A note on the emotive origins of syntax
In this note, I ask what (if any) linguistic means above the word level might have already been in place before
our full-blown syntactic capacity involving recursive Merge has evolved. I argue that the ‘pre-Merge era’ might have been
characterized by paratactic emotive utterances comparable to root small clauses in modern languages. At the end of this
contribution, this new emotive perspective on so-called ‘living linguistic fossils’ is extended to the core syntactic property of
displacement, which features an augmentation strategy in the form of multiple copies that is reminiscent of doubling and
reduplication processes involved in conveying expressive meaning components.
Article outline
- 1.The emotive use as a secondary use of language
- 2.The paratactic stage and its connection to the emotive use of language
- 2.1Small clauses as ‘living fossils’
- 2.2The emotive use as the primary use of small clauses
- 3.Conclusion and outlook
- Notes
-
References
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