- Email: [email protected]
On pragmatic change: The borrowing of discourse functions
Journal of Pragmatics 12 (1988) 505-518 North-Holland
505
ON PRAGMATIC CHANGE: THE BORROWING OF D ~ C O U I ~ E FUNCTIONS
Ellen F. PRINCE*
As is well known, a typical and frequent effect of language contact and bilingualism is linguistic borrowing, the importation into one language of something from the other. Borrowing has heel well documen:ed at many linguistic levels, including phonological, lexical, morphological, syntactic, and ~emantic. (See Weinreich (1953), inter alia.) However, what has not been appr~ciated is that borrowing can occur at the pragmatic level as well. In this Impel I shall present evidence for the existence of pragmatic borrowing, in Imrticu~ar, evidence that one language may borrow the discourse functions of a particular syntactic form from another language. More correctly, (i) a syntactic form $2 in L2 may be construed by speakers as 'analogous' to a syntactic form SI in LI, and (it) the discourse functions of Sl in Ll may then be borrowed into L2 and associated with $2. What speakers construe as 'analogous' syntactic forms turns out to be quite interesting and suggests that syntactic competen~ is both robust and sophisticated, as current syntactic theories clmm. Furthermore, the situation that actually obtains after the borrowing may correlate with the logical relations between the discourse functions originally associated with S1 and $2. The evidence comes from Yiddish, where it is argued that pragmatic borrowing from Slavic has occurred, and frota a nonstandard dialect of Englisk, where it is argued that pragmatic borrowing from Y'~dfiish has ~:w~curred.
1. Yiddish DOS..sen~euces: Pragmatic ~n'owiug from Slavic The first set of data concerns Yiddish DOS-sentences, exemplified in (1): o
(la) [-~rhether the Israelis found Eichmann alone, or whether someone informed them, is not known. Both WiesenthM and a second Nazi-hunter ...have claimed that]
* I shou]~l like to thank Mascha Benya and Arkady P|otnitsky for their patient and thoughtful help with the Yiddish and Russian data. I also thank S. Balaban, J. Hankamer, M. Herzog, H. Hiz, J. Hoeksema, P. Jacobson, T. Kroch, Y. Nibo~'ski, S. Pintzuk, B. Santorini, M. SchaechteL G. Ward, and A. Zaenen for their comments, advice, and general help. And a s ~ i a l thanks, as always, to A.K. Joshi and the Department of Computer and Information Science and the Cognitive Science Group at the University of Pennsylvania tbr the computing resources. This paper was presented at NWAV-XV, Stanford University, Oct. ~8, 1986. Author's address: Ellen F. Prince, Dept. of Linguistics, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA 19104, USA. 0378-2166/88/$3.50 © 1988, Elsevier Science Publishers B.V. (North-Holland)
506
E.F. Prince / On pragmatic change
dos hobn zey gefunen aykhmanen. this have they found Eichmann 'It was tkey that found Eichmann.' (Forward, 3/23/86, p. 1) (lb) [E. finds L., an itinerant scholar, sitting in front of the chum, where E's daughter had just been sitting churning butter...] E: dos shlogst du di puter? this beats you the butter 'It's you who's churning the butter?' L: ikh meg oykh shlogn purer, ma raash.9 I may also beat butter, what din? 'I can also churn butter, so what?' (P. Hirshbeyn, Grine felder) (lc) [This song is written with blood and not with lead. It's not a song of a summer bird on the wing.] dos hot a folk tsvishn falndike vent dos lid gezungen... ! this has a folk between falling walls this song sung 'It was a people inside falling walls that sang this song...' (H. Glik, Zog nit keynmol)
The canonical variants of the DOS-sentences in (1) are given in (2)" (2a) zey hobn gefunen aykhmanen. they have found Eichmann (2b) du shlogst di purer. you beat the butter (2c) a folk tsvishn falndike vent hot dos lid gezungen. a folk between falling walls has this song ~ung DOS-sentences are functional equivale~ats of English IT-clefts. That is, they are focus-presupposition constructions (Chomsky (1971)) that mark a proposition containing a variable, or an 'open' proposition, as 'presupposed', i.e. as taken by the speaker to be 'shared knowledge', and that supply the instantiation of that variable (Hall/day (1967), Bolinger (1972), Clark and Haviland (1977), Gundel (1977), Borkin (1978), Prince (1978), Atlas and Levinson (1981), Horn (1981), Delahunty (1982), Dederck (1983)). In English IT-clefts, the open proposition is represented by the subordinate clause, with the trace representing the variable, and the instantiation is represefited by the postcopular constituent, as shown in (3): (3a) It was they-i that e-i found Eichmann. (3b) X found Eichmann. [Open proposition] (3c) X = they [Instantiation]
E.F. Prince / On pragmatic change
507
Yiddish DOS-sentences are structurally very different: They are not 'cleft', i.e. divided into two parts by a copula, one part consisting of a ,iubordinate clause. Rather, DOS-sentences consist of a single clause will,, an 'extra' constituent: The initial dos 'this' is not an argument of the verb. Accordingly, the focus and presupposition are represented differently: In Yiddish DOSsentences, the open proposition is represented by the sentence, minus dos 'this', with the constituent immediately following the tensed verbal element replaced by a variable, and the instantiation of the variable is represented by that post-verbal consfiLucr,L as ~hown in (4)-(6): (4a) dos hobn zey gefunen aykhmanen. this have they found Eichmann (4b) X hot gefunen aykhmanen. [Open proposition] (4c) X = zey [Instantiation] (Sa) dosshlogstdu di purer? ~,J.gao
L/lm, l~L.~.~
~../4,1~
LgJt~
K.TK,Kgg~futg g
(sb) X shlogt 3~ purer. [Open proposition] (5c) X = du [In ~tantiation] (6a) dos hot a :91k tsvishn falndike vent dos klid gezungen... this has a ~ ~lk between falling walls this song sung... (6b) X hot dos hd gezungen. [Open proposition] (6c) X = a foil tsvishn falndike vent [Instantiation] Apparently, DOS-sentences have no cognates in any other Germanic language. For example, in German, the language most closely related to Yiddish, what would be the cognate of (la), shown in (7a), is not a possible sentence of the language; rather, (la) would be realized, as in English, by a cleft ccnstrcction, shown in (7b): (7a) *Das f~nden sic Eichmann. This found they Eichmann (7b) Sie waren es, die Eichmann fanden. they were it, who Eichmann found 'It was they who found Eichmann.' Consider, however, the functional equivalent of IT-clefts in Russian, exemplified in (8a), with its canonical variant in (Sb): (8a) eto on'i nashl'i aykhmana. this they found Eichmann 'It was they who found Eichmann.' (Sb) on'i nashri aykhmana. they found Eichmann
508
E.F. Prince / On pragmatic change
As is well known, Yiddish borrowed extensively from the Slavic languages with which it was coterritorial for much of its European existence. Furthermore, this borrowing was profound as well as exterJsive, reaching some of the most basic lexical items, and involving not oniy the lexicon but also the phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics. (See Weinreich (1980), inter alia.) Thus it should not be surprising to find borrowing at the pragmatic level. But what exactly has been borrowed in the DOS-sentences? One may claim that the borrowing in this case was in fact syntactic - that DOS-sentences are simply a caique of Slavic ETO-sentences- and that the function of marking focus and presupposition simply came for free. To see that this is not a tenable position, we must briefly consider the syntax of each construction. Compare closely the Russian ETO-sentence with the Yiddish DOS-sentence, repeated in (9) for convenience: (9) 'It was they that found Eichmann': (a) eto on'i nashri aykhmana. [Russian] this they found Eichmann (b) dos hobn zey gefunen aykhmanen. [Yiddish] this have they found Eichmann There is an important syntactic difference between the two: While both begin with the expletive, Russian has the remainder of the clause in SVO order whereas Yiddish has the remainder of the clause beginning with the finite verb. Note that a true calque of (ga) is ungrammatical in Yiddish: (10) *dos zey hobn gefunen aykhmanen.
