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.
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 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 – Metawe iNche pefin – Metawe pefin iNche – Pefin metawe iNche – Pefin iNche metawe SOV OSV OVS VOS VSO 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): 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) 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: Subj/Trans Subj/Intrans Obj/Trans Type NOM NOM ACC Type ERG ABS ABS So type = “nominative-accusative language, type = ergative-absolutive language 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 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 Ring rang sung 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 stemchanging 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 ... ‘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... 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... 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: