Linguistic Typology at the Crossroads

Types of clitics in the world’s languages

Martin Haspelmath — 2023-12-27

This paper offers and discusses a simple definition of the term clitic from a comparative perspective: A clitic is a bound morph that is neither an affix nor a root. It gives examples of several semantic and positional types of clitics from a wide range of languages, and it discusses some typical phonological effects associated with clitics. In the proposed definition, the crucial contrast between affixes and clitics is that affixes are class-selective (occurring always on nouns, on verbs, or on adjectives), while clitics do not exhibit word-class selectivity. In the stereotypical view of clitics, they are “prosodically deficient” in some way, but the phonological effects are quite diverse and cannot serve as a basis for a definition. As clitics are defined as kinds of minimal forms (or morphs), they cannot be nonsegmental, and they cannot interrupt another minimal form (so that there cannot be endoclitics by definition). Finally, I note that the object person indexes of the Romance languages, which have very often been called clitics, are actually affixes in the modern languages, although they must go back to earlier clitics.

Spanish as an argument-indexing language. A view from the analysis of Colombian Andean Spanish

Sergio Ibáñez Cerda — 2023-12-27

Spanish is considered a dependent-marking language in which argument realization is accomplished through the coding of lexical or referential phrases (RPs). This counter-proposal suggests that it is an argument-indexing language, one where the argument realization is carried out by means of person forms or indexes attached to the verbal word. To prove this, we show that in Standard Spanish (SS) subject and indirect object RPs are not coded in most cases, and that the verb plus the indexes can function as a complete clause. To further discuss these ideas, we analyze Colombian Andean Spanish (CAS), in which DO arguments are also mostly coded through clitic person forms, so CAS has a three index system. We propose that the argument features load is coded in a distributed fashion: the indexes are the syntactic expression of arguments, while the RPs manifest their semantic and pragmatic content.

Using a parallel corpus to study patterns of word order variation: determiners and quantifiers within the noun phrase in European languages

Luigi Talamo — 2023-12-27

Despite the wealth of studies on word order, there have been very few studies on the order of minor word categories such as determiners and quantifiers. This is likely due to the difficulty of formulating valid cross-linguistic definitions for these categories, which also appear problematic from a computational perspective. A solution lies in the formulation of comparative concepts and in their computational implementation by combining different layers of annotation with manually compiled list of lexemes; the proposed methodology is exemplified by a study on the position of these categories with respect to the nominal head, which is conducted on a parallel corpus of 17 European languages and uses Shannon’s entropy to quantify word order variation. Whereas the entropy for the article-noun pattern is, as expected, extremely low, the proposed methodology sheds light on the variation of the demonstrative-noun and the quantifier-noun patterns in three languages of the sample.

The Dimensions of Morphosyntactic Variation: Whorf, Greenberg and Nichols were right

Siva Kalyan — 2023-12-27

We examine a database of 3089 languages coded for 351 morphosyntactic features, including almost all of the morphosyntactic features found in The World Atlas of Language Structures (Dryer & Haspelmath 2013). We apply Factor Analysis of Mixed Data, and determine that the main dimensions of global morphological variation involve (1) word order in clauses and adpositional phrases, (2) head- versus dependent-marking, and (3) a set of features that show an east-west distribution. We find roughly the same features clustering in similar dimensions when we examine individual macro-areas, thus confirming the universal relevance of these groupings of features, as encapsulated in well-known implicational universals. This study confirms established insights in linguistic typology, extending earlier research to a much larger set of languages, and uncovers a number of areal patterns in the data.

Towards a typology of continuative expressions

Anastasia Panova — 2023-12-27

This paper investigates the cross-linguistic diversity of continuative (‘still’) expressions. Based on a genealogically stratified sample of 120 languages, the continuative expressions are systematically analyzed according to the four following parameters: morphosyntactic type, emphatic vs. non-emphatic status, other (non-continuative) uses and semantic effects when combined with negation. The study shows that the most widespread type of continuative expressions is represented by monosemous emphatic continuative adverbials which in combination with negation acquire a ‘not yet’ meaning. In many languages, however, we also find continuative expressions which have followed evolutionary pathways towards morphologization, non-emphatic uses, rich polysemy networks, and less trivial types of interaction with negation. The paper discusses possible areal, genealogical and structural factors which might contribute to the “maturation” of continuative expressions in the world’s languages.