Language Universals: With Special Reference to Feature Hierarchies [Reprint 2010 ed.] 9783110899771, 9783110172843

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Language Universals

W DE G

Language Universals With Special Reference to Feature Hierarchies

by Joseph H. Greenberg with a preface by Martin Haspelmath

Mouton de Gruyter Berlin · New York

Mouton de Gruyter (formerly Mouton, The Hague) is a Division of Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, Berlin. This work appeared originally as volume 59 of the series Janua Linguarum - Minor.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Greenberg, Joseph Harold, 1915Language universals : with special reference to feature hierarchies / by Joseph H. Greenberg ; with a preface by Martin Haspelmath, p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 3-11-017284^ (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Universals (Linguistics) I. Title. P204.G74 2005 401'.3-dc22 2005003895

Printed on acid-free paper which falls within the guidelines of the ANSI to ensure permanence and durability. ISBN 3-11-017284-4 Bibliographic information published by Die Deutsche Bibliothek Die Deutsche Bibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data is available in the Internet at . © Copyright 1966, 2005 by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, 10785 Berlin. All rights reserved, including those of translation into foreign languages. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Cover design: Sigurd Wendland, Berlin. Printed in Germany.

Table of contents Martin Haspelmath: Preface to the reprinted edition . . . . Preface 1. Introduction: Marked and unmarked categories 2. Phonology 3. Grammar and lexicon 4. Common characteristics in phonology, grammar, and lexicon 5. Universals of kinship terminology References .

vii 5 9 13 25 56 72 88

Preface to the reprinted edition by Martin Haspelmath Joseph H. Greenberg's short book Language Universals, just 89 pages long, is one of the true gems of 20th century linguistics. While the title might suggest a bland overview of known facts and issues in language universals research, Greenberg instead offers us a strikingly original set of observations about cross-linguistic patterns in phonological, grammatical and lexical categories. In addition, Greenberg sketches an explanatory account whose essentials have still not been surpassed, forty years after he first presented these ideas. The fundamental observation of Language universals is that pairs of linguistic categories in phonology, grammar and the lexicon typically show asymmetrical behavior that is to a very large extent crosslinguistically uniform. Category oppositions like voiced/voiceless, glottalized/plain, long/short, singular/plural, present/future, positive/ negative, consanguineal/affinal had been described earlier by the Prague School linguists Trubetzkoy and Jakobson as representing a contrast between unmarked and marked. But it was Greenberg who most forcefully claimed and demonstrated that these contrasts exist not just as part of particular language systems, but can in principle be observed in all languages, not only in phonology, but also throughout the inflectional system and in the lexicon. Where the structuralists Trubetzkoy and Jakobson saw markedness contrasts as embedded in the structures of individual synchronic languages, Greenberg emphasized the universal aspects of the substantive factors of phonetics, semantics, and language use, and language change was an integrated part of his explanatory framework. If Greenberg's book had been written today, a title such as Typological Markedness Theory would be considered more appropriate. But the abstract term markedness did not exist in the 1960s (it became current only in the late 1970s), and highly general scientific ideas were respectable also when they were not named "theories". But the partly overly general ("language universals") and partly overly technical ("feature hierarchy") title with the somewhat clumsy middle part ("with special reference to") cannot fully explain why Greenberg's book did not receive the attention that it deserved. To

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Preface to the reprinted edition by Martin Haspelmath

be sure, Language Universals was widely read and cited, and the fact that the terms marked and unmarked are known to every secondyear linguistics student is to a considerable extent due to its influence. But Greenberg's earlier 1963 article (with its even clumsier title "Some universale of language with particular reference to the order of meaningful elements") became far more influential; the book in which it appeared had to be reprinted three years later and is still widely available on the antiquarian market, and Greenberg's article is still commonly assigned as reading to graduate students in linguistics. Language Universals, too, should be compulsory reading for linguists. The main reason why it did not come close to Greenberg's word order work was that it mostly deals with phonology, morphology, and kinship terminology. But in the 1960s and 1970s, the field of linguistics was obsessed with syntax and its relation to semantics, and many of the students entering the field did not have the solid grounding in historical-comparative linguistics or the linguistics of some non-European languages that was characteristic of Greenberg's generation, and that could have helped readers to appreciate the full significance of the proposed universals. Morphology was simply not a hot topic, and phonology had to be done in Chomsky and Halle's (1968) generative framework, which was more interested in morphophonology than in explaining truly phonological patterns and relating them to phonetic factors. Greenberg's (1963) work on word order universals was just as remote in spirit from the widely popular generative syntactic model as his phonological work was from generative phonology, but the potential relevance of his word order universals to Chomsky's "Universal Grammar" approach to syntax was evident to everyone. In the 1980s, generative linguists began to incorporate Greenberg's discoveries into their theories of Universal Grammar. The markedness universals of Language Universals never made it on the agenda of generative grammarians (in phonology, markedness is now widely discussed again in the framework of Optimality Theory [McCarthy 2002], but it mostly follows the markedness concept of chapter 9 of Chomsky and Halle 1968 rather than Greenberg's). The full impact of the ideas of Greenberg's typological markedness theory on the field of linguistics is apparently still ahead of us. That statistical regularities of language use are intimately connected with language structure and are in fact an important ingredient for

