The Handbook of Discourse Analysis

Historical Discourse Analysis 147
2.2 From discourse to grammar/semantics
In 1979a, Givón argued for the following historical progression:
discourse > syntax > morphology > morphophonemics > zero 12
He saw the first two steps as motivated primarily by communicative needs and the
last two by phonological attrition. In discussions of this progression, interest has
focused on the change from looser, conjoined, paratactic constructions to more tightly
bound subordinated constructions, e.g. from finite clause to nonfinite complement,
from topic clause to relative clause, and so on; other examples of this progression
(with an emphasis on the initial discourse > syntax step) include the change from
topic to subject marking or from old/new information marking to case functions.
The strong interpretation of Givón’s now widely cited progression, which is probably
not tenable, is that all syntax results from the fossilization of original discourse
forms. A weaker interpretation – that what begins as a discourse strategy may sometimes
be reanalyzed as syntax – has provided fruitful means of approaching some
historical developments. For example, Burridge (1995) argues that in Pennsylvania
German, the dative of possession, which begins as a rhetorical device for promoting
personal involvement, develops into the regular syntactic marker of possession, displacing
the original possessive genitive; furthermore, the semantic shift involves a
conversational implicature from close relationship to possession. Faarlund (1985, 1989)
sees the rise of an obligatory subject with specific syntactic properties from Old Norse
to Modern Norwegian as the result of a topicalization rule moving the NP which is
not most highly ranked semantically (but which is most highly ranked thematically)
to the left; the moved NP then acquires the grammatical function of subject. Wiegand
(1982, 1987) argues that the OE construction for + demonstrative pronoun (+ ^e) begins
as a pragmatic indicator of cohesion between two units of discourse, with the demonstrative
indexing the cause. As case marking is lost in ME, the demonstrative is no
longer analyzable as a deictic, and the construction is reanalyzed as a simple conjunction.
König (1992) suggests that disjunctive (whether), quantificational (what/where/
however), and scalar (even) conditionals in English and German still show evidence of
deriving from a juxtaposed or loosely connected clause.
3 Diachronically Oriented Discourse Analysis
The third type of historical discourse analysis is one which examines the evolution of
discourse marking over time, whether focusing on the development of individual
discourse markers or on changes in systems of discourse marking. 13
3.1 The origin and development of discourse markers
A number of questions arise in the study of the development of discourse markers: