Adpositions are used, universally, to mark the roles of nominal participants in the verbal clause, most commonly indirect object roles. Practically all languages seem to have such markers, which begin their diachronic life as lexical words -- in this case either serial verbs or positional nouns. In… read more
Coherence, connectivity and the fitting together of smaller parts into larger structures and a coherent whole is the hallmark of complex biologically-based systems. As a structure-internal constraint, coherence makes it possible for the parts to work together as a whole. As an external constraint,… read more
This book is a new English translation of the two shortest, most controversial and perhaps most vibrant books in the Hebrew Old Testament – Song of Songs (Song of Solomon) and Qohelet (Ecclesiastes). The two books slipped into the Jewish – and eventually Christian – Canon by a series of… read more
In his foreword to the original edition of this classic of functionalism, typology and diachrony, Dwight Bolinger wrote: "I foresee it as one of the truly prizes statements of our current knowledge…a book about understanding done with deep understanding – of language and its place in Nature and in… read more
The zero coding of referents or other clausal constituents is one of the most natural, communicatively and cognitively-transparent grammatical devices in human language. Together with its functional equivalent, obligatory pronominal agreement, zero is both extremely widespread cross-linguistically… read more
This third volume of our Ute language collection contains the Ute dictionary. It opens with several introductory chapters that link the dictionary to our Ute Reference Grammar (2011) and explain the structure and use of the dictionary. The bulk of the information on the meaning and usage of Ute… read more
The case-studies assembled in these two volumes span a lifetime of research into the diachrony of grammar. That is, into the rise and fall of syntactic constructions and their attendant grammatical morphology. While focused squarely on the data, the studies are nonetheless cast in an explicit… read more
This second volume of our Ute trilogy contains a collection of Ute oral texts. Ute oral literature reflects the life experience of a small-scale hunting-and-gathering Society of Intimates and its tight connection to the local terrain, flora and fauna that supported the hunter-gatherer life. Ute… read more
Ute is a Uto-Aztecan language of the northernmost (Numic) branch, currently spoken on three reservations in western Colorado and eastern Utah. Like many other native languages of Northern America, Ute is severely endangered. This book is part of the effort toward its preservation. Typologically,… read more
Complex hierarchic syntax is a hallmark of human language. The highest level of syntactic complexity, recursive-embedded clauses, has been singled out by some for a special status as the evolutionary apex of the uniquely - human language faculty - evolutionary yet mysteriously immune to Darwinian… read more
Complex hierarchic syntax is considered one of the hallmarks of human language. The highest level of syntactic complexity, recursive-embedded clauses, has been singled out by some for a special status as the apex of the uniquely-human language faculty – evolutionary but somehow immune to adaptive… read more
Givon's new book re-casts pragmatics, and most conspicuously the pragmatics of sociality and communication, in neuro-cognitive, bio-adaptive, evolutionary terms. The fact that context, the core notion of pragmatics, is a framing operation undertaken on the fly through judgements of relevance, has… read more
Is human language an evolutionary adaptation? Is linguistics a natural science? These questions have bedeviled philosophers, philologists and linguists from Plato through Chomsky. Prof. Givón suggests that the answers fall naturally within an integrated study of living organisms.In this new work,… read more
The contributors to this volume are linguists, psychologists, neuroscientists, primatologists, and anthropologists who share the assumption that language, just as mind and brain, are products of biological evolution. The rise of human language is not viewed as a serendipitous mutation that gave… read more
This new edition of Syntax: A functional-typological introduction is at many points radically revised. In the previous edition (1984) the author deliberately chose to de-emphasize the more formal aspects of syntactic structure, in favor of a more comprehensive treatment of the semantic and… read more
This new edition of Syntax: A functional-typological introduction is at many points radically revised. In the previous edition (1984) the author deliberately chose to de-emphasize the more formal aspects of syntactic structure, in favor of a more comprehensive treatment of the semantic and… read more
This new edition of Syntax: A functional-typological introduction is at many points radically revised. In the previous edition (1984) the author deliberately chose to de-emphasize the more formal aspects of syntactic structure, in favor of a more comprehensive treatment of the semantic and… read more
[Not in series, SYN S] 2001. xviii, 500 pp. & x, 406 pp.
