Generative and nongenerative diversity linguists do not often engage in debates on general issues, but the topic of word-classes (nouns, verbs and adjectives) seems to be an area where some kind of dialogue seems to be not impossible (cf. Baker 2003, Croft 2009, and the 2005 LSA Institute class taught jointly by Baker and Croft, presenting their contrasting approaches to the students). Now the open-peer-commentary journal Theoretical Linguistics has published a very nice target article on word-classes in Chamorro by Sandy Chung (Chung 2012a), with commentaries by various linguists, including three nongenerativists (Bill Croft, Eva van Lier, and myself). Continue reading
Category Archives: Article comments
Panchronic semantics
In historical linguistics, it is obvious that the general principles of phonetic changes (which some, following Haudricourt, call ‘Panchronic Phonology’) are much better understood than those operating in morphology, and that historical morphology is generally better understood than historical syntax (a field which is however undergoing important developments in recent times with articles such as Eythorsson and Barðdal 2005).
Nouns are prosodically privileged over verbs
At the recent LIPP Symposium on parts of speech in Munich, one of the most interesting papers was Jennifer L. Smith’s paper on “Parts of speech in phonology” (see also Smith 2011). She examines 20 languages from 11 families and finds that in almost all cases where nouns, verbs and adjectives behave differently phonologically, the nouns have more phonological contrasts than adjectives, and these in turn have more contrasts than verbs. A well-known example is Spanish, where stress is contrastive in nouns (cf. 1a-b) and adjectives, but verbs show uniform stress for all verb classes. Continue reading
Should linguistic diversity be conserved like biodiversity?
This is not a question that Gorenflo et al. (2012) ask in their widely publicized PNAS article on the “co-occurrence of linguistic and biological diversity”. They seem to subtly presuppose a positive answer, but one wonders about the precise implications of this.
The contribution appeared as a regular scientific paper in the high-profile Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA, and it contains the usual trappings of such a paper: maps, charts and statistics. Like many PNAS papers on readily accessible topics, it was widely reported on in the media (e.g. here and here). But the major finding is neither new, nor do the authors have an explanation: Continue reading
Need and have
In a recent article, Harves & Kayne (2012: 120-121) proposed the following universal generalization:
(1) “All languages that have a transitive verb corresponding to need have an overt verb expressing predicative possession […] such that the possessor has nominative case and the possessee is a direct object (with accusative case and no preposition).”
The authors introduce the terms “H-languages” an “B-languages” for classifying languages as regards to their predicative possession constructions. H-languages have a transitive verb meaning ‘to have’ where the possessor is treated as the agent of the verb, while B-languages use a construction with a verb ‘to be, to exist’ and the agent is marked with oblique case. Continue reading
Expressing ontological categories in Brazilian languages and elsewhere
The paper by Hengeveld et al. (2012) in Functions of Language on “Semantic categories in the indigenous languages of Brazil” was probably written by Kees Hengeveld (with his characteristically clear style), but there are many “al.”: eleven additional coauthors! So it beats Bickel et al. (2007), which with its nine coauthors seems to be the record for papers in Language so far. In the natural sciences, of course, papers with many authors are now commonplace (sometimes even with hundreds of authors), so linguistics seems to be catching up with a wider trend. Continue reading
How to talk about role coding: cases and index-sets, nominative/accusative, subject/object, agent/patient
As an Athabaskanist working in Russia, Andrej Kibrik has long been interested in the head-marking/dependent-marking typology: Athapaskan languages mark the major clause roles by person prefixes on the verb, whereas the languages of Russia (Uralic, Turkic, Nakh-Daghestanian, etc.) almost all show extensive case-marking and limited person-indexing. In Kibrik (2012) (a paper that was originally presented at the LENCA conference in Kazan), he now urges linguists working on head-marking languages to draw the consequences from the parallelism between head and dependent marking and to use terminology familiar from case systems, i.e. “nominative/accusative” and “ergative/absolutive”, rather than “subject/object” or “agent/patient”.
Creoles are paradigmatically simplified but may otherwise be complex
For a long time, linguists have had the impression that creoles are particularly simple, but a precise and readily testable formulation of this insight has been difficult to come by. Important contributions to the recent debate include McWhorter (2001), Parkvall (2008) and Bakker et al. (2011). The latter two cite a lot of cross-linguistic data that will convince many quantitatively minded readers. But Good (2012) advances the debate in a different way, by taking apart the seemingly simple notion of “simplicity”. That complexity (and its converse, simplicity) can be understood in different ways should be clear, because these are simply words of the English language, not well-defined technical terms. Continue reading
A special kind of transitivity marking in Kerinci Malay
Like other Western Austronesian languages, Malay is well-known for its symmetrical voice system, but in this paper, McKinnon et al. (2011) report on something quite different in a little known Malay variety, Kerinci Malay, spoken in a valley near Mount Kerinci, the highest volcano of Indonesia. Kerinci has a distinction between an Absolute form and an Objective form for every transitive verb, e.g.
| Absolute | Objective | |
|---|---|---|
| maka | makən | eat |
| kihat | kihɨt | pull out |
| kɟɨ | kɟɨw | chase |