Typology and Linguistic Areas
نویسنده
چکیده
1. DEFINING A LINGUISTIC AREA IN “CENTRAL/EASTERN INDONESIA.” In her Rejoinder to Malcolm Ross’s squib, Klamer (2003) addresses Ross’s critique of her 2002 article, Typical features of Austronesian languages in Central/Eastern Indonesia, stating that, rather than attempting to present a rubric for evaluating genetic relatedness, the article was intended to describe a set of grammatical features that are relevant to the area she discussed (which is “roughly the geographic area between Lombok and Papua”).1 This is made clear in quotes from her discussion such as “regarding the features chosen: how typical are they for the area?,” “the paper was intended as a typological characterization of an area,” and “complex linguistic areas like C/E Indonesia” [emphases mine]. An approach that addresses areal, rather than historical, issues, does crucially rely on two methodological points that are only addressed in passing: (1) are the morphosyntactic features really typical of the area that Klamer describes, and (2) do these features serve to de2ne this area? Ross (2003:506) suggests not, saying that “the features she enumerates for this region are also widespread among Oceanic languages.” While Ross concludes that this commonality con2rms “that the major typological divide among Austronesian languages is one that separates the ... languages of Taiwan, the Philippines, Malaysia, western Indonesian, and Madagascar from ... Eastern Nusantara and Oceania,” I suggest that there is no “major typological divide” located in the region that Klamer describes, and that the features she examines 2nd as many exemplifying languages to the west of East Nusantara2 as they do in the languages to the east of this “area,” in as great a proportion of sample set. A qualifying note is required
منابع مشابه
Language Review/A New Approach to the Systematic Typology of Languages: Introduction and Review of Fundamentals of Linguistic Typology, Rafe’eh Khoshkhoo
متن کامل
What is Phonological Typology?
In this talk I am concerned with the following questions: 1. What is phonological typology? 2. How are phonological typology and phonetic typology the same/different? 3. How are phonological typology and general phonology the same/different? 4. How are phonological typology and general typology the same/different? Despite earlier work by Trubetzkoy, Jakobson, Martinet, Greenberg and others, and...
متن کاملJae Jung Song, Linguistic typology: morphology and syntax (Longman
The back cover of this book characterizes it as ‘an up-to-date critical introduction to linguistic typology’. The title might suggest that it gives equal coverage to morphology and syntax, but it is mainly about syntax. Chapter 1, ‘Introducing linguistic typology’, is a useful introduction to typology. For someone new to the area, it lays out the object of linguistic typology and discusses some...
متن کاملLinguistically Naïve != Language Independent: Why NLP Needs Linguistic Typology
In this position paper, I argue that in order to create truly language-independent NLP systems, we need to incorporate linguistic knowledge. The linguistic knowledge in question is not intricate rule systems, but generalizations from linguistic typology about the range of variation in linguistic structures across languages.
متن کاملMeasures of fuzzy disarray in linguistic typology
We extend crisp measures of disarray to the vaguely defined context of natural languages, so as to tackle problems of linguistic typology related to the order of words. We deal both with short abstract structure of the type “subject verb object”, and with texts in the original language and in a translation. Preliminary experimental results are provided.
متن کامل