Scrambling is one of the most widely discussed and prominent factors affecting word order variation in Korean. Scrambling in Korean exhibits various syntactic and semantic properties that cannot be subsumed under the standard A/A'-movement. Clause-external scrambling as well as clause-internal scrambling in Korean show mixed A/A'-effects in a range of tests such as anaphor binding, weak crossover, Condition C, negative polarity item licensing, wh-licensing, and scopal interpretation. VP-internal scrambling, by contrast, is known to be lack of reconstruction effects conforming to the claim that short scrambling is A-movement. Clausal scrambling, on the other hand, shows total reconstructions effects, unlike phrasal scrambling. The diverse properties of Korean scrambling have received extensive attention in the literature. Some studies argue that scrambling is a type of feature-driven A-movement with special reconstruction effects. Others argue that scrambling can be A-movement or A'-movement depending on the landing site. Yet others claim that scrambling is not standard A/A'-movement, but must be treated as cost-free movement with optional reconstruction effects. Each approach, however, faces non-trivial empirical and theoretical challenges, and further study is needed to understand the complex nature of scrambling. As the theory develops in the Minimalist Program, a variety of proposals have also been advanced to capture properties of scrambling without resorting to A/A'-distinctions.
Scrambling in Korean applies optionally but not randomly. It may be blocked due to various factors in syntax and its interfaces in the grammar. At the syntax proper, scrambling obeys general constraints on movement (e.g., island conditions, left branch condition, coordinate structure condition, proper binding condition, ban on string vacuous movement). Various semantic and pragmatic factors (e.g., specificity, presuppositionality, topic, focus) also play a crucial role in acceptability of sentences with scrambling. Moreover, current studies show that certain instances of scrambling are filtered out at the interface due to cyclic Spell-out and linearization, which strengthens the claim that scrambling is not a free option. Data from Korean pose important challenges against base-generation approaches to scrambling, and lend further credence to the view that scrambling is an instance of movement. The exact nature of scrambling in Korean—whether it is cost-free or feature-driven—must be further investigated in future research, however. The research on Korean scrambling leads us to the pursuit of a general theory, which covers obligatory A/A'-movement as well as optional displacement with mixed semantic effects in languages with free word order.
Article
Scrambling in Korean Syntax
Heejeong Ko
Article
Second Language Acquisition of Japanese
Masahiko Minami
Empirical and theoretical research on language has recently experienced a period of extensive growth. Unfortunately, however, in the case of the Japanese language, far fewer studies—particularly those written in English—have been presented on adult second language (L2) learners and bilingual children. As the field develops, it is increasingly important to integrate theoretical concepts and empirical research findings in second language acquisition (SLA) of Japanese, so that the concepts and research can be eventually applied to educational practice. This article attempts to: (a) address at least some of the gaps currently existing in the literature, (b) deal with important topics to the extent possible, and (c) discuss various problems with regard to adult learners of Japanese as an L2 and English–Japanese bilingual children. Specifically, the article first examines the characteristics of the Japanese language. Tracing the history of SLA studies, this article then deliberately touches on a wide spectrum of domains of linguistic knowledge (e.g., phonology and phonetics, morphology, lexicon, semantics, syntax, discourse), context of language use (e.g., interactive conversation, narrative), research orientations (e.g., formal linguistics, psycholinguistics, social psychology, sociolinguistics), and age groups (e.g., children, adults). Finally, by connecting past SLA research findings in English and recent/present concerns in Japanese as SLA with a focus on the past 10 years including corpus linguistics, this article provides the reader with an overview of the field of Japanese linguistics and its critical issues.
