The Pragmatic Nature of Grammatical Categories

This paper promotes the hypothesis that central grammatical categories must be analysed as pragmatic rather than semantic entities, in order to explain their seemingly redundant typological distribution. A case is made of the relatively complex English past tense system versus the single Russian past tense, and it is shown how the distinctions within the former system can be analysed in terms of pragmatic features like topic and focus, and how it thus can be explained how Russian may do with just a single past tense, without this leading to a communicative asymmetry between Russian and English. 1 The pragmatic nature of grammatical categories The topic of this paper is a seemingly trivial linguistic fact, but it has strong implications for linguistic description: It is the fact that a grammatical category may be compulsory in one language, but absent in another. Compare, for instance, the distinction between the past tense system in English and that of Russian. Whereas English has several tense forms in the past – e.g. the perfect, the preterit and the pluperfect – Russian has only one. This means that the Russian past tense sentence in (1) has three possible English translations: (1) Ja kupi-l nov-uju kurtk-u. I buy.PEF-PST.M.S new-ACC.F jacket-ACC2 'I have bought a new jacket.' / 'I bought a new jacket.' / 'I had bought a new jacket.' This seems trivial, because is not the English past tense system just another case of language redundancy? Most marking of grammatical categories seems to be 1 The fact that Russian makes a distinction between perfective and imperfective aspect, is irrelevant to the asymmetry between the English and the Russian tense systems. A past tense imperfective verb in Russian would have the same threefold translational possibility in English. 2 The abbreviations found in the glosses are explained at the end of the paper.