particular language polysynthetic is complicated by the fact that
morpheme and word boundaries are not always clear cut, and languages
may be highly synthetic in one area but less synthetic in other areas (
e.g. verbs and nouns in Southern Athabaskan languages or Inuit
languages). Many polysynthetic languages display complex
evidentiality and/or mirativity systems in their verbs.These languages
are observed in Americas, Australia, Siberia, and New Guinea;
however, there are also examples in other areas.The concept became
part of linguistic typology with the work of Edward Sapir, who used it
as one of his basic typological categories.Recently. Mark C. Baker has
suggested formally defining polysinthesis as a macro-parameter within
Noam Chomsky’s principles and parameters theory of grammar.
2) Isomorphism and allomorphism. Isomorphism is the similarity in
the structure of language (I will read – Я буду читать). The category
of number in English, Uzbek and Russian is an isomorphic feature.
Besides, isomorphism in English, Uzbek and Russian is the existence
of consonants and vowels, assimilation, the categories of person,
tense, parts of speech, the existence of sentences. For ex. isomorphic
features of the interrogative pronouns. In both languages there are
interrogative pronouns that are used for asking person:who-kim. The
English interrogative pronoun who has the category of case:
whose/whom; the Uzbek demonstrative pronouns kim,nima have the
categories of number, possession and case: kim-kimlar;
kimim/nimam ; kimlarimiz/nimalarimiz ; kimni/nimani
;kimdan/nimadan; kimga/nimaga. In both languages there is a
genitive case form of the interrogative pronouns:whose/kimning
306
Allomorphism is the property possessed by certain substances of
assuming a different form while remaining unchanged in
constitution:In English there two case forms, in Uzbek –six; In
English interrogative pronoun who has here case forms , in Uzbek the
interrogative pronoun kim is used in six case forms and etc.
3) Language universals – regularities, characteristic to all, or the
majority of languages. The systems of vowels and consonants are
present in all languages. Present tense form exists in all languages as
well. Universals common to all or to the majority of languages are
called absolute universals.
4) Model languages - The language with which other language under
investigation is compared is called model language. If you compare
native and foreign languages, your native language will be a model one.
2. The problem of the segmental level and its units
The aim of typological phonetics is to identify and investigate the
isomorphic and allomorphic features in the system of speech sounds in
the English and native languages. The aim of typology is to identify the
systems of phonemes of the contrasted languages. Typological
phonetics and phonology have a common subject matter (combinability
and functioning) of sounds (phonemes) in words and syllables
(segmental) level. And the super segmental level includes word stress,
sentence stress and tones melody in syntagmas.
Phoneme is an abstract linguistic unit, it combines all the features which
the sound actually posses in speech. Sounds are called phones and they
are the manifestation of one and the same phoneme.
Phoneme is a class of physically similar sounds which perform the same
function. They may be variants of one and the same class (allophones).
Phonemes and allophones are segmental units of speech. Different
languages have different phonological systems. Languages in which the
system of consonant is more developed than the system of vowels are
called consonantal languages (in Russian there are 35 consonans)
Phonemic stock of languages differs not only in quantity but in quality
as well. In some languages there are long and short vowels (Eng) or
long and short consonants (Ukr). These consonants’ contrast between
two or more phonemes is called a phonological opposition (cat-cut,
seat-sit). The functions of phonemes in the contrasted languages are
common.
They
are:
1. The constitutive is the ability of phonemes to constitute separate
307
morphemes
and
words.
2. The distinguishing is the ability to differentiate the meaning of the
words: coat, goat, boat;
3. Word-stress and its functions in English and Russian
Super segmental means (word stress and intonation) together with
segmental means (phonemes and allophones) form the phonological
level
of
the
language.
By stress or accent we mean prominence given to 1 syllable in a word
or word combination. Like the syllable word stress belongs to absolute
universals. Its functions are:
• Constitutive is due to which the syllables when arrange in a definite
stress pattern form a definite word (conduct – conduct, present –
present, пóра – порá, зáмок – замок , olma’-o’lma)
• Distinctive – word stress helps to differentiate between word groups
and words:
blue bottle; blue, bottle; qizil gul; qizil ,gul
Functions of stress in compared languages are different. In English
and Uzbek languages word stress helps to differentiate between nouns
and verbs:’present-pre’sent, olma’-o’lma. But the number of such
pairs is limited. There are about 135 such words differentiating the
lexical meaning by the change of the place of the stress in the word in
English. In Russian word stress helps to express different categorial
meanings and to form new words as well: засыпа’ть( несов.вид)-
засы’пать( сов. вид), замо’к –за’мок.
