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The European linguistic area: Standard Average European

January 2001

January 2001
2(2)

Authors:

Martin Haspelmath

Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology

.1: Comitative-instrumental: Syncretic and non-syncretic languages

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1492 XIV. Typological characterization of language families and linguistic areas

107. The European linguistic area: Standard Average European

1. Introduction

2. The major SAE features

3. Some further likely SAE features

4. Degrees of membership in SAE

5. How did SAE come into being?

6. Abbreviations of language names

7. References

1. Introduction

This article summarizes some of the main

pieces of evidence for a linguistic area (or

Sprachbund) in Europe that comprises the

Romance, Germanic and Balto-Slavic lan-

guages, the Balkan languages, and more mar-

ginally also the westernmost Finno-Ugrian

languages (these will be called core European

languages in this article). This linguistic area

is sometimes called Standard Average Euro-

pean (abbreviated SAE), following Whorf

(1941) [1956: 138]. The existence of this lin-

guistic area is a relatively new insight (cf.

Bechert et al. 1990, Bernini & Ramat 1996,

Haspelmath 1998, van der Auwera 1998, Kö-

nig & Haspelmath 1999).

While the close syntactic parallels among

the Balkan languages have struck linguists

since the 19th century and the existence of

a Balkan Sprachbund has been universally

accepted, the European linguistic area has

long been overlooked. This may at first ap-

pear surprising, because the members of the

Sprachbund are among the best studied lan-

guages of the world. However, it is easy to

understand why linguists have been slow to

appreciate the significance of the similarities

among the core European languages: Since

most comparative linguists know these lan-

guages particularly well, they have tended to

see non-European languages as special and

unusual, and the similarities among the

European languages have not seemed sur-

prising. Thus, it was only toward the end of

the 20th century, as more and more had be-

come known about the grammatical proper-

ties of the languages of the rest of the world,

that linguists realized how peculiar the core

European languages are in some ways when

seen in the world-wide context. From this

perspective, Standard Average European may

even appear as an “exotic language” (Dahl

1990).

A linguistic area can be recognized when

a number of geographically contiguous lan-

guages share structural features which cannot

be due to retention from a common proto-

language and which give these languages a

profile that makes them stand out among the

surrounding languages. There is thus no min-

imum number of languages that a linguistic

area comprises (pace Stolz 2001a). In prin-

ciple, there could be a linguistic area con-

sisting of just two languages (though this

would be rather uninteresting), and there

are also very large (continent-sized) linguistic

areas (Dryer 1989a). Likewise, there is no

minimum number of structural features that

the languages must share in order to qualify

as a Sprachbund. For instance, Jakobson

(1931) establishes his “Eurasian linguistic

area” on the basis of just two phonological

features, but of course an area that shares

more features is more interesting. As will be

shown below, Standard Average European

languages share over a dozen highly charac-

teristic features, so we are dealing with a very

interesting Sprachbund.

A linguistic area is particularly striking

when it comprises languages from genealog-

ically unrelated languages (like the South

Asian linguistic area (JArt. 109), or the

Mesoamerican linguistic area (JArt. 110)),

but this is not a necessary feature of a

Sprachbund. The Balkan languages are all

Indo-European, but they are from different

families within Indo-European (Romance,

Slavic, Greek, Albanian), and not all lan-

guages of these families belong to the Balkan

linguistic area, so nobody questions the va-

lidity of the Balkan Sprachbund (JArt. 108).

In the case of SAE, three entire branches

of Indo-European (Romance, Germanic and

Balto-Slavic) belong to the linguistic area.

However, here too it is clear that we are

not dealing with a genealogical grouping,

because nobody ever proposed a branch of

Indo-European that consists of precisely

these three families. On the contrary, Indo-

Europeanists typically assume a particularly

close genealogical relationship between Italic

and Celtic (and sometimes even an Italo-

Celtic protolanguage), but Romance (the sole

descendant of Italic) is inside SAE, while the

Celtic languages do not belong to SAE. And

since so much is known about the grammat-

ical properties that Proto-Indo-European

must have possessed, it is fairly easy to test

whether an SAE feature is an Indo-Euro-

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1493107. The European linguistic area: Standard Average European

peanism or not. As was shown in Haspelmath

(1998), most of the characteristic SAE fea-

tures (also called Europeanisms here) are not

Indo-Europeanisms but later common inno-

vations.

Thus, what needs to be shown in order to

demonstrate that a structural feature is a

Europeanism is

(i) that the great majority of core European

languages possesses it;

(ii) that the geographically adjacent lan-

guages lack it (i. e. Celtic in the west,

Turkic, eastern Uralic, Abkhaz-Adygh-

ean and Nakh-Daghestanian in the east,

and perhaps Afro-Asiatic in the south);

(iii) that the eastern Indo-European lan-

guages lack it (Armenian, Iranian, In-

dic); and

(iv) that this feature is not found in the ma-

jority of the world’s languages.

Particularly the last point is not easy to de-

monstrate for many features because there

are still far too few representative world-wide

studies of grammatical structures, so to the

extent that our knowledge about the world’s

languages is incomplete and biased, we can-

not be sure about the European linguistic

area. In this article, I will cite whatever in-

formation is available, and sometimes I will

have to resort to impressionistic observa-

tions.

The designation “core European lan-

guage” for members of SAE is deliberately

vague, because the European linguistic area

does not have sharp boundaries. It seems

possible to identify a nucleus consisting of

continental West Germanic languages (e.g.

Dutch, German) and Gallo-Romance (e.g.

French, Occitan, northern Italo-Romance).

For this set of languages, van der Auwera

(1998a: 824) proposes the name Charlemagne

Sprachbund. Of the other languages, those

which are geographically further from this

center also seem to share significantly fewer

SAE features, i. e. Ibero-Romance, insular

Scandinavian (Icelandic and Faroese), East

Slavic (Russian, Ukrainian, Belorussian) and

Baltic. Even English, a West Germanic lan-

guage, is clearly not within the nucleus. Of

the non-Indo-European languages of Europe,

the western Uralic languages (i. e. Hungarian

and Balto-Finnic) are at least marginal mem-

bers of Standard Average European; they are

in many ways strikingly different from east-

ern Uralic. Maltese also exhibits a number of

Europeanisms not shared by other Arabic

varieties, but Basque seems to show very few

of them. Somewhat further to the east, Geor-

gian in the southern Caucasus (and perhaps

the other Kartvelian languages) shares a

surprising number of features with the core

European languages. These impressionistic

statements should eventually be quantified,

but since it is not clear how much weight

should be attached to each feature, this is not

straightforward.

All of the features discussed below are syn-

tactic, or concern the existence of certain

morphosyntactic categories. I am not aware

of any phonological properties characteristic

of the core European languages (cf. Jakob-

son 1931: 182: “do six por ne udalos’ najti ni

odnogo obs

ˇc

ˇeevropejskogo … poloz

ˇitel’nogo

fonologic

ˇeskogo priznaka [so far not a single

Europe-wide positive phonological feature has

been found]”). Perhaps phonologists have

not looked hard enough, but at least one ma-

jor recent study of word prosody in Euro-

pean languages has not found any phonolog-

ical evidence for Standard Average European

(van der Hulst et al. 1999, especially Maps

1⫺4) (but cf. Pisani 1969). A few generaliza-

tions are discussed by Ternes (1998), but he

finds that in most respects European lan-

guages are unremarkable from a world-wide

perspective. Perhaps the only features worth

mentioning are the relatively large vowel in-

ventories (no 3-vowel or 4-vowel inventories)

and the relatively common consonant clus-

ters (no restriction to CV syllables). In these

respects, European languages are not average,

but they are by no means extreme either.

2. The major Standard Average

European features

In this section I will discuss a dozen gram-

matical features that are characteristic of the

core European languages and that together

define the SAE Sprachbund. In each case I

will briefly define the feature and give a few

examples from SAE languages. Then a name

map, which indicates the approximate loca-

tion of languages by the arrangement of (ab-

breviated) language names, shows the distri-

bution of the various feature values within

Europe. In each case it can be observed that

the nuclear SAE languages are within the

SAE isogloss, and that the marginal lan-

guages tend to be outside the isogloss to a

greater or lesser extent. (Part of the material

presented here was already included in Has-

pelmath 1998.)

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1494 XIV. Typological characterization of language families and linguistic areas

2.1. Definite and indefinite articles

Both a definite and an indefinite article (e. g.

English the book/a book;JArt. 62) exist in

all Romance and almost all Germanic lan-

guages plus some of the Balkan languages

(Modern Greek, perhaps Albanian and Bul-

garian), but not outside Standard Average

European. To be sure, their forms and syn-

tactic behavior show considerable diversity

(see Nocentini 1996 for an overview), but

their very existence is characteristic enough.

The distribution of articles in European lan-

guages is shown in Map 107.1. (Abbrevi-

ations of language names are given in the Ap-

pendix.)

-------- definite and indefinite article present

- - - - only definite article present

Map 107.1: Definite and indefinite article

In large parts of eastern Europe there are

no articles at all (East Slavic, West Slavic,

Finno-Ugrian other than Hungarian, Turkic,

Nakh-Daghestanian, Kartvelian). Some neigh-

boring non-SAE languages do have definite

articles (e. g. Celtic, Semitic, Abkhaz, Mord-

vin), and Turkish has an indefinite article,

but no neighboring non-SAE language has

both definite and indefinite articles. The only

exception among Germanic languages, Ice-

landic (which only has definite articles like

nearby Celtic), is also the most peripheral

Germanic language geographically. We can

also be certain that the existence of definite

and indefinite articles is not an Indo-Euro-

peanism: The Iranian and Indic languages

have generally lacked articles throughout

their history.

World-wide, articles are not nearly as

common as in Europe: According to Dryer’s

(1989b: 85) findings, “it appears that about a

third of the languages of the world employ

articles” (125 out of a sample of about 400

languages). Only 31 languages of those in

Dryer’s sample (i.e. less than 8%) have both

definite and indefinite articles.

