#language typology

[linguisticalities]

7 Things English Can’t Do (That Other Languages Can)

English, like any language, is capable of conveying complex ideas an emotions. Looking at the things English can't do is fun too, though.

[yuk-tepat]

Typology

You know what analytical/isolating, agglutinative, and fusional languages are, I presume. You’ve heard about heads and dependents and word-orders, you can tell the difference between head-initial and head-final. You know what SOV, SVO, VSO, VOS, OVS, and OSV mean, and which ones like prepositions and which ones like postpositions. Maybe you know what an ergative language is. Is that all? What else do you know about your language? Some things to think  about:

Does your language have vowel harmony? OK, but does it have consonant harmony?

What restrictions does it place on the shape of roots? Are they different from restrictions on the shape of words or syllables? Can the same phoneme occur twice in a root? Are phonemes from the same class required, or banned?

Is its prosody stress-timed, syllable-timed, or mora-timed?

If it’s tonal, does it have contour tones? Is tone lexically determined? Does each syllable have marked tone?

Does your language mark grammatical relations in clauses? Does it bother to mark them at all?

Is your language accusative, ergative, tripartite, transitive, or neutral?

Is your ergative language totally ergative or split-ergative?

Does it have active-stative alignment? What determines the alignment of intransitive subjects? The semantics of the subject? The semantics of the verb? Something else?

Is it a topic-prominent language?

Does it use some other system, like an Austronesian ‘trigger’ system, or direct-inverse marking? What determines the order / marking of the arguments? An animacy hierarchy?

Does it mark experiencers of experiential verbs like agents or patients or something else?

Does your language have any ditransitive verbs? Is it dechticaetive or secundative?

Can a sentence omit any argument of the verb? Only the subject? No arguments at all?

What is the word order, and what determines it?

Is it consistently head-final or head-initial, or mixed? And where does the split occur?

Is there V2 order, or another unusual order?

Do certain structures, like subordinate clauses or questions, require different orders?

Does something other than syntactic relations determine word order?

Do relative clauses precede their head, or follow their head, or does it have internally-headed relative clauses?

Does it use a relative pronoun, another linking word, a special inflection, or no marking on the relative clause?

Does it allow gaps in a relative clause, or require resumptive pronouns?

Does it use some less common relativization strategy, like correlative constructions?

Is your language highly deranking? Are coordinate or subordinate constructions more marked?

Do you allow serial verbs?

Is your language head-marking or dependent-marking? Or double-marking? Or zero-marking? Or marks relations on something else?

Is your language inconsistent in marking type? Where does the split occur? Is there a pattern? (E.g., head-marked clauses and dependent-marked noun phrases in Bantu.)

Is your language synthetic?

Does your language have derivational morphology, but no inflectional morphology?

Do morphemes tack on to each other like legos, one after the other, in linear order? Or not?

Does it have portmanteau morphemes?

Does it have non-concatenating morphology?

Does it have templatic morphology (e.g., Semitic triliteral roots)

Is there a limit to the number of morphemes you can tack onto a root?

Do the morphemes occur in a fixed order, or can you change the order, say to indicate scope?

Do you allow multiple roots in one word form, or does each complex word have only one root, no matter how many derivations and inflections you apply to it?

Can verbs incorporate multiple verb roots?

Can verbs incorporate nouns?

If a verb incorporates a possessed noun, does the possessor get marked on its person-marking

How many different arguments are indexed in your verbs’ person-marking? None? Only subject? Subject and object? Indirect objects too? Non-core arguments?

How do you construct comparatives?

Do you use a case form or adposition, or a particle like ‘than’?

Do you have ‘exceed’ comparatives, positive-negative comparatives, or topical comparatives?

Are motion events verb-framing or satellite-framing?

For satellite-framing languages, are the motion verbs manner-conflating or figure-conflating? Or even ground-conflating?

Do you mark evidentiality?

Do you distinguish alienable and inalienable possession?

Does your language have a copula? Multiple copulas? Does it have a separate existential verb? Does it have a ‘have’ verb?

Does it have separate words for ‘tree’ and ‘wood’?

[linguisten]

Correlational Studies in Historical Linguistics

Correlational Studies in Typological and Historical Linguistics By D. Robert Ladd, Seán G. Roberts, and Dan Dediu

We review a number of recent studies that have identified either correlations between different linguistic features (e.g., implicational universals) or correlations between linguistic features and nonlinguistic properties of speakers or their environment (e.g., effects of geography on vocabulary). We compare large-scale quantitative studies with more traditional theoretical and historical linguistic research and identify divergent assumptions and methods that have led linguists to be skeptical of correlational work. We also attempt to demystify statistical techniques and point out the importance of informed critiques of the validity of statistical approaches. Finally, we describe various methods used in recent correlational studies to deal with the fact that, because of contact and historical relatedness, individual languages in a sample rarely represent independent data points, and we show how these methods may allow us to explore linguistic prehistory to a greater time depth than is possible with orthodox comparative reconstruction.