The Arawak language family is the largest in South America in terms of its geographical spread, from Central America (Belize, Honduras, Guatemala, and Nicaragua) to as far south as Bolivia (and formerly Argentina and Paraguay). Within South America, Arawak languages are spoken in Lowland Amazonia and adjacent regions, covering Guyana, French Guiana, Surinam, Venezuela, Colombia, Peru, and Brazil, in at least ten locations north of the River Amazon, and at least ten to the south of it. There are over forty extant languages and a few dozen extinct ones. The genetic unity of Arawak languages was first recognized by Father Filippo Salvadore Gilij as early as 1783, based on a comparison of pronominal prefixes in Maipure, an extinct language from the Orinoco Valley, and in Moxo from Bolivia. The limits of the family were established by the early 20th century. Proposals to include Arawak languages in putative macro-groupings such as “Arawakan” or “Macro-Equatorial” have proved spurious and unsubstantiated. The heritage of Arawak languages survives in such common words as hammock, hurricane, barbecue, guava, and tobacco.
Arawak languages are synthetic, predominantly head-marking and suffixing, with a closed and historically stable set of prefixes—bound pronouns on verbs, the relativizing prefix ka- and its negative counterpart ma-. Personal prefixes distinguish first, second, and third person, and also impersonal and indefinite forms. Prefixes mark the subject of a transitive verb and of an intransitive active verb, and the possessor on nouns. In at least two thirds of the languages, personal suffixes or enclitics express the object of a transitive verb (o), and the subject of stative verbs (s
o) or the subject of non-verbal predicates. A few highly synthetic languages (including those from the Kampa subgroup in Peru) employ suffixes or enclitics to cross-reference the object and also the recipient or an oblique. There is typically a number of locative cases which can be stacked in one word. The majority of Arawak languages do not employ cases for marking core grammatical relations. The only exception is Tariana, from the multilingual Vaupés River Basin linguistic area. Here, core cases were developed under the influence of the neighboring Tucanoan languages. Inclusive–exclusive distinctions were developed in Resígaro and Palikur as a result of language contact.
Open classes are verbs and nouns; adjectives tend to form an open class, and share some features with nouns, and some with verbs. Verbal roots tend to be exclusively monosyllabic. Noun roots can contain more than one syllable. Derivational processes include affixation, compounding, and various kinds of reduplication. Just a few languages have single-word serial verb constructions. The order of suffixes within a word can be variable, reflecting the scope of the morphemes.
Nouns divide into obligatorily, or inalienably, possessed and optionally, or alienably, possessed. Obligatorily possessed nouns are body parts, kinship terms, and a few important possessions, for example ‘name’ and ‘house’. If the possessor is not specified, these nouns take an unpossessed form marked with a suffix, also used as a nominalizer on verbs in many languages. Alienably possessed nouns take a possessive prefix and an additional suffix (chosen based on the meaning of the noun). Most languages distinguish masculine and feminine genders in third person singular personal pronouns, demonstratives, nominalizations, and also as agreement markers on adjectives. More than half the languages have complex systems of classifiers on number words, and also on verbs, in possessive constructions, and on nouns themselves. They categorize the noun in terms of its shape, consistency, and animacy. Singular and plural numbers are fairly uniform across the family; dual has developed in Resígaro, as a consequence of language contact with the unrelated Bora. Other nominal grammatical categories include nominal tense, augmentative, diminutive, and approximative.
The verb is the most complicated part of the grammar of every Arawak language, and the only obligatory constituent in a clause. Typical verbal categories include tense, aspect, evidentiality, numerous modalities (including a frustrative meaning ‘do in vain’), and valency-changing derivations—passives, reflexives, reciprocals, causatives, and applicatives. Some Kampa languages have up to six applicative derivations, including comitative, benefactive, goal, presential, separative, and instrumental. Highly synthetic languages, such as Kampa and Palikur, have patterns of noun incorporation.
Many Arawak languages are located next to speakers of languages from other families. They take on their features, in grammar and sometimes also in lexicon. Tariana, the only Arawak language spoken in the multilingual Vaupés River Basin area surrounded by Tucanoan languages, has a distinct Tucanoan flavor to its grammar. Mawayana, Garifuna, and Palikur, in contact with Carib languages, have acquired a few Carib features. Resígaro has been affected by Bora, and Amuesha bears traces of contact with Quechua and other languages that are hard to identify. The interaction of genetic inheritance, language contact, and independent innovations makes Arawak languages dauntingly diverse.
