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MVS.OAC.UCLA.EDU>I re-read Newmeyer's original posting (date 30 Nov 94) and noticed that it has an implicit attack on the notion of "basic word order" for comparative purposes . This flows from his earlier question on how basic word order is variously defined by various analysts, implying that it lacks precision. To the extent that I have understood the responses so far, no one has responded to this particular point, so here goes -- basically in agreement with Newmeyer, but with some criticism of the assumed larger implications for comparative reconstruction of syntax. I'll stick to what I know about linguistic events in Europe since I expect the events to be more familiar to most readers than events in other language families, so that my examples may speak to readers' previous ideas about particular linguistic events referred to below, and, under the best circumstances, provoke further discussion. To anticipate, the notion of basic word order is too simple-minded (simplistic?) for diachronic purposes. FN: "Could anything resembling Latin syntax be reconstructed through comparison of the syntax of the modern Romance languages?" BW: Should it? The immediate ancestor of the Romance languages is not Latin but Proto-Romance. SVO? What about the exceptions, e.g., French j'ai rien fait etc. Aren't they hints to certain historical complications. Also AUX inversion in standard French, e.g., sont-ils venus? Standard French AUX inversion is probably of Germanic origin, not found elsewhere in Romance. As for reconstruction of case (cf. Latin/English), with possible implications for earlier word order possibilities, case inflections remain on (third person) object clitics in ALL Romance languages. When we consider deviations from SVO word order in Romance languages, we may suspect that the notion of "basic" word order is a villain to the extent that it invites the analyst to disregard less frequent or syntactically restricted word orders. This is not safe in INTERNAL reconstruction of syntax, while the most revealing procedure may be to do INTERNAL reconstruction of syntax within a language BEFORE using the COMPARATIVE method to reconstruct within groups of languages genetically related by OTHER criteria. In fact, the last point above is what is usually done, and is probably the ONLY proper way to proceed, given the intent of the comparative method. ALWAYS reconstruct a basic vocabulary first, on the basis of sound correspondences -- to justify genetic relationship among the languages. THEN consider syntactic comparison. Problems with this necessary procedure will emerge in following discussion, but it remains necessary unless you want to reconstruct the syntactic evolution of a geographical area rather than of a genetic family. The latter may be a useful complement to assumed genetic reconstruction, but I think it is too digressive an idea for me to pursue below. Now, what about preverbal object clitics in Romance? Another hint of complications to the SVO concept of Romance. Preverbal object clitic means OV -- but I suppose "basic" means when O has a noun not a pronoun as the head. And what aout the fixing of multiple object clitic order in Romance? e.g., case order versus person (inherent topicality) order. That can't be reconstructed for Latin because the clitics did not arise as distinct entities until Proto-Romance at the earliest. Can a single or preferred clitic order be reconstructed for Proto-Romance, e.g., DAT-ACC (invariant in Spanish and, I think, Rumanian, but ACC-DAT seems to be older in French, now remaining only for third persons, i.e., no inherent topicality difference therefore earlier case ordering remains--French ACC-DAT may reflect Germanic influence as well?)? Or did fixed clitic orders originally arise independently in various areas of Romance? In any case, HOW can we avoid the comparative method in addressing the problem of the origin of object clitic order in Romance? In sum, I think that the origin/s and evolution of fixed multiple object clitic orders in Romance is a legitimate issue, and that it cannot be solved without recourse to the comparative method (among others, of course). Therefore, the comparative method cannot be dismissed in syntactic reconstruction. FN: "Should we therefore reconstruct Proto-Germanic (almost surely incorrectly) as SVO?" BW: Newmeyer's reference to Proto-Germanic reveals even more than Romance that "basic" word order is a villainous concept for reconstruction in this case, as if "basic" word orders can be compared across related languages to reconstruct "proto-basic" word orders, such that "minor" word orders can be ignored or reconstructed as "proto-minor" word orders. One principle which emerges from our knowledge of the historical record is that word order change doesn't work that way, i.e., word orders cannot be compartmentalized as "basic" and "minor" for diachronic purposes. PRINCIPLE: If we want to develop tools and principles for syntactic reconstruction, we will really have to consider the functions served by the various