Linguistic diversity in space and time 9780226580562, 9780226580593, 9780226580579

Table of contents :
Frontmatter
List of Illustrations (page vii)
List of Tables (page ix)
Acknowledgments (page xiii)
Note on Transcription and Abbreviations (page xv)
1 Introduction (page 1)
2 Favored and Disfavored Grammatical Patterns (page 45)
3 Correlations between Types (page 97)
4 Correlations of Structural Types with Grammatical Categories (page 116)
5 Diachronic Stability: Genetic and Areal (page 163)
6 A Role of Geography: Structural Affinities between Areas (page 184)
7 Linguistic Diversity: Geographical Distribution (page 231)
8 Diversity and Linguistic Prehistory: Conclusions and Open Questions (page 254)
1 Sample Languages (page 283)
2 Data: Language (by Area) and Structural Features (page 292)
3 Alphabetical List of Languages (page 302)
4 Frequency and Distribution of Voice Systems (page 307)
Notes (page 311)
References (page 319)
Indexes (page 343)

Citation preview

LINGUISTIC

| DIVERSITY IN SPACE AND TIME

LINGUISTIC DIVERSITY IN SPACE AND TIME Johanna Nichols

The University of Chicago Press Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 1992 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. Published 1992 Paperback edition 1999 Printed in the United States of America

04 03 02 01 00 99 5432 ISBN: 0-226-58056-3 (cloth) ISBN: 0-226-58057-1 (paperback)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Nichols, Johanna. Linguistic diversity in space and time / Johanna Nichols.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. 1. Comparative linguistics. 2. Areal linguistics. 3. Language and languages—Variation. 4. Linguistic demography. I. Title.

P143.N53 1992 — 417'.7—dc20 91-43682 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences — Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.

Contents

List ofof Illustrations Vil List Tables 1X Acknowledgments Xi Note on Transcription and Abbreviations | XV

1 Introduction ]

2 Favored and Disfavored Grammatical Patterns 45

3 Correlations between Types 97

4 Correlations of Structural Types with Grammatical Categories 116

5 Dhiachronic Stability: Genetic and Areal 163

6 The Role of Geography: Structural Affinities between Areas 184

7 Linguistic Diversity: Geographical Distribution 231

and Open Questions 254

8 Diversity and Linguistic Prehistory: Conclusions

Appendixes

|2 Data: Sample Languages 283 Language (by Area) and Structural Features 292

3 Alphabetical List of Languages 302

Notes 311 References 319 Indexes 343

4 Frequency and Distribution of Voice Systems 307

Vv

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Illustrations

Figures

| Frequencies of D/(H+F) ratios 73

2 Frequencies of D/(D+H+F) proportions 74

3 Plot of D against H values (NP and S only) 77

4 Frequencies of complexity levels 88

5 Tree diagram of typological divergence 229

1 Sample areas 28 2 Modern language families 28 Maps

3 Sample languages 29 4 Head-marking languages in sample 29

5 Double/split marking languages in sample 30 6 Dependent-marking languages in sample 30

7 Ergative languages in sample 31

8 Stative-active languages in sample 31

9 Languages with inclusive/exclusive oppositions 32 10 Languages with alienable/inalienable possession 32

11 Languages with noun classes 33

12 Languages with numeral classifiers 33

Vil

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Tables

1 Bioregions and sampled areas 27

2 Word order and type of verb inflection in two surveys 43

3 Frequencies of marking types in three constituents 69 4 Frequencies of marking types in constituents, by area 70

(NP and S only) 72 6 Dpointsin NP + S 715 5) Areal preferences for head and dependent marking

78 Noun/pronoun Hpoints in NPsplits + S 76 78 9 Head marking in NP and S constituents, by area 83

10 Dependent marking in NP and S constituents, by area 83 11 Support for correlations of NP and D marking, and S and H

marking, shown by languages in Tables 9—10 84

12 Areal distribution of complexity levels 89 13 Frequencies of alignment patterns among parts of speech 90

14 Types and frequencies of ergative/accusative splits 91

IS Areal distribution of word order 94

16 Complexity and head/dependent type 99 17 Areal breakdown: Complexity and head/dependent type 100 18 Alignment and head/dependent type 101 19 Clause head marking and alignment of verbal morphology 102 20. Alignment and head/dependent type 104 21 Word order and head/dependent type 105 22 Word order and head/dependent type: New World only 106 1X

x . Tables

the verb 106

23. Word order and amount of head-marking morphology on

24 Word order and head/dependent type: Areal frequencies 107

25 Complexity and alignment 110

alignments only 110

26 Complexity and alignment, grouped and for three major

27 Mean complexity of dominant alignment types, by area 111

28 Complexity and alignment: Trends in Table 27 111

29 Complexity and word order 112 30 Alignment and word order 112

breakdown 113

31 Dominant alignment and word order: Two-way breakdown 113 32 Alignment of verbal morphology and word order: Two-way

33. Summary of correlations for type features 114

34 Inalienable possession and marking of the NP 119 35. Inalienable possession and dominant alignment 122

36 Geography and inalienable possession 123

37 Geography and inclusive/exclusive oppositions 124 38 Concord subclass, gender, and macrogender in Chechen 126 39 Loci of class marking (relative to the class-bearing noun) 128

40 Gender hotbeds and outliers 132 41 Frequencies of loci of class marking, plus type features 132 42 Plurality neutralization, by part of speech and continent 148

nonzero D and H) 149

43 Alignment and plurality neutralization (languages with

44 Head/dependent type and plurality neutralization (languages

with nonzero D and H) 149

45 Valence-affecting processes, by area 155

46 Types and frequencies of voice systems 155

and alignment 156

47 Valence-increasing (+) and decreasing (—) voice systems

dependent marking 157

48 A-affecting and O-affecting voice systems and head/

49 Locus of marking and category of agreement or classification 161

50 Genetic vs. areal stability 165 51 Numerical values of gross types 166 52 Hierarchy of features based on number of gross types per stock 167 53 Hierarchy of features based on number of gross types per area 167

54 Conformity to majority type within groups 171 55 Valence-changing directionalities exhibited by groups 174

Tables Xl 56 Conformity to preference for valence increase (“+’’),

decrease (“‘—”’), or both within groups 176

valence changes 177

57 Conformity to preference for A-affecting or O-affecting

58 Inclusive/exclusive: Departures from modal type 179 59 Inalienable possession: Departures from modal type 180

60 Noun classes: Departures from modal type 182

complexity, by area 186 62 Dominant alignment by area 187 61 Means and frequencies of head/dependent marking and

Dryer 1989a 188

63 Distributions required for significance on the test of

64 Significance levels for difference in frequency of H/D type

and alignment, by area and type of area 189

65 Languages with high levels of complexity 193 66 Average range and degree of complexity by kind of area 194

67 Levels of significance for word order differences 196

68 Inclusive/exclusive oppositions 197 69 Number and percent of languages having noun classes, by area 198

70 Number of languages having numeral classifiers, by area 199 71 Significance levels for areal differences in frequency of noun

classes and numeral classifiers 200

72 Plurality neutralization 201 73 Inalienable possession 202 74 Number of languages having PP’s, by area 203

75 Global clines 206 76 Significance levels for areal differences in frequency of three

clinally distributed properties 207

77 Mean head/dependent proportions, in rank order 218

78 Likeness: Analysis | 220 79 Nearness: Analysis | 220 80 Likeness: Analysis 81 Nearness: Analysis 44 222 222 82 Summary of correlations between and within areas (12 areas) 223 83 Summary of correlations between and within areas (7 areas) 223

84 Occurrence of high and low likeness and nearness values 225

85 Propensity for affinity, in decreasing order 226

86 Percentage of types by area 227

or more from the mean 227

87 Instances where areal frequencies are one standard deviation

Xi Tables

88 Genetic densities of sample areas 233 89 Areal means for percentage of languages showing specified feature values (reference values), and absolute distance of

that percentage from 50% 238

90 Areal means for percentage of languages showing modal feature values, and absolute distance of that percentage

from 33% or 50% : 240 91 Diversity in head/dependent marking 242

92 Diversity in alignment 243 93 Complexity and diversity of complexity by area 244 94 Diversity in word order 245 95 Three measures of the relative diversity of macroareas and

sets of residual or spread zones 248

96 Correlations in areal frequencies 257

Acknowledgments

Work on the structure and history of languages of the USSR, including fieldwork on Chechen-Ingush, has been made possible by research in the USSR, supported by the International Research and Exchanges Board (1979/80, 1981, 1984, 1989). I am grateful to Moscow State University, the Linguistics Institute of the Soviet Academy of Sciences (Moscow), Tbilisi State University, the Oriental Institute of the Georgian Academy of Sciences, the Linguistics Institute of the Georgian Academy of Sciences, Groznyj State University, the Daghestan Filial of the Soviet Academy of Sciences (Makhachkala), and the Archeological Institute of the Soviet Academy of Sciences (Moscow) for research affiliation at these various times.

Data collection and analysis in the languages of Australia and New Guinea, and the conceptual turning point where I came to see linguistic _ diversity as the focus of this project and the key to linguistic prehistory, were made possible by a visiting fellowship in the Department of Linguistics (Faculties), Australian National University, in 1989. Library work and preliminary analysis were made possible by sabbatical

leave from the University of California, Berkeley, and a Humanities Research Grant from the College of Letters and Science in the fall of 1988 and a Mellon Grant in Aid from the Center for Slavic and East European Stud-

ies, University of California, Berkeley, in the spring of 1989. Bibliographical research assistance has been supported by the Center, and other support, including the all-important funding for purchase of computer and software, has come from the Committee on Research of the University of California, Berkeley. The Statistical Consulting Service of the Department Xill

X1V Acknowledgments

of Statistics, University of California, Berkeley, has been of assistance on several occasions. Eureka Cartography produced map 1, and Pope Graphic Arts Center produced figure 3. Over the past few years a number of colleagues and friends have generously helped me with information about the structures and classification of languages, copies of unpublished work, comments on drafts, and other forms of scholarly support. My sincere thanks to Robert Austerlitz, Howard Berman, Joan Bybee, Lyle Campbell, Grev Corbett, Bob Dixon, Matthew Dryer, Mark Durie, Nick Evans, Bill Foley, Thomas Gamkrelidze, Orin Gensler, Ives Goddard, Victor Golla, Jeff Heath, Leanne Hinton, Gary Holland, Larry Hyman, Bill Jacobsen, Jim Kari, Terry Kaufman, Aleksandr Kibrik, Andrei Kibrik, G. A. Klimov, Randy LaPolla, Francesca Merlan, Larry Morgan, Volodja Plungjan, Rich Rhodes, Bruce Rigsby, Olga Romanova, Phil Rose, Alan Rumsey, Martin Schwartz, Alan Timberlake, Robert Van Valin, Ken Whistler, David Wilkins, Tony Woodbury, and two anonymous referees. None of these people necessarily agrees with all of my conclusions. Errors in the interpretation, coding, and entry of grammatical information in the database are inevitable, and these are my responsibility.

It is a pleasure to acknowledge a more general debt of gratitude to all authors of descriptive grammars. It is their work that makes crosslinguistic research possible.

May 1991 Johanna Nichols Berkeley

Note on Transcription and Abbreviations

Examples are reproduced from published sources, with no attempt at standardization apart from occasional minor typographical changes, noted with the examples. Interlinear abbreviations are also reproduced from published sources, with explanations only for those judged nontransparent. Interlinears have been added where the original sources did not provide them.

For some of the examples in chapter 2, the head of the constituent is boldface and the markers at issue are underlined.

XV

BLANK PAGE

Introduction ,

1.0 Issues One structural feature in language predicts another, implies its presence, or limits its functional or distributional possibilities. One grammatical property remains unchanged in most daughter branches of a family, while another shows the varied reflexes that bespeak a propensity for change. One property is found fairly consistently throughout a sizable language area,

while another has no detectable spatial patterning. These three familiar situations illustrate three kinds of what I will call stability: structural autonomy or the ability to function as typological predictor; diachronic persistence or conservatism; and areal consistency. This book seeks to establish

typologically, historically, and areally stable features in the world’s languages; to sort out genetic, geographical, and universal determinants of linguistic patterning; to describe and explain the ways in which the three kinds of stability do and do not work together; and to apply the findings to historical linguistics, especially to the problems of detecting affinity at great time depths and describing early linguistic prehistory. Opposed to stability, in connotations and probably also in popular consciousness, is diversity. But when the distribution of the most stable features is mapped, we see that typological diversity, both within and between areal groups, has a broader distribution and is more independent of geography and economy than relative homogeneity is; it is an evident ancient feature in long-inhabited and linguistically autonomous parts of the world; and the frequencies of certain typological features in high-diversity areas in all parts of the globe tend to converge on a common statistical profile. Likewise, great diversity of genetic lineages is a stable feature of all areas un-

less specific and identifiable geographical and cultural factors intervene.

|

2 Chapter One Diversity itself thus emerges as a stable and unmarked property of sets of languages, and one of the purposes of this book is to lead linguists to conceive of language not as an abstract object, a psychological object, text, a family tree, etc., but as a population, one characterized by diversity. As a first step toward this goal, it proposes a descriptive and interpretive apparatus for the analysis of linguistic diversity. The substantive phenomena whose distribution will be at issue are the substance of typology: linguistic types and typologically important features. Stability and diversity will be described in terms of standard typological notions: frequencies of types, marked-unmarked relations, implicational hierarchies, and structural correlations. The inventory of features surveyed and a number of the fundamental hypotheses about their distribution are drawn from the work of G. A. Klimov (especially 1977, 1983a), whose system for predicting a wide range of morphological, syntactic, and semantic features from the overall semantic cast of a language is the most far-reaching and the most explicitly whole-language typology yet attempted. Since the distribution of features in various groups is at issue, typology will be treated here as a population science, that is, a linguistic counterpart to population biology and population genetics, which analyze variation within and between populations of organisms and use the results to describe evolution. Viewing typology as a population science means shifting typology away from defining “‘possible human language”’ and instead pursuing generalizations about the world’s languages. Thus, the main object of description here is not principles constraining possible human languages but principles governing the distribution of structural features among the world’s languages. Whether the world’s languages of today fully represent all possible human languages will be discussed in the last chapter. The population sciences have a decidedly historical bent, and this project is intended as a contribution toward a typology that will actively serve historical linguistics. At present, when typology is brought to bear on the reconstruction of families and stocks its only recognized function is to serve as a plausibility check on reconstructions as synchronic systems and as a constraint on their substantive content (for this function of typology see Jakobson 1971a; for an extended application, Gamkrelidze and Ivanov 1984; for a textbook statement, Comrie 1981a:chap. 10; for discussion and principled objections, Klimov 1983a:138ff.). It does not establish correspondences and hence does not establish subgroupings. Nor is this necessary; at the level of reconstructable groupings, the standard comparative method suffices to establish correspondences and thus subgroupings. But the comparative method does not apply at time depths much greater than about 8000 years (this is the conventional age of Afroasiatic, which seems

Introduction 3 to represent the upper limit of detectability by traditional historical method), and it is precisely at great time depths that population typology will be shown here to have an important heuristic role to play in historical linguistics. The population typology presented here offers four advantages over standard comparative method for work at great time depths (in addition to the basic fact that the comparative method does not work at great time depths). The first advantage is that, instead of dealing primarily with lineages and family trees, it works with areal populations. This allows the linguist to say something about the prehistory of the languages in an area long before their genetic connections have been fully worked out. For example, a great deal can be said, on the basis of typological information, about the prehistory and origins of the languages of South America despite the fact that basic classificatory work on these languages is still far from complete (see Kaufman 1990 for the current state of knowledge in this arena). The geographical nature of the areal focus naturally means that the historical inferences to be drawn will have to do with geography and provenience rather than descent. But this is no handicap; in fact it seems to go without saying that at great time depths the issue of interest is migration and spread of languages rather than the reconstruction of protolanguages per se. (To take just three examples, migration is the main issue in the con-

cluding chapter of Greenberg 1987, which attempts groupings of native : American languages at great time depths; the mechanism and chronology of areal distribution is a main concern of Blake 1990, where a reconstruction at a great time depth is attempted precisely in order to establish what is conservative and what is innovative in a set of Australian areal isoglosses;

and Cavalli-Sforza et al. 1988 view prehistoric migration as one of the most important issues on which their attempt at integrating linguistic, genetic, and archeological evidence can throw light.) Second, population typology uses large areas and demonstrably stable structural features (for the areas see below in this chapter; stability of features is established in chap. 5). This enables us to reach back to great time depths (the connection between stability, scale of distribution, and time depth is established in chap. 6). Third, population typology uses structural affinities (in stable features) between areas to trace ancient migrations, colonization histories, and areal provenience of colonizers. For this there are established quantitative methods for determining affinity and testing its significance. Thus population typology gives us the heuristic method that standard comparative-historical method lacks for great time depths.’ Fourth, and probably most important, in population typology diversity

4 Chapter One is an object of theoretical and descriptive interest, and measures of diversity are its natural theoretical constructs. If we have a theory of diversity we can describe and explain diversity, and the chapters to follow will show that diversity, both genetic and structural, when properly analyzed provides the raw material for comparison and reconstruction at great time depths. There are four recurrent problems with recent historical work at great time depths. First, the family tree is the only model and genetic relatedness the only theoretical construct for comparative-historical work. In particular, genetic relatedness is the only theoretical explanation available for similarities judged to be due to something other than universals or random chance. As an example, consider three language families of central Eurasia which share striking similarities in morphosyntactic structure and pronominal roots: Turkic, Mongolian, and Tungusic. For a long time it was assumed that these three families were related as branches of a superstock called Altaic. When structural typology gave linguists another theoretical construct—implicational statements of grammatical universals—to ac-

count for the structural similarities (which include SOV order, clause chaining, agglutination, suffixing morphology, vowel harmony), the evidence was reduced to the pronominal root resemblances and a set of puta-

tive cognates. When the cognates proved not to be valid, Altaic was abandoned, and the received view now is that Turkic, Mongolian, and Tungusic are unrelated (see Unger 1990). But the disturbing fact remains that the pronominal roots are just too similar, in both basic consonantism and patterns of suppletion, to be the product of chance. As long as relatedness and the family tree are the only theoretical constructs available to historical linguistics, we face a dilemma: either the “Altaic” languages are genetically related (in which case they must be quite closely related, for the pronoun similarities are comparable to those that obtain within a single branch of Indo-European such as Germanic or Balto-Slavic; yet the lexical stock proves to offer very few good potential cognates, much unlike the situation in Germanic or Balto-Slavic) or they are not (in which case the pronominal similarities are due to chance, which seems highly implausible). The population-typological approach offers other theoretical con-

structs and hence other explanations for such facts as the striking similarities of pronouns in genetically unrelated languages (pronouns will be discussed again in chap. 8). A corollary to this problem is the fact that almost all historical work is based on the implicit assumption that the spreading families like IndoEuropean, Afroasiatic, Niger-Congo, Austronesian, Pama-Nyungan, UtoAztecan, Algonquian, Mayan, and others like them represent the norm in

Introduction 5 linguistic development and the primary and preferred object of historicalcomparative study; that groupings having any historical validity are to be described in the terms developed for describing these groups; and that the normal situation for a language is to belong to such a group. This leaves no way to describe isolates, small families, etc., except by assimilating them to the Indo-European model. It discourages historical linguists from working on language isolates, and it encourages historically-minded young linguists to specialize in one of the established families. Thus the scholarly

literature of comparative-historical linguistics continues to give the impres- , sion that the Indo-European picture is the norm. The second problem with standard historical method is that it has no theory of diversity and no way of scientifically describing diversity. Hence diversity has no theoretical status in historical linguistics (or, for that matter, in synchronic linguistics). Therefore, in standard method a description

of diversity is indistinguishable from presentation of a pile of unanalyzed , raw data. Unanalyzed raw data, of course, calls for analysis, and this means the comparative method and statements of genetic relatedness (see flaw 1, just above). Greenberg 1963b (where the languages of Africa are reduced to relatively few genetic groups) and Greenberg 1987 (where the languages of the New World are reduced to three genetic groups) serve as a minimal pair showing the importance of diversity and the need for a theory of diversity in historical linguistics. Greenberg 1963b is a paradigm case of scholarly success, its analysis still largely intact in received view and its

method generally accepted in mainstream thinking. The reception of Greenberg 1987 has been very different and its prospects for long-term success are very different (for some critiques see Campbell 1989; Jacobsen

1992; Matisoff 1990; Berman, in press). But the method is one and the same. The difference lies in the linguistic material it is applied to. The languages of Africa prove to have been underanalyzed raw data for comparative work, while those of the New World prove otherwise. The crucial difference is the degree of diversity, both structural and genetic, in those languages. But in the present theoretical climate, the claim that the New World languages are highly diverse is indistinguishable from a claim that they are simply underanalyzed and/or underclassified. The theoretical contribution envisioned for the present book is to give theoretical status to diversity in linguistics and provide descriptive measures for it, so that the observation that the New World’s languages exhibit diversity of certain kinds and in a certain degree will have the status of a scientific statement and usable descriptive observation. Third, as has been noted before (e.g., Bateman et al. 1990, Goddard and Campbell, in press), the comparative method when applied at time

6 Chapter One . depths greater than its cut-off point of some 8,000 years gives no way of

choosing between competing claims of relatedness. The populationtypological approach uses standard quantitative measures and hence offers both the possibility of partial or statistical (rather than all-or-nothing) relatedness and standard possibilities for ranking affinities and testing significance. (These are discussed in chap. 6.) The fourth problem involves differentiating between deep time depths.

Although the cut-off point is fairly shallow, the standard comparative method can nonetheless identify some phenomena that appear to be relevant to reconstruction or classification at greater time depths. But because the cut-off point is so shallow, the view of great time depths lacks resolution, and there is no way to decide whether one’s list of criterial resemblances pertains to 12,000 or to 40,000 years ago. But these are great differences,

and they delimit important stages in human prehistory: ca. 12,000 years ago marks the end of glaciation and of the Paleolithic era; by ca. 40,000 years ago, colonization of all inhabited continents seems to have been accomplished (for relevant dates see Roberts, Jones, and Smith 1990, Allen 1989, Nichols 1990); and ca. 100,000 years ago is the received conservative age of our species (see several papers in Mellars and Stringer 1989; also Tuttle 1988, Stringer 1988, Stringer and Andrews 1988). The fact that great time depths are indistinguishable to the lexical comparative method explains why the work on Nostratic, the putative macro-group joining Indo-European, Afroasiatic, Kartvelian (South Caucasian), Turkic, Tungusic, Mongolian, Uralic, and Dravidian (or some subset of these), expands its purview naturally and without clear breaks to a much larger grouping of most lineages of the Old World and New World (for one such extension of Nostratic see Kaiser and Shevoroshkin 1988). That is, the method makes no clear distinction between ca. 12,000 years ago (the presumable approximate age of the traditional Nostratic) and the ca. 40,000-year time depth

that would be a minimum required for an American-Eurasian-African grouping. Here, in contrast, measures proposed in chapters 6 and 7 below allow one to distinguish clearly between affinities possibly going back to the end of the Paleolithic and those possibly going back to the beginning of the global expansion. The effect of these four flaws has been to discourage mainstream academic study of ancient linguistic prehistory. This book is offered as a first step toward a historical methodology relevant to great time depths. It presents a view whereby the Indo-European situation is not the universal norm but requires fairly specific historical accidents for its formation, while the kind of typological and genetic diversity we see in the Caucasus, the Balkans, the American Pacific coast, northern Australia, Melanesia, and simi-

Introduction 7 lar areas represents a normal and at least equally common state of affairs. That diversity conforms to describable typological norms, and it offers a living, observable model for much if not most of linguistic prehistory. Today’s linguistic diversity will be used in chapters 6 and 7 as the basis for a very early reconstruction and a theory of affinity, divergence, and origins for the linguistic populations of different continents. Those chapters argue

that structural typology, rather than individual etymological and grammatical elements, correspondences, and family trees, is the best source of information relevant to extending the purview of historical linguistics back to at least the dawn of the Neolithic and perhaps to the beginning of human expansion over the globe. As this review of historical issues may already have made clear, this book is about typology only in the sense that typology provides its data and means of analysis. Its primary object of analysis and primary theoretical concern is linguistic prehistory. On a different plane, it has another goal of asserting and demonstrating the importance of form in typological description and prediction. Much of the recent work in functional and typological linguistics proceeds from content or function to form and assumes that content and function motivate form. This study, in contrast, argues that in a number of cases structure predicts, influences, or limits content and function, and that several grammatical categories which have traditionally been viewed as essentially semantic are driven by structural tendencies and can be analyzed as purely formal. It does not replace functional analyses with

structural ones; for the most part it simply looks at different problems. Some of the patterns uncovered below obviously call for functional explanations, but for most of them the most direct explanation, or at least the most satisfactory metagrammatical observation, is that form limits function. Finally, as a more practical goal, I hope this book will provide a documented core sample and a body of data which will be a useful reference for research and teaching. Appendix 2, the database, together with the struc-

tural correlations established in the chapters below, are intended as the main empirical contribution of this study.

1.1 History of the Question 1.1.1. Typological issues. The typological work of G. A. Klimov (e.g., Klimov 1977, 1983a; for shorter works in Western languages see Klimov 1986, 1985, 1983b) has been quite influential in the former USSR, especially in historical linguistics (for example, it is used in the reconstruction of Indo-European morphology, syntax, and lexical semantics in Gamkrelidze and Ivanov 1984). It raises interesting and testable cross-linguistic hypoth-

8 Chapter One eses, utilizes a substantial database, and draws on Klimov’s considerable comparative-historical sophistication. Yet Klimov’s work remains little known in the West (the only review known to me is Comrie 1976, reviewing Klimov 1973). I will therefore summarize some of his major claims about typology and prehistory, primarily those made in the 1977 and 1983 books. _ According to Klimov, the basic determinant of linguistic type is what I

will call the conceptual cast of a language’s predications and its categorization of basic nominal and verbal notions: whether they are based on subject-object relations, agent-patient relations, an active/inactive distinction, referential properties, or others. The salient indicator of the concep-

tual cast is the stative-active, ergative, or accusative alignment of the clause, and this in turn determines the occurrence of a number of other categories. The whole set of properties—conceptual cast, alignment type, and attendant categories—constitutes the type of the language. (Klimov 1977 divides the relevant grammatical features into those that are more or less direct implicanda of type and those that are frequently observed secondary properties.) There are four basic types: the ACCUSATIVE TYPE, which grammaticalizes subject-object relations; the ERGATIVE TYPE, which

grammaticalizes agent-factitive relations (for factitive—a semantic role es-

sentially coinciding with the formal category S/O of Dixon 1979—see Kibrik 1979); the ACTIVE TYPE, which grammaticalizes an active/inactive or animate/inanimate principle; and (singled out only in the 1983 book) the CLASS TYPE, based on referential properties of nominals and having well-

developed gender or class inflection. The first three types are named for their typical clause alignments, but in Klimov’s view clause alignment is merely one of several symptoms (albeit a salient one) of the conceptual cast and hence the type. Thus the active type is almost identical in extension but

different in intension from the set of languages exhibiting stative-active alignment. Since the active type is focal in Klimov’s scheme, I will use his term active in his sense while using stative-active in what I take to be the current standard sense. Klimov carefully distinguishes type from features, faulting most of contemporary typology for failing to make this distinction and pointing out that much of what is called typology is actually the crosslinguistic study of features rather than types.” A type, in Klimov’s view, is a set of independent but correlated features from different levels of grammar, accompanied by a theory explaining the correlation. What is of particular interest to cross-linguistic comparison is the sets of typical features Klimov establishes for each type. For instance, he shows

that the active type is associated with underdevelopment of number inflection, an inclusive/exclusive opposition in pronouns, an opposition of

Introduction 9 alienable to inalienable possession, classificatory verbs, grammaticalized animacy in nouns, and other features. The active and class types display the largest number of distinctive, interesting, and testable properties, and it is these traits that will be surveyed here. The complete list of traits which Klimov finds to be associated with the active type is as follows. The properties are extracted from Klimov 1977:chap. 3, with my numbering (the 1983 book shifts a few of these from the active to the class type): Lexical properties: 1. Binary division of nouns into active vs. inactive (often termed animate and inanimate or the like in the literature). 2. Binary division of verbs into active and inactive.

3. Classificatory verbs or the like (classification based on shape, animacy, etc.). 4. Active verbs require active nouns as subjects. 5. Singular-plural lexical suppletion in verbs. 6. The category of number absent or weakly developed. 7. No copula. 8. “Adjectives” are actually intransitive verbs. 9. Inclusive/exclusive pronoun distinction in first person. 10. No infinitive, no verbal nouns. 11. Etymological identity of many body-part and plant-part terms (e.g.,

“ear” = “leaf’’). 12. Doublet verbs, suppletive for animacy of actant. Syntactic properties:

13. The clause is structurally dominated by the verb. 14. “Affective” (inverse) sentence construction with verbs of perception, etc. 15. Syntactic categories of nearer and farther object rather than direct and indirect object. 16. No verba habiendi. 17. Word order usually SOV. 18. Direct object incorporation into verb. Morphological properties: 19. The verb is much more richly inflected than the noun. 20. Two series of personal affixes on the verb: active and inactive. 21. Verbs have aspect or Aktionsarten rather than tense. 22. The noun has possessive affixes.

10 Chapter One 23. Alienable-inalienable possession distinction. 24. Inalienable possessive affixes and inactive verbal affixes are similar or identical. 25. Third person often has zero affix. 26. No voice opposition (since there is no transitivity opposition). Instead, there can be an opposition of what is called version in Kartvelian studies (roughly, active vs. middle in the terminology of Benveniste 1966, or an opposition of normal valence vs. valence augmented by a second or indirect object, or an opposition of speech-act participant vs. nonparticipant in indirect-object marking on the verb). 27. Active verbs have more morphological variation or make more morphological distinctions than inactive verbs. 28. The morphological category of number is absent or weakly developed.

29. There are no noun cases for core grammatical relations (no nominative, accusative, genitive, dative). Sometimes there is an active/inactive case opposition. 30. Postpositions are often lacking or underdeveloped in these languages. Some of them have adpositions inflected like nouns. These findings are of considerable interest because categories such as inclusive/exclusive, alienable/inalienable, singular/plural, etc., and the absence of adpositions, adjectives, a copula, etc., are not a priori obvious consequences of clause organization; yet Klimov shows that they are indeed typical of the stative-active languages he surveys and the active type as he defines it. However, his discussion deals primarily with the positive cases, examining stative-active languages and ascertaining that the features in question are strikingly common in them. Furthermore, since the wellknown languages of Eurasia are the implicit standard of comparison, while the active languages come predominantly from other areas, there is always the possibility that the features in question are areal features in (say) the New World rather than typological properties of stative-active languages. The present study therefore attempts to test Klimov’s claims on a larger and more systematically designed sample of languages than was available to him, in order to sort out geographical and typological constraints and establish whether patterns are statistically significant. Klimov’s claims and interpretation can be reduced to three types of cross-linguistically testable hypotheses: (1) the above categories, or some

set of them, tend to cluster together in languages; (2) they are better predicted by alignment than by any other feature; (3) alignment, of all easily surveyable features, will have the temporal and geographical distribution and the genetic stability associated with great time depths. It follows from

Introduction 11 his approach and definitions that languages with stative-active alignment can be used to test his claims about the active type. I do not test all of Klimov’s claims as they are stated above. I have surveyed only the following of his properties of active languages (the numbers are those used in the listing above): Gender or other nominal classification (1) Formal stative/active opposition and whether it is a verbal or nominal category (2, 20) The category of number absent or weakly developed (5, 6, 28) Inclusive/exclusive pronoun distinction in first person (9) No infinitive, no verbal nouns (10) ‘Affective’ (inverse) sentence construction with verbs of perception, etc. (14) Word order usually SOV (17) Direct object incorporation into verb (18) Morphological head/dependent marking type (19, 22, 29, 30) Alienable-inalienable possession distinction (23) Voice oppositions; valence-changing operations in general (26) Presence of adpositional phrases (30) plus a measure of overall morphological complexity. The following chapters test for correlations among alignment, morphological marking type, morphological complexity, and word order as well as correlations between these and the other categories. The results reported below partly confirm Klimov’s notion of type and his observation that certain features cluster together and are associated with certain types; but they also show that morphological head/dependent marking is a stronger and more reliable predictor of other features than alignment is, and geography a still better predictor. 1.1.2. Historical issues. Klimov interprets his findings as bearing not only on the history of languages but also on the evolution of language (1983a: chap. 3). For instance, he finds that stative-active, ergative, and accusative types form a hierarchy in that order, and interprets the hierarchy as one of historical ordering and evolutionary sequence. In contrast, the findings reported below will be interpreted as requiring no reference to evolution, and indeed they preclude evolution as an explanation (for evolution in language see chap. 8). They will be shown to bear on the history of the geographical distribution of languages—that is, on prehistoric migrations and proveniences of large areal populations. The geographical distributions are in some cases such that the affinities between now-distant populations must date back substantially earlier than the greatest time depth attainable by the

12 Chapter One comparative method. Klimov observes that stative-active languages are more frequent in the New World than in the Old World (an observation strongly confirmed here) and regards the distribution as testifying to evolutionary archaism of the stative-active type. But I argue that there is no reason why evolutionary archaism should be one’s first assumption. Rather, we are dealing with a distributional fact of a known type: the New World is a secondarily inhabited, or colonized, area and its location is peripheral to the Old World centers where our species arose, and before turning to evolutionary change as explanation we need to exhaust what is known about central and peripheral distributions. If the New World is typologically distinctive in regard to any feature known to be slow-changing (and it is, as will be shown below), the most parsimonious inference to be made is one

about the frequency and source of entering migrations. Making such inferences requires reference to what I call the temporal and geographical scale of distribution of typological features, and chapters 4 through 6 attempt to set up scales of distribution for some of the more stable grammatical features.

1.2 Geography and Type In describing the distribution of types and typological features we can often make active use of geography as a predictive factor. This means viewing the languages of a region as a population and demonstrating a correlation

between the location or type of the region and the distribution of traits within the population or between populations. Geography enters into this study as a predictive factor in two ways, which will be called LOCATION and AREA. Location has to do with north-south and east-west coordinates, direction, and distance. Examples of location as a predictive factor include the correlation between clause head-marking and longitude in Eurasia, or that between pronoun categories and eastward location among the world’s continents (see chaps. 4 and 6). Area has to do with groups of contiguous languages; areas are limited by geography but not defined by geography, and they have features such as centers, peripheries, homogeneity or diversity, and directions of movement. They are defined by these features, not (or not exclusively) by location. In short, area is a matter of context, geographical and cultural and linguistic. This study will distinguish the following types of areas, and the sample and interpretation attempt to cover all of them. 1.2.1. Homeland and colonized areas. 1 will use the term OLD WORLD to refer to the continents of Eurasia and Africa (including insular Southeast

Introduction 13 Asia, an area not covered in my sample) which represent the original center of hominid evolution and the homeland of our species. The distinction of homeland vs. colonized areas is patterned on that of mainland vs. island in

biogeography (see, e.g., MacArthur 1972). The Old World is the homeland, from which other areas were colonized by societies with coastal adaptation and seagoing watercraft. As terminology for the colonized areas I use NEW WORLD conventionally, to refer to the Americas, while Australia, New Guinea, and Oceania (Melanesia, Micronesia, Polynesia) will be generically called the PaciFic. Chapters 4 through 7 will show that the colo-

nized areas differ systematically from the Old World: they show higher genetic and typological diversity and distinctive typological profiles. 1.2.2. Continents and subcontinents. Continents can of course be defined by location and geological criteria. Here, however, they warrant study as areas because for a number of typological features there are demonstrable, even significant, differences between continents and trends within continents, and this tells us that the languages within a continent are behaving as a group, or at least clustering, in the relevant respects. All inhabited continents are surveyed here; how they were defined is discussed in §1.4.1. A subcontinent is smaller than a continent or part of a continent. Those surveyed here are listed in §1.4.1. The only area used in the sample for this project whose status as continent or subcontinent can be debated is New Guinea, which is subcontinental in size but has the genetic and typological diversity of a continent. I wrote it into the sample as a subcontinent, but in many respects it behaves like a linguistically autonomous continent, and it is so tabulated in several of the counts below.

1.2.3. Spread zones and residual zones. The kinds of areas for which I propose the labels SPREAD ZONE and RESIDUAL ZONE are also subcontinen-

| tal in size, but their definitions are based not on size but on such criteria as relative diversity, center, periphery, and internal stability. The distinction of spread vs. residual zone is not intended as an exhaustive classification of all linguistic areas, but simply identifies two important and common types of areas. They happen to be polar opposites in many respects. The distinction can best be illustrated by a comparison of the Caucasus to the adjacent western Eurasian steppe. The Caucasus is well known for (1) its linguistic diversity, both structural and genetic, and (2) the distinctly non-European cast of the sound systems and grammars of its languages. Other, less wellknown, hallmarks of the Caucasus are the following. (3) The great antiquity of the indigenous linguistic stocks. One of them,

Northwest Caucasian, does not appear particularly deep; but the two

14 Chapter One others, Kartvelian (or South Caucasian) and Northeast Caucasian (or Nakh-Daghestanian), must be roughly as old as Indo-European. (For Kartvelian see Klimov 1964:35-—36; for Northeast Caucasian, specifically its

Daghestanian branch, see GiginejSvili 1977: 25.) | (4) The languages tend to remain in one location for as long as they can be traced in the Caucasus. Northwest Caucasian, Northeast Caucasian, and Kartvelian all apparently arose in or near their present territories. Northeast Caucasian, in particular, appears to go back in unbroken continuity to the Daghestan culture of the Bronze Age, which is itself of indigenous origin (Markovin 1969). (5) As in other mountain areas, innovations arise at the periphery (in the lowlands) and archaisms are found in the interior (in the highlands). (For discussion of the historical dynamics and linguistic typology of mountain residual zones, primarily the Central Asian linguistic area, see Edel’man 1968, 1980.) For instance, under the influence of the Turkic languages of the lowlands, front rounded vowels and phonological rules of umlaut have developed independently in lowlands dialects of Chechen-Ingush and lowlands languages of the Lezghian family (all Northeast Caucasian), while simpler vowel inventories are found in highlands languages. (The mechanism of transmission of lowlands-to-highlands innovations is described in Wixman 1980.) Thus there is no identifiable standard center of linguistic

diffusion (though there are clear pan-Caucasian areal features such as ergativity and glottalized consonant series). Similarly, there is no center of political, economic, or cultural influence, but simply a strong tendency for lowland culture to influence highland villages (and again there are clear pan-Caucasian cultural traits). (6) The Caucasus serves as a refugium of sorts, attracting intrusive lan-

guages from the adjacent lowlands. The two major entries to the north Caucasus in historical times are that of Ossetic (Iranian), a descendant of the Scytho-Sarmatian languages that dominated the western steppe from the early first millennium B.c. to the early centuries A.D.; and that of Karachay-Balkar (Turkic), a descendant of the Turkic languages that displaced Iranian. These intrusive languages have evidently absorbed speakers of preexistent languages, but there is no reason to believe they have obliterated whole languages, much less whole families. Intrusive languages, in other words, do not replace other languages or families but are added to them. Thus the Caucasus tends to increase in genetic and typological diversity over time. — (7) There is no single lingua franca for the entire Caucasus. As Wixman 1980 describes the picture for the north Caucasus, there are various forms of what can be called local bilingualism, all of them having a clear vertical

Introduction IS pattern: residents of highland villages generally know the language of a lower village, but not vice versa; languages of lowlands regions offering markets and seasonal employment may be known by residents of several higher levels. Russian of course now serves as a lingua franca, but that situation is recent. Prior to the recent spread of Russian, the lowlands to the north and southeast of the mountains were Turkic-speaking, so that various Turkic languages served as local (vertical) lingua francas, and they are sufficiently closely related that Turkic can loosely be said to have functioned as a lingua franca in the north Caucasus; but this is an accident of the genetic closeness of the Turkic languages. Before the appearance of Turkic

languages on the North Caucasian steppe, the lowlands languages that served as lingua francas—some of them [Iranian and some Northeast Cau-

casian, to judge from the languages which now have extended vertical distributions (Ossetic, Chechen-Ingush, Avar, Lak, Dargi)—-were quite different from one another. In general, then, there is no traditional panCaucasian lingua franca. The Eurasian steppe differs radically from this picture in every respect:

(1) Throughout the entirety of traceable linguistic history, i.e. since about the Eneolithic, at any one time all or most of the steppe has been dominated by a single language family, and often a single language has covered most of it. (2) The structural type of the steppe languages has been fairly consistent and standardly central and western Eurasian throughout. (3) The steppe language families are quite shallow. The first identifiable language that spread over the steppe was Indo-European; it evidently covered the steppe from about the time of its breakup (ca. fourth millennium)

to the later spread of its daughter branch Iranian (in the second millennium), and had therefore attained an age of only about two millennia when the time of its steppe dominance ended. Iranian dominated the steppe for about two millennia and thus attained an age of about two millennia on the steppe. The Turkic family that succeeded Iranian is now almost two millennia old, and Mongolian, which began to succeed Turkic in early medieval times, is younger than Turkic. (4) Languages of the steppe do not remain in their original locations for

long periods. The dynamic of linguistic and ethnic interaction on the steppe may be spoken of as LANGUAGE (or ETHNIC) SUCCESSION: approxi-

mately every two millennia a new linguistic group sweeps westward from the vicinity of Mongolia, rapidly attains military and cultural hegemony on the steppe (and simultaneously also in the deserts of Central Asia and the plains of northern Mesopotamia and Anatolia), and replaces the previous language or language family. The previous linguistic group is obliterated

16 Chapter One unless it has extended into refugia such as the Caucasus (where Armenian survives from the Indo-European expansion and Ossetic survives from the

Iranian expansion), the mountains of Central Asia (where Iranian languages survive), or the Danube plain and surrounding central Europe (where Indo-European languages survived and whence they spread over Europe, and where Hungarian, an eastern Uralic language absorbed into a Turkic confederation, survives from the Turkic spread). This process of language

succession was continuous from the late Neolithic, when stockbreeding spread to the vicinity of Mongolia, up until the sixteenth century, when the sedentary agricultural and urban economies of Europe outpaced the nomadic economy of the steppe and the first major eastward expansion, that of Russian, began. (For the historically documented stages of this process see Sinor ed. 1990. An excellent nontechnical description and chronology

of the post-Bronze Age steppe cultures is Basilov 1989.) , (5) Each language or dialect group spreading westward on the steppe probably took the form of a classic dialect-geographical area, with a center of innovation (in its eastern range, at least initially) and archaisms on the periphery. Certainly there were centers of political, economic, and cultural influence (the vicinity of the Volga seems to have been a standard center of economic and cultural influence and a standard site of major trading centers and military headquarters for the historically documented groups). (6) A new language sweeping westward is not simply added to the previous languages; the typical scenario of language succession is that it replaces them entirely (unless they survive in refugia). Thus there is little linguistic diversity, and no net increase in diversity, on the steppe. (7) Whichever language spread westward was the language of the political, cultural, and military elite and hence functioned as a lingua franca for most of the steppe. For instance, during the Turkic spread Turkic was a lingua franca for most of the steppe. The lexicon of Hungarian contains numerous Turkic loans (see Abondolo 1987) but not vice versa, showing that the Hungarians, a linguistically unassimilated minority component of a Turkic confederation, learned Turkic. I call the Caucasus a residual zone and the steppe a spread zone, because languages accumulate and survive in the Caucasus but spread and succeed each other on the steppe. The following is a listing of the distinguishing features of spread zones and residual zones, together with more

examples of each type and discussion of how each type of area was sampled for the present survey. Spread zones. The characteristic features are: (1) Little genetic diversity, a property that can be quantified as low genetic density (the ratio of genetic stocks to million square miles of area: see

Introduction 17 §7.1 and table 88). Most spread zones have genetic densities that are about half that of their continents. Often, a single language family dominates the spread zone.

