Typology - Introducing Morphology PDF

CHAPTER SEVEN Typology Chapter Outline In this chapter you will learn about morphological typology: How morphologists characterize the morphological systems of languages. We will begin by describing the morphological systems of five very different languages, looking at the kind...

CHAPTER SEVEN Typology Chapter Outline In this chapter you will learn about morphological typology: How morphologists characterize the morphological systems of languages. We will begin by describing the morphological systems of five very different languages, looking at the kinds of lexeme formation and inflection they display. Then we will discuss both traditional ways of classifying the morphology of languages and more contemporary ways of doing so. Finally, we will look at how both the family a language belongs to and the geographic area in which it is spoken can influence its typological classification. Introduction In this course, we have focused so far on formal processes of morphology that occur in many languages of the world; we have provided a sort of toolkit for forming new words from which languages can pick and choose. Universals and Particulars: A Bit of Linguistic History Universals – those things that are common to all human languages, perhaps because they are part of our common biological endowment. Particulars – those things that look unique and appear to distinguish languages from one another. At the turn of the twentieth century, linguists started studying indigenous languages of Africa, Asia, and the Americas more seriously emphasizing the uniqueness of languages. With the advent of Generative Grammar in the middle of the twentieth century, Chomskians stress what is universal in languages. Universals and particulars are both important. Until we have a sense of the full range of particulars, we can only begin to confront the issue of universals. That’s why studying the widest range of languages possible is so important.  Universals and Particulars: A Bit of Linguistic History Examples of morphological universals : There is a range of word formation strategies that appear in the languages of the world. And there are some conceivable sorts of word formation strategies that never occur. There is no language so far that forms one sort of word from another – say nouns from verbs or verbs from nouns – by reversing the sounds of the words, or by infixing [p] after every third sound. The Genius of Languages: What’s in Your Toolkit? The linguist Edward Sapir, writing at the turn of the twentieth century, had a rather romantic name for the unique combination of processes that characterize the grammar of each language – he called it the “genius” of the language. We will take a brief look at five very different languages – Turkish, Mandarin Chinese, Samoan, Latin, and Nishnaabemwin – to try to see something of this unique combination of morphological processes that constitutes at least one part of the genius of each language. All of these languages use morphology in one way or another, but each makes different choices from the universal toolbag of rule types. Some use predominantly one strategy, others many; some have lots of inflection, others almost none. But each has its own unique pattern. The Genius of Languages: What’s in Your Toolkit? Turkish (Altaic) Turkish is a language that is rich in suffixation. Turkish has a phonological rule called ‘vowel harmony’ which makes the vowels of suffixes agree with the preceding vowels in the base in backness and sometimes roundness. For examples: 1. The first suffix that we encounter after the base is a suffix - li, which attaches to nouns to make personal nouns. With vowel harmony, the suffix -li will show up as - lu after the front round vowel ö: -li (-lu) personal nouns: sehir ‘city’ ¸sehir-li ‘ city dweller’ köy ‘village’ köy-lu ‘villager’ 2. The next suffix -las forms intransitive verbs from adjectives. Again, taking vowel harmony into account, the suffix can appear as -les if it is preceded by a base with front vowels, and -las if preceded by back vowels: -las¸ (-les) intransitive verbs: ölmez ‘immortal’ ölmez-les ‘become immortal’ garp-lı ‘West-from’ garp-lı-las ‘become Westernized’ The Genius of Languages: What’s in Your Toolkit? Turkish (Altaic) 3. Next we have the suffix -dir, which forms causative verbs from intransitive verbs. Note that the [d] in the suffix shows up as the corresponding voiceless stop [t] if the preceding consonant is voiceless: -dir (-dur, -dür, -tir, etc.) causative. don ‘freeze’ don-dur ‘ cause to freeze’ Öl ‘die’ öl-dür ‘kill’ ( = ‘cause to die’) 4. The following suffix is called the ‘impotential’, which essentially means ‘not able’: -eme (-ama) impotential: gel-eme ‘unable to come’ anlı-ama ‘unable to understand’ 5. Next is the future suffix -ecek : -ecek (-acak) future: bul-acak ‘will find’ tanı-acak ‘will recognize’ 6. Then the