word orders at different times, and detect changes in their functions diachronically. In other words, word order change in a language must be studied in the context of the totality of functions of all its word orders at any given time. The difference between such a study and the study of change in "basic" word order, if the latter means anything at all, is analogous to the study of phonetic change and phonemic change. If analysts argue about the notion of "basic" word order, this is analogous to arguing about different concepts of the phoneme, and NOT about agreed upon linguistic facts. The fallacy of reconstructing "basic" word order for Proto-Germanic on the basis of the "basic" word order in current Germanic becomes obvious according to the above principle because of the SOV word order in subordinate clauses in continental Germanic. And even this is not as invariant a property of the oldest texts as it is of the later standardised languages, e.g., before Middle German and Dutch. English also clues us in to INVERSION by its many remnants, even without historical texts which reveal more similarities to continental Germanic, e. g., V-first following a subordinate clause or adverb, still common in the AV Bible. Including English but excluding Gothic which mirrors to the extent POSSIBLE the New Testament Greek syntax from which it was translated, the earliest texts in Germanic show, as far as I know, a tendency relatively favorable to verb-final in subordinate clauses, but much variation, later eliminated in the continental standards. This leads to arguments about whether or not the SOV tendency was the break-up of an earlier more general Indo-European SOV tendency (or earlier fixation?) which died in English and Scandinavian (including the still HIGHLY INFLECTED Icelandic -- creating problems even for simplistic functional arguments for the evolution of SVO in Germanic, so that the argument would have to be: it STARTED as a reaction to the increasing unreliability of case distinction but SPREAD for social reasons to languages that didn't need it. Such an argument does not strike me as at all unreasonable!). [Although I excluded Gothic above, because of its malleable accommodation to Greek syntax, its deviations from NT Greek are quite revealing. Most salient is the absence of a definite article, despite its occurrence in NT Greek as well as in all other Germanic languages. If Gothic translation was totally serious about imitating NT Greek syntax in all cases it could have adopted an unstressed demonstrative to imitate the Greek article, as later Germanic did (in a sense). The most important question about Gothic syntax is: is the malleability of its syntax innovative from Proto-Germanic? -- if so, we will probably never know in what ways the Gothic translations of NT Greek stretched the limits of that malleability, and distorted the colloquial functions of word order in spoken Gothic or more generally in the Germanic of the third century. If SOV was invariant in some ancestor, then why did it deteriorate in Germanic? At least as puzzling, how/why/when did Germanic get AUX inversion, even in yes/no questions. ALL Indo-European languages show WH fronting for WH questions, so is there any reason to believe the Proto-language did not. Would I be buying what Newmeyer is questioning with the preceding argument, cf. FN: "I have the impression that with increasing frequency, one comes across statements such as the following in the literature : "Most of the attested languages in language family X have some syntactic property. Therefore we can assume that Proto-X had this property."" BW: [why with "increasing frequency"? Is the implication that copy-cat historical linguists are becoming less responsible than they used to be (cf. the discussion of the spread of rumors about the number of Eskimo words for snow), or that syntax is driving historical linguistics to pot?] To be safe, I guess ancillary arguments come in, like: considering how areally widespread the IE languages are, is it likely that the unanimity of WH first questions across IE is NOT reflective of the proto-language? OK, so maybe WH fronting is Proto-IE (got a better explanation for the facts? Or reason to ignore them?), but why AUX inversion in Germanic questions. And does the application of inversion to yes/no questions mean that there was a question marker in initial position (WH question position) with yes/no questions, as in "WHAT/HULLO, are you kidding me?" (Such a marker "ibai" is found in Gothic whenever the New Testament Greek original has "me:"). Don't get me wrong. I'm not suggesting that an initial yes/no question-marker was a necessary condition for the inversion innovation in Germanic. I'm only observing that there was the option of such a marker, and anticipating (if indeed it has not already been suggested) that some analysts who are overly formal in their approaches to syntax might suppose the necessity of such a marker to motivate a mechanical generalisation of inversion from WH to yes/no questions. Again, because such in- version occurs in ALL Germanic