25.1.1 Typology

When you accidentally pick up a radio program in some foreign language it seems like chaos, completely unlike the familiar languages of your everyday life. But there are patterns in this chaos, and indeed, some aspects of human language seem to be universal, holding true for every language. Many universals arise from the functional role of language as a communicative system by humans. Every language, for example, seems to have words for referring to people, for talking about women, men, and children, eating and drinking, for being polite or not. Other universals are more subtle; for example Ch. 5 mentioned that every language seems to have nouns and verbs.

Even when languages differ, these differences often have systematic structure. The study of systematic cross-linguistic similarities and differences is called typology (Croft (1990), Comrie (1989)). This section sketches some typological facts about crosslinguistic similarity and difference.

Morphologically, languages are often characterized along two dimensions of variation. The first is the number of morphemes per word, ranging from isolating languages like Vietnamese and Cantonese, in which each word generally has one morpheme, to polysynthetic languages like Siberian Yupik ("Eskimo"), in which a single word may have very many morphemes, corresponding to a whole sentence in English. The second dimension is the degree to which morphemes are segmentable, ranging from agglutinative languages like Turkish (discussed in Ch. 3), in which morphemes have relatively clean boundaries, to fusion languages like Russian, in which a single affix may conflate multiple morphemes, like -om in the word stolom, (table-SG-INSTR-DECL1) which fuses the distinct morphological categories instrumental, singular, and first declension.

Syntactically, languages are perhaps most saliently different in the basic word order of verbs, subjects, and objects in simple declarative clauses. German, French, English, and Mandarin, for example, are all SVO (Subject-Verb-Object) languages, meaning that the verb tends to come between the subject and object. Hindi and Japanese, by contrast, are SOV languages, meaning that the verb tends to come at the end of basic clauses, while Irish, Arabic, and Biblical Hebrew are VSO languages. Two languages that share their basic word-order type often have other similarities. For example SVO languages generally have prepositions while SOV languages generally have postpositions.

For example in the following SVO English sentence, the verb adores is followed by its argument VP listening to music, the verb listening is followed by its argument PP to music, and the preposition to is followed by its argument music. By contrast, in the Japanese example which follows, each of these orderings is reversed; both verbs are preceded by their arguments, and the postposition follows its argument.

(25.1) English: He adores listening to music

$$ \begin{array}{l l l l l l l}{\mathrm{J a p a n e s e:}}&{\mathrm{k a r e}}&{\mathrm{h a}}&{\mathrm{o n g a k u}}&{\mathrm{w o}}&{\mathrm{k i k u}}&{\mathrm{n o}}\\ {\mathrm{d a i s u k i}}&{\mathrm{d e s u}}&{\mathrm{h e}}&{\mathrm{m u s i c}}&{\mathrm{t o}}&{\mathrm{l i s t e n i n g}}&{\mathrm{a d o r e s}}\end{array} $$

Another important dimension of typological variation has to do with argument structure and linking of predicates with their arguments, such as the difference between head-marking and dependent-marking languages (Nichols, 1986). Head-marking languages tend to mark the relation between the head and its dependents on the head. Dependent-marking languages tend to mark the relation on the non-head. Hungarian, for example, marks the possessive relation with an affix (A) on the head noun (H), where English marks it on the (non-head) possessor:

(25.2) English: the man- $ ^{A} $'s $ ^{H} $house

Hungarian: az ember $ ^{H} $ház- $ ^{A} $a

the man house-his

Typological variation in linking can also relate to how the conceptual properties of an event are mapped onto specific words. Talmy (1985) and (1991) noted that languages can be characterized by whether direction of motion and manner of motion are marked on the verb or on the “satellites”: particles, prepositional phrases, or adverbial phrases. For example a bottle floating out of a cave would be described in English with the direction marked on the particle out, while in Spanish the direction would be marked on the verb:

(25.3) English: The bottle floated out.

Spanish: La botella salió flotando.

The bottle exited floating.

Verb-framed languages mark the direction of motion on the verb (leaving the satellites to mark the manner of motion), like Spanish acercarse ‘approach’, alcanzar ‘reach’, entrar ‘enter’, salir ‘exit’. Satellite-framed languages mark the direction of motion on the satellite (leaving the verb to mark the manner of motion), like English crawl out, float off, jump down, walk over to, run after. Languages like Japanese, Tamil, and the many languages in the Romance, Semitic, and Mayan languages families, are verb-framed; Chinese as well as non-Romance Indo-European languages like English, Swedish, Russian, Hindi, and Farsi, are satellite-framed (Talmy, 1991; Slobin, 1996).

Finally, languages vary along a typological dimension related to the things they can omit. Many languages require that we use an explicit pronoun when talking about a referent that is given in the discourse. In other languages, however, we can sometimes omit pronouns altogether as the following examples from Spanish and Chinese show, using the 0-notation introduced in Ch. 21:

(25.4) [El jefe] $ _i $ dio con un libro. $ \emptyset_i $ Mostró a un descifrador ambulante.

[The boss] came upon a book. [He] showed it to a wandering decoder.

CHINESE EXAMPLE

Languages which can omit pronouns in these ways are called pro-drop languages. Even among the pro-drop languages, their are marked differences in frequencies of omission. Japanese and Chinese, for example, tend to omit far more than Spanish. We refer to this dimension as referential density; languages which tend to use more pronouns are more referentially dense than those that use more zeros. Referentially sparse languages, like Chinese or Japanese, that require the hearer to do more inferential work to recover antecedents are called cold languages. Languages that are more explicit and make it easier for the hearer are called hot languages. The terms hot and cold are borrowed from Marshall McLuhan's (1964) distinction between hot media like movies, which fill in many details for the viewer, versus cold media like comics, which require the reader to do more inferential work to fill out the representation (Bickel, 2003).

Each typological dimension can cause problems when translating between languages that differ along them. Obviously translating from SVO languages like English to SOV languages like Japanese requires huge structural reorderings, since all the constituents are at different places in the sentence. Translating from a satellite-framed to a verb-framed language, or from a head-marking to a dependent-marking language, requires changes to sentence structure and constraints on word choice. Languages with extensive pro-drop, like Chinese or Japanese, cause huge problems for translation into non-pro-drop languages like English, since each zero has to be identified and the anaphor recovered.