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Language Typology and Sprachliche Universalien La Typologie Des i ;.1,ijr! jri:j...li'' ljl LanguageTypology and LanguageUniversals Sprachtypologieund sprachlicheuniversalien La typologiedes langues et lesuniversaux linguistiques An InternationalHandbook / Ein internationalesHandbuch / Manuelinternational Editedby I Herausgegebenvon / Edite par Martin Haspelmath' Ekkehard Konig Wulf Oesterreicher' WolfgangRaible Volume2,1 2. Halbband/ Tome2 Walter de Gruvter ' Berlin ' New York 2001 i*.' 1492 XIV. Typologicalcharacterization of languagefamilies and linguisticareas 107.The European linguistic area: Standard Average European L lntroduction guagesshare structural features which cannot 2. The major SAE features be due to retention from a common proto- 3. Somefurther likely SAE features languageand which give these languagesa 4. Degreesof membershipin SAE profile that makesthem stand out amongthe 5. How did SAE come into being? is thus no min- 6. Abbreviationsof languagenames surroundinglanguages. There 7. References imum number of languagesthat a linguistic area comprisesQtace Stolz 2001a).In prin- ciple, there could be a linguistic area con- 1. Introduction sisting of just two languages(though this would be rather uninteresting), and there This article summarizessome of the main are also very large(continent-sized) linguistic piecesof evidencefor a linguistic area (or areas (Dryer 1989a).Likewise, there is no li rlltt' i. rili Sprachbund)in Europe that comprises the minimum number of structural featuresthat llll'itt Romance, Germanic and Balto-Slavic lan- the languagesmust sharein order to qualify guages,the Balkan languages.and more mar- as a Sprachbund.For instance, Jakobson "Eurasian ginally also the westernmostFinno-Ugrian (1931) establisheshis linguistic languageslthese will be called coreEuropean area" on the basis of just two phonological I' r, languagesin this article). This linguistic area features,but of course an area that shares I is sometimescalled Standard AverageEuro- more featuresis more interesting.As will be l.r pean (abbreviated SAE), following Whorf shown below, Standard Average European ; (1941)[956: 138].The existenceof this lin- languagesshare over a dozen highly charac- guistic area is a relatively new insight (cf. teristicfeatures, so we are dealingwith a very I Bechertet al. 1990,Bernini & Ramat 1996, interestingSprachbund. {i f ,, Haspelmath1998, van der Auwera 1998,Ko- A linguistic area is particularly striking 1 ,ii nig & Haspelmath1999). when it compriseslanguages from genealog- While the parallels (like t ;',r, close syntactic among ically unrelated languages the South the Balkan (* til;Ir languageshave struck linguists Asian linguistic area fut. 109), or the since the l9th century and the existenceof Mesoamericanlinguistic area (+ Art. ll0)), a Balkan Sprachbundhas been universally but this is not a necessaryfeature of a accepted,the European linguistic area has Sprachbund.The Balkan languagesare all long been overlooked.This may at first ap- Indo-European,but they are from different pear surprising,because the membersof the families within Indo-European (Romance, Sprachbundare among the best studied lan- Slavic. Greek. Albanian). and not all lan- guagesof the world. However, it is easy to guagesof thesefamilies belong to the Baikan understandwhy linguists have been slow to linguistic area, so nobody questionsthe va- appreciatethe significanceof the similarities lidity of the Balkan Sprachbund(- tut. 108). among the core European languages:Since In the case of SAE, three entire branches most comparative linguists know these lan- of Indo-European(Romance, Germanic and guagesparticularly well, they have tendedto Balto-Slavic) belong to the linguistic area. see non-European languagesas special and However, here too it is clear that we are unusual, and the similarities arnong the not dealing with a genealogicalgrouping, European languageshave not seemedsur- becausenobody ever proposed a branch of prising.Thus, it was only toward the end of Indo-European that consists of precisely the 20th century, as more and more had be- thesethree families. On the contrary, Indo- come known about the grammaticalproper- Europeaniststypically assumea particularly ties of the languagesof the rest of the world, closegenealogical relationship between Itaiic that linguists realizedhow peculiar the core and Celtic (and sometimeseven an Italo- European languagesare in some ways when Celtic protolanguage),but Romance(the sole seen in the world-wide context. From this descendantof ltalic) is inside SAE, while the perspective.Standard Average European may Celtic languagesdo not belong to SAE. And "exotic even appearas an language"(Dahl sinceso much is known about the grammat- 1990). ical properties that Proto-lndo-European A linguistic area can