Mind the gap! What typological databases tell us about the state of grammatical descriptions

Language: Documentation and Theory

The Endangered Languages Archive (ELAR) at the Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften (BBAW) together with the Leibniz-Zentrum Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft (ZAS) are delighted to continue with the lecture series. Our aim is to give a forum to linguistic work that advances or is based on the documentation of underdescribed languages, thus not only supporting linguistic research but also honoring the UNESCO International Decade of Indigenous Languages (2022-2032). For inquiries, please contact Mandana Seyfeddinipur (ELAR) director@eldp.net or Manfred Krifka (ZAS), krifka@leibniz-zas.de.

Zoom-Meeting:
Meeting-ID: 636 0615 0838

There is a password, the same as with previous talks. If you are interested, you can get it here: mailto:training@eldp.net.

Abstract

How well is linguistic diversity described and what gaps remain? The past years have seen some assessments of how well linguistic diversity is documented across the world (e.g. Seifart et al. 2018). Such surveys typically measure how well languages are documented. A complementary approach measures how broadly particular topics are described across languages. In this talk, we will show how information in typological databases can give us indications of the state of description of grammatical topics around the world. 

We investigate the description of grammatical topics using Grambank, a morphosyntactic typological database covering 2,467 language varieties based on 3,951 grammatical descriptions. Our analysis relies on information that is often overlooked in grammatical databases: the comments accompanying coded values and unknown values (indicated with ? in Grambank). We classify and quantify these comments. We then aggregate these comments and the coded data in Grambank to derive a level of description for each of 17 grammatical domains that Grambank covers (negation, adnominal modification, participant marking, tense, aspect, etc.). Our analysis shows how the description level of grammatical domains varies across space and time. For example, comparative constructions, as in the table is taller than the chair are most often described in Eurasia, but rarely for Australian languages. And the description level of complex predicates (serial verb constructions, light verb constructions, etc.) has picked up since the 1970s but remains relatively low overall in African  languages.

Information about gaps and uncertainties in our knowledge of grammatical domains within and across languages is essential to our understanding of grammatical diversity. When collected in a database, such information feeds into disciplines that focus on primary data collection, such as grammaticography and language documentation. We present an overview of what we have learned so far, hoping to inspire language specialists to fill some of these gaps.

Co-authors

Hannah J. Haynie (Department of Linguistics, University of Colorado Boulder; Boulder, USA)
Tobias Weber (Institute for Scandinavian Studies, Frisian and General Linguistics, Department of General Linguistics, Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel; Kiel, Germany)
Alena Witzlack-Makarevich (Department of Linguistics, Faculty of Humanities, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem; Jerusalem, Israel)

References

Seifart, F., Evans, N., Hammarström, H., & Levinson, S. C. (2018). Language documentation twenty-five years on. Language, 94 (4).