Article
Morphology in Arawak Languages
Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald
Article
Morphology in Austroasiatic Languages
Mark J. Alves
The languages of the Austroasiatic (AA) language family share a core set of derivational prefixes and infixes that are largely fossilized. Beyond these, there is a wide range of morphological features throughout these more than 160 languages. Of the 13 branches of AA, there is a geographically central concentration of branches with predominantly isolating morphology (Khmeric, Monic, Vietic, and Pearic), while geographically peripheral branches have more complex morphology (Aslian and Khasic), and some with inflectional morphology (Munda and Nicobaric). Other branches are typologically between, largely lacking inflectional morphology (i.e., systematic, productive grammatical morphology) but having a somewhat more complex range of morphological features (Katuic, Bahnaric, Palaungic, Khmuic, and Mangic), including those with some grammatical functions. Other than Munda and Nicobaric, most AA languages have iambic word-level stress and have only prefixes and infixes while lacking suffixes. This has resulted in a collapsing of older morphological material, while new affixes, with new morphosemantic functions, emerge. Alternating reduplication, in which complete prosodic templates are copied but various segments are alternated, is a common word-formation strategy and sometimes combines with prefixes and affixes. While lexical compounds are common, so are pseudo-compounds with near affix-like semantic, and sometimes phonological, features. Overall, while monomorphemic words are common among the more isolating types of AA languages, ample linguistic descriptions show a substantially wider range of morphological complexity throughout the AA language family.
Article
Morphology in Dene Languages
Keren Rice
Dene languages are often recognized for their morphological complexity. The languages are known in particular for their complex verbal morphology, and the Dene verb word has received considerable attention in the literature. The verb word is polysynthetic, with several unusual properties: the actual morpheme inventory is relatively small, with rich word formation possibilities; it is prefixing, while suffixing is far more common amongst the world’s languages; what is a single morpheme from a semantic perspective can be discontinuous, illustrating what Whorf calls interrupted synthesis; a single morpheme can be both semantically productive and lexically idiosyncratic; some affixes are mobile; there is considerable homophony; fusion of morphemes is common; and aspects of the phonology lead to surface opacity, with unexpected allomorphy. Several proposals have been introduced to account for the structure of the verb word, and psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic factors that enter in to understanding the complexities of the verb word have been addressed. There is also research on the acquisition of and teaching of the verb word. Overall, it is important to ask what the structure of the verb is synchronically, and what, while interesting, is a consequence of diachronic developments.
In addition to the well-studied complexities of the verb, there are also interesting aspects of other categories. The nouns are worthy of attention for their formation, a noun classification system, and nominal possession. The directional systems of Dene languages tend to be rich, including both a root that indicates direction and a prefix that specifies distance or direction from the speaker. At least some of he languages also have evidentials, and these are, in general, understudied.
Dene languages, like many other languages of North America, are now being learned largely as second languages. This increases the urgency to study areas such as acquisition and language use in order to help in sustaining the languages in communities where this is desired.
Article
Morphology in Dene-Yeniseian Languages
Edward Vajda
Dene-Yeniseian is a putative family consisting of two branches: Yeniseian in central Siberia and Na-Dene (Tlingit-Eyak-Athabaskan) in northwestern North America. Yeniseian contains a single living representative, Ket, as well as the extinct Yugh, Kott, Assan, Arin, and Pumpokol languages. Na-Dene contains Tlingit, spoken mainly in the Alaskan Panhandle, and a second branch divided equidistantly between the recently extinct Eyak language of coastal Alaska and the widespread Athabaskan subfamily, which originally contained more than 40 distinct languages, some now extinct. Athabaskan was once spoken throughout interior Alaska (Dena’ina, Koyukon) and most of northwestern Canada (Slave, Witsuwit’en, Tsuut’ina), with enclaves in California (Hupa), Oregon (Tolowa), Washington (Kwalhioqua-Clatskanie), and the American Southwest (Navajo, Apache). Both families are typologically unusual in having a strongly prefixing verb and nominal possessive prefixes, but postpositions rather than prepositions. The finite verb arose from the amalgamation of an auxiliary and a main verb, both with its own agreement prefixes and tense-mood-aspect suffixes, creating a rigid, mostly prefixing template. The word-final suffixes largely elided in Yeniseian but merged with the ancient verb root in Na-Dene to create a series of allophones called stem sets. Na-Dene innovated a unique complex of verb prefixes called “classifiers” on the basis of certain inherited agreement and tense-mood-aspect markers; all of these morphemes have cognates in Yeniseian, where they did not innovate into a single complex. Metathesis and reanalysis of old morphological material is quite prevalent in the most ancient core verb morphology of both families, while new prefixal or suffixal slots added onto the verb’s periphery represent innovations that distinguish the individual daughter branches within each family. Other shared Dene-Yeniseian morphology includes possessive constructions, directional words, and an intricate formula for deriving action nominals from finite verb stems.
