nasality and negation

[Matti Miestamo]

I fully agree with what Matthew just wrote. The sources of negative 
morphemes that I mentioned contain areal and genealogical information on 
the languages so these factors can be taken into account. I would 
certainly not suggest a simple count without paying attention to the 
stratification of the sample. I also agree that a serious study of the 
issue should pay attention to the phonological system of each language, 
how nasals relate to other phonemes in terms of frequency etc. As I 
said, the lists I mentioned could provide (only) preliminary data (for a 
pilot study).

Best wishes,
Matti


Matthew Dryer wrote:
> I think we need to be careful in a number of ways about what constitutes 
> relevant evidence regarding the hypothesis of an association between 
> negation and nasality.  First, anecdotal citations of examples of 
> languages without nasals in negative morphemes are largely irrelevant.  
> Even lists of negative morphemes in hundreds of languages would tell us 
> little (unless the association were so strong that most languages had 
> nasals in negative morphemes, but that does not appear to be the case).  
> Such lists would tell us little for two reasons.  First, it could be the 
> case that only a minority of languages have nasals in negative morphemes 
> but that there is still a statistically significant association between 
> nasality and negation, namely if nasals still occur significantly more 
> often in negative morphemes than in other types of morphemes.  Second, 
> unless one controls for genealogical and areal relationships, the 
> appearance of an association or lack of an association might be an 
> artifact of one's sample.  Solving those problems is not a trivial 
> matter, as I have argued in various publications.  Larry Hyman's 
> observation that there are a very large number of Niger-Congo languages 
> without nasals in negative morphemes is quite beside the point.  To the 
> contrary, what we need to do is to avoid examining too many languages 
> from the same family precisely in order to factor out the distorting 
> effects of large families.  Finally note that if we were to examine the 
> hypothesis seriously, we would also have to control for length of 
> morphemes.  It is quite possible, for example, that nasals occur in 
> words meaning 'dog' significantly more often than in negative morphemes 
> only because morphemes meaning 'dog' tend to be longer than negative 
> morphemes.  The hypothesis deserves to be tested, but doing so would not 
> be trivial, and would require collecting data on other sorts of 
> morphemes as well in order to test whether negative morphemes have 
> nasals more often than other morphemes.
> 
> Matthew Dryer
> 

-- 

Matti Miestamo,
Research Fellow, Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies 
<http://www.helsinki.fi/collegium/>.

Homepage at the Department of General Linguistics, University of 
Helsinki: <http://www.ling.helsinki.fi/~matmies/>.