[Lingtyp] Structural congruence as a dimension of language complexity/simplicity

Tue Jan 19 02:21:17 UTC 2016

One of the biggest problems in this regard that I have noticed is in grammars of individual languages. Fieldworkers sometimes confuse semantic and formal categories in the grammars, classifying as a syntactic structure a semantic category. If typologists are not careful writers/readers of grammars they may bring such confusions into their typological studies. Sounds obvious. But not always so.

Dan

Sent from my iPhone

On Jan 18, 2016, at 21:11, Matthew Dryer <dryer at buffalo.edu<mailto:dryer at buffalo.edu>> wrote:

I agree entirely with Jan on the need to distinguish semantic categories and formal categories. In fact, in a paper of mine that is I have nearly completed revising, I have an entire section arguing that generative approaches fail to note the fact that a given semantic category often has many different formal expressions over different languages and that this is problematic for implicit assumptions that equate semantic categories with formal categories.

But Jan seems to think that this presents some sort of problem for the work I have done in word order typology.  He says “When these authors subsequently formulate rules and principles on the basis of the data they collected, the semantic category labels (Adjective, Genitive, Relative Clause, but also e.g. Demonstrative and Numeral) appear to stand for formal categories, i.e. categories whose members are defined on the basis of structural or morphosyntactic criteria”. But this is false. They stand for semantic categories.

Jan seems to think that it is somehow a problem that a given semantic category may have many different formal realizations across different languages. However, neither in his email nor in his 2009 paper in LT does he explain why he sees this as a problem.

There is, I admit, a potential problem.  Namely, it might be the case that for the purposes of word order correlations, the syntactic realization of a semantic category makes a major difference and that lumping the different syntactic realizations together is obscuring these differences. That is why I have spent considerable time over the years collecting data, not only on word order in particular languages, but also on the syntactic realization in these languages, precisely to examine empirically whether the syntactic realization makes a difference. The result is that while the syntactic realization sometimes makes a small difference, it is overall irrelevant: by and large, generalizations over semantic categories apply the same, regardless of the syntactic realization.

Matthew

On 1/18/16 4:41 AM, Jan Rijkhoff wrote:
I think the last word has not been said about Greenbergian word order correlations, mainly because semantic categories and formal categories have not always been clearly distinguished in post-Greenberg (1963) word order studies (Rijkhoff 2009a).* For example, both Hawkins (1983: 12) and Dryer (1992: 120) claimed that they followed Greenberg (1963: 74) in ‘basically applying semantic criteria’ to identify members of the same category across languages, but in practice these semantically defined forms and constructions are treated as formal entities.

If Hawkins and Dryer applied semantic criteria in their cross-linguistic studies, this implies, for example, that their semantic category Adjective must also have included verbal and nominal expressions of adjectival notions (such as relative clauses and genitives), which are typically used in languages that lack a dedicated class of adjectives:

Kiribati (Ross 1998: 90)
(1) te      uee      ae    e          tikiraoi         (relative clause)
     art  flower  rel  3sg.s   be.pretty
     ‘a pretty flower’ (lit. ‘a flower that pretties’)

Makwe (Devos 2008: 136)
(2)   muú-nu      w-á=ki-búúli                 (genitive)
     nc1-person  pp1-gen=nc7-silence
    ‘a silent person’ (lit. ‘person of silence’)

Relative Clause and Genitive are, however, also semantic categories in their own right in word order studies by Dryer and Hawkins.

When these authors subsequently formulate rules and principles on the basis of the data they collected, the semantic category labels (Adjective, Genitive, Relative Clause, but also e.g. Demonstrative and Numeral) appear to stand for formal categories, i.e. categories whose members are defined on the basis of structural or morphosyntactic criteria. This apparent change of category is not explained, but can be seen in the case of the ‘Heaviness Serialization Principle’ (Hawkins 1983: 90-91) and the ‘Branching Direction Theory’ (Dryer 1992).

Hawkins defined ‘heaviness’ in terms of such non-semantic criteria as (a) length and quantity of morphemes, (b) quantity of words, (c) syntactic depth of branching nodes, and (d) inclusion of dominated constituents.

(3)   Heaviness Serialization Principle: Rel  ≥R  Gen  ≥R  A  ≥R  Dem/Num

Thus a member of the (semantic? formal?) category Relative Clause is ‘heavier’ than a member of the (semantic? formal?) category Adjective. But Hawkins’s semantic category Adjective must also have included members of the ‘heavy’ formal categories Genitive and Relative Clause (see (1) and (2) above). It is not clear whether the original members of the single semantic category Adjective were later ‘re-categorized’ and distributed over the formal categories Adjective, Genitive and Relative Clause in the Heaviness Serialization Principle.

