LINGUIST List 5.1416

Thu 08 Dec 1994

Disc: Basic Word Order

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1. Esa Itkonen, Basic word order

This is a somewhat delayed reaction to Frederick Newmeyer's posting on
basic word order. I was prepared to let someone else comment on the
underlying logic of Newmeyer's message. This did not happen, however, so
here comes.
 Newmeyer observes that data from a given language seldom exhibits an
unambiguous 'basic word order', and there seem to be no generally
agreed-upon criteria to resolve this ambiguity. He further notes that
this fact reveals a weakness in functionalist linguistics (or, in more
polite terms, 'presents a challenge to it'). He adds, on two occasions,
that generative linguistics is increasingly coming to share the same
weakness. By `increasingly' he must mean the fact that some
applications of the principles-and-parameters approach are
taking both language-particular and cross-linguistic data into account
more seriously than used to be the case. Before these developments,
generative linguistics decreed that every (configurational)
 language has some sort of basic word order, as specified
by the phrase structure (or X-bar) component of its grammar. Newmeyer
seems to suggest that this type of basic word order did not share the
weakness that is 'increasingly' becoming a characteristic of generative
linguistics. The difference between earlier generative linguistics and
current generative linguistics, and between their respective conceptions
of basic word order, resides in the fact that the former did not, whereas
the latter does, pay systematic attention to (cross-)linguistic data.
Newmeyer's formulation then seems to suggest that not paying attention to
(cross-)linguistic data is a STRENGTH of the theory.

Esa Itkonen