The papers in this volume were originally presented at the Symposium on Conversation, held at the University of New Mexico in July 1995. The symposium brought together scholars who work on face-to-face communication from a variety of perspectives: social, cultural, cognitive and communicative. Our… read more
This volume presents a functional perspective on grammatical relations (GRs) without neglecting their structural correlates. Ever since the 1970s, the discussion of RGs by functionally-oriented linguists has focused primarily on their functional aspects, such as reference, cognitive accessibility… read more
Edited by Werner Abraham, T. Givón and Sandra A. Thompson
This volume combines papers selected for their affinity with work on discourse analysis and language typology. The methodological platform is the authors' conviction that all linguistic work needs to be empirical in the sense that (1) generalizations are to be made on the basis of spoken texts in… read more
The main theme running through this volume is that coherence is a mental phenomenon rather than a property of the spoken or written text, or of the social situation. Coherence emerges during speech production-and-comprehension, allowing the speech receiver to form roughly the same episodic… read more
This book is Prof. Givón's long-awaited critical examination of the fundamental theoretical and methodological underpinnings of the functionalist approach to grammar. It challenges functionalists to take their own medicine and establish non-circular empirical definitions of both 'function' and… read more
This collection aims first to establish a structure-independent, language-independent definition of pragmatic voice, and more specifically then a universal functional definition of “inverse”. The grammar and pragmatic function of the four major voice constructions direct-active, inverse, passive,… read more
The approach to language and grammar that motivates this book is unabashedly functional; grammar is not just a system of empty rules, it is a means to an end, an instrument for constructing concise coherent communication. In grammar as in music, good expression rides on good form. Figuratively and… read more
The approach to language and grammar that motivates this book is unabashedly functional; grammar is not just a system of empty rules, it is a means to an end, an instrument for constructing concise coherent communication. In grammar as in music, good expression rides on good form. Figuratively and… read more
The approach to language and grammar that motivates this book is unabashedly functional: Grammar is not just a system of empty rules, it is a means to an end, an instrument for constructing concise coherent communication. In grammar as in music, good expression rides on good form. Figuratively and… read more
[Not in series, ENGRAM S] 1993. xxii, 318 pp. & xvi, 363 pp.
The long-awaited second volume of the two-volume work on syntax from a functional-typological perspective. Grammar is viewed as a non-arbitrary language-processing device, to be understood in terms of the various substantive parameters relevant to language: Communicative function, cognitive… read more
The functional notion of “topic” or “topicality” has suffered, traditionally, from two distinct drawbacks. First, it has remained largely ill defined or intuitively defined. And second, quite often its definition boiled down to structure-dependent circularity. This volume represents a major… read more
This paper examines Ute clitic pronouns and contrasts them with other reference-coding devices, such as demonstratives, independent pronouns, zero anaphora, and flexible word-order. It concludes that most independent pronouns are used in contexts of referential discontinuity and most zero and… read more
In the grammaticalization of verbs, a small group of lexical verbs is particularly prominent, invariably found on the short-list of ‘light verbs’ (Wilson 1999) that display peculiar grammatical properties. This chapter describes the behavior of a small group of such verbs in Ute. In addition to the… read more
The mechanisms via which subordinate clauses arise are relatively well explored, involving two major diachronic pathways (Givón 2009): first, via clause-chaining constructions, as in many Niger-Congo, Papua-New Guinea, Southeast Asian, Athabaskan, or Southern Arawak languages; and second, via… read more
This paper deals with Ute case-marking and its reconstructed diachrony, demonstrating once again that synchronic data from a single language can serve, via Internal Reconstruction (IR) and a theoretically informed approach to grammaticalization, to reconstruct older diachronic states. The… read more
In this paper I will discuss the diachronic rise of the so-called ‘Ethical Dative’ (henceforth ED). In examining first data from Spanish or Hebrew, a multi-step diachronic progression seems to lead to the ED construction:ALLATIVE > DATIVE > BENEFACTIVE >REFLEXIVE-BENEFACTIVE > EDSome people may be… read more
A diachronic typology of relative clauses points toward two major pathways towards embedded (restrictive) REL-clauses. The first starts from chained (conjoined) clauses, the second from parenthetical non-restrictive RELclauses. In both pathways, embedded (restrictive) REL-clauses start their life… read more
This paper investigate the acquisition of V-complement constructions (complex VPs) by English-speaking children ca. age 1;8-to-2;9. It suggests that the child acquires these constructions during intensive epistemic or deontic modal negotiations with the adult. In the earliest stage, the… read more
This paper investigates the diachronic pathways that lead to the rise of complex predications. It suggests that the great variety of complex predicate constructions can be traced back to two major pathways. Both pathways begin their life as paratactic verb-complement constructions (complex VPs)… read more
The functional correlates of grammatical constructions can be given heuristically as (i) “the discourse context within which the grammatical construction is used”. They can also be given as the more cognitive-sounding (ii) “the communicative intent of the speaker using the construction”. In this… read more
The paper first recapitulates a point made repeatedly elsewhere (Givón 1981, 1994 ed., 1995, 2001, 2002): that a syntactic typology of any clause-type, including the passive, is meaningless unless clause-types are first characterized as functional domains. Using as examples six widely-attested… read more
This paper undertakes to begin to perform the overdue task of de-objectivizing the key pragmatic notion of ‘context’. This notion will be re-interpreted in terms of mental models, which correspond to that portion of ‘reality’ that is relevant for information processing. For this purpose, a variety… read more
This paper suggest that in order to understand the cross-language distribution of the subjunctive mood one needs to understand the cross-grammar distribution of the irrealis modality, as well as have a general theory of modality, within which irrealis takes its rightful natural place. The… read more
This paper suggests that text coherence is a multi-factored affair that, ultimately, pertains to the mental organization of episodic memory, most likely as a partially-hierarchic mental structure. What text researchers usually describe as coherence is merely an artifact of the cognitive phenomenon.… read more