Yeniseian languages have been strongly affected by the exclusively suffixing languages brought north to Siberia by reindeer breeders during the past two millennia. In modern Ket the originally prefixing verb has largely become suffixing, and possessive prefixes have evolved into clitics that prefer to attach to any available preceding word. Na-Dene languages were likewise influenced by traits prevalent across the Americas. Athabaskan, for example, developed a system of obviation in third-person agreement marking and elaborated an array of distinct verb forms reflecting the shape, animacy, number, or consistency of transitive object or intransitive subject. Features motivated by language contact differ between Tlingit, Eyak, and Athabaskan, suggesting they arose after the breakup of Na-Dene, as the various branches spread across northwestern North America.
The study of Dene-Yeniseian morphology contributes to historical-comparative linguistics, contact linguistics, and also to the diachronic study of complex morphology. In particular, comparing Yeniseian and Na-Dene verb structure reveals the prominence of metathesis and reanalysis in processes of language change. Dene-Yeniseian is noteworthy not only for its wide geographic spread and for the effects of language contact on each separate family, but also for the opportunity to trace the evolution of uncommon morphological structures.
Article
Morphology in Dravidian Languages
R. Amritavalli
The Dravidian languages are rich in nominal and verbal morphology. Three nominal gender systems are extant. Pronouns are gender-number marked demonstratives. Gender-number agreement in the DP suggests an incipient classifier system. Oblique cases are layered on a genitive stem; iterative genitive and plural marking is seen. Genitive and dative case mark possession/ experience (there is no verb have), and the adjectival use of property nouns.
Verbs inflect for agreement (in affirmative finite clauses), aspect, causativity, and benefactivity/ reflexivity. Light verbs are ubiquitous as aspect markers and predicate formatives, as are serial verbs. Variants of the quotative verb serve as complementizers and as topic and evidential particles. Disjunctive particles serve as question particles; conjunctive and disjunctive particles on question words derive quantifiers. Reduplication occurs in quantification and anaphor-formation.
Article
Morphology in Niger-Congo Languages
Denis Creissels
This chapter is an overview of the structure of words belonging to the major lexical categories (nouns and verbs) in Niger-Congo languages, with an emphasis on the morphological patterns typically found in the core Niger-Congo languages commonly considered as relatively conservative in their morphology: rich systems of verb morphology, both inflectional and derivational, and systems of gender-number marking with a relative high number of genders, and no possibility to isolate number marking from gender marking. As regards formal aspects of the structure of words, as a rule, verb forms are morphologically more complex than nominal forms. The highest degree of synthesis is found in the verbal morphology of some Bantu languages. Both prefixes and suffixes are found. Cumulative exponence is typically found in gender-number marking. Multiple exponence is very common in the verbal morphology of Bantu language but rather uncommon in the remainder of Niger-Congo. Consonant alternations are common in several groups of Niger-Congo languages, and various types of tonal alternations play an important role in the morphology of many Niger-Congo languages. The categories most commonly expressed in the inflectional morphology of nouns are gender, number, definiteness, and possession. The inflectional morphology of verbs commonly expresses agreement, TAM, and polarity, and is also widely used to express interclausal dependencies and information structure. As regards word formation, the situation is not uniform across the language groups included in Niger-Congo, but rich systems of verb-to-verb derivation are typically found in the Niger-Congo languages whose morphological patterns are commonly viewed as conservative.
Article
Morphology in Quechuan Languages
Willem F. H. Adelaar
Quechuan is a family of closely related indigenous languages spoken in Argentina, Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru, in the central part of the Andean cordilleras, in what used to be the Empire of the Incas and adjacent areas. It is divided into two main branches, commonly denominated Quechua I and II, and comprises 15 or more spoken varieties and several extinct ones that can be considered separate languages, although an exact number cannot easily be established. Quechuan shares a long and intense contact history with the neighboring Aymaran languages, but a genealogical relationship between the two families has never been demonstrated, nor a relationship with any other language family in the area. Quechuan languages are mainly agglutinative. All grammatical categories are indicated by suffixes with very few exceptions. The order in which these suffixes occur within a word form is governed by rules and combinatory restrictions that can be rigid but not always explicable on a basis of scope and function. Portmanteau suffixes play a role in verbal inflection and in mutually interrelated domains of aspect and number in the Quechua I branch.
