Relativism and Universalism in Linguistics - Fachbereich 10 ...

92 Sections
various argumental and adverbial relations, on the dependent. Thus, head marking can be
considered more basic than dependent marking.
Aim of this study was to investigate the factors underlying this basicness. We analyzed a
language that generally marks grammatical relations on the dependent, such as Italian, and
identified manifestations of head marking in clitics that belongs both to the noun phrase (with
possessive or partitive functions) and to the verb phrase (for relations of direct object, indirect
object, locative, comitative, and instrumental). We related these phenomena to topicalization
devices, whereby a noun phrase that presents given information is introduced as an anchor for
the subsequent discourse, and is resumed by a pronoun on the constituent that presents the
new piece of information. Factors as definiteness and animacy, which play a decisive role in
the choice of accusative over ergative alignment (Dixon 1994; Givón 1997) and of
secundative over indirective alignment (Comrie 1982; Dryer 1986; Haspelmath 2005), appear
also relevant to the distinction between head and dependent marking. The topical function of
the Italian head marked constructions also emerges from the comparison with structures that
present focused information, which are never resumed by a pronoun, and which are typically
dependent-marked. While the latter exhibit a continuous intonation, head-marked constructions
have two separate intonational contours, one for the topicalized noun phrase and one for
its notional head. In written Italian, where the difference in intonation disappears, head
marked constructions decay as well. Therefore, the distinction between head and dependent
marking can be considered a sociolinguistic, rather than a purely syntactic, feature. Data from
the spoken register of a generally dependent-language like Italian are consistent with data of
certified head-marking languages like those of the Americas, which have a free word order
and verb-indexed pronominal arguments. Although both Nichols’ pioneering study and more
recent revisitations of it (cf. Helmbrecht 2001) illustrate the areal and diachronic implications
of head and dependent marking, the influence of sociolinguistic variation on these parameters
is mostly ignored. We hypothesize that the use of head marking in the oral communicative
mode, which is sensitive to pragmatic functions, underlies its cross-linguistic basicness.
Accordingly, pragmatics is the domain where universalism in languages is mostly evident, to
the extent that all languages are used for the purpose of communication. Differently,
phonological inventories and morphological categories are more language specific. The
traditional clear-cut distinction between head and dependent marking can be attributed to the
fact that most reference grammars focus on structural phenomena but are often silent on
discourse strategies.
References
Comrie, Bernard (1882) Grammatical relations in Huichol, in Hopper, Paul J & Thompson,
Sandra A. (eds.) Studies in transitivity. (Syntax and semantics 15). New York: Academic
Press, 95-115.
Dixon, Robert M. W. (1994) Ergativity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Dryer, Matthew S. (1986) Primary object, secondary object, and antidative, Language 62:
808-845.
Givón, Talmy (1997) Grammatical relations: a functionalist perspective. Amsterdam,
Benjamins.