Greville G Corbett
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 108493 |
|---|---|
| NOME | Greville G Corbett |
| PRENOMES | Greville G |
| SOBRENOME | Corbett |
| ASSINATURA | CORBETT G G |
| AFILIAÇÕES | University of Surrey |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-2667-9870 |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 88 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 417 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 82 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 6 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 1975 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 11 |
Dead and dying duals meet the Agreement Hierarchy
The dual in Colloquial Upper Sorbian is in severe decline. It is now largely limited to use with dwaj/dwě ‘two’ and wóbej/wóboj ‘both’. Dual agreement is being replaced by plural agreement, with dual agreement now restricted mainly to attributive position. We document this interesting situation from a range of sources, and give native speaker judgements on the alternative agreements. It has been claimed that the development is in accord with the …
The emergence of grammatical gender
Systems of grammatical gender are widespread, yet evidence on how these systems emerge is surprisingly scarce. We report on novel research using storyboard experiments in six Oceanic languages of Vanuatu and New Caledonia, to probe the initial stages in the emergence of grammatical gender from possessive classifiers. This would appear to be an unlikely source, yet we can demonstrate the development and investigate it through current experiments. …
Typology meets statistical modeling
The German gender system is known for its complexity, and there is a persistent misconception that it is largely arbitrary, and hence a challenge for the typology of gender systems. In response, we construct a database of more than 30,000 German nouns and show that a boosting tree model achieves a predictive success of 96%. Even more surprising, the model performs at 87% when trained on just the 100 most frequent nouns. We thus demonstrate that t…
Typology meets statistical modeling
The Agreement Hierarchy and (generalized) semantic agreement
Agreement systems often allow alternatives: This family has/have lost everything. Therefore typology requires a means for generalizing over them. Instances like PLURAL live are frequently termed ‘semantic agreement’ (vs. ‘syntactic agreement’ for SINGULAR lives), but this notion has proved difficult. The challenge is to encompass the full typological range of alternative agreements. These include the core instances: (i) hybrid nouns like family; …
Is morphosyntactic agreement reflected in acoustic detail? The s duration of English regular plural nouns
Studies have challenged the assumption that different types of word-final s in English are homophonous. On the one hand, affixal (e.g. laps ) and non-affixal s (e.g. lapse ) differ in their duration; on the other hand, variation exists across several types of affixal s (e.g. between the plural ( cars ) and genitive plural ( cars’ )). This line of research was recently expanded in a study in which an interesting side effect appeared: the s was lon…
The typology of external splits
There is a good deal of confirming data (Corbett 2006(Corbett :206-237, 2022b)), including luxuriant detail on Modern Hebrew (heb) in Landau 2016, and on English in Lakaw 2017.While the underlying logic is clear, instances often involve multiple splits and so are harder to spot.Take first a simple illustration of the constraint of the hierarchy:(2) that family are always making music together, and they evidently enjoy it a lotWith hybrid nouns li…
The typology of external splits
The lexicon divides into parts of speech (or lexical categories), and there are cross-cutting regularities (features). These two dimensions of analysis take us a long way, but several phenomena elude us. For these the term 'split' is used extensively ('case split', 'split agreement', and more), but in confusingly different ways. Yet there is a unifying notion here. I show that a split is an additional partition, whether in the part-of-speech inve…
Splits, internal and external, as a window into the nature of features
Lexemes may be splitinternally, by phenomena such as suppletion, periphrasis, heteroclisis and deponency. Generalizing over these phenomena, which split a lexeme's paradigm, we can establish a typology of the possible internal splits. There are also lexemes whoseexternalrequirements are split: they induce different agreement, for instance. Again, a typology of these splits has been proposed. The next logical step is to attempt a typology of the p…
The duration of word-final s in English
The alveolar fricative occurs in word-final position in English in different grammatical functions. Nominal suffixes may indicate plurality (e.g.cars), genitive case (e.g.car's) or plurality and genitive case in cumulation (e.g.cars'). Further, there are the third person singular verbal suffix (e.g.she fears) and the cliticized forms of the third person singular forms ofhaveandbe(e.g.she's been lucky;she's friendly). There is also non-affixals(e.…