Dryer’s ‘Branching Direction Theory’ refers to a structural feature of the internal syntactic organization of a constituent. According to the ‘Branching Direction Theory’, relative clauses and genitives are phrases, i.e. members of a branching category, whose position relative to the noun correlates with the relative order of Verb and Object, whereas adjectives are non-branching elements, whose position relative to the noun does not correlate with OV or VO order (Dryer 1992: 107-8, 110-1). In this case, too, one may assume that the semantic category Adjective also included members of the formal categories Genitive and Relative Clause (see examples above). Again we do not know what happened to the branching/phrasal members of the erstwhile(?) semantic category Adjective (relative clauses, genitives) when this category was turned into the formal (non-branching) category Adjective that is part of the ‘Branching Direction Theory’.

So as to avoid categorial confusion in cross-linguistic research (and so as to make it possible to produce more reliable results), it is necessary to keep formal and semantic categories apart, as members of these two categories have their own ordering rules or preferences. I also think it is an illusion to think we can give a satisfactory account of the grammatical behaviour of linguistic units -including word order- without taking into consideration functional (interpersonal) categories or ‘discourse units’ (Rijkhoff 2009b, 2015).

* Greenberg (1963: 88) made it clear that he sometimes used formal criteria to remove certain members of a semantic category before he formulated a universal, as in the case of his Universal 22.

References
Devos, M. 2008. A Grammar of Makwe. München: Lincom Europa.
Dryer, M. S., 1992. The Greenbergian word order correlations. Language 68-1, 81-138.
Greenberg, J. H. 1963. Some universals of grammar with particular reference to the order of meaningful elements. In J. H. Greenberg (ed.), Universals of Language, 73-113. Cambridge MA: MIT.
Hawkins, J. A., 1983. Word Order Universals: Quantitative analyses of linguistic structure. New York: Academic Press.

Rijkhoff, J. 2009a. On the (un)suitability of semantic categories. Linguistic Typology 13-1, 95‑104.
Rijkhoff, Jan. 2009b. On the co-variation between form and function of adnominal possessive modifiers in Dutch and English. In William B. McGregor (ed.), The Expression of Possession (The Expression of Cognitive Categories [ECC] 2), 51‑106. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
Rijkhoff, J. 2015. Word order. In James D. Wright (editor-in-chief), International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences (Second Edition), Vol. 25, 644–656. Oxford: Elsevier.
Ross, M. 1998. Proto-Oceanic adjectival categories and their morphosyntax. Oceanic Linguistics 37-1, 85-119.

Jan Rijkhoff

________________________________
From: Lingtyp [lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org<mailto:lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org>] on behalf of Alan Rumsey [Alan.Rumsey at anu.edu.au<mailto:Alan.Rumsey at anu.edu.au>]
Sent: Monday, January 18, 2016 12:23 PM
To: lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org<mailto:lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org>
Subject: Re: [Lingtyp] Structural congruence as a dimension of language complexity/simplicity

Many thanks to all of you who responded to my posting on this topic, both online and off. All the readings you have pointed me to have indeed been highly relevant and very useful, including an excellent recent publication by Jennifer Culbertson that she pointed me to in her offline response, at <redir.aspx?REF=sGl5RomnpE-BF3Bt1foWHNs4EZ9sLFpNokQs5Y0pxDO6ZjPcAyDTCAFodHRwOi8vam91cm5hbC5mcm9udGllcnNpbi5vcmcvYXJ0aWNsZS8xMC4zMzg5L2Zwc3lnLjIwMTUuMDE5NjQvYWJzdHJhY3Q.> http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01964/abstract

Thanks especially to Matthew Dryer for pointing out that the Greenbergian ‘universal’ I had used as an example – the putative association between VSO and noun-adjective order — had been falsified by his much more thorough 1992 study “The Greenbergian Word Order Correlations”.  My reading of that article and further correspondence with him has confirmed that, by contrast, Greenberg’s universals no 3 and 4 were solidly confirmed by his study, namely that SOV languages are far more likely to have postpositions than prepositions and that the reverse is true for VSO  languages.

Drawing on all your suggestions, Francesca and I have now finished a draft of the paper referred to in my posting, called 'Structural Congruence as a Dimension of Language Complexity: An Example from Ku Waru Child Language’. If any of you would like to read it please let me know and I’ll send it to you.

Alan

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