Main points from our nine guest lectures

1. Chinese

a. Chinese belongs to the Sin0-Tibetan language family.

b. Chinese has a regular plural morpheme for pronouns, but this is almost the only inflection it has – it’s an ‘isolating’ language. There are no number, case, or gender endings on nouns, no tense suffixes on verbs, etc.

c. Since Chinese nouns have no plural, they’re like mass nouns, and can only be counted with ‘classifiers’ – two long objects of pen, three grains of bean, etc.

d. Chinese is really a cover term for many languages that are not mutually intelligible, but which get called dialects because they are spoken in the same country and written with the same writing system.

e. Chinese is a tone language – different pitches and pitch movements on a syllable will make it into completely distinct words.

f. Chinese ‘adjectives’ are really not a separate part of speech – they are a kind of verb.

g. Chinese is very dependent on word order, since it has no cases. Word order can even tell us the difference between definite and indefinite NPs. The typical order is SVO.

2. Spanish

a. Spanish has quite a bit of derivational morphology. For instance, adverbs are formed by adding –mente to the end of the feminine form of an adjective

b. Spanish compound words are most often formed by taking a 3psg present tense verb and following it by a plural direct object. E.g. abrelatas ‘can opener’ comes from abre ‘it opens’ and latas ‘cans’.

c. Because Spanish has a rich system of verbal inflection that differentiates the person and number of the subject of every verb, it is a PRO-drop language. Many sentences do not have an explicit subject.

d. Animate direct objects in Spanish are preceded by the function word a. This acts like a case marker, allowing fairly free word order (SVO, VOS, VSO, etc).

e. Spanish adjectives and determiners agree in number and gender with the noun they modify. This is true whether the adjective is attibutive or predicative.

3. Hindi

a. Hindi is one of the official languages of India. It is Indo-European. There are between 200-450 million speakers, depending on whether you count Urdu speakers.

b. It is an SOV language. Like most SOV languages, it uses postpositions rather than prepositions.

c. Hindi verbs agree in number and gender with their subjects. However, in some tenses, a postposition is added to the subject and then the vern agrees with the direct object! This is unusual among languages. Usually languages have subject-verb agreement.

4. Latin

a. Latin is an Indo-European language; all the Romance languages are its descendents,

b. Latin is a case language. Adjectives agree with nouns in number, gender and case. There are three genders (masc., fem. neuter.)

c. Adjectives have three functions – predicative, attributive, and appositive. All agree with the noun they modify.

d. The default word order is SOV, but order is quite free. Attributive adjectives can even be separated from their nouns, since the number/gender/case agreement makes them easy to match up.

5. Italian

a. Italian is a Romance language (IE family).

b. It has many regional varieties which are really independent languages. They differ from eachother mainly in pronunciation.

c. There is a standard Italian which is prestigious and gradually replacing the local languages.

d. Italian has agreement between nouns and the adjectives that modify them, in number and gender. (Italian does not have case.)

e. The adverb molto ‘very’ is homophonous with the adjective molto ‘a lot of’, but the adverb in invariable. If molto modifies an adverb or adjective (in which case it direcvly precedes theadverb or adjective), it does not change its form.

6. Japanese

a. Japanese does not belong to the IE family. In fact, it is not known to be related to any other language.

b. Japanese has borrowed many content words, but adapted them to its basically CV syllable structure.

c. A popular method for borrowing new verbs is to borrow a noun and put it together with the Japanese verb that means ‘to do’.

d. Japanese is an SOV language. Like other SOV languages (Hindi, Turkish, etc.), it has postpositions rather than prepositions.

e. Japanese does not have a separate category of adjectives (just like Chinese!) Some adjectives behave just like verbs, others like nouns.

f. Japanese has complex verbal morphology. Many suffixes can be piled up at the end of a word, so we call the morphology ‘agglutinative.’

7. computational applications

a. Microsoft linguists are working on two major applications of grammar: (1) command and control systems, where the computer acts upon instructions given in a natural language (so far English, Japanese, German, French) and (2) intelligent question-answering systems for web queries or queries to a database.

b. The underlying linguistic analysis technology

i. Breaks strings of characters into sentences.

ii. Does a morphological analysis to recognize roots and affixes

iii. Assigns every word to a part of speech – but runs into the problem that in English, many words are ambiguous as to what part of speech they belong to til you have figured out the syntactic analysis

iv. Uses rules like – sentences consist of a noun phrase plus a verb phrase; noun phrases consist of article plus adjective plus noun.

v. Has trouble with ambiguous sentences. For instance, the preposition by can introduce an agent of a passive verb (by Hemingway), a time adverbial PP (by 10) or a location adverbial PP (by the road).

8. German

a. Indo-European, Germanic family

b. SVO in independent clauses, SOV in dependent.

c. Possibly changing to uniform SVO

d. Verbal complements and non-finite verb forms go at the end. This is probably because at one time German was completely SOV, but in main clauses, the finite verb has moved to right after the subject, leaving everything else behind.

e. German has a fairly strict requirement that the subject of a sentence must be animate.

9. Russian

a. IE language, Slavic family.

b. Russian is a case language, so the word order can be recruited to convey information beyond grammatical function.

c. New information (rheme) goes last in the sentence; old information (theme) goes first.

d. Adverbs and prepositional phrases of time and place tend to go at the beginning of the sentence.