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The Prepositional Noun Modifier Hierarchy (modified from Hawkins 1983, p. 75; Dryer 1992b; and Croft 2003, p. 123): N = Noun; Quan = Quantifier; Dem = Demonstrative; Adj =Adjective; Poss = Possessor; and Rel = Relative clause.
Source publication
The present study discusses typology and variation of word order patterns in nominal and verb structures across 20 Chinese languages and compares them with another 43 languages from the Sino-Tibetan family. The methods employed are internal and external historical reconstruction and correlation studies from linguistic typology and sociolinguistics....
Contexts in source publication
Context 1
... attempt has been made to explain the directionality of word order in a typological framework by providing a relative chronology in which constituents and their related constructions shift their directionality faster. For instance, Greenbergian implicational universals (1963) have been applied in the discussion of hierarchy among different noun modification types in Hawkins (1983, p. 75), Dryer (1992b) andCroft (2003, p. 123), as shown in Table 1. The given constituent orders in each row represent word order profiles, six scenarios which are typologically expected in a language. ...Context 2
... years back in time, which is significantly much later than the emergence of human speech ability a hundred thousand years ago (e.g., Oller 2000;Lieberman 2007;Perreault and Mathew 2012). This thereby leaves some room for the possibility of reconstructing a protolanguage with hybrid word order profiles which conform with one of the scenarios given in Table 1. This seems to be the case for the Proto-Chinese intermediate stage and the earlier Proto-Sino-Tibetan stage. ...Context 3
... the quantitative data from Sino-Tibetan languages presented in Supplementary Material B, in Table 4 and the discussion to this point, we propose in Table 5 an alternative schema to the model in Table 1, in which noun modification types have shifted from headfinal to head-initial in a chronological order. inal position of demonstratives more firmly than that of adjectives. ...Context 4
... the quantitative data from Sino-Tibetan languages presented in Supplementary Material B, in Table 4 and the discussion to this point, we propose in Table 5 an alternative schema to the model in Table 1, in which noun modification types have shifted from headfinal to head-initial in a chronological order. Based on our data and proposal, possessors and then compounds would be at even deeper syntactic levels of the noun phrase and thereby more resistant to change than relative clauses. ...Citations
... The typology and word order in noun and verb structures in different variants of the Chinese language were discussed in the work of C. Yurayong and E. Sandman (2023). The analysis revealed that extralinguistic factors, particularly sociolinguistic ones, significantly influence word order. ...
... Modern comparative-historical studies (Dickie, 2023;Lander, 2023;Petrovitz, 2023) exhibit a notable convergence with the domains of comparative typology (Yurayong et al., 2023) and general linguistics (Abalkheel et al., 2023). Recently, however, there has been a resurgence in addressing the contentious issues originally posed by classical linguistic comparative studies. ...
This article examines the construction of microstructures in Ernest Klein’s "Comprehensive Etymological Dictionary of the English Language" (CEDLE). It delves into the traditional and cognitive-comparative principles used in the compilation of etymological dictionaries, highlighting the integration of structural, functional, and cognitive linguistics in modern lexicography. The study emphasizes the significance of etymological dictionaries as repositories of linguistic evolution, exploring how etymons—original forms and meanings of words—are presented within CEDLE. It outlines the methods used to organize etymological data, including phonetic, morphological, historical, and ideographic rules, and demonstrates how these principles are applied to construct etymological microstructures. The article also introduces a heuristic model of etymological entries in the form of a fractal, reflecting the dynamic and evolving nature of etymological hypotheses. The research underscores the necessity of adopting novel approaches in etymological lexicography to facilitate a deeper understanding of language history and its cognitive and cultural factors.
