Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- List of tables
- Preface to the second edition
- Preface to the first edition
- List of abbreviations
- List of symbols
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Typological classification
- 3 Implicational universals and competing motivations
- 4 Grammatical categories: typological markedness, economy and iconicity
- 5 Grammatical hierarchies and the semantic map model
- 6 Prototypes and the interaction of typological patterns
- 7 Syntactic argumentation and syntactic structure in typology
- 8 Diachronic typology
- 9 Typology as an approach to language
- List of references
- Map of languages cited
- Author index
- Language index
- Subject index
5 - Grammatical hierarchies and the semantic map model
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- List of tables
- Preface to the second edition
- Preface to the first edition
- List of abbreviations
- List of symbols
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Typological classification
- 3 Implicational universals and competing motivations
- 4 Grammatical categories: typological markedness, economy and iconicity
- 5 Grammatical hierarchies and the semantic map model
- 6 Prototypes and the interaction of typological patterns
- 7 Syntactic argumentation and syntactic structure in typology
- 8 Diachronic typology
- 9 Typology as an approach to language
- List of references
- Map of languages cited
- Author index
- Language index
- Subject index
Summary
Grammatical hierarchies and implicational universals
In §3.3, we observed that the implicational universals for noun–adjective order were all of the form ‘X ⊃ NA’, and that this pattern of implicational universals represents the phenomenon of dominance of NA order. There is another even more frequent pattern found in implicational universals, which is taken to represent another type of deeper phenomenon, a grammatical hierarchy.
If one examines languages with prepositions, the following pattern in implicational universals for noun modifiers are found (Hawkins 1983:75; Dryer 1992b):
(1) Prep ⊃:
(1a) NNum ⊃ NDem
(1b) NDem ⊃ NA
(1c) NA ⊃ NG
(1d) NG ⊃ NRel
The series of implicational universals in 1a–d represents a chain in which the implicatum of each universal is the implicans of the subsequent universal in the list. This pattern leads to a sequence of grammatical types ranked by their position in the chain of implicational universals. This sequence is called a grammatical hierarchy. Hawkins christened this particular hierarchy the Prepositional Noun Modifier Hierarchy, represented as follows (the > symbol is oriented in the same direction as the implication ⊃ in 1a–d):
(2) Prepositional Noun Modifier Hierarchy: NNum > NDem > NA > NG > NRel
The chain of implicational universals in 1a–d can be reformulated to make direct reference to the Prepositional Noun Modifier Hierarchy in 2:
(3) If a modifier–noun order on the Prepositional Noun Modifier Hierarchy occurs in a prepositional language, then any order to the right also occurs in the language. If the opposite order to one on the Prepositional Noun Modifier Hierarchy occurs in a prepositional language, then any order to the left also occurs in the language.
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- Typology and Universals , pp. 122 - 157Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2002