Transcript Typology of core clause structure

Typology of core clause structure
Beatrice Primus, University of Cologne
Who (agent/actor) did what (patient/undergoer)?
How do languages express events with actor and undergoer?
What are cross-linguistically expected patterns? What are unexpected
patterns?
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CASES
Hierarchies
Alignment Typology
Word Order
Complications
Typology of Basic Clause Structure
Beatrice Primus
LLACAN Paris, January 14th 2015
CASES
Case is a category of marking dependent noun phrases for the type of
relationship they bear to their heads (cf. Blake 2001:1)
head (governor)
ad
victoria
lego
dependent noun phrase with case
urb-em (SG.ACC)
'at town'
Roman-orum (PL.GEN)
'the victory of the Romans'
libr-um (SG.ACC)
'(I) am reading a book'
CASE beyond inflectional affixes (Dryer 2013b)
 adpositional clitics
 tone (e.g. Nilotic languages such as Shilluk, Maasai and Nandi)
Typology of Basic Clause Structure
Beatrice Primus
LLACAN Paris, January 14th 2015
Implicational p-universal (Plank UA, 907):
Adpositions encode subject and object only if the language lacks inflectional
case altogether.
Most universals are probabilistic, i.e. not exceptionless (p-universals)
Implicational universals "if A then B" exclude only "A without B":
subj obj
peripheral functions
adpos
adpos
Latin
case
adpos
Hungarian
case
case
exceptional
adpos
case
Japanese
Typology of Basic Clause Structure
Beatrice Primus
LLACAN Paris, January 14th 2015
CASE in the broadest sense: Dependent- vs. head-marking languages
(Nichols 1986)
Abkhaz (North-West Caucasian, Hewitt 1979: 51):
Verbal arguments bear zero exponence for CASE, the CASE functions are
exclusively marked by verb prefixes (one has zero exponence, see Ø-)
Typology of Basic Clause Structure
Beatrice Primus
LLACAN Paris, January 14th 2015
Hierarchies (scales) of CASES and grammatical relations
The members of linguistic categories and relations are aligned on a hierarchy.
CH: nominative > accusative > dative
> other oblique cases
GRH: subject
> direct object > indirect object > other oblique function
increasing formal simplicity
increasing frequency
accessible to more operations / rules
easier to process
earlier in language acquisition
CH with adnominal gen > dat: Dixon 1994: 57, Blake 2001: 89-90, Croft 2001: 139-41, Malchukov &
Spencer 2009: 651
GRH: Keenan & Comrie 1977, among many others
Typology of Basic Clause Structure
Beatrice Primus
LLACAN Paris, January 14th 2015
Increasing formal complexity right-/downward
IF a grammatical function is encoded by adpositions, THEN all functions lower
on the GR Hierarchy of the language are also coded by adpositions and not
by inflectional cases (see above)
Increasing formal simplicity left-/upward
Exercise: replace the question marks
IF a CASE has only zero exponence, THEN all CASES ???? on the CASE
Hierarchy of the language also have ????.
Counterexamples are marked nominative languages, which are extremely rare
world wide but frequent in East Africa, e.g. Oromo (Cushitic) and Turkana
(Eastern Nilotic), where they are maked by tone (König 2009).
Tone-marking and head-marking systems exhibit less clear formal
asymmetries.
Typology of Basic Clause Structure
Beatrice Primus
LLACAN Paris, January 14th 2015
Frequency
For any CASES of verbal arguments ranked as A > B on the CH, if B is
selected by a verbal predicate*, then A is also selected.
Inflectional cases with bivalent verbs in German (Primus 2011):
92.7%
nom+acc
7%
nom+dat
0.3%
nom+gen
(vs. 99% nom+acc+dat)
Counterexamples: Split-intransitive systems, where the subject of one
subclass of intransitive verbs is marked by a non-nominative CASE depending
on its semantic role or the aspect class of the verb, inter alia.
*Selection frequencies are dependent on the head category. Nominal heads
most frequently select the genitive.
Typology of Basic Clause Structure
Beatrice Primus
LLACAN Paris, January 14th 2015
Accessibility - Agreement
For any grammatical relations whose CASES are ranked as A > B on the CH,
if the clausal predicate agrees with B-arguments, then it also agrees with Aarguments (Primus 1999, chap. 6; Croft 2001, chap. 4)
subj/nom
dirobj/acc
indirobj/dat
Swahili, Kinyarwanda (Bantu),
Maltese, Arabic (Semitic)
✓
✓
✓
Hungarian, Mordvin (Finno-Ugric)
✓
✓
German, Russian
✓
Indonesian (no agreement)
unexpected (Exercise: replace ?)
Barai (Southeast Papuan), Roviana
(Solomon Islands, Malayo-Polynesian), Gilbertese* (Micronesian,
Malayo-Polynesian)
?
?
?
*also known as Kirabati
Typology of Basic Clause Structure
Beatrice Primus
LLACAN Paris, January 14th 2015
Processing difficulty
(Bader & Lamers 2009)
Experimental evidence (e.g. case error detection)
Given A > B on the CH, B used instead of A was detected faster/more reliably
than A used instead of B.