2.2. Relative clauses with relative pronouns

The type of relative clause found in languages

such as German, French or Russian seems to

be unique to Standard Average European

languages. It is characterized by the follow-

ing four features: The relative clause is post-

nominal, there is an inflecting relative pro-

noun, this pronoun introduces the relative

clause, and the relative pronoun functions as

a resumptive, i. e. it signals the head’s role

within the relative clause (cf. Lehmann 1984:

103⫺109, Comrie 1998). In English, a rela-

tive construction like the suspicious woman

whom I described also displays all these fea-

tures. Furthermore, in most SAE languages

the relative pronoun is based on an interrog-

ative pronoun (this is true of all Romance, all

Slavic and some Germanic languages, Mod-

ern Greek, as well as Hungarian and Geor-

gian). (Languages like German, whose rela-

tive pronoun is based on a demonstrative, or

Finnish, which has a special relative pro-

noun, are not common.) The geographical

distribution of the relative pronoun strategy

is shown in Map 107.2.

-------- relative clause with introducing relative pro-

noun

- - - - only particle relative clause

Map 107.2: Two relative clause types in Europe

The only other type that is widespread in

Europe is the postnominal relative clause

introduced by a relative particle (Lehmann

1984: 85⫺87), which often occurs in the same

language beside the resumptive relative pro-

noun type just described (an English example

would be the radio that I bought). Particle

relatives of this type exist in most Slavic and

Romance languages, as well as in Scandina-

vian languages and Modern Greek, but also

in Welsh and Irish (Lehmann 1984: 88⫺90).

The relative particle is sometimes difficult to

distinguish from a degenerate resumptive

pronoun, and in many European languages

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1495107. The European linguistic area: Standard Average European

it developed from a relative pronoun through

the gradual loss of inflectional distinctions.

However, this also means that the relative

clause loses its specifically European flavor,

because particle relatives are also attested

widely elsewhere in the world (e. g. in Per-

sian, Modern Hebrew, Nahuatl, Indonesian,

Yoruba, and Thai, cf. Lehmann 1984: 85⫺

97).

However, the relative pronoun strategy

clearly is typically European. It is not found

in the eastern Indo-European languages, and

as Comrie (1998: 61) notes, “relative clauses

formed using the relative pronoun strategy

are quite exceptional outside Europe, except

as a recent result of the influence of Euro-

pean languages … The relative pronoun

strategy thus seems to be a remarkable areal

typological feature of European languages,

especially the standard written languages”.

2.3. ‘Have’-perfect

Another well-known feature typical of SAE

languages is the (transitive) perfect formed by

‘have’ plus a passive participle (e. g. English

I have written, Swedish jag har skrivit, Span-

ish he escrito;JArt. 59). A perfect of this

kind exists in all Romance and Germanic lan-

guages plus some of the Balkan languages

(Albanian, Modern Greek, Macedonian), and

also in Czech (Garvin 1949: 84). These per-

fects do not all mean the same thing, because

they are at different stages in the grammati-

calization process: in French and German,

the perfect can be used as a normal perfective

past, including the function of a narrative

tense, while in Spanish, English and Swedish

the perfect has a distinct present-anterior

meaning. What is important here is that they

all must have had basically the same meaning

when they were first created. The geographi-

cal distribution of ‘have’-perfects in Europe

is shown in Map 107.3.

Map 107.3: ‘Have’-perfects in Europe

In contrast to the languages just mentioned,

in Slavic, Finno-Ugrian and Armenian the

perfect is usually based on a participial

construction with an active participle and a

copula (e. g. Finnish ole-n saa-nut [be-1sg

receive-ptcp] ‘I have received’). Hungarian

seems to lack a perfect completely. In some

Nakh-Daghestanian languages (e.g. Lezgian

and Godoberi), the perfect is formed on the

basis of the past converb plus the copula.

Georgian comes closest to the SAE prototype

in that its transitive perfect is based on a pas-

sive participle, but this is combined with the

copula rather than the transitive verb ‘have’,

so that the perfect has a quasi-passive struc-

ture, with the agent in the dative case (‘The

letter is-written to-me’, rather than ‘I have-

written the letter’). In Welsh, the perfect is

formed with the preposition wedi ‘after’ (‘She

is after selling the house’ for ‘She has sold

the house’). The eastern Indo-European lan-

guages also lack a ‘have’-perfect (for in-

stance, both Persian and Hindi/Urdu have a

perfect based on a participle plus the copula,

somewhat like Slavic and Armenian).

Dahl (1995, 1996: 365), taking a global

perspective, notes that the ‘have’-perfect is al-

most exclusively found in Europe. Now one

might object that this is not a primitive fea-

ture of European languages. Many languages

do not use a transitive ‘have’-verb for indi-

cating predicative possession at all, and it has

in fact been suggested that the very existence

of a transitive verb of predicative possession

is a Europeanism (e. g. Lazard 1990: 246⫺47;

Benveniste 1960 [1966: 195]: “L’expression la

plus courante du rapport indique

´dans nos

langues par avoir s’e

´nonce a

`l’inverse par e

ˆtre

`… Telle est la situation dans la majorite

´des

langues.”) The restriction of a ‘have’-perfect

to Europe would then be just a consequence

of this (cf. Dahl 1990: 7). However, so far no

published research has documented an areal

restriction for ‘have’ verbs. From Heine’s

(1997: 47⫺50, 240⫺44) survey of predicative

possessive constructions, not much support

can be drawn for such a claim. Still, this is

an interesting idea to be addressed by further

research. If ‘have’-verbs turn out to be typi-

cal of Europe, that would fit with the ten-

dency of European languages to have nomi-

native experiencers in experiential verbs (see

the next section).

2.4. Nominative experiencers

There are two ways of expressing experiencer

arguments of verbs of sensation, emotion,

cognition and perception: The experiencer

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1496 XIV. Typological characterization of language families and linguistic areas

may be assimilated to agents and coded as

a nominative subject (e. g. I like it), or it may

be assimilated to a patient or goal, so that

the stimulus argument is coded as the nomi-

native subject (e. g. It pleases me). In Bos-

song’s (1998) typology, the first type is called

generalizing, and the second type is called

inverting. Bossong studies the expression of

ten common experiential predicates in 40

European languages. He computes the rela-

tion between inverting predicates and gener-

alizing predicates, arriving at figures between

0.0 for English (where all predicates are

generalizing) and 5.0 for Lezgian (where all

predicates are inverting). By arbitrarily divid-

ing the languages into those showing pre-

dominant generalization (ratios between 0.0

and 0.8) and those showing predominant

inversion (ratios between 0.8 and 5.0), we

arrive at the geographical pattern shown in

Map 107.4.

Map 107.4: Predominant generalization (center) vs. inversion (periphery)

Thus, Bossong’s study basically confirms

earlier claims (Lazard 1990: 246⫺47, Dahl

1990: 7) that the generalizing type is charac-

teristic of SAE, although some of the fig-

ures are perhaps a bit surprising (e. g. the fact

that Hungarian turns out to be more SAE

than German or Dutch, and the inclusion of

Turkish, but not Romanian or Albanian,

with respect to this feature). It is not possible

to explain everything here, but we evidently

have before us a fairly typical SAE pattern

with French and English at the center, Celtic

(plus Icelandic this time) at the western mar-

gin, Balto-Slavic, Finno-Ugrian and Cauca-

sian at the eastern margin, and fairly gradual

transitions within the macro-areas. No sys-

tematic world-wide studies have been made,

but at least the behavior of eastern Indo-

European is fairly clear: Indic languages are

well-known for their “dative subjects” of

experiencer verbs, so again the feature is

not genetic (see also Masica 1976, especially

Map 6, for the areal distribution of dative

subjects in Eurasia and northern Africa).

(See Haspelmath 2001 for more discussion

of experiential predicates in European lan-

guages.)

2.5. Participial passive

Standard Average European languages typi-

cally have a canonical passive construction

(JArt. 67) formed with a passive participle

plus an intransitive copula-like verb (‘be’,

‘become’, or the like). In this passive the

original direct object becomes the subject and

the original subject may be omitted, but it

may also be expressed as an adverbial agent

phrase. Such constructions occur in all Ro-

mance and Germanic languages, but also in

all Slavic (including East Slavic) and Balkan

languages, as well as in Irish. The geographi-

cal distribution of such participial passives is

shown in Map 107.5.

Map 107.5: Participial passives in Europe

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1497107. The European linguistic area: Standard Average European

No passives exist in Nakh-Daghestanian and

in Hungarian, and passives of different for-

mal types are found in Turkic, Georgian, and

Armenian (stem suffix), in Basque, and in

Celtic (cf. the Welsh ‘get’-passive: ‘Terry got

his hitting by a snowball’ for ‘Terry got hit

by a snowball’). Finnish and Irish have pas-

sives of a different syntactic type: In this con-

struction, only the subject is backgrounded,

while the direct object remains in its place.

Participial passives are very rare in lan-

guages other than Standard Average Euro-

pean. In Haspelmath (1990) I surveyed a

world-wide sample of eighty languages and

found that a passive exists only in the mi-

nority of the languages (thirty-one). Of these

thirty-one languages, only four have a pas-

sive formed from a participle plus an intran-

sitive auxiliary, and two of them are Euro-

pean languages (Latin and Danish). The

most common formal type of passive is the

stem suffix (found in twenty-five languages).

Syntactically, the possibility of an adverbial

agent phrase is also by no means universal,

but it is characteristic of SAE languages (La-

zard 1990: 246).

It must be admitted that the SAE status of

this feature is less evident than that of the

first two features because the eastern Indo-

European languages also tend to have pas-

sives of this type. In fact, in my 1990 study,

the two non-European languages with parti-

ciple-auxiliary passives were Baluchi (an Ira-

nian language) and Maithili (an Indic lan-

guage). Thus, one might say that this feature

is an Indo-European genealogical feature.

However, at least the Celtic languages and

Armenian, two non-SAE branches of Indo-

European, do not have such passives, and

Maltese is a non-Indo-European language

with such a passive (calqued from Italian).

2.6. Anticausative prominence

There are three ways in which languages can

express inchoative-causative alternations such

as ‘get lost/lose’, ‘break (intr.)/break (tr.)’,

‘rise/raise’. One is by means of a causative

derivation (JArt. 66), i. e. a derived verb

based on the inchoative member of the al-

ternation, e. g. Mongolian xajl-uul- ‘melt (tr.)’,

from xajl- ‘melt (intr.)’. The second is by

means of an anticausative derivation, i. e. a

derived verb based on the causative member,

e. g. Russian izmenit’-sja ‘change (intr.)’, from

izmenit’ ‘change (tr.)’. (The third type, in

which neither member is derived from the

other, i. e. non-directed alternations, will not

be considered further here.) In Haspelmath

(1993), I examined 31 verb pairs in 21 lan-

guages and found that languages differ

greatly in the way inchoative-causative pairs

are expressed: Some languages are anticau-

sative-prominent, preferring anticausatives to

causatives, while others are causative-promi-

nent. It turns out that anticausative-promi-

nence is a characteristic feature of SAE. In

my sample, German, French, Romanian,

Russian, Modern Greek and Lithuanian

show the highest percentages of anticausative

verb pairs (between 100% and 74 % of all

pairs that do not belong to the third, non-

directed, type). The percentage in the Euro-

pean languages of my sample are shown in

Map 107.6.

-------- 70 ⫺100 % anticausatives

---- 50⫺70% anticausatives

Map 107.6: Percentage of anticausative pairs

By contrast, Asian languages show much

lower percentages of anticausatives, prefer-

ring causatives instead (e. g. Indonesian: 0 %,

Mongolian: 11%, Turkish: 34%, Hindi/Urdu

35%, Lezgian: 40%). An intermediate posi-

tion is occupied by the Finno-Ugrian lan-

guages of eastern Europe (Finnish 47%,

Udmurt 46%, Hungarian 44%) as well as

Georgian (68%) and Armenian (65%). In a

study involving more languages from Asia,

Africa and Europe but less language-partic-

ular detail, Masica (1976) found a clear dis-

tinctive pattern for Europe: few causatives,

heavy reliance on anticausatives (see espe-

cially his Maps 2 and 3). In a recent world-

wide study of 18 verbs from 80 languages,

Nichols et al. (to appear) report that in in-

choative-causative pairs involving inanimate

participants (i. e. the most typical subtype),

the causative is generally favored worldwide

and is strongly disfavored only in Europe.

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1498 XIV. Typological characterization of language families and linguistic areas

Anticausative-prominence is not an Indo-

Europeanism: Older Indo-European had a

productive causative formation, which lost

its productivity in the European branches,

but continued to be productive in eastern

Indo-European (cf. the low figure of 35% an-

ticausatives in Hindi/Urdu).

2.7. Dative external possessors

In König & Haspelmath (1998) and Haspel-

math (1999), we studied the distribution of

external possessors in thirty European lan-

guages (JArt. 73). We found three main lan-

guage types in Europe: (i) those with dative

external possessors, e. g. German Die Mutter

wäscht dem Kind die Haare ‘The mother is

washing the child’s hair’, (ii) those with loca-

tive external possessors, e. g. Swedish Na

˚gon

bröt armen pa

˚honom ‘Someone broke his

arm (lit. on him)’, and (iii) those that lack

external possessors and must express posses-

sors NP-internally, e.g. English. The SAE

feature, external possessors in the dative, is

found in Romance, Continental West Ger-

manic, Balto-Slavic, Hungarian and Balkan

languages (Greek, Albanian). North Ger-

manic and Balto-Finnic languages have loca-

tive external possessors, i. e. they are some-

what peripheral SAE languages with respect

to this feature. The geographical distribution

is shown in Map 107.7.

Map 107.7: Dative external possessor

In the far west (Welsh, Breton, English) and

in the southeast (Turkish, Lezgian) of Europe

there are languages which do not have exter-

nal possessors at all. The eastern Indo-Euro-

pean languages Kurdish, Persian and Hindi/

Urdu also belong to this type. Outside Europe

a fourth type enjoys considerable popularity:

the “relation-usurping” type, where he pos-

sessor “usurps” the syntactic relation of the

possessum (e. g. Chichewa, a Bantu language,

has ‘The hyena ate the hare the fish’ for ‘The

hyena ate the hare’s fish’). This type is not

found in Europe at all. Conversely, dative ex-

ternal possessors seem to be very rare outside

Europe (the only case I am aware of is Ewe,

cf. Ameka 1996), so this is a very robust ex-

ample of an SAE feature.

2.8. Negative pronouns and lack of

verbal negation

The areal distribution of negation in Europe

has been studied in detail by Bernini &

Ramat (1996) (see also Ramat & Bernini

1990). Here I will single out just one aspect

of negation, the cooccurrence of verbal nega-

tion with negative indefinite pronouns. I dis-

tinguish two main types: (i) V ⫹NI (verb ⫹

negative indefinite), e. g. German Niemand

kommt ‘nobody comes’, and (ii) NV ⫹NI

(negated verb ⫹negative indefinite), e. g.

Modern Greek Kane

´nas dhen e

´rxete ‘nobody

(lit. not) comes’. A third, mixed type might

be distinguished in which verbal negation

cooccurs with negative indefinites only when

the indefinite follows the verb but not when

it precedes it, e. g. Italian Nessuno viene ‘no-

body comes’, but Non ho visto nessuno ‘Not I

have seen nobody’. For our purposes we can

classify this type as a subtype of (i), V ⫹NI.

The Standard Average European type is

V⫹NI (cf. Bernini & Ramat 1996: 184, Has-

pelmath 1997: 202). It is found in French (if

we disregard the particle ne), Occitan and all

Germanic languages, as well as (in the mixed

variety) in Ibero- and Italo-Romance and Al-

banian (but not in Romanian or other Bal-

kan languages). The geographical distribu-

tion of the types is shown on Map 107.8.

Map 107.8: Languages lacking verbal negation

with a negative indefinite

All the eastern European languages (Balto-

Slavic, Finno-Ugrian, Turkic, Nakh-Daghes-

tanian) with the exception of Georgian, and

the Celtic languages in the west show the

NV ⫹NI type. This type is also that of the

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1499107. The European linguistic area: Standard Average European

eastern Indo-European languages (Iranian

and Indic), as well as that of the clear major-

ity of the world’s languages: Kahrel (1996)

has studied negation in a representative world-

wide sample of 40 languages and found only

five languages with V ⫹NI negative pat-

terns, one of which is the SAE language

Dutch (the other four are Mangarayi (Aus-

tralia), Evenki, Chukchi (Siberia), and Nama

(southern Africa)), as against 41 NV ⫹NI

patterns, and seven others. I found a very sim-

ilar pattern in my (non-representative) sample

of 40 languages (Haspelmath 1997: 202).

2.9. Particles in comparative constructions

Comparative constructions were investigated

by Stassen (1985) in a world-wide study of 19

languages (JArt. 75). Stassen distinguishes

six main ways in which the standard of com-

parison may be expressed: Three kinds of loc-

ative comparatives (‘bigger from X’, ‘bigger

to X’, ‘bigger at X’), the exceed comparative

(‘Y is big exceeding X’), the conjoined com-

parative (‘Y is big, X is little’), and the par-

ticle comparative (‘bigger than X’). The par-

ticle in this latter type is often related to a

relative pronoun (cf. English than/that, Latin

quam/qui), and the case marking of the stan-

dard is not influenced by the particle (so that

it is possible to distinguish ‘I love you more

than she’ from ‘I love you more than her’).

As Heine (1994) notes, the six types are not

evenly distributed among the languages of

the world. Of the 18 particle comparatives

in Stassen’s sample, 13 are in Europe, and of

the 17 European languages in the sample, 13

have a particle comparative. The distribution

within Europe again conforms to our expec-

tations: Particle comparatives are found in

Germanic, Romance, Balto-Slavic, the Bal-

kans, Hungarian, Finnish and Basque, so this

is the SAE type. The distribution is shown in

Map 107.9.

-------- particle comparative

- - - - locative comparative

Map 107.9: Comparative types in Europe

The locative comparatives are all at the west-

ern fringe (Breton) or the eastern fringe of

Europe (Finnish, Russian, Nenets, Ubykh,

Turkish, Laz). The other two types do not

exist at all in Europe ⫺the exceed compara-

tive is found particularly in Africa, and the

conjoined comparative occurs only in the

Americas and Oceania.

2.10. Relative-based equative constructions

Comparison of equality (equative construc-

tions) is discussed less often than comparison

of inequality, and nobody has undertaken a

study of equatives on a world-wide scale.

Still, there are good reasons to think that

equative constructions provide evidence for

Standard Average European (Haspelmath &

Buchholz 1998). In Europe, many languages

have an equative construction that is based

on an adverbial relative-clause construction.

For example, Catalan has tan Z com X ‘as Z

as X’ (where Z is the adjective and X is the

standard). Catalan com is an adverbial rela-

tive pronoun, and tan is a correlative demon-

strative. A very similar construction is found

elsewhere in Romance (Portuguese ta

˜oZ

como X, Occitan tan Z coma X), in Germanic

(German so Z wie X), in Slavic (Czech tak Z

jako X, Russian tak(oj) z

ˇe Z kak X), in Ro-

mani (kade Z sar X), in Hungarian (olyan Z

mint X), in Finnish (niin Z kuin X), and in

Georgian (isetive Z rogorc X). In the English

construction, the relative-clause origin of as

is not fully transparent synchronically, but

diachronically as derives from a demonstra-

tive (eall swa ⬎all so) that was also used

as a relative pronoun. In some Balkan lan-

guages, the correlative demonstrative is not

used (e. g. Bulgarian xubava kato tebe ‘as

pretty as you’), but the standard marker is

clearly of relative-pronoun origin. (There is

probably some connection between the rela-

tive-pronoun origin of equative markers and

the relative-pronoun origin of comparative

standard markers that we saw in § 2.9.).

Non-SAE languages have quite different

equative constructions. Many SOV languages

in eastern Europe have a special equative

standard marker (Lezgian x

ˆiz, Kalmyk s

ˇing;

also Basque bezain and Maltese daqs), and

the Celtic languages have a special (non-

demonstrative) marker on the adjective (e. g.

Irish chomh Z le X ‘equative Z with X’). In

the Scandinavian languages, the word ‘equ-

ally’ is used on the adjective (e. g. Swedish

lika Z som X ‘equally Z as X’). The distri-

bution of the relative-based equative con-

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1500 XIV. Typological characterization of language families and linguistic areas

struction in Europe is shown in Map 107.10,

following Haspelmath & Buchholz (1998:

297).

Map 107.10: Relative-based equative-constructions

Impressionalistically, relative-based equatives

seem to be rare in the world’s languages, and

the eastern Indo-European languages do not

seem to use them in general (however, a

counterexample is Punjabi).

2.11. Subject person affixes as strict

agreement markers

The majority of the world’s languages have

bound person markers on the verb that cross-

refer to the verb’s subject (or agent). When

these subject affixes cooccur with overt sub-

ject NPs (full NPs or independent subject

pronouns), they are called agreement mark-

ers. However, in most languages they can oc-

cur on their own and need not cooccur with

overt subject NPs. For example, in the Bul-

garian phrase vie rabotite ‘you (pl.) work’, we

see the subject suffix -ite (2nd person plural)

cooccurring with the independent subject

pronoun vie ‘you (pl.)’, showing that -ite is

an agreement marker. But in Bulgarian it is

equally possible and probably more common

to say just rabotite ‘you (pl.) work’, i. e. the

subject suffix can have a referential function

on its own. In German, by contrast, this is

not possible: ‘you work’ is ihr arbeit-et. Since

the agreement suffix -et does not have such

an independent referential function, the sub-

ject pronoun ihr cannot be omitted. Lan-

guages like German are often called “non-

pro-drop languages”, and languages like

Bulgarian are called “pro-drop languages”;

better terms would be “strict-agreement lan-

guages” vs. “referential-agreement languages”.

It has sometimes been thought that strict

agreement, as exhibited by German, English,

and French, is the norm and that referential

agreement is somehow special. But in fact,

referential agreement is far more widespread

in the world’s languages, and strict subject

agreement is characteristic of a few European

languages, some of which happen to be well-

known. In her world-wide sample of 272

languages, Siewierska (1999) finds only two

strict-agreement languages, Dutch (an SAE

language) and Vanimo (a Papuan language

of New Guinea). Siewierska further notes

that outside of Europe, she is aware of only

two additional strict-agreement languages that

are not in her sample (Anejom and Labu, two

Oceanic languages). Gilligan (1987) reached

a similar conclusion on the basis of a sample

of 100 languages. The distribution of strict

subject agreement markers in some European

languages is shown in Map 107.11.

-------- languages with strict subject agreement

- - - - languages with obligatory subject pronouns,

lacking verb agreement

Map 107.11: Obligatory subject pronouns

The map shows two non-contiguous areas in

which subject agreement suffixes cannot have

a referential function: Germanic and Gallo-

Romance languages with Welsh on the one

hand, and Russian on the other. Perhaps only

the western European area should be thought

of as being relevant for SAE; in Russian,

past-tense verbs do not have subject person

affixes, so Russian is not a very good exam-

ple of a strict-agreement language. In the

eastern Nordic languages (Norwegian, Swed-

ish, Danish), the subject pronouns are obliga-

tory as they are in English, German or Ice-

landic, but the languages have lost agreement

distinctions on the verb entirely (cf. Swedish

jag biter/du biter/han biter ‘I/you/he bite(s)’,

Icelandic e

´gbı

´t/pu

´bı

´tur/hann bı

´tur). These

languages are thus “non-pro-drop” in a

sense, but they are not strict-agreement lan-

guages. English is approaching this type, as

the only remnant of subject agreement is the

3rd person singular present-tense suffix -s.

(There are also some languages of this type

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1501107. The European linguistic area: Standard Average European

in the eastern Caucasus, and indeed in many

other parts of the world, but they may never

have had subject person agreement marking.)

2.12. Intensifier-reflexive differentiation

Intensifiers are words like English self, Ger-

man selbst, French me

ˆme and Russian sam

that characterize a noun phrase referent as

central as opposed to an implicit or explicit

periphery (e. g. The Pope himself gave us an

audience, i. e. not just the cardinals (J

Art. 57; König & Siemund 1999). In many

languages, the intensifier expression is also

used as a reflexive pronoun, for instance in

Persian (xod-as

ˇ‘himself’: Hus

ˇang xod-as

‘Hushang himself’, and Hus

ˇang xodas

ˇ-ra

¯did

[Hushang self-acc saw] ‘Hushang saw him-

self’). However, a feature that is typical of

SAE languages is the differentiation of reflex-

ive pronouns and intensifiers (König & Has-

pelmath 1999). For instance, German has sich

(reflexive) vs. selbst (intensifier), Russian has

sebja vs. sam, Italian has si vs. stesso, Greek

has eafto

´vs. ı

´dhjos. Map 107.12 shows the lan-

guages in Europe with special reflexive pro-

nouns that are not identifical to intensifiers.

Map 107.12: Intensifier-reflexive differentiation

Intensifier-reflexive differentiation is not an

Indo-Europeanism, because eastern Indo-

European languages have the same expres-

sion for intensifiers and reflexives (e. g. Per-

sian xod-as

ˇ, Hindi aap). There are no pub-

lished world-wide studies yet, but it seems

that non-differentiation is very common

around the world, and while differentiation is

also found elsewhere, it is not found in areas

immediately adjacent to European languages.

3. Some further likely SAE features

In this section, I will mention a few features

which are less well-documented than those in

§ 2, or whose geographical distribution is less

striking, but which nevertheless seem good

candidates for Europeanisms. No maps will

be given for these features, and the evidence

will be summarized only briefly.

3.1. Verb fronting in polar interrogatives

In the large majority of languages, polar in-

terrogatives are marked by interrogative in-

tonation or an interrogative particle or both

(JArt. 77). In his sample of 79 languages,

Ultan (1978) found only seven languages

showing the alternative strategy of verb

fronting (often called “subject-verb inver-

sion”). Of these, six are European (English,

French, Romanian, Russian, Hungarian,

Finnish; the seventh language is Malay), so

that the SAE status of verb fronting seems

beyond doubt. In fact, the large majority of

Germanic, Romance and Slavic languages

(plus Modern Greek) appear to have verb

fronting in polar questions in one form or

another. The three European languages for

which Ultan explicitly reports that no verb

fronting occurs are peripheral: Basque, Gae-

lic and Lithuanian. Furthermore, SAE lan-

guages are characterized by the absence of an

interrogative particle. In Ultan’s data, the

nine European languages exhibiting a par-

ticle in polar questions are all peripheral to

a greater or lesser extent: Basque, Irish, Scot-

tish Gaelic, Albanian, Hungarian, Lithua-

nian, Russian, Finnish, Turkish (and I can

add Nakh-Daghestanian). Verb fronting in

polar questions was suggested as a Euro-

peanism already by Beckman (1934) (cf.

Dahl 1990).

3.2. Comparative marking of adjectives

Most European languages have special forms

for adjectives occurring in comparative con-

structions. For instance, English uses the

suffix -er in this way (The dog is bigg-er than

the cat). Such an inflectional marker of adjec-

tives is not common in the world’s languages

outside of Europe. Some languages use some

kind of adverbial particle modifying the ad-

jective (‘more’), but perhaps the most com-

mon type is represented by Japanese, where

the comparative semantics is carried by the

standard marker alone (e. g. inu-ga neko yori

ookii [dog-subj cat from big] ‘the dog is big-

ger than the cat’).

Special comparative forms are found in all

Germanic, Balto-Slavic and Balkan lan-

guages (with the exception of Romanian and

Albanian), and most Romance languages

preserve at least four suppletive forms (e. g.

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1502 XIV. Typological characterization of language families and linguistic areas

Italian maggiore ‘bigger’, minore ‘smaller’,

peggiore ‘worse’, migliore ‘better’). Compara-

tive forms also exist in Basque (e. g. haundi-

ago ‘bigg-er’), Hungarian (nagy-obb ‘bigg-er’),

Finnish (iso-mpi ‘bigg-er’), and other Finno-

Ugrian languages.

Comparative forms are not completely un-

known outside of Europe. Arabic has a spe-

cial comparative form (e. g.

akbar ‘bigger’,

from kabiir ‘big’), but it is unique among

Afro-Asiatic languages in this respect. Old

Indo-Iranian languages had comparative

forms, and the modern Iranian languages

have preserved them to some extent (e. g. Per-

sian -tær, Zaza -e

ˆr). But further east, in mod-

ern Indic, the comparative does not exist

anymore, and languages like Hindi-Urdu and

Bengali use a construction analogous to the

Japanese example just cited. Similarly, in the

Uralic languages, the further east we go, the

fewer comparatives we find. For instance,

Khanty (a Finno-Ugrian language spoken in

western Siberia, i. e. outside of Europe) does

have a comparative form in -sek(e. g. jam-sek

‘better’), which is used when no standard is

present. But in a complete comparative con-

struction, no marking is found on the adjec-

tive (e. g. nanke:se:-n e:welt jam [you knife-

2sg from good] ‘better than your knife’, Ni-

kolaeva 1999: 21).

Thus, although this feature is not confined

to Europe, it is typical of a SAE feature in

that it is robustly present in western Indo-

European and Uralic languages, but gets

rarer the further east we go in these families.

3.3. “A and-B” conjunction

The feature discussed in this section is less

distinctive than the others mentioned so far,

but I hope to show that it is not at all devoid

of interest. Stassen (2000) offers the first

world-wide typological study of NP conjunc-

tion strategies, based on a sample of 260

languages (JArt. 82). He distinguishes two

basic types, and-languages (using a symmet-

ric particle) and with-languages (using an

asymmetric comitative marker). Two thirds

of Stassen’s sample languages are and-lan-

guages, and since SAE clearly belongs to this

type, too, it is not a very distinctive property.

And-languages cover all of northern Eurasia,

South Asia, the Middle East and northern

Africa, Australia, New Guinea, and parts of

Central and South America. With-languages

are encountered in sub-Saharan Africa, East

and Southeast Asia, the islands of Oceania,

and large areas of North and South America.