(2) Low structural diversity.

(3) The language families present in the spread zone are shallow. (4) Rapid spread of languages or language families and consequent language succession. (5) Classic dialect-geographical area with innovating center and conservative periphery. The center is a center of cultural, political, and/or economic influence. The center may shift as political and economic fortunes shift. (6) No net long-term increase in diversity. A spread zone is a long-lasting phenomenon, but it preserves little linguistic evidence of its history. (7) The spreading language serves as a lingua franca for the entire area or a large part of it.

Of these features, (1) and (4) can tentatively be taken as defining features, and a spread zone defined as the combination of language spread, language succession, and low genetic density over some sizable area (at least a quarter of a million square miles). Six spread zones are surveyed here: western Europe, central Australia, interior North America, Mesoamerica, the Ancient Near East, and central insular Oceania. The first two are prototypical spread zones dominated by a single family (Indo-European and Pama-Nyungan respectively). Interior North America is mostly covered by a few language stocks, notably Algonquian and Siouan. Mesoamerica and the Ancient Near East exhibit a good deal of genetic diversity, but are known areas of cultural and economic integration in which political and economic centers succeeded one another and a certain amount of language succession took place. I include these two areas on criterion (7) above, and perhaps also (5), and in violation of (1). (in their grammatical features they do in fact pattern with the clear spread zones, and in contrast to the clear residual zones, in a number of respects.) Oceania is dominated in its northern part by one family, Austronesian, which has been spreading at the expense of the genetically diverse languages of Melanesia. Other spread zones of note include central sub-Saharan Africa, where the Bantu family has spread widely; the Great Basin of North America, where the Numic branch of Uto-Aztecan has spread widely and rapidly; the entire Arctic region, including the rapid and broad spread of the Eskimo family; and western Europe of post-Roman times. There are various kinds of spreads driven by various ecological, economic, and cultural forces. The spreads of nomadic stockbreeders across

18 Chapter One the Eurasian steppe were driven by cultural and economic power and by successive advances in military organization. The later spread of the Romance languages through Europe was economically and politically powered. The spread of the Numic branch of Uto-Aztecan through the Great Basin was a matter of actual migration and numerical predominance, driven apparently by cultural advantage. The spreads of the Austronesian languages through insular Oceania included migration into previously uninhabited territories. (For some taxonomies of ethnic spreads see Merpert

1978, Bettinger and Baumhoff 1982, Renfrew 1987: 120ff.) Despite the considerable cultural and historical differences between these various kinds

of spreads, their results, viewed as pure linguistic geography, are indistinguishable. The difference between a spread zone and other types of area could be described abstractly as one of scale: in a spread zone, cultural, economic, and/or political systems are on a larger scale, and so is the distribution of languages. The geographic and economic factors responsible for low genetic density and hence for spreads are reviewed in chapter 7. The center of a spread zone can shift from one group to another, causing a new language to spread, and may exhibit an identifiable geographical trajectory. For instance, the Indo-European expansion can be viewed as one stage in a gradual eastward shift of center in the central Eurasian steppe. The steppe was a major spread zone from the second millennium B.c. until the middle ages, as long as the nomadic pastoral economy was vital. During most of this period, the center was held by Indo-European groups. The result was spread of languages from a single family and consequently the

spread of a homogeneous type over much of Eurasia. The center moved steadily from west to east within Indo-European, and perhaps in real space. The spread of linguistic and cultural influence from the center was roughly radial, but the strongest and most consistent direction of movement was westward. Thus eastward movement of the center resulted in westward spreads of increasingly eastern language families. Initially the center must have been among the western Indo-European groups’ and must have been located on the western part of the steppe, for one of the first consequences of the rise of the pastoral economy on the steppe was the westward spread of the western Indo-European languages to cover most of Europe. The center then shifted eastward, to the Iranian groups which dominated the steppe for two millennia and at various times made substantial westward advances

into Europe. Within Iranian, the center shifted from Cimmerian to Scythian to Sarmatian, and the end result was the westward spread of what

was originally the eastern branch of Iranian (Ossetic, a descendant of Scytho-Sarmatian presently spoken in the North Caucasus, at the western

edge of the Iranian range, belongs to the East Iranian branch). At this

Introduction 19 point, having reached the eastern boundary of Indo-European, the center shifted to Hunnic, then Turkic, then Mongolian, each of which spread westward in turn. The west-to-east movement of the center is also supported in the standard view of archeological succession on the steppe prior to the Iron Age: the major cultures of the Eneolithic and early Bronze Age were centered in the western steppe and had cultural ties to Europe and the Caucasus (the Mariupol, Srednij Stog, early Pit-Grave, and Catacomb cul-

tures), and those of the later Bronze Age were centered in the VolgaCaspian area and had cultural ties to Central Asia (the later Pit-Grave, Timber-Grave, and Andronovo Cultures, the latter of which arose east of the Ural Mountains and is generally identified as Iranian). (The relevant archeological literature is too vast to review here. Two important recent compendia are Telegin 1985 and Merpert 1982; for an overview see Mallory 1989.) Another evident shift of center took place in northern Africa, whose linguistic prehistory I interpret as follows. The former grassland that is now the Sahara Desert was the site of a spread that somewhat antedated that centered on the Eurasian steppe. The center of the Sahara spread was originally located among the Afroasiatic languages—presumably in northeastern Africa—and its consequence was the eastward advance of the Semitic group into the Near East and the westward spread of the Berber and Chadic groups. The center moved westward, shifting eventually to the western Niger-Congo languages and resulting in the massive eastward and southward spread of the Bantu family. In both of these spreads, the center moved consistently in one direction. Spread from the center at any given time must have been more or less radial, but the movement of the center in one direction tended to obliterate earlier evidence for spreading on that side of the center. On the other side we have a stratigraphic record of the history of the spread in the form of ethnic and linguistic boundaries at the periphery of the spread zone: the mix of Indo-European languages in Europe, including the evidence for various Iranian incursions, plus the later stranding of (non-Indo-European) Hungarian at the edge of the steppe; in Africa and the Near East, the present distribution of the Semitic family and the mixture of Afroasiatic and nonAfroasiatic groups in the Ethiopia-Kenya region. On the Eurasian steppe, | the spread of the Turkic languages as the center moved eastward displaced or stranded some of the Iranian languages in the mountains of Central Asia and the Caucasus and obliterated the easternmost Indo-European languages (the one we know of is Tocharian).

Spread zones can also exist in the absence of significant language spread. An example of a spread zone involving minimal linguistic spread is

20 Chapter One the seafaring trade economy of the Baltic and North Sea region as described by Pritsak 1981: chap. 1. In my terms, the center shifted from Frisia (in the seventh century) to Viking Scandinavia to northern (Hanseatic) Germany to Holland and was on the verge of shifting to Russia before it ran its course (in the late eighteenth century). This steady eastward shift of center left a legacy of stratified loan vocabulary from early Scandinavian, Low German, and Dutch, but apart from some Scandinavian settlements and strong Scandinavian influence on English there was no spread of languages to accompany the spread of trade links and economic culture. The typical situation for a spread zone seems to be that people move into it and languages spread out of it. The periphery can nonetheless be quite stable in space and time. For instance, in the north Caucasus, where the spread zone of the Eurasian steppe ends, there is a long-standing tendency for languages to move in one direction and people to move in the opposite direction: steppe and lowland languages move uphill and mountain people move downhill, as the richer resources of the lowlands attract immigrants and the lowland markets serve as a vehicle of language spread (Wixman 1980). The mountain area attracts languages from the steppe: Ossetic (Iranian) and Karachay-Balkar (Turkic) are intrusions of this type. Despite this long-standing movement of languages and peoples, the boundary between the spread zone and the mountain zone is stable and no steppe language spreads widely into the mountains. A similar upward movement of a low-

land language into a mountain zone is described for Central Asia by Lorimer (1937: 69ff.), who mentions that Indo-Iranian Shina is replacing isolate Burushaski in the latter’s lower ranges. The periphery can also shift, in which case we get typological change in an area. If the periphery of a spread zone advances we get increased typological homogeneity over a larger area, and languages on the periphery either disappear or borrow typological features from the dominant language. If the periphery recedes we get isoglosses and consequently a strati-

graphic record of the recession, with the possibility of typological diversity. The western periphery of the steppe as a spread zone first advanced westward into Europe (covering Europe with Indo-European languages), then receded unevenly (there were various Iranian advances into Europe), with a late minor advance drawing Hungarian, a typologically and genetically exotic language, westward into Europe and the subsequent retreat stranding it there. These linguistic advances and recessions are of course only the result of political and economic changes whose analysis lies outside the province of linguistics. Their linguistic implication is that a spread zone cannot be neatly delimited for all time and its linguistic popu-

Introduction 21 lation exhaustively described; it must be arbitrarily circumscribed and its linguistic population sampled. Residual zones. The typical features are:

(1) High genetic density, significantly higher than the overall density of the host continent, often an order of magnitude higher. (2) High structural diversity. (Some measures of structural diversity are given in chap. 7.) (3) The language families, or at least a good number of them, are deep. (4) No appreciable spread of languages or families. No language succession.

(5) No clear center of innovation. Despite this (and despite the high ge-

netic and structural diversity), there are usually some clear areal features.

(6) Accretion of languages and long-term net increase in diversity. Language isolates and isolate families are likely to be found in residual zones. (7) No lingua franca (that is, no traditional or pre-colonial lingua franca)

for the entire area; local bilingualism or multilingualism is the main means of inter-ethnic communication. Of these features, (1) and (4) or (5) can tentatively be taken as defining features and a residual zone defined as a dense grouping of genetically diverse languages with ongoing accretion, increasing diversity, and no center of innovation. Again, the area should be sizable (perhaps a hundred thousand square miles or more). The residual zones surveyed here are a part of eastern Africa here represented by Ethiopia and Kenya; the Caucasus; the Pacific coast of northern Asia (from Japan to the Bering Strait); northern Australia; and the Pacific coast of North America, here represented by California. The genetic density of eastern Africa is actually only slightly higher than the world average, but it 1s four times the average of Africa taken as a whole. I have not computed the genetic density of the northern Asian coast because of difficulties in estimating the area, but it is obviously much higher than for interior northern Asia. The other residual zones have genetic densities several times those of their host continents and sometimes an order of magnitude greater. Some additional residual zones, not surveyed here, are the Pamir-

Himalaya region, the Balkan area, probably the southeastern United States, and presumably parts of South America. New Guinea may be a residual zone in itself, though here it is simply regarded as a continent. Often a residual zone will be located at the periphery of a spread zone, where it remains largely independent of the political and economic hegem-

22 Chapter One ony of the spread zone while maintaining cultural and economic links with it. The spread zone can thus contribute linguistic and cultural innovations to the residual zone; such innovations enter at the periphery and spread inward. Over time, the residual zone absorbs new groups which are driven by the linguistic and cultural forces in both the spread zone and the residual zone, or are stranded when the vectors of spread change. For instance, the entry of Ossetic from the steppe (spread zone) into the Caucasus (residual zone) can be regarded as an instance of the standard tendency of lowlands languages to spread uphill; in this case, the language of a culturally power-

ful steppe group spread along the central Caucasian pass, an important trade route in antiquity, and obviously controlled trade between the steppe

- and the Near East; the language was stranded when the situation on the steppe changed, the center shifted eastward, and Caspian and Central Asian trade routes increased in importance. The entry of Hungarian into the greater Balkan-Danube area was part of the regular east-to-west dynamic of migration within the steppe spread zone; and when the periphery of the spread zone retreated, Hungarian was stranded on the periphery of the Balkan residual zone. Residual zones can be technically described as refugia, but this does not mean that their populations are refugees from spread zones; in all instances that I know of, languages have been drawn

rather than pushed into residual zones. The geographical factors conducive to high genetic density are reviewed

in chapter 7. In the New World and the Pacific, residual zones develop along the Pacific coast, and in fact residual zones can be described as a hallmark of the Pacific rim. In the Old World, the clearest residual zones are in mountainous areas. Diffusion is a phenomenon or process which may or may not be overlaid upon any area as well as upon any subarea or any geographically coherent non-area. Diffusion does not define areas or types of areas. This view of diffusion is a departure from standard areal theory, in which diffusion is

generally seen as definitional of areas and isoglosses are sought within which all languages will display some diagnostic diffused feature (see Emeneau [1956]1980; Campbell, Kaufman, and Smith-Stark 1986); it is more consistent with the approach to areality taken by Masica 1976, where the spread of diagnostic features is traced as far as they have continuous distribution, so that the area is defined by its center and continuous distribution of features but not by a delimiting periphery. In a spread zone, if the

center shifts frequently and no single language spreads for long we get clear and strong evidence of diffusion (e.g., in Mesoamerica: see Campbell, Kaufman, and Smith-Stark 1986), but where a single language or family spreads for a long time it obliterates any evidence of interaction

Introduction 23 except insofar as it picks up loans from neighboring languages before engulfing them. A residual zone too may or may not show evidence of diffusion. There is considerable diffusion, at least locally, in northern Australia (Heath 1978) and in the Central Asian mountains (Edel’man 1980). The Caucasus shows strong areality in certain typological features, at least some of which must surely be due to diffusion. The Balkan area involves strong local diffusion, and Balkanists generally regard only the diffusion zone (Bulgarian-Macedonian, Rumanian, Albanian; sometimes also Greek and/or Serbo-Croatian dialects) as the Balkan area, but on the approach taken here this is only a local diffusion phenomenon and the residual zone includes all the above languages plus Slovene, Turkish, and perhaps even Italian dialects and Hungarian. One of the main claims to be made in this book is that the diversity of a residual zone is not an oddity but a token of a recurrent and systematically describable situation. It will be shown that residual zones consistently resemble one another in certain of the typological properties investigated here, and for those features their considerable internal diversity converges on the same profile. Thus a residual zone or a set of residual zones will contain a good deal of the world’s possible linguistic diversity in microcosm, and both the existence of internal diversity and its actual profile are stable and obviously very natural situations. Diversity of a particular kind may even be regarded as the state to which a group of languages will natu-

rally revert if left undisturbed, as will be argued below. Spread zones, in , contrast, are typically highly divergent from one another, but each is internally quite homogeneous. A spread zone is the areal analog to a genetic family; it is an individual, not a type, and has unique features which define it. Just which language spreads in a spread zone is a matter of historical accident, and this historical accident can distort the statistical distribution of linguistic types in an area (even an area of continental size, as the IndoEuropean spread has skewed the distribution of types in Eurasia). Historical contingencies are involved in the formation of residual zones as well, but since by definition no single language gains predominance in a residual zone no major skewing occurs. Since a spread zone is analogous to and often coincides with a genetic family, and since the methodology of historical linguistics tacitly assumes the genetic family as the normal object of description and the standard in historical modeling, it is not surprising that that basic notion of historical linguistics, the family tree, applies well to spread zones: the center of the spread zone corresponds to a node in a family tree, isoglosses spreading

from the center each define a set of branches under a single node, and whatever genetic diversity exists in a spread zone can be described as a

24 Chapter One shift of the center over time, i.e. as a substitution of one tree for another rather than as a tree-merging or multi-tree situation. The standard diffusion-based approach to areal linguistics can be seen as attempting to apply the tree model to residual zones as well, and hence as likening them to spread zones, in seeking isoglosses which define areas. But residual zones do not lend themselves well to this kind of model. Edel’man (1980) proposes a very different model, describing the shared features of the Central Asian area as due to substratal effects. Her model improves on the diffusion-based one in that it does not require sharing of diagnostic features by all and only languages within an isogloss bundle, but it also has some shortcomings: it implicitly treats the diversity of residual zones as a secondary rather than a defining feature, and it cannot explain the similar profiles of typological diversity in residual zones around the world. There is no graphic model which might be substituted for the family tree or the isogloss bundle in describing residual zones; rather, the statistical notions of diversity and standard profile of diversity are the tools needed for describing residual zones. Neither spread zones nor residual zones necessarily have clear or stable boundaries. In deciding which languages to include in zones I have used conventional delimitations where available (following Suarez 1983 for Mesoamerica and standard usage for the Caucasus), political boundaries for California and Ethiopia-Kenya, and latitude (18° S., excluding Cape York) to define northern Australia. The Ancient Near East is defined as all languages attested in written records from Anatolia and Mesopotamia earlier than the first millennium B.c. Thus each of my residual zones and spread zones is a sample of its actual zone. (For more detailed descriptions of the sample areas see appendix 1.)

1.3 Types of Genetic Groupings Three terms for genetic groupings of languages will be used here: The FAMILY, a group of clearly related languages of about the diversity, time depth, and independence of one of the older branches of IndoEuropean: Iranian, Balto-Slavic, etc. (i.e., somewhat older than Germanic). Cognates are numerous in a family, correspondences are regular and often

transparent, and relatedness is obvious without deep analysis once the cognate forms and paradigms are displayed. The time depth aimed at is ca. 2500-4000 years: up to about 2500 years since the time of its own breakup, and around 4000 years or more of independent existence from its parent stock. The sTOcK, a grouping of about the diversity and time depth of Indo-

Introduction 25 European, exhibiting correspondences which are regular (though often not

transparent to non-specialists), substantial cognate vocabulary, and signifi- , cant cognate paradigmaticity in grammar. The time depth aimed at is over 5000 years (Indo-European is some 6000 years old). The stock is the highest level reconstructible by the standard comparative method. The upper limit of what I call a stock is represented by Afroasiatic, some 8000 years old. Afroasiatic can be described, but may not be reconstructible, by the standard comparative method. A stock-level family, or isolate family, is a family that does not enter into any known stock and thus constitutes the sole representative of its stock. I use the term LINEAGE generically, as a cover term for any genetic grouping of any age. Each language isolate is a separate lineage. The distinction of family and stock is an ideal one intended to conceptually simplify the task of sampling. The actual reality of genetic classification is, of course, less neat.

1.4 Sample The corpus for this study is listed in appendices 1 (sample groups, languages used, and sources) and 2 (data). The languages are a sample of the world’s languages designed to permit comparison both within and among groups, for both areal and genetic groups. The sample operates at three

levels. At each level, the sampling procedure sets up groups, and the groups must meet five criteria: they must be (a) coherent, (b) delimitable,

i.e., discrete, (c) adequately described, (d) not original to this survey (though the exact placement of boundaries may be original), and (e) based on criteria other than linguistic typology. At each level a full (as opposed to representative) sample is taken. The three levels are as follows:

1.4.1. Global. The world is divided into large areas which are areally coherent and areally discrete from one another, based on geographical or cultural criteria, and with a prior identity as geographical or cultural areas. The areas in the sample are: Africa: more precisely the Sahel and Sub-Saharan Africa. A continent Ancient Near East: comprising the inscriptional languages of Mesopotamia and Anatolia up to the beginning of the first millennium B.c. A subcontinent, and a spread zone (though genetically diverse) Northern Eurasia: all of Europe and the northern part of Asia, bounded in ‘the south by the southern limit of the Caucasus and the southern limit of

the central Eurasian deserts—in other words, Europe, the former

26 Chapter One USSR, Mongolia and adjacent parts of northern China (Xinjiang, Manchuria), Korea, and Japan. A continent-like area

South and Southeast Asia: the area from India to Indonesia. A large subcontinent New Guinea: subcontinental in size but containing more language families than most continents. Probably a residual zone Australia: a continent Oceania: Melanesia and Micronesia, i.e., central insular Oceania. Subcontinental in size, and a spread zone North America: conventionally bounded in the south by the U.S.-Mexican border. A continent. Mesoamerica: as delimited by Suarez 1983: xv—xvi. A subcontinent, and a spread zone (though genetically diverse)

South America: conventionally bounded in the north by the Colombia-

Panama border. A continent |

In this sample, Africa is kept discrete from the Near East and Northern Eurasia by limiting Africa to sub-Saharan Africa. Northern Eurasia is kept discrete from South and Southeast Asia by not taking any languages for the Northern Eurasian area from its southern periphery. North America and northern Eurasia are kept discrete by omitting the Eskimo-Aleut family

from the survey. Mesoamerica is kept discrete from North and South America by arbitrary use of political boundaries. Australia and New Guinea are naturally discrete. These ten areas will be referred to as SAMPLE AREAS. I will refer to the sets of areas contained in the conventional Old World, Pacific, and New World as MACROAREAS. For some surveys Northern Eurasia will be divided

at the Urals into Europe (including the Caucasus) and Northern Asia, and North America will be divided at the Rockies into western and eastern portions. Where only continents are compared, Mesoamerica and the thinly described and hence thinly sampled South America will sometimes be lumped into a single continent-sized entity. The descriptive coverage of South America is defective: for only a minority of the families or stocks do we have a usable description. Nonetheless, the genetic diversity of South America is such that covering even a minority of the families gives a sample comparable in size to that for Africa, Northern Eurasia, or Australia; hence it can be regarded as adequately covered for purposes of sample design. The coverage of New Guinea is also incomplete, though better (in both quantity and quality of grammars) than for South America. Here and in all tables below the areas are listed in the order used above: first the Old World areas, then the Pacific, and then the New World. The

Introduction 27 areas correspond to the biogeographical regions set up by ecologists (for a map see MacArthur 1972:251), and the coverage of biogeographical regions is respectable but not exact. The coverage of macroareas is. more even. Of course, neither bioregions nor macroareas were part of the original sample design, which was designed to cover only languages, so uneven coverage is not a defect. The correspondences between the three types of areas are shown in table 1. The areas are shown in map 1. The Ancient Near East is discrete in time from the rest of the areas; it is also geographically discrete from northern Eurasia and sub-Saharan Africa. To include it in this survey is to include the entirety of attested tem-

poral diversity for languages: over four thousand years, a chronology which is still essentially flat relative to the 100,000 or more years during

which our species has existed and language as we know it must have existed. The value of the Ancient Near East to this sample is not chronological but areal: it contributes information about languages subsequently submerged by Arabic, Turkish, and Iranian languages, and allows us to reconstruct or hypothesize certain links between the languages of Africa and those of Eurasia. It also provides information about changes in genetic and typological diversity in the Old World over the last few millennia. 1.4.2. Areal. Insofar as possible, each of the above areas is covered completely at the level of the genetic family. Every attested family in the area is described by inclusion of one of its languages in the basic sample; in choosing the sample language for each family I tried to avoid any languages regarded by specialists as linguistically divergent or atypical of the family, so that the sample language would be maximally representative of its family.

The only exception to this procedure is that, when a stock branched into enough families that the sample could include several languages (as is the case for Indo-European), I attempted to cover the known typological range Table 1. Bioregions and sampled areas

Bioregion Sample area(s) Macroarea

Ethiopian Africa Old World

Palearctic AncientNorthern Near East Old World Eurasia Old World

Oriental South and Southeast Asia Old World Oriental and/or Australian Oceania Pacific

Australian New GuineaPacific Pacific . Australia

Nearctic North America New World Neotropical Mesoamerica New World South America New World

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34 Chapter One of the stock. The only concrete effect of this procedure—which was followed systematically but rarely needed to be applied since genetically elaborate stocks are few—1is that contemporary spoken French, a verbinitial language and radically head-marking at the clause level, was included as a representative of Indo-European precisely because it represents the extreme development away from the ancestral type. For sources on this type of French, which represents an idealization of sorts, see appendix 1.

A language isolate counts as a family and as a stock, so every adequately described isolate is included. Criterion (c) on selection of areas has guaranteed sufficiently clear understanding of genetic connections within the area, which in turn guarantees that families are coherent, discrete, decently described, established in the literature, and based on standard historical criteria and not typological criteria.

There is no continent, and no sizable part of the world, in which the attested language families include all families known to have been in the area prior to European contact. The picture is reasonably complete for aboriginal Australia (although Tasmanian is a critical gap, as discussed in chap. 8) and for Africa (although some languages of the Nilo-Saharan and Khoisan groups are undescribed; since neither of these appears to be a genetic grouping, underdescribed languages like [Khoisan] Hadza and Kwadi may for all we know each represent a separate lineage). For North America

there are gaps in the coverage of the Southeast, which is known to have been linguistically diverse, and occasional missing languages elsewhere; but for most of the continent the indigenous language families are surprisingly well covered. For much of Northern Eurasia the Indo-European and Turkic languages have obliterated prior linguistic diversity, but this situation goes back to prehistoric times and gives us our paradigm example of a spread zone. In the Pacific, Austronesian has been well covered, but the non-Austronesian, or Papuan, languages have been much less well covered, both in New Guinea and on the nearby islands; since Papuan is a wastebasket classification and not a genetic grouping, it could contribute many families to a sample and hence its statistical impact, if fully surveyed, could be considerable. South America is greatly underdescribed overall. Given these various gaps, the survey of all attested families which was used here cannot claim to be a complete survey of each entire area; but

it comes close to the actual picture and is adequate as a sample. For all surveys, colonial languages (English and Spanish in the New World and the Pacific, etc.) have been disregarded.

1.4.3. Genetic. Insofar as possible, for every stock in the sample areas all of the families are covered, except that for stocks containing a large num-

Introduction 35 ber of families (e.g., Indo-European) there is an upper limit of six families. For Indo-European the six languages were divided between three sample

areas: Hittite in the Ancient Near East; Armenian, Russian, colloquial French, and English in Northern Eurasia; and Waigali in South and Southeast Asia. Afroasiatic is divided between two areas: Akkadian in the An-

cient Near East and Amharic, Oromo, Dizi, and Hausa in Africa; Beja, deviant Cushitic or perhaps a separate branch, is not included in the basic sample but is added to the Ethiopian residual zone when residual zones are

treated separately. Egyptian and Berber are the only branches of Afroasiatic not in my sample, excluded by the decision to exclude northern Africa. There are two groups lower than the stock from which two languages were taken: Semitic (with Akkadian in the Ancient Near East and Amharic in Africa) and Finno-Ugric (with Hungarian representing the Ugric branch and Komi the Finnic branch, both in Europe). Austronesian is divided between the areas of Oceania (Chamorro, West Futuna, Drehu), New Guinea (Tawala), and Southeast Asia (Acehnese). The stocks, like the families as noted above, meet the criteria of coherence, discreteness, descriptive coverage, prior established status, and basis in non-typological criteria. The sampling procedure described here is the ideal one, from which departures sometimes had to be made for practical reasons. I adjusted the procedure for Australia, where the genetic picture is unique. Some 80 percent of the continent is covered by one stock, PamaNyungan; the rest of the continent is divided among what may be over 20

families, but many of them may be related to each other and to PamaNyungan at some great time depth (Dixon 1980: 221ff.; Blake 1990; but see Evans 1985:4—13). Australianists generally present Pama-Nyungan as being most saliently divided into typological and areal groups rather than family or subfamily groups (although some of the latter have been established): there is a southeastern region having bound pronouns, a central region lacking them, a northwestern region having them, and a smaller far western region lacking them, as well as small insular areas with bound pronouns in the far north (for a map see Dixon 1980: 364). I used these groupings rather than genetic ones. My sample contains six Pama-Nyungan languages by the traditional classification (Dixon 1980: 221ff.), but five by the reanalysis of Blake (1990) (who removes Yukulta, which is in my sample as a Pama-Nyungan representative, and its sisters from PamaNyungan; see Evans 1985:12-—13 for the argument; Blake also places Garawa, in my sample as non-Pama-Nyungan, and its sister in a transitional group). It samples all non-Pama-Nyungan groups for which grammars were available: 12 languages from the northwestern region and one from the southeast.

36 Chapter One : The coverage of New Guinea, the non-Austronesian languages of Melanesia, the languages of Mesoamerica, South America, and the “‘“Khoisan” and “Nilo-Saharan’’ groups in Africa is thinner than the maximum aimed at, since not all languages from these areas are described. For any area, of course, there are extinct languages for which documentation is inadequate or absent: examples are Kassitic (unattested but known to have existed) and

Hattic (attested but poorly understood) in the Ancient Near East, and Etruscan (decently attested but poorly understood) and Pictish (fragmentarily attested) in Northern Eurasia. 1.4.4. Verisimilitude and accuracy of the sample. One of the advantages claimed here for population typology is its ability to draw historical inferences from areal populations whose genetic classification is inadequate or incomplete from the perspective of standard historical work. It follows that the genetic classification assumed for each sample area is not ideal. Nor is it offered as anything better than a reasonable approximation, for purposes of sampling, to the received view of the actual picture (to the extent that a received view can be extracted from the literature). It is impor-

tant to emphasize that the listing of stocks, families, and languages in appendix 1 is a description of the sample, not a contribution to genetic classification. It is demonstrably adequate as a sample, especially given the

preliminary and primarily hypothesis-generating nature of this study. It yields statistical significance on valid tests; it distinguishes correlations from noncorrelations, resemblances from nonresemblances, high from low frequencies, and so on. Clear evidence of its adequacy as a sample comes from the fact that there have been no substantial changes in the findings as the database has evolved through three stages: just over 100 languages, disproportionately from Eurasia and North America; 137 languages, exclud-

ing South and Southeast Asia, New Guinea, and South America, and underrepresenting Africa; and the present 174 languages. The history of this project therefore suggests that a representative sample of the world’s areas (rather than the present full sample), and less complete coverage of each area, would be adequate for the intended purposes. To fine-tune the sample at this hypothesis-generating stage would waste time, and in any event there is little point in fine-tuning the Eurasian sample when there are major gaps in the descriptive coverage of other parts of the world. 1.4.5. Technical description of the sample. The database is then a sampling of the world’s areas and simultaneously a sampling of the world’s lan-

guage families by means of complete coverage of families within areas. Insofar as possible the globe, the areas, and the sets of families contained

Introduction 37 in the areas are sampled not representatively but exhaustively. More precisely, the attested families are described exhaustively. Criterion (c) insures that the attestation of languages within an area will be decent, but the examples of Hattic, Etruscan, and Pictish—about which the one claim that can be made with confidence is that they are genetically and typologically distinct from their neighbors—show that even the best-described synchronic area may overlie a very different earlier picture, and that a great deal of genetic, and possibly also typological, diversity has been lost even in the relatively short period of attested history. (If contemporary northern

Eurasia had the genetic diversity exhibited by the Ancient Near East sample area, it would contribute an order of magnitude more language families to the sample than it does.) For each language in the sample, the survey involved looking up 32 pri-

mary data points and calculating another 27 (ratios, totals, etc.) from those. Thus the basic requirement for inclusion of a language in the sample is a relatively full grammatical description. In terms of the types of samples reviewed by Bell 1978, at all three levels (global, areal, genetic) my sample is a total sample (at the family level) to the extent possible. When deciding which language to choose as a repre-

sentative of its family, I generally chose the best-described one. As discussed above, I excluded languages judged by specialists in their families to be atypical of the family, except that when selecting families from multibranch stocks from which I could take several languages I made an effort to include known structural diversity. Bibliographical considerations shaped the sample in only two respects: quality of available descriptions was rele-

vant to which languages were chosen, as mentioned, and insofar as possible the sample was limited to languages for which there are published descriptions, descriptions in press, or Ph.D. dissertations available in university libraries. I supplemented some published grammars by consulting with specialists, but managed to keep the number of languages for which personal communications, field notes, or archival materials are the sole or major source of information to a minimum of one: Natchez, for which I used the classroom handouts and lectures of Mary Haas. (The analyses of Russian, Chechen, and English are based on my own knowledge of the languages, but published descriptions are available.) In principle, therefore, it should be possible for other linguists to check any entry in the database (except those for Natchez) against published sources.‘ Surveys that draw databases from published descriptions can be divided

into those that tabulate the actual distribution of a linguistic feature and those that record reports in grammars. There is of course a high degree of correspondence between reports and reality, but it is not perfect. Features

38 Chapter One for which this survey is intended as tabulating reality rather than reports are head/dependent marking, complexity, alignment, plurality neutralization,

and aspects of gender systems. The survey simply tabulates reports for word order (since primary monographic studies of word order exist), inalienable possession, adpositions, valence-changing oppositions (for all of which coverage is uneven), inclusive/exclusive, noun classes, and numeral Classifiers (for which coverage is usually reliable). This study is intended as hypothesis-generating on the whole, so a survey of what is reported is adequate to the task and reduces the time cost enormously. In any event, the features surveyed were chosen because they are straightforward structural elements likely to be accurately recorded even in brief grammars. The sampling procedure is what I will call bottom-up: a decision was made to sample at a controlled time depth, and the size of the sample followed from that decision. The size of the sample was not actively decided in advance, although an approximate size was foreseeable from the decision to attempt areal coverage of the globe and genetic coverage at the family level. Another bottom-up sample is that used in several recent works by Matthew Dryer (e.g., Dryer 1989a), in which a comparable (slightly shallower) level of sampling is used and the number of languages in the sample is higher than for this one. Maddieson 1984 uses a sample that aims at a distinctly shallower level (that of West Germanic, when my sample aims at families ideally slightly older than Germanic) but takes a more lumping

approach to classification in New Guinea and the New World than is adopted here. As a result, whereas my sample takes slightly under onethird of its languages from the Old World, half of Maddieson’s languages come from the Old World. Most samples used in recent linguistic works are what I will call topdown: the sample size is decided on first, then the distribution of sampled languages among groups is designed so as to either maximize genetic distance or equalize genetic membership. A sample which maximizes genetic distance is that of Bybee 1985 (relying on the principles of sample design set forth in Perkins 1980), in which a sample size of 50 was decided on and the 50 languages were chosen so as to maximize both the genetic and the geographical distance between every two languages (so that no two languages came from the same genetic group and no two came from the same cultural area). The genetic classification used in that sample was the lumping one of Voegelin and Voegelin 1977, sampled at the level of the phylum defined there (it is an older, and in some cases more speculative, grouping than what is called the stock here, and does not represent a controlled time depth). A sample which equalizes genetic representation is that of Mallinson and Blake 1981: 134ff., designed as follows (182): “‘We arrived at our

Introduction 39 sample by going through lists of languages and language families and draw-

; ing out 100 spread evenly over those families.”’ The pioneering sample of Greenberg 1963a was designed so as to equalize both areal and genetic representation. The extension of that sample in Hawkins 1983 is a convenience sample with some attention given to maximizing genetic diversity (281).

Aspects of top-down and bottom-up are combined in the sample of Tomlin 1986, where genetic groups are sampled, though not at a controlled

time depth, and they contribute languages to the sample in proportion to the number of languages in them. The number of languages in the sample—402—was not decided in advance but represents what it took to approximate the genetic and areal distribution of the world’s languages

using his sampling technique. All of these samples proceed genetically, and most of them also sample areally. The only sample I am aware of that proceeds structurally rather than genetically is that of Koptjevskaja-Tamm 1988, which is designed to cover all possible types of the construction at issue (nominalizations with action nominals) and all possible combinations of the structural properties that define types. Hence a language family with several types could contribute many languages to the sample. The sample also attempts to cover all macroareas, so that two languages with identical structural types could both be included if they came from different parts of the world . All areal sampling known to me, including the areal part of the sample used here, is top-down in the sense that standard continents like Africa, North America, Australia, etc. are taken to be the same kind of unit and given some kind of equal or proportional representation. But, as will be-

come clear below (especially in chap. 7), these areas may not be of the same order: the entire Old World behaves like the same kind of unit as the single island of New Guinea; and the New World systematically shows kinds of within-group diversity where the Pacific has between-group diversity, a fact suggesting at least that a continent represents different levels of population structure in the two macroareas. We need a procedure for defining populations and subpopulations cross-areally if we are to devise a truly bottom-up areal survey; and only with a bottom-up survey can we be assured that the units being compared are really comparable. The sample used here and those of Dryer, Tomlin, and Maddieson exhibit a certain amount of stratification, or representation of groups proportional to their size: a stock like Indo-European or Austronesian, with many family-level branches, will contribute more languages than one like Uralic,

which is about equally old but initially split into only two primary branches. The representation of groups with elaborate initial branching is limited (to six) in my survey, but not in the others.

40 Chapter One Although the issue is not always discussed explicitly, it is evident that surveys based on top-down sampling (like those of Greenberg, Perkins, Mallinson and Blake, and Bybee) all have as their object of description (and hence, in the terms of Bell 1978, their sample universe) human language or possible human languages. They operate with incommensurate - genetic groupings, which poses no problems where the task is to maximize genetic distance but would make the present survey incoherent, since genetic tendencies are one of my objects of description and the sampled groups must therefore be of the same type. The existing top-down samples all happen to cover any given area too thinly and unevenly to catch areal patterns; again, this is not a problem where the task is to maximize areal distance, but it would vitiate the present survey, for which areal patterning is an object of description.

