Latest documents http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/index/index/ Mon, 19 Jul 2010 13:55:19 +0200 Mon, 19 Jul 2010 13:55:19 +0200 http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/14884 Two problems cloud our understanding of subgrouping in Tibeto-Burman. One is the lack of consistent and clear standards and principles for subgrouping. Subgrouping is often based on certain features that the languages are said to share, or on a few shared lexical items, or even on the fieldworker's intuitions, or on how remote speakers feel different languages are (the degree of mutual intelligibility). Randy J. LaPolla article http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/14884 Mon, 19 Jul 2010 13:55:19 +0200 http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/14883 Dulong and Rawang are closely related Tibeto-Burman languages spoken just south and east of Tibet. Randy J. LaPolla article http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/14883 Mon, 19 Jul 2010 13:46:23 +0200 http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/14882 Tagalog is an Austronesian language of the Philippines. It is the basis for one of the two official languages of the Philippines, Pilipino, and as such potentially spoken by 81 million people, though there are many sub-varieties. Randy J. LaPolla; Dory Poa article http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/14882 Mon, 19 Jul 2010 13:42:57 +0200 http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/14881 Randy J. LaPolla article http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/14881 Mon, 19 Jul 2010 13:36:08 +0200 http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/14880 Human communication takes place when one person does something that when seen or heard by another person is taken to be done with the intention to communicate, and the other person, having seen the communicator show his or her intention to communicate, then uses inference to determine what the communicator intends to communicate. This is possible because the addressee assumes that the communicator is a rational person, that is, acts with goals in mind (see Grice 1975), and so must be doing the act for a reason, and it is worth the addressee’s effort to try to determine what that reason is, that is, determine the relevance of the act. Randy J. LaPolla article http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/14880 Mon, 19 Jul 2010 13:31:56 +0200 http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/14879 Rawang [...] is a Tibeto-Burman language spoken by people who live in the far north of Kachin State in Myanmar (Burma), particularly along the Mae Hka ('Nmai Hka) and Maeli Hka (Mali Hka) river valleys (see map on back page); population unknown, although Ethnologue gives 100,000. In the past they had been called ‘Nung’, or (mistakenly) ‘Hkanung’, and are considered to be a sub-group of the Kachin by the Myanmar government. Until government policies put a stop to the clearing of new land in 1994, the Rawang speakers still practiced slash and burn farming on the mountainsides (they still do a bit, but only on already claimed land), in conjunction with planting paddy rice near the river. They are closely related to people on the other side of the Chinese border in Yunnan classified as either Dulong or Nu(ng) (see LaPolla 2001, 2003 on the Dulong language). In this paper, I will be discussing the word-class-changing constructions found in Rawang, using data of the Mvtwang (Mvt River) dialect of Rawang, which is considered the most central of those dialects in Myanmar and so has become something of a standard for writing and inter-group communication. Randy J. LaPolla article http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/14879 Mon, 19 Jul 2010 13:23:21 +0200 http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/14878 Rawang (Rvwàng) is a Tibeto-Burman language spoken in the far north of Myanmar (Burma), and is closely related to the Dulong language spoken in China. Rawang manifests a kind of hierarchical person marking on the predicate which marks first person primarily (in several different ways - suffixes, change of final consonant, vowel length - and up to five times within one verb complex), and second person indirectly with a sort of marking similar to the inverse marking found in some North American languages: it appears when there is a first person participant, but that referent is not the actor, and when the second person is a participant. This system is quite different from those that reflect semantic role (e.g. Qiang) or grammatical relations (e.g. English). Randy J. LaPolla article http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/14878 Mon, 19 Jul 2010 13:18:50 +0200 http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/14877 Rawang [...] is a Tibeto-Burman language spoken by people who live in the far north of Kachin State in Myanmar (Burma), particularly along the Mae Hka ('Nmai Hka) and Maeli Hka (Mali Hka) river valleys; population unknown, although Ethnologue gives 100,000. In the past they had been called ‘Nung’, or (mistakenly) ‘Hkanung’, and are considered to be a sub-group of the Kachin by the Myanmar government. They are closely related to people on the other side of the Chinese border in Yunnan classified as either Dulong or Nu (see LaPolla 2001, 2003 on the Dulong language and Sun 1988, Sun & Liu 2005 on the Anong language). In this paper, I will be discussing a particular morphological phenomenon found in Rawang, using data of the Mvtwang (Mvt River) dialect