Cleally, Y~dgi~h is ~bserving the Verb-Second Constraint, widespread throughout Germanic and particularly robust in Yiddish, which stipulates that the finite verbal element must stand in second position in the clause. Slavic has no such constraint and the verb in sentences like (9a) is in third position. In fact, consider (11): (lla)
eto aykhmana on'i nashri. this Eichmann they found 'It was Eichmann that they found.' (ilb.l) *dos aykhmanen zey hobn gefunen. this Eichmann they have found (lib.2) *dos aykhmanen hobn zey gefunen. this Eichmann have they found (1 lb.3) *dos hobn aykhmanen zey gefunen. this have Eichmann they found
E.F. Prince / On pragmatic change
509
In (1 la), we see that Russian ETO-sentences, like English IT-clefts, can focus objects as well as subjects: Whatever constituent immediately follows the expletive eto is the focus. The syntax of Russian ETO-sentences then seems to be that (i) an expletive, eto, occurs in some initial position and (ii) the focused constituent is topicalized to the position immediately following it. That is, (9a) and (1 la) presumably have a structhre along the lines of (12a,b), respectively, where the empty category in initial position is realized as the expletive eto 'this': (12a)
[el Comp? (12b) [e] Comp?
[ [on'i-i] [e-i] [nashl'i aykhmana]] S XP NP VP [ [aykhmana-i] [on'i] [nashl'i e-i]] S XP NP VP
In Yiddish, however, such - derivation is not possible" Due to the V/2 r..,.,~.~..,.~,,..ou,~w ~, there is ,,...j-'".~. .,,u,. . . . . . v,,o,-,,li;" . . . . ,,,,,i,~u,,.;~nt' .. ~ preceulnga" ,i.,,e ~:":',~,,~e.... ~.uk ,,,u~'-~ dos is filling it. Thus, the syntax of DOS-sentences seems to be that (i) an expletive, dos, appears in XP, or 'topic', pos~on and. (ii) following the theory that Yiddish subjects are base-generated in post-Infl position (cf. Thrainsson (1985)), no NP movement takes place. That is, (10b) presumably has a structure along the lines of (14), where the empty category in initial position is realized as the expletive dos 'this': (13)
[e] [hobn] [zey] [gefunen aykbmanen] XP Infl NP VP
This lack of movement possibilities in DOS-sentences makes one wonder how NPs other than the subject can be marked as focus. In fact, they cannot: DOS-sentences can focus only subjects. ~ Furthermore, one might say that subjects are 'marked' as focus in DOS-sentences not by any syntactic operation, since they have presumably undergone no operation, but only by arbitrary convention - given the fixed word order of DOS-sentences, subjects seem to have been simply picked arbitrarily as the focused constituent. In sum, I have tried to show that ETO- and DOS-sentences must have very different syntactic derivations. If that is true, then, clearly, what was borrowed into Yiddish was not the Slavic syntax. Two questions then arise: where did ~.he syntax of DOS-sentences come from, if not from Slavic, and what then was borrowed, given the obvious Slavic 'flavor' of these sentences?
Other means are used when non-subjects are foc,used: Topicalization plus stress, Topicalization with the fionted constituent preceded by the particle or, etc.
510
E.F. Prince / On pragmatic change
With respectto the source of the syntax of DOS-sentences, consider (14): (14a) Discourse-initial: es dremlen feygl oyf di tsvaygn. it doze birds on the branches 'Birds are dozing on the br~,:iches.' (L. Rudnitski, Dayn marne kumt nit tsurik) (l 4b) Discourse-initial: yen es falt der ovnt tsu... when it falls the evening PRT 'When evening falls...' (A. Szewach, Zayn letst lid) (14c) [Oh, a shadow falls, spreads out, and blossoms.) es kukn ale oyf di khmares... it look all on the clouds 'Everybody is looking at the clouds...' (Y. Fefer, Mayn liber) 3he tokens in (i4) exemplify a common Yiddish construction in which the expletive e s 'it' occurs in first position, the tensed verb in second, and the subject, with which the verb agrees, following the tensed verb. Although such ES-sentences have a much wider distribution in Yiddish than in German, they represent a well-entrenched native Germanic construction. For example, the German: translation of (14a) is: (15) Es d6sen V6gel auf den Zweigen. it doze birds on the branches No~e that, ~yntacticai',y, ES-sentences differ from DOS-sentences only in that their expletive is e s 'it' instead of d o s 'this'. 2 For example, the folloging are grammatical: (16a) dos dremlen feygl oyf di tsvaygn this doze birds or: the branches 'It is birds that are dozing on the branches.' (16b) yen dos falt der ovnt tsu... when this falls the evening PRT... 'When it is evening that falls...' (16c) dos kukn ale oyf di khmares... this look all on the clouds 'It's everyone who is looking at the clouds...' 2 In fact, the syntactic parallelism of ES- and DOS-sentences has beer, pointed out by Yiddish grammarians (cf. Weinreich (1971: 333)).
E.F. Prince ] On pragmatic change
511
Assuming uncontroversially that there is a level of syntactic representation prior to that in which expletives are realized lexically, we must conclude that DOS-sentences were in fact always grammatical in Yiddish. That is, both the ES-sentence in (14a) and the DOS-sentence in (16a) would have an underlying representation along the lines of (17):
(17)
[e] [dremlen] XP
Infl
[feygl] NP
[
[oyf di tsvaygn]]
VP PP
The only change in form that can be attributed to the introduction of DOSsentences was the lexical change of adding a feature [+ Expletive] to the pronoun dos 'this', clearly on the analogy of the Slavic expletive eto 'this'. But let us now compare the discourse functions of the three, Yiddish ESand DOS-sentences and Russian ETO-sentences. As noted above, DOS-sentences have the same discourse function as ETO-sentences: Both are focuspresupposition const~ctions, akin to English IT-clefts. In contrast, ES-sentences have totally different discourse functions, being used when the subject is nonthematic and when nothing is presupposed, a We may now answer the question of what exactly was borrowed: While the syntax of DOS-sentences was native to Yiddish, the discourse function associated with them was clearly a Slavic borrowing. Note that the native Yiddish syntax was immutable with respect to this phenomenon: Yiddish-Slavic bilinguals appear to have been aiming at producing in Yiddish a certain left-to-fight string order found in Slavic in order to make use of its Slavic discourse function in Yiddish. The best they could do, given the existing Yiddish syntax, was to use a structure, which, for focused subjects, produced a string which differed only in the order of the finite verb and subject. This difference could be factored out as irrelevant, since there was independent evidence for its existence: the V/2 Constraint in Yiddish but not in Slavic. The only formal adjustment made to Yiddish was the addition of the [+ Expletive] feature to the pronoun dos 'this'. Note that this was a compromise solution: The existing Yiddish structure allowed for no XP fronting, precluding the possibility of marking diff( :ent constituents as focus and resulting in the use of DOS-sentences only for focused subjects. 3 This raises interesting questions about the notion 'construction'. While current syntactic theory has no need for such a level, sentences being generated by a small numb,.~r of very general operations, e.g. WH-movement, NP-movement, it appears that the pragmatic component must distinguish a level of representation which includes both the syntactic configura .ion and the lexical realization of expletives and possibly other closed class elements, i.e. must identify the 'constructions', in order to associate with them their discourse functions (see Zwicky (1986)). Perhaps relevant here is Garretrs (1980) two-level model of sentence production, where the first level produces the syntactic configuration plus the closed class items, the second level adding the open class lexical items. This is clearly an important area for further research.
