Nominal categories

Armin Buch
Overview
Case
Nominal categories
Armin W. Buch1
2012/11/07
1
Relying heavily on material by Gerhard Jäger and David Erschler
Overview
Armin Buch
Overview
Case
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Nominal categories:
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Number
Possession
Gender
Definiteness
Case
Case will lead to case systems (next week)
Number
• Possibilities for number: no overt marking
on nouns (rare, but possible)
• Plural vs Singular
• Plural : Dual : Singular
• Plural: Paucal : Dual : Singular
Dual
• Hebrew (Semitic, Afro-Asiatic): dual for
natural pairs:
ajin
ejn-ajim regelragl-ajim
‘eye’
‘eyes’
‘leg’ ‘legs’
but
ecba
ecba-ot
xatul xatul-im
‘finger, toe’ ‘fingers, toes’ ‘cat’ ‘cats’
• Dual was present in early Indo-European
languages
• Hierarchy (Greenberg 1966)
Sing > Plur > Dual > Trial/Paucal
• Sanskrit noun inflection frequencies
(Greenberg):
Singular = 70.3%
Plural = 25.1%
Dual = 4.6%
Paucal: Manam Oceanic, Austronesian,
New Guinea (Lichtenberk 1983)
Marking of the Plural (Haspelmath
2011)
Map (Haspelmath 2011)
Other Nominal Grammatical
Categories
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•
•
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Number
Possession
Gender
Definiteness
Possession
• Alienable and inalienable possession
• John's mother and John's bike belong to
John in different senses.
• Inalienably possessed nouns: body parts,
kin terms
• Western European languages usually
don't distinguish these categories.
• In some Slavic languages, they are
distinguished to some extenct.
Alienable vs Inalienable
• Russian, body parts
No copula: inalienable possession
U
Maši
golubyje glaza
at
Masha
blue
eyes
'Masha has blue eyes.'
Copula: alienable possession
#U Maši
jestʲ
golubyje
at
Masha
is
blue
'Masha owns blue eyes.'
glaza
eyes
Alienable vs Inalienable
• Digor Ossetic
a. Inalienable
aslan-ɐn
suʁzɐrijnɐ k’oχ-tɐ
jes
Aslan-DAT gold
hand-PL
exists
‘Aslan has golden hands = He is very skillful at handwork.’
b. Alienable
aslan-mɐ
suʁzɐrijnɐ k’oχ-tɐ
jes
aslan-ALL gold
hand-PL
exists
‘Aslan owns golden hands (i.e. a piece of jewellery).’
Alienable vs Inalienable
• Adyghe (West
Caucasian,
Gorbunova 2009)
a. Inalienable
wə-šə
2SG-brother
‘your brother’
b. Alienable
w-jə-wəne
2SG-AL-house
‘your house’
Possessive classes
• There might be more classes of
possession:
• An extreme example (via Nichols & Bickel
2011): Anêm (isolate; Papua New Guinea)
"has at least 20 possessive classes based
on the allomorphy of the stem-final suffix
and of the possessive suffix." Four of
these classes are shown on the next slide
Possessive Classes in Anem
1sg
2sg
3sg.m
3sg.f
‘water’
‘child’
‘leg’ ‘mat’
kom-i
kom-î
kom-u
kom-îm
gi-ng-e
gi-ng-ê
gi-ng-o
gi-ng-êm
ti-g-a mîk-d-at
ti-g-îr mîk-d-ir
ti-g-î mîk-d-it
ti-g-î mîk-d-it
Possessive Classification (Nichols
& Bickel 2011)
Possessive Classification (Nichols
& Bickel 2011)
Other Nominal Grammatical
Categories
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Number
Possession
Gender
Definiteness
Grammatical Gender
• Number of genders may vary from zero (e.g. in
Iron Ossetic wəj 'he, she, it' or in Modern
Persian) to about 10.
• Grammatical gender systems often have
something to do with the natural sex (i.e. males
usually belong to the masculine gender and
females to the feminine gender), but systems
may be very non-transparent, e.g. German
nouns with -chen are always neutral. Corbett
(2011) calls that 'formal assignment'
Semantically Transparent Gender
Systems, Corbett (2011)
• In Kannada, nouns denoting male humans
are masculine, those denoting female
humans are feminine. There are also
deities, demons and heavenly bodies in
these genders. All remaining nouns,
including those denoting infants and
animals, are neuter. Thus appa ‘father’,
and candra ‘moon’ are masculine, amma
‘mother’ is feminine, and na:yi ‘dog’ is
neuter.
