Abstract
This paper takes a well-known observation as its starting point, that is, languages vary with respect to headedness, with the standard head-initial and head-final types well attested. Is there a connection between headedness and the size of a lexical class? Although this question seems quite straightforward, there are formidable methodological and theoretical challenges in addressing it. Building on initial results by several researchers, we refine our methodology and consider the proportion of nouns to simplex verbs (as opposed to light verb constructions) in a varied sample of 33 languages to evaluate the connection between headedness and the size of a lexical class. We demonstrate a robust correlation between this proportion and headedness. While the proportion of nouns in a lexicon is relatively stable, head-final/object-verb (OV)-type languages (e.g., Japanese or Hungarian) have a relatively small number of simplex verbs, whereas head-initial/verb-initial languages (e.g., Irish or Zapotec) have a considerably larger percentage of such verbs. The difference between the head-final and head-initial type is statistically significant. We, then, consider a subset of languages characterized as subject-verb-object (SVO) and show that this group is not uniform. Those SVO languages that have strong head-initial characteristics (as shown by the order of constituents in a set of phrases and word order alternations) are characterized by a relatively large proportion of lexical verbs. SVO languages that have strong head-final traits (e.g., Mandarin Chinese) pattern with head-final languages, and a small subset of SVO languages are genuinely in the middle (e.g., English, Russian). We offer a tentative explanation for this headedness asymmetry, couched in terms of informativity and parsing principles, and discuss additional evidence in support of our account. All told, the fewer simplex verbs in head-final/OV-type languages is an adaptation in response to their particular pattern of headedness. The object-verb/verb-object (OV/VO) difference with respect to noun/verb ratios also reveals itself in SVO languages; some languages, Chinese and Latin among them, show a strongly OV ratio, whereas others, such as Romance or Bantu, are VO-like in their noun/verb ratios. The proportion of nouns to verbs thus emerges as a new linguistic characteristic that is correlated with headedness.
Highlights
This paper takes a well-known observation as its starting point, that is, languages vary with respect to headedness, with the standard head-initial and head-final types well attested
The proportion of nouns to verbs emerges as a new linguistic characteristic that is correlated with headedness
The exponentiated coefficient for the intercept will correspond to the average verb-to-noun ratio for the base level; the exponentiated coefficients for the other levels of the predictor will correspond to the proportional change in the verb-to-noun ratio change relative to the base level
Summary
People learning Japanese as a second language have to struggle with many aspects of its grammar and orthography but there is at least one area of Japanese that is relatively easy to an L2 learner, i.e., the formation of verbs. An L2 learner takes a noun, combines it with the verb suru “do” and the result is comprehensible, even though it may not quite be idiomatic Japanese These days, suru often combines with English words, such as beesu appu suru “increase salary” (from base up), kisu suru ”kiss” (from kiss) guuguru suru ”Google”, and many others. Languages 2020, 5, 9 accompanied by the usual hand-wringing about the Japanese vocabulary being destroyed by English, suru has, been used with Mandarin Chinese loans in a similar way for centuries, yielding such compounds as kenkyuu suru ”study” and gensyoo suru ”decrease”.1 This initial observation suggests that Japanese has a rather small number of inflecting verbs and a large open class of complex predicates. The Mandarin Chinese borrowings are so numerous that it would take a number of pages to list just part of them; see (Jacobsen 1992, chp. 7) for representative examples
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