Reviews for Persuasion in Society

The average rating for Persuasion in Society based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2019-06-09 00:00:00 Suzanne Simcox Twenty-five years ago, when I was first studying linguistics, the theoretical assumptions of formalism and functionalism were presented to me as radically incommensurable and as mutually incompatible. I was in a functionalist program that took strides to incorporate typological variation and pragmatic (usage-based) explanations into a fairly anemic body of syntactic theory. Having longed for a balanced synthesis that would bring together the rigor of generative grammar with the enhanced data set of typological, cognitive, and discourse-functional analysis, I was pleased to find Muysken's Functional Categories, a grand rapprochement of two (or more) bodies of linguistic theory. Muysken's work demonstrates, in a way I had once hoped to do myself, that formalism and functionalism are really two sides of the same coin. It in fact makes little sense to study one without the other. Functional Categories is then a multi-disciplinary and multi-dimensional look at the converging evidence which suggests that the phenomena of functional categories (hereafter FC) can be subsumed under a label that helps to account for (a) language's structures AND functions. I will take a high level overview of Muysken's main macro-theoretical approaches: synchronic grammar, linguistic history, the brain, and interlanguage collisions. Muysken begins his characterization of FC's in the domain of grammar, that is, of the core linguistics sub-disciplines of phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics. FC's are delimited by a host of tendencies but by no necessary essential properties. FC's might be phonologically reduced, surfacing as clitics or affixes. They might be organized in paradigms, as with personal pronouns, cases, or tense-aspect-modality markers. They are typically some of the most frequently used words and often carry abstract and flexible meanings. They tend to carry grammatical rather than lexical (content-ful) information. FC's may also be non-truth functional, as in the case of discourse particles (like "y'know" or utterance initial "well,") that link together parts of a discourse. Their meaning might be tied to the context of the speech event as with shifters of various kinds. FC's might undergo suppletion more readily than lexical categories. But none of these common properties is necessary or sufficient to DEFINE FC's in a formal sense. And yet FC's are maybe most reliably understood as forming a closed class of items, a set of morphemes that cannot be added to the way lexical categories like nouns, adjectives, and verbs can be freely added to a language. Syntactically, FC's in a sentence project as heads (often but not exclusively as complementizers, agreement and tense markers, case markers, or as determiners) and provide the structural skeleton of the sentence. FC's comprise the language specific (parametric) lexical items and morphemes which give each language its uniqueness. Here is an example from Quechua(p. 19): "There is a grammaticalized set of particles in Quechua which mark focus (through the place where they are attached) and in addition function as evidentials, exclamatives, and validational markers. Thus -ma indicates that the speaker is impressed, -n denotes that the speaker is certain about the knowledge source, -cha expresses doubt, and -si marks hearsay." As this example demonstrates, the range of possible FC's can be vast, as each language selects (sets parameters for) only a small subset of the full range of functional possibilities. The Quechua data also make it clear that FC's must be looked at with both an openness to typological diversity and an awareness of how grammar may oftentimes be best understood by looking at the pragmatics of the speech event itself. Lastly, this example shows that individual functional morphemes can be multi-functional (e.g. providing in the Quechua case both focus and modality). Nevertheless, there can be a gray area between lexical (content) categories and FC's. Adpositions might be realized lexically in some languages (like English prepositions) and as affixes or clitics in another (like Bantu applicatives). The meaning of adpositions are fairly concrete, but their class membership is invariably closed. This gray area is often also the result of gramaticalization phenomena, where verbs or nouns might be caught en route from lexical to functional status. However they might become projected in the tree, FC's tend to dominate lexical categories, and so FC's appear to arise from a reanalysis of upward movement (say of a V to T, like 'will' as a full verb becoming a marker of tense) as base-generation higher up the tree as functional heads. And so with any synchronic snapshot of a grammar, it might be hard to tell if a morpheme is lexical/content-ful or functional/grammatical. On the other hand, FC's can be very stable across centuries (as with question words, pronominal systems, gender systems), so it is possible to compare genetically related languages to ascertain the FC's of their proto-language. Muysken gives brief examples of comparative/reconstructive work in Afro-Asiatic, Amerind, Proto-Uralic, and Proto-Indo-european (reconstructed