Object-initial languages

Spike Gildea spike at DARKWING.UOREGON.EDU
Thu Oct 24 22:45:06 UTC 2002


I am nervous at the suggestion that the subordinate clause word order
be considered a default for typing an entire language.  In general, I
am not sure that I believe in generalizations about a language's
"default order" that can extend across various constructions, which
individually show different ordering principles.  And while it might
be instructive for internal reconstruction of syntax to look at the
other aspects of word order typology in any given language, it
defeats the purpose when you go to a new language to test the
reliability of the published correlations from word order typology
and then you consider the orders of the things you want to correlate
as possible evidence to point you towards determining the "basic"
order (that is, the thing you want to then correlate the other orders
to).  If we want to correlate "basic" order order in independent
clauses with all the other orders, then we need to determine that
basic order independently.

And that's not always easy to do.  For instance, in the Cariban
language family, subordinate clause word order is more conservative
(in a historical sense) than main clause word order, but the
independent clauses in various individual languages seem to be
organized according to different syntactic principles, such that in a
single language different clause types (with different historical
origins) display distinct "default", or most frequent orders,
including OVS, Abs-V-Erg, SOV, SVO, and "free" (pragmatically
determined) order.


Spike



>Dear Ngoni,
>
>Lots of languages can do this sort of thing, but still they exhibit
>a default word order.  This typically shows up in subordinate
>clauses, where there tends to be less word order variation.  Does
>Shona allow the same flexibility in relative clauses or adverbial
>subordinate clauses?  How do other aspects of word order typology
>manifest themselves in Shona?
>
>Herb Stahlke
>Ball State University
>



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