512
E.F. Prince / On pragmatic change
2. English Yiddish-Movement: Pragmatic borrowing f~om Y|ddish The second instance of pragmatic borrowing to be discussed here concerns socalled Yiddish-Movement, occurring in the speech of certain nonstandard English speakers from a Yiddish backgrc,und: (18a) "Look who's here," his wife shouted at him the moment he entcied the door, the day's dirt still under h~.s fingernails. "Sors boy." The soldier popped up from his chair and extended his hand. "How do you do, Uncle Louis?" "A Gregory Peck," Epstein's wife said, "a Mongomerv Cliff your brother has. He's been here only 3 hours, already he has a date." (Roth (1963" 148)) (18b) "You've got clean undervear?" "i'al washing it at ~;ight. I'm okay, Aunt Gladys." "By hand you can't g-'" it clean." "It's clean enough. Loo~:, Aunt ~iadys, I'm having a wonderful time." "Shmutz he lives in and I shouldn't worry f' (Roth (1963" 54)) (18c) That night, after dinner, I gave Aunt Gladys a kiss and told her she shouldn't work so hard. "In less thar~ a week it's Rosh Hashana and he thinks I shoulo take a vacation. Ten people i'm having. What do you think, a chicken cleans itself?." (Roth (1963" 86)) As has long been noted, sentences like those in (18), infelicitous in Standard English, occur in the speech of English speakers from a Yiddish background. '~ However, clo~e in~pec;~on of Standard English reveals that, in fact. there is nothing ur~grarr,matical about Yiddish-Movements. That is, we find in the speech of standard speakers sentences called Focus-Movements 5, which appear to be identical syntactically to Yiddish-Movements °, e.g.: 4 Ross (1967) marks them with a six-pointed star. s It should be noted that, in the literature, Yiddish-Movement has generally been identified with (and often been confused with) Topicalization rather than with Focus-Movement. Postal ((1971) and elsewhere) calls all OSV constructions 'Yiddish-Movement', a practice continued by Kuno ((1972) and elsewhere). Jackendoff (1972) takes Yiddish-Movement to be a nonstandard construction analogous to Topicalization. Hankamer (1971) does likewise; at the same time, he distinguishes a construction which he subsumes under 'Y(iddish)-rules' called 'Emphatic Preposing', which has the flavor of what ! am here calling Yiddish-Movement. In fact, I believe Hankamer is correct in that there are no dcabt nonstandard uses of both Topicalization and Focus-Movement, but the usual examples of Yiddish-Movement in the literature are closer to Focus-Movement than to Topicalization and it is this type that I am considering. See Gundel (1974) for a discussion of differences between Topicalization and F~cus-Movement. 6 However, it should be noted that Yiddish-Movements exhibit different scope possibilities for negation from Focus-Movements and thus either the semantic component of this dialect is
E.F. Prince / On pragmatic change
513
(19a) I~et's assume there's a device ~:~hich can do it - a parser let's call ;.t. (J.D. Fodor, lecture) (19b) A: Where can I get the reading packet? B: In Steinberg. [Gives directions] ,Six dollars it costs. (Two Univ. of Penn. undergraduates) (19c) We'll take a hell of a beating [untelligible] in the next thirty days; a lot o f heat, we'll take, with regard to why we aren't appeanng, why we aren't going to appear before the committee. (R.M. Nixon, The presidential tran~fipts, p. 305) Clearly, then, what makes (18) foreign-sounding and infe!icitous for standard speakers is not the sentence-grammar. Rather, Yiddis ~-Movement has different discourse functions from Focus-Movement, and it therefore occurs in different discourse contexts. This is not to say that they are totally different: Briefly, both Yiddish-Movements like (18) and Focus-Movements like (~!9) are focus-presupposition constructions, the focus represented by the leftmost constituent instantiating an open proposition represented by the rest of the cl,~use, where the open proposition can be construed as 'shared knowledge', i.e. where the speaker is warranted in assuming tha~ the coparticipants already know the open proposition. Thus, (18a) and (19a) represent "~nformation structured as in (20) and (21), respectively: (20a) (20b) (20c) (21a) (21b) (21c)
A Montgomery Clift-i your brother has c-i. Your brother has X. [Open proposition] X = a Montgomery Cliff [Instantiation] A parser-i let's call it e-i. Let's call it X. !Open proposition] X = a parser [Instantiation]
The difference is that Focus-Movements are further restricted: The open proposition they represent must be not only 'share~i ° but also salient, i.e. somewhat different from that of the standard lang~-ge or else the.re are in fact syntactic differences bctw~n Focus-Movement and Yiddish-Move1 eat that are not otherwise obvious and that are not reflected in string order. That is, a negatior~ in the clause can have scope over the pr~pos¢~ const;',aent in a Yiddish-~ovement but not in a ::ochs-r,~o'~'~ment. Thus, (i) as a FocusMovemen~ is a paraphrase of (iia), as in the context of (iib), while, as a Yiddish-MovemenL it may also be a paraphrase of (iiia), as in the context of (iiib): (i) One he woulc~n't break. (iia) What he v~ou[~n't break was one. (iib) A: He's broken eight Commandments but he wouldn't break the ones about murder and adultery. B: No, one he wouldn't bre,zk~ He HAS committed adultery. (iiia) Not one would he break. (~iib) What a saint! He takes all the Commandments so seriously One ~e w¢~ldn't break, even if you held a knife to his throat!
514
E.F. Prince / On pragmatic change
appropriately in the heater's consciousness at that point in the discourse (see Chafe (1976), Prince (1981), Ward (1985)). No such salience need obtain with Yiddish-Moveme~,.:.s. 7 Thus, for example, while the speaker' in (I 8a) is warranted in believing that he~" husband knows that his brother has something, or even has a son of a certain type, she is not warranted in believing that this is currently on his mind. In contrast, the speaker in (19a), having just introduced a new device, is warranted in believing that the audience is currently thinking that it is called something, since "he ham. 3f a device is conventionally one of the first things one learns upon hearing of its existence, a Thus it is predicted that Yiddish-Movements can become Focus-Movements and vice versa, if the context is changed. This is in fact true: o
(22a) A" That's a really nice collection of actors' photos. My brother has a Rory Calhoun - maybe he can be persuaded to sell it to you. B: No, a Montgomery Cliff your brother has--and I've been trying for weekr :~ get him to sell it to me. (22b) What do you mean, you don't like the movie?! Six dollars it ~:ostslyou're going to sit here and watch it! That is, the Y;ddish-Movement in (18a) become~ a Foetus-Movement. ;ust i_n case the open proposition 'Your brother has X' can be assumed to be salient 7 Interestingly, Hankame, (1971) claims that Yiddish-type Topicalization (his Yiddish-Movement) does not require that the subject of the clause be 'presupposed', while standard TopicaliTation does. From his discussion and examples, L turns out ~..'mt,in the terms used here, the subject of standard Topicalizations must be salient, while the subject of Yiddish-type Topicalizations need only be 'shared knowledge'. If it is true, as a r t i e r in Pri,ce (1981), that the open proposition conveyed by a (standa~'d) lOpicalization is salient, then Hankamer's observation that the subject must be salient follows so long as the subject is not the focal constituent. If it is then the case that there is a Yiddish-type use of this construction in which the open proposition need only be 'shared knowledge', then Han~ amer's observation about the subject of such sentences would follow and we would have an exact parallel between Topicalization and Focus-Movement: In both, the standard dialect require s that the open proposition be salient but the Yiddish-type dialect requires only that it be 'shared knowledge'. Sin addition, Focus-Movements may be further constrained in that the variable may have to represent the value of an attribute, where the fact that the entity in question has that attribute is salient shared knowledge. (See Prince (1981,1985) for discussion.) Moreover, note that, for both Focus-Movement and Y:'ddish-Movement, the instantiation may in fact already be known and is simply being treated as new. The rhetorical effect differs: In Focus-Movement, this use is rare and it is generally for clarification (ia), while, in Yiddish-Movement, this use is very common and it is generally for affect (ib): (la) "I'll tell you, I go as far as New London, Connecticut. That's as far as I'll go, ~nd when I come home at night, I stop for a couple of drinks. Martinis. Two I have, someth tes 4'-:ee." (Roth (1963: 81)) (iib) EP: What did she see in him? FC: Eleven million! Eleven million b.e made on the Scarsdale Diet! (Conversation about the murder of the Scarsdale Diet doctor)
E.F. Prince / On pragmatic ~ ~. 7,~e
515
in the discourse, as in (22a), and the Focus-Movemert it: ~,~gt~) bec~o.... s a Yiddish-Movement just in case the open proposition "It costs X' can be assumed to be shared knowledge but not salient, as in (22b). The question then is: Where has the discourse function of Yiddish-Movement come from? An obvious place to look is Yiddish: is tt~ere a construction in Yiddish which speakers could find 'analogous' to Englis~ Focus-Movement and which has the discourse function of English Yiddish-t~4ovement? Consider (23): (23a) [Context of (19a)...] a montgomeri klift hot d'ayn bruder. a Montgomery Cliff has your brother (23b) [Context of (19b)...] in shmuts voynt er. in dirt lives he (23c) [Context of (19c)...] tsen mentshn krig iKh. ten people get I In fact, the Yiddish Focus-Movements of (23) are totally felicitous in the contexts of the tokens in (18), and it is the case in general that English Yidd~.sh-Movement functions in discourse like Yiddish Focus-Movement. Thus it appears that we have a second instance of pragmatic borrowing: Yiddish-English bilinguals presumably found English Focus-Movement to be syntactically analogous to Yiddish Focus-Movement and associated with ,he former the discourse function of the latter. (Borrowing :~t other linguistic levels from Yiddish into this dialect of English and even, at times, into Standard English, is well known, though far less pe~Jasive than Slavic borrowing into Yiddish. See Ros¢en (1982) for a nontechnical but large survey.) Furthermore, note that the syntactic analogy between the two is reminiscent of that between Russian ETO-sentences and Yiddish DOS-sentences. First, English Focus-Movements and Yiddish-Movements have a very different derivation and structure from Yiddish Focus-Movements, roughly as shown in (24): [A Montgomery Cliff] [ tyour brother] [has e-i]] XP-i S? NP VP [a montgomeri klift] [hot] [dayn bruder] [e-i] (2,,b) XP-i Infl NP VP
(24a)
But second, and crucial to the phenomenon, they have an identical ~tring order, with one exception: In Yiddish the verb occurs immediately after the
516
E.F. Prince / On pragmatic change
fronted constituent and immediately before the subject, occurs after the subject. This difference, here as in the Yiddish borrowing, appears to have been factored out bilinguals as an independent and hence irrelevant reflex of
while in English it case of the Slavicby Yiddish-English ~he V/2 Constraint.