In Quechuan verbal derivation affixes may be semantically polyvalent, depending on the combinations in which they occur, pragmatic considerations, the nature of the root to which they are attached, their position in the affix order, and so on. Verbal derivational affixes often combine with specific verbal roots to denote meanings that are not fully predictable on the basis of the meaning of the components. Other verbal affixes never occur in such combinations. Verbal morphology and nominal morphology tend to overlap in the domain of personal reference, where subject and possessor markers are largely similar. Otherwise, the two morphological domains are almost completely separate. Not only the morphological inventories but also the formal constraints underlying the structure of verbs and nouns differ. Nominal expressions feature an elaborate but relatively instable system of case markers, some of which appear to be of recent formation. Transposition from one class to another, nominalization in particular, is indicated morphologically and occupies a central place in Quechuan grammar, particularly in interaction with case. Finally, there is a class of Independent suffixes that can be attached to members of all word classes, including adverbial elements that cannot be classified as verbs or nominals. These suffixes play a role at the organizational level of larger syntactic units, such as clauses, nominal phrases, and sentences.
Article
Morphology in Japonic Languages
Taro Kageyama
Due to the agglutinative character, Japanese and Ryukyuan morphology is predominantly concatenative, applying to garden-variety word formation processes such as compounding, prefixation, suffixation, and inflection, though nonconcatenative morphology like clipping, blending, and reduplication is also available and sometimes interacts with concatenative word formation. The formal simplicity of the principal morphological devices is counterbalanced by their complex interaction with syntax and semantics as well as by the intricate interactions of four lexical strata (native, Sino-Japanese, foreign, and mimetic) with particular morphological processes. A wealth of phenomena is adduced that pertain to central issues in theories of morphology, such as the demarcation between words and phrases; the feasibility of the lexical integrity principle; the controversy over lexicalism and syntacticism; the distinction of morpheme-based and word-based morphology; the effects of the stage-level vs. individual-level distinction on the applicability of morphological rules; the interface of morphology, syntax, and semantics, and pragmatics; and the role of conjugation and inflection in predicate agglutination. In particular, the formation of compound and complex verbs/adjectives takes place in both lexical and syntactic structures, and the compound and complex predicates thus formed are further followed in syntax by suffixal predicates representing grammatical categories like causative, passive, negation, and politeness as well as inflections of tense and mood to form a long chain of predicate complexes. In addition, an array of morphological objects—bound root, word, clitic, nonindependent word or fuzoku-go, and (for Japanese) word plus—participate productively in word formation. The close association of morphology and syntax in Japonic languages thus demonstrates that morphological processes are spread over lexical and syntactic structures, whereas words are equipped with the distinct property of morphological integrity, which distinguishes them from syntactic phrases.
Article
Morphology in Northwest Caucasian Languages
Yury Lander
The five languages of the Northwest Caucasian family (also known as West Caucasian or Abkhaz-Adyghe), namely West Circassian, Kabardian, Ubykh, Abkhaz, and Abaza, are remarkable for their high degree of polysynthesis. This manifests itself in complex words that bear a lot of information on arguments and the characteristics of a situation, and which presumably can be constructed in the course of speech. Content words usually consist of several morphological zones within which certain permutations of morphemes are possible. Both prefixes and suffixes occur, with some morphemes being capable of appearing either as a prefix or a suffix, depending on the form. The predicate shows ergative-based cross-reference of core arguments and indirect objects introduced by applicatives, extensive use of the causative (including double causativization), highly developed means of expressing locational semantics within the predicate, and intricate tense-modality-aspect and polarity systems. Although classical noun-to-verb incorporation does not occur, there are constructions akin to incorporation, especially in the nominal domain. Nouns constitute a subclass of a broad class of predicates (both morphologically and syntactically) and hence may take the basic predicate morphology. At the same time, they form word-like nominal complexes with their attributes, and show specific head-marking possessive morphology (in West Circassian even distinguishing alienable and inalienable possession). Definiteness/specificity is regularly expressed either by articles (in Abkhaz, Abaza and Ubykh) or by the presence/absence of core case marking (in West Circassian and Kabardian). Morphemes demonstrate features that are not typical of morphemes in Standard Average European languages, including a high degree of autonomy reflected in affix order variation, widespread morphological recursion, occasional reduplication and even the ability to attach to complex syntactic constituents.
Article
The Morphology of Yam Languages
Matthew J. Carroll
The Yam languages are a primary language family spoken in southern New Guinea across an area spanning around 180km west to east across both the Indonesian province of Papua and Papua New Guinea.
The Yam languages are morphologically remarkable for their complex verbal inflection characterized by a tendency to distribute inflectional exponence across multiple sites on the verb. Under this pattern of distributed exponence, segmental formatives, that is, affixes, are identifiable but assigning any coherent semantics to these elements is often difficult and instead the inflectional meanings can only be determined once multiple formatives have been combined. Despite their complex inflectional morphology, Yam languages display comparatively impoverished word formation or derivational morphology.