With the possible exception of Mallinson and Blake 1981: 134ff., sample sizes for top-down surveys are too small to yield significance on Statistical tests, except where there are few categories tested and the categories are fairly evenly attested in the sample. They would be unlikely to yield valid significance in the kind of test done frequently here: a chiSquare test comparing, e.g., the distribution of accusative, ergative, and Stative-active clause alignments across head-marking, double-marking, and dependent-marking morphosyntactic types, where the stative-active type is infrequent overall and contributes few examples to any of the three morphosyntactic types. It can be questioned whether chi-square testing over the whole sample is valid at all, given that undetected deep genetic connections may make some of the languages technically nonindependent. I assume that any historical connections too deep to leave lexical and grammatical evidence have left the languages grammatically independent of each other to a requisite extent. I also assume (see Nichols 1990) that throughout human prehistory most languages have left few descendants, stocks have usually had at most one sister, and at any time about half of the world’s lineages have been isolates. Thus there is much less deep relatedness among the world’s languages than is widely assumed, and genetic nonindependence should not trouble designers of cross-linguistic samples. That the languages in my sample are empirically independent in the features surveyed here is shown by the Indo-European and Austronesian languages in the sample. The Indo-European ones approximate global frequencies for alignment and

- complexity, and do not greatly differ from global frequencies in word order; the Austronesian ones mirror global frequencies in head/dependent marking and alignment. The question of nonindependence in large areas (see Dryer 1989a) is more troubling in principle, but in this survey it is

Introduction 4] precisely the large areal distributions that are an object of investigation. For the relevant features I examine differences within areal groupings as well as differences between them, and it is this comparison rather than just the frequencies in the whole sample that is important. In interpreting the results of tests I not only look at the significance level but also state which groups, areas, etc., are contributing most of the significance. What is important is not the individual significance test but the whole set of tests, and the main distinction to be drawn is between correlations that prove significant for this sample and those that do not. So interpreted, the chi square test functions not only to indicate significance but also to indicate which features display areality and which do not, and hence more generally to identify diversity of certain kinds. It is unexamined chi square testing over the sample as a whole that can be questioned on the grounds of possible nonindependence of the data points. I have also applied the area-by-area statistic proposed by Dryer 1989a, which is designed to avoid distortion by nonindependent languages. For the most part the chi-square test on the whole sample and Dryer’s test give similar results, provided both are critically interpreted. Any area-by-area test is only as sound as the areal breakdown it assumes, and as mentioned above (and discussed at more length in chap. 7) the conventional breakdown into continents may not represent a consistent sampling grid. It may be that there are only four large linguistic areas in the world—the Old World, Australia, New Guinea (with Melanesia), and the New World— and the fewer the areas, the greater the likelihood of getting a straight run (or any other configuration) by chance. If we subdivide the macroareas more finely, we are looking at subpopulations under regional influence, something Dryer’s test was designed to bypass. In judging the significance of distributional trends I perform a chisquare test on the entire sample as well as one or both of a chi-square test on the New World languages alone and Dryer’s test. The entire sample is large enough to yield significance, but it is always possible that a correlation for which it finds significance is not a proper structural correlation but the result of chance configurations that dominate in large areas. For inStance, there is a significant correlation between word order and head/ dependent marking ($3.3): is this a genuine structural correlation, or is it an accidental result of the fact that one word order and one head/dependent type happen to be frequent in the New World while others happen to be frequent in the Old World? If it is a genuine structural correlation we are in a position to draw inferences about grammatical stability, historical affinity between populations, and universals; if it is an accident in the geographical

distribution of two parameters, no such inferences can be drawn. A chi

42 Chapter One square test on the New World languages alone will tell us which is the case:

there are enough languages in the New World to yield significance for geography-independent correlations, and in this case the test does yield significance. Dryer’s test is harder to apply since a low-frequency word order, verb-initial, is crucial but does not show up often enough outside of the New World to enable us to judge the preferences of the individual areas;

they can be lumped into macroareas, but the number of macroareas— three—is too low for even a straight run to yield anything better than borderline significance. I interpret the results of these various kinds of testing as follows: a correlation which emerges as significant for the entire sample yields only a

hypothesis; this is then hypothesis-generating statistical testing, and in such a case borderline significance is just as interesting as true significance. A correlation which emerges as significant on the entire sample and at least borderline significant for the New World alone and/or on Dryer’s test yields not just a hypothesis but a sound finding; this is then hypothesistesting statistical assessment. (The correlation of word order and head/dependent marking just mentioned is significant for the whole sample and

borderline significant on the other two tests, so, pace Dryer 1989a, it passes as a tested firm conclusion.) I describe such correlations as univer-

sals, since they hold independent of geography and genetic affinity. It should be noted that the term universal is often used to refer to necessary properties of human language, of which the world’s actual languages are only a subset and possibly a skewed subset; on that assumption, uncovering

universals by statistical means is impossible in principle. I use the term universal to refer to properties or correlations favored in languages independent of geography and genetic affiliation, and thus in the sense “universal preference of the world’s languages”. On this understanding of universals, they can indeed be uncovered by statistical means. A sense of the impact of sampling on findings can be gained by compar-

ing the figures for word order and type of verbal inflection discussed in $3.6 below with those collected by Mallinson and Blake (1981: 134ff.). Recall that theirs is a sample of 100 languages distributed over genetic groups of varying time depths. For both surveys the number of languages having a single clear word order is less than the whole sample. The two samples are compared in table 2. There are clear differences in overall frequencies: verb-medial order is a minor type for me but a major one for Mallinson and Blake; ergative and stative-active verb inflection are more common in my corpus than in theirs, and neutral inflection less common. This means that their sample increases the representation of features of the major world languages and the Western

Introduction 43 Table 2. Word order and type of verb inflection in two surveys

Observed frequencies Expected

V... .V.. JV Total V... V... ...V¥ Total

Neutral 7 14 13412166412414134121 Accusativel11 66

§3.6 below

Ergative 5 0 37212 2 22 3#7#8==12 Stative-Active 8 13 13 Total 20(18%)23(21%)69(62%)112 (100%)

Neutral 4 512 92725563710 It 25 Accusative 24 23 26 56 Ergative 2 0 4 6 l 2 3 62 Stative-Active 0 1 l 2 0 l ! Total 11 37 4] 89 (12%) (42%) (46%) (100%)

Mallinson & Blake 1981: 133ff

Note: V... = verb-initial order, ..V.. = verb-medial, ...V = verb-final; for other terms see §2.3 below. Expected values are rounded to no decimal places and may not add up to shown totals.

languages (accusative alignment; one-place verb agreement, or none; verbmedial word order), relative to mine. Furthermore, some of the asymmetries differ: neutral inflection with verb-final order is more frequent than expected in my corpus but less frequent than expected in theirs. On the other hand, ergative verb inflection with verb-medial order is less frequent than expected in both samples. The asymmetries reach conventional statistical significance in my sample (p < 0.05 with a chi-square test whose validity, however, can be technically questioned because major contributions to significance are made by entries whose expected frequencies are under 5); those of Mallinson and Blake do not reach significance (p = approximately 0.25).

1.4.6. The sample languages and the world’s languages. Maps 2 and 3 give a graphic illustration of the distribution of genetic diversity over the globe. They (and others to be used in later chapters) were created by plotting latitude against longitude for each language family. Coordinates were derived by eyeballing the language’s range to determine its center and entering the location of the center to the nearest degree, and they are therefore

fairly rough, especially for groups with wide or split distributions. The center is the geographical center of contemporary distribution, not the point of historical origin (except for Chinese, Russian, and Cree, whose

44 Chapter One distribution is too wide for a meaningful modern center to be determined; for these three I arbitrarily selected the political capital or a cultural center). Map 2 shows the world’s modern language families, those extant in the last two or three centuries; each family is represented by a sample language if it was sampled for this survey, otherwise by a language spoken in roughly the center of its area. Map 3 shows the sample languages for this survey; they include the languages of the Ancient Near East but lack a number of families which were shown on map 2 but could not be sampled for various reasons. Maps 2 and 3 show that the density of genetic groupings is visibly highest in the New World and the Pacific: the densest clusters are the west coast of North America, the southeastern United States, Mesoamerica, New Guinea (with adjacent insular Melanesia), and northern Australia. The cluster in southwestern central Eurasia is the Caucasus and, just to the south, Mesopotamia and eastern Anatolia (the Ancient Near Eastern sample area). Slightly to the east, Burushaski and Waigali are visible as a tight two-member cluster representing the considerable diversity of the Pamir-Himalayan region. The projection is nearly square, with some vertical elongation to make the mid latitudes look approximately familiar; this gives the areas near the equator some horizontal compression and greatly stretches out the horizontal dimension at the high latitudes.

Favored and Disfavored Grammatical Patterns

2.0 Introduction There are three well-known and standard kinds of distributional pattern regu-

larly sought in cross-linguistic research: relative frequencies of structures (so that, e.g., accusative morphology can be regarded as cross-linguistically unmarked because it is more frequent than ergative morphology); clustering of features (verb-final order and exclusively suffixing morphology tend to cooccur: Greenberg 1963a); and the patterning of splits within structural

domains (in split ergative systems, nominals higher on a hierarchy of speech-act relevance receive accusative marking and nominals lower on the hierarchy receive ergative marking: Silverstein 1976). Such patterns tell us not only about simple markedness and unmarkedness, but also about the implicational hierarchies that constrain distributions. In cases of structural interaction, they show which feature or category is constraining which. These cross-linguistic patterns of frequency and interaction are described here for four important structural features of morphosyntax: head/dependent marking, morphological complexity, word order, and the alignment (accusative, ergative, etc.) of subject-object relations in the clause. These four were chosen because previous typological work has shown that all of them have a certain amount of linguistic stability of one kind or another, and because information on these four structural points gives one a good sense of the overall type of a language. In recent typological work these four features (or their subpatterns) are often regarded as defining or constituting types in themselves: linguists speak of the ergative type, the isolating type, the head-marking type, the verb-final type, and so forth. Although (as argued in Klimov 1983a) this usage confounds the features defining a

45

46 Chapter Two type with the type itself, it will be followed here since it is conventional. I will speak of the four salient morphosyntactic patterns as TYPE FEATURES Or STRUCTURAL TYPES, and the other grammatical phenomena surveyed in

later chapters (inclusive/exclusive pronouns, gender or noun classification, numeral classifiers, alienable/inalienable possession, singular/plural, and valence-changing operations) as grammatical or inflectional CATEGORIES. Type features and categories will be generically termed simply FEATURES.

This chapter looks at the patterning of each of the four type features. Interactions between type features, and interactions between type features and particular grammatical categories, are covered in later chapters. The rest of this introductory section presents the four structural types, their subtypes and subpatterns, terminology and definitions to be used, problems encountered in assigning the constructions of individual languages to one or another subtype, and where I have drawn lines in ambiguous or indeterminate cases. 2.0.1. Head/dependent marking 2.0.1.1. Heads and dependents. The taxonomy of morphosyntactic marking used here relies on the notions of head and dependent, and the nature of cross-linguistic research on morphology requires that we hold syntax constant while surveying the distribution of morphology across that constant syntax. Therefore I use the terms head and dependent in senses which are standard for both dependency grammar and constituent-based grammar, and I have attempted to concentrate on constituents whose headdependent structure is not controversial in the literature. For decisions on

, what is head and what is not head I follow Mel’¢uk 1974, 1979. The head , is the word which determines the syntactic type of the entire constituent and hence the privileges of occurrence and syntactic distribution of the constituent. If there is any government (by which I mean requirement of one word in a particular grammatical function by another) within the constituent, it is the head that governs the dependent. For instance, the English

“noun phrase is headed by a noun, and hence has much the same distribution as a noun (so that, for example, new house has its distribution determined by house, not by new). The prepositional phrase is headed by the preposition, not by the object of the preposition, and has a very different distribution from phrases headed by nouns (for example, NP’s but not PP’s may be objects of prepositions). This study deals with three major types of constituent: noun phrase (NP), adpositional phrase (PP), and clause (S), with seven subtypes based on the kind of dependent. The constituents and their head-dependent structure are as follows: '

Favored and Disfavored Grammatical Patterns 47

Constituent Subtype Head NP Noun possessor Possessed noun Pronoun possessor Possessed noun

Modifying adjective Modified noun PP Noun object Adposition Pronoun object Adposition S Noun subject, direct object, and Verb indirect object

Pronoun subject, direct object, and Verb indirect object

Examples from English are the following. Heads are boldfaced. Parenthesized words are dependents of dependents, not required by the definition of the constituent but required for completeness in English.

Constituent Example NP, noun possessor (my) neighbor’s house NP, pronoun possessor my house

NP, adjective new house

PP, noun with (a) friend PP, pronoun with you

S, nouns My neighbor gave (a) bicycle to his son

S, pronouns She gave them to us

As representatives of each constituent surveyed here I chose the basic or most salient structural types of each. The clause is represented by a construction in the indicative mood and unmarked voice, with a basic three-

place verb like “‘give” or “‘tell”. For languages in which the notions of subject (of three-place verb), direct object, and indirect object were at all problematic, I used agent, message or patient, and recipient or addressee respectively.

In some of the languages surveyed here, certain constituents depart from these straightforward structures. In many languages, in one or more constituent types pronominal dependents are cliticized or affixed to the head instead of being separate words. Examples of affixation to the head are provided by the Hungarian noun with pronominal possessor (the possessor is italicized):

(a) haz-ad the house-2sg ‘your house’

48 Chapter Two and postposition with pronominal object: nek-em to- Isg ‘to me’

Such affixation or cliticization of dependents does not affect the status of the head word as head and hence does not affect the classification of the constituent. There is one pattern that does affect the classification of the constituent: suffixation of what would otherwise be postpositions in what would otherwise be a PP. Instead of being an independent word and head of the constituent, the postposition is suffixed onto its object noun. (An example from Southern Paiute is given in §2.0.1.3 below.) I have classified all such examples as oblique NP’s rather than as PP’s.

2.0.1.2. Morphological marking of syntactic relations. By morphological marking I mean any form of inflection, affixation, cliticization, or other overt morphological variation that signals some relevant relation, function, or meaning. This study deals only with morphological marking of the syntactic relations and constituent types listed above. Morphological marking can be divided into three types depending on the kind of meaning and how it is signaled. There is marking that INDEXES certain features of one word on another, as, e.g., Indo-European verbs index person and number of the subject:

Latin am-o Isg

‘I love’

am-as 2sg ‘you love’ am-at 38g

‘he/she/it loves’ There is marking that CODES functions. For instance, cases on nouns code their syntactic functions: in Russian, the nominative codes subject, citation

| form, and (under certain conditions) predicate functions; the accusative codes direct object (under certain conditions) and object of certain prepositions; the dative codes indirect object, inverse subject, and object of certain

prepositions; and so on. (The coding of syntactic functions by cases in

Favored and Disfavored Grammatical Patterns 49 Indo-European languages like Russian is not one-to-one, as these examples show, but it is coding nonetheless.) Finally, there is marking that REGISTERS the presence of another word but does not index its features. For example, the definite conjugation of Hungarian registers the presence of an object in the clause without indexing its features:

latok egy hazat I-see one house-acc _ [indefinite conjugation] ‘I see a house’

latoma_ _hazat

I-see the house-acc [definite conjugation] ‘I see the house’

Head/dependent marking has to do with where in the constituent any morphological marking of its syntactic structure or function is located. Markers of various types—affixes, clitics, ablaut, etc.—can be located on the head word, on the dependent word, on both, or on neither, and languages will be typologized by the location of these markers. As in Nichols 1986, constructions are described as HEAD-MARKING if the morphological marker of the syntactic relation or constituent type is affixed, cliticized, or otherwise attached to the head of the constituent; DEPENDENT-MARKING if the marker is attached to the dependent; DOUBLE-MARKING if both head and

dependent bear morphological markers; and without marking if there is no morphological marking of the type of relation or constituent. There are also

splits, and there are markers which appear on neither the head nor the de- , pendent. For all of these patterns it is immaterial whether a marker is an affix, a clitic, or a change in the stem. The following examples illustrate the various marking patterns for the three constituent types surveyed here. In these examples and below, wher-

ever the distinction is relevant, heads are boldfaced and markers are italicized.

2.0.1.2.1. Dependent marking. Dependent-marked possessive NP’s from Chechen (final -1 represents nasalization):

de:-n a:x¢a Fa-GEN money ‘father’s money’

S-an a:x¢a Isg-GEN money ‘my money’

50 Chapter Two NP’s with modifying adjective agreeing in gender, also from Chechen (D, J are labels for gender classes): d-ovxa Xi

D-hot water (D) ‘hot water’ j-Ovxa Sura

J-hot milk (J) ‘hot milk’

Dependent-marked PP’s from Chechen:

be:ra-na t’e child-DAT on

‘on the child’

su:-na t’e Isg DATOn ‘on me’

Dependent-marked clauses from Chechen:

da:-s woia-na urs-¢ tii:xira Fa-ERG son-DAT knife-NOM struck

‘father stabbed son’ (lit. ‘struck with knife’)

C-u0 cun-na_ tii:xira 3sg-ERG 3sg-DAT struck ‘he hit him’

and Dyirbal (Dixon 1972:95): | balan dugumbil bangul yarangu bangu ART.NOM woman-NOM ART.ERG man-ERG ART.INSTR

yugungu balgan stick-INSTR hit

‘The man is hitting the woman with a stick’

2.0.1.2.2. Head marking. Head-marked possessive NP’s from Abkhaz (Hewitt 1979: 116): Sara sa-y°nd

Isg lsg-house ‘my house’

Favored and Disfavored Grammatical Patterns 51

a-€’k°’an ya-y°nd ART-boy 3sg-house ‘the boy’s house’ There are no examples of head-marked NP’s with modifying adjectives in my sample. The only examples I know of are from Shuswap, which uses its relative case on nouns that are modified by attributives (Kuipers 1974 :78):

wist t-citx° high REL-house ‘high house’

and from Tadzhik and Persian, which use a suffix -i (Tadzhik), -e (Persian) on nouns that have postposed modifiers:

Persian kith-e boland mountain high ‘high mountain’ (Abaev et al. 1982: 111) Head-marked PP’s from Abkhaz (Hewitt 1979: 103)

a-jayas a-q’nd ART-river 3sg-at ‘at the river’

and Tzutujil (Dayley 1985: 152, 154; A3 = the third-person form used to index agents):

r-umaal jar aachi A3-cause the man ‘by the man’

r-umaal “because of him’

Head-marked clauses from Tzutujil (Dayley 1981 :417):

x-9-kee-tij tzyaq_ ch’ooyaa7 ASP-3sg-3pl-ate clothes rats ‘rats ate the clothes’ and Abkhaz (Hewitt 1979: 36):

a-xac’a a-ph°as a-s°q’’a_ @-la-y-te-yt’ ART-man ART-woman ART-book it-to.her-he-gave-FINITE

‘the man gave the woman the book’

52 Chapter Two 2.0.1.2.3. Double marking. A double-marked PP from Nogai (Baskakov 1963 : 48; extracted from clause example):

men-im art-ym-di Isg-GEN behind-1sg-CASE ‘behind me’

The object ‘me’ is in the genitive case governed by the postposition “behind’, and the postposition takes first person singular agreement with its object. A double-marked NP from the same language (539):

men-im kullyg-ym Isg-GEN work-|sg ‘my work’

Here the possessor ‘my’ is in the genitive case, as required by the adnominal structure, and the head noun ‘work’ acquires person and number marking from its object. Double-marked NP’s from Mangarayi (Merlan 1982: 105, 75; NCM = noun class marker):

hunyajgu na-muyg -hunya 2pl.GEN NCM dog 2pl ‘your dog’

maral-wu dab-nawu dama-nawu dead person-GEN skin-his —__ bone-his

‘a dead person’s skin and bones’

2.0.1.2.4. No marking. NP’s from !Kung with no marking (Snyman 1970: 92):

mi Pei

I axe ‘my axe’

dz’heu + xanu woman book ‘the woman’s book’ PP’s from the same language with no marking (p. 143; examples extracted from sentences):

’a si for they ‘on their behalf’

Favored and Disfavored Grammatical Patterns 53

’a dz’heu for woman ‘for the woman’

2.0.1.2.5. Split marking. A common type of split in NP’s and PP’s is one where constituents with pronoun dependents are head-marked while those with noun dependents are dependent-marked. Examples of the NP from Wappo (Radin 1929: 127, 135; transcription slightly adjusted):

ke'u-me _haiyu man Poss dog ‘the man’s dog’

mi-t:9'l 2sg hair

‘my hair’ (inalienable) ime-t'o'l Isg my hair (alienable: “my (detached) hair’)

Yukagir shows a multiple split in the marking of its NP’s (Krejnovi¢ 1958: 80, 63ff.). The basic distinction is between noun possessors, which can be dependent-marked with the genitive case, and pronoun possessors, which are not. (Krejnovi¢ uses a hyphen to mark some kinds of compounding, and writes it in the phrases with zero marking below. I substitute the plus sign, reserving the hyphen for the morphological boundary in the last example.)

met + nime

I house ‘my house’ [zero marking] (Krejnovic 1958: 80) tet + nime you(sg) house

‘your house’ [zero marking] _ (Ibid.) Beke + ile

Beke deer ‘Beke’s deer’ [zero marking] (lbid., 63)

: ile-n jawul

deer-GEN track [dependent marking] (Ibid., 63) ‘(the/a) deer’s track; deer tracks’

Third-person pronoun possessors can be head-marked with a possessive suffix -gi while first and second person cannot:

54 Chapter Two ecie-gi Fa 3

‘his father’ (Ibid., 68) ile-pe- gi deer PL 3

‘their deer’ (Ibid., 71) A split adpositional phrase from Hungarian, where there is head marking with pronominal objects but no marking of nominal objects: mellett-em

beside Isg ‘beside me’

a haz mellett the house beside “beside the house’ The related language Zyrian (Komi) has a split involving the choice of two patterns for postpositional phrases with pronoun objects: head-marked and without marking (Lytkin 1966: 291, 294). vyl-am

on Isg ‘on me’ [head-marked]

me vyl-yn Isg.NOM On LOC [no marking; the locative case on the

‘on me’ postposition marks the external relation of the PP, not its internal structure] In Amharic, pronominal possessors use either dependent or head marking (Hartmann 1980:216, 262): Sini-ye

cup Isg ‘my cup’ [head-marked]

yanria makina our.GEN Car

‘our car’ [dependent-marked] while noun possessors ordinarily take only dependent marking (Hartmann, 294):

yd-wandam logg GEN brother child

‘niece, nephew’ (lit. ‘brother’s child’)

Favored and Disfavored Grammatical Patterns 55

except in literary borrowings from Ge’ez which use the status constructus (the standard term in Semitic philology for a head-marked noun):

bet-d masahoft house-CONSTR book

‘library’ (lit. ‘book house’, ‘house of book(s)’) 2.0.1.2.6. Detached marking. I use this term for various patterns in which the marking is detached from the dependent but not attached to the head. Typically, a detached marker is positioned relative not to a particular word but to constituent boundaries. Constituent-second position is the most common location for detached markers. Such markers are typically cliticized pronouns, and they index features such as person and number of the dependent. The following Serbo-Croatian example has pronominal direct and indirect objects, as well as a tense marker (TNS), all cliticized in sentencesecond position (clitics underlined):

Jovan mu gaje dao juce. J. to.him it TNS gave yesterday ‘Jovan gave it to him yesterday’

Several Uto-Aztecan languages place subject clitic pronouns, together with

tense and modal particles, in a second-position Aux (Steele 1979), e.g., Luiseno (Steele 1979 :447; Aux underlined):

noo xu-n-po xwaani ?arl

‘T should kick John’ :

I Mop-Isg-TNS John-oss kick

Ngiyambaa places up to three pronominal clitics on the first word in the sentence (Donaldson 1980: 122ff.), whatever its part of speech or syntactic function. The following examples (taken from Dixon 1980:366) show a first person agent pronoun cliticized to the verb and to an independent pronoun (clitics underlined; A = subject of transitive verb):

naa-nhi-na burraay

‘I saw the child’ |

see-PAST-IsgA child

nadhu-na burraay naa-nhi

I-lsga child see-PAST ‘T saw the child’

Under the same rubric of detached marking I put the kind of marking pattern where a particle or clitic occurs between the two words in a PP or NP, regardless of their order. If in such a phrase the first word happens to be the

A

56 Chapter Two head, the surface pattern will look head-marked; if the dependent is first, it will look dependent-marked; but the best structural analysis of the constituent has the marker in second position. Examples are these Tagalog noun phrases, with a prepositional phrase modifying the noun and a linker -na/ -ng following whichever element comes first (examples from Schachter & Otanes 1972: 116ff., 123; heads are boldfaced, markers italicized):

nasa mesa-ng libro on table LINK book

libro-ng nasa mesa book LINK on _ table both ‘the book on the table’

Another example of detached marking at the phrasal level is 'Kung, in which a number of phrase types take a second-position particle -a. Adjectives follow nouns, so in the NP the particle occurs on the head:

+ xanu-wa g+a book PTC old ‘old book’ (Snyman 1970:95) The language has postpositions, so in the PP the particle occurs on the dependent: tS’u-wa !ont!eng house PTC inside

‘inside the house’ (Snyman 1970: 107) , Since word order is fixed in !Kung phrases, for any given phrase type there is no variation in whether it is the head or the dependent that 1s followed by the particle, and therefore it is possible to analyze the NP as head-marked and the PP as dependent-marked; but the best metagrammatical generalization to be made over all phrase types would be to regard both as marked by _ a second-position marker.

2.0.1.3. Counting markers and determining types. The complete data for each language in the sample can be found in appendix 2. The tabulation of head and-dependent marking for each language requires a count of the number of positions, or POINTS (affix, clitic, or particle slots), which are head-marking, dependent-marking, or detached, for each of the three constituents in each language surveyed. Constituents with noun dependents and constituents with pronoun dependents are counted separately and totaled for each constituent type. The Russian prepositional phrase contributes two dependent-marking points to the Russian total,

Favored and Disfavored Grammatical Patterns 57

since either a noun object or a pronoun object of a preposition takes a case governed by the preposition:

S nami with us-INSTR

S _ saxar-om ‘with us’

with sugar-INSTR

‘with sugar’

The Hungarian postpositional phrase contributes one head-marking point, since a prepositional object is affixed onto the postposition while a noun object is not, and the postposition does not govern a case:

mellett-em

beside Isg ‘beside me’

a haz _ mellett the house beside ‘beside the house’

In Fijian, a pronoun object is cliticized to the verb; a noun object is not, and a clitic pronoun copy may or may not be triggered by the noun object (with an aspectual distinction) (ART = article; TR = transitive):

e lagana_ sere 3sg sing ART song ‘She was singing the song’

e laga-t-a 3sg sing-TR-3sg “she sang it’

e laga-t-a na_ sere 3sg sing-TR-3sg ART song ‘she sang the song’ (Schiitz 1985: 151)

The pronoun object construction is head-marked while the noun object construction is split. For typological classification of individual languages and comparisons of languages, I count the number of head-marking, dependent-marking,. unmarked, and detached points in the various constituents and overall. In abbreviations, formulas, column headings, etc. ““H’’ refers to head marking, ““D” to dependent marking, and “F’’ to detachment (mnemonically, ‘““F”’ stands for ““free’’ or “floated’’). In formulas, ratios, sums, and other

58 Chapter Two analytic processes the three types of marking will always be given in the order D, H, F. For example, D/H is the ratio of dependent to head marking, D/((D+H+F) the proportion of dependent marking, and so on. Any sequence of D, H, and/or F in any other order abbreviates a linguistic expression, not a mathematical one. Thus H/D abbreviates “head/dependent”’ in tables and appendixes, while D/H is the ratio of dependent to head markings.

The Russian PP’s illustrated above, taken together, contribute two D points to the total for Russian: one for noun object and one for pronoun object. The Wappo PP contributes one H point (for the pronominal object) and one D point (for the noun object). The Fijian clause contributes two H points and one zero: one H point for the pronoun object, and one H and one zero for the split construction with the noun object.

For each language, a sum, a proportion, and a ratio of D, H, and F points were figured for the total marking in the NP and S constituents. (Only the proportion is shown in Appendix 2.) The sum treats D points as positive values, H and F points as negative: D — H — F. The proportion is D/(D+H+FBF). The ratio is (D/(H+F). I also calculate the COMPLEXITY for each language, adding D, H, and F points as positive figures: D + H + F. What morphological marking signals is the function of the dependent or the relation of dependent to head. Thus there can be one mark of each type for each form of each constituent: one D point, one H, and one F for each of the three types of NP, for a total of nine points of various types; one D, one H, and one F for each of the three arguments in the two clause types for a total of 18; and so on. The maximum possible values for the various constituents will be shown in §2.0.2.

Many languages lack adpositions as a part of speech. For radically head-marking languages, it is common for adpositions to be morphologically and syntactically indistinguishable from nouns, and they are often called relational nouns in the literature. For example, Tzutuyil uses bound nouns like -umaal ‘cause, fault’ with possessive markers to mean ‘by, on account of’ (Dayley 1985:152, 154; A3 = the third-person form used to index agents):

r-umaal jar aachi A3 cause the man

‘by the man’ |

A relational noun agrees with its object, usually in person and number, just as a possessed noun agrees with its possessor in an NP, so NP’s and PP’s are morphologically and syntactically the same kind of phrase in a lan-

Favored and Disfavored Grammatical Patterns 59

guage like Tzutuyil. Nonetheless, in this study, for purposes of comparison among languages, phrases with relational nouns are counted as PP’s. There are many languages which lack even relational nouns and have no

phrase which can be counted as a PP. This is common in North America and close to universal in Australia. Many such languages have a set of oblique case suffixes or case-like suffixes instead of adpositions. Therefore in such a language we have dependent-marked N’s instead of PP’s (as noted above in §2.0.1.2). Languages of the Numic family of Uto-Aztecan generally have two equivalent constructions, one a dependent-marked N with a postposed oblique marker and the other a double-marked PP, e.g., Southern Paiute (transcription adjusted): N: — qani’n-tcuq-waA

house under ‘under the house’ (Sapir 1930: 227)

PP: a-ruq°wA qani-A it under house-Acc ‘under the house’ (Sapir 1930:219) Common especially in New Guinea is the use of serial verbs in lieu of adpositions, as in Barai (serial verb and its glosses boldfaced):

fu burede ije sime abe ufu he bread the knife take cut ‘he cut the bread with a knife’ (Foley 1986:114, citing Olson 1981) The phrase sime abe is not a PP but a VP. Such constructions are not counted as PP’s here. For all constituent types, marking patterns were determined from both the descriptions of nominal, pronominal, adpositional, and verbal paradigms and any relevant examples. Languages with rich verbal agreement

generally omit independent overt pronouns except in emphatic or contrastive contexts (i.e., these are pro-drop languages). For such a language, constructing an example with overt independent pronouns as subject, direct object, and indirect object is highly artificial; the verbal inflection normally suffices. Nonetheless, for these languages the count for S includes as its dependent-marking component the number of relevant case distinctions made in independent pronouns and hence available in the event that such a sentence is constructed. 2.0.1.4. Types. The HEAD-DEPENDENT TYPE of the language is the pro-

portion of dependent-marking points, computed as D/(D+H+F). Any

60 Chapter Two comparison of types that includes the PP is problematic because many languages lack true PP’s and many grammars make no mention of PP’s or their functional equivalents, so in computing head/dependent types I exclude PP’s, taking NP and S only. The combination of marking points in NP and S is sufficiently variable cross-linguistically that the languages surveyed here give 35 different proportions. Thirty-five types is too many to work with, so most of the counts done below use one or another grouping into categorial types. Most often a three-way breakdown is used, enabling us to classify languages into three

gross types of head-marking, double- or split-marking, and dependentmarking; the criteria for the breakdown are given in §3.0 below. When a more delicate breakdown is needed, or when numbers rather than types are required, I generally use the proportion rounded to one decimal place: 0.2,

0.7, etc. This gives a total of 11 types ranging from 0.0 to 1.0. When simple predominance of one or the other type of marking 1s at issue, I break the range of proportions into greater than 0.5 and less than 0.5.

In determining the type of marking used in any given constituent I counted only major, salient marking patterns. Minor patterns of very limited scope were simply not counted. Splits were fairly common in which one pattern was clearly the open category and the other, while a closed class, was nonetheless frequent and salient. For example, a number of languages use dependent-marked possession as their regular type but use head marking for kin terms and body parts in a pattern typical of inalienable possession. If the inalienable pattern was described as applying to all or most kin terms and/or body parts, I counted it as a major, salient pattern; if it was quite restricted, say to an enumerable list of lexical items, I considered it a minor pattern. An example where it is a major pattern is Sahaptin, which uses dependent-marked alienable possession in general but headmarked possession for kin terms with pronoun possessors:

filam aliD my (GEN) made thing

‘my made thing’ (Coyote to the Chinook salmon he has just made) (Jacobs 1931 :229)

na-tut-as Isg Fa Isg ‘my father’ (Jacobs 1931: 135) The head-marked pattern is restricted in two ways: it is used only with pro-

nominal possessors and only with kin terms. It is nonetheless a major, salient pattern in my count: the restriction to pronominal possessors coincides with my definition of a constituent type (NP with pronominal depen-

Favored and Disfavored Grammatical Patterns 61

dent), and the restriction to kin terms creates a class which is both open and frequent. The class of kin terms is open and kin terms are rarely used without possessors in any language, so the Sahaptin inalienably possessed construction must have relatively high text frequency compared to other possessive NP’s. A language in which head-marked possession is counted as a minor pattern is !Kung, where possession is dependent-marked except that kin terms take head-marked possession only in the first person singular. Another is Eastern Pomo, in which a small closed set of kin terms takes head-marked possession while all other nouns take the dependent-marked pattern. For a language like Sahaptin, with its alienable/inalienable split, the NP constituent with pronominal dependent was counted as having both a D and an H point. For languages like Eastern Pomo and !Kung, it was counted as

having only a D point. These examples are representative of how splits were counted: where both patterns are salient, splits contribute both a D and an H point, just as double-marked constituents do. Splits can also involve H vs. zero or D vs. zero. An example is the Fijian examples given in §2.0.1.3 above, where a verb plus object noun can be either head-marked or unmarked. This is an H/zero split. Analogous splits in the NP come from many Australian languages, where alienable possession is dependent-marked while inalienable possession takes no marking. D/zero and H/zero splits were counted in the same way as D/H splits, but of course addition of a zero to the total does not change the total or the ratio. Thus an H/zero split and an unsplit H (or a D/zero split and an unsplit D) make the same contribution to the type, and a split involving a zero makes no contribution to the overall complexity. Both of these situations can be regarded as defects of my method of counting, in that there is complexity and detail which they do not reveal. But the only way to count them—use of decimal or fractional values for splits—would require a kind of mathematical preciseness and consistency which it would be almost impossible to reach: Is an even split to be counted as 0.5 for each form? How is an uneven split to be counted —0.3 to 0.7? Which splits are uneven, ‘and how uneven are they? For how many languages known only from brief descriptions are there undocumented minor splits? Etc., etc. Therefore I let the defect stand. I have not counted multiple instances of the same kind of marking. For instance, the Sahaptin example just above shows double head-marking on the inalienably possessed form with the kin term: first person singular na-

and -as. I have counted this and similar examples as contributing one H point, although in fact there are two instances of head marking in the construction. Several Australian languages use multiple case marking (Dench

62 Chapter Two and Evans 1988), i.e., multiple dependent marking, where every casemarked noun passes its case on to all of its dependents or co-constituents, which bear cases marking their own functions as well as the cases of their heads. Dependents of dependents are marked with their own case, that of their immediate head, and those of the next higher head; and so on. A tour-

de-force example with four levels of embedding is (Dench and Evans 1988 :34—35):

Kayardild maku-ntha yalawu-jarra-ntha yakuri-naa-ntha woman-OBL catch-PAST-OBL _ fish-MABL-OBL

dangka-karra-nguni-naa-ntha man-GEN-INSTR-MABL-OBL

mijil-nguni-naa-nth net-INSTR-MABL-OBL

‘The woman must have caught fish with the man’s net’ In this example, ‘man’ is in the genitive because it is possessor of ‘net’; it is instrumental because it is a dependent of ‘net’; it is in the modal ablative

(MABL) because ‘net’ is in the modal ablative, and ‘net’ acquires its modal ablative from ‘fish’, which is modal ablative for reasons explained by Dench and Evans; and it is oblique because it is a dependent of ‘net’, which acquires its case from ‘fish’, which is a dependent of ‘catch’, which acquires its case from ‘woman’, whose case is governed by the verb. The word ‘man’ has four instances of dependent marking. This is the dependent-marking analog to polysynthesis. I count ‘man’ as simply being dependent-marked and contributing one D point to the total, with the result that the Kayardild clause emerges as having the same structure and complexity as the typical Indo-European clause—an analysis which is mani-

festly inaccurate. This simplification is necessary because the precise amount of multiple case marking in the constructions I am surveying is generally not made clear in grammars, so no consistent count could be made. This is a temporary and not particularly satisfactory solution; suffice it to note that several Australian languages are substantially more complex and more inclined toward dependent marking than my count indicates.

2.0.1.5. Problems. There is only one type of marking which is arguably morphological but cannot be unambiguously classified as D, H, or F: lenition or other sandhi phenomena at constituent-internal boundaries. For in- | stance, in Gilyak (Nivkh), initial consonant alternations occur on the heads of NP’s and VP’s, triggered by the final consonant of the dependent (this analysis is based on the discussion in Comrie 1981a:268, where different

Favored and Disfavored Grammatical Patterns 63

terms are used). An example showing initial lenition in the head noun of the NP (Comrie 1981a: 267):

tof ‘house’ atak rof

Fa house ‘father’s house’

Is this then a head-marking pattern, or is it preferable to regard the sandhi as a boundary phenomenon and count it as detached marking? Since Gilyak is the only language in my corpus with this type of lenition, and the lenition registers the presence of a dependent or codes the type of the constituent but does not index features, I disregard it in my tabulation and will leave open the question of whether this is properly a head-marking pattern. A similar problem is posed by tone sandhi in NP’s which are formed (apart from the tone sandhi) by simple juxtaposition. Constituents marked by tone sandhi involve changes in the lexical tone of either the head or the dependent, and could therefore easily be classified as head-marked or dependent-marked correspondingly. I have nonetheless disregarded such sandhi in my tabulation, treating it the same as the Gilyak lenition. The clearest example in my sample comes from Songhai, where a tone-sequence rule works backwards within certain constituents, turning a high-low-low sequence into high-high-low. A later rule then changes a sequence of two high moras in the same syllable into a single high tone. These rules apply to NP’s with adnominal dependents (examples and analysis from TersisSurugue 1981: 104-5):

input: farka jinde naa wa first rule: farka jindé naa wa second rule: —— na wa

donkey neck mother milk ‘a donkey(’s) neck’ ‘the mother’s milk’

In the first example, the rule affects a tone in the head word; in the second, it affects a tone in the dependent word. Since the environment for this rule is based on constituent boundaries rather than head-dependent relationships, since it affects several different constituents, and since it applies to a tone sequence rather than to a particular word or position class, I regard it as unrelated to head/dependent marking and describe the above examples

as having no morphological marking. Like the lenition of Gilyak, tone sandhi in Songhai involves only registering the presence and/or the syntactic type of the other word, and not indexing of features.

64 Chapter Two Yoruba has a tonal marking which is clearly not sandhi: the head noun in

an adnominal construction has its final vowel lengthened on a mid tone: owo6 ‘money’ owo0o0 Dada

‘Dada’s money’ (Awobuluyi 1979: 40) Since this is not sandhi but a fixed tone added to the word (and admitting of

an analysis as underlyingly segmental: Schachter 1971), I count it as a head-marked pattern.

2.0.2. Morphological complexity. How to measure morphological complexity is itself an issue of some complexity. The measure I use is simply the total of D, H, and F points for NP and S (I omit PP since the languages lacking it or lacking descriptions of it would have their complexity artificially lowered if I counted it). This measure overlooks a good deal of the actual morphological complexity of languages, both in omitting categories commonly signaled by morphology (e.g., tense and aspect on verbs) and in

considering only where and whether something is marked but not how (e.g., by inflection, agglutination, cliticization, or incorporation). Its advantage lies in its simplicity: it requires no additional survey or analytic work once the head/dependent type features are assessed..It is my impression that complexity as measured here, partial and artificial though it is, correlates straightforwardly with overall morphological complexity and can hence be used as an index of something real. The logically possible amount of complexity available in the constructions surveyed here is the following:

Constituent D points H points F points Total

NP with noun 1I j| I] 33 with pronoun with adjective | l| ]| 33 PP with noun : | with pronoun Swith withpronouns nouns 33I 3Il3 33I 399

Total Total, NP11 + S 11 only11 9 9 933 27 NP’s and PP’s can have only one point of each type apiece, since in these constituents there is only one dependent (the possessor or modifier in NP and the object in PP); clauses can have three for each of the three relations

Favored and Disfavored Grammatical Patterns 65

of subject, object, and indirect object. No language in my sample shows even half of this theoretical total; 15 is the highest found. I have found no example of a constituent receiving simultaneously D, H, and F marking; no

examples of PP’s with F marking; and only two languages which use F marking in NP’s. It is fairly common for NP’s and clause relations to have both D and H, or both D and F, marking, but not both H and F. H and F are apparently in complementary distribution for any given constituent; hence in structuralist terms H and F are not distinct, a fact which justifies treating them as in some sense the same kind of marking and using the sum of H + F in computing the ratio of dependent to head marking as D/(H+F) (see §2.0.1.3). 2.0.3. Word order. I survey only clause-level word order and tabulate only the basic or most common word order in the clause. I lumped the standard word-order types into three categories: verb-initial, verb-medial, and verbfinal. All but one of the languages with basic verb-final order in my sample actually use SOV (the exception is Hurrian, which uses OSV), and all but three with verb-medial order are actually SVO (the exceptions are Man-

garayi, Ungarinjin, and Hixkaryana, which use OVS; a split including OVS is shown by Hanis, which uses OVS and VOS). Verb-initial subsumes

VSO (e.g., Gitksan, Nootka, Maasai) and VOS (e.g., Inesefio, Tzutujil). This classification of types is deliberately crude, since this book is not a study of word order but merely raises questions about the interaction of word order with other grammatical features. 2.0.4. Clause alignment. This term (taken from relational grammar) will be used here as generic for accusative, ergative, stative-active, etc. Only morphological alignment is surveyed in this study. The following categories are used, based on the morphological distinction or nondistinction of A, O, and S (as those abbreviations are used by Dixon 1979 to refer to subject of transitive, direct object, and subject of intransitive respectively). The first five are standard and the last, hierarchical, is a well-described pattern with no standard label (Mallinson and Blake 1981 use the term . relative-hierarchical). (a) Neutral: A = O = S, 1.e., no inflectional oppositions. (b) Accusative: S = A; O distinct. (c) Ergative: S = O; A distinct. When a language has a major tense- or, person-based ergative/accusative split and both patterns are salient, I count the language as primarily ergative, on the grounds that (following Silverstein 1976) most ergative systems are split and hence the split is part of the definition of “‘ergative’’.