Preface to the reprinted edition by Martin Haspelmath

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explanatory theories was known before Greenberg (see, in particular, Zipf 1935, 1949), but structuralist linguists were not interested in these connections.1 It was only fairly recently that linguists became more interested in the relation between language use and language structure (e. g., Barlow and Kemmer 2000), and in particular in the role of frequency of use in explaining language structure (e. g., By bee and Hopper 2001; Bod et al. 2003). After presenting a large number of correlations that are captured by the theory of typological markedness, Greenberg (in chapter 4) goes on to explicate the relationship between phonological markedness and grammatical/lexical markedness, and finally to discuss the role of frequency of use in the correlations. For phonology, he proposes that tendencies of diachronic change (in particular the tendency for the disappearance of the marked member if a contrast is given up) are the cause for frequency asymmetries, but for grammar and the lexicon, he sees the role of frequency as primary (pp. 6566). After all, speakers are free to say what they want, and a change in language structure will not make them choose a meaningful category (such as the singular or the future tense) any more or less often. Greenberg goes so far as to equate "marked/unmarked" in grammar and semantics with "less frequent/more frequent". This was criticized by later commentators (e.g., Lehmann 1989; Andersen 1989), and of course it represents a fairly radical departure from Trubetzkoy's and Jakobson's use of these terms (where "marked" fundamentally meant "specified for a phonological/semantic feature"). One could ask whether Greenberg's story could not have been told without using the terms "marked/unmarked" in the first place (cf. Haspelmath 2005). But Greenberg's main interest was in the language universals. He did not shy away from the deeper explanatory questions, raised them and attempted answers (from the present perspective, deeply insightful answers). But he did not see his main task in providing these answers. His unique contribution to linguistics was the truly global perspective, the empirically based search for universals of human language, whatever their ultimate explanation. In his famous 1963 article, he listed and numbered the universals he found, making the concept of a universal maximally concrete and accessible. Many of these universals have become famous, and even today we still refer to them using Greenberg's original numbers. Why

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Preface to the reprinted edition by Martin Haspelmath

did he not do this in Language Universalst This book does not contain a single numbered universal, set off from the main text in the way in which typologists now routinely highlight their precious discoveries. The reason is simple: Language Universals contains too many universals to list them all! In an understatement, Greenberg (p. 10) announces "a considerable number of specific universals". And they need not be listed individually, because they can be derived in a mechanical fashion from "a single rich and complex set of notions" (p. 10). All we need to list is the set of (un)markedness properties (called "markedness criteria" in Croft 1990) and the set of category pairs (or more generally, category hierarchies). A few such properties and category pairs are listed in (1)—(2). (1) phonology

unmarkedness properties:

category pairs:

neutralization higher text frequency greater phonemic differentiation greater subphonemic variation typological implicatum basic allophone

voiceless/voiced short/long non-nasal/nasal

unpalatalized/palatalized non-glottalized/glottalized unaspirated/aspirated

(2) grammar

unmarkedness properties:

category pairs:

facultative expression contextual neutralization higher text frequency zero expression syncretism defectivation irregularity

singular/plural direct case/oblique case masculine/feminine positive/comparative 3rd person/1st and 2nd person indicative/hypothetical present tense/future tense

For each category pair, it is claimed that universally (i. e., in all languages), the unmarked member will exhibit the unmarkedness properties of (1) and (2). For example, the following universals are among those hypothesized by Greenberg:

Preface to the reprinted edition by Martin Haspelmath

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(3) In all languages, if there is a frequency difference between unpalatalized and palatalized consonants, the palatalized consonants are more frequent. (4) In all languages, if the phoneme inventory contains glottalized consonants, it also contains (the corresponding) non-glottalized consonants. (5) In all languages, if there is a frequency difference between the indicative and the hypothetical mood, the indicative is more frequent. (6) In all languages, if there is syncretism in nominal case inflection, there will be syncretism in the oblique cases. In phonology, Greenberg discusses just seven category pairs (obviously a small minority of the existing pairs) and six properties, resulting in 42 universals. In morphology, there are twenty-seven category pairs (a list that is fairly representative of the most commonly occurring grammatical categories) and seven widely applicable properties,2 yielding 189 testable universals. Altogether, Language universals thus contains more than 230 universals. If all (or even just most) of these universals turned out to be empirically supported, this would indeed reveal "a vast amount of orderliness in language phenomena" (p. 33). Tables 1-2 show the properties in the rows and the category pairs in the columns, and the cells (each standing for a universal) indicate the pages in Language Universals where Greenberg discusses the relevant universal. In Language Universals, Greenberg does not even begin to test the predictions he makes (unlike in his 1963 article, where his 30-language sample is a serious beginning). Instead, he limits himself to making them plausible by pointing to individual examples. For the most part, the empirical work of testing the predictions on a representative sample of the world's languages remains to be done. But it seems fair to say that by and large, at least the more robust properties (especially frequency, zero expression, defectivation, syncretism, irregularity) have been confirmed by subsequent research (however, Croft 2003 suggests that contextual neutralization and agreement a potiori may not be valid correlating properties). Thus, Greenberg's prediction that his results are "unlikely to be seriously modified by subsequent work" (p. 15) seems to have been on target. But he was in no way dogmatic about his claims. He notes counterexamples to the general trend at various points (e. g., the un-

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