Nominal inflection is characterized by moderately large case inventories, the largest displaying 16 cases. Nouns are occasionally marked for number although this is typically restricted to certain case values. Verbal paradigms are much larger than nominal paradigms. Verbs mark agreement with up to two arguments in person, number, and natural gender. Verbs also mark complex tense, aspect, and mood values; in all languages this involves at least two aspect values, multiple past tense values, and some level of grammatical mood marking. Verbs may also be marked for diathesis, direction, and/or pluractionality.
The overall morphological pattern is that of fusional or inflectional languages. Nominal inflection is rather straightforward with nominals taking case suffixes or clitics with little to no inflectional classes. The true complexity lies in the organization of the verbal inflectional system, about which, despite individual variation across the family, a number of architectural generalizations can be made. The family displays a fairly uniform verbal inflectional template and all languages make a distinction between prefixing and ambifixing verbs. Prefixing verbs show agreement via a prefix only while ambifixing verbs via agreement with a suffix, for monovalent clauses, or with both a prefix and a suffix for bivalent verbs. These agreement affixes are also involved in the distributed exponence of tense, aspect, and mood.
Article
Morphology in Sino-Tibetan Languages
Giorgio Francesco Arcodia and Bianca Basciano
Sino-Tibetan is a highly diverse language family, in which a wide range of morphological phenomena and profiles may be found. The family is generally seen as split into two major branches, i.e., Sinitic and Tibeto-Burman, but while Sinitic is a fairly homogeneous group in terms of morphology, the so-called Tibeto-Burman branch of the family includes isolating languages like Karen, languages with transparent and regular agglutinative morphology (Lolo-Burmese, Tibetic, and Boro-Garo), but also paradigmatically complex languages, with elaborate argument indexation and transitivity management systems; while in some languages morphological complexity is mostly a conservative trait (e.g., Rgyalrongic and Kiranti), other languages developed innovative paradigms, with only few vestiges of the archaic system (Kuki-Chin). Some notable morphological phenomena in modern Tibeto-Burman languages are verb stem alternation, peculiar nominalization constructions, and long sequences of prefixes, which in some languages (Chintang) may even be freely permutated without any relevant change in meaning.
Also, while Sinitic languages are normally taken to be a prototypical example of the (ideal) isolating morphological type (with virtually no inflection, stable morpheme boundaries, no cumulative exponence, and no allomorphy or suppletion), phenomena of strong reduction of morphemes, blurring of morpheme boundaries and fusion between root and suffix, and nonconcatenative morphology, as well as allomorphy and (proto-)paradigmatic organization of morphology, are attested in some Chinese dialects, mostly concentrated in an area of Northern China (Shaanxi, Shanxi, Henan, Hebei, and Shandong provinces). Moreover, ‘Altaic-type’ agglutinative morphology, including case marking, is found in Sinitic languages of the so-called Qinghai-Gansu Sprachbund; in this case, the development of agglutination, as well as other typological traits (as SOV word order), is clearly the product of intense and prolonged contact between Northwestern Chinese dialects and Tibetic and Mongolic languages of China. On the other hand, Southern Chinese dialects have developed in closer contact with Hmong-Mien, Tai-Kadai, and Austroasiatic languages, and are thus closer to the typology of Mainland Southeast Asian languages, with a very strong isolating profile.
Article
Morphosyntactic Variation and Change in Italian
Michela Cennamo and Francesco Maria Ciconte
Italian is an Italo-Romance language based upon a form of Tuscan, old Florentine. For centuries, Italian was a literary language mastered only by well-educated elites. In contrast, almost the entire population spoke a local variety of Italo-Romance. The Italo-Romance varieties are not dialects—that is, variations—of Italian, but they are languages in their own right, which, like Tuscan, developed independently from Latin. The long-term and intensive coexistence of Italian and the Italo-Romance varieties has produced a great deal of variation, which still characterizes the linguistic repertoire of Italy. The diglossic relationship between Italian and the Italo-Romance varieties is thus the key to capturing such variation. The interrelation between a superstrate national language—that is, Standard Italian—and the deep-rooted local varieties has yielded interlanguage phenomena, which eventually led to substratum interference, that is, the occurrence of local features in Italian. This variation has not affected Standard Italian, but, rather, it has produced geo-varieties of Italian, altogether termed “Regional Italians.” The use of certain regional features has become the norm—a norm which is socially accepted and in fact constitutes the standard within the respective regional areas. Besides phonetic and prosodic variation and substantial lexical importation into Italian from the Italo-Romance varieties, a set of shared interference features has transcended isoglossic boundaries at the morphosyntactic level as well. At the same time, the traditional diamesic dichotomy between the spoken and written domain has loosened, allowing a variety of interrelated styles and registers. In this respect, contemporary Italian can be said to be undergoing a process of restandardization. The newly emerging standard variety, “Neo-Standard Italian,” encompasses originally regional morphosyntactic features which have become pan-Italian and are commonly used in almost all functional domains of communication.
