Cross-linguistic Tendency Research Articles

Silent Nominal Heads in Manner Adverbials

In this study we will start from a suggestion taken from Kayne’s proposal (2016) about silent heads, in order to analyse the structure of some specific adverbial PPs in different languages. It will be argued that behind certain manner constructions consisting of a preposition plus an adjective may lie a full nominal phrase, whose head is generally – but not exclusively – silent. This study will show that there is a cross-linguistic tendency to create manner expressions using a nominal head meaning ‘way’ or ‘manner’, and also that this head may change diachronically, either becoming silent to form idiomatic expressions, or being reanalysed and grammaticalised into a productive adverbial suffix.

Phonological learning is asymmetrical between prefixes and suffixes

Phonological theories typically treat prefixes and suffixes as if phonological processes apply uniformly to both. However, previous studies have found clear asymmetries between the behavior of both affixes. We argue that this is due to phonological processes being easier to learn in suffix position rather than prefix position. To test this, an artificial language learning task was used to evaluate whether phonological learning is symmetrical between affixes. Results pattern in the direction of the hypothesis, namely, that phonological learning is asymmetrically facilitated in suffix position over prefix position, providing support to general cognitive mechanisms being responsible for strong cross-linguistic tendencies.

Naturalness is gradient in morphological paradigms: Evidence from positional splits

Agreement markers that refer to the same feature or argument tend to be found in the same position (e.g., all subject agreement markers as suffixes, all object agreement markers as prefixes). However, little is known about the exceptions to this trend: cases where different values of the same feature are marked in different positions in the word (i.e., positional splits). In this study, we explore the positional properties of subject and object person-number agreement markers in a phylogenetically diverse sample of 227 languages. We find that the recurrence of a positional split is proportional to its degree of naturalness, that is, to the amount of shared feature values amongst the forms with the same positional arrangement. Natural patterns (e.g., where prefixal forms all share SG and suffixal forms all share PL) are over-represented in natural languages compared to a random baseline. The most unnatural patterns are underrepresented, and splits with an intermediate level of unnaturalness occur at around chance levels. We hypothesise that this graded bias for naturalness is grounded in a preference for morphological similarity amongst semantically similar forms during language learning. To test this hypothesis we conducted two online artificial language learning experiments where we trained and tested participants on person-number verbal agreement paradigms of different sizes with positional splits of different degrees of naturalness. We found that their relative learnability is also gradient, again proportional to the amount of feature value overlap, thus matching the observed cross-linguistic tendencies. Our findings support the notion that semantic similarity shapes the evolution of morphological structure in person-number verbal agreement systems and that it does so in a gradient way.

Relativized Locality: Phases and Tiers in Long-Distance Allomorphy in Armenian

Linguistic processes tend to respect locality constraints. In this article, we analyze the distribution of conjugation classes in Armenian verbs. We analyze a type of tense allomorphy that applies across these classes. We show that on the surface, this allomorphy is long-distance. Specifically, it is sensitive to the interaction of multiple morphemes that are neither linearly nor structurally adjacent. However, we argue that this allomorphy respects “relativized adjacency” (Toosarvandani 2016) or tier-based locality (Aksënova, Graf, and Moradi 2016). While not surface-local, the interaction in Armenian verbs is local on a tier projected from morphological features. This formal property of tier-based locality is substantively manifested as phase-based locality in Armenian (cf. Marvin 2002). In addition to being well-studied computationally, tier-based locality allows us to capture superficially nonlocal morphological processes while respecting the crosslinguistic tendency of locality. We speculate that tier-based locality is a crosslinguistic tendency in long-distance allomorphy, while phase-based locality is not necessarily so.

Probing a Neural Network Model of Sound Change for Perceptual Integration

The cross-linguistic tendency for contrast shifts to occur between some cues more than others has been investigated typologically and experimentally (Yang 2019), but with less attention in computational modeling. This paper adapts a human experimental paradigm (Kingston et al. 2008) to the speech perception component of a neural network model of sound change (Beguš 2020) to better understand how it processes acoustic cues in the context of Yang’s proposal that auditory dimensions affect which cues are more likely to undergo contrast shift. Piloting this neural network probing technique, I find evidence that the model integrates different pairs of English stop voicing cues than humans do, suggesting that further amendments to the model are necessary to implement Yang (2019)’s account. In general, these results highlight potential acoustic processing differences between humans and the model under investigation, a Convolutional Neural Network, which is commonly used in spoken language applications.

