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Re: THEORY: two questions

From:Matt Pearson <jmpearson@...>
Date:Tuesday, March 28, 2000, 16:41
>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.