Object-initial languages

Ellen F. Prince ellen at CENTRAL.CIS.UPENN.EDU
Fri Oct 25 16:05:45 UTC 2002


Just a note to Oesten: It's not just the facts of subordinate clauses
that leads one to posit a basic SOV word order for German and Dutch --
it's also main clause facts. If you consider a sentence with a
complex verb or a compound tense, you'll see that the order is
quite clearly SOV, except that the finite part is in 2nd position.
Alas, I don't know German or Dutch, but it would be something like
this:       John has the bread up-eaten.

Furthermore, while subordinate clauses are generally acquired later
than main clauses, it appears that German-acquiring children use SOV
order until they acquire tense. (I don't have the reference handy but
I bet someone here does.) That seems to me a compelling bit of
evidence that SOV is not just 'subordinate' word order in German but
something more basic.

And one final nit-picking point: Yiddish is a continental Germanic
language that is SVO (and with the Verb-Second constraint extended to
subordinate clauses, like Icelandic). :-)

Ellen



------- Forwarded Message

Date:    Fri, 25 Oct 2002 17:14:26 +0200
From:    =?iso-8859-1?Q?=D6sten_Dahl?= <oesten at LING.SU.SE>
To:      FUNKNET at listserv.rice.edu
Subject: Re: Object-initial languages

Joining Spike in being nervous at "the suggestion that the subordinate
clause word order be considered a default for typing an entire
language", here are some considerations that have worried me for quite
some time:

In all Germanic languages that I know of, a simple sentence such as "I
love you" has SVO word order. Still, the majority opinion seems to be
that whereas English and Scandinavian do have basic SVO word order, the
continental Germanic languages are really SOV, the order in subordinate
clauses being decisive. Similarly, in Standard Mainland Scandinavian,
negation and various other elements follow the finite verb in main
clauses and precede it in subordinate clauses. So syntacticians tend to
declare the latter order basic. But subordinate clauses are both less
frequent and acquired much later than simple main clauses. One wonders
if there isn't something fundamentally wrong with linguists' assumptions
about "basicness" and "markedness". Clearly, subordinate clauses are
more rigid with respect to word order, and this has something to do with
"degree of grammaticalization", which in turn has to do with historical
processes that fix the word order in constructions. But the result of
such processes may not necessarily be "basic" in the language in any
sense.

Östen Dahl

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