plural suffix -ler : -ler (-lar) plural : kız ‘girl’ kız-lar ‘girls’ el ‘hand’ el-ler ‘hands’ The Genius of Languages: What’s in Your Toolkit? Turkish (Altaic) Turkish has right-headed compounds. For examples: Noun + noun baba + anne babaanne father mother paternal Adjective + noun kirk + ayak kirkayak forty foot centipede Turkish uses suffixation for both derivation and inflection. In addition to marking number on nouns, Turkish also marks case. The cases are definite-accusative, genitive, dative, locative, ablative. Turkish verbs can be long and complex. They are inflected for person, number, tense, negative or interrogative. Verbs can mark other distinctions as well. Turkish has no processes of prefixation to speak of. What few prefixes can be found in Turkish are always on borrowed words, and essentially are not part of the native system of word formation of Turkish. The Genius of Languages: What’s in Your Toolkit? Mandarin Chinese (Sino-Tibetan) Mandarin has no processes of prefixation to speak of, and it has only a tiny handful of suffixes, among them are: -xué dòngwù-xué ‘animal-ology’ = ‘zoology’ shèhuì-xué ‘society-ology’ = ‘sociology’ zhé-xué ‘philosophy-ology’=‘study of philosophy’ -jiā kēxué-jiā ‘science -ist’ = ‘scientist’ yùndòng-jiā ‘athletics-ist’ = ‘athlete’ -huà gōngyè-huà ‘industry-ize’ = ‘industrialize’ tóng-huà ‘similar-ize’ = ‘assimilate’ The suffix -xué attaches to nouns to make nouns meaning ‘the study of X’, and -jiā makes personal nouns, also from other nouns. Notice that in the example kēxué-jiā, both suffixes occur. The third suffix huà makes verbs from nouns and adjectives. Mandarin also has full reduplication, which it uses for two purposes. Verbs can be reduplicated to form derived verbs meaning “a little”. jiāo ‘teach’ jiāo-jiāo ‘teach a little’ shuō ‘say’ shuō-shuō ‘say a little’ And some adjectives can be reduplicated to make intensive adjectives, that is, adjectives that mean ‘very X’: pang ‘fat’ pàng-pàng ‘very fat’ hóng ‘red’ hóng-hóng ‘very red’ The Genius of Languages: What’s in Your Toolkit? Mandarin Chinese (Sino-Tibetan) Though Mandarin is relatively poor in affixation and reduplication, it is incredibly rich in compounding. Mandarin has not only compound nouns and compound adjectives, as English does, but also all sorts of compound verbs. Mandarin has many different types of compound, indeed, many more types than English. It has very productive compounding processes. Mandarin has attributive, coordinative and subordinative compounds. See examples on page 139. Mandarin has little in the way of inflection: Nouns are not inflected for number, nor do verbs inflect for person or number. Tense is not marked morphologically, and aspect is marked only by separate particles that appear after the verb. Mandarin does have a system of noun classifiers that are used when counting or otherwise quantifying nouns, but again separate particles rather than affixes are used to mark the class of particular nouns. What this shows us is that Mandarin is just as able as Turkish to come up with new words and to express grammatical distinctions, but its strategy for doing so makes use of different means. The Genius of Languages: What’s in Your Toolkit? Samoan (Austronesian) In this language we can find prefixation, suffixation, and circumfixation, both partial and full reduplication, and also to some extent compounding. There’s also even a bit of internal stem change in the form of a morphological process of vowel lengthening. Prefixation: fa’a ‘causative’. alu ‘go’ fa’aalu ‘make go’ goto ‘sink’ fa’agoto ‘make sink’ ga’o ‘fat’ fa’aga’o ‘apply grease to’ The prefix fa’a can be put on either verbs or nouns to make verbs meaning ‘cause X’ or ‘make X’ or ‘put X on’. Circumfixation: fe- -a’i ‘reciprocal’. fīnau ‘quarrel’ fefīnaua’I ‘quarrel with one another’ logo ‘inform’ felogoa’I ‘consult with one another’ The Genius of Languages: What’s in Your Toolkit? Samoan (Austronesian) In addition to prefixes and circumfixes, Samoan can also form words by suffixation. For example: Suffixation: -ga forms abstract nouns from verbs. amo ‘carry’ amoga ‘carrying’ savali ‘walk’ savaliga ‘a walk’ Samoan is also rich in processes of reduplication. Samoan has a process of partial reduplication that forms verbs from nouns. Partial reduplication: N → V lafo ‘plot of land’ lalafo ‘clear land’ lago ‘pillow, bolster’ lalago ‘rest, keep steady’. The Genius of Languages: What’s in Your Toolkit? Samoan (Austronesian) New words are also formed in Samoan by full reduplication. Full reduplication: V → N ‘apa ‘beat, lash’ ‘apa‘apa ‘wing, fin’ au ‘flow on, roll on’ auau ‘current’ Although compounding in Samoan is possible, this language has nowhere near the richness of compound types that can be found in Mandarin. Samoan has no inflectional paradigms. Relations like case, tense, aspect, and mood are expressed by independent particles, rather than by