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Editor for this issue: Brett Churchill <brettlinguistlist.org>
scf-fs.usc.edu>I got several responses since I posted my query about the left-right asymmetries of word order variation. The following interim summary may be helpful for further observations. QUESTIONING OF DATA Two netters (Jon Aske and V\237ctor V\225zquez Mart\237nez) question the Spanish data in my posting as follows. a. el primer buen capitulo the first good chapter 'the first good chapter' b. * el buen primer capitulo the good first chapter c. el capitulo primero bueno the chapter first good d. el capitulo bueno primero the chapter good first However, their judgements are not completely consistent. Aske regards all four, including (b) perfect; while Mart\237nez regards (b) as good but (d) is strange. Well, I don't know much about Spanish and my Spanish data is taken from: Terker, Andrew M. 1980. Linear Order and Intonation in the Spanish Noun Phrase. University of Washington dissertation. pp 109-111. If this example is not good, how about the following data from the same book. a. sus amables amigos his likeable friends 'his likeable friends' b. * los amables suyos amigos the likeable his friends c. los amigos amables suyos the friends likeable his d. los amigos suyos amables the friends his likeable When both suyos/sus 'his' and amables 'likeable' precede the head noun, only one order is allowed (suyos must take short form sus when it precedes other modifiers in prenominal position); when both follow, the two alternatives are both allowed. Hopefully more clear examples might be found in other languages like Russian,where word order is freer and as I know there is still a unmarked, dominant order among multipleprenominal modifiers. Any Russian native speaker can help check it out? FURTHER SPECIFICATION OF THE ISSUE Let me specify my question further. It should be noted that there are many left-right asymmetrical phenomena and I am now concerned only with the asymmetries of "word order variations/consistency". Richard Kayne's 1994 book "The Antisymmetry of Syntax" is not direct relevant. My understanding of his book is that Kayne argues for the universal head-initiality at a deep, abstract level. My concern is on surface construction. In fact, I regard the left-right asymmetry as essentially a superficial phenomenon, since what left-right asymmetry really means is a temporal before-after contrast, which is a real-time performance issue. Following kayne, Yuji Takano, in his UC Irvine 1996 diss. "movement and parametric variation in syntax", also argues for the syntactic antisymmetry. But he differs form Kayne in that he argues for head-finality as universal order at an abstract deep level. It seems, then, the abstract antisymmetry is hard tojudge. My concern is also different from what Hawkins, Cutler, Bybee et al. previously discussed. Their left-right asymmetries are about the skewing distribution of some particular units. For example, while all head-final lanuages use suffixes, some head-initial languages, which are otherwise expected to use prefixes, use suffixes too. Hence, there is a general preference for suffixes over prefixes in human languages. The two kinds of asymmetries though related, are not the same. Discussions on the asymmetries in affixations are provided in Hawkins 1988a, b, Hawkins and Cutler 1988, Bybee et al. 1990. Takaku Tsunoda mentions that he found preposition stranding in a fair number of languages, but he does not know of any clear instance of postposition stranding. In his co-authored paper on adpositions ( Tsunoda, Tasaku; Yoshiaki Itoh; and Sumie Ueda. 1955. "Adpositions in word order typology". Linguistics, Vol.33, No.4:741-61.), based on the statistics of 130 languages, he points out that stranding is attested in 8-10 % of the prepositional languages, but only 2% of the postpositional languages. Stranding is surely a word order variation issue and therefore directly relevant to our current concern. The stranding phenomenon suggests that postpositions are more bound than prepositions in general. This may be a by-phenomon of the tendency that "postposed grammatical materials is more likely to affix than preposed grammatical materials", as observed by Greenberg, Hawkins et al. In other words, a postpositional bound morpheme is more bound than a prepositional morpheme. I would like to cite another example. The Russian instrumental preposition "c" /s/, though not constituting a syllable, is still treated as a word and written, perhaps even read, separately, but English postpositional genitive marker -s, is treated as a suffix, even in such case like "the king of England's daughter". My guess is that the tendency is related to some particular property of human cognitive perception. In addition to the asymmetries mentioned in my previous posting, I would like raise another two: cross-linguistic adjectival orders and the orders of direct and indirect objects. The great word order variation in noun-initial NPs seems not only occurs among determiner, numeral and adjecive as stated in Hawkins' NP internal order universal; it exists among various adjectives as well. It has been well observed that almost all the languages that have 'free adjectival order' are those where adjectives normally follow head nouns, such as Somali, Kurdish, spoken Arabic and modern Hebrew (Hetzron 1978: On the relative order of adjectives. In Hansjakob Seiler ed., Language Universals: 165-184.), as well as Romance (Sproat and Shih 1991,The cross-linguistc distribution of adjective ordering restrictions. Interdisciplinary approaches to language: essays in honor of S.-Y. Kuroda, ed. by Carol Georgopoulos and Roberta Ishihara, 556-593. Kluwer Academic Publishers.) Hetzron noticed this and wondered: "I do not know if it is a coincidence or not that these languages exhibiting free adjective order have the adjectives after the nouns." The orders of direct and indirect objects (hence DO and IO respectively) also demonstrate some left-right asymmetry. If both DO (direct object) and IO (indirect object) follow V, IO frequently stays nearer to V than DO does, as exemplified in English and Chinese dative shift. In Mandarin Chinse, the order [V IO DO] is in fact used more much frequently than the order V DO IO and is hence viewed by some grammarians as canonical, basic order. By contrast, if both DO and IO precede V, the corresponding mirror-image oder [DO IO V] is never taken as a canonical order, as far as I am aware. Hope to receive more feedback! Bingfu Lu USCMail to author|Respond to list|Read more issues|LINGUIST home page|Top of issue