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

Todays 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 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
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)

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 kz- 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

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 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

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 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)

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:

NP VP

The man V NP
killed the dragon

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)

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.

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
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

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 1 Type 2 So type 1 =
Subj/Trans NOM ERG nominative-accusative
language, type 2 =
Subj/Intrans NOM ABS ergative-absolutive
Obj/Trans ACC ABS 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 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 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.