. 29). Thus a semantically/pragmatically

IV. Grundbegriffe

unmarked category or element thereof is (an element of) a category A which is more basic in meaning than a comparable category B, as determined by pragmatics and/or syntax. 3.3. Predictions and conflicts The above-sketched deductive subtheory of universal morphological naturalness preferences allows several predictions (cf. Mayerthaler 1981; Dressler 1985 c): Universal preferences should have a significant effect on cross-linguistic distribution. For example, the preference for morphosemantic transparency should have the effect that, in a representative sample of languages of the world, meanings of inflected and derived words should be, with statistical significance, more morphosemantically transparent than opaque. As we will see in 4 and 5 below, such predictions need not hold within a single language or a given type of languages. But if they do not hold cross-linguistically, they are either falsified or it must be shown that diminution of statistical significance is due to naturalness conflicts, i.e. to conflicts between universal preferences within the morphological component itself or between preferences of different components. Thus the preference for biuniqueness results in languages with a rich morphology, such as Turkish (see 4), in polysyllabic word forms, and thus conflicts with the preference for bisyllabic word forms (optimal shape), i.e. with another universal preference of morphological naturalness. Or the preference for morphotactic transparency comes into conflict with the preference of phonological processes to be applied rather than to be suppressed. A satisfactory diachronic account of this conflict between two different grammatical components addresses many of the questions raised by neogrammarians of the 19th century in their conceptualization of the conflict between sound laws and analogy (cf. Wurzel 1988 b). Morphosemantic transparency holds much more in inflectional morphology than in word formation. Dressler (e.g. in Dressler et al. 1987) has tied this to a biuniqueness conflict within word formation, i.e. to a conflict between biunique form-meaning relations of morphemes vs. those of whole words. For example, in Eng. flut-ist, morpheme biuniqueness should hold separately for the meaning and form of (a) flute and (b) agent noun formation with -ist, whereas whole-word biuniqueness holds for the whole complex

293

31. Naturalness

word flutist. Since words have a semiotic priority over morphemes, lexical (whole-word) biuniqueness wins and accounts for idiosyncratic lexicalizations in word formation. This is, predictably, not the case in inflectional morphology, because inflected words are not lexical entities in their own right. The meager distribution of biuniqueness in general is due to another conflict, viz. with economy, i.e. parsimony of storage (cf. above 1.2, Ronneberger-Sibold 1980), a general cognitive factor. As one can easily see, in contrast to frequency approaches mentioned in 1.2, frequency is not a basis of naturalness, neither in theoretical explanation nor in heuristics, but one of its results. More specific predictions hold for domains of external evidence. Thus, in diachronic change, more natural options should be more stable than less natural ones on one and the same naturalness parameter, and the direction of morphological change should be preferrably towards more morphological naturalness. In addition to naturalness conflicts (such as the above-mentioned), there is a need for a specification of types of morphological change (cf. Wurzel 1994). Or in the domain of language acquisition, children should identify and acquire morphological rules the earlier the more natural these rules are according to universal parameters. An example is the earlier learning of plural formation rules for morphotactically very transparent plurals such as knife-s, girl-s than for less transparent ones such as wife J wives, foot J feet (often replaced by foot-s or being made more diagrammatic by adding the plural suffix to the adult form, which results in feet-s). It must also be noted that naturalness conflicts may find different solutions in different domains of external evidence, for example in early language acquisition as opposed to psycholinguistic experiments with adults. For example, in regard to Turkish polysyllabic inflectional forms, the above-mentioned conflict between biuniqueness and preference for disyllabic (or at most trisyllabic words) is solved by small children (but not adults) in a radical way, i.e. by avoidance of polysyllabic words.

4.

Typological adequacy

Since naturalness is not often understood in terms of typological adequacy, its discussion will be brief. Inspired by basic insights of

Skalicˇka (1979) on ideal language types which consist of properties which favor one another, language types have been reinterpreted as (alternative) sets of consistent responses to naturalness conflicts. Since it is impossible to combine the most natural options on all parameters within one language, naturalness on certain parameters must be, so to say, sacrificed for greater naturalness on others (cf. Dressler 1985 c; 1988 a). Thus the agglutinating type (as represented by Turkish) has the advantages of great constructional iconicity, great morphosemantic and morphotactic transparency, much biuniqueness, but deviates with its often very long word forms dramatically from the optimal shape of morphological words and does not fully achieve fixed morpheme order, whereas the opposite holds for the inflecting and introflecting type. Therefore universally rather unnatural options may be typologically adequate if they fit the properties of the respective language type (in the framework of the subtheory of typological adequacy).

5.

System-dependent naturalness

5.1. System-adequacy Language-specific, system-dependent naturalness, as conceived by Wurzel (1984) for systems of inflectional morphology, represents what is normal or system-congruous (system-adequate) within the morphology of a language, although it may contradict some universal morphological preference (as delineated in 3). Among competing system-defining structural properties the most dominant is the most adequate one. Let us illustrate this point with the universal parameter of the optimal base of morphological rules (3.1) and the respective systemadequacy of Latin declension. Universally most natural is word-based inflection (Wurzel’s base-form inflection), where the base of an inflectional paradigm is the unmarked autonomous inflectional word form, i.e. nom. sg. This holds for all case-forms of the feminine class terra ‘earth’ (gen./dat. terrae, acc. terram, voc. terra, abl. terra, nom./ voc. pl. terrae, gen. terrarum, acc. terras) except dat./abl. pl. terris, and for the whole paradigms of many subclasses of the consonantal declension, such as odor ‘odor’. Universally less natural stem-based inflection, where the root plus a thematic marker, i.e. less than an autonomous inflectional

294 word form, is the base of a paradigm, holds for the small i-class of turris ‘tower’ (where all case-forms are built on the stem turr-i-, with the exception of nom. pl. turres) and for several other classes. Universally still less natural root-based inflection, where the base of the paradigm is a root (without a thematic marker), holds, e.g., for the o- and mixed ideclension (e.g. acc. fin-em, abl. fin-e, nom. pl. fin-es, as opposed to stem-based nom. sg. fin-i-s). Thus, in terms of number and productivity of Latin declensional (sub)classes and caseforms, stem-based inflection is dominant and thus most system-adequate in Latin declension of nouns (and adjectives as well). For other properties of system adequacy see Wurzel (1984). 5.2. Universal vs. typological vs. systemdependent naturalness Typological adequacy (4 above) may be understood as a filter and elaboration on universal naturalness/markedness (3), and language-specific system adequacy (5.1) as a filter and elaboration on typological adequacy. Each lower-level filter can specify and even overturn preferences of the preceding higherorder level (cf. Dressler et al. 1987; Bittner 1988; Wheeler 1993). As a consequence, lack of the typological and the language-specific system-dependent filter leaves universal preferences intact. Therefore these play a higher role in the earliest phases of morphology acquisition by small children and in extragrammatical or expressive morphology (cf. Dressler & Karpf 1995), such as in echo-word formation (cf. Mayerthaler 1977) or in blends (contaminations, cf. Thornton 1993). For example, extragrammtical reduplication in echo-word formation (e.g. zig-zag, tick-tock) is in two ways more iconic than word-initial grammatical reduplication in the Latin perfect cu-curri/ce-curr-i ‘I ran’ from present curr-o ‘I run’: (a) reduplication is more complete in echowords, (b) there is diagrammaticity (analogy) between repetitive meaning and form in echo-words and metaphoricity between change of direction in the meaning of zig-zag and change of its vowels, whereas there is no iconicity between meaning and form in the Latin perfect. Symptomatically, small children produce many more echo-words and similar extragrammatical reduplications before they really start to acquire morphological grammar, i.e. before system-independent

IV. Grundbegriffe

preferences of universal naturalness are filtered by language-specific system adequacy. Particularly the above differentiation between these subtheories shows important differences between earlier uses of the terms markedness (e.g. in structuralism) and naturalness (e.g. in early “translations” of concepts from Stampean Natural Phonology to Natural Morphology) on the one hand, and current versions of Natural Morphology. These disallow simple statements of the type “The morphological construction X is more natural (less marked) than the comparable construction Y”. Instead, it is necessary to define on which parameters of universal markedness X is less marked than Y (cf. 3). This does not equal the evaluation of the respective type adequacy of X vs. Y in regard to one or another language type. And the relative system adequacy of X vs. Y may again differ, according to distinct and not necessarily covariating criteria of system adequacy (cf. already Wurzel 1984), within the system of one language as opposed to another one, even if both languages belong to the same language type. A comparable change has been going on in investigations of various domains of external evidence: sweeping statements as the binary markedness relations of Mayerthaler (1981), in an often hasty and superficial interpretation, are no longer adequate: for example, more natural morphological constructions are learned earlier by children than less natural ones. Quite apart from many intervening variables, which had been overlooked in earlier investigations, such sweeping predictions hold best for universal markedness predictions at very early stages, for system-adequacy predictions later on, because it takes time for small children to grasp all the language-specific properties of systemadequacy. In other words, in Natural Morphology, naturalness has become a cover term for more specific, distinct and theory-dependent subcategories (a similar move can be identified in Bybee 1991). Instead of inductive reasoning and descriptive labelling as natural, as has been frequent practice earlier on, a deductive theory has been proposed and is still in the process of being further elaborated.

6.

References

Aronoff, Mark (1994), Morphology by Itself: Inflectional Classes. Cambridge/MA: MIT Press Bailey, Charles-James N. (1982), On the Yin and Yang Nature of Language. Ann Arbor: Karoma Publ.

31. Naturalness Bates, Elizabeth & MacWhinney, Brian (1982), “Functionalist Approaches to Grammar”. In: Wanner, E. & Gleitmann, L. (eds.), Language Acquisition. Cambridge/MA: MIT Press, 173⫺218 Bittner, Andreas (1988), “Is Anything ‘More Natural’? Considerations on Establishing a Hierarchy of Naturalness Principles (NP)”. Linguistische Studien A 188 (Akademie der Wissenschaften der DDR: Zentralinstitut für Sprachwissenschaft), 23⫺35 Boretzky, Norbert & Dressler, Wolfgang & Oresˇnik, Janez & Wurzel, Wolfgang (1995, eds.), Natürlichkeitstheorie und Sprachwandel. Bochum: Brockmeyer Bybee, Joan L. (1985), “Diagrammatic Iconicity in Stem-inflection”. In: Haiman, John (ed.), Iconicity in Syntax. Amsterdam: Benjamins, 11⫺47

295 Functional Deficiencies”. In: Millar, Sharon & Mey, Jacob (eds.), Form and Function in Language. Odense: Odense University Press, 11⫺39 Dressler, Wolfgang U. (1996 a), “Principles of Naturalness in Phonology and across Components”. In: Hurch, Bernhard & Rhodes, Richard (eds.), Natural Phonology: The State of the Art. Berlin: de Gruyter, 41⫺51 Dressler, Wolfgang U. (1996 b), “Parallelisms between Natural Textlinguistics and Other Components of Natural Linguistics”. Sprachtypologie und Universalienforschung 49, 295⫺311 Dressler, Wolfgang U. & Karpf, Annemarie (1995), “The Theoretical Relevance of Pre- and Protomorphology in Language Acquisition”. Yearbook of Morphology 1994, 99⫺122

Bybee, Joan L. (1991), “Natural Morphology: The Organization of Paradigms and Language Acquisition”. In: Huebner, Thomas & Ferguson, Charles (eds.), Crosscurrents in Second Language Acquisition and Linguistic Theories. Amsterdam: Benjamins, 67⫺91

Dressler, Wolfgang U. & Mayerthaler, Willi & Panagl, Oswald & Wurzel, Wolfgang U. (1987), Leitmotifs in Natural Morphology. Amsterdam: Benjamins

Carstairs-McCarthy, Andrew (1992), Current Morphology. London: Routledge

Fenk-Oczlon, Gertraud (1990), “Ikonismus versus Ökonomieprinzip, am Beispiel russischer Aspektund Kasusbildungen”. Papiere zur Linguistik 42, 49⫺69

Dressler, Wolfgang U. (1977), “Elements of a Polycentristic Theory of Word Formation”. wiener linguistische gazette 15, 13⫺32 Dressler, Wolfgang U. (1985 a), “Typological Aspects of Natural Morphology”. wiener linguistische gazette 36, 3⫺26 [Acta Linguistica Hungarica 35, 1987, 51⫺70] Dressler, Wolfgang U. (1985 b), Morphonology. Ann Arbor: Karoma Publ. Dressler, Wolfgang U. (1985 c), “On the Predictiveness of Natural Morphology”. Journal of Linguistics 21, 321⫺337 Dressler, Wolfgang U. (1988 a), “Zur Bedeutung der Sprachtypologie in der Natürlichen Morphologie”. In: Albrecht, J. (ed.), Energeia und Ergon, Studia in honorem Eugenio Coseriu, Vol. III. Tübingen: Narr, 199⫺208 Dressler, Wolfgang U. (1988 b), “Preferences vs. Strict Universals in Morphology: Word Based Rules”. In: Hammond, Michael & Noonan, Michael (eds.), Theoretical Morphology. San Diego: Academic Press, 143⫺154 Dressler, Wolfgang U. (1989), Semiotische Parameter einer textlinguistischen Natürlichkeitstheorie. Wien: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften Dressler, Wolfgang U. (1991), “The Sociolinguistic and Patholinguistic Attrition of Breton Phonology, Morphology, and Morphonology”. In: Seliger, Herbert & Vago, Robert (eds.), First Language Attrition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 99⫺112 Dressler, Wolfgang U. (1995), “Wealth and Poverty of Functional Analyses, with Special Reference to