However, within the and-languages there are

several sub-types according to the position of

the particle, which we may call “A and-B”,

“A-and B”, “A-and B-and”, and “A B-and”

(of the remaining logical possibilities, “and-A

B” seems to be inexistent, and “and-A and-

B” occurs only as a secondary pattern). Most

European languages, and in particular all

SAE languages, belong to the sub-type “A

and-B”. The types “A-and B-and” and “A-

and B” are found in some languages of the

Caucasus and in some Turkic languages, as

well as scattered throughout northern Eu-

rasia and South Asia (e.g. in Abkhaz, Archi,

Persian, Sinhalese, Tamil, Burmese, Korean

according to Stassen; Stassen also points out

that there is a correlation with verb-final

word order here). Furthermore, some periph-

eral European languages make restricted use

of the with-strategy (e. g. Russian my s toboj

‘I and you’, lit. ‘we with you’, and also Old

Irish, Lithuanian, Polish and Hungarian,

according to Stassen). Taken together, these

data do show that belonging to the “A and-

B” type is not a trivial feature of the SAE

linguistic area.

3.4. Comitative-instrumental syncretism

In all SAE languages, the preposition that

expresses accompaniment (⫽comitative) also

serves to express the instrument role (e. g.

English with: with her husband/with the ham-

mer). Such languages are said to exhibit com-

itative-instrumental syncretism. Stolz (1996)

studied comitative and instrumental markers

in a world-wide sample of 323 languages and

found that this kind of syncretism is typical

of Europe. Non-European languages more

commonly possess separate markers for these

two semantic roles (e. g. Swahili na ‘with

(comitative)’, kwa ‘with (instrumental)’. As

Table 107.1 shows, about two thirds of Stolz’s

sample languages are non-syncretic, and only

one quarter is syncretic. (The remaining lan-

guages belong to a mixed type, which I ig-

nore here for the sake of simplicity; thus, the

percentages do not add up to 100%.)

Two areas diverge significantly from the

general trend: Oceania has far less syncretism

than the world average, and Europe has far

more syncretism than the world average.

When we look at the pattern within Europe,

it becomes even clearer that we are dealing

with an SAE feature (as Stolz recognizes, cf.

1996: 120). Of the 16 non-syncretic languages

in Europe, 10 are Caucasian languages, i. e.

they are clearly outside of SAE, and one is

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1503107. The European linguistic area: Standard Average European

Table 107.1: Comitative-instrumental: Syncretic and non-syncretic languages

syncretic (e. g. English) non-syncretic (e. g. Swahili)

languages percentage languages percentage

Europe 25 49% 16 31%

Africa 20 31% 38 58 %

Americas 16 21% 54 69 %

Asia 12 18% 47 71 %

Oceania 6 10% 54 86%

World 79 24% 209 65%

only politically, not anthropologically, in

Europe (Greenlandic). Four of the remaining

five languages are also otherwise not typical

instances of SAE (Basque, Finnish, Maltese,

Mari). And when we look at the 38 Indo-

European languages in Stolz’s sample, we

see that syncretism cannot be regarded as an

Indo-Europeanism: Of the eight Indo-Euro-

pean languages not spoken in Europe, only

three show syncretism, while five show non-

syncretism. Thus, in Asia Indo-European lan-

guages behave like Asian languages, and there

is no general pattern for Indo-European.

3.5. Suppletive second ordinal

Most languages have a suppletive form of the

ordinal numeral ‘first’, i. e. a form not de-

rived from the cardinal numeral ‘one’. An

example is German, where ‘1st’ is erster (un-

related to eins ‘1’), contrasting with other

ordinals such as zweiter ‘2nd’ (cf. zwei ‘2’),

vierter ‘4th’ (cf. vier ‘4’), and so on. In Stolz’s

(2001b) study of 100 languages world-wide,

there are 95 languages with special ordinal

numerals, and of these, 78 have a suppletive

word for ‘first’. Thus, languages that say

(literally) ‘oneth’ for ‘1st’ are not common.

However, the same sample has only 22 lan-

guages in which the word for ‘2nd’, too, is

suppletive and not derived from ‘2’ (e. g.

English second). Thus, most languages have

(literally) ‘twoth’ for ‘2nd’. The 22 languages

that have a suppletive ‘2nd’ word are heavily

concentrated in Europe: 17 are European

languages, and this type is clearly the major-

ity within Europe (which is represented by 27

languages in Stolz’s sample). Of the 10 Euro-

pean languages that do not have a suppletive

second ordinal, six are clearly outside SAE

(Basque, Turkish, Armenian, Georgian, Lez-

gian, Greenlandic). Among SAE languages,

only some Balkan languages (Romanian, Al-

banian, Romani) and German lack a supple-

tive second ordinal.

This is clearly a very marginal feature in

grammar, but it is intriguing that it should

show such a clear geographical distribution.

3.6. Some other characteristics of SAE

The features examined so far present the

most striking evidence for Standard Average

European, but there are probably many more

features that will turn out to be characteristic

of the core European languages in one way

or another. In this subsection, several such

candidates will be mentioned briefly. The first

few features in the following list are purely

negative: At first glance, this may seem odd,

but of course the lack of a category that is

widespread elsewhere is no less significant

than the presence of a category that is rare

elsewhere.

(i) Lack of an alienable/inalienable opposi-

tion in adnominal possession (JArt. 72). In

Nichols’s (1992) world-wide sample, almost

half of the languages show such an opposi-

tion, but no European language does (1992:

123). More generally, this opposition is rarer

in the Old World and common in the New

World, but in Europe it is even less common

than in Africa and Asia.

(ii) Lack of an inclusive/exclusive opposition

in first person non-singular pronouns. Again,

this opposition is commonest in the New

World and in the Pacific region, but in

Europe it is even rarer than in Africa and

Asia, as was shown by Nichols (1992: 123).

(iii) Lack of reduplicating constructions. I

have no systematic evidence to back up the

claim that this is a characteristic feature of

European languages, but reduplication is so

common across languages that its almost to-

tal absence in the core European languages

becomes striking. (Interestingly, reduplication

existed in older Indo-European languages at

least in one construction, the perfect, but

even here it was lost entirely by the Middle

Ages.)

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1504 XIV. Typological characterization of language families and linguistic areas

(iv) Discourse pragmatic notions such as

topic and focus are expressed primarily by

sentence stress and word order differences

(Lazard 1998: 116). Only the Celtic languages

and French give a very prominent role to

clefting, and particles marking discourse

pragmatic notions are virtually unknown.

(v) SVO basic word order at the level of the

clause. This feature is of course found else-

where in the world, but in Europe it corre-

lates particularly well with the other SAE

features. The Celtic languages in the west

have VSO order (except for Breton, which is

also otherwise more SAE than Irish and

Welsh), and the eastern languages have SOV

word order. Interestingly, Balto-Finnic (Fin-

nish, Estonian, etc.) and (less unequivocally)

Hungarian have SVO word order, whereas

the eastern Uralic languages have SOV. Simi-

larly, the eastern Indo-European languages

tend to show SOV word order. (See Dryer

1998 for more on word order in the lan-

guages of Europe.)

(vi) European languages tend to have just

one converb (JArt. 83) (cf. Nedjalkov 1998).

For instance, Romance languages have the

gerundio/ge

´rondif, English has the -ing-form,

and Slavic and Balkan languages have their

adverbial participle. The Celtic languages in

the west completely lack such a form, and the

languages east of SAE tend to have more

than one converb. Otherwise the core Euro-

pean languages tend to have adverbial con-

junctions (JArt. 63) to make adverbial

clauses. According to Kortmann (1997: 344),

they have “a large, semantically highly dif-

ferentiated inventory of free adverbial sub-

ordinators placed in clause-initial position”.

More generally, they tend to have finite rather

than non-finite subordinate strategies (J

Art. 100), though a multi-purpose infinitive

usually exists (except for the Balkan lan-

guages).

(vii) European languages usually have a spe-

cial construction for negative coordination,

e. g. English neither A nor B, Italian ne

´Ane

B, Russian ni A ni B, Dutch noch A noch B,

Hungarian sem A sem B. Again, no world-

wide study has been published, but such a

negative coordinating construction is rarely

reported from languages outside Europe (cf.

Haspelmath to appear).

(viii) SAE languages have a large number of

characteristic properties in the area of phasal

adverbials (expressions like already, still, no

longer, not yet) (van der Auwera 1998b).

These are rather well documented, but for the

detail I have to refer the reader to van der

Auwera’s thorough study.

(ix) “Preterite decay”: the loss of the old

preterite and its replacement by the former

present perfect. This is a change that oc-

curred in the last millenium in French, Ger-

man and northern Italian, as well as in some

other adjacent European languages (cf. Thie-

roff 2000: 285). Its distribution is far nar-

rower than that of the other Europeanisms,

but it is the only feature of those studied by

Thieroff whose geography comes close to

Standard Average European (cf. also Abra-

ham 1999).

Quite a few additional features have been

mentioned in the earlier literature as charac-

teristic of SAE, but earlier authors have

sometimes neglected to make sure that a pro-

posed Europeanism is not also common else-

where in the world. Most of Whorf’s original

examples of SAE features seem to be of this

kind. For instance, he notes that in contrast

to SAE, Hopi lacks “imaginary plurals” (such

as ‘ten days’, according to Whorf a “meta-

phorical aggregate”). But of course, we have

no evidence that such plurals of time-span

nouns are in any way characteristic of Euro-

pean languages. It may well be that they are

common throughout the world. (To give

Whorf his due, it must be added that he was

not interested in demonstrating that SAE

languages form a Sprachbund. He just used

this term as a convenient abbreviation for

“English and other European languages

likely to be known to the reader”, without

necessarily implying that these languages are

an exclusive club.)

4. Degrees of membership in SAE

Membership in a Sprachbund is typically a

matter of degree. Usually there is a core of

languages that clearly belong to the Sprach-

bund, and a periphery of surrounding lan-

guages that share features of the linguistic

area to a greater or lesser extent.

