Sterre Leufkens (Utrecht University)

(Why) do all languages have redundancy? 

It is often claimed that all languages of the world exhibit syntagmatic redundancy, i.e. repeated marking of information in a single phrase or clause, for instance in the form of subject-verb agreement. Supposedly, redundancy would be so omnipresent because it offers communicative, perceptual and acquisitional advantages. However, none of these claims are grounded in typological or psycholinguistic evidence. Is redundancy really such a fundamental characteristic of language? What kind of communicative effects does it have in genealogically distinct languages, and can such effects be related to the cross-linguistic distribution of redundancy phenomena?

In my talk I will present the findings of a typological enquiry into four concord phenomena, i.e. overlapping information in the combination of a lexical and a grammatical element:

1. Argument concord (lexical argument expression + argument marking on the predicate)
2. Negative concord (negative quantifier + grammatical negation marking)
3. Temporal concord (temporal adverb + tense marking)
4. Plural concord (>1 numeral + plural marking)

I will demonstrate that some of these phenomena are truly universal, while others are cross-linguistically less common. To explain the apparent restrictions on some types of redundancy, I will look into the different communicative effects of the concord phenomena under consideration, and go into their diachrony.