3. Comparison At the same time, there are important differences between the Slavic-toYiddish case and the Yiddish-to-English case. In the former, the host language construction that warranted the borrowing, the Yiddish ES-sentence, was kept both formally and pragmatically distinct from the result of the borrowing, the Yiddish DOS-sentence, the formal distinction made by the use of a new expletive, dos, the pragmatic distinction by the fact that ES-sentences retained their original function, the borrowed function associated only with the new DOS-sentences. In contrast, in the Yiddish-to-English case, the host language construction that warranted the borrov~ng~ English Focus-Movement, merged, both tbrmally and pragmatically (for these speakers), with the result of the borrowing, English Yiddish-Movement. Put differently, speakers who use Yiddish DOS-sentences have a distinct class of ES-sentences, while speakers who use English Yiddish-Movements very likely do not have a distinct class of Focus-Movements. The reason for this difference lies, I believe, in the different logical relations between the discourse functions of the relevant constructions. In the Slavic-toYiddish case, the discourse functions of ES-sentences are disjoint from those of DOS-sentences, the two trigger contradictory inferences, and each occurs in contexts in which the other cannot. Thus, a speaker, whether dominant in Slavic or Yiddish, has incontrovertible and constant evidence that the two are pragmatically distinct. In contrast, in the Yiddish-to-English case, the discourse functions of Yiddish-Movement are simply a less specified version of those of Focus-Movement, the inferences are noncontradictory, and the set of contexts in which Focus-Movements occur is a proper subset of those in which Yiddish-Movements occur. Thus the Yiddish-doJninant bilinguals and those of their progeny that constitute this dialect group have no evidence that Focus-Movement is distinct from Yiddish-Movement. If they simply associate the weaker Yiddish-Movement discourse function with both Yiddish-Movement and Focus-Movement, everything they hear is felicitous and they have no reason to suspect that Foces-Movement has in fact a richer discourse function and a more limited set of possible contexts. 9 In facL they tend to be
9 Intuitively, one may thus call the Yiddish-Movement case an instance of 'interference' rather than borrowing, but I am at a loss to find a principled basis for such a distinction.
E.F. Prince / On pragmatic change
517
unaware that there is anything marked about their speech, to In contrast, Standard English speakers, having only the more specified discourse function of Focus-Movement, frequently hear Yiddish-Movements in what are to them impossible contexts and conclude that the speakers are spealdng a different dialect. In conclusion, I have tried to show that borrowing is possible at the pragmatic level. Two instances of the borrowing of discourse functions of syntactic constructions were discussed and can be summarized as follows: (25) Borrowingof discoursefunctions: (a) Given SI, a syntactic [onstruction in one language, LI, and $2, a syntactic construction in another language, L2, the di~ourse ~'unction DFI associated with SI may be borrowed into L2 and associated with $2, just in case S I and $2 can be construed as syntactically 'analogous' in terms of string order. (b) If DF2, the discourse function originally associated with $2, properly includes DF!, then DF! simply replaces DF2 in its association with $2. (c) If DFi and DF2 are disjoin:, then $2 may become formally differentiated into $2-1 and $2-2, DF2 remaining associated with $2-1 and DF1 becoming associated with $2-2. The statements in (25) are simply descriptive of the two instances of pragmatic borrowing discussed above. Empirical research is needed to see if they are general principles and to discover what other general principles underlie such borrowing.
References Atlas, .I.D. and Levinson, S., 1981. 'It-clefts, informativeness, and logical form'. In: :,. Cole, ed., Radical pragmatics. NY: Academic Press. pp. 1-62. Bolinger, D., 1972. 'A look at equations and cleft sentences'. In: E. Firchow, ed., Studies for Einar Haugen. The Hague: Mouton. pp. 96-114. Borkin, A., 1978. What are clefts good for? (Unpublished ms.) Chafe, W., 1976. 'Givenness, contrastiveness, definiteness, subjects, topics, and point of view'~ In: C. Li, ¢d., Sub.i~t and topic, i~Y: Academic Pregs. pp. 25-55. Chomsky, N., t971. 'Deep structure, surface structure, and semantic interpretation'. In: D. Steinberg, and L. Jakobovits, ads., S,.~antics: An interdisc/plinary reader in plulosophy, l/nguistics, and philosophy. NY: Cambridge University Press. pp. 183-216.
1o This might explain Postars calling all OSV constructions in English 'Yiddish-Movement' (see note 4); cf. Morgan's subsequent division of them into 'Yiddish-Movement' and 'Goy-Movement' (l~lsonal communication).
518
E.F. Prince / On pragmatic change
Clark, H. and S. Haviland, 1977. 'Comprehension and the given-new contract'. In: R. Freedle, ed., Discourse production and comprehension. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. pp. 1--40. Declerek, R., 1983. On the pragmatics of IT-clefts and WH-clefts. (Unpublished ms.) Delahunty, G.P., 1982. Topics in the syntax and semantics of English cleft sentences. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Linguistics Club. Garrett, M.F., 1980. 'Levels of processing in sentence production'. In: B. Butterworth, ed. Language production, Vol. 1. London, New York: Academic Press. pp. 177-220. Gundel, J., 1974. The role of topic and comment in linguistic theory. University of Texas. (Ph.D. dissertation.) Gundel, J., 1977. Where do cleft sentences come from? Language 53: 343-359. HaUiday, M.A.K., 1967. Notes on transitivity anP theme in English. Part 2. Journal of Linguistics 3: 199-244. Hankamer, J., 1971. Constraints on deletion in syntax. Yale University. (Ph.D. dissertation.) Horn, L., 1981. ~Exhaustiveness and the semantics of clefts'. In: V. Burke and J. Pustejovsky, eds., Papers from 1lth Annual Meeting of the North Eastern Linguistic Society. Dep*.. of Linguistics, University of Massachusetts. Amherst, MA. pp. 125-142. Jackendoff, R.S., 1972. Semantic interpretation in generative grammar. Cambridge,, MA: MIT Press. Kuno, S., 1972 Functional sentence perspective: A case study from Japanese ~ d English. Li~.~uistic Inquiry 3: 269-320. Postal, P., !971. Crossover phenomena. N~Y: Holt Rinehart Winston. Prince, E.F., 1978. A comparison of WH-clefts and IT-clefts in discourse. Language 54: 883-906. Prince, E.F., 1981. 'Topicalization, Focus-Movement, and Yiddish-Movement: A pragmatic differentiation'. In: D. Alford et al., eds., Proceedings of the 7th Armual Meeting, Berkeley Linguistics Society. pp. 249-264. Prince, E.F., 1985. Fancy syntax and 'shared know:'edge'. Joar~al of Pragmatics 9: 65-81. Ross, J.R., 1967. Constraints on variables in syn~o MIT. (Ph.D. dissertation.) Rosten, L., 1982. Hooray for Yiddish! A book about English. NY: Simon and Schuster. Roth, P., 1963. Portnoy's complaint. NY: Random House. Thrainsson, H., 1985. 'V/l, V/2, V/3 in Icelandic'. In: H. Haider and M. Prinzhorn, eds., Verb Second phenomena in Germanic languages. Dordrecht: Foals. pp. 169-194. Ward, G., 1985. The semantics and pragmatics of Preposing. University of Penn. (Ph.D. dissertation.) Weinreich, M., 1980. History of the Yiddish language. Translated by J. Fishman and S. Noble. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Weinreich~ U.~ 1953. Languages in contact. Reprinted 1968. The Hague: Mouton. Weinreich, U., 1971. College Yiddish. 5th revised edition. NY: YIVO (Institute for Jewish Research). Zwicky, A.M., 1986. What's become of construction types? Working Papers in Linguistics 32, Ohio State University. pp. 157-162.