Dressler, Wolfgang U. & Merlini Barbaresi, Lavinia (1994), Morphopragmatics. Berlin: de Gruyter

Harnisch, Rüdiger (1990), “Morphologische Irregularität ⫺ Gebrauchshäufigkeit ⫺ psychische Nähe”. In: Me´ndez Dosuna & Pensado (eds.), 65⫺76 Jakobson, Roman (1965), Selected Writings, Vol. II. The Hague: Mouton Karpf, Annemarie & Dringel-Techt, Eva (1995), “The Role of Morphological Naturalness in Second Language Development”. In: Dressler, Wolfgang U. & Burani, Cristina (eds.), Crossdisciplinary Approaches to Morphology. Wien: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 131⫺ 147 Kilani-Schoch, Marianne (1988), Introduction a` la morphologie naturelle. Bern: Lang Köpcke, Klaus-Michael (1993), Schemata bei der Pluralbildung im Deutschen: Versuch einer kognitiven Morphologie. Tübingen: Narr Köpcke, Klaus-Michael (1994, ed.), Funktionale Untersuchungen zur Deutschen Nominal- und Verbalmorphologie. Tübingen: Narr Laskowski, Roman (1985), “What Seems Natural in Inflectional Morphology?”. Studia gramatyczne 7, 65⫺82 Luschützky, Hans-Christian (1991), Twenty Years of Naturalism in Linguistics: A Bibliography. Wien: Institut für Sprachwissenschaft (wiener linguistische gazette supplement 10) Mayerthaler, Willi (1977), Studien zur theoretischen und zur französischen Morphologie: Reduplikation, Echowörter, morphologische Natürlichkeit, Haplologie, Produktivität, Regeltelescoping, paradigmatischer Ausgleich. Tübingen: Niemeyer

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Mayerthaler, Willi (1981), Morphologische Natürlichkeit. Wiesbaden: Athenaion [English transl. (1988): Morphological Naturalness. Ann Arbor: Karoma Publ.] Mayerthaler, Willi & Fliedl, Günther & Winkler, Christian (1994), Infinitivprominenz in europäischen Sprachen, Vol. 1⫺2. Tübingen: Narr Me´ndez Dosuna, Julia´n & Pensado, Carmen (1990), “How Unnatural Is Spanish Vı´ctor J Victı´t-or? Infixed Diminutives in Spanish”. In: Me´ndez Dosuna & Pensado (eds.), 89⫺106 Me´ndez Dosuna, Julia´n & Pensado, Carmen (1990, eds.), Naturalists at Krems. Salamanca: Acta Salmanticensia (Estudios Filolo´gicos 227) Peirce, Charles S. (1965), Collected Papers. Cambridge/MA: Harvard University Press Plank, Frans (1981), Morphologische (Ir-)Regularitäten. Tübingen: Narr Ronneberger-Sibold, Elke (1980), Sprachverwendung, Sprachsystem, Ökonomie und Wandel. Tübingen: Niemeyer Schmid, Stephan, (1995), “Morphological Naturalness in Spanish-Italian Interlanguages”. In: Pishwa, Hanna & Maroldt, Karl (eds.), The Development of Morphological Systematicity. Tübingen: Narr, 263⫺291 Skalicˇka, Vladimir (1979), Typologische Studien. Braunschweig: Vieweg Slobin, Dan I. (1985), “Crosslinguistic Evidence for the Language-making Capacity”. In: Slobin, Dan (ed.), The Crosslinguistic Study of Language Acquisition. Hillsdale: Erlbaum, 1157⫺1256 Stampe, David (1973), “On Chapter Nine”. In: Kenstowicz, Michael & Kisseberth, Charles (eds.), Issues in Phonological Theory. The Hague: Mouton, 44⫺52 Thornton, Anna M. (1993), “Italian Blends”. In: Tonelli & Dressler (eds.), 143⫺155

Tonelli, Livia & Dressler, Wolfgang U. (1993, eds.), Natural Morphology: Perspectives for the Nineties. Padova: Unipress Vennemann, Theo (1983), “Theories of Linguistic Preferences as a Basis for Linguistic Explanations”. Folia Linguistica Historica 4, 5⫺26 Werner, Otmar (1989), “Sprachökonomie und Natürlichkeit im Bereich der Morphologie”. Zeitschrift für Phonetik, Sprachwissenschaft und Kommunikationsforschung 42, 34⫺47 Wheeler, Max W. (1993), “On the Hierarchy of Naturalness Principles in Inflectional Morphology”. Journal of Linguistics 29, 95⫺111 Winters, Margaret E. (1993), “Diachronic Natural Morphology and Cognitive Grammar”. In: Tonelli & Dressler (eds.), 169⫺178 Wurzel, Wolfgang U. (1984), Flexionsmorphologie und Natürlichkeit. Berlin: Akademie-Verlag [English transl. (1989): Inflectional Morphology and Naturalness. Dordrecht: Kluwer] Wurzel, Wolfgang U. (1988 a), “The Structuralist Heritage in Natural Morphology”. Linguistische Studien A 188 (Akademie der Wissenschaften der DDR: Zentralinstitut für Sprachwissenschaft), 99⫺116 Wurzel, Wolfgang U. (1988 b), “Hermann Paul ⫺ Analogie und die Natürliche Morphologie”. Zeitschrift für Germanistik 5, 537⫺544 Wurzel, Wolfgang U. (1993), “Morphology, Natural”. In: Asher, R. E. (ed.), The Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics. Oxford: Pergamon Press, 2590⫺2598 Wurzel, Wolfgang U. (1994), “Grammatisch initiierter Wandel”. In: Jeßing, Benedikt (ed.), Sprachdynamik: Auf dem Weg zu einer Typologie sprachlichen Wandels, Vol. I. Bochum: Brockmeyer, 7⫺ 114 Zipf, George K. (1935), The Psycho-biology of Language. Boston: Houghton Mifflin

Wolfgang U. Dressler, Wien (Austria)

32. Regularity 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

The notion of regularity Regularity and the rules of grammar Regularity and productivity Regularity and frequency Regularity as a scalar phenomenon Regularity and diachrony References

1.

