Frans Plank

Noun phrase structure in the languages of Europe

The result of over five years of close collaboration among an international group of leading typologists within the EUROTYP program, this volume is about the morphology and syntax of the noun phrase. Particular attention is being paid to nominal inflectional categories and inflectional systems and to the syntax of determination, modification, and conjunction. Its areal focus, like that of other EUROTYP volumes, is on the languages of Europe; but in order to appreciate what is peculiarly European about their noun phrases, a more comprehensive and genuinely typological view is being taken at the full range of cross-linguistic variation within this structural domain. There has been no shortage lately of contributions to the theory of noun phrase structure; the present volume is, however, unique in the extent to which its theorizing is empirically grounded.

Split morphology: How agglutination and flexion mix

Being AGGLUTINATIVE or FLEXIVE are not properties of entire languages, nor are they simple properties. There is a whole ränge of simple properties, all logically independent ofeach other, prominently including those ofseparation/cumulation and invariance/variance. They are all properties ofindividual wordforms, and again there is no logical necessityfor these to agree in their property sets. This creates a huge potential for heterogeneity within andfor diversity across languages, which, if realized to the fall, would render morphological typology unviable. However, an examination ofsplits between Separation and cumulation and between invariance and variance along the lines ofword-classes, ofsubsets within single word-classes, of morphological categories, and ofterms ofcategories suggests that mixtures between agglutination and flexion, though multifarious, are not random. Ifgrammars arefound to be less heterogeneous, and languages less diverse, than they could be, this can be due to universal, timeless principles or to regularities ofchange. Both play a wie in shaping morphological Systems.

The co-variation of phonology with morphology and syntax: A hopeful history

Throughout its history, the hope has always been cherished that typology is holistic, and holism entails that there is systematic co-variation not only within levels or modules of grammar but also between them. Accordingly, numerous claims have been made that phonology does not vary across languages independently of morphology and syntax, and vice versa. The variables that are allegedly interrelated pertain to segment inventories, the shapes of syllables, morphemes, and words, phonological or morphonological rules, tones and accents, and rhythmic or prosodic patterns on the one hand and to analytic or (poly-}synthetic grammar, Separatist or cumulative morphological exponence, the complexity of grammatical units, and their linear order on the other. These claims are cataloguedin thispaper. To substantiate them and to accommodate those that are found valid in theories of the Interface between phonology, morphology, and syntax remain äs tasks for the future.

ÜBER DEN PERSONENWECHSEL UND DEN ANDERER DEIKTISCHER KATEGORIEN IN DER WIEDERGEGEBENEN REDE

Die geläufige terminologische Dichotomie von »direkter* und »indirekter Rede* birgt in sich die Gefahr vorzuspiegeln, es gäbe zwei und nur zwei pauschal und kategorisch voneinander verschiedene Arten der Rede wiedergäbe. In einem gewissen, noch zu erläuternden Sinn ist es in der Tat angemessen, einen kategorischen Gegensatz zwischen »direktem* und »indirektem* WiedergabeModus zu sehen; nur muß eine Redewiedergabe in ihrer Gesamthe i t nicht notwendigerweise einheitlich im Hinblick auf die gewählten Modi sein. Und das liegt eigentlich auf der Hand, wenn man ,indirekt* wie üblich so versteht, daß der Sinn einer Rede, »direkt*, daß ihr Wortlaut (und damit nolens volens auch ihr Sinn, falls ihr ein solcher zuschreibbar ist) wiedergegeben wird. Es ergibt sich damit nämlich ein potentiell weit gefächertes Spektrum von Unterscheidungen, je nachdem, ob mehr oder weniger des Wortlauts einer Rede wiedergegeben wird und ob ihr Sinn, unter Beibehaltung von mehr oder weniger des originalen Wortlauts, mehr oder weniger stark interpretativ bearbeitet übermittelt wird. Im Grunde dürfte es auch nicht allzu kontrovers sein, daß bei der Unterscheidung von Arten der Redewiedergabe mit graduellen Abstufungen zu rechnen ist, ungeachtet der verbreiteten terminologischen Auszeichnung zweier bzw. dreier vermutlich als besonders konträr empfundener Arten, eben der direkten, indirekten und eventuell noch der zwischen diesen Extremen angesiedelten ,erlebten* Rede. Mit der Vorstellung eines Kontinuums der Direktheit bzw. Indirektheit von Redewiedergaben insgesamt ist eine durchaus traditionelle Auffassung wie etwa die Behaghels (1928: 695) gut verträglich:

