Talk:Linguistic typology

message: I don't quite see the point of a bunch of pages
    * Subject Verb Object
    * Subject Object Verb
    * Verb Subject Object
    * Verb Object Subject
    * Object Subject Verb
    * Object Verb Subject
that merely repeat information from the Linguistic typology page.
Couldn't we reduce all of those pages to a single line
"See Linguistic typology." ?
DavidCary 02:49, 20 Feb 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: whining about redundancy

message: Where do concepts like subject weak, declension and inflection fit into this? I'm sure I'm not understanding the classification properly so maybe some extra information for us beginners would be useful (thanks) --KayEss 21:50, 29 Mar 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: subject weak, declension, inflection

message: I'm really quite interested in Linguistic Typology, as it seems to offer a great deal of insight into languages.  Difficulties with the SVO/VSO/... system of classification have been pointed out, primarily in dealing with polysynthetic languages whose rich morphology allows speakers to permute the word order as they see fit.
While this is a valid concern, as a speaker of Chinese I am somewhat more concerned by its aparent failure to deal with topic comment (or sometimes topic predicate) lanugages.  ASL (American Sign Language) is another example of a topic-comment language, as is Japanese (or so I've read, I speak/sign neither of these languages).  Essentially, in a topic comment language the structure of the sentence is typically 'topic' followed by a predicate, or comment, which comments on the topic in some way.  Lingusitic typologists seem wont to classify Chinese as SVO, but it becomes very difficult to satisfactorily model the language in this way.  Rather like the tendency of speakers of nominative-accusative languages to confuse agent/experiencer with subject and patient with object because the tripartite distinction makes very little sense in the context of their own languages, it seems to me as though typologists are drawing heavily on their intuitive understanding of European languages and attempting to extend that framework globally.
The categorization of Chinese as SVO seems to be motivated by the fact that the subject typically precedes the verb, and that the object (if there is one) typically follows the verb.  However, this is overlooking the fact that in most sentences, the subject is the topic of the sentence.  As a result, one has a situation where a satistically significant number of sentences seem to begin with a subject, but in fact, they begin with a topic.
And, as a consequence, virtually any word can be regarded as the subject, the verb or the object in a Mandarin sentence.
Typically, a chinese sentence is broken down into topic-comment, comment, comment, comment ....  (with the comments
all being predicates that share the same topic, introduced at the sentence head).  In fact, the Chinese notion of a sentence is very different from an English sentence -- the above construction would invariably lead to a run-on sentence in a language like English, but is perfectly acceptable in both written and spoken Chinese.
As I've implied, the topic need not be the subject, but may in fact be any part of speech.  The canonical example is the sentence 七岁时死了他父亲 (literally 7 years old died his father) which of course means "His father died when he (the child) was seven" but leverages Chinese topic-comment sentence structuring to make the age of the child the topic of the sentence.  The intrasitivity of the verb 死 (to die) allows the "subject" to be placed anywhere without confusion (as the subject is actually the experiencer and not the agent).
This accounts for the frequent use of sentences that seem (to speakers of Indo-European languages, at any rate) to be in the passive voice, but are in fact not in the passive voice (Chinese has a well marked passive voice).  This is because in those sentences, the object acts as the topic and is brought to the beginning of the sentence, with the subject taking second place (or being ommited completely).  An example of this might be 车洗好了 (literally, car washed COMPLETE) which introduces the car as both the patient and the topic (and ommits the subject).  This could be translated (inaccurately) into an English framework in two ways: I washed the car (actually 我已把车洗好了, which introduces "me" as the topic of the sentence, and uses the active voice), or The car has been washed (actually 车被洗好了, which keeps the car as the topic of the sentence, but emphasizes -- through the use of the passive voice -- the existance of an agent).  The actual sentence in chinese is talking about the car, and is commenting on it: it's been washed.  This is rather hard to do in English.
With this background, I'd like to hear from some of the linguists around what their thoughts are on topic-comment structures.  It's essentially impossible to speak or understand Chinese if you adhere strictly to a SVO classification, and it's different from languages like German which are nominally SVO but SOV and VSO characteristics in certain instances, because in those languages, the grammar (rather than the semantics) completely predicts deviations from the norm (ie, German using SOV structure in subordinate clauses, and VSO when a prepositional phrase is brought to the head of the sentence).  In Chinese, there are no "rules" that predict when a sentence will depart from SVO -- the only way to know how to structure a sentence is to drop the SVO fallacy completely and accept the topic-comment model.
Is Topic-Comment a part of linguistic typology?  It occurs frequently in literature (esp with regards to Chinese, Japanese, and ASL).
If it is, maybe we ought to have an article on it.  If not, maybe we ought to have one anyway, and point this out as a possible limitation of Typology.
202.96.246.206 06:56, 14 Dec 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  topic comment? 