505
ON PRAGMATIC CHANGE: THE BORROWING OF D ~ C O U I ~ E FUNCTIONS
Ellen F. PRINCE*
As is well known, a typical and frequent effect of language contact and bilingualism is linguistic borrowing, the importation into one language of something from the other. Borrowing has heel well documen:ed at many linguistic levels, including phonological, lexical, morphological, syntactic, and ~emantic. (See Weinreich (1953), inter alia.) However, what has not been appr~ciated is that borrowing can occur at the pragmatic level as well. In this Impel I shall present evidence for the existence of pragmatic borrowing, in Imrticu~ar, evidence that one language may borrow the discourse functions of a particular syntactic form from another language. More correctly, (i) a syntactic form $2 in L2 may be construed by speakers as 'analogous' to a syntactic form SI in LI, and (it) the discourse functions of Sl in Ll may then be borrowed into L2 and associated with $2. What speakers construe as 'analogous' syntactic forms turns out to be quite interesting and suggests that syntactic competen~ is both robust and sophisticated, as current syntactic theories clmm. Furthermore, the situation that actually obtains after the borrowing may correlate with the logical relations between the discourse functions originally associated with S1 and $2. The evidence comes from Yiddish, where it is argued that pragmatic borrowing from Slavic has occurred, and frota a nonstandard dialect of Englisk, where it is argued that pragmatic borrowing from Y'~dfiish has ~:w~curred.
1. Yiddish DOS..sen~euces: Pragmatic ~n'owiug from Slavic The first set of data concerns Yiddish DOS-sentences, exemplified in (1): o
(la) [-~rhether the Israelis found Eichmann alone, or whether someone informed them, is not known. Both WiesenthM and a second Nazi-hunter ...have claimed that]
* I shou]~l like to thank Mascha Benya and Arkady P|otnitsky for their patient and thoughtful help with the Yiddish and Russian data. I also thank S. Balaban, J. Hankamer, M. Herzog, H. Hiz, J. Hoeksema, P. Jacobson, T. Kroch, Y. Nibo~'ski, S. Pintzuk, B. Santorini, M. SchaechteL G. Ward, and A. Zaenen for their comments, advice, and general help. And a s ~ i a l thanks, as always, to A.K. Joshi and the Department of Computer and Information Science and the Cognitive Science Group at the University of Pennsylvania tbr the computing resources. This paper was presented at NWAV-XV, Stanford University, Oct. ~8, 1986. Author's address: Ellen F. Prince, Dept. of Linguistics, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA 19104, USA. 0378-2166/88/$3.50 © 1988, Elsevier Science Publishers B.V. (North-Holland)
506
E.F. Prince / On pragmatic change
dos hobn zey gefunen aykhmanen. this have they found Eichmann 'It was tkey that found Eichmann.' (Forward, 3/23/86, p. 1) (lb) [E. finds L., an itinerant scholar, sitting in front of the chum, where E's daughter had just been sitting churning butter...] E: dos shlogst du di puter? this beats you the butter 'It's you who's churning the butter?' L: ikh meg oykh shlogn purer, ma raash.9 I may also beat butter, what din? 'I can also churn butter, so what?' (P. Hirshbeyn, Grine felder) (lc) [This song is written with blood and not with lead. It's not a song of a summer bird on the wing.] dos hot a folk tsvishn falndike vent dos lid gezungen... ! this has a folk between falling walls this song sung 'It was a people inside falling walls that sang this song...' (H. Glik, Zog nit keynmol)
The canonical variants of the DOS-sentences in (1) are given in (2)" (2a) zey hobn gefunen aykhmanen. they have found Eichmann (2b) du shlogst di purer. you beat the butter (2c) a folk tsvishn falndike vent hot dos lid gezungen. a folk between falling walls has this song ~ung DOS-sentences are functional equivale~ats of English IT-clefts. That is, they are focus-presupposition constructions (Chomsky (1971)) that mark a proposition containing a variable, or an 'open' proposition, as 'presupposed', i.e. as taken by the speaker to be 'shared knowledge', and that supply the instantiation of that variable (Hall/day (1967), Bolinger (1972), Clark and Haviland (1977), Gundel (1977), Borkin (1978), Prince (1978), Atlas and Levinson (1981), Horn (1981), Delahunty (1982), Dederck (1983)). In English IT-clefts, the open proposition is represented by the subordinate clause, with the trace representing the variable, and the instantiation is represefited by the postcopular constituent, as shown in (3): (3a) It was they-i that e-i found Eichmann. (3b) X found Eichmann. [Open proposition] (3c) X = they [Instantiation]
E.F. Prince / On pragmatic change
507
Yiddish DOS-sentences are structurally very different: They are not 'cleft', i.e. divided into two parts by a copula, one part consisting of a ,iubordinate clause. Rather, DOS-sentences consist of a single clause will,, an 'extra' constituent: The initial dos 'this' is not an argument of the verb. Accordingly, the focus and presupposition are represented differently: In Yiddish DOSsentences, the open proposition is represented by the sentence, minus dos 'this', with the constituent immediately following the tensed verbal element replaced by a variable, and the instantiation of the variable is represented by that post-verbal consfiLucr,L as ~hown in (4)-(6): (4a) dos hobn zey gefunen aykhmanen. this have they found Eichmann (4b) X hot gefunen aykhmanen. [Open proposition] (4c) X = zey [Instantiation] (Sa) dosshlogstdu di purer? ~,J.gao
L/lm, l~L.~.~
~../4,1~
LgJt~
K.TK,Kgg~futg g
(sb) X shlogt 3~ purer. [Open proposition] (5c) X = du [In ~tantiation] (6a) dos hot a :91k tsvishn falndike vent dos klid gezungen... this has a ~ ~lk between falling walls this song sung... (6b) X hot dos hd gezungen. [Open proposition] (6c) X = a foil tsvishn falndike vent [Instantiation] Apparently, DOS-sentences have no cognates in any other Germanic language. For example, in German, the language most closely related to Yiddish, what would be the cognate of (la), shown in (7a), is not a possible sentence of the language; rather, (la) would be realized, as in English, by a cleft ccnstrcction, shown in (7b): (7a) *Das f~nden sic Eichmann. This found they Eichmann (7b) Sie waren es, die Eichmann fanden. they were it, who Eichmann found 'It was they who found Eichmann.' Consider, however, the functional equivalent of IT-clefts in Russian, exemplified in (8a), with its canonical variant in (Sb): (8a) eto on'i nashl'i aykhmana. this they found Eichmann 'It was they who found Eichmann.' (Sb) on'i nashri aykhmana. they found Eichmann
508
E.F. Prince / On pragmatic change
As is well known, Yiddish borrowed extensively from the Slavic languages with which it was coterritorial for much of its European existence. Furthermore, this borrowing was profound as well as exterJsive, reaching some of the most basic lexical items, and involving not oniy the lexicon but also the phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics. (See Weinreich (1980), inter alia.) Thus it should not be surprising to find borrowing at the pragmatic level. But what exactly has been borrowed in the DOS-sentences? One may claim that the borrowing in this case was in fact syntactic - that DOS-sentences are simply a caique of Slavic ETO-sentences- and that the function of marking focus and presupposition simply came for free. To see that this is not a tenable position, we must briefly consider the syntax of each construction. Compare closely the Russian ETO-sentence with the Yiddish DOS-sentence, repeated in (9) for convenience: (9) 'It was they that found Eichmann': (a) eto on'i nashri aykhmana. [Russian] this they found Eichmann (b) dos hobn zey gefunen aykhmanen. [Yiddish] this have they found Eichmann There is an important syntactic difference between the two: While both begin with the expletive, Russian has the remainder of the clause in SVO order whereas Yiddish has the remainder of the clause beginning with the finite verb. Note that a true calque of (ga) is ungrammatical in Yiddish: (10) *dos zey hobn gefunen aykhmanen.