PIE had no articles, and realized gender and case morphologically). Muysken explores how FC's can help us understand how the brain works during the production of speech. Speech errors, for example, often entail the mixing up or erratic movement of lexical categories (nouns or verbs) while the FC's remain in place. This book also takes an interesting look at agrammatism phenomena. It appears people with Broca's aphasia are able to express themselves with nouns and verbs, but are unable to generate the functional skeleton of a sentence, apparently because they lack FC's. There is a lot of variation between patients in terms of how much functional structure is lost, and in terms of which FC's are missing. In general, though, people who suffer from agrammatism lack the subordination and movement of constituents in a sentence which are normally made possible by the projection and attraction of FC's. As a result, aphasics typically rely heavily on basic word order. Interestingly, research has shown that speakers of different languages (which necessarily have different FC's) show different agrammatic phenomena. For example, Mandarin aphasics typically lack the subordinating particle 'de', the absence of this functional word disrupting the syntactic framework and leading to a paratactic/flat rather than a syntactic/hierarchical sentence structure. Muysken then moves on to the question of what happens to languages in the aftermath of often drastic collisions of speech communities. This seems to be the area of linguistics that Muysken knows best, based on the books I see he has written previously about multilingual speakers. Language collisions might be gradual affairs, as when a minority language atrophies when the majority language becomes more and more the standard of the community. Examples are given of Scots Gaelic speakers in the UK, Hungarian speakers in the USA, and Dyirbal speakers in Australia. In each of these minority languages, there is a pronounced reduction of more highly marked forms and a loss of functional complexity. Some core FC's remain, but most are lost, being replaced by grammatical material from the majority languages. In the case of Dyirbal, even the ergative case system, being highly marked typologically, is quickly lost among young speakers. Such asymmetries are frequent when languages come in contact. There are 'mixed' languages like Media Lengua, whose lexical roots derive from Spanish but whose affixal FC's are maintained from Quechua. Media Lengua serves as an inter-generational bridge between the old who speak mostly Quechua and no Spanish and the young who speak mostly Spanish and are not able to communicate with their elders in Quechua. Muysken also looks at several creoles, noting how grammar makes a comeback after a speech community is reduced to bare bones communication through inter-generational disruption, slavery, or social upheaval. A familiar pattern emerges. FC's of the dominated language are re-created through a relexification process where words from the dominant language are reassigned meanings of a more abstract and grammatical nature. For example, in Tok Pisin, a creole spoken in New Guinea, words for tense-aspect-modality markers and for prepositions had been taken from English, but they develop a life of their own once they are grammaticalized and phonologically reduced as FC's in the new, creole language. Here are five examples from Tok Pisin: bin = past, from English 'been' bai = future, from English 'bye and bye' pinis = perfective, from English 'finish' olsem = 'like', from English 'all the same' klostu = 'about to', from English 'close to' In his conclusion, Muysken restates his dilemma'that all languages display FC's, yet there is no single definition of FC's that works for all languages. This justifies Muysken's multi-factorial analysis, even if the result is a prototypical or fuzzy category. Some FC's are more functional than others, and some are close to lexical. Thus prepositions are highly lexical FC's, or else they are highly functional lexical categories. And some common FC's might appear to be missing from particular languages. Mandarin has different and fewer FC's than English, for example. Muysken wraps up his discussion by musing on the evolutionary advantages to FC's. He looks at two approaches in particular (both of which assume a prior state where all words are lexical): Labov, who feels that FC's emerged because they increase the complexity of sentences and so increase the range of possible stylistic variation (FC's as rhetoric); Bickerton believes that FC's provide a universal cognitive map, projecting structures that aid the task of identifying/parsing lexical items in sentential contexts (T's help pick out V's, D's introduce N's). I personally accept Labov's theory. The fact that FC's can become worn out and subsequently replaced by grammaticalized new ones suggests that something rhetorical, or at least informational-structural, is going on here. And Bickerton's bioprogram hypothesis posits a universal grammar that is too restrictive to account for the vibrant and recalcitrant diversity of the FC's found in the world's languages. This might be the time to compare Muysken's Functional Categories to a few other works in linguistics that are concerned with categorical distinctions in the