message: There exists a myth that languages with rich morphology (and especially with noun cases) have free word order in sentences. I do not think it could be true in any language.
I think that a kind of a neutral word order is always essentially fixed in a given sentence ("given" - because it can depends on lexical facts, i.e. whether such or another verb / object / subject is used). Anyway, it is so in Polish, which is my mother tongue. Polish has noun cases, and it is said to have very free word order. In fact, the neutral word order in Polish is SVO in most sentences. The problem is, however, that this word order can be changed - but not freely, with no reason! In other words, the word order is "free" (in a special sense - you can find many sentences with the word order other than SVO in any Polish texts) but it cannot be freely changed.
On the other hand, there can be many reasons to change the "neutral" word order. Such a change is frequent, among others, in poetry (e.g. for preserving the metrum, the rhythm or the rhyme), or when you want to "topicize" a given part of a sentence. For example: co widziałeś w lesie? - w lesie widziałem wilka (what-ACC saw-2sg in forest-LOC - in forest-LOC saw-1sg wolf-ACC), which means what did you see in the forest? - I saw a wolf in the forest. Another example shows breaking the SVO order itself: Piotra bije Paweł (Peter-ACC beat-3sg Paul-NOM) - Paul is beating Peter. In this sentence the speaker gives the additional information that it is Peter who is beating Paul (Peter and not another person). A similar effect can be achieved in English with the help of intonation: Paul is beating Peter! with "Paul" spoken at a higher pitch of voice.
But there is another fact which is often omitted by typologists: some words tend to change the basic word order. Some examples. An intransitive word causes the SV word order as a rule. There are two verbs that can be used with the meaning "exist", they are być istnieć. The first one is just to be. It needs the VS word order in this meaning: jest Bóg (is-3sg God-NOM; God exists or there is God), w lesie są grzyby (in forest-LOC are-3pl fungi-NOMpl, there are mushrooms in the forest). But the synonymous word istnieć needs SV in simple sentences, like Bóg istnieje (God exists) while VS in more complex sentences (e.g. w kosmosie istnieją różne rodzaje gwiazd - in space-LOC exist-3pl various-NOMpl kinds-NOMpl stars-GENpl, various types of stars are/exist in the space). In boli mnie głowa - ache-3sg me-ACC head-NOM (I have a headache - or more literally my head is aching me) the VOS order is frequent (along with głowa mnie boli - SOV). In the subordinate close in chcę cię spytać (want-1sg you-ACCsg ask-INF, I want to ask you) we have OV, while in chcę spytać Piotra (I want to ask Peter) we have VO (no subject as it is the same as in the main clause). As you can see, here the word order depends on what part of speech is used, a pronoun or a noun. Etc...
As you can see, neutral word order does exist in Polish (and I belive, in all the other inflexional languages) even if it can be easily broken (e.g. in poetry, for emphase, topicization etc.). Which is more, it depends on lexical and semantic facts - it is not so that all verbs demand the same word order. Nevertheless, a given word needs "its own" word order (even if the word order cannot be the same as that one which is prevalent in the language).
Does it all mean that such languages like Polish cannot be classified within the S-V-O typology? No! But you should take only natural, neutral word order into consideration, such as in sentences with "typical" words - or just more frequent order (statistically) which can be found in texts. Taking this important notice, Polish belongs to the SVO type, Latin - to SOV etc., even if virtually any of the six orders can be found in Polish or Latin texts. Statistics seems to be the only method in such instances. And hence I am sure that Basque (or any other language) can be classified within one of the six types.
--Grzegorj 13:19, 17 Mar 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: I wonder if this can be related to Transformational Grammar's deep structure vs. surface structure theory. For example, perhaps in Polish the speaker subconsciously thinks everything in SVO order, but the sentence may go through a transformation using rules as mentioned that produces a very different order. So if there are no circumstantial rules that would apply in a given situation, then the sentence would default as SVO. (I'm probably misunderstanding transformational theory: despite many classes about it back when, I still barely know what it is!) Anyway, would anyone know if this kind of approach has been applied in this way (what is in the head vs. what is actually produced) to typology when using sentence word order to categorize? Not sure if it's really worth delving into for the purposes of this article, but thought it might be worth bringing up. —LaXian (talk) 23:18, 8 July 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Linguistic typology and inflexional languages 

message: The use κοινη without proper accentuation, modifying the English word "Greek" was a ridiculous pedanticism, so I removed it.  Besides, Modern Greek or Mycenean Greek are satisfactory examples of this phenomenon as well, so you may as well say simply "Greek."--Jpbrenna 22:35, 13 Jun 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Koine 

