Re: THEORY: two questions

>Matt Pearson wrote:
>
>> Depends on who you ask.  My definition:  A head-marking
>> language is one which keeps track of arguments (who did
>> what to whom) primarily by means of agreement on the verb,
>> while a dependent-marking language keeps track of arguments
>> primarily by means of case-marking on the noun phrases.
>
>Analogously, languages with genitives are dependent-marking,
>whereas languages with "construct state" nouns are head-marking?
Right.  As Adam noted, these terms can be applied to agreement
within noun phrases and prepositional phrases as well as clauses.

>And what are English and Mandarin: neither-marking?  They look
>more like dependent-marking to me, but not according to the
>above definition.
As someone else noted, many languages are not quite one or the
other.  Many languages (Russian, Hungarian, Turkish, many Australian
and Amerindian languages) combine head-marking (agreement) and
dependent-marking (case) to various degrees.  My impression is
that the term "head-marking" is, for whatever reason, generally
reserved for languages which have no dependent-marking at all--
or almost none--but have rich agreement systems.  In general,
the terms "head-marking" and "dependent-marking" are only
useful for languages which keep track of arguments by means of
inflectional morphology rather than word order or some other
strategy.

Matt.