Workshop on Analyticity, Hong Kong University, 20 July 2011
Panel on Analyticity
Despite the fact that the term has been around for close to two centuries now, it is still not
entirely clear what kind of language we are talking about when we talk about “analytic
languages” (or, “isolating languages”). There is some pre-theoretical understanding of
what is meant, such as that analytic languages have no morphology, but this is not quite
correct, unless we understand “morphology” as “inflectional morphology”, but even then,
the claim is debatable. In very general terms we could say that, descriptively, an analytic
language is more transparent than a so-called “synthetic” language, where “transparent”
is to be understood as that there is a tendency to realize one-to-one relationships between
form and meaning/function. Whether these forms are free or attached to other (lexical)
elements seems to be of lesser importance. Meaning/function is both lexical (meaning)
and grammatical (function). What this means is that every aspect of lexical and
grammatical meaning is associated with a separate morph. As a consequence, such
languages will not have single elements which express a combination of properties (e.g.,
definiteness + gender + number). While this definition steers us away from
morphological issues, it raises others.
As will be clear from the different presentations in this panel, a research program into the
nature of analytic languages necessarily has two sides to it. First, we need to make an
inventory of properties which seem to be typical of analytic languages (this seems
circular, but does not have to be). Intuitively, features such as tone, serialization,
discourse particles are among the features often attributed to analytic languages. The
question is whether these are merely superficial similarities or whether they point towards
fundamental, shared properties that define an “analytic” type? Secondly, and at the same
time, we need to investigate the question why in some languages many of these
properties cluster together. One hypothesis one could wish to explore is the idea that
functional heads in such languages may not enforce any movement of other functional
heads towards them, so that we do not find several grammatical functions combined onto
one single element. Or is it the case that, despite the apparent similarities between
languages of this type, there are no profound, shared structural similarities?
A related question is whether languages are, or (from a theoretical point of view) are
expected to be, equally analytic in the verbal and nominal domains. And how about the
sentential domain? And what role does prosody play in this discussion? For example, if it
is the case, as has been claimed, that in certain languages sentence final discourse
particles perform functions which in other languages are performed by intonation, do we
expect “analytic” languages to have more or less sentence final particles?
Papers (short abstracts below)
Linda Badan: “‘Dummy’ objects and verbs in Ewe and Mandarin”
Lisa Cheng, Enoch Aboh and Leston Buell: “Word order within the noun phrase: Gungbe
vs. Mandarin”
Rint Sybesma and Enoch Aboh: “Tense in the C-domain”
Walter Bisang: “Isolation as an area-specific epiphenomenon that cannot be transferred
easily to other languages”
Abstracts
—Linda Badan: “‘Dummy’ objects and verbs in Ewe and Mandarin”
In Ewe and Mandarin we find that verbs, transitive and intransitive, always
require a complement or a direct object, which often is a bare noun. In all these verbobject combinations either the verbal part or the object is a ‘dummy’, in the sense that it
does not contribute to the meaning of the combination as a whole. In this paper, I argue
that these verb-object combinations are a manifestation of the strong analyticity of Ewe
and Mandarin: transitive and intransitive verbs are not expressed by a unique lexical unit,
but each of its featural components is spelled out independently.
—Walter Bisang: “Isolation as an area-specific epiphenomenon that cannot be transferred
easily to other languages”
The term isolation is widely associated with East and mainland Southeast Asian
(EMSEA) languages. A look at these languages from the perspective of transparency
reveals that many of their markers cover a wide range of functions (e.g. markers with
various TAM functions; atomization and definiteness in the case of classifiers) and thus
do not show a one-to-one relation between form and meaning. While a definition in terms
of the lack of inflectional morphology may still be the most adequate definition of
isolation, I will argue that isolation is not a typologically coherent property and that it
may take areally divergent forms. The situation as we find it in East and mainland
Southeast Asia seems to be the consequence of two basic fundamental properties of these
languages, i.e., hidden complexity (pragmatic inference of grammatical categories instead
of overtly expressing them) and the morphosyntactic versatility of lexical items. These
properties are much less dominant in other potential isolating languages (some Creoles,
some Kwa languages). Thus, isolation is a term that was coined for a certain group of
languages and connot be transferred easily to other languages.
—Lisa Cheng, Enoch Aboh and Leston Buell: “Word order within the noun phrase:
Gungbe vs. Mandarin”
Despite the fact that both Gungbe and Mandarin can be characterized as VO
languages, they stand at opposite ends when it comes to word order within the noun
phrase. The noun is initial in Gungbe while it is final in Mandarin. In this paper, taking
Aboh (2004) as a starting point (where it is proposed that the noun and elements
associated with it undergo movement), we examine the lack of movement within the
noun phrase in Mandarin. In particular, we explore an answer which rests upon the
nature of the functional categories within the “nominal inflectional domain” in Gungbe
and its contrast with the classifier layer(s) in Mandarin.
—Rint Sybesma and Enoch Aboh: “Tense in the C-domain”
Languages from both the Sinitic and the Kwa language group can be called
“tenseless” because they generally do not express the difference between past and present
tense overtly using separate morphemes. One of the strategies they use to express what
might otherwise be expressed by tense is relying on the Aktionsart of the predicate: e.g.,
generally speaking, telic ones are by default interpreted as referring to past events and
non-telic ones refer to ongoing events. However, there are elements in the outer shells of
the sentence (in some circles referred to as the “C-domain”), which influence
the .temporal interpretation of the sentence. In this paper we explore the question whether
there is a relation with analyticity in light of claims in the literature that analytic language
are characterized by the lack of head-movement. In our case, this means that the link
between the temporal functional categories in the C-domain and the predicate is not
realized by way of verb movement.