PIE syntax and word-order

[Carol F. Justus]

>le 5/06/01 10:09, Eduard Selleslagh à edsel at glo.be a écrit :

>>> 1/ Hier j'ai achete une maison tres grande a Vaucresson

>>> 2/ Hier j'ai achete une tres grande maison a Vaucresson

>>> Absolutely no difference in meaning, style or emphasis. I am sorry.

>> Yes, but consider:
>> 1) De Gaulle était un très grand homme.
>> 2) De Gaulle était un homme très grand.

>> The meaning is completely different.

>    Of course, classical example of handbooks. You have (semantic) freedom
>with the substantive maison but not with homme.
>    What is in question here is that when there is the possibility of free
>word order, it does not induce _systematically_ a difference in meaning,
>style, emphasis etc.
>    But there again it is not PIE, where these possibilities were much more
>extended than in Modern french.
>    And to reduce PIE syntax to word-order (Lehmann, Friedrich) is simply
>nonsense.

>    XD

The word order position attributed here to Lehmann, Friedrich and others is
over simplified for the period in which it was being done (the early '70's)
and there is much now that goes beyond it without, however, entirely
scrapping some of the basic principles.

Even then (Lehmann's article in LG 1973 on "A Principle ...") it was not a
question of word order per se but of correlates among categories such as
governed objects and their governors, including the basic order of the
adjective in comparisons of inequality (e.g., 'bigger than John', 'from
John bigger').

Certainly pragamatic factors affect the statistics of occurring word order
patterns, as noted by various people on this list. For the classicist,
Henri Weil's (reprinted) little book on word order that distinguished
between rhetorical order and basic order among the older Latin and Greek as
opposed to the more recent French and German (maybe English too) gives
examples using those languages.

More recently attention to issues of alignment or contentive type in
language add to the issue of word order another entire range of syntactic
argument. Essentially, was PIE ergative? Was it an active language as
Gamkrelidze & Ivanov (their IE & the IEeans), Lehmann (1993), K. H. Schmidt
(various publications) suggested? Some recent approaches to the
interrelations of language categories and type or IE and such contentive
types have just appeared in the new issue of General Linguistics 37 2000 (1997)
(GL website: http://www.utexas.edu/cola/depts/lrc/gl/gl.html  contents of
GL 37 to be posted this week) for anyone who is interested.

Carol Justus