The typology of progressive constructions in Arabic dialects

Abstract This paper describes and compares the strategies used in Arabic dialects to encode the progressive aspect, in order to show their similarities and what sets them apart from one another, as well as to situate them within cross-linguistic tendencies. Drawing on a wide variety of data, the paper shows the different ways the progressive aspect was (or is being) grammaticalized in Arabic dialects in light of the typologically common paths of grammaticalization. These paths involve for some dialects the reorganization of their aspectual categories, and thus provide an interesting perspective to look at the evolution of aspectual systems in Arabic varieties.

A Variationist Sociolinguistic Analysis of Intensifiers in Oslo Norwegian

The present study uses variationist sociolinguistic methods to examine the intensifier system in Oslo Norwegian. Results indicate that both linguistic and social factors influence intensifier use. Predicative adjectives were intensified more frequently than attributive adjectives, women used intensifiers more frequently than men, and younger speakers had higher intensification rates than older speakers. Apparent time analyses also reveal a change in progress toward the use of skikkelig ‘proper’, a change led predominantly by young women. Although veldig ‘very’ was the most frequently used intensifier, its use decreases in apparent time, whereas skikkelig increases in frequency among younger speakers. The development of the intensifier skikkelig appears to follow a common pathway of change from adjective to manner adjunct to degree adverb, as well as from appropriateness to intensification. Comparisons with work on English, German, and Norwegian reveal several crosslinguistic tendencies about the linguistic and social conditioning of intensifiers. This study provides the first variationist sociolinguistic analysis of intensifiers in Oslo Norwegian; it provides support for several crosslinguistic claims about intensifier use; and it contributes to the visibility of variationist sociolinguistic work in the study of Norwegian variation and change.

More or Less Unnatural: Semantic Similarity Shapes the Learnability and Cross-Linguistic Distribution of Unnatural Syncretism in Morphological Paradigms.

Morphological systems often reuse the same forms in different functions, creating what is known as syncretism. While syncretism varies greatly, certain cross-linguistic tendencies are apparent. Patterns where all syncretic forms share a morphological feature value (e.g., first person, or plural number) are most common cross-linguistically, and this preference is mirrored in results from learning experiments. While this suggests a general bias towards natural (featurally homogeneous) over unnatural (featurally heterogeneous) patterns, little is yet known about gradients in learnability and distributions of different kinds of unnatural patterns. In this paper we assess apparent cross-linguistic asymmetries between different types of unnatural patterns in person-number verbal agreement paradigms and test their learnability in an artificial language learning experiment. We find that the cross-linguistic recurrence of unnatural patterns of syncretism in person-number paradigms is proportional to the amount of shared feature values (i.e., semantic similarity) amongst the syncretic forms. Our experimental results further suggest that the learnability of syncretic patterns also mirrors the paradigm's degree of feature-value similarity. We propose that this gradient in learnability reflects a general bias towards similarity-based structure in morphological learning, which previous literature has shown to play a crucial role in word learning as well as in category and concept learning more generally. Rather than a dichotomous natural/unnatural distinction, our results thus support a more nuanced view of (un)naturalness in morphological paradigms and suggest that a preference for similarity-based structure during language learning might shape the worldwide transmission and typological distribution of patterns of syncretism.

The sound symbolism of food: the frequency of initial /PA-/ in words for (staple) food.

In different languages around the world, morphemes representing the (cooked form of) staple food or food in general tend to begin with a [+labial] phoneme followed by a [+low] phoneme (/pa-/, /ma-/, /fa-/, /wa-/, etc.). This article provides evidence for this phonological similarity by analyzing 66 sample languages' morphemes representing the staple food within the society where each language is spoken. About a fourth of the morphemes referring to staple food begin with a [+labial] first phoneme followed by a [+low] second phoneme, which is a much higher proportion compared to another list of basic morphemes in the same 66 languages. I further argue that the motivation for this crosslinguistic tendency is the iconic association between the mouth-opening gesture and the concept of eating.

Category Clustering and Morphological Learning.

