Academia.eduAcademia.edu
ALT 2017 ANU COMPARABILITY IN TYPOLOGY Greville G. Corbett Thanks to the AHRC and the ARC (CoEDL) 1 A “parable” • Fahrenheit • his contribution: • accurate measurement • consistent across devices • But the scale: three points of calibration • freezing brine • freezing water • body temperature Source: www.thehistoryblog.com/archives/19606 2 The logical end point 0 Kelvin Source: http://www.livephysics.com/tools/thermodynamicstools/temperature-scales-conversions/ Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Thomson,_1st_Baron_Kelvin 3 Kolmogorov • Questions (1956) What exactly do we mean when we say that two words are in the same case? How many cases does the Russian language possess? (Report and analysis: van Helden 1993: 138) 4 An easy one: the Russian genitive Kolmogorov’s questions are demanding We’ll measure first within Russian, and then across languages (same technique) Let’s take an “easy” part of his problem. Everyone says Russian has a genitive: knig-a otc-a book-SG.NOM father-SG.GEN ‘father’s book’ Timberlake (2004: 205) “Possessors that are nouns are expressed in the genitive, and are placed after the possessed noun …”. 5 An easy one: the Russian genitive Everyone says Russian has a genitive -a knig-a otc-a knig book-SG.NOM father-SG.GEN ‘father’s book’ knig-a mater-i mater-i book-SG.NOM mother-SG.GEN ‘mother’s book’ What is there to measure? the marker -a is not uniquely genitive (-a is used elsewhere) the genitive is not always realized as -a 6 An easy (?) one: the Russian genitive And, even given a noun that realizes the genitive with –a, this may not be uniquely genitive: knig-a otc-a book-SG.NOM father-SG.GEN ‘father’s book’ knig-a mater-i book-SG.NOM mother-SG.GEN ‘mother’s book’ ja viž-u 1SG see-1SG ‘I see father’ ja viž-u 1SG see-1SG ‘I see mother’ otc-a father-SG.ACC mat´ mother[SG.ACC] Where to measure from? What would be the end point? 7 Where is the baseline/zero/canonical point? • Uniqueness: • one form one meaning: -a (or whatever) realizes genitive only • one meaning one form: genitive is realized by -a only • Canonical approach (compare Corbett 2015) 8 Russian nouns: syncretism ‘father’ ‘mother’ ‘magazine’ SG PL SG PL SG PL NOMINATIVE otec otcy mat materi žurnal žurnaly ACCUSATIVE otca otcov mat materej žurnal žurnaly GENITIVE otca otcov materi materej žurnala žurnalov DATIVE otcu otcam materi materjam žurnalu žurnalam INSTRUMENTAL otcom otcami materju materjami žurnalom žurnalami LOCATIVE otce otcax materi materjax žurnale žurnalax 9 Differences within Russian otec ‘father’, mat´ mother’ (no unique genitive) Russian nouns žurnal ‘magazine’ (unique genitive) Russian nouns, calculated from Zaliznjak’s 1977 dictionary: of 37678 nouns, 24% do not have a unique genitive with thanks to Dunstan Brown 10 Archi cases (non-spatial) baˤkʼ ‘ram’ ABSOLUTIVE ERGATIVE GENITIVE DATIVE COMITATIVE SIMILATIVE CAUSAL COMPARATIVE PARTITIVE SUBSTITUTIVE SG PL baˤk’ beˤk’-iri beˤk’-iri-n beˤk’-iri-s beˤk’-iri-ɬːu beˤk’-iri-qˤdi beˤk’-iri-šːi beˤk’-iri-χur beˤk’-iri-qˤiš beˤk’-iri-kɬ’ena baˤk’-ur baˤk’-ur-čaj baˤk’-ur-če-n baˤk’-ur-če-s baˤk’-ur-če-ɬːu baˤk’-ur-če-qˤdi baˤk’-ur-če-šːi baˤk’-ur-če-χur baˤk’-ur-če-qˤiš baˤk’-ur-če-kɬ’ena unique marker across number Chumakina, Brown, Quilliam & Corbett (2007: vi), and sources there 11 Russian and Archi Russian Russian Archi Unique across lexemes Archi Unique across features 12 So how do Russian pronouns shape up? 1 2 3 SG PL SG PL SG F PL NOMINATIVE ja my ty vy ona oni ACCUSATIVE menja nas tebja vas ee ix GENITIVE menja nas tebja vas ee ix DATIVE mne nam tebe vam ej im INSTRUMENTAL mnoj nami toboj vami eju imi LOCATIVE mne nas tebe vas ej ix NEVER a unique genitive 13 Russian and Archi Russian pronouns Russian nouns Archi Unique across lexemes 14 Back to Russian nouns: competition knig-a otc-a book-SG.NOM father-SG.GEN ‘father’s book’ (genitive) knig-a pap-y book-SG.NOM Dad-SG.GEN ‘Dad’s book’ (genitive) pap-in-a Dad-POSS-F.SG.NOM ‘Dad’s book’ knig-a (possessive adj) book(F)-SG.NOM Competition: Familiar? Yes, but with pronouns: my vs of me Here the competition has limited venues, e.g. singular only 15 Frequency of use of the possessive adjective overall East Slavonic Russian Belarusian Ukrainian South Slavonic Slovene Serbo-Croat West Slavonic Polish Czech Slovak situations of choice 10% 36% 23% 22% 65% 49% 66% 52% 98% 93% 3% 51% 42% 6% 94% 83% Ivanova (1975, 1976), Corbett (1995: 271) 16 Frequency of use of the possessive adjective 100% 90% 80% 70% 60% 50% 40% 30% 20% 10% Sl ov ak h Cz ec h Po lis Se r bo -C ro at e Sl ov en Uk ra ini an ar us ian Be l Ru ss ia n 0% overall situations of choice Ivanova (1975, 1976), Corbett (1995: 271) 17 Canonical space (partial) Russian pronouns Russian pronouns Russian Slovene nouns Russian nouns Archi Unique across lexemes Russian nouns Archi Unique across features Polish nouns Unique (no competition) 18 Genitive is not unique syntactically Bezhta (Dagestanian: Kibrik 1995: 220), van den Berg (2005: 261); further examples in Boguslavskaja (1995: 233-234) abo-s is father-GENDirect brother[ABS] ‘father’s brother’ abo-la is-t’i-l father-GENOblique brother-OBL-DAT ‘to father’s brother’ 19 Canonical space (partial) Russian pronouns Russian pronouns Bezhta Russian Slovene nouns Russian nouns Archi Unique across lexemes Russian nouns Archi Unique across features Polish nouns Unique (no competition) Russian Unique syntactically 20 Moral of the tale - I • Fahrenheit deserves better than a perfume • We can make progress by pulling apart complex phenomena: Canonical Typology, Multivariate typology (Bickel 2015) • Where possible we set the scale to zero: results are interesting whether or not there are instances which score zero • Compare simple elements (Round 2017); then powerful techniques developed in other sciences become available 21 Moral of the tale - II • To compare Russian, Polish, Archi and Bezhta we use exactly the same measures as for comparing the Russian of Marina, Sasha and Tatiana in SMG. • We should be careful of erecting a framework based on the idea that somehow language-internal analysis homogeneous and language-external comparison is different. • This way we can stay in the scientific mainstream – a good move when currently typologists are getting great results by using the same measures for all types of comparison. • Fahrenheit’s measuring > better theory > more accurate measuring >… 22 References Berg, Helma van den. 2005. The East Caucasian language family. Lingua 115.147-190. Bickel, Balthasar. 2015. Distributional typology: statistical inquiries into the dynamics of linguistic diversity. In: Bernd Heine & Heiko Narrog (eds). The Oxford Handbook of Linguistic Analysis, 2nd edition, 901-923. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Boguslavskaja, Ol´ga Ju.1995. Genitives and adjectives as attributes in Daghestanian. In: Franz Plank (ed.) Double Case: Agreement by Suffixaufnahme, 230–239. New York: Oxford University Press. Chumakina, Marina, Dunstan Brown, Harley Quilliam & Greville G. Corbett. 2007. Slovar´ arčinskogo jazyka (arčinsko-russko-anglijskij) [A dictionary of Archi: Archi-Russian-English]. Makhachkala: Delovoj Mir. Corbett, Greville G. 1995. Slavonic’s closest approach to Suffix Copying: the possessive adjective. In: Frans Plank (ed.) Double Case: Agreement by Suffixaufnahme, 265-282. New York: Oxford University Press. Corbett, Greville G. 2015. Morphosyntactic complexity: a typology of lexical splits. Language 91.145193. Helden, W. Andries van. 1993. Case and gender: Concept formation between morphology and syntax (Studies in Slavic and General Linguistics 20). Amsterdam: Rodopi. Ivanova, T. A. 1975. Nekotorye aspekty sopostavitel´nogo analiza posessivnyx konstrukcij (Na materiale sovremennyx slavjanskix literaturnyx jazykov. Slavjanskaja filologija (Leningrad) 3.148-52. Ivanova, T. A. 1976. K voprosu o sootnošenii upotrebljaemosti posessivnyx konstrukcij v sovremennyx slavjanskix jazykax. Voprosy filologii 5 (Izdatel´stvo Leningradskogo universiteta), 3-10. 23 References Kibrik, Aleksandr E. 1995. Direct-oblique agreement of attributes in Daghestanian. In: Franz Plank (ed.) Double Case: Agreement by Suffixaufnahme, 216–229. New York: Oxford University Press. Round, Erich. 2017. Review of Gordon, Matthew K. Phonological typology. 2016. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Folia Linguistica 51.745–755. Timberlake, Alan. 2004. A Reference Grammar of Russian. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 24