HYPOLOGY, TYPOLOGY: THE GABELENTZ PUZZLE

Jede Sprache ist ein System, dessen sammtliche Theile organisch zusammenhangen und zusammenwirken. Man ahnt, keiner dieser Theile durfte fehlen oder anders sein, ohne dass das Ganze verandert wurde. Es scheint aber auch, als waren in der Sprachphysiognomie gewisse Zuge entscheidender als andere. Diese Zuge galte es zu ermitteln; und dann musste untersucht werden, welche andere Eigenthumlichkeiten regelmassig mit ihnen zusammentreffen. Ich denke an Eigenthumlichkeiten des Wortund des Satzbaues, an die Bevorzugung oder Verwahrlosung gewisser grammatischer Kategorien. Ich kann, ich muss mir aber auch denken, dass alles dies zugleich mit dem Lautwesen irgendwie in Wechselwirkung stehe. Die Induction, die ich hier verlange, durfte ungeheuer schwierig sein; und wenn und soweit sie gelingen sollte, wird es scharfen philosophischen Nachdenkens bedurfen, um hinter der Gesetzlichkeit die Gesetze, die wirkenden Machte zu erkennen. Aber welcher Gewinn ware es auch, wenn wir einer Sprache auf den Kopf zusagen durften: Du hast das und das Einzelmerkmal, folglich hast du die und die weiteren Eigenschaften und den und den Gesammtcharakter! — wenn wir, wie es kuhne Botaniker wohl versucht haben, aus dem Lindenblatte den Lindenbaum construiren konnten. Durfte man ein ungeborenes Kind taufen, ich wurde den Namen Typologie wahlen. Hier sehe ich der allgemeinen Sprachwissenschaft eine Aufgabe gestellt, an deren Losung sie sich schon mit ihren heutigen Mitteln wagen darf. Hier wurde sie Fruchte zeitigen, die jenen der sprachgeschichtlichen Forschung an Reife nicht nachstehen, an Erkenntnisswerthe sie wohl ubertreffen sollten. Was man bisher von geistiger Verwandtschaft, von verwandten Zugen stamm verschiedener Sprachen geredet hat, das wurde hinfort greifbare Gestalt gewinnen, in zifTermassig bestimmten Formeln dargestellt werden; und nun trate das speculative Denken an diese Formeln heran, um das Erfahrungsmassige als ein Nothwendiges zu begreifen.

Thoughts on the origin, progress, and pronominal status of reciprocal forms in Germanic, occasioned by those of Bavarian

Abstract Grammaticalised reciprocal markers in Germanic derive from combinations of a quantifier and the alterity word ‘other’, elaborating on a minimalist strategy of identical NP repetition suggesting rather than expressing reciprocity (‘earl[s] hated earl[s]’). Subserved by quantifier floating, they develop fromfree to tighter syntactic combinations and eventually intomorphological units, tending towards complete inflectional deactivation. Sooner or later in all Germanic languages, the quantifier part of the reciprocal gets inside prepositional phrases (‘earls fought each/one with other’> ‘earls fought with each/one other’). German continues this fusional theme by combining the reciprocal with prepositions in compounds; and in Bavarian it eventually gets reduced further to a bound stem limited to (partly lexicalised) combinations with a preposition, thus being barred from the direct object relation, unlike the reflexive. In tracing this overall diachronic scenario, the question is raised of the pronominality (or pro-NP-hood) of reciprocals in Germanic. It is argued that, regardless of their nominal and referential source, reciprocals here strongly incline towards becoming adverbs of attenuated, situational rather than personal reference, highlighting the relational (role reversal) rather than the (co-)referential component of reciprocity, as is common also elsewhere.

