[Lingtyp] Non-marking for argument roles

Fri May 9 07:25:22 UTC 2025

Dear David,

I am a bit puzzled with your results for Yali.

Yali has obligatory subject marking on the verb, and object marking for 
animate objects. Subjects are furthermore optionally case marked in 
unmarked SOV order, and obligatorily so in marked OSV order. Object 
marking distinguishes three semantic roles: theme, beneficiary, and 
target. So Yali is actually pretty explicit in telling you who is doing 
what to whom (see, e.g. Riesberg 2018; 2021; and for other Dani 
languages Bromley 1981, Barclay 2008, and Etherington 2002)

Admittedly some of these distinctions can be neutralised in certain 
contexts, i.e., third person acting on third person in the present 
(progressive), which is maybe how your experiment was designed?

In any case I’d say Yali is pretty much the opposite of what Vladimir 
has been asking for.

Best
Sonja

Barclay, Peter. 2008. /A grammar of Western Dani. /München: Lincom 
Publishers.
Bromley, H. Myron. 1981. A grammar of Lower Grand Valley Dani. Canberra: 
Pacific Linguistics.
Etherington, Paul A. 2002. /Nggem morphology and Syntax. /Darwin: 
Charles Darwin University PhD dissertation.
Riesberg, Sonja. 2018. Optional ergative, agentivity, and discourse 
prominence – Evidence from Yali (Trans-New Guinea). /Linguistic Typology 
/22.1. 17–50/. /https://doi.org/10.1515/lingty-2018-0002 
<https://doi.org/10.1515/lingty-2018-0002>.
Riesberg, Sonja. 2021. Introduction to the Yali – English – German 
dictionary with a short grammatical sketch. In Sonja Riesberg, in 
collaboration with Carmen Dawuda, Lucas Haiduck, Nikolaus P. Himmelmann, 
and Kurt Malcher (eds.),/A Yali /(/Angguruk/) – /English – German 
dictionary/, 1–49. Canberra: Asia-Pacific Linguistics. 
https://shs.hal.science/halshs-03436264v1

Am 09.05.2025 um 06:51 schrieb David Gil via Lingtyp:
>
> 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:
>
> English5.3%
>
> Hebrew6.7%
>
> Standard Japanese9.6%
>
> Standard Indonesian22.8%
>
> Riau Indonesian43.4%
>
> Minangkabau65.0%
>
> Tikuna75.8%
>
> Mursi77.4%
>
> Yali82.3%
>
> 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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