Some polysemantic English words have primarily and secondary
stress (opportunity).
The number of words with 2 primarily stresses is much larger in
English. Due to the prefixes un-in-,dis-,sub-, under-, and others,
forming prominent syllables.
Stress may be fixed if it occurs on a definite syl. or it can be moveable
(can change its position). According to the place in the majority of cases
English stress is fixed. It occurs on the initial syllable – power-
powerful.
Universal: by its nature and functions the stress can be utterance-stress,
which can be observed in the contrasted languages in 2 types:
1. Logical stress- points out a word or a word combination of more
importance than others. (It was John, not Jack).
308
2. Emphatic stress- expresses emotions and is much stronger than
logical stress. Emotions may be positive (happiness, love, joy, luck,
admiration) and negative (indignation, sadness): What a nice weaher!
How awful, what? – that is impossible.
4. Historical outline of typological investigation
1. German school of Linguistics.
In the 17th – 18th centuries European scientists pointed to the existence
of some common features in different languages. Only the beginning of
the 19th century with its historic and comparative method is
characterized by a development of European Linguistics. One of the
first linguists to have made a systematic approach to the analysis of
structurally different languages was Friedrich Shlegel (1772 – 1829).
first to notice Grimm’s law, Shlegel was a pioneer in In Indo-European
studies,comparative linguistics and morphological typology, who
published in 1819 the first theory linking the Indo-Iranian and German
languages under the Aryan group.He compared Sanscrit with Latin ,
Greek, Persian and German ,noting many similarities in vocabulary and
grammar. He singled out 2 clearly distinguished groups:
1) affixal languages (Turkic languages);
2) inflexinal languages (Germanic).
Later this classification was perfected by his brother August Wilhelm
Shlegel. On the basis of the same morphological criteria he singled out
3 groups of languages:
1) amorphous languages( his term);
2) the affixal languages;
3) the flexional languages.
Wilhelm von Humboldt is considered to be the founder of typology
(1767 – 1835). He is considered as a linguist who made important
contributions to the philosophy of language, ethnolinguistics and to the
theory and practice of education . He was the architect of the
Humboldtian educational ideal, which was used from the beginning in
Prussia as a model for its system of public education , as well as in the
United States and Japan. On the basis of morphological criteria of
languages , he classified all the languages in the following way:
1) isolating languages (like Chinese);W. Humboldt changed the term
amorphous languages suggested by August Shlegel by the term
isolating, saying that the language can’t be without form
2) agglutinative languages (like those of the Turkic family);
309
3) flexional languages (Indo-European);
4) incorporative languages of the American Indians.
His followers in linguistics were Franz Bopp (1791 – 1867) and August
Schleicher(1821 – 1868).
They introduced a new approach to the typological investigation of the
languages on the basis of the root structure of the word. The “family –
tree” theory – “Schtaum – baum” was introduced by Schleicher, who
sort out languages as an organism that can grow and decay, whose
changes could be analyzed using the methods of the natural sciences.
Typological investigations of the first part of the 17th century were
mostly focussed on the morphological classification of languages.
Schleicher’s great work was A Compendium of the Comparative
Grammar of the Indo-European languages in which he attempted to
reconstruct the Proto-Indo-European language to show how Indo-
European might have looked, he created a short tale, Shleicher’s fable,
to exemplify the reconstructed vocabulary and aspects of Indo-
European
society
inferred
from
it.
The next step in the development of typology was made by G.
Shteyntal(1823 – 1899). The object of his studies was not word taken
separately, he investigated the syntactic connection in different
languages. So he switched from morphology to syntax.
2. American school of Linguistics
The 20th century typological investigations are characterized by some
new approaches to the contrasted study of languages and their
classification. American scientist Eduard Sapir(1884-1939) is the
founder of American structuralism. He was anthropologist-linguist
,dealt with the relationship between languages and extra-linguistic
reality (language and thought). All this made him one of the founders
of ethnolinguistics. He is considered to be a founder of a new trend in
typology. Some languages distant in location could in the course of time
acquire common features. Sapir put forward 3 criteria in language
classification:
1) the degree of cohesion between the root morphemes and the affixal
morphemes;
2) the degree of synthesis (the ability of a word to combine and express
different lexical and grammatical meanings as inflexional languages).