prefixes, suffixes, or reduplication, in this language. The Genius of Languages: What’s in Your Toolkit? Latin (Indo-European) Like Turkish, and unlike Mandarin and Samoan, Latin is a heavily inflected language. And like Turkish, its inflections are almost entirely suffixal. However, its inflection looks rather different from Turkish inflection in that often several meanings are combined into a single inflectional morpheme in Latin. Its toolbag is somewhat larger for derivation than for inflection, with some prefixation and compounding in addition to suffixation. Latin nouns are inflected for case, number, and gender, and adjectives are inflected to agree with them. The Genius of Languages: What’s in Your Toolkit? Latin (Indo-European) Verbs have a number of different stems which form the basis of inflectional paradigms that show aspect (imperfect vs. perfect) and voice (active vs. passive), as well as person and number. Latin has both derivational suffixes and prefixes. The Genius of Languages: What’s in Your Toolkit? Nishnaabemwin (Algonquian) The final language we will look at is Nishnaabemwin, an Algonquian language spoken in southern Ontario, Canada. It makes heavy use of affixation, especially suffixation, and has an extremely rich system of inflection. What’s most interesting about Nishnaabemwin, however, is the way that it combines bound morphemes to form new lexemes. Let’s look first at inflection. Nouns have either animate or inanimate gender. They can be inflected for number, and have different forms for diminutive, pejorative, and what is called ‘contemptive’, a suffix that adds a negative meaning, but one that is less strongly negative than the pejorative suffix. Nouns can also occur in a locative form, and what is called the ‘obviative’ form, which serves to distance a noun from the speaker in a narrative. Finally, there are prefixes and suffixes that indicate possession of a noun. The Genius of Languages: What’s in Your Toolkit? Nishnaabemwin (Algonquian) Verb inflection is even more complex than noun inflection. Derivation is no less complex than inflection in this language: words rarely consist of a single root morpheme. Instead, various bound morphemes are joined together to form words. Intransitive verbs, for example, frequently consist of two or three pieces. The last piece, called the ‘final’, expresses a verbal concept. The Genius of Languages: What’s in Your Toolkit? Nishnaabemwin (Algonquian) Verbs may also have a third piece that occurs between the initial and the final; this is called the ‘medial’ and corresponds to what in English would usually be a nominal concept. dewnike ‘have an ache in one’s arm’ dew ‘sore’ + nik ‘arm’ + e ‘have’ One thing that is striking about the morphological system of Nishnaabemwin is the overall complexity of words: words rarely consist of a single morpheme, and frequently consist of many morphemes. Summary Comparing these languages, we can see a bit of what Sapir means about the “genius” of a language. Although we don’t need to romanticize the unique character of each language, studying morphology opens our eyes to the different mixture and balance of word formation processes to be found in individual languages. Each language has a different combination of word formation processes that gives the language its unique character. But we should keep in mind as we wonder at all this diversity that we should always be on the lookout for the commonalities or universals that mark all these languages as human languages. Ways of characterizing languages We start this section by looking at a very traditional way of classifying languages, and then look at more contemporary schemes of morphological typology. But first, let’s consider what Typology means. Typology: It is the linguistic subfield that attempts to classify languages according to kinds of structures, and to find correlations between structures and genetic or areal characteristics. WALS: The World Atlas of Linguistic Structures. A great resource for student linguists is the World Atlas of Linguistic Structures, or WALS, which can be found online at https://wals.info/ WALS is a website that provides information on all sorts of phonological, syntactic, and morphological characteristics of the languages of the world, surveying everything from phonological inventories to types of clauses and illustrating the cross-linguistic results in easily accessible maps. Each of its 150 or so chapters covers a particular characteristic of language and provides an explanation of that phenomenon along with examples. For morphology, we can find lots of information on inflection, especially on the expression of person, number, gender, case, tense, aspect, and number in the languages of the world. The Fourfold Classification Morphological typology has a long history, going back at least to the early nineteenth century. It was common to divide languages