Article
Second Language Phonetics
Ocke-Schwen Bohn
The study of second language phonetics is concerned with three broad and overlapping research areas: the characteristics of second language speech production and perception, the consequences of perceiving and producing nonnative speech sounds with a foreign accent, and the causes and factors that shape second language phonetics. Second language learners and bilinguals typically produce and perceive the sounds of a nonnative language in ways that are different from native speakers. These deviations from native norms can be attributed largely, but not exclusively, to the phonetic system of the native language. Non-nativelike speech perception and production may have both social consequences (e.g., stereotyping) and linguistic–communicative consequences (e.g., reduced intelligibility). Research on second language phonetics over the past ca. 30 years has resulted in a fairly good understanding of causes of nonnative speech production and perception, and these insights have to a large extent been driven by tests of the predictions of models of second language speech learning and of cross-language speech perception. It is generally accepted that the characteristics of second language speech are predominantly due to how second language learners map the sounds of the nonnative to the native language. This mapping cannot be entirely predicted from theoretical or acoustic comparisons of the sound systems of the languages involved, but has to be determined empirically through tests of perceptual assimilation. The most influential learner factors which shape how a second language is perceived and produced are the age of learning and the amount and quality of exposure to the second language. A very important and far-reaching finding from research on second language phonetics is that age effects are not due to neurological maturation which could result in the attrition of phonetic learning ability, but to the way phonetic categories develop as a function of experience with surrounding sound systems.
Article
SE Constructions in the Romance Languages
Diego Pescarini
SE constructions across the Romance languages have been classified on the basis of syntactic and semantic evidence. Although the terminology varies, at least four main types of SE can be identified: three constructions in which SE can be interpreted as an argument (the reflexive/reciprocal SE, the arbitrary/impersonal SE, the middle SE) and a residual set of SE-marked predicates in which SE has not a clear pronominal status. Evidence from SE constructions is a crucial test bed for theories concerning the syntactic mapping of argument and event structure.
Article
Segmental Phenomena in Germanic: Consonants
Samantha Litty and Joseph Salmons
Speech sounds are divided into vowels and consonants, the latter being the focus here. Germanic includes ancient and modern “named languages”—traditionally divided into North Germanic (e.g., Swedish, Danish, Faroese), West Germanic (e.g., German, English, Yiddish), and East Germanic languages not spoken for centuries (notably Gothic). The family also includes countless “dialects,” which are often not mutually intelligible and so could be understood as distinct languages. Languages of the world vary in how many consonants distinguish differences in meaning (create phonological contrasts), like
bear versus
pear, from 6 to over 100. Most have about 20 and Germanic languages are near that number. Beyond abstract phonological contrasts, each consonant varies phonetically, in actual pronunciation, from varying degrees of aspiration on p, t, k and voicing on b, d, g to fundamental variation in the realizations of /r/, /l/, and /h/. Key consonantal phenomena are presented in historical context and for contemporary languages, with an emphasis on distinguishing abstract, phonological patterns from concrete, phonetic ones. Despite the long research tradition, many issues proffer opportunities to advance the field and are discussed to encourage readers to engage with them.
Article
Segmental Phenomena in Germanic: Vowels
Arjen Versloot
Germanic languages are typologically rich in their vowel inventories, with many different qualities, often with phonemic length oppositions, including both monophthongs and diphthongs. Vowel contrasts are not only used to mark lexical contrasts (minimal lexical pairs) but often also to mark morphological categories, such as number, case, tense, or person. Vowel harmony, vowel balance, tone (“accent”), and nasalization can be phonologically distinctive in some languages, mostly in those with relatively few speakers. These rich inventories are restricted to the root syllables, which are the locus of word stress in Germanic languages. In unstressed positions, most languages have (nearly) only [ə]; the maximum number of unstressed vowels is five.
Article
Segmental Phonology, Phonotactics, and Syllable Structure in the Romance Languages
Stephan Schmid
From the perspective of phonological typology, the Romance languages exhibit considerable diversity, although they all originate from the same ancestor language, that is, “Vulgar Latin.” Most consonant inventories are of average size, with 20–23 phonemes, whereas typologically marked segments (e.g., palatal obstruents or retroflex consonants) only occur in a minority of Romance varieties. Instead, the number of vowel phonemes varies substantially, ranging from 5 in Spanish to 16 in French (which features front rounded vowels and nasal vowels). Substantial differences also exist regarding the treatment of unstressed vowels, which are subject to various degrees of reduction—including their deletion in both diachrony and synchrony. Consequently, such phonological processes yield various degrees of phonotactic complexity: While most Romance varieties are commonly counted among the so-called syllable languages, with a strong preference for open syllables and relatively simple consonant clusters ordered along the sonority scale, some dialects depart from this general tendency, allowing complex consonant clusters that may also run against the sonority sequencing generalization.
Article
Sex-Denoting Patterns of Word Formation in the Romance Languages
Franz Rainer
Since sex distinctions are a basic fact of nature and society, any natural language must make available means to refer separately to males and females of humans as well as animals, to the extent that sex is salient or relevant with reference to animals. In each language, these means comprise a peculiar mix of the patterns used in enriching the lexicon, ranging from syntax to compounding, affixation, conversion, and sometimes devices that are even more exotic. In a minority of the languages of the world, such as Latin and its daughters, the distinction between the sexes has even been built into the grammar in the form of gender systems whose rules of gender assignment rely heavily on it for animate nouns. In these languages, the gender system itself can also be put to use in the creation of designations for males and females.
As is well known, the Indo-European gender system in origin reflected the animate/inanimate distinction, while the classification of animates along the feminine/masculine axis was a later development whose gradual expansion can still be observed in Latin and Romance. The demise, in spoken Latin, of one central pillar of feminization, namely, the suffix -trix, as well as other disruptive factors such as sound change and language contact, brought instability into the system. Each Latin and later Romance variety therefore had to adapt its system in order to cope with communicative needs concerning the expression of the male/female distinction. Different varieties did so in different ways, creating a large array of systems of sex-denoting patterns. In principle, it would be desirable to deal with each variety’s system on its own terms, describing as exactly as possible the domain of each pattern at the different stages of development as well as the mutual relationships among competing patterns and the mechanisms behind the changes. However, such an approach is unrealistic in the absence of detailed descriptions for many varieties, most notably the dialects.
Article
Social Network Approach in African Sociolinguistics
Klaus Beyer and Henning Schreiber
The Social Network Analysis approach (SNA), also known as sociometrics or actor-network analysis, investigates social structure on the basis of empirically recorded social ties between actors. It thereby aims to explain e.g. the processes of flow of information, spreading of innovations, or even pathogens throughout the network by actor roles and their relative positions in the network based on quantitative and qualitative analyses. While the approach has a strong mathematical and statistical component, the identification of pertinent social ties also requires a strong ethnographic background. With regard to social categorization, SNA is well suited as a bootstrapping technique for highly dynamic communities and under-documented contexts. Currently, SNA is widely applied in various academic fields. For sociolinguists, it offers a framework for explaining the patterning of linguistic variation and mechanisms of language change in a given speech community.
The social tie perspective developed around 1940, in the field of sociology and social anthropology based on the ideas of Simmel, and was applied later in fields such as innovation theory. In sociolinguistics, it is strongly connected to the seminal work of Lesley and James Milroy and their Belfast studies (1978, 1985). These authors demonstrate that synchronic speaker variation is not only governed by broad societal categories but is also a function of communicative interaction between speakers. They argue that the high level of resistance against linguistic change in the studied community is a result of strong and multiplex ties between the actors. Their approach has been followed by various authors, including Gal, Lippi-Green, and Labov, and discussed for a variety of settings; most of them, however, are located in the Western world.
The methodological advantages could make SNA the preferred framework for variation studies in Africa due to the prevailing dynamic multilingual conditions, often on the backdrop of less standardized languages. However, rather few studies using SNA as a framework have yet been conducted. This is possibly due to the quite demanding methodological requirements, the overall effort, and the often highly complex linguistic backgrounds. A further potential obstacle is the pace of theoretical development in SNA. Since its introduction to sociolinguistics, various new measures and statistical techniques have been developed by the fast growing SNA community. Receiving this vast amount of recent literature and testing new concepts is likewise a challenge for the application of SNA in sociolinguistics.
Nevertheless, the overall methodological effort of SNA has been much reduced by the advancements in recording technology, data processing, and the introduction of SNA software (UCINET) and packages for network statistics in R (‘sna’). In the field of African sociolinguistics, a more recent version of SNA has been implemented in a study on contact-induced variation and change in Pana and Samo, two speech communities in the Northwest of Burkina Faso. Moreover, further enhanced applications are on the way for Senegal and Cameroon, and even more applications in the field of African languages are to be expected.
