In her phase-based account, a high applicative in symmetrical languages occurs as a phase and thus renders the leapfrogging of a DO over a higher IO, whereas a low applicative does not constitute a phase and hence disallows the extraction of a DO.
This aligns Tsou with the Chichewa-type asymmetrical object languages instead of the Kichaga-type symmetrical object languages (Baker 1988, Bresnan and Moshi 1990, Alsina and Mchombo 1993, Marantz 1993, Donohue 1996, McGinnis 2001, among others).
But the knot that binds them there is revealed as oddly lovely, a symmetrical pattern woven of language-as-thought, thought-as-language.
Both languages are symmetrical in all their semantic and syntactical properties.
Even they do not usually have perfectly symmetrical competence in their two languages.
Those shimmery, layered arrangements, those lyrics in a language uncannily like English, those symmetrical Nordic voices — they all add up to something alarmingly permanent, a marshmallow monument on the cultural landscape.
The data of the present experiment were formally compared with those of a previous experiment, in which there was a symmetrical distinction between rigid and non-rigid syntax in the language domain.
A few years ago I was reading an anthropology book on symmetrical patterns and cultures that do not have the written language but use patterns as a form of cultural archive.
They argue that, because the later Acheulean tools of H. erectus are more carefully formed and are often highly symmetrical, this later hominin was the first to use symbols and language.
The disparity does not seem to be accidental; it follows from a general typological division: Tsou is an asymmetrical object language, as pointed out in H. Chang (2011b), whereas Kinyarwanda is a symmetrical object language (Bresnan and Moshi 1990).
