Re: THEORY: THEORY isolating & other typologies (was: THEORY: Ergativity and polypersonalism)

On 21 Jan 2005, at 6.24 pm, Ray Brown wrote:

> On Thursday, January 20, 2005, at 04:43 , Andreas Johansson wrote:
>
>> Quoting Tristan McLeay <conlang@...>:
>>
>>>
>>> One curious thing about English though is that it's often painted as
>>> a
>>> relatively isolating language, but as I understand it (and I might be
>>> *wildly* wrong here, which is the simplest explanation) German tends
>>> not to use its genitive, preferring expressions including 'von', and
>>> doesn't like its simple past tense, preferring expressions
>>> paralleling
>>> English past perfects, whereas English enjoys the use of both...
>>> OTOH,
>>> I've never heard anyone claiming that German's a relatively isolating
>>> language...
>>
>> I think the genitive is a bad example, since many would deny that
>> English
>> has an
>> inflectional genitive at all.
>
> That's right. the possesive 's is a clitic in modern English
Oh, I knew that... I just didn't realise a clitic didn't count for
giving the language a genitive/possessive. That's really why I asked
the next question I asked, even though you didn't answer it :) But I
spose I did get an answer---clitics are 'words', whatever that means,
so the existence of them only makes the language even more, not less,
isolating.

> [snip]
>>> BTW---if a language forms everything with clitics (like English seems
>>> to want to), does it necessarily count as isolating or agglutinative
>>> or
>>> something, or can it be whatever it darn well feels like based on
>>> other
>>> aspects?
>
> As I have observed recently, natlangs have the horrible habit of not
> fitting neatly into these typologies of 19th century linguists.
Yeah, but typologies of 19th century linguists are still useful for
giving generalisations to help understand the general nature of a
language. If I told you to grab me the blue bottle but the only bottles
around were a red one and a blue one with white writing, you we'd both
see the advantage of a generalisation.

>> I'd consider it isolating - clitics are syntactic words, and
>> isolating/agglutinating primarily refers to syntax, not phonology (or
>> that's my
>> understanding).
>
> Yes, to be agglutinating, the bound morphemes must be affixes. But the
> borderline between clitics and affixes is IMO a tad fuzzy.
Another of those 19th-century-linguist confusions? or is it 20th
century this time? :)

>> It's been said that an extremely agglutinating language is
>> indistinguishible
>> from an extremely isolating one, tho.
>
> Depending where put the white spaces, I suppose   :)
I would've thought you'd be able to tell based on where everything
goes... like how in English, modal(?) clitics(?) find their way not
onto the verb, but onto some element *before* the verb, usually the end
of a NP/pronoun, but also sometimes in more interesting places, as in
"what'll he do?" or "where's he go?".* If clitics don't count as
affixes, then this highly isolating language is clearly not
agglutinative.

OTOH, if you have a highly agglutinating language but it multiple
classes of nouns and they do other things (going by the criteria Thomas
Weir posted some time back), so that they're basically quite clearly
affixes, then it shouldn't be too hard to see it's agglutinating.

If, OTOH, you don't get such an obvious distinction between affixes and
clitics in some of these highly agglutinating/isolating languages,
well---some people say the sea's green.

> Personally, I have doubts. It would be interesting see an example.
Indeed.

--
Tristan.

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