Browsing by Subject "typology"
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(2024)Communicative efficiency principles are an area of great interest in linguistics research. Analyses are performed into determining how potentially infinite outputs of human language can be formed within the bounds of limited memory. One way in which the cognitive burden of a sentence is measured is through dependency distances. In this thesis, the idea that morphological marking could be used to alleviate communicative memory burdens was evaluated using token-based quantitative typological methods to extract tendencies of language use. Large, multilingual, labeled corpora were parsed to find and evaluate more than 300,000 simple transitive sentences for patterns of morphological agreement and case-marking in relation to dependency distances. No significant, meaningful, cross-linguistic correlation was found between morphological agreement and dependency distances when it was examined in usual patterns of sentence construction. Nor was a correlation found to suggest that marking would allow for longer dependencies in exceptional circumstances, indicating that marking was not of any assistance in alleviating memory burdens. Preliminary evidence was discovered which may suggest an inverse correlation between agreement and dependency distance, advocating for the future work into the process of ensuring agreement increasing cognitive burdens.
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(2024)Research on negation and evidentiality has seen a significant increase in the last decades, both from a typological perspective and for specific languages. The interaction of both domains with other categories has been investigated (e.g. Aikhenvald 2004, Miestamo 2005). However, the interaction of evidentiality with negation is heavily understudied. Apart from a few mentions (e.g. de Haan 1997) and language-specific analyses, I am not aware of comparative research on the topic. The present study analyses and draws a comparative picture of how clausal negation and grammatical evidentiality interact cross-linguistically. Semantically, there are two possibilities, illustrated in example (1) with a visual source of evidence (expressed lexically due to the characteristics of the English language) and the negator: in (1a), the proposition is negated, and in (1b), the source of evidence is negated. (1) a. ‘I see that it is not raining.’ b. ‘I do not see that it is raining.’ Since negation is a function universally grammaticalized in natural languages (Dahl 1979: 79), but grammatical evidentiality is only found in around a fourth of the world’s languages (Aikhenvald 2004: 1), the typological sample for this study contains languages that are known to have at least one evidential. De Haan’s typological study of evidentiality for the World Atlas of Language Structures (2013a) provides a good basis for sampling: the sample for the present study contains one language per family classified by de Haan as having evidentials, adding up to 70. In order to show maximal variety, languages known to be of interest for this phenomenon are also discussed, such as Akha (Aikhenvald 2004) and Cheyenne (Murray 2016). All in all, this study shows that the interaction of negation and evidentiality is of interest both from semantic as well as morphosyntactic points of view, and as much for language-specific research as for typological studies. It gives an overview of the diversity of interactions between negation and evidentiality, and their frequency in the 70-language sample. In short, it is a typology of not knowing what happened and knowing what did not.
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