Inflectional affixes expressing the same grammatical category (e.g., subject agreement) tend to appear in the same morphological position in the word. We hypothesize that this cross‐linguistic tendency toward category clustering is at least partly the result of a learning bias, which facilitates the transmission of morphology from one generation to the next if each inflectional category has a consistent morphological position. We test this in an online artificial language experiment, teaching adult English speakers a miniature language consisting of noun stems representing shapes and suffixes representing the color and number features of each shape. In one experimental condition, each suffix category has a fixed position, with color in the first position and number in the second position. In a second condition, each specific combination of suffixes has a fixed order, but some combinations have color in the first position, and some have number in the first position. In a third condition, suffixes are randomly ordered on each presentation. While the language in the first condition is consistent with the category clustering principle, those in the other conditions are not. Our results indicate that category clustering of inflectional affixes facilitates morphological learning, at least in adult English speakers. Moreover, we found that languages that violate category clustering but still follow fixed affix ordering patterns are more learnable than languages with random ordering. Altogether, our results provide evidence for individual biases toward category clustering; we suggest that this bias may play a causal role in shaping the typological regularities in affix order we find in natural language.

Phonetic and phonological properties of the advanced tongue root feature in African languages

The paper presents an overview of the ATR (advanced tongue root) feature, which is fairly widespread among the Niger-Congo and Nilo-Saharan languages of the Macro-Sudan Belt. The phonetic section provides a description of the articulatory and acoustic correlates of the feature. The review of the articulatory basis of the feature is presented in a historical perspective, from the fi rst cineradiographic studies of the 1960s till the laryngoscopic studies of the recent years. The paper shows how the introduction of new methods shifted attention from the tongue root movement, which had been given primacy in production of the contrast, to aryepiglotto-epiglottal constriction and a synergistic system of laryngeal articulations. The paper provides a description of several acoustic measures that have been found to correlate with the ATR feature: the frequency of the fi rst formant, the fi rst formant bandwidth, the spectral center of gravity, the relative intensity of the fi rst to the second formant. Similarities and differences between ATR, height and tenseness, which have been largely discussed in the literature, are also described in the paper. The phonological section provides an overview of ATR harmony systems. The main attention is paid to the strong crosslinguistic tendency for [+ATR] to function as the dominant value in languages with ATR contrast among high vowels, but for [−ATR] to be dominant in languages in which ATR is only contrastive for non-high vowels. The paper describes diff erent manifestations of ATR dominance (assimilatory, allophonic, and coalescent dominance) among two major types of underlying vowel inventories.

Sound symbolism in Chinese children’s literature

AbstractIconicity is a fundamental property of spoken and signed languages. However, quantitative analysis of sound-meaning association in Chinese has not been extensively developed, and little is known about the impact of sound symbolism in children’s literature. As sound symbolism is supposed to be a universal cognitive phenomenon, this research seeks to investigate whether iconic structures of Mandarin are embodied in native Chinese speakers’ language experience. The paper describes a case study of Chinese storybooks with the goal of testing whether phonosemantic association is prominent between name sounds and character features. A quantitative method was used to investigate the distribution of different phonological units in character denomination depending on their physical and emotional traits. The results show that phonemes and syllable combination patterns are closely related to perceivable character features. By comparing schematic mapping in Chinese with other languages, the study illuminates a cross-linguistic tendency in addition to a Chinese-specific iconic relation between sound and meaning.

Lexical Category-Governed Neutralization to Coronal and Non-Coronal Place of Articulation in Latent Consonants: The Case of Shipibo-Konibo and Capanahua (Pano)

This study documents and accounts for the behavior of the place of articulation of latent segments in the Panoan languages Shipibo-Konibo and Capanahua. In these languages, the lexical category of the word governs the place of articulation (PoA) of latent consonants. Latent segments only surface when they are syllabified as syllable onsets. They surface as coronal consonants when they are part of verbs; but they occur as non-coronal consonants when they belong to nouns or adjectives. In non-verb forms, by default, they are neutralized to dorsal in Shipibo-Konibo, and to labial in Capanahua. The analysis proposed consists in using the well-known markedness hierarchy on PoA, |Labial, Dorsal > Coronal > Pharyngeal|, and harmonically aligning it with a morphological markedness hierarchy in which non-verb forms are more marked than verb forms: |NonVerb > Verb|. This creates two fixed rankings of markedness constraints: one on verb forms in which, as expected, coronal/laryngeal is deemed the least marked PoA, and another one on non-verb forms in which the familiar markedness on PoA is reversed so that labial and dorsal become the least marked places of articulation. The study shows that although both Panoan languages follow the general cross-linguistic tendency to have coronal as a default PoA, this default can be overridden by morphology.

