Questioning Theoretical Primitives in Linguistic Inquiry

studies in functional and structural linguistics 76 Questioning Theoretical Primitives in Linguistic Inquiry edited by Naomi L. Shin Daniel Erker John Benjamins Publishing Company Questioning Theoretical Primitives in Linguistic Inquiry Studies in Functional and Structural Linguistics (SFSL) issn 1385-7916 Taking the broadest and most general definitions of the terms functional and structural, this series aims to present linguistic and interdisciplinary research that relates language structure – at any level of analysis from phonology to discourse – to broader functional considerations, whether cognitive, communicative, pragmatic or sociocultural. Preference will be given to studies that focus on data from actual discourse, whether speech, writing or other nonvocal medium. The series was formerly known as Linguistic & Literary Studies in Eastern Europe (LLSEE). For an overview of all books published in this series, please see http://benjamins.com/catalog/sfsl Founding Editor Honorary Editors John Odmark Eva Hajičová Petr Sgall Charles University Charles University General Editors Yishai Tobin Bob de Jonge Ben-Gurion University of the Negev Groningen University Editorial Board Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald James A. Matisoff La Trobe University University of California, Berkeley Joan L. Bybee Jim Miller University of New Mexico Emeritus, University of Edinburgh Ellen Contini-Morava Marianne Mithun University of Virginia University of California, at Santa Barbara Nicholas Evans Lawrence J. Raphael University of Melbourne CUNY and Adelphi University Victor A. Friedman Olga Mišeska Tomić University of Chicago Leiden University Anatoly Liberman Olga T. Yokoyama University of Minnesota UCLA Volume 76 Questioning Theoretical Primitives in Linguistic Inquiry Papers in honor of Ricardo Otheguy Edited by Naomi L. Shin and Daniel Erker Questioning Theoretical Primitives in Linguistic Inquiry Papers in honor of Ricardo Otheguy Edited by Naomi L. Shin University of New Mexico Daniel Erker Petr Sgall Boston University Charles University John Benjamins Publishing Company Amsterdam / Philadelphia TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of 8 the American National Standard for Information Sciences – Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.48-1984. doi 10.1075/sfsl.76 Cataloging-in-Publication Data available from Library of Congress: lccn 2018037084 (print) / 2018051225 (e-book) isbn 978 90 272 0167 6 (Hb) isbn 978 90 272 6334 6 (e-book) © 2018 – John Benjamins B.V. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any other means, without written permission from the publisher. John Benjamins Publishing Company · https://benjamins.com Table of contents First principles in linguistic inquiry 1 Daniel Erker and Naomi Shin Categories of grammar and categories of speech: When the quest for symmetry meets inherent variability 7 Shana Poplack Letter from Ricardo Otheguy to Shana Poplack 35 Variable grammars: Competence as a statistical abstraction from performance. Constructing theories from data 45 Gregory R. Guy Discovering structure: Person and accessibility 67 Catherine E. Travis and Rena Torres Cacoullos The justification of grammatical categories 91 Wallis Reid Spooky grammatical effects 133 Joseph Davis Ditransitives and the English System of Degree of Control: A Columbia School analysis 157 Nancy Stern LatinUs and linguistics: Complaints, conflicts, and contradictions – The anthro-political linguistics solution 189 Ana Celia Zentella Reviving the unicorn: Linguistic reconsiderations for the existence of Spanglish 209 Rachel Varra Bilingual acquisition: Difference or incompleteness? 245 Carmen Silva-Corvalán vi Questioning theoretical primitives in linguistic inquiry An incomplete disquisition against ‘incomplete acquisition’: With particular reference to changes in the distribution of the subjunctive in Spanish 269 Marcel den Dikken Index 291 First principles in linguistic inquiry Daniel Erker and Naomi Shin Boston University / University of New Mexico This book is a collection of papers dedicated to Ricardo Otheguy. The contributors to the volume, who rank among the leading scholars in linguistics, were encour- aged to imbue their writing with the characteristics that have defined Ricardo’s numerous contributions to the field: a commitment to clarity at the level of first principles, a penetrating skepticism towards presumed truths, and a mindfulness of the responsibility of linguists to foster public understanding of language. As his many students, collaborators, and colleagues can attest, these attributes have shaped Ricardo’s teaching, research, and professional interactions. This impression is not limited to those who know him personally, however, because