Re: THEORY: two questions

On Tue, 28 Mar 2000, Matt Pearson wrote:

> >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.
Nichols also accounted for the possibility that languages keep
track of this stuff without inflectional morphology; these fell
into an "other" category.

When I posted the table from Nichols' book, I suppressed the
bottom half of it, which showed figures for the percentage of
head/dependent marking. IIRC, she counted several construction
types, of which verbal agreement was only one. She also looked
at possessive constructions and the attributive adjective
constructions that Adam mentioned later (and a couple of others;
unfortunately, I'm at home and don't have the book with me).
There are no languages in her survey which fall to either end of
the spectrum--either completely head-marking or completely
dependent-marking.

Dirk

--
Dirk Elzinga
dirk.elzinga@m.cc.utah.edu