Article
South-Eastern Gallo-Romance: Francoprovençal
Andres M. Kristol
Francoprovençal is on UNESCO’s red list of the world’s most endangered languages. It is in danger of disappearing within one to two generations. Historically spoken in a large region of south-eastern France, northern Italy and French-speaking Switzerland, and lacking political unity, it is not ‘a’ language, but a set of dialects with common characteristics. Lacking any standardisation, its dialects show many of the evolutionary possibilities of Western Romance languages. Long regarded as a late separation from the Oïl area, it was traditionally described as a conservative Gallo-Romance language, rejecting Oïl innovations from about the eighth century onwards. More recent research has shown that its earliest linguistic features date back to the very beginning of the linguistic fragmentation of Galloromania (6th century at the latest); it is therefore just as ‘old’ as the other Gallo-romance languages. It thus has its own characteristic mixture of conservative and innovative phenomena among the Gallo-romance languages.
Article
Southern Gallo-Romance: Occitan and Gascon
Andres M. Kristol
Occitan, a language of high medieval literary culture, historically occupies the southern third of France. Today it is dialectalized and highly endangered, like all the regional languages of France. Its main linguistic regions are Languedocien, Provençal, Limousin, Auvergnat, Vivaro-dauphinois (Alpine Provençal) and, linguistically on the fringes of the domain, Gascon. Despite its dialectalization, its typological unity and the profound difference that separates it from Northern Galloroman (Oïl dialects, Francoprovençal) and Gallo-Italian remain clearly perceptible. Its history is characterised by several ruptures (the Crusade against the Albigensians, the French Revolution) and several attempts at "rebirth" (the Baroque period, the Felibrige movement in the second half of the 19th century, the Occitanist movement of the 20th century). Towards the end of the Middle Ages, the Occitan koinè, a literary and administrative language integrating the main dialectal characteristics of all regions, was lost and replaced by makeshift regional spellings based on the French spelling. The modern Occitanist orthography tries to overcome these divisions by coming as close as possible to the medieval, "classical" written tradition, while respecting the main regional characteristics. Being a bridge language between northern Galloroman (Oïl varieties and Francoprovençal), Italy and Iberoromania, Occitan is a relatively conservative language in terms of its phonetic evolution from the popular spoken Latin of western Romania, its morphology and syntax (absence of subject clitics in the verbal system, conservation of a fully functional simple past tense). Only Gascon, which was already considered a specific language in the Middle Ages, presents particular structures that make it unique among Romance languages (development of a system of enunciative particles).
Article
Spanish and Portuguese Outside Europe
J. Clancy Clements
With their 625 million native speakers, Spanish and Portuguese are the two most widely spoken and most important Ibero-Romance languages in the world. In their colonial expansion, both languages have come into contact with other languages in Africa, Asia, and the Americas. For Portuguese in Brazil, the strong presence of Africans and their descendants over several centuries seems to have contributed to the changes found in varieties and registers of this dialect that are rarely found or are absent in European Portuguese, features such as the variable use of stressed pronouns instead of object clitic pronouns, variable subject–verb agreement, and phrase-final negation. In East Timor Portuguese, the salient features are those found in second- and subsequent language acquisition, such as the use of present-tense or nonfinite verb forms to refer to past situations. Portuguese in Angola and Mozambique exhibits features expected in naturalistic subsequent language acquisition, such as variation in preposition and determiner use and native-language transfer. For Spanish in the Americas, it spans an enormous area and dialectal variation does not adhere to national boundaries. Three general areas are considered: Mexico, the Caribbean (Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico), and Argentina. While overall the grammatical system is relatively homogeneous, there is a pattern of change found in the coastal areas due to the diversity and density of the populations in these areas. The key features that distinguish the three varieties involve the pronunciation of syllable-final /s/ and different pronominal systems. The most significant changes in morphosyntactic structure are found in those areas in which Spanish and Indigenous languages are in contact, two examples of which are Spanish in the Andean region and in Paraguay. In Andean Spanish, the realization of /e, o/ as /i, u/, respectively, and object–verb order are not uncommon, traits present due to Quechua. For its part, Paraguayan Spanish (also called Jopara) is in a diglossic situation with Guarani and exhibits lexical and grammatical features taken from or influenced by Guarani.
Article
Spanish-Based Creole Languages
Armin Schwegler, Bart Jacobs, and Nicolas Quint
We offer a global overview of Spanish-based Creoles and the state of the art of the discipline. First, we present what is generally considered “the group” of Spanish-based Creoles. Two Creoles are then discussed in some detail, Palenquero and Papiamentu, providing sketches of their (a) sociolinguistic history and (b) linguistic structure. Completing this overview, we cover Chabacano (spoken in the Philippines), albeit in briefer fashion due to limitations of space. Attention is then turned to several Latin American areas that once may have been Creole speaking (these include Highland Bolivia, Peru, and western Colombia). We also make reference to Bozal Spanish, that is, the L2 Spanish formerly spoken in the Caribbean and elsewhere by slaves born in Africa.