into four morphological types: isolating (or analytic), agglutinative, fusional, and polysynthetic. An isolating or analytic language is one in which each word consists of one and only one morpheme. Vietnamese is often cited as an example of an isolating language. Mandarin comes closest to being an isolating language. Although Mandarin has abundant compounding, it has little that would count as morphological inflection. Like Vietnamese, plurality, tense, and aspect in Mandarin are all expressed by separate words. The Fourfold Classification Unlike isolating languages, agglutinative languages have complex words. Furthermore, those words are easily segmented into separate morphemes and each morpheme carries a single chunk of meaning. Turkish is the language that comes closest to an agglutinative ideal. A fusional language, like an agglutinative language, allows complex words, but its morphemes are not necessarily easily segmentable: several meanings may be packed into each morpheme, and sometimes it may be hard to decide where one morpheme ends and another one starts. Latin is a good example of a fusional language. The final morphological type is called polysynthetic. In a polysynthetic language words are frequently extremely complex, consisting of many morphemes, some of which have meanings that are typically expressed by separate lexemes in other languages. Nishnaabemwin is a language that could easily be characterized as polysynthetic. The Indexes of Synthesis, Fusion, and Exponence The problem with the traditional fourfold classification is that languages rarely fall neatly into one of the four classes. For example, English is not quite an isolating language – it has some inflection – but it is certainly not an agglutinating or a fusional language (Old English was much closer to being a fusional language, though). Another problem is that sometimes the inflectional system of a language falls into one category, but the derivational system fits better into another. English again can serve as an illustration: English derivational morphology is actually not that far from being agglutinating. One way of dealing with these problems is to give up the fourfold classification in favor of three different scales which can be used to gauge different aspects of the overall morphological behavior of a language: the index of synthesis, the index of fusion, and the index of exponence. The Indexes of Synthesis, Fusion, and Exponence The index of synthesis looks at how many morphemes there are per word in a language. Isolating languages will have few morphemes per word – in the most extreme cases, only one morpheme per word. Agglutinative or polysynthetic languages, however, will typically have many morphemes per word. And because this is a scale, languages like Samoan or English can fall somewhere in-between the extremes. The index of fusion is a measure of the degree to which morphemes are phonologically separable from their bases. In languages with a low degree of fusion, the phonological boundaries between morphemes are clear either because the languages are isolating in the classical sense or because they are agglutinative. In languages higher on the index of fusion, the phonological boundaries become increasingly less clear. Languages like Mandarin or Turkish would therefore be low on this index. Languages like Arabic or Hebrew with templatic (root and pattern) morphology would be high on the index of fusion, and languages like Latin would be somewhere in-between. The Indexes of Synthesis, Fusion, and Exponence The index of exponence measures how many meanings or inflectional features can be expressed simultaneously in a single morpheme in a language. We might expect, typically, for each morpheme to express a single meaning or feature – past tense, say, or plural. But in many languages a single morpheme might combine several meanings. Turkish, has a tendency to be low on the index of exponence, since typically each morpheme conveys only one meaning or inflectional feature. The Indexes of Synthesis, Fusion, and Exponence WALS uses the three indexes to look at inflectional morphology in the languages of the world. But there is no reason why we could not also look at the derivational and inflectional morphologies of a language separately and see where they fit on the scales. In terms of inflection, English would be low on the index of synthesis, but we might place it higher on that scale if we’re looking at English derivation, since many words in the language are formed by compounding, prefixation, or suffixation. Similarly, we might class English higher on the index of exponence if we’re looking at verbal inflection (the suffix -s carries the meanings ‘third person’, ‘present’, and ‘singular’ packed together in a form like walks) than if we’re looking at derivation, where each morpheme typically has one distinct meaning. Head- versus Dependent-Marking