of Rawang, which is considered the most central of those dialects in Myanmar and so has become something of a standard for writing and inter-group communication. Randy J. LaPolla article http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/14877 Mon, 19 Jul 2010 13:14:41 +0200 http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/14876 This handout (it isn’t a paper) presents phenomena and questions, rather than conclusions, related to the concept of transitivity. The idea is to return to these questions at the end of the Workshop to see if we can have a clearer consensus about the best general analysis of phenomena associated with transitivity. Section 2 presents alternative analyses of transitivity and questions about transitivity in three languages I have worked on. Section 3 discusses a few of the different conceptualisations of transitivity that might be relevant to our thinking about the questions related to these languages or that bring up further questions. Section 4 presents some general questions that might be asked of individual languages. Randy J. LaPolla article http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/14876 Mon, 19 Jul 2010 13:09:55 +0200 http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/14875 This paper is more about presenting phenomena and questions related to the concept of transitivity in Tibeto-Burman languages that I hope will stimulate discussion, rather than presenting strong conclusions. Sections 2 and 3 present alternative analyses of transitivity and questions about transitivity in two Tibeto-Burman languages I have worked on. In Section 4 I discuss some general issues about transitivity. Randy J. LaPolla article http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/14875 Mon, 19 Jul 2010 13:03:12 +0200 http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/14874 This paper is an inductive look at the constituents found in a randomly selected Tagalog text, Bob Ong’s Alamat ng Gubat (Makati City, MM: Visual Print Enterprises, 2004). The analysis is based on the full text, but we will only be able to go through the first few lines of the text here, which we will do one by one, and discuss the structures found in each line of the text in bullet format after the relevant line. At the end of the paper we will bring up some important questions about the structures found in Tagalog based on this text. Randy J. LaPolla article http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/14874 Mon, 19 Jul 2010 12:57:46 +0200 http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/14873 This paper is one argument for a theory of grammatical relations in Chinese in which there are no grammatical relations beyond semantic roles, and no lexical relation-changing rules. As the passive rule is one of the most common relation changing rules cross-linguistically, in this paper I will address the question of whether or not Mandarin Chinese has lexical passives, that is, passives defined as in Relational Grammar (see for example Perlmutter and Postal 1977) and the early Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG) literature (e.g. Bresnan 1982), where a 2-arc (object) is promoted to a 1-arc (subject). Randy J. LaPolla article http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/14873 Mon, 19 Jul 2010 12:37:07 +0200 http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/14872 In attempting to reconstruct the morphosyntax of Proto-Sino-Tibetan, one of the most basic questions to be answered is what was the unmarked word order of the proto-language? Chinese, Bai, and Karen are verb-medial languages, while all of the Tibeto-Burman languages except for Bai and Karen have verb-final word order. lf these languages are all related, as we can assume from lexical correspondences, then either Chinese, Bai and Karen changed from verb-final to verb-medial word order, or the other Tibeto-Burman languages changed trom verb-medial to verb-final order. How we answer the question of which languages changed their word would then give us the answer to the question of word order in Proto-Sino-Tibetan. Randy J. LaPolla article http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/14872 Mon, 19 Jul 2010 12:29:11 +0200 http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/14871 Thirty-one years ago Tsu-lin Mei (1961) argued against the traditional doctrine that saw the subject-predicate distinction in grammar as parallel to the particular- universal distinction in logic, as he said it was a reflex of an Indo-European bias, and could not be valid, as ‘Chinese ... does not admit a distinction into subject and predicate’ (p. 153). This has not stopped linguists working on Chinese from attempting to define ‘subject’ (and ‘object’) in Chinese. Though a number of linguists have lamented the difficulties in trying to define these concepts for Chinese (see below), most work done on Chinese still assumes that Chinese must have the same grammatical features as Indo-European, such as having a subject and a direct object, though no attempt is made to justify that view. This paper challenges that view and argues that there has been no grammaticalization of syntactic functions in Chinese. The correct assignment of semantic roles to the constituents of a discourse is done by the listener on the basis of the discourse structure and pragmatics (information flow, inference, relevance, and real world knowledge) (cf. Li & Thompson 1978, 1979; LaPolla 1990). Randy J. LaPolla article http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/14871 Mon, 19 Jul 2010 12:23:10 +0200 http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/14870 This paper concentrates on variable finals, and argues that just as we find a certain amount of both rule-governed and non-rule governed variation in modern languages, in reconstructing Proto-Sino-Tibetan we should recognize the possibility of these types of variation. Randy J. LaPolla article http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/14870 Mon, 19 Jul 2010 12:18:09 +0200 http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/14869 In chapters seven and eight of his book Language, Sapir talked about what he called ‘drift’, the changes that a language undergoes through time [...]