Example: unterstützen 'support' selects ACC, helfen 'help' selects DAT;
unterstützen + DAT is a more severe error than helfen + ACC
Language acquisition
earlier / fewer errors
nom+acc
(Eisenbeiß et al. 2006 for German)
later / systematic errors
nom+dat
nom+gen (5 years)
nom+acc+d
Typology of Basic Clause Structure
Beatrice Primus
LLACAN Paris, January 14th 2015
Explanations for hierarchies
 markedness (critically discussed in Haspelmath 2006, Bybee 2011)
 frequency (Croft 2001, Bybee 2011)
 language performance, i.e. processing and acquisition (Primus 2011)
Primus (2011: 314): The rationale of hierarchies is to guarantee a coalition of
conditions that enhances efficiency in performance.
Example: The simplest (least marked) form is used most frequently and is
most accessible to grammatical operations.
Hawkins' Performance-Grammar Correspondence Hypothesis (2011):
Grammars have conventionalized structures in proportion to their degree of
preference in performance.
Typology of Basic Clause Structure
Beatrice Primus
LLACAN Paris, January 14th 2015
Are hierarchies universal?
The fact that categories are organized on hierarchies is a p-universal, but the
categories themselves may not be. We may call the first CASE on the CH of
any language "nominative" or "subject" but we need not.
The order of German case forms for 'the' (M.SG) oriented on Latin:
der - des - dem - den
The typologically informed order of case forms (Eisenberg 2004):
der - den - dem - des
– heavier, i.e. less sonorous, syllable coda 
The grammatical relation that can be expressed by der is the only target of
verb agreement etc., etc.
Typology of Basic Clause Structure
Beatrice Primus
LLACAN Paris, January 14th 2015
Alignment Typology (e.g. Dixon 1994, Primus 1999, Bickel 2011)
also: typology of grammatical relations, relational typology
actor-like (A)
patient-like (P)
Van Valin & LaPolla 1997, Dowty 1991
1st CASE
2nd CASE
2nd CASE
1st CASE
accusative construction
ergative construction
A generalized CASE Hierarchy
nominative/absolutive > accusative/ergative > dative > other oblique cases
Dixon 1994: 57, Blake 2001: 89-90, Croft 2001: 139-41, Malchukov & Spencer 2009: 651.
These authors do not distinguish adverbal vs. adnominal selection and therefore assume adnominal gen
> dat. This leads to unnecessary counterexamples (cf. Malchukov & Spencer 2009: 653).
Typology of Basic Clause Structure
Beatrice Primus
LLACAN Paris, January 14th 2015
Yawa (isolate, Papuan, Jones 1986: 40, 47)
Exercise: Is this an accusative, ergative or marked nominative pattern?
Typology of Basic Clause Structure
Beatrice Primus
LLACAN Paris, January 14th 2015
Hierarchy-based expectations
nom/abs > acc/erg > dative > other oblique cases
increasing formal simplicity
increasing frequency
accessible to more operations / rules
easier to process (no pertinent studies)
earlier in language acquisition (Bavin & Stoll 2013)
Typology of Basic Clause Structure
Beatrice Primus
LLACAN Paris, January 14th 2015
Exercise: Spell out the expectations
If the language has exactly one argument function which has only or
predominantly zero exponence then
 will it be selected most frequently by mono-, bi-valent and trivalent verbs?
 will it trigger verb agreement iff CASE-functions determine this rule?
CASE-based agreement: each CASE function has its specific agreement marker(s)
 will it be the first to be acquired in language acquisition?
 will it be linked/mapped to actor-like roles or to patient-like roles?
Typology of Basic Clause Structure
Beatrice Primus
LLACAN Paris, January 14th 2015
CASE-based agreement in ergative constructions
For any grammatical relations whose CASES are ranked as A > B on the CH,
if the clausal predicate agrees with B-arguments, then it also agrees with Aarguments (Primus 1999, chap. 6; Croft 2001, chap. 4)
ABS
ERG
DAT
Basque (Isolate), Abkhaz
(Northwest-Caucasian)
✓
✓
✓
West Greenlandic (Eskimo),
K'iche' (Mayan)
✓
✓
Avar (Northeast-Caucasian),
Kurdish (Iranian), Kuikuro
(Cariban), Yawa (see above)
✓
Typology of Basic Clause Structure
Beatrice Primus
LLACAN Paris, January 14th 2015
CASE on full noun phrases does not privilege actor-roles over patient-roles.
Comrie 2013, WALS:
Value
No lgs (total)
%
Neutral
98
51.6
Nominative-accusative
(standard)
46
24.2
Nominative-accusative (marked
nominative)
6
3.2
Ergative-absolutive
32
16.8
Tripartite
4
2.1
Active-inactive
4
2.1
190
100
Total
active/inactive, also known as "split intransitive", is widely spread and co-occurs with the ergative or
accusative pattern (Bickel & Nichols 2009).