be recognizedwhen must have possessed,it is fairly easyto test a number of geographicallycontiguous lan- whether an SAE feature is an Indo-Euro- 107. The Europeanlinguistic area: Standard Average European 1493 peanismor not. As was shown in Haspelmath varieties,but Basqueseems to show very few (1998),most of the characteristicSAE fea- of them. Somewhatfurther to the east.Geor- tures (also called Europeanismshere) are not gian in the southernCaucasus (and perhaps Indo-Europeanismsbut later common inno_ the other Kartvelian languages) shares a vations. surprising number of featureswith the core Thus, what needsto be shown in order to .. European languages.These impressionistic demonstrate that a structural feature is a \ statementsshould eventually be quantified. Europeanismis but since it is not clear how much weisht (D that the greatmajority of core European shouldbe attachedto eachfeature. this is iot languagespossesses it; straightforward. (ii) that the geographically adjacent lan_ All ofthe featuresdiscussed below are svn- tactic. guages lack it (i. e. Celtic in the west, or concern the existenceof certiin Turkic, eastern Uralic, Abkhaz-Adygh- morphosyntacticcategories. I am not aware of any phonological ean and Nakh-Daghestanian in the eist, propertiescharacteristic of the and perhaps Afro-Asiatic in the south): core European languages(cf. Jakob- son l93l: "do (iii) that the eastern Indo-European lan- 182; six por ne udalos'najtini odnogo guageslack it (Armenian, Iranian. In_ obsdeevropejskogo... poloZitel'nogo dic); and fonologideskogopriznaka [so far not a sin[le Europe-widepositive (iv) that this feature is not found in the ma- phonological feature lias jority of the world's languages. been foundl"). Perhaps phonologists have not looked hard enough,but at leastone ma- Par ilarly the last point is not easy to de- jor recent study of word prosody in Euro- monstrate for many features because there pean languageshas not found any phonolog- are still far too few representativeworld-wide ical evidencefor StandardAverage-Europein studies of grammatical structures, so to the (van der Hulst et al. 1999,especially Maps extent that our knowledge -4) about the world's I (but cf. Pisani 1969).A few eeneralizi- Ianguagesis incomplete and biased. we can- tions are discussedby Ternes(199-3), but he not be sure about the European linguistic finds that in most respectsEuropean lan- area. In this article, I will cite whatevlr in_ guagesare unremarkablefrom a world-wide formation is available, and sometimes I will perspective.Perhaps the only featureswortlr have to resort to impressionistic observa- mentioning are the relatively large vowel in- tions. ventories(no 3-vowelor 4-vowelinventories) The designation "core European lan_ and the relativelycommou consonantclus- guage" for members of,SAE is diliberatelv ters (no restriction to CV syllables).In these vague, becausethe European linguistic area respects,European languages are not average. does not have sharp boundariei. It seems Dut they are by no meansextreme either. possibleto identify a nucleus consistins of continental West Germanic languages(i.g. 2. The major Standard Dutch, G_erman)and Gallo-Romance (e. g. Average French, Occitan, northern Italo-Romancej. European features For this set of languages,van der Auwera In this section I will discussa dozen sram- (1998a:-824)proposes the name Charlemagne matical featuresthat are characteristic6f the Spr )und. Of the other languages, th6se core European languagesand that together which are geographically furtier from this define the SAE Sprachbund. ln each case I center also seem to share significantly fewer will briefly dehne the feature and sive a few SAE features, i. e. Ibero-Romance. insular examplesfrom SAE languages.Thin a name Scandinavian(Icelandic and Faroese), East map, which indicatesthe approximate loca- Slavic(Russian, Ukrainian, Belorussian) and tion of languagesby the arrangementof (ab- Baltic. Even English, a West Germanic lan_ breviated)language names, shows the distri- guage, is clearly not within the nucleus. Of bution of the various feature values within the non-IndolEuropean languages of Europe, Europe. In eachcase it can be observedthat the-westernUralic languages(i. e. Hungarian the nuclear SAE languagesare within the and Balto-Finnic) are at least marginal-mem_ SAE isogloss, and that the marsinal lan- bers ofStandard AverageEuropea-n; they are guagestend to be outside the isoiloss to a ln many ways strikingly different from east_ greateror lesserextent. (part of thE material ern Uralic. Maltese also exhibits a number of presentedhere was already included in Has- Europeanisms not shared by other Arabic pelmath1998.) linguisticareas t494 XlV. Typologicalcharacterization of languagefamilies and with relativepronouns 2.1. Definite and
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