In order to quantify the degrees of mem-

bership in SAE, a simple procedure suggests

itself that was first applied to areal typology

by van der Auwera (1998a). In addition to

individual maps in which the lines denote iso-

glosses (as in Maps 107.1⫺12), we can com-

bine different features in a single map and

show the number of isoglosses shared by the

language. Map 107.13 shows such a “cluster

map” in which the lines stand for “quantified

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1505107. The European linguistic area: Standard Average European

isoglosses” (or “isopleths”). The map com-

bines nine features of § 2.: definite and indefi-

nite articles, relative clauses with relative pro-

nouns, ‘have’-perfect, participial passive, da-

tive external possessors, negative pronouns

and lack of verbal negation, relative-based

equative constructions, subject person affixes

as strict agreement markers, and intensifier-

reflexive differentiation. The languages in the

nucleus (French and German) show the SAE

value in all nine of these features. The lan-

guages in the next layer (Dutch, other Ro-

mance, Albanian) show eight features, the

next layer (English, Greek, Romanian) shows

seven features, and so on. In this map, the

resulting picture is actually very clear, be-

cause the SAE area with at least five SAE

features stands out from the remaining lan-

guages, which have at most two SAE fea-

tures.

Map 107.13: A cluster map combining nine fea-

tures

Such cluster maps are thus a fairly direct rep-

resentation of degrees of membership in a lin-

guistic area. But of course, the cluster map

directly reflects the choice of features that are

combined, and this choice is always some-

what arbitrary. Of the twelve features in § 2,

only nine were selected here because informa-

tion on the other three was incomplete. Ide-

ally, the features of § 3 should have been

added, too. But it seems to me that the main

results of Map 107.13 would not be changed

(this map can also be compared to the very

similar map in van der Auwera (1998a: 823),

which combines five adverbial features or

feature clusters). The most striking features

of Map 107.13 are:

(a) The nucleus of Standard Average Euro-

pean is formed by French and German (a

finding that led van der Auwera (1998a: 824)

to propose the term Charlemagne Sprachbund

for the nuclear area of SAE). In view of the

historical role played by speakers of these

two languages both in the early medieval his-

tory of continental Europe and in the very

recent attempt at European unification, this

is of course an extremely intriguing result.

(b) The southern European languages (both

Romance and Balkan languages) are at least

as close, if not closer to the nucleus than the

northern languages and English. This means

that it is misleading to call SAE features

“Western European features”, as is some-

times done. It is true that the Slavic lan-

guages in the east lack many SAE features,

but the Balkan languages are generally more

SAE than Slavic, although they are not west-

ern European.

European nucleus (as noted also by van der

Auwera 1998a: 823), although it is closely

related genealogically to German and has

been thoroughly influenced by French. Since

English is currently the dominant language

throughout the world, it is worth pointing

out its somewhat marginal status among its

European sister languages.

It is important to keep in mind that the fea-

tures on which Map 107.13 is based have not

been selected randomly and are thus by no

means representative of the morphosyntactic

features of European languages. They were

included precisely because they were known

to show a distribution that supports the SAE

hypothesis. Thus, no claim is made that all

(or even the majority of) features will show a

similar distribution. It is perfectly possible

that we will some day discover another

Sprachbund, based on a different set of fea-

tures, that has Russian at its core and extends

all the way to western Siberia in the east and

central Asia in the south, but within Europe

comprises only the Slavic, Balkan, and Scan-

dinavian languages. This area would overlap

with SAE, but it would not contradict it.

Thus, a language may in principle belong to

different linguistic areas, and different lin-

guistic areas may coexist “on top of” each

other. Since areal typology is only in its in-

fancy, we do not know how common such

situations are, but nothing in the logic of a

Sprachbund implies that the world should be

exhaustively divisible into non-overlapping

Sprachbünde.

In fact, a number of smaller linguistic

areas within Europe have been proposed in

the literature (apart from the Balkan area,

whose importance is not doubted by anyone),

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1506 XIV. Typological characterization of language families and linguistic areas

e. g. by Lewy (1942), Wagner (1959), De

´csy

(1973), Haarmann (1976), and Ureland (1985)

(cf. also Wintschalek 1993 on a Volga-Kama

area). Currently the most thoroughly studied

areas are the Circum-Baltic area (cf. Stolz

1991, Dahl & Koptjevskaja-Tamm (eds.)

2001) and the Mediterranean area (cf. Cris-

tofaro & Putzu (eds.) 2000). However, no

strong claims about a Circum-Baltic or a Me-

diterranean linguistic area seem to have been

made as a result of these studies.

5. How did SAE come into being?

Linguistic areas arise through language con-

tact, but precisely which contact situation

gave rise to Standard Average European is

not immediately clear. And what is the source

of the various Europeanisms: Who borrowed

from whom? A full discussion of the socio-

historical, cultural and sociolinguistic issues

is beyond the scope of this article, so I will

restrict myself here to mentioning just five

possibilities:

(i) retention of Proto-Indo-European struc-

tures and assimilation of some non-

Indo-European languages to Indo-Euro-

pean language structure;

(ii) influence from a common substratum

of a pre-Indo-European population in

Europe;

(iii) contacts during the great trans-

formations at the transition from late

antiquity to the early Middle Ages in

Europe;

(iv) the official language (Latin) and the

common European culture of the Mid-

dle Ages;

(v) the common European culture of mod-

ern times, from the Renaissance to the

Enlightenment.

The fifth possibility must be rejected because

a time depth of 300⫺500 years is not suffi-

cient to account for grammatical common-

alities of the kind discussed above. If lexical

similarities between the European languages

are discussed ⫺for instance neoclassical

compounding (socio-/paleo-/ortho-/demo-,

-graphy/-logy/-cracy, etc.) or idiomatic struc-

ture (e. g. ivory tower/torre d’avorio/Elfenbein-

turm, as poor as a church mouse/pauvre comme

un rat d’e

´glise/arm wie eine Kirchenmaus)⫺

then the last several centuries are the appro-

priate time frame for explaining the historical

links, but the basic syntactic structures com-

mon to SAE languages must be older.

The first possibility must be rejected be-

cause the great majority of Europeanisms

are innovations with respect to Proto-Indo-

European. For instance, as far as we know,

Proto-Indo-European did not have articles, a

‘have’-perfect, “A and-B” conjunction, strict

subject agreement, particle comparatives, or

relative clauses with relative pronouns (cf.

Lehmann 1974, Haspelmath 1998). With re-

spect to Proto-Indo-European, and also with

respect to the oldest Indo-European lan-

guages attested in Europe (Ancient Greek,

Old Latin, Gothic), Standard Average Euro-

pean is clearly an innovation.

The second possibility, a pre-Indo-Euro-

pean substratum in Europe causing the SAE

features, would be extremely difficult to de-

monstrate, but it might be worth pursuing. It

is intriguing to note that the geographical

space occupied by SAE languages coincides

fairly precisely with the area of the Old Euro-

pean hydronymy, i.e. the homogeneous layer

of river names discovered by Hans Krahe

(see Vennemann 1994 for recent discussion).

Vennemann (1994) proposes that these Old

European hydronyms were not coined by an

early prehistoric Indo-European population,

but by a pre-Indo-European people which he

calls Vasconic (the only surviving Vasconic

language being Basque). Furthermore, the

Old European hydronymy is hardly attested

in the British Isles, where the Celtic lan-

guages are spoken, i. e. they could not have

been influenced by the Vasconic substratum.

This is in perfect harmony with the well-mo-

tivated hypothesis that the Celtic languages

acquired some of their striking features from

a different substratum related to the Afro-

Asiatic languages (Pokorny 1927⫺30, Gens-

ler 1993).

The main argument against the substratum

view is that the SAE features seem to be gain-

ing ground too late for a pre-Indo-European

substratum to have caused them. Some SAE

features appear only in the first millenium

CE, but also the earlier features usually come

fairly late, so that the earliest records of Indo-

European-languages in Europe still show

traces of the Proto-Indo-European patterns

(e. g. causatives, relative clauses, locative com-

parative, “A B-and” conjunction). If these

SAE features were caused by a substratum,

then we should have much more evidence of

the population speaking this substratum lan-

guage. Moreover, a Vasconic substratum can

hardly account for the SAE features because

modern Basque is in most relevant ways very

much unlike the SAE languages.

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1507107. The European linguistic area: Standard Average European

Of the remaining two possibilities, we can

probably exclude option (iv) (the influence of

Latin in the Middle Ages), because most SAE

features were absent in Latin and developed

only in the Romance languages. There are

only two features for which Latin influence

is a likely factor: negation and relative pro-

nouns. In the case of these two features, the

standard languages sometimes show devia-

tions from the vernacular dialects, so at least

the written standard languages may have

been influenced by Latin, the European writ-

ten language par excellence for many centu-

ries. Thus, non-standard English has con-

structions like I won’t do nothing (‘I won’t do

anything’), and similarly in non-standard

German and French (cf. Haspelmath 1997:

205). Analogously, Latin-type relative pro-

nouns occur widely in the standard languages

of Europe, but vernacular speech often pre-

fers relative particles (Lehmann 1984: 88,

109). However, Latin probably only helped

to reinforce these structures in those lan-

guages where they existed already indepen-

dently as variants.

Thus, we are left with option (iii), the time

of the great migrations at the transition be-

tween antiquity and the Middle Ages. This

seems to be the appropriate time frame at

least for articles, the ‘have’-perfect, the par-

ticipial passive, anticausatives, negative in-

definites, nominative experiencers and verb

fronting. The rise of these constructions can

be observed only with difficulty because they

were by and large absent in the written classi-

cal languages but seem to be well in place

once the vernacular languages appear in the

written record toward the end of the first

millennium CE (cf. also Fehling 1980). This

hypothesis derives some further plausibility

from the fact that language contact must

have been particularly intensive and effective

during the great migrations, and in the case

of French and northern Italian we have am-

ple records of the lexical effects of these con-

tacts. However, it is not so easy to fit features

such as particle comparatives, „A and-B”

conjunction and relative pronouns into this

picture, because these features seem to have

developed around the middle of the first mil-

lenium BC or even earlier (cf. Haspelmath

1998). Of course, we must always reckon

with the possibility (or even likelihood) that

different SAE features are due to different

historical circumstances, and the correct pic-

ture is likely to be much more complicated

than we can imagine at the moment, let alone

discuss in this article.

