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Consistency, markedness and language change: on the notion ‘consistent language’

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2008

N. V. Smith
N. V. Smith
Affiliation:
Department of Phonetics and Linguistics, University College, London
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Extract

To avoid the triviality of mere taxonomy in which languages are classified by such arbitrary criteria as ‘is/is not tonal’, ‘does/does not have unbounded movement rules’, ‘has prefixes/suffixes’, etc., language typology needs to be able to make implicational statements of the sort usually associated with the name of Greenberg.1 For instance, one wants to be able to say of a language not only that it is VSO, but also that it THEREFORE will have prepositions, will place modifying adjectives after rather than before the noun, will put titles before proper names, and so on. Likewise, if a language has the word-order SOV, then an interesting typology should allow one to predict that it will ipso facto be postpositional, put attributive adjectives before the noun, etc.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Linguistics , Volume 17 , Issue 1 , March 1981 , pp. 39 - 54
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1981

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