Cleally, Y~dgi~h is ~bserving the Verb-Second Constraint, widespread throughout Germanic and particularly robust in Yiddish, which stipulates that the finite verbal element must stand in second position in the clause. Slavic has no such constraint and the verb in sentences like (9a) is in third position. In fact, consider (11): (lla)
eto aykhmana on'i nashri. this Eichmann they found 'It was Eichmann that they found.' (ilb.l) *dos aykhmanen zey hobn gefunen. this Eichmann they have found (lib.2) *dos aykhmanen hobn zey gefunen. this Eichmann have they found (1 lb.3) *dos hobn aykhmanen zey gefunen. this have Eichmann they found
E.F. Prince / On pragmatic change
509
In (1 la), we see that Russian ETO-sentences, like English IT-clefts, can focus objects as well as subjects: Whatever constituent immediately follows the expletive eto is the focus. The syntax of Russian ETO-sentences then seems to be that (i) an expletive, eto, occurs in some initial position and (ii) the focused constituent is topicalized to the position immediately following it. That is, (9a) and (1 la) presumably have a structhre along the lines of (12a,b), respectively, where the empty category in initial position is realized as the expletive eto 'this': (12a)
[el Comp? (12b) [e] Comp?
[ [on'i-i] [e-i] [nashl'i aykhmana]] S XP NP VP [ [aykhmana-i] [on'i] [nashl'i e-i]] S XP NP VP
In Yiddish, however, such - derivation is not possible" Due to the V/2 r..,.,~.~..,.~,,..ou,~w ~, there is ,,...j-'".~. .,,u,. . . . . . v,,o,-,,li;" . . . . ,,,,,i,~u,,.;~nt' .. ~ preceulnga" ,i.,,e ~:":',~,,~e.... ~.uk ,,,u~'-~ dos is filling it. Thus, the syntax of DOS-sentences seems to be that (i) an expletive, dos, appears in XP, or 'topic', pos~on and. (ii) following the theory that Yiddish subjects are base-generated in post-Infl position (cf. Thrainsson (1985)), no NP movement takes place. That is, (10b) presumably has a structure along the lines of (14), where the empty category in initial position is realized as the expletive dos 'this': (13)
[e] [hobn] [zey] [gefunen aykbmanen] XP Infl NP VP
This lack of movement possibilities in DOS-sentences makes one wonder how NPs other than the subject can be marked as focus. In fact, they cannot: DOS-sentences can focus only subjects. ~ Furthermore, one might say that subjects are 'marked' as focus in DOS-sentences not by any syntactic operation, since they have presumably undergone no operation, but only by arbitrary convention - given the fixed word order of DOS-sentences, subjects seem to have been simply picked arbitrarily as the focused constituent. In sum, I have tried to show that ETO- and DOS-sentences must have very different syntactic derivations. If that is true, then, clearly, what was borrowed into Yiddish was not the Slavic syntax. Two questions then arise: where did ~.he syntax of DOS-sentences come from, if not from Slavic, and what then was borrowed, given the obvious Slavic 'flavor' of these sentences?
Other means are used when non-subjects are foc,used: Topicalization plus stress, Topicalization with the fionted constituent preceded by the particle or, etc.
510
E.F. Prince / On pragmatic change
With respectto the source of the syntax of DOS-sentences, consider (14): (14a) Discourse-initial: es dremlen feygl oyf di tsvaygn. it doze birds on the branches 'Birds are dozing on the br~,:iches.' (L. Rudnitski, Dayn marne kumt nit tsurik) (l 4b) Discourse-initial: yen es falt der ovnt tsu... when it falls the evening PRT 'When evening falls...' (A. Szewach, Zayn letst lid) (14c) [Oh, a shadow falls, spreads out, and blossoms.) es kukn ale oyf di khmares... it look all on the clouds 'Everybody is looking at the clouds...' (Y. Fefer, Mayn liber) 3he tokens in (i4) exemplify a common Yiddish construction in which the expletive e s 'it' occurs in first position, the tensed verb in second, and the subject, with which the verb agrees, following the tensed verb. Although such ES-sentences have a much wider distribution in Yiddish than in German, they represent a well-entrenched native Germanic construction. For example, the German: translation of (14a) is: (15) Es d6sen V6gel auf den Zweigen. it doze birds on the branches No~e that, ~yntacticai',y, ES-sentences differ from DOS-sentences only in that their expletive is e s 'it' instead of d o s 'this'. 2 For example, the folloging are grammatical: (16a) dos dremlen feygl oyf di tsvaygn this doze birds or: the branches 'It is birds that are dozing on the branches.' (16b) yen dos falt der ovnt tsu... when this falls the evening PRT... 'When it is evening that falls...' (16c) dos kukn ale oyf di khmares... this look all on the clouds 'It's everyone who is looking at the clouds...' 2 In fact, the syntactic parallelism of ES- and DOS-sentences has beer, pointed out by Yiddish grammarians (cf. Weinreich (1971: 333)).
E.F. Prince ] On pragmatic change
511
Assuming uncontroversially that there is a level of syntactic representation prior to that in which expletives are realized lexically, we must conclude that DOS-sentences were in fact always grammatical in Yiddish. That is, both the ES-sentence in (14a) and the DOS-sentence in (16a) would have an underlying representation along the lines of (17):
(17)
[e] [dremlen] XP
Infl
[feygl] NP
[
[oyf di tsvaygn]]
VP PP
The only change in form that can be attributed to the introduction of DOSsentences was the lexical change of adding a feature [+ Expletive] to the pronoun dos 'this', clearly on the analogy of the Slavic expletive eto 'this'. But let us now compare the discourse functions of the three, Yiddish ESand DOS-sentences and Russian ETO-sentences. As noted above, DOS-sentences have the same discourse function as ETO-sentences: Both are focuspresupposition const~ctions, akin to English IT-clefts. In contrast, ES-sentences have totally different discourse functions, being used when the subject is nonthematic and when nothing is presupposed, a We may now answer the question of what exactly was borrowed: While the syntax of DOS-sentences was native to Yiddish, the discourse function associated with them was clearly a Slavic borrowing. Note that the native Yiddish syntax was immutable with respect to this phenomenon: Yiddish-Slavic bilinguals appear to have been aiming at producing in Yiddish a certain left-to-fight string order found in Slavic in order to make use of its Slavic discourse function in Yiddish. The best they could do, given the existing Yiddish syntax, was to use a structure, which, for focused subjects, produced a string which differed only in the order of the finite verb and subject. This difference could be factored out as irrelevant, since there was independent evidence for its existence: the V/2 Constraint in Yiddish but not in Slavic. The only formal adjustment made to Yiddish was the addition of the [+ Expletive] feature to the pronoun dos 'this'. Note that this was a compromise solution: The existing Yiddish structure allowed for no XP fronting, precluding the possibility of marking diff( :ent constituents as focus and resulting in the use of DOS-sentences only for focused subjects. 3 This raises interesting questions about the notion 'construction'. While current syntactic theory has no need for such a level, sentences being generated by a small numb,.~r of very general operations, e.g. WH-movement, NP-movement, it appears that the pragmatic component must distinguish a level of representation which includes both the syntactic configura .ion and the lexical realization of expletives and possibly other closed class elements, i.e. must identify the 'constructions', in order to associate with them their discourse functions (see Zwicky (1986)). Perhaps relevant here is Garretrs (1980) two-level model of sentence production, where the first level produces the syntactic configuration plus the closed class items, the second level adding the open class lexical items. This is clearly an important area for further research.