should we NOT reconstruct it for Proto-Germanic. .Qualification on ALL: it's variable in Gothic where it's variable in NT Greek: pronoun subjects usually do not invert with the verb, noun subjects usually do.] A practical point is that, as far as I know, there is an issue about the differentiation of Germanic into anything like the modern descendents before the 4-5th century. Thus, if AUX inversion goes back that far, does it matter if it SPREAD from one Germanic area to another or if it was part of Proto-(West?) Germanic? ALL innovations must spread before we recognise them as innovations in THE language (or dialect). Historical linguistics does not study the evolution of the idiolect (if such a concept as "evolution of the idiolect" is even coherent). Finally, about typological arguments. When morphology-as-fossilized syntax and universal-typology of word order congealed in the early 1970s, some suggested that even before IE was SOV it was VSO. Why? Because subject marking inflection FOLLOWS the verb: V-S, get it? Inevitably, then, some suggested that Celtic maintains the most archaic "basic" word order among the IE languages. This is another excess in diachronic application of (whatever) the notion of basic word order. The principal objection raised was that it is not obvious (and even unlikely) that ONLY BASIC word orders morphologise. (In fact, they may be least likely to morphologise.) Considering that S represents an unstressed anaphor in V-S, S might be in a MINOR word order position. [and note that if BASIC word order means when the arguments are nominal, NOT pronominal, then discourse frequency is not criterial of basic, since at least most subject arguments are pronominal, if not merely inflectional. Furthermore, if "basic" only counts the relative frequency of subject NOMINALS, it is based on something which is quite rare in discourse: subject nominals]. In any case, subject inflection following the verb stem is a widespread Eurasian areal feature, extending into Africa in Semitic and various other branches of Afro-Asiatic. To some this might be taken as a clue to the correctness of Nostratic and other super-family notions, to others an indication of an extremely old innovation having spread (over millenia?) across families regardless of genetic relationship (cf. the famous Balkan area). Still others might opt for coincidence. Various other languages also have this feature, e.g., Kanuri in West Africa and various New World languages. (Welcome to Nostratic?) Questions about the functions of position after the verb in so-called SOV languages are raised by V-S inflectional order. The typological implications of this go beyond my current knowledge, although I dimly remember that various Eurasian SOV languages are different according to whether or what function post-verb- al position has in such languages. This is obvious, for example, in the contrast between Eurasian SOV languages (with differences amongst themselves) and the so-called SOVX West African languages, where X is an adpositional phrase (with complications about the origin of adpositional phrases in such languages which I will refrain from discussing here). Since so many Eurasian SOV languages are also V-S inflectional languages, I do not know if there are SOV languages which have a "minor" postverbal position for an anaphoric subject (such that it turns up in other positions in certain constructions, so that we can demonstrate that it is not an inflection). Maybe typology of relevant Amerind languages will help solve this problem. But maybe we may also anticipate the reappearance of the party-spoiling question about the representativeness of curent language types to POSSIBLE (and FORMER) language types. No doubt an unwelcome (and unhelpful?) thought to many. In this context it seems worth mentioning that mathematical probability arguments for various word orders, as I have seen them practiced, are not impressive, because of faults in their initial assumptions. For example, as far as I know , they invariably assume the validity of counting NUMBER of languages, regardless of the genetic relationship or areal contiguity of the languages counted. This seems unsound to me, particularly ignoring areal contiguity. For example, we find (I think) that the Eurasian area, consisting of umpteen and umpred languages, has S...O word order (ignoring the position of the verb as an independent variable). Then in the New World we find large areas of contiguous S...O order, and separate areas of O...S order. Maybe we should be calculating mathematical probability on the basis of contiguous area rather than number of languages. The surprising result might be that O...S is more probable than S...O (where area is an independent variable, not individual language, of course.) I'm not sure what the implications of this might be, but one might be that O...S might have once been a more likely ordering strategy than it is now, and that the predominance of S...O across languages counted individually is largely the result of areal spread. [If the spread of S...O is old enough, its