The Genesis of Syntactic Complexity: Diachrony, Ontogeny, Neuro-Cognition, Evolution by Talmy Givón (review)

In the volume under review, Talmy Givón, one of the foremost pioneers of functionalist linguistics, pulls together his interest and expertise in language documentation, diachrony, language acquisition, evolution, and neurocognition and presents a multidisciplinary case for a gradual, functional-adaptive account of the genesis of syntactic complexity in human communication. In this review, I first provide a chapter-by-chapter summary, followed by my general evaluation of the book as well as discussions of some more specific issues that require attention.

The book consists of twelve chapters grouped into four parts, of which part 1 discusses the theoretical-methodological background. In chapter 1, “Complexity: An Overview” (pp. 3–18), Givón’s motivation is revealed to be the refutation of Hauser, Chomsky, and Fitch’s (2002) claims that recursion is the key design feature of language and that it evolved nongradually and nonadaptively. Instead of presenting a detailed critique, Givón’s plan is to argue for an alternative, functional-adaptive scenario for the evolution of complex syntax. The notion “complexity” is defined as increased hierarchic organization of a system (see Simon 1962) and some shared trends in ontogeny, diachrony, and evolution are presented, as well as possible correlations of syntactic complexity, cognitive representations, and the brain loci for language processing.

Chapter 2, “The Adaptive Approach to Grammar” (pp. 19–38), presents Givón’s general ideas about the purpose and motivation for grammar in human communication. In Givón’s view, language added two communicative codes, lexicon and grammar, to a preexisting cognitive representation system, and these new codes arose as an adaptive response to changes in communicative ecology (pp. 34–37). As for methodology, Givón’s approach to linguistic analysis is discourse-pragmatic: structures are studied in their natural communicative context and the focus is on communicative intent in discourse rather than on event frames of isolated clauses. Givón then uses discourse context as a methodological heuristic to probe the shifting mental states of the interlocutors, the representation of which, known as “theory of mind” in cognitive neuroscience, is taken as the central function of, as well as the main adaptive motivation for, grammar (pp. 28–33).

Part 2 consists of three chapters on the diachrony of complex syntax. In chapter 3, “The Diachrony of Grammar” (pp. 41–60), Givón argues for the diachronic roots of grammar and their parallels with evolution. He sees universals as processes that shape the development of synchronic structural traits (the Greenbergian approach) rather than as observable traits attested in all languages (the Chomskyan approach) (pp. 41–45). Givón uses passives to illustrate how synchronic types tend to resemble their source constructions, at least in the early stages of change, and how approaching structural diversity functionally can enable the analyst to reduce structural diversity to a handful of major types. Some specific issues pertaining to diachronic reconstruction, the genesis of morphology, and the main differences between diachrony and evolution (e.g., cultural vs. genetic transmission) are also discussed.

In chapter 4, “Multiple Routes to Clause Union: The Diachrony of Complex Verb Phrases” (pp. 61–96), Givón proposes that complex predicates, defined as containing multiple lexical predicates under the same intonation contour (p. 62), develop through two main diachronic pathways. First, embedding involves a change from a paratactic combination of main clause with complement clause under separate intonation contours (e.g., She said: “He will leave later”) to a combination of main clause with embedded complement clause under the same intonation contour (e.g., She said that he might leave later) (p. 65). Second, chaining involves a change from a paratactic combination of main clause with a chained complement clause under separate intonation contours to a serialverb clause. Clause union is then argued to be a matter of degree and to depend on the source construction. Finiteness is defined as a property of the whole clause...