Nouns and Iconicity of Distance: When Syntactic Proximity to the Noun Mirrors Semantic Closeness

This contribution examines semantico-cognitive aspects of the spatio-temporal distance between the noun and other constituents, both inside and outside the noun phrase. This paper argues that certain syntactic phenomena, namely constituency, a subset of the Greenbergian word order correlations, and scoping, i.e., placement of adnominal modifiers according to their scopal relations, can be attributed to diachronic developments driven by cognitive processes where speakers attempt to place together what belongs together semantically (‘iconicity of distance’). (Notice that in the current approach the category of Modifiers includes both lexical or phrasal members [e.g., adjectives, possessive NPs, relative clauses] as well as bound and free grammatical material [e.g., articles, demonstratives, inflectional number affixes].) The synchronic result of these historical processes was already captured by Behaghel’s first law (Deutsche Syntax / Band 4. Wortstellung, Periodenbau. Heidelberg: Winter, 1932: 4): “The principal law is this: that what belongs together mentally is also placed close together” (Das oberste Gesetz ist dieses, daß das geistig eng Zusammengehörige auch eng zusammengestellt wird). Three more specific ordering principles can be formulated on the basis of Behaghel’s first law: (1) the Principle of Domain Integrity, which can ultimately lead to the formation of hierarchically organized syntactic units (‘constituents’), (2) the Principle of Head Proximity, which may explain certain Greenbergian word order correlations, and (3) the Principle of Scope, which accounts for global ordering tendencies among adnominal modifiers in hierarchically structured noun phrases. It will be argued that these ordering principles are formal manifestations of a single cognitive, semantico-functional motivation or ‘diachronic force’ which is deemed to facilitate language processing: iconicity of distance, where “syntactic proximity mirrors semantic closeness” (Dyer, Integration Complexity and the Order of Cosisters. Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Universal Dependencies (UDW 2018). Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Brussels, October 31–November 4). Brussels, Belgium, November 1, 2018: 55). This type of iconicity is now widely recognized as a universal principle underlying language structure (Schultze-Berndt, Linguistics 60(3), 865–898, 2022). Notice, finally, that for a convincing presentation of the effects of three general ordering principles mentioned above (each of which crucially involves nouns), it will be necessary to go beyond the noun and also take into account aspects of the syntactic organization of noun phrases and clauses.