nasality and negation

[Östen Dahl]

Yes, before we try to find an explanation for the connection between
nasality and negation it is indeed a good idea to find out if such a
connection exists... :-) I just want to add one further difficulty here:
since phonemes such as /t/ and /n/ may well be overrepresented in
grammatical morphemes, we would need to check whether negative morphemes
differ from other morphemes of an equal degree of grammaticalization. This
will be tricky since the grammatical status of negative morphemes may also
vary. Thus, we should ideally compare negative affixes to other verbal
affixes and negative particles to similar particles in the language.

Östen


> -----Original Message-----
> From: Discussion List for ALT [mailto:LINGTYP at LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORG]
> On Behalf Of Matti Miestamo
> Sent: den 31 augusti 2007 18:10
> To: LINGTYP at LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORG
> Subject: Re: nasality and negation
> 
> 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/>.