Papers From The First Annual Meeting Of The Southeast Asian Linguistics Society 1991
Language:
English
Abstract:
A specification scale is introduced to provide a principled basis for an account of similar typological feature clustering in the languages of two widely separated areas, Southeast Asia & West Africa. Extremes of the scale are represented by prototypical under- & overspecifying languages, defined in terms of the extent to which dependency relations are overtly marked in surface structure. Data from Hmong & Yoruba illustrate the commonalities of underspecifying languages: a tendency to monosyllabism & tonal phonology, isolating morphology, verb serialization & compounding, incomplete differentiation of adjectives & prepositions from verbs, parataxis, & association of a noun phrase with more than one clause. It is argued that a prototypical target structure of this kind, based on absence of formal marking, accounts for typological characteristics of the languages in question without invoking debate over pragmatics, iconicity, & discourse vs sentence orientation. 32 References. J. Hitchcock