Linguistics%20001:%20Linguistic%20Typology

1
Linguistics 001 Linguistic Typology

• Part II Further aspects of Typology

2
Recall that

• We are examining some the various ways in which
  languages differ
• In the background, the question is how these
  differences can be reconciled with the idea that
  there is an innate aspect of language
• In our final examples from the last lecture, we
  began looking at syntactic typology and word order

3
Review, cont.

• We introduced in the abstract some different
  types of variation
• Whether a language has a fixed word-order or not
• What the fixed word-order of the language is in
  the first place
• Whether there have to be subject and object Noun
  Phrases in the first place
• Our illustration concentrated on the first type,
  whether or not a language allows free word order

4
Todays topics

• Word order typology, continued
• Ergativity
• Morphology Templates

5
Comparison

• English
• The man saw the vessel. (SVO)
• Mapudungun
• All six possibilities of linear order are
  grammatical
• The idea was that in Mapudungun, information
  about subject, object etc. is found in the verbal
  morphology

6
Word Orders

• In addition to allowing SVO sentences, all of the
  other possible arrangements are grammatical as
  well
• INche metawe pefin. SOV
• Metawe iNche pefin. OSV
• Metawe pefin iNche OVS
• Pefin metawe iNche VOS
• Pefin iNche metawe VSO

7
Agreement and Free Word Order

• How are the grammatical roles of these noun
  phrases determined?
• Above the verb is given as
• pefin
• This verb actually has a lot of information in
  it
• Pe-fi-n
• See-Object.Marker-1sS
• That is, the verb says that the subject is first
  person singular, and that there is a third person
  object.
• Thus the different word orders can be understood
  as expressing the same basic proposition

8
Free Word Order and Case

• Another type of language that has free word order
  shows case morphology.
• Consider the following forms of the noun femina
  woman in Latin (the colon indicates vowel
  length)
• Singular Plural
• Nom. femina feminae
• Acc. feminam feminas
• Dat. feminae feminis
• Gen. feminae feminarum
• Abl. femina feminis
• Note that the ends of these words indicate the
  grammatical role. On nouns, such morphemes are
  called case morphemes

9
Case, continued

• This means that in Latin, where the word order is
  relatively free, the role that a particular NP
  plays is encoded on that that NP
• Femina canem videt.
• woman-NOM dog-ACC sees
• The woman sees the dog
• Canem femina videt.
• Videt canem femina.
• .

10
Nouns and Verbs

• Whatever order the words may appear in, the Nouns
  (NPs), as long as the case marking is the same
  the basic semantics is the same.
• The information is not entirely marked in the
  verb, which conveys person, number, tense, but
  not the full message about the event
• The verb here is see, marked for 3s and present
  tense. Both dog and woman are 3s
• Latin probably has a basic word order (SOV),
  but uses these variants freely to emphasize or
  deemphasize different parts of the sentence
  (Mapudungun too probably)

11
Back to basic word orders

• As we discussed above, there are some languages
  that do not allow free word order
• Languages (of this type) tend to display a basic
  word order, which is used in unmarked
  circumstances
• Among these, there are again differences in terms
  of what order is employed

12
Possibilities/Illustrations

• SVO
• English The man ate the apple.
• SOV (remember Hindi in the last class)
• Turkish
• Hasan öküz-ü ald1.
• Hasan ox-ACC bought.
• In these two types, what differs is the relative
  position of the verb and the object NP
• Remember that a simple way of thinking of this
  was that the tree structures are the same, with
  the order of V and the NP object reversed

13
Remember

• S
• NP AuxP
• Rahul VP Aux
• NP V had
• the book read
• This is the Hindi version. Look carefully at what
  has changed.

14
VOS

• Basic VOS Word Order
• Malagasy (spoken in Madagascar)
• Nahita ny mpianatra ny vehivavy
• saw the student the woman
• The woman saw the student
• VOS doesnt provide the same challenge as VSO,
  which we discussed last time (draw the tree)
• At the same time, it might be the case that this
  isnt just the subject mirror image of SVO

15
Object-initial?

• While the above patterns are clearly attested,
  orders in which the object appears first are hard
  to find
• One example of OVS
• Hixkaryana (Carib, N. Brazil)
• Toto yahosIye kamara.
• man grab jaguar
• The jaguar grabbed the man
• In many cases the situation is complicated
  because of what it means to have a basic word
  order in the first place (e.g. you can get OVS
  order in lots of languages the question is, is
  this basic or not)

16
Frequencies

• Some studies take samples of languages and count
  the percentages of these types (e.g. Mallinson
  and Blake 1981)
• SOV 41
• SVO 35
• VSO 9
• VOS 2
• OVS 1
• OSV ??
• While such numbers give us an idea of whats out
  there, it is not clear what else we can learn
  from them, given that the samples are reflections
  of non-linguistic factors (history)

17
Verb-initial orders VSO

• VSO
• Welsh
• Lladdodd y ddraig y dyn.
• killed the dragon the man
• The dragon killed the man.
• Question Can this be derived as
  straight-forwardly as SVO/SOV, where we just
  change the order of the VP?