The notion of regularity

Most broadly conceived, regular means ‘conforming to the rule(s) of grammar’ and irregular means ‘in violation of the rule(s) gram-

mar’. In the first case both the inputs and the outputs of a rule must be regular (cf. Dressler 1985: 65⫺68). The input to a rule is regular if it can be characterized as a (natural) class. For example, there is a rule in English that makes tense vowels lax in the syllable before the suffix -ity (providing that there is an intervening consonant). This rule is one of the rules which are responsible for the vowel alternations in obscene-obscenity, divine-divinity, vain-vanity. The regular input to the laxing rule comprises the class of Latinate adjec-

297

32. Regularity

tives. Or to take another example, the regular input to the -s-plural rule is the set of all count nouns. In syntax the regular input to the passive rule covers, in principle, all transitive verbs. The words which may not undergo a rule constitute simple exceptions. In this sense obese is a simple exception to the laxing rule, oxen to the plural rule and resemble (cf. John resembles Mary’s mother ⫺ *Mary’s mother is resembled by John) to the passive rule. In this respect there is no difference between regularity in syntax, phonology and morphology. A morphological process may be more or less regular, that is, the shape and, more especially, the meaning of its products may be more or less predictable on the basis of the shape and the meaning of the bases to which it applies. Regularity thus has not only to do with form but also with meaning. If meaning is predictable it is also compositional. In this sense regularity is related to compositionality (cf. Art. 82). Consequently, “regular output” means both ‘regular shape’ and ‘compositional meaning’. A grammatical rule is any statement expressing a linguistically significant generalization about the grammatical facts of a particular language. Rules can be viewed as static statements or as dynamic processes. As for morphology, it is normally assumed that words are constructed out of morphs by means of morphological rules. Rules as processes must have a predictive power: they do not only account for actual words but can also be used to generate nonattested potential words. If a rule describes a productive process, it must have a regular output. If conceived as statements of linguistic generalizations, however, the notion of rule does not coincide with the notion of regularity. Rules can be formulated for irregular forms as well. Regularity can be ascribed to any linguistic unit which may undergo a rule (syllables, words, phrases, sentences, etc.). In languages in which paradigms exist they also obey certain rules. Consequently, paradigms may be regular as well. For example, the regular inflectional paradigm for the first conjugation in French is represented by a verb such as donner ‘to give’. Verbs such as mener ‘to lead’, semer ‘to sow’, se promener ‘to walk’ are to some extent irregular with respect to this paradigm since they undergo an unpredictable phonological rule. Any theory of language should provide a way for grammars defined by that theory to

distinguish irregular cases from regular ones. Different grammars, however, can draw the line between exceptions and regular cases differently. The relationship can even be reversed: what counts as irregular according to one grammar may count as fully regular according to another grammar. Moreover, exceptions may exhibit certain subregularities, they need not be completely irregular. It has often been claimed that a grammar which points out the most regularities should be preferred (cf. Lakoff 1970: 14). However, exceptions belong to grammar, too. It is wrong to assume that particular statements (i.e. lists) must be excised from the grammar of a language if general statements (i.e. rules) that subsume them can be established (the rule/list fallacy, cf. Langacker 1987: 29, 42). Theoretical linguists have normally resisted the idea that irregular expressions should be listed in a grammar, on the assumption that listing entails a failure to capture significant generalizations. This is fallacious because it tacitly presupposes only two options: rules vs. lists. But nothing in principle prevents a third option, namely positing both rules and lists. Some irregular forms are not only tolerated but desired in a language. This must be the case with suppletive forms which never get regularized (am, is, are; go ⫺ went; will ⫺ would). These are often function words or words which refer to our immediate experience. The more important the function of a lexical category is for the encoding of grammatical categories, the more important becomes their distinctiveness. Suppletion ensures maximal distinctiveness (cf. Bittner 1988: 422f.).

2.

Regularity and the rules of grammar

Not every regularity in the use of language is a matter of grammar. For example, shmreduplication in English producing constructions such as transformations shmansformations (with a meaning something like ‘Who cares about transformations?’) is quite regular (rule-governed), but it cannot be considered to be a rule of grammar. Consequently, one has to distinguish between grammatical and extragrammatical regularity (cf. Zwicky & Pullum 1987). More important than the distinction between grammatical and extragrammatical regularity is the fact that regularity depends

298

IV. Grundbegriffe

heavily on how the rules are formulated (or, what speakers consider to be the rule). For example, if one assumes that German selbstcompounds are derived from a reflexive construction (or are based on such a construction), then compounds such as Selbstkritik ‘self-criticism’, Selbstbildnis ‘self-portrait’, Selbstmord ‘suicide’ are regular, the ungrammaticality of forms as *Selbstteppich ‘selfrug’, *Selbststein ‘self-stone’, *Selbstkopf ‘self-head’ is predictable, and compounds such as Selbstfinanzierung ‘self-financing’, selbstklebend ‘self-adhesive’ are exceptions. If, however, selbst ‘self’ is analyzed as an intensifier (‘somebody does something personally’) rather than a reflexive, then the exceptions become regular, and the compounds which are regular in the previous analysis must be treated differently (cf. Plank 1981: 5). Regularity can be identified with regular shape or with regular meaning. The selbstcompounds in German are all regular in terms of shape (they are morphotactically regular), but semantically they do not conform to the same rule. Thus, some of them are (morpho-)semantically regular, others are not. The reverse situation may hold, too. For example, the comparative in English is morphosemantically regular, morphotactically, however, this is not always the case (large ⫺ larger, small ⫺ smaller versus good ⫺ better, bad ⫺ worse). That is, a distinction must be made between morphotactic and morphosemantic regularity. Some irregular forms may be accounted for by what has become known as “minor rules” (cf. Lakoff 1970: 30⫺48). Such forms must then be considered regular with respect to these minor rules (i.e. they obey certain subregularities), though they are still irregular with respect to the “major rules” of grammar. For example, in Hungarian certain stems appear in two forms, e.g. lo´ ⫺ lov ‘horse’, ho´ ⫺ hav ‘snow’, but the choice between them is rule-governed, their distribution is fully predictable. Nevertheless these stems have to be marked as exceptions in the lexicon.

3.

Regularity and productivity

A morphological rule is called productive if it can freely be applied to any item meeting its requirements, including elements newly

added to the language (cf. Art. 33). Productivity is a gradual notion, but, in general, it is sufficient to postulate three degrees of productivity: fully productive, semi-productive and unproductive. There is no direct relationship between regularity and productivity, though truly irregular forms cannot be produced by productive rules. Some morphological rules are unrestrictedly productive. This is the case with most inflectional rules quite independently of the fact whether they produce regular or irregular forms. Regular forms may be productive in a certain lexical area only; this is true of quite a few word formation rules. For example, normally the productive negative prefix un- attaches to the positive adjective. If un- is attached to the negative member of the pair, the resulting form is usually ill-formed. Compare unwell, unloved vs. *unill, *unhated. Several aspects of a rule can enhance productivity. To these belong type- and tokenfrequency and semantic transparency (cf. Becker 1990: 115⫺118). However, semantic transparency is not a necessary condition for productivity. For example, the deverbal nominalization in -er is very productive yet semantically vague or polysemous. Unproductive forms can be either regular or irregular. They can be regular provided they can be described by means of a rule which is not distinct from other rules of grammar except for the degree of productivity. In other words, rules can be unproductive. Such rules do not describe synchronic morphological relations, however. Regular but unproductive forms are, for example, Germ. heiss ‘hot’ ⫺ Hitze ‘heat’, schaffen ‘create’ ⫺ Geschöpf ‘creature’ which exhibit a regular consonant alternation. Such forms are historical relics, but they are relatively frequent and in the given domain completely regular.