One thing we can look at is the way that morphology signals the relationship between words in phrases. The main element in each syntactic phrase is called its head; the head of a noun phrase (NP) is the noun, the head of a verb phrase (VP) is the verb, and so on. The other elements that combine with the head to become a phrase might be called the dependents of the head. Dependents of a noun can be adjectives, determiners, or possessives, and dependents of a verb can be its subject or object. Languages can choose to mark relationships between the head and its dependents in different ways: the relationship can be marked exclusively on the head, or exclusively on the dependent, or on both or neither. If the relationship is marked by some morpheme on the dependent, this is called dependent-marking, and if it is marked on the head, it is called head-marking. Head- versus Dependent-Marking Examples for head-marking and dependent-marking come from Hungarian and English respectively. Hungarian is a head-marking language in NP of possession: as ember ház-a the man house-3SG. dependent head ‘the man’s house’ In English, the relationship between the head noun and its possessor is marked on the possessor (the dependent), (examples from Nichols 1986: 57): the man’s house dependent head Head- versus Dependent-Marking It is also possible for languages to show neither head- marking nor dependent-marking. For example, a language that is isolating and has no inflection would have neither head- nor dependent marking. On the other hand, it is possible for a language to have inflectional markings on both the head and its dependents. When the relationship between the dependent and the head is marked on both constituents, we have what is called double-marking. Correlations Typologists are interested in more than classification, however. They are also interested in seeing whether there are any predictable correlations between particular morphological characteristics or between morphological characteristics and other (syntactic or phonological) aspects of grammar. For example, as Whaley (1997: 131) points out, isolating languages usually have rigidly fixed word orders. This correlation makes perfect sense: if a language has no morphological way of marking the function of noun phrases in a sentence, those functions must be signaled by the position of a noun phrase in a sentence. Greenberg noted that if a language has inflection, it will also have derivation. Observations such as these are called implicational universals. Based on observations of lots of languages, they are not true in every language, but they are true in a statistically significant number of languages. Genetic and Areal Tendencies In addition to classifying languages on the basis of specific structural characteristics that they display in their morphologies; we can look at typological patterns in a more global way. There are two ways to do this: We can look at whether there are sorts of morphology that tend to be prevalent in particular language families or sub-families (Genetic). And we may look at whether there are specific sorts of morphology that tend to be found in certain geographic areas even among languages that belong to different language families (Areal). We can give several examples of genetic tendencies. If we look, for example, at compounding in two different branches of the Indo-European family, Italic (Romance) and Germanic, we can see an interesting pattern: although both branches make use of compounds, the sorts of compounds they favor are quite different. Germanic languages like English tend to favor endocentric attributive (e.g., dog bed) and subordinate compounds (e.g., hand made), whereas Italic languages seem to prefer exocentric subordinate compounds (e.g., lavapiatti ‘wash-dishes’ = ‘dishwasher’) and have few attributive compounds. As for areal tendencies, Whaley gives a fascinating example. He points out that three languages spoken in close proximity in the Balkan region of Europe and belong to different sub-families of the Indo-Eropean family; all mark the definiteness of nouns by adding a suffix. Typological Change As languages change over time, their typological characteristics can change as well. We looked at changes to the inflectional system of English, specifically about the loss of inflection. To reprise, Old English had a far more complex inflectional system than modern English does, with grammatical gender, four cases, agreement between determiners, adjectives, and nouns, and a far more extensive system of verb inflection than we have now. By Middle English, much of this system had been lost. In typological terms, English moved farther away from being fusional and synthetic and closer to being isolating or analytic. References LIEBER, ROCHELLE (2016). Introducing Morphology (second edition). CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS.