Morphology

Japanese is a language where the grammatical status of arguments and adjuncts is marked exclusively by postnominal case markers, and various argument realization patterns can be assessed by their case marking. Since Japanese is categorized as a language of the nominative-accusative type typologically, the unmarked case-marking frame obtained for transitive predicates of the non-stative (or eventive) type is ‘nominative-accusative’. Nevertheless, transitive predicates falling into the stative class often have other case-marking alignments, such as ‘nominative-nominative’ and ‘dative-nominative’. Consequently, Japanese provides much more varying argument realization patterns than those expected from its typological character as a nominative-accusative language.

In point of fact, argument marking can actually be much more elastic and variable, the variations being motivated by several linguistic factors. Arguments often have the option of receiving either syntactic or semantic case, with no difference in the logical or cognitive meaning (as in plural agent and source agent alternations) or depending on the meanings their predicate carry (as in locative alternation). The type of case marking that is not normally available in main clauses can sometimes be obtained in embedded contexts (i.e., in exceptional case marking and small-clause constructions). In complex predicates, including causative and indirect passive predicates, arguments are case-marked differently from their base clauses by virtue of suffixation, and their case patterns follow the mono-clausal case array, despite the fact that they have multi-clausal structures.

Various case marking options are also made available for arguments by grammatical operations. Some processes instantiate a change on the grammatical relations and case marking of arguments with no affixation or embedding. Japanese has the grammatical process of subjectivization, creating extra (non-thematic) major subjects, many of which are identified as instances of ‘possessor raising’ (or argument ascension). There is another type of grammatical process, which reduces the number of arguments by virtue of incorporating a noun into the predicate, as found in the light verb constructions with suru ‘do’ and the complex adjective constructions formed on the negative adjective nai ‘non-existent.’

While in phonology Middle Indo-Aryan (MIA) dialects preserved the phonological system of Old Indo-Aryan (OIA) virtually intact, their morphosyntax underwent far-reaching changes, which altered fundamentally the synthetic morphology of earlier Prākrits in the direction of the analytic typology of New Indo-Aryan (NIA). Speaking holistically, the “accusative alignment” of OIA (Vedic Sanskrit) was restructured as an “ergative alignment” in Western IA languages, and it is precisely during the Late MIA period (ca. 5th–12th centuries ce) when we can observe these matters in statu nascendi. There is copious literature on the origin of the ergative construction: passive-to-ergative reanalysis; the ergative hypothesis, i.e., that the passive construction of OIA was already ergative; and a compromise stance that neither the former nor the latter approach is fully adequate. In the spirit of the complementary view of these matters, more attention has to be paid to various pathways in which typological changes operated over different kinds of nominal, pronominal and verbal constituents during the crucial MIA period.

(a) We shall start with the restructuring of the nominal case system in terms of the reduction of the number of cases from seven to four. This phonologically motivated process resulted ultimately in the rise of the binary distinction of the “absolutive” versus “oblique” case at the end of the MIA period). (b) The crucial role of animacy in the restructuring of the pronominal system and the rise of the “double-oblique” system in Ardha-Māgadhī and Western Apabhramśa will be explicated. (c) In the verbal system we witness complete remodeling of the aspectual system as a consequence of the loss of earlier synthetic forms expressing the perfective (Aorist) and “retrospective” (Perfect) aspect. Early Prākrits (Pāli) preserved their sigmatic Aorists (and the sigmatic Future) until late MIA centuries, while on the Iranian side the loss of the “sigmatic” aorist was accelerated in Middle Persian by the “weakening” of s > h > Ø. (d) The development and the establishment of “ergative alignment” at the end of the MIA period will be presented as a consequence of the above typological changes: the rise of the “absolutive” vs. “oblique” case system; the loss of the finite morphology of the perfective and retrospective aspect; and the recreation of the aspectual contrast of perfectivity by means of quasinominal (participial) forms. (e) Concurrently with the development toward the analyticity in grammatical aspect, we witness the evolution of lexical aspect (Aktionsart) ushering in the florescence of “serial” verbs in New Indo-Aryan.

On the whole, a contingency view of alignment considers the increase in ergativity as a by-product of the restoration of the OIA aspectual triad: Imperfective–Perfective–Perfect (in morphological terms Present–Aorist–Perfect). The NIA Perfective and Perfect are aligned ergatively, while their finite OIA ancestors (Aorist and Perfect) were aligned accusatively. Detailed linguistic analysis of Middle Indo-Aryan texts offers us a unique opportunity for a deeper comprehension of the formative period of the NIA state of affairs.

The Kiowa-Tanoan family is a small group of Native American languages of the Plains and pueblo Southwest. It comprises Kiowa, of the eponymous Plains tribe, and the pueblo-based Tanoan languages, Jemez (Towa), Tewa, and Northern and Southern Tiwa. These free-word-order languages display a number of typologically unusual characteristics that have rightly attracted attention within a range of subdisciplines and theories.

One word of Taos (my construction based on Kontak and Kunkel’s work) illustrates. In tóm-múlu-wia ‘I gave him/her a drum,’ the verb wia ‘gave’ obligatorily incorporates its object, múlu ‘drum.’ The agreement prefix tóm encodes not only object number, but identities of agent and recipient as first and third singular, respectively, and this all in a single syllable. Moreover, the object number here is not singular, but “inverse”: singular for some nouns, plural for others (tóm-músi-wia only has the plural object reading ‘I gave him/her cats’).

This article presents a comparative overview of the three areas just illustrated: from morphosemantics, inverse marking and noun class; from morphosyntax, super-rich fusional agreement; and from syntax, incorporation. The second of these also touches on aspects of morphophonology, the family’s three-tone system and its unusually heavy grammatical burden, and on further syntax, obligatory passives. Together, these provide a wide window on the grammatical wealth of this fascinating family.

Due to a number of unusual and interesting properties, Korean phonetics and phonology have been generating productive discussion within modern linguistic theories, starting from structuralism, moving to classical generative grammar, and more recently to post-generative frameworks of Autosegmental Theory, Government Phonology, Optimality Theory, and others. In addition, it has been discovered that a description of important issues of phonology cannot be properly made without referring to the interface between phonetics and phonology on the one hand, and phonology and morpho-syntax on the other. Some phonological issues from Standard Korean are still under debate and will likely be of value in helping to elucidate universal phonological properties with regard to phonation contrast, vowel and consonant inventories, consonantal markedness, and the motivation for prosodic organization in the lexicon.

As might be expected from the difficulty of traversing it, the Sahara Desert has been a fairly effective barrier to direct contact between its two edges; trans-Saharan language contact is limited to the borrowing of non-core vocabulary, minimal from south to north and mostly mediated by education from north to south. Its own inhabitants, however, are necessarily accustomed to travelling desert spaces, and contact between languages within the Sahara has often accordingly had a much greater impact. Several peripheral Arabic varieties of the Sahara retain morphology as well as vocabulary from the languages spoken by their speakers’ ancestors, in particular Berber in the southwest and Beja in the southeast; the same is true of at least one Saharan Hausa variety. The Berber languages of the northern Sahara have in turn been deeply affected by centuries of bilingualism in Arabic, borrowing core vocabulary and some aspects of morphology and syntax. The Northern Songhay languages of the central Sahara have been even more profoundly affected by a history of multilingualism and language shift involving Tuareg, Songhay, Arabic, and other Berber languages, much of which remains to be unraveled. These languages have borrowed so extensively that they retain barely a few hundred core words of Songhay vocabulary; those loans have not only introduced new morphology but in some cases replaced old morphology entirely. In the southeast, the spread of Arabic westward from the Nile Valley has created a spectrum of varieties with varying degrees of local influence; the Saharan ones remain almost entirely undescribed. Much work remains to be done throughout the region, not only on identifying and analyzing contact effects but even simply on describing the languages its inhabitants speak.

Mayan languages are spoken by over 5 million people in Guatemala, Mexico, Belize, and Honduras. There are around 30 different languages today, ranging in size from fairly large (about a million speakers) to very small (fewer than 30 speakers). All Mayan languages are endangered given that at least some children in some communities are not learning the language, and two languages have disappeared since European contact. Mayas developed the most elaborated and most widely attested writing system in the Americas (starting about 300 BC).

The sounds of Mayan languages consist of a voiceless stop and affricate series with corresponding glottalized stops (either implosive and ejective) and affricates, glottal stop, voiceless fricatives (including h in some of them inherited from Proto-Maya), two to three nasals, three to four approximants, and a five vowel system with contrasting vowel length (or tense/lax distinctions) in most languages. Several languages have developed contrastive tone.

