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See discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/279960257 Word order pattern tendency and the Yongning Na (Mosuo) RESEARCH · JULY 2015 DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.1.4881.2644 READS 9 1 AUTHOR: Tsung-Lun Wan National University of Singapore 3 PUBLICATIONS 0 CITATIONS SEE PROFILE Available from: Tsung-Lun Wan Retrieved on: 25 January 2016 Word order pattern tendency and the Yongning Na (Mosuo) Tsung-Lun Wan National Taiwan University Department of Geography 1. Introduction The Universality indicates that there are some syntactic phenomena common in human language all over the world. One of them, the word order pattern tendency includes some principle that project the order of elements in certain structures. Many of these implications concern the relationship between the verb and its dependents (O’Grady 2012). To explain the tendencies in the word order correlations, syntacticians put emphasis on the contrast between right-branching (or head-initial) and left-branching (or head-final). The former one has the structurally more elaborate part of a phrase on its right branch; on the contrary, the more elaborate part of a phrase of the latter is on its left branch. Right-branching languages are likely to have P-NP, V-PP, N-Possessor, and subordinator-S patterns, like (1). (1) In contrast, left-branching languages prefer NP-P, PP-V, Possessor-N, and S- subordinator patterns as in (2). (2) However, as Dryer (2005) admits, not all languages can be assigned to a rigid word order. We can only say an order is frequently used in a certain language and other orders are infrequently used or depends on the pragmatic context. There are even some languages said to have flexible order, which is sometimes described as 1 “free” word order, in that this kind of languages choose word order according to pragmatic factors (Dryer 2005). In this sense, it seems to be difficult for us to predict the word order based on right/left-branching. This paper aims to examine how the word order pattern tendency applies to Yongning Na (Mosuo) language, whose grammar is seen to be context-dependent by syntacticians (Lidz 2010; Michaud et al. 2013). 2. Word Order Correlation As what is mentioned in section one, the word order tendency between different phrase structures can be explained by the contrast between right-branching and left-branching. This phenomenon is in fact called word order correlation by syntacticians. The previous researches use the head-dependent theory (HDT) to explain the syntactic phenomenon. HDT indicates that: …a pair of elements X and Y will employ the order XY significantly more often among VO languages than among OV languages if and only if X is a head and Y is a dependent. (Dryer 1992: 87) Dryer (1992) proposes that the HDT fails to predict some word order in the empirical evidence in human languages, and therefore he suggests that we should use phrasal categories instead of heads and dependents to predict word patterns. He called it as the branching direction theory (BDT): …a pair of elements X and Y will employ the order XY significantly more often among VO languages than among OV languages if and only if X is a nonphrasal category and Y is a phrasal category. (Dryer 1992: 89) Although Dryer (2005) admitted that there are some problems for explaining some pairs of elements under assumptions of flat constituent structure, this article will discuss the word pattern irrelevant to the failing prediction caused from the different assumption of constituent structure, and still, in this paper, I will use branching structure to demonstrate the discussion. In the following sections, I will give a brief introduction for Yongning Na and examine the word order correlations between V&NP, P&NP, V&PP, Possessor NP & N, and subordinator & S. 2 3. Yongning Na (Musuo) According to the report of minority languages by Chinese Academy of Sciences, the Mosuo people live in the north-western Yunnan near to Tibet. The language spoken by Mosuo people is called the Yonging Na, or Mosuo, which is the variety of Naxi, and belongs to Tibeto-Burman languages (He and Jiang 1983). Because of the increasing tourists from China to Lugu Lake, this area undergoes a rapid change. More and more children don’t speak Yongning Na (LACITO 2012), so this language is getting disappearing gradually now, and this means that we need more linguists doing research on Yongning Na lest we can no longer realize the holistic Mosuo language. Figure 1. the relative location of Mosuo in Yunnan Figure 2. The specific location of Mosuo (Jacques & Michaud 2011) 4. Word order pattern in Mosuo The basic word order structure in Mosuo is SOV, which means it may be a left- branching language, as (3) (data from Alexis Michaud 2006: S41). (3) ʐɯ˧ lə˧-ʑi˩ (4) alchohol Accomp.