<div dir="ltr">Dear Alan,<div><div><br></div><div>Concerning another type of structural congruence, namely VO/OV order and prefixing / suffixing verbal morphology, we know that strongly prefixing verb final languages are fairly rare; as far as I know, only Athabaskan, Siouan and the Gyalrongic branch of the Sino-Tibetan family share this characteristic (also North-West Caucasian and Ienissean, but languages of these two families are not strictly verb-final).</div><div><br></div><div>An interesting question is whether this rarity results from a psycholinguistic dispreference against the prefixing+verb final combination (such grammars would be less easily learnable, more "complex" in some way -- thus relevant to your question), or whether this is simply the result of historical contingency. This question is discussed, mainly on the basis of data from Gyalrongic languages, in the following article (and the references therein):</div><div><br></div><div>Jacques, Guillaume 2013. Harmonization and disharmonization of affix ordering and basic word order. <i>Linguistic Typology</i>, 17.2:187–215.</div><div><a href="http://www.academia.edu/2008163/Harmonization_and_disharmonization_of_affix_ordering_and_basic_word_order">http://www.academia.edu/2008163/Harmonization_and_disharmonization_of_affix_ordering_and_basic_word_order</a></div><div><br></div><div>It seems to me that all languages with prefixing verbal morphology and verb-final order all have a relatively more complex (less transparent) morphology that the average verb final suffixing languages, though this remains to be demonstrated with quantitative data.</div><div><br></div></div><div>Best regard,</div><div><br></div><div>Guillaume</div><div class="gmail_extra"><br><div class="gmail_quote">2016-01-16 16:03 GMT+01:00 Alan Rumsey <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:Alan.Rumsey@anu.edu.au" target="_blank">Alan.Rumsey@anu.edu.au</a>></span>:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
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<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Arial">Dear All,<u></u><u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Arial"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Arial">Francesca Merlan and I are currently working on a paper on structural congruence as a dimension of language complexity/simplicity. It is based on
</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Arial">results from our longitudinal study of children’s acquisition of two verb constructions in the
Papuan language </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Arial">Ku Waru, namely, serial verb constructions (SVC) and adjunct+verb constructions (AVC). We show that children learn the AVC before the SVC, and argue that this is
determined in part by the greater congruence between AVC and other basic aspects of Ku Waru syntax including its strictly verb-final word order. This has got us thinking about the general issue of structural congruence as a dimension of language complexity.
</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Arial">For example, long ago Greenberg demonstrated that there is a very strong tendency in languages
with VSO word order for the adjective in NPs to follow the noun. This is presumably because there is a kind of congruence between the noun as the head of the NP and the verb as the head of the clause – an insight which led to Nichols’ later very useful typological
distinction between head-marking and dependent-marking grammar. Not all languages conform to Greenburg’s generalization in this regard</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Arial">.</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Arial">
But we would argue that those that do are in that respect simpler than those that don’t, because both the VSO template and the noun-adjective one can be specified in terms of a more general relationship between heads and dependents. So far in our search through
the recent literature on linguistic complexity we haven’t come across any discussion of this kind of congruence as a dimension of language complexity/simplicity. Can any of you point us to any? Or to other relevant data for a comparative consideration of this
issue?<u></u><u></u></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Arial">Alan Rumsey,<u></u><u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Arial">Australian National University</span><b><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Arial"><u></u><u></u></span></b></p>
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<br></blockquote></div><br><br clear="all"><div><br></div>-- <br><div class="gmail_signature">Guillaume Jacques<br>CNRS (CRLAO) - INALCO<br><a href="http://cnrs.academia.edu/GuillaumeJacques" target="_blank">http://cnrs.academia.edu/GuillaumeJacques</a><br><div><a href="http://himalco.hypotheses.org/" target="_blank">http://himalco.hypotheses.org/</a></div><div><a href="http://panchr.hypotheses.org/" target="_blank">http://panchr.hypotheses.org/</a></div></div>
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