The major word classes in Mayan languages include nouns, verbs, adjectives, positionals, and affect words. The difference between transitive verbs and intransitive verbs is rigidly maintained in most languages. They usually use the same aspect markers (but not always). Intransitive verbs only indicate their subjects while transitive verbs indicate both subjects and objects. Some languages have a set of status suffixes which is different for the two classes. Positionals are a root class whose most characteristic word form is a non-verbal predicate. Affect words indicate impressions of sounds, movements, and activities. Nouns have a number of different subclasses defined on the basis of characteristics when possessed, or the structure of compounds. Adjectives are formed from a small class of roots (under 50) and many derived forms from verbs and positionals.

Predicate types are transitive, intransitive, and non-verbal. Non-verbal predicates are based on nouns, adjectives, positionals, numbers, demonstratives, and existential and locative particles. They are distinct from verbs in that they do not take the usual verbal aspect markers. Mayan languages are head marking and verb initial; most have VOA flexible order but some have VAO rigid order. They are morphologically ergative and also have at least some rules that show syntactic ergativity. The most common of these is a constraint on the extraction of subjects of transitive verbs (ergative) for focus and/or interrogation, negation, or relativization. In addition, some languages make a distinction between agentive and non-agentive intransitive verbs. Some also can be shown to use obviation and inverse as important organizing principles. Voice categories include passive, antipassive and agent focus, and an applicative with several different functions.

This is an advance summary of a forthcoming article in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Linguistics. Please check back later for the full article.

Catalan is a Romance language closely related to the Gallo-Romance languages. However, from the 15th century onward, it has adopted some linguistic solutions that have brought it closer to the Ibero-Romance languages, due to close contact with Spanish.

Catalan exhibits five main dialects: Central, Northern, and Balearic, which are ascribed to the Eastern dialectal branch; and Northwestern and Valencian, which belong to the Western one. Central, Northern, and Northwestern Catalan are historical dialects that derived directly from the evolution of the Latin spoken in Old Catalonia (the Catalan-speaking territory located on both sides of the Pyrenees). Conversely, Valencian and Balearic are dialects resulting from the territorial expansion of the old Crown of Aragon in the Middle Ages.

As a Gallo-Romance language, Catalan lost all final unstressed vowels different from a (manum > ma “hand,” viridem > verd “green,” but dominam > dona “wife”), which had important consequences on various aspects of nominal and verbal inflection. Regarding nominal inflection, for instance, the dropping of final unstressed vowels led to adjectives such as verd “green, sg.,” which were initially uninflected for gender, being formally identified with gender-inflected masculine ones (like alt “high, masc. sg.”). This triggered the development of analogical feminine forms parallel to those of etymologically gender-inflected adjectives (e.g., verda “green, fem. sg.,” analogical with alta “high, fem. sg.”). As for verbal inflection, the loss of final unstressed vowels caused some forms of the paradigm to become inflectionally unmarked. In various ways, inflectional markers were reintroduced by means of analogical processes and this led to important dialectal variation; for instance, in the first-person singular of the simple present indicative (canto > cant “I sing,” but now canto in Central and Northwestern, cante in Valencian, cant in Balearic, and canti in Northern Catalan).

Some of the most distinctive morphosyntactic features of Catalan are the following:

(1) Catalan is the only Romance language that exhibits a periphrastic past tense expressed by means of the verb anar “go” + infinitive (Ahir vas cantar “Yesterday you sang”). The periphrastic past coexists with a simple past (Ahir cantares “Yesterday you sang”). Conversely, Catalan does not have a periphrastic future with the movement verb go.

(2) Depending on the dialect, proper names may take the definite article (el, la) or a specific personal article (en, na from the vocative Latin forms domine “lord” and domina “lady,” respectively): El Joan (l’Ernest) or en Joan (n’Ernest), la Núria (l’Antònia) or na Núria. The personal article is not used in Valencian (Joan, Núria). Definite and personal articles are not present in vocative forms: Oh, Joan!

(3) Demonstratives show a two-term system in most Catalan dialects: aquí “here” (proximal) / allà or allí “there” (distal); but in Valencian and some Northwestern dialects there is a three-term system. In contrast with other languages with a two-term system, Catalan expresses proximity both to the speaker and to the addressee with the proximal demonstrative (Aquí on jo sóc “Here where I am”; Aquí on tu ets “There where you are”). The demonstrative systems show the same deictic properties as the movement verbs anar “go” and venir “come” in Catalan dialects.

(4) To express possession by means of a pronoun or a determiner, Catalan may use the genitive clitic en (En conec l’autor “I know its autor”), the genitive personal pronoun (el nostre fill “our son”), the dative clitic (Li rento la cara “I wash his/her face”) or the definite article (Tancaré els ulls “I will close my eyes”).

