You miss my point. Wherever you look in language, semantically there is a paucity of forms. Some language's "grammars" show paucity in different areas, but there is nevertheless, as I stated above, generalisation, economy, polysemy, and conceptual grouping occurring commonly in language. Just how this is played out varies from one language to the next. It is the tension between, to use Haiman's (2004) terminology, of "efficiency and complexity in grammars".
Archive powered by MHonArc 2.6.24.