Language Typology and Syntactic Description, Volume I: Clause Structure, Second edition
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Lgg Typology, Synt Description v. I - Clause structure
Parts-of-speech systems 37 (See also the Tagalog example (100), above, in which the affix ipinan- on the verb ipinansulat indicates that the topic noun phrase ang makinilya is to be interpreted as playing the role of an instrument.) Finally, it may be noted that certain discourse roles are sometimes indicated by the use of special syntactic constructions or by intonation. Thus the English equivalent of the Akan focus marker na of (107) is the so-called cleft-sentence construction, while the English equivalent of the Akan contrast marker de of (108) is intonational: (107) Kwame na ɔ b ε y ε adwuma no Kwame focus he. will. do work the ‘It’s Kwame who will do the work’ (108) Kwame de, ɔ b ε k ɔ na Kofi de, ɔ b ε tena ha Kwame contrast he. will. go and Kofi contrast he. will. stay here ‘Kwame will go but Kofi will stay here’ The next group of noun adjuncts to be considered, the quantifiers, consists of modifiers of nouns that indicate quantity or scope: for example numerals, and words meaning ‘many’, ‘much’, ‘few’, ‘all’, ‘some’, ‘each’, etc. In some lan- guages a quantifier is required if plurality is to be explicitly indicated. Tagalog, for example, uses the quantifier mga in this way: (109) Nasaan ang mga pinggan? where top pl dish ‘Where are the dishes?’ And Vietnamese appears to have some fifty different pluralizers (which, how- ever, also carry some more explicit quantifier meaning: ‘all’, ‘all (vague)’, ‘many’, ‘a few’, etc. – see Binh (1971:113–14)). In such languages the explicit indication of plurality is generally optional. Thus if mga is deleted from (109), the resultant sentence can still be interpreted as meaning ‘Where are the dishes?’, although it could also mean ‘Where is the dish?’ There are a number of languages in which quantifiers, or at least certain quantifiers, vary in form according to the semantic properties of the nouns they modify. Thus the Akuapem dialect of Akan has two distinct forms for certain numerals, according to whether the noun modified is human or nonhuman: for example nnipa baanu (people two) ‘two people’ vs mmoa abien (ani- mals two) ‘two animals’. And in Japanese there are semantically conditioned variants such as sannin ‘three (of humans)’, sanba ‘three (of birds)’, sanbon ‘three (of cylindrical objects)’, sanmai ‘three (of thin flat objects)’, etc. (The Japanese examples are bimorphemic, each consisting of the quantifier mor- pheme san- ‘three’ plus a classifier morpheme: see the discussion of classifiers below.) 38 Paul Schachter and Timothy Shopen The range of meanings expressed by a distinct parts-of-speech class of quan- tifiers varies considerably from language to language, and languages that have such a class may nonetheless have other means for expressing particular quan- tity or scope meanings. One such means involves nouns of quantity or scope in attributive phrases, as in Hausa mut ɑ ne d ɑ y ɑ w ɑ (people with abundance) ‘many people’, or in possessive-like constructions, as in Akan nnipa no nyinaa (people the wholeness) ‘all the people’ (cf. nnipa no ntade (people the clothes) ‘the people’s clothes’). Another involves verbs of quantity, such as Akan d ɔɔ so ‘be enough/much’, as in: (110) W ɔ noaa aduan a ε d ɔɔ so they. cooked food rel it. is. enough ‘They cooked enough / a lot of food’ It is, of course, very common for plurality to be expressed by affixes on nouns, whether by suffixation, as in English houses, fingers, or by prefixation, as in Ilocano balbalay ‘houses’, ramramay ‘fingers’ (where the plural prefix is a reduplication of the first three segments of the noun stem – cf. balay ‘house’, ramay ‘finger’). Less common, but attested in certain synthetic languages, is the use of noun affixes to express other quantifier meanings: for example Yana hanmau- ‘many’, as in hanmauyaa ‘many people’. The next group of noun adjuncts to be considered is the classifiers. These are words which are required by the syntax of certain languages when a noun is also modified by a numeral. (In some languages, such as Mandarin Chinese, classifiers are also required when nouns are modified by demonstratives, or by one of certain non-numerical quantifiers. In Thai, on the other hand, classifiers are obligatory only with a subset of numerals, those expressing ‘small definite numbers’ – see Adams and Conklin (1974).) The closest English analogue to classifiers are the words that follow the numerals in expressions like two heads of lettuce or three ears of corn. But while in English only a relatively small group of nouns are not directly modified by numerals, in languages with classifiers this is true of all nouns. Thus in English one says two boys, three dogs, four houses, etc. But in Thai the equivalent expressions must all have classifiers: deg s ɔɔŋ khon (boy two classifier) ‘two boys’, maa saam tu ɑ (dog three classifier) ‘three dogs’, baan sii la ŋ (house four classifier) ‘four houses’, etc. The number of classifiers found in a language may be quite large. Thus Warotamasikkhadit (1972) lists over sixty classifiers that occur in Thai, and acknowledges that the listing is incomplete. In some cases a given noun may co-occur with one of two or more different classifiers, in which case each classifier usually has a distinct meaning. Thus in the Thai examples kluay sii k ɔɔ (banana four classifier) ‘four banana trees (in a cluster)’, kluay sii wii |
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