Languages In the World (11 page)

Speakers of modern English currently show a preference for what we will call
the invariable word
. Other Indo-European languages have quite a bit of inflectional
morphology inherited from PIE. Modern English does not. Modern English no longer has gender classes for nouns, and it has only one case left, the genitive
's
, which is sometimes restricted in use for animate things:
the dog's collar
or
the boy's book
versus
the windows of the building
. This is to say that modern English speakers no longer have, nor like, a lot of variation in the forms of individual words. One of the last places left where there is morphological variation is the English pronoun system, and pronoun usage is currently in flux. Even speakers interested in prescriptive norms say things like “between you and I” as opposed to the so-called correct form
between you and me
. Children will say things like: “Him and me are going to the store.” Adults may respond to the question: “Who went to the store?” by answering: “Me and him.” We make our pronouns into nouns without a blink. A baby is born, and a friend asks, “Is it a he or a she?” In many nonstandard or vernacular varieties of English throughout the English-speaking world, these forms are subject to variation, in most cases by leveling the morphological variants.
That's
Mary
hat
, with the invariable form
Mary
, is a possible utterance in African American English. The point is that English speakers have been shedding their verbal morphology for about a thousand years, and the process continues into the present.

This preference for the invariable word is shared by a language such as Chinese, which has no historical relationship to English and no sustained contact with English until relatively recently. This preference is a typological possibility, and it is called
analytic morphology
or, formulaically: one morpheme, one meaning. Analytic typologies come in two variants, either all morphemes are free (separate words) or morphemes are strung together in one word, and the latter is called
agglutinative morphology
. Chinese keeps to the one morpheme, one meaning formula, and all words are separate: the word ‘three' is
san
, the word ‘ten' is
shí
, the word ‘thirteen' is
shí san
, and the word ‘thirty' is
san shí
.

An example of agglutinative word formation in English is
goodness
. It is composed of the free morpheme
good
meaning ‘good' and the bound morpheme -
ness
meaning ‘abstract noun.' The preference for agglutination is shared by many speakers and languages, such as Turkish (Turkic) and Swahili (Niger–Congo), to name another two historically and geographically unrelated languages. Turkish agglutinates using only suffixes, the oft-cited example being
evlerinizden
:

In contrast, Swahili agglutinates using primarily prefixes. The verbal morphemes include
a-
simple present;
na-
present progressive,
li-
simple past;
me-
present perfective;
ta-
future, and so forth. The pronoun ‘he/she' is
a
-. With the noun
m-toto
, ‘the child' and the verb
soma
‘to read' various utterances can be constructed such as:

Without a specific noun, the word
a
soma will be interpreted as ‘he/she reads,'
ana
soma as ‘he/she is reading,' etc. The point is, in Turkish and Swahili, the
morphemes have one meaning apiece and they agglutinate, that is, they stick to the root to form words.

In contrast to analytic morphology is
fusional morphology
or: one morpheme, many meanings. Verb endings in Polish exemplify synthetic word formation morphology. The ending
-iła
on the word
mów
iła
‘she speaks' puts four ideas into one morpheme: third person, singular, past tense, and feminine. The terms
analytic
and
fusional
refer to the morpheme-to-meaning correspondence.

When speaking of the morpheme-to-word correspondence, languages might be
isolating
, that is one morpheme–one word. A good example is Chinese. Or they might be synthetic/polysynthetic, that is, many morphemes–one word, and whether the term
synthetic
or
polysynthetic
is applied depends on who is doing the counting. The latter is also sometimes called
incorporating
morphology. In this type, it is difficult to separate the subjects from the predicates, since all parts of an utterance are incorporated into either a verbal or nominal expression of an action/idea. The vaguest sense of polysynthesis can be found in the verb
to babysit
, where the object of the action is incorporated into the verb, but polysynthesis is not a characteristic of English. A good example from Nootka, a Native American language found in British Columbia, would be the verb
inikihlminihisita
, which breaks down into the morphemes:

Elaborate polysynthesis is commonly found in the languages of the American Northwest.