4.

Regularity and frequency

Once again, there is no direct relationship between regularity and frequency. Frequency may refer to type-frequency or to token-frequency. Word frequency counts have very little to say concerning regularity. But even type-frequency is not an appropriate measure of regularity. It is impossible to extract information concerning the number of possible

32. Regularity

items of a morphological class from the observed number of types. Moreover, two word formation rules may yield approximately the same number of types in a corpus while differing significantly with respect to (their degree) of regularity (cf. Baayen 1989: 41). There are quite regular forms which are relatively unfrequent, e.g. the Hungarian noun form ha´z-am-e´-i-t ‘house-1.poss-belonging. to-pl-acc (things (acc) belonging to my house)’ or even practically non-occurring (though, in principle, quite possible), e.g. the iteration of the possessive and the plural with Hungarian nouns Pe´ter-e´-i-e´-i ‘Peter-belonging.to-pl-belonging.to-pl (things belonging to things which belong to Peter)’. Moreover, there are irregular forms which are quite frequent (e.g. went, is, are). In fact, there seems to be a close correlation between high frequency and irregularity, e.g. the present tense singular forms of the English verb to be (am, are, is) or the present tense and past tense forms of irregular verbs (go ⫺ went). This is considered to be one of the reasons why suppletion is maintained.

5.

Regularity as a scalar phenomenon

5.1. Degrees of regularity in terms of rules One way to show that regularity/irregularity is not a dichotomy but rather a scalar phenomenon is to describe the typical properties of regular forms and those of irregular forms and then examine whether there are forms which share some, but not all, of the properties of these forms. The strong/weak distinction in Germanic verb inflection is a case in point. Thus, for example, typical strong verbs in German have the following characteristics: (a) past participle ending in -en, (b) subjunctive preterite with umlaut (provided that the stem vowel is umlautable), (c) vowel alternation (ablaut), (d) first and third person singular preterite without the ending -e, (e) second and third person singular present tense with umlaut or e/i-alternation, and (f) the imperative with e/i-alternation and/or 0-suffix. Typical weak verbs, on the other hand, have the following properties: (a) past participle ending in -(e)t, (d) preterite ending in -t(e), (d) first and third person singular preterite ending in -e, and (d) imperative -e/i-alternation but with an -e-suffix. The reduction of the characteristics of strong verbs is not arbitrary but follows certain patterns. These

299 patterns show an implicative structure which is depicted in Fig. 2.1 (cf. Bittner 1985: 35): e/i alternation and/or 0-ending in 2nd imp. 傻 vowel alternation in 2nd/3rd sg. pres 傻 no dentals in pret. and/or 0-ending in 1st/3rd sg. pret. 傻 ablaut in pret. 傻 umlaut in subj. pret. 傻 strong part. perf. Fig. 32.1: The implicative pattern of strong verbs in German

This implicational pattern yields 7 classes, each of which shows a different degree of regularity. Class 7 comprises the prototypical (most irregular) strong verbs such as lesen ‘read’, essen ‘eat’, helfen ‘help’, sprechen ‘speak’, etc. which show all the characteristics of strong verbs. Class 6 contains verbs which have weak imperative forms but share all the other characteristics with strong verbs (e.g. tragen ‘bear’, graben ‘dig’, wachsen ‘grow’, etc.). Verbs in class 5 have weak imperative forms and no vowel alternation in present tense (e.g. heben ‘lift’, kommen ‘come’, schaffen ‘create’, genesen ‘recover’, etc.). Class 4 comprises the so-called Rückumlautsverben, i.e. verbs which have ablaut and umlaut in the subjunctive preterite but are otherwise regular (e.g. brennen ‘burn’, kennen ‘know’, nennen ‘call’, senden ‘send’, etc). Only a couple of verbs belong to class 3 where umlaut is still present but the preterite has no ablaut and shows the regular -t suffix: dingen ‘hire’ (the ablauted forms of ‘dingen’ are obsolete except for the subjunctive preterite dänge), schinden ‘flay, skin’, schleißen ‘slit, split’. These verbs still have strong forms in the past participle. Verbs in class 2, where the only strong characteristics appears in the past participle, are mahlen ‘grind’, melken ‘milk’, bersten ‘burst’, fechten ‘fence, fight’, etc. Some of these verbs are still listed in dictionaries as having strong forms though ⫺ at least in spoken language ⫺ these are no longer used. Finally, class 1 contains the prototypical weak (most regular) verbs. The “strongweak-continuum” is a scale from “typical strong” to “typical weak”, between these two extremes there are verb classes which show various degrees of the loss of the characteristics of typical strong verbs. The characteristics of verbal inflection are hierarchically ordered. This hierarchy is based exclusively on the formal properties of forms and on their implicational organization.

300 5.2. Degrees of regularity established on the basis of psycholinguistic evidence There are, of course, other ways of looking at gradualness in morphology. For example, hierarchies may also be based on psychological evidence (resulting from research on child language, second language acquisition, aphasia, etc.). Contrasting once again weak and strong verbal forms in Germanic it can be seen that while strong paradigms are mainly based on vowel oppositions, weak ones function by opposing consonants (present -0 vs. past -(e)d/t). People seem to use different strategies for producing and decoding strong and weak verbs. The consonantal opposition is categorial and located in the left hemisphere of the brain, the ablaut is gradual (among different vowels) and seems to be located in the right hemisphere (cf. McNeill 1970: 140; Deegener 1978: 83). At the same time, the left hemisphere seems to govern the analysis of symbolic properties of the received information, the right hemisphere is charged with the analysis of the structural stimuli of that information. In languages there seems to be a balance between regular, predictable forms, which are produced along regular patterns, and irregular, unpredictable forms which are stored in the mental lexicon. This balance may be due to the effect of two conflicting principles: the principle of least effort striving toward grammatical regularity, on the one hand, and iconicity in the Peircean sense (cf. Art. 23) striving toward easily recognizable forms (labels, or icons), on the other. The more easily recognizable they are, the more easily can the labels be stored in the mental lexicon. For example, in Germanic, weak verbal forms belong to the domain of grammar in the sense that they are produced along predictable patterns (rules) whereas strong forms have to be stored as such in the mental lexicon. They are iconic to the extent they belong to the basic vocabulary endowed with high frequency. It has been shown that English speaking children go through four phases in the acquisition of the past verbal forms (cf. Slobin 1971: 220): (a) production of irregular past forms whose frequency is very high (go, drink, eat, give, can, may, have, be, ets.); (b) acquisition of the regular past forms; (c) overgeneralization of the rule and possible production of hypercorrected forms: I bringed, I goed; (d) acquisition of new irregular

