Date: 24-Oct-2006
From: Steven Schaufele <fcosw5mail.scu.edu.tw>
Subject: Chinese & Polysynthesis
Regarding Query: http://linguistlist.org/issues/17/17-2888.html
A few weeks ago, one of the students in my Introduction to GeneralLinguistics class raised the question of whether, on the basis of suchdoublets as the following:
Zhe-ge ren mai-le yi-ben shu.DET-cl. `person' `buy'-asp. `one'-cl. `book'`This person bought a book.'
Zhe-ge mai-shu-de renDET-cl. `buy'-`book'-DE `person'`This book-buying person = This person who bought a book'
Chinese could be considered a `polysynthetic' language'. Not being anexpert in polysynthesis, i was unsure how to respond to this query, so iposted it to LINGUIST (17.2888). I am hereby posting a summary of theresponses i received.
(One correspondent raised the question of how this topic turned up in anintroductory linguistics course in the first place. To which my answerwould be partly that i am, among other things, a typologist and i love totalk about it, and partly that i have found that, at least to a certainlevel, typology is a concept that students find relatively easy to latchonto, and it helps in organizing the vast amount of data i'm necessarilythrowing at them. Which, of course, is an important part of the functionof typology.)
First of all, i would like to thank the following correspondents:
Peter T. DanielsBruce DespainChristian DiCanioChao LiBingfu LuEd McDonaldVivan NgaiNick ReidElanna TsengRalf VollmannAdam Werle
Several correspondents spoke of the importance of viewing such categoriesas `isolating', `incorporating', `polysynthetic', etc. as little more thanarbitrary/conveniently-labelled points on what is really a typologicalcontinuum. (In my own classes, i try to emphasize that there is probablyno such thing as a `perfectly isolating' or a `perfectly synthetic'language, rather that certain languages are more isolating, or moresynthetic, or whatever, than others.) And, to some extent, the question ofwhether a (supposedly?) isolating language like Chinese might actuallyqualify as polysynthetic arises from a tendency to reify these labels, andthus distort the facts.
A few correspondents noted further that there is as yet nogenerally-agreed-upon definition of `polysynthesis'. Vivian Ngai objectedto the common practice of treating `noun incorporation' and `polysynthesis'as synonymous terms, when according to a definition given by Comrie,`polysynthesis' is merely the most extreme form of agglutination, theability `to combine a large number of morphemes, be they lexical orgrammatical, into a single word'. Elanna Tseng pointed out thatnoun-incorporation is a feature in a wide variety of languages, includingEnglish (e.g, `babysit'), but English `is certainly not considered apolysynthetic language'. Evans & Sasse 2002 have offered a definition of`polysynthesis' as involving the possibility of *all* arguments beingabsorbed into a single, one-word predicate which is able to function `as afreestanding utterance without reliance on context', which is certainly along way from anything Chinese, pro-drop or no pro-drop, can do.
Skalicka 1979 argues that, rather than being a `true' isolating language,Modern Chinese is heavily into compounding. This is certainly true, atleast judging from my own experience, in spite of the impression created bythe traditional culture and the writing system that reflects it. Andcompounding can be regarded as a `simple type of synthesis', in DiCanio'swords.
However, true polysynthesis is supposed to involve the loss ofindependent-word status on the part of the incorporated elements. Bauer'sproposed definition suggests that, with regard especially to their semanticcontent, the incorporated morphemes exist in a sort of `no-man's land'somewhere between the status of derivational morphemes and full words,having greater semantic content than the former but less than the latter.Furthermore, in a textbook-example polysynthetic language like Sora,Greenlandic, or Onondaga the incorporated element is phonologically quitedistinct from the semantically-equivalent free form. In Chinese, on theother hand, `shu' (= `book') is the same whether it is functioning as theobject of a simple, monoclausal sentence or as an object within anoun-modifying relative construction. (I cannot even say with anyconfidence that, in the latter case, it suffers any loss of distinctive tone.)
It is doubtful that the noun-modifying relative construction in Chineseeven qualifies as a compound, since it allows the verbal element to bemodified by an aspect marker (such as the perfective marker `-le')*intervening* between the verb-stem and its object -- just as would be thecase in a full sentence -- and the nominal element to take adjectivalmodifiers of its own. Thus, the relative construction `mai-shu-de' in myexample can be expanded to e.g. `mai-le hen-duo-youqu-de shu-de' (`boughtmany interesting books'). Furthermore, it is *not* possible to put theperfective marker after the verb-object string within the relativeconstruction (`*zhe-ge mai-shu-le-de ren'), which clearly indicates thatthat string is not recognized by the grammar as a word-level entity, as itshould be if it were a true compound.
Literature:Bauer, Laurie. 2002. Introducing Linguistic Morphology. EdinburghUniversity Press.Chi, Hong. 1992. Noun Incorporation: A Chinese Case? Word vol. 43, no. 2Evans, Nicholas, & Hans-Jurgen Sasse, eds. 2002. Problems in Polysynthesis(Studia Typologica 4). Akademie Verlag.Skalicka, Vladimir. 1979. Typologische Studien (Schriften zur Linguistik11) Hrsg. v. Peter Hartmann.Vollmann, Ralf. MS. Der Wortbegriff im Tibetischen. MS available fromthe author, uni-graz.at>
Linguistic Field(s):
Typology
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