Optimal categorisation
The debate as to whether language influences cognition has been long standing but has yielded conflicting findings across domains such as colour and kinship categories. Fewer studies have investigated systems such as nominal classification (gender, classifiers) across different languages to examine the effects of linguistic categorisation on cognition. Effective categorisation needs to be informative to maximise communicative efficiency but also …
Comparability and measurement in typological science
Linguistics, and typology in particular, can have a bright future. We justify this optimism by discussing comparability from two angles. First, we take the opportunity presented by this special issue of Linguistic Typology to pause for a moment and make explicit some of the logical underpinnings of typological sciences, linguistics included, which we believe are worth reminding ourselves of. Second, we give a brief illustration of comparison, and…
Pluralia tantum nouns and the theory of features
Many languages have an interesting class of nouns, the pluralia tantum, which have restricted number possibilities when, in some sense, they should not. Thus English binoculars has no singular, which is worth noting (that is, it is not predictable). True, there are other nouns denoting items consisting of two significant parts which behave similarly (spectacles, trousers...); indeed they are subject to 'middle-size generalizations' (Koenig 1999).…
Repartitioning
We present a new phenomenon in inflectional morphology, ‘repartitioning’, based on data from Soq (Trans New Guinea). In repartitioning, the semantic boundary between two sets of morphological forms is redrawn in a single domain; one feature value takes over part, but not all, of the meaning of the other. In Soq the boundary is redrawn between the yesterday past tense and the hodiernal; the domain is the lexeme s-‘stay’. For this one verb, the yes…
Extreme classification
Categorization retains its key importance in research on human cognition. It is an intellectual area where all disciplines devoted to human cognition - psychology, philosophy, anthropology, and linguistics - intersect. In language, categorization is not only a central part of lexical structure but is also salient in systems of nominal classification, notably gender and classifiers. Recent years have seen great progress in the description and anal…
Gender and classifiers in concurrent systems
Some languages have both gender and classifiers, contrary to what was once believed possible. We use these interesting languages as a unique window onto nominal classification. They provide the impetus for a new typology, based on the degree of orthogonality of the semantic systems and the degree of difference of the forms realizing them. This nine-way typology integrates traditional gender, traditional classifiers and - importantly - the many re…
The theory of feature systems
Features are central to all major theories of syntax and morphology. Yet it can be a non-trivial task to determine the inventory of features and their values for a given language, and in particular to determine whether to postulate one feature or two in the same semantico-syntactic domain. We illustrate this from tense-aspect-mood (TAM) in Kayardild, and adduce principles for deciding in general between one-feature and two-feature analyses, there…
Gender
Understanding and Measuring Morphological Complexity
This work aims to assess the nature of morphological complexity, and the properties that distinguish it from the complexity manifested in other components of language. Chapters highlight novel perspectives on conceptualizing morphological complexity, and offer concrete means for measuring, quantifying and analysing it.
Canonical gender
Nominal classification remains a fascinating topic but in order to make further progress we need greater clarity of definition and analysis. Taking a Canonical Typology approach, we use canonical gender as an ideal against which we can measure the actual gender systems we find in the languages of the world. Building on previous work on canonical morphosyntactic features, particularly on how they intersect with canonical parts of speech, we establ…
Morphosyntactic complexity
A key notion in understanding language is 'possible word (lexeme)'. While there are lexemes that are internally homogeneous and externally consistent, we find others with splits in their internal structure (morphological paradigm) and inconsistencies in their external behavior (syntactic requirements). I first explore the characteristics of the most straightforward lexemes, in order to establish a point in the theoretical space from which we can …
Canonical Morphology And Syntax
This book presents canonical typology, a framework for comparing constructions and categories across languages. The canonical method takes the criteria used to define particular categories or phenomena (eg negation, finiteness, possession) to create a multidimensional space in which language-specific instances can be placed.
