Case loss and the rise of articles: Evidence for a ...€¦ · d) no indefinite article but definite article (98) e) neither indefinite nor definite (198) Sinnemäki & Wahlström

Thursday, March 8, 2018Sinnemäki & Wahlström / Case loss and the rise of articles / DGfS2018, Stuttgart 1

Case loss and the rise of articles:Evidence for a typological tendency

Kaius Sinnemäki (Uni Helsinki) &Max Wahlström (Uni Helsinki & Kone Foundation)

• Introduction• Data• Analysis• Results• Discussion

Thursday, March 8, 2018 2Sinnemäki & Wahlström / Case loss and the rise of articles / DGfS2018, Stuttgart

Outline: Case loss and the rise of articles

• IE languages spoken in the western part of Europe and the Balkans arecharacterized by the reduction of case inflection and the rise of definite and indefinite articles (see, e.g. Hewson 1972: 14)

(1) Old Church Slavonic. Codex Marianus, 11th Century (John 1:50)

viděhъ tę podъ smokovъnic-ejǫI-saw you.ACC PREP fig_tree-INS

‘I saw you under the fig tree’

(2) (Early) Modern Balkan Slavic. Tihonravov Damascene, 17th Century (Dëmina

1985, p. 245)

si počinete pod drəvo-toREFL rest.IMP.2PL PREP tree-DEF

‘rest under the tree!’


Introduction

• the European development has sparked claims about an interconnection• …claims date back at least a century (Krámský 1972: 48–49)• …mostly arguing for the case loss leading to the emergence of the articles

‒ for a critical assesment of these views, see Anward & Swedenmark (1997, 32–33) andBarðdahl (2001, 192–193).

• …but occasionally also vice versa‒ e.g. Tiraspol’ski (1980, 73–74)

• no attempts to test if there is a cross-linguistic inverse correlation• see, however, a preliminary result (Wahlström 2015, 170–183):

‒ “possibly an inverse correlation between the number of cases and the occurrence of the definite article… …indicating a universal tendency, which, nevertheless, does not imply direct causation”


Introduction

• we combine WALS data• for the marking of definiteness, Ch. 37 (Dryer 2013a), 620 languages

1) a definite word distinct from the demonstrative (216 languages)2) a demonstrative word used as a marker of definiteness (69)3) a definite affix on nouns (92)4) no definite article, but an indefinite article (45)5) neither a definite nor an indefinite article (198)

• for indefiniteness, Ch. 38 (Dryer 2013b), 534 languagesa) indefinite word distinct from numeral for 'one' (102)b) numeral for 'one' is used as indefinite article (112)c) indefinite affix on noun (24)d) no indefinite article but definite article (98)e) neither indefinite nor definite (198)


Data

• for the number of cases, Ch. 49 (Iggesen 2013), 261 languagesi. No morphological case-marking (100)ii. 2 case categories (23)

iii. 3 case categories (9)iv. 4 case categories (9)

v. 5 case categories (12)vi. 6-7 case categories (37)

vii. 8-9 case categories (23)viii. 10 or more case categories (24)

ix. Exclusively borderline morphological case-marking (24)

• our sample size: 183 languages


Data

• WALS data not entirely satisfactory for our purposes• category ii, languages with two cases

‒ includes languages like English and Swedish, whose possessive clitics are included

• category ix, exclusively borderline morphological case marking‒ these languages are generally ill-suited for the traditional definition of case,

because they are polysynthetic, for example, and involve noun incorporation, such as Wichita (Caddoan language) and Ainu (isolate)

‒ we treat them as languages without case (but check also what happens whenthey are excluded)


Data


• Absence of articlesmore likely when 5+ cases

• Presence of articlesless likely when < 5 cases.à5 cases as a cut-off

point


Descriptive distributions

• We use generalized linear mixed effects modeling (e.g., Jaeger et al. 2011.• The presence vs. absence of articles modeled as the response.• Number of cases modeled as the predictor.

‒ Model A: number of cases as counts.

‒ Model B: number of cases as binomial (< 5 cases vs. 5+ cases).

• Families and areas modeled as random intercepts and random slopes:‒ The predictor’s effect can vary across language families, thus assuming that rates of

change vary between different families.‒ Family = the highest taxa in WALS (Dryer & Haspelmath 2013).

‒ Area = 24 areas in AUTOTYP (Bickel et al. 2017).

• Likelihood ratio test used to derive p-values.

Thursday, 8 March 2018 10Sinnemäki & Wahlström / Case loss and the rise of articles / DGfS2018, Stuttgart

Modelling


AUTOTYP 24 areas

• We first ran GLMMs using the popular lme4 package in R.• But, perfect correlation (=1) between the random intercepts and slopes.

• As a solution, we used Bayesian Generalized Linear Mixed Effects Modeling, by using the package blme in R (Chung et al. 2013).• Bayesian point estimation without going into fully Bayesian inference (cf. Chung

et al. 2015).• This will help pull the correlation terms between random intercepts and slopes

slightly away from perfect correlation (cf. Dorie 2014: 93-94).


• Does the presence of articles depend on the number of cases?

• Logit estimates: -0.296 ± 0.15; p = .011 *

• Random effects:Groups Name Variance Std.Dev. CorrFam (Intercept) 2.63 1.62

num_cases 0.094 0.3070 -0.91Area (Intercept) 4.82 2.20

num_cases 0.094 0.31 -0.88

• Correlation terms still high, but pulled away from perfect correlation (= ±1).


Results

• Negative relationship between the presence of article and the number of cases.

• The probability for articles is about 0.9 for languages with no morphological cases.

• It drops to less than half of this (~0.35) for languages with 10 or more cases.



