Summary Details
| Query: |
Verbal and Nonverbal Word Orders, Part 2
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| Author: | Mark Donohue | |
| Submitter Email: | click here to access email | |
| Linguistic LingField(s): |
Syntax
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| Summary: |
Regarding query: http://www.linguistlist.org/issues/17/17-411.html#1
Regarding sum: http://www.linguistlist.org/issues/17/17-615.html#1 A few weeks ago I posted a query about the order of subjects and predicates in nonverbal clauses, such as that seen in (1), from Indonesian. (1) Dia guru 3sg teacher ���S/he���s [a] teacher.��� Crucially, I was interested in cases in which the order of the subject and predicate in the nonverbal clause was different to the order of the subject and predicate in a verbal clause. In Indonesian this is not the case; but some languages have, for instance, V-initial order in verbal clauses, but S-initial order in non-verbal clauses. (And, of course, many languages have variability in the order of elements, depending on some semantic property or other. More on this later.) And I got some responses, and posted a summary that included them, as well as a clarification of the original question. All well and good; but since the sum, I���ve received more information from LL readers, enough to think I should post a follow-up sum. (Advice to future LL query-posters: wait more than just a couple of weeks to post your summary!) We now, thanks to Dick Hudson, Philip Davies, and Bruno Estigarribia, have some more information. And it���s interesting, and a confirm-a-hypothesis-that-wasn���t-there-before way. Bruno points out that (verb-initial) Mixtec or Zapotec show similar behaviour; and Dick mentions Arabic as a rigidly VSO language that nonetheless has S PRED order in nonverbal clauses. (in the previous sum another language that featured strongly was Ge���ez, a classical language from Ethiopia, which is VSO. Verb-initiality is important?) Philip mentions Palauan as a language that shows a lot of SVO, but is underlyingly VOS, yet has S PRED in nonverbal clauses. On its own this is just another example; but combined with the fact that Enggano and Tukang Besi also show the same pattern, and that these languages are not only all related to each other (they���re all Austronesian), but are all found on the very fringe of the Western Malayo-Polynesian zone (Palauan: far east; Enggano: south-west; Tukang Besi: far south-east), we have an interesting distribution. But Palauan, Enggano and Tukang Besi are widely separated; there���s no question of mutual interference here. How is it that they all ended up with the same (typologically rare) pattern? Now, some more relevant information: Giv��n (1977), and Payne (1995) point out that, when you have VS and SV as alternatives, the SV option is used for more stative, less eventive predicates: and, surely, that will very nicely characterise the semantics of nonverbal predicates, almost by (a) definition. This suggests a possible historical scenario for the Austronesian languages mentioned earlier: predicate-initial languages have a subject-initial option, used (among other reasons) when you have less eventive predicates. This becomes grammaticalised first with nonverbal predicates, and later spreads to be a general subject-first parameter (the languages in the ���inside��� of the southern half of the WMP zone are usually SVO, S PRED). Outside the Austronesian cases, we have V-initial languages with an S PRED order in nonverbal clauses; no cases of V-final languages with PRED S in nonverbal clauses. Partly this reflects the lack of motivation for postposing an S (though, if my speech is representative, the number of postposed putative ���antitopics��� has been growing in the last couple of decades in English: things like ���It���s hard, that homework.���; and see the note on Sanskrit in the earlier sum). But the fact that, if anything, a smaller proportion of V-initial languages lack copular verbs than for V-medial and V-final languages means that there���s a definite pattern emerging here. Thanks again to all who wrote in. -Mark References: Giv��n, Talmy. 1977. The Drift from VSO to SVO in Biblical Hebrew: The Pragmatics of Tense-Aspect . Charles Li, ed., Mechanisms of Syntactic Change: 181-254. Austin: University of Texas Press. Payne, Doris. 1995. Verb initial languages and information order. In Pamela Downing and Michael Nooning, eds., Word order in discourse: 449-485. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. |
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| LL Issue: | 17.771 | |
| Date Posted: | 14-Mar-2006 | |
| Original Query: | Read original query | |
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