Article
Spanish in Contact With English in the United States
Phillip M. Carter and Rachel Varra
In the United States, Spanish is spoken by more than 50 million people, making it one of the largest Spanish-speaking populations in the world. What differentiates Spanish in the United States from most other national contexts is the ubiquitous presence of English, which engenders two important and related effects. First, at the level of the individual, the overwhelming majority of Spanish speakers are bilingual. Second, at the level of the speech community, Spanish is involved in a situation of language shift, in which Spanish is continuously abandoned generation by generation. Linguists studying Spanish in the United States want to know if these factors, which together we call “contact with English,” influence the structures of Spanish in the United States. Decades of research on this topic seem to indicate that, with the exception of lexical-level phenomena, the degree to which English represents both a direct force on and a driving factor of change in Spanish in the United States may be less than previously anticipated. Even where the influence of English is indisputable—the lexicon—the durability of changes due to English is still a matter of empirical investigation. The influence of English, it is clear, interacts in variegated and nuanced ways not only with the internal linguistic mechanisms of the Spanish grammatical system but also with respect to the influence of Spanish dialects in contact with each other in particular local ecologies.
Article
Spanish in Contact with South-American Languages, with Special Emphasis on Andean and Paraguayan Spanish
Fernando Zúñiga
The effect of indigenous languages of South America on Spanish is strongest in the lexicon (especially with toponyms, zoonyms, and phytonyms) and identifiable, but much more modest, in phonetics/phonology (e.g., vowel variability and reduction and nasalization) and morphosyntax (e.g., the different use of selected verb forms and constituent order). The phenomena called Media Lengua and Yopará differ from this picture in that the former roughly consists of a Spanish lexicon combined with Quechua grammar, while the latter is a fluid Guaraní-based system with numerous borrowings from Spanish. The effects of contact are socially and areally variable, with low-prestige, typically rural, varieties of South American Spanish showing the most significant systemic impact, while high-prestige, typically urban, varieties (including the national standards) show little more than lexical borrowings in the semantic fields mentioned. This result is hardly surprising, due to historical/sociolinguistic factors (which often led to situations of dominance and language shift) and to the typological dissimilarities between Spanish and the indigenous languages (which typically hinders borrowing, especially of morphological elements).
Article
Subtraction in Morphology
Stela Manova
Subtraction consists in shortening the shape of the word. It operates on morphological bases such as roots, stems, and words in word-formation and inflection. Cognitively, subtraction is the opposite of affixation, since the latter adds meaning and form (an overt affix) to roots, stems, or words, while the former adds meaning through subtraction of form. As subtraction and affixation work at the same level of grammar (morphology), they sometimes compete for the expression of the same semantics in the same language, for example, the pattern ‘science—scientist’ in German has derivations such as Physik ‘physics’—Physik-er ‘physicist’ and Astronom-ie ‘astronomy’—Astronom ‘astronomer’. Subtraction can delete phonemes and morphemes. In case of phoneme deletion, it is usually the final phoneme of a morphological base that is deleted and sometimes that phoneme can coincide with a morpheme.
Some analyses of subtraction(-like shortenings) rely not on morphological units (roots, stems, morphological words, affixes) but on the phonological word, which sometimes results in alternative definitions of subtraction. Additionally, syntax-based theories of morphology that do not recognize a morphological component of grammar and operate only with additive syntactic rules claim that subtraction actually consists in addition of defective phonological material that causes adjustments in phonology and leads to deletion of form on the surface. Other scholars postulate subtraction only if the deleted material does not coincide with an existing morpheme elsewhere in the language and if it does, they call the change backformation. There is also some controversy regarding what is a proper word-formation process and whether what is derived by subtraction is true word-formation or just marginal or extragrammatical morphology; that is, the question is whether shortenings such as hypocoristics and clippings should be treated on par with derivations such as, for example, the pattern of science-scientist.
Finally, research in subtraction also faces terminology issues in the sense that in the literature different labels have been used to refer to subtraction(-like) formations: minus feature, minus formation, disfixation, subtractive morph, (subtractive) truncation, backformation, or just shortening.
