Nicholas Evans
Teasing apart to weave together: distributed exponence and grammatical relations in Nen and beyond
Abstract
In this talk I bring together two phenomena – ergative case-marking and split-intransitive verb-agreement – and show how they interact in a particular Papuan language, Nen (Yam Family, Morehead district, Southern New Guinea).
At first glance, these two phenomena – each considered rather exotic by world standards, but each widely distributed in ‘Melazonia’ (the double cultural zone of Melanesia and Amazonia, which shows many interesting mutual resonances) – seem antithetical to standard treatments of grammatical relations in terms of ‘subject’, ‘object’ or ‘indirect object’: ergative/absolutive case systems split apart typical ‘subject’ categories into transitive and intransitive subjects, marking the latter like objects, while ‘split-intransitive’ systems fracture the ‘intransitive subject’ category and align the sole arguments of some intransitive verbs with transitive subjects, and others with objects.
In Nen the importance of split-intransitivity runs even deeper, since the syntactic distinctions which its verbal agreement patterns extend out even to certain multiclausal constructions such as ‘phasal auxiliaries’ (begin to X, finish Xing etc). As a result, characterisations of such syntactic constructions as ‘subject raising’ in English (Kim began to sing / to accompany Lee / to give the kids bananas) need to be tailored to the valency of the infinitive verb. The different forms of the phasal verb are adjusted by transitivisers and applicatives (opaps ‘begin to (intransitive)’, wapaps ‘begin (transitive)’, wawapaps ‘begin (ditransitive)’), and then exhibit the indexing pattern that the infinitivized word would have shown.
Typologically-informed approaches to syntax can respond to this cluster of phenomena in different ways. One is to essentialise one of the chosen dimensions, e.g. by treating the case-marking, or the split-intransitive verb agreement, as the key typological feature. Another, articulated in Bickel (2010), takes various local constructional features as primary, then builds – but only if the assemblage of these constructional features warrants it – a set of grammatical relations based on the integration of these features; this is essentially the approach to Nen grammatical relations taken in Evans (2015). More recently, a formalisation of this insight has been developed using the analytic framework of ‘distributed exponence’ (Caballero & Harris 2012, Carroll 2021). Originally developed for the analysis of inflectional features like number or TAM, distributed exponence has been extended to the analysis of grammatical relations in another Yam language, Ngkolmpu (Carroll 2016:131, 321), an approach whose usefulness for Nen I will illustrate here.
I will conclude the talk by discussing what this type of analysis implies for the typological enterprise. The burgeoning models of global typological distributions, from WALS to Grambank, focus on local features, such as alignment of case marking of full NPs (WALS98A, Comrie 2013) or alignment of verbal marking (WALS100A, Siewierska 2013). But, as shown by analyses like Carroll’s treatment of Ngkolmpu and that presented here for Nen, we also need to understand how the whole system of grammatical relations works once these local features are integrated, and mapping the systems that emerge from these combinations is as important for typology as the cartography of more local features.
References
Bickel, B. 2010. Grammatical relations typology. In Jae Jung Song (Ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Language Typology, pp. 399-444. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Caballero, G., & A. C. Harris. 2012. A working typology of multiple exponence. In F. Kiefer, M. Ladányi, & P. Siptár (Eds.), Current issues in morphological theory: (Ir)regularity, analogy and frequency, pp. 163-188, John Benjamins Publishing Company.
Carroll, M.J. 2016. The Ngkolmpu language. With special reference to distributed exponence. PhD Dissertation, Australian National University.
Carroll, M. J. 2020. The morphology of Yam languages. In M. Aronoff (Ed.), The Oxford research encyclopedia of linguistics, pp. 74pp, Oxford University Press.
Carroll, M. J. 2022. ‘Verbose exponence: Integrating the typologies of multiple and distributed exponence’. Morphology 32, 1–24. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11525-021-09384-8
Comrie, B. 2013. Alignment of Case Marking of Full Noun Phrases. In: Dryer, Matthew S. & Haspelmath, Martin (eds.). WALS Online (v2020.3) [Data set]. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7385533
(Available online at http://wals.info/chapter/98, Accessed on 2024-04-29.)
Evans, N. 2015. Inflection in Nen, In M. Baerman (Ed.), The Oxford handbook of inflection, pp. 543–75. Oxford University Press,
Evans, N. 2019. Waiting for the word: distributed deponency and the semantic interpretation of number in the Nen verb. In A. Hippisley, M. Baerman, & O. Bond (Eds.), Morphological perspectives: Papers in Honour of Greville G. Corbett, pp 100-123.
Edinburgh University Press.
Siewierska, Anna. 2013. Alignment of Verbal Person Marking. In: Dryer, Matthew S. & Haspelmath, Martin (eds.) WALS Online (v2020.3) [Data set]. Zenodo.
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7385533 (Available online at http://wals.info/chapter/100, Accessed on 2024-04-29.)
