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The major agglutinative languages like Turkish and Japanese are also notable for being almost strictly left-branching, much more so than, say, English is right-branching.

Is it a coincidence, or is there a relationship or correlation between agglutination and branching directionality (head directionality)?

What are some examples of mostly right-branching agglutinative languages, if any?

I am specifically interested in a language that uses prefixes and prepositions for agglutination, rather than suffixes and postpositions.

Adam Bittlingmayer
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Elamite is agglutinative and (mainly) right-branching, though quotative phrases are left branching.

https://archive.org/stream/TheElamiteLanguage1969/Reiner1969TheElamiteLanguagetext#page/n15/mode/2up

fdb
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I'm unsure by what we even mean by "mainly" or "mostly" right- or left-branching in a comparative context. I mean, sure, I can see how Japanese is mainly left-branching; but if by "left-branching" we mean OV + postpositions, and "right-branching" is VO + prepositions, then WALS would like to remind us that some languages have OV + prepositions (including Persian, Kurdish, Tuvaluan and at least 13 known others); and some languages have VO + postpositions (including Guaraní, Finnish and 40 others).

So all combinations of adposition and verbal argument order occur, although some are rarer than others. We could compare the two directionality variables (verb-object order, and adposition order) with an "agglutinative" parameter. But "agglutinative" is a category that mixes up several different things, and (to my knowledge) there's no easy way to define it in WALS. I tried to approximate it as a combination of exclusively concatenative, case, and time-aspect-mood monoexponential. Under this definition, this map allows you to compare the parameters in all possible combinations.

In particular, the following languages are listed as VO, prepositioned, and basically "agglutinative" (concatenative, monoexponential case and TAM): Squamish, Malagasy. The following have prepositions, VO, no morphological case, and may be more or less "agglutinative" depending on how you define it—it ends up including English!: Warembori, Hatam, Abipón, Cayuvava, Arapesh (Mountain), Luvale, Maung, Mixtec (Chalcatongo), Jakaltek, Zulu, Swahili, and English.

melissa_boiko
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  • In my definition, agglutination is composed of morphemes that are provably not standalone words, as in tr, ja, ka, hu. I am less concerned with SVO/OVS/... than with nouns and verbs. – Adam Bittlingmayer Sep 04 '16 at 06:14
  • I do not understand how OV vs VO has anything to do with left or right branching. Am I missing something? – fdb Sep 04 '16 at 09:28
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    @fdb In a verb phrase (VP), the verb is the head. In a VO language, "[eat [the apple]]", the syntax tree branches right (the non-heads are tacked on to the right). In an OV language, [[the apple] eat], the tree branches to the left (non-heads added left), so it's left-branching. Now consider adpositions: prepositions like [in [the room]] branch right; postpositions like [[the room] in] branch left. It was once assumed that languages which branched one way would do so consistently; but typologists have found many languages with mixed branching (OV+prepositions, or VO+postpositions). – melissa_boiko Sep 04 '16 at 19:56
  • @A.M.Bittlingmayer re: bound (non-standalone) morphemes: that's the "exclusively concatenative" variable; cf. the links above for more details, and more precision on what's exactly meant by "agglutinative language". – melissa_boiko Sep 04 '16 at 20:09
  • @A.M.Bittlingmayer I added monoexponentiality (cf.) to rule out things like e.g. Latin; because, despite morphemes like -mus, -tis-, -nt in amamus, amatis, amant, it's not usually considered within the fuzzy, popular category of "agglutinative". The reason is that each suffix stands for many things: -tis is all of "active indicative 2nd. pl. present", and in a traditional "agglutinative" language we'd expect one distinct morpheme for each (=monoexponentiality). Though I note that Japanese has poly-exponential morphemes (e.g. -keri = modal past, -ta (can be) past perfective etc.) – melissa_boiko Sep 04 '16 at 20:11
  • @A.M.Bittlingmayer Could you clarify what do you mean by being concerned with nouns and verbs, as it regards direction of branching? – melissa_boiko Sep 04 '16 at 20:12
  • Sure. If you consider a typical Finnish, Hungarian, Turkish, Georgian or Japanese example of agglutination, it consists of head-suffix-suffix-suffix-suffix... where head is a noun or verb. Or modifier too, I suppose. Now I am wondering if there are languages with ...prefix-prefix-prefix-head, where the prefixes are extensible and demonstrably not standalone words, so English does not count. Yes, these categories are not perfectly defined but let's stay by the traditional definition where English is not agglutinative and Hungarian is. – Adam Bittlingmayer Sep 05 '16 at 07:31
  • @A.M.Bittlingmayer So just to make sure I'm getting your meaning: you're not interested in syntactical headness at all, but in morphological structure (prefixes, suffixes); and things like Japanese Ama-kakeru-oo-mi-kami or English post-inter-net, anti-pseudo-classicism don't count because you want a language with more of those? – melissa_boiko Sep 05 '16 at 08:35
  • (Incidentally, Japanese kango words, nominal or verbal or other, can be very variable in morphological headness, including "parallel" constructions (ō-rai go-come = "comings and goings" ; ta-shō many-few = "quantity") . Prefix-piled right-headed examples include shinkansen new-trunk-line, shin-koten-ha neo-classical-faction, chō-shin-sei super-new-star (=supernova), chō-ō-mono super-big-person (=big shot, bigwig), chō-ō-gata super-big-model…) – melissa_boiko Sep 05 '16 at 09:13
  • It's still syntactic because "the longest Turkish word" has a parse tree (and is not in the dictionary), unlike the English compounds you mentioned. – Adam Bittlingmayer Sep 05 '16 at 18:02