Article
Suprasegmental Phenomena in Germanic: Tonal Accent
Pavel Iosad
Several Germanic varieties possess a phonological contrast usually referred to as “tonal accent.” They demonstrate phonological contrasts between words that are otherwise identical in their segmental make-up and the location of stress, as in (Urban East) Norwegian bønder ‘farmers’ and bønner ‘beans’, both segmentally [ˈbønːər]. Usually, the contrast is treated as implemented by pitch trajectories; hence, the name 'tonal accent.' Within Germanic, tonal accent contrasts are found in three (historically, perhaps four) areas. First, they occur in most varieties of Norwegian and Swedish, as well as in some Danish dialects; in addition, most varieties of Danish show a peculiar type of accentual distinction based on laryngealization, traditionally known as stød. Second, they are found in a set of West Germanic dialects along the middle Rhine and the Moselle, the so-called Franconian tonal area. Third, they are reported from many varieties of Low German, specifically North Low Saxon. Finally, they may have been present historically in Frisian.
Three aspects of Germanic tonal accent systems are of particular interest to linguistic theory. In terms of synchronic analysis, accents have been considered as sui generis objects, as fundamentally tonal phenomena, and as artifacts of contrasts in metrical (foot) structure and its mapping to intonation. Diachronically, Germanic accents are a poor fit to the cross-linguistic typology of tonogenesis: their development is intimately tied to processes manipulating metrical structures, such as vowel lengthening, syllable deletion and insertion, and clash resolution. Finally, they offer some enlightening case studies with respect to the role of language contact in the development of prosodic systems.
Article
Swedish
Erik M. Petzell
Swedish is a V2 language, like all Germanic except English, with a basic VO word order and a suffixed definite article, like all North Germanic. Swedish is the largest of the North Germanic languages, and the official language of both Sweden and Finland, in the latter case alongside the majority language Finnish. Worldwide, there are about 10.5 million first-language (L1) speakers. The extent of L2 Swedish speakers is unclear: In Sweden and Finland alone, there are at least 3 million L2 speakers. Genealogically, Swedish is closest to Danish. Together, they formed the eastern branch of North Germanic during the Viking age. Today, this unity of old is often obscured by later developments. Typologically, in the early 21st century, Swedish is closer to Norwegian than to Danish.
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, there was great dialectal variation across the Swedish-speaking area. Very few of the traditional dialects have survived into the present, however. In the early 21st century, there are only some isolated areas, where spoken standard Swedish has not completely taken over, for example, northwestern Dalecarlia. Spoken standard Swedish is quite close to the written language. This written-like speech was promoted by primary school teachers from the late 19th century onward. In the 21st century, it comes in various regional guises, which differ from each other prosodically and display some allophonic variation, for example, in the realization of /r/.
During the late Middle Ages, Swedish was in close contact with Middle Low German. This had a massive impact on the lexicon, leading to loans in both the open and closed classes and even import of derivational morphology. Structurally, Swedish lost case and verbal agreement morphology, developed mandatory expletive subjects, and changed its word order in subordinate clauses. Swedish shares much of this development with Danish and Norwegian.
In the course of the early modern era, Swedish and Norwegian converged further, developing very similar phonological systems. The more conspicuous of the shared traits include two different rounded high front vowels, front /y/ and front-central /ʉ/, palatalization of initial /k/ and /g/ before front vowels, and a preserved phonemic tonal distinction.
As for morphosyntax, however, Swedish has sometimes gone its own way, distancing itself from both Norwegian and Danish. For instance, Swedish has a distinct non-agreeing active participle (supine), and it makes use of the morphological s-passive in a wider variety of contexts than Danish and Norwegian. Moreover, verbal particles always precede even light objects in Swedish, for example, ta upp den, literally ‘take up it’, while Danish and Norwegian patterns with, for example, English: tag den op/ta den opp, literally ‘take it up’. Furthermore, finite forms of auxiliary have may be deleted in subordinate clauses in Swedish but never in Danish/Norwegian.
