Linguistics typology Part II: Further aspects of Typology

Linguistics 001 Linguistic Typology Linguistics Linguistic Typology Part II Further aspects of Typology 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 Review, cont We introduced in the abstract some different types of variation Whether a l.

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

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

• The idea was that in Mapudungun,

information about subject, object etc is found in the verbal morphology

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

Agreement and Free Word

Order

• How are the grammatical roles of these noun phrases determined?

• Above the verb is given as

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 femina:s

Dat. feminae femini:s

Gen. feminae femina:rum

Abl. femina: femini:s

• Note that the ends of these words indicate the

grammatical role On nouns, such morphemes are

called case morphemes

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.

– ….

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)

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

Possibilities/Illustrations

• SVO:

– English: The man ate the apple

• SOV (remember Hindi in the last class):

– Turkish:

• Hasan öküz-ü ald 1.

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

the book read

This is the Hindi version Look carefully at what has changed.

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 doesn’t 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 isn’t just the “subject mirror image” of SVO

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)

Frequencies

• Some studies take samples of languages and count

the percentages of these types (e.g Mallinson and Blake 1981):

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?

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.

English questions…

• Remember, English is

– S (AUX) V O

– John didn’t eat the apples

• But in questions, the AUX is moved to a position that precedes the subject:

– Didn’t John t eat eat apples?

• The same type of solution can be

applied to Welsh (and VSO generally)

• I = nominative case form of 1st singular

• Him = accusative case form of 3rd singular

• Even in English, where we don’t 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

• 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

A simple point

• Here’s 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

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.

• 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’

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)

So type 1 =

“nominative-accusative language, type 2 =

ergative-absolutive language

Morphological Patterns

• Recall that in our discussion of

morphology we examined cases in which discrete pieces are added to words:

John walk-ed to the store

I have walk-ed a lot this week.

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

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

‘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

Example: Templatic

morphology

• In other languages- we will illustrate

with Arabic below- the patterns of changing are quite complex

stem-• Arabic uses abstract sequences of

consonants and vowels to express

morphological differences

• These changes function in conjunction with prefixes and suffixes

Examples

• The basic unit in Arabic (and other Semitic

languages) is a root that consists of three

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’

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.