Asian Languages and Linguistics - Volume 1, Issue 1, 2020

Luro, an Austroasiatic language of the Mon-Khmer group is spoken in the Teressa island of the Andaman and Nicobar group of islands in the Bay of Bengal, India. Luro is a critically endangered language spoken by less than 2,000 speakers (Directorate of Census Operations 2011). The morphology of Luro is virtually undescribed in detail so far. The previous works are restricted to deRoepstorff (1875), Cruz (2005), Man (1889) and Rajasingh (2019) which are limited to wordlists and a partial dictionary. This is the first-ever account of word formation process in the language. Word formation processes include among others, compounding and derivation across grammatical categories. Incorporation is used in verb morphology. Although language does not have an extensive case marking system postpositions appear on some nouns optionally. Nouns are marked for duality and plurality but not for gender. Negation is indexed with pronoun morphology and participates in formation of antonyms. Kinship terminology and Number System have also been dealt with to represent diverse word formation processes.1

The paucity or absence of inflectional morphology (radical analyticity) and the omission of verbal arguments with no concomitant agreement (radical pro-drop) are well-known characteristics of East and mainland Southeast Asian languages (EMSEA). Both of them have a special status in typology and linguistic theory. Radical analyticity is known under the term of ‘morphological isolation’ and has recently been described as ‘diachronically anomalous’ (McWhorter 2016), while radical pro-drop is a theoretical challenge since Rizzi (1986). The present paper offers an alternative view on these characteristics based on data from EMSEA languages, radically analytic West African languages and pidgins and creoles. It develops diachronic evolutionary scenarios combining the specific properties of languages in their diachronic and geographic situations with two different notions of complexity (hidden vs. overt complexity) and factors which tend to block the development of inflectional morphological paradigms. From such a perspective, radical analyticity and radical pro-drop are by no means extraordinary. Given the enormous size of the task, the paper is a thought experiment based on available data and discussions on the above languages for stimulating further research.

This paper argues that compounding, the major source of word-formation in Chinese, and the root-and-pattern system in Hebrew involve fundamentally the same syntactic operations and observe the same locality constraints, despite the salient differences. More specifically, it addresses the well-known continuum that the coordinate and attributive compounds behave more like words, whereas resultative and subordinate compounds are much more like phrases. It puts forward the idea that this continuum can be accounted for by assuming that there is a distinction between word-formation from roots and word-formation from words, with the former giving rise to more lexical properties and the latter more phrasal properties. The paper also discusses some related issues, such as the correct formulation of word-level phases and the structure of the major types of compound words in Chinese.

This paper presents a discourse-pragmatic analysis of event conceptions with an accusative-, dative-, and comitative-marked participant and thereby accounts for somewhat irregular accusative marking in Korean and Japanese. The three cases can basically be analyzed as serving to mark participants in physical or mental events that involve a factive or fictive change as a primary element. The accusative marks a change-constitutive participant (so-called affected or effected entity), while the dative and comitative mark a change-independent participant. Unlike Japanese, Korean exhibits the tendency to extend the accusative case to the marking of an entity that constitutes some fictive change in a discourse-based event conception. In contrast, Japanese is liable to recruit the accusative case in an extended use for the marking of an entity that undergoes a fictive change in the conceptions of mental/bodily experiences. These conceptual characterizations can provide a further explanation for the discrepant and idiosyncratic accusative marking in verb phrases such as ‘ride a bus,’ ‘meet a person,’ ‘come/go to a place,’ and ‘give a person a book.’

This paper argues that linguistic typology, and linguistics more generally, got off to a good start in the 19th century with scholars like Wilhelm von Humboldt and Georg von der Gabelentz, where the understanding was that each language manifests a unique world view, and it is important to study and compare those world views. This tradition is still alive, but was sidelined and even denigrated for many years due to the rise of Structuralism, which attempted to study language structures divorced from their linguistic and socio-cultural contexts. The paper reviews the understandings the early scholars had and points out their similarities with cutting edge current views in cognitive linguistics, construction grammar, and interactional linguistics, which had to be rediscovered due to the influence of Structuralism for so many years. It then argues that we should make linguistic typology (and linguistics more generally) more modern, scientific, and empirical by returning to our roots.

This paper examines the forms and usage of case markers in the Gan-Qing dialects, the Amdo Tibetan and Altaic languages in the Gansu-Qinghai linguistic area (GQLA), including datives, accusatives, absolutives, comitatives, instrumentals, ablatives, locatives, genitives, comparatives and reflexive possessives. We come to two conclusions: (1) most markers in Gan-Qing dialects are widely distributed, but some are narrowly distributed and (2) case markers in Gan-Qing dialects are overwhelmingly from the Chinese inventory rather than direct copied from Amdo Tibetan or Altaic languages. These findings enable us to shed light on the situation of language contact in the GQLA and illustrate that there are two major strata of contact in the GQLA.