End of ADS-L Digest - 22 May 1998 to 23 May 1998
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<br>From: Automatic digest processor (5/20/98)
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<br>         ADS-L Digest - 18 May 1998 to 19 May 1998             98-05-20 00:01:19
<br>There are 7 messages totalling 271 lines in this issue.
<br>
<br>Topics of the day:
<br>
<br>  1. Law/Principle of Least Effort (2)
<br>  2. Single Swallow Summers
<br>  3. Sri Lankan psychologist taxi driver syndrome
<br>  4. "Is it raining out?"
<br>  5. ADS-L Archive Search (2)
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<br>Date:    Tue, 19 May 1998 10:05:48 -0400
<br>From:    Larry Horn <laurence.horn[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]YALE.EDU>
<br>Subject: Re: Law/Principle of Least Effort
<br>
<br>At 7:31 PM -0500 5/18/98, Gerald Cohen wrote:
<br>>    I am grateful to Larry Horn for his 5/18/98 message concerning the
<br>>Law/Principle of Least Effort.  It's been a while since I've worked on this
<br>>topic, and I appreciate the update.
<br>>
<br>>    I realize it's risky to advance thoughts without first checking the
<br>>latest literature, but here goes anyway.
<br>
<br>Sorry; by calling your attention--and that of others who might have been
<br>interested--to the work I mentioned (not that I'd necessarily classify Paul
<br>1890, Zipf 1935, or Martinet 1962 as exactly hot off the press), I hadn't
<br>intended a pre-emptive strike.  I was just trying to indicate that most
<br>research taking the Principle of Least Effort seriously does look at
<br>countervailing forces as well.  Here's Paul (from the Strong translation of
<br>the second edition of the Principles of the History of Language, 1890, p.
<br>251):
<br>
<br>"The more economical or more abundant use of linguistic means of expressing
<br>a thought is determined by the need... Everywhere we find modes of
<br>expression forced into existence which contain only just so much as is
<br>requisite to their being understood. The amount of linguistic material
<br>employed varies in each case with the situation, with the previous
<br>conversation, with the relative approximation of the speakers to a common
<br>state of mind."
<br>
<br>Zipf, Martinet, and the others I cited all have some version of
<br>countervailing or antinomic forces operating in the determination of this
<br>equilibrium.
<br>
<br>>  I approach the Law/Principle of
<br>>Least Effort from the perspective of my work on syntactic blends, and from
<br>>that work it seemed clear to me that in many instances the above
<br>>Law/Principle is violated by blends.
<br>
<br>Right; I'd say that some blends are motivated by what I call the Q
<br>Principle (the hearer-based requirement of sufficiency of informative
<br>content, as opposed to the speaker-based least effort tendency reflecting
<br>what I call the R Principle).  That's what I think is going on, for
<br>instance, in those cases of redundant affixation we were discussing a few
<br>weeks back (unthaw, dissever, reduplicate, irregardless), and I think it
<br>operates in some of your examples.  English "pleonastic negation", as in 'I
<br>miss not seeing you around anymore', and negative concord in general would
<br>reflect this tendency for clarity over economy (as would other varieties of
<br>concord or agreement).  In many cases, least effort is violated in parole
<br>while maintained in langue, the result being that these duplications are
<br>seen as errors, as in your "simultanously at the same time" or
<br>"although...but" examples.
<br>
<br>
<br>>   To take just a few examples.  There's French  "pleonastic ne," which as
<br>>far as I can tell adds nothing to the content of the message and yet takes
<br>>additional effort, however minimal, e.g.: Il est plus riche que je ne
<br>>pensais. (Literally: He's richer than I didn't think.")
<br>>
<br>>   Secondly, I once heard someone say: "simultaneously at the same
<br>>time"--without his intending  any special emphasis. I've also heard  "It's
<br>>full up," whereas "full" alone would suffice.
<br>>
<br>Expressivity in the latter case, I'd think.  "Full up" is more emphatic
<br>than just plain "full".  Here's Martinet (1962: 140): "The importance of
<br>redundancy does not, of course, invalidate the concept of language economy,
<br>but reminds us of its complexity."  Sounds like hand-waving, to be sure,
<br>but the point is that each case has to be investigated to determine the
<br>nature and force of the interacting principles.  The "ne" of French
<br>embracing negation is a particularly interesting case, because it
<br>represents an intermediate stage in the evolution of negative expression as
<br>described by Jespersen (1917) and others (I have a Zipfian-type account of
<br>this in Chapter 7 of my Natural History of Negation).  What happens in
<br>"Jespersen's Cycle" is the following:  a preverbal negative marker weakens
<br>for (least-effort-based) phonological reasons until it becomes a proclitic,
<br>too negligible (according to the Q Principle) to serve as the sole
<br>indicator of negative force, and it begins to be reinforced by a
<br>post-verbal indefinite or negative polarity marker of minimal quantity,
<br>either of which may spread from a particular context to other verbal frames
<br>(as with Eng. 'not' < 'ne-wiht' [meaning 'no thing/creature'; cf. not a
<br>whit] or Fr. 'pas' [lit. 'step', orig. with motion verbs:  'I didn't walk a
<br>step']).  (Jespersen:  'The incongruity between the notional importance and
<br>the formal insignificance of the negative may then cause the speaker to add
<br>something to make the sense perfectly clear to the hearer'--as they'd put
<br>it in the Oval Office,  "Let me make this perfectly clear:  I ne knew it
<br>NOT!")  Eventually, this reinforcer, with or without incorporated
<br>concordial negation, takes on the primary role of negator, supplanting the
<br>phonetically weakened proclitic, which is now seen as redundant or
<br>pleonastic.  Thus the (temporary) persistence of the "embracing" ne...pas
<br>negation of French, like its counterparts in Middle English and Middle
<br>Dutch, reflects a half-way house in the dialectic between a least-effort
<br>(R-based) tendency toward weakening and simplification and an
<br>information-preserving (Q-based) tendency toward (re)strengthening.  The
<br>proclitic eventually disappears, as happened in English and Dutch and is
<br>happening in colloquial French.  The final stage in the process may be a
<br>movement of the new post-verbal negator to an earlier position before the
<br>verb, to satisfy the "Neg-First" tendency to signal negation as early in
<br>the utterance as possible.  This, of course, makes it a candidate for later
<br>procliticization (cf. "I d'know") and the cycle begins again.
<br>
<br>Larry
<br>