After discussing some typical instances of morphosyntactic variation in the macro-areas of Regional Italians, this article analyzes some shared Romance phenomena with regard to the specific features of Italian and its regional variation, namely existential constructions, forms of address, futurity, mood, and negation, pointing to emerging new phenomena, coexisting with stable patterns of variation, some of which are already attested in earlier stages of the language and of the early vernaculars.
Article
Morphosyntax of Dravidian Languages
R. Amritavalli
The Dravidian languages, spoken mainly in southern India and south Asia, were identified as a separate language family between 1816 and 1856. Four of the 26 Dravidian languages, namely Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, and Malayalam, have long literary traditions, the earliest dating back to the 1st century ce. Currently these four languages have among them over 200 million speakers in south Asia. The languages exhibit prototypical OV (object–verb) properties but relatively free word order, and are rich in nominal and verbal inflection; only Malayalam lacks verb agreement.
A typical characteristic of Dravidian, which is also an areal characteristic of south Asian languages, is that experiencers and inalienable possessors are case-marked dative. Another is the serialization of verbs by the use of participles, and the use of light verbs to indicate aspectual meaning such as completion, self- or nonself-benefaction, and reflexivization. Subjects, and arguments in general (e.g., direct and indirect objects), may be nonovert. So is the copula, except in Malayalam.
A number of properties of Dravidian are of interest from a universalist perspective, beginning with the observation that not all syntactic categories N, V, A, and P are primitive. Dravidian postpositions are nominal or verbal in origin. A mere 30 Proto-Dravidian roots have been identified as adjectival; the adjectival function is performed by inflected verbs (participles) and nouns. The nominal encoding of experiences (e.g., as fear rather than afraid/afeared) and the absence of the verb have arguably correlate with the appearance of dative case on experiencers. “Possessed” or genitive-marked N may fulfill the adjectival function, as noticed for languages like Ulwa (a less exotic parallel is the English of-possessive construction: circles of light, cloth of gold). More uniquely perhaps, Kannada instantiates dative-marked N as predicative adjectives. A recent argument that Malayalam verbs originate as dative-marked N suggests both that N is the only primitive syntactic category, and the seminal role of the dative case.
Other important aspects of Dravidian morphosyntax to receive attention are anaphors and pronouns (not discussed here; see separate article, anaphora in Dravidian), in particular the long-distance anaphor taan and the verbal reflexive morpheme; question (wh-) words and the question/disjunction morphemes, which combine in a semantically transparent way to form quantifier words like someone; the use of reduplication for distributive quantification; and the occurrence of ‘monstrous agreement’ (first-person agreement in clauses embedded under a speech predicate, triggered by matrix third-person antecedents).
Traditionally, agreement has been considered the finiteness marker in Dravidian. Modals, and a finite form of negation, also serve to mark finiteness. The nonfinite verbal complement to the finite negative may give the negative clause a tense interpretation. Dravidian thus attests matrix nonfinite verbs in finite clauses, challenging the equation of finiteness with tense.
The Dravidian languages are considered wh-in situ languages. However, wh-words in Malayalam appear in a pre-verbal position in the unmarked word order. The apparently rightward movement of some wh-arguments could be explained by assuming a universal VO order, and wh-movement to a preverbal focus phrase. An alternative analysis is that the verb undergoes V-to-C movement.
Article
Morphosyntax of Himalayan Languages
George van Driem
Several language families and a few language isolates are represented in the Himalayas, the world’s greatest massif, running a length of over 3,600 km. The most well-represented language family in this region happens to be the Trans-Himalayan language family, whose very centre of gravity and phylogenetic diversity is situated within the Eastern Himalaya. This most populous language family on our planet in terms of numbers of speakers used to be known as Tibeto-Burman but, in some circles, the family formerly also went by the names “Indo-Chinese” or “Sino-Tibetan”, the latter two labels actually designating empirically unsupported and now obsolete models of language relationship. The study of Trans-Himalayan historical grammar began with Brian Houghton Hodgson in the 1830s, who during this time served at Kathmandu as the British Resident to the Kingdom of Nepal. Periodically, minor studies devoted attention to several of the more salient morphosyntactic phenomena of Trans-Himalayan historical grammar, but Stuart Wolfenden contributed the first major monograph to the subject in the 1920s. Finally, the historical morphosyntax of the Trans-Himalayan language family came to be the focus of numerous linguistic studies from the 1970s onward, and since that time our understanding of the historical grammar of the language family has changed drastically.