3) the nature of grammatical processes by means of which the
morphemes are joined in the word (isolation, agglutination). In this way
310
the linguists singled out 4 types of languages. Sapir was the first who
treated a language material as a system.
3. Prague school of Linguistics
In 1926 a group of well known linguists established the Prague school
of Linguistics. Its most representative people were a group of Russian
linguists: Roman Yakobson, Nikolay Trubetzkoy, A.V. Isachenko and
others. The primary interest of them was phonological theory. The
leading light in this domain was Nikolay Trubetzkoy(1890-1939) , a
professor in Viena. He was the founder of morpho-phonology. He
worked out typology of phonemic and morpho-phonemic systems of
languages based on opposition. He made important contributions to the
notion of the phoneme. Prague school phonology succeeded in placing
the notion of the phoneme in the centre of Linguistic theory as one of
the
most
fundamental
units.
Great research work in phonological typology was carried on by A. V.
Isachenko, who investigated the Slavonic languages on the qualitative
representation of vowels and on the existence or non-existence
palatalized consonants. As a result 2 types of languages were singled
out:
1) Vocalic languages;
2) Consonantal languages.
The vocalic types of languages are: Serbian and Slovenian. Their
features
are:
1. some consonants have historically changed into vowels and some
have become syllable phonemes;
2. languages in which there occurs an inclusion of vowels between
consonants;
3. languages in which the double consonants have reduced to single
consonants.
The consonantal type of language have the following features:
1. the existence of the binary opposition of palatalized consonants
verses non-palatalized one;
2. the loss of the syllable – forming consonants;
3. the retention (being preserved) of the double consonants.
4. Russian school of Linguistics
311
Russian typological investigations began at the end of the 19th century
and the representatives were N.Ya.Marr and Ivan Meshchaninov (1883
– 1967). Ivan Meshchaninov was a Soviet linguist and ethnographer
who studied the syntactical relations (predicative, objective) in different
languages. Meshchaninov’s syntactical typology includes 3 classes:
1. passive structure languages (Chukot lang. and lang. of American
Indians). They are characterized by incorporation, such syntactical
structures comprised neither the subject nor the object not having any
definite grammatical form. They are united in a single complex word
which is subordinated to a leading word, a verb. In this language it is
impossible to differentiate between transitive and intransitive verbs;
2. ergative structure languages are characterized by the so-called
negative construction. Predicate has dual syntactical connection with
subject. It agrees with the subject and governs it at a time. The subject
is used in special the so-called ergative case. We can come close to this
phenomena in Russian sentences, such as Мальчика cбило машиной.
In this sentences the subject is not used in Nominative case but in
ergative
case.
3. nominative structure languages are characterized by the usage of
subject in nominative case, irrespective of transitive or intransitive verb
in the function of the predicate. I. Meshchaninov considered Indo-
European, Turkic, Mongolian languages to be nominative structure
languages.
5. Typological characteristics of the super-segmental means. Typology
of intonation system.
Super-segmental means (word stress and intonation) together with
segm. means (phonemes and allophones) form the phonological level
of the l-ge. By stress or accent we mean prominence given to one syl.
of a word or a word combination. Like the syl., word stress belongs to
absolute universals.
Intonation as well as word stress belongs to super-segmental means of
language. It’s one of the most important means of differentiation of
meaning.
The most important components of intonation in the contrasted
languages are speech, melody,stress, sentence and utterance .
The main functions of intonation are isomorphic. They are:
1) sentence or utterance stress phoneme (forming);
2) sentence or utterance delimiting;
3) distinctive (helps to differentiate types of utterance);
312
4) attitudinal (to express differential model and pragmatic meanings).
Syntagma (sense group or intonation group) is the basic unit of into-
logical level. This notion was introduced by Lev Shcherba(1880-1944).
Syntagma is a word or a group of words which form a shortest possible
unit in a sentence from the point of view of meaning, grammatical
structure and information. It doesn’t have to coincide with a sentence.
It can coincide with a word. It has the following characteristics:
- it has at least one accented word, which carries change in pitch
(falling, rising tone);
- it is pronounced at a certain rate, things that are less important are
pronounced faster;
- it has a special voice quality – timbre.
The elements of the pitch and stress pattern of the intonation group are
as follows: the most important is a nuclear tone, a stressed syllable with
a marked change in pitch. Post nuclear, unstressed and partial stressed
syllables are called tail.
