What is the innateness theory for why some languages are similar?

What is a major detraction from the theory of innateness?

Languages are similar because language evolved in humans and some aspects of language are innate.  We should expect to find patterns between even unrelated languages.

Variation in languages and the concepts they communicate detracts from a theory of pure innateness.

Language is a tool, and its form is shaped by its use.

This makes sense as to why many languages have ways to locate situations in time, to refer back to established participants, etc.

smallest element that can be pronounced on its own, that makes sense on its own, and that can appear in different places within a sentence

often felt to have fixed reference

elements within words usually occur in a fixed order

consonants are dragged over to a following vowel

ex: mes amis

unstressed function words attach phonologically to content words

ex: I'm going to meet her tomorrow

I'm gointa meeter tomorrow

-assumption that concepts have sharp boundaries when they don't

-assumes 1:1 meaning across languages

-naively simple way of expressing meaning or too abstract as to be impracticable and non-functional

Concepts often have fuzzy boundaries and things have graded membership.

There is such a thing as "naturalness" of concepts

Meaning is dynamic.

The older form and the newer form exist side by side in our heads as different mental representations and that processes apply in our heads in the form of rules.

Differentiate between syntactic words and phonological words.

membership is in principle unlimited, and may differ from speaker to speaker

nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs

contain a fixed, usually small number of words, and which are essentially the same for all speakers

articles, auxiliaries, clitics, copulas, interjections, negators, particles, politeness markers, prepositions, postpositions, PRO-forms, quantifiers

-morphology

-argument tracking

-basic word order

What does it mean to be an isolating language?

Give an example of one.

a language that lacks morphology

ex: Chinese

What is a polysynthetic language?

Give an example.

Has very long words with several roots.

Inuktitut

What is an agglutinating language?

Give an example of one.

has easily separable morphemes.

ex: Turkish

What is a fusional language?

Give an example of one.

has morphemes that combine several grammatical concepts

ex: Russian

-index of synthesis (# of morphemes per word)

-index of fusion (ease with which morphemes can be separated)

-word order

-modifications (case/agreement)

The following language groups are members of what family?

Germanic

Celtic

Italic

Hellenic

Albanian

Armenian

Baltic

Slavic

Indo-Iranian

The following are members of what language family?

Finno-Ugric

Samoyedic

The following are members of what language family?

Turkish

Kazakh

Azerbaijani

Uzbek

nominative

genitive

dative

accusative

vocative

locative

instrumental

possession/part-whole

indicates "of what" or "of whom"

What is agent nominalization?

Give an example.

indicates a person known for doing an activity.

ex: run > runner

teach > teacher

sing > singer

high > height

wide > width

appropriate > appropriateness

-compounding

-adpositions

-case on the possessor

-affix on the possessor, possessum, or both

What family do these languages belong to?

Tamil

Malayalam

What family do these languages belong to?

Vietnamese

Cambodian

What language family do these belong to?

Tibeto-Burman

Sinitic

Chinese

What is the idea behind Keenan and Comrie's accessibility hierarchy for relative clauses?

subject > direct object > indirect object > oblique argument > possessor > object of comparison

numeral classifiers

noun classifiers

genitive classifiers

genetic = families of languages

typological = based on shared grammatical features

-word order

-compounding

-topic-comment constructions:

ex: California, its climate is good

At this place, it is good to plant wheat

sort out the different paterns and decide what uses each pattern has

consider type of modifier, placement of head, and semantic relation between elements

the second part of the compound signals some result of the action or process conveyed by the first part

can be put into a "potential" form, can also be directional and imply movement

What are some of the nominal compound types in Chinese?

(Seven are listed)

N2 is made of N1

N2 is a container of N1

N1 and N2 are parallel

N2 denotes a product of N1

N2 denotes a malady of N1

N2 is used for N1

N1 denotes the location of N2

Comrie: a grammatical category associated with time

Crystal: the way the grammar marks the time at which the action denoted by the verb took place

key point: it's a grammatical marker, not a semantic one like "tomorrow"

past, present, future

past, non-past

provides an approximate and subjective measure of the interval between the frame and the tense locus.

ex: Wishram-Wasco dialect of Chinook, ChiBemba

aspect proper

Aktionsart or lexical aspect

a past situation with present relevance

ex: John has read the book

SVO

deviation allowed by topicalization

adding an element to strengthen negation, then subtracting another one.

ex: non dico

(Old French) jeo ne di

(Mod. lit. French) je ne dis pas

(Mod. coll. French) je dis pas

grammatical category of questions.

