Commentary on Hengeveld & van Lier - The Added Value of the Connectivity Hypothesis for the Map of Parts of Speech
Caterina Mauri · Linguistic Discovery · 2010
Hengeveld and van Lier (2010) propose an interesting and convincing two-dimensional map for parts of speech (PoS), which is highly predictive and fruitfully integrates implicational hierarchies into a unified overall account that is in turn implicational in nature and provides a geometrical visualization of the respective hierarchical organization of the functions at play.The authors label their model implicational map rather than semantic map because it deals with analytical primitives which are not semantic in nature, but rather belong to a different domain of grammar.However, their model "can be related in several ways to the general methodology of semantic maps" (Hengeveld and van Lier 2010: section 6), and they highlight three respects in which the implicational map of PoS can push the theory of semantic maps a step further: it shows (i) that the analytical primitives can consist of propositional functions, (ii) that semantic maps may have a high predictive power if they include a "hierarchy of hierarchies" like the one at issue, (iii) that, if semantic maps are implicational in nature, they can make predictions about the frequency with which specified constructions for the mapped functions are in fact attested across languages.However, Hengeveld and van Lier do not consider a crucial ingredient of semantic map methodology, namely what Croft (2003:134) labels the Semantic Map Connectivity Hypothesis.As Croft and Poole (2008:4) argue, all possible semantic maps are constrained by the principle laid out in the Connectivity Hypothesis, according to which "any relevant language-specific and/or construction-specific category should map onto a connected region in conceptual space" (Croft 2003:134), or, in Haspelmath"s (2003: sec.2) terms, "the functions must be arranged in such a way that all multifunctional grams can occupy a contiguous area on the map".The purpose of this brief comment is to point out that the two-dimensional implicational map proposed by Hengeveld and van Lier could be even more predictive if the Connectivity Hypothesis was taken into account, because this additional constraint would increase the accuracy of the model (i.e.fine-tunes whether it excludes categories which are not attested).This will in turn highlight the added value of construing the four propositional functions at issue as interconnected grams on a map, i.e. including in the analysis the implicational constraints pertaining to semantic maps 1 (such as the Connectivity Hypothesis), besides organizing the different implicational universals into a hierarchical net.The authors formulate three implicational constraints that underlie the unified implicational map of PoS described in their paper (Hengeveld and van Lier 2010: sec.4): (i) Predication ⊂ Reference, (ii) Head ⊂ Modifier, (iii) ((Predication/Reference) ⊂ (Head/Modifier)).