What Linguistic Universals Can Be True Of

Universals in linguistics were traditionally intended to be true of languages: “for all languages, p” or “for all languages, if p then q”. Our contention, by contrast, is that many universals have a narrower scope than languages as such, or mental lexicons-and-grammars as such. Linguistic universals are not axiomatically to be conceived of as universals of language: it is only derivatively—namely if universals are true of all parts of each language and of all representations of forms-in-constructions of each language—that this is what they may amount to. Only very basic organising principles of lexicons and grammars should really be expected to make their influence felt pervasively, over all parts and all representations.

Delocutive verbs, crosslinguistically

Abstract Delocutive verbs can be defined as verbs derived from a base X which mean ‘by saying or uttering “X” (to someone) to perform an act which is culturally associated with the meaning or force of X’, where X is a variable ranging over types of things that can be said or uttered – 2nd person pronouns and other terms of address, words for asking and answering questions, formulaic expressions for social acts like greetings, various kinds of expressives, characterizations of speech peculiarities. Although originally identified as such in, and illustrated exclusively from, Indo-European languages by Debrunner (1956) and Benveniste (1958), delocutives are not confined to this family, but show a wide genetic and areal spread. The aim of this paper is to delineate the systematic possibilities for crosslinguistic diversity and for historical change in delocutive formations, and in particular to relate derivational delocutives to equivalent syntactic constructions. In such a wider typological and diachronic view, delocutives are seen not to be cases of ordinary quotation, nor a rare peculiarity at the margins of ordinary word formation, but to be one variation on the theme of complex predicates, instructively bearing on the general question of where verbs can come from. Their closest affinities, synchronic and diachronic, are to predications of existential causation (doing/making, often found to subsume saying).

Comparative Visual Analysis of Cross-Linguistic Features

Approaches in Visual Analytics have so far been developed for a wide array of research areas, mainly with a focus on industrial or business applications. The field of linguistics, however, has only marginally incorporated visualizations in its research, e.g. using simple tree representations, attribute-value matrices or network analyses. This paper suggests a new interesting field of application demonstrating how Visual Analytics is able to support linguists in their research. We show this with respect to one concrete linguistic phenomenon, named Vowel Harmony, where visual analysis allows an at-a-glance comparison across a variety of languages. Our approach covers the entire pipeline of Visual Analytics methodology: data processing, feature extraction and the creation of an interactive visual representation. Our results allow for a novel approach to linguistic investigation in that we enable an at-a-glance analysis of whether vowel harmony is present in a language and, beyond that, a precise indication of the particular type of vowel interdependence and patterning in a given language.

Extent and limits of linguistic diversity as the remit of typology : but through constraints on what is diversity limited?

Abstract 1. Finishing unfinished business 1.1. The first true linguistic typologist – recognisable as a predecessor by the likes of ourselves, now publishing in journals like Linguistic Typology – was Giovanni Domenico Campanella (1568–1639). A Dominican friar from Calabria (Fra Tommaso by monastic name) who was to rise to lasting fame as a utopian social thinker with his La città del sole, Campanella was a philosopher in the wide and colourful Renaissance sense. As was the standard repertoire, his Philosophia realis (1623) covered Physiologia, Ethica, Politica, and Oeconomica, and his Philosophia rationalis (1638) continued with Dialectica, Grammatica, Rhetorica, Poetica, and Historiographia; but, with labour not yet divided between scholar and wizard, Campanella also distinguished himself as a seeker of arcaner truths.