IV. Grundbegriffe

forms. Experiments on adult American speakers have shown that there still exists a kind of linguistic competence, probably based on rhyming analogy, for the production of new strong forms of invented verbs like to gling or to bing (cf. Berko 1958). However, the strong verbal forms are not irregular to the same degree. For example, English verbal forms with ablaut and -t/-d such as told, sold, brought come closest to the regular weak forms. They are more correctly reproduced by learning children than past forms based on ablaut alone. On the other pole we have isolated items, which were originally verbal forms but whose link with the verbal paradigm became more and more feeble in the course of linguistic development (cf. the past participles cloven from cleave and shorn from shear ‘deprived’; Ramat 1985: 167). Suppletion (e.g. was, went) is one step away from this pole. Strong verbs with three ablauted vowels come next (sing, fly) followed by strong verbs with two ablauted vowels (do, speak). A separate level can be postulated for doublets, i.e. where both strong and weak forms are possible independently of the direction of the development (cf. Dutch zwoer/ zwoerde ‘I/he sweared’, dolf/delfde ‘I/he delved’). Diachronically they represent clear evidence of the extension of the new analogical forms. Between the two poles, grammar and lexicon, there is a scale with the possibility of shifts. That is, we have to do with a dynamic process. Consequently grammar and lexicon should be replaced by the dynamic terms grammaticalization and lexicalization, respectively (cf. Ramat 1985: 168). Cf. the diagram below (reproduced with slight changes from Ramat 1985: 170). lexicalization grammaticalization ø¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¡ isolated supablaut weak and ablaut weak stems pletion strong -d/-t forms Fig. 32.2: Lexicalization and grammaticalization of Germanic verbs

Forms which exhibit the highest degree of grammaticalization are the most regular, and forms which show the highest degree of lexicalization are the most irregular. Between these two poles there is a continuum (with constant shifts) of regularity or irregularity (depending on the perspective chosen; cf. 1).

301

32. Regularity

5.3. The principle of economy There are inflectional affixes which express simultaneously several morphological categories, which can be quite different (cf., for example, the Person/Number syncretism in the verbal morphology of quite a few IndoEuropean languages). This compression of morphological information makes the morphological form shorter and simplifies its syntagmatic effects making thus (re)production easier. At the same time, however, it increases the number of elements in the paradigm and, consequently, the learning load. The abandonment of diagrammatic iconicity pays off only if the form is used frequently. (Cf. “Diagrams are icons which represent the relations, mainly dyadic, or so regarded, of the parts of one thing by analogous relations in their own parts”, Peirce 1965: 157; cf. also Art. 30.) Therefore, compression and high frequency exhibit a close correlation. In some cases compression may lead to disturbing homomorphy, which may motivate de-compression (cf. OHGerman huˆs (sg.) ⫺ hiusir (pl.), MHGerman huˆs (sg.) ⫺ huˆs (pl.), Germ. Haus (sg.) ⫺ Häuser (pl.) where the stem has been expanded by the plural suffix -er). Strongly compressed, but less frequent forms, too, can be expanded (cf. Germ. (wir) kiesen ⫺ kuren; kiesen ⫺ koren; küren ⫺ kürten ‘choose’ (rare) where the expansion has led to the adoption of the weak form for the past tense). Expansion or de-compression is the process which runs counter compression (cf. Werner 1987). In general, expansion processes are more regular (e.g. the perfect or the past tense of weak verbs) and are applicable to a large portion of lexical elements whereas compression processes are mostly irregular (the past tense of strong verbs, suppletion) and appear quite often only with a handful of lexical elements. This is so because compression is most often accompanied by various assimilation and reduction processes, which are tolerated with elements of high frequency only. Between strong suppletion and full iconicity there is a scale with more regular cases in the direction of expansion and with less regular (or more irregular) cases in the direction of compression. compression, expansion, less regular cases more regular cases ø¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¡ strong suppletion full iconicity Fig. 32.3: The relationship between compression/ expansion and regularity

In this sense, then, even irregularity is rulegoverned and can be subsumed under a “higher order” regularity. The three approaches motivate and define regularity in three different ways. In principle, the three scales thus defined need not coincide. However, they turned out to be by and large identical, which shows that what these approaches offer are different explanations for the same set of facts. The first one of these is a morphology-internal explanation, the other two invoke extragrammatical principles. The scale of regularity can be explained in terms of formal properties and rules internal to morphology. But the explanation of the ultimate reason of the existence of such scales comes from outside: it has to do with language use and the cognitive principles which underlie it.

6.

Regularity and diachrony

The scales of regularity established above are not static, i.e. they do not simply depict the present state of the morphological phenomena involved. Rather, they have a dynamic aspect, too. Grammaticalization and lexicalization, or expansion and compression are at the same time historical processes. The process of gradual compression can be observed in a considerable number of morphological changes. First, syntagms are turned by means of cliticization into “clitic groups” (e.g. Germ. da haben wir es ⫺ da hammers). As soon as cliticization becomes obligatory, clitics may give rise to affixes. The affixes are first agglutinative, there is a one-to-one correspondence between morphemes and morphs. High frequency, however, may bring about further compression. The agglutinated suffixes may phonologically affect the stem (assimilation, change of the root vowel, etc.). We may thus get discontinuous affixes, the inflected word can no longer be segmented. The affixes may lose their distinctiveness: OHGerman geb-ames ⫺ geb-ant + (wir) geben ⫺ (sie) geb-en, or they may completely disappear as in Germ. Bruder (sg.) ⫺ Brüder (pl.), geben (first and third person plural present tense) ⫺ gäben (first and third person plural present conditional). Inflection is expressed by root alternations. Both cases are typical of inflecting languages. The next and last step is (first weak and then strong) suppletion. The full scale of the diachronic change of compression is depicted in the following diagram (cf. Werner 1987: 300).

302

IV. Grundbegriffe

syntagms

cliticization

affixes affixes root alternation suppletion morphemewith variable morph 1:1 stems ø¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¡ isolation ⫺ agglutination ⫺ inflection ⫺ suppletion Fig. 32.4: Compression as a diachronic change

To be sure, not every language is passing through all the stages in Fig. 32.4. How far a language goes in the direction of compression will depend on various factors: on the role of assimilation processes, on the extent to which the language allows reduction processes, and on the proportion of forms which can feed such processes. Irregular forms are not just the relics of bygone times, a “semiotically deviant and essentially arbitrary synchronic residue” (Maiden 1992: 306). Allomorphic irregularity may not only persist, it may also emerge. “Novel allomorphy is the creation […] of patterns of alternation whose phonological form or whose paradigmatic distribution is unprecedented” (Maiden 1992: 297). Apparently, speakers, when confronted with conflicting typological evidence in lexical roots, seek to identify common distributional patterns. These patterns can then be made more prominent by emphasizing and elaborating phonological differences. An analogical change can propagate allomorphic irregularity and produce at the same time regularity in the sense that the number of lexical exceptions to irregular allomorphy is decreasing (cf. Maiden 1992: 310).

7.

References

Baayen, Rolf Harald (1989), A Corpus-based Approach to Morphological Productivity. Statistical Analysis and Psycholinguistic Interpretation. Amsterdam: Centrum voor Wiskunde en Informatica Becker, Thomas (1990), Analogie und morphologische Theorie. München: Fink Berko, Jean (1958), “The Child’s Learning of English Morphology”. Word 14, 150⫺177 Bittner, Andreas (1985), “Implikative Hierarchien in der Morphologie: Das ‘Stark-schwach-Kontinuum’ der neuhochdeutschen Verben”. Acta Linguistica Hungarica 35, 31⫺42

Bittner, Andreas (1988), “Reguläre Irregularitäten”. Zeitschrift für Phonetik, Sprachwissenschaft und Kommunikationsforschung 41.4, 416⫺425 Deegener, Günter (1978), Neuropsychologie und Hemisphärendominanzbeziehungen zwischen Händigkeit, Sprache und funktioneller Hemisphärensymmetrie. Stuttgart: Enke Dressler, Wolfgang U[llrich] (1985), Morphonology: The Dynamics of Derivation. Ann Arbor: Karoma Publishers Lakoff, George (1970), Irregularity in Syntax. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston Langacker, Ronald (1987), Foundations of Cognitive Grammar, Vol. I: Theoretical Prerequisites. Stanford: Stanford University Press Maiden, Martin (1992), “Irregularity as a Determinant of Morphological Change”. Journal of Linguistics 28, 285⫺312 McNeill, David (1970), The Acquisition of Language: The Study of Developmental Psycholinguistics. New York: Harper & Row Peirce, Charles Sanders (1965), Collected Papers, Vol. II. Cambridge: Harvard University Press Plank, Frans (1981), Morphologische (Ir-)Regularitäten. Tübingen: Narr (Studien zur deutschen Grammatik 13) Ramat, Paolo (1985), “On the Scalar Character of (Morphological) Irregularity”. In: Seiler, Hansjakob & Brettschneider, Gunter (eds.), International Interdisciplinary Conference on Language Invariants and Mental Operations. Tübingen: Narr, 162⫺171 Slobin, Dan (1971), “On the Learning of Morphological Rules. A Reply to Palermo and Eberhart”. In: Slobin, Dan (ed.), The Ontogenesis of Grammar. New York: Academic Press, 215⫺224 Werner, Otmar (1987), “Natürlichkeit und Nutzen morphologischer Irregularität”. In: Boretzky, Norbert & Enninger, Werner & Stolz, Thomas (eds.), Beiträge zum 3. Essener Kolloquium über Sprachwandel und seine bestimmenden Faktoren. Bochum: Brockmeyer, 289⫺316 Zwicky, Arnold M. & Pullum, Geoffrey K. (1987), “Plain Morphology and Expressive Morphology”. Berkeley Linguistic Society Papers 13, 339⫺342

Ferenc Kiefer, Budapest (Hungary)

303

33. Productivity

33. Productivity 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

1.

Meaning and usage of the term productivity Productivity in relation to inflection, derivation and compounding Productivity as a property of the langue The functions of productive morphological processes Morphological productivity as a ¤matter of degreeÅ: factors pertaining to the langue The actuation of morphological processes: factors pertaining to the parole Concluding remarks References

Meaning and usage of the term productivity

In linguistics the word productivity is used to refer to both morphological and syntactic phenomena. The general opinion, however, is that productivity has more to do with words than with phrases or sentences. In conformity with this, in this contribution focus will be on productivity as a morphological phenomenon, although some brief remarks will be made on the difference between morphological and syntactic productivity in 2. Within morphology the term productivity is applied both to rules or processes and to categories or word types. So, with regard to a pair like Eng. sweet ⫺ sweetness, one may say that the rule or process that relates sweetness to sweet (or derives the former from the latter) is productive or that sweetness represents a productive category or word type. The phenomenon to which both formulations refer is that words of the type [[x]A-ness]N constitute an open-ended category, or ⫺ in terms of rules ⫺ the word formation rule that derives nouns from adjectives by suffixation of -ness applies to an in principle not-countable number of adjectives. In a case like this, these different formulations are factually equivalent; yet they may point to different approaches to the phenomenon of morphological productivity or word structure as such (cf. 3). What has been said so far about morphological productivity may be considered to belong, more or less, to the communis opinio of the linguistic community. There remain many questions and problems, however, on which there are controversial opinions. The most important one is the question whether morphological productivity belongs to the langue

(the language as a given system), to the parole (the use of language) or, perhaps, to something in between. Inherently connected with this issue are questions with regard to the gradual nature of productivity. Observations which are relevant in this connection are for instance: some productive processes appear to be less restricted than others, some productive word types seem to permit new words with more ease than others, some productive processes can be applied much more readily than others etc. In this contribution the view is taken that the productivity versus unproductivity of a certain word type or word formation process within a language must be seen as a characteristic of the langue and should, therefore, be accounted for in the ¤grammarÅ of that language. However, the factors that pertain to the degree of productivity of morphological processes may belong either to the sphere of the langue or to the sphere of the parole.

2.

Productivity in relation to inflection, derivation and compounding

Traditionally, three types of morphological processes are distinguished: inflection, derivation and compounding (cf. Art. 37, 38, 87 and 89). These three processes show different kinds of productivity. In recent work in morphology the distinction between contextual inflection on the one hand and inherent inflection on the other is re-established. The former type of inflectional processes add no meaning to the underlying base at all. Processes such as case marking or agreement only add information that is relevant to the syntagmatic structure on phrase or sentence level. Processes of contextual inflection, then, typically possess an essentially unrestrained productivity, the type of productivity that one generally finds in syntax. This is not surprising, of course, since these morphological processes are imposed on words by the syntax. As soon as a word is used in a syntactic construction, it is automatically subjected to all obligatory inflectional rules. On the whole, this is even the case with incidental loans. Many rules of inherent inflection (such as those in the realm of verb conjugation) reveal more or less the