Ricardo’s socially mindful, fiercely skeptical pursuit of clarity and truth on the topic of human language has its fullest articulation in his writing – from his very first publication to those currently under review. In 1973, Otheguy made his debut as a published scholar with a challenge to Germán de Granda, the leading proponent of the view that the Spanish of Africans in the colonial Antilles should be viewed as a creole. Otheguy was driven to write the paper not because he disagreed with Granda’s classification of habla bozal antil- lana as an Afro-Caribbean creole, but because he thought that Granda was “right for the wrong reasons” (Otheguy, 1973: p. 326). In an analytical tour de force, Otheguy reassessed Granda’s data, uncovering the phonological, morphological, and syntac- tic evidence he thought necessary to make a compelling case for the creole roots of the present day Spanish Caribbean. Forty two years later, in a 2015 paper written with Ofelía García and Wallis Reid, we find Otheguy engaged in a complementary pursuit, namely, critiquing a position he and his collaborators view as being wrong for the right reasons. In that paper, Otheguy et al. argue that code-switching is a fundamentally defective concept, even when used by those who rightly champion the linguistic behavior of multilinguals as masterful and virtuosic. This is because the idea itself rests upon two faulty assumptions, one built on top of the other. The first assumption is that named languages, whether described in terms of nation states or social groups, are coherent linguistic objects. The second assumption is that the minds of multilinguals contain https://doi.org/10.1075/sfsl.76.01erk © 2018 John Benjamins Publishing Company 2 Daniel Erker and Naomi Shin two (or more) named languages, hermetically sealed off from each other. Otheguy et al. dismantle each of these assumptions, reminding us that named languages can never successfully refer to the linguistic knowledge and behavior of individual language users. Instead, they can only meaningfully point to the social history of people and the groups to which they belong. With the named language off the table as an option for describing the linguistic content of human minds, the case for code-switching crumbles, as it no longer makes sense to talk about the alternation between two named linguistic systems. As an alternative, Ricardo, Ofelía, and Wallis endorse translanguaging, a concept that refocuses attention on individual language users and sees their linguistic behavior as a process of selecting features from a unitary repertoire, or idiolect. These younger and older Otheguys – the ones on display in these papers from 1973 and 2015 – are not identical to one another. As his career progressed, so did the degree of difficulty and the variety of the topics Ricardo engaged. The remark- ably broad range of challenging themes that he has written impactfully on is con- sistent with the fact that he has always eschewed a scholarly identity articulated in terms of named schools of linguistic thought. It is true that he wears well the hats of a Diverian, a dialectologist, a functionalist, and a variationist sociolinguist. Yet, while these elements are central to Ricardo’s intellectual style, they by no means exhaust it. Instead, they are better seen as familiar items in an even larger intellectual wardrobe, one from which the appropriate dress is selected on the basis of the scholarly climate that Ricardo needs to weather. This flexibility has made it possible for him to increase our understanding of a collection of topics that might other- wise seem disparate, e.g., the analytical value of traditional grammatical categories such as reflexive and subject (Otheguy, 2002), the variable pronominal behavior of Spanish speakers in New York City (Otheguy & Zentella, 2012), the linguistic and social coherence of Spanglish (Otheguy, 2009), and the utility of the notion of incompleteness in the context of language acquisition (2016), among others. Over time and across intellectual stylings, Ricardo’s work is bound by an un- wavering impulse to expose what has been taken for granted, to challenge it if need be, and to offer a course correction. More importantly, reading his work is to be reminded of the higher purpose of linguistics, which is the illumination of the human condition. With this clearly in mind, it is easier to appreciate the stakes of our work: getting the linguistics wrong amounts to getting people wrong. The real reason Ricardo took aim at Granda in 1973 was not to repair a faulty morphopho- nological analysis. It was to better represent the linguistic experiences of the people whose lives constitute the story of Spanish in the Caribbean. While the ire he directs towards

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