Monotonicity as an effective theory of morphosyntactic variation
Monotonicity as an effective theory of morphosyntactic variation
复制标题
单调性作为形态句法变异的有效理论
作者：
T. Graf
语言学的主要目标之一是勾勒出不同语言之间可能存在的变异范围。最近的研究发现，在各种领域中存在着数量惊人的类型学空白。在词法上，这包括词干补足、人称代词合一、格合和名词干同形。在形态句法中，只有少数人称格限制和性别格限制被发现。虽然针对每个领域提出了不同的建议，但很少有人试图对所有领域的有限类型学做出统一的解释。本文提出了一种新的描述，有意地从语法描述的通常细节中抽象出来，以便对类型变异的限度提供一个领域不可知论的解释。这是通过将例如针对Person和Case的突出度层次结构与从这些层次结构到相关输出形式的映射相结合来实现的。由于要求映射是单调的，因此只能实例化所有可能的模式中的一小部分。
One of the major goals of linguistics is to delineate the possible range of variation across languages. Recent work has identified a surprising number of typological gaps in a variety domains. In morphology, this includes stem suppletion, person pronoun syncretism, case syncretism, and noun stem allomorphy. In morphosyntax, only a small number of all conceivable Person Case Constraints and Gender Case Constraints are found. While various proposals have been put forward for each individual domain, few attempts have been made to give a unified explanation of the limited typology across all domains. This paper presents a novel account that deliberately abstracts away from the usual details of grammatical description in order to provide a domain-agnostic explanation of the limits of typological variation. This is achieved by combining prominence hierarchies, e.g. for person and case, with mappings from those hierarchies to the relevant output forms. As the mappings are required to be monotonic, only a fraction of all conceivable patterns can be instantiated.