304 same picture. That is, those rules, too, exhibit the syntax-like kind of productivity that is characteristic to contextual inflection. Yet, in the domain of inherent inflection processes may be found (e.g. nominal plural formation) whose productivity is less automatic and which, consequently, resembles that of the most unrestrained derivational processes. Generally speaking, however, the productivity of most inflectional rules is a syntactic rather than a morphological phenomenon. Traditionally, this is often formulated by saying that inflection is concerned with ¤forms of wordsÅ rather than with words. Inflectional rules do not create new words. Many of them are necessary to express or modify propositions and/or speech acts; others, like the pluralization of nouns, do have a referential meaning, but they are not used to denote concepts. In contrast with inflection, derivation and compounding are both word formation processes in the strict sense. Both types of processes produce new words in the sense of new ¤namesÅ for concepts. It has often been claimed that, in general, compounding is far more productive than derivation and that in case of the former productivity comes close to the kind we find in syntax. Evidently, this is not universally true: of the Indo-European languages, for example, Latin appears to be far less productive in compounding than Greek. Moreover, within a language such as Dutch, the compound types N ⫹ N and V ⫹ N do exhibit a syntax-like across the board productivity, whereas other types, like A ⫹ N (snelweg ¤motorwayÅ; lit. ¤rapid wayÅ), are unproductive and are only expanded incidentally by more or less conscious creations. Note that it is precisely in this respect that the productivity of compounding resembles that of syntactic constructions: if a given compound type is productive, its productivity is of the kind we meet in syntax, which means that there are virtually no restrictions. The assessment of a category’s productivity is most problematic in the realm of derivation. It necessarily includes all kinds of modifications, from ¤very productiveÅ via ¤rather productiveÅ to ¤almost unproductiveÅ or ¤unproductive, but producing incidental neologismsÅ. In the light of this fact it is far from surprising that the discussion of morphological productivity centres by and large on derivational morphology. To come to grips with these rather subtle differences in the degree of productivity of derivational

IV. Grundbegriffe

processes, it is necessary to distinguish the langue-aspects and the parole-aspects of word formation, i.e. to distinguish between properties of word formation processes that belong to the language system and factors that pertain to the actuation of these processes in language use.

3.

Productivity as a property of the langue

Before discussing the reasons why morphological productivity must be considered a property of the language system (and not of its use), the notion of langue will have to be discussed briefly. In separating langue from parole Saussure (1976 [1916]: 25f.) made two distinctions: one between the social, conventional aspect of language in contrast with the individual linguistic creativity, and one between the language system per se and the use of that system. These two distinctions do not completely coincide. Although use and individual creativity clearly belong both to the same sphere, system and conventionality do not, or not necessarily. What is conventional in language is not necessarily systematic from a grammatical point of view and vice versa (cf. also Art. 80). In fact, the lexicon of a language (in its Bloomfieldian sense: the total sum of its idiosyncrasies) consists wholly of conventional but unsystematic forms, unsystematic in the sense that there is no system by which they are produced. A regularized form, such as a regular past tense of an irregular verb, represents the opposite: it is produced by the language system, but not (yet) conventional. Therefore, although a language, for most purposes, can be characterized as ¤a conventional systemÅ, one should bear in mind that ¤conventionalityÅ and ¤systematicityÅ are two distinct aspects of a language. As will be pointed out below, this distinction is crucial to a good understanding of the nature of morphological productivity. Conventionality, by definition, refers to social norms. Grammaticality or wellformedness refers to systematic ¤normsÅ (¤normÅ may not be the proper expression in this case but it is only used for reasons of clarity). As many linguistic studies show, it is very well possible to discuss rules of language without referring to the social norms of language; as a matter of fact, there are many linguistic phenomena to which social norms or conventions are not relevant, such as the

33. Productivity

grammaticality versus ungrammaticality of many constructed (and often rather artificial) sentences. In morphology, however, things are different, particularly in the realm of derivation. The productivity of a certain word type or word formation process involves not only the systematic well-formedness of new words, but crucially the social or conventional acceptability as well. In short, we may say that there is morphological productivity as soon as and as long as the two sets of norms coincide. This implies that one cannot discuss productivity without referring to the language community and its judgements about the conventional norms determining the acceptability of new words. This fact is directly reflected in those characterizations of productivity which stress the ¤unintentionalityÅ with which new words must be formed (Schultink 1961: 113). That is, the possibility of making new words in itself is not a sufficient characterization of productive processes; newly coined words should not attract attention as deviating, not-normal forms. Unproductive word types are then defined as those word types which permit no new formations, unless a speaker intentionally violates the conventional restrictions of the language. In that case the speaker creates an in a sense ¤poeticÅ language form which is meant to attract attention for some stylistic purpose (Jakobson 1960). Below it will be pointed out that this is not the only reason why speakers incidentally ¤reviveÅ unproductive word types (cf. 6). What has been said above can also be formulated in terms of the linguistic knowledge of the individual speaker. Speakers do not only know the words of their language as ¤namesÅ for concepts, they are also aware of relations between words of their language like those in (1), (2) and (3) below. Consider: (1) long ⫺ length; one ⫺ alone ⫺ lonesome; land ⫺ landscape; (2) count ⫺ countess; lion ⫺ lioness; god ⫺ goddess; (3) good ⫺ goodness; sweet ⫺ sweetness; narrow-minded ⫺ narrow-mindedness. But speakers also know that there is a systematic difference between relations of type (1) on the one hand and relations of type (2) and (3) on the other. The first are irregular, while the two other types constitute a systematic pattern. With regard to existing words (words that have been accepted by the community as

305 conventional expressions) there is no difference between relations of type (2) and of type (3): both are recurrent in a number of words and can, therefore, be formulated as a rule. But the speaker is also aware of the fact that the relations of type (2), or the rules that can be derived from them, and those of type (3) have a different status with regard to the conventional aspect of the language system. To use a traditional metaphor: he knows that the process in (2) is ¤deadÅ, whereas the process in (3) is still ¤livingÅ. He knows that a new word of the type [[x]A-ness]N belongs to the regular, ¤convention-governedÅ possibilities that his language provides, whereas coining a new word of the type [[x]N-ess]N would represent a creative, ¤convention-breakingÅ language act. It is precisely this knowledge that enables a speaker to distinguish between normal and playful, poetic language use. Thus, productivity versus unproductivity is a property of relations between (categories of) words. Since it involves properties of both the systematic and the conventional dimension of a language, it belongs to the speaker’s knowledge of that language and, therefore, should be situated in the langue and not in the parole. The question arises whether productive morphological processes possess defining characteristics in terms of which they are systematically different from their unproductive counterparts. Not infrequently morphological productivity is associated with semantic transparency. There can be no doubt that there is a link between these two phenomena, but it should be emphasized that morphological processes may vary greatly in terms of the specificness of their semantic contribution. In many cases ⫺ N ⫹ N compounds constitute a classic example ⫺ the semantic structure exhibited by morphological processes is of a very open nature. As far as their semantic characteristics are concerned, many newly coined words do not so much characterize one specific concept but a whole class of concepts. In other cases, however, the semantics of morphological processes is much more specific. There appears to be no direct link between the degree of specificness of a given morphological process on the one hand and its productivity on the other. However, semantic transparency per se is no doubt a condition for productivity, irrespective of the degre