Matthew Dryer

Last updated
Matthew Dryer
Scientific career
Fields Linguistics
Institutions State University of New York at Buffalo

Matthew S. Dryer is a professor of linguistics at the State University of New York at Buffalo who has worked in typology, syntax, and language documentation. [1] He is best known for his research on word order correlations, which has been widely cited. [2] He is one of the editors of the World Atlas of Language Structures. His research has also analyzed various definitions of markedness as they may apply to word order. [3] He has done original research on Kutenai and is currently[ when? ] doing research (in conjunction with Lea Brown) on a number of languages of Papua New Guinea, among them Walman.

Related Research Articles

Linguistic typology is a field of linguistics that studies and classifies languages according to their structural features to allow their comparison. Its aim is to describe and explain the structural diversity and the common properties of the world's languages. Its subdisciplines include, but are not limited to phonological typology, which deals with sound features; syntactic typology, which deals with word order and form; lexical typology, which deals with language vocabulary; and theoretical typology, which aims to explain the universal tendencies.

In linguistics, an object is any of several types of arguments. In subject-prominent, nominative-accusative languages such as English, a transitive verb typically distinguishes between its subject and any of its objects, which can include but are not limited to direct objects, indirect objects, and arguments of adpositions ; the latter are more accurately termed oblique arguments, thus including other arguments not covered by core grammatical roles, such as those governed by case morphology or relational nouns . In ergative-absolutive languages, for example most Australian Aboriginal languages, the term "subject" is ambiguous, and thus the term "agent" is often used instead to contrast with "object", such that basic word order is often spoken of in terms such as Agent-Object-Verb (AOV) instead of Subject-Object-Verb (SOV). Topic-prominent languages, such as Mandarin, focus their grammars less on the subject-object or agent-object dichotomies but rather on the pragmatic dichotomy of topic and comment.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Trans–New Guinea languages</span> Large Papuan language family

Trans–New Guinea (TNG) is an extensive family of Papuan languages spoken on the island of New Guinea and neighboring islands, a region corresponding to the country Papua New Guinea as well as parts of Indonesia.

In linguistics, word order is the order of the syntactic constituents of a language. Word order typology studies it from a cross-linguistic perspective, and examines how languages employ different orders. Correlations between orders found in different syntactic sub-domains are also of interest. The primary word orders that are of interest are

A linguistic universal is a pattern that occurs systematically across natural languages, potentially true for all of them. For example, All languages have nouns and verbs, or If a language is spoken, it has consonants and vowels. Research in this area of linguistics is closely tied to the study of linguistic typology, and intends to reveal generalizations across languages, likely tied to cognition, perception, or other abilities of the mind. The field originates from discussions influenced by Noam Chomsky's proposal of a Universal Grammar, but was largely pioneered by the linguist Joseph Greenberg, who derived a set of forty-five basic universals, mostly dealing with syntax, from a study of some thirty languages.

Tukang Besi is an Austronesian language spoken in the Tukangbesi Islands in southeast Sulawesi in Indonesia by a quarter million speakers. A Tukang Besi pidgin is used in the area.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Kutenai language</span> Indigenous language of Montana, Idaho, and British Columbia

The Kutenai language, also Kootenai, Kootenay, Ktunaxa, and Ksanka, is the native language of the Kutenai people of Montana and Idaho in the United States and British Columbia in Canada. It is typically considered a language isolate, unrelated to the Salishan family of languages spoken by neighboring tribes on the coast and in the interior Plateau. The Kutenai also speak ʔa·qanⱡiⱡⱡitnam, Ktunaxa Sign Language.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Torricelli languages</span> Language family

The Torricelli languages are a family of about fifty languages of the northern Papua New Guinea coast, spoken by about 80,000 people. They are named after the Torricelli Mountains. The most populous and best known Torricelli language is Arapesh, with about 30,000 speakers.

In linguistics, an OV language, or a language with object-verb word order, is a language in which the object comes before the verb. OV languages compose approximately forty-seven percent of documented languages.

The subject-side parameter, also called the specifier–head parameter, is a proposed parameter within generative linguistics which states that the position of the subject may precede or follow the head. In the world's languages, Specifier-first order is more common than Specifier-final order. For example, in the World Atlas of Linguistic Structures (WALS), 76% of the languages in their sample Specifier-first. In this respect, the subject-side parameter contrasts with the head-directionality parameter. The latter, which classifies languages according to whether the head precedes or follows its complement, shows a roughly 50-50 split: in languages that have a fixed word order, about half have a Head-Complement order, and half have a Complement-Head order.

Kuman is a language of Chimbu Province, Papua New Guinea. In 1994, it was estimated that 80,000 people spoke Kuman, 10,000 of them monolinguals; in the 2000 census, 115,000 were reported, with few monolinguals. Ethnologue also reported 70,000 second language speakers in 2021.

The Achang language is a Tibeto-Burman language spoken by the Achang in Yunnan, China, and northern Myanmar.

Determiner, also called determinative, is a term used in some models of grammatical description to describe a word or affix belonging to a class of noun modifiers. A determiner combines with a noun to express its reference. Examples in English include articles, demonstratives, possessive determiners, and quantifiers. Not all languages have determiners, and not all systems of grammatical description recognize them as a distinct category.

Martin Haspelmath is a German linguist working in the field of linguistic typology. He is a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, where he worked from 1998 to 2015 and again since 2020. Between 2015 and 2020, he worked at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History. He is also an honorary professor of linguistics at the University of Leipzig.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">South Bird's Head languages</span> Families of Papuan languages

The South Bird's Head or South Doberai languages are three families of Papuan languages. They form part of the Trans–New Guinea languages in the classifications of Malcolm Ross (2005) and Timothy Usher (2020), though Pawley and Hammarström (2018) do not consider them to be part of Trans–New Guinea. However, according to Dryer (2022), based on a preliminary quantitative analysis of data from the ASJP database, South Bird's Head languages are likely to be a subgroup of Trans–New Guinea.

A front rounded vowel is a particular type of vowel that is both front and rounded.

Angaatiha is the most divergent of the Angan languages in the Trans-New Guinea language family. It is native to the Menyanya District of Morobe Province, Papua New Guinea. As of 2015 it was estimated that there were 2,500 speakers. Ethnic speakers of the region who speak Angaatiha are called Angaatiya. The status of the language is categorized as a level 5 developing language. Its ISO code is agm.

Anna Siewierska was a Polish-born linguist who worked in Australia, Poland, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom. She was professor of linguistics at Department of Linguistics and English Language Lancaster University and a leading specialist in language typology.

Mele-Fila (Ifira-Mele) is a Polynesian language spoken in Mele and Ifira on the island of Efate in Vanuatu. In spite of their differences, Mele and Fila are two dialects of the same language and are mutually intelligible. French and English are also fairly common among the residents of Efate.

In linguistic typology, object–subject (OS) word order, also called O-before-S or patient–agent word order, is a word order in which the object appears before the subject. OS is notable for its statistical rarity as a default or predominant word order among natural languages. Languages with predominant OS word order display properties that distinguish them from languages with subject–object (SO) word order.

References

  1. "Matthew S. Dryer". Florida Linguistics Association. Retrieved 2013-09-19.
  2. Dryer, Matthew S. 1992. 'The Greenbergian Word Order Correlations', Language 68: 81-138
  3. Google Scholar citations of Dr. Dryer's publications