. Dialects of a language are formed when that language is broken into different segments that no longer move along the same exact drift. Even so, the general drift of a language has its deep and its shallow currents; those features that distinguish closely related dialects will be of the rapid, shallow currents, while the deeper, slower currents may remain consistent between the dialects for millennia. It is this latter type that Sapir felt is ‘fundamental to the genius of the language’ (p. 172), and he said that ‘The momentum of the more fundamental, the pre-dialectal, drift is often such that languages long disconnected will pass through the same or strikingly similar phases’ (p. 172). Randy J. LaPolla article http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/14869 Mon, 19 Jul 2010 12:07:31 +0200 http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/14868 Randy J. LaPolla article http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/14868 Mon, 19 Jul 2010 11:57:49 +0200 http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/14867 Randy J. LaPolla article http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/14867 Mon, 19 Jul 2010 11:50:16 +0200 http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/14866 This paper presents the first results of a comprehensive project on comparative Tibeto-Burman (TB) morpho-syntax. Data on morphological forms and typological patterns were collected from one hundred fifty-one languages and dialects in the TB family. For this paper the data were surveyed for nominal 'ergative' or agentive case marking (postpositions), in an attempt to determine if it would be possible to reconstruct an ergative case marker to Proto-Tibeto-Burman (PTB), and in so doing learn more about the nature of grammatical organization in PTB. Ablative, instrumental, genitive, locative, and other case forms were also surveyed for possible cognacy with ergative forms, as suggested in DeLancey 1984. Randy J. LaPolla article http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/14866 Mon, 19 Jul 2010 11:46:23 +0200 http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/14865 In attempting to understand the history of the morphology of a language or group of languages, we occasionally face a problem of isomorphy, where two or more semantic categories evince the same formal marking. We then must decide which use of that particular form of marking is the oldest, and also determine the possible source and path of development of the marking. In languages with written documents of great time depth this is often not a problem, but in unwritten languages it can be quite difficult. This paper discusses two tools that can be used for this purpose: the concepts of markedness and prototypes. Randy J. LaPolla article http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/14865 Mon, 19 Jul 2010 11:37:20 +0200 http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/14864 Middle voice marking is very rarely recognized as such in the grammars written on Tibeto-Burman languages. It is often simply treated as a normal direct reflexive or as an intransitivizer. In order to draw the attention of scholars to the existence and function of middle voice marking in Tibeto-Burman languages, the present paper discusses the form and function of middle marking in several of these languages. We will first discuss key facts about middle marking in general, then discuss the individual Tibeto-Burman examples. Randy J. LaPolla article http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/14864 Mon, 19 Jul 2010 11:27:42 +0200 http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/14863 Randy J. LaPolla article http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/14863 Mon, 19 Jul 2010 11:21:58 +0200 http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/14862 Dulong is a Tibeto-Burman language spoken in Gongshan Dulong and Nu Autonomous county in Yunnan, China, by members of the Dulong nationality (pop.: 6,000), and part of the Nu nationality (roughly 6,000 people). Randy J. LaPolla preprint http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/14862 Mon, 19 Jul 2010 11:13:07 +0200 http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/14861 Randy J. LaPolla article http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/14861 Mon, 19 Jul 2010 11:05:14 +0200 http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/14860 Ever since the publication of Greenberg 1963, word order typologists have attempted to formulate and refine implicational universals of word order so as to characterize the restricted distribution of certain word order patterns, and in some cases have also attempted to develop general principles to explain the existence of those universals. Randy J. LaPolla article http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/14860 Mon, 19 Jul 2010 10:58:57 +0200