512
E.F. Prince / On pragmatic change
2. English Yiddish-Movement: Pragmatic borrowing f~om Y|ddish The second instance of pragmatic borrowing to be discussed here concerns socalled Yiddish-Movement, occurring in the speech of certain nonstandard English speakers from a Yiddish backgrc,und: (18a) "Look who's here," his wife shouted at him the moment he entcied the door, the day's dirt still under h~.s fingernails. "Sors boy." The soldier popped up from his chair and extended his hand. "How do you do, Uncle Louis?" "A Gregory Peck," Epstein's wife said, "a Mongomerv Cliff your brother has. He's been here only 3 hours, already he has a date." (Roth (1963" 148)) (18b) "You've got clean undervear?" "i'al washing it at ~;ight. I'm okay, Aunt Gladys." "By hand you can't g-'" it clean." "It's clean enough. Loo~:, Aunt ~iadys, I'm having a wonderful time." "Shmutz he lives in and I shouldn't worry f' (Roth (1963" 54)) (18c) That night, after dinner, I gave Aunt Gladys a kiss and told her she shouldn't work so hard. "In less thar~ a week it's Rosh Hashana and he thinks I shoulo take a vacation. Ten people i'm having. What do you think, a chicken cleans itself?." (Roth (1963" 86)) As has long been noted, sentences like those in (18), infelicitous in Standard English, occur in the speech of English speakers from a Yiddish background. '~ However, clo~e in~pec;~on of Standard English reveals that, in fact. there is nothing ur~grarr,matical about Yiddish-Movements. That is, we find in the speech of standard speakers sentences called Focus-Movements 5, which appear to be identical syntactically to Yiddish-Movements °, e.g.: 4 Ross (1967) marks them with a six-pointed star. s It should be noted that, in the literature, Yiddish-Movement has generally been identified with (and often been confused with) Topicalization rather than with Focus-Movement. Postal ((1971) and elsewhere) calls all OSV constructions 'Yiddish-Movement', a practice continued by Kuno ((1972) and elsewhere). Jackendoff (1972) takes Yiddish-Movement to be a nonstandard construction analogous to Topicalization. Hankamer (1971) does likewise; at the same time, he distinguishes a construction which he subsumes under 'Y(iddish)-rules' called 'Emphatic Preposing', which has the flavor of what ! am here calling Yiddish-Movement. In fact, I believe Hankamer is correct in that there are no dcabt nonstandard uses of both Topicalization and Focus-Movement, but the usual examples of Yiddish-Movement in the literature are closer to Focus-Movement than to Topicalization and it is this type that I am considering. See Gundel (1974) for a discussion of differences between Topicalization and F~cus-Movement. 6 However, it should be noted that Yiddish-Movements exhibit different scope possibilities for negation from Focus-Movements and thus either the semantic component of this dialect is
E.F. Prince / On pragmatic change
513
(19a) I~et's assume there's a device ~:~hich can do it - a parser let's call ;.t. (J.D. Fodor, lecture) (19b) A: Where can I get the reading packet? B: In Steinberg. [Gives directions] ,Six dollars it costs. (Two Univ. of Penn. undergraduates) (19c) We'll take a hell of a beating [untelligible] in the next thirty days; a lot o f heat, we'll take, with regard to why we aren't appeanng, why we aren't going to appear before the committee. (R.M. Nixon, The presidential tran~fipts, p. 305) Clearly, then, what makes (18) foreign-sounding and infe!icitous for standard speakers is not the sentence-grammar. Rather, Yiddis ~-Movement has different discourse functions from Focus-Movement, and it therefore occurs in different discourse contexts. This is not to say that they are totally different: Briefly, both Yiddish-Movements like (18) and Focus-Movements like (~!9) are focus-presupposition constructions, the focus represented by the leftmost constituent instantiating an open proposition represented by the rest of the cl,~use, where the open proposition can be construed as 'shared knowledge', i.e. where the speaker is warranted in assuming tha~ the coparticipants already know the open proposition. Thus, (18a) and (19a) represent "~nformation structured as in (20) and (21), respectively: (20a) (20b) (20c) (21a) (21b) (21c)
A Montgomery Clift-i your brother has c-i. Your brother has X. [Open proposition] X = a Montgomery Cliff [Instantiation] A parser-i let's call it e-i. Let's call it X. !Open proposition] X = a parser [Instantiation]
The difference is that Focus-Movements are further restricted: The open proposition they represent must be not only 'share~i ° but also salient, i.e. somewhat different from that of the standard lang~-ge or else the.re are in fact syntactic differences bctw~n Focus-Movement and Yiddish-Move1 eat that are not otherwise obvious and that are not reflected in string order. That is, a negatior~ in the clause can have scope over the pr~pos¢~ const;',aent in a Yiddish-~ovement but not in a ::ochs-r,~o'~'~ment. Thus, (i) as a FocusMovemen~ is a paraphrase of (iia), as in the context of (iib), while, as a Yiddish-MovemenL it may also be a paraphrase of (iiia), as in the context of (iiib): (i) One he woulc~n't break. (iia) What he v~ou[~n't break was one. (iib) A: He's broken eight Commandments but he wouldn't break the ones about murder and adultery. B: No, one he wouldn't bre,zk~ He HAS committed adultery. (iiia) Not one would he break. (~iib) What a saint! He takes all the Commandments so seriously One ~e w¢~ldn't break, even if you held a knife to his throat!
514
E.F. Prince / On pragmatic change
appropriately in the heater's consciousness at that point in the discourse (see Chafe (1976), Prince (1981), Ward (1985)). No such salience need obtain with Yiddish-Moveme~,.:.s. 7 Thus, for example, while the speaker' in (I 8a) is warranted in believing that he~" husband knows that his brother has something, or even has a son of a certain type, she is not warranted in believing that this is currently on his mind. In contrast, the speaker in (19a), having just introduced a new device, is warranted in believing that the audience is currently thinking that it is called something, since "he ham. 3f a device is conventionally one of the first things one learns upon hearing of its existence, a Thus it is predicted that Yiddish-Movements can become Focus-Movements and vice versa, if the context is changed. This is in fact true: o
(22a) A" That's a really nice collection of actors' photos. My brother has a Rory Calhoun - maybe he can be persuaded to sell it to you. B: No, a Montgomery Cliff your brother has--and I've been trying for weekr :~ get him to sell it to me. (22b) What do you mean, you don't like the movie?! Six dollars it ~:ostslyou're going to sit here and watch it! That is, the Y;ddish-Movement in (18a) become~ a Foetus-Movement. ;ust i_n case the open proposition 'Your brother has X' can be assumed to be salient 7 Interestingly, Hankame, (1971) claims that Yiddish-type Topicalization (his Yiddish-Movement) does not require that the subject of the clause be 'presupposed', while standard TopicaliTation does. From his discussion and examples, L turns out ~..'mt,in the terms used here, the subject of standard Topicalizations must be salient, while the subject of Yiddish-type Topicalizations need only be 'shared knowledge'. If it is true, as a r t i e r in Pri,ce (1981), that the open proposition conveyed by a (standa~'d) lOpicalization is salient, then Hankamer's observation that the subject must be salient follows so long as the subject is not the focal constituent. If it is then the case that there is a Yiddish-type use of this construction in which the open proposition need only be 'shared knowledge', then Han~ amer's observation about the subject of such sentences would follow and we would have an exact parallel between Topicalization and Focus-Movement: In both, the standard dialect require s that the open proposition be salient but the Yiddish-type dialect requires only that it be 'shared knowledge'. Sin addition, Focus-Movements may be further constrained in that the variable may have to represent the value of an attribute, where the fact that the entity in question has that attribute is salient shared knowledge. (See Prince (1981,1985) for discussion.) Moreover, note that, for both Focus-Movement and Y:'ddish-Movement, the instantiation may in fact already be known and is simply being treated as new. The rhetorical effect differs: In Focus-Movement, this use is rare and it is generally for clarification (ia), while, in Yiddish-Movement, this use is very common and it is generally for affect (ib): (la) "I'll tell you, I go as far as New London, Connecticut. That's as far as I'll go, ~nd when I come home at night, I stop for a couple of drinks. Martinis. Two I have, someth tes 4'-:ee." (Roth (1963: 81)) (iib) EP: What did she see in him? FC: Eleven million! Eleven million b.e made on the Scarsdale Diet! (Conversation about the murder of the Scarsdale Diet doctor)
E.F. Prince / On pragmatic ~ ~. 7,~e
515
in the discourse, as in (22a), and the Focus-Movemert it: ~,~gt~) bec~o.... s a Yiddish-Movement just in case the open proposition "It costs X' can be assumed to be shared knowledge but not salient, as in (22b). The question then is: Where has the discourse function of Yiddish-Movement come from? An obvious place to look is Yiddish: is tt~ere a construction in Yiddish which speakers could find 'analogous' to Englis~ Focus-Movement and which has the discourse function of English Yiddish-t~4ovement? Consider (23): (23a) [Context of (19a)...] a montgomeri klift hot d'ayn bruder. a Montgomery Cliff has your brother (23b) [Context of (19b)...] in shmuts voynt er. in dirt lives he (23c) [Context of (19c)...] tsen mentshn krig iKh. ten people get I In fact, the Yiddish Focus-Movements of (23) are totally felicitous in the contexts of the tokens in (18), and it is the case in general that English Yidd~.sh-Movement functions in discourse like Yiddish Focus-Movement. Thus it appears that we have a second instance of pragmatic borrowing: Yiddish-English bilinguals presumably found English Focus-Movement to be syntactically analogous to Yiddish Focus-Movement and associated with ,he former the discourse function of the latter. (Borrowing :~t other linguistic levels from Yiddish into this dialect of English and even, at times, into Standard English, is well known, though far less pe~Jasive than Slavic borrowing into Yiddish. See Ros¢en (1982) for a nontechnical but large survey.) Furthermore, note that the syntactic analogy between the two is reminiscent of that between Russian ETO-sentences and Yiddish DOS-sentences. First, English Focus-Movements and Yiddish-Movements have a very different derivation and structure from Yiddish Focus-Movements, roughly as shown in (24): [A Montgomery Cliff] [ tyour brother] [has e-i]] XP-i S? NP VP [a montgomeri klift] [hot] [dayn bruder] [e-i] (2,,b) XP-i Infl NP VP
(24a)
But second, and crucial to the phenomenon, they have an identical ~tring order, with one exception: In Yiddish the verb occurs immediately after the
516
E.F. Prince / On pragmatic change
fronted constituent and immediately before the subject, occurs after the subject. This difference, here as in the Yiddish borrowing, appears to have been factored out bilinguals as an independent and hence irrelevant reflex of
while in English it case of the Slavicby Yiddish-English ~he V/2 Constraint.
