HUMSS - Laura Becker

Zero marking in morphology: Driven by efficiency or a by-product of other processes?

It has long been known that more frequent grammatical expressions tend to be shorter than functionally equivalent but less grammatical frequent forms. The fact that one value of a grammatical feature, e.g. third person singular, can be left zero-marked in opposition to the other value(s), e.g. first and second persons, has also been related to frequency and efficiency in the typological literature (cf. the example from Ch’ol below). I will call this the efficiency account. However, it has been argued that many of the phenomena accounted for by efficiency or result-driven adaptation should rather be viewed as independent consequences of various processes of grammaticalization or language change in general instead of an attractor state that languages eventually develop towards. I will call this the by-product account. The goal of this presentation is to shed more light on the potential explanations for crosslinguistic trends of zero marking. I will focus on zero marking in verbal person indexing, using a sample of 200 languages distributed across 6 macro areas. After providing a quantitative overview of the crosslinguistic patterns concerning zero marking, I will discuss what evidence we have for the efficiency account and the by-product account regarding zero marking in person indexing.