6. Abbreviations of language names

Alb Albanian

Arm Armenian

Blg Bulgarian

Brt Breton

Bsq Basque

Cz Czech

Dut Dutch

Eng English

Est Estonian

Fin Finnish

Fr French

Gae Scots Gaelic

Grg Georgian

Grk Greek

Grm German

Hng Hungarian

Ice Icelandic

Ir Irish

It Italian

Kom Komi

Lat Latin

Laz Laz

Lit Lithunian

Ltv Latvian

Lzg Lezgian

Mar Mari

Mlt Maltese

Mrd Mordvin

Nnts Nenets

Nor Norwegian

Pol Polish

Prt Portuguese

Rom Romanian

Rus Russian

SAE Standard Average European

Sam Saami

SCr Serbian/Croatian

Sln Slovene

Spn Spanish

Srd Sardinian

Swd Swedish

Tat Tatar

Trk Turkish

Uby Ubykh

Udm Udmurt

Ukr Ukrainian

Wel Welsh

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in the context of European prehistory”. Transac-

tions of the Philological Society 92: 213⫺282.

Wagner, Heinrich. 1959. Das Verbum in den Spra-

chen der britischen Inseln: ein Beitrag zur geographi-

schen Typologie des Verbums. Tübingen: Niemeyer.

Whorf, Benjamin Lee. 1941. “The relation of habit-

ual thought and behavior to language”. In: Spier,

Leslie (ed.) Language, culture, and personality: Es-

108. Aire linguistique balkanique

1. Ge

´ne

´ralite

´s

2. Phonologie

3. Syste

`me verbal

4. Syste

`me nominal

5. Autres unite

´s

6. Relations phrastiques

7. Subordination

8. Re

´fe

´rences

1. Ge

´ne

´ralite

´s

La linguistique balkanique est une discipline

relativement re

´cente, bien que la de

´couverte

de traits communs entre les langues balkani-

ques remonte a

`la premie

`re moitie

´du XIX

sie

`cle. Les spe

´cialistes (Asenova 1979: 5⫺45;

Schaller 1975: 37⫺45) s’accordent a

`diviser

l’histoire de la discipline en trois pe

´riodes:

une pe

´riode pre

´liminaire,ou

`l’on cherche a

expliquer les traits communs par l’influence

du substrat, une pe

´riode classique ou

`la lin-

guistique balkanique acquiert ses lettres de

noblesse gra

ˆce a

`la publication en 1930 de

Linguistique balkanique. Proble

`mes et re

´sul-

tats de Sandfeld, qui repre

´sente la premie

`re

synthe

`se comple

`te, et une pe

´riode moderne,

marque

´e par le polycentrisme et l’internatio-

nalisation des recherches (nombreuses revues

spe

´cifiques et organisation de congre

`s).

La linguistique balkanique ne consiste pas

`juxtaposer des descriptions de langues di-

verses dont le seul lien serait la contiguı

¨te

´ographique: il faut que ces langues for-

ment une « union linguistique» (Sprachbund).

ˆme si certaines voix s’e

´le

`vent encore pour

nier la re

´alite

´de l’union balkanique (Andrio-

tis & Kourmoulis 1968), la plupart des lin-

guistes sont convaincus de son existence. En

says in memory of Edward Sapir. Menasha, Wis.:

Sapir Memorial Publication Fund, 75⫺93. [Re-

printed in Whorf (1956), 134⫺159.]

Whorf, Benjamin Lee. 1956. Language, thought,

and reality: Selected writings of Benjamin Lee

Whorf. Edited by John B. Carroll, Cambridge/MA:

MIT Press.

Wintschalek, Walter. 1993. Die Areallinguistik am

Beispiel syntaktischer Übereinstimmungen im Wolga-

Kama-Areal. (Studia Uralica, 7.) Wiesbaden: Har-

rassowitz.

Martin Haspelmath, MPI Leipzig

(Deutschland)

effet, les traits communs sont trop nombreux

pour qu’ils soient le fruit du hasard. Il est

vrai que les spe

´cialistes discutent encore de

la notion de « balkanisme », que l’on de

´finira

ici comme un trait typologique propre a

`au

moins trois langues de l’union. Ce trait n’a

pas besoin d’eˆtre unique en son genre (ainsi,

l’article de

´fini postpose

´existe dans les lan-

gues scandinaves, le « redoublement» de l’ob-

jet se retrouve dans les langues romanes); il

doit eˆtre le re

´sultat d’une convergence qui

aboutit a

`un re

´sultat identique ou quasi iden-

tique, alors qu’il n’existait pas a

`des stades

plus anciens.

Les taˆches de la linguistique balkanique

sont consigne

´es dans l’histoire de la disci-

pline. Elles ont un triple aspect: synchronique

(description) panchronique (extension) et

diachronique (formation et e

´volution). Bien

que l’essentiel du travail descriptif semble

avoir e

´te

´acompli (la monographie de Sand-

feld a e

´t

´e comple

´te

´e, souvent ame

´liore

´e, par

des centaines d’articles et d’e

´tudes de de

´tail

qui ont permis d’accroı

ˆtre et d’approfondir

les donne

´es), il reste toujours beaucoup a

faire. L’e

´tude de l’extension des balkanismes

´cessite le recours a

`la ge

´ographie linguisti-

que (ou linguistique are

´ale) pour de

´terminer

avec exactitude le lieu d’apparition de chaque

balkanisme et son extension re

´elle sur le ter-

rain. Enfin, la perspective diachronique n’est

jamais perdue de vue par les balkanologues,

malgre

´les nombreuses difficulte

´s auxquelles

ils sont confronte

´s, faute de documents e

´crits.

Trois aspects sont a

`prendre en conside

´ra-

tion: 1) La gene

`se de l’union linguistique

balkanique; 2) La gene

`se des balkanismes; 3)

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The loss of synthetic past tense forms in Slovene in the context of the hypothesised Central European convergence area

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May 2024

Matej Šekli

One of the salient morphosyntactic features of the hypothesised Central European convergence area is allegedly a simple three-tense verb system (i. e. past, present, and future) without any formal and semantic distinction between the different past tense forms. The simplification of the originally more complex past tense system has been claimed to be contact-induced, which is mirrored in the loss of synthetic past tense forms in the linguistic history of German and Slavic. The article verifies the hypothesis according to which the loss of the preterit (i. e. a synthetic past tense form) in Upper German caused the disappearance of synthetic past tense forms, i. e. the aorist and the imperfect, in Slavic, more specifically Slovene. First, the process of the loss of the aorist and the imperfect in three medieval Slovene texts is presented, viz. the Freising Fragments (c. 972–1039), the Klagenfurt/Celovec or Rateče Manuscript (2nd half of the 14th century), and the Castelmonte/Stara Gora Manuscript (end of the 15th century). Second, the use of the preterit and the perfect in the Early New High German text Ain newes lied von den kraynneriſchen bauren (c. 1515) from the South Bavarian-Austrian speech territory, more precisely Lower Styria, is analysed. The historical linguistic analysis of the cited Slovene and German linguistic material (the latter originating from the Slovene linguistic area as well) shows that in medieval Slovene the aorist (and most probably the imperfect, too) was lost no later than by the end of the 15th century, while the formal and semantic distinction between the preterit on one hand and the perfect on the other is still preserved in Early New High German documented in the “Slovene-speaking lands” in the second decade of the 16th century. From these facts one cannot but conclude that the loss of synthetic past tense forms in Slovene could not have been influenced by (the demonstrably later) loss of the preterit in South Bavarian-Austrian German dialects, which were historically (and in some regions still are) in geographical and, consequently, sociolinguistic contact with Slovene.

ON THE GENEALOGICAL LINGUISTIC CLASSIFICATION OF SLAVIC LANGUAGES AND THEIR DIALECT MACRO-AREAS

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Jan 2023

Matej Šekli

Headless relative clauses with a gap: a typological trait of Mesoamerican languages

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Apr 2024

This paper has two main goals. One is to introduce a type of “headless” (or “antecedentless”) relative clause that presents a gap strategy and that has not been sufficiently discussed in the typological literature. The other is to show that this type of headless relative clause with a gap is a characteristic trait of Mesoamerican languages, since it exists in many languages of the Mesoamerican linguistic area as an important constructional option in their relativization syntax, independently of the genetic relationships of the language in question. Two types of headless relative clauses are well known to date: one involving a relativization strategy with a relative pronoun (e.g., I wore what you asked me to wear ) and another with a light head, introduced by Citko (2004. On headed, headless, and light-headed relatives. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 22. 95–126), somewhat comparable to I wore the one that you asked me to wear . The third type of headless relative clause discussed here presents a gap (i.e., there is no manifestation of the relativized term in the relative clause). It would be equivalent to saying ‘ I wore you asked me to wear ’. The phenomenon we study here is interesting both from a typological and areal point of view.

