Linguistics 001: Linguistic Typology

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. Today’s 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 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

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 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

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 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)

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 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)

21. 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.

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 • 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

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 NOMABS 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.