<div dir="ltr">
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in;font-size:12pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:"Times New Roman",serif">Dear Vladimir,<span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in;font-size:12pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:"Times New Roman",serif"><span> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in;font-size:12pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:"Times New Roman",serif">You mentioned Riau Indonesian.<span> </span>While my early writings on Riau Indonesian
apparently contributed to the impression that this language was somehow
exceptional with respect to the absence of obligatory thematic role encoding,
subsequent work suggests that it is anything but a typological outlier in this
respect.</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:"Times New Roman",serif"><span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in;font-size:12pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:"Times New Roman",serif"><span> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in;font-size:12pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:"Times New Roman",serif">In order to situate Riau
Indonesian in typological context, and to examine the degree to which different
languages encode thematic roles such as agent, patient, locative, instrumental
and so forth by various morphosyntactic devices such as word order and
flagging, I have been conducting a cross-linguistic psycholinguistic experiment,
details and preliminary results of which are presented in Gil and Shen (2019:5-8)
and references therein.<span> </span>So far, the
experiment has been conducted on 69 languages.<span>
</span>The final results have yet to be written up and published, but here are
some figures for a handful of languages from the 69-language sample:<span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in;font-size:12pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:"Times New Roman",serif"><span> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in;font-size:12pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:"Times New Roman",serif">English<span> </span>5.3%<span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in;font-size:12pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:"Times New Roman",serif">Hebrew<span> </span>6.7%<span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in;font-size:12pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:"Times New Roman",serif">Standard Japanese<span> </span>9.6%<span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in;font-size:12pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:"Times New Roman",serif"><span> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in;font-size:12pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:"Times New Roman",serif">Standard Indonesian<span> </span>22.8%<span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in;font-size:12pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:"Times New Roman",serif">Riau Indonesian<span> </span>43.4%<span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in;font-size:12pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:"Times New Roman",serif">Minangkabau<span> </span>65.0%<span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in;font-size:12pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:"Times New Roman",serif"><span> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in;font-size:12pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:"Times New Roman",serif">Tikuna<span> </span>75.8%<span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in;font-size:12pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:"Times New Roman",serif">Mursi<span> </span>77.4%<span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in;font-size:12pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:"Times New Roman",serif">Yali<span> </span>82.3%<span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in;font-size:12pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:"Times New Roman",serif"><span> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in;font-size:12pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:"Times New Roman",serif">In the above, percentages represent the degree to which arguments
associated with different thematic roles can be interchanged (e.g. the extent
to which an agent can be encoded in the same way as a patient) — averaged over
30-plus experimental subjects responding to 16 experimental stimuli testing
various morphosyntactic configurations.<span>
</span>Thus, lower percentages represent greater rigidity and obligatoriness in
the encoding of thematic roles, while higher percentages represent greater
flexibility and optionality — the state of affairs that prompted Vladimir's
query.<span> </span><span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in;font-size:12pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:"Times New Roman",serif"><span> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in;font-size:12pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:"Times New Roman",serif">As suggested by the above figures, Riau Indonesian turns out to be
mid-range with respect to the extent of grammaticalization of thematic
roles.<span> </span>The true outlier turns out to be
English, which scores the highest of the 69 languages (albeit not statistically
significantly higher than a handful of other mostly WEIRD languages).<span> </span>At the other end of the scale, a wide range
of languages from all over the world exhibit much greater flexibility in the
encoding of thematic roles than Riau Indonesian.<span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in;font-size:12pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:"Times New Roman",serif"><span> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in;font-size:12pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:"Times New Roman",serif">The experimental results suggest that the main factor governing the degree
of grammaticalization of thematic roles is the complexity of the polity
associated with the language in question:<span>
</span>sociopolitical complexity correlates positively with grammatical
complexity as manifest in thematic role encoding.<span> </span>The above correlation also explains why the
absence of encoding of thematic roles is massively under-represented in the
linguistic literature, which, even in the 2020s, retains a bias towards
languages associated with greater sociopolitical complexity.<span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in;font-size:12pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:"Times New Roman",serif"><span> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in;font-size:12pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:"Times New Roman",serif">Best wishes,<span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in;font-size:12pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:"Times New Roman",serif"><span> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in;font-size:12pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:"Times New Roman",serif">David<span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in;font-size:12pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:"Times New Roman",serif"><span> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in;font-size:12pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:"Times New Roman",serif"><span> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in;font-size:12pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:"Times New Roman",serif">Gil,
David and Yeshayahu Shen (2019) "How Grammar Introduces Asymmetry into
Cognitive Structures: Compositional Semantics, Metaphors and Schematological
Hybrids", <i>Frontiers in Psychology - Language Sciences</i> (</span><span style="font-family:"Times New Roman",serif;color:rgb(2,2,2);background:white">doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2019.02275)<span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in;font-size:12pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><span style="font-family:"Times New Roman",serif"><span> </span></span></p>
<br></div><br><div class="gmail_quote gmail_quote_container"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Thu, May 8, 2025 at 4:50 PM Vladimir Panov via Lingtyp <<a href="mailto:lingtyp@listserv.linguistlist.org">lingtyp@listserv.linguistlist.org</a>> wrote:<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><div dir="ltr">In order to specify my question a little bit: By saying NO MARKING I mean exactly this: NO MARKING AT ALL. E.g. if there is marking not on noun phrases but on the verb or by clitics elsewhere in the clause, then there definitely is marking of arguments. So typical "polysynthetic" languages don't count.<div><br></div><div>V.</div></div><br><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">чт, 8 мая 2025 г. в 10:28, Vladimir Panov <<a href="mailto:panovmeister@gmail.com" target="_blank">panovmeister@gmail.com</a>>:<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><div dir="ltr">Dear linguists,<div><br></div><div>I have the following question. Are you aware of any doculects/languages upon which there is a consensus that semantic roles like S, A, P, R are not obligatorily encoded, neither morphologically, nor through word order or adpositions? That is, languages in which the assignment of semantic roles, if any, is entirely matter of context/pragmatics. The famous Riau Indonesian comes to my mind. Any other suggestions? Maybe there are publications dedicated specifically to this problem?</div><div><br></div><div>Best,</div><div>Vladimir Panov, Vilnius University</div></div>
</blockquote></div>
_______________________________________________<br>
Lingtyp mailing list<br>
<a href="mailto:Lingtyp@listserv.linguistlist.org" target="_blank">Lingtyp@listserv.linguistlist.org</a><br>
<a href="https://listserv.linguistlist.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/lingtyp" rel="noreferrer" target="_blank">https://listserv.linguistlist.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/lingtyp</a><br>
</blockquote></div><div><br clear="all"></div><br><span class="gmail_signature_prefix">-- </span><br><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_signature"><div dir="ltr"><pre cols="72">David Gil
Senior Scientist (Associate)
Department of Linguistic and Cultural Evolution
Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
Deutscher Platz 6, Leipzig, 04103, Germany
Email: <a href="mailto:dapiiiiit@gmail.com" target="_blank">dapiiiiit@gmail.com</a>
Mobile Phone (Israel): +972-526117713
Mobile Phone (Indonesia): +62-082113720302</pre>
<br></div></div>