66 Chapter Two (d) Three-way: A, O, and S all distinct.

(e) Stative-active: S, = A, S, = O, 1.e., the language has two different kinds of intransitive verbs, one taking ordinary subject marking (or the

same subject marking as used with transitive verbs) and the other taking a subject whose marking is the same as that of the direct object of a transitive. The choice of S, or S, is usually determined by the verb: ‘’stative’’ verbs take S,, “‘active” verbs S,. (For this definition see Merlan 1985.) If S, = A is the clear majority type in a stative-active language, the language can be described as having an accusative bias or slant: most intransitive subjects are formally identical to transitive subjects, so for the most part S = A. If S, = O 1s the clear majority type, the language

has an ergative bias. I will speak of such languages as being stativeactive on an accusative BASE or Stative-active on an ergative base.

(f) Hierarchical: Access to inflectional slots for subject and/or object is based on person, number, and/or animacy rather than (or no less than) on syntactic relations. The clearest example of the hierarchical type in my sample is Cree. The verb agrees in person and number with subject and object, but the person-number affixes do not distinguish subject and object; that is done only by what is known as direct vs. inverse marking in the verb. There is a hierarchical ranking of person categories: second person > first person > third person. The verb takes direct marking when subject outranks object in this hierarchy, and inverse marking otherwise. In addition, verbs inflect differently depending on whether their S and O arguments are animate or not, a pattern which could be viewed either as another instance of hierarchical agreement or

as different conjugation classes (rather than hierarchical access to

| agreement slots).

In Tepehua (Watters 1988:81, 84, 285ff.) the verb takes subject and ob-

ject affixes, in a pattern that is basically accusative but where access to verbal marking is determined by person in the following hierarchy: highest macrorole [e.g., agent—-JN] > first or second person > argument of affix > undergoer. In the following example, the verb agrees with the first-per-

son actant and does not agree with the third-person one, regardless of which is undergoer (translation direct object) and which is argument of the dative affix (=translation indirect object) (Watters 1988 : 83):

ki- st’a:-ni- ye:- ‘1 loss sell DAT FUT 2SUB

‘You will sell her to me’ or ‘You will sell me to him’

Favored and Disfavored Grammatical Patterns 67

I count this pattern as split hierarchical/accusative. Mixe verb inflection is described in Van Haitsma and Van Haitsma 1976:57 as involving agreement with subject or object depending on rank in a hierarchy of first person

> second > third. The subject and object prefixes themselves are accusative in form (60—61), except for a three-way subsystem in the first person. This system is hierarchical with no split.

In Nunggubuyu (Heath 1984:347ff., esp. 362-63), the hierarchical structure appears in the morphemic analysis of the subject-object prefixes

to transitive verbs. There are four hierarchical categories of personnumber-gender prefixes, with first and second person in the first category. In prefix complexes to transitive verbs, the higher-ranked prefix always comes first, regardless of whether it is subject or object. If the subject hierarchically outranks the object, the two prefixes are simply combined se-

quentially. If the object outranks the subject, an inverse marker -N- is inserted between the two. For example (Heath 1984:362; ANA is a nonhuman gender category):

Subject Object Morphemic Phonemic

Isg ANA n®a-wun®an®gu n’awu ANA Isg n®a-N-wu

Since subject and object forms of prefix elements are identical in Heath’s abstract analysis, Nunggubuyu prefixation is neutral in alignment to the extent that it is not hierarchical. Kiowa (Watkins 1984: 113ff., 119, 134ff.) presents a borderline example of a hierarchical alignment system. The syntactic agreement categories for verb prefixes, in Watkins’s terms, are simple (for subjectively inflecting intransitives), agent, patient (variously indirect object and possessor, and apparently never'a true patient), and object (true direct object). Intransitives are split: some take simple agreement prefixes and others take patient agreement; hence in this respect Kiowa is a stative-active language. Transitive inflection has two hierarchical aspects. First, access to either agent or patient status requires animacy; also, objects are necessarily third person. Second, singular patients imply singular agents; special prefixation forms are required when there are other number combinations. Thus animacy, person, and number are all involved in determining access to agreement slots. Animates are compatible with any agreement category, but inanimates can only be objects; first and second person outrank third and appear in patient function when combined with a third person nonagent,

68 Chapter Two which is necessarily object. Apart from these hierarchical features, the alignment system of Kiowa is hard to classify. Intransitive verbs clearly follow the stative-active pattern. Transitives are basically hierarchical/accuSative, except that the agreement priorities are distinctive: verbs agree with agent or patient but not both, and agreement is with the patient if one is present, otherwise (including when the exceptional number combinations appear) with the agent. I counted such person-and-number-based patterns as hierarchical whenever they determined the basic inflectional forms for person-number configurations of arguments and were independent of voice. When a similar hierarchy was manifested only in the choice of active vs. passive (as in the passivization of Nootka, triggered by person-number combinations as well as by discourse factors: see Whistler 1985), I did not classify the alignment type as hierarchical. To judge from my database, most hierarchical languages also have an

identifiable accusative, neutral, or stative-active component. We may speak of hierarchical languages, like stative-active languages, as admitting

various base alignments, at least in theory. In reality, to judge from my sample, the hierarchical alignment on an ergative base does not occur. In the clearest examples of the hierarchical type, such as Cree and Nung, gubuyu, the base morphological alignment is simply neutral, in the sense that subject and object categories are not distinguished except by direct/ inverse marking. For Cree, there is an additional accusative component to the morphosyntax revealed in the active/passive opposition. The hierarchical languages in my sample and their base alignments can be summarized as follows:

Language Area Base alignment Nunggubuyu Australia Neutral

Cree E. North America Neutral/accusative

Kiowa E. North America Stative-active with special treatment of transitives

Mixe Mesoamerica Accusative/3-way Tepehua Mesoamerica Accusative

The ordering of neutral > accusative > ergative > three-way > stativeactive > hierarchical gives a cline of decreasing relevance of nominal syntactic relations, or increasing relevance of nominal semantics and semantic relations, to morphological marking: the neutral type makes no distinctions, the accusative type represents a grammaticalization of subject-object relations, the ergative type grammaticalizes agent and patient, the stative-

Favored and Disfavored Grammatical Patterns 69

active type grammaticalizes the lexical categorization of the verb, and the hierarchical type grammaticalizes not the functions of the individual arguments but their ranking in referential semantics relative to each other. This hierarchization is based on that offered by Klimov 1983a, where the accusative alignment is described as grammaticalizing subject-object relations, ergative as grammaticalizing agent-factitive relations, and stative-active as grammaticalizing nominal semantics. (In earlier work, e.g., Klimov 1972, the ergative alignment is described as grammaticalizing verbal transitivity. ) As will be discussed in §2.3, the alignment pattern is surveyed separately for pronouns, nouns, and verbs in each language, and then a DOMINANT ALIGNMENT type is defined for the language.

2.1 Head and Dependent Marking 2.1.1. Frequencies and preferences in placement of marking. Within the sample as a whole, head and dependent marking have approximately equal frequencies in each of the three individual constituents, in the basic type (NP + S), and overall. The figures are shown in table 3. There is a certain preponderance of dependent over head points in the NP and S constituents and overall, but when head and detached points are added together the figures level out: there is a slight preference for dependent marking (D) points over head marking (H + F) in the NP and overall, and a barely perceptible preference for head marking (H + F) in the PP and S. These preferences are shown by the last column, which gives the proportions. Except for NP, where dependent marking predominates, the proportions are quite close to 0.50, which amounts to an even split. The ten sample areas differ from each other, however, in their relative preference for D and H marking. The figures are given in table 4. Head-

marking points outnumber dependent-marking points in all three New World areas. There is a fairly even split in New Guinea and Oceania. DeTable 3. Frequencies of marking types in three constituents Marking

Constituent D H F D/(D+H+F)

NP 238 170030.45 0.58 PP 55 66 S 481 460 38 0.49 Total 774 696 41 0.51 NP +S 719 630 41 0.52

70 Chapter Two

Area constituent Dand H F D/(D+H+F)

Table 4. Frequencies of marking types in constituents, by area Marking

NP 38 9 1 0.79 PP 10 3 0 0.77 S 62 39 1 0.61 Total 110 51 2 NP +S 100 48 2 0.67 0.67 NP 12 6 0 0.67 PP 7 4 0 0.64 S 24 17 2 0.56

Africa

Ancient Near East

Total NP +S43 3627 23 22 0.60 0.59

NP 35 17 0 0.67 PP 20 12 0 0.62 S 95150 54830 00.64 Total 0.64

Northern Eurasia

NP + S 130 71 0 0.65

NP: 16 2 I 0.84 PP 5 1 0 0.83 S 37 15 1 0.70

South and Southeast Asia

Total NP +S58 5318 17 22 0.74 0.74

NP 34 16 0 0.68 PP 0 2 0 0.00 S 53 67 0 0.44

New Guinea

Total NP + S87 8785 8300 0.51 0.51

NP 44 9 0 0.83 PP — — — — S 80 46 13 0.58 Total 124 NP + §S 12455 5513 130.65 0.65

Australia

NP 9 8 l 0.50 , SPP 3 4 0 0.43 18 14 0 0.56 Total 30 26 1 NP +S 27 22 I 0.53 0.54 Oceania

Favored and Disfavored Grammatical Patterns 71 Table 4. (continued)

Area constituentand D H FTe D/(D+H+F) NP 34 65 0 0.34 PP 8 28 0 0.22 S 76 139 13 0.33 Total 118 232 13 NP +S 110 204 13 0.32 0.34 NP 5 16 0 0.24 PP 0 7 0 0.00 S 8 29 4 0.20 Marking

North America

Mesoamerica

Total NP +S13 1352 45 44 0.19 0.21

NP 11 22 0 0.33 PP* 2 5 0 0.29 S 28 40 4 0.39 Total 41 6/ 4 NP + S 39 62 40.37 0.37

South America

*PP infrequently described for South American languages.

pendent marking predominates in the Old World and Australia. We can generalize by saying that head marking is favored in the New World, dependent marking is favored in the Old World, and preferences vary in the Pacific. More generally, dependent marking is favored in the Old World and preferences vary in the colonized areas. The areal preferences for head and dependent marking are shown in table 5. All subcontinents behave like

their nearest neighbor continents, and except for California all residual zones behave like their host continents. (California has frequencies compa-

rable to Siberia or New Guinea-Oceania, as is consistent with the interpretation of New World colonization offered in chap. 6.) Worldwide, there is no single preferred type of marking. It should be noted, however, that in the areas where dependent marking is preferred it predominates by a wider margin than head marking does in the areas preferring it. The narrower margin for head marking suggests that it is somewhat disfavored in general, confirming the frequencies found in the overall sample. Generally the NP has the highest proportion of dependent marking and the PP has the lowest. This pattern is found in five areas: Northern Eurasia, New Guinea, Oceania, North America, Mesoamerica. The clause has the lowest proportion in three areas: Africa, the Ancient Near East, and South

72 Chapter Two

Area D H Prop

Table 5. Areal preferences for head and dependent marking (NP and S only)

Africa 100 48 .67 Ancient Near East 36 23 59 N. Eurasia 130 71 .65

Old World

S & SE Asia : 53 17 74

New Guinea 87 55 83 65 51 Australia 124

Pacific

Oceania 27 22 34

North America 110 204 34 Mesoamerica 13 45 21 South America 37 60 37

New World

Residual zones

Ethiopia & Kenya 47 19.59 71 Caucasus 23 16 North Asia Coast 37 18 .67 Northern Australia 62 45 58 California 54 34 50

Note: Entries indicating a clear majority are boldface; those indicating a slight majority are

underlined. Prop = proportion (D/(D + H+F)).

and Southeast Asia. Australia and South America are indeterminate: Australia because its languages lack PP’s, South America because PP’s are often either lacking or undescribed. In all but Oceania and South America, the NP has the highest proportion of dependent marking. The PP is similar to the NP in Africa, the Ancient Near East, South and Southeast Asia, and Oceania; it is similar to the S in northern Eurasia; and it is unlike either NP or S in Australia (where it is absent) and the three New World areas. The considerable variability of the PP from area to area means that in excluding it when defining the overall head/dependent type of each language (a decision described in §2.0.1.3) I have based the type on the constituents most prone to covary with each other, namely NP and S. Especially when examining the interaction of different typological features, as will be done in chapters 3 and 4, it will be useful to base first-order comparisons on the least area-specific features of head and dependent marking.

2.1.2. Frequencies of head/dependent types. As was mentioned above, computing the ratio of dependent to head marking as D/(H+F) gives us 35

different ratios among the 174 sample languages. Their distribution is shown in figure 1. It is bimodal, with the greatest peaks at the extremes of exclusive head marking (ratio of zero since D = O) and exclusive depen-

20 | 10 : ::::

Favored and Disfavored Grammatical Patterns 73

§

30

|f3

= ; * : : : 2 B a 4 q § NI

Figure 1. Frequencies D/(H+F) ratios

dent marking (since H +F = 0, an actual ratio cannot be computed as it has a zero denominator). The other ratios, those without zeroes, run from 0.14 (two languages) to 8.00 (one language). The highest frequencies are:

0.00 34 languages (radically head-marking)

O.17 9 languages 0.50 8 languages 1.00 11 languages 2.00 12 languages

H-+F=0 19 languages (radically dependent-marking) The languages with the 0.17 ratio all have the same configuration: a radically head-marking structure with two-place verbal cross-reference and head-marked possession, but either some marking of attributive adjectives in NP’s or a genitive case used only on human nouns or proper names or the like. The other three frequency peaks suggest that preferred patterns cluster at perceptually simple ratios: two to one, one to one, and one to two. Overall, then, we have a preference for neatness of some sort: polar types, twoto-one ratios, and even splits. The frequencies of proportions (D/(D+H+F)), rounded to one decimal place, are shown in figure 2. The second highest peak is now 0.6, which comprises 0.55 (four languages), 0.56 (two), 0.57 (five), 0.58 (one), 0.60

74 Chapter Two 40

20 +h a ee rere Soe bese é Sees

Epes BS Rg Besos: porsen Bl peas ee See Se: pd booed poeied pesca porn

ee oe tf fb L. see BR ft bt br:

» ee ne picooscoee BlseGhecacee Baesdpipoeiory Paar Beam Proc. Resseoias. Geen ee rs ste setecs BeRisen Se macnn: eeatataatatateP an Seekcnd a mesons

Seed sre oepam 4 Rey Fee ae renee mepee: ed pypoocune aoe, Soa Pened Boome baal pase ee heen Be at potouasog Bishan ants ee ed Bete prepwewmemee Bsc Bescccsied Bevnunwurtnd [ciuen Mere ESE pewwmmmmmen pscccntcie:

0 0.1 0.2 0.3 0.4 0.5 0.6 0.7 0.8 0.9 1

Figure 2. Frequencies of D/(D+H+F) proportions

(four), 0.62 (one), and 0.64 (six). Although rounding to one decimal place

changes the graphic configuration, it is still roughly bimodal. These rounded proportions give us a manageable and evenly divided 11-position scale, and they will henceforth be used in most calculations of head/dependent type.

If instead of using ratios or proportions we simply subtract H and F points from D points (this is how types were defined in Nichols 1986) we again get a bimodal distribution (not shown). The head-marking peak (at —6) consists of 19 languages, all from the New World: 16 polar headmarking languages (D = 0, H = 6) and three with other combinations. The dependent-marking peak (at 4) consists of 22 languages from various parts of the world with various combinations of D and H (and/or F) points. Thus in all three distributions—unrounded proportions, rounded proportions, and sum—the polar head-marking type appears as a mode, but there is no polar dependent-marking type that appears as a mode in all three distributions. We may then think of the dependent-marking end of the typological scale as showing more dispersal in several ways: the combination of marking points differs, the relevant languages come from all parts of the world, and the polar type is not modal in all calculations. In contrast, the

head-marking end of the scale is compact in the same ways: there is a

Favored and Disfavored Grammatical Patterns 75

single grammatical profile, it is found mostly in the New World, and the

polar type is modal in all three graphs. | If we look separately into the distribution of the D values and the H values instead of the type, we find that the distributions are skewed in ways consistent with the bimodality of type distribution. The figures are shown in table 6. The most common value for D is zero, or, in other words, the most common pattern is for a language to have no dependent marking; several of the higher values are also fairly common. Overall, the distribution of D values is also bimodal, indicative of the tendency for languages to cluster in the extremes of the typological range: they tend to have either little or no dependent marking (and considerable head marking), or a good deal of dependent marking (and little head marking). Even numbers of D values are more common than odd numbers. There are two reasons for this. First, most languages treat noun and pronoun dependents alike; splits occur, as will be discussed in §2.1.4, but they are in the minority. Identical

treatment of noun and pronoun dependents for any given constituent produces an even number of morphological marks while noun/pronoun splits produce odd numbers. A second reason for the higher frequency of even numbers is the fact that several languages use dependent marking (a genitive case) on both noun and pronoun possessors while they lack agreement in attributive adjectives. Such languages have two D points in the NP—one for noun possessor, one for pronoun possessor, but none for the adjective. The NP is the : only constituent in my sample that has an odd number of subtypes (with noun, pronoun, and attributive modifier as dependent) and might be expected to contribute an odd number of points, but the cross-linguistic facts are such that it usually contributes an even number: two.

The higher frequency of even numbers is somewhat artifactual. I counted nouns and pronouns separately because some languages treat them

} Table 6. D points in NP + S D Frequency

01 34 14 23 19 9 45 15 7 67 23 17 8 20 9 14

76 Chapter Two differently, but counting them separately amounts to doubling the points for a given constituent in that majority of languages that lack splits. The H values, shown in table 7, are unimodal but skewed; the mode 1s 6, and the languages with this value include the 16 polar head-marking languages with D = 0 and H = 6as well as a number of languages with some double marking. The even numbers are much more frequent than the odd numbers. The reasons for favoring even numbers are the same as those just discussed in connection with D values: the tendency to treat nouns and pronouns alike, a tendency for attributive adjectives not to agree with their head nouns, and the design of the count. The discrepancy between even and odd numbers is much greater for H values than for D values because head marking in NP’s with attributive adjectives is extremely rare (the only clear examples I have found are Shuswap and Persian-Tadzhik, languages not in the basic sample: examples are in §2.0.1.2.2). The odd numbers are contributed only by languages with noun/pronoun splits, and these are not particularly common (they are listed in §2.0.1.2.5 above).

2.1.3. Clustering of properties into types. Not all possible combinations of D and H values are attested. When D points are plotted against H points,

shown in figure 3, a tendency toward clustering is revealed. There is a fairly wide high-density region in the lower right, comprising languages with a good deal of dependent-marking morphology and less head-marking morphology, and there is a more compact high-density region in the central

to upper left, representing languages with more head-marking than dependent-marking morphology. The middle of the graph is mostly empty, showing that languages cluster in the predominantly head-marking and dependent-marking regions. The upper right and lower left are empty, showing that there is a negative correlation of H with D marking as well as a tendency to avoid the extreme complexity that would be entailed. Table 7. H points in NP + S

H Frequency

0] 23 4 23 29 16 4 38 a) 15 6 42

7 98 04

een 6 ' ae gp on i ai i a

Favored and Disfavored Grammatical Patterns 77

LTE LTT TT Fete eT Ty Ty

|.

| EEE3 bce ce te be £° Sl ste | em oe | oe ce

anes LE

Eeeaneresee eanpeeeeares 0 1 2 3 4 #§ 6 7 8 9 10 D points

Figure 3. Plot of D by H points (in NP + S)

2.1.4. Marking tendencies in nouns and pronouns. Section 2.0.1.2.5 gave examples of splits where nouns and pronouns took different kinds of marking. There are 37 such splits in the NP and PP in my sample, and they give evidence of three basic tendencies. The first and most common tendency is that illustrated in §2.0.1.2.5: pronouns have head marking while nouns do not. Twenty-eight languages have one or another form of this pattern. Ten of them have head-marked NP’s and/or PP’s where the dependents are pronouns, but dependent marking or no marking of nouns. Another 18 have this tendency combined with double marking or some additional split. Table 8 shows the patterns, with languages grouped areally. The second tendency is one whereby pronouns make case distinctions that nouns do not make. There are eight languages in my sample where only pronouns have cases (or only pronouns have core or grammatical

78 Chapter Two Table 8. Noun/pronoun splits

Area Language Constituent Pronoun Noun

Africa Amharic NPH D/H D Dizi NP D/H Gbeya PPH0/H 0 Hausa NP DH/H Kung PP 0 D

Maasai NPDDD/O DH Nera NP Near EastHittite Akkadian PP DH D D PP D,H Hurrian NP H D

Sumerian NP H D, DH

Northern Eurasia Hungarian PP HD Q Komi NP DH

Mongolian NP D/H Yukagir NP H DD

Yurak NP, PP H D

S & SE Asia Burushaski PP D, H D

New Guinea Abelam NP 0 0/D0/H D,H Kewa NP

Kombai NP0H0,DD Sentani NP Vanimo NP D H Yessan-Mayo NP D D/H?

Australia Malak MalakS NP 0D D Ngiyambaa D, F Tiwi NPNP0H0/H Ungarinjin . Warndarang NP 0 H/D H?

Wemba-Wemba NP H D/H

Oceania Chamorro NPPP HH D/H or F Drehu NP, D/H

Konua NP DH H 0/H Nasio1 NP H

North America Atakapa 0 0,DH Gitksan PPNP DH

Hanis NP D H Kiowa NP H incorporation; D

Lower Umpqua NP H, DH D Wappo NP, PP Zuni NP, S DH 0D

Mesoamerica Chichimec NP H 0

Mixtec NP H Q South America Canela-Krah6é NP DH D Guarani NP H 0

Note: D/H or @/H = split within a paradigm; DH = double marking; D, H = different marking patterns in different paradigms.

Favored and Disfavored Grammatical Patterns 719

cases) and as a result the NP with a pronoun possessor is dependentmarked while that with a noun possessor is not. The languages are (here and below, all combinations of marking types, whether split or double, are indicated as ““D, H’’, etc.):

Language Constituent Pronoun Noun

Fula NP, PP D 0 English PP D 0 French PP D 0 Kota NP, PP D 0 Arapesh NP D H

Kombai NP D 0 Gitksan PP D,H H Zuni NP D 0

The third tendency is illustrated by Atakapa NP’s. Neither nominal nor pronominal possessors have any morphological marking, but a nominal possessor can trigger an anaphoric pronoun adjacent to the possessed noun: ~~

pronoun: ha tal he skin ‘his skin’ [no marking] (Swanton 1929: 126)

noun: icak kai’ an man dead house ‘a dead man’s house’ _ [no marking] (ibid.; extracted from sentence)

or: yukhiti icak kat ha tal Indian man dead he skin ‘the skin of a dead Atakapa’_ [head marking’? ]

Djingili has an analogous pattern. Djingili has cases, and uses the dative on possessors. The possessor is postposed.

pronoun: biba narina son my ‘my son’

noun: gurnju nanu __sbai-na |

. Skin him.DAT man-DAT ‘the man’s skin’

In the grammars of these two languages, the pronoun is written as a sepa-

rate word, so one could simply assume that there is no morphological marking here. On the other hand, the pronoun in the last example is associ-

80 Chapter Two . ated with the head noun, so the pattern can be described as head marking: there is agreement, in the form of a pronominal copy of the possessor, associated with the head noun. This is the analysis I have used. Five languages show such patterns:

Language Constituent Pronoun Noun

Atakapa NPD0D, 0,H Djingili NP H

Hanis NP D H Tiwi NP 0 0,H Warndarang NP D,O H

There are four anomalous patterns which represent none of the above tendencies. (1) In Natchez, all possessors are head-marked except that the nonsingular pronouns have a participial form (“which is ours”’, “which is yours’’) instead of the head-marked form used for the singular pronouns. As appendix 2 shows, Natchez is counted as having both an H and a D point in the NP with pronoun possessor. (2) Gbeya uses dependent marking for both nouns and pronouns, and in addition puts a tonal affix on the first noun in an NP. Since the head is the first word, the resultant pattern is head-marking. Gbeya examples (Samarin 1966:74; the tone affix is -; as above, the head of the constituent is boldfaced; for typographical clarity, markers are underlined, rather than italicized as above):

pronoun: wen ko-m ]

story of-lsg ‘my story’ [dependent marking]

noun: sa’de-e k6 wi-ré body _— of person ‘people’s bodies’ [head marking and dependent marking |

(3) Maasai uses a possessive preposition whose initial agrees with the gender of the possessed noun (this is head marking). When the possessor is a pronoun, the preposition takes person-number affixes in agreement with the possessed noun (so the preposition itself is head-marking, although this inflected preposition figures as a dependent in the larger possessive phrase, which is thus dependent-marked). When the possessor is a noun, the preposition agrees with it in gender as well as agreeing with the head noun, so this kind of phrase is double-marked. In the following examples, ‘“‘M”’ and ““F” indicate masculine and feminine gender. The preposition base is /with masculine head noun, zero with feminine. The vowel of the preposi-

Favored and Disfavored Grammatical Patterns 81

tion is -o with masculine object, -e with feminine. (Examples from Tucker and Mpaayei 1955: 20.)

olayioni /-ai son (M) M-lsg ‘my son’

entito 0-ai daughter(F) F-1sg ‘my daughter’

ol-core /-o layioni friend (M) M-M boy (M) ‘boy’s friend’

ol-core /-e nkerai M-F child (F) ‘child’s friend’

en-toki @-o layioni thing (F) F-M boy (M) ‘boy’s thing’

en-toki 0-e nkerai F-F child (F) ‘child’s thing’

(4) The last of the four anomalous patterns is found in Nasioi, where all possession is head-marked, but pronoun possessors additionally take plural agreement with the possessed noun, a dependent-marked pattern. The first of the three tendencies described in this section—the one whereby pronoun possessors trigger head marking while noun possessors do not—is the strongest (28 languages) and clearly points to an implicational hierarchy for head/dependent marking on different parts of speech: pronouns are more likely to trigger head marking than nouns; head-marked possession with noun possessors implies head-marked possession with pronoun possessors. Put alternatively, noun possessors are more prone to take dependent marking than are pronoun possessors. This may be a universal hierarchy which directly affects head/dependent marking. The second tendency—pronouns make case distinctions that nouns do not—produces ap-

parent counterexamples in which pronouns are dependent-marked while nouns are not. This tendency is not a condition applying directly to head/ dependent marking; it 1s the accidental result of a completely orthogonal implicational hierarchy, one having to do with the distribution of inflectional categories over parts of speech. Its impact on the marking patterns in NP’s and PP’s is quite minor, showing up in only eight languages.

82 Chapter Two There are two languages (Malak Malak and Sentani) that have the opposed development, with more cases in nouns than in pronouns. Figures similar

to these for the NP emerge for the clause as well: eight languages have more cases in the pronoun and four have more in the noun. The great majority of languages have the same number of cases in both word classes in both constituents. For those that do not, we have seen that there is no universal preference as to which paradigm will be more elaborate: it is the pronoun more often than the noun, but both asymmetries are lowfrequency phenomena. The third tendency—pronoun copy of dependent next to head—also produces apparent, and fairly superficial, counterexamples: superficial in that the NP’s with pronoun possessors have the same structure as the head NP of a larger possessive NP with a noun possessor, as shown by this schematic English rendition of the Atakapa examples cited above:

(a) [ he skin | ‘his skin’ (b) [ [ the man] [ he skin] ] ‘the man’s skin’ I call the (b) pattern head-marked because in it the possessor is clearly associated with the head and distinct from the dependent, while (a) has no marking. This decision captures the difference between the two constructions but it ignores the fact that “his skin’ has the same structure in both constructions. Languages showing this tendency are again few (five in all),

so the distortion imposed by this decision is minimal. Such languages probably show us one historical source of head-marking nominal inflection: “he’’ in (b) is nonmorphological agreement, and if it cliticizes to the head noun there will be morphological agreement and a clear head-marking

construction. On the other hand, even if cliticization took place areal or typological pressure might force reanalysis as a dependent-marking pattern, as has happened with English, where the -’s of “‘the man’s skin” is now phonologically associated with the preceding word (dependent marking) although syntactically associated with the following word (the head).

2.1.5. Consistency of marking types in different constituents. Section 2.1.3 showed that there is some tendency toward consistency in the marking of different constituents: NP and S are often both head-marked or both dependent-marked. It needs to be established whether this is equally true for both head and dependent marking, and for both NP and S; and, if it is

not, whether there are any regularities, structural or areal, in the departures. Tables 9 and 10 give the data, for the whole sample and area by area. They were compiled by ascertaining for each language whether it had head marking in the NP only (and hence some other marking, or no marking, in

Favored and Disfavored Grammatical Patterns 83

S), in S only (and other or no marking in NP), in both, or in neither; and likewise for dependent marking. 2.1.5.1. Preferences for marking types in constituents. The row of totals at the bottom of tables 9 and 10 show that there is a simple correlation between marking type and constituent type: the S constituent favors head markTable 9. Head marking in NP and S constituents, by area (entries are numbers of languages)

Area NP only NPandS S only Neither Total

Africa 1 5 10 3 19 Near East 0 4 I 0 5 Europe & Caucasus 0 3 6 l 10 Northern Asia 1 7 1 2 11 S SE Asia 5 41010 Old&World total 20201 23 55

New Guinea0| 10 118219 24 Australia 6 5 Oceania I 4 2 0 7

Pacific ‘total 2 20 18 10 50 W North America 2 23 4 3 32

E North America 0] 10 2 0012 Mesoamerica 8 0 9 South America 0 11 1 0 12 New World total 3 . §2 7 3 65 Total, all areas 7 92 48 23 170 Table 10. Dependent marking in NP and S constituents, by area (entries are numbers of languages)

Area NP only NPandS S only Neither Total

Africa 4 12 2 l 19 Near East l 4 0 0 5 Europe & Caucasus 0 8 l 1 10

Northern Asia20682l 02 10 11 S & SE Asia Old World total8 712 383614 24 55 New Guinea Australia 3 |15 100l19 Oceania 5 7 Pacific total 12 32 4 2 50 W North America 4 12 5 11 32 E North America22 l1 1l 8512 Mesoamerica 9

South America 4 27 3 12 New World total 8 019511 65 Total, all areas 27 89 21 33 170

84 Chapter Two ing while NP favors dependent marking. Of the languages in which marking

types are found in only one of the two constituents, dependent marking outnumbers head marking nearly 4 to 1 (27 to 7) in the NP, while head marking outnumbers dependent marking just over 2 to 1 (48 to 21) in the clause. The asymmetry is highly significant (p < 0.001). Judging from the different margins of support, the correlation between NP and dependent marking is stronger than that between S and head marking. Area by area we have the pattern of support and nonsupport shown in table 11. A language supports the correlation of NP and dependent marking if its entry under “NP only” in table 10 is larger than that in 9, and it reverses the correlation if the entry in table 9 is larger. The correlation of S and head marking is supported if the entry under “S only” in table 9 is larger, and reversed if that in table 10 is larger. The correlation of NP and dependent marking is positively supported in nine of 12 areas, equivocal in two, and reversed in only one; it is therefore significant by Dryer’s test. Since the affinity between NP and dependent marking is significant both for the entire sample and area by area, it can be considered a universal prefer-

| ence. The correlation of S and head marking is clearly supported in the Old World and the Pacific but is reversed in three of four areas of the New World; this correlation then does not pass Dryer’s test. On the other hand, it is statistically significant for the entire sample (p < 0.01); and inspection Table 11. Support for correlations of NP and D marking, S and H marking, shown by languages in tables 9-10

NP and D S and H

Area yes tie no yes tie no

|

Africa X X Near East X XX Europe & Caucasus X NNew X X S &Asia SE Asia X X Guinea X xXX X Australia Oceania X X W North America XX E North America X X Mesoamerica South America X XX X Old World 30] J340i 0 0 Pacific 2 l New World Total —683 31 l0 81 0l 33 Total

Favored and Disfavored Grammatical Patterns 85

of tables 9 and 10 will show that the margins are larger in supporting areas (totals of 41 to 10) than in nonsupporting areas (totals of 7 to 11 in the New World). It can be concluded that while the correlation of NP and dependent marking is a strong statistical universal, a correlation of S and head marking is weaker, a cross-linguistic trend but not necessarily a universal. The 21 exceptional languages having dependent marking in only the clause show some recurrent patterns. Eight of them (Hungarian, Nanai,

Nyigina, Diegueno, Gitksan, Quileute, Choctaw, Miskito) have well_ developed case systems for marking core arguments but have head-marked ~ NP’s. Half of these have two-place verb agreement, half one-place. These

are then languages with systematic splits: the NP is head-marked, the clause double-marked. They could also be described as case-marking languages with no genitive case. This pattern appears to be stable, as four of the languages showing it belong to sizable and well-described stocks or families in which most of the daughter languages show it (Uralic, Tungusic, Yuman, and Muskogean for Hungarian, Nanai, Diegueho, and Choctaw respectively). Nine of the languages (Acehnese, Kiwai, Kobon, Washo, Yurok, Cayuvava, Guarani, Hixkaryana, Mapuche) are basically head-marking lan-

guages but have one case or adposition used on clause arguments. In Acehnese, Kiwai, Hixkaryana, and Mapuche that one case or adposition is used on indirect objects. These could be described as consistently headmarking languages in which indirect objects are treated as obliques rather than as clause arguments (this is how Derbyshire 1985: 17 describes Hixkaryana), and they would in fact fall into the category of polar head-marking languages in a survey that did not count indirect objects. The other languages mark direct objects (or objects in general: most simply make a sub-

ject/object distinction) with their single case, and can be described as predominantly head-marking languages with rudimentary case distinctions. The other four languages have relatively little morphology overall and show idiosyncratic patterns. Mandinka has no marking except for a twocase system for subject and object relations. Yoruba has a true reversal of the expected pattern: head-marked NP’s and exclusively dependent-marked clauses. Temiar and Salt- Yui have no marking in NP’s and double marking in their clauses.

2.1.5.2. Hierarchy of marking types in constituents. These correlations can be stated as an implicational hierarchy: If a language has salient head marking anywhere, it has it at the clause level. That is, the presence of salient head marking in the NP implies its presence in the clause. In terms of morphological categories, nominal possessive affixes (which mark pos-

86 Chapter Two session on the possessed noun, usually by person-number agreement) im-

ply verbal agreement with at least one argument. The support for this implicational ranking comes from the entries for head marking in Table 9:

the 92 languages with head marking in NP and S are consistent with the , implicational ranking, and the 48 languages with head marking in only S critically support it. There are only 7 counterexamples (4% of the total), languages with head marking in only the NP. For three of them, the violation is only artifactual, the result of not counting clause-level cliticization as head marking (so counted, cliticization would remove the three languages concerned into the category of those with head marking in both NP and S). The seven counterexamples are:

Language Area Remarks Yoruba Africa

Mongolian N. Asia Incipient cliticization of possessive pronouns under Turkic influence

Yessan-Mayo New Guinea

Drehu Oceania

Haida W. North America Has clitics in S Luisefio W. North America Has clitics in S Tarascan Mesoamerica Has clitics in S No comparable implicational ranking can be stated for dependent mark-

ing: roughly equal numbers of languages have it in the NP only (27 languages) and in S only (21 languages). Section 2.1.5.1 showed that there is a strong correlation between the NP and dependent marking, but this correlation does not translate into an implicational statement about the distribution of dependent marking; it has to.do with the differences between head and dependent marking, not with the preferred distribution of dependent marking taken by itself. The correlation between S and head marking was weaker and not a universal, when measured (as it was in §2.1.5.1) against dependent marking, but when the distribution of only head marking is considered it translates into a strong implicational generalization that has

to do with the distribution of head marking, not the difference between head and dependent marking. 2.1.5.3. Parallel marking across constituents. Another clear tendency is one toward parallelism: as shown in table 9, 92 languages (54%) have head marking in both NP and S, and in table 10, 89 (52%) have dependent mark-

ing in both. These are the only two majority patterns for their respective marking types, and they are substantially higher than any other entries on the tables. Area by area, parallelism is strongly supported for dependent

Favored and Disfavored Grammatical Patterns 87

marking in 10 of the 12 areas; the exceptions, both weak, are eastern North

America and Mesoamerica, in which languages having any dependent marking are very few. For head marking, parallelism is supported in 9 of 12 areas; the three exceptions, all of them strong exceptions, are Africa, Europe and the Caucasus, and South and Southeast Asia, in each of which there are substantially more languages with head marking in S only than in

NP and S. Thus parallelism is a strong cross-linguistic tendency and a probable universal for dependent marking, while for head marking it is a clear trend but easily undermined by the preference for head marking in only the clause. The explanation for the stronger showing of parallelism in dependent-marking languages must be the following. In all three constituents it is nouns and pronouns that are dependents, so the parallelism in dependent-marking languages is the automatic consequence of the fact that inflecting for case is a property of those parts of speech and independent of the constituents in which they appear. But in a head-marking language a different part of speech is inflected in each of the three constituents: nouns

in NP’s, adpositions in PP’s, and verbs in clauses. There will be morphological parallelism in the three constituents only if all three parts of speech happen to inflect alike.

2.1.5.4. Areal but not universal preferences. The number of languages having no head marking (23, or 14%) is lower than the number having no dependent marking (33, or 19%). That is, exclusively dependent-marking languages are fewer than exclusively head-marking languages, as was shown in §2.1.2 (where the frequencies of the polar types differ slightly from those given here because detached marking is counted together with head marking there but not here). The difference in frequencies of polar types is not great, and there is no consistent preference from area to area: languages lacking dependent marking are frequent in the New World, where the margins of support are very high; margins in the opposite direction are small in most of the other areas, but high in South and Southeast Asia and Australia. Thus the relative frequencies of the polar head-marking and dependent-marking types are a matter of areal or macroareal preference, not universals.

2.2 Complexity While the head/dependent types and the D and H values in them are dis-

tributed non-normally, the complexity (D+H+F in NP and S) has a roughly normal distribution, showing that languages avoid the extremes of complexity. Neither zero complexity nor the theoretical maximum com-

88 Chapter Two plexity of 27 points (9 H points plus 9 D points plus 9 F points for NP and

S) occurs: the highest attested complexity is 15, found in only two languages. Figure 4 shows the complexity values attested in my sample. The areal distribution of complexity types, lumped to facilitate comparison, 1s shown in table 12. The normal distribution and preference for moderate complexity shown in the overall sample are echoed in most of the areas, with high complexity predominating in only two. There is a preference for moderate complexity, though it is not significant in terms of Dryer 1989a.

2.3 Alignment In the following sections, stative-active and hierarchical patterns will sometimes be lumped together for convenience. (Their distribution is in fact almost identical, as the tables below will show).

Hee 2.3.1. Different alignments for different parts of speech. Although a number of languages show the same kind of alignment in all parts of speech or in all inflecting parts of speech (e.g., Basque, Chukchi, and ChechenIngush have ergative inflection in pronouns, nouns, and verbs; most IndoEuropean languages are accusative in pronouns, nouns, and verbs), it is probably commoner for languages to exhibit splits (for the various possible

30 -

a ERIE]

Billile ee 0 -PLL eleLLL) ea ee ee Eee > es es Sen . sens

| PEI RIBLIE ae Bey Feed Bed Bed Feed bed Fee Rend Bod poroe Booed Boa pom Bod ioe Bese

ee Fed fe Bed ed fed fea a Be Ray Beceg Bocted Bae Bag boneg paras Coe sees Sree

ee eS S eed bad Be 2 a: = Se Hee

See BESS BSS od Fed Boca Bod Beed Rood Kes) Boos oes eS eee

0123 45 6 7 8 9 101112131415161718

Figure 4. Frequencies of complexity levels

Favored and Disfavored Grammatical Patterns 89 Table 12. Areal distribution of complexity levels Complexity

Moderate High Area (O—5) Low (6-10) (11-15) Mean

Africa 6 8 5 7.9 Ancient Near East 0 l 4 Northern Eurasia 3 8 1012.2 9.6

Old World

S & SE Asia 3 5 2 7.2 New Guinea1 6916 2 7.1 Australia 9 10.1

Pacific

Oceania 2 4 l 7.1 North America 7 30 7 7.4

New World

Mesoamerica 42 10 5 1Il6.2 South America : 7.8 Totals 34 96 42 8.0 Total modes 0.5 7 2.5 Old World total912 2212 218.2 8.8 Pacific total 29 New World total 13 45 9 7.2

Ethiopia & Kenya 0 323 9.8 11.0 Caucasus 0 2 North Asia Coast02447l10.5 7.9 Northern Australia California I 12 l 7.9

Residual zones

Totals 3 250 14 Total modes 3 2 9.2 Europe l 1 4 10.2 Ancient Near East * 0 i 4212.2 Central Australia I 4 9.6 Interior North America 0 7 | 7.1 Oceania * 2* 44 31 l7.1 Mesoamerica 6.2 Totals 8 22 132 8.3 Total modes 0 3.5

Spread zones

Note: The modal type for each area is boldface. Ties and near-ties are underlined (and are counted as half an entry in figuring totals). * Also shown above as a basic sample area.

splits and conditions on their occurrence see Silverstein 1976, Dixon 1979). Hence it is necessary to tabulate not just a single alignment category for each language but one for each part of speech in each language.