As ever more languages out of the hundreds of previously undocumented Trans-Himalayan tongues came to be described and analysed in great detail, it came to be understood that the flamboyant verbal agreement morphology observed in languages such as the Kiranti languages of eastern Nepal and the rGyalrongic languages of southwestern China were neither grammatically innovative nor represented typological flukes, but instead represented the most grammatically conservative languages within the entire language family. Subsequently, cognate inflectional systems or vestiges of cognate conjugational morphology were discovered in most other branches of the language family as well. The geographical centre, as well as the centre of phylogenetic diversity of the Trans-Himalayan language family, was identified as the highland arc of the Eastern Himalaya. Sinitic languages, although representing by far the most populous single branch of the Trans-Himalayan family, were now understood as constituting just one out of many subgroups, not more divergent from other branches than any one of the four dozen other subgroups making up the language family. The various types of epistemic marking systems observed sporadically throughout the region were shown to be secondary innovations, reflecting a great variety of semantically distinct language-specific grammatical categories. Particularly, languages showing the typology of the Loloish or Sinitic type were shown to be innovative in their grammar, having lost much of the original Trans-Himalayan morphosyntax.
Article
Motion Verbs in Japanese
Yo Matsumoto
Japanese is a language rich in verbs representing Path of motion, but it also has verbs representing Manner and Deixis. Examining how they are used can deepen our understanding of some of the interesting properties of the Japanese language.
In typological literature on motion events descriptions, Japanese has been claimed to be the type of language in which Path is expressed in the main verb position rather than elsewhere in the sentence, with the use of a path verb. However, this view must be qualified in two ways. First, the language exhibits intralinguistic variation, using postpositions and other nonverbal elements to represent Path notions such as FROM, TO, and ALONG. Second, Path is expressed in the main verb position only when Deixis is absent from the sentence.
One feature of manner verbs in Japanese is that they are not used very often, especially concerning walking events. This phenomenon is accounted for by the “cost” of expressing Manner in Japanese. Another property of manner verbs in Japanese is they are incompatible with a goal phrase, which has been previously accounted for in different ways. A close semantic examination of manner verbs suggests that this restriction can be attributed to the nature of goal marking, rather than the semantics of manner verbs.
An examination of corpus and experimental data also reveals how Japanese speakers use deictic verbs. Deictic motion verbs are used very frequently, though this tendency is not observed in descriptions of the motion of inanimate entities. Finally, deictic verbs in Japanese are sensitive to the notion of the speaker’s interactional space or territory, not just restricted by the spatial location of the speaker.
Article
Multilingualism in Rural Africa
Pierpaolo Di Carlo, Jeff Good, and Rachel Ojong Diba
The pervasiveness of multilingualism throughout the African continent has led it to be viewed as Africa’s “lingua franca.” Nevertheless, sociolinguistic research on this topic has concentrated mostly on urbanized areas, even though the majority of Africans still live in rural regions, and rural multilingualism is clearly of much older provenance than its urban counterpart. In urban domains, individual language repertoires are dominated by the interplay between European ex-colonial languages, African lingua francas, and local languages, and language ideologies emphasize the ordering of languages in a hierarchy that is tied to social status. The situation in rural areas is clearly distinct, though it has yet to be thoroughly investigated.
Early work on language use in rural Africa tended to background the presence of multilingualism and was dominated by an approach that viewed each community (or “tribe”) as having its own language. Thanks to the progressive adoption of ethnographic methods of inquiry, facilitated by language documentation research especially since the beginning of the 21st century, it has been possible to more effectively study areas of high linguistic diversity in West and Central Africa which demonstrate that multilingualism plays an integral role in structuring social relations. Available case studies document the presence of individuals with linguistic repertoires that are primarily oriented around local languages, ideologies, and practices and that do not clearly fit with what is known from urban environments. The most important theme that emerges from this work is the extent to which rural multilingualism is linked to the specific dynamics holding among communities that are near to each other rather than being a reflection of a more general, externally imposed value system.
While this result makes it difficult to characterize rural multilingualism as a single, coherent phenomenon, it does point to the utility of a shared toolkit of research strategies for exploring it in more detail. In particular, ethnographic methods are required in order to ascertain the major local social divisions which language choice both reflects and constructs in these areas, and it is additionally important to focus on how individual repertoires are tied to specific life histories rather than to assume that groupings that are salient to the outside researcher (e.g., “villages” or “compounds”) are the relevant units of analysis.