Do Creoles conform to typological patterns? Habitual marking in Palenquero

AbstractIt is widely debated whether creole languages form a typological class; however, crosslinguistic generalizations from functional typology are seldom tested in creoles. Typological studies report a strong crosslinguistic tendency for asymmetries in habitual grammatical expressions across the present and past temporal reference domains (Bybee, 1994:245–8; Bybee, Perkins, & Pagliuca, 1994:151–60). This study analyzes two linguistic variants, preverbal asé and zero, which compete for habitual marking in Palenquero Creole (Colombia). I ask here: To what degree does the linguistic patterning of these forms conform to the crosslinguistic tendency? Results show that, despite Palenquero having widely cited creole features (e.g., preverbal markers and bare verb stems), the asymmetrical expression, distribution, and relative ordering of forms in the variable contexts closely align with crosslinguistic predictions for habituals, thus giving convincing evidence of typological markedness and not a Creole Prototype.

When a cross-linguistic tendency marries incomplete acquisition: Preposition drop in Russian spoken in Daghestan

Aims and Objectives/Purpose/Research Questions: The purpose of the study is to figure out what factors condition the phenomenon of preposition drop (P-drop) in locative, directional and temporal phrases. Specifically, we investigate what kind of phrases allow P-drop in Russian spoken in Highland Daghestan and aim at understanding the rationale for this phenomenon. Design/Methodology/Approach: We conduct a quantitative analysis of data extracted from the Corpus of Russian spoken in Daghestan, which includes interviews with 53 native speakers of 15 Daghestanian and Turkic languages, amounting to 228 thousand tokens. Data and Analysis: Data from 47 (29 male; 18 female) consultants speaking Russian as a second language (L2) who produced a sufficient number of prepositional phrases (PPs) were included in the analysis. 50 PPs were collected from each speaker, resulting in a data set of 2350 PPs. Each PP was annotated for P-drop and several sociolinguistic and linguistic parameters. We fitted a logistic mixed-effects regression model to determine which parameters are significant predictors of P-drop. Findings/Conclusions: We show that the probability of P-drop depends on preposition type, phonetic context and the speaker’s fluency in Russian. We propose that the prominence of P-drop in the speech of Daghestanian highlanders results from an interplay of two factors: a typological tendency for certain spatial and temporal locations to be formally unmarked, and incomplete acquisition of the Russian prepositional system. Originality: This is the first detailed quantitative study of P-drop based on an inferential statistical analysis of data from a large number of L2 Russian speakers from Daghestan. Significance/Implications: The results show that the apparently contact-induced phenomena such as P-drop may be explained both by typological tendencies and incomplete acquisition of L2. This paper is thus important both for the typological study of this phenomenon and for L2 acquisition research.

Brief at the Risk of Being Misunderstood: Consolidating Population- and Individual-Level Tendencies

Communicative pressures can give rise to regular patterns of language use. These patterns, in turn, can come to shape a language’s structure over time. In a recent study, Kanwal et al. (Cognition, 165:45–52, 2017) investigate whether an interaction of such pressures may underlie the cross-linguistic tendency of frequent forms to be shorter. Using a miniature artificial language, they show that speakers follow this tendency if pressured for brevity and accuracy. In this study, we use probabilistic models of varying complexity to shed light on the individual-level factors behind this trend. We find that a hierarchical model that accommodates for subjects’ heterogeneous beliefs about object frequencies best explains the data. At the population level, this model predicts an association of short forms with frequent meanings, in line with past research. At the individual level, however, it reveals a number of patterns that systematically deviate from this trend. On the one hand, these findings support the hypothesis that individual-level pressures may underlie natural languages’ relationship between frequency and brevity. On the other, by characterizing the individual-level dynamics on which this relationship rests, they highlight the importance of consolidating multiple strata of analysis and of understanding where and why they might diverge.