The frequencies of alignment patterns among the various parts of speech are shown in table 13.” In determining alignment patterns for pro-

90 Chapter Two Table 13. Frequencies of alignment patterns among parts of speech (modal entry is boldface)

. Dominant as % Alignment Pronoun Noun Verb Total Dominant of 155 languages Neutral 716587 7 (5%) Accusative 4524 88 182 198 93 (60%) Ergative 11 29 Stative-active 0 015 2255 2228 21(18%) (14%)

Hierarchical4000I858] 5(0.6%) (3%) Three-way Total 151 161 158 470 155 nouns, only first and second person pronouns were counted. Where there is a major or fairly even split, the alignment type counted was based on the following hierarchy: hierarchical > stative-active > three-way > ergative > accusative > neutral. For example, an even ergative/accusative split was counted as ergative. Reading the chart row by row, by alignment types, we see that the neutral pattern is found most often on nouns; that is, nouns are the part of speech most likely to be uninflected for the subject and object functions. The neutral pattern is rarest on verbs; this shows that, of all the parts of speech, the verb is the least likely to make no formal discrimina-

tion of subject and object functions. This is consistent with the general affinity of the clause for head marking shown in §2.1.5 above: the verb is the head of the clause and most prone to carry the marking of clause relations. The accusative pattern is commonest on verbs, the ergative pattern commonest on nouns. Three-way oppositions are too rare to permit reliable generalizations.

Stative-active and hierarchical morphology are found only on verbs. There are two languages with stative-active systems that are not marked directly on any one part of speech. One is Hua, where nouns and pronouns have ergative morphology, verbs are accusative, and one class of intransitive verbs can take ergative subjects. The other is Eastern Pomo, where nouns have ergative morphology, pronouns accusative, verbs have no agreement, and the ergative case can be used on intransitive subjects for a semantic connotation of deliberateness or agentivity. The generalization that hierarchical morphology is found only on verbs still holds if we include among hierarchical languages, as I have not, languages with obligatory passivization when object outranks subject on the relevant hierarchy. Nootka and Navajo are two such languages. In all examples of such languages that I know of, the passivization includes inflectional and/or derivational changes in the verb, and these are head marking. Looking at the chart vertically, by parts of speech, we see that pronouns and nouns favor neutral and accusative marking, nouns favor neutral and

Favored and Disfavored Grammatical Patterns 91

ergative marking, and verbs favor accusative and stative-active marking. These various correlations and preferences explain some of the correlations between head/dependent marking and clause alignment to be discussed in chapter 3, notably the limitation of the stative-active type to languages with a substantial head-marking component at the clause level. The accusative pattern is the commonest overall, with neutral a close second. The ergative and stative-active patterns are less frequent, and hierarchical and three-way inflection are quite rare (although the three-way pattern, in addition to its two occurrences here, also shows up as a subpattern in minor paradigms in

several languages; these are not tabulated here). | It has been observed (Anderson 1977; repeated in Comrie 1978; Klimov

1983a:124, 174-75) that there are ergative/accusative splits where the nominal morphology is ergative and the verbal morphology accusative, but

not vice versa. The ergative/accusative splits found in my sample are shown in table 14. The numbers in this and the preceding table support Anderson’s claim as a very strong statistical generalization: the ergative alignment favors nouns over verbs and the accusative alignment favors verbs over nouns, but the opposite configuration does occur (though only once, in Sahaptin, where it is due to cliticization rather than inflectional affixation). The noun/pronoun asymmetry whereby pronouns can be accusative and nouns ergative but not vice versa (Silverstein 1976) is never reversed in my sample and therefore continues to stand as an absolute generalization. Garrett 1990 reviews the debate on whether a split involving accusative pronouns and ergative verbs can occur, and shows that it does. My sample has three examples (Hittite, Sumerian, Sahaptin), and none of the opposite split. Table 14. Types and frequencies of ergative/accusative splits

No. of

Split languages Languages N = erg., V = acc. 9 Hua, Kate, Kewa, Sumerian, Dyingili, Mangarayi,* Wemba Wemba, Lower Umpqua, Cashinahua

N = acc., V = erg. l Sahaptin Pro. = acc., N = erg. 9 Sumerian, Dyirbal, Mangarayi,* Ngiyambaa, Uradhi,* Wemba Wemba, Western Desert, Eastern Pomo, Cashinahua

Pro. = erg., N = acc. 0 Pro = erg., V = acc. 0 Pro = acc., V = erg. 3 Hittite, Sumerian, Sahaptin * There is an additional minor split within one of the parts of speech

92 Chapter Two 2.3.2. Dominant alignment types. Having distinguished alignment patterns for the three parts of speech, it is still possible to identify what will be called the DOMINANT ALIGNMENT TYPE for each language. The dominant alignment type for a language is the pattern found in the majority of parts

of speech, or the sole non-neutral type, or the nominal rather than pronominal pattern, or (for languages with three-way splits) the most semantic of the patterns (the highest-ranking pattern in a hierarchy of hierarchical > stative-active > three-way > ergative > accusative); these criteria are applied in the order stated. This definition excludes the neutral pattern from the dominant type unless a language has absolutely no relevant morphology. Excluding neutral patterns is consistent with standard practice whereby, for example, Wishram and Tzutujil are classified as ergative on the strength of their verb morphology alone, when both languages are exclusively head-

marking and therefore have neutral alignment in their (uninflected) pronouns and nouns. Typing the language by the most semantic of the patterns

seems consistent with standard practice, whereby Batsbi or Ket is called Stative-active because the verb inflection is stative-active, while the nominal and pronominal inflection are ergative or accusative (for Batsbi see Ho-

lisky 1987; for Ket, Comrie 1982). Typing a language by the nominal rather than pronominal pattern is also consistent with standard practice, whereby Dyirbal is called ergative because of its nominal inflection (the pronominal inflection is accusative, the verb uninflected and therefore neutral; see Dixon 1972). With few unclear cases (marked with “?” in appendix 2) and no exceptions, application of these criteria yielded a dominant alignment type for each language which is consistent with the way the language’s alignment is usually typed in the literature.’ There are four languages in the sample with two-to-one splits involving two instances of accusative alignment and one nonaccusative:

Language Pronoun Noun Verb Dominant

Wemba Wemba - Acc Erg Acc Acc

SahaptinAcc Acc Acc ErgSt-Act Erg Choctaw Acc St-Act Tonkawa Acc Acc St-Act St-Act Though the accusative is the majority alignment for all, I classify the last three by their verbal alignments, as seems consistent with current practice. When the two nominal parts of speech are both accusative and the verb nonaccusative, the language is typed by the verbal morphology.

For Eastern Pomo, discussed above, stative-active is the dominant

Favored and Disfavored Grammatical Patterns 93

alignment though it is not found on any part of speech. The language is classified as stative-active because the intransitive verbs take different subject cases. There is a different alignment on each part of speech, and by the

rule given above for ranking the alignments in the event of even splits stative-active outranks ergative, accusative, and neutral. Hua, otherwise similar to Eastern Pomo, has ergative alignment in both nouns and pro-

nouns, so its dominant alignment is ergative. | The frequencies of dominant alignment types were shown in table 13. The few splits without a clear dominant type are not included in this count. Section 2.3.1 and table 13 yielded the following hierarchy for frequency of patterns (““>>>”’ indicates a major break in the ranking): accusative > neutral >>> ergative > stative-active >>> hierarchical > three-way

and the present section shows the identical hierarchy for dominant align-

ment (the neutral alignment is excluded from dominant types by definition): accuSative >>> ergative > stative-active >>> hierarchical > three-way

Both for dominant types and for individual parts of speech, the accusative pattern is much preferred relative to either ergative or stative-active. The areal distribution, presented in §6.1, shows a significant worldwide preference for accusative alignment, but no identifiable worldwide preference for either of the two major nonaccusative alignments as second most common.

2.4 Word Order The frequencies of the various word orders and their areal distribution are shown in table 15. This tabulation shows only languages with a single clear basic order or a split between two adjacent orders. Not included are languages for which the order could not be ascertained, languages described as having no basic order, and the one language in my sample with the order SVO/VS. The order counted is that reported by the grammar, whether as basic (underlying, etc.) or dominant (preferred, neutral, etc.). There is a trend in favor of verb-final order (8 of 12 areas), although the trend is not statistically significant by the test of Dryer 1989a since there are two areas each with verb-medial and verb-initial order. If only the six continent-sized areas are considered, five of them favor verb-final and only one (Australia) verb-medial. No continent favors verb-initial order, and of the two subcontinents that do, one (Oceania) does so with slim margins and a dispropor-

94 Chapter Two tionate contribution of the Austronesian stock. The areal distribution of word order is discussed again in chapter 6. There are some discrepancies between my word-order classifications and those of other sources. They are listed in appendix 3. Suppose we take from the most recent monographic source (Tomlin 1986) all classifications differing from mine and substitute them for my entries. The result is only a slight exaggeration of the trends in my overall sample (one fewer verbTable 15. Areal distribution of word order (entries are numbers of languages)

Area V... WV.. we Split Free n

Africa | 7 9 2 0 19

Old World

Ancient East 0l 40332000105 Europe &Near Caucasus

Northern Asia 00 40 95 20 0l 10 11 S & SE Asia Total 2 15 31 6 1 55 New Guinea0080 514002215 16 Australia

Pacific

Oceania 29 1201l]4036 5 Total 7 2 New World : W North America E North America10020118 30 2028 8

Mesoamerica 8 South America 52 0 3 62 0l 00 il

Total 17 5 27 4 2 55 Entire sample 21 29 78 11 5 146 Ethiopia & Kenya 030 I5 I0056 Caucasus 0 1 North Asia Coast 00 70160120107 Northern Australia California l 1 45 4 1 2. 38 10 Total l 9 20 (14%) (20%) (53%) (8%) (3%)

Residual zones

Europe I 3 1 1 0 6 Central Australia 0 1 4 0 0 Interior North America l 1 3 0 0 5 5

Spread zones

Ancient Near* East Oceania 2 *l 01015 00055

Mesoamerica * 5 03 201 34 08 Total 9 6 16 Note: Both clear and probable word orders are counted. The majority type in each area is boldface. n = number of languages in the area for which word order was described. * Also shown above as an entire area.

Favored and Disfavored Grammatical Patterns 95

initial language, seven more SVO, and 10 more SOV). For table 15 this procedure yields four changes, one of them important: in Australia, SOV becomes most frequent (exceeding SVO by only one: 6 SVO, 7 SOV), in South and Southeast Asia SVO and SOV are tied, in Oceania SVO is most frequent (two languages switched from verb-initial to SVO order come from Oceania), and in Mesoamerica SVO is more frequent than verb-initial

(3 to 2). The Australia shift makes SOV the unanimous choice of all six continents and thus the clear universally favored word order. However, if my classification is correct even for only one of the two Australian languages shifted from SVO to SOV (Dyingili, Gunwinggu), then SVO remains

in the majority (7 SVO, 6 SOV); and if both of the languages eventually prove to have no basic word order, there is a tie (5 SVO, 5 SOV). (My word-order entry for Gunwinggu is based on the descriptive observations, though not on the argument, of Carroll 1976:58, 83, 86.)

2.5 Conclusions: Frequencies and Distribution of Structural Features Head marking and dependent marking are about equally frequent overall, though there are areal asymmetries, and neither is clearly the marked or unmarked member of a head-dependent opposition. Languages show a tendency to use either head or dependent marking consistently, though mixtures and splits of various types also occur. Marking types have different preferences for parts of speech and constituent types: pronouns favor head marking, clauses favor head marking, NP’s favor dependent marking; cross-linguistically, head marking in NP’s implies head marking in the clause. The polar head-marking type is more frequent than the polar dependent-marking type; both structurally and geographically, head marking has a more compact distribution than dependent marking. Complexity has a normal distribution with extreme values disfavored. Alignment is unevenly distributed over parts of speech: accusative is most common everywhere, ergative favored by nouns, stative-active and hierarchical found only on verbs. Generalizations in the recent literature about ergative-accusative splits were upheld here: ergative nouns and accusative verbs, accusative pronouns and ergative nouns, and accusative pronouns and ergative verbs, all occur and their opposites are either unattested or extremely rare. Frequencies of dominant alignments are comparable to those of the alignment patterns on individual parts of speech. Accusative is again most common, with ergative and stative-active less frequent but still well represented. As for word order, verb-final order is the most frequent overall and favored in most areas, though not all.

96 Chapter Two If frequency indicates unmarkedness, then moderate complexity, accusative alignment, and verb-final order can be regarded as the crosslinguistically unmarked values for their type features. No comparable simple claim about markedness can be made for head/dependent marking. These same conclusions about markedness will be supported in interactions between features, described in the next chapter.

Correlations between Types

3.0 Method of Counting The previous chapter described the frequencies among types and drew conclusions about favored and disfavored types. This chapter looks at correla-

tions between type features and draws conclusions about which features favor which other features. It tests such hypotheses as the claim of Klimov 1977 that the stative-active type is associated with SOV word order, or the claim of Nichols 1986 that head marking favors verb-initial word order while dependent marking favors verb-final order. In some instances, correlations give evidence of the marked and unmarked status of particular features. Several of the correlations discussed below can best be demonstrated by grouping languages into broad type categories. It frequently proves useful to have three-way breakdowns for all four type features, and these threeway groupings will be referred to as GROSS TYPES. The three-way breakdowns to be used are as follows. (1) For head and dependent marking: HEAD/DEPENDENT TYPE (abbre-

viation, H/D type), determined by grouping proportions so as to define three types: head-marking, double/split marking, and dependent-marking languages. Recall that the proportion of marking points is computed as D/(D+H+F). Languages with a proportion of 0 belong to the polar headmarking type, those at 0.5 have an even split and are prototypical examples of double or split marking, and languages with a proportion of 1.0 belong to the polar dependent-marking type. Placement of the cutoff points between these three clear types is somewhat arbitrary. On the assumption that a language could safely be considered head-marking if its head-marking affixes outnumbered dependent-marking affixes two to one, and likewise for the dependent-marking type, I included the two-to-one splits (propor97

98 Chapter Three tions 0.33 and 0.67) with the polar types and drew the line there. With rounding to one decimal place, the types are as follows:

Gross H/D type Proportion Number of languages

Head-marking 0.0-—0.3 61

Double/split-marking 0.4—0.6 52

Dependent-marking 0.7-1.0 59

The decision about placement of cutoff points is arbitrary but not trivial, as there are frequency peaks right at 0.33 and 0.67 (see §2.1.2), and these

fall into the head-marking and dependent-marking (rather than double/ split-marking) types respectively when rounded to one decimal place. Wherever possible, I have tested correlations not only on the arbitrary three-way breakdown but also on other breakdowns, most often on a twoway breakdown into proportions higher than 0.5 vs. lower than 0.5 (men-

tioning separately or else excluding the few languages with 0.5). If a correlation with, say, the head-marking type holds for both proportions 0.0—0.3 and < 0.5, it is evidently nonartifactual. (2) For complexity: a rough distinction of LOW, MODERATE, and HIGH COMPLEXITY. The distributional curve shown in §2.2 contains complexity

values ranging from | to 15, and the breakdown is based on the curve.

Raw Gross

complexity complexity Number of languages

1 to5 low complexity 34

6 to 10 moderate complexity 96

Il to 15 high complexity 42

The mode of the distributional curve, 24 languages with the relatively low complexity index of 6, will be looked at separately when appropriate. (3) For alignment, the DOMINANT ALIGNMENT TYPE as defined in §2.3 is

used. When a three-way breakdown is needed, the three most common dominant alignments—accusative, ergative, and stative-active—are used. Their frequencies were shown in table 13.

(4) For word order, the same types used in §2.4: verb-initial, verbmedial, and verb-final. The frequencies were shown in table 15.

3.1 Head/Dependent Marking and Complexity The overall distribution of complexity was shown in §2.2: the distribution is roughly normal, with the extremes of low complexity (more or less iso-

Correlations between Types 99 lating type) and high complexity not particularly common and the theoretical maximum complexity never met. In principle, any given complexity level can be achieved by many combinations of H, D, and F points: a complexity level of 6 can represent 6 H points, or 6 D points, or 3 + 3, etc. In practice, however, not all possible combinations occur, and certain complexity levels are associated with certain head/dependent types. Table 16 shows the number of languages in each head/dependent type falling into the three complexity levels, followed by the same information for a twoway breakdown of head/dependent ratios.

On either breakdown there is a highly significant correlation: head marking favors low complexity and dependent marking favors high complexity. Languages of low complexity show a strong preference to place what little morphology they do have on heads: 21 of these languages are in the head-marking part of the range, and only ten in the dependent-marking part. The same asymmetry holds within just the New World, where (with various lumpings) it ranges from significant to highly significant. Thus we have a significant universal correlation.’ A language with high complexity cannot be exclusively of the head-marking or exclusively of the dependentmarking type, since the maximum D total or H total is 9 while high complexity begins at 11 and therefore requires some double marking. It does

not, however, logically require a dependent-marking bias; therefore the bias is evidence of structural interaction. Likewise, low complexity does : not logically entail head-marking morphology; this bias too must be evidence of structural interaction.’ Since both biases are statistically significant within the whole sample as well as just the New World, both of them must be universals. All three head/dependent types exhibit nearly identical (though not exactly overlapping) ranges of complexity: 11 or 12 points (head marking, Table 16. Complexity and head/dependent type Complexity levels

Low Moderate High Total

Head marking 61 Double, split 6182142251 52

Head/dependent type

Dependent marking 10 33 16 59 Total 34 96 42 172 p < 0.001

= 0.5 3 5 4 12 Total 34 96 42 172 p < 0.001

Head/dependent proportion

< 0.5 (chiefly heads) 21 50 4 75

> 0.5 (chiefly dependents) 10 41 34 85

100 Chapter Three complexity levels 2—12; double and split, 4-15; dependent, 2-13). Languages with polar head marking range from complexity levels 1 to 8, and those with polar dependent marking from 2 to 9. The areal distribution is shown in table 17 (omitting languages where the proportion is exactly 0.5, since most areas have none). Nine areas confirm the correlation of dependent marking with higher complexity; there is one counterexample, and it is weak (the margin is small, and one of the two head/dependent ranges is represented by only one language). Four of five residual zones confirm the trend; the fifth is noncommittal. The correlation is therefore significant by the method of Dryer 1989a, which further confirms its status as a language universal.

3.2 Head/Dependent Marking and Alignment The frequencies of the dominant alignment types exhibited by the various head/dependent types are shown in table 18. The accusative alignment has almost the same distribution as the total of all three alignment types; in other words, its distribution is not affected by head/dependent marking and Table 17. Areal breakdown: Complexity and head/dependent type (entries are the mean complexity for the head/dependent proportion category) Dependent marking associated with

Area < 0.5 > 0.5 higher complexity?

Africa 5.4 8.8 Yes

Old World

Ancient East 11.0 13.0 Yes Yes NorthernNear Eurasia 6.5 10.3

S & SE Asia 8 7.1 No* New Guinea 6.2 8.2 Yes Yes Australia 6.7 10.6 Oceania 6.3 9.0 Yes

Pacific

North America5.1 6.513 9.5Yes Yes* Mesoamerica South America 7.2 7.7 Yes

New World

Residual zones

Ethiopia & Kenya — 11.0 n.a.* Caucasus 8 10.3 Yes North Asia Coast 6.7 3.5 11.8 9.6 Yes Northern Australia Yes California 6.6 9.1 Yes

Tally for basic areas: Yes = 8; No = 0; not usable (*) = 2 (one Yes, one No) *n = 1 for the entry without decimal places

Correlations between Types 101 Table 18. Alignment and head/dependent type (number of languages with each dominant alignment type for each head/dependent type; clear cases only)

Neutral 1 0 6 7 Accusative 27 33 33 93 Ergative 4 8 16 28 Dominant alignment Head Double Dependent Total

Stative-active 14 4 3 21 Hierarchical 4 1 0 5

Three-way 0 l 0 ] Total 50 47 58 155 3 major types only 45 45 52 142 p < 0.001 for accusative, ergative, and stative-active only.

we can conclude that it is equally compatible with all head/dependent types. The ergative alignment favors dependent-marking morphology: of the 28 ergative languages in the sample, 16 are dependent-marking and only four are strongly head-marking (Abkhaz, Wishram, and Tzutujil, all with 0.0 proportions; Yimas with 0.25). The ergative type is well installed and stable in these languages, however: the first three (Abkhaz, Wishram, Tzutujil) belong to well-described families (Northwest Caucasian, Chinookan, Mayan) that are consistently ergative. The stative-active and hierarchical types strongly prefer head-marking morphology, consistent with the fact that the verb is the favored part of speech for showing stative-active marking. It is of course possible for a dependent-marking language to have stative-active dominant alignment. The dependent-marking stative-active languages in my sample, plus one (Batsbi; see Holisky 1987) not in my sample, are listed below, with their head/dependent ratios, alignment of noun and verb, and whether the struc-

terms of Dixon 1979. | tural semantics of the opposition is of the split-S or fluid-S type in the

Language Proportion Noun Verb Semantics

Georgian 0.67 Erg AccFluid Split Batsbi 0.82 Erg StAct Eastern Pomo 1.00 Erg Neut Fluid

Tonkawa 0.67 Acc StAct Fluid

The fluid-S type is rare overall among stative-active languages (Merlan 1985), and these examples show that the fluid-S type has a strong affinity for case-marking languages. Head-marking stative-active languages are split-S with only one exception: Acehnese uses head marking to implement

102 Chapter Three a fluid-S type (Durie 1985: 186ff.). We can conclude that the unmarked kind of stative-active language is head-marking and split-S. The correlation of head/dependent marking and alignment emerges more clearly if we plot the head-marking points in the clause against the alignment of the verb, as shown in table 19. The high frequency of neutral alignment in languages with no head marking in the clause is to be expected by definition: a language having no clause head marking has no marking on the verb, and no marking is neutral alignment. What requires comment is the non-neutral examples with zero clause head-marking. These include two languages that use detached marking, which I somewhat

arbitrarily counted as marking of alignment on the verb. These two languages are Haida (stative-active) and Luisefio (accusative). Otherwise, once again the distribution of the accusative alignment is much like that of the total, and the stative-active and hierarchical alignments are concentrated in the head-marking end of the scale (higher numbers of H points in S). The ergative alignment is fairly evenly distributed throughout the scale except that it does not occur in languages with zero head marking in the clause (since ergativity cannot be marked on the verb if the verb has no marking).

It is apparently possible to combine any of the three major alignment types with any head/dependent type, though there are preferred and dispreferred combinations and there are gaps (which I interpret as accidental) in the distribution of the low-frequency types. The accusative alignment is equally compatible with all types, as is consistent with its generally preferred and unmarked status. The less frequent types have interesting asymmetries and limitations. The ergative alignment favors dependent marking. This is consistent with the fact that ergative, of all alignment types, is prone to be marked on the noun (see §2.3.1), and this in turn may have to do with the fact that ergative alignment grammaticalizes nominal semantic Table 19. Clause head marking and alignment of verbal morphology (number of languages showing each verb alignment, for each value of H in the clause; clear cases only) H points in S

Neutral 20 I 21 Ergative 6 4 5 15

Alignment of verb 0 l 2 3 4 5 6 Total

Accusative 3 l 38 7 27 ] l 78 Stative-active I 4 2 13 2 22

Hierarchical 4 l 5 Three-way l l Total 24 48 9 49 ] 10 142

Correlations between Types 103 roles. Stative-active and hierarchical alignments prefer head marking, and this is consistent with what they grammaticalize: the stative-active type

grammaticalizes lexical categories of verbs, and the hierarchical type grammaticalizes relative ranking (for referential properties: animacy, person, etc.) rather than absolute functional status of clause arguments. The dependent-marked stative-active type is generally fluid-S, which is to say that it codes nominal semantic roles and not verb categorization. In general, then, alignments that favor marking on nominals (ergative; fluid-S Stative-active) are associated with grammaticalization of nominal semantic functions; those that favor marking on verbs are associated with the gram-

maticalization of verbal semantics and/or the semantics of the whole clause. We thus have a functional explanation, albeit a rather abstract one. But on a more general level, the distributional constraints on alignment types suggest that there is some kind of consistency between the morphological form of coding (head-marked or dependent-marked) and the semantics coded: fluid categories and NP relational semantics favor dependent marking, while split categories and verbal notions favor head marking. If the function of the part of speech bearing the marking influences the semantics coded, it is also true that the form of the coding, specifically its location, restricts its possible semantics. The correlation of stative-active type with head marking and ergative with dependent marking is difficult to demonstrate areally, partly because nonaccusative alignments are not common enough to form clear patterns in

any but the largest areas and partly because ergative and stative-active alignments are in roughly complementary distribution across the areas. Table 20 shows that wherever the ergative alignment is at all frequent it is associated with dependent marking, and wherever the stative-active alignment is frequent it is associated with head marking. Even when neither is frequent, as in the smaller areas, there is still conformity in that in most cases the few stative-active entries are no more dependent-marking, and often more nearly head-marking, than the few ergative entries. The only counterexample is the Caucasus. The correlation emerges as significant by Dryer’s test (reliably so if only the six continent-sized areas are considered; less reliably, but numerically more strongly, if all areas are counted). As mentioned in §2.0.4, stative-active languages can be described as having an ergative or accusative base, depending on whether the objectinflecting (“‘stative’’) or subject-inflecting (“‘active’’) set of intransitives is the open set. A base alignment can also be determined by considering the nominal and pronominal inflection, and sometimes also the inflection of transitive verbs. Information on closed and open classes of intransitives is

not always available, but where available it indicates that most stative-

104 Chapter Three Table 20. Alignment and head/dependent type Ergative more nearly dependent-marking, and/or stative/active more nearly head-

Area D 2 H marking? Old World

St. l St. l 1

Ancient Near East Erg. l 1 Yes Northern Eurasia Erg. 2 1 1 Yes

St. l

S & SE Asia Erg. 3 Yes Pacific

New GuineaSt. Erg. 3 2 l no evidence

St. ] St. l North America Erg. l 2 l Yes St. l 11 Mesoamerica Erg. l no evidence St. 1 South America Erg. l Yes St. 1 l Old World Erg. 6 2 1 Yes Australia Erg. 6 2 Yes

Oceania Erg. l l no evidence

New World

Totals

St.10l 24 21Yes Pacific Erg.

St. 2

New World 3 2 Yes St.Erg. l 11 13

Caucasus Erg. 1 1 No St. l North Asia Coast Erg. l no evidence

Residual zones

St. ] St. l 1 St.

Northern Australia Erg. l 1 Yes

California Erg. no evidence Note: nonaccusative alignments only. Entries show the number of languages with each pattern. D = dependent marking, 2 = double/split, H = head marking. Africa and the Ethiopia-Kenya residual zone are not included because they have no languages with nonaccusative alignment.

Correlations between Types 105 active languages have an accusative base. Inflectional paradigms yield the same conclusion: ergative base alignment is rare outside of the Old World (where it is found in Georgian and Elamite). Languages with hierarchical dominant alignment have an accusative or neutral base without exception.

3.3. Head/Dependent Marking and Word Order The frequencies of word-order types among head/dependent types are shown in table 21.* Statistically significant patterns emerge when we use a two-way breakdown of head/dependent types and leave out the languages with unknown or no basic word order; the significance levels shown in table 21 were determined in this way. Verb-initial order and unknown order or lack of any basic order pattern together, favoring head marking. Verbmedial and verb-final order pattern together, favoring dependent marking. The main contributors to significance are the entries for verb-initial order, which are higher than expected for head-marking languages and lower than expected for dependent-marking languages. In addition, table 22 shows that the same correlations are borderline significant within the New World alone. The combination of significance in the entire sample and borderline significance in just the New World indicates that these correlations are independent of geography and represent universal tendencies of the world’s languages. Table 21. Word order and head/dependent type

TT Unknown, V... .V.. ...V none Split Total Word order

Head marking 22 20 64 Double, split 811127 20 10 4l 51

H/D type

Dependent 10 11 35 6174 6 59 Total 21marking 29 77 236

p < 0.025

< 1043 27 11 23 74 85 79 > 0.5 0.5 15 6 18

H/D proportion

Total 21 28 70 34 11 164

p < 0.005

Note: ‘Unknown, none” includes languages for which no basic or dominant word order was given in grammars and none could easily be inferred from text examples, as well as languages explicitly described as having free word order or no basic order. Chi-square tests are based on the first three orders only.

106 Chapter Three Table 22. Word order and head/dependent type: New World only (The second breakdown is one of several two-by-two lumpings, all of which reached borderline significance.) Word order

V... V.. wo Total

Head marking 27 Double, split11 5 32 13 6 13

H/D type

Dependent17 marking 78 Total 5 26] 048

p < 0.50

< 0.5 13 17 30 = 0.5 4 14 18 Total 17 31 48

p ~ 0.10

H/D proportion

V... Other Total

Table 23. Word order and amount of head-marking morphology on the verb Word order

H points rn Unknown, on verb V... W.. wv none Split Total

02] 8]i 82 15 4 1 29 0 0 0 3 7 31 6 3 55 6 3180711 43 7] 9l 19 60

5 0 0 0 2 0 2 6 2 2 5 1 0 10 Total 20 29 76 34 11 170

When word order is plotted not against overall head/dependent type but against the number of H points in the clause, the same tendency emerges. The figures are shown in table 23. Verb-initial order and unknown or no basic order are rare in languages with zero H points in the clause, while verb-medial and verb-final orders are frequent in this type. In addition, verb-final order is frequent with all amounts of H marking. (Table 23 can most easily be scanned by looking only at the even-numbered H point en-

tries; as discussed in §2.1.2, even-numbered H values in the clause are much more frequent than odd-numbered ones.) Verb-initial order is the most compactly distributed, with peaks only at H=2 and H=4. Verbmedial and verb-final order have three peaks, at H=0, H=2, and H=4, favoring the least head-marking part of the range. The correlation of verb-initial order with head marking also stands in the New World and receives area-by-area support. Various lumpings of cat-

Correlations between Types 107 egories that produced 2 x 2 matrices yielded borderline significance on a chi-square test at about 0.10 for the New World (the best was a correlation between verb-final vs. other word order and head/dependent proportions of less than 0.5 vs. 0.5 or more, with p < 0.10). The areal frequencies are shown in table 24. Two kinds of pattern are visible in the areal survey. The first is areas where all or most languages are verb-final, regardless of head/ dependent type (Near East, New Guinea, less clearly North America; reTable 24. Word order and head/dependent type: Areal frequencies

Area H/D type V... Vz. WV

Africa < 0.5 0 3 2 > ] 4 7 Near East

N. Eurasia < 0.5 0 3 > 0.5 0 4 9 S & SE Asia < 0.5 040 50 > 0.5 0 Old World>total

0.5 Australia> 0.5 1 0 J Pacific total < 0.5 l 4 6 > 0.5 ] 4 10 North America < 0.537 ]1 12 > 0.5 6 Mesoamerica < 0.5 4 0 l > 0.5 ] 0 0 South America < 0.5 2]22 1 > 0.5 0 New World > total < 0.541323 14 0.5 8 Ethiopia & > Kenya < 0.5 0 050 0.5 0 0 Caucasus < 0.5 0 0 l > 0.5 0 l 2 N. Asia Coast < 0.5 00042 > 0.5 0 N. Australia < 0.50033 0] > 0.5 California < 0.501l04l > 0.5 Residual zones

> 0.5 0 5 16

Residual zones, total < 0.5 1 3 4

108 Chapter Three sidual zones Ethiopia and Kenya, Caucasus). The second is areas with two or three word-order types, and in all of these areas the dependent-marking

type has its peak frequency at verb-final order while the head-marking type peaks at either verb-initial or verb-medial order (Africa, northern Eurasia, South and Southeast Asia, Mesoamerica, South America, marginally Oceania; residual zone California). Northern Australia is unique with almost exclusively verb-medial order, regardless of head/dependent type. In nine of the ten basic areas (the exception is New Guinea), all five residual zones, and all three macroareas, the dependent-marking type has a greater portion of its instances at verb-final order than the head-marking type (New Guinea is tied: both types have 100% of their instances at verb-final order). In eight of ten basic areas the dependent-marking type peaks at verb-final order (the exceptions are Australia and Mesoamerica). Nine of ten areas meets Dryer’s criterion (1989a) for significance, and eight of ten is not significantly divergent. Thus a correlation between word order and head/dependent type is significant within the sample as a whole, significant area by

area, and borderline significant within the New World; it is therefore a universal.

These associations of word order with head/dependent marking have functional motivation. In a head-marked clause the verb carries the essential information about grammatical relations in the clause, so placing the

verb in initial position establishes the grammatical organization of the clause at the outset. In a dependent-marked clause, placing one or more arguments before the verb has the same effect, since in this kind of clause it is the case-marked nominals that carry most of the information. These correlations are significant, but they are not particularly reliable predictors of word order, since all three word orders are attested with all three head/dependent types. It should also be emphasized that the functional motivation

involved here is not one that speakers monitor and respond to clause by clause, but rather a fixed aspect of language structure. The functional con-

sideration of establishing clause relations at the outset has evidently worked to favor the grammaticalization of verb-initial word order in a num-

ber of head-marking languages, but I have seen no evidence that it ever determines speaker choice of word order in individual clauses in languages with free word order.

| It is no accident that unknown word order and lack of any basic wordorder pattern much like verb-initial word order. Both are associated with head marking, though for different reasons. The motivation for verb-initial order is functional, although grammaticalized, as just discussed. The motivation for absence of any clear basic order must be the grammatical status of arguments in head-marked clauses: in such languages, as argued in Boas

Correlations between Types 109

[1911] 1964, Jelinek 1984, Van Valin 1985, and elsewhere, in many respects independent noun and pronoun arguments have the status of appositions to the head-marking affixes, which in many respects behave like the clause arguments themselves and not like agreement markers. The location of appositional elements is, of course, quite likely to be free. Another possible motivation for both verb-initial order and lack of a clear basic order has to do with the fact that in a head-marked clause the basic grammatical information is all placed on a single word, the verb. In this clause type there is one single word which speakers and hearers can attend to in order to establish clause grammatical relations, whereas in a dependent-marked clause where each argument bears its own case there can be no single word which carries all the information. If one word carries

all the relevant information, the other words can be freely moved about with little impact on the hearer’s ability to establish the grammatical structure quickly. This explanation is supported by the fact that verb-initial order is just as common in languages of the double and split types as it is in

radically head-marking languages. In double and split types the verb is likely to carry as much information as in the head-marking type; the only difference is that the nouns also carry information. In general the findings of this section show that it is the presence of head marking (found in the head-marking and double/split-marking types) that favors verb-initial order, but the absence of dependent marking (and hence specifically the head-marking type) that favors lack of a basic word order. Thus it must be that verb-initial order is motivated by the functional consideration of establishing the clause relations at the outset, while lack of a basic word order is favored by appositional links between the verb and any overt independent arguments in the clause as well as by the possibility of putting all one’s grammatical information on one single word.

3.4 Complexity and Alignment The frequencies of the alignment types are plotted against complexity levels in table 25, and the complexity levels are lumped in table 26. The neutral alignment type, not surprisingly, is found only in languages with low com-

plexity. The accusative alignment is found throughout the complexity range, with a distribution similar to that of the total. The other alignments have more compact distributions, and the ergative is concentrated in the high complexity levels. These trends are clearest in the lumped version (table 26), for which they are significant. Most of the significance is contributed by the ergative alignment, specifically by its high frequency in languages of high complexity and absence in languages of low complexity.

05231362 2I]0735

110 Chapter Three

Table 25. Complexity and alignment (entries, except for mean complexity, are numbers of languages)

Alignment

Stative- __ Hierar-

Complexity Neutral Accusative Ergative Active chical 3-way Total

467 10 21111 2 15 8 2 | 21 2 ] 14 8 11 7 1 1 20 9 14 3 17 10 9 3 l 13

11 7 P) ] 1 14 12 4 5 4 Il 13 4 ] l 6

14 15 2l 2] 24

Total 7 93 28 21 m) ] 155 Mean complexity 2.3 8.0 10.4 7.9 7.6 12 8.0 Table 26. Complexity and alignment, lumped and for three major alignments only Alignment

Low 20 0 3 23 Moderate 55 14 11 80 High 18 14 7 39 Complexity Accusative Ergative Stative-Active Total

Total 93 28 21 142

p < 0.01

Table 27 shows the areal figures, and table 28 tallies the trends shown in those figures. Although there are some indeterminate results, two generalizations are almost without exception: ergative languages have higher complexity than accusative languages, and they have higher complexity than the average for their respective areas. There are no clear trends in the complexity of either accusative or stative-active types. Thus we find a consistent correlation between high complexity and ergative alignment. This association probably results from the correlation (shown in §3.2) of ergative with the dependent-marking type: as shown in $3.1, high-complexity languages have a distinct dependent-marking bias.

Correlations between Types 111 Table 27. Mean complexity of dominant alignment types, by area (“‘All” column includes alignment types not shown separately here—neutral, hierarchical, three-way.) Mean complexity of

Area Accusative Ergative Stative-Active All

Africa 9.0 — — 7.9 Ancient Near East 13.5 13.5 7* Northern Eurasia 8.7 11.2 12.512.2 9.6

Old World

S & SE Asia 8.3 10.3 8* 7.2 New Guinea 6.3 9.8 — 7.1 Australia Oceania 8.4 5.710.9 8.0 12* 11*10.1 7.1

Pacific

North America 7.7 9.7 6.8 7.4 Mesoamerica 4* 6.2 South America 7.0 9.0 6* 7* 8.5 7.2

New World

Residual zones

Ethiopia & Kenya 11.0 — — 11.0 Caucasus 8* 9.5 12* 9.7

N. Asia Coast 7.2 12* —10.5 7.9 N. Australia 8.8 12.5 12* California 8.4 — 6.0 7.9 *n = | Table 28. Complexity and alignment (trends in table 27)

Area Erg > Acc Erg > total Acc < total St-Act < Erg

Old World No 0Yes0233 i22

Neither 2 1 ] 1 Pacific Yes 3 3 3 0 No 0 0 0 2* Neither 0 0 0 0 New World Yes2* 1 13012 No 2* Neither 070 40 4 0 TotalNo Yes 6 2* 2* 6 ]5* Neither 2 ] 10 Residual zones Yes 3* 2 4 No 0 J2 20]14 Neither

Note: “Erg > Acc” means that average complexity level is greater for ergative than for accuSative. Entries are numbers of areas. “‘Neither” comprises ties and information gaps where one type is missing from an area. *n = 1 for one instance or one alignment type.

112 Chapter Three The high frequency of the stative-active alignment in languages of moderate complexity is due to the six stative-active languages of radically headmarking type and complexity level 6 in North America, and is hence best viewed as a local or areal preference. Thus, although there are discernable correlations between complexity and alignment, they all appear to be due to other factors; there is evidently no direct interaction between complexity and alignment.

3.5 Complexity and Word Order There are no valid correlations. The basic frequencies are as shown in table 29; they are not remotely significant.

3.6 Alignment and Word Order There are no clear trends involving alignment and word order. The basic figures are shown in table 30. Of the various recombinations and groupings of categories, only one approached significance within the entire sample: a correlation of nonaccusative alignment and verb-initial word order, shown in tables 31 and 32. However, this correlation is not remotely significant within the New World, and verb-initial order is not frequent enough outside the New World to make an area-by-area survey possible. Thus the putative Table 29. Complexity and word order (clear and probable cases) Word order

Complexity V... .WV.. iV Total

Low 3 12 7 15 154225 Moderate 69 High 6 7 20 33 Total 21 29 77 127 not significant (p > 0.90) Table 30. Alignment and word order

OO Unknown, Alignment V... .V.. ...V free Split Total Word order

Neutral 0 5 2 0 0 7 Accusative 10 16 48 9 4 87 Ergative 6 2 14 5 I 28

Stative-active 3 l 9 4 4 21 Hierarchical 00 |00] 03 0] 5l Three-way Total 19 25 74 21 10 149

Correlations between Types 113 Table 31. Dominant alignment and word order: Two-way breakdown Word order

Alignment V... .V.., oe W Total

Accusative 10 64 74 Ergative + stative-active 9 26 35

Total 19 90 109 p ~ 0.10 Table 32. Alignment of verbal morphology and word order: Two-way breakdown Word order

Alignment of verb V... Other Total

Accusative + neutral 12 78 90

Ergative + stative-active 8 18 26 Total 20 96 116 p < 0.05 correlation cannot be distinguished from an accident of geography whereby verb-initial order and nonaccusative alignments happen to be relatively frequent in the New World.

3.7 Summary of Correlations This chapter has presented the following correlations. ($3.1) Head marking is associated with low complexity, dependent marking with high complex-

ity; this is a language universal. ($3.2) Ergative alignment is associated with dependent marking, stative-active and hierarchical with head marking. A universal. ($3.3) Verb-initial order and lack of any determinate or stated order favor head marking; verb-medial and verb-final order favor dependent marking. A universal. ($3.4) Ergative alignment is associated with high complexity. This correlation is not a direct one, but a consequence of

those between ergative and dependent marking, and dependent marking and high complexity. Still, it is a possible universal. (83.6) Nonaccusative alignment may be associated with verb-initial order; this is only a hypothesis, and rests on a correlation that may be accidental. The four type features interact with each other to greater and lesser degrees. Their interactions are shown in table 33, and the number of interactions for each type feature can be summed to yield an index of propensity

to enter into correlations with other features. Recall that a correlation is regarded as tested and significant if it reaches conventional significance in a chi-square test of the whole sample and at least borderline significance in one or both of Dryer’s areal test and a chi-square test of just the New World languages.

114 Chapter Three Table 33. Summary of correlations for type features

Feature H/D marking Alignment Complexity | Word order

Alignment yes

Total 6 5 4 3 Complexity Word orderyes yesyes maybe no

Legend: Entry Meaning Counted as yes tested significant correlation 2

no no correlation 0 maybe hypothesis-generating correlation I

Note: Totals are combined row and column totals. (E.g., the total for Complexity combines the one entry under H/D marking, the one under Alignment, and the one under Complexity. )

Head/dependent marking shows the clearest propensity to enter into correlations. All of its correlations are strong or significant, and the correlations with word order and alignment have evident functional motivation. For the correlations that have motivation, it is not easy to say which factor drives which. For instance, does verb-initial word order favor head marking or does head marking favor verb-initial word order? If this were a case of on-line speaker-monitored functional motivation, we would assume that head marking determined word order, since in principle a speaker can manipulate word order while the morphology of agreement and government are given by the grammar. However, there is no evidence that verb-initial order is ever chosen by speakers in response to morphological structure,

and I argued above that all such correlations are the synchronic result of diachronic grammaticalization by selection. On this view, it is impossible to say which motivated which without doing comparative-historical study. Some of the correlations are interdependent: for instance, the headmarking type is correlated with lower complexity, stative-active alignment, and verb-initial word order, and these three are also correlated with one another; the ergative alignment is associated with dependent marking and greater complexity, and these two are also correlated with one another. Of the four type features and three gross types each surveyed here, only one feature value lacks any positive correlations of its own: SVO order, which can be said only to disfavor the non-accusative alignments and to fail to contribute significance to any test. For word order, alignment, and complexity it is possible to pinpoint one unmarked type which has high frequency, a robust roughly normal dis-

tribution worldwide and in most or all continent-sized areas, and few or no restrictions by the other features: SOV word order, the accusative alignment, and moderate complexity. For head and dependent marking there is no obvious unmarked type. The association of head marking with

Correlations between Types 115

lesser complexity might be taken to indicate markedness (in that head marking is limited to association with what must be the simplest situation, low complexity), while the association of head marking with the (marked) Stative-active type and the (marked) verb-initial word order suggest unmarkedness, in that a context which favors the appearance of these two marked properties must be unmarked itself. The correlation chain of head marking, lower complexity, stative-active

alignment, and verb-initial order is the most extensive of any, and may define a preferred type or prototype of sorts. This is supported by the frequency of languages of the polar head-marking type, not particularly complex (and indeed sometimes described in grammars as being extremely regular, simple, etc.), often stative-active or hierarchical, and verb-initial. On the other hand, in its pure form this putative prototype is limited to the New World. Combining the observations made here about interaction and markedness, it is possible to say that head/dependent marking has simultaneously the greatest autonomy and the greatest influence on the rest of the grammar, hence the greatest grammatical stability of any feature surveyed here. The next chapter shows that head/dependent marking predicts more grammatical categories than any other structural principle.

Correlations of Structural Types with Grammatical Categories

The six morphological features to be surveyed in this chapter were chosen

because correlations with overall structural type have been claimed for them in the literature. Klimov 1977, 1983a has found the stative-active type to be associated with inalienable possession, inclusive/exclusive pronouns, number, nonfinite verbs, and lack of case inflection in nouns. Nichols 1986 suggests a correlation between head/dependent marking and gender. Koptjevskaja-Tamm 1988 demonstrates a correlation between non-

finite verbs and head/dependent marking. Jacobsen 1985, Dixon 1979, and other contributions discuss the extent to which voice can be associated with alignment (specifically, antipassive with ergative). All six features have interesting geographical distributions, some of which are shown in

maps 9-12.

4.1 Alienable and Inalienable Possession Klimov 1977 finds that an opposition of alienable/inalienable possession 1s associated with the stative-active type. Nichols 1988, a survey limited to North America and Northern Eurasia, argues that the association is rather

with head/dependent marking: inalienable possession almost always involves head marking, and head marking in NP’s almost always entails an alienable/inalienable opposition. Chappell and McGregor 1989 give a more comprehensive structural analysis along comparable lines, placing alienable and inalienable possession in a hierarchy which continues on to lexical compounds and classificatory nouns. (Welmers 1971: 131ff. finds

evidence for a further connection—in this case historical rather than 116

Correlations of Structural Types with Grammatical Categories 117

typological—of bound vs. free possession with nominal classes.) The present survey has supported most of the findings of Nichols 1988 and Chappell and McGregor 1989. Only possessive constructions taking the form of NP’s are surveyed here. In the literature, the opposition of inalienable to alienable possession is generally presented as a semantic one, but Chappell and McGregor 1989 and Nichols 1988 show that it is best approached as a structural opposition rather than a semantic one. Languages with an opposition of inalienable to alienable possession have split systems of possession marking, and alienable and inalienable are not cross-linguistic semantic constants but simply the extremes of the nominal hierarchy defined by the splits. The term inalienable, then, refers not to a semantic constant having to do with the nature of possession, but to whatever set of nouns happens to take inalienable possession marking in a given language. In terms of its grammatical form, inalienable possession always involves a tighter structural bond or closer connection between possessed and possessor, and the tightness of the bond can be described in terms of head and dependent marking. One of the most common patterns is that where possession is head-marked and there is no formal difference between alienable and inalienable possession, other than

that there is an inalienable set of nouns that cannot occur without possessive affixation while alienables can be used alone. In some languages there is a formal difference between alienable and inalienable possessive affixes: both are head-marking, and those for inalienables are shorter, simpler, or more archaic than those for alienables. For instance, in Dieguefio the possessive prefixes for alienable possession are composed of the inalienable prefixes plus an element -n’- (Langdon 1970: 143ff.): ?-otal’

Isg mother ‘my mother’ (inalienable) 2-on” -owa:

Isg house

‘my house’ (alienable) There are several recurrent types of splits in the marking of possession,

and all of them lend themselves to a single generalization: the inalienables take marking which is more nearly head-marking or less dependentmarking than the marking of alienables. Commonly, inalienable possession is head-marked while alienable possession is dependent-marked. For ex-

ample, Burushaski (Klimov and Edel’man 1970:42—43, 41: see also Lorimer 1935: 135—37):

118 Chapter Four

1-rin mu-rin

3sgm hand 3sgF hand ‘his hand’ ‘her hand’ (inalienable)

Habas-e padsa Abyssinia-GEN king

‘the king of Abyssinia’ (alienable) and Eastern Pomo (McLendon 1975:92, 108): wi -bayle Isg husband

‘my husband’ (inalienable) wax Sari my.GEN basket

‘my basket’ (alienable) In some languages, inalienable possession is head-marked while alienable possession has no marking. For example, in Kiowa (Watkins 1984: 101) inalienables take possessive prefixes while alienables are simply juxtaposed to the possessive pronoun in a type of compound (“+”’ is the compound juncture):

2sg husband , 4-k’{:

‘your husband’

am + cé

2sg horse ‘your horse’

In some languages, inalienable possession involves no marking while alienables are dependent-marked. This kind of construction is common in the languages of Australia, e.g., Dyirbal (Dixon 1972: 106): balan dugumbil mambu ART woman _ back

‘the woman’s back’ (inalienable)

naygu bulgunu bala gadin Isg-GEN wife-GEN ART yamstick

‘my wife’s yamstick’ (alienable) Most languages with head-marked possession have inalienable possession, and no language in my sample with exclusively dependent-marked possession has inalienable possession. No language in my sample distin-

Correlations of Structural Types with Grammatical Categories 119

guishes alienable and inalienable possession with two distinct genitive endings, for instance. The frequencies of inalienable possession with various combinations of marking in the NP are shown in table 34. This table shows the salient and overt marking types only. Splits with zero, or minor patterns applying to a few lexical items, are not shown. All of the “‘yes”’ entries for dependent-marking NP use just such splits, invisible in the table, to implement their inalienable possession opposition: inalienables are zero-marked

while alienables are dependent-marked, or else inalienables are a small, enumerable class with head marking while alienables are dependentmarked. Despite such noise, a correlation of head marking with alienable/ inalienable oppositions and dependent marking with lack of alienability oppositions barely reaches significance in the New World. Since the noise is mostly found outside of the New World, where dependent-marked NP’s are common, the correlation may be regarded as a probable universal. In my sample there is only one reversal of the principle that when there is an alienable/inalienable opposition it is always the inalienables that are head-marked or less dependent-marked: in Dizi (Allan 1976: 382), alienable possession is signaled by juxtaposition plus tone sandhi, while inalienable possession is marked by affixation on the possessor: dada-kn _geli

boy Poss head ‘the boy’s head’ (inalienable) dada ‘boy’ + kiant ‘dog’ — dada kianu ‘the boy’s dog’ (alienable) Thus we find that inalienable possession is simply a classification of nouns into two sets, one of which—the inalienables—is always a closed Table 34. Inalienable possession and marking of the NP Inalienable possession

NP marking Yes No Total % Yes

Head 35 29 64 55 Double, split31 1148 13 79 24 39 46 Dependent Total 77 90 167 p < 0.25 Head 28split 17l 45 62 Double, 7 8 13 Dependent 7 5 12 58 Total 36 29 65 p < 0.05

New World languages only

120 Chapter Four set and often small. Inalienables typically include kin terms or body parts or both; part-whole relations may also be included, as may a few culturally ~ basic objects (e.g., clothing, “‘house”’) and words like ‘“‘name’’. The exact membership varies from language to language but the guiding principle is the same. There is an implicational hierarchy headed jointly by kin terms and body parts in inclusive disjunction: a language with inalienable possession will necessarily place either kin terms or body parts, or both, in the inalienable category. The same hierarchy surfaces in several other areas of grammar (see §4.9), which provides further evidence that it is not the semantics of ownership or any other aspect of possession that is at issue here. Rather, there is simply a universal (if sometimes latent) covert classification of nominals. The generalizations to be made about inalienable possession thus resemble, in the abstract, those made in §3.2 about the stative-active alignment: both are associated with head marking, and both involve split rather than fluid systems. Stative-active alignment is typically but not necessarily

split (occasionally fluid, as in Batsbi, Acehnese, Eastern Pomo, and Tonkawa) and typically but not necessarily associated with head marking (occasionally with dependent marking, as in Batsbi, Eastern Pomo, and Tonkawa). Inalienable possession appears to be necessarily split (never fluid) and necessarily associated with head/dependent marking. The correlation with head/dependent marking is shown in the fact that no language in my sample (and no language that I know of) uses only dependent marking to implement an alienable/inalienable distinction. (A language that did so would have two genitive cases, one for alienables and one for inalienables.) Inalienable possession is split rather than fluid in that the choice of marking is determined by the possessed noun rather than by the speaker’s decision about semantics. No language has what one would want to call fluid possessive marking, which would require the speaker to decide, for each possessed noun, whether (say) the possessor could part with the possessed item, whereupon the speaker would choose the formal marking accordingly. Some languages with bound inalienables have a special construction which allows the bound noun to be used without a possessor or to

be used with a separable possessor, as in Navajo (Young and Morgan 1980:7; UNSP = unspecified third-person possessor):

bi- be’ 3sg milk ‘her milk’ ’a- be’ UNSP

‘(someone’s, something’s) milk’

Correlations of Structural Types with Grammatical Categories 121

be- ’a- be’ 3sg UNSP milk

‘his/her (store-bought) milk’

The first example is the standard possessive construction with the bound noun “‘milk’’; it means “her milk” in the sense of “‘the milk from her own body”. The second has the unspecified third person possessive affix, and is the closest one can come to saying simply “‘milk”’ in Navajo without specifying a possessor. The third adds a possessive prefix to the unspecified form to give the meaning of milk which belongs to someone whose body it did not come from (typically, store-bought cow’s milk). Examples like these may look as though there were fluid possessive marking in the language, but that fluidity is limited to the inalienables. Thus we could describe Navajo as a language in which alienable possession is signaled by regular possessive marking and inalienable possession is signaled by a fluid opposition of regular to secondary possessive marking. There is indeed a kind of fluidity here, but what makes the alienable/inalienable opposition is not that fluidity and its semantics but the fact that there is a closed set of obligatorily possessed nouns. The fluidity obtains only within the closed set (and there presumably only with body parts and the like), and in strict structuralist terms it is the fluidity that marks the closed set. Thus we have a split system, not a fluid one; but one side of the split (the inalienable side) uses fluidity as part of its coding. Thus the formal coding of possession, and in particular its head/dependent coding, limits the semantics of inalienable possession in the very same way as the head/dependent coding of clause syntax limits the semantics of stative-active alignment: head marking entails splits, not fluidity. In addition, the very possibility of an alienable/inalienable opposition existing in a language depends on the type of formal coding available: inalienable possession is found almost exclusively, and very often, in languages which use head-marked possession.' Klimov’s finding (summarized in §1.1.1) that inalienable possession is common in stative-active languages was strongly supported in my survey: see table 35. Klimov and I differ only in our interpretation of these facts: he interprets this correlation as due to the semantics of the active type while I interpret it as due to the usual formal head-marking implementation of the stative-active type and inalienable possession, plus geographical factors to be mentioned below. In Klimov’s view, the semantics of the alienable/inalienable opposition presupposes the opposition of active to inactive, or animate to inanimate, that 1s fundamental to the active type. In the view argued here, inalienable possession

is not primarily a semantic distinction but the automatic consequence of the closer formal bonding that results in head-marked possession: in-

122 Chapter Four alienables typically include kin terms, part/whole terms, and/or body parts, nouns which are most likely to occur possessed in discourse, and the formal marking of inalienability simply grammaticalizes that possession. In many languages the inalienables are obligatorily possessed, and this constitutes the entirety of their formal distinctness. In some languages inalienables are head-marked while alienables are not; this simply means that the former possessor has fused to the inalienably possessed noun. In some

languages inalienables have zero marking while alienables have overt marking; then we have a form of compounding or incorporation between possessor and possessed. The association with the stative-active type can be explained as follows: since stative-active languages are generally headmarking, it is to be expected that they will have head-marked possession in particular, and if they have head-marked possession it is to be expected that they will have an alienable/inalienable opposition. There is no significant correlation between inalienable possession and head/dependent type of the language overall. Nor is there a straightforward correlation between the overall head/dependent marking of the NP and the presence or absence of inalienable possession. It is not infrequent for a language which is otherwise unswervingly dependent-marking in its NP mor-

phology to use head-marked or zero-marked possession with a few inalienables or a closed set of inalienables; examples are Burushaski, Eastern Pomo, Kiowa, and Dyirbal, from which examples were cited above. Table 36 shows that inalienable possession is an areal feature. The sample areas vary greatly in their propensity to have inalienable possession. The Old World areas have the lowest frequencies (median 27 percent), the New World is intermediate (median 51 percept), and the Pacific high (median 84

percent), a distribution we will see echoed by most of the other grammatical categories surveyed in this chapter. Table 35. Inalienable possession and dominant alignment (major contributors to significance underlined) Inalienable possession

Alignment Yes No Total % Yes

Accusative 5828 93 50 38 Ergative 143514

Stative-active 5 21 760.005 Total 65 77 16 142 p~

Accusative 38 Ergative 411018429 100

New World languages only

Stative-active Total 29 2014492 16 p

Table 41. Frequencies of loci of class marking, plus type features

Locus of marking H/D type Dominant alignment

Languages langs. classes N D H H 2/8 D Acc Erg StA_ Hier

Allclasses 174 61 524659 103 292023 52 No 127 32 47 76 16 Classes 47 3.9 45 38 40 15 20 12 27 9 7 3 Outliers 8 83017 In hotbeds13 34 3.4 4.1 37 2378 3 16391265 3522l Breakdown of languages with classes:

Note: N = neutral, D = dependent, H = head, 2/S = double or split. Both clear and unclear cases counted for alignment.

The classifier categories are not marked by what one could call agreement. Usually there is a separate word which is called a classifier; sometimes (e.g., in Gilyak and Nasioi in my sample) the classifier is fused to the numeral so that there are several shape-based numeral categories. There are many classifiers, minimally 20 and up to around 200. They almost always involve shape categories. Classification is fluid and quite clearly semantic. Numeral classifiers are also strongly areal in distribution, perhaps more strongly so than gender classes. Map 12 shows their distribution. They are concentrated in two places: Southeast Asia (including the western Pacific)

Correlations of Structural Types with Grammatical Categories 133

and coastal western America. This distribution can be reduced to a single circum-Pacific hotbed. 4.3.3.3. Predicate classification systems. The classic example of predicate classification, and the only example in my sample where it is systematic, is

provided by the Athabaskan languages, where the stem of the verb responds to the shape classification of the S/O. Predicate classification is mandated by the verb. The classification is fluid and quite clearly semantic, and both the fluidity and the particular semantic classes resemble those of

numeral classifier systems. (For predicate classification see Allan 1977; for , Athabaskan, Krauss 1968.) 4.3.3.4. Covert animacy systems involve the special, sometimes almost gender-like, treatment of animate or human nouns. (I will use the term ‘animate’ loosely here for convenience. The actual membership of the class can vary from language to language: all animates; higher animates; humans only; kin terms only.) They have the following properties. There is no agreement, hence no mandating of agreement. Animacy is borne by nouns and marked only in selection, neutralization, and the like.

For instance, in a number of languages animate nouns are privileged to function as subjects of both transitive and intransitive verbs while inanimates cannot easily be subjects of transitives (e.g., Kiowa; the Yuman languages, represented by Diegueno in my sample). Distinctions in number often apply only to animates: for instance, in Washo plural marking is regularly used only for nouns referring to humans; in Karok, Gitksan, and Nasioi, only human nouns can take plural marking; Chitimacha distinguishes singular from plural in only about 30 nouns, which include kin terms and other human nouns. (These and other examples are discussed again in §4.4 below.) A subset of animates—kin terms—with or without other nouns takes inalienable possession in many languages (see 84.1 above). Animate nouns may be marked by distinctive declension classes, including distinctive patterns of case neutralization (e.g., Russian, where in the first declension the animate nouns syncretize genitive and accusative while inanimates syncretize nominative and accusative; for the place of animacy in the Russian gender system see Mel’cuk 1980, Corbett 1991). A covert animacy system contains, in some sense, only one class: the

closed or delimitable set of human or animate nouns. The nonhuman or inanimate nouns have the nature of a residual category rather than a positive class. Covert animacy systems occur in languages of all morphological and syntactic types. They have no demonstrable areality. Macrogenders may be a special type of covert animacy system. I have

134 Chapter Four treated them separately because they assign genders, whereas all the examples of covert animacy systems mentioned here involve restricted access to categories or functions, not assignment of genders.

4.3.3.5. Nonagreeing classification. In many languages there are distinct

| declension classes of nouns, or other formal classes of nouns, which can sometimes be associated with semantic categories like those involved in gender and other kinds of classification but which never involve agreement, selection, or other formal response. In Indo-European languages, as is well known, there are formal declension classes based (at least etymologically) on the thematic vowel or stem-final phoneme. There is a certain amount of redundancy between declension classes and gender. For

, instance, in Russian most a-stem nouns are feminine (e.g., sestra ‘sister’, kniga ‘book’, bulavka ‘pin’), but a few are masculine (djadja “uncle’) or fluid (sirota ‘orphan’ ); most feminine nouns are a-stems, but a few belong to the old consonant stems and i-stems (mat ‘mother’, set’ ‘net’). Most languages of the Nakh-Daghestanian family have not only formal gender systems marked by agreement but also formal declension class systems marked by what I will call thematic suffixes found in the oblique and/or plural stem; these declension classes do not trigger agreement. Alekseev 1985 :27ff., describing the Lezghian branch, shows that gender and declension classes are independent and orthogonal systems, although some of the semantic distinctions involved in them are relevant to both systems. Kibrik 1991 gives a synchronic structural analysis of the thematic suffixes and their relation to gender classes in Daghestanian languages, in some of which there is a third, also orthogonal, categorization marked by differences in case endings. In Chechen and Ingush, for instance, there are gender classes, declension classes marked by thematic suffixes, and declension subclasses marked by different ergative case and/or plural endings. The words human and/or animate could be used in descriptions of the semantic basis for all three, but the three systems are independent. The Uto-Aztecan languages generally have what are known as abso- . lutive suffixes which can perhaps best be described as stem formatives that appear in most contexts of independent syntactic use but are removed in compounds and certain other contexts. In the protolanguage there appears to have been one absolutive suffix, but the languages of the Numic branch have innovated a set of new absolutive suffixes which have some connection with semantic categories such as animacy. (For a survey of absolutives in Uto-Aztecan see Steele 1979.) Since these absolutives apparently never trigger agreement, they can be regarded as declension class formatives and irrelevant, at least synchronically, to questions of gender.

Correlations of Structural Types with Grammatical Categories 135

Inalienable possession bears similarities to gender, in that it involves some kind of categorization of nouns. It differs from gender in that gender is an exhaustive classification of all nouns while inalienable possession opposes a closed and often small set of nouns, positively characterized as in-

alienable, to an open set. The only obvious exception to this statement comes from the Polynesian family, where nouns fall into two classes, both positively characterized and neither one closed, which determine the mark-

ing of possession. There is some fluid class membership (in these examples, O and A are the possession class markers):

Hawaiian ko’u inoa my-O name ‘my name’

ka’u inoa my-A name ‘my name (that I bestow on someone)’

ka welao_ ka la: ART heat PREP ART sun

‘the heat of the sun’ (the heat emanating from the sun) ka wela a ka la: (heat in a person or thing that can be traced to the sun) [i.e., ‘heat from the sun’ ]

(Examples and translations from Wilson 1982, except that the squarebracketed translation is mine.) This fluid classification is equally atypical of both gender and inalienable possession. Minimal pairs like those above

are reminiscent of examples like the following from Yurak Samoyed, where the distinction is obviously, on both formal and semantic grounds, one of basic vs. semantically marked adnominal relation: man’ xardu-v

Isg house lsg “my house’ man’ meda-mi

Isg deer Isg ‘(a/the) deer for me’ (both examples from TereS¢enko 1973: 221) Formally, the Yurak distinction involves an opposition of shorter and presumably older possessive affixes in the basic adnominal construction (the first example) to longer, more transparent, and presumably more recent affixes in the semantically marked adnominal construction (the second example). What is distinctive about the Polynesian pattern, and what makes

136 + Chapter Four

it look more like canonical alienable/inalienable possession, is that the choice of possession types in Polynesian is determined to a significant extent by the possessed noun. The Yurak pattern is apparently a fluid one, determined by the semantics of the adnominal relation rather than lexically determined by the head noun (although descriptions of these constructions are not extensive, and it is always possible that Yurak Samoyed is in fact like Polynesian in this respect). The Polynesian and Yurak patterns, then, have some affinities to inalienable possession, and the Polynesian one in addition has some (lesser) affinity to gender; but neither one can be described as either gender or inalienable possession as those terms have been defined here.

4.3.3.6. Transitional systems. The following four examples combine the features of gender and numeral classification. In languages of the Niger-Congo family (Luganda and Fula in my sample), the class systems are unusual. There are many classes (12 or more genders, 20 or more concord subclasses), some of which are clearly based on shape. There is a certain amount of fluid classification. Class marking is used on numerals. The number and semanticity of the classes, and the use

with numerals, suggest numeral classifiers; but there is agreement, multiple marking in the sentence, marking elsewhere than on or with numerals,

and sufficient lexical fixation to justify regarding these systems as noun classes. These are then noun class systems which bear some striking resemblances to numeral classification systems. In Chechen (illustrated in table 38 above) and its relatives, the class systems are like those of the Niger-Congo languages in some respects. There are fewer classes (two to eight genders, a maximum of four concord subclasses), though still more than the average in gender systems (in general and those of northern Eurasia in particular). There is no demonstrable basis in shape. Class marking is used on some numerals, but usually a minority

of them (in Chechen, only with “4” and its derivatives). There is then a difference of degree, not kind, between Luganda and Chechen. The Chechen system is one of noun classes which share a few features with numeral classification.

In Yagua and other languages of the western Amazon (Payne 1986, 1987), numeral classification shows similarities to gender. Classes are numerous, shape-based, and used primarily with numerals; but classifiers are also affixed to modifying adjectives in the NP and to predicate nominals. The Yagua system and the Niger-Congo systems are similar in many ways, although the Yagua system is closer to numeral classifiers while the Niger-Congo pattern is closer to noun classes. I have counted Yagua as

Correlations of Structural Types with Grammatical Categories 137

having both noun classes and numeral classifiers, though they are the same system. Chamorro has a type of numeral classification that resembles gender in

involving few classes and centering on animacy rather than shape. Con- : temporary Chamorro uses Spanish numerals and has no classification, but Costenoble (1940) was able to find elderly speakers who remembered the native system, which had three numeral systems, for animates, inanimates, and linear measures. This example is pathological in some respects—the subsystem was dying and may not have been elicited in its entirety—but nonetheless it provides us with an example of an anomalous system showing properties of both noun class and numeral classifier systems.

4.3.3.7. Multiple classification. As a number of the examples cited here have shown, it is not unusual, and indeed probably typical, for languages with noun class systems to also exhibit other, orthogonal, systems of nominal categorization. Indo-European and Nakh-Daghestanian languages have both gender and one or even two systems of declension classes; Hittite and Russian have, in addition to gender and declension classes, covert animacy subsystems; Nasioi has gender, numeral classification, and a covert

animacy system restricting plural marking. Most languages with genders seem to have macrogenders as well. For some discussions of multiple classification see Weitenberg 1987, Corbett 1991, Kibrik 1991, Alekseev 1985 :27ff., 36.

4.3.4. Distribution. Table 41 shows the frequencies of various loci of class marking and two morphosyntactic typological features, for four groups of languages: the entire sample of 174 languages; the 47 gender languages; only the gender outliers; only the hotbed gender languages. For dominant alignment, the entries total less than 174 because other minor types (neutral, three-way) and 7 instances of uncertain classification are not

counted. All entries show the number of languages except those in the three columns under “‘Locus of class marking,”’ which show the number of patterns (this can be greater than the number of languages). The favored places, cross-linguistically, for marking gender classes are on modifying adjectives in the NP (26 instances in appendix 2) and on the verb (32); the noun itself (22) and personal or anaphoric pronouns (22) are also common. Gender agreement on articles or similar words is not common (9 instances), if only because articles themselves are not found in all languages. Head-marked possession with person-number marking is crosslinguistically common, but gender does not often figure in this pattern (9

languages). As noted above, dependent-marked, head-marked, and neu-

138 Chapter Four trally marked patterns of gender agreement are about equally common, with a slight preference for neutral marking (38:40:45). The same balance is found in the two-gender languages and in the languages with many genders. No correlation of gender with any type feature proved statistically significant, though one for head/dependent marking approached borderline significance (gender being somewhat more frequent than expected in double/split marking languages and less frequent in dependent-marking languages).

There are interesting differences between languages in class hotbeds and outlier languages. Languages in class hotbeds, since they are the majority of class languages, define the typological profile of class languages. Hotbed languages disfavor the head as the locus of agreement, while outlier languages favor it. In alignment type, hotbed languages do not differ appreciably from languages without classes: in both groups, the accusative is strongly favored. But the accusative is rare in outlier languages. In head/ dependent type, class languages favor double and split marking; this is a straightforward reflection of the fact that languages with classes have a good deal of morphological complexity, since they have agreement slots as

well as morphological marking of the categories they agree in. But the outlier languages are again distinctive: they favor head marking. The preference for head marking as overall morphosyntactic type is contributed singlehandedly by North America, which contributes the majority of out-

liers, and where head marking dominates; but the preference for nonaccusative alignment and head as locus of agreement is contributed by all areas. The most general conclusion to be drawn is that the areal pressure of a hotbed favors class marking regardless of circumstances, while outside of

hotbeds classes are not common and seem to be favored by a set of typological properties which are unusual, individually and as a set. The fact that class languages are concentrated in hotbeds raises the question of how classes arise, and the distribution of properties and agreement patterns in the sample appear to shed light on the origin of noun classes. Especially since a number of outliers are language isolates whose histories are unknown, it is difficult to tell whether the distinctive type features of the outliers are to be regarded as factors favoring the survival of classes or factors favoring their rise, but clearly they can be regarded as factors favoring the

_ existence of noun classes in otherwise unfavorable circumstances. Based on the frequencies of properties in the outlier languages, we can say that marking of class on the noun itself is much less important than marking in agreement (the outliers show 8 instances of neutral marking against 25 patterns involving agreement, 8 of them dependent-marking plus 17 head-

Correlations of Structural Types with Grammatical Categories 139

marking), that head-marking agreement is more conducive to classes than dependent-marking agreement (17 to 8), that languages with a good deal of head marking and a good deal of morphological complexity (the double/ split and head-marking types) are conducive to classes, and that nonac-

cusative alignment favors classes. As shown in chapter 3, the nonaccusative alignments are associated with head marking (stative-active and hierarchical) and complexity (ergative); the ergative alignment is also associated with dependent marking, in part secondarily (because of the association of dependent marking with complexity) and in part metagrammatically (because ergativity and dependent marking both focus on nominal semantic functions). The factors probably to be associated with the rise of classes in languages, then, are, most importantly, location in or near a hotbed, and then a preference for head-marking morphology, morphological complexity overall, and nonaccusative alignment. Of these factors, proximity to a hotbed would seem clearly to be a causal factor; morphological type and complexity may be causal features, in that they would make formal agreement possible; alignment type is probably secondary or symptomatic, in that it follows from head/dependent type and complexity to some extent.

4.3.5. Possible language-internal sources for class systems. It has just been argued that causal factors favoring the rise of class systems can be inferred from the language sample used here. But once we have established the causal factors we also need to recover the actual mechanisms leading to the grammaticalization of class systems, and distributional patterns in the

sample can also be of use here. Greenberg 1978 proposes that gender agreement markers are diachronically renewed, or created in the first place, by numeral classifiers turning into demonstratives which then turn into articles. This explanation of the rise of gender requires the possibility of transition between numeral classification systems and gender systems, but in fact there is very little evidence in my sample for this kind of crossover. Gender and numeral classification do not often cooccur in languages. Furthermore, class hotbeds and numeral classification hotbeds almost never

overlap. The best-documented overlap occurs in India (Emeneau [1956] 1980), where gender systems are associated with the Indo-European languages and hence a center to the west while numeral classification is centered in Southeast Asia; this is then an overlap of peripheries, not overlap of centers. Therefore, to look to numeral classification as a source of gender systems is to disregard the evidence of geography. The only clear evidence for a possible transition from numeral classification to gender comes from the western Amazon (Payne 1987), where

140 Chapter Four we find transitional systems like that of Yagua, described above. That tran-

sitional systems occur at all here must be due to the influence of the numeral classifier hotbed centered in Mesoamerica. Languages like Yagua could eventually become Bantu-like in their noun class systems, if the use of classifiers on modifying and predicative parts of speech were expanded to more loci, if classification became more clearly a matter of agreement

(as it would, for example, if marking in more than one place per sentence became common), and if use with numerals became optional or restricted (e.g., to only some numerals, as it is in Bantu languages). If it is conceivable that Yagua could become Bantu-like, then an origin in numeral classification could conceivably explain the distinctive nature of the Niger-Congo gender systems. Thus the mechanism of grammaticalization proposed by Greenberg is plausible. However, geographical factors suffice to explain the fact that gender exists at all in the Niger-Congo stock: Africa

is a class hotbed, and we would expect to find noun class systems in this family. Evidence for a different kind of transition from numeral classification to gender comes from the moribund Chamorro counting system, which col-

lapses to a three-way, animacy-based opposition reminiscent of gender classification but does not thereby give rise to gender. Rather, numeral classification then dies out in the language. There is no evidence in my database for a transition from noun classes to numeral classifiers. My own field work in Northeast Caucasian languages suggests that na-

tive speakers expect gender classification of inanimates to be based on shape, even when it demonstrably is not. Chechen speakers will sometimes point out that words of the B gender refer to round objects, as some of them in fact do, although many do not and names of many round objects belong to other classes. If there is a speaker expectation that gender classes will be shape-based, then analogical reclassifications over time will probably lead to just such a situation. Therefore I propose the following scenario for the rise of elaborate and shape-based gender systems like those of central Africa: The language already has gender. The system 1s sufficiently elaborate that there is more than one class of inanimates. The morphological implementation of gender favors speaker awareness: e.g., the gender classes may be marked by transparently agglutinative affixes; fluid gender marking in a human macrogender may suggest that the markers are fully semantic and

interchangeable; etc. The poetic canon may exploit gender as a basis for metaphor and simile (as that of Chechen does). Under these circumstances, a typical gender system could well begin to elaborate and eventually de-

velop toward the central African model. It may be significant that in Chechen the folk expectation of shape-based semanticity for gender centers

Correlations of Structural Types with Grammatical Categories 141

on round objects, a category that figures prominently in shape-based numeral classification and renewal of classifier systems (Greenberg 1972;

, also Allan 1977:301). To summarize so far, the only clear evidence for crossover between sys-

tems—the transitional Niger-Congo and western Amazon shape-based elaboration of genders—could conceivably come from regrammaticalization of numeral classifiers; but there is equally good evidence that gender systems can be semanticized under the right set of conditions. In any event, crossover between systems seems unable to account for the rise of gender outside of hotbeds; and for any comprehensive account it is the outliers that most require explanation, since every hotbed must have been founded by what was an outlier at the time of founding. What we need to explain, then, is the rise of the noun class system in the outlier language. As shown above, outlier languages have minimal class systems, so it is the nonelaborate system (and not the elaborate Bantu or Yagua system) that requires explanation. Since minimal class systems always seem to focus on oppositions like animate/inanimate, human/nonhuman, and masculine/feminine, it makes the most sense to seek the origin of gender in the grammaticalization of covert animacy subsystems. Since these involve a universal cognitive hierarchy always available for potential implementation (and thus exploited in other grammatical domains as well: see §4.8), grammaticalization could presumably take place wherever morphological circumstances were right, even in the absence of a hotbed. If a covert animacy system or other covert classification were somehow picked up by agreement rules, the language would thereby have noun classes. It follows that all that is needed in order for noun classes to arise is a covert

animacy system, a potentially recruitable formal distinction, and preexistent agreement patterns. The following are some examples illustrating the actual or plausible or potential rise of noun classes in this way. (1) Spontaneous generation of categories: Noun classification appears

to have arisen out of number agreement in the Kiowa-Tanoan family, where nouns have inherent number, an affix switches the inherent number, and lexical classes of nouns are thereby set up. (For Kiowa see Watkins 1984: 78ff., Wonderly, Gibson, and Kirk 1954.) (2) Spontaneous generation of fillers. Markers in a person-number-based agreement system can easily be renewed by substitution of independent pronominal forms for the affixal pronominal forms. (For instance, some languages of the Numic branch of Uto-Aztecan replace inherited i-, first

person singular prefix and clitic, with the independent form ny ‘I’.) If third-person pronouns make any animacy distinction, then if they renew old affixes a gender agreement system will thereby be set up.

142 Chapter Four (3) Spontaneous generation of slots. Cliticization of pronouns can be the first step in development of an agreement system; if the pronouns make any

animacy distinctions, or if renewal implements an animacy distinction, concord subclasses are thereby set up. Or agreement may develop by reanalysis of roots or stems as containing agreeing affixes: elsewhere I have argued (Nichols, in press) that accidental alliteration of frozen former prefixes in verbs with noun initials gave rise to gender agreement, and hence to gender, in Northeast Caucasian. There is no unambiguous evidence for the prior existence of agreement—at least not on this pattern, with the verb responding to the classification of the S/O— in this language family. There may have been a singular/multiple or semelfactive/iterative category in verbs marked by stem changes or infixation on an ergative pattern, and there may have been person agreement on an accusative pattern: for the latter see Trubetzkoy 1929. In all of these scenarios, lexical classification of nouns is the consequence rather than the cause of agreement. In all of them, agreement (typically in person-number) is pre-existent, and when it picks up or formally renews relevant pronominal or formal categories, gender classification of nouns is thereby set up. I know of no example where gender-like lexical classification of nominals clearly preceded the rise of agreement. : Once an agreement system is set up, the system of noun classes can expand; and they may also semanticize, as they have in the Niger-Congo family and as may be imminent in Northeast Caucasian. The opposite development is reduction of classes, loss of agreement, and loss of the gender system, as has happened in the Romance and Baltic branches of IndoEuropean (which reduce the gender categories from three to two) and in English (which has lost all grammatical gender). Demuth, Faraclas, and Marchese 1986 show that when noun class is lost from a language the agreement rules are more persistent than the formal categorization of the nouns themselves. On the assumption that loss of categories produces a diachronic mirror image of their development, the persistence of agreement longer than formal categorization of nouns suggests that in the rise of noun class systems agreement precedes classification of nominals. To summarize the historical mechanism proposed here, agreement triggers noun classification (rather than vice versa); in other words, grammatical form triggers the semantics of nominal classification. However they arise, noun classes are extremely stable in language families. In IndoEuropean, many languages still preserve the gender system, and those that retain the original morphological type of Proto-Indo-European preserve not only the gender system but its marking and interaction with declension class as well. All the Afroasiatic languages in my sample have noun class

Correlations of Structural Types with Grammatical Categories 143

systems of the same type. Niger-Congo and Northeast Caucasian are two stocks in which noun class systems of cognate design are widespread, though not universal.

4.4 Number Oppositions Klimov 1977 finds that absence or underdevelopment of an inflectional category of number is typical of stative-active languages. It is common knowledge that obligatory grammatical categories of number are infrequent in the isolating languages of Southeast Asia, and that languages of North America frequently grammaticalize categories like distributive, collective, etc., rather than singular and plural (for North America see Boas [191la] 1964:30). Thus there is evidence that morphological type and/or geography influence the development and distribution of number categories. I surveyed the presence and absence of singular/plural oppositions in my sample languages and their interaction with head/dependent type and alignment, in order to test both Klimov’s claim and received views about the distribution of number oppositions. Durie 1986 shows that number can with equal ease be grammaticalized as an inflectional category of nouns (manifested in agreement on other words, as well as in the inflection of the noun itself) or a verbal category (manifested in selection). Moravcsik 1978 shows that the nominal category, when manifested in verbal agreement, need not be overt on the noun

itself. The findings presented below will show that the nominal category is ) not merely able but strongly inclined to be marked only on the verb, so that the verb emerges not only as a potential bearer of its own number categories but also as a favored formal carrier of number categories inherent in other parts of speech.

4.4.1. Definitions. What is surveyed here, and tabulated in appendix 2, is not the presence of number oppositions but the contexts, if any, in which they are weak or absent in each language. It is not easy to set up determinate and rigorous criteria for weakening or absence of a number category, for at least two reasons. One is that, as discussed below, it can be difficult to draw a principled distinction between lack of a (semantic, or semantically describable) category and mechanical lack of inflection on some part of speech. Another is that languages which lack a grammaticalized singular/plural (or singular/dual/plural) opposition often seem to have categories such as distributive and collective (which are not surveyed here). To keep the issues clear and determinate, I have limited this survey to patterns of neutralization or nondistinctness of a singular/plural (or singular/dual/

144 Chapter Four plural) opposition which is overt elsewhere in the grammar. I assume that neutralizations of this type will display the same distributional tendencies as the less easily testable weakening or absence of a category. I will refer to these patterns generically as PLURALITY NEUTRALIZATION. There are four

kinds of plurality neutralization, and this section surveys each of them in three parts of speech: noun, personal pronoun, and verb. The four kinds of plurality neutralization are: (1) Formal number oppositions are absent from some part of speech. In Lakhota, nouns carry no marker of plurality; it is marked only in the verb,

which takes a plural suffix -pi when used with an animate subject but undergoes reduplication with an inanimate subject (examples from Boas and Deloria 1939: 157):

wichasa ki hi-pi man ART come-PL “The men have come’

chgki haskaska tree tall (REDUPLICATED)

‘The trees are tall’

Similarly, Lower Umpqua marks number on verbs and independent pro-

nouns, but not on nouns. In Malak-Malak, Maung, and Ponapean, the noun does not carry plural marking, but plurality is shown within the noun _ phrase, on determiners, articles, or adjectives. Nunggubuyu, discussed below, has a similar pattern with lexical restrictions. For all these languages, number oppositions are covert in nouns; that the category is present, though covert, in the nouns is shown by the fact that verbs or modifiers agree with it. The only languages for which a category of number can be said to be absent, rather than covert, are those in which neither the noun nor the verb formally distinguishes number. Mandarin, radically isolating, is such a language. Another radically isolating language in my sample, Yoruba, uses what Dryer 1989b calls a plural word, a separate word in the NP. The Yoruba plural word is not in agreement with the noun; it is the third person plural pronoun, used appositively, and no corresponding singular pronoun is used for singular nouns. Thus Yoruba can also be described as lacking a category of number (though not, in view of its plural word, as unable to express the notion of plurality or as substituting some other category for it). (2) The formal number opposition is available only to restricted lexical

| items or lexical classes within some part of speech. A number of languages make a singular/plural distinction only for animate nouns, or human nouns, or kinship terms, or the like. This is especially common in the New World.

