Linguistic Diversity in Space and TimeUniversity of Chicago Press, 1992 - 358 sivua Scholars have long sought to discover whether there is a detectable genetic relationship among the world's languages, whether linguistic methods can demonstrate that all of the world's languages evolved from a single "mother tongue". In this book, Johanna Nichols offers original and important material that is likely to change significantly the way this exploration is conducted. For over a century, the comparative method has been the principle analytic tool in the reconstruction of prehistoric languages from which historically attested languages have developed. This method looks for regular laws which govern sound correspondences among the cognate words of related languages. The problem with cross-linguistic work based on theories of sameness is that it is necessarily limited to seeking genetic relatedness and reducing structural variety to types. It is restricted to shallow time depths and cannot draw inferences from diversity. But unless it is fairly well understood in what ways languages may group and differ over great depths of time within a geographical area, speculation about whether a certain isolated shared feature signals a genetic relationship is futile. In this groundbreaking book, Nichols proposes means of describing, comparing, and interpreting linguistic diversity, both genetic and structural, and thereby provides the foundations for a theory of diversity based upon population science. Using a database of 174 languages representing the world's linguistic families and surveying a number of structural features and grammatical categories as well as geographical distribution, Nichols establishes the relative frequencies and markedness of grammatical properties, theirinteraction with each other, their relative diachronic stability, and their correlations with geographical location and type of linguistic area. Maps, tables, appendices, and a reproduction of the sample and database will enable readers to test Nichols's conclusions, explore further hypotheses, expand existing databases, and assign cross-linguistic problems to students. This book will be of critical interest to linguists, archaeologists, population specialists, and anyone interested in ways of classifying mankind. |
Sisältö
H points in NP + | 7 |
Favored and Disfavored Grammatical Patterns | 45 |
Nounpronoun splits | 78 |
Support for correlations of NP and D marking and S and | 84 |
Frequencies of alignment patterns among parts of speech | 90 |
Correlations between Types | 97 |
Complexity and headdependent type | 99 |
Word order and headdependent type | 105 |
Conformity to preference for Aaffecting or Oaffecting valence changes | 177 |
Departures from modal type | 179 |
Departures from modal type | 180 |
Departures from modal type | 182 |
Structural Affinities between Areas | 184 |
Means and frequencies of headdependent marking and complexity by area | 186 |
Dominant alignment by area | 187 |
Distributions required for significance on the test of Dryer 1989a | 188 |
Word order and amount of headmarking morphology on the verb | 106 |
Areal frequencies | 107 |
Complexity and alignment | 110 |
Mean complexity of dominant alignment types by area | 111 |
Complexity and word order | 112 |
Twoway breakdown | 113 |
Summary of correlations for type features | 114 |
Correlations of Structural Types with Grammatical Categories | 116 |
Inalienable possession and marking of the NP | 119 |
Inalienable possession and dominant alignment | 122 |
Geography and inalienable possession | 123 |
Geography and inclusiveexclusive oppositions | 124 |
Concord subclass gender and macrogender in Chechen | 126 |
Loci of class marking relative to the classbearing noun | 128 |
Gender hotbeds and outliers | 132 |
Plurality neutralization by part of speech and continent | 148 |
Alignment and plurality neutralization languages with nonzero D and H | 149 |
Valenceaffecting processes by area | 155 |
Valenceincreasing + and decreasing voice systems and alignment | 156 |
Aaffecting and Oaffecting voice systems and head dependent marking | 157 |
Locus of marking and category of agreement or classification | 161 |
Genetic and Areal | 163 |
Genetic vs areal stability | 165 |
Numerical values of gross types | 166 |
Hierarchy of features based on number of gross types per stock | 167 |
Conformity to majority type within groups | 171 |
Valencechanging directionalities exhibited by groups | 174 |
Conformity to preference for valence increase + decrease or both within groups | 176 |
Significance levels for difference in frequency of HD type and alignment by area and type of area | 189 |
Languages with high levels of complexity | 193 |
Average range and degree of complexity by kind of area | 194 |
Levels of significance for word order differences | 196 |
Inclusiveexclusive oppositions | 197 |
Number and percent of languages having noun classes by area | 198 |
Number of languages having numeral classifiers by area | 199 |
Significance levels for areal differences in frequency of noun classes and numeral classifiers | 200 |
Plurality neutralization | 201 |
Inalienable possession | 202 |
Number of languages having PPs by area | 203 |
Global clines | 206 |
Significance levels for areal differences in frequency of three clinally distributed properties | 207 |
Mean headdependent proportions in rank order | 218 |
Analysis 1 | 220 |
Analysis 4 | 222 |
Summary of correlations between and within areas 12 areas | 223 |
Occurrence of high and low likeness and nearness values | 225 |
Propensity for affinity in decreasing order | 226 |
Percentage of types by area | 227 |
Geographical Distribution | 231 |
Conclusions | 254 |
Sample Languages | 283 |
Alphabetical List of Languages | 302 |
References | 319 |
Indexes | 343 |
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Yleiset termit ja lausekkeet
affinities affixes Africa Afroasiatic agreement alignment types Ancient Near East animacy areal groupings Asia Coast Australia Burushaski Caucasus classification clause clitics colonized areas complexity constituent continents correlation cross-linguistic dependent marking dependent-marking languages distribution diversity dominant alignment Dyirbal ergative Ethiopia & Kenya Eurasia Europe & Caucasus example favor frequencies gender genetic density genetic groups geographical global clines grammatical gross types guages Guinea head head-marking languages head/dependent marking head/dependent type hierarchy hotbed inalienable possession inclusive/exclusive inclusive/exclusive oppositions Indo-European inflection Klimov lexical linguistic macroareas markers mean Mesoamerica modal type morphology North America Northern Asia Northern Eurasia noun classes NP's number of languages numeral classifiers Oceania Old World Pacific patterns percentages plurality neutralization population PP's pronouns residual zones Sahaptin semantic shown in table shows significant South SOV SOV split spread zones stability steppe stocks structural survey tion Total typological Ungarinjin Uto-Aztecan verb word order