universaLIST

List constructions in typological and cognitive perspective

3-year project funded by the LILEC Department, Alma Mater Studiorum – University of Bologna

 

Project overview

The universaLIST project, embedded in the larger research network LIST – Listing in Natural Language – aims at investigating list constructions in the languages of the world adopting a typological and cognitive perspective.

Lists comprise a wide range of phenomena that are usually considered as separate linguistic entities. By ‘list’, here, we mean “the syntagmatic concatenation of two or more units of the same type (i.e. potentially paradigmatically connected) that are on a par with each other, thus filling one and the same slot within the larger construction they are part of” (Masini, Mauri & Pietrandrea to appear). We consider as occurrences of lists phenomena such as coordination (The system allows gas, electricity and water meters to be read), repetition (some people are very very very touchy), reformulation (they now had lifts, or rather elevators), but also – at the morphological level – (co-)compounding (Chuvash, Turkic: sĕt-śu ‘dairy products, lit. milk-butter’, cf. Wälchli 2005: 138) and (full) reduplication (Sundanese, Austronesian: hayaŋ-hayaŋ ‘want very much, red-want’, cf. Moravcsik 1978: 321).

Interestingly, all these devices are linked to each other not only by their structure, but also by the array of functions they convey in both intra- and cross-linguistic perspective. These functions include: intensification (English, Indo-European: he is very very bright, cf. Moravcsik 1978: 301; Thai, Tai-Kadai: díidii ‘to be extremely good’, from dii ‘to be good’, cf. Moravcsik 1978: 321); approximation (English, Indo-European: fifty or fifty-five=around fifty(five); Mandarin Chinese, Sino-Tibetan: sān-sì ‘three or four, lit. three-four’); categorization or hypernym-creation (English, Indo-European: knife and fork=cutlery; Chuvash, Turkic: erex-săra ‘alcoholic beverages, lit. vodka/wine-beer’, cf. Wälchli 2005: 141); generalization (English, Indo-European: night and day=always; Tagalog, Austronesian: araw-gabi ‘always, lit. day-night’, cf. Wälchli 2005: 139).

The universaLIST project aims at: (i) giving a comprehensive large-scale typological account of lists; and (ii) identifying possible recurrent and conventionalized pairings of form and function, i.e. constructions in the Construction Grammar sense (Hoffman & Trousdale 2013; cf. Croft 2001 for its typological application); (iii) exploring the existence of a unique underlying device connecting all the phenomena mentioned above and whether this (possible) device is cognitively grounded and, thus, potentially universal.

Since lists are thought to manifest themselves at different levels (from morphology to syntax and discourse), their typological study raises theoretical and methodological issues. Indeed, from a practical point of view, lists are far from being simple to find in descriptive grammars. For this reason, doing typology in the traditional way turns out to be quite hard. Consequently, a new methodology for bringing out the data is needed. We propose a three-level study allowing both a horizontal and a vertical investigation. Firstly, the traditional examination of descriptive grammars is pivotal and allows achieving a preliminary survey of how languages work (in this case, a variety sample is the better option). Secondly, a qualitative analysis of corpora and texts of a (smaller) language sample can be particularly useful to detect naturally occurring lists (corpora of spoken language would be especially useful, if available). The third level is connected to the second one, namely: a more quantitative analysis of large annotated corpora of few selected languages, which would provide data to draw some generalizations. This three-level investigation probably represents the best solution to study a non-canonical phenomenon like lists. However, this method requires a strict cooperation with linguists that are experts of specific linguistic areas; this would allow to work on data of particular languages and, consequently, to have a more detailed and comprehensive understanding of how lists work in these languages.

References

  • Croft, William. 2001. Radical Construction Grammar: Syntactic theory in typological perspective. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  • Hoffmann, Thomas & Graeme Trousdale. 2013. The Oxford handbook of Construction Grammar. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  • Masini, Francesca, Caterina Mauri & Paola Pietrandrea. To appear, 2018. List constructions: Towards a unified account. Italian Journal of Linguistics 30(1). Special Issue on “Lists: Description, delimitation, definition” edited by Francesca Masini, Caterina Mauri & Paola Pietrandrea.
  • Moravcsik, Edith. 1978. Reduplicative constructions. In Greenberg, Joseph H. (ed.). The universals of human language, 297-334. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
  • Wälchli, Bernhard. 2005. Co-compounds and Natural Coordination. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Data

For access to the List Typological Database please contact the authors (Francesca Masini, Simone Mattiola)

Contact

Francesca Masini (project coordinator) | Simone Mattiola (post-doc research fellow)