From etymology to historical pragmatics

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From Etymology to Historical Pragmatics

Article ? July 2002

DOI: 10.1515/9783110197143.1.19

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Elizabeth Closs Traugott Stanford University 155 PUBLICATIONS 7,080 CITATIONS

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From etymology to historical pragmatics

Elizabeth Closs Traugott

0. Introduction1

One of the much-discussed themes of linguistic work in the last hundred years has been how to think about the relationships between synchrony and diachrony, between structure and use, between arbitrariness and motivatedness, between what Roberts has called "a random `walk' through the space defined by the set of possible parameter values" (Roberts 1993: 252) and observed directionalities of change.

Throughout the twentieth century diachronic theory lagged behind synchronic. While rapid advances have in recent years been made in the study of historical morphosyntax, no aspect of language change has lagged behind synchronic theory more than pragmatic-semantic change. Though the seeds of many ideas that dominated the end of the century are to be found in work at its beginning, neither the semantics nor the pragmatics were sufficiently far advanced for those ideas to be developed in principled ways. Recently, however, there has been the possibility of catch-up, and in that catch-up it has been the functionalist, pragmatic aspects of linguistics that have carved out a path that in diverse ways link up with older concerns. What began as work on the semantic correlates of grammaticalization, often using texts in ways that privilege discourse and genre, has among some practitioners now come to be known as "historical pragmatics" (see Jucker 1995). There are many paths that one could follow with such a topic, but I will highlight work on certain aspects of the regularities and directionalities in change that have been explored, with particular attention to work on the interplay between language and use (see most recently Croft 2000), as it is conceptualized in the study of grammaticalization and especially historical semantics and pragmatics.

In recent years we have heard that the search for tendencies and directionalities is a hold-over from nineteenth century historicism, that change is an epiphenomenon, even that history itself is an epiphenomenon (Lightfoot 1999: 261). In other words, it falls out from things other than itself, from

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what people do. There is no doubt that language change occurs because of forces outside of language, most particularly processes of production and interpretation. If language acquisition is a prime reason for change, if competing motivations such as "be clear and processable" vs. "be quick and easy" (Slobin 1977; Langacker 1977) or maxims such as have been proposed by Keller (1994) are valid reasons for language change, then it is obvious that language change is an epiphenomenon. We have a tradition of calling change within a relatively homogeneous community that is brought about by language acquisition "internal change", as opposed to "external change" brought about by contact, but the first is actually no more "internal" than the latter ? it does not happen "in the language", or "in the grammar", only "in" transmission. Expressions like "grammars change" are short-hands for differences between grammars over time brought about by system-external factors such as acquisition, and not to be taken literally. Likewise, "directionalities" are not deterministic tendencies that require some change, and definitively not tendencies that live some reified existence as cognitive paths, trajectories, or whatever other metaphor might be used, but they are nevertheless powerful tendencies that demand historical thinking.

To couch debates about such issues in language referring to "formal" and "functional" theories is admittedly to reproduce old dichotomies many of which were fortunately falling by the wayside in the nineteen nineties (see e.g. Croft 1995; Newmeyer 1998). Nevertheless, it is useful in that it allows us to acknowledge that the questions different researchers pose may be fundamentally different (see also Kemenade 1999).

To say on the "formal" (generative) side of the debate that all one needs in order to explain language change is: "(a) an account of how trigger experiences have shifted and (b) a theory of language acquisition that matches PLD (primary linguistic data) with grammars in a deterministic way" (Lightfoot 1999: 225) simply puts the explanation off. WHY does the trigger change? Has the alleged "determinism" of the search for directionality been replaced by a different determinism that predicts that if two children were to have the same trigger experience they would acquire the same E-language? On this view, language change is the result of innovation in the individual compared to some other, older, individual. Same input (PLD) into the individual (LAD) will produce same output (G). In this scenario, the individual is a processor of systems, largely passive, a logic

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machine, a "language acquisition device", presumably devoid of personal differences or preferences. It is an implausible scenario not only because we know children negotiate and experiment with language, but above all because it does not allow for abduction in language acquisition (see Andersen 1973; Anttila [1972] 1989 on abduction as the key mechanism in language change).

From a "functionalist" perspective, by contrast, change is the result of strategic interaction, specifically of choice-making on the part of speakers/writers in interactional negotiation with addressees/readers. This includes, but is not limited to, conveying of information. On this view, language change is the result of innovation in the individual and spread of the innovation to the community, as suggested by Weinreich, Labov and Herzog (1968). This individual is active, an abducer who is a producer as well as processor of language, and likely to have personal differences and preferences. Furthermore, innovation is not limited to early child language acquisition (see e.g. Andersen 1973; Labov 1994; Ravid 1995). On this view too explanations for observed directionalities (and failures of directionality) should be especially interesting and precisely what historical linguists need to seek to provide. Here I hope to suggest some ways in which to organize our thinking as we look for ways to account for directionality.

Unidirectionality is a thread common to the study of grammaticalization and at least some branches of historical semantics and pragmatics. Some arguments against unidirectionality are primarily philosophical ? dependent on what the researcher thinks a scientific argument is or should be ? arguments of this type have been put forward by Lightfoot (1999), and Lass (2000). Other arguments have been primarily of an empirical sort, for example the work of Joseph and Janda (1988), Janda (1995), and Ramat (1992). Both kinds are presented in Newmeyer (1998) and Campbell (2001).2 I take these arguments seriously. Nevertheless I do not find it useful to take a position such as "I take any example of upgrading as sufficient to refute unidirectionality" (Newmeyer 1998: 263). If change is a social product, the result of the interaction of language and use, how could there be no counterexamples? Humans are not machines, and do not use language mechanically. They use it for purposes of strategic interaction. Strategies must be flexible not rigid 100%s of anything! But likewise, since unidirectionality is not exceptionless, it is also not useful to adopt Leh-

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mann's ([1982] 1995) and Haspelmath's (1999) claims that there are no, or at least no genuine, counterexamples to grammaticalization.

Our road map is as follows. Section 1 provides some background on grammaticalization, with focus on English studies in the last hundred years, and discusses aspects of the "deconstruction" of grammaticalization in Newmeyer (1998: 5). Section 2 provides some background on semantic change and the role of pragmatics in semantic change. In section 3 I suggest a possible model of grammaticalization informed by historical pragmatics. Section 4 puts forward some challenges for the future.

1. Grammaticalization

The term grammaticalization, as is well known, seems to have originated with Meillet ([1912] 1958). Since then it has been closely associated with reanalysis that involves a change from lexical material in constructions to functional category status, e.g. from nominal or verbal status to markers of case, tense, aspect, mood, conjunctions, etc.

Although the term grammaticalization did not find its way into much work on English until the early nineteen seventies, Jespersen's view of historical syntax was in several ways germane to work on it. We recoil today from Jespersen's ideological claims that the modern languages are "better" than older ones, that they have made "progress" or that simplification is "beneficial" (Jespersen [1922] 1959: 363). We probably reject the idea that perfect languages would "express the same thing by the same, and similar things by similar means ... sound and sense would be in perfect harmony" (Jespersen 1959: 442). Yet his interest in "the transition from freedom in word position to greater strictness" (Jespersen 1959: 363), in shifts to more regular paradigms, and to shorter forms, coupled with his idea that language originated in "half-musical unanalyzed expressions ... words and quasi-sentences" (Jespersen 1959: 441) resonates with some of the thinking behind Giv?n's famous "cycle" (as he calls it), reproduced in (1):

(1) discourse > syntax > morphology > morphophonemics > zero (Giv?n 1979: 209)

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