Correlations of Structural Types with Grammatical Categories 145

In Gitksan, Karok, and Eastern Pomo, only human nouns take plural marking. Chitimacha distinguishes singular from plural in only about 30 nouns,

which include kin terms, other human nouns, and the word “oar.” In Southern Paiute, only animate nouns have a suffixal plural (inanimates have distributive reduplication). In Tepehua, the plural is available to inanimate nouns only under restricted circumstances. In Cora, only animates distinguish singular from plural. In Wikchamni Yokuts (not in my sample), the plural of nouns is rare, found mostly on kin terms, body-part terms, and nouns referring to culturally important items (Gamble 1978 : 90). In Nunggubuyu the singular/plural opposition is overt only on human nouns (but shown for all nouns in agreeing adjectives). In Nasio1 only human nouns distinguish number (which is marked on the article, not on the noun itself).

(3) The formal opposition is available, but its use is optional and marked or emphatic. The plural is described as optional for Djingili, and as

optional and uncommon for Maidu and Southern Sierra Miwok. Most often this pattern is combined with the animacy hierarchy. In Washo, any noun may take the plural marker, but in general it is restricted to nouns referring to humans, animates, body parts, and articles of clothing. Its meaning is emphatic plurality, except for kin terms, where the meaning is

simple plurality. In Luiseno, plural marking is optional for inanimate nouns. In Yurok, only a few nouns have plurals (Robins 1958: 20 lists nine, seven of them human), and those are optional. In Dieguefio, overt plural marking is rare, and largely restricted to kin terms. (4) Number categories are neutralized for some part of speech. For a number of languages, pronouns and verbs distinguish singular, dual, and plural, but nouns distinguish only singular and plural: examples are Gunwinggu, Ineseho, Tonkawa, Washo. In Kiowa, any given noun distinguishes only singular/nonsingular or plural/nonplural. The verb, however, makes a three-way distinction: singular/dual/plural. Mangarayi combines partial neutralization with the animacy hierarchy: verbs and pronouns distinguish singular, dual, and plural; so do kin terms and subsection terms, but other nouns distinguish only singular vs. nonsingular. Sahaptin shows a comparable pattern, distinguishing the dual only in human nouns. There are patterns involving neutralization of number oppositions which do not fit the definition of plurality neutralization given above. One of them | is the near-universal lack of formal number oppositions for prototypical mass nouns. Another is neutralization of a number opposition for only part of an inflectional paradigm. An example of this is Tonkawa, where the singular/plural opposition in nouns is neutralized in the oblique cases but overt in the nominative and accusative; another is Waigali, where the opposition is neutralized in the nominative but overt in the oblique cases.

146 Chapter Four Since neutralization of a number opposition in only part of a paradigm removes the opposition from individual inflected forms of the word but not from the word itself, such intraparadigmatic neutralizations seem irrelevant to the question of whether the category of number is weakly developed in the language as a whole. It can sometimes be difficult to distinguish underdevelopment of a category within a language or part of speech—a semantic and morphosyntactic

fact—from mere absence of inflection on that part of speech, a strictly morphological fact. For instance, in a radically dependent-marking language such as Dyirbal, Mongolian, Japanese, or Yawelmani there is no verb agreement for any category, including number. Such languages lack number oppositions in the verb, but this is best viewed not as underdevelopment of number but as the absence of a certain kind of formal agreement pattern. Analogously, Dryer 1989b shows that languages of the isolating and head-marking types tend to mark participant plurality not on nouns but by means of a separate plural word. In Dryer’s analysis, the use of plural words is motivated not by the role of plurality in the language’s

semantic or conceptual structure, but by a general morphological constraint whereby nouns are simply not inflected in such languages. I avoid the problem of distinguishing between underdevelopment of a particular category and more general lack of inflection by basing the critical comparisons below on a survey of only those languages of my sample that have nonzero marking of both dependent and head at the clause level. In these languages (they number 83), it can be reasoned, the inflection of parts of speech is not ruled out a priori by purely structural rules, and therefore the absence of a number opposition in some such language will bear directly on cross-linguistic tendencies in number categories.

4.4.2. Observations on semantics. There is clear cross-linguistic evidence for a hierarchical ranking of nouns for their propensity to mark number: kin terms > human nouns > animates. At any stage in the hierarchy, including the first one, a few nouns referring to culturally basic or important items may also be included (as in Wikchamni Yokuts and Washo, discussed above). Sometimes body-part nouns are among those taking number marking (Wikchamni Yokuts and Washo again); but in most languages they are not included. Except for the inclusion of a few culturally salient inanimates and the high ranking of body-part nouns in a few languages, this hierarchy exactly replicates a portion of Silverstein’s metapragmatic hierarchy (1976). It also replicates, incompletely but almost exactly, the hierarchy for inalienable possession described in $4.1 (which is jointly headed by kin terms and/or body parts), and that for covert animacy systems described in $4.3. For languages in which number marking is optional, descriptions pre-

Correlations of Structural Types with Grammatical Categories 147

sent it in terms very similar to those used to describe the effect of including overt independent pronouns in languages having pro-drop. Jacobsen 1964:464-—66 describes the semantic effect of overt plural marking as “emphatic plurality’’, and many sources describe the effect of including Overt pronouns in a pro-drop language as emphatic. Overt plural marking in optional-plural languages, and overt pronouns in pro-drop languages, are both often described as rare in natural texts but elicitable in grammatical, though artificial, sentences. The semantics and patterning of prodrop have been used to argue that the marking of arguments on verbs is primary rather than due to copying in pro-drop languages (e.g., Bresnan and Mchombo 1987; Van Valin 1985; Jelinek 1984; and other contributions). To my knowledge, the analogous semantics and patterning of num-

ber marking in languages where it is optional has not led to analyses whereby the marking of plurality in such languages (and only in such languages) is primary on verbs and secondary, due to agreement, on nouns. (Durie 1986 distinguishes inherently verbal from inherently nominal categories of number, but the analysis I have in mind would deal only with the inherently nominal category and argue that that too is primary on verbs.) The structural analogies between number marking and pro-drop deserve close syntactic scrutiny in individual languages.

4.4.3. Survey. Table 42 shows the frequencies of plurality neutralization patterns of all types, by area and part of speech. The most obvious conclusion to be drawn from this table is that the parts of speech differ considerably in their propensity to show plurality neutralization. It is rare in pronouns, fairly common in nouns (close to half the languages in the sample have it), and intermediate for verbs. Plural words are in some sense the counterpart of words like the Aux of the Luisefio example in §2.0.1.2.6 (i.e., words separate from the verb and carrying such verbal categories as person, number, and tense): both attract number and other categories from, respectively, the nouns and verbs that are cross-linguistically the more common carriers of those categories.

The plural word marks number (and sometimes other categories, such as gender) for the notionally plural noun; and Aux and similar forms mark inflectional categories (often including number) for the verb. Another

point of comparison between the two is that both are of low frequency in my sample. This low frequency suggests that plurality neutralization is not simply a matter of noninflection of nouns or verbs: if it were, one would expect plural words to be common in radically head-marking languages and an Aux to be common in otherwise entirely dependent-marking languages. There is a clear correlation of plurality neutralization with geography: .

148 Chapter Four Table 42. Plurality neutralization, by part of speech and continent (languages with nonzero clause-level H and D marking only)

Area Pronoun Noun Verb Any % n

Africa 0 30 ]1 30 30 Near East 1 2510 4

Europe & Caucasus 0 00 0 06 8 N Asia 0 0 0 S & SE Asia 1] 2 1 2 33 6 New Guinea 0 10 0 10 83 12

Australia 00 26 10 36 75 75 4 8 Oceania W NorthAmerica America 02 29 00 29 100 69 13 E North 2I Mesoamerica I l l 1 100 South America 3 452 6 67 Total 6 39 8 343 839

| p < 0.001

Old World total l 6] 2196 79 18 24 34 Pacific total 0 18 New World total 6 15 5 18 72 25 Legend: Pronoun Plurality neutralization in pronoun

Noun Plurality neutralization in noun Verb Plurality neutralization in verb Any Any kind of plurality neutralization n number of languages with nonzero H and D marking in the clause

plurality neutralization is rare in the Old World but very common in the Pacific and the New World. The asymmetries between the Old World and the rest of the world are highly significant. The geographical pattern is similar to that shown by inalienable possession and inclusive/exclusive oppositions (§§4.1, 4.2). Plurality neutralization is rare in Eurasia, especially northern Eurasia, and somewhat more common in Africa and in South and - Southeast Asia. Frequencies are high in the New World, and higher in the Pacific.

Table 43 shows the frequency with which languages of the three main alignment types exhibit plurality neutralization. There is some skewing in the direction predicted by Klimov 1983a—stative-active languages exhibit plurality neutralization more often than not, unlike the other two alignment types—but it is not significant (p ~ 0.25; lumpings were no closer to significance). The same skewing can be seen in the New World, but even lumpings do not approach significance. Table 44 shows the interaction of plurality neutralization with head/dependent type. There is clear skewing: languages with predominantly dependent-marking morphology lack plurality neutralization by about two to one, while languages with predomi-

Correlations of Structural Types with Grammatical Categories 149

nantly head-marking morphology have plurality neutralization by about two to one. The difference is highly significant. (The same asymmetry holds within the New World and is borderline significant, but the frequencies of dependent-marking languages there are too low for the results to be very reliable.) It can be concluded that head/dependent marking is significantly correlated with plurality neutralization, but alignment is not.

4.4.4. Discussion. The implication of the part-of-speech hierarchy and the correlation with head/dependent type is that number is highly prone to be drawn off the noun and marked by agreement, primarily on the verb but sometimes also on a determiner or plural word (and rarely if ever on an attributive adjective). It is striking that number should easily be drawn off

of nouns, because number was defined for purposes of this survey as singularity/duality/plurality of arguments, which is an inherent category of nouns. Even when the mechanical effects of morphological type are removed (by surveying only languages with nonzero H and D entries in the clause), languages display a clear tendency to mark number not on the

noun that bears it lexically and logically but on another member of the constituent. Table 43. Alignment and plurality neutralization (languages with nonzero D and H) Plurality neutralization

Alignment Yes No Total

Accusative 45 Ergative 23 8 62214

Stative-active 7 68 29 Total 38 30 56% 44% p < 0.25 Table 44. Head/dependent type and plurality neutralization (languages with nonzero D and H) Plurality neutralization

Yes No Total

Head marking 7 0387 Double, split 26 12

Dependent marking 10 19 29 Total 43 31 74 p < 0.005

Head marking 5 |012 5 Double, split 11 Dependent marking 2 3 5

New World languages only

Total 18 4 22 p < 0.025

150 Chapter Four The preferred direction of number agreement is headward: number is frequently marked on the verb, and if the verb has any agreement at all it is

highly likely to have number agreement. But only a minority of languages—-27—_have number agreement in modifying adjectives in NP’s, where the agreement goes from head to dependent. There is only one lan-

guage in my sample that has verb agreement in some category but not in number: West Futuna (Oceania), which has agreement in person but not number. Maidu (North America) has number agreement in the first person only.’ It is quite common for verbs to agree in number with nouns lacking overt number marking: this is explicitly described for Lakhota, Ineseno, Mangarayi, Nootka, and Tepehua, and can be inferred for other languages having number agreement in the verb and optional or restricted number marking on nouns. Such patterns might better be spoken of as involving ATTRACTION of a category from one member of the constituent to another. Specifically, they involve attraction of number from a dependent to a head. Number attraction seems to go only in this direction, from dependent to

head. I have found no examples of the opposite directionality, where a modifying adjective attracts number from its head noun. (The 27 languages with number in modifying adjectives have agreement, not attraction.) Gen-

der attraction, in contrast, can go in either direction: in languages where the nouns do not bear overt gender marking, gender appears on verbs (attraction to head) and on modifying adjectives (attraction to dependent). The only instance of hierarchy reversal in my corpus occurs in the dual in Nunggubuyu: the plural is not marked on inanimate nouns but is overt on

the agreeing verb (consistent with the hierarchy), while the dual can be overt on any noun (animate or inanimate) but is not marked in verb agreement (a hierarchy reversal). Here we have lack of agreement, and also lack of attraction. While I have not surveyed categories such as distributive, collective, etc., the evidence that happened to come up indicated that these categories have the same tendency toward attraction, especially when they are marked

: by reduplication. Cross-linguistically they seem to occur most often on predicates. Andrade’s discussion of Quileute, a language which uses reduplication to mark a distributive for both nouns and verbs, describes what seems to be the common cross-linguistic state of affairs: “It is difficult to predict what word or words will be reduplicated when the sentence connotes distribution. On the whole we notice that an abstract concept involved in a unit of thought is more liable to be reduplicated than the more concrete ones which integrate such a unit” (1933: 190-91). There follow three examples where nouns referring to more than one individual, and hence logical candidates for distributive reduplication, are unreduplicated

Correlations of Structural Types with Grammatical Categories 131

while reduplication appears on the predicates, as well as one example where both noun and verb are reduplicated. Plurality neutralization in personal pronouns is rare. The sample languages that do not distinguish number in independent pronouns are Kiowa, Axininca Campa, Jagaru, and Piraha; Miskito and Canela-Kraho use plural words to mark the NP. However, personal pronoun roots which do not distinguish number and require plural affixes for the plural categories are not uncommon. A good many languages of the New World and Australia, and several in Asia, have no pronominal root distinction for number, pronoun roots distinguish person only, and nonsingular personal pronouns are transparent combinations of the roots and plural or dual affixes. In Washo, the independent pronouns are (Jacobsen 1964 : 445):

] lé: lési léw

person singular dual plural

inclusive lésisimiw léwhu 2 mi: misi 3(object) (subject)geo gicgési gisi géw giw

where /-, m-, and g- are first, second, and third person pronominal morphemes and {-i:} is the generic pronominal root. In Lakhota the independent pronouns are (Boas and Deloria 1939: 78):

singular inclusive plural

] miyé ‘ykiye ‘ykfye-pi 23 niyé niyé-pi ‘iyé ‘iyé-pi where -pi is the plural affix (it is also illustrated in 84.4.2 above). In Dieguefio the independent personal pronouns are (Langdon 1970: 145):

singular plural

?on’awup 2l ?on ma:a:mon’awup where ?- and m- are the first and second person morphemes respectively. Other languages exhibiting such patterns include Inesefio (in part), Karok, Lakhota, Tonkawa, Yurok, Maung. Most such languages exhibit some plurality neutralization in nouns. A language which uses affixal number

152 Chapter Four marking on its personal pronouns and exhibits some plurality neutralization in nouns is very explicitly following the hierarchy of Silverstein 1976. It treats number as an inflectional opposition everywhere, and it marks it regularly only in personal pronouns and in high-ranking nouns. A language in which number is a root category in personal pronouns, so that, for instance, “I” and “*we”’ are expressed by unrelated roots, insists even more strongly on the ranking of personal pronouns at the top of the hierarchy: number is a root category for the pronouns at the top of the hierarchy, an inflectional category for the next segment of the hierarchy, and unavailable at the low end of the hierarchy.

4.4.5. Conclusions. Klimov’s observation that stative-active languages tend to have a weakly developed category of number was correct for his sample, but I found no correlation between dominant alignment and plurality neutralization. There is some skewing between alignment and plurality neutralization, but it is an artifact of the correlation of head/dependent type and alignment (§3.2), which is itself due to the correlation of head/dependent type with plurality neutralization, which is strong. There are two good predictors of plurality neutralization, for which the correlations are highly significant: head/dependent type and geography (Old World vs. colonized areas). The correlation with head/dependent type is not surprising, and in fact its very statement flirts with circularity: the head-marking type involves marking on verbs, and it favors plurality neutralization, which usually involves number marking on verbs instead of nouns. The correlation with geography, which is more significant and not obviously motivated by the nature of the categories in question, is to be taken as the stronger of the two predictors. The macroareal distribution is the same as for inalienable possession and inclusive/exclusive: infrequent in the Old World, frequent in the New World, and even more frequent in the Pacific.

4.5 Nonfinite Verbs Klimov 1977 observes a tendency for stative-active languages to lack in-

, finitives, and Koptjevskaja-Tamm 1988 : 82 finds that the languages lacking action nominals (verbal nouns) are either isolating or head-marking. Although I did not survey nonfinites systematically for the entire sample, the implication of what data I did collect is that Koptjevskaja-Tamm’s statement applies to infinitives as well. Languages in my sample lacking infini-

tives and verbal nouns are either isolating languages, which lack the

Correlations of Structural Types with Grammatical Categories 153

inflectional morphology to form them, or head-marking languages. Not all head-marking languages lack infinitives and verbal nouns, and not only

head-marking languages lack them, but it appears that, of languages having substantial inflectional morphology and hence equipped with the morphological means to form them, only head-marking languages systematically lack nonfinites. In their place they use ordinary finite forms. Since Stative-active languages are predominantly of the head-marking type, my observation is consistent with, but more general than, that of Klimov. It is, however, only an observation. Until more systematic testing is done, the claim that head marking favors lack of certain nonfinite verbal forms can be offered only as a hypothesis.

4.6 Voice and Valence-Affecting Operations Valence-changing operations such as passives and antipassives affect and are limited by the core argument functions of subject and object, and are generally assumed to have some correlation with alignment type; at least the antipassive has been identified with the ergative alignment, and ergative languages have been claimed to lack passives (but see Jacobsen 1985 for antipassives and their distribution). It may be that language families are fairly stable with regard to whether they prefer valence-raising or valencelowering devices (Nichols 1982), so there is reason to study the interaction of valence-changing processes with typological properties known to be stable, as well as any possible areal connections. Some of the typological generalizations about voice types made in the literature are questionable because they lump together structurally distinct operations (as 1s argued by Hewitt 1982; Dixon 1979), so there is need for a cross-linguistic survey which uses strict structural definitions of categories. Valence-changing devices can be used to characterize language areas (Masica 1976: 40ff. uses causative and detransitivizing morphology to characterize large areas of

Eurasia), so there is reason to survey their geographical distribution worldwide. For the languages in my sample I surveyed valence-affecting processes that meet two conditions: they are regular, that is, they are inflectional, derivationally productive, or applicable to an open class of verbs; and they are morphological, that is, marked by affixation, cliticization, or stem change in the verb. I looked for standard valence-increasing and valence-lowering processes, classifying them according to whether they affect an agent (A),

a direct object (O,), or an indirect or second object (O,), and whether they add that argument (+) or remove or demote it (—). (I do not distinguish

154 Chapter Four between true removal of an argument and demotion.) Five patterns are attested, four of which have one or more standard labels in the literature: Process Standard terms

+A causative; sometimes factitive —A passive; impersonal passive +O, (no standard term; transitivization by addition of direct object)

—O, antipassive

+O, applicative, indirective, benefactive, etc.

For most of the comparisons to follow, +O, and +O, are lumped together as +O, to simplify the comparison of object-affecting and valence-raising processes (and also because O, and O, are in complementary distribution cross-linguistically as targets of valence-affecting rules: see Dryer 1986, Blansitt 1984). Determination of whether a valence-changing operation is inflectionally regular, productive, etc., is notoriously difficult. Grammars vary considerably in whether and how they describe valence-affecting operations and in the attention they give to distinguishing regular from minor categories. Therefore the data used in this section and the conclusions drawn from it are probably the least clean and the least reliable of any in this book. 4.6.1. Frequencies. The frequencies of the various valence-changing processes by area are shown in table 45. The commonest process is the causative (+A), with the passive (— A) a close second; antipassives (—QO) are distinctly infrequent. There are pronounced differences between areas in the frequency of A-affecting and Oaffecting processes. Overall there is a preference for A-affecting processes, which outnumber O-affecting processes almost three to one (190:69). No

area reverses this preference, but Eurasia shows a much greater predominance of A-affecting operations than expected, while in New Guinea

and Oceania the O-affecting processes are nearly as frequent as the Aaffecting ones. 4.6.2. Types of voice systems. I will use the term VOICE SYSTEM to refer to

the set of valence-affecting operations found in a given language. Not all possible combinations of valence-affecting processes are attested, so not all possible voice systems exist; and not all attested systems are equally

frequent. The possible systems, and the number of languages exhibiting them, are shown in table 46. (The languages are listed in appendix 4.) The following two subsections deal with correlations between the kind of

Correlations of Structural Types with Grammatical Categories 155

system and the typological features of alignment and head/dependent marking.

4.6.3. Voice and alignment. Various correlations between valenceaffecting operations or voice systems and dominant alignment type were tested. The only trend to emerge as even borderline significant is between Table 45. Valence-affecting processes, by area

Area —A +A —O +0 Mode

Africa 11East 14343 050 +A Ancient Near -A=+A

Europe & Caucasus —A Northern Asia 9 98 26 20 0-A=+A

S & SE Asia 2 6 0 0 +A New Guinea 2 82127 +A +A Australia 7 10

Oceania 4 6 3 6 +A W North America 18 23 5 12 +A

E North America64710 +A Mesoamerica 3 l46+A

South America 5 9 l 3 +A

Old World 8 5 +A +A Pacific 13 33 2438 6 15

New World 33 49 25 +A Total 79 111 241045

Note: Totals are number of patterns, not number of languages. (Many languages have more than one valence-affecting process.)

Table 46. Types and frequencies of voice systems (languages are listed in appendix 4)

+A 27 —A 9 +A 35 +A, 13l —A,+0 —0

System No. of languages

+A, —0 28 +A, —0 +A, +0 17 +A, +0 80 +A, +0 —A, +0 ]

+0 3 —0 3 +0 0 None 3 Unknown, uncertain 43

156 Chapter Four increase or decrease and alignment. It is shown in table 47. There was no valid correlation between A-affecting vs. O-affecting systems and alignment. It appears that the ergative alignment type may favor —O operations and disfavor +O operations, and that it may favor systems affecting only O at the expense of those affecting both A and O. Both inferences are dubious in that in the statistical tests the behavior of the ergative is the primary contributor to a significance level that is technically invalid because of the low frequency of ergative examples. More reliably, nonaccusative alignment favors systems which only increase valence, and accusative alignment disfavors such systems. Most generally, nonaccusative alignments are associ-

ated with restrictions on the directionality of valence change; and the ergative type may additionally be associated with restrictions on the argument affected by voice oppositions. Thus the stative-active and (especially) ergative alignments can be regarded as marked (in the Prague sense) relative to the accusative alignment, in that they are much more prone to be restricted by other grammatical categories.

The following categories display no particular correlations and can hence be regarded as unmarked: the accusative alignment; A-affecting operations; systems which both decrease and increase valence; and, to a lesser extent, systems with operations affecting both A and O.

4.6.4. Voice and head/dependent marking. There is a borderline correlation, shown in table 48. It appears that the dependent-marking type favors systems which affect only A or only O and disfavors systems which affect both A and O. Only the dependent-marking type displays such correlations, and it can therefore be regarded as the marked type in the Prague sense. There are no evident correlations involving the increasing or decreasing of valence.

Table 47. Valence-increasing (+) and decreasing (—) voice systems and alignment

Acc Erg St-A Total

+ only 19* 10 gee 37 — only 8 4 O*** 12 Both + and — 45 9 7 Total 72 23 15 11061 p< 0.10 * Expected: 24 ** Expected: 5 *** Expected: 2

Correlations of Structural Types with Grammatical Categories 157 Table 48. A-affecting and 0-affecting voice systems and head/dependent marking

(2/S = double split)

Head 2/S Dependent Total

A only 22 17231* 70 0Total only 4 Both A and 0 22 16 12**7 50 45 35 47 127 p ~ 0.10 *Expected: 26 **Expected: 18

4.6.5. Discussion. It is not clear what inclines a language to display +A or — A as its sole valence operation; both kinds of systems are well attested, and there is no correlation with either alignment or head/dependent mark-

ing. +A is relation-changing in an accusative language (where the causee must be demoted from its former subject position) but not in an ergative language (where the causee changes from S to O with no change in morphosyntactic status), yet languages having only +A include not only ergative languages which otherwise lack relation-changing rules (Chechen) but also accusative languages which otherwise lack relation-changing rules (dialects of Nanai, other Tungusic languages not in this sample). Grammars of languages having only +A sometimes describe causatives as having functions which are equivalent to passives (e.g., Lorimer 1935: 205, comparing the “active causative”’ of Burushaski to the “‘passive causative”’ of

other languages of the area), and there 1s the well-known semantic closeness : of he got himself shot and he was (or got ) shot. Perhaps it is fairly arbitrary whether a language chooses +A or —A as its sole valence-affecting operation; either one can acquire a wide range of voice functions. It is also not clear why dependent-marking languages should favor systems which affect only A or only O and disfavor systems affecting both A and QO. It cannot be simply that dependent-marking morphology is illsuited to expressing multiple voice oppositions, for dependent-marking

languages show voice systems containing both valence-increasing and | valence-decreasing processes with exactly the expected frequency. Regular or inflectional antipassives have often been held to be peculiar to ergative languages. Jacobsen 1985 shows that they are not restricted to ergative languages, and this survey has shown that they are in fact fairly common in accusative languages, although their frequency there is somewhat less than expected (12 observed, 14 expected). Their frequency in ergative languages is higher than expected (7 against 4). An additional cor-

158 Chapter Four relation emerges when we look simultaneously at alignment and head/ dependent marking. Antipassives can be found in ergative languages regardless of head/dependent marking (e.g., Dyirbal, dependent-marking; Basque, double-marking; Tzutujil, head-marking), and they can be found in languages with two-place verb agreement regardless of alignment type (accusative languages with subject-object agreement and antipassives are Hanis, Takelma, Washo, Yurak Samoyed, Fula, Maasai, and Nasioi; also Tepehua, hierarchical on an accusative base). Antipassives are rare in accusative languages that lack object agreement. The only examples in my sample are Zyrian and Ponapean, and for both of them a histor1cal explanation is available for the aberration. Zyrian belongs to a language stock (Uralic) for which object agreement can be reconstructed, and many of the daughter languages still have it (e.g., Yurak Samoyed in my sample). Ponapean belongs to a stock (Austronesian) with strong tendencies toward ergativity (Chamorro, in my sample, ts ergative in dominant alignment) and some object agreement (Tawala, in my sample). Perhaps

the antipassive in both of these languages is retained from an earlier stage when either the alignment or the marking of clause arguments was different. Generalizing over these patterns, we can state that antipassives are asso-

ciated with languages in which the O is central to clause morphosyntax: ergative languages, where the O takes the unmarked case, and those accusative languages in which there is agreement with the direct object (=O). It is thus observationally true, as traditionally maintained, that the antipassive is associated with ergativity; but the causal factor is evidently not the ergative alignment per se but the special structural status of the O which is basic to ergativity. There are few languages which have —O as their only valence-affecting

device: Chukchi, Dyirbal, and perhaps Yukulta are the only examples in my corpus. All are strongly ergative, not only morphologically but also syntactically, and this supports the traditional association of antipassives with ergativity. Only three languages (all in New Guinea: Awtuw, Hua, Kate) have +O as their sole device, and no language has both +O and —O but no operations on A. Thus half of the languages having only O-affecting valence operations have specifically an antipassive and no other voice; and most languages with only O-affecting operations are ergative, and strongly so (Chukchi, Hua, Kate, Dyirbal, Yukulta). Antipassives are found in nonergative languages in conjunction with some other voice, but tend to stand alone only in ergative languages. Logically, one would expect strongly ergative languages to show exclu-

Correlations of Structural Types with Grammatical Categories 159

sively O-affecting voice systems with about the same ease as accusative languages show exclusively A-affecting voice systems; but in fact we do not find this kind of symmetry. A-affecting operations are the unmarked type, common and apparently unrestricted; O operations are less common and more restricted. The unmarked status of A-affecting valence operations presumably has to do with the fact that most of the world’s languages—the great majority of ergative languages and probably all languages of other alignments—are syntactically accusative. Voice systems evidently serve syntax rather than morphology, and the cross-linguistic preference for A-affecting systems reflects the cross-linguistic preference for accusative syntax. Of the correlations tested here, those involving alignment have clear motivation (O marking, accusative syntax), while those involving head/dependent marking lack clear motivation (why should dependent-marking languages prefer voice systems that affect only A or only O but not both?). Geography, as mentioned in §4.6.1, also influences valence-affecting operations. It should be cautioned that there may be gaps and inconsistencies in the descriptions of voice systems and valence-affecting processes which vitiate

~ some of the above conclusions, since many of them are based on the assumption that a category not described for a language is indeed missing in it. Table 46 shows that descriptions of valence-affecting operations are missing for many languages. The percentage of languages for which grammars lack descriptions of voice varies from area to area, with the lowest success rates (highest percentage of languages in the “Unknown” category) coming from North America and Australia.

4.7 Case Case is of course correlated with head/dependent marking by definition: case is dependent marking. Klimov 1977 correctly observes that languages of the active type tend to lack case; in my terms, stative-active languages are almost all radically head-marking (as shown in §3.2), and this is a more general claim than Klimov makes.

4.3 PP’s Presence or absence of PP’s is not correlated with any type feature surveyed here. Chapter 6 will show that it is correlated with geography in much the same way as the other grammatical categories just described.

160 Chapter Four

4.9 Conclusions The correlations described in this chapter may be summarized as follows:

Feature Primary limiting or predicting factor(s) Inalienable possession Head/dependent marking (and, indirectly, alignment); geography

Inclusive/exclusive Geography

Gender Geography; head/dependent marking; alignment Plural neutralization | Geography; head/dependent marking

Nonfinites Geography; head/dependent marking and alignment, both with restrictions

PP’s Geography Voice Alignment

Case Head/dependent marking (by definition) The strongest limiting or predicting factors, then, are geography (which limits 6 of the 8 features) and head/dependent marking (which limits 5). Alignment seems to predict only two features: gender and voice. (It is correlated with a third, inalienable possession, but this correlation was argued to be the accidental result of primary correlations with head/dependent marking and geography, which are themselves associated with alignment.) Generalizing over sections 4.3 and 4.4, we can rank inherent nominal and pronominal categories for their propensity to be drawn off the noun or pronoun and marked in separate words or on head-marked verbs: Gender (most prone to be marked by only detachment or agreement) Number Person _— (never marked by only detachment or agreement)

Correlations between locus of marking and category of agreement or classification are shown in table 49. We have seen a number of structural patterns that are regulated by lexical features of nouns, typically agreement-triggering nouns. The lexical features turn out to be segments of one and the same hierarchy. The structural patterns and the lexical categorizations are as follows. ( ““>’’ marks hierarchical ranking; “|”’ marks categorical cut-off points where there is no cross-linguistic tendency to extend and form a hierarchy. ) Inalienable possession:

kin term > _ part-wholeterm>... body part Plurality neutralization:

kin term > human noun > animate noun > body part >. . .

Correlations of Structural Types with Grammatical Categories. 161

Macrogenders: human noun > animate noun | other

Covert animacy systems: human noun > animate noun | other Combining these hierarchies, we have an obvious implicational hierarchy:

_ kin term > human noun > animate noun... which replicates part of the hierarchy of Silverstein 1976. Body-part nouns are involved in the hierarchy as well, although they do not occupy aconsis- _ tent cross-linguistic position on it: for inalienable possession they share the top position in inclusive disjunction with kin terms (Nichols 1988); for plurality neutralization they may, but need not, be inserted together with or

just after kin terms; they seem not to appear at all in macrogenders and covert animacy systems. The appearance of body parts in the inalienable. possession hierarchy is quite obviously motivated: body parts, like kin terms, are usually used with possessors, hence there is heightened likelihood of closer binding or formal fusion of possessor to kin term or body part, and closer binding or formal fusion is the essence of inalienable possession. The appearance of body-part nouns in the hierarchy for plurality neutralization is not so obviously motivated. Chappell and McGregor 1989 point out that inalienable possessors are less individuated than alienable possessors; but if the top of the inalienable possession hierarchy receives special treatment because it is less individuated, surely the top of the plurality neutralization hierarchy (which comprises the types of nouns that do not show neutralization of number oppositions) must be receiving special treatment precisely because it is most individuated. Table 49. Locus of marking and category of agreement or classification Category

Locus Person Number Gender Animacy Case

On the noun itself X XXXXxX Separate word in NP Xx Adjective in NP X X x* Demonstrative in NP X X x* X Head noun in NP X X Xx Dependent noun NP X X X Adposition X XinX

Verb X XXX Anaphoric pronoun X X? X x = Occurs in sample. * Certain only for Slavic (Russian in this sample; see Mel’éuk 1980).

162 Chapter Four The special treatment of the most animate nouns in macrogenders and/ or covert animacy systems is probably the consequence of cognitive sali-

ence, and perhaps the same can be said of the plurality neutralization hierarchy as well. The hierarchy for inalienable possession is, as just noted, quite different. Overall, then, it can be said that different semantic or pragmatic prin-

ciples motivate these four hierarchies. The fact that virtually the same nominal hierarchy nonetheless enters into all of them is powerful evidence for the universality of the hierarchy of Silverstein 1976.

Diachronic Stability: Genetic and Areal :

5.0 Design of Survey We have seen that there are considerable differences in the frequency, structural distribution, and grammatical autonomy, and hence in the relative markedness, of the various grammatical features. It can now be asked whether structural unmarkedness corresponds to diachronic stability, and if so whether that stability is a matter of inheritance or areal consistency. To answer that question, this chapter compares the relative stability of features in genetic vs. areal groupings. The genetic and areal groups used here are shown in table 50. The genetic groups comprise all the groups at roughly the stock level for which the overall sample contains three or more members representing family-level branchings. There are eight such stocks in the sample: Afroasiatic, Niger-Kordofanian, Uto-Aztecan, an extended Penutian (California Penutian plus Klamath-Sahaptin), Indo-European,

Uralic-Yukagir, Pama-Nyungan, and Austronesian. (Of these, NigerKordofanian, Uralic- Yukagir and extended Penutian each represent a stock and its most likely sister, and both groupings are subscribed to by a good

number of specialists, though not all. The other groups are standard stocks.) There are additional genetic groups for which only two members are found in the sample (e.g., Algic, represented by Cree and Yurok), but they are not surveyed in this chapter. There are three groups of three or more members which are regarded as genetic groupings by some specialists but which are not included here because their status is more controversial and I assume they are not genetic groupings: Nilo-Saharan, Khoisan (both in Africa), and Hokan (in North America). Since diachronic change is at issue, all genetic groups used here consist of synchronically coexistent languages, specifically modern ones only: Hittite is removed from the 163

164 Chapter Five Indo-European group and Akkadian is removed from Afroasiatic, for this chapter only. The overall sample contains eight areal groupings comparable in size (three to eight languages) to the genetic groupings: some of the residual and spread zones described above (Ethiopia and Kenya, Near East, Europe, the Caucasus, Oceania, Mesoamerica) plus three others specially extracted for this chapter: the Southeastern U.S., Interior Siberia, and the North Pacific coast of Asia. The Ancient Near East is included among the areal groupings, since its languages are all synchronic with each other. The basic question to be asked about each grammatical feature is in which kind of grouping—genetic or areal—it shows more consistency on

the whole, and in which kind it shows more diversity. Four measures of central tendency and divergence are used: mean, range (maximum — minimum values of a feature within a group), and standard deviation of feature values or type frequencies, and the percentage of languages in a group departing from the modal type. Although the genetic and areal groupings are comparable in size, the areal groupings are slightly larger (the mean numbers of languages are 5 and 6 respectively, as shown in table 50). Thus there is some danger that any instance of greater divergence in areas than in families is artifactual, due wholly to the higher number of languages in areas. This danger was removed by taking an adjusted sample in which the oversized areal groupings are reduced (by random excision) so that the genetic and areal groups each contain the same number of groups of the same size and are strictly comparable. The results are virtually identical to those based on the unadjusted sample, with the putatively artifactual trends if anything strengthened, and this shows that the trends are real and not artifactual.

_ 5.1 The Number of Gross Types per Group The basic data for this and the next section will be taken from table 50. The

three-way distinction of each typological feature into three gross types, presented in §3.0, gives us an easy and consistent basis for comparison: for each feature it can be determined how many of the three possibilities are attested in the stocks and in the areas. To further facilitate comparability and statistical manipulability, the three gross types have been assigned arbitrary numerical values of 1, 2, and 3 as shown in table 51 below. The numerical values are arbitrary, but not (or not entirely) random: insofar as

possible, they are based on the correlations established in chapter 3. In table 50, head/dependent types are shown as proportions multiplied by ten:

Diachronic Stability: Genetic and Areal 165 Table 50. Genetic vs. areal stability

H/D type Complexity Alignment Word order Raw means

No. Raw Gross Raw Gross Gross Gross Com-

STOCKS Igs. rg. s.d. no. s.d. rg. s.d. no. s.d. no. s.d. no. s.d. HD plexity

Afroasiatic 4 2 07 2 #04 2 #O8 1 00 1 #00 2 04 7.0 11.8 Niger-Kordofanian 6 7 2.4 3 0.7 #7 2.2 3 0.6 1 0.0 2 0.5 5.8 7.3 Indo-European 5 5 16 2 04 5 2.1 2 0.5 2 0.4 3 06 7.8 9.4 Uralic-Yukagir 4 1 05 2 O5 3 #411 2 #05 1 #00 2 04 65 10.5 Pama-Nyungan 6 3 14 1] 0.0 5 16 2 0.5 2 0.4 2 0.4 8.7 9.7 Austronesian 50 9.0 7.5 Uto-Aztecan 46 58 28 2.332O8 0.526O08 2.4 21 04 0.43107 0.02 2#402 05 3.3 Penutian + 5 4 13 2 04 5 212 405 2 #04 2 10 7.8 10.6 Mean 50 44 16 21 05 44 16 19 04 16 0.2 21 05 65 9.5 AREAS

Ethiopia& Kenya 6 2 0.7 2 O04 3 #12 2 405 1 00 1 406 7.2 11.0

Near East 5 3 12 2 05 8 29 2 #204 3 #O5 1 00 58 12.4 Caucasus 5 8 3.0 2 0.8 5 2.1 2 0.5 3 0.7 2 04 5.8 10.4 Europe 5 5 18 2 O05 8 26 2 #O5 2 04 3 06 7.0 10.4 Interior Siberia 6 4 12 2 05 4 #16 2 #05 2 04 1 #420.2 67 10.8 N. Asia Coast 5 10 45 2 10 9 33 3 O07 2 O04 1 402 54 7.2

Oceania 7 9 2.7 3 06 7 #20 3 #05 3 06 2 04 51 7.4 Southeastern US. 6 3 1.1 1 O00 10 3.1 3 #07 2 OFS 1 00 0.7 6.0

Mesoamerica 9 5 2.0 2 0.4 11 2.9 3 0.6 3 0.6 2 0.8 13 £64

group. |

Mean 60 54 2.0 20 05 72 24 24 05 23 05 16 04 50 9.1

DIFFERENCE: Areas minus stocks

Average 10 11 04-01 01 28 08 06 O01 0.7 0.2 -0.6 -0.1 -1.5 -0.4 Note: rg. = range; s.d. = standard deviation; no. = number of different gross types represented in the

type 7 = proportion 0.7, type 3 = proportion 0.3, etc. This is done so that head/dependent type will fall in the same order of magnitude as the other features, facilitating direct comparisons of features. Some lumping of categories was necessary to produce three-way breakdowns into gross types for all four features. Accusative and neutral dominant alignment are grouped together as accusative, in this chapter and nowhere else; the other lumpings used in the tables (stative-active and hierarchical; VOS and VSO as verb-initial; etc.) have been used above as well. The grouping of accusative and neutral obscures some diversity but has no impact on the conclusions to be drawn below. There is one stock, NigerKordofanian, for which the dominant alignments include both accusative (majority of languages) and neutral (minority), and no others, but counting this group as having two alignments rather than one would have only minimal impact on the totals in the tables.

166 Chapter Five Table 51. Numerical values of gross types Feature

Numerical

H/D type Complexity Alignment Word order value

Head- Low Stative-active, Verb-initial l

marking hierarchical

split neutral

Double, Medium Accusative, Verb-medial 2

DependentHigh Ergative Verb-final 3 marking 5.1.1. The number of gross types in stocks. Table 50 shows, for each feature, the number of different gross types represented in each stock (e.g., for dominant alignment, Indo-European displays two types: accusative, found in most languages, and ergative, found in Waigali) and the standard deviation of the arbitrary numerical values assigned to types (e.g., for dominant alignment, Indo-European has types 2, 2, 2, 2, and 3 [2 = accusative, 3 = ergative] and a standard deviation of 0.4). The standard deviations for the individual stocks, the average standard deviations for all stocks, and their ranges, are fairly similar and fairly low for all four gross type features, showing that within-stock variability for all four features is about equally strong. Comparing the average number of gross types per stock for the four features yields the hierarchical ranking shown in table 52. Two metrics are used here—the mean number of gross types per stock and the product of number of stocks and number of types per stock—and both yield the same hierarchical ranking: dominant alignment shows the greatest stability in genetic groupings, head/dependent type and word order the least. 5.1.2. The number of gross types in areas. As for stocks, the standard deviations and average standard deviations in number of types are fairly similar and fairly low for areas, again showing that within-group variability is at comparable levels for all four features. The hierarchy of features based on the same metrics used above yields approximately the reverse ranking, shown in table 53. Word order is the most consistent feature in areas, head/ _ dependent type and alignment intermediate, and complexity least stable.