Bininj Gun-Wok
Grammatical Gender
• Example: Hinuq (East Caucasian, Daghestan),
Isakov & Khalilov 2001
Singular
• Gender I: males, God, prophet, angels
• Gender II: females, witch, houri, etc.
• Gender III: 'child', animals, devils, dragons
• inanimates are distributed across these 3
genders or belong to the 4th one:
• Gender IV: 'flower', 'grass', 'barley', 'water',
'road', 'cave'
Grammatical Gender
• Example: Hinuq cont.
• Plural
• Rational beings (humans and such like) vs
irrational beings
• Gender shows in the verb agreement.
Grammatical Gender: Swahili noun
classes
Grammatical Gender: Swahili noun
classes
• This ki-/vi- alteration even applies to
foreign words where the ki- was originally
part of the root, so vitabu "books" from
kitabu "book"
Number of Genders (Corbett 2011)
Number of Genders
Sex-based vs non-sex-based
gender systems
Principles of Gender Assignment,
Corbett (2011)
Other Nominal Grammatical
Categories
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•
•
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Number
Possession
Gender
Definiteness
Definiteness
• Definite/indefinite
• Dryer 2011: "There are, broadly speaking, two
functions associated with definite articles.
• One of these is an anaphoric function, to refer
back to something mentioned in the preceding
discourse.
• The other is a nonanaphoric function, to refer to
something not mentioned in the preceding
discourse but whose existence is something that
the speaker assumes is known to the hearer.
Definiteness
• Definite article may be a separate word
distinct from a demonstrative:
(1) Lakhota (Ingham 2001: 16)
wic‘aṡa ki he
man the that
‘that man’
Definiteness
• Definiteness may be marked with a
demonstrative:
• (4) Eastern Ojibwa (Nichols 1988: 46)
“mii maanpii
wii-bkeyaanh”
but
here
intend-turn.off.1sg
kido
giiwenh
wa
mko
say.3sg
it.is.said
that bear
‘“Well, this is where I turn off,” the bear
said.’
Definiteness
• Definiteness may be marked by an affix
• Hebrew
ha-bayit
ha-gadol
DEF-house
DEF-big
'the big house'
Definiteness vs Specificity
• An article may actually mark specific
indefinites, and then it may be hard to
classify it.
• English
I've seen a girl today.
• She might be unknown to me and to the
hearer, so indefinite, but specific.
Definiteness
• There might be a special article for this
• (5) Korowai (Awju-Dumut, Trans-New
Guinea; Papua, Indonesia)
uma-té-do
abül-fekha
khomilo-bo
tell-3pl.real-ds
man-indef
die.3sg.real-prf
'They told that a certain man had died.’
Definiteness
Definiteness
Definiteness
• Indefinite articles (Dryer 2011)
• A morpheme is considered here to be an
indefinite article if it accompanies a noun
and signals that the noun phrase is
pragmatically indefinite in the sense that it
denotes something not known to the
hearer, like the English word a in a dog.
• Often such a morpheme is cognate or
identical to the word 'one'.
Definiteness
• In some languages, like English, articles
belong to a category of determiner with a
particular position in the noun phrase.
• Other languages lack such a category in
the sense that definite articles and
demonstratives occur in different positions
in the noun phrase and can co-occur.
Definiteness
• For example, the indefinite article in Dongolese
Nubian is a clitic that attaches to the last word in
the noun phrase, (i); however, the demonstrative
precedes the noun, as in (ii).
(i)
hánu=wɛ̄r
donkey=indef
‘a donkey’
(ii) máŋ kā́
that house
‘that house’
Definiteness
• there are languages with both a definite
article and an indefinite article in which the
two articles appear in different positions in
the noun phrase, thus apparently not
forming a category in the language.
• For example, in Ju|'hoan (Northern
Khoisan; Namibia), the indefinite article
follows the noun, while the definite article
precedes the noun
Definiteness
Ju|'hoan (Dickens 1992: 41)
a. mí hoa jù
n|úí ko !aòh
1sg see person indef obl yard
‘I saw a (certain) person in the yard.’
b. ||'à jù-à
kú !aàh
def person-rel.sg impf run
‘The person was running.’