Typology of Basic Clause Structure
Beatrice Primus
LLACAN Paris, January 14th 2015
Word order
Word order privileges actor-roles over patient-roles.
Greenberg's (1963) Universal 1: In declarative sentences with nominal subject
and object, the dominant order is almost always one in which the subject
precedes the object.
"The terms subject and object are used here in a rather informal semantic
sense, to denote the more agent-like and more patient-like elements
respectively" (Dryer 2013a).
Typology of Basic Clause Structure
Beatrice Primus
LLACAN Paris, January 14th 2015
Dryer 2013a, WALS:
Value
No lgs (total)
No lgs (total)
%
1148
83.4
40
2.9
189
189
13.7
1377
1377
100
Subject-object-verb (SOV)
565
Subject-verb-object (SVO)
488
Verb-subject-object (VSO)
95
Verb-object-subject (VOS)
25
Object-verb-subject (OVS)
11
Object-subject-verb (OSV)
4
Lacking a dominant order
Total
Typology of Basic Clause Structure
Beatrice Primus
LLACAN Paris, January 14th 2015
Summary
CASE
 It is useful to align CASES on a hierarchy (formal marking, frequency,
accessibility, lg. processing & lg. acquisition)
 Three dominant patterns for coding actor vs. patient for bivalent events
• neutral pattern (no CASE)
• accusative pattern (1st CASE for actor)
• ergative pattern (1st CASE for patient)
• split intransitivity is wide spread and co-occurs with the ergative or
accusative pattern (Bickel & Nichols 2009)
WORD ORDER
 Word order is a scale, i.e. the first argument position is the privileged one.
 There is only one dominant pattern: actor-like roles are privileged.
Typology of Basic Clause Structure
Beatrice Primus
LLACAN Paris, January 14th 2015
Complications - Some examples
"Subject" and "object" are indeterminate wrt to CASE, word order or semantic roles,
so do not use them.
In ergative languages there is a tension between CASE, which privileges P, and
basic / dominant argument order, which privileges A; so their syntax is often split and
(even) less predictable than that of accusative languages.
The CASE patterns ergative vs. accusative are most consistently used for agents
proper and patiens proper. Other types of verbs, for instance verbs expressing
mental states, often do not follow the basic pattern of the language.
Both CASES and word order serve other functions related, inter alia, to information
packaging (e.g. focus, topic, definiteness), animacy and personhood.
Example: In Hindi a patient is marked by the nominative, unless it is definite and
animate, in which event it is marked by the CASE ko (also used for
recipients/addressees of trivalent verbs). This pattern is known as "differential object
marking".
Suggestions for further reading: Bickel (2011), Primus (2011)
Typology of Basic Clause Structure
Beatrice Primus
LLACAN Paris, January 14th 2015
Time for discussion
Typology of Basic Clause Structure
Beatrice Primus
LLACAN Paris, January 14th 2015
References
Bader, Markus / Lamers, Monique. 2009. Case in language comprehension. In: Malchukov / Spencer, 402-418.
Bavin, Edith L. / Stoll, Sabine (eds.) 2013. The acquisition of ergativity. 2013. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Bickel, Balthasar. 2011. Grammatical relations typology. In: Song (ed.), 399-444.
Bickel, Balthasar / Nichols, Johanna. 2009. Case marking and alignment. In: Malchukov / Spencer (eds.), 304-321.
Blake, Barry J. 2001. Case. 2nd rev. ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bybee, Joan. 2011. Markedness: Iconicity, economy, and frequency. In: Song (ed.), 131-147.
Comrie, Bernard. 2013. Alignment of case marking. http://wals.info/chapter/98, Accessed on 2015-01-09
Croft, William. 2001. Radical Construction Grammar: Syntactic Theory in Typological Perspective. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Dixon, Robert M. W. 1994. Ergativity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Dowty, David R. 1991. Thematic proto-roles and argument selection. Language 67, 547-619.
Dryer, Matthew S. 2013a. Order of Subject, Object and Verb. http://wals.info/chapter/81, Accessed on 2015-01-09
Dryer, Matthew S. 2013b. The position of case affixes. http://wals.info/chapter/51, Accessed on 2015-01-09
Dryer, Matthew S. / Haspelmath, Martin (eds.) 2013. The World Atlas of Language Structures Online (WALS
Online). Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. http://wals.info/
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elements. In: Greenberg, Joseph H. (ed.), Universals of language. Cambridge/Mass, 58-90.
Greenberg, Joseph. 1966. Language universals with a special reference to feature hierarchies. The Hague.
Typology of Basic Clause Structure
Beatrice Primus
LLACAN Paris, January 14th 2015
Haspelmath, Martin et al. (eds.) 2005. The World Atlas of Language Structures (WALS). Oxford: Oxford University
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Haspelmath, Martin. 2006. Against markedness (and what to replace it with). Journal of Linguistics 42, 25-70.
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Typology of Basic Clause Structure
Beatrice Primus
LLACAN Paris, January 14th 2015