Conditions on pronominal marking in the Alor-Pantar languages
We examine the varying role of conditions on grammatical relations marking (namely animacy and volitionality) by looking at different languages of one family, using both existing descriptions and working with specially prepared video stimuli. This enables us to see the degree of variation permitted within closely related languages. We look at four Alor-Pantar languages (Teiwa, Adang, Kamang, and Abui), Papuan languages of eastern Indonesia. The c…
Definiteness, Gender, and Hybrids
In some Norwegian dialects, such as older Oslo dialect, the noun mamma ‘mother’ unexpectedly appears to be masculine. The Nordreisa dialect (Northern Norwegian) goes one step further. The word looks like it is masculine, but only in the definite form. This is an unusual “split” because gender mixture is normally based on number, not definiteness (but we find some few corroborative examples in other Norwegian dialects and different, but converging…
Periphrasis
Periphrasis straddles the border between two major linguistic components, morphology and syntax. It describes a situation where a grammatical meaning, such as a tense, which could be expected to be expressed morphologically within a word, is instead expressed by a syntactic phrase. Inclusion of syntactic phrases in morphological paradigms creates analytical and theoretical problems that have yet to be resolved by linguists, who have been hampered…
Canonical Typology, Suppletion, and Possible Words
I specify a typology for the extreme of inflectional morphology, namely suppletion (as in go ~ went). This is an unusual enterprise within typology, and it requires a 'canonical' approach. That is, I define the canonical or best instance, through a set of converging criteria, and use this point in theoretical space to locate the various occurring types. Thus the criteria establish the dimensions along which specific instances of suppletion are fo…
The agreement hierarchy
Consideration of the problem of alternative agreement forms (§ 1) leads us to postulate a hierarchy of agreement positions (§ 2) which allows us to make predictions as to the possibility and relative frequency of semantic as compared to syntactic agreement. The hierarchy is justified by data from a variety of languages which permit alternative agreements (§ 3). Confirming evidence comes from a study of the instances where agreement in case and pe…
The Syntax-Morphology Interface
Syncretism - where a single form serves two or more morphosyntactic functions - is a persistent problem at the syntax-morphology interface. It results from a 'mismatch' whereby the syntax of a language makes a particular distinction but the morphology does not. This pioneering book provides a full-length study of inflectional syncretism, presenting a typology of its occurrence across a wide range of languages. The implications of syncretism for t…
The semantics of gender in Mayali
Mayali has four genders and five morphological classes, with formal identity between the gender prefixes and four of the morphological class prefixes. Gender and morphological class are assigned according to different but largely overlapping semantic principles. We analyze these partially overlapping systems within the network morphology framework; an implemented model demonstrates that the analysis gives the correct forms for the majority of nou…
Comparability and measurement in typological science
Linguistics, and typology in particular, can have a bright future. We justify this optimism by discussing comparability from two angles. First, we take the opportunity presented by this special issue of Linguistic Typology to pause for a moment and make explicit some of the logical underpinnings of typological sciences, linguistics included, which we believe are worth reminding ourselves of. Second, we give a brief illustration of comparison, and…
Network Morphology
In this paper we introduce a declarative approach to inflectional morphology, which we call Network Morphology, using the lexical representation language DATR. We show that we can account for a range of (Russian) data, for which previously various rule types were required, and can provide a more satisfying analysis than was previously available. First we outline the essential data (section 2), highlighting the problems they present. Section 3 int…
Morphosyntactic complexity
A key notion in understanding language is 'possible word (lexeme)'. While there are lexemes that are internally homogeneous and externally consistent, we find others with splits in their internal structure (morphological paradigm) and inconsistencies in their external behavior (syntactic requirements). I first explore the characteristics of the most straightforward lexemes, in order to establish a point in the theoretical space from which we can …
Defining 'periphrasis
Gender and classifiers in concurrent systems
Some languages have both gender and classifiers, contrary to what was once believed possible. We use these interesting languages as a unique window onto nominal classification. They provide the impetus for a new typology, based on the degree of orthogonality of the semantic systems and the degree of difference of the forms realizing them. This nine-way typology integrates traditional gender, traditional classifiers and - importantly - the many re…
