Cagliari, Italy 15-18 September 2003
ALT V Conference
Gertraud Fenk-Oczlon & August Fenk, University of Klagenfurt
Crosslinguistic correlations between size of syllables, number of cases, and adposition order
In a former crosslinguistic study native speakers of 34 typologically different languages translated a certain German “text” (a set of 22 unconnected simple declarative sentences) into their mother tongue. Crosslinguistic computation revealed a pattern of significant correlations between the “size” of syllables (in phonemes), of words (in syllables), and of sentences (in syllables, in words). For instance: the fewer phonemes per syllable, the more syllables per sentence. Languages with simple syllables also tended to OV order (and to syllable-timed rhythm and agglutinative morphology), while languages with more complex syllables tended to VO order (and to stress-timed rhythm and fusional or isolating morphology).
Agglutinative morphology is, moreover, often assumed to be associated with a rather high number of cases and postpositions. And OV order is not only associated with less complex syllables, but also with a tendency to postpositions (e.g. Greenberg 1966 and our sample, where 72 % of the postpositional languages showed OV and 90 % of the prepositional languages VO.)
These considerations were the starting point for the following assumptions generated and examined in the present paper. (A2 and B2 are coupled to their partners A1 and B1 by the above mentioned significant negative correlation between the number of phonemes per syllable and the number of syllables per sentence.)
A1 the fewer phonemes per syllable, the higher the number of cases
A2 the more syllables per sentence, the higher the number of cases
B1 a low number of phonemes per syllable is associated with a tendency to postpositions
B2 a high number of syllables per sentence is associated with a tendency to postpositions
The tendency to suffixing is generally stronger than the tendency to prefixing (e.g. Greenberg 1966). If postpositions get more easily attached to the stem, thus forming a new semantic case (e.g. a local case), then we may assume that
C a tendency to postpositions is associated with a tendency to a higher number of cases
Assumptions were tested on a database of 32 languages. (In 2 of our 34 languages - Annang and Ewondo - no sufficient grammatical information was available so far.) In all these assumptions the respective crosslinguistic correlations showed the expected tendency, i.e. the expected direction. Only correlations A1 (r = - 0.145) and A2 (r = + 0.056) were far from statistical significance. Coefficients regarding B1 (r = - 0.208) and B2 (r = + 0.314) were somewhat higher, and correlation C turned out to be highly significant despite the relatively small sample of languages.
Our rather speculative interpretation puts stress on the languages’ rhythm:
Stress-timed languages are often (e.g. Dauer 1983, Auer 1993) characterized by
their proneness to reduction processes such as the deletion of unstressed
vowels, which results in relatively complex syllables. Maybe stress-timed rhythm
also favours the deletion, fusion and cumulation of morphemes, so that
cumulative exponents should predominantly occur in stress-timed languages. And
languages with cumulative exponents tend to a lower number of cases than
languages with separatist exponents (Plank 1986). These tendencies taken
together might explain the associations found between certain phonological
traits like syllable complexity and morphological traits such as the number of
cases.