Principles of event framing : genetic stability in grammar and discourse

Ever since Wilhelm von Humboldt’s (1836) pioneering study of Nahuatl, linguists have recurrently recognized that languages differ fundamentally in the syntactic weight they attribute to noun-phrases as the arguments of a verb. Currently, the most prominent attempts to turn this intuition into a precise hypothesis revolve around the notion of ‘configurationality’

A general method for the statistical evaluation of typological distributions

The distribution of linguistic structures in the world is the joint product of universal principles, inheritance from ancestor languages, language contact, social structures, and random fluctuation. This paper proposes a method for evaluating the relative significance of each factor — and in particular, of universal principles — via regression modeling: statistical evidence for universal principles is found if the odds for families to have skewed responses (e.g. all or most members have postnominal relative clauses) as opposed to having an opposite response skewing or no skewing at all, is significantly higher for some condition (e.g. VO order) than for another condition, independently of other factors

Introduction: person and evidence in Himalayan languages

The present volume results from an initiative to foster cooperation between scholars of Himalayan languages in Europe. The initiative was launched five years ago and has brought about a series of annual workshop meetings and individual cooperative projects (cf. http://www.isw.unibe.ch/EuroHimal). The 1998 workshop, held in Heidelberg, was devoted to the role that notions of speech act participants play in the grammar of various Himalayan languages, and the present collection represents, with some additions and some subtractions, the proceedings of this workshop. In the following I will give some background on the rationale for the topics covered in this volume, especially on the ways in which the indexing of speech act participants is related in Himalayan languages to evidentials and other epistemological operators. I will close this introduction with a brief outline of the structure of the volume

Verb agreement and epistemic marking : a typological journey from the Himalayas to the Caucasus

Epistemische Morphologie registriert manchmal das Wissen über spezifische Argumente anstatt über Propositionen. Sie steht dann in minimalem Kontrast zu Kongruenzmorphologie, die die Identität von Argumenten registriert. Diese Ähnlichkeit lässt erwarten, dass die relevante Personenkategorie – der Referent, dessen Wissen in epistemischer Morphologie angezeigt wird bzw. der Referent dessen Merkmale in Kongruenzmorphologie unifiziert werden – der gleichen typologischen Varianz unterliegen. Eine Untersuchung vorwiegend himalajischer und kaukasischer Daten bestätigt diese Voraussage: in beiden Systemen sind Personenkategorien bald als Sprecher vs. Andere, bald als Adressat vs. Andere, bald als Informant vs. Andere (Sprecher in Aussagen, Adressat in Fragen) definiert. Die einzige Option, die in epistemischen Systemen bisher nicht belegt ist, ist die Dreifachopposition von Sprecher vs. Adressat vs. Andere, die in Kongruenzsystemen gängig ist.Studies of the epistemic categories expressed in Tibetan auxiliaries and copulas have mostly compared the phenomena with mirativity marking, and this is no doubt the correct comparandum in diachronic research. However, synchronic descriptions are also often tempted to compare the relevant categories with agreement systems or similar reference-related structures, at least for expository purposes when explaining how the system works (e. g. Denwood 1999, Tournadre 1996, Goldstein et al. 1991)

Cultural formalism and spatial language in Belhara

When looking at ethnographies of Himalayan societies, one is impressed by the recurrent relevance and importance of spatial notions in cullural domains from shamanism to architecture, from belief systems to everyday behaviour, from religion to grammar

From ergativus absolutus to topic marking in Kiranti : a typological perspective

In many languages, clauses can be subordinated by means of case markers. For Bodic languages, a branch of Sino-Tibetan, Genetti (1986) has shown that the meaning of case markers on clauses is in most instances a natural extension of their function on nouns. A dative, for example, which marks a referential goal with a noun, signals a situational goal, i.e., a purpose, when used on a clause. Among the case markers recruited for subordination, we not only get relatively concrete cases like datives, comitatives and various types of locatives, but also core argument relators such as ergatives and accusatives. In this paper, I focus on ergative markers in one subgroup of Bodic, viz. in Kiranti languages spoken in Eastern Nepal, especially in Belhare

What is typology? - a short note

It is often assumed that the goal of typology is to define the notion ‘possible human language’. This view, which I call the Universalist Typology view is shared, for example, by virtually all contributors to Bynon & Shibatani’s 1995 volume Approaches to Language Typology, and by Moravscik in her review of this volume in Linguistic Typology 1 (p.105). In the following I claim that this assumption is fundamentally mistaken. To clarify the theoretical status of what is meant by ‘possible human language’, I argue here for a distinction between typological theory (theoretical typology) and grammatical theory (theoretical syntax and theoretical morphology) as distinct subdisciplines of linguistics