nasality and negation, again

[Edith Moravcsik]

I agree with Frans. I think the general issue is this: what is it that human 
psychology and physiology can explain about language? Physical and 
psychological factors cannot directly explain synchronic facts of language; 
they can only explain what people DO with sychronic facts - i.e. language 
acquisition, language processing, and - ultimately -historical change.

(See on this, for example, Matthew Dryer's review of Newmeyer's book 
"Possible and probable languages" in Journal of Linguistics, 2007, 43, p. 
246.)

Thus, if we did know that there was a physically or psychologically given 
necessity or preference to associate negation with nasality, this would not 
directly explain what we may find in synchronic language states; it would be 
relevant only for explaning processes that lead to the origin and loss of 
negative markers.

Edith Moravcsik

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Frans Plank" <Frans.Plank at UNI-KONSTANZ.DE>
To: <LINGTYP at LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORG>
Sent: Friday, August 31, 2007 12:59 PM
Subject: Re: nasality and negation, again


> Now, if you, Matthew, or whoever, went ahead and did this project 
> properly, according to your specifications, and if it turned out that 
> there is, in some sense, a statistically significant connection between 
> negation (in one or the other or all of its possible senses) and nasality 
> (in one guise or another), but not an absolute implication "If negation, 
> then always a nasal":  What would that mean?
>
> I believe this is a serious question.  My single little, ostensibly 
> non-serious anecdotal example from Konstanz Alemannic -- where a negative 
> marker has lost its nasal segment, itself of IE origin -- 
> was intended to suggest that finding such a statistical correlation 
> perhaps wouldn't mean much, as far as the human brain, human articulation, 
> and human perception are concerned.  On my single piece of evidence I'd be 
> prepared to conclude -- as the only *linguistic* conclusion -- that humans 
> are free to either express negation through nasal segments or not to 
> express negation through nasal segments.  If they, as learners, are 
> confronted with a language where negation happens to be expressed though a 
> nasal, they can either reproduce this state of affairs or change it, by 
> way of just dropping the nasal (without even needing a productive 
> phonological rule obliterating all alveolar nasals from onsets of 
> grammatical, perhaps weak forms).
>
> Well, not to be too negative, perhaps it IS of interest that in a language 
> family where,some 8000 years ago, negative markers were innovated which 
> happened to have a nasal in them, it occurred relatively rarely that that 
> nasal was sacrificed (say, to phonology) by subsequent generations of 
> learners (some 300 of them).
>
> As I see it, a meaningful typological project then would have to be a 
> diachronic one.  First, we'd have to look at the source expressions for 
> the grammaticalisation of negative markers, across languages. The question 
> here would be whether there is any skewing in favour or disfavour of 
> nasals at the stage of grammaticalisation.  (Are, say, verbs of denying, 
> or articulatory gestures of disgust, likelier to grammaticalise as 
> negative markers when they contain nasals than when they don't?)  Second, 
> we'd have to look at what happens to negative markers once they have been 
> grammaticalised, across languages.  The questions would be (i) whether 
> those that have a nasal in them are less likely than other, non-negative 
> (grammatical) forms to lose their nasal over cycles of acquisition;  and 
> (ii) whether or not those that do not have a nasal are likelier than 
> other, non-negative (grammatical) forms to acquire a nasal (by whatever 
> means -- 
> spontaneous nasalisation, metanalysis of nasals from adjacent items, ...).
>
> Within this project, I don't think, incidentally, that Larry's and Derek's 
> observations are "quite beside the point".  Their observations would seem 
> to me to mean that negative markers have been successfully grammaticalised 
> I don't precisely know how often (Lary and Derek, more info please!), and 
> that they have been re-learnt over many cycles of acquisition, without 
> nasal segments as favourable factors at any stage.  It's this sort of 
> diachronic demonstration that I believe matters, linguistically speaking. 
> If we want to add crosslinguistic statistics, they better be statistics 
> about diachronic events.
>
> I wonder whether we are in agreement or disagreement over this general 
> conclusion.
>
> Frans
>
>
>
>>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
>