3. Comparison At the same time, there are important differences between the Slavic-toYiddish case and the Yiddish-to-English case. In the former, the host language construction that warranted the borrowing, the Yiddish ES-sentence, was kept both formally and pragmatically distinct from the result of the borrowing, the Yiddish DOS-sentence, the formal distinction made by the use of a new expletive, dos, the pragmatic distinction by the fact that ES-sentences retained their original function, the borrowed function associated only with the new DOS-sentences. In contrast, in the Yiddish-to-English case, the host language construction that warranted the borrov~ng~ English Focus-Movement, merged, both tbrmally and pragmatically (for these speakers), with the result of the borrowing, English Yiddish-Movement. Put differently, speakers who use Yiddish DOS-sentences have a distinct class of ES-sentences, while speakers who use English Yiddish-Movements very likely do not have a distinct class of Focus-Movements. The reason for this difference lies, I believe, in the different logical relations between the discourse functions of the relevant constructions. In the Slavic-toYiddish case, the discourse functions of ES-sentences are disjoint from those of DOS-sentences, the two trigger contradictory inferences, and each occurs in contexts in which the other cannot. Thus, a speaker, whether dominant in Slavic or Yiddish, has incontrovertible and constant evidence that the two are pragmatically distinct. In contrast, in the Yiddish-to-English case, the discourse functions of Yiddish-Movement are simply a less specified version of those of Focus-Movement, the inferences are noncontradictory, and the set of contexts in which Focus-Movements occur is a proper subset of those in which Yiddish-Movements occur. Thus the Yiddish-doJninant bilinguals and those of their progeny that constitute this dialect group have no evidence that Focus-Movement is distinct from Yiddish-Movement. If they simply associate the weaker Yiddish-Movement discourse function with both Yiddish-Movement and Focus-Movement, everything they hear is felicitous and they have no reason to suspect that Foces-Movement has in fact a richer discourse function and a more limited set of possible contexts. 9 In facL they tend to be
9 Intuitively, one may thus call the Yiddish-Movement case an instance of 'interference' rather than borrowing, but I am at a loss to find a principled basis for such a distinction.
E.F. Prince / On pragmatic change
517
unaware that there is anything marked about their speech, to In contrast, Standard English speakers, having only the more specified discourse function of Focus-Movement, frequently hear Yiddish-Movements in what are to them impossible contexts and conclude that the speakers are spealdng a different dialect. In conclusion, I have tried to show that borrowing is possible at the pragmatic level. Two instances of the borrowing of discourse functions of syntactic constructions were discussed and can be summarized as follows: (25) Borrowingof discoursefunctions: (a) Given SI, a syntactic [onstruction in one language, LI, and $2, a syntactic construction in another language, L2, the di~ourse ~'unction DFI associated with SI may be borrowed into L2 and associated with $2, just in case S I and $2 can be construed as syntactically 'analogous' in terms of string order. (b) If DF2, the discourse function originally associated with $2, properly includes DF!, then DF! simply replaces DF2 in its association with $2. (c) If DFi and DF2 are disjoin:, then $2 may become formally differentiated into $2-1 and $2-2, DF2 remaining associated with $2-1 and DF1 becoming associated with $2-2. The statements in (25) are simply descriptive of the two instances of pragmatic borrowing discussed above. Empirical research is needed to see if they are general principles and to discover what other general principles underlie such borrowing.
References Atlas, .I.D. and Levinson, S., 1981. 'It-clefts, informativeness, and logical form'. In: :,. Cole, ed., Radical pragmatics. NY: Academic Press. pp. 1-62. Bolinger, D., 1972. 'A look at equations and cleft sentences'. In: E. Firchow, ed., Studies for Einar Haugen. The Hague: Mouton. pp. 96-114. Borkin, A., 1978. What are clefts good for? (Unpublished ms.) Chafe, W., 1976. 'Givenness, contrastiveness, definiteness, subjects, topics, and point of view'~ In: C. Li, ¢d., Sub.i~t and topic, i~Y: Academic Pregs. pp. 25-55. Chomsky, N., t971. 'Deep structure, surface structure, and semantic interpretation'. In: D. Steinberg, and L. Jakobovits, ads., S,.~antics: An interdisc/plinary reader in plulosophy, l/nguistics, and philosophy. NY: Cambridge University Press. pp. 183-216.
1o This might explain Postars calling all OSV constructions in English 'Yiddish-Movement' (see note 4); cf. Morgan's subsequent division of them into 'Yiddish-Movement' and 'Goy-Movement' (l~lsonal communication).
518
E.F. Prince / On pragmatic change
Clark, H. and S. Haviland, 1977. 'Comprehension and the given-new contract'. In: R. Freedle, ed., Discourse production and comprehension. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. pp. 1--40. Declerek, R., 1983. On the pragmatics of IT-clefts and WH-clefts. (Unpublished ms.) Delahunty, G.P., 1982. Topics in the syntax and semantics of English cleft sentences. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Linguistics Club. Garrett, M.F., 1980. 'Levels of processing in sentence production'. In: B. Butterworth, ed. Language production, Vol. 1. London, New York: Academic Press. pp. 177-220. Gundel, J., 1974. The role of topic and comment in linguistic theory. University of Texas. (Ph.D. dissertation.) Gundel, J., 1977. Where do cleft sentences come from? Language 53: 343-359. HaUiday, M.A.K., 1967. Notes on transitivity anP theme in English. Part 2. Journal of Linguistics 3: 199-244. Hankamer, J., 1971. Constraints on deletion in syntax. Yale University. (Ph.D. dissertation.) Horn, L., 1981. ~Exhaustiveness and the semantics of clefts'. In: V. Burke and J. Pustejovsky, eds., Papers from 1lth Annual Meeting of the North Eastern Linguistic Society. Dep*.. of Linguistics, University of Massachusetts. Amherst, MA. pp. 125-142. Jackendoff, R.S., 1972. Semantic interpretation in generative grammar. Cambridge,, MA: MIT Press. Kuno, S., 1972 Functional sentence perspective: A case study from Japanese ~ d English. Li~.~uistic Inquiry 3: 269-320. Postal, P., !971. Crossover phenomena. N~Y: Holt Rinehart Winston. Prince, E.F., 1978. A comparison of WH-clefts and IT-clefts in discourse. Language 54: 883-906. Prince, E.F., 1981. 'Topicalization, Focus-Movement, and Yiddish-Movement: A pragmatic differentiation'. In: D. Alford et al., eds., Proceedings of the 7th Armual Meeting, Berkeley Linguistics Society. pp. 249-264. Prince, E.F., 1985. Fancy syntax and 'shared know:'edge'. Joar~al of Pragmatics 9: 65-81. Ross, J.R., 1967. Constraints on variables in syn~o MIT. (Ph.D. dissertation.) Rosten, L., 1982. Hooray for Yiddish! A book about English. NY: Simon and Schuster. Roth, P., 1963. Portnoy's complaint. NY: Random House. Thrainsson, H., 1985. 'V/l, V/2, V/3 in Icelandic'. In: H. Haider and M. Prinzhorn, eds., Verb Second phenomena in Germanic languages. Dordrecht: Foals. pp. 169-194. Ward, G., 1985. The semantics and pragmatics of Preposing. University of Penn. (Ph.D. dissertation.) Weinreich, M., 1980. History of the Yiddish language. Translated by J. Fishman and S. Noble. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Weinreich~ U.~ 1953. Languages in contact. Reprinted 1968. The Hague: Mouton. Weinreich, U., 1971. College Yiddish. 5th revised edition. NY: YIVO (Institute for Jewish Research). Zwicky, A.M., 1986. What's become of construction types? Working Papers in Linguistics 32, Ohio State University. pp. 157-162.