Typologie und Diffusion von Höflichkeitspronomina in Europa

Article

Full-text available

Jan 2005

Johannes Helmbrecht

In fast allen europäischen Sprachen gibt es zumindest eine Höflichkeitsdistinktion im Pronominalsystem. Diese Höflichkeitsdistinktion betrifft fast ausschließlich die Referenz auf den Hörer, das heißt die zweite Person. Die Distinktion, von der hier die Rede ist, wird im Deutschen durch die Opposition von du/Sie und im Französischen durch tu/vous ausgedrückt. Durch die Wahl einer Form in diesem Kontrastpaar referiert der Sprecher S nicht nur auf den Hörer H, sondern markiert zugleich einen Aspekt der sozialen Relation, die zwischen S und H besteht, bzw. der Einschätzung dieser Relation auf Seiten des S. Seit der berühmten Studie von Brown & Gilman (1960) über Höflichkeitsdistinktionen in Pronomina nennt man diese Distinktion auch T/V, abgeleitet von Lateinisch 2SG tu versus 2PL vos. T bezeichnet das familiäre Pronomen, V das höfliche Pronomen 2. Die Existenz einer Höflichkeitsdistinktion in den Pronominalparadigmen der europäischen Sprachen suggeriert, dass die Verwendungsregeln mehr oder weniger identisch sind. Das ist jedoch keineswegs der Fall. Die Sprachen unterscheiden sich zum Teil erheblich danach, wer in welcher Situation von wem mit dem V-Pronomen oder dem T-Pronomen angesprochen wird oder werden kann. Im Deutschen werden z. B. die Schwiegereltern von Schwiegersohn oder Schwiegertochter geduzt. Dieser Gebrauch ist symmetrisch und wird oft schon einige Zeit vor der eigentlichen Heirat (wenn eine solche abzusehen ist) verab-redet. Symmetrisch bedeutet in diesem Fall, dass der Schwiegersohn bzw. die Schwiegertochter du gibt und umgekehrt von den Schwiegereltern du erhält. Das ist im Französischen anders. Die Schwiegereltern werden gesiezt. Dieser Gebrauch der V-Pronomina ist ebenfalls symmetrisch. Wenn man diese Regel verletzt, hat das Irritation oder sogar Sanktionen zur Folge. Neben dem symmetrischen Gebrauch der T/V-Pronomina gibt es in Europa den historisch älteren Typ des asymmetrischen Gebrauchs.

Variation and change of relativizers in Austria’s German varieties

Article

Jan 2024

This paper explores the variation and change in relativizers in German varieties of Austria using various methods and datasets. Dialectal and standard data were collected via face-to-face dialect interviews, a written syntax questionnaire, and language production experiments. The study focuses on geographical, linguistic, and sociolinguistic factors and their interaction. For the standard language, in which the relative pronoun strategy clearly dominates, only marginal effects for the use of welch-pronouns can be seen with regard to age and gender. In contrast, for the dialects in which, in addition to the relative pronoun strategy, the relative particle strategy and the hybrid strategy are used, the analyses reveal clear regional differences. In the Bavarian dialect regions, for example, variants with the particle was are preferred, whereas variants with the particle wo occur almost exclusively in the Alemannic dialects of Austria. In addition, the grammatical gender of the antecedent and the age group are found to be factors constraining variation.

Sprache und Landschaft

Chapter

May 2024

Hans-Jörg Döhla

Universality versus variation in the conceptualization of anger: A question of methodology

Article

Full-text available

Mar 2024

Cognitive linguistic investigations into the metaphorical conceptualization of anger suggest that languages are remarkably similar on a schematic level, with intensity and control as two, possibly universal dimensions underlying the metaphorical conceptualization of anger. These dimensions, however, can manifest themselves in language-specific metaphors. Yet arriving at a definitive answer to the question of universality versus variation is hindered by (a) a relatively limited number of systematic, contrastive analyses; and (b) varied methodologies, with some papers adopting a type-based account, while others following a token-based analysis. We take up both challenges in the present paper with the aim of offering a more definitive answer to the question of the universality and variation of anger metaphors. We investigate the anger metaphors of a type-based analysis, focusing on dictionary data of anger-related idioms, and a token-based analysis, focusing on data collected from online corpora, in three languages: (American) English (2,000 random instances of the lemma anger from the Corpus of Contemporary American English), Hungarian (1,000 instances of the lemma düh from the Hungarian National Corpus) and Russian (1,000 instances of the lemma gnev from the Russian National Corpus). The lexical data were analyzed with the well-established Metaphor Identification Procedure (MIP). Our results indicate that there is a great deal of congruence relative to shared metaphors in both approaches, but this derives from specific-level metaphors in the lexical approach, whereas it derives from more schematic, generic-level metaphors in the corpus-based approach. The study shows that the full picture of the metaphorical conceptualization of a complex emotion concept such as anger can only emerge with the combination of the type- and token-based approach.

Subordinative Construction of Tamiang Malay Language: Syntactic Typology Study

Article

Full-text available

Dec 2023

This study aims to identify the syntactic typology of Tamiang Malay, focusing specifically on the co-referential patterns of grammatical relations to its arguments, including S, A and P in subordinative construction. This research is qualitative research. This study used a descriptive research design to investigate the syntactic typology of Tamiang Malay language. Data collection was conducted through a fieldwork in Tamiang Malay-speaking communities in Batu Lapan Sub-Village, Rantau Sub-District, Rantau Pauh Village, Aceh Tamiang District, Aceh Province, Indonesia. Tamiang Malay exhibits a unique syntactic structure that combines different types of clauses, including intransitive and transitive clause. The findings demonstrate the existence of several co-referential patterns, such as S = S, S = P, S = A, A = S, P = S, A = A, A = P, and P = A, within the combined clauses. The results of the research also show that Tamiang Malay exhibits a combination of accusative and ergative alignment patterns in its syntactic typology. In Tamiang Malay, the alignment pattern is primarily accusative, where the subject of an intransitive clause is marked the same way as the agent of a transitive clause, while the patient of a transitive clause is marked differently. However, Tamiang Malay also displays instances of ergative alignment that mark the subject of an intransitive clause the same way as the patient of a transitive clause, while the agent of a transitive clause is marked differently.

The Dimensions of Morphosyntactic Variation: Whorf, Greenberg and Nichols were right

Article

Full-text available

Dec 2023

We examine a database of 3089 languages coded for 351 morphosyntactic features, including almost all of the morphosyntactic features found in The World Atlas of Language Structures (Dryer & Haspelmath 2013). We apply Factor Analysis of Mixed Data, and determine that the main dimensions of global morphological variation involve (1) word order in clauses and adpositional phrases, (2) head-versus dependent-marking, and (3) a set of features that show an east-west distribution. We find roughly the same features clustering in similar dimensions when we examine individual macro-areas, thus confirming the universal relevance of these groupings of features, as encapsulated in well-known implicational universals. This study confirms established insights in linguistic typology, extending earlier research to a much larger set of languages, and uncovers a number of areal patterns in the data.

Hybrider Status des sein-Perfekts preprint.docx

Preprint

Full-text available

Dec 2023

Hybrider Status des sein-Perfekts zwischen stativ-resultativer und perfektischer Lesart. Eine Auswertung von Positionsverben in historischen Referenzkorpora des Deutschen Anhand einer Untersuchung in den Referenzkorpora Mittelhochdeutsch, Frühneuhochdeutsch sowie Mittelniederdeutsch/Niederrheinisch wird gezeigt, dass die Grammatikalisierung der aktiven Umschreibung bestehend aus sein + Partizip II in Verbindung mit Positionsverben historisch areal gestaffelt unterschiedliche Funktionsbereiche abdeckt, die verschiedene Grammatikalisierungsgrade repräsentieren. Im oberdeutschen Sprachraum wird gesessen sein, gelegen sein, gestanden sein bereits seit der mhd. Periode (wie das Perfekt im Gegenwartsdeutschen) zum Vorzeitigkeitsausdruck genutzt, während im mitteldeutschen und noch stär-ker im niederdeutschen Sprachraum die Verbindung aus sein+Partizip II primär resultativ-stative Lesart trägt. Die Umschreibung mit sein ist da-bei als Verbindung aus Kopula und prädikativem Adjektiv analysierbar. So geht der Hilfsverbwechsel zwischen haben und sein insbesondere im Mittelniederdeutschen mit einer temporal-aspektuellen Differenzierung zwischen einem ereignisbezogenen Perfekt und einer resultativ-stativen Lesart einher. Die nicht-oberdeutschen Varietäten fügen sich damit in ein Kontinuum nord-bzw. nordwestgermanischer Sprachen ein, wie Altnordisch,-schwedisch und-englisch, von denen bekannt ist, dass die Umschreibung mit SEIN in älteren Sprachstufen resultativ-stative Funktion erfüllte.

Some instruments are really good companions – some are not. On syncretism and the typology of comitatives and instrumentals

Article

Full-text available

Jan 1997

Thomas Stolz

The paper seeks to shed some light on the intricate relationship that holds between comitatives and instrumentals in the languages of the world. By way of checking the Companion Metaphor on the basis of a large cross-linguistic sample, a number of revisions are put forward as to the validity of the supposedly universal preference for comitative-instrumental syncretism. The paper demonstrates that the syncretistic patterns in which comitatives and instrumentals participate depend upon several parameters among which areal factors are especially important. In addition, the hypothesis is put forward that the syncretistic behaviour of comitatives and instrumentals cannot be explained in terms of propositional concepts. Rather, the syncretistic preferences observed for comitatives and instrumentals are suggestive of a feature-based explanatory model

Définition des actants dans les langues européennes

Chapter

Jan 1998

Gilbert Lazard

Possession: Cognitive Sources, Forces, and Grammaticalization

Book

Oct 1997

Bernd Heine

In this new work, Bernd Heine claims that the structure of grammatical categories is predictable to a large extent once we know the range of possible cognitive structures from which they are derived. The author uses as his example the structure of predicative possession, and shows how most of the possessive constructions to be found in the world's languages can be traced back to a small set of basic conceptual patterns. Heine identifies these patterns, and using grammaticalization theory he describes how each affects the word order and morphosyntax of the resulting possessive construction. He argues that grammaticalization theory explains much of the observable typological diversity which characterizes 'have'-constructions in the world's languages. Illustrated by a wealth of examples, this is an original and important statement from a leading linguist.

Converbs in the languages of europe

Chapter

Jan 2011

Igor’ V. Nedjalkov

Aspects of word order in the languages of Europe

Chapter

Dec 2010

Matthew S. Dryer

Adverbial Subordination: A Typology and History of Adverbial Subordinators Based on European Languages

Book

Aug 2012

Bernd Kortmann

This book is the result of a unique collaborative research effort. The outcome of this collaborative effort were two volumes, the first of which turned into the current monograph. The second volume includes the data which form the basis for this book, organized into two dictionaries (one language-based, the other semantics-based). It is hoped that this second volume will independently be published in the near future. In the meantime all readers interested in getting access to the data are welcome to contact the author via the publisher. © 1996 by Walter de Gruyter & Co., D-10785 Berlin. All rights reserved.

Das Tempussystem des Deutschen im typologischen Vergleich

Chapter