[Lingtyp] Non-marking for argument roles

[David Gil]

Dear Vladimir,



You mentioned Riau Indonesian.  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.



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.  So far, the experiment has been conducted on 69
languages.  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:



English                        5.3%

Hebrew                       6.7%

Standard Japanese       9.6%



Standard Indonesian   22.8%

Riau Indonesian          43.4%

Minangkabau              65.0%



Tikuna                         75.8%

Mursi                          77.4%

Yali                             82.3%



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.  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.



As suggested by the above figures, Riau Indonesian turns out to be
mid-range with respect to the extent of grammaticalization of thematic
roles.  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).  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.



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:  sociopolitical complexity
correlates positively with grammatical complexity as manifest in thematic
role encoding.  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.



Best wishes,



David





Gil, David and Yeshayahu Shen (2019) "How Grammar Introduces Asymmetry into
Cognitive Structures: Compositional Semantics, Metaphors and
Schematological Hybrids", *Frontiers in Psychology - Language Sciences* (
doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2019.02275)




On Thu, May 8, 2025 at 4:50 PM Vladimir Panov via Lingtyp <
lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org> wrote:

> 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.
>
> V.
>
> чт, 8 мая 2025 г. в 10:28, Vladimir Panov <panovmeister at gmail.com>:
>
>> Dear linguists,
>>
>> 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?
>>
>> Best,
>> Vladimir Panov, Vilnius University
>>
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-- 

David Gil

Senior Scientist (Associate)
Department of Linguistic and Cultural Evolution
Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
Deutscher Platz 6, Leipzig, 04103, Germany

Email: dapiiiiit at gmail.com
Mobile Phone (Israel): +972-526117713
Mobile Phone (Indonesia): +62-082113720302
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