predominance might even be the result of an absolute increase in the number of "languages" in the world all together. However, this isn't really relevant to my criticim of the way probability arguments have been applied to syntactic typology, only to the historical implications of adequate assumptions about language typology. In fact, I'll leave this discussion with the already widely accepted suggestion that strategies for information distribution in the clause, esp. in terms of old/new, are more relevant to typology than such problematic notions for cross-linguistic comparison as Subject and Object. Similarly, for example, I think that in Eurasia, Agent...Patient/Theme order largely cuts across ergative and accusative languages, even though ergative languages would have Patient/ Theme, or whatever term you want, as Subject. To this extent, S...O cannot be universal even in Eurasia, without confusing "accusative" definitions of subject and object, where subject status is consistent with case-marking, and "ergative" definitions, where case-marking is more closely tied to transitivity role than to the mushy cross-linguistic concept of subject.] FN: "And furthermore, syntactic change can be fairly catyclysmic, restructuring grammars wholesale in one generation -- unlikely or impossible with phonological systems." BW: I think the thrust of FN's suggestion here is largely right, though probably vastly overstated (on the basis of older ideas about creoles?). However, questions remain in my mind about conditions under which these things happen. Within monolingual areas (or among closely related, mutually intelligible languages, (certain types of?) syntactic strategies seem to have the potential to spead quite quickly, perhaps almost as quickly as new words and expressions, while comparable speed is not generally observed for phonological change (and is probably "unlikely or impossible", as Newmeyer puts it, for both internal linguistic and social reasons -- in fact, I think "unlikely" is more accurate than "impossible" depending on the nature of the particular type of phonological change, and I have an example of possible single-generation phonological change in the current English of the African Americans in New York City area, but I do not have sufficient data to make this possibility or its implications worth discussing here -- until I get to the section in Labov's new book where he discusses recent innovations in the Chicago vowel system I will not be sure if he has other examples) . However, to the extent that language-contact propels "cataclysmic" syntactic change (in the historical record) FN's suggestion is not so clear . For example, English in East LA (a Mexican American community) is more immediately strikingingly different from adjacent English dialects on the phonological than on the syntactic level .and that applies to monolingual speakers of East LA English as well as Spanish-English bilinguals, and to various phonological segments as well as intonational contours]. In understanding historical syntactic evolution, it is most often difficult to distinguish internal evolution from language contact (hence the sour regard for substratal theories during the late 19th-to-mid 20th c celebration of Neogrammarian achievements) -- and then there is also Jakobson's caution that language contact might not permit evoluton that is not internally possible anyway, rather that it can only promote one possible direction of change as opposed to other possible directions which might flourish under other external circumstances. This too I consider problematic as a blanket statement, but a major consideration to keep in mind as a possible constraint on change in most reconstructive expeditions into the unknown past. Enough. These are my thoughts about the problems of using the comparative method alone to reconstruct syntax. But nobody would suggest something so foolish as not enlisting all possible tools of reconstruction, including internal and typological in addition to comparative. Conversely, it would be equally foolish to shun the comparative method as a reconstructive tool. In any case, the notion of basic word order is not helpful to syntactic reconstruction, if not of doubtful value as an autonomous observation about the synchronic state of any language as well. I mean it's OK to observe that English and French are both synchronically SVO (spoken French even more than English -- not least because of the former's preferred question formation strategies), but without further discussion that does not mean that their syntaxes are "basically" the same, in any insightful or interesting (to coin an adjective) sense. I would like readers to react to any of the points I have made above, not least of all the accuracy of the facts I have suggested for various languages, since I am not an expert in the areas of most of the facts I have presented, e.g., current typological theory, Indo-European linguistics, Eurasian and New World areal syntactic characteristics. BenjiMail to author|Respond to list|Read more issues|LINGUIST home page|Top of issue