Defaults in Arapesh
Universals in the syntax of cardinal numerals
Russian noun stress and network morphology
We present a network morphology analysis of Russian noun stress. Nouns have a default fixed stem stress, but some nouns have nondefault stress that may deviate in a way that is determined by the form’s position within the paradigm: different declensions prefer particular patterns as their nondefault choices. Membership of a particular declension, it is argued, constrains the rang eof possible stress patterns. Stress is represented as a hierarchy …
Color terms in Setswana
Colour terms in Russian
One of the milestones in typological studies is Berlin & Kay's (1969) account of basic colour terms, which has produced a steady stream of research of various types. Berlin & Kay summarized their work as follows. In sum, our two major findings indicate that the referents for the basic color terms of all languages appear to be drawn from a set of eleven universal perceptual categories, and these categories become encoded in the history of a given …
Pluralia tantum nouns and the theory of features
Many languages have an interesting class of nouns, the pluralia tantum, which have restricted number possibilities when, in some sense, they should not. Thus English binoculars has no singular, which is worth noting (that is, it is not predictable). True, there are other nouns denoting items consisting of two significant parts which behave similarly (spectacles, trousers...); indeed they are subject to 'middle-size generalizations' (Koenig 1999).…
The theory of feature systems
Features are central to all major theories of syntax and morphology. Yet it can be a non-trivial task to determine the inventory of features and their values for a given language, and in particular to determine whether to postulate one feature or two in the same semantico-syntactic domain. We illustrate this from tense-aspect-mood (TAM) in Kayardild, and adduce principles for deciding in general between one-feature and two-feature analyses, there…
Prolegomena to a typology of morphological features
The basic color terms of Russian
Selon la theorie des couleurs de Berlin et Kay (1969), une langue peut posseder au maximum onze termes designant les couleurs de base. Or, on en denombre douze pour le russe, l'A. propose une etude sur ce phenomene et compare chez des locuteurs russes et anglais l'utilisation des termes de couleur
A Statistical Approach to Determining Basic Color Terms
We report a field study of the color terms of the Bantu language Xhosa. This was carried out to describe the Xhosa color term inventory, and particularly to establish which terms were basic, as a test of Berlin and Kay's theory of color universals. Our informants were from rural Transkei and performed two main color tasks: elicited lists ('tell me as many color terms as you know') and a color-naming task. Statistical indicators of salience and of…
Gender and number in Bayso
The Morphology/Syntax Interface
P[ossessive] A[djective]s in Slavonic, formed from nouns via suffixation, show unusual syntactic behavior. In Upper Sorbían, the form of attributive modifiers, relative pronouns, and personal pronouns can be controlled by the syntactic features of the noun underlying the PA. Control of attributive modifiers gives rise to phrases in which word structure and phrase structure do not match. The fact that the underlying noun is available for syntactic…
Canonical gender
Nominal classification remains a fascinating topic but in order to make further progress we need greater clarity of definition and analysis. Taking a Canonical Typology approach, we use canonical gender as an ideal against which we can measure the actual gender systems we find in the languages of the world. Building on previous work on canonical morphosyntactic features, particularly on how they intersect with canonical parts of speech, we establ…
Associative forms in a typology of number systems
A general typology of number systems has to confront the problem of variation both in the number values in different languages and in the inventories of nominals involved. We start from the Smith-Stark Hierarchy and extend this approach to additional numbers (such as dual and paucal). Associative plurals appear to undermine this typology, if we treat them as a third number. Either the associative plural or the ordinary plural proves to be excepti…
Mapping Russian basic colour terms using behavioural measures
The duration of word-final s in English
The alveolar fricative occurs in word-final position in English in different grammatical functions. Nominal suffixes may indicate plurality (e.g.cars), genitive case (e.g.car's) or plurality and genitive case in cumulation (e.g.cars'). Further, there are the third person singular verbal suffix (e.g.she fears) and the cliticized forms of the third person singular forms ofhaveandbe(e.g.she's been lucky;she's friendly). There is also non-affixals(e.…
Constructions with СЧИТАТЬ НУЖНЫМ
Universals in the syntax of cardinal numerals
The agreement hierarchy