message: The section about word order in the beginning is misleading. The employed concepts are indeed Subject, Verb and Object (syntactic) and not agent and patient (semantic), as the section now suggest. Consider English, a rigid SVO language:
1) The girl hits the ball
2) The ball is hit by the girl
'Girl' is agent in both sentences, but subject only in the first. The subject of the second sentence is 'ball'. This illustrates that subjects always precede the verb in English, while agents do not.
145.18.233.228 10:30, 7 August 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Yes, I've changed it back to the original form. User:Angr 20:42, 23 August 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Word order and agent 

message: Agent and patient are preferable as not all languages 'have' subjects and objects but all languages have means to express agent and patient. The examples from English show only that in passive the reversed Patient Verb Agent constituent order is found, but it doesn't mean that this is the most frequent order in 'neutral' contexts, thus English is an Agent Verb Patient word order, though it allows for variations.
And one more comment, in English subjects often but not always preceeds the verb (what about interrogative sentences).
--Newydd 01:29, 24 Aug 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: What languages don't have subjects and objects? And don't say "ergative languages", because that simply isn't true. (And even if it were, the terms SVO/SOV etc. are too well entrenched in the literature for us to change it here. Doing so would be original research.) "Subject" and "object" are terms of syntax, while "agent" and "patient" are terms of semantics. Word order is part of syntax, not semantics, and as the poster above mentioned, in English, active sentences are Agent-Verb-Patient while passive sentences are Patient-Verb-Agent, but both are Subject-Verb(-Object). In English interrogative sentences, do-support ensures that even they remain SVO ("Did MaryS kickV the ballO?" Wh-questions can become OSV (What did Mary kick?), but even there the subject precedes the verb. User:Angr 04:59, 24 August 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Word order and agent 2 

message: The article is interesting. However, if you are not a linguist, it can be difficult to understand as it doesn't fully explain terms like AVP, VAP, etc. It is only by reading the discussion that I understood them. Adding a paragraph to define the different terms and highlight the difference between say SVO and AVP would help clarify it immensely. For instance, you could give a quick example like "The dogs bites the cat" compared to "The cat is bitten by the dog" where both are SVO but the former is AVP and the latter PVA.
:I agree.  The article explains what S, V and O stand for, but then it introduces P and V abbreviations without first explaining what they stand for.  This is fairly jarring and confusing, I think. Chalkieperfect (talk) 08:56, 12 April 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  SVO, AVP, etc. 

message: Link in question: http://www.uio.no/studier/emner/hf/ikos/EXFAC03-AAS/h05/larestoff/linguistics/Chapter%204.(H05).pdf
Looking through the source it looks to be pretty good resource as an external link to provide. It think it would be a very good addition to the article. However the link as provided provides no information about author, copyright, or anything.  Neither did the link description prescribe any authority to the link.  I'm really sorry, but it shouldn't be here if we don't know who wrote it, if it's legal, etc  --Puellanivis (talk) 21:46, 15 December 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Well, it's freely available on the Web, so why not? The link does no more and no less than simply link to a freely available source. If we wrote a description on how to access it via Google, would that then be legitimate? This way the author might come upon the link and claim the credit that is due to him/her. Tkeu (talk) 22:36, 15 December 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: "freely available on the web" is not really a good standard.  While I'm sure someone could steal some proprietary source code and distribute it over the internet, it's still not "freely" available on the web.  Likewise, if this is simply a scan of a book, or otherwise illegally reproduced, I think it's kind of the duty of a responsible community to not endorse copyright infringement.  Honestly, it looks like there are a few chapters to this, someone should be able to walk up the tree, or whatever, and find out who wrote it, and if it's an authorized copy of the material. --Puellanivis (talk) 02:13, 16 December 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: OK, you're right. I've 'walked up the tree' and this is what I've found: the file comes from the University of Oslo website. Witness the following link, which is a root link for the file: http://www.uio.no/studier/emner/hf/ikos/EXFAC03-AAS/h05/larestoff. Next, expand the link further, and you discover this: http://www.uio.no/studier/emner/hf/ikos/EXFAC03-AAS/h05/larestoff. So it is freely available. I'll re-add the link and add information about the authors. Tkeu (talk) 04:24, 16 December 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Re: Linguistic Topics link 

