Baker argues that polysynthetic languages - in which verbs are built up of many parts and where one verb can act as a whole sentence - are more than an accidental collection of morphological processes; rather they adopt a systematic way of representing predicate-argument relationships, parallel to but distinct from the system used for English.
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Baker argues that polysynthetic languages - in which verbs are built up of many parts and where one verb can act as a whole sentence - are more than an accidental collection of morphological processes; rather they adopt a systematic way of representing predicate-argument relationships, parallel to but distinct from the system used for English.
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In this book Mark Baker presents a new hypothesis with implications for linguistic typology and the structural description of polysynthetic languages, he presents the observations that forms the basis for his hypothesis and he tests the hypothesis on a large number of languages.
Baker has observed that some of tha languages that are normally classified as "polysynthetic" and "headmarking" have structural similarities. Specifically he has observed that the Mohawk language seems to have a principle of obligatorily marking all direct arguments of phrasal heads with agreement morphemes on the phrases head constituent. He also observes this in some other polysynthetic languages.
Working within the framework of Chomskys "Principles and Parametres" theory he now posits that these languages have a parameter setting that forces them to mark direct arguments of phrasal heads on those heads, and that a number of syntactic and morphological similarities in these languages are caused by this parameter setting.
Baker concludes that there is compelling evidence for the existence of a "Polysynthesis Parameter" to be found, because the languages that uphold the basic principle of obligatory headmarking of phrasal heads share similarities that aren't shared by the languages that do not uphold this principle.
Bakers book is an extremely well researched work and its arguments are compelling. Its main weakness is the common tendency of linguists working within the structural tradition to have a sharper focus on the theoretical framework than on the actual data on which the theory should build. In other words one cannot escape a feeling that some of Bakers conclusions are not necessarilly based on the best interpretation of his data but that he rather interprets his data in a way so as to fit best with his theory. This is most evident in the cases where he spends numerous pages fitting his observations into specific chomskyian syntactic models when his observations might have been even more convincing without fitting them into the chomskyan framework.
The book is reccomended to everyone working with polysynthesis - whether or not one is fond of the idea of "parameters" it offers much food for thought.