Article
Syntactic Typology
Masayoshi Shibatani
The major achievements in syntactic typology garnered nearly 50 years ago by acclaimed typologists such as Edward Keenan and Bernard Comrie continue to exert enormous influence in the field, deserving periodic appraisals in the light of new discoveries and insights. With an increased understanding of them in recent years, typologically controversial ergative and Philippine-type languages provide a unique opportunity to reassess the issues surrounding the delicately intertwined topics of grammatical relations and relative clauses (RCs), perhaps the two foremost topics in syntactic typology.
Keenan’s property-list approach to the grammatical relation subject brings wrong results for ergative and Philippine-type languages, both of which have at their disposal two primary grammatical relations of subject and absolutive in the former and of subject and topic in the latter. Ergative languages are characterized by their deployment of arguments according to both the nominative (S=A≠P) and the ergative (S=P≠A) pattern. Phenomena such as nominal morphology and relativization are typically controlled by the absolutive relation, defined as a union of {S, P} resulting from a P-based generalization. Other phenomena such as the second person imperative deletion and a gap control in compound (coordinate) sentences involve as a pivot the subject relation, defined as an {S, A} grouping resulting from an A-based generalization. Ergative languages, thus, clearly demonstrate that grammatical relations are phenomenon/construction specific. Philippine-type languages reinforce this point by their possession of subjects, as defined above, and a pragmatico-syntactic relation of topic correlated with the referential prominence of a noun phrase (NP) argument. As in ergative languages, certain phenomena, for example, controlling of a gap in the want-type control construction, operate in terms of the subject, while others, for example, relativization, revolve around the topic.
With regard to RCs, the points made above bear directly on the claim by Keenan and Comrie that subjects are universally the most relativizable of NP’s, justifying the high end of the Noun Phrase Accessibility Hierarchy. A new nominalization perspective on relative clauses reveals that grammatical relations are actually irrelevant to the relativization process per se, and that the widely embraced typology of RCs, recognizing so-called headless and internally headed RCs and others as construction types, is misguided in that RCs in fact do not exist as independent grammatical structures; they are merely epiphenomenal to the usage patterns of two types of grammatical nominalizations.
The so-called subject relativization (e.g., You should marry a man
who loves you
) involves a head noun and a subject argument nominalization (e.g., [who [Ø loves you]]) that are joined together forming a larger NP constituent in the manner similar to the way a head noun and an adjectival modifier are brought together in a simple attributive construction (e.g., a rich man) with no regard to grammatical relations. The same argument nominalization can head an NP (e.g., You should marry who loves you
). This is known as a headless RC, while it is in fact no more than an NP use of an argument nominalization, as opposed to the modification use of the same structure in the ordinary restrictive RC seen above. So-called internally headed RCs involve event nominalizations (e.g., Quechua
Maria wallpa-ta wayk’u-sqa-n
-ta mik”u-sayku [Maria chicken-acc cook-P.nmlzr-3sg-acc eat-prog.1pl], lit. “We are eating Maria cook a chicken,” and English I heard
John sing in the kitchen
) that evoke various substantive entities metonymically related to the event, such as event protagonists (as in the Quechua example), results (as in the English example), and abstract entities such as facts and propositions (e.g., I know that John sings in the kitchen
).
Article
The Tangkic Languages of Australia: Phonology and Morphosyntax of Lardil, Kayardild, and Yukulta
Erich R. Round
The non–Pama-Nyugan, Tangkic languages were spoken until recently in the southern Gulf of Carpentaria, Australia. The most extensively documented are Lardil, Kayardild, and Yukulta. Their phonology is notable for its opaque, word-final deletion rules and extensive word-internal sandhi processes. The morphology contains complex relationships between sets of forms and sets of functions, due in part to major historical refunctionalizations, which have converted case markers into markers of tense and complementization and verbal suffixes into case markers. Syntactic constituency is often marked by inflectional concord, resulting frequently in affix stacking. Yukulta in particular possesses a rich set of inflection-marking possibilities for core arguments, including detransitivized configurations and an inverse system. These relate in interesting ways historically to argument marking in Lardil and Kayardild. Subordinate clauses are marked for tense across most constituents other than the subject, and such tense marking is also found in main clauses in Lardil and Kayardild, which have lost the agreement and tense-marking second-position clitic of Yukulta. Under specific conditions of co-reference between matrix and subordinate arguments, and under certain discourse conditions, clauses may be marked, on all or almost all words, by complementization markers, in addition to inflection for case and tense.
