Publication details
On cross-linguistic predictability of functionally equivalent linguistic structures: Decausativization in English, German and French as a test case for formal and functional grammars
| Authors | |
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| Year of publication | 2013 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Description | In the presentation, I review several more or less resent studies on decausativization, especially in French and German in order to determine if they facilitate cross-linguistic predictions concerning the appearance of a reflexive in a target language structure. The aim is to verify, if we fare better on a “universals and parameters” approach in the style of generative grammar or if a functional grammar style analysis referring to conceptual structures and markedness-conditions is needed. The findings are that the reviewed generative studies either are based on extremely abstract structures which grossly overgenerate concrete language structures (e.g. Aboiu, Barrie & Frigeni, 2004; Alexiadou, Anagnostopoulou & Schäfer, 2006; Labelle & Doron, 2010), or make reference to arbitrary lexical features which cannot be predicted from other properties of the languages under scrutiny (e.g. Everaert, 1986), while formal semantics (e. g., Chierchia, 2004) are not interested in actual marking patterns. In both cases, no cross-linguistic predictions whatsoever can be formulated. “Functionalist” approaches, on the other hand, rely on scalar concepts without sharp boundaries (Nedjalkov, 1969; Haspelmath, 1987; 1993; Nedjalkov 2011). Even though no precise predictions concerning concrete items can be formulated within such frameworks either, they at least allow on statistical grounds to unveil certain tendencies. |