(5) Existential constructions may contain the predicate haver-hi “there be,” consisting of the locative clitic hi and the verb haver “have” (Hi ha tres estudiants “There are three students”), the copulative verb ser “be” (Tres estudiants ja són aquí “Three students are already here”) or other verbs, whose behavior can be close to an unaccusative verb when preceded by the clitic hi (Aquí hi treballen forners “There are some bakers working here”).

(6) The negative polarity adverb no “not” may be reinforced by the adverbs pas or cap, in some dialects, and it can co-occur with negative polarity items (ningú “anybody/nobody,” res “anything/nothing,” mai “ever/never,” etc.). These polarity items exhibit negative agreement (No hi ha mai ningú “Nobody is ever here”). However, negative polarity items may express positive meaning in some non-declarative syntactic contexts (Si mai vens, truca’m “If you ever come, call me”).

(7) Catalan dialects are rich in yes-no interrogative and confirmative particles (que, o, oi, no, eh, etc.: (Que) plou? “Is it raining?,” Oi que plou? “It’s raining, isn’t it?”

This is an advance summary of a forthcoming article in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Linguistics. Please check back later for the full article.

The Yam Languages are a primary language family that is spoken in Southern New Guinea across an area spanning around 180 km 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 distributed inflectional exponence across multiple sites. 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. This raises interesting theoretical and typological questions about monotonic notions of morpheme and the isomorphic alignment of meaning and form. Yam languages are known for their complex inflectional morphology but display comparatively impoverished word formation or derivational morphology.

Nominal inflection is characterized by moderately large inventories of cases, the largest displaying 16 cases. Nouns may also be marked for number but this is typically restricted to certain case values. Verbal paradigms are also large; verbs mark agreement with up to two arguments in person, number, and at times natural gender. Additionally, languages display numerous tense, aspect, and mood values; this typically 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.

Architecturally, nominal inflection is rather straightforward with nominal taking case suffixes or clitics with little to no inflectional classes. The true complexity lies in the organization of the verbal inflectional system and the prevalence of distributed exponence. While each language exploits distributed exponence in a unique manner, there are a number of architectural generalizations that can be made across the family. The languages display a remarkably similar inflectional template for verbs and inflectional classes are organized along similar lines. The primary inflectional class divide is between prefixing and ambifixing verbs. Prefixing verbs mark their agreement with a prefix only while ambifixing verbs mark agreement with the suffix, for monovalent clauses, or with both a prefix and a suffix for bivalent verbs. The verbal template involves these agreement prefixes and suffixes that also mark tense, aspect, and mood. The most prominent of those are a set of agreement prefixes known as undergoer prefixes, which mark tense, aspect, and mood in a non-transparent or morphomic manner.

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.

Polysynthesis is informally understood as the packing of a large number of morphemes into single words, as in (1) from Bininj Gun-wok (Evans, in press).

1)

a-ban-yawoyʔ-wargaʔ-maɳe-gaɲ-giɲe-ŋ

1SGSUBJ-3PLOBJ-again-wrong-BEN-meat-cook-PSTPF

'I cooked the wrong meat for them again.'

Its status as a distinct typological category into which some of the world’s languages fall, on a par with isolating, agglutinating, or fusional languages, has been controversial from the start. Nevertheless, researchers working with these languages are seldom in doubt as to their status as distinct from these other morphological types. This has been complicated by the fact that the speakers of such languages are largely limited to hunter-gatherers—or were so in the not too distant past—so the temptation is to link the phenomenon directly to way of life. This proves to be oversimplified, although it is certainly true that languages qualifying as polysynthetic are almost everywhere spoken in peripheral regions and are on the decline in the modern world—few children are learning them today.

Perhaps the most pervasive of the traits that give these languages the impression of a “special” status is that of holophrasis, which can be defined as the (possible) expression of what in less synthetic languages would be whole sentences in single complex (usually verbal) words. It turns out, however, that there is much greater variety among polysynthetic languages than is generally thought: there are few other traits that they all share, although distinct subtypes can in fact be distinguished, notably the affixing as opposed to the incorporating type.

These languages have considerable importance for the investigation of the diachronic complexification of languages in general and of language acquisition by children, as well as for theories of language universals. The sociolinguistic factors behind their development have only recently begun to be studied in depth. All polysynthetic languages today are to some degree endangered (they are dying off at an alarming rate), and many have been poorly studied if at all, which makes their investigation before it is too late a prime goal for linguistics.