Group 2 SinoTibetan Languages Working Group II SinoTibetan

Group 2: Sino-Tibetan Languages Working Group II: Sino-Tibetan Languages Session Report July 2, 2005

Parts of Speech: General Issues 1. Nature of definitions: semantically based or morphosyntactically-based? – Need to allow for language-specific definition of classes based on morphosyntactic criteria in that language

Parts of Speech: General issues 2. Consider separating out issues of morphological boundedness and track as a separate feature of lexical categories e. g. , Problems with classifiers; concepts of grammatical vs. phonological word possibly useful

Issues & Suggestions 3. Do we want to build implicational universals into the ontology? e. g. , existence of dual number implies existence of plural number

Issues & Suggestions 4. Do you want to put together a working group that builds a particular COPE based on common grammaticalization patterns? In other words: What is inventory of relations between grammatical classes as exemplified in historical change?

– – – Numeral ‘ 1’ + classifier --> indefinite article Verb ‘stay’ -> progressive aspect 3 rd-person singular pronoun -> distal demonstrative People will at times be wondering whether a particular element is a X or Y. Is it an auxiliary verb or is it a lexical verb? Ideally there would be one-many linking. (Necessary). As with other cases of polyesemy, the status of a particular instance will be determined by context (or even will be unresolved in certain contexts) – how can you come up with a context-dependent assignment of a particular mapping to the ontology when multiple mappings are specified? State that relation between two concepts in ontology are likely to be expressed together by the same morpheme Note that certain types of grammaticalization patterns do not occur. E. g. , as far as we know, no attested examples of firstor second-person pronouns grammaticalizing into distal demonstratives.

Issues & Suggestions 5. Comments on various parts of speech: – – – Articles Coordinating conjunctions Demonstratives Classifiers Particles Serial verb constructions, auxiliary and copula – Interjections, Ideophones

Summary of Basic Points from Saturday (a. m. meeting) • Nature of definitions: semantically-based or morphosyntactically based • Recommendation that morphological boundedness be treated independently of other categories • Discussed building implicational universals into the GOLD architecture • Recommended development of COPE based on grammaticalization patterns • More detailed recommendations on particular parts of speech

What to do with “hybrid” classes? • Manange (T-B language, Nepal) – Lexical class of “verbal adjectives” or “adjectival verbs” in addition to well-defined verb and adjective classes – Morphology of verbs but syntax of adjectives – How do we treat this in GOLD • • • New class? -- Category “other”? Intersection of classes? Cross-referencing? Map to both (but not a super-class) Define by relation to other classes (relation: “morphology of X”, relation: “syntax of Y”

Constructions • Need an ontology of constructions • For example: ontology of constructions of verb/“VP”/clause sequencing – – Serial verb constructions Verb-Auxiliary constructions Converb/clause-chain constructions Reduplication • All syntactically distinct but coverlapping functional domains • Demonstrates the need for separation of formal and functional levels, with links between them

Reduplication • Complex structure – Has phonological, morphological, syntactic, and semantic dimensions – Need to be able to link between these different levels – Certain meanings common, e. g. , iterativity, durativity, plurality, distributive – Do we want to predefine a “reduplicant” with pre-association to the meanings? Open World Assumption allows other relations to occur

Aspect • Semantic categories look sufficient, but possibly add viewpoint and situational aspect • Must independently specify the meanings and formal devices by which they are coded – Serial verbs, auxiliary verbs, affixes, particles, tones, constructions – Any could potentially map to any meaning

More on form-function independence • Need mechanisms to link between features and form • Helpful to have a list of tendencies of which type of feature links to which type of form • Form-function independence was repeatedly mentioned, for example, evidentials can be realized by many formal types

Discussion of larger theoretical issues – – – To what extent is the goal to produce a description of what is possible in natural language or to provide interoperability between different language resources? Are there tensions between these different goals? Is GOLD a metalanguage for doing linguistics or a metalanguage for finding language resources? How theory-neutral is GOLD? Didn’t resolve these questions, but feel they are important to be asked iteratively in the process of developing GOLD

Languages carve up functional space in slightly different ways • How can we allow for this? • Ergative case in one language is not necessarily used for the same set of expressions in another language • Discussed various ways of handling this – Prototypes – Templates – Following diagram represents one conceptualization

GOLD Meanings: Prototype or template Agent of transitive predicate P-mean Ergative Case_Class Mean ERG-1 INSTANCES ERG-2 What ERG really means in each language