古典的類型論と比較統語論 : 日本語動詞形態の分析を通して

Abstract

F. von Schlegel (1808) has observed that languages indicate the secondary markings of meaning (i.e. tense, number, case, etc.) either by inner change of root or by adding a separate morpheme. He thus argues that these two simple cases designate the two main types of all languages, i.e. inflectional languages and agglutinative languages. Despite of later criticisms, this idea of classical (morphological) typology remains to be one of the most famous ways of classifying language types. Twentieth century generative linguists (Chomsky (1988), among others) assume that invariant principles of Universal Grammar narrowly restrict the class of possible grammars. Since languages still differ one from another in syntactic structure, they argue that UG principles are equipped with parameters which can be fixed by experience. Language variation is thus attributed to difference in setting of values of parameters. The theory of language variation guided by the idea of UG and its parameters is called "parametric syntax" or "comparative syntax". In this paper, we propose a theory of parameters that incorporates the classical typologists' insight into the current framework of generative syntax. To be more specific, we incorporate the idea of classical typology into the system of "formal features" proposed by Chomsky (1995). The proposed theory predicts that existence of agglutinative morphology is directly related to the lack of obligatory syntactic movement. That is, agglutinative languages employ the operation Morphological Merger (Marantz (1988, 1989), Halle and Marantz (1993)) in the phonological component instead of the operation Move in the syntactic component. We show that this prediction is born out through the contrastive analysis of verbal morphology in Japanese.