[Lingtyp] Response to Rijkhoff and LaPolla

[Matthew Dryer]

I want to return to near the beginning of the recent discussion, when 
both Jan Rijkhoff and Randy LaPolla raised issues in response to my 
drawing attention to the fact that Greenberg’s claim that verb-initial 
languages tend to place the adjective after the noun is misleading 
(since they do so to the same extent as verb-final languages).

There are two assumptions that Jan and Randy seemed to make that I think 
are at the heart of the discussion. The first assumption may not in fact 
be one that either Jan or Randy made, though it would not be an 
unreasonable assumption to make, given my published work.

The first apparent assumption is that in collecting data on the order of 
adjective and noun, what I did was to collect this data without paying 
attention to the grammatical properties of these “adjectives” (what I 
prefer to call semantic adjectives, though the label is not ideal), 
particularly the extent to which they behave like verbs and the extent 
to which they behave like nouns. The second assumption is that the word 
order behaviour of semantic adjectives varies considerably depending on 
these other properties. Both of these assumptions are false.

With respect to the first assumption, I have spent considerably more 
time over the years examining the grammatical properties of semantic 
adjectives than I have examining the order of adjective and noun, 
primarily the extent to which they behave like verbs or nouns.I have 
definitely not ignored these differences. My reason for spending so much 
time on this is precisely because I was curious whether there were 
differences in word order patterns varying with the extent to which 
semantic adjectives exhibit verbal or nominal properties. The overall 
conclusion from this is: very little.The word order patterns of semantic 
adjectives are very similar, regardless of whether they are verbal, 
nominal, or neither. Let me discuss briefly two examples of contrary 
claims in the literature.

In the paper of his that Randy provided a link to, he cites Van Valin 
(1986) and Lehmann (1986) as providing evidence that ‘adjectives which 
are highly nominal in nature precede the noun they modify in OV 
languages, while those which are highly verbal in nature follow the noun 
they modify’. However, on the basis of a sample of approximately 300 
languages in which the semantic adjectives exhibit nominal features, it 
turns out that this is not true. In my data, adjectives which are 
nominal in nature more often follow the noun, like adjectives which are 
verbal in nature. There is one area of the world where we do find a lot 
of OV languages that are AdjN and in which the adjectives are often 
nominal, and that is Eurasia excluding Sino-Tibetan and other families 
of southeast Asia. I suspect that Van Valin’s and Lehmann’s conclusions 
were influenced by this pattern, which I suspect is simply a reflection 
of two accidentally coinciding common traits throughout this area of 
Eurasia, namely OV&AdjN order and a tendency for semantic adjectives to 
be nominal in nature. It is true that the preference for NAdj order is 
higher in my data among languages in which the semantic adjectives are 
verbal, though the difference falls short of statistical significance. 
It is possible that this difference is real and if so has a ready 
explanation: relative clauses show a strong tendency to follow nouns 
among all languages and getting a higher proportion of NAdj order among 
languages in which semantic adjectives are verbal is hardly surprising. 
But the difference is much less than the quote from LaPolla would suggest.

The second case involves the position of semantic adjectives relative to 
the numeral and noun when both occur on the same side of the noun. The 
usual pattern is for the adjective to occur between the numeral and the 
noun, in either Num-Adj-Noun or Noun-Adj-Num order. Rijkhoff (2008: 804) 
claims that exceptions to this, namely Adj-Num-Noun or Noun-Num-Adj, 
must involve distinct syntactic constructions, such as ones where the 
adjective is verbal and a type of relative clause. However, in an 
almost-completed paper of mine reporting the order of demonstrative, 
numeral, adjective and noun in a sample of over 500 languages, I find 
little evidence to support this claim of Rijkhoff’s. There are a very 
small number of cases where his line of explanation is plausible but 
they are clearly the exceptions. Let me present two kinds of evidence 
from my paper bearing on this. The data in the following table 
distinguishes semantic adjectives with verbal properties from semantic 
adjectives lacking verbal properties, restricting attention to languages 
where the adjective and numeral occur on the same side of the noun. The 
numbers are numbers of genera rather than numbers of languages:

	

Adj closer to noun

than Num

	

Num closer to noun

than Adj

	

Percent

closer

Adj is verb

	

30

	

4

	

.88

Adj is not verb

	

106

	

12

	

.90

As the table shows, semantic adjectives which are verbs show the same 
strong tendency to occur closer to the noun than the numeral that we 
find with semantic adjectives which are not verbal. And the majority of 
cases where the adjective is further from the noun are ones where the 
adjective is nonverbal. In other words, the verbal nature of some 
semantic adjectives has little effect on their position relative to the 
numeral and noun.

Let me share one example from my paper that illustrates that it is only 
semantics which is relevant, not the particular morphosyntactic 
properties of semantic adjectives.The following examples come from Nias 
(Lea Brown, p.c.). Semantic adjectives in Nias are verbal and when used 
attributively occur in relative clauses. Adnominal numerals also occur 
in relative clauses. What the data in (1) shows is that the relative 
clause containing the semantic adjective must occur closer to the noun 
than the relative clause containing the numeral. The opposite order, 
shown in (1b), is judged ungrammatical.

1.

	

a.

	

No

	

u-bunu

	

n-asu

	

s=afusi

	

si=dua

	

rozi.

	

	

past

	

1sg-kill

	

abs-dog

	

rel=white

	

rel=two

	

clsfr

	

	

	

	

N

	

Adj

	

Num

	

‘I killed the two white dogs.’

	

b.

	

*No

	

u-bunu

	

n-asu

	

si=dua

	

rozi

	

s=afusi.

	

	

past

	

1sg-kill

	

abs-dog

	

rel=two

	

clsfr

	

rel=white

	

	

	

	

N

	

Num

	

	

A

‘I killed the two white dogs.’

However if we examine the position of relative clauses involving a verb 
that is not a semantic adjective, we find the opposite pattern. In (2), 
the relative clause involving the verb for ‘sleep’ must occur outside 
the relative clause containing the numeral. The opposite order, in (2b), 
is judged ungrammatical.

2.

	

a.

	

No

	

u-bunu

	

n-asu

	

si=dua

	

rozi

	

si=mörö.

	

	

past

	

1sg-kill

	

abs-dog

	

rel=two

	

clsfr

	

rel=sleep.

	

	

	

	

N

	

Num

	

	

Rel

‘I killed the two dogs that were sleeping.’

	

b.

	

*No

	

u-bunu

	

n-asu

	

si=mörö

	

si=dua

	

rozi.

	

	

past

	

1sg-kill

	

abs-dog

	

rel=sleep

	

rel=two

	

clsfr

	

	

	

	

N

	

Rel

	

Num

	

‘I killed the two dogs that were sleeping.’

In other words, despite the fact that all these modifiers involve 
relative clauses, the one involving a semantic adjective must occur 
closer to the noun. Even though these semantic adjectives are verbs, 
they occur closer to the noun, unlike relative clauses involving other 
verbs. My paper presents data from a number of other languages 
exhibiting a similar pattern.

In a way this should not be surprising. A common hypothesis is that 
modifiers representing more inherent properties are more likely to occur 
closer to the noun. Since ‘white’ is more inherent than ‘sleeping’, it 
is not surprising that it occurs closer to the noun. In other words, it 
is the semantics that is relevant, not the particular construction.

In short, it is not the case that I ignored the finer properties of 
semantic adjectives. Rather, I have collected a large amount of data 
that shows that these finer properties have little affect on their word 
order position, contrary to the claims of of LaPolla and Rijkhoff.

Matthew

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/lingtyp/attachments/20160121/ed6445eb/attachment.htm>