Non-faceted plots of the predictedprobabilities for articles per family


Non-faceted plots of the predictedprobabilities for articles per area

• Does the presence of articles depend on the presence of 5+ cases?

• Number of cases as binary variable “< 5 cases” vs. “5+ cases”• Logit estimate = −0.1996 ± 0.86; χ2(1) = 8.65; p = 0.0033 **

• Random effects:Groups Name Variance Std.Dev. Corr

fam (Intercept) 1.23 1.11

cases_binTRUE 1.47 1.21 -0.82

Area (Intercept) 4.22 2.05

cases_binTRUE 4.14 2.04 -0.89

• Correlation terms quite high, but still pulled away from perfect correlation (= ±1).


Results

• Negative relationship between the presence of article and the presence of 5+ cases.

• The probability for articles is about 0.85 for languages with less than 5 cases.

• It drops to about 0.4 for languages with 5+ cases.



Non-faceted plots of the predictedprobabilities for articles per family


Emphasizing Indo-European


Non-faceted plots of the predictedprobabilities for articles per area

• All in all the models suggested a negative relationship between articles and the number of morphological cases.

• The negative pattern was consistent across families and areas.

• (The results were the same when languages with borderline case (n = 12) were excluded from the sample.)

Thursday, 8 March 2018 22Sinnemäki & Wahlström / Case loss and the rise of articles / DGfS2018, Stuttgart

Results: summary

• Case and (at least) marking of definiteness known to interact• König (2011, 514–515): a universal interrelationship between case and the

expression of definiteness is obvious, e.g., there are examples of the marker of definiteness having developed into a nominative or ergative case marker

• as a criterion for DOM, definiteness is as common as animacy (Sinnemäki 2014a)• articles as carriers of case marking: German, Balkan languages


Discussion: tentative explanations for theinverse correlation

• Hewson and Bubenik (2006, 364) argue that languages with case inflection

and no articles tend to be less configurational:

• definiteness marked by ”…promoting definite nouns to the beginning of the

clause” and demoting indefinite nouns to the end…”

• languages with article systems ”eliminate case” and mark core arguments by

word order

• also (regarding IE languages): ”It is rare for a language to have an article system

and maintain more than four cases.”

• indirect quantitative support for the idea:

• in caseless languages the core arguments are more often expressed by word

order than they are in languages that have cases (Sinnemäki 2014b)



• Directionality of the causation• Hewson and Bubenik seem to side with Tiraspolski:

‒ “elimination” of cases by the articles• however, the possibility to “promote” definite nouns depends on the identifiability

of the arguments‒ if arguments are not differentiated by case inflection, this may increase the need to

mark information structure through other means than topicalization, for instance, by using demonstratives



Anward, J. & J. Swedenmark 1997. ¡Kasus nej, bestämdhet ja! Om Möjliga modeller av nominalböjningens utveckling i svenskan., 4th edn. (Studier i svensk språkhistoria). Stockholm: Stockholms universitet.

Barðdahl, J. 2001. Case in Icelandic: A synchronic, diachronic and comparative approach. Lund: Lund University.Bickel, B. et al. 2017. The autotyp typological databases. version 0.1.0. https://github.com/autotyp/autotyp-

data/tree/0.1.0.Chung Y. 2013. A nondegenerate penalized likelihood estimator for variance parameters in multilevel models.

Psychometrika 78(4): 685-709. http://gllamm.org/.Chung, Y. et al. 2015. Weakly Informative Prior for Point Estimation of Covariance Matrices in Hierarchical

Models. Journal of Educational and Behavioral Statistics 40(2): 136-157.Dëmina, E. I. 1985. Tihonravovskij damaskin: bolgarskij pamjatnik xvii v.: issledovanie i tekst, tom 2. Sofia:

Izd[atelstvo]. na Bălg[arskata]. Akad[emija]. na Naukite.Dorie, V. 2014. Mixed Methods for Mixed Models. PhD dissertation, Columbia University.Dryer, M. 2013a. Definite articles - chapter 37. In Dryer & Haspelmath (eds.).Dryer, M. 2013b. Indefinite articles - chapter 38. In Dryer & Haspelmath (eds.).Dryer, M. & M. Haspelmath (eds.) 2013. The world atlas of language structures online. Leipzig: Max Planck

Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. http://wals.info.


References

Hewson 1972. Article and noun in English. The Hague: Mouton.Hewson, J. & V. Bubenik. 2006. From case to adposition. the development of configurational syntax

in indo-european languages. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Iggesen, O. A. 2013. Number of cases - chapter 49. In Dryer & Haspelmath (eds.).Jaeger, F. T., W. Croft & D. Pontillo. 2011. Mixed effect models for genetic and areal dependencies

in linguistic typology. Linguistic Typology 15(2). 281–319.Krámský, J. 1972. The article and the concept of definiteness in language (Janua linguarum, Series

minor 125). The Hague: Mouton.Sinnemäki, K. 2014a. A typological perspective on Differential Object Marking. Linguistics 52(2):

281-313.Sinnemäki, K. 2014b. Complexity trade-offs: A case study. In Frederick J. Newmeyer and Laurel B.

Preston (eds.), Measuring Grammatical Complexity, 179-201. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Tiraspol’ski, G. I. 1980. K voprosu ob uslovijah i pričinah utraty bolgarskogo substantivnogo

sklonenija. Sovetskoe slavjanovedenie 4.Wahlström, M. 2015. The Loss of Case Inflection in Bulgarian and Macedonian (Slavica

Helsingiensia 47). Helsinki: Department of Modern Languages.


References

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Case loss and the rise of articles: Evidence for a ...€¦ · d) no indefinite article but definite article (98) e) neither indefinite nor definite (198) Sinnemäki & Wahlström