message: The SOV, SVO, et cetera classifications seem to be more tentative than absolute.  I think this article explains the difficulties fairly well.  Perhaps one might add that linguistic typology seems to be fairly young as a distinguished scientific field; note that the Association for Linguistic Typology was founded as late as 1994.  The trouble is, that we have a tendency to believe that "the name is the thing".
In other words, according to the article, Russian is classified as an SVO language, since frequency investigations of the occurring orders in a lot of sequences revealed that the SVO order was more common than others.  Actually, since Russian has a fairly free world order, other investigations might come to other conclusions; this might even be a mode thing. If some speakers/writers of Russian should be using another order somewhat more frequently, and SVO somewhat less, then you might conclude that their Russian should be classified differently; although most would agree that their language is as much Russian as that sampled before.
However, it is easy enough to read the statement as Russian is an SVO language, and take this to mean that this is an absolute property of some languages, Russian among them.  I do not believe that the linguistic typologists themselves would make that kind of mistake to a high extent, but for us others, it is all to easy to assume that a term like "SVO" covers an objectively existing "essence" shared by a large group of languages.
So, I like this article, but I think that we should be careful not to refer to specific languages as "being" e.g. SVO or SOV, especially not in the introductions of the separate articles about the languages. JoergenB (talk) 21:08, 8 May 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  A "tentative" field? 

message: I'm trying to put together a tentative list of the languages of the world with the linguistic features of each. It's a huge task and I don't have time to do it on my own. Please come here - User:Bienfuxia/List of languages by linguistic features - and help out a bit, when it's ready I can publish it as a proper article. This is one occasion where wiki is missing something substantive that it should have, please come along and do what you can! Bienfuxia (talk) 07:41, 10 March 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  New list 

message: There is no section on Morphological typology.
Bn (talk) 19:52, 8 December 2014 (UTC)
thread_title: Morphological Typology section

message: Where does mathematics as a language fit in a typology? I think entire proofs are published in peer-reviewed journals with not a word of English or similar natural non-math language except in the title and the abstract, so I think it's a language, but I doubt it arises from our genes any more than do constructed languages. And are there other languages of the same type? Nick Levinson (talk) 01:07, 7 January 2018 (UTC)
thread_title:  math etc. somewhere in a typology 

message: Hi all!
I was wondering, do you all think that it would be appropriate to mention any of the following issues? (I'll try to find sources later for these issues if others agree they are appropriate for this article)
* The concept of "word" has no clear cross-linguistic definition.
* The concepts of "subject" and "object" have no clear cross-linguistic definition
I think it might be helpful to mention Martin Haspelmath's idea of "comparative concepts" and how they are useful for cross-language research.
Additionally, this section mentions one approach to explaining typological patterns: some patterns are more common because they are easier to process. However, there is at least one alternative approach: these correlations are a result of common grammaticalization pathways. 
[T]he current synchronic distributions are argued to be long-term reflections of individual diachronic trajectories, in particular the diachronic sources from which the structures in question originate. Givón (1984) and Aristar (1991), for example, suggested that certain word-order correlations may simply be a consequence of a given ordering pair (e.g. Gen–N & Rel–N, or V–O & Aux–V) being directly related diachronically: Auxiliaries normally grammaticalize from main verbs that take other verbs as complements, and since these complements follow the verb in VO languages, they also follow the auxiliary in the resulting Aux–V construction; the mirror-image pattern holds for OV languages (see also Lehmann 1986: 12–13). If this line of reasoning extends to most other word-order pairs, there is no need to motivate the synchronic correlations in functional-adaptive terms, e.g. by saying that the correlations arise in order to facilitate efficient sentence
processing. [Explanation in typology: Diachronic sources, functional motivations and the nature of the evidence. Pages iv-v] 
By the way, this book also explores the processing based explanations, but I just used this specific quote because the article is currently missing this perspective.
Thanks for reading!
:Absolutely, JonathanHopeThisIsUnique. This article is not very comprehensive in its current form. If it grows too big, sections can be extended to separate articles. Here's a couple of thoughts of mine:
*The current sub-section "theoretical discussion" only refers to OV/VO typology. Maybe its name should be changed to something like "explanations of OV/VO harmony". 
*The problems of how to make cross-linguistic generalizations (what is 'word', what is 'subject' etc.) obviously belong to a different sub-section (or sub-sections).
*Haspelmath is proposing standardizing the terminology. However, his proposals have not reached consensus because there are different schools of analysis that have been using their own terminology for a long time... let's avoid verdicts. But his comparative concepts might be worth a mention.
*Givón is interesting, please add. Weidorje (talk) 07:32, 13 August 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  Expanding section "theoretical issues" 

message: Have you heard of qualitative and quantitative typology before? The definitions in the article seem to overlap each other. I propose explaining the goals (preferences, correlations) first. Then, I would divide the field into phonology, morphosyntax, semantics, etc. Сабріель (talk) 04:54, 8 May 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  Structural changes? 

message: :
Language X?? Is that a term of art, or a placeholder that someone forgot to replace? —Tamfang (talk) 04:36, 8 July 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  Language X