grammars of the world. In a sense, Muysken's work is in complementary distribution with Baker's Lexical Categories. Baker's approach is different in that he attempts to provide a positive definition to the categories he is concerned with. Yet while nouns are defined as bearing a referential index and verbs are characterized as licensing a subject, the category adjective is defined as being neither a noun nor a verb. This seems like defining a bicycle as neither a tree nor a book. It's true, but…. Baker's account also fails to look beyond grammar for explanations of lexical categories, instead positing nouns, verbs, and adjectives as primitives of universal grammar. Baker, like Muysken, presents adpositions as semi-lexical and semi-functional, but Baker does not allow for the fact that distinct languages can define word-classes differently. Also, while Baker surveys a wide assortment of languages, he does not consider how the noun-verb distinction might be absent in typologically marked (but obviously just as valid) languages. For example, Whorf had long ago noted the difficulty in drawing a universalist and formal definition of lexical categories: "The cases, tenses, aspects, modes, and voices of Indo-European and Azteco-Tanoan languages are modulus [functional] categories, applicable at will to words belonging to the proper larger [lexical] category'cases being moduli of the larger category of nouns; aspects, tenses, etc. moduli of the larger category of verbs. Hence the person versed only in Indo-European types of grammar poses to himself the distinction between selective and modulus classes (or between selectivity and modulation) as the distinction between 'parts of speech' on the one hand and 'grammatical forms' of the aspect, tense, and voice type on the other. But in widely different types of speech these familiar types of meaning and function cease to be associated with selectivity and modulation in the same way; entirely different alignments there hold sway in the grammar, and until this is recognized an adequate conception of the grammar cannot be obtained. It is not necessary to have large categories, such as nouns and verbs, in order to have modulus categories such as aspect. In Nitinat (and presumably in the closely related Nootka and Kwakiutl) all major words have aspects, such as durative, momentaneous, inceptive, etc.--both the word for 'run' and the word for 'house' always bear some element marking this aspect." (Benjamin Lee Whorf, "Grammatical Categories", 1945) Muysken's work would benefit from a more thorough typological exploration of how FC's interact with lexical categories in both unmarked and marked cases. Another work dealing with categoriality in grammar is Payne's Describing Morphosyntax. Payne tabulates a wide range of categories which can, but usually don't, emerge in the world's languages. While Payne's work deals with a wider range of functional morphemes, Muysken's work is preferable because it provides converging evidence from a host of sub-disciplines which make it clear that FC's are a phenomenon sui generis, and not just another kind of category in the mental lexicon. In summary, I would recommend this work to someone with a background in all sorts of linguistics and also to someone who shares an anthropologist's vision of a holistic treatment of diverse and often seemingly anomalous facts about how language gets it done. Muysken's poly-theoretical approach to FC's combines the serious rigor of generative theories with the wide spectrum of facts revealed through having an open mind about what 'exotic' languages may be 'really like'. He does not start with universals and then find data to fit (this still comprises the seedy side of much generativism), but instead undertakes an empirical investigation into phenomena that have no essential characteristics but which are identifiable in all languages on Earth taken individually. Functional Categories therefore might be one of the best linguistics monographs out there, and certainly builds more bridges between formalism and functionalism than others have been effectively able to burn. The problem of characterizing FC's on a universal basis is certainly not new: "We have yet to learn what requirements, if any, are common to all those arbitrary systems of requirement which we call languages. The real content and use of speech-utterances is the same the world over, but their linguistically fixed features vary enormously."(Leonard Bloomfield, "Review of Jesperson's Philosophy of Grammar", 1927) What IS new in Muysken's Functional Categories is an acceptance of the seemingly inevitable conclusion that while all languages have FC's (the converging evidence shows this to be a meaningful distinction everywhere), there is no way of circumscribing FC's without an appreciation of the cognitive, pragmatic, neurological, and most significantly historical contexts in which all FC's are embedded.

Review # 2 was written on 2013-04-12 00:00:00 Kathleen Mitsopoulos It's hard to judge a book coming from a framework you're critical of. The authors did a great work and everything but I often feel generativists are trying to fit a square in a circular-shaped hole. I'm just a PhD student and there's plenty I don't know, but this is the impression I have when I compare this with "Grammaticalization".