Language Typology and Rhetorics

by Walter Bisang

Language typologists try to find out to what extent languages are structurally different and where they follow universal patterns and they try to provide functional explanations for their findings, that is, motivations derived from the function(s) of language in its actual use.
In the present paper, I shall illustrate how particular typological properties existing in a given language can be used for rhetoric purposes and how it is systematically impossible to translate the same rhetoric effect(s) into a language that lacks that property. The languages I shall look at will be Chinese and Japanese. The properties to be presented will be:
-         Transcategoriality. In Late Archaic Chinese (5th - 3rd century B.C.) words are not determined in the lexicon for word class. Thus, words denoting objects canoccur in the syntactic positions for nouns or verbs.
Nevertheless, there are certain stereotypes which determine clear-cut preferences, but these preferences can be flouted for rhetorical purposes.
-         Indeterminateness or the lack of obligatory grammatical categories:
If a language is not forced to mark any grammatical category (such as number, tense or person in English), a speaker can make rhetorical use of its indeterminateness by not making clear from what perspective a text is presented. I shall present a text from Modern Standard Chinese.
-         Converbs are verb forms that are specialized for clause combining, but cannot form a sentence on their own, i.e. they cannot occur as main predicates of independent clauses. Converbs are used to form individual states of affairs into discourse units beyond the sentence, that is, into paragraphs. An example from Japanese will show how converbs are used to create textual coherence and how they maintain the same perspective on a whole sequence of states of affairs.
-         Topic markers are used to perspectivize a text. We shall see in a text from Japanese how topic markers can be used to set the scene of a novel with its main protagonists. It is almost impossible to translate this effect into a European language.

I shall conclude my paper with some more general statements on the relation between typology and rhetorics and I hope that the discussion will bring up more insights.

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