Pragmatics and the evolution of syntax
pp. 479-494
in: Jan Wind, Brunetto Chiarelli, Bernard Bichakjian, Alberto Nocentini, Abraham Jonker (eds), Language origin, Berlin, Springer, 1992Abstract
Pragmatics is presented as comprising the speaker's personal contribution to the composition of the utterance; his attitude towards its content; his communicative intentions in making the utterance, and how it is intended to be taken by the hearer; and the "anchoring" of his discourse on the situation of dialogue.This material reveals various degrees of integration into sentence structure. Some of it remains unincorporated, whereas at the other extreme, some of it is reanalysed to provide logical form. As it becomes incorporated, pragmatic material may provide sentential features which "control" the syntax of sentence structures. To support this notion, three main types of sentence are looked at: the "bipartite" pattern, narrative, and the "unitary" pattern. These types are considered as being feature-controlled; and these features turn out to be pragmatically based. In this way, it is proposed that a good deal of syntax has a pragmated underpinnig.The degree of incorporation of the pragmatic material is presented as following a sequence. This sequence leads to greater communicative efficiency by reducing the inferential contents of utterances until the goal of logical form is achieved, and may thus be envisaged as an evolutionary sequence. A speculative summary (Table 1) of that sequence is offered.