18
Questions

• Specifically can we relinearize the SVO tree
  to yield the VSO tree?
• Answer Not without crossing lines
• If we do not want to cross lines, then something
  additional must be happening in VSO languages.

19
That is

• Consider
• S
• NP VP
• The man V NP
• killed the dragon

20
English questions

• Remember, English is
• S (AUX) V O
• John didnt eat the apples
• But in questions, the AUX is moved to a position
  that precedes the subject
• Didnt John t eat eat apples?
• The same type of solution can be applied to Welsh
  (and VSO generally)

21
Ergativity An Introduction

• Weve seen cases like Nominative and
  Accusative e.g.
• I saw him.
• I nominative case form of 1st singular
• Him accusative case form of 3rd singular
• Even in English, where we dont see it very often
  (only in pronouns), we have the following
  pattern
• Subject Nominative case
• Object Accusative case
• Then we can talk about what is wrong with
• Me saw he.
• Us ate.

22
More Case

• As we saw earlier, some languages like Latin mark
  their nouns for different cases more thoroughly
• Reviewing, note that we can have
• Femina poetam videt.
• woman-NOM poet-ACC see-3s
• The woman sees the soldier
• Any order of these words means the same thing

23
A simple point

• Heres an additional point about English and
  Latin
• The subject of an intransitive verb is marked
  with the same case as the subject of a transitive
  verb
• I ate/I saw him.
• Femina poetam videt/Femina cantat
• (as on previous) woman-NOM sings

24
Continuing

• Although English has relatively little
  morphology, on pronouns, there are distinctions
• I saw him Me saw him.
• He saw I He saw me.
• I ran Me ran
• Notice that the subject of an intransitive and
  the subject of a transitive are identical
  objects of transitives are distinct
• Obvious, right? Not really, because not all
  languages work that way.

25
Illustration

• Dyirbal (spoken in Australia)
• Intransitive
• Numa banaga-nYu
• father-ABS return-NONFUT
• father returned
• Transitive
• yabu-Ngu numa bura-n
• mother-ERG father-ABS see-NONFUT
• Mother saw father
• Compare
• Numa-Ngu Yabu bura-n father saw mother
• Important point numa father is in the same
  case in the first two examples
• Follow up The special case in the transitive
  is on yabu mother

26
Terminology

• The cases in languages like Dyirbal (there are
  many) have different names from nominative and
  accusative
• Subject of Intrans/Object of Trans Absolutive
• Subject of Transitive Ergative
• This kind of case pattern is often referred to as
  Ergative(-Absolutive)

27
Pattern

• One way of visualizing this is as follows
• Abbreviations
• NOM nominative
• ACC accusative
• ERG ergative
• ABS absolutive
• Two types
• Type 1 Type 2
• Subj/Trans NOM ERG
• Subj/Intrans NOM ABS
• Obj/Trans ACC ABS

So type 1 nominative-accusative language, type
2 ergative-absolutive language
28
Morphological Patterns

• Recall that in our discussion of morphology we
  examined cases in which discrete pieces are added
  to words
• I walk he/she/it walk-s
• John walk-ed to the store
• I have walk-ed a lot this week.

29
The range of the pattern

• In languages like English, adding morphemes like
  this performs many different functions
• Example write
• write write-s writ-er
• writ-ing writ-ing-s

30
At the same time

• We also find cases where there is no overt
  additional affix
• Past tense wrote
• This is the pattern in other cases
• Sing sang sung
• Ring rang rung

31
Stem-changing

• The non-affixal morphological patterns that we
  see in English are restricted in scope
• For the most part, they involve a change to the
  vowel found in the stem sing, sang
• Otherwise, there is no complex rearrangement of
  the stem form

32
Example Templatic morphology

• In other languages- we will illustrate with
  Arabic below- the patterns of stem-changing are
  quite complex
• Arabic uses abstract sequences of consonants and
  vowels to express morphological differences
• These changes function in conjunction with
  prefixes and suffixes

33
Examples

• The basic unit in Arabic (and other Semitic
  languages) is a root that consists of three
  consonants
• ktb write
• The basic, active form of verbs shows the
  following template
• CVCVC
• In general, a template is an abstract pattern
  that guides a particular formation or operation
• There are many such templates

34
Examples

• In addition to knowing the consonants ktb for
  this Root, the vowels differ by Tense (and active
  vs. passive)
• The past
• katab-tu i wrote
• katab-a he wrote
• katab-at she wrote
• katab-uu they(m) wrote
• katab-na they(f) wrote

35
Further examples

• While the active (perfective) above has the form
  CVCVC, another type, the imperfective, has the
  form
• aCCuC
• So
• -aktub-u I write
• y-aktub-u he writes
• t-aktub-u she writes
• Etc.