Endoclitics in Andi

Abstract The paper provides evidence for the existence of endoclitics in Andi, a Nakh-Daghestanian language of the Avar-Andic branch spoken in the Republic of Daghestan, Russia. In Andi, the additive marker (‘also’) and the intensifying marker (‘even, at all’) behave as enclitics on various types of hosts and as endoclitics when they occur on negative verb forms. In the latter case, the additive and intensifying markers break up the word form and appear before the negation marker. I argue that both the additive and the intensifier are clitics, especially in view of their highly promiscuous attachment. I also show that negative verb forms are morphologically synthetic, so the additive and the intensifier are genuine endoclitics, i.e. clitics that occur inside morphological words. In addition I provide a few parallels for the unusual morphosyntactic behaviour of additive and intensifying clitics in some other Nakh-Daghestanian languages as well as in some languages of Northern Eurasia. Although in these cases the corresponding markers do not qualify as endoclitics proper, the available data hint at a cross-linguistic tendency towards word-internal placement of morphemes with meanings like ‘also’, ‘even’ or ‘only’.

Endoclitics in Andi

AbstractThe paper provides evidence for the existence of endoclitics in Andi, a Nakh-Daghestanian language of the Avar-Andic branch spoken in the Republic of Daghestan, Russia. In Andi, the additive marker (‘also’) and the intensifying marker (‘even, at all’) behave as enclitics on various types of hosts and as endoclitics when they occur on negative verb forms. In the latter case, the additive and intensifying markers break up the word form and appear before the negation marker. I argue that both the additive and the intensifier are clitics, especially in view of their highly promiscuous attachment. I also show that negative verb forms are morphologically synthetic, so the additive and the intensifier are genuine endoclitics, i.e. clitics that occur inside morphological words. In addition I provide a few parallels for the unusual morphosyntactic behaviour of additive and intensifying clitics in some other Nakh-Daghestanian languages as well as in some languages of Northern Eurasia. Although in these cases the corresponding markers do not qualify as endoclitics proper, the available data hint at a cross-linguistic tendency towards word-internal placement of morphemes with meanings like ‘also’, ‘even’ or ‘only’.

The history of tense and aspect in the Sogeram family

AbstractThis paper presents an overview of the tens-aspect system in the Sogeram languages of Papua New Guinea. Taking the Proto-Sogeram reconstruction in Daniels (2015,2020) as a starting point, I outline the innovations that have taken place in daughter languages and discuss the patterns of change that emerge. The study confirms a variety of known cross-linguistic tendencies, such as the common occurrence of the analytic-to-synthetic and aspect-to-tense pathways of change. More notable trends include the diachronic stability of the present and most remote past tenses; the instability of the middle pasts and future; the stability of the relative semantic ordering of tenses; the absence of a pathway leading from relative-tense to absolute-tense marking; and the ability of innovative tenses to be inserted anywhere into the five-way tense system of Proto-Sogeram. The study also illustrates how featural systems can interact over time, at first by introducing a new feature value in one system which can combine with values from another (as with the Manat habitual), and then, if the featural distinction is lost, creating a pattern of distributed exponence (as in Mum).

Elevation as a Grammatical and Semantic Category of Demonstratives.

In this paper I study semantic and pragmatic properties of elevational demonstratives by means of a typological investigation of 50 languages with elevational demonstratives from all across the globe. The four basic verticality values expressed by elevational demonstratives are UP, DOWN, LEVEL, and ACROSS. They can be ordered along the elevational hierarchy (UP/DOWN > LEVEL/ACROSS), which reflects cross-linguistic tendencies in the expression of these values by demonstratives. Elevational values are frequently co-expressed with distance-based meanings of demonstratives, and it is almost always distal demonstratives that express elevation, whereas medial or proximal demonstratives can lack elevational distinctions. This means that elevational demonstratives largely refer to areas outside the peripersonal sphere in a similar way as simple distal demonstratives. In the proximal domain, fine grained semantic distinctions such as those encoded by elevational demonstratives are superfluous since this domain is accessible to the interlocutors who in the default case of a normal conversation are located in close proximity to each other. I then discuss metaphorical extensions of elevational demonstratives to non-spatial uses such as temporal and social deixis. There are a few languages in which elevational demonstratives with the meaning UP express the temporal meaning future, whereas the DOWN demonstratives encode past. This finding is particularly interesting in view of the widely-debated use of Mandarin Chinese spatial terms ‘up’ for past events and ‘down’ for future events, which show the opposite metaphorical extension. I finally examine areal tendencies and potential correlations between elevational demonstratives and the geographical location of speech communities in mountainous areas such as the Himalayas, the Papuan Highlands and the Caucasus. I tentatively conclude that languages spoken in similar topographic environments do not tend to have similar systems of elevational demonstratives if they belong to different language families.