Projektnummer

0055832

Zusammenfassung

This project investigates the relative frequencies of nouns, verbs, and pronouns in spoken language corpora of Baure, Bora, Chintang, Even, N|uu, Sakha, Sri Lanka Malay, and English. We focus on two questions: (1) Why do languages vary so drastically in the overall ratio of nouns and pronouns per verb, ranging from roughly 1:1 (Chintang) to roughly 2:1 (Sri Lanka Malay)? Here we investigate typological factors such as argument indexing on verbs, which may make the overt realization of arguments as nouns or pronouns unnecessary. (2) Why are there regular peaks of heavy noun use as narra...