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THE LINGUISTICS STUDENT’S HANDBOOK 226
Formation types
This gives information on which languages use prefixes, suffixes, etc.
Following Bauer (1988), a synaffix is any affix made up of two or more formal
elements which must all co-occur to give a particular meaning. A circumfix is
thus a type of synaffix. Apophony (ablaut) was added late as a category, and
may not be reported in every relevant language. Categories in parentheses are
rare.
Word order
Word order is divided into three parts: the order of major sentence elements,
the ordering within a noun phrase, and whether prepositions or postpositions
are used. The first is given in terms of the ordering of S[ubject] V[erb] and
O[bject], with alternatives being V2 (verb second, common in Germanic languages),
Free or Focus-based where the word order is not determined by these
grammatical categories. Where the word order is completely free, even the
word order with a noun phrase may not be fixed, but the unmarked order of
noun and adjective (NA or AN) (sometimes other modifiers, especially in languages
which do not have adjectives) and the unmarked order of possessor and
possessed noun are also given where possible. The possessor–noun ordering
(poss N or N poss) is based on what happens when the possessor is a full noun
or a proper noun, not when it is a pronoun. Often these orders had to be
deduced from example sentences or texts. In many cases it is ambiguous
whether a language has postpositions or case suffixes, and although we have
largely followed the sources, there may be some inconsistencies here.
Parenthesised values are rare.
Syntactic phenomena
It was difficult to know what phenomena to look for in this category, but a list
was provided for research assistants which included absolutive/ergative
marking (not necessarily inflectional), classifiers, genders, inclusive/exclusive
1st person plural marking, inflecting adpositions, inflectional aspect, nominative/accusative
marking, noun classes, peculiarities in the number system,
peculiarities in the person system, verb conjugations and a vague ‘other points
of interest’. Of these, the distinction (if it is a real one) between gender and
noun classes was hard to uphold, peculiarities in the persons system were rarely
commented on, and verb conjugations were sometimes confused with verb
classes. Alienable/inalienable possession was added late, and is probably not
consistently noted, as were serial verbs, often hard to find since the label itself
is relatively recent.