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 35 the referent is singular or plural. In some cases, however, the noun adjuncts appear to be semantically empty and merely to be required under certain cir- cumstances by the syntax of the language. (This seems to be true, in particular, of certain classifiers – see below.) Four general classes of noun adjuncts will be distinguished here: role markers, quantifiers, classifiers, and articles. These classes are discussed in turn below. Role markers include case markers, discourse markers, and (other) adpo- sitions (i.e., prepositions or postpositions). Case markers are words that indi- cate the syntactic and/or semantic role (e.g. subject and/or agent) of the noun phrase to which they belong. Discourse markers are words that indicate the discourse role (e.g. topic) of the associated noun phrase. If the role marker precedes the noun, as in the following example from Tagalog, it may be called a preposition: (100) Ipinansulat ni John ng liham kay Mary ang makinilya wrote. with ag John obj letter io Mary top typewriter ‘John wrote Mary a letter on the typewriter’ And if the role marker follows the noun, as in the following example from Japanese, it may be called a postposition: (101) Type de wa John ga Mary ni tegami o kaita typewriter instr top John subj Mary io letter obj wrote ‘John wrote Mary a letter on the typewriter’ There are certain adpositions that are clearly not discourse markers, but that are not ordinarily identified as case markers: for example the postposition de in (101), and the words indicating various locative relations in the following examples from English and Akan respectively: (102) It’s on/under/beside the table (103) ε w ɔ pon no so/ase/nky ε n it. is table the on/under/beside ‘It’s on/under/beside the table’ The distinction between case-marking and other adpositions seems to be a somewhat arbitrary one, however, based in part on the traditional identification of only certain types of grammatical or semantic roles with the label ‘case’. (It is also true, however, that in some languages locative and other adpositions must be distinguished from case-marking affixes which occur in the same phrase. For example, in Latin ‘on the table’ is super mensam, which consists of the preposition super ‘on’ and a case-marked form, the accusative, of the noun mensa ‘table’. In such cases the adposition shows the relation of a noun (phrase) to some larger syntactic unit while the affix shows its relation to the adposition.) 36 Paul Schachter and Timothy Shopen A certain correlation is known to exist between the general word order type of a language and the occurrence in the language of prepositions as opposed to postpositions. In particular, Greenberg (1963:62) has claimed that verb-initial languages are always prepositional while verb-final languages are almost always postpositional (cf. (100) and (101) above). In verb-medial languages the situ- ation is less clearcut. While the majority of such languages are prepositional (cf. (102)), there are also a good many that are postpositional instead (cf. (103)). In languages that do not use role markers to indicate the grammatical, seman- tic, or discourse roles of nouns, or that use markers for some such roles but not others, the roles in question may be indicated by word order or by affixation. English, for example, uses word order to distinguish subjects from objects (compare The boy loves the girl and The girl loves the boy) while languages like Latin and Warlpiri use case-marking. Compare (104) and (105) for Warlpiri with free word order and a case-marking clitic for Ergative (-ngku), transitive subject. The case-marking clitic can attach itself to every word in a noun phrase or just the last word of the noun phrase: (104) a. Ngarrka-ngku karnta nyangu man-erg woman saw ‘The man saw the woman’ b. Nyangu ngarrka-ngku karnta saw man-erg woman ‘The man saw the woman’ (105) a. Ngarrka nyangu karnta-ngku man saw woman-erg ‘The woman saw the man’ b. Ngarrka karnta-ngku nyangu man woman-erg saw ‘The woman saw the man’ There are also languages in which the affixes that indicate the role of a noun or noun phrase may appear on a verb rather than on the noun or noun phrase itself. In Swahili, for example, the affix -i- on a verb expresses the equivalent of the benefactive preposition for, as in (106). (106) Ni-li-m-p-i-a chakula mwanamke I-past-her-give-for-ø food woman ‘I gave food for the woman’ cf. Ni-li-m-p-a chakula mwanamke I-past-her-give-ø food woman ‘I gave the woman food’ |
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