Semantic roles
Armin Buch
Overview
Case
Semantic roles
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Verb describe event types
Arguments and adjuncts denote participants of
the event described by the verb
Semantic role
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type of relationship between event and participant
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invariant across verbs and languages
Semantic roles
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Agent
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Elvis lived at Graceland.
The cook has diced the carrots.
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Benefactive
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Comitative
I always go to the store with my dog.
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Source
Whitney entered from the rear of the stage.
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Temporal
Father John left the church at noon.
Instrumental
Blake is walking with a cane.
Recipient
Ivana will donate her diamonds to the Church.
Goal
Ann arrived at the store to buy shoes.
Purposive
The pauper washed dishes for his supper.
Experiencer
Freud feared his mother.
Patient
George chopped down the cherry tree.
The chapter has been written for Lindsay
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Locative
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Theme
The Unabomber threatened to send a package to
LAX.
Grammatical relations
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functional roles in clauses, such as subject or
object
characterized by a cluster of morphological and
syntactic features
each subsumes several semantic roles
much cross-linguistic variation regarding
marking and semantic content
Grammatical relations
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universally, languages have three grammatical
roles that are realized as arguments
English:
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subject
The man gave Bill a ticket.
direct object
The man gave Bill a ticket.
indirect object
The man gave Bill a ticket.
Grammatical relations
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inventory differs between languages
German
Der Junge
ist dreckig.
the boy.NOM
is dirty
'The boy is dirty.'
Der Junge
wirft
einen Stein.
DEF boy.NOM throw a.ACC stone
'The boy is throwing a stone.'
Kalkatungu (Australia)
Kaun
muu-yan-ati
dress.ABS dirt-PROP-INCH
'The dress is dirty.'
Kuntu wampa-ngku kaun
not
girl-ERG
dress.ABS
'The girl will not dirty the dress.'
muu-yan-puni-mi.
dirty-PROP-CAUS-FUT
Marking of grammatical relations
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Three ways to code grammatical relations:
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word order
The stone hits
subject
the bucket.
object
case
Der Stein trifft
NOM->subject
den Eimer.
ACC->object
agreement: Kinyarwanda
umugabo y-ataaye umwaana mu maazi
C1.man
C1-threw child
in
water
'The man has thrown the child into the water.'
Case
Armin Buch
Overview
Case
I
Case marks argument roles
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While a lot of languages don’t mark case at all, most do to
some extent
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The number of cases is quite arbitrary: WALS 49A
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What is not expressed by case is usually marked by
adpositions
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Therefore, fused adpositions are a source of case inflection
Cases in Hungarian (Iggesen 2011)
Armin Buch
Overview
Case
Cases in Hungarian (Iggesen 2011)
Armin Buch
Overview
Case
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21 cases (although for large case systems, analyses differ)
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Typical: agglutinative morphology
Fusional case systems better be small
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telic: understandability
causal: Fusion reduced the effective number of case
morphemes
Case hierarchy (Blake 1994)
Armin Buch
Overview
Case
I
If a case on the hierarchy is present in the language, then
all the higher ones are present as well (implicational
universal)
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Nom > Acc/Erg > Gen > Dat > Loc > Abl
Icelandic has the dative. Genitive and accusative expected.
This is indeed so:
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Nom: hattur (‘hat’)
Acc: hatt
Gen: hatts
Dat: hatti
Case Marking
• Most common: suffixes or
postpositions
Turkish
ev-de
house-LOC
'in the/a house'
• Prepositions
for a girl, to a girl, with a hammer, etc.
Case Marking
• Prefixes
Krongo (Reh 1985: 151) àpá-ŋ
ìʔìŋ
á-kùufì M.PERF.hit-TR
3SG.M
INSTR-baton ‘He hit him with the baton.’ Gurr-goni (Burarran; Australia; Green 1995:
93) burr-wupunj awurr-bogi-ni INSTR-canoe
3AUG.SUBJ-goPRECONTEMP ‘They all went by canoe.’
Case Marking
• Tonal cases (Africa)
• Nandi (Creider and Creider 1989: 124) a. kè:r-éy
kípe:t
la:kwé:t look.at-IMPF
Kipet.SUB child.NSUB ‘Kibet is looking at the child.’ b. kè:r-éy
kipe:t
kípro:no look.at-IMPF
Kibet.NSUB
Kiprono.SUB ‘Kiprono is looking at Kibet.’
Case Marking
• Stem alternations
• Nuer (Nilotic, Southern Sudan) Frank 1999