Some observations on typological features of hunter-gatherer languages
Michael Cysouw | Deutscher Sprachatlas, Philipps-Universität MarburgMax Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, and University of California, Santa Barbara
The introduction of agriculture is a major event in human history, and this article offers a preliminary investigation into whether there might be structural features of language correlating with the distinction between languages spoken by hunter-gatherers and agriculturalists. A number of feature values treated in the World Atlas of Language Structures suggest promising results, in particular in relation to constituent order, phonology, and lexical typology. Hunter-gatherer languages favor (or agriculturalist languages disfavor) absence of a dominant order of major sentence constituents, absence of adpositions, absence of a dominant constituent order of noun and genitive, presence of subject clitics on a variable host, presence of initial interrogatives; a small vowel inventory, no tone, no voicing opposition in plosives and fricatives; and the lexicalization Finger = Hand ≠ Arm.
Cited by (2)
Cited by two other publications
Bakker, Peter
2017.
Reply to Enoch Aboh’s rejoinder to my article on his book ‘The emergence of hybrid grammars’.
<i>WORD</i> 63:3
► pp. 223 ff.

[no author supplied]
2016.
The Remote Past. In
Languages in The World,
► pp. 261 ff.

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 20 july 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
Any errors therein should be reported to them.