Finally, investigation of multilingualism in rural Africa is not only valuable for what it reveals about social dynamics on the continent, but it also seems likely to yield important insights for the study of sociolinguistics more broadly.
Article
Munda Languages
Gregory D. S. Anderson
The Munda language family constitutes the westernmost branch of the widespread Austroasiatic language family. Munda formerly was considered sister to the rest of the phylum, then known as Mon-Khmer, but this has been revised, and Munda is considered as Austroasiatic as any other branch. The internal classification of the Munda languages is still disputed, but a clear North Munda group exists and is uncontroversial. Other higher-order internal divisions remain disputed, although low-level groups like Sora-Gorum or Gutob-Remo are clear and accepted by almost all researchers today.
Phonologically speaking, Munda languages make extensive use of glottal stop and pre-glottalized stops, nasal vowels, and retroflexion. Word level prosody shows Austroasiatic features with an overlay of South Asian areal features on the phrase level. Register and tone have been reported for individual languages such as creaky voice in Gorum and a low tone in Korku.
Nouns in Munda languages may encode a range of grammatical and local cases, person and number of possessors, and covert distinctions of animacy in agreement and other morphosyntactic features. Verbs in Munda languages can be quite complex, with subject and object as well as TAM encoding, transitivity, finiteness, etc. Kherwarian languages stand out in this regard as well as for the distributional facts of the subject clitics, where the preferred locus is enclitic to the word immediately preceding the verb. Systems of negation can be very complicated and show unexpected interactions with TAM marking in languages like Gutob.
Syntactically, Munda languages show many typical South Asian features such as verb-final structure, as well as non-finite structures, and in some cases switch reference systems or noun incorporation.
The current sociolinguistic and demographic contexts of the different Munda languages range from expanding and healthy with official status in the case of Santali to seriously endangered in the case of Gorum.
Article
Muskogean Languages
Jack B. Martin
The Muskogean languages are a family of languages indigenous to the southeastern United States. Members of the family include Chickasaw, Choctaw, Alabama, Koasati, Apalachee, Hitchiti-Mikasuki, and Muskogee (Creek). The trade language Mobilian Jargon is based on Muskogean vocabulary and grammar. The Muskogean languages all have SOV word order. Noun phrases are marked for subject or non-subject case. Alienable and inalienable possession is marked on possessed nouns. Agreement on verbs for subjects and objects is sensitive to agency. The languages have grammatical tone (used to indicate verbal aspect) and switch reference. Several of the languages have measured tense systems (indicating several degrees of distance in the past).
Article
Neoclassical Compounding in the Romance Languages
Fabio Montermini
The label “neoclassical compounds” (NC) encompasses a set of phenomena found in, but not limited to, Romance languages. They can be roughly characterized as the emergence, in the lexicon of a language, of lexical units totally or partially made up of elements borrowed from ancient (classical) languages, namely Greek and Latin, and constructed by means of processes not (or not necessarily) corresponding to the “canonical” morphological processes at work in the language in question. Historically, the existence of NC in Romance languages is linked, on the one side, to the role played by Latin, and partly Greek, in the intellectual history of Europe; and, on the other side, to the various waves of relatinization Romance languages were subject to at different times, with two major turning points, in the 15th and 16th centuries, with the revival of classical authors advocated by Humanism and the Renaissance, and from the 18th century onward, with the development and democratization of scientific and technical knowledge. Progressively, NC have served as models for the emergence of productive word formation patterns which are, today, perfectly integrated into the derivational systems of Romance languages. However, rather than constituting a clearly delimited and homogeneous class, the label NC encompasses a constellation of phenomena sharing some characteristics that can globally be attributed to their common origin in the lexicon of neoclassical descent that has been transferred to Romance languages across the centuries.
Article
Nominal Inflectional Morphology in Germanic: Adjectives
Hans-Olav Enger
The article surveys the different types of adjective inflection: gradation and agreement. Agreement inflection on adjectives in Germanic can involve gender, number, case, and strong/weak (definiteness). The languages differ in their agreement inflection. The different modes of exponence for the different inflections are shown (e.g., periphrasis, affixation, and vowel change). There are adjectives that are defective and those that are completely indeclinable. The article also surveys deviations such as suppletion and syncretisms. The article shows how the notion of construction may be relevant for Germanic adjective inflection, how there is a difference between attributive and predicative use in that the former typically involves “more inflection,” and this is also shown for cases of semantic agreement. Perhaps some differences between Germanic languages in their adjective inflection relate to sociolinguistic factors.