Some languages distinguish yes/no questions from wh-questions

-politeness

-often thought that more polite expressions are longer than blunt expressions

-prepositional phrases

-postpositional phrases

-case on nouns

-prefixes on verbs

an object of a verb that is a nominalized form of the verb

ex: Mary slept a peaceful sleep.

Shift in which the intransitive form of a verb is marked, so that the object of the transitive becomes the subject of the intransitive

ex: acostar ('to put someone to bed') v acostarse ('to go to bed')

Shift in which a causative or transitivizing suffix is added to the intransitive to create the transitive version

ex: pinkal ('to be afraid') v. pinkali:c ('frighten, scare')

construction where one entity causes another event to happen, and where the causee has some control over the outcome

ex: 'the nurse made/had/let/required that the child eat'

subject typically corresponds to the direct object or benefactive of the active voice form

-sometimes said that passive promotes the primary object ot subject position

dependent clause serving to modify a sentence

ex: when making tea/after he graduated

Is the following adverbial clause finite or non-finite?

When making tea...

Is the following adverbial clause finite or non-finite?

After he graduated...

clause in argument position

ex: She said [that she was going to the park]

grammatical relation that, in the active voice, includes the most topical element of each sentence

some languages have evidence for subject as a grammatical relation, others don't

-agreement

-case marking

-imperatives

-dropped argument in infinitives

-participial clauses

subject > direct object > indirect object > other

If verb agreement is employed to signal the grammatical relation of any one nominal it will be the subject; as one moves to the right on the hierarchy, the frequency with which one finds agreement falls off drastically

other > indirect object> direct object > subject

If case is employed to signal the grammatical relation of any one nominal, it will be something other than indirect object, direct object, or subject; as one moves to the right on the hierarchy, the frequency with which one finds agreement falls off drastically

where the noun phrase in the predicate is marked in the nominative

seems to have two subjects (problem for understanding grammatical relations)

the experiencer is marked in the dative and yet sometimes has subject properties (ex: I like movies)

often have split subject properties (problem for grammatical relations)

ex: There's a fly in my soup or There appeared a great crowd

often have split subject properties (poses a problem for grammatical relations)

What are some examples of common agreement/case marking patterns?

-nominative/accusative

-ergative/absolutive

-agentive/non-agentive

-tripartite (intransitive subject, transitive subject, and transitive object considered separately)

-accusative imperfective, ergative perfective

-accusative pronoun, ergative other nouns

object that is the last one to be affected by an action (grammatical relation including the ultimate effect of the action

ex: I gave Jane the book (here, the primary object is Jane)

universalist/nativist approach: 'word,' 'clitic,' and 'affix' have concrete definitions that apply to all languages

relativist approach: 'word,' 'clitic,' 'affix,' etc. must be defined in each language

How does the nativist approach account for the apparent fact that all or most languages distinguish nouns and verbs?

Language is innate, so the reason why people shape language to their world is because we all perceive it similarly, and the distinction between a noun and a verb is inherent.

(This is Chomsky's approach)

singular v. plural

singular v. dual v. plural

singular v. dual v. triple v. plural

paucal v. multiple

X and associates

group, collective, or generic plural

alienable v. inalienable

alienable: separable, non-relational, transferable

inalienable: inseparable, relational, usually taken to refer to family terms and body parts; some nouns are even obligatorily possessed

Bambara is the language:

The man bought the horse that I saw:

man PAST [i PAST horse REL see] buy

phrase that must occur in a negative context

ex: "any-" words (anything, anyone, etc.)

a term used for a word (possibly a part of speech) that functions to equate a subject noun phrase with a predicate noun phrase: John is a student. The term is only useful in a language if this type of word has special properties. In some languages, the copula is only used for noun phrase predicates, but in languages like English, adjective phrase predicates use the same pattern: John is tall.  Depending on the language, a copula can be a particle, a verb, or even zero (as in Russian in the present tense).

What is a particle?