So we can speak about two variants of terminal tone:
- nuclear
- nuclear + tail
The terminal tone may be persisted by a scale, a serious of stressed and
unstressed syllables beginning with the first stressed one. The first
stressed syllable is called head, unstressed syllables before head are
called pre-head. In English the system of intonation groups was worked
out by Ernst Frideryk Konrad Koener (1939) and Arnold Gordon
Frederick.
6. Syntactic process, their types and ways of realization
Syntactic processes are various in contrasted languages and are realized
only in word-groups and sentences. The realization of these processes
may be realized by isomorphic and allomorphic ways, they are as
follows: 1. Extension is achieved in both contrasted languages through
adding subordinate components to an element that is the head/nucleus,
i.e. subordinating in the syntaxeme. Extension in English may be
achieved both by syndetic, i.e.explicit, synthetic or analytical means or
(which is more often in English) asyndetically, i.e. only by way of
placement of components. Eg: this book – these books, to see somebody
- to see him.
313
As to their structure, word-groups can be unextended, i.e. consisting of
two notional words (read well, nice flowers, good enough) and
extended which consist of more than two notional words, e.g. to go to
work every day. Extension may be achieved in English with the help of
asyndetic clustering of nouns : school library -- school library books --
new school library books -- school library books readers.
Ways of realisation of syntactic processes achieved through extension:
Apposition: a woman doctor, the city of Kiey/London, Shevchenko, the
poet; Шевченко-поэт.
Detachment is one more common way of external syntactic extension
that is presumably of isomorphic nature in most languages. Detached
syntactic process in English may happen by any secondary part of the
sentence and detachment is achieved through extension
by means of subordination: They're (Negroes) just like children , just as
easy-going, and always singing and laughing(D.Parker).
Specification. This kind of syntactic process presents a way of syntactic
extension in English which is achieved via a syntactic element/part of
the sentence usually modified by one or more other complementing
elements of the same nature and syntactic function. "I'm not very tall,
just average.
Expansion is usually achieved by addition (termed so by Georgy
Pocheptsov). Formed in this way (through addition) strings of
components usually function as homogeneous parts of the sentence. For
example, homogeneous subjects:
The police, the fishmonger, boys going to school, dozens of people ,
десятки людей,…….
Representation (репрезентація) represents a kind of reduction in
which the component of a syntaxeme is used to present the content of
the whole syntactic unit, which remains in the preceding syntaxeme but
its meaning is implicitly represented by some element. For example: "I
don't know if he's hungry, but I am." (I. Baldwin) Here the linking verb
am in the closing co-ordinate clause (but I am) represents the whole
subordinate clause "if he's hungry".
Contamination is a process in which two syntaxemes merge into one
predicative unit as in the following sentence: The moon rose red. This
means: The moon rose + she was red.
Compression represents a syntactic process which is closely connected
with reduction and with the secondary predication complex. This
314
syntactic process is most often observed in English with the nominative
absolute participial constructions: He stood beside me in silence, his
candle in his hand. (C. Doyle)- Nominative Absolute Construction; He
stood beside me in silence, holding his candle in his hand- Nominative
Absolute Participial Construcion.
There exist four types of syntactic relations that are also realized in
different languages partly via different means. These are:
1) predicative relations
2) objective relations
3) attributive relations
4) various adverbial relations
a) primary predicative relations and b) secondary predicative relations.
I. Primary predication is universal. It finds its realization between the
subject and predicate in any two-member sentence : "I never said I was
a beauty"-he laughed
Secondary predicative relation is formed in English by verbals in
connection with other nominal parts of speech: He stood by the creek
and heard it ripple over the stones(Objecive Infinitive Construcion).
Objective relations. They are directed by the action of the transitive verb
on some object, which may be either a life or lifeless component. The
notions of seeing/hearing somebody or something of being given smth.
by somebody, etc. are pertained to each single language and to all
languages of the world irrespective of their structural/typological
differences . Depending on the concrete language, these relations may
have different/unlike forms of expression: give a book to Peter)
Attributive relations are formed in all languages between adjuncts and
head words (subordinating parts) of nominal word-groups.
Adverbial relations in compared languages are created both in co-
ordinate and in subordinate word-groups to express different adverbial
meanings. Co-ordinate word-groups expressing adverbial relations may
be a) substantival: in winter or in summer (time) b) adverbial: quickly
and well (manner or attendant circumstances); neither seldom nor often
(time or frequency).
Dostları ilə paylaş: |