In addition to word-formation typologies, word-order typologies tell us a lot about speaker preferences. In the late 1950s, historical and comparative linguist, Joseph Greenberg, started investigating word-order patterns in a wide variety of languages, and the first thing he noticed was that speakers the world over have a strong preference for putting the subject before the object. Word-order typologies compare the basic word-order patterns in the world's languages with respect to the arrangements of the principle parts of a sentence, namely the subject (S), verb (V), and object (O). A basic word-order pattern is defined to be the most numerous type and/or the one with the least number of presuppositions. For instance, the German utterance
Die Mutter küsst die Tochter
could be either ‘the mother kisses/is kissing the daughter' or ‘the daughter kisses/is kissing the mother' because the definite feminine article
die
is the same in both the nominative (subject) and accusative (object) case. However, the first interpretation is the more basic, because it would be the answer to the question ‘What is the mother doing?,' which contains no presuppositions about that activity. The second interpretation would require a question presupposing that the daughter is doing something to someone, namely kissing, and we don't yet know whom she is kissing. In order to secure the effect of the second interpretation,
Mutter
is likely to be stressed.

There are six possibilities for a basic word order: SVO, SOV, VSO / / OVS, OSV, VOS. The first three are commonly found around the world, which suggests that speakers have a general preference for subjects before objects. The patterns OVS and OSV are not common but do occur, and VOS might be nonexistent. PIE and Old English were SOV languages, as are Japanese, Korean, Cherokee, Tibetan, Mongolian, and Georgian, just to name a few of this most prevalent worldwide pattern. Modern English and the standard Romance languages are SVO languages along with Vietnamese and Hausa, which is spoken in Nigeria and Niger. Arabic is a VSO language, along with Hawaiian, Welsh, and Squamish, another language spoken in British Columbia. The Amazonian language Urarina is OVS. Other languages of the Amazonian Basin are OSV, such as Jamamadi. ASL might well qualify as an OSV language. There is debate whether any true VOS languages exist. One candidate is regularly put forth, namely Malagasy (Austronesian), spoken on Madagascar.

What is most interesting about word-order typologies is how the basic word-order pattern of a language harmonizes with other word-order patterns in the language. One could categorize languages along any number of criteria, but these criteria may or may not reveal anything else interesting. For instance, one could make a list of all the tone languages in the world and all the intonation languages in the world, but those lists will not yield any further insight into the workings of those languages. A basic word-order pattern, however, predicts that when the object precedes the verb (SOV, OVS, OSV):

1. the indirect object precedes the object;
   
2. the auxiliary comes after the verb;
   
3. the relative clause precedes the object of the clause;
   
4. adjectives precede nouns; and
   
5. genitives precede nouns.
   

Conversely, when the verb precedes the object (SVO, VSO, VOS):

1. the indirect object follows the object;
   
2. the auxiliary comes before the verb;
   
3. the relative clause follows the object of the clause;
   
4. adjectives follow nouns; and
   
5. genitives follow nouns.
   

In other words, SVO/VSO and SOV are mirror images of one another. The phrase ‘I give the red book to the boy' in French is:

The direct object ‘the book' is next to the verb, thus making it literally direct, while the indirect object (to) ‘the boy' is farther away from the verb (S–V–D.O.–I.O.), thus making it literally indirect. Furthermore, the adjective ‘red' follows the noun. The
same order of elements is the case for the phrase ‘I give the red book to Taro' in Japanese, only in reverse:

Note that with the verb at the end, the direct object is still next to the verb, while the indirect object now precedes the direct object (S–I.O.–D.O.–V), making it farther away from the verb. Finally, the adjective ‘red' precedes the verb. Note further that English – always hedging its bets – does not type perfectly. Although it is now a very staid SVO language, adjectives precede nouns, as do genitives (of animate objects,
the woman's purse
). German is an interesting case because it, too, hedges its bets only in a different way: in main clauses, the order is SVO, and the auxiliary precedes the verb, while in dependent clauses, the order is SOV, and the auxiliary dutifully follows the verb.

A third typological classification exists, and this concerns where grammars (and presumably their speakers) choose to put what morphological information, of the kind we saw at the end of Chapter 1. In a nutshell: on the phrasal level, the marking of, for instance, possession can go either on the possessors (dependents) or on the things possessed (heads); at the clausal level, the marking of, for instance, grammatical relations can go either on the nouns (dependents) with case markers or on the verbs (heads) with what is called agreements with arguments.

The immediate point to make here is that typological classifications are possible in the first place because humans have found only a couple of ways of keeping track of what is going on in an utterance, which is a rapidly fading signal that necessarily unfolds in a linear fashion over time. Some of us have worked it out by attaching grammatical relations – who's doing what to whom/with whom/for whom – on the verb. Some of us have worked it out by distributing the information in elements surrounding the verb.