Consideration of the problem of alternative agreement forms (§ 1) leads us to postulate a hierarchy of agreement positions (§ 2) which allows us to make predictions as to the possibility and relative frequency of semantic as compared to syntactic agreement. The hierarchy is justified by data from a variety of languages which permit alternative agreements (§ 3). Confirming evidence comes from a study of the instances where agreement in case and pe…
Agreement with quantified subjects in Russian
Syntactic features
The aim of this paper is to justify the use of syntactic features, to show how they relate to semantic features and how they operate in syntax and morphology. 1 Particular stress is laid on the elimination of redundant features. First we shall review the literature, to show why syntactic features should require justification. Then, as an illustration, we shall investigate the feature of animacy in Russian in all components of the grammar in which…
Gender in Russian
Hierarchies, Targets and Controllers
Hierarchies, Targets and Controllers
A computer corpus of Australian English∗
(1986). A computer corpus of Australian English. Australian Journal of Linguistics: Vol. 6, No. 2, pp. 251-256
Agreement
Gender agreement in Chicewa
Gender in Chichewa is described as a complete system. First the basic data on gender agreement are presented and it is shown how the available agreement markers correlate with the noun genders (and how the system has changed in the recent past). There follows a discussion of interesting phenomena which do not fit easily into the main gender system. Next structures involving conjoined noun phrases headed by nouns from various genders are analysed …
Computers, Language Learning and Language Teaching
Gender and number in Bayso
The Morphology/Syntax Interface
P[ossessive] A[djective]s in Slavonic, formed from nouns via suffixation, show unusual syntactic behavior. In Upper Sorbían, the form of attributive modifiers, relative pronouns, and personal pronouns can be controlled by the syntactic features of the noun underlying the PA. Control of attributive modifiers gives rise to phrases in which word structure and phrase structure do not match. The fact that the underlying noun is available for syntactic…
The Scope of Slavic Aspect
Resolution rules in Qafar
Colour terms in Russian
One of the milestones in typological studies is Berlin & Kay's (1969) account of basic colour terms, which has produced a steady stream of research of various types. Berlin & Kay summarized their work as follows. In sum, our two major findings indicate that the referents for the basic color terms of all languages appear to be drawn from a set of eleven universal perceptual categories, and these categories become encoded in the history of a given …
Russian colour term salience
Mapping Russian basic colour terms using behavioural measures
Gender
Gender is a fascinating category, central and pervasive in some languages and totally absent in others. In this new, comprehensive account of gender systems, over 200 languages are discussed, from English and Russian to Archi and Chichewa. Detailed analysis of individual languages provides clear illustrations of specific types of system. Gender distinction is often based on sex; sometimes this is only one criterion and the gender of nouns depends…
Авmомаmuческая обрабоmка mексmа на есmесmвенном языке
Color terms in Setswana
Network Morphology
In this paper we introduce a declarative approach to inflectional morphology, which we call Network Morphology, using the lexical representation language DATR. We show that we can account for a range of (Russian) data, for which previously various rule types were required, and can provide a more satisfying analysis than was previously available. First we outline the essential data (section 2), highlighting the problems they present. Section 3 int…
A developmental study of the acquisition of colour terms in Setswana
We report a study of the acquisition of colour terms by speakers of Setswana, the language of Botswana in Southern Africa. This was carried out as a test of Berlin & Kay's theory of colour term universals, on a language with less than the maximum complement of eleven basic colour terms, and in order to document changes in Setswana under the impact of economic development. Seventy-seven five- to nine-year-olds were studied on two colour tasks: eli…
The basic colour terms of Ndebele∗
We report a field study of the colour terms of the Bantu language Ndebele. The main purposes of the study were to describe the Ndebele colour term inventory, and to determine which colour terms were basic in order to test Berlin & Kay's theory of colour universals. A sample of school children and a sample of adults from Matabeleland performed a list task ('tell me as many colour terms as you know') in order to identify Ndebele colour terms and to…
Linguistics (74 obras) · Philosophy (66 obras) · Computer Science (53 obras) · Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation (37 obras) · Philosophy (28 obras) · Psychology (28 obras) · History (27 obras) · Artificial Intelligence (25 obras) · Categorization, perception, and language (22 obras) · Mathematics (19 obras)