Linguistics 001: 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 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

Today’s topics Word order typology, continued Ergativity Morphology: Templates…

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

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 iNcheOVS –Pefin metawe iNcheVOS –Pefin iNche metaweVSO

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

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): SingularPlural Nom.feminafeminae Acc.feminamfemina:s Dat.feminaefemini:s Gen.feminaefemina: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

Remember… S NP AuxP Rahul VP Aux NP V “had” 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): –SOV: 41% –SVO: 35% –VSO: 9% –VOS: 2% –OVS: 1% –OSV: ?? While such numbers give us an idea of what’s out there, it is not clear what else we can learn from them, given that the samples are reflections of non-linguistic factors (history)

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.

That is… Consider: S NPVP The man VNP killed the dragon

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)

Ergativity: An Introduction We’ve 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 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.

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

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.

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’

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)

Pattern One way of visualizing this is as follows –Abbreviations: NOM = nominative ACC = accusative ERG = ergative ABS = absolutive Two types: Type 1Type 2 Subj/TransNOMERG Subj/IntransNOMABS Obj/TransACCABS 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: I walkhe/she/it walk-s 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 writewrite-swrit-er writ-ingwrit-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 sangsung 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 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

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

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.