-hold ‘(He) picked up the alcohol’ This sentence was from a Na speaker talking about his sister’s wedding. According to the context recorded, we can know the subject here was dropped, 3 and referred to the brother. As the syntactic tree in (4), the more elaborate part of the verb phrase occurs on the left side of the structure, which indicates that Na is a left-branching language. With the basic SOV structure, we can move on to the other word order patterns which can be predicted from this pattern. As O’Grady (2012) reports, PPs usually precede the verb in NP-V languages. The following data is from Alexis Michaud (2011: S49): (5) ʐɤ˩mi˩ qo˥ ɳɯ˩ ʈʂʰɯ˧ni˧˥ lə˧-ʈʰæ˧˥ dʑo˩ tʰi˩˥ way Loc. Abl./Top. therefore Accomp.-devour Top. then comme (la mère) s'était fait dévorer de la sorte en chemin... 1 ‘therefore (the mother) had herself devoured of this kind on way…’ (6) The sentence in (5) was about a story that how the tiger attacked a woman and her daughter. We can see that the PP precedes the verb in the VP in the syntactic tree. Another example below is from Lidz (2010: 341): (7) bɔ˥˩gu˧ tʰɯ˧ lɯ˧ dʑi˧ wɔ˧qʰwɤ˥˩ tʰɯ˧-tsɛ˩˥ lə˧-tsʰɯ˧ pig trough this Cls. water Loc.(on top) Dur.-float Accomp.-come ‘That pig trough has come here with the action floating upon the water.’ 1 The free translation was written in French by Michaud (2011), and the English version is translated by author. 4 (8) The sentence in (7) also complies with the world order correlations between NP-V and PP-verb, and furthermore, from data in (5) and (7), the sentences also reveals that the adposition in PPs belongs to postposition, which means the dependent in PP is also on the left side according to the word order tendency of left-branching languages. Another word order pattern which can be predicted via left-branching processing concerns with the possessor NP-noun structure (O’Grady 2012). The following data is from Alexis Michaud (2011: S3): (9) nɑ˩-bv̩˥ zɯ˧... the Na-poss life ‘the Na’s life’ As the sentence presents, the pattern also complies with the word order correlation between NP-V and possessor NP-noun. Another example is from Yang (2009: 28): (10) tʰɯ˧tɕi˥ bv̩˧ ɕo˥xɑ˩ 3Pl.Fam. poss. school ‘their school’2 The same pattern is also found in non-animate and supernatural possessor cases (Lidz 2010: 562-64): 2 Yang (2009) reports that in Mosuo language, when the connection between the possessor and the possessed is more distant, the possessive marker bv̩³³ is used. The example that shows no usage of possessive marker is as what follows: no⁵⁵ ɣuɑ³³ 2Sg village ‘your village’ 5 (11) ʐɯ˧mi˧ bv̩˧ tsɯ˧tæ˧ hearth room poss. foundation ‘the hearth’s room’s foundation’ (12) ɢɑ˧ɬɑ˧ tʰɯ˧ wu˧ bv̩˧ ɑ˧-mi˧ god this Cls. poss. mother ‘the god’s mother’ We can infer that there is no hierarchy for the syntactic processing of possession in Mosuo based on the data. And the last one, the predicted S-subordinator structure, is examined below. The following sentence is from Yang (2006: 32; 40): (13) lo˧ mɑ˧ ʑi˧ bi˧dʑo˩ xɑ˧-dzɯ˧-di˩ dʑo˧ mɑ˧ ku˧. work Neg do if food-eat-Nom Exist Neg able ‘If one doesn’t work, then one can’t have food to eat.’ (14) (15) tʰɯ˧ xɑ˧ dʑo˧ be˧lə˧ dzɯ˧ mɑ˧ ŋuɑ˩. 3Sg. food has even though eat Neg. give alms ‘Even though he has food, he doesn’t give alms.’ (16) Excitingly, the data reveals the S-subordinator order, the same as the predicted one, which means Mosuo language complies with all of the word order pattern according to left-branching principle. 6 5. Conclusion This paper tries to predict specific word order patterns in Mosuo language via the branching direction theory which was suggested by Dryer (1992). As the main body in this paper, I have examined the NP&V, PP&V, NP&P, Possessor NP & N, and subordinator & S structures with the narrative data from different sources built by different scholars. I have found that in Mosuo, there are NP-V, PP-V, NP- P, Possessor NP-N, and S-subordinator patterns the same as what Dryer (1992) indicates that the left-branching language should have. In future research, if there are more data collected, we may examine more patterns in that whether they are still complying with the word order correlation, which can be seen as a kind of Universality. 6. Reference Dryer, M. S. (2009). The branching direction theory of word order correlations revisited. In Universals of language today (pp. 185-207). Springer Netherlands. Dryer, M. S. (1992). The Greenbergian word order correlations. Language, 81- 138. Dryer, M. S. (2005). Order of subject, object, and verb. The world atlas of language structures, 330-33. Michaud, A. (2006). Sister: The sister's wedding (version 1). 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