5.1.3. Stocks vs. areas. The almost complete reversal of the hierarchy in tables 52 and 53 shows that these four features, and especially dominant alignment and word order, are in complementary distribution: dominant alignment is genetically stable and not greatly susceptible to areal spread,

Diachronic Stability: Genetic and Areal 167

while word order is not particularly stable in families and is highly susceptible to areal spread. More generally, the sole syntactic feature, word order, is genetically less stable and more prone to areal spread than the other three features, which are morphological; extrapolating from this finding, it can ‘ be said that morphology is genetically more conservative than syntax. The Difference row at the bottom of table 50 gives a more direct comparison of families and areas, but confirms the same hierarchies. A positive number in this row indicates that stocks have more uniformity than areas; zero indicates equal variability; a negative number indicates that areas have more uniformity than stocks. Looking at the entries for gross types in the

row of averages, we see the following hierarchy (‘‘»”’ indicates a larger break):

Most genetic Most areal Alignment » Complexity » Head/dependent marking » Word order

Complexity is the only feature for which no area exhibits only one type; word order is the feature for which the most areas (five) exhibit only one Table 52. Hierarchy of features based on number of gross types per stock

I 2 3* Index Feature of pertypes stock types Mean no. No. of stocks having

Alignment 1.6 42351l 15 13 Complexity 1.9 H/D type Word order 2.1 2.1 05 72l 17 17

Note: Index = no. of stocks X no. of types (i.e., labels < entries for columns 3—5: in the . first row, (1 x 4) + (2 X 3) + GB X 1) = 13). * Niger-Kordofanian, which has accusative and neutral alignments, is counted as having one type. If it is counted as having two types, the entries for alignment are 3, 4, and 1 and the index is 14. Table 53. Hierarchy of features based on number of gross types per area

l 2 3* Index Featureof pertypes area types Mean no. No. of areas having

Word order2.0 1.6I47312 18 16 H/D type

Alignment 2.30lm) 4 44 21 Complexity 2.4 23

* Ethiopia & Kenya, which has accusative and neutral alignments, is counted as having one type. If it is counted as having two types, the entries are 0, 5, and 4 and the index is 14.

168 Chapter Five type, and the only one for which no stock has only one type. Looking at the individual groups, we see that those that have the highest number (three) of gross types for complexity (stock: Niger-Kordofanian; areas: North Asia

coast, Oceania, Southeastern U.S., Mesoamerica) generally have the lowest average raw complexity (see the last two columns in table 50). The converse correlation (few complexity types and high average complexity), however, does not hold: of the two groups (Afroasiatic and Austronesian,

both of them genetic) having only one gross type of complexity, Afroasiatic has a very high average complexity while that of Austronesian is very low. The best interpretation of this situation seems to be the following:

If a language family is basically isolating, i.e. has very low complexity, areal pressure can easily promote the development of morphological complexity in some members of the family; such a family will exhibit two or three different complexity types, but a low average complexity reflecting the predominant and historically original situation. If, on the other hand, a language family has a good deal of morphological complexity, areal pressure may change the form and function of the morphology but will not easily reduce its level. This interpretation is consistent with that to be given in §8.3.6, to the effect that in the kind of contact situation found in residual

zones and other areas of diversity languages are likely to increase their complexity (e.g., by cliticization) and unlikely to decrease it. In tables 52 and 53, for both the mean number of types and the index the range is less for stocks than for areas, and the difference lies chiefly in the fact that the range extends higher for areas. This means that differences in genetic stability are small compared to differences in areal consistency. Of course, there are more areal groups (9) than stocks (8), so the index for areal groups is naturally higher. If, however, the index is divided by the number of groups, there is still little overlap. Thus the difference in ranges is not artifactual. The implication is that even the relatively less stable features in genetic groups nonetheless have, in absolute terms, fair genetic stability.

5.2 The Magnitude and Variety of Raw Types per Group Figures on the range of raw types per group are shown in the first columns under Head/dependent type and Complexity in table 50, and in the total ranges for raw means in head/dependent type and complexity (the last two columns of the table). Only for head/dependent marking and complexity do we have raw types that can be expressed numerically and compared to give an additional perspective on genetic vs. areal variability. Unlike the num-

ber of gross types, for which the scale ranged from one to three for all

Diachronic Stability: Genetic and Areal 169

features, raw head/dependent type and raw complexity have different scales and hence cannot be compared to each other. The only valid comparison that can be made is between areas and families for a single feature. Complexity is slightly higher in stocks than in areas. For head/dependent marking, there is clearer and more telling difference between stocks and areas: the average raw type of stocks is 6.5 and that of areas 5.0. That is, stocks fall in the dependent-marking range while areas fall in the range of double/split marking. The average for the areas is close to that of the entire sample, 4.7; hence it can also be said that genetic groupings tend to favor dependent marking and/or disfavor head marking relative to the world’s languages as a whole. Consistent with the average figures, two areal groups but no genetic groups have average types falling within the head-marking gross type (Mesoamerica and Southeastern U.S.). There do, of course, exist stocks whose type is head-marking. Uto-Aztecan is barely in the head-marking type with an average head/dependent proportion of 3.4 (table 50 shows 3.3 because of rounding). Algonquian-Ritwan is a radically head-marking stock; it is not included among the stocks surveyed here because, following Berman 1982, I regard its Ritwan branch as a single family, so it could not contribute the required minimum of three languages to the sample. If, as is plausible, Ritwan were regarded as a twofamily branch and both Yurok and Wiyot included in the sample (presently only Yurok is), we would have a three-member stock of which all three members are of the polar head-marking type. The claim that stocks are not head-marking while areas can be head-marking would then become statistical rather than categorial, but the basic asymmetry would stand. There are family-level groupings which are consistently head-marking: Algonquian, Iroquoian, Mayan, Northwest Caucasian, and Siouan are examples. All higher-level groupings with predominantly head-marking structure present problems with either their genetic unity (e.g., Hokan) or their subgrouping (Algonquian-Ritwan). On the other hand, there are a number of stocks with predominantly dependent-marking morphology: Indo-European, Uralic, Afroasiatic, Pama-Nyungan, and California Penutian are examples. In short, the solid genetic groupings of head-marking languages are shallower than the solid groupings of dependent-marking languages; solid deep groupings are often dependent-marking and rarely

head-marking. It is unlikely to be the case that sheer time depth disfavors head marking. Rather, it must be that head/dependent type has some effect on the applicability of the comparative method and/or on our interpretation of its results. That is, dependent-marking morphology must not

hinder, and probably assists, detection and reconstruction of stock-like genetic groups using standard comparative-historical methodology; while

170 Chapter Five head-marking morphology must not assist and probably complicates com-

parative reconstruction at stock-like time depths. Some of the ways in which head-marking morphology erodes what is generally regarded as critical comparative evidence are summarized in chapter 8. Or it may be that head-marking stocks do exist but they look like families to us; that (even if they erode some of their own best evidence) they are sufficiently conservative overall that we underestimate their age. For both of head/dependent marking and complexity, the range of raw types (not shown on table 50) is greater in areas than in stocks. This shows that these two features are more stable genetically than areally, even though one of them, head/dependent marking, appeared less stable in $5.1. It supports the conclusion given at the end of §5.1.3, that all four features have fair or better absolute genetic stability.

5.3 Conformity to Majority Type Features 5.3.1. Departures from modal type. Table 54 shows the modal types, 1.e., those displayed by the majority or plurality of languages within a group, for the four features, as well as the percentage of languages within a group which show nonmodal types. The results generally support the hierarchies above, and they show again that dominant alignment is strongly familial while word order is strongly areal. The Mean row for each kind of group shows the average number of departures from the mode for each feature. The higher the number, the less the stability. Ranking these numbers for stocks yields the following hierarchy of genetic stability:

Genetically most stable Genetically least stable Alignment » Head/dependent marking » Complexity » Word order The same procedure yields the following hierarchy for the areal groupings:

Most areal Least areal

Word order >» Alignment >» Head/dependent marking » Complexity These hierarchies generally agree with those established in §§5.1—5.2. Alignment is primarily genetic, word order primarily areal. Complexity 1s

neither strongly genetic nor strongly areal. Head/dependent marking is moderately genetic and not areal. The Difference rows in table 54 indicate the relative strength of familial vs. areal stability for the four features. Again, a negative number indicates

a feature which is more areal than familial. The features can be hier-

Diachronic Stability: Genetic and Areal 171 Table 54. Conformity to majority type within groups

H/D type Complexity Alignment Word order No. Modal Departures Modal Departures Modal Departures Modal Departures

STOCKS Igs. type No. % type No. % type No. % type No. %

Afroasiatic . 4 D 1 25 H OO 0 A _ QO 0 3 25 Indo-European 5 D 1 20 H 2 400 A 1 20 2 2 40 Uralic-Yukagir 4 0* 0*M* 2* 33 A EO10173 31 |25 Pama-Nyungan 6D 17 Niger-Kordofanian 6 D 3 50 M 2 33 A OO 0 2 2 33

Austronesian 64 ***** MM 0O1 02AA3050.1 I 25 17 Uto-Aztecan 0 1 l Penutian 5 D 1 20 M 2 400 A 1 20 =* *

Total 30.8l 013 1.3 l 26 Mean 5 1.2“**” 23 1.3 24 AREAS

Ethiopia & Kenya 6 DH1 I1720* *= A 0* 03.3 (0 #0 00 Near East 5 2 2 40 * Caucasus 5 2D40 2 400 H 2A401 *20* 23 2I 20 Europe 5 2 H 2 40 400 Interior Siberia 6 «6* * * * A 1 l7 3 0 N. Asia Coast 543 DM 2 40 * *AA 31 43 20 1«31014 0 Oceania 7 2 3 2 29 Southeastern U.S. 6 H 0 0 L 3 50 * * 3. C0 0

Total | 31.732400.8 12 Mean 6 1.8“**” 30 2.3 37 Mesoamerica 9 H 2 22 M 4 44 A 4 44 1 3 33

Total “*” —2 2 11 3 —0.5 —1 —14 Mean I 0.6 7 1.0 13 0.9 DIFFERENCE: Areas minus stocks

*no mode.

archized as follows (‘‘||” marks the cut-off point between negative and positive differences):

Number and percentage of departures from mode:

Most genetic Most areal Complexity » Alignment >» Head/dependent marking || Word order This hierarchy supports those given earlier. In general, alignment and complexity are strongly genetic, word order strongly areal, and head/dependent marking moderately genetic and moderately areal. Word order is the only feature that is completely consistent, emerging as either most areal or least genetic of every ranking given here.

172 Chapter Five 5.3.2. Absence of clear modal type. The ‘**”’ entries in table 54 show groups lacking a modal type in one or another feature. These entries tell us two things. First, it can be assumed that the greater the number of groups lacking a modal type, the less the stability of the feature. Second, the entries reveal something about the relative usefulness of the three-way break-

down for individual features. For a feature that is scalar, like head/ dependent proportions (which range from 0.0 to 1.0, or 0 to 10 as entered here), and whose three-way breakdown into gross types is based on curving and segmenting the range, a group of languages could fall into two gross types yet actually be highly consistent. If a group of four languages

has two languages with head/dependent proportion 0.20 and two with 0.38, it will be counted as having no modal type since the break between head-marking and double/split-marking types is set at 0.33. Yet this group is internally more consistent than one whose types range from 0 to 0.33, though the latter all fall into the same gross type. A group could lack a modal type in either of two ways: by having (e.g., in a four-language group) two languages of each polar type (two headmarking and two dependent-marking), or by having two of a polar type and two nonpolar (two dependent-marking and two double/split). The cases of nonmodality for head/dependent marking and complexity involve mostly a polar and a nonpolar type, but one case of each involves two polar types. For alignment it is difficult to say which types are polar. The Old World groups with no mode in alignment (the Near East and the Caucasus) both have even splits between accusative and ergative; the Southeastern U.S. has accusative and stative-active. The only instance of nonmodality in word order involves V.. . and. . . V, but only one language of each type (and several of unknown order), so it can be disregarded. Thus the pattern of “‘*’’ entries indicates that word order and alignment, _ the two features actually involving three discrete types, are well measured by the three-way breakdown. Head/dependent marking and complexity are features for which the three-way breakdown obscures some consistency, but for these the ranges of raw types can be measured (as they were in table 50). The instances of nonmodality support the general findings that alignment is strongly genetic and word order strongly areal.

5.3.3. The nature of discrepancy in scalar features. As just discussed, head/dependent marking and complexity are scalar properties for which the breakdown into three gross types is somewhat arbitrary. As might be ex-

pected, scanning the relevant entries in appendix 2 shows that language groups containing more than one type for these features tend to show types which are adjacent on the scalar breakdown. (This is a survey of all entries,

Diachronic Stability: Genetic and Areal 173 not just those for features lacking a modal type.) Most of the group-internal

discrepancies in head/dependent type involve adjacent types: head and double marking (Uto-Aztecan; Mesoamerica), double and dependent mark-

ing (Afroasiatic, Indo-European, Uralic-Yukagir, Penutian; Ethiopia & Kenya, the Near East, Europe, Interior Siberia). The polar types do not often cooccur in groupings, but when they do it is more often in areas: two stocks (Niger-Kordofanian and Austronesian) contain both head-marking and dependent-marking languages, while three areal groupings (the Caucasus, North Asia coast, Oceania) do. This indicates that head/dependent marking has a kind of stability which is not well revealed in the three-way breakdown into gross types, and that this stability may be more genetic than areal. For complexity the picture is similar, but clearer. One genetic grouping (Niger-Kordofanian) and four areal groupings (Oceania, North Asia coast, Southeastern U.S., Mesoamerica) contain languages of both high and low complexity. Complexity thus has distinct genetic stability by this measure. For both features, most groups showing both polar types also show the nonpolar type (double/split marking or moderate complexity). For head/ dependent marking this holds for both genetic groups but only one areal group (Oceania); for complexity it holds without exception for both genetic and areal groups. By this measure, head/dependent marking emerges as genetically stable but not areal; complexity is both genetic and areal. Only for head/dependent marking do we see groups comprising only the opposed polar types, and they are both areal.

5.4 Test for Artifactuality of Results As mentioned in §5.0, there is some chance that the various respects in which areas show greater variability than stocks are artifactual: the areas tend to contain a larger number of languages, which increases the chances that more types will appear in the sample. This risk applies to all trends determined by counting the number of gross types or range of gross types

in groups; it does not apply to those based on percentages. To check whether results are artifactual, I repeated the non-percentage-based comparisons using an adjusted sample in which both the number and sizes of groups were identical for areas and families. The adjustment procedure involved pairwise matching of genetic and areal groups for size; removing the unmatched, largest areal group (Mesoamerica); then taking pairs which were close but not identical in size and removing the alphabetically latest language from the areal group to equalize the size. The findings reported above also obtain for this adjusted sample. Thus the results reported so far

174 Chapter Five are not artifactual. The next section deals only with percentages of gross types and runs no risk of artifactuality.

5.5 Selected Grammatical Categories 5.5.1. Voice and valence-changing operations 5.5.1.1. Directionality of valence changes. To determine whether the propensity to prefer valence-increasing or valence-decreasing derivations is genetic or areal, I performed two counts. The first looked at the difference between the number of valence-increasing and valence-decreasing derivations in each language in order to compare the extent to which groups prefer to have only one direction of valence change. The results are shown in table 55. Here and below I use the following terminology: a UNIDIRECTIONAL system is one which contains only valence-increasing, or only valence-decreasing, operations, and a BIDIRECTIONAL system contains at least one of each. Table 55 shows the extent to which groups are predominantly unidirectional or bidirectional, and whether or not the unidirectional systems within a group are all of the same direction (all valence-increasing, or all valence-decreasing, or some of each). In general these results show that the direction of valence-changing operations is more stable in genetic stocks than in areas. It is unusual for all languages of a group to uniformly prefer one direction of valence change (patterns 1 and 3); there is only one such group, it is a genetic group (PenuTable 55. Valence-changing directionalities exhibited by groups

1. Increase predominates in all languages

Genetic ] Penutian

Areal 0

2. Increase predominates in some, others are bidirectional

Genetic 2 Uto-Aztecan, Niger-Kordofanian

Areal 1 Southeastern U.S.

3. Decrease predominates in all languages

Genetic 0

Areal 0

4. Decrease predominates in some, others are bidirectional

Genetic 3 Indo-European, Uralic- Yukagir, Pama-Nyungan Areal 4 Ethiopia & Kenya, Europe, Interior Siberia, North Asia Coast 5. All languages bidirectional

Genetic 1 Afroasiatic

Areal 1 Near East

6. Increase predominates in some, decrease in others, still others are bidirectional

Genetic 1 Austronesian

Areal 3 Mesoamerica, Caucasus, Oceania

Diachronic Stability: Genetic and Areal 175

tian), and the direction it favors is valence increase. More common is a pattern where the languages of a group either prefer one direction or are bidirectional (patterns 2 and 4); there are two such sets of languages, one with more genetic groups and one with more areal groups. Patterns 1 through 4 all indicate a distinct group-internal preference for one or the other directionality, and of the groups showing such patterns genetic groups slightly outnumber areal groups (6 genetic groups, 5 areal). Groups in which all languages use both directions (pattern 5) are evenly divided between genetic and areal. Groups in which some languages prefer one di-

rection and some prefer another (pattern 6) are primarily areal (3 areal groups, 1 genetic). Patterns 1—5 indicate consistency of one or another kind within groups, and pattern 6 indicates considerable inconsistency. Genetic groupings slightly outnumber areal groupings in patterns 1—5 (7 to 6), while areal groupings predominate in pattern 6. The frequencies are too low and the margins too close to be anything but suggestive, but they do imply that inconsistency in valence is associated with areal groups and con-

sistency with genetic groups, and hence more generally that valencechanging operations have fair genetic stability. The second count tabulates the number of departures from the majority directionality within groups (this is the same counting technique used for table 54 above). The results are shown in table 56. There are a number of respects in which genetic groupings have less internal variety than areal groupings. (a) The mean percentage of departures from the majority type is higher for areas (28%) than it is for stocks (24%). (b) Two areas, but no stocks, have no modal type. (c) Only one stock has nonzero entries in both ‘+ only’ and ““— only,” but two areas do; i.e., there are more areal than genetic groupings in which two different kinds of unidirectionality are attested. (d) More areal groups (3) than genetic groups (2) have exclusively bidirectional systems.

There are two respects in which genetic and areal groupings behave alike. (e) The numbers and percentages of groups with only valenceincreasing or only valence-lowering operations are very nearly the same. (f) Neither kind of grouping has any zero entries for “‘both”’; that is, all groups, regardless of type, have some languages with bidirectional systems. (g) Unidirectional modal types are rare, and bidirectional ones frequent, for both. (h) The few unidirectional modal systems are valencedecreasing for both kinds of groups. There are no respects in which areas show less variability than families. Again the sample is too small, and the margins too close, to permit any

firm conclusions to be drawn. These correlations should be tested on a sample designed for the purpose and containing more groups and more rep-

176 Chapter Five Table 56. Conformity to preference for valence increase (“‘+”’), decrease (“‘—’’), or both within groups (the mean is that of the percentages for stocks or areal groups, not of the individual languages)

Number of languages with Departures STOCKS + only -—only _ both Modal type No. %

Afroasiatic 0 0]40 both 0 Niger-Kordofanian 3 both 0 l 25

Indo-European 0044|both — | 0200 UralicYukagir 0 Pama-Nyungan 0| 234both both 32 50 33 Austronesian 2 Uto-Aztecan both2l 40 25 Penutian 2 0l 03 3both

Mean , 24 Total zero entries 4 (50%) 5 (62%) O 2 AREAL GROUPS

Ethiopia & Kenya 030both 6 both00 00 Near East 0 0 Caucasus 60 Europe2 ]02 3no 2modal — type 2 40

Interior Siberia O| 04 5both bothl 0200 N. Asia coast 0 Oceania 3 02 0 42 noboth 3type43 Southeastern U.S. modal 50 Mesoamerica 2 J 5 both 3 37 Total zero entries 5 (56%) 5 (56%) O 3

Mean 28 resentatives of each group. What has emerged here can be suggested only as a hypothesis: in general, as regards increase and decrease of valence, genetic groupings will be no more diverse, and sometimes less diverse, than areal groupings; thus this aspect of valence is somewhat genetic.

That said, it can also be noted that bidirectional voice systems are strongly favored over unidirectional ones (points f and g above), and valence-increasing and valence-decreasing systems are about equally favored in both types of groups. These may then be universal tendencies. It can also be noted that the most popular type of system, and the commonest core for more elaborated systems, consists of passive and causative operations only. The kind of system displayed by most modern Indo-European languages, in which there are only valence-decreasing devices, is unusual. Indo-European is the only genetic group in which this is the majority type, and the only area in which it is the plurality type is Europe, which is of

Diachronic Stability: Genetic and Areal 177

course dominated by Indo-European languages. Thus the limited extent to _ which this type of system has any areality (see (h) above) must be due to the presence of Indo-European languages.

5.5.1.2. The argument affected by valence changes. Table 57 shows the conformity to preferences for A-affecting, O-affecting, and A- and Oaffecting valence-changing operations. There are few differences between genetic and areal groupings. Genetic groupings have a higher percentage of

departures from the mode; they prefer A + O (“‘both’’) systems, while areas prefer A systems. The percentages of departures are not high for e1ther genetic or areal groupings. There are universal tendencies which outweigh areal and genetic tendencies: a strong preference for A-affecting over O-affecting voice types, and in particular a strong dispreference for systems containing only O-affecting operations (no grouping of either type has this as its modal system). Table 57. Conformity to preference for A-affecting or 0-affecting valence changes

Number of languages with Departures STOCKS A only OQonly _ both Modal type No. %

Afroasiatic 4 l00 30both A 0] 250 Niger-Kordofanian

Indo-European 5no0modal 0 A type , O 50 0 Uralic-Yukagir 2 0 2 Pama-Nyunganl |442both 0 A 22 33 33 Austronesian Uto-Aztecan both 2‘I 40 20 Penutian 2 0] 033both

Mean 25

Total zero entries 0 6 (75%) 3 (38%) 2 AREAL GROUPS

Ethiopia & Kenya ] A0] 20 Near East 3 0500 A 0

Caucasus Europe 4 50 0l 0AA1 0200

Interior Siberia 4l00| A A ]| 20 20 N. Asia Coast 4 Oceania l 0 6 both 1 14

Mean 20

Southeastern U.S. 2 3 0 20no modal type 50 Mesoamerica 5 both 2 37 Total zero entries 0 8 (89%) 3 (33%) 2

178 Chapter Five 5.5.1.3. Summary. The directionality of valence-affecting operations shows some stability in groups, but the argument affected does not. Stability involving the direction of valence change is primarily genetic rather than areal.

5.5.2. Inclusive and exclusive. Table 58 shows the extent to which genetic and areal groups tend to be consistent as to whether they do or do not have an inclusive/exclusive distinction. Genetic groups are much more stable than areas: the 12% departure rate is the lowest found for any feature surveyed here (dominant alignment, the next lowest, has 13%: see table 54). The difference between genetic and areal groupings is 9%, about average in comparison to the differences on table 54 (which range in absolute value from 7 to 14 percentage points). Evidently more important than genetic vs. areal determination is an interesting macroareal effect: both genetic and areal groupings exhibit more consistency in inclusive/exclusive oppositions if they are located in the Old World than if they are located in the Pacific or the New World. The percentages of departures are much lower in the Old World, as shown on table 58, and in addition the number of groups with zero departures is high in the Old World and low elsewhere. In 34.2 we saw that the frequency of inclusive/exclusive oppositions in areas was systematically different for Old World and colonized areas; now we see that not only the frequency but the very stability of inclusive/exclusive oppositions is dependent on geography. Specifically, the higher the frequency of inclusive/exclusive oppositions within an area, the greater the inconsistency within both genetic and

areal groupings. Thus the groupings whose modal type is “yes’’, i.e., groupings in which most languages have the opposition, show less consistency than those with “‘no’’. For inclusive/exclusive oppositions this is a

mechanical result of the geographical distribution—groupings whose modal type is “‘yes”” come from the areas in which frequency of inclusive/ exclusive oppositions is high—but for some of the other categories about to be discussed, “‘yes” vs. “no” modes give clearer results than geography.

: 5.5.3. Plurality neutralization. Plurality neutralization is tabulated only for languages with nonzero head and dependent marking in the clause, and the number of such languages in most genetic and areal groups was too small to give meaningful results. The same geographical correlation could be observed, however. A special ad hoc count of plurality neutralization including languages with some zero marking gave the same results.

Diachronic Stability: Genetic and Areal 179 Table 58. Inclusive/exclusive: Departures from modal type Departures

STOCKS Modal type No. %

Afroasiatic No 0 Niger-Kordofanian No0l 17 Indo-European . No No 00 0 0 UralicYukagir Pama-Nyungan Yes 2 33

Austronesian Yesl 0250 Uto-Aztecan No Penutian Yes l 20

Total zero entries 4

All stocks 12 Old World stocks Pacific stocks 174

Means

New World stocks 23 Stocks with ‘“‘yes” mode 18

Stocks with “no” mode 8

AREAS

Ethiopia & Kenya No 0 1 17 Near East No 0

Caucasus No l020 Europe No 0 Interior Siberia No l 17 N. Asia Coast No2l 29 25 Oceania Yes Southeastern U.S. No 2 40

Mesoamerica Yes2 4 44 Total zero entries

All areas 21

Means

Old World areas 14 -New Pacific areas 29 (n = 1) World areas 42 Areas with “‘yes”’ mode 36 Areas with “no” mode 19

5.5.4. Inalienable possession. Here the areal groupings are more consistent than the genetic groupings. The New World groups, and groups with ““yes’’ mode, are again less consistent. Table 59 gives the data. 5.5.5. Noun classes. Here the genetic groupings are more consistent. The inverse geographical correlation appears with the same structural correla-

180 Chapter Five Table 59. Inalienable possession: Departures from modal type Departures

STOCKS Modal type No. %

Afroasiatic No ] 25

Niger-Kordofanian no mode Indo-European No 03 50 0

Uralic- YukagirYes No Il 25 Pama-Nyungan 17 Austronesian Yes 2 33 Uto-Aztecan Yes2l 40 25 Penutian Yes Total zero entries l

All stocks 27 Old World 25 Pacific 25 New World 33

Means

Stocks mode 17 29 Stocks with with “‘yes”” “‘no”’ mode

AREAS

Ethiopia & Kenya 17 Near East NoNo2 l40

Caucasus No 0 0 Europe No 0 0 Interior Siberia Yes 2 33

N. Asia Coast No 14 00 Oceania Yes Southeastern U.S.No Yes3233 33 Mesoamerica Total zero entries 3

All areas 19 Old World 15 Pacific 14 (n = 1) New World 33

Means

Areas mode 15 27 Areas with with “‘yes”” ‘‘no”’ mode

tion: where frequencies are higher (this time in the Old World), inconsistency is greater. Table 60 gives the data.

5.6 Summary The areal and genetic stability of the features surveyed here can be summarized as follows.

Diachronic Stability: Genetic and Areal 181

Dominant alignment: High genetic stability.

Complexity: Both genetic and areal; somewhat more genetic than areal. Head/dependent marking: Both genetic and areal; somewhat more genetic than areal.

Word order: Little genetic stability; highly areal.

Voice: Directionality of valence-changing processes has some genetic stability. Argument affected is determined by universals.

Inclusive/exclusive: High genetic and moderate areal stability. Stability of either type is contingent on geography, and on frequency: higher frequency implies lower stability.

Plurality neutralization: Neither kind of stability is high. Stability contingent on geography and frequency. Results could be due to chance.

Inalienable possession: Low genetic and moderate areal stability. Stability contingent on geography and frequency.

Noun classes: High genetic and moderate areal stability. Stability contingent on geography and frequency.

There is a sizable literature on word-order change and areal spread of word-order tendencies, and it is no surprise to see word order emerge as a strongly areal and weakly genetic feature in this survey. There is also a literature on alignment change, against which the stability of dominant alignment found here may appear surprising. In part this difference must be due to the fact that the literature on alignment change uses a variety of defi-

nitions of the alignment types and describes not only morphological but also syntactic alignment and focuses on grammatical relations as much as morphological paradigms, while the technical notion of dominant alignment as defined here is somewhat different from standard notions and primarily morphological. The directionality of valence-changing processes shows some correla-

tion with alignment, as determined in §4.6.3, but there is no evident motivation other than the abstract structural tendency for marked types to

show more restrictions than unmarked types: marked alignment types (stative-active, ergative) show restrictions on the directionality of valence change. Whatever functional or structural motivations may eventually be demonstrated for directionality of voice, it is fairly persistent in language families. Whether it is A or O that 1s affected by voice operations is clearly

182 Chapter Five correlated with both alignment and head/dependent marking (§4.6.3) and based on syntactic universals (§4.6.5), and because it is so dependent on other features it behaves no differently in genetic than in areal groupings and is fairly stable in both. Sometimes it is difficult to distinguish between genetic and large-areal stability. The distinctive predominantly valence-decreasing voice system of Indo-European languages is an areal feature of Europe and the Caucasus, Table 60. Noun classes: Departures from modal type Departures

STOCKS Modal type No. Jo

Afroasiatic Yes 0 0 Niger-Kordofanian no mode 3 50

Indo-European Yes 2040 UralicYukagir No 0 Pama-Nyungan No 1 17 Austronesian No No 00 00 Uto-Aztecan Penutian No 0 0 Total zero entries 5

All stocks 13 Old World 22 Pacific 8 New World 0)

Means

Stocks Stockswith with“‘yes”” “‘no’’ mode mode20 3

AREAS

Ethiopia & Kenya Yesl 220 33 Near East Yes

Caucasus No2] 40 20 Europe No

Interior N. AsiaSiberia Coast No No l0170

Oceania No 2 29 Southeastern U.S. No 2 Mesoamerica No 0330

Total zero entries 2

All areas 21 Old World 22 Pacific 29 (n = 1) New World 16

Means

Areas with “‘no”’ “yes” mode Areas with mode 27 20

Diachronic Stability: Genetic and Areal 183

and although its areal distribution is now due to the domination of this area by Indo-European languages, historically it may have arisen as an areal feature in Indo-European. An inclusive/exclusive distinction is inherited, but the likelihood that a family will have it is strongly macroareal, as discussed in §§4.2 and 6.5. The relation between macroareal and deep genetic stability of features will be discussed again in chapter 6. For all four of the features inclusive/exclusive, plurality neutralization, inalienable possession, and noun classes, lower frequency of the feature is

associated with higher stability. That is, a tendency—be it areal or genetic—for one of these features to cluster will be stronger, even absolute, if the tendency is a negative one; but where presence of a feature characterizes a group, the members of the group will be less consistent in exhibiting it. Now, areal linguists and stock specialists seeking ways to characterize or define their groups generally seek positive features. Negative features are sometimes proposed, especially for areas (Jakobson 1971c proposes lack of tone oppositions as a Eurasian feature; Campbell, Kaufman, and Smith-Stark 1986 propose non-verb-final word order as a Mesoamerican feature; lack of an infinitive is a standard Balkan feature), but this

is probably less common. The findings presented here on inclusive/exclusive, etc. suggest that negative features may be better diagnostics than positive features: a group characterized by a positive feature will be less consistent with regard to that feature than one characterized by lack of a feature. To propose this principle as a general one for areal and historical linguistics will require substantial generalization beyond the four features for which it has been demonstrated here.

The Role of Geography: Structural Affinities between Areas

6.0 Types and Areas The preceding chapters have shown that in many cases the relative frequencies of linguistic structures can be attributed to their basic unmarkedness or grammatical stability, to universal correlations between structures, and to

diachronic stability of one type or another. But to a considerable extent geography is also a determinant of frequencies and hence of linguistic types, and there is a clear geographical component to a number of instances of structural stability. To isolate the geographical contribution we must compare geographically-based populations of languages in their relative frequencies of features that have demonstrable stability in such populations. The linguistic stocks of a continent-sized area are likely to include some that bear deep genetic connections to each other, connections too deep to be detectable by standard comparative method; and some that are not genetically related at any time depth but have deep-seated areal connections to each other as a result of millennia on the same continent. Since the comparative method is valid only for time depths up to about 10,000 years, in principle it cannot tell us whether any two stocks of a continent-sized area are ultimately related or not, and thus in principle it cannot tell whether features shared by several stocks in a continent are ultimately inherited. The features most revealing of geographical distribution are those that

have considerable diachronic stability of two types: they are genetically stable, so we know that their occurrence in several stocks is not a matter of recent convergence; and they have at least some areal consistency, so we know that their frequency in an area is not wholly contingent on genetic relatedness of languages. The ideal features would in addition be those 184

The Role of Geography: Structural Affinities between Areas 185

most likely to be transferred from substrate to superstrate language in cases of substratum contact; given this information, we could be relatively confident that they would persist in areas even when new languages spread into

the area. In addition, the most revealing features will have what I will call a large SCALE OF GEOGRAPHICAL PATTERNING. The scale of geographical pattern-

ing is the size of the areal unit—local, subcontinental, continental, larger than continental, global—within which the geographical distribution of a feature displays some clear and describable pattern. For example, it was established in chapter 4 that nominal classes tend to cluster areally and form hotbeds which are generally smaller than continental in size. This is then a feature whose scale of geographical patterning is subcontinental. On the other hand, the frequency of inclusive/exclusive oppositions in pronouns formed a clear pattern only at the global level: it increases from area to area on a cline going from west to east, and with a clear distinction between Old World and colonized areas. This is a feature whose scale of geographical patterning is global. Features having fair or better grammatical stability, moderate or better genetic stability, fair to moderate areal consistency, and a scale of patterning continental or larger in size can give a good picture of the long-standing affinities and disparities among large areas. They can be used in much the Same way as genetic markers are used to assess affinities and divergences among biological populations, and I will speak of them as structural (or typological) MARKERS for this reason. Of the structural features surveyed here, the best candidates for structural markers are head/dependent marking, alignment, inclusive/exclusive pronouns, plurality neutralization, and PP’s. Complexity, word order, inalienable possession, noun classes, and numeral classifiers each lack one of the desiderata but are nonetheless geo-

graphically revealing. This chapter describes the distribution of these markers across the sample areas and macroareas, proposes some informal dialect-geographical and population-typological methods for describing

and interpreting their distribution, and uses them to draw conclusions about the peopling of the world and deep linguistic prehistory. Tables 61 and 62 give data used in the next two sections. In this chapter, a 12-way breakdown of sample areas is used, with Northern Eurasia separated into Europe (including the Caucasus) and Northern Asia, and North America broken down into western and eastern parts. Establishing structural affinities or nonaffinities between areas means establishing that any similarities or dissimilarities are greater than would be expected from chance. Several different techniques for measuring de-

gree and significance of resemblance will be employed here. First, the

186 Chapter Six Table 61. Means and frequencies of head/dependent marking and complexity, by area

Area

Gross types H/D type TT mean D 2/S HComplexity Mean

Africa 0.64 122 34 0312.2 7.9 Near East 0.58 Europe & Caucasus 0.646633 2l 10.0 Northern Asia 0.60 9.2 S & SE Asia 0.79 8 l l 7.2 New Guinea 0.49 7 82 910.1 7.1 Australia 0.65 7 10 Oceania 0.50 2 4 l 7.1

W North America America 0.35 7l 09 11 16 7.7 E North 0.11 6.7 Mesoamerica 0.13 0 2 8 6.2

SouthWorld America34 0.33 l 577 7.8 Old 14 Pacific 16 22 12 New World 9 16 42 Total 59 52 61 All languages 0.47 8.0 (34%) (30%) (35%)

Residual zones

Ethiopia & Kenya 0.71 51] 010.4 11.0 Caucasus 0.58 3 l N Asia Coast 0.56 48 l2210.5 7.9 N Australia 0.51 1] California 4 5 7.9 Total 180.45 15510 (35%) (23%) Mean of zonal (42%) means 0.56 9.5

Near East 0.58 2 3 0 12.2 Europe 0.70 3 3 0 10.2

Spread zones

Central Australia 9.6 Oceania 0.500.88 2 46 ]l 07.1

Interior North America 0.12 l 0 7 7.1 Mesoamerica 2 8 6.2 Total 14 0.13 13 016 (33%) (30%) (37%)

Mean of zonal means 0.49 8.7

Note: Majority types for each area are boldface. Entries in “All languages” row are not column averages but means for the 174-language sample.

chi-square test is reliable where affinities can be described in terms of the frequencies of features in various areas, and where the actual frequencies are high enough to give the minimum expected frequencies required by the chi-square test. Second, for some of the comparisons to be given in 86.8, frequency curves will be segmented at breaks of two or more standard de- :

The Role of Geography: Structural Affinities between Areas 187

viations, and significant resemblance will be judged to hold within the groupings thus derived. Third, the test of Dryer 1989a will sometimes be employed in conjunction with the chi-square test. Dryer’s test involves counting the frequencies of structural features in areas (e.g., the number of languages having verb-final, verb-medial, and verb-initial word order in each of the areas) and comparing the areas to see whether they all have the same modal type (is verb-final order in the majority in all continents?). It Table 62. Dominant alignment by area Alignment

Area Acc + Neut Erg StAct

Africa 19 0 0 Near East 2 2 ] Europe & Caucasus 6 3 l1 | Northern Asia 9 1 S & SE Asia 6 3 l New Guinea 19 6 0l Australia 8 8 Oceania 4 2 i W North America 22 4 E North America 3 0 76

Mesoamerica 59 21 14 South America Old World 42 9 24 Pacific 31 16 New(of World 39 32 7 18 Total 172) 112 24 (65%) (19%) (14%)

Caucasus 2 2 l N Asia Coast 6 1 0 N Australia 6 2 l Ethiopia & Kenya 6 0 0

Residual zones

California 12 0 2 Total 32 5 4 78% 12% 10%

Near East 2 2 1 Europe 5 1 0 Oceania 4 2 l Central Australia 1 6 05 Interior North America 1 0 Mesoamerica 5 28 1 Total 18 13

Spread zones

(46%) (33%) (21%)

Note: The second most frequent alignment for each area is boldface. Based on both clear and unclear cases of dominant alignment. The total of 172 represents the languages with entries for dominant alignment in appendix 2.

188 Chapter Six

12 2 4 10 ] 3 658 0l 2 2

Table 63. Distributions required for significance on the test of Dryer 1989a

Maximum departures Minimum departures

No. of possible for goodness required for divergence

areas of fit at p = 0.05 at p = 0.10

3 not testable l

is assumed that the chances of exhibiting or not exhibiting the crosslinguistically most common feature (e.g., verb-final order) are binomially distributed, and a trend is significant (and hence a candidate for a universal of human language) if the run of “‘yes’’ answers has the conventional 0.05 or less chance of occurring randomly. So used, Dryer’s test is a goodnessof-fit test, one that measures the significance of resemblance. Here it will be used, instead, to measure significance of divergence. The procedure is the same, but the cut-off points in the binomial distribution are different. Table 63 shows the critical values required for Dryer’s test, as both goodness-of-fit and significance-of-divergence test, for various numbers of

sample areas. ,

Fourth, Kendall’s correlation coefficient test (a test of correlations between sets of data) will be employed as a retest of the correlations found by other means. A graphic presentation of some of the inter-areal affinities and other geographical distributions is given in maps 3-12.

6.1 Head/Dependent Marking and Alignment Table 64 applies chi square and Dryer’s tests to the data on head/dependent

' marking and alignment to determine the divergences and affinities both within and between the sets of areas. For both head/dependent marking and alignment, differences within the sample as a whole are highly significant, whether assessed for all areas or

only for continents. This shows that both head/dependent marking and alignment have distinct areality in their distribution. The fact that significant differences arise between continents suggests that the scale of geographical distribution for both features is continental or somewhat greater in size: if the scale were much smaller, the differences would tend to even out and high levels of significance would not be achieved. Within macroareas the differences are generally not significant, while they are significant between macroareas. This shows that the scale of distribution is close

The Role of Geography: Structural Affinities between Areas 189

to macroareal: the macroarea is the level within which areas are fairly consistent among themselves but have a distinct individual profile as a set. The main contributors to significance for head/dependent marking are the high frequency of dependent marking in Africa and Eurasia, the high frequency of double/split marking in Australia, and the high frequency of head marking in the New World areas. In chapter 2 it was shown that the distribution of alignment can be described as involving a universal preference for the accusative, plus preferences for ergative or stative-active as second most frequent—preferences which are larger than continental in their scale of geographical distribution,

to judge from the fact that ergative is favored throughout Eurasia and stative-active throughout the New World. Maps 7 and 8, which plot the location of the ergative and stative-active languages in the sample, show that this statement can be refined. The ergative plot (map 7) shows three clusters: a diffuse one centering in the Near East and Caucasus, one in AusTable 64. Significance levels for difference in frequency of H/D type and alignment, by area and type of area

H/D type Alignment

x? Dryer x? Dryer Differences within the sample as a whole

12 sample areas