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ALIGNMENT AND TRANSITIVITY IN LEXICAL TYPOLOGY
Johanna Nichols UC-Berkeley Tuesday, April 18, 5:30 PM MJH Rm 126 Sponsored by the Stanford Humanities Center/Mellon Foundation Graduate Research Program In standard morphosyntactic typology, a language has an alignment type that determines the coding of its arguments. In contrast, in lexical typology, the essential building blocks of clauses are individual verbs, each of which has its own argument structure and valence. Alignment types, role types, and argument types are not building blocks but linguists' generalizations over the behavior of individual verbs. For instance, an ergative language is one in which at least some criterial percentage of a standard sample of verbs code S and O alike. In this approach, types are not discrete but form a continuum. My recent work in lexical typology uses cross-linguistic surveys of sets of verb glosses to assess the individual and collective behavior of languages: How are 'fear' and 'frighten', or inchoative and causative 'break', treated, and which is derived from which? (Nichols et al. 2004 survey 18 such pairs of predicate glosses, such that one is the semantic causative of the other, across 80 languages.) How is the subject of 'see', 'fear', 'sneeze', and 'jump' treated -- is it coded like a transitive subject or an object, and if so which object (direct? primary? indirect? secondary?). (Nichols 2007 surveys 20 verbs across 40+ languages.) This talk summarizes some of the results of this work. How consistently do verbs behave in individual languages? What (if any) types emerge? What other properties of languages do these types correlate with? What factors determine the behavior of individual verbs, language by language and cross-linguistically? Can one really look up glosses in exotic languages and expect to retrieve comparable things? Are there any languages whose lexicons just don't fit a model using standard views of argument and event structure? Are some lexicons more complex than others? How rapidly, and how drastically, can languages change their lexical organization? (At least as regards transitivization/detransitivization, late Proto-Slavic turned 180 degrees, apparently over just a few centuries.) Is there any essential core list of verb glosses and morphosyntactic phenomena that might be recommended to fieldworkers and lexicographers, to facilitate further comparative work? Nichols, Johanna, Peterson, David A., and Barnes, Jonathan. 2004. Transitivizing and detransitivizing languages. Linguistic Typology 8:149-211. - ----. 2006. Transitivization/detransitivization and part-of-speech systems. Read at LSA Annual Meeting, Albuquerque. - ----. 2007. Why are stative-active languages rare in Eurasia? Typological perspective on split subject marking. In Semantic Alignment, eds. Mark Donohue and Søren Wichmann. 
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