Genetic Descent

[Leo A. Connolly]

Rick Mc Callister wrote:

>         The normal order for verbs like Spanish gustar, Italian piacere, etc.
>                 is Indirect object pronoun-Verb-Subject, OVS
>         You certainly can change the order to SOV for the purpose of
> emphasis but my point was that there is a whole category of "reverse action
> verbs" in Romance languages.
>         I'm curious how the curious syntax arose

As an addendum to what I wrote a few days ago:  The construction is not
confined to Romance (it flourishes in Hindi and Russian, to name but a
few other IE languages) or even to Indo-European (cf. Japanese).  It's
obviously a phenomenon of "universal grammar" (whatever that really
means) and hence cannot be answered within the context of a single
language family.  Hence my appeal to a Case Grammar solution.

Leo Connolly